No shit! This whole story makes me incredibly angry, you can see the veins popping out on my head (or you could, if I had a webcam). An attempt is being made here to officially identify the the Web with the Internet, which is (legally, I mean, not logically) precisely the same kind of manoeuvre as identifying peer-to-peer protocols with content piracy: it's groundwork for regulation of what client software architectures are legal.
Can the iPhone access the whole Internet? Well, can it ping every valid IPv4 and IPv6 address, I ask? Can it or not?
Mm, but are you sure this applies to female astronauts? I've only met one, but she seemed a lot like my girlfriend, who is indeed the kind of person who makes lists of things to fix, and then fixes them.
What if the left wing (let us say) are wrong? What if we do our science, and discover that the earth really was created in 4004BC? What if we do a survey of the world's economies and discover that universal health care really does drain the economy and produce a less healthy, less productive workforce? What if education is bad for you? What if studies show that an 80 hour work week really is better for you than a 30 hour work week? What if we are heading into an ice age and the only way we can save ourselves is by burning all the oil as soon as possible? What if it can be scientifically and objectively demonstrated that the US electoral system is the freest and fairest ever devised and should be forcibly imposed on the rest of the world, and reimposed whenever an election produces a leader who won't do what America says?
What then is the purpose of 'balance'?
Because, you know, the American center is so far to the right it makes the rest of the world's heads spin.... There might be a reason, might there not, why those who are trying to do a good job seem to be 'biased' towards the left?
I see. Can I suggest that you work on that response? You open yourself to serious ridicule. First, the "founders of the nation"—how did they come to acquire the land? Offhand, I can think of no nation with clean hands in that regard (though there may be a few very small ones, of course). Second, if you seriously consider the notion of inheritance to be self-evident, as you seem to imply, then you make it clear that any discussion will be difficult. What, for instance, if the founders of your nation chanced to be communists. Then what do you do?
But something is wrong here. You are collecting money from property owners, justified by the provided enforcement mechanism. But then you are redistributing to citizens, implying that you have collected rather more than required to cover the cost of that mechanism. By what right—and for what reason—are you doing this redistribution from residents to citizens?
So, when an American leaves US soil, are they obliged to cash out? You understand, I am taking you very seriously (I have a not unrelated view myself), but it seems to me very clear that when a person moves to your country it is often only a matter of a year or so before their contribution to the ongoing social effort is as great as that of those who were here all along, even if they have bought in rather than being born in.
I could use myself as an example. Never in my life have I worked in a country I was a citizen of. People are still glad to offer me work, because I'm doing my part to increase the shared wealth of all of us. Seems to me that someone should be looking after me—and, although your model is elegant, it's the country that I'm in at any given moment that is deriving the greatest benefit from my work.
Augment your model with inter-governmental transfer payments—or save on paperwork and have a bidirectional open migration policy—and I think your approach may have a sale. But, wait, that wasn't what you were saying, was it?
It is interesting that you do not consider the economy, jobs, defense, etc., to be technological issues. Indeed, I think that we would be doing a lot better if we considered management, administration and bureaucracy to be technological issues, and gave them same thought to effectiveness, efficiency, modularity and interface design there as we do with, well, our geeky things.
I think we can go further than this. The underlying philosophy of DRM and the DMCA is that of 'self help,' something that previous generations would have called vigilantism. The law is so messed up, the theory goes, that when I don't like someone - a thief, a customer, whoever - I should just go right ahead and shoot them. Of course, what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander: when, as a customer, I see my supplier going, 'f*** you, I'm going to lock you out of this thing that you bought because, let me tell you, I'm in a baaaad mood about customers,' well, I react by going, 'well, f*** you for your f*** you, if you're going to lock me out of this product that I paid for, well, next time, see if I pay you for your product!'
And because DRM is subject to the same lie as guns (that is, it is an offensive tactic that denies people their rights and is absolutely lacking in defensive application as its proponents try to claim, since it protects nobody against anything), well, it is subject to the same cycle of escalation. People on both sides try to 'defend' themselves by ever increasing aggression, and everyone suffers.
