Week 24
The numbers for basic income does not add up..
Ha ha
Finally we started seeing some comments on the issue. The Swiss will be voting on BI soon apparently, hence the interest..
BI is not for everyone. In the case of US, for starters, foreign-born immigrants should not qualify. Don’t give any money to Arnold Schwarzenegger - he doesn’t need it anyway. That reduces the number to 316 - 42 = 274 million.
Giving only to ppl over 21, 3/4’s of the # above is 205.5 million. $400 a month to these people makes about $1 trillion.
US pays about 60% of its budget to entitlement programs - a recent budget was $3.78 trillion, 60% of that is $2.27 trillion, these programs are healthcare, social sec, food stamps, etc. All that is canceled. More money needed? Close tax loopholes, offshore schemes, go to the corporations, rich people, tax their ass. Or if a person has a job, give them half BI - the allocations would be simple to adjust, a couple if..else statements added to a piece of software.
It is true social security pays 15,528 per year on average, and the final BI payment can fall a bit short of that, but throughout their lifetime people would work, and pay to their private retirement accounts, and when they retire they can have a good income. Social Security will go bust anyway, so any comparison to it is like comparing apples and oranges, or.. comparing an orange to a rotten apple.
After all that, what did we gain in return? Today 50 MILLION PEOPLE ARE ON FOOD STAMPS IN AMERICA. Now they have income, they can eat whatever they want, without some “very nice” state senator deciding what they eat. Poverty - gone.
Another benefit: 70% of employees are not engaged at work, most of these people, I assume, hate what they do / and probably working on useless shit. These people will have the freedom to try out other things, and be more productive.
Besides the immediate help it provides, BI is a political bribe like any other. It’s main function is to quell discontent; Sausage making banks were bailed out, defunct car makers were bailed out, money has been poured down the drain for stupid wars, naturally there will be residual bad feelings left from that. BI will help manage this negative perception.
If we ever base money on something, it should be gold (again), not a cybercurrency, because a bits can be stolen electronically / easily but gold cannot.
Wrong
Maybe thieves cannot hack into a vault, but they can still break your f**king door and take your gold. Plus the damn thing is impossible to transport easily once it is in physical form.
News
The head of a startup bringing blockchain to finance had a prestigious audience last week: central bankers from 90 countries including Federal Reserve Chair Yellen, as well as officials from the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and Bank for International Settlements. His message: get on board with digital ledgers, which proponents say could dramatically improve how money flows around the globe.[..]
Banks have a new reason to pay attention to emerging technologies following a series of thefts. In February, thieves made off with $81 million from the central bank of Bangladesh. A commercial bank in Ecuador said it was held up for $12 million last year, while a bank in Vietnam said criminals tried, and failed, to steal $1.1 million in what experts say may have been a practice run for Bangladesh. All of the attacks were committed by cybercriminals, and at least some made use of a messaging system run by the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, better known as Swift. Blockchain could help prevent such hacks. Unlike Swift, a banking system run on a blockchain would be distributed with no one point of failure because the system runs simultaneously on all the computers linked to it around the world.
Ludwin told bankers that the question they face is not how digital currencies can help the current financial system, it’s what role central banks decide to play. They can operate the digital networks themselves, issue digital assets, hold those assets, create products and services to run on those networks or just observe them, he said.[..] If banks and their customers conducted those transactions on a blockchain, it would give central bankers new insight and transparency. That’s because all transactions on a blockchain are recorded, can’t be changed and can be viewed by anyone on the network at any time, including regulators[..]
Great Idea
Comment
Bitcoin is bad [..] it is used by drug smugglers, shady characters
Errr
So is paper money… What’s your point?
This is an example of criticism-by-association, a form of mental laziness. Sky is blue, so is the blue man group, and a bad person once went to their show, so blue sky is not good. Seriously.
Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven may be partly stolen, judge says [..]
Insane
The song judge claims Zeppelin partly stole from sounds nothing like STH. The only similar part is here, and it repeats for a while, but that’s all.. To say this is an example of theft is like saying Magnum P. I. stole its idea from Sherlock Holmes. They are both about detectives, and crime solving aren’t they ?! There you go! Busted.
Copyright, its enforcement, this entire scheme around content is getting out of hand. I am already firmly against software patents, copyright on music is another ineffective, unworkable idea IMHO.
News
Bees can solve complex mathematical problems [..].The insects learn to fly the shortest route between flowers discovered in random order, effectively solving the “travelling salesman problem [TSP]” , said scientists [..]
Most Likely Not
TSP is a hard computer science problem, given a list of cities and distances between them, finding the shortest route after a visit to each city once and returning to the starting point. In computational complexity terms, TSP is NP-Hard - meaning all possibilities must be tried out.
I know I shared this before on amoebaes, but there is a big difference between anticipating periodicity and solving an NP-hard problem - the latter has much bigger implications. The bees might have solved this problem approximately, and that’s fine, but the approximate solution is already known by CS researchers as well.
This person has the right idea.
