What kind of pervert is still against porn in this age?
Mostly people who hope to distract their God and/or peers from their own sins, the same as in any other age. Also people who like to live roleplay paladins but don't want to mess with actual evil, which might fight back. And then there's the occasional creep who simply gets off on wielding power but doesn't want to do consensual BDSM for whatever reason.
Wait, do any of the democrats actually have experience creating private sector jobs?
Is that what private companies do? I thought they're there to make profits for their owners, and if one results in someone else getting paid that's just an unfortunate inefficiency that a good businessman will optimize away as much as possible. Of course this means they'll also have trouble finding customers who can afford their products, but that's the tragedy of the commons for you. A businessman doesn't need to (is not allowed to by the shareholders) care about that while a government has to, so not only are the skillsets for the two jobs different, but their respective goals - and thus their required indoctrinations - directly conflict with each other.
In other words, stop choosing businessmen into political positions (or the other way around, for that matter). You aren't going to find a worse mismatch this side of outright doomsday cultists (and since you mentioned parties, the "Religious Right" basically is a doomsday cult wishing - and sometimes actively pushing - for Apocalypse).
Imagine if you owned a business and wanted to sell to the highest bidder, but the government steps in and says sorry, you have to sell to the lowest bidder because "we" think it is better. Do you really want that?
Imagine if your neighbour opens a toxic dump on his yard, but the government steps in and says sorry, you have to follow zoning laws because "we" think it is better. Do you really want that?
You aren't the sole inhabitant of this world. Your actions affect other people, just like their actions affect you. And that means they will hold some say over them, either in the relatively benevolent form of a modern democratic government or in the time-tested form of assassination. Dislike it all that you want, just remember it's this same government enforcing claims of ownerships that lets you have something to sell in the first place, or a monetary system to receive the payment with for that matter.
None of this means that the government should block the sale of National Geographic (nor that it shouldn't - it would take an impartial expert to investigate the likely effects to decide), just that "the owner wouldn't like the sale being blocked" is an irrelevant argument.
Mad Max does not inform anything related to a shared knowledge base to build humanity.
Arguably it was the explosion of post-apocalyptic fiction that kept the world from becoming like them, by ensuring everyone and their dog knew what the consequences of nuclear war would be, thus helping to drown out the war hawks, for example during the Cuban missile crisis. Mad Max is part of the process of reinforcement which keeps this concept fresh in the noosphere, ready to spring into action if needed.
You should teach at a liberal-arts college. Your stupid ideas would fit in well.
Then who does? Datacenter jobs are just jobs. Average people work them, just like they do every job. And they do so under a corporate structure which excels at encouraging indifference and ass-covering at best and actively sabotaging each other at worst, just like any other dictatorship.
Someone commits a crime, they need to be punished.
...Why?
I'm asking because I've followed a lot of theological discussions lately, and have noticed that the nastiest perversions - such as the entire concept of Hell as God's torture chamber - are invariably introduced by taking the need for punishment as granted, even in a setting where the culprit can't possibly harm anyone anymore. On the other hand, animal trainers generally seem to agree that punishments are counter-productive from the viewpoint of getting results. That leaves the desire for revenge, which is ultimately just bloodlust with an excuse.
So I can't help but wonder if we, as a society, really need to have a discussion about whether punishment, as opposed to compensating the victim and neutralizing the culprit's ability to cause further harm, for example by placing them under surveillance, really has any place in justice, or should be considered as signs of our present immaturity as a species, which we should strive to overcome.
Because copyright law was nuisance in Industrial Age, but actively damages the productive potential of Information Age. Humanity as a whole can be thought of as a kind of distributed computer where each individual node (human) receives ideas, combines them with other received ideas to come up with slight variations, and passes those on to other humans to be further evaluated. Because bandwidth is limited, this requires an efficient compression algorithm, which in turn requires shared knowledge. This shared knowledge base takes the form of shared myths communication can refer to to establish the initial state which is then altered by communicating only the differences.
With modern communication methods this process is fast enough that copyrights get in the way, both because they hinder the establishment of common knowledge base and because they forbid derivative works. As the newest non-copyrighted works become older, they also become less relevant to the current status of the world. Consequently, getting in trouble with the copyright law is treated similarly to getting killed in a terrorist strike: it's possible it'll happen, but most people just go about their business anyway.
But other than that, this is not sharing a few movies with friends, as you say this is wholesale criminal piracy for profit - he deserved what he got.
