thegp
Meanwhile, non invasive BCI are getting AWESOME...if you are a quadriplegic with no other options.
Now imagine we solve those problems, and the first BCI is on the market. It's safe, it's a little bit faster than typing/reading (hey, first generation right). Who is going to be the first early adopter to undergo massive brainsurgery? Turns out upgarding cochlear implants is so hard they are made to last 100 years (they get surrounded by bones and scar tissue...) so upgrading will be really hard. And who wouldn't want to have their blackberry implanted into their head right now...even worse, if we have proprietary technology in the first ones and now your brainberry can only talk to other brainberries...or we go full internet of shit and it needs a cloud server to do anything:)
There is ample historic precedent for regimes and loud minorities implementing agendas by first going after the easiest targets (jews, kurds,hooligans,illegal immigrants) then slightly generalising (disabled, kurdish supporters, all "potentially violent", immigrants in general) in some steps until the end goal (political opponents, political opponents, political opponents and...political opponents). Hence in this case, the slippery slope is a given and justified.
And yes, I understand that, the "immediately" was a bit knee jerk. But at least part of what you described is what I meant in another comment here: it should be part of both education and procedures to make immediate prosecution not only possible but a no brainer. Then we can avoid situations like this, which always reeks to me as "guilty until proven innocent"
I just really dislike this situation where it boils down to "(s)he said/(s)he said" and the idea of "innocent until proven guilty" flies out the window
Another thing I don't get is why they wouldn't prosecute now that the community is already fractured.
Also, and this is where I probably sound like an as:
If you are an anarchist and don't believe in law enforcement OR in the ability of your community to replace them then tough shit if something happens and you have nobody to turn to. That is kinda the whole purpose od ordered society to provide a way to deal with that
You are right, victim blaming is horrible. That's why I didn't say "they should have said something immediately, now they have lost credibility"
I understand why they might not go immediately and don't blame them for it. I still think the right thing is immediate prosecution. If they don't feel like they will be helped by the authoritiesthat is a problem, which needs to be addressed both on the sides of the authorities (with proper training and procedures) and education (teaching people to prosecute immediately instead of shutting up)
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/christie-blatchford...
http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/a-good-day-for-jus...
If the allegations true, they should prosecute, and should have prosecuted immediately. As well as all the other people who knew of it. And we should continue to work towards a world where that is a no brainer.
Most people are nice. It's only a few people, mostly with unfortunate backgrounds or fates that are not. Let's work towards institutions which handle this efficiently, without the need for mobs
The main idea behind Spinnaker as far as I understood it is "cheap cores, lots of them, architecture for message passing and load distrubtion vaguely inspired by human brain". This rang similar on a first read
I will probably piss myself and cry if I ever really "become a target" as it happens in China, cartel controlled parts of south america, dictatorships etc. But I will be damned if I don't make some kind of token resistance to us going down that path if all it costs me is keeping my privacy and maybe having legal hassle+ cost of replacement if my stuff gets seized.
Take X people,all the same (assume I have cloning start-up and really good sales guys. You just bought those). Make 10% of them "grit and hardworking". Are they going to do better in live than the others ? Sure,everything else is equal after all.
Now, you are probably a wonderful human being, but assume that your evil twin got a hold of the ordering form and decided, just for fun, to introduce some extra random differentiators.
Like color of skin, gender, giving some of them more starting capital, or Paul Graham's personal Rolodex. Also making some of them ignorant pricks.
Are the 10% "grit and hardwork" still gonna so bettereverything else being equal? Definitely. But is specimen 99, baseline, only grid and hardwork, do better that specimen 1, baseline, capital, Rolodex ? Maybe, maybe not.
In the real world, nothing is equal. One of the starting perks (that I share) is having a supportive family which can provide enough nutrition, protection and stimulus so your brain can mature. Another one is learning discipline and hard work. Some of us learnt them the hard way( if the mythos is legit, Musk is one of them). But we all had to learn, and if you never have the chance to learn (for example by being part of a social in which one is punished for being smart or "trying to hard") then at some point it is no longer reasonable to expect you to rise against the circumstances. The very fact that we celebrate people who do so implies we understand this on some level.
If I look on my life(reasonable amount of success), most good things came down to luck. Grant you, I worked hard on improving my luck surface and seizing opportunities once I realised this, but luck nonetheless. Hell the only reason I am not a depresssed, burnt out social outcast right now was a meeting during a train ride
And for your last question:
1. What is your working definition of liberal(positive vs. Negative freedoms)? 2. Income tax taxes... Income. Not labour. Ideally not discriminating between capital and labour income.
In Germany, the legislative has created a way to handle this:
If you are a recognised nonprofit ("gemeinnützige Organisation ") you can give your donors donation receipts which count for tax purposes. It is literally an invoice for a donation, but importantly the transaction will not be taxed, the donors simply deduct it from their income and the recipients simply have more money, without accounting overhead.
If you are a nonprofit which works with international companies (we for example worked with them to organise events for students), this can be quite tricky to explain, since the concept seems a bit alien to their accountants, who are used to sponsorship deals or simple licences like op described
But yeah, kei style cars are redundant in Europe because bikes, scooters , minis, nowadays car sharing, public transport and more space exist.
That directly implies that removing income inequality and adding feedback loops that avoids excessive capital concentration is the way to go.
And to your point about non-coerced transactions, where does coercion start? Monopolies? Excessive costs? Does Comcast coerce their customers, if they have only no internet as the alternative? Does uber coerce people with surge pricing? And that pharma guy, raising the price of the drug, did he coerce people ? I would tend to say yes in the case of the Comcast monopoly, no in the other cases.
But it's hard to define exactly where coercion starts.
A more fundamental examples, from my libertarian socialist perspective: advertising in public view. Is that coercion of a third party(the advertised to?) Microsoft windows/ apple and other walled gardens with no data export, but payed for upgrade path and end of support?
And even more fundamentally, sometimes any and all transactions you make can be under duress and make you inherently dependent on the partner: Getting a shitty job that barely feeds you, because your skills are obsolete and your country doesn't provide basic income?
Startint that shitty job early, due to not having the same resources, stability and growing opportunities because your father is working a shitty job just to make ends meet?
30 years ago nobody complained about stuff like this because a)no woman at these events and b)it was absolutely acceptable. And that's without the honey/darling/grope your coworkes time old media tells me about (was that real by the way? I'm from Europe and to young to have had any contact with that )
At least 2 principles that I know allow a laser to push things:
1) photons do have impulse, given by its energy divides by the speed of light. This causes Radiation pressure (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_pressure ) 2) if a laser vaporises part of a structure, the resultant gas will push against the structure, delivering momentum