Nobel Prize Winner Argues Tech Companies Should Be Changing The World (qz.com) 154
An anonymous reader writes:
Tech companies are competing to serve the wealthy, argues the winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, complaining there's no "global vision," with big innovations instead "designed and dedicated mostly for commercial successes... while trillions of dollars are invested in developing robotics and artificial intelligence for military and commercial purposes, there is little interest in applying technology to overcome the massive human problems of the world." A genius in the tech industry "can dedicate his work to creating a medical breakthrough that will save thousands of lives -- or he can develop an app that will let people amuse themselves."
As an exception, he cites the low-cost Endless computer, which runs Linux and has 50,000 Wikipedia articles pre-installed to enable offline research -- plus more than 100 applications -- for a price of just $79. "One part of Endless's business is operated like a conventional, profit-seeking company, while the other part is a social business that provides underserved populations with educational, health, and creative services they were once denied. Endless is already being shipped around the globe by four of the five largest computer manufacturers. It has become the leading PC platform in Indonesia and much of Southeast Asia. It has also been selected as the standard operating system for the Brazilian Ministry of Education, and in coming months it will be adopted as the primary platform by a number of other Latin American countries."
The article is by Muhammad Yunus, who pioneered the concepts of microcredit and microfinance, and is taken from his new book, A World of Three Zeros: The New Economics of Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment, and Zero Net Carbon Emissions.
As an exception, he cites the low-cost Endless computer, which runs Linux and has 50,000 Wikipedia articles pre-installed to enable offline research -- plus more than 100 applications -- for a price of just $79. "One part of Endless's business is operated like a conventional, profit-seeking company, while the other part is a social business that provides underserved populations with educational, health, and creative services they were once denied. Endless is already being shipped around the globe by four of the five largest computer manufacturers. It has become the leading PC platform in Indonesia and much of Southeast Asia. It has also been selected as the standard operating system for the Brazilian Ministry of Education, and in coming months it will be adopted as the primary platform by a number of other Latin American countries."
The article is by Muhammad Yunus, who pioneered the concepts of microcredit and microfinance, and is taken from his new book, A World of Three Zeros: The New Economics of Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment, and Zero Net Carbon Emissions.
A lot of money does not make you a good person (Score:2, Insightful)
In fact, it is a pretty good indicator for the opposite. In capitalism, people tend to forget that and that harms humanity as a whole.
Re:A lot of money does not make you a good person (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know what the research is on this, but my default assumption is that money, like religion, tends to amplify the sort of person you are.
If you're a good person, money makes you very good. If you're a bad person, money makes you very bad. If you're an ignorant person, money makes you very ignorant. And so on.
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> ... If you're a good person, money makes you very good. If you're a bad person, money makes you very bad. If you're an ignorant person, money makes you very ignorant ...'
Money is a tool, nothing but a tool
Money does not make a good person gooder or a bad dude badder
All that we see from Mark Z or Bill G, and that from Google / Amazon / Adobe / Microsoft / IBM is their ignorance and arrogance in making what they are
Those of us who have had decades of experience in High Tech knows that Tech is not only T
Re:A lot of money does not make you a good person (Score:5, Interesting)
The key figures (Mark Z and Bill G) along with the key corps (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Adobe, IBM) I mentioned above, unfortunately, have decided to cramp their little brains with "Social Justice" mantra that takes them further and further away from true enlightenment, and thus, have lost their 'purpose of being'
Don't put them all in the same bucket. All those companies will profess their love of "diversity" because it's trendy, but Google and Facebook stand apart from the others in your list as they actively try to shove their social agenda down the throat of people.
As for Bill Gates, his philantropy is basically a scam. His foundation is a steamroller that crushes existing NGOs and promotes a very narrow vision of charity, which happens to profit him and his cronies immensely. That's hardly a social agenda like the one at Google, it's just more typical Microsoft (embrace extend extinguish).
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The key figures (Mark Z and Bill G) along with the key corps (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Adobe, IBM) I mentioned above, unfortunately, have decided to cramp their little brains with "Social Justice" mantra that takes them further and further away from true enlightenment, and thus, have lost their 'purpose of being'
Don't put them all in the same bucket. All those companies will profess their love of "diversity" because it's trendy, but Google and Facebook stand apart from the others in your list as they actively try to shove their social agenda down the throat of people.
As for Bill Gates, his philantropy is basically a scam. His foundation is a steamroller that crushes existing NGOs and promotes a very narrow vision of charity, which happens to profit him and his cronies immensely. That's hardly a social agenda like the one at Google, it's just more typical Microsoft (embrace extend extinguish).
