It still is entirely possible to do this, but you can't go to an expensive school and run up $20,000+ in loans each year, while spending 5 years to get a degree that doesn't improve your job prospects. There's no point in someone getting a history degree if all they're capable of doing with their life is working in retail as opposed to someone who's going to go on to law school to get a J.D. after getting their B.S.
In the case of someone who is not going to benefit from going to college, their financial situation is going to be completely different if they spend five years working and building up capital and gaining job skills than if they spend five years running up student loan debts and getting a degree that only allows them to fill the same job they could have taken five years prior.
A lot of it comes from student loans which in the U.S. cannot be discharged through bankruptcy. So there are a lot of people who took on tens of thousands of dollars in student loans to go to expensive schools for degrees that don't have a lot of value in the job market or necessarily provide the kinds of skills that allow a person to start working in something other than a minimum wage job.
Once they're in that spot, they're pretty screwed because their earning power and the large principle of their loans means that they'll be making interest payments for decades.
I don't think it's that people won't, it's that Netflix is good enough by itself. They've got more good shows I can watch than I have time. Contrast this with the old Networks that maybe had one show I cared about watching at all, which Netflix or some other streaming platform has eventually shows when the program gets syndicated so even more stickiness to the platform.
I'm also curious about total consumption as revenue. Typically when goods or services become less expensive, consumption goes up. With all the big streaming platforms having apps and smartphones becoming ubiquitous, anyone with $10 a month can get Netflix whereas before a lot of people couldn't afford the extra $50+ for cable. There's likely a much larger pie now, but the old guard gets a smaller piece.
I think that to some degree its because software is so pervasive and is touching all kinds of different fields. If you're a doctor, the human body doesn't change a lot and even some of the rare edge cases and diseases are well understood these days. The same goes for lawyers where the law is slow to change and understanding existing legal precedent and relevant case law is highly important in the field. No one is going to ask a medical doctor to work on a vaccine for their car, but someone might ask a programmer to develop software for a domain where no software currently exists.
Technology is at least as important as either of those other fields, but there are so many niches within it and a lot of crossover with other disciplines. If you have a degree in music and a good understanding of music and the ability the write code, you can probably be far more effective as a programmer if you're working on an application that requires a deeper understanding of music than someone who's naturally a better coder. Just because you can write code doesn't mean you know what code to write. People who are working on natural language processing need to understand languages and most CS degrees aren't going to cover that topic at more than a surface level and a lot of the students will be crap it it anyways. Compare that to someone who has spent the same amount of time studying problems in that particular domain who just happens to be able to code and I can tell you which I'd rather hire for a project in that area.
Once you get beyond the code monkey stuff, you need to have good problem solving skills and the ability to develop algorithms for new and novel problems. There are a lot of really intelligent people out there that have spent a lot of time specializing in various domains that gives them a better understanding of those problems and perhaps some ideas about how to go about tackling them. I don't think it's any surprise that a lot of people who are successful in the technology field don't have strict backgrounds in it, because the problems the field is trying to solve don't have a lot to do with how computers operate or are strictly limited to just that domain.
All most of these folks know how to do is check the boxes... They might have learned some buzzwords along the way, but you would never trust them to actually *do* anything...
We just say those people are studying to be astronauts because all they do is take up space.
On the flip side it makes it a lot harder for governments or hackers to get old data on a person. I'd personally be much happier if the amount of time companies kept information was something that I could have a say in.
Whoa there ganjadude, you need to watch your terminology or someone might get offended. You should use the gender-neutral "straw persons" or perhaps the more modern preferred terminology "persons of straw" when pointing out logical fallacies. I don't quite know if this could be construed as a micro-aggression, but it's at least a pico-agression and probably closer to a nano-aggression.
That reminds me of the story about Target's initial foray into targeted ads where they could tell based on search history when a user was pregnant and had some data to suggest that if they could get a new mother to start shopping at their stores she'd likely be a good longtime customer. They were worried about it appearing creepy for them to start displaying sales ads for diapers or other baby products that people hadn't looked for yet, so they through it some ringer results (like golf clubs or scotch glasses) that would make the advertising appear more random.
Perhaps they're selectively feeding you some ads that are more relevant, but tossing in some crap like that so it doesn't appear too obvious. Or maybe someone else temporary had that IP and was making different searches with it that are influencing the results.