Lawlessness benefits no one. Hold the lawgivers to the law. And then leave enforcement to them. Cycles of revenge cannot lead to civilisation. Strict third party law enforcement is an absolute necessity. You cannot have an automatic, unlimited right to defend yourself. Not if, in the end, you want to have any rights left at all.
The thing I don't understand here is the principle of the thing. If I see it, then I have seen it. Do I not have a right to my own memories? I can understand people feeling that I there are various things that are private, that I should not tell third parties about even if I have knowledge of them; and yes, of course, this can apply to scenes. It is, for example, rude, to gossip about who you saw tonguing whom at the art gallery (not that presidents haven't lost their jobs over such gossip, but that's another discussion), and it's the same rude, in higher degree, to post the pics on the 'net. But why is it not seen—I mean by everyone, not just by security guards and mall owners—as a natural right to preserve one's own memories? Why is there even a discussion here?
What I don't understand in this discussion is why the American on the street is so hot to criticise China, today. Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that China is fifty or a hundred years behind the US on human rights issues. For much of its history, the US has been fifty or a hundred years behind Britain in similar ways. But the US has been proud during that time of the rate at which it has advanced. To take one obvious example, the US is proud of having abolished slavery in (I think) 1865, despite that England ruled against it in 1772, even before the American revolution. Back in the present, China's current rate of progress on social and economic fronts is, I think unarguably, an order of magnitude greater than the US has ever accomplished. Why, then, are they the bad guys, when to all appearances they are doing the most good, in progress times population, perhaps of any nation ever existing on the planet?
Yes, to accomplish this, China is making a lot of what appear to be very, very calculated compromises. Taken in isolation, these compromises frequently appear ugly, cynical and sometimes (for instance on the environmental front) terrifyingly risky. But could you do better, starting from where they are starting? Could the US government do better? Nobody really believes any government when they say, 'in five years we will achieve this.' But look at your scorecard. Is the US truly keeping its promises better than China does?
The biggest high level criticism you can level at the Chinese government in recent history is that, OMG, they have abandoned the ideals of Communism. The US has been compromising on some of its political ideals lately, too. Tell me honestly: which direction of change do you prefer?
The point at which you, the parent, joined the discussion, was democracy and the free press. Take a step back and look at contemporary America. Are you certain that the last two elections represent the will of the people? Are you certain that what your news media are telling you about, let's say, the governments of the US and China are unbiased, unscripted, and intellectually and factually honest? I want to be very clear. I am emphatically not saying China is at this moment better than the US. But I am saying that they seem to be working on it, very hard indeed. The US, of late, is all talk. And a lot, a lot of America's recent 'progress' is frankly retrograde.
But then the job isn't being done. Why isn't everyone resisting the tribalism and saying, dudes, we're paying you to do a job!
I understand that there is local motivation for an individual to cheat, at least where what they are competing for is not in some sense honour; but why does society honour cheats? Why vote for someone who is not considering the issues? How do you, the voter, gain by this?
But if you cheated, you didn't win. You are lying and saying that you won, sure, but you could do that with much less effort than, say, by playing the game! (So perhaps I should have said "'winning'"....)
At the end of the day, the thing that is broken about contemporary America is precisely this "do whatever is necessary" meme. Why is winning better than sportsmanship? Why should conservatives vote Republican even if the Republicans plan to destroy the economy? Shouldn't civilised people prefer to be able to sleep at night? Ultimately, isn't that what civilisation is?
There is a thing I don't understand about American society. When an officer of the law obtains evidence illegally, it appears that the evidence is disallowed and the defendant walks free. But this is not a situation where the defendant did something good; it is one where the law officer did something bad. Why not allow the evidence and then jail the crooked cop? It seems that all of America is being held hostage to a fight between two ideologies, one of which says 'the police are above the law' and the other of which says, 'well, if you think that, then the law itself is wrong and must be opposed.'
Much better, I would have thought, to hold the enforcers of the law, stringently, to the law they supposedly uphold.
The one reasonable exception to the notion that evidence should be admissible however it is obtained is evidence acquired through torture, intimidation, or extortion (such as plea bargaining), since in this case the reliability of the evidence is called into question. Oddly, though, America seems to have little problem with this.