No, he didn't. He harmed no one, thus a jail sentence is unjust. Also, the company which made my coffee maker doesn't get paid every time I brew a cup, nor do they get to claim damages if I offer some to other people, nor do they get to demand a cut if I run a coffee shop. On what basis do record companies demand to be treated differently?
Copyright law will never be respected because it's completely incompatible with humanity's evolved desire to share information. The only things attempts to enforce it will accomplish is destroy lives, retard the development of popular culture, and bring all law into contempt. The faster various governments eat humble pie and admit it's beyond their power to change human nature, and that they should stop trying because changing this aspect would drop us back to animal status since it's passing forward of culture that gives us something besides instinct in the first place, the better off everyone but the "intellectual property" monopolists will be.
Oh well. A beast is always at its most vicious when it knows its time is short. I guess the MAFIAA and its servants are no exception.
No science was performed in the creation of this blatant attempt to exploit dumb rich people.
And for all that it still helps push demand for launch capacity, which in turn helps fund the research necessary to bring down the price of space travel to where you or I can afford it.
Predictive services aren't yet important enough to drive smartphone buying decisions. They're past the gimmick stage, into the "useful in narrow ways" stage, but a lot more is coming.
Well, let's hear it then: what "predictive services" are currently existent, what are coming, and why would any of them be a net positive to the typical end user, much less more important than other concerns?
The article itself doesn't answer these questions, and in fact seems to be nothing more than marketing material for machine learning companies.
Newtonian physics allows for objects that travel faster than light.
So it does. Observed behaviour of actual objects didn't back that up, so Newtonian physics was superseded by General Relativity. On the other hand, the warping of spacetime - or volumes being bigger on the inside than outside - is relatively easy to measure; for example, Earth's gravity is causing - or rather, it's observable effects are caused by - such warping, and things like the GPS system don't work properly unless it's taken into account. The only thing thing up to question is whether this curvature couples to presence of momentum in precisely the way GR describes, or some way that's very similar in all circumstances we've so far observed; but for the purposes of building pocket universes we can consider GR proven beyond reasonable doubt, since it depends on the existence of variable curvature rather than its particular details.
In general, "theory X was proven incorrect" is not a valid refutation of "theory Y allows Z", unless X == Y.
Nope, the problem we have now is not lack of the ability of congress to do anything, but the lurching shambling mass of government has freed itself from the thin tethers we were trying to use as a bridle and is now unstoppable and un-steerable.
That's a vivid image you're painting there. And it's also one that ensures only those who are hopelessly corrupt will seek a career in the government, thus becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. People take their cues on how they should behave from their surrounding culture; if that culture tells them this is how the government behaves, then that's exactly how anyone who makes it there will.
Maybe you should drop this bridle stuff and go back to "of the people, by the people, for the people"? Because, frankly, setting your goal as "paralysis" is pretty unambitious.
But the left keep claiming that Star Trek is a 'post-scarcity society'. In a post-scarcity society, you just click your fingers and you have a boat. You click your fingers, and you have a starship.
That's what 'post-scarcity' means. If you can't click your fingers and have a fleet of starships so vast that they block out the stars, you don't live in a post-scarcity society.
And if they can have that fleet, no worries: the right will simply say that a big enough starship will collapse into a black hole under its own gravity, so clearly they don't live in a post-scarcity society.
But what the right is pretending to not realize is that as far as most people (even themselves) are concerned, having a skyscraper-sized starship controlled by a computer, supplied by replicators, maintained by transporters and equipped with holodecks is, for all practical purposes, post-scarcity. Nobody's going to bother hoarding a fleet of them unless they're afraid they can't get another should they lose their current one, for example because they live in a brutal capitalist hellhole where their very existence depends on proving themselves useful to the few elites who are hoarding all the resources to build fleets vast enough to block out the stars before the other overlord will, which of course they can't in such a setting, so it becomes an ass-licking contest.
And that's the society we're moving towards. Advancing automation is quickly getting us to the point where economy simply no longer needs human cogs in its machinery. So will you right-wingers come up with excuses to force people to go in there to be ground to paste anyway, or will you admit that capitalism ran its course and human being's job now is telling the computer which star they want to explore first and whether they'd want milk in their tea while getting there, or perhaps some fun in the Holodeck?
Nothing lasts forever, and it's about time you people started thinking about your legacy.
It might if we had jobs going unfilled and land waiting for someone to farm it. Are you posting from modern Europe or 18th century America?
