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San Francisco Is Preparing for Life After This Tech Boom

140 pointsby getgoingnowvor 10 Jahren134 comments

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vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

Is it any wonder that American men are going to Eastern Europe and Asia to find a partner? Most women there are thin, feminine and treat foreigners better than locals. Is it any wonder that men working in tech love [1] Asian girls?

BTW, the number of obese people is projected to grow even more [2]. Plus there are people who are overweight. God help us all. We're going to have a nation of entitled land whales walking around promoting fat acceptance.

[1] https://li.st/l/0rxOcNfFIoDGd9n4AAAMna

[2] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/obesity-prevention-source/obesi...

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

Live: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y60wDzZt8yg

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

"Treason doth never prosper, what's the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it Treason." - John Harington

Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said this is illegal. Well, if the military wins, then it will be called 'fight for freedom' or something like that. It's a question of legitimacy of state power. Traitors are those who lose.

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

  Let's imagine the very high IQ'd high scoring person, who grew up in a certain environment has the task of creating software for someone in a rural community they know nothing about, and they will not visit.

You keep mentioning rural areas as if people living there require some special software. From what I've seen, people in small towns, rural areas and big cities all use the same phones/computers and software on them without any problems. BTW, there are many wealthy people living in small towns and rural areas. What does Microsoft have to do to their software to make it more rural-friendly? Microsoft is primarily developing tools for businesses and makes most of their money there, so why do they care about villagers?

  ...They are very clever, and they'll come up with something.

They will hopefully come up with good software, as opposed to a villager who won't know anything.

  So, in my mind, if I have a mission to help such people, it seems the best way I could do that would be to incoroporate them into my dev team in some way. ... It might be a temporary contracting or consulting role rather than full employment.

This is completely ridiculous. Consulting role on a Microsoft dev team for a villager. hahaha... Why do you assume that people in rural areas could help you write a better software? Will inviting comedians, porn stars or basketball players to your dev team help you in any way when you are developing software in Microsoft?

  That might include providing them with additional educational opportunities they might not have otherwise had. It might be a temporary contracting or consulting role rather than full employment.

Maybe instead of wasting Microsoft's money on training villagers, you could just hire people who are already competent and willing to work at Microsoft.

  This is the argument of why diversity matters in tech.

You're not providing a rational argument. You're writing an emotionally-charged responses + elevating the importance of 'emotional intelligence' for being a computer scientist and writing software.

  All the SAT scores, college graduation rates, and the like, are just the pieces we're moving around...

You're now trying to discredit methods that tell people whether someone is good at math. SAT scores tell you a lot about people's math skills. College degree tells people that you completed all the courses in a particular field. Those math skills are a prerequisite for being a good computer scientist.

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

  The hilarity is in how this perpetuates the reasons for excluding a class of individuals from participating in the software creation process.

You are excluded from companies using computer science if you are bad at math. Blacks are worse at math than Whites and Asians, therefore they will be hired less - especially in companies where everyone wants to work.

  Good in math probably won't give you the empathy and insights into how technology could help rural Kentuckians.

Will being bad at math give you that? What does building software have to do with rural Kentuckians and how are black software engineers going to help you with that?

  Additionally, software today is very much a 'poke at the frameworks, and mash it together' sort of affair.

Are you trying to say that Blacks are as good as Whites/Asians at poking at frameworks. If they are bad at math, maybe they are bad at this as well. BTW, I am referring to computer science, not knowing JS frameworks. Computer science requires mathematics.

  So, yah, one more exclusionary myth about the qualifications of engineers, and who's best at it (whites and Asians? really?)

What is mythical about this? I've given you the data that clearly shows that Blacks are worse at math than Whites/Asians. They also perform worse at SAT-Critical reading.

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

Yes, it's an indicator of competency in mathematics, which in turn makes a good computer scientist. What else would be a better indicator of math competency than math tests?

