Of'course humans are just not workers , but if you want to eat you need to sell something of value to buy your food from the farmers - and they most often then not really do not care about your humanities nonsense.
151 karma · joined June 12, 2014
Climate Change is intensifying the summers and winters in canada.
Notice the increased number of forest fires per year.
And the winters will also be worse.
Outrageous ! So you are saying we need to give the peasants MORE money ?? How am I supposed to live !
All this analysis tells me is that america is suffering from the same sort of inflation that Spain suffered when it stopped becoming the economical power house and Britain suffered during the 20th Century. What happens is money that was issued as dollar debt to foreigners creeps back into the economy that taxes in american dollar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...
This list should tell you everything - The difference in purchasing power between a Swed and american is just 6,000 dollars.
This is not even accounting for how expensive healthcare /education is in america - since america does a shitty job training its doctors compared to European nations - and even cuba.
I am happy that the US public is forcing their govt to look into it and hopefully a global system is set up to prevent tax evasion everywhere.
Asia is huge. Like 63% of humanity huge.
Of-course the market in Asia is going to be much more massive.
A lot of rural places in India have better Internet that I have sitting here in a British city - at a much more discounted price.
Everyday millions of people are coming online - internet virgins. They will have their own new taste, needs, etc.
The thing to understand before you think about investing your hard earned money in an asian country - is even though the volume of amazing ventures are a lot more - each smart ventures is followed by 1000s of dumb ones.
The signal to noise ratio in low - unless your are in the market - you will be scammed - this is why a lot of large companies have tried and failed to start industries all over asia.
Anytime you start pouring a lot of money anywhere - govt, scammers, etc all want to dig into you. Red-Tape, bribery, lack of transparency and rule of law.
This is not as overwhelmingly present in European or american markets.
I do not for a second doubt that the market size, growth, etc are going to be insane in asia for the foreseeable future - but there is a question of sustainability - and this requires structural change in government in many asian countries.
Unless you are interested in short term - high risk - high reward outcome. And are more interested in long term investment - then Asia needs some reform before you think about investing big time there.
But the reality is capital flees whenever a country tries to impose higher taxes.
The solution is a global taxing regime - something that Thomas Picketty advocated.
Taxes fundamentally is an business expense - and likes all business expenses companies will try to reduce it as much as they can - naturally due to the freedom of the market - companies that do not have to pay higher taxes will produce cheaper goods while maintaining quality and destroying their competition.
Its a prisoner's dilemma problem. With countries playing off each other to welcome businesses in their countries - the UK, US, etc.
The solution is for all countries to co-operate and create a global system to keep a close eye on the flow of capital. A change in america might actually lead to it, since america is good at bullying other countries to get its way.
Btw the same thing happened with China - its not that the Chinese are somehow inherently more capable - its just that they did not have the same level of obligation to their workers - health, pension, etc - as industrialized nations.
This is why its important to create a even and common playing field before talking about the "magic of the free market".
Just pointing out coping IP may be bad in the short term ( Tesla doesn't make as much money as they excepted ) - but in the long term its good for humanity.
Tesla will never sell its cars - in africa.
And lets not forget that america was built on blatant coping of IP from europe for over 100 years !
Paradoxically this blatant copying is actually going to lead to strong IP in china in the future.
A country can go so far by copying others - they will always be behind america by 10-20 years.
Anyway China is not a real threat to american interest - the american govt is.
Most of us were arguing about trying to use technical solutions in renewable - not realizing how badly the game is rigged against solar - especially in western countries.
China just took a very conventional solar panel design - not even the cutting edge ones - and just amped up production.
This destroyed the market that exits for actually better designs for solar in germany and the US.
Its a lot like the same problem with oil - yes oils are the foundation of modern agriculture ( fertilizers ), transportation and manufacturing ( plastics ) - and its laughable if we could find some immediate replacement - but I do not recall the wright brothers just saying meh since we had ships to transport people across the Atlantic.
# If you have a small data set - you set notation.
# If you have 100s of larger data set - try to formulate your problem as a graph theory problem - Its easy to walk small graphs.
# If you have 10,000 data points - start to think of your problem in terms of matrix.
I know there is going to strong disagreement about my rule of thumb but I found it useful for many problems.
But What I meant is When I started working with Maya initially - I was already put off by the extremely complex GUI. Trying to program ? I do not think many programmers appreciative the deep learning curve needed - and the average modeler is not adequately equiped.
Not for learning. When I see a UI of an app - I can at one instant see all the possible things that can be done using it.
text starts becoming a problem when their is a combinatronical explosion in what you can do with your app.
I cannot imagine Photoshop, Maya or After Effects to be text based.
Its a fairly interesting computer science question to me.
Using virtual Money is obviously much better than paper money. The difference is should it be centralized or de-centralized and anonymous ?
The paradoxical economic problem with decentralized money is that the govt has no control over it. Which means during bad time its going to be very difficult for the govt to enact changes. We learnt it the hard way During the great depression when money was pegged to gold and the govt was unable to use inflation to restart the economy.