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So happy to see someone that really gets it that I hit the submit accidentally... anyway, I'd consider voting for you..at least I'd give you an insightful mod if I had it.
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Money is the ultimate tool because it can be converted into nearly anything. You're right that a bad person doesn't necessarily become more heinous when he/she is given a lot of money, but the point is that with great wealth they now have much higher chances of pursuing their goals and if those goals are bad (from the point of view of the rest of humanity) then they will be able to cause a lot more damage than if
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Well, yes. From "power corrupts" (which basically says that power also brings out what kind of person you actually are) I deduce that most people that manage to get rich are not very good people. A supporting effect here is certainly that bad people with a fine instinct of how to abuse the system have a better chance of getting rich than others and that bad people also have a higher desire to get rich in the first place.
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So you are saying that a restaurant that becomes very popular because it makes excellent food is "harming humanity as a whole"? That iPhones are "harming humanity as a whole"? That life-saving medicine is "harming humanity as a whole"? Because all of those make people a lot of money.
In what way does inventing and producing something that lots of people want to buy make you a bad person or harm humanity?
Re: A lot of money does not make you a good person (Score:2)
With the food service industry, there is more variation in how things are done. Some very upscale places might provide decent wages, since they are given direct
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Note how these problems are not typical of capitalist countries.
What you call "scraping by" is considered luxurious by most of the world.
Well, actually, most of those people contribute a lot more. But ticket scalpers
Re: A lot of money does not make you a good perso (Score:2)
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Lots of problems with this statement.
First, I doubt that's true of "most of the world". Certainly a large part, but lots of people live in wealthy countries with access to health care, a "luxury" not possessed by the lower classes in the US. The world is advancing economically, and the main things now that keep countries poor are corrupt government and unbridled capitalism.
Second, you're dismissing one person's problems by sayi
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Sure about that? They're the sort of jobs that typically don't offer decent health care.
If you're talking about socialism as an economic system, that discussion has been very definitely settled. It doesn't work. What people are using "socialism" to mean now is restrictions on what people can do to make money and support for those in difficulties. That's more in opp
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Cite? Bear in mind that what I said doesn't require a totalitarian regime, so those would be irrelevant to the discussion.
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You're confusing capitalism with philanthropy.
Capitalism is what generates the resources that allows philanthropy to exist. The doctor's own example is proof of this. This includes the knock off of software created by an abusive telephone trust.
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Philanthropy basically allows people to work for the common good because they get money for it from some donor. In other systems besides capitalism, people already can work for the common good because they do not have to get money for it. Incidentally, there are a lot of volunteer workers even today with capitalism that work for the common good without getting money for it at all. Hence you made a completely empty argument.
And when you look right at it, a lot of Philanthropy comes from really, really big cr
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Philanthropy is only really possible when a market participant has made excessive profit.
just out of curiosity, did you post that comment from a MacBook or other Apple product?
Re:A lot of money does not make you a good person (Score:5, Insightful)
Pablo Escobar [wikipedia.org] "[had] ...an estimated net worth of US $30 billion by the early 1990s (equivalent to about $55 billion as of 2016), making him one of the richest men in the world in his prime."
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Nah very rarely does it make you free. Look at Mark Z with his estimated $70bn+ net value. It's not like he opens up his netbank and sees the $70bn bank balance is it? In fact he jumped from $10bn to $70bn without really doing much. He could of gone on a long holiday and it would of made little difference.
So, the definition of rich is what? The value of the stock you have? the line of credit the bank gives you? Rich gives you plenty of options, weather or not rich people choose the right options is few and
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"He could of gone on a long holiday and it would of made little difference."
HAVE. Would HAVE. Do you of any idea how annoying that is?
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That's easy. In my mind:
Wealth is the sum total street value of all things and assets that a person owns or wholly controls and has the right to sell for cash or money in the bank. That value should only be based on what dollar amount that person would actually end up with if they liquidated everything they could without having a significant negative impact on their ability to live in a safe, clean, comfortable environment, as defined by agencies like HUD, EPA, etc., or
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A rich person is defined to be someone who has more money than I do!
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You're confusing amount and rate. Net worth is about how much money someone has, regardless of income or outflow, which just change net worth. Cost of living is normally expressed as a certain amount of money per year, normally calculated with the idea that you have a household set up. Now, a decent life style can't cost $300K/year in California, and has to cost more than what you can make by investing $300K, so I have no idea where
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In simple terms money comes down to supply and demand.
If you are wealthy then you sold or did something that offered a good amount of supply that meet the demand.
