You want to trim the fat, cut Joe CEO's bonus a few million dollars and watch his bullocks run and find ways to improve profits...
He'll shut down R&D, cash in his bonus for the temporary increase in profits, and be gone before the company folds from having its increasingly outdated products outcompeted. Clearly, the solution is a larger bonus which attracts top talent that does this faster and more thoroughly, thus maximizing economic efficiency by bankrupting every participant in it. No economic activity -> no waste -> 100% efficient economy, the sacred grail of economics. And a lot of starving people, but that's the price of perfection.
The truth is that being paid based on effort, (or worse, TIME), instead of results is killing our economy on a global scale.
Being paid based on time is inevitable if you want control over how I use it. If you want a result-based pay system, fine: just hand me the specification for the desired result and hand me money once I turn it in. But understand that I won't be attending meetings (since I'd be wasting my time, not yours), remaining on-site (since it's my business where I spend my time), allowing you to change the specs halfway through without compensating me (since if I did, you'd be wasting my time already spent on the problem), etc. This, of course, causes problems with coordination and flexibility, not to mention the ridiculous overhead needed to bill every single time I cross a finger for you separately, and the fact that I'l naturally be serving your competitors too, just like contractors do nowadays. It doesn't eliminate inefficiencies, it just shifts them around.
Besides, global economy is not dying, and if it was, it's extremely unlikely that a change in wage accounting practices would stop it.
Are you a singularity nut or just a misguided computationalist?
That's not fair, you could just be a time-traveler from the 1970's when people still took those ideas seriously.
It is very efficient of you to combine ad hominem, appeal to authority and weasel words into a single post. Is it because you have no logical arguments against the possibility of strong AI?
Mathematicians have been adding extra dimensions to equations and finding they simplify things for years. It doesn't mean we live in a 27 dimension manifold. All direct observations to date point to a 3D universe.
What observations would those be? If assuming 27 dimensions gets the same results as assuming 3 dimensions, then you can't tell which one the universe is through observation. And if 27 dimensions is a simpler model, then Occam's razor suggests we should indeed consider our home to be a 27D manifold.
"No one" is strong language. Netbooks tended to be 32-bit because (due to Windows license pricing) they shipped with less than 4 GB of RAM. Though netbooks are discontinued, some are still in operation, and several tablet PCs have similar specs.
Perhaps. But that's hardly a reason to not have a 64-bit version as the default for the desktops. After all, we're not talking about assembly code here.
Besides, I can't help but notice that Chrome is somehow managing to keep working with 100+ open tabs day after day week after week in a freaking phone.
Do you expect to be able to use a 32-bit Flash Player inside a 64-bit browser?
Sure, why not? Firefox runs plugins inside a container nowadays precisely to isolate its own memory space from them. So why would it be a problem?
Furthermore, I limit Firefox's memory footprint on my machine by using Flashblock to control sites' access to Flash Player.
Block it or allow it by default, the second you start FP Firefox switches to another open window. Which is a bug, and an annoying one.
Your basic mistake is assuming employees are interchangeable. Likely rooted in your union indoctrination.
I am. Everyone I know are. It's because, at the end of the day, I'm an average person. I have no inherent advantage over another average person. Now, there are schools of economic thought that say that I should thereby starve to death or at the very least live in horrible misery since, after all, I can be easily replaced. And once upon the time, these schools got us the Gilded Era and its robber barons, and people like me got just that. Then we joined together, recognized our common plight, and formed the unions to put a stop to that ruthless exploitation. And now I get paid a decent wage for putting in a reasonable effort.
So I, for one, will continue supporting the unions. And you will undoubtedly continue looking down at them, never understanding that your own economic position depends not on your undoubtedly superhuman abilities but us average people being able to demand a decend wage, thus forcing the choice to be between your elite skills and elite pay and my mediocre skills and mediocre pay rather than my mediocre skills and starvation wage.
But hey, disregard that, it's far more satisfying to keep having delusions of grandieur.
If only we could enable this retaliation for things "everyone" agrees are bad, like "trolling," and not for being gay or having a political view that some people don't like.
Socrates was a troll. Jesus was a troll. Prometheus was a troll. Gandhi was a troll. ML King was a troll.
Trolling isn't inherently bad, just annoying. Neither in reality nor our wildest daydreams can we advance without someone challenging the status quo. And a living organism that stops advancing dies. And civilization is an organism.
