No, not just on paper. The cartels are not an existential threat to the Mexican government, and there's no part of Mexico the government doesn't control. But for some reason people think it makes them look sophisticated to say this. It doesn't. It just makes you look wrong.
Well, we could start by closing the border. We could also legalize pot and cocaine and eliminate most of their funds.
Well, on this point we agree. On the other hand, the political situation in the US is such that neither of these things are even being discussed seriously.
And yes, we could send in our military if we really wanted to. Who to fight? Well, most of the police, army, and politicians have been in the pocket of the cartels for some time, we could start with them. Besides, there is a difference between attacking a country and occupying a country, in this case it would end up being more of an occupation.
We're going to occupy all of Mexico, kill hundreds of thousands of people, make enemies of our neighbors for generations, and all to save them from a few thousand criminals? Really? I can't imagine why you aren't Secretary of State!
No we have not. We sell guns to the military and police, who then sell them to the cartels. There IS a difference.
This is wrong. You can google "Operation Fast & Furious" yourself. The US BATF deliberately sold thousands of guns to cartel buyers, and nobody will own up to the reason. It appears as if the idea was to trace all these guns back to the US and then use the body count as a way to build pressure for gun control domestically. You can imagine how the Mexicans would feel about that.
True many have misgivings with history but if the Mexican government needs help I think 50,000 marines could come in and solve the problem and work with their existing military to solve the problem.
By which you imply two things, neither of which is true.
1. The Mexican government wants US marines on Mexican soil. This is really what gets to the heart of the sovereignty point. Even if the US marines can solve the problem, and even if we're willing to provide them, it isn't our call. US forces on Mexican soil need to have the express permission of the Mexican government unless Congress has authorized hostilities against Mexico. I realize Pershing went chasing after Pancho Villa, but that was a long time ago and "we did it before without asking" isn't a very powerful argument.
2. The Mexican military isn't powerful enough to take on the cartels in battle. This is certainly not true. As always with criminal organizations the problem isn't that they fight well, the problem is they don't wear uniforms and they won't come out to fight. 50,000 US marines wouldn't solve the problem for the same reason the 45,000 deployed Mexican soldiers can't solve the problem: the cartels aren't armies, they don't hold territory, and they don't have political goals that don't relate to the drug trade. They just want to conduct business.
Stability in Mexico apparently is not financially beneficial to the United States. Otherwise I believe we would be working with their government in a different way.
What an odd mix of exaggerations and outright falsehoods.
The U.S. has never treated any country south of its borders as sovereign. Look, up the Monroe doctrine, if unfamiliar. Also, look at who trained _every_ bloody dictator in Latin America, all the death squads, and who was behind every right-wing coop in Latin America-- always "El Norte" aka U.S.A.
First of all, you might want to look up the Monroe doctrine yourself. It wasn't about interfering with states in central and south America. It was about preventing European powers from creating or expanding colonies in those regions. It was also almost 190 years ago.
Secondly, you grossly exaggerate US involvement in those governments. Yes, we certainly did topple a few governments to advance our interests. But to say every dictator in Latin America was trained by the US is laughably ahistorical.
Zetas are a paramilitary force trained and equipped by the U.S. and Israel-- really.
This is wrong. To start with they were not a "paramilitary" force at all. Some of the original members of Los Zetas were former members of Grupo Aeromóvil de Fuerzas Especiales, which is a uniformed Mexican military unit. A handful of those original members received counter-insurgency training at Ft. Benning as members of the Mexican military, but not all of them, and GAFE was never equipped by the US or Israel. In fact, I would like to see you substantiate any connection between GAFE and Israel whatsoever.
No one thought, as they were equipping the force like a military, and providing the best instruction in warfare and torture techniques, "what could possibly go wrong." Now these folks just mass kill folks for fun (U.S and Israeli training apparently really took-- they act just like them) like the couple hundred migrants that were recently ruthlessly and horrendously murdered by Zetas.
What a bunch of twisted bullshit. GAFE is equipped "like a military" because it's part of the Mexican army - you could at least get the most basic facts down before you presume to lecture other people. Furthermore, soldiers are not trained to "kill folks for fun". In fact quite the opposite: they are trained to kill only when ordered to kill. It's frankly ridiculous to blame the US for Los Zetas using this kind of triple bank shot, unless your argument is drug users in the US provided the money to tempt the deserters.
Mexico is a sovereign nation. Did you stop to think how condescending it sounds to say we "let" Mexico do anything? We've already flooded northern Mexico with people from various US government agencies. What's your plan? Shall we send in the army, too? Who will we fight?
The US government sold the cartels thousands of guns, which have been used to kill hundreds of people including police officers and politicians. I'm sure the Mexicans would be just as happy not to have much more "help" from the US.