A fast food worker is a position that is easy to fill and there are people applying all the time so the wage is low.
A CEO of a public traded company requires much more experience and it is much harder to replace. So the wage is high.
This isn’t representative of their worth to society just how easy can the job be replaced at a rate to meet dem
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It unfortunately does not even come down to that. As soon as some players are large enough, it comes down to market manipulation. We see a lot of that in the press these days and there will be much more of it that does not get reported on.
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You probably have never heard of fraud, crime, and unethical business practices and that you cannot really get rich with honest work.
So no, you are dead wrong. And you are part of the problem because of that.
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That's the fastest way to measure whether you're a parasite. At the end of the day you have taken $N dollars from society, and did X actions for society.
Oh bullshit. People pay you money for things that they value, and at the end of the day, it creates wealth for more people. The author of TFA is an idiot because he doesn't realize just how the humanitarian stuff he wants comes from some rich dude creating something entertaining for other rich dudes. Then he goes around and talks about a laptop, but he completely fails to acknowledge that laptops were originally built to solve rich people problems, and without rich people pushing this stuff forward, his vau
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Capitalism is a very, very good way to generate wealth. It's not a good way to distribute wealth to people, unless you have no idea of equitable distribution. Unregulated capitalism divides the people into the owner class and the scrabbling-for-a-living class. Unregulated capitalism also favors the exploitation of other people and the destruction of the environment, civil rights, etc. As a society, we really should make a difference between people who get rich making stuff or providing services with li
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It's not a good way to distribute wealth to people, unless you have no idea of equitable distribution.
First it needs to be pointed out that capitalism does by far the best at making ALL of the population wealthier, including the poor. Really, it is. Sure, the rich can and do get richer, but that does not take away from somebody else, and by extension, it's a total myth that the poor are getting poorer; this is just something that marxists say because they think of the economy as being zero-sum, but it isn't. (Karl Marx was stupidly ignorant about human behavior, and how material wealth can literally be crea
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We don't have anything better than capitalism to run economies. However, there are many variants of capitalism, and they all have certain evils. Similarly, I'm in favor of democracy as a system of government, but it has its evils, and there's many variants. What we've got now is generally more humane than what we had in the days of Karl Marx, and some elements of the Communist Manifesto are in general practice (and others have been shown not to work).
The basic capitalist distribution of wealth doesn't
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What we've got now is generally more humane than what we had in the days of Karl Marx, and some elements of the Communist Manifesto are in general practice
Like what?
The basic capitalist distribution of wealth doesn't match anything most people would find desirable.
Your echo chamber isn't "most people".
It reduces opportunities for the less wealthy, and that's not good.
Based on what, exactly? We're seeing more and more opportunities for the less wealthy as time goes on. Hans Rosling showed this pretty well using hard numbers. This primarily comes from new technology that the private sector creates for its own self interest. And whenever a new technology comes around that disrupts jobs, we see whole new industries spring up that weren't possible without that technology. Case in point: The word "computer" was a person's job ti
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Nope. Not as long as we have really good and really bad schools.
No; people work for money in all sorts of systems, including Communism. Capitalism is about capital, which means resources capitalists can invest to make more money.
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Nope. Not as long as we have really good and really bad schools.
You mean like the really bad school I went to that I got bullied so much that I barely graduated? Those kinds of bad schools? For comparison, I thought college was incredibly easy compared to high school, and I graduated summa cum laude with a perfect 4.0. And when I started college, some of my classes were high school level.
Saying that bad schools hold people back is just an excuse, like Morgan Freeman said.
No; people work for money in all sorts of systems, including Communism. Capitalism is about capital, which means resources capitalists can invest to make more money.
You're trying to explain this to me but you have no idea what the words you're saying even mean. Com
Definitely deserving of the Nobel Prize (Score:5, Informative)
There's been a lot of controversy over the Peace prize of late.
Note that Muhammad Yunus started the Grameen Bank [wikipedia.org] which has reduced worldwide poverty by some insane amount - something like 40% of all poverty in the world has been eliminated by this one idea(*).
This guy deserves his medal, and perhaps his stature and accomplishments should be taken into account before people start dissing his opinions.
He's not just a random blogger that got an article in BuzzFeed.
(*) With significant follow-on benefits, such as increasing childrens' dietary protein, leading to better health.
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No. Hell no. Grameen Bank is a wonderful program to allow small businesses access to capital. To become capitalists.
The 40% reduction in poverty was due to third-world countries embracing globalization. China, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Belarus, etc.
