An AI should never make a decision for child welfare. It simply isn't black and white and can just be tied to logic. Child welfare involves a lot more than just behavior, it involves emotions, something AI currently lack and probably will for a long time. The fact it is already in use is terrible. You can't just be like "Parent has X, so their children needs Y", there are maybe hundreds of factors in play on their children's welfare and a disability doesn't mean a child can't thrive nor does it mean a child's welfare is in danger. People who has no disabilities can be terrible parents too and a disability doesn't necessarily make one a bad parent. There are simply too many factors in a child's upbringing that their welfare isn't solely based on treatment from a parent. While parents play a large role in the welfare of children, then disabilities of the parent can be treated and almost be of no harm to a child's welfare.
I don't think he realistically have any huge impact on BTC, on the rest maybe, but BTC is too big and independent that he has no real impact on how it is valued. At least that is my impression.
I wonder if the locations researchers are staying at are located on top of the land or if it's just randomly located and could be either. Like if all (or a majority of) the ice melted how big of an impact would it have on the locations?
McMurdo station (the biggest one) is standing on land and does thaw in summer [1]. That's on an island at the outskirts of Antarctica though, so I don't imagine it's representative of stations elsewhere on the continent.
Scientific implications would be IceCube would no longer work, because the premise is based on the detector(s) being drilled 2 km into the glacier. You can't just bury it in rock, it specifically needs a transparent medium and ice is surprisingly good for neutrino propagation. The other telescopes would probably be fine, provided it was still sufficiently dry. SPT and BICEP are mostly taking advantage of the location - e.g. high altitude, extremely low humidity and extremely radio quiet, to a lesser extent the ability to stare at the same patch of sky all year. I guess you'd lose a lot of the environmental advantages, but maybe it would still be a desert.
There isn't a particularly good reason why everything is sited there beyond geopolitics. You could pick pretty much any place on the polar plateau and it would be fine. We just happened to luck out at how suitable the ice was for certain experiments.
The station is on a moving/shearing ice sheet though, which has some minor implications (like the relative position of the pole changes, so we have to move the marker each year by about 10 m).
I assume you mean located very close to the rotation axis rather than at some other latitude? I think it's convenience, because you can certainly do this at other points close to the pole, but it would involve more slewing I guess and it's mechanically simpler because you don't need to do much field rotation. At the pole, you can practically leave the altitude fixed and only move in azimuth to track something.
There are also telescopes in other places that are fixed in place, they stare at some angle and let the Earth's rotation do the work for surveying.
FYI, there's the following trick I read here some time ago:
The scammer starts a video call with the person they want to impersonate and record it. When that person takes the call, the scammer doesn't say anything. This creates a 5-10 seconds video of the person looking at the camera waiting for the scammer to say something, until they get fed up and hung up.
The scammer then calls the victim. They offer a video call as verification straight away, and they play that short video.
I imagine they say something like, "I couldn't see or here you. Did you see me?" through the other channel, and because modern tech messes up enough, it'll be believable to a lot of people. Especially the most gullible.
HN gets so caught up in logic. Has no one watched interviews of scammed people? Huge numbers of them report that they were suspicious it was a scam but they were so worried for a loved one they sent the money anyway because it was worth the risk to them just in case. Anything that helps push scams in the even slightly plailusible direction will make scams more successful.
It's necessary in some things, for example I made an app for myself where I have words/sentences spoken by text to speech, something like 12000 words/sentences, both in a normal speed and a slow speaking speed. That would be very difficult for me to do with natural voices as that would require some human to read these words/sentences, not to mention how expensive it would be, when I was able to do it for free with AI.
There are some things where AI voices absolutely ruin it, but it's not always a requirement for "emotions" to be felt in the speech we're listening to.
But tell me, how are you going to tax the super rich? It's incredibly difficult to tax someone who's actually poor on paper. Most super rich people actually don't seem to have much wealth officially declared, all of their wealth is sort of like "pseudo" in that it's all tied up in assets, and sometimes assets that aren't directly owned by them but their companies etc. and they have a lot of shortcuts for tax breaks on the stuff that can be taxed. With the current system in place then it's impossible to actually tax the rich.
