sykic

I think I may have upset you. I don't understand your original comment in the context it was made. From my perspective rb808 thinks that health care expenditures ought to be added to the U.S. tax computation to make comparisons to other OECD nations' tax rates. I don't agree with this for the reasons I stated.

As an aside I think if one doesn't view something as a tax then it shouldn't be added to the tax calculation. If one wants to say we are both taxed low and in return don't receive as much government services and so it balances out then have at it. I don't agree with that perspective either but it's a logical one to make.

If you agree with rb808 I wish you well in convincing others with your point of view.

I know that you didn't say that. Hence the question. I didn't claim you said it. But rb808 sort of did claim this:

...if we relabeled health insurance as a tax, US tax rates would be very high...

Your original comment doesn't appear to be relevant or to add to the conversation to me because VA, DOD, Medicare, and Medicaid spending are already taken into account when computing tax rates. I really don't understand what you are getting at with your original comment. The healthcare expenditures you mentioned are already part of the calculation for the tax rate in the U.S. So there is nothing to add with regard to the programs you mentioned when making the comparison to OECD average tax rates.

I fail to see what your point is. You believe the totality of all U.S. healthcare spending ought to be viewed as a tax because - using your statement - 1/3 of the people receive healthcare via a department of the federal government?

I misspoke. The cuts have been mostly but not exclusively for the very rich. For instance, Reagan thought the tax on capital ought to be higher than the tax on labor. Now if a politician suggested this they'd be labeled a socialist by the Republican party.

The problem I have with this relabelling is that decent health care is largely dependent upon how rich/nice your employer is and it costs lots of money at the point of contact. Healthcare in the U.S. is not provided to citizens in a way that resembles a government program.

The political system in the U.S. is broken from my perspective. It is not broken because tax rates are too low. That tax rates are low for the very wealthy is a symptom of the brokenness of the system. It is not the cause and I did not claim the U.S. has a broken system due to low taxation.

Making matters worse, America’s low tax-to-GDP ratio – just 27.1% even before the Trump tax cut – means a dearth of money for investment in the infrastructure, education, health care, and basic research needed to ensure future growth.

In comparison to our peers the U.S. is under taxed. The OECD average is 34.2%. What makes the average person feel overtaxed is the combination of federal income tax, state income tax (where it occurs), along with stagnant wages and high medical care costs. The U.S. spends far more per capita on healthcare than any other OECD nation.

It is easy to convince a significant portion of average Americans that taxes are too high. So they vote for politicians that promise to lower taxes. Except they don’t lower taxes for average people. In a properly functioning political system this disconnect between promise and actuality would be taken care of at election time. In my lifetime I’ve not seen this happen and my political memory starts with the Reagan administration.

Due to globalization and the ability of the top 0.1% to easily move money from country to country and to easily move citizenship from country to country one can no longer reasonably make the case that what is good for the top 0.1% is necessarily good for the country. The intersts of the nation as a whole and the interests of the top 0.1% are badly misaligned.

The U.S. is politically unhealthy and until this changes I see no hope for improvement. I think only a shock to the system will really change things.

Are Uyghurs typically very religious? If so wouldn’t this backfire and cause radicalization? I’m guessing China is prepared to engage in genocide if their current stategy fails. They appear to believe that Europe and the U.S. can’t afford to make too much of a ruckus over this.

You can order things from Amazon using Alexa but you can’t delete items from your cart using Alexa. For me this makes it useless. Not being able to delete items makes it user unfriendly. Unless Amazon changes this I’m not going to use Alexa.

Your post should not be downvoted. You make good points and even if someone disagrees with them the points do have merit. In the U.S. we regulate political television ads by not allowing stations to refuse to run them. It seems appropriate to think that the same should hold for a company like Facebook. As you say it does have the power to stifle speech and thus society does have a compelling interest in this area.

I believe, but am not certain, that there is no legal basis at this time to force Facebook to run such ads but their actions indicate that perhaps there should be. If for no other reason than to avoid the Streisand effect they should not have banned the ads. It’s a bad public image at a time when should be cultivating public goodwill. But perhaps they’ve calculated that this isn’t necessary.

You are right that there isn’t much of a story with regards to suicide at Amazon warehouses but there is a story with regard to the general working conditions at its warehouses. I guess mentioning suicide is good business from an entertainment/news aspect but this article is not helpful in terms of helping bring to attention the bad working conditions at Amazon’s warehouses.

Instead of mentioning 911 calls the article ought to have been about the working conditions and have more in depth interviews with people like Jace. The reporter probably didn’t have time to do such a piece and Business Insider probably doesn’t think it’ll be worth the investment to do such a piece. Instead we get an article that detractors can embrace and supporters can point out its obvious flaws.

