"Talking about what was "before" the big bang, is like talking about what is north of the north pole." Maybe, maybe not. If we find evidence for these black holes then it shows there was a before the big bang and we have to change our view of the universe accordingly. Until we look for the evidence we don't know, that's kind of the point of science.
I'm not sure what you outline is a universal truth. Infact gated communities are IME a very American phenomenon. As a rule lack of supply does tend to drive up prices, but you're right that if you get it wrong and people start cramming into ever smaller houses and there is not enough maintenance by the landlords then the path to a slum is very easy to take. It's just as likely that you will always have some trendy areas of cities that people want to live in at any cost they can afford. I know what you mean by demand going to 0 but as long as mortgages are given based upon the perceived future value of the property then there is nothing to stop them going sky high. An expensive house attracts a rich clientelle who will look after it/demand it is refurbished. This increases its worth and if anything drives demand and prices higher which the estate agents look at and see it as a sound investment so increase the asking price which feeds back to the banks who are willing to lend more and... I really see no limit given the right social factors.
I can only speak for the UK here, but. When the rail system was privatised it was fragmented into functional units, one company owned the tracks several companies run the services, and several companies bought the trains and leased them to the operational companies. The whole thing was sold off cheap to encourage investment and given that it was losing money that's about all they could get for it. So far so good, lots of competition, should drive prices low. Except that the companies that run the services were each given a local monopoly not allowed to compete on each others grounds. Good luck connecting up your services from different rail companies. Onto the companies who own the trains. let's say a train carriage costs £1million. They were by regulation given a price they could hire them out for, they were allowed to charge approx 1/10th the cost to allow them to have a 10 year payback on investment. i.e. they would charge £100,000 per year for a train that would cost £1million if you bought it today (except you bought it 15 years ago and sold it off for a fraction of that cost but i digress).The idea was this would encourage new investment. However the companies that ran the services were not allowed to buy their own trains, they HAD to hire from one of the hire companies. It was in the train hire companies interest to not invest because the fee they got was related to the cost of the train, no account made for depreciation. One or two got wise and bought new trains for even more money but again it was in their interest to buy the most expensive train they could. So we're in a situation where we (The british tax payer) already had paid for the rail network, but we're having to pay for it again because we have to repay the loans bankers they took out to buy the network. We have poor investment in sub-optimal solutions designed to maximise personal profit. We have multiple small monopolies with all the costs of bureaucracy and lack of competition combined with the inability to reduce costs through application of economies of scale. We have an ever aging network that investment is held up in by planning problems and the fact it takes longer to install a new system than it does for the next system to come along. I could go on, but hopefully you get an idea of how easy it is to lose a LOT of money on a rail network.
Which is an interesting list because when I asked my friends what the best books in literature was the list was overwhelmingly dominated by sci-fi and fantasy.
It all depends on who you ask what answers you get; I'm not saying that the people at the BBC were dishonest, but they might have been showing their background just as my friends show mine.
Sorry but IME that's just how serious engineering works, not software engineering usually I'll grant you, but by the time you've got to "Run first test engine" or "First engine off production line" or "First Launch" at each of those stages you've spent most of the money and pretty much already delivered the end product. Unless you want to have a single milestone at the end of the project...
You could have a milestone of "Initial architecture agreed" and that's a sensible thing to do is come up with an architecture and agree it with your customer, but how do you do that but have a design review? Same goes for "First Blueprints" "Tooling frozen" "First Model Testing" and so on, you normally also want to review not just the fact that the engine works but all the ancillery data, in many businesses you will produce something that works at your test, but how well does it work, what performance did it have, what error codes were generated, for that you need a design review. Now this may not be how most software is produced (Outside of large companies) but it is certainly how most mechanical engineering is done and certainly how any safety critical systems are designed.
"If a wealthy parent never gives his children anything except an education, his attention and knowledge, and a clean slate to start adult life" Why is a wealthy parent more likely to give any of these than a poor parent? Those children who have a tremendous advantage will IME have a tremendous disadvantage in that they never know the value of a dollar, they will expect everything to be handed to them, they will possibly succeed because their parents set them up with a job, but if they're not up to the job surely they'll fail? (Although JWB proves this completely invalid so maybe I should shut up;-))
The stereotype of the poor parent who works all hours of the day to buy a roof over the head is just as common as the stereotype of the rich businessman who has no time for anything but his career. Now it was eye-opening to me when i first went to Uni where over 50% of the people there had been to private school and to listen to the extra equipment their school had made me green with envy. That didn't mean that they knew the material any better though, it just meant that it was more likley that they would see science as an interesting subject. Yes I'd also agree that rich parents are more likely to expect success from their children because they want them to achieve a similar life to that that they have, and that works against some people who are born poor (hell I just went into electronics because it was fun, I thought I'd end up on a factory floor if I were lucky, but to be designing chips now is a dream come true, but I didn't know this was even possible and perhaps that's why poverty is contagious.)
