sevenless

Nothing has changed yet. In what way are Leave voters able to say "I told you so"?

I very much doubt the UK will exist in 10 years. It will fall, and Scotland will be free again :-)

If the EU really wanted to hurt the UK they'd declare the following things, in increasing order of nastiness:

1. Britain can swap immigrants for retirees. The residency rights of all Britons in Europe are contingent on residency rights of Europeans in Britain. If Europeans are made to apply for visas, so will every one of the millions of Britons in Spain.

2. Drain the country of talent. Recognizing that millions of British are being unilaterally stripped of their EU citizenship, create a new category of general EU citizens, and allow talented British to apply for instant and permanent residence, conditional on (1) giving up British citizenship and (2) learning the language of their continental locale within the next five years.

3. Tell Scotland that it would accept their continuing as a member of the EU if and only if they applied, as an independent state, while the UK was a member state of the EU.

4. Tell the UK that Article 50 is considered to have been invoked as of now, and they have two years to leave.

The last two would be especially funny.

There's a few thousand years of Mediterranean cargo and shipping distributed over the seabed.

And I'm sure Atlantis is down there somewhere...

But the archaeology would be fantastic.

How do you learn quantum field theory? I took a tiny amount of QM in school - basically, solving the Schrodinger equation for a few simple systems. What's the next step?

Also an opinion held by many conservatives. But what else could they say - would anyone air an openly pro-Trump cartoon show on US TV?

I don't dislike the show because it's conservative - King of the Hill is an example of a good, funny and politically conservative series - but because it's moved away from having character-driven plots, and become low-effort and predictable in who it satirizes.

I don't like the show - it's devolved into lazy one-sided caricaturing of 'progressive' causes - but the Make Love Not Warcraft episode still holds up as one of the funniest things I've ever seen.

Automation and IT in the US has little to do with free markets and a whole lot to do with enormous government expenditure, often war related. The internet is the obvious one. But if you go to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, you can see the first integrated circuit, which so happened to be built by Fairchild for the USAF, and the first computers, which were built in Silicon Valley for the Army. The same story is everywhere: About all the tech we take for granted owes its existence to state funding.

It's not like those are the only alternatives.

We should try communism with modern IT infrastructure and AI. The big problem with many command economies was the inability to collect and act on the data. Call it a "just-in-time command economy" if you prefer.

It doesn't really though. You have no choice on whether to participate in the market economy, and forming labor unions is restricted. Compared to other developed countries, work hours are long, minimum wage low and holidays short. If you don't work, even if the only work available is horrible and degrading, society thinks it's okay to deny you healthcare and starve you to death. This isn't a necessity, but a moral norm we have, that people who don't work should be punished, by death if necessary.

It's interesting that so many pro-market people claim to be individualists, because the view that the market should dictate everyone's life is as collectivist as it gets.

Most countries founded on invasion and genocide don't want to think about the victims, or acknowledge they had a 'real' civilization. Especially when their nationalism and Constitution-worship glorifies the genociders.

How about a small drone, with a camera, that follows you around at all times? That would be perfect.

Companies that do this should stop saying 'employees' and use 'meat robots'.

One of the great things about programming a computer to do something is that it forces you to expose and make explicit every hidden assumption. "Computers are very stupid: they only do exactly what you tell them to do."

With biases about people based on immutable characteristics (sex and race), we need to be clear about why stereotypes are bad and what we hope to achieve by eliminating stereotype-based reasoning. There is a great deal of hypocrisy and pretense around this subject, but only by being explicit and unapologetic can we explain to a computer what it is we want to achieve.

Stereotypes are not bad because they are false. Many stereotypes, even negative and unpleasant ones about vulnerable minorities, are statistically true at this time. A stereotype is nothing but a certain kind of model, and indeed, models built on sex and race stereotypes may perform better than those that aren't.

