The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

Post by beantownbubba »

John A Arkansawyer wrote:I'm still thinking it over.
I suspect it's gonna be a long think, at least it will be for me. Plenty of interesting stuff there but I'm not sure that it hangs together. I suppose I should read the book if I really want to understand it, but I don't see myself getting around to it for some time.
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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

Post by John A Arkansawyer »

beantownbubba wrote:
John A Arkansawyer wrote:I'm still thinking it over.
I suspect it's gonna be a long think, at least it will be for me. Plenty of interesting stuff there but I'm not sure that it hangs together. I suppose I should read the book if I really want to understand it, but I don't see myself getting around to it for some time.
That's kind of my reaction. It's sensible stuff, but I'm not sure it's enough. There's also so much accumulated dead weight behind it all.

And so much of the "new economy" seems like funny money and not the real thing. Unlike fart apps, steel mills and coal mines at least produced real pollution. ;-) But fart apps just prove some folks' shit really don't stink, at least out here in meatspace. Or maybe I'm overthinking again.
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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

Post by tinnitus photography »

Cole Younger wrote:You aren't even allowed to ask questions about global warming because if you do you will be called a "denier". That's religious rhetoric but that's the word that gets used.
here's my take on this... the average layperson does not have the necessary tools, training, access to data, etc to even begin to draw conclusions about the current state of the climate and it's future. i mean, you can certainly ask questions, but it'd be akin to asking questions about brain surgery. we are not SMEs.

and of the experts, the overwhelming majority are aligned.
https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/


who are the naysayers? typically they are backed by huge multi-national petro-chemical companies. who clearly have a vested interest in the status quo of fossil fuels as a dominant energy source. follow the money...

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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

Post by whatwouldcooleydo? »

Image

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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

Post by Tequila Cowboy »

whatwouldcooleydo? wrote:Image

Yep, spot on. I was also half expecting Trump to circle the table with a baseball bat and say "A man should have enthusiasms, enthusiasms"
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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

Post by Zip City »

I'm sure it's pure coincidence that he acts like a typical third world despot
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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

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Image

You're welcome.
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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

Post by PonyGirl »

Tequila Cowboy wrote:
whatwouldcooleydo? wrote:Image

Yep, spot on. I was also half expecting Trump to circle the table with a baseball bat and say "A man should have enthusiasms, enthusiasms"
You guys should have more respect for Vito Corleone.
His facial expression is terrifying. He's basically the equine Chucky.

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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

Post by beantownbubba »

PonyGirl wrote:You guys should have more respect for Vito Corleone.
That's Don Corleone to you.
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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

Post by beantownbubba »

It feels like the Washington "baseball shootings" should be acknowledged. But other than stating the obvious, that it's a horrible thing and wishing the victims speedy and complete recoveries, I'm not sure what to say about it. I am surely making this up because I can't point to anything specific that supports it, but it feels like it might be a turning point in one of several directions and that "everybody" is kind of holding their breath waiting to see which way things head. I think (hope?) it's reasonably clear that no matter what you think about our elected representatives, targeting them for shooting/killing raises the stakes considerably - not as a matter of numbers, we all can think of plenty of horrors w/ more victims - but if political violence becomes some kind of norm, we will truly have entered a new and very dangerous age. Is it a signal that our toxic political climate has fostered not just anger but life threatening danger and isn't that a sign that it's time to find a better way and to recognize that so many of us contribute to that climate, even if only in small and seemingly insignficant ways? Or does this "merely" illustrate that crazies w/ guns know no particular political ideology? Or is it "just" another data point in the guns v. gun control debate? I don't know and I hate that we're at this point, but as w/ every tragedy, I hope that some good can come of it, perhaps in unexpected ways...
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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

Post by tinnitus photography »

i guess the precedent was the murder of Jo Cox in Britain last year. well, maybe not 'the' but 'a.'


yeah, things are seriously fucked up when people are killing politicians.



i read an interesting article in Salon today, and it raises a good question as to how the 2nd amendment would actually work wrt to 'tyrannical governments'

i mean, this nutjob obv felt that way and starting taking action. so when does kicking in the armed militia uprising response become OK?
"It’s also never too soon to be reminded that Second Amendment purists believe that the “right to bear arms” was written into the Constitution to protect people against a despotic government. What they never tell us, however, is how exactly this works. Sen. Rand Paul, while running for president last year, tweeted the following to Fox News Channel’s Judge Andrew Napolitano: “Why do we have a Second Amendment? It’s not to shoot deer. It’s to shoot at the government when it becomes tyrannical!”

