You're thinking the right way, but in this case the answer is probably: None. This is trivial to work around. Just "hire" the $100k H1-B by contracting that function to a corporation that does nothing but sponsor H1-Bs. The most famous supposed examples of H1-B abuse aren't even direct hires; they are elimination of internal functions and localsourcing the function to another firm, who happens to employ H1-Bs. Would love to hear how you would stop this without making a huge leap into govt intrusiveness into businesses' operational decisions.
Slavery is already illegal, actually. If an employee trains his replacement, it's voluntary. Usually they are compensated with severance, which of course they are not entitled to. We can say this is a dick move by employers, but it's not forced.
You appear to be taking the straw man arguments too literally. Very few people say there is no effect from human greenhouse emissions. I have heard Lamar say this in hearings (something like "No one here would disagree that human greenhouse gas emissions affect climate innsome way."). Here are some questions to which we do not know the answer (though people will reply with claims that we do):
1) How big is the effect of human greenhouse emissions compared to natural temperature variation? 2) On climate time scale, is the net impact of human greenhouse emissions throughout all systems negative, neutral, or positive, and on what dimensions should we measure that?
My beef with the climate change people is the attitude of omniscience about a complex topic that nobody actually understands. We have pieces of the puzzle, and the climate change folks overcompensate for uncertainty with a condescending attitude and bullshit vending. The "98% scientific consensus" talking point is a great example. It's garbage, but because climate change people feel vulnerable with normal levels of uncertainty in scientific subjects, they exaggerate and fearmonger in substitution for fact based discussion about what we do and dont know.
There is another way to deal with this uncertainty: risk. Argue that yes, we might be wrong about our cost-benefit analysis of certain policy prescriptions because like any field of science, especially relatively new ones, there is a lot we don't know. But the risk is hugely asymmetrical. If we are wrong, we probably spent money on stupid projects and increased poverty levels and income inequality relative to what would have otherwise been. If we are right, human life will confront existential threats. So logically we should err on the side of the uncertainty that minimizes downside.
This is the sane argument, but I won't hold my breath (pardon the CO2 emission)
I'm very happy to come to the comments section and find mostly mocking and people who looked beyond the headline. Would have been nice if the editors did that.
Alright. You blamed women, and I said women wouldn't act that way if men didn't train them to do so. I don't think that is unclear; you just had a knee-jerk response and didn't think about what I was saying.
> Why do you need a rational argument? Life isn't rational. Choose to have kids. Choose to not have kids. Choose between flying a kite or riding a bike. None of it's rational.
I think you are saying that your examples are sort of first-order want and don't have a rational basis, because they are more primal, reptillian, and internally motivated. I guess that is a debatable point on the meaning of rational, but I don't think your examples are analogous. I choose not to have kids, because I don't want kids (or vice versa). I choose to have a relationship with a woman, because I want a relationship with a woman. For these to be analogous to the marriage question (given no desire for kids), you'd need to justify wanting to be in a contract with the woman you're with. Do people have an emotional attachment to a contract? Do people just want to be in a contract? I just don't see this as analogous to wanting kids or wanting to be with a woman.
This is really a different direction that I meant in my original question. I see normative changes in our culture that do reduce the number and value of the reasons for marriage. You've cited some yourself. I am not saying this is a good or bad thing. I'm just saying that -- given all these changes -- does it make sense for someone right now to decide to marry the woman they are with? I think the answer is clearly no, which is why you see a lot of women giving ultimatums to their men.
This is a highly unimaginative view. AV truck stops at designated points (let's just use rest areas for now to keep it simple) closest to the destination city. Driver takes over the truck and negotiates the city to the destination point.
You are 100% wrong when you say AV trucks need to negotiate city streets. It would be expensive to get an AV truck to do this, and it's pretty damn cheap to have a human take it the last 30 minutes of the trip. To me this is clearly how AV trucking will work initially.
Do you even see the irony in your post? You're calling me a "mangina" for saying that men who give pretty women everything they want train them to be entitled brats. I am criticizing weak men who get walked all over by women, so you call me a "mangina"?
