He wasn't suggesting that everybody has to live in a city, but rather that industry should be more dispersed. I think a big problem in Silicon Valley / etc is that everybody lives in suburbs and then commutes to a bunch of businesses that are all in one area. Nobody can afford to live near the employers and traffic is horrible.

If you spread the employers out and intermix it with residential areas then people move generally close to where they work, and everything ends up being moderately priced, with moderate traffic.

An urban model can work with real mass transit, but US cities tend to lack that, outside of maybe NYC.

Yup. For some reason people seem to prefer inefficient markets where the prices stay low but everybody stands around in lines waiting for rationed soap or whatever, to a market where the price gets set based on supply/demand and there are no lines and when the price of soap rises to $100/bar you find everybody with a pot and plastic containers making their own soap for sale, thus increasing the supply and satisfying demand.

Apparently you favor an algorithm where people with the time to stand on a street corner for 3 hours get lucky and get a cab. Uber apparently prefers an algorithm where anybody who requests a cab gets one in 5 minutes every time, albeit at a higher cost than normal.

Either way exactly the same number of people are being driven where they want to go per hour. It isn't like they're limiting the supply of cabs. Indeed, if fares are going up chances are that every Uber driver in the city is headed for that area even if it means working all night to do it. The algorithm probably means that more people are going to get where they want to go per hour.

An auction is actually the most straightforward way of ensuring that supply and demand are balanced. Virtually every stock exchange on the planet works in this manner as a result. If more people want Microsoft stock than are selling it at the moment, the price goes up.

Same way that Comcast gets away with hiring people like this.

Don't waste your time arguing with trolls. It is a bit like somebody spending all day arguing that there are lots of things that could make a pendulum behave the way it does besides the earth turning.

Since the whole point of dark matter is attempting to account for phenomena which have no other explanation, it is entirely possible that all of physics is off the mark. However, to just dismiss the entire matter because any ONE specific issue is somewhat circumstantial is to miss the overall picture. There is certainly a lot of evidence that established theories are wrong, and there are a lot of independent constraints on what is going on.

People seem to claim that Sony is particularly lax at security, but most of the solutions I see are tinfoil-hat territory - disconnect from the internet and such.

If Sony took the kinds of measures people seem to propose, they'd go out of business since their competitors would be far more efficient. You can't just turn the dial back to the 90s and pretend the internet didn't happen.

I don't have a solution. What Sony did is what virtually every company around does. I'm sure we'll see more hacks like this happen. Companies that try to prevent these attacks will either still get hacked because they don't do enough, or will go bankrupt because they did do enough. Maybe at some point governments will start firewalling at the border, or will make it illegal to distribute an operating system that isn't NSA-certified. That won't be much of an improvement.

You do realize that the solution proposed in that article is to completely disconnect an entire corporation from the internet, right? It reads like something written in 1995. People don't use the internet at work just to check Facebook these days. Ever use Stack Overflow or Google at work? Every profession has sites like that, and you're not going to way to pay to replicate every one of them inside the firewall. If you tried either nobody would get anything done, or every manager in the company would just tell their employees to switch to google docs and gmail and to use their own PCs.

That was the original point - "Both sides are afraid of incrimentalism by the other, which compels them to adopt the extremist position in order to prevent that strategy working."

Both sides are forced to take extreme positions. Thus we have wars over things where otherwise there might be compromise. The case you cited is an example that actually touches on both abortion and euthanasia, which are both incredibly controversial topics. In the US euthanasia is illegal even when consented to by a completely competent adult, let alone in the case of a child where the consent is provided by a parent. Any rational discussion on the matter is trumped by, "OMG, Death Panels!"

Not sure what the point of that is. Do you think that commercial outfits which likely have money and are interested in hanging onto it are going to be flying drones around airports or in the way of other aircraft (which will cost them drones likely carrying expensive gear which is traceable and lawsuits)? That sort of nonsense is strictly amateur hour, and if every Radio Shack $30 UAV came with anti-collision gear that would make a real dent in the risks there.