Oh, really? Wasn’t that exactly what Hodgkinson was doing? As an apparent Sanders supporter — and judging by his presence on social media — it’s safe to say he wasn’t happy with the current government in Washington. Is that an excuse for what he did? Not to me, nor should it be anyone’s excuse, including Sen. Paul. But it’s fair to assume if asked outside the bubble of the Alexandria news cycle, the aforementioned Second Amendment purists will agree that, yes, using your God-given right to unlimited firearms ownership to strike back against perceived tyrants is acceptable."
http://www.salon.com/2017/06/15/republi ... to-sanity/

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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

Post by Zip City »

tinnitus beat me to it. It was only a matter of time before "Second Amendment Solutions" to tyrannical government became reality instead of rhetoric, and a great many people should be reevaluating what comes out of their mouths
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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

Post by Flea »

Confession: I hope Scalise has a full and rapid recovery. I feel for his loved ones and their pain. But I have to consciously will myself to do this. It is very very difficult for me to empathize with him due to his obstinance in opposing (what I feel are) common sense legislative solutions to the proliferation and overabundance of assault weapons and handguns in our society. My emotions teeter on schadenfreude, and I don't particularly like that taste in this instance. Flame me if you will, I don't care, and I won't argue or discuss this further. Just being honest here.
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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

Post by lotusamerica »

I'm too lazy to dig through and pull quotes n all that, but I wanted to leave a couple comments.

1) Transgender. I have nearly always basically thought that people are free to be who they want to be, and it's nobody else's business and it is basically a form of bigotry to oppose things like transgenderism. I don't mean that as an insult, because the other side of that is I think we are basically all teeming with bigotry no matter our gender, race or creed. I think it's the human social DNA, and probably biological DNA as well. Things that seem like us just naturally seem better than things that seem different or foreign. And transgenderism is as foreign to us who didn't grow up with it as a working concept as it is more or less normal to most kids growing up today. I've worked with transgender actors, social activists prostitutes, and just plain transgender people just trying to live their lives and avoid being fussed at. Right now I have a few transgender students and I mostly completely forget to remember to think about how they're different from other people, or at least more different than anyone else. Our dichotomous ideas of gender are so deeply embedded in us but they're not reflective of reality any more than almost any other dichotomy, rich/poor, good/evil, right/wrong. Continuums with shades of gray all over the place and all you have to do is look outside of our own culture to find plenty of challenges to our views of gender, or even look back in time and see how this and other things that seem so obvious to us weren't necessarily obvious to people then, and how once we get used to them, it becomes harder to remember why were ever weren't used to them. Not just gender, but all kinds of things. Even something as simple as adolescence is something that didn't even exist until the past 150 years ago, but now much of our culture revolves around it as if it is a given reality and not a construct we've invented and it's hard to unimagine adolescence now that we've grown accustomed to the idea that it's its own phase of life -again even though it didn't even exist until well after the industrial age started - before then in many places in the world you were a child, then came puberty and at that point you became an adult - there was no such thing as adolescence in between the two. Now none of that is meant to directly respond to Cole but just off the top. IMHO, transgender people just deserve to be left to decide who they are and the rest of us just should do our best to respect that. I have a man's body and also a man's identity and can't imagine really how challenging life must be for those who grow up experiencing themselves as the opposite of the gender indicated by their genitals or societal roles or how horrible their social experiences often are and the devastating impact it has on their sense of identity, self-esteem and self-worth when some core aspect of yourself does not line up to expectations. Or I can't really even imagine what it's like to have highly mixed feelings/experiences of who I am such that neither binary gender role really fits me. If I show anything less than respect to those who have this particular situation/experience, then I'm not living up to my values of how to treat people (including how I think of them inside my head even if I try not to show it). So I know most of this was already said more carefully and with greater nuance, but I wanted to weigh in.

On to the next thing. Completely unrelated and will probably go full wacko by the time I finish.

2) Robots. We talk too much about immigrants and terrorists and not enough about robots. Our ideas about robots were shaped by old science fiction books and movies, so much that we don't really perceive how much robots are already taking over the world and how it will never turn back. The mistake (maybe) made by all science fiction is to imbue robots with consciousness, and that's the thing that has freaked us out in our nightmares, so that as long as robots don't have consciousness we don't really notice how they're emerging, because it's happening in a thousand small ways instead of one big change all at once. I like to read the writings of futurists, and one interesting recent book I read is Homo Deus (as differentiated/emerging from Homo Sapiens).

