Lurker > darkknight109

adjl posted...

The act was very clearly intentional. Ignorance of the law may be a mitigating factor in sentencing, but it does not change that a criminal act was committed.

It can - depends on the specifics of the crime and the jurisdiction. In some cases, ignorance of the law *is* a defence. You have to prove that a person was knowingly and willingly doing something they knew to be wrong. If someone violates the law but was not aware of it and made no attempts to hide it, they lack criminal intent - for some violations, that is sufficient to avoid prosecution.

For instance, if a drug dealer's home is being raided by the police and the dealer starts flushing all the drugs he has down the toilet, he is guilty of obstruction of justice. He is intentionally disposing of incriminating material in an attempt to conceal a crime. On the other hand, if his mother came across some of his drugs, assumed they were expired medication, and flushed them down the toilet as a means of safely getting rid of them, she would not be guilty of a crime in most cases. Even though she is conducting the exact same activity, she lacks criminal intent. Due to a lack of information, she did not realize that she was committing a crime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intention_(criminal_law)

Now, admittedly, that example isn't ignorance of the law, just ignorance of the specifics of the situation. But it can apply to the law too - I'm familiar with examples in contract law and tax law, where if you can show that you made a good faith attempt to follow the law and your ignorance of specific requirements of the law led to a violation, it is typically sufficient to avoid prosecution, and any prosecutor who opts for charges must prove that you knew that what you were doing was a violation of the law.

I'm not a lawyer and I have no idea if it would apply in this specific case, but the old phrase "ignorance is no defence" isn't 100% true.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

You know, Trump being unable to understand something as simple as a weather forecast is bad. Him refusing to let it go and taking a sharpie to a map to try and fix it is worse. But the worst part about this whole stupid "scandal" are the parade of unrelated adults scrambling to cover for Trump and defend him and insist that this wasn't wrong and a really stupid thing to say to boot.

Like, seriously, the guy was wrong. Just own up to it and we can all move on with our lives. At this point, you are literally arguing that the weather is wrong because Trump said so.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

LinkPizza posted...

People may trust them.

Enough of us will. And once everyone else sees how well the technology works and how effective it is, most will be onboard.

There will be holdouts, of course - there always are. It's 2019 and some people still don't trust seatbelts, after all.

But it won't stop the spread. After all, if you happen to be a transit rider and your city changes to an all-AV fleet and your options for getting to work now consist of "Ride an AV" or "Walk for two hours", you're going to be riding an AV. And you will see firsthand that nearly all the concerns people have about this technology are completely without merit.

LinkPizza posted...

Maybe. Maybe not. Motorcycle riders are pretty insane with their riding sometimes.

And?

An AV is the perfect thing to handle an erratic driver. They are much, much better than humans in that environment. Unlike us, they can see in all directions at once and have reaction times no human could hope to match. An AV can spot a motorcycle driver going nuts long before a human could and it can react accordingly.

Again, this is not hypothetical technology. These cars are on the road right now and they have no problem handling bikes, motorcycles, or aggressive drivers.

LinkPizza posted...

Not really. Cell phones are still crazy expensive.

If they're so expensive, why are they a common commodity in the developing world?

I've been to India. I've met people who make less in a year than I do in a week, yet still had a new smartphone on their hip.

The only reason they're expensive here in the developed world is that their manufacturers know we can afford it.

LinkPizza posted...

And cars are even more expensive. A lot of people still dont have cars because they are super expensive. This will be worse than it is already.

Actually, AVs would be a godsend to those who can't afford a car. Why? Because, unlike manual cars, AVs could be easily rented on the fly.

Instead of paying a $1000 a month car loan, you pay a $50 a month membership fee. When you need a vehicle, you hit a button on your phone and one drives its way over to your house, picks you up, drives you wherever you need to go, then goes off to pick up the next customer.

This exact business model is why companies like Uber and Lyft are big players in the AV market. Like most transportation companies, their drivers are their biggest cost. If they can replace their fleet with AVs, that would be enormous to their bottom line. Cars could be made cheaper and more accessible to those who cannot afford them right now, because you could feasibly have a private car that costs as little as a bus ticket to take you to and from your job. You wouldn't own it, but you wouldn't have to - the difference would be academic.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

LinkPizza posted...

Its not all about rates, but benefits, as well. Ike free towing a certain amount of times a year. Or roadside assistance.

Which would all be the same for AVs and manual vehicles, so it's pointless to bring this up.

LinkPizza posted...

Accidents can easily happen because human drivers are still on the road.

And if human drivers are the cause that means insurance companies will start to charge human drivers higher premiums, because they are proving to be more risky than AVs.

LinkPizza posted...

And during those years, self-driving cars can still end up in accidents with other self-driving cars and human drivers.

And?

Human drivers can wind up in accidents too. They do it frequently - far more so than AVs. That's my point.

LinkPizza posted...

Which jusy sucks for everyone else. Just a big ol Fuck you to people who have that as a hobby. Just find something else to do. Thats awesome. Just screw people over, I guess.

It's not really any different to other bygone hobbies.

Once upon a time horse racing was a common hobby because horses were absolutely everywhere. Then the internal combustion engine happened, the global horse population peaked right around the turn of last century, and now horse racing is largely a rich person's hobby.

Technology wipes out pastimes sometimes. Sucks, but it happens.

LinkPizza posted...

And this city is one of those places where ot wont be profitable.

So you keep saying, but you've yet to articulate a good reason as to why. It's coming off as wishful thinking on your part.

Other cities have old people. Other cities have disabled people. Other cities have people who become ill on buses. Yet they somehow manage just fine putting AVs on the road (and having unmanned train cars, for that matter).

LinkPizza posted...

You need to bring up What-ifs because you cant prepare without them.

Except you're not the one preparing - the AV designers are. And if the accident record is any indication, they're already way, way, way ahead of you on these points.

LinkPizza posted...

And Id rather avoid the accident altogether, which humans might be able to do.

This would be a fantastic points if humans never got into accidents.

Except... we do. All the time. Hundreds of thousands of people across the globe die in car crashes every single year. We're actually really shitty at this job. Because some of us get behind the wheel whild drunk or tired or decide to text while driving; some of us drive while we're sleepy or angry; some of us just have moments of inattentiveness that result in lost lives.

Robots don't do any of that. Which is why robots have accident rates far, far lower than humans.

You're attempting to make perfect the enemy of very good, which is why this, "Yeah, but a human might perform better in this one scenario than a robot" argument doesn't fly. Because the robot performs far better in most other scenarios and far better overall.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

LinkPizza posted...

Also, when working, you dont always have a chance to just spend money sometimes. But if youre not working, itll be easy to burn through it.

That sounds like a financial management problem, not an issue with UBI.

Also, if what you said was true, people on unemployment would be blasting through their benefits cheques in days, then starving to death. That clearly isn't happening.

LinkPizza posted...

I like being able to work a little extra to make a little extra. And then I can treat myself to something. I wouldnt be able to do that on mandatory welfare

Again, you don't seem to understand what UBI is.

There's literally no reason you couldn't do this with a UBI system.

LinkPizza posted...

We dont know how much were going to get.

Then we better start talking about it and figuring it out.

LinkPizza posted...

And it sucks that people wont have jobs even when they want to to make more to have a better life.

Well, what's your alternative?

Again, these jobs are going away. It's not that people want jobs but will arbitrarily be bared from having them; it's that the jobs will literally cease to exist.

Complaining about it would be like me complaining that I can't make a living as a carriage driver or lamplighter anymore.

LinkPizza posted...

Especially with how easy it will be to burn through when you dont have anything to do all day

Well, that's the upside of automation - the costs of entertainment will similarly be going down.

We're already seeing the windfall of this. Take a look as Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and ask yourself how many of them can be fulfilled using nothing but a high speed internet connection. Answer: everything except the bottom row, usually for free (especially if you're willing to play fast and loose with piracy laws).

There is more content available for free than at any point in human history. Everything from video games to music to movies to stories - all online, all with zero cost to the end user. Youtube alone has more video content than you could watch in 1000 lifetimes. Our ancestors could only dream of something like this. And, as robots continue to improve, costs will continue to drop, and more things will be available for free.

Which is, of course, ignoring the fact that UBI money can also be spent on leisure.

LinkPizza posted...

The only reason is sounds good is because its the only plan.

If you don't like it then you better start coming up with a different one.

Because - and I cannot stress this enough - this technology is here and now. Saying "let's not do this" is meaningless, because we are doing it. Right now. It's happening today.

LinkPizza posted...

It might. You cant say it wont.

Sure I can. It would make zero sense to charge a "driver" who has far fewer accidents and fewer claims than a human driver more money.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

LinkPizza posted...

And as I said before, just because its cost effective in one place doesnt mean its the same for everywhere.

Yet you haven't stipulated anything that would make the costs substantially different. "There's a lot of old people here" is not an argument against cost efficiency.

LinkPizza posted...