> That would depend a lot on the young man. I know how I'm bringing up my kids, and I think they'll do okay.
Ok, but I'm talking about the rational argument. It seems to me that it's irrational for men who have no interest in children to get married. You seem to agree here, when you earlier say that men used to get married largely to have cultural and personal permission to have sex, and now they get that cultural and personal permission without getting married. So now what's the rational argument?
LOL. Ok, so you should get married so that by the policy of certain hospitals you are allowed to visit someone who are in critical care hospital areas without extra hassle?
Inheritance is a total mess. If you're looking to allow easy inheritance to someone, for gods sake don't marry them; make them the successor to your trust.
What a your argument, exactly? That a majority of VC deals look like Theranos? Your example of stupid VC investment isn't even responsive to the point of discussion, which is whether these investors wrote checks at a $40b valuation purely in the "better, cheaper taxi" pitch. Your example is about an impressive pitch that wasn't real. If anything, this seems to support my view that VCs got excited about something else in Uber's pitch, something much bigger than "better, cheaper taxi".
I am not making an argument that private investors are purely rational supermen. I'm just saying that the OP's suggestion that the move into AV cars and trucks is Uber grasping at straws as they realize the taxi market is smaller than I guess they thought previously... just doesn't pass the smell test. And one of the reasons it doesn't pass the smell test is the $40b private valuation by VCs. That's just too outlandish a valuation for a taxi story, and we have to believe not that VCs were fooled by a fake pitch, but that they got the "real pitch" of just taxi and still somehow got super excited and came up with absolutely ludicrous global growth numbers for that line of business. Sorry, I just don't think so.
Your insurance example is a terrible one, as it misunderstands what insurance is buying you. But I agree with you 100% on the freedom issues. I think it is inevitable that we will eventually have certain AV-only roads, and this bothers me because it's harder to opt out. Same is true with smartphones. I want to opt out, but it is very difficult to do so as life increasingly assumes you have one, and there is little and shrinking incentive to serve the market segment that doesn't.
But I don't follow your logic on how this counters an AV Uber's usefulness. It's possible today to get around where ever you want to go in most cities just using Uber. Your wait is 3-5 minutes most of the time, and that's today with a relatively small percentage of cars on the road being uber cars. I think I just profoundly disagree with you that the market segments interested in a shared car lifestyle vs owning their own car is too small to support an AV Uber. I think it's quite the opposite. People like you and me who care about independence and freedom and would be bothered by reliance on AV generally and AV Ubers even more so are the exception not the rule. Like I said, I worry that overtime we will be forced into extinction. The market desire for this is that strong.
I'm assuming you will disagree. But nevertheless, I think this is the story sold to Uber investors and why these moves into AV make sense (vs flailing).
A lot of what you list has to do with what goes on which truck. This is already highly computerized, and anyway not at all what Uber is making autonomous. As for your first responders example, there is huge potential for much more information to be much more quickly available to first responders than a human driver sifting through discarded cheeseburger wrappers for their printed document.
Getting an autonomous truck to negotiate interstates has got to be easier than getting a car to negotiate city streets.
We really are not talking about city driving here. In fact, they could take a huge leap by limiting AV trucks to interstate only, and requiring trained commercial drivers to take it the last x miles from the interstate to the dock site. The long haul in between is where 24/7 operation is a big gain.
I'm sure we are talking dock-to-dock trucking. Humans (for now) on the loading end, and humans (for now) on the unloading end. Autonomous 24/7 operation in between.
That's a pretty dim view. Perhaps you can say that people buying their stock on public markets are stupid rubes buying into hype, but before Uber was public, what was the compelling pitch to private investors that got them a $40b valuation in 2014?
Yes, yes, I know this is slashdot, so stupid VCs and dumb billionaires, etc etc. But let's get real. These firms ran numbers to get to $40b, and you think that pitch was competing with taxis, Lyft, and others?
