I spent all that time and now you're saying I can't use my own invention just because you finished a few days earlier?
Hold on there, I didn't say that anywhere. In fact, I agree that this is a big problem with the current system. The whole point of my post was that the current system is flawed (but that simply having no system wouldn't work either).
I don't know that anyone has demonstrated that removing IP protection (patents and/or copyrights) would in fact "not work". Would people stop innovating completely without the potential for a monopoly? I doubt it. Would they innovate less? Perhaps. Would more access provide a better environment for other to build on prior work? Probably.
I suspect that most "innovation" in the economy goes towards improving somebody's core business (like improvements to robots to build cars faster) for which patent protection is only a side benefit - the improvements have value because they make something possible. These types of improvements will occur with or without patent protection. The whole point of patent protection was to ensure that these improvements were widely disseminated through the patent application process - however I don't know that the patent application paperwork actually does spread the new knowledge around very effectively.
Lack of patent protection would alter the way the "lone inventor" would need to operate. With the current system I can (in principle) come up with some great idea and patent it and then sell the rights to some manufacturer to allow them to use my idea in some sort of "better mousetrap". Without the patent protection I am going to have to work harder with "trade secrets" and "non-disclosure agreements" in order to market my idea. Maybe it would mean the complete loss of the "lone inventor" type of career. But how much innovation comes from that group in any case?
Maybe Apple knows it won't be able to keep up with demand for some time and that being exclusive to whoever will still allow them to immediately sell every single device that comes off the end of the production line.
If that is the case, the exclusivity deal might actually be of value to Apple even without a truckload of cash as a payment. Having the newest model for sale everywhere, but unavailable anywhere is actually pretty bad from a PR point of view, The "fanboys" on the "other" carriers would possibly be more pissed if their carrier was allowed to sell it but wasn't able to meet demand compared to how they might feel towards Apple if it just wasn't available on their carrier.
If robots grow all the food, and provide all the labour, then the proles better be getting something out of it or eventually they will tear down the walls and take it.
Only to be shot by the robotic soldiers. Knowing humanity, how this will likely play out is that the few overlords live in luxury and the rest of us will die. Then the overlords die too, and humanity ends.
That's how I figure it is going to work out too when I'm feeling gloomy. When I'm in a better mood I hope that enlightened self-interest will make at least a few of the overlords work towards a bit more sane system.
No one will be turned away from an emergency room.
And that's the big problem. Only EMERGENCIES should be treated at an emergency room. If we would start turning away people that show up for non-emergencies, we wouldn't have so many ERs going under.
Unfortunately, in order to turn someone away, you need to figure out what the problem is, and that alone takes up time and resources. Additionally, if you turn away the minor uninsured problems, at least some of them will end up coming back later as major uninsured problems.
This. Why public healthcare can't be run by the states? Heck, Canada does just that, so it's a model that's proven to work.
(Canadian provinces do cooperate in a money redistribution scheme that also involves Feds, but it is voluntary, and provinces can drop out at will and run their own healthcare programs - or none at all.)
I believe that there is federal legislation (Canada Health Act perhaps?) that requires each province to enact health care legislation that meets certain minimal standards for each province to meet.
But it looks like "shutdown" is correct in that the provinces do not in fact HAVE to follow the CHA, but when they step out of line, the feds can (and do) reduce the amount of money the federal government provides in proportion to the seriousness of the infraction.
"Apple tax" is common internet and/. parlance. Perhaps you are new here.
"Apple tax" implies that Apple is overcharging for a device just because they are Apple. There are arguments that can be made that such increased price is justified for various reasons, but to be at all reasonable, the Apple product would need to be higher priced than the same product from someone else (and of course there are huge discrepancies as to what is considered "the same").
If they are producing a product at the same price-point as everyone else, it does not make much sense to use the "Apple tax" pejorative.
Sure, but what happens when you end up with a few thousand lawyers, a few thousand doctors, and a few thousand entertainers (and a few thousand of each other possible profession) who, with all this automation assistance, can supply the needs of the entire country? Increased efficiency is a great thing, but when we end up with only a small fraction of the population being needed to do the work - with today's economic system, the rest of the population is screwed. No job, no money, no way to participate in the whole system.
