>> ^brycewi19:

>> ^blahpook:
The amount of manual labor here was surprising.

Yet refreshing.


To each his own, but ... why?

I grew up on a large family farm for wheat and corn in Kansas. My father talks about how from the time he was born till the time I was born, the farm operations went from being handled by about 10-15 full-time family member workers plus maybe 60+ seasonal harvest workers to having roughly 4 full-time workers and an additional 8 or so harvest part-timers. 75 plus down to 12.

First they got tractors for tilling. Then planter attachments for the tractors. Then the first harvester machines, etc. etc. on down to today, where we've got 2 massive combines running during harvest, 1 or 2 tractors with grain hoppers (serve other purposes outside of harvest season), 4-6 semi trucks with grain hopper trailers, and a central location with a set of large grain storage bins.

With the machines, we get higher yields per acre and less loss due to human error mistakes. We harvest over twice as much land in significantly less time. In the past 60 years, grain prices have crept up at a rate way lower than inflation, while prices for labor-intensive crops like fruit actually outpace inflation.

I am most definitely a biased source, but from my perspective more mechanization equals more food to go around, and lower food prices for everyone. I'd say that is pretty refreshing too!

No offense meant, just a different perspective.

Why the double standard with climate change?

Surely you don't consider those the same thing?

Toxicity is pretty simple. You run a test feeding creatures cyanide, and they always die if you give them enough.

By comparison, climate change involves interdependent processes that span virtually every branch of known science. I work in an academic environment and have seen what frequently comes out of inter-disciplinary studies. It comes out with stuff like the first link I gave above. Some climate guys who aren't very good with math go ahead and use a misapply a statistical method. That misuse is KNOWN and EXPECTED to give a falsely zero-biased result in the situation the climatologists misapplied. The climatologists then unknowingly went ahead and declared the zero-biased results they received as unique and important evidence that past climate change had little variance from zero. The reality, as evidenced in the article I linked, shows that the truth of the matter is that much better statistical methods exist for the application, and when they were applied by the climatologists, low and behold the historic variation leapt up, so much so as to make the last 100 years no longer look anything like the anomaly they did before.

With climate change there are a million variations and possibilities. The most important question to answer is just how imminent and severe are the effects we are facing. The most straight forward test is the one that Mann et al wowed the IPCC and the world with, showing that the temperature change over the last 100 years was unlike anything in the last 2 thousand. It turns out though that in truth, Mann's original results were an artifact not of human emissions, but of human error in math. Mann's new results show that the earth has been as warm as today multiple times over the last 2k years, and that in that time temperature has previously dropped just as fast as it rose in the last hundred.


As to what to do with unknowns, it still depends on the assumptions you come in with. What percentage do you want to lower emissions by? How much of a difference will that make to future temperature? What is the cost of lowering emissions by that much? What are the costs of dealing the increased temperature instead?

It's not a simply problem with some easy logical answer that is independent of those questions. What's worse, is now those questions not only span scientific fields, but they bleed over into economics and political science as well.

Your assessment before marks the cost of lowering CO2 emissions as moderate and the costs of not lowering them as potential huge. If the cost of lowering CO2 emissions is to be kept moderate, it means not lowering them by very much or not lowering them very quickly. Either way, it means if the effects of CO2 are drastic, we are STILL going to have to adapt significantly in addition to the money spent on reducing emissions. It sounds to me like just a variation on my own suggestion to be honest. A modest investment in battery and nuclear infrastructure, and adapt accordingly with the impacts that doesn't cover or accommodate. The most dire and immediate adaptations are ones that need to be made anyways, so I again don't see the risk as severe as others claim. It's not as though New Orleans was all peachy and good until things got warmer. A city on the coast below sea level, or islands a few feet above sea level could use a lot of dollars spent on adaptation even if we lowered emissions to the point of lowering sea levels by a foot.

[redacted]

@bareboards2: I'm not implying I assume a lack of human error. I'm explicitly stating you must use extreme caution when using both *dupeof and *isdupe as to mitigate your own error before you make it. If someone else after the first *dupeof just comes along and posts a comment stating "This is not a dupe," that should have the same affect of invoking *notdupe. (This is why *isdupe exists.)

If the first person is erring when they *dupeof and the second person is also erring when they *isdupe, then they'll both lose their privileges for being so overwhelmingly careless.