One of the main developments it focuses on over the past decade seems to be the decoupling of intelligence and consciousness. It's progressing so quickly that even the term "artificial intelligence" now sounds like an outdated old-fashioned science fiction term. "Outsourced intelligence" might be more accurate, and we are already well down the road of merging our minds with outsourced intelligence. Google might not seem like a robot at first, but when it goes from word searches to maps to GPS navigation of those maps in real time rerouting us based on other cars navigating them at the same time, to auto-pilot or driverless cars that automatically avoid traffic jams to a system of cars that get automatically dispersed so that traffic jams never happen in the first place, we're merging with robots.

Uber (and the like) is amazing because it's a huge computerized information system that, other than drivers, hardly employs any humans at all, it's just a set of algorithms connecting the phones of humans who want to go somewhere in real time with humans driving cars following the algorithm's direction toward the place we want to get to, yet is rapidly chipping away at the professional driving industry. Everything is pre-programmed by algorithm and it won't be long until the uber drivers themselves are replaced and a fair amount of daily transportation for many people will be almost entirely outsourced to robots. And then Uber will merge with google or whatever and the car will just automatically pick you up at the time you normally leave for work unless you tell it not to and show up for you when you usually get off work unless you tell it not to.

But soon you won't even have to tell it not to because it will already track what you're doing and when you're done doing it without you even telling it and it will just be there automatically, and if you decide to do something else it will just be reassigned to pick up someone else who has a regular pickup at the same time nearby. That is as long as you're lucky enough to have a job to go to (or maybe unlucky enough that you have to go to a job at all). Soon our refrigerators will know when we're low on eggs and trigger a drone to deliver fresh ones without us even having think about it, maybe even direct from a chicken farm without the eggs ever having to go through being sent to a packaging plant staffed by humans with human managers, being loaded onto trucks by humans and driven to grocery store by humans, with other humans sorting things onto the shelves and still others standing at cash registers to take our money while other humans put them in the bag that we have to put into our car and drive home and then figure out what to do with the leftover bag. Instead the eggs are just waiting for us when our automated cars deliver us home, at least until they automate the process of getting them directly into our refrigerator.

So many systems are about to become so inefficient or redundant that they will just cease to exist. Many we won't even mourn any more than we mourned the end of Blockbuster when we didn't have to drive out for videos anymore or mourned our 8-tracks, cassettes, and CDs when streaming took over (but never our vinyl, the robots will never touch our vinyl, or replace the guys pumping gas in New Jersey either). Robots will replace so many human tasks over the next 20-30 years that things will become almost unrecognizable compared to now, and we won't even notice a lot of it until the change has happened, if at all. My grandfather went from horses to men on the moon and although it seemed fantastical it's nothing like we'll see in our lifetimes if we live even 2-3 more decades. Many if not most physical tasks will soon be better handled by robots, and as information storage and processing continue to develop, even many tasks involving complex intelligence will no longer require humans because humans will cost much more and be more inefficient at the same time. In some strange way, those who thought the information age was their ticket may even be replaced sooner than those who stayed with more physical labor. The technology required will soon be cheap enough that not only will not so many factory workers or drivers or delivery people will even be needed (of those who are even left), but perhaps even sooner there will be less need for pilots, pharmacists, doctors, engineers, etc. While physical automation is regularly replacing the need for people to do tasks, those who moved to information-based occupations may be replaced even quicker as computer/information systems merge and information is not only immediately accessible, but analyzable at a level beyond what humans can do.

We moved from the industrial age to the information age already in our lifetimes but soon computers will not only know much more than we do but be able to solve problems better than us. They already do in many sectors but we don't notice. Much of the trading on wall street doesn't even involve humans other than peripherally at this point.

Computers are already self-learning and self-teaching and soon won't even need us for more than the initial programming as they will be able to do more than we ever could and become self-generating. Will you want a human doctor who remembers at best few thousand physical patterns and tries to keep on top of all of the newly developing treatments for each of them and the side-effects and contra-indications of each treatment while getting enough sleep and carving out enough time to listen to our vague descriptions of what we think is going on? Or will you want a robot doctor that can instantly recognized millions of patterns at a much more nuanced level, constantly uploaded with new data on treatments that are in constant development and experimentation, and able to calculate probablistic outcomes of various treatment options in ways that we can only imagine now, and can directly access most daily information about your body from heart rate to sleep to diet to sugar levels to digestive systems or whatever data will soon be easily gathered and tracked and automatically uploaded to the system that the robot doctor is plugged into? What about when the robot isn't even a physical robot, but just an information source that can connect you to medications and other treatments when you need them without you even having to first recognize that you need them. What about when they go beyond healing us from illnesses and start automatically trying to upgrade our health? What about as these information sources become our health coaches, begin organizing our saving and spending habits for us and automatically arranging a vacation based on our search habits or even by monitoring our conversations and noting whenever we mention the kinds of places we want to go to or experiences we want to have, or help in a thousand other ways? Most people won't mind this at all because they'll only really notice the advantages, or not notice at all, just like not noticing anti-skid brakes or front wheel drive as those took over cars and made them safer and less frustrating even if a little less fun (or the end of ashtrays and column shifts either, I suppose).