For every job there's someone who needs some need fulfilled. Current economic crisis is ultimately due to lack of demand, which in turn is because our bookkeeping system has been incapable of dealing with increases in productivity. While a long-term solution requires some form of citizen wage to offset the falling job-derived ones, the ideological commitment to austerity is in the way, so in the short term providing a minimum income to a lot of people so they don't starve should provide a politically expedient way to kickstart demand through hundreds of thousands of little pushes.
I'm not sure how gangs of islamicist vigilantes roaming the streets confiscating beer and telling women how to dress is going to cause an anti-Vatican movement.
I haven't seen any such gangs. That's not exactly surprising, since EU has some 500 million people, so the entire Middle East could move here and still be outnumbered. I have, however, seen a lot of de facto fascist groups using them as rhetorical devices to gain power for themselves.
And frankly, this whole anti-immigrant thing looks like a moral panic to me. They begin as real-life role-playing but end up taking a life of their own as confirmation bias kicks in. Unfortunately, anti-immigrant moral panics tend to lead to outright wars and genocides, and this one could potentially set the stage for World War III if it gives nationalistic forces the support they need to dissolve the EU itself.
There is no significant number of truly committed bleeding heart liberals. There's only the media and sheep.
So... does this mean that Rubert Murdoch is a bleeding-heart liberal? Or did you mean all the media which isn't owned by megacorps and billionaires?
In the end liberalism in society is bought with money,
Which implies lots of commitment. "Putting your money where your mouth is" is the very verbal image of commitment. So if there aren't a "significant number of truly committed bleeding heart liberals", where does all this money come from?
conservatism will have to be bought with blood and raped daughters.
So why do you post internally inconsistent conspiracy theories, then? Do you not believe your own rhetoric?
Up to a point, presently Europe is being driven into a situation where a future civil war with ethnic cleansing on a scale unknown in history is on our doorstep (regardless of who wins). Giving migrants more aid and convincing more people to try their luck in Europe is a dangerous game, easy to play for American liberals though who at worst have a bunch of Catholics with a few drug problems on their doorstep.
The threat to Europe comes from nationalistic forces who would love to see EU dissolved and are using the migrant crisis to drum up support. While that's understandable - nobody likes taking orders from a faraway central government - without EU the endless cycle of European wars will start again, and probably fast due to those very same nationalistic forces. I don't particularly fancy starring in live-action re-enacments of my grandfather's war stories, especially since their epilogy was being invalid for life. Also, does anyone want Putin to gain a stronger position, as he inevitably will if his main regional opposition collapses?
On the other hand, population boom could cause a corresponding economic boom, and we could certainly use one right about now. Islam itself opens new possibilites to kill off the remaining vestiges of authoritarian religion in politics by forcing people to confront the possibility of having to deal with someone else's religious bullcrap rather than merely forcing theirs down everyone's throats. It's even conceivable people might not be quite so easy to hoodwink by demagogues of the future if they're used to dealing with heterogenous societies, though I'm not holding my breath on that one.
So it seems that the cost/benefit analysis leans to the side of bleeding hearts in this one.
Overpopulation is depleting resources far faster than climate change.
AFAIK there's no region on Earth currently over its carrying capacity with the sole exception of Antarctica, which has around 5,000 people total.
PS. yes, there's plenty for plenty more people... but not correctly distributed among the people, which you can't redistribute without destroying civilization.
That's a rather extraordinary assertion, especially in the context of deciding over other people's life and death. Please give some concrete examples of resources that need redistributing and why redistributing them is more likely to destroy civilization than the hate earned through hoarding them?
Because frankly, that sounds nothing more than an excuse for selfishness to me, and since reality isn't an Ayn Rand fantasy novel, that will likely end badly for us.
AFAIK from the point of view of an outside observer, it takes forever for a falling object to reach the event horizon. Given this, no object can ever be seen actually crossing said horizon; even the original star's collapsing matter is still just above it (or, alternately, it's just short of collapsing beyond it's Schwarzschild radius), merely very hard to see due to gravitational redshift. So... it seems to me that there's no two points in time for any outside observer where said observer could say information has been lost somewhere between them, and thus no paradox to explain.
