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A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

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Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

#261

Post by XorNot »

BoardsOfCanada wrote: post #222
simonh wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. I'm a capitalist and free marketeer, but support social security systems and even public health care. I think the US goes too far, particularly it's health care system is appalling, but I have to admit it's thin employment protections do make it a lot more flexible and responsive to economic conditions. Just look at how rapidly it recovered from the 2008 crisis compared to Europe, it was a whole year ahead of u…

Yes and we need to avoid the nirvana fallacy. I live in a country with public health care and every so ofter people are sent home to die from scheduled surgery because there aren't doctors or other staff available. My dad had 99% clogged heart arteries before he got treatment. My brother works in the US and prefer their system, but then he's got a good job - still a data point for the discussion.

So, how rich is your dad?

Because unless it was "can drop quarter of a million dollars or more" rich, then no, in the US he would've just been sent home to die.

The existence of a public healthcare system running at capacity is not evidence the US system "doesn't have this problem". Being denied treatment because you can't afford it is objectively worse then being denied treatment because the system is busy.

One problem is fixable.

EDIT: And also, unless your brother has had a major health event, then the reality is he has no idea whether his insurance is any good.

Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

#262

Post by konjin »

ascorbic wrote: post #190
konjin wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>father to Ada Lovelace the first programmer Babbage was the first programmer seeing as he invented the first computer. Lovelace is a perfect mirror for our society: a vapid socialite with shallow understanding of the problems and a willingness to make grandiose claims without the ability to back them up. That she is a woman just makes it even more blatant that we care nothing for ability as long as it makes for a go…

You know there's a difference between a computer and a computer program, right?

The funny thing is that your low effort zinger is factually wrong. Something you'd learn in second year compsci:

>In computer science, a universal Turing machine (UTM) is a Turing machine that simulates an arbitrary Turing machine on arbitrary input. The universal machine essentially achieves this by reading both the description of the machine to be simulated as well as the input to that machine from its own tape.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Turing_machine

Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

#263

Post by TeMPOraL »

bigfoot675 wrote: post #233
fabianhjr wrote: post #113

Regarding the first paragraphs where luddism is mentioned several times; Lord Byron, father to Ada Lovelace the first programmer, was one of the few on the House of Lords to defend the Luddites: > But the police, however useless, were by no means idle: several notorious delinquents had been detected; men liable to conviction, on the clearest evidence, of the capital crime of poverty; men, who had been nefariously gui…

I mean that's the definition of the term "luddite" in our current understand of English. The only thing that could be labeled as propaganda is the application of the term to that movement

Still, it's important to know the story for two reasons. One, to realize that the "luddites" according to current meaning of the word never existed. Second, to realize that the people historically called "luddites" were fighting for the same reason communist revolutions happened, for the same reason you have a good chunk of world's population hating the elites (and arguably for the same reason many prior historical revolutions happened) - and it has nothing to do with technology. It's all about economic insecurity, about being poor, suddenly becoming poor, or being afraid of suddenly becoming poor, all while seeing fruits of your labor accumulate in your economic superiors' laps, and then trickle upwards towards the even more wealthy.

Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

#264

Post by XorNot »

swarnie_ wrote: post #225
simonh wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best way to destroy an enemy nuclear weapon is by hitting it with one of your nuclear weapons. Add on top of that your other strategic targets and a reserve, and the fact that their calculation is the same as yours, and you can see where this is going.

With weapons distributed amongst all USSR holdings this implies the US was willing to nuke everything from Poland to north Vietnam.

The US in fact did have a serious problem with nuclear warplan targeting during the Cold War - there was essentially never a reason you could give to take a target off the list, so the plan for a good deal of time was essentially something like "hit every single conceivable target several times" (to account for failed bombs or losses en route).

It was actually one of Dick Cheney's initiatives to create a process which would remove targets from the nuclear warplan's to get the number of weapons used down to a manageable number - and end the feedback of "oh no we've assigned all the weapons - we need more weapons in case there's more targets".