I say we start reducing the legal work week by a half hour every year. No lets do it asymptotically, reduce the work week (or the yearly amount of work by way of increased vacations or something like that) by 1.5%. Or maybe base the reduction percentage by some measure of the economy's increased efficiency or growth or something like that. I want my great grandkids to have a 2 hour work week and yet still enough to eat and the ability to pursue their dreams.
Until we have AI that's as smart as humans, there will be plenty of jobs for humans to do, so long as they get off their butt and don't sit around complaining about how their super-important job actually turned out to be so simple that a computer can do it better.
I guess it depends on what is meant by "plenty". At some point (I think we are well past it already, but even if it has not yet happened, it eventually will), the number of people necessary to do the work to support the entire population becomes small enough that significant numbers of people are going to be unable to find jobs because their services are just not necessary. Even if your job is so complicated that no computer can do it - is the society going to desire everyone working at that one job type? We currently have jobs for most people, and there are very few jobs that society needs filling that are currently unfilled. If every current job that can currently be replaced by automation were in fact replaced by automation, there would be so many people out of work that I no matter what amazing skills they might have, there is just no need for society to have them all be working - all the needed spots are filled.
Eventually we will need to come up with some pretty serious changes to how we put together this economic system in order that we do not have huge fractions of people with no hope for being a useful member of the society. Maybe dropping to a 30 (or 20, 10, or 5?) hour work-week is needed. Maybe some sort of societal handout (guaranteed annual income, "social credit", "societal dividend", whatever) would work. If robots grow all the food, and provide all the labour, then the proles better be getting something out of it or eventually they will tear down the walls and take it.
Sure, the pig studies where one burns up an entire pig via this type of wicking effect are just shoddy work done to cover up the murders done by the illumitati.
Animals have a lot of chemical energy stored in their body, under the right conditions they can sustain combustion. It doesn't have to happen at particularly high temperatures - it just takes a longer time to consume the material at lower temperatures.
Your missing the full picture here, nothing was left of the body except his feet yet nothing else in the house was destroyed except floor under him and ceiling over him! This is the true mystery of all these events.
Except it isn't that mysterious. If he burned like a candle, it isn't too surprising that nothing else when up in flames. This type of fire doesn't make a whole bunch of heat to cause things close by to burn. A bit of charring on the ceiling is about all you would expect. Sort of like what the candle inside a jack-o-lantern does to the top of the pumpkin.
This doesn't account for the accounts made by actual survivors of this phenomenon. There have been people who have survived the experience and could offer no explanation at all.
Well, except for the fact that they did not actually combust, so we don't really know that what they reported is in fact at all related to the supposed SHC cases such as this one.
Sure this case (and similar ones) are pretty creepy, but what do you think is more likely: An old guy dies from a heart attack (or other mundane cause) and a spark from the open fireplace in the room (was he a smoker? maybe he was smoking at the time and dropped his cigarette onto his clothes as he fell) starts his clothing to smolder and he burns like a candle for eight hours *as has been demonstrated possible with pigs*. Or some mysterious non-physical magic thing happened to char him in the spot.
Heck, I would more likely believe that someone strapped him to a chair, and injected him with air bubbles to cause his death, and then carefully laid him out and started him on fire in such a way as to maximize the wicking effect and cover up his evil plans. Rather than any mysterious SHC. What was the butler up to? Does the good-for-nothing son listed in the will have an alibi? Was the victim getting too close to the evidence of the toxic waste dumping coverup near the local reservoir? Have I been watching to much CSI?
"What happened, for instance, to swell the bureaucracy at the UC over the past two decades? There now are nearly as many senior managers (8,144) as tenured and tenure-track faculty (8,521). As recently as 1993, the ratio between these groups was much different - 2,429 to 6,846.
Put another way, 18 years ago the student-to-upper management ratio was 62-to-1. Now it's all the way down to 2-to-1. The ratio of students to regular faculty, meanwhile, has risen from 22-to-1 in 1993 to 26-to-1."