All in all the situation seems baffling, and entirely out of control.
The thing that baffles me is that Americans think sprawl is a natural phenomenon. It is not. It is the result of bone-headed urban 'planning.' Zoning laws require that you live and work and buy your food in different places. Planning priorities allow highways to break footpaths, take roads across rail lines without building bridges, create entire suburbs with no sidewalks and with fences to prohibit walking other than on the road itself. Not having a car is not an option in the minds of the policymakers.
And as to the scale of things, I believe you are simply mistaken. The USA is a federation of states. The European Union is a federation of states. In both cases, these states contain cities of widely varying sizes. European cities have, by and large, better transit systems than American cities. This is not about scale (what, you think London is small?). European states have, by and large, better transportation systems than American ones. Feel free to compare large, wealthy US states with Germany. Hell, feel free to compare small, wealthy US states with Germany. Europe as a whole has a better ground transportation network than the US, and their sizes are of the same order.
I'm not saying there's no difference; the US has only a quarter of the population density of Europe. The again, the US has twice the per-capita GDP with which to build infrastructure.
No, the real difference is just that America hates infrastructure. And looooooves concrete.
I'm English too, but it seems that there are several circumstances under which it would be worth apologising to the person in the next seat and making a phone call. When my flight has been delayed and I am saving someone else from waiting for three hours at the airport. When my mother, travelling with me, has an unexpected reaction to her medicine. When the person I have not seen for six months needs to know that I will be arriving at terminal three, not terminal four, and we have to arrange another place to meet in the thirty minutes before I catch my flight out. Or when I realise that yes, indeed, I left the gas on.
If we could trust the airlines to be reasonable and flexible in the interpretation of the rules (just as, one hopes, one won't get ticketed when pressed into service as an ambulance), it would be another thing. But in these days of exploding shoes(?!) this is no longer the culture of air travel.
I must be missing something in your argument. If the article said that people born without eyes are not annoyed by bright lights, would we conclude that eyes are 'superfluous'? The doubts rightly raised by others are about what else this long-evolved (and therefore presumptively useful!) gene does—what it is 'for,' if you will—not questioning these researchers' theory of how HIV exploits it.
I think the parent was seeing the same situation a little differently. You ever code up Conway's Life for the blitter? Whoosh! Now CUDA does floating point where the Amiga could only do binary operations, and the GPU has a lot more control onboard, but the analogy is not unsound. After all, CPUs themselves didn't even do floating point in the old days (though of course they did do narrow integer arithmetic).
I hate it when the halting problem is trotted out as "proof" that formal verification is impossible. If you like to put intractable recursion in your code then you probably shouldn't be a programmer. (Maybe you could draft legislation instead.) In practice, you should be able to prove (at least informally) that your program halts when it's supposed to. [...] The only real significance of the halting problem is to demonstrate that there can be some pretty absurd programs out there. It is not an indictment of static analyses. Nor is it an excuse to have less than total confidence in the correctness of your code.
Apparently you aren't in the formal software verification business. The canonical example of the unverifiable piece of software is the software verifier.
And no shit! If someone tells you, "I'm always right, and you know that this is so because I say so, and I'm always right!" are you going to believe them?
So not only is formal software verification obviously impossible, but unverifiable programs that we would obviously like to verify obviously exist.
The thing you perhaps ought to be taking issue with is the idea that if it's not perfect it can't be damned useful. That, I will agree, is silly. But your original argument seems to be targeted squarely at itself!
Sure. Maybe nothing exists and there's 'really' no such thing as observation, so you can unassailably disclaim anything. But nothing you say changes the fact that mathematical objects are in relative terms more empirical, more observable, than 'everyday' objects. You may personally be averse to abstraction, but I doubt this is a general property of intelligences. Being able to see 'visible' light, on the other hand, is not a property of intelligence at all. I think you're making a mistaken assumption that your own experience is universal, and thus that the ideas that are most readily accessible to you, through your personal experience, are thus somehow more real than ones that took you longer to pick up. I understand that I'm unlikely to be able to explain this to you, but if numbers weren't real, you could never arrive at the observation of an apple. But if apples weren't real, it would make no difference to numbers at all. Many people have never seen an apple, and can still add. Now, I'll certainly agree with you that both apples and numbers are in some sense 'linguistic' constructs, in the very general sense that you have to encode things to think about them. But, for example, (copies of) numbers are part of the structure of broad classes of coding systems themselves, and fruit are not.