If they push them. They may not be able to if they are on the floor dying. Also, people just may not push it. Some people are dumb. Some are drunk or on drugs. Some will probably be sleep. They could end up on the bus alone.

Literally every one of these arguments works just as well when applied to a train car, which has zero employees aboard 95+% of the time. Somehow they manage to function without turning into rolling abattoirs.

LinkPizza posted...

So, we use much more gas as there are more vehicles. Not to mention, with vans, there will be even more vehicles that also need fuel

...which use less fuel, as they are smaller vehicles.

And most self-driving cars are electric or hybrids; very few use conventional diesel or gasoline engines.

LinkPizza posted...

That wont work, either. The problem is they wont want to have some routes self-driving and other manual driving. One big reason is because like I said, the routes times would have to change.

I don't understand this complaint. Literally any route taken by a driver could also be taken by an AV.

LinkPizza posted...

The price is still an issue as they would need to also have enough as back-ups, as well.

Which is in no way different from a manual vehicle.

LinkPizza posted...

Especially with such expensive, yet small, vehicles.

You do realize there are more AVs than just vans, right? The one I cited earlier in this topic is just the first one that came up in my Google search. If there aren't automatic buses on the road already, there will be within a few years.

LinkPizza posted...

People might like the sound of it, until they realize they cant afford to live the same life they have be living. And have to give up a lot of stuff.

Says who?

No one has stipulated what the UBI would be set at. You can set it as high as you want. There's no reason why anyone, save for the rich, would need to take a haircut on this.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

LinkPizza posted...

Not to mention people who dont trust them.

People don't trust a lot of new technology. That doesn't stop it from becoming widespread.

My father, for years, didn't trust Paypal or any online banking tool. He refused to ever enter his credit card online. But the world moved on and soon that was the only practical way to buy a lot of goods. Today he does most of his shopping online.

AVs will be the same. People will bitch and complain and they will eventually get over it, one way or another.

The technology works. That's really the only thing that matters. Trust and adoption will follow. They always do.

LinkPizza posted...

and then, theres still motorcycles and bikes.

AVs are already programmed to understand motorcycles and bikes. They are not a source of concern for AV manufacturers.

LinkPizza posted...

Then theres the price. They are probably going to be pretty expensive.

Initially, yes, in the same way that first-generation technology is always expensive. Televisions, cell phones, smart phones, computers - when these things came out, they were expensive and not something everyone could or would buy. But they all quickly came down in price and swiftly became household fixtures.

AVs will be the same. The first generation will be costly, and not something the average consumer will be interested in. The next generations will see better market adoption and eventually they will become the norm.

LinkPizza posted...

But you expect everybody to have enough for a self-driving car. Or people to want to pay when they either just finished paying off a car, or are still currently paying for one.

Where did I say that?

There isn't going to be some random point ten years from now where someone says, "OK, manual vehicles are now illegal! Go buy a self-driving car."

People will self-adopt, the technology will get cheaper, and it will spread. That's how technology works.

In the 50s and 60s, automatic transmissions first started becoming commercially available and they were originally an expensive add-on to most vehicles. Today, you now have to specify if you want a manual transmission and it usually costs extra. Automatic transmissions have become a standard part of the vehicle. Self-driving units will be much the same - you'll have to pay more for them initially, but soon enough they will be considered a normal part of the car. And the people who insist on buying a manual drive vehicle will be looked at in much the same way as people today who insist on buying a manual transmission because they think it's more enjoyable to drive: hobbyists, willing to pay extra to finance their hobby.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

LinkPizza posted...

Not to mention the other cars on the road means that they still cant predict everything. And there are some thing humans can see that the car wont.

In bringing up all these "what-ifs", you still seem to be missing the point I've brought up several times. Self-driving cars aren't perfect, but they don't need to be - they just need to be better than us.

They already are. And they're still getting better. That there are some things that we're still better at isn't a winning argument because, on the whole, the self-driving cars still win out. They are better, safer, more efficient drivers than humans. Period.

The pedestrian with his body language? If the car doesn't already know what that means, it can and will be taught. Predictive ability? Already there. Driving is all about signals we, as drivers, give to one another. Self-driving cars simple take those signals and convert them to digital form.

I don't know how up-to-speed you are on AI and machine learning, but they've made huge strides over the last decade. Learning robots exist. There are commercially available robots that aren't programmed for any specific task, but can learn by watching a human do something. They attempt it themselves, then fine-tune their response until achieving the desired outcome. Self-driving cars use highly advanced variants of this to fine-tune their driving.

Self-driving cars are not individual entities, but a network of robots all communicating with one another. The first time one of them sees a pedestrian looking the wrong way and leaning forward, it might be fooled; but it will share its experience with the rest of the network and the next time one of them runs into a similar situation, it will know what to expect.

LinkPizza posted...

Except not everyone is going to like that. People like having their own car where they can fix and test drive, or just go out for nice drives, and stuff like that.

Sure, some hobbyists enjoy car driving and maintenance. But, increasingly, that's what manual driving is going to become - a hobby. Something the rich spend cash on to amuse themselves, much like old-style weapons forging in an assembly-line world. Eventually, it will probably be something that can only be done at specialized facilities, as manual vehicles will eventually be removed from the roads.

But that's not really what we're talking about in this topic. We're talking about commercial driving, and that's going to be one of the first sectors to automate, because the financial pressure to do so will be enormous.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

LinkPizza posted...

People want to be able to afford the lifestyle they already had. And youd rather take that away from them by forcing them to live on a basic income that would still have to change based on where you live. Nobody wants to be forced to not get the stuff they want. They can barely go out to eat. And that cant buy the normal foods they buy.

Based on this statement, it's clear to me that you don't understand what UBI is.

UBI isn't meant to keep people at the poverty line; it's basically saying, "Here's $XXXX.XX per month - no strings attached. Spend it as you see fit." Do you have a job on top of that? Good for you, keep the extra money. Do you not have a job? In our hypothetical future, UBI will be enough to let you earn a comfortable living - pay for your house, your food, entertainment, travel, whatever you want.

Automation is going to result in costs plummeting, because a fully automated manufacturing system has basically only raw materials and upkeep as overhead costs. In today's world, the vast majority of costs are human-created - wages for the workers, designers, engineers, managers, shippers, store owners, etc.; those mostly or all go away in an automated world.

LinkPizza posted...

Its basically like forcing people on welfare or food stamps when they could just keep their job and live peacefully without all this other shit.

Well... to be frank, no, they *can't* just keep their job and live peacefully without "all this other shit". Because "all this other shit" is here, and it can do their jobs better than they can.

Your argument is like saying, to an auto company factory worker in the 90s, "Why can't you just keep your job?"; the answer is, "Because improvements in technology have made my job obsolete, because now robots can do the tasks I used to, faster and better and far cheaper than I can."

Automation is coming, like it or not. It will take jobs, the way it's already hollowed out parts of the manufacturing sector. It will continue to do so. And we need a plan, if we don't want to wind up in this dystopian future you keep moaning about. UBI is as good as any that I've seen put forward.

LinkPizza posted...

And insurance could still easily rise.

It won't.

Insurance companies compete for each other's businesses. If one insurance company tried to increase rates on self-driving autos, it would be an immediate opportunity for one of their competitors to swoop in and steal their customers - especially since a large chunk of the self-driving market is going to be corporate fleets, who are keenly aware of their bottom line.

Again, a self-driving car is a perfect customer to an insurance company. They're not going to kill the golden goose.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

LinkPizza posted...

No. The higher prices are for the customers. It makes it easier for them because they end up with more money. By actually running our company, we technically lose money all the time.

Then you have no reason to worry about the financials. If your company is already operating at a loss, profitability is clearly not a huge factor in your operations.

Again, the truism is at play here: if it wasn't cost effective, cities wouldn't be putting these things in.

LinkPizza posted...

We need them for wheelchair, for any accidents (like pee, poop, vomit, and blood clean-up), to stop any disputes, medical emergencies (seizures, heart attack, heat stroke, etc.), etc

Any of these could be handled via an emergency button, the same way train cars work.

LinkPizza posted...

You said they hold 8 people sitting. And then cost $250,000 from what I saw online. Our buses cost about $500,000 and hold more than 30 sitting customers. We are paying half the price of a full buses, with 1/4 the number of seats. Thats already less cost-effective as you getting less seats for you buck.

Depends - how frequently are you driving with a completely full bus? I'm guessing not all the time. That will impact exactly how cost effective it is.

This is where smaller vehicles are actually more effective. During peak hours, you can get more of them on the road to handle volume, then immediately take them off the road when demand dies down. It's much more difficult to do that with a manned bus, because telling a driver, "Hey, can you come in and drive for an hour and a half, then go back home?" isn't going to fly with anyone who actually wants to use their paycheque to pay the bills.

LinkPizza posted...

And then, for both buses and vans, we would need a ton to replace them.

And no one is saying you'll do it all at once. Merely as buses are retired as part of their natural purchase cycle, they'll be replaced - in part or in whole - with self-driving vehicles.