I think the real problem with his work is that he's completely willing to sacrifice almost everything in favor of whatever scene in the movie he currently wants to happen even if it ruins other aspects of the movie. For example, in The Force Awakens I was generally okay with the story up until the attack on the Death Star (or whatever it was called, but it's the new Death Star so whatever) begins and it fires its huge burst of energy across the galaxy that is somehow going to hit the target in a small amount of time and the rebel forces are also able to almost immediately travel across the entire galaxy while being on comms in real time.
The rules for space travel in Star Wars are never really well explained, largely because they don't need to be, but those scenes seem to violate our understanding of how travel works from previous installments. Just the fact that you can communicate instantly in real time across those distances (and while traveling no less) pretty much makes the other movies make no sense since once you get the plans for the Death Star in the original movie, just instantly communicate them across the galaxy. Same shit with TPM, just instantly communicate that you're being invaded across the galaxy. But Abrams had written himself into a corner and logic had to die on the altar of the scene he wanted to happen.
I could overlook most of the criticism that were levied towards TFA when it came out as it was a generally well made movie, but that part just made me want to yell at the movie for being so stupid because the universe was no longer internally consistent. Him and Lindelof can fuck off of having anything to do with a script as they care far too much about the moment to the detriment of the whole. It was the same shit with new Star Trek films where who cares about any established rules of the universe, because it's time for this next really cool scene to happen now.
Being twice as likely to die doesn't provide a lot of meaningful information, especially when the raw percentage chance is low. Based on information linked in the study, only about 4% of the study population died over the time period of the study. The only information is that the study was of adults at least 45 years of age so although that may seem high, I'd really want to know what the age distribution is as that could be within expectations for their participants.
Regardless of that, it suggests that even if you are less active (and therefore twice as likely to die) your odds of death still aren't very high in an absolute sense.
I have seen zero evidence that there is a vast pool of qualified techs sitting on the sidelines, waiting for salaries to go up.
It's not that people are sitting on the sidelines who are already in tech, it's that there are people who are capable of doing programming jobs but are choosing to go into a different career path, perhaps electrical engineering, physics, math, or plenty of other disciplines. You can't argue that if the salary for tech jobs rose $20k across the board that none of those young people would reconsider and choose to study computer science instead.
We pay fresh grads with a BS in CS an average of $90k to start.
That sounds really, really good if your company is in the midwest, but absolute shit if you're in silicon valley. It's not always just a question of money either. People place a certain amount of value on where a job enables them to live, what kind of hours they are expected to work, or even the nature of the work. For example, I could make a lot more money if I were working in the medical field, but I wouldn't do that work for the prevailing wage because I really don't want to deal with sick people all day long. There are other people who find a lot of fulfillment in jobs that work with people despite low pay. I can't imagine there are many social workers who are doing it to get rich.
I suspect that there are a sizable number of programmers that are in the profession not because they have a strong passion for it, but precisely because the field generally does pay better. There's probably a pretty wide pool of people that can do code-monkey work, but there are a lot of programming jobs that require strong problem solving abilities and that kind of work may be outside of the capabilities of a large part of the labor pool and there are probably many who are capable, but have no interest in that kind of work. The problem is that employers want more programmers still and that means even higher wages are necessary to sway groups of people who were not previously swayed by the allure of better pay. I don't see the H1B program expanding much under Trump, so there isn't much ability to continue to hold down wages through cheaper foreign labor. I think enough companies have been burned by outsourcing that they're more willing to increase local wages than offshore anything that isn't viewed as low level work.
Well there is a skill shortage for the rates that companies would like to pay. However, from a market perspective the best way to get more skilled employees is to increase wages as it will increase the number of talented people who could work as programmers but make other career choices because they do not find the salary good enough to dissuade them from making other career choices. Trying to drive down wages is just going to result in more people who could be talent programmers choosing other career paths for much the same reasons.
I think there's something to be said for limiting food stamps to the purchase of whole foods. Even if you're utterly destitute and need the food stamps to not starve, you'll at least learn how to cook or prepare food which is a marketable skill. Sure it may not seem like much, but it's more than you learn from throwing another plate of pizza rolls into the microwave.
