> All told, these dozen mega-regions span 243 metropolitan areas in the U.S. and Canada, more than six in ten of all U.S. metros. They have a combined population of more than 230 million people, including 215 million from the United States or 70 percent of the U.S. population. Together, they produce more than $13 trillion dollars in economic output, equivalent to three-quarters of America’s total GDP.
Vast regions of the US don't even matter for the purpose of this discussion. When you only look at those regions the problem is no different than in a lot of other countries. That is also the geographical level where public transport makes sense, it's per-region (and different regions may want to/have to solve it in very different ways since their respective situations are different), not one solution for the whole country.
> the bold statements about no difference between men and women brains, everything is nurture/nothing nature, etc.
You are attacking a position that is not the common scientist position at all. Your whole comment is a bit surprising given the context. You went out of your way to invent a reason to vent.
It does not even matter how accurate any of those articles are, this just serves to show that the claim made by OP is wrong. There are plenty of science articles about differences.
So what exactly is the basis for your claim again? Did you do any research of your position at all (and just googling quickly before posting already counts)? It seems to be entirely made up.
Talking about making up your own invented antagonistic positions: I am not arguing everyone else pretends there are no difference, I am arguing that some do. Quoting some articles arguing that there are differences doesn't prove anything. As for the ad hominem arguments,...
What is the purpose of finding someone, anyone, who holds some fringe opinion to attack it as if its common? You can find any opinion about anything out there after all.
> Quoting some articles arguing that there are differences doesn't prove anything.
It proves that the opinion you attack does not seem to be the opinion of the scientific community. Unfortunately you did not include a single link to show whom or what exactly your comment is about.
I hope you don't consider it rude or an "attack" that I point out that you did not point to anyone/anywhere specifically? Because you really did not. I think your argument would benefit greatly from being more specific.
I have Facebook friends (who I keep because they are ex colleagues and mostly harmless otherwise) whose whole life (judging by their news feed) seems to be centered around finding the most stupid comments on the entire Internet and then posting them to show how stupid they are. Your comment strongly reminds me of that phenomenon. Personally, I consider it not only highly illogical but also a huge waste of time, not to mention what it probably does for your outlook on life to concentrate on the most absurd and ridiculous fringe opinions that you can find.
Also, counter to your latest claim, you make no such distinction at all. You attack the position as if it's common. The Facebook friends I mention at least include specific links that they attack. Not that that would make much sense given that we are here discussing a specific article.
It's not paid by taxes but by health insurance. We have both a private and a semi-public system (managed by "Krankenkassen", independent insurance entities, that compete for members; it's... complicated, but less so than in the US, and it does not depend on the employer).
Some might say it's like a tax, it gets deducted from your paycheck, but then that's the same everywhere, including the US. Difference is that it's managed by independent entities and not the government, and they even compete. The private insurances are quite significant in Germany too. You are allowed to leave the government-mandated "Krankenkassen" if you earn over a certain amount of money per year, then you have to get private insurance - which is less expensive if you are young, but unlike the Krankenkasse family members (e.g. non.working spouse, children) are not included and it may become much more expensive when you get older, it's hard to predict because it depends on many factors including if you picked the right insurance company (that didn't lose as much money and now has to raise prices).
I don't know if I would understand the German "insurance" system from that explanation. Maybe to complement your explanation another try at it:
Germany has two insurance-like systems to pay for medical treatments:
(1) insurances, with fees aligned with damage risk associated with the policy holder.
(2) a system of "funds" that provide insurance benefits for insurants, however, are not organized like an insurance.
The system (2) is quite old (dating back to the 19th century) and has a few peculiarities:
* fees vary by income of the member of the fund (principle of solidarity, basically people with well paying jobs subsidise others).
* half of the fee for a member is payed by the employer, half by the employee, deducted from the paycheck.
* family members can be insured, too, without increasing fees.
* fees are not dependent on your risk, i.e. they do not increase with age, preexisting conditions, etc.
The alternative to this fund are insurances that work on a risk-based pricing scheme - item (1) in the list:
* in order to be able to sign up for them, you need to have a certain steady income above a threshold (above 50000 EUR I believe).
* pricing is per insurant, i.e. extra insurance contributions for kids and family members if they are on the same plan, etc.
