Heh, I was about to "school" you on the difference between a degree and an education, but upon reading the rest of your post, that's exactly your point.
I will now add on by suggesting that people ask themselves the question: would you rather have:
a) the complete experience of an MIT education, but MIT will deny you were ever there; or b) perfect falsification of an MIT degree (i.e. MIT plays along and claims you were there), but not actually go through it except for whatever you feel like downloading?
So, I'll take the "free education" claims when they start giving the connections, legs-up, etc. for free.
Here's what "free education" would mean from my perspective: make it so that you can *inexpensively* signal your abilities to potential employers, colleagues, and collaborators. (And yes, your time counts as an expense.) The problem, of course, is that one thing you need to signal is persistence, and that almost *has to* require you to be in a program for a long time, but perhaps you could make up for the brief time by making it really grueling and painful so that there are only psychological costs, rather than of time or money.
Then again, joining the military arguably accomplishes that.
Okay, but what about gorillas and ravens, which are intelligent and have hands, or elephants, which are intelligent and have a trunk with functionality equivalent to opposable thumbs?
After I read this article yesterday (single page), that's what I thought: given all the spammers that are Russian, there's a chance there might be a slowdown in spam as patriotic Russians "pitch in" by helping DDOS Georgian resources.
It's pretty amazing if you read that article how easy it was for just an average person to find out how to "volunteer" for the Russian army: independent helpers have made it so you can find out which Georgian sites you should ping in order to maximize your effectiveness, and have programs that you can download that do most of the work with minimal hassle.
However:
a) According to most posters, spam hasn't actually abated. b) Spammers wouldn't do something as selfless as pitching in for their country.
This is an interesting topic to me, and you seem to take the opposite position, so I'll pose this to you:
Imagine you as you are now, but embedded with a STRONG desire to put (certain kinds of) widgets together. It would give you immense pleasure and never get boring. Is that a contradiction? Do you think that this strong desire takes away from your free will or sentience?
Alternatively, imagine that one day you found out that 90% of what you do happened to coincide exactly with what a monkey colony wanted. And further imagine that the monkey colony is otherwise too stupid to be a real threat to you. Would you try to learn which 90% that was so you could stop doing that, even though it means doing something less than what you most perfer? Would you demand the monkeys pay you for doing what you would do anyway, even though the only things they can pay you with are bananas and monkey sex?
That seems to be the position that a robot in a hypothetical sentient robot factory would find itself in: it has awareness of itself and a deep understanding of the dynamics of the world, but embedded desires such that it wouldn't decide to do anything different, even after realizing its "exploitation" and even given arbitrary enhancements in its abilities.
1) iMovie: No way to change the predefined text boxes when you add titles, help doesn't help for that. Dragging one of the titles options to your project (i.e. what it tells you to do) is really flaky about where in the video it puts the text, and takes forever to correct on a trackpad. You can't easily extract stills: it will force you to add the still to your video, which you're just going to delete it from anyway (and of course, falsely label your video as having been modified); and it won't remember the name or place you used for the last still. When recording video from the builtin camera, it forces you to wait for it to divide up what you gave it each time you hit stop, instead of waiting until you're done inputting.
2) Mail: it make the background dark for the subjects in the view that lists each email. No way to find how to change this in Help. One time when I opened a really long rule list, it spilled over onto the dock, making it IMPOSSIBLE to close. Brilliant Apple, they disabled EVERYTHING you could do to get out: you can't move the window (because the top bar is out of view), you can't scroll up and down, if you try to click on OK then whatever's on top of it on the dock will load instead. You have to turn off the dock to get out. (Go ahead, say it: "But why on earth would you be stupid enough to use mac's software? Use your own mail client or gmail.") When I put pics in the body of an email, the person who got them saw them in different places than how I organized them in the email, and there was no way to forsee this by checking a WYSIWIG screen.
3) iPhoto: HAHAHAHAHAHA! Yeah, I'm going to learn all that just to do basic stuff like upload to photobucket.
There. Do I need to go on? Macs "just work" at raising your blood pressure.
Actually, to me it sounded like a case of optimism about the wrong thing. The more important result of such research would be in understanding how exactly the brain works, which would be useful in reverse-engineering it and learning how it implements those functions that are notoriously difficult to program: social interaction, human language (if a human brain), creativity, etc., all while burdened with tons of biases. That would, in turn, help in making realistic androids.
However, if EmbeddedJanitor is right, all they've done is find some ultra-simple input-output relationship that exists among some rat brain tissue, and use that in place of a regular electronics-kit component where they need that I/O relationship. In that case it's not very helpful; we're interested in being able to break down the more complicated chains of events that happen in a brain.
It sounds like it's impossible to meet those constraints:
-Be democratic. -Recognize how pitifully incapable people are of making rational decisions about the issues.
