So it's like a blog, but without the opportunity for in depth information.
Yeah. The point of blogs isn't always depth of information. Sometimes you just want to share a brief thought, share a link, or let your friends and family know what you're up to.
So it's like an SMS, but with nothing I personally need to know.
Yes, probably not something you need to know, but perhaps something you'd like to know.
Yeah, I think the problem is that people on both sides, whether they love Twitter or hate it, are thinking that it's something more than it is. Its like a blog, but short. It's like an SMS message, but not necessarily directed at a particular person. It's like an IM status, but not tied to IM. It was a slightly interesting approach to dealing with Internet communication, but it's really not that unique or interesting. Some people use Twitter for inane information. Some people do the same thing with email. Some people post really inane blog entries. No big deal.
But somehow the media has bought into Twitter as some kind of technological marvel. "ZOMG! People are tweeting about the World Cup! Let's put those tweets on our show, so we can pretend to be technologically savvy and relevant!"'
Well also there's the fact that Monopoly is... you know... a game. When someone owns Park Place, Boardwalk, and the railroads it simply "sucks when it isn't you". You were trying to do the same thing, because that's the point of the game. You're not worried about whether the railroads continue to provide good service to their customers, because that's not part of the game.
But what we're talking about here is telecommunications infrastructure and information dissemination. These are not simply entertainment services, but you're talking about companies that control portions of the Internet and the news. These are essentially vital public services that we allow private companies to perform under the belief that private companies will do a better job. We can't afford to allow them to be abused, since it could have dire consequences for the future of our society. Worse: In an era where we could realistically damage our own planet to the point of making it unlivable for ourselves, abusing telecommunications infrastructure and information dissemination could threaten the existence of our species.
Are there any real news shows left on TV? I know there are multiple 24-hour "News" channels and plenty of "News" shows, but do any actually engage in responsible reporting?
Even more than that: you don't want rapid "innovation" in established products. When I buy a new computer, I want it to be better than my last computer, but I specifically want a lot of things to be the same. I'm used to a certain UI, and I have a variety of peripherals already that I might want to plug into it. I want to be able to perform essentially the same tasks in the same way.
Basically, the smartphone market had a distinct shift a couple of years ago (when the iPhone was released) where vendors started offering a new kind of product. They were starting with a clean slate, and you can draw whatever you want on a clean slate. Once you've established a new product that way, you have a relatively brief period of time to refine that vision before people's expectations become established. Then people want everything to work "as expected", and they want legacy support more than they want new features.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see more innovation in the desktop/laptop market. But if someone did conceive of a new and interesting vision for the computer, they'd have a lot of inertia to overcome.
That reminds me of an argument I had one time. I was arguing that we should invest in better public transportation, and someone responded, "That makes no sense. Public transportation is never profitable."
I said, "Well... yeah, it's not supposed to be. The goal is to provide efficient transportation at cost."
"My point exactly! It's bad for the economy."
"How do you mean?" I asked.
"Well, how can something be good for the economy if it's not profitable?"
I was baffled by this understanding of economics. How do you even argue with that?
Yeah, it doesn't make sense to think of "health care" as limited only to things which the patient had no control over. The first obvious problem (which you bring up) is, how much control do you need to have? Obviously a whole lot of health problems can theoretically be prevented by some kind of behavior, but where do you draw the line? If I smoke my whole life and get lung cancer at 80 years old, is it my own fault? What if I just smoked for a few years? What if I smoked a single cigarette once? What if I worked in a coal mine? What if I lived in a city with bad air pollution? At what point does it cease to be "my own fault"?
But aside from that, there's another problem: There's a reason why we provide health care to people who can't afford it. I don't just mean, "because we're nice" or "because they deserve care". There's a real, practical, economic reason to provide health care to people. A healthy worker adds productivity to our economy, whereas an unhealthy worker (who can't work) is a drain on our economy. Even if we don't provide health care to that unhealthy worker, he won't be adding to the GDP, and his friends and family will spend their money to help him get medical treatment. Even if we let people die in the streets, it will cost us some amount of money to dispose of the body and deal with the diseases that sick people spread.
This is what people really need to understand: If you have an efficient and well designed healthcare system, it is entirely possible to spend $X on public health care and see it result in $Y in increased production, resulting in $Z of increased tax revenue, such that $Z > $X.
Healthcare isn't necessarily charity or rewarding irresponsible people. It could be a simple win-win situation.
The graphs you've seen (on a snippy side-note, I refuse to use the word "infographic") may not have been intentionally misleading, but may have still been misleading, but they may have still been misleading. I've seen some that break medicare, prescription drug benefits, direct funding for hospitals, and health care subsidies each into different groups, for example.