LinkPizza posted...

Which nobody wants.

I'd be in favour of it. And it's an idea that's gaining a good deal of political traction.

So no, this isn't something "nobody" wants.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Peterass posted...

Also, no one cares about about a marker on a drawing board as it affects nothing

Wrong.

The National Weather Service had to immediately issue a statement saying that Alabama was not going to see any effects of Dorian because people started panicking.

If the fucking President of the United States says, "Heads up everyone, seek shelter and run for the hills, storm's-a-coming!", you shouldn't have reason to doubt that message and, sure enough, plenty of people in Alabama took him at his word.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

LinkPizza posted...

Cost effective in one place doesnt mean it is everywhere. Places have different prices. Some places have prices higher than us.

If somewhere else has higher prices than you do and they still make it cost effective, that means it should be easier - not harder - for it to be cost effective where you live.

LinkPizza posted...

The problem is between now and then. What happens to all the people who cant work because they have robots who do better jobs? Everything wont be free. So they need to work. But there are no jobs available because robots have all of them. Are they just suppose to starve and die because nobody has thought of anything?

That's the question I posed when we first started this little side-tangent; you said you would rather be a toddler - your words there - than have the discussion.

For the record, I think the simplest answer is shifting to some form of universal basic income. Jobs will pay extra, giving incentive to hold them, but if you don't have one it won't ultimately result in starvation and poverty.

LinkPizza posted...

Though, while low now, I think the number will definitely rise with pretty quickly when more of those cars are on the road.

Accident rates are already volume adjusted; how many cars there are on the road doesn't change them.

The raw number of accidents goes up, sure, but the fact that self-driving cars get into at-fault accidents at a far, far lower rate than humans isn't going to change. If anything, it will drop further as the system gets fine-tuned and the technology improves further.

LinkPizza posted...

And with real drivers still on the road, its possible enough of those vehicles will still have accidents.

That sounds like an excellent reason to phase out non-autonomous vehicles once the technology becomes widespread.

But more to the point, human drivers on the road having at-fault accidents involving other cars would affect all other vehicles at the same rate - autonomous or non-autonomous. It's a null factor.

LinkPizza posted...

Sure. I just dont agree with forcing everybody into something they dont want.

"Everybody" clearly isn't against this. I don't drive much these days, but if you offered me a ride with a random driver versus a ride in an autonomous vehicle, I'd take the AV every time.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

ParanoidObsessive posted...

I am adverse to answering my phone, but it has nothing to do with texting and everything to do with robocalls and scammers.

This.

If someone calls me and I don't recognize the number, it goes to voicemail. If no voicemail is left, they clearly didn't have anything of dire importance to say.

I flat-out don't respond to texts, because I find them obnoxious. Either e-mail me, so I can respond to you on a proper keyboard instead of a tiny touchscreen, or call me - your pick.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

LinkPizza posted...

The point was its not a slap in the face to everybody who has lost someone.

I didn't say it was to "everybody". That said, cars kill ~40,000 people every single year in the US alone - don't you think cutting down on that statistic is something we should be aiming for?

LinkPizza posted...

Again, making some assumptions.

Of course I'm making assumptions, because it's impossible to have this conversation unless you do that. You're also making assumptions - specifically, that these vehicles won't become widespread in your lifetime, despite the fact that the government's own estimates suggest there will be millions on the road in the next decade.

LinkPizza posted...

Youre also assuming Im going to live to be old.

People who assume they're going to die young often wind up impoverished in their later years. I don't recommend that mindset.

LinkPizza posted...

And that will pretty much collapse everything...

It very well could, if we don't prepare for it.

So let's stop complaining and start figuring out how to stave off that collapse. Something more realistic than, "Let's just not let technology advance any further."

gloBal enemy posted...

I'm curious, how old are you both (LinkPizza & Darkknight109) and what profession/industry are you in.

I don't generally give out my age online. I will say that I'm older than LinkPizza and I'm an engineer (specifically in the energy/oil and gas industry).
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

LinkPizza posted...

That makes absolutely no sense. Each bus goes to like 10 stops. So instead of 8 bus drivers, you want 80 attendants?

Put it this way - they've clearly found some way around this to make it cost effective. I have no idea what it is, but if it wasn't cost effective, they wouldn't bother doing it. They are, ergo it must be.

LinkPizza posted...

Besides, whos gonna work when everything is suppose to be free, right?

It's going to be a long time before we hit the "everything is free" stage, and by that point I'm quite confident that someone will have figured out a way to have a robot do a task as simple as belting someone in (such robots already exist, but are still too expensive to have doing something menial like that).

LinkPizza posted...

There can still easily be accidents inside.

Can be? Yes. Can "easily" be? No. Not if we're talking about at-fault accidents, that is.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 94% of serious crashes are due to "dangerous choices or errors people make behind the wheel" - AKA, human error. Computers aren't immune to making "bad choices", but they make them at a much lower rate (and some not at all, like driving drunk, distracted driving/texting while driving, fatigued driving, etc.). To date, there have been just six fatalities caused by self-driving cars (four drivers, two pedestrians).

And even in cases where a self-driving car has been involved in a crash, it's almost never an at-fault crash. Axios looked at this about a year ago - of 62 incidents when a self-driving car was in autonomous mode (i.e. not being driven by the driver), just one was determined to be the fault of the self-driving car.

LinkPizza posted...

It might be a little lower. But it will still rose every year like always. Even without accidents, they rise. And if they are still real people driving at that time, they cant lower as there can still be accidents.

Of course they can lower insurance for self-driving cars.

Again, insurers are all about risk. They evaluate you for your risk. If you are young, male, and have a couple of at-fault accidents or tickets on your record, you will be paying through the nose for insurance and some companies may flat-out refuse to cover you at all. You are simply too risky for them - they can and will charge you 10x the amount they would charge a less risky driver.

By the same token, if you are an older driver with decades of accident-free driving under your belt, your insurance is cheap. Hell, my insurance dropped by half after I moved because I no longer commuted to work, so my vehicle classification changed from "commuter vehicle" to "recreational vehicle".

To an insurance company, a vehicle that is permanently attentive, with a negligible at-fault accident rate is pretty close to their definition of an ideal customer. They want customers that they never have to pay for, customers that never make a claim, customers that are low risk. Self-driving vehicles are all of those things, moreso than humans ever could be. Once the technology is more widespread and the track record is proven, insurers will be tripping over themselves to insure these cars, because it's basically free money for them.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

I liked him - thought he was a good guy, honestly. I heard a rumour he ran off a joined a cult, though. Seems like something he'd do.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

LinkPizza posted...

Except for the fact that a good percentage of our customers are wheelchair bound and need to be strapped down, so we still need drivers to help with that for the shuttle replacing the bus.

Except that can be done at the stop, meaning you would need one attendant per stop rather than per vehicle. And given that these people would not require the driving credentials of a professional driver, they would cost less too - a high school student could do that level of work.

There's also the issue of insurance. Because self-driving vehicles are incredibly safe, their insurance costs are far, far lower than even the most careful human driver. From an insurer's perspective, it's basically free money - an automated, low-risk system that virtually never gets in at-fault accidents is pretty much their ideal customer.

LinkPizza posted...

You say that, but there was a guy on this site that lost his wife to a drunk driver. And he was very against the self-driving cars himself.

Counterpoint: my best friend's mother, someone I was very close to, died to a drunk driver and I'd swap all vehicles on the road to self-driving ones in a heartbeat if it was within my power to do so.

Personal anecdotes don't mean much in arguments like this.

LinkPizza posted...

I just dont want to be around when shit hits the fan.

But you will be - that's my point. Unless you are already in your 60s, you are vastly overestimating the time involved with self-driving car adoption if you think this won't be a thing in your lifetime. If you're part of the average demographics of this forum, it'll probably hit long before retirement is in sight for you.

So you have a choice right now. You can sit and complain about how unfair the whole thing is, which is just going to put people in the mind of a toddler whining that his toy got taken away, or you can start talking about how we can mitigate the negative effects of this, which is an actual solution to the problems you're raising.

If you're just going to complain, you may as well stop wasting everyone's time - including your own - because no one will listen. If you want to talk about viable ways to make this technology work for the betterment of all people, then you have grounds for a good discussion.

LinkPizza posted...

But I dont believe everything will be automated (or close to everything) in 10 years.

"Everything" won't be, in the same way that not everyone has a smart phone or Facebook account today. But it will be commonplace in that timeframe - common enough that businesses will adopt it and people will lose jobs over it.

LinkPizza posted...

Yes. They are more effective. But as I said, they wont be as effective as they can be until everyone has them.

Irrelevant - they don't need to be at peak effectiveness; as I've said, they just need to be more effective than us, and they already are.

It's not even that high a bar to surpass. To borrow a (modified) George Carlin quote: think about how stupid the average driver is, then realize that half of them are even stupider than that.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

LinkPizza posted...