Nonetheless, we have strong norms against using stereotypes in law, public life and employment, because the outcome of such reasoning would be intrinsically unjust, and because of a long history of political struggle against a society, that explicitly discriminated on the basis of race, sex, homosexuality and so on. Conservatives will disagree with these premises, but we implicitly reject a conservative, discriminatory vision of society. Rejecting oppressive and unjust stereotypes is an unavoidably political act.

We recognize that

[0] It is a category error to treat humans like other kinds of objects which can be measured, because human beings are intelligent and can alter their behavior. Telling humans that science has discovered certain facts about their behavior may well change their behavior, or even re-order society around these new 'facts'. There is no neutral ground; doing statistics on humans has ethical implications. An awful example of this was the eugenic movement that inspired the Nazis.

[1] Stereotypes can reify themselves. A society which treats women as less than men will end up as a society where women are less than men, and are systematically harmed - they will be less educated, and will get treated as less intelligent. This is a kind of positive feedback loop between the widespread endorsement of a stereotype and its being 'confirmed as true'.

[2] It's intrinsically unjust to judge individuals, especially in a negative way, based on the behavior of others. This is a matter of justice, and it overrides considerations of predictive accuracy.

[3] We live in a society that is still unjust, racist, sexist and so on. We want a society where fair and equal opportunities are given to everyone, and where everyone has a chance to escape from negative stereotypes. This overrides efficiency. In that sense, we can hope to change the nature of society by changing the nature of claims that are widely held as 'truth'.

These are sophisticated premises for rejecting stereotype based reasoning, and they come from rejecting the society-wide outcomes of treating stereotypes as truth. We know what these effects are, because we know what a discriminatory society looks like. But this is the kind of reasoning we can use to build non-discriminatory, socially just models that do not harm people simply for being who they are.

If you look at a plot of human population in the last century, it's similar to log-phase bacterial growth. We've had uncontrolled proliferation based on non-renewable resources - especially the capacity of the biosphere to deal with waste CO2 - and we're about to run out. A lot of dieback is reasonable to assume.

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

What exactly are western values, other than a not-so-subtle way of asserting hostility to Muslims? The people who go on about the importance of opposing immigration in the name of maintaining liberal and tolerant values (a code word for 'gays and feminism') seem to be exactly the same people who hate gays and feminism in the first place.

Would it be better if they were dead?

It's hard to take these kinds of rationalizations seriously. Simply, most people in our society find this sort of pornography revolting, and the law, which reflects public outrage, has banned it. We didn't reach that outrage from evidential reasoning. Moral revulsion is an irreducible position, and it's not subject to dispute. Likewise, we've never had a rigorous experiment to test whether murder should be illegal or not. That isn't how laws get made.

The key advantage of silicon, as I understand it, is that we can mass produce ICs on wafers via light-directed etching and epitaxy. I don't know of an equivalent process for carbon that's been proposed yet.

Violence isn't inherently wrong. Nonviolence is less important than ending injustice and continuing to innovate, such as building megaprojects, forming new states or restructuring existing political systems. Those who say otherwise are conservatives or benefit from continued injustice.

The way I've heard this explained, fuel is 3% of the mass of a modern car, 45% of the mass of a passenger jet, and 90% of the mass of a rocket. That means the structural engineering margins of safety for a rocket are much smaller, as there's very little mass fraction available to build redundancy into. There just isn't a lot of 'rocket' in a rocket. That, not complexity, is the root cause of why rockets aren't so reliable.

There's an even more basic physical reason why 'rockets are hard'. It's easy to explain in energy units of kT, the approximate energy of a gas molecule at room temperature. A carbon-carbon bond has an energy of 140 kT, while the gravitational potential energy of a carbon atom on Earth is 300 kT. If the Earth's gravitational potential were much closer to kT, room-temperature gas molecules would be able to diffuse out, we would have lost our atmosphere to space, and humans wouldn't exist. But that means that for a chemical system to escape Earth's gravity, needs a clever arrangement whereby most of the energy contained in its chemical bonds goes to a small fraction of its molecules. In a way, it's surprising not that chemical rockets are hard, but that we're lucky enough to be able to use them at all.

