You are confusing businesses with corporations. Not all businesses have shareholders and act in a sociopathic manner.

I'm not confusing anything, I'm simply focusing on corporations specifically.

Everyone seems to hate corporations, but bring up the idea of banning them in favor of a natural system (ie no government imposed "corporate veil" limiting the liability of the owners/shareholders) where the owners are actually responsible for the actions of their employees, and everyone goes crazy.

Without corporate veil you aren't going to get microprocessors, since those cost billions to develop and set up manufacturing for. You aren't going to get medicine either, for the same reason. Modern society can't function without Big Business, and Big Business can't exist without corporate veil. Problem isn't corporations in themselves, it's the social expectations and legal judgements guiding those corporations.

It's the "profit is all that matters" creed that has to go. But that's not going to be an easy battle, since Cold War left West with a religious attachment to an extreme form of capitalism. That secular religion needs to be either reformed or replaced. But of course the first hurdle is precisely that most people don't really consider it a religion - a social construct - but objective reality, thus effectively blinding them to any alternative.

Sure. But neither party actually wants you to end up with healthcare. Still it's a good example.

The actual information is that we provide a comparable or lower level of care for your average person in the United States than other developed nations. The UK spends less per person providing complete health and dental coverage than the United States spends in tax dollars per capita per person while the United States provides no healthcare. We accomplish nothing but a rigged and closed healthcare system with an FDA protection racket for pharmaceuticals companies and medical equipment manufacturers.

There is nothing magical about state provided healthcare that would suddenly make private medical institutions disappear. The costs would likely go up since you'd have reduced volume but you don't have to outlaw private medicine to have public medical staff.

The actual information is that the top 0.01 percent in this nation have 90% of the wealth in the United States, while the lower 99.99% generate 100% of that wealth and that 0.001% pay a tax rate comparable to or lower than that of the lowest income bracket. It's a bit misleading to target the top 1%, that drops the threshold low enough to include many engineers, doctors, and most lawyers. Those people work for a living, there is more than enough room to target the problem group and have a more reasonable distribution of wealth (and therefore power) without impacting those people.

The democrats are better at creating the illusion that they interested in fixing these problems than the republicans. Neither group actually wants that. Obamacare wasn't about giving everyone healthcare, obamacare was about putting money in the pockets of insurance companies while lowering the bar for the coverage they actually have to provide. Obamacare was about overpaying even more. And that is exactly how a free market system works in practice, the insurance companies can afford to buy more politicians and to pay lobbiest to whisper constantly in the ears of those politicians on every fine point of every bill than those who depend on insurance to pay their medical expenses therefore they get better representation. That is no different than someone who has more money getting better legal representation, superior medical care, or a superior education.

Insurance means very little to companies who have a certain service standard to uphold. No one will give a shit if they get their money back if their order of 10k worth of shoes disappears. These people want their service, and they will blame whoever they bought their stuff from if anything goes wrong.

There is a reason why certain trucking operations pay their truckers a shit-ton of money, have armed guards, locked trucks, tracking devices, etc. It's so that shit doesn't get "lost", not that they can pay their customer for shit that got "lost".

I think it's fair to say the republicans spew more blatant disinformation, the democrats spew more subtle disinformation and so what they are spewing will always be closer to actual information.

The difference between driving and VR is that VR is supposed to simulate your being physically present inside a computer-generated environment.

Aren't most cars nowadays designed with the aid of computers?

Seriously - don't dig those things up...

Little chance of that: "200 miles underground". Unless the summary got meters and miles confused, but Slashdot editors wouldn't make such a mistake.

no, but there is no reason to regulate every business under the sun either. The governments role is not to tell people what they can and cant do with minor exceptions

The problem is, businesses are people but unlike humans are only expected to care about "shareholder value". If you're trying to keep a horde of rules-lawyering sociopathic demigods from murdering people and destroying the entire planet for profit and the only tool you have is regulation then of course you'll end up with an ever-thickening rulebook. You are, after all, trying to enumerate badness against professional lawyers.

If you want less regulation, then you have to change social values so that people and organizations will consider more than just their personal benefit when making decisions. But that would mean acknowledging raw capitalism isn't sufficient to be the sole guide for society or even economy. So I guess it'll have to wait until current collapse forces the issue. Until then, choke on your regulations.

