You have abstractions and models for those things. I was formally trained as an EE, so I'm just guessing at how structural engineers do it.
I would expect someone building a bridge to keep the average/peak winds into consideration - and then feed it to CAD or whatever modeling software they use to design the structure. They don't need to know the exact force a screw was tightened with - they do need to give the specs of what range they should be tightened to. Again - considered in CAD. They don't need to know that theory is right - they just need to know it's not wrong to an unacceptable degree.
I'm sure there's some guessing, but a lot of these things are actually factored in.
I suggest you keep going with that math. I'll use the numbers from here [0]. 924 billionaires with an overall wealth of 7.5 trillion. Split among 300 million people, that's about $25k for everyone.
Here are some points of consideration:
1. They don't have $7.5T in liquid. The average american won't be able to use that $25k to pay a hospital bill or eat. Also note that one-time wealth transfer won't even pay in full for one major surgery.
2. You've wiped away the incentive for getting-big mentality which drove some of the billionaires to innovate which advances society to this point. Think - discouraging a future Jobs from making another iPhone-like device.
3. After the one-time transfer, it turns out we need more money for the common folks. "Why is the line at $1B? Isn't $900m enough? The line should be $100m." And so on and so forth.
> 2. You've wiped away the incentive for getting-big mentality which drove some of the billionaires to innovate which advances society to this point. Think - discouraging a future Jobs from making another iPhone-like device.
Am I meant to believe that we wouldn't have iPhone-level innovation if inventors couldn't become billionaires?
This makes no sense. We have so much more innovation than we have billionaires, always have. Ability to become a member of the 0.001% is not a barrier to innovation, not in America, not anywhere, and never has been.
No one serious is claiming there should be zero wealth inequality. Inequality is ineradicable. The claim is that wealth inequality can reach a degree that becomes corrosive to society as a whole and severs the link between innovation and profit, because it becomes more profitable to hoard wealth and collect capital gains and interest than it does to innovate and create things in the real world.
It's entirely possible to preserve (and in fact would actually strengthen) the profit motive if we changed incentives to get rid of the wild capital hoarding we see today.
The problem with billionaires is they have a vastly disproportionate voice in the political system, which leads to ineffective politicians and policies not aligned with a thriving society.
eg: cutting funding to the IRS and advanced science, both of which have long proven positive dividends… or advancing new wars abroad to directly blow up money.
Plus wbillionaires are nothing special. Right time, right place.
Steve Jobs is a perfect example of someone who was in it for the love of the game. He wouldn’t have been any different if his income was taxed at 90%.
The power and influence (and damage caused) does not scale linearly with net worth. And you don’t need to have money on hand to be able to use it to harm others, you can e.g. use it as a collateral for loans and funding to build your child crushing machine.
Personally I wager society would be better if the excess wealth of billionaires was simply deleted, or burned. It would be better yet if that wealth was used in our shared funds to build common infrastructure and services. Leaving such wealth in such few hands is really the worst you could possibly do for society.
Why not just force them to to build the common infrastructure and services, and in exchange they get to keep the money? e.g. Jeff Bezos has to build some subway stations in NYC or something.
That way you get somebody with a proven track record of building big projects who is also motivated by money, so the common infrastructure and services is handled competently.
> Why not just force them to to build the common infrastructure and services, and in exchange they get to keep the money?
Because it is undemocratic, ripe for corruption and abuse, will never work in practice (as the rich will inevitably find ways to game the system). What you are describing is basically just aristocracy, where the rich get to decide what is best for the rest of us.
Ah yes. Let's trust civic engineering to a man who ran a company that had front-line workers using piss bottles to keep up with quotas. This cannot possibly end badly.
Uh-huh. It brings clarity to say you'd be happy to have the wealth destroyed. These are two different concepts, and the second one (about redistribution) always muddles these conversations.
1. Billionaires shouldn't wield lots of wealth, because it's scary.
Sticking to that concept makes the discussion a lot clearer. Never mind concept 2, it's haunted by the futile spirit of Marx and he's throwing crockery around.
Personally I am a fan of logistical taxation, where the mean income (including capital gains) pays 50% in tax and every standard deviation σ above (or below) pays extra (or less) according to 1 / (1 + e^-σ).
What will happen with this taxation is that if everybody makes the same income, then everybody pays 50% in tax. If some rich dude is making a lot more money then everybody else, they will lower the tax for everybody else while paying a lot more them selves. At some point (say 3 standard deviations above the mean) you end up getting less after taxes then had your income been lower (say 2 SD above), in other words, the limit is 100% tax for extremely high incomes (and 0% for extremely low incomes). That is, I favor a system that has maximum income, and you are actively punished for making more.
Suppose it's 1999, and I'm planning to expand my online bookstore into a worldwide network of distribution centers and logistics, that can deliver anything at all to anybody, very quickly, though a unified web interface. How can I carry out this major business enterprise without getting very poor?
I guess the board would have to vote to keep my income at the optimum level, or just below, to prevent me from jumping ship to run a competing company that offers to pay less.
I would rather you did not do that. You would create a shit tone more global transfer of goods accelerating global warming, and make societies dependant on unsustainable dirt cheap production practices.
Even if yourself could argue that you’ve done a good thing overall, I’d rather not take your word on that and would rather not have you decide something so extremely impactful.
Literal money transfer is not the point. It's about power and concentration of it to insulate future consolidation of power.
Money is made up system to provide a relatively stable society; if that stops working it's not good; violence becomes what's left.
Maria Sam Antoinette and brethren saying let them eat cake (or everyone will just build new things with (our) AI) without a sense of what is happening / about to happen to the broader populous is on a similar track.
The "billionaires" should use their influence to help with this transition invest figuring out how these new system will work.