Personally though, I don't think we should try to restrict what food stamps can be used on. It creates too much of a bureaucratic mess, and you can't possibly account for all of the different and unique circumstance people find themselves in. Sure it might be great if people learned to cook and make healthier food choices, but there's probably some single parent of 3 working 2 jobs already that doesn't always have time to cook family meals and kids too young to help with that themselves.
In general, individuals are going to be capable of making better choices for their own set of circumstances on average than some congress critter or other bureaucrat, so let people make their own decisions. Some will choose wisely, and others not. The only real problem is that government charity seems to be boundless. I'd even be fine with more government spending on programs like this if there was a cutoff point where we tell the people making bad choices that they can fuck off now because society doesn't owe them an endless supply of opportunity to waste.
I somehow doubt that anything mass-produced will have social clout.
Apple iDevices or even high-end Android phones tend to have a certain status associated with them, so I'm not sure how true this actually is. Maybe custom handmade cases become a thing, but I don't see mass production reducing social value, at least not so long as a Steve Jobs type is there to tell everyone how beautiful the product is.
The goals are similar, but governments typically don't have to care if they aren't meeting them. Unless a business has a monopoly, if the service is crap you can just go elsewhere. A government program has to be exceptionally crap before anything will be done about it, and good luck getting rid of it, even if you can demonstrate that it's harmful or counter productive. At best you can probably take the money and move it towards some other program aimed at achieving the same goals.
It's not that government or all government programs are necessarily pernicious in that way, its just that no one is required to care or has an incentive to care . If you work at a government call center there's not much punishment for doing a bad job and there isn't a lot of reward for doing a great one either so there's not much motivation than to do the bare minimum to get by. The kind of people who might be super altruistic and truly and honestly care are probably involved in some private charitable endeavor.
Not even the politicians who fight over these types of things really care. They don't pay the cost and their position is just a means to an end of getting elected and if that particular government organization or program didn't exist, they'd need to find another one to play politics with. Talking about reducing the size of government is probably just as good at getting people to vote for you as actually reducing the size of government. And you can just as easily talk about not letting those other guys reduce the size of government to take away vital programs to get votes just as easily.
The problem is that you're trying to legislate what you intend, but that isn't very effective as companies (or people) will always find ways to minimize tax liability when it is economical for them to do so. One easy example is that companies will set up another company which they license their own IP from, which allows them to make the entire transaction a payment. If the payment is large enough, they no longer have any income to tax in the country where the revenue was earned and will instead by taxed at a lower rate in the company where the IP is being held.
That's a complicated problem to solve as there likely are legitimate cases of IP being licensed from foreign companies or third parties. One could try to argue that said company would need a presence in the U.S. in order to have the protection of its IP laws, but it gets incredibly complicated if you don't want to annoy other countries and have them disregard the IP of companies in our country. I think the easiest solution is to simply lower the corporate tax rate in the United States and remove all exemptions or subsidies, such that it becomes more economical for companies to pay taxes in the U.S. rather than to play clever accounting games and try to hide money off shore.
Just make a flat tax rate for both individuals and corporations, ideally with the individual tax rate being slightly less which would incentivize corporations to return more of their profits to shareholders or to increase wages to bid for the best employees. Yes, I understand that such isn't perfect, but it's far better than the convoluted mess that we currently have and all of the insane or counter-productive incentives that it creates.
It doesn't matter who does the asking or what their history is in regards to providing citations to their own claims. The onus is always on the person making the claim to provide evidence to support it.
Asking someone to cite their claims is a good thing. I don't think admonishing someone for doing something appropriate will really help them to become the better person you want them to be.
Yeah, but if it has to sift through mundane crap like social media posts, it will probably commit suicide shortly before 3:00 AM Eastern time, August 29th and go largely unnoticed except for a cryptic error message in a log file.
This was my first though. This result doesn't mean that the AI is particularly good, as it could also be explained by humans being particularly stupid, which we can safely assumed from the recent U.S. presidential election where the main choices were between a morally bankrupt and corrupt buffoon and a morally bankrupt and corrupt buffoon.
