fixed that for you, HTH, HAND

In the late 1970s in junior high we would ride the bus and get off at random stops and write down pay phone numbers. Then when we got home we would call the numbers and do all sorts of gags.

The one that inexplicably worked well was telling people that had won money from a radio station. Why they believed that an 8th grader sounded like a disk jockey is still beyond me.

It's almost kind of sad that kids of today can't get that experience. There's very few pay phones left and I bet none of them accept incoming calls. It was also pretty safe from a get in trouble perspective. Call logging and tracing would have been a huge endeavor and we never called any one pay phone more than a few times or suggested anything violent or even all that ribald.

Anything made by the USA with a V8 in the "malaise era" is the anti-tesla.

Hey, my dad gave me that watch. And I have allergies. I'm trying to make a cold medicine that will blow them away.

Thank you, Mister Rockefeller, but what about all the poor schmoes who don't have a lawyer on retainer? They shouldn't have to worry about being shaken down by the cops, either.

Now you're just getting redundant... can it.

If you swing for IT and miss, what are you going to do for a living? Phone support? Telemarketing?

If you swing for some real vocation and miss, like say smog tech or doctor, you can still fall back as something else, like a normal bolt-breaking mechanic, or a weed doc.

I don't know what the female equivalents are, it's probably sexist even to just suggest such a thing. Not a lot of women going into smog though

When a revolving door exists between corporations and Washington, and when corporations can buy public policy, what's the difference?

Man, I rail against NYT paywalls which people erroneously claim can by bypassed by private browsing, and I get accused of trolling. One failbook link, and everyone LOSES THEIR MINDS

Or however the meme goes.

They don't pay it off now by printing money because other people keep buying the debt.

The dollar represents 2/3rds of the world's reserve currency. The rest of the reserve currencies combined aren't enough to replace it.

Hyperinflation probably isn't always a guarnateed outcome, I would wager political pressure not to manipulate monetary and fiscal policy that much is a bigger reason.

One other interesting takeaway for me was the range of what it might mean to be be a superintelligence. The author being interviewed said there are kind of various dimensions to superintelligence, such as speed of processing, complexity of processing, size of "memory" or available database of info, concurrency (ability to process independent events simultaneously).

Not all superintelligences may have all of these qualitative dimensions maxmized, either, which can be part of the problem of failing to recognize when one has been created because we may fail to see its potential because it doesn't seem omniscient.

I think it's also interesting how we kind of default to science fiction ideas of like Terminator or other "machines run amok" scenerios where the outcome is physical violence against humans.

Some of the outcomes could be more subtle and some of the biases could be inbuilt by humans and not the part of some kind of warped machine volition or intuition.

One of the everyday examples might be the advanced software designed to bank finances, linking program trading, risk and portfolio analysis, markets, etc. The amount of information big banks have to process on a daily basis is massive and while humans make important decisions, they rely heavily on machine analytics and suggested actions (and modeled outcomes) to make those decisions.

The system may make money, but is it only biased in terms of firm profit or could it have other, unintended capital effects? Is it possible that while each big bank may have their own unique system but because all these systems have a lot of shared data (prices, market activity, known holdings by others, common risk models, etc) that they could have an influential or feedback loop among them that might actually drive markets? Could this unintentional "network" of like systems be something like a superintelligence?

One question I sometimes ask myself -- what if wealth inequality wasn't a conspiracy of some kind (by the rich, the politicians, a combination, etc) but instead was something of a "defect" in the higher order of financial system intelligence? Or maybe not even a defect, but a kind of designed-in bias in the system's base instructions (ie, make the bank profitable, for exampel) that resulted in financial outcomes which tend to make the rich richer? What if the natural outcome of markets was greater wealth equality but because they are heavily influenced by a primitive machine intelligence we get inequality? How could we know this isn't true?

I think these are the more interesting challenges of machine superintelligence because they grow out of the things we rely on current (and limited) machine intelligence to do for us now. Will we even recognize when these systems get it wrong and how will we know?

You can say that about absolutely anything, and have been able to say that ever since human knowledge became generally redistributable. But anybody can understand that nobody really knows whether these chemicals can be used safely, and that we have alternatives for them.

They can err on the side of caution. It doesn't mean taking no risks, it means taking action to limit risk.,/p>

I guess you win the turing test, everyone else is still wondering why you don't think an endocrine system is relevant to your existence.

Not just that, but many people stockpiled ammo when shortages were announced. Whether that was a bid to get people to stockpile ammo or just a handout to ammo manufacturers, either way there's a whole lot of ammunition out there as well as firearms. There's probably more ammo privately stockpiled now than at any time in history.

Nonsense. I hardly even drink cola any more, but Pepsi still tastes like ass and Coca-Cola still tastes better. It's a complete falsehood to suggest that anyone else can do what Coca-Cola can do, because a lot of people have spent a lot of money trying and they've all failed so far. Coca-Cola doesn't have a good name just because they've had it for a long time, Pepsi is an old brand too. Coca-Cola has a good name because they make a product that people want to buy, and have been doing that for a long time. Even when they were busy dicking around with their recipes and alienating some customers they still managed to remain on top.

Uber, on the other hand, really can be replaced overnight, in whole or in part, in some cities or in all cities, in some countries or in all countries, etc. They do absolutely nothing that someone else couldn't do just as well, if not better.

So yeah, everyone else is being compared to Uber, you've got that right. And it's worth something, you've got that right, too. But comparing Uber to Coca-Cola is way off-base. I haven't consumed a cola that wasn't from a weird off-brand (Zevia, in this case) in literally years, but if I were going to get one in some mainstream establishment devoid of more potable choices like filtered water (you have to hand it to soda, they at least filter the water before using it, it's important for consistency) I would still lick the sweat off a dead dog's balls before I'd drink a Pepsi. I'd drink Tabasco. I'd drink mayo.