Maybe this has to do with the negative side of drug culture of the USA. In Hong Kong and Taipei there is hardly any drug use, and therefore crime is reduced a lot as well.
651 karma · joined June 10, 2017
The problem with excessive regulation is that complying with it can be extremely complicated and time consuming. If you don't have the money to pay for that, you either risk being fined or sued, you don't play.
It sets a bar that only already wealthy people can get over.
I hope someday someone will read it.
It won't stifle communication on the internet at all. Trust us.
Everyone, ie the government and corporations, have gone into record debt, so they are much more dependent on low interest rates then before.
The recent daily pump of billions into the repo market is the latest play to do this.
This as well as the deficit, is adding a lot of money that has to be placed somewhere. That's why the stocks, gold and bonds have all become more bought at the same time.
Some of this money gets into the hands of banks, who use it as collateral, for lending out even more money.
The banks are the ones, becoming overleveraged, who will be the first to fall.
This is also what my guess is that this escalation in Iran is about. This could also have been why 9/11 occurred. The government wants something to blame for the coming crash. They don't want people to suddenly see the economy crash for no reason and then blame the government, so they start a war to distract and give them something else to blame instead.
Let's bomb China, next! All that fentanyl they are shipping over here kills 11,000 per year. Surely they deserve it, too.
It would seem to me that businesses that needed low wage workers and actually had to compete nationally or globally would have a far different outcome.
You can use webgl for 3d graphics, and there are lots of examples on the web.
You previously wrote, "It's entirely possible (also for us) that scientific and technological advancement plateaus." I don't see how "entirely possible" equates to "likely", so if you really felt it was likely, you can't blame me for assuming we were in agreement here, because you haven't made that clear until now.
> Second, even if that "technology plateau" is low probability was a legit argument, and even given that "technology plateaus now" is also low probability, and thus their chances of happening together being even lower probability (the multiplication of those two low probabilities) -- that would just prove that "technology plateaus now" is low probability. It wouldn't mean it's impossible, much less that it's not happening.
Yes, but if technology plateaus in the future, it would be the same as if it didn't plateau at all, in that we wouldn't be able to recognize the telltale signs of it, being completely foreign to our own.
> And my assumption wasn't based on probabilities, but on empirical observations. Winning the lottery is low probability. Your first script getting accepted to be made into a major movie is too. But if you have the lottery ticket in your hands, have verified the winning numbers, and you just got a call from a Hollywood director that want's to buy your script, the fact that those two events occurring together are "low probability" doesn't matter. They are reality.
> (Besides, for any two events with low probability that have happened in history, somebody could have made the exact same argument you've made, to "prove" that they didn't happen).
I find your empirical evidence rather weak. You cherry picked the data.
> Plotting the outline of inventions on a timescale, and their impact, one can see that there's a big boom in the 18th century, continues to 19th century, peaking in 20th to mid 20th century. For 60+ years we haven't found anything as big as electricity (Maxwell and co), electric light, combustion engine, telephone, television, internet, photography, AD/DA conversion, nuclear power, transistors, DNA, Quantum Mechanics, penicillin, antibiotics, Relativity, flight, plastics, rockets, etc. Even computers and the internet herald back to 30s and 60s respectively. Where are those equivalent impact theories or inventions (as opposed to mere optimizations and marginal improvements to existing theories/inventions) in the last 60 years?
> I'm sure you'll find a few. I doubt you'll find 1/10th as many as in, say, 1900-1950.
You realize human history started a long while before the 18th century, don't you? We have a long way to go before we drop back to the level of invention attained in the previous millennium. You are extrapolating out tiny fluctuations at the very tail end of the history of humanity, and ignoring the rest of it.
From https://www.google.com/amp/s/fortune.com/2017/07/20/are-airp...
For vehicles, “1.13 fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled”
and
“Airline accidents per one million miles flown came in at a rate of 0.0035.”
So with an equal denominator, 0.35 vs 1.13. So if you're in the top 20% of safest drivers, which is not hard to reach considering all the idiots out there, you are safer driving.
1 is immediate, meaning it needs to be fixed for the system to work.
2 is something that should be done before release.
3 is a near term wish list sort of thing, and
4 is a hopeful, probably never sort of thing
In addition, another place I deviate from the norm is when I comment out code, I write the reason why it's commented out.
These two things really help keep my code from becoming incomprehensible as time passes.
The article is reliably sourced, see the Bibliography section. Paris is sold as the most beautiful and romantic city despite being regularly ranked as one of the rudest to tourists, and East Asia buys into those claims hard. Take culture shock (which is already stronger going between East and West), crank it up to eleven, throw in:
a sense of powerlessness from none of your preparations being the least bit useful (Parisians hate it when you speak English)
a creeping sense of paranoia (Parisians hate tourists)
a growing sense of disgust at completely unfamiliar food (many Asians turn their nose at cheese that isn't American or this sweet milk-jelly stuff I thought was supposed to be a non-dairy creme substitute, think that western style bread is all like Sponge cakes or croissants, and are often raised with assumed culinary theories that conflict on points with western cuisine)
discovering that everything about your greatest lifelong dream is a complete lie made up to take your hard earned money
knowing that when you get home you'll be told that your experience must be wrong, you must have done something wrong, and your trauma can't possibly be real because Paris is magical and wonderful and nothing bad ever happens there Is what this article describes really that much of a wonder?
I'm in China, and even here plenty of restaurants and especially cafes and pastry shops try to attempt whatever unbelievable connection to Paris they can. Some of my students think less of me because I (a westerner) not only have never been to Paris, but recommend that they visit London, Munich, or Rome instead. Yet when some of my students came back from France over summer break, you could see a confused, frustrated, and disappointed conflict in their eyes as they tried to reconcile what everyone else told about Paris (which must be true!) with what happened to them (which must be a mistake!). Ian.thomson (talk) 04:11, 28 October 2016 (UTC)
Hmm...
It helps the common man, who isn't doing enough of these things, and that's enough for it to catch on.
If technology does plateau and did so near where we are now, it would be extremely unlikely, because it would require two unlikely but unrelated events both happening. Mathematically, you would multiply the probabilities of each together.
> Also how is a "great alien war" the "most logical" explanation for black matter?
It's distribution is quite odd. In some galaxies but not much in others, and tends to be around regular matter even though it there isn't much force keeping it that way.
The observed distribution is very odd, actually. In some galaxies there is nearly none, in others quite a lot, yet it tends to be hang quite close to matter even though the forces between them are quite weak.
OTOH, any world that was inhabited by aliens would, besides within a very narrow time frame, either have advanced to a state where their world would, for sure, be unrecognizable by us, or have destroyed themselves to such an extent that we would never have known they were there.
Typically human hubris, why can't we recognize the most logical explanation for so much dark matter? The wreckage and debris of a great alien war. Face it humanity, you're not the pinnacle of intelligence that you think, but, frankly the figurative apes throwing stones at each other after a (galactic version of) World War III.