That being said, half a million isnt so bad considering a self driving shuttle that holds 1/4 the people is a quarter million. Hold 1/4 the amount of people, but only about half the price, so...

Half the price, with 0% of the cost of a driver.

In the long term, that's cost effective.

LinkPizza posted...

Id still rather argue about it instead of accepting a pile of shit as life...

Argue all you like, but you're arguing the wrong thing.

Don't argue, "We shouldn't use this new technology". For one, that's a slap in the face to anyone who has ever lost a relative to a drunk or inattentive driver, something this technology could render a thing of the past. But more importantly, that argument is going to go precisely nowhere - no one who is in any position to do anything about it is going to take an argument like that seriously. It's simply not practical.

If you want to argue about something, argue about what we should do in response to this new technology. Argue how we should handle increasing numbers of people being pushed out of the job market.

This isn't he first time this has happened - factory workers also got automated out of their jobs, and we kinda fucked up our response to that. So let's start talking about what we can do differently, because the new wave of automation isn't just restricted to bus drivers and cabbies - it's coming for all of us, so we better figure out what we're going to do when it hits.

Do that and you'll find a much more receptive audience.

LinkPizza posted...

Those pieces of technology are different. Those change the world in a big way (somewhat), but youre talking about changing everything.

Consider, before you say this, that 10 years ago iPhones were luxury purchases in the developed world; now they're commonplace even in developing countries.

Technology moves fast, and you're in for a nasty surprise if you think automation is any different. Businesses are already looking at this technology with dollar signs in their eyes; civilian adoption won't be far behind.

LinkPizza posted...

Self-driving cars wont be as effective until everyone has them.

You're still talking about this like it's the future.

It's not - it's the present. Self driving cars are already on the road today. They're already being used in business applications today. Depending on where you are in the world, you may have already shared the road with them. And their accident rates are substantially lower than human drivers. They're already proven to be more effective than human drivers.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

LinkPizza posted...

Making it less cost effective, as 2 or 3 of those would cost more than one bus...

If it's less cost effective, why are municipalities already putting them into service?

(For the record, new buses cost about half a million dollars just to purchase, and that's not covering the costs of the driver and insurance, fees that a self-driving bus wouldn't need to worry about).

LinkPizza posted...

Yeah. I rather not fall when another choice where people can be happy is a choice. Why should we have to fall as a species because people are greedy and cant think about the rest of us for one fucking second instead of only themselves? We shouldnt have to.

Whether we should or shouldn't have to doesn't matter. We do.

This technology is here and it's not going away. Crying about how unfair it is or how it shouldn't be a thing is going to get you absolutely nowhere.

That's sort of like me saying, "We shouldn't have smartphones - it makes it so people expect to be able to get a hold of you at any time. We can't have a moment to ourselves anymore!"

That's a) True and b) Also completely irrelevant, because smart phones aren't going to disappear, so we may as well figure out how to deal with it.

LinkPizza posted...

And I sure hope its nowhere near commonplace in 10 years.

It will be.

The first iPhone launched in 2007; within a decade, they were everywhere.

Facebook went public in 2006; six years later, they got their 1,000,000,000th user.

Modern tablets first surfaced about 10 years ago; now they're as common as computers were in the 90s.

A decade is roughly how long it takes new tech to achieve market penetration and the clock is already ticking on self-driving vehicles. And honestly? You're overlooking the good side of these. Self-driving autos could solve traffic and drop accidents to near-zero. They singlehandedly could help fight global warming by simply being far, far more efficient than human drivers. Hell, the idea of owning your own car may one day become a thing of the past (if you think about it, 90% of the time your car just sits idle in a lot somewhere; if the car could go off and tend to other people when you're not using it, that would be far more efficient).
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

LinkPizza posted...

The shuttle holds only half of what buses hold.

A bus that's only holds half as many people is still cost effective if it is 10x cheaper.

LinkPizza posted...

As for who needs to slow down, everybody does.

But nobody will. Literally nobody involved in this has any impetus to slow down, so it's pointless to talk about it. What we should be talking about is how we function in a world where this new technology is commonplace, because it will be commonplace within the next 10 years.

We adapt or we fall. That's the rule.

SusanGreenEyes posted...

Try moving to Venezuela Dude.
Socialism has worked quite well over there.

Massive corruption did a lot more to sink Venezuela than socialism ever did.

For what it's worth, the lists of "Top 10 Happiest Countries", "Top 10 Countries with Highest GDP per Capita", "Top 10 Countries by Median Household Incomes", and "Top 10 Safest Countries" are dominated by European socialist states. Read into that what you will.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Kyuubi4269 posted...

If the world decided to turn on China and colonise it to avoid paying debt, they can disappear China and continue as normal. If you firebombed your bank to escape your loan, you would be imprisoned.

Your "firebombing" example is actually apt, though not in the way you think.

Ignoring the hilarious idea that the world could "disappear" a nuclear-armed country of 1.4 billion people without catastrophic cost in lives and treasure, which rather precludes the idea of "continuing on as normal" in any meaningful sense of the phrase, erasing a country would rather be like if I somehow destroyed your bank in its entirety. The bank may no longer exist... but you do, and now any savings your had in that bank are gone. Assuming you're not already destitute, the loss of your bank account would have enormous ramifications on your life.

Now imagine that same situation... except there's $4.3 trillion in the bank.

Again, this would precipitate a crisis. Yes, the loss of savings would be partially offset by the loss of debts (the US would effectively "gain" a little over a trillion dollars from the cancelled loans), but China - like pretty much all nations in the world - currently owes more than it is owed. China, by dint of no longer existing, would no longer be able to pay its creditors.

You know what happened the last time a bunch of loans started defaulting or entering delinquency? The subprime mortgage crisis, which led directly into the Great Recession.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

Country debt isn't even remotely close to peasant debt, you do not understand how it works.

I know enough to know that the correct titles are "sovereign debt" and "consumer debt", not "country debt" and "peasant debt".

The fact that you don't even know the proper terms for half of what you're talking about makes me question your knowledge of basic economics.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Kyuubi4269 posted...

The US, however, is valuable and can ask China for negative interest because they are valuable to their debtor.

If the US is so valuable that it can ask for negative interest, isn't it bizarre how you're the only person smart enough to think of asking for it? I mean, here's the US paying hundreds of billions of dollars in interest, when they could just march to all the people they owe money to and demand negative interest rates instead. Instead of paying hundreds of billions, they could be earning it instead! Man, why didn't anyone else think of that?

You should be on Wall Street - you'd make a killing.

(Also, I don't mean to embarrass you while you're passing on all this investment wisdom, but a "debtor" is the entity that owes debt; the word you were going for is "creditor").

Exactly, except the supermarket will take you to court if you can't make payments while China will offer negative interest as the trade with the US is more valuable to the country than interest payments.

Strange how they've literally never done that then.

They also can't get a CCJ on the US and make it sell up to pay off debts, all terms can be broken as nobody has sufficiently more power than another to force them, they're only maintained for keeping good relations.

They can't get a "CCJ" because it's not in the terms of the loans. Do you not understand how sovereign debt works?

The reason why banks and lenders can pursue liens and other activities to force you to pay up your debt is because you agree to let them do that when you sign off on the loan. Sovereign debt is not bound by any such agreement (largely because it doesn't make sense - countries don't retire or lose their jobs or die the way that people do, so there's no reason why they couldn't take 200 years to pay back a loan, so long as they're willing to keep up the interest payments in the mean time).

And while China can't force the US to pay up if it ultimately decides to default on its obligations, the results would nonetheless be catastrophic for the US (and the rest of the world, given America's unique position in the financial world).

The entire reason why the US is so "valuable", as you put it, is because the US always pays back its obligations. It is the ultimate safe haven, an entity where people can store their money in the form of investments without worry that it will be lost or devalued by default or government fiat.

But if the US *were* to default on its loans, suddenly that all goes away. Since, as you at least seem to understand, no one can enforce terms against an entity as powerful as the US, the nation's word is its bond and a default would reveal that its word is no longer trustworthy and it cannot be counted on to honour the terms of any agreements it has signed onto. While it cannot be directly punished for this, it will nonetheless suffer dire consequences. Investment capital would flee the country, looking for more secure lenders. US borrowing power would collapse, and with it America's ability to pay its bills. The resultant fallout would be catastrophic, far beyond the scale of the Great Depression or Great Recession, and the US would be at ground zero. It could very well precipitate a complete collapse of the global financial system, which would then have to be rebuilt (likely with a different country at its centre).

And no, the US couldn't just go to China and demand negative interest to counter it (for one thing, China only owns about 5% of the US's debt, so even if it agreed to ridiculously favourable terms it wouldn't be nearly enough to contain the disaster).
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Kyuubi4269 posted...

You hold the country's debt

Thus proving that I am not chattel. Thank you for acknowledging the point.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

you pay tax because you're told to

I pay taxes for the same reason I don't beat up my neighbours and steal their house - because it's the law.

