When times are hard, people tend to go back toward the "community" , group together to weather better the storm, a group is less likely to fail if individuals fails if other fare better and compensate. Thus the trend toward socialism/communism and other similar politics which tend to favorize the group and the lowest worker classes. It is just plain logic on the individual level.

it will be a long and hard period (perhaps even 10 years) of adaptation

You are *severly* udnerestimating it. It is not only that greece wll have tod efault, but also that greece will still be noted as junk as far as bond goes so will not be able to borrow again at good rate EVEN after default, but also that now that greece is outside of the eurozone, it will have to either junk their own currency so far down the rabbit hole to make export / import not kill them that the inflation in the subsequent decades (note the plural) will take a long time to stabilize the economy. And once out of the eurozone , guess what ? Greece will STILL have to have cut back on cost or have extreme inflation , maybe hyper inflation and their own bank default, if they start issuing bond on their own currency and spend like no tommorow.


Greece is a warning to France or even spain, italy and other of the eurozone with ramping up debt : get your table cleaned or it might get burn down as a sanitisation process by others.

Oh no, we can -- and should -- speculate. Consider everything we can think of. Consider.

What we should NOT do is create a self-fulfilling prophecy by taking the verbal fecal output of doom-criers as the inevitable or even as the likely.

Since you mention cats, would you like an AI treating you like you treat the cats?

Frankly, that would be awesome.

Except that the opinion of people like Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates and Elon Musk is definitely worth more than any "majority" thinking differently.

Nosense. That's just hero worship mentality. Very much like listening to Barbara Streisand quack about her favorite obsessions.

Bill Gates' opinion is worth more than the average person's when it comes to running Microsoft. Elon Musk's opinion is worth more than the average person's when building Teslas and the like. Neither one of them (nor anyone else, for that matter) has anything but the known behavior of the only high intelligence we've ever met to go on (that's us, of course.) So it's purest guesswork, completely blind specuation. It definitely isn't a careful, measured evaluation. Because there's nothing to evaluate!

And while I'm not inclined to draw a conclusion from this, it is interesting that we've had quite a few very high intelligences in our society over time. None of them have posed an "existential crisis" for the the planet, the the human race, or my cats. Smart people tend ot have better things to do than annoy others... also, they can anticipate consequences. Will this apply to "very smart machines"? Your guess (might be) as good as mine. It's almost certainly better than Musk's or Gates', since we know they were clueless enough to speak out definitively on a subject they don't (can't) know anything about. Hawking likewise, didn't mean to leave him out.

Within the context of our recorded history, it's not the really smart ones that usually cause us trouble. It's the moderately intelligent fucktards who gravitate to power. [stares off in the general direction of Washington] (I know, I've giving some of them more credit than they deserve.)

You are crazy. Here is an example of the democratic process working, yet you desperately have to search for some conspiracy theory to continue your irrational hatred of the USA.

No. It's an example of a republic not working. What history books tend to call "decline and fall" when it's happened in the past. It is what happens when governments completely lose sight of, and concern with, and respect for, the principles that brought them into being.

This is real life, not a Tom Clancy novel.

Oh, we know. In Clancy's works the US TLAs are the good guys. That's not been the case for decades now.

It's deep, but it's dry. And it has a sharp rock floor at about the 100 foot level.

"But it's two-year-old level childish thinking at it's finest to think you can get all the free and subsidized stuff out here in the world without the advertising"

Well how about a subscription or money ? I value my privacy and not getting advertising more than anything else.

"Others point out that those who drive electric vehicles need the roads maintained just as much as people still driving gas-powered cars."

Sooooo are truck paying proportionally much much more than hybrid ?

http://federal-budget.insidego...

"The U.S. government collected $80.9B in tax revenues and spent a total of $117B in its 1940 budget" So it was not 135 but 117, which is near enough but nowhere near the inflation adjusted number. I call BS on that because an inflation adjusted number for 135 would be around 10 billion 1940 dollar.

By the way the number is confirmed by government spend in % of GDP : it was 10% in 1940 a year which was *specially* suspiciously used, and it was between 16% and 22% ever since after WW2. The fact that in percentage GDP it stayed stable or had barely growth completely destroy the original argument.

You see often cited as conservative/republican mouth point. But this is an utter stupid viewpoint - why it is modded as insightful is beyond me. Interesting maybe at most.

The reason why this is stupid is as follow : when you rise minimum wage you rise slightly the living of people but you also partially rise inflation. Rise too much and the inflation will eat most of it. So the economic of it is to rise only slightly and try to minimize inflation. Rise it to 1000$ or 100000000$ and you got hyper inflation and your $ is worth as much as zimbabwe dollar. That type of stupid argument (1000$ hourly wage) by the way is the same slippery slope argument republican make for gay mariage "but then after that they will want to marry horse or multiple people or children"

Bullshit the inflation from 1940 is already ~15 times. In fact looking at your next sentences:

Because 135 billion alone in 1940 is 2.2 trillion to 2.3 trillion of today in constant dollar. Any CPI calculator will confirm that baring a few % +/-. The delta of 900 million is from federal programs which did NOT exists in 1940. From environmental protection, drug enforcement, NASA, EPA, etc...etc...

IF they really worked hard to get $15.50 and the business paid them that much because of hard work, then they have a very powerful tool to ask for an increase "are you going to pay me minimum wage for all the hard work ?".

I am jsut stating that it should help. A bit. In fact in a link above it is shown as a counter measure, as well as rotating the balistic projectile. Both combined would make it far far easier to avoid the laser burning thru... For a much cheaper price than such a lser system itself.

If you have a reflectance of X% for the wavelength considered, that means 100-X% is absorbed. Granted I am not sure how the reflectance of materials is at short wavelength but the weapon considered are at long wavelength compared to visible (the weapon considered seems to be around 1 to 2 micrometer in the near infrared https://fas.org/sgp/crs/weapon...). Source cite a reflectance of 94% to 98% for that wavelength for some type of mirror (silver mirror among others).

At such a 50kW Laser at 95% reflectance would mean 5% absorbance or only 2.5 kW. That means to give the same amount energy at the same distance for the same surface you need 20 time the same time. Or put in another way if you need to give 10.000 Joule to ablate that surface , you would need 4 seconds exposition rather than 1/4 of a seconds for a non reflective surface.

So where do I make an error ? Where do you see that the mirror would quickly lose the ability to reflect compared to exposure time ? Keep in mind that in the case of a balistic projectile, you only need to make sure the laser do not pierce the skin long enough that targeting would be hard. I do not see why you keep telling reflectance has no impact on such laser. It certainly has an impact on how much kW will the target absorb.