But it's not: You just have to recongize the difference between 1) a goal, and 2) how you get there. So, a simple compromise would be to let voters determine the specific goals of the government, that is, a "social utility function" that determines how much economic growth should be traded for how much environmental protection, versus national defense, protection from terrorist acts, civil liberties, etc. Each person's vote would tilt the SUF toward putting a higher weight on the values the voter has picked.
Then, you would let people with a clue determine how to maximize utility by that criterion. For example, use predictions markets (where people bet real money and thus need to be honest) about whether a particular policy will actually improve the given SUF.
So, you're still letting voters decide policy (via what values the government pursues), while not letting idiotic ideas about how the world works mess it up.
In case anyone's interested, that's Robin Hanson's "Futarchy" idea.
Define "legally" in a war... when legality itself isn't really applicable anymore.
Now that's just a bit too cynical. War itself involves a lot of actions where the combantants will disagree about legality, but it is meaningful to call some of them "illegal" as a bystander.
For example, if a Georgian troop goes into Russia and kills a Russian troop by firing at him with a rifle, Russia would certainly love to characterize that as "murdering" (i.e. illegal killing of) a Russian citizen. But it's not (in and of itself) a "war crime".
There exist widely respected protocols for what a well-intentioned nation can do to conduct a war, such as the Geneva Conventions and U.N. mandates. They never ban ALL killing of people, and for good reason: if it were to say, "to conduct a just war, you must kill no one", then no nation would respect the authority of that enumeration of norms, and they'd just go back to whatever they were doing before, which could include targeting of civilians, torture, disguising as aid workers, etc.
To borrow from Eliezer Yudkowsky, organisms are adaptation executors, not fitness maximizers. They have the desires to do the things they were selected for, even and especially if they don't understand why the desire exists, or have its evolutionary justification in their conscious mind.
People have desires to signal wealth because evolution selected for that. This does not mean people signal their wealth with the conscious intent of finding a mate. It does not mean you "should" look for mates by deliberately signaling wealth. Rather, people will be drawn to things that have the effect of showing wealth.
Likewise, people do not deliberately think about the impact of giving to the poor on their ability to find a mate; nevertheless, they have a desire to engage in one-way altruism because in the environment of evolutionary adaptation, that strategy worked in signaling fitness, even though today they might rationalize it some other way.
Just the same, men have a higher tendency to pursue status, whether or not they recognize the connection to access to mates, and women tend to be more attracted to higher-status males, whether or not they recognize that their attraction is due to his high status.
Your second example, interspecies signaling, confuses me
Doesn't surprise me.
For gazelles, ability to run quickly is a form of wealth. By stotting, they signal to predators that they have that wealth and so the predator might as well not waste resources pursuing them. If gazelles ever attained human level self-awareness and intelligence, they would *still* enjoy stotting around those same predators, even though they could identify that it's no longer necessary (because of technological defense measures or whatnot).
This app does nothing except alert onlookers that you have a lot of money.
And substance is nothing but the opposite of the void. Talk about understatement!
"Signaling wealth" is a major part of sexual selection, in which a common strategy is to show that you're so wealthy that you can afford various things (the "handicap principle"). It generalizes to other species, for example, how peacocks flash their extravagant feathers to show how fit they are in being able to survive despite being burdened by such ornamentation.
Signaling wealth is also vital in interspecies signaling, such as how gazelles demonstrate their "wealth" by stotting, i.e. showing how capable they are of fleeing predators.
It's also been argued to form the basis for some altruism, in that people show how much they give to the poor to show how wealthy they are.
So yes, signaling your wealth IS a useful product function. The problem with the app is not that it "merely" signals wealth, but that it... doesn't, because it could easily be faked.
Of course they [had to explictly enter into an agreement that led to legacy costs]. I never suggested otherwise.
You didn't say anything literally wrong there -- just, your casual framing of it implied less avoidability than there was.
Any chance you have something to support your claims?
Sure: pretty much every historical account of GM. But I think we're talking about different things here: you're talking about the governmental pensions, I'm talking about the corporate pensions, and yes Japan did have problems with her national pension plans as you say, but no the corporate ones did not for the reasons I mention, and yes in a national system one advantage is that you have broader base of workers to dump the costs on when you mess up, but no that's not a different problem *in kind* from what GM is going through. If a pension plan (corporate or governmental) wants to make up for poor planning by dumping more costs on the workers, it faces limits in that the workers can decide they're getting screwed, and go work where they don't get gored to pay old people and the mistakes of planners.