I enjoy the benefits of those taxes, in the sense that if someone tried to beat me up and steal my house, I can be confident that the entity those taxes get paid to will send a group of people over to remove the offenders. That costs money, though - hence, the taxes.

It's a fair tradeoff.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

you're not free unless you're a recognised nation and you're not

Sure I'm free. If I wanted to, I could stop paying taxes, declare myself independent from the government, live life as I choose. I'm perfectly free to do that - no one is standing over my shoulder preventing me from taking those actions. However, the government has told me the actions it would take in response to such conduct and I don't feel like trying to marshal a militia to overthrow them, so while I am free to undertake whatever actions I see fit, they are also free to respond in kind, and I think I like our current arrangement better; I'd rather work with people than against them, y'know?

Honestly, the agreement I and the rest of my fellow citizens have with them is pretty good, all things considered, so I don't see reason to try to renegotiate it at present.

Also, by your incredibly strange definition, recognized nations aren't free either. All nations have obligations they must follow - to their citizenry, and to their fellow nations. Governments that violate those obligations in a serious enough manner will swiftly find themselves replaced, either from within or without, in the same way that citizens that violate the law typically find themselves imprisoned.

That collection of obligations, by the by, is called "society". We've had it for a while and it's worked out pretty well.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

Imagine you have a loan. You cannot go to your bank and ask them for negative interest and they will not give it to you as you are not valuable.

You apparently missed the rest of my answer to this, as I already addressed this.

Yes, I can renegotiate my loan. Yes, I can ask for lower interest. And yes, I am valuable to the bank, as I have an extremely good credit rating (to the point where my bank won't shut up about trying to loan me more money, because they know I'm good to pay it back; I get offers from them for new credit cards and/or lines of credit about twice a month).

Would they give me negative interest? Not in these market conditions. But that's a difference of price, not concept. If I lived in Denmark, which is currently offering negative interest rates, I absolutely could.

Ask any mortgage specialist and they will all tell you the same story: the bank would rather renegotiate your loan than have you default or lose your business. If you lose your job and cannot pay, banks can and will negotiate from you, on the logic that they'd rather get some of their money back than none.

I don't know how much you make - perhaps it's a lot less than I do and that's why you think the bank doesn't consider its customers valuable, but I can tell you straight-up that you're wrong about this. A bank without investors is an empty building with no money.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

LinkPizza posted...

Those things are tiny. Smaller then the para-transit vans

They can hold 16 people - 8 sitting, 8 standing.

Without getting into too much detail on the rest of the situation you describe, I can simply tell you that you're vastly overestimating the problems these things run into. I feel the need to reiterate, we're not talking about the theoretical - these buses are in service today, in at least 20 countries. Whatever problems they're encountering, they're finding ways around them.

LinkPizza posted...

And without a plan, they should stop, or at least slow down, until they have one.

Who should slow down?

The tech companies developing this stuff? Why would they? Their job is to innovate and get a new product to take to market. It's not their job to do social planning. Developing these new products is what they do to make a living. If, say, Toyota were to stop their self-driving car program, all that would mean is they would lose profits and market share to Tesla, GM, Google, and everyone else who is developing these things (and there are a lot of them - all of the big automotive firms, plus a lot of big tech companies have recognized that this is the future and they don't want to be left behind).

Or perhaps you mean the companies like Uber or Amazon, which are pouring money into the projects in order to get them to market (note: Amazon already has self-driving trucks hauling cargo for them). But... why would they stop or slow down either? Like the tech companies, it's not their job to do social planning. These technologies represent huge savings for them. Again, any company that voluntarily avoids upgrading its own technology will simply lose market share to those without those compulsions.

Or maybe you're talking about the government? Maybe they should stop or slow down on self-driving cars.

Except... they can't slow down. They're neither the developer nor the primary market, and both of those are charging ahead full steam. It is not the government's job to stand in the way of innovation and scientific progress, which is why any attempt to ban this technology is ultimately doomed to fail.

Government's job is to plan and that's exactly what they should be doing. In all honesty, they should have been doing it years ago - this technology has been on the horizon for a decade, and now that it's here everyone is being caught with their pants down. We can't turn back the clock on scientific progress; now is the time to mitigate the effects.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

LinkPizza posted...

For the transportation, it wont happen fast. Bus and transit vans already cost a ton.

Faster than you think.

Google tells me that the average bus driver earns roughly $30,000 a year. This is not counting the costs of insurance, human-related downtime or error, and the other costs associated with human drivers.

Meanwhile, EasyMile self-driving shuttles cost $250,000 each and currently operate in 20 countries, with some already having been purchased by governments for transit purposes in Switzerland, Sweden, Australia... and the United States (you can ride it yourself if you're in the San Francisco area - it operates in San Ramon). The vehicles would pay for themselves in less than 10 years. And, like any tech invention, the more widespread the adoption, the more costs will be driven down.

You can bring up solutions like "how will it work at a bus stop?" (answer: it has sensors to handle that) or "what about if people can't attach the wheelchair properly?" (answer: come up with something to secure the chair in place that can be done by the chair's occupant, assuming that hasn't already been done), but that misses the point. Like I said earlier, these machines don't have to be perfect, they just have to be better than the humans they're replacing. Even if they can't handle people in wheelchairs as well, they're still better in nearly every other area, making the decision to switch over a no-brainer for those in charge.

LinkPizza posted...

Giving all power to robots and having no plan at all is not fine. We have no way to swap over from everyone working to no one working without causing mass chaos.

That's precisely my point: we don't have a plan and we badly need one. Because the technology is coming - in some cases, it's here already - and we are completely unprepared for the changes it is about to wreak on our society.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

LinkPizza posted...

Or we can just leave things the way they are.

No, we can't. That is literally the one thing we cannot do.

Things are headed that way, like it or not. I'm not talking about future tech now, I'm talking about technology that exists today, here and now. Self-driving cars are already a thing that exists. The first long-haul truck run with a computer at the wheel has already been done. That technology alone is going to have catastrophic effects on the job market. Between cabbies, transit drivers, long haul truckers, delivery drivers/couriers, and anyone else who makes their living behind the wheel of a car, as well as everyone who supports them (dispatchers, truck stop workers, etc.), roughly 10% of the US workforce is employed in transportation-related fields and the overwhelming majority of those jobs can be replaced with self-driving vehicles.

And this is something industry is going to push for hard. For freight companies, their biggest expense is their workers; if they can downsize or eliminate their truck-driving workforce, that has huge impacts on their bottom line.

Again, this is not a future problem, the technology is already here. And as things like smart phones and social media prove, once new technology hits the market, it can spread and become essential to life as we know it in just a few years.

Is self-driving technology perfect? No, but it doesn't have to be - it just has to be better than humans, and it unarguably is in most of the important ways. Self-driving cars don't drive drunk, don't get distracted or tired, don't get angry and cut people off. As workers, they don't need to stop for sleep or food, don't need vacation time or sick time, won't suddenly decide to quit and take a job elsewhere - they're more reliable, safer, and cheaper than human drivers. Much like the horse in the era of the combustion engine, humans simply can't compete in that environment. In all likelihood, the last American long haul trucker has probably already been born.

And that's just one technology. AI is spreading rapidly, and to many different fields. Lawyers now have robots that can help them with the tedious task of discovery, which is the bulk of their work. Doctors have various AI that can help them with diagnosis and understanding the interaction between medicines. Robots exist that can produce art or music that is indistinguishable from that created by a human. There are even robots who can write news articles if you just input the relevant facts.

Again, none of this is hypothetical, all of this technology exists, and it's only going to get more efficient and widespread. And each new technological jump forward increases our efficiency and, accordingly, reduces the number of man-hours needed for jobs. That equates to less workers required.

I brought up Luddites earlier for a reason, because they also advocated "Just don't use this new invention" approach. It, predictably, didn't work. We can't stick our heads in the ground and simply hope it all turns out (especially since various bad actors on the world stage are also looking at this technology with less altruistic aims; ignoring it leaves us woefully vulnerable, as every society that has attempted to "stand pat" has entered into an era of stagnation, decay, and obsolescence compared to the world around them). At this point, our only choice is how we face this future.

And theres no fair way to decided who gets what property. Someone is always getting screwed.

To be fair, that's not really a change.

The janitor in my office puts in the same number of hours I do, works just as hard as I do, and makes about one fifth my salary, all while doing a disgusting job few people would willingly do. Explain to me how that's fair.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

LinkPizza posted...

I dont trust automation or like it. But the problem just becomes how can we just not work? Thats my concern. Like, will I just go to the store and grab whatever I want. Do I have a limit? What about entertainment? Only a certain amount of games per month or something? I dont understand how not working makes any sense in those terms. I dont want to have my food or games limited. Right now, I can work extra hours if I need extra money. And I can treat myself. In that dystopian future, I feel like I wouldnt be able to live happily. Plus, I have to constantly worry about the robots taking over...

And therein lies the management issue.

