1,763 karma · joined December 26, 2009
I suppose you can reduce a lot of both good at bad things about the country to "because federalism".
It's hard for Anthropic to cater to both sets of users with one model.
- Superintelligence poses an existential threat to humanity
- Predicting the future is famously difficult
- Given that uncertainty, we can't rule out the chance of our current AI approach leading to superintelligence
- Even a 1-in-1000 existential threat would be extremely serious. If an asteroid had a 1-in-1000 chance of hitting Earth and obliterating humanity we should make serious contingency plans.
Second question: how confident are you that you're correct? Are you 99.9% sure? Confident enough to gamble billions of lives on your beliefs? There are almost no statements about the future which I'd assign this level of confidence to.
Honestly a really simple game design fix for this would be to unlock tasks more slowly as the player demonstrates more engagement with the system. That way if you are like me and mostly find them boring and repetitive, you don't feel as bad about not getting them done.
Realistically, of course, it probably doesn't matter since I assume the author doesn't have the resources to fight Firaxis in court over this anyway.
The way I see the field these days is a lot of hovering around a "middle" position on the bombs, as opposed to the extreme "ends" of the spectrum ("totally justified, best decision ever" vs. "terrible war crime done just to look tough"). The authors you are quoting, like Zinn (and Kuznik, who is also quoted by another response), are I think pretty anomalous in that they still stake out a hard, confident position on one end of the spectrum. (There are a few who stake out the other end, too.) The "middle" position, what the historian J. Samuel Walker calls "the consensus view", basically says that the bombs were seen as a perfectly fine, if not a little unusual, military decision, that they might not have been solely responsible for the surrender of Japan, and that the use of the bombs in the way they were used (on cities, little spacing, early August) was a mixture of vaguely strategic thinking (no "grand plan" on anyone's part, but people did have some ideas about what you might get out of doing it that way) and complete happenstance (the spacing between the bombs, and the fact that they had two ready to go in early August, depended on external factors that had nothing to do with real strategy).
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3zuffw/some_... has a detailed discussion of the issue.In this case Microsoft is saying that some amount of their IP was developed by their overseas subsidiary and thus doesn't need to be included in the transfer pricing calculation, so in their process of making up imaginary amounts of money to charge themselves for their own products they also need to deduct that. If e.g. most of the Windows networking stack was created in Germany they need to figure out what percentage of the value of the overall Windows IP is added by the ability to connect to the internet.
Understandably, it's possible for reasonable observers to disagree on the values chosen here, this is not a case of black and white corporate misconduct (tax issues essentially never are).