Afraid of a tax-spanking, Ford plays into the hands of the President Elect - and they will be richly rewarded for their grandstanding.
Meanwhile, a city in Mexico just lost $1.6B of direct investment and many hundreds of jobs. That's O.K., they'll have plenty of other opportunities; for one thing, Trump will keep many highly profitable drugs illegal (and therefore profitable.)
Village idiots still get elected (yes, I'm talking about W, but there are so many more....)
There are many levels at which to analyze and attack a problem. My two favorites are: should-be and is-be. Should-be is the rational analysis of what would happen if I were king of the world and everybody magically implemented my policies, optimize should-be and you have Utopia. Is-be is the world we live in, and what can we realistically do to move toward a better one. As time goes on, I am more and more convinced that there is no path from is-be to should-be.
Rational thought is a powerful tool that can hopefully describe realistic pictures of the should-be. So many people are incapable of rational thought in practice, maybe they can do it in a theoretical testing environment but then when you put them into real-life practice, for whatever reasons, they just don't do it. So, then, you are in our world of is-be, and left trying to apply rational thought to analyze and manipulate people who, for the most part, do not use rational thought to guide their daily lives. Highly successful people are (often quite lucky, but also) usually exploiting this gap between rational thought and realistic behavior of the masses.
Of course I was being sarcastic there - but, as the Buddhist monks have known for centuries, true happiness lies in accepting things as they are, and this is actually easier from the position of slave than master.
I have a cousin who works building Gulfstream jets, he absolutely loves his job. He, and the thousands of his co-workers who make up Gulfstream have only delivered 2000 jets since 1958, these are products exclusively for the 0.01%. If they all went to work every day worrying about how unfair their position in life is relative to the purchasers of their planes, they'd be miserable to the point of suicide.
Again, all depends on what you run, the easy quip is that Linux doesn't run any "real" software like Autocad or Office, so that's why it never needs rebooting (yes Office is absolute crap and should be replaced with Libre + Google, but Autocad - not so much.)
My Ubuntu 14.04 instance that has zone minder installed, needs its periodic reboots - others, not so much.
If you can make a parametric test for what you want to happen, and define a problem space for a computer to search for a solution in, the computer can find better solutions many orders of magnitude faster than humans can in a brute force search. If the humans know heuristics to reduce the search space, they can teach those to the computer, but often this will defeat the point of having a computer do the searches - it's usually flaws in the heuristics that keep the humans from finding more optimal solutions.
Show me an algorithm that designs its own tests and defines its own search spaces based on natural language inputs, and then I'll be impressed.
Same people who pick it apart today - we've had high level compilers and optimizers for decades - when I started work in 1991, there wasn't a functional C++ compiler on the market for IBM-PCs yet - today they're mostly rock solid, but stuff does still go wrong and people pick it apart layer by layer until they find the flaws and fix them. Not me, I just use the stuff, but there are still people who extend, revise and improve optimizing compilers.
Give me financial mastery of 100 people, I'll give them all a purpose./s
Seriously, though, maintaining the social fabric when everyone is financially independent will be one of the challenges of a transition to UBI. Only a select few have the means to become hermits today, when you open that opportunity to the whole population, a much larger number of people will at least try the isolated lifestyle for a while. Making social gatherings successful (keeping 99%+ of the population engaged with each other) without making them compulsory will be a challenge. Today we have school and work to keep us integrated. If school can be done in your private room with the door closed and work is optional - that changes things dramatically. Basic neurochemistry will come into play, social and herd instincts, etc. Studies will be done, papers will be written.
Well, servants used to be expensive, but imagine what kind of lifestyle you could have with 99 people with nothing but spare time in which to serve you.
I agree with your basic premise for UBI, but worry about population explosion. Sure "educated" people in the "more developed" countries currently control their birth rates, but is that just the harsh reality of economics suppressing the basic biological drive to procreate? When you remove the economic stressors, will that behavior continue, or will we have a huge population spike when food and shelter no longer require time and effort for the masses to obtain? Even if the first two children, or even one, is supported by UBI and additional children's expenses are borne by the parents, that would be a vastly different playing field than we have today. A potential demonstration of the hypothesis is contemporary Russia, with even lower birth rates than western Europe - they're not better educated or more developed, but they are more financially stressed.
