Mandatory voting is common in many places outside of the US, but I feel like it's something that can lead down a dangerous path. You shouldn't be compelled to choose a leader if you disapprove of the choices, I think that's a freedom I think everyone deserves.
It seems to me one of the problems with machine learning in the nlp domain is that language concepts are mutable, but at varying degrees. In the dog/cat example used in the original post, the degree of mutability is very low, given the concept of a dog and a cat are rooted in the physical world.
However, consider more abstract human concepts or language that is new and changing often. Ironically, much of the language used to describe AI falls into this category (and thus subject to confusion among humans).
Any sort of machine learning algorithm would need to include some sort of 'adaptability' parameter that could tell the machine when to discard the current concept of the word and try forming a new one. This would need to be based on checks in both immediate context of the phrase, and related phrases.
Disclaimer: My knowledge of machine learning is limited to passive reading, so this may already be a part of any nlp algorithm, or I'm just completely off base. So please consider my comments are coming from the perspective of an outsider!
You may never use the Fn and ESC keys (I hardly do either), but this does add to the list of events developers now need to handle in order to develop cross-platform compatible software.
Well yes, though the OP was referring more to those making the statements not having skin in the game, not a general consensus of the market. If you asked 50 investors their views on the market a month before the '08 crash, I am guessing only a small fraction of them would have responded with negative indicators as well.
In some of these cases they don't have to. A 2% contraction to the economy would be detrimental, but on a 0 y-axis based graph, that wouldn't seem like much.
Except this particular piece is quoting a large number of high profile investors who probably do have corresponding short positions against the market. There's hardly any author commentary in the piece.
I was actually told by one company I worked for previously to not respond to candidates I interviewed. Needless to say I'm not working for them anymore.
Given that electronic mail is an order of magnitude cheaper and more efficient, it would drive the US Government to adopt it much more widely than it is used today. Your assumption that UPS or FedEx prices would remain fixed if they were to compete for additional business from the US Government isn't necessarily true either.
It's a race to the point where the consumer is willing to pay more for better quality. At that point, the costlier alternatives survive and the low cost provider exits the market.
Not quite. Read my other comment above in this thread. When you have the US Government locked in as a customer, and that customer continues to rely on you for the majority of their communication instead of moving to electronic communications, you are relying on taxpayer dollars to pay for those stamps that fund your operations.
Yes, I do have a strong belief that environments that allow private individuals the freedom to experiment/innovate and compete with one another produce massively better outcomes. However, my comment about the USPS was based on a series of stories in the news over the past several years about their financial difficulties and the closing of numerous Post Offices in small towns across the country.
Keep in mind the USPS has locked in one massive customer that continues to rely on post mail instead of electronic communication for virtually everything - the U.S. Government. So while yes, the USPS may produce better outcomes for the last-mile delivery, it is most likely being subsidized by the U.S. Government using their services to communicate virtually everything to 330 million U.S. Citizens. In that regard, UPS and Fedex are saving money off the back of taxpayers when they use the USPS to deliver packages to homes beyond their most profitable routes.
It's unfortunate you're being downvoted here. The market for railways is not railroads and trains, it's transportation. People and goods will find the most efficient way to move around regardless of government involvement.
Your comment is interesting, because it points out the fact that quality does vary over time, for all types of goods and services. I think this is one of the strongest arguments for creating an environment where healthy competition exists.
The reason being that if a business/organization declines in quality, competition always exists to step in and serve those whom the organization previously served. When you have government controlled monopolies, private competition is literally killed off because the private competition's tax dollars typically go to subsidize the government entity serving the same customers. This keeps prices low, but it does nothing to address the quality of the services being provided, which oftentimes degrades over time (this is partially why most Fortune 500 companies weren't on the list 20 years ago).
When the government steps in and serves a group of people in the marketplace, there is rarely a mechanism to give consumers an alternative should the government entity fail to provide adequate service.
>>There is scant evidence backing up that "usually". You obviously need some incentives for people to take risks or work hard, but no Zuckerberg or Gates or Kamprad or Ek would have been discouraged if his marginal tax rate had been 10% higher.
Had Elon Musk's marginal tax rate been 10% higher, we wouldn't have Tesla or SpaceX, considering he nearly went bankrupt multiple times trying to build both companies. Your comment about drinking water is also inaccurate considering the water systems in nearly all US cities are government controlled monopolies.
UPS is not particularly strong on international shipping. Is your example because those post offices are actually more efficient, or because there are bureaucratic roadblocks slowing down UPS (a U.S. based carrier)?
The problem with privatization is it often involves granting monopoly powers to a private company instead of opening up the market to private competition. This in some ways is even worse than leaving the entity under government control because there is an incentive to squeeze as much profit as possible out of the entity and no pressure from competition to keep the private entity honest. Privatization in itself is not a problem, and neither is inequality (in modest form, created by competition, not unfairly), but creating an environment where the quality of goods and services suffer for the consumer/citizen because those providing those goods and services don't have an incentive to do a good job.
Sometimes a heavily biased source is the only one that is willing to discuss an issue, or bring it forward. Consider it the opposite of an appeal to authority argument, but bias of a source doesn't necessarily discredit the argument.
Increasing efficiency to western levels won't happen overnight. It still takes time for the market to develop, and there would be several cycles of commodity prices collapsing which would squeeze out less efficient participants.
I agree. In underdeveloped countries however, the number of people working in agriculture is much closer to 90%. The tech clearly exists to improve productivity in these countries, but the problems are (mostly) political and economic. In particular, dumping from the US distorts local commodity prices. This makes investment in new technology impossible for local producers. This is an area where lots of technologically advanced people have been working for a long, long time. If the advantage that YC/SV can add to ag is software and sensors, things are actually pretty advanced in that field (self-driving tractors have been around for 10+ years), just the perception is that farming is still low-tech. If YC believes a startup can provide new ways of thinking about some of these non-tech problems in the space, then there might be an opportunity to make significant improvements, especially in developing countries.
So humans do this too naturally - this is how new languages develop over hundreds of years and groups evolve and split. Aside from that, I'm a little nervous about seeing machines accelerate this process.
So do you have a suggestion for a system that works better, or do you prefer banks lend the money from your savings account without any sort of evaluation of how likely it is to be paid back?
Isn't Meteor a stand-alone server? It sits on top of node.js, and has a number of extra packages included to make it more of a complete framework, but those packages can easily be removed or replaced.