You don't tell investors you're going to lose money for years without a pitch for an utterly transformative business plan. That's not: cheaper taxi! No, Uber was one of the first people publicly talking about autonomous vehicles being the next step. I remember, because it got them a ton of shit from Uber haters, who used the news to beat up on uber drivers. "Uber is telling you that you're a temporary inconvenience and they will get rid of drivers as soon as they can."
They bought Otto... out of desperation? Really? Doesn't it seem more likely that it is 100% in line with a transformative transportation story they've had from the beginning?
You know another hyped up story that lost money for years and years and years (and I think still is)? Amazon. Online bookstore. Then, f it, let's sell everything. We have some spare capacity in our servers, so let's rent that out too. How we shop is completely different now vs 10 years ago, and Amazon owns that. How we do infrastructure is completely different from what we did 5 years ago, and AWS owns that.
I think Uber saw an equally silly misuse of resources in transportation. You buy a $20k car so you can drive it for 90 mins a day, and the other 22.5 hours it is unused capacity. Trucking is massive, extremely complex, is very sensitive to efficiency and speed of delivery, and has some serious limitations from human drivers (so much so that laws had to be passed to force drivers to rest).
Now, almost no business sets a course and then powers straight ahead. It's fluid and involves reactions to market signals. But I think the narrative that Uber is lost and grasping at straws is really hard to swallow. No way do they get a $40b valuation in private funding rounds with a story limited to attacking taxis.
I'm trying to have a rational discussion here. You sound unhinged.
Losers, all genders matter, recently realized. Am I supposed to waste time explaining how stupid each of these replies is?
Marriage is less and less attractive to men, and it is less and less necessary. Men's "duty" to marry is now considered quite backward and sexist, as women are encouraged to be self-sufficient. Viewing wives as dependents is anachronistic.
Yet the laws and culture hasn't completely caught up to that. The lag results in equal benefits but unequal costs and risks. Perhaps time solves this, but I wonder whether that reverses men's declining interest in marriage.
This is what Taleb would call "bullshit vending". These experts are compensated now for their predictions, and the more specific they are ("by 2050") the better, but they have no skin in the game if they are wrong. CNBC is full of clowns predicting events in the next few weeks or months, and at least there they keep track of the prediction record and don't invite them back or do invite them back and make them eat crow. But we are talking about a prediction 30+ years from now. This should be discounted 100%.
Yes and yes. But you are conflating issues. Two men were always able to enter into a marriage contract. What people generally mean when they casually refer to "marriage" is the government status that permits certain tax filing and welfare benefits. There is nothing keeping government from allowing you to treat your robot as a spouse for the purposes of filing your taxes as married or obtaining social security spousal benefits.
Ok, but that doesn't answer my question. It just states an example of past silliness. I'm not sure the fact that we have resolved that and have no remaining examples of such treatment helps your argument. You could use this argument to suggest anything should have human rights... cars, wine, water, balloons.
Obviously, there is something different about AI. What is it? They will look like us? They will simulate human expressions and emotion? They can "think" in some sense that is more advanced than your laptop?
Why is it not right to say AI should always be property? Where does the inevitability that they will have human rights come from?
Well, this is an interesting question. Does it harm me if I permit my neighbor to enter into a contract with his car? I guess not. But I also don't know what that means and whether my neighbor is going to expect the courts to enforce his contract.
Separately, there is the status in government called "married", and there are a number of laws that define how that effects tax filing and welfare benefits. I don't know that it harms me personally all that much, but when elected representatives made voting decisions on whether to enact these tax filing and welfare benefits for people with "married" status, that status had a specific definition. With a different definition or perhaps no definition at all, as you suggest, would those elected representatives decided to spend or not spend or collect that tax money?
This is pretty common, though. Any time special treatment is given to a group with a label, people are incentivized to expand the definition. It benefits them a lot and the harm is diffuse.
