he's a gross man that won by the narrowest of margins; look where we stood when Obama ended his term and look where when the molester is out (hopefully sooner than later) and judge; our world reputation has already taken a huge hit; stock market is down; product prices soon to go up; he's a foolish, foolish man surrounded by idiots like bannon

This was a backlash against corruption. (Oddly won by an insanely corrupt man)
This is EXACTLY what I've said was going to happen since the day the DNC collusion was exposed with no consequences for Clinton. She should have been disqualified by the cheating her subordinates did, but far too many of her supporters had blinders on to her myriad of faults and now they've screwed us all.
Understand that this means reversal on climate change, meaning more CO2 and less regulation, and probably ignoring the recent accords. Be ready for us to pass the point of no return (although I believe we passed that point in the 90's).

Republicans....it's 100% on you now to prove your ideas work. The stock market was 18300 yesterday, unemployment just over 5%, and gas is $2.20. We'll see what those numbers are in 2 years of pure right wing control.

Again democracy cant decide the death penalty, abortions, taxes, religion, defense spending and all the other puny details. Democracy can choose leaders, agendas and assign responsibility.

Noocracy is just a new name for despotism, you let inteligent people have their way, the first thing they do is take care of themselves. Stupid people must have a fair representation. Experiments are being conducted to just let them think they have a fair representation, but I am afraid they may not be that stupid. I mean I hope they (we) are not.

Democracy is fairly simple and straightforward - either there is a way to change the ruler or there is not. Putin cant lose. Erdogan cant lose. Chinese communist party cant lose. Castro cant lose. Not democracy. Obviously the details of implementation are very nuanced, like if there are only two parties is that democracy? Etc.

Basically if the ruler makes it impossible for himself to be deposed peacefully democracy ends.

So let us assume some artificial system to pick perfect leaders could be devised. They would have no responsibility (after all they are the best possible leader) no compassion (everyone else is stupid) and no motivation (Im no. 1 so why try harder). Add a secret police and Stalinist Russia is born.

The ignorant herd is painfully hit and miss, but so is the stock market. This is still preferable to any dictator, even a clever one.

What do you do? Pressure anyone who will listen to push for an immediate disqualification of Clinton and Sanders nomination, fuck the primary vote tally, it clearly wasn't in any way valid.
What you shouldn't do is vote for Hillary anyway, rewarding that behavior and guaranteeing more of it, but also don't vote for Trump...I'll be writing in Sanders....
.....but do vote for any other Democrats/Independents/Non Repulicans so Trump doesn't have a Republican congress, and hope the Democrats grow a pair quickly enough to thwart his disastrous 'plans'...whatever they may turn out to be on the day he tries to enact them, and just refuse to hold any confirmation hearings on supreme court justices while a psychopath is in office.
If America can't get it's head out of it's ass enough to at least do that, we deserve the civil war that a Trump led Republican government is going to cause. Maybe it will kill a few hundred million of us and we can have a decent nation again sometime in the future...assuming it's not all glowing with the ground thoroughly salted.

What else should you do? Sell out of the stock market in late October and buy gold bouillon. ;-)

Actually, I would say I have a pretty good understanding of machine learning. I'm a software developer and while I don't work on machine learning day-to-day, I've certainly read a good deal about it.

As I've already said, Tesla's solution is not autonomous driving, completely agree on that (which is why I said the video is probably fake or the driver was just messing with people).

A stock market simulator is a different problem. It's trying to predict trends in an inherently chaotic system.

A self-driving car doesn't have to have perfect prediction, it can be reactive as well as predictive. Again, the point is not whether self-driving cars can be perfect. They don't have to be, they just have to be as good or better than the average human driver and frankly, that's a pretty low bar.

That said, I don't believe the first wave of self-driving vehicles will be passenger cars. It's far more likely to be freight (specifically small freight, i.e. courier vans).

I guess we'll see what happens.