These powers cannot be taken so lightly as to encourage people to think, "Well, I'll just invoke without doing any research. If I'm wrong, we'll make siftbot undo it for me. Yay for ignorance!"

You assume no human error, lucky. There is more than you realize, as the votes so far are indicating.



>> ^lucky760:

>> ^arvana:
@lucky760 my understanding of the suggestion is that notdupe would cancel a dupeof before isdupe is called. I know that correcting a mistakenly duped video after isdupe would be a nightmare, but in between the two should be easy. amirite?

Thanks for your Cliff's Notes interpretation of this poll.
Now I understand the desired functionality, but how useful/necessary would that really be? If no one else invokes isdupe, then the initial dupeof will just be ignored. The lack of a confirmation isdupe invocation is the same as adding an additional notdupe invocation, except the latter would just serve to clutter the post.
I still vote no against what would be an unnecessary and comment cluttering invocation.

http://videosift.com/video/You-Have-No-Idea-How-Wrong-You-Are

Here is one source. He discusses how corrupt our government was in prior decades, and how we now have arguably the least corrupt government in our history.

Not saying that he is 100% right, but comparatively speaking, I think he has a point.

I also look at foreign governments that are labeled "corrupt" in the media and I see little in common with America.

Perhaps our real issue here is the definition of "corrupt."

And now we sneak up on why I called you naive.

Naive is a negative word, though. A more accurate adjective would be "idealistic."

I have found it is the idealists who are the most devastated by an imperfect world. I see human error, I hear "corrupt police state." I see political compromise in a complicated world, I hear "spineless sell-out and/or corrupt."

And we get back to why I admire you -- it is your idealism that gets me to rethink my positions.

You can't tell it, but I erase many things before I post them. I find that as I write, I see the fallacy and the complacency in my unexamined world view, and I re-think, re-examine, re-write.

The first time @blankfist called me an "apologist" I took a good hard look at how I thought about different topics (after I insulted him back, those were early days here on the sift.) I still hold the same points of view in general, but I am not so knee jerk in my responses. Knowing that blankie is watching, or might be watching, I consider my words carefully. My Imaginary Blankfist keeps me intellectually honest.

So that is why I say our government is not corrupt. What would you like me to know now? What do you think I can honestly say differently? Convince me, my friend, convince me!

In reply to this comment by GenjiKilpatrick:
Hah. Thanks for even acknowledging my questions & concerns.

Tho after this whole "The government is not corrupt" thing.

I'm much more curious about what in your experience and knowledge has lead you to that conclusion.

>> ^blankfist:

It would be very hard for businesses to get as large as corporations do today without the unfair support of government. This means more competition, and logically as a result more small businesses would sprout up, and therefore more jobs could be created.

I think taking away the liability limits ultimately raises the barrier for creating a new business, since it increases the potential downside risk of any new investment, and worse, makes predicting the worst case scenario nigh impossible.

The knock on effects of that would be that investors would be more reluctant to invest, meaning that interest rates would go up, and the tolerance for risk would go down.

In some sense I think we'd see companies that are larger, but also "flatter" in a sense. I'm thinking more McDonalds, Best Buy, and Amazon, and a lot less heavy industry with big, expensive, dangerous, illiquid capital investment.

I sorta say "so what, it's more fair, and restrains corporations' flagrant disregard for safety and the environment".

However, for people who want to see a bazillion small businesses, I think you want the limited liabilities there to help people simplify their risk assessments.
>> ^blankfist:

I don't see why we'd need regulatory requirements or unionization. Most of the responsibility would be held at the top levels, such as CEOs or COOs or supervisors or whomever. And this can all be decided by some form of conflict resolution whether that be the courts or arbitration.

Well, courts are guided by law in those sorts of determinations, arbitration is more guided by the relative strength of the bargaining positions of the participants (i.e. little people get reliably crushed).

Which is to say, we'd need to set some sort of standard on how accountability works, or it'll only be the guy following orders who gets the short end of the stick.

>> ^blankfist:
But my point was that people couldn't escape liability just because they're employed. If your boss told you to murder someone, for instance, you know that to be wrong and would hopefully not follow through. But if you did murder someone, obviously you'd be held accountable, right? kind of the same idea. Maybe not exactly, but it's close enough.

