506 karma · joined February 23, 2008
Naturally I'd assume in that case that dividends would be taxed at the same rate as earned income, and that both would have to rise somewhat at the higher brackets to cover the lost income. But given that is the case, I honestly don't see any downside. Can anyone help?
Free-will is a third possibility opposed to determinism of choice and pure randomness of choice.
But it is compatible with a either a deterministic or a probabilistic universe.
Note that from the outside, free-will is by definition apparently "random". It is a black box not determined by any variables in the greater world. What matters is that the free-will is mine or yours-- that the entity known as to me as myself or to you as yourself should also possess this power of determination which to the outside world appears random.
To witness to the lack of a logical incompatibility with determinism, you can posit a model wherein the will does something like project itself in both time directions in such a way as to keep up the "illusion of determinism". Not that I think such a mechanism is actually in place; this model is just to show there is no logical contradiction, and there could be other models that do the same.
But this is not what is classically understood by free-will, and I suggest that it is your dilemma which is false. Quoting Aquinas, "Free-will is the cause of its own movement, because by his free-will man moves himself to act."
I anticipate that free-will thus understood is likely ruled out a priori by your philosophical disposition. Nonetheless, I think you can perhaps come around to see that is logically opposed neither to determinism nor randomness in the human brain as observed from an objective standpoint.
Raise .9996 to 10,000th power and you find you will have a 2% chance of living 10,000 years. Raise it to the 100,000th and you get something very very close to zero.
You should also consider all the thousands of different rare diseases that we won't have figured out how to cure even if we do cure "ageing".
Long story short, you should be prepared to die at some point.
Well, I have heard engineery types saying they don't see the point of reading fiction ("it's just made up stories"), and more frequently have heard them disparaging subjects like philosophy and history. Maybe that's the equivalent response?
EDIT: This is more a consideration with respect to "cure for ageing"-type advances, not so much the mind-uploading scenario.
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Obviously this would require a completely different mechanism as you can no longer have cables attaching each car to the roof. In fact I have no clue how it could work! This is what I keep pondering...
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You say "it was nothing like what I knew from Norway." Does that mean in Norway you can have one crappy town charging 20% municipal taxes next to another crappy town charging only 10% municipal taxes, and this will have no effect on which town people want to live in?
I am not too familiar with the exact dynamics of the game, but I would think that as your SimCity becomes more awesome, higher taxes can be levied because people want to live there for other reasons. Is this not the case? I hope these social economists weren't just arguing, "taxes are high in Oslo, and there is no shortage of people who want to live there!"
Here are two charts that backup your point further.
Education since 1900: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spending_chart_1900_2015...
Defense since 1792: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spending_chart_1792_2015...
In particular, it is worth noting how low military spending was before WWII. I would be very interested to find similar charts for all world powers going back to ancient times, if anyone can help.
You mean... it's theoretically, some-time-in-the-future possible? What, we are all to put up with terrible search results until such time as strong AI has been cracked? I think not. It is perfectly valid for Google's spam detection to "rely on obscurity" if that is the best currently-available solution to the problem, and your criticism on this point is not very reasonable.
How to establish the natural right though? Fairly easy in the case of mixed race marriages-- No one at the time thought marriage between the races was impossible or unthinkable, they just didn't want it to happen. That's why they wrote laws against it. And note even that the history of such laws is rather skimpy![1] The overwhelming majority of human history attests to the possibility of the free mixture of races.
1) Would it be against current rules to trade on this information?
2) If someone did use this machine surreptitiously to their own gain, how quickly will they approach owning 100% of everything?
3) If the entire data set of future prices were made publicly available, what would happen to markets? I mean, exactly, what would happen to stock prices?
Is this anything approaching a workable idea?
scientifically untenable positions about evolution, global warming, vaccinations/autism, abortion
What is the scientifically untenable position about abortion? As far as I know there is no scientific controversy concerning abortion in general, but rather it is wholly a moral question.
My position is even stronger though: I am quite happy imagining honest p-zombies and AIs discussing consciousness, apparently as if they themselves possessed it, but without any internal contradiction. We (you and I) understand each other when we each say "consciousness" and "qualia" but it is only because these concepts have a privileged place in our intellects-- we experience them directly (what's more, they are the stuff of our very experience of anything at all). Now, a p-zombie has no predisposition toward understanding these concepts, because it has no subjective experience of its own. How do I explain these concepts to the p-zombie then, in a manner that will force it to say, "Oh, right, no, I don't have consciousness." I contend it can't be done, that any attempt at a definition can always be misunderstood to apply to objective phenomena of the human brain/mind/person apart from what we know as true consciousness, and this is how a p-zombie or AI will always understand it.
Consciousness does not present itself as just another thing in the world -- at all. It is the unique medium through which you experience everything you have ever experienced. It is the fact that the universe exists from a perspective. You assume that the universe also exists from other perspectives, but there is no objective basis for this belief -- in the sense that there are no phenomena solely attributable to true consciousness.
The rules don't generally prohibit per se certain investments from taking place. They require companies that take such investments (e.g. from unaccredited, unsophisticated investors) or that solicit investment from the general populace (i.e. not your best friend from high school), to comply with the regulations pertaining to publicly traded companies.