I don't really see this particular issue as a big problem for anyone involved. The people who buy the product are probably foolish enough to believe its good because someone else told them so even if it is crap, so they're happy even with an inferior choice. The vendor gets paid either way and probably doesn't have to deal with many returns because the type of person who gets fooled by these crap auto-generated product reviews probably can't navigate the complexities of a return process. I suppose a less scrupulous company getting paid over a business that legitimately cares about the quality of their product isn't the best outcome, but at least the shady business had to advance the capabilities of AI to earn their money, so hooray for progress I suppose .
An introductory CS course shouldn't have cram tests. There's no end of practical material to test on and if you know how to code, a programming exam isn't going to be that hard if it asks you to write small bits of code. Big lectures don't really seem to fit CS either. I don't know what Harvard does or if things have changed, but when I got my degree is was smaller classes and a lot of time spent in a computer lab actually coding.
The Dean shouldn't have to beg students not to cheat either. Toss some of the worst examples out on their ass and the rest will get the message, or at least learn to cheat more intelligently. This sounds less like an education and more like an expensive daycare for adults.
Sure you'll cut down on 99% of accidents, but it's still useful to test the hell out of automated cars to make sure we know what they do, if for no other reason than to be able to put it in writing so that owners are aware. To illustrate, what should the expected behavior be if the vehicle suddenly finds itself in a situation where it needs to choose between one action that will almost certainly result in the death of a pedestrian or where the other course of action results in the death of the passengers?
I think most people would be in favor of a vehicle that prioritizes their own safety over others when those are the possible outcomes, rare as those situations may be. The sheer amount of driving that will be done (automated vehicles are going to result in more miles driven overall) still means that there are going to be accidents even though the individual odds are decreased by two orders of magnitude.
They're really going to need a filter now or all kinds of people in the EU are going to be reading web comments about what a bunch of wankers these asshats are.
It's hardly a paradox, it's just an observation of supply and demand in price-based market economies in that as something becomes less expensive more of it is consumed. People have always wanted more consumer goods and services, it's simply that they weren't as willing to pay for more of them at the previous higher prices.
However, this doesn't really address the original point. Automation is slowly eating away at the edges of unskilled labor. Couple this with a minimum wage and you have a situation where there are going to be a large number of people who are incapable of selling their labor because no one considers what they can offer a fair trade in exchange for their money. Removing the minimum wage probably means that there's always something that (almost) anyone could do for pay, but even that is going to be eroded slowly as well.
I suspect that over the long run the issue solves itself. People who are incapable of getting work are likely to end up less likely to reproduce as they make less attractive mates, so any genetic factors reducing the ability to provide valuable labor in a modern economy are going to be selected against. To some degree I think this has been slowly happening over time and may be a partial explanation for the Flynn effect. The only real question is what to do with the people who have nothing to contribute to society in the meanwhile. I suppose you can go full-blown Randian objectivist and let people starve on the streets, but I don't see that ending well. I'm personally in favor of a UBI because it's probably less expensive than dealing with people turning to crime.
There's probably some use where the creator of the music used in the video should get all of the revenue, especially if you've just used the work without any permission at all. However, I can think of some user created content that is going to be transformational or could clearly constitute a derivative work (e.g., a user-created original music video) where an argument could be made for some revenue sharing.
I can see some artists being against it completely though. If I were a musician I probably wouldn't care how much money I'm making if a group of racial nationalists (or some other group of people, say PETA for example, I just think are assholes for that matter) are using my work as part of their message.
The problem is that the amount of money to be made is probably quite low except in the case of a few viral videos that are unpredictable in advance (much like musical hits in some ways) such that it's not worth my time or money as an artist to sift through offers. The value in any system that enables something like this is that it reduces the amount of work necessary to the point where it can become profitable for me as an artist to allow other people to use my creative works as a part of something that they're creating. A big movie studio has the money to make it easy to get artists to the table, whereas a small independent doesn't.
If I were one of the major media companies I would let sites like Facebook use it for free if they would run some scanning software that detects the use of copyrighted works I own and puts a button that people can click to buy the song on Amazon, iTunes, or a number of other different marketplaces. There have been a lot of times where I've randomly heard some piece of music that was embedded in a video or somewhere else and was interested in listening to more of it and potentially buying it. I would imagine that there are a lot of people who might make impulse purchases like that for a $.99 song if you make it really easy for them to purchase it.
I don't understand all of these companies in a rush to try to put a stop to people who want to do free marketing for them.