Also, you may have been looking at the costs right now, as opposed to the projected costs in the next decade or two. The Baby Boomers have just begun to reach retirement age.
Plus, that's just talking about government spending. All that spending will come along with increased private spending, which may have an adverse effect on the economy, thereby causing lost tax revenue.
You'll note that I didn't ask or demand that ANYONE work for free. All I ask is that the profit motive not be the determining factor in health care considerations.
Yeah, I always find it shocking when people claim that "profit" is and should be the *only* significant motivator. Even forgetting touchy-feely hippy-dippy stuff, what ever happened to taking pride in your work? To doing a good job? What happened to ideas like "honesty" and "honor" and "self respect"?
Do we want judges and police officers and firefighters to be "in it for the money"? Willing to send you to jail or let you die if it happens to be more profitable? Or are we just saying that doctors should be held to a lower standard?
The reason why healthcare insurance policies are counterintuitive to other insurances is to foster preventive care. If I am covered only for catastrophe, then I will sit and wait for the catastrophe to happen rather than going and getting things fixed early. Because, from my perspectives, my costs are identical in both cases.
You're ignoring the costs to your health. No one will wait for a catastrophe if they can afford the preventative care. Well, that's not *quite* true. Some people are afraid of doctors, or won't exercise the discipline to carry out the preventative care (e.g. "eating right"). But mostly, all things being equal, people would prefer to not-have a heart attack than to have a heart attack, even if it costs them the same amount of money. People would prefer to have the cancer treated early than to wait for it to be deadly.
But for health insurance, that's all turned around. It covers EVERYTHING.
There's a reason for this: it's socialized healthcare.
Sorry, you might be thinking I'm stupid right now. It's a bunch of private companies, right? How can that be socialized healthcare?
Here's the deal: As you've noted, health insurance doesn't work like insurance. Insurance is when you pay into a system, but only receive a payout in the likelihood that something unexpected happens. If the unexpected happens, you get compensation, but most people pay in more than they'll ever get out. It only works if the payout happens in the event of an unlikely disaster.
Health insurance, on the other hand, pays out expectedly. It pays for our doctors visits every year, and it pays for our medication. As we get older, we all get sicker and sicker and require bigger payouts. And yet, we're still convinced that the system makes sense because we think we get more out of health insurance than we put in.
Politicians and lobbyists have us convinced (if subconsciously) that health insurance makes our doctors visits and medication cheaper. You pay $20 for your doctor visit instead of $200, so it must be cheaper, right? Think about it much, and you realize that this is economically impossible. The money comes from somewhere. Therefore, the existence of health insurance would mean one of two things: either (a) we're wrong about insurance making things cheaper on an individual level and we're paying more to the insurance company than we would pay to just go to the doctor; or (b) the insurance companies are getting additional money elsewhere.
For the answer, ask yourself where most of us get our health insurance: our employer. So the reason health insurance is cheaper than paying the doctor directly is that your employer pays a portion of the cost. But why does your employer do that? Why not just pay you that amount extra in your paycheck, and let you decide how to spend it? One of the chief reasons is that employers get a tax break for paying for their employee's health insurance. That's right: federal tax breaks. So now we see the source of the additional money. The federal government is indirectly funding health insurance through tax breaks.
It's true. Our "private" health insurance industry is set up and funded by the federal government as a way to have socialize health care. We do not have a "free market" for insurance. Our current insurance industry is not an example of "capitalism". If the health insurance industry was subject to normal market forces, it would look a lot more like the renter's insurance market: Very few people would bother to get it, and it would only cover you in cases of unexpected catastrophe. There's no other way that the business model works.
So yes, we have a socialized healthcare system that consists of giving health insurance companies unbounded subsidies, and this was done on purpose to disperse costs among the taxpayers and increase access to health services. While politicians are trying to phrase the question as, "Do we want to move to a socialist system?" the real question is, "Is our current socialist system working efficiently?"
When they announced iOS4, they announced that it would be released for the iPhone in June and for the iPad "in the fall". This is not a surprise. Also, iPad applications have a different UI, so things aren't really any more segmented now than they were before.
Basically introducing the iPad introduced a new device with a different feature set and a different target market. That the market is "segmented" there isn't weird or problematic. Android, on the other hand, has several different devices from several different manufacturers with feature-sets that are mostly the same as each other, but which are basically incompatible with each other. That's a different problem.
For emphasis, think of how many different iOS devices there are. It's basically 4 iPhone models, 1 iPad model, and... something like 3 iPod touch models. So somewhere in the neighborhood of 8. For most purposes, you can treat a lot of these the same and say that there are 3 or 4 meaningfully different devices to target. How many different models of Android phones are there out there?
Well I agree that, "There's capitalism, then there's capitalism," which is why I said "capitalism" as a moral system.