Slashdot Mirror
You're thinking the right way, but in this case the answer is probably: None. This is trivial to work around. Just "hire" the $100k H1-B by contracting that function to a corporation that does nothing but sponsor H1-Bs. The most famous supposed examples of H1-B abuse aren't even direct hires; they are elimination of internal functions and localsourcing the function to another firm, who happens to employ H1-Bs. Would love to hear how you would stop this without making a huge leap into govt intrusiveness into businesses' operational decisions.
Slavery is already illegal, actually. If an employee trains his replacement, it's voluntary. Usually they are compensated with severance, which of course they are not entitled to. We can say this is a dick move by employers, but it's not forced.
âAnd, here, tech folks admit that increasing the minimum wage leads to less employmentâ.
You appear to be taking the straw man arguments too literally. Very few people say there is no effect from human greenhouse emissions. I have heard Lamar say this in hearings (something like "No one here would disagree that human greenhouse gas emissions affect climate innsome way."). Here are some questions to which we do not know the answer (though people will reply with claims that we do):
1) How big is the effect of human greenhouse emissions compared to natural temperature variation?
2) On climate time scale, is the net impact of human greenhouse emissions throughout all systems negative, neutral, or positive, and on what dimensions should we measure that?
My beef with the climate change people is the attitude of omniscience about a complex topic that nobody actually understands. We have pieces of the puzzle, and the climate change folks overcompensate for uncertainty with a condescending attitude and bullshit vending. The "98% scientific consensus" talking point is a great example. It's garbage, but because climate change people feel vulnerable with normal levels of uncertainty in scientific subjects, they exaggerate and fearmonger in substitution for fact based discussion about what we do and dont know.
There is another way to deal with this uncertainty: risk. Argue that yes, we might be wrong about our cost-benefit analysis of certain policy prescriptions because like any field of science, especially relatively new ones, there is a lot we don't know. But the risk is hugely asymmetrical. If we are wrong, we probably spent money on stupid projects and increased poverty levels and income inequality relative to what would have otherwise been. If we are right, human life will confront existential threats. So logically we should err on the side of the uncertainty that minimizes downside.
This is the sane argument, but I won't hold my breath (pardon the CO2 emission)
I'm very happy to come to the comments section and find mostly mocking and people who looked beyond the headline. Would have been nice if the editors did that.
Here is the full takedown on The Intercept of this BS-vending from WaPo: https://theintercept.com/2016/...
Alright. You blamed women, and I said women wouldn't act that way if men didn't train them to do so. I don't think that is unclear; you just had a knee-jerk response and didn't think about what I was saying.
> Why do you need a rational argument? Life isn't rational. Choose to have kids. Choose to not have kids. Choose between flying a kite or riding a bike. None of it's rational.
I think you are saying that your examples are sort of first-order want and don't have a rational basis, because they are more primal, reptillian, and internally motivated. I guess that is a debatable point on the meaning of rational, but I don't think your examples are analogous. I choose not to have kids, because I don't want kids (or vice versa). I choose to have a relationship with a woman, because I want a relationship with a woman. For these to be analogous to the marriage question (given no desire for kids), you'd need to justify wanting to be in a contract with the woman you're with. Do people have an emotional attachment to a contract? Do people just want to be in a contract? I just don't see this as analogous to wanting kids or wanting to be with a woman.
This is really a different direction that I meant in my original question. I see normative changes in our culture that do reduce the number and value of the reasons for marriage. You've cited some yourself. I am not saying this is a good or bad thing. I'm just saying that -- given all these changes -- does it make sense for someone right now to decide to marry the woman they are with? I think the answer is clearly no, which is why you see a lot of women giving ultimatums to their men.
This is a highly unimaginative view. AV truck stops at designated points (let's just use rest areas for now to keep it simple) closest to the destination city. Driver takes over the truck and negotiates the city to the destination point.
You are 100% wrong when you say AV trucks need to negotiate city streets. It would be expensive to get an AV truck to do this, and it's pretty damn cheap to have a human take it the last 30 minutes of the trip. To me this is clearly how AV trucking will work initially.
Do you even see the irony in your post? You're calling me a "mangina" for saying that men who give pretty women everything they want train them to be entitled brats. I am criticizing weak men who get walked all over by women, so you call me a "mangina"?
> That would depend a lot on the young man. I know how I'm bringing up my kids, and I think they'll do okay.
Ok, but I'm talking about the rational argument. It seems to me that it's irrational for men who have no interest in children to get married. You seem to agree here, when you earlier say that men used to get married largely to have cultural and personal permission to have sex, and now they get that cultural and personal permission without getting married. So now what's the rational argument?
LOL. Ok, so you should get married so that by the policy of certain hospitals you are allowed to visit someone who are in critical care hospital areas without extra hassle?
Inheritance is a total mess. If you're looking to allow easy inheritance to someone, for gods sake don't marry them; make them the successor to your trust.
I disagree that is evidence that OP is religious. Consider your own prejudices.
Name such a state. Did you read my comment with your brain turned off?
What a your argument, exactly? That a majority of VC deals look like Theranos? Your example of stupid VC investment isn't even responsive to the point of discussion, which is whether these investors wrote checks at a $40b valuation purely in the "better, cheaper taxi" pitch. Your example is about an impressive pitch that wasn't real. If anything, this seems to support my view that VCs got excited about something else in Uber's pitch, something much bigger than "better, cheaper taxi".
I am not making an argument that private investors are purely rational supermen. I'm just saying that the OP's suggestion that the move into AV cars and trucks is Uber grasping at straws as they realize the taxi market is smaller than I guess they thought previously... just doesn't pass the smell test. And one of the reasons it doesn't pass the smell test is the $40b private valuation by VCs. That's just too outlandish a valuation for a taxi story, and we have to believe not that VCs were fooled by a fake pitch, but that they got the "real pitch" of just taxi and still somehow got super excited and came up with absolutely ludicrous global growth numbers for that line of business. Sorry, I just don't think so.
Your insurance example is a terrible one, as it misunderstands what insurance is buying you. But I agree with you 100% on the freedom issues. I think it is inevitable that we will eventually have certain AV-only roads, and this bothers me because it's harder to opt out. Same is true with smartphones. I want to opt out, but it is very difficult to do so as life increasingly assumes you have one, and there is little and shrinking incentive to serve the market segment that doesn't.
But I don't follow your logic on how this counters an AV Uber's usefulness. It's possible today to get around where ever you want to go in most cities just using Uber. Your wait is 3-5 minutes most of the time, and that's today with a relatively small percentage of cars on the road being uber cars. I think I just profoundly disagree with you that the market segments interested in a shared car lifestyle vs owning their own car is too small to support an AV Uber. I think it's quite the opposite. People like you and me who care about independence and freedom and would be bothered by reliance on AV generally and AV Ubers even more so are the exception not the rule. Like I said, I worry that overtime we will be forced into extinction. The market desire for this is that strong.
I'm assuming you will disagree. But nevertheless, I think this is the story sold to Uber investors and why these moves into AV make sense (vs flailing).
A lot of what you list has to do with what goes on which truck. This is already highly computerized, and anyway not at all what Uber is making autonomous. As for your first responders example, there is huge potential for much more information to be much more quickly available to first responders than a human driver sifting through discarded cheeseburger wrappers for their printed document.
Getting an autonomous truck to negotiate interstates has got to be easier than getting a car to negotiate city streets.
We really are not talking about city driving here. In fact, they could take a huge leap by limiting AV trucks to interstate only, and requiring trained commercial drivers to take it the last x miles from the interstate to the dock site. The long haul in between is where 24/7 operation is a big gain.
I'm sure we are talking dock-to-dock trucking. Humans (for now) on the loading end, and humans (for now) on the unloading end. Autonomous 24/7 operation in between.
That's a pretty dim view. Perhaps you can say that people buying their stock on public markets are stupid rubes buying into hype, but before Uber was public, what was the compelling pitch to private investors that got them a $40b valuation in 2014?
Yes, yes, I know this is slashdot, so stupid VCs and dumb billionaires, etc etc. But let's get real. These firms ran numbers to get to $40b, and you think that pitch was competing with taxis, Lyft, and others?