I guess what I'm asking you to do is to apply your own test for whether the idea exists to an apple. An apple described in quantum mechanics terms, that is, not in the linguistically and culturally programmed terms that you so distrust when it comes to numbers.
Or try it this way: we'll rule out both language and mathematical physics (which, on reflection, I guess you disbelieve in) and do it mechanically and empirically. Which machine do you suppose is easier to build, an apple detector or a counter?
Let me try again. The notion of 'apple' is, though it may not appear so, massively culturally conditioned, as is the concept of a 'galaxy'. Absent the appropriate context, an 'apple' is at best a broken piece of tree, and a 'galaxy' some ill-defined slice through the substance of the universe. The notion of 'one', on the other hand, just drops out of the theory of cosets, which is pretty easily accessible (even if 'coset' itself is a fancy academic word) to a broad class of thinking beings. Any being that classifies can arrive at counting, but that is far from sufficient to identifying an apple, even if presented with a table full of fruit and an English dictionary.
And, for the record, this is indeed a fact with consequences, as you will know if you've tried to shop at a Chinese grocery. It does matter that Platonism is a more nearly usable theory for mathematics than for every day life (indeed, this is why when communicating with my Chinese girlfriend it often saves time to write an integral or indeed (we both live in the same temperature range and pressure range and at the same physical scale) a chemical formula, while for popular music the quickest cultural bridge is to Google for the object itself).
Depends what you mean by "exists". For example, mathematical concepts are not observable (which is the condition for existence in an empirical framework), but physical systems can be observed which implement the concept. One can observe one apple or one galaxy, but one cannot observe the number one.
What a bizarre statement! You can observe photons, but any interpretation of those photons as 'an apple' or 'a galaxy' relies on evolution, learning, interpretive and indeed linguistic skills. Seeing something and interpreting it as 'one' of something involves the same process, but with almost immeasurably less input, experience and technical side conditions.
Think about it this way: what proportion of sentient beings, universe-wide, would look at one apple and think (anything conceivably translatable as) 'apple'? What proportion would think 'one'?
It's impossible to draw a perfect line between invention and discovery, since both involve the interaction of mind and universe (how could they not, since the universe hosts and induces the abstraction we call 'mind'?), but 'one' is far closer to the 'observation' end of the spectrum than 'apple' can possibly be!
As something like an old-school liberal who knows some mathematics, I think you're very wrong. The argument for a universal income is the same as the argument for gun control: forced moves break otherwise self-regulating systems. Eating and breathing are not optional. People backed against the wall are not in the position to make rational choices; they are not in the position to make any choices. So any hope that they will act locally in such a way as to improve society globally is forlorn.
How I envision the task of public policy is to build a virtual environment which operates as much as possible in the linear domain, where the consequences of action are largely forseeable, and where the marginal incentives to rational and cooperative behaviour ('productivity', if you will), are uniform. Nonlinearities from means-tested benefits are utterly counterproductive.
I'd also like to point out, by the way, that your notion of 'productivity' may be a little narrow. In hindsight, what we consider to have been productive is art, science, mathematics—undertakings that are reusable by future generations. Unlike engineering and trade (and do not imagine that I am denigrating engineering and trade, by the way!) these are generally motivated by personal passion, even if they are facilitated by money. I think most geniuses would perform better in a world where they had to fear from offending their bosses—and, indeed, spent less of their time covering basic necessities.
The real people a universal income disincentivises are telemarketers and poorly paid bureaucrats who sit and read playboy when they are supposed to be filing completely unnecessary paperwork. And that's fine with me. Send them home, let them go fishing, because they are not contributing anyway. Who knows, given the opportunity, they might even find something to do that they care about.
Have you ever given thought to what percentage of the economy is soul-destroying and indeed socially counterproductive busy work that exists entirely as a place to park useless people—often people who have been made useless by overincentivising them with the threat of poverty—that for political reasons the government doesn't want to appear 'unemployed'?
