The original definition of Marxist Socialism involves state ownership of the means of production. The nordic counties used to be socialist but that ended in the 1980s (I lived in Sweden at the time). France is the most socialist country in Western Europe. The social democracies of Europe (like Bernie's democratic socialism) do not involve the state owning production.
If you want to use the looser definition of socialism often employed in the US (transfer of wealth from top to bottom) then every government that has ever existed is socialist. So that's not a useful defintion.
Automation and AI are for real. I've heard about job replacement by automation my whole life. But now it is seriously happening and not just for menial labor. Professional services and complex tasks are being replaced as fast as the software can be written.
So it is useless to talk about UBI as if it is optional. The only alternative is some form of luddite resistance to automation. UBI is a much better solution. It can be funded by taxing the massive profits coming from the automation. So the only real obstacle is the mindset that resists the idea of not requiring work for survival. Get over it.
I don't think that word means what you think it does. Zero rating, by definition, implies discrimination between sources of data. And it doesn't help to say it's ok to do it for Netflix because then your are discriminating against non-Netflix video or non-video applications. The whole point of net neutrality is that a bit is a bit and companies that use public easements (whether telephone poles or public airwaves) are common carriers subject to limitations on pricing.... for the public good.
And so are you. Humans are delicate blobs of protein, fat, and carbs in aqueous solution or suspension. Not the right stuff for space. The only good reason for humans to leave the Earth is to travel to another hospitable planetary surface to establish a permanent colony. All else is engineering ego.
There is little that a human can do in space that can't be done faster and cheaper (when you count life support costs) by an AI controlling robots. But NASA has become a very conservative and bureaucratic organization that feels more comfortable doing what it has already done. For engineers this may be fun but it's not very productive. Once you've expended the boost energy to get out of Earth's gravity well, Mars is not much further away, energy wise, than the Moon.
And there IS a very good reason to establish a self-supporting colony on Mars. Survival of the species.
Ok GR8, that's a use I had not considered. I agree that the asymmetrical speeds serve the big content providers at the expense of individually generated content.
Of course this is a moving scale over time. Right now, for most people, it's about 5Mbps down per person in the household. Netflix takes 3 Mbps. VOIP phone takes 0.16 Mbps. File downloads are usually limited by the server on the other end. I guess that servers will get faster if most folks have faster download speeds. Simple webpage downloads are limited by latency and broadband has little effect. I would really like to hear the case for speeds over 5Mbps/person.
But that's a different issue from what the official "broadband" definition should be. Government subsidies should only go to companies that are pushing the boundaries. Time Warner should not get money for building more of the same slow service.
You are assuming that the rise in per capita GDP equals a rise in median income. That is not true in an automation economy where the money goes to the owner class. And yes, war could eliminate the excess workers but would also eliminate the automation by destroying the physical and online infrastructure that makes a technological society possible. This is equivalent to the non-peaceful luddite revolution I started with.
Automation and adoption of AI is replacing human labor at an accelerating rate, and not just for menial labor. Computers can now do much of work of doctors, lawyers, financial analysts, and a wide array of service occupations. Touch screen vending machines will soon replace counter and kitchen workers in fast food restaurants. This increased productivity (production per person-hour) means higher profits for the companies but that money goes to the owner class, not the general population. So how are people going to survive.
There are two possibilities and only two. A luddite revolution reverses automation so that we return to the economy of the 20th Century.. or... a socialist revolution redistributes the wealth so that the majority of people have a way to have a meaningful life. The either of those revolutions can be peaceful but probably won't be. And this does not mean just Europe. It's the trajectory of the human race. Coming to a continent near you.
The way you can tell is that the article mentions that their plants had been attacked by mold. Really? And why were mold spores allowed to come into the plant growth facility? This reminds me of a comment by the agronomist in the Biosphere 2 building in Arizona, which was supposed to be a test of the ability of humans to survive in a closed environment such as a Mars habitat. She said she spent two thirds of her time weeding the vegetable garden.
There are lots of difficulties related to space agriculture, including light, heat, and hydration as mentioned in this article. But the ONE ADVANTAGE of off-world farming is that you can guarantee pest free, disease free, weed free environments for the plants. Once the plants are in a space habitat that is clean, there is no reason for ever allowing them to be infected. There are no weeds or bugs on Mars.
Failure to make use of that one big advantage tells you that this Space Shuttle plant stuff is just a publicity stunt.