It's not just about the tax lawyers or the focus on short-term growth, but the people who sold us on the idea that "profit" is the only thing that matters. We have been convinced that things like "high customer satisfaction" and "providing a product you can be proud of" or "behaving in a moral and ethical manner" are not values that anyone should have when doing business. The *only* measure of success is profit.
And this doesn't just apply to people working within the business. We have been convinced that capitalism was devised as a moral system rather than simply an economic system. I read this article a while ago, and one of the paragraphs seemed to be a terrific example of this sort of thing:
I’m a free marketeer. I believe that voluntary exchange is not just a good method of incentivizing people to provide their labor and talents to society, but a robust moral system — goods and services represent tangible benefit to people, market prices represent the true value of goods in society, and wages represent the value that a worker provides to others. Absent negative externalities or monopoly effects, a man receives from the free market what he gives to it, his material worth is a running tally of the net benefit that he has provided to his fellow man. A high income is not only justified, but there is nobility to it.
If this is the way you view things, then "profit" is basically considered an absolute measure of "goodness". Good businesses are profitable, bad ones are not. Good people make lots of money, bad ones do not. If a businessman makes 10x the amount of money that a garbageman makes, then it must mean that he's 10x better than the garbage man. Not just that he's better at business, but that he's a superior human being who is much more useful to society. According to this line of thought, the garbageman is more or less expendable.
I don't know who sold us on this idea, but it's extremely creepy to hear it voiced by supposed Christians in the "religious right". Capitalism wasn't intended to be a moral system. If you go back and read people like Adam Smith, you see that capitalism was intended to be a way to achieve greater efficiency by expanding individual economic choice, but it was hoped that those choices would be made while exercising wisdom and morality, and not a blind lust for profits.
Sometimes people do "err" out of laziness, stupidity of evil intent!
Well I think there's also another issue: When a mistake is serious enough, it might not matter whether it was made out of laziness, stupidity, or evil intent. It might be a sign that the person who made the mistake isn't capable or qualified. In that case, you may want to remove that person from their position of responsibility and find someone else who can do the job.
There's another issue: sometimes people don't learn from their mistakes. For various reasons, people sometimes repeat the same mistakes over and over again.
I don't know if you'd call either of those examples "laziness, stupidity, or evil intent", but it still means that the person who made a mistake often shouldn't be trusted to avoid further mistakes that are equally serious.
I have always found it amusing and interesting that computers work the way they do. They work in ways that are the complete opposite of the animal neuromechanism.
Well it makes sense. We developed computers to do the things that we're bad at, such as fast error-free calculation and perfect storage of information. If computers worked the way the human mind worked, then it would have the same problems as the human mind, and we'd be better off getting a person to do those things.
Scientists are constantly rediscovering and proving ideas that philosophers talked about hundreds or thousands of years ago. Sometimes they're even discovering the ideas that long ago stood as the underpinnings of the science that they're studying, arguably making the whole thing slightly circular.
Still, there's value in rediscovering old ideas (especially when they're good ideas) and there's value in proving them more rigorously or developing a more specific understanding of how these things work. Plus, when I see a story like this, I'm always suspicious that the reporter is oversimplifying.
Starting news businesses often requires that talented people start off working for little/no money. It doesn't need to stay that way.
There are lots of different issues involved here, but the real question comes down to what business models are available for funding production of TV shows on the Internet, and then whether strict DRM and distribution controls are required for those business models to work. The specific protocol (bittorrent) is really a side issue.
Of course they're going to need to make money at some point, but I don't see any reason to think that they can't. I'd like to see companies producing shows for channels like Netflix, iTunes, and Hulu, while bypassing the normal studio/network system. I'd be even more likely to buy shows from something like iTunes if they'd drop the DRM.
Yeah, and these companies are a good example of why we like consumer protection. There are a handful of players in a market with a high barrier to entry. As much as they compete for customers, they also compete over who can screw their customers the most. Instead of one company dropping prices and everyone else following suit to stay competitive, one company will add a new fee and the rest follow by adding the same fee.
It's also worth mentioning that this is not some frivolous consumer good; we're talking about vital telecommunication infrastructure.
So, as is frequently the case when organizations become hyper-focused on metrics,
decisions get made that maximize metrics but don't make good business sense.
Quoted for emphasis. Excellent point. I think this problem is pervasive in our culture right now, even including our attempts to improve education.
Interestingly (at least I think it's interesting), it seems to me to be caused by the right-wing's insistence on "capitalism" as a moral system (i.e. short-term profits are the only thing that matters), mixed with the left-wing insistence on "science" as wisdom (i.e. nothing is true unless it's quantifiable and provable). It's like a perfect storm of dumb ideologies, with some general greed, incompetence, and stupidity thrown in for good measure.