"The uppermost class does not, as a whole, act as if the benefit and support of the lowest are a burden they wish to bear, even if it means no real sacrifice to their standard of living or lifestyle." On the whole no I'd agree they don't, but it only takes one as long as they're sufficiently rich;-)
Evidence of this in the real world: The Gates foundation. But it's not just that there are plenty of forces at play that drive wealth from the rich to the poor. Any social welfare program to build homeless shelters, medicare, All those rich twerps buying bizzare art from an unknown starving artist, etc. Now they may not be things that are done for altruistic reasons, they may be for reasons of publicity, guilt, politics, or even to syphon money from the middle class to the lower class, but it does seem to happen. Also as a honest question is the poorest person in a wealthy country such as the USA better off than the poorest person somewhere like Africa? I honestly don't know, but I suspect they would be, and therefore jump to say that a greater overall wealth of a nation would provide for a better situation for all involved. I guess it comes down to I see the gap between the rich and the poor as one metric of a society, but by no means the only measure and that a greater gap could just mean that the system is working and those who do work hard are being rewarded and those who don't are being punished. Now this is far from saying that someone who is currently poor deserves to be, but I have certainly seen enough people in my life whose honest survival policy was to play the council benefit system and others who have been living off the money that great grandaddy left them whilst those who lost everything to a corrupt business partner toil to keep a roof over their heads that to me fair now is about being rewarded for your efforts rather than everyone having the same.
Back to your post though: "Assuming the holders of capital and the über-rich class are one and the same (and I see no reason not to make that assumption)".
I don't understand how this could be anything other than true, isn't owning capital and being part of the rich class synonymous? Or are you making a distinction between someone who makes a million a week by working as a banker and someone who makes a million a week from owning real estate? While I see that the motivations of the two people there would be very different, the real situation when it comes to how they spend their money and what that money will do for the rest of society would seem to me to be equivalent.
I'm really interested in this question and other people's viewpoints on it because I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about the transition to a post-scarcity society so really want people to pick holes in my viewpoint. I also spend a lot of time thinking about social justice and I can't say I'm proud of some of my conclusions so again I want challenging...
See I get a different story from those statistics. Not all of them give time related information which is what we're discussing, but: Homelessness is going down. Racism and Sexism are decreasing Those who are born in bottom quartile are less likely to stay lower quartile.
So for me that site where it gives time based information implies that things are getting better, what and who you are born as matters less than what you do. As far as a just society goes this is a better thing. Now things are still pretty bad, but the trend I read from those statistics is one of upwards. Now as for what counts as quality of life that's a good question that changes from one person to the next; however I do like "the ancient Greeks defined happiness as the exercise of vital powers, along lines of excellence, in a life affording them scope." In short the ability to pursue your dreams and get good at something. If this is true then the fall of sexism and racism combined with more social mobility are therefore the metrics that matter in determining quality of life. Alternatively look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the survival and comfort seem to be getting better with each generation with cheap food and sufficient housing. The more upper level ones like psychological and self actualisation are IMO greatly helped by things like social networks, so it seems to me that this generation is better placed than any other to be happy and have a high quality of life. This all assumes that most people are fed and have access to health care and shelter, but the trend on those fronts seems to be positive so in what way isn't the quality of life improving?
"the gap between normal and low incomes and the insanely rich has become incredibly huge." But does that matter? As long as as a society everyone is getting better does it matter that some are getting better faster than others?
Now you may say that it's not fair to those born to those who aren't rich, but what is the solution? Hold back those who are working to improve society? (This may not be rich people per-se but would include those with their sights on being rich) Would you prevent parents from passing on the fruits of their labours to their offspring? how do you make a society that is fair if you want to allow those who are successful and work hard to profit from their labour and you want to allow people to pass on the fruits of their work to their children? Is it fair to say to someone: "I don't care how hard you work, or how lucky you are or who clever you are, you're only allowed to do so much before we'll stop you." Now TBH the situation of the French Royality springs to mind here and why that should have been stopped. IMO that is very different to the current situation because anyone can become the new royalty, those who became billionaires off social networks or Paypal are testament to the fact that unlike the french royalty anyone can become part of that class as long as you do something that enough people want.
100% agree with your post, but I was just trying to get at that it would probably be a status symbol how many people you could get to work for you so while robots could clean your house it would be a symbol of status to have a person do it. The best restaurants would still use human waiters for similar reasons. Also would the AI be able to compose music? Possibly but would people want to listen to it. Unless it's kind of like now people prefer going to the theatre to watching a film of the theatre production. Maybe, don't know...
That fails to count for the fact that the technology to make things by machines in abundance would inevitably mean that the cost would be constant across society. Let me take an example. In the 1920s only the few eccentric uber-rich could afford a motorcar. Nowadays even your average joe finds a sports car well within his average budget. To one of the upper class sports cars are effectively free. For most middle class people food is a small part of the family budget and effectively available in a larger quantity than they can use. Compare that to the 1920s or earlier. Now fast forward another century. In the same way food is now effectively free to the middle class, then the sports cars that were an occasional luxury are now effectively free and it is the things like houses and land that are the limits. The point is the rich man is only rich because he can get those under him who are poor to work for him. If all goods are produced by the machines he owns then he has to give some of these machines to other people to wait his tables, to play music for him, to tidy his house. If the goods are effectively free to him then he will pay lots of those to get that great cook to cook for him instead of his rival, the great cook will pay hugely to those who work for him as assistants. As long as there is a capitalist system in effect the laws of supply and demand will mean that the wealth will trickle down. This then means to me that in the future society where machines can make more universal machines and therefore we do live in abundance the only two things that will be scarce will be things like music and waiters and cleaners. This to me puts a new light on the current copyright laws, but that's another story...
