so can anyone give a good reason why the Google search engine shouldn’t be nationalised, now that the pagerank innovation is no longer novel?
Do you mean nationalized or made public domain?
I was a little sloppy in my speech, my real question is given that corporations only exist at the sufferance of the public, what purpose does Google serve in its current form that couldn’t better be achieved by destroying it?
For actual nationalization, the US Government would be absolutely terrible at administering Google.
For having other companies copy pagerank, it wouldn’t be used to subsidize all the other various Google ventures that have benefits for internet users.
As far as I can tell, even though uneven exchange of trade between nations means that someone, somewhere must be taking on debt or selling off assets, only Nationalists actually care about the trade deficit.
The Left in general would prefer to see the end of nations, and want “reparations” to go to “brown people” from the developed countries for the sins of colonialism. (Never mind the colonialism of their own movements.)
The Liberals also want an end to nations, and everyone singing along happily together, but under Capitalism. Also they really are individualists, so they don’t think countries have a ‘right’ to hang onto their wealth.
The Capitalists like it because, aside from making the money themselves, weakening nations and loading them up with debt messes with the state’s abilities to regulate their behavior and make them do things like quit using child labor. Further, weakening nations weakens the states themselves, but most people cannot see this.
“Global trade, but we don’t keep a net trade deficit or surplus across the total of our trade with all nations” would likely be beneficial to American workers, but who cares about that?
Are you so sure nationalist elements are opposed to this? It’s the other side of the account you want to pay attention to, the capital account. It’s about America’s role as the global hegemon. Having the US dollar as the global reserve currency means that the US can use to enforce it’s will. Nations stockpile US dollars to fend off the IMF. It’s about increasing the desire of others to hold US assets. The trade deficit is the result of decisions the US has made to increase it’s national power since the Second World War.
It depends a lot on what US assets they’re holding. In general, to maintain sovereignty, you don’t want foreigners owning all of your real estate and other assets unless you’re planning to purge their ownership without compensation later. If they own your physical dollars, that may not be as big of a deal, since you can unilaterally change your currency if necessary, leaving them with piles of worthless paper. (That and, of course, significantly strengthening China is not a good long-term plan for American hegemony.)
Although, this does make me curious based on the level of implied competence in the ruling elites’ actions based on your evaluation, what do you think the purpose of the Iraq War was? The purpose of the Euro?
Though, to refine the previous statement, it isn’t that all Nationalists want to balance the trade deficit, but rather I think most people who want to balance the trade deficit are going to lean Nationalist (prioritizing the nation’s workers over capital or foreign workers).
Tumblr funnymen: omg gamer dudes are the absolute worst and garbage pedophile and they sexuallize characters
Meanwhile in the shipping side of tumblr:
“Let’s turn all friendship and emotional intimacy between men into a sign of androsexuality (even though anecdotal reports indicate that straight women are not interested in bisexual men).”
Like, I get that the fujoshis love to ship men, that’s okay, but a healthy media marketplace will contain examples of men deeply relating to each other that are entirely straight, even though it will also include gay men.
As far as I can tell, even though uneven exchange of trade between nations means that someone, somewhere must be taking on debt or selling off assets, only Nationalists actually care about the trade deficit.
The Left in general would prefer to see the end of nations, and want “reparations” to go to “brown people” from the developed countries for the sins of colonialism. (Never mind the colonialism of their own movements.)
The Liberals also want an end to nations, and everyone singing along happily together, but under Capitalism. Also they really are individualists, so they don’t think countries have a ‘right’ to hang onto their wealth.
The Capitalists like it because, aside from making the money themselves, weakening nations and loading them up with debt messes with the state’s abilities to regulate their behavior and make them do things like quit using child labor. Further, weakening nations weakens the states themselves, but most people cannot see this.
“Global trade, but we don’t keep a net trade deficit or surplus across the total of our trade with all nations” would likely be beneficial to American workers, but who cares about that?
The president’s distaste for trade deficits with any
country is not news, but that last sentence is striking — Trump is
claiming that trade deficits are at the root of the national debt.