> It's incredibly difficult to tax someone who's actually poor on paper
You think this because the super rich want you to think this. Actually, it's not hard and there are some good ideas floating around (e.g. more inheritance tax, don't let them get loans without taxes againt their illiquid wealth). Does it require a change of laws? Yes, but that's the whole point of democracy.
> don't let them get loans without taxes againt their illiquid wealth
You don't want to fix this. It would kill repurchasing agreements as a collateral damage, making access to credit more difficult and expensive for everyone. Not to mention HELOCs. You might say, "ok, exempt HELOCs", but that's just an arbitrary goalpost.
The economy is organic, you can just use a wrench and have a go at a couple of cogs and expect there to be no knock-on effect.
> The economy is organic, you can just use a wrench and have a go at a couple of cogs and expect there to be no knock-on effect.
What do you even mean by "organic"? Of course governments can, do and should intervene in the economy. And yes, there should be a range of experts evaluating policies before they are encated. I never stated the opposite.
It isn't difficult at all. This is an oft repeated excuse. The rich use their wealth as collateral to purchase things, like homes, companies, investments, etc. and transfer wealth to inheritors with basically no tax. So stop worrying about trying to figure out how to tax unrealized wealth and start taxing the things that unrealized wealth helps secure and purchases. This is one way to force realization of that wealth and thus tax it as well and get it back into circulation.
Right now, the rich are extremely incentivized to remain "poor on paper", so we should remove those incentives.
All the money they’ve made has been taxed. When they sell assets they pay taxes. Yes there are sone areas to address but wealthy people pay the majority of taxes.
Gifts eliminate estate tax up to $12m. You can exceed even that limit by purchasing a property and placing it in a QPRT.
Life insurance trusts also have no limit.
Finally, even if it were true that it's merely deferring taxes, that means you can essentially time the market to pay less in tax when the rules are more favourable, and you can realize more gains in the interim.
Except there are abuses of Roth IRAs and other cases where tax can be completely avoided. I think it was only recent that some limitations of Roth IRAs were put in place for heirs, but such investment vehicles do exist that do not get hit by the normal estate taxation processes.
Some rich person says “teehee, I actually have no money! It’s all in (some country)!” and the US gov says “oops! Guess you really are poor!”
They take a letter of the law instead of a spirit of the law approach with taxes. If they start seizing mansions because clearly they have no money and the only way they could afford it is through ill-gotten means, people will start paying. Police already take cash from the wallets of random people because they assume it’s illegal—meanwhile the IRS knows full well where your money comes from but they pretend to believe the tricks of the mega rich.
Plus the IRS literally have access to banks around the world. You’re required to give them proof of foreign bank accounts or face imprisonment and other countries comply with IRS requests. They can literally seize wealth and know it’s yours. They choose not to.
Of course you can track down de facto ownership and streams of income regardless of de jure separation. This is a question of political will, not economical (im)possibilities.
Whenever you try making rich people responsible, they move abroad. In Norway, the super rich are becoming Swiss citizens after a recent change in taxation. Unless Switzerland takes social responsibility, they're getting away with it. But if Switzerland does the right thing, the rich will find another safe haven.
However, this is a short term issue. The long term changes require a historical change in culture and policy. Otherwise we're still very much catering to the will of old money and power structures that resembles autocracy.
(I'm just an armchair socialist and no expert by any measure, ymmv.)
What's wrong with saying good riddance to the super rich moving abroad? I'm tired of these threats of the rich and corporations saying they'll just go elsewhere. I say go for it and call their bluff.
They still need to interact with developed countries economic systems, so still punish them there.
If the billionaires are net negative and worse than the value they provide, ie billionaires are harmful to society, it seems the easiest way to reduce inequality is just to have them leave.
That's win/win for everyone, they keep their money, you get a society without billionires.