Okay so you have the endgame of the post-scarcity society where machines make everything limited only by materials and energy input(and with orbital factories those are effectively infinite). Eventually everything goes beyond very cheap and becomes free. It doesn't matter who owns anything anymore because there is more than enough for everyone. (Except for fashion and IP, but I digress).
Somewhere between where we are and there: goods become cheaper and there are a few super rich who control the means of production. Those with anything are taxed to pay for those who don't and you get social welfare programs, medicare etc to mean that the poor aren't dying on the street of hunger and lack of medical care. As time goes on you end up with the rich who do little because they own everything, a social underclass who live off benefits and a middle class who are aspirational to become richer and therefore more powerful. It then becomes if you're born with riches, your machines build it all for you. If you are born without then social welfare keeps you alive. If you want to progress (get the latest good, toys fashions, bigger house etc) you have to work for it. Quite frankly this is almost my idea description of a society that those who can't work or chose not to are still supported and those who want to progress can, and in fact we seem very close to having this now.I just hope we carry on progressing this way until we reach the point where machines can build everything and people don't need to work at all, I don't see why we can't progress to this situation.
So to go back to your original point: Those bastards who made this possible who designed invested in and implemented those machines should be rewarded for that. After all they could have spent their money on paintings, or big parties or mansions but they didn't they build machines that made products cheaper with less human labor. This is a good thing, or would you rather we went back to 90% of the population toiling on the fields in order to scratch a survival?
Some earlier posts have covered this in more detail but in short evolution is about survival of the fittest sure, but it's also about beating your competitors. A good example is the forest canopy where being taller than your competitors is more important than being efficient with that light, for most food crops this translates to us trying to engineer shorter crops with less effort wasted on the (to us) useless stems. So it's easy to imagine analogous processes in the cell where efficiency isn't maximised in the ways that we as consumers would like. Also like we have an appendix and only two arms (Imagine in day to day life how useful it would be to have more arms, or extra eyes in the back of your head) evolution mostly optimises what it has. Look at the construction of a human eye and compare it to that of a squid, they have a more advanced arrangement than us so you can't assume that just because we have our design optimised very well that doesn't mean that a better design is not possible. There are mechanisms that algae have evolved to enhance their efficiency that corn hasn't, it's not just about converting sunlight to energy, but making use of that energy afterwards and keeping those processes that do that supplied with all they need, not every plant has evolved every trick in the book. By combining multiple advances together and tuning the processes towards what humans want is kind of what genetic engineering is all about.
One response would be, who cares, all science cares about is what is provable. If god follows a set of laws then it is just as interesting to discover the rules he keeps to. That would then be an interesting question, why does he choose to keep to those rules? Look I could claim that gravity is caused by the demon that lives on that roof over there. You can't prove he exists, but he makes sure gravity works (except on helium he hates the way it makes his voice sound) he's invisible and all matter passes through him. That however tells us nothing it would be completely pointless to try and claim anything about this undetectable demon because it only tells you about me and the things I invent, not anything about the universe, all we can do there is experiment and conjecture and not worry about the why, but the what and how.
They have evidence that they can turn water to wine? They can heal the sick? A book that states it happened centuries ago is not evidence. The ability to produce results now is what matters and is also what religion cannot offer when it comes to the material claims they make.
People can have faith in parts of science, they have no need to understand. However this is not a bad thing, you don't need to know how a dark matter behaves to design a transistor. (as long as someone knows how dark matter behaves and my colleagues challenge my design of the transistor and the design holds up to real behaviour).
To imply though that it's comparable to common popular religions is very trollish behaviour because as others have said no one person has to understand it all as long as the individual pieces are good. You couldn't hold the entire weight of a house on a single brick, but as long as each piece does it's job then the structure holds.
Once again this looks like someone confusing "science" with "truth". Science is a process that exists to find flaws in itself. Truth is an absolute which I suspect humans will never find. Science may try and find what is true and what is false but it is never going to be perfect. On a side note I believe (note that faith again) that science is due for a simplification soon, just how relativity simplified the theories that were around at the time, so maybe again we'll see it comprehendable by the more common man.
Considering I remember a time when big music was trying to make MP3s illegal because they could be played indefinitely and not wear out as any other media would, then yes they tried to do that one already. Fortunately they lost on that occasion.