Of course, by the same token, event horizon should be extremely noticeable to an infalling observer, since no part of them can enter before any other (since any part that's closer to the horizon will take forever to cross it from the point of view of any that's further), thus falling would be like being squeezed through jelly that keeps getting more and more rigid as you get closer to the horizon, culminating in you getting squeezed into a 2-dimensional shape against it. Yet scientists claim passing the horizon should be unnoticeable. Do we have anyone here who can actually work the equations and figure out what happens to observers who aren't point-like?
Frankly the only one that had a consistent attitude about the PD was Kirk, he did his best to pretty much ignore it unless he had no other choice.
That's because Kirk knew what the Prime Directive actually is: a plot device to stop Enterprise from simply technobabbling every problem away in five minutes without having to come up with yet another Bored Cosmic Jerk. It's the Red Tape equivalent of a Klingon ship uncloaking at the worst possible moment: an obstacle for the heroes to overcome through some clever maneuvering.
Of course, later writers missed this and had their captains take the damn thing seriously, which of course led things to go straight to Hell. It's a bit like someone from Transport For London apparently saw a storyboard for the Lord of the Rings and mistook Sauron for the hero.
I have always thought that the federation was a communist society. We are told that they don't need money. But the two fundamental rules of economics are:
1. We are in a universe of scarcity
Well, the original Star Trek was set in a post-scarcity setting, or the closest Roddenberry could imagine while still having a crew around. Scarcity was backported by writers and executives who had lived their whole lives in a society of scarcity and couldn't handle such alien world. The result is, of course, a mess that contradicts itself constantly.
In any case, the whole idea that universe has inherent scarcity isn't really backed by physics. General Relativity in theory allows space to be bigger inside than it appears outside without bound, and zero-energy universe allows the possibility that such "pocket universes" of unlimited size and usable content could be created for free. Even disregarding such exotic possibilities, the maximum entropy of a volume is proportional to the surface drawn around it; since our universe is expanding, and since the ability to do work depends only on having possible higher-entropy states to act as a "compass" to guide random processes, it doesn't seem likely that finite resources (such as stellar energy) are ultimately necessary for anything but bootstrapping the systems (us) capable of tapping to those possibilities.
In other words, economy is like Newtonian physics: an useful approximation in a specific set of circumstances, but not a true law of nature.
2. People have ever increasing unlimited desires and wants
But all desires are not equal. The difference of having nothing and $1 billion is huge, the difference between $1 billion and $2 billion mostly academic. More formally, the utility function of all things asymptotically approaches some finite value as quantity approaches infinite. In fact, that's a requirement for making rational choices, because rationality means comparing the product of the cost/benefit and its likelihood, infinite benefits (or costs) mean the product becomes infinite, and infinities of the same cardinality can't be compared.
Post-scarcity society isn't one where everyone can be a captain of a Galaxy-class starship with other people working under them, it's one where everyone can spend the rest of their lives exploring outer space in their fully automated space van without having to give a rat's ass about providing economic value to anyone else. Star Trek has technology capable of that - the ship's computer doesn't actually need the crew to fly it, and transporters could simply beam components straight from replicators to their proper place - but writers can't handle that (not to mention the production company doesn't want to see a future where it's obsolete) so we get the unfortunate implication that Federation is a military dictatorship that enforces strict class hierarchy for ideological reasons.
Then again, purposeful or not, that might be the most damning and badly needed commentary on our current society - even if we got a paradise, we would simply fence it out and turn it into a hell in the name of power - any show has ever made.
What I mean is that this variation is all different in the same way. If you've ever spent time flying around the Elite Dangerous universe, you'll find that once you've seen one system, you're more or less seen them all.
But this has more to do with current state of procedural generators rather than the concept of general. Try Dwarf Fortress, and you do get extremely varied environments to get your dwarfs killed in.
Only artists and animators are able to genuinely surprise you.
That is untrue. Any game with sufficiently complex mechanics will create surprising situations, through glitching if nothing else.
What humans can currently do that computers can't is recognize and combine tropes, or generic thematic elements, and adapt them to current situation. However, there is no known reason why an algorithm couldn't do so too.
An intermediate step might be to move the gameworld over from curent scripted and otherwise static model to a strategic simulation. Imagine, for example, an open-world game where the computer was playing a game of Civilization in the background and a procedural generator was responsible for rendering the results - city growth, roads, marching armies, etc - in the player-explorable environment, along with quests to affect the game either way (for example, the player could sneak into a besieged city to open the gates, or assassinate the army's general). Space Rangers does something like this: the missions you do affect how the game world develops, the war goes on in the background, and as you get stronger you become more and more important player in it.