Part of the problem is that automation largely eliminates one of the central tenants of commerce, which is scarcity. The idea that I have some good or service that you need and I can trade it for some good or service you have that I need. When all of the work, from raw material to finished product, is done by robots whose operating cost rounds down to zero, those goods are essentially scarcity-free. An excellent, if crass, example of a scarcity-free product in the modern world is porn - you can get as much porn as you want, in whatever particular flavour you want, at a cost of essentially zero dollars. Now imagine that same concept, but with everything.

So if you want more games or entertainment, just go get some more in the automated world - there's no reason it can't be free.

But one of the problems is that some goods and services will always be affected by scarcity with no way around it. Like housing, for instance: who gets to live in the seaside manse and who is stuck with the cut-and-paste single-family detached house in the suburbs? Do we just hold a lottery or something? Or are you given credits each month that you can use to bid on scarce goods?

These are the problems we need to start putting some brainpower into addressing, because the current capitalist model is entirely dependent on goods and services being affected by scarcity so that market forces can keep everything in balance; remove that and the entire system starts to break down.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

streamofthesky posted...

Yeah, low interest rates mean taking out loans and running up debt is super easy, barely an inconvenience!

https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/017/204/CaptainAmerica1_zps8c295f96.JPG

LinkPizza posted...

I didnt say outlaw it. I just wish it would stop. I already know I cant do anything about it. But thats just what I wish, is all. It just doesnt seem like a good thing. Maybe in moderation, it would be fine. But not when everything goes that route...

Well, the weird thing is that an automated future, where robots do all our work for us and people are free to spend their days how they like, is the basis for most utopian sci-fi stories and all of a sudden it seems like that could be at least somewhat feasible.

The problem is while the start point is OK and the end point is great, the path between is rocky. "Everybody works" is the world we've lived in since the dawn of humankind, "Nobody works" is the goal we've tried to work towards, but "only some people work" is a recipe for massive inequality and social unrest, unless carefully managed.

That's my big concern. Automation need not be feared, so long as governments take it seriously and take bold, decisive steps to manage the resultant upheaval. Thus far, none have shown any evidence of being up to the task.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Kyuubi4269 posted...

It's not debt in the real world, it only exists on paper.

My mortgage exists only on paper too - that doesn't mean I don't have to pay it.

You seem to be confusing the fact that sovereign debt does not have a repayment requirement (which is true) with the idea that sovereign debt has no effect on a country's ability to operate. As the PIIGS countries have helpfully shown us, this is not the case.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

The US will never be charged what they can't pay because it is not sensible to harm a country that props up your economy.

I'm reminded of the adage here that no single raindrop believes it's responsible for the flood.

People will always look after themselves first and foremost - that's just human nature. If my bank suddenly spikes interest rates on my loans, I may recognize that a major bank collapse could be catastrophic for my nation's economy, and that malaise could even spread beyond the border... but I still want my money back and will be taking my capital elsewhere at the earliest opportunity.

LinkPizza posted...

And automation needs to stop. People lose jobs. And technically, consumers suffer, as well. Using real people can help save money for many people.

You can't stop automation any more than the Luddites were able to stop the Industrial Revolution.

Outlawing automation comes dangerously close to outlawing an idea, which is a non-starter. I'm not even sure how you would hope to enforce it, given that we've been slowly automating jobs for centuries. I'm an engineer and the work that I do on a computer in an afternoon used to take 100 engineers with slide rules a couple weeks to work through.

What we should be preparing for is a world in which there are fewer jobs than people, because that's what's coming down the pipe. But I have yet to see any government take credible steps in that direction.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Kyuubi4269 posted...

Realistically nobody can or will enforce these debts as their economic relationships are too valuable.

You act like the only way to enforce debts is for someone to come to your house and demand your money back or else they jail you.

The market itself punishes bad actors; it doesn't need enforcement beyond that.

If what you said was in any way true, nobody would have any reason to fret about out of control economies. Yet not 10 years ago we had a major financial crisis where it looked like Greece might default on its loans, which was seen as something that could have torpedoed a very fragile economic recovery from the Great Recession. It took several bailout programs to calm the waters.

If a country defaults on its loans, capital flees that country for the same reason why I would remove my money from a bank that suddenly doesn't pay me the interest it owes me on my savings. On a sovereign level, this results in high inflation, as investors flood the market with cheap cash, and can cause currencies to collapse altogether. In order to try and get investment back, a country would then have to offer loans at terms more favourable to the borrower to help offset the intrinsic risk of defaulting on those loans, which is exactly where credit ratings come from.

This is especially true of a country like the US, which is considered the ultimate safe haven for cash. The US has long been the centre of the financial world, with the greenback serving as the benchmark currency. The US suddenly becoming a bad financial actor would have effects so disastrous and far-reaching, I'm not sure anyone could even document them all.

So no, the US can't just refuse to pay interest on its loans, then borrow ad infinitum. It can borrow whatever it likes (and it has been doing just that in recent years), but the interest becomes extremely costly, especially in boom times. Currently the US pays an eye-popping $389 billion per year (which is about 10% of all US government spending), an amount that's expected to grow by $100 billion a year for the next five years thanks to Trump's tax cuts. By 2023, the US government is expected to spend more on interest payments than on national defence.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

Do you really believe America's debt to China goes to the 1% and not China's operations?

No, but the vast majority of America's debt isn't owned by foreign countries, it's owned by US investors and corporations. Only ~30% of America's debt is foreign owned (and that includes all foreign investors, not just foreign governments).
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Kyuubi4269 posted...

Your standing loan to the government is zero too.

No, I do own sovereign debt as part of my portfolio, so a couple of governments actually owe me money.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

You are the government's property

Incorrect, because property/chattel cannot hold debt, does not have rights of self-determination, and cannot voluntarily "abandon" its owner, all of which are things I can do.

The era of human chattel ended a long time ago.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

Let me put it this way; you don't get to ask your bank for negative interest, you owe them, you have no position of worth to trade against.

Do you not know how debt works or something? Have you never had a mortgage?

If my bank changed my savings to negative interest, I would withdraw my savings and either take it to a different bank with more favourable terms, re-invest it in other low-risk options, or simply leave it as liquid cash, which - being an institution that needs my money to stay solvent - you may recognize as being the exact thing that the bank does not want me to do.

If my bank changed my loan to negative interest, I would have no reason to complain, because now my bank is essentially paying me to borrow money. However, to my knowledge, very, very few banks offer negative interest loans, save for countries where the economy has tanked and they're trying to spur investment and spending. However, long term this isn't healthy for the bank (no business can operate for long selling its product/service at a loss) and is a fairly damning indictment of the fiscal state of whatever region it's operating in.

Regardless, loans are renegotiated all the time. If I don't like the terms of my mortgage, I can speak to my bank and ask to modify the terms. If they don't want to, I can get a mortgage from a different bank, use it to pay back the mortgage from my current bank (which involves paying a penalty for early repayment, but one that is relatively minor), and simply have my loan transferred to the new bank on whatever terms I negotiate at the time.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

Governments give money to eachother (even with interest payments) because their existence cancels out the value the debt.

No, governments give money to each other because of naked self interest. For instance, Japan in the 80s/90s (and China now) bought up a lot of US sovereign debt not because they were enamoured with the US but because the US was the largest consumer of their manufactured goods, meaning they got dual benefits: interest payments providing income that would eventually more than pay back the value of the loan, plus increased economic activity in their biggest customer. National purchases of sovereign debt are essentially like your local supermarket offering you a credit card; they know you're going to spend most of your money there anyways, so that cash is coming back to them in a different form, plus now they get the interest money as well.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

The number doesn't mean anything significant beyond how much a country is worthwhile to keep around.

The number means "This country must now spend this many dollars on interest payments instead of on its citizens." And that's bad.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Thumb alone, index alone, thumb and index together. AKA the binary method.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Kyuubi4269 posted...

And those countries and investors are in debt to the starting government.

No, they're not.

My standing debt to the government is presently zero and while I'm well-off, I'm still outside the 1% bracket. Virtually no one of means is in debt to the government - why would they be?

Kyuubi4269 posted...

Quick reminder that some debt is even negative interest.

Which is alarming for different reasons, as it makes it much harder for governments to secure capital, given that they are basically saying "Pay us for the privilege of you loaning us money." This can, and historically has, driven panic and market flight.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

Everybody is in debt to eachother in a similar way to brothers, they do things for eachother freely for both sides' benefit

That's not debt.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

There's no end condition to non-payment of debt, the countries with most debt operate like mooching family members who never do anything bad enough to be disowned so their bad behaviour is tolerated indefinitely.

Nobody wants a country to collapse as it harms world trade so as long as a country is productive, they can be in as much debt as they like.

Sure, there's no real enforceable punishment to a country that defaults on their debts. That's not the same thing as saying there are no consequences.

Countries can hold as much debt as they want, but the interest payments choke out healthy economic growth as it's basically a regressive, upwards distribution of wealth, as tax is taken from all and given to sovereign debt holders, who are disproportionately rich, instead of consumers, whose spending drives the economy.