I just restarted Firefox, because after using 2 gigabytes on my 16-gigabyte system it started flashing black when switching windows in a way that predicts an imminent crash.
Would you please switch to 64-bit already? It's the year 2013, no one who uses the newest Firefox has a 32-bit system anymore, and it's not possible in practice to fix crashes due to running out of memory in C/C++.
Also, has the issue with switching to another window when a page using Flash is opened been fixed? I doubt that.
And part of "the public interest" is tracking down the people who want to drop off a truck bomb at the shopping center I'm going to be at. And part of tracking those people down is monitoring their communications.
1) You know some particular person is planning to bomb a shopping center. You don't need bugged encryption protocols, you can simply get a warrant to keep them under surveillance until you have enough evidence to arrest them.
2) You know there's a plan to bomb the shopping center, but don't know who's involved. Fortunately truck bombs need lots of materials, such as fertilizer, so start asking local sellers. And as a last resort you could simply stop and search every truck that approaches the center - you have probable cause, after all.
3) You don't know anything, but have a gnawing suspicion that some unspecified bad guy might be planning an attack against an unspecified shopping center for unspecified reason at unspecified date. Thus, you want the right and ability to open random letters on the off chance that these shadowy figures are discussing their evil plans on them. In this case, have you considered getting psychiatric help? Because it sure sounds like classic paranoia to me.
You say this as if it were a static, set state of affairs. Its not.
It's worse, actually, when the reason you are more efficient is because you have more capital and can thus afford better tools, such as factories and robots: you have better tools, thus you outcompete me, thus you can afford even better tools and outcompete me with an ever-larger margin.
That's the problem with free market: it has a natural tendency to collapse into a monopoly that sucks all the money in - an economic black hole, if you will.
I don't deny that Sandy was bad, but it was mainly bad because of its trajectory.
You are absolutely right. Concentrating only on hurricanes that hit inhabited areas is misleading. It's the completely inadequate response the Government has had for the Great Red Spot of Jupiter that we should focus on.
Especially when most news outlets are owned by media moguls with a vested interest in making the government look bad, so they get leverage to deregulate and thus transfer more of its power to themselves.
Now, let's say we live in a racist society where a good amount of people don't like people of a certain skin color and thus don't rent rooms to them. What this means is that people who aren't racist will be able to charge them more because there is less supply for them.
No, what this means is that their racist neighbours will beat them up for bringing filthy negroes into the neighborhood. And then lynch the negroes.
You really don't understand how evil works, do you?
I'm not much inclined to trust the economist profession. Their recent track record has been terrible, and there seems to be nothing even approaching concensus on some very fundamental policy issues.
You're assuming the purpose of an economist is to figure out how economy works. There are a few employed in such a position, faced with the hopeless task of examining a system composed of self-aware parts that can read their research and change their behavior accordingly. But most are simply propagandists: they are employed to come up with excuses for why whatever their employer wants is the best choice. Since the employers and their desired conclusions vary, so of course do the insane troll logic paths needed to reach them.
wait... so efficiently exchanging resources will lead to destruction? What school of economics is that from?
You being more efficient than me will destroy me, because you'll outcompete me. In a society based on earning wages from work an increasing number of people unable to find work because they can't compete with automatons leads to total chaos. Capitalism is coming to an end, one way or another - it's just not a viable economic model in a post-industrial society, any more than feudalism was in a postagricultural one. The questions are: what to replace it with, and how violent the process will be?
Most likely the good old selection bias: "all my friends share my political beliefs, or at least don't contradict them". Also, libertarians have a tendency to take a somewhat religious attitude towards their politics, and "all the cool/smart people agree with me" is a way of feeling validated, so...
I don't see why "vaporization" must be defined as "completely separating all atoms within a molecule." Evaporation and boiling are two means of vaporizing (making into vapor) without complete atomic separation.
Because most molecules in the human body are simply too big: the energy needed to separate them from each other is greater than the energy needed to break them apart. You can observe this behavior if you have a fireplace: a log of wood will first burn with a flame as volatiles evaporate and mix with the air (and burn), but even after the flame goes out there'll be a lot of charcoal which smolders as its breaks apart burn while it still remains solid.
We already are billed for driving all over the place. It's called taxes and it requires no special equipment for your car.
Taxes are a flat-rate uncapped Internet connection and toll roads are a pay-per minute. Both people and the businesses are better off with the former than the latter; in fact the only ones who benefit from pay-per minute are the toll booth owners.