@ChaosEngine

I'm not sure you understand what machine learning is. As I said, the trigger for your child.runsInFront() is based on numerical inputs from sensors that is fed into a formula with certain parameters and coefficients. This has been optimized from many hours of driving data but ultimately it's not able to predict novel events as it can only optimize off existing data. There is a base level of error from bias-variance tradeoff to this model that you cannot avoid. It's not simply a matter of logging enough hours of driving. If that base error level is not low enough, then autonomous cars may never be deemed reliable to be unsupervised.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias-variance_tradeoff
Or specifically: http://scott.fortmann-roe.com/docs/docs/BiasVariance/biasvariance.png

It's the same reason that a stock market simulator using the same method (but different inputs) is not accurate. The difference would be that while 55% correct for the stock market may be sufficiently accurate and useful to be profitable, a driving algorithm needs to be near perfect. It's true that a sensor reaction time to someone braking unexpectedly may be much better than a human's and prevent a crash, so yes in certain cases autonomous driving will be safer but because of exceptional cases, but it may never be truly hands-off and you may always need to be ready to intervene, just like how Tesla works today (and why on a regulatory level it passed muster).

The combination of Google hyping its project and poor understanding of math or machine learning is why news reports just parrot Google's reliability numbers. Tesla also, has managed to convince many people that it already offers autonomous driving, but the auto-steer / cruise and changing lanes tech has existed for around a decade. Volvo, Mercedes and Audi all have similar features. There is a tendency to treat this technology as magical or inevitable when there are some unavoidable limitations behind it that may never be surmounted.

Stock market trading is almost completely automated now. Just computer algorithms trading with algorithms.

As far as the "will there be a crash this year?" question, my guess is probably not.

Uber is a conservative idea, not a libertarian idea. Big difference, even though it is nuanced. For example, under corporate protections, loopholes, hedge fund / stock market finagling and so forth, Wal-mart has grown (more) than it could have ever imagined.

Still, the free market by itself doesn't work. However, just noting the hybrid system we have is almost worse in a way.

No need for snarky. I argued your point but less one-sided. Yes, America is too quick to put bullets into flesh and blood. And yes, I agree this was a dumb risk they took. But it was their risk, and it paid off. If this was the stock market, they would be rich.

Your video, How Congress Cashes In On The Stock Market, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Most of the stuff he mentioned (human rights, taxes, writing a check, how stock market works, etc) were taught in my high school civics class. My high school (and middle school) had other practical classes too - wood shop, metal shop, home-ec, etc.

Of course all this was pre no-child-left-behind, so who knows how shite it is now compared to then...

Stupid?....well, that's the pot calling the clear glass pitcher black.
Far better leader?!? If only I thought you might be joking, but I know you aren't.
Show me something Obama suggested that's worse than a single one of these Bush/republican plans
Free Bailouts-a Bush/republican idea, repeatedly, getting nothing for it.
9/11- warned about but completely ignored by Bush.
Katrina-do I need to say a word?
The second great depression- (according to republicans)-caused by republicans removing the safeguards put on the stock market and banks, allowing them to play fast and loose, totally screwing our economy.
Iraq-again, do I need to say a word?
Putting the Iraq war 'off the books' to try to blame Obama for the cost that was ignored during Bush-uh...yeah, keep trying that.
Cutting taxes while raising spending outrageously-that was Bush
Raising the national debt more than any president before him-I know fox told you that was Obama, but it was really Bush. Even the first years when federal income was severely depressed (thanks to the economy Bush left us with) he didn't spend like Bush, if you look at the REAL numbers, not the white washed, no war, no homeland security, no bailout numbers the republicans pretend are real.

Because the republicans decided that their plan was to obstruct ANY idea from Obama (clearly stated BEFORE he took office, and followed through), it didn't matter a whit how he led, they refused to follow. It's not about his leadership, it's about the republican leadership thinking that beating Obama is more important than governing. Refusing a 10-1 deal where for every $1 in raised taxes they get $10 in spending cuts....and they said NO! Get real for once, it's not Obama's leadership or lack thereof that's screwing us, it's partisan politics being more important than the nation...and we all know which side plays that game more often and harder. (EDIT: I do admit that both 'sides' play that game, however.)
10 votes total? What the F*&K are you talking about. You mean 10 REPUBLICAN votes in the house? You are simply wrong he only got 10 votes total.
"The House has never failed to pass an annual budget resolution since the current budget rules were put into place in 1974. However this spring noted that the GOP-led Congress didn’t pass a final resolution in 1998, 2004 and 2006."
..."And the politics of the moment are a far cry from last year, when the House and Senate easily passed Obama’s first budget on the president’s 100th day in office. The budget measure last year did not attract any GOP support."
Well...enough said. I know you won't really take any of this to heart, you drank the fox news koolaid long ago and facts no longer matter.

