Amazon closes customer accounts left right and center too, good luck getting thru to anyone human then despite being a decade long customer with thousands of digital purchases going poof.
Sample product: you can no longer get neodymium magnets from Amazon Shopping. (They were in my Wish List, and then, poof, "This product is no longer available." More searching within the site returned nothing.)
Okay, granted, but that's not exactly what I'd call egregious. They're, um, capable of causing injury, and the kind of thing I would probably want to ensure was only sent to recipients who had a i-know-what-i'm-doing form on file with my legal dept. Not the kind of thing I expect to be available for free 2-day shipping or whatnot.
I did, they want me to fax credit card details to their fax number (who the hell uses fax in this day and age?) which I done and no reply
I doubt anyone monitors it, everytime I ring them they bounce me from idiot to idiot
I now need access to some invoices for purchases I made last year for accountant but cant login, and of course all my digital purchases are gone, the 2 kindles are useless.
Considering we live in an infinite universe I do not see why economic growth can not continue even accelerate.
Especially seeing that sometime this century we will get cheap space travel (getting there) and AI (getting there) and transition from fossil fuels to renewables and fusion (getting there)
Tho' yes seeing how some of our best and brightest are working on how to serve more ads and how to get people spend their free time locked in their walled garden...
I also think that we underestimate the amount of unused resources that we haven't tapped into yet (e.g. planets in our solar systems) and the resources that we might not even know about yet (e.g. new forms of matter or "new" laws of physics). Also, it seems likely that paradigm-shifting technological breakthroughs will continue pushing the boundaries of our growth further out. An interesting read in that respect is "Thinking in Systems" by Donella Meadows. In the 60s and 70s, the systems thinking approach outlined in the book also predicted that our planet would soon hit it's "carrying capacity" and further growth would be stunted. A major reason this didn't happen was (IMHO) the rate of technological change, which moved the carrying capacity of the planet well beyond what would've been possible 30 years ago. The same processes that were at work then are still at work today and constantly change the technological background against which we make our assertions, which makes systemic estimates of macro-economic systems a very tricky business.
As they say, the stone age didn't end because of the lack of stones ;)
Starting with 7.4 billion people in 2016 and a population growth rate of 1 % per year we will reach the carrying capacity of Earth in less than 1400 years - the body heat alone will raise the surface temperature above the boiling point of water.
Once we reach the carrying capacity of Earth - no matter when that is - and decide to move into space we have 2685 more years until we run out of places to live in the Milky Way assuming 400 billion stars and one Earth-like colonizable planet per star.
Unfortunately 2685 years is not nearly enough time to reach all the stars in the Milky Way even if you would be traveling at the speed of light, you could cross just about 2 % in that time.
There are very real limits to the possible growth and we are talking about centuries or a few millennia. With a growth rate of 0.1 % per year one can push that to tens of millennia but that is still the blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things. And while I used population growth, things of course don't change if you substitute energy consumption per capita.
It is very unlikely the population of earth will continue to grow at 1%. In the best scenario, we will have worldwide development followed by a fall in fertility that it inevitably brings. In the more morbid ones, climate change, wars etc. will result in a large amount of the population getting destroyed.
My assumption is that all economic growth has some component that is based on matter and energy. Even if it's just firing of a neuron inside consumers head.
If that assumption holds, growth is limited by matter and energy. Assuming that you consume all matter and energy and leave behind maximum entropy (thermal radiation) the growth is limited by the area of an expanding sphere.
Unless the wealthy somehow manage to consume all the excess production the average can't buy because they're too poor, wealth will have a hard time increasing without general economic growth. There is a pretty hard limit on how much even the most ostentatious trillionaire can consume.
We are on a course for a confluence of some major technologies this century which could result in another great leap forward.
Anyways i forgot why i dont bother to reply much on this site, got down voted for my above comment yet no indication as to why (is it my comment about working on advertising? its ok that's what I work in too myself have to pay bills somehow, but would rather do something more interesting).
The observable universe is very much finite. (And if speed of light is a barrier, than the observable universe is about the biggest thing we can ever influence.)
Sure, there will be lots of nice technology coming over the next century. No doubts about that.
Lets assume we develop technology to travel at near light speeds and go mad colonising the universe, what exactly contains us to the observable universe, move 4 light years in another direction and your observable horizon shifts
Because we haven't gotten a way to get fuel outside earth yet (that I know of), or a solution to long travel times. As such we are practically still bound to earth, which is finite.
If we're willing to deal with the (technologically but not politically manageable) consequences, nuclear rockets are a proven technology and can reach most of the solar system within a year's traveling time.
The claim you're making is itself an example of dishonesty and anti-intellectualism. Let's take a look at what Gove actually said - the full quote, not the abridged version people like to throw around:
"I think the people in this country have had enough of experts from organisations with acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong"
Gove was clearly talking about a very specific subset of all possible 'experts' here - the ones from various (mostly governmental) acronymed organisations who have a long track record of making incorrect forecasts and yet still claim to be able to predict the future using their 'expertise'. The campaign was full of absurdly precise predictions like "leaving the EU will cost each household exactly £4300 a year".
Gove's position is not unreasonable or anti-intellectual. Post-vote, Paul Krugman started laying into economists and the economics profession as a whole, saying essentially that economists didn't deserve to be trusted because they so often made arguments that were just intellectual-sounding nonsense.
