It can, but then it runs into the Google Maps issue - everything altruistic at the expense of some bad actor becomes a Security, Military or Legal concern - and the apathy issue.
This is partly why George Clooney abandoned his Project Sentinel - documenting atrocities from space means nothing if you cannot action on the people and financial networks enabling them.
> This is partly why George Clooney abandoned his Project Sentinel - documenting atrocities from space means nothing if you cannot action on the people and financial networks enabling them.
At the very least you can try to hold the bad actors accountable even if it's years if not decades afterwards, if you have documentation. Germany for example had deathcamp criminal cases being prosecuted as late as 2022 [1].
It will get really interesting what happens in the US once the Trump administration is gone - even if the expected Trump pardon against everyone involved gets reversed somehow, I suspect that a lot of material regarding ICE or the military strikes against "drug smugglers" will simply have been shredded or never been created in the first place...
I don't think many people dispute the fact that the environment plays a role in intelligence.
Not even many people dispute that there is some heritability to intelligence.
What is in dispute is whether that heritability means that some races are on average genetically more intelligent than others (and another problem is how to define intelligence).
If we define intelligence as IQ then the evidence is overwhelming that the average differs among races. Even in Singapore, which has a very high standard of living, nutrition etc., we still see Chinese Singaporeans perform significantly better than Malay Singaporeans on various measures of intelligence, with Indian Singaporeans somewhere in the middle. The same pattern is seen among Chinese, Indians and native Malaysians in Malaysia, and globally when we compare the mean IQ scores of China, India and Malaysia.
That could also be explained by cultural differences, I don't think the evidence is overwhelming.
Or it could be discrimination.
There are studies that show that black and white mixed races children did not score any higher than children with two black parents, while white people score higher than black people on average, which may point to some discrimination impacting IQ.
We know that discrimination, even between whites, has a negative impact on test scores. It seems like discrimination can hurt people's performance, but the type of discrimination, how impactful it is on the people being discriminated against, and the extent to which it happens over the population probably matters.
There are significant cultural and economic differences between those communities. These will be similar between Singapore and Malaysia. The Chinese and Indians are sufficiently recent immigrants for their culture to still have a lot in common (they speak the same language, follow the same religions, have inherited attitudes) with the places their ancestors came from.
No, you mean to say "if we define intelligence as the output of IQ testing", which clarifies that you're projecting from statistical surveys (with all sorts of potential confounders) rather than some directly queryable and innate attribute of people.
How do you define races? As I said in another comment definitions shift and they are different in different countries. I have an encyclopedia from the 1950s that defines South Asians as "Caucasoid". Some East Africans were also defined as "Caucasoid" historically.If we define races on the basis of genetic similarity then almost everyone whose ancestry is from Eurasia is the same "race", but people whose ancestry is African belong to multiple races.
I disagree, I think one of the big problems in science (which also applies to IT, although to a lesser degree) is that a lot of time and resources are lost researching things that don't work, getting no results, and not publishing these lack of results. However, agents can potentially communicate much better and know what other agents have tried, so they don't waste their time on those dead ends.
They are also potentially able to divide work more efficiently.
They don't really work together, actually. Nuclear is the opposite of solar, it has a consistent output at all times that makes no sense to stop or curtail. It doesn't play particularly well with renewables, unlike gas, which is expensive to run and polluting, but is already built and can be run when renewables are not producing.
If you add enough batteries, nuclear comes back the original economics.
I'm not sure the "enough batteries" part is a good investment, and the original economics is already not competitive with renewables. But maybe after you add in long term storage and the possibility of black swan risks it can make sense to subsidize a bit of other kinds of power on some regions.
If you know the energy system it absolutely does. Theres a large portion of power that is always in demand. Industrial power needs high quality power and constant on.
If you know the energy system and are not operating off out of date thinking, it absolutely does not. Wind and solar shifted with batteries is munching its way through this night time supply window . On a timeframe of 20 years this obsolete “baseload supply” economic niche will absolutely no longer exist.
I'm not sure why you think that someone who believes that this is inevitable is just someone who assumes they'd be in the "have" rather the "have not" category.
It seems like you are doing exactly what you accuse the parent commenter of doing.
The only difference, perhaps, is that the commenter seems to extrapolate past progress to future progress, while your own assumption is a lot more tenuous.
I just find it uncertain what lies ahead. I just don't see the sustainability in this. I have degrees in Mechanical Engineering, Applied Mathematics and Scientific Computing. If the "inevitable" is that I do manual labour till we can augment the robots to do that as well, I don't see how me or millions others similar to me have any agency.
Right now, a bunch of stuff is blurted out every month or quarter and people in notable positions are given a chance to "tidy it up". Let's assume that you have even the open weight models at your disposal, the hardware to run any of this in the kind of scale needed, requires capital of Governmental level funding.
Where I see this heading is that there'd be a divide of who controls the resources to produce and who gets delegated to do the menial work. If that's what you mean by my tenous assumption, please do share what you see differently.
Your assumption was that someone who believes that this is inevitable is just someone who assumes they'd be in the "have" rather the "have not" category.
I agree there may be some correlation, but it is less of a sure thing than thinking AI replacing mathematicians is inevitable, in my opinion.
It just puts us in the same boat as buggy whip manufacturers and saddlemakers. At least now we know how they truly felt. The rest of society needs to care as much as you cared about saddlemakers before AI. See how that works?
It's fascinating how we start bringing in printing press, saddle makers and weavers into these discussions.