Well these days, people think that the whole point of companies is only "to profit". Read the people posting on this site, and you'll see people advocating the same idea. I wouldn't be surprised if someone responded to my post with the whole spiel about how "a corporation's only responsibility is to maximize profit for shareholders".
No consideration given to the idea of "producing things" or "doing a good job" or "benefiting customers". It's gotten so unscrupulously greedy people don't even need to hide it. They could say, "We're out to get every last penny out of our customers while providing as little benefit as possible," and most of their customers would say, "Yeah, that's about what we expect."
It's sad, really. We should be ashamed of ourselves.
But it may not be that necessary if the statistics are large enough.
It's possible, though, that the statistics can never be "large enough". I remember seeing an article here about natural language speech recognition (oh, here it is) and about how many companies had hoped to continually feed more and more examples of language use into a computer and, through statistical analysis, be able to develop human-level speech recognition. The article indicated that these companies found a point after which additional examples didn't help. The statistical analysis (at least the methods being used) leveled off around 40% while human recognition was up around 95%.
Even when the statistical models included searching the rest of the sentence for context and calculating likely words, the recognition still failed. Part of the problem is wordplay-- sarcasm, puns, and unusual word usage. We use all kinds of contextual queues, and not just the word's context in the sentence, but things like facial expressions, tone of voice, and even an understanding of the speaker's personality. That's a lot of context for a computer to pick up on.
What's more, when people listen to another person talking, we basically try to draw out "what the other person is saying" and then use that knowledge to fill in any blanks. So if I use a really strange word choice when talking about my wife, another married guy might understand more quickly what I'm saying by relating to his own feelings about his own wife. Until a computer has a wife, that's a level of context which will be inaccessible.
(not everything I'm talking about in this post is in the article I cited)
- You pick one of the [26] cases at the beginning. Instead of focusing on amounts let's call one a "winning" case (top prize), all the others losers.
This is a bad approach, since the amounts have a lot to do with it. The amounts mean that there isn't a "winning case" and 25 "losers", but instead 26 cases of various degrees of "win".
Also, the offers are some kind of function of the average of the remaining cases (haven't actually checked mathematically, but I'm sure it amounts to something like that), so which "losing cases" you eliminate changes your strategy drastically.
In short, the best strategy for the game is not to "pick the winning case", but rather to "eliminate the lowest-scoring cases" enough to drive the "deal" price up, and then take the deal. It's very rare that the game makes it all the way to the last 2 cases, and when it does, you're probably better off taking the deal instead of trying to pick a case.
For example, if you got it down to the $1mil and the $0.01 cases, the deal will be around $500k. The smart money is on pocketing the $500k rather than risking $1mil on a 50/50 bet. To try for the $1mil at that point is equivalent to having $500k in the bank and betting it all on a coin toss.
None of this really argues with your point about it being "like watching someone throw dice against the wall". It's a game of chance with very little strategy. However, with a lot of these shows, the point *is* the crap dialog that's interspersed with the game. They're trying to build a narrative where you're interested in the outcome in order to get you invested in the tension over whether they'll win.
Well essentially what has happened is that AI has become a term to mean any mechanical behavior which can adapt to different circumstances. It may be because of overuse of the term, but I've seen people use the word "AI" to any kind of computerized decision-making that is clever enough that people can't immediately tell how it's done.
However, I agree that this isn't what I consider "AI". In my opinion, we haven't built real AI when we've designed a computer that can beat all human players in Jeopardy. We've built real AI when the AI designed to defeat human players in Jeopard is capable of deciding that it doesn't want to play Jeopardy anymore.
I've argued many times before that real computerized intelligence will probably not be achieved through current approaches because we misunderstand "what intelligence is". It's a really funny thing, because almost universally I hear people talk about intelligence being a function of the brain, but that's blatantly wrong.
I think it's clear, at least, that human intelligence is an emergent trait that grows out of interacting with the world in a way that includes basic desires and goals. A baby become intelligent on its own because it's hungry and because it wants attention. If the baby didn't have animal desires and aversions, then the various stimuli wouldn't have an effect on the developing brain.
Or to give another example, there have been arguments (rather successful ones, IMO) that we never would have attained what we consider "human-level intelligence" if it weren't for the design of our hands. Hands allow us to pick things up and observe them in a way that animals can't do. For a dog to pick something up, it uses its mouth, which then means the dog can't see the object. So in this sense, I suspect we won't be able to accurately re-create human intelligence without re-creating a human body with human desires/aversions. It's not clear that's what we really want though, anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
So it's like a blog, but without the opportunity for in depth information.
