111–120 of 207 posts
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they deliberately conflate legal (skilled) immigrants and illegal aliens. to them, there is no difference. it is a hyper-egalitarian interpretation of the word 'immigrant' with no basis in law or social norms.
Didn't the recent travel ban attempt to revoke valid visas?
While there is plenty of discussion to be had on Palanyir, I think the more relevant discussion would be in the role the CIA plays in infiltration-by-default through In-Q-Tel of companies we like to forget got their start there, such as Facebook and Google and many more.
Most comments here seem to hate Peter Thiel, but when it comes to Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page (all whom seem to be in bed with governments since a long time and worked with Hillary Clinton's campaign staff), well there's nothing wrong there because democrats are the good guys, right? What would you do in their place? They don't make the rules. Government does, and you vote for government. So don't try…
Multiple people can be bad for reasons entirely their own, "but shes doing it TOOOOOOO" is the reasoning and defense of a child.
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That theory has a major blind spot: the increase in demand for a Western standard of living at an unprecedented global scale enables innovation to bring down costs. Example: Africa has dealt with underinvestment for a long time in many areas, like telecommunications infrastructure. But because of that, many African nations have leapfrogged hardline telecommunications in favor of mobile, resulting in less spending bef…
All of that is incremental and evolutionary. Here's a good example of what I mean. Fundamental invention: radio. Before radio communication via invisible waves over long distances was impossible. After radio it wasn't. This is a fundamental qualitative change in capability. Innovation and evolution: morse code keys to 4G/LTE and WiFi. This represents a quantitative change in capability (faster/better/cheaper), but qu…
It is widely understood that shipping containers are responsible for more global trade than any other factor, which has lowered the prices of goods around the world at a scale never seen before. The unprecedented demand for trade necessitated their adoption, but they are essentially a metal box on top of other metal boxes on top of a flat surface.
Shipping containers were a tremendous innovation but they required absolutely no new or novel technology to produce or deploy.
Another example: insulation. Energy costs are higher to heat in the winter than cool in the summer, but an extraordinary amount of energy is wasted due to insufficient insulation. Solving this problem would decrease energy costs, increase quality of life, and would require no new technology whatsoever.
I fear we in the tech sphere are sometimes too addicted to the lure of the future to imagine what we could do with what we already have.
I mean, shit, literally, could be solved by better toilets. Last I checked India had more cell phones than flushing toilets. Proper sanitation saves on health care costs later on. This is another very old technology that can prevent us from even needing high technology to solve the problem caused by insufficient sanitation and toilet access.
Shit happens, but it doesn't always have to.
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What's your opinion about the causes of this "mini Dark Age"? Do you still feel that we're in it?
Around the early 1970s, the great watch-word of the culture became "back." This came primarily in two forms: back to nature (left), and back to the Bible (right). Under the hood both embrace the naturalistic fallacy (natural equals good) and the idea that there is a proper order from which we have deviated (sin, redemption, reconciliation). This manifested as the Religious Right, the anti-development wing of the Gree…
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It's sad that people generalize about people that vote Republican. Most republicans (or people that vote republican) I have met, including myself, have been supportive of the LGBT community. Not ALL Republicans are against LGBT, just like not all liberals want free government handouts. These generalizations about the "other side" are counter-productive. Also, I'm not saying you came across as generalizing, I know you…
All of the Republican nominees this time around were opposed to gay marriage. So it doesn't seem to be that unfair to generalize to the conclusion that Republicans aren't very concerned about LGBT rights. They're certainly willing to vote for candidates who don't support LGBT rights.
There are of course gay Republicans, and they argued against this, both on the grounds that it's immoral and discriminatory, but also that it wasn't in the Republican party's long term interest as younger members are far less anti-LGBT but they couldn't convince anyone.
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> He represents a real threat to the safety of women, minorities, and immigrants As an immigrant myself, I keep seeing famous people write this, but I want some kind of "citation needed." What plans does this actually refer to?
Demanding others supply widely reported and debated information doesn't make sense for this forum. Try searches like below, evaluate them and pick specific issues you think people here could help you with: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=trump+threat+to+women&t=ffsb&ia=ne... https://duckduckgo.com/?q=trump+threat+to+minorities&t=ffsb&... https://duckduckgo.com/?q=trump+threat+to+immigrants&t=ffsb&...
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All of that is incremental and evolutionary. Here's a good example of what I mean. Fundamental invention: radio. Before radio communication via invisible waves over long distances was impossible. After radio it wasn't. This is a fundamental qualitative change in capability. Innovation and evolution: morse code keys to 4G/LTE and WiFi. This represents a quantitative change in capability (faster/better/cheaper), but qu…
I disagree with your assessment. It is widely understood that shipping containers are responsible for more global trade than any other factor, which has lowered the prices of goods around the world at a scale never seen before. The unprecedented demand for trade necessitated their adoption, but they are essentially a metal box on top of other metal boxes on top of a flat surface. Shipping containers were a tremendous…
The former makes things faster/better/cheaper, while the latter makes things possible.
You could still ship things across the ocean before containers. But before boats?
I predict that when the current zeitgeist finally does shift we will once again see the invention of things currently considered impossible. I can't say exactly what those will be any more than a scientist in the 1700s could have envisioned radio, though I can certainly speculate. For an early candidate my money would be on the invention of a process to reliably reverse aging in living cells, and maybe something really radical in energy like a compact high density fusion reactor exploiting a novel approach to containment discovered through machine learning. In the long term I strongly suspect that there are fundamental issues with our current models of physics (the whole dark matter 'hack' and the lack of agreement between QM and GR) and that solving this might open the door to things currently considered impossible.
BTW -- I think there have been a few fundamental inventions from 1970 to present.
- Graphene, though I don't know quite enough about materials to know if this has clear antecedents.
- The block chain, which seems like an actual novel mathematical discovery as well as a CS basic invention. It also seems pregnant with social implications since it might suggest a way to actually make communal self-governance by consensus work.
- CRISPR/CAS9
All those happened in the past 10 years or so, which fits in with the idea that the dark age is on its way out.
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Around the early 1970s, the great watch-word of the culture became "back." This came primarily in two forms: back to nature (left), and back to the Bible (right). Under the hood both embrace the naturalistic fallacy (natural equals good) and the idea that there is a proper order from which we have deviated (sin, redemption, reconciliation). This manifested as the Religious Right, the anti-development wing of the Gree…
> The alt-right's embrace of racism and sexism The scope of these terms has been expanded significantly. I no longer care what anyone considers to be 'racist' or 'sexist'; I care what their values are, and if I consider them of worth. EDIT: 'alt-right' may have changed too. Some seem to thing it just means 'alternate right', others 'code-name for racists'.
Thomas Sowell
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What's your opinion about the causes of this "mini Dark Age"? Do you still feel that we're in it?
Around the early 1970s, the great watch-word of the culture became "back." This came primarily in two forms: back to nature (left), and back to the Bible (right). Under the hood both embrace the naturalistic fallacy (natural equals good) and the idea that there is a proper order from which we have deviated (sin, redemption, reconciliation). This manifested as the Religious Right, the anti-development wing of the Gree…