As for CPS, they are essentially an unpredictable predatory force. Nobody can guess what might set them off or when they will ignore an obviously harmful situation.
And that sort of (completely understandable) hostility is taken by a lot of child protection officers as evidence that you've got something to hide....
"Ill" = "bad parent", does it? Should ill parents all have their children taken into care immediately? What other illnesses count? Do we protect children of diabetics from the trauma of seeing mummy inject herself every day? Are deaf people only allowed to look after their own kids if there's someone in the room to hear the child shout "HELP!"? Mild heart murmurs? We can't be sure that that won't trigger a heart attack with no warning....
So what are you saying -- epileptic people are broken subhumans and it's irresponsible for them to try to live independently? It's one thing to ban them from driving or operating heavy machinery, it's another to suggest that they can't bring up their own children.
If we start down that track, we're effectively saying "people with health problems can't be mothers". Next you'll be calling social services because you saw your blind neighbour carrying her own baby. Honestly, it would be nice if we were all perfectly healthy, but some of us aren't, and that doesn't make us any less human.
That won't work, as approaching a seizing epileptic is a good way to get a very sore slap, even for an adult. A two year old who gets hit by a fitting adult could be very seriously injured.
No, it's a fair view. The uncanny valley is all about intolerance of diversion from the expected norm. When VR was all stilted commands, all users quickly became accustomed to it (even if they didn't like it). The problem with Siri is that at first use, we're not expected to treat it like a formal system -- we're encouraged to interact act with it in an unconstrained way... yet it doesn't respond to that. It is "broken human" rather than "stupid machine".
The concept of the uncanny value is pseudoscience anyway.
Then think of it as a theoretical paradigm that gives us a useful conceptualisation until we have a better understanding.
My only beef with the uncanny valley is that too many analyses stop there. People investigating cartoons saw that there was a subtle interplay between drawing quality and animation quality: if the drawing quality is better than the animation quality, it looks fake, but the opposite is not true -- even simple stick men can look real when well animated. This was known decades ago, yet was completely ignored by many sections of the video game world. The effects in FPSes from Quake into mid 2000s were noticable. Even if you had a detailed texture and a good walk cycle, the stretch and distortion of the textures during animation didn't mesh, and the character ceased to look real. And yet I could quite readily relate to the cartoony characters with their stylised movements in Final Fantasy VII.
Anyone who "expects" device Y to behave like device X when they're from different vendors is a fool.
Not have as much of a fool as anyone who forgets that human beings aren't a collection of logic gates. However much we like to consider ourselves rational agents. Human beings generalise, which makes it difficult to remember whether the application your using uses shift-ctrl-z or ctrl-y for redo... which is why most programmers have standardise on shift-ctrl-z.
Penny Arcade's Extra Credits did a video a couple of years back on why Microsoft Kinect was the uncanny valley of input devices. (Kinect Disconnect) Their argument was that it was just too close to real movement to accept whatever was missing. It was +5 insightful, but I think they missed something -- successful motion interfaces (including in the movies) aren't ones that simulate direct manipulation, but ones that mimic a formalised, restricted sign language: ie the operator is simply telling the computer what to do.
I said even when I was at uni (turn of the century) that the GUI was going to hold back voice recognition, as it hid users from the command-line style that is even today a core element of computer workflow, and which would be needed for accurate voice control to work.
Voice recognition is a mess because it swings between two extremes -- ultra-free-but-prone-to-errors, ultra-restrictive-because-kids-these-days-dont-understand-command-lines-gedoffmylawn. If we had prepared users for codified formal languages, we'd be able to implement expressive voice recognition interfaces.
Ah, family. So you mean that because Johnnie Commoner is a burger cook, his kids should be forced to starve? Or do you think that poor children should be forced out of schooling and into the factories?
Ignorance is bliss (as is anonymity), right...? I said "recovery", and bed rest is necessary for recovery from serious illness, but is no good as a preventative medicine. Keynesian economics says public spending should increase in times of crisis and decrease in times of plenty. Greece got half of the equation wrong and spent too much during times of plenty, distorting markets. The cure for this is not to forcibly get the other half of the equation wrong -- two wrongs don't make a right.
You are attributing to austerity what is caused by the insane spending that preceded it. The very same spending that made austerity necessary.
If I had a bacterial infection would my doctor: A) say I should have taken antibiotics earlier, so now I can just die or B) give me antibiotics? You cannot solve any problem without addressing the root cause. Austerity tips the scales further in the favour of the rich, so it cannot redress the imbalance that is behind the problem.
if you are not qualified to do anything more than flip burgers, why should you be paid 50 grand a year???
Oooh!! That's a lovely strawman you've built there. Giving someone enough money to buy food, clothing and heating for their family is basic human decency. That's way short of 50 grand.
