Glad you pointed out such a huge difference with China. The US has an 80 year history of what it'll do. That might not be perfect behavior, but ... frankly I cannot name a single state that has the power the US currently has and behaved even half as well. That includes European countries, who were quite happy to "resolve wars" in other parts of the world ... and then they didn't leave and took over the entire economy, the government, and including levying taxes and stealing resources. Even fucking tiny Belgium abused their position when they got the chance. Hell, Luxembourg, smaller than most New York boroughs, helped them do it (and got paid handsomely for it)
But China ... China is far worse. Tibet, Xinjang, Taiwan, Pakistan, Phillippines, ... all are under attack. Oh, and perhaps relevant: China admitted to direct support of Russia's attack on Ukraine merely because of the small effect it has on naval power in the Pacific [1].
And let's just stop pretending here. Historically, modern European countries behaved exceptionally well (as most states just outright enslaved, as in "work yourself to death or we'll kill you right now" of whoever came under their control). China behaved pretty bad (e.g. killing millions of their own people for political optics. Enslaving people in Xinjang), but frankly not exceptionally bad. The Ottomans did worse (all caliphates did). The Persians did (although they deserve credit for stopping ... at least until the current government). The historical norm of behavior of states is incredibly, incredibly bad. And China has made it very clear they're not changing their old ways, in fact, they've made it very clear they're moving backwards, not forwards. They are moving towards having the state in control of everyone who lives anywhere China has power, on a literal, individual level. What apartment they live in. What they study. What they do. What they watch on TV, on their cellphones, ... This is not even remotely comparable to the worst dreams Trump has ever had.
Sorry to point out the obvious but China is the dystopia, not the US, and the US has a long way down before it gets anywhere close to CCP behavior.
> So, we need to get rid of this two class insurance system, and then make sure we have enough supply of doctors and specialists so that the waits are not 3 months.
Germany has reduced funding for training doctors. So clearly the opposite is true.
> For example, in Germany, where I live, there are also long waitlists for therapists or specialists in general. But not if you have a high income, then you can get private insurance and get an appointment literally the next day.
And the German government wants to (or is implementing policies to) achieve the opposite and further reduce access to medical specialists of any kind. Both by taking away funding and taking away spots for education. So they're BOTH taking away access to medical care now, and creating a situation where access to medical specialists will keep reducing for at least the next 7 years. Minimum.
> The last one always struck me as implausibly dumb.
Really? The current world is over 60% globalized.
Another way to state the exact same thing is: "all ideologies except one have failed. The vast majority have failed multiple times".
So it seems very obvious to me that 80% of the population would want to forget most of history. Plenty of countries do that explicitly. China, North Korea, all muslim countries (muslim countries of different branches outlaw different parts of their own history, e.g. Iran vs Saudi Arabia. In Saudi Arabia they say "in the name of racial harmony" and erase essentially all history, even their own), ...
Forgetting history is just not something the west does, and most people here have grown up in that culture. So it "feels" implausible. It doesn't feel implausible to other cultures though. It's called the "Judeo-Christian west" and, well, Judaism is obsessed with history and Christianity, perhaps a bit less than Judaism, but I bet anyone from a different culture would still call it obsessed. Islam, by contrast, has a rule that states there's pre-islamic history, which is "wrong" and is to be destroyed entirely and there's post-islamic history, which doesn't matter because islam is the answer.
(and there's the issue that islam is all conquest. In other words, go back further than a few hundred years in most muslim countries and all history is churches or synagogues. And recent muslim history ... well muslim economies were built on slavery as recent as 1965, so ... there's a bit of "that's not a ditch inside a locked room, that's where we shackled the slaves during the night" architecture)
Yes. Because every government will sell out their own citizens for a few bucks, then count on just using violence to get power back (without, of course, paying back the debts they incurred), so getting governments under control, especially in the beginning, will not be hard.
The question is thus, will governments succeed in using violence against an AGI to avoid paying back debts?
Every second reply here is "yes, congestion pricing is bad but it could be compensated by X"
The problem with every one of these posts is the same: IS it compensated by X? No. Why not? Because X is not happening, and the city is certainly not paying for it with the extra income.
You talk about a free bus pass, but you might as well talk about free use of a Star Trek transporter. I would argue that'd be more honest, because if you talk about a nonexistent transporter technology at least it's clear that it's not happening. Also: this is New York. The bus service would need to be improved as well. That too is not happening. Nobody would be complaining in the first place if there was cheap (you even say "free"), fast and good public transport. There isn't.
