If there are US fabs, and China invades Taiwan then Taiwanese fabs are destroyed, and China loses access to advanced chips, but the US and the west do not. This puts China at a major disadvantage compared to the US, for at least a few decades in the future, if it decides to invade Taiwan.
It seems unlikely that US and west would get involved in a direct major military conflict with China, no matter what. The costs are too great. It is far more likely that they would only provide military equipment and intelligence (like Ukraine).
So this move of TSMC actually strengthens the shield a lot more than it weakens the spear.
Silly Question: It it a good experiment to put the medicine in one eye and the placebo in the other eye? What could be other consequences of such a thing?
I sometimes think, one way to break this cycle is to send the all the kids to boarding school or military school. It could put them in an environment free from their background circumstances. It is of course a harsh thing to do, but I think maybe it could work.
> I sometimes think, one way to break this cycle is to send the all the kids to boarding school or military school.
This is a pretty standard solution by people working from abstractions that aren't checked against the realities of people.
It’s also a stunningly bad idea that tends not to survive past very initial steps toward implementation (on a general societal level; it has often been implemented in a more limited way targeted at disfavored minorities where it is a component of genocide by destroying the people as a people) in real societies, even when there is a powerful governing group devoted religiously to an ideology which embraces it.
> send the all the kids to boarding school or military school. It could put them in an environment free from their background circumstances.
It is a common meme in some circles that sending (problematic) kids to boarding or military school will "set them straight". To me, it's basically just hope that a bit more violence will work.
Also, after 6 years spent in an environment where you are told what to do every minutes, where rules are clear and mostly non-negotiable, bed and meal times always the same... what happens when you are put back in the regular world ? I exaggerate things to make a point, it's not black and white but still.
Can confirm.
My oldest daughter roomed in College with a girl who came from a structured boarding school. She was a mess.
I also recall a similar experience when I was in College.
That is a good point. But all these had racist reasons at their core.
Can this be better implemented today?
With extensive supervision and scrutiny.
For example, teenagers routinely join the army, and spend time learning and training at what is essentially a boarding school. It seems to work quite well.
I'm not sure replacing racism with classism (oh, you are poor, you need to go away to school) is much better.
Extensive supervision and scrutiny? I mean, are we not doing some of this with public schools now? And if not, why not?
And seriously, we (in the US) allow lots of options for troubled kids without supervision ("work the bad out of you), we've allowed conversion therapy for LGBT+ children, have little oversight on for-profit schools and we allow folks to force their religion on their children, even if the 16- or 17-year-old doesn't believe.
I highly doubt there would be oversight.
I'd also like to point out that the Canadian schools were really, really recent, and I don't think much has changed since.
In a some cases they had racism at their core - but that's a step removed.
They thought that the parents were (for whatever reason) incapable of raising their children appropriately and that the best way to properly raise the children was away from their homes, their cultures and their problems. They may even have thought their goals were noble and justified - as most folks tend to.
I cannot see a meaningful difference between taking kids away from their parents for racial reasons, for class reasons or really any other reason.
The issue isn't necessarily why they saw them as inferior, it's that they saw them as inferior.
> For example, teenagers routinely join the army, and spend time learning and training at what is essentially a boarding school.
This choice is made by the family and the individual. This is not the same thing. A meaningful harm vector is the removal of autonomy.
Once people leave a structured environment (home, boarding school etc) and live 'on their own' even if it's just a dorm room, then tend to act as one who has been leaning against a post, and you take the post away suddenly. It can talk a while for them to stand up straight again - keep their room clean, do their laundry on time, manage their money, wash and dress suitable for the situation.
I could always tell in college, which people had not lived on their own before. They were a mess.
One of the students from my high school, who was orphaned at 11, enrolled himself to the military university. At that school, he got free education, free uniform and free boarding. Every graduates must commit themselves to serve the military for a number of years. He possibly figured out that it's a good way to be independent, to get a quality education and to earn a decent living.
That school in my country has not been trivial to get accepted. He aimed for good grades at high school and participated in sports teams.
> Microsoft introduced the School of the Future that had incredible results.
Your article cites no actual results.
In reality, the problems it seems to have had is that the basic idea just doesn't work: the first years were plain rocky. [0] When it dealt with some of the early problems, it got good results, to the extent it did (and certainly some measures were quite good), largely by costing more, even though the fundamental concept was to prove a scalable, efficient model by requiring no additional funding (so it had to try to close the gap by aggressive outside fundraising to meet the additional costs.) [1] When the baseline funding for public schools dropped, the extra cost of SoF’s original model became even less sustainable. [2]
The school still exists, but I can't find anything after 2014 even treating it as a particularly interesting thing.
I'm thinking of this and i can't see it working. All previous attempts were usually executed on racist grounds, and i don't think we can do the same on non-racist grounds because poverty itself is a result of either intrinsic differences between races, or racism itself, so racial layout of kids in those boarding schools will be similar to the racial layout in prisons... It's hard to expect anything but radicalisation happening there.
GP did say "all the kids", so maybe they actually meant all the kids, as in rich, poor, in-between. So that it wouldn't be based on family income or school sector or what-have-you.