That seems strange - somehow even though the number of managers only went up by a factor of about 3 (from 2400 to 8100) the manager-student ratio when down by a factor of 31? (from 62-to-1 for 2-to-1 ?) Are there really half as many managers at UC as there are students? And yet there are more tenure-track faculty than managers by their numbers - shouldn't the teacher-student ratio be (if only marginally) larger than the manager-student ratio?
Maybe I missed something - the article you referenced seems to say that the energy generate equals the energy used in about 4 years, for panels with a lifetime of 20+ years. Seems like a net gain of a factor of 4 or 5, which isn't that bad in my opinion. I guess 20% is perhaps a "significant fraction" in some situations, but you seem to be implying that "going solar" is illogical from an energy-of-production point of view, when it certainly is not.
The practice of universities patenting everything that comes out of their labs is a relatively recent thing, and arguably has decreased the rate that new companies have been created out of university research. Without the patents and with a wide publication of university research, everyone in the world has the potential to benefit from that research, but the team that did the research has the advantage of actually being skilled with the methods and techniques and some or all of them could start a company to exploit that skillset. Will patent encumbrance, those people need to get the IP from the university or industrial partner before they can start their new company.
So, HFT is a system that encourages people to do what they don't really want to? The buyer who was only willing to pay $19.73 now pays more and the seller who wanted $19.76 gets less, and the "middle man" gets the difference? Without the HFT, none of these trades take place and the buyer and seller just sit around - but who cares? Either one of them always has the option of chaining their price. With the HFT, you've described a cascade of buy and sell transactions with lots of money moving around and a bunch of people making or losing various amounts of money but overall, the only real outcome is the loss of energy as all those computers thought about things.
Liquidity in a market is very important, but designing a system to encourage or reward transaction speeds at the sub-second rate only increases liquidity a marginal amount while creating a host of other ills.
The only growing economies are NOT the US and Europe.
How can you lump the US in with Europe? Yes, the US are approaching that level of indebtedness....
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_public_debt , as a percentage of GDP (IMF 2010 numbers), the US has less debt than Greece, Italy, Iceland, Belgium, and Ireland, but more than the other countries in the EU. I think that more recent numbers has the US in a worse position.
Personally, I feel that debt (while important) is less of a problem than the dysfunctional political system we seem to have developed. Making tough choices, compromising, and working towards a positive outcome seem virtually non-existent. Posturing, fear-mongering, and constant electioneering seem to be the only activity of those we have running things. May "the good ole days" weren't always good (and as Billy Joel might say: "tomorrow isn't as bad as it seems"), but if certainly feels like in my lifetime this is as bad as it has ever been.
The number of people living within walking distance of the downtown "core" in Vancouver is significantly higher than in Seattle (at least on a percentage basis). The whole "west end" of Vancouver houses about 45,000 out of 640,000 of Vancouver residents as only one example - Coal Harbour, the "East Side", Yaletown and False Creek house a bunch of people within walking distance of the financial and shopping and entertainment districts in the downtown. The downtown does have some non-residential regions, but there are a lot of "living areas" in the downtown - see the links to downtown neighbourhoods at Wikipedia:
With that said, Canada has repeated much of the same errors in city planning as has happened in much of the US, resulting is similar suburban sprawl and inner-city urban decay.
In comparing Vancouver and Seattle, I have heard a few times that Seattle planners look to Vancouver as an example of the benefits of not having a major highway system in the city - it has promoted the growth of alternative commercial centres (in Burnaby, Surrey, Abbotsford), and limited the distances people commute (though not the amount of time). Highways are good for getting stuff from one city to another, but when they enable people to travel huge distances daily they tend to fragment the development of a sense of local community and result in huge environmental costs.
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I spent all that time and now you're saying I can't use my own invention just because you finished a few days earlier?
Hold on there, I didn't say that anywhere. In fact, I agree that this is a big problem with the current system. The whole point of my post was that the current system is flawed (but that simply having no system wouldn't work either).
I don't know that anyone has demonstrated that removing IP protection (patents and/or copyrights) would in fact "not work". Would people stop innovating completely without the potential for a monopoly? I doubt it. Would they innovate less? Perhaps. Would more access provide a better environment for other to build on prior work? Probably.