The whole reason everyone and their dog is investing in physics engines is precisely that they can procedurally generate behaviour as it's needed, thus freeing the artist from having to guess everything the player might do (which is impossible). Procedurally generating animation is currently under development - beyond current ragdoll physics, that is - and then, of course, there's games like Victoria which are about generating alternate world histories. Then there's the ancient Neverwinter Nights Aurora toolset where the designer laid down rooms and procedural generator filled them with semi-random details.
The future of gaming is procedural generation, both because automation is the only way to keep costs under control and because the end result is superior. That doesn't mean those games won't require artists, it simply means those artists will be doing high-level design of thematic elements and interacting systems rather than hand-painting every pixel and modeling every room.
All procedural generation is is a really, really, really tight form of compression. It's also lossy compression, so what you recover from it is almost always lots of different things that are all basically the same.
But they need not. Chaos theory means that a deterministic system is capable of generating endless variation. Fractals are a famous example, and in fact games could be seen as systems which procedurally generate a timeline of events based on user input along the way.
Also, I'm not at all sure that "lossy compression" is a meaningful term here. What is the original you're comparing against? Surely not real life, unless you're day-to-day experience is pretty "interesting".
Artist created content may be expensive, but it's superior to procedural generation in almost every way.
So how does an artist generate his art? Magic? It's either that or some sort of procedural generation algorithm.
Slashdot Mirror
Mostly people who hope to distract their God and/or peers from their own sins, the same as in any other age. Also people who like to live roleplay paladins but don't want to mess with actual evil, which might fight back. And then there's the occasional creep who simply gets off on wielding power but doesn't want to do consensual BDSM for whatever reason.
Methinks that about sums it up.
Is that what private companies do? I thought they're there to make profits for their owners, and if one results in someone else getting paid that's just an unfortunate inefficiency that a good businessman will optimize away as much as possible. Of course this means they'll also have trouble finding customers who can afford their products, but that's the tragedy of the commons for you. A businessman doesn't need to (is not allowed to by the shareholders) care about that while a government has to, so not only are the skillsets for the two jobs different, but their respective goals - and thus their required indoctrinations - directly conflict with each other.
In other words, stop choosing businessmen into political positions (or the other way around, for that matter). You aren't going to find a worse mismatch this side of outright doomsday cultists (and since you mentioned parties, the "Religious Right" basically is a doomsday cult wishing - and sometimes actively pushing - for Apocalypse).
Accused by whom? Aren't the ballots anonymous precisely to avoid that?
Imagine if your neighbour opens a toxic dump on his yard, but the government steps in and says sorry, you have to follow zoning laws because "we" think it is better. Do you really want that?
You aren't the sole inhabitant of this world. Your actions affect other people, just like their actions affect you. And that means they will hold some say over them, either in the relatively benevolent form of a modern democratic government or in the time-tested form of assassination. Dislike it all that you want, just remember it's this same government enforcing claims of ownerships that lets you have something to sell in the first place, or a monetary system to receive the payment with for that matter.
None of this means that the government should block the sale of National Geographic (nor that it shouldn't - it would take an impartial expert to investigate the likely effects to decide), just that "the owner wouldn't like the sale being blocked" is an irrelevant argument.
Unless you're in Star Wars or high school.
Arguably it was the explosion of post-apocalyptic fiction that kept the world from becoming like them, by ensuring everyone and their dog knew what the consequences of nuclear war would be, thus helping to drown out the war hawks, for example during the Cuban missile crisis. Mad Max is part of the process of reinforcement which keeps this concept fresh in the noosphere, ready to spring into action if needed.
Well, you fail the class. Congratulations.
Then who does? Datacenter jobs are just jobs. Average people work them, just like they do every job. And they do so under a corporate structure which excels at encouraging indifference and ass-covering at best and actively sabotaging each other at worst, just like any other dictatorship.
...Why?
I'm asking because I've followed a lot of theological discussions lately, and have noticed that the nastiest perversions - such as the entire concept of Hell as God's torture chamber - are invariably introduced by taking the need for punishment as granted, even in a setting where the culprit can't possibly harm anyone anymore. On the other hand, animal trainers generally seem to agree that punishments are counter-productive from the viewpoint of getting results. That leaves the desire for revenge, which is ultimately just bloodlust with an excuse.