So vote for someone who will replace the minimum wage with a no questions asked universal basic income. There is no reason to collaborate in building a society that sucks to live in!
Slashdot Mirror
Nah, the people on the right think it will somehow work this time, too. Or we'd have a lot less wars, for a start.
No shit! This whole story makes me incredibly angry, you can see the veins popping out on my head (or you could, if I had a webcam). An attempt is being made here to officially identify the the Web with the Internet, which is (legally, I mean, not logically) precisely the same kind of manoeuvre as identifying peer-to-peer protocols with content piracy: it's groundwork for regulation of what client software architectures are legal.
Can the iPhone access the whole Internet? Well, can it ping every valid IPv4 and IPv6 address, I ask? Can it or not?
Evil idiots, all.
And down with flash anyway. I want my ftp!
Mm, but are you sure this applies to female astronauts? I've only met one, but she seemed a lot like my girlfriend, who is indeed the kind of person who makes lists of things to fix, and then fixes them.
Unlike me.
What if the left wing (let us say) are wrong? What if we do our science, and discover that the earth really was created in 4004BC? What if we do a survey of the world's economies and discover that universal health care really does drain the economy and produce a less healthy, less productive workforce? What if education is bad for you? What if studies show that an 80 hour work week really is better for you than a 30 hour work week? What if we are heading into an ice age and the only way we can save ourselves is by burning all the oil as soon as possible? What if it can be scientifically and objectively demonstrated that the US electoral system is the freest and fairest ever devised and should be forcibly imposed on the rest of the world, and reimposed whenever an election produces a leader who won't do what America says?
What then is the purpose of 'balance'?
Because, you know, the American center is so far to the right it makes the rest of the world's heads spin.... There might be a reason, might there not, why those who are trying to do a good job seem to be 'biased' towards the left?
I see. Can I suggest that you work on that response? You open yourself to serious ridicule. First, the "founders of the nation"—how did they come to acquire the land? Offhand, I can think of no nation with clean hands in that regard (though there may be a few very small ones, of course). Second, if you seriously consider the notion of inheritance to be self-evident, as you seem to imply, then you make it clear that any discussion will be difficult. What, for instance, if the founders of your nation chanced to be communists. Then what do you do?
But something is wrong here. You are collecting money from property owners, justified by the provided enforcement mechanism. But then you are redistributing to citizens, implying that you have collected rather more than required to cover the cost of that mechanism. By what right—and for what reason—are you doing this redistribution from residents to citizens?
So, when an American leaves US soil, are they obliged to cash out? You understand, I am taking you very seriously (I have a not unrelated view myself), but it seems to me very clear that when a person moves to your country it is often only a matter of a year or so before their contribution to the ongoing social effort is as great as that of those who were here all along, even if they have bought in rather than being born in.
I could use myself as an example. Never in my life have I worked in a country I was a citizen of. People are still glad to offer me work, because I'm doing my part to increase the shared wealth of all of us. Seems to me that someone should be looking after me—and, although your model is elegant, it's the country that I'm in at any given moment that is deriving the greatest benefit from my work.
Augment your model with inter-governmental transfer payments—or save on paperwork and have a bidirectional open migration policy—and I think your approach may have a sale. But, wait, that wasn't what you were saying, was it?
It is interesting that you do not consider the economy, jobs, defense, etc., to be technological issues. Indeed, I think that we would be doing a lot better if we considered management, administration and bureaucracy to be technological issues, and gave them same thought to effectiveness, efficiency, modularity and interface design there as we do with, well, our geeky things.
I think we can go further than this. The underlying philosophy of DRM and the DMCA is that of 'self help,' something that previous generations would have called vigilantism. The law is so messed up, the theory goes, that when I don't like someone - a thief, a customer, whoever - I should just go right ahead and shoot them. Of course, what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander: when, as a customer, I see my supplier going, 'f*** you, I'm going to lock you out of this thing that you bought because, let me tell you, I'm in a baaaad mood about customers,' well, I react by going, 'well, f*** you for your f*** you, if you're going to lock me out of this product that I paid for, well, next time, see if I pay you for your product!'