I suspect that most "innovation" in the economy goes towards improving somebody's core business (like improvements to robots to build cars faster) for which patent protection is only a side benefit - the improvements have value because they make something possible. These types of improvements will occur with or without patent protection. The whole point of patent protection was to ensure that these improvements were widely disseminated through the patent application process - however I don't know that the patent application paperwork actually does spread the new knowledge around very effectively.
Lack of patent protection would alter the way the "lone inventor" would need to operate. With the current system I can (in principle) come up with some great idea and patent it and then sell the rights to some manufacturer to allow them to use my idea in some sort of "better mousetrap". Without the patent protection I am going to have to work harder with "trade secrets" and "non-disclosure agreements" in order to market my idea. Maybe it would mean the complete loss of the "lone inventor" type of career. But how much innovation comes from that group in any case?
Maybe Apple knows it won't be able to keep up with demand for some time and that being exclusive to whoever will still allow them to immediately sell every single device that comes off the end of the production line.
If that is the case, the exclusivity deal might actually be of value to Apple even without a truckload of cash as a payment. Having the newest model for sale everywhere, but unavailable anywhere is actually pretty bad from a PR point of view, The "fanboys" on the "other" carriers would possibly be more pissed if their carrier was allowed to sell it but wasn't able to meet demand compared to how they might feel towards Apple if it just wasn't available on their carrier.
Only to be shot by the robotic soldiers. Knowing humanity, how this will likely play out is that the few overlords live in luxury and the rest of us will die. Then the overlords die too, and humanity ends.
That's how I figure it is going to work out too when I'm feeling gloomy. When I'm in a better mood I hope that enlightened self-interest will make at least a few of the overlords work towards a bit more sane system.
Hey, it could happen!
No one will be turned away from an emergency room.
And that's the big problem. Only EMERGENCIES should be treated at an emergency room. If we would start turning away people that show up for non-emergencies, we wouldn't have so many ERs going under.
Unfortunately, in order to turn someone away, you need to figure out what the problem is, and that alone takes up time and resources. Additionally, if you turn away the minor uninsured problems, at least some of them will end up coming back later as major uninsured problems.
This. Why public healthcare can't be run by the states? Heck, Canada does just that, so it's a model that's proven to work.
(Canadian provinces do cooperate in a money redistribution scheme that also involves Feds, but it is voluntary, and provinces can drop out at will and run their own healthcare programs - or none at all.)
I believe that there is federal legislation (Canada Health Act perhaps?) that requires each province to enact health care legislation that meets certain minimal standards for each province to meet.
Hey, looks like I was correct in my memory of the name at least: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_Health_Act
But it looks like "shutdown" is correct in that the provinces do not in fact HAVE to follow the CHA, but when they step out of line, the feds can (and do) reduce the amount of money the federal government provides in proportion to the seriousness of the infraction.
"Apple tax" is common internet and /. parlance. Perhaps you are new here.
"Apple tax" implies that Apple is overcharging for a device just because they are Apple. There are arguments that can be made that such increased price is justified for various reasons, but to be at all reasonable, the Apple product would need to be higher priced than the same product from someone else (and of course there are huge discrepancies as to what is considered "the same").
If they are producing a product at the same price-point as everyone else, it does not make much sense to use the "Apple tax" pejorative.
The solution to all this... and the economic collapse we're experiencing... is the following:
less work
more work sharing
Amen.
Sure, but what happens when you end up with a few thousand lawyers, a few thousand doctors, and a few thousand entertainers (and a few thousand of each other possible profession) who, with all this automation assistance, can supply the needs of the entire country? Increased efficiency is a great thing, but when we end up with only a small fraction of the population being needed to do the work - with today's economic system, the rest of the population is screwed. No job, no money, no way to participate in the whole system.
I say we start reducing the legal work week by a half hour every year. No lets do it asymptotically, reduce the work week (or the yearly amount of work by way of increased vacations or something like that) by 1.5%. Or maybe base the reduction percentage by some measure of the economy's increased efficiency or growth or something like that. I want my great grandkids to have a 2 hour work week and yet still enough to eat and the ability to pursue their dreams.