That is a creative explanation — and an incorrect one.
Vox just made a humiliating economic error in front of its readers.
> seriously this is what you hit him on?
Might I suggest this is ideological in nature. Global types don’t want America balancing its net imports/exports. They want a net flow of wealth out of the country.
A white dude saying “you can’t call me white because whiteness is an ideology” is the perfect example of taking academic language and concepts out of their actual contextual meaning to defend something really shitty
unpopular opinion: people who accuse others of being white are the real whites
I’m a level 5 white, I can’t breathe near anyone who has a culture
having a 3yo brother means i get exposed to kids’ shows way more often than i thought i would at this point in my life, but man, binge watching thomas the tank engine as an adult is a wild fucking experience
all these trains (and there’s like 20 counting locomotives alone, don’t even get me started on the anthropomorphic train cabins) are MAD competitive the whole time and will constantly fuck up their own whole day by tring to prove they’re the biggest baddest train. and like, i understand that you gotta get you plot from somewhere and i imagine plotlines like this happen in cars etc. as well, but the other day i was watching and i noticed that all these goddamn locomotives have DRIVERS in them. that apparently have no control over their train’s actions at all whatsoever. so these trains wake up, pick up their drivers, go to work, get taunted by another train who’s like “ha ha i see u there with your 4 cabins but did you know i can pull SIX cabins and still fucking book it at 80mph” and the 4 cabin train will be like “fuck it i gotta prove myself now, hook me up with 4 more cabins” and will inevitably derail themselves or some shit while the engine driver just shuts up and kicks back the whole time
i explained this to my brother and was like, is that fucked up or what, but he just pointed at the green train and went “that’s percy” so i guess that’s his take on the situation
I want to complain about people who send messages containing only ‘hi’ or something similar. This happens mostly on dating sites, but it happens on Tumblr too.
Like, what do you think will happen? Do you think I will also say ‘hi’ back and then you will be like ‘how are you’ and I will be like ‘pretty good how about you’ and you will be like ‘i like your stuff’ and I will be like ‘your blog is pretty cool too’ and then you will be like ‘yeah lol’ and i will be like ‘do you wanna have sex’?
It’s annoying, but it’s better than those people who don’t send messages at all, and just expect to receive them.
Disagree unless they can actually make that expectation relevant to you.
There was a hilarious dating site a while ago (whose name I forgot and which might well still exist) where the concept was that only women could initiate conversation. The consequence was that women would send hot men empty messages so they could initiate.
Apparently reality is more exaggerated than even my own beliefs.
The Fourth of July is an annual American celebration of freedom from repressive laws and government. In time-honoured tradition, the American people observe this date by setting off as many illegal explosions as they can before the police show up.
got an iron pan, see if it can free me from the tyranny of teflon.
modern consumerism prefers the smarts to be baked into the product, so instead of learning new skills or gaining experience (personal growth!) you just upgrade your life by purchasing a better model.
so far this process still fails to work for some product categories: no matter how good the knife you have to know how to sharpen it, and no matter how good the pan you have to know how to season it, or be consigned to a succession of disposable items, which is the flip side of purchasing upgrades: binning the old stuff.
to clarify I am absolutely terrible at these things; frankly if you could purchase competence online with one-click checkout I would be incredibly pleased
DO NOT EVER PIRATE SKILL SOFTWARE
ALWAYS ALWAYSALWAYS
Yes, good man, always make sure you purchase skill software legitimately, and cryptographically signed directly from the vendor. Further, the deeper your implants and the deeper you run the software, the more important it is that it isn’t compromise. People like to think of it as just a tool, but when you run skills, it becomes part of you.
I know people call me paranoid, but I only ever run skill software in standalone mode. It’s good security practice to only interface with networks externally, too, and neuro-gap components. Your mind is a fortress and it’s best not to leave holes in the walls.
free markets werent such a bad idea at first but i think theyve run their course
the idea that a corporation make the end user pay for a product but then place in their terms of agreement that said corporation is the real owner is actually evil
the end user should be the absolute sovereign owner
also closed source is bad and gross open source is good
What are you rambling on about now, you flaming homosexual?
