You complain that the bar keeps getting raised. Is there some good write up by someone who believes AGI is possible and how it might look like? I.e. what is your definition of the bar where you will say 'now, this is AGI'?
I guess a key stipulation there is an interrogator who know what they're doing, but an AI that can fool an experienced interrogator would be worthy of the AGI title to me.
"read some Marx"... do you have some book in mind? Perhaps some good summary? I hear Capital is hard to parse.
So far my experience in trying to distill Marx is that he did reasonable assessment of the state of affairs at the time (i.e. identifying main classes in society of 1800s), but then his prescriptions of what to do (socialize means of production) did not work out anywhere. Maybe I'm reading wrong books.
Whatever you do, do not only read the Manifesto. It was designed as an agitation pamphlet rather than an as a complete exposition of his thinking, and it is almost entirely devoid of his economic thought. As other commenters here have said, Wage Labour and Capital is a good read. You may also benefit from a companion guide if you want the full picture. Capitalism: A Companion to Marx's Economy Critique by Johan Fornas is a very high quality book, and relatively new; published by Routledge.
You will not come away with a good overview (whether you are sympathetic or not) just from the Manifesto. This is not enough to learn about Marx's thought. WLaC is better, but it too does not do a deep enough dive into the peak of his thought, nor his method of exposition. Capital, with a companion guide, is your best bet.
As another commenter here said, the first chapters (even as admitted by Marx himself) are difficult to get through, mainly due to the fact that Marx uses a dialectical presentation in his work, in which the most 'core' and highly abstract concept is dealt with first, before progressing to more concrete concepts. As such, the book gets easier as it goes on.
Like others have said, "The Communist Manifesto" is the easiest entry point. My copy also has "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" which some say is the work most descriptive of the US today. "The State and Revolution" by Lenin is a relatively easy and enlightening read as he talks about the nature of the capitalist state, the police, and other topics. "Reform or Revolution" by Rosa Luxemburg is also clarifying as it talks about why reformists have lost the thread. However, there are also many many many leftist podcasts you can listen to that can be easier to digest and will get you the basics, so that way when you read the original works later you have a baseline of understanding.
Capital is a doorstop, but I have heard that past chapter one which talks about the labor theory of value, the reading is much more breezy.
However, while some of these books are dense, even rural peasants have been able to read and metabolize these books, so don't despair!
Not, OP, and not well read in Marxist literature either (life is too short), but I can recommend The Communist Manifesto, it's short, quite lucid and of enormous historical influence (and would be worth reading for that reason alone). As you say, the interesting part is the analysis, the proposed remedies do not just look bad in hindsight, after tens of millions of dead bodies.
I think anything before the communist manifest is worth it. But it should always be read in context of the time of the industrial revolution and before.
The article does not support the title. The facts also do not support the article.
Stadia launched with 3 indie games, one of them exclusive. In just the last week they added 3 more indie-ish games (Spitlings and 2 titles from SteamWorld). They also announced at least 4 more indie-ish titles to land soon (Lost Words, 2 more SteamWorld titles, and Stacks On Stacks). So how can one claim that indie developers are not porting games to Stadia? At least some clearly do.
Speaking of Business Insider - in my personal opinion, they are a click factory. They'll write anything that drives clicks, just look at their landing page. "Stadia is DoA" drives clicks and Business Insider wrote quite a few articles to that extent. They know how to run business.
Speaking of this specific article: if devs and 'executives' believe Google is not serious about Stadia, why no-one agreed to speak on record? Is it possible that that these contacts actually think there is a path forward for Stadia and they don't want to burn bridges? Or maybe these industry contacts are imaginary?
Disclaimer: happy Stadia user, playing indie games on it and confused when someone says that indies are not porting games to Stadia.
> if devs and 'executives' believe Google is not serious about Stadia, why no-one agreed to speak on record? Is it possible that that these contacts actually think there is a path forward for Stadia and they don't want to burn bridges?
They simply don't want to burn bridges with Google. There is nothing to win by doing so.
Everyone knows Google has enough money to throw it against their problems if they decide to do so.
3 indie games is not exactly a lot. 3 indie games is what's launched on Steam any given 10 minutes. If you mean huge indie games, Steam gets about one or more of those a day.
And it seems like the Steamworld developer is quite serious about porting games to Stadia, since 4 games out of the 10 you mentioned are all related to Steamworld in some way. That doesn't strike me as a healthy indie market if it's so heavily sustained by one developer.
And announcing 4 more indie titles coming soon doesn't leave me with any confidence. It's not much.
I agree that the number of games compared to established platforms is small.
But what can you expect? This is a new entrant, all the new platforms faced similar issues. Some overcome it, some didn't, we'll see how it goes here. For what I know, Google already invested a lot and has deep pockets.
The facts seem to indicate that it's floundering if nearly half of its indie titles are from one minor developer. Indie devs often readily hop on new platforms (given that development isn't unreasonably difficult) since it's a wide open market and they have a fresh chance to get in before it's too crowded.