While the Drive By Truckers won't be replaced (though it's fun to imagine a Westworld Cooley who could be programmed to sing Cottonseed whenever we want, goddammit), a lot of what is recognized as music will be written and performed by computers, maybe with human singers until the robots can truly get emotional expression down, and human lyricists until robots can generate interesting stories in verse. We thought our worry was that robots would develop consciousness and then wipe us out, and they still might, but our role in the world as we now know it will be much reduced well before that point gets here.

But it won't necessarily be us vs. them as we will become them or there will actually cease to be a them because it will all be us as far as we're concerned. Nanotechnology, biotech, DNA shaping, and breaking the 100 year lifespan barrier are all happening now. People won't become immortal, but humankind is not that far away from technologies that will make humans smarter, more efficient, healthier and with lifespans that we can only imagine right now. It may not happen in our lifetimes, but most likely will in our children's. The pace of aging is not inevitable, and most people who make it to adulthood die now from things that develop over time and thus can be slowed or halted, and as technologies emerge that can reshape mitochondria some reverses to aging will begin to take place.

It seems so unlikely and so unreal, but the seeds have already been planted and are growing and each incremental step just seems like a kind of cool new thing and maybe each new one will too, but they keep building on each other and taking us to a place we can barely even imagine.

But there's always the dystopian side to keep an eye on. Unlike the 20th century, it's not clear that there will be a press for these technologies to be shared or mainstreamed. Once corporations and whatever kind of morphing of corporations and nations that is happening now advance further, there may be little need for the middle and lower class people and if we become irrelevant to the larger system, what will drive the corporations and machine intelligence to support us? Even the emerging superhumans may increasingly live in their own partitioned world, separate from us. For a while anyway, until humans themselves become irrelevant. Then robots will live on even if we ignore climate change to the point earth is no longer habitable for us. They won't need us to populate other planets, if they even need to populate planets because once intelligence no longer requires a carbon-based lifeform then the physical realm itself may cease to be terribly important to the evolutionary process.

Told ya it might go full wacko. But suddenly, I guess those transgender people don't really seem so different anymore.

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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

Post by John A Arkansawyer »

beantownbubba wrote:I am surely making this up because I can't point to anything specific that supports it, but it feels like it might be a turning point in one of several directions and that "everybody" is kind of holding their breath waiting to see which way things head.
That's how I felt when those cops got shot in Dallas and Baton Rouge last year. I'm not sure if we're waiting to see which way things turn or which one finally pushes us over the precipice, though. I mean, I can point at Trump and say that he started it in March, 2016, when he started inciting his crowds to rough up protestors. But two wrongs (or however many dozen we're up to now) don't make a right. This last shooting was just as fucked up as that first incitement was.

I could parse it out and say that a guy running for president has a greater level of responsibility. I truly think there's something to that. But this guy in Washington was violent before any of that started. He's got domestic violence on his record.

And while the BernieBro stereotype was way overstated, there were a small number who just seemed like cranky, creepy old men who hated Hillary beyond any rationality. This guy seems to have been one of them. Or maybe this is the answer to why we should care about the rage of Trump voters: Because they're just as human as those few BernieBros who were fuller of hate than anything else, and because they all have to matter somewhat, no matter how fucked up they are.

And the really virulent, irrational Hillary haters--I don't care for her myself, but I don't feel the need to call her a murderous bitch or whatever. She's just another politician--have been around for a long time, too. They predate Bernie. They predate the Tea Party people taking their guns to demonstrations, which seemed like an escalation, and which might be a different starting place to point at. Then I think about the right fomenting violence toward Kennedy in Dallas and how that turned out.

Abbie Hoffman was once asked if he expected violence at a demonstration. He was a True Sage, because he answered, "This is America. I always expect violence."

I think that's the truth of the matter. We are an exceptionally violent country. Our founding acts are all based in violence and are recent enough in history for us to know the reality of them. It wasn't till the American Revolution and John Adams in particular that the idea of a government of laws rather than of men came into the conversation. By that time, we had payment for nearly three centuries of bloodshed and atrocity on the books. Those wages have been drawing interest ever since.