I don't see any easy answers... sterilization after two children seems harsh, but anything less seems ineffective. If UBI is phased in gradually, this is a trend that can be monitored and guided - if UBI hits as a big change, the effect on population demographics could be even more dramatic than the end of WWII.
Time between reboots has so much to do with what is installed and running - my clean Win10 machines only reboot when updates make them do it - and I use them to do programming and browse the web extensively. My home Win10 machine with special touchscreen drivers that runs various 3D CAD packages in addition to heavier animation (kids education) web browsing seems to benefit from a reboot about once per 20 hours of work, if it's just sitting there doing basically nothing, it doesn't need to be rebooted, either. Now, if you have auto-launching crapware installed, you might need to reboot every couple of days, even if you "do nothing" with the machine.
Internet Explorer quit starting up on my IT dept. maintained laptop - that will kill your usage statistics in a hurry, if the program stops functioning on mass maintained fleets of PCs. Chrome works just fine there, even though it is not supported and IE is.
I see plenty of work in reducing student-teacher ratios in education, increasing maintenance and inspection intervals, transparency reporting on public officials, etc.
All of those can be automated and/or handed off to AI.
Sure, but not for 50 to 100 years. And, things like educating our children and making judgement calls on elected officials probably never should be reduced to algorithms. Maybe for the elected officials if the algorithm is completely transparent, but if you trust SkyNet to educate all the children... that could go very very wrong.
I see plenty of work in reducing student-teacher ratios in education, increasing maintenance and inspection intervals, transparency reporting on public officials, etc. Now, just convince the remaining working people that they want to pay for this from their taxes. I suppose when we hit 53% unemployed, we might be able to start winning popular elections, if the unemployed are still allowed to vote then.
Just say "Mars" and you can run into the tens of billions of dollars on administrative overhead alone.
Plutonium is a product of breeder reactors, its market price is far disconnected from the actual effort required to make it. "Like Plutonium Piles" does, indeed, imply the development of a nuclear reactor for Mars deployment. Plutonium piles are mostly developed for small energy needs on "deep space" missions, you'd want basalt melting heat from something relatively lightweight and portable. Rocket launch of fissionables is another administrative nightmare, but $4000 per kg launch cost is the same whether you are launching Thorium, Plutonium or LOX and LH2. Fissionables can release many many orders of magnitude more energy per kg.
Maybe solar is the answer on Mars, too. Personally, I'd rather have a solution that can't be screwed up by a dust storm.
bigger problem, potentially best solved by building from local materials.
As others have stated: knowing the properties of the readily available materials in the area where the colony will be located is critical. Assume we need water (ice), first we need some extensive surveys of the non-ice materials in the general vicinity of the ice.
I'm thinking that flickering the power is about the worst they can do, which can damage compressors and some other stuff - potentially surge the transformer and get it to blow its breaker, but they'd have to have had a really bad risk review process to build one of these things with the capacity to do something like short two power legs.
Many meters have partial load cutoff capability - so they might shut down your A/C and water heater during peak loads, without causing the rest of your stuff to lose power.
How on earth is software going to make a meter explode?
Many meters have load balancing capabilities, they can switch loads on and off... big loads. I don't think it would be the meter exploding, but fairly easily your compressors, and possibly the transformer.
When "smart" meters first hit the scene a few years ago, people brought up these very issues. I'm surprised that in that time they have not been addressed, though I know I shouldn't be surprised...
That's the main reason to get freaked out when something of this nature gets rolled out - it will NOT get addressed after deployment. Some serious flaws are baked in and won't be improved without an incompatible upgrade, meaning two systems deployed in parallel - who's going to pay for that? Nobody, until there is a demonstrated need.
FFmpeg, in my assessment, is a bunch of teenage, mostly French, egomaniacs running an otherwise decent piece of open source software into the ground with their attitudes. Some seemingly cooler heads did fork AvConv from it some years ago, and now the two forks spend quite a bit of effort duplicating each others' work... maybe in 10 years or so some of them will grow up enough to stop the ego wars.
Slashdot Mirror
...From my understanding it's impossible for a big V8 to pass the new emissions regulations that will be even more stringent next few years.
1978 called, they want your comment back.
Afraid of a tax-spanking, Ford plays into the hands of the President Elect - and they will be richly rewarded for their grandstanding.