Its a deep economical problem for which there is no known theoretical solution. Is it possible to have a decentralized monetary system that can also be controlled by a representive govt ?
When a soldier is ordered to torture - its clearly wrong to do so. Its a question of human ethic.
Is it the responsibility of the software engineer to know the exact level of NO_2 0.001 or 0002 that he should be coded into their product ?
Also a software engineer doesn't exist in a vacuum. There is a whole testing regime. Why should the coder be solely responsible ?
Should we give every individual easy access to ICMBs, Tanks and Nuclear Weapon ?
The difference is two fold.
1) Encryption is useful to society outside the need for killing people. That is why you really cannot compare encryption to guns.
2) Even When criminals do use encrpytion - its used to facilitate killing rather than a direct way to kill people.
Someone cannot just throw a bunch of random paper filled with numbers and I will fall dead. There is a long chain of events between transmission of secret information to people being killed. If you give the world's top two criminals access to encryption but lock them away in a plastic room - they cannot even theoretical hurt anyone.
TLDR : Guns are stupid and people who like guns are stupid
Or does the blackhole consume the entire cloud of water !
So many questions.
Imagine if life existed within it. They must be wondering if life outside a "cloud of water" is even possible ? A planet ?
I do not have a problem with muslims - most of my friends are. But islam is a terrible curse in south east asia in general.
I am not sure if its the saudis spreading wahabbism - I mean pakistan was terrible even during the independence.
Pakistan needs some sort of Hiroshima moment like the Japanese to come to terms with the fact that they as a country made a grave mistake breaking away from India.
He criticized India for its backward views on women - and no words on the saudis.
I view both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to be the most vile countries with extremely vile societies - I used to think its just the govt. But having lived in the middle east and known a lot of saudis and pakistanis I am disappointed to say that the people are not much more different that the terrible views spewed by their govt.
But somehow the countries that require the most attention are Iran and Syria ?
Pakistan and Saudi Arabia both fund extremist Islamist groups, but no one seems to acknowledge it since both are US allies.
India has its problems but no where the level of Pakistan. The people of Pakistan are extremely brainwashed with religious extremism. I know that because I went to a school filled with them and also Indians. They openly justify terrorism - we are not talking about uneducated people, but extremely educated - cream of the crop pakistanis.
I would love to live to see pakistan became a better country but its people are so backward - its going to take a lot of time to solve all the problems they have.
Until they sort themselves out its a good idea to create a donald trump style wall between them and India.
And during this one its again being blamed on a individual company.
The real blame lies with government. why did the US govt fail to properly test a car made by a foreign company ?
Having lived in a REAL totalitarian country in the middle east this always amuses me.
The way to view international geopolitics is purely from the perspective of game theory. If america wasn't as "terrible" we would be ruled by either the Russian or the Chinese. If the British had their way they would have loved to keep their colonies.
More often then not - real life decisions is not trying to get the most perfect outcome but choosing what is the least evil or harmful.
I can understand the reason for protesting. But this person seems completely unaware of modern biology. There is no "european" gene or "american" gene. Neither is there something called as a "syrian" gene. We do know that there is a homosexual gene - which means that homosexuality is natural. While nationality is not.
I would be interested to know his views about the german refugees during the 2WW to places like China/India ( while their european brothers ignored them ) and even the middle east ! Those immigrants even created there own large country last I heard.
The refugee crisis in syria is also a small drop in the bucket compared to the real refugee crisis humanity faces due to climate change. Large parts of London, New York. Since more than 50% of people live near coasts by next century most of us would be refugees anyway.
Are we going to play who is the last man standing or figure out a humane way to deal with this problem ?
I think what needs to happen is an increased in flexibility. To me it seems that society has done a piss poor job in figuring out how to accommodate to women and new types of knowledge work - which requires a lot of flexibility.
There is obviously a limit to human mental cognition.
The idea that More years studying = better Doctor, has anyone done any conclusive study on this ?
Most doctors will tell you that it would be madness to try to cut the time doctors spend in training - and that we should be extending it. But I fail to see how a single profession could be so much more complex then say quantum physicist.
I think doctors and society would be better off if we reduced the learning curve and figured out how to more effectively distribute the workload among more doctors.
Doctors already have high sucide rates and very low job satisfaction. And I bet its because of how long they work and the stress that comes from taking so much debt throughout one's life. Also the fact that doctors marry latter.
We should try to build work around life rather than the other way round.
It seems absurd to me that doctors need to choose between living their lives and their proffesional career.
The thing is all those things will eventually migrate to the web. Right now the web has so much potential and those pieces of software have a small market and that market is pretty saturated.
Once we do everything we can do with the web then we will move into domains that have incumbents
I would say Facebook is much more useful to society then Audio Production.
The newer android phone have amazing responsive. I sometimes use my phone to actually write presentation speech. Something I though I would never do with my older android phones.
Its just faster to let google auto-complete then having to browse my own phone for the app that I need.
typing the letter "f" is faster than exiting the browser and using my OWN EYES to browse left to right row by row the apps on my phone. How cave-manish.