The Week
[T]he groups working the longest hours are the ones who enjoy the most privilege: white upper-class men. That’s striking, since more leisure time has traditionally been associated with privilege. As Boushey and Ansel point out, “If you Google the definition of ‘bankers’ hours,’ it refers to the ‘short working hours’ bankers used to enjoy, which is certainly not the case today.” In America over the last few decades, the association between leisure and privilege has been flipped on its head.
What happened?
First, we’ve gone through several decades now where there’s basically always been more people looking for work than jobs available. Workers are competing for jobs, rather than employers competing for workers, so everyone — including professional-class white men — is worried about losing his or her job.[..]
Second, the highest paying industries are also incredibly cut-throat. This brings us to Boushey and Ansel’s other finding: The professions with the biggest income gaps between their lowest and the highest paid workers were also the professions where people were the most likely to work more than 40 hours a week.[..]
On the other end of the spectrum, many people aren’t allowed to work longer hours. Because workers can be so easily replaced, employers are free to put people to work sporadically and chaotically, especially in low-income service sectors. Racial minorities and African-Americans especially tend to be the first ones pushed into the surplus labor pool when this happens. Mothers, who still basically get no support from the U.S. government, are also forced to tap out of the workforce to take care of their children.
We used to think that as living standards improved, less work would deliver more income and thus more leisure time. But now, more and more work hours are what everyone’s after. Because in today’s economy, the alternative to working more isn’t enjoying quality time with friends and family. The alternative is nothing. The American workplace has basically become a Thunderdome where the victors are rewarded with long hours.[..]
[L]onger work hours and who gets those hours is ultimately a function of a sick economy, the answer is to fix the whole thing.
Yep
People long for a politician who says it like it is.
It’s a trend
It all started with Jesse Ventura; former Navy Seal, pro-wrestler, he was like exactly like this… Then McCain copied his style, he apparently sent people to Jesse’s events trying to learn from it. He must have learned something, because he used this “straight talk” angle against W during primaries and then against Obama during the 2008 election. He failed both times. Howard Dean used the same style on the Democratic side, until he was done in by “the scream”.
I guess straight-talk method was 1st used successfully, after Jesse, by the Governator -who happens to be good friends with Jesse BTW-. “I ain’t got time to bleed!”
Article
Trump is the son of a German immigrant, and you know, Germans are loud, boastful..
Ummm-No
See C. Rapaille’s The Culture Code. In France the sun is male, the moon is female. In German it is the other way around, die Sonne, der Mond. In France (and in most Mediterranean countries I assume, and Russia) the male shines, is supposed to take a center stage. In Germany women shine, men are supposed to be the hang-back, silent type, they don’t shine (see the fictional story Heidi, a happy little girl, and his silent, grumpy grandfather). That is the arcetype. If you try to be flippant, like this guy, you lose. D. Chump is the furthest thing from the archetype. Oh and he is no “favorite son” or whateever, he said some shit about people here too, so rest assured, his dumb-ass is disowned.
Question
What do you have against MTBI SPs?
Nothing
There are some great ones. Some cultures can accentuate their negatives, they’ll have a hard time at these places, but in some, and with good upbringing, they are perfectly fine. Clint Eastwood is a functioning one, he makes thoughtful movies, though his political views are a bit archaic. It took him a long time to get there though… Ben Affleck is another - great guy.
Question
What is needed to generate philosophy in today’s world?
Three Things
The budding philosopher must be good at three subjects 1) Computation, complexity theory, coding 2) Mathematical modeling, numerical computation 3) Understanding social dynamics, either through math or through inborn skill. Without these three, one cannot shoot the shit on philosophical matters today. I’m sorry.
Someone is going to combine all of this, do the slam-dunk. I am not saying I am that guy, but I can see that’s what it will take to get there. P != NP? Lyapunov exponent? Got to grok that biznitch. Without these how can a person generate new ideas on AI, the knowledge economy, so forth? Otherwise we’ll have bunch of INTJs talking out of their ass about subject matters outside their knowledge, they have a certain skill with that, sure, but it will not be the real thing.
Question
Aren’t INTJs good at theorizing?
They are
.. but they are also given to leave stuff out to “make the theory work” and these left-out facts can break the model completely. Their motto is “I’ve made up my mind, don’t confuse me with the facts” - their Ni (introverted intuition) works like a fuzzy Ti (introverted thinking) - it can converge on theories extremely fast, with limited knowledge. A strength in many environments, but also a weakness in some cases.
I give an example to how an INTJ theorizes. One INTJ told me once ”a country needs an empire in their past to have a good culinary culture”, Here’s a theory. The idea is if there is an empire there’d be a king and queen, and cooking for the palace develops the culinary culture, knowledge would spread from there to everyone, etc., etc.. Granted, history and culinary culture was outside the field of expertise for this INTJ (his field is chemistry and the man is really smart, a genius in fact), though the model has a certain elegance, it fits a lot of data points. But he left out one data point to make it all work.
THE BRITISH F–ING EMPIRE.
Right? I mean, when was the last time anyone went to a British Restaurant? What would the menu even be like? 1) Fish 2) Chips 3) Fish and Chips? Well… anyway. Leaving that aside, the theory could still be salvageable perhaps.., I don’t know, maybe you constrain it here and there, and it can still function.