So what you're saying is yes, overtaxation helped kill these empires, but there was some nuance to how it did that.
No, what he is saying is that a lot of wealthy people paid little or no tax and became more or less independent of the empire, contributing little and yet exploiting the economic benefits of having a large organised trading empire and powerful military to defend their interests.
In other words, selfish libertarians destroyed empires.
But Rome never addressed what I see as the fundamental driver, the accumulation of wealth and power by a small group of parasites, here a set of families of Rome and bureaucrats of the empire.
So in other words, these parasites weren't taxed enough. Yes, that sounds familiar, I just don't see how it's an argument for abolishing taxation.
If you don't pay taxes you shouldn't get anything.
When are we going to get the converse? If you don't use the service, you don't have to pay for the service?
That is perfectly fine if you go and live somewhere like Sealand or a desert island and are economically self sufficient. In fact, I wish a few more libertarians would have the courage of their convictions and fuck off to their Cryptonomicon wet dream micronations, and leave the rest of us alone.
Yes, if you are a multi-millionaire you can live on a fucking boat somewhere and pay for everything you need yurself. Big deal. The whole planet can't be multi-millionaires until we discover the secret of free unlimited resources.
Sealand isn't taken seriously by the UK, so the Brits won't simply send a cop to the platform to arrest everyone; which meant the only real threat were raiders.
Imagine the irony if The Pirate Bay had bought Sealand and then been raided by real pirates.
By 1776 America had become a long distance pain in the arse for Britain. At that stage there was no real concept of a British Empire, so there was no real economic purpose in trying to hang onto an unwilling trading partner. Plus, we didn't have nukes then.
At one time Einsteins theories weren't testable either and were just neat thought experiments.
That's not true, quite early on people performed experiments which (a) produced results in accordiance with the theories' predictions and (b) would have been able to falsify the theories if they had turned out differently. They were proper scientific theories from the start.
there still exists the challenge of getting past the barrier of infinite energy required to even match the speed of light
I love the way this is casually sidestepped. "Yeah, never mind that you would require infinite energy, let's just skip that stage and assume you're magically exceeding c".
I'm tempted to pay the $30 to get the article anyway.
Since I don't need to memorize information because I can just look it up via Google Search, I'm learning less and less and becoming more reliant on the internet. Which means my brain is shrinking, not expanding.
Almost everyone here seems to equate intelligence with being good at a pub quiz, i.e. knowing more or less instantaneously a great number of random facts. There is much more to thought and information processing than that.
Anybody else involuntarily swap "futurist" and "crackpot" in their minds whenever they read the term in a sentence? Especially one about Kurzweil?
I generally swap "futurist" with "jammy bastard who gets to become well known and well paid for making shit up that you wouldn't get away with in a sci fi story."
Intelligence emerges naturally from any sufficiently complex interaction
AI people keep saying things like this, but what proof is there? What intelligence other than in human beings can you show us? The evidence from chimps or dolphins is not very convincing, that from chess machines even less.
It's a weird joke because IQ is specifically supposed to exclude book learning and test innate problem solving, abstract from any knowledge context.
That may be the idea, but it's not how it works in practice.
True story: when I was much younger, my mum was teaching at my school and heard that we were going to be given IQ tests. So she bought me a book of practice IQ tests. Guess what? I came out rather well.
It's like when we used to have the compulsory Eleven Plus exam in the UK to separate kids into grammar and secondary modern schools at 11. Amazingly, the kids with interested, well educated parents who lived in houses with lots of books got better "IQ" results than the poor sods with single parents living off fuck all a week.
The point is that while there is a current technical reason to remotely access information on the internet via your phone, if you could store all that information locally it would still be the same information.
And you can store an awful lot of information locally quite cheaply nowadays, although admittedly you wouldn't be carrying it around in your coat pocket just yet.
You can download a copy of Wikipedia to your PC, but nobody does.
That is for technical reasons, people don't have the bandwidth, in the same way that people don't download the whole internet to their PC each day so they can have it available for faster, secure access.
If you had some version of the whole internet on your local PC being constantly updated, there would be no difference between accessing that and accessing The Cloud. There is nothing magically transformative about the way you access information, other than the obvious aspects of convenience.
What other types of vitamins are there? I mean, isn't that why people take vitamins, to live longer?