Even with the will to be non-violent, to de-escalate, to not be a beast, there is enough violence, and enough weapons with enough easy lethality lying around to be picked up for a song, that it seems almost suicidal not to get ready to rumble. Like Nas said about the coming of the crack era, "Crews without guns were goners." But it's not like he was saying that was a Good Thing, just a fact.

I mean, I have friends who are talking like it's a Good Thing that guy Scalise, who really is kind of a piece of work, got shot. But it's not like shooting him solves anything. There's another guy to take his place, and he may be worse. If we were still at the level where violence beyond the individual was difficult, there might be some sense to that line of reasoning, but we're way past that now. It's hard to kill just one person any more. Killing lots of people is just as easy and way more efficient.

i'm not a happy camper, but I still have hope. I don't think it'll take aliens to get us to the next level, but it's a pleasant fantasy to think about while we're trying to Reach The Higher Ground. And as The Man says of mass murder, "It's a terrible, stupid, mindless pursuit. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves."
The sooner we put those assholes in the grave&piss on the dirt above it, the better off we'll be

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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

Post by whatwouldcooleydo? »

Son, this ain't a dream no more, it's the real thing

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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

Post by Cole Younger »

lotusamerica wrote:I'm too lazy to dig through and pull quotes n all that, but I wanted to leave a couple comments.

1) Transgender. I have nearly always basically thought that people are free to be who they want to be, and it's nobody else's business and it is basically a form of bigotry to oppose things like transgenderism. I don't mean that as an insult, because the other side of that is I think we are basically all teeming with bigotry no matter our gender, race or creed. I think it's the human social DNA, and probably biological DNA as well. Things that seem like us just naturally seem better than things that seem different or foreign. And transgenderism is as foreign to us who didn't grow up with it as a working concept as it is more or less normal to most kids growing up today. I've worked with transgender actors, social activists prostitutes, and just plain transgender people just trying to live their lives and avoid being fussed at. Right now I have a few transgender students and I mostly completely forget to remember to think about how they're different from other people, or at least more different than anyone else. Our dichotomous ideas of gender are so deeply embedded in us but they're not reflective of reality any more than almost any other dichotomy, rich/poor, good/evil, right/wrong. Continuums with shades of gray all over the place and all you have to do is look outside of our own culture to find plenty of challenges to our views of gender, or even look back in time and see how this and other things that seem so obvious to us weren't necessarily obvious to people then, and how once we get used to them, it becomes harder to remember why were ever weren't used to them. Not just gender, but all kinds of things. Even something as simple as adolescence is something that didn't even exist until the past 150 years ago, but now much of our culture revolves around it as if it is a given reality and not a construct we've invented and it's hard to unimagine adolescence now that we've grown accustomed to the idea that it's its own phase of life -again even though it didn't even exist until well after the industrial age started - before then in many places in the world you were a child, then came puberty and at that point you became an adult - there was no such thing as adolescence in between the two. Now none of that is meant to directly respond to Cole but just off the top. IMHO, transgender people just deserve to be left to decide who they are and the rest of us just should do our best to respect that. I have a man's body and also a man's identity and can't imagine really how challenging life must be for those who grow up experiencing themselves as the opposite of the gender indicated by their genitals or societal roles or how horrible their social experiences often are and the devastating impact it has on their sense of identity, self-esteem and self-worth when some core aspect of yourself does not line up to expectations. Or I can't really even imagine what it's like to have highly mixed feelings/experiences of who I am such that neither binary gender role really fits me. If I show anything less than respect to those who have this particular situation/experience, then I'm not living up to my values of how to treat people (including how I think of them inside my head even if I try not to show it). So I know most of this was already said more carefully and with greater nuance, but I wanted to weigh in.

On to the next thing. Completely unrelated and will probably go full wacko by the time I finish.

2) Robots. We talk too much about immigrants and terrorists and not enough about robots. Our ideas about robots were shaped by old science fiction books and movies, so much that we don't really perceive how much robots are already taking over the world and how it will never turn back. The mistake (maybe) made by all science fiction is to imbue robots with consciousness, and that's the thing that has freaked us out in our nightmares, so that as long as robots don't have consciousness we don't really notice how they're emerging, because it's happening in a thousand small ways instead of one big change all at once. I like to read the writings of futurists, and one interesting recent book I read is Homo Deus (as differentiated/emerging from Homo Sapiens).

One of the main developments it focuses on over the past decade seems to be the decoupling of intelligence and consciousness. It's progressing so quickly that even the term "artificial intelligence" now sounds like an outdated old-fashioned science fiction term. "Outsourced intelligence" might be more accurate, and we are already well down the road of merging our minds with outsourced intelligence. Google might not seem like a robot at first, but when it goes from word searches to maps to GPS navigation of those maps in real time rerouting us based on other cars navigating them at the same time, to auto-pilot or driverless cars that automatically avoid traffic jams to a system of cars that get automatically dispersed so that traffic jams never happen in the first place, we're merging with robots.