Bureaucrats learn to rely on their tools. If the vehicle shows up at certain checkpoints, it would probably never occur to them to spend the hundreds of man-hours necessary to check things like traffic cameras to see if they could find it running without the tracker.
Man-hours? The tools the bureaucrats have include:
License plate scanners
Facial scanners
RFID scanners
Cell phone location scanners
E-mail and other online activity scanners
Databases to store all of this data
Automation to look for pretermined patterns
Data mining to look for unexpected patterns and deviations from them
What happens is that you do anything unexpected, the bureaucrat gets a notification from all this automation, along with your online and offline history. This isn't the 1700's anymore, there's no manpower or other resource constraint to keep every single person under 24/7 surveillance, and apparently no social one either, since you're a potential terrorist/child molester/drug user/kidnapper/whatever. Welcome to the Panopticon.
A small risk over thousands or more orders can become a big risk.
Isn't it the exact other way around? The more orders you place, the less overall deviation from the expected outcome there'll be, since outliers either way will cancel each other out.
I'm registered Republican, and I find myself rolling my eyes at much of the literature that comes my way from GOP candidates.
So why stay registered? It seems to me that it sends a pretty clear message that, as much as you roll your eyes, your vote is secured, thus your opinion can be safely ignored. Unregister and make them earn your vote.
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He'll shut down R&D, cash in his bonus for the temporary increase in profits, and be gone before the company folds from having its increasingly outdated products outcompeted. Clearly, the solution is a larger bonus which attracts top talent that does this faster and more thoroughly, thus maximizing economic efficiency by bankrupting every participant in it. No economic activity -> no waste -> 100% efficient economy, the sacred grail of economics. And a lot of starving people, but that's the price of perfection.
Being paid based on time is inevitable if you want control over how I use it. If you want a result-based pay system, fine: just hand me the specification for the desired result and hand me money once I turn it in. But understand that I won't be attending meetings (since I'd be wasting my time, not yours), remaining on-site (since it's my business where I spend my time), allowing you to change the specs halfway through without compensating me (since if I did, you'd be wasting my time already spent on the problem), etc. This, of course, causes problems with coordination and flexibility, not to mention the ridiculous overhead needed to bill every single time I cross a finger for you separately, and the fact that I'l naturally be serving your competitors too, just like contractors do nowadays. It doesn't eliminate inefficiencies, it just shifts them around.
Besides, global economy is not dying, and if it was, it's extremely unlikely that a change in wage accounting practices would stop it.
It is very efficient of you to combine ad hominem, appeal to authority and weasel words into a single post. Is it because you have no logical arguments against the possibility of strong AI?
What observations would those be? If assuming 27 dimensions gets the same results as assuming 3 dimensions, then you can't tell which one the universe is through observation. And if 27 dimensions is a simpler model, then Occam's razor suggests we should indeed consider our home to be a 27D manifold.
Perhaps. But that's hardly a reason to not have a 64-bit version as the default for the desktops. After all, we're not talking about assembly code here.
Besides, I can't help but notice that Chrome is somehow managing to keep working with 100+ open tabs day after day week after week in a freaking phone.
Sure, why not? Firefox runs plugins inside a container nowadays precisely to isolate its own memory space from them. So why would it be a problem?
Block it or allow it by default, the second you start FP Firefox switches to another open window. Which is a bug, and an annoying one.
I am. Everyone I know are. It's because, at the end of the day, I'm an average person. I have no inherent advantage over another average person. Now, there are schools of economic thought that say that I should thereby starve to death or at the very least live in horrible misery since, after all, I can be easily replaced. And once upon the time, these schools got us the Gilded Era and its robber barons, and people like me got just that. Then we joined together, recognized our common plight, and formed the unions to put a stop to that ruthless exploitation. And now I get paid a decent wage for putting in a reasonable effort.
So I, for one, will continue supporting the unions. And you will undoubtedly continue looking down at them, never understanding that your own economic position depends not on your undoubtedly superhuman abilities but us average people being able to demand a decend wage, thus forcing the choice to be between your elite skills and elite pay and my mediocre skills and mediocre pay rather than my mediocre skills and starvation wage.
But hey, disregard that, it's far more satisfying to keep having delusions of grandieur.
Socrates was a troll. Jesus was a troll. Prometheus was a troll. Gandhi was a troll. ML King was a troll.
Trolling isn't inherently bad, just annoying. Neither in reality nor our wildest daydreams can we advance without someone challenging the status quo. And a living organism that stops advancing dies. And civilization is an organism.