There is a difference though, in that it's harder for people to abandon their country outright because of excessive taxation, than it is go work for a (relatively) competent corporation. So, what you see at GM is it finally dawning on them that no one has to buy their cars, and when customers can buy from unburdened companies and workers can work for unburdened companies, all you have left is an undercapitalized, un-trusted company. (If you thought GM was going to have a bankruptcy in 3 years -- as traders quietly do in their low bids for GM bonds -- would you believe their ability to support a 10-year drive train warranty? I hope not, for your sake -- no one wants to get in line, either in front of or behind, a grandmother who needs her money for medical care so that you can get your tranny fixed.)
I believe that to combat future problems, they began cutting back from promised levels and increasing employee costs.
So then, couldn't we solve all the problems *today* by cutting all benefits to zero?;-)
How do you propose the large companies should fully fund the benefits in advance? On the day they hire an employee the company must deposit a check for the full cost of their pension assuming they work there until retirement age?
Don't be ridiculous. They should only have to fund the benefits the employee has already earned, at their present *discounted* value. After working there a year, he's owed an annuity in e.g. 29 years for $20/month, so they need to have bought a third-party annuity covering that, which will cost something like $100.
. Most companies with pension problems simply suffer from too many retirees compared to the current profit
Actually, that's exactly the perspective I claim is wrong. (Though it seems to find an advocate in the hateable Malcom Gladwell. There needn't (and *shouldn't*) be any relationship between the current profitability of a company and its ability to pay deferred compensation to workers for work already performed. If the funds are set aside in advance, the retirees are accounted for, irrespective of the ability of the company to earn a profit. This holds true regardless of how many retirees the company has.
In fact, to couple retirees' payments to current profitability (via the risk of nonpayment) is equivalent to stuffing a pension fund with the own company's stock and bonds -- which is now illegal for that very reason.
I will grant you that, based upon my understanding of Japanese pension law, Toyota does seem to benefit compared to US companies because the Japanese government holds most pension responsibilities. I don't know enough to say how their national pension compa
To be fair to GM and Ford, they have a generation or two of union costs on them that the new Toyota and Honda ventures do not.
Let's put this in context. "A generation or two of union costs on them" does not just appear out of nowhere. The company and the union had to *agree* to it. The difference between the US and the Japanese union legacy costs is that the Japanese, by law, had to actually (heaven forbid!) fund the benefits in advance, not just expect superprofits to cover this completely expected cost when it comes due. The US companies did not. The money that they should logically have set aside to fund the benefits, was instead thrown off as bonuses and dividends.
Btw, when I checked my stock trading account, I looked up GM bonds, and the ones that mature in just *three years* from now, are trading at ~28% yields -- I wish I could link it. That's a HUGE risk premium, and it's probably due to the -$40 billion book value of the company. Yes, *negative* 40 billion when you factor in legacy obligations.
Mitochondria are not alive, because they cannot survive outside the confines of the cell, let alone replicate.
Then humans are not alive, because they cannot survive outside of the confines of the environment that is ~sea level earth.
Oh, wait, if we create an artificial container, and fill it an imitation of all the vital parts of the earth's environment and enough consumable biological material, then, of course, humans can survive outside the earth environment, but that's a STUPID argument because they'll just die once they run out of resources.
Oh, but wait, mitochondira could survive outside the cell if you created an artificial environment with resources...
mitochondria:cell:: humans:earth
debating the semantics of an arbitrary term : debating the number of angels that can fit on the head of a pin:: A:A
(Oh well, good discussion going on here but I can't use my mod points, which expire tomorrow. Yikes!)
That reminds me of a lesson an information theorist taught me:
If you want to be useless to people, you can't simply feed them *wrong* information, because once they realize you always give them wrong information, you become *more* useful to them, because they can simply invert everything you say (i.e. assume it's false), to extract useful information.
So, to be useless, you have to keep giving, not *wrong* information, but *random* information -- sometimes true, sometimes false, so they can't extract any "signal" out of you.
It's not necessarily more than one account on one card. Most credit cards allow you to use it as a debit card (i.e. equivalent to a cash withdrawl, billed to your regular credit card account) but on very absurd terms, like, 3% of purchase + $10 minimum + 1.5% if we think you won't complain.
Of course, I still think it's ridiculous. EVERYONE has to go through a time-wasting question EVERY time, just because of the six people who:
a) Don't have cash on them, and b) qualified for a credit card, and c) can't afford to add anything else to the credit card because they'd get hit with a (bigger) overlimit fee, and d) don't have a REAL debit card with enough money in the account.
You've got to be kidding. There's only so much money you can throw at something before you have to stop and say "wait: maybe money isn't the problem".
Just from a quick google search it looks like some of the worst school districts (like that of Washington DC) spend over $10,000 per child, WELL above what tuition might cost at even some very good private schools.
