For too long now, fire departments across the United States have been SOCIALIST organizations, resulting in TAXES on the American people.
[...witty satire about how fire departments should be privatized...]
Here is how to privatize fire departments successfully...
If you buy fire protection for $20 a year, then they'll extinguish your burning house for free. If you do NOT buy fire protection, then they'll extinguish your burning house, and then send you a bill for $7000. Naturally, homeowners' associations will make it mandatory, but that isn't necessary.
This solution is so simple, and with all the correct incentives in place. In fact the solution is so easy that you MUST be either stupid or dishonest (or both) to not see it.
That's because such trivia is designed for children who never really grew up. Y'know, the ones who have adult bodies. That's why they think someone else's personal life is so much more fascinating than their own, merely because that person can sing or dance or act. They don't seem to notice that the truly famous entertainers are some of the most out-of-touch people who are least worthy of this kind of adoration. The doctor who finally cures cancer will be an anonymous, unknown figure by comparison.
Well said.
Reminds me of an old saying: Dull people talk about people; average people talk about events; smart people talk about ideas.
Medicare is another example - it's operating overhead is 4%. The operating overhead of private "insurance" (sorry, it's fraud, not insurance anymore) is a whopping 30% MINIMUM.
Probably not a good example to use in illustrating your point. Dealing with Medicare billing is such a gigantic heartache that doctors' offices who do so, and they are a small minority, will have to hire at least one specialized clerk just for that purpose. In this sense, Medicare is shifting its overhead onto its customers. Whereas private insurance is required, by competition, to be reasonably easy for all parties to deal with.
Regading your "fraud!" quip, I think the problem lies in our mistaken belief that "health insurance" = "health plan", and the subsequent chaotic conversion of the industry from the former to the latter. I would prefer to have health insurance, which is much cheaper than a "free zyrtec!" must-carry monstrosity whose sole purpose is to shift the cost of unhealthy people onto healthy people.
No, not really. Hauling the fuel for chemical rockets into orbit is expensive, so mostly they do hard burns to get the right speed and direction, then they coast most of the trip. VASIMR doesn't need the heavy fuel, as it is solar powered, so it provides constant thrust. Apparently days of constant acceleration makes a difference.
There is no free lunch. VASIMR is not radically more efficient than a chemical rocket. Its advantage is that it can run off electricity. But the electricity available from solar panels is slight.
This particular VASIMR is an improvement because it can handle more power... more than solar panels could provide. It will require a nuclear powersource -- a fission plant, or a very very powerful RTG.
But if you are willing to heft a fission plant into orbit, then you could just use it as a conventional nuclear rocket (i.e. superheated steam).
The original 8086 processor could address 1 megabyte of memory (20 bits) with a 16 bit processor. It used two registers (one shifted left by four bits) to address memory.
A 64 bit processor could trivially access a 128-bit address space by using the same segment:offset method.
How quickly we forget!
Writing code to use 'near' and 'far' pointers was a constant headache, of the same magnitude of C++'s requirement that you be constantly aware of character width when manipulating strings.
No one gives all the details about something they're trying to sell regardless of whether it's a piece of electronics, a car, or a home. The phrase caveat emptor has been around for at least 2000 years and probably a lot longer than that.
I do.
Next time you sell your old car, try it. Write down everything you know about it that is wrong or bothersome. Give it to the buyer while he's inspecting the car. You'd be surprised how good it feels to deal honorably.
Of course I know that nobody else will give me the same treatment, but I don't care. This is how I choose to move through our world.
Absolutely false. If you're talking about the absolute highest MPG you'll ever get, then every single car right now will get better mileage at 20 mph than at 55 mph. Hell, I can easily get over 50 mpg at an average speed of 20 mph on my 5-speed MkV Jetta.
Wrong. ICEs get better fuel economy in the vicinity of 50 mpg, just before drag becomes a major factor. See e.g. this chart.
However, the Prius is the most fuel efficient vehicle at each speed point from 1 mph to 100+ mph compared to any other car on the market. That's because at lower speeds, the car's computer turns off the engine until needed.