Yeah. The point of blogs isn't always depth of information. Sometimes you just want to share a brief thought, share a link, or let your friends and family know what you're up to.
So it's like an SMS, but with nothing I personally need to know.
Yes, probably not something you need to know, but perhaps something you'd like to know.
Yeah, I think the problem is that people on both sides, whether they love Twitter or hate it, are thinking that it's something more than it is. Its like a blog, but short. It's like an SMS message, but not necessarily directed at a particular person. It's like an IM status, but not tied to IM. It was a slightly interesting approach to dealing with Internet communication, but it's really not that unique or interesting. Some people use Twitter for inane information. Some people do the same thing with email. Some people post really inane blog entries. No big deal.
But somehow the media has bought into Twitter as some kind of technological marvel. "ZOMG! People are tweeting about the World Cup! Let's put those tweets on our show, so we can pretend to be technologically savvy and relevant!"'
Well also there's the fact that Monopoly is... you know... a game. When someone owns Park Place, Boardwalk, and the railroads it simply "sucks when it isn't you". You were trying to do the same thing, because that's the point of the game. You're not worried about whether the railroads continue to provide good service to their customers, because that's not part of the game.
But what we're talking about here is telecommunications infrastructure and information dissemination. These are not simply entertainment services, but you're talking about companies that control portions of the Internet and the news. These are essentially vital public services that we allow private companies to perform under the belief that private companies will do a better job. We can't afford to allow them to be abused, since it could have dire consequences for the future of our society. Worse: In an era where we could realistically damage our own planet to the point of making it unlivable for ourselves, abusing telecommunications infrastructure and information dissemination could threaten the existence of our species.
Whereas Monopoly is a game.
Are there any real news shows left on TV? I know there are multiple 24-hour "News" channels and plenty of "News" shows, but do any actually engage in responsible reporting?
Only thing: I think TWC was spun off into a separate company, and isn't actually controlled by Time Warner.
Even more than that: you don't want rapid "innovation" in established products. When I buy a new computer, I want it to be better than my last computer, but I specifically want a lot of things to be the same. I'm used to a certain UI, and I have a variety of peripherals already that I might want to plug into it. I want to be able to perform essentially the same tasks in the same way.
Basically, the smartphone market had a distinct shift a couple of years ago (when the iPhone was released) where vendors started offering a new kind of product. They were starting with a clean slate, and you can draw whatever you want on a clean slate. Once you've established a new product that way, you have a relatively brief period of time to refine that vision before people's expectations become established. Then people want everything to work "as expected", and they want legacy support more than they want new features.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see more innovation in the desktop/laptop market. But if someone did conceive of a new and interesting vision for the computer, they'd have a lot of inertia to overcome.
That reminds me of an argument I had one time. I was arguing that we should invest in better public transportation, and someone responded, "That makes no sense. Public transportation is never profitable."
I said, "Well... yeah, it's not supposed to be. The goal is to provide efficient transportation at cost."
"My point exactly! It's bad for the economy."
"How do you mean?" I asked.
"Well, how can something be good for the economy if it's not profitable?"
I was baffled by this understanding of economics. How do you even argue with that?
Yeah, it doesn't make sense to think of "health care" as limited only to things which the patient had no control over. The first obvious problem (which you bring up) is, how much control do you need to have? Obviously a whole lot of health problems can theoretically be prevented by some kind of behavior, but where do you draw the line? If I smoke my whole life and get lung cancer at 80 years old, is it my own fault? What if I just smoked for a few years? What if I smoked a single cigarette once? What if I worked in a coal mine? What if I lived in a city with bad air pollution? At what point does it cease to be "my own fault"?
But aside from that, there's another problem: There's a reason why we provide health care to people who can't afford it. I don't just mean, "because we're nice" or "because they deserve care". There's a real, practical, economic reason to provide health care to people. A healthy worker adds productivity to our economy, whereas an unhealthy worker (who can't work) is a drain on our economy. Even if we don't provide health care to that unhealthy worker, he won't be adding to the GDP, and his friends and family will spend their money to help him get medical treatment. Even if we let people die in the streets, it will cost us some amount of money to dispose of the body and deal with the diseases that sick people spread.
This is what people really need to understand: If you have an efficient and well designed healthcare system, it is entirely possible to spend $X on public health care and see it result in $Y in increased production, resulting in $Z of increased tax revenue, such that $Z > $X.
Healthcare isn't necessarily charity or rewarding irresponsible people. It could be a simple win-win situation.
Also, you might only get to pick one.
The graphs you've seen (on a snippy side-note, I refuse to use the word "infographic") may not have been intentionally misleading, but may have still been misleading, but they may have still been misleading. I've seen some that break medicare, prescription drug benefits, direct funding for hospitals, and health care subsidies each into different groups, for example.