Nobody is eager to put anything on Stadia. As an indie developer myself, Stadia would at best be an afterthought long after I've comfortably released my games elsewhere. It doesn't seem worth the time investment.
Looking at the overflowing hospitals in Wuhan, I'm preparing for the possibility of being mildly sick at home and not being able to get a bed in the hospital. The best hope is then that somehow we reduce chance of cross-infection inside the family. For that I got:
- Oxygen/HR meter ($15 @ Amazon) to monitor when oxygenation drops real low so that we know we have to get to ER and staying at home is suicidal.
- Some medical gloves, some masks (not hoarding - I think we have ~50 cheap masks from the time Bay Area was full of smoke).
- A ton of tissues and toilet paper.
- UV lamps to disinfect rooms.
- Basic staple foods to last for quite a while.
It's quite likely I won't be able to prevent cross-infection, but at least I've tried.
Transparency is good and all, but there is anther way. In most advanced economies professional bureaucracy figures out the costs. Ordinary folks focus on getting healthy, not on costs.
Again, I have lived there, and the numbers seem on the upper end of plausible for non-essential surgery like breast reduction, but extremely bogus for anything important. A day or two was normal for routine treatments.
The official government figures, where about half of patients get care within 24 hours, and about 90% within 48, are much more in line with my experience.
I know someone personally who had to wait months to see somebody. He said screw it and came to the states for care instead (dual citizenship). He was able to see a specialist immediately and found out he was grossly misdiagnosed.
And I know people in the USA who have gone to Canada or India for medical tourism because they could not get good care at an affordable price in the USA. But these are anecdotes.
When you look at the stats aggregated by OECD, Canada is indeed among the worst public health services in the developed world, but it still provides better care to the median earner than the US health system, at half the aggregated cost per capita.
The governments stats basically have to be kept. Running the system requires all of the necessary data to already be collected for other purposes, and their stats are drawn from that.
The stats you provide are collected by an institute looking to further their ideology. They come from a far smaller data pool,and their collection method seems rather suspect. For example, they're asking the actual practitioner rather than anyone involved in scheduling.
> The stats you provide are collected by an institute looking to further their ideology.
Proof?
> The governments stats basically have to be kept. Running the system requires all of the necessary data to already be collected for other purposes, and their stats are drawn from that.
You trust a government entity to accurately report data that's not in it's best interest? When has that ever happened?
That's essentially the definition of a think tank. This one was founded by a libertarian and considered by many to be libertarian. Certainly cause to question their stats, and I didn't like what I saw.
>You trust a government entity to accurately report data that's not in it's best interest? When has that ever happened?
This is probably enough for you to question their stats, but you've done nothing to show they are wrong.
I agree, my stats are in line with what I and my family have experienced, and yours are not.
Combine that with multiple agencies such as Health Canada and OECD which have measured wait times an order of magnitude lower than you cited, I am not sure what else to say.
And why is his data more legitimate than my data? And don't bring up the so called "bias" because of factors unrelated to the study. Every study has bias, including the numbers ori_b is touting.
Because one does not measure the quality of health care by the amount of time spent waiting for non-critical treatments such as hip replacements or breast reduction surgery, which is the only thing that your numbers are vaguely consistent with across about 10 different sources I've looked at by this point.
I challenge you to find a second source that is both consistent with your article, and breaks down the waiting times by type of treatment, including treatments that do not need follow ups with specialists.
The Fraser institute, which published this study, has a right wing bias and is funded by the Koch Brothers. It seeks to displace the public system in Canada with private healthcare modelled after the US. While they claim independence and give their research away freely, one should be aware of their interests.
Read again. The original posters claim was that the study was funded by foreign money that pushes an agenda, not that it was invalid.
As to the invalidity:
The fact that I have never waited for more than a couple of days for treatment in over 25 years, and neither had anyone I know (with 2 exceptions, both of which were for elective surgery like breast reduction surgery) does imply that, at best, their median measurement is measuring a specific niche, rather than general treatment.
Combine that with the fact that multiple agencies have measures wait times as being an order of magnitude lower than your source, and yes, I do think your numbers are invalid.
If you believe one implies the other, then evidence of the funding should be sufficient as evidence of invalidity. If you don't believe one implies the other, then your question about the funding was answered, and you are moving goalposts.
Which question was that? Stop putting words in my mouth. You've repeatedly argue in bad faith, made bad assumptions and attributed statements to me that I did not make.
> The Fraser institute, which published this study, has a right wing bias and is funded by the Koch Brothers. It seeks to displace the public system in Canada with private healthcare modelled after the US. While they claim independence and give their research away freely, one should be aware of their interests.
You requested "proof". Given that the only quantifiable claims which could possibly be proven is that they are funded by the Koch brothers, and would like to replace the public system with a private one, I assumed you were asking for proof of that.
Now, if you were not asking for proof of that, can you quote the section of the above you did want proof of?
The fact you think Britain has a single NHS doesn't inspire confidence in your level of knowledge, but let's hear it: why is the system so poor in the UK?