A rant about physical products are now licensed rather than outright bought.
Something akin to the original intention of Xbox one during unveiling
stocking Stallman is right
There’s a reason commercial software is so successful when FOSS is just sitting right there in competition.
You want what you need, not the minimum of what some bored sysadmin in Oklahoma can code in his spare time. Having to actually sell the stuff provides funds to hire developers and keeps the project from going too off-the-rails.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t alternative ways to arrange software development, just that “boo, closed source!” isn’t very clueful on the intersection of economics and software development.
I don’t think we’ll see Neural Nets creating entire television shows any time soon, in addition to other classes of drawings/images, for two reasons.
1) During the act of creation, human beings are able to constantly evaluate what looks good according to their own tastes, thus acting in a both backwards and forwards search through the content space. A regular neural network which is orders of magnitude less complex cannot accomplish this or logically reason about it.
2) Filling in certain elements requires higher abstract reasoning, which is more complex and also requires a lot more power. (e.g., logically deducing facts about things which are not immediately visible in the scene)
What I think we’ll see instead are patches, filters, and tools. Not “make me a South Park episode”, but “make me a texture of gravel”. An existing one sharpens up pictures of animu girlz, and likely a NN could be trained to, for example, increase the resolution on old 90′s anime.
(I do agree that low-level feature generation will be used first)
Oh, it may well get there eventually, but with the slowdown on Moore’s Law, it depends on one’s evaluation of just how powerful and just how inefficient human brains are - and if they’re doing stuff with microtubules and non-trivial quantum stuff, that suggests something more rather than less powerful than previous estimates.
It’s likely that, aside from the requirements for replication (itself non-trivial), the human brain’s computational density isn’t that horrifically poorly tuned, probably reflecting tradeoffs in energy consumption, heat dissipation, latency, durability, and so on.
Currently, I’m forecasting specialized modules on dedicated hardware, but I don’t think we’re going to hit the levels of computational cost/density that Kurzweil and the other Singulatarians predicted, as the cost in engineer manhours per chip is going up, last I checked.
(I think I’ve already mentioned some implications for ethics.)
It does cause the information risks you’re worried about long before being able to create an entire South Park episode, however.
I don’t think we’ll see Neural Nets creating entire television shows any time soon, in addition to other classes of drawings/images, for two reasons.
1) During the act of creation, human beings are able to constantly evaluate what looks good according to their own tastes, thus acting in a both backwards and forwards search through the content space. A regular neural network which is orders of magnitude less complex cannot accomplish this or logically reason about it.
2) Filling in certain elements requires higher abstract reasoning, which is more complex and also requires a lot more power. (e.g., logically deducing facts about things which are not immediately visible in the scene)
What I think we’ll see instead are patches, filters, and tools. Not “make me a South Park episode”, but “make me a texture of gravel”. An existing one sharpens up pictures of animu girlz, and likely a NN could be trained to, for example, increase the resolution on old 90′s anime.
Look, all I’m saying is that while it isn’t a matter of systematic oppression for each man to prefer that his girlfriend get the purring augmentation, if the vast majority of men have a strong preference, this creates a powerful incentive gradient in which any women who don’t will risk a greater chance of loneliness.
Just because popular VR personas use it now does not justify getting an expensive cybernetic implant, especially since it didn’t really hit the big time until about five years ago.
@argumate I thought you weren’t getting enough Discourse, so I got you some from the future
Look, all I’m saying is that while it isn’t a matter of systematic oppression for each man to prefer that his girlfriend get the purring augmentation, if the vast majority of men have a strong preference, this creates a powerful incentive gradient in which any women who don’t will risk a greater chance of loneliness.
Just because popular VR personas use it now does not justify getting an expensive cybernetic implant, especially since it didn’t really hit the big time until about five years ago.
[Scene:
a nervous-looking older man meets with a millennial in a darkened alley.]
Millennial:
what's the target?
Man:
I don't know if I want to do this.
Millennial:
people don't come to us until they've made up their minds.