* for young adults these plans are usually cheaper than for older people, which means you can get "trapped" in a contract that is more expensive than the public funds I wrote about above.
For both systems, treatment prices are kind of fixed (as a rule of thumb, doctors can charge the insurance a bit more than the public funds, by a constant factor of 2-3, but I heard from doctors that this depends on the treatment).
On the other hand, at least in the cities there is a ton of pharmacies - sometimes even across the street form one another, and easily every few hundred meters along major routes. There are way too many. When I walk through downtown Nuremberg I walk past several of them, right on the main pedestrian-only street of the city. And they are all allowed to advertise in their shop windows. So that's some prime advertising space, right in the hard of the city. On my way to downtown, a twelve minute walk, I walk past four pharmacies if I take the route along the street (vs. the lake route, which is a park).
Also, they are allowed to advertise for things like cold medicine, when I still had a TV (log time ago, admittedly) I remember seeing lots and lots of such ads: "WICK MediNait cold medicinefor the night", list of ingredients: https://www.aponet.de/wissen/arzneimitteldatenbank/suchergeb... (active ingredients Paracetamol, doxylamine hydrogen succinate, ephedrine hemisulfate, Dextromethorphan hydrobromide-1-water)
> it should be up to me if the pain is server enough to warrant opioids
It is!
You do get the drugs you need. If you actually ARE in pain. But this woman, as predicted by her doctor, was not. If you read the article, she did not have the pain, it was only fear of it.
Society does have to pay the price in the end if people are given what they want. See the problem of over-subscription of anything from pain killers (in the US) to antibiotics.
Not least, those drugs show up in ground water and in drinking water supplies, and water companies can't really filter that stuff out.
If you think "the levels are low - that is save", there is no scientific basis for such a statement. We have no clue what low-level exposure to drug cocktails does.
Not sure how you manage to come up with such a comment after reading this particular article. Clearly she did not have the pain she feared she would have. She said she took two Ibuprofen - that she did not need!
So why would you think she would have been better off taking drugs against pain that she didn't have?
Real pain is treated here in Germany - of course!
But taking pills for mere fear of pain that isn't even there?
I had had four wisdom teeth removed all at once, that's when I got and took a few (a few!) Ibuprofen during the following week. Only because I actually lived and worked in the US at the time (but had the surgery done during a vacation in Germany), and had to go back to work, doing IT training for a few days. Otherwise I would have taken even less.
Later I had jaw surgery, lower jaw extension by 4 mm (no metal left inside me, by the way, it was a z-cut followed by the shift and half of a bone could reattach to the other half, just shifted lengthwise a bit), so a complete cut through the lower jaw. I did not need a single pain pill.
>>So why would you think she would have been better off taking drugs against pain that she didn't have?
Never said she should have or would have been better off. I am making the claim that choice should have been hers and hers alone after getting advice from professionals.
Doctors could have told her "You do not need them, here are the reasons why" that is fine. the legal prohibition is what I have a problem with
>Real pain is treated here in Germany
That is not my understanding and I have known a couple people that have come to the US for pain management because they were unable to get it in the EU, I dont know if they were in Germany or not however. My understanding is that many EU nations have very strict and subject definition as to what "real pain" is. This is evidenced by the personal stories being told here how people "went through X and did not need pain meds" that is fine for them, people have different tolerance levels for different types of pain, and a tooth extraction may be a minor pain for some people and excruciatingly painful for others, yet most of these nations treat pain based on the average response by type of procedure not in individualized reactions.
In most common cases, like shallow clones and cloning simple objects, are already well-covered and solved, often with very few lines of code or even just a single command (`Object.assign()`). Stage 4 draft (i.e. it will be in the next version): `{ ...obj }` to clone an object [0].
Cloning Arrays, Maps, Sets is easy using their default constructors in a single line, such as `new Map(originalMap)` or `new Set(originalSet)` [1]. You can clone an array using spread syntax or `Array.from` [2].
Another issue is that there are many variants of "deep cloning". Some people only need actual "regular" object properties cloned - copying objects without any of the features you get through `Object.defineProperty()`, like object literals.
Some people want symbols cloned, others don't.