It isn't just IT. Management fads seem to be everywhere. People go where the incentives are. If doing something akin to internal marketing gets you a promotion, guess what you're going to do?

Consulting companies pay artists and designers to work on powerpoint presentations, or at least to teach their consultants how to design snazzy slides and arm them with a mountain of templates. That all happens off the official bills but obviously the cost gets baked in. They do it for the same reason that ads always look pretty - they know that it impresses internal management at the client and it makes the guy who decided to hire the consultants look good, so that he gets more power in the company and more discretion to bring in more consultants.

I learned a long time ago to read between the lines and work on the stuff that the managers "really" want. That project that has no business case that nobody has the guts to cancel - you put in the minimum effort so as to not outright be insubordinate and get yourself assigned to some hot project that is going to get rewarded and when they ask you to do things on the dead-end project you just say you're too busy and let the hotshot PM on your other project dump ice water on whoever asked you to do something unimportant. In the end the dead-end project fails and probably gets branded as a success and you haven't sidelined your career serving it.

Vaccines don't make us "feel more secure." They have been proven effective in preventing disease and saving lives. This isn't security theater.

Free expression of religion doesn't include driving without auto insurance, or without passing a basic automotive safety inspection where required. It doesn't include being free to practice human sacrifice. It doesn't include being free to raise your kid in a tribal lifestyle without basic education. Your freedom to practice your religion ends where you begin to infringe on my own freedom to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If your choice to not be vaccinated increases my risk of getting a dangerous disease, then I'd say that your choice is not one automatically protected by the constitution.

Of course vaccines have risks as well as benefits, and those should be weighed, but this was already done when the government approved the use of the vaccine in the first place. If the risks weren't outweighed by the benefits as demonstrated by the scientific data, then you wouldn't even be allowed to buy the vaccine in the first place.

Since everybody else is AC I'll reply here, mostly to agree with you.

The obvious argument to your claim is that if a woman had a gene that caused her to pump out more males in these circumstances, then her progeny would probably become more dominant, favoring this gene and making it more prevalent.

However, this is only true if you look at the local community.

Suppose the group of humans in which this gene is taking over is in competition with another group of humans that does not breed with them, but does compete for resources - another tribe essentially. If both groups are under stress, the one group might have a high frequency of the selfish gene, but the other group which lacks it might have more progeny overall, and thus may become dominant.

Genes aren't unlike viruses in this regard. A virus that reproduces so successfully that it kills its host quickly might make lots of headlines, but ultimately it won't be nearly as re-productively successful as some quiet little virus that lives in peace in every human on the planet.

Obviously the story anthropormorphizes things a bit, but the principles aren't wrong. For me one of the eye openers was learning about things like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Sure, but the humans doing the buying have to have something to buy it with. Also, at least in my home the number of handcrafted trinkets is FAR lower than the number of mass-produced stuff I own, and I imagine that is the case in just about any home. Unless the AIs start buying handcrafted stuff that makes for a very unbalanced economy. The same applies to butlers/servants/etc - most people have no desire to hire any of these, and most who do will just hire a robot to do a far better job for far less.

There is also a matter of resources. The machines will need to have resources to do their job, which means they'll drive up the prices of those resources. People using those same resources can't compete on price against the machines. It stands to reason that AI will accumulate all the wealth in the same way that the 1% do today.

It seems to me that unless the AI is designed to look out for human welfare the best we can hope to be is pets.

I have to agree with this. Presumably the morality that governs an AI will at least be understood, which is also far more than can be said about any person.

I think that just coming up with fundamental definitions of acceptable morality is going to be a big challenge in designing an AI. Any self-determining entity has morality - whether you intended for it to have it or not. "Do whatever it takes to make the owner money" is in fact a moral principle, albeit a rather poor one I think most would agree.