There are people who can't get a credit card? People without a lot of money seem to be the prime customers because they'll run the card up and only pay the minimum monthly payment, yielding shit tons of money for credit card companies due to absurd interest rates those cards charge. Most places that will take a credit card will also accept some form of debit cards or reloadable gift cards. Sure it's an extra hassle to get those if you don't have a credit card, but that may be as much of a personal choice anything to do with your financial situation.
I think it’s fine if you have a special extension of the executive branch make policy suggestions to Congress. Congress is free to ignore them, but it’s not the job of the executive branch (or more specifically the bureaucratic aspects of it) to create the rules. Congress has been irresponsible in abdicating their authority and the judicial branch is perhaps worse for allowing this folly to persist.
I don't know if Net Neutrality is a big enough deal to most voters for it to matter. The Dem's would be better off pushing things like gun control, protections for abortions, and other things that their base cares about if they're just signalling. If you want to signal that you're rich, you get a flash car and a gaudy but expensive looking wrist watch. That's going to be more effective than buying a $50,000 fountain pen because most people won't be able to pick up something like that as a signal for wealth.
Also, without both houses of Congress to even push bills to Trump's desk, there's no way to stop things from getting killed in the Senate or just so laden with excess bullshit that when they come back to the House they don't end up getting killed. That doesn't mean that there isn't signalling to voters to be done, only that there's different ways to go about it that are more effective in this case.
The summary tugged at the heartstrings a little, I'll admit, but then I watched the video. That thing had zero personality and if people had to choose between that thing being destroyed or a gnat getting crushed, I think most people would choose to spare the gnat. Hell if it were a choice between that thing being destroyed in hellfire and a gnat being mildly inconvenienced, I'd still bet most people would spare the gnat.
It's not particularly new, and was apparently used historically by medicine men types. You used to be able to buy it in head shops about a decade ago, even in states that banned just about everything else, but eventually they all wised up and banned salvia as well. I've only tried it once, but it was pretty good shit. It's utterly strange in that you're going to have an out of your mind trip, but it only lasts around 10 minutes and you come down fairly quick. I think the people who have bad experiences either smoke entirely too much of it (when it was sold it, you could buy some high concentrate stuff) or just aren't aware of what they've signed up for.
If anyone has an opportunity to try it, I'd definitely recommend it. I don't think anyone would lace it with other shit, the effects are quite profound, but very short term so you're not going to wake up on Tuesday wondering where the hell the weekend went, and it's not something you'll need to worry about getting hooked on. It's going to be a weird experience though. One of my friends said that he was walking around the entire neighborhood looking for everyone else all evening but couldn't find other people. In reality he was just sitting on the couch hugging himself for five minutes.
I'd guess opiates, possibly in conjunction with other drugs like cocaine, but opiates are almost certainly involved. Even for people who are able to manage their addiction or are high functioning, a batched laced with fentanyl can be deadly simply because the required amount for a lethal dose is so low. Other drugs can certainly kill you, but with a lot of the other most commonly abused substances it's a lot less common, especially for someone who is a habitual user and is unlikely to screw up a dose or take too much their first time using.
Seems like rehab isn’t doing a very good job. You can clean a person up and prevent them from using, but unless you address the underlying issues that lead to them seeking out the drugs in the first place they’ll eventually wind back up in the same place. Drug use and addiction can be as much of a symptom as it is a disease.
I think that’s why we need to end the war on drugs and decriminalize their use. We spend too much energy focusing on the wrong solution and wonder why nothing seems to change.
There have always been plenty of cranks. If it seems like there are more of them now, it's only because the internet makes it easy for them to gather in a single place. Movies were previously expensive to make and distribute, but the democratizing effects of technology mean that any idiot with a phone and an internet connection can produce and distribute video content.
Don't mistake people calling attention to something for an increase in that thing, especially when no one was really looking at it before. It's like all of the recent news about child sex rings and grooming gangs that have come out in the UK over the last few years. It was clearly all going on for a long time, and not something that suddenly just cropped up.
