What's a country with a more effective system? Not saying that the lack of a more effective system means the US's is optimal, but the outcomes for capital reallocation are far better in the US than the UK for instance.
In the US, workers at a bankrupt company can often show up to the same workplace the next day or week and not skip a beat, the customers might not even know they're doing business with a different entity - only the owners have changed - the old ones get wiped out and their debtors take control.
Formal logic AI systems have existed and were popular in the 1980s. One of the problems is that they don't work - in the real world there are no firm facts, everything is squishy, and when you try to build a large system you end up making tons of exceptions for special cases until it becomes completely untenable.
Non-deterministic systems that work probabilistically are just superior in function to that, even if it makes us all deeply uncomfortable.
I don't know what definition of AI you're using, but plenty of ML algorithms operate deterministically, let alone most other logic programmed into a computer. I don't see how your statement can be right given that these other software systems also operate in the real world.
Some AI systems have done things like hack out of a docker container to access correct answers while being benchmarked.
That is mildly concerning and I will give holding the AI accountable to some degree when it is actively being malicious like that, even though the user could have locked things down even more.
But it had write access to the prod DB without circumventing controls and dropped your tables? That is just a total fail.
I once flew on a flight from ORD to ROC where I was the only passenger. It was very, very weird to be in a big empty cabin all by myself. The flight attendant just came and did the safety briefing sitting next to me. I asked her why they didn't just cancel the flight, and she said the plane had to be in ROC for the next morning anyway. This was in the 1990s though. I've never encountered anything like that since.
It is still like that. The airline’s operations all depend on the flight crew being in the right place at the end of the flight, which is a higher priority than getting a passenger there.
Yes, the article seems to be not detailed enough. They show the pictures, and it is evident what the pressure release valve is, but I agree that by this logic any container or any steel water bottle is dangerous. Maybe there is some other additional feature that makes it particularly dangerous compared to other models (like, the new seal keeps higher pressure, or the lid needs fewer rotations to disengage, etc.) that is not explained here and makes all the difference. Older models didn't even have a pressure relief valve, did they?
The bottles were sold as "drink and food" bottles, but expiring/fermenting food turns the food bottle into a pressure vessel.
I was initially surprised too, because I mostly know Thermos from their coffee/water/etc bottles, but apparently they're also selling these with the intention of storing perishable goods, and in that case a pressure relief system of some kind is a necessity.
Often bottles have special threads with holes in them to let out the pressure when you twist them open, but it appears they didn't do that here.
No. If we're recalling a product for a safety issue, it is not user error. There is an engineering error, or a design error, or a manufacturing error. Whatever the product is doing it should not be doing.
It's trivial to design a cap that leaks before it becomes mechanically free, and most lids are so designed. If this one becomes mechanically free at or before the seal allows any pressure differential to equalize, then it's an avoidable design defect that fails to meet current minimum standards.
Everyone who knows what a microwave is knows microwaving a dog kills it.
How many people do you think realize that pressure can build up in a thermos if leftover food or drink ferments in it?
And even if you know the danger, how do you know if the thermals bottle you are holding is dangerous or not? Should people call the bomb squad every time they see a thermos with unknown contents inside?
I've never seen a thermos-style container with a pressure relief in my life. However, I'm European, it appears that in the US (a country where you have to write disclaimers on microwaves that you shouldn't dry hamsters in them) common sense has been going down the toilet.
Frankly, I'm all for a bit of darwinism here. It's bewildering that there are people who think it's a good idea to open a thermos that has been fermenting for days if not weeks without a lot of caution!
But all your last statement really does is make the problem someone else's, and more dangerously, because the design doesnt help even with caution.
If I have made an accidental kimchi bomb then I will want to defuse it safely before I dispose of it. If I put it in the trash and leave it for the refuse collector there is risk that it blows up in their face without any warning. That's a much worse outcome. The root issue here is that this thermos design doesnt have a way to safely defuse it.