I just restarted Firefox, because after using 2 gigabytes on my 16-gigabyte system it started flashing black when switching windows in a way that predicts an imminent crash.
Would you please switch to 64-bit already? It's the year 2013, no one who uses the newest Firefox has a 32-bit system anymore, and it's not possible in practice to fix crashes due to running out of memory in C/C++.
Also, has the issue with switching to another window when a page using Flash is opened been fixed? I doubt that.
Interesting. At what level of career achievement does someone stop being a subhuman deserving of debasement, in your eyes?
1) You know some particular person is planning to bomb a shopping center. You don't need bugged encryption protocols, you can simply get a warrant to keep them under surveillance until you have enough evidence to arrest them.
2) You know there's a plan to bomb the shopping center, but don't know who's involved. Fortunately truck bombs need lots of materials, such as fertilizer, so start asking local sellers. And as a last resort you could simply stop and search every truck that approaches the center - you have probable cause, after all.
3) You don't know anything, but have a gnawing suspicion that some unspecified bad guy might be planning an attack against an unspecified shopping center for unspecified reason at unspecified date. Thus, you want the right and ability to open random letters on the off chance that these shadowy figures are discussing their evil plans on them. In this case, have you considered getting psychiatric help? Because it sure sounds like classic paranoia to me.
It's worse, actually, when the reason you are more efficient is because you have more capital and can thus afford better tools, such as factories and robots: you have better tools, thus you outcompete me, thus you can afford even better tools and outcompete me with an ever-larger margin.
That's the problem with free market: it has a natural tendency to collapse into a monopoly that sucks all the money in - an economic black hole, if you will.
You are absolutely right. Concentrating only on hurricanes that hit inhabited areas is misleading. It's the completely inadequate response the Government has had for the Great Red Spot of Jupiter that we should focus on.
Especially when most news outlets are owned by media moguls with a vested interest in making the government look bad, so they get leverage to deregulate and thus transfer more of its power to themselves.
So... it's spot-on?
No, what this means is that their racist neighbours will beat them up for bringing filthy negroes into the neighborhood. And then lynch the negroes.
You really don't understand how evil works, do you?
You're assuming the purpose of an economist is to figure out how economy works. There are a few employed in such a position, faced with the hopeless task of examining a system composed of self-aware parts that can read their research and change their behavior accordingly. But most are simply propagandists: they are employed to come up with excuses for why whatever their employer wants is the best choice. Since the employers and their desired conclusions vary, so of course do the insane troll logic paths needed to reach them.
You being more efficient than me will destroy me, because you'll outcompete me. In a society based on earning wages from work an increasing number of people unable to find work because they can't compete with automatons leads to total chaos. Capitalism is coming to an end, one way or another - it's just not a viable economic model in a post-industrial society, any more than feudalism was in a postagricultural one. The questions are: what to replace it with, and how violent the process will be?
So what's your complaint here? That the Debian repository doesn't fit on your hard drive?
Most likely the good old selection bias: "all my friends share my political beliefs, or at least don't contradict them". Also, libertarians have a tendency to take a somewhat religious attitude towards their politics, and "all the cool/smart people agree with me" is a way of feeling validated, so...
Because most molecules in the human body are simply too big: the energy needed to separate them from each other is greater than the energy needed to break them apart. You can observe this behavior if you have a fireplace: a log of wood will first burn with a flame as volatiles evaporate and mix with the air (and burn), but even after the flame goes out there'll be a lot of charcoal which smolders as its breaks apart burn while it still remains solid.
Taxes are a flat-rate uncapped Internet connection and toll roads are a pay-per minute. Both people and the businesses are better off with the former than the latter; in fact the only ones who benefit from pay-per minute are the toll booth owners.
Man-hours? The tools the bureaucrats have include:
What happens is that you do anything unexpected, the bureaucrat gets a notification from all this automation, along with your online and offline history. This isn't the 1700's anymore, there's no manpower or other resource constraint to keep every single person under 24/7 surveillance, and apparently no social one either, since you're a potential terrorist/child molester/drug user/kidnapper/whatever. Welcome to the Panopticon.
Isn't it the exact other way around? The more orders you place, the less overall deviation from the expected outcome there'll be, since outliers either way will cancel each other out.
So why stay registered? It seems to me that it sends a pretty clear message that, as much as you roll your eyes, your vote is secured, thus your opinion can be safely ignored. Unregister and make them earn your vote.
I love how this got modded +4 Funny.