If the government keeps bailing out large corporations, can this eventually form a pattern in which major corporations and industries may collectively and artificially engineer a crash or downturn event to game the system?
Once any pattern is formed and determined, there are always some people who will attempt to exploit it, and those people are often the ones who would eventually ruin all the good things for everybody else.
They won't deliberately cause crashes, because those are not profitable, but they will deliberately make risky bets that benefit them if things go well, and get bailed out if they fail (riskier bets have more upside for the kleptocrats looking out for Number One).
Given the odds, crashes are nearly inevitable. This is undistinguishable from deliberate crashes.
The policies enacted after the 2008 crisis have actually made the banking sector even more concentrated and increased the likelihood of another such crash caused by moral hazard in the Too Big to Fail financial institutions. The procedures to fight against that, like "living wills", will likely have the same effectiveness as bulletproof vests made of wet toilet paper.
The dance between supply and demand in a market enforces a number of unavoidable consequences. When an outside influence artificially influences a change in one side, a contraction often occurs in the other. That reaction can often overcorrect. Theoretically, a small downturn in supply could cause a proportional contraction in demand as price rises. But what usually happens is the response is driven both by the proportion of downturn and a measure of future value confidence based on additional factors. Subtle changes can game the system a little, but every change carries an added risk of flight to substitutes.
At a low point, the ROI on trying to game market share or other factors quickly narrows.
How is this legal? They are essentially robbing their employees no? They have effectively converted government actions of bailing out the citizens into bailing out just me and myself only. The authorities should hit them with a big fine.
Employment in the US is generally at-will. Unless there are contracts otherwise, employers can raise or lower pay as they like, subject to few limitations.
That said, they're quite foolish to link this to the stimulus checks. And I suspect a lot of their employees (especially the better ones) will leave.
Supermarkets in South East Asia countries like Vietnam would not even let you go in without a face mask. Similar to how lottery is a game of chance and to win it requires you first buying a ticket, if life and death are too a matter of luck then to cheat death due to this virus at least mandatorily you must first be wearing a face mask.
One major weakness of the current N95 masks is that sometimes it doesn't seal very well to the contours of people's faces. When this happens, it doesn't work as well because particles can still travel into the airway via open space gaps.
I personally have not seen this implemented, but one possible solution I believe may work is to apply a thin layer of sticky hydrogen tape right along the edges of the mask so it would act like an adhesive that helps seal the open space gaps as it can fit with the unique shape and contour of each person's face.
Medical hydrogen tape is the same material that we often see being used in those sticky pads that they put on a person's body during an electrocardiogram (EKG) test. It's also the same adhesive that used by those electro pads in TENS pain-relief machines. This sticky adhesive material is safe for human skins and can last multiple uses.
It would be great if someone could add a feature in which you can insert a removable HEPA filter so it can be swapped in and out when needed.
The problem of facial sealing is well-solved in the industrial space. People who routinely need respiratory protection for stuff other than particulates use a half-face (or full face) respirator [0] that has a body made of some flexible material that seals to the face far better than an N95 mask.
You can get particulate cartridges in the N or P-flavored type, which I use for sanding. It's also usually possible to get a particulate pre-filter on top of e.g. an organic vapor cartridge.
Respirators also come in sizes and need to be fit-tested. The quick and dirty method is to take off the cartridges, seal the holes they mount to and breathe in. If you feel your ears popping, it fits-ish (EDITED TO ADD: I am not an industrial hygienist, and I'm principally worried about wood dust not organic vapors or acid vapors or anything really bad. Don't take industrial hygiene advice from some random on the internet!). A proper fit test involves somebody puffing something around the mask while you breathe, talk, and possibly a few other things.
As it happens, for a proper seal, you also need to be clean-shaven. As I'm principally protecting myself from wood dust, I don't bother. If I'm using something noxious (like paint stripper), I'll shave and put on the correct cartridges.
Whether or not this is a solution to the current medical problem is beyond my expertise. There may be an advantage to regularly disposing of your N95 mask to prevent accidental contamination or something.