What problems are they admitting that congestion pricing causes? I don’t know if there’s just like a lot of subtext in these threads, or I’m just misunderstanding what people are saying.
Don't we have a separate name for intentional bugs? I mean it's not like tax loopholes are there accidentally. They are fully, 100%, intentional features of the tax code.
You can tell the ones which aren't by watching them getting removed in a hurry when the government finally notices too many people using them. 10-15 years back, some colleagues had made businesses for themselves just so they could receive their real jobs' income at the lower rate of dividend income rather than the income tax rate. I am told this is no longer possible.
Conversely there is (or was) what I think was a deliberate loophole for UK inheritance tax — if I remember right (not a lawyer) it works like this: physical objects in your home are all bundled together and valued at £1 for inheritance tax purposes, so fancy art, stamp collections, etc. don't get taxed.
I don't want to defend Tesla, but ... The problem with LIDAR is a human problem. The real issue that LIDAR has fundamentally different limitations than human sensors have, and this makes any decision based on them extremely unpredictable ... and humans react on predictions.
A LIDAR can get near-exact distances between objects with error margins of something like 0.2%, even 100m away. It takes an absolute expert human to accurately judge distance between themselves and an object even 5 meters away. You can see this in the youtube movies of the "Tesla beep". It used to be the case that if the Tesla autopilot judged a collision between 2 objects inevitable, it had a characteristic beep.
The result was that this beep would go off ... the humans in the car know it means a crash is imminent, but can't tell what's going on, where the crash is going to happen, then 2 seconds "nothing" happens, and then cars crash, usually 20-30 meters in front of the Tesla car. Usually the car then safely stops. Humans report that this is somewhere between creepy and a horror-like situation.
But worse yet is when the reverse happens. Distance judgement is the strength of LIDARs. But they have weaknesses that humans don't have. Angular resolution, especially in 3D. Unlike human eyes, a LIDAR sees nothing in between it's pixels, and because the 3d world is so big even 2 meters away the distance between pixels is already in the multiple cm range. Think of a lidar as a ball with laser beams, infinitely thin, coming out of it. The pixels give you the distance until that laser hits something. Because of how waves work, that means any object that is IN ONE PLANE smaller than 5 centimers is totally invisible to lidar at 2 meters distance. At 10 meters it's already up to over 25 cm. You know what object is smaller than 25 cm in one plane? A human standing up, or walking. Never mind a child. If you look at the sensor data you see them appear and disappear, exactly the way you'd expect sensor noise to act.
You can disguise this limitation by purposefully putting your lidar at an angle, but that angle can't be very big.
The net effect of this limitation is that a LIDAR doesn't miss a small dog at 20 meters distance, but fails to see a child (or anything of roughly a pole shape, like a traffic sign) at 3 to 5 meters distance. The same for things composed of beams without a big reflective surface somewhere ... like a bike. A bike at 5 meters is totally invisible for a LIDAR. Oh and perhaps even worse, a LIDAR just doesn't see cliffs. It doesn't see staircases going down, or that the surface you're on ends somewhere in front of you. It's strange. A LIDAR that can perfectly track every bird, even at a kilometer distance, cannot see a child at 5 meters. Or, when it's about walking robots, LIDAR robots have a very peculiar behavior: they walk into ... an open door, rather than through it 10% of the time. Makes perfect sense if you look at the LIDAR data they see, but very weird when you see it happen.
Worse yet is how humans respond to this. We all know this, but: how does a human react when they're in a queue and the person in front of them (or car in front of their car) stops ... and they cannot tell why it stops? We all know what follows is an immediate and very aggressive reaction. Well, you cannot predict what a lidar sees, so robots with lidars constantly get into that situation. Or, if it's a lidar robot attempting to go through a door, you predict it'll avoid running into anything. Then the robot hits the wood ... and you hit the robot ... and the person behind you hits you.
> It takes an absolute expert human to accurately judge distance between themselves and an object even 5 meters away.
Huh? The most basic skill of any driver is the ability to see if you're at a collision course with any other vehicle. I can accurately judge this at distances of at least 50 meters, and I'm likely vastly underestimating the distance. It is very apparent when this is the case. I can't tell if the distance between us is 45 vs 51 meters, but that is information with 0 relevance to anything.