Apologies for the delay in reply, missed the email. I'm not claiming they mutate into radiation tolerant, I'm assuming that nukes do most of their damage by being bombs rather than by their radiation. Yes this assumes in a conflict no dirty bombs are used. However lets for the sake of argument assume a dozen or so were used, Chernobyl is often described as being equivalent to a dirty bomb and the human race survived that with at most a few tens of thousands of deaths, so it would be safe to assume that a few dozen dirty bombs wouldn't do more than kill a few hundred million. Still a catastrophe, but in terms of the human race still survivable - which was all i was trying to say was that a future civilisation would survive and move on. Hell there's enough people these days saying that there are too many people on the planet, those of the future might welcome such a population cull. A period with increased cancer rates would probably be barely noticed during the few centuries to rebuild civilisation.
This brings me right back to the idea that at the moment fear of radiation is the biggest problem- yet for some reason we don't have people who have fear of arsenic or mercury - and that maybe a number of nuclear disasters would have the converse effect of making people less afraid of radiation.
Sorry I've been thinking about this morbid topic way too much for a short story I'm working on, I think it's getting to me...
Nortel (used to) own the 47.0.0.0 class a network The also acquired IP ranges as they tookover other companies. It's not surprising they have lots to spare
That is a poor and misleading graph for several reasons not least: There is no comparison to other software platforms The style chosen only escalates, the graph doesn't go down when the court case is resolved in either party's favour. Ambiguous because not all court cases are equal, some cases could be more valid than others.
Let me paint a possible future scenario for you. 1) There is a limited nuclear exchange between two countries, let's say Pakistan and India as a modern day example. 2) While hundreds of thousands/Millions die in the attacks radiation casualties outside of the attack are limited to a few thousand. 3) Some bright spark decides casualties could have been fewer if they had not just airspace control, but also had assets in orbit. 4) After the public accept that there could be limited nuclear exchange, nuclear weapons come back on many military planning concepts. (after all they always like to prepare for the last war) 5) Military planning moves to the concept of large scale MAD in tandem with space based area denial platforms. Again I believe it is only a matter of time before defence against ICBMs becomes practical and this is best done from space. 6) Orion drive based ships are built in limited numbers by a few governments for "defence purposes" ostensibly with no plans to use them but to protect themselves against similar threats.
Some of those steps are a little shaky, but the problem with ground launched Orion is the fear of fallout from the bombs, but in the 60s the bomb testing that was done in the US was enough to launch dozens of orion ships and civilisation didn't end so there's no reason except fear (and the odd death or two, but who's counting;-) to not launch.
Change the situation in scenario 1 for a full on nuclear exchange and I think once civilisation recovers several centuries later they will fear not the radiation but the bomb itself. Kind of like how people who aren't used to cameras think it will steal their soul, or medieval man would think everything about modern life was witchcraft, as soon as you're used to it you no longer fear it.
Oh and given there is an infinite amount of time I believe it is only a matter of time, probably less than we think before someone does go nuclear in a confrontation. So I don't think orion is impossible, I think it's inevitable.
I was trying to paper over that complication in my post with the concept of the channel, seems like someone's called me on it;-) In short I agree, but using this as a platform to discuss an interesting bit of technology I'd like to see if I've got some fundamental concept wrong here.
As I understand the term SNR is often used to encompass a number of complex issues. Noise can be injected from many sources, the transmitter, the receiver, the channel, interference, noise floor of the background etc In my argument for infinite bitrate we'll assume transmitter and receiver are perfect therefore no noise.* The channel will introduce irregularities in the signal that will show up as noise, it will distort and corrupt the signal. However there are a number of techniques that allow you to measure the channel's behaviour, and effectively invert this distortion, I believe technologies like VDSL use this technique extensively to mitigate the channel effects. Therefore we'll assume in the perfect system the distortion effects of the channel cam be compensated forby inverting the transform that the channel performs. Interference: Noise from other people using the same spectrum or harmonics from others, again we'll ignore this. Which leaves flicker and thermal noise. This has a constant power density over a certain frequency range; that is, the wider band you receive on the more noise power you pick up. Conversely if you have a number of lower bandwidth channels you get less noise per channel. This is why systems such as VDSL use many many carriers working in parallel to achieve the high bandwidths they do and it's why you get megabits of data over a few kilohertz bandwidth of twisted pair. So the important thing for this one is the SNR per channel not the total SNR, therefore again this noise source can be mitigated.** [Checking some maths and references on this I can't get a good handle on which is dominant: one being a 1/f and one being an RMS based source so actually I'm not sure how FDM would help if an RMS noise source is dominant which would happen in the limit.]
So yes I know there are limitations our current ability to extract bitrate from a certain bandwidth, but I know of no reason why physics limits the bitrate per bandwidth. Now I'm sure quantum physics is going to rear its nasty head at somepoint soon, 'cause it always does that as soon as I start to have fun;-)
* Yes I know this will never happen in practice, but if my lecturer can do it so can I;-) ** Okay not information got from a lecturer but from a friend who I got nattering to down the pub, i must buy him a drink and ask him about this conversation since he designs VDSL software....
Slashdot Mirror
"Talking about what was "before" the big bang, is like talking about what is north of the north pole."
Maybe, maybe not. If we find evidence for these black holes then it shows there was a before the big bang and we have to change our view of the universe accordingly. Until we look for the evidence we don't know, that's kind of the point of science.