This type of thing never works, it just makes the people who already believe in this hunker down because now they believe it's an even bigger conspiracy. If you want to get people to stop believing in this, just make a pro-vaccine movie. Only you don't fill in full of scientists, reason and logic. Go film some of the anti-vaxxers whose children got sick with perfectly preventable diseases. Make sure to really capture the suffering of those poor children and the misery of the dumb-fuck parents. Go to the corners of the earth where polio still exists to show them the horrors of that. I think that will get their attention.
Lets say that I follow a person named John D. around for days without permission, make note of what John D. does and where he buys with timestamps accurate to the second without John D. knowing it is happening, analyze what kind of personality traits John D. has, enter that data into an electronic database where it is stored forever, and also make the data purchaseable to any third party who is interested.
That sounds a bit like a private detective, with the exception that they typically work for a specific client.
Also, if you stop to think about it, going to a website it like going to some person's private establishment. I'm visiting their server, so it's their rules. Stores no doubt track my purchases, and some even have cameras on presence that record my every action. If I have a problem with it, I can take my business elsewhere.
Sure, terms of service could be more explicit, but most people wouldn't bother to read them or would just click through like they did when they signed up for a Facebook account or half of the other shit they use online.
Most people don't care about net neutrality if they even know what it is. You're not going to get anyone to seriously consider selecting candidates on that basis as long as issues such as the economy, gun control, immigration, healthcare, taxes, abortion, and a whole list of others are around.
I would say that on average the scientific consensus is a better approximation or model of the capital-T Truth than the average other explanations that exist. That's a little bit meaningless, but the idea is is that the current consensus replaced a previous consensus that wasn't as close to the true explanation or understanding of the universe. New ideas can come out and change the consensus, but the consensus exists for a reason. It's not that people were wrong or idiots, but often just do to the limitations in our ability to objectively measure the universe.
To provide an example, before we understood microorganisms and developed germ theory, the doctors at the time operated under something called miasma theory, which indicated that bad air or noxious odors from rotting things. We know that this is wrong, but you have to look at why people believed it and the answer is that their belief in it caused them to behave in such a way that reduced the spread of disease. Prior to that you did shit like put leaches on a person to get rid of the bad blood, or drilled holes in their skull to let the evil spirits out. Miasma theory wasn't perfect, but it got people to dress up like plague doctors which was somewhat more effective of preventing the spread of airborne illness, so of course it seemed right to anyone at the time. Until you create a microscope and can view microbes, there isn't any more reason to believe in them than invisible purple unicorns that place hexes on people.
Yes, consensus can be limiting because it naturally opposes new radical ideas. However, most radical new ideas are complete shit. We're not going to have a healing crystal theory of disease anytime soon, for example. The downsides to consensus don't outweigh the benefits though. I really doubt that you'd want to live in a world that treats any point of view as having equally worthy consideration as the consensus. It might sound great, but then you get idiocy like the NHS having to pay for crystal therapy treatments, because why shouldn't that be just as good as modern medicine? The only way you could have such a system is in a anarchic system where everyone is free to do as they will and suffer the consequences of their own poor decisions. I'll gladly accept the small amount of imposition on freedom that consensus brings.
There are other forms of auctions that could be used. A silent auction is essentially immune to snipers. Everyone is forced to bid based on what they think and item is worth without the availability of information about how others value an item. You can use variations on that, such as having the winner only pay the next increment over the second highest bid instead of their actual amount, but the principle remains the same.
The problem with snipers is that because it makes sense for you to behave that way, it also makes sense for others to do that as well. It may be optimal behavior for you as an individual, but if everyone starts doing it, the results are sub-optimal for all players. Or maybe it's optimal for everyone to behave like a sniper. I'm sure there's someone who's looked at the game theory behind eBay auctions. I haven't used the site in over a decade, so I don't particularly care.
For some reason people think Socialism and Capitalism is an all or nothing type of thing, which has to diametrically opposed to each other.
While neither philosophy requires all-or-nothing implementation, they are at the core very much opposed to each other. A capitalist system must necessarily respect private property rights, and a socialist system by definition cannot.
