The network effect creates unearned profits. Unearned profits == inefficient market. An inefficient market will result in parasites showing up to exploit the margins.

The reason you have companies like Netflix, Facebook and Microsoft (and to a lesser degree Google) determining immigration policy is that they enjoy a network effect subsidy and there are cultures out there that have been so long without any kind of a frontier that they have evolved very sophisticated parasites.

If you want an efficient market, distribute network effect profits as citizen's dividends. Network effect profits can be extracted from the economy by shifting the tax base away from economic activity and toward liquidation value of assets.

Once the citizens realize that every immigrant is a dilution of the value of citizenship, immigration reform will be more rational.

It is not widely publicized nowadays but one of the chief propaganda items leading to the US entering WW II against Germany was the assertion that the Nazis were gay.

Since asm.js isn't sugared predication, there isn't a natural formalism to make assertions (declarations) about variables such as the set of values they can take on. Not all of these assertions need to be checked at run time. Some can be used at compile time to infer the most efficient implementation for certain use cases, and even generate different implementations for different use cases.

It is quite bizarre that you would accuse me of precisely that which I went to quote some lengths to describe as the attitude of "brain-dead zombies" of doing in thinking that "Prolog is that much related to predicate logic".

Anyway I'll proceed with something worth talking about when you said: "But maybe your quantum tabled resolution (or whatever I should call that) doesn't have any of the semantic and practical problems that Prolog and co. have. I'd be intrigued to hear about the nitty-gritty details in that case."

It is precisely the problem of time in relational programming systems that led me to investigate the work by the late Tom Etter there, and at HP reviving Russell and Whitehead's Relation Arithmetic via something he called Link Theory which is treats things like complex numbers (hence Hamiltonians and other dynamical constraint systems) as a particular symmetry on real-valued spinor matrices ala Macky.

If you do things in this way, you are less apt to "go astray in attempting to understand the empirical world" as Russell put it. To first order, think about it like this: What if you started not with pure, dimensionless numeric data types but with dimensional analysis that emerged from treating the columns of relation tables as dimensions of "relation numbers" to use Principia's terminology?

Quoting:

Mass-media influences cultural evolution in profound ways....Since institutional evolution is reflected in who has authority over what, editorial authority eventually reflects the biases of this group. They cannot understand life, except as something that generates politics and "human interest" stories. They may even, at some level of awareness, work to maintain our limits to growth since it places their skills at a premium. In a people-saturated environment (one at its limits to growth) people-oriented people are winners.

I was the Miami support team leader for Gerard O'Neil's Space Studies Institute from 1981 to 1983, and I wrote this while manager of interactive architectures at the first electronic newspaper in the US which deployed in Miami.

It actually points to something rather important that's not being mentioned in all this talk about SpaceX vs Blue Origin in the context of competition for government support.

When going to a new version of a language, the correct strategy is to come up with the highest level language one can conceivably jit-compile and rewrite the current language as syntactic sugars of the higher level language. "Pragmas" may be part of the sugaring (especially since there may be important pragmatic information provided by the lower level language) but it is better if the so-called "pragmas" are, instead, assertions written in the higher level language itself. The answer here is not a functional language but a relational one since functions are degenerate relations. Moreover, since one seeks to have assertions in the place of pragmas, the formal basis of the relational language should be sentence oriented. The sentence-oriented relational formalism most widely accepted across disciplines (including program specification) and with the most history is the predicate calculus. The brain-dead zombies will now start chanting things about Prolog even though it was never an implementation of the predicate calculus and tried to do things that probably should never have been attempted on a DEC-10 anyway. There are neo-zombies who will start chanting things about Erlang. Erlang is a bastardization of Prolog which is a bastardization of the predicate calculus. The best thing I can say about Erlang is that Mozart/Oz is much worse, being a bastardization of Erlang that is attempting to add relational constructs in without undoing the damage that Erlang did to Prolog -- when, in fact, they should have undone the whole mess, including Prolog, and gotten on with arranging a legitimate marriage of the predicate calculus with computers. If you are such a zombie, spare yourself the pain of reading further.

So, here is the high level idea (despite the danger of inviting Prolog zombies I'll be using its syntax for the Horn Clause):

The Idea

Parallelism spawns independent computations.

The Horn Clause:
m(A,B,C):-x(A),y(B),z(C).
expresses AND parallelism spawning 3 independent computations.

The Horn Clause document:
m(A):-x(A). m(A):-y(A). m(A):-z(A).
expresses OR parallelism spawning 3 independent computations.

In an operating system, parallel computations are scheduled for execution, allocating resources according to priorities.

There are also computations which cannot be scheduled until the computations upon which they depend complete. The Horn Clause document:
m(A,B,C):-m(A),m(B),m(C). m(A):-x(A). m(A):-y(A). m(A):-z(A).
expresses 3 AND parallel computations, each depending on 3 independent OR parallel computations.

This kind of data-dependency suspension of scheduling is also handled by operating systems.

By focusing on these constructs:

• AND parallelism
• OR parallelism
• Scheduling
• Dependency suspension

a radical reduction in semantic complexity can be realized.

Tools

Seymour Cray once said that much of engineering creativity comes from using old tools in never-before intended ways. The same is true of anything. New understanding of a thing's use is a way to create a new tool. Indeed, even when creating a new thing-in-itself as a tool (the ordinary means of creating a new tool), what comes first is its desired use. It is harmful to think about the fact that your hammer can be used as a paper-weight when you are pounding a nail into a piece of wood with a rock.