I'm not sure what you outline is a universal truth. Infact gated communities are IME a very American phenomenon. As a rule lack of supply does tend to drive up prices, but you're right that if you get it wrong and people start cramming into ever smaller houses and there is not enough maintenance by the landlords then the path to a slum is very easy to take.
It's just as likely that you will always have some trendy areas of cities that people want to live in at any cost they can afford.
I know what you mean by demand going to 0 but as long as mortgages are given based upon the perceived future value of the property then there is nothing to stop them going sky high. An expensive house attracts a rich clientelle who will look after it/demand it is refurbished. This increases its worth and if anything drives demand and prices higher which the estate agents look at and see it as a sound investment so increase the asking price which feeds back to the banks who are willing to lend more and...
I really see no limit given the right social factors.
I can only speak for the UK here, but.
When the rail system was privatised it was fragmented into functional units, one company owned the tracks several companies run the services, and several companies bought the trains and leased them to the operational companies. The whole thing was sold off cheap to encourage investment and given that it was losing money that's about all they could get for it.
So far so good, lots of competition, should drive prices low.
Except that the companies that run the services were each given a local monopoly not allowed to compete on each others grounds. Good luck connecting up your services from different rail companies.
Onto the companies who own the trains. let's say a train carriage costs £1million. They were by regulation given a price they could hire them out for, they were allowed to charge approx 1/10th the cost to allow them to have a 10 year payback on investment. i.e. they would charge £100,000 per year for a train that would cost £1million if you bought it today (except you bought it 15 years ago and sold it off for a fraction of that cost but i digress).The idea was this would encourage new investment. However the companies that ran the services were not allowed to buy their own trains, they HAD to hire from one of the hire companies. It was in the train hire companies interest to not invest because the fee they got was related to the cost of the train, no account made for depreciation. One or two got wise and bought new trains for even more money but again it was in their interest to buy the most expensive train they could.
So we're in a situation where we (The british tax payer) already had paid for the rail network, but we're having to pay for it again because we have to repay the loans bankers they took out to buy the network. We have poor investment in sub-optimal solutions designed to maximise personal profit. We have multiple small monopolies with all the costs of bureaucracy and lack of competition combined with the inability to reduce costs through application of economies of scale. We have an ever aging network that investment is held up in by planning problems and the fact it takes longer to install a new system than it does for the next system to come along.
I could go on, but hopefully you get an idea of how easy it is to lose a LOT of money on a rail network.
I'd like it to have bigger ambitions.
To make a profit from humans in space
Which is an interesting list because when I asked my friends what the best books in literature was the list was overwhelmingly dominated by sci-fi and fantasy.
It all depends on who you ask what answers you get; I'm not saying that the people at the BBC were dishonest, but they might have been showing their background just as my friends show mine.
Sorry but IME that's just how serious engineering works, not software engineering usually I'll grant you, but by the time you've got to "Run first test engine" or "First engine off production line" or "First Launch" at each of those stages you've spent most of the money and pretty much already delivered the end product. Unless you want to have a single milestone at the end of the project...
You could have a milestone of "Initial architecture agreed" and that's a sensible thing to do is come up with an architecture and agree it with your customer, but how do you do that but have a design review? Same goes for "First Blueprints" "Tooling frozen" "First Model Testing" and so on, you normally also want to review not just the fact that the engine works but all the ancillery data, in many businesses you will produce something that works at your test, but how well does it work, what performance did it have, what error codes were generated, for that you need a design review.
Now this may not be how most software is produced (Outside of large companies) but it is certainly how most mechanical engineering is done and certainly how any safety critical systems are designed.
"If a wealthy parent never gives his children anything except an education, his attention and knowledge, and a clean slate to start adult life" ;-))
Why is a wealthy parent more likely to give any of these than a poor parent?
Those children who have a tremendous advantage will IME have a tremendous disadvantage in that they never know the value of a dollar, they will expect everything to be handed to them, they will possibly succeed because their parents set them up with a job, but if they're not up to the job surely they'll fail? (Although JWB proves this completely invalid so maybe I should shut up
The stereotype of the poor parent who works all hours of the day to buy a roof over the head is just as common as the stereotype of the rich businessman who has no time for anything but his career.
Now it was eye-opening to me when i first went to Uni where over 50% of the people there had been to private school and to listen to the extra equipment their school had made me green with envy. That didn't mean that they knew the material any better though, it just meant that it was more likley that they would see science as an interesting subject. Yes I'd also agree that rich parents are more likely to expect success from their children because they want them to achieve a similar life to that that they have, and that works against some people who are born poor (hell I just went into electronics because it was fun, I thought I'd end up on a factory floor if I were lucky, but to be designing chips now is a dream come true, but I didn't know this was even possible and perhaps that's why poverty is contagious.)