And because DRM is subject to the same lie as guns (that is, it is an offensive tactic that denies people their rights and is absolutely lacking in defensive application as its proponents try to claim, since it protects nobody against anything), well, it is subject to the same cycle of escalation. People on both sides try to 'defend' themselves by ever increasing aggression, and everyone suffers.
Lawlessness benefits no one. Hold the lawgivers to the law. And then leave enforcement to them. Cycles of revenge cannot lead to civilisation. Strict third party law enforcement is an absolute necessity. You cannot have an automatic, unlimited right to defend yourself. Not if, in the end, you want to have any rights left at all.
The thing I don't understand here is the principle of the thing. If I see it, then I have seen it. Do I not have a right to my own memories? I can understand people feeling that I there are various things that are private, that I should not tell third parties about even if I have knowledge of them; and yes, of course, this can apply to scenes. It is, for example, rude, to gossip about who you saw tonguing whom at the art gallery (not that presidents haven't lost their jobs over such gossip, but that's another discussion), and it's the same rude, in higher degree, to post the pics on the 'net. But why is it not seen—I mean by everyone, not just by security guards and mall owners—as a natural right to preserve one's own memories? Why is there even a discussion here?
What I don't understand in this discussion is why the American on the street is so hot to criticise China, today. Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that China is fifty or a hundred years behind the US on human rights issues. For much of its history, the US has been fifty or a hundred years behind Britain in similar ways. But the US has been proud during that time of the rate at which it has advanced. To take one obvious example, the US is proud of having abolished slavery in (I think) 1865, despite that England ruled against it in 1772, even before the American revolution. Back in the present, China's current rate of progress on social and economic fronts is, I think unarguably, an order of magnitude greater than the US has ever accomplished. Why, then, are they the bad guys, when to all appearances they are doing the most good, in progress times population, perhaps of any nation ever existing on the planet?
Yes, to accomplish this, China is making a lot of what appear to be very, very calculated compromises. Taken in isolation, these compromises frequently appear ugly, cynical and sometimes (for instance on the environmental front) terrifyingly risky. But could you do better, starting from where they are starting? Could the US government do better? Nobody really believes any government when they say, 'in five years we will achieve this.' But look at your scorecard. Is the US truly keeping its promises better than China does?
The biggest high level criticism you can level at the Chinese government in recent history is that, OMG, they have abandoned the ideals of Communism. The US has been compromising on some of its political ideals lately, too. Tell me honestly: which direction of change do you prefer?
The point at which you, the parent, joined the discussion, was democracy and the free press. Take a step back and look at contemporary America. Are you certain that the last two elections represent the will of the people? Are you certain that what your news media are telling you about, let's say, the governments of the US and China are unbiased, unscripted, and intellectually and factually honest? I want to be very clear. I am emphatically not saying China is at this moment better than the US. But I am saying that they seem to be working on it, very hard indeed. The US, of late, is all talk. And a lot, a lot of America's recent 'progress' is frankly retrograde.
But then the job isn't being done. Why isn't everyone resisting the tribalism and saying, dudes, we're paying you to do a job!
I understand that there is local motivation for an individual to cheat, at least where what they are competing for is not in some sense honour; but why does society honour cheats? Why vote for someone who is not considering the issues? How do you, the voter, gain by this?
But if you cheated, you didn't win. You are lying and saying that you won, sure, but you could do that with much less effort than, say, by playing the game! (So perhaps I should have said "'winning'"....)
At the end of the day, the thing that is broken about contemporary America is precisely this "do whatever is necessary" meme. Why is winning better than sportsmanship? Why should conservatives vote Republican even if the Republicans plan to destroy the economy? Shouldn't civilised people prefer to be able to sleep at night? Ultimately, isn't that what civilisation is?
It makes no sense, but nobody wants to admit it.
There is a thing I don't understand about American society. When an officer of the law obtains evidence illegally, it appears that the evidence is disallowed and the defendant walks free. But this is not a situation where the defendant did something good; it is one where the law officer did something bad. Why not allow the evidence and then jail the crooked cop? It seems that all of America is being held hostage to a fight between two ideologies, one of which says 'the police are above the law' and the other of which says, 'well, if you think that, then the law itself is wrong and must be opposed.'