"Natural decrease is a major policy concern because it drains the demographic resilience from a region diminishing its economic viability and competitiveness." What a silly argument, given that productivity and and GDP are still rising rapidly in Europe.
Automation is accelerating with AI finally becoming a real thing. Economic output is rising in absolute terms and on a per-person basis. What this should mean is a rising standard of living. But in the US all the benefits of per capita productivity are going to the "owner class". This is the stuff of revolutions.
As long as there are intelligent, healthy people who are unemployed, the birth rate has not fallen enough.
Canada and Australia are not independent. They still swear allegiance to the Royal House of Britain. They are Commonwealth. The US is not. And if the US had not fought a war for independence, it is likely that all the colonies would still be more tightly controlled by England.
The article notes that VW would become a new competitor to Musk. It also notes that the bottleneck for electric vehicles is availability of batteries. But Musk is currently building the largest battery factory in the world, in Nevada. So VW would also be a customer of the Musk batteries. So now we know why Musk is so excited about VW entering the electric market.
Eventually a Mars colony will become independent, when it is economically self-sufficient. But only Martians can do that. Just look at the British colonies as an example. America declared it's independence when it was able to and was forced to. If we had waited for the Brits to "give" us independence, we would still be waiting. And in the case of Mars, it will take a long time because self-sufficiency will be difficult.
Please, please don't judge North Carolina by these rubes. This dumb little town is about 100 miles from Research Triangle Park, the largest concentration of PhDs in the world. North Carolina is a progressive and beautiful state with the best climate in the eastern US. It has traditionally had the best public education system in the South.
Yes, we are currently in the clutches of a backwards Republican state government so there are lots of headlines about regressive policies. But this is an aberration ( the first Republican government in over 100 years) and it will not last long.
"Solar is the energy of the future, and always will be." And that was true in a very sad way for the last 30 years. But NOW solar and wind are actually happening. They are already more economical than the market replacement costs of coal and oil, and that's without including the externalized environmental costs of fossil fuels.
So just at the moment when the joke is on fossil fuels for the first time ever, this joker suggest what? That we dump renewables for an unreachable and unproven fantasy? Yeah, that's funny.
The article defines the "commons" as sharing the meager resources available to the masses. But if we are one society, the commons are the property of the society as a whole. As technology increases productivity it also reduces the need for labor. So the wealth moves to the owners of the tech. Society can't survive unless there is a mechanism to re-distribute that wealth. It will happen by progressive taxation (like the 90% top marginal rate in the Eisenhower administration) or it will happen by revolution. I think everyone (including the rich) would prefer that it happen by taxation.
Our country does not exist to serve the theoretical construct of the "free market" (which of course is highly manipulated and not at all free). It exists to serve the people who live here.
Yes, this is the most important point that can be made about the article. It is based on a false premise: "what's especially strange about the failed push for renewables".
Wind and solar are growing faster than ever, in the US, in China, in Europe and in the developing world. Nuclear is an over-centralized, expensive, and dangerous technology based on a limited fuel source. Renewables would be growing even faster if it were not actively opposed by the incumbent fossil fuel industry which puts up legal roadblocks and receives far more in government subsidies than renewables ever have.
Yes, I was thinking that everything would be designed for whatever the standard robot is. I don't actually expect humans to be involved in asteroid mining. Too dangerous. Too expensive to provide life support.
Your point about 4 arms is good. It is "quite imaginable-able" that the feet would have articulate fingers/toes. Unfortunately, you thought of it and I thought of it, but NASA didn't. Given their woeful lack of imagination, it would have been better if NASA had just given a bunch of money to MIT and asked them to build AND program a robot for zero/low gravity environments.
What a coincidence! It just happens that the best physical form for a space robot is exactly the same as the evolutionary end product of millions of years of swinging in trees followed by millions of years of roaming around on grassy savannahs. Are legs really that useful in zero G? Only two arms when you could have three?
Sadly, this seems to indicate that NASA is more interested in pandering to pop culture than in optimizing a space-based physical effector.
Research Triangle.... Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill... is the best mix of tech jobs and Southern living. If you like the fine food, art, music, politeness and gentle culture of the liberal South, this is the place to be. Best weather in the eastern US, a culturally diverse society. Right now we have a backwards Republican Governor and General Assembly but that won't last for long.
No, it's not. Socialism means that the government owns the means of production. Countries like Sweden, Denmark, and Finland are no longer socialist. France is still somewhat socialist. But there is nothing about having a guaranteed national income that requires socialism. The American right has intentionally distorted the definition of socialism to imply that any re-distribution of wealth is part of a socialist system that has never worked anywhere. There is a real problem when government tries to run business (as opposed to regulating a level playing field).