Of course, this could be construed as "discrimination" against the better off, since they have to go through what seems like a tough time "just because of the poor people".
There is a long history of marxist groups trying to destroy the family by forcibly removing children and making them live in various communal camps. For example this was done in forced collectivization projects in the USSR and China, and also by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
I really recommend watching the film "The Killing Fields", in order to see this in action.
Both the USSR and China ended up abandoning these efforts and now acknowledge them as terrible failures. The Khmer Rouge had to be forced out via military invasion.
Always the justification is the fact that smarter parents tend to have smarter kids, patient parents tend to have patient kids, etc. E.g. most things in life are at least half heritable, and so you will see both competency and dysfunction cluster in families. This offended the levelers greatly and so they decided that families need to be broken up and the kids randomized in order to achieve a Great Leveling.
The result has always been catastrophic, not to mention a gross human rights violation.
Hardly just the Marxists - the Nazis gave it a go, the Danes gave it a go and so did the Canadians [1]. This idea spans the political spectrum, and it tends to go, er, predictably.
Meh… the Canadian example is more complex than the article infers. The idea is that all children should be educated in the public system. (we still do it today - education is mandatory). For First Nations in remote communities, those children would be required to attend residential schools since no local school existed.
If anything the mentality has more similarities to race relations today - “the White Man’s burden” of helping these cultures “bring themselves up”. Back then they took kids from parents and gave them a European education, and told them their current culture should be forgotten.
Today we just get rid of failing grades, calculus in high school, and standardized testing and implement racial quotas. In the end it’s the same - assuming we know best for other groups even if in the end it harms them.
Indeed, I didn't mean to equate them in any way other than "children were removed from their parents and educated according to prevailing practices." I suspect each example is quite unique.
Oh well this is a terrible idea beyond imagination. Even just simply "solving" poverty by the means of good old segregation, delimiting poor places with barbed wire, sounds better to me.
It's not, because America is highly segregated by self-increasing difference in school quality (because more expensive homes in the area yield more property taxes to the municipality which are used to fund school), and better schools make richer people move to the place, driving up both home prices, and school qualities too by improving racial and social mix of students, and it goes on and on in a self-propelling virtuous cycle. As a result most places are strictly segregated and no, children from all backgrounds don't go to the same school because they don't live (poor can't afford) in the same school district.
Take into account the probability of a costly failure, and increase the price to account for it. And compensate victims to a certain extent, but quietly. I suppose they would fight any publicity of such incidents, since that would have a huge impact on sales, I have read a few such stories, and usually they disappear from the news pretty soon, likely because the victim agreed to be quietly compensated. I could be wrong.
Yes they do, and this is why we have CPSC and lawsuits: to increase the cost of failure to the point where it's not a wise business decision to allow one to happen.
Nothing is 100% fool-proof, but the difference between 99.9% safe and 99.99% safe is 10x decrease in incidents.
Also, bribing voters is a thing. It would be far cheaper to pay 2X to buy X votes where each of the bribed voters keep half the money and buy a vote with other half.
Yes, in post-soviet countries it's pretty common to bribe large number of people from elderly and poor population with food or alcohol. It's literally trucks with food or vodka and name of the party/politian that head to the semi-forgotten villages, where some decent amount of electorate lives. Needless to say those people had grown up in Soviet Union and have zero trust in elections or democracy, so they happy to vote for whoever bribes them more.
In my country, elections are fair. If you ask people on the street -- they will say they believe in democracy. Which is reasonable since the concept of voting is easy to understand.
Offering free food for in exchange for votes is still a thing though, since voters know that everyone on the ballot is a corrupt sack of shit. They're going to end up equally fucked either way -- might as well pick up some free food along with it.
Depending on the location, oh yes it is. In the recent Serbian elections there were photos of "gift baskets" from a party if you voted for them ( of course they can't know for sure if the election is properly held, but afaik it isn't).
One issue in the US is how certain communities organize to stack members in districts until they can affect elections, then bribe and extort politicians for concessions, to stop them from expanding into other districts, or to vote a certain way.
It's an incredible racket because it's also the system "working as intended".
I don't think that it is misleading. The severity of a disease is relative to the current situation.
For example, it could be the case that Omicron is actually less infectious than the original variant, when compared in the setting of 2020. It spreads faster today because, (i) because of preexisting immunity most cases are very mild, and so lots of people become unwitting carriers, (ii) people have gone back to normal behavior after vaccination, and (iii) the vaccines inhibit the other variants much more than Omnicron. So Omicron gets more opportunities to infect and spread. Of course, all this is just conjecture and could be true or false.
What matters from a practical point of view is that, Omnicron is less severe in the general population today(for various reasons), as compared to the original strain back in 2020.
It is misleading if you compare a country with 80% infection rate with countries with much fewer infections. If the milder cases are because of previous infections it could be a hard hit for unvaccinated first timers.
> I don't think that it is misleading. The severity of a disease is relative to the current situation.
I think it is misleading. AIDS is much more survivable in "the current situation" because of various drug advances we made in the past few decades. Does that mean 2021 AIDS is "less severe" than 90s AIDS? I guess you could claim it's technically less severe, but the wording definitely suggests it's something about the virus, rather than the environment.