The difficulty in achieving a proper face seal is apparently why the US Army doesn't allow most soldiers to have beards.
"Actually, when I went to Israel I went and … talked about beards and challenges and issues, and had a lot of long discussions about it, and bottom line is, it poses a threat to our soldiers on the battlefield. There’s … data to prove it’s very difficult for the seal on a protective mask."
Im a fan of the pink p95 & p100 disposables with nuisance level organic filtering. I want to say 2097? I used them for small painting, welding, and brazing jobs. Work a treat with organic solvents & weak acid vapors and IIRC they werent much more than the regular N & P series. The carts were nice with theprefilters but then I just have more things to keep in stock.
For public health use (as opposed to medical use), the difference between an N95 mask and a surgical mask is pretty small. They both make a huge difference.
It's true: air can come around if the seal isn't perfect. However, you've eliminated most of the virus. At that point, other modes of spread become dominant.
In a medical setting, where you're guarding against all modes of spread with a full body suit, googles, etc., and where you're dealing with large numbers of exposures, it's a completely different story.
Ballpark numbers for masks+frequent handwashing suggest that they'd bring R0 close to 1, assuming a whole bunch of unvalidated assumptions (e.g. they have the same impact on coronavirus as on the flu). At that point, we should be able to get things under control with social distancing and similar measures.
When I was doing a lot of sanding, I had one of these masks, and taped it around the edges to my face. The mask would have been utterly useless if I hadn't done so, as all the dust would have just come around the edges. I just used painters' masking tape. It worked.
Most people probably won't put it on correctly, per this claim:
"I remember my respirator training, the last time I worked in a hospital. They gave the standard two minute explanation, made you put the respirator on, and then made you go underneath a hood where they squirted some aerosolized sugar solution. If you could smell the sugar, your respirator was leaky and you failed. I tried so hard and I failed so many times. It was embarrassing and I hated it.
"I’m naturally clumsy and always bad at that kind of thing. Some people were able to listen to the two minute explanation and then pass right away. Those kinds of people could probably also listen to a two minute YouTube explanation and be fine. So I don’t want to claim it’s impossible or requires lots of specialized background knowledge. It’s just a slightly difficult physical skill you have to get right...You are unlikely to be able to figure out how to use an N95 respirator correctly. I’m not saying it’s impossible, if you try really hard, but assume you’re going to fail unless you have some reason to think otherwise."
it's already being done. In today's (very disturbing) article about New York health workers:
A nurse on her unit has already contracted the virus and one doctor is so scared he affixes an N95 mask to his face with tape at the beginning of each shift.
First of all, I believe the stagnation today in scientific discoveries is resulted from the lack of big grand visions of a future that can draw inspirations.
Over the years, society has shifted into favoring financial languages and metrics in most of today communications instead of telling stories that are often associated with lifetime generational experiences. Most things are calculated based on precise risks and probabilities so naturally we would opt for the least risky path. As a result, the system has evolved into favoring incremental improvements rather than explorations of uncharted territories that are much more riskier.
In scientific publishing, this metric is represented by an over-emphasize in citations which has become the main criteria those publications are now being evaluated based on. Novelty or a desire for new experience that can generate large and meaningful impact, or even simply playful experimental ideas are no longer valued as much. Citations quantity has become the main currency in scientific publishing, and understandably has also led the community to prioritize incremental improvements.
In the paper, it mentioned that many seemingly irrelevant or uninteresting new scientific discoveries initially took a long time for the community to understand its potential, but those very same discoveries would later lead to much bigger and more meaningful inventions, such as the gene-editing tool CRISPR we have today. It took 20 years for this to happen counting from the initial discovery, so this is where the disconnection occurred.
In that sense, there is a great need to help propagating those initial discoveries both in its magnitudes and speeds so that it can receive more attentions from other scientists and community. The novelty should once again be the main focus to drive motivations and inspirations. Scientific publications shouldn't just prioritize on hard cold metrics like citations, but instead attaching more metaphors and new visions of future possibilities that can excite and propel both science community and public interests.