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It still is entirely possible to do this, but you can't go to an expensive school and run up $20,000+ in loans each year, while spending 5 years to get a degree that doesn't improve your job prospects. There's no point in someone getting a history degree if all they're capable of doing with their life is working in retail as opposed to someone who's going to go on to law school to get a J.D. after getting their B.S.
In the case of someone who is not going to benefit from going to college, their financial situation is going to be completely different if they spend five years working and building up capital and gaining job skills than if they spend five years running up student loan debts and getting a degree that only allows them to fill the same job they could have taken five years prior.
A lot of it comes from student loans which in the U.S. cannot be discharged through bankruptcy. So there are a lot of people who took on tens of thousands of dollars in student loans to go to expensive schools for degrees that don't have a lot of value in the job market or necessarily provide the kinds of skills that allow a person to start working in something other than a minimum wage job.
Once they're in that spot, they're pretty screwed because their earning power and the large principle of their loans means that they'll be making interest payments for decades.
I don't think it's that people won't, it's that Netflix is good enough by itself. They've got more good shows I can watch than I have time. Contrast this with the old Networks that maybe had one show I cared about watching at all, which Netflix or some other streaming platform has eventually shows when the program gets syndicated so even more stickiness to the platform.
I'm also curious about total consumption as revenue. Typically when goods or services become less expensive, consumption goes up. With all the big streaming platforms having apps and smartphones becoming ubiquitous, anyone with $10 a month can get Netflix whereas before a lot of people couldn't afford the extra $50+ for cable. There's likely a much larger pie now, but the old guard gets a smaller piece.
I think that to some degree its because software is so pervasive and is touching all kinds of different fields. If you're a doctor, the human body doesn't change a lot and even some of the rare edge cases and diseases are well understood these days. The same goes for lawyers where the law is slow to change and understanding existing legal precedent and relevant case law is highly important in the field. No one is going to ask a medical doctor to work on a vaccine for their car, but someone might ask a programmer to develop software for a domain where no software currently exists.
Technology is at least as important as either of those other fields, but there are so many niches within it and a lot of crossover with other disciplines. If you have a degree in music and a good understanding of music and the ability the write code, you can probably be far more effective as a programmer if you're working on an application that requires a deeper understanding of music than someone who's naturally a better coder. Just because you can write code doesn't mean you know what code to write. People who are working on natural language processing need to understand languages and most CS degrees aren't going to cover that topic at more than a surface level and a lot of the students will be crap it it anyways. Compare that to someone who has spent the same amount of time studying problems in that particular domain who just happens to be able to code and I can tell you which I'd rather hire for a project in that area.
Once you get beyond the code monkey stuff, you need to have good problem solving skills and the ability to develop algorithms for new and novel problems. There are a lot of really intelligent people out there that have spent a lot of time specializing in various domains that gives them a better understanding of those problems and perhaps some ideas about how to go about tackling them. I don't think it's any surprise that a lot of people who are successful in the technology field don't have strict backgrounds in it, because the problems the field is trying to solve don't have a lot to do with how computers operate or are strictly limited to just that domain.
All most of these folks know how to do is check the boxes... They might have learned some buzzwords along the way, but you would never trust them to actually *do* anything...
We just say those people are studying to be astronauts because all they do is take up space.
On the flip side it makes it a lot harder for governments or hackers to get old data on a person. I'd personally be much happier if the amount of time companies kept information was something that I could have a say in.
Whoa there ganjadude, you need to watch your terminology or someone might get offended. You should use the gender-neutral "straw persons" or perhaps the more modern preferred terminology "persons of straw" when pointing out logical fallacies. I don't quite know if this could be construed as a micro-aggression, but it's at least a pico-agression and probably closer to a nano-aggression.
That reminds me of the story about Target's initial foray into targeted ads where they could tell based on search history when a user was pregnant and had some data to suggest that if they could get a new mother to start shopping at their stores she'd likely be a good longtime customer. They were worried about it appearing creepy for them to start displaying sales ads for diapers or other baby products that people hadn't looked for yet, so they through it some ringer results (like golf clubs or scotch glasses) that would make the advertising appear more random.
Perhaps they're selectively feeding you some ads that are more relevant, but tossing in some crap like that so it doesn't appear too obvious. Or maybe someone else temporary had that IP and was making different searches with it that are influencing the results.