Also, you may have been looking at the costs right now, as opposed to the projected costs in the next decade or two. The Baby Boomers have just begun to reach retirement age.
Plus, that's just talking about government spending. All that spending will come along with increased private spending, which may have an adverse effect on the economy, thereby causing lost tax revenue.
You'll note that I didn't ask or demand that ANYONE work for free. All I ask is that the profit motive not be the determining factor in health care considerations.
Yeah, I always find it shocking when people claim that "profit" is and should be the *only* significant motivator. Even forgetting touchy-feely hippy-dippy stuff, what ever happened to taking pride in your work? To doing a good job? What happened to ideas like "honesty" and "honor" and "self respect"?
Do we want judges and police officers and firefighters to be "in it for the money"? Willing to send you to jail or let you die if it happens to be more profitable? Or are we just saying that doctors should be held to a lower standard?
The reason why healthcare insurance policies are counterintuitive to other insurances is to foster preventive care. If I am covered only for catastrophe, then I will sit and wait for the catastrophe to happen rather than going and getting things fixed early. Because, from my perspectives, my costs are identical in both cases.
You're ignoring the costs to your health. No one will wait for a catastrophe if they can afford the preventative care. Well, that's not *quite* true. Some people are afraid of doctors, or won't exercise the discipline to carry out the preventative care (e.g. "eating right"). But mostly, all things being equal, people would prefer to not-have a heart attack than to have a heart attack, even if it costs them the same amount of money. People would prefer to have the cancer treated early than to wait for it to be deadly.
But for health insurance, that's all turned around. It covers EVERYTHING.
There's a reason for this: it's socialized healthcare.
Sorry, you might be thinking I'm stupid right now. It's a bunch of private companies, right? How can that be socialized healthcare?
Here's the deal: As you've noted, health insurance doesn't work like insurance. Insurance is when you pay into a system, but only receive a payout in the likelihood that something unexpected happens. If the unexpected happens, you get compensation, but most people pay in more than they'll ever get out. It only works if the payout happens in the event of an unlikely disaster.
Health insurance, on the other hand, pays out expectedly. It pays for our doctors visits every year, and it pays for our medication. As we get older, we all get sicker and sicker and require bigger payouts. And yet, we're still convinced that the system makes sense because we think we get more out of health insurance than we put in.
Politicians and lobbyists have us convinced (if subconsciously) that health insurance makes our doctors visits and medication cheaper. You pay $20 for your doctor visit instead of $200, so it must be cheaper, right? Think about it much, and you realize that this is economically impossible. The money comes from somewhere. Therefore, the existence of health insurance would mean one of two things: either (a) we're wrong about insurance making things cheaper on an individual level and we're paying more to the insurance company than we would pay to just go to the doctor; or (b) the insurance companies are getting additional money elsewhere.
For the answer, ask yourself where most of us get our health insurance: our employer. So the reason health insurance is cheaper than paying the doctor directly is that your employer pays a portion of the cost. But why does your employer do that? Why not just pay you that amount extra in your paycheck, and let you decide how to spend it? One of the chief reasons is that employers get a tax break for paying for their employee's health insurance. That's right: federal tax breaks. So now we see the source of the additional money. The federal government is indirectly funding health insurance through tax breaks.
It's true. Our "private" health insurance industry is set up and funded by the federal government as a way to have socialize health care. We do not have a "free market" for insurance. Our current insurance industry is not an example of "capitalism". If the health insurance industry was subject to normal market forces, it would look a lot more like the renter's insurance market: Very few people would bother to get it, and it would only cover you in cases of unexpected catastrophe. There's no other way that the business model works.
So yes, we have a socialized healthcare system that consists of giving health insurance companies unbounded subsidies, and this was done on purpose to disperse costs among the taxpayers and increase access to health services. While politicians are trying to phrase the question as, "Do we want to move to a socialist system?" the real question is, "Is our current socialist system working efficiently?"
So the iPad won't be running iOS 4 right away...
When they announced iOS4, they announced that it would be released for the iPhone in June and for the iPad "in the fall". This is not a surprise. Also, iPad applications have a different UI, so things aren't really any more segmented now than they were before.
Basically introducing the iPad introduced a new device with a different feature set and a different target market. That the market is "segmented" there isn't weird or problematic. Android, on the other hand, has several different devices from several different manufacturers with feature-sets that are mostly the same as each other, but which are basically incompatible with each other. That's a different problem.
For emphasis, think of how many different iOS devices there are. It's basically 4 iPhone models, 1 iPad model, and... something like 3 iPod touch models. So somewhere in the neighborhood of 8. For most purposes, you can treat a lot of these the same and say that there are 3 or 4 meaningfully different devices to target. How many different models of Android phones are there out there?