Uber (and the like) is amazing because it's a huge computerized information system that, other than drivers, hardly employs any humans at all, it's just a set of algorithms connecting the phones of humans who want to go somewhere in real time with humans driving cars following the algorithm's direction toward the place we want to get to, yet is rapidly chipping away at the professional driving industry. Everything is pre-programmed by algorithm and it won't be long until the uber drivers themselves are replaced and a fair amount of daily transportation for many people will be almost entirely outsourced to robots. And then Uber will merge with google or whatever and the car will just automatically pick you up at the time you normally leave for work unless you tell it not to and show up for you when you usually get off work unless you tell it not to.

But soon you won't even have to tell it not to because it will already track what you're doing and when you're done doing it without you even telling it and it will just be there automatically, and if you decide to do something else it will just be reassigned to pick up someone else who has a regular pickup at the same time nearby. That is as long as you're lucky enough to have a job to go to (or maybe unlucky enough that you have to go to a job at all). Soon our refrigerators will know when we're low on eggs and trigger a drone to deliver fresh ones without us even having think about it, maybe even direct from a chicken farm without the eggs ever having to go through being sent to a packaging plant staffed by humans with human managers, being loaded onto trucks by humans and driven to grocery store by humans, with other humans sorting things onto the shelves and still others standing at cash registers to take our money while other humans put them in the bag that we have to put into our car and drive home and then figure out what to do with the leftover bag. Instead the eggs are just waiting for us when our automated cars deliver us home, at least until they automate the process of getting them directly into our refrigerator.

So many systems are about to become so inefficient or redundant that they will just cease to exist. Many we won't even mourn any more than we mourned the end of Blockbuster when we didn't have to drive out for videos anymore or mourned our 8-tracks, cassettes, and CDs when streaming took over (but never our vinyl, the robots will never touch our vinyl, or replace the guys pumping gas in New Jersey either). Robots will replace so many human tasks over the next 20-30 years that things will become almost unrecognizable compared to now, and we won't even notice a lot of it until the change has happened, if at all. My grandfather went from horses to men on the moon and although it seemed fantastical it's nothing like we'll see in our lifetimes if we live even 2-3 more decades. Many if not most physical tasks will soon be better handled by robots, and as information storage and processing continue to develop, even many tasks involving complex intelligence will no longer require humans because humans will cost much more and be more inefficient at the same time. In some strange way, those who thought the information age was their ticket may even be replaced sooner than those who stayed with more physical labor. The technology required will soon be cheap enough that not only will not so many factory workers or drivers or delivery people will even be needed (of those who are even left), but perhaps even sooner there will be less need for pilots, pharmacists, doctors, engineers, etc. While physical automation is regularly replacing the need for people to do tasks, those who moved to information-based occupations may be replaced even quicker as computer/information systems merge and information is not only immediately accessible, but analyzable at a level beyond what humans can do.

We moved from the industrial age to the information age already in our lifetimes but soon computers will not only know much more than we do but be able to solve problems better than us. They already do in many sectors but we don't notice. Much of the trading on wall street doesn't even involve humans other than peripherally at this point.

Computers are already self-learning and self-teaching and soon won't even need us for more than the initial programming as they will be able to do more than we ever could and become self-generating. Will you want a human doctor who remembers at best few thousand physical patterns and tries to keep on top of all of the newly developing treatments for each of them and the side-effects and contra-indications of each treatment while getting enough sleep and carving out enough time to listen to our vague descriptions of what we think is going on? Or will you want a robot doctor that can instantly recognized millions of patterns at a much more nuanced level, constantly uploaded with new data on treatments that are in constant development and experimentation, and able to calculate probablistic outcomes of various treatment options in ways that we can only imagine now, and can directly access most daily information about your body from heart rate to sleep to diet to sugar levels to digestive systems or whatever data will soon be easily gathered and tracked and automatically uploaded to the system that the robot doctor is plugged into? What about when the robot isn't even a physical robot, but just an information source that can connect you to medications and other treatments when you need them without you even having to first recognize that you need them. What about when they go beyond healing us from illnesses and start automatically trying to upgrade our health? What about as these information sources become our health coaches, begin organizing our saving and spending habits for us and automatically arranging a vacation based on our search habits or even by monitoring our conversations and noting whenever we mention the kinds of places we want to go to or experiences we want to have, or help in a thousand other ways? Most people won't mind this at all because they'll only really notice the advantages, or not notice at all, just like not noticing anti-skid brakes or front wheel drive as those took over cars and made them safer and less frustrating even if a little less fun (or the end of ashtrays and column shifts either, I suppose).

