Jim Cramer lies non stop. He repeatedly advised people to buy financials when it was extremely obvious to anyone with a brain that all banks were insolvent. His calls on bank stocks were so ridiculous that I find it impossible to believe that he made them out of stupidity.

He tried to defend his calls by claiming that all stocks went down, and that he also told people to sell everything. I have a few responses to this: (1) his call to "sell everything" was extremely late, and was only made after every Joe Six Pack out there had already figured out by himself that Cramer was full of shit; (2) one should never recommend the general public to BUY BUY BUY while the prices are dropping like a rock; (3) his stock picks aren't mere underperformers -- they went bankrupt or are worth cents on the dollar.

Make no mistake: Jim Cramer is a crook.

Too bad the real Obama has absolutely nothing to do with the character on this skit.

Last time AIG demanded more money, the administration just gave it to them.

I can't stand Bill Maher. His jokes are dumb and his reasoning has one false analogy after another.

With comedians such as Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert, I don't understand how this guy gets any attention.

>> ^burdturgler:
Is there no one in the U.S. who is qualified to translate properly?
wtf ..

There are tons of qualified people in the US. They're just not involved with politics.

This is the kind of faux pas that third world politicians are famous for, and that you see all the time on the local news when you live in a third world nation. It surprises me that it would happen with the United States.

I've visited my fair share of countries, and the US infrastructure is definitely NOT like a developing country's. You may not have decent rail, but there are alternatives for affordable and fast transportation.

To me, having a "developing country's" infrastructure involves being forced to drive on potholed roads or ride uncomfortable trains because you're given no alternative.

Anyway, his point about high speed rail is obvious to anyone who's even been to Europe. For trips under 500 km, I'd much rather travel by high speed rail -- it's cheaper and often quicker than flying once you account for the time wasted waiting for the flight and on airport security.

*dead

*kill

aw, crap. *dead

The first two arguments aren't bizarre at all.

The GOP chairman's distinction between jobs and work makes perfect sense, as long as you're willing to accept the implied meaning and not play the fool. Digging ditches for the purpose of filling them up is simply work, but not a job because it subtracts wealth from the economy (assuming that the ditch digger gets paid). An activity which adds value is a job. It may not be the dictionary definition (or may be, I haven't checked), but it's what the chairman wants to say.

The second argument is perfectly acceptable. Maddow's rebuttal is ridiculous, because she shows a graph and argues that correlation implies causation.

Maddow could've chosen something better out of all the stupid shit said by GOP members.

*dead

>> ^Psychologic:
One of Kurzweil's inventions was a computer program that taught itself how to distinguish between pictures of dogs and cats. No one programmed it with any description of either. This is built into a camera that he has demonstrated in public. You can take a picture of the page of a book and it will read it to you as well.

Both fine examples of pattern recognition, and featuring no automated reasoning whatsoever. The current state of AI was well predicted in the 70's and 80's, because most ideas used today were actually conceived back then (or even before). They just weren't implemented because the hardware wasn't fast enough.

My point is that current AI doesn't scale. One can't get the neural network used for image recognition and propose that human level AI is just a matter of using more nodes, because it isn't. And I have yet to see a proposal for useful (i.e., robust and expressive) knowledge representation that don't have exponential requirements (or worse).

There has always been a huge amount of handwaving in the AI scene. The bleeding edge of today's AI is basically an improvement of what began in the 70's (for example, regarding detailed specialist systems for medical diagnostics, or theorem provers for assisting professional mathematicians). The human-level part remains very unclear, and academic researchers are very conscious of how little is known. However, this doesn't stop "futurists" from making wild predictions about the singularity and what not.

>> ^chilaxe:
Creating human-level AI isn't an issue of processing power.
We've had for some time supercomputers that already possess greater processing power than the human brain, and that doesn't mean that they do anything more than crunch lots of numbers.
Human-level AI will be about organizing that processing power in a way that's similar to the human brain's functionality.

Exactly. The human-level AI problem is about knowledge representation and automated reasoning, and not about raw processing power. And as much as "futurists" like to describe a future filled with intelligent machines, no one has a clue about how to efficiently encode and process knowledge.

>> ^Hanns:
Just an observation: Apparently you're either a Republican or a Democrat. There can be no middle ground if I were to believe some of the posts here.

The Republican vs. Democrat false dichotomy gives the American people the illusion of choice. Most Americans are indoctrinated into choosing a side. Not belonging strictly to a side makes you a weirdo, and confuses the hell out of the typical voter.

>> ^Psychologic:
Many estimations have artificial intelligence surpassing human intelligence between 2020 and 2030.

I'm sorry to disappoint you, but these estimates are garbage. No one has a clue regarding how to efficiently model knowledge or thought processes in software. I worked with AI with automated theorem proving and knowledge representation during my undergrad years, and abandoned the field to work on more tractable problems.

Looking at it from an engineer's (and not a computer scientist's) perspective, I'd say we're no closer to human level AI than we were 10 years ago, despite massive advances in raw computational capacity.

No one really knows how fast technology will progress past that point because computers will be better at designing new computers than we are.

I'm looking forward to all this, especially as someone in the field of Computer Science. However, I fear for all of the people that will be out of work in the beginning stages of this.

I'm guessing you're still an undergraduate student. CS is aggressively outsourced to the lowest bidder, and this includes research. The intellectual pursuit of knowledge is always exciting, but salaries in engineering and computer science don't look very promising. Believe me, it sucks to study your whole life and realise you're making less money than a corporate executive that got barely passing grades in college.

How high do you think unemployment will have to go before most will accept a replacement for capitalism.

There is no replacement for capitalism because there's no such thing as a free lunch.

Wolff traces the source of the economic crisis to the 1970s, when wages began to stagnate and American workers were forced into a dysfunctional spiral of borrowing and debt that ultimately exploded in the mortgage meltdown.

What happened to personal responsibility? Workers weren't "forced" into borrowing. They did it out of greed, and got away with it because interest rates were set artificially low.

The typical educated person can no longer make the proper distinction between cash and credit. We're in a depression because of structural problems involving credit (i.e., debt), which were promoted by the government but abused by all levels of society. Since no one is more dependent on debt than the US government, the turning point will be when other nations decide to stop financing US government debt.