QE certainly isn't perfect. Giving liquidity to banks in theory should give them an incentive to loan it out (they earn more by doing that rather than sitting on it or putting it in super safe assets like Treasuries). However, they have generally erred on the conservative tack, partly also because their capital requirements (how much cash/equity they have to sit on) was raised. Companies that have done well and not received bailouts have also hoarded cash rather than invest because of uncertainty around the economy.

Meanwhile stock market valuations have soared because of a lack of other assets to put it in. Many of these cash holdings from corporations and banks have been dumped in Treasuries. This has reduced the return from Treasuries to a miserable amount. Meanwhile commodity prices have also tanked. That pretty much left stocks, which are arguably now inflated in price (and historically overvalued) largely as a result of the QE money handed out to banks.

What oritteropo says is very correct, if any poor or middle class person had opened a brokerage account and dumped their money in an S&P or Nasdaq tracking fund at or near the bottom of the 2009 market, they would have tripled their money or more. The option was certainly available and affordable to anyone.

The problem was that there were arguably limited alternatives. What the Australian government here did, which was far more effective (and completely avoided any recession) is simply gave out cash to everyone. Unlike QE money which just sat around in safe assets this got spent (largely to pay off debts, but this would have to happen anyway and sped up a recovery).

The issue was, this was fiscal policy, and we could easily afford it because we had (and still have) very low debt levels. A country like the UK could not so easily do this, certainly not many of the troubled European countries. The US arguably could have because with the USD being such a crux global currency, there is virtually no chance it would have led to a currency crash or brought about serious worries about being able to service their debt levels (even if they are high).

Nicely illustrated example of a rigged stock market: http://www.nanex.net/aqck2/4661.html

Worth reading, easy enough to understand, even for folks like us.

I'm advocating passivity because I don't recognise overpopulation as a threat, more an inconvenience, and one that we couldn't really prevent even if we wanted to.

I don't see what's preposterous or optimistic about taking widely accepted birth rate data and projecting based off that. Birth rates are predictable and stable sampled over a large population. The data consistently shows that as societies come out of poverty, their birth rates fall. The only assumption here is that there isn't another GFC event that hinders growth which at this point is not particularly likely.

All taken into account we already know it's plateauing, and have known for decades. This isn't a hypothesis, it's happening right now. Unless you can show me why this trend will suddenly and irrevocably reverse, despite population data being incredibly stable and predictable historically, it seems the onus is on you to explain why you're so pessimistic.

Again, I think you're still conflating (1) what I want / whether it's bad versus (2) whether it could plausibly be stopped. I would also rather live in a less populated world. At current rates of technology and resource utilisation, things would be cheaper, there'd be more to go around. Reality is not like that. But as I said before, every policy focus has an opportunity cost. I don't see a plateauing population as a threat and I would rather see that effort devoted to poverty which will help reduce it anyway.

We're nowhere near an economic bubble. Maybe a short term stock market valuation bubble right now, but there's plenty of economic under-utilisation in the US and Europe, and China and other developing countries have decades to grow.

The term technological bubble is a bit nonsensical. You can have a technology sector bubble but actual physical technology which works now, will not magically stop working tomorrow based on inflated expectations. If you're saying instead we'll reach some cusp of innovation, well people have predicting that for decades.

We're nowhere near a peak oil event. Every time people say current known reserves are dwindling, they either (1) discover a huge reserve in under developed countries that were previously not surveyed (Africa and parts of SE Asia at the moment), or (2) something like fraking comes along which unlocks new supply. The US is forecast to be the largest oil exporter by 2020 based on that second point.

Hell, I'll play devil's advocate with you. Suppose we do reach a glut. We'll know this at least a decade ahead based on dwindling new reserve discoveries. The price of energy will leap up far, far ahead of us running out. That will spur innovation in more efficient sources of energy and will incentivise both individuals and businesses to be more energy efficient. A gradual adjustment like I've talked about endlessly here. Why am I wrong?

Environmental damage is a different issue and something that I agree needs to actually be addressed. I'm sure if you search back through my posts you'll see me talking about the economic rationale of addressing this directly when corporations who pollute aren't subject to the negative externalities that they impose in our current capitalist system and that will inherently create issues. Hopefully countries will take note of the smog clouds in China's big cities.