The mistake people make is that the look at capitalism and see that it is a system under which the rich will grow richer. This is merely the outcome of any competitive game, where once you start to gain an advantage, it becomes easier gain further advantage. It's no different than a sporting team which has a history of winning championships having an easier time attracting players to come play for them. Fortunately, an economy is not a zero sum game. Even though the wealthiest people are more wealthy than ever before under capitalism, the value created is also enjoyed by those who are not as well off and they have an opportunity to sell their labor and accrue wealth, unlike previous periods in history where most people were slaves or serfs and had no rights to their own labor.
Socialism likes to promise a lot, but there's plenty of evidence to suggest that Marxist economic policies are nothing but disastrous. Central planning, price controls, the nationalization of private industry, and other policies typically employed under Communist or Marxist governments have a clear track record of failure. I think that even the major proponents of the ideology have realized this and now like to brag up what's often called Democratic Socialism and the Scandinavian countries that supposedly employ this system. Of course the dirty secrets are that these countries are not only strongly capitalist, but also have some of the freest markets in the whole world. The other dirty secret is that it isn't just the rich who pay heavily for the government services that those countries offer, but the middle class as well. In Denmark you barely need to be above the average income for the country before you're in the top marginal tax bracket. Never mind that there's VAT and other taxes beyond that.
There are some people who consider all of those "free" benefits to be great, but I don't think many of them realize the true cost. Certainly there are some who do, but I would never care to live under such a system. I believe that I can do a better job of making decisions for myself than can some government bureaucrat, and if I fuck up, then I've got no one but myself to blame for any actions I chose to take of my own accord.
It's no different than anything else that grows and tries to expand the user base to people who are just starting out and don't have years of previous experience that they can fall back on. Look at the computer industry and early internet where there was little hand-holding and people needed to spend a lot of time figuring things out. Unfortunately if you're a company that wants to increase their customer-base, that naturally requires dumbing-down the product so that more people are able to use it.
Try and make something that harkens back to that time and you'll get called elitist or get accused of gate-keeping. I recall this happening last year (or was it the year before) when Cuphead came out and was brutally difficult, but had a tutorial level that didn't spell things out for you where some hapless reviewer got stuck on something that seemed simple if you had any knowledge of platformers and was pilloried for it.
There's a pretty good video that discusses the whole concept of tutorials and using good level design to teach gameplay that's worth the watch if you haven't seen it already. There's a good deal of profanity used, so you might not want to blast it if you're at work.
But the key thing to keep sight of is that the editorial process should try to stamp out crap. That's the whole reason I'm willing to pay. I can't read everything and if every search term has a load of crap then it's useless.
The people reviewing the publications are often other researchers in the field who aren't paid for their services. These journals aren't employing anyone who understands whether or not the articles are good. They simply manage the entire process of submitting publications, finding people to peer review the work, and communicating responses back to the author. If they're good, they try to keep the whole process reasonably fair and free of potential bias the would come from outside of the research itself.
Obviously none of that's free. The researchers could always collectively do it themselves since outside of the organizational aspects, they're the ones producing and reviewing the research, but most of them would be crap at managing journals or have no interest in doing so. So here we are back to square one again.
The real problem is that because copyright in general has gotten so out of control, we have this interesting side effect that tax-payer funded research can be locked away from tax payers. That's a good enough reason to take issue with this in and of itself. If the government wants to step in and set much more strict copyright limitations on tax-payer funded research that means anything publicly funded becomes publicly available after only a few years, I think that would be a good compromise.
Payment is not guarantee of quality either. There are a lot of predatory journals that prey on the need for researchers to publish or perish and will gladly publish whatever shit anyone cares to crank out as long as you'll pay their fee. That's the problem with fucked up incentive structures. They always beget unscrupulous little cottage industries that spring up around them.
and you can still buy stuff. Not so much if you're one of the ones that lost jobs to automation (and process improvement, don't forget that).
That's why all of the switchboard operators starved when they were put out of work. Same with the displaced farmers, smiths, and little old ladies knitting socks by hand. Instead the cost of food, socks, etc. became cheap, to the extend that even a homeless person can eat quite well and own multiple sets of good quality clothing.