More than ever, people today are craving for that common naivety which used to connect everyone together into believing making the impossible possible. That's precisely what has made Elon Musk and his companies so successful.
They really should have stripped away Astro's championship title, not sure what their justification was. Why would the Astros want to keep this championship title in their cabinet anyway? To remind themselves and their fans of what their team did that year?
I like your analogy and do have a similar view in that the total consciousness level of all humans combined, at any given point in time, creates a separate universe of our own. This total consciousness level has its own rules and principles created by us which also evolves over time. It shapes all of our belief systems, actions, behaviors, etc. throughout various human civilizations in history.
It operates almost like a mind of the entire human race just hovering above all of us. This concept is pretty abstract but like you said, at any given point in time this total soul may not exist physically, but it does exist conceptually in our exclusive reality and it too constantly evolves together with us.
How did you come to the conclusion that the phenomenon you are describing is hovering above all of us, instead of resting comfortably inside our brains in the form of neurons?
I was saying that it would be a total level of consciousness from all human individuals combined, and its power is really more than just the sum of each individual. In a sense, this could be considered as the total knowledge that our species has acquired at a given point in time.
AI is going to be huge no doubt. However, in my opinion there would likely be some costly mistakes made before humans can reap its full benefits. We have been seeing a lot of AI developments but in reality it hasn't really brought us many meaningful changes as we had expected. In general our daily lives still remain pretty much the same as before. Our civilization has never experienced significant AI impacts at a large scale so mistakes may be hard to avoid, and it will serve as lessons for later generations not to repeat those same errors.
I have noticed human emotions and intelligence seem to be at odds with each other. Sometimes they are even a trade-off. The increase of one may lead to the decrease of the other. If we look around, humans today have the most advanced technologies in history, but are our lives really better compared to people's in the past? Materialistic wise, certainly yes because they are products directly produced by technologies, but mentally and emotionally it could arguably be worse.
AI and techs keep getting better and better everyday, but then human have to work more with longer hours and higher stress. We all thought the machines are supposed to help us human but it's actually the other way around. We work tirelessly days and nights in order to keep making those machines better and more advanced, but in return our lives have not seen many meaningful improvements, and even arguably worse than before in some areas. Individually our personal ability has limits and naturally it evolves very slowly, but the power of AI machines is potentially unlimited and growing at an even faster rate than Moore's law. We seem to be collectively working to make machine much better than us while we are remaining relatively the same individually. Are technlogies actually enslaving us?
We keep buying things that don't really serve us much. We have a lot of stuff now but they don't mean much. If something broke, meh we will just get another one. It's just another item and it will get shipped here tomorrow. We didn't have as much in the past but every little thing carried much greater value. Even the most simplest thing could fascinate and brought us joy.
We humans today already operate based on rules and algorithms dictated by the machines. We still don't know how our brains function organically (memory, consciousness, etc...), but in the quest of trying to make AI becoming human-like, we have created AI neural networks to simulate our brain. The danger is that even though we still don't know how our real brain functions, but we have now turned around and claimed that the human brain works in a similar way under the same principles of an AI neural network. We are enforcing AI rules onto ourselves.
This is a dangerous assumption to make simply because AI does not have emotions. Once we begin to operate strictly under these rules and principles that are dictated by AI, we would soon lose the attributes and characteristics of what made us human. Our emotional spectrum may get increasingly shorten.
TV shows and movies are an example as they are a form of story telling that have biggest influences on us at the emotional level. It's no coincidence that "Seinfeld" and "Friends" are still the two best tv shows today. Many movies that are considered as best were also made from a while ago. Despite the most advanced technologies, why is it that today we can't seem to tell stories that bring out the same level of emotional reponse and intensity as before? They all seem to lack the genuity and inspiration that the previous generation once had.
Is it because AI do not understand human emotions so its algorithms cannot accurately factor that into consideration? One can say that today humans are the ones who write those algorithms so maybe we can add in compenents to account for that? But just like the example above, if we don't even understand how our brain works, how can we simulate the machine to accurately reflect us? In the future, machines are supposed to learn and write all the codes by itself without human intervention, what would likely happen then? Would we still retain the ability to even understand those codes? Would it possible that human may slowly evolve into machines? In trying to make those machines becoming like us, we may instead become like machines.