Until we have AI that's as smart as humans, there will be plenty of jobs for humans to do, so long as they get off their butt and don't sit around complaining about how their super-important job actually turned out to be so simple that a computer can do it better.
I guess it depends on what is meant by "plenty". At some point (I think we are well past it already, but even if it has not yet happened, it eventually will), the number of people necessary to do the work to support the entire population becomes small enough that significant numbers of people are going to be unable to find jobs because their services are just not necessary. Even if your job is so complicated that no computer can do it - is the society going to desire everyone working at that one job type? We currently have jobs for most people, and there are very few jobs that society needs filling that are currently unfilled. If every current job that can currently be replaced by automation were in fact replaced by automation, there would be so many people out of work that I no matter what amazing skills they might have, there is just no need for society to have them all be working - all the needed spots are filled.
Eventually we will need to come up with some pretty serious changes to how we put together this economic system in order that we do not have huge fractions of people with no hope for being a useful member of the society. Maybe dropping to a 30 (or 20, 10, or 5?) hour work-week is needed. Maybe some sort of societal handout (guaranteed annual income, "social credit", "societal dividend", whatever) would work. If robots grow all the food, and provide all the labour, then the proles better be getting something out of it or eventually they will tear down the walls and take it.
If it isn't insanely complicated, it must be because people are lazy. Blame the workers, that's the ticket.
hear! hear!
But at the time, the choice was between Obamma and some guy who didn't even pretend to have been born in the USA.
I suspect that your natural gas fire was not "spontaneous", but rather was started either by a spark or a pilot light.
Sure, the pig studies where one burns up an entire pig via this type of wicking effect are just shoddy work done to cover up the murders done by the illumitati.
Animals have a lot of chemical energy stored in their body, under the right conditions they can sustain combustion. It doesn't have to happen at particularly high temperatures - it just takes a longer time to consume the material at lower temperatures.
Your missing the full picture here, nothing was left of the body except his feet yet nothing else in the house was destroyed except floor under him and ceiling over him!
This is the true mystery of all these events.
Except it isn't that mysterious. If he burned like a candle, it isn't too surprising that nothing else when up in flames. This type of fire doesn't make a whole bunch of heat to cause things close by to burn. A bit of charring on the ceiling is about all you would expect. Sort of like what the candle inside a jack-o-lantern does to the top of the pumpkin.
This doesn't account for the accounts made by actual survivors of this phenomenon. There have been people who have survived the experience and could offer no explanation at all.
Well, except for the fact that they did not actually combust, so we don't really know that what they reported is in fact at all related to the supposed SHC cases such as this one.
Sure this case (and similar ones) are pretty creepy, but what do you think is more likely: An old guy dies from a heart attack (or other mundane cause) and a spark from the open fireplace in the room (was he a smoker? maybe he was smoking at the time and dropped his cigarette onto his clothes as he fell) starts his clothing to smolder and he burns like a candle for eight hours *as has been demonstrated possible with pigs*. Or some mysterious non-physical magic thing happened to char him in the spot.
Heck, I would more likely believe that someone strapped him to a chair, and injected him with air bubbles to cause his death, and then carefully laid him out and started him on fire in such a way as to maximize the wicking effect and cover up his evil plans. Rather than any mysterious SHC. What was the butler up to? Does the good-for-nothing son listed in the will have an alibi? Was the victim getting too close to the evidence of the toxic waste dumping coverup near the local reservoir? Have I been watching to much CSI?
"What happened, for instance, to swell the bureaucracy at the UC over the past two decades? There now are nearly as many senior managers (8,144) as tenured and tenure-track faculty (8,521). As recently as 1993, the ratio between these groups was much different - 2,429 to 6,846.
Put another way, 18 years ago the student-to-upper management ratio was 62-to-1. Now it's all the way down to 2-to-1. The ratio of students to regular faculty, meanwhile, has risen from 22-to-1 in 1993 to 26-to-1."