"The uppermost class does not, as a whole, act as if the benefit and support of the lowest are a burden they wish to bear, even if it means no real sacrifice to their standard of living or lifestyle." ;-)
On the whole no I'd agree they don't, but it only takes one as long as they're sufficiently rich
Evidence of this in the real world: The Gates foundation. But it's not just that there are plenty of forces at play that drive wealth from the rich to the poor. Any social welfare program to build homeless shelters, medicare, All those rich twerps buying bizzare art from an unknown starving artist, etc. Now they may not be things that are done for altruistic reasons, they may be for reasons of publicity, guilt, politics, or even to syphon money from the middle class to the lower class, but it does seem to happen.
Also as a honest question is the poorest person in a wealthy country such as the USA better off than the poorest person somewhere like Africa? I honestly don't know, but I suspect they would be, and therefore jump to say that a greater overall wealth of a nation would provide for a better situation for all involved.
I guess it comes down to I see the gap between the rich and the poor as one metric of a society, but by no means the only measure and that a greater gap could just mean that the system is working and those who do work hard are being rewarded and those who don't are being punished. Now this is far from saying that someone who is currently poor deserves to be, but I have certainly seen enough people in my life whose honest survival policy was to play the council benefit system and others who have been living off the money that great grandaddy left them whilst those who lost everything to a corrupt business partner toil to keep a roof over their heads that to me fair now is about being rewarded for your efforts rather than everyone having the same.
Back to your post though:
"Assuming the holders of capital and the über-rich class are one and the same (and I see no reason not to make that assumption)".
I don't understand how this could be anything other than true, isn't owning capital and being part of the rich class synonymous? Or are you making a distinction between someone who makes a million a week by working as a banker and someone who makes a million a week from owning real estate? While I see that the motivations of the two people there would be very different, the real situation when it comes to how they spend their money and what that money will do for the rest of society would seem to me to be equivalent.
I'm really interested in this question and other people's viewpoints on it because I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about the transition to a post-scarcity society so really want people to pick holes in my viewpoint. I also spend a lot of time thinking about social justice and I can't say I'm proud of some of my conclusions so again I want challenging...
See I get a different story from those statistics. Not all of them give time related information which is what we're discussing, but:
Homelessness is going down.
Racism and Sexism are decreasing
Those who are born in bottom quartile are less likely to stay lower quartile.
So for me that site where it gives time based information implies that things are getting better, what and who you are born as matters less than what you do. As far as a just society goes this is a better thing. Now things are still pretty bad, but the trend I read from those statistics is one of upwards.
Now as for what counts as quality of life that's a good question that changes from one person to the next; however I do like "the ancient Greeks defined happiness as the exercise of vital powers, along lines of excellence, in a life affording them scope." In short the ability to pursue your dreams and get good at something. If this is true then the fall of sexism and racism combined with more social mobility are therefore the metrics that matter in determining quality of life.
Alternatively look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the survival and comfort seem to be getting better with each generation with cheap food and sufficient housing. The more upper level ones like psychological and self actualisation are IMO greatly helped by things like social networks, so it seems to me that this generation is better placed than any other to be happy and have a high quality of life. This all assumes that most people are fed and have access to health care and shelter, but the trend on those fronts seems to be positive so in what way isn't the quality of life improving?
"the gap between normal and low incomes and the insanely rich has become incredibly huge."
But does that matter? As long as as a society everyone is getting better does it matter that some are getting better faster than others?
Now you may say that it's not fair to those born to those who aren't rich, but what is the solution? Hold back those who are working to improve society? (This may not be rich people per-se but would include those with their sights on being rich) Would you prevent parents from passing on the fruits of their labours to their offspring? how do you make a society that is fair if you want to allow those who are successful and work hard to profit from their labour and you want to allow people to pass on the fruits of their work to their children? Is it fair to say to someone: "I don't care how hard you work, or how lucky you are or who clever you are, you're only allowed to do so much before we'll stop you."
Now TBH the situation of the French Royality springs to mind here and why that should have been stopped. IMO that is very different to the current situation because anyone can become the new royalty, those who became billionaires off social networks or Paypal are testament to the fact that unlike the french royalty anyone can become part of that class as long as you do something that enough people want.
100% agree with your post, but I was just trying to get at that it would probably be a status symbol how many people you could get to work for you so while robots could clean your house it would be a symbol of status to have a person do it. The best restaurants would still use human waiters for similar reasons. Also would the AI be able to compose music? Possibly but would people want to listen to it. Unless it's kind of like now people prefer going to the theatre to watching a film of the theatre production.
Maybe, don't know...
That fails to count for the fact that the technology to make things by machines in abundance would inevitably mean that the cost would be constant across society.
Let me take an example. In the 1920s only the few eccentric uber-rich could afford a motorcar. Nowadays even your average joe finds a sports car well within his average budget. To one of the upper class sports cars are effectively free. For most middle class people food is a small part of the family budget and effectively available in a larger quantity than they can use. Compare that to the 1920s or earlier.
Now fast forward another century. In the same way food is now effectively free to the middle class, then the sports cars that were an occasional luxury are now effectively free and it is the things like houses and land that are the limits.
The point is the rich man is only rich because he can get those under him who are poor to work for him. If all goods are produced by the machines he owns then he has to give some of these machines to other people to wait his tables, to play music for him, to tidy his house. If the goods are effectively free to him then he will pay lots of those to get that great cook to cook for him instead of his rival, the great cook will pay hugely to those who work for him as assistants. As long as there is a capitalist system in effect the laws of supply and demand will mean that the wealth will trickle down.