If I offer to give a homeless guy a sandwich, would you respond by asking whether he deserves a five-course banquet at the Ritz?
a new government that promised to tackle corruption and tax evasion
And will do no such thing. Obviously, I might add.
Why do you say "obviously"? If they don't, there will be no recovery, and then their country, and by implication all their families and friends, will be totally fucked. Syriza won't be coining it in in the meanwhile as they cut back government spending at the top, and they know that no-one will reelect a party elected on an anti-corruption manifesto if they don't do something about corruption. Not only this, but Syriza are unpopular in the global business world, so they're not exactly setting themselves up for the comfortable directorships and consultancy posts most politicos get when they retire....
Syriza aren't just about Europe -- they're also about internal reform; ie addressing the real problem of corruption at the top of society. Austerity prevents them addressing what is the real problem according to just about any respected economist: social inequality. If the goal is recovery, Keynes, Krugman et al assert that austerity must be avoided. Ergo anyone who forces them to continue with austerity measures is actually forcing them into a worse position. That's why they believe the debt obligation is illegitimate -- it creates a state of continuous penury.
I know this. However, a lot of people do have to live in those conditions, and I think it perfectly fair that rich people who use lots of electricity for luxuries pay proportionally more than poor people who only use it for essentials.
Spending money doesn't create wealth and prosperity. Productive work does.
Work is only productive if you can sell the fruit of your labours.
Giving people money to spend (which comes from where?) distorts the signals to the market and causes mal-investment.
Nice rhetoric. Except that "mal-investment" is hardly a possibility when that money is only just enough to buy the barest essentials of living. You clearly have no idea whatsoever of what poverty is like. I, thankfully, have only seen it from the outside, but I have seen enough of it never to wish it on anybody, or blame the poor for their situation.
Greece didn't need to "recover". It needed to stop spending itself into an even deeper hole, i.e. stop doing what got them into this mess.
"Stopping digging" and "climbing out of the hole" are not mutually exclusive, but rather complementary.
And Greece obviously didn't have sufficient motivation to fight the rampant corruption and pervasive tax evasion. None of that is going to get fixed with more money, so more money instead of austerity wasn't going to help.
...which is why the country elected a new government that promised to tackle corruption and tax evasion.
Im going to blame the govt before i blame the rich. the rich are playing by the rules put in place by the govt. in other words, dont hate the player, hate the game
Fine. But stop blaming the poor, because the solution isn't making them poorer.
as for min wage, we all see how well raising min wage is working out now. more part time jobs and less full time workers. Also robots and self serve POS terminals. Yeah, thats REALLY helping
Yeah, because a person could easily live off the per-hour cost of a self-service supermarket checkout.
Take a look at Spain -- austerity is seeing homes repossessed on an almost industrial scale, and people are dying because of poverty, and yet the banks got their bail-outs, and the people at the top (including the government) are still getting large take-home pay packets.
Greece's problem was that the politicians bought votes with debt rather than taking money from the rich -- the problem was always at the top-end of society, but austerity takes it out on those at the bottom.
Austerity is the opposite of honesty.
Greeks need to pay taxes for the services their government offers.
Rich Greeks need to pay taxes. People who have no money and no job cannot pay taxes.
History has also told us that trying to maintain an unbalanced situation will only result is a larger disaster later on
Yes, but the unbalanced situation is tax loopholes for the rich. Austerity does nothing to address this, hence maintaining the unbalanced situation.
capitalism may be a crappy economic solution, but its still the best one we have to date
Nope. Capitalism and socialism are both incomplete. Calling one more important than the other is like suggesting that your car's axle is more important than its pistons -- both are needed for the car to work. Pure capitalism is impossible, because in a truly free market, monopolistic practices win; but capitalism needs competition -- therefore we need regulation, hence not true free-market capitalism. Pure socialism doesn't work because a competition-free environment does little to encourage incremental improvement.
The balance is social democracy, where governments protect consumer interests and provide a welfare safety net that benefits the rich by preventing the poor turning to crime. Where government money and regulation is used to guarantee sufficient infrastructure to stimulate economic activity (just think how much wealth generation is lost by the lack of broadband provision to parts of the US that the telecoms cartels don't see as profitable, for instance).
Slashdot Mirror
As for CPS, they are essentially an unpredictable predatory force. Nobody can guess what might set them off or when they will ignore an obviously harmful situation.
And that sort of (completely understandable) hostility is taken by a lot of child protection officers as evidence that you've got something to hide....
"Ill" = "bad parent", does it? Should ill parents all have their children taken into care immediately? What other illnesses count? Do we protect children of diabetics from the trauma of seeing mummy inject herself every day? Are deaf people only allowed to look after their own kids if there's someone in the room to hear the child shout "HELP!"? Mild heart murmurs? We can't be sure that that won't trigger a heart attack with no warning....
