From what moral authority do positive rights originate? (a right that requires someone to provide you with a good or service)
From what moral authority do negative rights originate? (a right that prevents somebody from interfering with you or harming you)
Over the course of hundreds or perhaps thousands of years, negative rights have been developed successfully in legal systems around the world. We've seen demonstrable evidence that enforcing protections of negative rights results in a happier and more productive population.
Different countries have also, generally more recently, brought forth positive rights by various means- welfare programs, socialism, full communism, or otherwise.
People that tend to care more about negative rights than positive rights tend toward right-libertarianism. Positive rights, in a sense, require those who can provide to forfeit some of their freedom, in order to help those who require it. There is a non-zero risk that a well-meaning welfare or socialist policy fails in its mission despite good intentions. Many of the communist states with the most heartfelt populist movements have seen the deepest failures. So in the right-libertarian mindset, there is a risk of a two-fold (or perhaps threefold) failure:
-It promised to provide (positive rights) prosperity to all, and it didn't
-It had to trample on the negative rights of the wealthy to try to redistribute their wealth
-(more vague)It eroded many individuals' notion of self-determination in the process, and in doing so left them less likely to work towards their own values.
Separately, there's the important notion of what the "staying alive threshold" is. Almost nobody in G7 countries dies of hunger or thirst, and those who do were likely in a crisis not determined by lack of access. Statistically, life expectancy increases with income up to and past $100,000/yr. The spectrum in between is fraught.
The version control software that we use (I'm most familiar with Windchill, and just a wee bit familiar with SolidWorks PDM) is dumb. It's a B2B market with fat margins that is ripe to be disrupted.
Typically in Windchill, a part has a part number, and can be checked out and checked in, iterated, and revised, in operations that are non-intuitive and difficult to reverse. If you ever wanted to build an assembly using older versions of current parts, the process to figure it out might take 100 clicks, or might not be possible depending on how your system administrator set things up.
Merging (in the style of git) is generally a completely foreign concept, and engineers generally avoid collaborating on a single part or assembly file for that reason. Dividing up the interior of a vehicle's engine bay, for example, is best done as separate assembly files that are only later brought together as a parent assembly. Communicating about the volumetric boundaries of these assemblies is complicated.
I'm often aware that I could be more productive and adaptable using a git repo (or similar) containing my parts, assemblies, and drawings than I currently am with Windchill's specialized system. Haven't ever seen it in the wild, though.
I've used Windchill extensively and I've set up a Vault instance (the Autodesk equivalent). I completely agree with what you are saying. At most companies, there is a "Emperor's Clothes" scenario where even the expert users and administrators have no idea what's going on under the hood, or how to execute advanced operations. (granted, Git has the same issue sometimes, let's face it)
To make matters worse, Windchill has quite possibly the worst UI of any software I use --- first off, it runs in an instance of Internet Explorer embedded in the Creo CAD package. Few icons are labeled, and the UI is not discoverable at all. Google is often no help, since it is relatively niche BTB software.
Doing what the parent suggests, using old versions of parts in new assemblies, is only reliable when saving the old versions out as a "dumb solid" like a STEP and re-importing them into Windchill.
Part of the issue is that version control and databased file systems as a mental model do not align very well with how the human brain operates. The hierarchical structure rules the day in the end, because it aligns well with how we think.
I met the founder of Grabcad when he made a trip to Shenzhen China around 2012. I took away that he was trying to build the "github for CAD". We tried the Grabcad system out in our office for a while and it was useful but didn't really meet that vision. I haven't tried it since the company was acquired by Stratasys in like 2014 but a quick login looks like it hasn't changed much.
I deployed PDM at my company. It works fine, and even for people who don’t really know what version control is.
Multiple downsides though… cost, only really wants Solidworks files (although does handle everything as binaries), but the worst and most unforgivable issue…
They keep full versions of every file, at every check in… forever.
If you have a 500MB file, change the color, and check it it, you now have 1GB of file space taken up, with no clear way to cut that down! Coupled with the fact that deleted files don’t delete until someone manually does a destroy operation, it’s a storage space murderer.
There was something that was a super pain in the ass about their cold storage solution, but I haven’t ever seen a vault compression. I wonder if it’s new or I just missed it.
Completely agree, there is a lot of opportunity here. I have extensive experience using Solidworks, its PDM and another vault software (Adept, don't get me started). Collaboration on reasonably complex assemblies is rarely worth the effort, it's easier to communicate in other channels and link up at the end. File versioning is needlessly complicated and often frustrating, especially for less tech-savvy designers.
I’ve spent thousands of hours on pro|e and sw. the past few years it’s been mostly onshape. Their implementation for version control is the best I’ve seen, and is continuously improving. Def check it out if you haven’t
I kind of figure that a lot of people are trapped in a "local optimum." Their life is fairly comfortable, but not extremely satisfying, and any direction they push doesn't yield results in an easily accessible way.
I kind of figure that this is a result of the standard of living in developed countries having a high baseline level of easy comfort, and the fact that life is getting more and more complicated all the time. It's hard to justify striving really really hard toward a complex goal (that didn't even exist in its current incarnation 20 years ago) when the immediate rewards aren't satiating or apparent.
>In a long statement last week, Mr. Buffett defended himself by pointing to his long advocacy for a fairer taxation system, and then he immediately told on himself by undermining the very idea of taxes in the same letter. “I believe the money will be of more use to society if disbursed philanthropically than if it is used to slightly reduce an ever-increasing U.S. debt.”