Much better, I would have thought, to hold the enforcers of the law, stringently, to the law they supposedly uphold.
The one reasonable exception to the notion that evidence should be admissible however it is obtained is evidence acquired through torture, intimidation, or extortion (such as plea bargaining), since in this case the reliability of the evidence is called into question. Oddly, though, America seems to have little problem with this.
All in all the situation seems baffling, and entirely out of control.
The thing that baffles me is that Americans think sprawl is a natural phenomenon. It is not. It is the result of bone-headed urban 'planning.' Zoning laws require that you live and work and buy your food in different places. Planning priorities allow highways to break footpaths, take roads across rail lines without building bridges, create entire suburbs with no sidewalks and with fences to prohibit walking other than on the road itself. Not having a car is not an option in the minds of the policymakers.
And as to the scale of things, I believe you are simply mistaken. The USA is a federation of states. The European Union is a federation of states. In both cases, these states contain cities of widely varying sizes. European cities have, by and large, better transit systems than American cities. This is not about scale (what, you think London is small?). European states have, by and large, better transportation systems than American ones. Feel free to compare large, wealthy US states with Germany. Hell, feel free to compare small, wealthy US states with Germany. Europe as a whole has a better ground transportation network than the US, and their sizes are of the same order.
I'm not saying there's no difference; the US has only a quarter of the population density of Europe. The again, the US has twice the per-capita GDP with which to build infrastructure.
No, the real difference is just that America hates infrastructure. And looooooves concrete.
I'm English too, but it seems that there are several circumstances under which it would be worth apologising to the person in the next seat and making a phone call. When my flight has been delayed and I am saving someone else from waiting for three hours at the airport. When my mother, travelling with me, has an unexpected reaction to her medicine. When the person I have not seen for six months needs to know that I will be arriving at terminal three, not terminal four, and we have to arrange another place to meet in the thirty minutes before I catch my flight out. Or when I realise that yes, indeed, I left the gas on.
If we could trust the airlines to be reasonable and flexible in the interpretation of the rules (just as, one hopes, one won't get ticketed when pressed into service as an ambulance), it would be another thing. But in these days of exploding shoes(?!) this is no longer the culture of air travel.
I must be missing something in your argument. If the article said that people born without eyes are not annoyed by bright lights, would we conclude that eyes are 'superfluous'? The doubts rightly raised by others are about what else this long-evolved (and therefore presumptively useful!) gene does—what it is 'for,' if you will—not questioning these researchers' theory of how HIV exploits it.
I think the parent was seeing the same situation a little differently. You ever code up Conway's Life for the blitter? Whoosh! Now CUDA does floating point where the Amiga could only do binary operations, and the GPU has a lot more control onboard, but the analogy is not unsound. After all, CPUs themselves didn't even do floating point in the old days (though of course they did do narrow integer arithmetic).
Apparently you aren't in the formal software verification business. The canonical example of the unverifiable piece of software is the software verifier.
And no shit! If someone tells you, "I'm always right, and you know that this is so because I say so, and I'm always right!" are you going to believe them?
So not only is formal software verification obviously impossible, but unverifiable programs that we would obviously like to verify obviously exist.
The thing you perhaps ought to be taking issue with is the idea that if it's not perfect it can't be damned useful. That, I will agree, is silly. But your original argument seems to be targeted squarely at itself!
Sure. Maybe nothing exists and there's 'really' no such thing as observation, so you can unassailably disclaim anything. But nothing you say changes the fact that mathematical objects are in relative terms more empirical, more observable, than 'everyday' objects. You may personally be averse to abstraction, but I doubt this is a general property of intelligences. Being able to see 'visible' light, on the other hand, is not a property of intelligence at all. I think you're making a mistaken assumption that your own experience is universal, and thus that the ideas that are most readily accessible to you, through your personal experience, are thus somehow more real than ones that took you longer to pick up. I understand that I'm unlikely to be able to explain this to you, but if numbers weren't real, you could never arrive at the observation of an apple. But if apples weren't real, it would make no difference to numbers at all. Many people have never seen an apple, and can still add. Now, I'll certainly agree with you that both apples and numbers are in some sense 'linguistic' constructs, in the very general sense that you have to encode things to think about them. But, for example, (copies of) numbers are part of the structure of broad classes of coding systems themselves, and fruit are not.