Do people use calculators anymore? Seems like most people have either a mobile handy or some flavor of computer. "Chemistry students taking tests" doesn't strike me as a very large market niche.
Six dollars per kWh would make it twenty times worse than the current generation, though. Granted, that's a pretty easy target, and life is all about doing what you can do. But it would hardly merit a press release.
Well, sure, but VCs have a lot of skin in the game - usually a bunch of their own money. The government is spending tax dollars. Or, lately, printed money. Where the money is spent is much more important that what it gets spent on.
The government has a horrible record in funding energy projects. It spent billions (when a billion dollar was real money) on shale oil and solar projects in the seventies and ended up with nothing at all to show for it. Fund ten solar projects, and most likely all ten will fail unless they're kept alive with government funding. There's tons of money waiting on the sidelines right now, so any technology with a chance will be funded by an actual VC.
This time frame also coincided with a big increase in the proportion of web apps businesses deployed for internal use. It's a lot less important to keep your machines up to date if you're basically using them as browser-terminals.
People have been making this argument for hundreds of years. I've been through a handful of recessions, and in every recession people say "This time it's different. You'll see. The machines are taking all the jobs. Unemployment will never go down again. We'll all end up being slaves to a tiny number of people who own all the machines." And yet, eventually, unemployment does go back down. Machines replace people in some kinds of jobs but as the economy grows new jobs get created, both in old industries and in new ones that nobody expected.
People have a pretty impressive array of sensors and actuators for the money - automation is expensive, and it's an up-front cost. You have to shell out large amounts of money before your first widget rolls off the assembly line. Where labor costs are low we're seeing robots replaced by people.
I'm kind of surprised that's the biggest bang in the US arsenal. The Soviet/Russian R-36M in its single warhead configuration had a yield of 20 megatons.
unless we've been fusing helium or annihilating it with antihelium...all the helium thats ever existed on earth is still here (it doesnt even bond to things for the most part!)
Actually, no. Helium is light enough that it escapes the atmosphere entirely when not contained. It's gone forever. There's still quite a bit left - you find it in natural gas in the southern US, and other places, and we still have trillions of cubic meters of helium-bearing (to some extent) natural gas. But when it's gone, it really is gone. That will be something of a catastrophe, since helium has all sorts of industrial uses (like welding) for which we will not find an easy substitute.
Airships we can fill with hydrogen, at least the unmanned ones.
yeah yeah its all in where it is located...that's nothing like the problems facing oil supplies. burn a gallon of gas and it no longer exists chemically and physically (barring slight of hand or processes that take millions of years)
You can make hydrocarbon fuels if you have energy. In theory we could build a whole bunch of nuclear power plants and manufacture fuel from the air, essentially reversing the process of burning it.
Thank you. I've found that the way to deal with those that spout the "no progress" line is to get them to expound a little. That always makes their ignorance clear.
Heh. That's exactly what I was thinking, though in your case you still seem pretty convinced. Yes, "all the techniques and algorithms" are pattern matching and not any form of AI. They get us no closer to true AI, even the minimal Turing test. We are no closer to AI than we were in the '80s, though we seem to have managed to produce a few people who've convinced themselves otherwise. Is there some kind of grant money involved here?
You knew it because it's true. Nothing you've mentioned is in any way "AI" ("speech recognition"? Oh, please). This is all just pattern matching, and in the case of the chess computer and Watson they can only do what they do because there are people guiding them. Things look more advanced than they did in the '80s, but that's only because we have better hardware. In terms of actually developing something that can learn and make inferences it's the same way a rat could we're no closer.
Forget artificial intelligence. The future of computing is artificial consciousness, and it will be here within 20 years, and maybe much sooner than that,
Yeah, right. I've been hearing that since the mid '80s, and we're no closer now than we were then.
There's some kind of exponential increase buried in here. I mean, let's say you're 50 and your life expectancy is 70. That's enough time for twenty years worth of research, which isn't really all that much. By age 70 your life expectancy may have increased a handful of years over someone who was 70 when you were 50. But if your life expectancy is 150, that's 100 more years of research. We've gotten to the point where we're starting to understand some of the fundamental processes involved in aging - in 100 years aging may be seen as a chronic disease to be treated, and your odds of dying from natural causes may be close to zero..
But even if they could make your body last forever, you still wouldn't actually live forever. A few years back I read a report by an insurance company that said an ageless person living in the US would live into the low 600s on average because of an accident or a murder.
Physical access to satellites in low orbit which don't have any kind of defence system and can't be moved out of the way when the other guy sees you heading toward them.