For something as serious and obvious as murder, sure.

But say my boss tells me not to order the scheduled maintenance for critical safety equipment because "it's not in the budget"? If things go wrong later, am I to be held responsible because my idiot boss didn't budget for proper maintenance? Do I really need to constantly present my boss with waivers from legal liability for every decision I think has a potential risk? Can he fire me for demanding them too often?

>> ^blankfist:
If a business spilled oil like BP did, then all the parties involved would be liable within reason. If you were hired to clean the toilets on the rig, then you're probably not going to be responsible in any direct or indirect way. But if you are hired as a professional to do a specific job like supervising the boom or drilling or whatever, and that contributed somehow to the spill, then you're probably going to inherit some substantial responsibility. And I think that's more than fair.


I agree with that, but in my experience as a technical professional, I have to say that unsafe shit is almost exclusively something that happens when management refuses to pony up the cash to do things the right way.

But let's look at the other side of the coin. For the sake of argument, let's pretend management didn't do anything obviously wrong on Deepwater Horizon, and it was just some guy out on the rig who just made a stupid mistake and caused the whole thing to happen.

Should that guy bear all of the financial liability alone, while the CEO's, shareholders, and the company itself are held blameless?

I say even in that case, the blame needs to go upward -- management hired the guy, and someone higher up approved the process that was susceptible to massive damage coming from one guy's human error. They're the ones who put the oil rig in his hands, they're the ones responsible for the damage he did with it.

>> ^GeeSussFreeK:
In many of the situations were a parachute might have been useful in these accidents, the plane breaks up in mid air, making it moot
And like someone pointed out, a good majority of crashes happen on take off and landing where chutes would be relatively useless


yea most crashes happen at take off or landing, the majority of the rest happen because the pilots fly the plane in a mountain or something, most mechanical failures either kills you on takeoff, makes the plane explode or is fairly easy to recover from so you can do an emergency landing.
But almost all crashes today are due to human error in one form or another, so the planes doesn't need parachutes, it needs to get rid of the pilots and in some places their operators.

The speeds and impacts needed for the successful recovery of a hardened rocket booster with no organic lifeforms
is vastly different than the parachute system needed for a passenger vehicle. The "wight" issue isn't relative to the strength factor needed for the parachute, but the size needed to slow said weight. Once you get to a certain weight, you get the snowball effect. The weight from the size of the parachute adds a significant weight value as to need a even larger parachute (also note that empty rocket boosters are much lighter than full rocket boosters). Then you need more fuel to carry that parachute and still accomplish the same flight time, which in turn needs a slightly larger chute. Once you reach a certain weight of plane and want to carry a parachute, the plane becomes more of a parachute deployment vessel and less whatever it was originally designed for.

It is why they don't have such a system on the space shuttle for the "just in case", because in reality for most weights such a system has to be the primary methodology and not added on as a periphery.

Also, large air liners aren't designed to hang from the tail of the air craft. The tail maybe the strongest part of the plane, but I very well doubt the frame could handle the stress without major redesign. And then the nose of the aircraft would also take the full impact at ground level, which would most likely split the air craft at the wings or result in other catastrophic failure of the air craft. Also, many air line crashes result from catastrophic loss of control or destruction of major control surfaces making placement and successful deployment of such a system without causing a complete air break up an engineering nightmare. Parachutes for small planes and gliders has been around for a long time. Commercial jet liners, as they stand, are extremely safe compared to their terrestrial brothers. The feat of adding on a parachute for these giants of size of science isn't as easy as adding on a piece of cloth, I'm afraid. As a person who has a fear of flying, nothing would make me feel more at ease than such a system, but gravity is a harsh mistress.

I would wager even if such a system could be made to work, cases that it could be made for would be less than 1% of crashes that occur. Getting smashes by weather, misdirected my flight control or TCAS or some other human error, or the dozens of other common flight disasters would be helped little by a functional parachute system.

>> ^EMPIRE:

Well, you can't forget that the space shuttle rocket boosters and tank are all recovered because they parachute down after use. I'm sure it wouldn't be that hard producing a parachute strong enough to support an airliner. (and it doesn't even have to be a single one. It could be sets of 3 for example on several key structural points). The problem with speed is if the plane is going at least at cruise speed, and suddenly deploys the parachutes, it's an extremely fast stop, and people inside would break their necks. Of course multiple stage 'chutes like Larsarus mentioned would do the trick.