But since you bring that up, to recap, the then colonial powers, systemically invalidated the hand weavers of India (where I happen to be from) with the industrial revolution. What followed was famine, mass deaths and cultural collapse. So yes, I truly realize the catastrophe what a group of resource controlling groups can cause on the ones who don't have the chance to have say in how tech moves forward.
Also saddle makers and weavers weren't like a sizable part of world economy. The effects were "far away from home". The "inevitable" is people in tech, all sorts of knowledge workers and possibly even manual labour.
Jobs being invalidated has been happening for a long while. This is not that discussion.
Why not regulate more to prevent abuse? Although I am not sure how stressful it is for the horses to work in those conditions, in a congested city.
Surely there are more deaths with vehicles.
Meanwhile billions of animals are raised and killed in atrocious conditions every year.
You can't regulate away abuse that isn't happening without writing rules that cause some stupid enough to cause pushback consequences elsewhere. Also it might start a regulatory turf war depending on how the state of NY claims such things.
These conditions are a literal walk in the park compared to pulling a chord of wood off road in the rain or the 90deg sun because winter's coming and fuel must be stocked regardless of weather and the other "real work" these animals were meant for. The horses doing these jobs are borderline pet animals that have a job to subsidize themselves avoid the hoofed equivalent of a working dog that tears things up from boredom. Doesn't surprise me that they keel over on the job sometimes. Horses are both stupid and fragile.
The vibe I'm getting here is "sir the latest poll says you're losing the crazy cat ladys" "ok fine, ban the carriages and call it an animal safety thing and see if that gets them back"
Unless there's overwhelming public interest or overwhelming industry interest/corruption the government almost never takes it upon itself to regulate minutia like this, the downside is just not worth it unless you think you can pander to some demographic.
It’s an overwhelming public interest, and it’s not an animal cruelty thing: it’s like 100 people running a business on public land, where the externality is congestion in the lower loop, and horse shit strewn on the ground.
Oh piss off with the hand wringing. National defense. Health, cleanliness and sanitation, having effective courts, those are "overwhelming public interests". Some tourist attraction horses in the park is not an "overwhelming public interest".
Congestion in the lower loop? Rofl. It would be the same without the horses. Hire a guy with a shovel and a rolling trash can to deal with the horse shit.
My understanding is that people have been hired to handle the horse shit. It’s not like the road in Central Park is 6 feet deep in manure. But there’s still horse shit on the ground and it’s still disgusting if you’re just out trying to get some exercise in one of the only car-free spaces in the city.
I agree with you that the animal rights angle is a weak justification. But as someone who uses the park, I’m glad the carriages are gone. Let’s get rid of the pedicabs next.
I don't disagree that there could be some problems here but my point is that the problems (horse shit, potential for animal cruelty) are surmountable problems with known solutions, not a fundamental tradeoff.
I don't like these sorts of exclusionary type arguments. We should strive to include all users or as many types as possible, not kick some varieties out for others except where truly necessary (e.g. there is no vehicular through traffic).
Look at the arc of state forests, watershed districts and conservation lands over the past 20-50yr. A lot of them (especially in the northeast) follow the following pattern: First they kicked out the Jeeps and whatnot. Then they kicked out the ATVs and dirtbikes. Then they kicked out the hunters and fishermen. Then they kicked out the mountain bikes and kayakers. Then they kicked out the dog walkers. Then they closed it to the public and gave a megacorp permission to clearcut it and build a solar farm or something, i.e. it goes to shit and nobody can enjoy it.
I know central park isn't exactly the same but with these sorts of things that don't "actually" affect the detractors in a serious way (it's not like stepping around horse crap will ruin your finances for the month or cause you a risk of developing cancer later in life or something) there's a lot of potential for the same sort of purity spiral where once you start picking and choosing who and what's allowed you whittle down your potential user base and with it political support for keeping whatever your subject is from going to shit (IDK what "going to shit" looks like for central park). Like this is supposed to be a common good. I think some level of niche touristy commerce here is what you want.
It's not like the horses were thaaat detrimental. They surely weren't so numerous they were clogging it up to the exclusion of other users. Like at best they were a minor inconvenience, but one that brought a lot of paying customers entertainment and employed some people so I think it's worth having. If they're causing solvable problems solve those problems, don't just kick them out.
How is that a useful service? This is only useful because the criminals exist and are doing it. Are killers providing a useful service because people then use protection so they don't get killed?
Or perhaps it is useful by hardening systems in case you enter a war with another country, but presumably the other country has the same problems so it's a zero sum game.
While "useful service" may be generous wording, in my own experience, when given the option between "pentesting" and "ransom+patching", most corporations would prefer the third, cheaper option: do nothing.
Petty criminals are not the only black hat hackers that exist. An immediate monetary payout is not the only motivation for breaking into the computer system of a service that's essential to society.
If we're unable to constructively reform the regulator a genuine (though politically untenable) alternative would be to remove criminal penalties for intrusion and publication of private data provided that no physical damage was done and no disruption to daily operations occurred. Effectively legalizing blackmail of data breach and cryptominers.
I like this one too. An earlier one of the original recordings[1] seem to feature 2 birds, if you want to know what that sounds like. Though I do like the cleaned-up version you linked with reverb added that gives it a mournful sound.
Edit: I asked gemini and it's only 834 1200x1200 images for 1,200 km2 at standard lidar resolution.
Can that be used to detect illegal mining operations in South America?
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