EDIT: A critical element with nuclear warplan's is that you don't have one bomb per target - you generally have several bombs per target via different delivery systems with different priorities, because the key element of MAD is survivability - there has to always be a guarantee in your adversary's mind that they cannot destroy enough capability to create a winning scenario for them.

Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

#265

Post by jstanley »

Talanes wrote: post #80
dragonwriter wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a native english speaker, "for example" and "that is" code as basically the same style of skip-over phrase: just there to lead into the important part. As a native English speaker, seriously, WTF? “That is” (for which two different latin-derived abbreviations are frequently used in English, i.e. and viz. ) leads into an equivalent alternative to what precedes, while “for example” (for which e.g. is a latin-deriv…

Where does using one over the other cause an actual change in information though? Not just sticking out as the wrong one if you know the proper distinction, but actually conveying different information? The comparison that follows is the important part, the abbreviation is a part of grammatical dressing that provides some flow and framing.

But "i.e." doesn't lead to a "comparison", it leads to a restating of the same thing.

Take a look at a car (i.e. an automobile).

Take a look at a car (e.g. a Nissan).

Do you see the difference?

Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

#268

Post by imtringued »

tjr225 wrote: post #108
SideQuark wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>For most people the economy is not working for them. For most people in the world, they are quite a bit richer than their ancestors, even by 50 years ago. In fact, the number pulled from poverty over the past 50 years is astounding. Even in rich places like the US, the poor today are vastly richer than 50 years ago. Median wages are at all time highs as well. So how do you conclude "for most people" (which I take to…

Wtf? Who cares what the median wage is? People can’t afford health care or housing. Have you been outside in any major city recently? There is a homeless crisis that is truly shocking going on around all of us.

Those are not economic problems. They are structural problems. People have decided to build their cities all at once and expect them to never change. They have convinced themselves that incremental progress will not or should not happen and that any problems can be solved by running away from them.

A homeless crisis is easy to explain by counting numbers. Count the number of people, count the number of houses and count the number of jobs. The mismatch between those numbers is your housing crisis.

Why is there a mismatch? Because one of those numbers refuses to change despite an upwards trend in the other numbers.

Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

#269

Post by DanBC »

dragonwriter wrote: post #69
Talanes wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a native english speaker, "for example" and "that is" code as basically the same style of skip-over phrase: just there to lead into the important part. I'm curious what distinction you are reading into it. I'm sure that as a native learner I was more apt to just take mental shortcuts rather than resolve these ambiguities.

> As a native english speaker, "for example" and "that is" code as basically the same style of skip-over phrase: just there to lead into the important part. As a native English speaker, seriously, WTF? “That is” (for which two different latin-derived abbreviations are frequently used in English, i.e. and viz. ) leads into an equivalent alternative to what precedes, while “for example” (for which e.g. is a latin-deriv…

> They are not equivalent

They are often used as equivalents. Descriptivism is better than prescriptivism if you want to understand language as it's actually used.

Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

#270

Post by simonh »

vagrantJin wrote: post #230
simonh wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. I'm a capitalist and free marketeer, but support social security systems and even public health care. I think the US goes too far, particularly it's health care system is appalling, but I have to admit it's thin employment protections do make it a lot more flexible and responsive to economic conditions. Just look at how rapidly it recovered from the 2008 crisis compared to Europe, it was a whole year ahead of u…

> Just look at how rapidly it recovered from the 2008 crisis compared to Europe I'm not EU or US, but the US printed a heck of a lot of magic monopoly money. And yet the dollar remained as strong as it ever was. Yes, some smartie pants will no doubt explain this away as "quantitative easing" which is the magnum opus of magic monopoly money. EU central bank doesn't seem to like that very much being so risk averse. So…

So the US bailed out the banks with a Trillion dollars, got it all back with a profit, used massive QE to successfully cushion their economy, without inflation. Which is bad.

Meanwhile the EU which at the time was crippled over Greece, lagged far behind in the recovery and still haven't properly addressed deep flaws in the Euro are our saviours?

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