>> ^gorgonheap:

atheism doesn't require critical thought. In fact it requires no thought at all. I don't see why Dawkins takes so much time to try and defeat religion. If he doesn't believe in God then why try to prove that there isn't one? In fact Dawkins has yet to even begin to disprove that there is no God. His observations are based on examples of human error and a narrow line of scientific reasoning. He leaves too much out of his arguments to persuade anyone who has more then very limited experience and knowledge.


Are you saying that belief in a god requires critical thought? Concluding that something exists despite a lack of evidence to support that conclusion is critical thinking? Accepting without question ideas formed by others ~2000 years ago, passed on and on and on is critical thought?

Atheists are generally not brought up that way; they're the product of years of critical thought -- thought which is guilt-inducing and contrary and to what they're told in an overwhelming atmosphere of religious indoctrination from early childhood. Many, including myself, went to Sunday School just like you may have and were told there's a god before they had a choice to conclude that for themselves. Religion currently enjoys that perk.

Atheists have generally had to deprogram former beliefs to form conclusions, based on evidence or the lack of it: (evidence(or lack of)-->thought-->conclusion VS. statement-->reward/threat-->conclusion/belief)

Dawkins "takes so much time to try and defeat religion" because religion a majority view -- not because it makes so much sense-- but because it doesn't. Turn your question around: Why do those who espouse belief in a god "take so much time" to push that idea? Why is that "good" but a contrary view like Dawkins' is "bad"? Think critically.

Let him rail against the system. Its about time some one stood up for what they think is right.

Do these radars keep a log? Timestamps and stuff like that?

If not the systems cannot be trusted, due to human error.

Would you rather this guy go and shoot a place up? Cause an insurrection? Conspire to incite a uprising? Or rather non violently present his 1st amendment right in the court of law.

Let me be the first to say, fuck you if you think he should hang. I care not whether he was guilty or not guilty. I care the tactic he used for making his statement known.

His statement will live forever in public record, of the court system, however swamped by the myriad of other court records. The system is set up to feed on the people. It feeds on the peoples toil, and exhaustive efforts to make something for themselves. Face it, the system is designed to fuck the people and take all of their hard earned rights. Know what makes it so godamned ironic? The people created the system!

As for speed limits, I object to a group of non peer reviewed opinions on what is safe and what is not. Until I can see peer reviewed scientific data to back up the speed limit. Then they are inherently corrupt. I would suspect, this is my opinion, that some one could make a case for the government trying to make revenue with the changing of the speeds.

Also, you should not have to stand if you do not. Simply say, I am exercising my 1st amendment right, which is freedom of expression, to not stand.

>> ^peggedbea
the point thats being missed is that its a gigantic industry, linked to every other imaginable gigantic industry. it must support a massive infrastructure, education, salaries and insurance and liability costs of millions and millions of people. who do deserve to get paid. it is subject to all the other whims and manipulations of markets, inflations, corruption, bad management, human error and bad politicking. etc etc etc.

Do you know how many different people, from how many backgrounds, working with how many billions of dollars of equipment it takes to construct a computer which performs 3,000,000,000 operations a second? The computer industry is much larger and more complex than the healthcare system.

not only that, it is intimately entangled into every single persons life. from the joys of birth to the tragedy of death and everywhere in between. it is subject to bad decisions, catastrophic accidents, ignorance and arrogance of every single person.

As opposed to say, the civil engineers who built the Golden Gate bridge, of which millions of cars travel across (safely) every day? Or the Boeing 757s built by aerospace engineers, which take billions of people around the world to never-before-seen destinations safely, and at 500 miles per hour?

its huge. too big. and too important. and there is no solution. but the path we are currently on is completely unacceptable and unsustainable. and its time try something else.

As opposed to the genetic engineers who splice genes to create hybrid plants resistant to disease, or the agricultural engineers who develop the technologies to provide millions of tons of food each year to feed the 300,000,000 Americans in this country? That big or that important?

but an engineer will never have to cut a premature infant out of a dying mothers womb in a hallway while the father watches in horror. an engineer will never have to ask a mother to sign the paperwork so her sons organs can be harvested. and an engineer will never get beaten up by scared, mentally retarded man twice his size while trying to provide care.