I bet you actually have. Its those gaps in the threads for screwing on the lid. The pressure get escape through these gaps while the lid still stays on the bottle.
Most lids you've ever used have pressure relief. It's not an extra part or valve or anything, it's just the simple geometry to ensure that the seal opens before the lid becomes mechanically free.
Thermos has only been producing flasks since 1904. There shouldn't be an expectation that they already have this on a checklist of things to watch out for in new designs. /s
I said "given it should be there" because Thermos have just issued a recall notice where they openly admit liability and they openly state it should be there (see side by side photos in the recall).
I was never seeking to pass judgement on the factual element of whether "it should be there" in the pure definition of the term.
I was just saying "it should be there on THAT product because Thermos says so".
On a planet where fermentation exists, such as planet Earth, the only planet on which we, humans, reside and therefore where these containers are made and used, that means pressure.
Even if it were reproducible, realistically most people are using some service like Claude that makes no guarantee that the model or hardware didn't change. Which is fine, it doesn't need reproducibility.
This is interesting though, I didn't know PyTorch had a debug mode for reproducibility.
Even with this debug mode, a different batch size can give different results for the same input - e.g. your tensor multiplies might use different blocking, hence different associativity.
I posted that to show that at a bare minimum, there is some pretty extreme nondeterminism (though probably mild in effect) in even the most pedestrian GPU inference, unless you go to the extreme of using the debug mode and taking the potential performance hit.
Arterial blood gas. Calcium score (may not count as a lab). Skin biopsy for cancer (does it count as a lab?). I'm unaware how to order my own troponin if I think I've had a heart attack (not that that's one I should DIY diagnosis). Prostate specific antigen.
Not op but I also agree with the framing assuming you add “and they provide a vital service” to both. If a vital service is being used to extract profits it should be regulated so that equal access to the vital service can be provided. If a vital service is being provided but cannot make money it should be regulated so that it can be sustained since it is vital.
Now what is vital? Is Spirit vital? That’s the hard to define part.
1. "We want to have this, but we don't want to pay for it!"
2. "We won't pay for this, but we still want to have it!"
These are of course both fair points. Why should we "pay for" things, what's that all about? We should just naturally have the natural things that we naturally want, supplied by pixies.
I think they're both actually "We want to have this, but we don't want to pay too much for it just so a CEO can make 10,000x their workers and potentially ALSO still lose money."
How much of the money goes to CEO vs shareholders is something they can work out between themselves.
If the airline goes bankrupt, that just means that the creditors get less than they otherwise expected. That's something to haggle out between creditors and management and shareholders.
(Or do you want to imply that if the shareholders saved money on CEO compensation, they would give the money to ordinary workers?)
It JUST means that the creditors lose money? It doesn't stop the planes flying? It doesn't stop the humans and freight from being transported? The plane maintenance? The airport's budget isn't affected, the airline employees aren't affected?
It's funny how any time something comes along suggesting consumer choice should play a role in a market economy, these types of comments come along to suggest its not their place.
There's no fundamental rule of a capitalist society that consumers have to make their choices out a narrow selection of options provided by corporate oligarchies between the criteria they would prefer to compete on. As a customer, I can choose which airline I want based on whatever criteria I want. Maybe I pick it based on pay ratio between executives and average workers, maybe I pick it based on whichever has the font I like best on their homepage.
> We should just naturally have the natural things that we naturally want, supplied by pixies.
Is this how you see roads? Are we entitled for wanting those to be paid for by the state? What about the police? Should we have to pay whenever a police officer stops a mugging -- or is the wage of that officer, too, supplied by pixies?
These have remained unresolved questions, for me, for decades. When an internet pal was trying to found a libertarian (what noun should I use) locale, in Awdal in Somaliland (that detail of whether it was really in Somaliland or not was more debatable at the time), he first founded the Awdal Roads Company.
So obviously there are theories about how these things can be privately funded. But I can never remember the theories. Looking at that link, it was going to be toll roads. People dislike this, understandably. One problem with private roads is that you can't exactly use a competing road, which might entail moving house, or changing your plans for the day, or your job.