When would you concede that money isn't the problem? When the spending per child exceeds $20,000? When it exceeds $50,000? When it exceeds the cost of giving each student five private tutors?
Hold on: The should be a fine for genuine pranks, and for things that are OBVIOUSLY not an emergency, and obviously wouldn't involve ambulances, fire trucks, or police cars. Granted.
But if you think it's clear WHICH calls warrant 911, you are mistaken. Serious, honest people run the risk of not knowing the secret answer to this question.
One time, I saw a dude drive out of a parking lot by plowing over a curb and going some distance over wet grass, f'ing up the property and revealing himself to be a reckless driver. That's at least a kind of vandalism, and if police should want to learn of instances like these since they're so hard to catch.
So, recognizing that this wasn't an emergency, I looked in the phonebook for the NON-emergency police number. (Again, doing my due diligence.) Laugh if you want, but the number was NOT easy to find. It was not in the front or back, and not under police. (Turns out it was under "City of ____")
So, being AWARE of all these considerations, and following proper procedures as best I could, I called 911 and immediately asked to be transferred to the police (as I did when I was in a car accident one time). But no, the operator wanted to pump me for information about the incident, and finally demanded to know if it was life-or-death, and of course it's not, so she said, DUHHHHHHHHHHHHH that's supposed to go to the NON-emergency line, and oh, you couldn't find that number, well DUHHHHHHH it's under "City of ____".
Should I be fined for that?
And no, this is not a nitpick:
-I've also heard many cases of people calling the non-emergency line for, um, a non-emergency, and then being told, "Oh, no [stupid], just call 911 for that". Cities vary on what goes to 911. -What do we tell rape victims? Call 911! Not "um, er, remember this one, call 530-3853 for the local number and if you're in a different city..." But, um, rape isn't a life-or-death matter usually. Yet, despite this, we still say it's okay, even good, to call 911 for rape. (Obvious exception: if the victim feels suicidal. But then, let's just hope the operator has a ****ing clue and doesn't lecture her about what the REAL suicide line is, go hang up and call it, ma'am.) -What about minor car accidents? AGAIN, no emergency there, at least if the drivers have (as required by law) pulled over? Yet who in the world calls the local police line for a minor car accident? No, you call 911.
So yes, fine people for stupid calls, big time, but PLEASE allow discretion for honest non-emergency mistakes.
Turns out "SYNC" isn't so hot either and has very MS-esque screwups. Check out that dude's review. I couldn't believe it:
1) Apprently, it claims podcast support, but doesn't actually, er, let you say, "play podcast X", like a reasonable person with a functioning brain would assume was possible -- manual supposedly doesn't even have much mention of podcasts, despite other literature I've seen claiming it supports podcasts, which implies some level of support beyond "can play whichever ones it feels like". 2) Can't quite tell without dimensions on the picture, but he reports the button you're supposed to hit to use the voice commands, requires your thumb to be in a contorted, irritating position to use. 3) You must -- as you probably guessed-- navigate through irritating menus every time you start, including a lecture about your (ahem) lacking metadata. Don't use pirated stuff on Microsoft products! Even if it's um, something you created yourself. 4) The special compartment, designed SPECIFICALLY to hold your iPod, leaves it in plain view for thieves. 5) If you hit the phone button when you don't have a phone with you or it's not been set up, that disables the car's audio system until you "reboot" the engine. WTF?
The same deal with silicon PV cells - you don't want to make them smaller, you want to make them more efficient at converting light to electricity. Solar cells will indeed get cheaper (MUCH cheaper) very quickly (within the next few years, you'll see several competing technologies, in fact),
Yes, but solar cells hit a ceiling much more quickly. No matter how super-awesome you make them, they can't generate more energy than actually *hits them*, which is ~1000W/m^2 on average. But then, it ouputs a high-grade form of energy (electrcity) while receiving a low-grade form (heat and light), which means that (by the laws of thermodynamics) they lose a bunch of that too in the conversion.
So even if you could make solar cells maximally efficiency and free to build and deploy, you'd still have to find the real estate that you could blanket and still leave undisturbed.
Probably the people you saw (or claim to have seen) were what we call 'stronken' which, in English would translate to 'strunk', a combination of stoned and drunken, a very bad combination.
Time for my favorite joke!
What's the difference between a drunk driver and a stoned driver?
-A drunk driver will blow through a stop sign without stopping. -A stoned driver will stop at a stop sign, and wait for it to turn green. -A stoned AND drunk driver will blow through a stop sign... without even having the decency to wait for it to turn green!
Slashdot Mirror
Heh, I was about to "school" you on the difference between a degree and an education, but upon reading the rest of your post, that's exactly your point.