On paper, this is not really wrong. You can't force a shop owner to sell his products to you if he doesn't want to. Similarly, I just don't have the rights in forcing you to sell your house to me. I'm sure services like Netflix or Disney Plus are probably still not available in some countries. If you visit their website from those places, you would likely get a service denial message. It's within Google's rights to offer/withdraw their services to any places they wish.
Having said that, maybe there was a better solution they could have implemented instead. Something like this should only be the very last choice on the list after exhausting all other options.
> You can't force a shop owner to sell his products to you if he doesn't want to.
The very first article of the Dutch constitution actually says that people have to be treated equally in equal cases. If you live in a country with a similar principle, do you know how this works with someone refusing to do business with you? If they sell to your peer, wouldn't they have to have a reason for not selling to you (i.e. to indicate that the case is unequal)?
A reason like creditworthiness or "looking like you won't pay the bill" may or may not be sufficient, I'm not questioning which reasons may be used. I'm just wondering if it's true that a shop can indeed refuse someone for no reason at all.
> The very first article of the Dutch constitution actually says that people have to be treated equally in equal cases.
Is that supposed to apply to the Dutch government? Or to everyone? Constitutions normally say what the government can and can't do; they don't normally directly tell ordinary citizens what they can and can't do.
I know discrimination is illegal in general (the government, companies, and individuals are all not allowed to discriminate), and I assume that comes from this article since the second sentence mentions religion and skin color specifically, so then I assume the first sentence of this article should also apply to everyone equally. But that's just conjecture, I'm not a lawyer.
Not sure if even most. Just checked our constitution.
While in most articles it doesn't order or forbid people to do specific things, there are dozens of rules and rights, which apply to .. I guess anyone in scope, many of which seem quite pointless if they only applied to the government.
The US Constitution has a Bill of Rights, which applies to everyone in the sense that everyone has those rights, but which only applies to the government in the sense that the government is the one the Constitution says can't violate those rights. For example, the 1st Amendment says the government can't infringe freedom of speech. It does not say that everyone is guaranteed the same platform to speak from, nor does it require particular private entities to provide a speaking platform to anyone who asks for it.
Saying "people have to be treated equally in equal cases" sounds like the same kind of thing: if the US Constitution had such a provision, I would expect it to work the same as the 1st Amendment, i.e., requiring the government to treat people equally in equal cases, not requiring private entities to do so. But the Dutch Constitution might work differently, which is why I asked.
I'm not making any claim about what is "normative" in the sense of being somehow "legal" vs. "not legal" for Constitutions. I'm just curious what the actual application of the Dutch Constitution is.
In the US, our laws don't provide blanket protection, as it appears they do in the Netherlands. We do protect certain classes of people in some circumstances. Generally, these classes are race, religion, national origin, age, sex, and disability. There are a few others, depending on which state and what circumstances.
This leads us to (IMO) ridiculous legal cases where a baker refuses to serve a gay couple, or a toy store with Christian owners refuses to abide by some employment laws.
I was not necessarily referring to international transactions, just curious about what the person wrote since I indeed also believe that to be true (also in the Netherlands) even though I separately learned of this part of the constitution that (now that I put two and two together) seems contradictory, at least within the Netherlands. Since there are quite a few Dutch people here, I figured someone might know.
> You can't force a shop owner to sell his products to you if he doesn't want to.
Yes you can, for example in cases of racial segregation.
But this refusal seems to be based on anti-trust regulation and it seems that Turkey won't be able to further penalize Google for this. People seem to be upset that a company can refuse to comply with the law and showing a sovereign government the finger.
But there is even a precedent for this: Google also refused to cooperate with Chinese search censorship and retreated from that market.
Once any pattern is formed and determined, there are always some people who will attempt to exploit it, and those people are often the ones who would eventually ruin all the good things for everybody else.