With that in mind, let us properly-use the Horn Clause:

• Branching is properly scheduled parallelism. This is even done in CPUs with instruction look-ahead threads and their abort.
• Looping is either AND parallel recursion or it is properly scheduled OR parallelism.
• Class hierarchy is properly scheduled polymorphism.
• Polymorphism is OR parallelism.
• Name space determination is word-sense disambiguation embodied in a particular choice among various clauses for the same predicate enjoying logical success.
• Exception handling properly scheduled OR-parallelism.
• A database row is cached AND parallelism.
• Numbers are duplicate row counts, dimensioned by the conjunction of the dimensions of their columns (some of which may be, themselves be duplicates when, for example, the dimension is squared) where addition is OR (adding rows) and multiplication is AND (adding columns). Negative row and column counts are a result the kind of negation in logic required for quantum algorithm specification.
• A database table is cached OR parallelism.
• Triggers void caches and originate with user input upon which all computations ultimately depend.
• User observation demands computations.
• Eager evaluation is driven by imputed (future) user inputs and observations.
• Lazy evaluation is a failure of eager evaluation., And finally:
• While caches exist and are under user observation, change in user input state does not stupidly void caches -- thereby allowing dependent computation to proceed -- it first compares the cached value with the recomputed value and proceeds to void dependent caches if and only if there is a change in value.

I hate hate.

Hate is the defamation of a group.

For example, I hate those who defame blacks by proclaiming blacks to have a higher crime rate than whites.

I hate those who defame Jews by proclaiming Jews to have disproportionate influence relative to their numbers.

I hate those who defame the poor by proclaiming the poor to have lesser capabilities than the rich.

I hate those who defame the rich by proclaiming the rich to have engaged in unfairly acquired their wealth.

I hate those who say that ugly people are ugly.

I hate those who say criminals are criminal.

Hate is Great!

We can now look forward to a South Africa that will no longer be the rape capital of the world.

And to think that when I was living in Minnesota back in the late 70s they'd charge $35 to float in a sensory deprivation tank for the better part of an afternoon. I mean they had an actual sensory dep salon in the Uptown area of Minneapolis just a few blocks from where I lived.

Garbage. Voting with your feet is the antithesis of politics and its stillborn "freedom" democracy.

The conflation of cultural determinism with the empiricism was an obvious intellectual error that afflicted not just Enlightenment philosophers but Islamic and classical Greek philosophers as well. It has no more bearing on the priority of evidence over theory (particularly theology posing as theory), that was the bedrock of the Enlightenment, than do other widely-held erroneous beliefs that persist throughout the ages.

This study is just more social pseudo-science. Social science is incapable of effectively dealing with the "correlation doesn't imply causation" trope we've all been taught in statistics 102.

In real science control groups are required to establish causality.

Social scientists are as terrified of real control groups testing causal hypotheses in human ecology as were the Jesuits of independent interpretations of the Bible. This is because social science is essentially a pre-enlightenment theocratic discipline:

If the powers-that-be oppose your social "science" then no matter how much data you gather, some variant of "correlation doesn't imply causation" will be trotted out to ignore it.

If the powers-that-be like your social "science" then the NYT will take one data point -- perhaps even one anecdote about one person at some point in history and base public policy on it. With the mass media holding mass and preaching said sermons the pious slaves to intellectual fashion, generally those with college degrees from the seminaries known as "colleges", and and with IQs below 140 who like to pretend to be morally superior "thought leaders" (knowing they have safety in numbers from hearing sermons at "mass") will then to the dirty work on the street.

Moreover, this theocratic sophistry, imposing social theories on unwilling human subjects, locks into place powerful interests that oppose any truth-discovery.

From Machiavelli's "The Prince" chapter 6:

"It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them."

If we are ever to escape this vicious cycle driven by the social sciences, the Enlightenment must penetrate them through Sortocracy:

Sorting proponents of social theories into governments that test them.

Fortunately, like the Protestant movement's impetus to independently interpret the Bible due to the Gutenberg press, the Internet is now letting people have direct access to and independent interpretation of data about human ecologies -- and the demand for freedom from imposition of social theories on unwilling human subjects will increase until freedom from theocratic forms of government -- and their social scientist theologians -- will win the day.

In the process, as with the wars for freedom of religion that lasted over a century, we cannot expect this penetration of Enlightenment values into the social sciences to take place without a struggle.

Ever hear of " fair market value"? Liquidation value is the "fair" tax base rather than fair market value because liquidation value requires is what any banker can get for an asset as, for example, collateral on a loan. If you have that as your tax base you are, in essence, charging the owner of the asset for the entire infrastructure that maintains property rights -- not just defense but also the legal infrastructure that upholds property rights.

The reason you're arguing against this is that you are a typical freeloading "conservative" trying to get something for nothing.

The way to stop the upper class parasitism is not to interfere with income nor with any economic activity, but to charge a fee for the primary service of government: Provision of the infrastructure within which property rights have meaning.

Conservatives hate this because they want to be able to complain about how unfair "taxes" -- which they are if they tax economic activities -- while receiving, for free, the primary service of government.

Liberals hate this because it starts to treat government as a service business and unleashes true paleo-libertarian economics such as that promoted by Henry George and Martin Luther King Jr in his last book (the one that got him assassinated) "Where Do We Go From Here?" because what the paleo-libertarians (and Dr. King) recommend is to treat citizens as owners of the business that maintains the infrastructure of property rights by paying out citizens dividends rather than attempting to deliver social goods through bureaucratic management. Liberals serve the bureaucratic management class -- not the people -- so they oppose this even though their "saint" MLK supports it.

BTW: I find it somewhat interesting, although not too surprising, that /. isn't talking about the Swiss referendum on the unconditional basic income -- which is essentially the citizen's dividend.