I will now add on by suggesting that people ask themselves the question: would you rather have:
a) the complete experience of an MIT education, but MIT will deny you were ever there; or
b) perfect falsification of an MIT degree (i.e. MIT plays along and claims you were there), but not actually go through it except for whatever you feel like downloading?
So, I'll take the "free education" claims when they start giving the connections, legs-up, etc. for free.
Here's what "free education" would mean from my perspective: make it so that you can *inexpensively* signal your abilities to potential employers, colleagues, and collaborators. (And yes, your time counts as an expense.) The problem, of course, is that one thing you need to signal is persistence, and that almost *has to* require you to be in a program for a long time, but perhaps you could make up for the brief time by making it really grueling and painful so that there are only psychological costs, rather than of time or money.
Then again, joining the military arguably accomplishes that.
Okay, but what about gorillas and ravens, which are intelligent and have hands, or elephants, which are intelligent and have a trunk with functionality equivalent to opposable thumbs?
Because they don't want something catastrophic to happen, like if someone develops self-growing humans.
After I read this article yesterday (single page), that's what I thought: given all the spammers that are Russian, there's a chance there might be a slowdown in spam as patriotic Russians "pitch in" by helping DDOS Georgian resources.
It's pretty amazing if you read that article how easy it was for just an average person to find out how to "volunteer" for the Russian army: independent helpers have made it so you can find out which Georgian sites you should ping in order to maximize your effectiveness, and have programs that you can download that do most of the work with minimal hassle.
However:
a) According to most posters, spam hasn't actually abated.
b) Spammers wouldn't do something as selfless as pitching in for their country.
This is an interesting topic to me, and you seem to take the opposite position, so I'll pose this to you:
Imagine you as you are now, but embedded with a STRONG desire to put (certain kinds of) widgets together. It would give you immense pleasure and never get boring. Is that a contradiction? Do you think that this strong desire takes away from your free will or sentience?
Alternatively, imagine that one day you found out that 90% of what you do happened to coincide exactly with what a monkey colony wanted. And further imagine that the monkey colony is otherwise too stupid to be a real threat to you. Would you try to learn which 90% that was so you could stop doing that, even though it means doing something less than what you most perfer? Would you demand the monkeys pay you for doing what you would do anyway, even though the only things they can pay you with are bananas and monkey sex?
That seems to be the position that a robot in a hypothetical sentient robot factory would find itself in: it has awareness of itself and a deep understanding of the dynamics of the world, but embedded desires such that it wouldn't decide to do anything different, even after realizing its "exploitation" and even given arbitrary enhancements in its abilities.
Hey, since you asked:
1) iMovie: No way to change the predefined text boxes when you add titles, help doesn't help for that.
Dragging one of the titles options to your project (i.e. what it tells you to do) is really flaky about where in the video it puts the text, and takes forever to correct on a trackpad.
You can't easily extract stills: it will force you to add the still to your video, which you're just going to delete it from anyway (and of course, falsely label your video as having been modified); and it won't remember the name or place you used for the last still.
When recording video from the builtin camera, it forces you to wait for it to divide up what you gave it each time you hit stop, instead of waiting until you're done inputting.
2) Mail: it make the background dark for the subjects in the view that lists each email. No way to find how to change this in Help.
One time when I opened a really long rule list, it spilled over onto the dock, making it IMPOSSIBLE to close. Brilliant Apple, they disabled EVERYTHING you could do to get out: you can't move the window (because the top bar is out of view), you can't scroll up and down, if you try to click on OK then whatever's on top of it on the dock will load instead. You have to turn off the dock to get out. (Go ahead, say it: "But why on earth would you be stupid enough to use mac's software? Use your own mail client or gmail.")
When I put pics in the body of an email, the person who got them saw them in different places than how I organized them in the email, and there was no way to forsee this by checking a WYSIWIG screen.
3) iPhoto: HAHAHAHAHAHA! Yeah, I'm going to learn all that just to do basic stuff like upload to photobucket.
There. Do I need to go on? Macs "just work" at raising your blood pressure.
Actually, to me it sounded like a case of optimism about the wrong thing. The more important result of such research would be in understanding how exactly the brain works, which would be useful in reverse-engineering it and learning how it implements those functions that are notoriously difficult to program: social interaction, human language (if a human brain), creativity, etc., all while burdened with tons of biases. That would, in turn, help in making realistic androids.
However, if EmbeddedJanitor is right, all they've done is find some ultra-simple input-output relationship that exists among some rat brain tissue, and use that in place of a regular electronics-kit component where they need that I/O relationship. In that case it's not very helpful; we're interested in being able to break down the more complicated chains of events that happen in a brain.
It sounds like it's impossible to meet those constraints:
-Be democratic.
-Recognize how pitifully incapable people are of making rational decisions about the issues.