Some people don't care about functions. Some people want some things, like functions, not cloned but referenced to avoid duplication.
Some people want all the options copied that you get from `Object.defineProperty()`.
Some people care about the prototype chain, others don't (if you only clone regular objects, e.g. from object literal object creation and similar ones).
So there is huge variety about what people need when they talk about "deep-copying" in Javascript, because objects have so many optional features, but most of the time they are not needed or not relevant to the copying.
As others have said, it also is not actually all that essential. I use a functional style without OOP (this, bind, class (ES6 or ES5 "pseudo-class" construction), try not to mutate, and I rarely need deep-cloning, if at all. I think right now I only use my carefully crafted and speed-tested deep-clone module in tests. Each time I started using it in my code I eventually came up with a much better solution that didn't need it. Note that I did not actively try to avoid it, it just happened - the use case went away by itself each time I came up with an improved version of the code.
I think your comment raises some very interesting points, but that you go too far.
There are costs (in the wider not just monetary sense) and benefits to various approaches. The reason you had to resort to crypto-currency first of all seems to me to be the problems in the countries you lived in. If they had working institutions, if you had lived in a Western country and had had access to the banking there, would you have come to the same conclusions?
Also, there is a reason why Western banks and Asian ones too, it seems, prefer losing business over dealing with customers from some countries, and I doubt the reason is spite.
Having completely anonymous money sure benefits some small businesses (mostly those living in places with bad institutions), but it also enables a lot of very questionable businesses and people. I would suspect that as far as volume goes the latter might actually be far bigger than the former. As always those who have most to gain are those who have a lot of money to move (same with the question about who benefits from government more - the rich or the poor? The rich! Any "redistribution" is dwarfed by the amounts of money people get to make and to keep under the protections of strong government institutions). Anonymity, not just for money, always works for those who have their eyes closed to all the horrible things humans do when nobody is looking - and that is not a negligibly small amount. Of course, the extremely wealthy already have "anonymous money", tracing who owns what is very hard even for the government, but I doubt giving everybody access to anonymity would be a net positive.
> Having completely anonymous money sure benefits some small businesses (mostly those living in places with bad institutions), but it also enables a lot of very questionable businesses and people.
I'm not in favor of this argument at all. The internet has incredible benefits, but enables a lot of bad actors. Encryption has incredible benefits but enables a lot of bad actors. Lots of good things also enable bad things, that doesn't mean we shouldn't allow them.
Outside of third world or financially repressive countries, cryptocurrencies are great for "global citizens." I have done contract work while living in a different country, for clients in other countries, both parties have found it much easier to pay each other using cryptocurrencies as opposed to fiat.
Not like cash at all. You can't pay with cash unless you are right there. Also, paying with large amounts of cash is hard or suspicious or even impossible.
I don't understand what your question has to do with anything I wrote. Unless your intention is not an actual honest discussion, but to mislead - but surely that cannot be true.
First, by writing “just one person’s cash”, it is automatic to infer you consider this representative. I assert that it is not, and furthermore that if it were even close then the criminal economy would vastly exceed the non-criminal one.
Second, look at the date on that and tell me, with a straight face, that they didn’t use any cryptocurrencies. If they really did have $22bn, perhaps even if they only had $22m, I expected they used a dozen forms of currency they couldn’t even name.
I am not saying “worse”, I am saying “superset”. On the basis that all crimes that can occur with cash have an equivalent that can happen with cryptocurrencies but not vice versa — you cannot force someon else’s computer to forge coins for you, and high-value transactions have rules against cash in places that don’t have rules against cryptocurrencies.
I do not understand how you consider you response to be relevant, however.
It’s just occurred to me I have been ambiguous. I am talking about sets and classes, but you are responding as if I meant individual crimes (for which the 300,000 transactions per day limit provides a plausible upper ceiling, iff they only used bitcoin).
Let me rephrase: how many categories of crime occurred on Silk Road et al, and how many are not — based on current law enforcement — plausible to get away with when involving cash?
Do you seriously compare the total amounts of something HUGE and something tiny? The size of the cash universe still is orders of magnitude larger than Silkroad ever was - and you compare the totals? Seriously?
No I am comparing the utility of cash with the utility of crypto.
