Whatever you think of the various sides of this argument, it's interesting to me to look at how different the sides are.

The US is, on average, far more concerned about pornography and other sexual issues than the UK, but there is not and never will be any significant discussion of government-mandated filters, outside of specific situations like government-run schools. The reason is our belief in the importance of free speech. Although there are plenty of Americans who would like to ban porn, no one at a national level says it out loud. No one seriously talks about it even at local, highly homogeneous levels, because everyone knows it won't fly.

The UK is somewhat less prudish than the US, but is perfectly willing to carve out large exceptions to free speech wherever it's convenient. Therefore, British pols do talk seriously about trying to ban porn, except for adults who opt out.

Europe (as a whole; there are exceptions) is even less concerned about free speech than the UK, but apparently considers porn to be something worth fighting for, to the degree that they're willing to invest at least a little effort in fighting to keep porn available to kids in the UK.

FWIW, I think porn is bad. Conceptually, there's nothing wrong with human sexuality, but porn presents an extremely distorted view of human sexuality. I think regular consumption of hardcore pornography, particularly by adolescents, skews expectations and perceptions in ways that have negative consequences. That said, I have no interest in trying to ban it. I do filter it on my home network, but that's a half measure which mostly serves as an early warning system (I get notified of attempts to get to porn sites) which offers a chance to talk the issues over if I find my kids looking for it.

All of which mostly says that I'm a fairly typical American parent: concerned about porn but unwilling to take the strong anti-freedom steps needed to effectively ban it :-)

That's certainly fine with respect to crimes that justify criminal punishment (e.g. prison). But if regulators choose a market-style punishment (fines), then they're just acting as a market force, and that's a consideration for shareholders as owners.

Utter nonsense. Yes, in some cases that may be the effect, but it's certainly not the design. Your cynicism has gotten the better of you. By design, boards of directors are intended to serve the same role that elected political representatives do for citizens of a nation; to represent the interests of the voters. It's not feasible for every governmental or corporate decision to be voted upon by the whole body, so they choose representatives. A proper board of directors takes a dim view of executives acting against the interests of the shareholders, and boards that fail their jobs badly enough do get ousted.

That just indicates that regulators are not making the fines large enough. If regulators want to use financial penalties, they have to make them large enough that bad actions are unprofitable.

At the end? You want to say the LIBOR scandal was not real, courts were all wrong and banks paid out billions in fines just to avoid some bad PR?

Get back to reality. We have actual proof that these people are criminals and they they were engaged in a criminal conspiracy.

There is no conspiracy in the conspiracy-theory world-domination sense, but if you doubt that there was at least one conspiracy in the criminal sense, you haven't read any news for some years.

Yes, there is a part of that as well. The german government is absolutely to blame for the whole circus and far from the innocent victim they pretend to be.

Not at all. I'm very libertarian in this. The solution is to let the fucking "too big to fail" banks fail. But if they threaten to take down the whole system, bankrupt them the way you would any other essential service: By nationalising them, letting all their shareholders pay the bill, jail the top management for endangering the economy, selling all the financial market gambling money it holds and using all its assets to pay out regular peoples accounts. Then close the whole thing down and tell the other banks that if they so much as flinch, they'll be next.

Sadly, our fear of that is so overwhelming, that we've allowed the opposite to become reality. We've weakened our governments so much that banks and corporations interfere with politics (telling governments what to do) and they are using that ability not for the benefit of society, but for their own economic beenfit and the profit interests of their shareholders and investors.

You're assuming that simulating the structure of an organic brain is necessary to accomplish the same functions. That's like assuming that simulating legs is the only way to construct a self-moving machine, just because that's the way that nature has done it. Evolution produces workable schemes and fine tunes them; but it clearly suffers from the local maximum problem, while the scientific approach to generating knowledge is much less prone to that limitation. You're also ignoring the fact that the basic construction of our computers is orders of magnitude faster and more energy-efficient than the neurochemical processes that drive organic intelligence. That fundamental difference in materials has to make a difference at larger scales, I think. There are likely other questionable assumptions underlying your guess.

Your assumptions may be valid, but we have no way of knowing. I suspect they're not, myself. What is certainly true is that we won't know until we understand how intelligence works.

Bullshit. The loans were given under austerity conditions, i.e. orders to cut this and that and that in social services.

No, I call that we let the banksters actually suffer the consequences of a high-risk investment going wrong (after all, that risk is why the interest rate is so high) and send the money to Greece not to french and german banks with Greece being just a proxy.

It's even harder to see why taxpayers should pay for the gambling debt of big banks.

Iceland was the only country that did the right thing: Jail the bankers and save regular peoples' account money, not investors profits.

Here's a crazy idea: Some private corporations made a huge profit lending money at very high interest rates. Interest on credit is your payment for taking a risk (that's why there is higher interest if the risk is higher). What if - omg! - that risk actually were a risk and they would lose their money? If taxpayers did not bail them out so they can buy a 3rd yacht?

Exactly, and well said, AC.

It's shocking to me how people can buy--hook, line, and sinker--any rotten story that politicians tell, particularly if the story is "blame someone else!"

Did you even read the _summary_?

Thanks for the reply, that makes total sense to me, and I think we're in agreement. The issue is definitely not the vulnerability of individual systems or an increasing "hackability" of software, rather, as you say, the greater accessibility that makes things more risky.

Yes, aggressive lobbying form 'Merican companies like Bayer AG (oddly headquartered in Leverkusen, Germany) and the largest chemical producer in the world, BASF (again, oddly headquartered in Ludwigshafen, Germany).

It's really nice that the political class of the EU can rely on the old "blame the US" trick to convince Europeans to ignore their own indebtedness to European corporate interests. Always shocking to me to see propaganda work so well and so easily.

I would quip that you should RTFA, but the relevant part is even quoted in the summary!

Dupont -- American
Bayer AG -- German
BASF -- German

Yes, American corporations pressured American politicians to pressure EU politicians. EU corporations were also pressuring EU politicians directly. EU politicians wussed out. This story is sensationalist because, of course, the EU politicians want to blame the US for their lack of spine and total subservience to corporations. Pot, meet kettle.

What an odd thing to say. Of course the owners of the bank take the hit when fines are levied. Who else would? And it's up to the owners of the bank to decide how to hold their employees accountable.

No, this is clearly #1. The biggest existential risk, and the most promising opportunity. It all depends on what those 7 billion unusually intelligent apes decide to do.