From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Tue Oct 1 00:06:41 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2013 18:06:41 -0600 Subject: [ExI] roboburgers to go In-Reply-To: <5243FA9A.5080205@organicrobot.com> References: <0a1801ceb94d$bc6a3360$353e9a20$@att.net> <0b8101ceb964$559b6ac0$00d24040$@att.net> <5243FA9A.5080205@organicrobot.com> Message-ID: On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 3:12 AM, Alejandro Dubrovsky wrote: > On 26/09/13 06:53, Kelly Anderson wrote: > > On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 2:26 PM, spike > > > The front could be semi-automated much faster than the kitchen. I'm > > actually surprised that they haven't turned the cash registers around on > > the front desk in McDonalds they way they have at Home Depot, Walmart > > and some supermarkets around here. > > > > > One of my local McDonalds tried it for a while, but the experiment > didn't last long and the machines got taken out. The interface seems > surprisingly hard to get right. Too many products, too many ingredients > that people can and do individually take out or add. Everyone skipped > the machines and long-queued at the human-operated registers (I did too, > even though I am a strictly machine-only queuer at the supermarket). I > suspect that they'll have to go with either a short-list of classic > options only, or very good speech recognition. > While that may be entirely true, and I don't doubt it, I still think that is easier than automating the kitchen. Ray Kurzweil's consistently poorest prediction is the "when speech recognition will take off" which I attribute to his bias as part owner of the largest and most successful speech recognition program/company on the planet. (wishful thinking has struck down better thinkers than Kurzweil.) I own Dragon, but I rarely use it myself, despite being a pretty big fan. The bottom line is that people just don't want to talk to a machine, or at least to one that doesn't talk back. I think if you got the feedback correct, i.e. there is a video recording of a pretty young (possibly topless) lady doing every possible combination of asking for your order, there will be little chance of getting it right enough for most people to use. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Tue Oct 1 00:19:07 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2013 18:19:07 -0600 Subject: [ExI] roboburgers to go In-Reply-To: <04c901cebad8$13a6bdc0$3af43940$@att.net> References: <0a1801ceb94d$bc6a3360$353e9a20$@att.net> <0b8c01ceb965$4e85f380$eb91da80$@att.net> <0c4801ceb977$af578b80$0e06a280$@att.net> <20130925210033.GG10405@leitl.org> <00f101ceba58$fd16eeb0$f744cc10$@att.net> <5243D829.4030307@aleph.se> <04c901cebad8$13a6bdc0$3af43940$@att.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 10:47 AM, spike wrote: > I am open to suggestion from anyone here on teaching my mathematically > talented 7 yr old. He is performing actual algebra and geometry in the > second grade, no fooling. His entire top row on his Khan Academy board is > dark blue, 134 skills mastered and nearly a hundred more level 1s and 2s. > I have him doing Blender and Excel macros. > > ** ** > > Question please, what does a father teach a son today, assuming access to > the collective wisdom of years represented by this group?**** > > > Anders, Kelly, Eugen, Keith, anyone else especially fathers, what do we do > now, coach? > I'm sure he knows statistics by now, but just in case he doesn't, you should definitely have him go through that. Not the nasty Calculus kind, but the kinder gentler kind. When Kasey asked what to study in college a couple of years ago, I suggested some sort of Biotechnology or nanotechnology. She is now pursuing a career in bioengineering. With a seven year old though, the answer is harder than for a 20 year old. There is another decade of progress that will go by before he really has to decide. For example, autonomous vehicles will likely be a solved problem by the time he gets to college, so while that might be a good choice today, it probably wouldn't be in ten years. However, I don't think you could possibly go wrong in the meantime learning Chemistry (both Organic and Inorganic), Materials science, Physics, and just about anything really creative. Art, it's going to be big when the machines take over. I also think introducing him to the concepts of open source (not just for programming), crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, outsourcing (aka Speaking/Reading/Writing English really really well) and interpersonal communications are all really critical. A good foundation of psychology so that he doesn't marry a crazy person (speaking from LOTS of personal experience here) is also critical to a happy and successful life. I could probably talk about this all day, but I must make dinner now. Oh, cooking. That would be good. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Tue Oct 1 00:28:29 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2013 17:28:29 -0700 Subject: [ExI] roboburgers to go In-Reply-To: References: <0a1801ceb94d$bc6a3360$353e9a20$@att.net> <0b8c01ceb965$4e85f380$eb91da80$@att.net> <0c4801ceb977$af578b80$0e06a280$@att.net> <20130925210033.GG10405@leitl.org> <00f101ceba58$fd16eeb0$f744cc10$@att.net> <5243D829.4030307@aleph.se> <04c901cebad8$13a6bdc0$3af43940$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sep 30, 2013 5:20 PM, "Kelly Anderson" wrote: > I could probably talk about this all day, but I must make dinner now. Oh, cooking. That would be good. Quite. Basic cooking is often underappreciated as an introduction to making physical things. Plus, it is a practical skill of potential immediate use: have him try making dinner once in a while. (Not to mention its use in obtaining friends and favors once he enters college. I speak from personal experience there, on something I have much reason to believe has not changed since.) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Tue Oct 1 00:29:34 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2013 18:29:34 -0600 Subject: [ExI] roboburgers to go In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 8:46 PM, Keith Henson wrote: > > It's almost as bad as chipping rocks to get a sharp edge (which I can also > do). > That's one that I would definitely want to keep on the list of things to learn. I mean maybe Eugen is right after all... Knowing how to brain tan leather... that's another one that should definitely stay on the list as well. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Tue Oct 1 00:38:53 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2013 17:38:53 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Open source programs to get more kids to code In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sep 30, 2013 6:37 AM, "BillK" wrote: > For some reason boys don?t seem > to like Alice very much > the edit screen is not your standard > 'code' view, instead it?s friendly to kids by giving them pull down > menus of actions. Uh huh. "Friendly". And have they tested a "standard code view", much less an IDE that catches basic mistakes like a missing }, on these same kids? (Not hypothetical kids, not their own if their own wouldn't be using Alice outside of the test, but the same actual users.) Even kids can be turned off by UIs that get in the user's way. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Tue Oct 1 00:59:13 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2013 18:59:13 -0600 Subject: [ExI] roboburgers to go In-Reply-To: <524815EA.9060408@aleph.se> References: <0a1801ceb94d$bc6a3360$353e9a20$@att.net> <0b8c01ceb965$4e85f380$eb91da80$@att.net> <0c4801ceb977$af578b80$0e06a280$@att.net> <20130925210033.GG10405@leitl.org> <00f101ceba58$fd16eeb0$f744cc10$@att.net> <5243D829.4030307@aleph.se> <524815EA.9060408@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 5:58 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > On 2013-09-29 10:51, BillK wrote: > >> >> Sure, people have different views on what we really ought to do. But that > doesn't relativize moral truth any more than the fact that people have had > different views on the shape of the earth changes what shape it really is. > There could be a One True Moral System that we may or may not have found. > The deep question is of course if the OTMS exists, how it exists, and if we > can know it. In practice, however, moral systems do have sensible and > actionable ideas that should be followed, especially when several agree > with each other. Now there is a job that just perhaps no machine will ever be able to figure out... LOL. > And, of course, the people employed in nasty jobs might object > >> strongly to being told that their job has been eliminated. >> > > Should we introduce a cheap shipwrecking robot that would prevent > Pakistani children from making a living in the industry, yet save their > health? It is nontrivial, sure. But what about medical robots that make > medical care cheaper? Some doctors and nurses will be forced to do > different jobs, but healthcare will become cheaper and easier to provide to > poor people. Now, the occupation doctor is not so bad that it ought not > exist. It is just consequentially a good thing if it could be done with a > gadget. There are other jobs (fluffers, sewage workers, guano or sulphur > collectors, CTS decon or porta potty cleaners) where I think a very strong > case can be made in nearly every moral system that it would be good for the > workers if that work did not exist. > I resent fluffers being put into the same category as porta potty cleaners. Aside from that one man's child labor is another man's automation. I have no doubt there are some people doing horrible things who actually > love their jobs. But if those are rare in the occupation, you have a good > reason to suspect that the occupation ought to go. According to Mike Rowe, loving dirty jobs is more of the norm than the exception. For example, I would much prefer operating an excavator to programming a computer, but there is just no money in it. My most favorite job of all time was planting pineapples, which was backbreaking even at 16. But the views of Kaho'Olawe were just to die for. > The transhuman enhancement of morality is a dangerous concept. One > >> man's morality is another man's oppression. >> > > Only if you try to impose your morality on others. See the work on the > ethics of moral enhancement we have done in Oxford: there are plenty of > things that might be doable that would make people better able to act > morally without prescribing what morality to believe in. There are things we all could likely agree on. While child labor is relative, child pornography probably isn't. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From gsantostasi at gmail.com Tue Oct 1 01:16:06 2013 From: gsantostasi at gmail.com (Giovanni Santostasi) Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2013 20:16:06 -0500 Subject: [ExI] roboburgers to go In-Reply-To: <0a1801ceb94d$bc6a3360$353e9a20$@att.net> References: <0a1801ceb94d$bc6a3360$353e9a20$@att.net> Message-ID: There is only one solution. Automate everything and give people a living salary. Wealth should be shared. Otherwise Elysium scenarios would ensue. Give paradise to everybody. Only way. Giovanni On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 12:44 PM, spike wrote: > ** ** > > We knew this was going to happen eventually. A local company did this. > The timing is interesting, since the fast food workers are threatening to > strike unless their wages are raised way above minimum. Check it outwardly: > **** > > ** ** > > http://momentummachines.com/#team**** > > ** ** > > spike**** > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Tue Oct 1 02:44:15 2013 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2013 22:44:15 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <20130922205001.GP10405@leitl.org> <20130927055747.GI10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 7:59 PM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 12:47 PM, John Clark wrote: > >> On Fri, Sep 27, 2013 Eugen Leitl wrote: >> If it's all hopeless then what's the point of blabbing about it? Let us >> enjoy the little time we have left! And I still haven't heard if you've >> accepted my bet about the shortage of uranium, remember $1000 can buy a lot >> of cans of beans that will come in handy after the apocalypse. >> > > Perhaps if you bet $1000 worth of gold at today's prices, or $1000 worth > of today's Bitcoin you'll get a bite... :-) Since everything is going to > hell, $1000 may only buy ONE can of beans after the apocalypse. > > Maybe they should cut out the squabbling over "storage of value" in arbitrary currency and just bet directly in beans. (or cans of beans if one is extremely confident) I guess we'll have to figure some exchange rate from USD->BTC->PAB. It'll be interesting because demand for Post Apocalypse Bean supplies goes way up just as the exchanges for BTC cease to exist. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Tue Oct 1 03:16:55 2013 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2013 23:16:55 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Open source programs to get more kids to code In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 8:38 PM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > On Sep 30, 2013 6:37 AM, "BillK" wrote: > > For some reason boys don?t seem > > to like Alice very much > > > the edit screen is not your standard > > > 'code' view, instead it?s friendly to kids by giving them pull down > > menus of actions. > > Uh huh. "Friendly". And have they tested a "standard code view", much > less an IDE that catches basic mistakes like a missing }, on these same > kids? (Not hypothetical kids, not their own if their own wouldn't be using > Alice outside of the test, but the same actual users.) > > Even kids can be turned off by UIs that get in the user's way. > > I used Alice for a multimedia class. I wish the code IDE could be retooled for web scripting environments like javascript, php, and sql. I don't think it would work as well for huge projects, but we shouldn't be building huge monolithic projects these days anyway, right? I also feel like Alice's drag & drop coding would be excellent for touch interface. If Alice-style IDE and Firebug-style editor combined, programming would be much more intuitive. as far as the "storytelling" Alice goes, I doubt it is obvious that "boys don't like Alice very much." I think it is more likely that girls prefer the storytelling, stage directing, control of the 'action' that is afforded them in the storytelling Alice mod. I wonder if this is a gender bias that we're still programming onto children. Anyway, I wanted to endorse Alice for being a pretty cool project overall. I went looking for other game-like means of teaching programming. One of my favorite back-in-the-day Apple //c games was Omega. Your battle winnings could be used to purchase better virtual tank hardware and the clever/efficient "AI" software you wrote for it is what gave you any hope of surviving battles vs other tanks. Yes it was primitive; and it was fun. I'm not sure if we can teach that experience as "fun" anymore. It seems like any activity that takes more than 3-4 minutes to learn and start receiving positive reward feedback is probably going to be abandoned for those that do. Maybe we're not yet wireheaded, but it seems we're heading towards wireheading even if it's wireless by the time we arrive. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Tue Oct 1 03:58:36 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2013 20:58:36 -0700 Subject: [ExI] watch yourself: volunteers needed Message-ID: <003001cebe5a$82103f40$8630bdc0$@att.net> >.If the government shutdown proceeds tomorrow, we need volunteers to spy on themselves.I will start setting the example by noting the contents of this post. Recognizing that I wrote it, I will become suspicious of myself as possibly being some kind of snarky subversive. If l watch me will you watch you? If so, can we report each other to ourselves in this forum? Spike Requisition cancelled! The shutdown is going ahead in three minutes. But the NSA is immune. We no longer need to watch ourselves. Our government will do it for us: Government shutdown won't shut down NSA spying Published September 30, 2013 watchdog.org Facebook 183 Twitter 86 LinkedIn 0 ADVERTISEMENT Unless Congress can agree on a new budget, the federal government will shut down midnight Monday. But that's unlikely to stop the massive spy machine at the National Security Agency. The possible government shutdown would affect bureaucrats, park rangers and countless other government employees and contractors across the country. Even three-quarters of the White House staff would be sent home. But "essential personnel" and services would stay online -- including the NSA's surveillance operations. "A shutdown would be unlikely to affect core NSA operations," a government official familiar with the plans told The Hill on Thursday . -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Tue Oct 1 04:24:08 2013 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2013 21:24:08 -0700 Subject: [ExI] watch yourself: volunteers needed In-Reply-To: <003001cebe5a$82103f40$8630bdc0$@att.net> References: <003001cebe5a$82103f40$8630bdc0$@att.net> Message-ID: This disturbed me, though the man in question suffers from terrible judgment, and also needs to take a course in proper grammar... http://www.sott.net/article/266872-They-proved-him-right-FBI-interrogated-man-after-comment-about-police-state-on-Facebook John On 9/30/13, spike wrote: > > > > >>.If the government shutdown proceeds tomorrow, we need volunteers to spy >> on > themselves.I will start setting the example by noting the contents of this > post. Recognizing that I wrote it, I will become suspicious of myself as > possibly being some kind of snarky subversive. If l watch me will you > watch > you? If so, can we report each other to ourselves in this forum? Spike > > > > > > Requisition cancelled! The shutdown is going ahead in three minutes. But > the NSA is immune. We no longer need to watch ourselves. Our government > will do it for us: > > > > > Government shutdown won't shut down NSA spying > > > Published September 30, 2013 > > watchdog.org > > Facebook > wn-nsa-spying/> 183 Twitter > wn-nsa-spying/> 86 LinkedIn > wn-nsa-spying/> 0 > > ADVERTISEMENT > > Unless Congress can agree on a new budget, the federal government will shut > down midnight Monday. > > But that's unlikely to stop the massive spy machine at the National > Security > Agency. > > The possible government shutdown would affect bureaucrats, park rangers and > countless other government employees and contractors across the country. > Even three-quarters of the White House staff would be sent home. > > But "essential personnel" and services would stay online -- including the > NSA's surveillance operations. > > "A shutdown would be unlikely to affect core NSA operations," a government > official familiar with the plans told The Hill on Thursday > own-unlikely-to-curb-nsa-spying> . > > > > > > > > From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Tue Oct 1 04:48:07 2013 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2013 21:48:07 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Space X's Falcon 9 Launch Message-ID: Exciting news! http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/30/spacexs-60-more-powerful-falcon-9-rocket-can-lift-a-skyscraper-be-reused/#ugfoTlmc2lpSMdk8.99 John From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Tue Oct 1 04:49:23 2013 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2013 21:49:23 -0700 Subject: [ExI] What will be the next gene therapy? Message-ID: Things are progressing... http://www.technologyreview.com/news/519071/when-will-gene-therapy-come-to-the-us/ John From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Tue Oct 1 04:54:50 2013 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2013 21:54:50 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Engineers invent programming language to to build synthetic DNA Message-ID: I find this rather enthralling... I love to think about where this will take us in twenty or thirty years... http://phys.org/news/2013-09-language-synthetic-dna.html John : ) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Tue Oct 1 07:11:46 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2013 00:11:46 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Space X's Falcon 9 Launch In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Let's hope it doesn't turn out to be just another rebuildable, like the shuttle. Though there are signs that won't be the case this time. On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 9:48 PM, John Grigg wrote: > Exciting news! > > > http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/30/spacexs-60-more-powerful-falcon-9-rocket-can-lift-a-skyscraper-be-reused/#ugfoTlmc2lpSMdk8.99 > > > John > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rahmans at me.com Tue Oct 1 07:39:44 2013 From: rahmans at me.com (Omar Rahman) Date: Tue, 01 Oct 2013 09:39:44 +0200 Subject: [ExI] =?windows-1252?q?Tap_tap=85=2EHello=3F_Is_this_thing_on=3F_?= =?windows-1252?q?=28Or_Zombie_Apocalypse!=29?= In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <3BE3E642-B8AF-4182-99D4-3AADE05D500C@me.com> Dear All, Forget 'philosophical zombies', we have 'political zombies' in Washington. The shambling horde emerging from K street alone is enough to terrify the sane. So, how are you all doing in the post apocalyptic libertarian paradise? This is twice now that the Disciples of Reagan have acted on his proclamation "Government is the problem!" I wonder how the markets will react to this elimination of government. That's the true test of anything and everything, right? Media pundits are coming for our brains......*crash* .....*bang*.......*aaaaahhhhhhHHHHaaaAAAAa* .....braaiiins............braaaaiiiiiinnnnnnssss............ Braaaaaaaaiiiiinnnnnnnns, Omar Rahman From atymes at gmail.com Tue Oct 1 08:01:11 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2013 01:01:11 -0700 Subject: [ExI] =?windows-1252?q?Tap_tap=85=2EHello=3F_Is_this_thing_on=3F_?= =?windows-1252?q?=28Or_Zombie_Apocalypse!=29?= In-Reply-To: <3BE3E642-B8AF-4182-99D4-3AADE05D500C@me.com> References: <3BE3E642-B8AF-4182-99D4-3AADE05D500C@me.com> Message-ID: Not so much. Only bits of the government are getting shut down. More may get suspended the longer this goes on. This happened before, a bit under two decades ago. Then as now, Republican Congress vs. Democratic President. Then as now, the public backed the President. Last time was some days until the Republicans found out they really didn't have public support, and backed down. This time they seem more ideological, and more extremist (in part because they're fighting a black President: some of them have all but openly admitted racist motivations). That probably means it'll take longer. What will be more interesting, for good or for ill, is if they haven't backed down by the time the debt ceiling must be raised. I hear the deadline is currently projected to be October 17th. Forcing the US to default is no mere shutdown. On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 12:39 AM, Omar Rahman wrote: > > > Dear All, > > Forget 'philosophical zombies', we have 'political zombies' in Washington. > The shambling horde emerging from K street alone is enough to terrify the > sane. > > So, how are you all doing in the post apocalyptic libertarian paradise? > This is twice now that the Disciples of Reagan have acted on his > proclamation "Government is the problem!" I wonder how the markets will > react to this elimination of government. That's the true test of anything > and everything, right? > > Media pundits are coming for our brains......*crash* > .....*bang*.......*aaaaahhhhhhHHHHaaaAAAAa* > .....braaiiins............braaaaiiiiiinnnnnnssss............ > > Braaaaaaaaiiiiinnnnnnnns, > > Omar Rahman > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Tue Oct 1 11:09:28 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2013 13:09:28 +0200 Subject: [ExI] =?utf-8?q?Tap_tap=E2=80=A6=2EHello=3F_Is_this_thing_on=3F_?= =?utf-8?q?=28Or_Zombie_Apocalypse!=29?= In-Reply-To: References: <3BE3E642-B8AF-4182-99D4-3AADE05D500C@me.com> Message-ID: <20131001110927.GI10405@leitl.org> On Tue, Oct 01, 2013 at 01:01:11AM -0700, Adrian Tymes wrote: > What will be more interesting, for good or for ill, is if they haven't > backed down by the time the debt ceiling must be raised. I hear the > deadline is currently projected to be October 17th. Forcing the US to > default is no mere shutdown. The US is bankrupt. (Most countries are in fact bankrupt). Provoking the sovereign default now would be perhaps smarter than having it happen latter, out of your control. Of course this will crash the world economy, but that's also going to happen, anyway. From pharos at gmail.com Tue Oct 1 11:27:35 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2013 12:27:35 +0100 Subject: [ExI] =?windows-1252?q?Tap_tap=85=2EHello=3F_Is_this_thing_on=3F_?= =?windows-1252?q?=28Or_Zombie_Apocalypse!=29?= In-Reply-To: <20131001110927.GI10405@leitl.org> References: <3BE3E642-B8AF-4182-99D4-3AADE05D500C@me.com> <20131001110927.GI10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 12:09 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > The US is bankrupt. (Most countries are in fact bankrupt). > Provoking the sovereign default now would be perhaps smarter than > having it happen latter, out of your control. Of course this will > crash the world economy, but that's also going to happen, anyway. > Only the time of the default would be under their control. Thereafter chaos ensues. So perhaps they would like a few more years to stockpile and prepare before defaulting. Might as well keep the printing presses running while the good times roll. (Good times for the top 1% only, but that's what matters). BillK From eugen at leitl.org Tue Oct 1 11:39:11 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2013 13:39:11 +0200 Subject: [ExI] =?utf-8?q?Tap_tap=E2=80=A6=2EHello=3F_Is_this_thing_on=3F_?= =?utf-8?q?=28Or_Zombie_Apocalypse!=29?= In-Reply-To: References: <3BE3E642-B8AF-4182-99D4-3AADE05D500C@me.com> <20131001110927.GI10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20131001113911.GM10405@leitl.org> On Tue, Oct 01, 2013 at 12:27:35PM +0100, BillK wrote: > Only the time of the default would be under their control. Thereafter > chaos ensues. Sure thing. > So perhaps they would like a few more years to stockpile and prepare > before defaulting. They didn't bother to prepare for it before, why should you expect they'll plan for a managed collapse in future? The sooner it blows, the less the damage, after the smoke clears. Percussive maintenance of the economy; it's the only thing left. > Might as well keep the printing presses running while the good times roll. It does indeed work very well, until it doesn't. > (Good times for the top 1% only, but that's what matters). Technically it's more ~0.1%, but, yes. From eugen at leitl.org Tue Oct 1 12:18:29 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2013 14:18:29 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <20130927055747.GI10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20131001121829.GR10405@leitl.org> On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 02:08:43PM +1300, Andrew Mckee wrote: > On Fri, 27 Sep 2013 17:57:47 +1200, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > >Because alternative fuelcycle MSR breeders are an unsolved problem. > >Nobody knows if they can be made to work eventually, > > So more research and development is needed to figure out if they are We need to be 90% done by 2050. This means that nuclear energy sources will be not a noticeable part (<<1 TW) of the transition. > feasible, isn't that pretty much par for the course of every new > piece of complex technology humans have invented? Alternative fuelcycle research programs (these which have not been shut down due to problems) are alive and well all over the world. Yet they have not been able to produce a solution in over half a century. Including ability to draw funding, even from their more enthusiastic proponents. > >but even if, > >we already know they would come too late to make a difference. > > Too late, how so?, surely everything arrives into existence right > after some clever person(s) gets off their ass and decides to make > something useful, exactly when is of more interest to historians I Infrastructure work is not an idea, or a mobile app. Look at the last time we did it. Try ordering a synfuel plant on Amazon. > would think. From johnkclark at gmail.com Tue Oct 1 16:15:25 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2013 12:15:25 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: <20131001121829.GR10405@leitl.org> References: <20130927055747.GI10405@leitl.org> <20131001121829.GR10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 8:18 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > We need to be 90% done by 2050. This means that nuclear energy > sources will be not a noticeable part Today France delivers over 75% of its electricity from nuclear energy, but even with ridiculous subsidies wind power couldn't do better than 3% in 2012. So I ask you, which technology is more likely to play a noticeable part in the production of energy in 2050, wind or nuclear? > Alternative fuelcycle research programs (these which have not been shut > down due to problems) are alive and well all over the world. > Over the last several decades the worldwide research budget for Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors wouldn't be enough to cover the operational costs of a average sized McDonald's restaurant, and the reason for that is people like you would organize protest marches against any politician who even whispered the N word in his sleep. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ALONZOTG at verizon.net Tue Oct 1 15:22:58 2013 From: ALONZOTG at verizon.net (Alan Grimes) Date: Tue, 01 Oct 2013 11:22:58 -0400 Subject: [ExI] =?windows-1252?q?Tap_tap=85=2EHello=3F_Is_this_thing_on=3F_?= =?windows-1252?q?=28Or_Zombie_Apocalypse!=29?= In-Reply-To: <20131001113911.GM10405@leitl.org> References: <3BE3E642-B8AF-4182-99D4-3AADE05D500C@me.com> <20131001110927.GI10405@leitl.org> <20131001113911.GM10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <524AE8D2.4060608@verizon.net> Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Tue, Oct 01, 2013 at 12:27:35PM +0100, BillK wrote: > >> Only the time of the default would be under their control. Thereafter >> chaos ensues. > Sure thing. > >> So perhaps they would like a few more years to stockpile and prepare >> before defaulting. > They didn't bother to prepare for it before, why should you expect they'll > plan for a managed collapse in future? The sooner it blows, the less > the damage, after the smoke clears. Percussive maintenance of the economy; > it's the only thing left. Oh they've been preparing for it! The DHS has bought over two billion rounds of hollow point ammunition. (not legal for warfare use). They've been buying APCs, mobile checkpoints, basically a whole laundry list of stuff you would want to put down a rebellion. There are rumors that there are entire underground cities for the 1% and the culprits of all this to retreat to. -- NOTICE: NEW E-MAIL ADDRESS, SEE ABOVE Powers are not rights. From rtomek at ceti.pl Tue Oct 1 18:21:26 2013 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2013 20:21:26 +0200 (CEST) Subject: [ExI] Open source programs to get more kids to code In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Mon, 30 Sep 2013, Mike Dougherty wrote: > as far as the "storytelling" Alice goes, I doubt it is obvious that > "boys don't like Alice very much." I think it is more likely that girls > prefer the storytelling, stage directing, control of the 'action' that > is afforded them in the storytelling Alice mod. I wonder if this is a > gender bias that we're still programming onto children. Boys don't like storytelling to Alice - and much later, they don't like when Alice insists to know what they are thinking about. Connection? > Anyway, I wanted to endorse Alice for being a pretty cool project > overall. I went looking for other game-like means of teaching > programming. One of my favorite back-in-the-day Apple //c games was > Omega. Your battle winnings could be used to purchase better virtual > tank hardware and the clever/efficient "AI" software you wrote for it is > what gave you any hope of surviving battles vs other tanks. Yes it was > primitive; and it was fun. Perhaps because the tank didn't ask you strange/idiotic questions :-). > I'm not sure if we can teach that experience as "fun" anymore. It seems > like any activity that takes more than 3-4 minutes to learn and start > receiving positive reward feedback is probably going to be abandoned for > those that do. Maybe we're not yet wireheaded, but it seems we're > heading towards wireheading even if it's wireless by the time we arrive. Ouch. Only 3-4 minutes? This is so much worse than anything I could expect. It almost resembles a situation from Kate Wilhelm's "Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang" - when they discover new clones lack imagination, and when old ones see snow sculpture of a girl the new only see a heap of snow, no associations, bye-bye. I wonder if it always was like this (only some kids can trespass 3-4 min limit without passing out) or is it peculiarity of recent times? So, it's going to be peak programmers, too? In a world where everything including rolls of toilet paper is to include a micro? Wow. I understand that LOGO [1] is very much defashioned and forgotten? And "program is text" has been flushed down the drain, too? I ask because one thing that struck me was the number of environments available in the article - so it is possible a kid will end up learning all eight or ten of them, always repeating something. Would have been nice to have just one language good enough to cover at least 80% of those different areas - especially if its name wasn't Java, Javascript or Basic. [1] AFAICT LOGO is being constantly mistook for kids' prog lang, while being also a fully fledged full time lang on par with Lisps. I recall reading once that it's LISP without parentheses. [2] [2] Opinions like these can be very misleading - says someone who learned Python after being trickled into believing "Python is just like Lisp" by one prominent AI hunter. Well, assembler is just like Lisp, too. But in case of LOGO it may be much more true than in case of Python. Heh. Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From anders at aleph.se Tue Oct 1 21:23:10 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Tue, 01 Oct 2013 22:23:10 +0100 Subject: [ExI] =?windows-1252?q?Tap_tap=85=2EHello=3F_Is_this_thing_on=3F_?= =?windows-1252?q?=28Or_Zombie_Apocalypse!=29?= In-Reply-To: <3BE3E642-B8AF-4182-99D4-3AADE05D500C@me.com> References: <3BE3E642-B8AF-4182-99D4-3AADE05D500C@me.com> Message-ID: <524B3D3E.7050606@aleph.se> On 01/10/2013 08:39, Omar Rahman wrote: > So, how are you all doing in the post apocalyptic libertarian paradise? My impression is that it is just a tad more severe than when Belgium (the Galt's Gulch of Europe!) spent months without a government. -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Faculty of Philosophy Oxford University From spike66 at att.net Wed Oct 2 01:06:11 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2013 18:06:11 -0700 Subject: [ExI] volunteers needed Message-ID: <046901cebf0b$964542b0$c2cfc810$@att.net> >>.If the government shutdown proceeds tomorrow, we need volunteers to spy on themselves..spike >.Requisition cancelled! The shutdown is going ahead in three minutes. But the NSA is immune. We no longer need to watch ourselves. Our government will do it for us: Government shutdown won't shut down NSA spying It has long been noted that short snappy slogans win campaigns. Examples are Tippecanoe and Tyler Too, which won for William Harrison in 1840 and I Like Ike, which won for Eisenhower and Nixon in 1952. Note in both the previous examples, neither slogan gave any actual logical reason to vote for the candidates, depending on how you look at it. The Tippecanoe thing had a cool alliteration and the works Ike and like rhyme. In light of the government shutdown that took place starting today, it occurred to me that a nice snappy bumper-sticker slogan could be just the thing for the next US election cycle, one which expresses the meme that this democracy works just fine without a fully funded NSA to spy on us, one which relies on citizen volunteers to take up the slack. Suggested campaign slogan: Watch yourself, dude. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bookemdanomurderone at yahoo.com Wed Oct 2 02:40:15 2013 From: bookemdanomurderone at yahoo.com (Bookemdano Murderone) Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2013 19:40:15 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [ExI] volunteers needed In-Reply-To: <046901cebf0b$964542b0$c2cfc810$@att.net> References: <046901cebf0b$964542b0$c2cfc810$@att.net> Message-ID: <1380681615.12120.YahooMailNeo@web125405.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> ?"Suggested campaign slogan:? Watch yourself, dude." ? Which only means to?bubbas to plant cameras in their boudoirs. Best campaign slogan: 'Nixon's the One'. It was a presentiment: it meant he would be?the first one to resign. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Wed Oct 2 04:05:16 2013 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Wed, 2 Oct 2013 00:05:16 -0400 Subject: [ExI] another step towards uploading Message-ID: Coming just weeks after description of helium persufflation for fracture-free cryonic suspension, here is this: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130927123504.htm This is enormously interesting. 10 nm resolution for MRI, if coupled to MRS (MR spectroscopy) could lead to developing the ability to read off synaptic strengths directly from frozen tissue. This would be a major improvement over currently envisioned techniques, such as antibody perfusion or other molecule-specific staining techniques, followed by near-field microscopy. Staining is notoriously difficult and variable and perfusion of frozen tissue is essentially impossible. A technique capable of directly reading nanoscale molecular distributions of multiple molecular species (a prerequisite for individual brain physiology reconstruction) is the holy grail of brain uploading. Near-field MRS could be it, perhaps. Rafal From anders at aleph.se Wed Oct 2 09:49:29 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Wed, 02 Oct 2013 10:49:29 +0100 Subject: [ExI] another step towards uploading In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <524BEC29.2010505@aleph.se> On 2013-10-02 05:05, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > A technique capable of directly reading nanoscale molecular > distributions of multiple molecular species (a prerequisite for > individual brain physiology reconstruction) is the holy grail of brain > uploading. Near-field MRS could be it, perhaps. > I wonder how much and what information is actually needed to deduce synapse types. Obviously, just cataloging the local chemical species would give a ground truth. But we also know vesicle size and electron density gives about a bit of information (roughly, excitatory or inhibitory). Voltammetry reveals levels of dopamine, serotonin and noradrenaline. No doubt other markers indicate other properties, likely in a noisy and overlapping manner. But from a machine learning perspective, if we had good data sets of multimodal data we could try training classifiers that could tease out a proper decision tree. Comparing with real ground truth is of course essential, so we need a "chemical dissection method" for synapses to use as test set. But I suspect that in the end we will end up with surprisingly simple statistical models. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From pharos at gmail.com Wed Oct 2 10:07:29 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Wed, 2 Oct 2013 11:07:29 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Your Genome Is a Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland Message-ID: October 1, 2013 ? By Michael White ? Contrary to what you may have heard, your genome is not a highly sophisticated, finely tuned data storage and processing device. It?s a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Your 25,000 genes reside in a genetic landscape littered with the rubble of ancient and ongoing battles with hordes of viruses, clone armies of genetic parasites, and zombie genes that should be dead but aren?t. The idea that your genome is an ecosystem populated with species that pursue their own self-interest may make you wonder: Who am I, really? Unlike the parasites that you pick up when you drink the water in a place where you shouldn?t, transposable elements and endogenous viruses aren?t really foreign invaders; they *are* your DNA, and they have been part of our genetic identity for longer than we have existed as a species. They are among the raw materials from which our genes have been assembled, and a clear demonstration that our genetic core is a product of evolution. Like our social identities, our genetic identities are the result of competition, conflict, cooperation, and accommodation. Learning how our genome?s ecosystem works is a key part of our efforts to understand the relationship between our DNA and our health. BillK From painlord2k at libero.it Thu Oct 3 17:30:02 2013 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Thu, 03 Oct 2013 19:30:02 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Silk Road demise Message-ID: <524DA99A.4000004@libero.it> Silk Road is a template for future drugs and enhancements markets when they will be banned. ++ Apparently the fall of Silk Road and Dread Pirate Roberts was entirely caused by the carelessness of DPR in concealing his identity. Like with Chernobyl a number of mistakes were needed to cause the end result and more were done. By the way, alternatives exist and are already on the market. Black Market Reloaded and Sheep Market Place are taking up the migration of customers just now (with some problem given the numbers of new incoming buyers). The vendors are pretty well the sames on Silk Road. Silk Road processes 9 millions of bitcoin in sales in two years (around 1.2 billions of USD), netting around 600 K bitcoins in fees (around 80 M USD at the current exchange). I'm sure the current competitors are busily taking up all his users and more competitors are evaluating how enter the market. The Federals bought more than 100 items (drugs) on Silk Road and they were just able to indict DPR after they tricked him to help them to sell 1 Kg of coke, caught an aide of DPR and then tricked him to pay (with a bank account) to kill the same guy (posing to blackmail him). In the end this is a question of survival of the fittest. The careless, the stupid, the shortsighted are culled by the police, the others move to occupy their place on the market. And they will be more difficult to catch. Anyway, the police took two years to take it down, even with so many mistakes done. They bough 100 samples of drugs. This tell me they invested a lot of efforts and resources to find him and locate him. How many resources have they to devote to this? If he didn't do these initial mistakes, how much time they would have needed to locate him? Four years? Ten years? They took down Napster but they didn't stopped people from sharing. They took down innumerable drug traffickers and drug trafficking is unaffected. The stuff is cheaper and cheaper, a sign of a efficient market. As a commenter on Reddit put it: "From February 6, 2011 to July 23, 2013, there were 1,229,465 transactions completed on the site. These transactions involved 146,946 unique buyer accounts, and 3,877 unique vendor accounts. this shit is huge" Mirco From lubkin at unreasonable.com Thu Oct 3 22:08:15 2013 From: lubkin at unreasonable.com (David Lubkin) Date: Thu, 03 Oct 2013 18:08:15 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Neptune's Brood Message-ID: <201310032235.r93MYfQn000306@andromeda.ziaspace.com> I just finished Charlie Stross's transhumanist novel Neptune's Brood, set millennia after the events of his Heinleinesque Saturn's Children. I expect strange and novel from him. This fills the bill. I think it helps to understand three-phase commits and the uses of public-key encryption. I do, so it's hard to be sure how much sense it will make to someone who doesn't. The aspect I found most surprising is how many parallels I see to Cordwainer Smith's Norstrilia. A very different feel, and yet? My favorite line: "Unarchive the holy malware suite and prepare it for transmission." -- David. From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Fri Oct 4 03:46:06 2013 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2013 23:46:06 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Neptune's Brood In-Reply-To: <201310032235.r93MYfQn000306@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <201310032235.r93MYfQn000306@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: I read it too, and I did enjoy it, although with some reservations: Charlie seems to have developed an obsessive hostility towards Christianity, which pervades all of his recent books, starting with the Laundry series (very good, all of them) and stretching all the way to the far-future world of robots in Neptune's Brood. I am as good an atheist as any, but I have over the years lost any grudges against Christianity that I might have harbored earlier. Charlie doesn't revile religion in general but rather concentrates on this one faith, and in today's world this smacks too much of kicking someone who is lying on the ground already. I find it mildly off-putting. Also, while I understand the need for the literary device of implausible limitations of future progress, I dislike it. Neptune's Brood is predicated on the existence of fundamental limits on intelligence, which are completely implausible given our current knowledge, yet without such limits it is difficult to tell a story of human-like protagonists in the far future where, by any extrapolation of current trends, non-human, and possibly superhuman agents should be dominant. At least Charlie explicitly states such limitations as a premise, and kudos for that, he proves he is aware of the problem, but I don't like it anyway: It's too much of a reverse deus ex machina, so to say, a literary device banishing deities so as to keep the plot going. On Thu, Oct 3, 2013 at 6:08 PM, David Lubkin wrote: > I just finished Charlie Stross's transhumanist novel Neptune's Brood, set > millennia after the events of his Heinleinesque Saturn's Children. I expect > strange and novel from him. This fills the bill. I think it helps to > understand > three-phase commits and the uses of public-key encryption. I do, so it's > hard to be sure how much sense it will make to someone who doesn't. > > The aspect I found most surprising is how many parallels I see to Cordwainer > Smith's Norstrilia. A very different feel, and yet? > > My favorite line: "Unarchive the holy malware suite and prepare it for > transmission." From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Fri Oct 4 04:00:47 2013 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2013 00:00:47 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Purified humanity Re: Your Genome Is a Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland Message-ID: On Wed, Oct 2, 2013 at 6:07 AM, BillK wrote: > October 1, 2013 ? By Michael White ? > Contrary to what you may have heard, your genome is not a highly > sophisticated, finely tuned data storage and processing device. It?s a > post-apocalyptic wasteland. Your 25,000 genes reside in a genetic > landscape littered with the rubble of ancient and ongoing battles with > hordes of viruses, clone armies of genetic parasites, and zombie genes > that should be dead but aren?t. > ### In the next 20 years we might have the technologies sufficient to edit a human genome to remove all the garbage of the ages. No endogenous viruses, a much shorter genome with enhanced copy protection - imagine having no redundancy in genes, making most mutations deadly - this would give a much smaller "mutational cross-section" = many fewer parts to go wrong but if it goes wrong, it goes all the way to necrosis, rather than becoming an undead enemy, a neoplasm. The organism would be resilient, energetically efficient and completely cancer-proof. And all that even before splicing in any really new stuff. I wonder what would be the performance of such an organism. Rafal From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Fri Oct 4 04:11:27 2013 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2013 00:11:27 -0400 Subject: [ExI] another step towards uploading In-Reply-To: <524BEC29.2010505@aleph.se> References: <524BEC29.2010505@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Wed, Oct 2, 2013 at 5:49 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > On 2013-10-02 05:05, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: >> >> A technique capable of directly reading nanoscale molecular >> distributions of multiple molecular species (a prerequisite for >> individual brain physiology reconstruction) is the holy grail of brain >> uploading. Near-field MRS could be it, perhaps. >> > > I wonder how much and what information is actually needed to deduce synapse > types. Obviously, just cataloging the local chemical species would give a > ground truth. But we also know vesicle size and electron density gives about > a bit of information (roughly, excitatory or inhibitory). Voltammetry > reveals levels of dopamine, serotonin and noradrenaline. No doubt other > markers indicate other properties, likely in a noisy and overlapping manner. > But from a machine learning perspective, if we had good data sets of > multimodal data we could try training classifiers that could tease out a > proper decision tree. Comparing with real ground truth is of course > essential, so we need a "chemical dissection method" for synapses to use as > test set. But I suspect that in the end we will end up with surprisingly > simple statistical models. ### I think you are right about the simple statistical models substitutable for large chunks of dendritic trees but I would expect that the translation from a physical description of a neuron to a simplified equivalent might be very complex. There is a fair amount of analog computation going on in the dendritic trees, where the shape of the tree and the precise relative location of synapses modify the summation of inputs from synaptic strengths. After neural scan you would have to do some very heavy brute-force computations to yield the simplified models. All should be doable though, as long as the scan is of sufficient quality. Rafal From spike66 at att.net Fri Oct 4 03:56:22 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2013 20:56:22 -0700 Subject: [ExI] it was the best times, it was the best of times Message-ID: <043101cec0b5$b171ec90$1455c5b0$@att.net> An offlist commentary by a friend really has my wheels turning, compelling me to rephrase Dickens. In all of human history, now is unique in many ways, but I thought of a pleasant one: if one is a pauper, especially a young one, it is definitely the best of times. I don't know about other countries, but if one's standards in housing are not too picky, we now have developed a society where a pauper can really have a decent life, especially if one's favorite thing is devouring information in all its forms, and is a light eater. Consider for instance the way it has always been. If you have a ton of money, you can of course get the best mates, the best home, the best food, the best wheels etc. We know that, and that hasn't changed a bit, ever. But in the old days, if you had nothing, you couldn't really even get training: you couldn't learn to read, or if you could read, you couldn't get reading materials readily. There were public libraries, but we all know that the books there were generally outdated. Certainly better than nothing, but compare a typical public library to Stanford bookstore and you know exactly what I mean: Stanford's store is expensive, but highly selected with only the most wicked cool stuff in there. Of course it costs money. But now. it feels to me like we now have aaaaaalllll thiiiiis coooool stuff available online to the pauper, the free online training tools, the really meaty websites filled with skills that rich and poor alike need to struggle to master. There is still no royal road to trigonometry. In that sense it is the best of times for really poor people. You can pick up internet on a 200 dollar Kindle or equivalent, and there is free wifi over most of this town now. It isn't the fastest and a Kindle isn't the best interface, but for two days' minimum wage, look at all the stuff you can get! This has all given me a vision of sorts, which ties in nicely with the current US government's thrashing about, partially shut down, so they say. The fed was hoping someone would notice. So far we have learned we can do just fine without their expensive help. This shutdown is all about how we are going to do our healthcare. I would argue the proposed solution will be just as broken as the one before it, but I did think of a way that might help. In many countries in the world, people go to medical school right out of high school. I personally know two doctors who went to medical school, one in Iran, the other in China. Both practiced medicine for several years there. Neither has managed to get licensed here. I think we could set up a system where aspiring doctors could do much of their qualification for medical school online, starting at any time. Much of medical school could be done with online training as well. In this way we could generate many more doctors. Of course they would likely not be as competent as our current crop, but they would have far less investment in their education, so they could charge a lot less. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Fri Oct 4 14:52:50 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2013 10:52:50 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Another step towards uploading Message-ID: On Oct 4, 2013, at 12:11 AM, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > > After neural scan you would have to do some very heavy brute-force > computations to yield the simplified models. All should be doable though, > as long as the scan is of sufficient quality. > Right now the most detailed scans of entire brains were not obtained by freezing but by chemical fixation and then cutting the brain into thin slices, some only 30 nanometers or about 100 atoms thick and photographing the slices. I wish the good people at Alcor would say something about chemical fixation, the same process Drexler advocated in "Engines of Creation". I haven't heard any mention of chemopreservation from Alcor since a short 2009 article that I didn't think was very good. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rtomek at ceti.pl Fri Oct 4 18:27:30 2013 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2013 20:27:30 +0200 (CEST) Subject: [ExI] it was the best times, it was the best of times In-Reply-To: <043101cec0b5$b171ec90$1455c5b0$@att.net> References: <043101cec0b5$b171ec90$1455c5b0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Thu, 3 Oct 2013, spike wrote: [...] > But now. it feels to me like we now have aaaaaalllll thiiiiis coooool stuff > available online to the pauper, the free online training tools, the really > meaty websites filled with skills that rich and poor alike need to struggle > to master. There is still no royal road to trigonometry. In that sense it > is the best of times for really poor people. You can pick up internet on a > 200 dollar Kindle or equivalent, and there is free wifi over most of this > town now. It isn't the fastest and a Kindle isn't the best interface, but > for two days' minimum wage, look at all the stuff you can get! I almost agree, but: 1. If I were a pauper, I'd rather spend 100 on decent used laptop than 50 on Kindle. The truth is, one can live quite long while reading stuff on LCD (I lived quite long reading on CRT - albeit I always tried to buy from above the cheapest shelve) and Kindles (or ebook readers, if you please) lack anything valuable in this digital age other than good-for-reading display. I mean, no keyboard (some models sport this laugh of so called keyboard), no compiler, no decent editor of one's choice (say, if one wants Emacs? with full elisp enabled, of course), not even a SD-card (in case of Kindle) - so I can read until I faint but what can I _make_ , on my own, with this knowledge? To make, I need decent kb, some cpu and enough mem to compile. Longterm, I'd say this is worth much more than cool eink display - and I say this while having desktop, laptop and ereader. Last but not least, ereader is to be treated as monolitic piece of hardware - if something buckles up, one can trash it. Some repairs are possible, but it's much easier to try with a laptop and even easier with desktop, where rolling upgrade is one of the coolest property I can think of - it's possible to start with really shitty hw and go up in small steps. 2. While your depiction of prospects is true, and it is so in increasing number of places, the other side of it is that "your pauper" wasn't born a pauper or his parents were not paupers, or their parents etc etc, so he was taught the value of learning oneself (however, what actually is the value of this? perhaps it depends on neighbourhood). The real pauper is born into real paupers, I'm afraid, and then he goes to pauper school and chances are, there he is taught to, say, trade drugs (or trade himself/herself) and to "get reach or day traying". One can see some of paupers' attitude when analysing career of some sportsmen, who at their peak earn millions and present cars to the strangers, then quickly go back to the place of origin when their money dries away (is being given away, is being stolen by their smart advisors and so on). However, I don't think I ever was a pauper (especially that I was able to attend to public schools in times when one could expect from them, just as schools were to expect from me - not sure how much this is the case today). So maybe I'm wrong about something. Particularly when it comes to describing attitudes. Obviously, some paupers elevate themselves quite high and not all are loosing their earnings in stupid ways. Overally, I think I could trade even the network in exchange for ability to read from works freely available in current pub repositories (too many to list them here, Project Gutenberg and its kins). I.e., petabyte local read-only storage may be preferred to twistlers and falsebooks :-). Many of them books are somewhat dated, but anatomy atlas from 1900 or Latin book from 1911 are really good enough for me. But ok, network plus limited local storage for a number of books I find valuable is good, too. The first option would be better for paupers with bad internet access. > This has all given me a vision of sorts, which ties in nicely with the > current US government's thrashing about, partially shut down, so they say. > The fed was hoping someone would notice. So far we have learned we can do > just fine without their expensive help. I have vague suspicion that central _working_ government has quite few good uses, even if I decline to elaborate on those. I think it is ok to trash a gov only if you are goodenooph to take on local robbers, druggers and human traffickers by yourself (an army of one, etc). Otherwise, I advice to pay taxes and demand results (or the other way). I guess Wild West wasn't really very good place to live from today's perspective (hint: if the good always won, where the contemporary bads came from?). I somehow fail to envision anarchic paradise when everybody cooperates and no gov is necessary. Too angelic for us humans. I am much more prone to see how long term no-gov situation turns, in case of country like US, into war of everybody with everybody else. By long term here I mean longer than a week :-). [...] > licensed here. I think we could set up a system where aspiring doctors > could do much of their qualification for medical school online, starting at > any time. Much of medical school could be done with online training as > well. In this way we could generate many more doctors. Of course they > would likely not be as competent as our current crop, but they would have > far less investment in their education, so they could charge a lot less. But, I guess you can have this already? From CA to Mexico, go to hospital there? Tijuana, Chihuahua, Ciudad Juarez? Pay less, have a doc possibly as competent as your average? Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From atymes at gmail.com Sat Oct 5 01:23:21 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2013 18:23:21 -0700 Subject: [ExI] it was the best times, it was the best of times In-Reply-To: References: <043101cec0b5$b171ec90$1455c5b0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Fri, Oct 4, 2013 at 11:27 AM, Tomasz Rola wrote: > I can read until I faint but what can I _make_ , on > my own, with this knowledge? To make, I need decent kb, some cpu and > enough mem to compile. Careful with the programmer's hubris. Not all - not even most - things worth making, can be done entirely in software yet. (That said, a general purpose laptop is more likely than a Kindle to be able to be configured to, say, control a 3D printer or a drone. But that's not directly a result of memory, CPU, et cetera.) > The real pauper is > born into real paupers, I'm afraid, and then he goes to pauper school and > chances are, there he is taught to, say, trade drugs (or trade > himself/herself) and to "get reach or day traying". Quite. Opportunity is wonderful for those who realize there is opportunity and they should reach for it. That is not, and has never been so far as I know, the attitude of the majority of the human race. Hopefully that may change in the future, as many more actually do have opportunity (if they'll take it), but that is far from certain. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Sat Oct 5 23:07:27 2013 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Sat, 5 Oct 2013 19:07:27 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Another step towards uploading In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Friday, October 4, 2013, John Clark wrote: > > > Right now the most detailed scans of entire brains were not obtained by > freezing but by chemical fixation and then cutting the brain into thin > slices, some only 30 nanometers or about 100 atoms thick and photographing > the slices. I wish the good people at Alcor would say something about > chemical fixation, the same process Drexler advocated in "Engines of > Creation". I haven't heard any mention of chemopreservation from Alcor > since a short 2009 article that I didn't think was very good. > ### Max wrote about the choices between vitrification vs. fixation recently (or was it somebody else at Alcor?). The problem is that suspension usually takes place under non-optimal conditions - instead of live perfusion as in the case of animals used for the scans you mentioned, the cryonauts are treated typically after many hours of warm ischemia and this means the perfusion can be rather poor. Freezing here at least stops further damage. Keeping a poorly perfused brain at room temp makes it turn into a mush. This said, one of my greatest worries regarding suspension is organizational failure at Alcor - could happen during civil war, major economic downturn or even due to mismanagement (not to say that the current team is likely to fail but rather, you can never trust the younger generations to stay faithful to the ideas of their predecessors). If I could have elective live perfusion while still fully functional, followed by polymer embedding (this might require some technology development ) and room temperature storage, I might prefer it over cryoprotectant and helium persufflation. I'm assuming that nanoscale MRI would still work in polymer embedded tissue, so there would be no need for heavy metal staining. I do think that both approaches, vitrification and fixation, should be further researched, as much as our limited resources allow but for now vitrification is still the better way to go. Rafal -- Rafal Smigrodzki, MD-PhD Senior Scientist, Gencia Corporation 706 B Forest St. Charlottesville, VA 22903 tel: (434) 295-4800 fax: (434) 295-4951 This electronic message transmission contains information from the biotechnology firm of Gencia Corporation which may be confidential or privileged. The information is intended to be for the use of the individual or entity named above. If you are not the intended recipient, be aware that any disclosure, copying, distribution or use of the contents of this information is prohibited. If you have received this electronic transmission in error, please notify us by telephone (434-295-4800) or by electronic mail (fportell at genciabiotech.com) immediately. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Sun Oct 6 15:33:12 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sun, 6 Oct 2013 11:33:12 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Another step towards uploading In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sat, Oct 5, 2013 at 7:07 PM, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > The problem is that suspension usually takes place under non-optimal > conditions - instead of live perfusion as in the case of animals used for > the scans you mentioned, the cryonauts are treated typically after many > hours of warm ischemia and this means the perfusion can be rather poor. > Freezing here at least stops further damage. Keeping a poorly perfused > brain at room temp makes it turn into a mush. > Apparently a way to overcome this problem was found just a few months ago: http://www.nbcnews.com/science/human-brain-cut-7-400-slices-then-reconstructed-digitally-3-6C10413680 Using an automated process a woman's brain was cut into 7400 slices 20 micrometers thick, a human hair is about 50 micrometers thick. Then they mounted the slices on glass slides, stained them and took very high resolution photographs that almost reached the cellular level. This is 50 times better resolution in all 3 directions than ever made of a human brain before. I can't help but wonder if more information has been preserved about this women, that is to say she has a better chance of resurrection, than any current patient of Alcor. I'm not saying she does but I wonder. > Max wrote about the choices between vitrification vs. fixation recently > (or was it somebody else at Alcor?). > As far as I know the only thing Alcor has said about chemopreservation is here: http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/chemopreservation.html About a year ago I made some comments about some of its assertions, but I received no response from Alcor concerning them: > For example, the expensive and extremely toxic chemical osmium tetroxide > is routinely used for stabilization of lipids in preparation for electron > microscopy. > If something as dangerous to handle and expensive as osmium tetroxide were needed then that could be a show stopper for chemical fixation being a alternative to cryonics, but I don't see why it would be needed. Osmium tetroxide is primarily not a stabilizer but a stain, it works well as a contrast agent in electron microscopes because heavy metals like Osmium scatter lots of electrons. However how information is extracted from my 3 pounds of frozen or chemically fixed brain is not my problem it is the problem of beings who live in a age of advanced Nanotechnology. My only concern is that the information remains intact inside that 3 pounds of grey goo, I don't know exactly how it will be extracted but I doubt it will be by electron microscopes. > Unlike the cryobiologist, the chemical fixation researcher cannot > reverse fixation and test for viability. > I don't understand what is meant by that or what edge Cryonics has over fixation because of it. Viability just means it works, and so far neither Cryonics nor fixation has brought anybody back and I don't think anybody will until advanced nanotechnology is developed. It almost sounds like there is supposed to be some advantage in using the same atoms in the reawakened being as in the old one, but I can't imagine what that advantage could be. > The cryobiologist does not have to confine himself to this fate because > he can attempt to measure viability in the brain > Obviously during revival at every step you'd like to know if you're doing it right and are on the right track, but again I don't see why cryonics would be better at this than fixation. > or even the whole organism. > Preserving any part of the body with either method except for the brain seems completely pointless to me. > Let us assume, for the sake of the argument, that the chemopreservation > advocate has identified a number of fixatives (and other treatments) that > are sufficient for complete ultrastructural preservation of the brain. The > next question is going to be: how stable will chemopreservation be over > time? This is a very important point for the technical feasibility of > chemopreservation. > Yes that is a important point. With Cryonics, unless we're talking about millions of years and as long as things remain cold (but will it?), pretty much all the damage that is going to be done has been done by the time the brain reaches liquid nitrogen temperatures. And I'm not worried about damage caused during thawing because that won't be done with existing technology, assuming it's even thawed at all and it probably won't be; the information will probably be read out by disassembling the brain from the outside in while it remains in solid form. I don't know if chemical fixation would remain as stable over the centuries as freezing, my hunch is that cryonics has a small edge over fixation in this regard but I could be dead wrong, maybe it's a big edge. And I don't want to be dead. > It is not only necessary to demonstrate that all chemicals can be > introduced by perfusion fixation without perfusion artifacts > Both methods are imperfect so it is only necessary to demonstrate that fixation produces fewer artifacts than Cryonics or that the artifacts produced are easier to identify as artifacts to make it the superior technology. > In my opinion, the prospect of autolysis is much worse because when > biomolecules break up into their constitutive parts, and go into solution, > True, but if fixation is done correctly there won't be any fluid for things to move in. > there is a risk that essential parts of the brain will not be fixed, as a > result of inadequacies of the protocol, perfusion artifacts, or long term > degradation. It is at this point where classic cryopreservation really > shines. Even tissue that is not protected from ice formation as a > consequence of perfusion impairment will still be "fixed" through low > temperatures.[...] > That is another very good point. If the cryo-preservative doesn't reach a certain part of the brain things might not be hopeless because at least it still gets frozen so you still might be able to get information out of it if your technology is good enough, but if the chemical fixative doesn't reach part of the brain things are far far more serious. But the smaller the biological sample you're trying to infuse with cryo-preservative or chemical fixative the easier it is, so both methods might be improved if before any chemical was infused or any freezing done a dozen or so thin cuts were made to slice the brain into smaller pieces. The cuts could be made very thin indeed, 30 nanometers or about 100 atoms thick. Yes you would be destroying some tissue but if the technology is good enough to repair all the damage caused by freezing or chemical fixation then I don't think they'd have much trouble figuring out what is supposed to be in that very narrow gap. > [...] there is little hope of inferring the original structure of the > brain. > Yes, the important thing is that things stay put, or at least if they must move the flow should not be turbulent so you can figure out where the parts were before they moved. If things are turbulent then a small change in initial conditions will lead to a huge change in out come and you'll never figure out where things are supposed to go. I don't see why turbulence would occur in chemical fixation and fortunately (see below) it doesn't look like it would happen during the freezing of a brain either (I'm not interested in what happens during unfreezing, that's a problem for advanced nanotechnology, I just want to be sure the information is still inside that frozen lump of tissue). That's why I think Cryonics has a pretty good chance of working at least from a technical viewpoint, whether the brain will actually remain at liquid nitrogen temperatures until the age of nanotechnology and whether anybody will think we're worth the bother of reviving is a entirely different question. Fluid flow stops being smoothly Laminar and starts to become chaotically turbulent when a system has a Reynolds number between 2300 and 4000, although you might get some non chaotic vortices if it is bigger than 30. We can find the approximate Reynolds number by using the formula LDV/N. L is the characteristic size we're interested in, we're interested in cells so L is about 10^-6 meter. D is the density of water, 10^3 kilograms/cubic meter. V is the velocity of the flow, during freezing it's probably less than 10^-3 meters per second but let's be conservative, I'll give you 3 orders of magnitude and call V 1 meter per second. N is the viscosity of water, at room temperature N is 0.001 newton-second/meter^2, it would be less than that when things get cold and even less when water is mixed with glycerol as it is in cryonics but let's be conservative again and ignore those factors. If you plug these numbers into the formula you get a Reynolds number of about 1. 1 is a lot less than 2300 so it looks like any mixing caused by freezing would probably be laminar not turbulent, so you can still deduce the position where things are supposed to be. John K Clark > > This said, one of my greatest worries regarding suspension is > organizational failure at Alcor - could happen during civil war, major > economic downturn or even due to mismanagement (not to say that the current > team is likely to fail but rather, you can never trust the younger > generations to stay faithful to the ideas of their predecessors). If I > could have elective live perfusion while still fully functional, followed > by polymer embedding (this might require some technology development ) and > room temperature storage, I might prefer it over cryoprotectant and helium > persufflation. I'm assuming that nanoscale MRI would still work in polymer > embedded tissue, so there would be no need for heavy metal staining. > > I do think that both approaches, vitrification and fixation, should > be further researched, as much as our limited resources allow but for > now vitrification is still the better way to go. > > Rafal > > > > -- > Rafal Smigrodzki, MD-PhD > Senior Scientist, > Gencia Corporation > 706 B Forest St. > > Charlottesville, VA 22903 > > tel: (434) 295-4800 > > fax: (434) 295-4951 > > > > This electronic message transmission contains information from the > biotechnology firm of Gencia Corporation which may be confidential or > privileged. The information is intended to be for the use of the individual > or entity named above. If you are not the intended recipient, be aware that > any disclosure, copying, distribution or use of the contents of this > information is prohibited. If you have received this electronic > transmission in error, please notify us by telephone (434-295-4800) or by > electronic mail (fportell at genciabiotech.com) immediately. > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Sun Oct 6 17:33:03 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sun, 06 Oct 2013 18:33:03 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Purified humanity Re: Your Genome Is a Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <52519ECF.7090409@aleph.se> On 2013-10-04 05:00, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > > ## In the next 20 years we might have the technologies sufficient to > edit a human genome to remove all the garbage of the ages. No > endogenous viruses, a much shorter genome with enhanced copy > protection - imagine having no redundancy in genes, making most > mutations deadly - this would give a much smaller "mutational > cross-section" = many fewer parts to go wrong but if it goes wrong, it > goes all the way to necrosis, rather than becoming an undead enemy, a > neoplasm. The organism would be resilient, energetically efficient and > completely cancer-proof. And all that even before splicing in any > really new stuff. > > I wonder what would be the performance of such an organism. > Us too. We have been discussing this at FHI at some length, trying to find good references and models. There seem to be a significant mutational load on most organisms, but converting the theory into predictions for actual mental or physical performance has so far eluded us. Anybody who has some good pointers into the literature is most welcome to share them! Removing redundancy to make mutations directly lethal might not be optimal for all genes. A lot of mutations seem to just reduce performance, so you increase the risk of being born with reduced performance genes. After all, being heterozygous for sickle-cell anemia is not lethal, yet pretty annoying. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Sun Oct 6 17:25:11 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sun, 06 Oct 2013 18:25:11 +0100 Subject: [ExI] another step towards uploading In-Reply-To: References: <524BEC29.2010505@aleph.se> Message-ID: <52519CF7.4000200@aleph.se> Ah, I think you misread me (in an interesting direction). I was not talking about dendritic tree computation, just finding out what was in the different synapses. If you do not know whether they are glutaminergic or dopaminergic, it doesn't matter how much you try to brute force what the rest of the cell is doing. I think people tend to overestimate how hard it is to run a nonlinear neuron model. The big problem is getting the parameters right, not the actual simulation - that is mostly a matter of running a lot of HH-like equations, and optimizing for your available computational substrates. Getting enough data from tissue to pin down the simulation parameters *and* check that it produces sensible results (especially since the data collection might have ruined the cell for comparision and testing), that is the challenge. A super-resolution scan might still be worthless if it doesn't tell you what you need to know. On 2013-10-04 05:11, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > On Wed, Oct 2, 2013 at 5:49 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: >> On 2013-10-02 05:05, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: >>> A technique capable of directly reading nanoscale molecular >>> distributions of multiple molecular species (a prerequisite for >>> individual brain physiology reconstruction) is the holy grail of brain >>> uploading. Near-field MRS could be it, perhaps. >>> >> I wonder how much and what information is actually needed to deduce synapse >> types. Obviously, just cataloging the local chemical species would give a >> ground truth. But we also know vesicle size and electron density gives about >> a bit of information (roughly, excitatory or inhibitory). Voltammetry >> reveals levels of dopamine, serotonin and noradrenaline. No doubt other >> markers indicate other properties, likely in a noisy and overlapping manner. >> But from a machine learning perspective, if we had good data sets of >> multimodal data we could try training classifiers that could tease out a >> proper decision tree. Comparing with real ground truth is of course >> essential, so we need a "chemical dissection method" for synapses to use as >> test set. But I suspect that in the end we will end up with surprisingly >> simple statistical models. > ### I think you are right about the simple statistical models > substitutable for large chunks of dendritic trees but I would expect > that the translation from a physical description of a neuron to a > simplified equivalent might be very complex. There is a fair amount of > analog computation going on in the dendritic trees, where the shape of > the tree and the precise relative location of synapses modify the > summation of inputs from synaptic strengths. After neural scan you > would have to do some very heavy brute-force computations to yield the > simplified models. All should be doable though, as long as the scan is > of sufficient quality. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Sun Oct 6 17:19:43 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sun, 06 Oct 2013 18:19:43 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Another step towards uploading In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <52519BAF.7020308@aleph.se> On 2013-10-06 16:33, John Clark wrote: > > http://www.nbcnews.com/science/human-brain-cut-7-400-slices-then-reconstructed-digitally-3-6C10413680 > > Using an automated process a woman's brain was cut into 7400 slices 20 > micrometers thick, a human hair is about 50 micrometers thick. Then > they mounted the slices on glass slides, stained them and took very > high resolution photographs that almost reached the cellular level. > This is 50 times better resolution in all 3 directions than ever made > of a human brain before. I can't help but wonder if more information > has been preserved about this women, that is to say she has a better > chance of resurrection, than any current patient of Alcor. I'm not > saying she does but I wonder. While a tour-de-force of what we can do today in the lab, the scanned images are not enough to reconstruct her network topology. First, they used Nissl stains, so we can mainly see cell nuclei rather than dendrites and synapses. Second, the scan was optical resolution: we know there are fine branches below optical resolution. And third, 20 microns is too wide to get the topology. Looking at the cube here http://connectomethebook.com/?portfolio=atum-cortex-reconstructions http://connectomethebook.com/?portfolio=atum-cortex-reconstructions-2 shows just how much stuff there is in a ~3x3x3 micron cube. The slices are seven times thicker! EM approaches are great in resolution, but overload our data storage methods and lack the big field optical methods have. Now, we can hope the stained sections are stored safely and retain the information for the future methods. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Sun Oct 6 17:28:55 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sun, 06 Oct 2013 18:28:55 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Another step towards uploading In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <52519DD7.1040406@aleph.se> On 2013-10-06 00:07, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > ### Max wrote about the choices between vitrification vs. fixation > recently (or was it somebody else at Alcor?). The problem is that > suspension usually takes place under non-optimal conditions - instead > of live perfusion as in the case of animals used for the scans you > mentioned, the cryonauts are treated typically after many hours of > warm ischemia and this means the perfusion can be rather poor. > Freezing here at least stops further damage. Keeping a poorly perfused > brain at room temp makes it turn into a mush. The problem might be that fixing brains has the same problem. In reality, you will need to proceed more or less like for cryosuspension: wait until the patient is declared dead, and then start biostasis protocols. In fact, I expect cryonics people to be the best kind of people to perform the initial stages of a fixation procedure - they know their way around distributing chemicals in a deanimating body. Lab histologists are a little bit too used to being able to force the deanimation themselves, and to small mammal brains :-) -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From rtomek at ceti.pl Sun Oct 6 20:24:23 2013 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Sun, 6 Oct 2013 22:24:23 +0200 (CEST) Subject: [ExI] it was the best times, it was the best of times In-Reply-To: References: <043101cec0b5$b171ec90$1455c5b0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Fri, 4 Oct 2013, Adrian Tymes wrote: > On Fri, Oct 4, 2013 at 11:27 AM, Tomasz Rola wrote: > > > I can read until I faint but what can I _make_ , on my own, with this > > knowledge? To make, I need decent kb, some cpu and enough mem to > > compile. > > > Careful with the programmer's hubris. Not all - not even most - things > worth making, can be done entirely in software yet. :-) Please forgive me this programmer's hubris of mine, everybody. But to be frank, I consider introduction of programmable computer to be on par with introduction of the wheel and writing. Especially when they met the so called Individual and started to be used by her/him for all things everydaily, big and small. I admit I feel rather uncomfortable whenever I see a computing device with no means to make new software on it - to the point when I consider it broken, somewhere in the back of my head. To some limits, of course. I can easily live with knowledge that car's engine lacks onboard compiler and vi editor. But engine behaviour can be modified with proper combination of cable and software (if we're talking about relatively modern engine). Ditto for Windows desktop - it's quite easy to repair it from the damaged state it is being advertised and sold (well, to some extent - one cannot regrow a bonsai tree too high). OTOH there is growing class of devices, which require more work to undamage them - and I can smell there's quite a big group willing to make permamently damaged computers, and this makes me a bit angry. Because at the same time I keep reading about "PC death" and the like propaganda - sure it's not going to happen this year, but they keep saying this mantra, like it's something great. > (That said, a general purpose laptop is more likely than a Kindle to be > able to be configured to, say, control a 3D printer or a drone. But > that's not directly a result of memory, CPU, et cetera.) I guess it can be successfully argued that 3d printer is best paired with CAD software. Including CADs already used in the industry, with their parts libraries and the like. This means, for about a decade (or a half), PC-class device. It doesn't need to have mem or cpu - I can buy those later :-). > Quite. Opportunity is wonderful for those who realize there is > opportunity and they should reach for it. That is not, and has never > been so far as I know, the attitude of the majority of the human race. > Hopefully that may change in the future, as many more actually do have > opportunity (if they'll take it), but that is far from certain. My take on it is that maybe not everybody should be Mozart. That would've been a nightmare. But I wouldn't mind a world where everybody tries, or rather, where everybody plays (this can be adjusted accordingly so the wish applies to other areas of life, too, so we don't end with billions of piano boxers). Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sun Oct 6 21:32:28 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sun, 6 Oct 2013 15:32:28 -0600 Subject: [ExI] it was the best times, it was the best of times In-Reply-To: <043101cec0b5$b171ec90$1455c5b0$@att.net> References: <043101cec0b5$b171ec90$1455c5b0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Oct 3, 2013 at 9:56 PM, spike wrote: > > In all of human history, now is unique in many ways, but I thought of a > pleasant one: if one is a pauper, especially a young one, it is definitely > the best of times. > There is more free or virtually free stuff available now than at any time in human history. Certainly much of it is digital, but much of it is not. The book "Free: How Today's Smartest Businesses Profit by Giving Something for Nothing" by Chris Anderson shows how many physical things can be free as well. I have an idea for a way to give people free haircuts, and the business would be very profitable if it caught on. It basically involves trading your time watching advertisements for getting your hair cut. It's just one way to show how you can make the economy go without collecting money from the people getting the service (or good). > I don?t know about other countries, but if one?s standards in housing are > not too picky, we now have developed a society where a pauper can really > have a decent life, especially if one?s favorite thing is devouring > information in all its forms, and is a light eater. > But to a large extent, this society is based upon redistribution of wealth in addition to the commoditization of everything basic to life. And any society based on redistribution of wealth is likely to fail long term. Unless, that is, the best people are radically better than the unenhanced. So, for example, our society works well for cats and dogs because we simply don't expect anything from them. If there is an underclass that has the same comparative capabilities to dogs and cats, then maybe we can afford to support them. > ** > > Consider for instance the way it has always been. If you have a ton of > money, you can of course get the best mates, the best home, the best food, > the best wheels etc. We know that, and that hasn?t changed a bit, ever. > But in the old days, if you had nothing, you couldn?t really even get > training: you couldn?t learn to read, or if you could read, you couldn?t > get reading materials readily. There were public libraries, but we all > know that the books there were generally outdated. Certainly better than > nothing, but compare a typical public library to Stanford bookstore and you > know exactly what I mean: Stanford?s store is expensive, but highly > selected with only the most wicked cool stuff in there. Of course it costs > money. > A rising tide lifts everyone. > **** > > **This has all given me a vision of sorts, which ties in nicely with the > current US government?s thrashing about, partially shut down, so they say. > The fed was hoping someone would notice. So far we have learned we can do > just fine without their expensive help. > If it would just STAY shut down, we could adjust. Knowing that it will open up again soon enough, it's just going to be back to business as usual as soon as both sides have made the political points they need to for their constituents. > ** > > **This shutdown is all about how we are going to do our healthcare. I > would argue the proposed solution will be just as broken as the one before > it, but I did think of a way that might help. In many countries in the > world, people go to medical school right out of high school. I personally > know two doctors who went to medical school, one in Iran, the other in > China. Both practiced medicine for several years there. Neither has > managed to get licensed here. I think we could set up a system where > aspiring doctors could do much of their qualification for medical school > online, starting at any time. Much of medical school could be done with > online training as well. In this way we could generate many more doctors. > Of course they would likely not be as competent as our current crop, but > they would have far less investment in their education, so they could > charge a lot less. > The problem is that there is a government bureaucracy that is dedicated to getting us to use ONLY the very expensive doctors, even for prescribing antibiotics. Something your average tenth grader could do with a week's training. To paraphrase the Hitch: "Obama is not Great: How Government Poisons Everything" will perhaps be my next book. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Sun Oct 6 22:24:10 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sun, 6 Oct 2013 15:24:10 -0700 Subject: [ExI] it was the best times, it was the best of times In-Reply-To: References: <043101cec0b5$b171ec90$1455c5b0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sun, Oct 6, 2013 at 1:24 PM, Tomasz Rola wrote: > I admit I feel rather uncomfortable whenever I see a computing device with > no means to make new software on it - to the point when I consider it > broken, somewhere in the back of my head. > I know the feeling. Back in high school, I knew CAD was becoming the industry standard - and yet, the drafting class I took was on-paper drawing only, with CAD an optional add-on that they might get to at the end of the course if there was time. It was the only course in high school I dropped, because I couldn't stand such obsolescence being presented to new students of the art. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Mon Oct 7 04:36:04 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2013 00:36:04 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Another step towards uploading In-Reply-To: <52519BAF.7020308@aleph.se> References: <52519BAF.7020308@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Sun, Oct 6, 2013 at 1:19 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > > While a tour-de-force of what we can do today in the lab, the scanned > images are not enough to reconstruct her network topology. First, they used > Nissl stains, so we can mainly see cell nuclei rather than dendrites and > synapses. Second, the scan was optical resolution: we know there are fine > branches below optical resolution. > > I too am certain that the photographs, as good as they are, do not contain enough to reconstruct the individual, but I am also certain that the photographs do not contain anywhere near as much information as the slides themselves do. So the key question is, in a era of advanced Nanotechnology (and I don't think anybody is going to be doing any resurrecting before then) which contains more easily available information, one of Alcor's frozen brains or a box containing those 7400 slides? I am a little surprised that Alcor seems to have so little interest in knowing the answer to this question. > > And third, 20 microns is too wide to get the topology. > Because they wouldn't be photographing them I imagine that if Alcor were to ever use this technique their slides would be much WIDER than 20 microns, and they would have far fewer than 7400 slides. The only reason to slice the brain at all would be to ensure even diffusion of the chemical fixative. And I think that if we tried to "help" the Nanotechnology people by staining the slides, we could be causing more problems than we solved; the best strategy would be to just preserve the tissue as best we can and not try to second guess how those who have technology vastly more powerful than we do how they intend to get at the information. > > Now, we can hope the stained sections are stored safely and retain the > information for the future methods. > Yes John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Mon Oct 7 05:49:06 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2013 07:49:06 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Purified humanity Re: Your Genome Is a Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland In-Reply-To: <52519ECF.7090409@aleph.se> References: <52519ECF.7090409@aleph.se> Message-ID: <20131007054906.GS10405@leitl.org> On Sun, Oct 06, 2013 at 06:33:03PM +0100, Anders Sandberg wrote: > Us too. We have been discussing this at FHI at some length, trying > to find good references and models. There seem to be a significant > mutational load on most organisms, but converting the theory into Of course that mutational load is a side effect of evolutionary optimization. Such a brittle system must be henceforth perpetually maintained by manual intervention, or be outcompeted by wild type should that chain ever break. > predictions for actual mental or physical performance has so far > eluded us. Anybody who has some good pointers into the literature is > most welcome to share them! > > Removing redundancy to make mutations directly lethal might not be > optimal for all genes. A lot of mutations seem to just reduce > performance, so you increase the risk of being born with reduced > performance genes. After all, being heterozygous for sickle-cell > anemia is not lethal, yet pretty annoying. From eugen at leitl.org Mon Oct 7 05:43:39 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2013 07:43:39 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Another step towards uploading In-Reply-To: <52519DD7.1040406@aleph.se> References: <52519DD7.1040406@aleph.se> Message-ID: <20131007054339.GR10405@leitl.org> On Sun, Oct 06, 2013 at 06:28:55PM +0100, Anders Sandberg wrote: > On 2013-10-06 00:07, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > >### Max wrote about the choices between vitrification vs. fixation > >recently (or was it somebody else at Alcor?). The problem is that > >suspension usually takes place under non-optimal conditions - > >instead of live perfusion as in the case of animals used for the > >scans you mentioned, the cryonauts are treated typically after > >many hours of warm ischemia and this means the perfusion can be > >rather poor. Freezing here at least stops further damage. Keeping > >a poorly perfused brain at room temp makes it turn into a mush. > > The problem might be that fixing brains has the same problem. In > reality, you will need to proceed more or less like for > cryosuspension: wait until the patient is declared dead, and then There might be a loophole: euthanasia is legal in some jurisdictions. Eliminating peri-arrest damage appears to be crucial for optimal perfusion. > start biostasis protocols. In fact, I expect cryonics people to be > the best kind of people to perform the initial stages of a fixation > procedure - they know their way around distributing chemicals in a Everybody keeps talking about fixation/plastination with full ultrastructure preservation at liter scale as if it was a solved problem. It isn't. Everybody keeps talking that fixation/plastination preserves all relevant aspects necessary for personal reconstruction. Nobody knows that. > deanimating body. Lab histologists are a little bit too used to > being able to force the deanimation themselves, and to small mammal > brains :-) Perfusion by diffusion works only on cm^3 scale systems. From eugen at leitl.org Mon Oct 7 05:38:54 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2013 07:38:54 +0200 Subject: [ExI] another step towards uploading In-Reply-To: <52519CF7.4000200@aleph.se> References: <524BEC29.2010505@aleph.se> <52519CF7.4000200@aleph.se> Message-ID: <20131007053854.GQ10405@leitl.org> On Sun, Oct 06, 2013 at 06:25:11PM +0100, Anders Sandberg wrote: > I think people tend to overestimate how hard it is to run a > nonlinear neuron model. The big problem is getting the parameters > right, not the actual simulation - that is mostly a matter of > running a lot of HH-like equations, and optimizing for your You don't have to solve the equations (neural tissue certainly doesn't do that), just build a physical system that does the equivalent. Until you can do that, you need classical all-purpose computers, of course, as a sacrificial bootstrap substrate. > available computational substrates. Getting enough data from tissue > to pin down the simulation parameters *and* check that it produces > sensible results (especially since the data collection might have > ruined the cell for comparision and testing), that is the challenge. > A super-resolution scan might still be worthless if it doesn't tell > you what you need to know. From pharos at gmail.com Mon Oct 7 06:16:37 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2013 07:16:37 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Purified humanity Re: Your Genome Is a Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland In-Reply-To: <20131007054906.GS10405@leitl.org> References: <52519ECF.7090409@aleph.se> <20131007054906.GS10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Mon, Oct 7, 2013 at 6:49 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > Of course that mutational load is a side effect of evolutionary > optimization. Such a brittle system must be henceforth perpetually > maintained by manual intervention, or be outcompeted by wild > type should that chain ever break. > As the original article points out, optimization is the wrong word to use as description. Arbitrary hacks based on previous hacks is more like it. Think of computer spaghetti code after a hundred programmers have done urgent fixes and patches. Much of the code is bypassed by later fixes. A lot of it no longer works as intended. A lot is no longer needed. But the program still manages to work somehow. (Though nobody is quite sure how!). It's a mess. BillK From eugen at leitl.org Mon Oct 7 08:06:29 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2013 10:06:29 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Purified humanity Re: Your Genome Is a Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland In-Reply-To: References: <52519ECF.7090409@aleph.se> <20131007054906.GS10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20131007080629.GG10405@leitl.org> On Mon, Oct 07, 2013 at 07:16:37AM +0100, BillK wrote: > On Mon, Oct 7, 2013 at 6:49 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > Of course that mutational load is a side effect of evolutionary > > optimization. Such a brittle system must be henceforth perpetually > > maintained by manual intervention, or be outcompeted by wild > > type should that chain ever break. > > > > As the original article points out, optimization is the wrong word to If the original article doesn't understand evolutionary optimization, then it's a peer review failure. > use as description. > Arbitrary hacks based on previous hacks is more like it. Mutation is not selection (though not entirely blind, once the system has evolved evolvability), all the selection is done by the fitness function -- which is not static, but certainly selective. > Think of computer spaghetti code after a hundred programmers have done > urgent fixes and patches. Much of the code is bypassed by later fixes. > A lot of it no longer works as intended. A lot is no longer needed. > But the program still manages to work somehow. (Though nobody is quite > sure how!). It's a mess. Yet that mess produced you. Using pretty pedestrian means. That's pretty damn powerful. And strangely, the very thoughts you're forming right now are produced by a highly similar process, by selecting competing activity patterns in your neocortex. Those who don't understand evolutionary optimization are doomed to reinvent it, poorly. From eugen at leitl.org Mon Oct 7 08:44:08 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2013 10:44:08 +0200 Subject: [ExI] it was the best times, it was the best of times In-Reply-To: References: <043101cec0b5$b171ec90$1455c5b0$@att.net> Message-ID: <20131007084408.GK10405@leitl.org> On Sun, Oct 06, 2013 at 03:32:28PM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > There is more free or virtually free stuff available now than at any time > in human history. Certainly much of it is digital, but much of it is not. This is correct, but I expect we've peaked on that as well, or will do so shortly. Maybe any resident freegans can attest whether their pickings have declined in quality/became more slim lately. > The book "Free: How Today's Smartest Businesses Profit by Giving Something > for Nothing" by Chris Anderson shows how many physical things can be free > as well. I've been in a silver/copper mine on Saturday, which has been mined by humanity for 6000 years, leaving 500 km of tunnels up to 1 km depth. Mining has ceased last century, as the richer ore veins have been exhausted. You might notice that while the volume still appears exponential http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Copper_-_world_production_trend.svg the price isn't showing anything too nice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Copper_Price_History_USD.png Silver is not any different http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Silver_-_world_production_trend.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Silver_price_in_USD.png I'm skipping the same part with oil, we know that oil has not becoming any cheaper lately. > I have an idea for a way to give people free haircuts, and the business > would be very profitable if it caught on. It basically involves trading > your time watching advertisements for getting your hair cut. It's just one > way to show how you can make the economy go without collecting money from > the people getting the service (or good). How about free energy or free food, in the long run? > A rising tide lifts everyone. This assumes two things: that the tide is still rising, and that some boats are not sinking. None of these assumptions hold water on a closer look. Blub. From pharos at gmail.com Mon Oct 7 10:20:43 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2013 11:20:43 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Purified humanity Re: Your Genome Is a Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland In-Reply-To: <20131007080629.GG10405@leitl.org> References: <52519ECF.7090409@aleph.se> <20131007054906.GS10405@leitl.org> <20131007080629.GG10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Mon, Oct 7, 2013 at 9:06 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > Mutation is not selection (though not entirely blind, once the > system has evolved evolvability), all the selection is done by > the fitness function -- which is not static, but certainly selective. > > Those who don't understand evolutionary optimization are doomed > to reinvent it, poorly. > You may be mixing evolutionary computing techniques to solve specific problems with evolutionary changes. Evolutionary computing starts afresh with every new problem. Evolution doesn't. For example, way back, some creature in the sea found that four fins were quite useful at that time. After that, evolution, building on the past, was stuck with four limbs for ever after. Even when four limbs is no longer the best solution. BillK From eugen at leitl.org Mon Oct 7 10:34:27 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2013 12:34:27 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Purified humanity Re: Your Genome Is a Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland In-Reply-To: References: <52519ECF.7090409@aleph.se> <20131007054906.GS10405@leitl.org> <20131007080629.GG10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20131007103427.GS10405@leitl.org> On Mon, Oct 07, 2013 at 11:20:43AM +0100, BillK wrote: > You may be mixing evolutionary computing techniques to solve specific > problems with evolutionary changes. When arguing your case, please don't invent facts. They hate that. > Evolutionary computing starts afresh with every new problem. Evolution doesn't. It depends on what you prime your initial population with. Starting from urslime all the time is expensive. Notice that none of current methods are anywhere criticality, aka evolving evolvability. This is computationally expensive, and likely not easy to replicate in a different context. So this means mature methods will have initial pool conservation. > For example, way back, some creature in the sea found that four fins > were quite useful at that time. After that, evolution, building on the > past, was stuck with four limbs for ever after. Even when four limbs Hexapodia is the key insight. > is no longer the best solution. Best according to who? From anders at aleph.se Mon Oct 7 11:35:35 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Mon, 07 Oct 2013 12:35:35 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Purified humanity Re: Your Genome Is a Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland In-Reply-To: <20131007103427.GS10405@leitl.org> References: <52519ECF.7090409@aleph.se> <20131007054906.GS10405@leitl.org> <20131007080629.GG10405@leitl.org> <20131007103427.GS10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <52529C87.5010102@aleph.se> On 2013-10-07 11:34, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Mon, Oct 07, 2013 at 11:20:43AM +0100, BillK wrote: > >> You may be mixing evolutionary computing techniques to solve specific >> problems with evolutionary changes. > When arguing your case, please don't invent facts. They hate that. However, this morning I think the facts are confused about who is arguing what. I have a suspicion that BillK was talking about doing artificial selection on real genomes using selection methods generated by various methods, including evolutionary computing. >> Evolutionary computing starts afresh with every new problem. Evolution doesn't. > It depends on what you prime your initial population with. > Starting from urslime all the time is expensive. Notice that > none of current methods are anywhere criticality, aka evolving > evolvability. This is computationally expensive, and likely not > easy to replicate in a different context. So this means mature > methods will have initial pool conservation. I think this is an important consideration. Far too much evolutionary algorithms start with ur-slime because it is far cooler and more open-ended than playing Author and dropping in some already-designed scheme. Then again, most useful applications of EC tend to be finding weird-looking solutions in small problem spaces rather than open-ended invention. Small 'c' creativity, rather than the capital 'C' Creativity that answers a different question than you asked. >> For example, way back, some creature in the sea found that four fins >> were quite useful at that time. After that, evolution, building on the >> past, was stuck with four limbs for ever after. Even when four limbs > Hexapodia is the key insight. I haven't had the chance to see the video. Bandwidth here in the UK is so limited. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From eugen at leitl.org Mon Oct 7 12:55:25 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2013 14:55:25 +0200 Subject: [ExI] [drone-list] Boston Dynamics Wildcat Message-ID: <20131007125525.GD10405@leitl.org> ----- Forwarded message from Gregory Foster ----- Date: Sat, 05 Oct 2013 04:06:12 -0500 From: Gregory Foster To: drone-list Subject: [drone-list] Boston Dynamics Wildcat Message-ID: <524FD684.5060800 at entersection.org> User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130801 Thunderbird/17.0.8 Reply-To: drone-list -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512 "Introducing Wildcat" (Oct 3) by @BostonDynamics; 16 MPH 4-legged #robotics; 2.2M views in 2 days: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wE3fmFTtP9g #drones #UGV "WildCat is a four-legged robot being developed to run fast on all types of terrain. So far WildCat has run at about 16 mph on flat terrain using bounding and galloping gaits. The video shows WildCat's best performance so far. WildCat is being developed by Boston Dynamics with funding from DARPA's [Maximum Mobility and Manipulation, M3] program." U.S. Department of Defense (Sep 18) - Contract No. 668-13: http://www.defense.gov/contracts/contract.aspx?contractid=5136 "Boston Dynamics Inc., Waltham, Mass., has been awarded a maximum $9,983,844 modification (P00018) to a cost-plus-fixed-fee contract (HR0011-10-C-0025) for the Legged Squad Support System (LS3) program. LS3 seeks to demonstrate that a legged robot can unburden dismounted squad members by carrying their gear, autonomously following them through rugged terrain, and interpreting verbal and visual commands. Within the general scope of work of Phase 2, the modification adds additional tasks to the contract for the development of an enhanced version of the LS3 system with increased reliability and usability, enhanced survivability against small arms fire and a quiet power supply to support stealthy tactical operations. Work will be performed in Waltham, Mass. The estimated completion date is March 31, 2015. Fiscal 2013 research and development funds are being obligated at time of award. The contracting activity is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Arlington, Va." via IEEE Spectrum (Sep 23) - "Boston Dynamics Gets $10 Million from DARPA for New Stealthy, Bulletproof LS3" by @BotJunkie: http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/military-robots/boston-dynamics-gets-10-million-from-darpa-for-new-stealthy-bulletproof-ls3 gf - -- Gregory Foster || gfoster at entersection.org @gregoryfoster <> http://entersection.com/ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG/MacGPG2 v2.0.19 (Darwin) Comment: GPGTools - http://gpgtools.org iQIcBAEBCgAGBQJST9aBAAoJEMaAACmjGtgjWJcP/0azlcV7cP2C5UkexcajPKU3 RxfQlDIXdAb601RYZv67uLYifL83kZ3ey2RcJBM4bNIlSXJ7T94aF+k2mUuYBf8o cLgpM+GHD8EAO5PPKrP22bK+V7E+Zu/U7+IiGS+k/LKatuX3OWIdRGsenM1D49kE kMZ30LBGsA1eHvn1LM4cryqBJU8sDPZSVlVaVWdwq4M0rWgDY7im8HaQGjBkay9F wMAS5pNGa5QAoKH8/NZEglTDhBggR5QGV4p/yJd6J5cyIXhNoluSCb4ia46p4v4Q lJPV0WvEiF/dgmZvKacTRfC4jfgeuOz4RYUV0veKkPXLkIeOFVI49fXuuHv2Y8KY BpHT0rMgGWhx5weoJNXUJRpPpcDJT8XB8L9EsAjY/OtERIwl8RWWAX+doNknV/uA 0I8ob7W5KU8cxNa8Uj3tRRmXZ1J3AOP/zEcCFu/FL5NWY/l6Vg873WqHV8Eek/9o B38zwacV5C+oyuQRVj5U58HGy2p75/VF/+YdLrD/lSeoJN5JbkjHtYq7eyxgiZjH oI5eYdFVEPX22FLBwD6Kk3RoTo/yXQu4JEXCP3KIvmA8I7EYd9SoK9xUEy8q8dLn u0n18OdZzdEBsUkstNTk13+rJCTv+KOOxz5RViLIx88rN5LdZZFm4w09wZ91psU/ 44YZHl87Z7n1cKWfyMK0 =pVE8 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- Want to unsubscribe? Want to receive a weekly digest instead of daily emails? Change your preferences: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/drone-list or email companys at stanford.edu ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From bbenzai at yahoo.com Mon Oct 7 13:05:47 2013 From: bbenzai at yahoo.com (Ben Zaiboc) Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2013 06:05:47 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [ExI] Purified humanity In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <1381151147.6846.YahooMailNeo@web165005.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> BillK wrote: > On Mon, Oct 7, 2013 at 6:49 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: >> Of course that mutational load is a side effect of evolutionary >> optimization. Such a brittle system must be henceforth perpetually >> maintained by manual intervention, or be outcompeted by wild >> type should that chain ever break. >> > > As the original article points out, optimization is the wrong word to > use as description. > Arbitrary hacks based on previous hacks is more like it. > Think of computer spaghetti code after a hundred programmers have done > urgent fixes and patches. Much of the code is bypassed by later fixes. > A lot of it no longer works as intended. A lot is no longer needed. > But the program still manages to work somehow. (Though nobody is quite > sure how!).? It's a mess. It certainly looks like a hell of a mess, and it's easy to see how inevitable it is that we get ridiculous results like our inside-out eyes, and crappy spines, and all sorts of other just-good-enough-to-sort-of-work structures and mechanisms that any self-respecting engineer would commit hara-kiri over if they'd had any hand in them. It's very tempting to conclude that we need to re-design the whole mess in order to gain any sort of control over it (so that we can improve our lives, extend our capabilities, lifespans, etc.).? To optimise it. I think that, in a sense, you're both right, and a highly-optimised biology, while working much better, would also be very brittle, and lack the flexibility of naturally-evolved systems.? Maybe what we need to do is build efficient systems, then make them less-efficient again by building in lots of redundancy, back-up mechanisms and ways of doing things differently (see what I did there?), but in a way that gives us much better control over the whole thing.? This probably involves understanding biology really, really well.? Probably so well that by the time we do, we won't need it anymore. Anyway, I do think that spaghetti evolution sucks, and there must be a better way, that can get us the benefits of comprehenisble, controllable systems /and/ resiliency. Actually, that gives me an idea.? Need to think about it for a bit.. From eugen at leitl.org Mon Oct 7 14:36:44 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2013 16:36:44 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Purified humanity In-Reply-To: <1381151147.6846.YahooMailNeo@web165005.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> References: <1381151147.6846.YahooMailNeo@web165005.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <20131007143644.GF10405@leitl.org> On Mon, Oct 07, 2013 at 06:05:47AM -0700, Ben Zaiboc wrote: > It certainly looks like a hell of a mess, and it's easy to see how inevitable it is that we get ridiculous results like our inside-out eyes, and crappy spines, and all sorts of other just-good-enough-to-sort-of-work structures and mechanisms that any self-respecting engineer would commit hara-kiri over if they'd had any hand in them. Yeah, due to the need for systems to be embodied at each step we get atrocities like http://scienceblogs.com/grrlscientist/2010/06/22/the-laryngeal-nerve-of-the-gir/ > It's very tempting to conclude that we need to re-design the whole mess in order to gain any sort of control over it (so that we can improve our lives, extend our capabilities, lifespans, etc.).? To optimise it. A major improvement would be ability to hald and copy state to new substrate, or even incremental remote replication of evolving state. This makes you substrate-indepedant. It's a big step, but given that we can halt state now (cryopreservation or fixation/plastination) it's one that is available to us today. > I think that, in a sense, you're both right, and a highly-optimised biology, while working much better, would also be very brittle, and lack the flexibility of naturally-evolved systems.? Maybe what we need to do is build efficient systems, then make them less-efficient again by building in lots of redundancy, back-up mechanisms and ways of doing things differently (see what I did there?), but in a way that gives us much better control over the whole thing.? This probably involves understanding biology really, really well.? Probably so well that by the time we do, we won't need it anymore. I think the whole buck stops about a complex system trying to understand its own operation. You can't destill it into something comprehensible, yet still meaningful. Even if you can write down all the equations governing your neural tissue, this still doesn't tell you a damn thing why you crave grilled calamari today. > Anyway, I do think that spaghetti evolution sucks, and there must be a better way, that can get us the benefits of comprehenisble, controllable systems /and/ resiliency. If you ever find out an alternative, do drop us a note. > Actually, that gives me an idea.? Need to think about it for a bit.. The problem with evolutionary systems is that seed is compact, and morphogenesis is a complex, trapdoor system. So there is no simple way to link bit mutations in the seed to the expressed adult system. It's pretty much like trying to invert a cryptohash. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Mon Oct 7 14:45:37 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2013 10:45:37 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Another step towards uploading In-Reply-To: <20131007054339.GR10405@leitl.org> References: <52519DD7.1040406@aleph.se> <20131007054339.GR10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Mon, Oct 7, 2013 at 1:43 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > Everybody keeps talking that fixation/plastination preserves all relevant > aspects necessary for personal reconstruction. Nobody knows that. > Nobody knows if freezing preserves all relevant aspects necessary for personal reconstruction either, so a judgement call must be made about which is the better technology and that's why I think it might be wise if Alcor at least thought about it. And If freezing is better I don't understand why neuroscientists use chemical fixation not freezing when they want to get the most detailed map of a brain that they can. > Perfusion by diffusion works only on cm^3 scale systems. > OK, but how is that a problem? Just cut the big brain up into slices one centimeter thick or less; the gap between the slices could be made very thin indeed, on the order of 30 nanometers. Perhaps I'm wrong but it seems to me that if the nanotechnology people can't extrapolate and deduce what must have been inside those very small missing gaps then they're not ready to resurrect anyone preserved by any method. 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URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Mon Oct 7 15:28:38 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2013 11:28:38 -0400 Subject: [ExI] it was the best times, it was the best of times In-Reply-To: <20131007084408.GK10405@leitl.org> References: <043101cec0b5$b171ec90$1455c5b0$@att.net> <20131007084408.GK10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: Eugen Leitl, aka Dr. Doom, showed us a graph purporting to show that because of worldwide shortages copper prices are going through the roof: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Copper_Price_History_USD.png and it is a ugly graph no doubt about it, but if you look at a more recent copper price graph that shows the last 5 years in greater resolution things look much more cheerful: http://www.infomine.com/investment/metal-prices/copper/5-year/ > Silver is not any different > Today silver costs $22.41 an ounce, 33 years ago in 1980 silver cost $49.45 an ounce, adjusted for inflation that would be about $138 per ounce. And I still haven't heard from Eugen if he's accepted my bet about a worldwide uranium shortage by 2020. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Mon Oct 7 15:45:29 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2013 17:45:29 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Human Brain Project kicks off today Message-ID: <20131007154529.GL10405@leitl.org> http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/10/07/how-to-build-human-brain-with-computer/ How to build a human brain (with a computer 1,000x faster than today?s) By John Brandon Published October 07, 2013 FoxNews.com FLICKR/ILLUMINAUT What if you could build a computer that works just like the human brain? Scientists have started to imagine the possibilities: We could invent new forms of industrial machinery, create fully autonomous thinking cars, devise new kinds of home appliances. A new project in Europe hopes to create a computer brain just that powerful in the next ten years -- and it?s incredibly well-funded. There?s just one catch: computers that fast simply haven?t been invented yet. The Human Brain Project kicks off Oct. 7 at a conference in Switzerland. Over the next 10 years, about 80 science institutions and at least 20 government entities in Europe will figure out how to make that computer brain. The project will cost about $1.6B in U.S. dollars. The research hinges on creating a super-powerful computer that?s 1,000 times faster than those in use today. If you?re keeping track, that?s an ?exascale? supercomputer, one fast enough to model a nuclear explosion or the complex, planetwide forces that shape the climate. Just a few years ago, scientists started using ?petascale? supercomputers like Blue Waters at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in Illinois that went online last year. 'The more we know about our brains, the more we can utilize our brains to its full potential.' - Dr. Gayani DeSilva, a psychiatrist with a private practice in Orange, Calif. ?Well-known manufacturers of supercomputers like IBM, Cray, Intel, and Bull, are committed to building the first exascale machines by approximately 2020. So we are confident we will have the machines we need,? Henry Markram, the director of the Human Brain Project at ?cole Polytechnique F?d?rale de Lausanne in Switzerland, told FoxNews.com. Markram also directs the Blue Brain project started in 2005 that hopes to reverse-engineering the human brain by rebuilding the molecules. For scientists, these sorts of projects are all about understanding ourselves. The brain is the least understood organ in the human body. We don?t really know how the brain controls our thoughts, our bodily functions, or our behavior. And, Markham says the lack of processing power in modern computer is the least of our worries. He says a computer brain will consume gigawatts of power, require new forms of memory, and force scientists to look at cutting edge storage techniques. But the immense technical hurdles will be worth the effort. The first phases will help us understand how the brain functions. In later phases, we?ll find out how we learn, how we see and hear, and why the brain sometimes doesn?t process information correctly. Dr. Gayani DeSilva, a psychiatrist with a private practice in Orange, Calif., told FoxNews.com a human brain model could have ?unimaginable? implications for medicine, helping us learn how we adapt, heal, and develop. ?The more we know about our brains, the more we can utilize our brains to its full potential, intervene when issues arise, replicate in artificial creations the power of the brain?s ability to integrate a vast amount of information that then causes other systems to perform specific actions,? she says. ?The human brain is immensely complex, and a model reduces this complexity into a controlled system. In a model, scientists can test hypotheses as to how the human brain works, and what occurs in disease in order to understand how to treat neurological conditions. It's analogous to astronauts training in a flight simulator prior to a shuttle launch,? added Amina Ann Qutub, a bioengineer at Rice University. Fortunately, scientists won?t have to wait 10 years for the results. Markram says there will be initial models they can use for medical research with a year. In three years, they will have models that could help us build new kinds of computer chips. (That?s right: the brain project itself will help them build the computer brain.) As with any cutting edge science, we don?t know yet what we don?t know. Qutub says this is all unmapped territory. ?The number of total cells including the neurons, vascular cells, and glia in a human brain is more than the number of stars in the Milky Way,? she said. That?s enough to give scientists quite the headache. Editors' Note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly listed the cost of the project. The correct cost is shown above. From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Mon Oct 7 15:58:01 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2013 09:58:01 -0600 Subject: [ExI] it was the best times, it was the best of times In-Reply-To: <20131007084408.GK10405@leitl.org> References: <043101cec0b5$b171ec90$1455c5b0$@att.net> <20131007084408.GK10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Mon, Oct 7, 2013 at 2:44 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Sun, Oct 06, 2013 at 03:32:28PM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > > > There is more free or virtually free stuff available now than at any time > > in human history. Certainly much of it is digital, but much of it is not. > > This is correct, but I expect we've peaked on that as well, or will > do so shortly. Maybe any resident freegans can attest whether their > pickings have declined in quality/became more slim lately. > So now you're jumping from peak oil to peak creativity? Damn, who peed in your breakfast Eugen? You yourself just posted an awesome robot video. Are we peaking in robot performance as well. Perhaps it's just that all of humanity has peaked at everything. But that can't possibly be correct, because I don't think we've reached "peak Eugen curmudgeonism" yet. ;-) > > The book "Free: How Today's Smartest Businesses Profit by Giving > Something > > for Nothing" by Chris Anderson shows how many physical things can be free > > as well. > > I've been in a silver/copper mine on Saturday, which has been mined > by humanity for 6000 years, leaving 500 km of tunnels up to 1 km depth. > Mining has ceased last century, as the richer ore veins have been > exhausted. You might notice that while the volume still appears > exponential > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Copper_-_world_production_trend.svg > the price isn't showing anything too nice > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Copper_Price_History_USD.png I'm afraid copper is going to get slightly worse before it gets better, but I suspect it will be a fairly temporary issue. This is due to the fact that the Kennecott copper mine here in Salt Lake suffered a major land slide in the last year, and it's going to take a while for it to get back on its feet. The copper, however, is still there, and likely is still profitable to go after. > Silver is not any different > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Silver_-_world_production_trend.svg > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Silver_price_in_USD.png > > Looking at those graphs, I don't think they clearly make your point. Silver production has gone up considerably. Demand has also risen, therefore the price has remained more or less flat. There is no hockey stick there. > I'm skipping the same part with oil, we know that oil has not > becoming any cheaper lately. > Much more demand for oil than for silver. > > I have an idea for a way to give people free haircuts, and the business > > would be very profitable if it caught on. It basically involves trading > > your time watching advertisements for getting your hair cut. It's just > one > > way to show how you can make the economy go without collecting money from > > the people getting the service (or good). > > How about free energy or free food, in the long run? > I didn't say everything was free. However, if we are able to get orbiting solar jumpstarted, it will get closer to free than it ever has been. As for free food, food is primarily a function of energy. Currently, all food is produced using (directly or indirectly) terrestrial solar energy. Thus, if we can get off world energy, we can produce food in amounts greater than any farmer now can comprehend. If you can grow meat in a tube rather than on hoofs, it should be more efficient. I believe technology can fix both food and energy problems if there is sufficient interest. Since everyone is interested in food, I can't imagine us not fixing the problems, unless some form of world wide socialism stops it. > > A rising tide lifts everyone. > > This assumes two things: that the tide is still rising, and that > some boats are not sinking. None of these assumptions hold water > on a closer look. Blub. I believe that the tide is rising. Yes, there is more concentration of wealth, but overall wealth is still rising. The technological tide is clearly still rising. Once again, are you predicting peak human creativity Eugen? I think you won't find any allies on that front here. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Mon Oct 7 16:12:33 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2013 09:12:33 -0700 Subject: [ExI] it was the best times, it was the best of times In-Reply-To: <20131007084408.GK10405@leitl.org> References: <043101cec0b5$b171ec90$1455c5b0$@att.net> <20131007084408.GK10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Mon, Oct 7, 2013 at 1:44 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Sun, Oct 06, 2013 at 03:32:28PM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > > There is more free or virtually free stuff available now than at any time > > in human history. Certainly much of it is digital, but much of it is not. > > This is correct, but I expect we've peaked on that as well, or will > do so shortly. Maybe any resident freegans can attest whether their > pickings have declined in quality/became more slim lately. > Among the free services I get - nope. I see no data, either statistical or anecdotal from my own experience, that suggests we are anywhere near a peak on this. You are right to point out that free services are not free products, though. Someone always pays for the products eventually - even if that price often (though not always, especially for raw ingredients such as oil) gets lower over time, as more efficient ways to make and/or use the products are discovered. (For instance, if oil gets 1.2 times as expensive but cars get twice the MPG, then it net costs less to drive a certain distance.) > Mining has ceased last century, as the richer ore veins have been > exhausted. "Ceased" is a strong word. It doesn't mean "in decline", it means "completely stopped". If mining ceased no later than 2000 (depending on where you put the century mark), then what's with all the active, productive mines today in 2013? And, of course, there's the potential for asteroid mining. It hasn't started yet, and there's quite a bit to do, but the amount of energy needed to get it seriously productive seems to be within current reserves - so long as that effort is started soon enough, of course. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Mon Oct 7 16:45:44 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2013 18:45:44 +0200 Subject: [ExI] it was the best times, it was the best of times In-Reply-To: References: <043101cec0b5$b171ec90$1455c5b0$@att.net> <20131007084408.GK10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20131007164544.GM10405@leitl.org> On Mon, Oct 07, 2013 at 09:12:33AM -0700, Adrian Tymes wrote: > Among the free services I get - nope. I see no data, either statistical or > anecdotal from my own experience, that suggests we are anywhere near a peak > on this. I'm referring to advanced dumpster divers here. Probably not many freegans are reading this list. I would be genuinely interested about their pickings in UK (London, largely) and US. My theory is that there's less waste now, but I have no actual data. > You are right to point out that free services are not free products, > though. Someone always pays for the products eventually - even if that > price often (though not always, especially for raw ingredients such as oil) > gets lower over time, as more efficient ways to make and/or use the > products are discovered. (For instance, if oil gets 1.2 times as expensive > but cars get twice the MPG, then it net costs less to drive a certain > distance.) What we're seeing empirically, in the US, is that nonessential driving is reduced, aka demand destruction. I wonder when the reality of fuel prices at the pump and economy versus the rhetoric will percolate through. It doesn't seem to, so far. > > > Mining has ceased last century, as the richer ore veins have been > > exhausted. > > > "Ceased" is a strong word. It doesn't mean "in decline", it means Well, that particular mine (the largest medieval mine, 85% of world's silver came from there during its peak in 1500) was shuttered in 1975. It might be reopened again, if the price increases make the lower ore grades and deeper mining cost effective. We should also see some of the copper and silver substituted (e.g. Cu being substituted by aluminium bronzes and aluminium), similarly as whale oil is no longer much in demand. But some elements are more vital than others. > "completely stopped". If mining ceased no later than 2000 (depending on > where you put the century mark), then what's with all the active, > productive mines today in 2013? I don't know when copper production is supposed to peak, some say 2040 http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3086 -- I think we don't have sufficient data to be able to tell, quite yet. Some minerals are critical, others are less so http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5239 > And, of course, there's the potential for asteroid mining. It hasn't > started yet, and there's quite a bit to do, but the amount of energy needed > to get it seriously productive seems to be within current reserves - so > long as that effort is started soon enough, of course. I'm very optimistic long-term, but we must get there first. I'm not at all optimistic mid-term, simply because the evidence shows that we're making pretty much all mistakes in the book. If you make too many mistakes, there's a critical mass beyond which you no longer can recover. That possibility should scare people shitless, and make them move in order to avoid that scenario. Unfortunately, we monkeys are quite lousy dealing with abstract threats. From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Mon Oct 7 17:29:36 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2013 11:29:36 -0600 Subject: [ExI] it was the best times, it was the best of times In-Reply-To: <20131007164544.GM10405@leitl.org> References: <043101cec0b5$b171ec90$1455c5b0$@att.net> <20131007084408.GK10405@leitl.org> <20131007164544.GM10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Mon, Oct 7, 2013 at 10:45 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Mon, Oct 07, 2013 at 09:12:33AM -0700, Adrian Tymes wrote: > > > Among the free services I get - nope. I see no data, either statistical > or > > anecdotal from my own experience, that suggests we are anywhere near a > peak > > on this. > > I'm referring to advanced dumpster divers here. Probably not many freegans > are reading this list. I would be genuinely interested about their pickings > in UK (London, largely) and US. My theory is that there's less waste now, > but I have no actual data. > Even the government isn't wasteful enough to collect data on something this useless. If there is less waste, then that is a GOOD THING. Conservation is always the lowest hanging fruit. I didn't even laugh so much when Obama said "Inflate your tires" though he got dumped on for saying so. Dumpster diving may be a way of life for a fringe, but that's not what I'm talking about when I talk about stuff being free in great amounts these days. > > You are right to point out that free services are not free products, > > though. Someone always pays for the products eventually - even if that > > price often (though not always, especially for raw ingredients such as > oil) > > gets lower over time, as more efficient ways to make and/or use the > > products are discovered. (For instance, if oil gets 1.2 times as > expensive > > but cars get twice the MPG, then it net costs less to drive a certain > > distance.) > > What we're seeing empirically, in the US, is that nonessential driving > is reduced, aka demand destruction. I wonder when the reality of fuel > prices at the pump and economy versus the rhetoric will percolate through. > It doesn't seem to, so far. > But even products can be free to the users. For example, Google paid for hard drives that store my email. Yes, they made up for it with advertising, which I read. But the hard drive space is "free" to me in terms of actual cash. I do pay for it with a minimal amount of time. > "completely stopped". If mining ceased no later than 2000 (depending on > > where you put the century mark), then what's with all the active, > > productive mines today in 2013? > > I don't know when copper production is supposed to peak, some say > 2040 http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3086 -- I think we don't have > sufficient data to be able to tell, quite yet. > Should be enough time to develop space based copper mining... don't you think? > Some minerals are critical, others are less so > http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5239 > > > And, of course, there's the potential for asteroid mining. It hasn't > > started yet, and there's quite a bit to do, but the amount of energy > needed > > to get it seriously productive seems to be within current reserves - so > > long as that effort is started soon enough, of course. > > I'm very optimistic long-term, but we must get there first. I'm not > at all optimistic mid-term, simply because the evidence shows that > we're making pretty much all mistakes in the book. If you make too > many mistakes, there's a critical mass beyond which you no longer > can recover. That possibility should scare people shitless, and make > them move in order to avoid that scenario. Unfortunately, we monkeys > are quite lousy dealing with abstract threats. But some monkeys are more clever than others. Fortunately, we still have money enough that some of the clever monkeys can amass the fortunes necessary to do this (Elan Musk, Paul Alan anyone?) despite the government attempting to take most of it away to keep the non-functional monkeys breathing and voting for the socialist agenda. If we take all of Musk's money away from him and those like him, then perhaps we will not be mining asteroids in the end and we can all eat terrestrial rocks with Eugen. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Mon Oct 7 19:42:12 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Mon, 07 Oct 2013 20:42:12 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Another step towards uploading In-Reply-To: References: <52519DD7.1040406@aleph.se> <20131007054339.GR10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <52530E94.8080505@aleph.se> On 07/10/2013 15:45, John Clark wrote: > On Mon, Oct 7, 2013 at 1:43 AM, Eugen Leitl > wrote: > > > Perfusion by diffusion works only on cm^3 scale systems. > > > OK, but how is that a problem? Just cut the big brain up into slices > one centimeter thick or less; the gap between the slices could be made > very thin indeed, on the order of 30 nanometers. The problem is: how do you cut a brain? A fresh brain has the consistency of stringy toothpaste: any cutting will do massive damage. Methods for sectioning brains properly always start with putting them in a bucket of formaline... for two weeks or more: http://goo.gl/9ueYjN Think about what happens during that time. Yuck. As this paper shows, diffusion is slow enough to produce noticeable gradients of immunostains: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165027087800018 Now, there seem to exist perfusion based methods, and fixing in situ seems to be a great start for getting something that can be sliced well later: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9372749 http://www.abcam.com/ps/pdf/protocols/perfusion.pdf Some aim at rapid fixation by injecting fixation liquid through basal blood vessels and the ventricles, followed by the bucket for a few days: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1860363/ It might even be applicable to whale brains (!): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165027002001826 "Due to limited space and supplies of fresh water on board, the fixative usually had to be mixed for each whale using seawater instead of fresh water. When seawater was used, NaCl was not added to the solution. To prepare and open the skull, sharp painter scrapes, a circular bone saw with an adjustable blade, chisels and hammers were needed. The use of chemicals and saw on a very unstable working platform and the risk of spatters of bone splints, necessitated that the operator wore protective glasses, gasmask, chemical resistant industrial gloves, heavy oilskins and strong boots." - ah, tough Norwegian science! -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Faculty of Philosophy Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Mon Oct 7 21:24:43 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2013 23:24:43 +0200 Subject: [ExI] it was the best times, it was the best of times In-Reply-To: References: <043101cec0b5$b171ec90$1455c5b0$@att.net> <20131007084408.GK10405@leitl.org> <20131007164544.GM10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20131007212443.GS10405@leitl.org> On Mon, Oct 07, 2013 at 11:29:36AM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > Even the government isn't wasteful enough to collect data on something this Your dogma is showing. This is going to make you miss some solutions. > useless. If there is less waste, then that is a GOOD THING. Conservation is Less waste is a good thing, but I'm using it instrumentally here, as a metric. > always the lowest hanging fruit. I didn't even laugh so much when Obama > said "Inflate your tires" though he got dumped on for saying so. Dumpster > diving may be a way of life for a fringe, but that's not what I'm talking > about when I talk about stuff being free in great amounts these days. I realize what you're talking about. I'm talking about something else. > But even products can be free to the users. For example, Google paid for > hard drives that store my email. Yes, they made up for it with advertising, Google is not selling cloud services. Google is selling their users. You're not the customer, you're the product. > which I read. But the hard drive space is "free" to me in terms of actual > cash. I do pay for it with a minimal amount of time. You're having only a tiny idea of what you're paying for it. > Should be enough time to develop space based copper mining... don't you > think? What, about 30 years? No way in hell. Go talk to rocket people to realize how much you don't know. > But some monkeys are more clever than others. Fortunately, we still have Their cleverness does not translate into moving all the other monkeys from their furry butts. > money enough that some of the clever monkeys can amass the fortunes > necessary to do this (Elan Musk, Paul Alan anyone?) despite the government I'm happy that these guys exist. I'm unhappy that the bulk of capital amassment is unproductive. I'm unhappy that much of wealth-building lies in our past. > attempting to take most of it away to keep the non-functional monkeys > breathing and voting for the socialist agenda. > > If we take all of Musk's money away from him and those like him, then > perhaps we will not be mining asteroids in the end and we can all eat > terrestrial rocks with Eugen. I'm getting tired of arguing with a caricature. Please try to be more amusing in future. From max at maxmore.com Mon Oct 7 21:34:25 2013 From: max at maxmore.com (Max More) Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2013 14:34:25 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Another step towards uploading In-Reply-To: <52530E94.8080505@aleph.se> References: <52519DD7.1040406@aleph.se> <20131007054339.GR10405@leitl.org> <52530E94.8080505@aleph.se> Message-ID: Someone mentioned a Cryonics magazine article on plastic embedding vs cryopreservation. You can find the article here: http://www.alcor.org/magazine/2013/01/16/chemical-brain-preservation-and-human-suspended-animation/ --Max On Mon, Oct 7, 2013 at 12:42 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > On 07/10/2013 15:45, John Clark wrote: > > On Mon, Oct 7, 2013 at 1:43 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > > Perfusion by diffusion works only on cm^3 scale systems. >> > > OK, but how is that a problem? Just cut the big brain up into slices one > centimeter thick or less; the gap between the slices could be made very > thin indeed, on the order of 30 nanometers. > > > The problem is: how do you cut a brain? A fresh brain has the consistency > of stringy toothpaste: any cutting will do massive damage. Methods for > sectioning brains properly always start with putting them in a bucket of > formaline... for two weeks or more: http://goo.gl/9ueYjN > Think about what happens during that time. Yuck. As this paper shows, > diffusion is slow enough to produce noticeable gradients of immunostains: > https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165027087800018 > > Now, there seem to exist perfusion based methods, and fixing in situ seems > to be a great start for getting something that can be sliced well later: > http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9372749 > http://www.abcam.com/ps/pdf/protocols/perfusion.pdf > Some aim at rapid fixation by injecting fixation liquid through basal > blood vessels and the ventricles, followed by the bucket for a few days: > http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1860363/ > > It might even be applicable to whale brains (!): > https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165027002001826 > > "Due to limited space and supplies of fresh water on board, the fixative > usually had to be mixed for each whale using seawater instead of fresh > water. When seawater was used, NaCl was not added to the solution. To > prepare and open the skull, sharp painter scrapes, a circular bone saw with > an adjustable blade, chisels and hammers were needed. The use of chemicals > and saw on a very unstable working platform and the risk of spatters of > bone splints, necessitated that the operator wore protective glasses, > gasmask, chemical resistant industrial gloves, heavy oilskins and strong > boots." - ah, tough Norwegian science! > > > -- > Anders Sandberg, > Future of Humanity Institute > Oxford Martin School > Faculty of Philosophy > Oxford University > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -- Max More, PhD Strategic Philosopher Co-editor, *The Transhumanist Reader* http://www.amazon.com/Transhumanist-Reader-Contemporary-Technology-Philosophy/dp/1118334310/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1372225570&sr=1-1&keywords=the+transhumanist+reader President & CEO, Alcor Life Extension Foundation -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Mon Oct 7 22:36:48 2013 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2013 15:36:48 -0700 Subject: [ExI] roboburgers to go In-Reply-To: References: <0a1801ceb94d$bc6a3360$353e9a20$@att.net> Message-ID: Will it succeed? http://foodbeast.com/2012/11/16/heres-a-look-at-the-worlds-first-smart-restaurant-chain-kitchen-free-and-run-by-robots-2/#Sl3R7e6XK4ZUuZRd.01 John On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 6:16 PM, Giovanni Santostasi wrote: > There is only one solution. Automate everything and give people a living > salary. Wealth should be shared. > Otherwise Elysium scenarios would ensue. > Give paradise to everybody. > Only way. > Giovanni > > > > On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 12:44 PM, spike wrote: > >> ** ** >> >> We knew this was going to happen eventually. A local company did this. >> The timing is interesting, since the fast food workers are threatening to >> strike unless their wages are raised way above minimum. Check it outwardly: >> **** >> >> ** ** >> >> http://momentummachines.com/#team**** >> >> ** ** >> >> spike**** >> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> >> > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Tue Oct 8 02:38:11 2013 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2013 19:38:11 -0700 Subject: [ExI] it was the best times, it was the best of times Message-ID: Tomasz Rola wrote > Please forgive me this programmer's hubris of mine, everybody. > But to be frank, I consider introduction of programmable computer to be on par with introduction of the wheel and writing. Especially when they met the so called Individual and started to be used by her/him for all things everydaily, big and small. I might possibly be the oldest person on this list. I was born in 1942. That's pretty much before the computer age. I was in high school before I saw my first computer, a vacuum tube IBM 650. Worked my way through college programing geophysical type cases on an IBM 7494 and a CDC 6400. After I got out of school started a company that designed, built and programmed industrial control and communication devices. One of them had 34 80186 chips in it. One of the uncomfortable facts I don't like to consider is that the whole industrial complex upon which humans produce computers is remarkably complex and fragile. It seems unlike to survive a serious upset. And then what? Keith From msd001 at gmail.com Tue Oct 8 02:54:01 2013 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2013 22:54:01 -0400 Subject: [ExI] it was the best times, it was the best of times In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Mon, Oct 7, 2013 at 10:38 PM, Keith Henson wrote: > > One of the uncomfortable facts I don't like to consider is that the > whole industrial complex upon which humans produce computers is > remarkably complex and fragile. It seems unlike to survive a serious > upset. > > And then what? > > Makes me think of Falken's 'life lesson' regarding the demise of the dinosaurs in Wargames. How did we get to where we are now? We have everything as it is as proof what more-primitive people are capable of achieving. I guess the sentiment you are expressing is whether or not our less-primitive selves would have any hope of re-asserting the status quo if it were taken away. How far would civilization have to fall if modern wizards and their magic were suddenly absent from the world? I feel like it would be pretty far. What might survive? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Tue Oct 8 03:36:33 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2013 21:36:33 -0600 Subject: [ExI] it was the best times, it was the best of times In-Reply-To: <20131007212443.GS10405@leitl.org> References: <043101cec0b5$b171ec90$1455c5b0$@att.net> <20131007084408.GK10405@leitl.org> <20131007164544.GM10405@leitl.org> <20131007212443.GS10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Mon, Oct 7, 2013 at 3:24 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Mon, Oct 07, 2013 at 11:29:36AM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > > > Even the government isn't wasteful enough to collect data on something > this > > Your dogma is showing. This is going to make you miss some solutions. > I don't mind my dogma. If the solutions your referring to involve BIG religion, BIG government, BIG science, BIG corporations or other things involving too damn many people, then I'm happy to opt out of those solutions. They usually don't work so well anyway and they are almost universally annoying. > > useless. If there is less waste, then that is a GOOD THING. Conservation > is > > Less waste is a good thing, but I'm using it instrumentally here, as a > metric. > As usual, you want to use metrics of things that cannot be measured. It is very convenient to do that, since you can use such metrics to make any argument you wish to. However, you do this at the cost of your arguments being weighted lower than they would if you provided actual data. (Actual data meaning anything that didn't originate on theoildrum as a first order approximation). > > always the lowest hanging fruit. I didn't even laugh so much when Obama > > said "Inflate your tires" though he got dumped on for saying so. Dumpster > > diving may be a way of life for a fringe, but that's not what I'm talking > > about when I talk about stuff being free in great amounts these days. > > I realize what you're talking about. I'm talking about something else. > I understand. I reserve the right to reject your reality and substitute my own. > > But even products can be free to the users. For example, Google paid for > > hard drives that store my email. Yes, they made up for it with > advertising, > > Google is not selling cloud services. Google is selling their users. > You're not the customer, you're the product. > You may have a point there. > > which I read. But the hard drive space is "free" to me in terms of actual > > cash. I do pay for it with a minimal amount of time. > > You're having only a tiny idea of what you're paying for it. > Other than advertising, I know of no really big revenue stream for Google. Would you please enlighten me? My privacy?? Don't know how they monetize that yet. > > Should be enough time to develop space based copper mining... don't you > > think? > > What, about 30 years? No way in hell. Go talk to rocket people to > realize how much you don't know. > There are rocket people here. They seem to be relatively optimistic... but perhaps I overstate it. I'll let them speak for themselves. > > But some monkeys are more clever than others. Fortunately, we still have > > Their cleverness does not translate into moving all the other monkeys > from their furry butts. > Sadly no, since we have so many clever monkeys who are busy caring for the monkeys that won't get off their furry butts. > > money enough that some of the clever monkeys can amass the fortunes > > necessary to do this (Elan Musk, Paul Alan anyone?) despite the > government > > I'm happy that these guys exist. I'm unhappy that the bulk of capital > amassment is unproductive. I'm unhappy that much of wealth-building lies > in our past. > Ooooh. I'm so scared. Wealth building in our past? Are you mad? I've known many rich people myself. None of them are sitting on their ass or their money the way you seem to think they do. All of them are busy investing or building something. Maybe there is something different about rich people in Utah than in other places, but I rather doubt it. Would you like to pull a number out of your butt to back up your view of capital amassment? Even rich people who do sit on their asses have money men who invest for them. They don't buy millions of dollars worth of savings bonds for heck sake. It is ridiculous to say that rich folk's money doesn't do anything. Numbers please. > > attempting to take most of it away to keep the non-functional monkeys > > breathing and voting for the socialist agenda. > > > > If we take all of Musk's money away from him and those like him, then > > perhaps we will not be mining asteroids in the end and we can all eat > > terrestrial rocks with Eugen. > > I'm getting tired of arguing with a caricature. Please try to be more > amusing in future. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzHjIj3fpR8&list=PL6F85DE52B8FD688D&index=9 -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Tue Oct 8 04:33:29 2013 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2013 00:33:29 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Purified humanity Re: Your Genome Is a Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland In-Reply-To: <52519ECF.7090409@aleph.se> References: <52519ECF.7090409@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Sun, Oct 6, 2013 at 1:33 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > > Removing redundancy to make mutations directly lethal might not be optimal > for all genes. A lot of mutations seem to just reduce performance, so you > increase the risk of being born with reduced performance genes. After all, > being heterozygous for sickle-cell anemia is not lethal, yet pretty > annoying. ### Aren't heterozygotes almost always asymptomatic, aside from being immune to malaria? This said, I agree that changing the levels of redundancy would not be a simple project - since we evolved with redundancy, it's woven deep into our control logic, and untangling this association would be a very complex undertaking, probably much more difficult than a "simple" sweep to remove pseudogenes, and correct mutated ones. Rafal From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Tue Oct 8 04:39:21 2013 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2013 00:39:21 -0400 Subject: [ExI] =?utf-8?q?Tap_tap=E2=80=A6=2EHello=3F_Is_this_thing_on=3F_?= =?utf-8?q?=28Or_Zombie_Apocalypse!=29?= In-Reply-To: <3BE3E642-B8AF-4182-99D4-3AADE05D500C@me.com> References: <3BE3E642-B8AF-4182-99D4-3AADE05D500C@me.com> Message-ID: On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 3:39 AM, Omar Rahman wrote: > So, how are you all doing in the post apocalyptic libertarian paradise? This is twice now that the Disciples of Reagan have acted on his proclamation "Government is the problem!" I wonder how the markets will react to this elimination of government. That's the true test of anything and everything, right? > > Media pundits are coming for our brains......*crash* .....*bang*.......*aaaaahhhhhhHHHHaaaAAAAa* .....braaiiins............braaaaiiiiiinnnnnnssss............ > > Braaaaaaaaiiiiinnnnnnnns, ### For something written by somebody with a brain, see here: http://www.gosanangelo.com/news/2013/oct/06/thomas-sowell-who-shut-down-the-federal/ Rafal From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Tue Oct 8 04:44:06 2013 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2013 00:44:06 -0400 Subject: [ExI] another step towards uploading In-Reply-To: <52519CF7.4000200@aleph.se> References: <524BEC29.2010505@aleph.se> <52519CF7.4000200@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Sun, Oct 6, 2013 at 1:25 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > Ah, I think you misread me (in an interesting direction). I was not talking > about dendritic tree computation, just finding out what was in the different > synapses. If you do not know whether they are glutaminergic or dopaminergic, > it doesn't matter how much you try to brute force what the rest of the cell > is doing. ### Oh, ok :) I would guess that the nanoscale MRS should be able to read the type of synapse, since neurotransmitters, being small molecules, tend to have clear MR spectra, so they should be easier to tell apart than e.g. receptors or other proteins. Rafal From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Tue Oct 8 04:51:01 2013 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2013 00:51:01 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Purified humanity In-Reply-To: <20131007143644.GF10405@leitl.org> References: <1381151147.6846.YahooMailNeo@web165005.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> <20131007143644.GF10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Mon, Oct 7, 2013 at 10:36 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > The problem with evolutionary systems is that seed is compact, and > morphogenesis is a complex, trapdoor system. So there is no simple > way to link bit mutations in the seed to the expressed adult system. > It's pretty much like trying to invert a cryptohash. ### Massive sequence databases with millions of individual humans and some data on their phenotypes should give us a lot of knowledge. With in silico modeling of genetic control networks from /omic (proteomic, genomic, interactomic) research and some 3D interaction simulations we might get quite far in the next 30 years. Which is not to say this is a simple endeavor. Rafal From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Tue Oct 8 05:11:30 2013 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2013 01:11:30 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Another step towards uploading In-Reply-To: References: <52519BAF.7020308@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Mon, Oct 7, 2013 at 12:36 AM, John Clark wrote: > Because they wouldn't be photographing them I imagine that if Alcor were to > ever use this technique their slides would be much WIDER than 20 microns, > and they would have far fewer than 7400 slides. The only reason to slice the > brain at all would be to ensure even diffusion of the chemical fixative. ### You need to take into account the damage introduced during mechanical slicing. Even a single bad slice (torn, crushed, happens all the time, as anybody who spent hours at a microtome can attest) could scramble the long-distance fibers, and if you have many very large slides there is really a lot of opportunity for non-salvageable losses. This is not to say the idea is bad, but it might require a lot of tweaking and development work, not necessarily possible on Alcor's budget. Vitrification with helium persufflation should allow complete preservation of long-distance topology, making the subsequent reconstruction work much easier. Rafal From spike66 at att.net Tue Oct 8 04:58:59 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2013 21:58:59 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Tap tap..Hello? Is this thing on? (Or Zombie Apocalypse!) In-Reply-To: References: <3BE3E642-B8AF-4182-99D4-3AADE05D500C@me.com> Message-ID: <01bf01cec3e3$1a1cf160$4e56d420$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Rafal Smigrodzki ### For something written by somebody with a brain, see here: http://www.gosanangelo.com/news/2013/oct/06/thomas-sowell-who-shut-down-the- federal/ Rafal_______________________________________________ Thanks Rafal, that is an excellent article. They told us all these dire consequences that would result from a government shutdown, but it was all exaggerated. Now the government is afraid no one will notice they shut down. So they go out of their way to be as annoying as possible: http://legalinsurrection.com/2013/10/now-govt-trying-to-block-people-from-lo oking-at-mt-rushmore-seriously/ If they really wanted to scare the bejeebers out of the proletariat with something real, they should threaten to shut down the internet. That would stir even MY jaded libertarian soul. Sowell made the case as clear as anyone has to date. The answer he left out is one I have been wondering all this time: if ObamaCare is to be revenue-neutral as we were told, why does it need all this funding the House of Representatives refuses to give? Can't they just go ahead without pumping money into it? Why not? If they did that, who wouldn't get paid, and why do we need them anyway? The law says you buy insurance, you go to the doctor, the insurance company pays. Where is all this government funding needed for doing that? Can't they just do the parts of it that don't cost the government anything? spike From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Tue Oct 8 05:41:35 2013 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2013 22:41:35 -0700 Subject: [ExI] New way to enumerate prime number Message-ID: I think there is at least one person on this list with an interest in primes. I have never seen anything like this that I know of. http://www.skycoyote.com/Tableau Keith From giulio at gmail.com Tue Oct 8 06:18:24 2013 From: giulio at gmail.com (Giulio Prisco) Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2013 08:18:24 +0200 Subject: [ExI] New way to enumerate prime number In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: WOW - is this new? On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 7:41 AM, Keith Henson wrote: > I think there is at least one person on this list with an interest in > primes. I have never seen anything like this that I know of. > > http://www.skycoyote.com/Tableau > > Keith > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From anders at aleph.se Tue Oct 8 08:18:22 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Tue, 08 Oct 2013 09:18:22 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Purified humanity Re: Your Genome Is a Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland In-Reply-To: References: <52519ECF.7090409@aleph.se> Message-ID: <5253BFCE.9030900@aleph.se> On 2013-10-08 05:33, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > On Sun, Oct 6, 2013 at 1:33 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: >> Removing redundancy to make mutations directly lethal might not be optimal >> for all genes. A lot of mutations seem to just reduce performance, so you >> increase the risk of being born with reduced performance genes. After all, >> being heterozygous for sickle-cell anemia is not lethal, yet pretty >> annoying. > ### Aren't heterozygotes almost always asymptomatic, aside from being > immune to malaria? Whoops, I intended to write homozygote. > This said, I agree that changing the levels of redundancy would not be > a simple project - since we evolved with redundancy, it's woven deep > into our control logic, and untangling this association would be a > very complex undertaking, probably much more difficult than a "simple" > sweep to remove pseudogenes, and correct mutated ones. I wonder how many of the pseudogenes have accidental regulatory function by now? One of the annoyances with a very redundant and messy system is that it likely quickly adapts to shifts in the messy contents, but shifts in overall level of messiness may have qualitative effects. Would be interesting to study. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Tue Oct 8 08:34:37 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Tue, 08 Oct 2013 09:34:37 +0100 Subject: [ExI] New way to enumerate prime number In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <5253C39D.2050508@aleph.se> On 2013-10-08 07:18, Giulio Prisco wrote: > WOW - is this new? I have never seen it before. However, I think this is a restatement of the sieve of Eratosthenes: look at the third colum: it is going 0101010, allowing only odd numbers after 2 to be prime. The fourth goes 0110110110, allowing only numbers not divisible by 3. And so on. > > On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 7:41 AM, Keith Henson wrote: >> I think there is at least one person on this list with an interest in >> primes. I have never seen anything like this that I know of. >> >> http://www.skycoyote.com/Tableau >> >> Keith >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From pharos at gmail.com Tue Oct 8 09:27:05 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2013 10:27:05 +0100 Subject: [ExI] New way to enumerate prime number In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 6:41 AM, Keith Henson wrote: > I think there is at least one person on this list with an interest in > primes. I have never seen anything like this that I know of. > > http://www.skycoyote.com/Tableau > > Google seems to be developing a grudge against Keith. Gmail puts his posts into the Spam folder, claiming that similar posts have been marked as spam by users. To me, there doesn't seem to be anything unusual in these posts. Is there a campaign going on to mark all Keith's posts as spam? BillK From eugen at leitl.org Tue Oct 8 09:49:53 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2013 11:49:53 +0200 Subject: [ExI] it was the best times, it was the best of times In-Reply-To: References: <043101cec0b5$b171ec90$1455c5b0$@att.net> <20131007084408.GK10405@leitl.org> <20131007164544.GM10405@leitl.org> <20131007212443.GS10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20131008094953.GI10405@leitl.org> On Mon, Oct 07, 2013 at 09:36:33PM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > > Your dogma is showing. This is going to make you miss some solutions. > > > > I don't mind my dogma. If the solutions your referring to involve BIG > religion, BIG government, BIG science, BIG corporations or other things > involving too damn many people, then I'm happy to opt out of those > solutions. They usually don't work so well anyway and they are almost > universally annoying. As a *pragmatic* transhumanist anarchist I'm primarily interested in working around defects in the human condition in order to enhance co-operation. You're obviously taking me for somebody else. > > > > useless. If there is less waste, then that is a GOOD THING. Conservation > > is > > > > Less waste is a good thing, but I'm using it instrumentally here, as a > > metric. > > > > As usual, you want to use metrics of things that cannot be measured. It is Bull. I can trust a long-term freegan to recognize subjective trends in a given area, and integrate multiple such data points into a global trend. > very convenient to do that, since you can use such metrics to make any > argument you wish to. However, you do this at the cost of your arguments > being weighted lower than they would if you provided actual data. (Actual > data meaning anything that didn't originate on theoildrum as a first order You're cherry-picking. From now on I demand evidence in peer-reviewed publications. If you're too stupid to understand the value of TOD I can pull up equivalent publications from Nature and Science. I hope you can do the same for your polyannish pronouncements. > approximation). > > > > > always the lowest hanging fruit. I didn't even laugh so much when Obama > > > said "Inflate your tires" though he got dumped on for saying so. Dumpster > > > diving may be a way of life for a fringe, but that's not what I'm talking > > > about when I talk about stuff being free in great amounts these days. > > > > I realize what you're talking about. I'm talking about something else. > > > > I understand. I reserve the right to reject your reality and substitute my > own. If you keep doing that you'll wind up alone in a room. > > > > But even products can be free to the users. For example, Google paid for > > > hard drives that store my email. Yes, they made up for it with > > advertising, > > > > Google is not selling cloud services. Google is selling their users. > > You're not the customer, you're the product. > > > > You may have a point there. > > > > > which I read. But the hard drive space is "free" to me in terms of actual > > > cash. I do pay for it with a minimal amount of time. > > > > You're having only a tiny idea of what you're paying for it. > > > > Other than advertising, I know of no really big revenue stream for Google. > Would you please enlighten me? My privacy?? Don't know how they monetize > that yet. How much is your freedom worth in a fascist state? Please put it that in exact dollar and cents values. > > > > Should be enough time to develop space based copper mining... don't you > > > think? > > > > What, about 30 years? No way in hell. Go talk to rocket people to > > realize how much you don't know. > > > > There are rocket people here. They seem to be relatively optimistic... but I'm just an egg, but I understand the economics of mass transfer in the solar system, and our ability to boostrap autonomous fabrication capacities in remote locations, which is nonexistent. You want kilotons of cheap metal from lightminutes away deorbited and semi-soft landed in three decades. Sure, if Singularity lands. Should be any day now. > perhaps I overstate it. I'll let them speak for themselves. > > > > > But some monkeys are more clever than others. Fortunately, we still have > > > > Their cleverness does not translate into moving all the other monkeys > > from their furry butts. > > > > Sadly no, since we have so many clever monkeys who are busy caring for the > monkeys that won't get off their furry butts. So you agree that mere cleverness of a tiny fraction is insufficient, if the majority remain engaged in dysfunctional, long-term suicidal behavior. > > > > money enough that some of the clever monkeys can amass the fortunes > > > necessary to do this (Elan Musk, Paul Alan anyone?) despite the > > government > > > > I'm happy that these guys exist. I'm unhappy that the bulk of capital > > amassment is unproductive. I'm unhappy that much of wealth-building lies > > in our past. > > > > Ooooh. I'm so scared. Wealth building in our past? Are you mad? Funny, I think you're stark hopping mad, but it seems the feeling is mutual. We can't be possibly both right. So one of us has a much greater disconnect from reality that the other. > I've known many rich people myself. None of them are sitting on their ass Anecdote. > or their money the way you seem to think they do. All of them are busy > investing or building something. Maybe there is something different about > rich people in Utah than in other places, but I rather doubt it. Would you Definitely anecdote. > like to pull a number out of your butt to back up your view of capital > amassment? > > Even rich people who do sit on their asses have money men who invest for > them. They don't buy millions of dollars worth of savings bonds for heck You're obviously clueless about basic mechanisms of wealth transfer and trends in social stratification. > sake. It is ridiculous to say that rich folk's money doesn't do anything. > Numbers please. No. You point me to peer-reviewed publications proving your point. Nature/Science should be a good first start. Put up, or shut up. > > > > attempting to take most of it away to keep the non-functional monkeys > > > breathing and voting for the socialist agenda. > > > > > > If we take all of Musk's money away from him and those like him, then > > > perhaps we will not be mining asteroids in the end and we can all eat > > > terrestrial rocks with Eugen. > > > > I'm getting tired of arguing with a caricature. Please try to be more > > amusing in future. > > > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzHjIj3fpR8&list=PL6F85DE52B8FD688D&index=9 From pharos at gmail.com Tue Oct 8 10:14:20 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2013 11:14:20 +0100 Subject: [ExI] it was the best times, it was the best of times In-Reply-To: References: <043101cec0b5$b171ec90$1455c5b0$@att.net> <20131007084408.GK10405@leitl.org> <20131007164544.GM10405@leitl.org> <20131007212443.GS10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 4:36 AM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > I've known many rich people myself. None of them are sitting on their ass or > their money the way you seem to think they do. All of them are busy > investing or building something. Maybe there is something different about > rich people in Utah than in other places, but I rather doubt it. Would you > like to pull a number out of your butt to back up your view of capital > amassment? > > Even rich people who do sit on their asses have money men who invest for > them. They don't buy millions of dollars worth of savings bonds for heck > sake. It is ridiculous to say that rich folk's money doesn't do anything. > Numbers please. > Well, there are a few well-known rich tech people building rockets, planes, robots, etc. But these few seem to be vastly outweighed by the unknown rich. In 2013 there were 442 US billionaires. A lot were in hedge funds / finance industry (of course). There are about 50,000 super-rich (over 30 million USD) and over 5 million mere millionaires. So there are plenty of people with money to do stuff. But there seems to be very little news about what they might be doing with their wealth. BillK From anders at aleph.se Tue Oct 8 10:23:10 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Tue, 08 Oct 2013 11:23:10 +0100 Subject: [ExI] it was the best times, it was the best of times In-Reply-To: <20131008094953.GI10405@leitl.org> References: <043101cec0b5$b171ec90$1455c5b0$@att.net> <20131007084408.GK10405@leitl.org> <20131007164544.GM10405@leitl.org> <20131007212443.GS10405@leitl.org> <20131008094953.GI10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <5253DD0E.7040509@aleph.se> On 2013-10-08 10:49, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Mon, Oct 07, 2013 at 09:36:33PM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: >> As usual, you want to use metrics of things that cannot be measured. It is > Bull. I can trust a long-term freegan to recognize subjective trends > in a given area, and integrate multiple such data points into a global > trend. Bad method. (down, bad method! down!) Subjective trends are strongly biased, especially when linked to highly valued beliefs. Aggregating them from independent sources with the same rough biases is worse than selecting random anecdotes. This method will strongly tell you that the moon has a major influence on health-care admission types; just ask some nurses. Now, waste numbers are tracked in an objective way by various agencies since they have to deal with landfills, and this is where you would get not just samples but aggregated numbers for entire societies. I do not have the time to delve deep into this, but looking at http://wwws3.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/figures/municipal-waste-generation-per-capita-in-western-europe-eu-15-new-member-states-eu-12-eu-countries-eu-27-and-total-in-europe-eu-27-turkey-croatia-norway-iceland-switzerland-7/image_xlarge and http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index.php/Municipal_waste_statistics suggests that municipal waste per capita remains fairly constant in the core EU - the variations we see are far smaller than anything that could be reliably observed on the ground. West Balkan shows a markedly rising trends as their living standard improves (there the freegans ought to be able to notice year-by-year changes). Maybe the composition of the waste is changing; I leave that for other data dumpster divers. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From protokol2020 at gmail.com Tue Oct 8 10:45:19 2013 From: protokol2020 at gmail.com (Tomaz Kristan) Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2013 12:45:19 +0200 Subject: [ExI] New way to enumerate prime number In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Indeed, Google is throwing Keith's posts into spam. I dislike Google, more and more. On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 11:27 AM, BillK wrote: > On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 6:41 AM, Keith Henson wrote: > > I think there is at least one person on this list with an interest in > > primes. I have never seen anything like this that I know of. > > > > http://www.skycoyote.com/Tableau > > > > > > Google seems to be developing a grudge against Keith. > Gmail puts his posts into the Spam folder, claiming that similar posts > have been marked as spam by users. > > To me, there doesn't seem to be anything unusual in these posts. > Is there a campaign going on to mark all Keith's posts as spam? > > BillK > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -- https://protokol2020.wordpress.com/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Tue Oct 8 11:08:11 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2013 13:08:11 +0200 Subject: [ExI] it was the best times, it was the best of times In-Reply-To: <5253DD0E.7040509@aleph.se> References: <043101cec0b5$b171ec90$1455c5b0$@att.net> <20131007084408.GK10405@leitl.org> <20131007164544.GM10405@leitl.org> <20131007212443.GS10405@leitl.org> <20131008094953.GI10405@leitl.org> <5253DD0E.7040509@aleph.se> Message-ID: <20131008110811.GM10405@leitl.org> On Tue, Oct 08, 2013 at 11:23:10AM +0100, Anders Sandberg wrote: > Now, waste numbers are tracked in an objective way by various > agencies since they have to deal with landfills, and this is where > you would get not just samples but aggregated numbers for entire > societies. I'm not talking about bulk waste. I'm talking about salvageables like http://chronopause.com/chronopause.com/index.php/2011/09/29/doing-the-time-warp/index.html If you're aware of any statistics covering these, I would be very interested to hear them. > I do not have the time to delve deep into this, but looking at > http://wwws3.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/figures/municipal-waste-generation-per-capita-in-western-europe-eu-15-new-member-states-eu-12-eu-countries-eu-27-and-total-in-europe-eu-27-turkey-croatia-norway-iceland-switzerland-7/image_xlarge > and > http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index.php/Municipal_waste_statistics > suggests that municipal waste per capita remains fairly constant in > the core EU - the variations we see are far smaller than anything > that could be reliably observed on the ground. West Balkan shows a > markedly rising trends as their living standard improves (there the > freegans ought to be able to notice year-by-year changes). Maybe the > composition of the waste is changing; I leave that for other data > dumpster divers. From eugen at leitl.org Tue Oct 8 11:37:46 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2013 13:37:46 +0200 Subject: [ExI] When Wealth Disappears Message-ID: <20131008113746.GO10405@leitl.org> (doesn't mention the actual core problem: exponential growth kinetics reaching fundamental limits "unexpectedly") http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/07/opinion/when-wealth-disappears.html?ref=opinion&_r=0&pagewanted=print When Wealth Disappears By STEPHEN D. KING LONDON ? AS bad as things in Washington are ? the federal government shutdown since Tuesday, the slim but real potential for a debt default, a political system that seems increasingly ungovernable ? they are going to get much worse, for the United States and other advanced economies, in the years ahead. >From the end of World War II to the brief interlude of prosperity after the cold war, politicians could console themselves with the thought that rapid economic growth would eventually rescue them from short-term fiscal transgressions. The miracle of rising living standards encouraged rich countries increasingly to live beyond their means, happy in the belief that healthy returns on their real estate and investment portfolios would let them pay off debts, educate their children and pay for their medical care and retirement. This was, it seemed, the postwar generations? collective destiny. But the numbers no longer add up. Even before the Great Recession, rich countries were seeing their tax revenues weaken, social expenditures rise, government debts accumulate and creditors fret thanks to lower economic growth rates. We are reaching end times for Western affluence. Between 2000 and 2007, ahead of the Great Recession, the United States economy grew at a meager average of about 2.4 percent a year ? a full percentage point below the 3.4 percent average of the 1980s and 1990s. From 2007 to 2012, annual growth amounted to just 0.8 percent. In Europe, as is well known, the situation is even worse. Both sides of the North Atlantic have already succumbed to a Japan-style ?lost decade.? Surely this is only an extended cyclical dip, some policy makers say. Champions of stimulus assert that another huge round of public spending or monetary easing ? maybe even a commitment to higher inflation and government borrowing ? will jump-start the engine. Proponents of austerity argue that only indiscriminate deficit reduction, accompanied by reforming entitlement programs and slashing regulations, will unleash the ?animal spirits? necessary for a private-sector renaissance. Both sides are wrong. It?s now abundantly clear that forecasters have been too optimistic, boldly projecting rates of growth that have failed to transpire. The White House and Congress, unable to reach agreement in the face of a fiscal black hole, have turned over the economic repair job to the Federal Reserve, which has bought trillions of dollars in securities to keep interest rates low. That has propped up the stock market but left many working Americans no better off. Growth remains lackluster. The end of the golden age cannot be explained by some technological reversal. >From iPad apps to shale gas, technology continues to advance. The underlying reason for the stagnation is that a half-century of remarkable one-off developments in the industrialized world will not be repeated. First was the unleashing of global trade, after a period of protectionism and isolationism between the world wars, enabling manufacturing to take off across Western Europe, North America and East Asia. A boom that great is unlikely to be repeated in advanced economies. Second, financial innovations that first appeared in the 1920s, notably consumer credit, spread in the postwar decades. Post-crisis, the pace of such borrowing is muted, and likely to stay that way. Third, social safety nets became widespread, reducing the need for households to save for unforeseen emergencies. Those nets are fraying now, meaning that consumers will have to save more for ever longer periods of retirement. Fourth, reduced discrimination flooded the labor market with the pent-up human capital of women. Women now make up a majority of the American labor force; that proportion can rise only a little bit more, if at all. Finally, the quality of education improved: in 1950, only 15 percent of American men and 4 percent of American women between ages 20 and 24 were enrolled in college. The proportions for both sexes are now over 30 percent, but with graduates no longer guaranteed substantial wage increases, the costs of education may come to outweigh the benefits. These five factors induced, if not complacency, an assumption that economies could expand forever. Adam Smith discerned this back in 1776 in his ?Wealth of Nations?: ?It is in the progressive state, while the society is advancing to the further acquisition, rather than when it has acquired its full complement of riches, that the condition of the labouring poor, of the great body of the people, seems to be the happiest and the most comfortable. It is hard in the stationary, and miserable in the declining state.? The decades before the French Revolution saw an extraordinary increase in living standards (alongside a huge increase in government debt). But in the late 1780s, bad weather led to failed harvests and much higher food prices. Rising expectations could no longer be met. We all know what happened next. When the money runs out, a rising state, which Smith described as ?cheerful,? gives way to a declining, ?melancholy? one: promises can no longer be met, mistrust spreads and markets malfunction. Today, that?s particularly true for societies where income inequality is high and where the current generation has, in effect, borrowed from future ones. In the face of stagnation, reform is essential. The euro zone is unlikely to survive without the creation of a legitimate fiscal and banking union to match the growing political union. But even if that happens, Southern Europe?s sky-high debts will be largely indigestible. Will Angela Merkel?s Germany accept a one-off debt restructuring that would impose losses on Northern European creditors and taxpayers but preserve the euro zone? The alternatives ? disorderly defaults, higher inflation, a breakup of the common currency, the dismantling of the postwar political project ? seem worse. In the United States, which ostensibly has the right institutions (if not the political will) to deal with its economic problems, a potentially explosive fiscal situation could be resolved through scurrilous means, but only by threatening global financial and economic instability. Interest rates can be held lower than the inflation rate, as the Fed has done. Or the government could devalue the dollar, thereby hitting Asian and Arab creditors. Such ?default by stealth,? however, might threaten a crisis of confidence in the dollar, wiping away the purchasing-power benefits Americans get from the dollar?s status as the world?s reserve currency. Not knowing who, ultimately, will lose as a consequence of our past excesses helps explain America?s current strife. This is not an argument for immediate and painful austerity, which isn?t working in Europe. It is, instead, a plea for economic honesty, to recognize that promises made during good times can no longer be easily kept. That means a higher retirement age, more immigration to increase the working-age population, less borrowing from abroad, less reliance on monetary policy that creates unsustainable financial bubbles, a new social compact that doesn?t cannibalize the young to feed the boomers, a tougher stance toward banks, a further opening of world trade and, over the medium term, a commitment to sustained deficit reduction. In his ?Future of an Illusion,? Sigmund Freud argued that the faithful clung to God?s existence in the absence of evidence because the alternative ? an empty void ? was so much worse. Modern beliefs about economic prospects are not so different. Policy makers simply pray for a strong recovery. They opt for the illusion because the reality is too bleak to bear. But as the current fiscal crisis demonstrates, facing the pain will not be easy. And the waking up from our collective illusions has barely begun. Stephen D. King, chief economist at HSBC, is the author of ?When the Money Runs Out: The End of Western Affluence.? From msd001 at gmail.com Tue Oct 8 11:53:59 2013 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2013 07:53:59 -0400 Subject: [ExI] New way to enumerate prime number In-Reply-To: <5253C39D.2050508@aleph.se> References: <5253C39D.2050508@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 4:34 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > On 2013-10-08 07:18, Giulio Prisco wrote: > >> WOW - is this new? >> > > I have never seen it before. > > However, I think this is a restatement of the sieve of Eratosthenes: look > at the third colum: it is going 0101010, allowing only odd numbers after 2 > to be prime. The fourth goes 0110110110, allowing only numbers not > divisible by 3. And so on. Good point. This graphical process could also model a growth pattern of a physical system.[1] Seeing those streams of close-distance "1" makes me think of networks (or a default topology on which to build a network according to another iterative process [2]) [1] DNA Origami / DNA Folding http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhGG__boRxU (I hope every person capable of understanding this video would have already seen it) [2] Ophanogenesis chapter of Greg Egan's Diaspora http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/DIASPORA/01/Orphanogenesis.html On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 7:41 AM, Keith Henson wrote: >> >>> I think there is at least one person on this list with an interest in >>> primes. I have never seen anything like this that I know of. >>> >>> http://www.skycoyote.com/**Tableau >>> >>> At least one, but it seems there are more :) Thanks for posting. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Tue Oct 8 12:06:42 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2013 05:06:42 -0700 Subject: [ExI] New way to enumerate prime number In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <007601cec41e$da9f0280$8fdd0780$@att.net> On Behalf Of Keith Henson Subject: [ExI] New way to enumerate prime number >...I think there is at least one person on this list with an interest in primes. I have never seen anything like this that I know of. http://www.skycoyote.com/Tableau Keith _______________________________________________ Keith, this is a good graphical way to explain a method Eratosthenes used to calculate primes. The method shown on Sky's page can be improved by only extrapolating forward on those rows which do not have a zero. Then you are using only primes rather than all integers to identify composites, so it eliminates redundancy. Sky's page got me to thinking about what it must have been like for the ancient Greeks, when they were discovering all this math for the first time. Oh my how cool would that be? They discover all this new stuff and realize they were the very first humans to have figured it out, the algebra, the geometry, the primes, all the wicked cool stuff. They would know that had others elsewhere discovered it, there would have been consequences that were not seen, so they could deduce they were the very first humans to see this stuff. That must have been a mind blowing awesome time, new math being discovered every day, chicks in togas all over the place, how cool is that? Eratosthenes must have been at ground zero for all that. He is my favorite ancient Greek. If we get uploading and it is possible to enter a sim of any historic human, to experience all the things that person experienced, virtually live in that historic person's time doing the things that person did, discover the things that person discovered, feel the things he felt, I know whose life I will choose to experience: Hugh Hefner. But after I live Hugh's life a time or three, then I would want to live Eratosthenes' life. spike From spike66 at att.net Tue Oct 8 12:47:49 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2013 05:47:49 -0700 Subject: [ExI] does a us default take down the internet? was: RE: New way to enumerate prime number Message-ID: <008001cec424$98fac0c0$caf04240$@att.net> ... On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg Subject: Re: [ExI] New way to enumerate prime number On 2013-10-08 07:18, Giulio Prisco wrote: >>... WOW - is this new? >...However, I think this is a restatement of the sieve of Eratosthenes: -- Dr Anders Sandberg _______________________________________________ It's tough living in California. You find out everything several hours later than those living in Europe. I propose we move the international date line. Anders is right on this and got there first. He probably would have answered it first in any case for I already knew that he is a late up-stayer. It used to be a few hours delay didn't mean much, but times have changed. Now in terms of cool discoveries, hours have become years. I understand there is a new undersea cable that will shave a few milliseconds off the communication latency between Tokyo and London, which the currency traders need. With software trading in place, a few milliseconds is the difference between a few billion dollar payday and bankruptcy. So all this talk of the US defaulting on its debts raises a question I don't see being answered anywhere. If the US government shuts down for real, does that take down the internet? spike From eugen at leitl.org Tue Oct 8 13:20:01 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2013 15:20:01 +0200 Subject: [ExI] does a us default take down the internet? was: RE: New way to enumerate prime number In-Reply-To: <008001cec424$98fac0c0$caf04240$@att.net> References: <008001cec424$98fac0c0$caf04240$@att.net> Message-ID: <20131008132001.GU10405@leitl.org> On Tue, Oct 08, 2013 at 05:47:49AM -0700, spike wrote: > So all this talk of the US defaulting on its debts raises a question I don't > see being answered anywhere. If the US government shuts down for real, does > that take down the internet? Only an internet. The Internet is a global network of Autonomous Systems running open protocols, and as such does not have single point of failure (the current centralized structures are fundamentally circumventable). You can run a piece of the Internet. At the moment you'll be still beholden to the cascade of authorities, but with approaches like cjdns everybody can be a netop in future. From spike66 at att.net Tue Oct 8 13:32:50 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2013 06:32:50 -0700 Subject: [ExI] does a us default take down the internet? was: RE: New way to enumerate prime number In-Reply-To: <20131008132001.GU10405@leitl.org> References: <008001cec424$98fac0c0$caf04240$@att.net> <20131008132001.GU10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <009601cec42a$e3247190$a96d54b0$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Eugen Leitl Subject: Re: [ExI] does a us default take down the internet? was: RE: New way to enumerate prime number On Tue, Oct 08, 2013 at 05:47:49AM -0700, spike wrote: >>... So all this talk of the US defaulting on its debts raises a question I > don't see being answered anywhere. If the US government shuts down > for real, does that take down the internet? >...Only an internet. The Internet is a global network of Autonomous Systems running open protocols, and as such does not have single point of failure (the current centralized structures are fundamentally circumventable). >...You can run a piece of the Internet. At the moment you'll be still beholden to the cascade of authorities, but with approaches like cjdns everybody can be a netop in future. _______________________________________________ Excellent thanks. Sounds like the early internet designers thought of this and made arrangements ahead of time. For those following the US government threatened shutdown, I don't understand why no one proposes the most obvious solutions. Clearly we have far too many government workers and they are paid too much, with too little to do, so they occupy their time reading our email. So start with an across the board 10% pay cut for all federal employees, then some of them get pissed off and leave, so you have fewer of them, so the expenses go down twice. In return, the budget hawks let them borrow another trillion dollars. They use up that in less than a year. Repeat the process as soon as the newly borrowed money, as often as necessary until income matches outgo. Why is that so difficult? spike From rahmans at me.com Tue Oct 8 14:32:50 2013 From: rahmans at me.com (Omar Rahman) Date: Tue, 08 Oct 2013 16:32:50 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Tap tap..Hello? Is this thing on? (Or Zombie Apocalypse!) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <24B7EFB7-3E41-4C1F-B12D-5BC8AD5A6B4A@me.com> > >> ... On Behalf Of Rafal Smigrodzki > > ### For something written by somebody with a brain, see here: > > http://www.gosanangelo.com/news/2013/oct/06/thomas-sowell-who-shut-down-the- > federal/ > > > > Rafal_______________________________________________ > > > Thanks Rafal, that is an excellent article. They told us all these dire > consequences that would result from a government shutdown, but it was all > exaggerated. Now the government is afraid no one will notice they shut > down. So they go out of their way to be as annoying as possible: > > http://legalinsurrection.com/2013/10/now-govt-trying-to-block-people-from-lo > oking-at-mt-rushmore-seriously/ > > If they really wanted to scare the bejeebers out of the proletariat with > something real, they should threaten to shut down the internet. That would > stir even MY jaded libertarian soul. > > Sowell made the case as clear as anyone has to date. The answer he left out > is one I have been wondering all this time: if ObamaCare is to be > revenue-neutral as we were told, why does it need all this funding the House > of Representatives refuses to give? Can't they just go ahead without > pumping money into it? Why not? If they did that, who wouldn't get paid, > and why do we need them anyway? The law says you buy insurance, you go to > the doctor, the insurance company pays. Where is all this government > funding needed for doing that? Can't they just do the parts of it that > don't cost the government anything? > > spike Rafa?, For something written by someone with a sense of humor please check out John Stewart or Stephen Colbert. For the more serious points raised by Thomas Sowell, in his article he suggested people check out "legislation by appropriation". I did so. A quick Wikipedia check led to the informations that all these: Annual appropriations are divided into 12 separate pieces of legislation: Agriculture, Commerce, Justice, and Science, Defense, Energy and Water, Financial Services, Homeland Security, Interior and Environment, Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, Legislative, Military and Veterans, State and Foreign Operations, Transportation and Housing and Urban Development. These are funded by by appropriations that could be blocked by a slim majority of refuseniks or potentially by a simple filibuster in the senate. The American system of government is based on a system of "checks and balances". The President and the Senate have made it clear that they do not accept this "legislation by appropriation" and insist that "Obamacare" be funded. The Supreme Court has upheld it's constitutionality. That's 2.5 branches of government in favor of "Obamacare" vs. 0.5 branches against. Time to check your balance I'd say. Mr. Sowell may be right that "legislation by appropriation" isn't new, but he is wrong to imply that this is a sensible way to govern. All we have to do to prove this is imagine what chaos would occur if Congress were to take aim at the laundry list above 'unless' they get x, y, or z. And to Spike, The Government is running the exchanges and regulating the market: these activities cost money and do not raise money. The legislation is supposed to be cost neutral to the public as an aggregate. (Hopefully cost beneficial if this experiment in mixing free markets and universal coverage works out.) Perhaps you are proposing the introduction of fees into the markets so that it would be self-supporting, yes Spike? ;) As for the seriousness of the situation, the whole laundry list of things given above are funded by appropriations and will run out of money in a short time. If you notice item 5 on the list, financial services, which would cover little things like paying the interest on the debt I think. So even if we do have revenue coming in which exceeds our interest payments we have no legal way to pay it without an (You know what's coming don't you?) appropriations bill. I've lived all my life in countries with universal health care, Canada and Poland, except for 2 years in the US where I wasn't covered. Thankfully I didn't get seriously ill in the US. Personally I like knowing that I'm "covered". It builds trust in society and makes us richer 'as a nation'. Regards, Omar -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Tue Oct 8 15:48:47 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2013 08:48:47 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Tap tap..Hello? Is this thing on? (Or Zombie Apocalypse!) In-Reply-To: <24B7EFB7-3E41-4C1F-B12D-5BC8AD5A6B4A@me.com> References: <24B7EFB7-3E41-4C1F-B12D-5BC8AD5A6B4A@me.com> Message-ID: <00e501cec43d$e0f736b0$a2e5a410$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Omar Rahman >? >?Annual appropriations are divided into 12 separate pieces of legislation: Cool thanks Omar. Let us look at these please. 1. Agriculture? OK agriculture. Why do we need government to be involved in that? Why? In the old days we set up subsidies for farmers to not grow stuff. It was a means of price support, which we no longer need, given international markets. We had the notion of subsidizing excess food production in case a world war suddenly takes huge numbers of people away from normal food production. That paradigm is ever more outdated as fewer and fewer people are needed for both agriculture and military: both tasks are mostly done by machines now. Does anyone think we face a world war 2 style conflict in which millions of guys face each other at short range with rifles? Nah. Get rid of the Department of Agriculture. 2. Commerce, Why do we need a department of commerce? Let states regulate commerce. I don?t see anything in the constitution which justifies having that department. Justice Justice is a good thing. Keep it unchanged. , and Science, Science is a good thing. Freeze or reduce pay slightly. They will not leave. There are fewer attractive options for scientists now than there once was. 3. Defense? This can be greatly reduced. With a military the size of the ours, it is too tempting for a US president to use it, even when the consequences would likely be catastrophic. Examples, Iraq, Afghanistan, and narrowly averted recent use in Syria. Keeping an enormous military force has been nothing but trouble for the US for a couple decades: everyone expects us to use it to help them. They fooled us into going into Iraq, then very nearly fooled us into going into Syria, all because we have this absurdly oversized military. Reduce it. 4. Energy Why do we need government involved in that? Let energy companies run energy policy, and let them compete. Hell they could raise their own mercenary armies to defend far-flung oil fields and supply lines, hiring the locals to do the defending. If the result is the cost of oil rose to what it really costs to get the stuff out of the ground and delivered safely, well so be it. We pay for it anyway. Then we wouldn?t need government subsidies on domestic alternatives: they would become cost effective even sooner with cost savings all around. and Water, Water is a good thing. Leave as is. 5. Financial Services, I do see that we need to make interest payments, in full, on time. Much of that goes to foreign bond holders. If we default on that and they stop loaning, evolution help us. Leave as is. Note that if the borrowing limit is hit, the government still has income: people still pay taxes. This revenue can cover interest payments with change left over to actually run the government. Regarding foreign investors, I do wonder what this must look like to them. We have admitted we cannot operate on the taxes we collect, we cannot live the life to which we are fondly accustomed on the money we make. So now we depend on foreign investors to loan us money to pay them the interest we owe them? And we are debating whether we will allow ourselves to borrow more? And still they lend? Why? What am I missing here? 6. Homeland Security Reduce it. We went all those years without it, we can slim down on it now. 7. Interior and Environment, Reduce it some. The big battles are long behind us now. Notice how clean the air has become just in our lifetimes. I do congratulate those who fought and won those struggles. It worked. The air is clean now. Reducing the EPA will not suddenly cause car companies to stop using catalytic converters, and besides, both those tasks could be done on a state level. 8. Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, All four of those could and probably should be done on a state level. 9. Legislative, So we have seen. 10. Military and Veterans, Veterans no change. Military: size reduction. We won the wars, now we should offer every enlisted an option to bail with an honorable discharge, no questions asked. Ossifers get a 10% reduction in pay, other benefits unchanged. Most will not leave. 11. State and Foreign Operations, No comment. 12. Transportation and Housing and Urban Development. Transportation: the big costs are behind us now that the interstate highway system is complete. Don?t build more of them. Housing and Urban Development: do that on a state level. I see no reason why the fed should be involved in housing at all. >?These are funded by by appropriations that could be blocked by a slim majority of refuseniks? But recall that ObamaCare was passed without senate debate because one party had a temporary supermajority, which is 60 out of 100 seats. With that, they could force a vote on a bill which was never debated on the senate floor, since it only required a senate simple majority to pass. >? or potentially by a simple filibuster in the senate? Indeed. Back when ObamaCare was crafted, any actual debate of the substance of the bill was called a filibuster. How strange is this, when actual debate about the content of a bill being crafted in private is called a filibuster. The contents of the bill created in private was not on the public record. So now we have an absurdity: nearly all the commentary in the historic record of the US senate with regard to ObamaCare was read into the record by Tea Party guy Ted Cruz. Historians will find this most amusing: the US passed the biggest change in the structure of government without public debate. This led to such howlers as the speaker of the house commenting that we need to hurry and pass this bill so we can find out what is in it. Cannot they see this would lead to all manner of mischief? Once we pass it and find out what is in it, that no one likes it, for instance, or that it is unworkable. We find out that the whole scheme really depends on young and healthy people buying overpriced health insurance. If they don?t come, the scheme doesn?t work. They aren?t coming. >?The American system of government is based on a system of "checks and balances"? Ja, and that system is defeated if one party holds all three seats of power and a supermajority in the senate, as we saw. The government was given unlimited power. They immediately abused it. >? The President and the Senate have made it clear that they do not accept this "legislation by appropriation" and insist that "Obamacare" be funded. The Supreme Court has upheld it's constitutionality. That's 2.5 branches of government in favor of "Obamacare" vs. 0.5 branches against. Time to check your balance I'd say? Sure. Now what happens when we check our balance, it is zero, so we need yet another increase in debt limit? We set a precedent that the government cannot stop borrowing, that it must borrow just to pay ordinary operating expenses. Then the check on our balance must come from our creditors. We will not like the way China runs this place. >?Mr. Sowell may be right that "legislation by appropriation" isn't new, but he is wrong to imply that this is a sensible way to govern? We must check our spending, or China will do it for us. We will not like it. >?And to Spike, >?The Government is running the exchanges and regulating the market: these activities cost money and do not raise money? Easy solution: let the insurance companies run the exchanges, leave the market regulation to the states. Open it up so that anyone can buy insurance from any state. That creates fifty competing markets, regulated by competition among states. >? The legislation is supposed to be cost neutral to the public as an aggregate. (Hopefully cost beneficial if this experiment in mixing free markets and universal coverage works out.) Perhaps you are proposing the introduction of fees into the markets so that it would be self-supporting, yes Spike? ;) Thanks for that clarification. If the whole notion relies on young and healthy people picking up the bills for the old and sick, this whole scheme will fail. Here?s how you will know: count the number of people who are young and healthy who opt to buy into the exchanges rather than pay the tax. Notice no one will tell us how many are doing it. I suspect it is few, and I don?t blame them: health insurance for a young healthy person is a bad deal, even after the tax penalty is taken into account. >? So even if we do have revenue coming in which exceeds our interest payments we have no legal way to pay it without an (You know what's coming don't you?) appropriations bill? I disagree with this. The government can still issue checks to bond holders on executive order to the federal reserve. This may be demonstrated in 9 days. Good chance what might happen is the house would pass a midnight bill authorizing it on the 17th. >?I've lived all my life in countries with universal health care, Canada and Poland, except for 2 years in the US where I wasn't covered. Thankfully I didn't get seriously ill in the US. Personally I like knowing that I'm "covered"? You were always free to buy health insurance or pay for it out of your personal funds, even in the US. I have heard this so often from people who came to the US from Europe especially. I recommend if you want to be in the US and not buy health insurance, that you keep your citizenship, or maintain dual citizenship. Then if you get sick, head on back to the homeland for treatment. Otherwise just buy health insurance: it has always been there. Ja it is expensive, but the way we do healthcare in the US is expensive: we charge those who have insurance more to cover the bills of those who do not. That is what caused this whole mess to start with. >? It builds trust in society? Indeed sir. ObamaCare has created more distrust in society than I have seen in my lifetime. I predict catastrophic failure of the whole venture. >? and makes us richer ?as a nation?. Regards, Omar Ja, what happens if we build it, but the young and healthies do not come? Where are we then as a nation? We mostly took apart a system which kinda worked, Medicare, defunded that and substituted one which looks like a failure right out of the starting gate. I will change my mind as soon as I see jillions of healthy young people flocking into the exchanges and actually buying the insurance. Right now the system is crashing under the load of millions of old and sick people struggling to opt in, and millions of healthy shoppers who see the price tag and decide to opt out. Omar, I admire your idealism, but I think this scheme will fail spectacularly. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Tue Oct 8 16:33:28 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2013 09:33:28 -0700 Subject: [ExI] does a us default take down the internet? was: RE: New way to enumerate prime number In-Reply-To: <009601cec42a$e3247190$a96d54b0$@att.net> References: <008001cec424$98fac0c0$caf04240$@att.net> <20131008132001.GU10405@leitl.org> <009601cec42a$e3247190$a96d54b0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 6:32 AM, spike wrote: > Excellent thanks. Sounds like the early internet designers thought of this > and made arrangements ahead of time. > They thought of nuclear war, wherein the US government might be physically unable - not just unwilling - to perform its duties. > For those following the US government threatened shutdown, I don't > understand why no one proposes the most obvious solutions. Clearly we have > far too many government workers and they are paid too much, with too little > to do, so they occupy their time reading our email. So start with an > across > the board 10% pay cut for all federal employees, then some of them get > pissed off and leave, so you have fewer of them, so the expenses go down > twice. Employees aren't the primary expense. Besides, many of them are unionized and under contract; it would be flat-out illegal for the government to do what you say, not to mention it would get many of those in Congress, who have been bystanders as the two sides "negotiate", thrown out of office. The easiest solution to getting the budget down is to withdraw our troops from the Middle East immediately, and otherwise cease military expenditures over there. (And don't start new ones - e.g., maybe sell arms to the rebels in Syria, but don't send "advisors" who we'd have to protect.) That would have consequences, though. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Tue Oct 8 17:41:20 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2013 13:41:20 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Another step towards uploading In-Reply-To: References: <52519DD7.1040406@aleph.se> <20131007054339.GR10405@leitl.org> <52530E94.8080505@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Mon, Oct 7, 2013 at 5:34 PM, Max More wrote: > Someone mentioned a Cryonics magazine article on plastic embedding vs > cryopreservation. You can find the article here: > > http://www.alcor.org/magazine/2013/01/16/chemical-brain-preservation-and-human-suspended-animation/ > Thanks Max, I'll have more comments about that article in a few days but first a quick question, Mr. Wolf keeps saying things like: > In neural cryobiology, on the other hand, it is possible to subject the > cryopreserved brain tissue to both a viability test and (subsequently) to > ultrastructural examination. > What is he talking about? Today with the absence of advanced Nanotechnology how can you give a viability test to a block of tissue frozen harder than a brick? John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bbenzai at yahoo.com Tue Oct 8 18:41:31 2013 From: bbenzai at yahoo.com (Ben Zaiboc) Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2013 11:41:31 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [ExI] Human Brain Project kicks off today In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <1381257691.49527.YahooMailNeo@web165003.