No one should care if that means more "millionaires" vs less billionaires these numbers as social constructs; the point is power and self determination. History shows lacking that for too many will breakdown to broad violence and or dystopic robot overloads guarding a diminishing small and isolated elite.
> 2. You've wiped away the incentive for getting-big mentality which drove some of the billionaires to innovate which advances society to this point. Think - discouraging a future Jobs from making another iPhone-like device.
In general, this is total bullshit. But in the particular, Job made his first billions from selling Pixar to Disney, not from Apple.
From my understanding, it's generally for health purposes (though the convenience doesn't hurt). An example my vet provided is that the level of sodium consumption needed by humans is way too high for dogs.
There's an economic benefit: in the UK (and many other countries), ingredients which are not "fit for human consumption" (and might otherwise be thrown away) can be processed into pet food.
Much commercial dog-food is made with ingredients which aren't fit to be consumed by humans.
Very interesting. I play RS3 and made a helper tool[0] for tracking ticks. I noticed increased jitter on my MBair (~50-150ms) compared to Windows, but I chalked it up to the air being on a wifi connection. I wonder if your explanation's the real reason.
Yeh, you are right. A snippet for they would have taken longer than booting an agent and let it hallucinate for—loop parameters that didn’t even exist.
I still think that's missing the point of LLMs; they're sources of plausible text continuations. Their strength is using them in places where the actual semantics of their output isn't important.
TCM is mostly used by people in China too poor to afford standard medicine. If they've got the money, they go for non-TCM. That's all, nothing to do with the evil CCP bogeymen.
While this seems true and may be true within China, the Chinese government does push for this to be accepted around the world by pressuring for its inclusion in WHO documents, and is trying to open up new markets for TCM “Pharma” in poorer nations.
I consider that quite evil as it’s not evidence based and undermines actually good, useful medicine. Just as I would/do consider anyone trying to increase take up of homeopathy in poorer parts of the world to be evil.
In the case of China and TCM there appear to be nationalist and financial motives.
It's not necessarily bad, these probably aren't hard figures but a GP once told me that of the cases he gets, if you do nothing much then 70% will get better by themselves, 20% will stay the same, and 10% will get worse (may have misremembered the numbers there). A lot of people just need a bit of reassurance and something to make them feel like they're doing something and they'll be OK, for which very affordable TCM is fine. Albert Schweitzer was once asked why he was OK with witch-doctors (as they were called then) practising outside his hospital, and he said they treated the stuff they could and sent the serious cases to him. It was an arrangement that worked for both sides.
It's impressive that he did it at 12, but like you said, he had years of focused practice under his belt before he did this one. Anyone can do this level of work - they just need to actually learn it. It doesn't require someone be born with talent.
Articles like this contribute towards the gatekeeping feeling people get about the arts in my opinion.
>Anyone can do this level of work - they just need to actually learn it.
Sorry, that's like saying with enough math practice, any kid could perform at the level of young Terry Tao (e.g. teaching himself calculus at 8, winning a gold medal at the International Math Olympiad at 12). Some people are just intrinsically talented at certain things, and no amount of hard work in people lacking those intrinsic talents will get them to that level. This is indisputable when it comes to athletic talent; everyone would agree that no matter how much an average tall person practices basketball, they will never play at the level of Michael Jordan, LeBron James, or even the lowest ranked NBA player [0], for that matter. Artistic and intellectual talent is no different.
I didn't say anyone can become Michelangelo. I said anyone can do this level of work.
That is, the exact same thing he did when he was 12, which is a master study. He didn't create the design - he copied a previous work and added color to find out what Schongauer's thought process was when making the original piece.
I very much doubt the majority of adults with sufficient practice could do this level of work. I can say with 100% certainty that an infinitesimal minority of 12 year olds with sufficient practice could do this level of work.
What are you basing this off of? Do you actually have any experience making art? Or is this just learned helplessness talking?
Also please stop implying I said any 12 year old can do this. I didn't. Once again, I said anyone who puts in the time can do what 12-year old Michelangelo did.
>What are you basing this off of? Do you actually have any experience making art? Or is this just learned helplessness talking?
I've done ≥weekly life drawing classes for 20+ years, and have observed the distribution of progress people make over time. Based on my observations and conversations with my teachers, I agree with you that a nontrivial fraction of adults starting with zero artistic ability can be trained to an advanced degree. But I disagree that this holds true for "anyone"; a larger fraction cannot be trained beyond a basic level.
>Also please stop implying I said any 12 year old can do this. I didn't.
You literally said: "It's impressive that he did it at 12, but he had years of focused practice under his belt before he did this one. Anyone can do this level of work - they just need to actually learn it." To me, that heavily implies any 12 year old with sufficient training is encompassed by that "anyone."
It’s hard to prove without knowing the app devs, but for points 1 & maybe 2, we can look at whether Americans think the raids are justified.
28% of them think they are [0]. It wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility that the devs would be part of that number
Edit: it looks like the poll it’s for the recent incident of the woman who was shot - my mistake. Then I would assume the number for the raids themselves is higher
Google and Verizon were under fire recently from the DOJ for not complying with the govt's anti-DEI stance quickly enough[0]. If these policies truly aren't in the companies best interests, they would've dropped the policies on Jan 20th. Instead, they chose to continue them. I don't see how this squares with your assertion that they don't want to continue following DEI in staffing.
I would expect someone building a bridge to keep the average/peak winds into consideration - and then feed it to CAD or whatever modeling software they use to design the structure. They don't need to know the exact force a screw was tightened with - they do need to give the specs of what range they should be tightened to. Again - considered in CAD. They don't need to know that theory is right - they just need to know it's not wrong to an unacceptable degree.
I'm sure there's some guessing, but a lot of these things are actually factored in.
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