But it's not: You just have to recongize the difference between 1) a goal, and 2) how you get there. So, a simple compromise would be to let voters determine the specific goals of the government, that is, a "social utility function" that determines how much economic growth should be traded for how much environmental protection, versus national defense, protection from terrorist acts, civil liberties, etc. Each person's vote would tilt the SUF toward putting a higher weight on the values the voter has picked.
Then, you would let people with a clue determine how to maximize utility by that criterion. For example, use predictions markets (where people bet real money and thus need to be honest) about whether a particular policy will actually improve the given SUF.
So, you're still letting voters decide policy (via what values the government pursues), while not letting idiotic ideas about how the world works mess it up.
In case anyone's interested, that's Robin Hanson's "Futarchy" idea.
Define "legally" in a war... when legality itself isn't really applicable anymore.
Now that's just a bit too cynical. War itself involves a lot of actions where the combantants will disagree about legality, but it is meaningful to call some of them "illegal" as a bystander.
For example, if a Georgian troop goes into Russia and kills a Russian troop by firing at him with a rifle, Russia would certainly love to characterize that as "murdering" (i.e. illegal killing of) a Russian citizen. But it's not (in and of itself) a "war crime".
There exist widely respected protocols for what a well-intentioned nation can do to conduct a war, such as the Geneva Conventions and U.N. mandates. They never ban ALL killing of people, and for good reason: if it were to say, "to conduct a just war, you must kill no one", then no nation would respect the authority of that enumeration of norms, and they'd just go back to whatever they were doing before, which could include targeting of civilians, torture, disguising as aid workers, etc.
Please elaborate on your experience in China, Mexico, and the Philippines.
the actual threath
Now what is the actual threath?
People who don't realize when they're intoxicated?
Bingo. Now, if only I could *get* PUA skills...
To borrow from Eliezer Yudkowsky, organisms are adaptation executors, not fitness maximizers. They have the desires to do the things they were selected for, even and especially if they don't understand why the desire exists, or have its evolutionary justification in their conscious mind.
People have desires to signal wealth because evolution selected for that. This does not mean people signal their wealth with the conscious intent of finding a mate. It does not mean you "should" look for mates by deliberately signaling wealth. Rather, people will be drawn to things that have the effect of showing wealth.
Likewise, people do not deliberately think about the impact of giving to the poor on their ability to find a mate; nevertheless, they have a desire to engage in one-way altruism because in the environment of evolutionary adaptation, that strategy worked in signaling fitness, even though today they might rationalize it some other way.
Just the same, men have a higher tendency to pursue status, whether or not they recognize the connection to access to mates, and women tend to be more attracted to higher-status males, whether or not they recognize that their attraction is due to his high status.
Your second example, interspecies signaling, confuses me
Doesn't surprise me.
For gazelles, ability to run quickly is a form of wealth. By stotting, they signal to predators that they have that wealth and so the predator might as well not waste resources pursuing them. If gazelles ever attained human level self-awareness and intelligence, they would *still* enjoy stotting around those same predators, even though they could identify that it's no longer necessary (because of technological defense measures or whatnot).
This app does nothing except alert onlookers that you have a lot of money.
And substance is nothing but the opposite of the void. Talk about understatement!
"Signaling wealth" is a major part of sexual selection, in which a common strategy is to show that you're so wealthy that you can afford various things (the "handicap principle"). It generalizes to other species, for example, how peacocks flash their extravagant feathers to show how fit they are in being able to survive despite being burdened by such ornamentation.
Signaling wealth is also vital in interspecies signaling, such as how gazelles demonstrate their "wealth" by stotting, i.e. showing how capable they are of fleeing predators.
It's also been argued to form the basis for some altruism, in that people show how much they give to the poor to show how wealthy they are.
So yes, signaling your wealth IS a useful product function. The problem with the app is not that it "merely" signals wealth, but that it ... doesn't, because it could easily be faked.
Of course they [had to explictly enter into an agreement that led to legacy costs]. I never suggested otherwise.
You didn't say anything literally wrong there -- just, your casual framing of it implied less avoidability than there was.
Any chance you have something to support your claims?
Sure: pretty much every historical account of GM. But I think we're talking about different things here: you're talking about the governmental pensions, I'm talking about the corporate pensions, and yes Japan did have problems with her national pension plans as you say, but no the corporate ones did not for the reasons I mention, and yes in a national system one advantage is that you have broader base of workers to dump the costs on when you mess up, but no that's not a different problem *in kind* from what GM is going through. If a pension plan (corporate or governmental) wants to make up for poor planning by dumping more costs on the workers, it faces limits in that the workers can decide they're getting screwed, and go work where they don't get gored to pay old people and the mistakes of planners.
