Insurance actuaries are already factoring in the damage, and what exactly are the benefits to rain belt shifts that could leave large tracts of currently arable land in a semi-arid state, or that plunges coastal areas where huge proportions of the human population live under a meter of water?
I've used algorithms plugged with financial data to test man-hour scenarios. Yes, at the end of the day, I would make the final decision, but it sure isn't a matter of "I think Bob stinks like cheese, so I'll sack him." I could see the value of these tools, even if there's still a human at the top of pyramid who does the final assessment. And really, the final assessment in very large organizations isn't likely to involve "Mary's husband has leukemia and while she's underperforming right now, there's a good reason and we should keep Mary around."
The difference we're seeing now is that we're not talking about applying "mechanical" management principles to people, we're now beginning to glimpse a world in which the machines effectively integrate and compete with each other, where you're not going to have humans being managed with machines or by machines, but rather the machines being at least semi-autonomous, with a few humans with the authority to override them, much as how automation of industrial processes has been heading. The reality is that there are already aspects of financial management that are already effectively little more than just algorithms. While a loans officer may have some ability to stretch the rules, he's still going by what a series of algorithms are informing him about the individual seeking the loan. The stock market is full of automated systems, both for the market itself, and used by investors. Banks have been marching towards full automation for sixty years now.
The writing has been on the wall for a long long time.
If the business AI does better, then it's hard to imagine a level of tax that would make it non-viable. You can't tax away progress. It just doesn't work. Besides, those building these AIs are some of the most powerful entities in the world. They may have to accept some higher level of taxation, but at the end of the day, governments will no more put the AI genie back in the bottle than they did earlier forms of automation. AI is simply another step in a process that's been going on since the 18th century, and really, people have been predicting this level of automation at least since the first decades of the 20th century.
I call bullshit on this. While, all in all, most people living in the industrialized world in the last sixty or seventy years have the highest standard of living of any humans, that is really a statistical statement. That doesn't mean kings of the past lived in poverty, which is, of course, a moronic statement that only an ignoramus could make. People like Caesar Augustus, Charlemagne and just about any given Pope lived in splendor that would still amaze today (look at Versailles to see how Louis XIV thought a king should live).
The chief advantage most of the poor in the West have is that health care is a lot better, so I'll give you that, although for certain groups of poverty-stricken, life expectancy still hovers somewhere around where it did for their ancestors two or three hundred years ago. But other than that, they tend to have the same dismal nutrition of their ancestors, and in some ways much worse because the poor tend to consume a lot more pre-processed meals, meaning the levels of salts and carbohydrates they're consuming are far higher than people of the past, leading to health problems more unique to the 21st century.
But really, to claim the poor of today live better than the kings of yesterday is so astonishingly stupid a claim that I have to imagine you're either trolling or a fucking moron. In either case it doesn't reflect well on you at all. And if you don't think poverty doesn't exist in the West, go down to any inner city, where the mentally ill and the addicted tend to gravitate towards since society seems to have little desire to help them, and tell me you're not looking at people whose condition would likely have even shocked a 12th century serf.
I advocate a carbon tax, because I believe free markets can solve the problem. But when fossil fuel profits are effectively subsidized by not having the damage they're doing factored into the price of their product then that's corporate welfare. Maybw youre the communist.
Sigh. Of all the moronic talking points the pro-fossil fuel crowd bring up, this is somehow the dumbest and most infuriating. Dumbest because human civilization didn't exist 80 million years ago, and in fact only arose during the climate conditions found in the last 10,000 years or so, and infuriating because once you've adopted this idiotic statement, you've basically admitted we're fucking things up very badly, but are just trying to spin it as a positive "You see, the dinosaurs liked it!!!!"
I'm going to be charitable and suggest you're just doing a bit of trolling, and aren't in fact one of the most retarded human beings alive.
The difference being that burning wood is burning carbon that is still actively part of the carbon cycle, whereas burning coal and oil releases CO2 that was removed from the carbon cycle millions of years ago, and in fact is releasing millions of years worth of sequestered CO2 in the space of a few centuries.
Conversely, this is why claims of "greening up" due to higher CO2 PPM in the atmosphere isn't solving the increased emissions problem; simply because the vast majority of plants release the CO2 they've captured relatively quickly after they have absorbed it.
So you'd rather just offload the costs on to the next generation? Because in fifty years, the costs you pay now will be nothing compared to what local and larger scale economies will have to pay out.
And really, the bigger problem in Ontario is absurd electricity contracts, not green energy. That's just Postmedia's talking point, because it has whored its newspaper chain out to be the voice of the fossil fuel industry.
No we are not far away from useful predictive models. Every model produced in the last quarter century has shown warming. Yes the precise timelines are hard, and one big flaw was that until recently we didn't fully understand the oceans' ability to absorb heat, but that's how science works.