> The result was that this beep would go off ... the humans in the car know it means a crash is imminent, but can't tell what's going on, where the crash is going to happen, then 2 seconds "nothing" happens, and then cars crash, usually 20-30 meters in front of the Tesla car. Usually the car then safely stops. Humans report that this is somewhere between creepy and a horror-like situation.
This is a non-issue and certainly not horror-like. All one's got to do is train themselves to slow down / brake when they hear the beep. And you're trying to paint this extremely useful safety feature as something bad?
> Worse yet is how humans respond to this. We all know this, but: how does a human react when they're in a queue and the person in front of them (or car in front of their car) stops ... and they cannot tell why it stops? We all know what follows is an immediate and very aggressive reaction.
What are you trying to say here? If the car in front of me brakes I brake too. I do not need to know the reason it braked, I simply brake too, because I have to. It works out fine every time because I have to drive in such a way to be able to stop in time in case the car in front of me applies 100% braking at any time. Basic driving.
Generally, what you're describing as predicting is more accurately called assuming. Assuming that things will go how one wants them to go. I call that sort of driving optimistic: optimistically assuming that the car in front of me will continue going forward and that there is nothing behind that huge truck that's blocking my view of the upcoming intersection, so I can freely gas it through.
That mindset is of course wrong; we must drive pessimistically, assuming that any car may apply max braking at any time and that if any part of our line of sight is obstructed, the worst case scenario is happening behind it - there is a high speed object coming towards us at a collision course that will reveal itself from behind the obstruction at the last second. Therefore, we must slow down when coming around a line of sight obstruction.
> Huh? The most basic skill of any driver is the ability to see if you're at a collision course with any other vehicle. I can accurately judge this at distances of at least 50 meters, and I'm likely vastly underestimating the distance. It is very apparent when this is the case. I can't tell if the distance between us is 45 vs 51 meters, but that is information with 0 relevance to anything.
That's probably because for things moving in straight lines at constant velocity you don't need to be able to measure distance at all accurately to figure out if they are on a collision course. You just need to be able to tell if the distance is decreasing.
First, you just have to note if their angular position is changing. If it is then they are not on a collision course.
If the angular position is not changing, then you have to check if the distance is decreasing. If it is they are on a collision course. If it is not then they aren't.
If you take advantage of the fact that cars generally have distinctly different front ends and back ends and that most of the time cars are traveling forward you don't even have to estimate distance. If the angular position is not changing just note if the direction the car is pointing has its front closer to you than its back or not. If its front is closer than its back then it is on a collision course. Otherwise not.
You will need to make some adjustments due to cars having volume. A near miss for point cars could still be a collision for cars with volume, but this should be fairly easy to deal with.
> Huh? The most basic skill of any driver is the ability to see if you're at a collision course with any other vehicle. I can accurately judge this at distances of at least 50 meters
Can you tell me the distance between 2 objects, each 50 meters away from you, down to 1 cm? That's the superhuman part. Even the distance between you and an object 10 meters away down to a few millimeters is impossible for a human.
It is because 10 measurements of that per second can predict with great accuracy where every object in the scene will go for the next few seconds, except for small children or bikes or ... that the LIDAR cannot see.
It can also tell you 4-5 seconds before it happens which objects are going to collide. Not just which object YOU are going to collide with, but any collision between any 2 objects if they are within the range of the LIDAR.
But they see fundamentally different things than humans. So humans will never work together nicely with LIDAR guided robots.
But ... the whole reason Trump got elected is the fact that the electorate has split into us-vs-them group identities, he works through polarization. And although this post captures how one group (let's call it the "internet generation") feels about the world, it's probably not helping with polarization.
You have to admire, in fact, how smart Trump is. Look at the central "problem" according to that post:
"But see, not everybody was thinking that Hillary Clinton was an alien, that global warming was a Chinese hoax and that what America needed most of all was a plywood wall stretching from Texas to California. Only the stupid people were"
Holy crap this is polarizing. AND WE DON'T EVEN DISAGREE ON THESE. These sort of statements are the exact opposite of what we need to defeat Trump. Because no, this is NOT a difference between "smart" and "dumb". If you abstract just a little bit ...
Hillary Clinton is an unpopular war hawk. Would you like her as president? I wouldn't, just about the only big positive I see in her is that it's long past time for a female president. But please: not her. She IS an alien in that I don't know who this woman represents. Not me, certainly, and I frankly don't see or know any group that she does represent. I'd MUCH prefer AOC, but frankly, I'd prefer Nikki Haley over her.