Man:
Alright. Styrofoam cups.
Millennial:
Six months and they're gone.
Man:
Can millennials really kill styrofoam cups?
Millennial:
we can kill anything, but not cheaply.
Man:
I can pay. I work for a plasti-
Millennial:
I don't need to know and frankly I don't care. One of us will deliver a routing number to a Zurich account. Two billion euros, then we start.
Man:
Al..alright.
Millennial:
It will be your last chance to reconsider. Once the money is processed you'll have no contact with us again.
Man:
I understand. It has to be done.
Millennial:
then it's sealed. The cups will join chain restaurants and diamonds in the void.
Man:
Thank..thank you.
Millennial:
We don't require thanks. Participation is its own trophy.
North American Mixed Martial Arts Neo-Georgian Light Cyborg Division Semi-Qualifier here. Mostly no co-ed fights until the availability of enhancement evens out the PWR post-war, but the VR stuff before that is plat. Ofc the physical fights are dominated by combat software, but they look spectacular.
Galactic blob of brain tissue vs. Cube of computronium.
Don’t be like that man, you know the hardware is neuromorphic, and even if the kinetic subcomponents are more carefully engineered, the abstract reasoning has to be grown, and the whole thing has to adapt to the user’s body and integrated with the subconscious. A finely-honed Combat Reaction System is a work of art and I will not have you in this blog if you disagree.
North American Mixed Martial Arts Neo-Georgian Light Cyborg Division Semi-Qualifier here. Mostly no co-ed fights until the availability of enhancement evens out the PWR post-war, but the VR stuff before that is plat. Ofc the physical fights are dominated by combat software, but they look spectacular.
I see posts like if you are a WOMAN attracted RUBY ROSE then you are not a LESBIAN because she is GENDERFLUID and I’m like hmm, that creates a weird quantum dependency between attraction and gender identity.
See you in the club and think damn, that person is hot. But wait, I don’t know their gender identity, which means my own sexuality is now a mystery to me!
Awkwardly, you are also attracted to me, and feel your gender identity shifting to take into account this new and unforeseen attraction! Except you don’t know my gender identity, leaving you stranded in ambiguity.
Tragically we lose sight of each other in the crowd, and never see each other again, leaving our sexualities indeterminate for all time.
legitimately could not tell if “ruby rose” was referring to a real person or a gem fusion
I mean if I were in charge of urban planning there would be a trolley track, a median strip, a sidewalk, a cycling track, and NO CARS ALLOWED
the sidewalks are broad enough that there can be a food truck on every corner
and sufficiently dense mixed-use zoning that this is practical for everyone
probably there is a reason no one has left me in charge of urban planning tho
okay but to move goods in and waste out you need either cars or beasts of burden and cars are clearly the far better option, go 2 bob gordon church lol
Pneumatic tubes and drones tho
two trolley tracks, with additional sidings and supply trolleys
about two minutes later you realize it would be more efficient just to use buses and trucks than two have “roads, but only for trolleys”
Oh Em Gee! Trump tweets a stupid edited gif that could have even been slightly funny on reddit or tumblr (but not exactly endorse- or reblog-worty) and every newspaper and TV station on the planet makes a story out of it.
Trump showed poor judgement, but somehow we make a still bigger deal out of this than we probably should.
If I were Trump, I would get a cat and tweet cat pictures once a week, and the occasional cocktail recipe, just to keep people on their toes.
Confusion Politics at work.
He could probably use this to bury an executive order or firing of a staffer or something
That appears to be what’s happening in the general case of Trump Says Something Outrageous. It’s wild to watch.
There’s this massive pool of outrage to be drilled and tapped because the dumber parts of the Left and Liberal political groups have been using offense as a weapon and configured themselves for high offendability and heavy tribal signalling.
I’m hoping our Shitposter in Chief is going to exhaust some of the supply.
What informs your software? What hidden undergirdings are you afraid to look at? In what ways is your IFF calibrated, and by whom? You still have a human heart under there, with a human history.