Nope, it was before (Score:5, Informative)
No. Hell no. Grameen Bank is a wonderful program to allow small businesses access to capital. To become capitalists.
The 40% reduction in poverty was due to third-world countries embracing globalization. China, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Belarus, etc.
No. Hell no. Grameen Bank is a wonderful program to allow small businesses access to capital. To become capitalists.
The 40% reduction in poverty was due to third-world countries embracing globalization. China, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Belarus, etc.
The Grameen Bank was written up in the November 1999 issue of Scientific American [scientificamerican.com].
NAFTA came into force in 1994, so most of the benefits from Grameen happened *before* the push towards globalization.
And for the record, bringing people out of poverty through globalism is temporary, because the root cause of poverty is corruption and globalism doesn't change that.
Most of the wealth to China went first to the people, then to the government. The government now has all the money, and the people would return to poverty in a heartbeat if the global demand dried up.
Not so much with the Grameen bank.
China is throwing tons of money at worthless projects: cities with no residents, massive investment in research with no accountability for quality, and huge state-sponsored projects that regularly fail - such as bridges and dams.
All that wealth coming from the US has gone to waste.
What's worse is that globalism is pulling us down into poverty. Highly trained Chinese can come to this country and get jobs, but highly trained Americans can't similarly go to China. You can't become a Chinese citizen even if you marry a Chinese citizen.
Globalism is one-sided, and makes our country weaker in every possible way. The wealth flows from the richer country to the poorer, where it is wasted.
At any rate, the Grameen bank was an idea that actually worked.
Even if you are philosophically opposed to capitalism, you have to admit that the Grameen Bank, as an idea, works.
Re:Nope, it was before (Score:5, Interesting)
China is throwing tons of money at worthless projects: cities with no residents, massive investment in research with no accountability for quality, and huge state-sponsored projects that regularly fail - such as bridges and dams.
That kind of comment is somewhere between "hindsight is 20/20" and reversed survival bias. You look at things that failed and ignore those that worked.
The population of Shanghai went from 16 to 24 million people in the last 15 years. That's more than 500,000 newcomers *every year*. Those people need a roof over their head, they need food, they need plumbing and waste management, transportation, etc. And Shanghai is not even among the fastest growing city in China. For instance Zhengzhou went from 3 million to 9 million in 5 years - that's like transforming Phoenix into NYC in 5 years.
And it's not just about the population density. A decade ago, China was importing garbage from the USA to recycle and extract resources. They no longer do that because their industry is catching up; in fact, more and more they don't even bother shipping back containers when they send stuff to the USA, they sell them on the cheap or even trash them. Another sign that they're moving ahead full speed is that the bulk of their industrial capacity goes to the domestic market. The crap you can buy at Walmart is a drop in the bucket compared to the volume they're selling to the new Chinese middle class, which is amazing.
China has been growing at a crazy speed, and mistakes are made here and there, but I'd be curious to see how well you personally would succeed with those kinds of challenges. This is more complicated than playing SimCity.
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Indeed. People point to that one high speed rail crash and claim that it shows everything Chinese is crap and a failure. But actually they built the world's largest high speed rail network, and the world's largest underground network, and in record time and with a generally excellent safety record. Per passenger kilometre it's extremely safe, affordable and efficient. I'm looking forward to using it myself.
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Corruption is the cause of poverty, but it is so because it allows the same kind of plague on the free productive people as mafias, warlords, and criminals in the street in a lawless state.
In other words, those who produce are not safe from looting of one kind or another, and say to hell with it, and don't even try.
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In other words, each poor person could become wealthy, but are discouraged by their quality of life. I suspect that most poor people would get a middle-class lifestyle if they could, and that you should really rethink your view of economics and society.
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Yup. Businesses get to globalize, while individuals don't. The businesses want to pay third-world wages while charging their customers first-world prices. If we could buy pretty much everything at the prices the poor countries pay, globalization would be a lot more fair.
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"...his stature and accomplishments should be taken into account before people start dissing his opinions...."
Sure. Then again, if the Nobel Committee wants their winners to carry some de facto credibility from their award, they need to give the prize to more people like him, and fewer prizes based on virtue signalling.
Re:Definitely deserving of the Nobel Prize (Score:5, Informative)
G I V E M E A B R E A K
A bank which requires debt to be paid of reduced world hunger by 40%? Absolutely laughable.
it's not just his bank directly, it's the concept he invented (microcredit).