What do you think an aerospace engineer things each time one of their plane crashes? Or a civil engineer thinks when the buildings they designed fell on 9/11? Or the chemical engineer when the drug they designed accidentally kills a thousand people?

Your argument is absolutely vacuous.

There are two reasons why healthcare has been a complete failure not only in the US but worldwide:
1. Healthcare is too intertwined with politics
2. Healthcare providers are not as smart as you think.

are suggesting reading a "how to" website will give you all the information you need to be a doctor?

i think this statement very clearly illustrates the problem i have with you.
all your hyper argumentative bullshit is lacking one thing. relevant life experience. the kind where wisdom and intimate knowledge and understand outweighs any number of words you can plug into google together and read about. maybe one day when you grow up you will understand this.

i could google causes of inflated healtcare costs all fucking day until i found 1 single point that agreed with me. the problem with your fda scenario is that its doing what every other argument is doing and that is talking healthcare down to a singularity.

the point thats being missed is that its a gigantic industry, linked to every other imaginable gigantic industry. it must support a massive infrastructure, education, salaries and insurance and liability costs of millions and millions of people. who do deserve to get paid. it is subject to all the other whims and manipulations of markets, inflations, corruption, bad management, human error and bad politicking. etc etc etc.
not only that, it is intimately entangled into every single persons life. from the joys of birth to the tragedy of death and everywhere in between. it is subject to bad decisions, catastrophic accidents, ignorance and arrogance of every single person.

its huge. too big. and too important. and there is no solution. but the path we are currently on is completely unacceptable and unsustainable. and its time try something else.

last thing, an engineer may deal with some hardcore serious precision and smarts. but an engineer will never have to cut a premature infant out of a dying mothers womb in a hallway while the father watches in horror. an engineer will never have to ask a mother to sign the paperwork so her sons organs can be harvested. and an engineer will never get beaten up by scared, mentally retarded man twice his size while trying to provide care. apples do not equal oranges. nor would i attempt to say one is more valuable than the other.

Human error. It sucks. I can't blame bush for katrina, but there are fingers that can easily be pointed here. That's my gripe.

It's not productive, but there it is.

On the up-side, the response to this emergency has been good however, and they way the sifters has pulled together to make the best of it has been exemplary.

>> ^rottenseed:
gwiz I don't understand your gripe.


I suppose you are right in this. I'm just annoyed with the sifted videos with 0 votes. Meh, disregard that post, I was just being pissy.

>> ^mauz15:
>> ^gwiz665:
Me. I'm angry that this could happen. I'm even fucking pissed off.
If we're going to reset this, we might as well, just reset it proper and put all videos - every single one - in our queues until they get sifted through again, and star points will need to be reset completely too, so we don't have x sifted videos but 1 or 2 star points.

that makes no sense.
It is an advantage that the order of videos (sifted vs unsifted, pqueued vs discarded, etc) did not get messed up during this crash.

Most "weak AI" or narrow AI is used in games or for very specific purposes. There are very few that have grasped at the complexity of a general, strong AI. The main reason, as far as I can see, is that it is really, really, really complex and therefore hard to do. As soon as you up the complexity, the human error margin rises a bunch. Just look at games, which are nowhere near as complex, there are always bugs.

Any commercial physics engine (havok, PhysX etc.) are not based on the actual laws of physics, they use simplified rules that gives a similar behavior, but with a much better performance.

The argument that programming languages don't know any more than we do is a faulty one, that's like saying that our natural language is limited by our knowledge or that we can only express the math we know. There have been plenty of mathematical discoveries, which are expressed just fine in the mathematical language, so there is no reason why we should not be able to express an algorithmic solution to any turing-complete language.

All the, usually chatbots, AI's who are claimed to be "human emulators" are in fact not. They have a very narrow application, processing language and making a "reasonable" response.

I agree that we need to research the human mind, but I'm not sure we're going to find any magic there, which is inherent to the way the brain is built, I think it is far more likely that we will find that it builds on similar principles as what we now know as weak AI, but that the complexity is insanely higher.

Neural networks can run on a turing machine as well, and most scientists agree that we indeed have neural networks in our brain, so there's no reason to dismiss that we can run a brain in a computer as such.