The mixed economies of Scandinavia make use of the free enterprise system to efficiently distribute production resources and generate wealth. And then harvest some of that wealth for the benefit of the citizens of the country. Our society exists not for some abstract principle of capitalism. It exists for the benefit of all its citizens.
Yes, automation can wipe out most jobs in manufacturing, production, computers, law, medicine, etc, etc. So it's time to start thinking about how we will obtain the necessities (and niceties) of life. We will be a fabulously productive and rich country but all the money will go to the top, the owners of the automation companies. So now it's about the post-scarcity society perhaps as illustrated in Star Trek. But for real, Finland is now working on the idea of a national guaranteed income. This may upset the puritan types who think that hard work is somehow connected to morality. You know, dancing is sinful because it's too much fun.
So yes, this means taking money from the extremely wealthy and providing an income and services to those who are not. Is this socialism? No, not the Marxist version anyway because that means the ownership of the means of production by the state. But this definitely is redistribution of wealth, just as has been done by every nation on the face of the earth in all of recorded time.
Reminds me of the shuttle launches in 1986. Just keep on launching them in colder and colder weather until one blows up. I guess we keep on recertifying nuke plants until one blows up.
A nuclear plant will eventually blow up/melt down in the US, just like in Russia and Japan. And when it does, we will suddenly be surprised at how costly it is to abandon a large section of the country. We will suddenly realize that nuclear is not a good deal at all. So why can't we just decide that right now, before we destroy a big part of the country?
The reason it is so profitable for companies to continue to sell old antibiotics is that the research and marketing is largely done. It' s pure profit with no additional investment. And there is no competition because they are protected by long patent terms.
Patents exist (see Art. 1, Sec 8 of the US Constitution) to encourage science and the arts. Not to encourage profit. The Congress has been bought and they keep extending the length of patent and copyright protections.
So shorten the time that patents are in effect. When the old antibiotics become public domain there will be a strong incentive for the big rich pharma companies to invest in developing the new ones.
Slashdot Mirror
The original definition of Marxist Socialism involves state ownership of the means of production. The nordic counties used to be socialist but that ended in the 1980s (I lived in Sweden at the time). France is the most socialist country in Western Europe. The social democracies of Europe (like Bernie's democratic socialism) do not involve the state owning production.
If you want to use the looser definition of socialism often employed in the US (transfer of wealth from top to bottom) then every government that has ever existed is socialist. So that's not a useful defintion.
Automation and AI are for real. I've heard about job replacement by automation my whole life. But now it is seriously happening and not just for menial labor. Professional services and complex tasks are being replaced as fast as the software can be written.
So it is useless to talk about UBI as if it is optional. The only alternative is some form of luddite resistance to automation. UBI is a much better solution. It can be funded by taxing the massive profits coming from the automation. So the only real obstacle is the mindset that resists the idea of not requiring work for survival. Get over it.
I don't think that word means what you think it does. Zero rating, by definition, implies discrimination between sources of data. And it doesn't help to say it's ok to do it for Netflix because then your are discriminating against non-Netflix video or non-video applications. The whole point of net neutrality is that a bit is a bit and companies that use public easements (whether telephone poles or public airwaves) are common carriers subject to limitations on pricing.... for the public good.
And so are you. Humans are delicate blobs of protein, fat, and carbs in aqueous solution or suspension. Not the right stuff for space. The only good reason for humans to leave the Earth is to travel to another hospitable planetary surface to establish a permanent colony. All else is engineering ego.
There is little that a human can do in space that can't be done faster and cheaper (when you count life support costs) by an AI controlling robots. But NASA has become a very conservative and bureaucratic organization that feels more comfortable doing what it has already done. For engineers this may be fun but it's not very productive. Once you've expended the boost energy to get out of Earth's gravity well, Mars is not much further away, energy wise, than the Moon.
And there IS a very good reason to establish a self-supporting colony on Mars. Survival of the species.
Ok GR8, that's a use I had not considered. I agree that the asymmetrical speeds serve the big content providers at the expense of individually generated content.
Of course this is a moving scale over time. Right now, for most people, it's about 5Mbps down per person in the household. Netflix takes 3 Mbps. VOIP phone takes 0.16 Mbps. File downloads are usually limited by the server on the other end. I guess that servers will get faster if most folks have faster download speeds. Simple webpage downloads are limited by latency and broadband has little effect. I would really like to hear the case for speeds over 5Mbps/person.
But that's a different issue from what the official "broadband" definition should be. Government subsidies should only go to companies that are pushing the boundaries. Time Warner should not get money for building more of the same slow service.
You are assuming that the rise in per capita GDP equals a rise in median income. That is not true in an automation economy where the money goes to the owner class. And yes, war could eliminate the excess workers but would also eliminate the automation by destroying the physical and online infrastructure that makes a technological society possible. This is equivalent to the non-peaceful luddite revolution I started with.
Automation and adoption of AI is replacing human labor at an accelerating rate, and not just for menial labor. Computers can now do much of work of doctors, lawyers, financial analysts, and a wide array of service occupations. Touch screen vending machines will soon replace counter and kitchen workers in fast food restaurants. This increased productivity (production per person-hour) means higher profits for the companies but that money goes to the owner class, not the general population. So how are people going to survive.
There are two possibilities and only two. A luddite revolution reverses automation so that we return to the economy of the 20th Century.. or... a socialist revolution redistributes the wealth so that the majority of people have a way to have a meaningful life. The either of those revolutions can be peaceful but probably won't be. And this does not mean just Europe. It's the trajectory of the human race. Coming to a continent near you.
The way you can tell is that the article mentions that their plants had been attacked by mold. Really? And why were mold spores allowed to come into the plant growth facility? This reminds me of a comment by the agronomist in the Biosphere 2 building in Arizona, which was supposed to be a test of the ability of humans to survive in a closed environment such as a Mars habitat. She said she spent two thirds of her time weeding the vegetable garden.
There are lots of difficulties related to space agriculture, including light, heat, and hydration as mentioned in this article. But the ONE ADVANTAGE of off-world farming is that you can guarantee pest free, disease free, weed free environments for the plants. Once the plants are in a space habitat that is clean, there is no reason for ever allowing them to be infected. There are no weeds or bugs on Mars.
Failure to make use of that one big advantage tells you that this Space Shuttle plant stuff is just a publicity stunt.
Starting with the line "When you take both 5GHz channels at 2,100Gb/s " everything should be in Mb/s instead of Gb/s.
"Natural decrease is a major policy concern because it drains the demographic resilience from a region diminishing its economic viability and competitiveness." What a silly argument, given that productivity and and GDP are still rising rapidly in Europe.
Automation is accelerating with AI finally becoming a real thing. Economic output is rising in absolute terms and on a per-person basis. What this should mean is a rising standard of living. But in the US all the benefits of per capita productivity are going to the "owner class". This is the stuff of revolutions.
As long as there are intelligent, healthy people who are unemployed, the birth rate has not fallen enough.
Canada and Australia are not independent. They still swear allegiance to the Royal House of Britain. They are Commonwealth. The US is not. And if the US had not fought a war for independence, it is likely that all the colonies would still be more tightly controlled by England.
The article notes that VW would become a new competitor to Musk. It also notes that the bottleneck for electric vehicles is availability of batteries. But Musk is currently building the largest battery factory in the world, in Nevada. So VW would also be a customer of the Musk batteries. So now we know why Musk is so excited about VW entering the electric market.
Eventually a Mars colony will become independent, when it is economically self-sufficient. But only Martians can do that. Just look at the British colonies as an example. America declared it's independence when it was able to and was forced to. If we had waited for the Brits to "give" us independence, we would still be waiting. And in the case of Mars, it will take a long time because self-sufficiency will be difficult.
Please, please don't judge North Carolina by these rubes. This dumb little town is about 100 miles from Research Triangle Park, the largest concentration of PhDs in the world. North Carolina is a progressive and beautiful state with the best climate in the eastern US. It has traditionally had the best public education system in the South.
Yes, we are currently in the clutches of a backwards Republican state government so there are lots of headlines about regressive policies. But this is an aberration ( the first Republican government in over 100 years) and it will not last long.
"Solar is the energy of the future, and always will be." And that was true in a very sad way for the last 30 years. But NOW solar and wind are actually happening. They are already more economical than the market replacement costs of coal and oil, and that's without including the externalized environmental costs of fossil fuels.
So just at the moment when the joke is on fossil fuels for the first time ever, this joker suggest what? That we dump renewables for an unreachable and unproven fantasy? Yeah, that's funny.
The article defines the "commons" as sharing the meager resources available to the masses. But if we are one society, the commons are the property of the society as a whole. As technology increases productivity it also reduces the need for labor. So the wealth moves to the owners of the tech. Society can't survive unless there is a mechanism to re-distribute that wealth. It will happen by progressive taxation (like the 90% top marginal rate in the Eisenhower administration) or it will happen by revolution. I think everyone (including the rich) would prefer that it happen by taxation.
Our country does not exist to serve the theoretical construct of the "free market" (which of course is highly manipulated and not at all free). It exists to serve the people who live here.
Yes, this is the most important point that can be made about the article. It is based on a false premise: "what's especially strange about the failed push for renewables".
Wind and solar are growing faster than ever, in the US, in China, in Europe and in the developing world. Nuclear is an over-centralized, expensive, and dangerous technology based on a limited fuel source. Renewables would be growing even faster if it were not actively opposed by the incumbent fossil fuel industry which puts up legal roadblocks and receives far more in government subsidies than renewables ever have.
Yes, I was thinking that everything would be designed for whatever the standard robot is. I don't actually expect humans to be involved in asteroid mining. Too dangerous. Too expensive to provide life support.
Your point about 4 arms is good. It is "quite imaginable-able" that the feet would have articulate fingers/toes. Unfortunately, you thought of it and I thought of it, but NASA didn't. Given their woeful lack of imagination, it would have been better if NASA had just given a bunch of money to MIT and asked them to build AND program a robot for zero/low gravity environments.
What a coincidence! It just happens that the best physical form for a space robot is exactly the same as the evolutionary end product of millions of years of swinging in trees followed by millions of years of roaming around on grassy savannahs. Are legs really that useful in zero G? Only two arms when you could have three?
Sadly, this seems to indicate that NASA is more interested in pandering to pop culture than in optimizing a space-based physical effector.
Research Triangle .... Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill... is the best mix of tech jobs and Southern living. If you like the fine food, art, music, politeness and gentle culture of the liberal South, this is the place to be. Best weather in the eastern US, a culturally diverse society. Right now we have a backwards Republican Governor and General Assembly but that won't last for long.
No, it's not. Socialism means that the government owns the means of production. Countries like Sweden, Denmark, and Finland are no longer socialist. France is still somewhat socialist. But there is nothing about having a guaranteed national income that requires socialism. The American right has intentionally distorted the definition of socialism to imply that any re-distribution of wealth is part of a socialist system that has never worked anywhere. There is a real problem when government tries to run business (as opposed to regulating a level playing field).
The mixed economies of Scandinavia make use of the free enterprise system to efficiently distribute production resources and generate wealth. And then harvest some of that wealth for the benefit of the citizens of the country. Our society exists not for some abstract principle of capitalism. It exists for the benefit of all its citizens.
Yes, automation can wipe out most jobs in manufacturing, production, computers, law, medicine, etc, etc. So it's time to start thinking about how we will obtain the necessities (and niceties) of life. We will be a fabulously productive and rich country but all the money will go to the top, the owners of the automation companies. So now it's about the post-scarcity society perhaps as illustrated in Star Trek. But for real, Finland is now working on the idea of a national guaranteed income. This may upset the puritan types who think that hard work is somehow connected to morality. You know, dancing is sinful because it's too much fun.
So yes, this means taking money from the extremely wealthy and providing an income and services to those who are not. Is this socialism? No, not the Marxist version anyway because that means the ownership of the means of production by the state. But this definitely is redistribution of wealth, just as has been done by every nation on the face of the earth in all of recorded time.
Reminds me of the shuttle launches in 1986. Just keep on launching them in colder and colder weather until one blows up. I guess we keep on recertifying nuke plants until one blows up.
A nuclear plant will eventually blow up/melt down in the US, just like in Russia and Japan. And when it does, we will suddenly be surprised at how costly it is to abandon a large section of the country. We will suddenly realize that nuclear is not a good deal at all. So why can't we just decide that right now, before we destroy a big part of the country?
The reason it is so profitable for companies to continue to sell old antibiotics is that the research and marketing is largely done. It' s pure profit with no additional investment. And there is no competition because they are protected by long patent terms.
Patents exist (see Art. 1, Sec 8 of the US Constitution) to encourage science and the arts. Not to encourage profit. The Congress has been bought and they keep extending the length of patent and copyright protections.
So shorten the time that patents are in effect. When the old antibiotics become public domain there will be a strong incentive for the big rich pharma companies to invest in developing the new ones.