And it does work. Let's say someone is very poor and tries to make a living selling bottles of water on the street. They buy 10 every day from a grocery store and make a profit of a few cents; it's difficult to sell more because people don't buy warm water and the constant trips to the grocey store to restock is taking a long time. Getting that business to the next level, which would be to sell 50 bottles a day, would require a small plastic cooler. From our perspective it's cheap, maybe $15, but for someone who makes a few cents a day, it could take a long time to save $15. That's where microcredit comes in. The person can now buy a cooler and quintuple their income, which allows them to repay the debt much faster. And then after a while maybe they're ready for a second cooler, or an employee.
There are other forms of microcredit that work too, like "microcredit unions", where a bunch of poor people pool their money and each member of the pool can borrow a larger sum in a round-robin fashion.
It all comes down to leverage. There's a ceiling (or more accurately a chasm) but this kind of financing works.
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The best part is that if you just put up a website you can get people to not only front the capital for you, but also pay your salary and any relevant fees at their own expense.
a quote from Yunnus (not Yunus) (Score:3)
the business of 'murika is business (Score:1)
theres no room for morality, compassion, or anything else. made greed great again.
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It doesn't have to be. Let's celebrate the over 160 billionaires who have signed the Giving Pledge [cnbc.com] and promised to give away more than half of their money. This is an act that other people in their position should be measured by.
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"How do we get rid of the idiots in a democracy where NOBODY is going to vote for the Nazi Party and related eugenics program?"
Education maybe? AKA "Tell people the truth in order to make them free", which is not quite in line with the capitalists’ and advertisers’ motto: "Tell people lies in order to make them slaves".
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That's a political problem of "How do we get rid of the idiots in a democracy where NOBODY is going to vote for the Nazi Party and related eugenics program?"
I hope you were joking about the NAZIs' eugenics program as a solution. Assuming you were trying to make a point: Quality education is the key. Also define 'Idiot'. Is that someone who disagrees with your point of view? Is it someone with a given measurable intelligence? Or perhaps you're considering people who parrot what their tribe says on a subject, without using critical thinking skills? Seeing 'idiots' all around us is not a problem, as much as a symptom of out of control tribalism.
The bigges
The best minds of this generation... (Score:2)
The best minds of this generation are being put to good use optimizing ad revenue and building detailed personal profiles to better tailor ads.
Why should they waste time on toy projects like cancer cures and climate change?
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Tech geniuses to solve humanity problems? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Blame those pouring trillions into military & commercial instead of real human problems and not tech geniuses.
Right! We should forget investing in military and commercial products and invest money in solving problems like getting food, clothing, shelter, and communications! What has military investment brought us? I mean other than GPS? We need ways to get food from people who grow it to those who need it. I mean that government funded GPS and highway system are nice but we need people to talk to each other. That military project that brought us the Internet is great but what about satellites? I mean we got
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War was certainly a catalyst for developing navigation systems, but there is no reason why we could not have built them much cheaper as civilian projects and made things like GPS available to everyone from day one. Aviation could have started using GPS much earlier if selective availability had not been there.
It's really unfortunate that war and pissing contests are often the biggest drivers of our development. Even civilian projects like Concorde and Apollo were tainted by that, but it doesn't mean it has
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Military needs also shit on everything, like the space shuttle being designed for same. Or how they used to use the sa in GPS.
Oh, there is interest, compounded annually (Score:4, Insightful)
there is little interest in applying technology to overcome the massive human problems of the world.
Completely false, even says so in the summary. Throughout history, if the general population was upset with the ruling class they overthrew them. With automated factories and armies, total control will soon be put in the hands of a few people, unlike all of history. Heck, with all the automation there won't be a need for the plebes to create the luxurious life they are accustomed to. I'm pretty sure Oligarchs agree, this will overcome a massive human problem.
Fourth Zero (Score:4)
Inevitably, zero freedom.
Laughable (Score:2)
This guy has no idea what he is talking about.
Science is about discovery not invention. Technology is about invention, not science, but it has other limits.
That means we can't decide to use science to solve problems - I can't decide to discover FTL travel, I can just investigate promising quantum physics and pray that I will stumble upon something that will be helpful in that direction. But I am honestly just as likely to discover a new source of power.
Technology is about invention - I decide to build the
Easier said than done (Score:5, Insightful)
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Well said... Conversations about businesses having positive ethics always make me think of that quote from Spider-Man...
"With great power comes great responsibility"
So much for corporations acting in the best interest of the environment, much less personal suffering...