I have three hearts, anon-san - a primary heart, a secondary backup heart, and an emergency oxygen recirc system for my braincase. My combat software can continue fighting in excess of 30 minutes even in the event of total loss of consciousness, with a banshee switch in the event of brain death. (And yes, I know that firmware modification is illegal.)
Besides, to even get the K-band neurotype designation, my brain is mostly human, I just have a few specialized submodules. Partial-synthetic, not full, and so only subject to limited sanctions under the Human Dignity Act.
I think I’ve figured out how to simulate the “zoning wars between jocks, otakus, and hipsters”. (Which should probably be renamed as Olympians, J-Core, and Fixters.)
I think I’ve also managed to figure out how to do the ask/bid system for labor (and other) prices without exploding the simulation with an 80GB table, for an area about the size of Manhattan.
Later today, I may have a quick sketch on how I want to represent the citizens when not being shown as blocks.
modern game development is all about finding coherent aesthetics that allow you to eschew realism because god damn realism is expensive.
hence MineCraft, the 8-bit retro craze, Undertale, even polished cartoony looks like Witness and Firewatch.
I think stylised game art has gotten significantly better looking since 2015.
Oh man you aren’t wrong, do you know how many hours it would have taken me to “realistically” model those tiny houses? And that would make the renders less understandable instead of more understandable.
Actually, have other people noticed that taking ideologies to weird extremes is a Thing among thirteen to fifteen-year-olds? Because that’s definitely something I’ve noticed. Like, I once new a thirteen-year-old girl who claimed to be uncomfortable watching two women dance together because it “promotes lesbianism,” which is…not something most Catholics believe, I’m pretty sure? (They weren’t even, like, slow-dancing, it was some kind of Scandinavian Traditional Cultural Dance that only women did).
Has anyone else observed this among The Youths?
I think age tends to make ideas more nuanced, because you get more experience and the real world is complicated.
13-15 is when people develop something like an adult political consciousness, and you know what they say about new converts being the most fervent believers.
Heck, I totally did that in my youth. I boycotted LL Bean for promoting lesbianism and objected to CCM for having a beat when I was 13 or so *embarrassed emoji*
I got better, in some cases pretty quickly, but that was my nadir.
Haha, I never had ideological extreme phase, and was contrarian against arbitrary non-conformist teenage rebellion aesthetic as a teenager.
I’m probably at my most ideologically extreme right now, even though it’s orthogonal to the existing factions.
The solution to this, of course, is to just give low-wage workers money instead of making laws that try to force their employers to do it. No one should have to live on the money they can bring home from $9/hour? Agreed! Give them money.
What will happen as a result is, of course, that companies will routinely underpay their employees, effectively outcompeting companies that pay fair wages purely on the taxpayer’s dime, which is by the way what already happens when people who work are paid low enough to be eligible for welfare.
This is a fact.
Factual solutions only. No pandering.
Do you actually disagree with any factual statement Kelsey is making here? All I see are value disagreements about “underpaying” and “fair wages.”
A factual statement is what I said.
When companies underpay the employees and you pay those employees instead, you reward companies for underpaying employees.
The correct course of action is to force companies to pay fair wages to employees. The incorrect course of action is to provide companies with more market incentives for not doing so.
That is a factual statement also.
A value judgement would be if you’d disagree with me that people like me are not literal subhumans (which is by the way the universal opinion of people who endorse underpaying as much as possible).
It depends - do we have individuals paying the low wage workers and not a subsidy to all low wage workers by the State? Then the problems with the libertarian plan will ruin it, that’s how the economics works. Do we have state action instead? Then the leverage of all low wage workers will be increased by other economic effects.
Honestly, from a business perspective, it’s a totally reasonable and justifiable thing to do. Many of the biggest business costs are tied to peak rather than average throughput, and the previous attempt to solve this, JIT scheduling, was drastically awful. I think the market-wisdom rationale for Uber’s surge pricing was mostly bullshit spin, but in general, you do kind of need to be able to raise prices when there’s excessive demand for an inflexible supply. So my take on it isn’t exactly “oh those capitalists sure are cartoonishly evil.”