>Gove was clearly talking about a very specific subset of all possible 'experts' here - the ones from various (mostly governmental) acronymed organisations
The question was about the following "experts" (it was Gove who defined them as experts not the interviewer):
>The leaders of the US, India, China, Australia, every single one of our allies, the Bank of England, the IFS, the IMF, the CBI, five former NATO secretary generals, the chief executive of the NHS and most of the leaders of the trade unions in Britain
"People have had enough of experts from organisations with acronymns saying they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong".
By implication, those "experts" aren't actually experts because they get it consistently wrong. But sure, it's easy to mis-quote him and cut the rest of the statement to make the leave voters sound like knuckle draggers because that's the agenda a certain set of the remain voters wanted to push. Leave voters are stoooopppppidddddddd.
That tactic didn't work well.
Gove was talking about experts who get it consistently wrong. So many of these "experts" have suddenly gone "oh, we wrong, X won't happen now after all", all the threats, punishment budgets and dire consequences have dissipated like the nonsense fear-mongering they actually were. And we also now get a report about the IMF being irrationally pro-Euro, destroying Greece in the process, and we were supposed to listen to them as neutral voices about Brexit consequences? Turns out they had vested interests, just like so many of the other "independent" "experts".
What we have now seen, and Brexit has really shone a light on this, is that the political elite across the world seem obsessed with European political integration and will spout utterly unsubstantiated rubbish to justify it.
So, he was kinda right. Which is very disappointing.
The whole Brexit hoopla was filled with dishonesty and anti-intellectualism
Sadly, both official campaigns were the worst kind of politics, with a lot of negative campaigning, full of half-truths and sometimes outright lies, frequently trying to make voters fear consequences that were highly unlikely, and frequently more about personalities than policies. The same was true of many interventions by various foreign leaders, mostly advocating Remain but again often through negativity about Leave rather than a positive message; their rhetoric was also being walked back within moments of the actual result being known.
I've had a few interesting discussions with friends and friends-of-friends, before and since the referendum itself. I've heard views, often strong ones, for both decisions articulated based on reasonable principles and rational arguments. I've seen intelligent, well-informed people reach either conclusion. However, many of the issues that ultimately persuaded those people one way or the other were hardly mentioned by the official campaigns, both of which focussed on the short term and on the economy and immigration for the most part.
Something I've seen many people, voting either way, agree on is that we don't really know why people chose to vote the way they did, which was always going to put whoever was in government after the vote in a tricky position because they would have a mandate to do something but little other guidance on how to set out the details. For example, in my personal experience I've met plenty of people who value the collaborative arrangements with our European neighbours on issues like trade and freedom of movement and the scientific research we're talking about in this discussion, yet who strongly dislike the EU as an institution because of some other aspects of membership. So far, I'd say roughly half of those people voted each way in the actual referendum, based on which outcome they thought was most likely to achieve the middle of the road path they really wanted. However, I have no reliable way to determine whether this sentiment is just a small clique around my own social network, or whether actually most people who voted had similar views and the hardline pro-EU Remain and anti-immigrant Leave voters who are getting most of the press are small but vocal minorities.
Would you like to comment on the substance of my post, which was about how there was actually plenty of rational thinking and reasonable debate going on among the voters regardless of the official campaigns, and how the big problem now is how to set future policy since the result itself doesn't necessarily tell us very much about what the voters really wanted?
Ah, I think I understand now. My intent was to contrast the official campaigns (and advocacy from foreign leaders) with the discussions among real voters, not to contrast one official campaign with the other. Apologies if that wasn't clear.
I agree that both official pro and con Brexit campaigns were ... not good. I just think that there is clear difference between them in terms of how bad they were.
In political opinions, particularly for US politics, you see a lot of ritualistic opening with words to the effect of "both sides are terrible", "they're both equally bad", which is facile even-handedness, and unhelpful when they're differing kinds and degrees of bad. Knocking it back as facile is also becoming a trope, though probably still a necessary one.
When economists who entirely failed to see the 2008 financial crisis coming try to convince you that Brexit will be a calamity, skepticism is a healthy response.
When 'respectable' institutional economists make predictions like this:
So, I imagine, they asked Facebook for a list of IPs having logged to the Facebook KAT page, and then maybe they went around asking Apple – and who knows whom else – if they got those IPs in their records?
If it was like this it doesn’t seem proper to me, but IANAL.
Landing large vehicles will never be routine. Every ship that moors, every plane that lands, is a life-threatening event that can go wrong in ways the public will never anticipate but the professionals have entire subsystems designed to manage.
UK with its house of Lords, no constitution, monarch as head of state, and members of parliament who somehow seem to come from same schools/universities is not exactly the best example of Democracy
The U.K. Has a constitution, just not a single written document. It's the oldest extant constitutional government: even at the time of the Magna Carta 800 years ago the English were following constitutional principles.
Only one part of a DMCA takedown is under penalty of perjury, and it's quite possible to file a knowingly false takedown request without that part being falsified.
But isn't it the part where you assert in good faith you own the copyright? How do you get around that scenario of a malicious takedown request against a random site?
It's the part where you asset that you are the owner of the copyright you alleged is being violated. As long as you own copyright on something that's not a problem. The part where you actually allege that particular content uses your work without permission or privilege is not under penalty of perjury.
Under Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (18 U.S.C. 1030) it is a federal crime to "intentionally access a computer without authorization or exceed authorized access" ...
An eager prosecutor could take that and run a mile