While the Drive By Truckers won't be replaced (though it's fun to imagine a Westworld Cooley who could be programmed to sing Cottonseed whenever we want, goddammit), a lot of what is recognized as music will be written and performed by computers, maybe with human singers until the robots can truly get emotional expression down, and human lyricists until robots can generate interesting stories in verse. We thought our worry was that robots would develop consciousness and then wipe us out, and they still might, but our role in the world as we now know it will be much reduced well before that point gets here.

But it won't necessarily be us vs. them as we will become them or there will actually cease to be a them because it will all be us as far as we're concerned. Nanotechnology, biotech, DNA shaping, and breaking the 100 year lifespan barrier are all happening now. People won't become immortal, but humankind is not that far away from technologies that will make humans smarter, more efficient, healthier and with lifespans that we can only imagine right now. It may not happen in our lifetimes, but most likely will in our children's. The pace of aging is not inevitable, and most people who make it to adulthood die now from things that develop over time and thus can be slowed or halted, and as technologies emerge that can reshape mitochondria some reverses to aging will begin to take place.

It seems so unlikely and so unreal, but the seeds have already been planted and are growing and each incremental step just seems like a kind of cool new thing and maybe each new one will too, but they keep building on each other and taking us to a place we can barely even imagine.

But there's always the dystopian side to keep an eye on. Unlike the 20th century, it's not clear that there will be a press for these technologies to be shared or mainstreamed. Once corporations and whatever kind of morphing of corporations and nations that is happening now advance further, there may be little need for the middle and lower class people and if we become irrelevant to the larger system, what will drive the corporations and machine intelligence to support us? Even the emerging superhumans may increasingly live in their own partitioned world, separate from us. For a while anyway, until humans themselves become irrelevant. Then robots will live on even if we ignore climate change to the point earth is no longer habitable for us. They won't need us to populate other planets, if they even need to populate planets because once intelligence no longer requires a carbon-based lifeform then the physical realm itself may cease to be terribly important to the evolutionary process.

Told ya it might go full wacko. But suddenly, I guess those transgender people don't really seem so different anymore.
Very interesting post. As far as robots and AI are concerned, I read a book about this a few years ago that I picked up at a bookstore in Athens during Homecoming. The author knows his stuff as much as anyone really can when it comes to this topic, as you said, most people have never even considered how this will fundamentally change the game forever. An analogy he used in the opening was that no human stands a chance going toe to toe with an adult gorilla. It's no contest. Yet we are at the top of the food chain or animal kingdom or whatever you like because of our brains. In this other scenario, we are the gorillas. The only thing we have going g for us is we have the first move. It's a subject that I find fascinating and more than a tad worrisome. I'm not sure how political it is but I had to respond.
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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

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Son, this ain't a dream no more, it's the real thing

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a couple of things Mitch McConnell said regarding healthcare legislation back in 2009:

“Fast-tracking a major legislative overhaul such as healthcare reform or a new national energy tax without the benefit of a full and transparent debate does a disservice to the American people.”

“Make no mistake: If the people who wrote this bill were proud of it, they wouldn’t be forcing this vote in the dead of night.”


What changed?

And it ain't just the Terrapin

http://fusion.kinja.com/10-gop-senators ... 1796272431
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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

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whatwouldcooleydo? wrote:a couple of things Mitch McConnell said regarding healthcare legislation back in 2009:

“Fast-tracking a major legislative overhaul such as healthcare reform or a new national energy tax without the benefit of a full and transparent debate does a disservice to the American people.”

“Make no mistake: If the people who wrote this bill were proud of it, they wouldn’t be forcing this vote in the dead of night.”


What changed?
the guy (or in this case, creature) sitting in the oval office.

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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

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our Sec of Energy and EPA heads are fucking morons.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation ... story.html

Taking down the Web page came after EPA administrator Scott Pruitt, appearing on ‘‘Squawk Box’’ in March, said ‘‘there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact’’ of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases on the planet.

‘‘So, no, I would not agree that [carbon dioxide] is a primary contributor to the global warming that we see,’’ Pruitt said.
yeah, a panel of experts probably know a lot less about this stuff than Pruitt.
The Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, organized by the United Nations, calls carbon dioxide the biggest heat-trapping force, responsible for about 33 times more added warming than natural causes.

and the neanderthal speaks:
‘‘This idea that science is just absolutely settled and if you don’t believe it’s settled then you’re somehow another Neanderthal, that is so inappropriate from my perspective,’’ he said.