Meanwhile, a city in Mexico just lost $1.6B of direct investment and many hundreds of jobs. That's O.K., they'll have plenty of other opportunities; for one thing, Trump will keep many highly profitable drugs illegal (and therefore profitable.)
Village idiots still get elected (yes, I'm talking about W, but there are so many more....)
There are many levels at which to analyze and attack a problem. My two favorites are: should-be and is-be. Should-be is the rational analysis of what would happen if I were king of the world and everybody magically implemented my policies, optimize should-be and you have Utopia. Is-be is the world we live in, and what can we realistically do to move toward a better one. As time goes on, I am more and more convinced that there is no path from is-be to should-be.
Rational thought is a powerful tool that can hopefully describe realistic pictures of the should-be. So many people are incapable of rational thought in practice, maybe they can do it in a theoretical testing environment but then when you put them into real-life practice, for whatever reasons, they just don't do it. So, then, you are in our world of is-be, and left trying to apply rational thought to analyze and manipulate people who, for the most part, do not use rational thought to guide their daily lives. Highly successful people are (often quite lucky, but also) usually exploiting this gap between rational thought and realistic behavior of the masses.
I like your ideas, and I'd like to see them spread... you might take some notes from this rather successful promoter:
http://blog.dilbert.com/post/1...
Of course I was being sarcastic there - but, as the Buddhist monks have known for centuries, true happiness lies in accepting things as they are, and this is actually easier from the position of slave than master.
I have a cousin who works building Gulfstream jets, he absolutely loves his job. He, and the thousands of his co-workers who make up Gulfstream have only delivered 2000 jets since 1958, these are products exclusively for the 0.01%. If they all went to work every day worrying about how unfair their position in life is relative to the purchasers of their planes, they'd be miserable to the point of suicide.
Again, all depends on what you run, the easy quip is that Linux doesn't run any "real" software like Autocad or Office, so that's why it never needs rebooting (yes Office is absolute crap and should be replaced with Libre + Google, but Autocad - not so much.)
My Ubuntu 14.04 instance that has zone minder installed, needs its periodic reboots - others, not so much.
it's = it is
its = possessive of it
If you can make a parametric test for what you want to happen, and define a problem space for a computer to search for a solution in, the computer can find better solutions many orders of magnitude faster than humans can in a brute force search. If the humans know heuristics to reduce the search space, they can teach those to the computer, but often this will defeat the point of having a computer do the searches - it's usually flaws in the heuristics that keep the humans from finding more optimal solutions.
Show me an algorithm that designs its own tests and defines its own search spaces based on natural language inputs, and then I'll be impressed.
Same people who pick it apart today - we've had high level compilers and optimizers for decades - when I started work in 1991, there wasn't a functional C++ compiler on the market for IBM-PCs yet - today they're mostly rock solid, but stuff does still go wrong and people pick it apart layer by layer until they find the flaws and fix them. Not me, I just use the stuff, but there are still people who extend, revise and improve optimizing compilers.
Give me financial mastery of 100 people, I'll give them all a purpose. /s
Seriously, though, maintaining the social fabric when everyone is financially independent will be one of the challenges of a transition to UBI. Only a select few have the means to become hermits today, when you open that opportunity to the whole population, a much larger number of people will at least try the isolated lifestyle for a while. Making social gatherings successful (keeping 99%+ of the population engaged with each other) without making them compulsory will be a challenge. Today we have school and work to keep us integrated. If school can be done in your private room with the door closed and work is optional - that changes things dramatically. Basic neurochemistry will come into play, social and herd instincts, etc. Studies will be done, papers will be written.
Well, servants used to be expensive, but imagine what kind of lifestyle you could have with 99 people with nothing but spare time in which to serve you.
I agree with your basic premise for UBI, but worry about population explosion. Sure "educated" people in the "more developed" countries currently control their birth rates, but is that just the harsh reality of economics suppressing the basic biological drive to procreate? When you remove the economic stressors, will that behavior continue, or will we have a huge population spike when food and shelter no longer require time and effort for the masses to obtain? Even if the first two children, or even one, is supported by UBI and additional children's expenses are borne by the parents, that would be a vastly different playing field than we have today. A potential demonstration of the hypothesis is contemporary Russia, with even lower birth rates than western Europe - they're not better educated or more developed, but they are more financially stressed.
