What are the odds!

Call it socialism, communism, or whatever you want; the fact remains that technology is changing economic realities for large swaths of people and that means we need to rethink ideas about how wealth should be distributed. As an economist I can tell you that commonly accepted economic theory puts great weight in the significance of Labor. Those models break down when Labor is being done by machines, and not workers. When a farm that once employed 100 farmers now only employs 10, and some machines - what are the 90 unemployed farmers reasonably Supposed to do. Changing your livelihood is easier said than done, and many jobs that they might be eligible for are suffering from the same problem. Should they just commit suicide? Is that really morally acceptable? Or, should the farm that now produces as much if not more with fewer laborers, have some sort of obligation to support those they have turned away? Some day, 95% of all human labor will be completely automated. Not today. Not tomorrow. But when that's our new reality, and billions of people cannot work through no fault of their own, do you just tell them to all commit suicide? Or, will we redistribute. I dont know about you, but redistribution seems like the right call to me. I dont love the idea of "freeloading", but I don't think that it should be thought of that way - everything that is produced will be so from the earth, and by the creations of man - at that point, it's only natural that the whole of mankind share in the common heritage of man.

Protect US - From a bunch of hoodlum fundamentalists that kill fewer Americans on average than lightning does. That old adage about trading freedom for security aside, if we wouldn't give every single 'terror' crime days of 24 hour news coverage, they would fade away and blend into the overall background of murders. If the American people want surveillance, it's only because we've created this narrative of fear or "it could happen to you" when in reality you are far far far more likely to die driving into work than from a terrorist attack. Allowing the terrorists to shock and scare the population is doing exactly what the terrorists want... so why do they do it?

> Implying that popular vote wouldn't give the the same representation as the state vote
The idea that the electoral college is needed to give each state a representative stake is obsolete. Theoretically, each citizen should have an equal vote; your vote is as good as mine, and so on. With the electoral college, votes are weighted - representation is therefore, also weighted. This allows places where relatively small numbers of people are represented by a delegate to have a larger sway. If the popular vote were adopted, your region and it's concerns would still be represented; just in a more granular, and more accurate form. Instead of condensing the views of millions down to an electoral vote, we could have much more precise representation. The electoral college is an instrument that was necessary in the past, logistically. It is no longer necessary.

The power of technology will necessarily require UBI. If there is no UBI, then we will have to do the equivalent of mandatory gas-station attendants but for 95% of things. We will have to artificially create jobs doing things that could be more easily done with automation, just to reinforce the old ways. Automation, AI, you all Should know what those technologies are capable of. The idyllic future where machines can fill the vast majority of society's needs may not arrive for another 50 years or longer, but so long as the wheel of technological progress turns, we too get closer and closer. With robots taking care of everything, its not that humans couldn't work, but that it makes no sense to send 100 people to farm a field that a robot can take care of, by itself, more efficiently, with less pain and toil. IE, most humans will be UNEMPLOYABLE through no fault of their own, because machines can do pretty much everything they can do, harder, better, faster, and stronger. I'm not saying we should switch to UBI tomorrow. We're not ready. The systems are not in place. But so long as we progress, we get closer to that day and it does better to just accept that. Its just another part of progress.

"You need to approach this blackout period with an unwavering belief in its benefit and a commitment to see it through." -- If you do that, how do you know that the results you experience are not placebo, or biased. If you go into this trying as hard as you can to convince yourself that it will be great and you'll feel better afterward, how do you know that the better you feel isn't just a result of accomplishing your task, and not the subject of the task. I can be convinced, but not by anecdote. Science plz.

I know a lot of you might think this is a ridiculous thing for him to do, but maybe if there is actual punishment for people who freak out and accuse simple electronics projects of being terrorism - like 15 million dollars in punishment - people will start to use their brains and not running for the hills and calling the bomb squad for anything that looks remotely suspect.

People make bad decisions, so it's science's fault? I don't know if i'm just missing something here, but this seems a lot less like a failing of science and a lot more like the ravings of a person who doesn't understand how science works. Nutrition is a balance, it's not as simple as saying "I thought fatty food made you fat, but turns out it doesn't guise!". Vitamins have been/are vigorously studied, it's not like scientists are clueless about their effects. My personal opinion is that he, like many, probably got duped by the downright horrible state of science reporting in the media. Now that the headlines haven't come true, it seems to make sense that those bumbling scientists had no idea what they were talking about! Scientific data about diet, health, and really anything else generally requires a lot of expertise to interpret. Headlines like to make conclusions of studies cut and dry, when the reality is that each study usually only contributes to the understanding of a system, and is not an answer in and of itself. The only way that science itself can be responsible for obesity, diabetes, and coronary problems is perhaps that since we have science we can have richer diets, and live longer lives, increasing the likelihood that those diseases will kill us as opposed to having a grizzly bear gnaw our faces off. The hard truth about it is that the public in general is really, REALLY ignorant when it comes to scientific issues, and even just how science works. Science is what keeps you alive past 30, gives you food a plenty, and every other modern amenity that you can think of, so really if diabetes, obesity, and coronary heart problems are your chief concerns i think you owe science a lot, not the other way around. Science is not a "mostly wrong" situation by design. Science is a systematic method of examination, using careful observation and logic to arrive at conclusions based on evidence - it is designed specifically to find what is Correct, not what is Incorrect.

Not being vaccinated means that employees retain slightly more freedom by choosing to work at disney world; at the expense of an increased likelyhood that disease will spread in a popular tourist attraction with alot of traffic. Mandating vaccination for employees would mean that becoming an employee would be giving up slightly more (maybe not really) freedom, in exchange for a job / whatever benefits you perceive; but the benefit is that there would be a decreased likelihood of disease spread. Personally, I think employer mandated vaccination isnt that much of an infringement upon personal freedoms, and that it protects everyone and is worth it; to make a real case for or against though, you'd probably need to do something like Statistically determine how many people die each year from a preventable disease as a result of visiting disney world; weigh that number of deaths against the cost of the freedom of employees to be illness vectors.

It seems like mesh network initiatives like this haven't been covered extensively on Slashdot, though I'm curious as to anyone's take on what protocols like CJDNS and the experimental hyperbora network will be able to do to stop this... of course, the caveat being that we would have to assume that the networks were bigger than they are now, more accessible. Any thoughts?

In my experience virus infections happen most often by either clicking on suspect internet banners or P2P file sharing. I doubt your mommy is racking up the copyright notices, but she very well may be decieved by fraudulent banners; so my suggestions would be 1. get her to use firefox or chrome, install adblock plus and https everywhere addons 2. Use Microsoft Security Essentials - maybe not the greatest, but just fine protection generally. 3. make sure her computer is set to update automatically, as that should help mitigate some security vulnerabilities 4. as a secondary antivirus program, malwarebytes has in my experience, been very good. All the software i mentioned above is free, good luck brotato.

The way I see it, laws like this are made to be broken. Reading the comments, I can see that the Slashdot community is predictably opposed to it, as am I... But, then again, I don't really care at the same time; because even though it will technically illegal, that isn't going to stop me. And it wont stop you. Unless they plan on throwing half the country in jail, nobody cares. P.S. Hello NSA guy. Yes i have just said that i am prepared to break the law. What are you going to do about it? Probably nothing. Because nobody cares, not even you. I bet you are going to break it too aren't you. It's okay, we all will.