I have a vague notion that roads could be funded by a group of businesses that benefit from them, sort of like the W3C or a mall. Non-profit, sponsored roads, or something. (Now I'm thinking of runestones, several of which are near bridges and say "He made this bridge for his soul" or a similar statement.)
Don't ask me about police, I don't even understand crime and punishment, really.
I should maybe add that I meant "We should just naturally have the natural things that we naturally want" somewhat unironically. I feel that way, the same as anyone else. The difficulty, as observed up the thread, is in working out what's natural, or vital, or wanted and feasible. There are no pixies to magically know the answers, to my regret, only governments, and they only pretend to know. By buying and selling we can almost figure out the answers, contingently and approximately, but a lot goes wrong with that, including the friction of having to do it all the time, and "rent-seeking", whatever defines that really.
> "I have a vague notion that roads could be funded by a group of businesses that benefit from them"
Everybody benefits from roads. People who use the roads directly, benefit from being able to move around quickly. Companies which move raw materials around to make products benefit from roads. People who buy products that were moved and delivered by road are benefitting. People who can work because roads enable tourists to come, benefit from them. People whose decent coworkers were once children who were educated by teachers who got to work by road, are benefitting years later. People whose family members didn't suffer a massive property loss because they could call a plumber who got there by road, are benefitting. People who can engage in long distance trade and relationships by post, benefit.
Even though there are people harmed by roads, there's nobody who doesn't benefit from roads.
We have ways to charge people-who-use-roads-more, more money; they pay larger road tax for commercial vehicles, for larger wheelbase vehicles, for larger engine vehicles, they pay more fuel tax because they drive further and buy more fuel, they pay more tax on parts and labour because they wear out their vehicles faster, replace parts and vehicles more often, spend more on mechanic work.
I also don't really want it so that a business owns private roads, and if the road gets a sinkhole and traffic cannot flow, the business can just shrug. If ambulances can't get through, if garbage collection can't happen, if people can't get to work, if companies can't deliver products, the company doesn't have to hurry to fix it. They only care to the extent that their toll income has dropped by one road's worth, but if they fix it within a month or two that might be fast enough for them - but not fast enough for the rest of us to avoid serious consequences.
You’re missing the vital framing. You’re welcome to strawman the strawman but the respond with yet a third: “I’m not able to pay for it and will die as a result”. I’d prefer to live in a society where we avoid as many situations like that as possible. It’s the primary purpose of a government and a nation. Solving the problems of aggregating the required parts? Again it’s why we work together and it’s the point of government to solve that problem.
Good regulation doesn’t completely avoid market mechanisms it tries to tame the more brutal ones in order to maximize return to society. The roads argument is important because without roads we do not have any trade. So by collectively and somewhat proportionally, to use and income, managing the cost of road it makes everything else the market does possible.
So you're saying it's all about the concept "vital" and I should pay that more heed? But I don't think the term "vital" solves the problem of information. Natural, vital, optimal, feasible, wanted, it's all the same question, which is, uh, "how should we specifically cooperate," I guess. Government just knows less about this than the people involved do. Hayek yek yek.
Maybe you mean that in desperate situations - such as working out what to do about roads - we might as well resort to government. We do, so I guess you're right.
Lots of roads in the USA are built by private developers, then they're deeded over to the municipality for "free" so its on taxpayers to do maintenance.
And the tax income from sparse, sprawling suburbs, is not enough to cover the cost of providing sewage/electric/gas/garbage collection/firefighting/road maintenance. So either 'wealthy' suburbanites end up being subsidised by taxes from dense 'poor' inner city taxpayers, or the city has to approve a new suburb to get a chunk of income from new house sales and taxpayers to pay for the maintenance of the previous suburb's roads, in an unsustainable pyramid scheme where the city has to build more roads forever just to stand still.