Only if you are as deranged as Kurzweil and Doctor Terry.
Most people take vitamins so that they keep a healthy balance in their bodies because they can't be bothered to eat properly. It's lazy and mostly a waste of money, but at least it's not insane.
I tried asking their live chat woman what it felt like to work for such creepily deranged con artists, and she cut me off! So I won't be buying any sugar free chocolate from them in a hurry.
I find the CPU analogy compelling. It helps to think of the brain as a multi-core processor, running an OS with run of the mill core pinning.
If half your brain is fried, you can move daemons (like speech) pinned to the destroyed cores to different cores. Maybe. If it doesn't work, file a bug. It should be fixed in the next revision of humanity.
You can use binary computer analogies all you like, but that is self evidently not how brains work, or else it would be trivial to build one, given the vast amount of computing power now available.
"in order to prove that human nature is mechanistic and reducible to mere information."
But what if Kurzweil is *right* in that claim? Lanier is doing what so many philsophers do: Defending the 'magic' in mankind, without considering that the magic he defends may not exist at all.
The simplest proof for those who believe that they can create something indistinguisable from a human brain/being is to go and create something that is indistinguishable from a human brain/being.
BTW labelling your critics as believers in "magic" is pretty pathetic when they are merely pointing out that we don't seem to be able to build that "magic" in a model, never mind a workshop. But, of course, as with cheap fusion power, it'll be reality in 25 years no doubt.
That doesn't mean it's simplistic binary information though. You can believe in an entirely materialistic universe, but not accept that it's just a matter of well ordered 1s and 0s.
Slashdot Mirror
The libertarian idea that there is a separate power elite called "the government" which is a parasite on the honest rich folks is frankly ludicrous.
So what you're saying is yes, overtaxation helped kill these empires, but there was some nuance to how it did that.
No, what he is saying is that a lot of wealthy people paid little or no tax and became more or less independent of the empire, contributing little and yet exploiting the economic benefits of having a large organised trading empire and powerful military to defend their interests.
In other words, selfish libertarians destroyed empires.
But Rome never addressed what I see as the fundamental driver, the accumulation of wealth and power by a small group of parasites, here a set of families of Rome and bureaucrats of the empire.
So in other words, these parasites weren't taxed enough. Yes, that sounds familiar, I just don't see how it's an argument for abolishing taxation.
The loss of England's American colonies.
The "no taxation without representation" gag was more about lack of democratic accountability than the taxes themselves.
If you don't pay taxes you shouldn't get anything.
When are we going to get the converse? If you don't use the service, you don't have to pay for the service?
That is perfectly fine if you go and live somewhere like Sealand or a desert island and are economically self sufficient. In fact, I wish a few more libertarians would have the courage of their convictions and fuck off to their Cryptonomicon wet dream micronations, and leave the rest of us alone.
Yes, if you are a multi-millionaire you can live on a fucking boat somewhere and pay for everything you need yurself. Big deal. The whole planet can't be multi-millionaires until we discover the secret of free unlimited resources.
Sealand isn't taken seriously by the UK, so the Brits won't simply send a cop to the platform to arrest everyone; which meant the only real threat were raiders.
Imagine the irony if The Pirate Bay had bought Sealand and then been raided by real pirates.
I think I'd have died laughing.
By 1776 America had become a long distance pain in the arse for Britain. At that stage there was no real concept of a British Empire, so there was no real economic purpose in trying to hang onto an unwilling trading partner. Plus, we didn't have nukes then.
At one time Einsteins theories weren't testable either and were just neat thought experiments.
That's not true, quite early on people performed experiments which (a) produced results in accordiance with the theories' predictions and (b) would have been able to falsify the theories if they had turned out differently. They were proper scientific theories from the start.
there still exists the challenge of getting past the barrier of infinite energy required to even match the speed of light
I love the way this is casually sidestepped. "Yeah, never mind that you would require infinite energy, let's just skip that stage and assume you're magically exceeding c".
I'm tempted to pay the $30 to get the article anyway.
Isn't it on The Pirate Bay?
Or does anyone truly believe that human-level AI or neuro-interfaces will never happen?
I'll believe it when I see it. It's like the existence of God.
I expect neither to be demonstrated during my lifetime.
Since I don't need to memorize information because I can just look it up via Google Search, I'm learning less and less and becoming more reliant on the internet. Which means my brain is shrinking, not expanding.