So what are you saying -- epileptic people are broken subhumans and it's irresponsible for them to try to live independently? It's one thing to ban them from driving or operating heavy machinery, it's another to suggest that they can't bring up their own children.
If we start down that track, we're effectively saying "people with health problems can't be mothers". Next you'll be calling social services because you saw your blind neighbour carrying her own baby. Honestly, it would be nice if we were all perfectly healthy, but some of us aren't, and that doesn't make us any less human.
That won't work, as approaching a seizing epileptic is a good way to get a very sore slap, even for an adult. A two year old who gets hit by a fitting adult could be very seriously injured.
No, it's a fair view. The uncanny valley is all about intolerance of diversion from the expected norm. When VR was all stilted commands, all users quickly became accustomed to it (even if they didn't like it). The problem with Siri is that at first use, we're not expected to treat it like a formal system -- we're encouraged to interact act with it in an unconstrained way... yet it doesn't respond to that. It is "broken human" rather than "stupid machine".
The concept of the uncanny value is pseudoscience anyway.
Then think of it as a theoretical paradigm that gives us a useful conceptualisation until we have a better understanding.
My only beef with the uncanny valley is that too many analyses stop there. People investigating cartoons saw that there was a subtle interplay between drawing quality and animation quality: if the drawing quality is better than the animation quality, it looks fake, but the opposite is not true -- even simple stick men can look real when well animated. This was known decades ago, yet was completely ignored by many sections of the video game world. The effects in FPSes from Quake into mid 2000s were noticable. Even if you had a detailed texture and a good walk cycle, the stretch and distortion of the textures during animation didn't mesh, and the character ceased to look real. And yet I could quite readily relate to the cartoony characters with their stylised movements in Final Fantasy VII.
She'll seem higher maintenance when you're paying your lawyers and your fine for sexual harassment.
Anyone who "expects" device Y to behave like device X when they're from different vendors is a fool.
Not have as much of a fool as anyone who forgets that human beings aren't a collection of logic gates. However much we like to consider ourselves rational agents. Human beings generalise, which makes it difficult to remember whether the application your using uses shift-ctrl-z or ctrl-y for redo... which is why most programmers have standardise on shift-ctrl-z.
Penny Arcade's Extra Credits did a video a couple of years back on why Microsoft Kinect was the uncanny valley of input devices. (Kinect Disconnect) Their argument was that it was just too close to real movement to accept whatever was missing. It was +5 insightful, but I think they missed something -- successful motion interfaces (including in the movies) aren't ones that simulate direct manipulation, but ones that mimic a formalised, restricted sign language: ie the operator is simply telling the computer what to do.
I said even when I was at uni (turn of the century) that the GUI was going to hold back voice recognition, as it hid users from the command-line style that is even today a core element of computer workflow, and which would be needed for accurate voice control to work.
Voice recognition is a mess because it swings between two extremes -- ultra-free-but-prone-to-errors, ultra-restrictive-because-kids-these-days-dont-understand-command-lines-gedoffmylawn. If we had prepared users for codified formal languages, we'd be able to implement expressive voice recognition interfaces.
Ah, family. So you mean that because Johnnie Commoner is a burger cook, his kids should be forced to starve? Or do you think that poor children should be forced out of schooling and into the factories?
Ignorance is bliss (as is anonymity), right...? I said "recovery", and bed rest is necessary for recovery from serious illness, but is no good as a preventative medicine. Keynesian economics says public spending should increase in times of crisis and decrease in times of plenty. Greece got half of the equation wrong and spent too much during times of plenty, distorting markets. The cure for this is not to forcibly get the other half of the equation wrong -- two wrongs don't make a right.
You are attributing to austerity what is caused by the insane spending that preceded it. The very same spending that made austerity necessary.
If I had a bacterial infection would my doctor: A) say I should have taken antibiotics earlier, so now I can just die or B) give me antibiotics? You cannot solve any problem without addressing the root cause. Austerity tips the scales further in the favour of the rich, so it cannot redress the imbalance that is behind the problem.
Rich people are the leeches. The thing with trickle-down economics is that "let them eat cake" is a lie.
if you are not qualified to do anything more than flip burgers, why should you be paid 50 grand a year???
Oooh!! That's a lovely strawman you've built there. Giving someone enough money to buy food, clothing and heating for their family is basic human decency. That's way short of 50 grand.
If I offer to give a homeless guy a sandwich, would you respond by asking whether he deserves a five-course banquet at the Ritz?
a new government that promised to tackle corruption and tax evasion
And will do no such thing. Obviously, I might add.
Why do you say "obviously"? If they don't, there will be no recovery, and then their country, and by implication all their families and friends, will be totally fucked. Syriza won't be coining it in in the meanwhile as they cut back government spending at the top, and they know that no-one will reelect a party elected on an anti-corruption manifesto if they don't do something about corruption. Not only this, but Syriza are unpopular in the global business world, so they're not exactly setting themselves up for the comfortable directorships and consultancy posts most politicos get when they retire....