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/585302/201109191844/By-The-Way-We-Teach-A-Little-Too.htm
That seems strange - somehow even though the number of managers only went up by a factor of about 3 (from 2400 to 8100) the manager-student ratio when down by a factor of 31? (from 62-to-1 for 2-to-1 ?) Are there really half as many managers at UC as there are students? And yet there are more tenure-track faculty than managers by their numbers - shouldn't the teacher-student ratio be (if only marginally) larger than the manager-student ratio?
it doesn't matter: the amount of energy that goes into the production of those panels is a significant fraction of the energy they generate over their lifetime. whoops... http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090201062719AATwL62
Maybe I missed something - the article you referenced seems to say that the energy generate equals the energy used in about 4 years, for panels with a lifetime of 20+ years. Seems like a net gain of a factor of 4 or 5, which isn't that bad in my opinion. I guess 20% is perhaps a "significant fraction" in some situations, but you seem to be implying that "going solar" is illogical from an energy-of-production point of view, when it certainly is not.
There's more to learning than test scores.
Exactly what I thought!
yeah, right here: http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/08/11/1458205/Cancer-Cured-By-HIV
but at least this story title is a bit more accurate.
Yeah, but that one had a very poor title, implying that the HIV did the curing, whereas it was really only used to do the reprogramming.
The practice of universities patenting everything that comes out of their labs is a relatively recent thing, and arguably has decreased the rate that new companies have been created out of university research. Without the patents and with a wide publication of university research, everyone in the world has the potential to benefit from that research, but the team that did the research has the advantage of actually being skilled with the methods and techniques and some or all of them could start a company to exploit that skillset. Will patent encumbrance, those people need to get the IP from the university or industrial partner before they can start their new company.
Sorry, locations outside the U.S. are currently not supported.
drat.
I suppose they will be eventually.
So, HFT is a system that encourages people to do what they don't really want to? The buyer who was only willing to pay $19.73 now pays more and the seller who wanted $19.76 gets less, and the "middle man" gets the difference? Without the HFT, none of these trades take place and the buyer and seller just sit around - but who cares? Either one of them always has the option of chaining their price. With the HFT, you've described a cascade of buy and sell transactions with lots of money moving around and a bunch of people making or losing various amounts of money but overall, the only real outcome is the loss of energy as all those computers thought about things.
Liquidity in a market is very important, but designing a system to encourage or reward transaction speeds at the sub-second rate only increases liquidity a marginal amount while creating a host of other ills.
The only growing economies are NOT the US and Europe.
How can you lump the US in with Europe? Yes, the US are approaching that level of indebtedness....
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_public_debt , as a percentage of GDP (IMF 2010 numbers), the US has less debt than Greece, Italy, Iceland, Belgium, and Ireland, but more than the other countries in the EU. I think that more recent numbers has the US in a worse position.
Personally, I feel that debt (while important) is less of a problem than the dysfunctional political system we seem to have developed. Making tough choices, compromising, and working towards a positive outcome seem virtually non-existent. Posturing, fear-mongering, and constant electioneering seem to be the only activity of those we have running things. May "the good ole days" weren't always good (and as Billy Joel might say: "tomorrow isn't as bad as it seems"), but if certainly feels like in my lifetime this is as bad as it has ever been.
The number of people living within walking distance of the downtown "core" in Vancouver is significantly higher than in Seattle (at least on a percentage basis). The whole "west end" of Vancouver houses about 45,000 out of 640,000 of Vancouver residents as only one example - Coal Harbour, the "East Side", Yaletown and False Creek house a bunch of people within walking distance of the financial and shopping and entertainment districts in the downtown. The downtown does have some non-residential regions, but there are a lot of "living areas" in the downtown - see the links to downtown neighbourhoods at Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downtown_Vancouver
With that said, Canada has repeated much of the same errors in city planning as has happened in much of the US, resulting is similar suburban sprawl and inner-city urban decay.
In comparing Vancouver and Seattle, I have heard a few times that Seattle planners look to Vancouver as an example of the benefits of not having a major highway system in the city - it has promoted the growth of alternative commercial centres (in Burnaby, Surrey, Abbotsford), and limited the distances people commute (though not the amount of time). Highways are good for getting stuff from one city to another, but when they enable people to travel huge distances daily they tend to fragment the development of a sense of local community and result in huge environmental costs.