There is absolutely no doubt that we are warming the planet and that if we cannot restrain CO2 emissions and start bringing them down very soon, we will cross the red line where the worst case scenarios begin playing out.
You've just bought into a sort of epistemological nihilism, whereby because we do not have perfect knowledge, we therefore have no useful knowledge and can make no useful prediction, and that is just plain false.
If there's another ice age coming, it's thousands of years away. Human-caused global warming is already having significant effects, and by the end of the century not even people repeating moronic memes they read on the Internet will have much ability to deny reality.
If you think parts of the High Arctic being near 0C at the end of December is somehow a good thing, then you're a fucking idiot.
I'm presuming the route in that case would be a legislative reversal. That will, of course, invite filibusters from the Democrats, which probably means it won't happen any time soon. I guess that's the point, in a way, to make it a big pain in the ass, so until the price of oil is over $150 a barrel (2016 prices), it's probably not worth anyone's while. Seeing as no even thinks the current marginal bump in oil prices has legs, I can sort of see the logic in what Obama's done.
The world kept turning and the sun kept rising during the Depression, but it still remained an incredibly hideous time for large parts of the world, so avoiding such economic collapses is an awfully damned good idea. And yes, some bad people effectively got rewarded, but the greater good and all of that.
No modern economy is going to peg to gold anymore. The day is done. Find another hobby horse. This isn't a "left vs right" matter, this is a "sensible vs irrational" thing.
As off the mark as mainstream journalism may be, this need by both the alt-right and alt-left (Bernie's angry supporters) to basically invoke some sort of weird journalistic solipsism leaves me pretty exasperated. We are really reaching a place of post-modernist nihilism, where people are convinced there is no such thing as truth, so therefore they are free to say and believe anything, and that such conduct will have no consequences.
Which is one of the reasons why artificial islands are not accepted under Maritime Law as being actual territory. They are ultimately transient. If China were to abandon this island, within twenty years it would be back under water. It takes continuous import of materials and shoring up to keep artificial islands built atop reefs and seamounts usable. They are not land save in the most temporary sense of the word. It's like calling a bridge land.
Slashdot Mirror
Insurance actuaries are already factoring in the damage, and what exactly are the benefits to rain belt shifts that could leave large tracts of currently arable land in a semi-arid state, or that plunges coastal areas where huge proportions of the human population live under a meter of water?
So you actually didn't read it either, but rather invented a narrative to fit your own bias.
I've used algorithms plugged with financial data to test man-hour scenarios. Yes, at the end of the day, I would make the final decision, but it sure isn't a matter of "I think Bob stinks like cheese, so I'll sack him." I could see the value of these tools, even if there's still a human at the top of pyramid who does the final assessment. And really, the final assessment in very large organizations isn't likely to involve "Mary's husband has leukemia and while she's underperforming right now, there's a good reason and we should keep Mary around."
The difference we're seeing now is that we're not talking about applying "mechanical" management principles to people, we're now beginning to glimpse a world in which the machines effectively integrate and compete with each other, where you're not going to have humans being managed with machines or by machines, but rather the machines being at least semi-autonomous, with a few humans with the authority to override them, much as how automation of industrial processes has been heading. The reality is that there are already aspects of financial management that are already effectively little more than just algorithms. While a loans officer may have some ability to stretch the rules, he's still going by what a series of algorithms are informing him about the individual seeking the loan. The stock market is full of automated systems, both for the market itself, and used by investors. Banks have been marching towards full automation for sixty years now.
The writing has been on the wall for a long long time.
If the business AI does better, then it's hard to imagine a level of tax that would make it non-viable. You can't tax away progress. It just doesn't work. Besides, those building these AIs are some of the most powerful entities in the world. They may have to accept some higher level of taxation, but at the end of the day, governments will no more put the AI genie back in the bottle than they did earlier forms of automation. AI is simply another step in a process that's been going on since the 18th century, and really, people have been predicting this level of automation at least since the first decades of the 20th century.
I call bullshit on this. While, all in all, most people living in the industrialized world in the last sixty or seventy years have the highest standard of living of any humans, that is really a statistical statement. That doesn't mean kings of the past lived in poverty, which is, of course, a moronic statement that only an ignoramus could make. People like Caesar Augustus, Charlemagne and just about any given Pope lived in splendor that would still amaze today (look at Versailles to see how Louis XIV thought a king should live).
The chief advantage most of the poor in the West have is that health care is a lot better, so I'll give you that, although for certain groups of poverty-stricken, life expectancy still hovers somewhere around where it did for their ancestors two or three hundred years ago. But other than that, they tend to have the same dismal nutrition of their ancestors, and in some ways much worse because the poor tend to consume a lot more pre-processed meals, meaning the levels of salts and carbohydrates they're consuming are far higher than people of the past, leading to health problems more unique to the 21st century.