I'm with you in the first half but not the second half. State governments don't allocate state money to helping suburb/exurb infrastructure unless it's specifically a state road. Never for residential roads. What happens is that maintenance gets deferred indefinitely, it goes to shit because nobody has the money for it, and the homeowners who are affected conclude government doesn't work.
> and "rent-seeking", whatever defines that really.
"The act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating public policy or economic conditions without creating new wealth." This is in opposition to profit-seeking, where "entities seek to extract value by engaging in mutually beneficial transactions." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
Friend, with respect, the mental blocks you're coming up against regarding roads, police, and resource distribution, within an American libertarian framework, are outlining exactly why American libertarianism (unregulated capitalism) is an untenable ideology.
Private roads don't make sense in capitalist framing because there's no possibility of competition - no market for a free hand to move in. Furthermore, there's ethical issues around the fact that roads won't be built to people who aren't as instrumentally valuable to capitalism, which is in opposition to the idea that all humans are equally intrinsically valuable. In plain words: poor people won't get roads built to them, won't be able to work, will get poorer. This is bad, and if you want to just be selfish about it, will lead to crime and social discohesion.
This argument extends to all the resources governments typically involve themselves in: electricity, sewage, water. We have direct evidence that when they try to privatize these things, it goes horribly wrong: see, the American healthcare industry, or, what's happening to the UK as it privatizes sewage. See the Texas privatized power grid.
All capitalist entities (corporations) are simple algorithms: Make profit go up. We like to tell ourselves that making profit go up is possibly only through mutually beneficial trades, aka the aformentioned profit-seeking, however that's not true in practice. The most profitable activity is slavery driven labor, and the most profitable state for a corporation to be in is monopoly. All optimized capitalist behavior selects for and trends towards that activity and that state, and literally the only way to stop this is through establishing some kind of hierarchy that allows for the limiting of corporate behavior - governments, and regulations.
Any example you give of a corporation in capitalism not trending towards slavery or monopoly has one of several explanations. 1. It's regulated, 2. It's led by someone who ethically doesn't want to trend towards slavery or monopoly, or isn't intelligent enough to do so. In the case of 2, that company will eventually be surpassed and consumed by someone with less morals, more intelligence, and more capital (more power).
> "We should just naturally have the natural things that we naturally want" somewhat unironically. I feel that way, the same as anyone else. The difficulty, as observed up the thread, is in working out what's natural, or vital, or wanted and feasible.
I completely agree, and there are other ways to do this other than capitalism, regulated or otherwise. I strongly recommend the most cited economist in history: Karl Marx. Peter Kropotkin is also very good, "The Conquest of Bread" is a great speculation of alternative systems.
Breaking down complex topics into binary black and white doesnt have to be wrong. The more important part is, how much wealth they extracted and how exactly. Was it market dominance with a superior product or amoral cost externalization.
The angle of treating transportation as regulated utility shifts the business focus away from profit onto providing services, which sometimes can cost more than your income. Similarly, would you close schools, because they didnt make enough money? Airlines are highly subsidized anyway, treating them as regulated utilities falls short of taking public ownership as public institutions, where services just cost money/subsidies.
> Similarly, would you close schools, because they didnt make enough money?
Yes, of course. We should separate school and state.
> Airlines are highly subsidized anyway, treating them as regulated utilities falls short of taking public ownership as public institutions, where services just cost money/subsidies.
How are they highly subsidized? And where? Perhaps we should fix that, instead of adding to the problem? Two wrongs don't make a right.
You mean better education for uber achievers that can pay more for it? That is already the case in the US [1] for a long time now and with expectable outcomes of poverty and wasted economic and human potential, observable today. With the melting middle class, these problems will continue to grow. Are you for euthanasia already? The next step is cutting public education even more and divert these budgets into private school via school vouchers [2]. Can you guess the outcome?
> "Today I learned that a new account starts getting rate limited upon receiving its first downvote. Yay?"
Your comments are one-line thoughtless mic-drops, the system is working.
> "If a service cannot be provided for a cost below what someone will pay, the service should not be provided as providing that service is a lose-lose situation."