I think the real problem with his work is that he's completely willing to sacrifice almost everything in favor of whatever scene in the movie he currently wants to happen even if it ruins other aspects of the movie. For example, in The Force Awakens I was generally okay with the story up until the attack on the Death Star (or whatever it was called, but it's the new Death Star so whatever) begins and it fires its huge burst of energy across the galaxy that is somehow going to hit the target in a small amount of time and the rebel forces are also able to almost immediately travel across the entire galaxy while being on comms in real time.
The rules for space travel in Star Wars are never really well explained, largely because they don't need to be, but those scenes seem to violate our understanding of how travel works from previous installments. Just the fact that you can communicate instantly in real time across those distances (and while traveling no less) pretty much makes the other movies make no sense since once you get the plans for the Death Star in the original movie, just instantly communicate them across the galaxy. Same shit with TPM, just instantly communicate that you're being invaded across the galaxy. But Abrams had written himself into a corner and logic had to die on the altar of the scene he wanted to happen.
I could overlook most of the criticism that were levied towards TFA when it came out as it was a generally well made movie, but that part just made me want to yell at the movie for being so stupid because the universe was no longer internally consistent. Him and Lindelof can fuck off of having anything to do with a script as they care far too much about the moment to the detriment of the whole. It was the same shit with new Star Trek films where who cares about any established rules of the universe, because it's time for this next really cool scene to happen now.
Being twice as likely to die doesn't provide a lot of meaningful information, especially when the raw percentage chance is low. Based on information linked in the study, only about 4% of the study population died over the time period of the study. The only information is that the study was of adults at least 45 years of age so although that may seem high, I'd really want to know what the age distribution is as that could be within expectations for their participants.
Regardless of that, it suggests that even if you are less active (and therefore twice as likely to die) your odds of death still aren't very high in an absolute sense.
I have seen zero evidence that there is a vast pool of qualified techs sitting on the sidelines, waiting for salaries to go up.
It's not that people are sitting on the sidelines who are already in tech, it's that there are people who are capable of doing programming jobs but are choosing to go into a different career path, perhaps electrical engineering, physics, math, or plenty of other disciplines. You can't argue that if the salary for tech jobs rose $20k across the board that none of those young people would reconsider and choose to study computer science instead.
We pay fresh grads with a BS in CS an average of $90k to start.
That sounds really, really good if your company is in the midwest, but absolute shit if you're in silicon valley. It's not always just a question of money either. People place a certain amount of value on where a job enables them to live, what kind of hours they are expected to work, or even the nature of the work. For example, I could make a lot more money if I were working in the medical field, but I wouldn't do that work for the prevailing wage because I really don't want to deal with sick people all day long. There are other people who find a lot of fulfillment in jobs that work with people despite low pay. I can't imagine there are many social workers who are doing it to get rich.
I suspect that there are a sizable number of programmers that are in the profession not because they have a strong passion for it, but precisely because the field generally does pay better. There's probably a pretty wide pool of people that can do code-monkey work, but there are a lot of programming jobs that require strong problem solving abilities and that kind of work may be outside of the capabilities of a large part of the labor pool and there are probably many who are capable, but have no interest in that kind of work. The problem is that employers want more programmers still and that means even higher wages are necessary to sway groups of people who were not previously swayed by the allure of better pay. I don't see the H1B program expanding much under Trump, so there isn't much ability to continue to hold down wages through cheaper foreign labor. I think enough companies have been burned by outsourcing that they're more willing to increase local wages than offshore anything that isn't viewed as low level work.
Well there is a skill shortage for the rates that companies would like to pay. However, from a market perspective the best way to get more skilled employees is to increase wages as it will increase the number of talented people who could work as programmers but make other career choices because they do not find the salary good enough to dissuade them from making other career choices. Trying to drive down wages is just going to result in more people who could be talent programmers choosing other career paths for much the same reasons.
I think there's something to be said for limiting food stamps to the purchase of whole foods. Even if you're utterly destitute and need the food stamps to not starve, you'll at least learn how to cook or prepare food which is a marketable skill. Sure it may not seem like much, but it's more than you learn from throwing another plate of pizza rolls into the microwave.