Ban people with an opposing point of view? Google deciding intentionally what's "true" and "not true"? Only people with approved viewpoints get a chance to place ideas out there?

"I hate Jews" is a point of view. "There was no Holocaust" is a flat-out lie. You are entitled to your own opinions and interpretations, but not your own facts. The latter makes you wilfully insane.

And frankly, Turkey is being a moron here. They could simply ignore all this, it happened 100 years ago after all. Or they could issue an official apology. They could even frame the Armenians as nasty people who had it coming, evil as such approach might be. But instead they pick the one strategy that has no chance of success whatsoever: pretending nothing ever happened. It's enough to make one question whether someone in Turkey wishes to ride a national persecution complex to power.

looks more like some moron bragging about his overclocked computer running for 48 hours straight at 4.7 ghz, and after that much time wasted he wanted to get back to watching cute cat videos or something so he shut it down with nothing to show for it.

You do realize modern computers can multitask, right? And even Windows supports setting process priority. So it's not like he can't watch videos while the thing is running in the background, it'll just run a bit slower.

The point of the holographic principle is not that one can imagine a 3D encoding onto a 2D surface, e.g. a holograph, but that the maximum possible information in a volume is not proportional to volume, but to surface area. That implies the fundamental mechanics of the universe can't be something like "voxels".

Perhaps it could, but those voxels/cells aren't really independent. General Relativity requires space to be differentiable (smooth) which in turn means that value of one cell limits possible values for nearby cells. Laws of physics could also be understood as rules of how values can vary across time- and lightlike paths. Put these effects together, and I suspect the result is the holographic principle.

if you want to turn technical decisions into political decisions

Every decision which has consequences to anyone or anything else is a political decision.

Massachusetts just shut down it's offshore wind farm program and more are dying (a welcome event for those of us that pay our own bills )

And who would that be? Last I checked, coal, gas and oil let you shit your externalities all over other people's environment (and lungs, real estate and insurance costs), and nuclear is impossible due to political reasons.

Wind is more expensive than fossil fuels only as long as you force me to suck up the fumes from your smokestack and tailpipe and consequently die horribly from lung cancer for free. Not to mention the fact fossils will run out eventually, leaving to future generations sitting in the dark if the alternatives are not in place by then.

Also, yes, we do buy more than we used to buy. That is called keeping the economy running, and if we weren't buying all those gadgets and trinkets and things *you* don't think are necessary our economy would be in even worse shape. As for the credit card debt, if wages were at least keeping even with what they have historically been people wouldn't have to fall back on so much credit debt now would they.

So what happens when credit cards are all maxed out and people have to lower their spending? Why companies will have to lay off people, leading to even less demand, leading to more layouts, and so forth until the economic tailspin turns into an outright economic and social collapse. Yet no company can unilaterally rise wages to ward off this disaster, because even if it made them more competitive due to a workforce that wouldn't hate them quite so much, the shareholders would complain, since the money could be going to them instead.

If only there were a party who could simply order everyone to rise wages, like it or not, to meet some kind of minimum standard high enough to keep the market working. Or, even better, simply pay a minimal income unconditionally to everyone.

Hawking, who appeared via hologram,

Wait, what?

A terrorist has a nuclear weapon in his backpack and is 10 blocks away from where he plans to set it off. He also plans to die, so if you confront him, he'll just set it off anyway.

The sniper who is supposed to shoot the bad guy has his shot blocked by a girl on her daddy's shoulders. He doesn't have a clear shot.

Do you shoot through the girl to hit the bad guy in that case?

Well, the girl is less likely to die from a bullet wound than a nuclear bomb going off right next to her, so it's not really an ethical dilemma, any more than performing a risky medical operation to save that girl's life afterwards would be.

The problem is, this entire ridiculous scenario is an example of an idea - that ethics can be set aside if needed - fighting for existence. Ideas aren't passive things; they're encoded by living neural cells in human brains, and neurons have a basic drive to be used. So once you accept the idea of ethical exceptions in principle, that idea will always whisper in your ear in every situation, even ones that don't involve any immediate danger.

So the question is: given two imperfect options - absolute ethical commandment and a slippery slope - which one is likely to cause less destruction?