If you're worried about people finding new employment just make sure that the barriers to starting businesses aren't too steep and they'll take care of creating economies themselves and finding all manner of useful work that you can't even imagine. It's why countries like Vietnam and China have been so economically successful after enabling their citizens to own private property and start their own businesses. Don't mistake your own inability to imagine what people will do for work in absence of existing jobs for the inability of the whole to develop new businesses or services.
That wasn't automation, that was cheaper labor and longer (non-Union) work hours....
It's the same underlying principle. When things become less expensive to produce, you can produce more of them and there are more people who can afford to purchase them. And the Chinese were glad to do it because it was a means for them to get off of the subsistence farms they lived on and accumulate capital of their own. It's no coincidence that China has a massive middle class as a result of this. Same thing happened in the U.S. when it industrialized and humans using machines had a lower labor cost than the humans who built everything with more manual processes.
If there are no jobs at all that humans can do, it only means that robots can produce everything we need. You've essentially reduced the cost of caring and providing for humans to zero. We can't give inexpensive medical care to everyone today because there aren't enough doctors to provide the level and quality of care that everyone would like to have. If you've got robots that can do all of that work, then it becomes incredibly inexpensive to provide top of the line medical care.
You seem to imagine some dystopian hell where the rich have all the robots. Many of the biggest humanitarians in the world today are wealthy industrialists. Do you think Bill Gates is suddenly going to hoard all of the robots and wall himself off from the rest of the world? All it takes is for one person who owns robots to build more robots and freely distribute them to people who have none. Do you think that there's no wealthy person who wouldn't do such a thing?
Automation makes sense where it makes sense. Where it doesn't make sense forcing it doesn't make sense.
And how do you purport to know which is which?
Do you think that the businesses who are investing their own money into this automation would be doing it if they didn't believe that it makes sense for them to do so? Just because you cannot see the case for doing it, doesn't mean that one doesn't exist.
and also implying there is no major, major downside to automating away employment.
I don't believe I've done any such thing or that you're choosing to infer more than I meant to imply. Yes, automation means people will lose their jobs. Yet here we are today and no one bemoans the plight of the telephone switchboard operator, the out of work farriers, or the countless other jobs lost over the decades due to improvements in automation. Many of the jobs that exist today couldn't exist at all without the prior advances in automation that freed up human labor to fill those new jobs.
I suppose I don't really care since I don't bother reading YouTube comments, but I have to question why you're watching such low quality YouTube video's that you consider the comments more valuable. Sure, a comment pointing out that the earth is not flat is more valuable than a video going on about some inane flat-earth conspiracy, but that makes me wonder why you're watching that video in the first place. Are you sure that you're not the one who's looking at the wrong videos?
Maybe you think that by removing the comments, there's no way to argue against a video containing some incorrect statements, but I don't believe that to be the case. YouTube would be better off doing away with comments entirely and having some threading to create response videos. Many content creators already do something like this without having such a system in place.
Even after YouTube started hiding (or outright purging) a large number of comments (obvious spam, etc.) the quality is still poor. Due to the nature of creators having fans and followers, comment sections are almost always going to be a bit of an echo chamber, so it's easy for actual quality comments to be voted down out of view. Worse yet, there's nothing stopping the video creator from moderating anything that they dislike out of existence as well.
YouTube is a not a platform that is designed in any way for meaningful comments. I don't doubt that you could find something truly useful, only I think the deck is stacked against that, and the signal to noise ratio means that it's not worth the time spent looking.
I know that there are plenty of people who like to complain about loss of jobs, but this is good. We wouldn’t be able to afford to own even a quarter of all the nice shit we currently have without advances that automated away inefficient human labor which makes things expensive. Go back far enough and almost everyone would need to be farming so that we all wouldn’t starve.
Slashdot Mirror
There are people who can't get a credit card? People without a lot of money seem to be the prime customers because they'll run the card up and only pay the minimum monthly payment, yielding shit tons of money for credit card companies due to absurd interest rates those cards charge. Most places that will take a credit card will also accept some form of debit cards or reloadable gift cards. Sure it's an extra hassle to get those if you don't have a credit card, but that may be as much of a personal choice anything to do with your financial situation.