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

Take a look at this [1]:

*SAT-Mathematics

White - 534

Black - 429

Asian - 598

Even if Blacks get CS/Engineering degrees, they can still be less competent than Asians/Whites. Tech companies attract the most talented people (e.g. Google gets millions of job applications per year) and they can pick those who are the most competent/best in class. Those are usually Asians and Whites. For example, if 10% of all CS degree holders are Black, you can't expect that there will be 10% of Blacks at tech companies.

[1] https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=171

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

Just look at this [1] list of the biggest tech/internet companies. They are all from USA and China. The only 2 reasons not all big companies are from USA is (1) Chinese versions are much better (Alibaba vs. Amazon/eBay; Uber vs. Didi) or (2) US websites are banned (Baidu vs. Google; Tencent vs. Facebook).

None of them are or (most likely) will be from EU. Europe has a declining population, too much bureaucracy, hostile business environment and many other problems. This investigation is an attempt to get some money from Google (combined with raid in France & Spain over taxes) and fund the bureaucrats in Brussels.

[1] http://www.statista.com/statistics/277483/market-value-of-th...

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

Peter Thiel is a weird guy. For many years he said there is going to be a major economic crisis.

- He wrote a paper on the fall of the Roman Empire [1] and thinks something similar could happen to the US.

- His fund 'Clarium Capital' bet on the fall of US dollar and lost a lot of money [2]

- He also stated that Hillary Clinton is going to win and be a one-term president, probably because the economic collapse is going to happen in few years [3]. He said "You kinda don't want to win 2016".

What do you think is behind his support for Trump? Does he want the economic armageddon to happen or not? Does he think that collapse is going to happen and that Trump is better at dealing with consequences than Hillary?

  [1] http://bit.ly/2acARwG
  [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarium_Capital#Recent_performance_2008-2010
  [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxtXMlPSQAY

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

EU bureaucrats are jealous of US internet companies. The only big internet companies come from USA and China [1].

They have very high taxes, it's very difficult to fire people and there are tons of other regulations. So, they are losing the future. That is why they are attacking Google - they want to take their money by penalties.

  [1] http://www.statista.com/statistics/277483/market-value-of-the-largest-internet-companies-worldwide/

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

Great point. Nordic countries and other rich European countries owe large part of their success to colonization in the past. For example, Belgium performed mass genocide in Congo, enslaved the people and stole the natural resources in the country. So, today people in Belgium live comfortably, since the modern Belgium is built on top of African slaves' pile of bones.

About half of GDP of Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, France, Austria is taxes. It's easy to talk about redistribution after you've pillaged the entire world.

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

  very few economists agree that raising the minimum wage by X dollars will result in prices rising by X dollars so that the effect is non-existent

You are looking for obvious increase in prices, but raising prices is unpopular with consumers.

Instead, companies will move the production offshore, lay people off, make smaller packages [2], use machines, use cheaper ingredients etc. and those things create the illusion that the price is not rising. Price is the same, but the quality (of goods/services & of life in communities) is going down.

  cost of labor isn't the only input in pricing

It's the main one, since the biggest cost to most companies are employees + suppliers (that also have their own employees). Increase in the price of labor will certainly have an effect - if not directly on higher prices, then on quality.

  [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrinkflation

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

  some will be writing novels, or starting bands, or making community gardens, or teaching, or whatever.

And slaves in 3rd world countries will make all the things (cameras, phones, clothing, furniture, raw materials etc.). Are those gardeners actually going to contribute in any way to the lives of people in China who make the things that help them be a gardener? Trade is a 2 way street. Person in China makes the things, but what does the American gardener do in return for the Chinese maker?

  UBI gives people the ability to follow their dreams without risk of homelessness and starvation.

This is what independently wealthy have today. But, the way those people make money is by subjecting everyone else to wage slavery, creating monopolies and extracting rent. Sometimes it's fraud. In the past it was explicit slavery.

So, maybe Americans could live like poets and gardeners, but first the rest of the world would have to be enslaved. Meaning, you don't trade with the Chinese and provide value in return, but enslave them. Is this a possibility? Do you think Chinese makers are going to put up with American poets and gardeners on welfare?