Well I agree that, "There's capitalism, then there's capitalism," which is why I said "capitalism" as a moral system.
It's not just about the tax lawyers or the focus on short-term growth, but the people who sold us on the idea that "profit" is the only thing that matters. We have been convinced that things like "high customer satisfaction" and "providing a product you can be proud of" or "behaving in a moral and ethical manner" are not values that anyone should have when doing business. The *only* measure of success is profit.
And this doesn't just apply to people working within the business. We have been convinced that capitalism was devised as a moral system rather than simply an economic system. I read this article a while ago, and one of the paragraphs seemed to be a terrific example of this sort of thing:
I’m a free marketeer. I believe that voluntary exchange is not just a good method of incentivizing people to provide their labor and talents to society, but a robust moral system — goods and services represent tangible benefit to people, market prices represent the true value of goods in society, and wages represent the value that a worker provides to others. Absent negative externalities or monopoly effects, a man receives from the free market what he gives to it, his material worth is a running tally of the net benefit that he has provided to his fellow man. A high income is not only justified, but there is nobility to it.
If this is the way you view things, then "profit" is basically considered an absolute measure of "goodness". Good businesses are profitable, bad ones are not. Good people make lots of money, bad ones do not. If a businessman makes 10x the amount of money that a garbageman makes, then it must mean that he's 10x better than the garbage man. Not just that he's better at business, but that he's a superior human being who is much more useful to society. According to this line of thought, the garbageman is more or less expendable.
I don't know who sold us on this idea, but it's extremely creepy to hear it voiced by supposed Christians in the "religious right". Capitalism wasn't intended to be a moral system. If you go back and read people like Adam Smith, you see that capitalism was intended to be a way to achieve greater efficiency by expanding individual economic choice, but it was hoped that those choices would be made while exercising wisdom and morality, and not a blind lust for profits.
Sometimes people do "err" out of laziness, stupidity of evil intent!
Well I think there's also another issue: When a mistake is serious enough, it might not matter whether it was made out of laziness, stupidity, or evil intent. It might be a sign that the person who made the mistake isn't capable or qualified. In that case, you may want to remove that person from their position of responsibility and find someone else who can do the job.
There's another issue: sometimes people don't learn from their mistakes. For various reasons, people sometimes repeat the same mistakes over and over again.
I don't know if you'd call either of those examples "laziness, stupidity, or evil intent", but it still means that the person who made a mistake often shouldn't be trusted to avoid further mistakes that are equally serious.
I have always found it amusing and interesting that computers work the way they do. They work in ways that are the complete opposite of the animal neuromechanism.
Well it makes sense. We developed computers to do the things that we're bad at, such as fast error-free calculation and perfect storage of information. If computers worked the way the human mind worked, then it would have the same problems as the human mind, and we'd be better off getting a person to do those things.
Scientists are constantly rediscovering and proving ideas that philosophers talked about hundreds or thousands of years ago. Sometimes they're even discovering the ideas that long ago stood as the underpinnings of the science that they're studying, arguably making the whole thing slightly circular.
Still, there's value in rediscovering old ideas (especially when they're good ideas) and there's value in proving them more rigorously or developing a more specific understanding of how these things work. Plus, when I see a story like this, I'm always suspicious that the reporter is oversimplifying.
Starting news businesses often requires that talented people start off working for little/no money. It doesn't need to stay that way.
There are lots of different issues involved here, but the real question comes down to what business models are available for funding production of TV shows on the Internet, and then whether strict DRM and distribution controls are required for those business models to work. The specific protocol (bittorrent) is really a side issue.
Of course they're going to need to make money at some point, but I don't see any reason to think that they can't. I'd like to see companies producing shows for channels like Netflix, iTunes, and Hulu, while bypassing the normal studio/network system. I'd be even more likely to buy shows from something like iTunes if they'd drop the DRM.
Yeah, and these companies are a good example of why we like consumer protection. There are a handful of players in a market with a high barrier to entry. As much as they compete for customers, they also compete over who can screw their customers the most. Instead of one company dropping prices and everyone else following suit to stay competitive, one company will add a new fee and the rest follow by adding the same fee.
It's also worth mentioning that this is not some frivolous consumer good; we're talking about vital telecommunication infrastructure.
So, as is frequently the case when organizations become hyper-focused on metrics, decisions get made that maximize metrics but don't make good business sense.
Quoted for emphasis. Excellent point. I think this problem is pervasive in our culture right now, even including our attempts to improve education.
Interestingly (at least I think it's interesting), it seems to me to be caused by the right-wing's insistence on "capitalism" as a moral system (i.e. short-term profits are the only thing that matters), mixed with the left-wing insistence on "science" as wisdom (i.e. nothing is true unless it's quantifiable and provable). It's like a perfect storm of dumb ideologies, with some general greed, incompetence, and stupidity thrown in for good measure.