I don't think Java is dying or anything like that, but a lot of Android development is being done in Kotlin now.
I think it’s fine if you have a special extension of the executive branch make policy suggestions to Congress. Congress is free to ignore them, but it’s not the job of the executive branch (or more specifically the bureaucratic aspects of it) to create the rules. Congress has been irresponsible in abdicating their authority and the judicial branch is perhaps worse for allowing this folly to persist.
I don't know if Net Neutrality is a big enough deal to most voters for it to matter. The Dem's would be better off pushing things like gun control, protections for abortions, and other things that their base cares about if they're just signalling. If you want to signal that you're rich, you get a flash car and a gaudy but expensive looking wrist watch. That's going to be more effective than buying a $50,000 fountain pen because most people won't be able to pick up something like that as a signal for wealth.
Also, without both houses of Congress to even push bills to Trump's desk, there's no way to stop things from getting killed in the Senate or just so laden with excess bullshit that when they come back to the House they don't end up getting killed. That doesn't mean that there isn't signalling to voters to be done, only that there's different ways to go about it that are more effective in this case.
The summary tugged at the heartstrings a little, I'll admit, but then I watched the video. That thing had zero personality and if people had to choose between that thing being destroyed or a gnat getting crushed, I think most people would choose to spare the gnat. Hell if it were a choice between that thing being destroyed in hellfire and a gnat being mildly inconvenienced, I'd still bet most people would spare the gnat.
It's not particularly new, and was apparently used historically by medicine men types. You used to be able to buy it in head shops about a decade ago, even in states that banned just about everything else, but eventually they all wised up and banned salvia as well. I've only tried it once, but it was pretty good shit. It's utterly strange in that you're going to have an out of your mind trip, but it only lasts around 10 minutes and you come down fairly quick. I think the people who have bad experiences either smoke entirely too much of it (when it was sold it, you could buy some high concentrate stuff) or just aren't aware of what they've signed up for.
If anyone has an opportunity to try it, I'd definitely recommend it. I don't think anyone would lace it with other shit, the effects are quite profound, but very short term so you're not going to wake up on Tuesday wondering where the hell the weekend went, and it's not something you'll need to worry about getting hooked on. It's going to be a weird experience though. One of my friends said that he was walking around the entire neighborhood looking for everyone else all evening but couldn't find other people. In reality he was just sitting on the couch hugging himself for five minutes.
I'd guess opiates, possibly in conjunction with other drugs like cocaine, but opiates are almost certainly involved. Even for people who are able to manage their addiction or are high functioning, a batched laced with fentanyl can be deadly simply because the required amount for a lethal dose is so low. Other drugs can certainly kill you, but with a lot of the other most commonly abused substances it's a lot less common, especially for someone who is a habitual user and is unlikely to screw up a dose or take too much their first time using.
Seems like rehab isn’t doing a very good job. You can clean a person up and prevent them from using, but unless you address the underlying issues that lead to them seeking out the drugs in the first place they’ll eventually wind back up in the same place. Drug use and addiction can be as much of a symptom as it is a disease.
I think that’s why we need to end the war on drugs and decriminalize their use. We spend too much energy focusing on the wrong solution and wonder why nothing seems to change.
There have always been plenty of cranks. If it seems like there are more of them now, it's only because the internet makes it easy for them to gather in a single place. Movies were previously expensive to make and distribute, but the democratizing effects of technology mean that any idiot with a phone and an internet connection can produce and distribute video content.
Don't mistake people calling attention to something for an increase in that thing, especially when no one was really looking at it before. It's like all of the recent news about child sex rings and grooming gangs that have come out in the UK over the last few years. It was clearly all going on for a long time, and not something that suddenly just cropped up.
This type of thing never works, it just makes the people who already believe in this hunker down because now they believe it's an even bigger conspiracy. If you want to get people to stop believing in this, just make a pro-vaccine movie. Only you don't fill in full of scientists, reason and logic. Go film some of the anti-vaxxers whose children got sick with perfectly preventable diseases. Make sure to really capture the suffering of those poor children and the misery of the dumb-fuck parents. Go to the corners of the earth where polio still exists to show them the horrors of that. I think that will get their attention.