And a country the size and importance of the US defaulting on its payments would cause an immediate market crash that would dwarf the scale and impact of anything in the last 100 years.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Kyuubi4269 posted...

The world is in debt to itself, it doesn't mean anything so they can spend freely.

This is perhaps the most economically clueless viewpoint I've ever seen.

No, the world isn't in debt to itself; governments - the entities charged with taking money from the people and spending it on projects that benefit society as a whole - are in debt to other entities, largely other countries and investors. And the more they "spend freely", the more their ability to do so is constrained due to their contractual obligation to pay interest on all outstanding debt issued.

At this point a healthy chunk of your taxes is going directly into the pocket of other countries and rich owners of sovereign debt, rather than into anything that you will ever see benefit from, which is not how taxes are supposed to work.

(And may God have mercy on the Americans if a recession hits, because Trump has taken the unprecedented step of slashing taxes and exploding the deficit during an economic boom, leaving the government almost totally unequipped to use monetary policy to blunt the effects of a recession.)

Saying "the world is in debt to itself, so it doesn't matter", is kind of like if I owed you money and said, "Well, you're a human and I'm a human, so this is just humanity owing money to itself, so I'm just going to pay the money to myself and call the debt settled. Oh, and I'd like to buy a new car, so please give me another $50,000."
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Kungfu Kenobi posted...

And this is the sense in which Trump's tweet is to be understood.

Don't be obtuse. There is a world of difference between "Bob's a miracle worker!" and "Jews love Bob like he's the King of Israel" and you know it.

Blaqthourne posted...

But then you're not fact checking everything, since you're now taking that "credible source" as fact.

Yes - also known as fact checking.

Because if you want to get technical, what you described - going back and checking the box scores to verify a baseball stat - isn't fact checking by your definition either. How do you know those box scores were reputable? How do you know someone didn't make a mistake? Or that they weren't altered after the fact? You'd have to go back and review all the footage of the games in question and compile your own data (and even then maybe some maniacal fanatic altered the footage).

Which is something no reasonable person would ever do, because credible sources and good data are things that exist. We can be confident that box scores are reputable and if multiple sports outlets are reporting on the same analysis pointing to records being set, we can be confident that that data is also valid. Reasonable fact checking simply involves checking your sources and, ideally, seeing if what they've reported has been verified by other reliable sources or peer review.

This isn't nearly as hard as you're making it out to be.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Kyuubi4269 posted...

Patriotism is to stand by your country's governance

No, patriotism is to stand by your country's values, recognizing that every country has periods of shitty governance.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Kungfu Kenobi posted...

You answer your own question by bringing Trump's own tweet into this. The only thing he adds to that whole statement is, "Thank you to Wayne Allyn Root for the very nice words."

Sure - and he didn't need to add anything more, because it's plenty damning on its own.

Like, if you went to Bob's twitter page and he had a pinned tweet there from a KKK leader saying, "Bob is the best white supremacist of this century. He is truly a force for promoting the superiority of the white race," and Bob had replied, thanking the man for his kind words, what does that say about Bob?

I mean, technically, Bob didn't say any of those things - he just thanked another man for saying them about him. But the very fact that he's acknowledging this fringe figure's words and praise means he feels honoured by them and, as such, agrees with their sentiment.

That's exactly what happened with Trump. He promoted a tweet from a guy who claimed that Obama was gay, that the Las Vegas shooting was a Muslim plot, that a non-existent trucker strike prevented the Trump administration from responding adequately to Hurricane Maria on Puerto Rico, that the asshole who drove his car into a crowd at Charlottesville was a paid inside man (because conservatives don't commit violence EVER), that George Soros was funding migrant caravans, and that Seth Rich was murdered by Hillary Clinton and the Democrats. And he promoted this guy using "the King of Israel" as a compliment.

You come down pretty hard on the Post for their headline but, to borrow your own words, you bloody well know exactly what Trump meant when he tweeted that.

Blaqthourne posted...

You really shouldn't need to fact check everything. Otherwise, you'll never get anything accomplished.

Sure you should.

Fact-checking doesn't necessarily, or even usually, require you to go back to first principles the way you suggested with your baseball example. It requires that you find a credible source (or, preferably, multiple credible sources) verifying the account as true. In the case of your baseball example, if your random friend told you a random stat about a player, you would have reason to doubt him, but if MLB's website says the same thing, you know that it's probably true.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Kungfu Kenobi posted...

Trump derangement syndrome is not a euphemism.

"Trump derangement syndrome" is the latest incarnation of a tired conservative trope that is now over 15 years old. Charles Krauthammer coined the original title - "Bush Derangement Syndrome" - in 2003, which was probably the last time it was in any way relevant or clever to talk about (added irony: Krauthammer was a strong critic of Trump).

For whatever reason, conservatives seem to think this is the most brilliant thing in the world, and update it with every conservative leader that comes along (with most seemingly forgetting it was ever a thing in the past and thinking it's some new and biting slogan). In Canada we had "Harper Derangement Syndrome"; in the UK, "Boris Derangement Syndrome" is occasionally batted about, replacing the old "Blair Derangement Syndrome".

Notably, those same conservatives are silent about similar monomaniacal tendencies in their own ranks, levelled not just at liberal leaders, but even rank-and-filers. You never hear about Hillary Derangement Syndrome, Trudeau Derangement Syndrome, Obama Derangement Syndrome, or AOC-Derangement Syndrome, even though there's just as strong a case to be made there.

I'd be less annoyed at this term if it was in any way new or creative and if it wasn't being clumsily used by conservative talking heads to try and hand-wave away any criticism of Dear Leader Trump (or whatever other conservative is being referenced) without having to debate the actual facts of the issue.

Kungfu Kenobi posted...

And, yes, that was indeed a story being circulated that was 99% horse shit, and 1% Trump being Trump.

How was it horseshit? The source on this is literally Trump's own Twitter account. He retweeted a conservative conspiracy theorist who said - direct quote here - "Jewish people in Israel love him like he's the King of Israel". Ignoring the humour in someone essentially saying, apparently without a hint of irony, "Jews love him like he's Jesus", you don't retweet people and thank them for their effusive praise if you don't agree with what they're saying. Sure, your friend screwed up a detail when he said that Trump named himself King of Israel, but that's on your friend; none of the actual reputable media outlets made that screw-up.

And yes, it was "Trump being Trump" - that's the entire fucking problem! You don't wave off a serial killer murdering people by saying, "Yeah, but that's just Dave being Dave. He always does this kind of stuff, you just kind of have to learn to live with it." Trump is the political equivalent of an ape throwing handfuls of shit at anything he sets his sight on; that doesn't mean that the rest of us should just get used to the smell.

Kungfu Kenobi posted...

So when I hear about Trump's attitudes toward climate change, or especially anything said in private (such as the nuking hurricanes thing), I have to question every single thing. I have to fact check every single thing.

You should be doing that anyways, so I don't see the problem.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Broken_Zeus posted...

It's science, which I know conflicts with your faith-based beliefs.

Kind of a weird thing to say for someone who routinely defends the highest profile climate change denier in the world and who routinely waves off sources he personally doesn't agree with (which invariably are always proven right).

Broken_Zeus posted...

His critics inundated us with false or misleading scandals

I have yet to see a false or misleading Trump scandal get any real traction in the media. Even the example you love to harp on with Trump feeding the koi was one that none of the major outlets spent much time on; hell, I read a lot of news and the first time I became aware of that story was an article pointing out that Abe did it first.

Even at its heat, it was never a "scandal", because that implies corruption or malfeasance and "not feeding fish right" doesn't rise to that level even for Trump's most virulent detractors.

Broken_Zeus posted...

so you now have one group stuck in a state of perpetual outrage based on an accumulation of either sketchy or *very* often outright fake news

You mean Republicans?

I mean, when you look at which group insisted that Obama was a Kenyan Muslim (a group that notably includes the current White House occupant), or Hillary was running a pedophile sex ring in the basement of a pizzeria, or that immigrants commit more crime than native-born Americans, or that China was secretly trying to invade Texas with Obama's support, or that Hillary routinely had people assassinated with impunity, or that climate change is a hoax, or that China is paying for the trade war, or that there's massive electoral fraud afoot and Trump actually won the popular vote, or that Russia didn't interfere with the 2016 election... well, you start to notice that they all have a certain political persuasion.

All of those are verifiably false, yet they not only enjoyed (or, in some cases, enjoy) broad support in the Republican base, they all were espoused by Republican elected officials - in many cases, by Trump himself.

The number of lies told by this administration is now charitably in the five digit realm and Trump rode to power on a wave of outrage against immigrants and foreigners,something he continues to routinely stoke because he seems to consider it key to his re-election. His inauguration speech notably included descriptions of "American carnage" and combative vows to take back from others what rightfully belonged to the US.

If you want the group perpetually steeped in outrage, there it is - the Republicans have been running on that ticket for the last 15+ years and they show no signs of giving it up any time soon.