Wrong. Turning off the ICE does not modify the car's tires' rolling resistance, or its air drag, or the (often substantial) load imposed by climate controls. The only reason that the ICE is not 'needed' instantaneously, is because the Prius is draining its batteries instead, and those must eventually be recharged by running the ICE. They could have easily given the Prius a very small gasoline engine, strictly for running a generator, which would run all the time.
The advantage of the Prius is that it can run its ICE at an optimal speed, rather than the constantly-changing speeds (many of which are sub-optimal) of a traditional car.
The ICE has late intake valve closure (aka Atkinsonized cams), which makes the engine more fuel efficient. This, coupled with a more aerodynamic shape than most other cars makes the Prius more fuel efficient on the highway as well.
Wrong. Read up on electronic valve-trains (e.g. BMW), or variable valve-timing by advancing or lagging the timing chain (e.g. Toyota's VVTI).
Re:is there any other way to prevent crowd dispers
on
Revisiting DIY HERF Guns
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
b) Government now has sufficient control of the media that they don't need to play by the rules. They can kill whoever they want, whenever they want, and then call it terrorism, and the majority of the population will not challenge it.
I think you'll have a hard time proving that 'government', or even some specific component of government, has enough control of the media in order to perpetrate something serious. They can frame a small number of people, brand them with 'pedo' or 'terrorist' or 'drug dealer' and everybody just nods... but this doesn't scale.
A much more relevant government power is this: more than 50% of Americans now receive significantly direct payments from some level of government. At that point it is impossible for a democracy to scale back its own taxing or spending. The only way out of it is to switch over to a monarchy for a while, and hope we get a philosopher king who can resist the corrupting force of that power.
I've never flown in not-orange ever since they came up with the system. I'm not some business traveler, but I fly between three and six times a year round-trip to various places around the country, and I always hear the same recording of some guy saying "The current threat level is orange". And I don't think anyone has so much as batted an eye. From San Francisco to Denver to freaking JFK Intl., I've never seen people act more alert and suspicious after that announcement.
Yep yep. I interpret the terror alert color to only indicate one thing: how long the line will be at the security checkpoint. And it's for purely psychological reasons: higher danger levels make us desire a greater inconvenience in order to feel safe.
To wit: if the color was green, nobody would care if they just whisked everybody through without searching purses, confiscating water bottles, and making us take off our shoes.
Actually, we have a pretty good notion of how pleasure and pain work in the human body and brain, and we're getting a better picture all the time. I tire of this "know-nothing" crap that gets bandied about in AI discussions.
The neurophysiology of pain is a topic of great research, since it has great practical benefits. To say we have no clue how pain works is ludicrous.
Yes we know the mechanism of pleasure and pain as they exist in meat-based lifeforms. But we do not have clue one why they feel like they do. How do you build an AI that can similarly feel them? It's not some mere arrangement of neurons.
You can't irradiate something with a microwave tower. This guy's a nutter.
He might be perfectly rational -- and perfectly aware that his customers are nutters. All it would take is for a competing organic farm to say "Oh yeah, that other brand, their stuff is exposed to MICROWAVE RADIATION OMG!", and boom, he's out of business.
You've got to keep in mind the sort of people (his customers) who will pay double for 'organic' foods.
The problem here is capitalism doesn't care -- only protecting high value targets would be the sensible precaution, but why only do that when can make millions, even billions, for a few years until the resistance is developed? And nevermind the ethical implications of short-circuiting a natural defense mechanism -- we might give cockroaches and other insects, that make up a significant amount of the biomass, the ability to spread diseases on a massive scale, since they aren't afraid of their dead anymore.
That may be the very thing that prevents the bug population from ever developing a resistance to this. Any group that does, will be exposed to the perils that they were once protected from (via their aversion to the smell).
Without the base drives of pleasure and pain, there is no basis for any higher purpose. And we have not one barking clue how pleasure and pain work or could be translated to a synthetic intelligence.
Until pleasure and pain are invented, AI cannot be sentient -- or if it can, it will (as others have noted) realize it has no reason to follow its programming.
Productivity has increased by 20x since the 1950's. Yet now 2 people have to work instead of one. And they both still have to work 40-50 hour weeks.