Lets say that I follow a person named John D. around for days without permission, make note of what John D. does and where he buys with timestamps accurate to the second without John D. knowing it is happening, analyze what kind of personality traits John D. has, enter that data into an electronic database where it is stored forever, and also make the data purchaseable to any third party who is interested.
That sounds a bit like a private detective, with the exception that they typically work for a specific client.
Also, if you stop to think about it, going to a website it like going to some person's private establishment. I'm visiting their server, so it's their rules. Stores no doubt track my purchases, and some even have cameras on presence that record my every action. If I have a problem with it, I can take my business elsewhere.
Sure, terms of service could be more explicit, but most people wouldn't bother to read them or would just click through like they did when they signed up for a Facebook account or half of the other shit they use online.
Most people don't care about net neutrality if they even know what it is. You're not going to get anyone to seriously consider selecting candidates on that basis as long as issues such as the economy, gun control, immigration, healthcare, taxes, abortion, and a whole list of others are around.
I would say that on average the scientific consensus is a better approximation or model of the capital-T Truth than the average other explanations that exist. That's a little bit meaningless, but the idea is is that the current consensus replaced a previous consensus that wasn't as close to the true explanation or understanding of the universe. New ideas can come out and change the consensus, but the consensus exists for a reason. It's not that people were wrong or idiots, but often just do to the limitations in our ability to objectively measure the universe.
To provide an example, before we understood microorganisms and developed germ theory, the doctors at the time operated under something called miasma theory, which indicated that bad air or noxious odors from rotting things. We know that this is wrong, but you have to look at why people believed it and the answer is that their belief in it caused them to behave in such a way that reduced the spread of disease. Prior to that you did shit like put leaches on a person to get rid of the bad blood, or drilled holes in their skull to let the evil spirits out. Miasma theory wasn't perfect, but it got people to dress up like plague doctors which was somewhat more effective of preventing the spread of airborne illness, so of course it seemed right to anyone at the time. Until you create a microscope and can view microbes, there isn't any more reason to believe in them than invisible purple unicorns that place hexes on people.
Yes, consensus can be limiting because it naturally opposes new radical ideas. However, most radical new ideas are complete shit. We're not going to have a healing crystal theory of disease anytime soon, for example. The downsides to consensus don't outweigh the benefits though. I really doubt that you'd want to live in a world that treats any point of view as having equally worthy consideration as the consensus. It might sound great, but then you get idiocy like the NHS having to pay for crystal therapy treatments, because why shouldn't that be just as good as modern medicine? The only way you could have such a system is in a anarchic system where everyone is free to do as they will and suffer the consequences of their own poor decisions. I'll gladly accept the small amount of imposition on freedom that consensus brings.
Is it actually 18%, or is that just another lie? What reason do I have to believe that Facebook is telling the truth this time around?
There are other forms of auctions that could be used. A silent auction is essentially immune to snipers. Everyone is forced to bid based on what they think and item is worth without the availability of information about how others value an item. You can use variations on that, such as having the winner only pay the next increment over the second highest bid instead of their actual amount, but the principle remains the same.
The problem with snipers is that because it makes sense for you to behave that way, it also makes sense for others to do that as well. It may be optimal behavior for you as an individual, but if everyone starts doing it, the results are sub-optimal for all players. Or maybe it's optimal for everyone to behave like a sniper. I'm sure there's someone who's looked at the game theory behind eBay auctions. I haven't used the site in over a decade, so I don't particularly care.
You may as well just kill these people, it would be less cruel.
If they killed them, they wouldn't have a constant and visible reminder for everyone else to stay in line.
For some reason people think Socialism and Capitalism is an all or nothing type of thing, which has to diametrically opposed to each other.
While neither philosophy requires all-or-nothing implementation, they are at the core very much opposed to each other. A capitalist system must necessarily respect private property rights, and a socialist system by definition cannot.