Being a skeptic about climate change issues is ‘‘quite all right,’’ Perry added, saying skepticism is a sign of being a ‘‘wise, intellectually engaged person.’’

if there were powerful industry lobbyists would gain if the prevailing world view was that the earth was flat, i'm sure Perry and Pruitt would fall right into line.


Cole, you mentioned something about 'deniers' and climate change... not sure if you saw my reply (which is probably few pages back now), but i am interested in how a layman's opinion matters when stacked up against the overwhelming majority of scientists who have studied this branch of knowledge for years. and yes, it's not unanimous. i get that. but the naysayers are often linked to oil/car industries... as i said before, follow the money.

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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

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Yes I did see your comment. I believe some of this. I just dont believe all of it. I've read up on it a lot and I honestly don't know how anyone who does and doesn't have an agenda can come away being a full on convert to the climate change cult (indulge me. I'm mostly just joking around with my choice of words there. The use of the terms "denier" and religious like rhetoric surrounding this both astounds me and cracks me up.)

Do I believe we have seen a rise in temperature? Yes.

Do I believe polution has contributed to that? Yes.

Do I believe that's the whole story? No.

Do I think we need to take common sense and cost effective steps toward cleaning g up where we can? Yes.

Do I believe we are on the precipice of the Apocalypse vis a vis any of this? No.

I don't buy the hysteria. People like Al Gore and others of his ilk are in this to make money. The scare tactics surrounding this are both amusing and sickening.

The folks screaming the loudest about this all have a vested personal interest and I aint talking about a cleaner planet when I say that. Some of power grabs by the government in the name of global warming are something to behold.

The thing is, a lot of folks have fixed opinions on this but not many of them have done much digging. They don't want to.

And finally, it a long, long way from being the overwhelming majority that is certain this all just like what the alarmists say it is. Some very respected scientists say something quite different.

I spend a lot of time outdoors. I am a big time hunter and fisherman (I just mean that I do both of those things a lot), I love to camp, hike, and kayak. I care about the environment. But I care about what is true as well.
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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

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So a bunch of Californians poured a bunch of money into trying to get John Ossof elected.

Show those dumb bumpkins what is good for them. We know what is best for everyone. Reconstruct or die mofos.
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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

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Cole Younger wrote:
The folks screaming the loudest about this all have a vested personal interest and I aint talking about a cleaner planet when I say that. Some of power grabs by the government in the name of global warming are something to behold.
Whereas the loudest deniers are the ones being bankrolled by Big Oil [tm]
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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

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Zip City wrote:
Cole Younger wrote:
The folks screaming the loudest about this all have a vested personal interest and I aint talking about a cleaner planet when I say that. Some of power grabs by the government in the name of global warming are something to behold.
Whereas the loudest deniers are the ones being bankrolled by Big Oil [tm]
I don't...deny that.
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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

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Cole Younger wrote:So a bunch of Californians poured a bunch of money into trying to get John Ossof elected.

Show those dumb bumpkins what is good for them. We know what is best for everyone. Reconstruct or die mofos.
are you as equally outraged when the Koch Brothers pour money--correction, exercise their right to free speech--into elections all over the country?
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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

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whatwouldcooleydo? wrote:
Cole Younger wrote:So a bunch of Californians poured a bunch of money into trying to get John Ossof elected.

Show those dumb bumpkins what is good for them. We know what is best for everyone. Reconstruct or die mofos.
are you as equally outraged when the Koch Brothers pour money--er, exercise their right to free speech--into elections all over the country?
The freaking Koch brothers. :lol:

Yes.

Somebody play my song. You know the one, If You Dont Know Me By Now, by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes. I am that song in this thread.
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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

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Cole Younger wrote:
whatwouldcooleydo? wrote:
Cole Younger wrote:So a bunch of Californians poured a bunch of money into trying to get John Ossof elected.

Show those dumb bumpkins what is good for them. We know what is best for everyone. Reconstruct or die mofos.
are you as equally outraged when the Koch Brothers pour money--er, exercise their right to free speech--into elections all over the country?
The freaking Koch brothers. :lol:

Yes.

Somebody play my song. You know the one, If You Dont Know Me By Now, by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes. I am that song in this thread.
I like to think of you more as the Simply Red version :lol: :lol: :lol:
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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

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That is just plain mean. :shock:
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Re: The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

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Cole Younger wrote:That is just plain mean. :shock:
well, like Ricky Bobby, I meant that with all due respect ;)

Now off to mow front yard now that it's cooled down to 105. Ain't gonna mess with the back
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