The claim was made that crypto is bad because it can be used for crime to which i responded like cash.
You claimed it's not at all like cash but you haven't actually provided any argument for how it's not. Instead you have looked at a few obvious differences which doesn't take anything away from the original claim that cash and crypto can be used for the same things and in fact are being used for the same thing.
In Sweden, it’s fast becoming nigh impossible to pay for things with cash, particularly in places like restaurants, cafés and bars. If you have a business that deals in cash, banks make it almost farcically difficult to deposit said cash into your business account.
For example, in one town the largest bank will only accept cash through a deposit machine, outdoors, for one hour during the middle of the day. Oh and you can only deposit something like $1500 per day. Your only other option is to order pickups from a security company, which will cost quite a bit more than you’ll pay for card transactions most likely.
Granted, this example is from a smaller town (aprox. 12000 inhabitants, but LOTS of tourists from abroad that tend to carry cash) but even in a place like the capital Stockholm, you’ll have very particular cash handling restrictions. Some because regulation, but most because banks don’t like to deal with cash. It’s a very real security risk and requires manual labor – both of which are costly and like any business banks like to keep costs down. Most smaller (and local) branches these days don’t deal with cash at all, or deals in very limited amounts.
If you run a small shop that deals in cash, there’s a very real possibility that you’ll have to face the question of whether to pay a lot of money for secure cash handling, or just getting a safe and hope you don’t get robbed.
Sweden is an outlier (same things also happening in Denmark, where I am originally from)
But contrary to cash, cryptocurrencies like bitcoin can be traced fairly easily in fact, it's one of the most transparent currencies that's ever existed.
As color coins show it will be possible to trace the history of a coin and thus trace what's it's been used for.
This will potentially allow NGO's to recieve funding and track how they are used and make sure they can't be used for approved expenses all autimatic.
Cryptocoins are exactly what governments would want if they really thought it trough. The control they loose in creating the currency is gained in controlling the history of them.
That's another problem cryptocurrencies solve. You'd think that when people say governments and banks provide currencies, that they'd provide very basic services related to that, such as the ability to get currency into an account.
As any business owner can tell you, they don't provide these services. Which of course means that someone could step in, provide these services, and actually has a chance of success.
It sounds so incredibly absurd, but it's actually true: governments do not provide the ability to transact in currency. Only banks do, and only for hefty fees. Hell, the aborted attempt by Varoufakis to issue a tax-backed currency by the Greek IRS would have been the first time I've heard any state providing such a service.
One might think, in reaction, governments would be a little worried and then 2 reactions are possible:
a) governments could make sure these services are provided. Basic banking services, after all, are a complete necessity in todays world. In trade they'd get insight, maybe even a little control, and would make a LOT of people very happy, because the government is omnipresent, and a lot of people feel that banks exploit things (e.g. cashing checks in the US).
b) governments could punish everyone involved, AND threaten everyone until insight is, grudgingly and only after every option to obfuscate things is utilized to the maximum extent, provided.
Of course in the case of b), insight would be a punishment inflicted on businesses and people, and make it very clear to everyone involved that citizens and the government are each other's enemy, and therefore naturally everyone would be trying to make that insight as useless as possible.
Needless to say, every government on the planet has chosen only a single avenue, namely b).
Can I just say: may God help governments as soon as someone realizes a way to provide a cryptocurrency that can't be easily blocked over radio or ... because it will turn into an utter disaster for them very quickly.
Or perhaps I should say: the first government to issue a tax-backed currency with a government provided ability to transact, banks, the entire financial sector, and all other governments are in extreme trouble.
As a software architect (current title, but I had a technical education, "electrical/mechanical", incl. technical drawing, lab work, metal work, decades ago, before studying CS), who prefers text most of the time I still can see the appeal of something like this (All links lead to pictures):
Even this is not any worse than a complex text-based software project, you can zoom to the part that you want to look at in detail, just like you navigate between modules/classes/code files:
Also beneficial for a visual approach is that that is how electrical circuits are visualized. It's been a long time, maybe they describe more electrical circuits in text (I know VHDL but that is not for all kinds of circuits, nor does it concentrate on the electrical aspects), AFAIK it's still mostly diagrams.