The mistake people make is that the look at capitalism and see that it is a system under which the rich will grow richer. This is merely the outcome of any competitive game, where once you start to gain an advantage, it becomes easier gain further advantage. It's no different than a sporting team which has a history of winning championships having an easier time attracting players to come play for them. Fortunately, an economy is not a zero sum game. Even though the wealthiest people are more wealthy than ever before under capitalism, the value created is also enjoyed by those who are not as well off and they have an opportunity to sell their labor and accrue wealth, unlike previous periods in history where most people were slaves or serfs and had no rights to their own labor.
Socialism likes to promise a lot, but there's plenty of evidence to suggest that Marxist economic policies are nothing but disastrous. Central planning, price controls, the nationalization of private industry, and other policies typically employed under Communist or Marxist governments have a clear track record of failure. I think that even the major proponents of the ideology have realized this and now like to brag up what's often called Democratic Socialism and the Scandinavian countries that supposedly employ this system. Of course the dirty secrets are that these countries are not only strongly capitalist, but also have some of the freest markets in the whole world. The other dirty secret is that it isn't just the rich who pay heavily for the government services that those countries offer, but the middle class as well. In Denmark you barely need to be above the average income for the country before you're in the top marginal tax bracket. Never mind that there's VAT and other taxes beyond that.
There are some people who consider all of those "free" benefits to be great, but I don't think many of them realize the true cost. Certainly there are some who do, but I would never care to live under such a system. I believe that I can do a better job of making decisions for myself than can some government bureaucrat, and if I fuck up, then I've got no one but myself to blame for any actions I chose to take of my own accord.
It's no different than anything else that grows and tries to expand the user base to people who are just starting out and don't have years of previous experience that they can fall back on. Look at the computer industry and early internet where there was little hand-holding and people needed to spend a lot of time figuring things out. Unfortunately if you're a company that wants to increase their customer-base, that naturally requires dumbing-down the product so that more people are able to use it.
Try and make something that harkens back to that time and you'll get called elitist or get accused of gate-keeping. I recall this happening last year (or was it the year before) when Cuphead came out and was brutally difficult, but had a tutorial level that didn't spell things out for you where some hapless reviewer got stuck on something that seemed simple if you had any knowledge of platformers and was pilloried for it.
There's a pretty good video that discusses the whole concept of tutorials and using good level design to teach gameplay that's worth the watch if you haven't seen it already. There's a good deal of profanity used, so you might not want to blast it if you're at work.
But the key thing to keep sight of is that the editorial process should try to stamp out crap. That's the whole reason I'm willing to pay. I can't read everything and if every search term has a load of crap then it's useless.
The people reviewing the publications are often other researchers in the field who aren't paid for their services. These journals aren't employing anyone who understands whether or not the articles are good. They simply manage the entire process of submitting publications, finding people to peer review the work, and communicating responses back to the author. If they're good, they try to keep the whole process reasonably fair and free of potential bias the would come from outside of the research itself.
Obviously none of that's free. The researchers could always collectively do it themselves since outside of the organizational aspects, they're the ones producing and reviewing the research, but most of them would be crap at managing journals or have no interest in doing so. So here we are back to square one again.
The real problem is that because copyright in general has gotten so out of control, we have this interesting side effect that tax-payer funded research can be locked away from tax payers. That's a good enough reason to take issue with this in and of itself. If the government wants to step in and set much more strict copyright limitations on tax-payer funded research that means anything publicly funded becomes publicly available after only a few years, I think that would be a good compromise.
Payment is not guarantee of quality either. There are a lot of predatory journals that prey on the need for researchers to publish or perish and will gladly publish whatever shit anyone cares to crank out as long as you'll pay their fee. That's the problem with fucked up incentive structures. They always beget unscrupulous little cottage industries that spring up around them.
can we PLEASE have our country back?
What was taken from you exactly? It's this kind of vague and useless platitudes that I'm talking about.
time to share some of the wealth
You're likely more wealthy than 99% of the world. Why aren't you sharing all of your wealth with them?
and you can still buy stuff. Not so much if you're one of the ones that lost jobs to automation (and process improvement, don't forget that).