This then means to me that in the future society where machines can make more universal machines and therefore we do live in abundance the only two things that will be scarce will be things like music and waiters and cleaners. This to me puts a new light on the current copyright laws, but that's another story...
Okay so you have the endgame of the post-scarcity society where machines make everything limited only by materials and energy input(and with orbital factories those are effectively infinite). Eventually everything goes beyond very cheap and becomes free. It doesn't matter who owns anything anymore because there is more than enough for everyone. (Except for fashion and IP, but I digress).
Somewhere between where we are and there: goods become cheaper and there are a few super rich who control the means of production. Those with anything are taxed to pay for those who don't and you get social welfare programs, medicare etc to mean that the poor aren't dying on the street of hunger and lack of medical care.
As time goes on you end up with the rich who do little because they own everything, a social underclass who live off benefits and a middle class who are aspirational to become richer and therefore more powerful.
It then becomes if you're born with riches, your machines build it all for you. If you are born without then social welfare keeps you alive. If you want to progress (get the latest good, toys fashions, bigger house etc) you have to work for it. Quite frankly this is almost my idea description of a society that those who can't work or chose not to are still supported and those who want to progress can, and in fact we seem very close to having this now.I just hope we carry on progressing this way until we reach the point where machines can build everything and people don't need to work at all, I don't see why we can't progress to this situation.
So to go back to your original point: Those bastards who made this possible who designed invested in and implemented those machines should be rewarded for that. After all they could have spent their money on paintings, or big parties or mansions but they didn't they build machines that made products cheaper with less human labor. This is a good thing, or would you rather we went back to 90% of the population toiling on the fields in order to scratch a survival?
Got to also love the bit here:
"Rutkowski[...] prides himself as being the fist person to coin the term “Web 3.0”"
Fine I'm going to create the term Web 4.0.
I'll get back to you in a few weeks to let you know what it means. Be sure to check my blog regularly for the announcement!
Some earlier posts have covered this in more detail but in short evolution is about survival of the fittest sure, but it's also about beating your competitors.
A good example is the forest canopy where being taller than your competitors is more important than being efficient with that light, for most food crops this translates to us trying to engineer shorter crops with less effort wasted on the (to us) useless stems. So it's easy to imagine analogous processes in the cell where efficiency isn't maximised in the ways that we as consumers would like.
Also like we have an appendix and only two arms (Imagine in day to day life how useful it would be to have more arms, or extra eyes in the back of your head) evolution mostly optimises what it has. Look at the construction of a human eye and compare it to that of a squid, they have a more advanced arrangement than us so you can't assume that just because we have our design optimised very well that doesn't mean that a better design is not possible.
There are mechanisms that algae have evolved to enhance their efficiency that corn hasn't, it's not just about converting sunlight to energy, but making use of that energy afterwards and keeping those processes that do that supplied with all they need, not every plant has evolved every trick in the book. By combining multiple advances together and tuning the processes towards what humans want is kind of what genetic engineering is all about.
One response would be, who cares, all science cares about is what is provable. If god follows a set of laws then it is just as interesting to discover the rules he keeps to. That would then be an interesting question, why does he choose to keep to those rules?
Look I could claim that gravity is caused by the demon that lives on that roof over there. You can't prove he exists, but he makes sure gravity works (except on helium he hates the way it makes his voice sound) he's invisible and all matter passes through him. That however tells us nothing it would be completely pointless to try and claim anything about this undetectable demon because it only tells you about me and the things I invent, not anything about the universe, all we can do there is experiment and conjecture and not worry about the why, but the what and how.
They have evidence that they can turn water to wine? They can heal the sick?
A book that states it happened centuries ago is not evidence. The ability to produce results now is what matters and is also what religion cannot offer when it comes to the material claims they make.
People can have faith in parts of science, they have no need to understand. However this is not a bad thing, you don't need to know how a dark matter behaves to design a transistor. (as long as someone knows how dark matter behaves and my colleagues challenge my design of the transistor and the design holds up to real behaviour).
To imply though that it's comparable to common popular religions is very trollish behaviour because as others have said no one person has to understand it all as long as the individual pieces are good. You couldn't hold the entire weight of a house on a single brick, but as long as each piece does it's job then the structure holds.
Once again this looks like someone confusing "science" with "truth". Science is a process that exists to find flaws in itself. Truth is an absolute which I suspect humans will never find. Science may try and find what is true and what is false but it is never going to be perfect.
On a side note I believe (note that faith again) that science is due for a simplification soon, just how relativity simplified the theories that were around at the time, so maybe again we'll see it comprehendable by the more common man.
Considering I remember a time when big music was trying to make MP3s illegal because they could be played indefinitely and not wear out as any other media would, then yes they tried to do that one already.
Fortunately they lost on that occasion.
Apologies for the delay in reply, missed the email.
I'm not claiming they mutate into radiation tolerant, I'm assuming that nukes do most of their damage by being bombs rather than by their radiation. Yes this assumes in a conflict no dirty bombs are used.