I don't see any easy answers... sterilization after two children seems harsh, but anything less seems ineffective. If UBI is phased in gradually, this is a trend that can be monitored and guided - if UBI hits as a big change, the effect on population demographics could be even more dramatic than the end of WWII.
Time between reboots has so much to do with what is installed and running - my clean Win10 machines only reboot when updates make them do it - and I use them to do programming and browse the web extensively. My home Win10 machine with special touchscreen drivers that runs various 3D CAD packages in addition to heavier animation (kids education) web browsing seems to benefit from a reboot about once per 20 hours of work, if it's just sitting there doing basically nothing, it doesn't need to be rebooted, either. Now, if you have auto-launching crapware installed, you might need to reboot every couple of days, even if you "do nothing" with the machine.
Internet Explorer quit starting up on my IT dept. maintained laptop - that will kill your usage statistics in a hurry, if the program stops functioning on mass maintained fleets of PCs. Chrome works just fine there, even though it is not supported and IE is.
I see plenty of work in reducing student-teacher ratios in education, increasing maintenance and inspection intervals, transparency reporting on public officials, etc.
All of those can be automated and/or handed off to AI.
Sure, but not for 50 to 100 years. And, things like educating our children and making judgement calls on elected officials probably never should be reduced to algorithms. Maybe for the elected officials if the algorithm is completely transparent, but if you trust SkyNet to educate all the children... that could go very very wrong.
They won't, that's the point.
I see plenty of work in reducing student-teacher ratios in education, increasing maintenance and inspection intervals, transparency reporting on public officials, etc. Now, just convince the remaining working people that they want to pay for this from their taxes. I suppose when we hit 53% unemployed, we might be able to start winning popular elections, if the unemployed are still allowed to vote then.
Just say "Mars" and you can run into the tens of billions of dollars on administrative overhead alone.
Plutonium is a product of breeder reactors, its market price is far disconnected from the actual effort required to make it. "Like Plutonium Piles" does, indeed, imply the development of a nuclear reactor for Mars deployment. Plutonium piles are mostly developed for small energy needs on "deep space" missions, you'd want basalt melting heat from something relatively lightweight and portable. Rocket launch of fissionables is another administrative nightmare, but $4000 per kg launch cost is the same whether you are launching Thorium, Plutonium or LOX and LH2. Fissionables can release many many orders of magnitude more energy per kg.
Maybe solar is the answer on Mars, too. Personally, I'd rather have a solution that can't be screwed up by a dust storm.
it's a very energy intense process
Energy, like comes from Plutonium piles?
involving some pretty heavy hardware
bigger problem, potentially best solved by building from local materials.
As others have stated: knowing the properties of the readily available materials in the area where the colony will be located is critical. Assume we need water (ice), first we need some extensive surveys of the non-ice materials in the general vicinity of the ice.
I'm thinking that flickering the power is about the worst they can do, which can damage compressors and some other stuff - potentially surge the transformer and get it to blow its breaker, but they'd have to have had a really bad risk review process to build one of these things with the capacity to do something like short two power legs.
Many meters have partial load cutoff capability - so they might shut down your A/C and water heater during peak loads, without causing the rest of your stuff to lose power.
How on earth is software going to make a meter explode?
Many meters have load balancing capabilities, they can switch loads on and off... big loads. I don't think it would be the meter exploding, but fairly easily your compressors, and possibly the transformer.
When "smart" meters first hit the scene a few years ago, people brought up these very issues. I'm surprised that in that time they have not been addressed, though I know I shouldn't be surprised...
That's the main reason to get freaked out when something of this nature gets rolled out - it will NOT get addressed after deployment. Some serious flaws are baked in and won't be improved without an incompatible upgrade, meaning two systems deployed in parallel - who's going to pay for that? Nobody, until there is a demonstrated need.
FFmpeg, in my assessment, is a bunch of teenage, mostly French, egomaniacs running an otherwise decent piece of open source software into the ground with their attitudes. Some seemingly cooler heads did fork AvConv from it some years ago, and now the two forks spend quite a bit of effort duplicating each others' work... maybe in 10 years or so some of them will grow up enough to stop the ego wars.
Your statements remind me of FFmpeg.
Marriage did lower my insurance rates, but not my overall expenses.