That's why all of the switchboard operators starved when they were put out of work. Same with the displaced farmers, smiths, and little old ladies knitting socks by hand. Instead the cost of food, socks, etc. became cheap, to the extend that even a homeless person can eat quite well and own multiple sets of good quality clothing. If you're worried about people finding new employment just make sure that the barriers to starting businesses aren't too steep and they'll take care of creating economies themselves and finding all manner of useful work that you can't even imagine. It's why countries like Vietnam and China have been so economically successful after enabling their citizens to own private property and start their own businesses. Don't mistake your own inability to imagine what people will do for work in absence of existing jobs for the inability of the whole to develop new businesses or services.
That wasn't automation, that was cheaper labor and longer (non-Union) work hours....
It's the same underlying principle. When things become less expensive to produce, you can produce more of them and there are more people who can afford to purchase them. And the Chinese were glad to do it because it was a means for them to get off of the subsistence farms they lived on and accumulate capital of their own. It's no coincidence that China has a massive middle class as a result of this. Same thing happened in the U.S. when it industrialized and humans using machines had a lower labor cost than the humans who built everything with more manual processes.
If there are no jobs at all that humans can do, it only means that robots can produce everything we need. You've essentially reduced the cost of caring and providing for humans to zero. We can't give inexpensive medical care to everyone today because there aren't enough doctors to provide the level and quality of care that everyone would like to have. If you've got robots that can do all of that work, then it becomes incredibly inexpensive to provide top of the line medical care.
You seem to imagine some dystopian hell where the rich have all the robots. Many of the biggest humanitarians in the world today are wealthy industrialists. Do you think Bill Gates is suddenly going to hoard all of the robots and wall himself off from the rest of the world? All it takes is for one person who owns robots to build more robots and freely distribute them to people who have none. Do you think that there's no wealthy person who wouldn't do such a thing?
Automation makes sense where it makes sense. Where it doesn't make sense forcing it doesn't make sense.
And how do you purport to know which is which?
Do you think that the businesses who are investing their own money into this automation would be doing it if they didn't believe that it makes sense for them to do so? Just because you cannot see the case for doing it, doesn't mean that one doesn't exist.
and also implying there is no major, major downside to automating away employment.
I don't believe I've done any such thing or that you're choosing to infer more than I meant to imply. Yes, automation means people will lose their jobs. Yet here we are today and no one bemoans the plight of the telephone switchboard operator, the out of work farriers, or the countless other jobs lost over the decades due to improvements in automation. Many of the jobs that exist today couldn't exist at all without the prior advances in automation that freed up human labor to fill those new jobs.
I suppose I don't really care since I don't bother reading YouTube comments, but I have to question why you're watching such low quality YouTube video's that you consider the comments more valuable. Sure, a comment pointing out that the earth is not flat is more valuable than a video going on about some inane flat-earth conspiracy, but that makes me wonder why you're watching that video in the first place. Are you sure that you're not the one who's looking at the wrong videos?
Maybe you think that by removing the comments, there's no way to argue against a video containing some incorrect statements, but I don't believe that to be the case. YouTube would be better off doing away with comments entirely and having some threading to create response videos. Many content creators already do something like this without having such a system in place.
Even after YouTube started hiding (or outright purging) a large number of comments (obvious spam, etc.) the quality is still poor. Due to the nature of creators having fans and followers, comment sections are almost always going to be a bit of an echo chamber, so it's easy for actual quality comments to be voted down out of view. Worse yet, there's nothing stopping the video creator from moderating anything that they dislike out of existence as well.
YouTube is a not a platform that is designed in any way for meaningful comments. I don't doubt that you could find something truly useful, only I think the deck is stacked against that, and the signal to noise ratio means that it's not worth the time spent looking.
I know that there are plenty of people who like to complain about loss of jobs, but this is good. We wouldn’t be able to afford to own even a quarter of all the nice shit we currently have without advances that automated away inefficient human labor which makes things expensive. Go back far enough and almost everyone would need to be farming so that we all wouldn’t starve.