coolaliasbro

IMO legislators should spend most of their time (at least until a reasonable "break even" is achieved") striking old, erroneous, irrelevant laws.

I recall when my college roommate showed that site to the rest of the apartment. The combination of hilarity and incredulity was intense.

But how would our species conceive of the idea of emissions and the effects thereof without first creating emissions and observing their effects?

I think the issue has more to do with the Cassandra effect and the tendencies of some to not consider or want to act on potentially catastrophic situations if they believe it imperils their own more immediate well-being or status.

What do you believe to be the cause of that abject poverty?

What it takes is having the means to show up, etc. Most people are not in the financial position to pursue such actions.

Completely agree. Just understanding paradigms and being willing/able to read documentation goes a long way at non-tech companies.

Yeah, had to read it in high school and immediately noticed the "tribe's" name was just "America" spelled backward. I'd already come to the realization that so much of what we do is inane, so it was quite interesting to see my peers draw similar conclusions after having a fast one pulled on them.

I apologise for all the child comments but I find your posts compelling. However, your 3rd paragraph above seems a bit at odds with your idea in an earlier comment to rebuild SROs. In any case, I think the same sorts of housing opportunities should be available to all, which is why I brought up the fact that the USA has ample unused housing, it's mostly just an issue of policy/assholes in power.

I see your point, but AFAIK, there is ample empty housing to ensure everyone in the United States has a roof over their head, so maybe appropriating dis/misused properties toward this end would also be an option?

Ditto school debt, health care, and child care. If these costs were not (increasingly) the burden of proles, we could all do a lot more with what we have/where we are currently at economically.

I think that people want to be productively occupied without all the baggage that "work" entails.

Why wouldn't people spend their extra time and resources to reclaim/occupy/homestead/etc. open spaces for the benefit of themselves and their communities?

"I don't personally believe..."

Fair enough, but do a search for "agricultural surplus destruction". As far as I can tell, this isn't a matter of belief.

"My dad was also part of a charitable group that helped provide seeds and training to other countries in need in an attempt to help them to establish their own self-sustaining agricultural industry."

So the idea is that these populations we're incapable of sustaining themselves before contact with the West/Global North? No trying to be confrontational, just hoping to highlight that this statement begs the question.

Agreed. Part of this, IMO, also has to do with the fact that the capital in the Bay is very concentrated and often excessive. In other words, most of what gets done out there could get done better, for less, elsewhere, but there's a cultural tick in the community that makes the fast-and-loose approach almost obligatory. Anecdotally, this tick seems to be diminishing, which I attribute to changing attitudes about wealth accumulation and the fact that a lot of people would rather make a comfortable living doing something cool/useful than chase a dragon/ride a unicorn.

"...sold to the residents of Flint at ludicrous prices." FTFY

I'm no fan of Facebook or discrimination, and am happy to see this pursued by the federal government, but I personally would gladly be excluded from all ads, ranging from billboards to search results to food packaging.

I guess what I'm thinking is, if Facebook had a feature (maybe it does, I'm not a user) allowing members to search housing classifieds, and if that feature allowed listing agents to discriminate against who saw their listings in results, that would be straight up bullshit. But, AFAIK, anyone can anonymously search different housing listing platforms for available housing wherever they want to live, so I guess I'm just struggling to see how housing advertising is worth this sort of scrutiny at all.

Again, I stress that discrimination is fucked and I'm happy to see something being done about it on any level, at all. I just feel like there are surely bigger fish to fry and spending resources on pursuing to whom/how ads are delivered doesn't seem like the best investment.

As a creative process, and in the interest of compassion, I tend to name everything as humanly readable as possible, and provide voluminous documentation in production systems. Even quick-and-dirty things tend to get moved to production if they work, so I increasingly apply the same approach to them, as the "this will be tossed after x" sentiment has bitten me on the ass more than once.

Pseudorandomness vs randomness is a funny distinction to me because randomness effectively boils down to either an inadequate dataset or inadequate computational resources for analyzing an adequate dataset, with adequateness being an arbitrary measure. In other words, any apparently random sequence approaches pseudorandomness as more computational resources are applied to its analysis.

Wrong--it is certainly the case that many insured individuals are left insolvent after necessary but costly medical procedures.

That's a fun thought. Assuming it's true, make me wonder: what are the odds that humans would even notice/observe the missed one?

True, but minimum wage work typically isn't full-time. That link didn't work for me, but are those numbers inflation-adjusted?

> Just because someone—erm, our whole culture—lied to you and you took the bait, doesn’t mean you’re off the hook. That’s how freedom works.

This sentence is contradictory: since individuals are told these lies/take this bait when they're minors--ie, not 'free' in any legal sense--they in fact are off the hook. When most minors, particularly those closer to the left-hand side of the privilege bell curve, do not have parents with the necessary social/economic background to teach them 'not to take loans from creeps', they are precluded from assessments such as the above.

Agreed--this was a huge source of philosophical dissonance for me when I lived there. The issue is just as persistent in the East Bay (specifically, Oakland/Berkeley) and is worse, IMO, because Berkeley espouses a progressive/compassionate/environmentally+socially friendly image, to which it does not adhere in practice.

> I think an AGI will possibly be capable of changing its own core, so a much more reliable safeguard is to make sure that it does not want to change it.

Assuming an AGI's consciousness would be anything like a human's, changes to its moral core might be largely dictated by environment, in which case it would be a good idea to be pals.

> The smartest player possible would still lose poker to someone that can read their hand.

And let's not forget those cases where the smartest player is the one that can read your hand.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stu_Ungar

> (in part because most papers are badly written and need familiarity with the genre to be understood)

Considering science is a community/social enterprise, it's surprising that such papers are published at all.

Indeed! And the more neophytes that take the plunge and pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, the more neophytes there will be to encourage and enable other neophytes to do the same (network effects and whatnot).

Completely agree. Science is not a published paper about an experiment. It is a community activity, the results of which only improve with increased participation and experimental replication. Anything enabling a greater number of people to participate makes science more science-y.

Complaining draws attention which can lead to interest and eventually actionable conditions for a greater group of individuals than just the affected.

Also, when one is scrambling to make ends meet, it's not always so easy to be more proactive. Surviving in such situations consumes a lot of mental, emotional, and temporal resources.

>...but it won't be with the current infrastructure... slowly phase out driver-only cars with self-driving cars/lanes.

Upvoted!

I've posted it before and I'll post it again: what advantages does driverless car-based transportation infrastructure offer over a rail system of the same scale? I am genuinely interested to hear counter arguments since, to my mind, well planned/maintained rail systems can better leverage centrally generated power, have better driver (conductor) : passenger ratios, are easier to maintain in aggregate (ie. tracks vs. roads, total number of train cars < total number of motor vehicles, etc.), and so forth.

What am I missing?