So I can't help but wonder if we, as a society, really need to have a discussion about whether punishment, as opposed to compensating the victim and neutralizing the culprit's ability to cause further harm, for example by placing them under surveillance, really has any place in justice, or should be considered as signs of our present immaturity as a species, which we should strive to overcome.
Because copyright law was nuisance in Industrial Age, but actively damages the productive potential of Information Age. Humanity as a whole can be thought of as a kind of distributed computer where each individual node (human) receives ideas, combines them with other received ideas to come up with slight variations, and passes those on to other humans to be further evaluated. Because bandwidth is limited, this requires an efficient compression algorithm, which in turn requires shared knowledge. This shared knowledge base takes the form of shared myths communication can refer to to establish the initial state which is then altered by communicating only the differences.
With modern communication methods this process is fast enough that copyrights get in the way, both because they hinder the establishment of common knowledge base and because they forbid derivative works. As the newest non-copyrighted works become older, they also become less relevant to the current status of the world. Consequently, getting in trouble with the copyright law is treated similarly to getting killed in a terrorist strike: it's possible it'll happen, but most people just go about their business anyway.
No, he didn't. He harmed no one, thus a jail sentence is unjust. Also, the company which made my coffee maker doesn't get paid every time I brew a cup, nor do they get to claim damages if I offer some to other people, nor do they get to demand a cut if I run a coffee shop. On what basis do record companies demand to be treated differently?
Copyright law will never be respected because it's completely incompatible with humanity's evolved desire to share information. The only things attempts to enforce it will accomplish is destroy lives, retard the development of popular culture, and bring all law into contempt. The faster various governments eat humble pie and admit it's beyond their power to change human nature, and that they should stop trying because changing this aspect would drop us back to animal status since it's passing forward of culture that gives us something besides instinct in the first place, the better off everyone but the "intellectual property" monopolists will be.
Oh well. A beast is always at its most vicious when it knows its time is short. I guess the MAFIAA and its servants are no exception.
And for all that it still helps push demand for launch capacity, which in turn helps fund the research necessary to bring down the price of space travel to where you or I can afford it.
Well, let's hear it then: what "predictive services" are currently existent, what are coming, and why would any of them be a net positive to the typical end user, much less more important than other concerns?
The article itself doesn't answer these questions, and in fact seems to be nothing more than marketing material for machine learning companies.
So it does. Observed behaviour of actual objects didn't back that up, so Newtonian physics was superseded by General Relativity. On the other hand, the warping of spacetime - or volumes being bigger on the inside than outside - is relatively easy to measure; for example, Earth's gravity is causing - or rather, it's observable effects are caused by - such warping, and things like the GPS system don't work properly unless it's taken into account. The only thing thing up to question is whether this curvature couples to presence of momentum in precisely the way GR describes, or some way that's very similar in all circumstances we've so far observed; but for the purposes of building pocket universes we can consider GR proven beyond reasonable doubt, since it depends on the existence of variable curvature rather than its particular details.
In general, "theory X was proven incorrect" is not a valid refutation of "theory Y allows Z", unless X == Y.
That's a vivid image you're painting there. And it's also one that ensures only those who are hopelessly corrupt will seek a career in the government, thus becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. People take their cues on how they should behave from their surrounding culture; if that culture tells them this is how the government behaves, then that's exactly how anyone who makes it there will.
Maybe you should drop this bridle stuff and go back to "of the people, by the people, for the people"? Because, frankly, setting your goal as "paralysis" is pretty unambitious.
And if they can have that fleet, no worries: the right will simply say that a big enough starship will collapse into a black hole under its own gravity, so clearly they don't live in a post-scarcity society.
But what the right is pretending to not realize is that as far as most people (even themselves) are concerned, having a skyscraper-sized starship controlled by a computer, supplied by replicators, maintained by transporters and equipped with holodecks is, for all practical purposes, post-scarcity. Nobody's going to bother hoarding a fleet of them unless they're afraid they can't get another should they lose their current one, for example because they live in a brutal capitalist hellhole where their very existence depends on proving themselves useful to the few elites who are hoarding all the resources to build fleets vast enough to block out the stars before the other overlord will, which of course they can't in such a setting, so it becomes an ass-licking contest.
And that's the society we're moving towards. Advancing automation is quickly getting us to the point where economy simply no longer needs human cogs in its machinery. So will you right-wingers come up with excuses to force people to go in there to be ground to paste anyway, or will you admit that capitalism ran its course and human being's job now is telling the computer which star they want to explore first and whether they'd want milk in their tea while getting there, or perhaps some fun in the Holodeck?