Monty Python - How To Do It (Score:1)
Leading PC platform? (Score:4, Informative)
Be careful what you wish for (Score:2)
I have recently become involved in a BioTech startup
Our goal is to demystify the human genome; while the cost of sequencing a human has gone down by a factor of a MILLION in 15 years (blowing away Moore's "Law"), not so the ability to analyze it. Now, using the absolute best technology, we hope to finally unravel the mysteries from 3.5 billion year old spaghetti code (your DNA randomly programmed by natural selection).
In short, we hope to provide EXACTLY what was promised/feared in the movie GATTACA (which
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Oops got the Rick and Morty quote wrong. Next time I'll watch it with subtitles
What's easyer: (Score:5, Interesting)
1.) Trying to explain to idiots how they're doing things wrong and trying to correct them? ... Very difficult. As soon as they're overwelmed they'll start voting for Trump and Co. and things will go downhill from there.
2.) Exploiting idiots and getting obscenely rich whilst giving them PHP doodads / toy apps or virutal swords? ... Very easy. You just once need to fathom how truely unbelievably stupid most people are and what stupid shit they will spend money on, then you're good.
Bottom line:
While I get that we need to save the world (Elon Musk is showing us how it can be done) I also get the enticing proposition of simply manipulating the masses and enjoying yourself while doing it. If you get bored, then you can go about saving the world. Which is basically what Bill Gates and the likes are doing.
New tech SHOULD be marketed to the wealthy (Score:2)
In this article, Yunus calls for Silicon Valley to develop a smartphone for the poor. I define that as being any smartphone that has been on the market for about three years, and which still sells.
The rich are early adopters, willingly paying premium prices to be first to try technology that may or may not catch on. They might find themselves with an iPhone that has innumerable uses - and they would have been among those to try Google Glass, and look silly doing so. Tech that survives the early adopter filt
CEOs Argues Tech Companies Should Be Charging The (Score:2)
And the CEOs of Tech Companies Argues They Should Be Charging The World with more subscriptions and license fees.
FFS "technology" isn't magic (Score:2)
Am I the only one? (Score:2)
Am I the only one that saw the ad for Endless computer and thought, "Heh! I could get one and delete the wikipedia stuff to make room for more games!" ?
Innovations Bitchs (Score:1)
Zero unemployment is not possible (Score:2)
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Zero unemployment is impossible, because zero unemployment means, among other things, that there is zero possibility of starting a new business/industry/whatever - where are you going to get people?
Unless "zero unemployment" is a code phrase for "everyone has some makework to do", you won't be able to hire them away without damaging the place you hired them from...
Which is why, in the Real World (tm), we actually aim for somewhere around 5% unemployment as our target....
Money (Score:2)
Everything that accomplishes to a certain level is then monetized and the user experience diminished.
raspberry pi (Score:3)
It seems like the $79 model is very similar to a Raspberry pi plus a typical canakit or similar (i.e, case, power supply, sd card, cables-- typically about $60 with the pi included) Of the two I'd lean towards a Raspi for it's versatility and ubiquity making packages available for it. Just having Wolfram, Scratch, and Minecraft in the Raspberry pi in working form is arguably more important than having Wikipedia, which you could just get on a USB stick. At least it's a push in terms of value and trans
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Whenever I see someone use the term "merkin" I think of Dr. Strangelove and the character President Muffley.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
We got our own President Merkin Muffley in office now. Think about why that is. As screwed up the Republican Party is for getting Trump to be POTUS the Democratic Party is even more screwed up for putting the only person that could lose to him on the ballot.
Re:No they shouldn't (Score:5, Insightful)
That's what a lot of people do not understand. A company cannot provide food, shelter, medicine, or whatever unless they make a profit. If there is no profit in it then they cannot pay their wages, pay back investors, and have money left over for when times are thin or to invest in expansion.
Profit is good. Greed is a natural instinct. People understand greed. It is with greed that businesses stay in business to feed another natural instinct, charity. When people have enough to see to their own needs they tend to see to the needs of others. Those that don't see charity as a virtue can be tolerated, and may in fact be necessary for human survival. People with unrestrained charity are also seen as not right in the head. Giving their food up to the point they starve themselves is not healthy, for themselves or society.
I keep seeing people claim we should increase taxed the wealthy because "they can afford it". What is that other than greed? These people see others with more so they send the government to take it from them. That's just theft by proxy.