You left out the change in standard of living. Do you know how the middle class lived in the 1950s? If you were willing to live that way (1 car, 900 square foot house, perhaps three appliances), then you would not need two incomes any more than they did.
I doubt we'll see anything resembling colonization in our lifetimes (it took generations to carry that out right here on Earth in a much more friendly environment) but I do think [Mars colonization] will happen eventually. We should be laying the groundwork for it and soaking up as much knowledge as we possibly can.
Pfah. Mars is ideally suited for metal lifeforms. Leave it pristine so that they can move there and then take it over when they're ready. Meat lifeforms belong on the warm wet planets like Earth.
It's not homo sapiens that concerns me -- it is humanity, the continuation of our accumulated wisdom. Let it be carried forward by the best-suited lifeform.
You see, this is the beauty of having a swarm -- you don't need any individual to have a lot of brainpower. We see the same thing in ants (and Red Sox fans), one ant has an IQ barely higher than that of a carrot but is programmed with one simple set of instructions. When millions of creatures with different simple sets of instructions end up bumping into each other and interacting, some extremely complex and "intelligent" behaviors can emerge -- ants build underground cities with temperature control and hydroponic gardens. They keep slaves and livestock. Ants wage large scale war. This is pretty impressive for a creature with only about 100 neurons each, until you realize how little each ant has to do, and that all of the higher level function comes from the millions of minute interactions between individuals, which is often personified as the "hive mind".
Well said.
Have you noticed that human societies also qualify as hive minds? They have epiphenominal patterns that arise due to the interactions between unwitting individuals. Even tiny changes to the interactions (i.e. to the rules) can redound as huge changes downstream. That's why it scares me when anybody wants to tinker with what is so far the wealthiest society in the history of the world.
People have asked why I don't like programming with exceptions. In both Java and C++, my policy is:
Never throw an exception of my own
Always catch any possible exception that might be thrown by a library I'm using on the same line as it is thrown and deal with it immediately.
I have done code that way, before exceptions came into vogue. To do it right, you've got to have many many many error-checking if() statements after every call to any function that could fail. That could maybe be done as neatly as with exception-handling, if one was ever careful to maintain one's error-codes in a single numeric heirarchy, so as to allow 'families' of errors. The error-checking statements can then select for specific errors or for families of errors, like this: if (errorCode & ERROR_FAMILY_FILEIO).
But that is a lot of work, and the code won't be any cleaner than with exception-handling. In fact it will be uglier because you can no longer just call a bunch of functions in a row without checking returns, allowing a single exception-handler at the bottom to catch any errors it thinks it can handle.
Nor is the author correct in contending that 'throw' is somehow less visible or less handy or less maintainable than 'return'.
And he won't get the very very nice exception-handling support that some languages like C# offer.
[Turn fertility off by default using a chemical in the water, and offer free pills to anyone to turn it back on.]
How ironic that, given your signature, you would advocate forcible medication of 'undesirables' because you don't like their moral behaviour. You want to stop the 'lower classes' from having children? Why not just call them 'degenerate races' and be done with it?
1. Indeed I do NOT like the moral behavior of the lower class.
2. Your paraphrase of my post is dishonest -- particularly the word 'forcible'.
3. I don't want the lower class to cease having children. I do, however, want the lower class to stop having accidental children -- children that are not particularly wanted and not particularly affordable to their parents.
4. Your final sentence is an argument from intimidation, and not even a good one, given points 1, 2, and 3.
Not really. The only proven effective method of stabilizing population is to give women the choice over whether to have children. Happily, this is also the Right Thing To Do. Sometimes the universe throws you a bone.
But then most children will be had by bored and/or irresponsible women -- which means: the lower class. You need one more step in your grand plan: turn fertility off by default, using a chemical in the water or whatever. Then offer free pills, to anybody who wants one, to turn it back on.