I guess what I'm asking you to do is to apply your own test for whether the idea exists to an apple. An apple described in quantum mechanics terms, that is, not in the linguistically and culturally programmed terms that you so distrust when it comes to numbers.
Or try it this way: we'll rule out both language and mathematical physics (which, on reflection, I guess you disbelieve in) and do it mechanically and empirically. Which machine do you suppose is easier to build, an apple detector or a counter?
Let me try again. The notion of 'apple' is, though it may not appear so, massively culturally conditioned, as is the concept of a 'galaxy'. Absent the appropriate context, an 'apple' is at best a broken piece of tree, and a 'galaxy' some ill-defined slice through the substance of the universe. The notion of 'one', on the other hand, just drops out of the theory of cosets, which is pretty easily accessible (even if 'coset' itself is a fancy academic word) to a broad class of thinking beings. Any being that classifies can arrive at counting, but that is far from sufficient to identifying an apple, even if presented with a table full of fruit and an English dictionary.
And, for the record, this is indeed a fact with consequences, as you will know if you've tried to shop at a Chinese grocery. It does matter that Platonism is a more nearly usable theory for mathematics than for every day life (indeed, this is why when communicating with my Chinese girlfriend it often saves time to write an integral or indeed (we both live in the same temperature range and pressure range and at the same physical scale) a chemical formula, while for popular music the quickest cultural bridge is to Google for the object itself).
What a bizarre statement! You can observe photons, but any interpretation of those photons as 'an apple' or 'a galaxy' relies on evolution, learning, interpretive and indeed linguistic skills. Seeing something and interpreting it as 'one' of something involves the same process, but with almost immeasurably less input, experience and technical side conditions.
Think about it this way: what proportion of sentient beings, universe-wide, would look at one apple and think (anything conceivably translatable as) 'apple'? What proportion would think 'one'?
It's impossible to draw a perfect line between invention and discovery, since both involve the interaction of mind and universe (how could they not, since the universe hosts and induces the abstraction we call 'mind'?), but 'one' is far closer to the 'observation' end of the spectrum than 'apple' can possibly be!
As something like an old-school liberal who knows some mathematics, I think you're very wrong. The argument for a universal income is the same as the argument for gun control: forced moves break otherwise self-regulating systems. Eating and breathing are not optional. People backed against the wall are not in the position to make rational choices; they are not in the position to make any choices. So any hope that they will act locally in such a way as to improve society globally is forlorn.
How I envision the task of public policy is to build a virtual environment which operates as much as possible in the linear domain, where the consequences of action are largely forseeable, and where the marginal incentives to rational and cooperative behaviour ('productivity', if you will), are uniform. Nonlinearities from means-tested benefits are utterly counterproductive.
I'd also like to point out, by the way, that your notion of 'productivity' may be a little narrow. In hindsight, what we consider to have been productive is art, science, mathematics—undertakings that are reusable by future generations. Unlike engineering and trade (and do not imagine that I am denigrating engineering and trade, by the way!) these are generally motivated by personal passion, even if they are facilitated by money. I think most geniuses would perform better in a world where they had to fear from offending their bosses—and, indeed, spent less of their time covering basic necessities.
The real people a universal income disincentivises are telemarketers and poorly paid bureaucrats who sit and read playboy when they are supposed to be filing completely unnecessary paperwork. And that's fine with me. Send them home, let them go fishing, because they are not contributing anyway. Who knows, given the opportunity, they might even find something to do that they care about.
Have you ever given thought to what percentage of the economy is soul-destroying and indeed socially counterproductive busy work that exists entirely as a place to park useless people—often people who have been made useless by overincentivising them with the threat of poverty—that for political reasons the government doesn't want to appear 'unemployed'?
So vote for someone who will replace the minimum wage with a no questions asked universal basic income. There is no reason to collaborate in building a society that sucks to live in!