However lets for the sake of argument assume a dozen or so were used, Chernobyl is often described as being equivalent to a dirty bomb and the human race survived that with at most a few tens of thousands of deaths, so it would be safe to assume that a few dozen dirty bombs wouldn't do more than kill a few hundred million. Still a catastrophe, but in terms of the human race still survivable - which was all i was trying to say was that a future civilisation would survive and move on.
Hell there's enough people these days saying that there are too many people on the planet, those of the future might welcome such a population cull. A period with increased cancer rates would probably be barely noticed during the few centuries to rebuild civilisation.
This brings me right back to the idea that at the moment fear of radiation is the biggest problem- yet for some reason we don't have people who have fear of arsenic or mercury - and that maybe a number of nuclear disasters would have the converse effect of making people less afraid of radiation.
Sorry I've been thinking about this morbid topic way too much for a short story I'm working on, I think it's getting to me...
Work down a coal mine for 20 years and let me know how good your health is.
Nortel (used to) own the 47.0.0.0 class a network
The also acquired IP ranges as they tookover other companies.
It's not surprising they have lots to spare
That is a poor and misleading graph for several reasons not least:
There is no comparison to other software platforms
The style chosen only escalates, the graph doesn't go down when the court case is resolved in either party's favour.
Ambiguous because not all court cases are equal, some cases could be more valid than others.
FUD, IMO
Let me paint a possible future scenario for you.
1) There is a limited nuclear exchange between two countries, let's say Pakistan and India as a modern day example.
2) While hundreds of thousands/Millions die in the attacks radiation casualties outside of the attack are limited to a few thousand.
3) Some bright spark decides casualties could have been fewer if they had not just airspace control, but also had assets in orbit.
4) After the public accept that there could be limited nuclear exchange, nuclear weapons come back on many military planning concepts. (after all they always like to prepare for the last war)
5) Military planning moves to the concept of large scale MAD in tandem with space based area denial platforms. Again I believe it is only a matter of time before defence against ICBMs becomes practical and this is best done from space.
6) Orion drive based ships are built in limited numbers by a few governments for "defence purposes" ostensibly with no plans to use them but to protect themselves against similar threats.
Some of those steps are a little shaky, but the problem with ground launched Orion is the fear of fallout from the bombs, but in the 60s the bomb testing that was done in the US was enough to launch dozens of orion ships and civilisation didn't end so there's no reason except fear (and the odd death or two, but who's counting ;-) to not launch.
Change the situation in scenario 1 for a full on nuclear exchange and I think once civilisation recovers several centuries later they will fear not the radiation but the bomb itself. Kind of like how people who aren't used to cameras think it will steal their soul, or medieval man would think everything about modern life was witchcraft, as soon as you're used to it you no longer fear it.
Oh and given there is an infinite amount of time I believe it is only a matter of time, probably less than we think before someone does go nuclear in a confrontation. So I don't think orion is impossible, I think it's inevitable.
I was trying to paper over that complication in my post with the concept of the channel, seems like someone's called me on it ;-)
In short I agree, but using this as a platform to discuss an interesting bit of technology I'd like to see if I've got some fundamental concept wrong here.
As I understand the term SNR is often used to encompass a number of complex issues. Noise can be injected from many sources, the transmitter, the receiver, the channel, interference, noise floor of the background etc
In my argument for infinite bitrate we'll assume transmitter and receiver are perfect therefore no noise.*
The channel will introduce irregularities in the signal that will show up as noise, it will distort and corrupt the signal. However there are a number of techniques that allow you to measure the channel's behaviour, and effectively invert this distortion, I believe technologies like VDSL use this technique extensively to mitigate the channel effects. Therefore we'll assume in the perfect system the distortion effects of the channel cam be compensated forby inverting the transform that the channel performs.
Interference: Noise from other people using the same spectrum or harmonics from others, again we'll ignore this.
Which leaves flicker and thermal noise. This has a constant power density over a certain frequency range; that is, the wider band you receive on the more noise power you pick up. Conversely if you have a number of lower bandwidth channels you get less noise per channel. This is why systems such as VDSL use many many carriers working in parallel to achieve the high bandwidths they do and it's why you get megabits of data over a few kilohertz bandwidth of twisted pair. So the important thing for this one is the SNR per channel not the total SNR, therefore again this noise source can be mitigated.** [Checking some maths and references on this I can't get a good handle on which is dominant: one being a 1/f and one being an RMS based source so actually I'm not sure how FDM would help if an RMS noise source is dominant which would happen in the limit.]
So yes I know there are limitations our current ability to extract bitrate from a certain bandwidth, but I know of no reason why physics limits the bitrate per bandwidth. Now I'm sure quantum physics is going to rear its nasty head at somepoint soon, 'cause it always does that as soon as I start to have fun ;-)
* Yes I know this will never happen in practice, but if my lecturer can do it so can I ;-)
** Okay not information got from a lecturer but from a friend who I got nattering to down the pub, i must buy him a drink and ask him about this conversation since he designs VDSL software....