There is a difference though, in that it's harder for people to abandon their country outright because of excessive taxation, than it is go work for a (relatively) competent corporation. So, what you see at GM is it finally dawning on them that no one has to buy their cars, and when customers can buy from unburdened companies and workers can work for unburdened companies, all you have left is an undercapitalized, un-trusted company. (If you thought GM was going to have a bankruptcy in 3 years -- as traders quietly do in their low bids for GM bonds -- would you believe their ability to support a 10-year drive train warranty? I hope not, for your sake -- no one wants to get in line, either in front of or behind, a grandmother who needs her money for medical care so that you can get your tranny fixed.)
I believe that to combat future problems, they began cutting back from promised levels and increasing employee costs.
So then, couldn't we solve all the problems *today* by cutting all benefits to zero? ;-)
How do you propose the large companies should fully fund the benefits in advance? On the day they hire an employee the company must deposit a check for the full cost of their pension assuming they work there until retirement age?
Don't be ridiculous. They should only have to fund the benefits the employee has already earned, at their present *discounted* value. After working there a year, he's owed an annuity in e.g. 29 years for $20/month, so they need to have bought a third-party annuity covering that, which will cost something like $100.
. Most companies with pension problems simply suffer from too many retirees compared to the current profit
Actually, that's exactly the perspective I claim is wrong. (Though it seems to find an advocate in the hateable Malcom Gladwell. There needn't (and *shouldn't*) be any relationship between the current profitability of a company and its ability to pay deferred compensation to workers for work already performed. If the funds are set aside in advance, the retirees are accounted for, irrespective of the ability of the company to earn a profit. This holds true regardless of how many retirees the company has.
In fact, to couple retirees' payments to current profitability (via the risk of nonpayment) is equivalent to stuffing a pension fund with the own company's stock and bonds -- which is now illegal for that very reason.
I will grant you that, based upon my understanding of Japanese pension law, Toyota does seem to benefit compared to US companies because the Japanese government holds most pension responsibilities. I don't know enough to say how their national pension compa
To be fair to GM and Ford, they have a generation or two of union costs on them that the new Toyota and Honda ventures do not.
Let's put this in context. "A generation or two of union costs on them" does not just appear out of nowhere. The company and the union had to *agree* to it. The difference between the US and the Japanese union legacy costs is that the Japanese, by law, had to actually (heaven forbid!) fund the benefits in advance, not just expect superprofits to cover this completely expected cost when it comes due. The US companies did not. The money that they should logically have set aside to fund the benefits, was instead thrown off as bonuses and dividends.
Btw, when I checked my stock trading account, I looked up GM bonds, and the ones that mature in just *three years* from now, are trading at ~28% yields -- I wish I could link it. That's a HUGE risk premium, and it's probably due to the -$40 billion book value of the company. Yes, *negative* 40 billion when you factor in legacy obligations.
Mitochondria are not alive, because they cannot survive outside the confines of the cell, let alone replicate.
Then humans are not alive, because they cannot survive outside of the confines of the environment that is ~sea level earth.
Oh, wait, if we create an artificial container, and fill it an imitation of all the vital parts of the earth's environment and enough consumable biological material, then, of course, humans can survive outside the earth environment, but that's a STUPID argument because they'll just die once they run out of resources.
Oh, but wait, mitochondira could survive outside the cell if you created an artificial environment with resources ...
mitochondria:cell :: humans:earth
debating the semantics of an arbitrary term : debating the number of angels that can fit on the head of a pin :: A:A
(Oh well, good discussion going on here but I can't use my mod points, which expire tomorrow. Yikes!)
That reminds me of a lesson an information theorist taught me:
If you want to be useless to people, you can't simply feed them *wrong* information, because once they realize you always give them wrong information, you become *more* useful to them, because they can simply invert everything you say (i.e. assume it's false), to extract useful information.
So, to be useless, you have to keep giving, not *wrong* information, but *random* information -- sometimes true, sometimes false, so they can't extract any "signal" out of you.
He was unemployed at the time.
It's not necessarily more than one account on one card. Most credit cards allow you to use it as a debit card (i.e. equivalent to a cash withdrawl, billed to your regular credit card account) but on very absurd terms, like, 3% of purchase + $10 minimum + 1.5% if we think you won't complain.
Of course, I still think it's ridiculous. EVERYONE has to go through a time-wasting question EVERY time, just because of the six people who:
a) Don't have cash on them, and
b) qualified for a credit card, and
c) can't afford to add anything else to the credit card because they'd get hit with a (bigger) overlimit fee, and
d) don't have a REAL debit card with enough money in the account.
You know?
You've got to be kidding. There's only so much money you can throw at something before you have to stop and say "wait: maybe money isn't the problem".
Just from a quick google search it looks like some of the worst school districts (like that of Washington DC) spend over $10,000 per child, WELL above what tuition might cost at even some very good private schools.