Physical access to our satellites is a capability we don't have now that would be very nice to have, especially for the pricier models. Tampering with other peoples' satellites isn't a very useful mission - it's an act of war and something you wouldn't be able to hide very easily.
um, i know it's being said quite a lot, already, but it's worth repeating: java's pretty much dead on the desktop.
I'm not sure this is true. There are a whole host of reasons to use a Java client for internal corporate applications, and from what I can tell they're very common in that space.
I wouldn't be surprised if Oracle was successful with a desktop push - the main drawback of Java on the desktop was that it had a relatively large minimum memory footprint. But ten years later "large" isn't what it was. These days nobody cares if the minimum memory footprint for a Swing app is 10MB. And broadband is pretty ubiquitous, so you don't have to wait twenty minutes to get a new version.
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No, not just on paper. The cartels are not an existential threat to the Mexican government, and there's no part of Mexico the government doesn't control. But for some reason people think it makes them look sophisticated to say this. It doesn't. It just makes you look wrong.
Well, on this point we agree. On the other hand, the political situation in the US is such that neither of these things are even being discussed seriously.
We're going to occupy all of Mexico, kill hundreds of thousands of people, make enemies of our neighbors for generations, and all to save them from a few thousand criminals? Really? I can't imagine why you aren't Secretary of State!
This is wrong. You can google "Operation Fast & Furious" yourself. The US BATF deliberately sold thousands of guns to cartel buyers, and nobody will own up to the reason. It appears as if the idea was to trace all these guns back to the US and then use the body count as a way to build pressure for gun control domestically. You can imagine how the Mexicans would feel about that.
No, not really. Mostly we went into Iraq an A-stan to break things. We're not actually mad at the Mexicans.
Not true on either count.
By which you imply two things, neither of which is true.
1. The Mexican government wants US marines on Mexican soil. This is really what gets to the heart of the sovereignty point. Even if the US marines can solve the problem, and even if we're willing to provide them, it isn't our call. US forces on Mexican soil need to have the express permission of the Mexican government unless Congress has authorized hostilities against Mexico. I realize Pershing went chasing after Pancho Villa, but that was a long time ago and "we did it before without asking" isn't a very powerful argument.
2. The Mexican military isn't powerful enough to take on the cartels in battle. This is certainly not true. As always with criminal organizations the problem isn't that they fight well, the problem is they don't wear uniforms and they won't come out to fight. 50,000 US marines wouldn't solve the problem for the same reason the 45,000 deployed Mexican soldiers can't solve the problem: the cartels aren't armies, they don't hold territory, and they don't have political goals that don't relate to the drug trade. They just want to conduct business.
Really? How?
What an odd mix of exaggerations and outright falsehoods.
First of all, you might want to look up the Monroe doctrine yourself. It wasn't about interfering with states in central and south America. It was about preventing European powers from creating or expanding colonies in those regions. It was also almost 190 years ago.
Secondly, you grossly exaggerate US involvement in those governments. Yes, we certainly did topple a few governments to advance our interests. But to say every dictator in Latin America was trained by the US is laughably ahistorical.
This is wrong. To start with they were not a "paramilitary" force at all. Some of the original members of Los Zetas were former members of Grupo Aeromóvil de Fuerzas Especiales, which is a uniformed Mexican military unit. A handful of those original members received counter-insurgency training at Ft. Benning as members of the Mexican military, but not all of them, and GAFE was never equipped by the US or Israel. In fact, I would like to see you substantiate any connection between GAFE and Israel whatsoever.
What a bunch of twisted bullshit. GAFE is equipped "like a military" because it's part of the Mexican army - you could at least get the most basic facts down before you presume to lecture other people. Furthermore, soldiers are not trained to "kill folks for fun". In fact quite the opposite: they are trained to kill only when ordered to kill. It's frankly ridiculous to blame the US for Los Zetas using this kind of triple bank shot, unless your argument is drug users in the US provided the money to tempt the deserters.
Mexico is a sovereign nation. Did you stop to think how condescending it sounds to say we "let" Mexico do anything? We've already flooded northern Mexico with people from various US government agencies. What's your plan? Shall we send in the army, too? Who will we fight?
The US government sold the cartels thousands of guns, which have been used to kill hundreds of people including police officers and politicians. I'm sure the Mexicans would be just as happy not to have much more "help" from the US.
Well, sure, I still have my HP 41. But I don't use it any more.
Do people use calculators anymore? Seems like most people have either a mobile handy or some flavor of computer. "Chemistry students taking tests" doesn't strike me as a very large market niche.
Six dollars per kWh would make it twenty times worse than the current generation, though. Granted, that's a pretty easy target, and life is all about doing what you can do. But it would hardly merit a press release.
Well, sure, but VCs have a lot of skin in the game - usually a bunch of their own money. The government is spending tax dollars. Or, lately, printed money. Where the money is spent is much more important that what it gets spent on.
