Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re: You can't cut off cheap Chinese goods (Score 1) 42

Because that will not pacify the poor. Printing money constantly will cause monetary inflation, so only the rich will be able to buy anything of significant value like homes. You'd have to also give away housing. It makes much more sense just to take the money from the rich and give it to the poor, the rich will end up with it again anyway.

Comment Re: Alibaba (Score 2) 13

I buy from AliExpress all the time. (Same business, different storefront.) As a rule they are roughly as responsive as Amazon. Shipping takes longer but prices are much better. Pretty much all the cheap crap on Amazon comes from them and it's much cheaper from the source. So far they have processed all of my complaints gracefully.

Comment Re:Could the AI bubble do something good? (Score 1) 54

I agree that's the main problem in this context, but there are other large ones of course. The nuclear isn't just a problem in construction, it's also a problem in maintenance, and in decommissioning. Nuclear is also not cheaper than fossil fuels if you consider full lifecycle costs of operation. You might say it's cheaper because it's possible to contain the waste and that's not possible for fossil fuels, but fossil fuels shouldn't actually even be in the running.

Comment Re:Does it mean... (Score 1) 58

It always boils down to the question: Does it matter?

Does it matter if you have 9 or 10 dollars, if all you want is to buy an ice cone for $3.50?

Does it matter if there are 9 or 10 parking lots if you know 5 of them are occupied, and you want to park your car?

Sometimes, 9 or 10 is a question of life and death. Are there 9 or 10 people in the burning building, and have we account for all of them rescued from the fire? Sometimes it is totally irrelevant.

Same with Dark Matter. If we want to account for effects on cosmic scales, it is really important. For gravitational effects in our Solar system, not so much.

Comment Difference in fundamental rights. (Score 1) 64

Jokes aside about Thanksgiving...

Thanksgiving dinner costs a little more this year, govt can I has a few thousand in free money? What's the difference between those examples and texas buying btc?

The difference is that food is part of(*) rights to an adequate standard of living as per Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Not dying of starvation is a fundamental human right.

So yeah, I get that you're joking about somebody throwing an excessively opulent Thanksgiving party and then complaining that it costs a bit much.

But making sure that every single person has access to sufficient food is a core job that government has to do(**). You can make jokes around what constitutes "sufficient", but you can't deny that nobody should die of starvation.
On the other hand, making sure that your Ponzi scheme doesn't implode before you had time to make it to the bank isn't the government's job. At best government's job would be to regulate in order to make it less likely that unsuspecting idiots get caught up in such scams.

(**): Yes, I understand that from the US' point of view, I am an evil Euro-communist and my country is some socialist hell-hole.

(*): along with "clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control."

There isn't excess public money, its all deficit trailing back to the black hole $37t...38 whatever it is now since states are dependent on federal money

You do understand that government budgets don't work like balancing your home expenses, right?

Comment Re:PR article (Score 3, Insightful) 206

People have a very important source of knowledge which is totally missing from AI: experience.

A person knows what "hot" means, because it has touched a hot surface during its lifetime at least once and felt the pain. A person knows how a speed bump affects the car ride, and how lemon tastes. A person knows which shape fits into which hole, because as a child, it has played the game.

Persons learn all the time by formulating hypotheses about the world and then experience how it works out.

AI totally misses this feedback. Or as my father uses to say: AI talks about color like a blind person.

Comment Re:uh (Score 1) 25

That's interesting to know. I never spent a lot of time with NeXTStep, though I have played with it a little bit. I think I have a VM for an x86 version around here somewhere, but it was a little crashy in a way that the 68k machines weren't and I don't know which piece's fault that is. I spent more time with OS X, but not a whole lot, so I didn't get that far into it.

Slashdot Top Deals

Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (6) Them bats is smart; they use radar.

Working...