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The article hardly mentions "oppressed peoples" at all. Much of the focus is on the benefits gained to the empire by the diversity therein, with brief forays into the historical and geographical layout of different parts of the early/mid Roman empire.
It's still just "buy low, sell high". You make the money from the same folks you normally would, only the order of when you buy and sell is swapped.
So that adds some extra "benefits" (mutation and natural selection improves the probes over time) along with some extra difficulties - how do you keep the self-reproducing probes "on-task" from one generation to the next? How do you instill "explore and report home" as an innate goal to a mutating system?
We could have coffee made today by automated coffee vending machines, but many people still prefer to go to a coffee shop. Why is that?
Sometimes we don’t choose the cheaper automated product, and instead opt for the “human experience”. I don’t imagine this will change any time soon. Humans like being around humans.
To put it another way, the cost per advancement increases. That’s “as we advance it becomes more difficult to advance”. However, because of the prior advances, you also have more resources to throw at future advancements.
So, then, the question is whether the “profits” on the last advance are enough to pay for the next one. We can define a new term, “affordability”, as what % “profit” you can expect from each advance relative to its cost, telling us whether it becomes relatively easier or harder to continue to advance.
tbf, they already had artillery pointed at 10 million people, enough to commit an atrocity. The nukes were just the frosting on the cake.
tbf, it's not like the toil and sweat wasn't partly the toil and sweat of the slaves.
Most of this isn't geographical determinism, though. The death of the indigenous americans (allowing settlers to come in and take over), the brain drain after WW2, the first modern democracy (even if the Constitution is a bit kludgy), etc., all not geographical determinism.
It seems like they use obscure language (non-optimal, excess) on purpose to try to ...
Huh. No, in the scientific literature, this isn't obscure language. This is normal language there.
This... kinda comes across like going to France and objecting that everyone's speaking French.
Aye, but this will let us gradually work towards more and more basic cell forms, so that we can eventually figure out abiogenesis.
It's the obligation of our elected officials to keep the American people safe, and our borders are one of our early lines of defense to do that.
Against an invading army, sure. Against the cartel and drug-running, ok, I can see some reasoning there, although I'm not sure we're ever going to win the War on Drugs. But with regards to immigration, I don't see a solid argument that we need strong border control in order to "keep Americans safe". Studies show that immigrants commit crime at a lower rate, right? So how would stronger border control keep us safe? Economically, immigration helps us, enriches us. Culturally, also.
People joke "yep, gotta protect us from that Mexican grandma selling tamales out of her car", and I didn't want to throw that at you. But I don't think it's entirely that far from the truth.
There is a long and storied history of humans being afraid of foreigners. "They speak different, they have different values, they worship a different god. How can I know they're safe?"
But we humans often have more in common than differences, and cultural differences usually soften after a few decades in this big Melting Pot.
There are people who have interest in selling fear and distrust, even if that fear and distrust ends up hurting us as a society. When I hang out with people from other countries, I don't see this fear justified. Usually, I just see other people, who want to work and live and create art and fall in love and have a family, just like the rest of us. And if you've got legitimate fears, please bring 'em.. just do try to be careful that the fear is solidly based in reality, not just something sold by Fox News.
This then seems like an argument that the children of diplomats should be US citizens, not an argument against naturalized birth for immigrants.
If you believed this, would you be against sterilizing third world populations to limit the overall population growth ( given those are the populations which continue to grow in this environment ) ?
...wow.
Is this a serious question?
No, I don't advocate for open borders. I'm fine with keeping out criminals, people who don't value our democratic system, or people who aren't interested in being productive members of society (e.g., NEETs - people not either working or getting educated).
Your idea is borderline insane. ... someone on the left who lacks fundamental self preservation instincts ...
Huh. Well, checking, checking... I don't feel insane. I'm feeling pretty calm, rational, and evidence-driven.
The two big risks I see from large-scale immigration is this: - people who don't agree with liberal secular democracy. E.g., religious fanatics who want to enact a theocracy. That's all good; I'm fine with screening those out. - economic damage. But here, again, the economic data shows that immigration distinctly benefits the US, mostly through economies of scale, but also partly through higher-than-average rates of college attendance and entrepreneurship in 1st- and 2nd-generation immigrants, leading to higher earnings and innovation.
There definitely are also localized *negative* impacts from immigration, particularly for overwhelmed healthcare and education systems. These do not outweigh the national net benefits - meaning, the US still benefits as a whole - but I can understand that people living in those areas or culturally affiliated with them would be anti-immigration. But these are problems we could very much tackle if we wanted to: the federal government has more than enough resources to help these locales, while still getting the long-term and nation-wide benefits from increased immigration.
So: no, I flatly deny that I'm not concerned with self-preservation. Yes, I care about compassion and fairness, but it's quite reasonable to ask that fairness and compassion be balanced with self-preservation. And yet - even after considering self-preservation, we still benefit from increased immigration.
And the addition of mixed-use rockets! That is going to make it a lot cheaper to easily kick up initial platforms.
which will put a massive strain on our resources
True, but again, scientists are saying that we're already putting massive strain on our ecological resources, and the strain is only increasing. Not just climate change, but ocean acidification, modification of biogeochemical balances, habitat destruction, etc.
We are at genuine risk of accidentally wrecking the ecosystems we depend on.
I mean, aren't diplomats immune to US laws? Literal "diplomatic immunity".
It makes sense to me to say that they do not fall under US laws and US jurisdiction, and their children likewise.
And you think that is not insane?
I think there would be a real problem with creating a class of people who live here their entire lives and aren't citizens. And then their children also live here and aren't citizens, and their grandchildren, etc.
It's not that birthright citizenship is ideal, but it prevents some other, bigger problems.
Trump and his cronies were never going to win that battle.
He got dang close. He's only one justice replacement away from making it doable.
Gods, we are not as far from ripping up the Constitution as we'd like to think.
I mean, it tracks with "no taxation without representation". Getting rid of birthright citizenship has the chance to create a separate *multi-generational* class of people that aren't given the same rights in society.
I'm personally happy to welcome anyone who's willing to come, work hard, pay taxes, and support democratic ideals. This is how most of our ancestors got here, and it seems fair to me that we continue to extend that offer to other would-be immigrants.
Worth noting that the economic literature also shows that this is firmly in our best interests, and immigrants and their children more than pay their way in future taxes and future entrepreneurship.
The US didn't even have a particularly selective immigration process for the first century. It was only after a big influx of Chinese immigrants (and a corresponding backlash) that we enacted our first immigration controls, limiting how many immigrants could come from a given country each year. The aptly-named "Chinese Exclusion Act" of 1882.
Not getting wrecked in major land wars during the 1800s and 1900s also helped
Well, no, but almost everyone inside US borders is subject to US laws. The exceptions are rare: people in foreign embassies (which is "foreign soil"), invading armies, and indigenous tribes on tribal land.
It makes sense to me. When women have more choices, they tend to put off having kids or they raise their standards - for their economic situation before kids, for partners, etc.
I think this is good; insofar as women have children, it should be because they want to, not because they're pushed into it.
I'll say - it also wouldn't kill us to have slightly fewer people on the planet. We're already taxing much of our systems/ecosystems past their breaking points. Smarter people than me, entire groups of scientists, are saying that what we're doing now is badly unsustainable and we're heading for trouble.
Kavanaugh ruled that Trump's EO wasn't unconstitutional, just contrary to federal law, and Congress could change the law there if they wanted. So, this makes it only 5-4 upholding the 14th amendment.
Which is gods-damned crazy. We are that close to overturning major civil rights.
Water usage goes up with data centers because more cooling is needed when you run the hardware harder.
So: if you're running the models on your own machine, presumably you're not running them as often, and air cooling is sufficient. But, at the same time, this is less efficient in terms of hardware use; the data centers need water cooling specifically because they're getting more bang from their buck from their hardware, by running their hardware harder.
So that's the tradeoff: more hardware-use efficiency means more water usage.
I don't follow. If weights are open, can't competing providers pop up? Including, e.g., coalitions of anarchists who collectively share compute and collaborate on modifications to the weights.
Even if it's too expensive to run the models on your own personal hardware, open weights may still make it possible to take power back from the big private corporations.
I thought Moore's Law came to an end in the last decade?
Certainly the transistors/chip or transistors/$ or flops/$ have not been progressing at the same exponential rate as during 1970-2010. There is still progress, but it's rather slower.
Practically no one is against hard science research, properly conducted
Eh, I grew up conservative evangelical, and they were pretty much always going to have a problem with research in evolution and astronomy. Same goes for the fossil fuel industry w.r.t. climate science.
When the scientific evidence interferes with religious doctrine or industrial paycheck, then yeah, folks are still going to have a problem with hard science research.