"Global warming is a Chinese hoax". This is the one I would most describe as "dumb". But ... not really global warming policy has not worked for 50 years. This is, of course, not a reason to give up on it, but it probably is time to change course bigtime. And, sorry, the protests about global warming ... are equally dumb as Trump's (made-in-china) MAGA caps.
"what America needs most ... wall stretching from Texas to California". Obviously "dumb" Americans like this because life has become ever more difficult and immigration (specifically pressure on the job market and housing market) is a huge and growing problem. Trump only gets points because he does something.
The ("our") internet generation is getting old. Perhaps not dying yet, but we are not young anymore. And the train has definitely left the station: nobody's growing up to be internet generation anymore. The only thing that is happening to the internet generation is that people are leaving it. Not in great numbers. Not yet. But we'll only be shrinking from 5 years ago forward. Yet another reason to find a way to agree with Trump's electorate.
I feel like these viewpoints (I hope) represent "the internet generation". My conclusion is Trump got elected because he convinced me and the "real Americans" that we disagree. We don't. These are superficial, not worth having a fight over and CERTAINLY not worth having a president like Trump over.
maybe he's just the cancer and we're the ones who have been ingesting the poison all along (doing nothing about income inequality, social and financial mobility, a sense of civic duty, the courts not bringing him to justice, etc etc). That doesn't change the fact that you excise the cancer with extreme prejudice otherwise it kills you.
You can't "excise the cancer" of Trump's voters, and that isn't the goal. My first point is that we shouldn't do that. These are normal people just like you and me. That they can live, have a job, and participate in discussing the future of America is a great thing. A good second point is if we try to just cut them out, we'll lose, because the "internet generation" shrinks while their generation grows. And a third point is that Trump is anything but a champion of "real Americans", so putting a wedge between those two is very doable.
Some voters are unwilling to see truth. Some are so high on their own supply of confirmation bias they can’t be swayed. Every idiot praying their legislator votes for the big beautiful bill but is dependent on Medicaid is voting irrationally - but because Trump told them to they will.
My excise comment was more about Trump and poor-exploiting-rich-people like him that feign care for structural ills but run and act in a hostile autocratic xenophobic and populist way.
I like to think that people voted for him despite his policies on immigration and others because they thought this idiot real estate mogul turned reality TV star was an actually competent business person and yet …
The man failed at selling steaks in America, casinos, ran fraudulent universities, stole from veterans in charity money … the list is nigh infinite.
This is because you attack the symbol that they're proud of, rather than pointing out the policies. The problem is that the democrats are doing the same, like the blog post this is about.
The problem isn't Trump, and it certainly isn't Trump voters, it's the policy. Trump is nothing but a tasteless symbol of failure. But if someone wants a bust of him on an altar, who fucking cares?
The problem is that we AREN'T discussing policies. We aren't discussing whether cutting medicare is good or bad, we're discussing whether all democrats are terrorist lovers, and all republicans are dumb broke versions of uncle scrooge.
The way capitalism works the issue is that it's optimized by now. In order to get more players we need to find some application that people are willing to seriously "overpay" for first. The money from that can then be used to make new designs.
But China ... China is far worse. Tibet, Xinjang, Taiwan, Pakistan, Phillippines, ... all are under attack. Oh, and perhaps relevant: China admitted to direct support of Russia's attack on Ukraine merely because of the small effect it has on naval power in the Pacific [1].
And let's just stop pretending here. Historically, modern European countries behaved exceptionally well (as most states just outright enslaved, as in "work yourself to death or we'll kill you right now" of whoever came under their control). China behaved pretty bad (e.g. killing millions of their own people for political optics. Enslaving people in Xinjang), but frankly not exceptionally bad. The Ottomans did worse (all caliphates did). The Persians did (although they deserve credit for stopping ... at least until the current government). The historical norm of behavior of states is incredibly, incredibly bad. And China has made it very clear they're not changing their old ways, in fact, they've made it very clear they're moving backwards, not forwards. They are moving towards having the state in control of everyone who lives anywhere China has power, on a literal, individual level. What apartment they live in. What they study. What they do. What they watch on TV, on their cellphones, ... This is not even remotely comparable to the worst dreams Trump has ever had.
Sorry to point out the obvious but China is the dystopia, not the US, and the US has a long way down before it gets anywhere close to CCP behavior.
[1] https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/europe/china-says-...
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