Can you explain why the security guarantee disappears in more detail?
I thought that the security of a block-chain comes primarily from the difficulty of rewriting the chain of blocks.
To do that you will have to fork and recompute the chain from some point back in history (say 5 blocks ago).
This puts at a disadvantage since the rest of the network is ahead of you by 5 blocks and will continue adding new blocks.
So you will need a lot of computational power to rewrite history and also overtake the rest of the network.
Why would some additional reward for mining (by solving a useful problem) break this?
You don't actually need 51% of the mining power to perform a double-spend attack. Just by pure chance, even with 10% of the mining power, you will find 5 blocks in a row sometimes.
With a "wasteful" PoW, miners would not attempt this as they would hemorrhage money doing that.
Withe a "useful" PoW, miners could have an outside funding source like some institute that pays for protein folding. The would not lose money in their attempt to produce a minority chain (in proportion to the "usefulness" of their PoW)
The external reward in "useful" PoW is given to all miners, good and bad. So everyone is equally incentivized. In fact it should actually increase the participation in the network, e.g. those who don't care about cryptocurrency but are interested in the "useful" problem being solved.
The external reward by itself provides no competitive advantage. It reduces everyone's costs by the same amount.
Rewriting history still remains difficult.
Rewriting history needs to be expensive, not just difficult. If you decrease the cost of writing history, you decrease the penalty of participating in a minority chain.
I always understood the security of block-chains as a race between the good and the bad agents.
Both are extending their respective chains as fast as they can. A bad-agent, who wishes to double-spend has to rewrite history, and therefore has to start a few step behind the good agent. To succeed, the bad agent has to overtake the good agent.
Even if both have the same speed (i.e. 50% computational power each), the good agent will sill be a few steps ahead of the bad agent, and the system is secure. If the bad agent is faster(51%), then eventually it will overtake the good agent breaking security.
This is true even if the cost of computation is zero (e.g. the Govt. pays for all your computation cost). As long as the bad agent doesn't have 51% or more of the computational power, the system is secure.
An attacker does not have to wait in order to produce a parallel chain. He can mine his separate chain immediately after submitting the transaction.
Even with less than 50% hashrate, he is bound to find a few blocks in a row from time to time. Keep in mind that he can run the attack as often as he wants. This is why the recommendation is to wait for 6 blocks - it is very unlikely (not impossible) that somebody with a 20% hashrate ever finds 6 blocks in a row.
When an attack is successful, everybody will mine on the attackers chain - including the honest miners. The attackers chain is valid after all, it just has a different valid transaction set.
The significance of the 51% hashpower is that the attacker is guaranteed to succeed over a long-enough time horizon.
Reducing or removing the costs of mining a parallel chain (even for miners with 20% hashpower) reduces their cost to mine a parallel chain and weakens the security guarantee. If a miner can work on a side chain and get paid for protein folding at the same time, he can keep doing it without losing money on electricity. When he finally succeeds, he will also cash in the mining reward.
But I wonder why doesn't this problem also arise in the current Proof-of-Work system. A sufficiently well-funded group, with about 20% hash-rate can try to extend the current head of the blockchain by 6 fake blocks at every time. If they succeed, i.e. all 6 fake blocks are mined before the real network mines 6 real blocks, then they can publish their parallel chain with the fake transactions and it would be longer than the real chain.
This is equivalent to the expected number of coin tosses to get 6 consecutive heads, where the coin is heads with probability 1/5. Here, heads means that a fake block is mined before the corresponding real block is mined.
This number is less than 20000, which corresponds to about 6 months of time. This is expensive, but not infeasible. They just need to remain solvent until they succeed and then easily cover the costs.
Yup, this is indeed a weakness of the current PoW system.
People often misunderstand it to be completely secure if no attacker has more than 50% hashrate.
In reality (and as described in the whitepaper), the 51% limit is described as the state where no number of confirmations is sufficient.
If an attacker has less than 50% hashpower, you can plug in some numbers like hashpower and cost of attack and come up with a number of confirmations that is likely to be secure.
It seems to me that even in the PoW is useful, then both the honest and the dishonest miners will be able to get outside funding (from the perspective of the research institute after all, they are doing the same task). So the opportunity cost for dishonest mining is exactly the same - you miss out on the block reward more often.
> Additionally, it is the universal part of UBI that people struggle with. If everyone gets it, do prices just rise to meet that reality and soak up the "free" money.
Think about this another way:
if it is true that the prices are going to rise because of UBI, i.e. because everyone can afford the "basics"(the B of UBI), then it means that the lower prices of today require that some people do without these basics.
6) If we want to mount this automatically at login.
Adding it to /etc/fstab may not work because of encryption.
But perhaps some script at login to mount it will work.
For example, we can create a script at /usr/local/bin/mountDB.sh and then add a line to /etc/sudoers
It lets you mount a file as a filesystem, instead of an actual hardware device. I think it's called "loopback" because instead of reading from /dev/whatever it loops back to /dev/original and reads the specified file.
Older photo is the real one.