>In other words: I believe in higher income taxes on people like me, but I’m highly organized to avoid having income to report, and I don’t really believe in taxes because I think I should decide how these surplus resources are spent.
I really don't like this slant. If somebody truly believes in taxes, they would pay taxes they don't need to pay? Nonsense. It assumes so much and paints charitable contributions as... malicious? Or at least it implicitly assumes that Buffett's billions aren't deserved (in whatever sense the author thinks it means to deserve something), and should be assumed to be the property of the public.
Buffett's signed the Giving Pledge, and has given tremendous billions to charity, with many more billions to come. The charitable causes he supports aim to solve real problems that governments are often poorly suited to solve. Having a policy preference of a higher tax rate while minimizing the taxes you pay is not hypocrisy for either billionaires or middle class Joes.
Seems to me that throwing Buffett under the bus is equivalent to saying... "we don't care if you try to help the world. If you're a billionaire, you're evil." If that sort of opinion becomes popular, good luck getting billionaires to give to charity when they're just gonna get yelled at for it.
You're not a billionaire, why are you spending your precious time on this earth trying to lump them together with "middle class Joes" as if that absolves them of their history?
Perhaps Buffett doesn't have a singular genius for applying his wealth to charity. It's anti-democratic on its face to just surrender control of "what problems are solved" to a single person, regardless of the decision metric. Is it truly better for one person to control all of that on a whim? Even assuming the best of intentions, he may pick a disease charity based on a close association with a victim rather than any broad rational analysis. You're just hopping right on board with his unquestioned assertion "I'm better at picking," did you give that one any pause or just hopped right up to carry that water?
What are the problems that governments are 'often' poorly suited to solve? Would governments be more or less suited to deal with these issues if they hadn't been defunded to support the personal wealth and charitable whims of billionaires?
Thankfully, the government still exists and also works to solve problems in parallel with charities. I don't advocate that Buffett takes charge of the world. It's also nice that Buffett doesn't give all his money to one charity- he distributes it across multiple charities that (I assume) he deems as "effective enough to be worth taking a risk on," which is about as good of a guess as anybody has on anything. And even if his motives are more personal, the motivation of earning the autonomy to act for your own best interest is one of the primary motivations that causes people to do hard work that both earns money and (often, but not always, but I figure more often than not) makes the world a better place to live.
At a certain level, any decision made by any individual with autonomy is anti-democratic. The greater that person's autonomy, the larger the effects, and for billionaires those effects are large. They aren't always "better at picking" than the government, but having diversifying our methods of problem solving yields better results. The world would not get eradicated of polio as quickly if the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation didn't work on it. The Against Malaria Foundation does a more cost effective job of preventing malaria than just about any organization on the planet. Habitat for Humanity completes an amazing mission of building affordable housing, teaching skills to interested volunteers, and helping people invest in their community all at the same time.
If government is the only tool in the toolbox, you'll only hammer the nails that governments can hammer.
> good luck getting billionaires to give to charity when they're just gonna get yelled at for it.
When billionaires take food out of the mouths of workers' families, they're lucky they're not made an offer they can't refuse. Even a few interested people amongst millions who have had more than enough of billionaires buying politicians, buying tax laws, stealing from society, and cheating workers out of living with dignity would make a difference to send a message. Strike the shepherd and the herd will follow. and Chop enough hands, theft disappears.
They should feel lucky to not have their stolen treasure reclaimed to help people, rather than overbidding on real estate to park it in empty homes that real owners could live in.
I would like to specifically talk about Warren Buffett.
If we can determine whether we agree or disagree about whether Warren Buffett is more or less virtuous than the average billionaire, then we can have a productive conversation.
Talking about the specifics of the person the article is about is talking about the signal.
Creating an abstract notion of what he represents as a member of the billionaire class is talking about something entirely different, and something that is distracted by notions of class warfare, social justice, and a thousand other emotionalized predispositions. It's less accurate and less useful if you care about judging an individual as an individual.
When the OCEAN model of personality (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism) was developed, they used a statistical approach. Researchers asked hundreds or thousands of study participants hundreds of overlapping questions about personality, and from there they clustered correlations between responses into the 5 categories. (sorry, I don't have my source for this)
I wonder if they controlled for gender when this model was developed. Such a method would lead to the outcome quoted below.
>For instance, males and females on average don't differ much on extraversion. However, at the narrow level, you can see that males on average are more assertive (an aspect of extraversion) whereas females on average are more sociable and friendly (another aspect of extraversion). So what does the overall picture look like for males and females on average when going deeper than the broad level of personality
A treadmill design using large rollers would have a chosen motor and gearing combination to accomodate the large rollers, likewise for one with small rollers. They would likely be able to impart the same force at the roller (or at least which one would be stronger is unknown and a function of other design variables).
One I can think of off the top of my head (statistics, not AI, although AI would also allow it) is that the actuarial calculations for home/car insurance quotes rely on risk data by zip code, education level, income, and any and all other socioeconomic variables not including protected class, but which often correlate/group by protected class, and which are also reliable indicators of risk.
Depending on who you talk to these algorithms either are or are not discriminating against protected classes "through the back door".
Sure but my point is that, while you could argue that decisions about some topics could be discriminatory by definition, that has nothing to do with AI (and saying that AI is at fault is pure anti-AI FUD).