Almost everyone here seems to equate intelligence with being good at a pub quiz, i.e. knowing more or less instantaneously a great number of random facts. There is much more to thought and information processing than that.
So, I store my memories/infomation on the "cloud" but still have a 250gb download limit a month, how does that help?
You get to live most of your life as a drooling, mindless zombie. So pretty much the same as going to work is now.
Anybody else involuntarily swap "futurist" and "crackpot" in their minds whenever they read the term in a sentence? Especially one about Kurzweil?
I generally swap "futurist" with "jammy bastard who gets to become well known and well paid for making shit up that you wouldn't get away with in a sci fi story."
Intelligence emerges naturally from any sufficiently complex interaction
AI people keep saying things like this, but what proof is there? What intelligence other than in human beings can you show us? The evidence from chimps or dolphins is not very convincing, that from chess machines even less.
It's a weird joke because IQ is specifically supposed to exclude book learning and test innate problem solving, abstract from any knowledge context.
That may be the idea, but it's not how it works in practice.
True story: when I was much younger, my mum was teaching at my school and heard that we were going to be given IQ tests. So she bought me a book of practice IQ tests. Guess what? I came out rather well.
It's like when we used to have the compulsory Eleven Plus exam in the UK to separate kids into grammar and secondary modern schools at 11. Amazingly, the kids with interested, well educated parents who lived in houses with lots of books got better "IQ" results than the poor sods with single parents living off fuck all a week.
I don't need to memorize *everything* - now I only need to know how to find the answers I need
This has been the case since mankind invented writing.
The point is that while there is a current technical reason to remotely access information on the internet via your phone, if you could store all that information locally it would still be the same information.
And you can store an awful lot of information locally quite cheaply nowadays, although admittedly you wouldn't be carrying it around in your coat pocket just yet.
You can download a copy of Wikipedia to your PC, but nobody does.
That is for technical reasons, people don't have the bandwidth, in the same way that people don't download the whole internet to their PC each day so they can have it available for faster, secure access.
If you had some version of the whole internet on your local PC being constantly updated, there would be no difference between accessing that and accessing The Cloud. There is nothing magically transformative about the way you access information, other than the obvious aspects of convenience.
A PC or portable device wouldn't possibly work, it must be the cloud. Not because cloud is a buzzword.
Duh, do you know how stupid you would look with a powerful desktop computer glued to your head?
Oh no! The man is promoting proper nutrition and a healthy diet, clearly the work of an insane super criminal!
You don't need to buy snake oil pills to have a healthy diet, though.
Longevity vitamins.
What other types of vitamins are there? I mean, isn't that why people take vitamins, to live longer?
Only if you are as deranged as Kurzweil and Doctor Terry.
Most people take vitamins so that they keep a healthy balance in their bodies because they can't be bothered to eat properly. It's lazy and mostly a waste of money, but at least it's not insane.
Number one: Ray and Terry's Longevity Products.
I tried asking their live chat woman what it felt like to work for such creepily deranged con artists, and she cut me off! So I won't be buying any sugar free chocolate from them in a hurry.
I find the CPU analogy compelling. It helps to think of the brain as a multi-core processor, running an OS with run of the mill core pinning.
If half your brain is fried, you can move daemons (like speech) pinned to the destroyed cores to different cores. Maybe. If it doesn't work, file a bug. It should be fixed in the next revision of humanity.
You can use binary computer analogies all you like, but that is self evidently not how brains work, or else it would be trivial to build one, given the vast amount of computing power now available.
"in order to prove that human nature is mechanistic and reducible to mere information." But what if Kurzweil is *right* in that claim? Lanier is doing what so many philsophers do: Defending the 'magic' in mankind, without considering that the magic he defends may not exist at all.
The simplest proof for those who believe that they can create something indistinguisable from a human brain/being is to go and create something that is indistinguishable from a human brain/being.
BTW labelling your critics as believers in "magic" is pretty pathetic when they are merely pointing out that we don't seem to be able to build that "magic" in a model, never mind a workshop. But, of course, as with cheap fusion power, it'll be reality in 25 years no doubt.
To me human life is reducible to information
That doesn't mean it's simplistic binary information though. You can believe in an entirely materialistic universe, but not accept that it's just a matter of well ordered 1s and 0s.