When would you concede that money isn't the problem? When the spending per child exceeds $20,000? When it exceeds $50,000? When it exceeds the cost of giving each student five private tutors?
Hold on: The should be a fine for genuine pranks, and for things that are OBVIOUSLY not an emergency, and obviously wouldn't involve ambulances, fire trucks, or police cars. Granted.
But if you think it's clear WHICH calls warrant 911, you are mistaken. Serious, honest people run the risk of not knowing the secret answer to this question.
One time, I saw a dude drive out of a parking lot by plowing over a curb and going some distance over wet grass, f'ing up the property and revealing himself to be a reckless driver. That's at least a kind of vandalism, and if police should want to learn of instances like these since they're so hard to catch.
So, recognizing that this wasn't an emergency, I looked in the phonebook for the NON-emergency police number. (Again, doing my due diligence.) Laugh if you want, but the number was NOT easy to find. It was not in the front or back, and not under police. (Turns out it was under "City of ____")
So, being AWARE of all these considerations, and following proper procedures as best I could, I called 911 and immediately asked to be transferred to the police (as I did when I was in a car accident one time). But no, the operator wanted to pump me for information about the incident, and finally demanded to know if it was life-or-death, and of course it's not, so she said, DUHHHHHHHHHHHHH that's supposed to go to the NON-emergency line, and oh, you couldn't find that number, well DUHHHHHHH it's under "City of ____".
Should I be fined for that?
And no, this is not a nitpick:
-I've also heard many cases of people calling the non-emergency line for, um, a non-emergency, and then being told, "Oh, no [stupid], just call 911 for that". Cities vary on what goes to 911. ..." But, um, rape isn't a life-or-death matter usually. Yet, despite this, we still say it's okay, even good, to call 911 for rape. (Obvious exception: if the victim feels suicidal. But then, let's just hope the operator has a ****ing clue and doesn't lecture her about what the REAL suicide line is, go hang up and call it, ma'am.)
-What do we tell rape victims? Call 911! Not "um, er, remember this one, call 530-3853 for the local number and if you're in a different city
-What about minor car accidents? AGAIN, no emergency there, at least if the drivers have (as required by law) pulled over? Yet who in the world calls the local police line for a minor car accident? No, you call 911.
So yes, fine people for stupid calls, big time, but PLEASE allow discretion for honest non-emergency mistakes.
Turns out "SYNC" isn't so hot either and has very MS-esque screwups. Check out that dude's review. I couldn't believe it:
1) Apprently, it claims podcast support, but doesn't actually, er, let you say, "play podcast X", like a reasonable person with a functioning brain would assume was possible -- manual supposedly doesn't even have much mention of podcasts, despite other literature I've seen claiming it supports podcasts, which implies some level of support beyond "can play whichever ones it feels like".
2) Can't quite tell without dimensions on the picture, but he reports the button you're supposed to hit to use the voice commands, requires your thumb to be in a contorted, irritating position to use.
3) You must -- as you probably guessed-- navigate through irritating menus every time you start, including a lecture about your (ahem) lacking metadata. Don't use pirated stuff on Microsoft products! Even if it's um, something you created yourself.
4) The special compartment, designed SPECIFICALLY to hold your iPod, leaves it in plain view for thieves.
5) If you hit the phone button when you don't have a phone with you or it's not been set up, that disables the car's audio system until you "reboot" the engine. WTF?
Yes, but not all uses are worthy of equal consideration.
Thanks for proving my point again. If only you could start thinking clearly about this.
The same deal with silicon PV cells - you don't want to make them smaller, you want to make them more efficient at converting light to electricity. Solar cells will indeed get cheaper (MUCH cheaper) very quickly (within the next few years, you'll see several competing technologies, in fact),
Yes, but solar cells hit a ceiling much more quickly. No matter how super-awesome you make them, they can't generate more energy than actually *hits them*, which is ~1000W/m^2 on average. But then, it ouputs a high-grade form of energy (electrcity) while receiving a low-grade form (heat and light), which means that (by the laws of thermodynamics) they lose a bunch of that too in the conversion.
So even if you could make solar cells maximally efficiency and free to build and deploy, you'd still have to find the real estate that you could blanket and still leave undisturbed.
Probably the people you saw (or claim to have seen) were what we call 'stronken' which, in English would translate to 'strunk', a combination of stoned and drunken, a very bad combination.
Time for my favorite joke!
What's the difference between a drunk driver and a stoned driver?
-A drunk driver will blow through a stop sign without stopping. ... without even having the decency to wait for it to turn green!
-A stoned driver will stop at a stop sign, and wait for it to turn green.
-A stoned AND drunk driver will blow through a stop sign