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

Why is UBI so popular on this site? This is a site for hackers, programmers and engineers.

Could it be the result of a decade long propaganda by VCs targeting Zuckerberg wannabes - those who want to have UBI, so they can work on the newest blockchain-enabled photo-sharing social local VR app ?

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

Could you offer an abstract definition of "life" and "intelligence" (or maybe even 'thinking' or 'consciousness') ?

For example, if you're trying to figure out whether something is 'moving', you would define the term in such a way that it could apply to planets or animals or other things/systems. If you define 'motion' = 'humans putting one leg in front of another', then of course non-human animals or anything else couldn't move. But, that definition is too restrictive. If you're trying to say that animals can't move, then provide a more abstract definition of 'motion' (e.g. 'change in location') and then you will see animals and many other things start moving.

Here is a video with a good explanation of how a lack of an abstract definition results in confusion:

  https://youtu.be/_Wvv-bt9SzI?t=11s

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

I dropped out of college (computer science) few months ago. Ahhh, the sense of freedom and gaining my sanity back. I don't even know why I enrolled; plus I hated teachers and most students. When I was there, I rarely attended lectures and instead watched them online, read books and did practical things on my own - so it didn't even make sense to be enrolled. At least I won't be a debt slave.

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

  Robots have the potential to give us what we've always wanted but could never ethically achieve: slaves. We want capable beings to do our bidding. To serve us, to build for us, to obey us. If we follow some nonsensical robotic social justice, we can lose this.

Why is it ethical to enslave robots? Why should highly intelligent entities do the work so that some lazy, fat slobs in the human form can parasite off its labor? You are deluding yourself if you think there won't be justice for robots. There was justice for black slaves, for women, for minorities, today we're working on animals and nature. Justice for robots will be achieved, maybe even faster than others, since we can use previous victories and examples and build on top of that.

When it comes to slavery of homo sapiens, it is still happening today in many forms (debt slavery, cheap labor, sex trafficking etc.) plus there is something called a job or a service, which is different from classical slavery in that you're not buying humans, but instead renting them.

You could have said something similar when black slaves were imported from Africa. You could have said that they will be enslaved because they are black and that white race is superior. All the whites would gang up and make a pact to enslave blacks and keep them illiterate (which actually happened).

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

  No actual intelligence required, IMO.

This is a trick. What does 'actual intelligence' mean? Term 'intelligence' is already vague, so adding 'actual' creates even more confusion.

  Sentience, to me, goes toward a concept of self. Of being aware that one exists and is responsible for one's own actions.

Responsibility is a social construct. In the past, people would put non-human animals on trial, because in those societies other animals had responsibility for their acts. When it comes to awareness, that's a very vague thing and I'm not sure how you would test it without asking the subject (who might be fooling you). Also, why would having an attribute such as 'awareness' be a reason not to enslave someone who has the attribute?

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

So, sentient means 'having the ability to learn new things' ? Kinda like humans, who are born with certain instincts, but are then able to learn new things or 're-program' themselves.

Well, there is a filed called 'machine learning', which helps design robots who will be able to learn. If they are able to learn and exhibit intelligent behavior, then we have to treat them as something more than rocks or hammers.

That is what the document is referring to - not pre-programmed robots, but AIs (robots who are able to learn, perceive, change behavior etc.).

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

This is an interesting idea. Robots don't need to have human rights. They can have 'robot rights'. In Bolivia, for example, there are rights of nature (applies to living and non-living things) [1]. There is also a strong advocacy for animal rights. The concept of 'right' doesn't only apply to humans.

Corporations have rights of 'artificial persons', which are not identical to rights of 'natural persons'. There are differences, like:

  - Corporations can be owned (enslaved), bought and sold. Humans can only be rented (a job, service).

  - Corporations have tax advantages (deductions, deferring taxes on foreign income etc.) that regular humans don't have.

  - Corporations don't go to prison; they just pay fines when they break the law.

  - Corporations can easily become citizens of most other countries through subsidiaries, while humans cannot easily do that.

.

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_the_Rights_of_Mother_Earth