I don't have an XBox, but I do have a PS3. I wouldn't say I play it a whole lot, but it's in a fairly small cabinet in my entertainment center, and we close the glass door when we're not using it. So every once in a while, my wife leaves the remote on the coffee table overnight, and somehow, the cat frequently managed to step on the remote, which for some idiotic reason powers up the PS3. I think at least on 10-20 occasions, it has sat in the cabinet with the door closed all night long. In the morning, it's literally like an oven in the cabinet, and the fans are screaming so loud you can hear them almost through the whole house.
Have you considered taping a piece of black paper over the entertainment center door glass, so as to block IR signals from reaching the PS3 when the doors are closed?
[joke about how Chinese people usually cannot pronounce R versus L correctly]
Dear/.: Silly racism is not +1 Funny, it is just sad.
The word 'racism' is not the all-purpose curse you fancy it to be. If you include within it every respectful gest about race, then the word will no longer carry much weight on the topic of "serious social ills".
I'm alarmed too. But this news is not entirely awful. It just means that DNA is no longer quite so useful in proving that a person is guilty. It is still perfectly useful in the much more important task of proving not guilty.
[What if the one well-funded hacker who can recover the data is Chinese?]
Oh, that's ok, my data isn't written in Chinese...
Doesn't matter. They could still read images, sound recordings, schematics, spreadsheets of numbers...
Well, they COULD, except the West uses a different binary encoding scheme than the Chinese. Over here everything is written as ones and zeros, but over there everything is written as ones and zewos. And I doubt they have the technology to convert.
I remember reading a big article in the German science magazine "Spektrum der Wissenschaft", that there is no such thing as innate talent.
They tried to find out, what made geniuses geniuses. And they found, that it's not relevant what you were born with.
Scientists cannot discover knowledge precluded by their own philosophy. Germany has long labored under Sceptical philosophy which is not comfortable with objectivity, or superiority, or for that matter any value judgments at all. So take their finding with a whole shaker full of salt.
To wit: what criteria did they use to select 'genius'? Did they allow themselves to factor in, or even consider, impolite elements like standardized test scores? What about taboo elements like race and gender? How many non-geniuses had to be mixed into the alleged pool of geniuses in order to satisfy their need for anti-superiority and political correctness?
Nobody who professes a Sceptical/Leftist desire for "equality of outcomes", or who found the willpower to believe in the cognitive equality of the races, should be allowed to oversee such investigations.
Ok I'll bite. They aren't a facade because they clearly have the manpower to overthrow their government, but have not done so. Either they keep their current form of government because it works better than anything they've had in their history, or because they are completely broken as a people and thus indifferent.
There is a third option. It was demonstrated in Iraq under Saddam, and probably a zillion other places. Imagine a whole population of people oppressed under the boot of a single man. Everyone, EVERYONE hates him, without exception. Every citizen would overthrow him and reboot the system if given the choice.
But the dictator is careful to reward loyalty. The penalty for treason is death, the penalty for ratting out a treasoner is money and promotion and more power.
This will cause a strong social pattern to develop. Whenever a rebellion begins to form, it will be sold out by one of its members -- by the first person who sees a greater personal reward from the dictator than from his rebellious group and the small chance it will succeed.
This social pattern can be impossible to uproot from within. It REQUIRES outside intervention, because the insiders are caught in an incentive trap.
Slashdot Mirror
Here is how to privatize fire departments successfully...
If you buy fire protection for $20 a year, then they'll extinguish your burning house for free.
If you do NOT buy fire protection, then they'll extinguish your burning house, and then send you a bill for $7000.
Naturally, homeowners' associations will make it mandatory, but that isn't necessary.
This solution is so simple, and with all the correct incentives in place. In fact the solution is so easy that you MUST be either stupid or dishonest (or both) to not see it.
Well said.
Reminds me of an old saying: Dull people talk about people; average people talk about events; smart people talk about ideas.
Probably not a good example to use in illustrating your point. Dealing with Medicare billing is such a gigantic heartache that doctors' offices who do so, and they are a small minority, will have to hire at least one specialized clerk just for that purpose. In this sense, Medicare is shifting its overhead onto its customers. Whereas private insurance is required, by competition, to be reasonably easy for all parties to deal with.