You not cheating will not lead to the powerful being less corrupt. It will actually reward them for being corrupt. In a prisoners' dilemma, they are constantly defecting without cost, and you are refusing to defect on principle. That makes you a sucker.

The way to eliminate corruption is to overthrow those who are corrupt.

We're ruled by politicians, bankers and corporations who lie, cheat, bribe, tax-dodge, and break the law with impunity. Why shouldn't the rest of us?

What about the reverse scenario, though? Should someone who watches videos about refugee suffering be given anti-refugee video recommendations, lest they be dragged into a 'left wing ideology'? I don't see how that would be acceptable. Would Holocaust documentaries be 'diversified' with Holocaust denial videos?

'Information bubbles' have existed as long as people have had a choice of newspapers to buy and TV channels to watch. Calling for Youtube to artificially 'balance' videos seems like political interference.

I don't see how those links back up that assertion. The second one gives a more detailed explanation of the mechanism I outlined. If you're saying the market always checks excessive leverage by pricing risk fairly, we saw how well that worked in 2008!

This might interest you. It shows the impact of recent increases in capital reserve requirements on corporate lending.

https://www.financedigest.com/post-crash-banking-regulation-...

> The ongoing impact of post-crash banking regulation on corporate lending is a case in point. Thanks to reforms such as Basel III, banks must now hold a far greater portion of their capital in reserve.Some banks may face even stricter requirements in future; only this month Sir John Vickers called for UK banks to be forced to shore up their financial buffers further in the face of renewed market volatility.

> These measures are primarily motivated by a desire to make the overall system more stable, to ensure adequate reserves and liquidity in the case of another major shock. But part and parcel of this is the fact that it is now far harder and less profitable for banks to lend to a range of businesses.

> As a result, banks have been steadily withdrawing from large areas of corporate lending as they look to reorient their focus to key relationships and diversifying risk. This has left a gap in the market: many corporates are finding it near impossible to get the level of financing from banks that they previously relied upon.

It has a lot to do with it.

If you deposit X to the bank, and the reserve requirement is R (say R=0.1), then the bank can loan out X(1-R) to someone else, who can deposit that money. Then on the basis of that deposit, they can loan out X(1-R)(1-R), and so on. The geometric series says that a deposit of X becomes bank-created money in circulation of up to X/R. With a reserve of 10%, $100,000 can become $1,000,000.

That legal fractional reserve requirement acts like a powerful lever on how much money banks can create.

It's also possible that cyclists can adapt to sharing roads with robots. Perhaps by RFID-tagging their bikes, or wearing something LIDAR-visible. At least the autonomous vehicles aren't deliberately hostile, and conflicts between cyclists and drivers over road rules designed around cars, not bikes, might be restructured.

The knock-on effects are more interesting, in some ways. A nation where shared, autonomous vehicles are normal would likely have a totally different set of considerations in urban planning. Cars and spontaneous roadtrains can take the place of light rail and urban transport. Inner-city parking might disappear, and commutes could be much longer. You can imagine two effects: suburbs could really spread out for those who want space and don't mind a couple of hours each way reading the newspaper or snoozing, and cities can concentrate and build way up as you no longer have to build parking space into apartments. A more densely populated city with fewer dedicated drivers might have more political reasons to become bike-friendly.

I've read that bicycles might be even more challenging for autonomous vehicles than other human drivers.

Most money is created by commercial banks through fractional-reserve lending though.

Nice! Lucky the annotations aren't accurate, I wouldn't like to have 68mph plate tectonics... :)

Interesting that there seem to be the plate tectonic versions of cyclones, like off Baja California.

Also, is the absence of data at the poles due to a coordinate system limitation?

Presumably they could've also gone back to a gold and silver standard. (This would be a terrible idea for other reasons, but it wouldn't inflate, right?)