Nothing lasts forever, and it's about time you people started thinking about your legacy.
For every job there's someone who needs some need fulfilled. Current economic crisis is ultimately due to lack of demand, which in turn is because our bookkeeping system has been incapable of dealing with increases in productivity. While a long-term solution requires some form of citizen wage to offset the falling job-derived ones, the ideological commitment to austerity is in the way, so in the short term providing a minimum income to a lot of people so they don't starve should provide a politically expedient way to kickstart demand through hundreds of thousands of little pushes.
I haven't seen any such gangs. That's not exactly surprising, since EU has some 500 million people, so the entire Middle East could move here and still be outnumbered. I have, however, seen a lot of de facto fascist groups using them as rhetorical devices to gain power for themselves.
And frankly, this whole anti-immigrant thing looks like a moral panic to me. They begin as real-life role-playing but end up taking a life of their own as confirmation bias kicks in. Unfortunately, anti-immigrant moral panics tend to lead to outright wars and genocides, and this one could potentially set the stage for World War III if it gives nationalistic forces the support they need to dissolve the EU itself.
So... does this mean that Rubert Murdoch is a bleeding-heart liberal? Or did you mean all the media which isn't owned by megacorps and billionaires?
Which implies lots of commitment. "Putting your money where your mouth is" is the very verbal image of commitment. So if there aren't a "significant number of truly committed bleeding heart liberals", where does all this money come from?
So why do you post internally inconsistent conspiracy theories, then? Do you not believe your own rhetoric?
The threat to Europe comes from nationalistic forces who would love to see EU dissolved and are using the migrant crisis to drum up support. While that's understandable - nobody likes taking orders from a faraway central government - without EU the endless cycle of European wars will start again, and probably fast due to those very same nationalistic forces. I don't particularly fancy starring in live-action re-enacments of my grandfather's war stories, especially since their epilogy was being invalid for life. Also, does anyone want Putin to gain a stronger position, as he inevitably will if his main regional opposition collapses?
On the other hand, population boom could cause a corresponding economic boom, and we could certainly use one right about now. Islam itself opens new possibilites to kill off the remaining vestiges of authoritarian religion in politics by forcing people to confront the possibility of having to deal with someone else's religious bullcrap rather than merely forcing theirs down everyone's throats. It's even conceivable people might not be quite so easy to hoodwink by demagogues of the future if they're used to dealing with heterogenous societies, though I'm not holding my breath on that one.
So it seems that the cost/benefit analysis leans to the side of bleeding hearts in this one.
Overpopulation is depleting resources far faster than climate change.
AFAIK there's no region on Earth currently over its carrying capacity with the sole exception of Antarctica, which has around 5,000 people total.
That's a rather extraordinary assertion, especially in the context of deciding over other people's life and death. Please give some concrete examples of resources that need redistributing and why redistributing them is more likely to destroy civilization than the hate earned through hoarding them?
Because frankly, that sounds nothing more than an excuse for selfishness to me, and since reality isn't an Ayn Rand fantasy novel, that will likely end badly for us.
AFAIK from the point of view of an outside observer, it takes forever for a falling object to reach the event horizon. Given this, no object can ever be seen actually crossing said horizon; even the original star's collapsing matter is still just above it (or, alternately, it's just short of collapsing beyond it's Schwarzschild radius), merely very hard to see due to gravitational redshift. So... it seems to me that there's no two points in time for any outside observer where said observer could say information has been lost somewhere between them, and thus no paradox to explain.
Of course, by the same token, event horizon should be extremely noticeable to an infalling observer, since no part of them can enter before any other (since any part that's closer to the horizon will take forever to cross it from the point of view of any that's further), thus falling would be like being squeezed through jelly that keeps getting more and more rigid as you get closer to the horizon, culminating in you getting squeezed into a 2-dimensional shape against it. Yet scientists claim passing the horizon should be unnoticeable. Do we have anyone here who can actually work the equations and figure out what happens to observers who aren't point-like?
That's because Kirk knew what the Prime Directive actually is: a plot device to stop Enterprise from simply technobabbling every problem away in five minutes without having to come up with yet another Bored Cosmic Jerk. It's the Red Tape equivalent of a Klingon ship uncloaking at the worst possible moment: an obstacle for the heroes to overcome through some clever maneuvering.