I remember a history teacher in high school making fun of "trickle down economics". He said that the taxes on the wealthy was reduced on the theory that the wealthy would use that tax money to invest in more business but they instead bought expensive cars, went on vacations, and generally lived it up. I bought it, trickle down economics was bad. Then, years later, something made me think of this some more. These wealthy people put a lot of people to work building those cars they bought, making their lavish parties, carrying their clubs at golf courses, and so on. They still invested in the economy. Even if they stuffed all that money under a mattress it still helped the economy since that was a store of wealth that could be added back when they couldn't afford those big parties and golf trips. They'd still have to buy food. Even if it stayed there until they died that money ended up in the hands of their children where they'd spend it on food, housing, clothes, and of course luxuries like caviar, lobster, plane tickets, and tips to the golf caddies.
We cannot grow total wealth without getting wealth disparity. Taking money from the wealthy and giving it to the poor rewards poverty. That's not the signal we should be sending as a society. Punishing the wealthy only because they are wealthy is paving made of good intentions that leads us down a road to where we don't want to go.
Re:No they shouldn't (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep, fsck 'em, I say. I've made a bit of money, and I'm 'pulling up the draw bridge' to make sure my neighbours, and definitely that grubby looking guy I see on the way to the shops don't get any of it. I mean, I know I'll never get any further up the ladder, because of the millionaires and billionaires all keeping all their money to themselves, but hey, at least that grubby guy down the street won't get any of mine.
"Punishing" the wealthy to give up a little more than they currently do doesn't really punish them. Most of the super-rich (people with multiple billions in personal wealth) wouldn't notice if you took a million dollars off them each year. It wouldn't affect their buying power, it wouldn't affect the output of their investments, and they won't materially suffer for it. In other words, what looks like a large amount of money here, makes almost no difference at all.
Shockingly, there are people who just happen to live somewhere very poor. They were born because their parents are so poor that if they don't have some kids to help out with the work around the house, they won't earn the few cents they need to buy a decent meal, or to fix the hole in the roof. They have to have quite a few kids because there's a good chance a couple of them will die during childhood due to disease and malnutrition, so it's not like they can just produce kids 'to order' either. Such people can't work themselves out of poverty in anything like a reasonable timeframe because they have near-zero income. That means they don't have any spare money to buy an extra bag of seeds to grow more crops, or to keep the goat alive for another year. If someone gives them an extra bag of seeds today, they go from a daily income of $1 to $1.01. That extra one cent can be used to increase their output next time around, and so on. In other words, a tiny amount of money here helps to dramatically accelerate the rate of 'wealth creation' in a vast number of people.
As for stuffing money in the mattress - that's effectively what the super-rich are doing. Their personal spending is massively outstripped by their income, and so more and more money is being removed from the economy and into their hands. They're not spending it all, and so the flows of money around the economy are reduced. Do too much of that, and you get a recession - which absolutely won't affect the super-rich as they move off-shore, making the problem even worse.
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Nope, the profit is unnecessary. Wages paid are not profits. Payments to suppliers are not profits. Operating costs are not profit. All of those are expenses. So is research, development, and investment. Profit is revenue minus expenses.
Are you going to claim that trickle-down economics works? Since Reagan started his voodoo eco
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Nope, the profit is unnecessary.
Sure it is. How else do you motivate people to invest? Tell them they would have the same amount of money they started with? Oh, but they get to help people, that might motivate them. If you tell them they'll lose money, but help people, that might work too. What would work even better is to tell people they will make money AND help others.
Even corporations that are legally non-profits can make a lot of people a lot of money. The NFL was a non-profit until the public outcry over what they thought was
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There are non-profit corporations that do a lot of things without returning any money to investors. Profit is not always necessary.
Profit is what is returned to investors, either as dividends or in the form of increased value of the company. Non-profits don't have investors in that sense. They do pay people, sometimes handsomely, and buy things, but none of that is profit.
When I criticize trickle-down economics, I'm talking primarily about the empirical results, which were to make the rich richer an
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When I criticize trickle-down economics, I'm talking primarily about the empirical results, which were to make the rich richer and largely detach the workers from productivity increases.
Reagan's tax cuts decreased government revenue
The tax revenue as a percentage of GDP decreased but total revenue increased. What also decreased was unemployment and inflation. The workers saw these benefits, and relatively quickly too. The first year or so sucked but things got better. A lot better. Homelessness was a big problem and then it wasn't. There were still homeless people, because there will always be homeless people.
Actions can be evil and yet profitable.
I won't dispute that. Profit itself is not evil, it is required for a healthy economy. People must make money. A non-p
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Like all giant corporations, Facebook/Google/Apple/Microsoft/etc. exist first and foremost to monetize the great unwashed masses. Part of the manipulation required to do that most effectively was convincing them that there was any other goal than that.