> The fact you think Britain has a single NHS doesn't inspire confidence in your level of knowledge
Can you point me to where I say that? You've just killed any potential discussion by arguing in bad faith. Why should I listen to anything you have to say on the subject now that I know your intentions are hostile and that you're not open to debate?
Perhaps you are right --- Amazon would not be punished in this way.
But likely you are right for different reasons than you think?
US government can put US executives in jail. I'm sure it would put them in jail. You have to remember what happened here: ZTE was caught, paid penalty and promised to be nice, then they reneged on their promise, lied about it, and got caught again.
Feds in fact just recently put VW executive in jail for even lesser offense. US government has no such jail-time leverage with Chinese companies, there is no extradition agreement, so the only leverage US has, it used.
"it would be as slow as conventional rail" - citation?
Even Reason Foundation (which is as biased as it gets - it's funded by Koch brothers and ideological critic of almost any government investment) claim SF to LA times will be 3:30 to 4:40, which is faster than any train today.
That's barely faster than driving, once you account for the time spent moving between your origin/destination and the train station as well as transferring luggage.
An under-four-hour train trip still sounds like a win over a six-hour-with-good-traffic drive. Especially for people who don't really like making that drive, which I suspect is a substantial subset of the population. (I like driving, personally, but that trip is decidedly less than a thrill.)
In the near age of driverless cars I think this might be its biggest demise. If cars are automated people wouldn't need a train. It will be cheaper and less confining to a schedule and to a destination.
I think air travel for short to medium flights will fall off. By the time I leave my house and get to someplace that is 8 hours by car it would take 5 hours to check in and check out and you still need to rent a car.
Autonomous vehicles do not obviate grade-separated transit options. Even if we imagine a road network populated only by highly efficient and inter-connected autonomous vehicles, the increased capacity allowed in such a situation will only create more demand, which will scale up traffic problems.
Now, other than traffic, I agree. When deciding whether to drive somewhere or take the train, my second factor is whether or not I feel like actually driving a car. That answer is usually no, so I'm very excited about driverless cars.
The real benefit, in my opinion, from autonomous vehicles is that they remove a major barrier for a lot of people to not owning one. By taking drivers out of the equation, you can cut cost or increase vehicle availability or both to the extent that being able to get vehicles urgently, or cheaper, depending on need, can give most people in densely populated areas an experience close to as good as owning a car. Better if multiple people need to go different places.
And while you're right that this will probably drive up demand, it achieves something else too: Availability of extensive route information. Now imagine a shared system for such cars to negotiate routing, and such cars can know which routes will be less congested, and can know which cares it is most effective to re-route because of where they're going.
E.g. there's a chokehold near me for Southbound traffic that it's tremendously beneficial to bypass if you're heading South-East, because you can take back-roads with lower speed limits but that are shorter, and that will end up being much faster when the chokehold is congested. Which it "always" is between certain hours. But if you're going South West, it's better to suffer through it.
With vehicles able to negotiate route information, vehicles going South East could be automatically re-routed when there's congestion, resulting in average speed improving for everyone.
In fact, you could even imagine a system where cars autonomously negotiate a fee for other cars to let it get in front (so you could e.g. pay a 30% premium for urgent trips and have the car company spend, say 25% to buy its way in front of others on congested routes).
This may not entirely solve the problem, but it can make congestion more about total throughput than maximizing throughput on a small number of routes.
End-to-end route information also opens the door for services to mediate multi-step routes with e.g. cars feeding public transport much more efficiently (e.g. in my case I live almost exactly halfway between two major rail stations, with two more small ones not much further away. I almost always opt for the largest of the four because it's at a central junction that gives me the best option for almost every destination so I rarely need to think about it, and it also means I know exactly how long it takes me to get there.
But if I can tell an app where I want to go, and get told to either go to the bus stop or wait for a car, get taken to whichever station is the best option and told which track/train to take, and get picked up by a car on the other end, there might be substantial time savings and often a better shot at a seat. The only thing stopping me from "shopping around" like that today is that it's extremely inconvenient.
Again combine that with pervasive end-to-end route information, and you can make it even better by ensuring not too many people get routed onto each train if two options are relatively equal and one is less loaded.
And taking the light rail north of SF to the ferry and then the Embarcadero in SF takes longer than driving when my brother commutes, but he still chooses that method. Perhaps there are factors other than time that go into his calculation.
People would take HSR even if it took the same time as driving. They would likely take it if it took an extra 20%, as the time has more utility to them when used for a train ride. That it's actually faster than driving just makes it more attractive.
Agreed. Many people underestimate the aversion of a large swath of the population to driving. Driving basically monopolizes your time and focus and exposes you to accidents. I don’t know if I know anyone who would rather drive if they could get to their destination in the same relative time, unless they’d need a car on the other end.
Oh goodness. Monopolizing your time is part of the value of driving, for me - it gives me something to do while I'm waiting to arrive at my destination!
Who doesn't need a car in LA though? LA has terribad public transit, if you are planning on renting a car on the far end you can probably afford to fly too.