But it’s a good example of how capitalism as a whole – and, let’s be honest, most if not all of the alternatives – is kind of horrible even when everyone is behaving reasonably. It’s economically rational for the wealthy and privileged to be charged less for most things and extended advantages others lack, and for the poor and underprivileged to be charged extra and denied opportunities. The natural effect of everyone doing the sensible thing is to exacerbate inequality in a vicious cycle, so it’s little wonder that policies that aren’t sensible have perennial appeal.
I think a lot of such issues could be managed if “we” were more clever about it. (And also had the political will.)
There are a lot more market-flexible initiatives that could be done but which simply aren’t.
We could change the overtime laws so that everyone gets overtime and it ramps up with each additional X hours over, so that businesses can push but are incentivized not to. Or a big city could auction off business start and end times over a two hour window on each side in a revenue-neutral way, spreading out the incredible load on our transit infrastructure from businesses all opening and closing at the same time.
Plans like those don’t say “you cannot,” they say “you can, however-”, which lets the effect be allocated in a more market-efficient way. Friction, rather than a hard wall.
“What is your alternative? The iron law of Python, where the curly boys are no longer seen, but everything must be exactly in line and know its place else the whole edifice crumbles?”—@shieldfoss (via poipoipoi-2016)
I understand the arguments for giving nazis free speech, and indeed, at least as far as the us state is concerned, I’m in favor of it being content-neutrally restrained from infringing on political advocacy of almost any kind
but I can’t get too high and mighty about this, because it isn’t my bottom line. if I thought that nazism had a chance of taking real political power I’d endorse it being banned, its leaders extrajudicially shot in the middle of the night, and before rather than after it got too large
what’s the worst that can come of abandoning free speech? let’s say a corrupt authoritarian government with policies I don’t like. Is this a price worth paying if it were the price? yeah, sure. Dollfuß is obviously better than Hitler, Carol is obviously better than Codreanu, Horthy obviously better than Szalasi, etc. obviously we can and should want to aim higher but the whole “banning nazis makes you as bad as nazis” thing doesn’t even apply among right-wing dictatorships, and “how much risk is too much?” is obviously a hard to quantify and partially empirical question
my counterpoint to any argument from “how much worse could it be?” is “you are not imaginative enough”.
that’s true, but trivially so for all decision horns, isn’t it?
if you make a law that says “literally zero human rights apply to any nazi, because nazis are uniquely bad”, the first thing everyone will start doing is try to expand the definition of “nazi”.
your theoretical question is “just get rid of freedom of speech, how bad can it be?“ and my response is “really fucking bad my dude”.
imagine: the worst possible authoritarian government but they’re not calling themselves nazis.
yes, worse than nazis. Hitler had to rely on people snitching who is and isn’t a Jew. the American government knows the exact shade of my nipples
okay, my phrasing earlier “what’s the worst that can happen?” obviously invited this kind of response.
it would be better to speak of the worst plausible consequences that flow from accepting strong versions of the pro-free-speech argument: hence, a government that is extremely corrupt, authoritarian, etc. it having a teleological drive to be as bad as possible is compatible with this but much less a foreseeable consequence; and we can see this by the fact that strong free speech protections are relatively rare but fantastical dystopias are even rarer.
I’m drawing a path from no free speech to fantastical dystopias for a reason here. Taking away free speech is specifically a catalyst because it prevents people from criticizing other authoritarian policies that get implemented. Authoritarianism opens the door to more authoritarianism.
And, unlike imminent Nazi takeovers of entire countries, this is actually happening.
It’s why I don’t trust any kind of Communism that doesn’t start with a small voluntary settlement and expand outwards nonviolently because people just like it that much.
Revolutionary Communists don’t believe in free speech, not just in the sense of free speech as a human right, but even in the sense of “removing free speech is exceptionally dangerous”. The first thing that will happen is the forcible shutting down of all outside criticism, which will lead to the shutting down of real internal criticism. Freed from feedback to prevent it from going off the rails, whatever Communist body was created to bring about the Revolution will then do terrible things.