It can be a win-win situation, not everything is about profit. See also:
> "How did poor people who needed to fly fly when flying was expensive?"
If a poor person can fly somewhere to get a better job, they stop being a poor person. That's a win for them personally, and a win for society, and a win for future government tax income. It's also a win for the airline which moved them and got paid for it. The only time it's not a win is if you have a myopic focus on "but it costs money now and that's bad".
Utilities and transportation should be public services, and they are in many places. Sometimes it works well, other times it works less well… usually because the capitalists lobby it into neglect and then say “see it’s not working / losing money let the private sector take over”.
The extremes of capitalism have a negative impact on people’s lives.
The first scenario it harms us by under-serving and scammy practices, the second scenario it’s over-extractive and funneling money from the many to the few.
Companies like John-Deere should be able to survive without abusing their downstream customers. Many farmers are importing tractors from China because they're cheap and not hostile to repair like JD is. Some people might call it a "smart business model" to sell interdependent services, but in the long-term it's suicide.
Whether or not you solve this through regulation, that's up to you.
In The Art Of Computer Programming, one of the most influential and comprehensive series of books on the subject, Knuth uses a fictional assembly language called MIX in the examples. The reader does "just run the program in their head."
In Software Tools Brian Kernighan and P.J. Plauger describe a pseudo-language called RATFOR (Rational Fortran), and then throughout the book implement RATFOR in itself.
Getting feedback while learning to program has a lot of value, but so does learning to think through code in your head. People old enough to remember when you had to wait a day to run your program and get results back (very slow turnaround) know the value of that skill, we used to call it "desk checking" -- reading through your code and running it in your head and on paper.
This is itself a skill people need to learn, that I'm not sure is possible with pseudocode and no prior experience. Too easy to gloss over details without actually running it to learn where your blind spots are.
I did this workshop a decade or so ago where I learned my co-workers don't do this, and never did learn how they understand code otherwise. One of them mentioned he didn't even realize this was a thing.
> never did learn how they understand code otherwise.
This particular statement interested me.
In code review, I always am a stickler that "if I need to run the code in my head to prove something about it for me, I want to see that in a unit test - I shouldn't have questions about the code that aren't already answered by the tests"
When I took an introductory programming class at Sacramento City College in fall 2004 during my senior year of high school, we spent the first half of the semester designing our programs using flowcharts and pseudocode. We were encouraged to check the logic of our flowcharts and pseudocode. In the second half of the semester, we implemented those programs in C++.
I haven’t seen this pedagogical practice in any other introductory course I’ve seen since. I believe it’s a holdover from the early days of computing, when programmers didn’t have access to personal computers or even interactive computing, which meant that programmers needed to spend more up-front time on design. Think of the punchcard era, for example.
I teach introductory programming in C++ at Ohlone College in Fremont, and I have my students write C++ on Day 1, starting with “Hello World” and going from there without flowcharts.
I think it's for all intents and purposes impossible to program like this in this century. Like imagine just writing x + y in C++. Are you seriously going to enumerate every declaration of operator+ in the translation unit in your head to see if it's eligible (don't forget ADL)? And then every single possible implicit conversion or promotion that could make other ones eligible? And then go through all the overload resolution rules that practically no humans have memorized (with any template instantiations that may come into play) to figure out if the declaration you wanted is actually the best match? That's before you even look at its definition...
In one of my classes they had to explicitly ban people from using Python in their psuedocode submissions lol. (Generally this meant things like "no list comprehensions" and similar Python syntax details).
Not at all. It's called learning computer science. Just like you can do calculus without simulation, you can understand the semantics of a computer program without running it. It might make it harder, but running it is only a didactic tool - as Knuth did, you should be able to prove it correct without ever running it.
In the US, workers at a bankrupt company can often show up to the same workplace the next day or week and not skip a beat, the customers might not even know they're doing business with a different entity - only the owners have changed - the old ones get wiped out and their debtors take control.
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