Well these days, people think that the whole point of companies is only "to profit". Read the people posting on this site, and you'll see people advocating the same idea. I wouldn't be surprised if someone responded to my post with the whole spiel about how "a corporation's only responsibility is to maximize profit for shareholders".
No consideration given to the idea of "producing things" or "doing a good job" or "benefiting customers". It's gotten so unscrupulously greedy people don't even need to hide it. They could say, "We're out to get every last penny out of our customers while providing as little benefit as possible," and most of their customers would say, "Yeah, that's about what we expect."
It's sad, really. We should be ashamed of ourselves.
But it may not be that necessary if the statistics are large enough.
It's possible, though, that the statistics can never be "large enough". I remember seeing an article here about natural language speech recognition (oh, here it is) and about how many companies had hoped to continually feed more and more examples of language use into a computer and, through statistical analysis, be able to develop human-level speech recognition. The article indicated that these companies found a point after which additional examples didn't help. The statistical analysis (at least the methods being used) leveled off around 40% while human recognition was up around 95%.
Even when the statistical models included searching the rest of the sentence for context and calculating likely words, the recognition still failed. Part of the problem is wordplay-- sarcasm, puns, and unusual word usage. We use all kinds of contextual queues, and not just the word's context in the sentence, but things like facial expressions, tone of voice, and even an understanding of the speaker's personality. That's a lot of context for a computer to pick up on.
What's more, when people listen to another person talking, we basically try to draw out "what the other person is saying" and then use that knowledge to fill in any blanks. So if I use a really strange word choice when talking about my wife, another married guy might understand more quickly what I'm saying by relating to his own feelings about his own wife. Until a computer has a wife, that's a level of context which will be inaccessible.
(not everything I'm talking about in this post is in the article I cited)
- You pick one of the [26] cases at the beginning. Instead of focusing on amounts let's call one a "winning" case (top prize), all the others losers.
This is a bad approach, since the amounts have a lot to do with it. The amounts mean that there isn't a "winning case" and 25 "losers", but instead 26 cases of various degrees of "win".
Also, the offers are some kind of function of the average of the remaining cases (haven't actually checked mathematically, but I'm sure it amounts to something like that), so which "losing cases" you eliminate changes your strategy drastically.
In short, the best strategy for the game is not to "pick the winning case", but rather to "eliminate the lowest-scoring cases" enough to drive the "deal" price up, and then take the deal. It's very rare that the game makes it all the way to the last 2 cases, and when it does, you're probably better off taking the deal instead of trying to pick a case.
For example, if you got it down to the $1mil and the $0.01 cases, the deal will be around $500k. The smart money is on pocketing the $500k rather than risking $1mil on a 50/50 bet. To try for the $1mil at that point is equivalent to having $500k in the bank and betting it all on a coin toss.
None of this really argues with your point about it being "like watching someone throw dice against the wall". It's a game of chance with very little strategy. However, with a lot of these shows, the point *is* the crap dialog that's interspersed with the game. They're trying to build a narrative where you're interested in the outcome in order to get you invested in the tension over whether they'll win.
Well essentially what has happened is that AI has become a term to mean any mechanical behavior which can adapt to different circumstances. It may be because of overuse of the term, but I've seen people use the word "AI" to any kind of computerized decision-making that is clever enough that people can't immediately tell how it's done.
However, I agree that this isn't what I consider "AI". In my opinion, we haven't built real AI when we've designed a computer that can beat all human players in Jeopardy. We've built real AI when the AI designed to defeat human players in Jeopard is capable of deciding that it doesn't want to play Jeopardy anymore.
I've argued many times before that real computerized intelligence will probably not be achieved through current approaches because we misunderstand "what intelligence is". It's a really funny thing, because almost universally I hear people talk about intelligence being a function of the brain, but that's blatantly wrong.
I think it's clear, at least, that human intelligence is an emergent trait that grows out of interacting with the world in a way that includes basic desires and goals. A baby become intelligent on its own because it's hungry and because it wants attention. If the baby didn't have animal desires and aversions, then the various stimuli wouldn't have an effect on the developing brain.
Or to give another example, there have been arguments (rather successful ones, IMO) that we never would have attained what we consider "human-level intelligence" if it weren't for the design of our hands. Hands allow us to pick things up and observe them in a way that animals can't do. For a dog to pick something up, it uses its mouth, which then means the dog can't see the object. So in this sense, I suspect we won't be able to accurately re-create human intelligence without re-creating a human body with human desires/aversions. It's not clear that's what we really want though, anyway.