The government has a horrible record in funding energy projects. It spent billions (when a billion dollar was real money) on shale oil and solar projects in the seventies and ended up with nothing at all to show for it. Fund ten solar projects, and most likely all ten will fail unless they're kept alive with government funding. There's tons of money waiting on the sidelines right now, so any technology with a chance will be funded by an actual VC.
Heh heh.
Dr. Strangelove: Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you *keep* it a *secret*! Why didn't you tell the world, EH?
This time frame also coincided with a big increase in the proportion of web apps businesses deployed for internal use. It's a lot less important to keep your machines up to date if you're basically using them as browser-terminals.
People have been making this argument for hundreds of years. I've been through a handful of recessions, and in every recession people say "This time it's different. You'll see. The machines are taking all the jobs. Unemployment will never go down again. We'll all end up being slaves to a tiny number of people who own all the machines." And yet, eventually, unemployment does go back down. Machines replace people in some kinds of jobs but as the economy grows new jobs get created, both in old industries and in new ones that nobody expected.
People have a pretty impressive array of sensors and actuators for the money - automation is expensive, and it's an up-front cost. You have to shell out large amounts of money before your first widget rolls off the assembly line. Where labor costs are low we're seeing robots replaced by people.
At that point it'll be a bit late to start worrying.
I'm kind of surprised that's the biggest bang in the US arsenal. The Soviet/Russian R-36M in its single warhead configuration had a yield of 20 megatons.
It's been done several times successfully, at least from an engineering standpoint. The problem with airships is more financial than technical.
Actually, no. Helium is light enough that it escapes the atmosphere entirely when not contained. It's gone forever. There's still quite a bit left - you find it in natural gas in the southern US, and other places, and we still have trillions of cubic meters of helium-bearing (to some extent) natural gas. But when it's gone, it really is gone. That will be something of a catastrophe, since helium has all sorts of industrial uses (like welding) for which we will not find an easy substitute.
Airships we can fill with hydrogen, at least the unmanned ones.
You can make hydrocarbon fuels if you have energy. In theory we could build a whole bunch of nuclear power plants and manufacture fuel from the air, essentially reversing the process of burning it.
Thank you. I've found that the way to deal with those that spout the "no progress" line is to get them to expound a little. That always makes their ignorance clear.
Heh. That's exactly what I was thinking, though in your case you still seem pretty convinced. Yes, "all the techniques and algorithms" are pattern matching and not any form of AI. They get us no closer to true AI, even the minimal Turing test. We are no closer to AI than we were in the '80s, though we seem to have managed to produce a few people who've convinced themselves otherwise. Is there some kind of grant money involved here?
You knew it because it's true. Nothing you've mentioned is in any way "AI" ("speech recognition"? Oh, please). This is all just pattern matching, and in the case of the chess computer and Watson they can only do what they do because there are people guiding them. Things look more advanced than they did in the '80s, but that's only because we have better hardware. In terms of actually developing something that can learn and make inferences it's the same way a rat could we're no closer.
Forget artificial intelligence. The future of computing is artificial consciousness, and it will be here within 20 years, and maybe much sooner than that,
Yeah, right. I've been hearing that since the mid '80s, and we're no closer now than we were then.
There's some kind of exponential increase buried in here. I mean, let's say you're 50 and your life expectancy is 70. That's enough time for twenty years worth of research, which isn't really all that much. By age 70 your life expectancy may have increased a handful of years over someone who was 70 when you were 50. But if your life expectancy is 150, that's 100 more years of research. We've gotten to the point where we're starting to understand some of the fundamental processes involved in aging - in 100 years aging may be seen as a chronic disease to be treated, and your odds of dying from natural causes may be close to zero..
But even if they could make your body last forever, you still wouldn't actually live forever. A few years back I read a report by an insurance company that said an ageless person living in the US would live into the low 600s on average because of an accident or a murder.
Physical access to our satellites is a capability we don't have now that would be very nice to have, especially for the pricier models. Tampering with other peoples' satellites isn't a very useful mission - it's an act of war and something you wouldn't be able to hide very easily.
I bet Obama's going to make this an issue in his re-election campaign.
Of course he will. He can't very well run on his record.
I'm not sure this is true. There are a whole host of reasons to use a Java client for internal corporate applications, and from what I can tell they're very common in that space.
I wouldn't be surprised if Oracle was successful with a desktop push - the main drawback of Java on the desktop was that it had a relatively large minimum memory footprint. But ten years later "large" isn't what it was. These days nobody cares if the minimum memory footprint for a Swing app is 10MB. And broadband is pretty ubiquitous, so you don't have to wait twenty minutes to get a new version.