But really, to claim the poor of today live better than the kings of yesterday is so astonishingly stupid a claim that I have to imagine you're either trolling or a fucking moron. In either case it doesn't reflect well on you at all. And if you don't think poverty doesn't exist in the West, go down to any inner city, where the mentally ill and the addicted tend to gravitate towards since society seems to have little desire to help them, and tell me you're not looking at people whose condition would likely have even shocked a 12th century serf.
Oh, and for your edification
http://iopscience.iop.org/arti...
I advocate a carbon tax, because I believe free markets can solve the problem. But when fossil fuel profits are effectively subsidized by not having the damage they're doing factored into the price of their product then that's corporate welfare. Maybw youre the communist.
Sigh. Of all the moronic talking points the pro-fossil fuel crowd bring up, this is somehow the dumbest and most infuriating. Dumbest because human civilization didn't exist 80 million years ago, and in fact only arose during the climate conditions found in the last 10,000 years or so, and infuriating because once you've adopted this idiotic statement, you've basically admitted we're fucking things up very badly, but are just trying to spin it as a positive "You see, the dinosaurs liked it!!!!"
I'm going to be charitable and suggest you're just doing a bit of trolling, and aren't in fact one of the most retarded human beings alive.
The difference being that burning wood is burning carbon that is still actively part of the carbon cycle, whereas burning coal and oil releases CO2 that was removed from the carbon cycle millions of years ago, and in fact is releasing millions of years worth of sequestered CO2 in the space of a few centuries.
Conversely, this is why claims of "greening up" due to higher CO2 PPM in the atmosphere isn't solving the increased emissions problem; simply because the vast majority of plants release the CO2 they've captured relatively quickly after they have absorbed it.
So you'd rather just offload the costs on to the next generation? Because in fifty years, the costs you pay now will be nothing compared to what local and larger scale economies will have to pay out.
And really, the bigger problem in Ontario is absurd electricity contracts, not green energy. That's just Postmedia's talking point, because it has whored its newspaper chain out to be the voice of the fossil fuel industry.
No we are not far away from useful predictive models. Every model produced in the last quarter century has shown warming. Yes the precise timelines are hard, and one big flaw was that until recently we didn't fully understand the oceans' ability to absorb heat, but that's how science works.
There is absolutely no doubt that we are warming the planet and that if we cannot restrain CO2 emissions and start bringing them down very soon, we will cross the red line where the worst case scenarios begin playing out.
You've just bought into a sort of epistemological nihilism, whereby because we do not have perfect knowledge, we therefore have no useful knowledge and can make no useful prediction, and that is just plain false.
If there's another ice age coming, it's thousands of years away. Human-caused global warming is already having significant effects, and by the end of the century not even people repeating moronic memes they read on the Internet will have much ability to deny reality.
If you think parts of the High Arctic being near 0C at the end of December is somehow a good thing, then you're a fucking idiot.
Translation: I have a huge chip on my shoulder, but rather than actually learn something, I will denigrate those that have accomplished something.
These are not liberal arts degrees, for chrissake.
Which is irrelevant. Human civilization did not exist during the age of the dinosaurs or when trilobites crawled along the ocean floor.
Reduce albedo by melting ice, what do you think is going to happen?
I'm presuming the route in that case would be a legislative reversal. That will, of course, invite filibusters from the Democrats, which probably means it won't happen any time soon. I guess that's the point, in a way, to make it a big pain in the ass, so until the price of oil is over $150 a barrel (2016 prices), it's probably not worth anyone's while. Seeing as no even thinks the current marginal bump in oil prices has legs, I can sort of see the logic in what Obama's done.
So you don't think fucking up nature ultimately harms humans?
Why would they need to? The Republicans run the show now.
The world kept turning and the sun kept rising during the Depression, but it still remained an incredibly hideous time for large parts of the world, so avoiding such economic collapses is an awfully damned good idea. And yes, some bad people effectively got rewarded, but the greater good and all of that.
No modern economy is going to peg to gold anymore. The day is done. Find another hobby horse. This isn't a "left vs right" matter, this is a "sensible vs irrational" thing.
And then the gold standard kooks come out of the woodwork.
As off the mark as mainstream journalism may be, this need by both the alt-right and alt-left (Bernie's angry supporters) to basically invoke some sort of weird journalistic solipsism leaves me pretty exasperated. We are really reaching a place of post-modernist nihilism, where people are convinced there is no such thing as truth, so therefore they are free to say and believe anything, and that such conduct will have no consequences.
Which is one of the reasons why artificial islands are not accepted under Maritime Law as being actual territory. They are ultimately transient. If China were to abandon this island, within twenty years it would be back under water. It takes continuous import of materials and shoring up to keep artificial islands built atop reefs and seamounts usable. They are not land save in the most temporary sense of the word. It's like calling a bridge land.
If you're talking about BlackBerry investors, they're one step down from little old ladies feeding quarters into a slot machine.