You don't tell investors you're going to lose money for years without a pitch for an utterly transformative business plan. That's not: cheaper taxi! No, Uber was one of the first people publicly talking about autonomous vehicles being the next step. I remember, because it got them a ton of shit from Uber haters, who used the news to beat up on uber drivers. "Uber is telling you that you're a temporary inconvenience and they will get rid of drivers as soon as they can."
They bought Otto... out of desperation? Really? Doesn't it seem more likely that it is 100% in line with a transformative transportation story they've had from the beginning?
You know another hyped up story that lost money for years and years and years (and I think still is)? Amazon. Online bookstore. Then, f it, let's sell everything. We have some spare capacity in our servers, so let's rent that out too. How we shop is completely different now vs 10 years ago, and Amazon owns that. How we do infrastructure is completely different from what we did 5 years ago, and AWS owns that.
I think Uber saw an equally silly misuse of resources in transportation. You buy a $20k car so you can drive it for 90 mins a day, and the other 22.5 hours it is unused capacity. Trucking is massive, extremely complex, is very sensitive to efficiency and speed of delivery, and has some serious limitations from human drivers (so much so that laws had to be passed to force drivers to rest).
Now, almost no business sets a course and then powers straight ahead. It's fluid and involves reactions to market signals. But I think the narrative that Uber is lost and grasping at straws is really hard to swallow. No way do they get a $40b valuation in private funding rounds with a story limited to attacking taxis.
I'm trying to have a rational discussion here. You sound unhinged.
Losers, all genders matter, recently realized. Am I supposed to waste time explaining how stupid each of these replies is?
Marriage is less and less attractive to men, and it is less and less necessary. Men's "duty" to marry is now considered quite backward and sexist, as women are encouraged to be self-sufficient. Viewing wives as dependents is anachronistic.
Yet the laws and culture hasn't completely caught up to that. The lag results in equal benefits but unequal costs and risks. Perhaps time solves this, but I wonder whether that reverses men's declining interest in marriage.
Woah, harsh. Musk reads this site, you know.
This is what Taleb would call "bullshit vending". These experts are compensated now for their predictions, and the more specific they are ("by 2050") the better, but they have no skin in the game if they are wrong. CNBC is full of clowns predicting events in the next few weeks or months, and at least there they keep track of the prediction record and don't invite them back or do invite them back and make them eat crow. But we are talking about a prediction 30+ years from now. This should be discounted 100%.
Yes and yes. But you are conflating issues. Two men were always able to enter into a marriage contract. What people generally mean when they casually refer to "marriage" is the government status that permits certain tax filing and welfare benefits. There is nothing keeping government from allowing you to treat your robot as a spouse for the purposes of filing your taxes as married or obtaining social security spousal benefits.
Ok, but that doesn't answer my question. It just states an example of past silliness. I'm not sure the fact that we have resolved that and have no remaining examples of such treatment helps your argument. You could use this argument to suggest anything should have human rights... cars, wine, water, balloons.
Obviously, there is something different about AI. What is it? They will look like us? They will simulate human expressions and emotion? They can "think" in some sense that is more advanced than your laptop?
Why is it not right to say AI should always be property? Where does the inevitability that they will have human rights come from?
Well, this is an interesting question. Does it harm me if I permit my neighbor to enter into a contract with his car? I guess not. But I also don't know what that means and whether my neighbor is going to expect the courts to enforce his contract.
Separately, there is the status in government called "married", and there are a number of laws that define how that effects tax filing and welfare benefits. I don't know that it harms me personally all that much, but when elected representatives made voting decisions on whether to enact these tax filing and welfare benefits for people with "married" status, that status had a specific definition. With a different definition or perhaps no definition at all, as you suggest, would those elected representatives decided to spend or not spend or collect that tax money?
This is pretty common, though. Any time special treatment is given to a group with a label, people are incentivized to expand the definition. It benefits them a lot and the harm is diffuse.