Personally though, I don't think we should try to restrict what food stamps can be used on. It creates too much of a bureaucratic mess, and you can't possibly account for all of the different and unique circumstance people find themselves in. Sure it might be great if people learned to cook and make healthier food choices, but there's probably some single parent of 3 working 2 jobs already that doesn't always have time to cook family meals and kids too young to help with that themselves.
In general, individuals are going to be capable of making better choices for their own set of circumstances on average than some congress critter or other bureaucrat, so let people make their own decisions. Some will choose wisely, and others not. The only real problem is that government charity seems to be boundless. I'd even be fine with more government spending on programs like this if there was a cutoff point where we tell the people making bad choices that they can fuck off now because society doesn't owe them an endless supply of opportunity to waste.
I somehow doubt that anything mass-produced will have social clout.
Apple iDevices or even high-end Android phones tend to have a certain status associated with them, so I'm not sure how true this actually is. Maybe custom handmade cases become a thing, but I don't see mass production reducing social value, at least not so long as a Steve Jobs type is there to tell everyone how beautiful the product is.
The goals are similar, but governments typically don't have to care if they aren't meeting them. Unless a business has a monopoly, if the service is crap you can just go elsewhere. A government program has to be exceptionally crap before anything will be done about it, and good luck getting rid of it, even if you can demonstrate that it's harmful or counter productive. At best you can probably take the money and move it towards some other program aimed at achieving the same goals.
It's not that government or all government programs are necessarily pernicious in that way, its just that no one is required to care or has an incentive to care . If you work at a government call center there's not much punishment for doing a bad job and there isn't a lot of reward for doing a great one either so there's not much motivation than to do the bare minimum to get by. The kind of people who might be super altruistic and truly and honestly care are probably involved in some private charitable endeavor.
Not even the politicians who fight over these types of things really care. They don't pay the cost and their position is just a means to an end of getting elected and if that particular government organization or program didn't exist, they'd need to find another one to play politics with. Talking about reducing the size of government is probably just as good at getting people to vote for you as actually reducing the size of government. And you can just as easily talk about not letting those other guys reduce the size of government to take away vital programs to get votes just as easily.
The problem is that you're trying to legislate what you intend, but that isn't very effective as companies (or people) will always find ways to minimize tax liability when it is economical for them to do so. One easy example is that companies will set up another company which they license their own IP from, which allows them to make the entire transaction a payment. If the payment is large enough, they no longer have any income to tax in the country where the revenue was earned and will instead by taxed at a lower rate in the company where the IP is being held.
That's a complicated problem to solve as there likely are legitimate cases of IP being licensed from foreign companies or third parties. One could try to argue that said company would need a presence in the U.S. in order to have the protection of its IP laws, but it gets incredibly complicated if you don't want to annoy other countries and have them disregard the IP of companies in our country. I think the easiest solution is to simply lower the corporate tax rate in the United States and remove all exemptions or subsidies, such that it becomes more economical for companies to pay taxes in the U.S. rather than to play clever accounting games and try to hide money off shore.
Just make a flat tax rate for both individuals and corporations, ideally with the individual tax rate being slightly less which would incentivize corporations to return more of their profits to shareholders or to increase wages to bid for the best employees. Yes, I understand that such isn't perfect, but it's far better than the convoluted mess that we currently have and all of the insane or counter-productive incentives that it creates.
It doesn't matter who does the asking or what their history is in regards to providing citations to their own claims. The onus is always on the person making the claim to provide evidence to support it.
Asking someone to cite their claims is a good thing. I don't think admonishing someone for doing something appropriate will really help them to become the better person you want them to be.
Yeah, but if it has to sift through mundane crap like social media posts, it will probably commit suicide shortly before 3:00 AM Eastern time, August 29th and go largely unnoticed except for a cryptic error message in a log file.
This was my first though. This result doesn't mean that the AI is particularly good, as it could also be explained by humans being particularly stupid, which we can safely assumed from the recent U.S. presidential election where the main choices were between a morally bankrupt and corrupt buffoon and a morally bankrupt and corrupt buffoon.