Of course, later writers missed this and had their captains take the damn thing seriously, which of course led things to go straight to Hell. It's a bit like someone from Transport For London apparently saw a storyboard for the Lord of the Rings and mistook Sauron for the hero.
Well, the original Star Trek was set in a post-scarcity setting, or the closest Roddenberry could imagine while still having a crew around. Scarcity was backported by writers and executives who had lived their whole lives in a society of scarcity and couldn't handle such alien world. The result is, of course, a mess that contradicts itself constantly.
In any case, the whole idea that universe has inherent scarcity isn't really backed by physics. General Relativity in theory allows space to be bigger inside than it appears outside without bound, and zero-energy universe allows the possibility that such "pocket universes" of unlimited size and usable content could be created for free. Even disregarding such exotic possibilities, the maximum entropy of a volume is proportional to the surface drawn around it; since our universe is expanding, and since the ability to do work depends only on having possible higher-entropy states to act as a "compass" to guide random processes, it doesn't seem likely that finite resources (such as stellar energy) are ultimately necessary for anything but bootstrapping the systems (us) capable of tapping to those possibilities.
In other words, economy is like Newtonian physics: an useful approximation in a specific set of circumstances, but not a true law of nature.
But all desires are not equal. The difference of having nothing and $1 billion is huge, the difference between $1 billion and $2 billion mostly academic. More formally, the utility function of all things asymptotically approaches some finite value as quantity approaches infinite. In fact, that's a requirement for making rational choices, because rationality means comparing the product of the cost/benefit and its likelihood, infinite benefits (or costs) mean the product becomes infinite, and infinities of the same cardinality can't be compared.
Post-scarcity society isn't one where everyone can be a captain of a Galaxy-class starship with other people working under them, it's one where everyone can spend the rest of their lives exploring outer space in their fully automated space van without having to give a rat's ass about providing economic value to anyone else. Star Trek has technology capable of that - the ship's computer doesn't actually need the crew to fly it, and transporters could simply beam components straight from replicators to their proper place - but writers can't handle that (not to mention the production company doesn't want to see a future where it's obsolete) so we get the unfortunate implication that Federation is a military dictatorship that enforces strict class hierarchy for ideological reasons.
Then again, purposeful or not, that might be the most damning and badly needed commentary on our current society - even if we got a paradise, we would simply fence it out and turn it into a hell in the name of power - any show has ever made.
And they are. Or can you honestly say this judgment surprised you?
But this has more to do with current state of procedural generators rather than the concept of general. Try Dwarf Fortress, and you do get extremely varied environments to get your dwarfs killed in.
That is untrue. Any game with sufficiently complex mechanics will create surprising situations, through glitching if nothing else.
What humans can currently do that computers can't is recognize and combine tropes, or generic thematic elements, and adapt them to current situation. However, there is no known reason why an algorithm couldn't do so too.
An intermediate step might be to move the gameworld over from curent scripted and otherwise static model to a strategic simulation. Imagine, for example, an open-world game where the computer was playing a game of Civilization in the background and a procedural generator was responsible for rendering the results - city growth, roads, marching armies, etc - in the player-explorable environment, along with quests to affect the game either way (for example, the player could sneak into a besieged city to open the gates, or assassinate the army's general). Space Rangers does something like this: the missions you do affect how the game world develops, the war goes on in the background, and as you get stronger you become more and more important player in it.
The whole reason everyone and their dog is investing in physics engines is precisely that they can procedurally generate behaviour as it's needed, thus freeing the artist from having to guess everything the player might do (which is impossible). Procedurally generating animation is currently under development - beyond current ragdoll physics, that is - and then, of course, there's games like Victoria which are about generating alternate world histories. Then there's the ancient Neverwinter Nights Aurora toolset where the designer laid down rooms and procedural generator filled them with semi-random details.
The future of gaming is procedural generation, both because automation is the only way to keep costs under control and because the end result is superior. That doesn't mean those games won't require artists, it simply means those artists will be doing high-level design of thematic elements and interacting systems rather than hand-painting every pixel and modeling every room.
But they need not. Chaos theory means that a deterministic system is capable of generating endless variation. Fractals are a famous example, and in fact games could be seen as systems which procedurally generate a timeline of events based on user input along the way.
Also, I'm not at all sure that "lossy compression" is a meaningful term here. What is the original you're comparing against? Surely not real life, unless you're day-to-day experience is pretty "interesting".
So how does an artist generate his art? Magic? It's either that or some sort of procedural generation algorithm.