Surely, being the "left-leaning centrist" you are, you are not blind to this.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Broken_Zeus posted...

You can blame Trump critics for it.

This is known as the "Look what you made me do!" defence and it is a classic beloved by abusers the world over.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

SeahorseCpt89 posted...

Im not sure if thats how pardoning works. All a pardon does is stop you from going to jail, or whatever punishment youd face for criminal charges. You can still lose your job if youre doing something illegal like this and private land owners can still fight them on this. I would think so anyway.

Well, their job is for the government and Trump is the head of the executive branch, so no, they probably wouldn't get fired.

That being said, Trump's pardon power only extends to federal crimes and unilaterally seizing land without going through the proper process would violate a raft of state-level crimes that Trump has exactly zero power to pardon, so no bureaucrat with a brain would ever risk doing it.

The courts can and probably would step in to block egregious gaps in oversight. Trump's argument of "These regulations must be ignored, because this haste is a matter of national defence," is, from a legalistic point of view, not a bad one... but he would need to prove that this truly is a matter of national defence and I think that's a pretty flimsy argument, especially given that immigrant crime levels are lower than native born and unemployment is currently exceptionally low.

Oh the one hand, courts typically give wide deference to the executive branch on issues of executive authority; on the other, the Trump administration's record in court has been laughably bad (a win rate of ~6%, if memory serves), so I don't like their chances.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Broken_Zeus posted...

...if you picked up a history book, "America First" was historically a guiding philosophy:
https://theweek.com/articles/627638/brief-history-american-isolationism

And American interventionism is responsible for installing dictators throughout much of the world and played a hand in both the creation of ISIS and the current refugee crisis.

So you've just laid out how "America First" created some of the country's biggest problems of the modern era.

Do you see the issue yet?

Broken_Zeus posted...

He doesn't "hide" his college grades.

Yes, he did.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherrim/2019/02/28/heres-why-donald-trump-doesnt-want-anyone-to-know-his-grades-or-sat-scores/#51304a893764

At the same time Trump was claiming - with no evidence - that his grades were higher than Obama's, he had Cohen send threatening letters to his high school and colleges warning them that he would sue them if his grades were ever made public. He even had some of his fellow alumni threaten the military academy he graduated from, pressuring them to bury his records (they wound up moving them to a separate location from the rest of the records).

Broken_Zeus posted...

He didn't "pay" for sex, he allegedly paid them to shut up afterward.

No, according to Karen McDougal, he tried to pay for the sex too.

Broken_Zeus posted...

The charity thing is ambiguous.

I mean sure, I guess, if you consider having to shut down your charity over what a judge calls "a shocking pattern of illegality" to be ambiguous...

Broken_Zeus posted...

He had a medical exemption.

Widely accepted to be spurious given that it was granted by a doctor who was renting from Fred Trump, with the doctor's own daughters saying that the diagnosis was made "as a favour" to Fred (and Trump's "debilitating" bone spurs didn't seem to hinder him from playing football in college). And yes, that is 100% draft-dodging.

Honestly, I don't really give a shit whether he dodged the draft - he's far from the only White House occupant who did so (fun fact: there has never been a US president who was actually deployed to Vietnam, and there probably never will be) and I don't fault anyone for deciding, when forcibly conscripted for a conflict they don't believe in or have no personal stake in, to place a premium on the value of their life and decline the order, in whatever form that takes. On the list of "objectionable things Donald Trump has done", draft dodging isn't anywhere near the top - there are literally hundreds of more relevant and obnoxious things we can spend our time talking about instead.

What annoys me is the dishonesty. Unlike other draft-dodging politicians, who at least have the good graces to show contrition when talking about those who weren't well-connected enough to evade the draft, Trump still acts like he deserves all the respect and admiration afforded to vets. When he talks about things like how dodging STDs was "his own personal Vietnam", or how "would've been honoured" to serve in Vietnam, as though it wasn't his choice to seek a deferment, that's the objectionable part - not the fact that he decided he didn't want to die in a jungle in southeast Asia.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

ParanoidObsessive posted...

A more interesting metric might be to chart the shift in the number of people voting in the poll over time, to see how much it's shifted downward from peak.

Even that would be an imperfect measure. Web browsing habits have changed over the past 10-15 years. People seldom visit "portal" front pages, as their browsers remember the page they view most frequently and can take them to it instantly.

10 years ago I voted in the poll daily; these days entire weeks will go by where I completely forget the GF front page exists.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

InfestedAdam posted...

Oddly enough, accuracy and precision are two different concepts in shooting to my understanding. The former being able to hit what you're aiming for wheres the latter being able to consistently hit the same spot.

Those definitions are basically correct (accuracy is how close the average shot is to the intended target, precision is how close shots are to one another; in statistical terms, accuracy refers to the mean distance from the target, while precision refers to the standard deviation of distance from the mean).

Worth noting that Obi-Wan uses both terms, but he's likely speaking colloquially.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Did you see the sign?
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Still waiting on Mega Man Collection Collection.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Mead posted...

They miss because if the heroes got shot by run of the mill foot soldiers the movies would be 10 minutes long and fucking stupid.

This. People act like Plot Armour isn't a thing.

Yes, stormtroopers are good shots. Obi-Wan calls them accurate and precise, and in any battle where they're not shooting at the main heroes (Tantive IV, Hoth, Endor) they usually bring down a good number of their targets.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

TheWorstPoster posted...

First of all, Trump never said that.

According to who? Trump?

Trump claimed that a trade deal with Japan was a done deal, leading to Shinzo Abe to correct him and explain there was still work to be done and it hadn't been finalized. He said no world leaders had criticized his trade war with China; Boris Johnson, of all people, then immediately criticized him. He claimed that China had called him up and wanted to restart talks; China's foreign ministry explained that no such calls had been made. Trump claimed that doctors were coming out of operating rooms to meet with him when he visited hospitals after the two recent mass shootings; both hospitals denied this was true (and it would be a serious breach of medical protocol if it had). And this is all from the past week.

Trump has literally zero credibility at this point. He has provably lied so many times or denied saying something before later admitting that it's true that there is no reason for anyone to take him at face value without independent verification.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

LinkPizza posted...

Do they really have merits

Yes, they do, chiefly around unit conversion. All metric units, other than the second, are based around Base 10, with major units occurring every three orders of magnitude. There are 1000 millilitres in a litre, 1000 metres in a kilometre, 1000 grams in a kilogram, 1,000,000 pascals in a megapascal, 1000 kg in a tonne, so on and so forth. Simple, clean easy

Contrast to imperial. There are 12 inches in a foot, three feet per yard, 1760 yards per mile. There are 16 cups in a gallon, There are 8 ounces per cup, 4 cups per quart, 4 quarts per gallon. There are 16 ounces per pound, 2000 pounds per ton (unless you're in the UK, in which case it's 2240 pounds per ton). It's entirely arbitrary and pointlessly so. And don't even get me started on the other nonsense with Imperial, like how an "ounce" can be a measure of volume or mass, or how a pound can be a unit of mass or weight.

Moreover, because metric was designed around base units, all physical equations are simplified, with no unit conversion factors necessary. Work = Force x Distance; Power = Energy/Time; Force = Mass x Acceleration. In imperial, all of those equations require conversion factors to make the units line up. In metric, you just plug in your numbers and away you go.

Blaqthourne posted...

Why pick water as the base? Why not pick mercury, since that's what most thermometers use?

Most thermometers don't use mercury and haven't for a long time because of how toxic it is.

More to the point, water is one of the most common substances in our day-to-day lives and is one of the rare substances that we frequently encounter in all three basic physical states (solid as snow/ice, liquid as water, gas as steam). By contrast, you are unlikely to ever encounter solid or gaseous mercury, unless you are a chemist.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

LinkPizza posted...

Youre talking about making everyone learn a new system because you like it a little better. But people using the system already know and understand it. Why make it difficult by making everyone learn a new system for literally no reason at all? Its actually asinine to change it for no reason...

Maybe because the rest of the world uses metric? Because the US is literally the only holdout on the entire planet, other than Myanmar and Liberia, who has not recognized how much better the metric system is.

And yes, there is rationale behind it. Any US good that is being marketed overseas needs to be in metric; by remaining in the imperial system, the US is essentially forcing its own companies to make two versions of their product, one with SI labelling and one with imperial labelling. And the same goes for importing - many foreign products are designed to work with metric, not imperial, forcing domestic conversions that can be costly.

Hell, I get to deal with that in my professional life. I'm an engineer and the clients I work with are based all over the world. When my company is running analysis for American clients, they essentially pay a small premium because we have to rejigger our analysis tools and spreadsheets to work with Imperial units, which we charge for. This also introduces a potential source for error, which was fairly dramatically demonstrated with the Mars Climate Orbiter when Lockheed-Martin's software caused the orbiter to crash because it was designed to work with Imperial, rather than metric units, meaning that the US taxpayers got to pay over $300 million to crash a satellite into Mars because the country's too stubborn to join everyone else in the 21st century.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!