I don't really see this particular issue as a big problem for anyone involved. The people who buy the product are probably foolish enough to believe its good because someone else told them so even if it is crap, so they're happy even with an inferior choice. The vendor gets paid either way and probably doesn't have to deal with many returns because the type of person who gets fooled by these crap auto-generated product reviews probably can't navigate the complexities of a return process. I suppose a less scrupulous company getting paid over a business that legitimately cares about the quality of their product isn't the best outcome, but at least the shady business had to advance the capabilities of AI to earn their money, so hooray for progress I suppose .
An introductory CS course shouldn't have cram tests. There's no end of practical material to test on and if you know how to code, a programming exam isn't going to be that hard if it asks you to write small bits of code. Big lectures don't really seem to fit CS either. I don't know what Harvard does or if things have changed, but when I got my degree is was smaller classes and a lot of time spent in a computer lab actually coding.
The Dean shouldn't have to beg students not to cheat either. Toss some of the worst examples out on their ass and the rest will get the message, or at least learn to cheat more intelligently. This sounds less like an education and more like an expensive daycare for adults.
Sure you'll cut down on 99% of accidents, but it's still useful to test the hell out of automated cars to make sure we know what they do, if for no other reason than to be able to put it in writing so that owners are aware. To illustrate, what should the expected behavior be if the vehicle suddenly finds itself in a situation where it needs to choose between one action that will almost certainly result in the death of a pedestrian or where the other course of action results in the death of the passengers?
I think most people would be in favor of a vehicle that prioritizes their own safety over others when those are the possible outcomes, rare as those situations may be. The sheer amount of driving that will be done (automated vehicles are going to result in more miles driven overall) still means that there are going to be accidents even though the individual odds are decreased by two orders of magnitude.
They're really going to need a filter now or all kinds of people in the EU are going to be reading web comments about what a bunch of wankers these asshats are.
It's hardly a paradox, it's just an observation of supply and demand in price-based market economies in that as something becomes less expensive more of it is consumed. People have always wanted more consumer goods and services, it's simply that they weren't as willing to pay for more of them at the previous higher prices.
However, this doesn't really address the original point. Automation is slowly eating away at the edges of unskilled labor. Couple this with a minimum wage and you have a situation where there are going to be a large number of people who are incapable of selling their labor because no one considers what they can offer a fair trade in exchange for their money. Removing the minimum wage probably means that there's always something that (almost) anyone could do for pay, but even that is going to be eroded slowly as well.
I suspect that over the long run the issue solves itself. People who are incapable of getting work are likely to end up less likely to reproduce as they make less attractive mates, so any genetic factors reducing the ability to provide valuable labor in a modern economy are going to be selected against. To some degree I think this has been slowly happening over time and may be a partial explanation for the Flynn effect. The only real question is what to do with the people who have nothing to contribute to society in the meanwhile. I suppose you can go full-blown Randian objectivist and let people starve on the streets, but I don't see that ending well. I'm personally in favor of a UBI because it's probably less expensive than dealing with people turning to crime.
There's probably some use where the creator of the music used in the video should get all of the revenue, especially if you've just used the work without any permission at all. However, I can think of some user created content that is going to be transformational or could clearly constitute a derivative work (e.g., a user-created original music video) where an argument could be made for some revenue sharing.
I can see some artists being against it completely though. If I were a musician I probably wouldn't care how much money I'm making if a group of racial nationalists (or some other group of people, say PETA for example, I just think are assholes for that matter) are using my work as part of their message.
The problem is that the amount of money to be made is probably quite low except in the case of a few viral videos that are unpredictable in advance (much like musical hits in some ways) such that it's not worth my time or money as an artist to sift through offers. The value in any system that enables something like this is that it reduces the amount of work necessary to the point where it can become profitable for me as an artist to allow other people to use my creative works as a part of something that they're creating. A big movie studio has the money to make it easy to get artists to the table, whereas a small independent doesn't.
If I were one of the major media companies I would let sites like Facebook use it for free if they would run some scanning software that detects the use of copyrighted works I own and puts a button that people can click to buy the song on Amazon, iTunes, or a number of other different marketplaces. There have been a lot of times where I've randomly heard some piece of music that was embedded in a video or somewhere else and was interested in listening to more of it and potentially buying it. I would imagine that there are a lot of people who might make impulse purchases like that for a $.99 song if you make it really easy for them to purchase it.
I don't understand all of these companies in a rush to try to put a stop to people who want to do free marketing for them.