Regading your "fraud!" quip, I think the problem lies in our mistaken belief that "health insurance" = "health plan", and the subsequent chaotic conversion of the industry from the former to the latter. I would prefer to have health insurance, which is much cheaper than a "free zyrtec!" must-carry monstrosity whose sole purpose is to shift the cost of unhealthy people onto healthy people.
There is no free lunch. VASIMR is not radically more efficient than a chemical rocket. Its advantage is that it can run off electricity. But the electricity available from solar panels is slight.
This particular VASIMR is an improvement because it can handle more power... more than solar panels could provide. It will require a nuclear powersource -- a fission plant, or a very very powerful RTG.
But if you are willing to heft a fission plant into orbit, then you could just use it as a conventional nuclear rocket (i.e. superheated steam).
How quickly we forget!
Writing code to use 'near' and 'far' pointers was a constant headache, of the same magnitude of C++'s requirement that you be constantly aware of character width when manipulating strings.
I do.
Next time you sell your old car, try it. Write down everything you know about it that is wrong or bothersome. Give it to the buyer while he's inspecting the car. You'd be surprised how good it feels to deal honorably.
Of course I know that nobody else will give me the same treatment, but I don't care. This is how I choose to move through our world.
Wrong. ICEs get better fuel economy in the vicinity of 50 mpg, just before drag becomes a major factor. See e.g. this chart.
Wrong. Turning off the ICE does not modify the car's tires' rolling resistance, or its air drag, or the (often substantial) load imposed by climate controls. The only reason that the ICE is not 'needed' instantaneously, is because the Prius is draining its batteries instead, and those must eventually be recharged by running the ICE. They could have easily given the Prius a very small gasoline engine, strictly for running a generator, which would run all the time.
The advantage of the Prius is that it can run its ICE at an optimal speed, rather than the constantly-changing speeds (many of which are sub-optimal) of a traditional car.
Wrong. Read up on electronic valve-trains (e.g. BMW), or variable valve-timing by advancing or lagging the timing chain (e.g. Toyota's VVTI).
I think you'll have a hard time proving that 'government', or even some specific component of government, has enough control of the media in order to perpetrate something serious. They can frame a small number of people, brand them with 'pedo' or 'terrorist' or 'drug dealer' and everybody just nods... but this doesn't scale.
A much more relevant government power is this: more than 50% of Americans now receive significantly direct payments from some level of government. At that point it is impossible for a democracy to scale back its own taxing or spending. The only way out of it is to switch over to a monarchy for a while, and hope we get a philosopher king who can resist the corrupting force of that power.
Yep yep. I interpret the terror alert color to only indicate one thing: how long the line will be at the security checkpoint. And it's for purely psychological reasons: higher danger levels make us desire a greater inconvenience in order to feel safe.
To wit: if the color was green, nobody would care if they just whisked everybody through without searching purses, confiscating water bottles, and making us take off our shoes.
Yes we know the mechanism of pleasure and pain as they exist in meat-based lifeforms. But we do not have clue one why they feel like they do. How do you build an AI that can similarly feel them? It's not some mere arrangement of neurons.
He might be perfectly rational -- and perfectly aware that his customers are nutters. All it would take is for a competing organic farm to say "Oh yeah, that other brand, their stuff is exposed to MICROWAVE RADIATION OMG!", and boom, he's out of business.
You've got to keep in mind the sort of people (his customers) who will pay double for 'organic' foods.
That may be the very thing that prevents the bug population from ever developing a resistance to this. Any group that does, will be exposed to the perils that they were once protected from (via their aversion to the smell).
Without the base drives of pleasure and pain, there is no basis for any higher purpose. And we have not one barking clue how pleasure and pain work or could be translated to a synthetic intelligence.
Until pleasure and pain are invented, AI cannot be sentient -- or if it can, it will (as others have noted) realize it has no reason to follow its programming.
You left out the change in standard of living. Do you know how the middle class lived in the 1950s? If you were willing to live that way (1 car, 900 square foot house, perhaps three appliances), then you would not need two incomes any more than they did.
Pfah. Mars is ideally suited for metal lifeforms. Leave it pristine so that they can move there and then take it over when they're ready. Meat lifeforms belong on the warm wet planets like Earth.