My take on the article and in particular the quote that I referenced in my original post is that the author does not think memory is stored in the way that you and I think it is. The way I think of the brain working with regard to memory is analogous to how computers store information. I’m unable to model it in any other way. But then there’s the quote in the article that even if I had a snapshot of the brain at time t I would not be able to reconstruct something meaningful without knowing the history of that brain’s owner.

I don’t know enough to understand how that is possible or why someone knowledgeable about this stuff thinks this. I have basically the same conception of the brain and how it works as you do. But I’m confronted with the fact that a person far more knowledgeable than me thinks otherwise. It is that fact that causes me to persist in my view with caution. The author may be a crank. I don’t know.

This quote from the article stuck out to me:

Wallace-Wells hits this note in his book, too, writing, “We seem most comfortable adopting a learned posture of powerlessness.” As uncertainty and denial about climate have diminished, they have been replaced by similarly paralyzing feelings of panic, anxiety, and resignation.

I certainly fall into this group. I sometimes think it’d be better to stop talking about climate change and instead talk about how we all would like to breather clean air, have plastic free rivers and lakes, and soil that isn’t contaminated. I don’t know anyone who is opposed to such things and maybe changing the conversation to these things would sidestep those who believe that climate change is a leftist hoax.

One thing from the article that I did not know and have never heard before is this:

As atmospheric carbon levels rise, plants produce more sugars and fewer nutrients—by 2050, vegetables will be turning into junk food.

Anecdotally it’s been my experience that increasingly fruit that I buy is becoming tasteless and bland. I don’t know the cause or if indeed it’s true but fruit from childhood seems to have tasted better.

I’m a mathematician and tend to take things literally. I should not have mentioned the infinite tape part. What I should have said is that according to the article we don’t store memories in the way that a Turing machine does. There is no tape as such and there is no set of rules that the brains abides in terms of how to do the next step so to speak.

I gathered that the quote I referenced means that the state of a brain at time t is not sufficient to reconstruct memories or other meaningful information. The fundamental point of contention between you and others criticizing the article appears to be that you all believe that there is a storage mechanism in the brain in a similar (analogous?) fashion as a computer. I gather the author claims this is not so. Information is not stored in neurons in such a way that one “retrieves” it by accessing a storage location.

I don’t know enough about this stuff to intelligently comment on the veracity of it. I just know that someone far more knowledgeable than me and just about everyone else commenting says that our intuition about how this stuff works is wrong. That alone is worth causing me to reconsider my intuition on this stuff.

In a very real sense an average American like me is incomparably wealthier than Mansa Musa or anyone else living in past times if we measure wealth in terms of things we are able to own and buy. Mansa Musa certainly had a lot more power over more people than I do but he couldn’t go across the world in day and didn’t have access to healthcare products like I do. Unfortunately humans tend to compare themselves to those around them and especially to those who are better off so I don’t feel as though I’m incomparably wealthier than Mansa Musa.

Plastic is not a great material for the environment and your comment illustrates the crux of the issue for humanity. We tend to optimize for local maxima and not global ones. As other commenters have pointed out pricing in externalities would be a great step forward. Plastic shampoo containers may not be so great in your eyes if their cost became prohibitively expensive.

I understand your position better now. Thank you.

The quote I made certainly goes against my intuition. But I’ve not studied the issue and don’t know enough about it to trust my intuition. Apparently though there are people who have studied this at the level of an expert and they believe it. At the very least this indicates that possibly my intuition is wrong and that I shouldn’t be so ready to discount the article.

If I’m the random person you are referring to then you should not rely on evidence from me. My conclusion was based on what was written by the author of the article. I quoted from the article. You may want to rely on what the author says or on another expert. I did state that my opinion was a non expert one. The quote I made said that even if one had a snapshot of the current state of a person’s brain that would be meaningless without the full history of that brain’s owner. That’s a pretty damning fact if one wants to think of a brain as a computer.

I see from another comment that you disagree with the author. I’m guessing you aren’t an expert in this area either. Do you have more than visceral reasons to doubt the author’s conclusion? The author’s credentials seem to imply that he has thought about these issues far more that you or I. He presumably knows much more about how the brain works than you do. Why do you think your few minutes of thought on this article are enough to discount what he says and his conclusions? Isn’t that a bit arrogant?

How can the brain be mapped to the definition of a Turning machine? It doesn’t have an equivalent to an infinite tape and it doens’t work accoriding to anything like the table of rules for a Turning machine. Can you point me to a reference for this claim?

Most of the comments I’ve read don’t like the article but almost all of the commenters I’ve read don’t seem to have studied this issue. It gives me the impression that these are visceral reactions. The article is not an article for experts. It’s expository in nature.

One thing that stood out for me was this quote:

The Future of the Brain (2005), a snapshot of the brain’s current state might also be meaningless unless we knew the entire life history of that brain’s owner – perhaps even about the social context in which he or she was raised.

If true this seems to me (very much a non-expert) to give serious doubt to the notion that the brain is a computer.