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> Eugen Leitl quoted: > What if you could build a computer that works just like the human brain? > ... > There's just one catch: computers that fast simply haven't been invented yet. Hilariously ironic, as the biological version can't transmit signals faster than the speed of sound! It's almost as if someone is taking the beer-cans-and-string argument too far.? Sure, a brain could be built out of beer cans and string.? In principle.? Unfortunately, we don't yet have enough string... I suspect Maslow's Hammer is at work here.?? Minds and classical digital computers may be a poor match. From eugen at leitl.org Tue Oct 8 19:15:49 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2013 21:15:49 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Human Brain Project kicks off today In-Reply-To: <1381257691.49527.YahooMailNeo@web165003.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> References: <1381257691.49527.YahooMailNeo@web165003.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <20131008191549.GE10405@leitl.org> On Tue, Oct 08, 2013 at 11:41:31AM -0700, Ben Zaiboc wrote: > Eugen Leitl quoted: > > > > What if you could build a computer that works just like the human brain? > > > ... > > There's just one catch: computers that fast simply haven't been invented yet. > > > Hilariously ironic, as the biological version can't transmit signals faster than the speed of sound! We have hybrid systems which can render about a day's worth of dynamics in a second. But they're not all-purpose, so you need exascale systems to figure out how to build dedicated hardware, which can't be modifed after the fact, only adjusted in some operational parameters. > It's almost as if someone is taking the beer-cans-and-string argument too far.? Sure, a brain could be built out of beer cans and string.? In principle.? Unfortunately, we don't yet have enough string... > > I suspect Maslow's Hammer is at work here.?? Minds and classical digital computers may be a poor match. Bootstrap stages are sacrificial/discardable, just as in compiler bootstrap. From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Wed Oct 9 04:45:37 2013 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2013 00:45:37 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Tap tap..Hello? Is this thing on? (Or Zombie Apocalypse!) In-Reply-To: <24B7EFB7-3E41-4C1F-B12D-5BC8AD5A6B4A@me.com> References: <24B7EFB7-3E41-4C1F-B12D-5BC8AD5A6B4A@me.com> Message-ID: On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 10:32 AM, Omar Rahman wrote: > > For something written by someone with a sense of humor please check out John > Stewart or Stephen Colbert. ### I abstain from listening to CC. Their humor is too often of the servile kind, laughing with the master, not at him. ----------------- > > The American system of government is based on a system of "checks and > balances". The President and the Senate have made it clear that they do not > accept this "legislation by appropriation" and insist that "Obamacare" be > funded. The Supreme Court has upheld it's constitutionality. That's 2.5 > branches of government in favor of "Obamacare" vs. 0.5 branches against. > Time to check your balance I'd say. ### To go back to the initial contention: Congress gave the president about 99% of the money he needs to run the government. The president refused to run the government, and shut it down. He could have taken the money and done his job but refused to. Do you agree that the president shut down the government? ------------------ > > Mr. Sowell may be right that "legislation by appropriation" isn't new, but > he is wrong to imply that this is a sensible way to govern. All we have to > do to prove this is imagine what chaos would occur if Congress were to take > aim at the laundry list above 'unless' they get x, y, or z. ### Yes, let's imagine: Maybe, if there was a balance between drunken sailors and accountants, we would not have about 250 - 300 trillion dollars in unfunded government liabilities. Maybe, if the doves could keep the hawks in check, our nation would not have the blood of millions of brown people on our hands. Perhaps a few refuseniks could say no to the fifth estate (the permanent government,) and the Federal Register would be 700 pages, instead of 79,000 pages long. Would that be chaos? Dunno. But, to quote Mr Obama, "and make no mistake about it" - chaos is now, and it is the result of our "sensible" way of governing. Rafal From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Wed Oct 9 04:57:26 2013 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2013 00:57:26 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Human Brain Project kicks off today Message-ID: On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 3:15 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > Bootstrap stages are sacrificial/discardable, just as in compiler bootstrap. ### Ah, I am getting it now: Initial uploading/human-level AI stages are general purpose hardware with very bloaty software, with gigantic inefficiencies but then with enough specific knowledge you can build specialized hardware running highly optimized code. Makes sense. How many Eugens could you fit in the head of a pin (make it a sphere 3/16 inch diameter)? Rafal From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Wed Oct 9 05:04:49 2013 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2013 01:04:49 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Another step towards uploading In-Reply-To: References: <52519DD7.1040406@aleph.se> <20131007054339.GR10405@leitl.org> <52530E94.8080505@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 1:41 PM, John Clark wrote: > Thanks Max, I'll have more comments about that article in a few days but > first a quick question, Mr. Wolf keeps saying things like: > >> > In neural cryobiology, on the other hand, it is possible to subject the >> cryopreserved brain tissue to both a viability test and (subsequently) to >> ultrastructural examination. > > > What is he talking about? Today with the absence of advanced Nanotechnology > how can you give a viability test to a block of tissue frozen harder than a > brick? > ### You can thaw a piece and try to record electric activity, dissociate the tissue and try to culture surviving cells, look for evidence of metabolism (oxygen, glucose consumption, carbon dioxide production). This list is roughly in the diminishing order of viability. Rafal From ALONZOTG at verizon.net Wed Oct 9 04:57:15 2013 From: ALONZOTG at verizon.net (Alan Grimes) Date: Wed, 09 Oct 2013 00:57:15 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Meditations on the million year mind. Message-ID: <5254E22B.9000508@verizon.net> om Tonite I feel like mumbling incoherently about how you would go about engineering a mind to last a million years. The problem is much less trivial than it would first appear because the main issue is to maintain a youthful learning capacity even when memories spanning thousands of years are already stored. Other aspects of cognitive performance must not degrade eather. Any non-zero rate of degradation will turn out fatal over protracted time. This posting will make some brief comments about the physical requirements of such a mind but mainly focus on the architecture of the mind itself. Some consideration will also be made with regards to changing workloads and the inherent need to move beyond the baseline in terms of capacity and capabilities. om A cursory glance at the world will inform you that minds exist, primarily, in order to solve the problems of maintaining and operating their embodyment. These problems are protection, maintainance, and socialization. Additionally, if the embodyment is mobile, then it also involves navigation. Virtual 'embodyment' is frequently proposed so therefore I will address it. While there is certainly some value in being able to use a VR environment, it cannot serve as a primary environment because there will always be a physical substrate and because. By definition, any action in VR is utterly inconsequential on the physical layer and is therefore completely uninteresting. Furthermore, a VR intended to preserve a mind over long periods of time is, by definition, hell because it would cantinually have to force the mind to solve somewhat difficult but completely contrived problems just to provide the stimulation required to keep a mind in working order. Regardless of what you wish to deem the embodyment to be, the mind will exist within a physical substrate. If there is one true thing about the universe it is that it loves to kick the shit out of substrates. Any feeling of safety you might have is both temporary and illusory. So you will need to engineer a countermeasure for every conceivable scenario that might damage your brain. But more importantly, you need a way to service and repair it to factory spec. So therefore it will not be a solid block of computronium, A more plausible configuration is .1 mm cubes of computronium packed in a classical organic phospholipid membrane or in a more trendy nanosystem. In any event it must be sturdy enough to do anything from play football to get mildly zapped by the B+ on a classic tube amplifier. While the substrate is much fetishized, in the bigger picture it is profoundly irrelevant. The real issue is how the brain actually works. In the crudest sense, the brain works kind of like a flash memory. Because synapses can't form in specific locations, they must form in a shotgun fashion and then get pruned back. Similarly, a flash memory uses electrical currents to reset a bank of fuses and then selectively blows the fuses to write information. To erase information, the entire bank must be cleared. So as you are learning, you are progressively loosing synapses, as they are pruned back. There are some exceptions to this but that is the basic process. Inevitably, however, the brain exhausts it's plasticity and simply cannot form new memories. Any approach you would use to grow new synapses, or add additional cortical columns will have the effect of erasing existing memories, or, if you must, the existing personality. So therefore we need to go back to the drawing board and come up with a new system for thinking that can be expanded or re-configured as needed without unobtanium. Reconfigurability is important because there are any number of reasons you might alter your embodyment and your mind must be able to adapt as well. While we are at it, there are several crucial areas of performance that should also be addressed. These include the ability to deal with many tasks concurrently, as well as the depth and breadth of knowledge that can be brought to bear on any given problem, not to mention the capacity for higher-dimensional thinking, a deeper short-term memory stack, etc... The first thing that needs to happen is the abstraction from the unit of data from the unit of computation. Doing this will open up the whole universe of data manipulation techniques. The current cortical column is both data and processor approach might be fast but it is not flexible or scalable. What we find in the brain is a network of interconnected sub-modules, each with a relatively discreet function. A brain of the type I propose would start out with a hanful of functional modules dictated by the embodyment and what is essential to create a functioning mind. The rest would be created dynamically and without limit. The learning rate could be extrordinary by human standards and, on account of the ability to create new modules to process new ideas, could *OUT CLASS* any previous human genius (or upload thereof). Because the system would be based on database theory, the amount of information could grow to the limits of the hardware, instead of being bounded by the limitations of the original equipment due to emulation, and because the original brain lacks capacity for expansion. The next problem, is how to take advantage of such a system personally. The unchallenged standard proposal is to scan the existing brain (subsequent to sacrificing the patient in an occultic ritual involving removing the patient's heart and showing it to him while it's still beating; yes it's that primitive!). But the prospects of extracting anything useful much less extracting the data from the processors in that secenario is extremely dubious. Actually, that's much too polite: It ain't going to happen. You just aren't going to extract enough information to dump it into the new mind architecture and have anything even remotely like the original. Now, what Just Might Work (tm) is mind coalescence. You use a BCI to mind-meld with the new platform. The new platform will acquire your knowledge not by trying to un-tangle your rat's nest of dendrites but, *ghasp*, *shudder*, etc etc, by communicating with the living system. The next step would involve stimulating each cortical column to play-back all of it's information which can be remembered by the new system. The ultimate question is whether the universe will allow you to choose your point of view. This is the most profoundly non-trivial question there is. Unfortunately, only experimentation will even begin to shed light on it. =\ Will your original mind ever become "spare" and disposable to your new mind? In any event, the best result will almost certainly be obtained by operating both minds in their joined state for as long as your original brain can be maintaned. Therefore it is urgent to construct the new mind at the earliest possible date, preferably ten years ago when I came up with this idea. =P I was working on a story involving it, but then my DOS partition got wiped out so I had to manually hunt down fragments of the manuscript with a disk editor and re-construct the thing... FUN. Wanna read it? (350k file). So, you can either spend the rest of your lives debating whether cryonics is better than plastination, and then, uppon your death, someone else decides to creamate you... Or you could develop AI, neural interfaces, and mind coalescence now and start the journy toward your first-millionth birthday... The choice is yours, punks! -- NOTICE: NEW E-MAIL ADDRESS, SEE ABOVE Powers are not rights. From eugen at leitl.org Wed Oct 9 06:48:16 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2013 08:48:16 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Human Brain Project kicks off today In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20131009064816.GG10405@leitl.org> On Wed, Oct 09, 2013 at 12:57:26AM -0400, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 3:15 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > > Bootstrap stages are sacrificial/discardable, just as in compiler bootstrap. > > ### Ah, I am getting it now: Initial uploading/human-level AI stages > are general purpose hardware with very bloaty software, with gigantic > inefficiencies but then with enough specific knowledge you can build > specialized hardware running highly optimized code. Makes sense. Yes. See http://www.stanford.edu/group/brainsinsilicon/challenge.html http://www.stanford.edu/group/brainsinsilicon/neurogrid.html http://www.stanford.edu/group/brainsinsilicon/goals.html for early work in that area. It pretty much mimicks what the brain does, the spike shape itself encodes no information, and the long-distance fiber structure is pretty much like a modern supercomputer N-dimensional torus fabric, routing packets. > How many Eugens could you fit in the head of a pin (make it a sphere > 3/16 inch diameter)? Less than it might appear. It takes minimum nm^3 to encode one bit in 3D solid state, so um^3 buys you 10^9, mm^3 10^18, cm^3 10^21 bits. The actual volume is anywhere in 100 cm^3 to 1 cm^3 range. Human brain minus water is some 300 cm^3, plus a fraction is that for metabolism/maintenance, so the 100-1 cm^3 figure appears reasonable. From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Wed Oct 9 07:11:19 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2013 01:11:19 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Tap tap..Hello? Is this thing on? (Or Zombie Apocalypse!) In-Reply-To: <00e501cec43d$e0f736b0$a2e5a410$@att.net> References: <24B7EFB7-3E41-4C1F-B12D-5BC8AD5A6B4A@me.com> <00e501cec43d$e0f736b0$a2e5a410$@att.net> Message-ID: On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 9:48 AM, spike wrote: > Indeed sir. ObamaCare has created more distrust in society than I have > seen in my lifetime. I predict catastrophic failure of the whole venture. > I'll second that. However, it will take a long time for the Democrats to acknowledge it as a failure. They still haven't acknowledged their past failures in similar redistribution of wealth schemes. In fact, they point at these failures as their greatest successes. It boggles the mind. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Wed Oct 9 09:20:50 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2013 11:20:50 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Gartner's 2013 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies Maps Out Evolving Relationship Between Humans and Machines Message-ID: <20131009092050.GP10405@leitl.org> https://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2575515 STAMFORD, Conn., August 19, 2013 View All Press Releases Gartner's 2013 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies Maps Out Evolving Relationship Between Humans and Machines 2013 Hype Cycle Special Report Evaluates the Maturity of More Than 1,900 Technologies Gartner to Host Complimentary Webinar "Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle for 2013: Redefining the Relationship," August 21 at 10 a.m. EDT and 1 p.m. EDT The evolving relationship between humans and machines is the key theme of Gartner, Inc.'s "Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2013." Gartner has chosen to feature the relationship between humans and machines due to the increased hype around smart machines, cognitive computing and the Internet of Things. Analysts believe that the relationship is being redefined through emerging technologies, narrowing the divide between humans and machines. Gartner's 2013 Hype Cycle Special Report provides strategists and planners with an assessment of the maturity, business benefit and future direction of more than 2,000 technologies, grouped into 98 areas. New Hype Cycles this year include content and social analytics, embedded software and systems, consumer market research, open banking, banking operations innovation, and information and communication technology (ICT) in Africa. The Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies report is the longest-running annual Hype Cycle, providing a cross-industry perspective on the technologies and trends that senior executives, CIOs, strategists, innovators, business developers and technology planners should consider in developing emerging-technology portfolios. "It is the broadest aggregate Gartner Hype Cycle, featuring technologies that are the focus of attention because of particularly high levels of hype, or those that Gartner believes have the potential for significant impact," said Jackie Fenn, vice president and Gartner fellow. "In making the overriding theme of this year's Hype Cycle the evolving relationship between humans and machines, we encourage enterprises to look beyond the narrow perspective that only sees a future in which machines and computers replace humans. In fact, by observing how emerging technologies are being used by early adopters, there are actually three main trends at work. These are augmenting humans with technology ? for example, an employee with a wearable computing device; machines replacing humans ? for example, a cognitive virtual assistant acting as an automated customer representative; and humans and machines working alongside each other ? for example, a mobile robot working with a warehouse employee to move many boxes." "Enterprises of the future will use a combination of these three trends to improve productivity, transform citizen and customer experience, and to seek competitive advantage," said Hung LeHong, research vice president at Gartner. "These three major trends are made possible by three areas that facilitate and support the relationship between human and machine. Machines are becoming better at understanding humans and the environment ? for example, recognizing the emotion in a person's voice ? and humans are becoming better at understanding machines ? for example, through the Internet of things. At the same time, machines and humans are getting smarter by working together." Figure 1. Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2013 Gartner Hype Cycles 2013 Source: Gartner August 2013 The 2013 Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle highlights technologies that support all six of these areas including: 1. Augmenting humans with technology Technologies make it possible to augment human performance in physical, emotional and cognitive areas. The main benefit to enterprises in augmenting humans with technology is to create a more capable workforce. For example, consider if all employees had access to wearable technology that could answer any product or service question or pull up any enterprise data at will. The ability to improve productivity, sell better or serve customer better will increase significantly. Enterprises interested in these technologies should look to bioacoustic sensing, quantified self, 3D bioprinting, brain-computer interface, human augmentation, speech-to-speech translation, neurobusiness, wearable user interfaces, augmented reality and gesture control. 2. Machines replacing humans There are clear opportunities for machines to replace humans: dangerous work, simpler yet expensive-to-perform tasks and repetitive tasks. The main benefit to having machines replace humans is improved productivity, less danger to humans and sometimes better quality work or responses. For example, a highly capable virtual customer service agent could field the many straightforward questions from customers and replace much of the customer service agents' "volume" work ? with the most up-to-date information. Enterprises should look to some of these representative technologies for sources of innovation on how machines can take over human tasks: volumetric and holographic displays, autonomous vehicles, mobile robots and virtual assistants. 3. Humans and machines working alongside each other Humans versus machines is not a binary decision, there are times when machines working alongside humans is a better choice. A new generation of robots is being built to work alongside humans. IBM's Watson does background research for doctors, just like a research assistant, to ensure they account for all the latest clinical, research and other information when making diagnoses or suggesting treatments. The main benefits of having machines working alongside humans are the ability to access the best of both worlds (that is, productivity and speed from machines, emotional intelligence and the ability to handle the unknown from humans). Technologies that represent and support this trend include autonomous vehicles, mobile robots, natural language question and answering, and virtual assistants. The three trends that will change the workforce and the everyday lives of humans in the future are enabled by a set of technologies that help both machine and humans better understand each other. The following three areas are a necessary foundation for the synergistic relationships to evolve between humans and machines: 4. Machines better understanding humans and the environment Machines and systems can only benefit from a better understanding of human context, humans and human emotion. This understanding leads to simple context-aware interactions, such as displaying an operational report for the location closest to the user; to better understanding customers, such as gauging consumer sentiment for a new product line by analyzing Facebook postings; to complex dialoguing with customers, such as virtual assistants using natural language question and answering to interact on customer inquiries. The technologies on this year's Hype Cycle that represent these capabilities include bioacoustic sensing, smart dust, quantified self, brain computer interface, affective computing, biochips, 3D scanners, natural-language question and answering (NLQA), content analytics, mobile health monitoring, gesture control, activity streams, biometric authentication methods, location intelligence and speech recognition. 5. Humans better understanding machines As machines get smarter and start automating more human tasks, humans will need to trust the machines and feel safe. The technologies that make up the Internet of things will provide increased visibility into how machines are operating and the environmental situation they are operating in. For example, IBM's Watson provides "confidence" scores for the answers it provides to humans while Baxter shows a confused facial expression on its screen when it does not know what to do. MIT has also been working on Kismet, a robot that senses social cues from visual and auditory sensors, and responds with facial expressions that demonstrate understanding. These types of technology are very important in allowing humans and machines to work together. The 2013 Hype Cycle features Internet of Things, machine-to-machine communication services, mesh networks: sensor and activity streams. 6. Machines and humans becoming smarter The surge in big data, analytics and cognitive computing approaches will provide decision support and automation to humans, and awareness and intelligence to machines. These technologies can be used to make both humans and things smarter. NLQA technology can improve a virtual customer service representative. NLQA can also be used by doctors to research huge amounts of medical journals and clinical tests to help diagnose an ailment or choose a suitable treatment plan. These supporting technologies are foundational for both humans and machines as we move forward to a digital future and enterprises should consider quantum computing, prescriptive analytics, neurobusiness, NLQA, big data, complex event processing, in-memory database management system (DBMS), cloud computing, in-memory analytics and predictive analytics. Additional information is available in Gartner's "Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2013" at http://www.gartner.com/resId=2571624. The Special Report includes a video in which Ms. Fenn provides more details regarding this year's Hype Cycles, as well as links to all of the Hype Cycle reports. The Special Report can be found at http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/hype-cycles/. Mr. LeHong and Ms. Fenn will provide additional analysis during the Gartner webinar "Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle for 2013: Redefining the Relationship" on August 21, at 10 a.m. EDT and 1 p.m. EDT. To register for one of these complimentary webinars, please visit http://my.gartner.com/portal/server.pt?open=512&objID=202&mode=2&PageID=5553&resId=2546719&ref=Webinar-Calendar. Contacts Janessa Rivera Gartner janessa.rivera at gartner.com Rob van der Meulen Gartner rob.vandermeulen at gartner.com From eugen at leitl.org Wed Oct 9 09:37:07 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2013 11:37:07 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Attacking Tor: how the NSA targets users' online anonymity Message-ID: <20131009093707.GQ10405@leitl.org> (Use VM jails with amnesiac distros like Tails for daily browsing, separate security compartments using CubeOS and related, use air gap with USB sneakernet (using *nix with no USB autorun) to encrypt/decrypt and maintain sensitive information in general). http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/04/tor-attacks-nsa-users-online-anonymity Attacking Tor: how the NSA targets users' online anonymity Secret servers and a privileged position on the internet's backbone used to identify users and attack target computers Bruce Schneier theguardian.com, Friday 4 October 2013 15.50 BST Tor is a well-designed and robust anonymity tool, and successfully attacking it is difficult. Photograph: Magdalena Rehova/Alamy The online anonymity network Tor is a high-priority target for the National Security Agency. The work of attacking Tor is done by the NSA's application vulnerabilities branch, which is part of the systems intelligence directorate, or SID. The majority of NSA employees work in SID, which is tasked with collecting data from communications systems around the world. According to a top-secret NSA presentation provided by the whistleblower Edward Snowden, one successful technique the NSA has developed involves exploiting the Tor browser bundle, a collection of programs designed to make it easy for people to install and use the software. The trick identified Tor users on the internet and then executes an attack against their Firefox web browser. The NSA refers to these capabilities as CNE, or computer network exploitation. The first step of this process is finding Tor users. To accomplish this, the NSA relies on its vast capability to monitor large parts of the internet. This is done via the agency's partnership with US telecoms firms under programs codenamed Stormbrew, Fairview, Oakstar and Blarney. The NSA creates "fingerprints" that detect http requests from the Tor network to particular servers. These fingerprints are loaded into NSA database systems like XKeyscore, a bespoke collection and analysis tool which NSA boasts allows its analysts to see "almost everything" a target does on the internet. Using powerful data analysis tools with codenames such as Turbulence, Turmoil and Tumult, the NSA automatically sifts through the enormous amount of internet traffic that it sees, looking for Tor connections. Last month, Brazilian TV news show Fantastico showed screenshots of an NSA tool that had the ability to identify Tor users by monitoring internet traffic. The very feature that makes Tor a powerful anonymity service, and the fact that all Tor users look alike on the internet, makes it easy to differentiate Tor users from other web users. On the other hand, the anonymity provided by Tor makes it impossible for the NSA to know who the user is, or whether or not the user is in the US. After identifying an individual Tor user on the internet, the NSA uses its network of secret internet servers to redirect those users to another set of secret internet servers, with the codename FoxAcid, to infect the user's computer. FoxAcid is an NSA system designed to act as a matchmaker between potential targets and attacks developed by the NSA, giving the agency opportunity to launch prepared attacks against their systems. Once the computer is successfully attacked, it secretly calls back to a FoxAcid server, which then performs additional attacks on the target computer to ensure that it remains compromised long-term, and continues to provide eavesdropping information back to the NSA. Exploiting the Tor browser bundle Tor is a well-designed and robust anonymity tool, and successfully attacking it is difficult. The NSA attacks we found individually target Tor users by exploiting vulnerabilities in their Firefox browsers, and not the Tor application directly. This, too, is difficult. Tor users often turn off vulnerable services like scripts and Flash when using Tor, making it difficult to target those services. Even so, the NSA uses a series of native Firefox vulnerabilities to attack users of the Tor browser bundle. According to the training presentation provided by Snowden, EgotisticalGiraffe exploits a type confusion vulnerability in E4X, which is an XML extension for Javascript. This vulnerability exists in Firefox 11.0 ? 16.0.2, as well as Firefox 10.0 ESR ? the Firefox version used until recently in the Tor browser bundle. According to another document, the vulnerability exploited by EgotisticalGiraffe was inadvertently fixed when Mozilla removed the E4X library with the vulnerability, and when Tor added that Firefox version into the Tor browser bundle, but NSA were confident that they would be able to find a replacement Firefox exploit that worked against version 17.0 ESR. The Quantum system To trick targets into visiting a FoxAcid server, the NSA relies on its secret partnerships with US telecoms companies. As part of the Turmoil system, the NSA places secret servers, codenamed Quantum, at key places on the internet backbone. This placement ensures that they can react faster than other websites can. By exploiting that speed difference, these servers can impersonate a visited website to the target before the legitimate website can respond, thereby tricking the target's browser to visit a Foxacid server. In the academic literature, these are called "man-in-the-middle" attacks, and have been known to the commercial and academic security communities. More specifically, they are examples of "man-on-the-side" attacks. They are hard for any organization other than the NSA to reliably execute, because they require the attacker to have a privileged position on the internet backbone, and exploit a "race condition" between the NSA server and the legitimate website. This top-secret NSA diagram, made public last month, shows a Quantum server impersonating Google in this type of attack. The NSA uses these fast Quantum servers to execute a packet injection attack, which surreptitiously redirects the target to the FoxAcid server. An article in the German magazine Spiegel, based on additional top secret Snowden documents, mentions an NSA developed attack technology with the name of QuantumInsert that performs redirection attacks. Another top-secret Tor presentation provided by Snowden mentions QuantumCookie to force cookies onto target browsers, and another Quantum program to "degrade/deny/disrupt Tor access". This same technique is used by the Chinese government to block its citizens from reading censored internet content, and has been hypothesized as a probable NSA attack technique. The FoxAcid system According to various top-secret documents provided by Snowden, FoxAcid is the NSA codename for what the NSA calls an "exploit orchestrator," an internet-enabled system capable of attacking target computers in a variety of different ways. It is a Windows 2003 computer configured with custom software and a series of Perl scripts. These servers are run by the NSA's tailored access operations, or TAO, group. TAO is another subgroup of the systems intelligence directorate. The servers are on the public internet. They have normal-looking domain names, and can be visited by any browser from anywhere; ownership of those domains cannot be traced back to the NSA. However, if a browser tries to visit a FoxAcid server with a special URL, called a FoxAcid tag, the server attempts to infect that browser, and then the computer, in an effort to take control of it. The NSA can trick browsers into using that URL using a variety of methods, including the race-condition attack mentioned above and frame injection attacks. FoxAcid tags are designed to look innocuous, so that anyone who sees them would not be suspicious. An example of one such tag [LINK REMOVED] is given in another top-secret training presentation provided by Snowden. There is no currently registered domain name by that name; it is just an example for internal NSA training purposes. The training material states that merely trying to visit the homepage of a real FoxAcid server will not result in any attack, and that a specialized URL is required. This URL would be created by TAO for a specific NSA operation, and unique to that operation and target. This allows the FoxAcid server to know exactly who the target is when his computer contacts it. According to Snowden, FoxAcid is a general CNE system, used for many types of attacks other than the Tor attacks described here. It is designed to be modular, with flexibility that allows TAO to swap and replace exploits if they are discovered, and only run certain exploits against certain types of targets. The most valuable exploits are saved for the most important targets. Low-value exploits are run against technically sophisticated targets where the chance of detection is high. TAO maintains a library of exploits, each based on a different vulnerability in a system. Different exploits are authorized against different targets, depending on the value of the target, the target's technical sophistication, the value of the exploit, and other considerations. In the case of Tor users, FoxAcid might use EgotisticalGiraffe against their Firefox browsers. FoxAcid servers also have sophisticated capabilities to avoid detection and to ensure successful infection of its targets. One of the top-secret documents provided by Snowden demonstrates how FoxAcid can circumvent commercial products that prevent malicious software from making changes to a system that survive a reboot process. According to a top-secret operational management procedures manual provided by Snowden, once a target is successfully exploited it is infected with one of several payloads. Two basic payloads mentioned in the manual, are designed to collect configuration and location information from the target computer so an analyst can determine how to further infect the computer. These decisions are made in part by the technical sophistication of the target and the security software installed on the target computer; called Personal Security Products or PSP, in the manual. FoxAcid payloads are updated regularly by TAO. For example, the manual refers to version 8.2.1.1 of one of them. FoxAcid servers also have sophisticated capabilities to avoid detection and to ensure successful infection of its targets. The operations manual states that a FoxAcid payload with the codename DireScallop can circumvent commercial products that prevent malicious software from making changes to a system that survive a reboot process. The NSA also uses phishing attacks to induce users to click on FoxAcid tags. TAO additionally uses FoxAcid to exploit callbacks ? which is the general term for a computer infected by some automatic means ? calling back to the NSA for more instructions and possibly to upload data from the target computer. According to a top-secret operational management procedures manual, FoxAcid servers configured to receive callbacks are codenamed FrugalShot. After a callback, the FoxAcid server may run more exploits to ensure that the target computer remains compromised long term, as well as install "implants" designed to exfiltrate data. By 2008, the NSA was getting so much FoxAcid callback data that they needed to build a special system to manage it all. From rahmans at me.com Wed Oct 9 10:53:52 2013 From: rahmans at me.com (Omar Rahman) Date: Wed, 09 Oct 2013 12:53:52 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Tap tap..Hello? Is this thing on? (Or Zombie Apocalypse!) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <2E607AFE-D3EF-4DFB-8F37-EEEAE84E2277@me.com> > > From: "spike" >> ?Annual appropriations are divided into 12 separate pieces of legislation: > > > > Cool thanks Omar. Let us look at these please. > > 1. Agriculture? > > OK agriculture. Why do we need government to be involved in that? Why? In the old days we set up subsidies for farmers to not grow stuff. It was a means of price support, which we no longer need, given international markets. We had the notion of subsidizing excess food production in case a world war suddenly takes huge numbers of people away from normal food production. That paradigm is ever more outdated as fewer and fewer people are needed for both agriculture and military: both tasks are mostly done by machines now. Does anyone think we face a world war 2 style conflict in which millions of guys face each other at short range with rifles? Nah. Get rid of the Department of Agriculture. In general I'm in favour of subsidies only to support farmers in times of disaster or to encourage new types of production that might not be initially profitable. So generally we should remove a lot of subsidies. The problem with that is that other countries have lots of subsidies and/or cheaper costs due to the artificially high American dollar. One solution to this is to take such countries to task for breaking 'free trade' provisions. Another is to let the presses roll until a can of pop costs $100. Another is to adopt a global currency and let the markets sort it out. Or a mix of these things. But, aside from subsidies, the Department of Agriculture does lots of other things that we need. You know that thing with the cows and the transformation of grass into methane.....something like that. (/joke If it weren't for Agriculture most Red States wouldn't have any culture at all! /endjoke) > > 2. Commerce, > > Why do we need a department of commerce? Let states regulate commerce. I don?t see anything in the constitution which justifies having that department. Even if it wasn't specifically listed in the constitution, the fact of which I haven't ascertained, it doesn't mean that having that power is unconstitutional. Case in point, "Obamacare" was held to be constitutional even though there is nothing in the constitution about healthcare mandates. Aside from this, what 'special power' do states have to govern commerce that the federal government doesn't or can't possess? As an engineer Spike would you like one of your rockets to have 50 parallel incompatible control systems? Do you really think that that would be more efficient? Or that it would even work? This goes for most of your arguments that powers should devolve to individual states. > > Justice > > Justice is a good thing. Keep it unchanged. > > , and Science, > > Science is a good thing. Freeze or reduce pay slightly. They will not leave. There are fewer attractive options for scientists now than there once was. > > 3. Defense? > > This can be greatly reduced. With a military the size of the ours, it is too tempting for a US president to use it, even when the consequences would likely be catastrophic. Examples, Iraq, Afghanistan, and narrowly averted recent use in Syria. Keeping an enormous military force has been nothing but trouble for the US for a couple decades: everyone expects us to use it to help them. They fooled us into going into Iraq, then very nearly fooled us into going into Syria, all because we have this absurdly oversized military. Reduce it. As a thought experiment, what would happen if 'by accident' we gave the Defence Department and Homeland Security Department budgets to the Justice, Science, and Education (and maybe a few other) Departments and vice versa? I have no fear for the long term security of the United States. The military budget is literally weakening the country. The Budgeteers, like generals, are 'fighting the last war' and by that I mean the Cold War. That's the one, if you remember, that we won by literally outspending the Soviets until their economy collapsed. We shouldn't now defeat ourselves with the same weapon. > > 4. Energy > > Why do we need government involved in that? Let energy companies run energy policy, and let them compete. Hell they could raise their own mercenary armies to defend far-flung oil fields and supply lines, hiring the locals to do the defending. If the result is the cost of oil rose to what it really costs to get the stuff out of the ground and delivered safely, well so be it. We pay for it anyway. Then we wouldn?t need government subsidies on domestic alternatives: they would become cost effective even sooner with cost savings all around. Sure, let the energy companies do their own security work. Most of the threats to American security are actually threats to 'American' financial interests. 'American' in quotes because can anyone really say that the Oil Majors are American? But for their sakes we have done things like depose the duly elected government of Iran in a coup. (And we are surprised that they a still pissed off about it!) > > and Water, > > Water is a good thing. Leave as is. Water is the most important thing even. Without it nothing else is possible. LIfe, health, agriculture cease without it. As I'm sure you're better aware than myself that space exploration and settlement is waiting on being able to secure large amounts of water than almost anything else. (Big rockets...check! Power sources...check! Habitation modules...check! Water to keep the biologicals bio and logical...um......in orbits where you'll get hit or not present in useable densities on the ground.) As someone one said, :You can't drink the oil. You can't eat the money." > > 5. Financial Services, > > I do see that we need to make interest payments, in full, on time. Much of that goes to foreign bond holders. If we default on that and they stop loaning, evolution help us. Leave as is. Note that if the borrowing limit is hit, the government still has income: people still pay taxes. This revenue can cover interest payments with change left over to actually run the government. > > Regarding foreign investors, I do wonder what this must look like to them. We have admitted we cannot operate on the taxes we collect, we cannot live the life to which we are fondly accustomed on the money we make. So now we depend on foreign investors to loan us money to pay them the interest we owe them? And we are debating whether we will allow ourselves to borrow more? And still they lend? Why? What am I missing here? Why is that first hit of heroin, crack, etc. free? Why do they keep giving it to you when you try to get clean? Because then you're 'their bitch' as they say. > > 6. Homeland Security > > Reduce it. We went all those years without it, we can slim down on it now. Yup, we have lots of spy agencies who are already doing more than we probably really want them to do. Hello to the NSA observers of the Exi list! Does an actual NSA person read this or do we only rate keyword skimming? We really should name our observer, I suggest #NSA_SEEL. I found a nice verb as a synonym for blind: seel - sew up the eyelids of hawks and falcons > > 7. Interior and Environment, > > Reduce it some. The big battles are long behind us now. Notice how clean the air has become just in our lifetimes. I do congratulate those who fought and won those struggles. It worked. The air is clean now. Reducing the EPA will not suddenly cause car companies to stop using catalytic converters, and besides, both those tasks could be done on a state level. Here I disagree, the EPA is critically underfunded. As science and technology progress, we hope at an exponential rate, the need for someone to oversee what we can and can't release into the environment is magnified. As before, devolving this power to the sates does not add either legitimacy or efficiency. *copy* > > 8. Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, > > All four of those could and probably should be done on a state level. *paste* As before, devolving this power to the sates does not add either legitimacy or efficiency. > > 9. Legislative, > > So we have seen. Yes. All this hullabaloo, mostly in Red States, to ensure that voters are qualified to vote and it turns out that any pet chimpanzee in a gerrymandered district with a psychotic billionaire holding their leash can get elected. > > 10. Military and Veterans, > > Veterans no change. Military: size reduction. We won the wars, now we should offer every enlisted an option to bail with an honorable discharge, no questions asked. Ossifers get a 10% reduction in pay, other benefits unchanged. Most will not leave. Yup, take care of the veterans for they have gone to the closest thing to hell that we know of. The next major war will be the 'drone war' and every teenager seems to be in active training with their consoles and computers already so we don't need so many active duty personnel. We probably need to recruit more psychologists, psychiatrists and ethicist now so that when the 'drone war' starts we can move beyond seeing our enemies as 'bug splats' waiting to happen. Why, when, and how we wage war are essential ways for judging the moral quality of a civilisation. Hooray for diplomacy being able to remove chemical weapons from Syria. > > 11. State and Foreign Operations, > > No comment. To comment, or not to comment, that is the question: Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Comments, Or to take Arms against a Sea of comments, And by opposing end them: I too shall comment not lest our commenting comments beget. > > 12. Transportation and Housing and Urban Development. > > Transportation: the big costs are behind us now that the interstate highway system is complete. Don?t build more of them. Housing and Urban Development: do that on a state level. I see no reason why the fed should be involved in housing at all. > Hyperloops anyone? Maintenance of existing infrastructure is underfunded. State level? *paste* As before, devolving this power to the sates does not add either legitimacy or efficiency. > >> ?These are funded by by appropriations that could be blocked by a slim majority of refuseniks? > > > > But recall that ObamaCare was passed without senate debate because one party had a temporary supermajority, which is 60 out of 100 seats. With that, they could force a vote on a bill which was never debated on the senate floor, since it only required a senate simple majority to pass. > Not debated on the floor does not mean it wasn't debated. In fact many, myself included, feel it was watered down with too many compromises. > > >> ? or potentially by a simple filibuster in the senate? > > > > Indeed. Back when ObamaCare was crafted, any actual debate of the substance of the bill was called a filibuster. How strange is this, when actual debate about the content of a bill being crafted in private is called a filibuster. The contents of the bill created in private was not on the public record. So now we have an absurdity: nearly all the commentary in the historic record of the US senate with regard to ObamaCare was read into the record by Tea Party guy Ted Cruz. Historians will find this most amusing: the US passed the biggest change in the structure of government without public debate. This led to such howlers as the speaker of the house commenting that we need to hurry and pass this bill so we can find out what is in it. Cannot they see this would lead to all manner of mischief? Once we pass it and find out what is in it, that no one likes it, for instance, or that it is unworkable. We find out that the whole scheme really depends on young and healthy peo! > ple buying overpriced health insurance. If they don?t come, the scheme doesn?t work. They aren?t coming. > > > >> ?The American system of government is based on a system of "checks and balances"? > > > > Ja, and that system is defeated if one party holds all three seats of power and a supermajority in the senate, as we saw. The government was given unlimited power. They immediately abused it. > That's not a bug that's a feature of the system. If the democrats in the Legislative branch had had more spine they really could have done almost anything. Campaign finance reform, a balanced budget amendment, reversing 'Citizen's United', the list goes on and on. Instead they wasted their chance by compromising to implement a version Mitt Romney's Massachusetts health care plan. > > >> ? The President and the Senate have made it clear that they do not accept this "legislation by appropriation" and insist that "Obamacare" be funded. The Supreme Court has upheld it's constitutionality. That's 2.5 branches of government in favor of "Obamacare" vs. 0.5 branches against. Time to check your balance I'd say? > > > > Sure. Now what happens when we check our balance, it is zero, so we need yet another increase in debt limit? We set a precedent that the government cannot stop borrowing, that it must borrow just to pay ordinary operating expenses. Then the check on our balance must come from our creditors. We will not like the way China runs this place. > > Totally with you on that. We need to get our financial house in order. We will not enjoy 'being someone's bitch'. They will make us do things with our offices and orifices that we do not wish to. > > > >> ?Mr. Sowell may be right that "legislation by appropriation" isn't new, but he is wrong to imply that this is a sensible way to govern? > > > > We must check our spending, or China will do it for us. We will not like it. > Agreed! > > >> ?And to Spike, > > > >> ?The Government is running the exchanges and regulating the market: these activities cost money and do not raise money? > > > > Easy solution: let the insurance companies run the exchanges, leave the market regulation to the states. Open it up so that anyone can buy insurance from any state. That creates fifty competing markets, regulated by competition among states. > *paste*As before, devolving this power to the sates does not add either legitimacy or efficiency. First rule of state regulation is: we do not recognise out of state regulation. So I think you mean 50 fragmented markets, where if you step over some line on a map 'Procedure A' is or isn't covered. Very logical, we all know that our medical needs are determined ultimately by our position on a map and not on the conditions within our bodies. > > >> ? The legislation is supposed to be cost neutral to the public as an aggregate. (Hopefully cost beneficial if this experiment in mixing free markets and universal coverage works out.) Perhaps you are proposing the introduction of fees into the markets so that it would be self-supporting, yes Spike? ;) > > > > Thanks for that clarification. If the whole notion relies on young and healthy people picking up the bills for the old and sick, this whole scheme will fail. Here?s how you will know: count the number of people who are young and healthy who opt to buy into the exchanges rather than pay the tax. Notice no one will tell us how many are doing it. I suspect it is few, and I don?t blame them: health insurance for a young healthy person is a bad deal, even after the tax penalty is taken into account. > This is in some ways the heart of the matter. Statistically, it is a bad deal for a young person to pay for a system that they will probably not need "right now". Just as an old person with no hope of cryo-presevation or life extension has no interest in paying for the development or maintenance of infrastructure they they will probably never use. This is the the fundamental problem of most libertarians. Libertarians generally believe that people will 'take care of themselves' and 'need freedom from external control' and with a bunch of hand waving everything will somehow 'work'. And the strange thing is: they're right. As we evolved from our apelike ancestors we were free, completely free. We could run away from our troop, join another troop, live alone, find our own food, etc. And guess what, organised groups, which shared their resources, propagated their culture, etc. outcompeted and out evolved their 'freer' brethren who now sadly found primarily in primate exhibits in our zoos. And because the young person might have an accident "right now" and need care so that "sooner or later" they will be an old person who needs health care is why we socialise these costs. Also, the old person from my example might go to 'Place X' and walk across "Bridge Y" thereby showing a reason for him to pay for the development and maintenance of infrastructure. Ideally, this insurance shouldn't be private, it should be public. It offends me that some corporation with access to 'big data', advanced analytic methods, and an army of lawyers can essentially profit from misfortune. > > >> ? So even if we do have revenue coming in which exceeds our interest payments we have no legal way to pay it without an (You know what's coming don't you?) appropriations bill? > > > > I disagree with this. The government can still issue checks to bond holders on executive order to the federal reserve. This may be demonstrated in 9 days. Good chance what might happen is the house would pass a midnight bill authorizing it on the 17th. > > I defer to you in this as I'm not sure of the legalities or what will happen. In 9 days, if they push things that far, I hope that someone pulls some legal rabbit out of a hat (or out of their ass for that matter, it matters not where from, just that the rabbit appears) and the bills get paid. > >> ?I've lived all my life in countries with universal health care, Canada and Poland, except for 2 years in the US where I wasn't covered. Thankfully I didn't get seriously ill in the US. Personally I like knowing that I'm "covered"? > > > > You were always free to buy health insurance or pay for it out of your personal funds, even in the US. I have heard this so often from people who came to the US from Europe especially. I recommend if you want to be in the US and not buy health insurance, that you keep your citizenship, or maintain dual citizenship. Then if you get sick, head on back to the homeland for treatment. Otherwise just buy health insurance: it has always been there. Ja it is expensive, but the way we do healthcare in the US is expensive: we charge those who have insurance more to cover the bills of those who do not. That is what caused this whole mess to start with. > I was young and healthy and took the logical risk......while knowing that I could probably just run back to Canada to get health care and/or declare bankruptcy to avoid debts piled up by any emergency care (thus passing my financial responsibilities on to rate paying policy holders in classic 'freeloader') or that my Dad is a doctor and my Mom is a nurse and 1/2 my family in Pakistan are doctors. In short, I had options and in the end I didn't get unlucky. I would consider myself to be a (very?) atypical case. What matters is the general person, one without my options, and they need health care. About the cost, there are 2 things wrong with health care in the US in my opinion. One is more or less specific to the US and one is almost universal. The specific: US health care is run at a profit generally for the benefit of insurance companies and lawyers. The universal: Doctors operate as a guild and limit the supply of new doctors to keep prices up. Solution to the specific problem in the US requires a cultural shift away from litigiousness and towards a 'not for profit' insurer. Solution to the universal problem is taking place in the form of the rise of 'nurse practitioners' and expert systems. Hooray for "Doctor Watson"! > >> ? It builds trust in society? > > > > Indeed sir. ObamaCare has created more distrust in society than I have seen in my lifetime. I predict catastrophic failure of the whole venture. > > It is surprising to me that someone trying to look after the nation's health generates more distrust than the NSA (hello #NSA_SEEL!) monitoring all our communications but I cannot deny that at least in some quarters that this is indeed the case. > >> ? and makes us richer ?as a nation?. Regards, Omar > > > > Ja, what happens if we build it, but the young and healthies do not come? Where are we then as a nation? We mostly took apart a system which kinda worked, Medicare, defunded that and substituted one which looks like a failure right out of the starting gate. I will change my mind as soon as I see jillions of healthy young people flocking into the exchanges and actually buying the insurance. Right now the system is crashing under the load of millions of old and sick people struggling to opt in, and millions of healthy shoppers who see the price tag and decide to opt out. Omar, I admire your idealism, but I think this scheme will fail spectacularly. > > > > spike > > If the young do not come they will be fined. Also, parents are able to keep their children covered until they are 26. And, speaking as one parent to another, while my son might or might not appreciate the value of health insurance before he reaches the age of 27, I certainly do. Though I thank you, you need not think me idealistic, I am quite the realist in this as I have participated in two national health care systems. Of all the countries in the world the US and Canada are perhaps the most similar. If the system does fail spectacularly you need look no further than your northern border for a system to adopt. A very real system, with the complications and problems of any real system, that works. Works at a fraction of the per capita cost of the American 'system'. A good read is located at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_the_health_care_systems_in_Canada_and_the_United_States As a last item, what does any of this have to do with Extropianism you ask? Lots, politics and morality are not going to go away, and as we approach a potential BRANCHING POINT in evolution politics and morality may become more important than ever. Best regards, Omar Rahman P.S. This went much longer than I intended and I don't have time for a good edit so please be merciful in your interpretations of any errors I have made. As I always I am open to correction of any factual errors I have made. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rahmans at me.com Wed Oct 9 11:12:55 2013 From: rahmans at me.com (Omar Rahman) Date: Wed, 09 Oct 2013 13:12:55 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Tap tap..Hello? Is this thing on? (Or Zombie Apocalypse!) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <9B616DA5-75FC-4D60-9CEF-92C7A256E2E2@me.com> > Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2013 00:45:37 -0400 > From: Rafal Smigrodzki > Subject: Re: [ExI] Tap tap..Hello? Is this thing on? (Or Zombie > Apocalypse!) > Message-ID: > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 > > On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 10:32 AM, Omar Rahman wrote: > >> >> For something written by someone with a sense of humor please check out John >> Stewart or Stephen Colbert. > > ### I abstain from listening to CC. Their humor is too often of the > servile kind, laughing with the master, not at him. > > ----------------- >> >> The American system of government is based on a system of "checks and >> balances". The President and the Senate have made it clear that they do not >> accept this "legislation by appropriation" and insist that "Obamacare" be >> funded. The Supreme Court has upheld it's constitutionality. That's 2.5 >> branches of government in favor of "Obamacare" vs. 0.5 branches against. >> Time to check your balance I'd say. > > ### To go back to the initial contention: Congress gave the president > about 99% of the money he needs to run the government. The president > refused to run the government, and shut it down. He could have taken > the money and done his job but refused to. > > Do you agree that the president shut down the government? In a word; no. > > ------------------ >> >> Mr. Sowell may be right that "legislation by appropriation" isn't new, but >> he is wrong to imply that this is a sensible way to govern. All we have to >> do to prove this is imagine what chaos would occur if Congress were to take >> aim at the laundry list above 'unless' they get x, y, or z. > > ### Yes, let's imagine: Maybe, if there was a balance between drunken > sailors and accountants, we would not have about 250 - 300 trillion > dollars in unfunded government liabilities. Maybe, if the doves could > keep the hawks in check, our nation would not have the blood of > millions of brown people on our hands. Perhaps a few refuseniks could > say no to the fifth estate (the permanent government,) and the Federal > Register would be 700 pages, instead of 79,000 pages long. > > Would that be chaos? Dunno. But, to quote Mr Obama, "and make no > mistake about it" - chaos is now, and it is the result of our > "sensible" way of governing. > > Rafal I wholeheartedly agree that US foreign policy has resulted in millions of unnecessary deaths for very little gain or service to the American people. I also agree that we have 'chaos' now and it is the result of "sensible" governing, which is to say nonsensical governing. Your point about the Federal Register is actually the one that most impacts us as Extropians I think. How do we avoid binding ourselves in overly complicated and inevitably contradictory legislation? As we move towards an existence as information in a machine a process for 'negotiating protocols' and 'maintaining backward compatibility' needs to be designed. We started with such a lovely 'kernel', the Constitution, and people have put so many layers on top of that now that it's hard to see the beauty of the original implementation. That said, we could have the modern generation of apps that we have with out all those APIs. Regards, Omar Rahman -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Wed Oct 9 12:24:17 2013 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2013 08:24:17 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Attacking Tor: how the NSA targets users' online anonymity In-Reply-To: <20131009093707.GQ10405@leitl.org> References: <20131009093707.GQ10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Wed, Oct 9, 2013 at 5:37 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > (Use VM jails with amnesiac distros like Tails for daily browsing, > separate security compartments using CubeOS and related, use air > gap with USB sneakernet (using *nix with no USB autorun) to > encrypt/decrypt and maintain sensitive information in general). > > > According to a top-secret operational management procedures manual, FoxAcid > servers configured to receive callbacks are codenamed FrugalShot. After a > callback, the FoxAcid server may run more exploits to ensure that the > target > computer remains compromised long term, as well as install "implants" > designed to exfiltrate data. > > By 2008, the NSA was getting so much FoxAcid callback data that they needed > to build a special system to manage it all. > This reads like a really bad cyberpunk story -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Wed Oct 9 12:30:16 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2013 14:30:16 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Attacking Tor: how the NSA targets users' online anonymity In-Reply-To: References: <20131009093707.GQ10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20131009123016.GT10405@leitl.org> On Wed, Oct 09, 2013 at 08:24:17AM -0400, Mike Dougherty wrote: > This reads like a really bad cyberpunk story Now you know why I don't find The Onion funny. From eugen at leitl.org Wed Oct 9 13:40:18 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2013 15:40:18 +0200 Subject: [ExI] How Lavabit Melted Down Message-ID: <20131009134018.GW10405@leitl.org> http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/10/how-lavabit-edward-snowden-email-service-melted-down.html HOW LAVABIT MELTED DOWN POSTED BY MICHAEL PHILLIPS AND MATT BUCHANAN On August 8th, Lavabit, newly famous for being the secure e-mail service used by the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, went dark. Its owner and operator, Ladar Levison, replaced its home page with a message: ?I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests.? Levison could write only that he chose to shut down the company rather than ?become complicit in crimes against the American people,? and he promised to ?fight for the Constitution in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.? Court-watchers repeatedly checked the Fourth Circuit docket to see whether Levison would follow through. While the Fourth Circuit kept the appeals secret and placed them under seal, observers deduced that Levison?s appeals were the ones numbered 13-4625 and 13-4626. Last week, U.S. District Judge Claude M. Hilton unsealed a hundred and sixty-two pages of previously secret documents related to two District Court orders issued against Lavabit, so that Levison could have a public record of his appeals. These disclosures fall short of the ideal of open justice, but they do give Levison?s ordeal a public shape. They also allow Levison to speak more openly now. This past weekend, in Manhattan?s Bryant Park, his demeanor was steady, if clearly burdened; he is, after all, a man who was forced to destroy the business he had spent most of the past decade building, and who is locked in a legal and philosophical battle against the United States government. Levison wore a white, starched collared shirt with thin gold cufflinks; the afternoon was warm, and sweat, mixed with the gel that fixed his hair in a slightly spiked coiffure, dotted his forehead. He spoke sternly but calmly?his tenor lacked the quiet frenzy of, say, Thomas Drake, the N.S.A. whistleblower, even though most of what he had to say was bad news, if you value electronic privacy or security. He doesn?t use e-mail on his Android smartphone, for instance, because neither the software nor the hardware of any commercial phone can be trusted; carriers and phone makers can push malware onto the device, he said. Yet his views are far from radical. While he opposes the bulk collection of domestic communications, he has no such strong feelings about the N.S.A.?s foreign-surveillance efforts. He is, if anything, disappointed that the U.S. government would spy on its own citizens on such a grand scale, and with such impunity, even though Levison?s decision to build a privacy-oriented e-mail service in the first place, in 2004, was partly in response to the Patriot Act. Part of Lavabit?s mission, before it shut down, was that it would ?never sacrifice privacy for profits.? One of its most notable features was that, for paying users, it encrypted e-mail messages and other files stored on its server so that they could not be read by third parties without a user?s password. As the Times reported last week, the unsealed documents reveal that the first chapter of Levison?s ?tangle with law enforcement? began in May?well before the first Snowden leak of the N.S.A.?s massive database of call logs broke in June?when an F.B.I. agent left his business card on Levison?s doorstep. On June 10th, the government secured an order from the Eastern District of Virginia. The order, issued under the Stored Communications Act, required Lavabit to turn over to the F.B.I. retrospective information about one account, widely presumed to be that of Snowden. (The name of the target remains redacted, and Levison could not divulge it.) The order directed Lavabit to surrender names and addresses, Internet Protocol and Media Access Control addresses, the volume of each and every data transfer, the duration of every ?session,? and the ?source and destination? of all communications associated with the account. It also forbade Levison and Lavabit from discussing the matter with anyone. Levison now says that while that particular investigation ?escalated,? it was not the only one to land at his doorstep in recent years. He believes that even if he hadn?t hosted the e-mail account of the target, Lavabit would eventually have found itself in the position that it?s in now because it ?constitutes a gap? in the government?s intelligence. The broader implication?as shown by the N.S.A.?s efforts to attack the anonymous Tor network?is that intelligence agencies will try to crack any service designed for privacy and used at scale. On June 28th, the Eastern District Court of Virginia issued another order, ?authorizing the installation and use of a pen register and the use of a trap and trace device? on all electronic communications being sent from or to the account. The term ?pen register? is a relic of Morse?s telegraph; it refers to the mechanical pen that recorded the electrical pulses that routed a telegraph. Today, the term is used to refer to any device or process that records outgoing routing information, such as phone numbers dialed or e-mail addresses typed. A ?trap and trace device? does the inverse, and records incoming phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and other connections. A court may issue this kind of order if the information likely to be captured is ?relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation.? This order also forbade Lavabit from discussing the matter. The unsealed documents describe a meeting on June 28th between the F.B.I. and Levison at Levison?s home in Dallas. There, according to the documents, Levison told the F.B.I. that he would not comply with the pen-register order and wanted to speak to an attorney. As the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Neil MacBride, described it, ?It was unclear whether Mr. Levison would not comply with the order because it was technically not feasible or difficult, or because it was not consistent with his business practice in providing secure, encrypted e-mail service for his customers.? The meeting must have gone poorly for the F.B.I. because McBride filed a motion to compel Lavabit to comply with the pen-register and trap-and-trace order that very same day. Magistrate Judge Theresa Carroll Buchanan granted the motion, inserting in her own handwriting that Lavabit was subject to ?the possibility of criminal contempt of Court? if it failed to comply. When Levison didn?t comply, the government issued a summons, ?United States of America v. Ladar Levison,? ordering him to explain himself on July 16th. The newly unsealed documents reveal tense talks between Levison and the F.B.I. in July. Levison wanted additional assurances that any device installed in the Lavabit system would capture only narrowly targeted data, and no more. He refused to provide real-time access to Lavabit data; he refused to go to court unless the government paid for his travel; and he refused to work with the F.B.I.?s technology unless the government paid him for ?developmental time and equipment.? He instead offered to write an intercept code for the account?s metadata?for thirty-five hundred dollars. He asked Judge Hilton whether there could be ?some sort of external audit? to make sure that the government did not take additional data. (The government plan did not include any oversight to which Levison would have access, he said.) Most important, he refused to turn over the S.S.L. encryption keys that scrambled the messages of Lavabit?s customers, and which prevent third parties from reading them even if they obtain the messages. The pen-register order required Levison to permit the F.B.I. to install the pen register and provide ?technical assistance necessary to accomplish the installation.? Levison argued that the ?technical assistance? provision did not require that he surrender the S.S.L. keys, especially because he was willing to write intercept code for the information the government desired. Giving up the keys ?would compromise all of the secure communications in and out my network, including my own administrative traffic,? he told Judge Hilton. The U.S. Attorney?s Office, for its part, insisted that without the S.S.L. keys, ?the data from the pen register will be meaningless,? an analysis shared by others. But the pen-register data may not have been ?meaningless? if the government took up Levison?s offer to write his own intercept code. Prior to the hearing on July 16th, the U.S. Attorney filed a motion for civil contempt, requesting that Levison be fined a thousand dollars for every day that he refused to comply with the pen-register order. Earlier in the day, Hilton issued a search-and-seizure warrant, authorizing law enforcement to seize from Lavabit ?all information necessary to decrypt communications sent to or from [the account], including encryption keys and SSL keys,? and ?all information necessary to decrypt data stored in or otherwise associated with [the account].? On July 25th, Lavabit petitioned to cancel the subpoena and warrant, arguing that if the ?government gains access to Lavabit?s Master Key, it will have unlimited access to not only [the account], but all of the communications and data stored in each of Lavabit?s 400,000 e-mail accounts.? Lavabit also asked the court to unseal its records and permit Levison to speak. It was the government?s insistence on collecting the S.S.L. keys that most deeply disturbed Levison, and led to the shutdown of Lavabit. He believes that not only would the F.B.I. have had unfettered, secret access to the communications of his four hundred thousand customers?without being required to give Levison a log of what it accessed?but putting his encryption keys in the hands of the government would have opened Lavabit to a more profound exploitation of his service?s communications. Levison worried that if he turned the keys over to the F.B.I., the N.S.A. would have been able to obtain them without his knowledge through a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court order. We know now that the N.S.A. has been systematically cracking encryption across the Web, and it has built a database of encryption keys that automatically decode messages; this is dangerous, Levison says, because it allows the N.S.A. to read encrypted communications as they flow past the agency?s taps of the broader Internet infrastructure by simply observing them, leaving no trace of the surveillance, unlike a traditional ?man-in-the-middle? attack. This vulnerability, he insists, is not sufficiently understood. And, while the Times?s initial reporting indicates that the N.S.A.?s method of obtaining the keys for its database is ?shrouded in secrecy,? Levison suggests that his case also illustrates one of the ways in which it collects them: by secretly compelling companies to turn them over. The F.B.I., Levison says, ?sold its soul? to the N.S.A. to acquire its technologies and become a ?counter-intelligence agency? rather than a domestic police force. The result is an agency with somewhat stunning technical capabilities?it was the F.B.I. that used malware to identify users of the Tor network in the course of its investigation of Freedom Hosting, the anonymous service provider, an incident that disturbed Levison because it put legitimate users at risk, even if he doesn?t agree with the illegal content that Freedom Hosting was allegedly housing. Before the Bureau demanded Lavabit?s S.S.L. keys, in fact, he was asked ?half a dozen times? about any point in the system where information flowed through unencrypted so that the F.B.I. could tap it. One result of this newfound expertise, however, is that Levison believes there is a knowledge gap between the Department of Justice and law-enforcement agencies; the former did not grasp the implications of what the F.B.I. was asking for when it demanded his S.S.L. keys. (According to Levison, the F.B.I. agents who came to his house were surprised that he hadn?t seen one of the sets of documents that had been e-mailed to him demanding Lavabit?s information; they pointed to his phone and said he could look up the information right there. He responded, ?You know better than I do why I don?t have e-mail on my phone.?) On August 1st, Lavabit?s counsel, Jesse Binnall, reiterated Levison?s proposal that the government engage Levison to extract the information from the account himself rather than force him to turn over the S.S.L. keys. THE COURT: You want to do it in a way that the government has to trust you? BINNALL: Yes, Your Honor. THE COURT: ?to come up with the right data. BINNALL: That?s correct, Your Honor. THE COURT: And you won?t trust the government. So why would the government trust you? Ultimately, the court ordered Levison to turn over the encryption key within twenty-four hours. Had the government taken Levison up on his offer, he may have provided it with Snowden?s data. Instead, by demanding the keys that unlocked all of Lavabit, the government provoked Levison to make a last stand. According to the U.S. Attorney MacBride?s motion for sanctions, At approximately 1:30 p.m. CDT on August 2, 2013, Mr. Levison gave the F.B.I. a printout of what he represented to be the encryption keys needed to operate the pen register. This printout, in what appears to be four-point type, consists of eleven pages of largely illegible characters. To make use of these keys, the F.B.I. would have to manually input all two thousand five hundred and sixty characters, and one incorrect keystroke in this laborious process would render the F.B.I. collection system incapable of collecting decrypted data. The U.S. Attorneys? office called Lavabit?s lawyer, who responded that Levison ?thinks? he could have an electronic version of the keys produced by August 5th. Judge Hilton ordered that Levison and Lavabit be fined five thousand dollars for each day that they did not turn over the electronic-encryption keys. On August 8th, rather than turning over the master key, Levison shut down Lavabit. A week later, Levison?s lawyers announced that they were appealing to Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, an announcement that nearly got Levison into further trouble; the appeal was promptly placed under seal. Levison believes that when the government was faced with the choice between getting information that might lead it to its target in a constrained manner or expanding the reach of its surveillance, it chose the latter. The documents, and Levison?s comments to us, suggest that although he is a skeptic, he was willing to work with the government: he offered to write intercept code himself to capture their target?s metadata, and acknowledged that the government might have a right to the person?s information. He was willing to turn that information over, as he did in a case involving child pornography; Lavabit?s archived site in fact explicitly states that one of the reasons its most secure services are available to paying customers only is so that if an account ?is used for illegal purposes that money trail can be used to track down the account owner.? But the government refused Levison?s offer. It wanted the keys to everything, so he gave it nothing. Levison will be back in court on Friday to file his opening brief with the Fourth Circuit. The brief is Levison?s principal opportunity to make his arguments. Levison may appeal the orders on a technological basis, and argue that the pen-register order did not require the surrender of the S.S.L. keys. Or he may appeal on a broader constitutional basis, and push the Fourth Circuit to evaluate the legality of back-door Internet-surveillance programs. On November 4th, the United States will file its response brief, after which oral arguments will follow. Due to the case?s sensitivity, the court may hold the arguments in secret. The United States and the court are waiting for Levison?s brief, which could break one of at least two ways. When this is all over, he plans to reopen Lavabit, if possible, in the United States; he intends to stay in the country no matter what. If Lavabit can?t operate securely in the U.S., he intends to hand off the project to someone in a country with more sympathetic laws, such as Iceland or Switzerland. In the meantime, he is beginning to think about the grander, harder project of creating a replacement for e-mail that can be truly secure and easy to use, although he?s not ready to say anything substantive about the project. With the muzzle largely removed, he is now reluctantly engaging in a media blitz, both to raise money for his legal defense through Rally.org and to boost awareness of the grim nature of the surveillance state. When asked what he was doing differently with his computing habits to protect his communications, Levison offered an answer that?s becoming all too familiar from people of his ilk: he wanted to keep it at least some of it a secret. Michael Phillips is an associate at a Wall Street litigation firm. Matt Buchanan is the editor of Elements. Photograph by Mauricio Alejo. From spike66 at att.net Wed Oct 9 13:55:10 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2013 06:55:10 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Tap tap..Hello? Is this thing on? (Or Zombie Apocalypse!) In-Reply-To: References: <24B7EFB7-3E41-4C1F-B12D-5BC8AD5A6B4A@me.com> <00e501cec43d$e0f736b0$a2e5a410$@att.net> Message-ID: <018901cec4f7$2c6e5ec0$854b1c40$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Kelly Anderson Subject: Re: [ExI] Tap tap..Hello? Is this thing on? (Or Zombie Apocalypse!) On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 9:48 AM, spike wrote: Indeed sir. ObamaCare has created more distrust in society than I have seen in my lifetime. I predict catastrophic failure of the whole venture. I'll second that. However, it will take a long time for the Democrats to acknowledge it as a failure. They still haven't acknowledged their past failures in similar redistribution of wealth schemes. In fact, they point at these failures as their greatest successes. It boggles the mind. -Kelly One of the things that went wrong I can see already. The Healthcare.gov site is a place to gather information, an insurance shopping mall. It has been down since it opened on 1 October, but I kept trying. This morning I get thru for the first time. The very first thing they do is ask a bunch of questions confirming my identity, such as three security questions which made me squirm, then immediately went about trying to verify my identity, asking my full legal name, first, middle, and last, my address, my social security number, everything they need to do identity theft. They want my social security number which is actually a tax ID number, linked to the outfit which has been visiting Tea Party members with an audit team as soon as they can be identified. They do this while claiming to not be politically motivated. They want this sent over an open link which can be read by the NSA and shared with anyone they want. The former head of the IRS recently lied to congress, which is illegal as all hell, by saying she did nothing illegal when email shows she did, then invoked the fifth amendment and left the courtroom. So we are to dump all this personal information into a site run by the government? Indeed? What happened to setting up a site where we can shop our healthcare options? Is this that? Last time I went to the shopping mall, they didn't ask for my tax ID or ask any personal questions. If the system is supposed to require the exchanges to sell you insurance regardless of pre-existing conditions, why do they even need to know all this stuff? This system is so doomed to fail, even while they threaten to shut down the government if it does not get implemented this year. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Wed Oct 9 14:18:54 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2013 10:18:54 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Another step towards uploading In-Reply-To: References: <52519BAF.7020308@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 1:11 AM, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > You need to take into account the damage introduced during mechanical > slicing. Even a single bad slice (torn, crushed, happens all the time, as > anybody who spent hours at a microtome can attest) could scramble the > long-distance fibers > I'm no expert but just from my experience of using a meat slicer I would think mangled slices could be a problem if you were trying to make the slices super thin, but I'm talking about slices on the order of a centimeter thick or maybe even more, and only about a dozen slices. And if the blade was sharp and the gap between the slices narrow it should be possible to deduce what those long-distance fibers did in that missing gap. And whatever method was used wouldn't slices ensure better distribution of cryoprotective or chemical fixative than entire uncut brains? Wouldn't better preservation of well over 99% of the brain be worth the slight loss of tissue from the gaps between the few slices? I would think so but as I say I'm no expert and am just asking questions. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ALONZOTG at verizon.net Wed Oct 9 14:46:35 2013 From: ALONZOTG at verizon.net (Alan Grimes) Date: Wed, 09 Oct 2013 10:46:35 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Tap tap..Hello? Is this thing on? (Or Zombie Apocalypse!) In-Reply-To: <9B616DA5-75FC-4D60-9CEF-92C7A256E2E2@me.com> References: <9B616DA5-75FC-4D60-9CEF-92C7A256E2E2@me.com> Message-ID: <52556C4B.4010600@verizon.net> Omar Rahman wrote: > As we move towards an existence as information in a machine a process > for 'negotiating protocols' and 'maintaining backward compatibility' > needs to be designed. Speak for yourself, asshole. -- NOTICE: NEW E-MAIL ADDRESS, SEE ABOVE Powers are not rights. From atymes at gmail.com Wed Oct 9 15:38:06 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2013 08:38:06 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Meditations on the million year mind. In-Reply-To: <5254E22B.9000508@verizon.net> References: <5254E22B.9000508@verizon.net> Message-ID: A couple thoughts: As is, the human brain forgets over time, preserving only those memories it deems important. Perhaps that is its way of dealing with living for a longer time than it can store? There are eidetic memories, but they are an exception - and perhaps an order of magnitude better at storing info, such that they could store every detail over half a century vs. the average human's half a decade (or so) of moments. Still inadequate for 5,000 years, but a similar technique could be adopted. Cryonics/plastination is a gamble, in case uploading (or coalescence, as you suggest) is not available before we die. Not all gambles pay off - but not all gambles don't. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Wed Oct 9 15:56:25 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2013 17:56:25 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Meditations on the million year mind. In-Reply-To: References: <5254E22B.9000508@verizon.net> Message-ID: <20131009155625.GJ10405@leitl.org> On Wed, Oct 09, 2013 at 08:38:06AM -0700, Adrian Tymes wrote: > Cryonics/plastination is a gamble, in case uploading (or coalescence, as > you suggest) is not available before we die. Not all gambles pay off - but We all are playing one game: russian roulette. The outcome for that is certain: information-theoretic death. Several people on this list, who all hoped that uploading will become available are now carbon dioxide. Frankly, you're next. Nobody has made out of here alive, yet. If you want to improve your chances, help support policy and methods which allow you to evade that fate. Unless you're actually doing research in animal scanning and modelling, godspeed with that. > not all gambles don't. From spike66 at att.net Wed Oct 9 16:16:53 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2013 09:16:53 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Meditations on the million year mind. In-Reply-To: <20131009155625.GJ10405@leitl.org> References: <5254E22B.9000508@verizon.net> <20131009155625.GJ10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <022d01cec50a$f8dd98a0$ea98c9e0$@att.net> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Eugen Leitl >...We all are playing one game: russian roulette... We should come up with a new name for that game. Commie crap shoot? While we are at it, we need a name for the practice of opting out of health insurance, paying the tax penalty and hoping for the best, which still externalizes risk onto the other tax payers. Suggestions welcome, extra credit for alliteration, such as Capitalist Coinflip or American Insecurity. >... The outcome for that is certain: information-theoretic death. Several people on this list, who all hoped that uploading will become available are now carbon dioxide. Frankly, you're next... Oh now that's just cold. Adrian is a young healthy guy, a perfect example of the kind of person who will weigh the cost of health insurance vs the price of the tax penalty for not having it, then opt out. We get your point however. Many of even the young and healthy among us will be taking the nitrogen dive or the dirt nap some time in the next 50 years. I can show you examples of space hardware that hasn't changed at all in the past 50 years, stuff that is part of missile guidance systems that have been proven to work, so they don't mess with them. It is too easy to imagine those bits will still be exactly the same 50 yrs from now. In that way, we aerospace types get a feel for how long it takes for some revolutions. I am reminded of a line from a song by the Eagles "...things in this life change very slowly if they ever change at all..." Cryonics appears to me to be the best shot we have now, but I am open to suggestion if someone has an alternative. spike From lubkin at unreasonable.com Wed Oct 9 15:44:37 2013 From: lubkin at unreasonable.com (David Lubkin) Date: Wed, 09 Oct 2013 11:44:37 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Positive yield in nuclear fusion Message-ID: <201310091634.r99GYDjq014721@andromeda.ziaspace.com> "The yield was significantly greater than the energy deposited in the hot spot by the implosion." I am cautiously delighted. For the importance of this milestone. For how long it's been coming. And because it's in the family. This was achieved at LLNL. ? Where the competing approach, magnetic fusion, had been pioneered by my mother's boyfriend when I was a kid. Which I was part of for five years at the National Magnetic Fusion Energy Computer Center. ? In a project led by our former pediatrician's husband. Hot damn. So to speak. -- David. From spike66 at att.net Wed Oct 9 17:37:58 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2013 10:37:58 -0700 Subject: [ExI] nondestructive uploading of sorts Message-ID: <007c01cec516$4bd8b9d0$e38a2d70$@att.net> >.Frankly, you're next. We are a looooong long ways from true uploading. Even the very young among us are unlikely to live to see that. But we could likely do some kinda fakey pseudo-uploading which could be a great toy, and will make a buttload of money for whoever gets it to the market. Those of us who have children often crack up when our five year old comes up with some saying that we know they learned from us, some quirky mannerism perhaps or odd spike-ism. Example: Saturday my seven year old son's playmate did a fully splayed flying pancake into the dirt. I didn't see it, but we noticed he was dusty from knees to chin. I said "This must have been some fall, huh?" My son popped up with "Ja, it was quite spectacular." He used the same accent and mannerism I use when I make those kinds of comments. So now we have these computers with cameras, and they can read what we write and listen to what we say, taking digital samples of our voice as we talk on Skype and so forth. We can imagine a kinda-sorta uploading where the computer imitates our style using our digitally recorded voices and our image on the screen. Using only current technology, we might be able to rig something that feels like we are visiting with our digital selves. Clearly that is a form of nondestructive uploading in a very loose sense, a toy version of it anyway. We would know it isn't really uploading, for uploading requires machine-based or artificial intelligence. The universal rule is that any algorithm which we can understand is not artificial intelligence. If we don't understand something, then it is magic. We know true intelligence is ineffable, incomprehensible, magic. So if we can understand it, it is comprehensible and thus becomes not magic, therefore it isn't intelligence, and isn't uploading. Someday we may figure out how neurons actually work and how they work together. Then the workings of the brain become at least theoretically comprehensible, and therefore less magic and less intelligent. So the more we learn, the dumber we get. If we figure it out completely, then we may eventually discover what I have already begun to suspect: that we are stupid. I could imagine using the above toy with our parents and grandparents, so that after they are gone, we could have a better-than-nothing Eliza-ish "discussion" of sorts with their avatar. Would that be cool or what? {8-] spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Wed Oct 9 18:59:56 2013 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2013 11:59:56 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Meditations on the million year mind. Message-ID: From: Alan Grimes > om > Tonite I feel like mumbling incoherently about how you would go about > engineering a mind to last a million years. The problem is much less > trivial than it would first appear And very possibly more immediate. Consider widespread uploading by mid century and million to one speedup. That means by the end of the calendar century, some people could have 50 million subjective years of existence. > because the main issue is to maintain > a youthful learning capacity even when memories spanning thousands of > years are already stored. I don't know that "learning" will have the same meaning after uploading. You need a new skill, you just load it like we load programs today. It's gonna get weird. Keith From spike66 at att.net Wed Oct 9 18:46:01 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2013 11:46:01 -0700 Subject: [ExI] id theft in o-care Message-ID: <010801cec51f$cdfb0040$69f100c0$@att.net> It took me nine days, but this morning for the first time I was able to get thru to where I could shop around in the new healthcare exchanges. Up to now, they have been posting absurdities such as "The System is down for the moment." The moment is eight solid days as of last night. But in any case, I got in this morning, and they immediately began wanting all kinds of personal information, social security number, phone number, home address, income, all this stuff that looks to me like a recipe for disaster if I provide it. All several thousand government employees who could have access to this could do identity theft on me, or sell the info to others who would do it. Note that I am not buying anything, but rather I want to put in a theoretical state I might move to in the future, so I want to shop prices. They ask for my home address, and they direct me to the California exchanges. What about those who are shopping for a future home? If I want to learn about a theoretical future state, do I need to put in a theoretical future address? I don't want that outfit knowing who I am or what I estimate my future income will be. Can I give them a theoretical name, a really obvious made-up pseudonym such as Fester N. Carbuncle? They ask for my legal name, first, middle and last, as would be shown on a legal document. So if I just want to shop around and not buy anything yet but just for planning purposes I go in with SNN 111 11 1111 under the name Barf McBuns to avoid identity theft, is that identity theft? I don't want to mess with the IRS. They are in charge of enforcing O-Care, the outfit that recently demonstrated they can commit felonies without consequences. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Wed Oct 9 19:11:37 2013 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2013 15:11:37 -0400 Subject: [ExI] nondestructive uploading of sorts In-Reply-To: <007c01cec516$4bd8b9d0$e38a2d70$@att.net> References: <007c01cec516$4bd8b9d0$e38a2d70$@att.net> Message-ID: On Wed, Oct 9, 2013 at 1:37 PM, spike wrote: > So now we have these computers with cameras, and they can read what we > write and listen to what we say, taking digital samples of our voice as we > talk on Skype and so forth. We can imagine a kinda-sorta uploading where > the computer imitates our style using our digitally recorded voices and our > image on the screen. Using only current technology, we might be able to > rig something that feels like we are visiting with our digital selves. > Clearly that is a form of nondestructive uploading in a very loose sense, a > toy version of it anyway. > > ** > > ** > > I could imagine using the above toy with our parents and grandparents, so > that after they are gone, we could have a better-than-nothing Eliza-ish > ?discussion? of sorts with their avatar. > Doesn't skype already let you wear digital adornments like hats or silly glasses? (i know google hangouts played with that) So at some point the digital adornment is your whole presentable face. This will let you "answer" the call (even if you are answering the call, eh?) regardless of whether your hair/makeup is done (or undone). People won't expect your 'real' presence because the facade is more polite or professional. Then you'll have so many macros built (on the fly) to handle the common expressions or answers you use that your knowledge agent / representative will be able to handle the preamble smalltalk before you even accept the call (because we're all so busy we don't make time for the smalltalk) It'll also fill in those gaps where you fall asleep during the boring parts of a call or optionally (probably for a small fee) feign interest in the other party (fee schedule probably extorts higher rates depending on how much you were supposed to be caring about this other party) Eventually your digital representation will be able to make calls for you to extract the information you wanted from others who probably were going to let their digital representation handle the requests for them too. Our isolation from each other will be complete - while maintaining the illusion that everyone we might want to contact is 100% available for us 24x7. Maybe then we'll learn how to be physically present and listening to each other for the sheer novelty of the experience. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Wed Oct 9 19:16:05 2013 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2013 12:16:05 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Human Brain Project kicks off today Message-ID: > From: Rafal Smigrodzki > How many Eugens could you fit in the head of a pin (make it a sphere > 3/16 inch diameter)? 27 years ago Eric Drexler worked this out and got around a 10 cm cube "volume of a coffee cup" for a human capacity hardware. With enough power and cooling it would run a million times faster than a meat state human. It's in Engines of Creation. Keith From msd001 at gmail.com Wed Oct 9 19:26:32 2013 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2013 15:26:32 -0400 Subject: [ExI] id theft in o-care In-Reply-To: <010801cec51f$cdfb0040$69f100c0$@att.net> References: <010801cec51f$cdfb0040$69f100c0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Wed, Oct 9, 2013 at 2:46 PM, spike wrote: > > ** > > ** > > I don?t want that outfit knowing who I am or what I estimate my future > income will be. Can I give them a theoretical name, a really obvious > made-up pseudonym such as Fester N. Carbuncle? They ask for my legal name, > first, middle and last, as would be shown on a legal document. So if I > just want to shop around and not buy anything yet but just for planning > purposes I go in with SNN 111 11 1111 under the name Barf McBuns to avoid > identity theft, is that identity theft?**** > > ** > No, of course that's not identity theft; it's identity creation! It's the same way banks use the reserve ratio for "wealth creation." ** > > I don?t want to mess with the IRS. They are in charge of enforcing > O-Care, the outfit that recently demonstrated they can commit felonies > without consequences. > Shh, they have friends in NSA who are reading this right now. You may have already been messing with them. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Wed Oct 9 19:31:35 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2013 21:31:35 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Meditations on the million year mind. In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20131009193135.GV10405@leitl.org> On Wed, Oct 09, 2013 at 11:59:56AM -0700, Keith Henson wrote: > I don't know that "learning" will have the same meaning after > uploading. You need a new skill, you just load it like we load > programs today. This implies having a common encoding layer (something like language, only for function), or at least one can easily translate into. Starting with biology, due to wide structure diversity and no apparent homology at low signal layers it appears to be difficult to even translate for different substrates. It's not obvious how the result would have detectable homologies, without having an effective monoclone with minor diffs, which is a pathological, and quite useless case. So maybe no "I know Kung Fu". And if you can do fast-forward unconscious learning, why waste that time by editing memory? From eugen at leitl.org Wed Oct 9 19:37:08 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2013 21:37:08 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Human Brain Project kicks off today In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20131009193708.GW10405@leitl.org> On Wed, Oct 09, 2013 at 12:16:05PM -0700, Keith Henson wrote: > > From: Rafal Smigrodzki > > > How many Eugens could you fit in the head of a pin (make it a sphere > > 3/16 inch diameter)? > > 27 years ago Eric Drexler worked this out and got around a 10 cm cube > "volume of a coffee cup" for a human capacity hardware. With enough > power and cooling it would run a million times faster than a meat > state human. Nanosystems uses an engineering analysis based on diamond rod logic. Deliberately conservatively, in order to be easy analyzable. There are a few problematic assumptions there as well. So it is an answer, but not an exhaustive one. We now pretty much know that nothing exactly like that will be built. There are alternatives, but they're not easy to analyze, and it's really hard to estimate how well a particular computational model (of which many parts are yet unknown) is mapping to a different substrate. Once we have living critters in EFlops systems we can make a much better estimate. > It's in Engines of Creation. From eugen at leitl.org Wed Oct 9 20:11:09 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2013 22:11:09 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Cryonics and Immortality Visionary: An Interview with Stephen Valentine of Timeship Message-ID: <20131009201109.GZ10405@leitl.org> http://hplusmagazine.com/2013/10/09/cryonics-and-immortality-visionary-an-interview-with-stephen-valentine-of-timeship/ Cryonics and Immortality Visionary: An Interview with Stephen Valentine of Timeship By: Christine Gaspar Published: October 9, 2013 Set in the hot, Tuscany-like rolling hills of Comfort, Texas, northwest of San Antonio, is a project that is one of sciences? best kept secrets, although it really isn?t a secret. On a 646 acre property, formerly known as the Bildarth Estate, lays the hopes and dreams of the creators of Timeship. Timeship has been dubbed the ?Fort Knox? of cryopreservation. Its plans are magnificent, and include a 6 acre structure designed to become the first bio bank for long term storage that will include organs and tissue for transplantation, materials to support fertility, tissue for regenerative medicine- DNA, including the DNA of near extinct species, and whole mammalian organisms including humans after legal death for whom all medical procedures have failed. Much thought and love has been put into the design of this project. It not only serves as a functional masterpiece of planning, but it will also be a beautiful testament to man?s quest for immortality. Stephen Valentine, the project?s creator and architect, has filled this structure with rich symbolism and a beauty that will stand out as a beacon of our collective history and vision of a promising future for humanity. Mr. Valentine has also been meticulous in planning the structure to last centuries. It is designed to protect its contents from human and natural threats of many kinds. Who Is Steve Valentine? On researching for this interview, I found a wealth of information on this accomplished man. Stephen Valentine is a world renowned architect who resides in New York City, though originally from Norwood, Massachusetts. For more than three decades, Valentine has contributed to the design of major commercial and institutional projects worldwide. He was concept architect for a proposed new Long Island Railroad Station in New York City, located next to the historic Grand Central Terminal. At I. M. Pei and Partners, he served as a senior architect for partner James Ingo Freed?s highly acclaimed United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and New York?s Javits Center, which is the world?s largest space-frame structure. He was a senior architect for the Hong Kong Convention Center; the landmark structure that was the site for the transfer of governmental authority from the United Kingdom to the People?s Republic of China in 1997. During his tenure as president and design director for the New York office of the Japanese firm Mirai International, Valentine led the design team for Superparadise, a multi-billion dollar environmental science exposition park and habitat located outside Tokyo. He also was a member of a select team of international architects commissioned to design a master plan for the future development of the sacred city of Hangzhou, China, with a population of three million inhabitants. A graduate of Pratt Institute and recipient of the AIA School Medal, Valentine taught at Pratt Institute for more than a decade and has lectured to university groups, professional organizations, and governmental associations throughout the world. Mr. Valentine was approached in the late nineties by Saul Kent, to create plans for a facility to support the works of the Stasis Foundation. At the time he had not yet chosen the site for this facility. Mr. Kent wanted this building to withstand the test of time and operate continuously for at least 100 years- something no building to date had accomplished. They called it Timeship. It was my privilege to recently interview Mr. Valentine. I have been waiting in anticipation to hear about Timeship?s progress for years, and am very curious about the man and the project he is creating. Q: What inspired you to create this project? Please tell us about its origins. A: Saul Kent, my client, was once asked by the New Yorker magazine ?Why build Timeship?? Saul?s answer was that Timeship was part of a comprehensive plan to conquer aging and death. As the architect and project designer of Timeship, I realized from the beginning that the ideas of Timeship were both extremely optimistic and dependent on future technologies. I often wondered if these advances would ever be realized. Who could have guessed that in the last century, the many human achievements and discoveries made could be summarized so neatly as to say that the perception of who we are in the universe, what we want to be, and where we are going has changed so radically? More importantly, the year 2000, a milestone in time, and more importantly in science, came to be, marking the time when we were able to map the human genome. Prominent scientists are now predicting that the 21st century will be known as the Century of Immortality. Q: What has the timeline been like? A: In 1997 the initial concept design for Timeship was completed, but put on hold for a few years. The science of cryopreservation wasn?t developed sufficiently to start such a project. In 2000 an advanced method of vitrification of mammalian organs was developed, allowing for their cryopreservation while minimizing damage to cells by ice crystals. In 2001 Timeship?s plans were brought back to the table as a result of this breakthrough. In 2003, the successful transplant of a mammalian kidney that was cryopreserved then rewarmed to body temperature took place. In 2007 the site to build Timeship was purchased. It has since been announced in 2011 as the former Bildarth Estate, in Comfort Texas. In 2007 a patent was issued for the advanced engineered cooling system called the TCV, or Temperature Controlled Volume Units, designed to complement vitrification. It is the most advanced method to date to allow for cooling with precise temperature controls, to reduce the incidence of fracturing during the cryopreservation process. In late 2009, the award winning book, TIMESHIP: The Architecture of Immortality, was released. It outlined the concepts and design of this building. The year 2012 brought us to the point where we are currently working on extensive renovations of the estate buildings and upgrading its infrastructure. A comprehensive Master Plan for the construction of Timeship and its supporting facilities are in progress and should be completed in 2014. Plans for the TCV (Temperature Controlled Volume) advanced cryogenic storage research building will be developed in the coming year. Q: Tell us more about the facility and its property. Can you elaborate on its features? A: My goal was to integrate a bold symbolic vision with optimal functionality. I wanted to make this facility and its property the epitome of beauty and careful design. Timeship will be a scientific mecca for life extension research. Our plans include the cryopreservation of the DNA of both humans and endangered animal species. We will serve as a major research center for the cryopreservation of organs for transplantation, including bioengineered organs for which there is currently no real method of storage, and of course, thousands of human patients who wish to travel to the future. The facility makes use of sacred geometry to include symbolic themes of birth and re-birth as demonstrated throughout history. I believe that anyone encountering this building should experience these concepts viscerally. The building will enclose 700,000 square feet, some of it underground, and will cost about $375 million. Much thought and planning has gone into its security both from natural and man-made threats. The property will also include a place for guests to stay when they visit, as well as conference facilities. There will also be land within the research park for other biotech companies. Timeship will be a very efficient energy consumer, using alternative renewable energy for its power as well as remaining on the grid of two independent energy sources. These alternate energy sources may include geomagmatic devices to draw electricity from ground heat as well as photovoltaic cells to gather solar energy. There will be emergency backup energy onsite in the form of liquid nitrogen (LN2) to allow it to continue to function for months in the event of serious disruption. Our design team partnered with security consultants to incorporate the best and most efficient security measures possible throughout all phases of Timeship?s construction. Obviously I can?t elaborate too much, but I can say that we used the best medieval and modern strategies in planning and constructing this facility. The medieval features ensure that the building will be secure even if the electricity goes out. The location was chosen to minimize the risk of violent weather damaging or disrupting the facility. Much care was taken to learn from our collective history and plan for short, mid and long range human made threats as well, gleaned from historical fact and likely future trends. I specifically chose this location in 2007 for many reasons. Comfort, Texas, in the San Antonio region is very welcoming and open to the idea of attracting a scientific community similar to the region of Silicon Valley in California. The area is relatively free of potential natural disasters that may make other areas less suitable. This location is also near two major airports, to facilitate the rapid transport of patients and organs for cryopreservation. It is located fifty miles from a major metropolitan area in a place that would be attractive for researchers and other professionals to live. The quality of life for Timeship staff was considered as seriously as the security of the location. The property is a beautiful expanse of rolling hills very similar in appearance to Tuscany, Italy. It took five years and a lot of careful attention to select the best property and location for this project and I am very happy with the results. Q: What kinds of challenges have you faced along the way? A: Every step of this process has been challenging in that the greatest of care and attention has been paid to the details of this project. Timeship is a massive undertaking and is being planned and built to last for centuries. No aspect of it can be rushed or miscalculated. It is important that our timing and how our infrastructure is rolled out be deliberate and meets the demanding standards I have placed for it. Q: Have there been any recent developments that you would like to discuss? A: We had a major breakthrough with receiving the patent for the TCV system in 2007. We are currently onsite doing the renovations to the estate infrastructure that are necessary to build this project. One square mile has been set aside for the comprehensive Master Plan for the location at the site of the first phase of the project. This includes the TCV Research and Assembly Building. Boots are on the ground as we speak. Q: What kinds of resources do you need to accomplish this goal? How can we support your mission? A: We are always looking for exceptionally creative and technical expertise. Timeship is a serious, large scale operation and it will always be looking for the best talent to add to its pool of resources. From an advisory perspective, contributions from the brightest thinkers in transhumanism, life extension and cryonics are always welcome. As Timeship evolves and its needs change, it will always be in search of assistance on some level. It is important now that we not only continue to move forward with its development as we share Timeship?s promise with the world. ?What can surpass the pyramids of Egypt as a symbol of the strength of mankind?s reach for immortality? Today, Timeship is founded on the bedrock of science rather than merely the symbols observed in the natural world. Ultimately, history may judge the impact of Timeship as more profound than that of the pyramids on the ultimate fate of the human species.? ?Michael D. West, PhD ### For more information, you can visit http://www.timeship.org or purchase Valentine?s award winning book. References: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/01/19/040119fa_fact_wilkinson http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xcrypt_timeship-the-architecture-of-immort_tech http://www.timeship.org Timeship: The Architecture of Immortality by Stephen Valentine, 2009 See also: http://hplusmagazine.com/2013/02/21/ben-bova-bumps-timeship-life-extension-center/ From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Wed Oct 9 20:14:53 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2013 14:14:53 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: <20131001121829.GR10405@leitl.org> References: <20130927055747.GI10405@leitl.org> <20131001121829.GR10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 6:18 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: Infrastructure work is not an idea, or a mobile app. Look at the > last time we did it. Try ordering a synfuel plant on Amazon. > Uh, my brother is currently building a synfuel plant for Sasol in Louisiana. He had three bidders competing to build it. It is not "off the shelf" by any means, but no large chemical plant is. You can't buy any chemical plant on Amazon. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rtomek at ceti.pl Wed Oct 9 20:22:25 2013 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2013 22:22:25 +0200 (CEST) Subject: [ExI] it was the best times, it was the best of times In-Reply-To: References: <043101cec0b5$b171ec90$1455c5b0$@att.net> <20131007084408.GK10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Mon, 7 Oct 2013, Kelly Anderson wrote: > On Mon, Oct 7, 2013 at 2:44 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > [...] > > This assumes two things: that the tide is still rising, and that > > some boats are not sinking. None of these assumptions hold water > > on a closer look. Blub. > > > I believe that the tide is rising. Yes, there is more concentration of > wealth, but overall wealth is still rising. The technological tide is > clearly still rising. Once again, are you predicting peak human creativity > Eugen? I think you won't find any allies on that front here. Depends. If by "ally" you mean a clone of Eugen, this will have to wait a decade or two to be feasable. I think it can be said that creativity is a function of surplus energy available. And surplus time. But the dependence seems to be a bit more complicated than linear. And BTW, there are different kinds of creativity - judging by content typed into internet by billions of monkeys, it goes every direction. Judging by contents of contemporary movies, we are already in deep crisis - the mean density of intellectual content is dropping down like dead bird, at least this is how I see it. If what we see is really what people want to see, we are dead man walking. Then there are brain limitations. No matter how much pot the "creativators" smoke, their brains are still able to operate only 5-9 elements at the same time, if I'm not mistaken. BTW there are similar limits in other areas, like the number of buddies one can comfortably have relations with (about few hundreds people AFAIR, so when you have full house and meet someone new, you will have to remove someone else to include her into your circles). Likewise, there is a limit of program size which individual can successfully maintain (writing is just a function of time, almost linear, but maintainance is PITA, perhaps 2^nlines). Some are good enough to care of OS kernel, some can take care of a browser, but the limit is there, and good luck if you want to pass it. So, the space of the problems individuals are able to solve seems to be limited. Say, if it's a function of type n^x, where x is the said short-term memory capacity and n is some constant natural number, like 2. In such case, there is vast difference in problem solving capacity between people having x=5 and x=9. But there is scarce number of people exceeding 9, if any. Once the limits are approached, there should be visible increase of problem solving cost, in terms of time (and maybe some other factors) invested. In fact, the current "groupisation" of research teams may be a hint supporting the claim that it is already happening. This will only slightly help. Adding new people increases intragroup communications. And if every member needs to be aware of those communications, it eats increasingly bigger time to be aware what others are doing vs doing oneself. Making groups smaller only slightly helps. There are some tricks to be played but I don't think they will reverse the trend. So, I would rather say, we managed to go quite far. But this has to slow down and halt eventually. Unless radical brain improvements get into the game. Without them, slow and halt. It doesn't matter if one is optimistic about humanity' abilities or otherwise. Math is orthogonal to optimism. Anyway, creativity is not a new product. Falsebook is not creativity. New cell phone is not creativity. Neither is Tesla car, even though solving some technical difficulties could have required creativity. Fusion is. Fuel cell beating current best is. As far as I can tell, Nicola Tesla was creative. Hollywood uses the word but doesn't know the meaning. Creativity is not about increasing sales (well, it is in some way, but not really the same level as scientific breakthrough). You can define your own version of "creativity" and in such case you are free to enjoy every optimistic conclusion that follows. Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Wed Oct 9 20:24:18 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2013 14:24:18 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Middle Class Doomed? In-Reply-To: <20130930140223.GY10405@leitl.org> References: <20130930140223.GY10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 8:02 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 07:29:34AM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > > > I believe that incomes almost always follow a power curve, with a few > > Depends on the country. It's not a natural law. > Can you provide an example of a country where income does not approximately follow a power curve. Please be specific and have some kind of numbers to back it up please. > > people making a lot of money, and a lot of people making a little bit of > > money. The best one can hope for is that the curve isn't too "corner > > hugging" and that there is a robust middle class. That seems like pretty > > simple economics to me. > > The only simple thing about economics is that it's an academical > fairy-tale. > When many grown men believe into fairy tales, bad things happen. > Much of economics is based on intelligent fully informed perfect agents, which is a fairy tale. > so why, and whether other forces might be at play beyond technological > > improvements that make "the rich richer, the poor poorer", which is > another > > way of saying that the curve above is too "corner hugging". > > There are two major factors mentioned: loss of cheap plentiful energy > (by adaptive increase in numbers of consumers and also consumption per > individual), and soon scarcity in other material supply, and globalization. > Loss of special snowflake status is hard to take. No doubt there are > several other factors I'm missing. > I haven't noticed that energy prices are skyrocketing. They are going up, but it doesn't seem like they are going up as fast as say the cost of a college education, or the cost of health insurance. Scarcity is something that mostly exists in theory, not yet in practice. I do thing globalization is killing the middle class. No doubt about that. Special snowflake status could be applied to the entire United States. It's part of the Copernican revolution that the US is not the center of the universe. So I can't disagree with that at all. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Wed Oct 9 20:33:47 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2013 22:33:47 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <20130927055747.GI10405@leitl.org> <20131001121829.GR10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20131009203347.GA10405@leitl.org> On Wed, Oct 09, 2013 at 02:14:53PM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 6:18 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > Infrastructure work is not an idea, or a mobile app. Look at the > > last time we did it. Try ordering a synfuel plant on Amazon. > > > > Uh, my brother is currently building a synfuel plant for Sasol in > Louisiana. He had three bidders competing to build it. It is not "off the > shelf" by any means, but no large chemical plant is. You can't buy any > chemical plant on Amazon. Look at the numbers below (budget, time of contruction, consider bottlenecks). Multiply by domestic (US) demand, including budget (US will default). Add matching renewable electricity capacity and water electrolysis instead of methane, because the natural gas bonanza is fleeting. See that deployment rate, or budget for that deployment rate? Nobody talks about these figures when talking about PV, wind, or even nuke. http://mg.co.za/article/2013-09-20-00-sasol-cracks-major-us-fracking-deal Sasol cracks major US fracking deal 20 SEP 2013 00:00 LISA STEYN A record-breaking multibillion-dollar investment will see the company cash in on the gas boom. It?s a gas: Sasol has the technical know-how to cash in on the fracking boom. (Lucy Nicholson/Reuters) A $20-billion investment in a facility in Louisiana, prompted by the North American shale boom, will be a world first in some respects. It will be Sasol?s largest investment yet; the biggest single investment in Louisiana?s history; and the largest foreign direct investor manufacturing project in the history of the United States. Sasol?s move to join the boom in hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, that is transforming the energy landscape in the US comes as the South African government prepares to grant the first prospecting licences here. A Louisiana state official told the Mail & Guardian the project cannot start until all permits have been obtained from the department of environmental quality. Part of the second-largest shale deposit in the US falls within the borders of the state. Louisiana is the second-largest natural gas-producing state after Texas. Sasol?s investment will be to expand its existing facility, a chemicals plant, in Lake Charles, an industrial hub in Louisiana, where it will develop an ethane cracker and derivatives units, followed by a gas-to-liquids (GTL) plant. Cracker project The cracker project, with an estimated cost of between $5-billion and $7-billion, is expected to begin in 2017. The cracker (a processing plant) will convert ethane, a constituent of natural gas, into ethylene (producing an estimated 1.5-million tonnes a year), which can be used to produce a wide range of chemical feedstock for products such as cool drink cans and detergents. The gas-to-liquids plant, with an estimated cost of between $11-billion and $14-billion, will produce fuel from natural gas and other by-products. Only Sasol and Shell have the proven technology to produce fuel from gas on such a large scale. Sasol will not extract the gas itself but will buy it from suppliers in the area who use drilling and/or fracking. Both projects are expected to have a significant economic spin-off for the state, worth an estimated $42.6-billion over the next 20 years. Job creation In an interview with the M&G, Sasol?s chief executive and executive director, David Constable, said that at the peak of the construction phase between 7?000 and 7?500 jobs will be created on site, after which between 12?000 and 15?000 permanent jobs, with an average annual salary of between $80?000 to $85?000, will be created. The state of Louisiana will pay the company a special incentive of $257-million in grants, including giving it millions of dollars in tax breaks, a $20-million worker training facility and a $115-million payment to the company for land and infrastructure. But the funding is not without contention. According to an article in a New Orleans daily paper, the Times Picayune, when the land and infrastructure payment is made in 2018 and 2019, state tax revenues will be negative ? which is according to the Louisiana Economic Development?s own projections, and will throw a spanner into the budgeting plan for those outlying years. However, officials say the cumulative tax revenues will be positive. The report said it is expected that incentives will not be handed over to Sasol until the project begins to yield positive tax revenues to the state. The state is also offering other incentives that Sasol will take advantage of. All in all, they could be north of $1-billion in total value over the life of the project, Sasol?s head of global chemicals and North American operations, Andr? de Ruyter, told the Engineering News. Investment criteria But it is the cheap gas, not the grants, that have convinced Sasol of the soundness of the investment. ?It is very nice, obviously,? Con?stable said. ?We have had great support from the state.? However, he said, the project meets and exceeds Sasol?s investment criteria given a wide range of economic scenarios. ?We don?t need the incentive but [it] is appreciated and makes things much smoother.? Most crackers run off other, more costly fossil fuels, so developing a gas-run cracker, at least at current low gas prices, would give any company the competitive edge. ?The cracker is a no-brainer,? said Guy Antoine, an investment analyst at Element Investment Managers, noting that the sell-side estimates of what this option is worth make it exceptionally worthwhile. ?The cracker can take that gas, turn it into chemicals and ultimately plastics ? the technology is so attractive because the capital outlay is less. Energy landscape turned upside down ?The energy landscape in the US has been turned upside down,? Constable said. ?[The US] is in a very strong position right now and the manufacturing industry is coming back with a vengeance.? Antoine said the only concern is that, because of the rush for petrochemical companies to build these plants, in future, there may be too much capacity. Owen Ncomo, an executive partner at Inkunzi investments, said there is always a risk of capital costs rising. ?If the US dollar weakens and they have to import equipment, they risk the cost of the project rising.? The gas-to-liquids plant is a riskier project should the gas price rise and the oil price drop, and analysts are divided over whether Sasol will recover the cost of building the plant. The price differential between the oil and gas price is key for the project to succeed, Antoine said. Oil prices The difference spiked in early 2012 when oil prices shot up and natural gas prices fell to around $2 a mmBtu (million British thermal units) and the ratio was 1:30. Currently, Brent crude oil is at $108 a barrel and natural gas is at 3.74 per mmBtu, a ratio of 1:28.8. Sasol, Constable said, can afford for the ratio to go as low as 1:16. Constable said the company expected ethane feedstock pricing to stay low over the next few decades and was also ?very comfortable with economics on the GTL plant?, although it requires a relatively low natural gas price and a relatively high oil diesel price. ?We also have value-add products off GTL which enhance the economics nicely ? analysts often miss that.? The possibility of the oil price sinking and the natural gas price rising can never be ruled out as some believe the shale boom will be short-lived and, according to Antoine, the market expects oil to decline to $88 dollars a barrel. Risky ?It is risky. You have to take a market view on what gas prices and oil [will be]. Gas prices have a higher historic volatility than oil prices do,? Antoine said. Although Constable said the company sees the gas and oil prices staying above the 1:16 ratio in the long term, they have sought to de-risk the project further. Shale assets in Canada owned by Sasol through a joint venture with Talisman acts as a ?natural hedge?, Constable said. A high gas price could mean losses in the Louisiana facility but will be offset by profits made by fracking and selling gas in the north. ?If all goes well, which we expect ? it [the cracker] will be starting up in 2017,? Constable said. ?There is a very high probability of proceeding.? Sasol has begun ordering equipment for the cracker and applications for an air permit and wetlands permit have been submitted. Confidence ?We are confident we will receive the permits in January and April respectively. It?s going very well on that front. We have got a lot of support from the state and Washington ? it looks very good right now.? The final investment decision on the gas-to-liquids plant will be taken 18 to 24 months after the cracker. Constable said Sasol chose to phase in the projects to take care of the balance sheet and to make sure it had the right financial and human resources. Sasol, with the use of its exclusive technology, is investing in a number of other gas-to-liquids offshore projects and, by the end of the decade, Constable said, it will be a much larger company, adding 70% to 75% more volumes for the group overall. Sasol?s Oryx gas-to-liquids plant in Qatar is said to be performing exceptionally well and ran at 108% capacity in July. This, Constable said, was proof that Sasol?s gas-to-liquids technology is fully commercialised and ready to be rolled out elsewhere in the world. Not gaining traction In Escravos, Nigeria, Sasol?s third gas-to-liquids plant is close to being commissioned and, in Uzbekistan, Sasol, as part of a joint venture, is in the final stages of planning a facility that will convert gas reserves into transport fuel. But a coal-to-liquids plant in the Waterberg does not seem to be gaining much traction ? it is simply not as economically viable as the gas-to-liquids projects. ?The capital costs are much more, therefore the economics are much more challenging,? Constable said. Coal-to-liquids plants need to be near a coal mine, and adequate water and infrastructure need to be in place. Diversified risk Coal to liquids requires a gasification process but using natural gas from the start removes that step and the costs associated with it. Sasol?s investments offshore, and particularly the Lake Charles expansion, is ?absolutely positive,? Ncomo said. ?In my view they have diversified their risk.? Antoine agreed: ?Sasol, since being privatised, have taken their proprietary technology and tried to monetise that.? Constable said Sasol?s focus is in Southern Africa until 2050. ?We have a firm rooted in South Africa; we are not going anywhere.? He said Sasol was keeping a close eye on the Karoo and the government?s interministerial committee on fracking. The production of shale gas in South Africa ?would change the energy landscape in the region?, he said. ?That would drive more feedstock for our Sasolburg and Secunda plants, and we would look at gas to power plants too.? He said Sasol would also be keen to get involved with the extraction if the water and other environmental challenges can be overcome. Lisa Steyn is a business reporter at the Mail & Guardian. From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Wed Oct 9 20:37:25 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2013 14:37:25 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Middle Class Doomed? In-Reply-To: <5249DC4C.3000903@aleph.se> References: <20130930140223.GY10405@leitl.org> <5249DC4C.3000903@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 2:17 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > On 2013-09-30 15:02, Eugen Leitl wrote: > >> On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 07:29:34AM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: >> >> I believe that incomes almost always follow a power curve, with a few >>> >> Depends on the country. It's not a natural law. >> > > Whether it is a natural law is a good question, actually. The folks at the Santa Fe Institute certainly seem to think that it is. They are smart people, pursuing original lines of thinking, but it makes a lot of sense to me. > It is not just that power-law tails are found in all industrialised > economies, but they seem to follow robustly from a lot of models too (e.g. > http://arxiv.org/abs/condmat/**0002374). Do you happen to know what they mean by "distribution of wealth tends to be very broadly distributed when exchanges are limited" Anders? > One can of course quibble about whether it is really power law, lognormal > or stretched exponential: http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.0212 - but the effect > is the same. > Yes, it is only an approximation. But a pretty good one most of the time. > Different countries have different exponents, so clearly the shape can be > affected. The question sort of comes down to this, "Is it always a good thing when the exponent is adjusted so that the middle class is larger?" It seems obvious, but perhaps it isn't so obvious. I'm not entirely sure, but my gut says a healthy middle class is a good thing. > But I suspect the overall wealth condensation effect is just due to the > skew distribution of human ability and the winner-take-all properties of > human attention: give everybody an equal amount of wealth, and very soon > they will have given some of it to a few superstars who produce something > everybody wants. What I'm seeing is that globalization, the Internet and dematerialization are things that push the winner-take-all paradigm to levels that it hasn't previously attained. For example, there can be only one lowest cost blender at Walmart. Other slightly higher priced blender makers are therefore pushed out of the market. That means that the blender maker that wins the Walmart bid makes way more money, and the underbidder makes so much less that they might even go out of business. That kind of winner-take-all thing happens with web sites as well. Just look how hard it is for Bing to make inroads against Google, despite spending tons of money to try. The way I think of this is that there are natural monopolies. Or in other words, monopolies are often the natural outcome of competition. Since monopolies are bad in the end, (no competition leads to inevitably higher prices) we try to keep them from forming. I should amend my normal anarchist stance slightly to say that I approve of the government keeping the formation of monopolies to a minimum. Even with that caveat, ologopies lead to Mark Zuckerberg being one rich mother. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Wed Oct 9 21:02:53 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2013 15:02:53 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: <20131009203347.GA10405@leitl.org> References: <20130927055747.GI10405@leitl.org> <20131001121829.GR10405@leitl.org> <20131009203347.GA10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Wed, Oct 9, 2013 at 2:33 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Wed, Oct 09, 2013 at 02:14:53PM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > > On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 6:18 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > > > Infrastructure work is not an idea, or a mobile app. Look at the > > > last time we did it. Try ordering a synfuel plant on Amazon. > > > > > > > Uh, my brother is currently building a synfuel plant for Sasol in > > Louisiana. He had three bidders competing to build it. It is not "off the > > shelf" by any means, but no large chemical plant is. You can't buy any > > chemical plant on Amazon. > > Look at the numbers below (budget, time of contruction, consider > bottlenecks). > Multiply by domestic (US) demand, including budget (US will default). Add > matching > renewable electricity capacity and water electrolysis instead of methane, > because the > natural gas bonanza is fleeting. See that deployment rate, or budget > for that deployment rate? Nobody talks about these figures when talking > about PV, wind, or even nuke. > > http://mg.co.za/article/2013-09-20-00-sasol-cracks-major-us-fracking-deal Quoting from the article: Antoine said the only concern is that, because of the rush for petrochemical companies to build these plants, in future, there may be too much capacity. Doesn't sound too doom and gloom to me in terms of energy supply. I really don't see how you can turn that into something negative, unless you are concerned about CO2 emissions. There will be a shit load of CO2 emissions from this plant. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lubkin at unreasonable.com Wed Oct 9 21:05:03 2013 From: lubkin at unreasonable.com (David Lubkin) Date: Wed, 09 Oct 2013 17:05:03 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Positive yield in nuclear fusion In-Reply-To: <201310091634.r99GYDjq014721@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <201310091634.r99GYDjq014721@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <201310092105.r99L5LC6020194@andromeda.ziaspace.com> I wrote: >I am cautiously delighted. For the importance of this milestone. For >how long it's been coming. This is a more modest step than the press is reporting. But it's a step. And reportedly they did better still last month but can't report it yet, due to the shutdown. -- David. From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Wed Oct 9 21:27:35 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2013 15:27:35 -0600 Subject: [ExI] it was the best times, it was the best of times In-Reply-To: <20131008094953.GI10405@leitl.org> References: <043101cec0b5$b171ec90$1455c5b0$@att.net> <20131007084408.GK10405@leitl.org> <20131007164544.GM10405@leitl.org> <20131007212443.GS10405@leitl.org> <20131008094953.GI10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 3:49 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Mon, Oct 07, 2013 at 09:36:33PM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > > I understand. I reserve the right to reject your reality and substitute > my > > own. > > If you keep doing that you'll wind up alone in a room. > As long as we aren't in the room together... ;-) > > Other than advertising, I know of no really big revenue stream for > Google. > > Would you please enlighten me? My privacy?? Don't know how they monetize > > that yet. > > How much is your freedom worth in a fascist state? Please put it that > in exact dollar and cents values. > $2,350,000.00 > > There are rocket people here. They seem to be relatively optimistic... > but > > I'm just an egg, but I understand the economics of mass transfer in > the solar system, and our ability to boostrap autonomous fabrication > capacities in remote locations, which is nonexistent. You want kilotons > of cheap metal from lightminutes away deorbited and semi-soft landed > in three decades. > > Sure, if Singularity lands. Should be any day now. > I'm not saying it will happen, but if there is a sufficiently painful shortage of key metals, it could happen. > > Sadly no, since we have so many clever monkeys who are busy caring for > the > > monkeys that won't get off their furry butts. > > So you agree that mere cleverness of a tiny fraction is insufficient, > if the majority remain engaged in dysfunctional, long-term suicidal > behavior. > Encouraged by their governments. Yes it is insufficient in the face of widespread suicidal behavior. That being said, I don't see driving around in cars to be widespread suicidal behavior. > > Ooooh. I'm so scared. Wealth building in our past? Are you mad? > > Funny, I think you're stark hopping mad, but it seems the feeling is > mutual. We can't be possibly both right. So one of us has a much > greater disconnect from reality that the other. > This is CLEARLY the case. > > I've known many rich people myself. None of them are sitting on their ass > > Anecdote. > > > or their money the way you seem to think they do. All of them are busy > > investing or building something. Maybe there is something different about > > rich people in Utah than in other places, but I rather doubt it. Would > you > > Definitely anecdote. > Granted, its anecdotal. > like to pull a number out of your butt to back up your view of capital > > amassment? > > > > Even rich people who do sit on their asses have money men who invest for > > them. They don't buy millions of dollars worth of savings bonds for heck > > You're obviously clueless about basic mechanisms of wealth transfer > and trends in social stratification. > I know the rich are getting richer. The poor are getting poorer. Give me a republican president, senate and house, and we'll reverse that trend in America. Give me Libertarian all three and it will explode! > > sake. It is ridiculous to say that rich folk's money doesn't do anything. > > Numbers please. > > No. You point me to peer-reviewed publications proving your point. > Nature/Science should be a good first start. Put up, or shut up. > Ok, how stuff works isn't exactly peer reviewed, but I'm only using one number, and even if it is off by a bit, it makes my point. http://www.howstuffworks.com/question241.htm >From the headline, it states that the New York Stock Exchange has stocks valued at $15 trillion total. That is $15 trillion dollars that is working for the good of the economy. How much of that $15 trillion dollars do you suppose belongs to rich people? A third, half? If the rich are getting richer, then that number, whatever it is, is likely going up. According to: http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html in 2008, only 19% of the income reported by the 13,480 individuals or families making over $10 million came from wages and salaries. See Norris, 2010, for more details. Norris, F. (2010, July 24). Off the Charts: In '08 Downturn, Some Managed to Eke Out Millions. *New York Times*, p. B-3. The New York Times isn't peer reviewed... but a pretty reliable source... So we have to assume the rest is primarily capital gains. You only get capital gains if you have your money invested in SOMETHING. Clearly someone is investing their money, not stuffing it into mattresses. So the rich assist everyone by investing their money. If you don't think they do, you're uninformed. If they don't invest it, they spend it. That pumps the economy, which you claim they aren't doing. I just don't understand your point that money belonging to the rich doesn't benefit the economy. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Wed Oct 9 21:39:47 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2013 15:39:47 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Meditations on the million year mind. In-Reply-To: <022d01cec50a$f8dd98a0$ea98c9e0$@att.net> References: <5254E22B.9000508@verizon.net> <20131009155625.GJ10405@leitl.org> <022d01cec50a$f8dd98a0$ea98c9e0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Wed, Oct 9, 2013 at 10:16 AM, spike wrote: > -----Original Message----- > From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org > [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Eugen Leitl > > >...We all are playing one game: russian roulette... > > We should come up with a new name for that game. Commie crap shoot? While > we are at it, we need a name for the practice of opting out of health > insurance, paying the tax penalty and hoping for the best, which still > externalizes risk onto the other tax payers. Suggestions welcome, extra > credit for alliteration, such as Capitalist Coinflip or American > Insecurity. > Millennial Maximizers? > Oh now that's just cold. Adrian is a young healthy guy, a perfect example > of the kind of person who will weigh the cost of health insurance vs the > price of the tax penalty for not having it, then opt out. > I haven't decided whether to opt out and pay the penalty yet, and I'm 49. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Wed Oct 9 21:45:00 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2013 15:45:00 -0600 Subject: [ExI] nondestructive uploading of sorts In-Reply-To: <007c01cec516$4bd8b9d0$e38a2d70$@att.net> References: <007c01cec516$4bd8b9d0$e38a2d70$@att.net> Message-ID: On Wed, Oct 9, 2013 at 11:37 AM, spike wrote: > ** ** > > >?Frankly, you?re next?**** > > ** ** > > We are a looooong long ways from true uploading. > Agreed. So now we have these computers with cameras, and they can read what we > write and listen to what we say, taking digital samples of our voice as we > talk on Skype and so forth. We can imagine a kinda-sorta uploading where > the computer imitates our style using our digitally recorded voices and our > image on the screen. Using only current technology, we might be able to > rig something that feels like we are visiting with our digital selves. > Clearly that is a form of nondestructive uploading in a very loose sense, a > toy version of it anyway. > That is precisely what Ray Kurzweil is working on at Google. It might not be as far off as you think for this sort of toy. > ** > > So the more we learn, the dumber we get. If we figure it out completely, > then we may eventually discover what I have already begun to suspect: that > we are stupid. > Ding ding ding, give the man a cigar! > ** > > ** > > **I could imagine using the above toy with our parents and grandparents, > so that after they are gone, we could have a better-than-nothing Eliza-ish > ?discussion? of sorts with their avatar. > > ** > > Would that be cool or what? > Google apparently thinks so. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From steinberg.will at gmail.com Wed Oct 9 22:29:55 2013 From: steinberg.will at gmail.com (Will Steinberg) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2013 17:29:55 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Meditations on the million year mind. In-Reply-To: References: <5254E22B.9000508@verizon.net> <20131009155625.GJ10405@leitl.org> <022d01cec50a$f8dd98a0$ea98c9e0$@att.net> Message-ID: But we already have a billions-year old mind. /anthropocentric On Oct 9, 2013 4:41 PM, "Kelly Anderson" wrote: > On Wed, Oct 9, 2013 at 10:16 AM, spike wrote: > >> -----Original Message----- >> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org >> [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Eugen Leitl >> >> >...We all are playing one game: russian roulette... >> >> We should come up with a new name for that game. Commie crap shoot? >> While >> we are at it, we need a name for the practice of opting out of health >> insurance, paying the tax penalty and hoping for the best, which still >> externalizes risk onto the other tax payers. Suggestions welcome, extra >> credit for alliteration, such as Capitalist Coinflip or American >> Insecurity. >> > > Millennial Maximizers? > > >> Oh now that's just cold. Adrian is a young healthy guy, a perfect example >> of the kind of person who will weigh the cost of health insurance vs the >> price of the tax penalty for not having it, then opt out. >> > > I haven't decided whether to opt out and pay the penalty yet, and I'm 49. > > -Kelly > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Wed Oct 9 23:33:15 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 00:33:15 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Middle Class Doomed? In-Reply-To: References: <20130930140223.GY10405@leitl.org> <5249DC4C.3000903@aleph.se> Message-ID: <5255E7BB.5060505@aleph.se> On 09/10/2013 21:37, Kelly Anderson wrote: > On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 2:17 PM, Anders Sandberg > wrote: > > On 2013-09-30 15:02, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 07:29:34AM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > > I believe that incomes almost always follow a power curve, > with a few > > Depends on the country. It's not a natural law. > > > Whether it is a natural law is a good question, actually. > > > The folks at the Santa Fe Institute certainly seem to think that it > is. They are smart people, pursuing original lines of thinking, but it > makes a lot of sense to me. That is just a disguised argument from authority. Santa Fe is great, but remember that they also are motivated to hope for universal laws of complexity. We need better arguments for it than that it is popular at cool places. > It is not just that power-law tails are found in all > industrialised economies, but they seem to follow robustly from a > lot of models too (e.g. http://arxiv.org/abs/condmat/0002374 ). > > > Do you happen to know what they mean by "distribution of wealth tends > to be very broadly distributed when exchanges are limited" Anders? When the interaction between agents is more limited than "everybody trades with everybody" the distribution gets more lumpy and unequal. > The question sort of comes down to this, "Is it always a good thing > when the exponent is adjusted so that the middle class is larger?" > > It seems obvious, but perhaps it isn't so obvious. I'm not entirely > sure, but my gut says a healthy middle class is a good thing. OK, here is a utilitarian argument: wellbeing as a function of wealth is a very convex function. So the sum total wellbeing is maximized if the distribution of wealth is equal. Of course, one might counter by pointing out that (1) maybe we cannot sum or compare individual wellbeing, (2) maybe it is not the sum that should be maximized, and (3) reallocation schemes might be impermissible for deontological reasons. A classical leftist argument is that wealth is power, so a more equal distribution distributes power in society widely. The problem is that it is not clear how power actually scales with wealth. It could be that it is convex like sqrt(W) or concave like W^2. If it is convex even power law tails are not too bad, while concave might make even very equal societies look falsely egalitarian while small coalitions rule. And a realistic view that things are a messy combination of skill, ambition and wealth might imply that in different domains different forms hold. > What I'm seeing is that globalization, the Internet and > dematerialization are things that push the winner-take-all paradigm to > levels that it hasn't previously attained. Yes. This is true. It also reaches the limit: it is not possible to be more global than totally global. Once we have good translation everybody will be in the same big domain. -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Faculty of Philosophy Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Wed Oct 9 23:41:24 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2013 16:41:24 -0700 Subject: [ExI] it was the best times, it was the best of times In-Reply-To: References: <043101cec0b5$b171ec90$1455c5b0$@att.net> <20131007084408.GK10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Oct 9, 2013 1:23 PM, "Tomasz Rola" wrote: > Judging by contents of contemporary movies, we are > already in deep crisis - the mean density of intellectual content is > dropping down like dead bird, at least this is how I see it. If what we > see is really what people want to see, we are dead man walking. This is a well known error in perception. You see much crap today, yet the surviving works of the past - and your memories of them - are generally not crap, therefore the past must have been better, right? Actually, wrong. For the most part, the best of the past will be preserved, the rest recycled and destroyed. This leaves little evidence it was there. Likewise, memories focus on the important - often including good or personally bad (which movies rarely are) - and delete the (literally) forgettable dross. (Many children of the 1980s remember the Transformers. How many remember the Gobots, especially without prompting?) Further, as a person matures, the unsubtle storytelling techniques that amused them in their youth wear out their novelty, and further works with the same objective quality are subjectively perceived to be more mundane, boring, et cetera. (There are ways to fight this effect, but it takes effort to pick out and potentially enjoy the novel components.) See how each generation expresses an opinion that the one or two after it have no taste in literature/music/culture, going back every generation to ancient Greece. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Thu Oct 10 00:47:42 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 01:47:42 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Tap tap..Hello? Is this thing on? (Or Zombie Apocalypse!) In-Reply-To: <018901cec4f7$2c6e5ec0$854b1c40$@att.net> References: <24B7EFB7-3E41-4C1F-B12D-5BC8AD5A6B4A@me.com> <00e501cec43d$e0f736b0$a2e5a410$@att.net> <018901cec4f7$2c6e5ec0$854b1c40$@att.net> Message-ID: <5255F92E.4090209@aleph.se> On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 9:48 AM, spike > wrote: > > Indeed sir. ObamaCare has created more distrust in society than I > have seen in my lifetime. > From an outside perspective, it looks more like the mistrust was there already. People in most western democracies are sceptical of government programs from the wrong side of the aisle. But they rarely fear them or go out of the way to obstruct them like in the US. Germans might complain loudly against Energiewende and we Swedes had a long political battle over L?ntagarfonder, but it did not reach these levels of paranoia. Even a big badly planned healthcare reform is not worth this much bile. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Thu Oct 10 06:05:48 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2013 23:05:48 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Meditations on the million year mind. In-Reply-To: <022d01cec50a$f8dd98a0$ea98c9e0$@att.net> References: <5254E22B.9000508@verizon.net> <20131009155625.GJ10405@leitl.org> <022d01cec50a$f8dd98a0$ea98c9e0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Wed, Oct 9, 2013 at 9:16 AM, spike wrote: > -----Original Message----- > From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org > [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Eugen Leitl > >... The outcome for that is certain: information-theoretic death. Several > people on this list, who all hoped that uploading will become available are > now carbon dioxide. Frankly, you're next... > >From what I understand, you're likely to go well before me. > Oh now that's just cold. Adrian is a young healthy guy, a perfect example > of the kind of person who will weigh the cost of health insurance vs the > price of the tax penalty for not having it, then opt out. > Not with the putting of words in my oratory emitter, please. :P (As it happens, I don't have that choice. Health insurance is provided on my behalf by multiple sources. I do not have the option to refuse, and even if I did, refusal would not benefit me: the money diverted to paying for it would not otherwise be added to my income. But that's my particular situation.) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Thu Oct 10 06:25:56 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 08:25:56 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <20130927055747.GI10405@leitl.org> <20131001121829.GR10405@leitl.org> <20131009203347.GA10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20131010062556.GF10405@leitl.org> On Wed, Oct 09, 2013 at 03:02:53PM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > Quoting from the article: > Antoine said the only concern is that, because of the rush for > petrochemical companies to build these plants, in future, there may be too > much capacity. See, selective quoting of beliefs of somebody from press articles is why I insisted on peer reviewed publications in future. You seemed to read some other article entirely, uncritically, and you entirely failed to do your math. > Doesn't sound too doom and gloom to me in terms of energy supply. I really Believe all you want, I'm done. Let's talk again in 20 years. > don't see how you can turn that into something negative, unless you are > concerned about CO2 emissions. There will be a shit load of CO2 emissions > from this plant. From eugen at leitl.org Thu Oct 10 06:36:28 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 08:36:28 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Meditations on the million year mind. In-Reply-To: References: <5254E22B.9000508@verizon.net> <20131009155625.GJ10405@leitl.org> <022d01cec50a$f8dd98a0$ea98c9e0$@att.net> Message-ID: <20131010063628.GG10405@leitl.org> On Wed, Oct 09, 2013 at 11:05:48PM -0700, Adrian Tymes wrote: > On Wed, Oct 9, 2013 at 9:16 AM, spike wrote: > > > -----Original Message----- > > From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org > > [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Eugen Leitl > > >... The outcome for that is certain: information-theoretic death. Several > > people on this list, who all hoped that uploading will become available are > > now carbon dioxide. Frankly, you're next... > > > > From what I understand, you're likely to go well before me. That didn't apply to several others who went before into the great entropy sink in the sky. And if you think a couple decades matter, well, so did they. You seem to have to made up your mind to ignore the only methods which can provably, potentially save your ass, today. So have many others. Collectively, you're making sure that your only future is carbon dioxide. And most of you are not even aware of what you're doing, when you're not doing. Well, good luck with that. You're going to need it. From atymes at gmail.com Thu Oct 10 06:43:38 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2013 23:43:38 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Meditations on the million year mind. In-Reply-To: <20131010063628.GG10405@leitl.org> References: <5254E22B.9000508@verizon.net> <20131009155625.GJ10405@leitl.org> <022d01cec50a$f8dd98a0$ea98c9e0$@att.net> <20131010063628.GG10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Wed, Oct 9, 2013 at 11:36 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > You seem to have to made up your mind to ignore the only > methods which can provably, potentially save your ass, today. > Except: * They haven't been proven. It won't be proven until people start being uploaded (or "coalesced", or whatever you choose to term it) and this is observed to work. Until then, there is always room for the theory to be missing something. * They won't save my ass today. Maybe some decades from now, if they work - and if they can be made to work in time for me. They didn't come soon enough for many who came before us; if this won't work before I need it, then I have no incentive to invest in it. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Thu Oct 10 07:46:51 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 09:46:51 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Meditations on the million year mind. In-Reply-To: References: <5254E22B.9000508@verizon.net> <20131009155625.GJ10405@leitl.org> <022d01cec50a$f8dd98a0$ea98c9e0$@att.net> <20131010063628.GG10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20131010074651.GH10405@leitl.org> On Wed, Oct 09, 2013 at 11:43:38PM -0700, Adrian Tymes wrote: > On Wed, Oct 9, 2013 at 11:36 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > > You seem to have to made up your mind to ignore the only > > methods which can provably, potentially save your ass, today. > > > > Except: > > * They haven't been proven. It won't be proven until people start being Yes, we provably have ultrastructure preservation *and* function preservation. If you don't know this, you've not done your due diligence, and dumping straight from /dev/ass > uploaded (or "coalesced", or whatever you choose to term it) and this is > observed to work. Until then, there is always room for the theory to be > missing something. You're definitely missing something: you're dying. > * They won't save my ass today. Maybe some decades from now, if they work Have fun in the crematorium oven, then. Buh-bye. > - and if they can be made to work in time for me. They didn't come soon > enough for many who came before us; if this won't work before I need it, > then I have no incentive to invest in it. Yes, yes, I pegged you exactly right. You have no reason to put your money where your mouth is. A real killing joke, for once. From pharos at gmail.com Thu Oct 10 08:02:52 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 09:02:52 +0100 Subject: [ExI] id theft in o-care In-Reply-To: <010801cec51f$cdfb0040$69f100c0$@att.net> References: <010801cec51f$cdfb0040$69f100c0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Wed, Oct 9, 2013 at 7:46 PM, spike wrote: > Note that I am not buying anything, but rather I want to put in a > theoretical state I might move to in the future, so I want to shop prices. > They ask for my home address, and they direct me to the California > exchanges. What about those who are shopping for a future home? If I want > to learn about a theoretical future state, do I need to put in a theoretical > future address? > > I don?t want that outfit knowing who I am or what I estimate my future > income will be. Can I give them a theoretical name, a really obvious > made-up pseudonym such as Fester N. Carbuncle? They ask for my legal name, > first, middle and last, as would be shown on a legal document. So if I just > want to shop around and not buy anything yet but just for planning purposes > I go in with SNN 111 11 1111 under the name Barf McBuns to avoid identity > theft, is that identity theft? > Well, it is a government system, so they already know most of the data they are asking you for. They claim to have reasons for requiring the data. It is a health insurance quote, so they need to access your medical records. They need to know your immigration status. i.e. Are you an official US citizen? It is benefit assisted, so they need to check your IRS records. And so on..... However, I think the most important thing not mentioned is that when you give them all this information, make sure that you don't use your home pc. You certainly don't want to link your normal IP address to all this data. The NSA can then link everything on the internet sent from that IP address to your real life details. BillK From eugen at leitl.org Thu Oct 10 08:19:11 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 10:19:11 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Tap tap..Hello? Is this thing on? (Or Zombie Apocalypse!) In-Reply-To: <5255F92E.4090209@aleph.se> References: <24B7EFB7-3E41-4C1F-B12D-5BC8AD5A6B4A@me.com> <00e501cec43d$e0f736b0$a2e5a410$@att.net> <018901cec4f7$2c6e5ec0$854b1c40$@att.net> <5255F92E.4090209@aleph.se> Message-ID: <20131010081911.GL10405@leitl.org> On Thu, Oct 10, 2013 at 01:47:42AM +0100, Anders Sandberg wrote: > People in most western democracies are sceptical of government > programs from the wrong side of the aisle. But they rarely fear them > or go out of the way to obstruct them like in the US. Germans might > complain loudly against Energiewende and we Swedes had a long The Energiewende is actually still extremely popular (76% can imagine to make their own power), despite plenty of sniper work from the side of the government to discredit it. http://www.heise.de/tp/blogs/2/155086 tl;dr Energiewende is not a government thing, and it only happened *despite* the government > political battle over L?ntagarfonder, but it did not reach these > levels of paranoia. Even a big badly planned healthcare reform is > not worth this much bile. From eugen at leitl.org Thu Oct 10 08:29:14 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 10:29:14 +0200 Subject: [ExI] id theft in o-care In-Reply-To: References: <010801cec51f$cdfb0040$69f100c0$@att.net> Message-ID: <20131010082914.GM10405@leitl.org> On Thu, Oct 10, 2013 at 09:02:52AM +0100, BillK wrote: > However, I think the most important thing not mentioned is that when > you give them all this information, make sure that you don't use your > home pc. You certainly don't want to link your normal IP address to > all this data. The NSA can then link everything on the internet sent > from that IP address to your real life details. Are you implying that the spooks are amateurs? I also notice little outrage about things like http://killerapps.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/10/01/on_the_eve_of_the_government_shutdown_the_pentagon_spent_billions_on_weapons Politics is insane in general, but US' is pure bedlam. From anders at aleph.se Thu Oct 10 09:32:04 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 10:32:04 +0100 Subject: [ExI] id theft in o-care In-Reply-To: References: <010801cec51f$cdfb0040$69f100c0$@att.net> Message-ID: <52567414.5090600@aleph.se> On 2013-10-10 09:02, BillK wrote: > Well, it is a government system, so they already know most of the data > they are asking you for. Who are "they"? The government as a whole may "know" everything, but within each compartment it might be impossible to get all relevant data together. The DMV cannot just ask the NSA for a current photo of you. I remember hearing the head of a UK drug enforcement agency complaining about that despite giving a direct order, his subordinate agencies were *unable* to tell him - after months of research - how much methadone they were handing out. The Swedish government simultaneously knows and does not know where I live: I get tax bills to the right UK address, but the healthcare system has me in a database of "unfindable citizens" while the pension system thinks I live in the wrong place. Government-sceptical Americans seem to have undue faith in how well governments actually work. (But badly managed sites that can be hacked should be a concern) -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From pharos at gmail.com Thu Oct 10 10:32:26 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 11:32:26 +0100 Subject: [ExI] id theft in o-care In-Reply-To: <52567414.5090600@aleph.se> References: <010801cec51f$cdfb0040$69f100c0$@att.net> <52567414.5090600@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Thu, Oct 10, 2013 at 10:32 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > Who are "they"? The government as a whole may "know" everything, but within > each compartment it might be impossible to get all relevant data together. > The DMV cannot just ask the NSA for a current photo of you. > > Government-sceptical Americans seem to have undue faith in how well > governments actually work. > > (But badly managed sites that can be hacked should be a concern) > Yes, it is well-known that government databases are full of errors and out-of-date data. The same applies to most large company databases, police. local government, etc. That is a significant problem with 'big data'. But it is a known problem and efforts are being made to cross-check, link and consolidate data files. This is not always to the advantage of the people. If you are trying to get a licence or passport from the government and they cannot confirm your details (or even have you recorded as dead!) then you have a problem. Another problem is when organisations ask you for information that they already know. The reason is not that the knowledge is in another department. They want to see if you are going to try to give false information. When you fill up an application form it is cross-checked all over the place. If your name and address is not in the census records or phone book, etc. then you are very likely to get your application refused, or at least queried. What always makes me smile is the constant harassment from banks to try to get me to change to paperless (online) monthly bank statements. Yet if you try to open a bank account the first thing they will ask for is a recent bank statement from your present bank! BillK From eugen at leitl.org Thu Oct 10 11:37:49 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 13:37:49 +0200 Subject: [ExI] some numbers on synfuels, just for the US Message-ID: <20131010113749.GB10405@leitl.org> (Exercise to the reader: identify the number of assumptions made, implicit or otherwise) http://dieoffdebunked.blogspot.de/2012/12/synfuel-to-partly-offset-peak-oil.html Synfuel to partly offset Peak Oil declines? Chris Floudas, a professor of chemical engineering at Princeton, has just published a paper outlining a strategy for replacing the entire U.S. transportation oil supply with synthetic fuels from a feedstock comprised of a combination of non food crops and other (more abundant than oil) fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas. The fuel would be competitive at a $/barrel price of between $80-$110. Now, we?ve known for some time (at least the 1930s) that you can convert coal to liquids and natural gas to liquids so this is not new news. What?s different is the persistently high oil prices, which makes the process cost competitive with oil based fuels. So let?s make a couple of assumptions here: 1. Oil prices stay high because markets are tight due to inability to raise production much 2. Using Prof Floudas?s numbers, 47 large plants would produce 71 percent of the total transportation fuel 3. Although US/Canadian oil production is increasing, globally we see a decline rate 4. We are meeting some (but not all) of the decline rate by a combination of increased fuel efficiency and substitution to electric vehicles. So what does that look like? For each percentage point of global decline rate, like for like, we need to replace 1% of the total U.S. fleet, which is 25 million vehicles. Now naturally, the fleet turns over once every 17 years so this gives us 100/17 for a percentage turnover every year which is about 6% of the fleet. If every single one of those vehicles doubled fuel efficiency from 15 mpg to 30 mpg we could handle a 3% decline. That?s probably unrealistic, however, as Americans are notoriously conservative when it comes to changing their driving habits. So how many are realistic? Well right now we are selling about 50,000 priuses a year in the U.S. so let?s make a wild guess and say we sell 100,000 fuel efficient vehicles per year today. Is it realistic to say in the face of peak oil we might see demand double? So let?s say 200,000 fuel efficient vehicles per year. That?s close to one percent. So we therefore cover a half percentage point of decline rate with fuel efficient vehicles. Let?s be super optimistic and say we can cover another half percent by replacing oil consumption all together by selling 100,000 all-electric vehicles per year. So we?ve got x-1 to cover with synthetic fuel (where x is the decline rate). But let's imagine that we are uber-pessimists. Let's ignore the contribution to covering the decline rate from fuel efficient vehicles and electric vehicles (never mind compressed natural gas vehicles) and instead just look at how many plants we need to build and what it will cost us to do it. So let?s be super pessimistic and say the decline rate is at the high end (say 10%). So in the case of the U.S. that?s 1.3 million barrels needs to be replaced every year for transportation. Using Prof Floudas?s numbers 71 percent of the total transportation requires 47 large plants, so that?s about 2/3 of a percent per plant each year. So we need 15 large plants per year. That?s a cost of $226 billion per year. Which is about 700 bucks per U.S. citizen per year or about 60 bucks per month or about 12 bucks per week. So that?s the pessimistic case. Now is that going to break the bank? Hmmmm. From spike66 at att.net Thu Oct 10 12:59:22 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 05:59:22 -0700 Subject: [ExI] id theft in o-care In-Reply-To: References: <010801cec51f$cdfb0040$69f100c0$@att.net> Message-ID: <05e501cec5b8$8adc49b0$a094dd10$@att.net> ... On Behalf Of BillK Subject: Re: [ExI] id theft in o-care On Wed, Oct 9, 2013 at 7:46 PM, spike wrote: >> ... They ask for my legal > name, first, middle and last, as would be shown on a legal document. > So if I just want to shop around and not buy anything yet but just for > planning purposes I go in with SNN 111 11 1111 under the name Barf > McBuns to avoid identity theft, is that identity theft? > >....Well, it is a government system, so they already know most of the data they are asking you for. They claim to have reasons for requiring the data. It is a health insurance quote, so they need to access your medical records. They need to know your immigration status. i.e. Are you an official US citizen? It is benefit assisted, so they need to check your IRS records. And so on... Ja, there is that, but what I really want is to do some what-ifs for planning purposes. If I enter an anticipated future annual salary which is much lower than now, I want to know what kind of medical insurance this wonderful new system will provide for me. I am asking not what I can do for my country but what my country can do for me. >...However, I think the most important thing not mentioned is that when you give them all this information, make sure that you don't use your home pc. You certainly don't want to link your normal IP address to all this data. The NSA can then link everything on the internet sent from that IP address to your real life details...BillK _________________________________ There are a number of different people who use this computer and this IP address. This is intentional, and still as far as I know the best tool for being anonymous. There is no law against giving others your computer login credentials. I can imagine in the future the government may want to change this somehow. I have been careful to not include anyone on that list who might do identity theft however. spike From eugen at leitl.org Thu Oct 10 13:24:43 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 15:24:43 +0200 Subject: [ExI] id theft in o-care In-Reply-To: <05e501cec5b8$8adc49b0$a094dd10$@att.net> References: <010801cec51f$cdfb0040$69f100c0$@att.net> <05e501cec5b8$8adc49b0$a094dd10$@att.net> Message-ID: <20131010132442.GH10405@leitl.org> On Thu, Oct 10, 2013 at 05:59:22AM -0700, spike wrote: > There are a number of different people who use this computer and this IP Shared account, I hope. > address. This is intentional, and still as far as I know the best tool for > being anonymous. There is no law against giving others your computer login Currently, your best tool for being anonymous is booting up Tails from a write-protected USB stick. > credentials. I can imagine in the future the government may want to change > this somehow. I have been careful to not include anyone on that list who > might do identity theft however. From pharos at gmail.com Thu Oct 10 13:41:40 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 14:41:40 +0100 Subject: [ExI] id theft in o-care In-Reply-To: <05e501cec5b8$8adc49b0$a094dd10$@att.net> References: <010801cec51f$cdfb0040$69f100c0$@att.net> <05e501cec5b8$8adc49b0$a094dd10$@att.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Oct 10, 2013 at 1:59 PM, spike wrote: > Ja, there is that, but what I really want is to do some what-ifs for > planning purposes. If I enter an anticipated future annual salary which is > much lower than now, I want to know what kind of medical insurance this > wonderful new system will provide for me. I am asking not what I can do for > my country but what my country can do for me. > > If you search for Obamacare calculator, there are several sites which will do estimates for you. They vary in quality, of course, and some may just be marketing health insurance. This one looks reasonable to me. BillK From spike66 at att.net Thu Oct 10 13:23:20 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 06:23:20 -0700 Subject: [ExI] id theft in o-care In-Reply-To: <20131010082914.GM10405@leitl.org> References: <010801cec51f$cdfb0040$69f100c0$@att.net> <20131010082914.GM10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <05ef01cec5bb$e413eb70$ac3bc250$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Eugen Leitl Subject: Re: [ExI] id theft in o-care >...I also notice little outrage about things like http://killerapps.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/10/01/on_the_eve_of_the_gover nment_shutdown_the_pentagon_spent_billions_on_weapons >...Politics is insane in general, but US' is pure bedlam. _______________________________________________ Eugen, clearly you don't understand the system. The money they talk about in this article is a different kind of money than the kind they need to prevent closing down outdoor memorials and national parks. The military already had this money from last year's budget, which was a CR or continuing resolution, which is a way of saying when the House of Representatives cannot agree on a budget, they just pass a CR, which keeps the budget the same as last year. The current president started his first term with an enormous economic stimulus in the form of hundreds of billions of dollars meant to save failing banks. They somehow managed to get that one time economic stimulus to count as part of that year's budget, so the next year's CR included that economic stimulus package again. Repeat for the next five years in a row and this is where we end up. The government has billions that it must spend at the end of the fiscal year, on anything it can think of, anything. Otherwise it loses that money for next year. At the same time, parks are closing for lack of funding. This is a different kind of money, for it goes for things that are highly visible, parks, open air memorials and so forth. These are intentionally closed and blocked off in order to draw attention to the government's need for more money. It encourages the citizenry to pressure their congress-critters to authorize more borrowing, so that next year about this time, there will again be a wild and desperate struggle to spend the remaining budget on time. What we are really seeing is a massive real-world test of Keynesian economics. Keynes would suggest that the government's taking the maximum funds from the citizenry and spending it on anything, even complete frivolity, helps and stimulates the economy. Hayek would predict that only sane expenditures really help the economy in the long run, that silly wasteful expenditures actually hurt the economy and the nation, for it keeps it building infrastructure to make stuff we don't need or want. spike From spike66 at att.net Thu Oct 10 14:01:57 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 07:01:57 -0700 Subject: [ExI] id theft in o-care In-Reply-To: <20131010132442.GH10405@leitl.org> References: <010801cec51f$cdfb0040$69f100c0$@att.net> <05e501cec5b8$8adc49b0$a094dd10$@att.net> <20131010132442.GH10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <05f901cec5c1$491b02b0$db510810$@att.net> On Behalf Of Eugen Leitl Subject: Re: [ExI] id theft in o-care On Thu, Oct 10, 2013 at 05:59:22AM -0700, spike wrote: >>... There are a number of different people who use this computer and this IP address... >...Shared account, I hope. >...Currently, your best tool for being anonymous is booting up Tails from a write-protected USB stick. _______________________________________________ Ja, I have never gotten serious about online security because I haven't done anything illegal. That being said, I now learn that I cannot window-shop in the new ObamaCare system. In order to see what deals are available, you need to identify yourself with social security numbers, birth date, address, answers to three security questions, current medical insurance, everything, so that if you don't currently have insurance or have insurance they deem inadequate, you have provided everything the feds need to fine you. So this system as it is currently does not allow you to window shop anonymously. It is an insurance shopping mall with all the windows blacked out. If you enter that mall, you must buy something before you can leave, even if you don't want any of the products there. They have set up a system which would make the casual shopper vulnerable to ID theft. Of course people will get that far and just stop. How can you know that this site isn't counterfeit? It looks just like a phishing scam to me. Consider how we often spot phishing scams: look for little grammatical errors, misspellings, things that Nigerians would likely do. This is a screen shot I reached yesterday from what claims to be the official government site: cid:image002.jpg at 01CEC535.145F94F0 So why do they repeat the message in the red box? Why do they insert an apostrophe in couldn't the second time but omit it the first time? Why is the second Important in bold but the first one is not? Is the second Important more important than the first Important? Why? This site looks phishy to me, just a little too Nigerian to dump personal information here. I don't know that any of this matters however. It is perfectly clear to me this system is heavily dependent on young healthy people, and they are not coming, even according to the most liberal optimistic sites I can find. The young and healty are opting for the tax penalty, which isn't much in the first year. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image003.jpg Type: application/octet-stream Size: 30781 bytes Desc: not available URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Thu Oct 10 14:54:52 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 10:54:52 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Euthanasia Message-ID: > > >> fixing brains has the same problem. In reality, you will need to >> proceed more or less like for cryosuspension: wait until the patient is >> declared dead, and then start biostasis protocols. >> > > > There might be a loophole: euthanasia is legal in some jurisdictions. > Eliminating peri-arrest damage appears to be crucial for optimal perfusion. > Obviously legal euthanasia would be a very desirable thing, and not just because it leads to better perfusion; but unfortunately the same political party that says it wants to get government off your back is also willing, as can be seen in the Terri Schiavo fiasco, to call for a emergency session of congress to make sure government retains its power to prevent you from doing what you want with your body. To my mind making someone live who wants to die is as immoral as murder, making someone die who wants to live. But at least that party can sometimes cause congress to act quickly and decisively, even if it is quickly and decisively stupid. Speaking of stupid, that same political party has also come to think that not paying your bills will calm down your creditors. And the really amazing thing is that, although I'm embarrassed to admit it, I am a member of that very same political party. I think a few years ago that party must have suffered a stroke that resulted in massive brain damage, and so now I am ashamed to belong to the party of Lincoln. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Thu Oct 10 15:46:15 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 08:46:15 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Euthanasia In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Oct 10, 2013 7:55 AM, "John Clark" wrote: > Speaking of stupid, that same political party has also come to think that not paying your bills will calm down your creditors. And the really amazing thing is that, although I'm embarrassed to admit it, I am a member of that very same political party. I think a few years ago that party must have suffered a stroke that resulted in massive brain damage, and so now I am ashamed to belong to the party of Lincoln. Technically both parties are Lincoln's: the Democrats split off from the Democratic-Republican party. Moreover, ideological and candidate shifts mean neither party retains meaningful connection except in name to what they were in or before the 1960s - 1970s too, somewhat. That said, "brain damage" is an apt way to describe the TEA Party's takeover of the Republicans over the past decade or so. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Thu Oct 10 16:39:26 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 09:39:26 -0700 Subject: [ExI] put this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia Message-ID: <007801cec5d7$49cee760$dd6cb620$@att.net> >. On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes Subject: Re: [ExI] Euthanasia On Oct 10, 2013 7:55 AM, "John Clark" wrote: >>. Speaking of stupid, that same political party has also come to think that not paying your bills will calm down your creditors. now I am ashamed to belong to the party of Lincoln. I don't understand why US creditors are as calm as they are. We are saying we must be allowed to borrow more money at a faster pace in order to pay our bills for things we have already bought. But a crazy faction is saying no, if we pay bills with borrowed money, we haven't really paid our bills at all, but rather merely rearranged credit ratings as we rack up ever higher bills. We have a president who says things like: "Now, this debt ceiling -- I just want to remind people in case you haven't been keeping up -- raising the debt ceiling, which has been done over a hundred times, does not increase our debt; it does not somehow promote profligacy. All it does is it says you got to pay the bills that you've already racked up, Congress. It's a basic function of making sure that the full faith and credit of the United States is preserved." By what line of reasoning does raising the debt ceiling not result in increased debt? Is he claiming that if we raise this debt limit we will not borrow the money? If he thinks we will not borrow more money, why do we need to authorize it? We have hit this debt limit over 100 times and increased it. Every single time the US government borrowed all it was allowed to borrow and has come back for more, as it is doing now. I consider that pretty good evidence that it will happen again. In that sense raising the debt limit is equivalent to borrowing that amount of money. Remind me again John why it is you are ashamed to belong to the party of Lincoln? The same president who is now telling us raising the debt ceiling does not increase our debt seven years ago uttered this: 'The fact that we are here today to debate raising America's debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the US Government cannot pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government's reckless fiscal policies. Increasing America's debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that "the buck stops here." Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.' Which sounds right to you? John, which of these comments sounds more right? I'll take the second one from 2006. Show me even one reckless fiscal policy which has ended since 2006, and I can show you a dozen new reckless policies that have replaced it. Remind me again please that bit about we need to borrow more money to preserve the full faith and credit of the US? This government healthcare scheme DEFINITELY does shift the burden onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. That in itself is bad enough, but consider what happens when it becomes obvious that our children and grandchildren cannot afford even their own health insurance, never mind ours. In specifically disowning his 2006 commentary, the president suggested he was engaging in political gamesmanship back then. Well OK, how do we know he isn't doing that now? US creditors are asked to rely on the full faith and credit of the US, if we demonstrate not only that we cannot live on what we make, but our accounting system absolutely demands we waste money, tall piles of it: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/10/07/new-air-force-cargo-planes-fly-straight -into-mothballs/ That O-care website Healthcare.gov which doesn't work right and looks like a phishing scam cost the US government over 600 million dollars. And it isn't a minor glitch. I checked it this morning and it still isn't working. I used BillK's site this morning to see numbers so shocking it gave me a clear view of how this will all play out in the near term future. The ones who manage to penetrate this healthcare.gov system will find they misunderstood what this new law does if you are poor: very little. They will get quoted numbers far higher than you can afford, then they will be reminded that they must buy something or face a fine, and the people who will levy the fine know everything they need to know because of the info you just entered, thank you. Anders can you see why this whole thing has generated distrust and bilious political sniping everywhere in the US? One party gained a supermajority in 2008. A filibuster-proof supermajority means they did not need to debate anything in public, for any actual debate on the content of the proposed law could just be mislabeled filibuster and ended by supermajority vote, which it was. Then the whole thing could be designed off the record, possibly including the use of threats, bribes or any other available means, which it likely was. This whole mess was designed in secret and passed by brute force without a single minority party vote in either house, not one. And even after it was brought up for vote, the majority party leader admitted they passed this mess without knowing what was actually in the bill. They couldn't have known: they were making changes right up to the last minute, there wasn't time to even read the thing, never mind have legitimate debate on it. I am not kidding: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoE1R-xH5To So they own this damn thing. If it fails spectacularly, it will likely destroy the existing healthcare system and along with it that party which designed the failed fix, which merely took a broken system and broke it even more. That will fundamentally alter the face of politics in the country for a generation if not longer. John why is it you are ashamed of being a Republican? >.Technically both parties are Lincoln's: the Democrats split off from the Democratic-Republican party. Ja, the Republicans were the party of abolition. The Democrats were the party of slavery. It sure looks to me like that party is trying to force us back into slavery. John, remind me why it is you are ashamed to be registered with the party of abolition please? >.That said, "brain damage" is an apt way to describe the TEA Party's takeover of the Republicans over the past decade or so. Ja those crazy fools believe the government should live within its means. It is the rise of a party of Friedrich Hayek. Insane, dangerous people are these. Not. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Thu Oct 10 17:53:55 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 11:53:55 -0600 Subject: [ExI] some numbers on synfuels, just for the US In-Reply-To: <20131010113749.GB10405@leitl.org> References: <20131010113749.GB10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Thu, Oct 10, 2013 at 5:37 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > (Exercise to the reader: identify the number of assumptions made, > implicit or otherwise) > Yes this article made a HUGE number of assumptions. The first assumption which I think is wrong is that oil prices would stay high. The petroleum industry has shown in the past that every time they have significant competition, they simply drop the price for a while to starve that competition out. They have the ability to do this as an oligopoly (OPEC being part of that) and they could very easily outlast a highly leveraged synfuel company. If the government were itself the large synfuel company, then they might be able to outlast the oil conglomerate... but then you would have the inefficiencies associated with it being a government operation. I suppose the government could just hold the price of oil high enough with taxation to make sure the synfuel giants succeeded, but that seems unlikely EXCEPT in the case where the large oil giants also become the synfuel giants. So if a company like Sasol expanded large enough to become a major threat to the oil industry, they would simply be crushed. It wouldn't take long. They seem to be taking a grow slow approach to it now, not over leveraging, which is probably wise. Don't want to show up on the oil industry's enemies list too soon. If they are successful, then maybe there will be a similar Exxon plant or Shell plant someday. The article did have a number of other assumptions as well. Some may be good, some bad. It's hard to say. I don't really get his point about energy efficient and electric cars. Just adding up demand I suppose. He seems to throw that out at the end. Every smart energy person I've ever heard talks about deemphasising which energy source is most important in the future. Now, oil for transportation and coal for electricity have much more of a percentage than anything likely will have in the future unless something like space based solar turns out to be so cheap that you just don't do anything else. That would indeed be frightening for all of our energy supply to come from off planet. That's a very high tech bet. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Thu Oct 10 19:55:11 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 13:55:11 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: <20131010062556.GF10405@leitl.org> References: <20130927055747.GI10405@leitl.org> <20131001121829.GR10405@leitl.org> <20131009203347.GA10405@leitl.org> <20131010062556.GF10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Thu, Oct 10, 2013 at 12:25 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Wed, Oct 09, 2013 at 03:02:53PM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > See, selective quoting of beliefs of somebody from press articles is why > I insisted on peer reviewed publications in future. You seemed to read > some other > article entirely, uncritically, and you entirely failed to do your math. > We are all pattern seeking mammals. We see the world through the framework that we have built up of it. The map, so to speak. I tend to be optimistic. You tend to be pessimistic. You believe the facts support your side, I believe the facts support my side. Everything goes through our filters and is amplified by them. The truth no doubt lies somewhere in between. I am not as Pollyanna as I may sound in this discussion. I know there are hard problems. I also know there are good people out there working hard on those problems because it is in their self interest to do so. My brother, for example, has four kids to send to college, so I'm pretty sure he's working hard on his new plant in Lake Charles. Your assumption is that we are all on a big Easter Island and we're chopping down the last trees. My assumption is that Easter Island is full of Easter eggs and that we simply have to look for them. Have you read Peter Diamandis' book Abundance? http://www.diamandis.com/abundance/ You probably feel that he's full of semi-digested material too. But I choose to believe, simply, that Peter has thought this all through better than you have. He has, after all, had access to the world's greatest minds for the last couple of decades and has made millions through his understanding of how the world really works. If you understood how the world really works, wouldn't you also have made millions? Show me the corresponding multi-millionaire on your side. I am simply unaware that the Warren Buffetts of the world are spouting the dangers of EROEI. Maybe they are, I just haven't heard them. Is it an important issue. Yes. I agree with that. Is it going to be a huge issue... I'm not sure that it will be since we have hundreds of years worth of fossil fuels left to burn that are not in danger of having a negative EROEI. If the environmentalists take over, it would make it more difficult, but they simply won't win against kids that want to go to the mall. > Doesn't sound too doom and gloom to me in terms of energy supply. I really > > Believe all you want, I'm done. Let's talk again in 20 years. > Sounds good. For the record, that will be 10/10/2023. I look forward to the conversation. Of course if you are right, we may not be able to power the Internet by then, and you won't even have the ability to tell me "I told you so" from your cave. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Thu Oct 10 20:35:44 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 16:35:44 -0400 Subject: [ExI] eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia Message-ID: On Oct 10, 2013, at 12:39 PM, spike wrote: > I don?t understand why US creditors are as calm as they are. > Well just today there are hints that the Republicans may have found a little sanity concerning the debt ceiling and won't set off the dynamite suicide vest they have strapped to their chest for 6 weeks, and the stock market went up 323 points. > We are saying we must be allowed to borrow more money > Yes > at a faster pace > No, we're borrowing more money but the rate of increase has slowed. The deficit has decreased for the last 2 years, it's 250 billion less this year than last, 336 if you count the sequester. > in order to pay our bills for things we have already bought. > Yes, borrowing money to pay your bills might or might not be bad depending on circumstances, but not paying your bills is ALWAYS bad. > Every single time the US government borrowed all it was allowed to borrow > and has come back for more, > Yes. > as it is doing now. > Yes. > I consider that pretty good evidence that it will happen again. > Yes. Since 1960 the debt ceiling has been raised 78 times, but nevertheless this planet has gone on cycling according to the fixed law of gravity, and far from inflation showing signs of returning today deflation seems to be a far more pressing threat. > Remind me again John why it is you are ashamed to belong to the party of > Lincoln? > *Because REPUBLICAN congressman Ted Yoho said that the government of the USA refusing to pay back the money it was owed: "would bring stability to the world markets" *Because REPUBLICAN congressman Mo Brooks said: "In fact, our credit rating should be improved by not raising the debt ceiling.? *Because REPUBLICAN congressman Paul Brown said: " All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell. And it's lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior. You see, there are a lot of scientific data that I've found out as a scientist that actually show that this is really a young Earth. I don't believe that the Earth's but about 9,000 years old. I believe it was created in six days as we know them. That's what the Bible says." *Because REPUBLICAN Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell said: "It is not enough to be abstinent with other people, you also have to be abstinent alone. The Bible says that lust in your heart is committing adultery. You can't masturbate without lust!" and ?American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains.? and "You know what, evolution is a myth. Why aren't monkeys still evolving into humans?" *Because REPUBLICAN congressman Michele Bachman said: "There are hundreds and hundreds of scientists, many of them holding Nobel Prizes, who believe in intelligent design.? *Because REPUBLICAN Senate candidate Joe Miller said: "The first thing that has to be done is secure the border ? East Germany was very, very able to reduce the flow.... secure the border. If East Germany could, we could.? *Because REPUBLICAN Congressman Glen Urquhart said: ?Do you know, where does this phrase ?separation of church and state? come from? It was not in Jefferson?s letter to the Danbury Baptists. ? The exact phrase ?separation of Church and State? came out of Adolph Hitler?s mouth, that?s where it comes from. So the next time your liberal friends talk about the separation of Church and State, ask them why they?re Nazis. > > Remind me again please that bit about we need to borrow more money to > preserve the full faith and credit of the US? > Because if you owe me money and promise to pay me back today and you don't pay me back today then I will have lost my faith in you and will never lone you money again nor will anybody else once the word gets out, in other words you would have lost your credit. If you don't have a lot of money it might be irresponsible to go to a expensive restaurant, but it would be far more irresponsible to stuff yourself and then refuse to pay the bill. It's ridiculous we're even arguing over this Economics 101 point. And I think the name you've renamed this thread to is interesting, just blow up the entire economic world and start over from square one. Well I can understand the appeal, there are a hell of a lot of things I'd like to change if I could, I too would like to live in a libertarian utopia, but we're so many light years from that it's just unrealistic to expect to start civilization all over again from the stone age without several billion deaths. Historically grand plans to radically and instantly transform a society NEVER end well. > This government healthcare scheme DEFINITELY does shift the burden onto > the backs of our children and grandchildren. > To hell with them, let them fight their own wars. Productivity improves, so a dollar today is far more valuable than a dollar will be to my grandchildren. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Thu Oct 10 20:58:20 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 14:58:20 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Middle Class Doomed? In-Reply-To: <5255E7BB.5060505@aleph.se> References: <20130930140223.GY10405@leitl.org> <5249DC4C.3000903@aleph.se> <5255E7BB.5060505@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Wed, Oct 9, 2013 at 5:33 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > On 09/10/2013 21:37, Kelly Anderson wrote: > > On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 2:17 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > >> >> Whether it is a natural law is a good question, actually. > > > The folks at the Santa Fe Institute certainly seem to think that it is. > They are smart people, pursuing original lines of thinking, but it makes a > lot of sense to me. > > That is just a disguised argument from authority. > That is a really great point. > Santa Fe is great, but remember that they also are motivated to hope for > universal laws of complexity. We need better arguments for it than that it > is popular at cool places. > Complexity is a new science. It is probably early to expect a lot of really strong results from a science this young. Nevertheless, I personally find it to be very compelling and entirely worth pursuing. > > It is not just that power-law tails are found in all industrialised >> economies, but they seem to follow robustly from a lot of models too (e.g. >> http://arxiv.org/abs/condmat/0002374 ). > > > Do you happen to know what they mean by "distribution of wealth tends to > be very broadly distributed when exchanges are limited" Anders? > > > When the interaction between agents is more limited than "everybody trades > with everybody" the distribution gets more lumpy and unequal. > I see. Thanks. Does that happen in real economies? I guess maybe like in old Soviet Russia??? Would the lack of certain kinds of stores in American inner cities be an example of this kind of lumpiness? > > > The question sort of comes down to this, "Is it always a good thing > when the exponent is adjusted so that the middle class is larger?" > > It seems obvious, but perhaps it isn't so obvious. I'm not entirely > sure, but my gut says a healthy middle class is a good thing. > > > OK, here is a utilitarian argument: wellbeing as a function of wealth is a > very convex function. > Happiness is only positively influenced by a rise out of abject poverty. Once you reach a certain level, happiness is no longer correlated with wealth. Is that what you mean when you say it is a convex function? > So the sum total wellbeing is maximized if the distribution of wealth is > equal. > I kind of understand, but some people are savers, and some spenders, so even if you achieved this, there is no possible way to maintain it for any length of time. Just imagine if everyone in America had the same amount of money one day. Ten percent would blow through that money in a matter of weeks. Ten percent would serve those people and end up with twice as much money in a matter of weeks, and you would be well on your way back to a Pareto distribution in a matter of months. How would you prevent that? Of course, one might counter by pointing out that (1) maybe we cannot sum > or compare individual wellbeing, (2) maybe it is not the sum that should be > maximized, and (3) reallocation schemes might be impermissible for > deontological reasons. > Well being is also not correlated to wealth, other than escaping abject poverty. So well being isn't a function of money, so using money (rather than education or therapy for example) to distribute well being is a kind of false argument, don't you suppose? While I think you can sum or compare individual well being theoretically, it would be difficult to do so in actual practice. I prefer to let each person pursue their own well being as they see fit to do so. The founding fathers of America famously asked for the ability to pursue happiness, not to have happiness. Equality of opportunity is not equality of outcome. > A classical leftist argument is that wealth is power, so a more equal > distribution distributes power in society widely. The problem is that it is > not clear how power actually scales with wealth. It could be that it is > convex like sqrt(W) or concave like W^2. If it is convex even power law > tails are not too bad, while concave might make even very equal societies > look falsely egalitarian while small coalitions rule. And a realistic view > that things are a messy combination of skill, ambition and wealth might > imply that in different domains different forms hold. > It is clearly a complex subject. However, I question the premise to some extent. If you and I had equal power, and you are clearly more intelligent than I, then giving us equal power could lead to a worse outcome than if you made the decisions by yourself. So one COULD argue that the best outcome would be if the most intelligent person to be found was made into the dictator of us all. However, there is limited bandwidth to one person's thinking, no matter how intelligent they are, so distributing power to the more intelligent or ambitious or even wealthy might not be a necessarily bad thing. There is a reason that we elect successful people to the office of President (the current occupant being the exception to the rule.) > > What I'm seeing is that globalization, the Internet and dematerialization > are things that push the winner-take-all paradigm to levels that it hasn't > previously attained. > > > Yes. This is true. It also reaches the limit: it is not possible to be > more global than totally global. Once we have good translation everybody > will be in the same big domain. > Except that we still have countries with less infrastructure, with poorer educational systems, with religious domination (Iran, Utah), and other factors that will keep things unequal for quite some time. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rtomek at ceti.pl Thu Oct 10 21:44:08 2013 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 23:44:08 +0200 (CEST) Subject: [ExI] it was the best times, it was the best of times In-Reply-To: References: <043101cec0b5$b171ec90$1455c5b0$@att.net> <20131007084408.GK10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Wed, 9 Oct 2013, Adrian Tymes wrote: > On Oct 9, 2013 1:23 PM, "Tomasz Rola" wrote: > > Judging by contents of contemporary movies, we are already in deep > > crisis - the mean density of intellectual content is dropping down > > like dead bird, at least this is how I see it. If what we see is > > really what people want to see, we are dead man walking. > > This is a well known error in perception. You see much crap today, yet > the surviving works of the past - and your memories of them - are > generally not crap, therefore the past must have been better, right? > Actually, wrong. Ok, this may be an error in my perception. It's quite easy to agree with such statement, especially that it ends discussion - "oh, so it's nothing so wrong with nowadays, it is just I am growing old and envious"... On the other hand, perhaps too many people, too often agree with such explanation and dismiss the other answer out of mental lazyness? > For the most part, the best of the past will be preserved, the rest > recycled and destroyed. This leaves little evidence it was there. > Likewise, memories focus on the important - often including good or > personally bad (which movies rarely are) - and delete the (literally) > forgettable dross. (Many children of the 1980s remember the > Transformers. How many remember the Gobots, especially without > prompting?) I don't remember Transformers and those other guys. I remember Star Wars *without* dinosaurs, and meant to be watched by adults. Or at least wannabe adults. :-) > Further, as a person matures, the unsubtle storytelling techniques that > amused them in their youth wear out their novelty, and further works > with the same objective quality are subjectively perceived to be more > mundane, boring, et cetera. (There are ways to fight this effect, but > it takes effort to pick out and potentially enjoy the novel components.) Well, perhaps. I recently started to enjoy B movies a lot. They don't have pretentious posturing to be something more than they really are. Some are truly catastrophically made, but some are quite good. On the other hand, after watching Avatar (on my cable), I decided to not watch it again for a while, maybe five or ten years. I wasn't totally disgusted but if I was to measure the worth of cultural good by my will to buy it, then Avatar and many others are not on the list at all. Of sf movies, I will buy Kubrick's "2001" (Hyams' "2010" I could buy too, if not very pricey), maybe "Clockwork Orange", then Scott's "Blade Runner" and then I really have nothing to buy. At least nothing that would've been obvious choice, without some intense thinking. However, of noncinematic movies, I have bought me a "Terminator the Sarah Connor Chronicles". But I'm not sure if I would buy T3 and T4. Well T3, maybe. T1 and T2, too. I may consider some sf movies made in Eastern Block, they feel and look very nice compared to certain abovementioned titles (like, Avatar, Next, Inception or whatever else I watched and forgot). Of non-sf movies, full set of Kurosawa and Scorsese's "Taxi driver" are obvious buy. Then, I don't know again. This night my cable serves "The Helix Loaded", a "Matrix" B-ripoff. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0401462/ AFAIK I have never before watched a movie with imdb rating so low (1.7). I am so excited! > See how each generation expresses an opinion that the one or two after > it have no taste in literature/music/culture, going back every > generation to ancient Greece. I don't remember how it was in ancient Greece, I was very young at the time. I believe your word, however. Perhaps the real problem I have with today's culture is that some time ago, if I'm not mistaken, children wanted to be adults. Or at least it was something normal. And I don't mean children working in coalmines. Nowadays it's adults who want to be children and salespeople jumping out of their skins to help fulfill this dream. Another explanation is, I expect to see nuts and bolts. It looks like most folks don't want to bother, so they're served some "coming of age" or "feeling" stories packaged and repackaged, with nuts and bolts being merely part of decoration. Heck, there are even remakes of films made elsewhere, because... why, viewer is unable to keep attention on a plot while being distracted by cultural differences, even between two _western_ countries? Heck2, there are even remakes of films made in the same country, 20-30 years earlier, maybe even only 10 years earlier... Yeah, I know. If something earned money to some other guys, then lets remake and earn money too. But it really makes a, say, cultural landscape rather miserable to look at. Ewww... Ewww... Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From spike66 at att.net Thu Oct 10 22:24:12 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 15:24:12 -0700 Subject: [ExI] eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <01f101cec607$730f5b20$592e1160$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of John Clark Sent: Thursday, October 10, 2013 1:36 PM To: ExI chat list Subject: [ExI] eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia On Oct 10, 2013, at 12:39 PM, spike wrote: >>. I don't understand why US creditors are as calm as they are. >.Well just today there are hints that the Republicans may have found a little sanity concerning the debt ceiling and won't set off the dynamite suicide vest they have strapped to their chest for 6 weeks, and the stock market went up 323 points. Ja, cool about the stock market. Now about that business of borrowing money to pay our debts, if we do that, we haven't paid off any debts at all. We just rearrange debts. If no one challenges it, the insane practice goes on unabated. We had this guy who told us in 2006 that this was a national threat, unpatriotic, etc. So we elected him president. He not only didn't try to fix it, he switched sides. His former argument regarding increasing the debt limit is far more convincing than the one he is using now. How did massive borrowing become not a national threat, and not unpatriotic? I don't understand who is still loaning money to the US, and why. If you were a banker and some yahoo came in saying he needed to borrow money to pay interest on what he has already borrowed, you would say that guy is bankrupt. Not will go bankrupt, but is now. We have a president who says raising the borrowing limit doesn't add to the debt. How does that work? Do we have two different definitions of the term debt? >>. This government healthcare scheme DEFINITELY does shift the burden onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. >.To hell with them, let them fight their own wars. Productivity improves, so a dollar today is far more valuable than a dollar will be to my grandchildren. John K Clark Hmmm, perhaps. But maybe not. We have held assumptions of exponential growth forever, and based all our spending on that assumption. What happens if future generations are not as rich as we are? Then we have borrowed their money and spent it on the craziest stuff: http://www.businessinsider.com/newly-built-aircraft-set-to-go-straight-to-de sert-boneyard-2013-10 If we go with the assumption that wasteful spending is a good thing, why not waste it on something that might somehow pay in the future, like manufacturing and warehousing billions in solar panels and inverters? If we are just wasting the money anyway, why not waste it on that? You can get a lot of solar panels for the price of one useless cargo plane. My prediction is that the congress will eventually compromise and pass some kind of budget, perhaps a pumped-up version of sequestration. Life will go on. Eventually the economy will grow enough to accommodate the spending level we have sustained for the past five years. We have seen already that there is plenty of room to cut government. The sequestration cuts they have made so far were so nearly painless, they had to go out of their way to make the cuts annoying. I got a call this morning from where we had reservations to camp next weekend, saying the fed had closed the campground. They didn't refund my reservation money. I have gone up into the Sierras every fall for the last several years and I have never seen a federal agent anywhere. So closing that campground didn't save the government anything, not one dollar. They did it just to make life difficult. So I say very well, close the campgrounds and monuments, keep the pressure on congress. Do a version of healthcare which does not require government subsidy. Give a temporary debt limit increase, say 100 billion dollars, then let's go at it again, extract a few cuts and give them another 100 billion when that is gone. Let's get on with it, but not by just borrowing more and more and more money. It's unpatriotic. It's a national security threat. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Fri Oct 11 00:28:32 2013 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 17:28:32 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Talk at Google last July Message-ID: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B5N71bNMoGurLTNJMTJ1cm1wTk0/edit?usp=sharing It's most of an hour and ~130 MB streaming. For those who really want to know one way to solve energy/carbon/climate/economic problems. Keith From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Fri Oct 11 02:50:00 2013 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 22:50:00 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Euthanasia In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Thu, Oct 10, 2013 at 11:46 AM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > > That said, "brain damage" is an apt way to describe the TEA Party's takeover > of the Republicans over the past decade or so. ### For a brain to be damaged, there has to be one, and cancers usually don't have a brain (yes, I know about teratomas). The Tea Party was one doomed attempt at healing our society but, as any oncologist will tell you, tea tree oil doesn't cut it when the disease is so deeply entrenched. Rafal From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Fri Oct 11 03:09:48 2013 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 23:09:48 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <20130927055747.GI10405@leitl.org> <20131001121829.GR10405@leitl.org> <20131009203347.GA10405@leitl.org> <20131010062556.GF10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: Eugen wrote: >> Believe all you want, I'm done. Let's talk again in 20 years. ### Uh, finally! This EROEI stuff has been really talked to death hereabouts, it's like the identity thread. Also, concentrating on it detracts from our ability to think about the real challenges of our society, such as loss of economic feedback loops, potentially dangerous social inhomogeneities, the coming robot apocalypse, etc. Not that one could do something about them anyway but at least we would go down arguing about stuff that matters. Plus, there is a good chance that increased return on capital achieved through AI and a well-managed transition to the robot society will allow us to muddle through and maybe even flourish. So maybe it will be all good, in 20 years. Rafal From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Fri Oct 11 03:35:56 2013 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 23:35:56 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Smallest human-equivalent device Message-ID: On Wed, Oct 9, 2013 at 3:37 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Wed, Oct 09, 2013 at 12:16:05PM -0700, Keith Henson wrote: >> > From: Rafal Smigrodzki >> >> > How many Eugens could you fit in the head of a pin (make it a sphere >> > 3/16 inch diameter)? >> >> 27 years ago Eric Drexler worked this out and got around a 10 cm cube >> "volume of a coffee cup" for a human capacity hardware. With enough >> power and cooling it would run a million times faster than a meat >> state human. > > Nanosystems uses an engineering analysis based on diamond rod logic. > Deliberately conservatively, in order to be easy analyzable. There > are a few problematic assumptions there as well. So it is an answer, > but not an exhaustive one. ### I am surprised that the estimate is so, well, bulky. 1 liter volume is very close to actual human brain volume and I simply don't believe our brain is anywhere near the limits of miniaturization. There should be large improvements just from removing metabolism from the brain. Human brain already does a little bit of that: Neurons offload a lot of their metabolism (i.e. energy generation) onto glia through lactate exchange. Instead of using a lot of real estate to extract all chemical energy from glucose, neurons do a quick-and-dirty glycolysis and let the glia pick up the pieces, allowing the neural cytoplasm to do more computationally relevant chemistry, such as processing of neurotransmitters, adjustment of synaptic strength, etc. A designed neuromorphic device would be fed energy in a highly computation-friendly form (DC current, light) just like today's computers rather than using chemical precursors like our brain does, and that alone should bring the volume down by a large percentage. Rafal From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Fri Oct 11 03:45:17 2013 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 23:45:17 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Tap tap..Hello? Is this thing on? (Or Zombie Apocalypse!) In-Reply-To: <9B616DA5-75FC-4D60-9CEF-92C7A256E2E2@me.com> References: <9B616DA5-75FC-4D60-9CEF-92C7A256E2E2@me.com> Message-ID: (I wrote) Congress gave the president > about 99% of the money he needs to run the government. The president > refused to run the government, and shut it down. He could have taken > the money and done his job but refused to. > > Do you agree that the president shut down the government? > Omar wrote: > In a word; no. ### If not Mr Obama, then who shut down parts of the executive branch of government, and precisely how did he do it? Name specific names and describe the flow of legal authority and commands that achieved the shutdown. As you may remember from civics, members of the legislative branch do not have the legal authority to issue commands to institutions of the executive branch, except in some limited and relatively well-defined situations. So, who did it and how? Rafal From johnkclark at gmail.com Fri Oct 11 03:53:05 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 23:53:05 -0400 Subject: [ExI] eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia In-Reply-To: <01f101cec607$730f5b20$592e1160$@att.net> References: <01f101cec607$730f5b20$592e1160$@att.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Oct 10, 2013 at 6:24 PM, spike wrote > > Now about that business of borrowing money to pay our debts, if we do > that, we haven?t paid off any debts at all. We just rearrange debts. > And yet our debtors remain happy and are more than willing to continue loaning money to us just as they have for centuries and they will continue to do so, unless we do something brain dead dumb. The thing that frightens me is that the tea party members in the House are brain dead dumb. > > He not only didn?t try to fix it, he switched sides. His former > argument regarding increasing the debt limit is far more convincing than > the one he is using now. How did massive borrowing become not a national > threat, and not unpatriotic? > All politicians from both parties feel that they must make protest noises every time the silly debt ceiling limit vote comes up, they have done so every one of the 78 times since 1960 it's come up. And that's OK, people expect it, just as you expect a dog to bark every time he sees a cat. What is terrifying the markets, and me too, is that this time the politicians might actually mean the idiotic things they are saying. > **** > > > I don?t understand who is still loaning money to the US, > If you contribute to a pension fund you're loaning money to the USA whenever they buy a government bond, mutual funds also loan money to the USA, and so do countless companies big and small who provide goods and services to the government before they are paid. And traditionally the government could give lower interest rates for their bonds than even the best corporations and people would still snap them up because people perceived government bonds as the safest thing around. But starting about a month ago for the first time in history and thanks entirely to the moron Republicans in the house to sell government bonds they must provide more interest than corporations do. That's what happens when you even hint that maybe you'll default. And higher interest rates will only increase the debt that the jackass Republicans say they are so concerned about. > > If we go with the assumption that wasteful spending is a good thing, > Nobody thinks wasteful spending is a good thing, and if you want to spend less then spend less, but don't refuse to pay your bills because you now feel that the purchases you already made (and were voted for in that same House of Representatives that is now making such a fuss) were unwise. > > My prediction is that the congress will eventually compromise and pass > some kind of budget, perhaps a pumped-up version of sequestration. Life > will go on. > Life will not go on if they refuse to raise the debt ceiling, at least not as it has before. A worldwide 1930's style depression would not be fun, but that's what we're staring at thanks to dimwit Republicans, they're so stupid they make George Bush look like an economic genius, and that's not easy to do. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Fri Oct 11 03:46:04 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 20:46:04 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Smallest human-equivalent device In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <02c101cec634$69a98740$3cfc95c0$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Rafal Smigrodzki ### I am surprised that the estimate is so, well, bulky. 1 liter volume is very close to actual human brain volume and I simply don't believe our brain is anywhere near the limits of miniaturization...Rafal _______________________________________________ In all these kinds of calculations we are locked into a paradigm that was handed to us by evolution: brains exist as individual units. We need to think of ways in which silicon based intelligence can work together in teams far more effectively than we carbon units can ever do. We have all this evolutionary baggage we just cannot seem to shed. But silicon intelligence evolved along a different path. For this reason we have reason to hope that a human brain equivalent might be made up of a few thousand units of a cubic millimeter each. This approach allows a large surface area to volume ratio, for heat rejection, as well as flexibility unavailable to us meat brains. Like the ants and bees, perhaps we can create individual units which are stupid, but together they could do some really smart stuff. spike From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Fri Oct 11 04:17:02 2013 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2013 00:17:02 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Term limits Message-ID: One of the greatest dangers to our society is the unbridled growth of the fourth branch of government, bureaucrats of the myriad federal agencies. These organizations are uniquely detrimental to normal functioning of the society, due to being largely outside of the web of feedback loops that restrains erroneous behaviors in the civilized world and due to their enormous size and reach in all aspects of our society. A key feature of these bureaucrats is their permanence - no matter the level of misconduct or incompetence, a federal agency never dies, and a bureaucrat smart enough to cover his ass with enough paper never gets fired. This is not a uniquely American situation, but rather a general feature of state organization. In many countries there are periodic attempts at cleaning out the Augean stables but these are usually propaganda exercises or internecine warfare among various bureaucratic factions, doomed to failure as a way of improving quality. However, there *is* a way to make the bureaucracy less dangerous: Impose employment duration limits on all federal executive branch employees (maybe except the DoD). Instead of having lifers, and a revolving door, have temps (at most 10 years allowed on government pay) and a rocket-assisted chute, kicking them out back into the ranks of honest (i.e. not tax-supported) citizenry before they get too fond of their power. If we kick out the president after eight years, why would we keep the regular pen-pushers forever? This tweak to the Civil Service Act would reduce the chasm between the goons of the EPA, IRS, or OSHA, and their subjects, us. We would be one again, since most people would end up temping at the government at some time, continuously bringing in an outside perspective to these insider machines. And before inventing yet another stupid law, a temp might hesitate and think about how it might feel once he is on the receiving end of the stick. Rafal From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Fri Oct 11 04:32:08 2013 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2013 00:32:08 -0400 Subject: [ExI] eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia In-Reply-To: References: <01f101cec607$730f5b20$592e1160$@att.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Oct 10, 2013 at 11:53 PM, John Clark wrote: > > Life will not go on if they refuse to raise the debt ceiling, at least not > as it has before. ### Default and the debt ceiling are two separate issues. The government can easily pay its debts and of course, it should. Increasing the debt ceiling, for the 79th time, is a whole different thing. There is absolutely no need to do it: They could just stop spending too much, for example by instituting immediate across the board cuts in all appropriations, including the DoD, various "entitlements" and every single government agency. Unfortunately and of course, they won't use this approach. Rafal From spike66 at att.net Fri Oct 11 04:38:30 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 21:38:30 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Tap tap..Hello? Is this thing on? (Or Zombie Apocalypse!) In-Reply-To: References: <9B616DA5-75FC-4D60-9CEF-92C7A256E2E2@me.com> Message-ID: <02e901cec63b$bcd3a480$367aed80$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Rafal Smigrodzki >...As you may remember from civics, members of the legislative branch do not have the legal authority to issue commands to institutions of the executive branch, except in some limited and relatively well-defined situations...Rafal _______________________________________________ If I can find a silver lining in this dark cloud, it has all been a most wonderful civics lesson. I am tempted to be optimistic regarding what I heard this evening: both sides of this conflict seem to have grown a brain. The president is as protective of his healthcare scheme as a mama grizzly bear. No surprise there, it has his name on it. So, OK, let that stand. We will find out soon enough if that whole thing will work or not. I am predicting not. Then we find enough cuts somewhere else. Do like we did with sequestration: balance the cuts between domestic and military spending, but find the cuts and keep cutting and when we finish cutting, cut some more. Extend the debt ceiling a hundred billion at a time, so really all congress is doing is finding cuts. There are places they can cut. They must. This is all turning out to be a test case which has been needed since the days of Keynes and Hayek. I have never been able to convince myself that we can overspend long term and survive any better than the commies could in the 80s. spike From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Fri Oct 11 04:58:16 2013 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2013 00:58:16 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Another step towards uploading In-Reply-To: References: <52519BAF.7020308@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Wed, Oct 9, 2013 at 10:18 AM, John Clark wrote: > On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 1:11 AM, Rafal Smigrodzki > wrote: > >> > You need to take into account the damage introduced during mechanical >> > slicing. Even a single bad slice (torn, crushed, happens all the time, as >> > anybody who spent hours at a microtome can attest) could scramble the >> > long-distance fibers > > > I'm no expert but just from my experience of using a meat slicer I would > think mangled slices could be a problem if you were trying to make the > slices super thin, but I'm talking about slices on the order of a centimeter > thick or maybe even more, and only about a dozen slices. And if the blade > was sharp and the gap between the slices narrow it should be possible to > deduce what those long-distance fibers did in that missing gap. ### This might be an option, especially with brains that cannot be perfused because they spent too much time in ischemia and there was blood clotting in the vessels. Such brains might be a lost cause anyway but who knows, fixation by immersion might here be better than bulk freezing. Either way, you want to avoid this situation. ------------------------- And whatever > method was used wouldn't slices ensure better distribution of cryoprotective > or chemical fixative than entire uncut brains? ### Perfusion always gives better distribution than immersion. You really want to avoid a situation where perfusion, whether cryo or fixative, is no longer possible. If slicing is your only option, you might be toast anyway. Let me put it this way: Either you are perfusable or not. If yes, then we can argue about the relative merits of cryoperfusion vs. fixative perfusion, and I will grant this is not an open-and-shut case. If you are not perfusable, the damage induced by slicing might be the least of your worries and the whole exercise might be futile, although fixation by immersion followed by sucrose gradient and cryogenic storage might be the best of your (dismal) options. Rafal Rafal From spike66 at att.net Fri Oct 11 04:55:08 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 21:55:08 -0700 Subject: [ExI] eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia In-Reply-To: References: <01f101cec607$730f5b20$592e1160$@att.net> Message-ID: <02ea01cec63e$0fcf29f0$2f6d7dd0$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of John Clark >.And traditionally the government could give lower interest rates for their bonds than even the best corporations and people would still snap them up because people perceived government bonds as the safest thing around. But starting about a month ago for the first time in history and thanks entirely to the moron Republicans in the house to sell government bonds they must provide more interest than corporations do. John K Clark I see this as a good thing. We loan money to the government, they waste it. Loan money to corporations, they turn it into more money. If government bonds are seen as appropriately risky, money will flow to corporations and small businesses instead. We cannot let our government be so dependent on selling bonds at a hundred billion dollars a month just to survive, like some kind of desperate enormous heroin addict with nukes. John eventually this whole house of cards had to come down eventually. You have seen the CBC extrapolations. Generations past have said to hell with us, just as you suggested in an earlier post that we say to hell with future generations. Past generations borrowed our money, assuming the future economy would be bigger. Now we are suffering the consequences, as we are entering a long term slower growth era. We risk borrowing from future generations who might be no richer, and perhaps poorer than we are today. We need to stop doing this forthwith. I do not wish to have my frozen head in the hands of some future generation which I had to-hell-with-ed, deciding if I am worth uploading. All our fondest extropian hopes and dreams depend on a prosperous future. If we overspend now, in peacetime, what chance have we? Let's get this overspending problem under control, starting now. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Fri Oct 11 05:03:53 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 22:03:53 -0700 Subject: [ExI] eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia In-Reply-To: References: <01f101cec607$730f5b20$592e1160$@att.net> Message-ID: <02ef01cec63f$491a1b10$db4e5130$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Rafal Smigrodzki Subject: Re: [ExI] eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia On Thu, Oct 10, 2013 at 11:53 PM, John Clark wrote: > >>... Life will not go on if they refuse to raise the debt ceiling, at least not as it has before. ### Default and the debt ceiling are two separate issues. The government can easily pay its debts and of course, it should. Increasing the debt ceiling, for the 79th time, is a whole different thing. There is absolutely no need to do it: They could just stop spending too much, for example by instituting immediate across the board cuts in all appropriations, including the DoD, various "entitlements" and every single government agency. Unfortunately and of course, they won't use this approach. Rafal _______________________________________________ Ja, agree. The fed can pay its debts with what it takes in now, but it will take deep cuts in what it spends. Is it not clear to everyone on the planet that our military is of such a size that it is not sustainable? We try to maintain the ability to simultaneously fight two wars, sheesh. Let's work harder at keeping it to one or fewer at a time. The cold war is over, we won, humanity won, let's get over that and find deep cuts. Let's balance that with domestic cuts; we can do it, and we must. There will be pain, but (Rafal, here's a medical allusion for you) I see it as cutting out a cancer without anesthesia. Sure it will hurt like all hell, but it beats the alternative. spike From rahmans at me.com Fri Oct 11 08:33:35 2013 From: rahmans at me.com (Omar Rahman) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2013 10:33:35 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Tap tap..Hello? Is this thing on? (Or Zombie Apocalypse!) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <755D81DC-0949-4A64-A634-C225E3A0596F@me.com> > > Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 23:45:17 -0400 > From: Rafal Smigrodzki > To: ExI chat list > Subject: Re: [ExI] Tap tap..Hello? Is this thing on? (Or Zombie > Apocalypse!) > Message-ID: > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 > > (I wrote) > > Congress gave the president >> about 99% of the money he needs to run the government. The president >> refused to run the government, and shut it down. He could have taken >> the money and done his job but refused to. >> >> Do you agree that the president shut down the government? >> > > Omar wrote: > >> In a word; no. You said, "Congress gave the president about 99% of the money he needs to run the government." This is just plain wrong. Congress is a bicameral legislature and it failed to pass an appropriations bill. The president had nothing to sign or veto, hence the president didn't shut down the government. Are these two sentences clear enough for you? If some sort of mangled appropriations bill had landed on the president's desk defunding some important program,(You pick whatever you like/dislike.....it doesn't matter for this example.), the president has the option to veto it. In the case of a stalemate, Congress has some sort of mechanisms for forcing a bill to become law but I believe it involves 2/3 majorities in both the House and the Senate. What is far more likely to happen, as pointed to by the repeated use of the phrase "full faith and confidence of the government of the United States" by the president, is that this will reach a crisis level equal to that of a "national emergency" and the president will then be able to use "emergency powers" to resolve the standoff. I'm guessing that even the most fanatical, racist, and fascist elements of the Tea Party will cave in before then. They should be called the Koolaid Party because they really seem to have 'drunk the koolaid'. > > ### If not Mr Obama, then who shut down parts of the executive branch > of government, and precisely how did he do it? Name specific names and > describe the flow of legal authority and commands that achieved the > shutdown. > > As you may remember from civics, members of the legislative branch do > not have the legal authority to issue commands to institutions of the > executive branch, except in some limited and relatively well-defined > situations. > > So, who did it and how? > > Rafal I'm sure that I don't want to delve into the specifics of how and why each element and/or employee of the government that is 'shutdown' is 'shutdown' as this would devolve into an argument about bureaucratic trivialities. But more than that I certainly wouldn't want to try to give specifics about unspecified specifics. Moreover, I don't feel that I could do this precisely. In general; "He of the Orange glow and Weepy eyes" afraid of the "Brethren of Koolaid" who made loud 'ugg ugg' for many time in the place of 50 clan chiefs. Great sky spirt X, Y, and Z has revealed to the Brethren of Koolaid that most harmful thing for people is 'healthcare' and best thing for people is big more guns. Now the Brethren of Koolaid make loud 'ugg ugg' in all place and no give gold rocks to nobody never nohow nowhen nowhy. NO NO NO! UGG UGG! Until Main Street, Wall Street, and K Street finally have had enough and kick them right where they will say 'UGG uggg uggggg....' Are we clear? As Yoda I could talk, if help it would? ( Remember that? =D) Regards, Omar Rahman -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Fri Oct 11 08:37:30 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2013 10:37:30 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Smallest human-equivalent device In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20131011083729.GZ10405@leitl.org> On Thu, Oct 10, 2013 at 11:35:56PM -0400, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > On Wed, Oct 9, 2013 at 3:37 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > On Wed, Oct 09, 2013 at 12:16:05PM -0700, Keith Henson wrote: > >> > From: Rafal Smigrodzki > >> > >> > How many Eugens could you fit in the head of a pin (make it a sphere > >> > 3/16 inch diameter)? > >> > >> 27 years ago Eric Drexler worked this out and got around a 10 cm cube > >> "volume of a coffee cup" for a human capacity hardware. With enough > >> power and cooling it would run a million times faster than a meat > >> state human. > > > > Nanosystems uses an engineering analysis based on diamond rod logic. > > Deliberately conservatively, in order to be easy analyzable. There > > are a few problematic assumptions there as well. So it is an answer, > > but not an exhaustive one. > > ### I am surprised that the estimate is so, well, bulky. 1 liter > volume is very close to actual human brain volume and I simply don't > believe our brain is anywhere near the limits of miniaturization. I agree. However, there's a widespread tendency to underestimate what evolutionary-driven biology has managed to accomplish in a few gigayears. A synapse is pretty damn small http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v12/n7/box/nrn3025_BX2.html Characteristic sizes of the synaptic complex Synaptic active zone diameter: 300 ? 150 nm Synaptic vesicle diameter: 35 ? 0.3 up to 50 nm Synaptic cleft width: 20 ? 2.8 nm Number of docked vesicles: 10 ? 5 Total number of vesicle per synaptic bouton: 270 ? 180 > There should be large improvements just from removing metabolism from > the brain. Human brain already does a little bit of that: Neurons Metabolism is dual-use here, because the elements are active. You can complain about hydration, but diffusion is very efficient on microscale, and there *is* active transport. We can complain about homeostasis, but hardware configurability depends on the same mechanisms. In nanoscale solid-state you're pretty much limited to arrays of static elements with very low intrinsic connectivity, so you have to state the network layer in terms of such syntax. Look at 10^4 connectivity, and look at the space it takes. There are different computational paradigms than this, but they're incredibly complex and opaque to top-layer us. Useful for ALife from scratch, but very hard to compile digitized neuoanatomy/connectome into such a wildy different paradigm. > offload a lot of their metabolism (i.e. energy generation) onto glia > through lactate exchange. Instead of using a lot of real estate to Glia are far from being just glue, so anyone who thinks glia can be thrown away will experience an unexpected surprise. > extract all chemical energy from glucose, neurons do a quick-and-dirty > glycolysis and let the glia pick up the pieces, allowing the neural > cytoplasm to do more computationally relevant chemistry, such as > processing of neurotransmitters, adjustment of synaptic strength, etc. > > A designed neuromorphic device would be fed energy in a highly > computation-friendly form (DC current, light) just like today's > computers rather than using chemical precursors like our brain does, > and that alone should bring the volume down by a large percentage. 100-1 cm^3 vs. ~1400 cm^3 is a very large percentage. The exact number is not known, because the mode of computation is very different. The only way to know for sure is to run benchmarks on your wet/hardware targets, which you can't. A way to assess would be to compare ALife and wet life solutions to the same, simple problem. E.g the retina or cochlea would be a good playground. From anders at aleph.se Fri Oct 11 08:49:30 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2013 09:49:30 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Smallest human-equivalent device In-Reply-To: <02c101cec634$69a98740$3cfc95c0$@att.net> References: <02c101cec634$69a98740$3cfc95c0$@att.net> Message-ID: <5257BB9A.9010501@aleph.se> > ### I am surprised that the estimate is so, well, bulky. 1 liter > volume is very close to actual human brain volume and I simply don't > believe our brain is anywhere near the limits of miniaturization...Rafal The typical estimates work by assuming a scale, counting the number of things on the scale, estimating the computational requirements per thing, a conversion factor from computation to physical resources in an artificial system, and then multiplying. There are plenty of arbitrariness here, a bit like using the Drake equation. Especially the scale choice can totally change things without looking like a massive assumption. Personally I suspect a straight mapping brain-to-solidstate will have to be bulky, while a functional mapping can be very small. On 2013-10-11 04:46, spike wrote: > In all these kinds of calculations we are locked into a paradigm that > was handed to us by evolution: brains exist as individual units. We > need to think of ways in which silicon based intelligence can work > together in teams far more effectively than we carbon units can ever do. If you have program A and program B, with goal 1 and 2 respectively, there can exist a program AB that achieves both goals in some optimal tradeoff and saves resources by combining A and B (think shared libraries and no risk for conflict). So under some conditions it is rational to merge software into bigger systems. Humans typically balk at this because their goals include existing as themselves, and these lexical goals are incompatible with the merging. But other software will disagree. And the uploads in my big data center will not care that they are sharing underlying hardware and software as long as their data and processes are kept in separate virtual machines. Biobrains are messy: creating good interfaces to them is hard. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From eugen at leitl.org Fri Oct 11 09:27:45 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2013 11:27:45 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <20130927055747.GI10405@leitl.org> <20131001121829.GR10405@leitl.org> <20131009203347.GA10405@leitl.org> <20131010062556.GF10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20131011092745.GC10405@leitl.org> On Thu, Oct 10, 2013 at 11:09:48PM -0400, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > Eugen wrote: > > >> Believe all you want, I'm done. Let's talk again in 20 years. > > ### Uh, finally! > > This EROEI stuff has been really talked to death hereabouts, it's like > the identity thread. > > Also, concentrating on it detracts from our ability to think about the > real challenges of our society, such as loss of economic feedback Thermodynamics trumps economics. I tend to focus on thermodynamics vs. ecology because it's both a short-term large-scale problem and also a benchmark. It's useless trying to explain generic overshoot if you can't explain the one facet of it: the energy limitations. It's simple problem, we have lots of empirical data, yet that benchmark already indicates a failure. The majority of peakers at this point have given up on the whole Cassandra business, and focus on bringing their own house in order. These people are obviously far smarter than me. > loops, potentially dangerous social inhomogeneities, the coming robot These are secondary and tertiary problems. These are alleviated or at least delayed if your nail your primary dysfunctions. > apocalypse, etc. Not that one could do something about them anyway but The robot apocalypse is a long-term problem, and will not be at all a problem if we lose the ability to maintain nevermind advance technology necessary for autonomous automation. > at least we would go down arguing about stuff that matters. Plus, > there is a good chance that increased return on capital achieved > through AI and a well-managed transition to the robot society will > allow us to muddle through and maybe even flourish. So maybe it will > be all good, in 20 years. If we continue on this course, for the majority of the world population 2030 would suck immensely more than 2013. Whether this directly translates to where you sit then is another matter. Wealth and location can insulate, for a while. From eugen at leitl.org Fri Oct 11 09:39:52 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2013 11:39:52 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Smallest human-equivalent device In-Reply-To: <5257BB9A.9010501@aleph.se> References: <02c101cec634$69a98740$3cfc95c0$@att.net> <5257BB9A.9010501@aleph.se> Message-ID: <20131011093952.GE10405@leitl.org> On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 09:49:30AM +0100, Anders Sandberg wrote: > merging. But other software will disagree. And the uploads in my big > data center will not care that they are sharing underlying hardware > and software as long as their data and processes are kept in > separate virtual machines. This is one of the rare cases where you're mistaken, Anders. All the other points are spot on. Context switches make things slower, if your system is 100% loaded. The more state you have to save and restore, the slower. In a simulation, it's all state. This is why supercomputers use batching, running until done, and never multitask between jobs. So if you have to twiddle 10^21 bits or more very rapidly, they stay where they are. There is only I/O, and occasional snapshot, which needs to be serialized when transported out of the computational volume. Notice that snapshot and transport circuitry either make you stop until done, or dilute the effective computation concentration per volume, making things slower on the average. Fast and energy-efficient means there's risk. From eugen at leitl.org Fri Oct 11 11:25:45 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2013 13:25:45 +0200 Subject: [ExI] [New_Cryonet] Invitation to join an online conversation this Sunday Message-ID: <20131011112545.GU10405@leitl.org> ----- Forwarded message from chriscorte01 at yahoo.com ----- Date: 10 Oct 2013 17:02:19 -0700 From: chriscorte01 at yahoo.com To: New_Cryonet at yahoogroups.com Subject: [New_Cryonet] Invitation to join an online conversation this Sunday Message-ID: X-Mailer: Yahoo Groups Message Poster Reply-To: New_Cryonet at yahoogroups.com Anyone interested in cryonics and transhumanism is invited to join in an online discussion this Sunday at 11:30 A.M. PST. Our previous conversations have been lively, entertaining and have covered a wide range of topics. These chats are a great way to meet like-minded people, make personal connections and help us build a stronger cryonics community. We now have a Meetup pagehttp://www.meetup.com/Transhumanism-and-Cryonics-Online-Conversation-Group/ http://www.meetup.com/Transhumanism-and-Cryonics-Online-Conversation-Group/ . If you would like to join us, just send an email to kekik2336 at .... On Sunday at 11:30 you'll receive an email from Google+ inviting you to join the Hangout. Just click the link and join in the conversation. You'll need to sign up for a Google+ account to access the Hangout. No one will mind if you use a pseudonym and the software allows you to mask your identity on the video. Of course, your privacy will be respected. No part of our discussion will be reproduced, broadcast or recorded. ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5 From eugen at leitl.org Fri Oct 11 12:21:26 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2013 14:21:26 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Another step towards uploading In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20131011122126.GA10405@leitl.org> On Sat, Oct 05, 2013 at 07:07:27PM -0400, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > I do think that both approaches, vitrification and fixation, should > be further researched, as much as our limited resources allow but for > now vitrification is still the better way to go. It is a question of budget, priorities, and fundamental issues like presence or absence of feedback. Right now the priorities are should be on achieving decent results in the field, and that is far from being a solved problem. If there's a poor cryonics presence in your area, don't expect that by paying your member dues the situation will magically fix itself. You have to become a little more proactive. Many people all over the world are facing that problem, let's organize, that everybody can help themselves. From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Fri Oct 11 12:38:50 2013 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2013 05:38:50 -0700 Subject: [ExI] [New_Cryonet] Invitation to join an online conversation this Sunday Message-ID: snip If you would like to join us, just send an email to kekik2336 at .... On Sunday at 11:30 you'll receive an email from Google+ snip That email didn't come through. Keith From johnkclark at gmail.com Fri Oct 11 15:16:14 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2013 11:16:14 -0400 Subject: [ExI] eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia In-Reply-To: References: <01f101cec607$730f5b20$592e1160$@att.net> Message-ID: On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 12:32 AM, Rafal Smigrodzki < rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com> wrote: > Default and the debt ceiling are two separate issues. > Yes. > > The government can easily pay its debts Bullshit. > > and of course, it should. > Yes. > > Increasing the debt ceiling, for the 79th time, is a whole different > thing. Yes, it's one more than 78. Every dime spent by government was authorized and voted on by the House of Representatives and every tax was also authorized and voted on by the House of Representatives, they knew at the time that those 2 things were not equal so the only way to pay for the things THAT THEY ALREADY VOTED TO BUY, is to borrow money. And now in the name of fiscal responsibility they are going to break their word and refuse to do what they promised to do. >There is absolutely no need to do it: BULLSHIT! > They could just stop spending too much, for example by instituting > immediate across the > board cuts in all appropriations, including the DoD, various > "entitlements" The cost to run the DoD is trivial compared with entitlements (social security, Medicare, veterans benefits, etc). You could argue, and I would too, that the entitlements should never have been instituted in the first place, but the fact is they were and so like it or not they are the law of the land, and until the law is changed legally those debts are just as legitimate as any other debts. So will the law be changed? To do that a RADICAL bill would have to be passed by both houses and signed by the president, and there is zero chance of that happening. Let me be clear, I'm not saying the chances are almost zero I am saying they are ZERO. Those programs are very popular, so even the republican imbeciles who are screaming the loudest would vote against eliminating social security or Medicare or veterans benefits because the most rabid tea party voters back in their home districts tend to be old and they want the government to stop handing out money to everybody EXCEPT to people just like them. So yes we don't live in a libertarian paradise and we are so many light years from it that there is virtually no chance of getting there from here; so we must settle for something less and our present system, despite its many many faults, is one hell of a lot better than the worldwide economic chaos that would result in the government of the USA defaulting on its legal debts for the first time in history, and unless the Republicans find a brain that is exactly what is going to happen just 7 days from today. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Fri Oct 11 15:28:26 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2013 17:28:26 +0200 Subject: [ExI] funding Tor development Message-ID: <20131011152826.GH10405@leitl.org> Guys, in order to minimize Tor Project's dependance on federal funding and/or increase what they can do it would be great to have some additional funding ~10 kUSD/month. If anyone is aware of anyone who can provide funding at that level or higher, please contact execdir at torproject.org From johnkclark at gmail.com Fri Oct 11 15:34:06 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2013 11:34:06 -0400 Subject: [ExI] eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia In-Reply-To: <02ef01cec63f$491a1b10$db4e5130$@att.net> References: <01f101cec607$730f5b20$592e1160$@att.net> <02ef01cec63f$491a1b10$db4e5130$@att.net> Message-ID: On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 1:03 AM, spike wrote: > The fed can pay its debts with what it takes in now, No Spike, it can not. > but it will take deep cuts in what it spends. Is it not clear to > everyone on the planet that our military is of such a size that it is not > sustainable? We try to maintain the ability to simultaneously fight two > wars, sheesh. Let's work harder at keeping it to one or fewer at a time. > The cold war is over, we won, humanity won, let's get over that and find > deep cuts. Let's balance > that with domestic cuts; That's all well and good Spike and I agree with much of what you say, but right now I'm not interested in the long term, I'm far far more interested in the lurking catastrophe that is set to strike in just 7 days if we break our promise and don't pay for things that we already bought. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Fri Oct 11 16:09:40 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2013 09:09:40 -0700 Subject: [ExI] funding Tor development In-Reply-To: <20131011152826.GH10405@leitl.org> References: <20131011152826.GH10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: A series of Kickstarters, to fund a series of one-off improvements that will be shared. Another possibility: add a button to some popular Tor clients that lets people donate via Paypal (or Bitcoins, preferably linked to the non-largest exchanges to lessen the chances of the linked exchanges being subverted). On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 8:28 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > Guys, in order to minimize Tor Project's dependance on > federal funding and/or increase what they can do it > would be great to have some additional funding ~10 kUSD/month. > > If anyone is aware of anyone who can provide funding at > that level or higher, please contact execdir at torproject.org > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Fri Oct 11 16:12:00 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2013 09:12:00 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Talk at Google last July In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: That document does not appear to be publicly shared. When I click the link, I get "access denied". Also, a better summary would be appreciated. "One way to solve" could mean a bunch of things, from the we-could-do-it-today to the impossible-in-this-universe. On Thu, Oct 10, 2013 at 5:28 PM, Keith Henson wrote: > > https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B5N71bNMoGurLTNJMTJ1cm1wTk0/edit?usp=sharing > > It's most of an hour and ~130 MB streaming. > > For those who really want to know one way to solve > energy/carbon/climate/economic problems. > > Keith > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Fri Oct 11 16:25:57 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2013 18:25:57 +0200 Subject: [ExI] funding Tor development In-Reply-To: References: <20131011152826.GH10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20131011162557.GL10405@leitl.org> On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 09:09:40AM -0700, Adrian Tymes wrote: > A series of Kickstarters, to fund a series of one-off improvements that > will be shared. Thanks, have received the same suggestion elsewhere. > Another possibility: add a button to some popular Tor clients that lets > people donate via Paypal (or Bitcoins, preferably linked to the non-largest > exchanges to lessen the chances of the linked exchanges being subverted). BTC would be preferrable obviously, Paypal are known to play dirty. From atymes at gmail.com Fri Oct 11 16:30:54 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2013 09:30:54 -0700 Subject: [ExI] funding Tor development In-Reply-To: <20131011162557.GL10405@leitl.org> References: <20131011152826.GH10405@leitl.org> <20131011162557.GL10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 9:25 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > Another possibility: add a button to some popular Tor clients that lets > > people donate via Paypal (or Bitcoins, preferably linked to the > non-largest > > exchanges to lessen the chances of the linked exchanges being subverted). > > BTC would be preferrable obviously, Paypal are known to play dirty. > Anyone who deals in actual $ plays dirty. Paypal isn't the only option, though; you may wish to research online payment processors. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Fri Oct 11 17:00:31 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2013 10:00:31 -0700 Subject: [ExI] eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia In-Reply-To: References: <01f101cec607$730f5b20$592e1160$@att.net> Message-ID: <018f01cec6a3$65c4ac80$314e0580$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of John Clark Subject: Re: [ExI] eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia >.Every dime spent by government was authorized and voted on by the House of Representatives and every tax was also authorized and voted on by the House of Representatives, they knew at the time that those 2 things were not equal so the only way to pay for the things THAT THEY ALREADY VOTED TO BUY, is to borrow money. Or vote to buy less now. Waaaaay less now. Scale back almost everything the government is doing, not by choice but because we have used up our credit rating. >.And now in the name of fiscal responsibility they are going to break their word and refuse to do what they promised to do. John K Clark They promised to do what they cannot do. In the early 2000s, the congress bet the economy would grow enough to accommodate the wild spending spree of those heady days. The economy didn't grow at the assumed pace. Now we must face up to the bills that were run up during that period. This is the democrat's big chance to say It's all Bush's fault. They would be right this time, or half right. They have already borrowed our Social Security savings and spent it without means to repay, so those of our generation are screwed when we reach retirement age. What do we mortgage next? Overspending is unpatriotic, it represents a threat to national security, a failure in leadership. Our current president could read off his teleprompter word for word the speech he made in 2006, for it is more true now than it was then. Instead he disowns it. Why? Instead, congress brings in another far bigger wild overspending program. Sheesh. At some point, the US will go into massive default. It only gets worse the longer we wait. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Fri Oct 11 18:13:15 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2013 11:13:15 -0700 Subject: [ExI] eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia In-Reply-To: References: <01f101cec607$730f5b20$592e1160$@att.net> <02ef01cec63f$491a1b10$db4e5130$@att.net> Message-ID: <01f201cec6ad$8f504f50$adf0edf0$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of John Clark >.That's all well and good Spike and I agree with much of what you say, but right now I'm not interested in the long term, I'm far far more interested in the lurking catastrophe that is set to strike in just 7 days if we break our promise and don't pay for things that we already bought. John K Clark. They are not going to default John. There are contingencies they haven't told us about. There's still a lot of gold in Ft. Knox that belongs to the government, strategic oil reserves that can be sold. Why the hell are we still be stockpiling physical gold? They can furlough indefinitely those government employees currently on furlough. Some leave for other employment, so it cuts the budget by brute force. These are all unpalatable options of course, but plenty of the bad choices in front of us are better than defaulting. This default talk is meant to scare, political posturing all of it. The 2016 presidential election is one of those unusual chaotic times like 2008 when there is likely to be no incumbent in the race. Ted Cruz is already running for president, Paul Ryan is running, Rand Paul, Joe Biden, Clinton, Elizabeth Warren, Darrell Issa, possibly even Harry Reid and John Boehner, a bunch of others are trying to find a way to wrangle a political advantage anticipating a run for the White House, struggling to not let a perfectly good crisis go to waste. None of these guys are going to risk a run on the banks, or any of that really bad stuff they said could happen if the fed defaults. They won't default. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Fri Oct 11 18:46:51 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2013 12:46:51 -0600 Subject: [ExI] eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia In-Reply-To: <01f101cec607$730f5b20$592e1160$@att.net> References: <01f101cec607$730f5b20$592e1160$@att.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Oct 10, 2013 at 4:24 PM, spike wrote: > How did massive borrowing become not a national threat, and not > unpatriotic? > I heard an interesting argument from a reasonably smart person that continued growth of the US economy would keep the debt from ever becoming a major problem. Now if the economy stops growing at a good pace, we're all screwed. So it does seem extremely dangerous to make the assumption. But it is a kind of interesting argument. It's another way to print money, in other words. Like fractional banking. > **** > > I don?t understand who is still loaning money to the US, and why. > Because you need to loan your money to someone. Someone who is safe. Imagine you are a ChiCom, and you have to put your country's money in a safe place. There are a limited number of safe places, and you have a lot of money. In addition, there is the political leverage that money earns you over the US government. In this cartoon, which fox represents China and which the United States after this transaction? http://bit.ly/15Zjc7a > If you were a banker and some yahoo came in saying he needed to borrow > money to pay interest on what he has already borrowed, you would say that > guy is bankrupt. Not will go bankrupt, but is now. We have a president > who says raising the borrowing limit doesn?t add to the debt. How does > that work? Do we have two different definitions of the term debt? > Yes. Public debt and private debt are immensely different beasties. > Hmmm, perhaps. But maybe not. We have held assumptions of exponential > growth forever, and based all our spending on that assumption. What > happens if future generations are not as rich as we are? > Then there will be big trouble. > Then we have borrowed their money and spent it on the craziest stuff: > http://www.businessinsider.com/newly-built-aircraft-set-to-go-straight-to-desert-boneyard-2013-10 > A great example of government stupidity. Of course, those planes will last a LONG time in Arizona, and may eventually get put to use. > If we go with the assumption that wasteful spending is a good thing, why > not waste it on something that might somehow pay in the future, like > manufacturing and warehousing billions in solar panels and inverters? If > we are just wasting the money anyway, why not waste it on that? You can > get a lot of solar panels for the price of one useless cargo plane. > Well, the cargo plane props up the military-industrial complex... there is that. > My prediction is that the congress will eventually compromise and pass > some kind of budget, perhaps a pumped-up version of sequestration. Life > will go on. Eventually the economy will grow enough to accommodate the > spending level we have sustained for the past five years. > Perhaps. But the economy is growing more slowly because of the increased spending levels. I fear it won't get better until we elect more responsible leaders. > We have seen already that there is plenty of room to cut government. The > sequestration cuts they have made so far were so nearly painless, they had > to go out of their way to make the cuts annoying. > Yup. > I got a call this morning from where we had reservations to camp next > weekend, saying the fed had closed the campground. They didn?t refund my > reservation money. I have gone up into the Sierras every fall for the last > several years and I have never seen a federal agent anywhere. So closing > that campground didn?t save the government anything, not one dollar. They > did it just to make life difficult. So I say very well, close the > campgrounds and monuments, keep the pressure on congress. Do a version of > healthcare which does not require government subsidy. Give a temporary > debt limit increase, say 100 billion dollars, then let?s go at it again, > extract a few cuts and give them another 100 billion when that is gone. > Let?s get on with it, but not by just borrowing more and more and more > money. It?s unpatriotic. It?s a national security threat. > Eventually, it is a national security threat. The question is just how long do we have before it is? -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Fri Oct 11 19:29:30 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2013 12:29:30 -0700 Subject: [ExI] eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia In-Reply-To: References: <01f101cec607$730f5b20$592e1160$@att.net> Message-ID: <028c01cec6b8$3616f780$a244e680$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Kelly Anderson . >>.I don't understand who is still loaning money to the US, and why. >.Because you need to loan your money to someone. Someone who is safe. Imagine you are a ChiCom, and you have to put your country's money in a safe place. There are a limited number of safe places, and you have a lot of money. In addition, there is the political leverage that money earns you over the US government. -Kelly I can tell you where a lot of that Chinese money is being socked away: California real estate. I see ever more local homes being sold to absentee owners with Chinese names. The Chinese don't really trust their own government to not seize their wealth, so they park it in the US in the form of million dollar tract shack which serves as their vacation cottage. I can testify of a house down the street from me which has never really been occupied in the traditional sense in 18 years, but the owners show up for about 2 wks a year. It is meticulously maintained by a yard service, cars parked out front, cars that started out new but now have become weather-beaten with a couple thousand miles on the odometer. Local neighborhoods are growing quiet as their population declines. That's where you Walmart dollars are going. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Fri Oct 11 21:45:03 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2013 22:45:03 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Smallest human-equivalent device In-Reply-To: <20131011093952.GE10405@leitl.org> References: <02c101cec634$69a98740$3cfc95c0$@att.net> <5257BB9A.9010501@aleph.se> <20131011093952.GE10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <5258715F.4050707@aleph.se> On 2013-10-11 10:39, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 09:49:30AM +0100, Anders Sandberg wrote: > >> merging. But other software will disagree. And the uploads in my big >> data center will not care that they are sharing underlying hardware >> and software as long as their data and processes are kept in >> separate virtual machines. > This is one of the rare cases where you're mistaken, Anders. > All the other points are spot on. "Any lapses in Omniscience are the price I pay for being implementable." :-) > Context switches make things slower, if your system is > 100% loaded. The more state you have to save and restore, > the slower. In a simulation, it's all state. > > This is why supercomputers use batching, running until > done, and never multitask between jobs. Good point. And shifting around 10^21 bits non-locally is a hassle, so you do not want to move your uploads between servers too often. I think Robin makes the same point in his manuscript. Still, I wonder how much can be done using superposed states. SIMD taken to the logical extreme. > Fast and energy-efficient means there's risk. Energy efficient also means less error correction (for a given speed). -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Fri Oct 11 21:40:16 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2013 22:40:16 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Influencing the far future Message-ID: <52587040.9040404@aleph.se> There seem to be quite a lot of theoretical near-present discussion here right now. I was delighted by this post by Paul Christiano, which is looking at far-future approaches: http://80000hours.org/blog/258-influencing-the-far-future -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Fri Oct 11 23:45:31 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2013 17:45:31 -0600 Subject: [ExI] eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia In-Reply-To: <028c01cec6b8$3616f780$a244e680$@att.net> References: <01f101cec607$730f5b20$592e1160$@att.net> <028c01cec6b8$3616f780$a244e680$@att.net> Message-ID: On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 1:29 PM, spike wrote: > ** ** > > ** ** > > *From:* extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto: > extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] *On Behalf Of *Kelly Anderson > *?***** > > >>?I don?t understand who is still loaning money to the US, and why.**** > > ** ** > > >?Because you need to loan your money to someone. Someone who is safe. > Imagine you are a ChiCom, and you have to put your country's money in a > safe place. There are a limited number of safe places, and you have a lot > of money. In addition, there is the political leverage that money earns you > over the US government. ?Kelly**** > > ** ** > > I can tell you where a lot of that Chinese money is being socked away: > California real estate. I see ever more local homes being sold to absentee > owners with Chinese names. The Chinese don?t really trust their own > government to not seize their wealth, so they park it in the US in the form > of million dollar tract shack which serves as their vacation cottage. I > can testify of a house down the street from me which has never really been > occupied in the traditional sense in 18 years, but the owners show up for > about 2 wks a year. It is meticulously maintained by a yard service, cars > parked out front, cars that started out new but now have become > weather-beaten with a couple thousand miles on the odometer. Local > neighborhoods are growing quiet as their population declines. That?s where > you Walmart dollars are going.**** > > ** > I don't doubt it. But what the Chinese government does is different than what the typical Chinese citizen is doing. I was speaking of the government, not individuals. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Sat Oct 12 14:28:02 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2013 10:28:02 -0400 Subject: [ExI] eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia In-Reply-To: <01f201cec6ad$8f504f50$adf0edf0$@att.net> References: <01f101cec607$730f5b20$592e1160$@att.net> <02ef01cec63f$491a1b10$db4e5130$@att.net> <01f201cec6ad$8f504f50$adf0edf0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 spike wrote: > They are not going to default John. > They are unless House Republicans learn to become potty trained in the next 6 days or so. > There are contingencies they haven?t told us about. There?s still a lot > of gold in Ft. Knox > So destroying the world currency, the US dollar, isn't enough and you also want to collapse the price of gold by dumping thousands of tons on the market overnight. I don't think there is an economist on the planet who would agree with your economic views, like that the government refusing to pay it's bills would be a good thing, or causing interest rates to skyrocket like never before seen in history in a sluggish economy with no hint of inflation is a really good idea. Another interesting effect is that it will cause the president to do something illegal no matter what he does; if he does nothing then he is failing to uphold the law (like social security or Medicare) that he has sworn to enforce, if he raises the debt ceiling on his own he is claiming powers the law says he does not have. Maybe that's all part of the retarded Republican plan, so after the debt catastrophe and in the middle of all that incredible chaos they will impeach the first black president. Maybe Eugine was right after all about doomsday arriving very soon. > This default talk is meant to scare, > Anyone who thinks default is just scare talk doesn't understand the situation. > The 2016 presidential election is one of those unusual chaotic times like > 2008 when there is likely to be no incumbent in the race. Ted Cruz is > already running for president, Paul Ryan is running, Rand Paul, [...] > John Boehner, > If we hit default none of those people, or any other Republican, has a snowball's chance in hell of ever becoming president. The successor to Barack Obama will be whoever gets the Democratic nomination and the actual November 2016 election day will just be a formality rubber stamping the inevitable. The only good thing coming from default is that the kamikaze attack on the economy will destroy the Republican party too, and it will go the way of the Wig or Federalist party. > They won?t default. [...] political posturing all of it. > The only reason the markets haven't melted down already is that they think it's just political posturing and Republicans can't possibly be as dumb as they seem to be. But my fear is that they really can be that dumb. John k Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Sat Oct 12 16:59:17 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2013 12:59:17 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Smallest human-equivalent device In-Reply-To: <20131011083729.GZ10405@leitl.org> References: <20131011083729.GZ10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 4:37 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > there's a widespread tendency to underestimate what evolutionary-driven > biology has managed to accomplish in > a few gigayears. A synapse is pretty damn small > Synaptic active zone diameter: 300 ? 150 nm > Synaptic vesicle diameter: 35 ? 0.3 up to 50 nm > Yes but unlike the 22 nm 3D transistors that you have in your computer right now (or the 14 nanometer ones in the Broadwell chip when Intel ships it in 2014) a synapse cannot switch from on to off without the aid of a much much larger structure, an entire neuron, or rather 2 entire neurons. Oh and then there is the fact that the typical neuron firing rate varies depending on the neuron, about 10 per second for the slowpokes and 200 times a second for the speed daemons; but the typical transistor in your computer fires somewhere north of 3 BILLION times a second. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Sat Oct 12 17:35:02 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2013 13:35:02 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: <20131011092745.GC10405@leitl.org> References: <20130927055747.GI10405@leitl.org> <20131001121829.GR10405@leitl.org> <20131009203347.GA10405@leitl.org> <20131010062556.GF10405@leitl.org> <20131011092745.GC10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 5:27 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > Thermodynamics trumps economics. I tend to focus on thermodynamics vs. > ecology Then you should be a big fan of Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors, they operate at a much higher temperature (although at a much lower pressure) than conventional reactors, and thermodynamics says that means much higher thermal efficiency. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Sat Oct 12 17:36:14 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2013 18:36:14 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Smallest human-equivalent device In-Reply-To: References: <20131011083729.GZ10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <5259888E.6040202@aleph.se> On 12/10/2013 17:59, John Clark wrote: > On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 4:37 AM, Eugen Leitl > wrote: > > > there's a widespread tendency to underestimate what > evolutionary-driven biology has managed to accomplish in > a few gigayears. A synapse is pretty damn small > Synaptic active zone diameter: 300 ? 150 nm > Synaptic vesicle diameter: 35 ? 0.3 up to 50 nm > > > Yes but unlike the 22 nm 3D transistors that you have in your computer > right now (or the 14 nanometer ones in the Broadwell chip when Intel > ships it in 2014) a synapse cannot switch from on to off without the > aid of a much much larger structure, an entire neuron, or rather 2 > entire neurons. Oh and then there is the fact that the typical neuron > firing rate varies depending on the neuron, about 10 per second for > the slowpokes and 200 times a second for the speed daemons; but the > typical transistor in your computer fires somewhere north of 3 BILLION > times a second. This kind of calculation easily becomes an apple-and-orange comparison. How many transistors are functionally equivalent to one synapse? If we take the basic computational neuroscience model, an incoming spike gets converted to a postsynaptic potential. This is typically modelled as the membrane potential of the postsynaptic neuron getting a beta function added to it (like w_ij H(t-t_0) (t-t_0)exp(-k(t-t_0)), where w_ij is the weight, H the Heaviside function, t_0 the time of the spike, and k some constant). Another common approach is to have a postsynaptic potential that acts as a leaky integrator (P'=-kP + w_ij delta(t-t_0), V(t)=P(t)+). In a crude integrate-and-fire model we do away with the electro-physiology and just keep the P potential, causing the recipient neuron to fire (and reset P to 0) if it goes above a threshold. Clearly we need to at least be able to add a synaptic weight to some other state variable, and this variable needs to have at least a few bits of resolution. Doing this with transistors requires more than one (28 transistors for a full adder, and far more for a multiplier). Note that this has ignored synaptic adaptation (w_ij should decrease if the synapse is used a lot over a short time, and then recover) and plasticity (w_ij should potentiate or not depending on correlations between neuron i and j). These require fairly involved calculations depending on model used; each state variable likely needs some adders and multipliers too. In fact, some approaches to neuromorphic hardware try to use analog electronics to get away from the messiness of adders and multipliers - the above operations can be done relatively neatly that way using. But the power, precision and low price of digital electronics tends to win most of the time. In the end, it is not obvious to me that a digital synapse can be made using silicon tech smaller than a real synapse. I would be surprised if an analog couldn't be done. Similarly speeding things up might be eminently doable, but while digital systems can vary clock frequencies continuously an analog synapse would actually be stuck at a single speed. -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Faculty of Philosophy Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Sat Oct 12 22:15:27 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2013 23:15:27 +0100 Subject: [ExI] eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia In-Reply-To: <018f01cec6a3$65c4ac80$314e0580$@att.net> References: <01f101cec607$730f5b20$592e1160$@att.net> <018f01cec6a3$65c4ac80$314e0580$@att.net> Message-ID: On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 6:00 PM, spike wrote: > They promised to do what they cannot do. In the early 2000s, the congress > bet the economy would grow enough to accommodate the wild spending spree of > those heady days. The economy didn?t grow at the assumed pace. Now we must > face up to the bills that were run up during that period. This is the > democrat?s big chance to say It?s all Bush?s fault. They would be right > this time, or half right. They have already borrowed our Social Security > savings and spent it without means to repay, so those of our generation are > screwed when we reach retirement age. What do we mortgage next? > > Overspending is unpatriotic, it represents a threat to national security, a > failure in leadership. Our current president could read off his > teleprompter word for word the speech he made in 2006, for it is more true > now than it was then. Instead he disowns it. Why? Instead, congress > brings in another far bigger wild overspending program. > > Sheesh. > > At some point, the US will go into massive default. It only gets worse the > longer we wait. > > "The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.? -- Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) BillK From spike66 at att.net Sat Oct 12 23:02:20 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2013 16:02:20 -0700 Subject: [ExI] eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia In-Reply-To: References: <01f101cec607$730f5b20$592e1160$@att.net> <02ef01cec63f$491a1b10$db4e5130$@att.net> <01f201cec6ad$8f504f50$adf0edf0$@att.net> Message-ID: <01cb01cec79f$1bd0f690$5372e3b0$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of John Clark Sent: Saturday, October 12, 2013 7:28 AM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [ExI] eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 spike wrote: > They are not going to default John. >.They are unless House Republicans learn to become potty trained in the next 6 days or so.John k Clark Johnny, be of good cheer me lad. They aren't going to shut down the government. It is all political posturing. Here's why I think so. Both sides, and particularly the Tea Party, have the option of the Obi Wan Kenobi defense. Prediction: they will take it right up to about midnight on the 16th, then pass a clean continuing resolution with no strings attached, which is what the president and the senate are demanding. The message the Tea Party gets to send is: OK, you guys have two seats of power, or possibly 2.5 seats, and you demonstrated you are willing to shut down the government to keep this turd sandwich of a law called ObamaCare. OK, we aren't willing to shut down the government to stop it, but you are. So this is all yours, all of it, enjoy. John, if O-care fails, don't you think someone should be held accountable? If it succeeds, shouldn't someone be rewarded? Doesn't that seem fair? The Tea Party has seen the disastrous roll-out of the O-care site. They have gone on HealthCare.gov and they have seen what happens. (Go ahead, do it.) The Tea Party believes this whole scheme will fail catastrophically and will cause a lot of damage on its way down. So they are currently making sure they go on record and getting plenty of attention as the party opposed to it. Why shouldn't they, if they are expressing their beliefs? Any why shouldn't their opposition stand up for their beliefs as well? They should in both cases. That is all it is, really. A deal will be made on the 16th. The stock market agrees. If you dislike the Tea Party and you think O-care will succeed, then be of good cheer, for when O-care works out, those ugly Tea Party guys will go away and will lose big in November 14. If O-care fails of course, then we can be sure the Tea Party will remind us early and often what happened in these three weeks in October. If that happens, they will surely do quite well in the November 2014 elections. If you believe O-care will work, be of good cheer, for you have nothing to worry about and the future is bright. I know what is actually going on here, and I am not worried. Are you worried? Why? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lloydmillerus at yahoo.com Sun Oct 13 00:14:06 2013 From: lloydmillerus at yahoo.com (Lloyd Miller) Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2013 20:14:06 -0400 Subject: [ExI] [Bulk] Re: eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia In-Reply-To: <01cb01cec79f$1bd0f690$5372e3b0$@att.net> References: <01f101cec607$730f5b20$592e1160$@att.net> <02ef01cec63f$491a1b10$db4e5130$@att.net> <01f201cec6ad$8f504f50$adf0edf0$@att.net> <01cb01cec79f$1bd0f690$5372e3b0$@att.net> Message-ID: <033301cec7a9$21a699d0$64f3cd70$@yahoo.com> are. So this is all yours, all of it, enjoy. John, if O-care fails, don't you think someone should be held accountable? If it succeeds, shouldn't someone be rewarded? Doesn't that seem fair? Lloyd Sez: The problem is, even if ObamaCare is a disaster, the DEM(agogues) with the help of the DEM(agogue) media (minus Fox) will see too it that the blame will not fall on the DEM(agogues), but on their political opposition and/or "the people." Then, the government will ratchet down the tyranny to "make" the law work! According to the Constitution, the House of Representatives has the veto on all spending. So, they should just vote no. If Obama shuts down the government it is time for revolution. That's how the Founders would have handled it. They literally "stuck to their guns." Lloyd Miller -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Sun Oct 13 08:04:08 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2013 10:04:08 +0200 Subject: [ExI] [New_Cryonet] (no subject) Message-ID: <20131013080407.GG10405@leitl.org> ----- Forwarded message from m2darwin at aol.com ----- Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2013 18:46:02 -0400 (EDT) From: m2darwin at aol.com To: lonintelcomms at gmail.com, New_Cryonet at yahoogroups.com Subject: [New_Cryonet] (no subject) Message-ID: <81da8.500a565b.3f8b2b2a at aol.com> X-Mailer: AOL 9.6 sub 168 Reply-To: New_Cryonet at yahoogroups.com To Whom it May Concern, I noticed your petition to" HM Government: Start a universal cryonics care program to preserve people after death," and would like to make the following comments and observations. First, the use of the word "death" is both confusing and a non-starter. The definition of death is the irreversible loss of life. By that definition, "dead" people cannot be returned to life using non-mystical/non-supernatural means.Iit is for this reason that ideas like "the resurrection of the dead" and "reviving the dead" are, properly, considered the province of god and religion. If persons who are cryopreserved are truly dead, then they cannot, by definition, be revived by any known or foreseeable technological means. The clear implication is that people being subjected to cryopreservation after medico-legal death are not, in fact, dead, but rather, that the past and current criteria for determining and pronouncing death are flawed and inaccurate - and therefore invalid. Asking the population as a whole, their government(s,), or any large segment of either, to support the revival of dead people evokes an attitude of disbelief and dismissal, at best, and of outrage and sacrilege at worst. It is also oxymoronic on the face of it, since dead is, in fact, dead. Second, your petition puts the cart before the horse. No government or nation state is going to sanction subjecting living (viable) people to a process that results in currently irreversible injury to the brain rendering it non-viable by all established medical criteria; no matter how compelling hypothetical scenarios for future repair may be. Thus, at a minimum, it is necessary to first demonstrate that the mammalian (and human) brain is viable after cryopreservation using now available techniques. Current criteria for a viable brain (= a living person) are the presence of integrated electrocerebral activity; e.g., an EEG of some sort (quality not specified). It is not legally or practically required that the person's body be intact or capable of (independent) function, since a person on a mechanical ventilator, or who is undergoing extracorporeal; support or even hemodialysis is not capable of remaining alive (i.e., having a functioning brain) absent external technological support. By the same reasoning, a person with a viable (even though injured) brain who is cryopreserved may still be considered alive, even though much of their body has not survived cryopreservation. We are, in fact, quite close to achieving mammalian brain cryopreservation sufficiently good to allow for demonstration of EEG and LTP activity following cryopreservation using existing vitrification technology. In several instances, rabbit brains subjected to vitrification have briefly yielded integrated EEG activity (Greg Fahy, personal communication, June, 2011). Thus, the most rational course of action to follow is to urge/petition for the development of cryopreservation technology which can be shown with scientific rigor to at least preserve the brain well enough to satisfy existing, conservative legal and medical criteria for preserving life. This is a trivial technological goal compared to the development of whole body, fully reversible human suspended animation. At The 8th Annual Critical Care Symposium held in Manchester,United Kingdom on 29 April, 2011, I presented a talk entitled "Achieving Truly Universal Health Care" which argue that the most logical and humane way to deal with the increasingly impossible burden of delivering health care to an increasingly moribund population using contemporary "half-way" medical measures was to develop reversible brain cryopreservation and then begin triaging patients receiving medically futile and otherwise ineffective care into long term cryopreservation. Not only would this greatly reduce the overall cost of healthcare, it would represent the only known option for definitively rescuing and treating these moribund and otherwise hopeless patients. It would, in effect, be not only their best path to short term, meaningful (functional) survival, but their only chance at indefinitely extended life in a state of youth, health and productivity. Most of this talk, and of the slides which accompanied it are present here: http://chronopause.com/chronopause.com/index.php/2011/02/14/achieving-truly- universal-health-care/index.html This talk was given to ~200 medical professionals from the UK, Europe and the US specializing in "intensive care (treatment)" medicine and it was generally well received. In conclusion, I would urge you to rethink and "re-present" your petition to include (more) reasonable and vastly more achievable goals, along with scientifically and financially robust plans to achieve them and the associated documentation, which demonstrate that the use of cryopreservation as an alternative to futile and extremely, indeed unbearably costly end of life care is a superior alternative. Mike Darwin ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5 From eugen at leitl.org Sun Oct 13 08:06:19 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2013 10:06:19 +0200 Subject: [ExI] eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia In-Reply-To: <01cb01cec79f$1bd0f690$5372e3b0$@att.net> References: <01f101cec607$730f5b20$592e1160$@att.net> <02ef01cec63f$491a1b10$db4e5130$@att.net> <01f201cec6ad$8f504f50$adf0edf0$@att.net> <01cb01cec79f$1bd0f690$5372e3b0$@att.net> Message-ID: <20131013080619.GH10405@leitl.org> On Sat, Oct 12, 2013 at 04:02:20PM -0700, spike wrote: > I know what is actually going on here, and I am not worried. > > Are you worried? Why? It's stupid to smoke around an open gasoline tank. Even if you know it's going to blow anyway, at some point. From eugen at leitl.org Sun Oct 13 08:31:37 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2013 10:31:37 +0200 Subject: [ExI] [Bulk] Re: eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia In-Reply-To: <033301cec7a9$21a699d0$64f3cd70$@yahoo.com> References: <01f101cec607$730f5b20$592e1160$@att.net> <02ef01cec63f$491a1b10$db4e5130$@att.net> <01f201cec6ad$8f504f50$adf0edf0$@att.net> <01cb01cec79f$1bd0f690$5372e3b0$@att.net> <033301cec7a9$21a699d0$64f3cd70$@yahoo.com> Message-ID: <20131013083137.GJ10405@leitl.org> On Sat, Oct 12, 2013 at 08:14:06PM -0400, Lloyd Miller wrote: > are. So this is all yours, all of it, enjoy. > > John, if O-care fails, don't you think someone should be held accountable? > If it succeeds, shouldn't someone be rewarded? Doesn't that seem fair? > > Lloyd Sez: The problem is, even if ObamaCare is a disaster, the > DEM(agogues) with the help of the DEM(agogue) media (minus Fox) will see too > it that the blame will not fall on the DEM(agogues), but on their political > opposition and/or "the people." Then, the government will ratchet down the > tyranny to "make" the law work! > > > > According to the Constitution, the House of Representatives has the veto on > all spending. So, they should just vote no. If Obama shuts down the > government it is time for revolution. That's how the Founders would have > handled it. They literally "stuck to their guns." The US health costs are now some 18% of GDP, while many go uninsured. This is ridiculously bad, and obviously unsustainable. It is one of the most inefficient health systems in the world http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/03/26/21-graphs-that-show-americas-health-care-prices-are-ludicrous/ http://www.bloomberg.com/visual-data/best-and-worst/most-efficient-health-care-countries This is what you should be up in the arms again. Hey, and how about the bloody wars and domestic "security" and surveillance racket? http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/01/07/everything-chuck-hagel-needs-to-know-about-the-defense-budget-in-charts/ And interest on debt? The prison industry, the result of war on some drugs? The education bubble? Sinking your money into domestic fossil hole in the ground instead of renewable? And so on, and so forth. Get rid of the donklephant. Don't buy into staged fights between two wings of the same party. From eugen at leitl.org Sun Oct 13 08:34:19 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2013 10:34:19 +0200 Subject: [ExI] [Doctrinezero] Fwd: [London-Futurists] For people who speak French Message-ID: <20131013083419.GK10405@leitl.org> ----- Forwarded message from Zero State ----- Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2013 08:27:51 +0100 From: Zero State To: "doctrinezero at zerostate.is" Subject: [Doctrinezero] Fwd: [London-Futurists] For people who speak French Message-ID: Reply-To: doctrinezero at zerostate.is ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: David Wood Date: 13 October 2013 06:22 Subject: [London-Futurists] For people who speak French To: London-Futurists-announce at meetup.com The following news from Marc Roux will be of interest to members of this group who speak French: >>> Hello everybody, The *French Transhumanist Association, Technoprog!* is pleased to announce that, from the month of November 2013, we are launching the first round of French conferences entirely online which we named "*TechnoXLR8*." These conferences will be organized in thematic cycles, one for each month. To inaugurate our first round , we have the pleasure of hosting one of the best specialists of transhumanism in France : *R?mi Sussan*, InternetActu journalist, author of *Les utopies posthumaines* (2005) and an essay on the brain (forthcoming: 2013). R?mi Sussan propose a reflection from the question "*? quoi peut servir le transhumanisme?*" This first conference will be held Monday, November 11 - 6:00 pm CET ( central european time = Paris time) - on the platform of online conference TeleXLR8. To register for this conference, you should follow the instructions on the Technoprog! site: *Online Conference: TechnoXLR8 *. Looking forward to seeing your colourful avatar in the virtual conference room of TeleXLR8 :-) For *AFT:Technoprog!* Marc Roux-- [image: Association Fran?aise Transhumaniste] http://transhumanistes.com/ contact at transhumanistes.com -- This message was sent by David Wood (davidw at deltawisdom.com) from London Futurists . To learn more about David Wood, visit his/her member profile To report abuse or block this person, please click here To unsubscribe from special announcements from your Organizer(s), click here Meetup, POB 4668 #37895 NY NY USA 10163 <#141b043d83bdad43_> | support at meetup.com -- Amon Kalkin http://zerostate.net _______________________________________________ Doctrinezero mailing list Doctrinezero at zerostate.is Unsubscribe: https://lists.zerostate.is/mailman/listinfo/doctrinezero ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5 From lloydmillerus at yahoo.com Sun Oct 13 13:58:35 2013 From: lloydmillerus at yahoo.com (Lloyd Miller) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2013 09:58:35 -0400 Subject: [ExI] [Bulk] Re: eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia In-Reply-To: <20131013083137.GJ10405@leitl.org> References: <01f101cec607$730f5b20$592e1160$@att.net> <02ef01cec63f$491a1b10$db4e5130$@att.net> <01f201cec6ad$8f504f50$adf0edf0$@att.net> <01cb01cec79f$1bd0f690$5372e3b0$@att.net> <033301cec7a9$21a699d0$64f3cd70$@yahoo.com> <20131013083137.GJ10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <03b501cec81c$4f8a8280$ee9f8780$@yahoo.com> >The US health costs are now some 18% of GDP, while many go uninsured. This is ridiculously bad, and obviously unsustainable. >It is one of the most inefficient health systems in the world Lloyd Sez: So that justifies and even more insane system? How about introducing market mechanisms for and fixing the safety net so it actually function. >This is what you should be up in the arms again. Hey, and how about the bloody wars and domestic "security" and surveillance racket? >And interest on debt? The prison industry, the result of war on some drugs? The education bubble? Sinking your money into domestic fossil hole in the ground instead of renewable? And so on, and so forth. Get rid of the donklephant. Don't buy into staged fights between two wings of the same party. Lloyd Sez: So you think I endorse NSA abuse, IRS abuse, Federal Reserve, the War on Drugs, Public Education? Or is that just a calculated lying implication, a calculated DEM(agoguery)? On the other hand, fossil fuel is where it's at and all society's problems could be solved by all-out exploration for and use of fossil fuel. Right now, the price of oil is kept up by the irrational restrictions in the US bought and paid for by the Rockefeller / Saudi / OPEC camarilla. Apparently, you are "taken in" by the Establishment Petro-Dollar recyclers: David Rockefeller, Soros, Prince Waleed and their intellectual frauds financed through the UN, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Rockefeller Bros. Fund, Harvard, etc. No, the Republicans are floundering simpletons, resisting the ultra-Statist DEM(agogue) agenda. They are not the same Party. One is populated at the top by cunning tyrants, the other is populated by blithering fools. From pharos at gmail.com Sun Oct 13 14:52:12 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2013 15:52:12 +0100 Subject: [ExI] [Bulk] Re: eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia In-Reply-To: <03b501cec81c$4f8a8280$ee9f8780$@yahoo.com> References: <01f101cec607$730f5b20$592e1160$@att.net> <02ef01cec63f$491a1b10$db4e5130$@att.net> <01f201cec6ad$8f504f50$adf0edf0$@att.net> <01cb01cec79f$1bd0f690$5372e3b0$@att.net> <033301cec7a9$21a699d0$64f3cd70$@yahoo.com> <20131013083137.GJ10405@leitl.org> <03b501cec81c$4f8a8280$ee9f8780$@yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Sun, Oct 13, 2013 at 2:58 PM, Lloyd Miller wrote: > On the other hand, fossil fuel is where it's at and all society's problems > could be solved by all-out exploration for and use of fossil fuel. Right > now, the price of oil is kept up by the irrational restrictions in the US > bought and paid for by the Rockefeller / Saudi / OPEC camarilla. > Apparently, you are "taken in" by the Establishment Petro-Dollar recyclers: > David Rockefeller, Soros, Prince Waleed and their intellectual frauds > financed through the UN, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Rockefeller Bros. > Fund, Harvard, etc. > > No, the Republicans are floundering simpletons, resisting the ultra-Statist > DEM(agogue) agenda. They are not the same Party. One is populated at the > top by cunning tyrants, the other is populated by blithering fools. Lloyd, Welcome to Exi! But this is not the place for conspiracy theories or shouting political slogans like 'Reps Good, Dems bad!'. Neither look likely to solve the present problems. Here we try to be constructive and discuss problems and solutions for now and into the far future. (With supporting evidence for any wild claims made!). :) BillK From spike66 at att.net Sun Oct 13 15:06:00 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2013 08:06:00 -0700 Subject: [ExI] [Bulk] Re: eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia In-Reply-To: References: <01f101cec607$730f5b20$592e1160$@att.net> <02ef01cec63f$491a1b10$db4e5130$@att.net> <01f201cec6ad$8f504f50$adf0edf0$@att.net> <01cb01cec79f$1bd0f690$5372e3b0$@att.net> <033301cec7a9$21a699d0$64f3cd70$@yahoo.com> <20131013083137.GJ10405@leitl.org> <03b501cec81c$4f8a8280$ee9f8780$@yahoo.com> Message-ID: <008701cec825$bb454fb0$31cfef10$@att.net> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of BillK > >>... No, the Republicans are floundering simpletons, resisting the > ultra-Statist > DEM(agogue) agenda. They are not the same Party. One is populated at > the top by cunning tyrants, the other is populated by blithering fools. >...Lloyd, Welcome to Exi! Seconded. >...But this is not the place for conspiracy theories or shouting political slogans like 'Reps Good, Dems bad!'. Neither look likely to solve the present problems... BillK Seconded. Political advocacy is not welcome here. But if you have some insights which might interest the transhumanist community, that is welcome. ObamaCare is an interesting case on so many levels, for it has profound implications that ripples to even the international community, as well as those of us whose future depends on medical technology, both current and that which is to come. spike _______________________________________________ From spike66 at att.net Sun Oct 13 15:16:07 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2013 08:16:07 -0700 Subject: [ExI] what the us gov owes to whom: RE: [Bulk] Re: eput this crazy system... Message-ID: <008801cec827$25668ac0$7033a040$@att.net> Check this interesting graph: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/10/10/230944425/everyone-the-u-s-governm ent-owes-money-to-in-one-graph?utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=20131013&utm_so urce=mostemailed Reading this graph I get the feeling someone somewhen would be left holding the bag. The current debate is about if it is us, now, or if we can arrange for it to be us later. spike From johnkclark at gmail.com Sun Oct 13 16:04:48 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2013 12:04:48 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Smallest human-equivalent device In-Reply-To: <5259888E.6040202@aleph.se> References: <20131011083729.GZ10405@leitl.org> <5259888E.6040202@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Sat, Oct 12, 2013 at 1:36 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > How many transistors are functionally equivalent to one synapse? > I don?t know but I can figure out how many modern transistors you could fit inside 2 neurons. The average human brain is about 1450 cubic centimeters or 1.45*10^24 cubic nanometers. There are about 10^11 neurons in the brain so each neuron and its accompanying support structures ( glial cells, capillaries etc) occupies about 1.45* 10^13 cubic nanometers, but you need 2 neurons to make a synapse so that?s 2.9*10^13 cubic nanometers. Using technology that Intel will mass produce next year they can build a transistor inside a 3*10^3 cubic nanometer box, or about 10^10 transistors in the volume occupying 2 neurons. And I don?t think the fact that those 10 billion transistors are operating nearly a billion times faster than neurons can is a insignificant consideration. Granted you couldn?t (yet) pack transistors at that density throughout a volume as large as the human brain due to heat considerations, but imagine what will be practical in just a few years. > > Clearly we need to at least be able to add a synaptic weight to some > other state variable, and this variable needs to have at least a few bits > of resolution. > OK. > > Doing this with transistors requires more than one (28 transistors for > a full adder, > OK, so if 99.99999% of the volume inside that brain sized 1450 cubic centimeter cavity inside the skull was just empty space to deal with the heat problem you'd still have more than enough transistors to give that synapse an adder. And yes I know that a neuron has more than one synapse, but it doesn't have a billion of them, and transistors are very fast, a lot faster than neurons. And all this is with just 2014 technology. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Sun Oct 13 16:16:53 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2013 09:16:53 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Smallest human-equivalent device In-Reply-To: References: <20131011083729.GZ10405@leitl.org> <5259888E.6040202@aleph.se> Message-ID: <00a101cec82f$a22bf150$e683d3f0$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of John Clark Sent: Sunday, October 13, 2013 9:05 AM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [ExI] Smallest human-equivalent device On Sat, Oct 12, 2013 at 1:36 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > >.How many transistors are functionally equivalent to one synapse? >. >.Granted you couldn't (yet) pack transistors at that density throughout a volume as large as the human brain due to heat considerations, but imagine what will be practical in just a few years. Heat transfer problems never go away. At the end of the miniaturizing game we have enjoyed for the last half century, heat dissipation is what finally stops our fun, and explains most of why processor clock speeds have stopped increasing. Agreed there is room for further progress, but what I see is more efficient use of smaller processors. I am thinking about checking out a local ARM processor conference this week: http://www.linleygroup.com/events/event.php?num=24 I get the feeling the future development is in these small energy efficient processors with open architecture. We might be able to get a bunch of these things working together to form a kind of intelligence. When we talk about a human equivalence intelligence, we may find it is impossible to decide exactly what that means. I will make this speculation: the next generation of humanoid robots will have a bunch of interdependent processors. Future sports will be robots racing and playing against humans and against each other. This stuff will be big entertainment and possibly big employment in the near term future. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Sun Oct 13 16:32:26 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2013 12:32:26 -0400 Subject: [ExI] eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia In-Reply-To: <01cb01cec79f$1bd0f690$5372e3b0$@att.net> References: <01f101cec607$730f5b20$592e1160$@att.net> <02ef01cec63f$491a1b10$db4e5130$@att.net> <01f201cec6ad$8f504f50$adf0edf0$@att.net> <01cb01cec79f$1bd0f690$5372e3b0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sat, Oct 12, 2013 at 7:02 PM, spike wrote: > Johnny, be of good cheer me lad. They aren?t going to shut down the > government. They've already shut down the government, I'm talking about something far more serious than that. > John, if O-care fails, don?t you think someone should be held > accountable? > Sure, but the success or failure of O-care is of trivial importance compared with the default issue. > If you dislike the Tea Party > IF?! I don't like anyone who thinks it's cute to play with nitroglycerin while standing right next to me! > A deal will be made on the 16th. > Spike, I sincerely hope you're right about that, otherwise we will enter a singularity on Thursday morning, but this one will have nothing to do with Artificial Intelligence, or of intelligence of any sort. This singularity will be more like the one at the center of a Black Hole. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Sun Oct 13 17:52:45 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2013 18:52:45 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Smallest human-equivalent device In-Reply-To: References: <20131011083729.GZ10405@leitl.org> <5259888E.6040202@aleph.se> Message-ID: <525ADDED.2030706@aleph.se> On 2013-10-13 17:04, John Clark wrote: > On Sat, Oct 12, 2013 at 1:36 PM, Anders Sandberg > wrote: > > > How many transistors are functionally equivalent to one synapse? > > > I don't know but I can figure out how many modern transistors you > could fit inside 2 neurons. In computational neuroscience the typical fine-grained neuron model is divided into electrically isopotential compartments, typically corresponding to each segment of the dendritic and axonal branches. A reasonable estimate is that there are as many compartments as synapses, so the total number is twice the synapse number (synapses also count). A typical neuron has around 8000 synapses, so 16,000 compartments is likely. Each compartment has at least a membrane potential and some channel states (in the Hodgkin--Huxley model you have 3-6 depending on how you slice the activations). Izhikevich estimated the cost as around 1000 FLOPS per compartment. This is likely an underestimate when you add extra channels and synaptic properties, but they just multiply the guesstimate a bit. So I would be surprised if a synapse takes more than 10,000 FLOPS, even if you try to model a lot of state. Assuming 2000 FLOPS per compartment gives an overall cost of 32 MFLOPS per neuron. > Using technology that Intel will mass produce next year they can > build a transistor inside a 3*10^3 cubic nanometer box, or about 10^10 > transistors in the volume occupying 2 neurons. That ought to be enough. Even if we assume 1000 transistor per operation, we should have more than enough. Not to mention a big speed advantage. The deep mess might be the change in configuration that happens during plasticity. Synapses grow and find targets on a hour/day timescale. This means the network topology is slightly mutable. Just assuming a fixed circuit network will not do. I think this is not too hard to handle with interconnects, but they are pretty big circuits. > Granted you couldn't (yet) pack transistors at that density throughout > a volume as large as the human brain due to heat considerations, but > imagine what will be practical in just a few years. This is why I have high hopes for quantum dot cellular automata and other near-reversible tech. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Sun Oct 13 17:55:46 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2013 13:55:46 -0400 Subject: [ExI] [Bulk] Re: eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia In-Reply-To: <20131013083137.GJ10405@leitl.org> References: <01f101cec607$730f5b20$592e1160$@att.net> <02ef01cec63f$491a1b10$db4e5130$@att.net> <01f201cec6ad$8f504f50$adf0edf0$@att.net> <01cb01cec79f$1bd0f690$5372e3b0$@att.net> <033301cec7a9$21a699d0$64f3cd70$@yahoo.com> <20131013083137.GJ10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Sun, Oct 13, 2013 Eugen Leitl wrote: > It's stupid to smoke around an open gasoline tank. Even if you know it's > going to blow anyway, at some point. > Yes, it's one thing to know you're going to die, it's another to know you're going to die on Thursday. > The US health costs are now some 18% of GDP, while many go uninsured. > Yes. This is ridiculously bad, and obviously unsustainable. > Yes. > It is one of the most inefficient health systems in the world > No not one of the most, it is THE most inefficient health system in the world. > how about the bloody wars and domestic "security" and surveillance > racket? And interest on debt? The prison industry, the result of war on > some drugs? The education bubble? Sinking your money into domestic fossil > hole in the ground instead > of renewable? > Those are all serious long term problems, but.... > This is what you should be up in the arms again. > I guess, it's just that right at this minute my long range planing and concerns don't extend much beyond Thursday. > > Don't buy into staged fights between two wings of the same party. > I hope it's a stage fight because that would imply a script exists, but I think its like a toddler playing with a loaded automatic pistol and the Republicans don't know what they're doing or how dangerous it is. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Sun Oct 13 17:44:48 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2013 10:44:48 -0700 Subject: [ExI] idea for empty warehouses Message-ID: <010c01cec83b$ea79ce80$bf6d6b80$@att.net> Perhaps some of you virtual reality hipsters have some ideas. Many if not most US metropolitan areas are interspersed with huge warehouses that gradually became more empty as most American manufacturing was exported to China. Enormous Chinese container ships became de facto warehouses, as we perfected just-in-time delivery to our big-box stores. These empty warehouses create a new opportunity for fun and profit. We also saw an important transition as data storage went way more compact. Engineering offices once needed a drawing board, several filing cabinets, some means of cataloging the filing cabinets, often a big wooden card catalog like we used to see in the public library in our misspent youth (remember those things?), a big locking wooden desk if you were a bigshot or a smaller metal desk otherwise. All this stuff took a lot of space. But now your computer is your drawing board, your filing cabinets, your card catalog, your calendar, your secretary, your draftsman, and a desk isn't really necessary if your computer weighs 2 kg. After we mostly went paperless in the early 00s, we got rid of that bulky junk and the excess employees, so we easily fit four engineers into the office space that once held one. This allowed Lockheeed Sunnyvale to sell of most of its really valuable real estate to the local internet fly-by-nights. That's why it is now about a fifth the area it was 20 yrs ago. This transition must have happened elsewhere as well, vacating so many enormous office buildings. Now we have all these unused warehouses and empty office buildings in metro areas which no one knows how to employ. They really are everywhere, and they are not difficult to spot. We call them see-throughs, because you drive by on the freeway, see a huge office building and everything behind it. Many of the warehouses have no cars parked anywhere near them, so they must be empty as well. Here's the idea: we use google glass to create something like a meat-world quasi-real version of the virtual reality game Second Life. We could use VR hoods or goggles to dress up a big empty room as whatever the participant likes best, as they walk around in a climate-controlled environment. It can be a field of flowers for instance, or a Mario Brothers world with chompy plants and Yoshis running about, or perhaps a big virtual Disneyland for the younger set. The players could perceive a garden of Eden as they walk around observing delights such as the tree of life, serpents offering fruit, nekkid Eves and so forth. Oh that would be so trippy. Big multi-floor office buildings could be arranged so that floors have common themes and interacting players. If other office buildings are like the ones I know, the periphery of each floor are private offices with a door, what we used to call four-walls and a lid which you could aspire to inhabit, these always reserved for the big shots and higher ranking players. These could be converted into rooms for copulation for those players who successfully negotiate that particular interaction. Oh my, there is money to be made here, waaaay big money. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Sun Oct 13 18:02:58 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2013 20:02:58 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Smallest human-equivalent device In-Reply-To: <00a101cec82f$a22bf150$e683d3f0$@att.net> References: <20131011083729.GZ10405@leitl.org> <5259888E.6040202@aleph.se> <00a101cec82f$a22bf150$e683d3f0$@att.net> Message-ID: <20131013180258.GR10405@leitl.org> On Sun, Oct 13, 2013 at 09:16:53AM -0700, spike wrote: > Heat transfer problems never go away. At the end of the miniaturizing game > we have enjoyed for the last half century, heat dissipation is what finally > stops our fun, and explains most of why processor clock speeds have stopped Heat dissipation is what already stopped our fun with frequency doublings almost a decade ago. > increasing. > > > > Agreed there is room for further progress, but what I see is more efficient > use of smaller processors. I am thinking about checking out a local ARM > processor conference this week: > > > > http://www.linleygroup.com/events/event.php?num=24 > > > > I get the feeling the future development is in these small energy efficient > processors with open architecture. We might be able to get a bunch of these > things working together to form a kind of intelligence. The exascale machines are effective embedded SoCs with stacked memory, and a mesh fabric router. The actual challenges of exascale is graceful handling of unreliable transport and unreliable components (if you have millions and billions of widgets, you will need to keep on trucking when there's failure here and there). I don't think we'll get spintronics in the first generation of exascale, but it's the only way to go on after that. > When we talk about a human equivalence intelligence, we may find it is > impossible to decide exactly what that means. If you have an isofunctional system, this is effectively your benchmark. However, the only way to construct isofunctional system is for isolated/small scale systems, and many that are evolutionary old. I mentioned retina, but retina doesn't do high connectivity. So it is highly suitable for embedded-like SoC computation. > I will make this speculation: the next generation of humanoid robots will > have a bunch of interdependent processors. Future sports will be robots > racing and playing against humans and against each other. This stuff will > be big entertainment and possibly big employment in the near term future. The big advantage of autonomous cars is that this not just kills trucker and delivery jobs (the poor bastards), but it vastly reduces the number of cars built. So it actually hits car makers far, far more than it hits truckers. From spike66 at att.net Sun Oct 13 19:15:16 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2013 12:15:16 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Smallest human-equivalent device In-Reply-To: <20131013180258.GR10405@leitl.org> References: <20131011083729.GZ10405@leitl.org> <5259888E.6040202@aleph.se> <00a101cec82f$a22bf150$e683d3f0$@att.net> <20131013180258.GR10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <016e01cec848$8dd9ba20$a98d2e60$@att.net> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Eugen Leitl ... >>... I will make this speculation: the next generation of humanoid robots > will have a bunch of interdependent processors. Future sports will be > robots racing and playing against humans and against each other. This > stuff will be big entertainment and possibly big employment in the near term future. >...The big advantage of autonomous cars is that this not just kills trucker and delivery jobs (the poor bastards), but it vastly reduces the number of cars built. So it actually hits car makers far, far more than it hits truckers. _______________________________________________ Eugen's comment leads me to the future of one branch of robotics. We now have cars that can drive themselves, but they require a bunch of extra stuff to be added, sensors and computer gazazzafratzes and such. I see the Google cars around here occasionally, with people in them, but they can drive themselves, as Google has demonstrated on closed courses at Moffett Field recently. We could imagine retrofitting existing cars with the sensors, but that would be costly. I can imagine a next-generation idea: driving robots capable of taking a current Detroit and driving it unmodified, as is. It would need to be able to take the keys, open the door, get in, start the car, drive it somewhere safely, come back, lock it and leave. That next engineering goal is exciting! We could set them to delivering packages, since they can get in and out, can pick up and move stuff and so forth. The supply of junky old cars would be nearly endless, so they would be cheap as dirt. It wouldn't matter if the cars smelled like barf inside because some drunken prole had used it for his latest rolling Bacchanalian indiscretion; the humanoid driving robot wouldn't know or care. We are going to need a bunch of these kinds of devices to replace all the guys who once drove around doing errands but are now too busy wearing VR goggles walking around in a big empty warehouse or office building with others doing the same thing: struggling to negotiate a hike to the springs in the periphery offices. spike From pharos at gmail.com Sun Oct 13 20:08:43 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2013 21:08:43 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Smallest human-equivalent device In-Reply-To: <016e01cec848$8dd9ba20$a98d2e60$@att.net> References: <20131011083729.GZ10405@leitl.org> <5259888E.6040202@aleph.se> <00a101cec82f$a22bf150$e683d3f0$@att.net> <20131013180258.GR10405@leitl.org> <016e01cec848$8dd9ba20$a98d2e60$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sun, Oct 13, 2013 at 8:15 PM, spike wrote: > We could imagine retrofitting existing cars with the sensors, but that would > be costly. I can imagine a next-generation idea: driving robots capable of > taking a current Detroit and driving it unmodified, as is. It would need to > be able to take the keys, open the door, get in, start the car, drive it > somewhere safely, come back, lock it and leave. That next engineering goal > is exciting! We could set them to delivering packages, since they can get > in and out, can pick up and move stuff and so forth. The supply of junky > old cars would be nearly endless, so they would be cheap as dirt. It > wouldn't matter if the cars smelled like barf inside because some drunken > prole had used it for his latest rolling Bacchanalian indiscretion; the > humanoid driving robot wouldn't know or care. > > A fully mobile delivery robot is surely unnecessary? Nice, but not required for deliveries. The driver robot can deliver the package, but there is no need for it to get out and swagger casually up to the residence, with all the complication that involves. (It would probably expect a tip as well and chat up the lady of the house). The van could just phone ahead to make sure someone would be available, then beep when it arrives and the resident comes out to collect their package. The vans can work all hours, so no problem with late deliveries. Much cheaper solution. But fully mobile robots will be very useful for other situations. They will just be very expensive to develop. BillK From spike66 at att.net Sun Oct 13 21:04:56 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2013 14:04:56 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Smallest human-equivalent device In-Reply-To: References: <20131011083729.GZ10405@leitl.org> <5259888E.6040202@aleph.se> <00a101cec82f$a22bf150$e683d3f0$@att.net> <20131013180258.GR10405@leitl.org> <016e01cec848$8dd9ba20$a98d2e60$@att.net> Message-ID: <000f01cec857$df8f3f20$9eadbd60$@att.net> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of BillK Sent: Sunday, October 13, 2013 1:09 PM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [ExI] Smallest human-equivalent device On Sun, Oct 13, 2013 at 8:15 PM, spike wrote: > >... I can imagine a next-generation idea: driving robots > capable of taking a current Detroit and driving it unmodified, as is... the humanoid driving robot wouldn't know or care. > >...A fully mobile delivery robot is surely unnecessary? Nice, but not required for deliveries. ... >...But fully mobile robots will be very useful for other situations. They will just be very expensive to develop...BillK _______________________________________________ Ja. The core idea is that if we can develop sufficiently human-like robots, they can use our tools, run our machines, drive our cars, wear our clothes, generally use the existing infrastructure rather than requiring a huge expensive retrofit with competing standards. That expensive development might be our least expensive path forward. This approach appeals to me from a controls engineering perspective: it's a hard enough problem to be interesting. spike From eugen at leitl.org Mon Oct 14 06:14:21 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2013 08:14:21 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Smallest human-equivalent device In-Reply-To: <000f01cec857$df8f3f20$9eadbd60$@att.net> References: <20131011083729.GZ10405@leitl.org> <5259888E.6040202@aleph.se> <00a101cec82f$a22bf150$e683d3f0$@att.net> <20131013180258.GR10405@leitl.org> <016e01cec848$8dd9ba20$a98d2e60$@att.net> <000f01cec857$df8f3f20$9eadbd60$@att.net> Message-ID: <20131014061421.GA10405@leitl.org> On Sun, Oct 13, 2013 at 02:04:56PM -0700, spike wrote: > Ja. The core idea is that if we can develop sufficiently human-like robots, > they can use our tools, run our machines, drive our cars, wear our clothes, > generally use the existing infrastructure rather than requiring a huge > expensive retrofit with competing standards. That expensive development Handicap-proofed surroundings are already suitable for wheeled robots. Which can be rather agile, think Segway. And as a first step teleoperation would do. You can teleoperate (and teleport, switching between multiple platforms on the fly) from your ergonomic chair. From your home, if you've got fiber. > might be our least expensive path forward. This approach appeals to me from > a controls engineering perspective: it's a hard enough problem to be > interesting. An interesting subtopic: weed- and pest-picking bots. These can be big as a gantry, or agile rodent-sized beasties blasting bugs with lasers. From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Mon Oct 14 07:29:55 2013 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2013 00:29:55 -0700 Subject: [ExI] What if humans were twice as intelligent? Message-ID: What do you think? This reminds me of Robert Bradbury's desire to grant fifty extra I.Q. points to every person on Earth, to improve society. http://www.livescience.com/17918-humans-intelligent.html John -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Mon Oct 14 09:47:36 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2013 10:47:36 +0100 Subject: [ExI] What if humans were twice as intelligent? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <525BBDB8.5060308@aleph.se> On 2013-10-14 08:29, John Grigg wrote: > What do you think? This reminds me of Robert Bradbury's desire to > grant fifty extra I.Q. points to every person on Earth, to improve > society. It is a bit of a naive extrapolation, but I like how they actually mention and sidestep the problem that the IQ scale doesn't do doublings. Overall, sounds a bit like my own handwaving when interviewed by media about enhanced societies. I think we have good reasons to think they will be richer, safer, nicer and more turbulent. The point about personality mattering is very true: intelligence is multiplicative with motivation, neither can substitute for the other. The "twice as intelligent" problem is actually a bit subtle. My own favorite approach for comparing intelligence would be to use something like chess Elo ratings: you run random "games" and estimate the probability that individual A will beat individual B. If it is 50% they have the same rating, if it is 64% higher A is 100 points higher, and so on. This way you could compare even superintelligences (who would have win probabilities against non-superintelligences close to 100%) by looking at a possibly hypothetical chain of intermediate minds, getting a score. Still, such a score doesnt tell you what you can do. X points does not necessarily imply figuring out peace in the Middle East or how to make a stardrive is doable. And the above scale does assume you have a core general intelligence that can easily work on all domains; in reality we tend to specialise a lot, and certain styles are better at certain things. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From pharos at gmail.com Mon Oct 14 10:00:34 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2013 11:00:34 +0100 Subject: [ExI] What if humans were twice as intelligent? In-Reply-To: <525BBDB8.5060308@aleph.se> References: <525BBDB8.5060308@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 10:47 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > It is a bit of a naive extrapolation, but I like how they actually mention > and sidestep the problem that the IQ scale doesn't do doublings. Overall, > sounds a bit like my own handwaving when interviewed by media about enhanced > societies. I think we have good reasons to think they will be richer, safer, > nicer and more turbulent. The point about personality mattering is very > true: intelligence is multiplicative with motivation, neither can substitute > for the other. > i.e. The evil genius will be twice as bad. (Smiles and strokes white cat). > > Still, such a score doesnt tell you what you can do. X points does not > necessarily imply figuring out peace in the Middle East or how to make a > stardrive is doable. And the above scale does assume you have a core general > intelligence that can easily work on all domains; in reality we tend to > specialise a lot, and certain styles are better at certain things. > > It doesn't mention that for humans high intelligence now seems to be an evolutionary disadvantage. The top 20% don't reproduce nearly as much as lower IQs. High IQ acts like a form of birth control. BillK From pharos at gmail.com Mon Oct 14 10:50:44 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2013 11:50:44 +0100 Subject: [ExI] eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia In-Reply-To: <01cb01cec79f$1bd0f690$5372e3b0$@att.net> References: <01f101cec607$730f5b20$592e1160$@att.net> <02ef01cec63f$491a1b10$db4e5130$@att.net> <01f201cec6ad$8f504f50$adf0edf0$@att.net> <01cb01cec79f$1bd0f690$5372e3b0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sun, Oct 13, 2013 at 12:02 AM, spike wrote: > That is all it is, really. A deal will be made on the 16th. The stock > market agrees. If you dislike the Tea Party and you think O-care will > succeed, then be of good cheer, for when O-care works out, those ugly Tea > Party guys will go away and will lose big in November 14. If O-care fails > of course, then we can be sure the Tea Party will remind us early and often > what happened in these three weeks in October. If that happens, they will > surely do quite well in the November 2014 elections. If you believe O-care > will work, be of good cheer, for you have nothing to worry about and the > future is bright. > > Just one teensy weensy point here....... The O-care system wasn't actually built by the guv'mnt. It was built by the glorious free-trade corporations making millions off the government spending. The corporations that spent the most on lobbying (bribing) got the business. See: Quote: The biggest problem with Healthcare.gov seems simple enough: It was built by people who are apparently far more familiar with government cronyism than they are with IT. ---------------- BillK From anders at aleph.se Mon Oct 14 11:19:44 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2013 12:19:44 +0100 Subject: [ExI] What if humans were twice as intelligent? In-Reply-To: References: <525BBDB8.5060308@aleph.se> Message-ID: <525BD350.5010909@aleph.se> On 2013-10-14 11:00, BillK wrote: > On Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 10:47 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: >> The point about personality mattering is very >> true: intelligence is multiplicative with motivation, neither can substitute >> for the other. >> > i.e. The evil genius will be twice as bad. (Smiles and strokes white cat). And have to contend with millions of peers. (Similes and strokes an identical white cat) A spread of smarts would even the playing field for a lot of normally high-threshold jobs. So we will want actuaries and particle physicists who are not just smart, but also social, creative or any other added useful trait. Meanwhile the currently very smart people in this scenario will end up having to find activities that are hard to do for the mere geniuses; that is likely going to be tough. > It doesn't mention that for humans high intelligence now seems to be > an evolutionary disadvantage. The top 20% don't reproduce nearly as > much as lower IQs. High IQ acts like a form of birth control. The effect is fairly weak. While the image of Idiocracy is vivid, when you actually sit down and simulate genetic equilibria of numerous small IQ-related genes you will find that the anti-intelligence selection effect is not doing much. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From pharos at gmail.com Mon Oct 14 12:19:47 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2013 13:19:47 +0100 Subject: [ExI] What if humans were twice as intelligent? In-Reply-To: <525BD350.5010909@aleph.se> References: <525BBDB8.5060308@aleph.se> <525BD350.5010909@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 12:19 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > The effect is fairly weak. While the image of Idiocracy is vivid, when you > actually sit down and simulate genetic equilibria of numerous small > IQ-related genes you will find that the anti-intelligence selection effect > is not doing much. > Hmmnnn. Not simulations, but real world studies have found a correlation. The most significant factor is child mortality. When nations stop high child mortality, then women stop having so many children. When you add in female education / empowerment and higher incomes as well, that explains the fall in first world birth rates. But in the US some surveys have shown that college graduates have fewer children. Quote: One study investigating fertility and education carried out in 1991 found that high school dropouts in America had the most children (2.5 on average), with high school graduates having fewer children, and college graduates having the fewest children (1.56 on average). -------- See: However, it is difficult to prove as education and IQ effects are mixed up. BillK From crw at crw.io Mon Oct 14 05:15:30 2013 From: crw at crw.io (crw at crw.io) Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2013 22:15:30 -0700 Subject: [ExI] idea for empty warehouses In-Reply-To: <010c01cec83b$ea79ce80$bf6d6b80$@att.net> References: <010c01cec83b$ea79ce80$bf6d6b80$@att.net> Message-ID: <20131014051530.GA1751@crw.io> On 10/13, spike wrote: > > > Perhaps some of you virtual reality hipsters have some ideas. > > Here's the idea: we use google glass to create something like a meat-world > quasi-real version of the virtual reality game Second Life. We could use VR > hoods or goggles to dress up a big empty room as whatever the participant > likes best, as they walk around in a climate-controlled environment. It can > be a field of flowers for instance, or a Mario Brothers world with chompy > plants and Yoshis running about, or perhaps a big virtual Disneyland for the > younger set. The players could perceive a garden of Eden as they walk > around observing delights such as the tree of life, serpents offering fruit, > nekkid Eves and so forth. Oh that would be so trippy. Sounds like fun, but could turn into this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEexx5BR5eY > Big multi-floor office buildings could be arranged so that floors have > common themes and interacting players. If other office buildings are like > the ones I know, the periphery of each floor are private offices with a > door, what we used to call four-walls and a lid which you could aspire to > inhabit, these always reserved for the big shots and higher ranking players. > These could be converted into rooms for copulation for those players who > successfully negotiate that particular interaction. Wonder how much insurance would cost to run an operation like this? > Oh my, there is money to be made here, waaaay big money. And how are laser tag arenas and roller rinks faring? The joy of virtual reality is that you can connect and play from anywhere. Why not tear down and scrap the warehouses, bust up the concrete and start rehabilitating the soil underneath? -c. From spike66 at att.net Mon Oct 14 13:54:15 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2013 06:54:15 -0700 Subject: [ExI] eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia In-Reply-To: References: <01f101cec607$730f5b20$592e1160$@att.net> <02ef01cec63f$491a1b10$db4e5130$@att.net> <01f201cec6ad$8f504f50$adf0edf0$@att.net> <01cb01cec79f$1bd0f690$5372e3b0$@att.net> Message-ID: <019e01cec8e4$dfe1a9d0$9fa4fd70$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of BillK Subject: Re: [ExI] eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia On Sun, Oct 13, 2013 at 12:02 AM, spike wrote: >>... If you believe O-care will work, be of good > cheer, for you have nothing to worry about and the future is bright. > > >...The O-care system wasn't actually built by the guv'mnt. >...It was built by the glorious free-trade corporations making millions off the government spending... Exactly so, thanks for this BillK. Here is a British guy who gets this better than Americans. BillK, this entire system was designed by one party, in private, with little public debate so nothing is on the record and no one is required to take ownership of anything. No one is responsible for it. The speaker of the house didn't know what was in that bill: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1ht8msGqwI None of the opposition party knew what was in it, and it got zero votes from that side of the aisle. How can you vote for a mystery bill? It was designed by those who intended to generate profit from it. That part it looks like it will work. People will make money, plenty of money. Since there was all these profit-making provisions in there, those who designed it specifically removed isolation clauses to prevent its being modified to defeat the profit-making portions. This means that to modify any part of the law, everything in it is up for modification. To do that would mean debating it before congress. But the present congress is balanced. It was completely over on one side when it was passed. So they don't do that. >...The corporations that spent the most on lobbying (bribing) got the business... The former speaker said we need to pass the bill to find out what is in it. It passed, we still don't know. But I suspect bribery was used at every step by those who would directly profit from the law. >...See: Quote: The biggest problem with Healthcare.gov seems simple enough: It was built by people who are apparently far more familiar with government cronyism than they are with IT. ---------------- BillK _______________________________________________ BillK, if we can see what a mess HealthCare.gov is, and how it still doesn't work right, why should it be such a leap of faith that the law was put together the same way? It was designed by all the wrong people with all the wrong motives. We know our previous system was in a death spiral. If you had health insurance, your company was billed to compensate for all those who had no health insurance. Hospitals cannot absorb all that loss. So they took a system which was in a tailspin and replaced it with a different system which was in a tailspin closer to the ground and dropping faster. What we see now is an attempt to cram every attitude towards O-care on one axis, the only one politicians really care about, the classic left right political axis. But one's attitude on this law has many nuances that are not captured by this. For instance, how about an axis for those who think they will benefit vs those who think they will not? I am one who would benefit, being old. Perhaps more importantly, an axis for those who believe it will work vs those who do not? I do not. Of all the plausible axes, I am close to center on most all of them except one: I am one who is convinced this system will fail spectacularly, no matter what we do, because it didn't solve any of the biggest four problems wrecking our previous system, in fact it makes all three of them worse: -It doesn't solve the free rider problem, it makes it worse: the government convinced voters it will give poor people free health insurance with low or no deductibles. I can assure you. -It doesn't solve the lack of market feedback problem, it makes it worse: for those most likely to pay attention to deductibles, it promises a means of having them subsidized, which intentionally defeats price controls in medicine. -It doesn't solve the problem of the legal industry's over-involvement in the health industry, it makes it worse, waaaay worse. -It doesn't solve the insurance industry's overdependence on young and healthies subsidizing the old and sicklies, it makes it worse. The young and healthy are compelled to buy insurance and allowing the old and sickly to buy in, then imposing government controls on the price structure. O-care introduces a new huge problem by setting the IRS as the enforcement arm. We currently have one IRS chief, Lois Lerner, who invoked the fifth amendment, meaning she refuses to testify because it can incriminate her. We have the IRS chief in charge of O-care enforcement, who has been caught sharing confidential taxpayer information with those not legally entitled to that information, specifically targeting political opponents: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnWK-rodi2M Watch that video, then go to HealthCare.gov. If you can get it to work, the first thing they do is ask for a bunch of personal information, birthdate, legal name, address, email, three security questions, social security number, everything an identity thief would need to empty your bank account. And it goes to a person who has been caught sharing confidential taxpayer information with unauthorized parties, specifically political opposition. My attitude to O-care has little to do with my political views and everything to do with skepticism of this particular system as written. Even though I am among those who would benefit if it succeeds, I already know it will not. It cannot, it is too deeply flawed, by design. Note that the US government's current thrashing about, threatening to default is about this law. I would suggest we scrap this mess and start over. We can still call it ObamaCare if the current president wants a signature legislation. Get buy-in from both parties. Actually debate the material in public, on the record. Break it up into reasonable sized pieces of legislation, which can be actually read by those being asked to vote on it, so we never again have the sound-bite of the house speaker uttering the absurdity "...we need to hurry and pass this so you can find out what is in it..." A more reasonable sized legislation should be about 20 to 50 pages, rather than 2000. There's no way to legitimately understand a bill that is the size of O-care. Avoid passing huge society-changing packages when the legislature is unbalanced. That invites corruption and incompetence, as we saw. Avoid passing major legislation in an even year, such as 2010. In even years, the congressmen are more concerned about their reelection campaigns than what they are voting on. They don't even know what they are voting on, or care. They will vote on anything in exchange for campaign contributions and support. They are politicians, not insurance executives. They don't know what they are doing. spike From brent.allsop at canonizer.com Mon Oct 14 14:17:38 2013 From: brent.allsop at canonizer.com (Brent Allsop) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2013 08:17:38 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Nobel Prize for Evidence supporting "Law of the Crypto Coin"? Message-ID: 3 people were just awarded a Nobel prize for: "showing that asset prices move unpredictably in the short term but with greater predictability over longer periods" Said the NY times: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/15/business/3-american-professors-awarded-nobel-in-economic-sciences.html?_r=0 To me, this is exactly what the "Law of the Crypto Coin Camp" ( http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/154/2) has been predicting about Bitcoin valuations - that short term, you don't know what the market will do, but over the long term, you can make intelligent predictions. Does this convince anyone, or do people that think you can't make long term predictions an any kind of law like way, interpret this differently? Brent Allsop -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Mon Oct 14 14:45:58 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2013 07:45:58 -0700 Subject: [ExI] idea for empty warehouses In-Reply-To: <20131014051530.GA1751@crw.io> References: <010c01cec83b$ea79ce80$bf6d6b80$@att.net> <20131014051530.GA1751@crw.io> Message-ID: <01c301cec8ec$18de4520$4a9acf60$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of crw at crw.io Subject: Re: [ExI] idea for empty warehouses On 10/13, spike wrote: >>... Here's the idea: we use google glass to create something like a > meat-world quasi-real version of the virtual reality game Second Life... >...Sounds like fun, but could turn into this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEexx5BR5eY Their point is well taken: we are ever more often playing together alone. My father-in-law who doesn't use the internet, is definitely feeling lonely these days. Where kids used to play outdoors, they are now all home with their noses in the computer. I doubt the above YouTube scenario, because it makes too little money. You want to run several proles in your sim simultaneously to increase profits. >>... Big multi-floor office buildings could be arranged so that floors have > common themes and interacting players... >...Wonder how much insurance would cost to run an operation like this? This is an interesting paradigm which has become second nature to Americans: any time you run any business or venture, you must insure yourself against lawsuits. So here's the idea: the company with the empty warehouse or office building does not buy insurance, the participants do. That is the admission ticket. The insurance company charges whatever it deems appropriate, with non-standardized rates. Profit from the insurance pays the company with the office building. >...And how are laser tag arenas and roller rinks faring? We might be able to convert those low-profit ventures into something like this. The beauty of it is the building doesn't supply the decorations, the VR does. All the empty office building does is supply a comfortable environment, warm and dry. All the cool stuff is in the participants' goggles or VR helmet. >...The joy of virtual reality is that you can connect and play from anywhere... Ja. It would enhance those games to be able to walk around, kind of like a meat-ish version of Duke Nukem perhaps, or a Leisure Suit Larry with actual carnal rewards for the successful. >... Why not tear down and scrap the warehouses, bust up the concrete and start rehabilitating the soil underneath? -c._____________________________________________ Tearing down a building costs a lot of money. Something like the above would make money using capital already invested with very little additional cost. In some areas, such as this county, tearing down an existing structure can cause the assessed value of the land to go way up, which has adverse tax consequences. So, unless a developer wants to come in, the owner is often better off leaving the unused structure as is, which is why we have so many empty shells and see-throughs in an area where office space is still crazy expensive. spike From spike66 at att.net Mon Oct 14 15:20:18 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2013 08:20:18 -0700 Subject: [ExI] eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia In-Reply-To: <019e01cec8e4$dfe1a9d0$9fa4fd70$@att.net> References: <01f101cec607$730f5b20$592e1160$@att.net> <02ef01cec63f$491a1b10$db4e5130$@att.net> <01f201cec6ad$8f504f50$adf0edf0$@att.net> <01cb01cec79f$1bd0f690$5372e3b0$@att.net> <019e01cec8e4$dfe1a9d0$9fa4fd70$@att.net> Message-ID: <01c401cec8f0$e54825a0$afd870e0$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of spike ... >...Watch that video, then go to HealthCare.gov. If you can get it to work, the first thing they do is ask for a bunch of personal information, birthdate, legal name, address, email, three security questions, social security number, everything an identity thief would need to empty your bank account. And it goes to a person who has been caught sharing confidential taxpayer information with unauthorized parties, specifically political opposition...spike _______________________________________________ Data and security hipsters, do offer me some guidance please. Why would the government have set up a system (Healthcare.gov) which looks to me like strong security just to go in and shop, or just to get a quote? I understand the birthdate and address, because your age and state determine your health insurance price. But why do they need to know your social security number? And why the security questions? Just to shop? Couldn't they ask for that only if you choose to buy something and pay with a credit card? What if you wanted to use PayPal instead? Or get a paper bill in the snail mail so you can pay with a check? Are you really going to give all that information to an organization which recent had a top officer give self-contradictory testimony, then invoke the fifth amendment? And that apparent felon's boss was caught sharing confidential tax payer information with unauthorized persons? And if so, are you completely crazy? Someone, do explain please: what (if anything) were they thinking? spike From johnkclark at gmail.com Mon Oct 14 16:03:11 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2013 12:03:11 -0400 Subject: [ExI] What if humans were twice as intelligent? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 3:29 AM, John Grigg wrote: > What do you think? This reminds me of Robert Bradbury's desire to grant > fifty extra I.Q. points to every person on Earth, to improve society. > When I was a kid I read a novel called "Brain Wave" by Poul Anderson, it had the IQ of the entire world population double and then quadrupole almost overnight; at the time I liked it a lot but haven't read it in years. John k Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Mon Oct 14 16:20:04 2013 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2013 09:20:04 -0700 Subject: [ExI] What if humans were twice as intelligent? Message-ID: > From: Anders Sandberg > On 2013-10-14 11:00, BillK wrote: >> It doesn't mention that for humans high intelligence now seems to be >> an evolutionary disadvantage. The top 20% don't reproduce nearly as >> much as lower IQs. High IQ acts like a form of birth control. > > The effect is fairly weak. While the image of Idiocracy is vivid, when > you actually sit down and simulate genetic equilibria of numerous small > IQ-related genes you will find that the anti-intelligence selection > effect is not doing much. Don't forget that selection is happening on both ends of the intelligence spectrum. Which is typical for any trait you can measure. If it was not, then the center of the curve would drift until selection on both ends was equal. Keith From atymes at gmail.com Mon Oct 14 16:25:43 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2013 09:25:43 -0700 Subject: [ExI] idea for empty warehouses In-Reply-To: <01c301cec8ec$18de4520$4a9acf60$@att.net> References: <010c01cec83b$ea79ce80$bf6d6b80$@att.net> <20131014051530.GA1751@crw.io> <01c301cec8ec$18de4520$4a9acf60$@att.net> Message-ID: On Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 7:45 AM, spike wrote: > In some areas, such as this county, tearing down an existing > structure can cause the assessed value of the land to go way up, which has > adverse tax consequences. So, unless a developer wants to come in, the > owner is often better off leaving the unused structure as is, which is why > we have so many empty shells and see-throughs in an area where office space > is still crazy expensive. > Tch. A little remodeling, some interior walls or just a cubicle farm, and there's office space without increased tax assessment. (And agreed re: the YouTube scenario being unrealistic for only having one customer at a time. Not to mention, to many customers there's a network effect: the total value to customers can be more than N times if N customers are in at once. Granted, for some customers there's an anti-network effect - less than N times as valuable - but these are a small enough minority with a small enough negative that the average balances in favor of "many at once".) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Mon Oct 14 16:28:21 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2013 09:28:21 -0700 Subject: [ExI] o-care promotes the singularity, was: RE: eput this crazy system Message-ID: <01ef01cec8fa$66b32a00$34197e00$@att.net> Hey I thought of a spin compatible with practical optimism. Our hopes and dreams of a singularity are advanced by having more people in software development, rather than say law or financial "services." When young people deciding on a career see the HealthCare.gov site, their first thought will be: Aw hell, even I could do better than this. spike From lloydmillerus at yahoo.com Mon Oct 14 16:30:02 2013 From: lloydmillerus at yahoo.com (Lloyd Miller) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2013 12:30:02 -0400 Subject: [ExI] [Bulk] Re: eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia In-Reply-To: References: <01f101cec607$730f5b20$592e1160$@att.net> <02ef01cec63f$491a1b10$db4e5130$@att.net> <01f201cec6ad$8f504f50$adf0edf0$@att.net> <01cb01cec79f$1bd0f690$5372e3b0$@att.net> <033301cec7a9$21a699d0$64f3cd70$@yahoo.com> <20131013083137.GJ10405@leitl.org> <03b501cec81c$4f8a8280$ee9f8780$@yahoo.com> Message-ID: <000001cec8fa$a2d94410$e88bcc30$@yahoo.com> >But this is not the place for conspiracy theories or shouting political slogans like 'Reps Good, Dems bad!'. Neither look likely to solve the present problems. Lloyd Sez: The ruling class exists. To ignore that fact totally misconstrues human society. That the DEMS are demagogues and ultra Statists is just fact. The current DEMS are just implementing what the statist Rockefeller Foundation complex inculcated, from environmentalism to global warming, etc. From pharos at gmail.com Mon Oct 14 16:46:27 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2013 17:46:27 +0100 Subject: [ExI] eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia In-Reply-To: <01c401cec8f0$e54825a0$afd870e0$@att.net> References: <01f101cec607$730f5b20$592e1160$@att.net> <02ef01cec63f$491a1b10$db4e5130$@att.net> <01f201cec6ad$8f504f50$adf0edf0$@att.net> <01cb01cec79f$1bd0f690$5372e3b0$@att.net> <019e01cec8e4$dfe1a9d0$9fa4fd70$@att.net> <01c401cec8f0$e54825a0$afd870e0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 4:20 PM, spike wrote: > Data and security hipsters, do offer me some guidance please. Why would the > government have set up a system (Healthcare.gov) which looks to me like > strong security just to go in and shop, or just to get a quote? I > understand the birthdate and address, because your age and state determine > your health insurance price. But why do they need to know your social > security number? And why the security questions? Just to shop? Couldn't > they ask for that only if you choose to buy something and pay with a credit > card? What if you wanted to use PayPal instead? Or get a paper bill in the > snail mail so you can pay with a check? Are you really going to give all > that information to an organization which recent had a top officer give > self-contradictory testimony, then invoke the fifth amendment? And that > apparent felon's boss was caught sharing confidential tax payer information > with unauthorized persons? And if so, are you completely crazy? > > Someone, do explain please: what (if anything) were they thinking? > > This flowchart may help..... BillK From lloydmillerus at yahoo.com Mon Oct 14 16:34:10 2013 From: lloydmillerus at yahoo.com (Lloyd Miller) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2013 12:34:10 -0400 Subject: [ExI] eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia In-Reply-To: <01c401cec8f0$e54825a0$afd870e0$@att.net> References: <01f101cec607$730f5b20$592e1160$@att.net> <02ef01cec63f$491a1b10$db4e5130$@att.net> <01f201cec6ad$8f504f50$adf0edf0$@att.net> <01cb01cec79f$1bd0f690$5372e3b0$@att.net> <019e01cec8e4$dfe1a9d0$9fa4fd70$@att.net> <01c401cec8f0$e54825a0$afd870e0$@att.net> Message-ID: <014501cec8fb$36465ad0$a2d31070$@yahoo.com> Someone, do explain please: what (if anything) were they thinking? Spike Lloyd Sez: Maxine Waters spilled the beans a few years ago that Obama DEMS would have the most powerful database in the world soon. . . From lloydmillerus at yahoo.com Mon Oct 14 16:38:24 2013 From: lloydmillerus at yahoo.com (Lloyd Miller) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2013 12:38:24 -0400 Subject: [ExI] [Bulk] Re: eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia In-Reply-To: <019e01cec8e4$dfe1a9d0$9fa4fd70$@att.net> References: <01f101cec607$730f5b20$592e1160$@att.net> <02ef01cec63f$491a1b10$db4e5130$@att.net> <01f201cec6ad$8f504f50$adf0edf0$@att.net> <01cb01cec79f$1bd0f690$5372e3b0$@att.net> <019e01cec8e4$dfe1a9d0$9fa4fd70$@att.net> Message-ID: <014601cec8fb$cda915c0$68fb4140$@yahoo.com> >>I am one who would benefit, being old. Perhaps more importantly, an axis for those who believe it will work vs those who do not? I do not. Lloyd Sez: Maybe NOT when the Medicare Cuts go into effect. Obama said already in that famous question and answer period that Grandma should have got a pill instead of a pacemaker. Pacemakers aren't even all that expensive, but compared to asprin? From spike66 at att.net Mon Oct 14 18:10:01 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2013 11:10:01 -0700 Subject: [ExI] eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia In-Reply-To: References: <01f101cec607$730f5b20$592e1160$@att.net> <02ef01cec63f$491a1b10$db4e5130$@att.net> <01f201cec6ad$8f504f50$adf0edf0$@att.net> <01cb01cec79f$1bd0f690$5372e3b0$@att.net> <019e01cec8e4$dfe1a9d0$9fa4fd70$@att.net> <01c401cec8f0$e54825a0$afd870e0$@att.net> Message-ID: <025f01cec908$9aebd070$d0c37150$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of BillK Subject: Re: [ExI] eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia On Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 4:20 PM, spike wrote: >>... Someone, do explain please: what (if anything) were they thinking? >...This flowchart may help..... >...BillK _______________________________________________ OK thanks BillK, that clears up the confusion. Oy vey. I don't know if this is true, but the rumor has it that the system tripped over how to handle rate structures for smokers. Before it was pretty simple: if you are an individual wanting health insurance and are a smoker, they would just sing you the Ray Charles song (Hit the road, Jack and don't you come back no more no more no more no more...) Simple, what part of NO do you not understand. Well OK then, now we have all these people who were previously uninsurable with all the big four: they eat too much, they drink too much, they smoke too much and they never exercise. Now these insurance companies are being forced to bet these folks are going to stay healthy, then are being told how much they can charge and how much they must pay. The system doesn't know how to handle the rate structure restrictions when the maximum rate difference between a 65 yr old smoker and a 25 year old non-smoker can have at most a factor of 3, when their health care costs differ by a factor of about 8. I don't know how they will do that either, but I can envision zombie mobs of elderly big-fours staggering towards the insurance company like that scene in Michael Jackson's Thriller. spike From rolandodegilead at gmail.com Mon Oct 14 18:34:19 2013 From: rolandodegilead at gmail.com (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Eugenio_Mart=EDnez?=) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2013 20:34:19 +0200 Subject: [ExI] eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia In-Reply-To: <025f01cec908$9aebd070$d0c37150$@att.net> References: <01f101cec607$730f5b20$592e1160$@att.net> <02ef01cec63f$491a1b10$db4e5130$@att.net> <01f201cec6ad$8f504f50$adf0edf0$@att.net> <01cb01cec79f$1bd0f690$5372e3b0$@att.net> <019e01cec8e4$dfe1a9d0$9fa4fd70$@att.net> <01c401cec8f0$e54825a0$afd870e0$@att.net> <025f01cec908$9aebd070$d0c37150$@att.net> Message-ID: Opinion from Europe: Universal healthcare system works. We in Spain spend ?1.500 ($2039) for person and it guarantees that everybody have access to free hospital, medics, expensive treatments etc. Works, and is hardly argueable because is a cuestion of numbers. (or worked: Popular Party is putting a lot of obstacles in order to desprestige it and sell the hospitals to private companies for no money. They have done it before with a lot of public system companies) Apart of the obvious advantages (you save lives, for god?s sake.. this is the most important), is cheaper. How many money for person do USA spend for their health? And, if you solve a contagious ill, it?s not going to spread, so you save a lot of money in the future. Yes, the smoker fallacie: You have to pay their treatments.. YES. And they have to pay your police if you are assaulted. They could say: "Not me, not my problem", but everybody pays taxes for the police. Anyway, yes, you pay the smokers treatment.. but they pay your mother?s pills. It?s a quid pro quo. On Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 8:10 PM, spike wrote: > > >... On Behalf Of BillK > Subject: Re: [ExI] eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: > Euthanasia > > On Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 4:20 PM, spike wrote: > > > >>... Someone, do explain please: what (if anything) were they thinking? > > > >...This flowchart may help..... > > < > http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/03/20/can-you-get-obam > acare-this-insanely-complicated-chart-will-tell-you/> > > >...BillK > _______________________________________________ > > OK thanks BillK, that clears up the confusion. > > Oy vey. > > I don't know if this is true, but the rumor has it that the system tripped > over how to handle rate structures for smokers. Before it was pretty > simple: if you are an individual wanting health insurance and are a smoker, > they would just sing you the Ray Charles song (Hit the road, Jack and don't > you come back no more no more no more no more...) Simple, what part of NO > do you not understand. > > Well OK then, now we have all these people who were previously uninsurable > with all the big four: they eat too much, they drink too much, they smoke > too much and they never exercise. Now these insurance companies are being > forced to bet these folks are going to stay healthy, then are being told > how > much they can charge and how much they must pay. > > The system doesn't know how to handle the rate structure restrictions when > the maximum rate difference between a 65 yr old smoker and a 25 year old > non-smoker can have at most a factor of 3, when their health care costs > differ by a factor of about 8. > > I don't know how they will do that either, but I can envision zombie mobs > of > elderly big-fours staggering towards the insurance company like that scene > in Michael Jackson's Thriller. > > spike > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -- OLVIDATE.DE Tatachan.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Mon Oct 14 19:03:32 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2013 12:03:32 -0700 Subject: [ExI] eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia In-Reply-To: References: <01f101cec607$730f5b20$592e1160$@att.net> <02ef01cec63f$491a1b10$db4e5130$@att.net> <01f201cec6ad$8f504f50$adf0edf0$@att.net> <01cb01cec79f$1bd0f690$5372e3b0$@att.net> <019e01cec8e4$dfe1a9d0$9fa4fd70$@att.net> <01c401cec8f0$e54825a0$afd870e0$@att.net> <025f01cec908$9aebd070$d0c37150$@att.net> Message-ID: <028a01cec910$14500010$3cf00030$@att.net> > On Behalf Of Eugenio Mart?nez Subject: Re: [ExI] eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia > Opinion from Europe: Universal healthcare system works Ja, thanks Eugenio. Some have been led to believe ObamaCare is universal healthcare or is a step towards it. As far as I can tell, it is neither. It is a tax-incentive to enter the health insurance market, with a bunch of rules which effectively defeat the value that health insurance companies add. The smoking is a good example. Before, if you wanted health insurance, the cigarettes had to go. This was a huge incentive to give up that habit. Now that?s gone. > Anyway, yes, you pay the smokers treatment OK then, I want a lot more control over the lives of smokers, a looooot more. Not just for tobacco use either, I have a list of things I want changed in the lives of those who get government-mandated health insurance. They will not like my list. Hey, I am paying, so I get a say in the matter. Otherwise I will just pay the tax for not having insurance and be done with it. Alternately, we could keep that individual mandate and even the subsidies, but allow health insurance companies to do what they do so very well: take into account all the known factors, then estimate your health cost risks and charge what it costs, rather than trying to overcharge some to subsidize others. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Mon Oct 14 20:10:13 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2013 13:10:13 -0700 Subject: [ExI] eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia In-Reply-To: <028a01cec910$14500010$3cf00030$@att.net> References: <01f101cec607$730f5b20$592e1160$@att.net> <02ef01cec63f$491a1b10$db4e5130$@att.net> <01f201cec6ad$8f504f50$adf0edf0$@att.net> <01cb01cec79f$1bd0f690$5372e3b0$@att.net> <019e01cec8e4$dfe1a9d0$9fa4fd70$@att.net> <01c401cec8f0$e54825a0$afd870e0$@att.net> <025f01cec908$9aebd070$d0c37150$@att.net> <028a01cec910$14500010$3cf00030$@att.net> Message-ID: <02d701cec919$6596a560$30c3f020$@att.net> My apologies for hammering on this please. Healthcare.gov, that same system which asks for all the information needed to clean out your bank account, including bank account numbers should you opt to have tax penalty deducted directly from your savings, has the following comment: You have no reasonable expectation of privacy regarding any communication or data transiting or stored on this informationsystem. At any time, and for any lawful Government purpose, the government may monitor, intercept, and search and seize any communication or data transiting or stored on this information system. Any communication or data transiting or stored on this information system may be disclosed or used for any lawful Government purpose. http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/obamacare-website-source-code-no-reasona ble-expectation-privacy_762489.html#read-more Is this an Orwellian nightmare, or am I hallucinating? They collect all this info, then just outright state that you have no reasonable expectation of privacy. You just dropped all manner of personal info into the public domain. How the hell can they set up strong security with all this private info, then after the fact casually say you cannot reasonably expect privacy? How do they figure? Is this really what our own government wanted? Ignore my previous screeds, do comment on this please. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rolandodegilead at gmail.com Mon Oct 14 20:39:54 2013 From: rolandodegilead at gmail.com (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Eugenio_Mart=EDnez?=) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2013 22:39:54 +0200 Subject: [ExI] eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia In-Reply-To: <02d701cec919$6596a560$30c3f020$@att.net> References: <01f101cec607$730f5b20$592e1160$@att.net> <02ef01cec63f$491a1b10$db4e5130$@att.net> <01f201cec6ad$8f504f50$adf0edf0$@att.net> <01cb01cec79f$1bd0f690$5372e3b0$@att.net> <019e01cec8e4$dfe1a9d0$9fa4fd70$@att.net> <01c401cec8f0$e54825a0$afd870e0$@att.net> <025f01cec908$9aebd070$d0c37150$@att.net> <028a01cec910$14500010$3cf00030$@att.net> <02d701cec919$6596a560$30c3f020$@att.net> Message-ID: If this: "Some have been led to believe ObamaCare is universal healthcare or is a step towards it." is right, I mean, if Obamacare is not an universal health care, it?s wrong and you are right: Is useless. Anyway, with Universal Healthcare, this "OK then, I want a lot more control over the lives of smokers, a looooot more" is not applicable. I mean: I could say: Ok. If you go out of house at night in a middle dangerous place I?d like to have a lot more control over your life, because I pay the police that saves you. On Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 10:10 PM, spike wrote: > ** ** > > My apologies for hammering on this please. Healthcare.gov, that same > system which asks for all the information needed to clean out your bank > account, including bank account numbers should you opt to have tax penalty > deducted directly from your savings, has the following comment:**** > > ** ** > > You have no reasonable expectation of privacy regarding any communication > or data transiting or stored on this informationsystem. At any time, and > for any lawful Government purpose, the government may monitor, intercept, > and search and seize any communication or data transiting or stored on this > information system. Any communication or data transiting or stored on this > information system may be disclosed or used for any lawful Government > purpose.**** > > ** ** > > > http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/obamacare-website-source-code-no-reasonable-expectation-privacy_762489.html#read-more > **** > > ** ** > > Is this an Orwellian nightmare, or am I hallucinating? They collect all > this info, then just outright state that you have no reasonable expectation > of privacy. You just dropped all manner of personal info into the public > domain. How the hell can they set up strong security with all this private > info, then after the fact casually say you cannot reasonably expect > privacy? How do they figure? Is this really what our own government > wanted?**** > > ** ** > > Ignore my previous screeds, do comment on this please.**** > > ** ** > > spike**** > > ** ** > > ** ** > > ** ** > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -- OLVIDATE.DE Tatachan.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Mon Oct 14 21:33:39 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2013 22:33:39 +0100 Subject: [ExI] eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia In-Reply-To: <02d701cec919$6596a560$30c3f020$@att.net> References: <01f101cec607$730f5b20$592e1160$@att.net> <02ef01cec63f$491a1b10$db4e5130$@att.net> <01f201cec6ad$8f504f50$adf0edf0$@att.net> <01cb01cec79f$1bd0f690$5372e3b0$@att.net> <019e01cec8e4$dfe1a9d0$9fa4fd70$@att.net> <01c401cec8f0$e54825a0$afd870e0$@att.net> <025f01cec908$9aebd070$d0c37150$@att.net> <028a01cec910$14500010$3cf00030$@att.net> <02d701cec919$6596a560$30c3f020$@att.net> Message-ID: On Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 9:10 PM, spike wrote: > http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/obamacare-website-source-code-no-reasonable-expectation-privacy_762489.html#read-more > > Is this an Orwellian nightmare, or am I hallucinating? They collect all > this info, then just outright state that you have no reasonable expectation > of privacy. You just dropped all manner of personal info into the public > domain. How the hell can they set up strong security with all this private > info, then after the fact casually say you cannot reasonably expect privacy? > How do they figure? Is this really what our own government wanted? > As the article explains, these sentences are found in the programmer's comments. They are NOT part of the terms shown to and agreed by clients. (You really don't want to go investigating the stuff that programmers leave in comments!) :) That said, if you search for - no reasonable expectation of privacy - then you will get a fright. Going by Supreme Court decisions, pretty much anything you send to the internet has little expectation of privacy. Any data given to the government can be shared to any other government agency, and also to pretty much anybody that the government decides has a need to know. You don't have any internet privacy left now (Just ask Eugen!). BillK From msd001 at gmail.com Tue Oct 15 00:38:55 2013 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2013 20:38:55 -0400 Subject: [ExI] What if humans were twice as intelligent? In-Reply-To: <525BD350.5010909@aleph.se> References: <525BBDB8.5060308@aleph.se> <525BD350.5010909@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 7:19 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > On 2013-10-14 11:00, BillK wrote: > >> On Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 10:47 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: >> >>> The point about personality mattering is very >>> true: intelligence is multiplicative with motivation, neither can >>> substitute >>> for the other. >>> >>> i.e. The evil genius will be twice as bad. (Smiles and strokes white >> cat). >> > > And have to contend with millions of peers. (Similes and strokes an > identical white cat) > > Where do evil geniuses source these cats? Are they lab-grown clones? Seems like an unhealthy dependence on a particular genotype. tbh, I first assumed they were the same cat (identity of indiscernibles) but that had the comical result of two smiling evil geniuses sharing the same pet; clearly that's just weird. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Tue Oct 15 00:42:52 2013 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2013 20:42:52 -0400 Subject: [ExI] idea for empty warehouses In-Reply-To: References: <010c01cec83b$ea79ce80$bf6d6b80$@att.net> <20131014051530.GA1751@crw.io> <01c301cec8ec$18de4520$4a9acf60$@att.net> Message-ID: On Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 12:25 PM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > > (And agreed re: the YouTube scenario being unrealistic for only having one > customer at a time. Not to mention, to many customers there's a network > effect: the total value to customers can be more than N times if N > customers are in at once. Granted, for some customers there's an > anti-network effect - less than N times as valuable - but these are a small > enough minority with a small enough negative that the average balances in > favor of "many at once".) > > This month is a perfect example: with all the pop-up Halloween stores and "Haunted House" entertainment. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Tue Oct 15 00:54:25 2013 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2013 20:54:25 -0400 Subject: [ExI] eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia In-Reply-To: <025f01cec908$9aebd070$d0c37150$@att.net> References: <01f101cec607$730f5b20$592e1160$@att.net> <02ef01cec63f$491a1b10$db4e5130$@att.net> <01f201cec6ad$8f504f50$adf0edf0$@att.net> <01cb01cec79f$1bd0f690$5372e3b0$@att.net> <019e01cec8e4$dfe1a9d0$9fa4fd70$@att.net> <01c401cec8f0$e54825a0$afd870e0$@att.net> <025f01cec908$9aebd070$d0c37150$@att.net> Message-ID: On Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 2:10 PM, spike wrote: > The system doesn't know how to handle the rate structure restrictions when > the maximum rate difference between a 65 yr old smoker and a 25 year old > non-smoker can have at most a factor of 3, when their health care costs > differ by a factor of about 8. > > I don't know how they will do that either, but I can envision zombie mobs > of > elderly big-fours staggering towards the insurance company like that scene > in Michael Jackson's Thriller. > > It could be worse, they could be spilling over walls like the zombies of World War Z. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Tue Oct 15 01:19:27 2013 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2013 21:19:27 -0400 Subject: [ExI] eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia In-Reply-To: <028a01cec910$14500010$3cf00030$@att.net> References: <01f101cec607$730f5b20$592e1160$@att.net> <02ef01cec63f$491a1b10$db4e5130$@att.net> <01f201cec6ad$8f504f50$adf0edf0$@att.net> <01cb01cec79f$1bd0f690$5372e3b0$@att.net> <019e01cec8e4$dfe1a9d0$9fa4fd70$@att.net> <01c401cec8f0$e54825a0$afd870e0$@att.net> <025f01cec908$9aebd070$d0c37150$@att.net> <028a01cec910$14500010$3cf00030$@att.net> Message-ID: On Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 3:03 PM, spike wrote: > Ja, thanks Eugenio. Some have been led to believe ObamaCare is universal > healthcare or is a step towards it. As far as I can tell, it is neither. > It is a tax-incentive to enter the health insurance market, with a bunch of > rules which effectively defeat the value that health insurance companies > add. The smoking is a good example. Before, if you wanted health > insurance, the cigarettes had to go. This was a huge incentive to give up > that habit. Now that?s gone. > > >?Anyway, yes, you pay the smokers treatment? > > OK then, I want a lot more control over the lives of smokers, a looooot > more. Not just for tobacco use either, I have a list of things I want > changed in the lives of those who get government-mandated health > insurance. They will not like my list. Hey, I am paying, so I get a say > in the matter. Otherwise I will just pay the tax for not having insurance > and be done with it. > > Alternately, we could keep that individual mandate and even the subsidies, > but allow health insurance companies to do what they do so very well: take > into account all the known factors, then estimate your health cost risks > and charge what it costs, rather than trying to overcharge some to > subsidize others. > > control over lives I view it being similar to how a rancher seeks control over the life of each member of his herd. The "health" of the individual isn't important because of some noble philosophy but because it is a for-profit product. Those lucky cattle that win the lottery and enjoy a grass-fed life ultimately fetch a higher price at the market to pay for all the aggravation entailed in the special handling. Is my analogy disturbing? yes, of course. Is my attitude (and the memeplex I maintain) a function of the environment we live in? yes, of course. I'll admit to being too unhealthy to propose a less-grim perspective. I think spike may be slightly more optimistic because he is still proposing solutions. I don't presume to know any. to be honest, I feel like even ranting about it publicly is approaching mindcrime. As the surveillance net noose tightens, it may be declared retroactive mindcrime. In the meantime, you have the right to continue to incriminate yourself. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Tue Oct 15 03:36:17 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2013 20:36:17 -0700 Subject: [ExI] surveillance noose: RE: eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia Message-ID: <015001cec957$b5e2f210$21a8d630$@att.net> >. On Behalf Of Mike Dougherty Subject: Re: [ExI] eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia >...to be honest, I feel like even ranting about it publicly is approaching mindcrime. As the surveillance net noose tightens, it may be declared retroactive mindcrime. In the meantime, you have the right to continue to incriminate yourself. Mike Those of us who have incriminated ourselves in this manner will be those who will be most spirited in the defense of freedom. Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/patrick.asp spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Tue Oct 15 04:35:27 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2013 21:35:27 -0700 Subject: [ExI] surveillance noose Message-ID: <017c01cec95f$f9c311b0$ed493510$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of spike Sent: Monday, October 14, 2013 8:36 PM To: 'ExI chat list' Subject: [ExI] surveillance noose: RE: eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia >. On Behalf Of Mike Dougherty Subject: Re: [ExI] eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia >>...to be honest, I feel like even ranting about it publicly is approaching mindcrime. As the surveillance net noose tightens, it may be declared retroactive mindcrime. In the meantime, you have the right to continue to incriminate yourself. Mike >.Those of us who have incriminated ourselves in this manner will be those who will be most spirited in the defense of freedom. spike My apologies for overposting today. This is an interesting question. I have never done anything more illegal than ripping the tag off a mattress I bought after I got it home. But I have criticized O-care with reckless abandon, both here and with personal online contact lists. Soon we shall see if we still have a first amendment in this country, or if criticism has become a crime: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/10/14/nsa-reportedly-collecting-million s-personal-online-contact-lists-worldwide/ Recall that this same government which is collecting all this stuff is the one which requires strong passwords and plenty of personal information just to shop on HealthCare.gov. In light of the ".no reasonable expectation of privacy." comment, can anyone explain why they would have done that? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Tue Oct 15 07:37:58 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2013 08:37:58 +0100 Subject: [ExI] What if humans were twice as intelligent? In-Reply-To: References: <525BBDB8.5060308@aleph.se> <525BD350.5010909@aleph.se> Message-ID: <525CF0D6.7060302@aleph.se> On 2013-10-15 01:38, Mike Dougherty wrote: > On Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 7:19 AM, Anders Sandberg > wrote: > > On 2013-10-14 11:00, BillK wrote: > > > i.e. The evil genius will be twice as bad. (Smiles and strokes > white cat). > > > And have to contend with millions of peers. (Similes and strokes > an identical white cat) > > > Where do evil geniuses source these cats? Are they lab-grown clones? > Seems like an unhealthy dependence on a particular genotype. There is an app for that: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/blofeld/id289049840?mt=8 (this is what I use during meetings to indicate that I got an evil idea) But just as there is http://www.privateislandsonline.com/ there has to be some cat cloning company. > tbh, I first assumed they were the same cat (identity of > indiscernibles) but that had the comical result of two smiling evil > geniuses sharing the same pet; clearly that's just weird. Yes, sharing is a skill most evil geniuses are bad at. Many of the best evil geniuses are into altruism bigtime (think of Trevor Goodchild), but *sharing* is not one of their skills. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Tue Oct 15 09:46:41 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2013 10:46:41 +0100 Subject: [ExI] eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia In-Reply-To: References: <01f101cec607$730f5b20$592e1160$@att.net> <02ef01cec63f$491a1b10$db4e5130$@att.net> <01f201cec6ad$8f504f50$adf0edf0$@att.net> <01cb01cec79f$1bd0f690$5372e3b0$@att.net> <019e01cec8e4$dfe1a9d0$9fa4fd70$@att.net> <01c401cec8f0$e54825a0$afd870e0$@att.net> <025f01cec908$9aebd070$d0c37150$@att.net> <028a01cec910$14500010$3cf00030$@att.net> Message-ID: On Tue, Oct 15, 2013 at 2:19 AM, Mike Dougherty wrote: > I think spike may be slightly more optimistic because he is still proposing > solutions. I don't presume to know any. > > to be honest, I feel like even ranting about it publicly is approaching > mindcrime. As the surveillance net noose tightens, it may be declared > retroactive mindcrime. In the meantime, you have the right to continue to > incriminate yourself. > > We now know that the NSA is collecting email address books and phone contact lists, so if Spike is incriminating himself, then all his contacts are obviously suspicious characters as well. (Hastily looks over shoulder). Given the six degrees of separation theory, it appears that the NSA now thinks that everyone in the world is a possible suspect. So, for security, the ideal solution is to jail or drone everybody except the NSA. Their future is an NSA enclave surrounded by smouldering wastelands. BillK From eugen at leitl.org Tue Oct 15 10:28:10 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2013 12:28:10 +0200 Subject: [ExI] eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia In-Reply-To: References: <01cb01cec79f$1bd0f690$5372e3b0$@att.net> <019e01cec8e4$dfe1a9d0$9fa4fd70$@att.net> <01c401cec8f0$e54825a0$afd870e0$@att.net> <025f01cec908$9aebd070$d0c37150$@att.net> <028a01cec910$14500010$3cf00030$@att.net> Message-ID: <20131015102810.GZ10405@leitl.org> On Tue, Oct 15, 2013 at 10:46:41AM +0100, BillK wrote: > So, for security, the ideal solution is to jail or drone everybody > except the NSA. > Their future is an NSA enclave surrounded by smouldering wastelands. Or you could defund TLAs, and jail the guys who broke laws, and kept lying to Congress. From eugen at leitl.org Tue Oct 15 12:39:04 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2013 14:39:04 +0200 Subject: [ExI] [Doctrinezero] Fwd: [London-Futurists] Books to review in London Futurists HOAs Message-ID: <20131015123904.GG10405@leitl.org> ----- Forwarded message from Zero State ----- Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2013 13:30:01 +0100 From: Zero State To: "doctrinezero at zerostate.is" Subject: [Doctrinezero] Fwd: [London-Futurists] Books to review in London Futurists HOAs Message-ID: Reply-To: doctrinezero at zerostate.is ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: David Wood Date: 15 October 2013 13:09 Subject: [London-Futurists] Books to review in London Futurists HOAs To: London-Futurists-announce at meetup.com Dear Futurists, This Sunday (20th October), another meetup in the open online series of London Futurists Hangout on Air takes place. It'a a panel discussion about issues raised by the recent novel "The Transhumanist Wager" by Zoltan Istvan. See *the event page * for more details of that meetup, and the team of distinguished panellists on this occasion: Giulio Prisco, Rick Searle, Chris T. Armstrong, and Zoltan himself. *Note 1:* a couple of people have asked me for more details about the concept of "Transhumanist" mentioned in the title of Zoltan's book. To provide some background, I've created a couple of pages over on the main London Futurists website: - *Transhumanist declarations *: This contains a couple of short videos and some background material (including the 1957 definition of the word "Transhumanism" by Julian Huxley) - *Technoprogressives and transhumanists *: A short video about varieties of different futurists, including (you guessed it) technoprogressives and transhumanists). *Note 2:* Depending on how quickly you can read, there's still (just about) enough time to download and read through *Zoltan's book * prior to the start time of the meetup (7pm UK time, i.e. BST = British Summer Time). That way, you'll probably enjoy the discussion more fully (though it's not a requirement to read the book before participating in the meetup). *Note 3:* We'll be using the Hangout On Air 'Questions' feature, which mean that people watching the meetup from *my Google+ page * will be able to raise questions for answer by the panellists, and to vote on questions raised by other viewers. This should help create a better sense of a connected community jointly participating in an online event. *But which books should feature in forthcoming London Futurist HOA panel reviews?* *This Google Moderator page *contains a number of suggestions. I invite you to get involved in voting suggestions Up or Down, and to raise your own suggestions. In casting votes, criteria you may like to consider include: - Is the book well-written? Was it a pleasure to read? - Does it raise important topics of interest to futurists? - Is the book something you would be happy to recommend to many of your friends that they should read it too? Or would you have reservations? - Is the book already a key part of discussion among people seriously interested in the future? You can also leave comments explaining your reasons for voting other suggestions Up or Down, or for having mixed feelings about a particular book. // David W. Wood Chair, London Futurists -- This message was sent by David Wood (davidw at deltawisdom.com) from London Futurists . To learn more about David Wood, visit his/her member profile To report abuse or block this person, please click here To unsubscribe from special announcements from your Organizer(s), click here Meetup, POB 4668 #37895 NY NY USA 10163 <#141bc05642eecd75_> | support at meetup.com -- Amon Kalkin WAVE: Positive Social Change Through Technology http://wavism.net _______________________________________________ Doctrinezero mailing list Doctrinezero at zerostate.is Unsubscribe: https://lists.zerostate.is/mailman/listinfo/doctrinezero ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5 From eugen at leitl.org Tue Oct 15 14:23:49 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2013 16:23:49 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Big nanotech: towards post-industrial manufacturing Message-ID: <20131015142348.GJ10405@leitl.org> http://www.theguardian.com/science/small-world/2013/oct/14/big-nanotech-post-industrial-manufacturing-apm Big nanotech: towards post-industrial manufacturing Atomically precise manufacturing (APM) could transform the material basis of human civilisation A factory emits smoke and steam on a cold winter day 'An APM system amounts to a factory in a box.' Photograph: Nick Suydam/Alamy What if nanotechnology could deliver on its original promise ? not only new, useful, nanoscale products, but a new, transformative production technology able to displace industrial production technologies and bring radical improvements in production cost, scope, and resource efficiency? What if we could raise the global material standard of living above that of today's richest nations, while reducing impacts on Earth's environment? What if we could manage a more rapid transition to zero net carbon emissions, and (yet more challenging) could afford to build the systems that would be required to capture, compress, and remove a trillion or so tons of industrial-era CO2 from the atmosphere? The technology in question is high-throughput atomically precise manufacturing (APM), a prospect that will emerge from technologies that will emerge from progress in atomically precise fabrication ? progress with ongoing and surprising achievements today. More concretely, one can think of APM as 3D printing perfected: a factory-in-a-box technology based on what, by analogy with 3D printers, could be called "nanofabbers". APM-based production technologies will bond molecules together to make larger and larger components, ultimately delivering products that range from computer chips to aircraft to photovoltaics and household goods. The principles of physics show that nanoscale machinery can direct bonding by guiding the motion of molecules (and then larger components), and the principles of engineering indicate that these nanoscale machines can and should resemble the machines found in factories today: built of gears and bearings, motors and conveyor belts ? smaller, different in detail, and yet guiding similar motions in similar ways. Why pay attention to a future technology? Transformative economic and environmental prospects give reason to take a close look at APM-level technologies, and all the more so because there's reason to think the prospects are real. For a suitably stodgy and weighty piece of evidence, in one of its many dust-gathering studies, the US National Academy of Sciences looked at the feasibility of APM and called for pursuing its development. For a document with less institutional weight but more technical detail, add to the stack the MIT doctoral dissertation (mine) that first explored the physics and engineering of APM. For another, add a technology roadmap for APM developed in conjunction with several of the US National Laboratories. (I mention these credentialed, technical documents to distinguish APM technologies from a clinging miasma of popularised mythologies ? Star Trek replicators, nanomagicbots and the like.) The potential of APM matters for our future because it is an aspect of the potential of 21st-century technologies. It's past time for a discussion of APM that begins with an understanding of what the technology is, its physical basis, and how it could transform the material basis of human civilisation. Perhaps the most surprising fact about APM is this: that it can be understood today, both in outline and in sufficient scientific detail to fathom its basic capabilities. This understanding is based on exploratory engineering, a game in which the rules require shunning unknowns, relying only on known science and engineering principles, a game of exploring potential technologies that can be designed and analysed within those rules. In other words, the rules require that the numbers can be checked, as they have been. In the mid-20th century, exploratory engineering established that liquid-fueled rockets could reach the moon. To achieve this required an immense amount of further, more detailed engineering, but the numbers left no room for doubt that the moon was within reach. Much the same is true today of APM. If the basic physical facts are so well established, why has the concept of APM-level technology been controversial? This is also understandable, but the story involves a tangle of science and fiction linked with money, press coverage, Washington politics and sheer confusion. For now, however, I'd like to set the confusion aside and outline the concept itself. What kind of technology? An APM system amounts to a factory in a box, but a kind of factory with extraordinary capabilities. To understand the potential of this kind of factory, consider the following comparison: APM strongly parallels today's leading nanotechnology: the nanoelectronic technology that powers the information revolution. Today's nanotechnology of digital electronics uses intricate arrays of high-frequency, nanoscale electronic devices to move bits and bytes from place to place and put them together to make precise patterns of information ? perhaps an image displayed on a tablet computer. Tomorrow's nanotechnology of atomically precise manufacturing will use intricate arrays of high-frequency, nanoscale mechanical devices to move atoms and molecules from place to place and put them together to make precise patterns of matter ? perhaps an actual, physical tablet computer. Nanoelectronic information technologies can put a computer in a desktop box; Nanomechanical APM technologies can put a factory in a desktop box. Digital electronics provides a general-purpose technology in the world of information products; atomically precise manufacturing will provide a general-purpose technology in the world of physical products, somewhat like 3D printing, but able to do much, much more. What does "general purpose" mean here? Consider the digital analogy again: patterns of bits and bytes can form a virtually infinite range of images made from a limited range of pixels; patterns of atoms and molecules can likewise form a virtually infinite range of physical products made from a large yet limited range of materials. In 3D printing technology, fabbers cross over to making physical products, building with bits of material in place of pixels. APM-based production systems (nanofabbers?) will work with a wider range of materials and ultimate precision: the range of potential APM products includes not only devices like tablet computers with a billion processor cores and good battery life, but also lightweight ultrastrong structures for aircraft, engines for high-performance zero-emission vehicles, and rolls of solar photovoltaic cells flexible and tough enough use in resurfacing a road. Questions and more questions? Prospects for atomically precise manufacturing raise many questions, as I know from giving talks on the subject to both technical and general audiences. I've outlined answers to only the most basic questions above ? questions that are directly linked to the physics and engineering of APM-based production. Here are some further and broader questions: ? What does APM have to do with the rest of nanotechnology? ? What is the state of relevant research, and what's next? ? When can we expect to see applications? ? What are the potential benefits and risks? ? What are the points of leverage today? I'll explore some of these questions in later posts on this blog. ? Eric Drexler, often called "the father of nanotechnology", is currently at Oxford with the Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology, where he completed his recent book, Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization From spike66 at att.net Tue Oct 15 15:54:01 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2013 08:54:01 -0700 Subject: [ExI] surveillance noose In-Reply-To: <017c01cec95f$f9c311b0$ed493510$@att.net> References: <017c01cec95f$f9c311b0$ed493510$@att.net> Message-ID: <012301cec9be$c5839ff0$508adfd0$@att.net> >. On Behalf Of spike >.Recall that this same government which is collecting all this stuff is the one which requires strong passwords and plenty of personal information just to shop on HealthCare.gov. In light of the ".no reasonable expectation of privacy." comment, can anyone explain why they would have done that? spike OK found the answer. This was a huge debate in the design of HealthCare.gov from the start: whether to allow anonymous window shopping in the insurance markets. The short version of the story is that after much discussion, the Fed decided to disallow anonymous insurance shopping, and defeat the creation of pseudonym accounts. But most of the state exchanges, faced with the same question, decided to allow anonymous shopping. The 14 state exchanges that allow anonymous shopping before purchase are said to be mostly working, but the fed site has become an epic fail worthy of its own fail poster. The US gov has demonstrated repeatedly that it is an untrustworthy and incompetent recipient of personal information. So most people decided to not hand over that information just to shop. Imagine that. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Wed Oct 16 03:17:03 2013 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2013 23:17:03 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Tap tap..Hello? Is this thing on? (Or Zombie Apocalypse!) In-Reply-To: <755D81DC-0949-4A64-A634-C225E3A0596F@me.com> References: <755D81DC-0949-4A64-A634-C225E3A0596F@me.com> Message-ID: On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 4:33 AM, Omar Rahman wrote: > > Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 23:45:17 -0400 > From: Rafal Smigrodzki > To: ExI chat list > Subject: Re: [ExI] Tap tap..Hello? Is this thing on? (Or Zombie > Apocalypse!) > Message-ID: > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 > > (I wrote) > > Congress gave the president > > about 99% of the money he needs to run the government. The president > refused to run the government, and shut it down. He could have taken > the money and done his job but refused to. > > Do you agree that the president shut down the government? > > > Omar wrote: > > In a word; no. > > > You said, "Congress gave the president about 99% of the money he needs to > run the government." This is just plain wrong. > > Congress is a bicameral legislature and it failed to pass an appropriations > bill. The president had nothing to sign or veto, hence the president didn't > shut down the government. ### The House of Representatives passed the appropriations bill. You could claim that Mr Reid, who is the Senate Democrat leader, shut down the government by refusing to confirm the House bill. This would be fail to adequately describe reality - Mr Reid would not act in this way without approval from Mr Obama. Hence, Mr Obama, in concert with Mr Reid and other Democrats, shut down the government. ---------------- > > What is far more likely to happen, as pointed to by the repeated use of the > phrase "full faith and confidence of the government of the United States" by > the president, is that this will reach a crisis level equal to that of a > "national emergency" and the president will then be able to use "emergency > powers" to resolve the standoff. ### In other words, as soon as democratic procedure does not yield what you personally want, you wish to have a dictator ("elected" in a rigged vote) take over. The wishes of others need not be heeded. -------------- I am also quoting a bit more of your post: > > I'm guessing that even the most fanatical, racist, and fascist elements of > the Tea Party will cave in before then. They should be called the Koolaid > Party because they really seem to have 'drunk the koolaid'. and: > > In general; "He of the Orange glow and Weepy eyes" afraid of the "Brethren > of Koolaid" who made loud 'ugg ugg' for many time in the place of 50 clan > chiefs. Great sky spirt X, Y, and Z has revealed to the Brethren of Koolaid > that most harmful thing for people is 'healthcare' and best thing for people > is big more guns. Now the Brethren of Koolaid make loud 'ugg ugg' in all > place and no give gold rocks to nobody never nohow nowhen nowhy. NO NO NO! > UGG UGG! > > Until Main Street, Wall Street, and K Street finally have had enough and > kick them right where they will say 'UGG uggg uggggg....' > > Are we clear? ### What is clear to me is that you have a tendency to deride people who disagree with you in a very crude, contemptuous manner. I can only hold up the example of other members of the list for you to learn from. Have you ever seen e.g. Anders behave like you? This explains why you are so comfortable with running roughshod over the wishes of others - if they are fascist troglodytes, why should anyone care? Live and learn. From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Wed Oct 16 03:32:11 2013 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2013 23:32:11 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Another step towards uploading In-Reply-To: <20131011122126.GA10405@leitl.org> References: <20131011122126.GA10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 8:21 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > If there's a poor cryonics presence in your area, don't > expect that by paying your member dues the situation will magically > fix itself. You have to become a little more proactive. > > Many people all over the world are facing that problem, let's > organize, that everybody can help themselves. ### I live in VA, only a couple of hours' flight from Scottsdale, so I am reasonably well covered (although not as well as Californians or Arizonians). The biggest problem could be a sudden death or unexpected terminal hospital admission with loss of the ability to contact Alcor (e.g. car accident with brain trauma, followed by ICU stay and death) - in this situation you are screwed even if you live in Scottsdale itself. I wonder how difficult would it be to adapt a personal medical monitoring system to cryonics needs. A device continuously worn on your wrist, like an active cryonics bracelet, with the ability to wirelessly scream for Alcor if you stop moving and body temperature drops, would be pretty cool. The same device might be also readable by EMS, and could contain power-of-attorney information, so the likelihood of inappropriate end-of-life care would be reduced. Rafal From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Wed Oct 16 03:49:46 2013 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2013 23:49:46 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: <20131011092745.GC10405@leitl.org> References: <20130927055747.GI10405@leitl.org> <20131001121829.GR10405@leitl.org> <20131009203347.GA10405@leitl.org> <20131010062556.GF10405@leitl.org> <20131011092745.GC10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 5:27 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > Thermodynamics trumps economics. ### Nah, it's the other way round. Not in the sense that money could buy the perpetuum mobile but in the sense that our primary limitations are not absolute, low level physical limits (e.g. total radiative capacity of Earth at 500C surface temperature) but rather high-level cognitive and social issues (stupidity, dominance, parasitism) that keep us now at a level many orders of magnitude away from the physical limits. ------------------- I tend to focus on thermodynamics > vs. ecology because it's both a short-term large-scale problem > and also a benchmark. It's useless trying to explain > generic overshoot if you can't explain the one facet of it: > the energy limitations. It's simple problem, we have lots of > empirical data, yet that benchmark already indicates a failure. ### The inability to finish Yucca Mountain has nothing to do with thermodynamics. Societal failure is like rotting fish - it starts at the head. Rafal From spike66 at att.net Wed Oct 16 03:51:36 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2013 20:51:36 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Tap tap..Hello? Is this thing on? (Or Zombie Apocalypse!) In-Reply-To: References: <755D81DC-0949-4A64-A634-C225E3A0596F@me.com> Message-ID: <03a901ceca23$03f83f70$0be8be50$@att.net> Rafal Smigrodzki ... ### The House of Representatives passed the appropriations bill... A way to state all this taking personalities and parties out of it for the sake of non-USian readers would be as follows: The government passed a law with a new twist in it: the individual mandate looked to most of us like the government ordering us to do something, buy health insurance. The government cannot order its citizens to do something. It can only order us to not do something. The Supreme Court court decided the constitution does allow the individual mandate if the penalty for not buying insurance is declared a tax. Declaring the penalty a tax has interesting implications. The House of Representatives controls taxation and spending. So under the constitution, the House has the authority to set the penalty for non-compliance anywhere it sees fit (since it is a tax) and to fund the law where it sees fit (since it is spending.) That means the body which has full constitutional authority over the law is now in the hands of the party which voted against it in perfect unison. The Senate and the presidency are in the hands of the other party. They refuse to accept the authority of the opposing party over this law, as granted by the constitution and affirmed by the Supreme Court. So, those two seats of power, the Senate and the president, veto any appropriations bill the House sends up, all the way until the nation is on the verge of default. By that line of reasoning, the Senate and the president are responsible for the partial shutdown and now threaten to send the government into default unless the final irony is passed. Final irony is seen tonight, two days before default. The House and the Senate have worked closer and closer to a deal, with the exception being the House wants a version of the appropriations bill which requires congress to be subject to the health care law. The senate is refusing that provision, and wants instead its own nearly identical bill but exempts congress from the healthcare law that they are imposing on the rest of us. So we see the Senate willing to send the government into default in order to impose the healthcare law on the citizens and simultaneously exempt themselves from that law. Any questions? spike From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Wed Oct 16 04:04:47 2013 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 00:04:47 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Smallest human-equivalent device In-Reply-To: <20131011083729.GZ10405@leitl.org> References: <20131011083729.GZ10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On 10/11/13, Eugen Leitl wrote: > I agree. However, there's a widespread tendency to underestimate > what evolutionary-driven biology has managed to accomplish in > a few gigayears. A synapse is pretty damn small > > http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v12/n7/box/nrn3025_BX2.html > > Characteristic sizes of the synaptic complex > > Synaptic active zone diameter: 300 ? 150 nm > Synaptic vesicle diameter: 35 ? 0.3 up to 50 nm > Synaptic cleft width: 20 ? 2.8 nm > Number of docked vesicles: 10 ? 5 > Total number of vesicle per synaptic bouton: 270 ? 180 ### And not to forget the post-synaptic structures, which contain hundreds of precisely tuned protein complexes that allow finely graded ajustments of synaptic strength. Still, I am sure there is physics that allows signal processing of the same type as synapse (adjustable gain, summation, conditional gain adjustment) and does not use diffusion and gets the job done in a smaller volume. Evolution is locked in a wet organic substrate, designers of upload substrates are not. Definitely many order of magnitude speed gains and most likely substantial size reductions are possible here. ---------------- > >> There should be large improvements just from removing metabolism from >> the brain. Human brain already does a little bit of that: Neurons > > Metabolism is dual-use here, because the elements are active. > You can complain about hydration, but diffusion is very efficient > on microscale, and there *is* active transport. We can complain > about homeostasis, but hardware configurability depends on > the same mechanisms. In nanoscale solid-state you're pretty much > limited to arrays of static elements with very low intrinsic > connectivity, so you have to state the network layer in terms > of such syntax. Look at 10^4 connectivity, and look at the > space it takes. ### This is a very good remark. I do think that a neuromorphic system could be done with spatially separated layers, a solid state gain adjustment layer analogous to learning in existing synapses and a network reconfiguration layer analogous to the synaptogenesis/synaptic elimination aspect of learning. The reconfiguration layer may require some molecular rather than electron movement but you should be still able to keep metabolism out of most parts of the device. -------------------- > > 100-1 cm^3 vs. ~1400 cm^3 is a very large percentage. ### ?? Rafal From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Wed Oct 16 04:16:01 2013 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 00:16:01 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Smallest human-equivalent device In-Reply-To: <5259888E.6040202@aleph.se> References: <20131011083729.GZ10405@leitl.org> <5259888E.6040202@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Sat, Oct 12, 2013 at 1:36 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > > In fact, some approaches to neuromorphic hardware try to use analog > electronics to get away from the messiness of adders and multipliers - the > above operations can be done relatively neatly that way using. But the > power, precision and low price of digital electronics tends to win most of > the time. > > In the end, it is not obvious to me that a digital synapse can be made using > silicon tech smaller than a real synapse. I would be surprised if an analog > couldn't be done. Similarly speeding things up might be eminently doable, > but while digital systems can vary clock frequencies continuously an analog > synapse would actually be stuck at a single speed. > ### I am fan of the locally-analog, systemwide-digital approach - after all, Mother Nature used it to make us. That single speed of the analog analog of a synapse isn't a problem if it is, well, the top speed :) From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Wed Oct 16 04:37:18 2013 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 00:37:18 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Smallest human-equivalent device In-Reply-To: <016e01cec848$8dd9ba20$a98d2e60$@att.net> References: <20131011083729.GZ10405@leitl.org> <5259888E.6040202@aleph.se> <00a101cec82f$a22bf150$e683d3f0$@att.net> <20131013180258.GR10405@leitl.org> <016e01cec848$8dd9ba20$a98d2e60$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sun, Oct 13, 2013 at 3:15 PM, spike wrote: > > We could imagine retrofitting existing cars with the sensors, but that would > be costly. ### If you watch Mythbusters, they retrofit jalopies for remote control on the cheap. A fully doped out driving computer might make do with 6 - 7 cameras and some microphones for its sensor suite, all off the shelf stuff. Adding autonomous driving capability to random old cars should be quite cheap eventually - although it's possible that the software/system vendors would initially refuse to offer retrofit kits and rather try to push new cars out. ---------------- I can imagine a next-generation idea: driving robots capable of > taking a current Detroit and driving it unmodified, as is. It would need to > be able to take the keys, open the door, get in, start the car, drive it > somewhere safely, come back, lock it and leave. ### Eh, with trivial modifications that robot could drive to your house and stay, as long as you wished to pay for her company..... but that's a whole new generation, indeed. Rafal From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Wed Oct 16 04:50:51 2013 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 00:50:51 -0400 Subject: [ExI] [Bulk] Re: eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia In-Reply-To: References: <01f101cec607$730f5b20$592e1160$@att.net> <02ef01cec63f$491a1b10$db4e5130$@att.net> <01f201cec6ad$8f504f50$adf0edf0$@att.net> <01cb01cec79f$1bd0f690$5372e3b0$@att.net> <033301cec7a9$21a699d0$64f3cd70$@yahoo.com> <20131013083137.GJ10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Sun, Oct 13, 2013 at 1:55 PM, John Clark wrote: > > I guess, it's just that right at this minute my long range planing and > concerns don't extend much beyond Thursday. > >> >> > Don't buy into staged fights between two wings of the same party. > > > I hope it's a stage fight because that would imply a script exists, but I > think its like a toddler playing with a loaded automatic pistol and the > Republicans don't know what they're doing or how dangerous it is. ### I don't understand the doom mood. Obviously, there is no possibility of Republicans causing as USG default. The government has all the money it needs to keep paying its debts, since tax receipts continue. Only a premeditated decision by the executive branch to withhold payment (despite having the funds) could cause a default. This is not going to happen, one way or another. So all this talking about default is only a smokescreen. Rafal From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Wed Oct 16 04:54:33 2013 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 00:54:33 -0400 Subject: [ExI] [Bulk] Re: eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia In-Reply-To: <008701cec825$bb454fb0$31cfef10$@att.net> References: <01f101cec607$730f5b20$592e1160$@att.net> <02ef01cec63f$491a1b10$db4e5130$@att.net> <01f201cec6ad$8f504f50$adf0edf0$@att.net> <01cb01cec79f$1bd0f690$5372e3b0$@att.net> <033301cec7a9$21a699d0$64f3cd70$@yahoo.com> <20131013083137.GJ10405@leitl.org> <03b501cec81c$4f8a8280$ee9f8780$@yahoo.com> <008701cec825$bb454fb0$31cfef10$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sun, Oct 13, 2013 at 11:06 AM, spike wrote: > > > -----Original Message----- > From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org > [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of BillK > >>...But this is not the place for conspiracy theories or shouting political > slogans like 'Reps Good, Dems bad!'. > Neither look likely to solve the present problems... BillK > > Seconded. Political advocacy is not welcome here. ### I don't think Lloyd says "Reps Good, Dems bad" or advances conspiracy theories. He said they were blithering fools and cunning tyrants, respectively. That hardly counts as advocacy. Rafal From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Wed Oct 16 04:58:20 2013 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 00:58:20 -0400 Subject: [ExI] eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia In-Reply-To: References: <01f101cec607$730f5b20$592e1160$@att.net> <02ef01cec63f$491a1b10$db4e5130$@att.net> <01f201cec6ad$8f504f50$adf0edf0$@att.net> <01cb01cec79f$1bd0f690$5372e3b0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 6:50 AM, BillK wrote: > > The O-care system wasn't actually built by the guv'mnt. ### Who paid for it? Gummint. Who made up the bullshit rules? Gummint. Who hired the cronies who actually coded the bullshit into a dystopian reality? Gummint. So, Ocare was built by gummint. Rafal From eugen at leitl.org Wed Oct 16 06:33:18 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 08:33:18 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Another step towards uploading In-Reply-To: References: <20131011122126.GA10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20131016063318.GN10405@leitl.org> On Tue, Oct 15, 2013 at 11:32:11PM -0400, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > I wonder how difficult would it be to adapt a personal medical > monitoring system to cryonics needs. A device continuously worn on > your wrist, like an active cryonics bracelet, with the ability to > wirelessly scream for Alcor if you stop moving and body temperature > drops, would be pretty cool. The same device might be also readable by > EMS, and could contain power-of-attorney information, so the > likelihood of inappropriate end-of-life care would be reduced. This is being worked upon, albeit slowly. The current spike of activity was due to availability of cheap and reliable monitoring devices from the quantified self movement. We don't have anything sufficiently reliable yet, but that is a question of time. From eugen at leitl.org Wed Oct 16 06:36:14 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 08:36:14 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Smallest human-equivalent device In-Reply-To: References: <20131011083729.GZ10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20131016063614.GO10405@leitl.org> On Wed, Oct 16, 2013 at 12:04:47AM -0400, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > > > > 100-1 cm^3 vs. ~1400 cm^3 is a very large percentage. > > ### ?? The range of 1...100 cm^3 vs ~1.4 l. From rahmans at me.com Wed Oct 16 13:08:27 2013 From: rahmans at me.com (Omar Rahman) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 15:08:27 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Tap tap..Hello? Is this thing on? (Or Zombie Apocalypse!) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <464AC9FE-3ECB-4779-9CFB-65632E925E2D@me.com> Dear Rafa?, Let me begin by apologising. It was not my intent to 'run roughshod' over anyone, simple to inject a bit of humour into what to me is a pharisaical situation. While I may not agree with your political opinions I do respect you as a scientist, list member, and as a human being. However; > Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2013 23:17:03 -0400 > From: Rafal Smigrodzki > To: ExI chat list > Subject: Re: [ExI] Tap tap..Hello? Is this thing on? (Or Zombie > Apocalypse!) > Message-ID: > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 > > On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 4:33 AM, Omar Rahman wrote: >> >> Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 23:45:17 -0400 >> From: Rafal Smigrodzki >> To: ExI chat list >> Subject: Re: [ExI] Tap tap..Hello? Is this thing on? (Or Zombie >> Apocalypse!) >> Message-ID: >> >> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 >> >> (I wrote) >> >> Congress gave the president >> >> about 99% of the money he needs to run the government. The president >> refused to run the government, and shut it down. He could have taken >> the money and done his job but refused to. >> >> Do you agree that the president shut down the government? >> >> >> Omar wrote: >> >> In a word; no. >> >> >> You said, "Congress gave the president about 99% of the money he needs to >> run the government." This is just plain wrong. >> >> Congress is a bicameral legislature and it failed to pass an appropriations >> bill. The president had nothing to sign or veto, hence the president didn't >> shut down the government. > > ### The House of Representatives passed the appropriations bill. You > could claim that Mr Reid, who is the Senate Democrat leader, shut down > the government by refusing to confirm the House bill. This would be > fail to adequately describe reality - Mr Reid would not act in this > way without approval from Mr Obama. Hence, Mr Obama, in concert with > Mr Reid and other Democrats, shut down the government. > ---------------- The Senate has no obligation whatsoever to rubber-stamp the House's bills. That's just not how it's designed to work. It matters not what their supposed motivations. >> >> What is far more likely to happen, as pointed to by the repeated use of the >> phrase "full faith and confidence of the government of the United States" by >> the president, is that this will reach a crisis level equal to that of a >> "national emergency" and the president will then be able to use "emergency >> powers" to resolve the standoff. > > ### In other words, as soon as democratic procedure does not yield > what you personally want, you wish to have a dictator ("elected" in a > rigged vote) take over. The wishes of others need not be heeded. > > -------------- This is not a bug it's a feature. If the rest of the government fails to act, or there is some other national emergency, the President has been empowered to act within the framework of "Emergency Powers". In terms of 'democratic pressure', the last presidential election was run primarily on this issue and the people spoke in favour of Obama/"Obamacare". In terms of 'democratic pressure', the democratic party holds a majority in the Senate. In terms of 'democratic pressure', the democratic party got (many) more votes for members of the House but thanks to Republican gerrymandering (which happens at a state level) they failed to get a majority. > I am also quoting a bit more of your post: > >> >> I'm guessing that even the most fanatical, racist, and fascist elements of >> the Tea Party will cave in before then. They should be called the Koolaid >> Party because they really seem to have 'drunk the koolaid'. > > and: > >> >> In general; "He of the Orange glow and Weepy eyes" afraid of the "Brethren >> of Koolaid" who made loud 'ugg ugg' for many time in the place of 50 clan >> chiefs. Great sky spirt X, Y, and Z has revealed to the Brethren of Koolaid >> that most harmful thing for people is 'healthcare' and best thing for people >> is big more guns. Now the Brethren of Koolaid make loud 'ugg ugg' in all >> place and no give gold rocks to nobody never nohow nowhen nowhy. NO NO NO! >> UGG UGG! >> >> Until Main Street, Wall Street, and K Street finally have had enough and >> kick them right where they will say 'UGG uggg uggggg....' >> >> Are we clear? > > ### What is clear to me is that you have a tendency to deride people > who disagree with you in a very crude, contemptuous manner. I can only > hold up the example of other members of the list for you to learn > from. Have you ever seen e.g. Anders behave like you? This explains > why you are so comfortable with running roughshod over the wishes of > others - if they are fascist troglodytes, why should anyone care? > > Live and learn. I ascend into the realms of humour when faced with the absurd. This seems to me to be a healthy reaction. At no time have I made fun of you personally Rafa?, unless indirectly if are a Tea Party (Brethren of the Koolaid) member. I will not apologise for making fun of the Tea Party though. I find them threatening and offensive in the extreme and see no reason to coddle their feelings. Regards, Omar Rahman P.S. Anders does rock! I've watched him on YouTube and I'm a fan I think! Squeeeee! P.P.S. If someone is a fascist troglodyte they will by definition try to kill/enslave/disempower/repress some group and I hope that I find the courage to oppose them if that day comes. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Wed Oct 16 13:17:57 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 15:17:57 +0200 Subject: [ExI] [CryonicsVitalSignsAlerts] Quantified Self Forums Message-ID: <20131016131757.GD10405@leitl.org> ----- Forwarded message from ben_best_ci ----- Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 11:29:45 -0000 From: ben_best_ci To: CryonicsVitalSignsAlerts at yahoogroups.com Subject: [CryonicsVitalSignsAlerts] Quantified Self Forums Message-ID: User-Agent: eGroups-EW/0.82 X-Mailer: Yahoo Groups Message Poster Reply-To: CryonicsVitalSignsAlerts at yahoogroups.com Last week I was able to attend the 2013 Quantified Self conference in San Francisco. It was a fantastic experience. I am now geared-up to quantify myself in even more ways than 23andme, blood tests, etc. There was an exhibitors' area at the conference. One of the more promising products that I saw was Vital Connect http://www.vitalconnect.com/ which will reportedly be available in the first quarter of 2014. I have had so many disappointments in the past that I am not holding my breath, but they do seem credible. There is much that life extensionists can appreciate at a Quantified Self conference. The QS community is a bunch of folks gathering data about themselves for the purpose of self-improvement in a wide range of areas, health in particular. They have forums that are open for participation by anyone, so I would encourage anyone interested in this area to investigate: https://forum.quantifiedself.com/ -- Ben Best --- In CryonicsVitalSignsAlerts at yahoogroups.com, "ben_best_ci" wrote: > > > I am at the SENS Conference in Cambridge, England > where I ran into Brent Erskin. Brent was formerly > involved in the Toronto cryonics group, but he is > now living in northern British Columbia (Rupert, > Terrace area). > > Aside from his hospital networking expertise, > Brent is an expert in Apple apps, which he says > are much more advanced and numerous than what is > available for Android devices. Brent has been > very interested in the subject of vital signs > monitoring -- not simply as alerts of the > moment of death, but to provide alerts that > would allow prediction of impending death > (which would be better for cryonics purposes > than an alarm after death has occurred). > > Brent has attended two of the Quantified > Self" conferences. > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantified_Self > > I have booked a flight to attend the upcoming > conference in October, although Brent says he > will not be attending this one. > > http://quantifiedself.com/topics/conference-2/ > > Brent is currently most excited about "Scanadu Scout" > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanadu > > http://www.scanadu.com/scout/ > > which is expected to be released before the end > of 2013. It is a device uses optics to read blood > values when held next to the forehead. This is not > continuous monitoring. It does not appear to me to > give heart rate and blood pressure, but Brent claims > that it will. Of course, we still want a device that > will send an alarm to a call center -- and provide > GPS information about the location and identity > of the sender. > > I have invited Brent to join this group, and hope > that he will contribute his extensive knowledge about > medical device apps. And get the discussion going-again > on this Yahoo Group. > > -- Ben Best > ------------------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CryonicsVitalSignsAlerts/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CryonicsVitalSignsAlerts/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: CryonicsVitalSignsAlerts-digest at yahoogroups.com CryonicsVitalSignsAlerts-fullfeatured at yahoogroups.com <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: CryonicsVitalSignsAlerts-unsubscribe at yahoogroups.com <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://info.yahoo.com/legal/us/yahoo/utos/terms/ ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5 From rahmans at me.com Wed Oct 16 13:30:02 2013 From: rahmans at me.com (Omar Rahman) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 15:30:02 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Tap tap..Hello? Is this thing on? (Or Zombie Apocalypse!) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <93F7CEE9-D437-4D89-9C64-459AA4A422F4@me.com> > > Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2013 20:51:36 -0700 > From: "spike" > To: , "'ExI chat list'" > > Subject: Re: [ExI] Tap tap..Hello? Is this thing on? (Or Zombie > Apocalypse!) > Message-ID: <03a901ceca23$03f83f70$0be8be50$@att.net> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" > > > Rafal Smigrodzki > ... > ### The House of Representatives passed the appropriations bill... > > A way to state all this taking personalities and parties out of it for the > sake of non-USian readers would be as follows: > > The government passed a law with a new twist in it: the individual mandate > looked to most of us like the government ordering us to do something, buy > health insurance. The government cannot order its citizens to do something. > It can only order us to not do something. The Supreme Court court decided > the constitution does allow the individual mandate if the penalty for not > buying insurance is declared a tax. The government can and does have the power to order it's citizens to do something. For example we must provide education to our children either in schools or through homeschooling. I like education. It used to issue draft notices. I'm not so keen on that. There are probably lots more examples but these two will suffice. Oh, car insurance is another one that comes to mind due to relevance. > > Declaring the penalty a tax has interesting implications. The House of > Representatives controls taxation and spending. So under the constitution, > the House has the authority to set the penalty for non-compliance anywhere > it sees fit (since it is a tax) and to fund the law where it sees fit (since > it is spending.) That means the body which has full constitutional > authority over the law is now in the hands of the party which voted against > it in perfect unison. > > The Senate and the presidency are in the hands of the other party. They > refuse to accept the authority of the opposing party over this law, as > granted by the constitution and affirmed by the Supreme Court. So, those > two seats of power, the Senate and the president, veto any appropriations > bill the House sends up, all the way until the nation is on the verge of > default. > > By that line of reasoning, the Senate and the president are responsible for > the partial shutdown and now threaten to send the government into default > unless the final irony is passed. > > Final irony is seen tonight, two days before default. The House and the > Senate have worked closer and closer to a deal, with the exception being the > House wants a version of the appropriations bill which requires congress to > be subject to the health care law. The senate is refusing that provision, > and wants instead its own nearly identical bill but exempts congress from > the healthcare law that they are imposing on the rest of us. So we see the > Senate willing to send the government into default in order to impose the > healthcare law on the citizens and simultaneously exempt themselves from > that law. > > Any questions? > > spike This is an interesting take on things but as I've said before elsewhere, the Senate has no duty to rubber-stamp any bill sent up by the House. I really have no interest in playing the 'blame game' but the Republicans did sign an open letter stating that they would shut down the government unless "Obamacare" was defunded/destroyed/whatever. This is all part of a political game where the Republicans are backing themselves into the corners of their gerrymandered districts. They have placed themselves so firmly on the wrong side on demographic trends that just to remain 'centrist' the Democratic party has slid to the right just from the huge power vacuum the Republicans are creating. I'm sure that somehow it is ironic that the members of Congress, even radical Tea Party people I assume, have the government funded health care that they are so afraid of. Why would you personally Spike pass a bill that took away your government funded health care so that you could get government funded health care? It seems quite logical to strip that nonsensical provision from the bill. Regards, Omar Rahman -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Wed Oct 16 14:19:10 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 07:19:10 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Tap tap..Hello? Is this thing on? (Or Zombie Apocalypse!) In-Reply-To: <464AC9FE-3ECB-4779-9CFB-65632E925E2D@me.com> References: <464AC9FE-3ECB-4779-9CFB-65632E925E2D@me.com> Message-ID: <00fb01ceca7a$af7cdde0$0e7699a0$@att.net> On Behalf Of Omar Rahman Subject: Re: [ExI] Tap tap..Hello? Is this thing on? (Or Zombie Apocalypse!) >?Dear Rafa?, >?Let me begin by apologising? Rafal and Omar you are a true gentlemen. Excellent, me lads. >?The Senate has no obligation whatsoever to rubber-stamp the House's bills. That's just not how it's designed to work. It matters not what their supposed motivations?Regards, Omar Rahman There is one more important layer of subtlety, critically important in that argument. The way the constitution is designed, the responsibility for a budget is on the House of Representatives. The Senate has veto power, as they have demonstrated, and they can counter propose and negotiate, as can the president. But neither of those two can legislate into existence funding or taxation. The House must do that, for that is their responsibility and their authority. If the other two seats of power refuse the House?s budget, there is a contingency called the CR or continuing resolution, which keeps the government in business. At the tail end of George Bush?s term, a giant pile of money was spent by the government to rescue the banking system which was declared too big to fail. That was then considered part of the 2008 spending, so the next year, congress was unable to agree and failed to pass a budget. So they just passing a CR, which kept the spending at the same absurd level as the 2008. The same thing happened every year since. Being able to pass a CR, which is functionally equivalent to a huge one-time bank rescue operation every year, effectively defeats the ability of congress to control spending, which is what happened. The constitution was brilliantly designed that way: the house which faces re-election every two years and is thus closest to the voters, is responsible for taxation and spending. The president is elected every four years and is term limited, the senate every six. So the latter two seats of power have by design veto power, but the House is the boss on the budget. That one-time ?stimulus package? partially defeated the intention of the constitution. So, we end up with farces lie we are seeing now. The house wanted to defund ObamaCare, which it can legally do, the Senate kept saying no, which it can legally do, and the two sides negotiated until it comes down to one major point of disagreement. Currently congress is exempt from ObamaCare. The House has proposed a funding bill like the Senate?s version in every way except congress would not be exempt from ObamaCare; congress would be under the same system it is imposing on the proletariat. The Senate doesn?t like that idea, but there is still one further interesting observation: both opposition and agreement with both plans are seen in both parties in both houses. Now it is unclear which plan will succeed, but as a member of the proletariat who does not believe this system could work as written, I hope they subject congress to the same plan we are having forced upon us. It will motivate them to fix it. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Wed Oct 16 15:18:05 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 11:18:05 -0400 Subject: [ExI] [Bulk] Re: eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia In-Reply-To: References: <01f101cec607$730f5b20$592e1160$@att.net> <02ef01cec63f$491a1b10$db4e5130$@att.net> <01f201cec6ad$8f504f50$adf0edf0$@att.net> <01cb01cec79f$1bd0f690$5372e3b0$@att.net> <033301cec7a9$21a699d0$64f3cd70$@yahoo.com> <20131013083137.GJ10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Wed, Oct 16, 2013 at 12:50 AM, Rafal Smigrodzki < rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com> wrote: > I don't understand the doom mood. > I do. > Obviously, there is no possibility of Republicans causing as USG default. > I hope you're right but every time I figure they can't possibly be that stupid the Republicans prove me wrong. > The government has all the money it needs to keep paying its debts, since > tax receipts > continue. That's what scares me, I think you sincerely believe that is true, and I think the Republicans and the millions of voters that put them into office sincerely believe it also, but no reputable economist on the planet does. Sincerity is a vastly overrated virtue and if you want to watch a infant playing with a loaded handgun just turn on C-span. Money is a very abstract thing and it only has value because people think it does, and they think it does because people have faith that the government will keep it's word and pay it's bills when it says it will. If that faith is eroded, as it will be very very soon unless action is taken, it will be catastrophic. Forget about global warming in the next century, worry about what the world will be like one month from today if the Republicans get their way. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Wed Oct 16 15:39:16 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 08:39:16 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Tap tap..Hello? Is this thing on? (Or Zombie Apocalypse!) In-Reply-To: <93F7CEE9-D437-4D89-9C64-459AA4A422F4@me.com> References: <93F7CEE9-D437-4D89-9C64-459AA4A422F4@me.com> Message-ID: <013601ceca85$e00afa40$a020eec0$@att.net> >. On Behalf Of Omar Rahman Subject: Re: [ExI] Tap tap..Hello? Is this thing on? (Or Zombie Apocalypse!) Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2013 20:51:36 -0700 From: "spike" < spike66 at att.net> >>.The government cannot order its citizens to do something. It can only order us to not do something. The Supreme Court court decided the constitution does allow the individual mandate if the penalty for not buying insurance is declared a tax. >.The government can and does have the power to order it's citizens to do something. Only by specific authority from the constitution. Read on please. >. For example we must provide education to our children either in schools or through homeschooling. The federal government cannot and does not command its citizens to education their children, the state governments do. The Federal government empowers and requires state governments to provide public education. State governments can and do require its citizens to educate their children in some fashion. In some states, such as Idaho, it is almost just a mere formality, this state being extremely open-minded on what constitutes home schooling. The federal constitution says not a word about education. >. It used to issue draft notices. Ja, this is a power specifically enumerated in the constitution, article 1, section 8, clause 12: "Congress has the power to raise and support armies." >.Oh, car insurance is another one that comes to mind due to relevance. Car insurance is required by state governments. The US constitution has not one word in there about cars or insurance. There has never been a serious attempt to insert a car insurance requirement into the constitution. Likewise with drivers' licenses. Some states are issuing them to illegal immigrants. They are asking the Fed to make other states recognize those licenses, but the Fed cannot do that, for the constitution does not allow them that authority. So some states recognize drivers licenses of illegals from other states and some do not. Likewise with same-sex marriage: the Fed cannot order all states to recognize those marriage contracts made in states where it is allowed: the constitution does not contain the words sex or marriage. I do confess I would be entertained by any attempt to add an amendment covering those. Would they try to imitate Jeffersonian English? How would they define cars? As a teenager I used to drive a conveyance that might challenge attempts at definition. Legally defining a conveyance is more difficult than it sounds. How would they define gender? Could we see terms for specific organs mentioned in the constitution? This should be entertaining. >. There are probably lots more examples but these two will suffice. Omar, I will stand by and wait patiently for those examples. But your point is well taken and refuted thus: the Federal government has many clear restrictions on its power imposed by a constitution which was carefully and brilliantly designed by those who knew a lot about what power does to people, having fresh experience with European tyrants. The constitution relies heavily on state governments, and is codified by the last (but certainly not least) of the amendments in the Bill of Rights, amendment 10: 'The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.' Bravo! Excellent work, my founding fathers! In order for the federal government to legally order the citizen to do anything requires a specific amendment or power specifically enumerated in the constitution, examples being payment of income tax (16th amendment) and the draft (A1S8c12.) My argument from the start is if the Fed wants an individual mandate, it must first get a constitutional amendment granting it the specific authority to do that. I still think they should do that as step 1. The reason this is so relevant to our day is that if you have fifty competing governments, somewhere in that bunch is a government which does things most to your liking. I choose California, warts and all. We all get to choose our favorite government, and we as American citizens have the right to immigrate into any of those fifty states, to choose our favorite government. We do not have the right to go to any country in the world. We can make arrangements for any country if we have a ton of money of course, universal rule. But we have the right to choose any state in the US, regardless of our ability to pay. I recognize the argument that having 50 governments is not more efficient than having one, but that argument is irrelevant, for the constitution does not contain the term efficient, and the US government has certainly demonstrated that it does not know the definition of the term. >.I'm sure that somehow it is ironic that the members of Congress, even radical Tea Party people I assume, have the government funded health care that they are so afraid of. That's the current fight. The irony is that congressional proponents of ObamaCare want to make sure congress is exempt from it. Congressional opponents of ObamaCare are arguing that congress should be subject to the rules they impose on the proletariat. Which sounds right to you? Ja, me too. Make congress eat the same turd sandwich they serve up to the rest of us. >. Why would you personally Spike pass a bill that took away your government funded health care so that you could get government funded health care? It seems quite logical to strip that nonsensical provision from the bill. Regards, Omar Rahman Omar, this is a common misperception. ObamaCare really isn't government funded health care. It is tax-incentivized buy-in to the health insurance system (which is legal) coupled with a pile of restrictions on the health insurance industry's rate and payout structure (which probably is not legal and certainly not workable as written) along with a couple thousand pages of legislation which never should have been tacked on to this bill. Omar, what this is really all about is far more than health care. The ObamaCare law as written gives the federal government powers that appear to be outside the rigid bounds of the constitution. Some are comfortable with that, but I am not. They should have gotten an open-ended constitutional amendment first, such as our 16th amendment, which created the IRS. Perhaps a still larger objection is that I can see the law as written will not and cannot succeed. It relies too heavily on young and healthy people buying and overpaying for health insurance. I predict that they will opt out in perfect unison and pay the tax penalty (which isn't much) then come crawling back if they get sick. From the insurance company's point of view, it would be the high school track team running the other way and the zombie horde from Thriller staggering inbound with huge medical bills in their rotting hands. Any young and healthy who buys in, I wouldn't trust them. The system cannot succeed without them. I personally would benefit greatly if they all came in and paid, for they subsidize my health insurance costs. I personally reap great benefits if it works. But it will not. ObamaCare is the most poorly designed piece of legislation in American history, utterly without exception. It was never properly debated on the floor of the Senate and is full of obvious flaws, such as the one cited above: the government imposes on the insurance companies a rate structure. The only person in government who has read the whole thing is Ted Cruz, the man who railed against it for over 20 hours and was just getting warmed up. His so-called filibuster is the bulk of the public debate on the topic. I think we need to start all over with a clean sheet of paper. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Wed Oct 16 16:03:57 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 12:03:57 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" Message-ID: For those living in a fools paradise and think the failure to extend the debt ceiling is no big deal this is what Warren Buffett, a man who knows a thing or two about money, has to say on the subject: "I'm worried about damage to an asset that we've carefully cultivated for 237 years [...] it would be asinine for the U.S. to risk its hard-won reputation for paying its bills on time.[...] There are certain weapons that are just improper to use against humanity," It is a political weapon of mass destruction and both sides should say we?re not going to touch it, just like with poison gas or nuclear weapons. It?s too powerful." John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Wed Oct 16 16:27:15 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 09:27:15 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <01d801ceca8c$9449cda0$bcdd68e0$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of John Clark Sent: Wednesday, October 16, 2013 9:04 AM To: ExI chat list Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" For those living in a fools paradise and think the failure to extend the debt ceiling is no big deal this is what Warren Buffett, a man who knows a thing or two about money, has to say on the subject: . John K Clark John everyone, even the Tea Party, agrees default is bad. The argument is really about who is doing it and why we keep hitting the debt limit with mind-numbing regularity, as well as how to stop hitting it it and what to do if the lenders stop lending, which is looking like a more distinct possibility very day. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Wed Oct 16 16:37:42 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 09:37:42 -0700 Subject: [ExI] What if humans were twice as intelligent? In-Reply-To: <525CF0D6.7060302@aleph.se> References: <525BBDB8.5060308@aleph.se> <525BD350.5010909@aleph.se> <525CF0D6.7060302@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Tue, Oct 15, 2013 at 12:37 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > But just as there is http://www.privateislandsonline.com/ there has to be > some cat cloning company. > Several, in fact. Just google "cat cloning company" (and note that it's searched on often enough that Google autofills that search term). -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Wed Oct 16 16:37:29 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 09:37:29 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: <01d801ceca8c$9449cda0$bcdd68e0$@att.net> References: <01d801ceca8c$9449cda0$bcdd68e0$@att.net> Message-ID: <020701ceca8e$01aee910$050cbb30$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of spike >.John everyone, even the Tea Party, agrees default is bad. The argument is really about who is doing it and why we keep hitting the debt limit with mind-numbing regularity, as well as how to stop hitting it it and what to do if the lenders stop lending, which is looking like a more distinct possibility very day. spike I was wrong on an earlier prediction. I thought they would work until midnight tonight before announcing congress has reached a deal. They just announced they reached a deal today at noon, 12 hours ahead of where I predicted. So now I am more cautious but still confident on my next prediction: we will see a similar phony crisis again on or around 7 February, when we are again at the debt limit. It could be the Mr. Obama was correct when he said that raising the debt limit does not increase debt. In that case we never hit that debt limit again and the whole problem goes away. I jest of course. They will borrow it all, hit the new temporary funding limit on 15 January, have another phony partial shutdown (or slimdown as they are calling it) as we did a couple weeks ago, argue and thrash about right up until the debt limit on 7 February, then dish out another three or four months' temporary funding with none of the underlying problems solved at all. Not that Americans are growing cynical and skeptical of our own government or anything. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mlatorra at gmail.com Wed Oct 16 17:12:36 2013 From: mlatorra at gmail.com (Michael LaTorra) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 11:12:36 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: <01d801ceca8c$9449cda0$bcdd68e0$@att.net> References: <01d801ceca8c$9449cda0$bcdd68e0$@att.net> Message-ID: The way to deal with the debt is to reduce it over time, through a combination of decreased spending and increased taxes, not by default or repudiation. The Tea Party is concerned about the debt like an abortionist is concerned about a fetus. Don't let those people anywhere near my baby! Seriously, the Tea Party is the problem here. Many months ago, Boehner and Obama reached an agreement for dealing with the debt that included just what I said above: decreased spending and increased taxes over the long term. The Tea Party faction (which is the tail that wags the Republican dog these days) would have none of it. For them, taxes must only move in one direction: toward zero. Their mindless absolutism scuttled what could have been the solution. The Tea Party is intransigent and, frankly, not too bright. Their rigidity combined with their stupidity just could be the thing that sinks their ship...and ours. And by ours, I don't mean only the American ship of state, or the nation. I mean the global economy. If America gets the flu, the rest of the world gets cancer. The dollar is the international reserve currency. US government bonds and other Treasury securities are the investment of choice for sovereign wealth funds and individual investors of means who seek to preserve the portion of their capital that they choose not to risk on dicier propositions. Those financial instruments are paying very low interest rates right now; below the rate of inflation even. But they are still considered to be the best bet for safety because payment is guaranteed by the "full faith and credit of the United States." That means something in an uncertain world. But it will mean nothing if the Tea Party fanatics don't get a f*@king clue! Sign me disgusted. On Wed, Oct 16, 2013 at 10:27 AM, spike wrote: > ** ** > > ** ** > > *From:* extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto: > extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] *On Behalf Of *John Clark > *Sent:* Wednesday, October 16, 2013 9:04 AM > *To:* ExI chat list > *Subject:* [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are > "asinine"**** > > ** ** > > For those living in a fools paradise and think the failure to extend the > debt ceiling is no big deal this is what Warren Buffett, a man who knows a > thing or two about money, has to say on the subject: ? John K Clark**** > > ** ** > > > John everyone, even the Tea Party, agrees default is bad. The argument is > really about who is doing it and why we keep hitting the debt limit with > mind-numbing regularity, as well as how to stop hitting it it and what to > do if the lenders stop lending, which is looking like a more distinct > possibility very day.**** > > spike**** > > **** > > ** ** > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Wed Oct 16 17:29:25 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 13:29:25 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: <020701ceca8e$01aee910$050cbb30$@att.net> References: <01d801ceca8c$9449cda0$bcdd68e0$@att.net> <020701ceca8e$01aee910$050cbb30$@att.net> Message-ID: On Wed, Oct 16, 2013 at 12:37 PM, spike wrote: >?John everyone, even the Tea Party, agrees default is bad. > No spike they don't, tea party members have been quoted as saying default will calm the markets. > I was wrong on an earlier prediction. I thought they would work until > midnight tonight before announcing congress has reached a deal. > It's not over yet. The House hasn't voted yet and the House is the home of the dumbest of the dumb. In that body I believe you could find a one to one relationship between those representatives who think paying its bills on time is not a important thing for the Government of the United States to do and those who think the universe was created in 6 days less than 6 thousand years ago. > It could be the Mr. Obama was correct when he said that raising the debt > limit does not increase debt. In that case we never hit that debt limit > again and the whole problem goes away. I jest of course. They will borrow > it all, hit the new temporary funding limit on 15 January, > If a congressman feels that the debt limit shouldn't go higher on January 15 then they should vote to spent less money RIGHT NOW, don't wait till 1159PM on January 14 and say you're not going to pay for the new stuff YOU ALREADY BOUGHT!! > have another phony partial shutdown (or slimdown as they are calling it) > As Fox is calling it you mean, the only organization that rivals the House for stupidity. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Wed Oct 16 17:40:26 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 10:40:26 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: References: <01d801ceca8c$9449cda0$bcdd68e0$@att.net> Message-ID: <02a401ceca96$cd3cc4a0$67b64de0$@att.net> >. On Behalf Of Michael LaTorra Subject: Re: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" >.The way to deal with the debt is to reduce it over time, through a combination of decreased spending and increased taxes. How much time? The current debate is nowhere near reducing debt, not really even in holding debt increase to zero, for even that is a far off goal by everyone's estimation. If we say we want to reduce the rate at which debt increases over time, how much time? If the debt goes too high, then as soon as interest rates go up, we will not even be able to service the interest on what has already been borrowed. And this is the outfit which is clamoring to borrow more and faster? >.Seriously, the Tea Party is the problem here. So what happens if we elect a bunch more of them next fall? >. For them, taxes must only move in one direction: toward zero. No. The TEA in Tea party is for Taxed Enough Already. The Tea Party goal is to keep taxes at their current rate and decrease government spending to match what the government takes in. Is this really so insane? >. The Tea Party is intransigent and, frankly, not too bright. That's what we are told. I can't see the overwhelming stupidity is keeping taxes where they are now and cutting spending to where the taxes are now. >. Their rigidity combined with their stupidity just could be the thing that sinks their ship...and ours. Alternately we could continue to overspend and sink their ship and ours. >.And by ours, I don't mean only the American ship of state, or the nation. I mean the global economy. The global economy depends on the US government's overspending? Indeed? >. The dollar is the international reserve currency. Why is that? Should the international reserve currency be issued by a government which has demonstrated that it cannot live with its own means? >. US government bonds and other Treasury securities are the investment of choice for sovereign wealth funds and individual investors of means who seek to preserve the portion of their capital that they choose not to risk on dicier propositions. I agree that it is, but I utterly fail to understand why it is. Why are other propositions dicier than the securities of a government which has been spending way beyond its means for a long time, and defines as idiocy the act of pointing out the obvious? >.Those financial instruments are paying very low interest rates right now; below the rate of inflation even. Why do people keep investing in something in which the risk is rising and the payoff is falling? >. But they are still considered to be the best bet for safety because payment is guaranteed by the "full faith and credit of the United States." That means something in an uncertain world. Why is the rest of the uncertain world uncertain? I am certain: persistent overspending and flat out admitting that we are borrowing money to pay debts is as uncertain as any investment I can think of. >. But it will mean nothing if the Tea Party fanatics don't get a f*@king clue! Indeed? The world invests in the full faith and credit of a nation which cannot pay its debts without borrowing massive piles of money from outside its borders and incurring still more debt? In what sense is that paying its debts? The world invests in a nations whose president comments that raising the debt limit does not increase our debt? How does that work? Why do not we rely instead on the full faith and credit of China? They seem to have plenty of money to lend the US, so we can keep buying their manufactured goods. Why don't we buy their securities? Sometimes I get the feeling the world thinks that if the USA gets in trouble it can nuke its way out of it. We cannot nuke our way out of debt. We have maxed out the credit cards, just as we are clamoring for a waaay deeper line of credit. Now we must tighten the belt. How crazy is that? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Wed Oct 16 18:53:07 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 11:53:07 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Tap tap..Hello? Is this thing on? (Or Zombie Apocalypse!) In-Reply-To: <013601ceca85$e00afa40$a020eec0$@att.net> References: <93F7CEE9-D437-4D89-9C64-459AA4A422F4@me.com> <013601ceca85$e00afa40$a020eec0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Oct 16, 2013 8:54 AM, "spike" wrote: > The irony is that congressional proponents of ObamaCare want to make sure congress is exempt from it. Congressional opponents of ObamaCare are arguing that congress should be subject to the rules they impose on the proletariat. Did the House actually pass a budget bill, this year, including that Congress would be under the same insurance rules as the general public, and the Senate vetoed it? If so, do you have a source for this? (My impression is, advocacy aside they have not actually passed a bill w/those terms for the Senate to veto - at least, not in the current showdown. Insofar as Congress was exempt in the first place: they already have insurance that meets the minimums, and the point of the ACA is to make sure everyone does; those that do, there's little to no direct affect on, secondary effects from others getting insurance aside.) > The only person in government who has read the whole thing is Ted Cruz Now now. Its authors read it, and they are "in government" even if they were not elected by the general American public. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Wed Oct 16 19:35:20 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 12:35:20 -0700 Subject: [ExI] eput this crazy system out of our misery: was RE: Euthanasia In-Reply-To: References: <01f101cec607$730f5b20$592e1160$@att.net> <02ef01cec63f$491a1b10$db4e5130$@att.net> <01f201cec6ad$8f504f50$adf0edf0$@att.net> <01cb01cec79f$1bd0f690$5372e3b0$@att.net> <019e01cec8e4$dfe1a9d0$9fa4fd70$@att.net> <01c401cec8f0$e54825a0$afd870e0$@att.net> <025f01cec908$9aebd070$d0c37150$@att.net> <028a01cec910$14500010$3cf00030$@att.net> Message-ID: On Oct 15, 2013 2:47 AM, "BillK" wrote: > We now know that the NSA is collecting email address books and phone > contact lists, so if Spike is incriminating himself, then all his > contacts are obviously suspicious characters as well. (Hastily looks > over shoulder). > > Given the six degrees of separation theory, > > it appears that the NSA now thinks that everyone in the world is a > possible suspect. > > So, for security, the ideal solution is to jail or drone everybody > except the NSA. Except? Even the NSA can disagree with itself. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rahmans at me.com Wed Oct 16 20:45:45 2013 From: rahmans at me.com (Omar Rahman) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 22:45:45 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Tap tap..Hello? Is this thing on? (Or Zombie Apocalypse!) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <1C7AE90A-4EA5-42E5-8DD2-1ADE696686F2@me.com> > > Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 08:39:16 -0700 > From: "spike" > To: "'ExI chat list'" > Subject: Re: [ExI] Tap tap..Hello? Is this thing on? (Or Zombie > Apocalypse!) > Message-ID: <013601ceca85$e00afa40$a020eec0$@att.net> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" > > *snip* *snip* *Snip of almost everything* > > Omar, what this is really all about is far more than health care. The > ObamaCare law as written gives the federal government powers that appear to > be outside the rigid bounds of the constitution. Some are comfortable with > that, but I am not. They should have gotten an open-ended constitutional > amendment first, such as our 16th amendment, which created the IRS. > spike Thanks Spike for the (snipped) information. I stand corrected on a few (snipped) matters. What you said at the the end here is most interesting to me. We are reaching a point where the US might need an amendment or two to get things squared away. The Laundry List: (In no particular order and most certainly not complete.) 1. Campaign Finance Reform 2. Defining Personhood (of special interest to us here as many might wish to become something well outside the 'working' definition) (there are a who raft of issues tied to this) 3. Normalising International Relations (abandoning the doctrine of American exceptionalism...which is to me just a thin veneer on American Imperialism) 4. Reversing Citizen's United (Does the exchange of trust tokens (ie. money) really equal speech? And are corporations really people? See issue 2.) 5. The Second amendment itself needs to be clarified/interpreted or something. (As we enter the age of desktop manufacturing.....are we allowed to have our ray guns if we build them ourselves?) 6. _______________________________ (anyone care to add to the list? add something and make a new space for the next person) The way I look at things I see Corporations and National Governments as mostly analog versions of AI. Reforming and managing these systems are probably going to be basic survival skills for post-singularity entities of sufficient complexity. International relations are also most interesting when view through the prism of potential post-singularity evolutionary branching of humanity. What are we do when we meet Spike vers. 7546.3.6.8? Will we recognise it as human? Will Spike vers. 7546.3.6.8 recognise Spike vers. 231.7.4 as human? In an earlier post I postulated that Libertarianism had had it's chance in the savannahs of our deep past. And as the man said: No Man Is An Island No man is an island, Entire of itself, Every man is a piece of the continent, A part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less. As well as if a promontory were. As well as if a manor of thy friend's Or of thine own were: Any man's death diminishes me, Because I am involved in mankind, And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee. John Donne However, what if we do reach the point where someone could bootstrap themself up into some sort of rig soaking up the sun in an asteroid belt? Perhaps then Libertarian principles would apply. Regards, Omar Rahman -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Wed Oct 16 20:51:49 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 13:51:49 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: <02a401ceca96$cd3cc4a0$67b64de0$@att.net> References: <01d801ceca8c$9449cda0$bcdd68e0$@att.net> <02a401ceca96$cd3cc4a0$67b64de0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Oct 16, 2013 10:55 AM, "spike" wrote: > >?Seriously, the Tea Party is the problem here? > > So what happens if we elect a bunch more of them next fall? I have to wonder: of the US citizens on this list, how many voted for a Tea Party candidate last year, and how many are now represented by one. I have the strong impression that the answer to the latter is "zero" - meaning that "we" didn't elect them. I, for one, am represented by Anna Eshoo, a Democrat and very much not Tea Party. I, personally, have no direct ability to vote the Tea Party out. > The TEA in Tea party is for Taxed Enough Already. The Tea Party goal is to keep taxes at their current rate and decrease government spending to match what the government takes in. Is this really so insane? It might be sane if that was actually the likely effect of the legislation they back. Such is mostly not the case. Tax breaks just for the rich and substantial energy spent on disagreeing with Obama for the sake of disagreeing with Obama are two of the most notable priorities they have expressed in fact. They don't actually want to lower your tax rate, but just their own, even though they claim otherwise. > >? The dollar is the international reserve currency? > > Why is that? Should the international reserve currency be issued by a government which has demonstrated that it cannot live with its own means? Logic has far less to do with this than history. It is, and it would take a lot more work than has been done to replace it entirely with another currency. Whether or not another would be better is almost beside the point...although, every specific viable alternative has its own problem. Rather than think about it in the abstract, to truly answer your question you must specifically compare the dollar vs. the euro, vs. the yuan, and so on for each specific currency you'd propose to replace it. Run out of satisfactory options and you have completely answered "Why?": because, damaged as it is, it's better than the existing alternatives, and implementing a superior one in practice is far harder than you think, mainly because gaining the world's trust is a very difficult and laborious proposition. See how little success Bitcoin has had so far, and that's far and away the most widely accepted non-government-backed currency. > I agree that it is, but I utterly fail to understand why it is. Why are other propositions dicier than the securities of a government which has been spending way beyond its means for a long time, and defines as idiocy the act of pointing out the obvious? Because it does pay its debts, in the end, no matter how close to default it has danced so far. Just like it ultimately did this time, and will do so again next time, with greater likelihood than the existing alternatives. > Sometimes I get the feeling the world thinks that if the USA gets in trouble it can nuke its way out of it. We cannot nuke our way out of debt. Technically we can. We'd really rather not, but it is physically possible: just kill everyone to whom a certain debt is owed, their inheritors, their inheritors' inheritors, and so on until no one remains to claim the debt (or more likely, the survivors relinquish all claim to the debt). Some people sincerely believe this is our backup plan, with not that many alternatives between the status quo and resorting to that. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Wed Oct 16 20:55:40 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 13:55:40 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Tap tap..Hello? Is this thing on? (Or Zombie Apocalypse!) In-Reply-To: <1C7AE90A-4EA5-42E5-8DD2-1ADE696686F2@me.com> References: <1C7AE90A-4EA5-42E5-8DD2-1ADE696686F2@me.com> Message-ID: On Oct 16, 2013 1:47 PM, "Omar Rahman" wrote: > However, what if we do reach the point where someone could bootstrap themself up into some sort of rig soaking up the sun in an asteroid belt? Perhaps then Libertarian principles would apply. American laws as they are today probably wouldn't. You'd be talking about a new government with a new constitution to cover a civilization in the asteroid belt. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Wed Oct 16 21:20:46 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 22:20:46 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <525F032E.70409@aleph.se> > "I'm worried about damage to an asset that we've carefully cultivated > for 237 years [...] it would be asinine for the U.S. to risk its > hard-won reputation for paying its bills on time.[...] I had a discussion this week with Bj?rn Lomborg about the rationality of geoengineering, and I mentioned the argument that stopping aerosol injection causes a very rapid move to the temperatures one would have had without any intervention. That would obviously be very bad. However, Bj?rn disagreed, since (1) it would be irrational to stop in this case, and (2) this kind of geoengineering is relatively cheap and in the case of some major consortium failing one could easily imagine a billionaire or single nation sponsoring extra efforts, either altruistically or just because the damage to their own interests. Point taken. Now, in the light of the brinkmanship in the US we might see another twist on the problem. Geoengineering is usually framed as a game between national powers, and would run according to the rationality of game-theory on that level. But the US demonstrates that games on lower levels can produce irrational outcomes on higher levels: the US brinkmanship was (perhaps) rational for individual politicians and politicial coalitions, but likely made the US as an agent nearly act irrationally. Yes, it is asinine for the US to risk its reputation, but it might not be asinine for some politicians to risk it. It is not hard to imagine other versions of this situation, where rational low-level games produce irrational higher-level actions. In a way, this might just be a formalisation of a lot of history and politics - a contributing explanation for the "Cock-up Theory of History" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor ). Low-level brinkmanship upsetting bigger global collective goods doesn't sound far-fetched, and might actually be a serious Achilles heel of geoengineering. I have some colleauges who plan to model it in more detail. In the meantime I hope that if we find ourselves in such a mess some Warren Buffett might unilaterally solve the problem (in exchange for all weather reports ending with a thank you note). Of course, the unilateral possibility of geoengineering leads to other fun problems ( http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/unilateralist.pdf )... (Incidentally, another senior researcher mentioned that we ought to develop geoengineering techniques regardless, as a just in case fix for methane burps - here a modest aerosol injection gets us past the worst, and cessation is not a major issue once past the peak.) -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Faculty of Philosophy Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Wed Oct 16 22:50:22 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 23:50:22 +0100 Subject: [ExI] What if humans were twice as intelligent? In-Reply-To: References: <525BBDB8.5060308@aleph.se> <525BD350.5010909@aleph.se> Message-ID: <525F182E.8060601@aleph.se> On 14/10/2013 13:19, BillK wrote: > On Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 12:19 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: >> The effect is fairly weak. While the image of Idiocracy is vivid, when you >> actually sit down and simulate genetic equilibria of numerous small >> IQ-related genes you will find that the anti-intelligence selection effect >> is not doing much. > > Hmmnnn. Not simulations, but real world studies have found a correlation. Yes, but so what? I am not denying that there might be a lower fertility at the high end of the IQ spectrum (although the data is somewhat tricky - cohort effects, delayed childbearing, smaller samples etc.) However, this does not lead to dysgenic pressure. See http://www.jstor.org/stable/2781579 or Julian Simon's excellent simpler explanation: http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Articles/PRESTON3.txt The low-IQ people have low fertility, so the population tends to be "pushed away" from too low IQs even if there is some push away from high IQs too. I did a small simulation myself (since I could not find my old simulation): assume 100 alleles that can be in two states, each one in the "one" state adding a fixed N(0,1) normally distributed number of IQ points to all individuals who have it (this is pretty close to Plomin's current result for common IQ-related alleles). Some boost IQ, some decrease it. Assume a fitness that is a piecevise linear function: 0 for IQ 0, 0.1 for IQ 50 (probably a major overestimate), rising to 1 for IQ 80, 1 at IQ 110, going down to 0.5 for IQ 150 and 0 at IQ 400 (these numbers were chosen by guesswork during a non-connected train-ride, but I think they are not too crazy compared to the Preston and Campbell data). Select parents with a probability proportional to their fitness, have them generate offspring using cross-over of their respective genes. This model produces the expected behavior: the population does maintain an equilibrium pretty far away from the lower limit, staying stable because of the upper limit. If I remove the high-IQ fitness penalty the population drifts upwards very slowly, with diminishing speed as more alleles get fixed. Same thing (by symmetry) for removing the low IQ limit. In practice, we can likely rely on our real-world IQ distribution having a shape roughly in line with what the fitness constraints have been during most of the past - and the number of generations it takes to affect the frequency of an allele contributing 1 IQ point is pretty large, given that its fitness effects gets mixed up with 99 others. -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Faculty of Philosophy Oxford University From spike66 at att.net Thu Oct 17 05:01:51 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 22:01:51 -0700 Subject: [ExI] ok, time for some fun Message-ID: <003901cecaf5$fe7853e0$fb68fba0$@att.net> After all that heavy stuff that went on this last couple weeks, we are allowed to have some fun. I love jokes, the bigger the better. Elaborate setups that they clearly had to work for, such as this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlOxlSOr3_M I nearly wet my diapers. I did wonder, suppose I was in that coffee house. I would likely figure out this was a really well-done gag, for at this point I am utterly unable to suspend disbelief. I struggled with disbelief far too long to be able to suspend it now. The guy up the wall is really an impressive illusion. The rolling table bit is just way too cool. {8^D spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Thu Oct 17 05:23:25 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 22:23:25 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Big nanotech: towards post-industrial manufacturing In-Reply-To: <20131015142348.GJ10405@leitl.org> References: <20131015142348.GJ10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Tue, Oct 15, 2013 at 7:23 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > > http://www.theguardian.com/science/small-world/2013/oct/14/big-nanotech-post-industrial-manufacturing-apm > > I'll explore some of these questions in later posts on this blog. > > ? Eric Drexler > Cool. He's getting regular promotion from a mainstream press outlet. I wonder if Natasha might be able to get similar from, say, the LA Times? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hrivera at alumni.virginia.edu Thu Oct 17 01:06:45 2013 From: hrivera at alumni.virginia.edu (Henry Rivera) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 21:06:45 -0400 Subject: [ExI] [Exl] Tap tap.. Hello? Is this thing on? (Or Zombie Apocalypse!) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Spike wrote: exempts congress from > the healthcare law that they are imposing on the rest of us. So we see the > Senate willing to send the government into default in order to impose the > healthcare law on the citizens and simultaneously exempt themselves from > that law. I keep hearing this on TV, so I'm not just critiquing Spike. Characterizing "the exemption" this way is misleading. This exemption you refer to is the one that allows anyone with health insurance provided through their employer to be exempt from having to buy (what would be additional) insurance. You know, the idea is that everyone needs to be insured--no one is really exempt. Full time Federal employees including Congressional staff, just like Google and other organizational employees, have insurance provided through their employer. Since they thus have insurance, of course the mandate that they buy insurance doesn't apply. If you are suggesting Federal employees who happen to work on Capital Hill should be singled out and not be allowed to get insurance through their employer, I disagree. And where do you draw the line? Would congressional staffers who work in their home districts not be able to get insurance through their employer? What about Executive Branch employees? How about DOD employees? Many would leave the public sector if their benefits were comprised as such not because the govt healthcare they'd have to buy would be bad, but because they could get a job in the private sector that provided this benefit. -Henry -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Thu Oct 17 05:32:36 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 22:32:36 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Big nanotech: towards post-industrial manufacturing In-Reply-To: References: <20131015142348.GJ10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <007401cecafa$4a319040$de94b0c0$@att.net> >. On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes Subject: Re: [ExI] Big nanotech: towards post-industrial manufacturing >.On Tue, Oct 15, 2013 at 7:23 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: http://www.theguardian.com/science/small-world/2013/oct/14/big-nanotech-post -industrial-manufacturing-apm >.Cool. He's getting regular promotion from a mainstream press outlet. I wonder if Natasha might be able to get similar from, say, the LA Times? Regarding extropian notions getting mainstream press, Ray Kurzweil got a lot of exposure from an unlikely source: Glenn Beck. Of course Beck's show is a parody, but it is well done: he plays a far rightwing nut job so well he fools plenty of people in his audience into thinking it is the real thing, the same crowd that thinks championship rassling is real. In this segment from last January, he freaks out over the coming Singularity, and tells what a horror it is. http://www.glennbeck.com/2013/01/18/glenn-the-government-cannot-stop-the-exp onential-growth-of-technology/ spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Thu Oct 17 05:55:38 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 22:55:38 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Big nanotech: towards post-industrial manufacturing In-Reply-To: <007401cecafa$4a319040$de94b0c0$@att.net> References: <20131015142348.GJ10405@leitl.org> <007401cecafa$4a319040$de94b0c0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Wed, Oct 16, 2013 at 10:32 PM, spike wrote: > *>?* *On Behalf Of *Adrian Tymes > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] Big nanotech: towards post-industrial manufacturing** > ** > > ** ** > > >?On Tue, Oct 15, 2013 at 7:23 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote:*** > * > > > > http://www.theguardian.com/science/small-world/2013/oct/14/big-nanotech-post-industrial-manufacturing-apm > **** > > **** > > >?Cool. He's getting regular promotion from a mainstream press outlet. > I wonder if Natasha might be able to get similar from, say, the LA Times?* > *** > > ** ** > > Regarding extropian notions getting mainstream press, Ray Kurzweil got a > lot of exposure from an unlikely source: Glenn Beck. > That was a one-time thing. This blog, being repeated publication for many weeks - possibly months or more - is a higher caliber of exposure. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Thu Oct 17 06:03:43 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 2013 08:03:43 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: References: <01d801ceca8c$9449cda0$bcdd68e0$@att.net> Message-ID: <20131017060343.GQ10405@leitl.org> On Wed, Oct 16, 2013 at 11:12:36AM -0600, Michael LaTorra wrote: > The way to deal with the debt is to reduce it over time, through a > combination of decreased spending and increased taxes, not by default or Many countries all over the world, but especially the US, are addicted to growth by borrowing from the future. Nobody likes the word austerity, but this is exactly what living within your means means. There is no reasoning with drug addicts. This is mirrored by overshoot, aka ecological debt. You can live over the ecosystem carrying capacity, for a while, but you then must pay that debt, and interest on it, too (degradation of carrying capacity through overshoot). The currency is flesh and bone. > repudiation. The Tea Party is concerned about the debt like an abortionist > is concerned about a fetus. Don't let those people anywhere near my baby! I'm afraid it's already dead, Jim. > Seriously, the Tea Party is the problem here. Many months ago, Boehner and The Tea Party is a symptom. We have our own Tea Party over here, which went from zero to (almost) hero at 4.9%. I predict that anti-EU parties will be in the EU parliament at the next vote. > Obama reached an agreement for dealing with the debt that included just > what I said above: decreased spending and increased taxes over the long Too little, too late. > term. The Tea Party faction (which is the tail that wags the Republican dog > these days) would have none of it. For them, taxes must only move in one > direction: toward zero. Their mindless absolutism scuttled what could have > been the solution. The Tea Party is intransigent and, frankly, not too > bright. Their rigidity combined with their stupidity just could be the > thing that sinks their ship...and ours. They're just the trigger, the actual reason is cumulated bill for behavior of decades past. > And by ours, I don't mean only the American ship of state, or the nation. I > mean the global economy. If America gets the flu, the rest of the world The global economy is very, very sick. Read between the lines on China's economy, for instance. > gets cancer. The dollar is the international reserve currency. US The petrodollar status (backed by oil, which is backed by military and economic warfare) has been slipping gradually. What's buoying it up is that all that scared money has nowhere else to go. You might notice that e.g. CFPB has started encouraging the banks to limit international money transfers. Hold onto your Bitcoins, these might jump into orbit yet. > government bonds and other Treasury securities are the investment of choice > for sovereign wealth funds and individual investors of means who seek to > preserve the portion of their capital that they choose not to risk on > dicier propositions. > > Those financial instruments are paying very low interest rates right now; > below the rate of inflation even. But they are still considered to be the > best bet for safety because payment is guaranteed by the "full faith and > credit of the United States." That means something in an uncertain world. It's a self-supporting belief system. You can pay off your debt through the printing press with your creditors paying the bill for only so long. > But it will mean nothing if the Tea Party fanatics don't get a f*@king clue! > > Sign me disgusted. Very. From spike66 at att.net Thu Oct 17 06:12:36 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 23:12:36 -0700 Subject: [ExI] [Exl] Tap tap.. Hello? Is this thing on? (Or Zombie Apocalypse!) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <00dc01cecaff$e0b06190$a21124b0$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Henry Rivera Sent: Wednesday, October 16, 2013 6:07 PM To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org Subject: Re: [ExI] [Exl] Tap tap.. Hello? Is this thing on? (Or Zombie Apocalypse!) Spike wrote: >>? exempts congress from the healthcare law that they are imposing on the rest of us. So we see the Senate willing to send the government into default in order to impose the healthcare law on the citizens and simultaneously exempt themselves from that law. >? Full time Federal employees including Congressional staff, just like Google and other organizational employees, have insurance provided through their employer. Since they thus have insurance, of course the mandate that they buy insurance doesn't apply?-Henry Henry I see your point, and have a suggestion. The Federal government should specifically exempt those people who actually vote on legislation from getting employer-provided health coverage. It isn?t that many people, 535, and would likely not deter a congressman or senator from running for office. What it would do is make them go into those exchanges and see for themselves what it is like. To extend a previous discussion on this topic and make a few predictions, I try to imagine what all this must look like from the point of view of a health insurance company. They must see what I mentioned before as the first wave after the exchanges opened on 1 October: the profitable track team fleeing and the dead loss zombie horde staggering inbound. (Or would that be undead loss?) An insurance company would be swamped with applications from people who are not insurable, and the big profit customers are nowhere to be found: they will opt out for at least two years, if not decades, until they too join the zombies. So an insurance company would like to just lie low for a while and not issue many new policies, if any at all. So what are the ways they could make this happen, while making it appear that they are selling policies? I had some ideas. Insurance companies, competitors, could temporarily work together and trade customers. They could offer each other old-ish customers who have never made a claim in the past 5 years, then just trade them among themselves, while the zombie applications pile high. If an insurance company formerly sold 10k policies per month, they could create the illusion of maintaining that number, while selling no new policies. The law says they cannot turn people away because of pre-existing conditions, but it doesn?t say they cannot just fail to sell the policy because the agents are busy. The most profitable insurance companies in the next couple years may be those who figure out how to escape from the zombies, and possibly those companies who manage to chase down and seduce the profitable track team. But my bet is on escaping the zombies. Regarding how they would deal with a new customer when they cannot base their coverage on pre-existing conditions, I had a thought on that. I don?t know exactly how they will do it, but I have every reason to think that they will somehow figure out how to bribe or hack or steal or by some other mysterious means, they will get access to hospital and medical records. They will figure out somehow or by some mysterious means who has pre-existing conditions, and they will figure out some means of fleeing. To get into Healthcare.gov, one is required to supply a social security number. If an application is made online, the insurance company could just claim someone else used that social security number and therefore the application has been temporarily delayed while identity verification is being performed. They will use the same definition of ?temporarily? as HealthCare.gov, which means it could take years to confirm identity. They can still argue they didn?t turn the customer away because of pre-existing condition, on the basis that they haven?t actually turned the customer away. The ACA doesn?t say how quickly an insurance company must act on an application. The insurance company will not volunteer the information that they were the someone else who used that social security number. If the customer resorts to paper applications, this too can be easily tripped in the following way. The insurance company fails to act long enough, the customer sends in a duplicate application. The company accepts both applications, which are given two distinct policy numbers, payments begin on only one of them. Customer turns out to be a zombie, sends huge medical bills to insurance company. Insurance company switches policy numbers and claims payment was never made on the policy in question, refuses to pay. Another variation on the theme: customer buys new policy, pays, company holds check. A week later, medical bills start to show up. Company shreds check, claims payment was never made, policy cancelled. Customer shows up in person, fills out enormous application by hand. Application lost. No evidence can be found that the application ever existed. I am not even in the biz, and I consider myself a moral person, but all these ideas for escaping the zombies seem pretty obvious to me. Therefore the real insurance people who really understand risk models, will have thought of a thousand of them by now. Insurance companies don?t like losing money any more than you and I would. They will not insure zombies. They don?t stay in business by writing unprofitable policies. My guess is they will not. My guess is they will make piles of money with the new law, more than before, way more. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Thu Oct 17 13:19:05 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 2013 15:19:05 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Edward Snowden: saving us from the United Stasi of America Message-ID: <20131017131905.GO10405@leitl.org> http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/10/edward-snowden-united-stasi-america Edward Snowden: saving us from the United Stasi of America Snowden's whistleblowing gives us a chance to roll back what is tantamount to an 'executive coup' against the US constitution Daniel Ellsberg theguardian.com, Monday 10 June 2013 11.30 BST Link to video: NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: 'I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things' In my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden's release of NSA material ? and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago. Snowden's whistleblowing gives us the possibility to roll back a key part of what has amounted to an "executive coup" against the US constitution. Since 9/11, there has been, at first secretly but increasingly openly, a revocation of the bill of rights for which this country fought over 200 years ago. In particular, the fourth and fifth amendments of the US constitution, which safeguard citizens from unwarranted intrusion by the government into their private lives, have been virtually suspended. The government claims it has a court warrant under Fisa ? but that unconstitutionally sweeping warrant is from a secret court, shielded from effective oversight, almost totally deferential to executive requests. As Russell Tice, a former National Security Agency analyst, put it: "It is a kangaroo court with a rubber stamp." For the president then to say that there is judicial oversight is nonsense ? as is the alleged oversight function of the intelligence committees in Congress. Not for the first time ? as with issues of torture, kidnapping, detention, assassination by drones and death squads ?they have shown themselves to be thoroughly co-opted by the agencies they supposedly monitor. They are also black holes for information that the public needs to know. The fact that congressional leaders were "briefed" on this and went along with it, without any open debate, hearings, staff analysis, or any real chance for effective dissent, only shows how broken the system of checks and balances is in this country. Obviously, the United States is not now a police state. But given the extent of this invasion of people's privacy, we do have the full electronic and legislative infrastructure of such a state. If, for instance, there was now a war that led to a large-scale anti-war movement ? like the one we had against the war in Vietnam ? or, more likely, if we suffered one more attack on the scale of 9/11, I fear for our democracy. These powers are extremely dangerous. There are legitimate reasons for secrecy, and specifically for secrecy about communications intelligence. That's why Bradley Mannning and I ? both of whom had access to such intelligence with clearances higher than top-secret ? chose not to disclose any information with that classification. And it is why Edward Snowden has committed himself to withhold publication of most of what he might have revealed. But what is not legitimate is to use a secrecy system to hide programs that are blatantly unconstitutional in their breadth and potential abuse. Neither the president nor Congress as a whole may by themselves revoke the fourth amendment ? and that's why what Snowden has revealed so far was secret from the American people. In 1975, Senator Frank Church spoke of the National Security Agency in these terms: "I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return." The dangerous prospect of which he warned was that America's intelligence gathering capability ? which is today beyond any comparison with what existed in his pre-digital era ? "at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left." That has now happened. That is what Snowden has exposed, with official, secret documents. The NSA, FBI and CIA have, with the new digital technology, surveillance powers over our own citizens that the Stasi ? the secret police in the former "democratic republic" of East Germany ? could scarcely have dreamed of. Snowden reveals that the so-called intelligence community has become the United Stasi of America. So we have fallen into Senator Church's abyss. The questions now are whether he was right or wrong that there is no return from it, and whether that means that effective democracy will become impossible. A week ago, I would have found it hard to argue with pessimistic answers to those conclusions. But with Edward Snowden having put his life on the line to get this information out, quite possibly inspiring others with similar knowledge, conscience and patriotism to show comparable civil courage ? in the public, in Congress, in the executive branch itself ? I see the unexpected possibility of a way up and out of the abyss. Pressure by an informed public on Congress to form a select committee to investigate the revelations by Snowden and, I hope, others to come might lead us to bring NSA and the rest of the intelligence community under real supervision and restraint and restore the protections of the bill of rights. Snowden did what he did because he recognised the NSA's surveillance programs for what they are: dangerous, unconstitutional activity. This wholesale invasion of Americans' and foreign citizens' privacy does not contribute to our security; it puts in danger the very liberties we're trying to protect. ? Editor's note: this article was revised and updated at the author's behest, at 7.45am ET on 10 June From spike66 at att.net Thu Oct 17 14:54:20 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 2013 07:54:20 -0700 Subject: [ExI] saving us from the United Stasi of America Message-ID: <01af01cecb48$c34584c0$49d08e40$@att.net> -----Original Message----- From: tt-bounces at postbiota.org [mailto:tt-bounces at postbiota.org] On Behalf Of Eugen Leitl Sent: Thursday, October 17, 2013 6:19 AM To: tt at postbiota.org; ExI chat list; doctrinezero at zerostate.is; Liberation Technologies Subject: [tt] Edward Sneaudin: saving us from the United Stasi of America Thanks Gene. If Edward had been French, his name might have been spelled Sneaudin. Just to make it slightly challenging for the snoops, let us assume it. This article fails to mention what I think is an important point. USians have these 4th and 5th amendment rights, but none of these deal with the legality of a foreign power gathering intelligence on American citizens. The US is free to observe Germans under our constitution, and I assume Germany is free to observe Americans. Then I see nothing preventing the American and German government from watching each other's people (and everyone else for that matter), perhaps running some kind of data reduction software, then swapping results. Both governments then cleanly sidestep those bothersome legal restrictions, depending on how one defines the term "cleanly." spike( Jeaunes) http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/10/edward-sneaudin-united-stasi-america Edward Sneaudin: saving us from the United Stasi of America Sneaudin's whistleblowing gives us a chance to roll back what is tantamount to an 'executive coup' against the US constitution Daniel Ellsberg theguardian.com, Monday 10 June 2013 11.30 BST Link to video: NSA whistleblower Edward Sneaudin: 'I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things' In my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Sneaudin's release of NSA material ? and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago. Sneaudin's whistleblowing gives us the possibility to roll back a key part of what has amounted to an "executive coup" against the US constitution. Since 9/11, there has been, at first secretly but increasingly openly, a revocation of the bill of rights for which this country fought over 200 years ago. In particular, the fourth and fifth amendments of the US constitution, which safeguard citizens from unwarranted intrusion by the government into their private lives, have been virtually suspended. The government claims it has a court warrant under Fisa ? but that unconstitutionally sweeping warrant is from a secret court, shielded from effective oversight, almost totally deferential to executive requests. As Russell Tice, a former National Security Agency analyst, put it: "It is a kangaroo court with a rubber stamp." For the president then to say that there is judicial oversight is nonsense ? as is the alleged oversight function of the intelligence committees in Congress. Not for the first time ? as with issues of torture, kidnapping, detention, assassination by drones and death squads ?they have shown themselves to be thoroughly co-opted by the agencies they supposedly monitor. They are also black holes for information that the public needs to know. The fact that congressional leaders were "briefed" on this and went along with it, without any open debate, hearings, staff analysis, or any real chance for effective dissent, only shows how broken the system of checks and balances is in this country. Obviously, the United States is not now a police state. But given the extent of this invasion of people's privacy, we do have the full electronic and legislative infrastructure of such a state. If, for instance, there was now a war that led to a large-scale anti-war movement ? like the one we had against the war in Vietnam ? or, more likely, if we suffered one more attack on the scale of 9/11, I fear for our democracy. These powers are extremely dangerous. There are legitimate reasons for secrecy, and specifically for secrecy about communications intelligence. That's why Bradley Mannning and I ? both of whom had access to such intelligence with clearances higher than top-secret ? chose not to disclose any information with that classification. And it is why Edward Sneaudin has committed himself to withhold publication of most of what he might have revealed. But what is not legitimate is to use a secrecy system to hide programs that are blatantly unconstitutional in their breadth and potential abuse. Neither the president nor Congress as a whole may by themselves revoke the fourth amendment ? and that's why what Sneaudin has revealed so far was secret from the American people. In 1975, Senator Frank Church spoke of the National Security Agency in these terms: "I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return." The dangerous prospect of which he warned was that America's intelligence gathering capability ? which is today beyond any comparison with what existed in his pre-digital era ? "at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left." That has now happened. That is what Sneaudin has exposed, with official, secret documents. The NSA, FBI and CIA have, with the new digital technology, surveillance powers over our own citizens that the Stasi ? the secret police in the former "democratic republic" of East Germany ? could scarcely have dreamed of. Sneaudin reveals that the so-called intelligence community has become the United Stasi of America. So we have fallen into Senator Church's abyss. The questions now are whether he was right or wrong that there is no return from it, and whether that means that effective democracy will become impossible. A week ago, I would have found it hard to argue with pessimistic answers to those conclusions. But with Edward Sneaudin having put his life on the line to get this information out, quite possibly inspiring others with similar knowledge, conscience and patriotism to show comparable civil courage ? in the public, in Congress, in the executive branch itself ? I see the unexpected possibility of a way up and out of the abyss. Pressure by an informed public on Congress to form a select committee to investigate the revelations by Sneaudin and, I hope, others to come might lead us to bring NSA and the rest of the intelligence community under real supervision and restraint and restore the protections of the bill of rights. Sneaudin did what he did because he recognised the NSA's surveillance programs for what they are: dangerous, unconstitutional activity. This wholesale invasion of Americans' and foreign citizens' privacy does not contribute to our security; it puts in danger the very liberties we're trying to protect. ? Editor's note: this article was revised and updated at the author's behest, at 7.45am ET on 10 June _______________________________________________ tt mailing list tt at postbiota.org http://postbiota.org/mailman/listinfo/tt From pharos at gmail.com Thu Oct 17 15:57:50 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 2013 16:57:50 +0100 Subject: [ExI] saving us from the United Stasi of America In-Reply-To: <01af01cecb48$c34584c0$49d08e40$@att.net> References: <01af01cecb48$c34584c0$49d08e40$@att.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Oct 17, 2013 at 3:54 PM, spike wrote: > If Edward had been French, his name might have been spelled Sneaudin. Just to make it slightly challenging for the snoops, let us assume it. > Strictly speaking it would probably be more like Neige-repaire :) BillK From johnkclark at gmail.com Thu Oct 17 18:06:50 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 2013 14:06:50 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: <02a401ceca96$cd3cc4a0$67b64de0$@att.net> References: <01d801ceca8c$9449cda0$bcdd68e0$@att.net> <02a401ceca96$cd3cc4a0$67b64de0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Wed, Oct 16, 2013 at 1:40 PM, spike wrote: >> the Tea Party is the problem here >> > ** ** > > > So what happens if we elect a bunch more of them next fall? > I think that is unlikely. For one thing there is a limited supply of people that dumb, for another they're going to find it increasingly difficult to raise money. Traditionally the Republican party has been the party of business but not anymore, the tea party big money backers have found that they can no longer control the loonies they created. Despite the antics of the last 16 days the Republicans achieved NONE of their goals, zero nada goose egg, but they did cost the economy 24 billion dollars in direct costs and probably ten times that in indirect costs. And the meter is still running, we'll be paying for this for years to come in the form of interest rates that will be higher than they otherwise would have been, in effect the party that thinks taxes are too high has just imposed a new tax on us. And the Republicans came within 90 minutes of costing the economy many many TRILLIONS of dollars, and they want to play the same moronic game of chicken in just 3 months. Billionaires, regardless of how conservative, are going to think long and hard before they start writing big checks to dimwits like that again. **** > >> >> The dollar is the international reserve currency? >> > ** ** > > > Why is that? > The reason is irrelevant, to deny the fact is to deny reality, and if you fuck with the international reserve currency welcome to 1929. >> Those financial instruments are paying very low interest rates right >> now; below the rate of inflation even? >> > > > Why do people keep investing in something in which the risk is rising > and the payoff is falling? > Because like it or not the international perception is that US savings bonds are the safest investment in the world, or at least that was the perception 16 days ago, not so sure now. > Why do people keep investing in something in which the risk is rising > and the payoff is falling? > Gee, and I can't imagine why the risk is rising. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Thu Oct 17 22:57:32 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 2013 15:57:32 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: References: <01d801ceca8c$9449cda0$bcdd68e0$@att.net> <02a401ceca96$cd3cc4a0$67b64de0$@att.net> Message-ID: <037201cecb8c$4428af20$cc7a0d60$@att.net> >. On Behalf Of John Clark >>>. the Tea Party is the problem here >>. So what happens if we elect a bunch more of them next fall? >.I think that is unlikely. For one thing there is a limited supply of people that dumb. John what do you make of this? http://www.politico.com/story/2013/10/tea-party-science-98488.html?hp=r3 All is not lost for our embarrassed mainstream left wing, for the claim can be made that there is no evidence that the Tea Party is an extreme wing of either end of the political spectrum. Why could not they argue that the Tea Party is actually the far left? Then the Yale professor would be able to more easily explain his results. I don't see why not: two famous left wing figures pointed out several years ago where this is headed, Charley Rangel in 2004 and Barack Obama in 2006. Why not see the Tea Party position as extrapolating on what these guys realized several years ago? I still haven't been able to figure out why it is lunacy to point out that the US is not only pretending to pay off debts with borrowed money, but that we are admitting we have no way out. We are saying by yesterday's action that we are borrowing money to pay for what we already bought, and simultaneously buying a whole bunch of new stuff, which immediately becomes a bunch of stuff we already bought. Remind me please, is it merely stupid or both stupid and crazy, to point out that this plan is not just stupid, it is stupid and crazy? If it is crazy stupid lunacy now, how much crazier and loonier was it 7 to 10 years ago when the left wing rising stars were forcefully delivering the same message, when the deficit was a quarter what it is now and the debt was less than a third as much as it is now? Those guys must have been some really powerful brand of stupid. How could they even stay in office? Could it be that the Tea Party has little or nothing to do with mainstream left or right? That the attitude that we must live within our means does not map onto the traditional political spectrum in any meaningful way? Earlier I had an alternative suggestion to repeatedly raising the government borrowing limit: we sell the gold in Fort Knox. Every American to whom I suggested this thought it a terrible idea. So the obvious question is, if we are issuing IOUs and the world is pretending these are money, is not that identical to selling the actual gold? Are we admitting these IOUs are not as good as gold, but rather are as good as paper? John your objection as I recall is that it would cause chaos by tanking the value of gold. I don't see why that is such a problem. In fact it gives me a great idea. We sell several tons of gold, but only to those countries which mint real money. That dump causes the price of gold to go down. Then we buy it back at the lower price using US money. We end up with their currency, they end up with ours. It is like ordinary currency trading, only with the gold supply in Ft. Knox jacking the price around, we get a discount for a while. Cause chaos, and profit from it. Of course that might create some new problems, but consider this. We are being told that the world's economy has become dependent on American overconsumption, that markets will collapse without that factor, etc. So we as a species have painted ourselves into a corner: the world's economies depend on the US to overspend, while the US depends on the world economies to lend us the money to do it. Remind me again please: is this scheme is crazy and stupid? Or rather is suggesting that this scheme is crazy and stupid crazy and stupid? >.Gee, and I can't imagine why the risk is rising. >. John K Clark I can, John. Plenty of us can. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Fri Oct 18 01:25:07 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 17 Oct 2013 18:25:07 -0700 Subject: [ExI] fifth skull found Message-ID: <002101cecba0$e2a149f0$a7e3ddd0$@att.net> Cool! A fifth skull: http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013/10/17/18-million-year-old-skull-shakes-h umanitys-family-tree/ spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From andymck35 at gmail.com Fri Oct 18 07:51:08 2013 From: andymck35 at gmail.com (Andrew Mckee) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2013 20:51:08 +1300 Subject: [ExI] saving us from the United Stasi of America In-Reply-To: <01af01cecb48$c34584c0$49d08e40$@att.net> References: <01af01cecb48$c34584c0$49d08e40$@att.net> Message-ID: On Fri, 18 Oct 2013 03:54:20 +1300, spike wrote: > This article fails to mention what I think is an important point. > USians have these 4th and 5th amendment rights, but none of these deal > with the legality of a foreign power gathering intelligence on American > citizens. The US is free to observe Germans under our constitution, and > I assume Germany is free to observe Americans. Then I see nothing > preventing the American and German government from watching each other's > people (and everyone else for that matter), perhaps running some kind of > data reduction software, then swapping results. Both governments then > cleanly sidestep those bothersome legal restrictions, depending on how > one defines the term "cleanly." Surely you jest? That is after all exactly how and why ECHELON (now FIVE EYES ) was set up after all, just not with the Germans, since half of them were Commies at the time, IE the very people they were supposed to be spying on, as opposed to todays spying on everyone on planet earth. From eugen at leitl.org Fri Oct 18 08:07:55 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2013 10:07:55 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Snowden sets OPSEC record straight Message-ID: <20131018080755.GV10405@leitl.org> ----- Forwarded message from coderman ----- Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2013 01:03:43 -0700 From: coderman To: "Cathal Garvey (Phone)" Cc: cpunks Subject: Re: Snowden sets OPSEC record straight Message-ID: On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 12:27 AM, Cathal Garvey (Phone) wrote: > Lets not forget that "avoiding a bullet" was a prime motivator in Snowden's > coming out as the leaker. that doesn't sound painful enough; evidence suggests they prefer an extended crushing destruction of opponents and whistle-blowers - """ [Thomas] Drake said he was still suffering the consequences of his actions. "My life was essentially destroyed," Drake said, noting that the case took a terrible financial and personal toll. He lost his retirement savings and went into debt as his legal bills approached $100,000. ... Asked if he still believes what he did was worth it, Drake had no doubts: "Is freedom worth it? Is liberty worth it? Is not living in a surveillance society worth it?" "If you don't want to live it, then you've got to stand up and defend the rights and the freedoms that prevent that from actually happening," he said. """ http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/11/us-usa-security-nsa-drake-idUSBRE95A12X20130611 <$TLA> we sentence you to a long life! ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5 From anders at aleph.se Fri Oct 18 08:57:59 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2013 09:57:59 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Snowden sets OPSEC record straight In-Reply-To: <20131018080755.GV10405@leitl.org> References: <20131018080755.GV10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <5260F817.40409@aleph.se> On 2013-10-18 09:07, Eugen Leitl wrote: > Asked if he still believes what he did was worth it, Drake had no > doubts: "Is freedom worth it? Is liberty worth it? Is not living in a > surveillance society worth it?" "If you don't want to live it, then > you've got to stand up and defend the rights and the freedoms that > prevent that from actually happening," he said. " Yes, when I met this crowd (last year, when they honored Thomas Fingar) I was struck by how justified they felt. They had sacrificed a lot for doing what was Right, and they slept very well at night with their clean consciences. Of course, a cynical part of my mind saw cognitive dissonance hard at work. I think building the right kind of protective and reward system for whistleblowing is a very important function for open societies. I suspect that there is inefficiently too little of it. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From eugen at leitl.org Fri Oct 18 09:12:26 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2013 11:12:26 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Snowden sets OPSEC record straight Message-ID: <20131018091226.GK10405@leitl.org> ----- Forwarded message from coderman ----- Date: Thu, 17 Oct 2013 21:13:38 -0700 From: coderman To: cpunks Subject: Snowden sets OPSEC record straight Message-ID: it doesn't get much more definitive than this retort.. : """ [Snowden] felt confident that he had kept the documents secure from Chinese spies, and that the N.S.A. knew he had done so. His last target while working as an agency contractor was China, he said, adding that he had had ?access to every target, every active operation? mounted by the N.S.A. against the Chinese. ?Full lists of them,? he said. ?If that was compromised,? he went on, ?N.S.A. would have set the table on fire from slamming it so many times in denouncing the damage it had caused. Yet N.S.A. has not offered a single example of damage from the leaks. They haven?t said boo about it except ?we think,? ?maybe,? ?have to assume? from anonymous and former officials. Not ?China is going dark.? Not ?the Chinese military has shut us out.? ? """ there is a clear thoughtfulness, moral reasoning, and conscientiousness repeatedly demonstrated by Snowden in these events. it is now obvious that history will exonerate him fully. ... the distance between current reactionary retribution and that future absolution appears to be a bit of a distance, however... hopefully not too long. --- http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/18/world/snowden-says-he-took-no-secret-files-to-russia.html?_r=0&pagewanted=print October 17, 2013 Snowden Says He Took No Secret Files to Russia By JAMES RISEN WASHINGTON ? Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, said in an extensive interview this month that he did not take any secret N.S.A. documents with him to Russia when he fled there in June, assuring that Russian intelligence officials could not get access to them. Mr. Snowden said he gave all of the classified documents he had obtained to journalists he met in Hong Kong, before flying to Moscow, and did not keep any copies for himself. He did not take the files to Russia ?because it wouldn?t serve the public interest,? he said. ?What would be the unique value of personally carrying another copy of the materials onward?? he added. He also asserted that he was able to protect the documents from China?s spies because he was familiar with that nation?s intelligence abilities, saying that as an N.S.A. contractor he had targeted Chinese operations and had taught a course on Chinese cybercounterintelligence. ?There?s a zero percent chance the Russians or Chinese have received any documents,? he said. American intelligence officials have expressed grave concern that the files might have fallen into the hands of foreign intelligence services, but Mr. Snowden said he believed that the N.S.A. knew he had not cooperated with the Russians or the Chinese. He said he was publicly revealing that he no longer had any agency documents to explain why he was confident that Russia had not gained access to them. He had been reluctant to disclose that information previously, he said, for fear of exposing the journalists to greater scrutiny. In a wide-ranging interview over several days in the last week, Mr. Snowden offered detailed responses to accusations that have been leveled against him by American officials and other critics, provided new insights into why he became disillusioned with the N.S.A. and decided to disclose the documents, and talked about the international debate over surveillance that resulted from the revelations. The interview took place through encrypted online communications. Mr. Snowden, 30, has been praised by privacy advocates and assailed by government officials as a traitor who has caused irreparable harm, and he is facing charges under the Espionage Act for leaking the N.S.A. documents to the news media. In the interview, he said he believed he was a whistle-blower who was acting in the nation?s best interests by revealing information about the N.S.A.?s surveillance dragnet and huge collections of communications data, including that of Americans. He argued that he had helped American national security by prompting a badly needed public debate about the scope of the intelligence effort. ?The secret continuance of these programs represents a far greater danger than their disclosure,? he said. He added that he had been more concerned that Americans had not been told about the N.S.A.?s reach than he was about any specific surveillance operation. ?So long as there?s broad support amongst a people, it can be argued there?s a level of legitimacy even to the most invasive and morally wrong program, as it was an informed and willing decision,? he said. ?However, programs that are implemented in secret, out of public oversight, lack that legitimacy, and that?s a problem. It also represents a dangerous normalization of ?governing in the dark,? where decisions with enormous public impact occur without any public input.? Mr. Snowden said he had never considered defecting while in Hong Kong, nor in Russia, where he has been permitted to stay for one year. He said he felt confident that he had kept the documents secure from Chinese spies, and that the N.S.A. knew he had done so. His last target while working as an agency contractor was China, he said, adding that he had had ?access to every target, every active operation? mounted by the N.S.A. against the Chinese. ?Full lists of them,? he said. ?If that was compromised,? he went on, ?N.S.A. would have set the table on fire from slamming it so many times in denouncing the damage it had caused. Yet N.S.A. has not offered a single example of damage from the leaks. They haven?t said boo about it except ?we think,? ?maybe,? ?have to assume? from anonymous and former officials. Not ?China is going dark.? Not ?the Chinese military has shut us out.? ? An N.S.A. spokeswoman did not respond Thursday to a request for comment on Mr. Snowden?s assertions. Mr. Snowden said his decision to leak N.S.A. documents developed gradually, dating back at least to his time working as a technician in the Geneva station of the C.I.A. His experiences there, Mr. Snowden said, fed his doubts about the intelligence community, while also convincing him that working through the chain of command would only lead to retribution. He disputed an account in The New York Times last week reporting that a derogatory comment placed in his personnel evaluation while he was in Geneva was a result of suspicions that he was trying to break in to classified files to which he was not authorized to have access. (The C.I.A. later took issue with the description of why he had been reprimanded.) Mr. Snowden said the comment was placed in his file by a senior manager seeking to punish him for trying to warn the C.I.A. about a computer vulnerability. Mr. Snowden said that in 2008 and 2009, he was working in Geneva as a telecommunications information systems officer, handling everything from information technology and computer networks to maintenance of the heating and air-conditioning systems. He began pushing for a promotion, but got into what he termed a ?petty e-mail spat? in which he questioned a senior manager?s judgment. Several months later, Mr. Snowden said, he was writing his annual self-evaluation when he discovered flaws in the software of the C.I.A.?s personnel Web applications that would make them vulnerable to hacking. He warned his supervisor, he said, but his boss advised him to drop the matter and not rock the boat. After a technical team also brushed him off, he said, his boss finally agreed to allow him to test the system to prove that it was flawed. He did so by adding some code and text ?in a nonmalicious manner? to his evaluation document that showed that the vulnerability existed, he said. His immediate supervisor signed off on it and sent it through the system, but a more senior manager ? the man Mr. Snowden had challenged earlier ? was furious and filed a critical comment in Mr. Snowden?s personnel file, he said. He said he had considered filing a complaint with the C.I.A.?s inspector general about what he considered to be a reprisal, adding that he could not recall whether he had done so or a supervisor had talked him out of it. A C.I.A. spokesman declined to comment on Mr. Snowden?s account of the episode or whether he had filed a complaint. But the incident, Mr. Snowden said, convinced him that trying to work through the system would only lead to punishment. He said he knew of others who suffered reprisals for what they had exposed, including Thomas A. Drake, who was prosecuted for disclosing N.S.A. contracting abuses to The Baltimore Sun. (He met with Mr. Snowden in Moscow last week to present an award to him for his actions.) And he knew other N.S.A. employees who had gotten into trouble for embarrassing a senior official in an e-mail chain that included a line, referring to the Chinese Army, that said, ?Is this the P.L.A. or the N.S.A.?? Mr. Snowden added that inside the spy agency ?there?s a lot of dissent ? palpable with some, even.? But he said that people were kept in line through ?fear and a false image of patriotism,? which he described as ?obedience to authority.? He said he believed that if he tried to question the N.S.A.?s surveillance operations as an insider, his efforts ?would have been buried forever,? and he would ?have been discredited and ruined.? He said that ?the system does not work,? adding that ?you have to report wrongdoing to those most responsible for it.? Mr. Snowden said he finally decided to act when he discovered a copy of a classified 2009 inspector general?s report on the N.S.A.?s warrantless wiretapping program during the Bush administration. He said he found the document through a ?dirty word search,? which he described as an effort by a systems administrator to check a computer system for things that should not be there in order to delete them and sanitize the system. ?It was too highly classified to be where it was,? he said of the report. He opened the document to make certain that it did not belong there, and after he saw what it revealed, ?curiosity prevailed,? he said. After reading about the program, which skirted the existing surveillance laws, he concluded that it had been illegal, he said. ?If the highest officials in government can break the law without fearing punishment or even any repercussions at all,? he said, ?secret powers become tremendously dangerous.? He would not say exactly when he read the report, or discuss the timing of his subsequent actions to collect N.S.A. documents in order to leak them. But he said that reading the report helped crystallize his decision. ?You can?t read something like that and not realize what it means for all of these systems we have,? he said. Mr. Snowden said that the impact of his decision to disclose information about the N.S.A. had been bigger than he had anticipated. He added that he did not control what the journalists who had the documents wrote about. He said that he handed over the documents to them because he wanted his own bias ?divorced from the decision-making of publication,? and that ?technical solutions were in place to ensure the work of the journalists couldn?t be interfered with.? Mr. Snowden declined to provide details about his living conditions in Moscow, except to say that he was not under Russian government control and was free to move around. ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5 From eugen at leitl.org Fri Oct 18 14:31:53 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2013 16:31:53 +0200 Subject: [ExI] [Hplus-talk] Working toward an Optimal Future Message-ID: <20131018143153.GY10405@leitl.org> ----- Forwarded message from Magnus Ulstein ----- Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2013 15:44:41 +0200 From: Magnus Ulstein To: hplus-talk at list.humanityplus.org Subject: [Hplus-talk] Working toward an Optimal Future Message-ID: If you are on this mailing list, chances are you?ve given at least some thought into how you would prefer the future to turn out. And chances are reality isn?t quite living up to your expectations. So the question we have to ask ourselves is: What can we do about it? How can we nudge transhumanity on to a path that leads to a more optimal future? And just as importantly: what does a more optimal future even mean? So, what can we do about it? Well, there are maybe a few thousand of you who receive this email. That?s probably enough of a community to do something. And elsewhere on the internet, net communities like LessWrong and the Lifeboat Foundation are working to prevent some pretty nasty futures. In another corner of the internet, environmentalists and socialists are discussing how to prevent a corporation controlled future from two very different angles. Environmentalist movements oppose genetic modification in general, thinking only of terminator seeds and genetic diversity while transhumanist movements support genetic modification in general, thinking about the end of hereditary disease and a new generation of transhumans. As I see it, the main problem we have is simply this: those of us who think seriously about the future aren?t talking to each other. At least not enough. There are millions of people out there working towards a brighter future, and we aren?t coordinating. And because we lock ourselves in different mailing lists, on different web forums, we miss out on the ideas that could be born from our interaction. We have a lot we can learn from each other. Imagine the Green movement combining with the Maker movement to produce 3d printers using recycled plastic. Imagine transhumanist socialism, based on raising everyone up rather than forcing everyone down to the lowest common denominator. Imagine open sourced cybernetic implants. Who knows what good ideas could emerge if we could just talk together. Some colleagues and myself have put together a website where all futurists and people who care about the future (but do not identify themselves as futurist) can discuss the relevant topics and hopefully find novel solutions through combining ideas that one wouldn?t normally think to combine. Hence this mail. Humanity+ is perhaps one of the largest and best established future interested groups out there, and frankly I?m not sure we?d be able to pull it off without you. Your participation in this grand experiment would help us make a more Optimal Future for everyone. In return, we can offer a refreshing change of perspective and a look at the bigger picture on where we are headed. I hope to see you there. http://optimalfuture.org/ _______________________________________________ Hplus-talk mailing list Hplus-talk at list.humanityplus.org http://lists.list.humanityplus.org/mailman/listinfo/hplus-talk ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5 From eugen at leitl.org Fri Oct 18 15:48:44 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2013 17:48:44 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Who wants to live forever? Maybe you can... Message-ID: <20131018154844.GG10405@leitl.org> http://innovation.uk.msn.com/personal/who-wants-to-live-forever-maybe-you-can Who wants to live forever? Maybe you can... Simon Cowell wants to be frozen in ice when he dies and for the right price you can be too A cryonics laboratory (? Rex Features) Rex Features Cryonics has been a staple of science fiction ever since its invention in the 1960s. The idea that human bodies can be frozen at death, and then magically thawed in the future by humans with advanced technology has obvious public appeal. It?s easy to see cryonics as science fiction for gullible rich fools, but it has always had a serious side. Over the years a constant stream of innovations in cryonic storage, advances in brain-scanning technology and the ever-forward push to create a computer as powerful as the human mind have conspired to keep cryonics a respectable science: even if it?s fully rooted in belief, rather than any scientific fact. It?s got some rich friends too: the TV mogul Simon Cowell is reportedly interested in the innovations in cryonics. In 2009 he was said to have told dinner guests that he had "decided to freeze myself when I die". The idea of cryonics sprang up in the 1960s: it was first introduced in 1965 by Karl Werner and several societies in support of it sprang up in the US, including the Cryonics Society of Michigan (CSM), the Cryonics Society of California (CSC) and the Bay Area Cryonics Society (BACS). It soon became a mainstay of science fiction, including one episode of Star Trek: TNG in which the crew of the USS Enterprise intercepted a cryonics satellite and brought several humans from the year 1994 back to life. Today there are still many avid enthusiasts of cryonics, including the Cryonics Institute and Cryonics UK, and several professional companies such as KrioRus and Alcor ready to put people in frozen storage for perpetuity (that is ?forever?). And the cost of cryonics is falling thanks to newcomers in Russia. This has made it possible for everyday people to consider being frozen at death, and not just multimillionaire TV executives. The Kriorus deep freeze (? Kriorus) Kriorus Is cryonics a rip-off? There is a website called Rational Wiki, in which academics analyse and refute pseudoscience. It says that ?Cryonicists are almost all sincere, exceedingly smart, and capable people. However, they are also by and large absolute fanatics, and really believe that freezing your freshly-dead body is the best current hope of evading permanent death and that the $50?120,000 this costs is an obviously sensible investment in the distant future. There is little, if any, deliberate fraud going on.? Although it does point out that ?at present cryonics practices are speculation at best, and quackery and pseudoscience at worst.? The cost of cryonics varies greatly depending on the agency at work. Alcor, the leading US-based organisation, charges more than $250,000 for full-body cryopreservation. But new organisations such as the Russian-based KrioRus charge around $10,000 for just the head; or up to $80,000 for the full body. It?s worth noting that there are other costs on top of this. You have to pay somebody to arrive at the scene of your death and quickly freeze your body, then arrange for it to be transported to the cryonics facility. However, it is possible to sign up for cryonics as part of a life insurance policy. This spreads the cost of both transportation and cryonics. Cryonics UK (a UK charity) runs its own ambulance service manned by volunteers; these people are trained to freeze a body at the time of death and arrange for it to be transferred to the cryonics facility. It?s not fraud: but cryonics is generally considered a waste of money. How much money you want to spend is up to you. The adage ?you can?t take it with you? springs to mind (although you can always donate it to the charity of your choice instead). A freezing body (? Cryonics UK) Cryonics UK How does cryonics work? Even in the future it is unlikely (although not impossible) that the process of freezing a human being could be reversed. And that you could be brought back to life. But as our understanding of the human mind progresses, and our computer processing capability expands, the idea of retrieving the information from a human brain, and storing it in a computerised machine is starting to look increasingly possible. This ?mind mapping? is what generally interests cryonicists today. Given the rate of Moore?s law of computer expansion it is estimated that the human race is 25 years away from building a computer with the same level of processing power as the human mind. What then becomes possible with mind scanning and mind mapping will become very interesting. A brain scan (? Diagn?stico por Imagem, Lda - Portugal) Diagn?stico por Imagem, Lda - Portugal Cryonics enthusiasts believe that revival may be possible thanks to advanced bioengineering, molecular nanotechnology or mind uploading. It?s certainly true that brain scanners are becoming increasingly powerful, and ever more capable. And they?re already routinely used on dead people. Scanners are often used to observe Egyptian bodies preserved through mummification. It?s not inconceivable that more advanced models will be used to scan cryogenically preserved bodies in the future. A mummy being scanned (? Siemens) Siemens There is an open letter signed by 61 prominent scientists, which states that ?cryonics is a legitimate science-based endeavor that seeks to preserve human beings, especially the human brain, by the best technology available. Future technologies for resuscitation can be envisioned that involve molecular repair by nanomedicine, highly advanced computation, detailed control of cell growth, and tissue regeneration.? Working with liquid nitrogen (? Rex Features) Rex Features Can you trust the cryonics agencies? Cryonics is a long way away from being offered on the NHS, and is a fairly niche activity (it is estimated that only around 250 people have been actually cryonically preserved to date). There is the fear that the agency you choose to frozen you will not be as legitimate as you would like, although the Cryonics community is generally considered small and serious. But there are always questions about how your chosen facility will be run in the future. Cryonics suffered its first major setback in 1979 when it was discovered that nine bodies stored by CSC Chatsworth had thawed due to lack of funding. Wikipedia notes that ?All modern cryonics organizations require full payment for all future costs associated with storage 'in perpetuity' before patient cryostorage will be accepted.? Working in the lab (? Rex Features) Rex Features Is cheating death natural? The idea of death as an intrinsic part of life is so essential to humans that we overlook many organisms don't. A jellyfish known as Turritopsis nutricula regresses back to a juvenile form once it mates, through a process called transdifferentiation, and so it can theoretically live forever. There is also some doubt as to whether lobsters die from natural causes (being boiled and eaten doesn?t really count). And there are plenty of microscopic animals and bacteria that don?t die in any sense that we think of as death. Aside from this there are many organisms that live well in excess of 2,000 years and aspen trees up to 80,000 years old are still alive. Given all this, our paltry lifespan of 100 years starts to seem ever so limited. So nature is clearly capable of creating organisms that live far longer than us, or rejuvenate instead of dying. The question is could we, and should we, do the same? The idea does have an air of the unnatural about it, but then our lives are already artificially extended. For much of human history the average life expectancy was 38 years (although this figure is weighed significantly by infant mortality); the current world average is 68 years, with Japan leading the way at 82 years. Cryonics UK states: ?Science is constantly pushing the boundaries of what is considered ?dead?; cryonics simply pushes that boundary a little further.? From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Fri Oct 18 16:54:43 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2013 10:54:43 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Who wants to live forever? Maybe you can... In-Reply-To: <20131018154844.GG10405@leitl.org> References: <20131018154844.GG10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 9:48 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > But new organisations such as the Russian-based KrioRus > charge around $10,000 for just the head; I'd be interested in Max's impressions of KrioRus. $10k is getting into the realm of reality from my perspective, but if it has zero percent chance of working, then it's not worth it. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Fri Oct 18 16:49:29 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2013 09:49:29 -0700 Subject: [ExI] five stages interpretation of shutdown Message-ID: <013501cecc22$0400d1c0$0c027540$@att.net> Elisabeth Kubler-Ross introduced a ground-breaking theory in her 1969 book On Death and Dying, regarding the five stages generally experience by terminally ill patients, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Since that time, we have realized that the concept can be expanded to some degree. Examples would be dealing with other losses besides death, such as divorce, a huge financial setback or the end of career. The EKR theory can help explain conflict in groups of people dealing with a common tragedy, such as a family dealing with the loss of a child for instance, or a company which loses a huge contract to a competitor and is ruined. The members of the group at different stages of DABDA tend to find themselves in conflict with each other. Let us try to use the EKR notion to interpret the flailing acrimony regarding the recent conniptions of the US government. I think it explains a lot of what we are seeing and hearing. If we try to apply EKR theory in this novel manner, the first thing to identify is what is the crisis or tragedy? Unless we can focus on a common assumption there, the experiment will fail. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Fri Oct 18 20:13:57 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2013 14:13:57 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: <01d801ceca8c$9449cda0$bcdd68e0$@att.net> References: <01d801ceca8c$9449cda0$bcdd68e0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Wed, Oct 16, 2013 at 10:27 AM, spike wrote: > *From:* extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto: > extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] *On Behalf Of *John Clark > > *Sent:* Wednesday, October 16, 2013 9:04 AM > *To:* ExI chat list > *Subject:* [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are > "asinine"**** > > ** ** > > For those living in a fools paradise and think the failure to extend the > debt ceiling is no big deal this is what Warren Buffett, a man who knows a > thing or two about money, has to say on the subject: ? John K Clark**** > > > ** > > John everyone, even the Tea Party, agrees default is bad. The argument is > really about who is doing it and why we keep hitting the debt limit with > mind-numbing regularity, as well as how to stop hitting it it and what to > do if the lenders stop lending, which is looking like a more distinct > possibility very day. > It is idiotic for the president to stand up and say we don't have a spending problem. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbWVv8H_S44 We have just added another Trillion dollars to the debt ceiling, and we're going to hit that early next year. A trillion dollars in debt in just a few months. It's incomprehensible to think that someone as smart as the president of the united states would think this is a good idea. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Fri Oct 18 20:16:45 2013 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2013 16:16:45 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: References: <01d801ceca8c$9449cda0$bcdd68e0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 4:13 PM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > It is idiotic for the president to stand up and say we don't have a > spending problem. > Isn't that like the alcoholic that says "I don't have a drinking problem, I rather enjoy it." -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Fri Oct 18 20:35:18 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2013 16:35:18 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: <037201cecb8c$4428af20$cc7a0d60$@att.net> References: <01d801ceca8c$9449cda0$bcdd68e0$@att.net> <02a401ceca96$cd3cc4a0$67b64de0$@att.net> <037201cecb8c$4428af20$cc7a0d60$@att.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Oct 17, 2013 at 6:57 PM, spike wrote: > John what do you make of this? > > http://www.politico.com/story/2013/10/tea-party-science-98488.html?hp=r3 > Not much, there are no details. I have some details, what do you make of this? TEA PARTY member and presidential candidate Senator Rick Santorum proposed a amendment that would require the teaching of creationism in schools. TEA PARTY member and potential presidential candidate Senator Marco Rubio said: "Whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I?m not sure we?ll ever be able to answer that. It?s one of the great mysteries.? (he doesn?t even know the Bible, it says 6 days not 7) TEA PARTY member Governor and presidential candidate Rick Perry bragged: ?[Evolution is just] a theory that's out there. I am a firm believer in intelligent design as a matter of faith and intellect. In Texas we teach both Creationism and evolution.? TEA PARTY member and potential presidential candidate Senator Rand Paul thinks prayer should be in public schools and refuses to dismiss the idea that the Earth is only 9000 years old. TEA PARTY member and presidential candidate congressman Michele Bachman said: "There are hundreds and hundreds of scientists, many of them holding Nobel Prizes, who believe in intelligent design.? TEA PARTY congressman (and member of the House SCIENCE committee!!) Paul Brown said: "All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell. And it's lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior. You see, there are a lot of scientific data that I've found out as a scientist that actually show that this is really a young Earth. I don't believe that the Earth's but about 9,000 years old. I believe it was created in six days as we know them. That's what the Bible says.? TEA PARTY Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell said: "American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains. You know what, evolution is a myth. Why aren't monkeys still evolving into humans?? Can you think of one prominent Tea Party member who has said something positive about the single most important biological idea known? I can?t. > the claim can be made that there is no evidence that the Tea Party is an > extreme wing of either end of the political spectrum. > No evidence of extremism??!! 18 republican senators (including all the potential GOP 2016 presidential candidates) and the vast majority of republican house members voted AGAINST averting a economic catastrophe of unprecedented proportions just 90 minutes before is was set to hit. If they had gotten their way on Thursday the stock market would have dropped many thousands of points and today entire world would be in a state of panic not seen since 1929. No evidence of extremism??!! > > I still haven?t been able to figure out why it is lunacy to point out > that the US is not only pretending to pay off debts with borrowed money > The difference between the government?s debts and yours is that the government has the power to print money and you don?t, so yes, they are paying off their debts by cranking up the printing presses; but that is only lunacy in a time of high inflation, at other times it can be a very good idea. The Great Depression started in 1929 and reached its nadir in early 1933, after that things slowly but steadily improved until 1938 when conservative politicians decided that even though there was no sign of inflation (just like now) it was time to stop the printing presses and embrace austerity. And then the economy promptly crashed again almost back to 1933 levels and didn?t recover again until 1942. > If it is crazy stupid lunacy now, how much crazier and loonier was it 7 > to 10 years ago when the left wing rising stars were forcefully delivering > the same message, when the deficit was a quarter what it is now and the > debt was less than a third as much as it is now? Those guys must have been > some really powerful brand of stupid. > Since then we?ve had a really stupid guy predict that the 2 wars he started would pay for themselves and when they didn?t that same stupid guy put the cost of the wars on a credit card, and since then we?ve also had the worst economic downturn in over 80 years, so of course the debt went up. > Earlier I had an alternative suggestion to repeatedly raising the > government borrowing limit: we sell the gold in Fort Knox. Every American > to whom I suggested this thought it a terrible idea. > If they?re not tea party members I?m not surprised. > So the obvious question is, if we are issuing IOUs and the world is > pretending these are money, > We do and they are. > is not that identical to selling the actual gold? > No. > Are we admitting these IOUs are not as good as gold, but rather are as > good as paper? > Yes, but that is hardly new, the government admitted that on March 4, 1933. And yet for the last 80 years the dollar has continued to retain value, even though it was no longer exchangeable for gold, for one reason and one reason only, most people, even people who hated the USA with a passion, had faith the government would keep its monetary promises. And on October 23 2013 thanks to the Tea Party we came within 90 minutes of that faith being destroyed forever. > John your objection as I recall is that it would cause chaos by tanking > the value of gold. I don?t see why that is such a problem. > You want to reinvent everything from square one on up and make the most radical change in the way the world economy operates in human history, and you think you can get it all done in 90 minutes without blood flowing in the streets. And that?s not evidence of extremism ??!! For your long term survival you?re going to have to live through not one but two singularities, one caused by Nanotechnology and AI, and the other cause by the room temperature IQ of congressional Tea Party members. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From max at maxmore.com Fri Oct 18 21:03:04 2013 From: max at maxmore.com (Max More) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2013 14:03:04 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Who wants to live forever? Maybe you can... In-Reply-To: References: <20131018154844.GG10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: Kriorus is not going to cryopreserve you for $10K. I believe that price does not include various additional costs involved in getting you to them. >From the US to Russia would be quite a bit extra. If you want a standby (very important!), stabilization, and prompt transport you would have to make additional arrangements (if that's possible) at further cost. I'm pretty sure it's correct to say that Kriorus has nothing like Alcor's Patient Care Trust Fund. They couldn't, with prices that low. That means they have no money dedicated to keeping you cryopreserved. I believe they are entirely dependent on sufficient new business to keep them in operation and their patients in storage. If they keep growing fast enough, perhaps that could work. If not, it will not be sustainable. Kelly, I presume you know that you can use life insurance to pay for cryopreservation? You can get a neurocryopreservation with Alcor for $80K (which includes standby, stabilization, and transport). If you already have or can get a policy for something like that amount ($100K may be the minimum), you're covered. --Max On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 9:54 AM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 9:48 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > >> But new organisations such as the Russian-based KrioRus >> charge around $10,000 for just the head; > > > I'd be interested in Max's impressions of KrioRus. $10k is getting into > the realm of reality from my perspective, but if it has zero percent chance > of working, then it's not worth it. > > -Kelly > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -- Max More, PhD Strategic Philosopher Co-editor, *The Transhumanist Reader* http://www.amazon.com/Transhumanist-Reader-Contemporary-Technology-Philosophy/dp/1118334310/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1372225570&sr=1-1&keywords=the+transhumanist+reader President & CEO, Alcor Life Extension Foundation -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Sat Oct 19 01:00:11 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2013 18:00:11 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: References: <01d801ceca8c$9449cda0$bcdd68e0$@att.net> <02a401ceca96$cd3cc4a0$67b64de0$@att.net> <037201cecb8c$4428af20$cc7a0d60$@att.net> Message-ID: <011501cecc66$91421280$b3c63780$@att.net> >. On Behalf Of John Clark Subject: Re: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" On Thu, Oct 17, 2013 at 6:57 PM, spike wrote: > John what do you make of this? http://www.politico.com/story/2013/10/tea-party-science-98488.html?hp=r3 >.Not much, there are no details. I have some details, what do you make of this? >.TEA PARTY member and presidential candidate Senator Rick Santorum. Etc. John, it is much easier to paint your political adversaries as crazy and stupid than it is to deal with their contentions. Economics and biology are two completely different disciplines. Many biologists are clued in on economics either. We could likely find plenty of them who couldn't tell Hayek from Keynes. >>. the claim can be made that there is no evidence that the Tea Party is an extreme wing of either end of the political spectrum. >.No evidence of extremism??!! 18 republican senators (including all the potential GOP 2016 presidential candidates) and the vast majority of republican house members voted AGAINST averting a economic catastrophe. Ja, and plenty of those were not extremists. My contention is that we cannot tell for instance which wing is Ted Cruz. He could be far left as well as far right. Recall that the two farthest left members of congress in 2004 and 2006 were the strongest voices against raising the debt limit, Charlie Rangel and Barack Obama. When both switched sides, I was as appalled but perhaps less surprised than if Christopher Hitchins and Richard Dawkins had taken up creationism. >.The difference between the government's debts and yours is that the government has the power to print money and you don't, so yes, they are paying off their debts by cranking up the printing presses. OK then, we have discovered the basis of our disagreement. John how could you be right in the middle of all this debate yet still not realize the government needs to borrow money in order to print it? Printing money and borrowing wealth are the same thing. The debt limit is all about how much money the government can issue. The government needs to borrow real wealth and stay within its borrowing limit in order to print money. Of course they could theoretically print money without borrowing wealth. This has been tried, in Weimar Germany and more recently Zimbabwe. The Germans supposed they would just need to make more sturdy wheelbarrows and all would be well. The Zimbabwe government assumed they could just print new money every few months with an extra zero tacked onto the denominations. I wasn't there, but I understand it turned out badly in both cases. >>. Earlier I had an alternative suggestion to repeatedly raising the government borrowing limit: we sell the gold in Fort Knox. Every American to whom I suggested this thought it a terrible idea. >.If they're not tea party members I'm not surprised. So why are we hording that stuff? It isn't used for anything useful anymore. >>. is not that identical to selling the actual gold? >.No. Why? If there is a good reason to hang onto gold, why not sell that new aircraft carrier, the John F. Kennedy? That one is said to have cost about 12 billion, so we can assume it would sell for about the same. Stock it with American made fighter planes gets it to about 15B. At the current rate, just one battle-ready modern nuclear carrier with planes would cover US government borrowing for nearly a entire week. Well, OK, five days if we want to split hairs and quibble over a mere few billion dollars. >>. Are we admitting these IOUs are not as good as gold, but rather are as good as paper? >. And on October 23 2013 thanks to the Tea Party we came within 90 minutes of that faith being destroyed forever. The fact that there is a Tea Party is what keeps the world having some faith in the dollar. What if we had no one who thought there was anything wrong with borrowing the cost of a nuclear aircraft carrier every five days? > . the other cause by the room temperature IQ of congressional Tea Party members. John K Clark It is far easier to declare your adversary a crazy fool than it is to actually refute his actual arguments. The Tea Party is gently suggesting that we cannot sustain the endless borrowing and overspending the way we have been doing for at least 14 years. You are saying the Tea Party is made up of crazy fools, therefore their arguments can be safely dismissed. Does that mean you believe we can sustain the borrow and spend indefinitely? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Sat Oct 19 05:45:51 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2013 22:45:51 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: <011501cecc66$91421280$b3c63780$@att.net> References: <01d801ceca8c$9449cda0$bcdd68e0$@att.net> <02a401ceca96$cd3cc4a0$67b64de0$@att.net> <037201cecb8c$4428af20$cc7a0d60$@att.net> <011501cecc66$91421280$b3c63780$@att.net> Message-ID: <006501cecc8e$794ffa70$6befef50$@att.net> On Behalf Of spike >>>. is not that identical to selling the actual gold? >>.No. >.Why? If there is a good reason to hang onto gold. .I can't imagine what it is. Google claims there is about 150 million ounces of gold in Ft. Knox, so that is about a couple hundred billion dollars right there. If we sell that to China, we still owe them over a trillion dollars, but at least we offset two entire months of borrowing at the current rate, TWO WHOLE MONTHS of this current Bacchanalian spendfest! Just hand over the damn gold. We could sell off that, wouldn't even need to borrow until the middle of December, possibly make it to Jingle Bells on that alone if we tighten the belt a bit. Two months of our current lifestyle to which we have grown so fondly accustomed, just for a pile of useless yellow metal. And surely there must be some silver squirreled away somewhere. We are told we aren't really racking up new debt, but rather just paying for stuff we already bought. So it appears to me it is past time to already sell some stuff we already bought. There is probably some valuable stuff lying around here somewhere, perhaps some change in the couch cushions, before we have to resort to selling Alaska and Hawaii. If we did that, we would need to change all the flags back to 48 stars. >.why not sell that new aircraft carrier, the John F. Kennedy? That one is said to have cost about 12 billion, so we can assume it would sell for about the same. Stock it with American made fighter planes gets it to about 15B. My apologies, the new carrier set to launch next month is the Gerald R. Ford: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Gerald_R._Ford_(CVN-78) Aint she a beauty? Ignoring the obvious absurdity of naming a ship after a man then referring to her with the feminine pronoun, I am left even more baffled as to why we are still building these things, while borrowing money at the rate of one fully loaded floating nuclear hornet's nest every five days. Is there anything even vaguely insane about this practice? We can build one of these Ford-class carriers about every three years if we keep the modern Rosie the Riveters going around the clock, so we only need 90 more of them to cover what we owe China and about 70 for what we owe Japan, so at the current rate, we can pay off both those guys in about four and half centuries just in fully stocked aircraft carriers. Of course those two countries are the biggest buyers of our securities, so it isn't clear how we can make this happen if we build a nuclear carrier every three years while we are borrowing a nuclear carrier every five days. But I digress. >. And on October 23 2013 thanks to the Tea Party we came within 90 minutes of that faith being destroyed forever. Why those evil rotten bastards. 90 minutes to total destruction of the planet! The USA had only enough time to borrow about 170 million dollars in that 90 minutes to destruction. > . the other cause by the room temperature IQ of congressional Tea Party members. John K Clark Remind me again John how those foolish evil stupid congressional Tea Party members are causing all this? Did you mean they are the crazy fools who actually uttered the flaming blasphemy that the emperor is naked? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Sat Oct 19 09:27:26 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2013 11:27:26 +0200 Subject: [ExI] [cryptome] Thank You, Edward Snowden Message-ID: <20131019092726.GO10405@leitl.org> ----- Forwarded message from coderman ----- Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2013 12:11:43 -0700 From: coderman To: cpunks , cryptome at freelists.org Subject: [cryptome] Thank You, Edward Snowden Message-ID: Reply-To: cryptome at freelists.org Ron Wyden++ -- http://reason.com/archives/2013/10/18/thank-you-edward-snowden/print Ronald Bailey | Oct. 18, 2013 1:30 pm Last week the Cato Institute put on a terrific conference about unconstitutional domestic spying. The Cato conference took place after a summer of alarming revelations of just how deep and extensive the feds? secret surveillance of our everyday communications had become. The conference, held at the institute?s downtown D.C. headquarters, brought some of the most knowledgeable Internet luminaries together with some of the fiercest fighters for Americans? Fourth Amendment rights. Watchdog organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) had sought for years to expose the extent and depth of federal surveillance, but their efforts were largely stymied by the very walls of secrecy they were trying to breach. In the 2006 case Hepting v. AT&T, for example, the EFF sued the giant telco for the privacy violations incurred by allowing the National Security Agency (NSA) to wiretap and data-mine all of the company?s customers? communications. To forestall this case, Congress in 2008 passed the FISA Amendments Act, conferring retroactive immunity on the telephone companies and government agencies for engaging in warrantless wiretapping. Earlier this year, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a challenge to the FISA Amendments Act by the ACLU and other groups, on the grounds that they had no standing to sue because they could not actually prove that the NSA was spying on them. This is Catch-22 logic: The ACLU needs to sue the NSA to get the evidence that the agency spied on it and its clients, but they can?t sue because they have no evidence that the agency spied on them. The walls of surveillance secrecy were finally cracked by the June revelations of whistleblower Edward Snowden. Snowden?s files conclusively show that the federal government has been operating a vast spying program that violates the Fourth Amendment rights of tens of millions of ordinary Americans. To justify this surveillance, the government offers tortured legal interpretations of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act. Section 702 authorizes warrantless surveillance of the communications of foreigners outside of the United States. As Snowden?s documents reveal, the NSA has interpreted Section 702 as a backdoor loophole allowing the agency to retain and comb through the call data and emails of Americans whose communications are ?about? a terror suspect or have been ?inadvertently? intercepted by the NSA?s PRISM monitoring program. The even more egregious violations of our constitutional rights, Snowden revealed, occurred under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, which the NSA has used to justify the dragnet collection and retention of the call metadata of essentially all Americans. (Metadata includes the numbers called and the location, date, time, and duration of each call.) The first keynote at the Cato conference was delivered by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who cited the ?revelations of June? numerous times. Several speakers used such circumlocutions during the conference, clearly as a way to avoid actually speaking the name of the man who finally broke the news that our government has been unconstitutionally spying on us for years. Despite his reticence with regard to Snowden, Wyden has been at the lonely forefront of the fight to rein in America?s growing surveillance state. It was Wyden who asked Director of National Intelligence James Clapper in a March hearing whether the agency collected any sort of data on hundreds of millions of Americans. ?No, sir,? lied Clapper. ?Not wittingly.? After Snowden?s revelations proved that Clapper was a liar, Clapper attempted to justify himself in a June television interview by suggesting that ?collect? doesn?t mean the same thing to him that it means to ordinary Americans. ?Collect,? Clapper claimed, doesn?t mean intercepting and storing data about telephone calls; the data are only ?collected? when the agency goes searching through its vast databases looking for specific calls. At the Cato conference, New York Times national security reporter Charlie Savage pointed out that ?Congress doesn?t know that there is a secret lexicon at the NSA in which words mean something else at the NSA.? He recommended that people might want to look up the Electronic Frontier Foundation?s helpful NSA glossary, which shows how the agency reinterprets normal words in ways that ordinary people would say amount to ?lies.? Another speaker, Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), said that Clapper should step down and be prosecuted for lying to Congress. During his morning keynote, Wyden outlined the main provisions of a new bill he introduced with Sens. Mark Udall (D-Utah), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) two weeks earlier. The bill would end the mass collection of American?s communication data, close the backdoor search loophole under FISA Section 702, provide an advocate to argue against government abuses before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and enable citizens to be heard in federal courts when they believe that the surveillance agencies have violated their Fourth Amendment right to privacy. In addition, telecommunications companies would be enabled to disclose more information about their cooperation with government surveillance activities. Wyden warned that the agency heads and their enablers in the Congress, such as Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), would be striking back against proposals for increased transparency. ?Their objective is to fog up the surveillance debate,? he explained, ?and convince Congress and the public that the real problem is not unconstitutional surveillance, the real problem is sensationalistic reporting.? Wyden is encouraged, however, by the broader reaction to the ?revelations of June.? Referring to the Amash amendment, a July measure that sought to cut funding to the NSA?s bulk collection of Americans? phone records, Wyden said, ?If you?d told me that you could get 200 votes on the floor of the House of Representative, I would have said you?re dreaming.? The amendment failed, but the vote was surprisingly close. Of course, that vote was only possible because of Snowden?s disclosures. Yet in July, when Wyden was asked whether Snowden is a hero or a villain, he replied that ?when there is an individual who?s been charged criminally and he has been charged with espionage, I don?t get into commenting beyond that.? Wyden should comment, and his comment should be: ?Thank you, Edward Snowden.? Next up at the conference was a panel of national security reporters moderated by Cato?s Julian Sanchez. The panelists were Bart Gellman of the Washington Post, Spencer Ackerman of The Guardian, Siobhan Gorman of The Wall Street Journal, and Charlie Savage of The New York Times. Gellman was the first speaker to say the word ?Snowden,? noting that the whistleblower?s greatest fear was that the risks he took would be all for nothing; that there would be no debate over the extent and intrusiveness of domestic surveillance. In fact, Gellman declared, ?Snowden succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.? Gellman also said that Clapper wasn?t the only administration official to lie to Congress. NSA chief Keith Alexander wasn?t telling the truth when he claimed a year ago that his agency does ?not hold data on U.S. citizens? at its gigantic new data facility in Bluffdale, Utah. And the Justice Department had certainly been misleading, even if it didn?t technically lie, when it said the Section 215 authorities had been used only 20 to 30 times to collect data. Yes, but those 20 to 30 times allowed the NSA to collect trillions of records. Gorman added that the Snowden revelations had ?shaken the trees? and prompted other reporting that has forced other government disclosures about various domestic spying efforts. For example, the NSA has tapped the Internet backbone through secret agreements with nine major (but unnamed) U.S. telecommunications companies. This has given the agency the capacity to monitor 75 percent of all U.S. Internet communications. Once it was revealed that the big telecommunications companies were cooperating with the NSA spying program, Gellman noted, they started agitating to be allowed to disclose more about what they are being asked and ordered to do. The luncheon keynote was delivered by Rep. Amash, who described how spy agencies try to limit congressional access to information about their activities, making meaningful oversight all but impossible. Agencies speak in generalities and then engage in a game of 20 questions with legislators who seek deeper knowledge. They might, for example, answer a query with ?No, our agency doesn?t do that? without mentioning that another agency does. Amash described one occasion in which he was seeking to review a particular document and the agency promised to arrange for members of Congress to do so. The agency did not send a message that the document was available for scrutiny by emailing members? offices directly; instead it sent the notification through the more general and less read Dear Colleague email system. Even then, the document was available for review only between 9 a.m. and noon in a briefing room on the day just before Congress was scheduled to leave for vacation. Members who reviewed the document also had to sign a nondisclosure agreement saying that they would not discuss it with other members who had not seen it. After lunch, the conference featured a panel of legal experts, many of whom have tangled in court with the NSA and the Justice Department. Georgetown law professor Laura Donohue argued that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) was solely created to supervise spying on foreign powers and their agents. Under statute, the FISC is supposed to review and grant orders under Section 215 only when agencies supply ?a statement of fact showing that there are reasonable grounds to believe that tangible things sought are relevant to an authorized investigation.? Donohue argues that the FISC and the NSA have now interpreted ?relevant? to include all data on all telephone calls, and possibly other records, such as data on all emails, financial records, medical records, and so forth. As such, Section 215 orders function as general warrants allowing officials to rifle through the records of any American without the need to show probable cause as delimited by the Fourth Amendment. The ACLU?s Jameel Jaffer agreed that the NSA?s dragnet collection of phone records violates the relevance standard of Section 215. He also argued that it violated Americans? reasonable expectations of privacy under the Fourth Amendment and, less obviously, our right of free association under the First Amendment. If people think they are watched by government agents, he explained, they may curtail innocuous contacts with others out of fear that government functionaries will misinterpret or abuse information about their relationships. David Lieber, privacy counsel for Google, struck another First Amendment note, expressing frustration over the government?s prior restraint of speech when it forbade his company (and others) from disclosing even summary statistics on how much information on its customers the feds were requiring it to turn over. Paul Rosenzweig, a former deputy assistant for policy at the Department of Homeland Security, is much more sanguine about NSA domestic surveillance. He offered a very nice demonstration, produced by journalist Kieran Healy based on David Hackett Fischer?s biography of Paul Revere, showing how metadata on various club memberships would have identified Paul Revere to the British authorities as the center of terrorist network in late-18th-century Boston. That may sound alarming to you, but to Rosenzweig the NSA?s use of such relational data-mining is ?relevant? to an investigation. The second afternoon panel focused on techniques to protect data from federal surveillance. First, the good news: Jim Burrows of Silent Circle, a new company offering various encryption services, observed that TOR, the free open source software that protects users? anonymity, generally stands up to NSA snooping. Less happily, David Dahl of SpiderOak, a company that offers encrypted file backup, decried the recent revelations that the NSA had succeeded in introducing subtle vulnerabilities by influencing the development of encryption standards. Matt Blaze, an Internet security guru at the University of Pennsylvania, observed that maintaining vulnerabilities in computer code doesn?t just make it easier for the NSA to spy; it makes it easier for the Chinese, Russians, and Iranians to spy, and for Internet criminals to steal data and cause other havoc. Burrows discussed the case of Lavabit, an encrypted email service apparently used by Snowden. The NSA ordered Ladar Levison, the owner of the service, to hand over data that would enable the agency to spy on his 350,000 customers. Levison instead shut down the service, saying that he refused ?to become complicit in crimes against the American people.? Burrows noted that Silent Circle was also an offering encrypted email service. Within 10 hours of learning what had happened to Lavabit, Silent Circle shut down and purged its own service without notice to subscribers. Burrows noted that had Silent Circle informed its customers in advance the shutdown might have become illegal. ?We knew for sure that someday some law enforcement agency would order us to give them a backdoor,? said Burrows. Burrows noted that there is no email that is currently secure against metadata collection, although users can securely encrypt the content of their messages. The ACLU?s Chris Soghoian added that the laws of physics make it impossible to shield the location data emitted by mobile phones. SpiderOak?s Dahl speculated that some peer-to-peer communications protocols with built-in cryptography might make secure email possible. The final panel considered what reforms are necessary to rein in domestic surveillance. Cato Senior Fellow John Mueller demolished the claim that the NSA?s domestic spying has done much to protect Americans against terrorism. NSA chief Alexander claimed in June that mass telephone surveillance program had thwarted 54 terrorist plots. In October, Alexander admitted in a Senate hearing that the telephone dragnet?s effect was much more modest: It may have helped in one or maybe two cases. ?The Obama administration has doubled down on this program and doesn?t believe that it has done anything wrong,? despaired Michelle Richardson, legislative counsel for the ACLU. Center for Democracy and Technology senior counsel Kevin Bankston remarked that it is ?insane? that Google?s privacy counselor David Lieber ?had to dance around the question of receiving requests from the NSA.? People are free to say they haven?t received such requests, but they?re not allowed to tell anyone when they have. ?The NSA has turned the Internet into a giant surveillance platform,? declared renowned tech guru and Harvard Berkman Center fellow Bruce Schneier. Metadata collection that tells spies where a person went, who he spoke to, what he bought, and what he saw equals surveillance. ?When the president says, ?It?s just metadata,?? he means, ?Don?t worry, you?re all under surveillance all of the time.? Schneier argued that we need to make the Internet secure against all attackers. ?A secure Internet is in everyone?s interests,? said Schneier. ?We are all better off if no one can do this kind of bulk surveillance. Fundamentally, security is more important than surveillance.? The panel agreed that it is critical to pass legislation preventing the government from mandating that companies build spy-friendly insecurities into their systems. The final keynote speaker, Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R?Wisc.), outlined the contours of his Uniting and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ending Eavesdropping, Dragnet-Collection, and Online Monitoring (USA FREEDOM) Act. His bill would limit the collection of phone records to known terrorist suspects, force the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts to disclose surveillance policies, establish a constitutional privacy advocate in that court?s proceedings, and permit companies to disclose NSA information requests. At the end of conference, the one person whose efforts made it possible to for new Congressional reform efforts aimed at reining in the surveillance state went largely unacknowledged. And so, again: Thank you, Edward Snowden. Disclosure: I am still a card-carrying member of the ACLU. ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5 From eugen at leitl.org Sat Oct 19 11:34:32 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2013 13:34:32 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: <006501cecc8e$794ffa70$6befef50$@att.net> References: <01d801ceca8c$9449cda0$bcdd68e0$@att.net> <02a401ceca96$cd3cc4a0$67b64de0$@att.net> <037201cecb8c$4428af20$cc7a0d60$@att.net> <011501cecc66$91421280$b3c63780$@att.net> <006501cecc8e$794ffa70$6befef50$@att.net> Message-ID: <20131019113432.GS10405@leitl.org> On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 10:45:51PM -0700, spike wrote: > .I can't imagine what it is. Google claims there is about 150 million > ounces of gold in Ft. Knox, so that is about a couple hundred billion Nobody knows how much gold is in Ft Knox. My guess is: very little. You might remember what ended Bretton Woods on 15th August 1971. The French called the bluff. There are some people who think they bought gold, by buying certificates. They might even have demanded to see the gold in person, and were perhaps even shown yellow metal bars. But this is a scam, as you will find out if you want to take physical possession of it. Try it for yourself. (If you raise enough stink, especially involving the press, the bad publicity will eventually outweigh issuing massively oversubscribed metal, and you will get it. But not before). Even if they own physical metal, remember Roosevelt's Executive Order 6102, on 5th April 1933. You only own it if it's entirely off the record. > dollars right there. If we sell that to China, we still owe them over a > trillion dollars, but at least we offset two entire months of borrowing at > the current rate, TWO WHOLE MONTHS of this current Bacchanalian spendfest! > Just hand over the damn gold. We could sell off that, wouldn't even need to I'm afraid there is nothing to hand out. > borrow until the middle of December, possibly make it to Jingle Bells on > that alone if we tighten the belt a bit. Two months of our current > lifestyle to which we have grown so fondly accustomed, just for a pile of > useless yellow metal. Gold is not an investment, it's a portable value store to hedge against blowup of fiats. People think of ROI, the Jews who bought personal transport from smugglers out of Nazi Germany after borders were closed thought the ROI was excellent, considering the only alternative: becoming black smoke up the chimney. From spike66 at att.net Sat Oct 19 13:44:49 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2013 06:44:49 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: <20131019113432.GS10405@leitl.org> References: <01d801ceca8c$9449cda0$bcdd68e0$@att.net> <02a401ceca96$cd3cc4a0$67b64de0$@att.net> <037201cecb8c$4428af20$cc7a0d60$@att.net> <011501cecc66$91421280$b3c63780$@att.net> <006501cecc8e$794ffa70$6befef50$@att.net> <20131019113432.GS10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <006901ceccd1$61ea9dc0$25bfd940$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Eugen Leitl >...People think of ROI, the Jews who bought personal transport from smugglers out of Nazi Germany after borders were closed thought the ROI was excellent, considering the only alternative: becoming black smoke up the chimney. _______________________________________________ Ja. I find it remarkable that Senator Ted Cruz is getting so much criticism. Reasoning: Barack Obama commented that "...raising America's debt limit is a sign of leadership failure." Therefore, Cruz' fight against raising the debt limit is a sign of leadership success. "It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our government's reckless fiscal policies." Obama, 2006 So Cruz is fighting against asking for foreign aid, and is against reckless fiscal policies. Mr. Obama considered raising the debt a threat to national security. So when Ted Cruz opposes it, he is speaking in support of national security. As I see it, the Tea Party has constituents from everywhere along the traditional political spectrum from far right to far left and everything in between. The de facto leader is saying the same thing now that Barack Obama was saying seven years ago. So the one feller who said it then was elected president and the other feller who is saying the same thing now is having his life threatened. What changed? spike From pharos at gmail.com Sat Oct 19 14:18:25 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2013 15:18:25 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: <006901ceccd1$61ea9dc0$25bfd940$@att.net> References: <01d801ceca8c$9449cda0$bcdd68e0$@att.net> <02a401ceca96$cd3cc4a0$67b64de0$@att.net> <037201cecb8c$4428af20$cc7a0d60$@att.net> <011501cecc66$91421280$b3c63780$@att.net> <006501cecc8e$794ffa70$6befef50$@att.net> <20131019113432.GS10405@leitl.org> <006901ceccd1$61ea9dc0$25bfd940$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sat, Oct 19, 2013 at 2:44 PM, spike wrote: > As I see it, the Tea Party has constituents from everywhere along the > traditional political spectrum from far right to far left and everything in > between. The de facto leader is saying the same thing now that Barack Obama > was saying seven years ago. So the one feller who said it then was elected > president and the other feller who is saying the same thing now is having > his life threatened. > > What changed? > > Obama got elected, saw the secret set of accounts, was briefed on how bad the situation actually is and the approaching cataclysm. So he was told that there was no option but to try and keep things going as long as possible, while preparing as best he could against domestic insurrection and foreign attacks. It is easy to talk the talk until faced with having to walk the walk and not only never get elected again, but force years of suffering on the country. Yes, postponing the evil day makes the evil day far worse. But the current leaders hope that they will be well clear of the mess by the time it does arrive. A crisis postponed means it is somebody else's problem. That seems to be the way cities, states and most of the world is currently operating. BillK From spike66 at att.net Sat Oct 19 15:01:17 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2013 08:01:17 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: References: <01d801ceca8c$9449cda0$bcdd68e0$@att.net> <02a401ceca96$cd3cc4a0$67b64de0$@att.net> <037201cecb8c$4428af20$cc7a0d60$@att.net> <011501cecc66$91421280$b3c63780$@att.net> <006501cecc8e$794ffa70$6befef50$@att.net> <20131019113432.GS10405@leitl.org> <006901ceccd1$61ea9dc0$25bfd940$@att.net> Message-ID: <00b801ceccdc$10f842e0$32e8c8a0$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of BillK Subject: Re: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" On Sat, Oct 19, 2013 at 2:44 PM, spike wrote: >> ...So the one feller who said it then was elected president and the other feller who is saying the same thing now is having his life threatened. What changed? spike >...Obama got elected... BillK, I would accept your notion, except for the following: >... saw the secret set of accounts... Except that none of it is secret. These numbers are all right out on the table. We have heard whispers and conspiracy theorist rumors that there is no gold in Ft. Knox, that it has been secretly spirited away in the night and sold. But we can see that under the current borrowing rate, it doesn't matter all that much whether it has or has not. Its total value is a couple months of borrowing, eight weeks. We spent more time that that arguing over borrowing more money. None of this is secret. >...was briefed on how bad the situation actually is... We are all briefed now on how bad the situation actually is. Once we get to where we are borrowing a fully stocked nuclear aircraft carrier every five days, it scarcely matters if we are briefed that the real situation is really a nuke carrier every two days. None of this is secret however. Anyone who is paying attention sees that more people successfully signed up for a one-way trip to Mars than have signed up for the new heath care entitlement for which our government nearly defaulted in order to sustain. Is the real situation really worse than that? If so, even I would switch sides. >... and the approaching cataclysm... At least that would explain why the government is buying up all that ammo. >... So he was told that there was no option but to try and keep things going as long as possible, while preparing as best he could against domestic insurrection and foreign attacks... If that were the case, I have a hard time explaining why he didn't agree to delay the opt-out penalty for not buying health insurance, or offer some compromise which would buy them a few more weeks. >...A crisis postponed means it is somebody else's problem. That seems to be the way cities, states and most of the world is currently operating. BillK Ja. BillK, how are the Brits doing? Are you guys balancing your books these days? Eugen, how are the Germans doing? Anders, Swedes? Italians present? Where did all our ExI-talians go? You guys used to chatter a lot here, we enjoyed that. Are you guys balancing the books? Anyone anywhere else? Do chime in here please. I have some practical optimism to apply in this case however. Right now we are borrowing a nuke carrier a week, but we are getting in return container ships of cheapy manufactured goods from China, which goes to stock our Walmarts. And everywhere else for that matter. Soon they will tell us "No more borrow, Round Eyes. You pay now." Then we will be mostly without factories, for we don't do that kind of dirty work much in this pristine country. So I can imagine we will get extremely creative with making do on the stuff we currently have, analogous to the way Cuba is so masterful at keeping 50s and 60s era American cars running all this time, after the communist revolution stopped imports of those items. With the help of the internet, we can trade used stuff far more efficiently and do with far less than we have now, while still having a decent life. spike From johnkclark at gmail.com Sat Oct 19 15:47:26 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2013 11:47:26 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: <011501cecc66$91421280$b3c63780$@att.net> References: <01d801ceca8c$9449cda0$bcdd68e0$@att.net> <02a401ceca96$cd3cc4a0$67b64de0$@att.net> <037201cecb8c$4428af20$cc7a0d60$@att.net> <011501cecc66$91421280$b3c63780$@att.net> Message-ID: On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 9:00 PM, spike wrote: > Etc. John, it is much easier to paint your political adversaries as > crazy and stupid than it is to deal with their contentions. > Yes indeed. When you have hard evidence that your adversary is crazy it's easy to paint him as crazy. > Economics and biology are two completely different disciplines. Many > biologists are clued in on economics either. > The primary problem is that Tea Party members are so ignorant that they don't even know they're ignorant. And even though it's not their field I believe most biologists know that the earth goes around the sun and not the other way round, and a expert on genetics won't start pontificating on the nature of Dark Energy. But the Tea Party thinks it is a expert on everything. And it's not just biology and economics, Tea Party politicians have demonstrated that they are ignoramuses about the physical sciences too (the Big Bang theory is lies straight from the pit of Hell) and they know even less about economics or even basic human behavior (government default would calm the markets) than they do about science. > My contention is that we cannot tell for instance which wing is Ted Cruz. > He could be far left as well as far right. > I don't care if he's right or left, I care that Ted Cruz is not rational. > Recall that the two farthest left members of congress in 2004 and 2006 > were the strongest voices against raising the debt limit, Charlie Rangel > and Barack Obama. > I'm not here to defend Obama, and all politicians engage in political theater, but this time it was a pointless 24 billion dollar production that came within 90 minutes of global catastrophe. > Printing money and borrowing wealth are the same thing. > I know. > The debt limit is all about how much money the government can issue. > I know. > The government needs to borrow real wealth and stay within its borrowing > limit in order to print money. > I know. > Of course they could theoretically print money without borrowing wealth. > This has been tried, in Weimar Germany and more recently Zimbabwe. > And there we have it, fears about inflation, the GOP has been predicting it's going to show up any second now for almost 10 years, but there is still nothing. I'm not saying such a thing is not theoretically possible, but inflation is not the only disaster that can infect a economy, deflation can be just as bad or worse. Starting in 1929 and throughout the 1930's just like now there was not even a hint of inflation, but everybody was still miserable. It would be simplistic to say that printing money is always good or always bad, it depends on circumstances and right now the danger of deflation is greater than that of inflation. > why not sell that new aircraft carrier, the John F. Kennedy? That one is > said to have cost about 12 billion, so we can assume it would sell for > about the same. > Great idea, we could sell the aircraft carrier to Al Qaeda and the 12 billion dollars would be enough to keep the government running for almost 8 hours. > >The fact that there is a Tea Party is what keeps the world having some > faith in the dollar. > THAT IS RIDICULOUS! Tea Party hillbillies have turned the USA into a laughing stock in the eyes of the world, or at least they would be laughing if they weren't screaming in terror as if they just saw an infant holding a loaded handgun. > > You are saying the Tea Party is made up of crazy fools > Yes. > therefore their arguments can be safely dismissed. Yes. > The Tea Party is gently suggesting that we cannot sustain the endless > borrowing and overspending the way we have been doing for at least 14 years. > Yes, among other even stupider things that is what the Tea Party is saying. > Does that mean you believe we can sustain the borrow and spend > indefinitely? > Probably. The government of the USA has been in debt every year since 1835, and every single president since Herbert Hoover has increased the amount of debt. And except for 4 years the government has spent more money than it took in every year since 1970. And yet the country is still here, and as long as some intelligence is used, that is to say as long as the Tea Party is not involved, I see no reason this can't continue. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Sat Oct 19 15:52:36 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2013 17:52:36 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: <00b801ceccdc$10f842e0$32e8c8a0$@att.net> References: <02a401ceca96$cd3cc4a0$67b64de0$@att.net> <037201cecb8c$4428af20$cc7a0d60$@att.net> <011501cecc66$91421280$b3c63780$@att.net> <006501cecc8e$794ffa70$6befef50$@att.net> <20131019113432.GS10405@leitl.org> <006901ceccd1$61ea9dc0$25bfd940$@att.net> <00b801ceccdc$10f842e0$32e8c8a0$@att.net> Message-ID: <20131019155236.GI10405@leitl.org> On Sat, Oct 19, 2013 at 08:01:17AM -0700, spike wrote: > Ja. BillK, how are the Brits doing? Are you guys balancing your books > these days? Eugen, how are the Germans doing? Anders, Swedes? Italians The Germans are only doing well in comparison to rest of Europe. Krautlandia a low-wage country with about zero domestic demand and rising income inequality, entirely reliant on exports, and some of the exports (e.g. non-EV cars) are known to experience problem in future. If exports collapse, Germany will be hurting very badly, very soon. There are locations like Norway or Switzerland which are doing quite well. > present? Where did all our ExI-talians go? You guys used to chatter a lot > here, we enjoyed that. Are you guys balancing the books? Anyone anywhere > else? Do chime in here please. From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sat Oct 19 15:55:39 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2013 09:55:39 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: References: <01d801ceca8c$9449cda0$bcdd68e0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 2:16 PM, Mike Dougherty wrote: > On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 4:13 PM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > >> It is idiotic for the president to stand up and say we don't have a >> spending problem. >> > > Isn't that like the alcoholic that says "I don't have a drinking problem, > I rather enjoy it." > It's more like the alcoholic saying, "I don't have a drinking problem, I have a pissing problem. You can't expect me not to piss after drinking all that beer!" -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Sat Oct 19 16:26:10 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2013 12:26:10 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: <006501cecc8e$794ffa70$6befef50$@att.net> References: <01d801ceca8c$9449cda0$bcdd68e0$@att.net> <02a401ceca96$cd3cc4a0$67b64de0$@att.net> <037201cecb8c$4428af20$cc7a0d60$@att.net> <011501cecc66$91421280$b3c63780$@att.net> <006501cecc8e$794ffa70$6befef50$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sat, Oct 19, 2013 at 1:45 AM, spike wrote:> > Google claims there is about 150 million ounces of gold in Ft. Knox, so > that is about a couple hundred billion dollars right there. If we sell > that to China, we still owe them over a trillion dollars, > So if we follow your advice overnight gold becomes worthless and the dollar becomes worthless and everybody lives happily ever after. I don't think so. > TWO WHOLE MONTHS of this current Bacchanalian spendfest! > And that should tell you something right there, gold is nowhere near the most important means of economic exchange, the dollar is, that is to say the faith that the government of the USA will do what it promises to do, like pay its creditors when it says it will. As I said money is a very abstract thing, the only thing holding it together is faith and trust, and it is this faith and trust that you are determined to destroy. But they all lived happily ever after. > Remind me again John how those foolish evil stupid congressional Tea > Party members are > OK, these facts can not be repeated too often: TEA PARTY member and presidential candidate congressman Michele Bachman criticized the only smart thing Governor Rick Perry ever did, requiring all sixth-grade girls to get vaccinated against HPV, the virus that is the leading cause of cervical cancer. Perry later apologized for being smart and promised never to do it again. Oh and the flu vaccine causes mental retardation too. TEA PARTY member and presidential candidate Senator Rick Santorum proposed a amendment that would require the teaching of creationism in schools. TEA PARTY member and potential presidential candidate Senator Marco Rubio said: "Whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I?m not sure we?ll ever be able to answer that. It?s one of the great mysteries.? (he doesn?t even know the Bible, it says 6 days not 7) TEA PARTY member Governor and presidential candidate Rick Perry bragged: ?[Evolution is just] a theory that's out there. I am a firm believer in intelligent design as a matter of faith and intellect. In Texas we teach both Creationism and evolution.? TEA PARTY member and potential presidential candidate Senator Rand Paul thinks prayer should be in public schools and refuses to dismiss the idea that the Earth is only 9000 years old. TEA PARTY member and presidential candidate congressman Michele Bachman said: "There are hundreds and hundreds of scientists, many of them holding Nobel Prizes, who believe in intelligent design.? TEA PARTY congressman (and member of the House SCIENCE committee!!) Paul Brown said: "All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell. And it's lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior. You see, there are a lot of scientific data that I've found out as a scientist that actually show that this is really a young Earth. I don't believe that the Earth's but about 9,000 years old. I believe it was created in six days as we know them. That's what the Bible says.? TEA PARTY Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell said: "American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains. You know what, evolution is a myth. Why aren't monkeys still evolving into humans?? John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Sat Oct 19 16:18:34 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2013 09:18:34 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: References: <01d801ceca8c$9449cda0$bcdd68e0$@att.net> <02a401ceca96$cd3cc4a0$67b64de0$@att.net> <037201cecb8c$4428af20$cc7a0d60$@att.net> <011501cecc66$91421280$b3c63780$@att.net> Message-ID: <010701cecce6$dc95c3f0$95c14bd0$@att.net> >. On Behalf Of John Clark >. >> You are saying the Tea Party is made up of crazy fools >Yes. >> therefore their arguments can be safely dismissed. >Yes. John, even if they are wrong, they appear neither crazy nor foolish to me, but merely wrong, if they are wrong. I suspect they are right on the borrow and spend notion, which is their only official position. >>. The Tea Party is gently suggesting that we cannot sustain the endless borrowing and overspending the way we have been doing for at least 14 years. Does that mean you believe we can sustain the borrow and spend indefinitely? >.Probably. The government of the USA has been in debt every year since 1835. Yes, the 'so far so good' argument. >. as long as the Tea Party is not involved. Ja. We can call that: 'Since they get it all wrong on biology, we are compelled to not just dismiss but assume the opposite of whatever they say on economics' argument. Side note: the Tea Party has no position on evolution. There may be TP proponents of creationism, but the TP has no position on it. The TP has no position on abortion, drug laws, minority rights, none of that stuff. >. I see no reason this can't continue. John K Clark Very good then, we have both clearly stated our positions. The Tea Party says our current rate of borrow and spend cannot continue. You say it can, so long as the Tea Party is not involved, since they believe in creationism, etc. We can refute their views on biology, but have not on economics. It looks to me like this is one case where the suspected creationists got it right on government borrowing and spending. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sat Oct 19 16:34:22 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2013 10:34:22 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: References: <01d801ceca8c$9449cda0$bcdd68e0$@att.net> <02a401ceca96$cd3cc4a0$67b64de0$@att.net> <037201cecb8c$4428af20$cc7a0d60$@att.net> <011501cecc66$91421280$b3c63780$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sat, Oct 19, 2013 at 9:47 AM, John Clark wrote: > On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 9:00 PM, spike wrote: > > > Etc. John, it is much easier to paint your political adversaries as >> crazy and stupid than it is to deal with their contentions. >> > > Yes indeed. When you have hard evidence that your adversary is crazy it's > easy to paint him as crazy. > John, please back off the inflammatory rhetoric so that we can have a fact based, rational conversation. > > Economics and biology are two completely different disciplines. Many >> biologists are clued in on economics either. >> > > The primary problem is that Tea Party members are so ignorant that they > don't even know they're ignorant. > I am a Tea Party member. Do you think I'm ignorant? I don't believe in creationism. The Tea party is dedicated to ONE thing T.axed E.nough A.lready. We believe in lower taxation, followed by a decrease in government spending. Just because there are some creationists that are members of the Tea Party doesn't make the Tea Party about creationism. It's in the name, lower taxes is what we demand. Lowering the debt and deficit are helpful in lowering taxes long term, assuming we ever intend on paying any of that back. You mentioned earlier that we've borrowed money for nearly 200 years. And that's true, but whenever we've borrowed money against future inflation, it's been a small enough amount that growth made it later seem insignificant. With the coming shifts in energy, can we cavalierly accept that the growth of the US economy will make 16 trillion dollars seem insignificant? That is a pretty large bet on growth, especially when the president sees himself as managing the equalization of the United States with the rest of the world. American exceptionalism isn't part of his view of the planet. > > My contention is that we cannot tell for instance which wing is Ted >> Cruz. He could be far left as well as far right. >> > > I don't care if he's right or left, I care that Ted Cruz is not rational. > Or perhaps on economic and government growth issues he is the ONLY one who is rational. You can't possibly think he's more wrong on those issues than the entire rest of congress. > > Recall that the two farthest left members of congress in 2004 and 2006 > were the strongest voices against raising the debt limit, Charlie Rangel > and Barack Obama. > > I'm not here to defend Obama, and all politicians engage in political > theater, but this time it was a pointless 24 billion dollar production that > came within 90 minutes of global catastrophe. > And what was that if not political theater? They weren't really going to default on the debt. They were just making a point. I never heard Ted Cruz or Mike Lee say that defaulting on the debt would be a good idea. > >The fact that there is a Tea Party is what keeps the world having some >> faith in the dollar. >> > > THAT IS RIDICULOUS! Tea Party hillbillies have turned the USA into a > laughing stock in the eyes of the world, or at least they would be laughing > if they weren't screaming in terror as if they just saw an infant holding a > loaded handgun. > This could be debated. China recently downgraded the US again. Again, you are conflating right wing religious zealots with the people who just want lower taxes and smaller government. They are NOT always the same. I give myself as a prime example. > > You are saying the Tea Party is made up of crazy fools >> > > Yes. > Gee, thanks. > > The Tea Party is gently suggesting that we cannot sustain the endless >> borrowing and overspending the way we have been doing for at least 14 years. >> > > Yes, among other even stupider things that is what the Tea Party is saying. > How is that stupid? > > Does that mean you believe we can sustain the borrow and spend > indefinitely? > > Probably. The government of the USA has been in debt every year since > 1835, and every single president since Herbert Hoover has increased the > amount of debt. And except for 4 years the government has spent more money > than it took in every year since 1970. And yet the country is still here, > and as long as some intelligence is used, that is to say as long as the Tea > Party is not involved, I see no reason this can't continue. > It's the level at which we're doing it now that is of concern. This chart shows the situation really clearly. http://bit.ly/19TizJy For the Tea Party, the elbow of greatest concern is that at the beginning of Bush 43. The hilarious thing about this graph from my point of view is that Ronald Reagan was responsible for turning the whole ship about. Sigh. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Sat Oct 19 17:12:55 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2013 18:12:55 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: <20131019155236.GI10405@leitl.org> References: <02a401ceca96$cd3cc4a0$67b64de0$@att.net> <037201cecb8c$4428af20$cc7a0d60$@att.net> <011501cecc66$91421280$b3c63780$@att.net> <006501cecc8e$794ffa70$6befef50$@att.net> <20131019113432.GS10405@leitl.org> <006901ceccd1$61ea9dc0$25bfd940$@att.net> <00b801ceccdc$10f842e0$32e8c8a0$@att.net> <20131019155236.GI10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <5262BD97.1090009@aleph.se> On 19/10/2013 16:52, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Sat, Oct 19, 2013 at 08:01:17AM -0700, spike wrote: > >> Ja. BillK, how are the Brits doing? Are you guys balancing your books >> these days? Eugen, how are the Germans doing? Anders, Swedes? Italians > The Germans are only doing well in comparison to rest of Europe. Half-full vs. half-empty glasses. Sweden is doing decently by European standards, the UK as usual underperforming a bit but nowhere near the French or Mediterranean levels. It is a matter of muddling through. I think one can argue that the EU as a political institution is pretty ineffective and most euro governments too complacent. But they are not actively crazy, at least not in the northern half of Europe. As the Economist put it, at least they vaguely talk about solutions rather than just make up things that will not work at all. There is no political deadlock in the same way as in the US. Will be visiting Norway next week, it might be fun seeing how the successful half lives. (I will talk transhumanism at an atheism youth camp) -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Faculty of Philosophy Oxford University From johnkclark at gmail.com Sat Oct 19 17:52:12 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2013 13:52:12 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: References: <01d801ceca8c$9449cda0$bcdd68e0$@att.net> <02a401ceca96$cd3cc4a0$67b64de0$@att.net> <037201cecb8c$4428af20$cc7a0d60$@att.net> <011501cecc66$91421280$b3c63780$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sat, Oct 19, 2013 at 12:34 PM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > John, please back off the inflammatory rhetoric > No. I will continue to call a spade a spade. And it's a little ironic that the default will calm the market and the embryology is a lie from the fiery pit of hell people are complaining about inflammatory rhetoric. >> I don't care if he's right or left, I care that Ted Cruz is not rational. > > > > Or perhaps on economic and government growth issues he is the ONLY one > who is rational. > And perhaps pigs will fly, but probably not. > you can't possibly think he's more wrong on those issues than the entire > rest of congress. > Oh but I can! > > I never heard Ted Cruz or Mike Lee say that defaulting on the debt would > be a good idea. > Actions speak louder than words, 90 minutes before default would have devastated the world Ted Cruz voted to allow that catastrophe to happen. And I can never forgive him for that. Never. > They weren't really going to default on the debt. They were just making a > point. > No, it was far far more than that. After the vote and sanity prevailed Ted Cruz lambasted his fellow republicans that didn't vote as he did and made it clear that the Tea Party would finance loonier opponents to challenge them in the Republican primary races. > I am a Tea Party member. > And I too have a confession to make, although I'm embarrassed to admit it I'm still a registered Republican. In fact, I actually agree with about half of what the Tea Party says, the problem is that in the other half they're not just wrong they're BAT SHIT CRAZY WRONG. > you are conflating right wing religious zealots with the people who just > want lower taxes and smaller government. They are NOT always the same. I > give myself as a prime example. > I want lower taxes and smaller government too, but the way to do that is to vote to buy less stuff, not to vote to refuse to pay for stuff you've already voted to buy. And if I don't get my way I'm not going to try my very best to set off a economic H bomb that would destroy the world as the hillbilly Tea Party did. > It's the level at which we're doing it now that is of concern. > This chart shows the situation really clearly. > http://bit.ly/19TizJy > That chart is really not a very good argument that debt is bad, according to it the largest percentage of debt to GDP happen in 1946, just before the 1950's boon times and the largest increase in economic activity in history. And the second largest economic boon happened during the Clinton years, a time of increasing debt. John k Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Sat Oct 19 22:12:11 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2013 23:12:11 +0100 Subject: [ExI] What if humans were twice as intelligent? In-Reply-To: <525F182E.8060601@aleph.se> References: <525BBDB8.5060308@aleph.se> <525BD350.5010909@aleph.se> <525F182E.8060601@aleph.se> Message-ID: <526303BB.1040601@aleph.se> Some updated runs with my model: http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2013/10/the_morons_are_marching_rather_slowly.html -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Faculty of Philosophy Oxford University From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sun Oct 20 02:39:19 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2013 20:39:19 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Who wants to live forever? Maybe you can... In-Reply-To: References: <20131018154844.GG10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 3:03 PM, Max More wrote: > I'm pretty sure it's correct to say that Kriorus has nothing like Alcor's > Patient Care Trust Fund. They couldn't, with prices that low. That means > they have no money dedicated to keeping you cryopreserved. I believe they > are entirely dependent on sufficient new business to keep them in operation > and their patients in storage. If they keep growing fast enough, perhaps > that could work. If not, it will not be sustainable. > I assumed that there had to be hidden costs. > Kelly, I presume you know that you can use life insurance to pay for > cryopreservation? You can get a neurocryopreservation with Alcor for $80K > (which includes standby, stabilization, and transport). If you already have > or can get a policy for something like that amount ($100K may be the > minimum), you're covered. > I am aware of the life insurance approach. I have extremely significant cash flow issues at the moment. Paying for dinner comes before paying for cryopreservation... :-) That being said, even if I had the money, I have not entirely bought into cryopreservation for myself, even though I totally support others having the option and I believe it is a reasonable thing to do and real science. It's not that I don't believe future technology may be able to retrieve cryonauts, I'm just not entirely convinced that enough of the microstructures are preserved with current approaches. In addition, I'm not entirely sure I want to experience the future in a big jump. It's scary enough getting there one day at a time... LOL. I reserve the right to change my mind once I have enough money to avoid the Obamacare penalty for not having health insurance. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Sun Oct 20 03:29:31 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2013 20:29:31 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: References: <01d801ceca8c$9449cda0$bcdd68e0$@att.net> <02a401ceca96$cd3cc4a0$67b64de0$@att.net> <037201cecb8c$4428af20$cc7a0d60$@att.net> <011501cecc66$91421280$b3c63780$@att.net> <006501cecc8e$794ffa70$6befef50$@att.net> Message-ID: <025301cecd44$97857860$c6906920$@att.net> >. On Behalf Of John Clark Subject: Re: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" >.As I said money is a very abstract thing, the only thing holding it together is faith and trust, and it is this faith and trust that you are determined to destroy. . John K Clark John, just knowing that I have the awesome power to singlehandedly destroy the world's economies with merely a skeptical attitude gives me a nearly irresistible urge to make comments such as Bwaaaaahahahahahaaaa. https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTOFiT9fVOJY_dwipakntwO 1zeAfXBYj04SE1npjOD25jMyAT-x6QIt is such a wild head rush, I suddenly understand and sympathize with Simon Bar Sinister. This world must not depend on money which has value based only on trust and faith. We need money that represents actual wealth, based on evidence and frequent verification by exchange. Otherwise it enables whichever nation which mints the faith-cash to borrow real wealth at any arbitrary rate based on nothing. This is a form of unchecked power, which always results in unchecked corruption and eventual chaos. Your counter-evidence is in pointing out the attitude of some Tea Party candidates on a perfectly irrelevant and unrelated topic, creationism. The Tea Party holds no position on that subject. You have produced no evidence to convince me that we can continue to borrow three billion dollars a day and sustain that indefinitely. That idea is to economics as creationism is to biology. I am still not buying that notion. My shocking theory: all governments and all nations must live within their means. All governments must balance their books, including that fortunate nation which mints the world's favorite currency. Otherwise it does not stay the world's favorite currency. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: application/octet-stream Size: 5173 bytes Desc: not available URL: From atymes at gmail.com Sun Oct 20 06:46:37 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2013 23:46:37 -0700 Subject: [ExI] [Hplus-talk] Working toward an Optimal Future In-Reply-To: <20131018143153.GY10405@leitl.org> References: <20131018143153.GY10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: Unfortunately, the value of yet another community for mere talk is low and potentially negative. There are many, and adding one more disperses what unity we have. It would be superior to take one of the established forums and promote it more widely. Further, it is mere talk. There is no connection to action - no assistance for, once the talk has come up with a plan of action, implementing it. There are already many well-known things we could do right now, if we had the resources. The energy to put this forum together could be better spent, researching the ideas (on existing forums) and finding ways to, for instance, actually get a 3D printer into the hands of one who proposes to adapt it to use recycled plastics...but perhaps can not afford their own 3D printer. (Or better yet, to design those last few bits of 3D printers that 3D printers can't yet print.) On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 7:31 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > ----- Forwarded message from Magnus Ulstein > ----- > > Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2013 15:44:41 +0200 > From: Magnus Ulstein > To: hplus-talk at list.humanityplus.org > Subject: [Hplus-talk] Working toward an Optimal Future > Message-ID: < > CAGSNXr3SuJj8q7UiSERGCq3n7xeCCq4emJkDmY36Y_4Aix0Eag at mail.gmail.com> > > If you are on this mailing list, chances are you?ve given at least some > thought into how you would prefer the future to turn out. And chances are > reality isn?t quite living up to your expectations. So the question we have > to ask ourselves is: What can we do about it? How can we nudge > transhumanity on to a path that leads to a more optimal future? And just as > importantly: what does a more optimal future even mean? > > So, what can we do about it? Well, there are maybe a few thousand of you > who receive this email. That?s probably enough of a community to do > something. And elsewhere on the internet, net communities like LessWrong > and the Lifeboat Foundation are working to prevent some pretty nasty > futures. In another corner of the internet, environmentalists and > socialists are discussing how to prevent a corporation controlled future > from two very different angles. Environmentalist movements oppose genetic > modification in general, thinking only of terminator seeds and genetic > diversity while transhumanist movements support genetic modification in > general, thinking about the end of hereditary disease and a new generation > of transhumans. > > As I see it, the main problem we have is simply this: those of us who think > seriously about the future aren?t talking to each other. At least not > enough. There are millions of people out there working towards a brighter > future, and we aren?t coordinating. And because we lock ourselves in > different mailing lists, on different web forums, we miss out on the ideas > that could be born from our interaction. > > We have a lot we can learn from each other. Imagine the Green movement > combining with the Maker movement to produce 3d printers using recycled > plastic. Imagine transhumanist socialism, based on raising everyone up > rather than forcing everyone down to the lowest common denominator. Imagine > open sourced cybernetic implants. Who knows what good ideas could emerge > if we could just talk together. > > Some colleagues and myself have put together a website where all futurists > and people who care about the future (but do not identify themselves as > futurist) can discuss the relevant topics and hopefully find novel > solutions through combining ideas that one wouldn?t normally think to > combine. > > Hence this mail. Humanity+ is perhaps one of the largest and best > established future interested groups out there, and frankly I?m not sure > we?d be able to pull it off without you. Your participation in this grand > experiment would help us make a more Optimal Future for everyone. In > return, we can offer a refreshing change of perspective and a look at the > bigger picture on where we are headed. > > I hope to see you there. > > http://optimalfuture.org/ > > _______________________________________________ > Hplus-talk mailing list > Hplus-talk at list.humanityplus.org > http://lists.list.humanityplus.org/mailman/listinfo/hplus-talk > > > ----- End forwarded message ----- > -- > Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org > ______________________________________________________________ > ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org > AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5 > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Sun Oct 20 09:09:55 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sun, 20 Oct 2013 11:09:55 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Who wants to live forever? Maybe you can... In-Reply-To: References: <20131018154844.GG10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20131020090955.GX10405@leitl.org> On Sat, Oct 19, 2013 at 08:39:19PM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > I am aware of the life insurance approach. I have extremely significant > cash flow issues at the moment. Paying for dinner comes before paying for > cryopreservation... :-) I'm not yet signed up, either. I hope to sign up with our own organisation, which is probably a decade away. In case you have some spare time, I recommend you organize a group of volunteers in your area, and complete a transport technician training as well as build up some first responder capability. > That being said, even if I had the money, I have not entirely bought into > cryopreservation for myself, even though I totally support others having > the option and I believe it is a reasonable thing to do and real science. > It's not that I don't believe future technology may be able to retrieve > cryonauts, I'm just not entirely convinced that enough of the > microstructures are preserved with current approaches. In addition, I'm not The hardest validation we have is viability, and there has been some quite promising work on hippocampal slices. > entirely sure I want to experience the future in a big jump. It's scary No jump, expect to be sandboxed from reality for a while, until you're ready. > enough getting there one day at a time... LOL. > > I reserve the right to change my mind once I have enough money to avoid the > Obamacare penalty for not having health insurance. From pharos at gmail.com Sun Oct 20 10:07:00 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sun, 20 Oct 2013 11:07:00 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: <025301cecd44$97857860$c6906920$@att.net> References: <01d801ceca8c$9449cda0$bcdd68e0$@att.net> <02a401ceca96$cd3cc4a0$67b64de0$@att.net> <037201cecb8c$4428af20$cc7a0d60$@att.net> <011501cecc66$91421280$b3c63780$@att.net> <006501cecc8e$794ffa70$6befef50$@att.net> <025301cecd44$97857860$c6906920$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sun, Oct 20, 2013 at 4:29 AM, spike wrote: > This world must not depend on money which has value based only on trust and faith. > We need money that represents actual wealth, based on evidence and frequent verification > by exchange. Otherwise it enables whichever nation which mints the faith-cash to borrow > real wealth at any arbitrary rate based on nothing. This is a form of unchecked power, > which always results in unchecked corruption and eventual chaos. > > Your counter-evidence is in pointing out the attitude of some Tea Party candidates on > a perfectly irrelevant and unrelated topic, creationism. The Tea Party holds no position > on that subject. You have produced no evidence to convince me that we can continue > to borrow three billion dollars a day and sustain that indefinitely. > That idea is to economics as creationism is to biology. I am still not buying that notion. > > My shocking theory: all governments and all nations must live within their means. > All governments must balance their books, including that fortunate nation which mints > > It's complicated. :) As shown by the wildly differing opinions. Fundamentally, a nation that prints it's own fiat currency can never go bust. It can always print enough currency to pay all the debts. So what is the problem? Currency hyperinflation. e.g. Weimar Republic, Zimbabwe, etc. So how can the US continue to print so much money and avoid hyperinflation? (up till now, anyway). First, control what gets counted in the inflation statistics. (Who cares if rare champagne costs 100,000 USD a bottle if it is not in the CPI stats?). Next, keep the income of the majority of the population low, thus avoiding hyperinflation of the basics, like food and clothing. (Nobody wants wheelbarrows of money to buy food). So, where is all the US money printing going? Look at the growing inequality in the US. The 0.1% ultra rich and their corporations are getting richer. And the things they spend their money on are increasing rapidly in price. Look at the multi-million corporation deals, planes, property, islands, art objects, lobbying costs!, etc. All things not in the CPI calculation are wildly inflating. So there is still a problem with US money printing. It is just not that obvious yet what it is. There is a huge transfer of wealth going on and the 0.1% are very happy with the situation. BillK From bbenzai at yahoo.com Sun Oct 20 12:28:49 2013 From: bbenzai at yahoo.com (Ben) Date: Sun, 20 Oct 2013 13:28:49 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Who wants to live forever? Maybe you can... In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <5263CC81.2080400@yahoo.com> Eugen Leitl wrote: > Kelly Anderson wrote: >> I'm not entirely sure I want to experience the future in a big jump. It's scary > No jump, expect to be sandboxed from reality for a while, until you're ready. That's one of the biggest problems with cryonics. Just as we have no practical way of telling if we live in a simulation now, anyone waking from suspension will have no way of telling that they're /not/ in a simulation. That sandbox could be indefinite, and totally convincing. From spike66 at att.net Sun Oct 20 14:24:49 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 20 Oct 2013 07:24:49 -0700 Subject: [ExI] [Hplus-talk] Working toward an Optimal Future In-Reply-To: References: <20131018143153.GY10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <008101cecda0$235e7f20$6a1b7d60$@att.net> >. On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes Subject: Re: [ExI] [Hplus-talk] Working toward an Optimal Future >.(Or better yet, to design those last few bits of 3D printers that 3D printers can't yet print.). I have been pondering that problem for some time. We could imagine some kind of multistage printing process which uses different equipment rather than a single machine capable of printing every part of itself. I think of nature's own 3D printers, marvelous evolures are these. They deposit material a bit a time to form smooth walled hexagonal cell structures, into which a related but differently abled beast places a third type of evolure which develops into still another 3D printer. Together the hive self-repairs and self-replicates, interacting with its world in a mutually beneficial way. If there are some kind of high-melting-point metal bits needed for a 3D printer, we can imagine using a small collection of machines made almost entirely of 3D printed parts which includes a lathe and mill which can make the remaining bits from castings of high temperature material. The casts would be made by layering deposited fused silica over a lower temperature printable material to create a one-time-use cast. I realize that wasn't a good description. I need to spin up a powerpoint pitch. Nature has figured out how to make self-replicating machines, with a bio-version of 3D printing as part of the process. We should be able to do the same or exceed that. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Sun Oct 20 15:11:04 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sun, 20 Oct 2013 11:11:04 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: <025301cecd44$97857860$c6906920$@att.net> References: <01d801ceca8c$9449cda0$bcdd68e0$@att.net> <02a401ceca96$cd3cc4a0$67b64de0$@att.net> <037201cecb8c$4428af20$cc7a0d60$@att.net> <011501cecc66$91421280$b3c63780$@att.net> <006501cecc8e$794ffa70$6befef50$@att.net> <025301cecd44$97857860$c6906920$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sat, Oct 19, 2013 at 11:29 PM, spike wrote: > creationism. The Tea Party holds no position on that subject. > I don't know how you determine the position of the Tea Party about anything except by looking at the position of Tea Party members, and nearly all of the most prominent ones are creationists, and very vocal and militant ones too. And there is a connection, if you're irrational in one subject, like biology, I think you're probably more likely to be irrational in another subject, like economics. At any case it would certainly be irrational and an avoidance of reality to claim that there is not a strong connection between the Tea Party and creationism. > This world must not depend on money which has value based only on trust > and faith. > Spike, that's the only type of money there is and it is the only reason any form of exchange has value. > We need money that represents actual wealth, > Actual wealth? Like what, atoms that contain 79 protons and 118 neutrons? The only reason that stuff has value is that people think it has value and they have faith that value will continue in the future. That's why it's money, although a form of money that is not nearly as important to the world economy as the US dollar is. And if we go along with your plan and dump thousands of tons on the market the faith in the future value of that stuff will be destroyed too just like the value of the dollar, and with nothing left to use we'll be bartering 2 skinned squirrels for one can of beans. > based on evidence and frequent verification by exchange. > The US dollar has been the backbone of world exchange for nearly a century, and you want to destroy that and make gold worthless too. And you think the world economy can withstand those two devastating head shots and continue on as if nothing has happened. I think there will be blood in the streets, in fact there would be blood in the streets today if more people had voted Ted Cruz's way on Wednesday night. > You have produced no evidence to convince me that we can continue to > borrow three billion dollars a day and sustain that indefinitely. > I don't know about indefinitely but there is plenty of evidence it's not a immediate problem. I'm sure you believe in the wisdom of the free market as I do, and the market is saying that the government HAS NOT printed too much money in the last few years; inflation is the lowest it's been in many decades, in fact it's so low it's starting to scare economists. And interest rates are also the lowest they've been in decades which means the free market is not expecting inflation to pick up anytime soon. Inflation happens when there is more money in circulation than there are things to buy, but today it's the very opposite; there are millions of houses with nobody living in them and factories are operating far below their maximum capacity, the lowest level in my lifetime. Right now the big danger is deflation not inflation. > > My shocking theory: all governments and all nations must live within > their means. > That is incorrect. The government of the USA has not lived within its means since 1835, and yet it continues. >All governments must balance their books, > No government on earth balances their books nor do they need to because they have the power to print money. True, that power can be abused but it can be abused in 2 different ways, printing too much and printing too little. Today there is zero evidence the USA is printing too much. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sun Oct 20 16:28:08 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sun, 20 Oct 2013 10:28:08 -0600 Subject: [ExI] B Movies - Worst Movie of All Time (Re: it was the best times, it was the best of times) Message-ID: On Thu, Oct 10, 2013 at 3:44 PM, Tomasz Rola wrote: > I recently started to enjoy B movies a lot. > > Of non-sf movies, full set of Kurosawa and Scorsese's "Taxi driver" are > obvious buy. Then, I don't know again. > > This night my cable serves "The Helix Loaded", a "Matrix" B-ripoff. > > http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0401462/ > > AFAIK I have never before watched a movie with imdb rating so low (1.7). I > am so excited! > If you enjoy truly terrible movies, as I do, then there isn't one much worse than Monster a Go Go. It has a terrible plot, terrible lighting, they changed all the actors half way through without saying anything about it, it has a lousy ending, they didn't finish the opening credits, the music score is horrid, the editing is truly awful. In short, if you feel that you have not contributed to the world in a really significant way, this movie will make you feel much better, because at least you weren't involved in making it. The best thing you can say about Monster a Go Go is that nobody involved in making this film ever worked in Hollywood again. Whew! Monster a Go Go makes Ed Wood look like Stephen Spielberg. Honestly. If you can't find a copy... hit me up. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sun Oct 20 16:43:24 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sun, 20 Oct 2013 10:43:24 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: References: <01d801ceca8c$9449cda0$bcdd68e0$@att.net> <02a401ceca96$cd3cc4a0$67b64de0$@att.net> <037201cecb8c$4428af20$cc7a0d60$@att.net> <011501cecc66$91421280$b3c63780$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sat, Oct 19, 2013 at 11:52 AM, John Clark wrote: > > On Sat, Oct 19, 2013 at 12:34 PM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > > > I am a Tea Party member. >> > > And I too have a confession to make, although I'm embarrassed to admit it > I'm still a registered Republican. In fact, I actually agree with about > half of what the Tea Party says, the problem is that in the other half > they're not just wrong they're BAT SHIT CRAZY WRONG. > Again, the stuff that makes the Tea Party wrong is not officially part of the Tea Party, but rather positions that members of the Tea Party often take. It's a matter of being highly correlated, but not causal. For example, the Tea Party itself says nothing about creationism that I am aware of. Yet, a high number of Tea Party advocates believe in creationism. The question though is can you hold your nose and be in the room with that level of craziness in order to bring fiscal responsibility to Washington? The Republicans and Democrats have both shown a disregard for spending money and love growing government. We have to have a real alternative. Personally, I'm a Libertarian, which reflects my thoughts that the Tea Party has it right on fiscal issues, (even though defaulting on the debt is clearly not something anyone is really going to let happen) and that the social liberals have it right on the social and science side of the ledger. > > you are conflating right wing religious zealots with the people who just >> want lower taxes and smaller government. They are NOT always the same. I >> give myself as a prime example. >> > > I want lower taxes and smaller government too, but the way to do that is > to vote to buy less stuff, not to vote to refuse to pay for stuff you've > already voted to buy. And if I don't get my way I'm not going to try my > very best to set off a economic H bomb that would destroy the world as the > hillbilly Tea Party did. > But with the juggernaut that is Washington, how else do you slow it down other than throwing bodies under it? This is a serious question. How the hell do we slow it down? > > > It's the level at which we're doing it now that is of concern. >> This chart shows the situation really clearly. >> http://bit.ly/19TizJy >> > > That chart is really not a very good argument that debt is bad, according > to it the largest percentage of debt to GDP happen in 1946, just before the > 1950's boon times and the largest increase in economic activity in history. > And the second largest economic boon happened during the Clinton years, a > time of increasing debt. > > And yet it shows a trend towards levels of debt that we haven't experienced since the TRUE emergency of WWII. Does anyone other then Eugen think we are currently facing a crisis that rises to the level of WWII? -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Sun Oct 20 16:49:10 2013 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Sun, 20 Oct 2013 12:49:10 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Who wants to live forever? Maybe you can... In-Reply-To: <20131020090955.GX10405@leitl.org> References: <20131018154844.GG10405@leitl.org> <20131020090955.GX10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Sun, Oct 20, 2013 at 5:09 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Sat, Oct 19, 2013 at 08:39:19PM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > > > I am aware of the life insurance approach. I have extremely significant > > cash flow issues at the moment. Paying for dinner comes before paying for > > cryopreservation... :-) > > I'm not yet signed up, either. I hope to sign up with our > own organisation, which is probably a decade away. > Given your prediction about energy and end of civilization, who are you expecting will be around to maintain the cryopreserved state or eventually reanimate you? Given the choice between freezing to death or keeping the dead frozen, I'm going to use those resources for myself. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sun Oct 20 17:00:16 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sun, 20 Oct 2013 11:00:16 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: References: <01d801ceca8c$9449cda0$bcdd68e0$@att.net> <02a401ceca96$cd3cc4a0$67b64de0$@att.net> <037201cecb8c$4428af20$cc7a0d60$@att.net> <011501cecc66$91421280$b3c63780$@att.net> <006501cecc8e$794ffa70$6befef50$@att.net> <025301cecd44$97857860$c6906920$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sun, Oct 20, 2013 at 9:11 AM, John Clark wrote: > On Sat, Oct 19, 2013 at 11:29 PM, spike wrote: > > > creationism. The Tea Party holds no position on that subject. >> > > I don't know how you determine the position of the Tea Party about > anything except by looking at the position of Tea Party members, and nearly > all of the most prominent ones are creationists, and very vocal and > militant ones too. And there is a connection, if you're irrational in one > subject, like biology, I think you're probably more likely to be irrational > in another subject, like economics. At any case it would certainly be > irrational and an avoidance of reality to claim that there is not a strong > connection between the Tea Party and creationism. > But John, other than threatening to default on the debt, which I attribute to political theater only, what CRAZY economic theory do you attribute to the Tea Party? > > > > This world must not depend on money which has value based only on trust >> and faith. >> > > Spike, that's the only type of money there is and it is the only reason > any form of exchange has value. > True enough. We need a currency based on Work, in the Physics sense. You could value oil in the amount of Work it would do, and then you could value everything else in terms of oil. Then you could have other "currencies" based on the Work done by solar, wind, nuclear, whatever. Just a thought. And since oil is tied to the US dollar, that is the closest currency to this ideal. Unfortunately, with the Fed printing dollars at an unusually high rate, it takes us farther from that ideal. > > > We need money that represents actual wealth, >> > > Actual wealth? Like what, atoms that contain 79 protons and 118 neutrons? > The only reason that stuff has value is that people think it has value and > they have faith that value will continue in the future. That's why it's > money, although a form of money that is not nearly as important to the > world economy as the US dollar is. And if we go along with your plan and > dump thousands of tons on the market the faith in the future value of that > stuff will be destroyed too just like the value of the dollar, and with > nothing left to use we'll be bartering 2 skinned squirrels for one can of > beans. > Money's main purpose is to simply avoid barter. To store wealth in between transactions. Anything will serve this purpose, but the purpose will be served better if there aren't people who exert a lot of pressure on what the medium of exchange is worth. That is, if you have a central power that can create inflationary or deflationary pressure on a currency, then the currency is less stable or trustworthy for use as a medium of exchange. The reason that some of us like Bitcoin is that it is just such a currency, and is largely independent of centralized meddling (other than just declaring it illegal). > > > based on evidence and frequent verification by exchange. >> > > The US dollar has been the backbone of world exchange for nearly a > century, and you want to destroy that and make gold worthless too. > I'm not sure where this idea comes from. Spike does not want to make gold nor dollars worthless, I'm sure. > And you think the world economy can withstand those two devastating head > shots and continue on as if nothing has happened. I think there will be > blood in the streets, in fact there would be blood in the streets today if > more people had voted Ted Cruz's way on Wednesday night. > No. The president would have folded in the face of such pressure, and the individual mandate for Obamacare would have been sensibly put off for a year, just as the mandate for companies and unions and everyone else with power has. The problem is that the people have no power, and we get the short end of every stick. Nobody, including the POTUS in particular, is going to allow the government to go into default. But if the people are truly represented by the House of Representatives, then we can get off of the crazy spending binge we currently observe. > You have produced no evidence to convince me that we can continue to >> borrow three billion dollars a day and sustain that indefinitely. >> > > I don't know about indefinitely but there is plenty of evidence it's not a > immediate problem. I'm sure you believe in the wisdom of the free market as > I do, and the market is saying that the government HAS NOT printed too much > money in the last few years; inflation is the lowest it's been in many > decades, in fact it's so low it's starting to scare economists. And > interest rates are also the lowest they've been in decades which means the > free market is not expecting inflation to pick up anytime soon. > I have reason to believe that the interest rate has a lot to do with the derivatives markets. If the interest rate does begin to creep up into the 6 or 7 range, I think that's going to make the housing market problems in 2008 look like a walk in the park. > Inflation happens when there is more money in circulation than there are > things to buy, but today it's the very opposite; there are millions of > houses with nobody living in them and factories are operating far below > their maximum capacity, the lowest level in my lifetime. Right now the big > danger is deflation not inflation. > The problem most people have with the debt and deficit is not related to deflation or inflation, it's related to fairness. How can the government operate in perpetual deficit when individuals and corporations can not? > > >> > My shocking theory: all governments and all nations must live within >> their means. >> > > That is incorrect. The government of the USA has not lived within its > means since 1835, and yet it continues. > Sad that. Always been a big fan of Andrew Jackson for that reason. > > >All governments must balance their books, >> > > No government on earth balances their books nor do they need to because > they have the power to print money. True, that power can be abused but it > can be abused in 2 different ways, printing too much and printing too > little. Today there is zero evidence the USA is printing too much > Every time the government prints a dollar, the dollar in your pocket goes down in value just a little. It is just another hidden tax and taxes are high enough already. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Sun Oct 20 17:00:39 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sun, 20 Oct 2013 10:00:39 -0700 Subject: [ExI] [Hplus-talk] Working toward an Optimal Future In-Reply-To: <008101cecda0$235e7f20$6a1b7d60$@att.net> References: <20131018143153.GY10405@leitl.org> <008101cecda0$235e7f20$6a1b7d60$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sun, Oct 20, 2013 at 7:24 AM, spike wrote: > If there are some kind of high-melting-point metal bits needed for a 3D > printer, we can imagine using a small collection of machines made almost > entirely of 3D printed parts which includes a lathe and mill which can make > the remaining bits from castings of high temperature material. > Ah, that's the trap, settling for "almost entirely". Then the printers can't actually make themselves completely, so more printers does not directly mean more capacity to make printers. That said - why not 3D print the lathe and mill? A plasma torch is, I hear, capable of making itself (with proper feedstock and robot arms + vision to guide it). Perhaps a self-creating multi-tool is more feasible than a self-creating 3D printer specifically. Certainly, a typical machine shop can create all the components of another typical machine shop (and manipulators to assemble it), no? So how do we miniaturize this, and in so doing get the total cost down to something any hobbyist can easily afford - and then, ramp production up further until fully robotic manufacturing on large scales, and then on small scales, becomes significantly cheaper than even the cheapest foreign labor? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Sun Oct 20 17:04:37 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sun, 20 Oct 2013 10:04:37 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Who wants to live forever? Maybe you can... In-Reply-To: <5263CC81.2080400@yahoo.com> References: <5263CC81.2080400@yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Sun, Oct 20, 2013 at 5:28 AM, Ben wrote: > That's one of the biggest problems with cryonics. Just as we have no > practical way of telling if we live in a simulation now, anyone waking from > suspension will have no way of telling that they're /not/ in a simulation. > That sandbox could be indefinite, and totally convincing. > That argument is a non-op. If the chances of us being in a simulation before and afterward are essentially the same - and they appear to be - then it does not affect the decision to go for cryonics or not. Odds are, though, we'll be revived at the minimum viable technical capability - which may include uploading, but probably precludes upload into simulation. Cheaper to let the cryonaut experience and get over any future shock. (It also helps the cryonaut become a production member of society faster - and maybe give the reviving organization some more money.) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sun Oct 20 17:11:49 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sun, 20 Oct 2013 11:11:49 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Who wants to live forever? Maybe you can... In-Reply-To: <20131020090955.GX10405@leitl.org> References: <20131018154844.GG10405@leitl.org> <20131020090955.GX10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Sun, Oct 20, 2013 at 3:09 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > In case you have some spare time, I recommend you organize a group > of volunteers in your area, and complete a transport technician > training as well as build up some first responder capability. > I've got quite enough non-money producing activities at the moment. I have to get back to where I can be effective at philanthropy first. ;-) > > > That being said, even if I had the money, I have not entirely bought into > > cryopreservation for myself, even though I totally support others having > > the option and I believe it is a reasonable thing to do and real science. > > It's not that I don't believe future technology may be able to retrieve > > cryonauts, I'm just not entirely convinced that enough of the > > microstructures are preserved with current approaches. In addition, I'm > not > > The hardest validation we have is viability, and there has been some > quite promising work on hippocampal slices. > I do try to pay attention, and I have great hope that we can get there. I'm just not sure we're there yet. > > > entirely sure I want to experience the future in a big jump. It's scary > > No jump, expect to be sandboxed from reality for a while, until > you're ready. > That's actually a really comforting thought. I appreciate that idea very much Eugen. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Sun Oct 20 17:18:24 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sun, 20 Oct 2013 19:18:24 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Who wants to live forever? Maybe you can... In-Reply-To: <5263CC81.2080400@yahoo.com> References: <5263CC81.2080400@yahoo.com> Message-ID: <20131020171824.GD10405@leitl.org> On Sun, Oct 20, 2013 at 01:28:49PM +0100, Ben wrote: > That's one of the biggest problems with cryonics. Just as we have > no practical way of telling if we live in a simulation now, anyone There is a simple way: it's too expensive for such an exercise in pointlessness, unless the real reality is entirely different from what is being rendered. In that case we never had a history of 'outside', but are entirely synthetic. Could happen, but there's a much simpler explanation. > waking from suspension will have no way of telling that they're > /not/ in a simulation. That sandbox could be indefinite, and > totally convincing. What would be the incentive? There is an incentive in reintegration. Continuation of a prior history in the same boring old context is certainly sufficiently cruel and unusual. From gsantostasi at gmail.com Sun Oct 20 22:32:03 2013 From: gsantostasi at gmail.com (Giovanni Santostasi) Date: Sun, 20 Oct 2013 17:32:03 -0500 Subject: [ExI] B Movies - Worst Movie of All Time (Re: it was the best times, it was the best of times) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: *Monster a Go-Go!* is a 1965 science fiction horror film directed by Bill Rebane and Herschell Gordon Lewis (who remained uncredited in association with this film). The film is considered to be one of the worst films ever . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_a_Go-Go On Sun, Oct 20, 2013 at 11:28 AM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > On Thu, Oct 10, 2013 at 3:44 PM, Tomasz Rola wrote: > >> I recently started to enjoy B movies a lot. >> >> Of non-sf movies, full set of Kurosawa and Scorsese's "Taxi driver" are >> obvious buy. Then, I don't know again. >> >> This night my cable serves "The Helix Loaded", a "Matrix" B-ripoff. >> >> http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0401462/ >> >> AFAIK I have never before watched a movie with imdb rating so low (1.7). I >> am so excited! >> > > If you enjoy truly terrible movies, as I do, then there isn't one much > worse than Monster a Go Go. It has a terrible plot, terrible lighting, they > changed all the actors half way through without saying anything about it, > it has a lousy ending, they didn't finish the opening credits, the music > score is horrid, the editing is truly awful. > > In short, if you feel that you have not contributed to the world in a > really significant way, this movie will make you feel much better, because > at least you weren't involved in making it. > > The best thing you can say about Monster a Go Go is that nobody involved > in making this film ever worked in Hollywood again. Whew! > > Monster a Go Go makes Ed Wood look like Stephen Spielberg. Honestly. If > you can't find a copy... hit me up. > > -Kelly > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rtomek at ceti.pl Sun Oct 20 22:21:08 2013 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 00:21:08 +0200 (CEST) Subject: [ExI] [GRG] NewBook: Transhumanist Reader (fwd) Message-ID: ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sun, 20 Oct 2013 11:49:19 -0700 From: "L. Stephen Coles, M.D., Ph.D." Reply-To: Gerontology Research Group To: Gerontology Research Group Subject: [GRG] NewBook: Transhumanist Reader To Members and Friends of the Los Angeles Gerontology Research Group: New Book: Collection on transhumanism... -- Steve Coles >"The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, >Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future" > > >by >Max >More and >Natasha >Vita-More, Editors >(Paperback; 1st Edition; 480 pages; Wiley-Blackwell; New York; 2013; $32.32 on >Amazon.com) > >The first authoritative and comprehensive survey of the origins and >current state of transhumanist thinking... > > The rapid pace of emerging technologies is playing an > increasingly important role in overcoming fundamental human limitations. > Featuring core writings by seminal thinkers in the speculative > possibilities of the posthuman condition, essays address key > philosophical arguments for and against human enhancement, explore the > inevitability of life extension, and consider possible solutions to the > growing issues of social and ethical implications and concerns. Edited > by the internationally acclaimed founders of the philosophy and social > movement of transhumanism, The Transhumanist Reader is an indispensable > guide to our current state of knowledge of the quest to expand the > frontiers of human nature. > > >Review: > > > > ?Edited by the internationally acclaimed founders of the > philosophy and social movement of transhumanism, The Transhumanist > Reader is an indispensable guide to our current state of knowledge of > the quest to expand the frontiers of human nature.? (LIS Trends, 8 March > 2013) > > >Reviews: > > > > ?We are in the process of upgrading the human species, so we > might as well do it with deliberation and foresight. A good first step > is this book, which collects the smartest thinking available concerning > the inevitable conflicts, challenges and opportunities arising as we > re-invent ourselves. It's a core text for anyone making the future.? ?- > Kevin Kelly, Senior Maverick for Wired > > ?Transhumanism has moved from a fringe concern to a mainstream > academic movement with real intellectual credibility. This is a great > taster of some of the best emerging work. In the last 10 years, > transhumanism has spread not as a religion but as a creative rational > endeavor.? -? Julian Savulescu, Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics, > University of Oxford > > ?The Transhumanist Reader is an important, provocative > compendium critically exploring the history, philosophy, and ethics of > transhumanism. The contributors anticipate crucial biopolitical, > ecological, and planetary implications of a radically technologically > enhanced population.? -? Edward Keller, Director, Center for > Transformative Media, Parsons The New School for Design > > ?This important book contains essays by many of the top thinkers > in the field of transhumanism. It?s a must-read for anyone interested > in the future of humankind.? -? Sonia Arrison, Best-selling author of > 100 Plus: How The Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything L. Stephen Coles, M.D., Ph.D., Co-Founder Los Angeles Gerontology Research Group URL: http://www.grg.org E-mail: scoles at grg.org E-mail: scoles at ucla.edu L. Stephen Coles, M.D., Ph.D., Co-Founder Los Angeles Gerontology Research Group URL: http://www.grg.org E-mail: scoles at grg.org E-mail: scoles at ucla.edu -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ To UNSUBSCRIBE or for ADMINISTRATIVE REQUESTS send an E-mail to jadams at grg.org or scoles at grg.org, or call (949) 922-9786 USA. *** Do NOT send an UNSUBSCRIBE message to the entire list. *** GRG mailing list GRG at lists.ucla.edu http://lists.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/grg From rex at nosyntax.net Mon Oct 21 00:46:36 2013 From: rex at nosyntax.net (rex) Date: Sun, 20 Oct 2013 17:46:36 -0700 Subject: [ExI] What if humans were twice as intelligent? In-Reply-To: <526303BB.1040601@aleph.se> References: <525BBDB8.5060308@aleph.se> <525BD350.5010909@aleph.se> <525F182E.8060601@aleph.se> <526303BB.1040601@aleph.se> Message-ID: <20131021004636.GV6397@ninja.nosyntax.net> Anders Sandberg [2013-10-19 15:15]: >Some updated runs with my model: >http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2013/10/the_morons_are_marching_rather_slowly.html Hello Anders, Is the source code for your simulation available? If not would you mind describing it in more detail, e.g., what function is served by the 50 loci that are in the 0 state, and what determines which are in the 1 state? Also, how is the crossover done? Thanks, -rex -- Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world, is either a madman or an economist. --Kenneth Boulding From eugen at leitl.org Mon Oct 21 05:29:14 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 07:29:14 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Who wants to live forever? Maybe you can... In-Reply-To: References: <20131018154844.GG10405@leitl.org> <20131020090955.GX10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20131021052914.GG10405@leitl.org> On Sun, Oct 20, 2013 at 12:49:10PM -0400, Mike Dougherty wrote: > > I'm not yet signed up, either. I hope to sign up with our > > own organisation, which is probably a decade away. > > > > Given your prediction about energy and end of civilization, who are you I can see how the Limits to Growth report people are really annoyed. They did not predict. They mapped generic trajectory space based on varied input, and discovered there are regions in that space that are not good to go, and gave suggestions how to avoid getting there. Nobody bothered (business as usual), so now we're on the outskirts of one of that region. > expecting will be around to maintain the cryopreserved state or eventually In case of irreversible deep collapse there won't be the technology necessary for resuscitation. For transient disruptions you need to plan for onsite energy generation and cryogenics. Me and others have written enough about that elsewhere. > reanimate you? Given the choice between freezing to death or keeping the > dead frozen, I'm going to use those resources for myself. From eugen at leitl.org Mon Oct 21 06:32:02 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 08:32:02 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Who wants to live forever? Maybe you can... In-Reply-To: References: <5263CC81.2080400@yahoo.com> Message-ID: <20131021063202.GH10405@leitl.org> On Sun, Oct 20, 2013 at 10:04:37AM -0700, Adrian Tymes wrote: > That argument is a non-op. If the chances of us being in a simulation > before and afterward are essentially the same - and they appear to be - > then it does not affect the decision to go for cryonics or not. Odds are, The problem is with "You Might Be Immortal Already!" crowd. > though, we'll be revived at the minimum viable technical capability - which > may include uploading, but probably precludes upload into simulation. Pardon? Simulation, but no simulation? There are very good reasons to suspect that most activities will happen in solid state (with, of course, plenty of physical layer construction and maintenance), so don't assume somebody is going to build a biosphere life support bubble just for you at an astronomic expense just to cater to your antiquated superstitions, so that you can hang around frozen in slowtime, like flies in amber. > Cheaper to let the cryonaut experience and get over any future shock. (It It is indeed cheaper and without temporal impedance mismatch to resuscitate in solid state. > also helps the cryonaut become a production member of society faster - and > maybe give the reviving organization some more money.) From atymes at gmail.com Mon Oct 21 07:21:33 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 00:21:33 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Who wants to live forever? Maybe you can... In-Reply-To: <20131021063202.GH10405@leitl.org> References: <5263CC81.2080400@yahoo.com> <20131021063202.GH10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Sun, Oct 20, 2013 at 11:32 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Sun, Oct 20, 2013 at 10:04:37AM -0700, Adrian Tymes wrote: > > though, we'll be revived at the minimum viable technical capability - > which > > may include uploading, but probably precludes upload into simulation. > > Pardon? Simulation, but no simulation? > As in, "if this reality isn't a simulation already, then if you'll be uploaded, you'll more likely be uploaded into something that views the world as it is than into a simulation". > There are very good reasons to suspect that most activities will happen > in solid state (with, of course, plenty of physical layer construction and > maintenance) Indeed. I was, in part, emphasizing that parenthetical. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Mon Oct 21 08:17:29 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 10:17:29 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Who wants to live forever? Maybe you can... In-Reply-To: References: <5263CC81.2080400@yahoo.com> <20131021063202.GH10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20131021081729.GN10405@leitl.org> On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 12:21:33AM -0700, Adrian Tymes wrote: > > There are very good reasons to suspect that most activities will happen > > in solid state (with, of course, plenty of physical layer construction and > > maintenance) > > > Indeed. I was, in part, emphasizing that parenthetical. This definitely could use some emphasis. Ignoring the physical layer will tend to disagree with you more sooner than later. Though a lot of that activity would be about as conscious as you're conscious of your brain stem activity right now -- but you immediately certainly would notice if it's no longer doing its job, the same as you'd notice your metabolism crashing. Everything is embodied, somewhere. From anders at aleph.se Mon Oct 21 08:31:51 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 09:31:51 +0100 Subject: [ExI] What if humans were twice as intelligent? In-Reply-To: <20131021004636.GV6397@ninja.nosyntax.net> References: <525BBDB8.5060308@aleph.se> <525BD350.5010909@aleph.se> <525F182E.8060601@aleph.se> <526303BB.1040601@aleph.se> <20131021004636.GV6397@ninja.nosyntax.net> Message-ID: <5264E677.6000000@aleph.se> On 2013-10-21 01:46, rex wrote: > Anders Sandberg [2013-10-19 15:15]: >> Some updated runs with my model: >> http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2013/10/the_morons_are_marching_rather_slowly.html >> > > Hello Anders, > > Is the source code for your simulation available? I added links at the end of the post. > If not would > you mind describing it in more detail, e.g., what function is > served by the 50 loci that are in the 0 state, and what determines > which are in the 1 state? Also, how is the crossover done? Each loci either does nothing (0 state) or it adds a fixed Gaussian-distributed random number to the overall IQ (1 state). They are initialized as 50% ones. Crossover is done by selecting a random point in the (linear) genome and making everything before it the same as parent 1's genome, and everything after parent 2's genome. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From rahmans at me.com Mon Oct 21 09:18:34 2013 From: rahmans at me.com (Omar Rahman) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 11:18:34 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <98403CF1-5A40-46A2-9DE8-3661B39FC7BF@me.com> > > Date: Sun, 20 Oct 2013 10:43:24 -0600 > From: Kelly Anderson > > On Sat, Oct 19, 2013 at 11:52 AM, John Clark wrote: > >> >> On Sat, Oct 19, 2013 at 12:34 PM, Kelly Anderson wrote: >> >>> I am a Tea Party member. >>> >> >> And I too have a confession to make, although I'm embarrassed to admit it >> I'm still a registered Republican. In fact, I actually agree with about >> half of what the Tea Party says, the problem is that in the other half >> they're not just wrong they're BAT SHIT CRAZY WRONG. >> > > Again, the stuff that makes the Tea Party wrong is not officially part of > the Tea Party, but rather positions that members of the Tea Party often > take. It's a matter of being highly correlated, but not causal. > > For example, the Tea Party itself says nothing about creationism that I am > aware of. Yet, a high number of Tea Party advocates believe in creationism. > The question though is can you hold your nose and be in the room with that > level of craziness in order to bring fiscal responsibility to Washington? > > The Republicans and Democrats have both shown a disregard for spending > money and love growing government. We have to have a real alternative. > Personally, I'm a Libertarian, which reflects my thoughts that the Tea > Party has it right on fiscal issues, (even though defaulting on the debt is > clearly not something anyone is really going to let happen) and that the > social liberals have it right on the social and science side of the ledger. > > Kelly and others have tried to disassociate the Tea Party from the commonly expressed views of it's members/leaders. Ok, whatever; whoever believes that won't believe evidence to the contrary. I would like to comment on the whole 'premise' of the T.axed E.nough A.lready P.arty: quite simply we aren't. If we were taxed at a level that would fund our expenditures you would actually see real broad based bi(tri?)partisan support for military entitlements reform. We might even see progress on increasing helpful things like education, food stamps, and the minimum wage. I put to you list members that: the crazed billionaires backing the Brethren of the Koolaid are in fact far more extropian than us here on this list. Sitting on top of their mountains of money they can see further, just as those who stand on the shoulders of giants can see. They can see the wave robotisation that will drive many jobs out of the hands of humans. They are the primary beneficiaries of this. It isn't an academic discussion for them it's a business plan. Anders and others recently posted information about jobs that will/could be soon computerised or robotised; egotistical crazed billionaire was not on any list that I saw. They are in practical terms (far?) closer to the singularity than us. Elsewhere I've said on his list that corporations and countries are like huge mostly analogy AIs. A billionaire or dictator who respectively controls one of these corporations or countries is the closest facsimile to a post singularity entity that we can see. Of course to them taxation, national governments, and international agreements are usually just impediments to their free action. Even the 'good' egotistical crazed billionaires, think Elon Musk (to be fair Elon doesn't come off as egotistical even when he makes some sweeping statement that some past approach or program is doomed to fail) , have a perspective that might not always line up with the 'little guy'. > >>> you are conflating right wing religious zealots with the people who just >>> want lower taxes and smaller government. They are NOT always the same. I >>> give myself as a prime example. >>> >> >> I want lower taxes and smaller government too, but the way to do that is >> to vote to buy less stuff, not to vote to refuse to pay for stuff you've >> already voted to buy. And if I don't get my way I'm not going to try my >> very best to set off a economic H bomb that would destroy the world as the >> hillbilly Tea Party did. >> > > But with the juggernaut that is Washington, how else do you slow it down > other than throwing bodies under it? This is a serious question. How the > hell do we slow it down? > > >> >>> It's the level at which we're doing it now that is of concern. >>> This chart shows the situation really clearly. >>> http://bit.ly/19TizJy >>> >> >> That chart is really not a very good argument that debt is bad, according >> to it the largest percentage of debt to GDP happen in 1946, just before the >> 1950's boon times and the largest increase in economic activity in history. >> And the second largest economic boon happened during the Clinton years, a >> time of increasing debt. >> >> > And yet it shows a trend towards levels of debt that we haven't experienced > since the TRUE emergency of WWII. Does anyone other then Eugen think we are > currently facing a crisis that rises to the level of WWII? We are a nation addicted to war and war spending. If we can't have a big one we'll take as many little ones as we can get. We'll create never ending wars on concepts; "Drugs', 'Terror', 'Cuteness' (ok I made the last one up....but why not....there is no way we could clean up the internet of cat pictures...let's go for it!) Let's not forget our openly 'covert' wars, wars which suspiciously resemble terrorism if you happen to have family at the wedding/funeral that gets 'bug splatted'. If, and I'll admit it's a big IF, you accept the notion that countries are 'mostly analog AIs', how would you rate the US on the 'friendly' scale? Psychotic? Delusional? About debt Kelly, the graph you presented shows pretty clearly that in recent times Reagan and Bush the 2nd are right at the elbows where the debt to gdp ratio turned for the worse. Almost every president has raised spending in dollar amounts, but when you couple that with tax cuts you get exactly the debt explosion that you would expect rather than the 'golden shower' of the trickle down economics we were promised. Why? The billionaires are buying more industrial plant and marching forward to the singularity alone. Here's a graph for you: http://www.cbc.ca/news2/interactives/canada-deficit/ Guess what, in Canada the fiscally conservative 'Conservatives'...aren't. The Liberals, at least since Chr?tien, are. The final irony is that the Conservatives have outlined in their platform a legislative goal to have a 'balanced budget amendment', something they haven't been able to do after squandering the surplus handed to them by their Liberal predecessors. Reminiscent of the Clinton to Bush transition, yes? The Military-Industrial complex wants more wars and money, and the banking system wants a perpetually indebted client. They want a 'functional alcoholic', someone who can keep paying the bills but is completely incapable of 'getting off the bottle'. Guess what they've got? The Tea Party is clearly not opposed to the Military-Industrial complex, it's priority lately has and continues to be to oppose a health care system that, while it is flawed, is a step in the right direction towards reducing the costs of health care to people and to the economy. Just try to get the Tea Party to stand up and propose cuts just to the defence department and the spies. The American public in a vast majority would approve of that. Instead of going after that mountain of pork-barrel spending they go after the handful of beans that is 'Obamacare'. Conclusion: either the Tea Party isn't sincere about wanting to reduce spending or they are motivated by idealogical concerns more strongly than fiscal concerns. Regards, Omar Rahman -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rex at nosyntax.net Mon Oct 21 09:44:36 2013 From: rex at nosyntax.net (rex) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 02:44:36 -0700 Subject: [ExI] What if humans were twice as intelligent? In-Reply-To: <5264E677.6000000@aleph.se> References: <525BBDB8.5060308@aleph.se> <525BD350.5010909@aleph.se> <525F182E.8060601@aleph.se> <526303BB.1040601@aleph.se> <20131021004636.GV6397@ninja.nosyntax.net> <5264E677.6000000@aleph.se> Message-ID: <20131021094436.GY6397@ninja.nosyntax.net> Anders Sandberg [2013-10-21 01:34]: >On 2013-10-21 01:46, rex wrote: >>Anders Sandberg [2013-10-19 15:15]: >>>Some updated runs with my model: >>>http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2013/10/the_morons_are_marching_rather_slowly.html >>> >Each loci either does nothing (0 state) or it adds a fixed >Gaussian-distributed random number to the overall IQ (1 state). They >are initialized as 50% ones. > >Crossover is done by selecting a random point in the (linear) genome >and making everything before it the same as parent 1's genome, and >everything after parent 2's genome. Thanks! I've never used Matlab, but used Octave for a small project years ago, so I tried to run your code under Octave. It appears to run, but fails after several minutes with the warning: Fontconfig warning: "/etc/fonts/conf.d/65-droid-sans-fonts.conf", line 103: Having multiple values in isn't supported and may not work as expected I suspect it's the plot(ff) statement that is causing the problem. No plot is produced. Rather than try to track down the plot() incompatibility, I'm going to try to translate your code to R. There may be some sticky spots, and I hope you don't mind my asking about them. -rex -- To call in the statistician after the experiment is done may be no more than asking him to perform a post-mortem examination: he may be able to say what the experiment died of. -- Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher From johnkclark at gmail.com Mon Oct 21 15:15:49 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 11:15:49 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: References: <01d801ceca8c$9449cda0$bcdd68e0$@att.net> <02a401ceca96$cd3cc4a0$67b64de0$@att.net> <037201cecb8c$4428af20$cc7a0d60$@att.net> <011501cecc66$91421280$b3c63780$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sun, Oct 20, 2013 at 12:43 PM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > a high number of Tea Party advocates believe in creationism. > > Yes. > > The question though is can you hold your nose and be in the room with > that level of craziness > > No I can't, the stink of stupid is just too strong. > > in order to bring fiscal responsibility to Washington? > The economic ideas of the hillbilly wing of the Republican party are just as irrational as their biological ideas, and in my lifetime I have never observed more irresponsible behavior by a American politician than what I observed from the Tea Party Republicans on Wednesday night. > > I'm a Libertarian, which reflects my thoughts that the Tea Party has it > right on fiscal issues > I'm a Libertarian too, but I'm not suicidal, or irrational. > > But with the juggernaut that is Washington, how else do you slow it down > other than throwing bodies under it? This is a serious question. How the > hell do we slow it down? > Easy, if you're in congress you vote to spend less money. And if things don't come out your way you try to convince others to come around to your way of thinking so that next time the outcome is different. What you DON'T do is have a temper tantrum and try your very best to destroy the world because you're angry that you lost. > >> That chart is really not a very good argument that debt is bad, >> according to it the largest percentage of debt to GDP happen in 1946, just >> before the 1950's boon times and the largest increase in economic activity >> in history. And the second largest economic boon happened during the >> Clinton years, a time of increasing debt. >> > > > And yet it shows a trend towards levels of debt that we haven't > experienced since the TRUE emergency of WWII. Does anyone other then Eugen > think we are currently facing a crisis that rises to the level of WWII? > Well, wars are very expensive, the Republicans started 2 and refused to raise taxes to pay for them. And then we entered the greatest economic downturn since the 1930's. And by the way, the Great Depression would have probably ended in 1938 if drastic measures were not taken to stop inflation, inflation which did not exist in 1938. Sound familiar? > > creationism. The Tea Party holds no position on that subject. > I don't know how you determine the position of the Tea Party about anything except by looking at the position of Tea Party members, and nearly all of the most prominent ones are creationists, and very vocal and militant ones too. And there is a connection, if you don't think logic is important in one subject, like biology, then you probably don't think logic is important in another subject, like economics. At any rate it would certainly be irrational to claim that there is not a very strong connection between the Tea Party and creationism. > The president would have folded in the face of such pressure, and the > individual mandate for Obamacare would have been sensibly put off for a year > It is time to face reality, the president is never EVER going to abandon Obama care. There are 2 reasons: 1) It was passed by the House and the Senate and the Supreme Court said it was constitutional and, although you may not like it, Obamacare is the single thing the president is most proud of having accomplished. 2) If Obama gives in to terrorist demands and they are seen to be successful then he knows that the exact same tactics will be used against him and future presidents again and again and again. > other than threatening to default on the debt, Besides that Mrs. Lincoln how did you like the play? > > what CRAZY economic theory do you attribute to the Tea Party? > How about the USA going back to the Gold Standard and in effect give China and Australia and the happenstance of geology the power that the Federal Reserve Board has now, as both countries produce more gold than the USA does. And Uzbekistan becomes a major world power and Japan and Briton and Germany and France become insignificant footnotes. Do you expect a radical change like that to happen in 90 minutes without blood in the streets? > > We need a currency based on Work, in the Physics sense. You could value > oil in the amount of Work it would do, and then you could value everything > else in terms of oil. > So how much Work in the physical sense does a computer programmer do, or a novelist, or a cancer researcher, or a Tea party politician? > > Money's main purpose is to simply avoid barter. > Yes. > > To store wealth in between transactions. > Yes. > Anything will serve this purpose No not just anything can serve that purpose, only those things that, for whatever reason, people have faith will retain its value in the future. And thanks to Tea Party Neanderthals in congress that is the faith that came within 90 minutes of being destroyed forever. > > if you have a central power that can create inflationary or deflationary > pressure on a currency, then the currency is less stable or trustworthy for > use as a medium of exchange. > Since currency was first invented countries have exerted inflationary and deflationary pressure on them and the US dollar is no exception, but nevertheless it remains the most trusted currency in the world. The hillbilly republicans are doing everything they can to destroy that trust. > > The reason that some of us like Bitcoin is that it is just such a > currency, and is largely independent of centralized meddling (other than > just declaring it illegal). > If the free market decides it would prefer Bitcoins to dollars who am I to disagree, but that will take a long time if ever. Bitcoin, just like any other form of money, has value because people have faith it will be valuable in the future; right now far far fewer people have faith in Bitcoin than in the US dollar, so far far fewer people are willing to accept it as exchange. If Bitcoin can get over its wild and unpredictable price swings the faith people have in it could increase, but that sure as hell was not going to happen on Wednesday night in the 90 minutes before the dollar was lynched by hillbillies. > > based on evidence and frequent verification by exchange. > The US dollar has been the backbone of world exchange for nearly a century, and you want to destroy that and make gold worthless too. > > Spike does not want to make gold nor dollars worthless, I'm sure. > I don't care what he wants I care what would happen and default would make the dollar worthless and dumping everything in Fort Knox on the market would make gold worthless. By the way, what form of payment would we accept for all those thousands of tons of gold? Paper currency? Issued from what country? > > The problem most people have with the debt and deficit is not related to > deflation or inflation, it's related to fairness. > If the Tea Party can make rich people poor but can't make poor people rich then fuck fairness. > > How can the government operate in perpetual deficit when individuals and > corporations can not? > Because government can print money and corporations can't. Printing money can be a wonderful thing, or a terrible thing, it depends on the circumstances. > >Every time the government prints a dollar, the dollar in your pocket > goes down in value just a little. > During the last 5 years the free market has disagreed with you about that, despite a lot more dollars having been printed prices have not gone up, and I think the free market is wiser in these matters than you or me. John K Clark > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Mon Oct 21 15:37:35 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 11:37:35 -0400 Subject: [ExI] B Movies - Worst Movie of All Time (Re: it was the best times, it was the best of times) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sun, Oct 20, 2013 at 12:28 PM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > If you enjoy truly terrible movies, as I do, then there isn't one much > worse than Monster a Go Go. It has a terrible plot, terrible lighting, they > changed all the actors half way through without saying anything about it, > it has a lousy ending, they didn't finish the opening credits, the music > score is horrid, the editing is truly awful. > In short, if you feel that you have not contributed to the world in a > really significant way, this movie will make you feel much better, because > at least you weren't involved in making it. The best thing you can say > about Monster a Go Go is that nobody involved in making this film ever > worked in Hollywood again. Whew! Monster a Go Go makes Ed Wood look like > Stephen Spielberg. Honestly. If you can't find a copy... hit me up. > Monster a Go Go is indeed the Citizen Kane of bad movies, take a look at Mystery Science Theater's take on it, it's one of the funniest things I've ever seen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnGHJ7VlYYc If you want to get directly to the movie go 17 minutes into the show, although the other parts aren't bad. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Mon Oct 21 16:35:33 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 12:35:33 -0400 Subject: [ExI] This is one amazing robot! Message-ID: -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Mon Oct 21 16:36:58 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 12:36:58 -0400 Subject: [ExI] This is one amazing robot! Message-ID: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wE3fmFTtP9g -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Mon Oct 21 18:16:09 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 11:16:09 -0700 Subject: [ExI] This is one amazing robot! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: They've got horse-grade locomotion figured out in outdoor lab environments, yeah. Now if they can work on the power source and productize it... On Oct 21, 2013 9:37 AM, "John Clark" wrote: > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wE3fmFTtP9g > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Mon Oct 21 18:37:11 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 11:37:11 -0700 Subject: [ExI] This is one amazing robot! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <00ea01cece8c$8eba9960$ac2fcc20$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes Sent: Monday, October 21, 2013 11:16 AM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [ExI] This is one amazing robot! >.They've got horse-grade locomotion figured out in outdoor lab environments, yeah. Now if they can work on the power source and productize it... The power source sounds to me like two independent two-stroke IC motors. My guess is that they chose that for space and weight minimization. Good chance they could go to four-stroke ICs and get it a little quieter and less smoky. The path forward is clear enough to see: mechanical horse racing: traditional Kentucky Derby style (wouldn't that be cool to see?) racing over rough terrain that wheeled vehicles cannot handle, racing on ice, racing over mixed cross country/street conditions, oh this will be fun to watch. Look at how much money we dump into NASCAR and Indy racers. Even for big fans such as me, it does get a little boring. But I would pay good money to watch mechanical horses gallop around, get them to jump over stuff like the steeple chase they used to have in the Olympics, that sort of thing, maybe polo on mechanical horses, or mechanical guys playing polo on real horses, or mechanical guys riding mechanical horses doing old-time Monte-Python-esque jousting. Is this a fun time to be alive or what? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Mon Oct 21 19:03:34 2013 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 12:03:34 -0700 Subject: [ExI] This is one amazing robot! In-Reply-To: <00ea01cece8c$8eba9960$ac2fcc20$@att.net> References: <00ea01cece8c$8eba9960$ac2fcc20$@att.net> Message-ID: Spike wrote: >Is this a fun time to be alive or what? Yes!!! But I just wish that our lifespans were naturally twice as long as they currently are, so we would have much more of a fighting chance to benefit from the radical life extension technologies, which may end up coming down the pike too late to help us. I want to witness many more cool things! I have a bad feeling that just as technology and society are getting really super-awesome, I will be dying of old age... : ( John On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 11:37 AM, spike wrote: > ** ** > > ** ** > > *From:* extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto: > extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] *On Behalf Of *Adrian Tymes > *Sent:* Monday, October 21, 2013 11:16 AM > *To:* ExI chat list > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] This is one amazing robot!**** > > ** ** > > >?They've got horse-grade locomotion figured out in outdoor lab > environments, yeah. Now if they can work on the power source and > productize it...**** > > The power source sounds to me like two independent two-stroke IC motors. > My guess is that they chose that for space and weight minimization. Good > chance they could go to four-stroke ICs and get it a little quieter and > less smoky. **** > > The path forward is clear enough to see: mechanical horse racing: > traditional Kentucky Derby style (wouldn?t that be cool to see?) racing > over rough terrain that wheeled vehicles cannot handle, racing on ice, > racing over mixed cross country/street conditions, oh this will be fun to > watch. Look at how much money we dump into NASCAR and Indy racers. Even > for big fans such as me, it does get a little boring. But I would pay good > money to watch mechanical horses gallop around, get them to jump over stuff > like the steeple chase they used to have in the Olympics, that sort of > thing, maybe polo on mechanical horses, or mechanical guys playing polo on > real horses, or mechanical guys riding mechanical horses doing old-time > Monte-Python-esque jousting.**** > > Is this a fun time to be alive or what?**** > > spike**** > > ** ** > > ** ** > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Mon Oct 21 19:23:36 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 12:23:36 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: References: <01d801ceca8c$9449cda0$bcdd68e0$@att.net> <02a401ceca96$cd3cc4a0$67b64de0$@att.net> <037201cecb8c$4428af20$cc7a0d60$@att.net> <011501cecc66$91421280$b3c63780$@att.net> Message-ID: <011c01cece93$0ac21910$20464b30$@att.net> >. On Behalf Of John Clark Subject: Re: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" >. I have never observed more irresponsible behavior by a American politician than what I observed from the Tea Party Republicans on Wednesday night. Indeed? The persistent deficit spending for the past 14 years doesn't qualify? >.Easy, if you're in congress you vote to spend less money. They are trying. That's what sequestration is all about. >>. creationism. The Tea Party holds no position on that subject. >.I don't know how you determine the position of the Tea Party about anything except by looking at the position of Tea Party members, and nearly all of the most prominent ones are creationists. I could find not one quote on the subject by the most prominent Tea Party member Ted Cruz. But Barack Obama was a proto-Tea Party member, before it had a name. That doesn't make him a creationist. The whole argument devolves into a logic loop. Senator Fester N. Boyle disagrees with me on economics, therefore he is an idiot, therefore he must be a creationist, which is proof that he is an idiot which is proof that he is a creationist. The way I would go with that is to note that it is possible to grow up in the USA knowing exactly nothing about evolution (I am a poster child proof of that.) We are not required to take biology classes here, ever. You can opt to do chemistry classes if you find that more interesting for what little science is required. Even if you take biology in the US, the little bit they say about evolution is often wrong. This too I know from firsthand experience. Our biology classes really should be called taxonomy and anatomy, both of which can be taught without even mentioning evolution. The students will not understand anything without that cornerstone insight, but it can be done, and it is. Regarding politicians' stance on that topic, it doesn't surprise me that they don't know anything. If you gathered all of them and gave them a test as a group, all 535 would likely score very poorly. It isn't their thing. None of the student government types do I recall seeing in any science class. They needed to take easy stuff so they would have time to do student government stuff. I don't really worry about that too much, because federal level congress people don't make the call on education standards, the states do. Of course that same problem is seen there too, possibly even worse. >. And there is a connection, if you don't think logic is important in one subject, like biology, then you probably don't think logic is important in another subject, like economics. This assumes logic applies to areas where the politician has exactly zero knowledge or interest. Regarding economics, this theory fails to explain why there are two major schools of thought competing currently, Hayek and Keynes. American schools have been teaching Keynes for the lifetime of the oldest politicians, and nearly all of them are Keynesian. Keynesian theory would predict that we just keep borrowing and spending, that if we do it sincerely enough that we can eventually spend our way out of debt. But I have seen counter evidence of that notion everywhere. The so-called economic stimulus packages failed. The really hard-core Keynesians argued that they failed because they weren't big enough. The Hayek crowd argued the reason they failed is that they suck too much money out of the economy. If you filter the current conniptions as a test case on Hayek vs Keynes, then you understand why any threat to the borrowing stream is terrifying, for a failure to borrow not only destroys the nation, it destroys the world. And all along we were worried about nukes. >. It is time to face reality, the president is never EVER going to abandon Obama care. There are 2 reasons: >.1) It was passed by the House and the Senate. .Without a single vote from the minority party, which now holds the house. >. and the Supreme Court said it was constitutional. As a tax, which puts it under the control of the house, which is controlled by the party which voted against in perfect unison. >. Obamacare is the single thing the president is most proud of having accomplished. >.2) If Obama gives in to terrorist demands. Terrorist demands. The will of the house of representatives on a tax, which is their legal responsibility, is a terrorist demand now? The problem with that argument is it invites us to recognize a startling contrast. A military officer jumps onto a desk and starts shooting his fellow soldiers while shouting JOSEPH SMITH AKHBAR (or something to that effect) and it gets labeled a workplace shooting, since the poor dear had post traumatic stress syndrome, having never been to actual battle but rather having caught it from those who had. But representatives in the house voting against absurd over-borrowing and overspending are terrorists, with bombs on their chests, guns to our heads, hoping to destroy the world, having a temper tantrum, etc. So lawmakers making law are terrorists, but a murder shouting religious slogans as he shoots innocent unarmed people is workplace violence. >. and they are seen to be successful then he knows that the exact same tactics will be used against him and future presidents again and again and again. Ah yes I did overlook that. The current president is worried about future presidents losing power. OK. This really is about power, that much I will agree. I disagree that presidents should have much power, but I agree this really is about power. But assume Keynes is right, and borrowing to stimulate the economy is right, and the reason the previous attempts failed is that they didn't borrow and spend enough. All we need to do is borrow way more than we are now. We do it and spend our way right out of this hole, hurray! The other countries see evidence that Keynesian economics really works, and realize that instead of lending money to America to stimulate their economy, they lend it to their own governments to stimulate their own economies! What happens then? America's borrowing dries up because no one will lend it money. Then it all crashes. But wait, there's more. The other countries don't just walk away, for they have invested their capital the USA, betting that Keynes was right, that spending is the way. That capital is lost because America is hopelessly addicted to borrowing and spending. So their economies crash too, and we can't have that. So Keynesian theory predicts that optimizing the world economy consists of the world choosing its favorite nation, whichever one is willing to keep borrowing the funds they want to invest, and keep on investing there indefinitely, but with the understanding that investing there can never stop; otherwise you lose your capital. Hmmmm. Something sounds vaguely wrong with that notion, I just can't quite put my finger on it. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Mon Oct 21 21:46:35 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 22:46:35 +0100 Subject: [ExI] What if humans were twice as intelligent? In-Reply-To: <20131021094436.GY6397@ninja.nosyntax.net> References: <525BBDB8.5060308@aleph.se> <525BD350.5010909@aleph.se> <525F182E.8060601@aleph.se> <526303BB.1040601@aleph.se> <20131021004636.GV6397@ninja.nosyntax.net> <5264E677.6000000@aleph.se> <20131021094436.GY6397@ninja.nosyntax.net> Message-ID: <5265A0BB.4000904@aleph.se> On 21/10/2013 10:44, rex wrote: > Thanks! I've never used Matlab, but used Octave for a small project > years ago, so I tried to run your code under Octave. It should run fine, I don't use anything weird. > It appears > to run, but fails after several minutes with the warning: > Fontconfig warning: "/etc/fonts/conf.d/65-droid-sans-fonts.conf", line > 103: Having multiple values in isn't supported and may not work > as expected > > I suspect it's the plot(ff) statement that is causing the problem. No > plot is produced. Yes, I would suspect that is the risky part. Octave has never had any native plot functions. And my code certainly doesn't touch any fonts. > Rather than try to track down the plot() incompatibility, I'm going > to try to translate your code to R. There may be some sticky spots, > and I hope you don't mind my asking about them. Happy to explain. I ought to learn R too - Matlab is getting a bit old anyway. R and SciPy look like the future. -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Faculty of Philosophy Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Mon Oct 21 22:17:23 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 23:17:23 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: <98403CF1-5A40-46A2-9DE8-3661B39FC7BF@me.com> References: <98403CF1-5A40-46A2-9DE8-3661B39FC7BF@me.com> Message-ID: <5265A7F3.9080009@aleph.se> On 21/10/2013 10:18, Omar Rahman wrote: > I put to you list members that: the crazed billionaires backing the > Brethren of the Koolaid are in fact far more extropian than us here on > this list. Sitting on top of their mountains of money they can see > further, just as those who stand on the shoulders of giants can see. > They can see the wave robotisation that will drive many jobs out of > the hands of humans. They are the primary beneficiaries of this. It > isn't an academic discussion for them it's a business plan. Anders and > others recently posted information about jobs that will/could be soon > computerised or robotised; egotistical crazed billionaire was not on > any list that I saw. They are in practical terms (far?) closer to the > singularity than us. In a sense they are already there: they can pay, and conglomerates of minds will try to solve their problems for them. Conglomerates that are beyond individual human intelligence. Being rich in a capitalist economy is a useful state, since it means that you can earn a living just by existing and having certain possessions. In fact, it might be the *only* stable state in sufficiently AI-enriched economies. A socialist would of course try to bring everybody into this state through joint ownership of the means of production. Anarchists hope that having a non-money economy will fix things (which is an interesting claim - I am not entirely convinced mutualist societies are stable in the face of AI). > Elsewhere I've said on his list that corporations and countries are > like huge mostly analogy AIs. A billionaire or dictator who > respectively controls one of these corporations or countries is the > closest facsimile to a post singularity entity that we can see. Of > course to them taxation, national governments, and international > agreements are usually just impediments to their free action. Even the > 'good' egotistical crazed billionaires, think Elon Musk (to be fair > Elon doesn't come off as egotistical even when he makes some sweeping > statement that some past approach or program is doomed to fail) , have > a perspective that might not always line up with the 'little guy'. There is a difference between going for the usual power/wealth/status complex and planning for the radical long run. If you think something like an AI/brain emulation singularity is likely you should make sure to own part of it (and sponsor research to make it safe for you) - even if that means fellow billionaires think you are crazy (a surprisingly large number of them are pretty conventional people, it turns out). Same thing for all other "weird" extremes we discuss here, whether positive or negative. I like Musk. He was very good at quickly getting to the core of arguments through first principle physics/engineering thinking, and he delivered some relevant xrisk warnings to 10 Downing St. -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Faculty of Philosophy Oxford University From rex at nosyntax.net Mon Oct 21 22:52:02 2013 From: rex at nosyntax.net (rex) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 15:52:02 -0700 Subject: [ExI] What if humans were twice as intelligent? In-Reply-To: <5265A0BB.4000904@aleph.se> References: <525BBDB8.5060308@aleph.se> <525BD350.5010909@aleph.se> <525F182E.8060601@aleph.se> <526303BB.1040601@aleph.se> <20131021004636.GV6397@ninja.nosyntax.net> <5264E677.6000000@aleph.se> <20131021094436.GY6397@ninja.nosyntax.net> <5265A0BB.4000904@aleph.se> Message-ID: <20131021225202.GB12678@ninja.nosyntax.net> Anders Sandberg [2013-10-21 15:11]: >On 21/10/2013 10:44, rex wrote: >>I suspect it's the plot(ff) statement that is causing the problem. No >>plot is produced. > >Yes, I would suspect that is the risky part. Octave has never had any >native plot functions. And my code certainly doesn't touch any fonts. It was working -- the plot window was apparently under another window, and the warnings were only warnings. Your code is very compact and clean. :) >>Rather than try to track down the plot() incompatibility, I'm going >>to try to translate your code to R. There may be some sticky spots, >>and I hope you don't mind my asking about them. > >Happy to explain. I ought to learn R too - Matlab is getting a bit >old anyway. R and SciPy look like the future. I've a version that works in R now, but I only partially understand it. In particular, I don't understand how selectrand() works. I can see what it does, but it's not clear to me why it works. Once I understand the code better I'm going to look into vectorizing some of it. I've attached a plot of 3 runs with a fitness change at gen 50. I stumbled across the Prestion-Campbell paper a few years ago and was so surprised I put up a web page about it. http://www.nosyntax.net/cfwiki/index.php/Differential_Breeding http://www.nosyntax.net/cfwiki/index.php/Preston_Campbell_1993 BTW, Python+NumPy+SciPy+Matplotlib was my main language for several years, but R seduced me, and about 95% of my code is written in R now. -rex -- "In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded." -- Terry Pratchett -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: anders-0.01.png Type: image/png Size: 50281 bytes Desc: not available URL: From spike66 at att.net Mon Oct 21 23:28:18 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 16:28:18 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: <5265A7F3.9080009@aleph.se> References: <98403CF1-5A40-46A2-9DE8-3661B39FC7BF@me.com> <5265A7F3.9080009@aleph.se> Message-ID: <016801ceceb5$3a47f5c0$aed7e140$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg >...Subject: Re: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" On 21/10/2013 10:18, Omar Rahman wrote: > I put to you list members that: the crazed billionaires backing the > Brethren of the Koolaid are in fact far more extropian than us here on > this list... Crazed billionaires, contradiction in terms. If we are crazed, then we are just crazed. But with ownership of sufficient piles of money, it is known as respectfully as eccentric, as was the case with Bruce Wayne. Howard Hughes was extremely eccentric, growing ever more so as he approached the end of his life. Had he actually lost all his money, he would have been demoted to crazy, even if he had managed to regain is clinical sanity. >...Sitting on top of their mountains of money they can see > further, just as those who stand on the shoulders of giants can see... (...snif...) Omar, I am proud of you, me lad. > ...They can see the wave robotisation that will drive many jobs out of > the hands of humans... The beauty of it all is that we can too, even if we are poor. The rich have the advantage of the theoretical ability to make their visions a reality, and if successful, they get to scale ever-higher mountains of money and get to see even further. Our challenge as poor proles is to compensate for our lack of money with ever sharper vision and ever deeper analytical thought. If we see further than the wealthy on their lofty perches, we may join them up there. With the sharp-eyed foresight we developed down here, we get to see even further than they do once we are at the same altitude on our own piles of money. Our vision will then be enhanced with our own ability to buy our visions into reality. Ain't life grand? >... They are the primary beneficiaries of this... Well sure. But I would argue that we poor have benefitted wildly from certain visionaries, the computer gurus from the 70s, the electronics visionaries before them, the medical pioneers before them, my heroes, all. I bless their wealth. >... It isn't an academic discussion for them it's a business plan. Anders and > others recently posted information about jobs that will/could be soon > computerised or robotised; egotistical crazed billionaire was not on > any list that I saw... I can imagine a convincing software simulation an egotistical crazed billionaire. If well done, it could be nearly as annoying as the real thing. I have met (as far as I know) only one billionaire personally, and he was a most pleasant and interesting gentleman. One could meet him at a party and never know he had stacks of cash. They don't dress or act like that banker guy with the top hat in the Monopoly game. >... Being rich in a capitalist economy is a useful state, since it means that you can earn a living just by existing and having certain possessions. In fact, it might be the *only* stable state in sufficiently AI-enriched economies... Anders Sandberg Anders, I am really turned on by this kind of talk. Rich people are our friends. Rather, most of them are, or can be. If they are atheists, they might decide to pour a pile of money into something like cryonics before they perish. Bill Gates is doing a lot of good things with his dough. My one billionaire acquaintance is supporting SIAI. If you look, good chance most of the Silicon Valley jillionaires are driving good things into reality. spike From spike66 at att.net Mon Oct 21 23:30:54 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 16:30:54 -0700 Subject: [ExI] What if humans were twice as intelligent? In-Reply-To: <20131021225202.GB12678@ninja.nosyntax.net> References: <525BBDB8.5060308@aleph.se> <525BD350.5010909@aleph.se> <525F182E.8060601@aleph.se> <526303BB.1040601@aleph.se> <20131021004636.GV6397@ninja.nosyntax.net> <5264E677.6000000@aleph.se> <20131021094436.GY6397@ninja.nosyntax.net> <5265A0BB.4000904@aleph.se> <20131021225202.GB12678@ninja.nosyntax.net> Message-ID: <016901ceceb5$96ef2320$c4cd6960$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of rex ... >>...Yes, I would suspect that is the risky part. Octave has never had any >native plot functions. And my code certainly doesn't touch any fonts. >...BTW, Python+NumPy+SciPy+Matplotlib was my main language for several years, but R seduced me, and about 95% of my code is written in R now. -rex -- Welcome Rex. Feel free to tell us about yourself, or not. spike From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Tue Oct 22 01:30:34 2013 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 18:30:34 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The brave new world of biohacking Message-ID: "Last year, molecular biologist Ellen Jorgensen put the biohacker movement on the map when she gave a TED talkabout Genespace, the DIY science lab she opened in Brooklyn, N.Y., in late 2010. Genespace is one of about 40 (and counting) independent citizen-science groups in the world ? more than 20 of them in the United States." http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/10/18/the-brave-new-worldofbiohacking.html John -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Tue Oct 22 01:42:55 2013 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 18:42:55 -0700 Subject: [ExI] US Army to Build Armored Talos Suit That Merges Man and Machine Message-ID: A staple of science fiction is becoming real... http://singularityhub.com/2013/10/21/us-army-to-build-an-armored-talos-suit-that-merges-man-and-machine/ John -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Tue Oct 22 01:51:56 2013 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 18:51:56 -0700 Subject: [ExI] How to Develop a Subversive Mindset: The Five Rules of Experimental Philosophy Message-ID: "If you think that choreographing a ballet for honeybees and attempting to genetically engineer God are absurd projects, the conceptual artist and experimental philosopher Jonathon Keats would agree with you. And yet, that does not mean that these thought experiments are without value." "When one is pursuing experimental philosophy," Keats says in his new workshop on Big Think Mentor , a way of thinking occurs that is vital to creative problem-solving. While the problem at hand may be abstract, or even absurd, the way of thinking through the problem can be greatly applicable in life." http://bigthink.com/big-think-mentor/the-five-rules-of-experimental-philosophy John -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Tue Oct 22 01:55:30 2013 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 18:55:30 -0700 Subject: [ExI] What Would an Ideal College Look Like? A Lot Like This... Message-ID: "If you could design your ideal college from scratch, what would it look like? Mine would look something like the following. Students would acquire training that makes them immediately employable. They?d take courses in the liberal arts that would sharpen their skills in writing, analysis, and reasoning. And they?d graduate with some real-life knowledge, such as how to interview for a job. There?d be no tenure for faculty, but instructors would be made to feel they?re valued members of the enterprise. And administrators would constantly ask themselves ?how can we prepare students for what the world needs of them?? http://m.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/10/what-would-an-ideal-college-look-like-a-lot-like-this/280717/?utm_content=bufferf946b&utm_source=buffer John -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mlatorra at gmail.com Tue Oct 22 02:02:57 2013 From: mlatorra at gmail.com (Michael LaTorra) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 20:02:57 -0600 Subject: [ExI] What Would an Ideal College Look Like? A Lot Like This... In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I read the article and went to the website of that college. It does look like a very good school. But it falls short of being ideal, because it is unaffordable. Most students can't afford spending over $40,000 per year. On Oct 21, 2013 7:56 PM, "John Grigg" wrote: > "If you could design your ideal college from scratch, what would it look > like? Mine would look something like the following. Students would acquire > training that makes them immediately employable. They?d take courses in the > liberal arts that would sharpen their skills in writing, analysis, and > reasoning. And they?d graduate with some real-life knowledge, such as how > to interview for a job. There?d be no tenure for faculty, but instructors > would be made to feel they?re valued members of the enterprise. And > administrators would constantly ask themselves ?how can we prepare students > for what the world needs of them?? > > > > http://m.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/10/what-would-an-ideal-college-look-like-a-lot-like-this/280717/?utm_content=bufferf946b&utm_source=buffer > > > John > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cvanderwall14 at gmail.com Tue Oct 22 03:53:59 2013 From: cvanderwall14 at gmail.com (Christian Vanderwall) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 20:53:59 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Dawn of Autonomous Corporations Message-ID: http://btcgeek.com/dawn-of-autonomous-corporations/ Dawn of Autonomous Corporations, Powered by Bitcoin Still waiting for Bitcoin to be accepted at Amazon and eBay? Forget it. Bitcoin will power the next generation of corporations and the only way to deal with those corporations will be through Bitcoin (that?s right, they won?t, or rather can?t, accept fiat like US Dollar). These ideas may seem futuristic, but they are not more than 5 years away, maybe 10. Autonomous Corporations That?s right, autonomous corporations will be a new breed of corporations that act and behave, for all practical purposes, just like regular corporations. However, no one ?owns? them. Not the creator, not the customers, not the governments, no one really. Sound familiar? Bitcoin can be thought of as the first real autonomous ?corporation? although you probably don?t see it that way. Think about it ? it provides a payment protocol and employs miners to maintain that protocol. The employs are rewarded with ?stock? that is split at most into 21 million units. You don?t have to think of Bitcoin this way to get to autonomous corporations, though it will help. The idea is the same ? this corporation has revenues, expenditures and profits. However, once again, no one owns this entity, it owns itself. The reason it exists is to provide a service at an extremely competitive price that no human-based corporation can provide, so they?ll work higher up the chain to provide ?value-added? services. How Does this Work? - The corporation is completely decentralized, so no one can really shut it down. It lives in the cloud. It finds the cheapest and most reliable servers and lives there. This is also the biggest source of the corporation?s expenditure. - Revenues come from people using the service. For instance, if it is a file-sharing service, like StorJ, revenues could be anything that regular file-sharing services have ? paid hosting, advertising, etc. - People will make all attempts to rob this poor corporation of its money. This means it needs to keep the private key really private and decentralized. This also means major code changes, written by humans, will need to be tested on a child first. - It also needs to establish a protocol for communication (HTTP might not cut it in a decentralized network) through which people will interact with the corporation. This kind of corporation isn?t restricted to live online. If the hardware exists (which might take time), you could have, say, self-driving cars owned by this corporation . These are being worked on right now, and the first ones shouldn?t be that far away into the future. See also Vitalik?s series on decentralized autonomous corporations . Bitcoin makes this possible, for the first time ever, because it provides a payment protocol that is independent of an entity and since this autonomous corporation cannot deal with banks (for all practical reasons), Bitcoin solves the major missing piece of the equation ? payments. Bitcoin makes it possible to program a corporation to accept payments and make payments without having to deal with any intermediaries that cannot be trusted. If you want to deal with such a corporation, you better have Bitcoin or any other potential decentralized crypto-currency. The last pieces of centralization are removed with a system like Namecoin that is decentralized DNS system that the autonomous corporation uses as its website/front where it interacts with people. There will ideally be a decentralized identity system, like the Keyhotee system. Communication can take place through something like Bitmessage or through the Keyhotee mailing system that is decentralized. The autonomous corporation cannot afford a central point of failure for essential functions. Value of Bitcoin This is just one example where a protocol like Bitcoin can completely revolutionize the world we live in. Lets look at the big picture. Who cares if eBay accepts Bitcoin? *The real value of Bitcoin lies in economies that don?t yet exist*. Now that Bitcoin has reached another high since the last run-up, there will be several calls of a bubble. Lets not forget the real strengths of Bitcoin in the day to day price fluctuations. These don?t measure the value of Bitcoin and what it can be. And all people seem to care about is drawing parallels to tulips! Thoughts? Christian -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kgh1kgh2 at gmail.com Tue Oct 22 06:54:37 2013 From: kgh1kgh2 at gmail.com (Kevin G Haskell) Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2013 02:54:37 -0400 Subject: [ExI] The Actual Visionary of the Future Message-ID: >As Anders Sandberg would say, science is about approximation. Well, so, then, perhaps, is this, and perhaps not: >I was once told by 'someone' here that having an Extropian Facebook Page would be like >drinking quality champagne from plastic glasses, but I always wondered, >"why would such a great group of thinkers limit themselves to >such an archaic system as a llstserv? >I wondered why a group founded on the Extropian principles about >'ever moving forward toward the future', would reject such an >obviously superior system of exchange of ideas as FB provides, or Google+? >I was told by a young, mindless liberal, who directed me here, that she considered >'this as one of the best libertarian of sites, one that actually "made some sense sometimes," >but all others, she couldn't understand. >Here's the thing. Like on FB, the original Extropian, libertarian-oriented ideals as expounded >in words by Max More, but 'somehow' seemingly undermined, made me curious about >WTF happened. >Then I figured it out. >My young, mindless, leftwing friend (who, btw, wanted to replace the present reigning H+ queen), >didn't see much of an ideological difference. >What did she see in herself, then, that was different? Take a guess. That's what you 'both' are fighting. >It is a losing game unless you up it, and muscles,death boxes, and advanced degrees >aren't visionary, they are only stop-gaps to hold on. That's fine, but don't attack 'him' anymore. >I've heard this group become overrun by negatarians, not optimists. So... >My words, in deference to the #1 visionary of the future, in that 'plastic' world 'you' denounced,were: >"IN PRAISE OF MODERN HERO, RAY KURZWEILl: >Not sure if I'm the first one to say this, but I am totally in love with Ray Kurzweil as one human being to another, and hopefully in the soon-to-be future, one >higher being to another. >Yes, it's true! >This man...I am just happy and privilaged to be alive in the same time period that he is. >This man, this great, great man, is one of the very few who drive humanity forward fearlessly. He doesn't just do it with words, but by his inventions, his >creativity, his goals, and his beautiful vision of the future. >Ray Kurzweil does not seed fear of future, but pushes forth optimism, based on human history of progress, but he appeals to the non-violent methods we've >used for most of our progress, not the minor amounts of primitive, violent methods we've used. >Ray Kurzweil sees the best in humanity, and more, which is what humanity 'will' become. >Ray Kurzweil is the single most important futurist of our age, and hopefully, that will mean for humanity, an everlasting, ever-growing universal species that >humanity can become. >Ray Kurweil is one off the few human beings who have a vision, not just for the Earth, not just for humanity, but for the universe and beyond. >Let the world raise it's glasses to the greatest living leader alive, and to this date, possibly forever, modern humanity's modern hero, RAY KURZWEIL! >Again, TO RAY KURZWEIL! Congratulations on your new book, but remember, there are young liberals gunning for the same positions which you now hold, because you've ceded you're cutting-edge selves. This has also had an unfortunate effect on the minds up the upcoming 'bright stars', at their loss, for you gain. Again, if the numbers in science is about approximation,as Anders who say, perhaps what I just wrote can be viewed the same way. Perhaps not. -- * Tweet me on Twitter! - @*KevinGHaskell -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Tue Oct 22 08:12:36 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2013 09:12:36 +0100 Subject: [ExI] This is one amazing robot! In-Reply-To: References: <00ea01cece8c$8eba9960$ac2fcc20$@att.net> Message-ID: On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 8:03 PM, John Grigg rote: > Yes!!! But I just wish that our lifespans were naturally twice as long as > they currently are, so we would have much more of a fighting chance to > benefit from the radical life extension technologies, which may end up > coming down the pike too late to help us. I want to witness many more cool > things! I have a bad feeling that just as technology and society are > getting really super-awesome, I will be dying of old age... : ( > > John! Just think it - Don't say it out loud. :) Remember there are many people here that are older than you. If it gives you a bad feeling, think how it feels to them. On the other hand, they can console themselves with the thought that perhaps the future is going to be so terrible that an early departure might be preferable. Perhaps we now live in the best of times, before the chickens come home to roost. BillK From pharos at gmail.com Tue Oct 22 08:42:55 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2013 09:42:55 +0100 Subject: [ExI] What if humans were twice as intelligent? In-Reply-To: <20131021225202.GB12678@ninja.nosyntax.net> References: <525BBDB8.5060308@aleph.se> <525BD350.5010909@aleph.se> <525F182E.8060601@aleph.se> <526303BB.1040601@aleph.se> <20131021004636.GV6397@ninja.nosyntax.net> <5264E677.6000000@aleph.se> <20131021094436.GY6397@ninja.nosyntax.net> <5265A0BB.4000904@aleph.se> <20131021225202.GB12678@ninja.nosyntax.net> Message-ID: On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 11:52 PM, rex wrote: > I stumbled across the Prestion-Campbell paper a few years ago and > was so surprised I put up a web page about it. > > http://www.nosyntax.net/cfwiki/index.php/Differential_Breeding > http://www.nosyntax.net/cfwiki/index.php/Preston_Campbell_1993 > > It looks like there are a lot of differing opinions on this subject. Some argue that IQ is just not a heritable characteristic. i.e. Regression to the mean within populations. But populations are not constant. There is immigration and emigration going on. Others claim that education and poverty are more significant factors. Obviously severe poverty or pollution can badly affect a child's developing brain. And wealth enables a child's development. Others say that it is the number of children in a family that affects a child's development. I.e. fewer children with a large gap in years between children enables the parents to give more time to caring for the child. There seem to be just too many factors involved. BillK From info at wavism.net Mon Oct 21 18:28:25 2013 From: info at wavism.net (Wavism) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 19:28:25 +0100 Subject: [ExI] [Doctrinezero] WAVE & longevity advocacy: Sep 28th meeting summary Message-ID: http://transhumanpraxis.wordpress.com/2013/10/21/wave-longevity-advocacy-sep-28th-meeting-summary/ WAVE & longevity advocacy: Sep 28th meeting summary *Here?s a belated update on the small ZS London meeting which was held on Saturday September 28th, 2013:* It was a very small meeting, as advertised ? technically anyone was welcome, but in the end we decided on a small get-together for a handful of friends and associates to discuss a few in-depth ideas and plan future activity. We felt that it was more important to discuss a few key plans amongst ourselves rather than try to address interested members of the general public, on this particular occasion. The planned outline of our discussion can be found at: http://www.longevityday.org/united-kingdom.html The key points we discussed on the day are given below: *1.* One of the most energetic areas associated with Futurism, Transhumanism, & Singularitarianism is that of longevity research and advocacy. While Zero State has not run any kind of longevity research or advocacy project up until this point, we intend to set up a group to explore the possibility of supporting longevity activism led by other organizations, with particular emphasis upon those which are affiliated with the broader Wave movement for positive social change through technology (of which ZS is a part). *2.* This new ZS life extension group will consider longevity and cryonics research to be complementary, despite the fact that the two concerns are often not shared equally by individual activists and researchers. In short, while we acknowledge that there are many unresolved questions about the viability of cryonics, we believe that cryonics should be seriously explored as an option for those who are unfortunately unable to reap the benefits of breakthroughs in longevity science. *3.* We discussed ideas associated with The Praxis, which is a set of techno-spiritual ideas put forth in a book of the same name by Dirk Bruere. The main thrust of that book is that religious themes are recapitulated by technological possibilities, and that ideas such as immortality and even resurrection can still act as the centre of vibrant communities without resorting to unnecessary religious mysticism. This has particular relevance to cryonics, since a suspended cryonics patient needs people to work toward their re-animation, and we could reasonably expect a spiritual community to be more durable and dedicated than even the links in a family chain (or indeed an insurance company). *4.* It is intended that The Praxis ? as a living network of communities ? will be connected with Zero State by common affiliation with the Wave movement. Wave is a very new development, essentially a network of like-minded organizations dedicated to positive social change through technology. Wave won?t be officially launched until next year, but the groundwork is being laid now. This is particularly relevant to longevity activism, because a significant part of our discussion (and one of the reasons this was a small meeting) was about a particular longevity advocacy organization being one of the initial founding groups affiliated to the Wave movement. I cannot make any announcements about the details of that now, but hope to do so soon. *In short, Zero State is evolving to become part of something larger and even more exciting, and that process is marked by a new engagement with longevity activism.* We?re very excited about this, and hope to become a significant part of the movement to defeat ageing over the next few years, particularly through vigorous support of other organizations. -- Amon Kalkin WAVE: Positive Social Change Through Technology http://wavism.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ Doctrinezero mailing list Doctrinezero at zerostate.is Unsubscribe: https://lists.zerostate.is/mailman/listinfo/doctrinezero From eugen at leitl.org Tue Oct 22 09:28:07 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2013 11:28:07 +0200 Subject: [ExI] This is one amazing robot! In-Reply-To: References: <00ea01cece8c$8eba9960$ac2fcc20$@att.net> Message-ID: <20131022092807.GJ10405@leitl.org> On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 09:12:36AM +0100, BillK wrote: > Remember there are many people here that are older than you. > If it gives you a bad feeling, think how it feels to them. It is touching that the kids think a few decades are going to make a difference. You'd better be already using that anti-aging therapy *right now* in order to profit from it. Oops. There is no validated anti-aging therapy yet. Ok, so scrap that. What changes in lifestyle have you personally *already implemented*? Remember, no last-second conversions on the deathbed allowed. > On the other hand, they can console themselves with the thought that > perhaps the future is going to be so terrible that an early departure > might be preferable. Perhaps we now live in the best of times, before > the chickens come home to roost. Depends on your metric. Some things peaked, some are yet to peak. From rex at nosyntax.net Tue Oct 22 10:20:28 2013 From: rex at nosyntax.net (rex) Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2013 03:20:28 -0700 Subject: [ExI] What if humans were twice as intelligent? In-Reply-To: References: <525BD350.5010909@aleph.se> <525F182E.8060601@aleph.se> <526303BB.1040601@aleph.se> <20131021004636.GV6397@ninja.nosyntax.net> <5264E677.6000000@aleph.se> <20131021094436.GY6397@ninja.nosyntax.net> <5265A0BB.4000904@aleph.se> <20131021225202.GB12678@ninja.nosyntax.net> Message-ID: <20131022102028.GA5101@ninja.nosyntax.net> BillK [2013-10-22 01:45]: >On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 11:52 PM, rex wrote: > >> http://www.nosyntax.net/cfwiki/index.php/Differential_Breeding >> http://www.nosyntax.net/cfwiki/index.php/Preston_Campbell_1993 >> >> > >It looks like there are a lot of differing opinions on this subject. > >Some argue that IQ is just not a heritable characteristic. i.e. >Regression to the mean within populations. >But populations are not constant. There is immigration and emigration going on. > >Others claim that education and poverty are more significant factors. >Obviously severe poverty or pollution can badly affect a child's >developing brain. And wealth enables a child's development. > >Others say that it is the number of children in a family that affects >a child's development. I.e. fewer children with a large gap in years >between children enables the parents to give more time to caring for >the child. > >There seem to be just too many factors involved. Hello Bill, As you know, IQ is highly politicized. A good read on the history of the debate is _Born that Way_. For over a generation, the "nurture is all" group dominated, but they have been on the retreat for years and except for the diehards, it's recognized that both nature and nurture play important roles. The separated identical twin studies are strong evidence that IQ is highly heritable, though some authors claim heritability is low in low SES homes. Recent studies have shown that most personality traits that were once thought to be entirely environmental have a significant genetic component. Regression to the mean will occur unless heritability is 1, and the expected value of trait in the offspring is given by: O = M + h^2(P-M) Where M = population mean, h^2 is the narrow heritability, and P is the mean of the parents. As an illustration of how accurate this is, Terman started a longitudinal study of over 1500 children with IQs > 140 in 1922 (it's still going on). The mean IQ was 152, and the mean of their spouses was estimated as 125 (assortative mating in action) by Terman, so P = (152+125)/2 = 138.5. Using Jinks and Fuller's estimate of h^2 as 0.71, the predicted mean IQ of the offspring is 127.33. The measured IQ of 1525 offspring was 132.7 with SD = 16.5. The higher than predicted value is likely due to the environmental advantage of being raised by high-IQ parents who also had a higher than average SES. (This is from Jensen's book, _Educability and Group Differences_, pg 171.) The Flynn Effect doesn't have a satisfactory explanation, and there are other debates still going on, but I'm interested in simulation, and in particular in simulating the startling results of the Preston-Campbell paper. They are highly counterintuitive, to me anyway, though Julian Simon's explanation quoted on Anders' site is clear. Since humans mate assortatively, I'd like add add it to Anders' simulation, but it's not clear to me how to do that with a gene simulation. Perhaps Anders can think of a way to add it. -rex -- Computers run on smoke. If it leaks out they stop working. From anders at aleph.se Tue Oct 22 13:05:14 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2013 14:05:14 +0100 Subject: [ExI] What if humans were twice as intelligent? In-Reply-To: <20131022102028.GA5101@ninja.nosyntax.net> References: <525BD350.5010909@aleph.se> <525F182E.8060601@aleph.se> <526303BB.1040601@aleph.se> <20131021004636.GV6397@ninja.nosyntax.net> <5264E677.6000000@aleph.se> <20131021094436.GY6397@ninja.nosyntax.net> <5265A0BB.4000904@aleph.se> <20131021225202.GB12678@ninja.nosyntax.net> <20131022102028.GA5101@ninja.nosyntax.net> Message-ID: <5266780A.5020100@aleph.se> (Good overview, Rex!) Yes, there are multiple factors involved in intelligence. They can be complex, but they are not magic nor guaranteed to preclude any predictability. On 2013-10-22 11:20, rex wrote: > Since humans mate assortatively, I'd like add add it to Anders' > simulation, but it's not clear to me how to do that with a gene > simulation. Perhaps Anders can think of a way to add it. I would do something like this: select one parent with a probability proportional to their fitness (BTW, the mysterious selectrandom routine is basically just exploiting that if F(x) is a cdf of the distribution f(x) and u a uniform [0,1] random number, the variate F^{-1}(u) will have the probability distribution f(x)). Then we want to find a mate who is selected by fitness *and* has an IQ correlated with the first parent. One approach would be to randomly generate a set of candidates (select random ones by their fitness), get the one with the closest IQ - the correlation between parents will be set by the number of candidates. I don't know if this actually works. I suspect the *right* method is selection-rejection or copulas. In the first case, generate random pairs of couples (as per above), and reject them with a probability proportional to a bivariate Gaussian with the right covariance to fit observed assortive mating - continue until you get one couple that is probable. The computationally efficient approach is likely copula-based, but I do not understand them yet. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Tue Oct 22 13:11:00 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2013 14:11:00 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Life extension In-Reply-To: <20131022092807.GJ10405@leitl.org> References: <00ea01cece8c$8eba9960$ac2fcc20$@att.net> <20131022092807.GJ10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <52667964.9040008@aleph.se> On 2013-10-22 10:28, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 09:12:36AM +0100, BillK wrote: > >> Remember there are many people here that are older than you. >> If it gives you a bad feeling, think how it feels to them. > It is touching that the kids think a few decades are going > to make a difference. You'd better be already using that > anti-aging therapy *right now* in order to profit from it. Actually, future therapies might be good enough if one is non-old enough. Remember those sims I did, http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2009/09/life_extension_model.html ? Of course, the sensible thing is to factor in hefty Bayesian uncertainty about everything anyway - hence the need for close-to-present risk minimization. > Oops. There is no validated anti-aging therapy yet. Which reminds me. I will be talking to UK policymakers next week about life extension. What policy suggestions ought I make? -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From ilia.stambler at gmail.com Tue Oct 22 13:32:55 2013 From: ilia.stambler at gmail.com (Ilia Stambler) Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2013 16:32:55 +0300 Subject: [ExI] Life extension In-Reply-To: <52667964.9040008@aleph.se> References: <00ea01cece8c$8eba9960$ac2fcc20$@att.net> <20131022092807.GJ10405@leitl.org> <52667964.9040008@aleph.se> Message-ID: The suggestions for policy can be similar for most places: 1) Ensuring a significant increase of governmental funding for goal oriented progress on preventing the degenerative aging process and for extending healthy life during the entire life course. 2) Developing and adopting legal and regulatory frameworks that give incentives for goal oriented research and development designed to specifically address the development, registration, administration and accessibility of drugs, medical technologies and other therapies that will ameliorate the aging process and extend healthy life. 3) Establishing medical advisory boards to develop clinical guidelines to modulate the aging process and extend healthy life and scientific advisory boards to steer future useful research on the topic. I wonder if I may ask what other topics are to be discussed? Thanks you! ilia On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 4:11 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > On 2013-10-22 10:28, Eugen Leitl wrote: > >> On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 09:12:36AM +0100, BillK wrote: >> >> Remember there are many people here that are older than you. >>> If it gives you a bad feeling, think how it feels to them. >>> >> It is touching that the kids think a few decades are going >> to make a difference. You'd better be already using that >> anti-aging therapy *right now* in order to profit from it. >> > Actually, future therapies might be good enough if one is non-old enough. > Remember those sims I did, http://www.aleph.se/andart/** > archives/2009/09/life_**extension_model.html? Of course, the sensible thing is to factor in hefty Bayesian uncertainty > about everything anyway - hence the need for close-to-present risk > minimization. > > Oops. There is no validated anti-aging therapy yet. >> > Which reminds me. I will be talking to UK policymakers next week about > life extension. What policy suggestions ought I make? > > -- > Dr Anders Sandberg > Future of Humanity Institute > Oxford Martin School > Oxford University > > ______________________________**_________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/**mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-**chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sparge at gmail.com Tue Oct 22 13:47:02 2013 From: sparge at gmail.com (Dave Sill) Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2013 09:47:02 -0400 Subject: [ExI] What Would an Ideal College Look Like? A Lot Like This... In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 10:02 PM, Michael LaTorra wrote: > I read the article and went to the website of that college. It does look > like a very good school. But it falls short of being ideal, because it is > unaffordable. Most students can't afford spending over $40,000 per year. Yep. Charles Hugh Smith has a lot to say about traditional higher education. From http://www.oftwominds.com/Nearly-Free-University.html "Let?s start with what is self-evident about the basic structure of higher education: 1. As my colleague Mark Gallmeier noted in the Foreword, higher education is a legacy system based on the scarcity of recorded knowledge (printed and other media) and informed lectures. Both recorded knowledge and informed lectures are now essentially free and readily available. This is the material basis of the alternative system outlined in this book, the Nearly Free University (NFU), whose core is an open-enrollment, universally accessible, individually accredited curriculum designed for the emerging economy and the individual student. 2. The current higher education model is a factory composed of broadcast lectures and mass-distributed reading/coursework/tests. The student moves down the assembly line, attending the same lectures as other students, reading the same materials and taking the same tests. When the student receives a passing grade in a quasi-arbitrary number of courses, he or she is issued a diploma. This factory model of education is fundamentally unchanged from the era of World War II, when the government expanded higher education from its traditional elitist function to serve the nation?s war production. While factories churned out war materiel with low-skill labor, behind the scenes the war effort demanded a vast increase in engineering and scientific skills. This began the transformation into a knowledge-based economy. The difference between an industrial economy that requires massive numbers of low-skill factory workers and a knowledge-based (often referred to a post-industrial) economy is the knowledge of its workers. The factory model is obsolete in an era where a variety of nearly-free instructional materials and methodologies enable the student to select the most appropriate approach for his aptitudes and needs. 3. In terms of its financial structure, higher education is a cartel-like system that limits its product (accredited instruction) and restricts its output (credentials, diplomas). (A cartel is an organization of nominally competing enterprises that fixes prices and production to benefit its members. Cartels may be formal, such as the Organization of Oil Exporting Nations (OPEC) or informal like the higher education cartel. Informal cartels often rely on government regulations to restrict competitors? entry into their market and on government spending or loans to fund their operations. To mask the uncompetitive nature of their cartel, they devote enormous resources to public relations.) The cartel?s basic mechanism of maintaining non-competitive pricing is to enforce an artificial scarcity of credentials. The cartel?s control of a product that is in high demand (college diploma) frees it from outside competition and free-market price discovery, enabling it to charge customers (students) an extraordinary premium for a product whose value is entirely scarcity-based. This is the very definition of a rent-seeking cartel, a cartel that extracts premiums solely on the basis of an artificial scarcity. By their very nature, rent-seeking cartels are exploitive and parasitic, drawing resources from those who can least afford to pay high premiums and misallocating capital that could have been invested in productive social investments. The term rents in this context means that the cartel collects a premium without providing any corresponding additional value. The rentier class includes landed aristocracy, who collect rents while adding no value to the production of their tenant farmers. 4. Since the higher education cartel is the sole provider of accreditation (college diplomas), it is unaccountable for its failure to prepare its customers (students) for productive employment in the emerging economy. If a diploma is portrayed as essential, students must pay the cartel even if the cartel?s product (education) is ineffective and obsolete. 5. The four-year college system is profoundly disconnected from the economy. That the cartel?s product has little practical application is not considered a factor in the value of the product (diploma), whose primary purpose is to act as a higher education passport that enables passage to a more expansive territory of employment. 6. The present system of higher education is unaffordable for all but the wealthy. The cartel?s solution to its high prices, $1 trillion in student loan debt (exceeding both credit card debt and vehicle loans), is a crushing burden on both individuals and society at large. 7. The higher education cartel is an intrinsically elitist force, as its survival as a rent-seeking cartel is based on limiting what is now essentially free: knowledge and instruction. In other words, the higher education cartel charges an extraordinary premium for a free product. 8. The only way the Higher Education cartel can continue to charge a premium for nearly-free products is to actively mystify its product (by attributing secular sanctity and civic value to its diplomas) and promote an artificial value for this product using public relations and political lobbying. In other words, the higher education cartel operates on the same principles as other informal cartels: it depends on the state to fund its operations, and it uses public relations to mask its cartel structure and systemic failure to fulfill its original purpose." -Dave From painlord2k at libero.it Tue Oct 22 14:33:02 2013 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2013 16:33:02 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Dawn of Autonomous Corporations In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <52668C9E.2000508@libero.it> Il 22/10/2013 05:53, Christian Vanderwall ha scritto: > http://btcgeek.com/dawn-of-autonomous-corporations/ Don't know if it was already linked but, just in case: Bootstrapping A Decentralized Autonomous Corporation: Part I http://bitcoinmagazine.com/7050/bootstrapping-a-decentralized-autonomous-corporation-part-i/ http://bitcoinmagazine.com/7119/bootstrapping-an-autonomous-decentralized-corporation-part-2-interacting-with-the-world/ http://bitcoinmagazine.com/7235/bootstrapping-a-decentralized-autonomous-corporation-part-3-identity-corp/ Mirco From mlatorra at gmail.com Tue Oct 22 16:40:35 2013 From: mlatorra at gmail.com (Michael LaTorra) Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2013 10:40:35 -0600 Subject: [ExI] What Would an Ideal College Look Like? A Lot Like This... In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Thanks for that post, Dave. I agree with quite a lot of what Charles Hugh Smith wrote. One more thing to add, which applies mostly to large public universities and some of the bigger private schools, is the heavy cost of competitive team sports. College athletics are a profit center for a few schools but a big financial drain for many others. I recall one student who quipped that he attended a large football institution with a small educational facility attached. On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 7:47 AM, Dave Sill wrote: > On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 10:02 PM, Michael LaTorra > wrote: > > I read the article and went to the website of that college. It does look > > like a very good school. But it falls short of being ideal, because it is > > unaffordable. Most students can't afford spending over $40,000 per year. > > Yep. Charles Hugh Smith has a lot to say about traditional higher > education. From http://www.oftwominds.com/Nearly-Free-University.html > > "Let?s start with what is self-evident about the basic structure of > higher education: > > 1. As my colleague Mark Gallmeier noted in the Foreword, higher > education is a legacy system based on the scarcity of recorded > knowledge (printed and other media) and informed lectures. Both > recorded knowledge and informed lectures are now essentially free and > readily available. This is the material basis of the alternative > system outlined in this book, the Nearly Free University (NFU), whose > core is an open-enrollment, universally accessible, individually > accredited curriculum designed for the emerging economy and the > individual student. > > 2. The current higher education model is a factory composed of > broadcast lectures and mass-distributed reading/coursework/tests. The > student moves down the assembly line, attending the same lectures as > other students, reading the same materials and taking the same tests. > When the student receives a passing grade in a quasi-arbitrary number > of courses, he or she is issued a diploma. > > This factory model of education is fundamentally unchanged from the > era of World War II, when the government expanded higher education > from its traditional elitist function to serve the nation?s war > production. While factories churned out war materiel with low-skill > labor, behind the scenes the war effort demanded a vast increase in > engineering and scientific skills. This began the transformation into > a knowledge-based economy. The difference between an industrial > economy that requires massive numbers of low-skill factory workers and > a knowledge-based (often referred to a post-industrial) economy is the > knowledge of its workers. > > The factory model is obsolete in an era where a variety of nearly-free > instructional materials and methodologies enable the student to select > the most appropriate approach for his aptitudes and needs. > > 3. In terms of its financial structure, higher education is a > cartel-like system that limits its product (accredited instruction) > and restricts its output (credentials, diplomas). (A cartel is an > organization of nominally competing enterprises that fixes prices and > production to benefit its members. Cartels may be formal, such as the > Organization of Oil Exporting Nations (OPEC) or informal like the > higher education cartel. Informal cartels often rely on government > regulations to restrict competitors? entry into their market and on > government spending or loans to fund their operations. To mask the > uncompetitive nature of their cartel, they devote enormous resources > to public relations.) > > The cartel?s basic mechanism of maintaining non-competitive pricing is > to enforce an artificial scarcity of credentials. The cartel?s control > of a product that is in high demand (college diploma) frees it from > outside competition and free-market price discovery, enabling it to > charge customers (students) an extraordinary premium for a product > whose value is entirely scarcity-based. > > This is the very definition of a rent-seeking cartel, a cartel that > extracts premiums solely on the basis of an artificial scarcity. By > their very nature, rent-seeking cartels are exploitive and parasitic, > drawing resources from those who can least afford to pay high premiums > and misallocating capital that could have been invested in productive > social investments. The term rents in this context means that the > cartel collects a premium without providing any corresponding > additional value. The rentier class includes landed aristocracy, who > collect rents while adding no value to the production of their tenant > farmers. > > 4. Since the higher education cartel is the sole provider of > accreditation (college diplomas), it is unaccountable for its failure > to prepare its customers (students) for productive employment in the > emerging economy. If a diploma is portrayed as essential, students > must pay the cartel even if the cartel?s product (education) is > ineffective and obsolete. > > 5. The four-year college system is profoundly disconnected from the > economy. That the cartel?s product has little practical application is > not considered a factor in the value of the product (diploma), whose > primary purpose is to act as a higher education passport that enables > passage to a more expansive territory of employment. > > 6. The present system of higher education is unaffordable for all but > the wealthy. The cartel?s solution to its high prices, $1 trillion in > student loan debt (exceeding both credit card debt and vehicle loans), > is a crushing burden on both individuals and society at large. > > 7. The higher education cartel is an intrinsically elitist force, as > its survival as a rent-seeking cartel is based on limiting what is now > essentially free: knowledge and instruction. In other words, the > higher education cartel charges an extraordinary premium for a free > product. > > 8. The only way the Higher Education cartel can continue to charge a > premium for nearly-free products is to actively mystify its product > (by attributing secular sanctity and civic value to its diplomas) and > promote an artificial value for this product using public relations > and political lobbying. In other words, the higher education cartel > operates on the same principles as other informal cartels: it depends > on the state to fund its operations, and it uses public relations to > mask its cartel structure and systemic failure to fulfill its original > purpose." > > -Dave > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Tue Oct 22 16:55:40 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2013 12:55:40 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: <011c01cece93$0ac21910$20464b30$@att.net> References: <01d801ceca8c$9449cda0$bcdd68e0$@att.net> <02a401ceca96$cd3cc4a0$67b64de0$@att.net> <037201cecb8c$4428af20$cc7a0d60$@att.net> <011501cecc66$91421280$b3c63780$@att.net> <011c01cece93$0ac21910$20464b30$@att.net> Message-ID: On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 3:23 PM, spike wrote: >? I have never observed more irresponsible behavior by a American >>> politician than what I observed from the Tea Party Republicans on Wednesday >>> night? >>> >> >> Indeed? The persistent deficit spending for the past 14 years doesn?t >> qualify? >> > No that doesn't qualify and doesn't even come close to the level of irresponsibility and just raw stupidity that I observed on Wednesday; only one congressional vote in the last 14 years, or in my lifetime for that matter, threatened to destroy the economic world in the next 90 minutes. And in general deficit spending is not a bad thing, certainly from 2008 to today it has not been. As for before 2008, well, I remind you that those same hillbillies that you like so much that voted not to raise the debt ceiling also voted to buy not one but TWO wars, AND they also voted NOT to raise taxes to pay for them, AND now when the bill comes due to pay for all that stuff that they insisted of buying they are (in the name of fiscal responsibility of course) refusing to pay the bill. >> if you're in congress you vote to spend less money? >> > > > They are trying. > They are very trying. > That?s what sequestration is all about. > I'm not talking about sequestration, I'm talking about debt default, the failure to keep your word, hypocrisy, the destruction of the dollar, and economic catastrophe. > The whole argument devolves into a logic loop. Senator Fester N. Boyle > disagrees with me on economics, therefore he is an idiot > If I know nothing about Senator Fester N. Boyle except that he voted not to extend the debt limit last Wednesday then I can say without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion that Senator Fester N. Boyle is a monumental idiot. > >therefore he must be a creationist, > It's not a sure thing but if he voted to default on Wednesday I would be willing to bet you 4 to 1 that Senator Boyle is a creationist, and probably a militant one. > >> if you don't think logic is important in one subject, like biology, >> then you probably don't think logic is important in another subject, like >> economics >> > > > This assumes logic applies to areas where the politician has exactly > zero knowledge or interest. > Like economics. > > Regarding economics, this theory fails to explain why there are two > major schools of thought competing currently, Hayek and Keynes. > No school of economics said that not raising the debt ceiling on Wednesday and turning the government of the USA into a deadbeat was a good idea, although plenty of hillbillies thought so. > >> If Obama gives in to terrorist demands? >> > > > Terrorist demands. The will of the house of representatives on a tax, > which is their legal responsibility, is a terrorist demand now? Yes. The hillbilly wing of the once proud Republican party has decided to use terror as a weapon, they sent millions of people, including me, into a panic when they threatened to destroy the economy of the world in 90 minutes if their demands were not met. If that isn't terrorism I don't know what is. >> and they are seen to be successful then he knows that the exact same >> tactics will be used against him and future presidents again and again and >> again >> > > > Ah yes I did overlook that. The current president is worried about > future presidents losing power. OK. This really is about power, that much > I will agree. I disagree that presidents should have much power, but I > agree this really is about power. > Politics is always about power, but next time we could have a conservative president and 50% of the house or 40% of the Senate threatening to destroy the world in 90 minutes if their socialist demands are not met. Would you be happy then? John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Tue Oct 22 16:55:53 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2013 17:55:53 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Life extension In-Reply-To: References: <00ea01cece8c$8eba9960$ac2fcc20$@att.net> <20131022092807.GJ10405@leitl.org> <52667964.9040008@aleph.se> Message-ID: <5266AE19.3010708@aleph.se> On 2013-10-22 14:32, Ilia Stambler wrote: > > I wonder if I may ask what other topics are to be discussed? > Well, me and professor Linda Partridge will have 10 minutes each, and the Minister for Care and Ageing is presumably busy enough to escape after having done his job. So the total amount of topics will be very, very limited. The core idea is to explain to the politicians that we are seeing increases in life expectancy, that longevity risk (uncertainty about future mortality) is going up, and that there are potential for interventions to extended lifespan. So weought to develop strategies for dealing with this. I will talk about the ethical and social motivations why longevity is a good thing. Hmm, interesting realization: the Minister is on the health side rather than research. So he might have less ability to help research, but ought to be good for the advisory board idea. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From ilia.stambler at gmail.com Tue Oct 22 17:09:47 2013 From: ilia.stambler at gmail.com (Ilia Stambler) Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2013 20:09:47 +0300 Subject: [ExI] Life extension In-Reply-To: <5266AE19.3010708@aleph.se> References: <00ea01cece8c$8eba9960$ac2fcc20$@att.net> <20131022092807.GJ10405@leitl.org> <52667964.9040008@aleph.se> <5266AE19.3010708@aleph.se> Message-ID: Perhaps the first point might be slightly reformulated - 1) Ensuring a significant increase of governmental funding for goal oriented progress on preventing the degenerative aging process, and the derivative chronic noncommunicable diseases and disabilitie*s*, and for extending healthy and productive life during the entire life course. That is to stress both the health and economic rationale for prioritizing *healthy* life extension research and practice. On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 7:55 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > On 2013-10-22 14:32, Ilia Stambler wrote: > >> >> I wonder if I may ask what other topics are to be discussed? >> >> > Well, me and professor Linda Partridge will have 10 minutes each, and the > Minister for Care and Ageing is presumably busy enough to escape after > having done his job. So the total amount of topics will be very, very > limited. > > The core idea is to explain to the politicians that we are seeing > increases in life expectancy, that longevity risk (uncertainty about future > mortality) is going up, and that there are potential for interventions to > extended lifespan. So weought to develop strategies for dealing with this. > I will talk about the ethical and social motivations why longevity is a > good thing. > > Hmm, interesting realization: the Minister is on the health side rather > than research. So he might have less ability to help research, but ought to > be good for the advisory board idea. > > > -- > Dr Anders Sandberg > Future of Humanity Institute > Oxford Martin School > Oxford University > > ______________________________**_________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/**mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-**chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Tue Oct 22 17:36:02 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2013 18:36:02 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Life extension In-Reply-To: <5266AE19.3010708@aleph.se> References: <00ea01cece8c$8eba9960$ac2fcc20$@att.net> <20131022092807.GJ10405@leitl.org> <52667964.9040008@aleph.se> <5266AE19.3010708@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 5:55 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > Well, me and professor Linda Partridge will have 10 minutes each, and the > Minister for Care and Ageing is presumably busy enough to escape after > having done his job. So the total amount of topics will be very, very > limited. > > The core idea is to explain to the politicians that we are seeing increases > in life expectancy, that longevity risk (uncertainty about future mortality) > is going up, and that there are potential for interventions to extended > lifespan. So weought to develop strategies for dealing with this. I will > talk about the ethical and social motivations why longevity is a good thing. > > Hmm, interesting realization: the Minister is on the health side rather than > research. So he might have less ability to help research, but ought to be > good for the advisory board idea. > Only 10 minutes! Better keep it simple and straight to the point. Keeping people healthy longer will save a fortune on NHS costs. Ideally politicians don't want people to use the NHS at all. Just keep healthy until they drop. Also keeping people healthy longer will enable them to keep working longer and mean that paying pensions can be postponed to an even later age than current predictions. Pension age 100 years old? He'll like that. BillK From keithl at kl-ic.com Tue Oct 22 17:40:24 2013 From: keithl at kl-ic.com (Keith Lofstrom) Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2013 10:40:24 -0700 Subject: [ExI] [tt] [Server-sky] Intel trigate transistors and radiation Message-ID: <20131022174024.GA1427@gate.kl-ic.com> I've been offline for a while, learning more about the van Allen belt, diffusion of particles through the various regions, etc. There is surprisingly little "intermediate" level technical description out there. We may have to create it ourselves out of the more sophisticated models and papers, so we can engineer with it, and explain our design decisions to others. As the semiconductor literature suggests, I've verified that the radiation resistance of the recent Intel trigate processes is indeed fantastic, which raises issues with export control for Intel's commercial products. Intel is negotiating with the US government now to resolve these issues. Server Sky's future options hinge on successful negotiations, so wish them luck, but please don't upset the process. We may find similar technologies (eventually) at TSMC or Samsung, but that may require that Server Sky exports the design work and perhaps ourselves, not only production and launch. Color me provincial, but I'd rather make jobs for friends and neighbors here in the US. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom keithl at keithl.com _______________________________________________ Server-sky mailing list Server-sky at lists.server-sky.com http://lists.server-sky.com/mailman/listinfo/server-sky _______________________________________________ tt mailing list tt at postbiota.org http://postbiota.org/mailman/listinfo/tt From spike66 at att.net Tue Oct 22 17:58:19 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2013 10:58:19 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: References: <01d801ceca8c$9449cda0$bcdd68e0$@att.net> <02a401ceca96$cd3cc4a0$67b64de0$@att.net> <037201cecb8c$4428af20$cc7a0d60$@att.net> <011501cecc66$91421280$b3c63780$@att.net> <011c01cece93$0ac21910$20464b30$@att.net> Message-ID: <035701cecf50$4b6cd500$e2467f00$@att.net> >. On Behalf Of John Clark Subject: Re: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 3:23 PM, spike wrote: >. I have never observed more irresponsible behavior by a American politician than what I observed from the Tea Party Republicans on Wednesday night. Indeed? The persistent deficit spending for the past 14 years doesn't qualify? >.No that doesn't qualify and doesn't even come close to the level of irresponsibility and just raw stupidity that I observed on Wednesday; only one congressional vote in the last 14 years, or in my lifetime for that matter, threatened to destroy the economic world in the next 90 minutes. John, clearly you have bought into the flaming rhetoric that was fed to us by some in the mainstream press. Not only is that idea wrong, it is pi radians wrong. The ninety minutes to flaming apocalypse scenario wasn't threatening the end of the world's economies; in fact I am surprised they didn't run it closer than that for a nice melodramatic climax. Perhaps the senators wanted to go home and go to bed. They had to make this whole thing appear dramatic, but it was all for show. They need to do things like this in order to support the value of the dollar, rather than threaten it. Reasoning: think of the opposite scenario, where there is no one in government opposed to more borrow and overspend, borrow and print more money. What if they just rubber stamped the debt limits? Then the government has open ended permission to print as much currency as it needs or wants, for anything it needs or wants. How would foreign debt holders see that? If we just borrowed and overspent with no controls, that is what would tank the dollar, not the opposite, where we are doing at least show struggles, to pretend some in government will fight and try to hold overspending in check. That's all it is John, and here's how you will know I am right: we will have something like a repeat of this whole thing in December, a phony "shutdown" which is really just a needed government slimdown, the treasury secretary will start doing "extraordinary measures" to handle the borrowing until the real deadline arrives, just as before. This time of course it will not be as extraordinary. I doubt they will call it ordinary measures, because they need to keep up the show. I don't know if they will go all the way to 2230 this time, or just go ahead and make it a normal working day, or call it around 2100. They might take it all the way to nearly midnight, but I doubt it. We are not buying this time. Most of us didn't buy it last time. We know what they are doing. In any case, these lawmakers are not terrorists. Terrorists are terrorists. Guys with bombs and guys who shoot up shopping malls are terrorists. The lawmakers are not threatening to destroy the world. The armed governments simultaneously launching every nuke they have would destroy the world. But lawmakers pretending to control the overspending will not destroy the world. Brits, did you feel worried last Wednesday that the US was about to utterly destroy the planet? Germans, Italians, did you have a nail biter that day? Neither did I. My contention is that the US federal government could find ways to operate on about three quarters of what it is now spending, which is what it is taking in. Keep federal tax structure as is, at the current level. They would hand the National Parks down to the state governments. They would call in the troops everywhere and cut armed forces in half, for starters. They would come up with one of their phony inflation numbers to adjust pensions. Keep the ACA but put no federal government money into it; rather they would take whatever tax funds are collected from the opt-outs and use that to subsidize the poor, at the state level. Set up state government-run clinics funded by the opt-outs, and staff them with nurses as well as full doctors. Run all these at the state level, with the feds out of the picture completely: the feds don't have the authority that states have. Import all foreign doctors who apply for immigration, all of them. Let the foreign doctors prove themselves in the free clinics. Scale back Medicare part D and put its administration at the state level. Give all current federal government workers an across the board pay cut. Note that none of this requires knowledge of evolution, just a little common sense. These steps would not destroy the world, but they would support the dollar and save the world, for it would establish that we recognize we have a serious problem. The previous paragraph would demonstrate that we also have some serious solutions to go with the serious problem. We would then be past the denial and anger stages John, and on to bargaining and depression, with some of us already into the acceptance stage. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Tue Oct 22 19:30:48 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2013 13:30:48 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: <98403CF1-5A40-46A2-9DE8-3661B39FC7BF@me.com> References: <98403CF1-5A40-46A2-9DE8-3661B39FC7BF@me.com> Message-ID: On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 3:18 AM, Omar Rahman wrote: > Kelly and others have tried to disassociate the Tea Party from the > commonly expressed views of it's members/leaders. Ok, whatever; whoever > believes that won't believe evidence to the contrary. > I am open to all kinds of evidence. As a devout skeptic and extropian, I must be open to changing my mind when the data are convincing. I may seem unreasonable when talking to Eugen, but that is just because I find his oildrum data tainted and unconvincing. > I would like to comment on the whole 'premise' of the T.axed E.nough > A.lready P.arty: quite simply we aren't. If we were taxed at a level that > would fund our expenditures you would actually see real broad based > bi(tri?)partisan support for military entitlements reform. We might even > see progress on increasing helpful things like education, food stamps, and > the minimum wage. > This is a difference of opinion. It doesn't make you a bad person. It doesn't make me a good person to disagree. I simply believe that large more global organizations are less efficient than smaller more local organizations. The same people who want to raise the minimum wage are those who cry from the mountain tops to buy locally produced produce. Why is locally produced lettuce better than locally produced governance? Isn't a group of local volunteers running a soup kitchen better than a distant bureaucracy in Washington DC? I sure think it is. I put to you list members that: the crazed billionaires backing the > Brethren of the Koolaid are in fact far more extropian than us here on this > list. Sitting on top of their mountains of money they can see further, just > as those who stand on the shoulders of giants can see. They can see the > wave robotisation that will drive many jobs out of the hands of humans. > They are the primary beneficiaries of this. It isn't an academic discussion > for them it's a business plan. Anders and others recently posted > information about jobs that will/could be soon computerised or robotised; > egotistical crazed billionaire was not on any list that I saw. They are in > practical terms (far?) closer to the singularity than us. > I am having trouble understanding why you would simultaneously want a higher minimum wage AND be against jobs that will soon be computerized or robotised. Do you not understand that a raise of the minimum wage will increase the speed of such automation? It's very simple economics. If it costs me less to have a combine harvest my cotten than a bunch of Africans, then I'm going with the combine. If you make me pay the Africans $100 a day (in 1862 terms) then I'm going to go invent a combine. Fast. Elsewhere I've said on his list that corporations and countries are like > huge mostly analogy AIs. > I think I actually agree with that for the most part. > A billionaire or dictator who respectively controls one of these > corporations or countries is the closest facsimile to a post singularity > entity that we can see. > There you go making a point against your previous point again. Please try to think consistently. Yes, a corporation is like an AGI, in that it DOES NOT reflect the point of any individual. Then you turn it around and say that it DOES reflect the point of a megalomaniacal individual. Which way do you want it? I don't see how you can have both sides of this view. Try to see what I'm saying here. > Of course to them taxation, national governments, and international > agreements are usually just impediments to their free action. Even the > 'good' egotistical crazed billionaires, think Elon Musk (to be fair Elon > doesn't come off as egotistical even when he makes some sweeping statement > that some past approach or program is doomed to fail) , have a perspective > that might not always line up with the 'little guy'. > I like Elon's view for transportation in California. It's much better than the government's proposal. It's a prime example of why to give money to corporations instead of governments. > But with the juggernaut that is Washington, how else do you slow it down > other than throwing bodies under it? This is a serious question. How the > hell do we slow it down? > > I still have this question. We are a nation addicted to war and war spending. > I'll grant that point. I would like to shut down many of our bases around the world. I would like to consolidate some of our bases here in the USA. Much savings could be achieved in this manner. I do believe that a strong national defense is necessary. But I also believe we are spending more on defence than is necessary because of political considerations. Why can't Germany fund it's own defense? They waste their money on premature solar installations while we waste money on their defense. One could say that the USA is partially funding Germany's headlong dash into premature alternative energy projects. > If we can't have a big one we'll take as many little ones as we can get. > We'll create never ending wars on concepts; "Drugs', 'Terror', 'Cuteness' > (ok I made the last one up....but why not....there is no way we could clean > up the internet of cat pictures...let's go for it!) Let's not forget our > openly 'covert' wars, wars which suspiciously resemble terrorism if you > happen to have family at the wedding/funeral that gets 'bug splatted'. > I am against the war on drugs. If I were the dictator of America, I would immediately make all drugs (including prescription drugs) legal without a prescription. I would put in place strong incentives to use such drugs responsibly. For example, if someone chooses to drive drunk and they kill someone, I believe that should be treated as equivalent to first degree homicide. (Let's not argue capital punishment, this thread is broad enough already.) I am largely against the war on terror. I think we should be able to absorb a certain amount of terrorist activity, just as we absorb gang violence now. Why focus on it so heavily. It's a little like the government focusing disproportionately on AIDS when cancer and heart disease kill more people. It is as if the entire government is functioning like a reptile brain, responding to one Amygdala hijack after another. We need a more mammalian government that balances risks and reactions to risk in a more mathematically correct way. Too damn much emotion and fear in it. I would also oppose a war on Cuteness. The only war I am in favor of at the moment is the war against bloated government. It's like a large tumor growing in the belly of the world's nations. It will eventually kill the hosts. If, and I'll admit it's a big IF, you accept the notion that countries are > 'mostly analog AIs', how would you rate the US on the 'friendly' scale? > Psychotic? Delusional? > Totally bat shit crazy. Much worse than the TEA party. One can easily make the case that the US as a nation has Borderline Personality Disorder, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Paranoid Personality Disorder, Antisocial Personality Disorder and many others. Of course, most other nations are also bat shit crazy. That's why I want smaller, more localized government, because if you can reach your fingers around the neck of the crazy ass hole that's making the rules, he's going to make better rules (usually). > About debt Kelly, the graph you presented shows pretty clearly that in > recent times Reagan and Bush the 2nd are right at the elbows where the debt > to gdp ratio turned for the worse. > True, and I condemn them for it. I'm not a Republican because of it. > Almost every president has raised spending in dollar amounts, but when you > couple that with tax cuts you get exactly the debt explosion that you would > expect rather than the 'golden shower' of the trickle down economics we > were promised. > I feel the golden shower running down my back everytime Washington pisses on me. > Why? The billionaires are buying more industrial plant and marching > forward to the singularity alone. > I don't know. > Here's a graph for you: > > http://www.cbc.ca/news2/interactives/canada-deficit/ > > Guess what, in Canada the fiscally conservative 'Conservatives'...aren't. > The Liberals, at least since Chr?tien, are. The final irony is that the > Conservatives have outlined in their platform a legislative goal to have a > 'balanced budget amendment', something they haven't been able to do after > squandering the surplus handed to them by their Liberal predecessors. > Reminiscent of the Clinton to Bush transition, yes? > Don't know enough Canadian politics to comment, though I know enough to know that they use Conservative and Liberal differently than they are defined in the USA. Very confusing that. > The Military-Industrial complex wants more wars and money, and the banking > system wants a perpetually indebted client. They want a 'functional > alcoholic', someone who can keep paying the bills but is completely > incapable of 'getting off the bottle'. Guess what they've got? > I agree. The military-industrial complex is another large dysfunctional organization. The banking system is yet another. The Bank of American Fork is one of the best run banks in the nation. Why? Probably because they are not large. > The Tea Party is clearly not opposed to the Military-Industrial complex, > it's priority lately has and continues to be to oppose a health care system > that, while it is flawed, is a step in the right direction towards reducing > the costs of health care to people and to the economy. > I disagree with you slightly here. When Obama put forth his idea of the sequester, he thought the Republicans would fold before taking money away from defense. Guess what? It backfired on him because the Tea Party thought it more important to reduce spending than fund defense. I would say that is evidence against your proposition. > Just try to get the Tea Party to stand up and propose cuts just to the > defence department and the spies. The American public in a vast majority > would approve of that. Instead of going after that mountain of pork-barrel > spending they go after the handful of beans that is 'Obamacare'. > Handful of beans? Health Care represents 18% of the US economy. How is that a handful of beans? I am convinced that the long term plan is for Obamacare to morph into a single payer system. Doing what they are doing now (so badly) is the way forward to a single payer system. If we get there, Zeus protect us! Conclusion: either the Tea Party isn't sincere about wanting to reduce > spending or they are motivated by idealogical concerns more strongly than > fiscal concerns. > I simply disagree as a grass roots member of the Tea Party. I certainly don't think that way. I'm betting Spike (him being the most like me in political thought) doesn't either. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Tue Oct 22 19:43:37 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2013 13:43:37 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: References: <01d801ceca8c$9449cda0$bcdd68e0$@att.net> <02a401ceca96$cd3cc4a0$67b64de0$@att.net> <037201cecb8c$4428af20$cc7a0d60$@att.net> <011501cecc66$91421280$b3c63780$@att.net> Message-ID: On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 9:15 AM, John Clark wrote: > On Sun, Oct 20, 2013 at 12:43 PM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > >> >> > But with the juggernaut that is Washington, how else do you slow it >> down other than throwing bodies under it? This is a serious question. How >> the hell do we slow it down? >> > > Easy, if you're in congress you vote to spend less money. > Uh, that just never happens. Or so rarely that I can't recall it, other than "Dr. No", Ron Paul. > And if things don't come out your way you try to convince others to come > around to your way of thinking so that next time the outcome is different. > What you DON'T do is have a temper tantrum and try your very best to > destroy the world because you're angry that you lost. > So Obama in stating that he would not negotiate with the other side is MORE rational? > Well, wars are very expensive, the Republicans started 2 and refused to > raise taxes to pay for them. > I was never in favor of the first or second Iraq war. I was not in favor of the expensive nation building in Afghanistan. > And then we entered the greatest economic downturn since the 1930's. And > by the way, the Great Depression would have probably ended in 1938 if > drastic measures were not taken to stop inflation, inflation which did not > exist in 1938. Sound familiar? > Not really. World War II ended the depression. > > creationism. The Tea Party holds no position on that subject. >> > > I don't know how you determine the position of the Tea Party about > anything except by looking at the position of Tea Party members, and nearly > all of the most prominent ones are creationists, and very vocal and > militant ones too. And there is a connection, if you don't think logic is > important in one subject, like biology, then you probably don't think logic > is important in another subject, like economics. At any rate it would > certainly be irrational to claim that there is not a very strong connection > between the Tea Party and creationism. > There is indeed a strong correlation. I just find it irrelevant. > > The president would have folded in the face of such pressure, and the >> individual mandate for Obamacare would have been sensibly put off for a year >> > > It is time to face reality, the president is never EVER going to abandon > Obama care. There are 2 reasons: > > 1) It was passed by the House and the Senate and the Supreme Court said it > was constitutional and, although you may not like it, Obamacare is the > single thing the president is most proud of having accomplished. > I know he's proud of it. I think it's going to blow up in his face though. > 2) If Obama gives in to terrorist demands and they are seen to be > successful then he knows that the exact same tactics will be used against > him and future presidents again and again and again. > See, there you go calling the Tea Party terrorists. That's not the way to build consensus, even amongst us friendly individuals. > > what CRAZY economic theory do you attribute to the Tea Party? >> > > How about the USA going back to the Gold Standard and in effect give China > and Australia and the happenstance of geology the power that the Federal > Reserve Board has now, as both countries produce more gold than the USA > does. And Uzbekistan becomes a major world power and Japan and Briton and > Germany and France become insignificant footnotes. Do you expect a radical > change like that to happen in 90 minutes without blood in the streets? > China's star is rising regardless of the gold standard. They will own the moon. I'm public about that on the Long Now Bet site. I am not in favor of going back on the Gold Standard, but I wish the dollar was treated with a little more reverence than quantitative easing pays to it. We are not Zimbabwe or at least we shouldn't be. > > We need a currency based on Work, in the Physics sense. You could value > oil in the amount of Work it would do, and then you could value everything > else in terms of oil. > > So how much Work in the physical sense does a computer programmer do, or a > novelist, or a cancer researcher, or a Tea party politician? > The amount that someone will pay them in oil for that work. I wouldn't personally pay much for any politician, though the argument could be made that if you paid them enough, you would get better ones. > > > Money's main purpose is to simply avoid barter. >> > > Yes. > > > >> > To store wealth in between transactions. >> > > Yes. > > > Anything will serve this purpose > > No not just anything can serve that purpose, only those things that, for > whatever reason, people have faith will retain its value in the future. And > thanks to Tea Party Neanderthals in congress that is the faith that came > within 90 minutes of being destroyed forever. > Political Theater. Pandering to their base. Just like the other side. > > The reason that some of us like Bitcoin is that it is just such a >> currency, and is largely independent of centralized meddling (other than >> just declaring it illegal). >> > > If the free market decides it would prefer Bitcoins to dollars who am I to > disagree, but that will take a long time if ever. Bitcoin, just like any > other form of money, has value because people have faith it will be > valuable in the future; right now far far fewer people have faith in > Bitcoin than in the US dollar, so far far fewer people are willing to > accept it as exchange. If Bitcoin can get over its wild and unpredictable > price swings > I don't think it's all that wild. Silver did a bigger jump in 1978 and everyone sees that as money. > the faith people have in it could increase, but that sure as hell was not > going to happen on Wednesday night in the 90 minutes before the dollar was > lynched by hillbillies. > No, certainly Bitcoin is a long term bet. > > The problem most people have with the debt and deficit is not related to >> deflation or inflation, it's related to fairness. >> > > If the Tea Party can make rich people poor but can't make poor people rich > then fuck fairness. > Sorry, it's the Liberals that want to make rich people poor by taxing them into the ground. Seems you want to fuck fairness. > > > How can the government operate in perpetual deficit when individuals and >> corporations can not? >> > > Because government can print money and corporations can't. Printing money > can be a wonderful thing, or a terrible thing, it depends on the > circumstances. > I think it's a terrible thing to print too much of it. > > >> >Every time the government prints a dollar, the dollar in your pocket >> goes down in value just a little. >> > > During the last 5 years the free market has disagreed with you about that, > despite a lot more dollars having been printed prices have not gone up, and > I think the free market is wiser in these matters than you or me. > In what sense has the dollar not lost value? Gold has gone up a lot. Oil has gone up. Everything of real value has gone up. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Tue Oct 22 19:53:35 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2013 13:53:35 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Stability of Mutualist Societies in the Face of AI (was Re: Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine") Message-ID: On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 4:17 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > A socialist would of course try to bring everybody into this state through >> joint ownership of the means of production. Anarchists hope that having a >> non-money economy will fix things (which is an interesting claim - I am not >> entirely convinced mutualist societies are stable in the face of AI). > > Anders, I love how in the middle of a flaming political war, you throw in these little gems of plain old fashioned brilliance. I would love to hear more about your ideas about the stability of mutualist societies in the face of AI. What is it about AI that threatens mutualist societies, and do you see that we have a mutualist society today? -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Tue Oct 22 20:04:45 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2013 14:04:45 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Life extension In-Reply-To: <52667964.9040008@aleph.se> References: <00ea01cece8c$8eba9960$ac2fcc20$@att.net> <20131022092807.GJ10405@leitl.org> <52667964.9040008@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 7:11 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > On 2013-10-22 10:28, Eugen Leitl wrote: > >> >>> Oops. There is no validated anti-aging therapy yet. >> > Which reminds me. I will be talking to UK policymakers next week about > life extension. What policy suggestions ought I make? I'm sure you've heard what Aubrey de Grey has to say on this topic. If you haven't, go looking for it. The biggest insight I think he's had is that you don't talk about life extension. Particularly radical life extension. You talk about people living healthy into older age. Nobody can argue with the desire for a healthy 90 year old, but lots of people get damn nervous when you talk about a bunch of 140 year olds running around. Aubrey has come to the conclusion, accurately I think, that talking about healthy 90 year olds is better political theater. The funny thing is that it is just another way of saying the same thing. If we're going to have governments involved in funding health research at all (something I'm totally against of course) then they should spend some of that money on helping people stay out of nursing homes longer. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Tue Oct 22 20:44:37 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2013 21:44:37 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Life extension In-Reply-To: References: <00ea01cece8c$8eba9960$ac2fcc20$@att.net> <20131022092807.GJ10405@leitl.org> <52667964.9040008@aleph.se> Message-ID: <5266E3B5.7060201@aleph.se> On 2013-10-22 21:04, Kelly Anderson wrote: > The biggest insight I think he's had is that you don't talk about life > extension. Particularly radical life extension. You talk about people > living healthy into older age. Yes. This is important, since you do not want to give people an excuse for not listening. Another approach is to point out the enormous savings. Olshansky and the other longevity dividend people have come out with yet another article looking at the healthcare economics of life extension: http://sjayolshansky.com/sjo/Longevity_Dividend_Initative_files/Health%20Affairs%202013%20LDI%20Final.pdf Then there is the unavoidable boredom and overpopulation arguments. I usually handle the boredom with a Nietzsche quote and then discuss the tragedy of life projects cut short. A very cool answer to the usual overpopulation worry can be found in this paper: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3192186/ They use Swedish demographic data to demonstrate that even with radical life extension the population does not have to explode. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Tue Oct 22 21:21:22 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2013 22:21:22 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Stability of Mutualist Societies in the Face of AI In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <5266EC52.5020003@aleph.se> On 2013-10-22 20:53, Kelly Anderson wrote: > On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 4:17 PM, Anders Sandberg > wrote: > > A socialist would of course try to bring everybody into this > state through joint ownership of the means of production. > Anarchists hope that having a non-money economy will fix > things (which is an interesting claim - I am not entirely > convinced mutualist societies are stable in the face of AI). > > > Anders, I love how in the middle of a flaming political war, you throw > in these little gems of plain old fashioned brilliance. I would love > to hear more about your ideas about the stability of mutualist > societies in the face of AI. What is it about AI that threatens > mutualist societies, and do you see that we have a mutualist society > today? I'm using the term from the anarchist community. As Wikipedia puts it, "A society where each person might possess a means of production, either individually or collectively, with trade representing equivalent amounts of labor in the free market." Now, straight mutualism is based on the labor theory of value, so it is just plain wrong. Even if one believes the theory, AI wrecks it: now things can be produced without labor, including labor-saving devices. But more relevantly, if AI can do stuff, why should I trade with you? Yes, you might have an AI, and I exchange some stuff I or my AI do for its products, but I am not really trading with *you*. If I had your AI I would just use it straight away. The whole trade idea goes away. One answer is that in that case we have a post-scarcity economy and everything is fine. Except the usual problems with allocation: not everybody can have a beach-front villa in Malibu. But it seems that AI also threatens to unravel the threads of mutual dependency that likely hold an anarchist society together. It might not produce total autarchy (everybody can produce everything they need), yet make people so independent that the incentives to work together and hash out disagreements weaken. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rtomek at ceti.pl Tue Oct 22 22:09:23 2013 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2013 00:09:23 +0200 (CEST) Subject: [ExI] B Movies - Worst Movie of All Time (Re: it was the best times, it was the best of times) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sun, 20 Oct 2013, Kelly Anderson wrote: [...] > Monster a Go Go makes Ed Wood look like Stephen Spielberg. Honestly. If > you can't find a copy... hit me up. > > -Kelly Ah :-) Your description made me laugh quite a bit. But to be frank, after watching "Helix" I felt intoxicated. So, for a while, no B-movies. I require full detox. Wajda, Mad men, this kind of stuff, until I regenerate. Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From spike66 at att.net Tue Oct 22 22:03:20 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2013 15:03:20 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Life extension In-Reply-To: <5266E3B5.7060201@aleph.se> References: <00ea01cece8c$8eba9960$ac2fcc20$@att.net> <20131022092807.GJ10405@leitl.org> <52667964.9040008@aleph.se> <5266E3B5.7060201@aleph.se> Message-ID: <04d301cecf72$858fac90$90af05b0$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg >...I usually handle the boredom with a Nietzsche quote ... -- Dr Anders Sandberg "Dead is as boring as it can possibly get." spike From atymes at gmail.com Tue Oct 22 23:31:50 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2013 16:31:50 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Stability of Mutualist Societies in the Face of AI In-Reply-To: <5266EC52.5020003@aleph.se> References: <5266EC52.5020003@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Oct 22, 2013 2:22 PM, "Anders Sandberg" wrote: > But more relevantly, if AI can do stuff, why should I trade with you? Yes, you might have an AI, and I exchange some stuff I or my AI do for its products, but I am not really trading with *you*. If I had your AI I would just use it straight away. The whole trade idea goes away. Ah, but you don't. Any AI is not necessarily the same as any other. Further, my AI might take advantage of tools or resources not available to your AI...without trade, anyway. If you are trading with my AI, in many senses you are essentially trading with me: you are trading with my agent for resources under my control. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Wed Oct 23 00:03:23 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2013 18:03:23 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Apple vs. Obama Message-ID: Not normally a Fox News watcher, but I found this piece interviewing John Scully to be immensely entertaining. http://video.foxnews.com/v/2761785850001/cavuto-mr-president-you-are-no-apple/ It is not my intention to start a huge argument about Obamacare, but even supporters of the president have to be a little embarrassed about the web site roll out. The idea that the POTUS and his spokesman would compare their website "glitch" to that of Apple is hilarious on numerous levels to me as a programmer. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Wed Oct 23 02:09:46 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2013 20:09:46 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Stability of Mutualist Societies in the Face of AI In-Reply-To: <5266EC52.5020003@aleph.se> References: <5266EC52.5020003@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 3:21 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > On 2013-10-22 20:53, Kelly Anderson wrote: > > On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 4:17 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > >> A socialist would of course try to bring everybody into this state >>> through joint ownership of the means of production. Anarchists hope that >>> having a non-money economy will fix things (which is an interesting claim - >>> I am not entirely convinced mutualist societies are stable in the face of >>> AI). >> >> > Anders, I love how in the middle of a flaming political war, you throw > in these little gems of plain old fashioned brilliance. I would love to > hear more about your ideas about the stability of mutualist societies in > the face of AI. What is it about AI that threatens mutualist societies, and > do you see that we have a mutualist society today? > > > I'm using the term from the anarchist community. As Wikipedia puts it, "A > society where each person might possess a means of production, either > individually or collectively, with trade representing equivalent amounts of > labor in the free market." > Ok. Thanks for that. Now, straight mutualism is based on the labor theory of value, so it is > just plain wrong. > I would have to agree that labor doesn't account for everything, but like an energy based theory of value, can't it be exchanged for non-labor types of stuff? Then again, if I get oil easily in Saudi Arabia and with difficulty in the Gulf of Mexico, the labor theory of value would mean the Saudi oil would have less value than the Gulf oil, so that doesn't quite work, does it? > Even if one believes the theory, AI wrecks it: now things can be produced > without labor, including labor-saving devices. > That seems to be wrecked with plain old automation, forget AI. > But more relevantly, if AI can do stuff, why should I trade with you? Yes, > you might have an AI, and I exchange some stuff I or my AI do for its > products, but I am not really trading with *you*. If I had your AI I would > just use it straight away. The whole trade idea goes away. > I kind of assume that "my AI" will be based roughly on "me" and therefore would be unique. If I simply had a big computing cloud, that's different than the software that runs on that cloud. Will I be able to rent out copies of "me"? > One answer is that in that case we have a post-scarcity economy and > everything is fine. Except the usual problems with allocation: not > everybody can have a beach-front villa in Malibu. > Well, we all can in virtual reality... I see the real limits being rare earth elements... most likely... until we can go out in space and get all we want... which is still hard. > But it seems that AI also threatens to unravel the threads of mutual > dependency that likely hold an anarchist society together. > That's depressing for someone that really wants to believe anarchy could work, but I can see where you're coming from. Do you think AI means the end of money? I would assume not. > It might not produce total autarchy (everybody can produce everything they > need), yet make people so independent that the incentives to work together > and hash out disagreements weaken. > I can see that. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Wed Oct 23 06:17:28 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2013 08:17:28 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: References: <98403CF1-5A40-46A2-9DE8-3661B39FC7BF@me.com> Message-ID: <20131023061728.GF10405@leitl.org> On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 01:30:48PM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > I am open to all kinds of evidence. As a devout skeptic and extropian, I > must be open to changing my mind when the data are convincing. I may seem > unreasonable when talking to Eugen, but that is just because I find his > oildrum data tainted and unconvincing. You also found Nature and Science Magazine "tainted and unconvicing". That's not skeptic, that's pure lunatic country. From rahmans at me.com Wed Oct 23 08:11:36 2013 From: rahmans at me.com (Omar Rahman) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2013 10:11:36 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <0D88C874-D5C5-4C89-A32A-4EA028ABC982@me.com> > > Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 16:28:18 -0700 > From: "spike" > Subject: Re: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks > Republicans are "asinine" > Message-ID: <016801ceceb5$3a47f5c0$aed7e140$@att.net> >> ... On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg >> ...Subject: Re: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans > are "asinine" > > On 21/10/2013 10:18, Omar Rahman wrote: >> I put to you list members that: the crazed billionaires backing the >> Brethren of the Koolaid are in fact far more extropian than us here on >> this list... > > Crazed billionaires, contradiction in terms. If we are crazed, then we are > just crazed. But with ownership of sufficient piles of money, it is known > as respectfully as eccentric, as was the case with Bruce Wayne. Howard > Hughes was extremely eccentric, growing ever more so as he approached the > end of his life. Had he actually lost all his money, he would have been > demoted to crazy, even if he had managed to regain is clinical sanity. > >> ...Sitting on top of their mountains of money they can see >> further, just as those who stand on the shoulders of giants can see... > > (...snif...) Omar, I am proud of you, me lad. > >> ...They can see the wave robotisation that will drive many jobs out of >> the hands of humans... > > The beauty of it all is that we can too, even if we are poor. The rich have > the advantage of the theoretical ability to make their visions a reality, > and if successful, they get to scale ever-higher mountains of money and get > to see even further. Our challenge as poor proles is to compensate for our > lack of money with ever sharper vision and ever deeper analytical thought. > If we see further than the wealthy on their lofty perches, we may join them > up there. With the sharp-eyed foresight we developed down here, we get to > see even further than they do once we are at the same altitude on our own > piles of money. Our vision will then be enhanced with our own ability to > buy our visions into reality. Ain't life grand? > >> ... They are the primary beneficiaries of this... > > Well sure. But I would argue that we poor have benefitted wildly from > certain visionaries, the computer gurus from the 70s, the electronics > visionaries before them, the medical pioneers before them, my heroes, all. > I bless their wealth. > >> ... It isn't an academic discussion for them it's a business plan. Anders > and >> others recently posted information about jobs that will/could be soon >> computerised or robotised; egotistical crazed billionaire was not on >> any list that I saw... > > I can imagine a convincing software simulation an egotistical crazed > billionaire. If well done, it could be nearly as annoying as the real > thing. I have met (as far as I know) only one billionaire personally, and > he was a most pleasant and interesting gentleman. One could meet him at a > party and never know he had stacks of cash. They don't dress or act like > that banker guy with the top hat in the Monopoly game. > Well, extrapolating from a sample size of one aside....=D >> ... Being rich in a capitalist economy is a useful state, since it means > that you can earn a living just by existing and having certain possessions. > In fact, it might be the *only* stable state in sufficiently AI-enriched > economies... Anders Sandberg > > Anders, I am really turned on by this kind of talk. Rich people are our > friends. Rather, most of them are, or can be. If they are atheists, they > might decide to pour a pile of money into something like cryonics before > they perish. Bill Gates is doing a lot of good things with his dough. My > one billionaire acquaintance is supporting SIAI. If you look, good chance > most of the Silicon Valley jillionaires are driving good things into > reality. > > spike > My point is that they might have interests that align with 'ours' but they might not, just like regular people. However, I would maintain that there is a fundamental change in things when your money reaches such a size that if forms self sustaining structures (trusts, inheritances, locating itself in tax havens, etc.) and attracts hordes of intelligent beings (accountants, lawyers, tax advisors, sycophants, etc.) to advise and amuse the 'owner' of the wealth. These activities seems roughly analogous to the behaviour of some sort of AI/Post-singularity entity. Gates is an interesting case for me because I can remember back in the old anti-trust days when Microsoft was making serious moves to be the only viable OS and I thought that Microsoft was a company that really needed reigning in. Now they have backed off from that hegemonist stance and Gates is saving thousands, perhaps millions, of lives with his foundation. Gates is a good guy these days basically, but we shouldn't forget that he almost took over the (computing) world. Regards, Omar Rahman -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rahmans at me.com Wed Oct 23 09:42:05 2013 From: rahmans at me.com (Omar Rahman) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2013 11:42:05 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <37292EF0-2D2D-4805-B8DA-F291BDF90C13@me.com> > > Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 23:17:23 +0100 > From: Anders Sandberg > To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > Subject: Re: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks > Republicans are "asinine" > > On 21/10/2013 10:18, Omar Rahman wrote: >> I put to you list members that: the crazed billionaires backing the >> Brethren of the Koolaid are in fact far more extropian than us here on >> this list. Sitting on top of their mountains of money they can see >> further, just as those who stand on the shoulders of giants can see. >> They can see the wave robotisation that will drive many jobs out of >> the hands of humans. They are the primary beneficiaries of this. It >> isn't an academic discussion for them it's a business plan. Anders and >> others recently posted information about jobs that will/could be soon >> computerised or robotised; egotistical crazed billionaire was not on >> any list that I saw. They are in practical terms (far?) closer to the >> singularity than us. > > In a sense they are already there: they can pay, and conglomerates of > minds will try to solve their problems for them. Conglomerates that are > beyond individual human intelligence. > > Being rich in a capitalist economy is a useful state, since it means > that you can earn a living just by existing and having certain > possessions. In fact, it might be the *only* stable state in > sufficiently AI-enriched economies. A socialist would of course try to > bring everybody into this state through joint ownership of the means of > production. Anarchists hope that having a non-money economy will fix > things (which is an interesting claim - I am not entirely convinced > mutualist societies are stable in the face of AI). Your '*only*' makes this an interesting and strong claim. It is true by definition that you won't even be a ('normal' or perhaps 'equal') member of a sufficiently AI-enriched economy without controlling some of these devices. Basically you won't belong to the 'new' species without an appropriate 'AI-apendage'. The heart of the matter is the '*only* stable state' claim. Oddly for this case I would like a definition of stable that does not reference time because we do not know on what time scale post-sigularity entities will operate. So, what is stability without reference to some specific interval of time? I would propose a notion of connectedness between our internal states and the external universe. Take the example of a lover; a post-singularity might conceivably love another for for 100 microseconds or 100 megayears, but the it's stability would be measured by the presence, absence, or most likely amount of love in that entity. Anarchism is interesting as it might conceivably 'dissolve' post-singularity entities. I say dissolve because a post-singularity entity (I feel an acronym coming on...PSE perhaps?) could conceivably spawn a self-aware process to manage some situation. This process might refuse to re-merge with the main in an anarchist entity and proceed on it's own with a share of resources. What if there are certain problems that are best/only managed with self-aware processes and they consistently refuse to re-merge? Such an entity might 'dissolve' into a cloud of self-aware processes or reach some sort of 'intelligence plateau'. Aside from that a 'non-money' economy is for me a 'non-trust-marker' economy and it will indeed result in anarchy. While, trust came before 'trust-markers' and some sort of society is possible it would be deeply personal and would probably end up dividing the universe into camps of 'self', 'family', 'friends', 'lovers', 'enemies', 'food', etc. Our emotions can lead us to wonderful things but they can also lead us to 'Stockholm syndrome'. I think we are always going to have 'trust markers' and we will always have people trying to 'trick' or 'play' the system to get trust they don't deserve. For me the capitalist vs socialist debate can be rephrased in terms of 'trust'. Capitalists: we should trust those the most who have the most trust symbols. Seems obvious. Socialists: all people deserve a fair chance to earn trust. Seems obvious. A competitive measure beween the two systems would be which system has the most trust in it. (To anyone at this point who wishes to 'get specific' with 'real world' examples that are probably based on the Cold War...please don't.) I fall on the side of socialism because in the capitalist side of things we reach a state change once a certain level of wealth is achieved. The rich really are different, they are magnified, extended, and assisted. They have 'private armies', they become 'too big to fail', etc. At some point when a person or entity is comparatively 'too rich' they are above the law. At that point the opposite of trust occurs, I fear them, just as I would fear standing next to a bull elephant on the African savannah, due to it's immense comparative size, or standing next to a poisonous snake, due to it's 'special power'. This is why I fear unfettered capitalism and this is why every government in the world regulates business. To be fair the fear of socialism is also easily explained; assuming an equal 'trust' distribution (hahahahhahahaha!) 50% of the population would feel that they would be harmed or 'less trusted' just because they were 'more trusted' and conversely 50% would be 'more trusted' just because they were 'less trusted'. This seems patently unfair, the 'wealth redistribution' nightmare! This is why many fear unfettered socialism and this is why every government in the world tries to make a 'fair' tax system. This is my long winded way of saying that re: > I am not entirely convinced > mutualist societies are stable in the face of AI). Any 'real' AI will go beyond a 'turing test' level and become something akin to a large corporation or a country and will be some sort of 'mutualist society' by definition. > >> Elsewhere I've said on his list that corporations and countries are >> like huge mostly analogy AIs. A billionaire or dictator who >> respectively controls one of these corporations or countries is the >> closest facsimile to a post singularity entity that we can see. Of >> course to them taxation, national governments, and international >> agreements are usually just impediments to their free action. Even the >> 'good' egotistical crazed billionaires, think Elon Musk (to be fair >> Elon doesn't come off as egotistical even when he makes some sweeping >> statement that some past approach or program is doomed to fail) , have >> a perspective that might not always line up with the 'little guy'. > > There is a difference between going for the usual power/wealth/status > complex and planning for the radical long run. If you think something > like an AI/brain emulation singularity is likely you should make sure to > own part of it (and sponsor research to make it safe for you) - even if > that means fellow billionaires think you are crazy (a surprisingly large > number of them are pretty conventional people, it turns out). Same thing > for all other "weird" extremes we discuss here, whether positive or > negative. > > I like Musk. He was very good at quickly getting to the core of > arguments through first principle physics/engineering thinking, and he > delivered some relevant xrisk warnings to 10 Downing St. > > I am so jealous of Musk as he goes around like the protagonist of some SF novel or my every geeky daydream that I don't know whether to cry over the unrealised dreams of my youth or scrape together the cash to buy one of his cars. > -- > Anders Sandberg, > Future of Humanity Institute > Oxford Martin School > Faculty of Philosophy > Oxford University I apologise if we have dragged this thread too far away from the, purported by the worried Warren Buffet, "asinine" nature of Republicans. Regards, Omar Rahman -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Wed Oct 23 10:20:20 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2013 11:20:20 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Turning into a protagonist In-Reply-To: <37292EF0-2D2D-4805-B8DA-F291BDF90C13@me.com> References: <37292EF0-2D2D-4805-B8DA-F291BDF90C13@me.com> Message-ID: <5267A2E4.2000305@aleph.se> On 2013-10-23 10:42, Omar Rahman wrote: > I am so jealous of Musk as he goes around like the protagonist of some > SF novel or my every geeky daydream that I don't know whether to cry > over the unrealised dreams of my youth or scrape together the cash to > buy one of his cars. I think the trick is to try to become a protagonist of the story yourself. When I encountered transhumanism I immediately saw it as a tool for making myself a character from one of the sf stories I read. After all, this is a philosophy not just about some future for mankind but also for being hugely ambitious with our own lives. So I set out to train myself so I could be part of the game. Yes, I am not as rich, smart or spaceship-equipped as in most dreams of youth. I did not become Batman or Ironman. But I am also successful in dimensions I at that earlier point did not appreciate the value of - political networking, love, some philosophical realisations. On a personal level what really matters is the absolute amount of point-scoring stuff you have, but whether you feel you are playing the game well. If you don't feel it, you should try to figure out and learn how to do it better. If it feels it is working, then up the difficulty and try to make a larger difference. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From rahmans at me.com Wed Oct 23 11:53:38 2013 From: rahmans at me.com (Omar Rahman) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2013 13:53:38 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <2C17352F-6BCF-4DF9-BFF0-6333CC83FDA1@me.com> > > Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2013 13:30:48 -0600 > From: Kelly Anderson > To: ExI chat list > Subject: Re: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks > Republicans are "asinine" > Message-ID: > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" > > On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 3:18 AM, Omar Rahman wrote: > >> Kelly and others have tried to disassociate the Tea Party from the >> commonly expressed views of it's members/leaders. Ok, whatever; whoever >> believes that won't believe evidence to the contrary. >> > > I am open to all kinds of evidence. As a devout skeptic and extropian, I > must be open to changing my mind when the data are convincing. I may seem > unreasonable when talking to Eugen, but that is just because I find his > oildrum data tainted and unconvincing. > > >> I would like to comment on the whole 'premise' of the T.axed E.nough >> A.lready P.arty: quite simply we aren't. If we were taxed at a level that >> would fund our expenditures you would actually see real broad based >> bi(tri?)partisan support for military entitlements reform. We might even >> see progress on increasing helpful things like education, food stamps, and >> the minimum wage. >> > > This is a difference of opinion. It doesn't make you a bad person. It > doesn't make me a good person to disagree. I simply believe that large more > global organizations are less efficient than smaller more local > organizations. The same people who want to raise the minimum wage are those > who cry from the mountain tops to buy locally produced produce. Why is > locally produced lettuce better than locally produced governance? You are conflating lettuce production and government when all know that the proper analogy from farming to government is pork production. This I will forgive you....once! =D Personally, about lettuce, I feel that is should be produced efficiently and in a manner that preserves my health. If some sort of lettuce could be produced more cheaply, assuming the same healthiness, even with the transportation costs of bringing it half way around the world I would assume that there is some sort of economic imbalance somewhere. Especially if I'm not living in a waterless desert. My solution to this would be a global currency issued directly to the citizens on a per capita basis. I think this would go a long way to addressing economic imbalances. Local government IS better at local issues. However, my health care needs are determined by the conditions in my body and not my position of a map. > > Isn't a group of local volunteers running a soup kitchen better than a > distant bureaucracy in Washington DC? I sure think it is. You only know when you perform a side by side comparison. The assumption by most 'pro-capitalist', 'anti-big-govenrment' people is that economies of scale work wonderfully for business but when applied to government they go into reverse. > > I put to you list members that: the crazed billionaires backing the >> Brethren of the Koolaid are in fact far more extropian than us here on this >> list. Sitting on top of their mountains of money they can see further, just >> as those who stand on the shoulders of giants can see. They can see the >> wave robotisation that will drive many jobs out of the hands of humans. >> They are the primary beneficiaries of this. It isn't an academic discussion >> for them it's a business plan. Anders and others recently posted >> information about jobs that will/could be soon computerised or robotised; >> egotistical crazed billionaire was not on any list that I saw. They are in >> practical terms (far?) closer to the singularity than us. >> > > I am having trouble understanding why you would simultaneously want a > higher minimum wage AND be against jobs that will soon be computerized or > robotised. Do you not understand that a raise of the minimum wage will > increase the speed of such automation? It's very simple economics. If it > costs me less to have a combine harvest my cotten than a bunch of Africans, > then I'm going with the combine. If you make me pay the Africans $100 a day > (in 1862 terms) then I'm going to go invent a combine. Fast. You seem to misunderstand me, if a job can be computerised then let it. The industrial revolution put weavers and knitters out of work, but....my wife is knitting me a scarf. A minimum wage is a very important social safety mechanism that prevents social inequality from growing too wide. > > Elsewhere I've said on his list that corporations and countries are like >> huge mostly analogy AIs. >> > > I think I actually agree with that for the most part. > > >> A billionaire or dictator who respectively controls one of these >> corporations or countries is the closest facsimile to a post singularity >> entity that we can see. >> > > There you go making a point against your previous point again. Please try > to think consistently. Yes, a corporation is like an AGI, in that it DOES > NOT reflect the point of any individual. Then you turn it around and say > that it DOES reflect the point of a megalomaniacal individual. Which way do > you want it? I don't see how you can have both sides of this view. Try to > see what I'm saying here. > > I'm saying that a billionaire/corporation/country is roughly analogous to an AGI and that it has some distributed capacity and it has a leader. Both at once. The leaders aren't necessarily megalomaniacal. >> Of course to them taxation, national governments, and international >> agreements are usually just impediments to their free action. Even the >> 'good' egotistical crazed billionaires, think Elon Musk (to be fair Elon >> doesn't come off as egotistical even when he makes some sweeping statement >> that some past approach or program is doomed to fail) , have a perspective >> that might not always line up with the 'little guy'. >> > > I like Elon's view for transportation in California. It's much better than > the government's proposal. It's a prime example of why to give money to > corporations instead of governments. > > Elon is the good guy in this example. My claim is that even good guys could do something bad. This hardly seems controversial. >> But with the juggernaut that is Washington, how else do you slow it down >> other than throwing bodies under it? This is a serious question. How the >> hell do we slow it down? >> >> I still have this question. > > We are a nation addicted to war and war spending. >> > > I'll grant that point. I would like to shut down many of our bases around > the world. I would like to consolidate some of our bases here in the USA. > Much savings could be achieved in this manner. I do believe that a strong > national defense is necessary. But I also believe we are spending more on > defence than is necessary because of political considerations. Why can't > Germany fund it's own defense? They waste their money on premature solar > installations while we waste money on their defense. One could say that the > USA is partially funding Germany's headlong dash into premature alternative > energy projects. > General agreement. > >> If we can't have a big one we'll take as many little ones as we can get. >> We'll create never ending wars on concepts; "Drugs', 'Terror', 'Cuteness' >> (ok I made the last one up....but why not....there is no way we could clean >> up the internet of cat pictures...let's go for it!) Let's not forget our >> openly 'covert' wars, wars which suspiciously resemble terrorism if you >> happen to have family at the wedding/funeral that gets 'bug splatted'. >> > > I am against the war on drugs. If I were the dictator of America, I would > immediately make all drugs (including prescription drugs) legal without a > prescription. I would put in place strong incentives to use such drugs > responsibly. For example, if someone chooses to drive drunk and they kill > someone, I believe that should be treated as equivalent to first degree > homicide. (Let's not argue capital punishment, this thread is broad enough > already.) > > I am largely against the war on terror. I think we should be able to absorb > a certain amount of terrorist activity, just as we absorb gang violence > now. Why focus on it so heavily. It's a little like the government focusing > disproportionately on AIDS when cancer and heart disease kill more people. General agreement. > It is as if the entire government is functioning like a reptile brain, > responding to one Amygdala hijack after another. We need a more mammalian > government that balances risks and reactions to risk in a more > mathematically correct way. Too damn much emotion and fear in it. > About emotion I would say that we need emotional development more than almost anything else. We aren't going to be able to get rid of our emotions and remain anything close to 'sane' or 'human'. An interesting video about the 'psychopath test': http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUsGDVOCLVQ > I would also oppose a war on Cuteness. Traitor! > > The only war I am in favor of at the moment is the war against bloated > government. It's like a large tumor growing in the belly of the world's > nations. It will eventually kill the hosts. > General agreement that government spending must be periodically cut/adjusted. Cancer is in a way a good analogy not just because of the 'uncontrolled growth' aspect, but also from the 'treatment aspect'. Current treatment for cancer is unfortunately very drastic. Generally we cut something off, or we take poison into our systems in hopes that the less fit cancer cells will die. If we have a foot that has cancer we might consider an amputation to prevent the spear. We however can't take that approach with our head or heart. The systemic poisons we take fairly often end up killing the patient. I would make the analogy that not all spending cuts are equal. Don't cut the 'heart' out of our institutions. I would also make the point that government itself isn't the 'cancer' it's the patient. There are some who think, as Reagan did, that 'government is the problem'; that is a fundamental disagreement for me. > If, and I'll admit it's a big IF, you accept the notion that countries are >> 'mostly analog AIs', how would you rate the US on the 'friendly' scale? >> Psychotic? Delusional? >> > > Totally bat shit crazy. Much worse than the TEA party. One can easily make > the case that the US as a nation has Borderline Personality Disorder, > Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Paranoid Personality Disorder, > Antisocial Personality Disorder and many others. Of course, most other > nations are also bat shit crazy. That's why I want smaller, more localized > government, because if you can reach your fingers around the neck of the > crazy ass hole that's making the rules, he's going to make better rules > (usually). > > In a sense I agree with you; we need appropriately scaled institutions to deal with each other. You think states are better because they are roughly speaking 1/50th the size of the Federal government in the US. Well, that's going towards 2 orders of magnitude better! Problem solved? No, because (I put my Canadian hat on for a second...a toque if you must know.) we evil Canadians are massing on your northern border in preparation for a permanent spring break. We're going to carve you up state by state in our drive towards Florida as part of our doctrine 'of blatantly obvious need for sunny days destiny'. Does anyone know of a reference towards a type of bureaucratic structure that incorporates an idea of a series of appropriately scaled institutions for dealing with each other? The obvious example is a military model but I'm thinking of a democratic institution. >> About debt Kelly, the graph you presented shows pretty clearly that in >> recent times Reagan and Bush the 2nd are right at the elbows where the debt >> to gdp ratio turned for the worse. >> > > True, and I condemn them for it. I'm not a Republican because of it. > > >> Almost every president has raised spending in dollar amounts, but when you >> couple that with tax cuts you get exactly the debt explosion that you would >> expect rather than the 'golden shower' of the trickle down economics we >> were promised. >> > > I feel the golden shower running down my back everytime Washington pisses > on me. So it's not just me then? I mean being the unfortunate pissee not the pisser.... > > >> Why? The billionaires are buying more industrial plant and marching >> forward to the singularity alone. >> > > I don't know. > > >> Here's a graph for you: >> >> http://www.cbc.ca/news2/interactives/canada-deficit/ >> >> Guess what, in Canada the fiscally conservative 'Conservatives'...aren't. >> The Liberals, at least since Chr?tien, are. The final irony is that the >> Conservatives have outlined in their platform a legislative goal to have a >> 'balanced budget amendment', something they haven't been able to do after >> squandering the surplus handed to them by their Liberal predecessors. >> Reminiscent of the Clinton to Bush transition, yes? >> > > Don't know enough Canadian politics to comment, though I know enough to > know that they use Conservative and Liberal differently than they are > defined in the USA. Very confusing that. > Well, roughly speaking Conservatives = Republicans and Liberals = Democrats. The whole thing makes more sense from the perspective of Hawks and Doves. The Hawks want oversized militaries and are prone to the use of force and political violence to get this. The Doves want a whole laundry list of things and need to cut spending in 'defence' to get them. > >> The Military-Industrial complex wants more wars and money, and the banking >> system wants a perpetually indebted client. They want a 'functional >> alcoholic', someone who can keep paying the bills but is completely >> incapable of 'getting off the bottle'. Guess what they've got? >> > > I agree. The military-industrial complex is another large dysfunctional > organization. The banking system is yet another. The Bank of American Fork > is one of the best run banks in the nation. Why? Probably because they are > not large. > We agree that the system as a whole is dysfunctional. However, the military-undustrial complex and the banking system aren't dysfunctional they are functioning EXACTLY as the generals, military suppliers, and the bankers want. > >> The Tea Party is clearly not opposed to the Military-Industrial complex, >> it's priority lately has and continues to be to oppose a health care system >> that, while it is flawed, is a step in the right direction towards reducing >> the costs of health care to people and to the economy. >> > > I disagree with you slightly here. When Obama put forth his idea of the > sequester, he thought the Republicans would fold before taking money away > from defense. Guess what? It backfired on him because the Tea Party thought > it more important to reduce spending than fund defense. I would say that is > evidence against your proposition. > There was a moment in one of the most recent Republican Presidential primary debates where they were asked if they would accept even a 10:1 ratio of cuts to tax increases. They all signified that they would not. This sort of inflexibility, largely due to Grover Norquist's pledge (which is somehow help more solemn than their pledge to serve the American people), is not conducive to shared bi-partisan governance. > >> Just try to get the Tea Party to stand up and propose cuts just to the >> defence department and the spies. The American public in a vast majority >> would approve of that. Instead of going after that mountain of pork-barrel >> spending they go after the handful of beans that is 'Obamacare'. >> > > Handful of beans? Health Care represents 18% of the US economy. How is that > a handful of beans? I am convinced that the long term plan is for Obamacare > to morph into a single payer system. Doing what they are doing now (so > badly) is the way forward to a single payer system. If we get there, Zeus > protect us! > Health care is some large, you say 18%, part of the economy. The funding for Obamacare is what is being discussed. That funding pales to insignificance when compared to Military and Spy funding. > Conclusion: either the Tea Party isn't sincere about wanting to reduce >> spending or they are motivated by idealogical concerns more strongly than >> fiscal concerns. >> > > I simply disagree as a grass roots member of the Tea Party. I certainly > don't think that way. I'm betting Spike (him being the most like me in > political thought) doesn't either. > > -Kelly Then perhaps they are bad at math? Bad to the point where they don't know which number is larger than another? You said: > We need a more mammalian > government that balances risks and reactions to risk in a more > mathematically correct way. Well, Defence is larger than Obamacare. Interestingly Medicare and Medicaid are BIGGER than Defence and the opportunity to reform those seems to be gone. A good article about the comparisons between Obamacare and the Canadian system is: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/obamacare-vs-canada-five-key-differences/article14657740/ In a lot of ways I think the answer was for the US to emulate the Canadian system more rather than less. The cost side of the equation has been left firmly in the grip of the Hospital corporations, Insurance industry, and medical guilds. Regards, Omar Rahman -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From painlord2k at libero.it Wed Oct 23 11:57:09 2013 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2013 13:57:09 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: <98403CF1-5A40-46A2-9DE8-3661B39FC7BF@me.com> References: <98403CF1-5A40-46A2-9DE8-3661B39FC7BF@me.com> Message-ID: <5267B995.3020906@libero.it> Il 21/10/2013 11:18, Omar Rahman ha scritto: > If, and I'll admit it's a big IF, you accept the notion that countries > are 'mostly analog AIs', how would you rate the US on the 'friendly' > scale? Psychotic? Delusional? Amoral, in large part. As they always were and are. > About debt Kelly, the graph you presented shows pretty clearly that in > recent times Reagan and Bush the 2nd are right at the elbows where the > debt to gdp ratio turned for the worse. Almost every president has > raised spending in dollar amounts, but when you couple that with tax > cuts you get exactly the debt explosion that you would expect rather > than the 'golden shower' of the trickle down economics we were promised. > Why? The billionaires are buying more industrial plant and marching > forward to the singularity alone. The problem in this reasoning is to impute to the POTUSes the responsibility of deficit spending. Is the legislative branch totally innocent? And the Judiciary Branch? After you delve enough in economics of the Austrian Schools you find out the entire welfare state thing + fiat money thing + democracy thing had no and have no other route to travel. The drivers, at best, can only change the speed. He US defaulted in 1972, when Nixon suspended temporarily the convertibility of the US$ in gold. They will now default on their obligation in fiat currency or they will print their currency in oblivion, like will happen for the ?, ?, Yen, Yuan and many other fiats. The default would be better for the people, but they will hyper-inflate because it is better for them (and they will blame the higher prices to the "evil capitalists" and/or some other "evil groups". In between, Bitcoin hit 210$ today. The free market alternative to government fiat. It will rein government spending, entitlements, wars, corruption and brainwashing of younger generations. It will take the power of the printing presses away from the governments. The power to stealthy stealing. It will do democracy a lot less interesting, also. Because if you can not vote to rob you neighbors, where is the fun? Mirco From painlord2k at libero.it Wed Oct 23 13:06:55 2013 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2013 15:06:55 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: <20131023061728.GF10405@leitl.org> References: <98403CF1-5A40-46A2-9DE8-3661B39FC7BF@me.com> <20131023061728.GF10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <5267C9EF.9000008@libero.it> Il 23/10/2013 08:17, Eugen Leitl ha scritto: > On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 01:30:48PM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > >> I am open to all kinds of evidence. As a devout skeptic and extropian, I >> must be open to changing my mind when the data are convincing. I may seem >> unreasonable when talking to Eugen, but that is just because I find his >> oildrum data tainted and unconvincing. > > You also found Nature and Science Magazine "tainted and unconvicing". > That's not skeptic, that's pure lunatic country. Well, sometimes they retract an paper published. They are not the Bible, either. Mirco From spike66 at att.net Wed Oct 23 14:52:30 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2013 07:52:30 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: <0D88C874-D5C5-4C89-A32A-4EA028ABC982@me.com> References: <0D88C874-D5C5-4C89-A32A-4EA028ABC982@me.com> Message-ID: <01d901cecfff$804c0980$80e41c80$@att.net> >. On Behalf Of Omar Rahman >.most of the Silicon Valley jillionaires are driving good things into reality.spike . >.Gates is an interesting case for me because I can remember back in the old anti-trust days when Microsoft was making serious moves to be the only viable OS and I thought that Microsoft was a company that really needed reigning in. So I recall, but I had an alternate spin on that then, based on an extrapolation of some comments Eugen made. If one guy gets a corner on the word processor market as Microsloth did back in about y2k, his failed competitors say that this one guy might as well have a patent on the English language. Once one word processor gets established, it forever eliminates any possibility for anyone else to come along later with a viable competitor. But this is OK, for what ended up happening is that Java Open Office came along, which is free, and is compatible with Word. Over the years I have noticed that Microsloth never did make Word incompatible with existing Open Office Writer. So now if we want all the bells and whistles of Word, we have that option. If not, we have that option. So the market did reign in Microsoft in that sense. It created a very competent free alternative, which can open Word formatted documents, but not write Word formatted documents. There is a free Open Office analog of Excel called Calc. That one isn't as good as Excel, but I have used it for sharing spreadsheets with people who don't use Excel. It works if you don't abuse it the way I do Excel on a regular basis. In the case of operating systems and mail programs, having one dominant competitor forms a negative feedback in the form of a cherry red hot target for virus writers. A monoculture with no alternatives would be an invitation to create chaos. Consequently alternatives came into existence, possibly less capable but free. >. Now they have backed off from that hegemonist stance and Gates is saving thousands, perhaps millions, of lives with his foundation.Gates is a good guy these days basically, but we shouldn't forget that he almost took over the (computing) world.Regards, Omar Rahman Ja. The argument goes that no one can take over the computing world, for any attempt creates a market for free alternatives, some of which are really good, as we saw. Our current USA medical struggles suggest that we need a parallel competing system of some sort, analogous to Microsloth competitors such as Red Hat, arguably less capable but at much lower cost. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Wed Oct 23 15:53:34 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2013 11:53:34 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: <035701cecf50$4b6cd500$e2467f00$@att.net> References: <01d801ceca8c$9449cda0$bcdd68e0$@att.net> <02a401ceca96$cd3cc4a0$67b64de0$@att.net> <037201cecb8c$4428af20$cc7a0d60$@att.net> <011501cecc66$91421280$b3c63780$@att.net> <011c01cece93$0ac21910$20464b30$@att.net> <035701cecf50$4b6cd500$e2467f00$@att.net> Message-ID: On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 1:58 PM, spike wrote: > **** > > They had to make this whole thing appear dramatic, but it was all for > show. > So the thing was worth doing because it was so dramatic that there was a real possibility that the president would think it was real and capitulate to the Hillbilly's demands, but it was not so dramatic that you personally couldn't see through it and understand that it was all fake. Is that what you're saying? > They need to do things like this in order to support the value of the > dollar, rather than threaten it. > That is nuts. Although its trivial compared to actually doing it, by just threatening to default the mad tea party hatters have cost the economy hundreds of billions of dollars that you and I will be paying for years. And what did the Republicans get out of it? Nothing, except that according to the latest Gallup Poll the number of people in the USA who view the Republican party favorably has dropped 10 points in just one month, from 38% to 28%; and that is the lowest favorable rating the Gallup organization has EVER observed EITHER party having in its entire history. > and here?s how you will know I am right: we will have something like a > repeat of this whole thing in December, > At one time I would have said nobody is dumb enough to repeat this whole sorry fiasco, but that was before I met the Tea Party. If it turns out you are right then there is no longer any doubt, President Obama successor will be whoever it is that the Democrats nominate and election day itself will just be a formality. > > What if they just rubber stamped the debt limits? The debt limit should ALWAYS be rubber stamped!!! In fact it's stupid you even have to vote on something like that. If you vote to buy lots of very expensive things, like TWO wars, and you refuse to raise taxes to pay for them, where the hell did those oh so fiscally responsible Tea Party dimwits think the money to pay for those new huge expenses was going to come from other than by printing more money?? If you buy something new that is very expensive and is not in the budget and you refuse to raise taxes to pay for it then logically you are giving implicit permission to print more money and a separate vote on the matter is utterly ridiculous. > Then the government has open ended permission to print as much currency > as it needs or wants > Exactly, and the determination of how much stuff the government needs or wants is made by the House of Representatives. If they decree that we need something or they just really really want it then they're going to have to pay for it, and if it's expensive there are only 2 ways to do that: 1) Raise taxes, that is to say take more money from you and me to pay for that new thing that we need so very badly. 2) Print more money to pay for it. > How would foreign debt holders see that? As sane, because the only other alternative is to become a deadbeat and welsh on your bills and gain a worldwide reputation as somebody who does not keep his word. > My contention is that the US federal government could find ways to > operate on about three quarters of what it is now spending, which is what > it is taking in. Today the US federal government is employing the fewest people since 1966, and back then 4.4% of the people worked for the government, now it's just 2%. And politicians, especially tea party politicians, love to shout that in general we should spend less money, but when asked for specifics about what exactly we should cut they suddenly get very shy. Basically they say we should cut all government programs except for pork-barrel projects in my district (or state if I'm a senator) that will help me get reelected. And if you vote for my pork-barrel projects I'll vote for your pork-barrel projects. In that regard at least the Tea Party politicians are no different from anybody else. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From painlord2k at libero.it Wed Oct 23 18:05:37 2013 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2013 20:05:37 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: References: <01d801ceca8c$9449cda0$bcdd68e0$@att.net> <020701ceca8e$01aee910$050cbb30$@att.net> Message-ID: <52680FF1.3040802@libero.it> Il 16/10/2013 19:29, John Clark ha scritto: > >?John everyone, even the Tea Party, agrees default is bad. > No spike they don't, tea party members have been quoted as saying > default will calm the markets. Real Tea Party members or passers by Tea Party member do not know. Anyway, there are many types of default. Defaulting printing more FRN (hyperinflating) is worse than defaulting on a part of the debt. But, do not worry, the default can be delayed, not avoided. Not for the US, not for Italy, not for the UK, nor for Japan or China. Not for anyone using fiat money. > If a congressman feels that the debt limit shouldn't go higher on > January 15 then they should vote to spent less money RIGHT NOW, don't > wait till 1159PM on January 14 and say you're not going to pay for the > new stuff YOU ALREADY BOUGHT!! Just to balance the budget they should cut 2 trillions from the budget. Do you understand how much pork they should cut? How much entitlements they should cut? How much Obamacare cost? They will never cut anything (not even the Republicans). Bohener(spl?) when asked do not recalled any specific program to cut. So, they will never cut anything substantial. The Republican establishment is wedded to Big Government as much are the Democrats. It is spend and spender AND dumb and dumber. And it is so in all the western (Japan included) world. This will stop when the wheels come out. Just be patient and it will happen. I suppose this is the just punishment for believing in Santa Claus Government. Mirco From spike66 at att.net Wed Oct 23 18:25:44 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2013 11:25:44 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: References: <01d801ceca8c$9449cda0$bcdd68e0$@att.net> <02a401ceca96$cd3cc4a0$67b64de0$@att.net> <037201cecb8c$4428af20$cc7a0d60$@att.net> <011501cecc66$91421280$b3c63780$@att.net> <011c01cece93$0ac21910$20464b30$@att.net> <035701cecf50$4b6cd500$e2467f00$@att.net> Message-ID: <028501ced01d$4a7195f0$df54c1d0$@att.net> >. On Behalf Of John Clark Subject: Re: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 1:58 PM, spike wrote: > They had to make this whole thing appear dramatic, but it was all for show. >.So the thing was worth doing because it was so dramatic that there was a real possibility that the president would think it was real and capitulate to the Hillbilly's demands, but it was not so dramatic that you personally couldn't see through it and understand that it was all fake. Is that what you're saying? No. The fake drama was to at least pretend we understand we have a serious overspending problem, so those loaning us the money will not lose confidence and stop loaning. That's what I am saying. There are no hillbillies. Everyone involved is in government, the same dysfunctional government. > They need to do things like this in order to support the value of the dollar, rather than threaten it. >>.That is nuts. No John. Borrowing 3 million dollars a second is nuts. At least pretending we want to stop doing that is sane. >>. and here's how you will know I am right: we will have something like a repeat of this whole thing in December, >.At one time I would have said nobody is dumb enough to repeat this whole sorry fiasco, but that was before I met the Tea Party. If it turns out you are right then there is no longer any doubt, President Obama successor will be whoever it is that the Democrats nominate and election day itself will just be a formality. Indeed? Would that be Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden? Would you feel better if they had no rivals? > What if they just rubber stamped the debt limits? >.The debt limit should ALWAYS be rubber stamped!!! There is where we differ John. We must make the big government advocates fight for every borrowed dollar. If they are unwilling to fight, then it is time to already sell some stuff we already bought. >. In fact it's stupid you even have to vote on something like that. On that contrary sir, this is what democracy is all about: making sure the people are on board. More and more of us are not. >. If you vote to buy lots of very expensive things, like TWO wars, and you refuse to raise taxes to pay for them, where the hell did those oh so fiscally responsible Tea Party dimwits think the money to pay for those new huge expenses was going to come from other than by printing more money?? It comes from already selling some of the things we already bought. It comes from US federal government could find ways to operate on about three quarters of what it is now spending, which is what it is taking in. Keep federal tax structure as is, at the current level. They would hand the National Parks down to the state governments. They would call in the troops everywhere and cut armed forces in half, for starters. They would come up with one of their phony inflation numbers to adjust pensions. Keep the ACA but put no federal government money into it; rather they would take whatever tax funds are collected from the opt-outs and use that to subsidize the poor, at the state level. Set up state government-run clinics funded by the opt-outs, and staff them with nurses as well as full doctors. Run all these at the state level, with the feds out of the picture completely: the feds don't have the authority that states have. Import all foreign doctors who apply for immigration, all of them. Let the foreign doctors prove themselves in the free clinics. Scale back Medicare part D and put its administration at the state level. Give all current federal government workers an across the board pay cut. >. If you buy something new that is very expensive and is not in the budget. .Then you scale it back, eliminate it or sell it. >. and you refuse to raise taxes to pay for it then logically you are giving implicit permission to print more money. .But of course you can't do that unless someone lends the government the money to print. >. and a separate vote on the matter is utterly ridiculous. Or utterly sane, for it forces representatives to acknowledge that we have bought more than we can pay for, more than we can even borrow to "pay for." > Then the government has open ended permission to print as much currency as it needs or wants >.Exactly, and the determination of how much stuff the government needs or wants is made by the House of Representatives. Sure, but they cannot legislate wealth into existence. >. If they decree that we need something or they just really really want it then they're going to have to pay for it, and if it's expensive there are only 2 ways to do that. If they decree that we need something, they are subject to the will of the lenders who may decree to the contrary. >.1) Raise taxes, that is to say take more money from you and me to pay for that new thing that we need so very badly. The problem with raising taxes it that it may or may not raise revenues. If businesses are already on the margin of profitability, which most of them are, we raise taxes 10% and revenues may increase 1%. They may decrease by 1%. In either case I can assure you there is no possible way to increase government revenue enough to even cover that which we already bought. We must scale that back to the revenue they currently take in, thus the acronym TEA, which is the only official position of the TEA party. >.2) Print more money to pay for it. Well sure, if someone is fool enough to lend you the money to do that. > How would foreign debt holders see that? >.As sane, because the only other alternative is to become a deadbeat and welsh on your bills and gain a worldwide reputation as somebody who does not keep his word. So the alternative is to install a huge new entitlement program which the casual observer can see we cannot pay for? We never had a way to pay for Medicare part D, so now we bring on ObamaCare? Suggest transforming that to a self-sustaining program not dependent on government funding by making the penalty for not having health insurance pay for subsidies for the poor. Take the IRS out of the loop entirely: they are corrupt. We don't even know what they did yet, since they are protected from testifying against themselves. Do all the stuff I suggested above and we will become an alivebeat. We are deadbeats now: we are not paying our debts. Paying debts with borrowed money isn't paying, it is just rearranging debt. We are not living within our means. >> My contention is that the US federal government could find ways to operate on about three quarters of what it is now spending, which is what it is taking in. >.Today the US federal government is employing the fewest people since 1966, and back then 4.4% of the people worked for the government, now it's just 2%. JA exactly. Why do we need all those government employees? That ratio of about 40% as many as it was in 1966 is absurd. In 1983 when I started my engineering career, a typical senior engineer had an office with a desk, a drawing board, several filing cabinets, a card catalog, a bookshelf, a secretary, a shared courier, a shared draftsman, one or two flunkies to do errands. Now that same company's senior engineers have a computer small enough to carry under the arm which is all the office furniture and the secretary, and the courier, and the draftsman and everything the flunkies used to do. A big stodgy traditional pokey company like Lockheeed can easily do more with 20% the people it had in 1983. I am contending that the federal government do with about 75% of what it has now, or 30% of what it had in 1966, when almost nothing was automated. We saw how government bureaucracies work with the phone "shutdown" of 1 October. They warned of all the dire consequences if those mean evil stupid Tea Party people forced it. Much to our surprise, we awoke on 1 October and the world had not ended. We were so puzzled, we began to sing that song from a long time ago: Why does my heart go on beating? Why do the stars glow above? Don't they know it's the end of the world; It ended when the US Government attempted to somehow make do with slightly reduced expenditures. So I took slight liberties with that last line, but when we failed to notice they were gone, the feds acted like petulant children, putting up barricades to block visitors from open air memorials, placed highway cones to prevent people from even taking pictures of Mt. Rushmore, closing campgrounds that didn't cost them anything to leave open (they never refunded our money) treating government assets as their own private property, made cuts as visible and painful as they possibly could, even spending more money to demonstrate how critically important they are, and generally taking revenge on the American people. THEN: they are DISMAYED, SHOCKED! That we are not buying their bullshit anymore John. We can make do with less, just like any family can find ways to cut back if they realize they are over-borrowing and overspending. We can do it. >.And politicians, especially tea party politicians, love to shout that in general we should spend less money, but when asked for specifics about what exactly we should cut they suddenly get very shy. Ja? I don't get shy at all. Do these things for starters: They would hand the National Parks down to the state governments. They would call in the troops everywhere and cut armed forces in half. They would come up with one of their phony inflation numbers to adjust pensions. Keep the ACA but put no federal government money into it; rather they would take whatever tax funds are collected from the opt-outs and use that to subsidize the poor, at the state level. Set up state government-run clinics funded by the opt-outs, and staff them with nurses as well as full doctors. Run all these at the state level, with the feds out of the picture completely: the feds don't have the authority that states have. Import all foreign doctors who apply for immigration, all of them. Let the foreign doctors prove themselves in the free clinics. Scale back Medicare part D and put its administration at the state level. Give all current federal government workers an across the board pay cut. >. Basically they say we should cut all government programs except for pork-barrel projects in my district (or state if I'm a senator) that will help me get reelected. Pork barrel projects have to go too. Time to face reality. >. And if you vote for my pork-barrel projects I'll vote for your pork-barrel projects. In that regard at least the Tea Party politicians are no different from anybody else. John K Clark Ja, if so, then it is time for a more sincere version of the Tea Party. Call it the Green Tea Party. We need a party which suggests we do all of the stuff in the paragraph I put in this post twice, for these points cannot be emphasized enough. Start a party which is more budget hawkish than the Tea Party and doesn't like pork, which makes the audacious claim that we must cut government until expenditures match revenue, already sell some stuff we already bought, reform entitlement programs, starting with the apparently crippled-at-birth "Affordable" "Care" Act, as radical as that sounds. If that Green Tea Party understands that expenditures must match revenue, then we don't care what they believe about evolution, we don't care how stupid they are, none of that matters for budget considerations, so long as they understand that which seems to completely elude our current representatives as brilliant as they are, even those so very enlightened on evolution and creation: government spending must match revenue. Even the evolutionists in government act as though government can create wealth. That is the most dangerous form of creationism. Printing money is not printing wealth. That Green Tea Party knows what needs to happen John. That party would know we need to stop borrowing money and live on what we make. That concept seems so fundamentally sane to me, I don't understand why even stating it generates such wild-eyed denial and anger. Time to move on to bargaining and depression, or skip depression and just do bargaining and acceptance. Our lenders know what needs to happen. Most of us here know what needs to happen. It is up to us to make it happen. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From painlord2k at libero.it Wed Oct 23 19:14:01 2013 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2013 21:14:01 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: <02a401ceca96$cd3cc4a0$67b64de0$@att.net> References: <01d801ceca8c$9449cda0$bcdd68e0$@att.net> <02a401ceca96$cd3cc4a0$67b64de0$@att.net> Message-ID: <52681FF9.1080102@libero.it> Il 16/10/2013 19:40, spike ha scritto: > How much time? The current debate is nowhere near reducing debt, not > really even in holding debt increase to zero, for even that is a far off > goal by everyone?s estimation. If we say we want to reduce the rate at > which debt increases over time, how much time? If the debt goes too > high, then as soon as interest rates go up, we will not even be able to > service the interest on what has already been borrowed. And this is the > outfit which is clamoring to borrow more and faster? The debt is already too high and can not be repaid. With the fiat money system there never is enough currency to pay back the debt. If they seriously try to pay back the debt they would destroy all base money without extinguishing the debt completely. 2,551.8 billions of Money stock (M1) 2013/10/07 3,813.6 billions Fed Res total Assets 16,669 federal debt Do you see any problem in the numbers cited? I do not see a problem, I see an outcome. Mirco From painlord2k at libero.it Wed Oct 23 20:43:55 2013 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2013 22:43:55 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: <00b801ceccdc$10f842e0$32e8c8a0$@att.net> References: <01d801ceca8c$9449cda0$bcdd68e0$@att.net> <02a401ceca96$cd3cc4a0$67b64de0$@att.net> <037201cecb8c$4428af20$cc7a0d60$@att.net> <011501cecc66$91421280$b3c63780$@att.net> <006501cecc8e$794ffa70$6befef50$@att.net> <20131019113432.GS10405@leitl.org> <006901ceccd1$61ea9dc0$25bfd940$@att.net> <00b801ceccdc$10f842e0$32e8c8a0$@att.net> Message-ID: <5268350B.3000808@libero.it> Il 19/10/2013 17:01, spike ha scritto: > Ja. BillK, how are the Brits doing? Are you guys balancing your books > these days? Eugen, how are the Germans doing? Anders, Swedes? Italians > present? Where did all our ExI-talians go? You guys used to chatter a lot > here, we enjoyed that. Are you guys balancing the books? Anyone anywhere > else? Do chime in here please. Italy is not balancing the books. But government politicians sell "recovery the next year" every time they open their mouths. By the US standard Italy is not in bad shape, we have 130% debt/GDP ration, but it is all there (less the unfunded liabilities). The US, in comparison is just over 100% just with the Federal Government. I do not see the Federal Government do nothing if California default. By the way, Italy have a long standing "primary surplus" and the government balance. The problem is the surplus become a deficit when the interest on the debt are added up (around 10% of the revenues go there). The problem, like in the US, is no politician is serious about cutting the spending. They are just forced to be a bit less reckless because they can not force the ECB to print ? just for them. The ECB print ? for them as much as they pay back the bonds to the German banks. If we default the German banks go tits over arse just two hours later. Mirco From spike66 at att.net Wed Oct 23 22:03:19 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2013 15:03:19 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: <2C17352F-6BCF-4DF9-BFF0-6333CC83FDA1@me.com> References: <2C17352F-6BCF-4DF9-BFF0-6333CC83FDA1@me.com> Message-ID: <033b01ced03b$af5627b0$0e027710$@att.net> >. On Behalf Of Omar Rahman >>. That's why I want smaller, more localized government. >.You think states are better because they are roughly speaking 1/50th the size of the Federal government in the US. Well, that's going towards 2 orders of magnitude better! Problem solved? No.Omar Rahman Problem solved yes, but not because smaller is necessarily better. You want all healthcare institutions at the state level because US citizens get fifty choices on which government they prefer. The solution chosen is not 2 orders of magnitude better, but it is better; the best solution of the fifty choices. Those of you who live and travel internationally, dual citizenship etc, may miss this critically important point, but homegrown Americans seldom do. We don't want to live anywhere else, and our own country is worth fighting to preserve. Our roots are here. We like the idea of 50 confederated governments, each doing things their own way, with some overall cooperation where it is required, such as national defense, the interstate highway system, etc. The federal government did not form the states, rather the states formed the federal government. The people in DC keep forgetting that. It is our job to remind them. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Wed Oct 23 22:15:34 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2013 15:15:34 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: <5267B995.3020906@libero.it> References: <98403CF1-5A40-46A2-9DE8-3661B39FC7BF@me.com> <5267B995.3020906@libero.it> Message-ID: <034601ced03d$65d6c700$31845500$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Mirco Romanato >...The problem in this reasoning is to impute to the POTUSes the responsibility of deficit spending. Is the legislative branch totally innocent? And the Judiciary Branch? Mirco _______________________________________________ Presidents are mostly innocent. The power to tax and spend comes from the lower house of the legislative branch, the representatives. They have the power to declare war or refuse to do so. If the president does a police action like the US did in Vietnam in the 60s, the house has the authority to refuse funding, which it did not do. The Judiciary Branch is perfectly innocent, for they have no say on how the government spends money. Their only job is to interpret laws made by the legislature and determine if they are legal from the point of view of the constitution. They reviewed ObamaCare and declared that the individual mandate is legal only if declared a tax, which puts in under the house of representatives. This latest go-around is an oddball in that the house voted to defund ObamaCare while a senator was leading the charge, then the senate and POTUS together refused to go along with that which is in the house's purview. spike From rex at nosyntax.net Thu Oct 24 01:16:19 2013 From: rex at nosyntax.net (rex) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2013 18:16:19 -0700 Subject: [ExI] A Gedanken Rational Eugenics Experiment (AGREE) Message-ID: <20131024011619.GB4312@ninja.nosyntax.net> (I've no idea if anyone here is interested, but the best way to find out is to chum the water...) Since IQ is highly heritable, all else being equal, mean IQ would rise if low IQ individuals were offered payment not to breed. How would such a program play out? Simulation is a good way to explore the issue. A fairly realistic simulation would require far more coding work than I'm willing to invest, so I propose a Gedanken experiment: a world where there are only females, each of whom has one child (and is replaced by the child), or opts out of having children. Those who opt out are replaced by a child with a Gaussian IQ with the mean and SD of the population. Now the eugenics: women with an IQ 1 SDs below the (current) mean IQ of the population are offered a payment not to breed. What happens to the population mean IQ over time when various percentages of low-IQ women accept the payment? Below are results from the latest version. Note the large difference in the percentage of HighIQ people when 75% choose not to breed vs 50% vs 25%. The HighIQ% column is the percentage of the population that has an IQ greater than or equal to the cutoff, which is 140. IOW, when 75% of the low-IQ group accepts the payment and does not breed, the percentage of the population that is IQ 140+ increases from an initial 0.6% to 33%. Clearly, such a huge change in the fraction of high-IQ people would have profound effects upon society. Initial mean IQ, SD 100.3 16.1 Heritability of IQ 0.7 HighIQ is IQ of 140 or more IQs 1.0 SDs below mean offered payment not to breed, 75.0 % accept Generation IQ SD Opt-in% HighIQ% QualIQ 1 102.6 16.1 11.5 0.6 87 2 105.2 16.0 12.3 1.0 89 3 107.5 16.0 12.1 1.2 92 4 109.9 15.9 11.8 2.2 94 5 112.2 15.9 11.6 2.9 96 6 114.6 15.9 11.7 4.2 99 7 117.0 15.9 11.8 5.7 101 8 119.4 15.9 11.8 7.2 103 9 121.5 16.2 11.7 9.7 105 10 123.9 16.2 11.5 12.9 108 11 126.3 15.9 12.3 16.1 110 12 128.5 16.0 11.7 19.8 112 13 130.6 16.0 12.0 23.4 115 14 132.9 16.1 11.6 27.6 117 15 135.0 15.8 12.1 33.0 119 iq_sel6.py Initial mean IQ, SD 99.9 16.0 Heritability of IQ 0.7 HighIQ is IQ of 140 or more IQs 1.0 SDs below mean offered payment not to breed, 50.0 % accept Generation IQ SD Opt-in% HighIQ% QualIQ 1 101.5 15.9 8.5 0.6 85 2 102.8 16.0 7.9 0.8 87 3 104.4 16.1 8.2 1.0 88 4 105.6 16.1 8.2 1.4 90 5 107.0 16.0 7.9 1.7 91 6 108.7 16.0 8.1 2.1 93 7 110.1 16.2 7.8 2.2 94 8 111.7 16.2 8.3 3.3 96 9 113.3 16.0 8.1 3.9 97 10 115.0 16.0 8.1 4.8 99 11 116.5 16.2 7.9 5.7 100 12 118.0 16.0 8.2 7.2 102 13 119.8 16.0 8.1 8.4 104 14 121.4 16.1 7.7 10.2 105 15 122.8 15.9 7.7 12.3 107 iq_sel6.py Initial mean IQ, SD 99.9 15.9 Heritability of IQ 0.7 HighIQ is IQ of 140 or more IQs 1.0 SDs below mean offered payment not to breed, 25.0 % accept Generation IQ SD Opt-in% HighIQ% QualIQ 1 100.8 16.2 3.9 0.6 85 2 101.3 16.0 4.3 0.7 85 3 102.2 15.9 3.7 0.8 86 4 102.9 15.9 4.2 0.9 87 5 103.7 16.1 3.7 0.9 88 6 104.2 16.1 4.0 1.1 88 7 105.3 16.1 4.4 1.4 89 8 106.2 15.9 4.2 1.5 90 9 106.7 16.0 3.9 1.8 91 10 107.4 16.1 3.9 1.7 91 11 108.1 16.0 3.8 2.1 92 12 108.9 16.2 4.0 2.3 93 13 109.9 16.1 3.9 2.7 94 14 110.6 16.0 4.0 3.0 95 15 111.4 16.1 4.0 3.2 95 Note that even when only 25% of the low-IQ women choose not to breed the fraction of high-IQ people increases by a factor of 5. If one subscribes to the "smart fraction" theory of civilizations, then even this result is highly significant. Smart fraction theory: http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/sft.htm http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/sft2.htm All La Griffe du Lion's material: http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/ Thoughts? (Python program attached.) -rex -- -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: iq_sel6.zip Type: application/zip Size: 2054 bytes Desc: not available URL: From tara at taramayastales.com Thu Oct 24 01:32:12 2013 From: tara at taramayastales.com (Tara Maya) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2013 18:32:12 -0700 Subject: [ExI] A Gedanken Rational Eugenics Experiment (AGREE) In-Reply-To: <20131024011619.GB4312@ninja.nosyntax.net> References: <20131024011619.GB4312@ninja.nosyntax.net> Message-ID: <129F1AE8-DD5D-4470-A168-58C7F4197D1D@taramayastales.com> I have an even simpler solution. Don't kick women out of grad school if they become pregnant, thereby forcing smart women to choose school over family. Tara On Oct 23, 2013, at 6:16 PM, rex wrote: > > > Since IQ is highly heritable, all else being equal, mean IQ would rise > if low IQ individuals were offered payment not to breed. How would > such a program play out? From ilsa.bartlett at gmail.com Thu Oct 24 04:25:39 2013 From: ilsa.bartlett at gmail.com (ilsa) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2013 21:25:39 -0700 Subject: [ExI] A Gedanken Rational Eugenics Experiment (AGREE) In-Reply-To: <129F1AE8-DD5D-4470-A168-58C7F4197D1D@taramayastales.com> References: <20131024011619.GB4312@ninja.nosyntax.net> <129F1AE8-DD5D-4470-A168-58C7F4197D1D@taramayastales.com> Message-ID: Once in a very long while I post: I got married instead of going to Harvard ... I showed my daughter the acceptance letter before I crushed it and tossed it in the trash when I was packing to move to California. So I do not have the 'degree' and when people talk with me they know I am intelligent but I get NO Respect as I would if I had the verbal and written practice and poilsh of a Harvard education. Did I make the right choice? You tell me. Ilsa Bartlett Institute for Rewiring the System http://ilsabartlett.wordpress.com http://www.google.com/profiles/ilsa.bartlett www.hotlux.com/angel "Don't ever get so big or important that you can not hear and listen to every other person." -John Coltrane On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 6:32 PM, Tara Maya wrote: > I have an even simpler solution. Don't kick women out of grad school if > they become pregnant, thereby forcing smart women to choose school over > family. > > > Tara > > > > > On Oct 23, 2013, at 6:16 PM, rex wrote: > > > > > > > Since IQ is highly heritable, all else being equal, mean IQ would rise > > if low IQ individuals were offered payment not to breed. How would > > such a program play out? > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Thu Oct 24 05:05:43 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2013 22:05:43 -0700 Subject: [ExI] US Army to Build Armored Talos Suit That Merges Man and Machine In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Yeah, they've been working on this for a while. The one big challenge they've run into: power density. in short: the batteries (or fuel cells) they can fit on a human-armor-sized thing can't power it for long enough to be tactically useful (at least 4 hours; I don't know if they've even got up to 1 hour), and non-battery solutions have problems making them impractical (small gasoline engines are not quiet and have emissions indoors, fission reactors don't come that small yet and there are concerns with carrying significant radioactives into a combat zone, et cetera). If it wasn't for that one issue, they'd have field-ready versions today. But most of the work on these is reinventing the wheel, only to eventually run into a lack of power density. That said, this isn't a problem for some of the non-military applications...but (unfortunately) almost everyone treats those as a secondary market, if they think of them at all; very few pursue the avenue that could actually result in shippable product. (Then again, many of the "developers" live to divert government R&D funding into things that they have no intention of turning into actual products, despite controls attempting to stop them from doing so.) On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 6:42 PM, John Grigg wrote: > A staple of science fiction is becoming real... > > > > http://singularityhub.com/2013/10/21/us-army-to-build-an-armored-talos-suit-that-merges-man-and-machine/ > > > John > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Thu Oct 24 09:53:09 2013 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 05:53:09 -0400 Subject: [ExI] A Gedanken Rational Eugenics Experiment (AGREE) In-Reply-To: <20131024011619.GB4312@ninja.nosyntax.net> References: <20131024011619.GB4312@ninja.nosyntax.net> Message-ID: On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 9:16 PM, rex wrote: > Smart fraction theory: > > http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/sft.htm > http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/sft2.htm > > All La Griffe du Lion's material: > > http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/ > > Thoughts? ### 15 generations is way too long to matter... you want to get results before the AI takeover rather than after. Zygote selection is an already existing technology which, if widely applied, could dramatically increase the smart fraction, even if the below average would not participate. Generally, it's not realistic to expect voluntary participation in an eugenics effort from stupid people, and I am quite averse to any non-voluntary effort. However, smart people are frequently quite obsessed withe the IQ of their offspring (if they have any), and despite the current leftoid anti-science animus, I would expect a lot of interest if a company would offer zygote full sequencing and selection. If you could screen about 50 zygotes (a big if but not fundamentally impossible) per pregnancy, you could shift the average IQ of offspring by more than 1 SD. I am assuming here that 85% of the zygotes would be non-viable to begin with, leaving about 6 to make the actual choice from. Since the likely parental generation would have above average IQ, the filial generation might be actually pretty smart. Unless the service was banned, it could have some impact on national IQ even before human IQ ceases to matter. Rafal From eugen at leitl.org Thu Oct 24 10:39:16 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 12:39:16 +0200 Subject: [ExI] A Gedanken Rational Eugenics Experiment (AGREE) In-Reply-To: References: <20131024011619.GB4312@ninja.nosyntax.net> Message-ID: <20131024103916.GL10405@leitl.org> On Thu, Oct 24, 2013 at 05:53:09AM -0400, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > ### 15 generations is way too long to matter... you want to get > results before the AI takeover rather than after. It is hard to see a technology level that sustains GMO capability for centuries, yet shows no progress towards 3d integrated molecular circuitry. If anything, both are closely related. From eugen at leitl.org Thu Oct 24 10:43:10 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 12:43:10 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Future of London: the New York Times on the foreign rich buying up property Message-ID: <20131024104310.GM10405@leitl.org> http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/oct/20/london-new-york-times-foreign-rich-property Future of London: the New York Times on the foreign rich buying up property Property in the capital has become a global reserve currency for the super elite, altering its delicate cultural ecology, says Michael Goldfarb. Then he explains why his story had such an impact Michael Goldfarb The Observer, Sunday 20 October 2013 Tower Bridge Aerial view of Tower Bridge and the River Thames at night. Photograph: Jason Hawkes/theguardian.com Our neighbours Lauren and Matt and their kids moved out of London to Cambridge the other week. Bibi, Andy and their two left for Bristol in June. Another of my eight-year-old's classmates and her family are heading out after Christmas. In my book this is a trend. The moves are not examples of the lifecycle of the striving middle classes. Nor are they examples of middle-class folks being thrown on hard times by the sluggish British economy. The families moving out had good incomes. Matt, who had been looking for a house for more than three years, summed up the reason for leaving best: "I don't want to be a slave to a mortgage for the next 25 years." Given the astronomical rise in house prices here, he wasn't speaking metaphorically. This is what happens when property in your city becomes a global reserve currency. For that is what property in London has become, first and foremost. The property market is no longer about people making a long-term investment in owning their shelter, but a place for the world's richest people to park their money at an annualised rate of return of around 10%. It has made my adopted hometown a no-go area for increasing numbers of the middle class. According to Britain's Office for National Statistics, London house prices rose by 9.7% between July 2012 and July 2013. In the surrounding suburbs they rose by a mere 2.6%. The farther away from London you go, the lower the numbers get. When you finally cross the border into Scotland, house prices actually decline by 2%. The gap between London prices and those of the rest of the country is now at a historic high and there is only one way to explain it. London houses and apartments are a form of money. The reasons are simple to understand. In 2011, at the height of the eurozone crisis, citizens of the two countries at the epicentre of the cataclysm ? Greece and Italy ? bought ?400m of London bricks and mortar. The Italian and Greek rich, fearing the single currency would collapse, got their money out of euros and parked it some place where government was relatively stable and the tax regime was gentle ? very, very gentle. Considering that tax evasion in Italy and Greece was a significant contributory factor to their debt problems, it just seems grotesquely cynical to encourage this kind of behaviour. But that's what Britain in general, and London in particular, does. The city is essentially a tax haven with great theatre, free museums and formidable dining. If you can demonstrate that you have a residence in another country, you are taxed only on your British earnings. And the savings on property taxes are phenomenal. The property taxes on New York mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's $20m London home come to ?2,143.30 a year. That's $3,430. Clearly, the mayor bought in at the right time. The Google executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, is reported to be house-hunting here ? he's looking in the ?30m (about $48m) price range. Yet he will pay a similar amount in property tax as Bloomberg does. There are other facets of London real estate as a medium of exchange. British gross domestic product has yet to return to pre-crash levels, but the financial services industry has roared back. Banks are paying out big bonuses again, and anyone looking for a safe investment is getting into London property. >From the top of Parliament Hill, on Hampstead Heath, look eastward. Out around the Olympic Park and beyond you see clumps of highrise apartment buildings sprouting like toadstools in a meadow after heavy rain. These aren't being built to meet the calamitous shortage of affordable family housing in the city; they are studio and one- or two-bedroom apartments. The developments are financed by "off plan" buying. Bonus babies look at the blueprints and put their money down with no intention of living in what they've bought ? just collecting decades of rent. And it's not just those who work in London's financial district, the City, who buy in. Hot money from China, Singapore, India and other countries with fast-growing economies and short traditions of good governance is pouring into London. When I say property is money I mean it. An astonishing ?83bn of properties were purchased in 2012 with no financing ? all cash purchases. That's around $133bn. I suppose the development that houses equals medium of exchange isn't all bad. I have friends who were very successful "creatives" (architects, cinematographers, commercial and television directors, etc) in their 30s and 40s. They bought houses when houses were places to live in. Once they turned 50, they passed through a mirror that turned them invisible. Work dried up. They have survived in London via the magic of remortgaging. They accept that their children will never be able to afford to stay on in the city. The ripple effect of this frankly demented situation is felt all over town. The foreign rich and the City rich (there is some overlap) have made most of the centre of London unaffordable to any but their own kind. Those who were once considered rich ? in the top 10% of earners ? now can barely afford to move to my neighbourhood, where a typical row (terraced) house, with three bedrooms (the third bedroom wouldn't qualify as a closet in Manhattan) and a total living space of around 950 square feet tops a million dollars, three times what it cost in 2000. The overall economy of Britain certainly doesn't justify these prices. Bank lending for businesses is flat, but mortgage lending? Hoo-ha, it's soaring up and up and the bulk of it is concentrated in London. It's as if the whole British economy is based on housing speculation in the capital. David Cameron's government seems to think that is the case. Cameron may be pursuing austerity policies elsewhere in the economy, doing virtually nothing to help subsidise employment or industry, but his government has just started a "help to buy" scheme. The government will guarantee up to 15% of the purchase price of a house up to ?600,000 ($960,000), if you have a 5% down payment. The ordinary uses of the city have been changed beyond recognition. London was never a cheap place to live, but now more expensive property means more expensive everything else: restaurants, cinemas, bars and theatre tickets.As for services, the minimal tax paid by those who have made property into money means that a city whose population has increased by 14% in the last decade can't afford to build new schools. There will be a capacity shortfall of an estimated 90,000 places by 2015. Children won't be turned away from school, but class sizes will grow to untenable proportions. So younger people, like my former neighbours, feel compelled to leave ? even though they were making a very decent living. The delicate social ecology that made London's transformation into a great world city over the last two decades is past the tipping point, I fear. For the quarter of a century I have lived here, a sense of community has defined my life. A very organic sense of London pride has allowed this city to withstand substantial shocks ? some welcome, like its transformation into a true cosmopolis; some unwelcome, like jihadist terrorism. Now it is beginning to feel that the next phase of London's history will be one of transience, with no allegiance to the city. I wonder whether those just parking their money here by buying real estate will ever be able to provide the communal sensibility to help the city survive the inevitable shocks it will experience in years to come. How this story will end doesn't bear thinking about. It seems a very reasonable bet, though, that those who use London property as just another form of money aren't thinking about it at all. Michael Goldfarb is a writer whose most recent book is Emancipation: How Liberating Europe's Jews From the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance ? 2013 The New York Times Syndicate WHY MY STORY HAD SUCH AN IMPACT When I wrote this piece in September, shortly after the ONS published its report showing a 9.7% increase in London house prices, I never thought to send it to a British paper. Everybody here knows the score ? no one will publish it, I thought. Wrong. It went viral. Clearly, it spoke to people's fears. They fear that property prices make no sense. It feels like 2005-07 all over again. People shake their heads and say it can't go on like this. Since nothing has changed in oversight of the City and the rest of the global financial system, people fear what the next property- driven crash will do to their lives. People fear for their jobs. The time frame of productive economic life for the middle classes is growing shorter. People don't get into good full-time work now until their late 20s. By the time they are 50, they are living on borrowed time (it's more like 40 if they work at Silicon Roundabout). And anyway wages are not rising in line with house prices, so they have to take out massive mortgages. Finally, they fear what I write about at the end of the essay. The balance in London's complex social ecology has been lost. The balance point in any society should be between stability and stasis. Stability is good; stasis is bad. What's happening in London has shifted the ground so dramatically that stability isn't something most people can contemplate. How do you raise your children knowing that the place they were born and raised is ? on current trends ? not a place they will be able to afford to live when they grow up? From anders at aleph.se Thu Oct 24 10:43:51 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 11:43:51 +0100 Subject: [ExI] A Gedanken Rational Eugenics Experiment (AGREE) In-Reply-To: <20131024011619.GB4312@ninja.nosyntax.net> References: <20131024011619.GB4312@ninja.nosyntax.net> Message-ID: <5268F9E7.8080602@aleph.se> Fertility is surprisingly changeable through culture and institutions. The points made about higher education being parent-unfriendly are just the tip of the iceberg; the big birth differential between northern and southern Europe is largely due to institutional affordances... and *soap operas* have been a major vector in changing fertility patterns in Brazil and India. But getting less smart people have fewer children requires them to (1) think this is a good idea, and (2) recognize that they are less smart. 2 often fails due to the Dunning-Kruger effect. And 1 is often overruled by emotion and (one could argue) freerider problems ("Yes, we are a stupid couple, but we *and our children* will benefit from living in a smarter society.") This is why I think liberal eugenics, which works by parents selecting themselves what traits to go for, might be more robust. And cheaper... On 2013-10-24 02:16, rex wrote: > Since IQ is highly heritable, all else being equal, mean IQ would rise > if low IQ individuals were offered payment not to breed. Note that you would need to pay *a lot*. The below 1 SD population is around 15%, so in the US that would be about 47 million people you need to pay off. I am not sure what the going price for getting sterilized is, but at least I expect it to be on the order of a few thousand dollars - we are easily talking hundreds of billions here. Not quite as much as is already spent on elementary schools, but still a lot. > Note that even when only 25% of the low-IQ women choose not to breed > the fraction of high-IQ people increases by a factor of 5. Impressive. Except, as noted, it takes 15 generations and would cost you a lot. I am mildly sceptical of the smart fraction theory. Yes, breakthrough happens because of geniuses and clusters of genius (I am fond of Murray's "Human Excellence"). But most of the big economic and technological growth requires a lot of talent rather than a few spearheads: the network effects of a smart, long-term oriented, low-friction society seem to matter enormously. Cynically, it might be more cost-effective to spend those billions on deworming and education in Africa and Asia, and then open your borders to brain-drain smart people... -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From spike66 at att.net Thu Oct 24 14:44:56 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 07:44:56 -0700 Subject: [ExI] europeans say yanks are spying Message-ID: <05e001ced0c7$9c7c1550$d5743ff0$@att.net> The Europeans claim the NSA is spying on them: http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/10/24/21112994-absolutely-not-right- us-slammed-after-reports-nsa-spied-on-german-premier?lite http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-24628947 But I don't understand why they would care. They aren't the Tea Party and are not subject to an IRS audit. To quote a once and future president: What difference does it make? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Thu Oct 24 15:18:01 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 11:18:01 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: References: <01d801ceca8c$9449cda0$bcdd68e0$@att.net> <02a401ceca96$cd3cc4a0$67b64de0$@att.net> <037201cecb8c$4428af20$cc7a0d60$@att.net> <011501cecc66$91421280$b3c63780$@att.net> Message-ID: On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 3:43 PM, Kelly Anderson wrote: >> Easy, if you're in congress you vote to spend less money. > > > > Uh, that just never happens. > Yes it never happens, your Tea Party buddies vote to buy more stuff and then when the bill comes due they vote to break their word and declare that just refusing to pay what the owe will solve the countries economic troubles. > And if things don't come out your way you try to convince others to come >> around to your way of thinking so that next time the outcome is different. >> What you DON'T do is have a temper tantrum and try your very best to >> destroy the world because you're angry that you lost. >> > > > So Obama in stating that he would not negotiate with the other side is > MORE rational? > Yes, much more rational. I don't even like Obamacare but negotiating with terrorists is worse. And below is a list of the demands that at various times the Tea Party insisted that Obama submit to in order to avoid default. *1.* A balanced budget amendment *2.* Approving Keystone XL *3.* Eliminating funding for Planned Parenthood *4.* Medicare privatization *5.* Tax reform, as outlined by Paul Ryan *6.* The REINS Act, which would require Congress to approve significant federal regulations *7.* Means-testing Social Security *8.* Defunding Obamacare *9.* Allowing employers to eliminate insurance coverage for birth control *10.* An expansion of off-shore drilling *11.* Preserving all the Bush tax cuts *12.* ?Trillions? in budget cuts *13.* Slashing funding for food stamps *14.* Protecting mountaintop strip mining *15.* Stripping the EPA of authority to regulate greenhouse gases *16.* Loosening regulation on coal ash *17.* Delaying Obamacare implementation by one year *18.* Repealing a tax on medical devices *19.* Eliminating Social Service Block Grants *20.* Expanding drilling on federal lands *21.* Restricting the child tax credit Just as virtually everybody predicted months ago, even the non-hillbilly Republicans said so, the Tea Party ended up getting NONE of their demands, zero zilch nada goose egg. All they got was the contempt of the American voters for Republicans, the lowest favorable rating either party has ever gotten in history. > > See, there you go calling the Tea Party terrorists. > I make absolutely no apology for calling somebody who uses terrorists tactics, such as the Tea Party fools did last Wednesday, a terrorist. > That's not the way to build consensus, even amongst us friendly > individuals. > If I can?t speak my mind without worrying about political correctness on the Extropian list where can I? And it has been my understanding that most Extropians have libertarians tendencies, but other than advocating lower taxes and less government spending (except in my district!) the Tea Party is about as far from libertarian as its possible to get. For example, that Tea Party favorite the NRA is uncompromising in its defense of the Second Amendment, but as for the First Amendment not so much. NRA president Wayne LaPierre wants the government to censor stuff, he said ?Guns don?t kill people. Video games, the media and Obama?s budget kill people.? And on a issue that should especially interest those involved in Cryonics, nobody is more paranoid about the potential evils of euthanasia than the Tea Party. >> wars are very expensive, the Republicans started 2 and refused to raise >> taxes to pay for them. >> > > > I was never in favor of the first or second Iraq war. I was not in favor > of the expensive nation building in Afghanistan. > Your opinion of the merits of the war, or rather of the wars, is of no importance whatsoever and neither is whatever buyers remorse the House of Representatives may have today. Regardless of what they may think about it now the fact remains that they voted to purchase those 2 white elephants, and votes have consequences and bills need to be paid. > >> I don't know how you determine the position of the Tea Party about >> anything except by looking at the position of Tea Party members, and nearly >> all of the most prominent ones are creationists, and very vocal and >> militant ones too. And there is a connection, if you don't think logic is >> important in one subject, like biology, then you probably don't think logic >> is important in another subject, like economics. At any rate it would >> certainly be irrational to claim that there is not a very strong connection >> between the Tea Party and creationism. >> > > > There is indeed a strong correlation. I just find it irrelevant. > Ask yourself this question, what attribute would a mind need to have such that it believed that both creationism and defaulting on the debt were good ideas? It sure as hell isn?t a fondness for logic! > I don't think it's all that wild. Silver did a bigger jump [than bitcoin] > in 1978 and everyone sees that as money. > No they don't, being valuable and being money is not the same thing. These days it's very rare for somebody to exchange silver (or gold) for goods or services, they use greenbacks instead. People buy gold and silver for jewelry and for a few industrial applications, but mainly they buy it as a speculation, the same reason they would buy a stock. >> government can print money and corporations can't. Printing money can be >> a wonderful thing, or a terrible thing, it depends on the circumstances. >> > > > I think it's a terrible thing to print too much of it. > I agree, and printing too little money can be just as bad as we found out in the 1930's. > In what sense has the dollar not lost value? Gold has gone up a lot. Oil > has gone up. Everything of real value has gone up. > Gold has gone up recently because of investor fears that Tea Party knuckleheads would destroy the dollar, so they dumped dollars and bought gold. But overall prices have gone up only 1.4% over the last 12 months and that is the lowest its been in decades; in fact its too low, most economists think that in a economy that isn't stagnant inflation shouldn't get below 2%. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Thu Oct 24 15:21:09 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 17:21:09 +0200 Subject: [ExI] europeans say yanks are spying In-Reply-To: <05e001ced0c7$9c7c1550$d5743ff0$@att.net> References: <05e001ced0c7$9c7c1550$d5743ff0$@att.net> Message-ID: <20131024152109.GX10405@leitl.org> On Thu, Oct 24, 2013 at 07:44:56AM -0700, spike wrote: > But I don't understand why they would care. They aren't the Tea Party and Most don't care. See last elections. > are not subject to an IRS audit. To quote a once and future president: What > difference does it make? To these who actually care (less than 10%): They're human, mortal, and don't want to be killed or sent to the camps. Dissent is impossible in a Panopticon. We're on our way to become Vinge's Emergents. Once we arrive there, there will be no Queng Ho to save us. You might see some of the machinery put into place in action when the world economy goes south. In the US, specifically, when there are large scale riots threatening to turn into a civil war. From pharos at gmail.com Thu Oct 24 15:24:37 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 16:24:37 +0100 Subject: [ExI] europeans say yanks are spying In-Reply-To: <05e001ced0c7$9c7c1550$d5743ff0$@att.net> References: <05e001ced0c7$9c7c1550$d5743ff0$@att.net> Message-ID: 24 October 2013 MEPs vote to suspend US data sharing Quote: The European Parliament has voted to suspend the sharing of financial data with the US, following allegations that citizens' data was spied on. The allegation forms part of leaked documents from whistleblower Edward Snowden. ----------------- Businesses are also moving their 'cloud' data files away from US based companies. The NSA is making the US into a pariah state. BillK From eugen at leitl.org Thu Oct 24 15:36:16 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 17:36:16 +0200 Subject: [ExI] europeans say yanks are spying In-Reply-To: References: <05e001ced0c7$9c7c1550$d5743ff0$@att.net> Message-ID: <20131024153616.GA10405@leitl.org> On Thu, Oct 24, 2013 at 04:24:37PM +0100, BillK wrote: > Businesses are also moving their 'cloud' data files away from US based > companies. It doesn't matter where your cloud is hosted. You want to be safe, use client-side encryption, and never let the cloud see cleartext, and be really really protective of your secret key unlocking it. Once stolen, you're toast. Oh, and if you're using a proprietary system: you're still fucked. Put it on an air gap, never let it see the Internet. > The NSA is making the US into a pariah state. Creeping TLA overreach is just a symptom. We've got a failure of democracy on our hands. Got a technical fix for that? From painlord2k at libero.it Thu Oct 24 15:38:53 2013 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 17:38:53 +0200 Subject: [ExI] [tt] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: <525F032E.70409@aleph.se> References: <525F032E.70409@aleph.se> Message-ID: <52693F0D.9070508@libero.it> Il 16/10/2013 23:20, Anders Sandberg ha scritto: > >> "I'm worried about damage to an asset that we've carefully cultivated >> for 237 years [...] it would be asinine for the U.S. to risk its >> hard-won reputation for paying its bills on time.[...] Well, the US defaulted when closed the Gold Window, so the last default was just 42 years ago. Continentals and Greenbacks also were practical defaults. > Low-level brinkmanship upsetting bigger global collective goods doesn't > sound far-fetched, and might actually be a serious Achilles heel of > geoengineering. I have some colleauges who plan to model it in more > detail. In the meantime I hope that if we find ourselves in such a mess > some Warren Buffett might unilaterally solve the problem (in exchange > for all weather reports ending with a thank you note). Of course, the > unilateral possibility of geoengineering leads to other fun problems ( > http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/unilateralist.pdf )... An example of this low level brinkmanship causing higher-level damage is here, in Venice. The local politicians are bickering about stopping cruisers from entering the Lagoon of Venice for a bunch or ridiculous reasons. The problem is not only for Venice tourism workers losing jobs and revenues; a big problem is for all other major ports in the Adriatic Sea where these ship dock during their travels, because nearly 99% of the cruises dock in Venice. Venice close, all of them lose cruiser traffic. Yesterday a delegation of these cities come to Venice to talk with the Major and the message is "WTF are you doing/thinking?" Mirco From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Thu Oct 24 15:52:59 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 09:52:59 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Dawn of Autonomous Corporations In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 9:53 PM, Christian Vanderwall < cvanderwall14 at gmail.com> wrote: > http://btcgeek.com/dawn-of-autonomous-corporations/ > > Thoughts? > Christian, My thought is that this is an amazing concept. My second thought is how would you incentivize someone to start building such a beastie. I can see how you could do it technically. But what I don't see is why you would spend years of your life building such a thing. I mean, I can see how building wikileaks on this model would be a good thing. The question is why would anyone do it? I get that the founder of Bitcoin did it out of a sense of enabling anarchy (freedom, whatever you want to call it), but the world usually runs on money. So how does a founder make money out of such an arrangement? And if you can't, it seems that this will remain forever a niche formulation of human effort compared to such things as corporations. Any ideas? -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Thu Oct 24 16:05:23 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 10:05:23 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Life extension In-Reply-To: <5266E3B5.7060201@aleph.se> References: <00ea01cece8c$8eba9960$ac2fcc20$@att.net> <20131022092807.GJ10405@leitl.org> <52667964.9040008@aleph.se> <5266E3B5.7060201@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 2:44 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > On 2013-10-22 21:04, Kelly Anderson wrote: > >> The biggest insight I think he's had is that you don't talk about life >> extension. Particularly radical life extension. You talk about people >> living healthy into older age. >> > > Yes. This is important, since you do not want to give people an excuse for > not listening. > For some reason, a lot of people tune out to radical life extension, but do not tune out to radical health improvement. > Another approach is to point out the enormous savings. But there is the pension side of things. That's scary, isn't it? > Olshansky and the other longevity dividend people have come out with yet > another article looking at the healthcare economics of life extension: > http://sjayolshansky.com/sjo/**Longevity_Dividend_Initative_** > files/Health%20Affairs%202013%**20LDI%20Final.pdf > > Then there is the unavoidable boredom and overpopulation arguments. I > usually handle the boredom with a Nietzsche quote and then discuss the > tragedy of life projects cut short. A very cool answer to the usual > overpopulation worry can be found in this paper: > http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/**pmc/articles/PMC3192186/ > They use Swedish demographic data to demonstrate that even with radical > life extension the population does not have to explode. I would also appeal to the data from Hans Rosling (you can find him on TED.com, if nowhere else) that shows that having lots of children is about being taken care of in your old age. If you can come up with other ways to take care of the elderly, such as social security, it reduces the population growth. If you can just reduce the need to take care of the elderly, since they aren't really elderly anymore, that is a better way to resolve the problem. Unfortunately, you still have people who have the expectation to retire at 65, even if they expect to live to 300. That probably can't work with a social security type model. The whole concept of retirement clashes with radical life extension in ways that make the middle east conflict a cake walk to solve by comparison. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Thu Oct 24 16:15:19 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 18:15:19 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Dawn of Autonomous Corporations In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20131024161519.GB10405@leitl.org> On Thu, Oct 24, 2013 at 09:52:59AM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 9:53 PM, Christian Vanderwall < > cvanderwall14 at gmail.com> wrote: > > > http://btcgeek.com/dawn-of-autonomous-corporations/ > > > > Thoughts? > > > > Christian, My thought is that this is an amazing concept. In case you haven't yet, read Daemon/Freedom by Suarez. From spike66 at att.net Thu Oct 24 16:02:30 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 09:02:30 -0700 Subject: [ExI] europeans say yanks are spying In-Reply-To: References: <05e001ced0c7$9c7c1550$d5743ff0$@att.net> Message-ID: <062701ced0d2$722b6840$568238c0$@att.net> ----------------- >...The NSA is making the US into a pariah state. BillK _______________________________________________ The yanks deserve it BillK. The way it looks to me, the US is going thru one of those generational confirmations of the long-known truth that power corrupts. Back in our grandparents' generation, the poster child for corrupt power-mad dictator was Hitler. What wasn't known so well was that Roosevelt was doing some remarkably similar power grabbing in the states during the 1930s, such as running for a third (and later fourth) term, pressuring private industry and wealthy citizens to put money into the economy, stacking the supreme court, grabbing power for the executive branch under the New Deal, etc. In our parents' generation, Nixon seriously asked if a president could pardon himself, and was at a loss to see why not. He used the IRS as a weapon and spied on his political opponents in Watergate. When told he could not pardon himself, he took his marbles and went home. In our generation, our government is doing everything both previous generations' overreaching governments did and more, with the exception of running for a third term. I have however been seeing more and more Michelle Obama '16 suggestions. It didn't take long this time: as soon as the fed was given a lot of power, it IMMEDIATELY demonstrated that it was both corrupt and incompetent. spike From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Thu Oct 24 16:21:07 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 10:21:07 -0600 Subject: [ExI] This is one amazing robot! In-Reply-To: <20131022092807.GJ10405@leitl.org> References: <00ea01cece8c$8eba9960$ac2fcc20$@att.net> <20131022092807.GJ10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 3:28 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 09:12:36AM +0100, BillK wrote: > > It is touching that the kids think a few decades are going > to make a difference. Eugen, your pessimism is showing again. Would you like an optimism transfusion? I think I have enough for both of us. It was only in the 1990s that we sequenced the entire human genome. And now look what it costs: http://bit.ly/18PrQUD That is a truly shocking curve. We are only just now bringing anything based on that huge breakthrough to the marketplace. Understanding the human genome will take time, but we are parsing it with increasingly powerful computers. Get the protein folding algorithm down, and we'll see some real breakthroughs real fast. Yes it is a hard problem. Can it be solved? Maybe with special hardware or something. Maybe with online games. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foldit Start parsing the genome of various plants and animals, and we'll figure out even more stuff. Medicine is making a radical jump towards being more predictably scientific and less trial and error prone. This really does make a difference. If you can predict what a compound might do without animal trials, the things you can do with the same amount of research money start to go up a Moore's Law kind of curve. That's a game changer, don't you think? Said another way, when medicine becomes engineering, won't that change the rules of the game? And can't you see that medicine is evolving towards engineering? There is no limit on the resource of human ingenuity over time in such matters. This isn't a limited resource like sweet crude. Just walk into the light Eugen! -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rex at nosyntax.net Thu Oct 24 16:33:13 2013 From: rex at nosyntax.net (rex) Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 09:33:13 -0700 Subject: [ExI] A Gedanken Rational Eugenics Experiment (AGREE) In-Reply-To: <5268F9E7.8080602@aleph.se> References: <20131024011619.GB4312@ninja.nosyntax.net> <5268F9E7.8080602@aleph.se> Message-ID: <20131024163313.GA4352@ninja.nosyntax.net> Anders Sandberg [2013-10-24 07:29]: >Fertility is surprisingly changeable through culture and >institutions. The points made about higher education being >parent-unfriendly are just the tip of the iceberg; the big birth >differential between northern and southern Europe is largely due to >institutional affordances... and *soap operas* have been a major >vector in changing fertility patterns in Brazil and India. Soap operas changed fertility patterns? How would a causal relationship be proven? >But getting less smart people have fewer children requires them to >(1) think this is a good idea, and (2) recognize that they are less >smart. 2 often fails due to the Dunning-Kruger effect. And 1 is often >overruled by emotion and (one could argue) freerider problems ("Yes, >we are a stupid couple, but we *and our children* will benefit from >living in a smarter society.") The payments would make some fraction think it's a good idea. What fraction that would be depends upon the amount of payment and the IQ required to qualify (the sim used -1 SD, but -1.5 SDs or -2 SDs) would also work. >This is why I think liberal eugenics, which works by parents >selecting themselves what traits to go for, might be more robust. And >cheaper... It's merely a Gedanken experiment to illustrate the ideas, and not intended to be a policy to be compared with others which may well be more socially viable. And, it's not an exclusive policy. >On 2013-10-24 02:16, rex wrote: >>Since IQ is highly heritable, all else being equal, mean IQ would rise >>if low IQ individuals were offered payment not to breed. > >Note that you would need to pay *a lot*. The below 1 SD population is >around 15%, so in the US that would be about 47 million people you >need to pay off. I am not sure what the going price for getting >sterilized is, but at least I expect it to be on the order of a few >thousand dollars - we are easily talking hundreds of billions here. >Not quite as much as is already spent on elementary schools, but >still a lot. But only half that 47 million are females, and if the qualifying IQ were -2 SDs, the number of qualified females would be about 3 million, and only perhaps half would participate. BTW, as I expect you know, in the long run delayed fertility has a similar effect to lowering fertility, so birth control would be viable and removes the need for a (difficult) sterilization decision. Payments could be semi-annual contingent upon 6-month birth control implants, and costs would be at least partially offset by lower food stamp expenditures. >>Note that even when only 25% of the low-IQ women choose not to breed >>the fraction of high-IQ people increases by a factor of 5. > >Impressive. Except, as noted, it takes 15 generations and would cost >you a lot. In politics 15 generations is an unthinkably long period. In evolutionary biology it's an eyeblink. >I am mildly sceptical of the smart fraction theory. Yes, breakthrough >happens because of geniuses and clusters of genius (I am fond of >Murray's "Human Excellence"). But most of the big economic and >technological growth requires a lot of talent rather than a few >spearheads: the network effects of a smart, long-term oriented, >low-friction society seem to matter enormously. La Griffe du Lion's smart fraction theory is not about genius; it's about a critical fraction with the modest IQ required to be useful to society. (I don't know who he really is, but he's clearly an incisive thinker who uses statistical inference fluently.) http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/sft.htm "Thus, for a technologically sophisticated society, SFT asserts that a nation's per capita GDP is determined by the population fraction with IQ greater than or equal to some threshold IQ. Consistent with the data of Lynn and Vanhanen, that threshold IQ is 108, a bit less than the minimum required for what used to be a bachelor's degree. Figure 3 illustrates the fit of (3) to the data of Lynn and Vanhanen." >Cynically, it might be more cost-effective to spend those billions on >deworming and education in Africa and Asia, and then open your >borders to brain-drain smart people... Yes, perhaps. I'm more interested in varying parameters in simulations to see how they behave than in comparing potential policies. For example, assortative mating and the high heritability of IQ cause speciation pressure. As these values large enough to eventually cause speciation in humans? If not, how large must the correlation between the IQs of mates be to cause speciation? -rex -- For every complex problem, there is a solution that's simple, straightforward -- and wrong. -- H.L. Mencken From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Thu Oct 24 16:36:12 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 10:36:12 -0600 Subject: [ExI] The Actual Visionary of the Future In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 12:54 AM, Kevin G Haskell wrote: > >As Anders Sandberg would say, science is about approximation. Well, so, > then, perhaps, is this, and perhaps not: > > > >I was once told by 'someone' here that having an Extropian Facebook Page > would be like > >drinking quality champagne from plastic glasses, but I always wondered, > >"why would such a great group of thinkers limit themselves to > >such an archaic system as a llstserv? > Because for deep discussions of deep topics, a listserv still works better than facebook. If you would like to debate this point, I am up to the challenge. > >WTF happened. > Facebook happened. And it dumbed us down just like PowerPoint. > >I've heard this group become overrun by negatarians, not optimists. So... > Not so. I remain firmly optimistic along with most of my friends here. > >This man...I am just happy and privilaged to be alive in the same time > period that he is. > I am privileged to live in an era with spell checkers. > >This man, this great, great man, is one of the very few who drive > humanity forward fearlessly. > I'm one of the few open fans of Ray on this list. I have been since I read his dissertation (master's thesis?) on character recognition around 1987. Well before his first book was published, I was borrowing his thesis through interlibrary loan. I think a lot like Ray in many ways. He does have a blind spot for speech recognition being "just around the corner"... but other than that capitalistic imposed blindness, he's been spot on about a lot of things. I believe in the Law of Accelerating Returns, and I think it applies even more broadly than Ray applies it. I know it is a faith. But I am an acolyte. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Thu Oct 24 16:38:09 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 09:38:09 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Life extension In-Reply-To: References: <00ea01cece8c$8eba9960$ac2fcc20$@att.net> <20131022092807.GJ10405@leitl.org> <52667964.9040008@aleph.se> <5266E3B5.7060201@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Thu, Oct 24, 2013 at 9:05 AM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > For some reason, a lot of people tune out to radical life extension, but > do not tune out to radical health improvement. > Easily explained, if we put aside our own viewpoint and honestly accept what their viewpoint is. (Not that we agree with it, just that we accurately recognize it.) They believe that death is inevitable, period. They think that one can no more achieve immortality than reach the Moon merely by flapping one's arms, or exceed the speed of light through conventional Newtonian thrust. Further, they have a heavy bias toward believing in the impossibility of things quite unlike what anyone has achieved before. Therefore, living to 200 is "obviously" impossible and anyone saying otherwise can be dismissed without thinking too hard about it, just like anyone proposing another perpetual motion machine. On the other hand, many people *are* alive at 90 today - and some of them are generally physically capable, if past their prime. That's not speculation. Therefore, there is existing proof that this is possible...and so the same could be made true for more people. They might have logical dissonance at the likely consequence of a lot of super-healthy 90 year olds (i.e., people living to 150+), but they don't reject the possibility of many super-healthy 90 year olds itself. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Thu Oct 24 16:38:52 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 18:38:52 +0200 Subject: [ExI] This is one amazing robot! In-Reply-To: References: <00ea01cece8c$8eba9960$ac2fcc20$@att.net> <20131022092807.GJ10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20131024163852.GD10405@leitl.org> On Thu, Oct 24, 2013 at 10:21:07AM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > Eugen, your pessimism is showing again. Would you like an optimism > transfusion? I think I have enough for both of us. > > It was only in the 1990s that we sequenced the entire human genome. And now That was two decades ago. What impact on human longevity has that knowledge given us, so far? > look what it costs: > http://bit.ly/18PrQUD > That is a truly shocking curve. I agree it's a good thing. I wish we knew how to engineer genomes to build proteins to specs. > We are only just now bringing anything based on that huge breakthrough to > the marketplace. Understanding the human genome will take time, but we are > parsing it with increasingly powerful computers. Get the protein folding Computers are good for many things, but ability to engineer organisms is not yet one of them. Arresting nevermind reversing aging in a living adult animal is a massive molecular-scale control problem. This spells medical nano, and we can't do even the basic MNT stuff. GMO is pretty weak sauce, and would only work in the yet unborn. > algorithm down, and we'll see some real breakthroughs real fast. Yes it is > a hard problem. Can it be solved? Maybe with special hardware or something. > > Maybe with online games. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foldit > > Start parsing the genome of various plants and animals, and we'll figure > out even more stuff. > > Medicine is making a radical jump towards being more predictably scientific One of my hats involves reading primary medical literature, and unfortunately I'm not seeing anything too radical there, yet. > and less trial and error prone. This really does make a difference. If you > can predict what a compound might do without animal trials, the things you > can do with the same amount of research money start to go up a Moore's Law > kind of curve. That's a game changer, don't you think? You sound like me, early 1990s. Virtual screening is pretty much dead now. > Said another way, when medicine becomes engineering, won't that change the > rules of the game? > > And can't you see that medicine is evolving towards engineering? I can see that. I just don't see much relevant progress since I was 17. I then thought we'll need to freeze, and now it's three decades later. It seems that I was correct. > There is no limit on the resource of human ingenuity over time in such There's one thing: we haven't got too much time to buy us more time. > matters. This isn't a limited resource like sweet crude. Just walk into the > light Eugen! Optimism is considered dangerous to your health. From johnkclark at gmail.com Thu Oct 24 17:07:50 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 13:07:50 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: <028501ced01d$4a7195f0$df54c1d0$@att.net> References: <01d801ceca8c$9449cda0$bcdd68e0$@att.net> <02a401ceca96$cd3cc4a0$67b64de0$@att.net> <037201cecb8c$4428af20$cc7a0d60$@att.net> <011501cecc66$91421280$b3c63780$@att.net> <011c01cece93$0ac21910$20464b30$@att.net> <035701cecf50$4b6cd500$e2467f00$@att.net> <028501ced01d$4a7195f0$df54c1d0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 2:25 PM, spike wrote: > we will have something like a repeat of this whole thing in December, >> >> >At one time I would have said nobody is dumb enough to repeat this whole >>> sorry fiasco, but that was before I met the Tea Party. If it turns out you >>> are right then there is no longer any doubt, President Obama successor will >>> be whoever it is that the Democrats nominate and election day itself will >>> just be a formality? >>> >> > > Indeed? Would that be Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden? > I have no idea, all I know is the next President will be a Democrat if the Republicans repeat their October stunt in January. > Would you feel better if they had no rivals? > It makes no difference how I feel about it, if they repeat the October idiocy that has dropped the approval ratings that American voters give Republicans to the lowest level either political party has ever received then the Republican party will no longer be in critical condition, it will be as dead as the Federalist or Whig Party. >> If you buy something new that is very expensive and is not in the budget? >> > > > Then you scale it back, eliminate it > It's too late for that, YOU ALREADY BOUGHT IT! > or sell it. > If you can find somebody who wants to buy our wars then fine, otherwise pay your bills as you promised to do. > and you refuse to raise taxes to pay for it then logically you are >> giving implicit permission to print more money? >> >> >> > > But of course you can?t do that unless someone lends the government the > money to print. > The government has been finding people quite willing to do that since 1835. > >> the determination of how much stuff the government needs or wants is >> made by the House of Representatives >> > > Sure > Sure? So you're defending the practice of buying something on Monday and refusing to pay for it on Tuesday when you get the bill? > but they cannot legislate wealth into existence. > So what? Most people don't have enough wealth to buy a house, so they borrow money and buy a house. And the government of the USA didn't have enough wealth to wage a war so they borrowed money and waged a war. And if you don't think they should borrow money then you shouldn't have voted to wage two wars. > **** > >> >> If they decree that we need something or they just really really want >> it then they're going to have to pay for it, and if it's expensive there >> are only 2 ways to do that? >> > > If they decree that we need something, they are subject to the will of > the lenders who may decree to the contrary. > I have no idea what you mean by that, all I know is that the Tea Party House members voted to buy stuff and then refused to pay for it, and that is not good fiscal policy, it is not conservative and it is not moral. >> 1) Raise taxes, that is to say take more money from you and me to pay >> for that new thing that we need so very badly? >> > > The problem with raising taxes it that it may or may not raise revenues. > I know, so if that doesn't work you're going to have to find another way to pay the bills, and there is only one other way and it involves a printing press. And if you don't like that fact you should have thought of that before you bought all that stuff. >> 2) Print more money to pay for it? >> > > Well sure, if someone is fool enough to lend you the money to do that. > As I've said, we've had no trouble finding such fools since 1835. > **** > > >> ?And politicians, especially tea party politicians, love to shout > that in general we should spend less money, but when asked for specifics > about what exactly we should cut they suddenly get very shy?**** > > > Ja? I don?t get shy at all. Do these things for starters: [lots of big > cuts] > Yes Spike you're not shy in speaking your mind nor should you be on this list, but you're not a politician and you never will be, not in the House, not unless you carefully went through your extensive list of big government cuts (many of which I agree with) and only pushed for the cuts that didn't result in less government spending in your particular district. And the more pork you can get for your district the more likely you are to get reelected, so if you want to stay in the House you are going to have to make deals with other representatives and vote for their pork if they vote for yours. And then, if you want to prove to the Tea Party how very conservative and fiscally responsible you are, when the bills for all that pork comes due you're going to have to break your word and just refuse to pay. > > Pork barrel projects have to go too. Time to face reality. If you want to get into politics it would be fine to say that, required even, but don't even think about actually doing it. > **** > >> > And if you vote for my pork-barrel projects I'll vote for your >> pork-barrel projects. In that regard at least the Tea Party politicians are >> no different from anybody else. >> > > Ja, if so, then it is time for a more sincere version of the Tea Party. > That's never going to work. The insincere Tea Party would leave the sincere Tea Party in the dust on election day because they can obtain more pork for their district. *>government spending must match revenue* > No Spike, government expenditures don't have to match revenue, usually they don't and very often they shouldn't. But to avoid disaster governments had better pay their bills. Always. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rex at nosyntax.net Thu Oct 24 17:27:53 2013 From: rex at nosyntax.net (rex) Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 10:27:53 -0700 Subject: [ExI] A Gedanken Rational Eugenics Experiment (AGREE) In-Reply-To: References: <20131024011619.GB4312@ninja.nosyntax.net> Message-ID: <20131024172753.GB4352@ninja.nosyntax.net> Rafal Smigrodzki [2013-10-24 07:29]: >On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 9:16 PM, rex wrote: > >> Smart fraction theory: >> >> http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/sft.htm >> http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/sft2.htm > >Zygote selection is an already existing technology which, if widely >applied, could dramatically increase the smart fraction, even if the >below average would not participate. Hello Rafal, Yes. I've proposed the idea before in another venue. >Generally, it's not realistic to expect voluntary participation in an >eugenics effort from stupid people, and I am quite averse to any >non-voluntary effort. If a woman isn't planning on becoming pregnant in the next 6 months, why not get paid for a birth control implant? What's the downside? >However, smart people are frequently quite obsessed withe the IQ of >their offspring (if they have any), and despite the current leftoid >anti-science animus, I would expect a lot of interest if a company >would offer zygote full sequencing and selection. If you could screen >about 50 zygotes (a big if but not fundamentally impossible) per >pregnancy, you could shift the average IQ of offspring by more than 1 >SD. I am assuming here that 85% of the zygotes would be non-viable to >begin with, leaving about 6 to make the actual choice from. Since the >likely parental generation would have above average IQ, the filial >generation might be actually pretty smart. Unless the service was >banned, it could have some impact on national IQ even before human IQ >ceases to matter. Perhaps surprisingly, it only requires 4 viable zygotes to have a 50% probability of at least one having a potential IQ greater or equal to 1 SD above the mean (R code below). It requires screening 31 to get a > 50% probability of 2 SDs above the mean. BTW, why do you assume so few zygotes are viable? zy=4 frac = vector('numeric', 100) for (j in 1:100){ count = 0 N=1000 for (i in 1:N){ group = rnorm(zy, 100, 15) if (max(group) >= 115) count = count+1 } print(c('fraction', count/N)) frac[j] = count/N } print(c(mean(frac), sd(frac))) -rex -- "The defendant's objections to the evidence obtained by wire-tapping must, in my opinion, be sustained. It is, of course, immaterial where the physical connection with the telephone wires leading into the defendant's premises was made. And it is also immaterial that the intrusion was in aid of law enforcement. Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding." - Justice Louis D. Brandeis, dissenting, Olmstead v. United States, From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Thu Oct 24 20:43:54 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 14:43:54 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Life extension In-Reply-To: References: <00ea01cece8c$8eba9960$ac2fcc20$@att.net> <20131022092807.GJ10405@leitl.org> <52667964.9040008@aleph.se> <5266E3B5.7060201@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Thu, Oct 24, 2013 at 10:38 AM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > On Thu, Oct 24, 2013 at 9:05 AM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > >> For some reason, a lot of people tune out to radical life extension, but >> do not tune out to radical health improvement. >> > > Easily explained, if we put aside our own viewpoint and honestly accept > what their viewpoint is. (Not that we agree with it, just that we > accurately recognize it.) > > They believe that death is inevitable, period. They think that one can no > more achieve immortality than reach the Moon merely by flapping one's arms, > or exceed the speed of light through conventional Newtonian thrust. > Further, they have a heavy bias toward believing in the impossibility of > things quite unlike what anyone has achieved before. Therefore, living to > 200 is "obviously" impossible and anyone saying otherwise can be dismissed > without thinking too hard about it, just like anyone proposing another > perpetual motion machine. > > On the other hand, many people *are* alive at 90 today - and some of them > are generally physically capable, if past their prime. That's not > speculation. Therefore, there is existing proof that this is > possible...and so the same could be made true for more people. > > They might have logical dissonance at the likely consequence of a lot of > super-healthy 90 year olds (i.e., people living to 150+), but they don't > reject the possibility of many super-healthy 90 year olds itself. > I agree, but I do think that's only PART of the problem. In my own discussions with people, I also run into these objections: The religious element. Why would I WANT to live 500 years if heaven awaits me? The "I've lived through enough change already" point of view. Why would I want to live 500 years? I wouldn't understand a damn thing when I got there. Look at grandma, she can't even work an iPad. The grumpy old man avoidance POV. "When I was a kid, we played with rocks, and we were grateful!" Do I want to be THAT guy for 400 years? The "I'd be useless" POV. I don't want to draw on society from 65 to 500. The "I'd get in the way of change" POV. If I lived to 500, I would probably be rich and influential, which would stop young people from making changes that need to be made. That can only be made when the previous generation passes away. And of course, "Wouldn't the earth fill up?" This last one I address by noticing that despite 4 billion years of death, 700 million years of multicellular death, and thousands of years of human ritualistic death, we haven't run out of room to put graveyards. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From max at maxmore.com Thu Oct 24 21:23:23 2013 From: max at maxmore.com (Max More) Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 14:23:23 -0700 Subject: [ExI] 50 greatest post-fire breakthroughs Message-ID: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/innovations-list/309536/ -- Max More, PhD Strategic Philosopher Co-editor, *The Transhumanist Reader* http://www.amazon.com/Transhumanist-Reader-Contemporary-Technology-Philosophy/dp/1118334310/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1372225570&sr=1-1&keywords=the+transhumanist+reader President & CEO, Alcor Life Extension Foundation -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Thu Oct 24 22:50:03 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 23:50:03 +0100 Subject: [ExI] A Gedanken Rational Eugenics Experiment (AGREE) In-Reply-To: <20131024163313.GA4352@ninja.nosyntax.net> References: <20131024011619.GB4312@ninja.nosyntax.net> <5268F9E7.8080602@aleph.se> <20131024163313.GA4352@ninja.nosyntax.net> Message-ID: <5269A41B.4070002@aleph.se> On 2013-10-24 17:33, rex wrote: > Anders Sandberg [2013-10-24 07:29]: >> Fertility is surprisingly changeable through culture and >> institutions. The points made about higher education being >> parent-unfriendly are just the tip of the iceberg; the big birth >> differential between northern and southern Europe is largely due to >> institutional affordances... and *soap operas* have been a major >> vector in changing fertility patterns in Brazil and India. > > Soap operas changed fertility patterns? How would a causal relationship > be proven? Ah, it is a classic set of studies. Television arrived in some villages but not other comparable villages, fertility went down in the television villages. A lot is ascribed to viewing family patterns among the soap opera people (anthropologists found that soap operas were the major viewing). http://www.econ.upf.edu/docs/seminars/laferrara.pdf http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/emily.oster/papers/tvwomen.pdf http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/programs/conservation-and-development/population-bomb-so-wrong/ > The payments would make some fraction think it's a good idea. Yes, but if that is 5% (still a lot of people) the selection pressure will be very low. > What > fraction that would be depends upon the amount of payment and the IQ > required to qualify (the sim used -1 SD, but -1.5 SDs or -2 SDs) > would also work. If you select against the extreme tail you will have a far weaker selection pressure. The "wall" the distribution moves away from will be further down. > >> This is why I think liberal eugenics, which works by parents >> selecting themselves what traits to go for, might be more robust. And >> cheaper... > > It's merely a Gedanken experiment to illustrate the ideas, and not > intended to be a policy to be compared with others which may well be > more socially viable. And, it's not an exclusive policy. I get it. But I still think there is a problem with a policy that requires a sustained centralized effort. Getting people to pay for their own selection is distributed, cheaper and unlikely to stop just because of a change in government. >> >> Note that you would need to pay *a lot*. The below 1 SD population is >> around 15%, so in the US that would be about 47 million people you >> need to pay off. I am not sure what the going price for getting >> sterilized is, but at least I expect it to be on the order of a few >> thousand dollars - we are easily talking hundreds of billions here. >> Not quite as much as is already spent on elementary schools, but >> still a lot. > > But only half that 47 million are females Your model only uses females, but half of the genome is from the males. > In politics 15 generations is an unthinkably long period. In > evolutionary biology it's an eyeblink. In technology one human generation is more than a millennium of Internet years. I am often dissing genetic enhancement for this reason: many technologies for direct manipulation have a good chance of being developed and refined much faster than designer babies can grow up. Genetics has the advantage of actually working to some extent, and we might be wrong about the other technologies. But generically it will be slower than a lot of other factors. > La Griffe du Lion's smart fraction theory is not about genius; it's > about a critical fraction with the modest IQ required to be useful to > society. (I don't know who he really is, but he's clearly an incisive > thinker who uses statistical inference fluently.) > > http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/sft.htm > > "Thus, for a technologically sophisticated society, SFT asserts that a > nation's per capita GDP is determined by the population fraction with > IQ greater than or equal to some threshold IQ. Consistent with the > data of Lynn and Vanhanen, that threshold IQ is 108, a bit less than > the minimum required for what used to be a bachelor's degree. Figure > 3 illustrates the fit of (3) to the data of Lynn and Vanhanen." 108+ is about 30% of the population. If we assume actual useful performance in a knowledge heavy world is some kind of concave function of IQ (at least close to the middle of the bump) one should not be too surprised that this subset is responsible for the majority of the useful work. Still, if the usefulness grows as a polynomial (or even exponential!) function of intelligence the main effect when multiplied with the available population is merely to shift the Gaussian towards the right: there are so few of the real extreme performers that the bulk of useful work is done by the mediocre high performers. > > I'm more interested in varying parameters in simulations to see how > they behave than in comparing potential policies. For example, > assortative mating and the high heritability of IQ cause speciation > pressure. As these values large enough to eventually cause speciation > in humans? If not, how large must the correlation between the IQs of > mates be to cause speciation? That would be fun to run. I think the correlations in assortiveness we see enable mixing of genes over rather few generations, precluding speciation. I suspect that a population with some sort of assortive mating but a single fitness function will have a distribution mostly determined by the fitness, not the mating. But it deserves simulating. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Thu Oct 24 23:08:22 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 00:08:22 +0100 Subject: [ExI] europeans say yanks are spying In-Reply-To: <05e001ced0c7$9c7c1550$d5743ff0$@att.net> References: <05e001ced0c7$9c7c1550$d5743ff0$@att.net> Message-ID: <5269A866.2070109@aleph.se> On 2013-10-24 15:44, spike wrote: > But I don't understand why they would care. They aren't the Tea Party > and are not subject to an IRS audit. To quote a once and future > president: What difference does it make? Remember when GWB tried to give Merkle a backrub? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTQY1Aw9zcs Obama has done it again. She - and a fair number of Germans - grew up under a system of state surveillance. There is a symbolism there that is deadly serious, and the fact that the US does not seem get it is a very bad sign. Maybe the German ambassador should dress up like a KKK member for the White House Halloween party - surely the president will get the joke? Of course intelligence agencies are up to a lot of surveillance of friends and foes. But there are presumably certain gentlemen's agreements about what Is Not Done. Flouting these are not just embarrassments, they are signs that a government is no longer in full control over their agencies. I think the US is seriously losing allies right now. Worse, we are seeing further breakdown of an international system that - while never perfect - at least kept trust and interaction habits functional. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From painlord2k at libero.it Thu Oct 24 23:11:14 2013 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 01:11:14 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Dawn of Autonomous Corporations In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <5269A912.4000106@libero.it> Il 24/10/2013 17:52, Kelly Anderson ha scritto: > On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 9:53 PM, Christian Vanderwall > > wrote: > > http://btcgeek.com/dawn-of-autonomous-corporations/ > > Thoughts? > > > Christian, My thought is that this is an amazing concept. > > My second thought is how would you incentivize someone to start building > such a beastie. Profit will incentivize one. The programmer can programmatically code the corporation so it will give profits to someone. Mirco From anders at aleph.se Thu Oct 24 23:19:44 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 00:19:44 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Oxford Martin Commission for Future Generations Message-ID: <5269AB10.8030700@aleph.se> Over here, the Oxford Martin Commission for Future Generations has just launched its first report, http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/commission http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/commission/Oxford_Martin_Now_for_the_Long_Term.pdf By our standards it is rather modest (and full of worthy platitudes), but there seem to be some interesting ideas in there. In particular they have looked at "Coalitions of the working" to overcome gridlocks on global issues. There is also some potentially developable stuff about an early warning platform for cyber-risks, WorldStat for getting good global statistics, and sunset clauses for publicly-funded international institutions. We'll see how it turns out. Or whether some clever people just take the ideas and run with them. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Thu Oct 24 23:28:35 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 00:28:35 +0100 Subject: [ExI] 50 greatest post-fire breakthroughs In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <5269AD23.8080707@aleph.se> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/innovations-list/309536/: > In short, these scientists and creative types decided to answer the > question they wanted us to ask, rather than the exact one we posed. We > have new sympathy for people attempting to manage universities and R&D > labs. Amen. Never try to give a survey to academics! Nice discussion, more relevant than the list itself. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Thu Oct 24 23:16:43 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 16:16:43 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: References: <01d801ceca8c$9449cda0$bcdd68e0$@att.net> <02a401ceca96$cd3cc4a0$67b64de0$@att.net> <037201cecb8c$4428af20$cc7a0d60$@att.net> <011501cecc66$91421280$b3c63780$@att.net> <011c01cece93$0ac21910$20464b30$@att.net> <035701cecf50$4b6cd500$e2467f00$@att.net> <028501ced01d$4a7195f0$df54c1d0$@att.net> Message-ID: <080701ced10f$1ab642f0$5022c8d0$@att.net> >. On Behalf Of John Clark >. >>>. If you buy something new that is very expensive and is not in the budget. >> .Then you scale it back, eliminate it >.It's too late for that, YOU ALREADY BOUGHT IT! . On the contrary John, for this is what the whole debate is all about. The house has never bought the ACA opt-out penalty as a tax. Reasoning: the ACA originated in the Senate and was passed into law on 30 March 2010, without a single minority party vote. Among the objections by the minority party was that there is no authority in the constitution for requiring citizens to buy health insurance, or anything else for that matter. I have read it carefully and I see not one word in there about the federal government having the authority to require a purchase of any kind. The question started working its way to the Supreme Court. In November 2010, the minority party became the majority of the legislature and gained control of the house of representatives. In June 2012, the Supreme Court handed down a decision confirming what the new majority party had said all along, that there is no constitutional authority for the individual mandate. (John have you found anything in there which suggests to the contrary? Where?) However, they confirmed that the individual mandate is legal if it is declared a tax, and the fed can levy a tax under the 16th amendment. So now all that remained was to send an identical bill back to the house for ratification. However, by that time the house was controlled by the party which was in the minority party when the bill originated in the Senate. Under article 1 section 7 clause 1 of the constitution, all taxation and spending bills must originate in the house. The bill was never sent back down to the house, for the house had already voted to repeal or dismantle ObamaCare over twenty times between taking the house and the SCOTUS decision. They never bought it as a tax. We haven't already bought this John. This is a tax bill which does not conform to the requirements of article 1 section 7 clause 1. We have never already bought it and we are not already buying it now. If you are now struggling with the temptation to write in all caps that the US is obligated to pay for that which we already bought, keep repeating the real truth: the ACA is a tax, a tax must originate in the house, the house has never agreed to it as a tax. We have not already bought the ACA. We still are not already buying it. We are already rejecting it, repeatedly. This constitutional clause is not merely a technicality for it has enormous implications, besides the obvious one that collecting a tax penalty for opting out is illegal. Declaring the opt-out penalty a tax would place the collection authority with the IRS. Note that there is an opt-out tax, however the IRS does not have the authority to collect it. They can (and will) withhold the penalty for opt-out if you have a refund coming, but it is easy to adjust tax withholdings to make sure you do not have a tax refund, or if so only a small one, single digit dollars. Then one would owe the IRS the opt-out penalty, if the IRS had the authority to bill you for that. But it does not. Reason: tax bills must originate in the house. This one did not, so they didn't legally authorize the IRS to collect that which had not yet been declared a tax. So. There is a theoretical opt-out tax penalty, but it is actually a voluntary contribution. The IRS cannot punish a citizen for not paying a tax which it lacks the authority to collect. All this being said, all is not lost, for even Tea Party people would agree there are socially redeeming qualities. The next step would be to extend a temporary exemption for everyone to O-care until the legislature passes a constitutional amendment specifically granting the federal government the authority to collect a penalty for opting out. If we get that, then we can stop calling the ACA opt-out a tax, and the whole scheme is not subject to repeated rejection by the house. Another suggestion is that we use the same constitutional authority granted by the constitution to raise and provision an army, then give us hapless draftees the option to not serve in the military if we buy health insurance. Buying one's way out of the army was used during the civil war. The draft has been repeatedly challenged and found constitutional. Then it wouldn't be repeatedly pounded on by the house of representatives, under whose purview is all taxation, and has voted to repeal the ACA 46 times in just the past two years. So draft all Americans, both genders, between the ages of 18 and 65 inclusive, with the provision that we can buy our way out yearly with a valid approved health insurance policy. Simple. >>.government spending must match revenue >.No Spike, government expenditures don't have to match revenue. In the long run, it must. Otherwise we end up where we are. >.usually they don't. Tragically so. >. and very often they shouldn't. On the contrary, they should very often, nearly always. Times of war are temporary exceptions. But it must be a real war, not the phony stuff our president tried to start in Syria a few weeks ago. >. But to avoid disaster governments had better pay their bills. Always. John K Clark The ACA isn't our bill yet. It isn't our bill until either a constitutional amendment is passed allowing the government to require citizens to purchase health insurance, or an opt-out tax is originated in the house in accordance with constitutional requirements. Now, isn't that simple John? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From max at maxmore.com Fri Oct 25 00:15:43 2013 From: max at maxmore.com (Max More) Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 17:15:43 -0700 Subject: [ExI] 50 greatest post-fire breakthroughs In-Reply-To: <5269AD23.8080707@aleph.se> References: <5269AD23.8080707@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Thu, Oct 24, 2013 at 4:28 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > > http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/innovations-list/309536/: > > In short, these scientists and creative types decided to answer the > question they wanted us to ask, rather than the exact one we posed. We have > new sympathy for people attempting to manage universities and R&D labs. > > > Amen. Never try to give a survey to academics! > > Nice discussion, more relevant than the list itself. > Absolutely! Worth reading, also, for enriched historical context for current discussion of rates (and significance) of technological change. --Max > > -- > Dr Anders Sandberg > Future of Humanity Institute > Oxford Martin School > Oxford University > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -- Max More, PhD Strategic Philosopher Co-editor, *The Transhumanist Reader* http://www.amazon.com/Transhumanist-Reader-Contemporary-Technology-Philosophy/dp/1118334310/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1372225570&sr=1-1&keywords=the+transhumanist+reader President & CEO, Alcor Life Extension Foundation -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Fri Oct 25 06:52:21 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 08:52:21 +0200 Subject: [ExI] europeans say yanks are spying In-Reply-To: <5269A866.2070109@aleph.se> References: <05e001ced0c7$9c7c1550$d5743ff0$@att.net> <5269A866.2070109@aleph.se> Message-ID: <20131025065221.GL10405@leitl.org> On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 12:08:22AM +0100, Anders Sandberg wrote: > Of course intelligence agencies are up to a lot of surveillance of > friends and foes. But there are presumably certain gentlemen's > agreements about what Is Not Done. Flouting these are not just > embarrassments, they are signs that a government is no longer in > full control over their agencies. This is a common narrative, but I doubt it ever was true. Some countries are little more than US vassals -- occupied Germany would be a good example (Sweden, the sixth's eye, another -- witness the Assange charade, for instance -- and last, but not least the UKUSA members). Do you think BND has installed the surveillance capacity in Germany? It's an open secret NSA is operating all the sigint, and throwing the three German intelligence services a few information scraps from their table. The only gentlemen's agreements exist between national intelligence services, where there are no formal (secret, of course) obligations to collect and share. Why do you think there are US drones over Bavaria, officially limited to certain flight corridors? And that Germany can't train their own military pilots but leave it to the US? Allies, yeah, right. > I think the US is seriously losing allies right now. Worse, we are > seeing further breakdown of an international system that - while > never perfect - at least kept trust and interaction habits > functional. Was that any trust to start with? The mix of economic and outright petrodollar-maintenance warfare seem to keep the "partners" firmly on the leash. What we're seeing it little more than kabuki theatre, played for the masses in managed democracies. Any outrage is staged, or comes from real ignorance (of course, neither interpretation is favorable, it it comes from our designated leaders). From atymes at gmail.com Fri Oct 25 07:08:56 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 00:08:56 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Life extension In-Reply-To: References: <00ea01cece8c$8eba9960$ac2fcc20$@att.net> <20131022092807.GJ10405@leitl.org> <52667964.9040008@aleph.se> <5266E3B5.7060201@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Thu, Oct 24, 2013 at 1:43 PM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > The grumpy old man avoidance POV. "When I was a kid, we played with rocks, > and we were grateful!" Do I want to be THAT guy for 400 years? > > The "I'd be useless" POV. I don't want to draw on society from 65 to 500. > > The "I'd get in the way of change" POV. If I lived to 500, I would > probably be rich and influential, which would stop young people from making > changes that need to be made. That can only be made when the previous > generation passes away. > Even if immortality were cheap and easy and available today, it still probably wouldn't be for everyone - maybe not even for most people. One would have to consciously adopt a mindset of accepting and adapting the new ways. Otherwise one's mind would die, soon (within some years) followed by one's body. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rahmans at me.com Fri Oct 25 07:22:03 2013 From: rahmans at me.com (Omar Rahman) Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 09:22:03 +0200 Subject: [ExI] A Gedanken Rational Eugenics Experiment (AGREE) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <69C0136E-5F99-4C65-9D86-70EC38F8E55F@me.com> > Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2013 18:16:19 -0700 > From: rex > To: ExI chat list > Subject: [ExI] A Gedanken Rational Eugenics Experiment (AGREE) > > (I've no idea if anyone here is interested, but the best way to find > out is to chum the water...) > > Since IQ is highly heritable, all else being equal, mean IQ would rise > if low IQ individuals were offered payment not to breed. How would > such a program play out? > > Simulation is a good way to explore the issue. Their whole notion of 'national IQ' is so deeply flawed it is laughable. Just looking at and attempting to account for the bias in IQ tests is difficult enough, but rubbing that together with a notion of GDP which is connected to a fiat currency produces a rich creamy mousse of pure bullshit. An excerpt from the Wikipedia page about 'IQ and the Wealth of Nations': > Criticism of data sets[edit] > > Some criticisms have focused on the limited number of studies upon which the book is based. The IQ figure is based on one study in 34 nations, and two studies in 30 nations. There were actual tests for IQ in 81 nations. In 104 of the world's nations there were no IQ studies at all and IQ was estimated based on IQ in surrounding nations.[2] The limited number of participants in some studies has also been criticized. A test of 108 9-15-year olds in Barbados, of 50 13?16-year olds in Colombia, of 104 5?17-year olds in Ecuador, of 129 6?12-year olds in Egypt, and of 48 10?14-year olds in Equatorial Guinea, all were taken as measures of national IQ.[3] > > Denny Borsboom (2006) argues that mainstream contemporary test analysis does not reflect substantial recent developments in the field and "bears an uncanny resemblance to the psychometric state of the art as it existed in the 1950s." For example, it argued that IQ and the Wealth of Nations, in order to show that the tests are unbiased, uses outdated methodology, if anything indicative that test bias exists.[12] Girma Berhanu in an essay review of the book concentrated on the discussion of Ethiopian Jews. The review criticizes the principal assertion of the authors that differences in intelligence attributed to genetics account for the gap between rich and poor countries. Berhanu criticized the book as being based in a "racist, sexist, and antihuman" research tradition and alleged that "the low standards of scholarship evident in the book render it largely irrelevant for modern science".[13] We are not talking about 'bad data' in most of this........no data. > Prodigy. I do have a few modest observations. In Figure 2, the data is divided into contributions from four groups: blacks, (European) whites, East Asians and "others." I did not include the outliers: South Africa, Barbados, Qatar and China. Also, 'I did not include the outliers X, Y, Z, aaaaaannnnnnnnd CHINA!' When 1/6 of humanity is an outlier even on your extremely poor data set maybe it's time to call it a day. Just maybe. I find it odd that no one else who viewed that page didn't immediately comment on: > Prodigy. I noticed that too, Mentor, and computed a correlation coefficient for the 15 black nations as a group. The result, 0.034, confirms your observation. It seems there is an IQ threshold to be reached before a country can get off the ground economically. None of the black nations has yet reached this threshold. Here are the black-nation data. > > Country Avg > IQ per cap > GDP > Zambia 77 719 > Congo 73 995 > Uganda 73 1,074 > Sudan 72 1,394 > Jamaica 72 3,389 > Kenya 72 980 > Tanzania 72 480 > Ghana 71 1,735 > Nigeria 67 795 > Zimbabwe 66 2,669 > Guinea 66 1,782 > Congo 65 822 > Sierra Leone 64 458 > Ethiopia 63 574 > Equatorial Guinea 59 1,817 If you see 'data' indicating that the AVERAGE CITIZEN OF EQUATORIAL GUINEA IS SEVERELY MENTALLY RETARDED, the AVERAGE CITIZEN mind you, and you make any other conclusion than your data being horribly horribly wrong then well... They say that 'travel broadens the mind' and therefore I can say with absolute conviction that 'Prodigy' is a pinhead for it is certain that he has never, ever, pulled his head out of his ass. Regards, Omar Rahman -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rahmans at me.com Fri Oct 25 07:53:56 2013 From: rahmans at me.com (Omar Rahman) Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 09:53:56 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: > Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2013 07:52:30 -0700 > From: "spike" > To: "'ExI chat list'" > Subject: Re: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks > Republicans are "asinine" > Message-ID: <01d901cecfff$804c0980$80e41c80$@att.net> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" > > > > > >> . On Behalf Of Omar Rahman >> .Gates is an interesting case for me because I can remember back in the old > anti-trust days when Microsoft was making serious moves to be the only > viable OS and I thought that Microsoft was a company that really needed > reigning in. > > > > So I recall, but I had an alternate spin on that then, based on an > extrapolation of some comments Eugen made. > > > > If one guy gets a corner on the word processor market as Microsloth did back > in about y2k, his failed competitors say that this one guy might as well > have a patent on the English language. Once one word processor gets > established, it forever eliminates any possibility for anyone else to come > along later with a viable competitor. But this is OK, for what ended up > happening is that Java Open Office came along, which is free, and is > compatible with Word. Over the years I have noticed that Microsloth never > did make Word incompatible with existing Open Office Writer. So now if we > want all the bells and whistles of Word, we have that option. If not, we > have that option. So the market did reign in Microsoft in that sense. It > created a very competent free alternative, which can open Word formatted > documents, but not write Word formatted documents. > I think that if MS had indeed engineered incompatibilities with Open Office, it would have been conclusive proof that it was a harmful monopoly that needed breaking up. Someone somewhere in MS must have convinced the rest that if you can't tolerate even a free 'competitor' you really must be 'anti-competitive'. > > Ja. The argument goes that no one can take over the computing world, for > any attempt creates a market for free alternatives, some of which are really > good, as we saw. > Ah, so that's what 'free' market means. =D Seriously though, when your competitors can only 'compete' by giving away their products it's a pretty bad sign. > > > Our current USA medical struggles suggest that we need a parallel competing > system of some sort, analogous to Microsloth competitors such as Red Hat, > arguably less capable but at much lower cost. > > > > spike In the end I basically agree. If a not for profit insurance company and not for profit hospital system were to be established through some means we might see it grow into a national sized program in a 100 years or something. I would prefer the Federal government to implement an insurance policy that MUST be accepted at all hospitals and only pays a FIXED cost for procedures. Comparison shopping doesn't work well in health care because there is a too much time pressure and you don't have time to move to Arizona/Hawaii/etc where procedure X is covered and/or cheaper than where you live in a 'State Model' situation as you have proposed. Regards, Omar Rahman -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Fri Oct 25 10:38:06 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 11:38:06 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Tracking your internet browsing Message-ID: Collusion is an experimental add-on for Firefox and allows you to see all the third parties that are tracking your movements across the Web. It will show, in real time, how that data creates a spider-web of interaction between companies and other trackers. They have a demo to show how it works: They suggest using the TrackerBlock extension to block third party tracking. I always use Private Browsing mode (and other security extensions) in Firefox, so it had no tracking to show for me. BillK From eugen at leitl.org Fri Oct 25 10:55:47 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 12:55:47 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Tracking your internet browsing In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20131025105547.GI10405@leitl.org> On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 11:38:06AM +0100, BillK wrote: > They suggest using the TrackerBlock extension to block third party tracking. > I always use Private Browsing mode (and other security extensions) in > Firefox, so it had no tracking to show for me. You're not anonymous unless you're running the Tor Browser Bundle, and NoScript set to JavaScript disable. See https://panopticlick.eff.org/ (down for scheduled maintenance atm). From pharos at gmail.com Fri Oct 25 11:05:20 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 12:05:20 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Tracking your internet browsing In-Reply-To: <20131025105547.GI10405@leitl.org> References: <20131025105547.GI10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 11:55 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > You're not anonymous unless you're running the Tor Browser Bundle, > and NoScript set to JavaScript disable. > > See https://panopticlick.eff.org/ (down for scheduled maintenance atm). > True. And I do occasionally use Tor when I really want to be anonymous. But this is just talking about third party advertisers using cookies to do behaviour tracking. Although new browser 'fingerprinting' techniques are being tested to do tracking without using cookies. (And ways round that are also being developed). It's an ongoing war! :) BillK From protokol2020 at gmail.com Fri Oct 25 12:21:35 2013 From: protokol2020 at gmail.com (Tomaz Kristan) Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 14:21:35 +0200 Subject: [ExI] The Actual Visionary of the Future In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: > I believe in the Law of Accelerating Returns, and I think it applies even more broadly than Ray applies it. Me, too! I know LAR is in a disagreement with the light speed principle. Eventually they'll meet in a duel. I give 99% probability that LSP will win over LAR, but not 100%. On Thu, Oct 24, 2013 at 6:36 PM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 12:54 AM, Kevin G Haskell wrote: > >> >As Anders Sandberg would say, science is about approximation. Well, so, >> then, perhaps, is this, and perhaps not: >> >> >> >I was once told by 'someone' here that having an Extropian Facebook Page >> would be like >> >drinking quality champagne from plastic glasses, but I always wondered, >> >"why would such a great group of thinkers limit themselves to >> >such an archaic system as a llstserv? >> > > Because for deep discussions of deep topics, a listserv still works better > than facebook. If you would like to debate this point, I am up to the > challenge. > > >> >WTF happened. >> > > Facebook happened. And it dumbed us down just like PowerPoint. > > >> >I've heard this group become overrun by negatarians, not optimists. So... >> > > Not so. I remain firmly optimistic along with most of my friends here. > > >> >This man...I am just happy and privilaged to be alive in the same time >> period that he is. >> > > I am privileged to live in an era with spell checkers. > > >> >This man, this great, great man, is one of the very few who drive >> humanity forward fearlessly. >> > > I'm one of the few open fans of Ray on this list. I have been since I read > his dissertation (master's thesis?) on character recognition around 1987. > Well before his first book was published, I was borrowing his thesis > through interlibrary loan. I think a lot like Ray in many ways. He does > have a blind spot for speech recognition being "just around the corner"... > but other than that capitalistic imposed blindness, he's been spot on about > a lot of things. > > I believe in the Law of Accelerating Returns, and I think it applies even > more broadly than Ray applies it. I know it is a faith. But I am an acolyte. > > -Kelly > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -- https://protokol2020.wordpress.com/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From painlord2k at libero.it Fri Oct 25 12:46:09 2013 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 14:46:09 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: <080701ced10f$1ab642f0$5022c8d0$@att.net> References: <037201cecb8c$4428af20$cc7a0d60$@att.net> <011501cecc66$91421280$b3c63780$@att.net> <011c01cece93$0ac21910$20464b30$@att.net> <035701cecf50$4b6cd500$e2467f00$@att.net> <028501ced01d$4a7195f0$df54c1d0$@att.net> <080701ced10f$1ab642f0$5022c8d0$@att.net> Message-ID: <526A6811.7070807@libero.it> Il 25/10/2013 01:16, spike ha scritto: Spike, are the US reintroducing slavery and bonded serfdom? And the other western countries as well I would say. John Clarke position that governments must pay their expenditures, whatever they be, no matter the cost, it is very intriguing. First, because the idea is to saddle with the debt the future generations, if they will be born at all. Because the current young are the future generation of the same people starting the debt explosion and enjoying the wealth transfer from the future. Now, the young are forced to pay for the elder, enticed or forced in debt slavery in many different ways. The people with a mortgage are in debt slavery because their home market value is way lower than their debt with the bank. The younger tricked to go to college with cheap loans for cheap degree end with a lot of debt and not useful skill and are unable to form a family and buy an home, if they are not forced to return to the home of their parents. The people without debts with the banks are forced to pay a tax on their house, so they can be forced in debt with the local government (and if I remember correctly, they can withhold your passport and prevent you from leaving the US if you have any unpaid tax). Then the US government affirm its right to a cut of the income of any US citizen living abroad and any one renouncing citizenship for 10 years. Just to pay for the stuff bough from your grandfathers, fathers and all the politicks in Washington and at the local level when you and your children were not born and surely not voted for it. Mirco From eugen at leitl.org Fri Oct 25 13:30:31 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 15:30:31 +0200 Subject: [ExI] The Actual Visionary of the Future In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20131025133031.GL10405@leitl.org> On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 02:21:35PM +0200, Tomaz Kristan wrote: > Me, too! I know LAR is in a disagreement with the light speed principle. > Eventually they'll meet in a duel. LAR is not just limited in time, but also in scope. Exponential processes are the exception, rather than the rule. And that exception never lasts long. The trouble with cornucopians like Kurzweil is that they cheerfully and cherrypickingly apply LAR to anything under the sun, and never admit it when reality disproves them. This is the opposite of science. We've had a number of such people, which turned out a liability to transhumanism in the end. Our handicap is already sufficiently high, we don't need such monkeys on our back. > I give 99% probability that LSP will win over LAR, but not 100%. From lubkin at unreasonable.com Fri Oct 25 12:53:18 2013 From: lubkin at unreasonable.com (David Lubkin) Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 08:53:18 -0400 Subject: [ExI] What cats see Message-ID: <201310251335.r9PDYkRX004502@andromeda.ziaspace.com> This is great. Except I always want more. How about an app for smartphone, smart glasses, and desktop that shows a stored image or video, or live camera feed, as it would appear to any of a wide range of species? Including (for sf writers and scientists) an advanced mode that lets you define your own custom species. Someone do this. Mention me. Throw me a few bucks. -- David. From anders at aleph.se Fri Oct 25 14:12:42 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 16:12:42 +0200 Subject: [ExI] The Actual Visionary of the Future In-Reply-To: <20131025133031.GL10405@leitl.org> References: <20131025133031.GL10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <526A7C5A.1000803@aleph.se> On 2013-10-25 15:30, Eugen Leitl wrote: > LAR is not just limited in time, but also in scope. Exponential > processes are the exception, rather than the rule. And that exception > never lasts long. In a sense they are ubiquitous, since they represent the transition from one metastable state to another. Look carefully at punctuated equilibrium and you will see plenty of tiny exponentials as state B replaces state A at an exponential pace (and then slow exponentially, making a rapid sigmoid). Whether you say they are rare or not depends on what you count: events or moments. *Ongoing* chains of sigmoids making large scale exponentials is a more daring prediction from the LAR people. If that is true for our era, it might simply represent that we are in the phase transition from one stable state (unmanaged matter) to another stable state (managed matter). Given that it happens fairly early in the universe's expected history it might just be a nucleation transition. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Fri Oct 25 14:20:25 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 16:20:25 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Tracking your internet browsing In-Reply-To: References: <20131025105547.GI10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <526A7E29.6010300@aleph.se> On 2013-10-25 13:05, BillK wrote: > Although new browser 'fingerprinting' techniques are being tested to > do tracking without using cookies. (And ways round that are also being > developed). I am using a plugin that switches the user agent identification randomly. And two different ones that surfs/searches randomly. This adds some confusion. > It's an ongoing war! :) Not really. It is a struggle between companies that want to track data and annoying users like me that generate a lot of chaff that reduce the data mining clarity - about me, in certain dimensions. It does not affect the average user (who does not care much), the average analytics customer (who doesn't want to sell stuff specifically to people like me) and hence not to the average analytics company. Now if somebody spread malware that did adversarial data mining to salt analytics databases, then it would be war. Or at least a guerilla conflict. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From eugen at leitl.org Fri Oct 25 14:28:28 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 16:28:28 +0200 Subject: [ExI] The Actual Visionary of the Future In-Reply-To: <526A7C5A.1000803@aleph.se> References: <20131025133031.GL10405@leitl.org> <526A7C5A.1000803@aleph.se> Message-ID: <20131025142828.GO10405@leitl.org> On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 04:12:42PM +0200, Anders Sandberg wrote: > In a sense they are ubiquitous, since they represent the transition > from one metastable state to another. Look carefully at punctuated > equilibrium and you will see plenty of tiny exponentials as state B > replaces state A at an exponential pace (and then slow > exponentially, making a rapid sigmoid). Whether you say they are > rare or not depends on what you count: events or moments. You're applying this to far wider scope than I intended (a couple centuries if not decades), but even so, this is then limited to one observation point: this particular planet. It has seen zero exponentials which carried over significant times. Everything was a sigmoid. > *Ongoing* chains of sigmoids making large scale exponentials is a Anything exponential involving energy and atoms rapidly runs out of energy and/or atoms, and/or punches a hole into spacetime. We celebrated Avogadro day a couple days ago, but even a mole of people is very far away from infinity. > more daring prediction from the LAR people. If that is true for our > era, it might simply represent that we are in the phase transition > from one stable state (unmanaged matter) to another stable state > (managed matter). Given that it happens fairly early in the I think we're managing the transition very poorly, so far. I'm particular to borderline advanced technology and livable environments. It would be a pity if something happened to it. > universe's expected history it might just be a nucleation > transition. We'd better not fuck up this here nucleation event. The universe is counting on us not to. From johnkclark at gmail.com Fri Oct 25 14:36:02 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 10:36:02 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: <080701ced10f$1ab642f0$5022c8d0$@att.net> References: <01d801ceca8c$9449cda0$bcdd68e0$@att.net> <02a401ceca96$cd3cc4a0$67b64de0$@att.net> <037201cecb8c$4428af20$cc7a0d60$@att.net> <011501cecc66$91421280$b3c63780$@att.net> <011c01cece93$0ac21910$20464b30$@att.net> <035701cecf50$4b6cd500$e2467f00$@att.net> <028501ced01d$4a7195f0$df54c1d0$@att.net> <080701ced10f$1ab642f0$5022c8d0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Oct 24, 2013 at 7:16 PM, spike wrote: >> It's too late for that, YOU ALREADY BOUGHT IT! >> > > > This is a tax bill which does not conform to the requirements of article > 1 section 7 clause 1. We have never already bought it and we are not > already buying it now. > Although it will come as a big surprise to the Tea Party the fact is that there are other things in the world than Obamacare, and the pronoun ?it? that I used above does NOT refer to Obamacare, ?it" refers to all the bills for all the stuff that you already voted to buy that would be declared overdue in just 90 minutes. > The house has never bought the ACA opt-out penalty as a tax. Reasoning: > the ACA originated in the Senate and was passed into law on 30 March 2010 > [...] However, they confirmed that the individual mandate is legal if it > is declared a tax, and the fed can levy a tax under the 16th amendment. So > now [...] > Spike, I never said what the Republicans were doing was unconstitutional, I said it was astoundingly stupid and irresponsible. And there are other things happening in the world, this obsession over Obamacare is counterproductive; when people see a very unpopular organization like the Tea Party (that has become dramatically more unpopular in the last 30 days) hate something that much they figure it can?t be all bad. As for me I no longer much care if Obamacare is a good idea or bad because the significance of the entire issue is dwarfed by the looming menace of default and the slack jawed stupidity that almost caused that to happen and still might in January. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Fri Oct 25 14:46:15 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 16:46:15 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Tracking your internet browsing In-Reply-To: <526A7E29.6010300@aleph.se> References: <20131025105547.GI10405@leitl.org> <526A7E29.6010300@aleph.se> Message-ID: <20131025144615.GP10405@leitl.org> On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 04:20:25PM +0200, Anders Sandberg wrote: > I am using a plugin that switches the user agent identification > randomly. And two different ones that surfs/searches randomly. This > adds some confusion. I'm afraid this is no protection at all. > >It's an ongoing war! :) > > Not really. It is a struggle between companies that want to track > data and annoying users like me that generate a lot of chaff that I have a fair chance of hiding from companies. I have very little chance of intelligence agencies missing even a single significant potential troublemaker. If you're worried if you qualify, yep, you definitely do. And the nail that sticks out gets hammered, eventually. The chilling effect is fully intended. > reduce the data mining clarity - about me, in certain dimensions. It > does not affect the average user (who does not care much), the > average analytics customer (who doesn't want to sell stuff > specifically to people like me) and hence not to the average > analytics company. > > Now if somebody spread malware that did adversarial data mining to > salt analytics databases, then it would be war. Or at least a > guerilla conflict. I have a few ideas of hostile acts. Building provably secure code, open trusted hardware, keeping user-side secrets in hardened comparments, building global distributed cryptographic file storage, decentralized currencies, decentralized energy production and fabrication, making decentralized global networks operated and end by end users, fabrication from open source design depositories. Try being a mere security hacker these days, and count the ways of how you're treated specially. Now consider becoming a potential large scale disruptor e.g. by building a P2P banking infrastructure, and see how much trouble that will get you. I've seen people caught in such small guerilla conflicts. It can make your life quite difficult. Do something big, and you better be off the radar, all the time. From taxakis at gmail.com Fri Oct 25 08:22:21 2013 From: taxakis at gmail.com (taxakis) Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 10:22:21 +0200 Subject: [ExI] europeans say yanks are spying In-Reply-To: <20131025065221.GL10405@leitl.org> References: <05e001ced0c7$9c7c1550$d5743ff0$@att.net> <5269A866.2070109@aleph.se> <20131025065221.GL10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <01d101ced15b$540bed60$fc23c820$@com> I couldn't have said it better, Eugen. Staged crap. The entire debate is crafted by spin-doctors, wittingly and eagerly assisted by cash seeking press. /t > -----Original Message----- > From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat- > bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Eugen Leitl > Sent: Friday, October 25, 2013 8:52 AM > To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > Subject: Re: [ExI] europeans say yanks are spying > > On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 12:08:22AM +0100, Anders Sandberg wrote: > > > Of course intelligence agencies are up to a lot of surveillance of > > friends and foes. But there are presumably certain gentlemen's > > agreements about what Is Not Done. Flouting these are not just > > embarrassments, they are signs that a government is no longer in full > > control over their agencies. > > This is a common narrative, but I doubt it ever was true. > Some countries are little more than US vassals -- occupied Germany would > be a good example (Sweden, the sixth's eye, another -- witness the > Assange charade, for instance -- and last, but not least the UKUSA > members). > > Do you think BND has installed the surveillance capacity in Germany? It's > an open secret NSA is operating all the sigint, and throwing the three > German intelligence services a few information scraps from their table. > The only gentlemen's agreements exist between national intelligence > services, where there are no formal (secret, of course) obligations to > collect and share. > > Why do you think there are US drones over Bavaria, officially limited to > certain flight corridors? > And that Germany can't train their own military pilots but leave it to > the US? Allies, yeah, right. > > > I think the US is seriously losing allies right now. Worse, we are > > seeing further breakdown of an international system that - while never > > perfect - at least kept trust and interaction habits functional. > > Was that any trust to start with? The mix of economic and outright > petrodollar-maintenance warfare seem to keep the "partners" firmly on the > leash. > > What we're seeing it little more than kabuki theatre, played for the > masses in managed democracies. > Any outrage is staged, or comes from real ignorance (of course, neither > interpretation is favorable, it it comes from our designated leaders). > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From cvanderwall14 at gmail.com Fri Oct 25 00:10:32 2013 From: cvanderwall14 at gmail.com (Christian Vanderwall) Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 17:10:32 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Dawn of Autonomous Corporations In-Reply-To: <5269A912.4000106@libero.it> References: <5269A912.4000106@libero.it> Message-ID: The first autonomous corporation may very well be created with profit as a motivator, but if a creator of an autonomous corporation built it in a way that allowed them to extract profit without working it would defeat the purpose. Another developer would be able to create a more efficient copy of that corporation by foregoing the extraction of profits. I think there are plenty of reasons why one would want to create an autonomous corporation besides profiting directly: To provide oneself with steady, well paid employment. Depending on its structure and function, an autonomous corporation might still need humans to complete work. For example, a web developer, or group of developers might create an autonomous web development firm. This autonomous web development firm would need advanced algorithms in order to function independent of any management, but you can imagine how it could work. Employees are hired and fired algorithmically. Clients posts jobs, and developers are assigned to those jobs. Because there is no management running the company, developers would keep more of the profits. To solve a personal pain point. Someone might want food delivered to their home, but feel that the existing human run options are too expensive. To fix this, they create an autonomous corporation that delivers food with self driving cars, allowing them to get their food delivered for the lowest possible price (they would pay price of the food + costs of delivery) For fun. I would not be surprised if someone built an autonomous corporation that directly competes with a major existing corporation just to see if they could put that corporation out of business. Christian On Thu, Oct 24, 2013 at 4:11 PM, Mirco Romanato wrote: > Il 24/10/2013 17:52, Kelly Anderson ha scritto: > > On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 9:53 PM, Christian Vanderwall > > > wrote: > > > > http://btcgeek.com/dawn-of-autonomous-corporations/ > > > > Thoughts? > > > > > > Christian, My thought is that this is an amazing concept. > > > > My second thought is how would you incentivize someone to start building > > such a beastie. > > Profit will incentivize one. > > The programmer can programmatically code the corporation so it will give > profits to someone. > > Mirco > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Fri Oct 25 15:52:51 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 08:52:51 -0700 Subject: [ExI] europeans say yanks are spying In-Reply-To: <20131025065221.GL10405@leitl.org> References: <05e001ced0c7$9c7c1550$d5743ff0$@att.net> <5269A866.2070109@aleph.se> <20131025065221.GL10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <01bc01ced19a$43a1d090$cae571b0$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Eugen Leitl >...Subject: Re: [ExI] europeans say yanks are spying On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 12:08:22AM +0100, Anders Sandberg wrote: >>... Of course intelligence agencies are up to a lot of surveillance... >> ... they are signs that a government is no longer in full control over their agencies. >...This is a common narrative, but I doubt it ever was true. _______________________________________________ Both the IRS and the NSA are under the executive branch purview. Obama told us last week that he learned the HealthCare.gov site is catastrophe from reading it in the newspaper. That story sounded familiar. Then I recalled he told us he first learned about the IRS targeting his political adversaries (the party which controls the house of reps) from a newspaper. He learned about gun running to Mexico that way too. And the DoJ scandal, and the NSA snooping. This represents either an attempted cover-up or an epic breakdown in the executive branch command and control structure. Just for fun, take a listen to Jon Stewart's take on it, the first video of the two: http://www.mediaite.com/tv/stewart-tears-apart-obama-you-cant-keep-saying-yo u-found-out-about-news-at-the-same-time-as-us/ Why that grumpy old conservative, he probably sneaks away to Tea Party meetings in disguise. spike From painlord2k at libero.it Fri Oct 25 16:11:05 2013 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 18:11:05 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: References: <037201cecb8c$4428af20$cc7a0d60$@att.net> <011501cecc66$91421280$b3c63780$@att.net> <011c01cece93$0ac21910$20464b30$@att.net> <035701cecf50$4b6cd500$e2467f00$@att.net> <028501ced01d$4a7195f0$df54c1d0$@att.net> <080701ced10f$1ab642f0$5022c8d0$@att.net> Message-ID: <526A9819.9080402@libero.it> Il 25/10/2013 16:36, John Clark ha scritto: > Although it will come as a big surprise to the Tea Party the fact is > that there are other things in the world than Obamacare, and the pronoun > ?it? that I used above does NOT refer to Obamacare, ?it" refers to all > the bills for all the stuff that you already voted to buy that would be > declared overdue in just 90 minutes. The question is: It is this debt (or part of it) odious? Was it done with the only and clear goal to help the People of the US? OR Was it done with the only and clear goal to enrich the politicks and their cronies? The US government already defaulted when Nixon (not his fault) closed the gold window. So, no, the US government is used to default on his obligation. It defaulted when it devalued the Fed Note against gold under FDR. By the way, defaulting is not the end of the world, just the end of cheap credit. Because if you default, there are two parties in the wrong: you for not paying your dues and they for trusting you. it is also a moral responsibility to give loan only to people able to repay them in full in the predetermined time. But, are the US (or any government in this world) able to pay their debts in full without receiving additional loans? I do not suppose so. Not the US, not Germany, not Italy. As spike suggested, better to default now on 10% of the debts than default in three months on 30% or the next year for 100% of the debt. It is better for the US and it is better for the creditors. Creditors are reasonable and rationale actors if the debtor is reasonable and rationale. The reality of the fact is the Federal Reserve own 30% of the Federal debt. If China and Japan stop buying Treasury Bills and start selling them, the Fed will become the owner of the 60% of the debt of the Federal Government. And to do so, they would need to print a lot of US currency. And China and Japan would buy anything and probably everything not nailed down in the US and would bring it home. They would buy factories, farmland, timberland, milk, bread, copper, gold, silver, whatever (even good looking women). > Spike, I never said what the Republicans were doing was > unconstitutional, I said it was astoundingly stupid and irresponsible. As much as implementing a mandate that do not work, can not work and will not work? The system is designed to fail (because the insurers will be forced to default (the people signing early and willingly is the heavy users, the people signing later and preferring to pay the penalty will be the healthy) or the insured will be unable to pay the REAL prices of the insurance (because there are a lot of loopholes to raise the payment). Could you explain me why males must have maternity coverage under Obamacare? Will they be able to become pregnant if the sign Obamacare? And they will need a female to impregnate them? > As for me I no longer much care if Obamacare is a good > idea or bad because the significance of the entire issue is dwarfed by > the looming menace of default and the slack jawed stupidity that almost > caused that to happen and still might in January. Default is not a menace, it is a certain. The US will default because it will not pay the T-bill or because it will pay them with worthless pieces of paper. Mirco From anders at aleph.se Fri Oct 25 16:13:55 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 18:13:55 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Oxford Martin Commission for Future Generations In-Reply-To: <5269AB10.8030700@aleph.se> References: <5269AB10.8030700@aleph.se> Message-ID: <526A98C3.8010409@aleph.se> OK, continuing advertising the local produce: http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/publications/view/1349 Nano-solutions for the 21st Century, by Eric Drexler, Dennis Pamlin How to package the vision in a palatable form. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Fri Oct 25 16:29:43 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 18:29:43 +0200 Subject: [ExI] chilling effects In-Reply-To: <20131025144615.GP10405@leitl.org> References: <20131025105547.GI10405@leitl.org> <526A7E29.6010300@aleph.se> <20131025144615.GP10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <526A9C77.7020209@aleph.se> On 2013-10-25 16:46, Eugen Leitl wrote: > I have a fair chance of hiding from companies. I have very little > chance of intelligence agencies missing even a single significant > potential troublemaker. If you're worried if you qualify, yep, > you definitely do. And the nail that sticks out gets hammered, > eventually. The chilling effect is fully intended. I am starting to think a lot of chilling effects are home-made too. A while ago a friend told me in all sincerity that I must not criticise stupid aspects of Islam publicly, because I would be at a risk for violence. Yes, criticising a view that has some violent adherents does up your risk, but when you do the numbers it is clear that the actual risk is minuscule. Human risk biases do the real job here: a few well-published beheadings or FBI raids, and the availability heuristic will make people think there are jihadists and spooks around every corner. But there is a more insidious aspect: our drive for attention and importance makes us brew chilling effects. A lot of people I meet deal with things that are fairly important and controversial. But most of what they do is, let's face it, boring low social status research or activism. In that situation it is easy to make what you do more impressive by warning about how the Powers That Be are against it and will stop at nothing in order to prevent their work. It is an easy claim (especially when it has *some* grain of truth), slots into paranoia receptors, and gives the desired admiration for bravery. But it also serves to convince a lot of people that dealing with the whole area is scary and dangerous, best left to the James Bond hacktivist. Most dire warnings I hear about how the Powers are doing sinister things seem to be more about getting attention and playing human social games than actual intel. And they do damage by their chilling effects - I have met people who are afraid of being associated with cryptography or working for better intelligence oversight because they do believe the talk. That talk was not produced by psyops spooks, but bona fide crypto-activists. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Fri Oct 25 16:42:03 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 18:42:03 +0200 Subject: [ExI] A Gedanken Rational Eugenics Experiment (AGREE) In-Reply-To: <69C0136E-5F99-4C65-9D86-70EC38F8E55F@me.com> References: <69C0136E-5F99-4C65-9D86-70EC38F8E55F@me.com> Message-ID: <526A9F5B.4040804@aleph.se> On 2013-10-25 09:22, Omar Rahman wrote: > > Their whole notion of 'national IQ' is so deeply flawed it is > laughable. Just looking at and attempting to account for the bias in > IQ tests is difficult enough, but rubbing that together with a notion > of GDP which is connected to a fiat currency produces a rich creamy > mousse of pure bullshit. Hmm, you have a population of people. You measure something (IQ, weight, liking of icecream). Of course there is a group mean, no matter how big the group is. And that group mean might very well be a decent predictor of things when comparing to other groups even if the test is lousy. While Lynn and Vahanen's original study was pretty crappy, their data does work surprisingly well as a predictor of a lot of things (and some temporal changes seem to be good predictors of changes in other important variables). That is in itself curious, even if one does not think they are measuring real intelligence differences. Newer and better data seem to follow the same pattern, whatever it means. > If you see 'data' indicating that the AVERAGE CITIZEN OF EQUATORIAL > GUINEA IS SEVERELY MENTALLY RETARDED, the AVERAGE CITIZEN mind you, > and you make any other conclusion than your data being horribly > horribly wrong then well... Actually, measures of state IQs in the US also show that some states are retarded. Is that a reason to say that those differences do not tell us *anything*, or to conclude that maybe state IQ is not really the same thing as an individual person's IQ? -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Fri Oct 25 17:48:25 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 11:48:25 -0600 Subject: [ExI] The Actual Visionary of the Future In-Reply-To: <20131025133031.GL10405@leitl.org> References: <20131025133031.GL10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 7:30 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 02:21:35PM +0200, Tomaz Kristan wrote: > > > Me, too! I know LAR is in a disagreement with the light speed principle. > > Eventually they'll meet in a duel. > > LAR is not just limited in time, but also in scope. Exponential > processes are the exception, rather than the rule. And that > exception never lasts long. > Even Ray doesn't expect Moore's Law to run indefinitely. In his book TSIN, he talks about the ultimate physical limitations of computing with matter. If we stay on the current track, as Ray predicts, we will hit limitations of physics in a dozen decades or so. The interesting point for humanity is that point puts computers at many billions of times smarter than us in a relatively short time frame compared to the ultimate limits. I know you MUST believe that computers will continue to get faster, even if they don't quite keep up the doubling pace. Right? > The trouble with cornucopians like Kurzweil is that they > cheerfully and cherrypickingly apply LAR to anything under > the sun, and never admit it when reality disproves them. > I'd be happy to admit when reality disproves anything. Ray has never applied LAR to oil seeking technology, for example, as it just doesn't apply. However, in a sense it does apply. We do get some percent better at extracting what's left each year. That doesn't mean we get an exponential amount of oil, since there's a limited amount of the stuff. But it does mean that we get exponentially better at finding what's left (note that this curve is likely much more gentle than computing, with a doubling of reserves we can get at maybe every 20 or 50 years. I don't know.) > This is the opposite of science. > It is a part of science, the hypothesis part. LAR applied to computing available per dollar in particular is a hypothesis formed in the mid 1960s. As far as I know, we are still more or less on that track, though they have had to cheat with multiple cores, which does make writing software that takes advantage of it much more difficult. For the next few years, we can safely believe that computers will continue to get cheaper. Maybe for the next fifty years, but who knows. For sure for the next 5 though. Intel has it all mapped out. > We've had a number of such people, which turned out a liability > to transhumanism in the end. Our handicap is already sufficiently > high, we don't need such monkeys on our back. > How is being pessimistic about the future more helpful? -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From brent.allsop at canonizer.com Fri Oct 25 18:11:55 2013 From: brent.allsop at canonizer.com (Brent Allsop) Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 12:11:55 -0600 Subject: [ExI] What cats see In-Reply-To: <201310251335.r9PDYkRX004502@andromeda.ziaspace.com> References: <201310251335.r9PDYkRX004502@andromeda.ziaspace.com> Message-ID: <526AB46B.5030501@canonizer.com> That's kind of interesting. But what is it qualitatively like? Surely cat's don't represent the colors with the same elemental qualities I do. That's what I want to effing know. Oh, and I want to know what it is like for a tetrachromat (Most of us are trichromats), who experiences colors I've never experienced before, also. Why is nobody asking that far more important question? What is reality qualitatively like? Surely the discovery of what has an elemental redness quality in physics will be the greatest discovery in physics, ever! If people weren't so blind to this, surely we'd have discovered this long before now. Everyone, if you are interested in this, please sign the online petition (join at least the Representational Qualia Theory camp here: http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/88/6 ) so we can finally communicate to the world how important this is, and finally figure it out. Brent Allsop On 10/25/2013 6:53 AM, David Lubkin wrote: > > > This is great. Except I always want more. How about an app for > smartphone, smart glasses, and desktop that shows a stored image or > video, or live camera feed, as it would appear to any of a wide range > of species? Including (for sf writers and scientists) an advanced mode > that lets you define your own custom species. > > Someone do this. Mention me. Throw me a few bucks. > > > -- David. > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From msd001 at gmail.com Fri Oct 25 18:19:19 2013 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 14:19:19 -0400 Subject: [ExI] What cats see In-Reply-To: <526AB46B.5030501@canonizer.com> References: <201310251335.r9PDYkRX004502@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <526AB46B.5030501@canonizer.com> Message-ID: On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 2:11 PM, Brent Allsop wrote: > That's kind of interesting. But what is it qualitatively like? Surely > cat's don't represent the colors with the same elemental qualities I do. > That's what I want to effing know. > > Oh, and I want to know what it is like for a tetrachromat (Most of us are > trichromats), who experiences colors I've never experienced before, also. > > Why is nobody asking that far more important question? What is reality > qualitatively like? Surely the discovery of what has an elemental redness > quality in physics will be the greatest discovery in physics, ever! If > people weren't so blind to this, surely we'd have discovered this long > before now. > > Everyone, if you are interested in this, please sign the online petition > (join at least the Representational Qualia Theory camp here: > http://canonizer.com/topic.**asp/88/6) so we can finally communicate to the world how important this is, and > finally figure it out. Not sure about a cat, but Nagel's already discussed what it's like to be a bat - right? (http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/animal-minds/201202/what-is-it-be-bat) Perhaps we aren't so "blind" as confused? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Fri Oct 25 18:08:20 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 11:08:20 -0700 Subject: [ExI] inernet whiffenpoof, was: RE: Tracking your internet browsing Message-ID: <029a01ced1ad$30e05a40$92a10ec0$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg >... It is a struggle between companies that want to track data and annoying users like me that generate a lot of chaff that reduce the data mining clarity ...--Dr Anders Sandberg _______________________________________________ Cool! Anders how do you do that? I have my ways, but they are clumsy, such as doing random word Google searches and having friends use my email accounts, even sending email with my spike on there, that sort of thing. What I want is some script or app which starts up if the computer is idle for about 10 minutes, then randomly generates a few words, does a google search, picks a random hit from the choices 10 through 20, grabs about four or five random words from that site and repeats a search on those words, always ignoring the top site or any site which is in the recently visited list. It should repeat the process about every three to five minute randomly chosen time intervals, around the clock. Wouldn't that scheme make it impossible to take someone's websearch history for use as an advertisement magnet? What about the recent case where a web search history was used as evidence in court? Could not some evil Tea Party candidate use website search history to discourage or defame a political opponent? This group is crawling with script gurus. Someone help out the world here. My reward to you is my sincere best wishes forever or until I forget. spike From tara at taramayastales.com Fri Oct 25 18:26:05 2013 From: tara at taramayastales.com (Tara Maya) Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 11:26:05 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Life extension In-Reply-To: References: <00ea01cece8c$8eba9960$ac2fcc20$@att.net> <20131022092807.GJ10405@leitl.org> <52667964.9040008@aleph.se> <5266E3B5.7060201@aleph.se> Message-ID: <6624879A-1444-41C5-8DBB-39FCF4294DC1@taramayastales.com> Lots of people don't want to be immortal. But nobody wants to die. I really think this is a classic case of the consumer not knowing they want something until they actually see it for sale. If you could box "Don't Die Today" or "Youth and Vigor" in a box and sell it, people would buy. Eternal Youth, I think, would indeed be a better selling point than immortality per se. Tara Maya Blog | Twitter | Facebook | Amazon | Goodreads On Oct 25, 2013, at 12:08 AM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > Even if immortality were cheap and easy and available today, it still probably wouldn't be for everyone - maybe not even for most people. One would have to consciously adopt a mindset of accepting and adapting the new ways. Otherwise one's mind would die, soon (within some years) followed by one's body. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Fri Oct 25 18:32:26 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 20:32:26 +0200 Subject: [ExI] chilling effects In-Reply-To: <526A9C77.7020209@aleph.se> References: <20131025105547.GI10405@leitl.org> <526A7E29.6010300@aleph.se> <20131025144615.GP10405@leitl.org> <526A9C77.7020209@aleph.se> Message-ID: <20131025183226.GS10405@leitl.org> On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 06:29:43PM +0200, Anders Sandberg wrote: > But there is a more insidious aspect: our drive for attention and > importance makes us brew chilling effects. A lot of people I meet > deal with things that are fairly important and controversial. But > most of what they do is, let's face it, boring low social status Anders, do you remember Assange? He used to post to this list. Have you received email from him? Encrypted email? Are you one one or two hops away from people that are known targets? Have you received packages from any such? Have you had any significant exposure to Bitcoin circles? Did you travel to Bitcoin conferences as a speaker? Are you a computer security researcher? Are you a member of political group even remotely considered daring, or are you connected to people like that? Do you travel a lot, into diverse countries? &c&c If any of these apply, consider yourself a likely target for telco surveillance. This is not conjecture. We have multiple data points for such, so it's robust evidence. > research or activism. In that situation it is easy to make what you > do more impressive by warning about how the Powers That Be are > against it and will stop at nothing in order to prevent their work. > It is an easy claim (especially when it has *some* grain of truth), > slots into paranoia receptors, and gives the desired admiration for > bravery. But it also serves to convince a lot of people that dealing > with the whole area is scary and dangerous, best left to the James > Bond hacktivist. The very opposite: they're not Beria. You will not be deported to the gulags, at least not just yet. Just make sure you travel with disposable, clean electronics, and be prepared to be denied entry. Not knowing this would be foolish. Letting you get all hot and flustered about it would be even more foolish. Not getting hopping mad about it, and trying to make a difference is the most foolish at all. > Most dire warnings I hear about how the Powers are doing sinister > things seem to be more about getting attention and playing human > social games than actual intel. And they do damage by their chilling > effects - I have met people who are afraid of being associated with > cryptography or working for better intelligence oversight because They have reason to suspicition that this adds a flag that can make a difference in future, but perhaps being flagged a coward stings a bit more. > they do believe the talk. That talk was not produced by psyops > spooks, but bona fide crypto-activists. From brent.allsop at canonizer.com Fri Oct 25 18:37:24 2013 From: brent.allsop at canonizer.com (Brent Allsop) Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 12:37:24 -0600 Subject: [ExI] What cats see In-Reply-To: References: <201310251335.r9PDYkRX004502@andromeda.ziaspace.com> <526AB46B.5030501@canonizer.com> Message-ID: <526ABA64.6060403@canonizer.com> Hi Mike, Nagal was one of the first to ask this all important question with his "what is it like to be a bat?" question You seem very confused at exactly what his question was about. You seem to think he answered this question??? He was pointing out that we are blind to qualities of nature, he was asking the same question I'm asking. But asking it for echolocation, vs light detection, completely confuses everyone about what is qualitatively important. Much better to simply focus on things like my elemental redness quality could be your greenness quality. Think about it for a bit. When I see the strawberry, something in my brain, which has my redness quality to it, is what my brain represents this knowledge of the strawberry with. Tetrachromats represent what they see with 4 colors, and at least some of the light they see is represented with something my brain has never experienced before. It could be a neurotransmitter like glutamate, that has the redness quality I experience. But of course, glutamate reflects white light, so if your brain represents glutamate with something that has a white quality to it (very different than glutamate), you are missing what is all important. That is the essence of the qualia interpretation problem, and why we are effing blind to any qualitative properties in any one else's brain, a bat's brain, or of anything in nature. There is also a good chance that many of us have inverted quale, and so on. Do you have any interested in knowing if your redness is anything like mine? This kind of blind confusion is exactly why the world is completely missing what we should have discovered long ago. This is not a scientific problem, we're already way past the required science required. This is simply an effing communication problem. And achieving the ability to truly effingly communicate must be the greatest achievement in physics, and tell us more about reality, than any other discovery. Brent Allsop On 10/25/2013 12:19 PM, Mike Dougherty wrote: > On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 2:11 PM, Brent Allsop > > wrote: > > That's kind of interesting. But what is it qualitatively like? > Surely cat's don't represent the colors with the same elemental > qualities I do. That's what I want to effing know. > > Oh, and I want to know what it is like for a tetrachromat (Most of > us are trichromats), who experiences colors I've never experienced > before, also. > > Why is nobody asking that far more important question? What is > reality qualitatively like? Surely the discovery of what has an > elemental redness quality in physics will be the greatest > discovery in physics, ever! If people weren't so blind to this, > surely we'd have discovered this long before now. > > Everyone, if you are interested in this, please sign the online > petition (join at least the Representational Qualia Theory camp > here: http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/88/6 ) so we can finally > communicate to the world how important this is, and finally figure > it out. > > > Not sure about a cat, but Nagel's already discussed what it's like to > be a bat - right? > (http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/animal-minds/201202/what-is-it-be-bat) > > Perhaps we aren't so "blind" as confused? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Fri Oct 25 18:42:01 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 20:42:01 +0200 Subject: [ExI] inernet whiffenpoof, was: RE: Tracking your internet browsing In-Reply-To: <029a01ced1ad$30e05a40$92a10ec0$@att.net> References: <029a01ced1ad$30e05a40$92a10ec0$@att.net> Message-ID: <20131025184201.GT10405@leitl.org> On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 11:08:20AM -0700, spike wrote: > Wouldn't that scheme make it impossible to take someone's websearch history > for use as an advertisement magnet? What about the recent case where a web Yes. Do not have a web search history. Download an amnesiac environment like Whonix or Tails, and never, every bother about forgetting to have your shields up when doing battle with the forces of evil. > search history was used as evidence in court? Could not some evil Tea Party > candidate use website search history to discourage or defame a political > opponent? > > This group is crawling with script gurus. Someone help out the world here. This is not a matter of some simple script. But there are appliances like https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Main_Page or https://tails.boum.org/ > My reward to you is my sincere best wishes forever or until I forget. From pharos at gmail.com Fri Oct 25 19:07:45 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 20:07:45 +0100 Subject: [ExI] inernet whiffenpoof, was: RE: Tracking your internet browsing In-Reply-To: <029a01ced1ad$30e05a40$92a10ec0$@att.net> References: <029a01ced1ad$30e05a40$92a10ec0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 7:08 PM, spike wrote: > Cool! Anders how do you do that? I have my ways, but they are clumsy, such > as doing random word Google searches and having friends use my email > accounts, even sending email with my spike on there, that sort of thing. > What I want is some script or app which starts up if the computer is idle > for about 10 minutes, then randomly generates a few words, does a google > search, picks a random hit from the choices 10 through 20, grabs about four > or five random words from that site and repeats a search on those words, > always ignoring the top site or any site which is in the recently visited > list. > > It should repeat the process about every three to five minute randomly > chosen time intervals, around the clock. > > Wouldn't that scheme make it impossible to take someone's websearch history > for use as an advertisement magnet? What about the recent case where a web > search history was used as evidence in court? Could not some evil Tea Party > candidate use website search history to discourage or defame a political > opponent? > Eugen's suggestion is best. Just don't have a search history at all. But have a read through the Privacy and Security extensions for Firefox and install those you like. Trackerblock stops ad companies tracking you. TrackMeNot runs in Firefox and Chrome as a low-priority background process that periodically issues randomized search-queries to popular search engines, e.g., AOL, Yahoo!, Google, and Bing. It hides users' actual search trails in a cloud of 'ghost' queries, significantly increasing the difficulty of aggregating such data into accurate or identifying user profiles. To better simulate user behavior TrackMeNot uses a dynamic query mechanism to 'evolve' each client (uniquely) over time, parsing the results of its searches for 'logical' future query terms with which to replace those already used. There are many others. BillK From spike66 at att.net Fri Oct 25 19:13:18 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 12:13:18 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: <526A9819.9080402@libero.it> References: <037201cecb8c$4428af20$cc7a0d60$@att.net> <011501cecc66$91421280$b3c63780$@att.net> <011c01cece93$0ac21910$20464b30$@att.net> <035701cecf50$4b6cd500$e2467f00$@att.net> <028501ced01d$4a7195f0$df54c1d0$@att.net> <080701ced10f$1ab642f0$5022c8d0$@att.net> <526A9819.9080402@libero.it> Message-ID: <030101ced1b6$443a2f40$ccae8dc0$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Mirco Romanato Subject: Re: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" Il 25/10/2013 16:36, John Clark ha scritto: >>... Although it will come as a big surprise to the Tea Party the fact is > that there are other things in the world than Obamacare, and the > pronoun "it" that I used above does NOT refer to Obamacare, "it" > refers to all the bills for all the stuff that you already voted to > buy that would be declared overdue in just 90 minutes... Ja very well. The reason for the laser focus on ObamaCare is that it is an enormous new entitlement that even the casual observer can see is fundamentally flawed in concept. It is dependent on being subsidized by young males, who will not carry that load. If a young male has a couple hundred extra dollars a month, he will use it to buy a faster motorcycle. That's what I did when I was that age, and I am one of the more cautious types. Honestly this isn't difficult to figure out what happened here. The government sold one party on a system with a price tag of 900 some billion. That price has risen steadily. It was premised on a recovery that never happened, was passed without a single minority party vote, declared a tax after the fact when it was sold as not a tax, placing it under the control of the party which voted in perfect unison against it. The final disagreement which took us down to the (phony) 90 minutes to midnight showdown was a disagreement over whether the mandate could be delayed, just delayed! The president's party said no. Now the president's party is not so sure that was a good idea. Scratch that, now they are proposing delaying the individual mandate, at least for a few months, claiming the website will be fixed by the first of November they promise. Hmmmmm. However, the government still intends to use what should be a private transaction as a means of harvesting personal data. Double hmmmm. They still intend to ask questions that the private citizen does not want the government to know. Triple hmmmmm. Hint, you silly goofs in Washington: STOP THAT! Is it not perfectly obvious that it is time to start over with a clean sheet of paper? Give up this arrogant notion of single party rule; Americans have political parties for a reason: as a check on government power. We want at least two parties, with different ideas. How about if the two mainstream parties just make a deal with the Tea Party: we delay this train wreck, you guys give us more borrowing space, deal? >...By the way, defaulting is not the end of the world, just the end of cheap credit... DEAL! Credit shouldn't be as cheap as it is. Make it hurt. >...But, are the US (or any government in this world) able to pay their debts in full without receiving additional loans? I do not suppose so. Not the US, not Germany, not Italy... Again, I may have a differing and faulty definition of "paying debts." Borrowing money to pay a debt isn't paying a debt. It is rearranging debt. >...As spike suggested, better to default now on 10% of the debts than default in three months on 30% or the next year for 100% of the debt... Ja, but I haven't accepted that we need to default. We eventually need to default on Social Security probably, or come up with phony inflation numbers more likely and underpay retirees. But that pain will be at least stretched out. I think my grandfather called it right over 40 years ago: Social Security will eventually be converted into a welfare program, and those with means will get a haircut. >...The reality ...China and Japan would buy anything and probably everything not nailed down in the US and would bring it home... China is already doing that, but not exactly carting anything home. They want to keep it here. The Silicon Valley is seeing more and more suburban residences bought by Chinese national to use as vacation homes. I see them as escape pods as well, just in case something goes seriously wrong in China. I also imagine they make the best bank vaults imaginable: buy a house, rig it with motion detectors and security cameras, pull up part of the carpet, drill a 5 cm diameter hole in the concrete floor, down into the soil beneath, drill down 3 meters, get a PVC pipe, stack the bottom half with platinum coins, cap it, lower it into the hole, put a rubber stopper into the hole countersunk a cm, put bondo in the hole, smooth over, replace carpet. You have just put a couple million dollars worth of metal into a bank vault where no metal detector can find it (recall that concrete floors have metal rebar everywhere) and no one would have any reason to suspect there is a ton of money hidden there. It isn't difficult to see this must be happening: physical gold is steadily disappearing to somewhere, as is physical silver and platinum. But don't take my word for it, go on any Silicon Valley real estate site, pick any random town and look at the names of the buyers (this is public domain info.) Then compare that list with the names of the students enrolled at the local high school. Then ask yourself, Why don't these two lists roughly match? Reason: those perfectly groomed houses in all those ever more quiet neighborhoods and not being used as residences, they are being used as remote emergency bank vaults by mostly Chinese nationals, whose government is still technically communist, and might at any time do what the US has done in the last decade, decide it is tired of having rich people. >...They would buy factories, farmland, timberland, milk, bread, copper, gold, silver, whatever (even good looking women)... SEXIST! They would buy good looking men too. Hey, if the price is right, everything is for sale. >>... Spike, I never said what the Republicans were doing was > unconstitutional, I said it was astoundingly stupid and irresponsible... Ah, thanks for the clarification John. If I had to choose between the two, I'll take Stupid for 500 please Alex. As soon as we allow this big nuclear-armed government off the leash of the constitution, the terms stupid and irresponsible do not begin to describe the consequences. >...the people signing early and willingly is the heavy users... Ja, the zombies. The zombies are frustrated by the failed rollout. >... the people signing later and preferring to pay the penalty will be the Healthy... Ja, the track team. The track team didn't even notice that the site doesn't work; they haven't been there. They aren't going either. If a young man has an extra couple hundred bucks, it will never go to an insurance company, it goes for a faster motorcycle. Or beer. Or dope. Or whores. Or a car that runs more often than the current one. Or food. Or a hundred things a young man will put ahead of buying "Brosurance." This isn't an Onion parody, in fact I flatly challenge the Onion to outdo it for sheer absurdity. This may take the record as the very most misguided and least successful campaign in advertising history: http://gotinsurancecolorado.org/index.php?id=6 Come now. When our bodies are young, they can take a lot of abuse. A day or two later, good as new, no doctors needed. These guys aren't buying. >...Could you explain me why males must have maternity coverage under Obamacare? Sure can Mirco. To subsidize the zombies. >...Will they be able to become pregnant if the sign Obamacare?... No. They will pay the bills of those who do, and they BETTER by god pay up, or they will face a hypothetical TAX penalty of 95 dollars a year! >...And they will need a female to impregnate them? I am sure they will try that. >>... As for me I no longer much care if Obamacare is a good idea or bad > because the significance of the entire issue is dwarfed by the looming > menace of default and the slack jawed stupidity that almost > caused that to happen and still might in January... John It is always a bad idea to pass any major legislation without at least some buy-in from the minority party; that causes all kinds of mischief as we have seen. It can never be fixed. >...Default is not a menace, it is a certain...Mirco _______________________________________________ Mirco I have never accepted that, at least not completely. We will likely partially default on Social Security by converting it to a welfare program. But that was as foreseeable as the sunrise on a calm sea: my grandfather called it an obvious Ponzi scheme in 1972. The government borrowed the money and spent it, without a clear plan for repayment, betting on growth rates we haven't seen since the late 90s, many of which were based on phony business models and irrational exuberance. We can pay the Chinese and the Japanese for now, even though our debt to Japan alone comes to over nine thousand dollars for each man, woman and child in that nation. Oops scratch that, Japan doesn't really have many children anymore. We owe Japan a Toyota for each married couple, which constitutes a family for the most part in that ageing nation. All is not lost for America. As long as we have a rising political party which is urging we stand and fight, rather than passively walk off the debt cliff, all is not lost. Much is lost, but not all. spike From eugen at leitl.org Fri Oct 25 19:51:15 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 21:51:15 +0200 Subject: [ExI] The Actual Visionary of the Future In-Reply-To: References: <20131025133031.GL10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20131025195114.GU10405@leitl.org> On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 11:48:25AM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > Even Ray doesn't expect Moore's Law to run indefinitely. In his book TSIN, Ray thinks everything is exponential. > he talks about the ultimate physical limitations of computing with matter. > If we stay on the current track, as Ray predicts, we will hit limitations > of physics in a dozen decades or so. The interesting point for humanity is We are constantly running into limits, but people have a short memory. Nobody remembers the time when the clocks stopped doubling. People forget that hard drives stopped doubling, at least for a short while. People are unaware of finer points like http://postbiota.org/pipermail/tt/2013-October/014179.html > that point puts computers at many billions of times smarter than us in a Many billions times smarter than us, using which metric? > relatively short time frame compared to the ultimate limits. My personal time is very short, probably less than 40 years if I'm lucky. My personal interests lie squarely with a working suspend function, the future better get the resume part right. > I know you MUST believe that computers will continue to get faster, even if > they don't quite keep up the doubling pace. Right? What does faster mean? The only reliable way is a benchmark. The only really relevant benchmark is the one that runs your problem. As such faster never kept up with Moore's law. Moore's law is about affordable transistors, and that one gives you a canvas for your potential. So your gains are less than Moore, and sometimes a lot less. For me personally, the bottleneck in classical (GPGPU is classical) computers is worst-case memory bandwidth. Which is remarkably sucky, if you look it up. Ok. So, now your transistor budget no long doubles in constant time, but that time keeps increasing. It's roughly three years by end of this year, no longer 18 months. Physical feature size limits are close behind, and your Si real state is a 400 mm pizza, max. WSI gives you a factor of two by making yield quantitative, but it wrecks havoc to your computation model, because grain size starts being tiny (less than mm^2), and asks for asynchronous shared-nothing, and did I mention fine-grained? So no TBytes of RAM for your LUT. The next step is FPGA, as in runtime reconfigurable. That *might* give you another factor of 2, or maybe even 4. Stacking is off-Moore, but it will do something, particularly giving cache-like access to your RAM, as long as it's few 10 MBytes max. And then you have to go real 3d, or else there's gap. My guess the gap is somewhere 15-20 years long, but we've got maybe 10 years until saturation curve is pretty damn flat. > > > The trouble with cornucopians like Kurzweil is that they > > cheerfully and cherrypickingly apply LAR to anything under > > the sun, and never admit it when reality disproves them. > > > > I'd be happy to admit when reality disproves anything. Ray has never > applied LAR to oil seeking technology, for example, as it just doesn't He implicitly implied we'll run on 100% of thin-film PV in 16 years. That was 2011, so make that 14 years. This means 4.2 TWp/year just for power in a linear model, nevermind matching synfuel capability (try doubling that, after all is sung and done -- 8 shiny TWp/year). We're not getting the linear model. In fact, we arguably sublinear, see http://cleantechnica.com/2013/10/14/third-quarter-2013-solar-pv-installations-reach-9-gw/ > apply. However, in a sense it does apply. We do get some percent better at > extracting what's left each year. That doesn't mean we get an exponential No, in terms of net energy we're not getting better. We're actually getting worse. > amount of oil, since there's a limited amount of the stuff. But it does > mean that we get exponentially better at finding what's left (note that We're not getting better. We've mapped all the stuff, there are almost no unknown unknowns. And dropping EROEI and even dropping volume (not net energy, volume!) per unit of effort is pretty much the opposite of exponential. Do 40% of decay rate/well/year mean a thing to you? > this curve is likely much more gentle than computing, with a doubling of > reserves we can get at maybe every 20 or 50 years. I don't know.) There are no exponentials in infrastructure. There is an early sigmoidal that looks that way, but we've left that already. > > > This is the opposite of science. > > > > It is a part of science, the hypothesis part. LAR applied to computing > available per dollar in particular is a hypothesis formed in the mid 1960s. > As far as I know, we are still more or less on that track, though they have No, we're not. See benchmarks. > had to cheat with multiple cores, which does make writing software that Multiple core SMP doesn't scale. People who thought multithreading will scale are going to get a nasty surprise. People who expect global coherent caches scaling are going to get a nasty surprise. People who assume global shared memories are a thing are going to get a nasty surprise. People who hear about Amdahl's Law the first time have to stop worrying, and embrace nondeterminism. People who expect reliable systems at hardware level are gonna have a bad time. > takes advantage of it much more difficult. For the next few years, we can > safely believe that computers will continue to get cheaper. Maybe for the > next fifty years, but who knows. For sure for the next 5 though. Intel has > it all mapped out. > > > > We've had a number of such people, which turned out a liability > > to transhumanism in the end. Our handicap is already sufficiently > > high, we don't need such monkeys on our back. > > > > How is being pessimistic about the future more helpful? It obviously isn't. You have to be a realist. The problem with optimists is that they think they're realists. But, unfortunately, they aren't. When in a tough spot, never, ever team up with an optimist. From anders at aleph.se Fri Oct 25 20:25:47 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 22:25:47 +0200 Subject: [ExI] chilling effects In-Reply-To: <20131025183226.GS10405@leitl.org> References: <20131025105547.GI10405@leitl.org> <526A7E29.6010300@aleph.se> <20131025144615.GP10405@leitl.org> <526A9C77.7020209@aleph.se> <20131025183226.GS10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <526AD3CB.9000807@aleph.se> On 2013-10-25 20:32, Eugen Leitl wrote: > Anders, do you remember Assange? He used to post to this list. > Have you received email from him? Encrypted email? Are you one > one or two hops away from people that are known targets? Have you > received packages from any such? Have you had any significant > exposure to Bitcoin circles? Did you travel to Bitcoin conferences > as a speaker? Are you a computer security researcher? Are you > a member of political group even remotely considered daring, > or are you connected to people like that? Do you travel a lot, > into diverse countries? &c&c > > If any of these apply, consider yourself a likely target for > telco surveillance. Sure. I also get invited to speak to the US and UK government. If they *didn't* check me out, they would be rather remiss. You wouldn't want one of the Bad Guys to visit the MoD or NSC shindig, right? In fact, one intriguing issue is government self-surveillance. When the Army invites me to a meeting, no doubt the NSA has to check out the people attending - they are dealing with somebody in the network of "interesting" people! Ah, yes, obvious Swedish military and crazy libertarian connections, hey - double second-order links to Assange! ...wait, a third order link to *Saddam*?! And vice versa, by going to that meeting I am now by definition an "interesting" person and my government contacts are worth checking out a bit more... The problem is of course to rein in the spread of who to keep tabs on - and big data is providing its own apparent solution: "all of them". Plus that large scale trawling will tend to pick up lots of things just by default. Which actually means that various agencies are gathering data other agencies would rather not have gathered. Just ask David Petraeus. At least humans know better than to spy on the boss, but the software can't tell the president apart from another suspiciously well-connected person who is meeting with shady people. Add to this the normal craziness of intelligence ( http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/10/spook-century.html ) and there is plenty of potential for tragicomedy. But the upshot of this is not that I should keep silent: *it doesn't matter*. I am in this mess whatever I do, even if I follow the best opsec and sigint practice. The risk of me being targeted is less affected by my actual activities and more affected by arbitrary group memberships. >> Most dire warnings I hear about how the Powers are doing sinister >> things seem to be more about getting attention and playing human >> social games than actual intel. And they do damage by their chilling >> effects - I have met people who are afraid of being associated with >> cryptography or working for better intelligence oversight because > They have reason to suspicition that this adds a flag that can > make a difference in future, but perhaps being flagged a coward > stings a bit more. The most worrisome effect is that a certain kind of people take those putative flags very seriously, and deliberately live amazingly bland lives. You can see the young politicians who have nearly no net shadow except party activities, and plan on being electable because they have no scandals. You can see it among the admin people who aim at conforming maximally, thinking this is a clever career move. The problem is that this can lead to a feedback loop: if the officers vetting you have a perspective of what a proper life is based on their own conformist lives, they will gather people like themselves in the institutions of power. Most bureaucracies love bureaucrats, because they make sense to bureaucrats. But this is specific problem that is more narrow than the general problem of *badly founded* fear of omnipresent and omnicompetent Powers making people conform. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From pharos at gmail.com Fri Oct 25 20:39:56 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 21:39:56 +0100 Subject: [ExI] chilling effects In-Reply-To: <526AD3CB.9000807@aleph.se> References: <20131025105547.GI10405@leitl.org> <526A7E29.6010300@aleph.se> <20131025144615.GP10405@leitl.org> <526A9C77.7020209@aleph.se> <20131025183226.GS10405@leitl.org> <526AD3CB.9000807@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 9:25 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > The most worrisome effect is that a certain kind of people take those > putative flags very seriously, and deliberately live amazingly bland lives. > You can see the young politicians who have nearly no net shadow except party > activities, and plan on being electable because they have no scandals. You > can see it among the admin people who aim at conforming maximally, thinking > this is a clever career move. The problem is that this can lead to a > feedback loop: if the officers vetting you have a perspective of what a > proper life is based on their own conformist lives, they will gather people > like themselves in the institutions of power. Most bureaucracies love > bureaucrats, because they make sense to bureaucrats. > > Have you read this article? A well travelled writer was refused entry to USA from Canada after hours of interrogation because the border guards didn't like some of the countries he had visited. A sad story. BillK From rahmans at me.com Fri Oct 25 22:04:24 2013 From: rahmans at me.com (Omar Rahman) Date: Sat, 26 Oct 2013 00:04:24 +0200 Subject: [ExI] A Gedanken Rational Eugenics Experiment (AGREE) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: > Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 18:42:03 +0200 > From: Anders Sandberg > To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > Subject: Re: [ExI] A Gedanken Rational Eugenics Experiment (AGREE) > Message-ID: <526A9F5B.4040804 at aleph.se> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"; Format="flowed" > > On 2013-10-25 09:22, Omar Rahman wrote: >> >> Their whole notion of 'national IQ' is so deeply flawed it is >> laughable. Just looking at and attempting to account for the bias in >> IQ tests is difficult enough, but rubbing that together with a notion >> of GDP which is connected to a fiat currency produces a rich creamy >> mousse of pure bullshit. > > Hmm, you have a population of people. You measure something (IQ, weight, > liking of icecream). Of course there is a group mean, no matter how big > the group is. And that group mean might very well be a decent predictor > of things when comparing to other groups even if the test is lousy. > > While Lynn and Vahanen's original study was pretty crappy, their data > does work surprisingly well as a predictor of a lot of things (and some > temporal changes seem to be good predictors of changes in other > important variables). That is in itself curious, even if one does not > think they are measuring real intelligence differences. Newer and better > data seem to follow the same pattern, whatever it means. > > I said 'their' notion not 'the' notion. Of course you can get a group of people together and survey them. What they didn't have is: 1. Data - some countries were assigned 'national IQs' based on their neighbours scores 2. Data - some countries had single surveys of under a hundred people 3. An IQ test that performs consistently across cultures 4. A notion of GDP which is independent of a foreign fiat currency 5. A notion of historical context when speaking about development Take any one of these points and their conclusions would not be supported, but taken together this amounts to seriously flawed work. >> If you see 'data' indicating that the AVERAGE CITIZEN OF EQUATORIAL >> GUINEA IS SEVERELY MENTALLY RETARDED, the AVERAGE CITIZEN mind you, >> and you make any other conclusion than your data being horribly >> horribly wrong then well... > Actually, measures of state IQs in the US also show that some states are > retarded. Is that a reason to say that those differences do not tell us > *anything*, or to conclude that maybe state IQ is not really the same > thing as an individual person's IQ? > > -- > Dr Anders Sandberg > Future of Humanity Institute > Oxford Martin School > Oxford University A measure of state IQ in the US might indeed tell us some interesting things because we could: 1. Get data for all 50 states without guessing that North and South Dakota should be the same because they are next to other and both Dakotas after all 2. Get a large enough sample, to avoid the effects of self selection and cherry picking 3. Have relatively fewer cultural biases to account for in IQ testing (though this would still remain somewhat problematic) 4. Not have to worry about currency conversions when calculating GDP numbers 5. Have a well known historical context (though this would still be very problematic) I'm not aware of any study which places some US state in a 'retarded' category. I looked around a bit and found a bunch of 'state IQ maps', with credibility ranging from outright hoaxes to things purporting to be based on 'official' data. Even the hoaxes didn't go past one standard deviation (15) from 100. Lynn and Vahanen placed Equatorial Guinea at 59. That's about 1/2 a standard deviation away from the average person with Down's syndrome. Would you find that data point believable enough for you to publish Anders? Of course you wouldn't so why should we take some publication with such 'data' seriously? Regards, Omar Rahman -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Sat Oct 26 02:04:39 2013 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 22:04:39 -0400 Subject: [ExI] inernet whiffenpoof, was: RE: Tracking your internet browsing In-Reply-To: <029a01ced1ad$30e05a40$92a10ec0$@att.net> References: <029a01ced1ad$30e05a40$92a10ec0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 2:08 PM, spike wrote: > It should repeat the process about every three to five minute randomly > chosen time intervals, around the clock. > > Wouldn't that scheme make it impossible to take someone's websearch history > for use as an advertisement magnet? What about the recent case where a web > search history was used as evidence in court? Could not some evil Tea > Party > candidate use website search history to discourage or defame a political > opponent? > > This group is crawling with script gurus. Someone help out the world here. > My reward to you is my sincere best wishes forever or until I forget. > I don't think it matters enough to be worth the effort. It isn't about the search history in your browser. Your ISP is spying on you. They keep their own history. Your shops are keeping their own history. Your government is keeping everyone's history. Even simple narrow AI could examine the stream of data your script (proposed, above) is generating and see the pattern over time. Anything searched/requested from outside that stream would be human-generated. In the case of allowing your friends to impersonate you, there is either "guilty by association" or an outright violation of terms of service ("you will keep your account/passwords secure") I want to be more optimistic. I'd like to believe that everyday people's everyday data isn't incriminating. I want to assume that a large enough net catches everyone's weirdest interests and that my profile is simply lost in the crowd. However, I've worked with big [-enough] data to also suspect that there aren't enough people/profiles on earth for the crowd to be large enough to be lost among. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Sat Oct 26 03:13:18 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 20:13:18 -0700 Subject: [ExI] readers digest version of hayek Message-ID: <005701ced1f9$5216f060$f644d120$@att.net> In the tiresome but necessary discussion of current world politics, I offer you the Readers Digest condensed (and very well-done) version of Hayek's classic and as relevant as ever, The Road to Serfdom. Back in the 40s, people had a longer attention span than we do today, and could actually read 70 dense pages of text. But we are busy today, so I ask that you open the enclosure, advance to page 70 and just look at the drawings, for it nicely and concisely sums up Hayek's Road. Pay close attention to illustration 12, on page 83. Note how well the Tea Party fits into the role of despised scapegoat minority, which united the Republican and Democrat parties in common cause, given the label of terrorists, arsonists, every other vile thing. Note illustration 11 in the light of the rhetoric of one party dominating soon. Well hell, let us go back to slide 1, War forces national planning (and even if not war, a major crisis such as the collapse of the healthcare system forces national planning.) 2. Many want planning to stay (in whatever form, at the national level.) 3. The planners promise utopias (where everyone, even the poor get health care.) 4. but they can't agree on ONE utopia (so they just end up cramming every representatives into one huge unwieldy self-contradicting illogical bill.) 5. The citizens can't agree either (split between two mainstream political parties.) 6. the planners hate to force agreement (but they do anyway, and force this agreement upon us, like it or not.) 7. they try to sell the plan to all (such as by sending the minister of Health and Human Services on a national tour, along with much speechifying.) 8. the gullible do find agreement (that nationalized health care is a great idea, and even if not, it is the LAW!) 9. Confidence in the planners fades (imagine that, just from one miserably failed 600 million dollar website.) 10. A strong man is given power (hmmmm, does this sound familiar?) 11. The party takes over the country (the newly unified Democratic Republicans.) 12. A negative aim welds party unity, inflame the majority in common cause against some scapegoat minority (destroy the Tea Party until not one trace of it remains.) Note Americans, this is where we are right now, two thirds of the way down the Road to Serfdom. 13. No one opposes the leaders plan, for it would be suicidal (it is already highly unadvisable, with the NSA collecting every word of every email while denying it, and the IRS, having escaped unscathed from being caught before, ready to take aim at anyone associated with the despised minority Tea Party.) 14. Your profession is planned (unclear how that will be, open to suggestion.) 15. Your wages are planned (by limiting excessive salaries for instance, and raising minimum wages, especially for union members.) 16. Your thinking is planned, with posters, radio, press, all telling you the same lies (sound familiar?) 17. Your recreation is planned (by for instance closing National Parks.) 18. Your disciplining is planned (for you can be called in by the IRS for any reason which they do not disclose, and are given a trial which is not public. Is it now clear why I have been so favorably impressed by Hayek? -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: RoadtoSerfdom_.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 1172855 bytes Desc: not available URL: From anders at aleph.se Sat Oct 26 05:44:07 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sat, 26 Oct 2013 07:44:07 +0200 Subject: [ExI] chilling effects In-Reply-To: References: <20131025105547.GI10405@leitl.org> <526A7E29.6010300@aleph.se> <20131025144615.GP10405@leitl.org> <526A9C77.7020209@aleph.se> <20131025183226.GS10405@leitl.org> <526AD3CB.9000807@aleph.se> Message-ID: <526B56A7.1070503@aleph.se> On 2013-10-25 22:39, BillK wrote: > Have you read this article? > > A well travelled writer was refused entry to USA from Canada after > hours of interrogation because the border guards didn't like some of > the countries he had visited. So, will you stop visiting other countries as a result of this? *That* is what this thread is about. (As the no-fly lists demonstrate, many innocent people are stopped for no reason whatsoever.) -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From spike66 at att.net Sat Oct 26 15:16:27 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 26 Oct 2013 08:16:27 -0700 Subject: [ExI] chilling effects In-Reply-To: <526B56A7.1070503@aleph.se> References: <20131025105547.GI10405@leitl.org> <526A7E29.6010300@aleph.se> <20131025144615.GP10405@leitl.org> <526A9C77.7020209@aleph.se> <20131025183226.GS10405@leitl.org> <526AD3CB.9000807@aleph.se> <526B56A7.1070503@aleph.se> Message-ID: <016201ced25e$58357420$08a05c60$@att.net> On 2013-10-25 22:39, BillK wrote: > Have you read this article? > b_4098130.html> A well travelled writer was refused entry to USA from > Canada after hours of interrogation because the border guards didn't > like some of the countries he had visited. _______________________________________________ That wouldn't worry me as much as if it were the opposite: the USA would let you in but wouldn't let you back out. spike From atymes at gmail.com Sat Oct 26 19:39:23 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sat, 26 Oct 2013 12:39:23 -0700 Subject: [ExI] readers digest version of hayek In-Reply-To: <005701ced1f9$5216f060$f644d120$@att.net> References: <005701ced1f9$5216f060$f644d120$@att.net> Message-ID: On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 8:13 PM, spike wrote: > 14. Your profession is planned (unclear how that will be, open to > suggestion.) > Doesn't look like a logical consequence of our current situation. Given that this would be the next step from where we are, by your analogy, that seems like it breaks your analogy. > 15. Your wages are planned (by limiting excessive salaries for instance, > and raising minimum wages, especially for union members.) > Good luck with that, at least for executive pay. Unless the limits would just be for the rank and file - which is already the case. (Go on, just try justifying a $200,000/year salary for almost any technical job at any major company. Then try justifying it for a senior executive job.) > 16. Your thinking is planned, with posters, radio, press, all telling you > the same lies (sound familiar?) > Again, only for people who don't know to find alternate points of view. Sadly, this is already most people. > 17. Your recreation is planned (by for instance closing National Parks.) > ...not even close to comparable. National parks closed? There are other places to camp. 18. Your disciplining is planned (for you can be called in by the IRS for > any reason which they do not disclose, and are given a trial which is not > public. > Unfortunately, they can't do that on a mass scale. They can only crack down on a (very) small percent of the populace at a time. This supposes that they could do it to most people. They'd need a much larger ruling class to be able to do that. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Sun Oct 27 00:03:42 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 26 Oct 2013 17:03:42 -0700 Subject: [ExI] readers digest version of hayek In-Reply-To: References: <005701ced1f9$5216f060$f644d120$@att.net> Message-ID: <034401ced2a7$ffe7b630$ffb72290$@att.net> >. On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes Subject: Re: [ExI] readers digest version of hayek >. 17. Your recreation is planned (by for instance closing National Parks.) >...not even close to comparable. National parks closed? There are other places to camp. Our camping spot wasn't a National park. It was on federal land, so the closed it during the "shutdown." They never refunded our money. They tried everything they could to be as annoying as possible, such as by barricading open-air monuments, placing traffic cones along the freeway to make it difficult to photograph Mt. Rushmore from the road outside the park, among other crimes against Americans. Shame. 18. Your disciplining is planned (for you can be called in by the IRS for any reason which they do not disclose, and are given a trial which is not public. >. they can't do that on a mass scale. They can only crack down on a (very) small percent of the populace at a time. This supposes that they could do it to most people. They'd need a much larger ruling class to be able to do that. The strategy is divide and conquer. Note that both parties have developed a hatred for the Tea Party. I couldn't help but notice a comment by Health and Human Services' Kathleen Sebelius, "The majority of people calling for me to resign I would say are people who I don't work for, and who do not want this program to work in the first place." Think about that for a minute. Do you suppose there are Europeans, or Asians, or Africans, or Australians calling for Sebelius to resign? Antarcticans perhaps? She was talking about Americans. We have current government officials who think they do not work for the American people. Or that if they are Tea Partiers, they are not Americans? See where I am going with this, Adrian? The cartoon version of Road to Serfdom is fast, but it does miss something important: that these steps are not necessarily serial, and not necessarily well defined. They can peak out of order. Try to see the message, and why it is we need to get this program back up to the state level asap. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Sun Oct 27 01:02:10 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 26 Oct 2013 18:02:10 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Apple vs. Obama In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <036a01ced2b0$2ae52360$80af6a20$@att.net> >. On Behalf Of Kelly Anderson Subject: [ExI] Apple vs. Obama http://video.foxnews.com/v/2761785850001/cavuto-mr-president-you-are-no-appl e/ >. even supporters of the president have to be a little embarrassed about the web site roll out..The idea that the POTUS and his spokesman would compare their website "glitch" to that of Apple is hilarious on numerous levels to me as a programmer..-Kelly Kelly, they have announced that they PROMISE they will have the website working by 1 November. They didn't actually specify which year, but they will have it by 1 November, for SURE. I suspect there might be a little consternation at Health and Human Services, as reflected in the new splash page graphic: cid:image002.jpg at 01CED1DA.C2E89060 {8^D spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: application/octet-stream Size: 27506 bytes Desc: not available URL: From zyttyz at yahoo.com Sun Oct 27 03:10:05 2013 From: zyttyz at yahoo.com (paul michael) Date: Sat, 26 Oct 2013 20:10:05 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [ExI] MiNTing (or if you must, APM) library Message-ID: <1382843405.57752.YahooMailNeo@web141604.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> Hello ~ I've been studying MNT for about 15 years now, basically trying to map the societal implications of MiNTing (thank you Damien Broderick!) will have on the US economy (sorry, I don't really know much about other countries).? Some of the concerns I had have been unrolling rather well, such as: what will happen to the integrity of money against MiNTing counterfeiting?? Answer:? Bitcoin (sort of) and the prevalence of plastic money cards.? How will people access their MiNTing device?? Answer:? 3D printing software or a variance thereof. BTW Robert Bradbury wrote an article concerning money and MNT that I remember worked out the money problem really well, does anyone have a copy?? At one of the Foresight meetings (I can't remember which one)? we had a breakout the discussed 'the societal implications of MNT' and we came? up with the idea that a MNT transitional society would need something like a UL stamp of approval for the MiNTing software.? Why?? Because think about it - a scrip kiddie decides that it would be 'fun' to change the molecular design of cotton such that in sunlight the clothes made from this cotton turn transparent or some such thing (some hot actress naked?).? Or, MiNTing a rug that turns to slag when hit by UV - really bad for your floor.? Designers today don't need to know chemistry to make clothes, or rug makers, wool so for MiNTing it would be a really good idea to have some sort of 'library' of software that would MiNT at the basic molecular level then let user's design at the macro level.? Does this make any sense?? I've been watching for this 'library' and can't find even a hint of it existing.? Do you know of any group that is working on this?? Is it still too early?? It will be probably the most important aspect of the transitional MNTing economy, integrity at the basic molecular level.? By 'transitional MiNTing economy' I? mean the first decade or so of going from our current manufacturing style to the MNT/APM for everyday (excluding food) items.? So much of the literature skips over the difficulties of this transition and blightly extolls the wonderful things everybody is going to be able to play with. Any ideas? mimzy -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kanzure at gmail.com Sun Oct 27 04:00:49 2013 From: kanzure at gmail.com (Bryan Bishop) Date: Sat, 26 Oct 2013 23:00:49 -0500 Subject: [ExI] MiNTing (or if you must, APM) library In-Reply-To: <1382843405.57752.YahooMailNeo@web141604.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> References: <1382843405.57752.YahooMailNeo@web141604.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Sat, Oct 26, 2013 at 10:10 PM, paul michael wrote: > Does this make any sense? I've been watching for this 'library' and can't > find even a hint of it existing. There are libraries of molecular components in here: https://github.com/kanzure/nanoengineer - Bryan http://heybryan.org/ 1 512 203 0507 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Sun Oct 27 12:45:27 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 13:45:27 +0100 Subject: [ExI] How to Get Ahead at the NSA Message-ID: <20131027124527.GJ10405@leitl.org> http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n20/daniel-soar/how-to-get-ahead-at-the-nsa How to Get Ahead at the NSA Daniel Soar If you?re not exhausted by or indifferent to the endless revelations about the NSA ? another week, another codename, another programme to vacuum up and analyse the world?s communications ? then you?ve probably long since drawn a single general conclusion: we?re all being watched, all the time. You may also think this is something we sort of knew anyway. Perhaps you see ubiquitous spying as a function of the post-9/11 authoritarian state, which gathers knowledge by any means possible in order to consolidate its control, and which sees us all as potential suspects. Or perhaps you think that if the state is going to have a chance of keeping us safe from bad guys it obviously has to have the latitude to look for them: it isn?t interested in your research into 13th-century frescoes or cheap tights, but it needs to monitor all internet activity so that it can detect that rare occasion when someone searches for the materials to make hexamethylene triperoxide diamine bombs. The trouble with both these responses is that they?re answers to a selfish question: are the spies doing what they?re doing because they?re interested in us? Civil libertarians say yes, and that the monitoring must stop; security advocates say no, not if we aren?t doing anything bad. The paranoid reaction ? that if I use the word ?bomb? in an email to my aunt from the vicinity of a Bali nightclub then I may find black-suited agents descending on my hotel room ? is just an extreme version of the narcissistic fallacy that someone is trying to see into my brain. There are seven billion people on the planet, and nearly seven billion mobile phones; six billion emails are sent every hour; 1.2 petabytes of data travel across the internet every minute, the equivalent of two thousand years? worth of music playing continuously, the contents of 2.2 billion books. Even if they don?t get everything ? the NSA claims, with loving wording, to ?touch? just 1.6 per cent of global internet traffic, or about 35 million books? worth of data a minute ? the spooks have an awful more to be getting on with than worrying about you. And that?s just the internet. That the NSA ? along with the rest of the Five Eyes, the signals intelligence agencies of the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand ? has for the past sixty or so years sought to monitor as many of the world?s communications as it has been technically possible for it to access is widely accepted. In response to Edward Snowden?s leaks, the NSA put out a statement in August to expand on the public description of its mission, defining signals intelligence (or SIGINT) ? its primary job ? as ?the production of foreign intelligence through the collection, processing and analysis of communications or other data, passed or accessible by radio, wire or other electromagnetic means?. ?Communications or other data? that is ?passed or accessible? by ?electromagnetic means?: that?s anything emitted or received by a phone, computer, fax, radio, guidance system or satellite, or data that travels along any kind of cable, whether dedicated to voice signals or internet payloads or banking transactions or supposedly secure diplomatic, government and military communications. It?s anything with a pulse. Asked last month by a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee whether there was a limit to the records the NSA could collect, Keith Alexander, the agency?s director, said: ?There is no upper limit.? He was talking about the phone records of Americans, but since those explicitly fall outside the NSA?s foreign intelligence remit, and since many had thought that systematically collecting them was illegal, it went without saying that there was no limit to its ambition or ability to monitor anything else either. So the question has to be not so much ?Is Big Brother watching?? but ?How in hell can it cope?? We know what the NSA?s job is, but we don?t know how it does it. How would you, as a junior analyst in S2C41, the branch of the Signals Intelligence Directorate responsible for monitoring Mexico?s leadership, navigate the millions of call records and pieces of ?digital network intelligence? logged from Mexico daily, in order to find that nugget of information about energy policy that?s going to get you noticed? For all the doomsaying certainty of the news stories that have periodically filled front pages since early June we are still in the dark about most of the NSA?s actual methods and day to day activities. The NSA employs more than thirty thousand people and has an annual budget of nearly $11 billion; outside its headquarters at Fort Meade in Maryland, it operates major facilities in Georgia, Texas, Hawaii and Colorado, and staffs listening posts around the world. The leaks are, at best, a series of tiny windows into a giant fortress. It?s still hard to spy on the activity within. The documents we?ve seen ? a fraction of the total number in the hands of Guardian and Washington Post journalists ? are a blur of codenames. EVILOLIVE, MADCAPOCELOT, ORANGECRUSH, COBALTFALCON, DARKTHUNDER: the names are beguiling. But they don?t always tell us much, which is their reason for existing: covernames aren?t classified, and many of them ? including the names of the NSA?s main databases for intercepted communications data, MAINWAY, MARINA, PINWALE and NUCLEON ? have been seen in public before, in job ads and resum?s posted online (these have been collected over the years by a journalist called William Arkin, who has written several books on American secrecy and maintains a useful blog). It?s been a feature of the coverage that the magic of the words has been used to stand for a generalised assertion of continuous mass surveillance. On 29 September the New York Times ran a story reporting that MAINWAY was being used ?to create sophisticated graphs of some Americans? social connections?. The next day, not wanting to have its thunder stolen, the Guardian, which after all owned the Snowden story, having broken it, ran a front-page piece saying that MARINA provided the ability to look back on the past 365 days of a user?s internet browsing behaviour. The only new piece of information in the story ? new in the sense that it hadn?t been already been reported in the Guardian ? was the business of the year?s worth of history. It was a case of my database is scarier than yours. One reason for the uncertainty over what these things are for and how they work is that the leaked documents aren?t everything you might hope. The ones which have been relied on most heavily in the coverage are PowerPoint presentations that are usually described as ?training slides?, even though ? in the sections which have been made public, at least ? they tend not to explain how a particular system is used. They are more like internal sales brochures aimed at the analysts, bigging up the benefits of one method over all the others. ?PRISM,? one introductory slide says, ?The SIGAD Used Most in NSA Reporting.??? A series of bar charts shows how relatively rubbish other forms of collection are by comparison. The presentation?s author, PRISM?s own collection manager, proudly notes the ?exponential? growth in the number of requests made through the system for Skype data: 248 per cent. ?Looks like the word is getting out about our capability against Skype.? The system about which most detail is given, thanks to a presentation that begins with the question ?What can you do with XKEYSCORE??, sells itself by advertising ? in a bullet-pointed list ? its ?small, focused team? that can ?work closely with the analysts?. There?s some geeky speak of Linux clusters and the Federated Query Mechanism ? which simultaneously searches current traffic at all of the NSA?s collection sites around the globe ? as well as a strong sense of startup culture: XKEYSCORE?s philosophy is ?deploy early, deploy often?, a weaponised version of the Silicon Valley mantra beloved of Facebook engineers, ?ship early, ship often?. Some handy use cases are listed: find everyone using PGP encryption in Iran, find everyone in Sweden visiting an extremist web forum. ?No other system? ? these words highlighted in red ? ?performs this on raw unselected bulk traffic.? There?s an endorsement from the Africa team, declaring that XKEYSCORE gave it access to stuff from the Tunisian Interior Ministry that no other surveillance system had managed to catch. It?s not unlike a washing powder ad. One of the things these slides are most revealing of is the marketplace within the NSA. At your desk in S2C41, as you sit down to find the best way to home in on dodgy goings-on by senior Mexicans, you have a whole menu of sexy tools to choose from. The sales-speak nature of this material means that it can be misleading. It was the PRISM system ? which the reports said gave the NSA ?direct access? to the servers of some of Silicon Valley?s biggest and most beloved companies, including Facebook, Google, Apple and YouTube ? that dominated the headlines when the leaks first hit. The idea that the genius behind your perfectly engineered iPhone and the friendly souls behind the colourful Google logo had willingly collaborated with the electronic eavesdroppers to hand over the full set of keys to their multibillion-dollar server farms ? when there was no law that could require them to do so ? was a shock to many. It was also at some level outlandish: in most cases (if you leave aside Apple), the data the company possesses is what generates its phenomenal value, and it was hard to imagine that this commercially priceless property would be freely shared with anyone, let alone with the government. (Ayn Randist libertarian capitalists don?t like government.) The internet companies themselves categorically denied any knowledge of the PRISM programme, or anything like it.?? But ?collection directly from the servers? was what the slides said, and the implication was that the full unencrypted traffic from everyone?s favourite web services was being piped wholesale into the NSA?s databases. The implication turned out to be wrong. What happens is that an NSA analyst ?tasks? PRISM by nominating a ?selector? ? meaning an email address or username ? for collection and analysis. In other words, PRISM allows an NSA worker to submit a request, which is invariably granted, to monitor an individual Gmail account or Yahoo identity or Facebook profile and have all its activity sent back to the NSA. (In this context, ?direct access? is accurate: if a selector has been approved for monitoring, the NSA has access to it in real time.) One of the slides the Guardian didn?t disclose ? it appeared a few days later in the Washington Post ? showed a screenshot of the tool used to search records retrieved through PRISM. The total count of records in the database ? in April, when the slide was made ? was 117,675. It?s worth looking at that number. Facebook has a billion users: half of the internet-connected population of the planet has an account. The fraction of those whose full unencrypted activity the NSA was actively monitoring can be no more than 0.01 per cent. This isn?t to pretend that the NSA high-mindedly refrains from seeking access to our baby pictures or inane comments on other people?s baby pictures. But it does suggest that you don?t fill in a form to access a random Mexican?s timeline unless you expect to get something out of it. Another slide the Guardian withheld ? it published only five of the 41 in the full presentation, citing security concerns, though the wish for maximum impact could be another reason for the choice ? describes the PRISM ?tasking process?. The slide shows a flowchart of mind-numbing complexity. After the analyst puts selectors into the Unified Targeting Tool, they are passed to S2 FAA Adjudicators in Each Product Line and to Special FISA Oversight and Processing (SV4), before going to a third department, Targeting and Mission Management (S343), pending Final Targeting Review and Release. Somewhere at the bottom of the line the approved request gets handed over to the FBI?s Data Intercept Technology Unit (DITU), the external body which actually interfaces with whichever internet company the NSA needs data from. (You can see why Facebook, Google et al have found it so easy to maintain that they aren?t systematically feeding the NSA.) The internet company hands over the requested data to the FBI ? in 90 per cent of cases with no questions asked ? and the information is then processed and ingested into NSA databases for all analysts to enjoy. As ever, the blandly obscurantist codes give little sense of what is actually going on, and it?s easy to suppose ? as many do ? that all this meaningless superstructure is designed merely to give a semblance of due process to a system that has none. But in fact the arrangement has its devilish logic, each coded unit standing for a whole subsection of the NSA?s huge, hydra-headed military bureaucracy. The full extent of this bureaucracy is one of the most valuable lessons of the leaks. S2 is ?analysis and production?, S3 ?data acquisition?. S35 and its subcodes refer to Special Source Operations, the department responsible for conducting the delicate task of arranging ?partnerships? with entities that can give the NSA access to data that can?t be reached by any other means: cable companies, internet backbone providers, the maintainers of the switches and relays that keep global communications whirring. It is these arrangements that give rise to many of the more spectacular covernames that have been seen recently: MONKEYROCKET, SHIFTINGSHADOW, YACHTSHOP, SILVERZEPHYR. The type of data these sources provide, whether phone or internet records, is lightly classified: it?s merely secret. The area the source is targeted at ? say, counterterrorism in the Middle East ? is classified top secret. How the NSA has actually gone about getting hold of these data streams ? through what pressure put on what companies by what means ? is so sensitive that none of the documents we?ve seen even hints at it. SILVERZEPHYR (SIGAD US-3273) is a source of particular interest to our man on the Mexico desk. It delivers data from Central and South America, serving up phone and fax metadata, as well as internet records ? both metadata and content. An impressive demonstration of what can be achieved with it appears in an NSA presentation that was released last month to Fant?stico, a Brazilian news programme, by Glenn Greenwald, the chief shepherd of the Snowden leaks. The presentation is a case study to show the benefits of creating ?contact graphs?, ?a useful way of visualising and analysing the structure of communication networks?. The slides describe a two-week ?surge? operation that S2C41 carried out in the final month of the 2012 presidential campaign against Enrique Pe?a Nieto, who was then leading in the polls, and nine of his closest advisers. The analysts first tasked their systems with ?seed? selectors, representing the phone numbers of Pe?a Nieto and the advisers. Using MAINWAY ? the database, you?ll remember, that allows for analysis of phone metadata and the relationships between numbers ? S2C41 then produced a ?two-hop? contact graph, to show everyone each seed communicated with, and everyone those people communicated with too. Further analysis of the graph showed who in the network was most significant, including targets who until then hadn?t been known. It was then a cinch to run the content of all text messages sent from and received by these significant numbers through a system called DISHFIRE, which extracted any messages that were ?interesting?. Among these messages were lists of names of the people who would be given senior positions in a Pe?a Nieto administration. Six months after Pe?a Nieto?s election, all the people listed had joined the government. A case study like this shows why you really do need all the systems at your disposal to do useful work at the NSA. It?s also a good primer in how to learn things that are unknown to anybody other than the Mexican president-elect, and perhaps his wife. * There are rarely complaints in the US media about the practice of spying on leaders and diplomats from foreign countries. It has always been seen as a relatively uncontroversial part of the NSA?s mission, and indeed of the way international affairs are conducted. The Snowden leaks have revealed some recent operations, such as a successful effort to crack the UN?s videoconferencing system, and an infiltration of the EU?s new building on New York?s Third Avenue. These have only been reported in detail in Der Spiegel: the Anglophone press barely cares. It?s hard not to get the impression that international meetings are invariably bugged, and delegates? phones monitored, to give the home team an advantage in negotiations. The last time there was a significant scandal in the UK about this kind of activity was in 2003, when Katharine Gun, a translator for GCHQ, leaked an email she had been sent by an NSA official asking for her assistance in eavesdropping on member states? discussions to help force a favourable UN resolution on Iraq. Clare Short, Tony Blair?s international development secretary, claimed that she was given transcripts of Kofi Annan?s bugged conversations at around the same time. It usually takes something like an imminent war to bring such intelligence-gathering to light, but it has gone on since at least the days of Herbert Yardley, the director in the 1920s of the Cipher Bureau, a precursor to the NSA, who helpfully explained his methods in a bestselling memoir called The American Black Chamber. It might be reassuring to imagine that the US surveillance complex is secretly busy with nothing more sweeping than an old-school foreign surveillance operation, keeping an eye on bigwigs from unfriendly countries. The legend goes that Yardley?s operation was closed down by Hoover?s secretary of state, Henry Stimson, who supposedly said: ?Gentlemen do not read each other?s mail.? What a nice sentiment. Of course, there?s no evidence that he said any such thing, and the moment the Cipher Bureau was shut in 1929 its files were transported from New York to Washington by the man who had been appointed to head its successor organisation. ?Immediate steps were taken,? William Friedman later wrote, ?completely to reorganise the bureau and its work.? Along with the files went the secret agreements with the telegraph companies, such as Western Union, which would lend out telegrams for analysis before delivering them. The telegraph companies weren?t always comfortable with the arrangement, but it kept going in one form or another until after the Second World War, when legal orders came into force to compel all the major providers to share the communications they were handling with the organisation that was about to be called the NSA. The programme was called SHAMROCK, and it persisted until the late 1970s, when Senator Frank Church started investigating the NSA?s activities, declaring them to be potentially intrusive on the lives of ordinary Americans. Church?s high-profile investigations led to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, a law which seemed to give more freedom to citizens but was also followed ? we now know ? by the introduction of a new programme to replace the now outlawed SHAMROCK. BLARNEY ? a comfortably familiar Irish name ? got going the year FISA was passed and is still a significant presence in the Snowden files. And then there was 9/11. The President?s Surveillance Program (PSP) authorised broad new powers to collect and analyse Americans? communications without a warrant. It was, at first, highly secret: the NSA?s own inspector general wasn?t told of its existence until well after it had launched. Gradually the news spread and in 2004 a New York Times reporter, James Risen, started looking into it. The response was dramatic: the Times was dissuaded from publishing its story about it for nearly a year, and in the interim the NSA rushed to find new legal authorities to maintain the supply of information it had come to find so useful. By the time the news was public, alternative systems were already in place, and they were eventually enshrined in a 2008 amendment to FISA, FAA, the authority under which programmes such as PRISM now operate. Every time one of the spies? methods comes under the spotlight, questions of legality arise. The law is changed, purportedly to stop such abuses happening again. But inevitably the new law includes a new route by which some version of the old system is made valid again, and a programme that once had to be kept highly secret can be discussed in public as much as you like. In response to the Snowden revelations, a new bill has been put forward, the Intelligence Oversight and Surveillance Reform Act. It sounds benign, but if you?re of a paranoid disposition, you have reason to fear what it might bring. From eugen at leitl.org Sun Oct 27 13:59:21 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 14:59:21 +0100 Subject: [ExI] inernet whiffenpoof, was: RE: Tracking your internet browsing In-Reply-To: References: <029a01ced1ad$30e05a40$92a10ec0$@att.net> Message-ID: <20131027135921.GS10405@leitl.org> On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 10:04:39PM -0400, Mike Dougherty wrote: > I don't think it matters enough to be worth the effort. I entirely disagree. If you roll over before even giving a fight it's only going to keep getting worse and worse. > It isn't about the search history in your browser. Your ISP is spying on > you. They keep their own history. Your shops are keeping their own Exactly. Which is why anonymizing networks like Tor are only the first step towards P2P infrastructure where the only cleartext content comes from localhost, and none of that from anyone's else's single localhost. The cleartext coalesces from a number of globally sourced cyphertext streams, from opaque blobs which do not have a fixed count and location. Of course, that only makes sense when you can trust your own system, which rules out proprietary software and hardware, and only leaves open source hardware and open source software *formally proven secure*. We're pretty far from that, but we can be there in less a decade, if we set our minds to it. > history. Your government is keeping everyone's history. Not everyone's. Some people have no history at all by way of low-tech, yet others are taking the high-tech protection route. > Even simple narrow AI could examine the stream of data your script A simple narrow AI can't break encryption. > (proposed, above) is generating and see the pattern over time. Anything > searched/requested from outside that stream would be human-generated. In > the case of allowing your friends to impersonate you, there is either > "guilty by association" or an outright violation of terms of service ("you > will keep your account/passwords secure") > > I want to be more optimistic. I'd like to believe that everyday people's No. You should be as pessimistic as you can possibly be, and then multiply that by considering unknown unknowns, including future unknown unknowns. > everyday data isn't incriminating. I want to assume that a large enough Beria's motto was "show me the man and I show you the crime". We already have enough law load that any person is commiting enough laws to bring him into trouble, which is the whole point of harassment by selective enforcement. Plus, people who know they're watched are going to behave differently. > net catches everyone's weirdest interests and that my profile is simply > lost in the crowd. However, I've worked with big [-enough] data to also Nothing is ever lost, given the limits of what can be stored. The only question is what kind of future query will light up your database slot. Given that you're not clairvoyant, the only rational choice should be: stop this practice (jail the offenders, defund the agencies, fire your political representatives and keep firing them until you get these who can get it right) and until that happens leave as few data trails as possible. > suspect that there aren't enough people/profiles on earth for the crowd to > be large enough to be lost among. The whole model is wrong. A live redundant PByte storage is just a single rack. The price point is small enough that you can add storage faster than users can generate it. EByte/facility is easily doable, and there can be several such. There are maybe 5 Gmonkeys who have a data trail, and maybe 2 who have a significant data trail, so do the math. From anders at aleph.se Sun Oct 27 14:19:29 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 14:19:29 +0000 Subject: [ExI] MiNTing (or if you must, APM) library In-Reply-To: <1382843405.57752.YahooMailNeo@web141604.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> References: <1382843405.57752.YahooMailNeo@web141604.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <526D20F1.2070204@aleph.se> On 2013-10-27 03:10, paul michael wrote: > a MNT transitional society would need something like a UL stamp of > approval for the MiNTing software. Why? Because think about it - a > scrip kiddie decides that it would be 'fun' to change the molecular > design of cotton such that in sunlight the clothes made from this > cotton turn transparent or some such thing This is generally true for complex artefacts where trust is important, yet the source is not an easily tracked nym with reputation capital. Consider software certificates, or peer review in science. Ideally papers, software and consumer products should be reviewed and analysed in great detail by trusted third parties (certification agencies, consumer reports, review boards) or at least customer information compiled (yelp, amazon). The challenges are (1) complex objects can have complex flaws that are near-impossible to find, (2) who bears the cost of testing? Breaking down artefacts into modules helps reduce 1 and 2: a library can be analysed and then re-used, but failures of review can make a vast number of derived artefacts unreliable. Strengthening the traceability of causes and agents can also help: if you can find who inserted what, and then bring the authorities or internet opprobrium down on his head, there is some disincentive for bad behaviour. But this only works if traceability to real names or high-capital nyms works. A mature NMT economy has this problem but to a higher degree. I wonder why you just think this is fpr transitional economies? -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sun Oct 27 16:11:06 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 10:11:06 -0600 Subject: [ExI] inernet whiffenpoof, was: RE: Tracking your internet browsing In-Reply-To: References: <029a01ced1ad$30e05a40$92a10ec0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 8:04 PM, Mike Dougherty wrote: > On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 2:08 PM, spike wrote: > >> Your ISP is spying on you. They keep their own history. > > Btguard.com can help keep your ISP in the dark. I use it for bittorrenting only though because I had a problem there. My ISP was apparently sharing my personal information with the RIAA and the like. The power of what companies can do for me by NOT shielding myself is sufficient that I'm not sure I want to block what I browse. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sun Oct 27 16:25:20 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 10:25:20 -0600 Subject: [ExI] readers digest version of hayek In-Reply-To: <034401ced2a7$ffe7b630$ffb72290$@att.net> References: <005701ced1f9$5216f060$f644d120$@att.net> <034401ced2a7$ffe7b630$ffb72290$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sat, Oct 26, 2013 at 6:03 PM, spike wrote: > Our camping spot wasn?t a National park. It was on federal land, so the > closed it during the ?shutdown.? They never refunded our money. They > tried everything they could to be as annoying as possible, such as by > barricading open-air monuments, placing traffic cones along the freeway to > make it difficult to photograph Mt. Rushmore from the road outside the > park, among other crimes against Americans. Shame. > This kind of behavior, of spending extra money during a shutdown JUST to make it maximally painful is really unforgivable. I just hope it wasn't really as widespread as reported. > The strategy is divide and conquer. Note that both parties have developed > a hatred for the Tea Party. > Yeah, since both major parties are in favor of government growth, just at slightly different rates. Very Very Fast vs. Very Very Very Fast. It's a joke that we don't have the choice "Slowly please." Or better yet, "let's shrink the damn thing a bit" > I couldn?t help but notice a comment by Health and Human Services? > Kathleen Sebelius, ?The majority of people calling for me to resign I would > say are people who I don?t work for, and who do not want this program to > work in the first place.? > > ** ** > > Think about that for a minute. Do you suppose there are Europeans, or > Asians, or Africans, or Australians calling for Sebelius to resign? > Antarcticans perhaps? She was talking about Americans. We have current > government officials who think they do not work for the American people. > Or that if they are Tea Partiers, they are not Americans? See where I am > going with this, Adrian? > Spike, I heard this same argument on Hannity, and you're better than him. Kathleen Sebelius is a despicable human being and bureaucrat who has done horrible things in the name of supporting Obamacare, but this is honestly a poorly formed argument. What she's saying is that she serves the president. He is her boss, and he tells her what to do. I can't believe that she truly meant what the right wing spins this to mean. She was probably referring to people like Mike Lee, who she indeed doesn't work for in the sense that he doesn't tell her what to do on a day to day basis. She works at the pleasure of Barack Hussein Obama, who is the only person legally enabled to fire her ass. These kinds of attacks, twisting words towards unintended meanings are below you. Let's get back to the substance of what's wrong with Obamacare and its implementation. There's plenty of structural and implementation stuff to attack without resorting to this kind of word play. This only weakens our argument because it is so transparently ingenuous. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Sun Oct 27 16:47:27 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 09:47:27 -0700 Subject: [ExI] readers digest version of hayek In-Reply-To: References: <005701ced1f9$5216f060$f644d120$@att.net> <034401ced2a7$ffe7b630$ffb72290$@att.net> Message-ID: <029c01ced334$393ad480$abb07d80$@att.net> >. On Behalf Of Kelly Anderson I couldn't help but notice a comment by Health and Human Services' Kathleen Sebelius, "The majority of people calling for me to resign I would say are people who I don't work for, and who do not want this program to work in the first place." >.Spike, I heard this same argument on Hannity, and you're better than him. You flatter me sir. He has the TV show. All I have is you guys. >. Kathleen Sebelius is a despicable human being. Never met her, don't know anything about her personally. >. and bureaucrat who has done horrible things in the name of supporting Obamacare, but this is honestly a poorly formed argument.-Kelly Criticism accepted! I won't do it again. This week. Well, depending on what your definition of week is. {8^] I must repeat and reinforce a previous comment: knowing what was at stake here, I am astonished HHS would not have discovered in time the coming catastrophe and stopped the rollout, looking for some face-saving way to postpone until they could fix the site, perhaps by blaming Tea Party activists. It feels like it was insider sabotage, but I cannot figure out the angle or motive. Of course, just because the US government's credibility has been shredded beyond recognition does not mean we are not allowed to have some fun with it. Ms. Sebelius was on Saturday Night Live last night. Check it outwardly: http://www.bizpacreview.com/2013/10/27/snl-open-sebelius-hilarious-tips-for- navigating-sucking-website-86015 {8^D The SLN gag is a lot funnier if you have actually tried to use the site and have been stuck on the spinning rainbow for several minutes, then had it time out while you were waiting for it to respond. This is a rare example of geek humor, especially funny for internet hipsters. Well done, SNL! spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Sun Oct 27 17:31:57 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 13:31:57 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Inflation graph Message-ID: For those who think that inflation in the USA is the most important economic problem in the world today and is so high that every effort, no matter how draconian, should be used to decrease it, take a look at this graph: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/10/27/business/economy/inflation-falls.html?ref=economy John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Sun Oct 27 17:32:28 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 18:32:28 +0100 Subject: [ExI] inernet whiffenpoof, was: RE: Tracking your internet browsing In-Reply-To: References: <029a01ced1ad$30e05a40$92a10ec0$@att.net> Message-ID: <20131027173227.GB10405@leitl.org> On Sun, Oct 27, 2013 at 10:11:06AM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > Btguard.com can help keep your ISP in the dark. I use it for bittorrenting But Btguard knows your real IP address and your physical identity by having your payment information on file. > only though because I had a problem there. My ISP was apparently sharing my > personal information with the RIAA and the like. If you think that using a VPN service is sufficient, evidence shows that it isn't. > The power of what companies can do for me by NOT shielding myself is > sufficient that I'm not sure I want to block what I browse. I see you're still drinking the cool aid. Hint: whatever the corporation knows about you the government does. That's the price of staying in business. So, long-term, the only companies which stay in business are sellouts. If you're thiking that the power of companies is to offer you the best products at lowest prices, try visiting the same site with privacy shields on. You might see something you won't like. From johnkclark at gmail.com Sun Oct 27 17:35:28 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 13:35:28 -0400 Subject: [ExI] A little Inflation can be good Message-ID: The following was the lead article on the front page of today's New York Times: ========== WASHINGTON ? Inflation is widely reviled as a kind of tax on modern life, but as Federal Reserve policy makers prepare to meet this week, there is growing concern inside and outside the Fed that inflation is not rising fast enough. Multimedia Graphic Inflation Fails Some economists say more inflation is just what the American economy needs to escape from a half-decade of sluggish growth and high unemployment. The Fed has worked for decades to suppress inflation, but economists, including Janet Yellen, President Obama?s nominee to lead the Fed starting next year, have long argued that a little inflation is particularly valuable when the economy is weak. Rising prices help companies increase profits; rising wages help borrowers repay debts. Inflation also encourages people and businesses to borrow money and spend it more quickly. The school board in Anchorage, Alaska, for example, is counting on inflation to keep a lid on teachers? wages. Retailers including Costco and Walmart are hoping for higher inflation to increase profits. The federal government expects inflation to ease the burden of its debts. Yet by one measure, inflation rose at an annual pace of 1.2 percent in August, just above the lowest pace on record. ?Weighed against the political, social and economic risks of continued slow growth after a once-in-a-century financial crisis, a sustained burst of moderate inflation is not something to worry about,? Kenneth S. Rogoff, a Harvard economist, wrote recently. ?It should be embraced.? The Fed, in a break from its historic focus on suppressing inflation, has tried since the financial crisis to keep prices rising about 2 percent a year. Some Fed officials cite the slower pace of inflation as a reason, alongside reducing unemployment, to continue the central bank?s stimulus campaign. Critics, including Professor Rogoff, say the Fed is being much too meek. He says that inflation should be pushed as high as 6 percent a year for a few years, a rate not seen since the early 1980s. And he compared the Fed?s caution to not swinging hard enough at a golf ball in a sand trap. ?You need to hit it more firmly to get it up onto the grass,? he said. ?As long as you?re in the sand trap, tapping it around is not enough.? All this talk has prompted dismay among economists who see little benefit in inflation, and who warn that the Fed could lose control of prices as the economy recovers. As inflation accelerates, economists agree that any benefits can be quickly outstripped by the disruptive consequences of people rushing to spend money as soon as possible. Rising inflation also punishes people living on fixed incomes, and it discourages lending and long-term investments, imposing an enduring restraint on economic growth even if the inflation subsides. ?The spectacle of American central bankers trying to press the inflation rate higher in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis is virtually without precedent,? Alan Greenspan, the former Fed chairman, wrote in a new book, ?The Map and the Territory.? He said the effort could end in double-digit inflation. The current generation of policy makers came of age in the 1970s, when a higher tolerance for inflation did not deliver the promised benefits. Instead, Western economies fell into ?stagflation? ? rising prices, little growth. Lately, however, the 1970s have seemed a less relevant cautionary tale than the fate of Japan, where prices have been in general decline since the late 1990s. Kariya, a popular instant dinner of curry in a pouch that cost 120 yen in 2000, can now be found for 68 yen, according to the blog Yen for Living. This enduring deflation, which policy makers are now trying to end, kept the economy in retreatas people hesitated to make purchases, because prices were falling, or to borrow money, because the cost of repayment was rising. ?Low inflation is not good for the economy because very low inflation increases the risks of deflation, which can cause an economy to stagnate,? the Fed?s chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, a student of Japan?s deflation, said in July. ?The evidence is that falling and low inflation can be very bad for an economy.? There is evidence that low inflation is hurting the American economy. ?I?ve always said that a little inflation is good,? Richard A. Galanti, Costco?s chief financial officer, said in December 2008. He explained that the retailer is generally able to expand its profit margins and its sales when prices are rising. This month, Mr. Galanti told analysts that sluggish inflation was one reason the company had reported its slowest revenue growth since the recession. Executives at Walmart, Rent-A-Center and Spartan Stores, a Michigan grocery chain, have similarly bemoaned the lack of inflation in recent months. Multimedia Graphic Inflation Fails ?Let me just remind everyone that inflation falling below our target of 2 percent is costly,? Charles L. Evans, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, said in a speechin Madison, Wis., this month. ?If inflation is lower than expected, then debt financing is more burdensome than borrowers expected. Problems of debt overhang become that much worse for the economy.? Inflation also helps workers find jobs, according. to an influential 1996 paperby the economist George Akerlof and two co-authors. Rising prices allows companies to increase profit margins quietly, by not raising wages, which in turn makes it profitable for companies to hire additional workers. Lower rates of inflation have the opposite effect, making it harder to find work. Companies could cut wages, of course. But there is ample evidence that even during economic downturns, companies are reluctant to do so. Federal data show a large spike since the recession in the share of workers reporting no change in wages, but a much smaller increase in workers reporting wage cuts, according toan analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.There is, in practice, an invisible wall preventing pay cuts. The standard explanation is that employers fear that workers will be angry and therefore less productive. ?I want to be really careful about advocating for lower wages because I typically advocate for the other side of that equation,? said Jared Bernstein, a fellow at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and a former economic adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. ?But I think higher inflation would help.? The Anchorage school board, facing pressure to cut costs because of a budget shortfall, began contract negotiations with its 3,500 teachers this year by proposing to freeze rather than cut wages. The final deal, completed last month, gives the teachers raises of 1 percent in each of the next three years. Teachers, while not thrilled, described the deal as better than a pay cut. But it is likely, in effect, to cut the teachers? pay. Economists expect prices to rise about 2 percent a year over the next three years, so even as the teachers take home more dollars, those dollars would have less value. Instead of a 1 percent annual increase, the teachers would fall behind by 1 percent a year. ?We feel like this contract still allows us to attract and retain quality educators,? said Ed Graff, the Anchorage school district superintendent. In June, Caterpillar, the industrial equipment maker, persuaded several hundred workers at a Wisconsin factory to accept a six-year wage freeze. The company described the workers as overpaid, but it did not seek direct cuts. The slow pace of inflation, however, minimizes the benefits. Seeking further savings, Caterpillar has since laid off almost half of the workers. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sun Oct 27 18:02:57 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 12:02:57 -0600 Subject: [ExI] readers digest version of hayek In-Reply-To: <029c01ced334$393ad480$abb07d80$@att.net> References: <005701ced1f9$5216f060$f644d120$@att.net> <034401ced2a7$ffe7b630$ffb72290$@att.net> <029c01ced334$393ad480$abb07d80$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sun, Oct 27, 2013 at 10:47 AM, spike wrote: > ** ** > > ** ** > > *>?* *On Behalf Of *Kelly Anderson**** > > >?Spike, I heard this same argument on Hannity, and you're better than him > ? > > ** ** > > You flatter me sir. He has the TV show. All I have is you guys. > Yes, but you really "have" us. At least me. > **** > > > >? Kathleen Sebelius is a despicable human being?**** > > ** ** > > Never met her, don?t know anything about her personally. > The thing that is horrible about her is that she's a bureaucrat. They are all evil. Banally evil. > **** > > >? and bureaucrat who has done horrible things in the name of supporting > Obamacare, but this is honestly a poorly formed argument?-Kelly > > ** > > ** ** > > Criticism accepted! I won?t do it again. This week. Well, depending on > what your definition of week is. {8^] > Well, if I don't criticize you when I think you're wrong, I'll lose what little credibility I might have... LOL > **** > > I must repeat and reinforce a previous comment: knowing what was at stake > here, I am astonished HHS would not have discovered in time the coming > catastrophe and stopped the rollout, looking for some face-saving way to > postpone until they could fix the site, perhaps by blaming Tea Party > activists. It feels like it was insider sabotage, but I cannot figure out > the angle or motive. > Big software projects are complex enough in the private sector. Add the complexities of government oversight, and you have a formula for failure. It has happened MANY times. It happens a lot in private industry too. Occam's razor tells me the simplest answer is that software is a bitch and big software is more of a bitch. > Of course, just because the US government?s credibility has been shredded > beyond recognition does not mean we are not allowed to have some fun with > it. Ms. Sebelius was on Saturday Night Live last night. Check it > outwardly: > > ** ** > > > http://www.bizpacreview.com/2013/10/27/snl-open-sebelius-hilarious-tips-for-navigating-sucking-website-86015 > That was amusing. > **** > > ** ** > > {8^D **** > > ** ** > > The SLN gag is a lot funnier if you have actually tried to use the site > and have been stuck on the spinning rainbow for several minutes, then had > it time out while you were waiting for it to respond. This is a rare > example of geek humor, especially funny for internet hipsters. Well done, > SNL!**** > > > Reminds me of this TED talk... http://bit.ly/17pECJs -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From brent.allsop at canonizer.com Sun Oct 27 18:07:04 2013 From: brent.allsop at canonizer.com (Brent Allsop) Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 12:07:04 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Bitcoin effect on the Fed's abilities? (Was Re: Inflation graph) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <526D5648.2040708@canonizer.com> Thanks John, This is all very interesting information about Inflation. It'll be very interesting to see how Bitcoin start effecting this durring the next decade. Currently, when we get to far ahead of ourselves, and head into a "great recession", the federal reserve is able to help keep it from becoming a depression by printing and spending lots of money (largely on stupid things like the government buying used cars to be destroyed). The big problem is, when we head into such retractions, there has never been any place to invest money, as everything crashes in value, even cash if the federal reserve is printing it, as it should. But Bitcoin is dramatically changing this Big time. Anything like the US government threatening a default on their loans, causes the price of Bitcoin to rocket. The next time things turn down, I'm going to have all my capital in Bitcoins, as they are sure to explode in value. Sure, people say deflation is a bad thing, but not if people are getting stinking rich by holding Bitcoins. Then they can spend such wealth on much better things than buying used cars to destroy. In such a world, printing money may help stop deflation of the dollar, but what about virtual currencies? What effect will that have on Governments attempting to stimulate economies? What is the next 'great recession' going to be like? Brent Allsop On 10/27/2013 11:31 AM, John Clark wrote: > For those who think that inflation in the USA is the most important > economic problem in the world today and is so high that every effort, > no matter how draconian, should be used to decrease it, take a look at > this graph: > > http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/10/27/business/economy/inflation-falls.html?ref=economy > > > John K Clark > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Sun Oct 27 18:15:14 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 19:15:14 +0100 Subject: [ExI] chilling effects In-Reply-To: <526B56A7.1070503@aleph.se> References: <20131025105547.GI10405@leitl.org> <526A7E29.6010300@aleph.se> <20131025144615.GP10405@leitl.org> <526A9C77.7020209@aleph.se> <20131025183226.GS10405@leitl.org> <526AD3CB.9000807@aleph.se> <526B56A7.1070503@aleph.se> Message-ID: <20131027181514.GG10405@leitl.org> On Sat, Oct 26, 2013 at 07:44:07AM +0200, Anders Sandberg wrote: > So, will you stop visiting other countries as a result of this? Will I be stopped, you mean? Maybe. I certainly know people who are every time "randomly" selected for special treatment when flying, and I know people who've been denied entry. It is really quite ridiculous. I also know people who are afraid for their life so they're effectively in exile. We also know a person who's trapped in an embassy in London. Nevermind people like Snowden and Manning. > *That* is what this thread is about. > > (As the no-fly lists demonstrate, many innocent people are stopped > for no reason whatsoever.) Indeed, and if you are stopped, do document it, and advertise this fact as widely as possible. From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sun Oct 27 18:19:44 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 12:19:44 -0600 Subject: [ExI] A Gedanken Rational Eugenics Experiment (AGREE) In-Reply-To: <5268F9E7.8080602@aleph.se> References: <20131024011619.GB4312@ninja.nosyntax.net> <5268F9E7.8080602@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Thu, Oct 24, 2013 at 4:43 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > Note that you would need to pay *a lot*. The below 1 SD population is > around 15%, so in the US that would be about 47 million people you need to > pay off. I am not sure what the going price for getting sterilized is, but > at least I expect it to be on the order of a few thousand dollars - we are > easily talking hundreds of billions here. Not quite as much as is already > spent on elementary schools, but still a lot. > There is a successful private endeavor to sterilize female drug addicts for as little as $300. http://www.projectprevention.org Unfortunately, low IQ apparently is negatively correlated with drug use. At least in one study. http://www.ibtimes.com/smart-people-illegal-drugs-intelligent-people-dont-always-do-right-thing-371056 -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sun Oct 27 18:42:17 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 12:42:17 -0600 Subject: [ExI] A Gedanken Rational Eugenics Experiment (AGREE) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: The biggest political problem with this approach is that while there may be a correlation between being a liberal, and having a higher IQ... http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20130412071732AAKsAlE Or it may be a wash... No serious academic has done a study showing the opposite... i.e. that conservatives as a group are more intelligent than liberals... which may be a case of who's doing such studies... who knows? All that being said, any attempt to change the country's IQ would most certainly be presented in the press as the Republicans trying to depress the Democrat's voting base. Both sides likely view the other as having lower IQs, but it would be quashed as an anti-Democratic pogrom. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sun Oct 27 18:47:44 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 12:47:44 -0600 Subject: [ExI] inernet whiffenpoof, was: RE: Tracking your internet browsing In-Reply-To: <20131027173227.GB10405@leitl.org> References: <029a01ced1ad$30e05a40$92a10ec0$@att.net> <20131027173227.GB10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Sun, Oct 27, 2013 at 11:32 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Sun, Oct 27, 2013 at 10:11:06AM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > > > Btguard.com can help keep your ISP in the dark. I use it for > bittorrenting > > But Btguard knows your real IP address and your physical identity by > having your payment information on file. > True enough. Though they are in Canada. Doesn't protect me from the NSA, but my problem was with my ISP, not the NSA. > > only though because I had a problem there. My ISP was apparently sharing > my > > personal information with the RIAA and the like. > > If you think that using a VPN service is sufficient, evidence shows > that it isn't. > It has worked for over a year to keep my ISP off my back, which is all I cared about. > > The power of what companies can do for me by NOT shielding myself is > > sufficient that I'm not sure I want to block what I browse. > > I see you're still drinking the cool aid. Hint: whatever the > corporation knows about you the government does. That's > the price of staying in business. So, long-term, the > only companies which stay in business are sellouts. > > If you're thiking that the power of companies is to offer > you the best products at lowest prices, try visiting the same > site with privacy shields on. You might see something you won't > like. You missed my point. As a software person, I recognize that the more data I have about a customer, the better customer service I can provide. The loss of privacy is a side effect, but the increase in customer service is measurable. If, for example, Google serves me more relevant advertising, I don't have to watch tampon ads. I like not having to watch tampon ads, than you very much. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Sun Oct 27 18:58:43 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 18:58:43 +0000 Subject: [ExI] inernet whiffenpoof, was: RE: Tracking your internet browsing In-Reply-To: References: <029a01ced1ad$30e05a40$92a10ec0$@att.net> <20131027173227.GB10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Sun, Oct 27, 2013 at 6:47 PM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > If, for example, Google serves me more relevant advertising, I don't have to > watch tampon ads. I like not having to watch tampon ads, than you very much. > And that's just the tip of the iceberg. > > You watch ads!!!???? How quaint. AdBlock Plus removes almost all ads. I'm always horrified when I see the screen of somebody browsing without AdBlock. BillK From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sun Oct 27 19:03:31 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 13:03:31 -0600 Subject: [ExI] inernet whiffenpoof, was: RE: Tracking your internet browsing In-Reply-To: References: <029a01ced1ad$30e05a40$92a10ec0$@att.net> <20131027173227.GB10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Sun, Oct 27, 2013 at 12:58 PM, BillK wrote: > On Sun, Oct 27, 2013 at 6:47 PM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > > > If, for example, Google serves me more relevant advertising, I don't > have to > > watch tampon ads. I like not having to watch tampon ads, than you very > much. > > And that's just the tip of the iceberg. > > > > > > You watch ads!!!???? How quaint. > > AdBlock Plus removes almost all ads. > > > I'm always horrified when I see the screen of somebody browsing without > AdBlock. > Does AdBlock stop youtube advertisements? Those are the ones that bug me. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Sun Oct 27 19:06:40 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 19:06:40 +0000 Subject: [ExI] chilling effects In-Reply-To: <20131027181514.GG10405@leitl.org> References: <20131025105547.GI10405@leitl.org> <526A7E29.6010300@aleph.se> <20131025144615.GP10405@leitl.org> <526A9C77.7020209@aleph.se> <20131025183226.GS10405@leitl.org> <526AD3CB.9000807@aleph.se> <526B56A7.1070503@aleph.se> <20131027181514.GG10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <526D6440.6000605@aleph.se> On 2013-10-27 18:15, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Sat, Oct 26, 2013 at 07:44:07AM +0200, Anders Sandberg wrote: > >> So, will you stop visiting other countries as a result of this? > Will I be stopped, you mean? Maybe. I certainly know people > who are every time "randomly" selected for special treatment > when flying, and I know people who've been denied entry. > It is really quite ridiculous. > > I also know people who are afraid for their life so they're > effectively in exile. We also know a person who's trapped > in an embassy in London. Nevermind people like Snowden > and Manning. It is not 'chilling effects' if you actually are harassed or have warrants on your head. What I am getting at is that the vast majority of people are not directly affected by many of the threats we have discussed, yet if they think they are or could be and as a result change their behaviour in a more compliant direction then we have a problem. Especially if the thinking is (accidentally) seeded by the people who actually are against the compliance. There is a fine line here, similar to denouncing a tyrannical government. You want to make people aware of the abuses, yet not so afraid of the abuses that their response is to conform. There are also links to Hirschman's "Exit, voice, loyalty" analysis: if key people respond by exit (moving to friendlier states, disappearing into the blacknets) the remaining people will be less able to efficiently voice concern and ensure some negotiated resolution - and many might cleave to loyalty because that seems to be the only solution. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From spike66 at att.net Sun Oct 27 19:06:55 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 12:06:55 -0700 Subject: [ExI] readers digest version of hayek In-Reply-To: References: <005701ced1f9$5216f060$f644d120$@att.net> <034401ced2a7$ffe7b630$ffb72290$@att.net> <029c01ced334$393ad480$abb07d80$@att.net> Message-ID: <03df01ced347$b51034c0$1f309e40$@att.net> >. On Behalf Of Kelly Anderson Subject: Re: [ExI] readers digest version of hayek On Sun, Oct 27, 2013 at 10:47 AM, spike wrote: You flatter me sir. He has the TV show. All I have is you guys. >.Yes, but you really "have" us. At least me. In a TOTALLY Platonic sense, with ABSOLUTELY NO expressed or implied anything by the quotes around "have" you understand, none at all, no, nothing like that one bit, no way Jose. >.The thing that is horrible about her is that she's a bureaucrat. They are all evil. Banally evil. What they need to do is take someone already known to be non-evil, smart, sweet, good hearted, kind and beautiful. The face doesn't even need to know how to run stuff; rather they would serve as the face of evil bureaucracy, a bit like the brown-eyed splash page girl. I have seen exactly this in a big company; get someone who knows little but is personable, attractive, dresses nicely, impeccable manners, to be the boss, then have some really smart guy in the background, some nearly invisible person, perhaps a short bald shabby guy who knows what is going on and is smart as a whip, to do the actual work while the front person represents the effort. For head of Health and Human Services I would recommend the stunning Kari Byron. Anything she is selling, I am buying. She is all the above, and no matter what, I am confident even the bureaucrattest of governments could never make that young lady evil. Femininity just doesn't get any better than this. >.Well, if I don't criticize you when I think you're wrong, I'll lose what little credibility I might have... LOL Ja, well I don't have cable TV and don't watch Hannity. So I claim to have derived the poor argument independently. {8^D I must repeat and reinforce a previous comment: knowing what was at stake here, I am astonished HHS would not have discovered in time the coming catastrophe and stopped the rollout. >.Reminds me of this TED talk... http://bit.ly/17pECJs Excellent! {8^D >.Big software projects are complex enough in the private sector. Add the complexities of government oversight, and you have a formula for failure. It has happened MANY times. It happens a lot in private industry too. Occam's razor tells me the simplest answer is that software is a bitch and big software is more of a bitch.-Kelly Kelly me lad, note please: this whole thing *did not need to be* big software. There was exactly no need for it! That's the point of my argument really. It could have been as simple as just a publicly accessible spreadsheet with fifty tabs along the bottom, one for each state, so each tab would refer to residents of only that state. Across the top they could have identified the columns as benefits from each plan. The rows could have been filled in by all the companies competing in that state. One of the lines could have been the public option, offered by O-care. Most of the squares could have been simple checkmarks, with green tab notes if you wanted them. The companies could fill in what benefits they would cover, so the companies would have filled in their squares on their spreadsheets, and do let me assure you, they would have done it right. This didn't need to be complicated. Simple not only would do, it would do better and do right. Columns could be added for estimated government subsidies by age group, income level etc. They wouldn't need to know anything about who is asking, no security, nothing. They would provide the means for us to plan what-ifs, which is really what spreadsheets do best, let us do what we need to do, without asking questions that are perfectly irrelevant to the current situation, such as the earnings on your most recent W2. If you give them your current salary, when you are being moved from 40 hours a week to 30 so your company does not need to buy your health insurance, the amount on your current W2 is irrelevant and something you may not wish to share with the whole world in any case. It doesn't help if you anticipate your salary is going down very soon, as plenty of the applicants know is coming. So they could put up that spreadsheet, which could be derived mostly by the insurance companies (the only ones who really do know what is in the ACA, and knew it even BEFORE it was passed) with about a dozen government bureaucrats including the stunning Kari Byron in less than a week for considerably less than 600 million dollars. Failure to do it that way demonstrates bad judgment, stunning incompetence and even more than a hint of Simon bar Sinister-esque control-freakish power-drunken evil. So my criticism of Ms. Sebelius has nothing to do with her being evil or anything about the ignominious failure of the website and its subsequent shameless rollout for all to see, in all its refulgent wretchedness. My criticism is that they even felt it needed to be a big software project to begin with, when it really only required a small simple software project. All they needed was just a big but simple spreadsheet, no more complex than some I have created myself in my own misspent youth, and continue to create in my misspent late youth. That they struggled to find the very most expensive and complicated way to do a simple project, then flubbed it spectacularly makes HealthCare.gov a perfect textbook example of why we don't want to hand over healthcare to the federal government. Get government OUT of the healing business, don't put more of it in there! SHEESH for evolution SAKES! What, if anything, were they thinking? A slightly more sinister version of this is that it is perfectly clear that HealthCare.gov is a nakedly transparent attempt at inappropriate data harvesting by a government which has recently been caught doing that illegitimately, but in the negative sense of the otherwise delightful word nakedly. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Sun Oct 27 19:28:19 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 19:28:19 +0000 Subject: [ExI] A Gedanken Rational Eugenics Experiment (AGREE) In-Reply-To: References: <20131024011619.GB4312@ninja.nosyntax.net> <5268F9E7.8080602@aleph.se> Message-ID: <526D6953.2080708@aleph.se> On 2013-10-27 18:19, Kelly Anderson wrote: > On Thu, Oct 24, 2013 at 4:43 AM, Anders Sandberg > wrote: > > Note that you would need to pay *a lot*. The below 1 SD population > is around 15%, so in the US that would be about 47 million people > you need to pay off. I am not sure what the going price for > getting sterilized is, but at least I expect it to be on the order > of a few thousand dollars - we are easily talking hundreds of > billions here. Not quite as much as is already spent on elementary > schools, but still a lot. > > > There is a successful private endeavor to sterilize female drug > addicts for as little as $300. > http://www.projectprevention.org > > Unfortunately, low IQ apparently is negatively correlated with drug > use. At least in one study. > http://www.ibtimes.com/smart-people-illegal-drugs-intelligent-people-dont-always-do-right-thing-371056 Well, as a drug user with decent IQ ( http://news.sky.com/story/1147488/smart-drug-modafinil-risks-student-health ) I don't feel much desire to be sterilized. But then again, my likelihood of getting an offspring is pretty microscopic. "As of 7 October 2011 the organization had paid 3,848 clients." - that tells me they likely do not have the right price. Looking at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/drug-misuse-findings-from-the-2012-to-2013-csew/drug-misuse-findings-from-the-2012-to-2013-crime-survey-for-england-and-wales it seems that a few percent of the population are drug users (2.8% adults are 'frequent drug users'). So of the around 1,457,735 frequent drug users only 0.26% had taken up the offer. More than I expected, actually, but still tiny. Still, there is something relevant with that project: it looks at a phenotype that - at the very least through phenotypical effects - has a good chance of reducing the life quality of children. One could just as well imagine similar project paying other statistically bad parents - say people with personality disorders or criminal lifestyles - to not have children*. This would be good for the average child (since the chance of having a nice parent goes up), and indirectly maybe have some gene pool effect. But the moral argument for this largely hinges on the direct effect on the children, rather than caring for the gene pool. The gene pool is in my opinion only instrumentally valuable as something that generates something truly valuable: good human lives. If we could get equally good lives by compiling DNA strings or voodoo invocations, there would not be any particular reason to keep the gene pool. This is why I am sceptical of interventions that seem to serve "the species" more than individual members. [* Of course, when you start thinking about parent group membership correlating with bad childhoods a lot of the results are pretty unpalatable. Very fun to string people along and see how far they are willing to go - what about poor people? immigrants? parents with bad food habits? the wrong religion? ] -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Sun Oct 27 19:39:49 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 19:39:49 +0000 Subject: [ExI] inernet whiffenpoof, was: RE: Tracking your internet browsing In-Reply-To: References: <029a01ced1ad$30e05a40$92a10ec0$@att.net> <20131027173227.GB10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Sun, Oct 27, 2013 at 7:03 PM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > Does AdBlock stop youtube advertisements? Those are the ones that bug me. > > That's what it says on their website. I assume you probably need a bit more info. ;) After you add AdBlock to Firefox, you need to add various Filter Subscriptions, as explained on the website. I use EasyPrivacy+EasyList and Malware Domains. I also uncheck the box for 'Allow some non-intrusive advertising' in Filter Preferences, but if you like some ads you can leave it checked. A search will also find more filter subscriptions if required. BillK From anders at aleph.se Sun Oct 27 19:32:34 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 19:32:34 +0000 Subject: [ExI] A Gedanken Rational Eugenics Experiment (AGREE) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <526D6A52.7050509@aleph.se> On 2013-10-27 18:42, Kelly Anderson wrote: > Or it may be a wash... No serious academic has done a study showing > the opposite... i.e. that conservatives as a group are more > intelligent than liberals... which may be a case of who's doing such > studies... who knows? There are some interesting results suggesting that it is more a matter of personality than intelligence. If you have a more fearful, neophobic personality you will be less likely to pursue open-ended learning and to prefer to cleave to tried and tested tradition. End result: conservatives would have somewhat lower education and IQ, despite the IQ not causing their conservatism. A smarter population does not necessarily mean smarter politics. A less fearful population on the other hand is pretty likely to produce a more liberal political outlook. (And if we could just block people's "sacred value" system somewhere in amygdala, they would all become libertarians! ;-) -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sun Oct 27 19:50:23 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 13:50:23 -0600 Subject: [ExI] The Actual Visionary of the Future In-Reply-To: <20131025195114.GU10405@leitl.org> References: <20131025133031.GL10405@leitl.org> <20131025195114.GU10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 1:51 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 11:48:25AM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > > > Even Ray doesn't expect Moore's Law to run indefinitely. In his book > TSIN, > > Ray thinks everything is exponential. > That's simply not true Eugen. You're better than that. I believe MORE things are exponential than Ray does, and even I don't believe everything is exponential. That being said, lots of things are, like the savings in your bank account. > > he talks about the ultimate physical limitations of computing with > matter. > > If we stay on the current track, as Ray predicts, we will hit limitations > > of physics in a dozen decades or so. The interesting point for humanity > is > > We are constantly running into limits, but people have a short memory. > Nobody remembers the time when the clocks stopped doubling. I do. I pointed that out in a recent post in fact. > People > forget that hard drives stopped doubling, at least for a short while. > Because of a flood in Thailand. Nobody has said there wouldn't be bumps in the road, just that there was an overall trend. > People are unaware of finer points like > http://postbiota.org/pipermail/tt/2013-October/014179.html Ok, I read that, and what it said in a nut shell is "fuck this is hard". Not, I expect it to come to a screeching halt. > > that point puts computers at many billions of times smarter than us in a > > Many billions times smarter than us, using which metric? > Any you wish to put forward. > relatively short time frame compared to the ultimate limits. > > My personal time is very short, probably less than 40 years if > I'm lucky. My personal interests lie squarely with a working > suspend function, the future better get the resume part > right. > If they read your posts here Eugen, they might decide not to thaw you out. Who needs a pessimist in a utopia... :-) > > I know you MUST believe that computers will continue to get faster, even > if > > they don't quite keep up the doubling pace. Right? > > What does faster mean? The only reliable way is a benchmark. > The only really relevant benchmark is the one that runs your > problem. As such faster never kept up with Moore's law. > Moore's law is about affordable transistors, and that one > gives you a canvas for your potential. So your gains are less > than Moore, and sometimes a lot less. For me personally, > the bottleneck in classical (GPGPU is classical) computers > is worst-case memory bandwidth. Which is remarkably sucky, > if you look it up. > The problem I care about the most is computer vision. We are now approaching automated vehicles becoming a reality. I thought it would happen in 2014 since 2004. It may be delayed a year or two by bureaucrats and lawyers, but the technology should be cheap enough for luxury cars to have highway cruise control (including steering) by 2014 or 2015. So my venture into guessing the future was pretty close, using Ray's technique. > Ok. So, now your transistor budget no long doubles in > constant time, but that time keeps increasing. It's roughly > three years by end of this year, no longer 18 months. > Physical feature size limits are close behind, and your > Si real state is a 400 mm pizza, max. WSI gives you a > factor of two by making yield quantitative, but it wrecks > havoc to your computation model, because grain size starts > being tiny (less than mm^2), and asks for asynchronous > shared-nothing, and did I mention fine-grained? So no > TBytes of RAM for your LUT. The next step is FPGA, as in > runtime reconfigurable. That *might* give you another > factor of 2, or maybe even 4. Stacking is off-Moore, but > it will do something, particularly giving cache-like > access to your RAM, as long as it's few 10 MBytes max. > I've predicted that they will go to 3D. It is the only logical way to go from here, other than maybe 2 1/2 D first... > And then you have to go real 3d, or else there's gap. > True, unless something completely different comes along, which may not be highly likely. > My guess the gap is somewhere 15-20 years long, but > we've got maybe 10 years until saturation curve is pretty > damn flat. > Ok. Then we can start making larger structures. It won't speed up due to decreasing transistor size, but it will be able to do useful work. Imagine a 3d CPU 5 inches on a side. That could do some serious work. More than a human brain. > > > The trouble with cornucopians like Kurzweil is that they > > > cheerfully and cherrypickingly apply LAR to anything under > > > the sun, and never admit it when reality disproves them. > > > > > > > I'd be happy to admit when reality disproves anything. Ray has never > > applied LAR to oil seeking technology, for example, as it just doesn't > > He implicitly implied we'll run on 100% of thin-film PV in 16 years. > That was 2011, so make that 14 years. This means 4.2 TWp/year just > for power in a linear model, nevermind matching synfuel capability > (try doubling that, after all is sung and done -- 8 shiny TWp/year). > We're not getting the linear model. In fact, we arguably sublinear, > see > http://cleantechnica.com/2013/10/14/third-quarter-2013-solar-pv-installations-reach-9-gw/ You obviously don't understand the nature of his prediction. If he says that the doubling in solar efficiency is 3.5 years (going from memory) then half of the solar he envisions will be installed between July 2023 and 2027. What's being installed now probably is sublinear, that's what an exponential would predict. He didn't predict a linear model. We'll revisit his prediction in 2027 if we're both still communicating by then. > apply. However, in a sense it does apply. We do get some percent better at > > extracting what's left each year. That doesn't mean we get an exponential > > No, in terms of net energy we're not getting better. We're actually > getting worse. > > > amount of oil, since there's a limited amount of the stuff. But it does > > mean that we get exponentially better at finding what's left (note that > > We're not getting better. We've mapped all the stuff, there are almost > no unknown unknowns. And dropping EROEI and even dropping volume > (not net energy, volume!) per unit of effort is pretty much the > opposite of exponential. Do 40% of decay rate/well/year mean a > thing to you? > You misunderstand my point again. I know it's harder to get oil. But we develop new technologies for getting at what's left. > > this curve is likely much more gentle than computing, with a doubling of > > reserves we can get at maybe every 20 or 50 years. I don't know.) > > There are no exponentials in infrastructure. There is an early > sigmoidal that looks that way, but we've left that already. > Infrastructure can change rapidly. How long did it take for everyone to get a cell phone? Smart Phones? When electric cars make financial sense (if they ever do) then people will switch to them quickly. Large infrastructure like roads and so forth will remain problematic until robotics is good enough to do much more of the job. > > > > > This is the opposite of science. > > > > > > > It is a part of science, the hypothesis part. LAR applied to computing > > available per dollar in particular is a hypothesis formed in the mid > 1960s. > > As far as I know, we are still more or less on that track, though they > have > > No, we're not. See benchmarks. > Data please. I can't find any. I have looked. > > had to cheat with multiple cores, which does make writing software that > > Multiple core SMP doesn't scale. People who thought multithreading will > scale > are going to get a nasty surprise. Agreed. > People who expect global coherent > caches scaling are going to get a nasty surprise. People who assume > global shared memories are a thing are going to get a nasty surprise. > Agreed. > People who hear about Amdahl's Law the first time have to stop worrying, > and embrace nondeterminism. People who expect reliable systems at hardware > level are gonna have a bad time. > I disagree with that. There will be reliable hardware, or they won't be able to sell it. No matter how slow the previous generation was. It is hard enough to get programmers to do multi-threading. It would be damn close to impossible to get them to switch to a model where the answer might not be right. > > takes advantage of it much more difficult. For the next few years, we can > > safely believe that computers will continue to get cheaper. Maybe for the > > next fifty years, but who knows. For sure for the next 5 though. Intel > has > > it all mapped out. > > > > > > > We've had a number of such people, which turned out a liability > > > to transhumanism in the end. Our handicap is already sufficiently > > > high, we don't need such monkeys on our back. > > > > > > > How is being pessimistic about the future more helpful? > > It obviously isn't. You have to be a realist. The problem with > optimists is that they think they're realists. But, unfortunately, > they aren't. When in a tough spot, never, ever team up > with an optimist. > A pessimist will just hole up in his cave. I refer you to "The Croods" to see how that worked out in one fictional setting. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Sun Oct 27 19:52:02 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 12:52:02 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Inflation graph In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <04bf01ced34e$02ba59c0$082f0d40$@att.net> >. On Behalf Of John Clark Subject: [ExI] Inflation graph >.For those who think that inflation in the USA is the most important economic problem in the world today and is so high that every effort, no matter how draconian, should be used to decrease it, take a look at this graph: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/10/27/business/economy/inflation-fal ls.html?ref=economy >.John K Clark On the contrary sir. The comment itself presupposes that inflation is some kind of fiat number somehow dictated by some central power somewhere. A more accurate description is a number which is derived by governments to describe what exists. If reduced to one number, it does throw away some important subtleties. An analogy would be to derive a number to express how fast plants grow. How would you do that? Once you have a way to express in one number how fast plants grow, you are ready to derive a single number to describe inflation. Once you figure out a way to do these things, you are ready to command by some means the rate of plant growth and the rate of inflation. Some have suggested that we can artificially raise inflation by printing money without any wealth behind it. This does create inflation, but only the particular currency of the nation that attempts it, as was seen in Weimar Germany and in Zimbabwe. I recommend a cheaper way of doing that: just use Zimbabwe money. It is already printed and available in larger denominations, it is already printed on high quality paper, etc, and costs less than the raw paper used in printing American money, since it is already soiled by ink with lots of zeros on it. Had the people of Zimbabwe been more aware of the concept of exponents, their government's game could have still been operable to this day, for their currency would not have run out of room to add more zeroes. John, we do not control inflation. The government does not control inflation. It does derive a single number, an average of sorts, to try to describe it, but note that manufactured goods have been deflating for some time, while fuel and food prices have risen sharply, while labor prices, and ESPECIALLY medical insurance prices, have inflated dramatically at the same time. So I ask you sir, what is the current inflation rate? What does that chart you provided actually describe? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Sun Oct 27 20:26:46 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 13:26:46 -0700 Subject: [ExI] A Gedanken Rational Eugenics Experiment (AGREE) In-Reply-To: <526D6953.2080708@aleph.se> References: <20131024011619.GB4312@ninja.nosyntax.net> <5268F9E7.8080602@aleph.se> <526D6953.2080708@aleph.se> Message-ID: <05d501ced352$dc7e0b30$957a2190$@att.net> >. On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg >.Well, as a drug user with decent IQ ( http://news.sky.com/story/1147488/smart-drug-modafinil-risks-student-health ) I don't feel much desire to be sterilized. But then again, my likelihood of getting an offspring is pretty microscopic. Dr Anders Sandberg So very tragic is this, Anders. Any time you wish to remedy this unacceptable situation, I propose we get the stunning Kari Byron as an egg donor and you as the Y chromosome provider, under which conditions my bride would cheerfully volunteer to supply the drug-free smoke-free alcohol-free womb, as well as a loving nurturing home for at least two decades if not more, along with a kind-hearted older brother, and permanent visitation rights extended to you and of course Ms. Byron. Do forgive my recent obsession. The new season of MythBusters just came out on video, and our family has been enjoying her. THEM I meant, heh heh, enjoying the VIDEOS of course is what I meant ahem moving right along... That young lady is just as stunning at age 39 as she was at 27. She doesn't age! She doesn't get all full of herself. She gets smarter with each episode, and it isn't even an act or a script. Or if so, it is only lightly scripted. MythBusters is the very best TV show ever made. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Sun Oct 27 20:59:35 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 20:59:35 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Scales of comparision In-Reply-To: References: <20131025133031.GL10405@leitl.org> <20131025195114.GU10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <526D7EB7.6060601@aleph.se> On 2013-10-27 19:50, Kelly Anderson wrote: > On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 1:51 PM, Eugen Leitl > wrote: > > > that point puts computers at many billions of times smarter than us in a > > Many billions times smarter than us, using which metric? > > > Any you wish to put forward. This has on and off been the matter of discussion at the office. "A hundred times smarter than X" - what kind of scale is implied? Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_measurement one can see that statements like this requires the measured thing to behave according to a ratio scale - you can meaningfully multiply and divide. But this is not true for IQ scales: while indicating a real number that can certainly be multiplied, there is no inherent meaning of double IQ-intelligence beyond "can get a higher score on the same test that places the person in a twice as high IQ bracket". It is not twice as many correct answers, and it is not being part of a half as large population fraction. Elo scales does something similar: if you score X and I score 2X, the probability of you winning against me is 1/(1+10^(X/400)) - a bit more well defined, but still not obvious in any way. One can imagine chains of ever greater players reaching up from our human level to some mind playing at score 5744, but this might only make sense in a space where ranking is nicely one-dimensional - there is also an assumption that we are dealing with a scalar scale. In the game of real world statesmanship it is not clear that Hitler, Gandhi or Shi( Hu?ngd? played for maximizing the same kind of score. Maybe one was "twice as good" at military conquest as another one, but that does not imply much about the score on empire building or moral rectitude. While one can sum together ratio and interval scales, the result is not necessarily meaningful (consider human development indices - an ordinal "higher is better" is likely the only possible conclusion one can draw from them, but it is not clear that the equal country is better off than the country with great education). For superintelligence I am willing to assume one could construct something like an Elo scale by comparing different minds gaming against each other and/or nature across a wide set of problems. I also think for many kinds of minds general problem solving is able to generalize to new kinds of challenges, creating enough correlation between the ability to solve them that it makes sense of speaking of one score. (But see http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2013/10/silicon_dreams.html - it might be that talking about "twice as smart as humans" would require using humanity as a whole as a test subject, not just a representative human) In short, while it might be possible to rank intelligences roughly along some kind of scale linked to their intelligence, it looks like saying "twice as smart" doesn't convey much useful information. One would at the very least need to get into the tedious explanation of what kind of test it is. It might be better to say *what* the superminds are supposed to be able to do, and then discuss how one reaches that conclusion. (Example: I can imagine and argue for minds that solve standard IQ tests at the same accuracy as humans a million times faster, for example fast brain emulations. Incidentally, given http://www.pearsonassessments.com/NR/rdonlyres/E9B43B7C-E94C-44CF-89D0-B59BABB0147C/0/TimedUntimed.pdf their performance would likely not be super-good score-wise thanks to extra time. However, given past group problem solving papers it is likely that running a million emulations in parallel and then using agreed to be best answers could improve scores a lot, up to 55 IQ points.) So, *please*: no more "a billion times smarter than us"! (Could a beauty a million times more beautiful than Helen of Troy launch a billion ships? Is the admiral's wife who launches one ship a thousandth of Helen?) -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sun Oct 27 21:00:57 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 15:00:57 -0600 Subject: [ExI] A Gedanken Rational Eugenics Experiment (AGREE) In-Reply-To: <526D6953.2080708@aleph.se> References: <20131024011619.GB4312@ninja.nosyntax.net> <5268F9E7.8080602@aleph.se> <526D6953.2080708@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Sun, Oct 27, 2013 at 1:28 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > On 2013-10-27 18:19, Kelly Anderson wrote: > > Well, as a drug user with decent IQ ( > http://news.sky.com/story/1147488/smart-drug-modafinil-risks-student-health) I don't feel much desire to be sterilized. But then again, my likelihood > of getting an offspring is pretty microscopic. > So if you don't plan on having kids, would you accept a few hundred dollars to make sure? I have considered being sterilized, but the cost for one thing keeps me from going there. The high cost of sperm storage is a secondary issue as well in my personal case. I don't know my personal future to the point of saying I would never ever want kids, but I might take a few thousand dollars to be sterilized. It might tip the scales, as it were. > "As of 7 October 2011 the organization had paid 3,848 clients." - that > tells me they likely do not have the right price. Looking at > https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/drug-misuse-findings-from-the-2012-to-2013-csew/drug-misuse-findings-from-the-2012-to-2013-crime-survey-for-england-and-walesit seems that a few percent of the population are drug users (2.8% adults > are 'frequent drug users'). So of the around 1,457,735 frequent drug users > only 0.26% had taken up the offer. More than I expected, actually, but > still tiny. > Perhaps you're looking at it wrong. Maybe they haven't had enough money to hand out. If they had $20,000,000 I'm guessing they could find enough people to sterilize. Still, there is something relevant with that project: it looks at a > phenotype that - at the very least through phenotypical effects - has a > good chance of reducing the life quality of children. One could just as > well imagine similar project paying other statistically bad parents - say > people with personality disorders or criminal lifestyles - to not have > children*. This would be good for the average child (since the chance of > having a nice parent goes up), and indirectly maybe have some gene pool > effect. But the moral argument for this largely hinges on the direct effect > on the children, rather than caring for the gene pool. > I agree. > The gene pool is in my opinion only instrumentally valuable as something > that generates something truly valuable: good human lives. If we could get > equally good lives by compiling DNA strings or voodoo invocations, there > would not be any particular reason to keep the gene pool. This is why I am > sceptical of interventions that seem to serve "the species" more than > individual members. > Human happiness is a sum of individual human being's happiness. The distribution of happiness, just as the distribution of money, is a controversial subject. > [* Of course, when you start thinking about parent group membership > correlating with bad childhoods a lot of the results are pretty > unpalatable. Very fun to string people along and see how far they are > willing to go - what about poor people? immigrants? parents with bad food > habits? the wrong religion? ] > Yes, this is the difficulty and the reason the government doesn't do such things. But as a private organization, I think you can do things that could not be done by governments. This has always been one of my best examples of that. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Sun Oct 27 21:37:20 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 22:37:20 +0100 Subject: [ExI] inernet whiffenpoof, was: RE: Tracking your internet browsing In-Reply-To: References: <029a01ced1ad$30e05a40$92a10ec0$@att.net> <20131027173227.GB10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20131027213720.GL10405@leitl.org> On Sun, Oct 27, 2013 at 12:47:44PM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > > But Btguard knows your real IP address and your physical identity by > > having your payment information on file. > > > > True enough. Though they are in Canada. Doesn't protect me from the NSA, > but my problem was with my ISP, not the NSA. Your problem is less with the ISP, but by a third party who's interested in learning which is the warm body associated with a particular download. That third party has modified your local politics (likely, by paying a nice sum, off the record) to the point that it can enforce their interests. That third party might well have representants in the compartment where your traffic egresses. Any of these will make some nice money on you, if they can make their case. As I said, some people had to learn this the hard way. > > If you think that using a VPN service is sufficient, evidence shows > > that it isn't. > > > > It has worked for over a year to keep my ISP off my back, which is all I > cared about. This certainly seems to be working, so far. I just wouldn't rely on this entirely. > You missed my point. As a software person, I recognize that the more data I > have about a customer, the better customer service I can provide. The loss You're a software person, not a salesman. A salesman has very different interests, for instance, what is the amount of interest in a particular product I *know for sure* this customer has? The higher the amount of interest, the higher the price that customer is willing to bear. You can watch this in action when booking flights online. If you want to pay more for the same product than an anonymous party, by all means keep being tracked online. You're subsidizing the prices for all the anonymouses. > of privacy is a side effect, but the increase in customer service is > measurable. > > If, for example, Google serves me more relevant advertising, I don't have Google doesn't care about you at all. You're not Google's customer. You're Google's product. As long as you're willing to deal with obnoxious advertisming and not ditch the product Google will carve you up in nice pieces, and sell the prime rib and the cutlets to the highest bidder. > to watch tampon ads. I like not having to watch tampon ads, than you very If you don't like to watch tampon ads, why the fuck are you watching tampon ads? I ditched TV in early 1990s, because the ads bugged me too much. I opted out from online advertisements, by running the right kind of tools it takes seconds to install. I don't watch Youtube ads, because I don't watch Youtube. > much. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. So, again, why the Stockholm syndrome? These people are making money on you. Why are you giving them the benefit of doubt? From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Mon Oct 28 00:23:00 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 18:23:00 -0600 Subject: [ExI] inernet whiffenpoof, was: RE: Tracking your internet browsing In-Reply-To: <20131027213720.GL10405@leitl.org> References: <029a01ced1ad$30e05a40$92a10ec0$@att.net> <20131027173227.GB10405@leitl.org> <20131027213720.GL10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Sun, Oct 27, 2013 at 3:37 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Sun, Oct 27, 2013 at 12:47:44PM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > > > > But Btguard knows your real IP address and your physical identity by > > > having your payment information on file. > > > > > > > True enough. Though they are in Canada. Doesn't protect me from the NSA, > > but my problem was with my ISP, not the NSA. > > Your problem is less with the ISP, but by a third party who's > interested in learning which is the warm body associated > with a particular download. That third party has modified > your local politics (likely, by paying a nice sum, off the > record) to the point that it can enforce their interests. > That third party might well have representants in the compartment > where your traffic egresses. Any of these will make some > nice money on you, if they can make their case. > You can't get blood from a rock. > As I said, some people had to learn this the hard way. > Understood. But there are lower hanging fruit than me. I don't have to run faster than the bear, just faster than the guy next to me. > > > If you think that using a VPN service is sufficient, evidence shows > > > that it isn't. > > > > > > > It has worked for over a year to keep my ISP off my back, which is all I > > cared about. > > This certainly seems to be working, so far. I just wouldn't rely on this > entirely. > > > You missed my point. As a software person, I recognize that the more > data I > > have about a customer, the better customer service I can provide. The > loss > > You're a software person, not a salesman. A salesman has very different > interests, for instance, what is the amount of interest in a particular > product I *know for sure* this customer has? The higher the amount of > interest, the higher the price that customer is willing to bear. > > You can watch this in action when booking flights online. > If you want to pay more for the same product than an anonymous party, > by all means keep being tracked online. You're subsidizing the prices > for all the anonymouses. > > > of privacy is a side effect, but the increase in customer service is > > measurable. > > > > If, for example, Google serves me more relevant advertising, I don't have > > Google doesn't care about you at all. You're not Google's customer. > You're Google's product. As long as you're willing to deal with > obnoxious advertisming and not ditch the product Google will carve > you up in nice pieces, and sell the prime rib and the cutlets > to the highest bidder. > Well, I did install the ad software referred to earlier today. > > to watch tampon ads. I like not having to watch tampon ads, than you very > > If you don't like to watch tampon ads, why the fuck are you watching > tampon ads? > I'm not, but I used to on TV. Hated it. And with Youtube, they never serve one up to me, assumedly because they know I'm a guy. > I ditched TV in early 1990s, because the ads bugged me too much. > I've been TV free for a few years now too. Don't miss it much. > I opted out from online advertisements, by running the right kind > of tools it takes seconds to install. I don't watch Youtube > ads, because I don't watch Youtube. > Yeah, well I like youtube... :-) > > > much. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. > > So, again, why the Stockholm syndrome? These people are making money > on you. Why are you giving them the benefit of doubt? > Because they are delivering something of value to me as well. It's commerce. It is capitalism. I'm in favor of those things. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Mon Oct 28 00:23:35 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 18:23:35 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Scales of comparision In-Reply-To: <526D7EB7.6060601@aleph.se> References: <20131025133031.GL10405@leitl.org> <20131025195114.GU10405@leitl.org> <526D7EB7.6060601@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Sun, Oct 27, 2013 at 2:59 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > On 2013-10-27 19:50, Kelly Anderson wrote: > > On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 1:51 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > >> > that point puts computers at many billions of times smarter than us in a >> >> Many billions times smarter than us, using which metric? >> > > Any you wish to put forward. > > > This has on and off been the matter of discussion at the office. "A > hundred times smarter than X" - what kind of scale is implied? Looking at > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_measurement one can see that > statements like this requires the measured thing to behave according to a > ratio scale - you can meaningfully multiply and divide. > Yes, I agree that putting a number on intelligence is tricky business. Perhaps I use it in more of a metaphorical sense. However much smarter you are than a tree, there is some possible being that is that much smarter than you. That sort of thing. > But this is not true for IQ scales: while indicating a real number that > can certainly be multiplied, there is no inherent meaning of double > IQ-intelligence beyond "can get a higher score on the same test that places > the person in a twice as high IQ bracket". It is not twice as many correct > answers, and it is not being part of a half as large population fraction. > There is also the issue of speed. If a machine can finish the same IQ test in 100 milliseconds, and score 145, then I would say that it was smarter than me, even if the scores in the end are identical. > For superintelligence I am willing to assume one could construct something > like an Elo scale by comparing different minds gaming against each other > and/or nature across a wide set of problems. I also think for many kinds of > minds general problem solving is able to generalize to new kinds of > challenges, creating enough correlation between the ability to solve them > that it makes sense of speaking of one score. > Of course, solving by committee is extremely poor at solving certain kinds of problems, like what to do about the US national debt. Almost any single individual would do better than the current collection. > (But see http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2013/10/silicon_dreams.html- it might be that talking about "twice as smart as humans" would require > using humanity as a whole as a test subject, not just a representative > human) > It is clear to me that two humans are not twice as smart as one. The main benefit seems to be in keeping the smarter of the two intellectually honest, and also adding a few facts in here and there that the more intelligent doesn't have stored in his memory. > In short, while it might be possible to rank intelligences roughly along > some kind of scale linked to their intelligence, it looks like saying > "twice as smart" doesn't convey much useful information. One would at the > very least need to get into the tedious explanation of what kind of test it > is. It might be better to say *what* the superminds are supposed to be able > to do, and then discuss how one reaches that conclusion. > I apologize for my sloppy thinking on this matter. > (Example: I can imagine and argue for minds that solve standard IQ tests > at the same accuracy as humans a million times faster, for example fast > brain emulations. Incidentally, given > http://www.pearsonassessments.com/NR/rdonlyres/E9B43B7C-E94C-44CF-89D0-B59BABB0147C/0/TimedUntimed.pdftheir performance would likely not be super-good score-wise thanks to extra > time. However, given past group problem solving papers it is likely that > running a million emulations in parallel and then using agreed to be best > answers could improve scores a lot, up to 55 IQ points.) > > So, *please*: no more "a billion times smarter than us"! > Ok. How about this. I can envision a day when the utility value of a machine will be as much greater than a human being than a human being's utility is greater than that of a cockroach? > (Could a beauty a million times more beautiful than Helen of Troy launch a > billion ships? Is the admiral's wife who launches one ship a thousandth of > Helen?) > While assigning numbers to it, it is clearly the case that some people are more beautiful and intelligent than some others. That's not to say you could line us up in rank order, unless it were to solve the precise same problem. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Mon Oct 28 00:35:24 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 18:35:24 -0600 Subject: [ExI] readers digest version of hayek In-Reply-To: <03df01ced347$b51034c0$1f309e40$@att.net> References: <005701ced1f9$5216f060$f644d120$@att.net> <034401ced2a7$ffe7b630$ffb72290$@att.net> <029c01ced334$393ad480$abb07d80$@att.net> <03df01ced347$b51034c0$1f309e40$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sun, Oct 27, 2013 at 1:06 PM, spike wrote: > For head of Health and Human Services I would recommend the stunning Kari > Byron. Anything she is selling, I am buying. She is all the above, and no > matter what, I am confident even the bureaucrattest of governments could > never make that young lady evil. Femininity just doesn?t get any better > than this. > You've really got a thing for Ms. Byron... LOL > >?Well, if I don't criticize you when I think you're wrong, I'll lose > what little credibility I might have... LOL > > ** > > ** ** > > Ja, well I don?t have cable TV and don?t watch Hannity. So I claim to > have derived the poor argument independently. > Does it frighten you to think like Hannity?? LOL > **** > > {8^D > > **** > > I must repeat and reinforce a previous comment: knowing what was at stake > here, I am astonished HHS would not have discovered in time the coming > catastrophe and stopped the rollout?**** > > > > >?Big software projects are complex enough in the private sector. Add the > complexities of government oversight, and you have a formula for failure. > It has happened MANY times. It happens a lot in private industry too. > Occam's razor tells me the simplest answer is that software is a bitch and > big software is more of a bitch?-Kelly**** > > ** ** > > Kelly me lad, note please: this whole thing **did not need to be** big > software. There was exactly no need for it! > If you're putting up a web site that hundreds of thousands of people are going to hit, it is big software. > That?s the point of my argument really. It could have been as simple as > just a publicly accessible spreadsheet with fifty tabs along the bottom, > one for each state, so each tab would refer to residents of only that > state. Across the top they could have identified the columns as benefits > from each plan. The rows could have been filled in by all the companies > competing in that state. One of the lines could have been the public > option, offered by O-care. Most of the squares could have been simple > checkmarks, with green tab notes if you wanted them. The companies could > fill in what benefits they would cover, so the companies would have filled > in their squares on their spreadsheets, and do let me assure you, they > would have done it right. This didn?t need to be complicated. Simple not > only would do, it would do better and do right. > I'm a big fan of Craig's List for this reason. But putting lipstick on the pig that is Obamacare is important political theater. > **** > > ** Columns could be added for estimated government subsidies by age > group, income level etc. They wouldn?t need to know anything about who is > asking, no security, nothing. They would provide the means for us to plan > what-ifs, which is really what spreadsheets do best, let us do what we need > to do, without asking questions that are perfectly irrelevant to the > current situation, such as the earnings on your most recent W2. If you > give them your current salary, when you are being moved from 40 hours a > week to 30 so your company does not need to buy your health insurance, the > amount on your current W2 is irrelevant and something you may not wish to > share with the whole world in any case. It doesn?t help if you anticipate > your salary is going down very soon, as plenty of the applicants know is > coming. > I would say that your spreadsheet idea would be fine if everyone were as smart as you are. However, that sadly isn't the case. It does need to be usable. I finally went on the site today and it did seem to mostly work for what I was doing. Though being 49 going on 50 very soon, it wasn't clear whether I'd be charged a lower or higher rate. It's a big jump that upcoming birthday. > So they could put up that spreadsheet, which could be derived mostly by > the insurance companies (the only ones who really do know what is in the > ACA, and knew it even BEFORE it was passed) with about a dozen government > bureaucrats including the stunning Kari Byron in less than a week for > considerably less than 600 million dollars. Failure to do it that way > demonstrates bad judgment, stunning incompetence and even more than a hint > of Simon bar Sinister-esque control-freakish power-drunken evil. > The $600 million dollars is incredibly stupid. I heard that the two guys who ran the winning bid for building the web site each walked away with $80 million dollars a piece in pure profits. I'm pretty sure I could have gotten the whole site built for less than $20 million, and still had $10 million in profit. > So my criticism of Ms. Sebelius has nothing to do with her being evil or > anything about the ignominious failure of the website and its subsequent > shameless rollout for all to see, in all its refulgent wretchedness. My > criticism is that they even felt it needed to be a big software project to > begin with, when it really only required a small simple software project. > All they needed was just a big but simple spreadsheet, no more complex than > some I have created myself in my own misspent youth, and continue to create > in my misspent late youth. That they struggled to find the very most > expensive and complicated way to do a simple project, then flubbed it > spectacularly makes HealthCare.gov a perfect textbook example of why we > don?t want to hand over healthcare to the federal government. Get > government OUT of the healing business, don?t put more of it in there! > SHEESH for evolution SAKES! What, if anything, were they thinking? > I'm assuming they must have done more than create the signup website. They must also be writing software to deal with other parts of the monster. Which means there is more of this to come. > A slightly more sinister version of this is that it is perfectly clear > that HealthCare.gov is a nakedly transparent attempt at inappropriate data > harvesting by a government which has recently been caught doing that > illegitimately, but in the negative sense of the otherwise delightful word > nakedly. > Naked is also one of my favorite words... Saw a lovely game of spin the bottle last night... LOL... Anyway I digress. I don't think a government that is incapable of creating a simple web site is capable of covering up a functioning data harvesting operation via that same site. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Mon Oct 28 00:45:48 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 18:45:48 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: <20131023061728.GF10405@leitl.org> References: <98403CF1-5A40-46A2-9DE8-3661B39FC7BF@me.com> <20131023061728.GF10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 12:17 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 01:30:48PM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > > > I am open to all kinds of evidence. As a devout skeptic and extropian, I > > must be open to changing my mind when the data are convincing. I may seem > > unreasonable when talking to Eugen, but that is just because I find his > > oildrum data tainted and unconvincing. > > You also found Nature and Science Magazine "tainted and unconvicing". > That's not skeptic, that's pure lunatic country. > I deny that claim. I might not have liked the spin you put on the data. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Mon Oct 28 01:35:59 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 19:35:59 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: <2C17352F-6BCF-4DF9-BFF0-6333CC83FDA1@me.com> References: <2C17352F-6BCF-4DF9-BFF0-6333CC83FDA1@me.com> Message-ID: On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 5:53 AM, Omar Rahman wrote: > > > This is a difference of opinion. It doesn't make you a bad person. It > doesn't make me a good person to disagree. I simply believe that large more > global organizations are less efficient than smaller more local > organizations. The same people who want to raise the minimum wage are those > who cry from the mountain tops to buy locally produced produce. Why is > locally produced lettuce better than locally produced governance? > > > You are conflating lettuce production and government when all know that > the proper analogy from farming to government is pork production. This I > will forgive you....once! =D > Except real farms never produce too much pork. You can never have enough bacon. > Personally, about lettuce, I feel that is should be produced efficiently > and in a manner that preserves my health. If some sort of lettuce could be > produced more cheaply, assuming the same healthiness, even with the > transportation costs of bringing it half way around the world I would > assume that there is some sort of economic imbalance somewhere. Especially > if I'm not living in a waterless desert. My solution to this would be a > global currency issued directly to the citizens on a per capita basis. I > think this would go a long way to addressing economic imbalances. > Wow. You want to go to a one world government? That is exactly the opposite of my idea of a good time. > Local government IS better at local issues. However, my health care needs > are determined by the conditions in my body and not my position of a map. > If you think it costs a lot to send a head of lettuce from Sonora to Denver, you should try sending a dollar to Washington DC and back. A lot more lettuce gets to Denver from Sonora than from Washington in this scenario. > Isn't a group of local volunteers running a soup kitchen better than a > distant bureaucracy in Washington DC? I sure think it is. > > > You only know when you perform a side by side comparison. The assumption > by most 'pro-capitalist', 'anti-big-govenrment' people is that economies of > scale work wonderfully for business but when applied to government they go > into reverse. > Don't confuse me with the economies of scale people. Yes, it is better to produce drywall by the boat full. (a very cool process, btw) But that doesn't mean it has to be in the same company that produces car safety seats (which don't work so well, but that's another story of government incompetence). My favorite industrialist is a fellow named Ricardo Semler. He divides his companies whenever they get to big, amonst other things. > > I am having trouble understanding why you would simultaneously want a > higher minimum wage AND be against jobs that will soon be computerized or > robotised. Do you not understand that a raise of the minimum wage will > increase the speed of such automation? It's very simple economics. If it > costs me less to have a combine harvest my cotten than a bunch of Africans, > then I'm going with the combine. If you make me pay the Africans $100 a day > (in 1862 terms) then I'm going to go invent a combine. Fast. > > > You seem to misunderstand me, if a job can be computerised then let it. > The industrial revolution put weavers and knitters out of work, but....my > wife is knitting me a scarf. A minimum wage is a very important social > safety mechanism that prevents social inequality from growing too wide. > A minimum wage ensures that those who can't earn that much live off the government dole. > > > There you go making a point against your previous point again. Please try > to think consistently. Yes, a corporation is like an AGI, in that it DOES > NOT reflect the point of any individual. Then you turn it around and say > that it DOES reflect the point of a megalomaniacal individual. Which way do > you want it? I don't see how you can have both sides of this view. Try to > see what I'm saying here. > > > > I'm saying that a billionaire/corporation/country is roughly analogous to > an AGI and that it has some distributed capacity and it has a leader. Both > at once. The leaders aren't necessarily megalomaniacal. > Ok. > > Elon is the good guy in this example. My claim is that even good guys > could do something bad. This hardly seems controversial. > > Nope, not at all. but if they do enough bad things, they become bad guys... sort of tautological. > > > Too damn much emotion and fear in it. > > > About emotion I would say that we need emotional development more than > almost anything else. We aren't going to be able to get rid of our emotions > and remain anything close to 'sane' or 'human'. > I never said emotions were all bad... Just that decisions based entirely on emotions like fear lead to large militaries and other poor decisions. > > An interesting video about the 'psychopath test': > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUsGDVOCLVQ > I've seen that. While I'm not a psychopath (and I don't say that lightly, I have good friends who are), I have enough psychopathic tendencies to identify. > > I would also oppose a war on Cuteness. > > > Traitor! > Tough. Most war is bad. I am however totally in favor of the Jihad against Barney the Purple Dinosaur. http://www.jihad.net/ (was alt.barney.dinosaur.die.die.die back in the good old days of usenet) > > The only war I am in favor of at the moment is the war against bloated > government. It's like a large tumor growing in the belly of the world's > nations. It will eventually kill the hosts. > > > General agreement that government spending must be periodically > cut/adjusted. > It will be, but if it isn't done voluntarily, it could be VERY painful. Make the sequester look like a little grey cloud in comparison to the Katrina that could result. > Cancer is in a way a good analogy not just because of the 'uncontrolled > growth' aspect, but also from the 'treatment aspect'. > Agreed. Current treatment for cancer is unfortunately very drastic. Generally we > cut something off, or we take poison into our systems in hopes that the > less fit cancer cells will die. If we have a foot that has cancer we might > consider an amputation to prevent the spear. We however can't take that > approach with our head or heart. The systemic poisons we take fairly often > end up killing the patient. > > I would make the analogy that not all spending cuts are equal. Don't cut > the 'heart' out of our institutions. > The government has no business being in the heart business. They should be in the business of maintaining our freedom and safety and leave the rest up to private citizens. Americans are so generous of their own volition that nobody would go hungry. > I would also make the point that government itself isn't the 'cancer' it's > the patient. There are some who think, as Reagan did, that 'government is > the problem'; that is a fundamental disagreement for me. > Agree to disagree. Government IS a big part of the problem, along with big corporations, and big religions. > If, and I'll admit it's a big IF, you accept the notion that countries are > > 'mostly analog AIs', how would you rate the US on the 'friendly' scale? > Psychotic? Delusional? > > > Totally bat shit crazy. Much worse than the TEA party. One can easily make > the case that the US as a nation has Borderline Personality Disorder, > Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Paranoid Personality Disorder, > Antisocial Personality Disorder and many others. Of course, most other > nations are also bat shit crazy. That's why I want smaller, more localized > government, because if you can reach your fingers around the neck of the > crazy ass hole that's making the rules, he's going to make better rules > (usually). > > > > In a sense I agree with you; we need appropriately scaled institutions to > deal with each other. > The only large institution that I think we need is the military. It may be a little too large, but it does need to be monolithic to be functional. > You think states are better because they are roughly speaking 1/50th the > size of the Federal government in the US. Well, that's going towards 2 > orders of magnitude better! Problem solved? > No, but it does give us 50 different experimental labs in democracy, and that will let us learn what works, and what doesn't. I think that's a better approach. And what works in one place might not work in another. I'm against Common Core for that reason. Though most who are against it want to sneak religion back into school... sigh. > No, because (I put my Canadian hat on for a second...a toque if you must > know.) we evil Canadians are massing on your northern border in > preparation for a permanent spring break. We're going to carve you up state > by state in our drive towards Florida as part of our doctrine 'of blatantly > obvious need for sunny days destiny'. > 80% of Canadians live within 50 miles of the US border. Huddled there for warmth, no doubt. The only thing I fear less than a Canadian invasion is a French invasion. > Does anyone know of a reference towards a type of bureaucratic structure > that incorporates an idea of a series of appropriately scaled institutions > for dealing with each other? The obvious example is a military model but > I'm thinking of a democratic institution. > The Internet. Anarchy in action. It's nearly perfect. > Almost every president has raised spending in dollar amounts, but when you > couple that with tax cuts you get exactly the debt explosion that you would > expect rather than the 'golden shower' of the trickle down economics we > were promised. > > > I feel the golden shower running down my back everytime Washington pisses > on me. > > > So it's not just me then? I mean being the unfortunate pissee not the > pisser.... > It's all about consent my friend, and I didn't consent to being pissed on by the government. > > Don't know enough Canadian politics to comment, though I know enough to > know that they use Conservative and Liberal differently than they are > defined in the USA. Very confusing that. > > > Well, roughly speaking Conservatives = Republicans and Liberals = > Democrats. > That's not what I got out of it when I talked to people up there. That's roughly true here though. > The whole thing makes more sense from the perspective of Hawks and Doves. > The Hawks want oversized militaries and are prone to the use of force and > political violence to get this. The Doves want a whole laundry list of > things and need to cut spending in 'defence' to get them. > In America we are way past that. I think it is more of the anarchists vs. the bureaucrats. Defense spending or no defense spending just doesn't make any difference anymore. We spend so much on social security, medicare, medicaid and interest on the debt, that the rest of it just doesn't matter a lick. > > I agree. The military-industrial complex is another large dysfunctional > organization. The banking system is yet another. The Bank of American Fork > is one of the best run banks in the nation. Why? Probably because they are > not large. > > > We agree that the system as a whole is dysfunctional. However, the > military-undustrial complex and the banking system aren't dysfunctional > they are functioning EXACTLY as the generals, military suppliers, and the > bankers want. > The banking system is dysfunctional. I doubt anyone wanted the housing bubble to go boom the way it did. > > I disagree with you slightly here. When Obama put forth his idea of the > sequester, he thought the Republicans would fold before taking money away > from defense. Guess what? It backfired on him because the Tea Party thought > it more important to reduce spending than fund defense. I would say that is > evidence against your proposition. > > > There was a moment in one of the most recent Republican Presidential > primary debates where they were asked if they would accept even a 10:1 > ratio of cuts to tax increases. They all signified that they would not. > This sort of inflexibility, largely due to Grover Norquist's pledge (which > is somehow help more solemn than their pledge to serve the American > people), is not conducive to shared bi-partisan governance. > Nobody in Washington takes any pledge seriously. > > Handful of beans? Health Care represents 18% of the US economy. How is that > a handful of beans? I am convinced that the long term plan is for Obamacare > to morph into a single payer system. Doing what they are doing now (so > badly) is the way forward to a single payer system. If we get there, Zeus > protect us! > > > Health care is some large, you say 18%, part of the economy. The funding > for Obamacare is what is being discussed. That funding pales to > insignificance when compared to Military and Spy funding. > > I want numbers. And Obamacare is just getting started, it will get WAY more expensive. > > Then perhaps they are bad at math? Bad to the point where they don't know > which number is larger than another? > Hard numbers are difficult to come by, at least the media never puts them in front of us. > > You said: > > We need a more mammalian > government that balances risks and reactions to risk in a more > mathematically correct way. > > > Well, Defence is larger than Obamacare. > For the moment. Again, numbers please? > Interestingly Medicare and Medicaid are BIGGER than Defence and the > opportunity to reform those seems to be gone. A good article about the > comparisons between Obamacare and the Canadian system is: > http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/obamacare-vs-canada-five-key-differences/article14657740/ > > In a lot of ways I think the answer was for the US to emulate the Canadian > system more rather than less. The cost side of the equation has been left > firmly in the grip of the Hospital corporations, Insurance industry, and > medical guilds. > Omar, America will soon enough have a system similar to Canada's. Obamacare is an enormous cluster fuck designed to implode so that we have to go to a single payer system. Just wait for the boom. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Mon Oct 28 01:49:31 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 19:49:31 -0600 Subject: [ExI] This is one amazing robot! In-Reply-To: <20131024163852.GD10405@leitl.org> References: <00ea01cece8c$8eba9960$ac2fcc20$@att.net> <20131022092807.GJ10405@leitl.org> <20131024163852.GD10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Thu, Oct 24, 2013 at 10:38 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Thu, Oct 24, 2013 at 10:21:07AM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > > > Eugen, your pessimism is showing again. Would you like an optimism > > transfusion? I think I have enough for both of us. > > > > It was only in the 1990s that we sequenced the entire human genome. And > now > > That was two decades ago. What impact on human longevity has that > knowledge given us, so far? > The latest report from the Centers for Disease Control is that in 2009 the U.S. life expectancy exceeded 78 years for the first time ever. At the turn of the last century, this number was 47.3 years. In fact, in the life expectancy during 10 of the past 10 years was the highest on record. Certainly a small part of this has come from the human genome project. But how long did it take from Columbus discovering America to gold going back to Portugal? Some projects are long term. Be sure the human genome project will eventually bear fruit worth having. It is a young science. > > look what it costs: > > http://bit.ly/18PrQUD > > That is a truly shocking curve. > > I agree it's a good thing. I wish we knew how to engineer > genomes to build proteins to specs. > Me too. And we will someday. > > We are only just now bringing anything based on that huge breakthrough to > > the marketplace. Understanding the human genome will take time, but we > are > > parsing it with increasingly powerful computers. Get the protein folding > > Computers are good for many things, but ability to engineer organisms > is not yet one of them. Arresting nevermind reversing aging in a living > adult animal is a massive molecular-scale control problem. This spells > medical nano, and we can't do even the basic MNT stuff. GMO is pretty > weak sauce, and would only work in the yet unborn. > Still, it will eventually help you and I. I'm pretty sure of that. > > algorithm down, and we'll see some real breakthroughs real fast. Yes it > is > > a hard problem. Can it be solved? Maybe with special hardware or > something. > > > > Maybe with online games. > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foldit > > > > Start parsing the genome of various plants and animals, and we'll figure > > out even more stuff. > > > > Medicine is making a radical jump towards being more predictably > scientific > > One of my hats involves reading primary medical literature, and > unfortunately > I'm not seeing anything too radical there, yet. > No. I agree with you. But it is coming. One of the first cool things I think we'll see is cloned teeth at the dentist. > > and less trial and error prone. This really does make a difference. If > you > > can predict what a compound might do without animal trials, the things > you > > can do with the same amount of research money start to go up a Moore's > Law > > kind of curve. That's a game changer, don't you think? > > You sound like me, early 1990s. Virtual screening is pretty much dead now. > It will come back. Just needs the right algorithms and computing power. > > Said another way, when medicine becomes engineering, won't that change > the > > rules of the game? > > > > And can't you see that medicine is evolving towards engineering? > > I can see that. I just don't see much relevant progress since I was > 17. I then thought we'll need to freeze, and now it's three decades > later. It seems that I was correct. > I'm not counting you out yet. Something happened young padawan to turn you to the dark side... > > There is no limit on the resource of human ingenuity over time in such > > There's one thing: we haven't got too much time to buy us more time. > All right, we'll all die soon... might as well party like rock stars now. > > matters. This isn't a limited resource like sweet crude. Just walk into > the > > light Eugen! > > Optimism is considered dangerous to your health. > Uh, quite the opposite. http://www.webmd.com/balance/news/20041101/optimism-may-help-you-live-longer I know WebMD isn't exactly nature, but it's pretty nice. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From zyttyz at yahoo.com Mon Oct 28 05:17:40 2013 From: zyttyz at yahoo.com (paul michael) Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 22:17:40 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [ExI] MiNTing (or if you must, APM) library In-Reply-To: <526D20F1.2070204@aleph.se> References: <1382843405.57752.YahooMailNeo@web141604.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> <526D20F1.2070204@aleph.se> Message-ID: <1382937460.88686.YahooMailNeo@web141602.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> "A mature NMT economy has this problem but to a higher degree. I wonder why you just think this is fpr transitional economies?" I don't think that it just for transitional economies, the change from current manufacturing style to MNT/APM manufacturing will be a time of great turmoil.? If the transition time is quick, say only a decade or less how will people (non-techie) adjust?? Suppose a person who sells ..... clothes, can't anymore because a MNT/APM 'box' is now everywhere making clothes and everyday things.? This person won't be able to find a similar job - there aren't anymore jobs in their area.? Well this 'box' is sitting on the table making things for the family. Not only did they lose their job to the 'box', it is in their home it had better work and not be a cheat.? Anger might ensue. I've worked with many people who basically, when change occurs or bad times happen they just try harder, get another job, work work work because the kids need shoes or at least a better life.? That is why I'm worried, transitional times destroy, they also create but creating takes time. Shopkeepers, shoe salesmen, people who just are living week to week will really need WYSIWYG with respect to this 'box'. And yes, software certifications and such are really nice to have consumer products reviewed - lovely we will need them for MNT/APM box or it will cause great pain for people who have lost just about everything to the coming transition. mimzy On Sunday, October 27, 2013 7:24 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: On 2013-10-27 03:10, paul michael wrote: a MNT transitional society would need something like a UL stamp of approval for the MiNTing software.? Why?? Because think about it - a scrip kiddie decides that it would be 'fun' to change the molecular design of cotton such that in sunlight the clothes made from this cotton turn transparent or some such thing This is generally true for complex artefacts where trust is important, yet the source is not an easily tracked nym with reputation capital. Consider software certificates, or peer review in science. Ideally papers, software and consumer products should be reviewed and analysed in great detail by trusted third parties (certification agencies, consumer reports, review boards) or at least customer information compiled (yelp, amazon). The challenges are (1) complex objects can have complex flaws that are near-impossible to find, (2) who bears the cost of testing? Breaking down artefacts into modules helps reduce 1 and 2: a library can be analysed and then re-used, but failures of review can make a vast number of derived artefacts unreliable. Strengthening the traceability of causes and agents can also help: if you can find who inserted what, and then bring the authorities or internet opprobrium down on his head, there is some disincentive for bad behaviour. But this only works if traceability to real names or high-capital nyms works. A mature NMT economy has this problem but to a higher degree. I wonder why you just think this is fpr transitional economies? -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Mon Oct 28 05:40:58 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 22:40:58 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: References: <2C17352F-6BCF-4DF9-BFF0-6333CC83FDA1@me.com> Message-ID: <080201ced3a0$48ed1c50$dac754f0$@att.net> >. On Behalf Of Kelly Anderson >.Most war is bad. I am however totally in favor of the Jihad against Barney the Purple Dinosaur. http://www.jihad.net/ (was alt.barney.dinosaur.die.die.die back in the good old days of usenet). Did you notice one of the early posters on barney was our very own Eliezer Yudkowsky. He started posting on ExI when he was about 15, so it was interesting to read such a young guy with such big ideas. >.I want numbers. And Obamacare is just getting started, it will get WAY more expensive. Kelly, there are some comments in this article that blow my mind: http://money.cnn.com/2013/10/23/technology/obamacare-website-fix/index.html? iid=EL They mention a number I think must be in error, 500 million lines of code. Indeed? No one has yet offered us a reasonable explanation for what the hell all those lines of code think they are doing in there. Why did they need all that? Software gurus please, does that tell you what they could have had in mind? With half a billion lines of code, there is just no possible way they could secure the data. With that much code they can't even really debug it all, no way! Surely there must be a mistake, or I am failing to understand something fundamental. With all that code, I am naturally suspicious as all get out, never mind the recent revelations. Suppose they do start over. Why not go with that big spreadsheet idea? The user would just download the whole thing, compare costs at their leisure, or if Kelly is right and they can't do that, just have someone with actual brains help them, figure out what they want, find the company which offers the closest to that, then see if the price is within reality, or opt out, not all that different from buying a car. Really simple for most people who don't get employer health insurance: I am betting most will opt out, at least at first when it doesn't cost much, and really doesn't cost anything, since the ACA doesn't specifically empower the IRS to collect, and after the way they treated the Republicans in the house this month, goooood luck getting them to pass a law to empower collection. The Republicans are likely to tell them to go to hell and take their ACA law with them. All they need is a big downloadable spreadsheet, with every company's deal in there, simple. >.Omar, America will soon enough have a system similar to Canada's. Obamacare is an enormous cluster fuck designed to implode so that we have to go to a single payer system. Just wait for the boom. -Kelly Here's the real kicker: I and plenty of others would likely go for a single payer system under one condition: that it be done on a state level. We don't have enough control over the Fed to do this, so no way I could go along with it. We see corruption spilling out more every day, IRS chief taking the fifth, another IRS chief sharing taxpayer data with the government, now we hear the NSA is spying on Angela Merkel. Clearly this bunch is corrupt to the bone. Actually states are free to set up a single payer system now, and have always been free to do that. That none of them are doing it should be some kind of hint that it might not work as well as it sounds. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Mon Oct 28 06:05:32 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 23:05:32 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: <080201ced3a0$48ed1c50$dac754f0$@att.net> References: <2C17352F-6BCF-4DF9-BFF0-6333CC83FDA1@me.com> <080201ced3a0$48ed1c50$dac754f0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sun, Oct 27, 2013 at 10:40 PM, spike wrote: > They mention a number I think must be in error, 500 million lines of > code. Indeed? No one has yet offered us a reasonable explanation for what > the hell all those lines of code think they are doing in there. Why did > they need all that? Software gurus please, does that tell you what they > could have had in mind? > My hunch is, that figure includes third party things such as Apache Web servers, and thus all the lines of code from those projects - including lots of features and special cases that this Web site does not and never will use (within the next half century, at least). While it is technically correct to say the project contains those lines of code, it is also grossly misleading. That or they're including data files and other non-code things. That said, it's a federal government IT project. Rare is such a project that is well managed and well designed. I can readily believe there's quite a bit of bloat too. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Mon Oct 28 08:02:38 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2013 09:02:38 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: References: <98403CF1-5A40-46A2-9DE8-3661B39FC7BF@me.com> <20131023061728.GF10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20131028080238.GA10405@leitl.org> On Sun, Oct 27, 2013 at 06:45:48PM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 12:17 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > > On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 01:30:48PM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > > > > > I am open to all kinds of evidence. As a devout skeptic and extropian, I > > > must be open to changing my mind when the data are convincing. I may seem > > > unreasonable when talking to Eugen, but that is just because I find his > > > oildrum data tainted and unconvincing. > > > > You also found Nature and Science Magazine "tainted and unconvicing". > > That's not skeptic, that's pure lunatic country. > > > > I deny that claim. Denial DENIED DENIED DENIED. > I might not have liked the spin you put on the data. You still haven't produced a single peer reviewed publication in either Science or Nature that shows that cornucopians have a case. I'm waiting. From pharos at gmail.com Mon Oct 28 09:38:31 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2013 09:38:31 +0000 Subject: [ExI] readers digest version of hayek In-Reply-To: References: <005701ced1f9$5216f060$f644d120$@att.net> <034401ced2a7$ffe7b630$ffb72290$@att.net> <029c01ced334$393ad480$abb07d80$@att.net> <03df01ced347$b51034c0$1f309e40$@att.net> Message-ID: On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 12:35 AM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > The $600 million dollars is incredibly stupid. I heard that the two guys who > ran the winning bid for building the web site each walked away with $80 > million dollars a piece in pure profits. > > I'm pretty sure I could have gotten the whole site built for less than $20 > million, and still had $10 million in profit. > That's not the way government contracts work. The 600 million includes paying for jobs (necessary or not) in their area, to get popular support. The 'profits' may look huge, but a big share of that goes back to the politicians in kickbacks, lobbying, political contributions, etc. If it doesn't, you won't get any more government contracts. The same system works at state and city level, except it is possibly even more corrupted. Jobs and contracts for family and friends, etc. BillK From rex at nosyntax.net Mon Oct 28 09:23:18 2013 From: rex at nosyntax.net (rex) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2013 02:23:18 -0700 Subject: [ExI] A Gedanken Rational Eugenics Experiment (AGREE) In-Reply-To: References: <20131024011619.GB4312@ninja.nosyntax.net> <5268F9E7.8080602@aleph.se> Message-ID: <20131028092318.GB4903@ninja.nosyntax.net> Kelly Anderson [2013-10-27 11:22]: > On Thu, Oct 24, 2013 at 4:43 AM, Anders Sandberg <[1]anders at aleph.se> > wrote: > > Note that you would need to pay *a lot*. The below 1 SD population is > around 15%, so in the US that would be about 47 million people you need > to pay off. I am not sure what the going price for getting sterilized > is, but at least I expect it to be on the order of a few thousand > dollars - > > There is a successful private endeavor to sterilize female drug addicts > for as little as $300. > [2]http://www.projectprevention.org Hello Kelly, Note that the organization also offers payment for long-term birth control, which is IMO a much better option. Sterilization, like suicide, is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. > Unfortunately, low IQ apparently is negatively correlated with drug use. > At least in one study. > [3]http://www.ibtimes.com/smart-people-illegal-drugs-intelligent-people-dont-always-do-right-thing-371056 Careful. The study finds an odds ratio > 1 for high IQ & drug use, but it does not follow that low IQ has a negative correlation with drug use. To see why, consider a "\__/" shaped relationship between IQ and drug use. If that were the case, both high- and low-IQs would have a positive correlation with drug use. Statistical inference is a slippery subject. -rex -- There are two kinds of geniuses: the "ordinary" and the "magicians." An ordinary genius is a fellow whom you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what they've done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. Even after we understand what they have done it is completely dark. Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest calibre. --Mark Kac From eugen at leitl.org Mon Oct 28 10:37:12 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2013 11:37:12 +0100 Subject: [ExI] The Actual Visionary of the Future In-Reply-To: References: <20131025133031.GL10405@leitl.org> <20131025195114.GU10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20131028103712.GC10405@leitl.org> On Sun, Oct 27, 2013 at 01:50:23PM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > That's simply not true Eugen. You're better than that. That was obviously hyperbole, to make a point. He is, however, prone to see exponentials where there are none. > I believe MORE things are exponential than Ray does, and even I don't > believe everything is exponential. That being said, lots of things are, > like the savings in your bank account. Exponential growth of compound interest is a textbook case where your numerical model of physical layer processes and reality increasingly diverge, requiring periodic, painful readjustments. > > People > > forget that hard drives stopped doubling, at least for a short while. > > > > Because of a flood in Thailand. Nobody has said there wouldn't be bumps in Thailand was not the reason. We're stuck at 4 TB because they ran into limits of a particular technology. In case of platters full of spinning rust the snag is temporary, as there are two successor technologies about to enter the marketplace (HAMR and BPM, not new but close to becoming mature enough for practical applications) so there's probably another order of magnitude still to go before end of the line. That makes it 40 TB. Coincidentally, NOR flash has recently also entered scaling limits. The time for surface scaling is running out. The only alternative is 3d volume integration. We do not have anything in the pipeline to arrive in time, so there will be a gap. The only technology to interpolate would be Langmuir-Blodgett serial layer deposition, with according 2d liquid mosaic self-assembly/alignment. I'm not aware of this technology to be ready for deployment. Next after that is 3d crystal self-assembly from solution. This is even further away. > the road, just that there was an overall trend. > > > > People are unaware of finer points like > > http://postbiota.org/pipermail/tt/2013-October/014179.html > > > Ok, I read that, and what it said in a nut shell is "fuck this is hard". Yes, this is the nature of limits. Instead of constant doubling times the last few show longer and longer steps. As I told you, we're no longer at 18 months but at 3 years doubling time this moment. The next doubling times will be longer. This means that linear semilog plot is no longer linear. No more Moore for you. > Not, I expect it to come to a screeching halt. Why do you expect that? Look at the price tag of the zEnterprise 196. Obviously, a somewhat higher margin than on a 50 USD ARM SoC. > > > that point puts computers at many billions of times smarter than us in a > > > > Many billions times smarter than us, using which metric? > > > > Any you wish to put forward. I cheerfully admit that I have absolutely no idea. Ants can possibly design ways to evaluate people which make sense to people. > > relatively short time frame compared to the ultimate limits. > > > > My personal time is very short, probably less than 40 years if > > I'm lucky. My personal interests lie squarely with a working > > suspend function, the future better get the resume part > > right. > > > > If they read your posts here Eugen, they might decide not to thaw you out. > Who needs a pessimist in a utopia... :-) Utopia? I'm afraid I have another piece of bad news for you. Very bad news, I'm afraid... > > > I know you MUST believe that computers will continue to get faster, even > > if > > > they don't quite keep up the doubling pace. Right? > > > > What does faster mean? The only reliable way is a benchmark. > > The only really relevant benchmark is the one that runs your > > problem. As such faster never kept up with Moore's law. > > Moore's law is about affordable transistors, and that one > > gives you a canvas for your potential. So your gains are less > > than Moore, and sometimes a lot less. For me personally, > > the bottleneck in classical (GPGPU is classical) computers > > is worst-case memory bandwidth. Which is remarkably sucky, > > if you look it up. > > > > The problem I care about the most is computer vision. We are now Computer vision is very easy, actually, and quite well understood. The low number of layers and connectivity (fanout), all local at that, a retina needs are within the envelope of silicon fabrication. > approaching automated vehicles becoming a reality. I thought it would > happen in 2014 since 2004. It may be delayed a year or two by bureaucrats > and lawyers, but the technology should be cheap enough for luxury cars to I'm afraid luxury something is going to be a very, very small market in the coming decades. I agree that autonomous cars are mostly a very good thing, unless you happen to be a trucker, or a car maker. Whatever Germany earns on car making is about enough to pay for the fossil fuel imports. > have highway cruise control (including steering) by 2014 or 2015. So my > venture into guessing the future was pretty close, using Ray's technique. > > > > Ok. So, now your transistor budget no long doubles in > > constant time, but that time keeps increasing. It's roughly > > three years by end of this year, no longer 18 months. > > Physical feature size limits are close behind, and your > > Si real state is a 400 mm pizza, max. WSI gives you a > > factor of two by making yield quantitative, but it wrecks > > havoc to your computation model, because grain size starts > > being tiny (less than mm^2), and asks for asynchronous > > shared-nothing, and did I mention fine-grained? So no > > TBytes of RAM for your LUT. The next step is FPGA, as in > > runtime reconfigurable. That *might* give you another > > factor of 2, or maybe even 4. Stacking is off-Moore, but > > it will do something, particularly giving cache-like > > access to your RAM, as long as it's few 10 MBytes max. > > > > I've predicted that they will go to 3D. It is the only logical way to go Everybody and his dog predicted that, since early 1970s. The difficult is actually making it happen, just in time when semiconductor photolitho just runs out of steam. Guess what, that time is now. So, where is your 3d integration technology? > from here, other than maybe 2 1/2 D first... You can't have that by semiconductor photolitho. Stacking is off-More. What else have you got? > > > And then you have to go real 3d, or else there's gap. > > > > True, unless something completely different comes along, which may not be > highly likely. New technologies typically take decades of development, until they're sufficiently matured so that they can take on mature technologies that have ran into their scaling limits. > > > My guess the gap is somewhere 15-20 years long, but > > we've got maybe 10 years until saturation curve is pretty > > damn flat. > > > > Ok. Then we can start making larger structures. It won't speed up due to > decreasing transistor size, but it will be able to do useful work. Imagine > a 3d CPU 5 inches on a side. That could do some serious work. More than a > human brain. The human brain is a 3d integrated assembly of computational elements which are built from features on nm scale. > > He implicitly implied we'll run on 100% of thin-film PV in 16 years. > > That was 2011, so make that 14 years. This means 4.2 TWp/year just > > for power in a linear model, nevermind matching synfuel capability > > (try doubling that, after all is sung and done -- 8 shiny TWp/year). > > We're not getting the linear model. In fact, we arguably sublinear, > > see > > http://cleantechnica.com/2013/10/14/third-quarter-2013-solar-pv-installations-reach-9-gw/ > > > You obviously don't understand the nature of his prediction. If he says Obviously. I expect prediction to be brittle, and that the originator is prepared to eat some crow, in case she is wrong. I'm old-fashioned this way. > that the doubling in solar efficiency is 3.5 years (going from memory) then > half of the solar he envisions will be installed between July 2023 and Thank you for explaining exponential growth to me. I think I've first understood it before I was 10. The nature of solar cells is the only way to double the output is to double the surface. And the according infrastructure in the background, simple things like 10 GUSD plants, electric grid upgrades, storage systems, and the like. > 2027. What's being installed now probably is sublinear, that's what an > exponential would predict. He didn't predict a linear model. We'll revisit You're not understanding me. It used to be exponential. Because it's very easy to double very little. Until suddenly you have to double quite a lot. This isn't a lily pond or a bacterial culture, this is infrastructure work. So Ray is already wrong, once again. The trend is no longer exponential. > his prediction in 2027 if we're both still communicating by then. The prediction is 100% of electricity in 16 years. He then scaled that back by saying 20 years. That's 2021. Given that we're already off-exponential, I expect that you keep posting "I'm wrong" every year. > > apply. However, in a sense it does apply. We do get some percent better at > > > extracting what's left each year. That doesn't mean we get an exponential > > > > No, in terms of net energy we're not getting better. We're actually > > getting worse. > > > > > amount of oil, since there's a limited amount of the stuff. But it does > > > mean that we get exponentially better at finding what's left (note that > > > > We're not getting better. We've mapped all the stuff, there are almost > > no unknown unknowns. And dropping EROEI and even dropping volume > > (not net energy, volume!) per unit of effort is pretty much the > > opposite of exponential. Do 40% of decay rate/well/year mean a > > thing to you? > > > > You misunderstand my point again. I know it's harder to get oil. But we > develop new technologies for getting at what's left. Fracking is 40 years old. Fracking is running into diminishing returns. So where are your new technologies, which need to be already in wide deployment, now? > > > > this curve is likely much more gentle than computing, with a doubling of > > > reserves we can get at maybe every 20 or 50 years. I don't know.) > > > > There are no exponentials in infrastructure. There is an early > > sigmoidal that looks that way, but we've left that already. > > > > Infrastructure can change rapidly. How long did it take for everyone to get No. Infrastructure takes 30 years, frequently longer. That's a constant. > a cell phone? Smart Phones? When electric cars make financial sense (if How long did take for everybody to get their own synfuel plant? > they ever do) then people will switch to them quickly. Large infrastructure Do you understand the logictics of car production? Battery manufacturing? Dynamics of fleet exchange? Recharging infrastructure? Including the money to fund it all? Do the math, it is really quite illuminating. > like roads and so forth will remain problematic until robotics is good > enough to do much more of the job. > > > > > > > > > This is the opposite of science. > > > > > > > > > > It is a part of science, the hypothesis part. LAR applied to computing > > > available per dollar in particular is a hypothesis formed in the mid > > 1960s. > > > As far as I know, we are still more or less on that track, though they > > have > > > > No, we're not. See benchmarks. > > > > Data please. I can't find any. I have looked. Try Stream, though it's a synthetic benchmark http://www.admin-magazine.com/HPC/Articles/Finding-Memory-Bottlenecks-with-Stream It would be a reasonable assumption for retina-like processing scaling. Deeper visual pipelines are different. Here, you need to access something like fetching from a large (>>10 GByte) of random pointers. > > People who hear about Amdahl's Law the first time have to stop worrying, > > and embrace nondeterminism. People who expect reliable systems at hardware > > level are gonna have a bad time. > > > > I disagree with that. There will be reliable hardware, or they won't be If you want to not run into Amdahl you need to embrace nondeterminism. Building test harnesses just got a bit harder. > able to sell it. No matter how slow the previous generation was. It is hard Yes, there will be unreliable hardware. This is one of the problems in exascale: unreliable transport and unreliable components (as in: parts of your system keep failing at runtime, and you diagnose and remap to hot spares, all without breaking a stride). Beyond that, you've got stochastical computing elements. That's one of the joys of living at nanoscale. > enough to get programmers to do multi-threading. It would be damn close to > impossible to get them to switch to a model where the answer might not be > right. There is no longer "exactly right" there is only "good enough". > > > > takes advantage of it much more difficult. For the next few years, we can > > > safely believe that computers will continue to get cheaper. Maybe for the > > > next fifty years, but who knows. For sure for the next 5 though. Intel > > has > > > it all mapped out. > > > > > > > > > > We've had a number of such people, which turned out a liability > > > > to transhumanism in the end. Our handicap is already sufficiently > > > > high, we don't need such monkeys on our back. > > > > > > > > > > How is being pessimistic about the future more helpful? > > > > It obviously isn't. You have to be a realist. The problem with > > optimists is that they think they're realists. But, unfortunately, > > they aren't. When in a tough spot, never, ever team up > > with an optimist. > > > > A pessimist will just hole up in his cave. I refer you to "The Croods" to I don't know what a pessimist would do. I do know that the only guy who'd still have water when his cars break down in the desert is a realist. The optimists always end up as bleached bones. Your call. > see how that worked out in one fictional setting. From spike66 at att.net Mon Oct 28 14:57:38 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2013 07:57:38 -0700 Subject: [ExI] readers digest version of hayek In-Reply-To: References: <005701ced1f9$5216f060$f644d120$@att.net> <034401ced2a7$ffe7b630$ffb72290$@att.net> <029c01ced334$393ad480$abb07d80$@att.net> <03df01ced347$b51034c0$1f309e40$@att.net> Message-ID: <08d601ced3ee$0c0870c0$24195240$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of BillK >... > >>... I'm pretty sure I could have gotten the whole site built for less than $20 million, and still had $10 million in profit. Kelly > >...That's not the way government contracts work. >...The 600 million includes paying for jobs (necessary or not) in their area, to get popular support. >...The same system works at state and city level, except it is possibly even more corrupted. Jobs and contracts for family and friends, etc. BillK _______________________________________________ BillK, if this is done on a national level, there is only one big rich corrupt customer, and as it turns out, only one big rich corrupt contractor. If the whole scheme is done at the state level, most states do not have hundreds of millions of dollars, so it forces some simple alternative designs. With fifty potential customers, someone somewhere, perhaps one of you software wizards who read ExI, join the competition. Then someone somewhere hits on the obvious solution: 1) the state governments create a big spreadsheet, companies on the left, maladies across the top, with a price column, 2) the insurance companies fill it in with the deal they are offering and their price, 3) the customer downloads the whole thing, shops around in anonymity, chooses a plan or opts out, 4) the customer goes to the company they chose, 5) the company collects the information it needs and only that information from the customer, 6) the insurance company applies to the federal government on behalf of the customer for a subsidy, if the customer qualifies, based on income, 7) the subsidy is paid to the insurance company if the patient qualifies, reducing or in some cases eliminating required insurance payment, 8) the opt outs pay an extra tax, which is extracted from their tax refund if one is due, otherwise nothing happens, 9) use the opt out tax to create a pool of funds to pay for the subsidies, so that the whole system is self-sustaining, removing it from being threatened if the government is short of funds. Alternative to number 8, the opt-out tax is collected by the state government, which does have the authority to place a lien against your damn property if you fail to pay, or withhold your drivers' license and car registration. States can do things like that; the Fed cannot. The constitution was written and signed before there were cars, and the founders intentionally set a high bar to change it. This makes the federal government too big and clumsy to change course, like a big lumbering dinosaur. But states operate more like a big flock of birds, who can change direction when one bird sends the signal. State governments can change their constitutions however, and often do. None of this requires any enormous multimillion dollar multi mega-line code package, doesn't require the snoopy-doopy federal government asking personal questions. Some state or several will find this easy path and do it. Then that state is held up for the others as an example of how to do a government/commercial partnership correctly, and the whole flock pivots on a feather, off they go in the RIGHT direction. Compare that vastly simplified (and legal) approach to the failed ObamaCare. Any questions? spike From eugen at leitl.org Mon Oct 28 16:03:12 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2013 17:03:12 +0100 Subject: [ExI] The Battle for Power on the Internet Message-ID: <20131028160312.GU10405@leitl.org> The Battle for Power on the Internet Distributed citizen groups and nimble hackers once had the edge. Now governments and corporations are catching up. Who will dominate in the decades ahead? BRUCE SCHNEIER OCT 24 2013, 7:07 AM ET Vivek Prakash/Reuters We?re in the middle of an epic battle for power in cyberspace. On one side are the traditional, organized, institutional powers such as governments and large multinational corporations. On the other are the distributed and nimble: grassroots movements, dissident groups, hackers, and criminals. Initially, the Internet empowered the second side. It gave them a place to coordinate and communicate efficiently, and made them seem unbeatable. But now, the more traditional institutional powers are winning, and winning big. How these two side fare in the long term, and the fate of the rest of us who don?t fall into either group, is an open question?and one vitally important to the future of the Internet. In the Internet?s early days, there was a lot of talk about its ?natural laws??how it would upend traditional power blocks, empower the masses, and spread freedom throughout the world. The international nature of the Internet bypassed circumvented national laws. Anonymity was easy. Censorship was impossible. Police were clueless about cybercrime. And bigger changes seemed inevitable. Digital cash would undermine national sovereignty. Citizen journalism would topple traditional media, corporate PR, and political parties. Easy digital copying would destroy the traditional movie and music industries. Web marketing would allow even the smallest companies to compete against corporate giants. It really would be a new world order. This was a utopian vision, but some of it did come to pass. Internet marketing has transformed commerce. The entertainment industries have been transformed by things like MySpace and YouTube, and are now more open to outsiders. Mass media has changed dramatically, and some of the most influential people in the media have come from the blogging world. There are new ways to organize politically and run elections. Crowdfunding has made tens of thousands of projects possible to finance, and crowdsourcing made more types of projects possible. Facebook and Twitter really did help topple governments. But that is just one side of the Internet?s disruptive character. The Internet has emboldened traditional power as well. On the corporate side, power is consolidating, a result of two current trends in computing. First, the rise of cloud computing means that we no longer have control of our data. Our e-mail, photos, calendars, address books, messages, and documents are on servers belonging to Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and so on. And second, we are increasingly accessing our data using devices that we have much less control over: iPhones, iPads, Android phones, Kindles, ChromeBooks, and so on. Unlike traditional operating systems, those devices are controlled much more tightly by the vendors, who limit what software can run, what they can do, how they?re updated, and so on. Even Windows 8 and Apple?s Mountain Lion operating system are heading in the direction of more vendor control. I have previously characterized this model of computing as ?feudal.? Users pledge their allegiance to more powerful companies who, in turn, promise to protect them from both sysadmin duties and security threats. It?s a metaphor that?s rich in history and in fiction, and a model that?s increasingly permeating computing today. Medieval feudalism was a hierarchical political system, with obligations in both directions. Lords offered protection, and vassals offered service. The lord-peasant relationship was similar, with a much greater power differential. It was a response to a dangerous world. Feudal security consolidates power in the hands of the few. Internet companies, like lords before them, act in their own self-interest. They use their relationship with us to increase their profits, sometimes at our expense. They act arbitrarily. They make mistakes. They?re deliberately?and incidentally?changing social norms. Medieval feudalism gave the lords vast powers over the landless peasants; we?re seeing the same thing on the Internet. It?s not all bad, of course. We, especially those of us who are not technical, like the convenience, redundancy, portability, automation, and shareability of vendor-managed devices. We like cloud backup. We like automatic updates. We like not having to deal with security ourselves. We like that Facebook just works?from any device, anywhere. Government power is also increasing on the Internet. There is more government surveillance than ever before. There is more government censorship than ever before. There is more government propaganda, and an increasing number of governments are controlling what their users can and cannot do on the Internet. Totalitarian governments are embracing a growing ?cyber sovereignty? movement to further consolidate their power. And the cyberwar arms race is on, pumping an enormous amount of money into cyber-weapons and consolidated cyber-defenses, further increasing government power. Technology magnifies power in general, but rates of adoption are different. In many cases, the interests of corporate and government powers are aligning. Both corporations and governments benefit from ubiquitous surveillance, and the NSA is using Google, Facebook, Verizon, and others to get access to data it couldn?t otherwise. The entertainment industry is looking to governments to enforce its antiquated business models. Commercial security equipment from companies like BlueCoat and Sophos is being used by oppressive governments to surveil and censor their citizens. The same facial recognition technology that Disney uses in its theme parks can also identify protesters in China and Occupy Wall Street activists in New York. Think of it as a public/private surveillance partnership. What happened? How, in those early Internet years, did we get the future so wrong? The truth is that technology magnifies power in general, but rates of adoption are different. The unorganized, the distributed, the marginal, the dissidents, the powerless, the criminal: They can make use of new technologies very quickly. And when those groups discovered the Internet, suddenly they had power. But later, when the already-powerful big institutions finally figured out how to harness the Internet, they had more power to magnify. That?s the difference: The distributed were more nimble and were faster to make use of their new power, while the institutional were slower but were able to use their power more effectively. So while the Syrian dissidents used Facebook to organize, the Syrian government used Facebook to identify dissidents to arrest. All isn?t lost for distributed power, though. For institutional power, the Internet is a change in degree, but for distributed power it?s a qualitative one. The Internet gives decentralized groups?for the first time?the ability to coordinate. This can have incredible ramifications, as we saw in the SOPA/PIPA debate, Gezi, Brazil, and the rising use of crowdfunding. It can invert power dynamics, even in the presence of surveillance censorship and use control. But aside from political coordination, the Internet allows for social coordination as well to unite, for example, ethnic diasporas, gender minorities, sufferers of rare diseases, and people with obscure interests. This isn?t static: Technological advances continue to provide advantage to the nimble. I discussed this trend in my book Liars and Outliers. If you think of security as an arms race between attackers and defenders, any technological advance gives one side or the other a temporary advantage. But most of the time, a new technology benefits the nimble first. They are not hindered by bureaucracy?and sometimes not by laws or ethics either. They can evolve faster. We saw it with the Internet. As soon as the Internet started being used for commerce, a new breed of cybercriminal emerged, immediately able to take advantage of the new technology. It took police a decade to catch up. And we saw it on social media, as political dissidents made use of its organizational powers before totalitarian regimes did. Which type of power dominates in the coming decades? Right now, it looks like traditional power. This delay is what I call a ?security gap.? It?s greater when there?s more technology, and in times of rapid technological change. Basically, if there are more innovations to exploit, there will be more damage resulting from society's inability to keep up with exploiters of all of them. And since our world is one in which there?s more technology than ever before, and a faster rate of technological change than ever before, we should expect to see a greater security gap than ever before. In other words, there will be an increasing time period during which nimble distributed powers can make use of new technologies before slow institutional powers can make better use of those technologies. This is the battle: quick vs. strong. To return to medieval metaphors, you can think of a nimble distributed power?whether marginal, dissident, or criminal?as Robin Hood; and ponderous institutional powers?both government and corporate?as the feudal lords. So who wins? Which type of power dominates in the coming decades? Right now, it looks like traditional power. Ubiquitous surveillance means that it?s easier for the government to identify dissidents than it is for the dissidents to remain anonymous. Data monitoring means easier for the Great Firewall of China to block data than it is for people to circumvent it. The way we all use the Internet makes it much easier for the NSA to spy on everyone than it is for anyone to maintain privacy. And even though it is easy to circumvent digital copy protection, most users still can?t do it. The problem is that leveraging Internet power requires technical expertise. Those with sufficient ability will be able to stay ahead of institutional powers. Whether it?s setting up your own e-mail server, effectively using encryption and anonymity tools, or breaking copy protection, there will always be technologies that can evade institutional powers. This is why cybercrime is still pervasive, even as police savvy increases; why technically capable whistleblowers can do so much damage; and why organizations like Anonymous are still a viable social and political force. Assuming technology continues to advance?and there?s no reason to believe it won?t?there will always be a security gap in which technically advanced Robin Hoods can operate. Most people, though, are stuck in the middle. These are people who have don?t have the technical ability to evade either the large governments and corporations, avoid the criminal and hacker groups who prey on us, or join any resistance or dissident movements. These are the people who accept default configuration options, arbitrary terms of service, NSA-installed back doors, and the occasional complete loss of their data. These are the people who get increasingly isolated as government and corporate power align. In the feudal world, these are the hapless peasants. And it?s even worse when the feudal lords?or any powers?fight each other. As anyone watching Game of Thrones knows, peasants get trampled when powers fight: when Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon fight it out in the market; when the U.S., EU, China, and Russia fight it out in geopolitics; or when it?s the U.S. vs. ?the terrorists? or China vs. its dissidents. The abuse will only get worse as technology continues to advance. In the battle between institutional power and distributed power, more technology means more damage. We?ve already seen this: Cybercriminals can rob more people more quickly than criminals who have to physically visit everyone they rob. Digital pirates can make more copies of more things much more quickly than their analog forebears. And we?ll see it in the future: 3D printers mean that the computer restriction debate will soon involves guns, not movies. Big data will mean that more companies will be able to identify and track you more easily. It?s the same problem as the ?weapons of mass destruction? fear: terrorists with nuclear or biological weapons can do a lot more damage than terrorists with conventional explosives. And by the same token, terrorists with large-scale cyberweapons can potentially do more damage than terrorists with those same bombs. The more destabilizing the technologies, the greater the rhetoric of fear, and the stronger institutional powers will get. It?s a numbers game. Very broadly, because of the way humans behave as a species and as a society, every society is going to have a certain amount of crime. And there?s a particular crime rate society is willing to tolerate. With historically inefficient criminals, we were willing to live with some percentage of criminals in our society. As technology makes each individual criminal more powerful, the percentage we can tolerate decreases. Again, remember the ?weapons of mass destruction? debate: As the amount of damage each individual terrorist can do increases, we need to do increasingly more to prevent even a single terrorist from succeeding. The more destabilizing the technologies, the greater the rhetoric of fear, and the stronger institutional powers will get. This means increasingly repressive security measures, even if the security gap means that such measures become increasingly ineffective. And it will squeeze the peasants in the middle even more. Without the protection of his own feudal lord, the peasant was subject to abuse both by criminals and other feudal lords. But both corporations and the government?and often the two in cahoots?are using their power to their own advantage, trampling on our rights in the process. And without the technical savvy to become Robin Hoods ourselves, we have no recourse but to submit to whatever the ruling institutional power wants. So what happens as technology increases? Is a police state the only effective way to control distributed power and keep our society safe? Or do the fringe elements inevitably destroy society as technology increases their power? Probably neither doomsday scenario will come to pass, but figuring out a stable middle ground is hard. These questions are complicated, and dependent on future technological advances that we cannot predict. But they are primarily political questions, and any solutions will be political. In the short term, we need more transparency and oversight. The more we know of what institutional powers are doing, the more we can trust that they are not abusing their authority. We have long known this to be true in government, but we have increasingly ignored it in our fear of terrorism and other modern threats. This is also true for corporate power. Unfortunately, market dynamics will not necessarily force corporations to be transparent; we need laws to do that. The same is true for decentralized power; transparency is how we?ll differentiate political dissidents from criminal organizations. Oversight is also critically important, and is another long-understood mechanism for checking power. This can be a combination of things: courts that act as third-party advocates for the rule of law rather than rubber-stamp organizations, legislatures that understand the technologies and how they affect power balances, and vibrant public-sector press and watchdog groups that analyze and debate the actions of those wielding power. Transparency and oversight give us the confidence to trust institutional powers to fight the bad side of distributed power, while still allowing the good side to flourish. For if we?re going to entrust our security to institutional powers, we need to know they will act in our interests and not abuse that power. Otherwise, democracy fails. In the longer term, we need to work to reduce power differences. The key to all of this is access to data. On the Internet, data is power. To the extent the powerless have access to it, they gain in power. To the extent that the already powerful have access to it, they further consolidate their power. As we look to reducing power imbalances, we have to look at data: data privacy for individuals, mandatory disclosure laws for corporations, and open government laws. Medieval feudalism evolved into a more balanced relationship in which lords had responsibilities as well as rights. Today?s Internet feudalism is both ad-hoc and one-sided. Those in power have a lot of rights, but increasingly few responsibilities or limits. We need to rebalance this relationship. In medieval Europe, the rise of the centralized state and the rule of law provided the stability that feudalism lacked. The Magna Carta first forced responsibilities on governments and put humans on the long road toward government by the people and for the people. In addition to re-reigning in government power, we need similar restrictions on corporate power: a new Magna Carta focused on the institutions that abuse power in the 21st century. Today?s Internet is a fortuitous accident: a combination of an initial lack of commercial interests, government benign neglect, military requirements for survivability and resilience, and computer engineers building open systems that worked simply and easily. Corporations have turned the Internet into an enormous revenue generator, and they?re not going to back down easily. Neither will governments, which have harnessed the Internet for political control. We?re at the beginning of some critical debates about the future of the Internet: the proper role of law enforcement, the character of ubiquitous surveillance, the collection and retention of our entire life?s history, how automatic algorithms should judge us, government control over the Internet, cyberwar rules of engagement, national sovereignty on the Internet, limitations on the power of corporations over our data, the ramifications of information consumerism, and so on. Data is the pollution problem of the information age. All computer processes produce it. It stays around. How we deal with it?how we reuse and recycle it, who has access to it, how we dispose of it, and what laws regulate it?is central to how the information age functions. And I believe that just as we look back at the early decades of the industrial age and wonder how society could ignore pollution in their rush to build an industrial world, our grandchildren will look back at us during these early decades of the information age and judge us on how we dealt with the rebalancing of power resulting from all this new data. This won?t be an easy period for us as we try to work these issues out. Historically, no shift in power has ever been easy. Corporations have turned our personal data into an enormous revenue generator, and they?re not going to back down. Neither will governments, who have harnessed that same data for their own purposes. But we have a duty to tackle this problem. I can?t tell you what the result will be. These are all complicated issues, and require meaningful debate, international cooperation, and innovative solutions. We need to decide on the proper balance between institutional and decentralized power, and how to build tools that amplify what is good in each while suppressing the bad. From johnkclark at gmail.com Mon Oct 28 16:06:35 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2013 12:06:35 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Inflation graph In-Reply-To: <04bf01ced34e$02ba59c0$082f0d40$@att.net> References: <04bf01ced34e$02ba59c0$082f0d40$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sun, Oct 27, 2013 spike wrote: > > The comment itself presupposes that inflation is some kind of fiat > number somehow dictated by some central power somewhere. [...] If > reduced to one number, it does throw away some important subtleties. > Spike, if the graph http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/10/27/business/economy/inflation-falls.html?ref=economy were inverted and thus supported your economic theories would you still be saying that inflation can't be quantified and making other excuses? And it's silly to think that inflation is the only disaster that can befall a economy, look at the 2 charts directly below, the first one shows the rate of inflation in Japan and the second shows the rate of GDP growth in Japan. The Japanese economy has been stagnate for almost 25 years, it started about when deflation (not inflation!) became a problem. [image: Chart - historic CPI inflation Japan - long term inflation development] > > just use Zimbabwe money. It is already printed and available in larger > denominations > If inflation can't be quantified what makes you think that the countries of Zimbabwe or Weimar Germany ever suffered from inflation? > > An analogy would be to derive a number to express how fast plants grow. > How would you do that? > A graph of biomass produced per unit of time would certainly provide some valuable insight on that question. > Some have suggested that we can artificially raise inflation by printing > money without any wealth behind it. This does create inflation, but only > the particular currency of the nation that attempts it, as was seen in > Weimar Germany and in Zimbabwe. > Richard Feynman once said that String Theory is not really a scientific theory at all because it does not create good predictions it just creates excuses. Printing presses have been in massive overdrive for well over a decade printing lots and lots of money, and according to your theory we should be in massive inflation by now; and as can be clearly seen by this chart we are not. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/10/27/business/economy/inflation-falls.html?ref=economy Richard Feynman also said that when a theory doesn't fit the facts it must be abandoned no matter how beautiful or well loved the theory may be. Ten years ago I too would have predicted huge inflation if the printing presses continued to operate at the rate they were at it would create huge inflation, but in spite of the fact that the presses have actually accelerated my prediction failed miserably, therefore I must change my economic theories. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Mon Oct 28 16:02:44 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2013 09:02:44 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Actual Visionary of the Future In-Reply-To: <20131028103712.GC10405@leitl.org> References: <20131025133031.GL10405@leitl.org> <20131025195114.GU10405@leitl.org> <20131028103712.GC10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <090a01ced3f7$24a57890$6df069b0$@att.net> >...Do you understand the logictics of car production? Battery manufacturing? Dynamics of fleet exchange? Recharging infrastructure? Including the money to fund it all? Do the math, it is really quite illuminating. Eugen I have found it most illuminating to try to sketch out a math/economic model for every wild idea. You guys who like to make fun of spreadsheet users, I accept the observation they don't do everything. But they are brilliant at some tasks, such as making 1 digit of precision estimates for time and money required to do some big tasks. We are coming into a rapid-change period in America which presents some enormous challenges but also some enormous opportunity. Automation is taking over a lot of jobs which causes solutions along with problems: armies of unemployed people are a problem, but also means we have the available manpower to do what comes next. The unemployed can supply lower cost labor than they were before when more people were employed. We can do things like build solar cell factories and get armies of proles to go out and install them on rooftops at lower cost. Send the power directly into the grid, so the homeowner doesn't do any of the complicated expensive tasks associated with PVs, no batteries in the home, no inverters, none of that. All she does is sign up to have PVs installed and supply the roof, in exchange for a reduced power bill. Think of it: you could arrange for bikini-clad PV installers for the single hetero male homeowners, or beefcake men for the ladies or those so inclined, you could get specialty PV cheerleaders like Your Humble Servant to wave an American flag and give the homeowners pep talks on how all this generates our own energy for greater independence (by god) reduce and eventually eliminate our dependence on Arab energy-tyrants, help to save the planet, rescue humanity from itself, and yakity yak and bla bla. I can see myself doing something like that; we could have some fun with it. Yes it will cost money. If we have a believable plan that pencils out, investors will come. Sheesh they are doing this in GERMANY! We yanks have more rooftop area per capita and way more sun than they do, and they can supply a cost model. They have the PV factories, so we hire the kraut engineers over here to help build our PV factories using our cheap labor. We can go from a discontented idler society to one in which most people are cheerfully working their asses off most of the time. This is what we mean by Practical Optimism. spike From johnkclark at gmail.com Mon Oct 28 16:22:57 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2013 12:22:57 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Bitcoin effect on the Fed's abilities? (Was Re: Inflation graph) In-Reply-To: <526D5648.2040708@canonizer.com> References: <526D5648.2040708@canonizer.com> Message-ID: On Sun, Oct 27, 2013 at 2:07 PM, Brent Allsop wrote: > It'll be very interesting to see how Bitcoin start effecting this > durring the next decade. > Maybe someday Bitcoin will be important, maybe not, but one thing is certain, right now Bitcoin is so microscopic compared with the dollar that to the world economy it's not even a rounding error. And if Bitcoin ever does take over from the dollar the transition phase is going to be UGLY! John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Mon Oct 28 16:48:11 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2013 09:48:11 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Inflation graph In-Reply-To: References: <04bf01ced34e$02ba59c0$082f0d40$@att.net> Message-ID: <099f01ced3fd$7e167270$7a435750$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of John Clark Sent: Monday, October 28, 2013 9:07 AM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [ExI] Inflation graph On Sun, Oct 27, 2013 spike wrote: > The comment itself presupposes that inflation is some kind of fiat number somehow dictated by some central power somewhere. [...] If reduced to one number, it does throw away some important subtleties. Spike, if the graph http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/10/27/business/economy/inflation-fal ls.html?ref=economy were inverted and thus supported your economic theories would you still be saying that inflation can't be quantified and making other excuses? etc. John K Clark John, what I am saying is that these inflation numbers depend on what it is you are buying. Prices for electronics and most manufactured goods have been falling for years, while fuel and food have been going up smartly. So inflation is different for everyone. The overall number is an average of sorts, rather arbitrarily derived. For instance, should it include gold? I haven't bought any of that, don't plan to. Should it exclude food and fuel, when for many poorer people nearly all their available money goes for those two things? Should it be weighted somehow? Consider the Zimbabwe example. Even during their exponential inflation, the price of some things actually went down, such as the price of cars. Their only value in most cases depended only on how much fuel was in the tank. A typical vehicle only had value if enough fuel could be scraped together to drive the thing to the southern border and sold for scrap. Even the spare parts were nearly worthless. Some of the raw materials, such as tires, could be cut up to make sandals. But food? Forget it, their currency couldn't really buy that. Fortunately for me, my family are all vegetarians and light eaters, and we are well situated so we need not drive all that far. The climate is mild enough to seldom need any sincere attempts at HVAC. So food and fuel costs don't hit me very hard. So inflation is arbitrary, and depends on what the consumer buys. A number is derived arbitrarily to let the government decide how it will adjust its pensioners for cost of living, but if you have some foresight when you retire, your costs can actually decline even in inflationary times. Housing around here is going up like crazy as foreign money is coming in and snapping up the available homes. But I am not buying; I already own one. Inflation all depends on what you buy. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Mon Oct 28 19:51:22 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2013 13:51:22 -0600 Subject: [ExI] The Actual Visionary of the Future In-Reply-To: <20131028103712.GC10405@leitl.org> References: <20131025133031.GL10405@leitl.org> <20131025195114.GU10405@leitl.org> <20131028103712.GC10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 4:37 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Sun, Oct 27, 2013 at 01:50:23PM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > > > That's simply not true Eugen. You're better than that. > > That was obviously hyperbole, to make a point. He is, however, > prone to see exponentials where there are none. > I think his data is well researched. Whether all of the curves extend into the future, and just how far they will extend is guess work. > > I believe MORE things are exponential than Ray does, and even I don't > > believe everything is exponential. That being said, lots of things are, > > like the savings in your bank account. > > Exponential growth of compound interest is a textbook case > where your numerical model of physical layer processes and reality > increasingly diverge, requiring periodic, painful readjustments. > I have never heard of a case where a bank simply refused to pay interest because there was just too much money in the account. So what are you referring to here? > > > People > > > forget that hard drives stopped doubling, at least for a short while. > > > > > > > Because of a flood in Thailand. Nobody has said there wouldn't be bumps > in > > Thailand was not the reason. > > We're stuck at 4 TB because they ran into limits of a particular > technology. > I'm baffled by your use of the word "stuck" here. We just got to 4 Tbytes not that long ago. We always get "stuck" by this definition. I have attached my spreadsheet of hard drive prices that I have been maintaining for a few years, but initially got elsewhere. I welcome comments. > In case of platters full of spinning rust the snag is temporary, > as there are two successor technologies about to enter the > marketplace (HAMR and BPM, not new but close to becoming > mature enough for practical applications) so there's probably > another order of magnitude still to go before end of the line. > That makes it 40 TB. > That hardly seems like "stuck" to me. Knowing how we're going to get the next order of magnitude is good enough for me. Aside from that, there are things out there that promise to give the next order of magnitude after that... such as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racetrack_memory Which is clearly not ready for prime time, but is a good idea of the sorts of things that might happen when brilliant people are tasked with an objective. Coincidentally, NOR flash has recently also entered > scaling limits. > > The time for surface scaling is running out. The only > alternative is 3d volume integration. We do not have anything > in the pipeline to arrive in time, so there will be a gap. > The only technology to interpolate would be Langmuir-Blodgett > serial layer deposition, with according 2d liquid mosaic > self-assembly/alignment. I'm not aware of this technology > to be ready for deployment. Next after that is 3d crystal > self-assembly from solution. This is even further away. > That's ok, we have time to get this stuff right before falling off the curve. > > the road, just that there was an overall trend. > > > > > > > People are unaware of finer points like > > > http://postbiota.org/pipermail/tt/2013-October/014179.html > > > > > > Ok, I read that, and what it said in a nut shell is "fuck this is hard". > > Yes, this is the nature of limits. Instead of constant doubling > times the last few show longer and longer steps. As I told you, > we're no longer at 18 months but at 3 years doubling time this > moment. The next doubling times will be longer. This means > that linear semilog plot is no longer linear. No more Moore for you. > And yet, it is still doubling rapidly. The end result is the same, just at a slightly different time scale. And there is no guarantee that we won't make a hop with a new technology and get back on any given curve. It can happen. > > > Not, I expect it to come to a screeching halt. > > Why do you expect that? Look at the price tag of the > zEnterprise 196. Obviously, a somewhat higher margin > than on a 50 USD ARM SoC. > Sorry, you've lost me here. I don't know what these things are. > > If they read your posts here Eugen, they might decide not to thaw you > out. > > Who needs a pessimist in a utopia... :-) > > Utopia? I'm afraid I have another piece of bad news for you. > Very bad news, I'm afraid... > Anyone looking at 2013 from the time frame of 1913 would clearly call this utopia, at least from the technological standpoint. Also from the number of people operating under democracy, decreased violence and a number of other points. Not that it is utopia in every way. > > > > I know you MUST believe that computers will continue to get faster, > even > > > if > > > > they don't quite keep up the doubling pace. Right? > > > > > > What does faster mean? The only reliable way is a benchmark. > > > The only really relevant benchmark is the one that runs your > > > problem. As such faster never kept up with Moore's law. > > > Moore's law is about affordable transistors, and that one > > > gives you a canvas for your potential. So your gains are less > > > than Moore, and sometimes a lot less. For me personally, > > > the bottleneck in classical (GPGPU is classical) computers > > > is worst-case memory bandwidth. Which is remarkably sucky, > > > if you look it up. > > > > > > > The problem I care about the most is computer vision. We are now > > Computer vision is very easy, actually, and quite well understood. > You are clearly stark raving MAD. There is no computer on earth that can tell a cat from a dog reliably at this point. > The low number of layers and connectivity (fanout), all local at > that, a retina needs are within the envelope of silicon fabrication. > The retina is not what I'm talking about. I'm discussing image understanding. "That is a picture of a dog in front of a house. The house has a victorian architecture. The 1957 Cadillac next to the house would indicate that the picture was most likely taken between 1956 and 1976." > > approaching automated vehicles becoming a reality. I thought it would > > happen in 2014 since 2004. It may be delayed a year or two by bureaucrats > > and lawyers, but the technology should be cheap enough for luxury cars to > > I'm afraid luxury something is going to be a very, very small market > in the coming decades. > Stop. This is just irritating and unhelpful. > I agree that autonomous cars are mostly a very good thing, unless > you happen to be a trucker, or a car maker. I'm not sure how autonomous cars are bad for car makers. I do get why they are bad for truckers. > Whatever Germany > earns on car making is about enough to pay for the fossil fuel > imports. > You're confusing me again. > > have highway cruise control (including steering) by 2014 or 2015. So my > > venture into guessing the future was pretty close, using Ray's technique. > > > > > > > Ok. So, now your transistor budget no long doubles in > > > constant time, but that time keeps increasing. It's roughly > > > three years by end of this year, no longer 18 months. > > > Physical feature size limits are close behind, and your > > > Si real state is a 400 mm pizza, max. WSI gives you a > > > factor of two by making yield quantitative, but it wrecks > > > havoc to your computation model, because grain size starts > > > being tiny (less than mm^2), and asks for asynchronous > > > shared-nothing, and did I mention fine-grained? So no > > > TBytes of RAM for your LUT. The next step is FPGA, as in > > > runtime reconfigurable. That *might* give you another > > > factor of 2, or maybe even 4. Stacking is off-Moore, but > > > it will do something, particularly giving cache-like > > > access to your RAM, as long as it's few 10 MBytes max. > > > > > > > I've predicted that they will go to 3D. It is the only logical way to go > > Everybody and his dog predicted that, since early 1970s. > The difficult is actually making it happen, just in time > when semiconductor photolitho just runs out of steam. > Guess what, that time is now. So, where is your 3d integration > technology? > > > from here, other than maybe 2 1/2 D first... > > You can't have that by semiconductor photolitho. Stacking is > off-More. What else have you got? > > > > > > And then you have to go real 3d, or else there's gap. > > > > > > > True, unless something completely different comes along, which may not be > > highly likely. > > New technologies typically take decades of development, until > they're sufficiently matured so that they can take on mature > technologies that have ran into their scaling limits. > I totally agree that the 2d processes we are currently using are running into limits. But we will keep making the stuff we're making now cheaper. In my mind, that keeps us on Moore until such time as a 3D solution is worked out that makes things faster. The main problem in my mind isn't making stuff smaller, but in dissipating heat so you can stack it up close to each other. That's what I mean by 2.5 D. > > > > > > My guess the gap is somewhere 15-20 years long, but > > > we've got maybe 10 years until saturation curve is pretty > > > damn flat. > > > > > > > Ok. Then we can start making larger structures. It won't speed up due to > > decreasing transistor size, but it will be able to do useful work. > Imagine > > a 3d CPU 5 inches on a side. That could do some serious work. More than a > > human brain. > > The human brain is a 3d integrated assembly of computational > elements which are built from features on nm scale. > Sure is. And I'm convinced that we'll soon enough have similar computational devices. Maybe we'll even figure out how to grow them. Who knows. > > > He implicitly implied we'll run on 100% of thin-film PV in 16 years. > > > That was 2011, so make that 14 years. This means 4.2 TWp/year just > > > for power in a linear model, nevermind matching synfuel capability > > > (try doubling that, after all is sung and done -- 8 shiny TWp/year). > > > We're not getting the linear model. In fact, we arguably sublinear, > > > see > > > > http://cleantechnica.com/2013/10/14/third-quarter-2013-solar-pv-installations-reach-9-gw/ > > > > > > You obviously don't understand the nature of his prediction. If he says > > Obviously. I expect prediction to be brittle, and that the originator > is prepared to eat some crow, in case she is wrong. I'm old-fashioned > this way. > No Eugen. Let's simplify. If I predict that there will be 20 billion cats running loose in Germany in 16 years and that the number of cats will increase exponentially with a doubling every two years, and you come back in two years and say "We don't yet have 2 billion cats, so the prediction must be wrong." Then you clearly don't have an understanding of what exponential means. > > that the doubling in solar efficiency is 3.5 years (going from memory) > then > > half of the solar he envisions will be installed between July 2023 and > > Thank you for explaining exponential growth to me. I think I've first > understood it before I was 10. Clearly not so much. > The nature of solar cells is the only > way to double the output is to double the surface. And the according > infrastructure in the background, simple things like 10 GUSD plants, > electric grid upgrades, storage systems, and the like. > > > 2027. What's being installed now probably is sublinear, that's what an > > exponential would predict. He didn't predict a linear model. We'll > revisit > > You're not understanding me. It used to be exponential. Because it's > very easy to double very little. Until suddenly you have to double > quite a lot. This isn't a lily pond or a bacterial culture, this is > infrastructure work. > > So Ray is already wrong, once again. The trend is no longer exponential. > The only thing Ray said about solar is that the cost of the panels themselves was on an exponential curve. There is a lot more to solar costs than that. So if you hold him to something he didn't say, then yes, we're off the curve. If you have data showing that the panels themselves have fallen off the curve, then I'll give you credit for being correct, and will admit that Kurzweil is off, at least for the moment. (Unfortunately for you, you can sometimes hop back on the curve later with a new technology.) > > his prediction in 2027 if we're both still communicating by then. > > The prediction is 100% of electricity in 16 years. He then scaled > that back by saying 20 years. That's 2021. > > Given that we're already off-exponential, I expect that you keep > posting "I'm wrong" every year. > I will give you this. Ray made a prediction about the price of solar panels and then extrapolated that to the price of solar generated electricity (which includes infrastructure, inverters, batteries and the like) which is not the same thing. I don't think Ray is right when he says things that imply that lots of infrastructure will just pop into existence. But, how much more infrastructure would pop into existence if solar panels were nearly free? A little more, but the other parts are still damn pricey, better than half of a current home installation. > > > apply. However, in a sense it does apply. We do get some percent > better at > > > > extracting what's left each year. That doesn't mean we get an > exponential > > > > > > No, in terms of net energy we're not getting better. We're actually > > > getting worse. > > > > > > > amount of oil, since there's a limited amount of the stuff. But it > does > > > > mean that we get exponentially better at finding what's left (note > that > > > > > > We're not getting better. We've mapped all the stuff, there are almost > > > no unknown unknowns. And dropping EROEI and even dropping volume > > > (not net energy, volume!) per unit of effort is pretty much the > > > opposite of exponential. Do 40% of decay rate/well/year mean a > > > thing to you? > > > > > > > You misunderstand my point again. I know it's harder to get oil. But we > > develop new technologies for getting at what's left. > > Fracking is 40 years old. Fracking is running into diminishing returns. > So where are your new technologies, which need to be already in wide > deployment, now? > Fracking is currently producing a fair amount of oil. It's produced a lot of buzz. I am not an expert on oil production techniques, so I'm not going to argue from ignorance. > > > > this curve is likely much more gentle than computing, with a > doubling of > > > > reserves we can get at maybe every 20 or 50 years. I don't know.) > > > > > > There are no exponentials in infrastructure. There is an early > > > sigmoidal that looks that way, but we've left that already. > > > > > > > Infrastructure can change rapidly. How long did it take for everyone to > get > > No. Infrastructure takes 30 years, frequently longer. That's a constant. > > > a cell phone? Smart Phones? When electric cars make financial sense (if > > How long did take for everybody to get their own synfuel plant? > I agree larger infrastructure is harder. But things can change rapidly when they have to. > > they ever do) then people will switch to them quickly. Large > infrastructure > > Do you understand the logictics of car production? Battery manufacturing? > Dynamics of fleet exchange? Recharging infrastructure? Including the money > to fund it all? Do the math, it is really quite illuminating. > I'm sure it is a hard problem. I do know the US car fleet turns over every 16 years or so. That would indicate that if it became a real issue and we had a real solution that it could be done in 16 years. > > like roads and so forth will remain problematic until robotics is good > > enough to do much more of the job. > > > > > > > > > This is the opposite of science. > > > > > > > > > > > > > It is a part of science, the hypothesis part. LAR applied to > computing > > > > available per dollar in particular is a hypothesis formed in the mid > > > 1960s. > > > > As far as I know, we are still more or less on that track, though > they > > > have > > > > > > No, we're not. See benchmarks. > > > > > > > Data please. I can't find any. I have looked. > > Try Stream, though it's a synthetic benchmark > > http://www.admin-magazine.com/HPC/Articles/Finding-Memory-Bottlenecks-with-Stream > It would be a reasonable assumption for retina-like processing > scaling. Deeper visual pipelines are different. Here, you need > to access something like fetching from a large (>>10 GByte) of > random pointers. > A coprocessor with direct access to the "memory" of a retina would be very good for problems like this. > > > > People who hear about Amdahl's Law the first time have to stop > worrying, > > > and embrace nondeterminism. People who expect reliable systems at > hardware > > > level are gonna have a bad time. > > > > > > > I disagree with that. There will be reliable hardware, or they won't be > > If you want to not run into Amdahl you need to embrace nondeterminism. > Building test harnesses just got a bit harder. > You would need a new generation of programmers to go there, I think. > > able to sell it. No matter how slow the previous generation was. It is > hard > > Yes, there will be unreliable hardware. This is one of the problems in > exascale: unreliable transport and unreliable components (as in: parts > of your system keep failing at runtime, and you diagnose and remap to > hot spares, all without breaking a stride). Beyond that, you've got > stochastical computing elements. That's one of the joys of living at > nanoscale. > But it has to be dealt with at a low level, or programmers won't stand for it. > > > enough to get programmers to do multi-threading. It would be damn close > to > > impossible to get them to switch to a model where the answer might not be > > right. > > There is no longer "exactly right" there is only "good enough". > Well, for now we have exactly right for computation, in the future, and for certain algorithms that are NP complete, for example, good enough is fine. But for credit card processing, good enough isn't good enough. > > > A pessimist will just hole up in his cave. I refer you to "The Croods" to > > I don't know what a pessimist would do. I do know that the only guy who'd > still have water when his cars break down in the desert is a realist. > > The optimists always end up as bleached bones. Your call. > I prefer the extra years of life. Perhaps I'll spend them in a cave in the desert. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Hard Drive Costs.xlsx Type: application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet Size: 38760 bytes Desc: not available URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Mon Oct 28 19:56:14 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2013 13:56:14 -0600 Subject: [ExI] The Actual Visionary of the Future In-Reply-To: <090a01ced3f7$24a57890$6df069b0$@att.net> References: <20131025133031.GL10405@leitl.org> <20131025195114.GU10405@leitl.org> <20131028103712.GC10405@leitl.org> <090a01ced3f7$24a57890$6df069b0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 10:02 AM, spike wrote: > The unemployed can supply lower cost labor > than they were before when more people were employed. > Unless there is an unreasonably high minimum wage. Then more will just be automated. > I can see myself doing something like that; we > could have some fun with it. Yes it will cost money. If we have a > believable plan that pencils out, investors will come. > But solar isn't yet economically viable for most applications. You have to have government subsidies to get it going at this point most of the time. I know you don't want that Spike. > Sheesh they are doing this in GERMANY! The government over there is doing it. Or rather paying for it. > We yanks have more rooftop area per > capita and way more sun than they do, and they can supply a cost model. > They have the PV factories, so we hire the kraut engineers over here to > help > build our PV factories using our cheap labor. > > We can go from a discontented idler society to one in which most people are > cheerfully working their asses off most of the time. > > This is what we mean by Practical Optimism. I think a better plan is to open up more areas for energy exploration. Just a thought. It's working in North Dakota and parts of Texas. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Mon Oct 28 20:01:46 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2013 14:01:46 -0600 Subject: [ExI] The Battle for Power on the Internet In-Reply-To: <20131028160312.GU10405@leitl.org> References: <20131028160312.GU10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 10:03 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > The Battle for Power on the Internet > > Distributed citizen groups and nimble hackers once had the edge. Now > governments and corporations are catching up. Who will dominate in the > decades ahead? > Time will tell. > This was a utopian vision, but some of it did come to pass. See!!! It does happen sometimes. LOL -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Mon Oct 28 21:24:20 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2013 15:24:20 -0600 Subject: [ExI] A Gedanken Rational Eugenics Experiment (AGREE) In-Reply-To: <20131028092318.GB4903@ninja.nosyntax.net> References: <20131024011619.GB4312@ninja.nosyntax.net> <5268F9E7.8080602@aleph.se> <20131028092318.GB4903@ninja.nosyntax.net> Message-ID: On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 3:23 AM, rex wrote: > Kelly Anderson [2013-10-27 11:22]: > >> On Thu, Oct 24, 2013 at 4:43 AM, Anders Sandberg <[1]anders at aleph.se> >> >> wrote: >> >> Note that you would need to pay *a lot*. The below 1 SD population is >> around 15%, so in the US that would be about 47 million people you >> need >> to pay off. I am not sure what the going price for getting sterilized >> is, but at least I expect it to be on the order of a few thousand >> dollars - >> There is a successful private endeavor to sterilize female drug addicts >> for as little as $300. >> [2]http://www.**projectprevention.org >> > > Hello Kelly, > > Note that the organization also offers payment for long-term birth > control, which is IMO a much better option. Sterilization, like suicide, > is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. > Still, I'm betting that the limits of their success are based on how much money they have to hand out, not how many people sign up. I agree that long term birth control is equally good. I came to my controversial support of this group due to the fact that my children's birth mother popped out six or eight kids AFTER she knew DCFS was going to take them away as soon as they found them, no matter what. She just loved being preggers and high. > Unfortunately, low IQ apparently is negatively correlated with drug use. >> At least in one study. >> [3]http://www.ibtimes.com/**smart-people-illegal-drugs-** >> intelligent-people-dont-**always-do-right-thing-371056 >> > > Careful. The study finds an odds ratio > 1 for high IQ & drug use, but it > does not follow that low IQ has a negative correlation with drug > use. To see why, consider a "\__/" shaped relationship between IQ and drug > use. If that were the case, both high- and low-IQs would have a positive > correlation with drug use. > Yeah, well, that's why some people say you should publish ALL your data. Not just mine it for a headline. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Mon Oct 28 21:28:35 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2013 15:28:35 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: <5267B995.3020906@libero.it> References: <98403CF1-5A40-46A2-9DE8-3661B39FC7BF@me.com> <5267B995.3020906@libero.it> Message-ID: On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 5:57 AM, Mirco Romanato wrote: > The problem in this reasoning is to impute to the POTUSes the > responsibility of deficit spending. > Is the legislative branch totally innocent? > Though you wouldn't know it from recent media reports, the House of Representatives has the constitutional power of the purse in the United States. Whenever they responsibly execute that constitutional privilege, they are jumped on by EVERYONE. > And the Judiciary Branch? > Almost zero power over the money. Though they did find Obamacare to be constitutional. I don't follow how they managed that, but whatever, it's done. > The default would be better for the people, but they will hyper-inflate > because it is better for them (and they will blame the higher prices to > the "evil capitalists" and/or some other "evil groups". > Perhaps the Tea Party... LOL > In between, Bitcoin hit 210$ today. > Nice. Wish I had some. > The free market alternative to government fiat. > It will rein government spending, entitlements, wars, corruption and > brainwashing of younger generations. It will take the power of the > printing presses away from the governments. The power to stealthy stealing. > > It will do democracy a lot less interesting, also. > Because if you can not vote to rob you neighbors, where is the fun? In keeping what you earn. That's fun enough, isn't it? -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Mon Oct 28 22:14:57 2013 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2013 15:14:57 -0700 Subject: [ExI] How to build a happier brain Message-ID: How would you redesign the human brain, so that people could lead happier, more vibrant lives? http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/10/how-to-build-a-happier-brain/280752/ John -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Mon Oct 28 22:43:12 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2013 22:43:12 +0000 Subject: [ExI] A Gedanken Rational Eugenics Experiment (AGREE) In-Reply-To: <05d501ced352$dc7e0b30$957a2190$@att.net> References: <20131024011619.GB4312@ninja.nosyntax.net> <5268F9E7.8080602@aleph.se> <526D6953.2080708@aleph.se> <05d501ced352$dc7e0b30$957a2190$@att.net> Message-ID: <526EE880.7020506@aleph.se> On 2013-10-27 20:26, spike wrote: > > *>...**On Behalf Of *Anders Sandberg > > ** > > >...Well, as a drug user with decent IQ (http://news.sky.com/story/1147488/smart-drug-modafinil-risks-student-health ) I don't feel much desire to be sterilized. But then again, my likelihood of getting an offspring is pretty microscopic... Dr Anders Sandberg > > So very tragic is this, Anders. Any time you wish to remedy this > unacceptable situation, I propose we get the stunning Kari Byron as an > egg donor and you as the Y chromosome provider, under which conditions > my bride would cheerfully volunteer to supply the drug-free smoke-free > alcohol-free womb, as well as a loving nurturing home for at least two > decades if not more, along with a kind-hearted older brother, and > permanent visitation rights extended to you and of course Ms. Byron. > :-) Yes, Mythbusters is great - because it shows people creating and testing things. We need more of that. This is why I can't stand most documentaries: they usually show people having opinions or describing scenarios, rather than checking against reality. And of course, everything is more fun with a bit of explosions. In a sense Mythbusters is doing memetic eugenics, spreading good memes widely in the memepool. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From brent.allsop at canonizer.com Mon Oct 28 22:56:09 2013 From: brent.allsop at canonizer.com (Brent Allsop) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2013 16:56:09 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Bitcoin effect on the Fed's abilities? (Was Re: Inflation graph) In-Reply-To: References: <526D5648.2040708@canonizer.com> Message-ID: Hi John, Yes, Bitcoin is still closer to being worthless (what it was a few years ago) than it is to being anything more than a rounding error. But if the historical growth rate of 10 times every year or so counties, it could get there. And I'd be very interested to hear more details about what you mean by "the transition being UGLY". I don't see it ever replacing fiat currency, as you still need something to determine consistent valuations. You can't expect anyone to get paid in bitcoin valuations, as that is always very different. As it has always worked, You'll get paid in X dollars worth of Bitcion - whatever value Bitcoin happens to be at that time. And some people will just never switch to Bitcoin I simply view it as another asset class, like Government Bonds, Cash, Stocks, Real Estate, Gold, and so on. When there is a recession, Gold is about the only one that increases in value. I just think that Bitcoin will be way more extreme in this direction. Instead of governments spending us out of recessions, spending on crap like buying and destroying used cars, holders of bitcoins will be getting rich, and they'll be the ones spending us out of recessions. Or at least one can hope - if they aren't spending, there would be ever more extreme boom and bust cycles. Is that the kind of ugly you are talking about? Brent Allsop On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 10:22 AM, John Clark wrote: > On Sun, Oct 27, 2013 at 2:07 PM, Brent Allsop wrote: > > > It'll be very interesting to see how Bitcoin start effecting this >> durring the next decade. >> > > Maybe someday Bitcoin will be important, maybe not, but one thing is > certain, right now Bitcoin is so microscopic compared with the dollar that > to the world economy it's not even a rounding error. And if Bitcoin ever > does take over from the dollar the transition phase is going to be UGLY! > > John K Clark > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Mon Oct 28 22:32:18 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2013 22:32:18 +0000 Subject: [ExI] How to build a happier brain In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <526EE5F2.1010207@aleph.se> On 2013-10-28 22:14, John Grigg wrote: > How would you redesign the human brain, so that people could lead > happier, more vibrant lives? His book sounds like it makes a lot of sense. Whether that is enough to actually help, is of course another matter! Building the right practical or cognitive habits is a lot of work. We need to streamline the process (but presumably not make it too easy, because then we might get instability). I would love to know how to manipulate the mood setpoint of the brain. Surely the right kind of thinking can change your stable mood a bit, but genetic and other innate factors seem to be more powerful. One of the things I am hoping to figure out using personal genomics is why I have my bright mood setpoint - and then we can start figuring out how to fix it in other brains. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Mon Oct 28 22:39:42 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2013 22:39:42 +0000 Subject: [ExI] MiNTing (or if you must, APM) library In-Reply-To: <1382937460.88686.YahooMailNeo@web141602.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> References: <1382843405.57752.YahooMailNeo@web141604.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> <526D20F1.2070204@aleph.se> <1382937460.88686.YahooMailNeo@web141602.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <526EE7AE.4030608@aleph.se> On 2013-10-28 05:17, paul michael wrote: > That is why I'm worried, transitional times destroy, they also create > but creating takes time. Shopkeepers, shoe salesmen, people who just > are living week to week will really need WYSIWYG with respect to this > 'box'. WYSIWYG does not solve the problem. The laser printer and windowing system did not turn everybody into a graphics designer or author. To actually make something useful with a box you need to understand the right kind of engineering, hacking and design. It is likely a mindset rather than a skillset, and not everybody can get it. In a world where you could get anything you could imagine, the people with poor imagination would still be losers. And they cannot easily imagine a better imagination. But this is separate from the inherent turbulence of transitions. I think APM is going to be much less dramatic than we commonly think here simply because it just transforms a lot of manufacturing, retail and transport - important parts of the economy, but already a fairly thin slice of the overall cake. It is technologies like AI that transform services - the big pie slice - that really will change the economy. Yes, APM will make our material culture quite different. But it doesn't change the service backbone. And being less disruptive than AI doesn't mean it is going to be minor - I would expect at least a few major power losing out in the transition. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Tue Oct 29 01:32:23 2013 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2013 18:32:23 -0700 Subject: [ExI] An expensive product line to "live to be 150..." Message-ID: What do you think? Is it snake oil? Or just marginally effective? The final segment from Youtube... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxdpUEgosX4 And just how expensive is it? John -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Tue Oct 29 01:33:55 2013 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2013 18:33:55 -0700 Subject: [ExI] How to build a happier brain In-Reply-To: <526EE5F2.1010207@aleph.se> References: <526EE5F2.1010207@aleph.se> Message-ID: My understanding is that "mood setpoint" is so strong and ingrained, that even anti-depressants over time, tend to lose effectiveness, due to it. John On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 3:32 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > On 2013-10-28 22:14, John Grigg wrote: > >> How would you redesign the human brain, so that people could lead >> happier, more vibrant lives? >> > > His book sounds like it makes a lot of sense. Whether that is enough to > actually help, is of course another matter! > > Building the right practical or cognitive habits is a lot of work. We need > to streamline the process (but presumably not make it too easy, because > then we might get instability). > > I would love to know how to manipulate the mood setpoint of the brain. > Surely the right kind of thinking can change your stable mood a bit, but > genetic and other innate factors seem to be more powerful. One of the > things I am hoping to figure out using personal genomics is why I have my > bright mood setpoint - and then we can start figuring out how to fix it in > other brains. > > -- > Dr Anders Sandberg > Future of Humanity Institute > Oxford Martin School > Oxford University > > ______________________________**_________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/**mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-**chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Tue Oct 29 01:37:32 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2013 18:37:32 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: References: <98403CF1-5A40-46A2-9DE8-3661B39FC7BF@me.com> <5267B995.3020906@libero.it> Message-ID: <0e1101ced447$71132650$533972f0$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Kelly Anderson Sent: Monday, October 28, 2013 2:29 PM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 5:57 AM, Mirco Romanato wrote: The problem in this reasoning is to impute to the POTUSes the responsibility of deficit spending. Is the legislative branch totally innocent? >.Though you wouldn't know it from recent media reports, the House of Representatives has the constitutional power of the purse in the United States. Whenever they responsibly execute that constitutional privilege, they are jumped on by EVERYONE. Bet they won't this time (in January.) The news people sold a narrative that the Republicans and Tea Party were being intransigent, but in fact the day the Supreme Court declared the ACA a tax, the house became the boss over that. The house has never voted for the ACA since it was declared a tax. Right after the phony a-faux-calypse on the 16th, they were at a low point. Now they appear to me to have regained all the lost ground and then some, as Americans gain a better appreciation every day for how badly bungled was the rollout. And the Judiciary Branch? >.Almost zero power over the money. Though they did find Obamacare to be constitutional. I don't follow how they managed that, but whatever, it's done. -Kelly I don't see why not Kelly. The Fed can offer a tax rebate for a certain behavior, such as investing in green energy programs. So why can't the offer a tax rebate for buying health insurance? So I would argue that it is legitimately a tax. But the tax rebate for buying health insurance is nowhere near compelling the track team to buy in, not even close. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Tue Oct 29 05:16:27 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2013 22:16:27 -0700 Subject: [ExI] A Gedanken Rational Eugenics Experiment (AGREE) In-Reply-To: <526EE880.7020506@aleph.se> References: <20131024011619.GB4312@ninja.nosyntax.net> <5268F9E7.8080602@aleph.se> <526D6953.2080708@aleph.se> <05d501ced352$dc7e0b30$957a2190$@att.net> <526EE880.7020506@aleph.se> Message-ID: <0ef301ced466$060a63e0$121f2ba0$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg >.permanent visitation rights extended to you and of course Ms. Byron. spike :-) >.Yes, Mythbusters is great - because it shows people creating and testing things. We need more of that. This is why I can't stand most documentaries: they usually show people having opinions or describing scenarios, rather than checking against reality. And of course, everything is more fun with a bit of explosions. >.In a sense Mythbusters is doing memetic eugenics, spreading good memes widely in the memepool. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Thanks for that Anders. I sent them a number of ideas, but the one which intrigues me the most is an idea I had about filling a tire with a type of metal alloy which melts at a temperature slightly lower than that of boiling water. I may have posted something about that a couple months ago, don't recall. A eutectic alloy of tin, lead and bismuth makes a high density, low melting point metal (about 97C) which you could use to fill a motorcycle tire. It would look perfectly normal but would weight over 200 kg for the front and nearly 300 for the back. If you had one on the front and everything else normal, the CG of the bike/rider combination would be moved down and forward, which would allow a prole to ride up ramps of impossible-looking angles, assuming of course one had some kind of traction enhancement, such as vertical nail points poking up about half a cm. What I don't know is how it would handle, with the gyroscopic effect increased by a factor of about 30. I don't know how it would stop either, for the angular momentum of that wheel would be enormous. Jamie Hyneman is a big motorcycle fan, but I wouldn't want to risk his hurting himself with some crazy stunt I suggested. But perhaps they wouldn't. They're what you call "experts." spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From markalanwalker at gmail.com Mon Oct 28 23:30:23 2013 From: markalanwalker at gmail.com (Mark Walker) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2013 17:30:23 -0600 Subject: [ExI] How to build a happier brain In-Reply-To: <526EE5F2.1010207@aleph.se> References: <526EE5F2.1010207@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 4:32 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > On 2013-10-28 22:14, John Grigg wrote: > >> How would you redesign the human brain, so that people could lead >> happier, more vibrant lives? >> > > His book sounds like it makes a lot of sense. Whether that is enough to > actually help, is of course another matter! > > Building the right practical or cognitive habits is a lot of work. We need > to streamline the process (but presumably not make it too easy, because > then we might get instability). > > I would love to know how to manipulate the mood setpoint of the brain. > Surely the right kind of thinking can change your stable mood a bit, but > genetic and other innate factors seem to be more powerful. One of the > things I am hoping to figure out using personal genomics is why I have my > bright mood setpoint - and then we can start figuring out how to fix it in > other brains. > > -- > Dr Anders Sandberg > Future of Humanity Institute > Oxford Martin School > Oxford University > > ______________________________**_________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/**mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-**chat > Anders, I think you are one of the "happy giants" I discuss in my book: http://www.amazon.com/Happy-People-Pills-Blackwell-Public-Philosophy-Series/dp/1118357477 The proposal is to reverse engineer what you and your genetic kinder have thanks to the genetic lottery and put it in pill form for the rest of us. Dr. Mark Walker Richard L. Hedden Chair of Advanced Philosophical Studies Department of Philosophy New Mexico State University P.O. Box 30001, MSC 3B Las Cruces, NM 88003-8001 USA http://www.nmsu.edu/~philos/mark-walkers-home-page.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Tue Oct 29 09:34:56 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 09:34:56 +0000 Subject: [ExI] How to build a happier brain In-Reply-To: References: <526EE5F2.1010207@aleph.se> Message-ID: <526F8140.9030702@aleph.se> On 2013-10-28 23:30, Mark Walker wrote: > Anders, I think you are one of the "happy giants" I discuss in my book: Quite likely. I get used as a standard example in the ethics discussions around here. I wonder how a civilization that had mastered happiness would be like? It would still not be the utopia of David Pearce (there would still be pain), but it would be a place where there was far more energy and pleasure. Whether kindness comes naturally from happiness is another matter - a rather chilly idea might be a state where we are all very happy, yet do not care much about others. "And I feel fantastic And I never felt as good as how I do right now Except for maybe when I think of how I felt that day When I felt the way that I do right now, right now, right now." -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Tue Oct 29 09:45:26 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 09:45:26 +0000 Subject: [ExI] A Gedanken Bike Experiment In-Reply-To: <0ef301ced466$060a63e0$121f2ba0$@att.net> References: <20131024011619.GB4312@ninja.nosyntax.net> <5268F9E7.8080602@aleph.se> <526D6953.2080708@aleph.se> <05d501ced352$dc7e0b30$957a2190$@att.net> <526EE880.7020506@aleph.se> <0ef301ced466$060a63e0$121f2ba0$@att.net> Message-ID: <526F83B6.5080807@aleph.se> On 2013-10-29 05:16, spike wrote: > Thanks for that Anders. I sent them a number of ideas, but the one which intrigues me the most is an idea I had about filling a tire with a type of metal alloy which melts at a temperature slightly lower than that of boiling water. I may have posted something about that a couple months ago, don't recall. A eutectic alloy of tin, lead and bismuth makes a high density, low melting point metal (about 97C) which you could use to fill a motorcycle tire. It would look perfectly normal but would weight over 200 kg for the front and nearly 300 for the back. > > If you had one on the front and everything else normal, the CG of the bike/rider combination would be moved down and forward, which would allow a prole to ride up ramps of impossible-looking angles, assuming of course one had some kind of traction enhancement, such as vertical nail points poking up about half a cm. > I don't know much about bike dynamics, but I suspect the liquid metal would be tricky to have in the tires. The most obvious reason is that it would accumulate downwards, ballooning the tire. But if the tire rotates, then the bulge would tend to be behind the lowest point, and exert a slowing force. At higher rotation rates I predict you will get fun but problematic standing modes that will likely make the tire non-round. A bit like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcizFC-Qt_U and especially http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4z4QdiqP-q8 In any case, it would be fun to test. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Tue Oct 29 11:29:28 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 12:29:28 +0100 Subject: [ExI] The Actual Visionary of the Future In-Reply-To: References: <20131025133031.GL10405@leitl.org> <20131025195114.GU10405@leitl.org> <20131028103712.GC10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20131029112928.GK10405@leitl.org> On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 01:51:22PM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > I think his data is well researched. Whether all of the curves extend into > the future, and just how far they will extend is guess work. No, no, no. If you're formulating a theory, you have to define its scope of applicability, and margins beyond which the theory is falsified. If it's not a theory, then why are we wasting time on such assclownage? > > > believe everything is exponential. That being said, lots of things are, > > > like the savings in your bank account. > > > > Exponential growth of compound interest is a textbook case > > where your numerical model of physical layer processes and reality > > increasingly diverge, requiring periodic, painful readjustments. > > > > I have never heard of a case where a bank simply refused to pay interest You have never heard of banks going broke, assets seized, currency hyperinflated? Really? Are you honestly believing that money likes to work, and it keeps growing in the bank vaults, like early miners thought metal grew in the mountain, so that they left there some so that it could breed? > because there was just too much money in the account. So what are you > referring to here? > > > > > > People > > > > forget that hard drives stopped doubling, at least for a short while. > > > > > > > > > > Because of a flood in Thailand. Nobody has said there wouldn't be bumps > > in > > > > Thailand was not the reason. > > > > We're stuck at 4 TB because they ran into limits of a particular > > technology. > > > > I'm baffled by your use of the word "stuck" here. We just got to 4 Tbytes You're getting far too frequently baffled for my liking. I'm showing you instances where reality deviates from the nice linear semi-log. There have been multiple smooth technology handovers in the platter areal density which however shew a different scaling http://www.hindawi.com/journals/at/2013/521086/fig1/ If you think you're seeing a linear semilog plot in there, then throw away your ruler. Or buy new glasses. If you're now agreeing that the growth is saturating, then why are you wasting my time? > not that long ago. We always get "stuck" by this definition. I have > attached my spreadsheet of hard drive prices that I have been maintaining The metric you're looking for is areal density. > for a few years, but initially got elsewhere. I welcome comments. > > > > In case of platters full of spinning rust the snag is temporary, > > as there are two successor technologies about to enter the > > marketplace (HAMR and BPM, not new but close to becoming > > mature enough for practical applications) so there's probably > > another order of magnitude still to go before end of the line. > > That makes it 40 TB. > > > > That hardly seems like "stuck" to me. Knowing how we're going to get the > next order of magnitude is good enough for me. No, deviations from linear semi-log plot are definitely not good enough for Ray, and I have to agree with him. If you like leaning out of the windows very far, prepare to deal with gravity. > Aside from that, there are things out there that promise to give the next I'm not interested in promises. I'm interested in past data that show where real world disagreed with prior predictions. > order of magnitude after that... such as: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racetrack_memory > Which is clearly not ready for prime time, but is a good idea of the sorts > of things that might happen when brilliant people are tasked with an Brilliant people can't make features smaller than atoms. Brilliant people have no magic wands to short-cut technology maturation times so that they spring full-formed from nothing, just as Athena sprang from Zeus' forehead. Brilliant people can't make a refinery grow out overnight, for free. > objective. > > Coincidentally, NOR flash has recently also entered > > scaling limits. > > > > The time for surface scaling is running out. The only > > alternative is 3d volume integration. We do not have anything > > in the pipeline to arrive in time, so there will be a gap. > > The only technology to interpolate would be Langmuir-Blodgett > > serial layer deposition, with according 2d liquid mosaic > > self-assembly/alignment. I'm not aware of this technology > > to be ready for deployment. Next after that is 3d crystal > > self-assembly from solution. This is even further away. > > > > That's ok, we have time to get this stuff right before falling off the > curve. We've already fallen from the semiconductor litho curve. See the NOR flash scaling at the URL I posted earlier. We've already fallen of the PV deployment curve (and we were never on the according infrastructure curve in the first place). You can't jump from zero TW to 20 TW in 20 years. Not unless you have MNT, and collectively we made sure we failed to develop that. > > > > the road, just that there was an overall trend. > > > > > > > > > > People are unaware of finer points like > > > > http://postbiota.org/pipermail/tt/2013-October/014179.html > > > > > > > > > Ok, I read that, and what it said in a nut shell is "fuck this is hard". > > > > Yes, this is the nature of limits. Instead of constant doubling > > times the last few show longer and longer steps. As I told you, > > we're no longer at 18 months but at 3 years doubling time this > > moment. The next doubling times will be longer. This means > > that linear semilog plot is no longer linear. No more Moore for you. > > > > And yet, it is still doubling rapidly. The end result is the same, just at Which part of "no more constant doubling times for you" you don't understand? > a slightly different time scale. And there is no guarantee that we won't Which part of "you can't make widgets smaller than single atoms" you don't understand? > make a hop with a new technology and get back on any given curve. It can > happen. A gold meteorite can fall in my garden. Hey, it could happen. > > > > > > Not, I expect it to come to a screeching halt. > > > > Why do you expect that? Look at the price tag of the > > zEnterprise 196. Obviously, a somewhat higher margin > > than on a 50 USD ARM SoC. > > > > Sorry, you've lost me here. I don't know what these things are. It's a cheap mainframe, 75 kUSD entry level. Obviously, CPUs build from such can be made from unobtainium. But flash drives and mobile CPUs have low margins, so there's diminished incentive to go to the next node (especially if the next node has lower performance than current one). > > > > If they read your posts here Eugen, they might decide not to thaw you > > out. > > > Who needs a pessimist in a utopia... :-) > > > > Utopia? I'm afraid I have another piece of bad news for you. > > Very bad news, I'm afraid... > > > > Anyone looking at 2013 from the time frame of 1913 would clearly call this Anyone looking at an arbitrary time frame knows that darwinian evolution still applies. > utopia, at least from the technological standpoint. Also from the number of > people operating under democracy, decreased violence and a number of other > points. Not that it is utopia in every way. My thesis is that a postecosystem has a food web. > > > > > > I know you MUST believe that computers will continue to get faster, > > even > > > > if > > > > > they don't quite keep up the doubling pace. Right? > > > > > > > > What does faster mean? The only reliable way is a benchmark. > > > > The only really relevant benchmark is the one that runs your > > > > problem. As such faster never kept up with Moore's law. > > > > Moore's law is about affordable transistors, and that one > > > > gives you a canvas for your potential. So your gains are less > > > > than Moore, and sometimes a lot less. For me personally, > > > > the bottleneck in classical (GPGPU is classical) computers > > > > is worst-case memory bandwidth. Which is remarkably sucky, > > > > if you look it up. > > > > > > > > > > The problem I care about the most is computer vision. We are now > > > > Computer vision is very easy, actually, and quite well understood. > > > > You are clearly stark raving MAD. There is no computer on earth that can > tell a cat from a dog reliably at this point. There is a significant difference between "I have no idea how to do that" from "ok, it's mere engineering at this point". We're understanding processing the retina sufficiently to produce code that the second processing pipeline can use. We have mapped features of later processing stages to the point that we know what you're looking at, or what you're dreaming of. We have off the shelf machine vision systems for many industrial tasks. We have autonomous cars that drive better than people. This is obviusly one of these cases where we've made some slight progress over last few decades. > > > > The low number of layers and connectivity (fanout), all local at > > that, a retina needs are within the envelope of silicon fabrication. > > > > The retina is not what I'm talking about. I'm discussing image But the retina is what I'm talking about, because it's structurally and functionally simple enough so that Moravec picked it for his analysis. ftp://io.usp.br/los/IOF257/moravec.pdf > understanding. "That is a picture of a dog in front of a house. The house > has a victorian architecture. The 1957 Cadillac next to the house would > indicate that the picture was most likely taken between 1956 and 1976." This is beyond machine vision. This is halfway to human-equivalent AI. > > > > approaching automated vehicles becoming a reality. I thought it would > > > happen in 2014 since 2004. It may be delayed a year or two by bureaucrats > > > and lawyers, but the technology should be cheap enough for luxury cars to > > > > I'm afraid luxury something is going to be a very, very small market > > in the coming decades. > > > > Stop. This is just irritating and unhelpful. You can bet this is fucking irritating, because we did it to ourselves! A pathetic failure of planning. > > > I agree that autonomous cars are mostly a very good thing, unless > > you happen to be a trucker, or a car maker. > > > I'm not sure how autonomous cars are bad for car makers. I do get why they The duty cycle of a personal car is terrible. With autonomous cars you only need a small fraction of total fleet. You already see the beginning of this with carsharing smartphone apps. Now you no longer need the hassle of owning a car just that you can use it. It's just great, unless you're in the car making business. It's pretty awful if car making is your country's main moneymaking business, and they're really EV and autonomous car-tarded. > are bad for truckers. > > > > Whatever Germany > > earns on car making is about enough to pay for the fossil fuel > > imports. > > > > You're confusing me again. Obviously, Germany has to figure out some other way to pay for their fossil fuel imports in the near future. > > > > have highway cruise control (including steering) by 2014 or 2015. So my > > > venture into guessing the future was pretty close, using Ray's technique. > > > > > > > > > > Ok. So, now your transistor budget no long doubles in > > > > constant time, but that time keeps increasing. It's roughly > > > > three years by end of this year, no longer 18 months. > > > > Physical feature size limits are close behind, and your > > > > Si real state is a 400 mm pizza, max. WSI gives you a > > > > factor of two by making yield quantitative, but it wrecks > > > > havoc to your computation model, because grain size starts > > > > being tiny (less than mm^2), and asks for asynchronous > > > > shared-nothing, and did I mention fine-grained? So no > > > > TBytes of RAM for your LUT. The next step is FPGA, as in > > > > runtime reconfigurable. That *might* give you another > > > > factor of 2, or maybe even 4. Stacking is off-Moore, but > > > > it will do something, particularly giving cache-like > > > > access to your RAM, as long as it's few 10 MBytes max. > > > > > > > > > > I've predicted that they will go to 3D. It is the only logical way to go > > > > Everybody and his dog predicted that, since early 1970s. > > The difficult is actually making it happen, just in time > > when semiconductor photolitho just runs out of steam. > > Guess what, that time is now. So, where is your 3d integration > > technology? > > > > > from here, other than maybe 2 1/2 D first... > > > > You can't have that by semiconductor photolitho. Stacking is > > off-More. What else have you got? > > > > > > > > > And then you have to go real 3d, or else there's gap. > > > > > > > > > > True, unless something completely different comes along, which may not be > > > highly likely. > > > > New technologies typically take decades of development, until > > they're sufficiently matured so that they can take on mature > > technologies that have ran into their scaling limits. > > > > I totally agree that the 2d processes we are currently using are running > into limits. But we will keep making the stuff we're making now cheaper. In Older processes are cheaper than bleeding edge, but that curve saturates almost immediately. The only way to drop the costs is by using a new technology. > my mind, that keeps us on Moore until such time as a 3D solution is worked We are already off-Moore. The question is how long it will take until a different technology can pick up scaling, at least for a brief while (if you're at atomic limits in the surface, you're only a few doublings away from where your only option is to start doubling the volume). > out that makes things faster. > > The main problem in my mind isn't making stuff smaller, but in dissipating > heat so you can stack it up close to each other. That's what I mean by 2.5 Stacking is off-Moore. One of the scaling limits is that the power scaling is no longer with us. As you'll notice, no novolatile memory is ready to pick up the torch of SRAM/DRAM/NOR flash, despite many decades of development. > > D. > > > > > > > > > > > My guess the gap is somewhere 15-20 years long, but > > > > we've got maybe 10 years until saturation curve is pretty > > > > damn flat. > > > > > > > > > > Ok. Then we can start making larger structures. It won't speed up due to > > > decreasing transistor size, but it will be able to do useful work. > > Imagine > > > a 3d CPU 5 inches on a side. That could do some serious work. More than a > > > human brain. > > > > The human brain is a 3d integrated assembly of computational > > elements which are built from features on nm scale. > > > > Sure is. And I'm convinced that we'll soon enough have similar > computational devices. Maybe we'll even figure out how to grow them. Who > knows. > > > > > > He implicitly implied we'll run on 100% of thin-film PV in 16 years. > > > > That was 2011, so make that 14 years. This means 4.2 TWp/year just > > > > for power in a linear model, nevermind matching synfuel capability > > > > (try doubling that, after all is sung and done -- 8 shiny TWp/year). > > > > We're not getting the linear model. In fact, we arguably sublinear, > > > > see > > > > > > http://cleantechnica.com/2013/10/14/third-quarter-2013-solar-pv-installations-reach-9-gw/ > > > > > > > > > You obviously don't understand the nature of his prediction. If he says > > > > Obviously. I expect prediction to be brittle, and that the originator > > is prepared to eat some crow, in case she is wrong. I'm old-fashioned > > this way. > > > > No Eugen. Let's simplify. If I predict that there will be 20 billion cats > running loose in Germany in 16 years and that the number of cats will > increase exponentially with a doubling every two years, and you come back > in two years and say "We don't yet have 2 billion cats, so the prediction > must be wrong." Then you clearly don't have an understanding of what > exponential means. I'm sorry, this is too stupid, I'm done with this mail. This is the kind of argumentation that made me stop talking to John. > > > > that the doubling in solar efficiency is 3.5 years (going from memory) > > then > > > half of the solar he envisions will be installed between July 2023 and > > > > Thank you for explaining exponential growth to me. I think I've first > > understood it before I was 10. > > > Clearly not so much. > > > > The nature of solar cells is the only > > way to double the output is to double the surface. And the according > > infrastructure in the background, simple things like 10 GUSD plants, > > electric grid upgrades, storage systems, and the like. > > > > > 2027. What's being installed now probably is sublinear, that's what an > > > exponential would predict. He didn't predict a linear model. We'll > > revisit > > > > You're not understanding me. It used to be exponential. Because it's > > very easy to double very little. Until suddenly you have to double > > quite a lot. This isn't a lily pond or a bacterial culture, this is > > infrastructure work. > > > > So Ray is already wrong, once again. The trend is no longer exponential. > > > > The only thing Ray said about solar is that the cost of the panels > themselves was on an exponential curve. There is a lot more to solar costs > than that. So if you hold him to something he didn't say, then yes, we're > off the curve. If you have data showing that the panels themselves have > fallen off the curve, then I'll give you credit for being correct, and will > admit that Kurzweil is off, at least for the moment. (Unfortunately for > you, you can sometimes hop back on the curve later with a new technology.) > > > > > his prediction in 2027 if we're both still communicating by then. > > > > The prediction is 100% of electricity in 16 years. He then scaled > > that back by saying 20 years. That's 2021. > > > > Given that we're already off-exponential, I expect that you keep > > posting "I'm wrong" every year. > > > > I will give you this. Ray made a prediction about the price of solar panels > and then extrapolated that to the price of solar generated electricity > (which includes infrastructure, inverters, batteries and the like) which is > not the same thing. I don't think Ray is right when he says things that > imply that lots of infrastructure will just pop into existence. But, how > much more infrastructure would pop into existence if solar panels were > nearly free? A little more, but the other parts are still damn pricey, > better than half of a current home installation. > > > > > > apply. However, in a sense it does apply. We do get some percent > > better at > > > > > extracting what's left each year. That doesn't mean we get an > > exponential > > > > > > > > No, in terms of net energy we're not getting better. We're actually > > > > getting worse. > > > > > > > > > amount of oil, since there's a limited amount of the stuff. But it > > does > > > > > mean that we get exponentially better at finding what's left (note > > that > > > > > > > > We're not getting better. We've mapped all the stuff, there are almost > > > > no unknown unknowns. And dropping EROEI and even dropping volume > > > > (not net energy, volume!) per unit of effort is pretty much the > > > > opposite of exponential. Do 40% of decay rate/well/year mean a > > > > thing to you? > > > > > > > > > > You misunderstand my point again. I know it's harder to get oil. But we > > > develop new technologies for getting at what's left. > > > > Fracking is 40 years old. Fracking is running into diminishing returns. > > So where are your new technologies, which need to be already in wide > > deployment, now? > > > > Fracking is currently producing a fair amount of oil. It's produced a lot > of buzz. I am not an expert on oil production techniques, so I'm not going > to argue from ignorance. > > > > > > > this curve is likely much more gentle than computing, with a > > doubling of > > > > > reserves we can get at maybe every 20 or 50 years. I don't know.) > > > > > > > > There are no exponentials in infrastructure. There is an early > > > > sigmoidal that looks that way, but we've left that already. > > > > > > > > > > Infrastructure can change rapidly. How long did it take for everyone to > > get > > > > No. Infrastructure takes 30 years, frequently longer. That's a constant. > > > > > a cell phone? Smart Phones? When electric cars make financial sense (if > > > > How long did take for everybody to get their own synfuel plant? > > > > I agree larger infrastructure is harder. But things can change rapidly when > they have to. > > > > > they ever do) then people will switch to them quickly. Large > > infrastructure > > > > Do you understand the logictics of car production? Battery manufacturing? > > Dynamics of fleet exchange? Recharging infrastructure? Including the money > > to fund it all? Do the math, it is really quite illuminating. > > > > I'm sure it is a hard problem. I do know the US car fleet turns over every > 16 years or so. That would indicate that if it became a real issue and we > had a real solution that it could be done in 16 years. > > > > > like roads and so forth will remain problematic until robotics is good > > > enough to do much more of the job. > > > > > > > > > > > This is the opposite of science. > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > It is a part of science, the hypothesis part. LAR applied to > > computing > > > > > available per dollar in particular is a hypothesis formed in the mid > > > > 1960s. > > > > > As far as I know, we are still more or less on that track, though > > they > > > > have > > > > > > > > No, we're not. See benchmarks. > > > > > > > > > > Data please. I can't find any. I have looked. > > > > Try Stream, though it's a synthetic benchmark > > > > http://www.admin-magazine.com/HPC/Articles/Finding-Memory-Bottlenecks-with-Stream > > It would be a reasonable assumption for retina-like processing > > scaling. Deeper visual pipelines are different. Here, you need > > to access something like fetching from a large (>>10 GByte) of > > random pointers. > > > > A coprocessor with direct access to the "memory" of a retina would be very > good for problems like this. > > > > > > > > People who hear about Amdahl's Law the first time have to stop > > worrying, > > > > and embrace nondeterminism. People who expect reliable systems at > > hardware > > > > level are gonna have a bad time. > > > > > > > > > > I disagree with that. There will be reliable hardware, or they won't be > > > > If you want to not run into Amdahl you need to embrace nondeterminism. > > Building test harnesses just got a bit harder. > > > > You would need a new generation of programmers to go there, I think. > > > > > able to sell it. No matter how slow the previous generation was. It is > > hard > > > > Yes, there will be unreliable hardware. This is one of the problems in > > exascale: unreliable transport and unreliable components (as in: parts > > of your system keep failing at runtime, and you diagnose and remap to > > hot spares, all without breaking a stride). Beyond that, you've got > > stochastical computing elements. That's one of the joys of living at > > nanoscale. > > > > But it has to be dealt with at a low level, or programmers won't stand for > it. > > > > > > > enough to get programmers to do multi-threading. It would be damn close > > to > > > impossible to get them to switch to a model where the answer might not be > > > right. > > > > There is no longer "exactly right" there is only "good enough". > > > > Well, for now we have exactly right for computation, in the future, and for > certain algorithms that are NP complete, for example, good enough is fine. > But for credit card processing, good enough isn't good enough. > > > > > > > A pessimist will just hole up in his cave. I refer you to "The Croods" to > > > > I don't know what a pessimist would do. I do know that the only guy who'd > > still have water when his cars break down in the desert is a realist. > > > > The optimists always end up as bleached bones. Your call. > > > > I prefer the extra years of life. Perhaps I'll spend them in a cave in the > desert. > > -Kelly > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From markalanwalker at gmail.com Tue Oct 29 12:30:39 2013 From: markalanwalker at gmail.com (Mark Walker) Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 06:30:39 -0600 Subject: [ExI] How to build a happier brain In-Reply-To: <526F8140.9030702@aleph.se> References: <526EE5F2.1010207@aleph.se> <526F8140.9030702@aleph.se> Message-ID: Empirical studies suggest that the happy giants are more likely to have characteristics that perfectionists advocate: more friendships, better jobs, higher paying jobs, better marriages, better health, better grades, and--at last to your example--more "prosocial behavior" (i.e., other regarding virtues). To the ancient battle between hedonists and perfectionists I say: false dilemma. Naturally, things are bit more complex than this--this is the Reader's Digest version. Dr. Mark Walker Richard L. Hedden Chair of Advanced Philosophical Studies Department of Philosophy New Mexico State University P.O. Box 30001, MSC 3B Las Cruces, NM 88003-8001 USA http://www.nmsu.edu/~philos/mark-walkers-home-page.html On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 3:34 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > On 2013-10-28 23:30, Mark Walker wrote: > >> Anders, I think you are one of the "happy giants" I discuss in my book: >> > > Quite likely. I get used as a standard example in the ethics discussions > around here. > > I wonder how a civilization that had mastered happiness would be like? It > would still not be the utopia of David Pearce (there would still be pain), > but it would be a place where there was far more energy and pleasure. > Whether kindness comes naturally from happiness is another matter - a > rather chilly idea might be a state where we are all very happy, yet do not > care much about others. > > "And I feel fantastic > And I never felt as good as how I do right now > Except for maybe when I think of how I felt that day > When I felt the way that I do right now, right now, right now." > > -- > Dr Anders Sandberg > Future of Humanity Institute > Oxford Martin School > Oxford University > > ______________________________**_________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/**mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-**chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Tue Oct 29 14:11:38 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 07:11:38 -0700 Subject: [ExI] A Gedanken Bike Experiment In-Reply-To: <526F83B6.5080807@aleph.se> References: <20131024011619.GB4312@ninja.nosyntax.net> <5268F9E7.8080602@aleph.se> <526D6953.2080708@aleph.se> <05d501ced352$dc7e0b30$957a2190$@att.net> <526EE880.7020506@aleph.se> <0ef301ced466$060a63e0$121f2ba0$@att.net> <526F83B6.5080807@aleph.se> Message-ID: <00f201ced4b0$c981e970$5c85bc50$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg Subject: Re: [ExI] A Gedanken Bike Experiment On 2013-10-29 05:16, spike wrote: Thanks for that Anders. I sent them a number of ideas, but the one which intrigues me the most is an idea I had about filling a tire with a type of metal alloy which melts at a temperature slightly lower than that of boiling water. I may have posted something about that a couple months ago, don't recall. A eutectic alloy of tin, lead and bismuth makes a high density, low melting point metal (about 97C) which you could use to fill a motorcycle tire. It would look perfectly normal but would weight over 200 kg for the front and nearly 300 for the back. >.I don't know much about bike dynamics, but I suspect the liquid metal would be tricky to have in the tires. The most obvious reason is that it would accumulate downwards, ballooning the tire. But if the tire rotates, then the bulge would tend to be behind the lowest point, and exert a slowing force. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Ooops apologies, I didn't explain that very well. The Bismuth Tin Lead alloy melts at about 97C, which a vulcanized tire can tolerate. So you melt the stuff in a water bath, drill a small vent hole in the top of the tire, pour in the liquid metal until it is up to the vent hole, let the tire cool to room temperature, freezing the metal. Now it is a very hard very heavy tire. What I want to know is how the bike would handle. The gyro action of the front wheel would be increased way more than the factor of 30, for the radius of gyration would be increased. So the moment of inertia of the front wheel would be increased by a factor of over a 100. That would introduce weird handling. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Tue Oct 29 15:05:45 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 11:05:45 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Inflation graph In-Reply-To: <099f01ced3fd$7e167270$7a435750$@att.net> References: <04bf01ced34e$02ba59c0$082f0d40$@att.net> <099f01ced3fd$7e167270$7a435750$@att.net> Message-ID: On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 12:48 PM, spike wrote: > John, what I am saying is that these inflation numbers depend on what it > is you are buying. > Obviously. > Prices for electronics and most manufactured goods have been falling for > years, > Yes, and if you eliminate all the things that go down in price and only consider the things that go up you can make inflation look much worse, and if you consider only things that go down in price you can make inflation look much better; but in science you can't throw out data just because it doesn't support your theory and only accept data that does support it. And the data from at least the last ten years is clear as a crystal, massive government spending and massive government debt has NOT caused massive inflation; I would have thought it would have but it did not, so I guess I don't know all there is to know about economics after all. And I don't see how anyone can dispassionately look at the data and say that inflation is the most important economic problem we have right now on October 29 2013. > while fuel and food have been going up smartly. > Food prices have spiked because of the idiotic bio-fuel laws and have nothing to do with deficit spending, fortunately in the USA less than 7% of annual income is spent on food. And as for fuel, take a look at the 2 charts below, it sure doesn't look like fuel prices have gone up much: John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Tue Oct 29 15:34:31 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 11:34:31 -0400 Subject: [ExI] How to build a happier brain In-Reply-To: <526EE5F2.1010207@aleph.se> References: <526EE5F2.1010207@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 6:32 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > I would love to know how to manipulate the mood setpoint of the brain. When my mood gets gloomy I think that individuals having full access to their mood setpoints could be the explanation for the Fermi Paradox. Einstein must have felt great on the day he discovered General Relativity, but it took him 10 years and was such hard work that he lost 40 pounds and it nearly killed him. How much easier it would have been if he could have gotten that exact same feeling of pride of accomplishment and awe at the profound beauty of the universe by just sitting on his ass and turning a knob. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Tue Oct 29 15:26:13 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 08:26:13 -0700 Subject: [ExI] comments please regarding snoopy-doopy.gov Message-ID: <01b701ced4bb$348976c0$9d9c6440$@att.net> "The president clearly feels strongly about making sure we are not just collecting information because we can, but because we should," Carney said. "We recognize there needs to be additional constraints on how we gather and use intelligence." Jay Carney, White House Press Secretary, official spokesman for POTUS Perhaps those across the Atlantic can offer hapless USians a comment or two on yesterday's revelations by Diane Feinstein, but do ponder the comment above by Mr. Obamao's press secretary. The president is going all Sergeant Shultz on us (he knows nossink! .about this other than what he reads in the newspapers.) Indications are to the contrary, that he knew sompzink about this. Our European friends do comment please, in light of your better understanding of how the German government behaved in the 1930s and the Russian government behaved in the 1950s. I see a link between this alleged monitoring of Germany, France, Mexico, Spain, perhaps others, and the way the ACA rollout was handled. It is plausible to claim that the USA sacrificed healthcare reform on the altar of inappropriate and illegitimate data collection. To this day, I have never seen a reasonable official explanation for why they wanted all that data, or what they planned to do with it, but it was this data harvesting effort which crashed the HealthCare.gov site, required a 600 million dollar software development effort which failed ignominiously, taking down with it the credibility of the administration, tearing it to bits like gay porno advertisements in the paper shredder. All this they did, wrecked the system and influenced government for perhaps a decade, all in order to gobble up private data on the proletariat. Apologies for hammering on this, but it has been a lot on my mind recently. I honestly don't get it. Someone here, please explain. Help me Obi wan Extropi, you're my only hope. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Tue Oct 29 16:43:03 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 10:43:03 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Hard Drives, What Comes Next Message-ID: This is an article by Mark H. Kryder and Chang Soo Kim. Kryder works for Carnegie Melon. This was published in IEEE Transactions on Magnetics (peer reviewed) in October 2009. Kryder is well respected enough to have a law named after him. He was also Seagate Corp's senior vice president of research and chief technology officer. https://www.dssc.ece.cmu.edu:49155/research/pdfs/After_Hard_Drives.pdf The first line of this article states: MAGNETICALLY stored bits are theoretically stable in FePt at densities approaching 100 Tb/in . With areal densities of today?s drives around 500 Gb/in , hard disk drives (HDDs) are far from fundamental limits. The Information Storage Industry Consortium and its industrial sponsors from the HDD industry are targeting a demonstration of an real density of 10 Tb/in in 2015. Such a technology would enable over 7 TB to be stored on a single 2.5 inch disk, enabling a cost of the order of $3/TB for a two-disk 2.5 inch drive. Given the current 40% compound annual growth rate in areal density, this technology should be in volume production by 2020. A similar article was published in 2005 in Scientific American (also peer reviewed) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Kryder If hard drives continue to progress at their current pace, then in 2020 a two-platter, 2.5-inch disk drive will be capable of storing more than 14 terabytes (TB) and will cost about $40. I present this as refutation of the idea that hard drives are approaching the end of their exponential growth, even in their current state. SMR is apparently likely to be the next "big thing" that will keep us on track. (At least according to this possibly self serving article) http://www.seagate.com/files/www-content/solutions-content/it-professionals/_shared/docs/smr-requires-new-data-management-usenix-login-feldman-gibson.pdf I plan on doing a little more work in this area if I can get some matlab help from Kasey. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Tue Oct 29 16:47:54 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 09:47:54 -0700 Subject: [ExI] comments please regarding snoopy-doopy.gov In-Reply-To: <01b701ced4bb$348976c0$9d9c6440$@att.net> References: <01b701ced4bb$348976c0$9d9c6440$@att.net> Message-ID: On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 8:26 AM, spike wrote: > it was this data harvesting effort which crashed the HealthCare.gov site, > required a 600 million dollar software development effort which failed > ignominiously > Please refrain from such hyperbole. Not only does it do you no credit, but it prevents you from figuring things out: as you noted, you "don't get it" here. Almost all the data HealthCare.gov collects is already known to the government; no "data harvesting effort" was necessary. But there were also HealthCare.gov's very well documented troubles: mismanagement, requirements changing during development (which is well known to cause crappy software, no matter who's building it), and so on. Never assume malice where mere incompetence will suffice. In the case of that site, mere incompetence suffices. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Tue Oct 29 16:52:38 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 10:52:38 -0600 Subject: [ExI] comments please regarding snoopy-doopy.gov In-Reply-To: <01b701ced4bb$348976c0$9d9c6440$@att.net> References: <01b701ced4bb$348976c0$9d9c6440$@att.net> Message-ID: On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 9:26 AM, spike wrote: > All this they did, wrecked the system and influenced government for > perhaps a decade, all in order to gobble up private data on the proletariat. > Spike, what is the basis for believing that the health care site failed because of data collection and not because of poor engineering? My understanding of the Healthcare.org web site problem increased greatly yesterday, when I came to understand that they are using web services to gather information from individual states, individual insurance companies, and from the bureaucracy itself. All of this data and logic is needed to perform the complex operation of coming up with a price (A really stinky architecture, btw) and all of this data and logic is stored and maintained by each party individually. This means that if there is one weak link in the chain, you don't get an answer. This is an Obaminable architecture. A much better approach would have been to say: 1) You host your data and functions here (rackspace, whatever) 2) You answer the questions like so (standard APIs.) 3) test the hell out of it This isn't rocket science, but the way they implemented it as a distributed system maintained by 53+ separate entities, it only takes one entity being a dumb ass to bring parts of the system to its knees. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Tue Oct 29 16:55:10 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 10:55:10 -0600 Subject: [ExI] comments please regarding snoopy-doopy.gov In-Reply-To: References: <01b701ced4bb$348976c0$9d9c6440$@att.net> Message-ID: On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 10:47 AM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > > Never assume malice where mere incompetence will suffice. In the case of > that site, mere incompetence suffices. > Totally 100% agree with this Adrian. There is no vast data collection conspiracy, just the normal incompetence we experience from the government every day. Aside from that, if the NSA wanted to collect this data, they could do it off of the traffic, without having to infiltrate the development of the software. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Tue Oct 29 16:58:57 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 10:58:57 -0600 Subject: [ExI] How to build a happier brain In-Reply-To: References: <526EE5F2.1010207@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 9:34 AM, John Clark wrote: > On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 6:32 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > > > I would love to know how to manipulate the mood setpoint of the brain. > > > When my mood gets gloomy I think that individuals having full access to > their mood setpoints could be the explanation for the Fermi Paradox. > Einstein must have felt great on the day he discovered General Relativity, > but it took him 10 years and was such hard work that he lost 40 pounds and > it nearly killed him. How much easier it would have been if he could have > gotten that exact same feeling of pride of accomplishment and awe at the > profound beauty of the universe by just sitting on his ass and turning a > knob. > It would be interesting though to have seen whether Einstein accomplished more on days that he felt happy during that period. I know that I have super productive days, and super non-productive days. I wish I could figure out better what leads to the more productive days. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Tue Oct 29 17:17:50 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 11:17:50 -0600 Subject: [ExI] A Gedanken Bike Experiment In-Reply-To: <00f201ced4b0$c981e970$5c85bc50$@att.net> References: <20131024011619.GB4312@ninja.nosyntax.net> <5268F9E7.8080602@aleph.se> <526D6953.2080708@aleph.se> <05d501ced352$dc7e0b30$957a2190$@att.net> <526EE880.7020506@aleph.se> <0ef301ced466$060a63e0$121f2ba0$@att.net> <526F83B6.5080807@aleph.se> <00f201ced4b0$c981e970$5c85bc50$@att.net> Message-ID: On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 8:11 AM, spike wrote: > ** ** > > ** ** > > *From:* extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto: > extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] *On Behalf Of *Anders Sandberg > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] A Gedanken Bike Experiment** > > ** ** > > Ooops apologies, I didn?t explain that very well. The Bismuth Tin Lead > alloy melts at about 97C, which a vulcanized tire can tolerate. So you > melt the stuff in a water bath, drill a small vent hole in the top of the > tire, pour in the liquid metal until it is up to the vent hole, let the > tire cool to room temperature, freezing the metal. Now it is a very hard > very heavy tire. What I want to know is how the bike would handle. The > gyro action of the front wheel would be increased way more than the factor > of 30, for the radius of gyration would be increased. So the moment of > inertia of the front wheel would be increased by a factor of over a 100. > That would introduce weird handling. > The primary thing you would notice first would be that steering would be way more difficult. As you point out, gyroscopic forces would tend to make the wheel want to stay straight, so much more force would be required to turn the handle bars. Fairly intelligent power steering might be able to fix that issue. The other thing you would likely notice is less traction. The pliability of a normal tire gets more of the tire on the surface of the road. Take away that flexibility, and you have less tire contacting the road, and thus would be more of a slippery issue. Since the bike is heavier, you would need more traction, not less to safely negotiate corners. The third think I can think of is that the ride would be far more bumpy. This would also lead to stability issues, particularly in cornering. Imagine hitting a pebble, and losing almost all contact with the road for a brief time. That could lead to a kind of skipping that would likely be very dangerous. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Tue Oct 29 17:47:09 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 10:47:09 -0700 Subject: [ExI] comments please regarding snoopy-doopy.gov In-Reply-To: References: <01b701ced4bb$348976c0$9d9c6440$@att.net> Message-ID: <032a01ced4ce$e4ee7f70$aecb7e50$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Kelly Anderson Sent: Tuesday, October 29, 2013 9:53 AM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [ExI] comments please regarding snoopy-doopy.gov On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 9:26 AM, spike wrote: All this they did, wrecked the system and influenced government for perhaps a decade, all in order to gobble up private data on the proletariat. >.Spike, what is the basis for believing that the health care site failed because of data collection and not because of poor engineering? Hi Kelly, sure it was poor engineering and a flawed underlying concept, but what I meant was, all they needed to do was create a spreadsheet and have the insurance companies fill it in, then post that to anyone who wants to go look at it. They didn't need to ask where I live, my legal name, the amount on my last W2, for two of those three things are likely to change for a lot of people next year. A buttload of employees will be moved from 40 hrs/wk to 30hrs/wk so their company need not shoulder that expense, and in many cases, that change will also result in a change of address. So why do they ask it? And why the security questions? Once I drop those into the public domain, those are three pieces of information I can never again use to secure an account. I claim that nooooone of what caused HealthCare.gov to fail was necessary. Anyone who did dump all that info on the government was imprudent or had exactly nothing to lose (because they had no money and/or were desperately ill). These are examples of the zombies, who the insurance companies do not want. They want the track team, who have money and seldom get sick. If you dump all that info, you tell the government and everyone who wants to know, which team you belong to, the track team or the zombie squad. I don't want the whole world knowing that, even if I am lucky enough to be on the track team, thank evolution. The claim has been made that the government needed to know this in case you want to apply for a subsidy. But if you already know you are not eligible, why isn't there a bypass feature, or a privacy setting so that you can create a fictitious account? Or just an estimated benefits page? Or just a comparison sheet? How easy would that be? Hell I could derive that, if they would just let me shop anonymously. Kelly, what this was about in my case is I wanted to apply a mathematical technique I know of which I developed in my career, superposition of probability distributions. It would allow me to get the available subsidies in classes or categories. I could then estimate using demographics and my estimated probability of opt-outs how much this whole scheme is likely to cost us (by "us" I mean taxpayers) to subsidize the zombies, and how much would be offset by the tax penalties paid by the track team, corrected by the percentage that choose to pay it, since the IRS cannot legally collect it. (Is that a kick in the ass, or what?) >.My understanding of the Healthcare.org web site problem increased greatly yesterday, when I came to understand that they are using web services to gather information from individual states, individual insurance companies, and from the bureaucracy itself. Sure but again please, why do they need to know all this? All they would have needed is to create a pot of money, toss in there the tax penalties collected from donors (the opt-outs who chose to pay) then divide that pool among the qualifying destitute and send subsidy checks to the insurance companies of the opt-in poor, they're done! It doesn't require all the snoopy-doopy info-harvesting, doesn't even need external funding. >. All of this data and logic is needed to perform the complex operation of coming up with a price (A really stinky architecture, btw) and all of this data and logic is stored and maintained by each party individually. No sir. The insurance company gives the price. The info was needed to calculate the subsidy, and that is a critical difference indeed. They could estimate the subsidy and just say right out that they won't know what is the subsidy until after it is collected, because they don't know how big is the pot of money from opt-out donors. They could estimate it, but that's all. If they calculate it, they are guaranteeing it, which they cannot really do in any case. >.This means that if there is one weak link in the chain, you don't get an answer. This is an Obaminable architecture. Indeed. {8^D >.A much better approach would have been to say: 1) You host your data and functions here (rackspace, whatever) 2) You answer the questions like so (standard APIs.) 3) test the hell out of it No sir again to all the above. The right approach would have been collect data from the insurance companies, knowing they will get their own stuff exactly right (they are in the biz of being right), make a single digit estimate of the available subsidy, based on the number of opt-outs who choose to pay the tax, and state right up front that it is an estimate. Very little code would be needed to do that, an no testing at all full stop. >.This isn't rocket science, but the way they implemented it as a distributed system maintained by 53+ separate entities, it only takes one entity being a dumb ass to bring parts of the system to its knees. -Kelly Agreed to that. The whole scheme was based on such deeply flawed reasoning, it calls into question the fundamental judgment of any government which would get so deep into it without seeing that which is perfectly obvious to any outside observer. Am I hallucinating, or is not this design obviously flawed? To me it is as clear as designing a jet liner with only one wing. Everyone can see it can't fly like that. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Tue Oct 29 17:52:46 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 10:52:46 -0700 Subject: [ExI] comments please regarding snoopy-doopy.gov In-Reply-To: References: <01b701ced4bb$348976c0$9d9c6440$@att.net> Message-ID: <034401ced4cf$ade492c0$09adb840$@att.net> >. On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes Subject: Re: [ExI] comments please regarding snoopy-doopy.gov On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 8:26 AM, spike wrote: >>.it was this data harvesting effort which crashed the HealthCare.gov site, required a 600 million dollar software development effort which failed ignominiously >.Please refrain from such hyperbole. Not only does it do you no credit, but it prevents you from figuring things out: as you noted, you "don't get it" here. Almost all the data HealthCare.gov collects is already known to the government; no "data harvesting effort" was necessary. I disagree sir. The IRS had most of this data, but the IRS is not the government. They are not allowed to share what they know. They sometimes do, if the victim is a Tea Party type or a Republican, but it is illegal, as we are watching unfold in the case of Sarah Hall Ingram. >.Never assume malice where mere incompetence will suffice. In the case of that site, mere incompetence suffices. Adrian, I see incompetence here, but I also see plenty of evidence of malice in both the Ingram case and the Lerner case, both of which are applicable to the current situation: the IRS abused its power and leaked confidential information. It will all eventually come out, likely just before the November 2014 elections. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Tue Oct 29 18:08:59 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 19:08:59 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Hard Drives, What Comes Next In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20131029180859.GP10405@leitl.org> On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 10:43:03AM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > I present this as refutation of the idea that hard drives are approaching > the end of their exponential growth, even in their current state. I present above statement as evidence that I can write anything, because nobody is going to read it, anyway. (Or, perhaps, I shouldn't bother writing anything at all, and save us all the aggravation). Either you believe in linear semilog plots, or you don't. So any deviation from a linear semilog is either evidence for you or against you. You can't have it both ways. Either you believe that there is a magic mechanism by which a technology arises just in time to be passed on the torch from the failing without stumbling, or you don't. If there's a falure to bridge the gap you'll get a kink in the curve, and inverted hockey stick. Some gaps are very short, some less so. You don't get to cherrypick which gaps are significant, and which aren't. So in 2027 the world will have 16 TW cumulated PV capacity, that's 48 TWp (currently it has 0.1 TWp, added within 20 years, this is lost in the error margins). You've got 7 doublings yet to go. I'll spell Ray's implications out, all errors are mine: year added capacity TWp 2010 +0.06 TWp (actual data) 2012 2013 +0.19 TWp (so far 0.037 TWp added in 2013, my guess this will be 0.077 TWp instead of 0.19 TWp, so -0.113 TWp gap) 2015 +0.38 TWp (mind the gap?) 2017 +1.5 TWp (mind the gap?) 2019 +3.0 TWp (mind the gap?) 2021 +6.0 TWp (mind the gap?) 2023 +12 TWp (mind the gap?) 2025 +24 TWp (mind the gap?) 2027 Do these numbers really look good to you? You'll notice we're already kinda off-track, here. How do you like your serving of crow? Roasted, boiled, smoked? From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Tue Oct 29 19:50:53 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 13:50:53 -0600 Subject: [ExI] The Actual Visionary of the Future In-Reply-To: <20131029112928.GK10405@leitl.org> References: <20131025133031.GL10405@leitl.org> <20131025195114.GU10405@leitl.org> <20131028103712.GC10405@leitl.org> <20131029112928.GK10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 5:29 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 01:51:22PM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > > > I think his data is well researched. Whether all of the curves extend > into > > the future, and just how far they will extend is guess work. > > No, no, no. If you're formulating a theory, you have to define > its scope of applicability, and margins beyond which the > theory is falsified. > This is not a theory like the theory of gravity or the theory of evolution. It is a rule of thumb or a hypothesis by which you can approximate what things will PROBABLY be like in the future. The future cannot be known with certainty. For example, we all know of existential risks that would throw Moore's Law out the window. It's more like using climate projections to guess the weather on a specific date than using orbital dynamics to determine the location of Jupiter on July 4, 3200. Both are forecasts, but I know which one I'd rather depend upon. If I were planning a wedding months out, I would rather have the Farmer's Almanac (based upon history on a specific date) than nothing. The LoAR is more like the Farmer's Almanac than it is like planetary tables. > If it's not a theory, then why are we wasting time on > such assclownage? > Because even as a rule of thumb it is better than going completely in the dark. If you were in a cave, would you not want a small candle as opposed to nothing at all? I don't know if $1000 worth of computation will approximate the power of the human brain in 2025, 2029, 2035 or 2040 but the center of my guess is 2029 based on Moore's Law. That's slightly better than saying, "I have no idea", isn't it? > > > > believe everything is exponential. That being said, lots of things > are, > > > > like the savings in your bank account. > > > > > > Exponential growth of compound interest is a textbook case > > > where your numerical model of physical layer processes and reality > > > increasingly diverge, requiring periodic, painful readjustments. > > > > > > > I have never heard of a case where a bank simply refused to pay interest > > You have never heard of banks going broke, assets seized, currency > hyperinflated? Really? > Of course I have. Those things can happen because of bad management, war, bad government control over money and the like. The point is that banks don't ever go out of business JUST because they can't pay interest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_banks_in_continuous_operation Monte dei Paschi di Siena was founded in 1472. If you put a dollar in there, you would now have a LOT of money, and I doubt the bank would go out of business if they had that money just sit there for hundreds of years. Interestingly, this bank almost went out of business in 2008... Just shows that the level of stupidity was nearly unprecedented. > Are you honestly believing that money likes to work, and it > keeps growing in the bank vaults, like early miners thought > metal grew in the mountain, so that they left there some so > that it could breed? > Yes, I believe money properly invested (say in the stock market) does like to work. It does create value. I know this because I've personally witnessed 8 million dollars grow into 32 million dollars over a period of ten years. Without investment, that could never have happened. > > because there was just too much money in the account. So what are you > > referring to here? > > > > > > > > > People > > > > > forget that hard drives stopped doubling, at least for a short > while. > > > > > > > > > > > > > Because of a flood in Thailand. Nobody has said there wouldn't be > bumps > > > in > > > > > > Thailand was not the reason. > > > > > > We're stuck at 4 TB because they ran into limits of a particular > > > technology. > > > > > > > I'm baffled by your use of the word "stuck" here. We just got to 4 Tbytes > > You're getting far too frequently baffled for my liking. I'm showing > you instances where reality deviates from the nice linear semi-log. > There have been multiple smooth technology handovers in the platter > areal density which however shew a different scaling > http://www.hindawi.com/journals/at/2013/521086/fig1/ I think this goes more to proving my point than yours. If you think you're seeing a linear semilog plot in there, then > throw away your ruler. Or buy new glasses. If you're now agreeing > that the growth is saturating, then why are you wasting my time? > The biggest downcurve in the plot is the part that projects into the future. Let's come back in 5 years and see what reality actually happens. > > not that long ago. We always get "stuck" by this definition. I have > > attached my spreadsheet of hard drive prices that I have been maintaining > > The metric you're looking for is areal density. > The metric I care about is inflation adjusted dollars/byte. I could care less about areal density, except that it is one (and only one) mechanism by which dollars/byte goes down. > > for a few years, but initially got elsewhere. I welcome comments. > > > > > In case of platters full of spinning rust the snag is temporary, > > > as there are two successor technologies about to enter the > > > marketplace (HAMR and BPM, not new but close to becoming > > > mature enough for practical applications) so there's probably > > > another order of magnitude still to go before end of the line. > > > That makes it 40 TB. > > > > > > > That hardly seems like "stuck" to me. Knowing how we're going to get the > > next order of magnitude is good enough for me. > > No, deviations from linear semi-log plot are definitely not good enough > for Ray, and I have to agree with him. If you like leaning out of the > windows very far, prepare to deal with gravity. > I'm sure deviations from the semi-log plot are of concern to many people. I'm more interested in the idea that things continue to improve at an astonishing (perhaps near exponential) rate. I see no indication that that kind of progress is going to end, even if it slows slightly. You're just playing with the exponent a bit. That doesn't change the end result much. > > Aside from that, there are things out there that promise to give the next > > I'm not interested in promises. I'm interested in past data that > show where real world disagreed with prior predictions. > > > order of magnitude after that... such as: > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racetrack_memory > > Which is clearly not ready for prime time, but is a good idea of the > sorts > > of things that might happen when brilliant people are tasked with an > > Brilliant people can't make features smaller than atoms. Brilliant > people have no magic wands to short-cut technology maturation times > so that they spring full-formed from nothing, just as Athena sprang > from Zeus' forehead. Brilliant people can't make a refinery grow > out overnight, for free. > I agree that brilliant people will find it EXTREMELY difficult to build features smaller than atoms, perhaps even impossible. But we aren't close enough to the problem to say that we KNOW it is impossible yet. If it is possible, it might involve something like a highly controlled neutron star. And IF this is the case, that would explain the Fermi paradox. This is pure conjecture. There are a LOT of things we can do before we need subatomic manipulation. We aren't even close. Things like refineries do take a long time to build using today's techniques. I can see a day coming though where building such things will not take as long as they do today. Humans can only move so fast, but robots can move faster. I refer you to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KxjVlaLBmk If you could imagine robots programmed by sophisticated scheduling systems to build a refinery, I propose that you could, in principle, build a refinery rather quickly. The slowest part potentially is getting government approval. Here is my biggest point. If you can imagine being able to do something given a reasonable amount of time and money with current technology, then I can't imagine that given sufficient incentive that such a thing would not be accomplished. There is sufficient incentive to improve computational efficiencies, therefore, I cannot see such things not being accomplished. > > > objective. > > > > Coincidentally, NOR flash has recently also entered > > > scaling limits. > > > > > > The time for surface scaling is running out. The only > > > alternative is 3d volume integration. We do not have anything > > > in the pipeline to arrive in time, so there will be a gap. > > > The only technology to interpolate would be Langmuir-Blodgett > > > serial layer deposition, with according 2d liquid mosaic > > > self-assembly/alignment. I'm not aware of this technology > > > to be ready for deployment. Next after that is 3d crystal > > > self-assembly from solution. This is even further away. > > > > > > > That's ok, we have time to get this stuff right before falling off the > > curve. > > We've already fallen from the semiconductor litho curve. > Let's talk about CPS/Second/inflation adjusted Dollar. I am intensely NOT interested in the details of how it happens. That is someone/everyone else's job at the moment. > See the NOR flash scaling at the URL I posted earlier. > We've already fallen of the PV deployment curve (and we > were never on the according infrastructure curve in the > first place). > > You can't jump from zero TW to 20 TW in 20 years. > Not unless you have MNT, and collectively we made sure we > failed to develop that. > When you say MNT, do you mean molecular nanotechnology? > > > > > > the road, just that there was an overall trend. > > > > > > > > > > > > > People are unaware of finer points like > > > > > http://postbiota.org/pipermail/tt/2013-October/014179.html > > > > > > > > > > > > Ok, I read that, and what it said in a nut shell is "fuck this is > hard". > > > > > > Yes, this is the nature of limits. Instead of constant doubling > > > times the last few show longer and longer steps. As I told you, > > > we're no longer at 18 months but at 3 years doubling time this > > > moment. The next doubling times will be longer. This means > > > that linear semilog plot is no longer linear. No more Moore for you. > > > > > > > And yet, it is still doubling rapidly. The end result is the same, just > at > > Which part of "no more constant doubling times for you" you don't > understand? > As long as it continues to double, I don't care if it takes 18 months or 24 or 36. You can't point to a date in the future and say "improvement stops here" can you? As long as it is doubling somewhat close to current levels, the things I care about will continue to happen in the time scales I care about. I do care if the whole damn boat is going down. But that is a separate conversation. So long as there are SOME rich people/corporations/AGIs paying for the development of this stuff, I think it will continue to be developed. > > a slightly different time scale. And there is no guarantee that we won't > > Which part of "you can't make widgets smaller than single atoms" you don't > understand? > What part of "There's plenty of room at the bottom" do you not understand. We're not close to the atomic limits on most things. > > make a hop with a new technology and get back on any given curve. It can > > happen. > > A gold meteorite can fall in my garden. Hey, it could happen. > Touche. Getting back on a curve after having fallen off of it is really difficult. It has happened occasionally, but it is rough. > > > > > > > > > Not, I expect it to come to a screeching halt. > > > > > > Why do you expect that? Look at the price tag of the > > > zEnterprise 196. Obviously, a somewhat higher margin > > > than on a 50 USD ARM SoC. > > > > > > > Sorry, you've lost me here. I don't know what these things are. > > It's a cheap mainframe, 75 kUSD entry level. Obviously, CPUs > build from such can be made from unobtainium. But flash drives > and mobile CPUs have low margins, so there's diminished incentive > to go to the next node (especially if the next node has lower > performance than current one). > Thank you for explaining that. I don't pay much attention to mainframes, or even highly parallel computers or supercomputers in my work. I'm mostly interested in PCs, tablets and cell phones, and perhaps Google glass. Consumer related stuff. Yes, the cloud changes that, but I don't play in that world much. Given that, I'm still not understanding your point. Are these mainframes getting more expensive as time goes on? Are we not on some kind of curve with respect to them? My understanding is that rack based computing is chugging along at an acceptable rate of growth. Am I missing something? > > > > If they read your posts here Eugen, they might decide not to thaw you > > > out. > > > > Who needs a pessimist in a utopia... :-) > > > > > > Utopia? I'm afraid I have another piece of bad news for you. > > > Very bad news, I'm afraid... > > > > > > > Anyone looking at 2013 from the time frame of 1913 would clearly call > this > > Anyone looking at an arbitrary time frame knows that darwinian > evolution still applies. > But we are in the era of memetic evolution, not darwinian. And memes replicate faster, and have a higher mutation rate. > > utopia, at least from the technological standpoint. Also from the number > of > > people operating under democracy, decreased violence and a number of > other > > points. Not that it is utopia in every way. > > My thesis is that a postecosystem has a food web. > Ok, so here we may have a difference of opinion. I concede that the future ecosystem will have an energy web, but not necessarily food based. > > > > > > > > I know you MUST believe that computers will continue to get > faster, > > > even > > > > > if > > > > > > they don't quite keep up the doubling pace. Right? > > > > > > > > > > What does faster mean? The only reliable way is a benchmark. > > > > > The only really relevant benchmark is the one that runs your > > > > > problem. As such faster never kept up with Moore's law. > > > > > Moore's law is about affordable transistors, and that one > > > > > gives you a canvas for your potential. So your gains are less > > > > > than Moore, and sometimes a lot less. For me personally, > > > > > the bottleneck in classical (GPGPU is classical) computers > > > > > is worst-case memory bandwidth. Which is remarkably sucky, > > > > > if you look it up. > > > > > > > > > > > > > The problem I care about the most is computer vision. We are now > > > > > > Computer vision is very easy, actually, and quite well understood. > > > > > > > You are clearly stark raving MAD. There is no computer on earth that can > > tell a cat from a dog reliably at this point. > > There is a significant difference between "I have no idea how to do that" > from "ok, it's mere engineering at this point". > Agreed. > We're understanding processing the retina sufficiently to produce > code that the second processing pipeline can use. We have mapped > features of later processing stages to the point that we know what > you're looking at, or what you're dreaming of. We have off the > shelf machine vision systems for many industrial tasks. We have > autonomous cars that drive better than people. > I agree with all of this except the part of "we know what you're looking at"... if that is state of the art, then I'm way behind. > This is obviusly one of these cases where we've made some slight > progress over last few decades. > The progress that has been made in computer vision MOSTLY comes from Moore, not from better algorithms. Now, better computers enable algorithms that are less efficient to be tried, and therefore one could argue that some new algorithms have emerged from Moore. There has been progress in computer vision to be sure. The progress is slow. It is largely based upon computational improvements. Algorithmic improvement has occurred, but not at the same rate. > > > > > > The low number of layers and connectivity (fanout), all local at > > > that, a retina needs are within the envelope of silicon fabrication. > > > > > > > The retina is not what I'm talking about. I'm discussing image > > But the retina is what I'm talking about, because it's structurally > and functionally simple enough so that Moravec picked it for his analysis. > ftp://io.usp.br/los/IOF257/moravec.pdf Ok. > > understanding. "That is a picture of a dog in front of a house. The house > > has a victorian architecture. The 1957 Cadillac next to the house would > > indicate that the picture was most likely taken between 1956 and 1976." > > This is beyond machine vision. This is halfway to human-equivalent AI. > But this is what I mean by computer vision. Think if it as computer graphics backwards. In graphics, you take a description and make a scene. In computer vision, you take a scene and produce a description. > > > > > > approaching automated vehicles becoming a reality. I thought it would > > > > happen in 2014 since 2004. It may be delayed a year or two by > bureaucrats > > > > and lawyers, but the technology should be cheap enough for luxury > cars to > > > > > > I'm afraid luxury something is going to be a very, very small market > > > in the coming decades. > > > > > > > Stop. This is just irritating and unhelpful. > > You can bet this is fucking irritating, because we did it to ourselves! > A pathetic failure of planning. > > sigh > > > > > I agree that autonomous cars are mostly a very good thing, unless > > > you happen to be a trucker, or a car maker. > > > > > > I'm not sure how autonomous cars are bad for car makers. I do get why > they > > The duty cycle of a personal car is terrible. With autonomous cars you > only need a small fraction of total fleet. You already see the beginning > of this with carsharing smartphone apps. Now you no longer need the hassle > of owning a car just that you can use it. It's just great, unless you're > in the car making business. It's pretty awful if car making is your > country's main moneymaking business, and they're really EV and autonomous > car-tarded. > Ok. That makes sense. Thank you for explaining it to me. (See, I am capable of learning, and also agreeing with you.) > > > are bad for truckers. > > > > > > > Whatever Germany > > > earns on car making is about enough to pay for the fossil fuel > > > imports. > > > > > > > You're confusing me again. > > Obviously, Germany has to figure out some other way to pay for their > fossil fuel imports in the near future. > Ah. You are referring to Germany as a car manufacturing nation. I thought you were referring to Germany as the solar energy capital of the universe. Thus my confusion. > > > > > > have highway cruise control (including steering) by 2014 or 2015. So > my > > > > venture into guessing the future was pretty close, using Ray's > technique. > > > > > You never commented on whether we would have autonomous cruise control. > > > > > > > I totally agree that the 2d processes we are currently using are running > > into limits. But we will keep making the stuff we're making now cheaper. > In > > Older processes are cheaper than bleeding edge, but that curve saturates > almost immediately. The only way to drop the costs is by using a new > technology. > It isn't the ONLY way, but it is important for sure. If every CPU company stopped producing better chips today it would take a long time for a competitor to arise who could do it better. Prices would stop dropping quickly. So in that sense you are correct. That being said, I think technological progress will continue to be made, and that older technologies will drop in price. The hard drive market is a good example that there is a bottom to this. You can't buy a 5 MByte hard drive anymore. Nobody is making them (unless there is some microscopic hard drive I'm unaware of). > > my mind, that keeps us on Moore until such time as a 3D solution is > worked > > We are already off-Moore. In the transistors per square cm sense, we probably are. Though it's hard to find data to support even that. Not in the dollars per computation realm, unless I'm missing something basic. Honestly, I can't find much data on whether we're on or off Moore. It's frustrating not to know. > The question is how long it will take until > a different technology can pick up scaling, at least for a brief while > (if you're at atomic limits in the surface, you're only a few doublings > away from where your only option is to start doubling the volume). > I don't have trouble with doubling the volume. > > > out that makes things faster. > > > > The main problem in my mind isn't making stuff smaller, but in > dissipating > > heat so you can stack it up close to each other. That's what I mean by > 2.5 > > Stacking is off-Moore. The only Moore I care about is $/computation. Any other Moore is irrelevant to me, and to Ray's predictions as well. > One of the scaling limits is that the power scaling > is no longer with us. As you'll notice, no novolatile memory is ready to > pick up the torch of SRAM/DRAM/NOR flash, despite many decades of > development. > I posted a paper about this, and yes, you are correct that there is nothing yet close to hard drives. Too bad you stopped prior to addressing the optimism adds years to your life part. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Tue Oct 29 20:54:42 2013 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 13:54:42 -0700 Subject: [ExI] How to build a happier brain In-Reply-To: References: <526EE5F2.1010207@aleph.se> Message-ID: Anders, could you share with us, the story (or perhaps brief scenario is a better term, I only vaguely remember it) you wrote, about the genetically engineered "Smiley's" who were an inspiration to the rest of humanity? John : ) On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 9:58 AM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 9:34 AM, John Clark wrote: > >> On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 6:32 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: >> >> > I would love to know how to manipulate the mood setpoint of the brain. >> >> >> When my mood gets gloomy I think that individuals having full access to >> their mood setpoints could be the explanation for the Fermi Paradox. >> Einstein must have felt great on the day he discovered General Relativity, >> but it took him 10 years and was such hard work that he lost 40 pounds and >> it nearly killed him. How much easier it would have been if he could have >> gotten that exact same feeling of pride of accomplishment and awe at the >> profound beauty of the universe by just sitting on his ass and turning a >> knob. >> > > It would be interesting though to have seen whether Einstein accomplished > more on days that he felt happy during that period. I know that I have > super productive days, and super non-productive days. I wish I could figure > out better what leads to the more productive days. > > -Kelly > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Tue Oct 29 21:02:18 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 22:02:18 +0100 Subject: [ExI] The Actual Visionary of the Future In-Reply-To: References: <20131025133031.GL10405@leitl.org> <20131025195114.GU10405@leitl.org> <20131028103712.GC10405@leitl.org> <20131029112928.GK10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20131029210218.GR10405@leitl.org> On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 01:50:53PM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > > If it's not a theory, then why are we wasting time on > > such assclownage? > > > > Because even as a rule of thumb it is better than going completely in the > dark. If you were in a cave, would you not want a small candle as opposed > to nothing at all? I don't know if $1000 worth of computation will > approximate the power of the human brain in 2025, 2029, 2035 or 2040 but > the center of my guess is 2029 based on Moore's Law. That's slightly better There are two problems with this statement. First, the brains don't run LINPACK. So you don't know, you can only guess. Secondly, you assume that Moore still continues until 2040, while we have data that this isn't true even in 2013. > than saying, "I have no idea", isn't it? Where it matters I prefer to be bounded by pessimums rather than optimums. Because optimism kills, that's why. > > You have never heard of banks going broke, assets seized, currency > > hyperinflated? Really? > > > > Of course I have. Those things can happen because of bad management, war, > bad government control over money and the like. Systemic crises happen due to disconnect when your resource tracking model has a cumulative bias. There is a very good reason why usury always had a bad rap. > > Are you honestly believing that money likes to work, and it > > keeps growing in the bank vaults, like early miners thought > > metal grew in the mountain, so that they left there some so > > that it could breed? > > > > Yes, I believe money properly invested (say in the stock market) does like > to work. It does create value. I know this because I've personally Most of stock market is very much like Monte Carlo. > witnessed 8 million dollars grow into 32 million dollars over a period of > ten years. Without investment, that could never have happened. http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-BBP7VMgAIgM/TtL0OTVc5SI/AAAAAAAAATI/CmYlGzcsaco/s640/stock_market_crash_1930_10d.gif Fly, you fools! > > > > > > > > > > I'm baffled by your use of the word "stuck" here. We just got to 4 Tbytes > > > > You're getting far too frequently baffled for my liking. I'm showing > > you instances where reality deviates from the nice linear semi-log. > > There have been multiple smooth technology handovers in the platter > > areal density which however shew a different scaling > > http://www.hindawi.com/journals/at/2013/521086/fig1/ > > > I think this goes more to proving my point than yours. None of that curve reminds you of nongreen in http://www.gotw.ca/images/CPU.png ? > If you think you're seeing a linear semilog plot in there, then > > throw away your ruler. Or buy new glasses. If you're now agreeing > > that the growth is saturating, then why are you wasting my time? > > > > The biggest downcurve in the plot is the part that projects into the > future. Let's come back in 5 years and see what reality actually happens. Yes, let's come back in 5 years and see how these 2 year doublings are fairing, and what the doubling time of Moore is by then. > > > > not that long ago. We always get "stuck" by this definition. I have > > > attached my spreadsheet of hard drive prices that I have been maintaining > > > > The metric you're looking for is areal density. > > > > The metric I care about is inflation adjusted dollars/byte. I could care > less about areal density, except that it is one (and only one) mechanism by You don't see Thailand in areal density. You do see it in price. There are no affordable 4-platter drives, so areal density is really the only useful metric. > which dollars/byte goes down. > > I agree that brilliant people will find it EXTREMELY difficult to build > features smaller than atoms, perhaps even impossible. But we aren't close > enough to the problem to say that we KNOW it is impossible yet. If it is It's useful to know that the Si-Si bond length is 0.235 nm. Of course you can't make widgets from just Si, so let's put the critical size down to 1 nm. Intel is currently at 14 nm, and already has issues with yield. So we're definitely close enough. > possible, it might involve something like a highly controlled neutron star. > And IF this is the case, that would explain the Fermi paradox. This is pure > conjecture. There are a LOT of things we can do before we need subatomic > manipulation. We aren't even close. > > Things like refineries do take a long time to build using today's > techniques. I can see a day coming though where building such things will I can also see a day coming, but the day needs to be yesteryear, because Ray's exponential photovoltaics doesn't produce liquid fuels. Nor glass or aluminium, nor electricians, nor grid upgrades. > not take as long as they do today. Humans can only move so fast, but robots > can move faster. > > I refer you to: > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KxjVlaLBmk > > If you could imagine robots programmed by sophisticated scheduling systems > to build a refinery, I propose that you could, in principle, build a > refinery rather quickly. The slowest part potentially is getting government > approval. > > Here is my biggest point. If you can imagine being able to do something > given a reasonable amount of time and money with current technology, then I > can't imagine that given sufficient incentive that such a thing would not > be accomplished. There is sufficient incentive to improve computational > efficiencies, therefore, I cannot see such things not being accomplished. I can see such things not being accomplished. We suffer a death of thousand papercuts, and then we use up whatever plutonium is around to make a few strong points in trinitite. > > We've already fallen from the semiconductor litho curve. > > > > Let's talk about CPS/Second/inflation adjusted Dollar. I am intensely NOT What is CPS? Characters Per Second? > interested in the details of how it happens. That is someone/everyone > else's job at the moment. > > > > See the NOR flash scaling at the URL I posted earlier. > > We've already fallen of the PV deployment curve (and we > > were never on the according infrastructure curve in the > > first place). > > > > You can't jump from zero TW to 20 TW in 20 years. > > Not unless you have MNT, and collectively we made sure we > > failed to develop that. > > > > When you say MNT, do you mean molecular nanotechnology? Yes. > > Which part of "no more constant doubling times for you" you don't > > understand? > > > > As long as it continues to double, I don't care if it takes 18 months or 24 What is you doubling times double, too? Remember, we're already at 36 months, not 18. How do 6, 12, 24, 48 years sound like? > or 36. You can't point to a date in the future and say "improvement stops I can show you an asymptote, and no futurist likes asymptotes. > here" can you? As long as it is doubling somewhat close to current levels, > the things I care about will continue to happen in the time scales I care > about. > > I do care if the whole damn boat is going down. But that is a separate > conversation. So long as there are SOME rich people/corporations/AGIs > paying for the development of this stuff, I think it will continue to be > developed. The reason Moore is off-track is because there's not enough money in the world people are willing to throw at a problem. With each further step the difficulty rises, so do the amounts of money. > > > > a slightly different time scale. And there is no guarantee that we won't > > > > Which part of "you can't make widgets smaller than single atoms" you don't > > understand? > > > > What part of "There's plenty of room at the bottom" do you not understand. > We're not close to the atomic limits on most things. We're in touching distance to atomic/quantum limits in CMOS semilitho things. I don't care about anything else if we're talking Moore. > > > Sorry, you've lost me here. I don't know what these things are. > > > > It's a cheap mainframe, 75 kUSD entry level. Obviously, CPUs > > build from such can be made from unobtainium. But flash drives > > and mobile CPUs have low margins, so there's diminished incentive > > to go to the next node (especially if the next node has lower > > performance than current one). > > > > Thank you for explaining that. I don't pay much attention to mainframes, or Mainframes are money-makers. You can make things there you can't do elsewhere, but there's the price to pay for it. > even highly parallel computers or supercomputers in my work. I'm mostly Supercomputers are highly parallel computers. > interested in PCs, tablets and cell phones, and perhaps Google glass. Supercomputers are pretty much like tablets and cell phones. PCs are dead. > Consumer related stuff. Yes, the cloud changes that, but I don't play in > that world much. Cloud is a bit like cellphones, but without the floats. Same core issue, though: power. > Given that, I'm still not understanding your point. Are these mainframes > getting more expensive as time goes on? Are we not on some kind of curve They stay roughly the same. > with respect to them? My understanding is that rack based computing is > chugging along at an acceptable rate of growth. Am I missing something? x86 doesn't yet know it's dead yet. Developers don't yet know hardware is going places they don't understand (some haven't yet figured out that clocks stopped doubling yet). > > Anyone looking at an arbitrary time frame knows that darwinian > > evolution still applies. > > > > But we are in the era of memetic evolution, not darwinian. And memes > replicate faster, and have a higher mutation rate. Darwin never missed a beat. The fitness function change, but we're still imperfect replicators in a limited resource context. The future is exactly like that, only far more so. Darwin stuck on fast-forward is not a happy fun place. Do not taunt the happy-fun Darwin ball. > > My thesis is that a postecosystem has a food web. > > > > Ok, so here we may have a difference of opinion. I concede that the future > ecosystem will have an energy web, but not necessarily food based. Locally, atoms and Joules are limited, and there is still competition and replication. Which is the main reason why nobody can ignore the physical layer. > > We're understanding processing the retina sufficiently to produce > > code that the second processing pipeline can use. We have mapped > > features of later processing stages to the point that we know what > > you're looking at, or what you're dreaming of. We have off the > > shelf machine vision systems for many industrial tasks. We have > > autonomous cars that drive better than people. > > > > I agree with all of this except the part of "we know what you're looking > at"... if that is state of the art, then I'm way behind. I'm talking instrumented behaving subjects. Neuroscience is making remarkable advances, driven by instrumentation and computers. > > > This is obviusly one of these cases where we've made some slight > > progress over last few decades. > > > > The progress that has been made in computer vision MOSTLY comes from Moore, I agree, we're hardware-limited. Which is why the early failure of Moore is so dismal. > not from better algorithms. Now, better computers enable algorithms that > are less efficient to be tried, and therefore one could argue that some new > algorithms have emerged from Moore. There has been progress in computer > vision to be sure. The progress is slow. It is largely based upon > computational improvements. Algorithmic improvement has occurred, but not > at the same rate. > > > > Obviously, Germany has to figure out some other way to pay for their > > fossil fuel imports in the near future. > > > > Ah. You are referring to Germany as a car manufacturing nation. I thought > you were referring to Germany as the solar energy capital of the universe. Germany is a good demonstration why solar is anti-Moore. It's very easy to double very little, but just as in the grains of rice on a chessboard it suddenly turns sigmoid once you're in serious cash flow country. > Thus my confusion. > > > > > You never commented on whether we would have autonomous cruise control. We've been having autonomous cruise control for a while, the interesting part is where it's cheap enough for conventional cars, and the insurance issue is addressed. This can be rather soon, I'm not going to make a prediction because I expect significant disruption ahead, scrambling pretty every growth prognosis. > > > > We are already off-Moore. > > > In the transistors per square cm sense, we probably are. Though it's hard > to find data to support even that. Just as peak oil, such data is only visible a bit after the fact. Some have called it as early as 2011, we'll see it soon enough. > Not in the dollars per computation realm, unless I'm missing something > basic. Honestly, I can't find much data on whether we're on or off Moore. > It's frustrating not to know. It is, most search engines are getting increasingly useless for technical queries. > > > The question is how long it will take until > > a different technology can pick up scaling, at least for a brief while > > (if you're at atomic limits in the surface, you're only a few doublings > > away from where your only option is to start doubling the volume). > > > > I don't have trouble with doubling the volume. Remember the grains of rice on a chessboard thing. Somebody has to pay for these and move these. In the beginning, it is very easy. From pharos at gmail.com Tue Oct 29 22:41:04 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 22:41:04 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Inflation graph In-Reply-To: <099f01ced3fd$7e167270$7a435750$@att.net> References: <04bf01ced34e$02ba59c0$082f0d40$@att.net> <099f01ced3fd$7e167270$7a435750$@att.net> Message-ID: On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 4:48 PM, spike wrote: > John, what I am saying is that these inflation numbers depend on what it is > you are buying. Prices for electronics and most manufactured goods have > been falling for years, while fuel and food have been going up smartly. So > inflation is different for everyone. The overall number is an average of > sorts, rather arbitrarily derived. For instance, should it include gold? I > haven?t bought any of that, don?t plan to. Should it exclude food and fuel, > when for many poorer people nearly all their available money goes for those > two things? Should it be weighted somehow? > > So inflation is arbitrary, and depends on what the consumer buys. A number > is derived arbitrarily to let the government decide how it will adjust its > pensioners for cost of living, but if you have some foresight when you > retire, your costs can actually decline even in inflationary times. Housing > around here is going up like crazy as foreign money is coming in and > snapping up the available homes. But I am not buying; I already own one. > You're right, Spike. The government inflation number is a big lie. As is the unemployment number. See: Consumer inflation should be nearer 10%. And Unemployment is approaching 25%. The flood of money printing is going into very few hands. It is being spent on luxury goods, mansions, Ferraris, yachts, etc. While the majority of the population is suffering. There are many attempts at explaining what is going on available on the web. But unfortunately it is complicated. No easy sound-bite solutions. The financiers are making so much money that it is not in their interest for people to understand what they are doing. This article is worth reading. BillK From atymes at gmail.com Tue Oct 29 22:44:11 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 15:44:11 -0700 Subject: [ExI] comments please regarding snoopy-doopy.gov In-Reply-To: <034401ced4cf$ade492c0$09adb840$@att.net> References: <01b701ced4bb$348976c0$9d9c6440$@att.net> <034401ced4cf$ade492c0$09adb840$@att.net> Message-ID: On Oct 29, 2013 11:06 AM, "spike" wrote: > The IRS had most of this data, but the IRS is not the government. They are not allowed to share what they know. They sometimes do, if the victim is a Tea Party type or a Republican, but it is illegal If you believe the NSA would set up HealthCare.gov as a data collection operation, how then do you not believe they have full access to all IRS records, with or without the knowledge (let alone consent) of anyone employed by the IRS? > >?Never assume malice where mere incompetence will suffice. In the case of that site, mere incompetence suffices. > > Adrian, I see incompetence here, but I also see plenty of evidence of malice in both the Ingram case and the Lerner case But we are not discussing those cases for this point. This is a different set of screw-ups we're discussing. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Tue Oct 29 23:14:45 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 17:14:45 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Hard Drives, What Comes Next In-Reply-To: <20131029180859.GP10405@leitl.org> References: <20131029180859.GP10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 12:08 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 10:43:03AM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > > > I present this as refutation of the idea that hard drives are approaching > > the end of their exponential growth, even in their current state. > > I present above statement as evidence that I can write anything, > because nobody is going to read it, anyway. (Or, perhaps, I shouldn't > bother writing anything at all, and save us all the aggravation). > > Either you believe in linear semilog plots, or you don't. > I believe they are a good approximation in many areas. > So any deviation from a linear semilog is either evidence for you > or against you. You can't have it both ways. > Agreed. Though you have to compare apples to apples, and sometimes that's hard. For example, we can talk about the exponential growth of hard drive space, but that negates the value of getting at those bits faster, which is also important. > Either you believe that there is a magic mechanism by which > a technology arises just in time to be passed on the torch from > the failing without stumbling, or you don't. > It's not magic. It is the result of work. > If there's a falure to bridge the gap you'll get a kink in > the curve, and inverted hockey stick. Some gaps are very short, > some less so. You don't get to cherrypick which gaps are > significant, and which aren't. > If the gaps are not leaped, then yes, it's a problem for the model. It may also be the case that the measured doubling period was incorrect. > So in 2027 the world will have 16 TW cumulated PV > capacity, that's 48 TWp (currently it has 0.1 TWp, > added within 20 years, this is lost in the error > margins). > > You've got 7 doublings yet to go. I'll spell Ray's implications > out, all errors are mine: > > year added capacity TWp > > 2010 > +0.06 TWp (actual data) > 2012 > > > > 2013 > +0.19 TWp (so far 0.037 TWp added in 2013, my guess this will be > 0.077 TWp instead of 0.19 TWp, so -0.113 TWp gap) > So let me make sure I understand what you're saying. You're saying that Ray predicted that there would be 0.19 TWp installed by year end 2013, and there is actually 0.077 TWp installed. According to Wikipedia, by end of 2012, the 100 GW installed capacity milestone was achieved. If my math is correct, that makes 0.1 TWp, and there is still a year between that number and the end of 2013. So where does the 0.077 come from? The thing that I remember Ray saying is that the price of solar panels per watt was on a curve. Are we at all on target for that? Ray gets things wrong, but so far, he has gotten more right than he has gotten wrong. I never said it was a perfect science, but I know of no better approach for trying to predict the future. Do you? The thing that Ray sometimes misses is human psychology issues and infrastructure issues. I've long said he was wrong about speech recognition. He isn't a god and I'm not his acolyte. > 2015 > +0.38 TWp (mind the gap?) > 2017 > +1.5 TWp (mind the gap?) > 2019 > +3.0 TWp (mind the gap?) > http://www.renewindians.com/2013/02/global-installed-solar-capacity-to-Reach-330GW-by-2020.html According to Global Data The Global Solar PV installed capacity will leap frog from the current 96GW to 330GW by 2020 and will showcase a CAGR of 16.5%. In another article, it states: ?No one would have predicted even 10 years ago that we would see more than 100 GW of solar photovoltaic capacity in the world by 2012,? said EPIA President Winfried Hoffmann. ?The photovoltaic industry clearly faces challenges but the results of 2012 show there is a strong global market for our technology. Even in tough economic times and despite growing regulatory uncertainty, we have nearly managed to repeat the record year of 2011.? So by your rendering of Ray's Numbers, by 2020 Ray predicts that we will have just under 5 TWp installed, and the solar industry is thinking more like 330 GW will be installed by then. I'd be willing to bet here on the record that we will have more than 330 GW installed by 2020. > 2021 > +6.0 TWp (mind the gap?) > 2023 > +12 TWp (mind the gap?) > 2025 > +24 TWp (mind the gap?) > 2027 > > Do these numbers really look good to you? You'll notice we're already kinda > off-track, here. > They don't look especially good, no. But I was discussing hard drive prices and then you changed the subject before we could talk numbers. > How do you like your serving of crow? Roasted, boiled, smoked? > Roasted please. 2012 was a bad year for solar. They didn't sell as much as they did in 2011. Not making excuses, but I don't think anyone would have predicted that. Ray is famous for saying that economic downturns won't effect his data over the long term, but in this case I'm guessing that is precisely what has happened. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Wed Oct 30 01:46:30 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 18:46:30 -0700 Subject: [ExI] How to build a happier brain In-Reply-To: References: <526EE5F2.1010207@aleph.se> Message-ID: <058f01ced511$dbee9750$93cbc5f0$@att.net> >. On Behalf Of John Clark Subject: Re: [ExI] How to build a happier brain >.Einstein must have felt great on the day he discovered General Relativity, but it took him 10 years and was such hard work that he lost 40 pounds and it nearly killed him. John Clark I should say so. Since he had already discovered ten years previously that E=MC^2, those 40 pounds mass would be the equivalent of about 1.6 quintillion joules, or the energy of about 400 million tons of TNT. Edward Teller was a child of 8 years at the time Einstein discovered General Relativity, surely in his early intellectually formative years. Teller is thought to have coined the term "mega-death." By Teller's calculus that 40 pounds of mass lost by Einstein, if converted to energy and effectively distributed, would produce approximately 2000 mega-deaths, which is not far off from the population of the world at that time. Einstein's 40 pounds could have destroyed humanity down to nearly the last radioactive gasp, so it is no wonder it nearly slew him. Someone made a comment here about Teller being the inspiration for Kubric's Dr. Strangelove. The notion was that Teller must have been completely insane to promote the development of a hydrogen bomb, when the radioactive ash from the Uranium and Plutonium bombs had scarcely settled, but it occurred to me that he was not only sane, he was right. When Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, he thought it would end all war, because it would just be too dangerous; wrong. The same argument was made with the atom bomb, but wrong again, for note that it was used a second time. But eventually a bomb too large to ever use was invented, Teller's horrifying brain child, the mega-death inducing hydrogen bomb. Now, what was it we were discussing? Oh yes, how to build a happier brain. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Wed Oct 30 01:58:34 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 18:58:34 -0700 Subject: [ExI] How to build a happier brain In-Reply-To: References: <526EE5F2.1010207@aleph.se> Message-ID: <059401ced513$8b3b5760$a1b20620$@att.net> >. On Behalf Of Kelly Anderson >.It would be interesting though to have seen whether Einstein accomplished more on days that he felt happy during that period. I know that I have super productive days, and super non-productive days. I wish I could figure out better what leads to the more productive days. -Kelly There is no question for me: sadness is definitely correlated with creative thinking. When I am happy, I don't think, I just have fun. It isn't clear if sadness actually causes creativity, or if creativity somehow causes sadness, but if the latter it seems like it should be the other way around. Discovering something certainly causes satisfaction, and discovery usually requires creativity. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Wed Oct 30 02:05:17 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 19:05:17 -0700 Subject: [ExI] A Gedanken Bike Experiment In-Reply-To: References: <20131024011619.GB4312@ninja.nosyntax.net> <5268F9E7.8080602@aleph.se> <526D6953.2080708@aleph.se> <05d501ced352$dc7e0b30$957a2190$@att.net> <526EE880.7020506@aleph.se> <0ef301ced466$060a63e0$121f2ba0$@att.net> <526F83B6.5080807@aleph.se> <00f201ced4b0$c981e970$5c85bc50$@att.net> Message-ID: <059901ced514$7b3cafc0$71b60f40$@att.net> >. On Behalf Of Kelly Anderson Subject: Re: [ExI] A Gedanken Bike Experiment On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 8:11 AM, spike wrote: >. On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg Subject: Re: [ExI] A Gedanken Bike Experiment >. The gyro action of the front wheel would be increased way more than the factor of 30, for the radius of gyration would be increased. So the moment of inertia of the front wheel would be increased by a factor of over a 100. That would introduce weird handling. >.The third think I can think of is that the ride would be far more bumpy. This would also lead to stability issues, particularly in cornering. Imagine hitting a pebble, and losing almost all contact with the road for a brief time. That could lead to a kind of skipping that would likely be very dangerous. -Kelly No problem there: the testing would be done on an Olympic-style indoor oval racetrack, like the one over in Santa Clara. I may write to Jamie Hyneman, see if he wants to try to make something like this. When tire rubber gets up close to 100C, it gets soft and gummy a little, but does not break down. The trick is to make a cast to prevent it from deforming during the filling process. I figured out how to do that. This would be so cool, if I can talk the MythBusters into doing it. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Wed Oct 30 02:52:42 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 20:52:42 -0600 Subject: [ExI] comments please regarding snoopy-doopy.gov In-Reply-To: <032a01ced4ce$e4ee7f70$aecb7e50$@att.net> References: <01b701ced4bb$348976c0$9d9c6440$@att.net> <032a01ced4ce$e4ee7f70$aecb7e50$@att.net> Message-ID: On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 11:47 AM, spike wrote: > > > *From:* extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto: > extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] *On Behalf Of *Kelly Anderson > *Sent:* Tuesday, October 29, 2013 9:53 AM > *To:* ExI chat list > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] comments please regarding snoopy-doopy.gov**** > > ** ** > > On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 9:26 AM, spike wrote:**** > > All this they did, wrecked the system and influenced government for > perhaps a decade, all in order to gobble up private data on the proletariat. > **** > > ** ** > > >?Spike, what is the basis for believing that the health care site failed > because of data collection and not because of poor engineering?**** > > ** ** > > Hi Kelly, sure it was poor engineering and a flawed underlying concept, > but what I meant was, all they needed to do was create a spreadsheet and > have the insurance companies fill it in, then post that to anyone who wants > to go look at it. > The problem is that the insurance companies want more control over it than that and the law gives them that flexibility. > They didn?t need to ask where I live, my legal name, the amount on my last > W2, for two of those three things are likely to change for a lot of people > next year. > Apparently, they did. And when I went to the site the other day, I didn't have to put any of that in. > A buttload of employees will be moved from 40 hrs/wk to 30hrs/wk so their > company need not shoulder that expense, and in many cases, that change will > also result in a change of address. So why do they ask it? And why the > security questions? Once I drop those into the public domain, those are > three pieces of information I can never again use to secure an account. > They (meaning the government as a whole) already know those things. Nevertheless, the dropping from 40 to 30 hours a week is a real thing, and a real shame. > **** > > I claim that nooooone of what caused HealthCare.gov to fail was necessary. > The distributed nature of the computing doomed it from the beginning, IMHO. The fact that the government was in charge was a secondary issue that doomed it. > Anyone who did dump all that info on the government was imprudent or had > exactly nothing to lose (because they had no money and/or were desperately > ill). These are examples of the zombies, who the insurance companies do > not want. They want the track team, who have money and seldom get sick. > If you dump all that info, you tell the government and everyone who wants > to know, which team you belong to, the track team or the zombie squad. I > don?t want the whole world knowing that, even if I am lucky enough to be on > the track team, thank evolution. > I think you're unnecessarily combining two different issues. Government inefficiencies in general, and the government's desire to invade your privacy. While I agree with you on both of these issues, combining them into one complaint in this instance seems to border on a conspiracy theory. > The claim has been made that the government needed to know this in case > you want to apply for a subsidy. But if you already know you are not > eligible, why isn?t there a bypass feature, or a privacy setting so that > you can create a fictitious account? Or just an estimated benefits page? > Or just a comparison sheet? How easy would that be? Hell I could derive > that, if they would just let me shop anonymously. > But I didn't have to put any of that data in to get my quote. Perhaps the problem you are seeing comes from the state you live in??? > Kelly, what this was about in my case is I wanted to apply a mathematical > technique I know of which I developed in my career, superposition of > probability distributions. It would allow me to get the available > subsidies in classes or categories. I could then estimate using > demographics and my estimated probability of opt-outs how much this whole > scheme is likely to cost us (by ?us? I mean taxpayers) to subsidize the > zombies, and how much would be offset by the tax penalties paid by the > track team, corrected by the percentage that choose to pay it, since the > IRS cannot legally collect it. (Is that a kick in the ass, or what?) > The data are not that simple, apparently. If you could put it in a spreadsheet, it probably woudn't have cost so much. Since you are being asked for data that I am not, I can only assume there is something different in the code about being from Utah vs. California. > >?My understanding of the Healthcare.org web site problem increased > greatly yesterday, when I came to understand that they are using web > services to gather information from individual states, individual insurance > companies, and from the bureaucracy itself? > > ** ** > > Sure but again please, why do they need to know all this? All they would > have needed is to create a pot of money, toss in there the tax penalties > collected from donors (the opt-outs who chose to pay) then divide that pool > among the qualifying destitute and send subsidy checks to the insurance > companies of the opt-in poor, they?re done! It doesn?t require all the > snoopy-doopy info-harvesting, doesn?t even need external funding. > Again, they didn't ask any of that in Utah. Thus the complexity of the website. Perhaps you need to get the hell out of California. **** > > > ** ** > > >? All of this data and logic is needed to perform the complex operation > of coming up with a price (A really stinky architecture, btw) and all of > this data and logic is stored and maintained by each party individually?** > ** > > ** ** > > No sir. The insurance company gives the price. The info was needed to > calculate the subsidy, and that is a critical difference indeed. > Ok, that is entirely possible. > They could estimate the subsidy and just say right out that they won?t > know what is the subsidy until after it is collected, because they don?t > know how big is the pot of money from opt-out donors. They could estimate > it, but that?s all. If they calculate it, they are guaranteeing it, which > they cannot really do in any case.**** > > ** ** > > ** ** > > >?This means that if there is one weak link in the chain, you don't get > an answer. This is an Obaminable architecture?**** > > ** ** > > Indeed. {8^D**** > > ** ** > > >?A much better approach would have been to say:**** > > 1) You host your data and functions here (rackspace, whatever)**** > > 2) You answer the questions like so (standard APIs.)**** > > 3) test the hell out of it**** > > ** ** > > No sir again to all the above. The right approach would have been collect > data from the insurance companies, knowing they will get their own stuff > exactly right (they are in the biz of being right), make a single digit > estimate of the available subsidy, based on the number of opt-outs who > choose to pay the tax, and state right up front that it is an estimate. > Very little code would be needed to do that, an no testing at all full stop. > But being bureaucrats, they MUST make it complicated to justify their own existence. I'm telling you, there is going to be big money made by someone like H&R Block in helping people navigate this mess. You think it's a problem getting an estimate? Wait until you try to get reimbursed for some illness. THAT IS COMPLICATED!!! Really complicated. > **** > > ** ** > > >?This isn't rocket science, but the way they implemented it as a > distributed system maintained by 53+ separate entities, it only takes one > entity being a dumb ass to bring parts of the system to its knees. ?Kelly* > *** > > ** ** > > Agreed to that. The whole scheme was based on such deeply flawed > reasoning, it calls into question the fundamental judgment of any > government which would get so deep into it without seeing that which is > perfectly obvious to any outside observer. Am I hallucinating, or is not > this design obviously flawed? To me it is as clear as designing a jet > liner with only one wing. Everyone can see it can?t fly like that. > You are not hallucinating. It is a mess, and they will respond by making it messier. I refer you to the tax code, which by the way, was a target of the Paper Reduction Act that Clinton and Gore were so proud of. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Wed Oct 30 02:55:15 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 20:55:15 -0600 Subject: [ExI] comments please regarding snoopy-doopy.gov In-Reply-To: References: <01b701ced4bb$348976c0$9d9c6440$@att.net> <034401ced4cf$ade492c0$09adb840$@att.net> Message-ID: On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 4:44 PM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > On Oct 29, 2013 11:06 AM, "spike" wrote: > > If you believe the NSA would set up HealthCare.gov as a data collection > operation, how then do you not believe they have full access to all IRS > records, with or without the knowledge (let alone consent) of anyone > employed by the IRS? > I'm with Adrian. I see nothing that would stop the NSA from spying on the IRS, other than the illegality of it, which would only slow them down enough to get a lawyer to write a position paper about why it isn't really illegal after all. Get one judge on the FISA(sp?) court to agree, and they are home free. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tara at taramayastales.com Wed Oct 30 02:36:34 2013 From: tara at taramayastales.com (Tara Maya) Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 19:36:34 -0700 Subject: [ExI] How to build a happier brain In-Reply-To: <059401ced513$8b3b5760$a1b20620$@att.net> References: <526EE5F2.1010207@aleph.se> <059401ced513$8b3b5760$a1b20620$@att.net> Message-ID: <08071C6F-D66D-40A1-8D47-F57D4BBB499E@taramayastales.com> Interesting. For me it's the reverse. Manic = creative overdrive! Depressed = cry in my bed, watch bad tv and overeat. On Oct 29, 2013, at 6:58 PM, spike wrote: > There is no question for me: sadness is definitely correlated with creative thinking. When I am happy, I don?t think, I just have fun. It isn?t clear if sadness actually causes creativity, or if creativity somehow causes sadness, but if the latter it seems like it should be the other way around. Discovering something certainly causes satisfaction, and discovery usually requires creativity. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Wed Oct 30 02:58:21 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 20:58:21 -0600 Subject: [ExI] How to build a happier brain In-Reply-To: <08071C6F-D66D-40A1-8D47-F57D4BBB499E@taramayastales.com> References: <526EE5F2.1010207@aleph.se> <059401ced513$8b3b5760$a1b20620$@att.net> <08071C6F-D66D-40A1-8D47-F57D4BBB499E@taramayastales.com> Message-ID: I'm on the Tara side of things. I get more work done when I'm happy. Unfortunately, I also tend to get more speeding tickets. -Kelly On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 8:36 PM, Tara Maya wrote: > Interesting. For me it's the reverse. Manic = creative overdrive! > Depressed = cry in my bed, watch bad tv and overeat. > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Wed Oct 30 04:05:41 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 21:05:41 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Inflation graph In-Reply-To: References: <04bf01ced34e$02ba59c0$082f0d40$@att.net> <099f01ced3fd$7e167270$7a435750$@att.net> Message-ID: <069401ced525$4d567120$e8035360$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of BillK Subject: Re: [ExI] Inflation graph On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 4:48 PM, spike wrote: >>... John, what I am saying is that these inflation numbers depend on what > it is you are buying... Housing around here is going up like crazy as > foreign money is coming in and snapping up the available homes. But I am not buying; I already own one. > >...You're right, Spike. The government inflation number is a big lie. As is the unemployment number. See: ... It isn't so much a lie, as it is arbitrarily calculated. If you have a car which is likely to last for the next 30 years, it doesn't matter much how fast cars are inflating. If the price of postage stamps is going crazy, it doesn't matter much because we don't really buy them anymore and even if we do, they never did amount to much. I used to spend a huge percentage of my money on information, in the form of books. Now I don't: there is more information available nearly free than I have time to devour. I don't need a lot of bandwidth: nearly all the information I consume is in the form of text, which doesn't require much. So everyone has a personal inflation number, based on what they buy. There is not a single "right" way to determine the inflation rate, yet we routinely see it announced with two digits of precision. >...Consumer inflation should be nearer 10%. But what if a prole likes the kind of stuff which has been declining in price? I do: electronics. Capabilities go up, waaay up, while prices come down. I have kept data on my expenses in detail since 1989. I bought my present home in 1995, so all the data since then are directly comparable. Over that period of 18 years, my expenditures have actually declined slightly, without even attempting any arbitrary correction for inflation, this in spite of adding a family member seven years ago. I don't argue that inflation is low or high. I know it is high for some people. It is very low or slightly negative for me. I am one who is lucky enough to live very close to the office. Now of course I don't have an office, but back when I did, I didn't need to buy much fuel. >...And Unemployment is approaching 25%... Ja, and they tell me I don't count in that number anymore. After 2 years, you drop off the list, even if you are still actively looking for work. >...The flood of money printing is going into very few hands. It is being spent on luxury goods, mansions, Ferraris, yachts, etc. While the majority of the population is suffering... Well, ja. On the other hand, a lot of people are employed building mansions, Ferraris and yachts. That's why they cost so much. >...This article is worth reading. BillK _______________________________________________ Thanks BillK! spike From spike66 at att.net Wed Oct 30 04:20:09 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 21:20:09 -0700 Subject: [ExI] comments please regarding snoopy-doopy.gov In-Reply-To: References: <01b701ced4bb$348976c0$9d9c6440$@att.net> <034401ced4cf$ade492c0$09adb840$@att.net> Message-ID: <069501ced527$52a9bea0$f7fd3be0$@att.net> >. On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes Subject: Re: [ExI] comments please regarding snoopy-doopy.gov On Oct 29, 2013 11:06 AM, "spike" wrote: >>. The IRS had most of this data, but the IRS is not the government. They are not allowed to share what they know. They sometimes do, if the victim is a Tea Party type or a Republican, but it is illegal >.If you believe the NSA would set up HealthCare.gov as a data collection operation, how then do you not believe they have full access to all IRS records, with or without the knowledge (let alone consent) of anyone employed by the IRS? Regardless, it is all about need to know. In the space biz, classified info is carefully compartmentalized. You sometimes hear a rocket scientist make comments like "my job is so secret I don't even know what I am doing." It is funny because it isn't far from the truth. Plenty of guys supply components who do not know or care what the final application is going to be. They are given a set of specs, they meet them, they get paid. When others inside the company ask questions, it is the engineer's responsibility to verify they have a need to know. When I saw the kinds of questions they were asking on HealthCare.gov, I struggled in vain to figure out why they would need to know any of it. Three security questions? Why? I never did figure out the need to know, and I damn sure will not offer it freely to an organization which has known fifth-takers, Tea Party suppressors and confidential data leakers. The IRS is corrupt. Don't offer them data. Here's what they should have done to start with. Instead of coming up with a claim that the federal government has the authority to order citizens to buy something (an argument as shaky as a twerking cheerleaders hind quarters) then having it overthrown by the court but upheld as a tax (which has its own set of new problems) they should have set it up under the clause with allows the draft. When that was first used during the Civil War, anyone who had a ton of money could pay someone else to take their place; you could buy your way out of military service. Plenty of rich guys did so. OK no problem: draft everyone between the ages of 18 and 50, with the provision that you can buy your way out with a health insurance policy or an opt-out (of the army) fee, the proceeds of which would be then be used to subsidize the poor. Declare the individual mandate not a tax, but rather an option to not go to the army. Problem solved. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Wed Oct 30 09:16:45 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Wed, 30 Oct 2013 09:16:45 +0000 Subject: [ExI] How to build a happier brain In-Reply-To: References: <526EE5F2.1010207@aleph.se> <059401ced513$8b3b5760$a1b20620$@att.net> <08071C6F-D66D-40A1-8D47-F57D4BBB499E@taramayastales.com> Message-ID: <5270CE7D.20906@aleph.se> On 2013-10-30 02:58, Kelly Anderson wrote: > I'm on the Tara side of things. I get more work done when I'm happy. > Unfortunately, I also tend to get more speeding tickets. Yes, being manic is sometimes useful. But it is typically not sustainable over the long run. This is why it is great to be in a stable state of hypomania or something similar. Apropos genius, there is the long-running debate about whether bipolar disorder is overrepresented among creative geniuses. Not settled, but I did note that an entire room of postdocs at a maths department I visited were bipolar. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Wed Oct 30 09:29:41 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Wed, 30 Oct 2013 09:29:41 +0000 Subject: [ExI] How to build a happier brain In-Reply-To: References: <526EE5F2.1010207@aleph.se> Message-ID: <5270D185.3020408@aleph.se> On 2013-10-29 20:54, John Grigg wrote: > Anders, could you share with us, the story (or perhaps brief scenario > is a better term, I only vaguely remember it) you wrote, about the > genetically engineered "Smiley's" who were an inspiration to the rest > of humanity? Ah, I remember that story. I just don't know how to find it... it must be *deep* in the list archives. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From eugen at leitl.org Wed Oct 30 09:46:51 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 30 Oct 2013 10:46:51 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Hard Drives, What Comes Next In-Reply-To: References: <20131029180859.GP10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20131030094651.GY10405@leitl.org> On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 05:14:45PM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > Agreed. Though you have to compare apples to apples, and sometimes that's > hard. For example, we can talk about the exponential growth of hard drive > space, but that negates the value of getting at those bits faster, which is > also important. My secret hope is that the gap is long enough so that solid state can catch up (SSDs have already killed 10-15 krpm SAS by way of size, price and reliability, I don't even bother with SAS SSDs but buy consumer SATA for production) to spinning rust, and put a dagger into its back. But, that is unlikely. However, I expect that spintronics on large surfaces (think inkjet printed on plastic or metal, and then rolled up on a cylinder) can make spinning rust static, putting the head into each bit. Expect good things from the same kind of technology that brought you large, flexible OLEDs. Serial layer deposition is an additive technology which doesn't degrade underlying layers, so here you have a chance to go to m^2 substrates, with many more layers than cm^2 Si allows you -- at the price of much larger, much slower switches -- but if these are fully static (spintronic) that may be well worth it, particularly since you're extremely flexible, and prototype pipelines are so much shorter. > > Either you believe that there is a magic mechanism by which > > a technology arises just in time to be passed on the torch from > > the failing without stumbling, or you don't. > > > > It's not magic. It is the result of work. Yes, work that takes decades, typically. So far we've been pretty lucky, but now the air is getting really thin. > > So in 2027 the world will have 16 TW cumulated PV > > capacity, that's 48 TWp (currently it has 0.1 TWp, > > added within 20 years, this is lost in the error > > margins). > > > > You've got 7 doublings yet to go. I'll spell Ray's implications > > out, all errors are mine: > > > > year added capacity TWp > > > > 2010 > > +0.06 TWp (actual data) > > 2012 > > > > > > > > 2013 > > +0.19 TWp (so far 0.037 TWp added in 2013, my guess this will be > > 0.077 TWp instead of 0.19 TWp, so -0.113 TWp gap) > > > > So let me make sure I understand what you're saying. You're saying that Ray > predicted that there would be 0.19 TWp installed by year end 2013, and Ray did not say that number specifically. The number emerged simply by >>> 0.1 + 0.0625 + 0.125 + 0.5 + 1.0 + 2.0 + 4.0 + 8.0 15.7875 or in terms of TWp >>> 0.1 + 0.0625*3 + 0.125*3 + 0.5*3 + 1.0*3 + 2.0*3 + 4.0*3 + 8.0*3 47.1625 The 0.1 TWp is cumulative deployment over the entire 20-40 years. As you see, it doesn't at all figure. The 15.7 TW figure is also not that relevant, because in the next 2 years you'd double that (to 31.8 TW). > there is actually 0.077 TWp installed. > > According to Wikipedia, by end of 2012, the 100 GW installed capacity Yes, this is cumulated installed Wp capacity so far, accounted for. > milestone was achieved. If my math is correct, that makes 0.1 TWp, and > there is still a year between that number and the end of 2013. So where > does the 0.077 come from? I've found a decent graph for a number of years http://www.renewableenergyfocus.com/view/18384/solar-pv-installations-over-21-gw-in-2011-but-lower-2012/ specifically http://csmres.co.uk/cs.public.upd/article-images/IMS.jpg and a newer one http://cleantechnica.com/2013/02/05/solar-pv-installations-hit-32-gw-in-2012-35-gw-projected-for-2013-according-to-ihs/ http://cleantechnica.com/2013/02/05/solar-pv-installations-hit-32-gw-in-2012-35-gw-projected-for-2013-according-to-ihs/global-solar-pv-installations/ so you can fill in 2010 10 GWp 2011 28 GWp 2012 32 GWp 2013 35 GWp and further projections show linear growth. Assuming they're correct, they say that 0.32 TWp will be deployed 2010-2017. This is obviously a drop in the bucket, and a giant deviation from Ray's very bold projections. > The thing that I remember Ray saying is that the price of solar panels per > watt was on a curve. Are we at all on target for that? The price is the most irrelevant part of PV. Solar inverters, floatglass, aluminium, steel, electricians, grid upgrades, storage capacity, synfuel production capacity are all entirely on different curves, and you need all of these to match his prediction. There is also the considerable energy investment due to long energy payback times (the EROEI over lifetime is ok, but we're looking at 30-40 years of lifetime here -- which is why we need to turn all the residual coal into PV and wind capacity). > Ray gets things wrong, but so far, he has gotten more right than he has I've once taken the time and looked at what exactly he predicted. A lot of it is trivial (it is not particularly difficult to predict something which already exists), a lot wrong, and the rest any moderately well informed pundit would get right. > gotten wrong. I never said it was a perfect science, but I know of no > better approach for trying to predict the future. Do you? There are few areas of interest to me, mostly life extension, whole body/brain emulation, real AI and MNT. I don't see any reliable way to predict it, other than I know that plotting lines on semilog paper is a provably wrong way to do it. You're not quite plotting what you think you're plotting, and these lines tend to start curving down sooner than you would have liked. > The thing that Ray sometimes misses is human psychology issues and > infrastructure issues. I've long said he was wrong about speech > recognition. He isn't a god and I'm not his acolyte. > > > > 2015 > > +0.38 TWp (mind the gap?) > > 2017 > > +1.5 TWp (mind the gap?) > > 2019 > > +3.0 TWp (mind the gap?) > > > > http://www.renewindians.com/2013/02/global-installed-solar-capacity-to-Reach-330GW-by-2020.html > > According to Global Data The Global Solar PV installed capacity will leap > frog from the current 96GW to 330GW by 2020 and will showcase a CAGR of 0.330 TWp by 2020, vs. 3.0 TWp just added between 2019 and 2021 alone. > 16.5%. > > In another article, it states: > ?No one would have predicted even 10 years ago that we would see more than > 100 GW of solar photovoltaic capacity in the world by 2012,? said EPIA > President Winfried Hoffmann. ?The photovoltaic industry clearly faces > challenges but the results of 2012 show there is a strong global market for > our technology. Even in tough economic times and despite growing regulatory > uncertainty, we have nearly managed to repeat the record year of 2011.? > > So by your rendering of Ray's Numbers, by 2020 Ray predicts that we will > have just under 5 TWp installed, and the solar industry is thinking more > like 330 GW will be installed by then. > > I'd be willing to bet here on the record that we will have more than 330 GW > installed by 2020. You're probably correct, but it will be considerably lower than 3.0 TWp, and the gap will only grow larger with each passing doubling period. That's because while deployment *is* cumulative, the deployment rate is sigmoidal. It looks like an exponential initially, where you double very little and hence can afford it, to linear mid-term, and then saturates as you run into limits. > > > 2021 > > +6.0 TWp (mind the gap?) > > 2023 > > +12 TWp (mind the gap?) > > 2025 > > +24 TWp (mind the gap?) > > 2027 > > > > Do these numbers really look good to you? You'll notice we're already kinda > > off-track, here. > > > > They don't look especially good, no. But I was discussing hard drive > prices and then you changed the subject before we could talk numbers. I don't have a good feel of problem space in areal density, so talking about limits there makes little sense, especially since two unrelated technologies need to be on track to hit the limits which are still comfortably far away. The uncertainty is sufficiently high so you can just throw dice. The situation is different in PV and cutting-edge semiconductor photolithography. So there the deviations between the exponential model and a linear or saturating growth model are easier to see and thus it's easier to validate or falsify your growth model. > > > How do you like your serving of crow? Roasted, boiled, smoked? > > > > Roasted please. 2012 was a bad year for solar. They didn't sell as much as > they did in 2011. Not making excuses, but I don't think anyone would have > predicted that. Ray is famous for saying that economic downturns won't I did predict that, actually. Doubling an expensive resource is not sustainable, as very soon you run out of money and production/deployment capacities. This is why end of clock scaling and end of financial and Moore size scaling in semiconductors doesn't surprise me. If you have a good model of near future limits, you can plan to route around it, which however requires long-term planning and a lot of cash spent in advance, which is not favorable to one's career in industry or politics. > effect his data over the long term, but in this case I'm guessing that is > precisely what has happened. From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Wed Oct 30 09:52:06 2013 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Wed, 30 Oct 2013 02:52:06 -0700 Subject: [ExI] How to build a happier brain In-Reply-To: <5270D185.3020408@aleph.se> References: <526EE5F2.1010207@aleph.se> <5270D185.3020408@aleph.se> Message-ID: Anders wrote: >Ah, I remember that story. I just don't know how to find it... it must be >*deep* in the list archives. Well, put your personal A.I. to work on it... John : ) On Wed, Oct 30, 2013 at 2:29 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > On 2013-10-29 20:54, John Grigg wrote: > >> Anders, could you share with us, the story (or perhaps brief scenario is >> a better term, I only vaguely remember it) you wrote, about the genetically >> engineered "Smiley's" who were an inspiration to the rest of humanity? >> > > Ah, I remember that story. I just don't know how to find it... it must be > *deep* in the list archives. > > > -- > Dr Anders Sandberg > Future of Humanity Institute > Oxford Martin School > Oxford University > > ______________________________**_________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/**mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-**chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mbb386 at main.nc.us Wed Oct 30 11:08:45 2013 From: mbb386 at main.nc.us (MB) Date: Wed, 30 Oct 2013 07:08:45 -0400 Subject: [ExI] comments please regarding snoopy-doopy.gov In-Reply-To: References: <01b701ced4bb$348976c0$9d9c6440$@att.net> <032a01ced4ce$e4ee7f70$aecb7e50$@att.net> Message-ID: <4d9ecc18d4a8065accd08e69b69567ce.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> > And when I went to the site the > other day, I didn't > have to put any of that in. I checked Healthcare.gov early in this discussion (days ago, but not the first day) and I did not need to put any of that info in. Site was https from the get-go. I gave my state, my age bracket. They gave me the names of two insurance companies that would work with me and they gave me prices for 3 different policies. Seemed pretty darned limited choice from what I was used to, and was more expensive than before, but there was nothing particularly invasive. Except, the site requested that I needed enable JavaScript to do this. And that's not something I like to do. Perhaps if I actually *applied* I'd have more choices. And then for sure would have supplied more info. Regards, MB From eugen at leitl.org Wed Oct 30 12:03:55 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 30 Oct 2013 13:03:55 +0100 Subject: [ExI] The Peak Oil Crisis: The Shale Oil Bubble Message-ID: <20131030120354.GA7781@leitl.org> http://fcnp.com/2013/10/29/the-peak-oil-crisis-the-shale-oil-bubble/ The Peak Oil Crisis: The Shale Oil Bubble OCTOBER 29, 2013 2:25 PM0 COMMENTS By Tom Whipple Most of us are aware by now that the introduction of widespread hydraulic fracturing into the oil and gas business has resulted in a rapid growth in U.S. production. U.S. crude output is up by nearly 2.5 million barrels a day (b/d) since mid-2007 and natural gas production is up by 25 percent. The key question of course is how long production will continue to grow before it inevitably declines. Optimists maintain that we have just scratched the surface of our shale oil reserves and that production will continue increasing for years, if not decades. Realists are not so sure, noting that not only is fracked oil very expensive, requiring circa $80 a barrel to cover the costs of extraction, but that production from fracked oil wells drops off quickly so that new wells have to be drilled constantly to maintain production. Until recently information about just how fast our fracked oil wells were depleting was rather hard to come by, so that the hype about the US becoming energy independent and a major oil exporter became conventional wisdom for most. Last week the US?s Energy Information Administration issued the first in a new series entitled Drilling Productivity Report- For key tight oil and shale gas regions. This report analyzes the six onshore oil and gas regions in the U.S. where 90 percent of the growth in oil production and nearly all of the growth in natural gas production has taken place in the last few years. The report tallies the number of drilling rigs at work in these six regions; the amount of new oil and gas they are bringing into production each month; and most importantly the rate at which production from those wells already in production is falling. Nearly all of the growth in U.S. onshore crude production these days is coming from North Dakota?s Bakken field and Texas?s Eagle Ford. They account for nearly 2 million of the 2.4 million b/d increase in oil production that the US has seen in recent years. North Dakota publishes detailed data on its oil industry, and from this we learn that the state now has about 9,600 producing oil wells each of which is producing about 100 b/d. The 183 rigs currently drilling in the Bakken formation are bringing an average of 150 new wells per month into production or about 1,800 per year. Efficient use of these rigs is improving so that the 183 rigs currently active are drilling nearly as many new wells as the 220 that were drilling in the spring of 2012. There are two key questions which will determine how much longer these shale oil plays will continue growing. One is how many economically viable sites are left to drill; and how long it will it be before production from the 10,000 or wells already pumping in the Bakken will fall to the place where the 150 or so new wells coming into production each month will not be enough to keep total production growing. While not making a forecast as to when production will peak in the shale fields, the EIA, however, does make a projection as to what will happen in November 2013, not a particularly bold prediction but at least it is something. According to the EIA report, what it terms the decline in ?legacy oil production? (i.e. those wells that have been producing for more than a month) for the Bakken field is now at 60,000. The Texas?s Eagle Ford field?s production is now declining at 80,000 b/d and the no longer growing Permian Field is declining at 34,000 b/d. Winter in North Dakota can be rather harsh and we have already had some snow up there, so bringing new wells into production in the next few months can be difficult. Last winter the number of new wells coming on stream was closer to 100 per month rather than the 200 or so during better weather. In South Texas bad weather is not much of a problem, but the availability of fracking water is. Anyway the EIA is forecasting that in November the Bakken Shale will bring 86,000 new barrels per day into production for a net gain of 26,000 b/d by the end of the month. In the Eagle Ford shale 105,000 b/d of new production is forecast to come on stream for a net gain of 24,000 b/d or 50,000 b/d for the two oil fields. The other four shale oil fields should have negligible increases in production. This of course raises the important question of what will be the state of our shale oil production by December of 2014 and during the following year. Remember the number of producing wells in North Dakota is increasing at about 1,800 a year and even more down in Texas. In looking at the steep decline in production from legacy wells in the Bakken and Eagle Ford shales, decline between November 2012 and November 2013 increased from 44,000 b/d to 60,000 b/d and from 54,000 b/d to 78,000 b/d respectively. Given that there will be another 4,000 or so legacy wells in production by this time next year the decline going on by this time next year is certain to be considerably greater. While the EIA does not seem willing to make a forecast, it sure looks as if the increase in production for these two fields will be unlikely to keep up with the rate of decline within the next 12 to 18 months and that US shale oil production will no longer be growing. While it is possible that a surge of investment will increase the drilling to keep up with declines in production from the older wells, this is expensive, and for now it looks as if oil prices are heading for a level where fracked oil production is not profitable. Outside geologists with access to proprietary data on decline rates have been forecasting for some time now that as the number wells increases and their quality declines, the shale boom will be coming to an end in the next two years. The release of EIA data seems to confirm these predictions. From spike66 at att.net Wed Oct 30 14:17:17 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 30 Oct 2013 07:17:17 -0700 Subject: [ExI] How to build a happier brain In-Reply-To: <5270CE7D.20906@aleph.se> References: <526EE5F2.1010207@aleph.se> <059401ced513$8b3b5760$a1b20620$@att.net> <08071C6F-D66D-40A1-8D47-F57D4BBB499E@taramayastales.com> <5270CE7D.20906@aleph.se> Message-ID: <00cc01ced57a$bdabea90$3903bfb0$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg >...Apropos genius, there is the long-running debate about whether bipolar disorder is overrepresented among creative geniuses. Not settled, but I did note that an entire room of postdocs at a maths department I visited were bipolar. -- Dr Anders Sandberg _______________________________________________ Once we figure out that linkage, I want to know why it is so many creative geniuses are obsessive compulsive. spike From johnkclark at gmail.com Wed Oct 30 15:01:15 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Wed, 30 Oct 2013 11:01:15 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Inflation graph In-Reply-To: References: <04bf01ced34e$02ba59c0$082f0d40$@att.net> <099f01ced3fd$7e167270$7a435750$@att.net> Message-ID: On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 6:41 PM, BillK wrote: > The government inflation number is a big lie. As is the unemployment > number. > Right, and the fossils of Archeopteryx, the transition form between reptiles and birds are all forgeries made by devil worshiping scientist eager to promote godless evolution, a theory straight out of the fiery pit of hell. http://www.cai.org/bible-studies/archaeopteryx-fossil-forgery John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Wed Oct 30 15:19:52 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 30 Oct 2013 08:19:52 -0700 Subject: [ExI] comments please regarding snoopy-doopy.gov In-Reply-To: <4d9ecc18d4a8065accd08e69b69567ce.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> References: <01b701ced4bb$348976c0$9d9c6440$@att.net> <032a01ced4ce$e4ee7f70$aecb7e50$@att.net> <4d9ecc18d4a8065accd08e69b69567ce.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> Message-ID: <010601ced583$7bec0320$73c40960$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of MB Subject: Re: [ExI] comments please regarding snoopy-doopy.gov >>... And when I went to the site the other day, I didn't have to put any of that in. >...I checked Healthcare.gov early in this discussion (days ago, but not the first day) and I did not need to put any of that info in...Perhaps if I actually *applied* I'd have more choices. And then for sure would have supplied more info...Regards, MB _______________________________________________ I haven't checked it recently. My experience was in the first few days. I probably should have let the dust settle a bit before bothering with the thing. Somehow both my original pseudonym accounts disappeared. I consider it all wasted effort at this point. It occurred to me that it is possible I was on a counterfeit site the whole time. It wouldn't be all that difficult to divert the user to a fake site, then ask a bunch of stuff the real site doesn't ask. I didn't tell it anything real, so I am not in danger fortunately. spike From spike66 at att.net Wed Oct 30 15:37:29 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 30 Oct 2013 08:37:29 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Inflation graph In-Reply-To: References: <04bf01ced34e$02ba59c0$082f0d40$@att.net> <099f01ced3fd$7e167270$7a435750$@att.net> Message-ID: <010701ced585$f22d6130$d6882390$@att.net> >. On Behalf Of John Clark Subject: Re: [ExI] Inflation graph On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 6:41 PM, BillK wrote: > The government inflation number is a big lie. As is the unemployment number. >.Right, and the fossils of Archeopteryx, the transition form between reptiles and birds are all forgeries made by devil worshiping scientist eager to promote godless evolution, a theory straight out of the fiery pit of hell. http://www.cai.org/bible-studies/archaeopteryx-fossil-forgery John K Clark It isn't so much inflation is a lie, but rather that it is different for each person. Show me where your money is going, I will show you how to estimate your inflation rate. Mine is near zero, possibly negative. John, I might be able to offer some insight on politician's stance on evolution vs creationism. If you ask anyone here a question about evolution, their answer is likely to have at least something to do with biology and science. If you ask a politician the same question, their thought process would be along the lines of "If I answer 4.5 billion years, I could lose votes in the southern faith-based communities, which are thought to comprise 55% percent of registered yakity yaks and it could cause the bla bla voters in the tight hurkity hurk district to shift to." etc. It doesn't mean they are stupid. They are doing what politicians do. Representatives represent the views of their constituency, more specifically, their voter base. They don't care about science generally; rather they leave that to scientists. Their answer has nothing to do with their personal views or their intelligence, and very little to do with science, any more than a defense lawyer is asked about her own personal view of the guilt of her client. The defense attorney's own opinions are irrelevant and they will not share them anyway: they have a job to do. Note that most politicians are lawyers. Regardless of what they say on the topic, we do not know their views on creationism. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Wed Oct 30 16:21:48 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Wed, 30 Oct 2013 16:21:48 +0000 Subject: [ExI] Inflation graph In-Reply-To: <010701ced585$f22d6130$d6882390$@att.net> References: <04bf01ced34e$02ba59c0$082f0d40$@att.net> <099f01ced3fd$7e167270$7a435750$@att.net> <010701ced585$f22d6130$d6882390$@att.net> Message-ID: On Wed, Oct 30, 2013 at 3:37 PM, spike wrote: > It isn?t so much inflation is a lie, but rather that it is different for > each person. Show me where your money is going, I will show you how to > estimate your inflation rate. Mine is near zero, possibly negative. > Agreed. Everybody's inflation rate is as different as the goods they buy. But the reason I used the term 'lie' is that the government CPI calculation is no longer based on the price you pay. For the long explanation, see: Some examples: If you buy burger instead of steak because steak has gone up in price, that's called substitution, and there is no price increase. If your textbook goes up in price because of added features, like glossy photographs or leather covers, a deduction is made for the added features, and again there is no price increase. Even though you cannot buy a cheaper alternative and have tp pay the dearer price. That's called ?hedonic? quality adjustments. By gaming these two techniques the government now produces a ridiculously low CPI figure which is becoming obviously wrong to anybody that goes shopping. The government has good reasons (to them) for using a low CPI figure. BillK From anders at aleph.se Wed Oct 30 16:35:58 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Wed, 30 Oct 2013 16:35:58 +0000 Subject: [ExI] How to build a happier brain In-Reply-To: <00cc01ced57a$bdabea90$3903bfb0$@att.net> References: <526EE5F2.1010207@aleph.se> <059401ced513$8b3b5760$a1b20620$@att.net> <08071C6F-D66D-40A1-8D47-F57D4BBB499E@taramayastales.com> <5270CE7D.20906@aleph.se> <00cc01ced57a$bdabea90$3903bfb0$@att.net> Message-ID: <5271356E.3000208@aleph.se> On 2013-10-30 14:17, spike wrote: > > disorder is overrepresented among creative geniuses. Not settled, but I did > note that an entire room of postdocs at a maths department I visited were > bipolar. -- Dr Anders Sandberg > _______________________________________________ > > Once we figure out that linkage, I want to know why it is so many creative > geniuses are obsessive compulsive. Because if you are obsessive you can become good at something, and if you happen to be really creative and skilled then working obsessively on something might be the factor that make your thing The Best rather than among the best. OCD is great for science, as long as it is not extreme enough to prevent you from finishing. Just like Aspergers the right pinch of non-neurotypicalness can be very useful in the right context. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From eugen at leitl.org Wed Oct 30 16:37:13 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 30 Oct 2013 17:37:13 +0100 Subject: [ExI] moar Moore Message-ID: <20131030163713.GI10405@leitl.org> http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/the-status-of-moores-law-its-complicated/?utm_source=techalert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=103113 The Status of Moore's Law: It's Complicated Node names?the milestones of the chip industry?no longer mean what they used to By Rachel Courtland Posted 28 Oct 2013 | 20:21 GMT Illustration: Harry Campbell One chilly Tuesday evening last December, dozens of physicists and engineers who dream up tomorrow?s transistors met in San Francisco to ponder the far future. Would today?s state-of-the-art switch?a three-dimensional transistor dubbed the FinFET?be able to carry chips ?to the finish,? a distant, possibly unreachable horizon where transistors are made up of just a handful of atoms? Or would we need a new technology to get us there? This may all sound like the tech world?s version of arguing over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but it actually has enormous real-world implications. The semiconductor industry pulled in revenues of US $300 billion in 2012. After decades of fulfilling Gordon Moore?s prophesy of steadily doubling transistor densities (these days every 18 to 24 months), the industry is now delivering integrated circuits with transistors that are made using what chipmakers call a 20- or 22-nanometer manufacturing process. An IC fabricated with this process, such as a microprocessor or a dynamic RAM (DRAM) chip, can have billions of transistors. Nevertheless, there on the cutting edge, the business is troubled. Each new generation of ultradense chips demands a new manufacturing process of mind-boggling industrial and technological complexity. The struggle has become so pitched that researchers are now often at a loss for words to describe the metrics of their progress. At the December meeting, for example, Chenming Hu, the coinventor of the FinFET, began by mapping out the near future. Soon, he said, we?ll start to see 14-nm and 16-nm chips emerge (the first, which are expected to come from Intel, are slated to go into production early next year). Then he added a caveat whose casual tone belied its startling implications: ?Nobody knows anymore what 16 nm means or what 14 nm means.? It?s actually become a fairly common refrain among industry experts. The practice of attaching measurements to chip generations has ?been hijacked by marketers to an enormous extent,? one chip-design expert told me. ?A lot of it?s really smoke and mirrors,? says analyst Dan Hutcheson of VLSI Research in Santa Clara, Calif. It?s ?spin,? he says, that?s designed to hide widening technological gaps between chip companies. The nanometer figures that Hu discussed are called nodes, and they are, for want of a better term, the mile markers of Moore?s Law. Each node marks a new generation of chip-manufacturing technology. And the progression of node names over the years reflects the steady progress that both logic and memory chips have made: The smaller the number, the smaller the transistors and the more closely they are packed together, producing chips that are denser and thus less costly on a per-transistor basis. But the relationship between node names and chip dimensions is far from straightforward. Nowadays, a particular node name does not reflect the size of any particular chip feature, as it once did. And in the past year, the use of node names has become even more confusing, as chip foundries prepare to roll out 14-nm and 16-nm chips, custom-made for smartphone makers and other customers, that will be no denser than the previous 20-nm generation. That might be just a temporary hiccup, a one-time-only pause in chip-density improvement. But it?s emblematic of the perplexing state of the field. Moore?s Law, when reflected through the steady march of node names, might seem easy and inexorable. But today a plague of intense manufacturing and design problems is forcing compromises that are sometimes sobering. And some analysts suggest that regardless of what we call the next generation of chips, the transition from old to new no longer provides nearly the kind of payoff?in cost or performance?that it used to. ?What do you mean by 14 nm?? When I asked An Steegen that question at an industry conference in July, she smiled and let out a wry, knowing laugh. ?Ah?what?s in a name?? asked Steegen, senior vice president for process technology development at Imec, the Belgian research center. ?Actually, not that much any more.? It?s a state of affairs that has been nearly two decades in the making. Once upon a time, the node name told you practically everything you needed to know about a chip?s underlying technology. If you trained your microscope on microprocessors made by a handful of different companies using a 0.35-micrometer process, you?d find that their products were all remarkably similar. what?s in a chart? roadmap chart Data Source: GlobalFoundries What?s in a name? Key chip dimensions, such as the transistor gate length [yellow] and the metal one half pitch [orange]?half the distance spanned by the width of a wire and the space to the next one on the dense, first metal layer of a chip?have decreased but not strictly tracked the node name [red]. These numbers, provided by GlobalFoundries, reflect the company?s plans to accelerate the introduction of 14 nm chips in 2014, a good year early. In the mid-1990s, when such chips were the state of the art, 0.35 ?m was an accurate measure of the finest features that could be drawn on the chip. This determined dimensions such as the length of the transistor gate, the electrode responsible for switching the device on and off. Because gate length is directly linked to switching speed, you?d have a pretty good sense of the performance boost you?d get by switching from an older-generation chip to a 0.35-?m processor. The term ?0.35-?m node? actually meant something. But around that same time, the link between performance and node name began to break down. In pursuit of ever-higher clock speeds, chipmakers expanded their tool kit. They continued to use lithography to pattern circuit components and wires on the chip, as they always had. But they also began etching away the ends of the transistor gate to make the devices shorter, and thus faster. After a while, ?there was no one design rule that people could point to and say, ?That defines the node name,?? says Mark Bohr, a senior fellow at Intel. The company?s 0.13-?m chips, which debuted in 2001, had transistor gates that were actually just 70 nm long. Nevertheless, Intel called them 0.13-?m chips because they were the next in line. For want of a better system, the industry more or less stuck to the historical node-naming convention. Although the trend in the measurements of transistors was changing, manufacturers continued to pack the devices closer and closer together, assigning each successive chip generation a number about 70 percent that of the previous one. (A 30 percent reduction in both the x and y dimensions corresponds to a 50 percent reduction in the area occupied by a transistor, and therefore the potential to double transistor density on the chip.) The naming trend continued as transistors got even more complex. After years of aggressive gate trimming, simple transistor scaling reached a limit in the early 2000s: Making a transistor smaller no longer meant it would be faster or less power hungry. So Intel, followed by others, introduced new technologies to help boost transistor performance. They started with strain engineering, adding impurities to silicon to alter the crystal, which had the effect of boosting speed without changing the physical dimensions of the transistor. They added new insulating and gate materials. And two years ago, they rejiggered the transistor structure to create the more efficient FinFET, with a current-carrying channel that juts out of the plane of the chip. Through all this, node name numbers continued to drift ever downward, and the density of transistors continued to double from generation to generation. But the names no longer match the size of any specific chip dimension. ?The minimum dimensions are getting smaller,? Bohr says. ?But I?m the first to admit that I can?t point to the one dimension that?s 32 nm or 22 nm or 14 nm. Some dimensions are smaller than the stated node name, and others are larger.? The switch to FinFETs has made the situation even more complex. Bohr points out, for example, that Intel?s 22-nm chips, the current state of the art, have FinFET transistors with gates that are 35 nm long but fins that are just 8 nm wide. That is, of course, the view from a chip manufacturer?s side. For his part, Paolo Gargini, the chairman of the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, says the node is and always has been defined by the proximity of wires on the first metal layer on the back of the chip, a dimension that was reflected well in DRAM and, later, flash memory, but not in logic. Two transistors image Illustrations: Emily Cooper Two Transistors: Chipmakers are in the process of moving from traditional planar transistors [left] to ones that pop out of plane [right]. Intel introduced these 3-D transistors in 2011, and they are now shipping widely. The leading foundries, such as GlobalFoundries, Samsung, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., are in the process of ramping up production of 20-nanometer planar transistors. They will make the switch to 3-D with the next generation. Regardless of definition, numbers in node names have continued to decline. Along with them, the distance between transistor gates and that between the closest copper wires on the back of the chip have also decreased. Both of those features help define how dense a chip can be and thus how many more you can produce on a single silicon wafer to drive down costs. But the difficulty inherent in printing ever-finer features has now taken its toll. ?When we got to around 28 nm, we were actually pushing the limits of the lithographic tools,? says Subramani Kengeri, vice president of advanced technology architecture at GlobalFoundries, the world?s second-biggest chipmaking foundry after Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. To deal with this, Kengeri and his colleagues were forced to adopt a lithographic technique called double patterning. It lets technicians pattern smaller features by splitting a single patterning step into two, relying on a slight offset between the two steps. Intel used the technique to form transistors on its 22-nm chips, but it stuck to single patterning to make the densest metal layer. Pushing the technique to its limits, the company made wires with a pitch of 80 nm, which encompasses the width of one wire and the space to the next. By adopting double patterning, GlobalFoundries and others could push the pitch down to about 64 nm for their 20-nm chips. But that move came with a significant trade-off: Double-patterned chips take longer to make, adding significantly to the cost. Carrying this technique over from the 20-nm node to 14 nm would mean that chipmakers would have to double-pattern even more layers of the chip. So last year, Kengeri and his colleagues announced a chip industry first: They would put a stop to the shrink. GlobalFoundries? line of 14-nm chips, which are slated to begin production in 2014, may be the foundry world?s first FinFET transistors. But the company will build the new chips with the same wiring density used in its 20-nm chips. ?The first-generation FinFET is basically reusing all of that and plugging a FinFET into that framework,? Kengeri says. ?It?s really a 20-nm FinFET, in a way.? Nevertheless, the company refers to these as 14-nm chips because they offer roughly a generation?s-worth jump in performance and energy efficiency over its 20-nm chips. Kengeri hopes that by putting a one-generation pause on shrinking chips and focusing on introducing 3-D transistors, GlobalFoundries will catch up with Intel, which is already shipping 3-D devices in its 22-nm chips. GlobalFoundries? 14-nm chips aren?t any denser than?and therefore cost just about as much as?the previous generation, but they?re still a big improvement, Kengeri says. ?Our point?and our customers agree?is that as long as they see that value, they don?t care what the technology is called or what is inside.? ?It is quite a controversial move,? says William Arnold, chief scientist at ASML, the world?s largest maker of semiconductor-fabrication equipment. ?The customers of the foundries, the people who are making cellphone parts, are very skeptical of not being able to get a shrink along with a performance improvement. They?re pretty vocal about saying that they?re not happy about that.? The foundries? latest move aside, chips are still more or less doubling in density from node to node, says Andrew Kahng, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, and an expert on high-performance chip design. But for Kahng, the steady progression of node names masks deeper problems. There is a difference, he says, between ?available density? (how closely you can pack circuits and wires on a chip) and ?realizable density? (what you can actually put into a competitive commercial product). The sheer density and power levels on a state-of-the-art chip have forced designers to compensate by adding error-correction circuitry, redundancy, read- and write-boosting circuitry for failing static RAM cells, circuits to track and adapt to performance variations, and complicated memory hierarchies to handle multicore architectures. The problem, Kahng says, is that ?all of those extra circuits add area.? His group has been scouring company specs and deconstructing images of chips for years, and they?ve come to an unsettling conclusion: When you factor those circuits in, chips are no longer twice as dense from generation to generation. In fact, Kahng?s analysis suggests, the density improvement over the past three generations, from 2007 on, has been closer to 1.6 than 2. This smaller density benefit means costlier chips, and it also has an impact on performance because signals must be driven over longer distances. The shortfall is consistent enough, Kahng says, that it could be considered its own law. This might be a recoverable loss. So far, Kahng says, the chip industry has made it a priority to keep up the pace of Moore?s Law, ensuring that manufacturers can continue to build and release new product families while using a new process every 18 to 24 months. This means there hasn?t been time to explore a number of design tricks that could be used to cut down on power or boost performance. ?When you?re on that kind of schedule, you don?t have time to optimize things,? he says. As the value of the simple shrink decreases, he says, chipmakers should then be able to revisit their designs and find chip-improving approaches they may have missed or else left on the cutting-room floor. When will the scaling stop? Today?s patterning technology, which relies on 193-nm laser light, is becoming an ever more costly challenge, and its natural successor, shorter-wavelength extreme ultraviolet lithography, has been long delayed. Kahng says chipmakers may face a more immediate struggle with wiring in just a few years as they attempt to push chip density down past the 10-nm generation. Each copper wire requires a sheath containing barrier material to prevent the metal from leaching into surrounding material, as well as insulation to prevent it from interacting with neighboring wires. To perform effectively, this sheath must be fairly thick. This thickness limits how closely wires can be pushed together and forces the copper wires to shrink instead, dramatically driving up the resistance and delays and drastically lowering performance. Although researchers are exploring alternative materials, it?s unclear, Kahng says, whether they will be ready in time to keep up with Moore?s Law?s steady pace. Many people in the industry, who have watched showstopper after showstopper crop up only to be bypassed by a new development, are reluctant to put a hard date on Moore?s Law?s demise. ?Every generation, there are people who will say we?re coming to the end of the shrink,? says ASML?s Arnold, and in ?every generation various improvements do come about. I haven?t seen the end of the road map.? But for those keeping track of the road, those mile markers are starting to get pretty blurry. A version of this article originally appeared in print as ?The End of the Shrink.? From johnkclark at gmail.com Wed Oct 30 17:40:18 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Wed, 30 Oct 2013 13:40:18 -0400 Subject: [ExI] How to build a happier brain In-Reply-To: <058f01ced511$dbee9750$93cbc5f0$@att.net> References: <526EE5F2.1010207@aleph.se> <058f01ced511$dbee9750$93cbc5f0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 9:46 PM, spike wrote: > Someone made a comment here about Teller being the inspiration for > Kubric?s Dr. Strangelove. The notion was that Teller must have been > completely insane to promote the development of a hydrogen bomb, when the > radioactive ash from the Uranium and Plutonium bombs had scarcely settled, > but it occurred to me that he was not only sane, he was right. > So it would seem. In the Oppenheimer/ Teller confrontation my heart is with Oppenheimer but my brain says Teller was right. Percentage-wise between the years 1952 and 2013 fewer humans have killed other humans than any other time in history. I don't think its a coincidence those are also the years that the H-bomb has existed on this planet. Of course this happy situation could change dramatically in just one hour, but only if somebody completely uninterested in logic took control of a country with nuclear weapons, for example if one of the Tea Party members who voted to default in 90 minutes were ever to become president. Can you imagine what it would have been like if Ted Cruz (or even Lyndon Johnson) had been president during the Cuban Missile Crisis?! No, sorry, that's too scary a thought to consider even on Halloween. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Wed Oct 30 18:55:06 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 30 Oct 2013 11:55:06 -0700 Subject: [ExI] How to build a happier brain In-Reply-To: References: <526EE5F2.1010207@aleph.se> <058f01ced511$dbee9750$93cbc5f0$@att.net> Message-ID: <013101ced5a1$8d643a50$a82caef0$@att.net> >. On Behalf Of John Clark Subject: Re: [ExI] How to build a happier brain Of course this happy situation could change dramatically in just one hour, but only if somebody completely uninterested in logic took control of a country with nuclear weapons, for example if one of the Tea Party members who voted to default in 90 minutes were ever to become president. . John K Clark I am puzzled at this comment John. We were told the US could destroy the world simply by defaulting on its debt. There would be no need to waste perfectly good nukes on a world which was already utterly destroyed, a lifeless and barren wasteland, made utterly inhospitable for man and beast, all because of irresponsible acts by those deranged fools who erroneously and destructively believed governments as well as families must live within their means. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kpj at sics.se Thu Oct 31 12:15:58 2013 From: kpj at sics.se (KPJ) Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2013 13:15:58 +0100 Subject: [ExI] How to build a happier brain In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <0eb6f01259fc7bbf12d9ee77ea761976@sics.se> Wed, 30 Oct 2013 16:35:58 +0000, Anders Sandberg scripsit: | |> On 2013-10-30 14:17, spike wrote: |> |> disorder is overrepresented among creative geniuses. Not settled, but I did |> note that an entire room of postdocs at a maths department I visited were |> bipolar. -- Dr Anders Sandberg |> _______________________________________________ |> |> Once we figure out that linkage, I want to know why it is so many creative |> geniuses are obsessive compulsive. | [SNIP]. | |OCD is great for science, as long as it is not extreme enough to prevent |you from finishing. Just like Aspergers the right pinch of |non-neurotypicalness can be very useful in the right context. Explain. _______________________________________________ This e-mail message contains information from the [REDACTED] [REDACTED] of [REDACTED] which may be confidential or privileged. The information is intended to be for the use of the individual or entity named above. If you are not the intended recipient, be aware that any disclosure, copying, distribution or other use of the contents of this information is prohibited. If you have received this electronic transmission in error, please notify us by telephone ([REDACTED]) or by electronic mail ([REDACTED]@[REDACTED]) immediately. Have a nie day. From anders at aleph.se Thu Oct 31 13:28:54 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2013 13:28:54 +0000 Subject: [ExI] How to build a happier brain In-Reply-To: <0eb6f01259fc7bbf12d9ee77ea761976@sics.se> References: <0eb6f01259fc7bbf12d9ee77ea761976@sics.se> Message-ID: <52725B16.5010207@aleph.se> On 2013-10-31 12:15, KPJ wrote: > Wed, 30 Oct 2013 16:35:58 +0000, Anders Sandberg > scripsit: > |OCD is great for science, as long as it is not extreme enough to prevent > |you from finishing. Just like Aspergers the right pinch of > |non-neurotypicalness can be very useful in the right context. > > Explain. Yes. The classic example is how the systematizing approach of autism works well with programming - it is a domain where the approach works well, and traditionally at least, programmers did not have to interact much socially with co-workers. But I suspect it is great for plenty of other domains, whether it is taxonomy or mathematics. The detail orientedness of some people on the spectrum works well with many reductionistic domains, since it makes people try to understand parts and underlying principles of sameness: http://www.ucp.pt/site/resources/documents/ics/gnc/artigosgnc/anamariaabreu/d_hafr06.pdf And autism is overrepresented among *professional* scientists: http://docs.autismresearchcentre.com/papers/2001_BCetal_AQ.pdf From the abstract: > ... Four groups of subjects were assessed: Group 1: 58 adults with > Asperger syndrome (AS) or high-functioning autism (HFA); Group 2: 174 > randomly selected controls. Group 3: 840 students in Cambridge > University; and Group 4: 16 winners of the UK Mathematics Olympiad. > The adults with AS/HFA had a mean AQ score of 35.8 (SD = 6.5), > significantly higher than Group 2 controls (M = 16.4, SD = 6.3). 80% > of the adults with AS/HFA scored 32+, versus 2% of controls. ... The > students in Cambridge University did not differ from the randomly > selected control group, but scientists (including mathematicians) > scored significantly higher than both humanities and social sciences > students, confirming an earlier study that autistic conditions are > associated with scientific skills. Within the sciences, mathematicians > scored highest. This was replicated in Group 4, the Mathematics > Olympiad winners scoring significantly higher than the male Cambridge > humanities students. 6% of the student sample scored 327plus; on the > AQ. On interview, 11 out of 11 of these met three or more DSM-IV > criteria for AS/HFA, and all were studying sciences/mathematics, and 7 > of the 11 met threshold on these criteria. ... See also http://docs.autismresearchcentre.com/papers/2007_BC_etal_maths.pdf I doubt you become autistic from doing science (besides learning how to fit in), but people with an autistic mode likely have better chances of success in the domain. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Thu Oct 31 14:39:44 2013 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2013 15:39:44 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Interview on Transhumanism, a Futurism of the Will Message-ID: The English translation of the interview I recently gave to Roby Guerra is now available online at: hplusmagazine.com/2013/10/28/transhumanism-and-futurism-of-the-will-an-interview-with-stefano-vaj -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Thu Oct 31 16:01:35 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2013 10:01:35 -0600 Subject: [ExI] How to build a happier brain In-Reply-To: References: <526EE5F2.1010207@aleph.se> <058f01ced511$dbee9750$93cbc5f0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Wed, Oct 30, 2013 at 11:40 AM, John Clark wrote: > So it would seem. In the Oppenheimer/ Teller confrontation my heart is > with Oppenheimer but my brain says Teller was right. > Percentage-wise between the years 1952 and 2013 fewer humans have killed > other humans than any other time in history. I don't think its a > coincidence those are also the years that the H-bomb has existed on this > planet. > Agreed. Teller was right. > Of course this happy situation could change dramatically in just one hour, > but only if somebody completely uninterested in logic took control of a > country with nuclear weapons, for example if one of the Tea Party members > who voted to default in 90 minutes were ever to become president. Can you > imagine what it would have been like if Ted Cruz (or even Lyndon Johnson) > had been president during the Cuban Missile Crisis?! No, sorry, that's too > scary a thought to consider even on Halloween. > I would submit that John F Kennedy was more conservative than anyone in government today. Including the Tea Party "fanatics" and the Libertarians. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Thu Oct 31 16:05:22 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2013 10:05:22 -0600 Subject: [ExI] How to build a happier brain In-Reply-To: <52725B16.5010207@aleph.se> References: <0eb6f01259fc7bbf12d9ee77ea761976@sics.se> <52725B16.5010207@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 7:28 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > On 2013-10-31 12:15, KPJ wrote: > > Wed, 30 Oct 2013 16:35:58 +0000, Anders Sandberg scripsit: > |OCD is great for science, as long as it is not extreme enough to prevent > |you from finishing. Just like Aspergers the right pinch of > |non-neurotypicalness can be very useful in the right context. > > Explain. > > > Yes. > > The classic example is how the systematizing approach of autism works well > with programming - it is a domain where the approach works well, and > traditionally at least, programmers did not have to interact much socially > with co-workers. But I suspect it is great for plenty of other domains, > whether it is taxonomy or mathematics. > Asperger's leads people to reduce their interactions with other people to a bare minimum because other people are hard to understand for them. They bury themselves in their work and focus on it in an obsessive way because it's what they understand. Great examples of people with probable Asperger's include Sir Isaac Newton, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs (to a slightly lesser extent than the other two). -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Thu Oct 31 15:53:04 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2013 08:53:04 -0700 Subject: [ExI] How to build a happier brain In-Reply-To: <0eb6f01259fc7bbf12d9ee77ea761976@sics.se> References: <0eb6f01259fc7bbf12d9ee77ea761976@sics.se> Message-ID: <016a01ced651$496cdf90$dc469eb0$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of KPJ Subject: Re: [ExI] How to build a happier brain >... >>...OCD is great for science, as long as it is not extreme enough to Prevent you from finishing. Just like Aspergers the right pinch of non-neurotypicalness can be very useful in the right context... Anders >...Explain. KJP _____________________________________________ An Aspie might be more likely to be home studying on a typical college Saturday night than to be out at a frat party, where few scientific insights are derived. spike From spike66 at att.net Thu Oct 31 16:03:32 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2013 09:03:32 -0700 Subject: [ExI] How to build a happier brain In-Reply-To: <52725B16.5010207@aleph.se> References: <0eb6f01259fc7bbf12d9ee77ea761976@sics.se> <52725B16.5010207@aleph.se> Message-ID: <017f01ced652$bff9bb00$3fed3100$@att.net> >. On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg >.See also http://docs.autismresearchcentre.com/papers/2007_BC_etal_maths.pdf >.I doubt you become autistic from doing science (besides learning how to fit in), but people with an autistic mode likely have better chances of success in the domain.-- Dr Anders Sandberg Anders, you have been to the extro-schmoozes and plenty of science gatherings. I find it striking that of all social situations, the science and math geeks are the very most accepting of those who are socially atypical, more accepting than even the most kindhearted religious gathering. I recall from an extro gathering at my house a few years ago, where you were present. One of the near-normal followers brought her boyfriend, who was completely normal as far as I can tell. That poor lad was just lost, bewildered by our crowd. {8^D Robert Bradbury was here, being Robert, and he was encouraging the others to unleash their inner autistic. I watched the normal boyfriend from an amused distance. {8^D I still laugh when I think of that. There is no point in being a geek if you can't be weird. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Thu Oct 31 18:33:46 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2013 19:33:46 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Big nanotech: an unexpected future Message-ID: <20131031183346.GM10405@leitl.org> http://www.theguardian.com/science/small-world/2013/oct/28/big-nanotech-unexpected-future-apm Big nanotech: an unexpected future How we deal with atomically precise manufacturing will reframe the future for human life and global society Manufacturing at the smallest scale could have global consequences. Photograph: Corbis In my initial post in this series, I asked, "What if nanotechnology could deliver on its original promise, not only new, useful, nanoscale products, but a new, transformative production technology able to displace industrial production technologies and bring radical improvements in production cost, scope, and resource efficiency?" The potential implications are immense, not just for computer chips and other nanotechnologies, but for issues on the scale of global development and climate change. My first post outlined the nature of this technology, atomically precise manufacturing (APM), comparing it with today's 3D printing and digital nanoelectronics. My second post placed APM-level technologies in the context of today's million-atom atomically precise fabrication technologies and outlined the direction of research, an open path, but by no means short, that leads to larger atomically precise structures, a growing range of product materials and a wider range of functional devices, culminating in the factory-in-a-box technologies of APM. Together, these provided an introduction to the modern view of APM-level technologies. Here, I'd like to say a few words about the implications of APM-level technologies for human life and global society. Solving major global problems A surprising range of global problems can be seen as problems of manufacturing, not solvable by manufacturing alone, of course, but transformed and made more tractable by better ways to make things. Global material economic development is, fundamentally, a problem of making things that serve human needs, whether these are power systems, medical supplies, or consumer goods. Similarly, resource depletion is a problem involving the materials needed to make things and the costs (both economic and environmental) of producing and recycling those materials; better ways to make things with frugal use of common materials could bypass mines and restructure international trade. And a switchover to renewable solar photovoltaic energy? This is a matter of producing enough photovoltaic panels, packaged for low-cost deployment. Getting the resulting energy to people? This is a matter of producing electric power transmission infrastructure. Producing liquid fuels from renewable energy? This is a matter of processing molecules (CO2 + H2O + energy ?> hydrocarbon fuels + oxygen), and atomically precise manufacturing can provide the required energy and high-throughput catalytic mechanisms. Even reversing the CO2 problem is, in the end, a problem of manufacturing, a one that could be solved with enough energy and equipment for CO2 capture and compression. Both expanding energy supplies and capturing CO2 are primarily problems of producing the requisite devices, but on a daunting scale. The project would require some 30 terawatt-years of non-carbon-based energy, enormous when compared to the three terawatts of electric power produced by the world today. To provide the necessary energy in the span of a decade would require photovoltaic arrays covering about 1% of the area of the Sahara desert ? 100bn square metres would be enough. This would be too costly with today's means of manufacture, but practical at some time in the future with APM-level technologies. These examples suggest that atomically precise manufacturing could not solve, but could provide the means to solve problems that are beyond the reach of industrial technologies. And the task of developing APM-level technologies is itself a problem of manufacturing, a task that will require an incremental climb up a ladder of production technologies that extends today's surprising progress in atomically precise fabrication. Raising new concerns Every major advance in making things can have both beneficial and harmful applications, and even beneficial applications have unintended (and often unpredictable) consequences. It seems that APM-level technologies can lead to problems of three main kinds: ? The potential manufacture of desirable products on a scale that, unless moderated or managed, would cause deep economic disruption by collapsing demand for many sorts of natural resources, labour, and conventional products. ? The potential manufacture of products that, unless forestalled by law or regulation, could cause harm (for example, drugs, guns, and devices prone to exploding or worse). ? Of special concern, the potential manufacture of weapons that, unless forestalled by co-operative arms control, could lead to a risky and unpredictable arms race: imagine rapidly deployable arsenals that include millions of cruise missiles, each delivering up to millions of drones no larger than wasps, able to disperse, communicate, wait, watch, and then act when triggered. Or simply consider the prospect of efficient uranium isotope separation equipment made as easily as a plastic gadget from a 3D printer. These concerns all involve APM products, because APM production technologies in themselves can by their very nature (and with a bit of sensible regulation) be cleaner and safer than the technologies they replace. APM is a particular kind of factory-in-a-box technology ? no dispersed particles, wandering bots, toxic materials, or anything gooey, but instead a machine that resembles a printer. APM is a specific kind of technology but its products, by contrast, can be extraordinarily diverse. Like the nanotechnology used to build information systems, APM's products and applications can be as different from one another as online games, drone guidance systems, smartphones, and Wikipedia. Asking the right questions If there's anything to the concept of high-throughput atomically precise manufacturing, then it's important to understand what it may mean for our future. The way forward in understanding that these prospects starts with asking the right questions. The first question must be? "What is it?" in the most basic, physical sense, because without this understanding, any conversation will immediately run off the rails. I outlined the basic nature of the technology in my first post, drawing parallels with digital systems, 3D printing and conventional manufacturing. Digging deeper into this question involves exploring the molecular physics and mechanical engineering of nanoscale systems of particular kinds, systems that can be understood in terms of today's science, yet are beyond the reach of today's technology. As I mentioned, there is some institutional weight (the US National Academy of Sciences APM-feasibility study, etc) behind the idea that the science and engineering of APM systems makes sense. With this picture in place, the next question is? "Can it be built?" The answers to this depend on the timeframe: not today, because we don't yet have the necessary toolkit. Yes, in the future, because the necessary toolkit can be developed through further progress in atomically precise fabrication. Note that this progress centres on the molecular sciences and often isn't labelled as "nanotechnology". A further layer of questions asks? "What can APM-based production enable?" The answers here are uncomfortably broad: asking what APM systems can do with materials is much like asking what computers can do with information. The most important questions look one step further, asking? "What are the potential consequences?" These questions involve the physics and engineering of APM-enabled technologies, of course, but they centre on anticipated and unanticipated human actions. Among these, the key questions will involve potential societal agreements and regulatory regimes that seek ways to apply APM-enabled technologies to solve human problems while minimising potential misapplications and disruptive results. These questions and answers, asked and discussed in a host of venues, will reframe the potential future of 21st century material civilisation. Timelines, applications and outcomes will depend on how well and how widely APM-level technologies are understood and how we choose to manage them. I find that asking these questions opens the door to a banquet of indigestible truths, yet if the prospects are real, it's time to start nibbling. And this means beginning to broaden our conversation about the future to take account of new possibilities. Eric Drexler, often called "the father of nanotechnology", is at the Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology, University of Oxford. His most recent book is Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization The Oxford Martin School of Oxford University and the Research Center for Sustainable Development of the China Academy of Social Sciences recently released a report on atomically precise manufacturing, Nano-solutions for the 21st century. The report discusses the status and prospects for atomically precise manufacturing (APM) together with some of its implications for economic and international affairs. From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Thu Oct 31 18:37:40 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2013 12:37:40 -0600 Subject: [ExI] moar Moore In-Reply-To: <20131030163713.GI10405@leitl.org> References: <20131030163713.GI10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Wed, Oct 30, 2013 at 10:37 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > The sheer density and power levels on a state-of-the-art chip have forced > designers to compensate by adding error-correction circuitry, redundancy, > read- and write-boosting circuitry for failing static RAM cells, circuits > to > track and adapt to performance variations, and complicated memory > hierarchies > to handle multicore architectures. The problem, Kahng says, is that ?all of > those extra circuits add area.? His group has been scouring company specs > and > deconstructing images of chips for years, and they?ve come to an unsettling > conclusion: When you factor those circuits in, chips are no longer twice as > dense from generation to generation. In fact, Kahng?s analysis suggests, > the > density improvement over the past three generations, from 2007 on, has been > closer to 1.6 than 2. This smaller density benefit means costlier chips, > and > it also has an impact on performance because signals must be driven over > longer distances. The shortfall is consistent enough, Kahng says, that it > could be considered its own law. > To me, this was the most concerning paragraph in this article. If you have to add more error correcting logic to make increasingly unreliable small components perform in a reliable fashion, then you aren't getting performance increases. > When will the scaling stop? Today?s patterning technology, which relies on > 193-nm laser light, is becoming an ever more costly challenge, and its > natural successor, shorter-wavelength extreme ultraviolet lithography, has > been long delayed. > Sounds like an interesting direction to go. > Many people in the industry, who have watched showstopper after showstopper > crop up only to be bypassed by a new development, are reluctant to put a > hard > date on Moore?s Law?s demise. ?Every generation, there are people who will > say we?re coming to the end of the shrink,? One named Eugen... :-) > says ASML?s Arnold, and in ?every > generation various improvements do come about. I haven?t seen the end of > the > road map.? > And there you have it. Improvement, but perhaps not at the same breakneck pace. I wonder if they will start building ICs on something like cardboard waferboard. That is, all crinkled up... That would be another way to get towards 2.5 D configurations, particularly if you put two sheets of them together face to face... I'm not sure, but I am hopeful that we will see increased performance, combined with decreased pricing for many years to come. If not, it will signal the end of this particular brand of exponential improvement. I was also concerned about marketing taking over naming conventions. Although, if you have more transistors per sq cm, is that not good enough? And are they getting that? The article didn't say. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Thu Oct 31 18:57:20 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2013 18:57:20 +0000 Subject: [ExI] moar Moore In-Reply-To: References: <20131030163713.GI10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 6:37 PM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > On Wed, Oct 30, 2013 at 10:37 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: >> When will the scaling stop? Today?s patterning technology, which relies on >> 193-nm laser light, is becoming an ever more costly challenge, and its >> natural successor, shorter-wavelength extreme ultraviolet lithography, has >> been long delayed. > > > Sounds like an interesting direction to go. > > The Intel CEO is talking up this technology and is investing billions in companies developing it. Quote: Intel is working on 10 nm transistors by 2015 and 7 nm in 2017. These are insanely small. In comparison, a human blood cell is about 7,000 nm while a strand of DNA is 2.5 nm. Intel won't confirm that it will be using EUV to get there, but then it's famous for not discussing its manufacturing technologies, for obvious competitive reasons. Still, if EUV makes it to market, we could see chips that make 7 nm seem unimpressive by the end of the decade. ------------ BillK From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Thu Oct 31 19:04:10 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2013 13:04:10 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Inflation graph In-Reply-To: References: <04bf01ced34e$02ba59c0$082f0d40$@att.net> <099f01ced3fd$7e167270$7a435750$@att.net> Message-ID: On Wed, Oct 30, 2013 at 9:01 AM, John Clark wrote: > On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 6:41 PM, BillK wrote: > > > The government inflation number is a big lie. As is the unemployment >> number. >> > > Right, and the fossils of Archeopteryx, the transition form between > reptiles and birds are all forgeries made by devil worshiping scientist > eager to promote godless evolution, a theory straight out of the fiery pit > of hell. > > http://www.cai.org/bible-studies/archaeopteryx-fossil-forgery > There have been such forgeries, Piltdown Man comes to mind. When people with political or illicit financial agendas pretend to be scientists, great damage can be done to science itself. I am grateful that my understanding of the evolution of birds from dinosaurs is greatly assisted by the recent finds in China, such that if the berlin specimen of Archaeopteryx were found to be a forgery, it would not change my opinion of evolution in the slightest. That being said, it isn't a great comeback when complaining about the government inflation number. The government has all kinds of good reasons to lie about this. http://www.investopedia.com/university/inflation/inflation2.asp "Measuring inflation is a difficult problem for government statisticians." The government itself has changed how the number is computed over time. Using the fact that it is "complicated", I believe they have made small "errors" in their own favor reporting a lower number than if they had not done so. This is because many government programs pay out based upon the number. It was a cheap way (politically) to reduce Social Security payments for example. If you follow the money, it is easy to believe that government statisticians have an interest in reporting a lower number. Looking for a few minutes, I can't find a single article claiming that the government numbers are too high, but a huge number of articles claiming the reverse. Some claiming that the number is as little as 25% of reality. That should give you an idea of the direction the government tends to skew the numbers. They also want to hide the effects of quantitative easing, but I think saving money from COLAs is the main gist of the story. I'm betting if you were able to interview the numbers junkies that compute the official government inflation rates, they would admit after a few beers that the numbers are skewed low. Now, all that being said, I'm GLAD the government under reports the inflation number, because it reduced the debt and deficit and keeps us from automatically spending a lot more money on stuff. So it's hard to argue against something I would also do if I were them. But it is not in the interest of the American People, just the interest of the government that is served. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Thu Oct 31 19:27:36 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2013 13:27:36 -0600 Subject: [ExI] The Peak Oil Crisis: The Shale Oil Bubble In-Reply-To: <20131030120354.GA7781@leitl.org> References: <20131030120354.GA7781@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Wed, Oct 30, 2013 at 6:03 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > http://fcnp.com/2013/10/29/the-peak-oil-crisis-the-shale-oil-bubble/ > > The Peak Oil Crisis: The Shale Oil Bubble > > There are two key questions which will determine how much longer these > shale > oil plays will continue growing. One is how many economically viable sites > are left to drill; and how long it will it be before production from the > 10,000 or wells already pumping in the Bakken will fall to the place where > the 150 or so new wells coming into production each month will not be > enough > to keep total production growing. > Absolutely true this. > While not making a forecast as to when production will peak in the shale > fields, the EIA, however, does make a projection as to what will happen in > November 2013, not a particularly bold prediction but at least it is > something. According to the EIA report, what it terms the decline in > ?legacy > oil production? (i.e. those wells that have been producing for more than a > month) for the Bakken field is now at 60,000. The Texas?s Eagle Ford > field?s > production is now declining at 80,000 b/d and the no longer growing Permian > Field is declining at 34,000 b/d. > Winter in North Dakota can be rather harsh and we have already had some > snow > up there, so bringing new wells into production in the next few months can > be > difficult. Last winter the number of new wells coming on stream was closer > to > 100 per month rather than the 200 or so during better weather. Calling the winter in North Dakota "rather harsh" is like calling New Orleans a "little breezy" during a hurricane. I'm surprised they could bring 100 up in that kind of weather. The whole article from there forward would have been a little easier to follow if they had done year to year comparisons, rather than October to November comparisons. > Remember the number of producing wells in North Dakota is increasing at > about > 1,800 a year and even more down in Texas. > That sounds good. Though if they dry up quickly, that is clearly a bad thing for oil production long term. > In looking at the steep decline in production from legacy wells in the > Bakken > and Eagle Ford shales, decline between November 2012 and November 2013 > increased from 44,000 b/d to 60,000 b/d and from 54,000 b/d to 78,000 b/d > respectively. Given that there will be another 4,000 or so legacy wells in > production by this time next year the decline going on by this time next > year > is certain to be considerably greater. > It is hard to follow the logic from these numbers. The number goes up, but it is seen as a problem? > While the EIA does not seem willing to make a forecast, it sure looks as if > the increase in production for these two fields will be unlikely to keep up > with the rate of decline within the next 12 to 18 months and that US shale > oil production will no longer be growing. > That would be unfortunate for us all. > While it is possible that a surge of investment will increase the drilling > to > keep up with declines in production from the older wells, this is > expensive, > and for now it looks as if oil prices are heading for a level where fracked > oil production is not profitable. And thus, the fields will last longer until it is again profitable. Again, oil prices declining is seen as a "bad thing" and this doesn't make a lot of sense to me. > Outside geologists with access to > proprietary data on decline rates have been forecasting for some time now > that as the number wells increases and their quality declines, the shale > boom > will be coming to an end in the next two years. The release of EIA data > seems > to confirm these predictions. > That would indeed be unfortunate. I hope he is incorrect, but I fear he is not. Oil is a boom and bust kind of business, and booms don't last forever. I hope they find another place to go boom when we need it. Maybe Antarctica? Winters are a bit brisk there too... LOL -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Thu Oct 31 20:11:24 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2013 13:11:24 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Inflation graph In-Reply-To: References: <04bf01ced34e$02ba59c0$082f0d40$@att.net> <099f01ced3fd$7e167270$7a435750$@att.net> Message-ID: <035601ced675$60a273e0$21e75ba0$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Kelly Anderson >. That being said, it isn't a great comeback when complaining about the government inflation number. The government has all kinds of good reasons to lie about this. http://www.investopedia.com/university/inflation/inflation2.asp "Measuring inflation is a difficult problem for government statisticians." -Kelly The fault is in the terminology. Inflation isn't something that is measured in this case, but rather it is a report of the factor by which a particular government intends to adjust its pensioners for constant standard of living. The US government flatly refuses to let that number go negative, even if there are indications it would be perfectly appropriate to do it, if you assume food, fuel and labor out of the equation. As automation accumulates, the price of manufactured goods does decline. It doesn't wreck an economy if prices decline. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Thu Oct 31 20:32:56 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2013 21:32:56 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Inflation graph In-Reply-To: <010701ced585$f22d6130$d6882390$@att.net> References: <04bf01ced34e$02ba59c0$082f0d40$@att.net> <099f01ced3fd$7e167270$7a435750$@att.net> <010701ced585$f22d6130$d6882390$@att.net> Message-ID: <20131031203256.GQ10405@leitl.org> On Wed, Oct 30, 2013 at 08:37:29AM -0700, spike wrote: > It isn't so much inflation is a lie, but rather that it is different for Inflation is very much a lie, because there is a huge financial incentive to minimize the number. Many other statistics are doctured. E.g. the unemployment numbers are cooked ten times to sunday. And then there's the touching belief that GDP is a good metric to represent the real economy activities. It seems people want to be deceived, given that reality is rather glum. > each person. Show me where your money is going, I will show you how to > estimate your inflation rate. Mine is near zero, possibly negative. From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Thu Oct 31 20:35:54 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2013 14:35:54 -0600 Subject: [ExI] The Actual Visionary of the Future In-Reply-To: <20131029210218.GR10405@leitl.org> References: <20131025133031.GL10405@leitl.org> <20131025195114.GU10405@leitl.org> <20131028103712.GC10405@leitl.org> <20131029112928.GK10405@leitl.org> <20131029210218.GR10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 3:02 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 01:50:53PM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > > > Because even as a rule of thumb it is better than going completely in the > > dark. If you were in a cave, would you not want a small candle as opposed > > to nothing at all? I don't know if $1000 worth of computation will > > approximate the power of the human brain in 2025, 2029, 2035 or 2040 but > > the center of my guess is 2029 based on Moore's Law. That's slightly > better > > There are two problems with this statement. First, the brains don't > run LINPACK. So you don't know, you can only guess. It's based on a rough estimate as to how much computational power is required to simulate a brain. Since we don't yet know exactly how brains work, it is a rough estimate based on number of neurons, dendrites etc. and speed of neuron firing and the number of bytes of information such a firing might convey. As I recall, it was a very conservative number that was upped just to make sure. > Secondly, you > assume that Moore still continues until 2040, while we have data > that this isn't true even in 2013. > While I accept the clock speed data as being entirely convincing and incontrovertible, the computational power of the CPUs are still being increased in other ways. By how much is actually rather hard to say... Even when Moore's law held, software would only run 40% faster when the number of transistors doubled, according to one site. > > than saying, "I have no idea", isn't it? > > Where it matters I prefer to be bounded by pessimums rather than optimums. > Because optimism kills, that's why. > That's a pessimistic view of the world. > > Yes, I believe money properly invested (say in the stock market) does > like > > to work. It does create value. I know this because I've personally > > Most of stock market is very much like Monte Carlo. > The underlying reason for the stock market is valid. Companies need capital investment to grow. They get this going to the stock market. Of course, today's stock market is overvalued because of the Fed dumping money into the system through the banks (and then through Wallstreet) so New York doesn't feel the current economic realities the way the rest of the country (other than Elko, NV, North Dakota and parts of Texas) because they are in a government induced boom time. > > witnessed 8 million dollars grow into 32 million dollars over a period of > > ten years. Without investment, that could never have happened. > > > http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-BBP7VMgAIgM/TtL0OTVc5SI/AAAAAAAAATI/CmYlGzcsaco/s640/stock_market_crash_1930_10d.gif > > Fly, you fools! > I'm not talking about the stock market. I'm talking about investing in a startup company that produced something useful, then made the stockholders money. This model is important to bringing new ideas to fruition. Without it, there would be no new stuff. Period. > > > > I'm baffled by your use of the word "stuck" here. We just got to 4 > Tbytes > > > > > > You're getting far too frequently baffled for my liking. I'm showing > > > you instances where reality deviates from the nice linear semi-log. > > > There have been multiple smooth technology handovers in the platter > > > areal density which however shew a different scaling > > > http://www.hindawi.com/journals/at/2013/521086/fig1/ > > > > > > I think this goes more to proving my point than yours. > > None of that curve reminds you of nongreen in > http://www.gotw.ca/images/CPU.png > ? > Not really, so much. The blue part of the curve is clearly a concern. But the graph from before has a minimal downturn insofar as I can see. > > If you think you're seeing a linear semilog plot in there, then > > > throw away your ruler. Or buy new glasses. If you're now agreeing > > > that the growth is saturating, then why are you wasting my time? > > > > > > > The biggest downcurve in the plot is the part that projects into the > > future. Let's come back in 5 years and see what reality actually happens. > > Yes, let's come back in 5 years and see how these 2 year doublings > are fairing, and what the doubling time of Moore is by then. > Ok, let's. I hope for all our sakes that I am right. > > > > not that long ago. We always get "stuck" by this definition. I have > > > > attached my spreadsheet of hard drive prices that I have been > maintaining > > > > > > The metric you're looking for is areal density. > > > > > > > The metric I care about is inflation adjusted dollars/byte. I could care > > less about areal density, except that it is one (and only one) mechanism > by > > You don't see Thailand in areal density. You do see it in price. > Thus I saw it and you didn't. Makes sense. > There are no affordable 4-platter drives, so areal density is really > the only useful metric. > Perhaps there will be 4 platter affordable drives at some point, who knows? According to the one IEEE article, hard drives are on the path until 2020 or so. > > which dollars/byte goes down. > > > > I agree that brilliant people will find it EXTREMELY difficult to build > > features smaller than atoms, perhaps even impossible. But we aren't close > > enough to the problem to say that we KNOW it is impossible yet. If it is > > It's useful to know that the Si-Si bond length is 0.235 nm. Of course > you can't make widgets from just Si, so let's put the critical size down > to 1 nm. Intel is currently at 14 nm, and already has issues with > yield. So we're definitely close enough. > It is pretty damn close. I believe physicists and Intel will have a lot to talk about over the next 10 years for sure. > > Things like refineries do take a long time to build using today's > > techniques. I can see a day coming though where building such things will > > I can also see a day coming, but the day needs to be yesteryear, because > Ray's exponential photovoltaics doesn't produce liquid fuels. Nor > glass or aluminium, nor electricians, nor grid upgrades. > Yes, infrastructure is the main reason America is where it is today. And we are ignoring it at our peril. We could not be more in agreement on the infrastructure problems America faces. The politicians talk about it from time to time when a bridge falls down or something. Then go on to ignore it. The only answer IMHO is to privatize the highway system. Tolls for everyone! > > not take as long as they do today. Humans can only move so fast, but > robots > > can move faster. > > > > I refer you to: > > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KxjVlaLBmk > > > Wow, really, that didn't produce a response. That was WAY cool stuff. > > If you could imagine robots programmed by sophisticated scheduling > systems > > to build a refinery, I propose that you could, in principle, build a > > refinery rather quickly. The slowest part potentially is getting > government > > approval. > > > > Here is my biggest point. If you can imagine being able to do something > > given a reasonable amount of time and money with current technology, > then I > > can't imagine that given sufficient incentive that such a thing would not > > be accomplished. There is sufficient incentive to improve computational > > efficiencies, therefore, I cannot see such things not being accomplished. > > I can see such things not being accomplished. We suffer a death of thousand > papercuts, and then we use up whatever plutonium is around to make a few > strong points in trinitite. > Ok. The answer to that is more corporations and less government. But that's not happening. So maybe we are doomed after all. The biggest exponential I fear is the exponential growth of government. > > > We've already fallen from the semiconductor litho curve. > > > > > > > Let's talk about CPS/Second/inflation adjusted Dollar. I am intensely NOT > > What is CPS? Characters Per Second? > Calculations per second. > > interested in the details of how it happens. That is someone/everyone > > else's job at the moment. > > > > > See the NOR flash scaling at the URL I posted earlier. > > > We've already fallen of the PV deployment curve (and we > > > were never on the according infrastructure curve in the > > > first place). > > > > > > You can't jump from zero TW to 20 TW in 20 years. > > > Not unless you have MNT, and collectively we made sure we > > > failed to develop that. > > > > > > > When you say MNT, do you mean molecular nanotechnology? > > Yes. > Ok. > > > > Which part of "no more constant doubling times for you" you don't > > > understand? > > > > As long as it continues to double, I don't care if it takes 18 months or > 24 > > What is you doubling times double, too? Remember, we're already at 36 > months, > not 18. How do 6, 12, 24, 48 years sound like? > That sounds bad. I would like it to stay on track better than that, and I think that it is. > > or 36. You can't point to a date in the future and say "improvement stops > > I can show you an asymptote, and no futurist likes asymptotes. > Asymptotes do occur, they are real. If they are real, this futurist wants to understand them. > > here" can you? As long as it is doubling somewhat close to current > levels, > > the things I care about will continue to happen in the time scales I care > > about. > > > > I do care if the whole damn boat is going down. But that is a separate > > conversation. So long as there are SOME rich people/corporations/AGIs > > paying for the development of this stuff, I think it will continue to be > > developed. > > The reason Moore is off-track is because there's not enough money in > the world people are willing to throw at a problem. With each further > step the difficulty rises, so do the amounts of money. > Yes, it does get more difficult to proceed. But there is still a LOT of money in getting it better. Jan. 17, 2013 ? Intel Corporation today reported full-year revenue of $53.3 billion, operating income of $14.6 billion, net income of $11.0 billion and EPS of $2.13. The company generated approximately $18.9 billion in cash from operations, paid dividends of $4.4 billion, and used $4.8 billion to repurchase 191 million shares of stock. Sounds like a fair amount of money to me. But there is the other end of the exponential that it becomes exponentially more expensive to build the machinery that builds the exponentially faster CPUs. Those two exponents do fight against each other for sure. > > > > a slightly different time scale. And there is no guarantee that we > won't > > > > > > Which part of "you can't make widgets smaller than single atoms" you > don't > > > understand? > > > > > > > What part of "There's plenty of room at the bottom" do you not > understand. > > We're not close to the atomic limits on most things. > > We're in touching distance to atomic/quantum limits in CMOS semilitho > things. > I don't care about anything else if we're talking Moore. > Ok. When I say Moore, I mean in the more general sense of CPS/second/$ not in the limited sense of transistors per cm^2. I don't care how they do it, only that it happens. > > > > Sorry, you've lost me here. I don't know what these things are. > > > > > > It's a cheap mainframe, 75 kUSD entry level. Obviously, CPUs > > > build from such can be made from unobtainium. But flash drives > > > and mobile CPUs have low margins, so there's diminished incentive > > > to go to the next node (especially if the next node has lower > > > performance than current one). > > > > > > > Thank you for explaining that. I don't pay much attention to mainframes, > or > > Mainframes are money-makers. You can make things there you can't do > elsewhere, but there's the price to pay for it. > I have never played with a mainframe. I haven't even seen one for 20 years. I guess I assumed they were outdated. > > even highly parallel computers or supercomputers in my work. I'm mostly > > Supercomputers are highly parallel computers. > Yup. Very cool those. > > interested in PCs, tablets and cell phones, and perhaps Google glass. > > Supercomputers are pretty much like tablets and cell phones. PCs > are dead. > I like my PC. I hope they don't die entirely. > > Consumer related stuff. Yes, the cloud changes that, but I don't play in > > that world much. > > Cloud is a bit like cellphones, but without the floats. Same core > issue, though: power. > > > Given that, I'm still not understanding your point. Are these mainframes > > getting more expensive as time goes on? Are we not on some kind of curve > > They stay roughly the same. > I would guess that MIGHT be related to demand, but I don't know for sure. > > with respect to them? My understanding is that rack based computing is > > chugging along at an acceptable rate of growth. Am I missing something? > > x86 doesn't yet know it's dead yet. Developers don't yet know hardware > is going places they don't understand (some haven't yet figured out > that clocks stopped doubling yet). > I know that parallelism is becoming increasingly important, and that developers risk ignoring that at their own peril. Lamda expressions and functional programming are going to be really big deals in 10 years. Customers want speed. If hardware alone can't give it to them, then there will have to be a resurgence in programmer based optimization, which almost never happens today. > > > Anyone looking at an arbitrary time frame knows that darwinian > > > evolution still applies. > > > > > > > But we are in the era of memetic evolution, not darwinian. And memes > > replicate faster, and have a higher mutation rate. > > Darwin never missed a beat. The fitness function change, but we're > still imperfect replicators in a limited resource context. The future > is exactly like that, only far more so. Darwin stuck on fast-forward > is not a happy fun place. Do not taunt the happy-fun Darwin ball. > Darwinism is neither fun nor not fun, it just is. If you are correct, however, we have much less to fear from machines replacing us than I thought. > > > My thesis is that a postecosystem has a food web. > > > > > > > Ok, so here we may have a difference of opinion. I concede that the > future > > ecosystem will have an energy web, but not necessarily food based. > > Locally, atoms and Joules are limited, and there is still competition > and replication. Which is the main reason why nobody can ignore the > physical layer. > The physical layer is indeed important. That's why I support space exploration by non-human entities. > > > We're understanding processing the retina sufficiently to produce > > > code that the second processing pipeline can use. We have mapped > > > features of later processing stages to the point that we know what > > > you're looking at, or what you're dreaming of. We have off the > > > shelf machine vision systems for many industrial tasks. We have > > > autonomous cars that drive better than people. > > > > > > > I agree with all of this except the part of "we know what you're looking > > at"... if that is state of the art, then I'm way behind. > > I'm talking instrumented behaving subjects. Neuroscience is making > remarkable advances, driven by instrumentation and computers. > Good. If we get insight into how the brain works, then we're all that much closer to replicating it. > > > This is obviusly one of these cases where we've made some slight > > > progress over last few decades. > > > > > > > The progress that has been made in computer vision MOSTLY comes from > Moore, > > I agree, we're hardware-limited. Which is why the early failure of Moore > is so dismal. > For computer vision it would be dismal indeed. I am glad we seem to have gotten far enough the curve to have automated vehicles. That should add a few months to life expectancy. > > not from better algorithms. Now, better computers enable algorithms that > > are less efficient to be tried, and therefore one could argue that some > new > > algorithms have emerged from Moore. There has been progress in computer > > vision to be sure. The progress is slow. It is largely based upon > > computational improvements. Algorithmic improvement has occurred, but not > > at the same rate. > > > > > > Obviously, Germany has to figure out some other way to pay for their > > > fossil fuel imports in the near future. > > > > > > > Ah. You are referring to Germany as a car manufacturing nation. I thought > > you were referring to Germany as the solar energy capital of the > universe. > > Germany is a good demonstration why solar is anti-Moore. It's very easy > to double very little, but just as in the grains of rice on a chessboard > it suddenly turns sigmoid once you're in serious cash flow country. > I never thought installed solar was exponential without serious installation automation, which is nearly impossible on roof tops. I was under the impression that solar panels W/$ was exponential with a doubling of 3.5 years, but I haven't done my own research on that one. > > Thus my confusion. > > > > You never commented on whether we would have autonomous cruise control. > > We've been having autonomous cruise control for a while, the interesting > part is where it's cheap enough for conventional cars, and the insurance > issue is addressed. This can be rather soon, I'm not going to make a > prediction because I expect significant disruption ahead, scrambling > pretty every growth prognosis. > Well, in thinking it through, I'm not entirely sure that this is a bad thing for Germany. While yes, the duty cycle on cars is dismal... If we share a car, it will get 300K miles faster, requiring a replacement. That will require building more cars if the total number of miles driven doesn't decrease. Right??? > > > We are already off-Moore. > > > > In the transistors per square cm sense, we probably are. Though it's hard > > to find data to support even that. > > Just as peak oil, such data is only visible a bit after the fact. > Some have called it as early as 2011, we'll see it soon enough. > It is hard to figure out with the numbers out there. On the optimistic side, however, one of the reasons we're off Moore in the near future is because Intel is being secretive about what they are doing next. > > Not in the dollars per computation realm, unless I'm missing something > > basic. Honestly, I can't find much data on whether we're on or off Moore. > > It's frustrating not to know. > > It is, most search engines are getting increasingly useless for > technical queries. > I once tried to compare the computer on the lunar module to my desktop computer. Eventually I had to give up because they were just so hard to compare to each other, even having all the numbers in hand. It's a little like comparing IQ... what is "twice as smart" anyway? > > > The question is how long it will take until > > > a different technology can pick up scaling, at least for a brief while > > > (if you're at atomic limits in the surface, you're only a few doublings > > > away from where your only option is to start doubling the volume). > > > > I don't have trouble with doubling the volume. > > Remember the grains of rice on a chessboard thing. Somebody has to pay > for these and move these. In the beginning, it is very easy. > I get that it becomes more expensive. Intel is investing billions in the future. If they bet right, they will stay on Moore for a while. If they bet poorly, then we're in trouble. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Thu Oct 31 20:39:01 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2013 14:39:01 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Inflation graph In-Reply-To: <035601ced675$60a273e0$21e75ba0$@att.net> References: <04bf01ced34e$02ba59c0$082f0d40$@att.net> <099f01ced3fd$7e167270$7a435750$@att.net> <035601ced675$60a273e0$21e75ba0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 2:11 PM, spike wrote: > As automation accumulates, the price of manufactured goods does decline. > It doesn?t wreck an economy if prices decline. > I am not an economist, but if prices decline, you are better off holding onto cash, rather than investing it. That is a recipie for disaster because investment would stop, and the markets would lose their liquidity. That would be a bad thing. The price of technology going down isn't a problem because we always buy the new stuff and the old stuff obsolesces fast. If we get off Moore significantly, then old stuff is just about as good, and then we have a problem because deflation means something even in the tech world then. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Thu Oct 31 21:04:48 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2013 15:04:48 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: <080201ced3a0$48ed1c50$dac754f0$@att.net> References: <2C17352F-6BCF-4DF9-BFF0-6333CC83FDA1@me.com> <080201ced3a0$48ed1c50$dac754f0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sun, Oct 27, 2013 at 11:40 PM, spike wrote: > *>?* *On Behalf Of *Kelly Anderson > > ** > > > http://money.cnn.com/2013/10/23/technology/obamacare-website-fix/index.html?iid=EL > > ** ** > > They mention a number I think must be in error, 500 million lines of > code. Indeed? No one has yet offered us a reasonable explanation for what > the hell all those lines of code think they are doing in there. Why did > they need all that? Software gurus please, does that tell you what they > could have had in mind? With half a billion lines of code, there is just > no possible way they could secure the data. With that much code they can?t > even really debug it all, no way! Surely there must be a mistake, or I am > failing to understand something fundamental. With all that code, I am > naturally suspicious as all get out, never mind the recent revelations. > I think the answer lies in redundant code. If you divide that by 50 states, you'll find that there are 10 million lines of code per state. Since each state is doing it's own thing independently, this becomes much more understandable. Nevertheless, 10 million lines of code is a boatload of code for what they are doing. Suppose that half the code is the Fed's side, now it's 5 million lines per state. Still a huge amount, but it doesn't sound QUITE so bad. Then again, the Linux kernel is around 15 million lines of code. 50 million in Microsoft Windows 7. And that's bloated. In any case, it has some seriously bad architecture going on there. I suspect many of the lines of code are linked in legacy code, which is not optimized or set up to do the sorts of things that it's being asked to do now. It is likely a complete cluster f**k. **** > > Suppose they do start over. Why not go with that big spreadsheet idea? > The user would just download the whole thing, compare costs at their > leisure, or if Kelly is right and they can?t do that, just have someone > with actual brains help them, figure out what they want, find the company > which offers the closest to that, then see if the price is within reality, > or opt out, not all that different from buying a car. > More like figuring out what to pay on your taxes, I'm afraid. But then you have to have a system that they can use. Try getting the price of an asprin in the hospital BEFORE you take it, and you start to see the problem here. > Really simple for most people who don?t get employer health insurance: I > am betting most will opt out, at least at first when it doesn?t cost much, > and really doesn?t cost anything, since the ACA doesn?t specifically > empower the IRS to collect, and after the way they treated the Republicans > in the house this month, goooood luck getting them to pass a law to empower > collection. The Republicans are likely to tell them to go to hell and take > their ACA law with them. > I'll opt out unless I have an employer providing insurance by then. > All they need is a big downloadable spreadsheet, with every company?s deal > in there, simple. > > ** ** > > >?Omar, America will soon enough have a system similar to Canada's. > Obamacare is an enormous cluster fuck designed to implode so that we have > to go to a single payer system. Just wait for the boom. ?Kelly**** > > ** ** > > Here?s the real kicker: I and plenty of others would likely go for a > single payer system under one condition: that it be done on a state level. > We don?t have enough control over the Fed to do this, so no way I could go > along with it. We see corruption spilling out more every day, IRS chief > taking the fifth, another IRS chief sharing taxpayer data with the > government, now we hear the NSA is spying on Angela Merkel. Clearly this > bunch is corrupt to the bone. > I see NOTHING wrong with the NSA spying on Angela Merkel. The only thing they did wrong was allowing themselves to get caught. > **** > > Actually states are free to set up a single payer system now, and have > always been free to do that. That none of them are doing it should be some > kind of hint that it might not work as well as it sounds. > Well, if you count other nations, lots of people are under single payer systems. It's just uniquely un-American. I thought of something else. All this time and oxygen spent on Obamacare guarantees that we aren't doing anything to reform Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Since those are the REAL problem areas in the federal budget, Obamacare is like the magician making us look away from where the real action is. I can't believe I didn't see the trick before now! Even talk radio is ignoring that stuff for the moment. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Thu Oct 31 22:51:43 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2013 15:51:43 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Warren Buffett is worried too and thinks Republicans are "asinine" In-Reply-To: References: <2C17352F-6BCF-4DF9-BFF0-6333CC83FDA1@me.com> <080201ced3a0$48ed1c50$dac754f0$@att.net> Message-ID: <047d01ced68b$c5fa0c60$51ee2520$@att.net> Note, most of this is US-centric political stuff. Unless you have a special interest in that, do move along, nothing to see here. Or skip down to that last part, with which you might have some fun. spike >. On Behalf Of Kelly Anderson >>.the government, now we hear the NSA is spying on Angela Merkel. Clearly this bunch is corrupt to the bone. >.I see NOTHING wrong with the NSA spying on Angela Merkel. The only thing they did wrong was allowing themselves to get caught. Ja, I do see something wrong with the NSA spying on me however. If I were Merkel, I suppose I would feel likewise. A problem I have had with the current bunch is they don't seem to know the difference between our friends and our enemies. They alienate exactly the kinds who we should be working hard to strengthen alliances, the Brits, the French, the commies, the Italians, DEFINITELY the krauts, all our natural allies as the world realigns after retiring the old capitalism/communism divide, these having merged into one nearly indistinguishable mass. The government should somehow farm out the task of surveillance to private companies and industries, for none of the above list are likely to be military adversaries. But our companies will compete against each other, and it looks like China will be home to the most of the strongest of those companies. We see the current bunch are saying the Tea Party patriots are terrorists and coming very close to identifying them as national enemies. OK then what happens if they get a bunch of seats in congress next fall, more than they already have? Good luck in getting them to deal, after that treatment. So now Americans with libertarian political leanings are terrorists, while a guy who jumps on a desk and starts murdering fellow officers while shouting "Joseph Smith Ahkbar" is a perpetrator of workplace violence? They can't bring themselves to declare that guy a terrorist, but a few politicians are terrorists, with bombs strapped to their chests and guns to our heads? Indeed? So what if the IRS does manage to destroy the Tea Party? Who is next? Republicans? OK, once they are gone, who is next? You? There is no one to speak up in your defense, for they have already been disposed. It sure looks to me like we are about 2/3 down Hayek's Road to Serfdom. >.I thought of something else. All this time and oxygen spent on Obamacare guarantees that we aren't doing anything to reform Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Since those are the REAL problem areas in the federal budget, Obamacare is like the magician making us look away from where the real action is. I can't believe I didn't see the trick before now! Even talk radio is ignoring that stuff for the moment. -Kelly I have heard a closely related theory, is that this O-care is a sacrificial lamb, an intentional failure intended to distract us from immigration reform or a path to single payer. The reason I don't find the theory compelling is that health care reform is the cornerstone of liberal thought, a huge expansion of government power, and something liberals have really wanted for a really long time. To fail this badly would need to call into question the whole notion of big government being trusted with anything, never mind our entire healthcare system, along with our medical records. I can't imagine Obama and his people wanting to decrease the power of central government. I can imagine a younger generation coming up which is scarcely recognizable as a younger generation. They may wake up and see that the government came up with all these healthcare reforms and then sent them the bill. Then it will be the sixties all over again with many of the roles reversed in a sense. Instead of burning draft cards, that generation might burn their W2 forms. Then we have a whole new set of headaches. > I'll opt out unless I have an employer providing insurance by then. Kelly Me too. In any election the guy with the simplest shortest bumper sticker gets a big advantage. This was known even before there were bumpers, back in 1840 with Tippecanoe and Tyler too, which could be even further shortened to Tip and Ty. Later, it was: I Like Ike. In the coming election I can imagine the bumper stickers: Obama Lied, HealthCare Died Hillary Failed to Answer the 3am Call HealthCare.gov is why the Republicans Just Said No My favorite I have thought of so far: Tune In, Turn On, Opt Out I can imagine a counterpart to that, perhaps a T-shirt worn by drunken cheerleaders at a frat party, emblazoned with the words: OPT IN! or no pussy for YOU! Or a related meme, also appropriate on a young attractive female body: Opt in, shell out or fuck off. Or You no opt in, I no put out. {8^D Kelly we could make a ton of money selling those shirts. Inviting creative minds in ExI-chat for T-shirt or bumper sticker suggestions, with no particular political view preferred. I am far more interested in making money than spreading any particular meme. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: