benpbenp

I just finished the sublime Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy by Sigrid Undset, in the Tiina Nunnally translation. If you have any interest in the medieval period or specifically medieval rural Norway, it really brings that setting to life and this is reason enough to give it a try. Much more than that though, it deals with so many profound themes -- mostly related to family and faith -- in a very natural and poignant way. I feel like reading it gave me one big long meditation running parallel to my life, to which my mind would dip in and out throughout all sorts of other goings on (it took me almost a year to finish). I would say the cumulative effect was transformative.

Your global figure includes both donations and value of time donated ([2], pg.8)

Your US figure ([1]) doesn't say anything about value of time donated so I'd assume it is not included.

Finally, the metric where Netherlands and Switzerland come out on top in [3] is in size of philanthropic assets vs GDP. This is noteworthy for sure but is a an entirely different thing than amount of yearly donations.

I'm not sure that ruling really has the impact you say it does here. That ruling held that of the 8,000 plaintiffs in the class action suit, only 1,853 had standing because their incorrect credit reports were actually sent to businesses. The remaining 6,332 did not have standing because although their files were incorrect, this incorrect information was never transmitted to anyone (I am getting this from scotusblog coverage). I wouldn't call this a very, very high bar to clear.

It is a joke based on Aquinas' style of answering questions. He begins with a handful of "objections" that take the opposite position to the one he eventually lands on. To take a random example, "Whether a man is bound to give thanks to every benefactor?" (https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.II-II.Q106.A3)

Very well summerized.

Actually, in Sumer, they used an intercalary month every three years or so, much like the leap year in the Gregorian Calendar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumer

That quote is from the Bluetooth standardisation group’s response. They are clearly trying to downplay the seriousness with their choice of language here. “All within a narrow time window” is, generally speaking, something computers are capable of handling. I have no idea from that statement how easy/tricky this attack is. Also, is it really necessary to block transmissions, or can the attacker just “get lucky” and have his transmissions received first? (Honest question, I have no idea)

Well, by my Maths, 10^18 would require close to 7,000 trees for every square meter of dry land on the planet Earth. Even if we allow the use of Bonsai, that would be a stretch :)

There are distance-bounding protocols[0], but I don't think anyone has implemented them in something as small as a car key yet.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distance-bounding_protocol

Except for the "realism in the depiction of human figures" bit.

and also unambiguous to future-me. Ex: "Your worst encounter with bees occurred in what place?"

Optimistically assuming your worst-bee-encountering days are behind you, of course.

First thing, you have to teach them the phrase, "Explain it like I'm five."

But the potential of the end goal might be enough to keep people working on it perpetually.

Working on it perpetually, you say? If only we could somehow harness that energy...

The tendency to use "fancier" vocabulary has actually been noted as a tendency of the non-Upper class. Cf. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English

Not sure if you are aware of this or not but Form 8938 is different from FBAR. FBAR is filed with the department of the treasury and the threshold is only $10,000.

Ugh, regarding the lack of such a twentieth century visionary, look up Le Corbusier's Plan Voisin for an idea of what such a thing might have looked like!

Ha! I got my own name when I first landed on the site. For a second there I thought the real story was that they'd somehow exploited a third party cookie but it appears to be a coincidence.

Well, and I don't think this is a nitpick, a recession is not the same as a depression. It would be good to get the original source for both of these facts to compare. Perhaps during recession, the number of "failures" is not increased quite enough to create the "generally accepted reason for failure" you might find in a depression.

Honest question, what problems do you think this would solve?

Is it that you don't want people to have children until they are financially capable of supporting them?

It is indeed a grave responsibility to provide for one's offspring while they are still in the brood. But the upside of the situation, even in the unfortunate circumstance where one cannot make such financial provision, is no less than the creation of a brand new, fully conscious member of the human species, capable of experiencing the full wonder and surprise of being, who otherwise would have no chance of ever existing at all.

Furthermore, and here I risk delving into platitudes, children are quite literally the future of society. The continued production of children at a healthy clip is absolutely essential to the continuation of all the things we, as humans, value highest.

Hence it seems deranged to me to be so afraid of any monetary hardship that one should seek to positively disincentivize childbearing with such a broad and punitive measure. You are tampering with processes of infinite value and you do so at infinite risk.

As a smaller, more concrete objection, what about those who are initially of sound bank account, but then fall into hardship sometime after they've commenced in their procreative endeavours? Are they to be punished as well? In light of this possibility, why not take the opposite tack, and instead reward every new human life with a large gift to help pay for the cost of the upbringing?

For this kind of transfer I recently discovered and have saved tons of money using TransferWise. Their model is to charge a moderate upfront fee (0.5% for £200 and up), but then after that they complete the currency conversion always at the exact mid-market rate. The fee may sound like a lot at first, but as you discovered, all the banks "hide" their fee in atrocious exchange rates, such as the 4% mark-up you experienced.

Some downsides are that they don't support every currency yet (cf. https://transferwise.com/support/customer/en/portal/articles...), and they can be significantly slower than banks.

Anyway, here, use my link and I get some money. (and you get a free transfer up to £3000): https://transferwise.com/u/85ec4

On the contrary, as Ambrose says (De Offic. iii, 10): "In all contracts the defects of the salable commodity must be stated; and unless the seller make them known, although the buyer has already acquired a right to them, the contract is voided on account of the fraudulent action."[0]

It is altogether sinful to have recourse to deceit in order to sell a thing for more than its just price, because this is to deceive one's neighbor so as to injure him.[1]

It seems to me, generally in the case of publicly traded securities, that you may assume that your counterparty in any trade has access to all the same information you do in making their decision to buy what you are selling or to sell what you are buying.

However, this assumption no longer holds if you knowingly make use of insider information in making a trade. In this case, it is more likely than not that the counterparty to your trade does not hold the same information that you do, and hence executing such a trade can rightly be called fraudulent.

An obvious exception would be that you can make the same trade, off-exchange, with someone you know personally and to whom you can privately relate the relevant insider information before making the trade. Is this the type of circumstance you meant when you said "merely trading based on insider knowledge... there is no deception"?

[0] http://www.newadvent.org/summa/3077.htm#article3

[1] http://www.newadvent.org/summa/3077.htm#article1

This is very very good. Thank you for taking the time to make that comment. I have often struggled to make this same point but find that many people today are so deeply committed to a worldview of scientific materialism (the objects of physics constitute all that is), positivism (everything true must have empirical evidence), and a general anti-philosophicalism, that they just cannot accept it.

I think it just goes to show how sick and deficient that worldview is. Have you witnessed that cliche in some films where a character confronts a scientist and says, "But there's more to life than cold hard facts! What about love and art and seeing your child go to school and ...!" And all the scientists watching the film scoff and think that's just fluffy and inexact and those are just emergent properties anyway. And it's true, it is fluffy and inexact. What the character should say is, "What about the fact that I experience my own existence!", just like you've said it. And then, afterwards comes love and free will and personhood and all the other stuff. But the hard problem of consciousness is the immaterial's undeniable "foot in the door". If you are interested in a true philosophy of all that is, pay attention!

What if you wore a band around your back and sides, that would vibrate at a certain location to communicate angle, and intensity to communicate distance?

This is pretty great. I am convinced there is lots of room in this space for services that cater to people who aren't quite in the Bloomberg terminal crowd, and yet would benefit from easy access to financial data for whatever reason. I've been working on a service to open up EDGAR data to more people: www.easyedgar.com (pre-launch). Not quite as fancy as Penny Whale but I think a lot of people just want the data in their spreadsheet and don't know how to do that.

What I'd be interested in, if anyone has a perspective to share, is whether we should be worried? Will the job market change? Will our salaries stagnate or fall?

Could you please go into this a bit more and explain why machines thinking would prove any kind of materialism, and specifically eliminative materialism?

I am an anti-materialist and I think machines can almost certainly be made to exhibit general intelligence, and possibly even (I am not sure about this) to achieve "really real" thinking a la consciousness and self awareness. I don't see either of those eventualities to be in conflict with my anti-materialism.

I really don't think these types of experiments tell us anything about the fundamental question of consciousness. The question being, why am I here experiencing it all? Why is it not just, well, "automated", without me here as an "observer"?

So you have a research subject and you stick a pin in his brain and that makes him, I don't know, forget the alphabet. You say that contributes to the theory that consciousness is generated by the brain.

Two objections.

1) I already knew you could stick a pin in his eye and he would probably fail to recall the alphabet for several minutes. What I am getting at is that the fact that human consciousness is "heavily invested" in the material universe is bleeding obvious from the get-go. What does recent knowledge about the brain add to this? There is a heluva lot of functionality there, sure. There is a serious nexus of sensation, communication, and computation there, sure. But the above-referenced, Fundamental Question of Consciousness (TM), remains untouched.

2) How do you know your subject (the one with the pin in his brain) is truly conscious? Yes, I am talking about the possibility of a p-zombie[0]. You might want to say, "All reasonable people can here assume that the subject is a truly conscious being." And indeed I agree we can generally, in life, make such assumptions. However, you are hoping for scientific understanding of the nature of true consciousness, so you bloody-well hope for a scientific method to verify a truly conscious being. Otherwise it's like hoping to have the periodic table before you can test whether a material is gold or lead. However, there can be no such hope for a future method of verification, because presently there is not even any observation of the very thing to be verified! This would be like expecting someone who, I don't know, perhaps grew up imprisoned in a cave to develop a model of the solar system.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

There is a gigantic mystery which you are sweeping under the rug.

Sure, a purely materialistic conception of the universe is very neat and appealing. But you are at risk of missing something of fundamental importance to the overall nature of being if you simply shut down any possible additions to this conception.

The mystery is this: Why can't we observe consciousness? No, literally, we cannot observe it. The scientific process at least requires a starting observation, some phenomenon which requires explanation, something you can point to and say, "What's that?". The sun rising and setting. Brownian motion. Whatever.

Consciousness on the other hand is merely the fact that the universe exists from a perspective. You only ever have access to one perspective, your own, you can never observe any other instance of perspective "out there", "in the world". It is not a thing, an "object". It is a subject, "you".

Really? Very strange logic? I experience future versions of myself in the future, and present version(s) of myself in the present. That seems normal. You say, "they [future versions] are also you." But your tense is wrong. Don't you mean... "will be also you"?

The fact that the software copy of me is in my present time frame and yet is obviously separate from me seems to force the conclusion that I am not it, generally, in all time frames. This does not fill me with confidence that I will live on in any sense in this software copy once my present conscious experience is snuffed out.

What if the copy is running while I'm still alive, would I experience what the copy experiences? No, right? So what gives? Why should I expect to live on in my software copy?

When I see "she" it makes me reflexively stop and look back to make sure I haven't missed something, wondering, "who is this 'she', I must have skipped the paragraph introducing the subject."

This is definitely bad for readability, the user, and all that. Please, anyone reading this who complains about line-heights and font-sizes, pay attention to grammar as well.