Another point is that unlike software, where you deal with abstract things in any case (even registers, if you program in assembler, are pretty abstract). What you design in LabView is made of actual physical components, and you really physically run wires from one to the next.
What is shown as an enclosing box with "gates" between inside and outside as in this diagram really looks like this, LabView is a simulation of a physical system:
I have done quite a few courses (edX, Coursera) over the last few years, and when there were LabView portions I had no difficulty and actually found it quite appealing. I would not say the same for software, where I still prefer text.
if bots can produce 'worthy set of opinions' we would be totally useless
Are you useless because other people write comments? What is the difference between it being a biological human and an artificial human - should we ever get that far?
Apart from quality and relevance considerations I'm reminded of the situation where people open businesses that already exist, or people try to get jobs despite other people existing that are actually better. For example, why doesn't BMW stop producing cars, after all, there's Mercedes-Benz (and very close too), or vice versa. Or why is there yet another bakery. Or why do I try to get that programming job and don't even mind to admit that I'm probably not even among the best 1% of people for that particular job. Because none of that matters. My advantage in the last case is I'm here (interviewing) while those other people are not. Same with the bakery and the car makers. The existence of something else isn't a reason unless there is a direct impact.
Even if we ever make something that is far more intelligent than us. Still no reason to expect that that new thing is going to murder each and everyone. We don't murder each and every creature that is orders of magnitude less intelligent than us (the extinction event that we started notwithstanding, that's a side effect because of limited space on the planet). We don't murder our own less intelligent members of society either.
To extend on the last point, the real human intelligence is not as much in the individual members of this society - but in the network that we present. Place any human being alone in a remote region and see what they accomplish. They will actually die, most likely. The power of humanity is not the individuals, it's a huge invisible "cloud" of stuff: The knowledge, the "magic items" that were created by this "human cloud" over time (like a computer, or just a can of Coke [1]).
Even if we created something that is an order of magnitude more intelligent than any human being, or even two - it's power (and intelligence!) pales compared to the combined network power of humanity.
Don't look at "humanity" as a bunch of individual hairless mutated apes (i.e. the physical, biological beings), "humanity" is much, MUCH more, most of it invisible to the eye. Knowledge/culture, the way we interact in a gigantic network (like a brain - think of humans as neurons!), the tools and items we have.
In this network there is plenty of room for new "nodes", and if they are truly intelligent they will value the network and - unlike most humans - recognize that their own individual abilities are tiny compared to being part of the whole thing.
Another things is, when/if we can create things that are "better" than us we can also change ourselves. We can improve our bodies, our brains. We will integrate computers and brains, not have them (only) externally. So the humans that "compete" with some super-intelligent AI won't be the humans of today either.
> Humans are a puzzling species. What has enabled us to dominate the globe, more than any other species, while remaining virtually helpless as lone individuals? Joseph Henrich's shows that the secret of our success lies not in our innate intelligence, but in our collective brains—on the ability of human groups to socially interconnect and learn from one another over generations.
> The number of individuals who know how to make a can of Coke is zero. The number of individual nations that could produce a can of Coke is zero... Invention and creation is something we are all in together. Modern tool chains are so long and complex that they bind us into one people and one planet. They are not only chains of tools, they are also chains of minds: local and foreign, ancient and modern, living and dead — the result of disparate invention and intelligence distributed over time and space. ...every can of Coke contains humanity’s choir.
In support of this statement, here is a map of "mega regions": http://www.america2050.org/sync/elements/america2050map.png
Source: http://www.america2050.org/maps/
Alternative: "The Mega-Regions of North America" http://martinprosperity.org/content/the-mega-regions-of-nort...
> All told, these dozen mega-regions span 243 metropolitan areas in the U.S. and Canada, more than six in ten of all U.S. metros. They have a combined population of more than 230 million people, including 215 million from the United States or 70 percent of the U.S. population. Together, they produce more than $13 trillion dollars in economic output, equivalent to three-quarters of America’s total GDP.
Vast regions of the US don't even matter for the purpose of this discussion. When you only look at those regions the problem is no different than in a lot of other countries. That is also the geographical level where public transport makes sense, it's per-region (and different regions may want to/have to solve it in very different ways since their respective situations are different), not one solution for the whole country.