I don't think this was true for Facebook, at least initially. Until the "Lean in" lady came in, they were reluctant to build their ad platform to target specific demographics. The general culture before she came in was that Facebook was making money to grow the network and improve the user experience, not the other way around, and budgets were set accordingly (i.e more funding for features and growth, less for monetization opportunities). Now the greedy bunch is in charge of course, as it usually happens wh
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Even nobel prize winners are trying to make a quick buck from publishing their books, instead of spreading their ideas to a bigger audience free of charge. Definition of irony?
Obama won a Nobel prize for peace, then went on to spend the most money on the military in the history of the USA, on top of vastly expanding NSA spying programs and establishing a formal kill list.
Think I'm kidding?
Mr. Obama has placed himself at the helm of a top secret “nominations” process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical. He had vowed to align the fight against Al Qaeda with American values; the chart, introducing people whose deaths he might soon be asked to order, underscored just what a moral and legal conundrum this could be.
Mr. Obama is the liberal law professor who campaigned against the Iraq war and torture, and then insisted on approving every new name on an expanding “kill list,” poring over terrorist suspects’ biographies on what one official calls the macabre “baseball cards” of an unconventional war. When a rare opportunity for a drone strike at a top terrorist arises — but his family is with him — it is the president who has reserved to himself the final moral calculation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05... [nytimes.com]
^ yes, NY times, not breitbart or fox news
It's more hypocrisy than irony, though.
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And yet the scariest thing is that Obama is a pacifist compared to mainstream American thinking. Both the politicians and, more importantly, the people of America -- who can agree on more money for the military and more aggressive action around the world when they can't agree on anything else.
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And yet the scariest thing is that Obama is a pacifist compared to mainstream American thinking. Both the politicians and, more importantly, the people of America -- who can agree on more money for the military and more aggressive action around the world when they can't agree on anything else.
Actually people are fed up of the constant meddling in other countries affairs, that's one of the reasons why Trump was elected. At least during the campaign MAGA was all about putting foreign policy on the backburner and dealing with crumbling bridges and schools. America first, fuck the TPP, fuck the UN, etc. Not sure to what extent it's actually happening but lots of people want that.
Re:Not only technologists... (Score:5, Interesting)
Even nobel prize winners are trying to make a quick buck from publishing their books, instead of spreading their ideas to a bigger audience free of charge. Definition of irony?
Obama won a Nobel prize for peace, then went on to spend the most money on the military in the history of the USA, on top of vastly expanding NSA spying programs and establishing a formal kill list.
Think I'm kidding?
Mr. Obama has placed himself at the helm of a top secret “nominations” process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical. He had vowed to align the fight against Al Qaeda with American values; the chart, introducing people whose deaths he might soon be asked to order, underscored just what a moral and legal conundrum this could be.
Mr. Obama is the liberal law professor who campaigned against the Iraq war and torture, and then insisted on approving every new name on an expanding “kill list,” poring over terrorist suspects’ biographies on what one official calls the macabre “baseball cards” of an unconventional war. When a rare opportunity for a drone strike at a top terrorist arises — but his family is with him — it is the president who has reserved to himself the final moral calculation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05... [nytimes.com] ^ yes, NY times, not breitbart or fox news
It's more hypocrisy than irony, though.
It's a difficult job to be president. The alternative to your narrative is that there are very bad people in the world who wish to kill lots of innocent people. The decision to eliminate such people is one that should not be taken lightly. Escalating this decision to the top executive shows that these decisions are taken very seriously.
Giving Obama the Nobel Peace prize was a huge mistake in both timing (too early) and merit (undeserved). But the President should be involved directly in drone strike targets. Otherwise these decisions would be made by unelected military officials, and that sounds very troubling to me.
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the President should be involved directly in drone strike targets. Otherwise these decisions would be made by unelected military officials, and that sounds very troubling to me
What is troubling is doing drone strikes, full stop. If someone from another country was to send drones to bomb a condo tower in Los Angeles because "they have intel", you'd probably be the first one to call them terrorists.
It's real people that die in those strikes, not just names on a list or pixels on a screen. Thousands upon thousands of innocents that are robbed of their life and future, thousands upon thousands of family who lose someone for no reason.
I know the number makes it easier to digest (as St
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Henry Kissinger won a Nobel prize for peace specifically for ending the Vietnam war which then continued another 18 months.
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And as we all know, that war was crucial otherwise Vietnam would have become a communist state and it woud have been the apocalypse (now).
Oh wait...
Vietnam, a one-party Communist state, has one of south-east Asia's fastest-growing economies and has set its sights on becoming a developed nation by 2020.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-... [bbc.com]