It's not homo sapiens that concerns me -- it is humanity, the continuation of our accumulated wisdom. Let it be carried forward by the best-suited lifeform.
Well said.
Have you noticed that human societies also qualify as hive minds? They have epiphenominal patterns that arise due to the interactions between unwitting individuals. Even tiny changes to the interactions (i.e. to the rules) can redound as huge changes downstream. That's why it scares me when anybody wants to tinker with what is so far the wealthiest society in the history of the world.
From the linked article:
I have done code that way, before exceptions came into vogue. To do it right, you've got to have many many many error-checking if() statements after every call to any function that could fail. That could maybe be done as neatly as with exception-handling, if one was ever careful to maintain one's error-codes in a single numeric heirarchy, so as to allow 'families' of errors. The error-checking statements can then select for specific errors or for families of errors, like this: if (errorCode & ERROR_FAMILY_FILEIO).
But that is a lot of work, and the code won't be any cleaner than with exception-handling. In fact it will be uglier because you can no longer just call a bunch of functions in a row without checking returns, allowing a single exception-handler at the bottom to catch any errors it thinks it can handle.
Nor is the author correct in contending that 'throw' is somehow less visible or less handy or less maintainable than 'return'.
And he won't get the very very nice exception-handling support that some languages like C# offer.
1. Indeed I do NOT like the moral behavior of the lower class.
2. Your paraphrase of my post is dishonest -- particularly the word 'forcible'.
3. I don't want the lower class to cease having children. I do, however, want the lower class to stop having accidental children -- children that are not particularly wanted and not particularly affordable to their parents.
4. Your final sentence is an argument from intimidation, and not even a good one, given points 1, 2, and 3.
But then most children will be had by bored and/or irresponsible women -- which means: the lower class. You need one more step in your grand plan: turn fertility off by default, using a chemical in the water or whatever. Then offer free pills, to anybody who wants one, to turn it back on.
Have you considered taping a piece of black paper over the entertainment center door glass, so as to block IR signals from reaching the PS3 when the doors are closed?
The word 'racism' is not the all-purpose curse you fancy it to be. If you include within it every respectful gest about race, then the word will no longer carry much weight on the topic of "serious social ills".
I'm alarmed too. But this news is not entirely awful. It just means that DNA is no longer quite so useful in proving that a person is guilty. It is still perfectly useful in the much more important task of proving not guilty.
Doesn't matter. They could still read images, sound recordings, schematics, spreadsheets of numbers...
Well, they COULD, except the West uses a different binary encoding scheme than the Chinese. Over here everything is written as ones and zeros, but over there everything is written as ones and zewos. And I doubt they have the technology to convert.
Scientists cannot discover knowledge precluded by their own philosophy. Germany has long labored under Sceptical philosophy which is not comfortable with objectivity, or superiority, or for that matter any value judgments at all. So take their finding with a whole shaker full of salt.
To wit: what criteria did they use to select 'genius'? Did they allow themselves to factor in, or even consider, impolite elements like standardized test scores? What about taboo elements like race and gender? How many non-geniuses had to be mixed into the alleged pool of geniuses in order to satisfy their need for anti-superiority and political correctness?
Nobody who professes a Sceptical/Leftist desire for "equality of outcomes", or who found the willpower to believe in the cognitive equality of the races, should be allowed to oversee such investigations.
There is a third option. It was demonstrated in Iraq under Saddam, and probably a zillion other places. Imagine a whole population of people oppressed under the boot of a single man. Everyone, EVERYONE hates him, without exception. Every citizen would overthrow him and reboot the system if given the choice.
But the dictator is careful to reward loyalty. The penalty for treason is death, the penalty for ratting out a treasoner is money and promotion and more power.
This will cause a strong social pattern to develop. Whenever a rebellion begins to form, it will be sold out by one of its members -- by the first person who sees a greater personal reward from the dictator than from his rebellious group and the small chance it will succeed.
This social pattern can be impossible to uproot from within. It REQUIRES outside intervention, because the insiders are caught in an incentive trap.