If giving money to people who will spend it is good economic policy, how is everyone not in economic nirvana right now.
There are people right now who can't afford enough food to feed their family. We're not doing it. So what exactly are you trying to prove?
Syriza aren't just about Europe -- they're also about internal reform; ie addressing the real problem of corruption at the top of society. Austerity prevents them addressing what is the real problem according to just about any respected economist: social inequality. If the goal is recovery, Keynes, Krugman et al assert that austerity must be avoided. Ergo anyone who forces them to continue with austerity measures is actually forcing them into a worse position. That's why they believe the debt obligation is illegitimate -- it creates a state of continuous penury.
Er, yes you can. Start starving them and I bet all of a sudden you will find a bunch of novice farmers ready to go.
A) Land ownership laws in most countries preclude people from becoming farmers and hunters at will.
B) Agriculture is intensive labour, and attempting to do it on an empty stomach will lead to death by exhaustion.
C) Farming yields food only at the end of the season. Give a starving man a cow and he will eat it, not set up a breeding programme.
D) That cow is going to be more expensive than feeding him for months, so how the hell is he going to get the cow anyway?
E) Untrained farmers and hunters are very dangerous to the local ecology, and end up causing long-term damage to the ecosystem.
F) There are people starving to death right now, all over the world. Evidence enough that your theory is utterly, utterly wrong.
I know this. However, a lot of people do have to live in those conditions, and I think it perfectly fair that rich people who use lots of electricity for luxuries pay proportionally more than poor people who only use it for essentials.
Spending money doesn't create wealth and prosperity. Productive work does.
Work is only productive if you can sell the fruit of your labours.
Giving people money to spend (which comes from where?) distorts the signals to the market and causes mal-investment.
Nice rhetoric. Except that "mal-investment" is hardly a possibility when that money is only just enough to buy the barest essentials of living. You clearly have no idea whatsoever of what poverty is like. I, thankfully, have only seen it from the outside, but I have seen enough of it never to wish it on anybody, or blame the poor for their situation.
Greece didn't need to "recover". It needed to stop spending itself into an even deeper hole, i.e. stop doing what got them into this mess.
"Stopping digging" and "climbing out of the hole" are not mutually exclusive, but rather complementary.
And Greece obviously didn't have sufficient motivation to fight the rampant corruption and pervasive tax evasion. None of that is going to get fixed with more money, so more money instead of austerity wasn't going to help.
...which is why the country elected a new government that promised to tackle corruption and tax evasion.
Im going to blame the govt before i blame the rich. the rich are playing by the rules put in place by the govt. in other words, dont hate the player, hate the game
Fine. But stop blaming the poor, because the solution isn't making them poorer.
as for min wage, we all see how well raising min wage is working out now. more part time jobs and less full time workers. Also robots and self serve POS terminals. Yeah, thats REALLY helping
Yeah, because a person could easily live off the per-hour cost of a self-service supermarket checkout.
he has a nobel prize in macro economics and you don't
I can exclusively reveal that I am not now, and never have been, Paul Krugman!
Austerity is imposing honesty into the equation
Take a look at Spain -- austerity is seeing homes repossessed on an almost industrial scale, and people are dying because of poverty, and yet the banks got their bail-outs, and the people at the top (including the government) are still getting large take-home pay packets.
Greece's problem was that the politicians bought votes with debt rather than taking money from the rich -- the problem was always at the top-end of society, but austerity takes it out on those at the bottom.
Austerity is the opposite of honesty.
Greeks need to pay taxes for the services their government offers.
Rich Greeks need to pay taxes. People who have no money and no job cannot pay taxes.
History has also told us that trying to maintain an unbalanced situation will only result is a larger disaster later on
Yes, but the unbalanced situation is tax loopholes for the rich. Austerity does nothing to address this, hence maintaining the unbalanced situation.
capitalism may be a crappy economic solution, but its still the best one we have to date
Nope. Capitalism and socialism are both incomplete. Calling one more important than the other is like suggesting that your car's axle is more important than its pistons -- both are needed for the car to work. Pure capitalism is impossible, because in a truly free market, monopolistic practices win; but capitalism needs competition -- therefore we need regulation, hence not true free-market capitalism. Pure socialism doesn't work because a competition-free environment does little to encourage incremental improvement.
The balance is social democracy, where governments protect consumer interests and provide a welfare safety net that benefits the rich by preventing the poor turning to crime. Where government money and regulation is used to guarantee sufficient infrastructure to stimulate economic activity (just think how much wealth generation is lost by the lack of broadband provision to parts of the US that the telecoms cartels don't see as profitable, for instance).