In the quest for customers, innovative businesses have explored different ways to give away things for free and seeking their revenue in unexpected ways. So there was always this race to the bottom and the winners are those able to scale economically.
We see this game being played by countries in the taxes on companies that they are willing to ignore. We see this also in the US where states with different taxation laws. This is of course all a race to the bottom by its participants.
In today's economy, you don't really have captive citizens or captive corporations. The digital economy has allowed them to operate wherever they please to do. This mobility gives them bargaining power.
Not only does this mobility lead to greater options, this mobility also locks out the local population from access to scarce resources. In cities where people want to live, there are more homes that are left unoccupied by the investors.
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Why must conscious biological creatures be made of predominantly unconscious stuff? Is not the answer to this within the realm of our daily experience?
The answer is simple. To avoid unnecessary and expensive bureaucracy. Imagine a brain where everything is micromanaged from a centralized command and control center. It would be crushed by the complexity of the task.
The brain is composed of a multitude of unconscious processes. Each process disseminating indications of inconsistencies in its predictions to other processes. The purpose of this information distribution is to ensure the homeostasis of the whole brain.
It's incorrect to treat either emotions or consciousness like an axiom in the formulation of general intelligence.
I agree that emotions are a parameter in cognition. I agree with @PLinz But this parameter is also regulated by cognition. How we perceive the world is regulated by our cognition and emotions are an emergent response to our perception. An axiom is a boundary condition.
Emotions are affected by our perception and thus it's not a boundary condition but rather is a constraint that morphs with our subsequent interactions with our world and our minds.
This is just unfortunate. It's a consequence of scientists themselves not understanding how life emerges out of physics. Absent this understanding, one can easily fall into this kind of worthless extrapolation.
I understand the appeal of 'one force that binds the universe together'. I further understand the first-person perspective that is inextricable in physics. But when we use the term consciousness, we imply a speckle of agency and hence the presence of choice.
The laws of physics are not broken even if biological creatures have agency. Agency in the sense that select behaviors in response to sensing their environments.
Perhaps it was a brilliant idea that WHO gave a different name for a variant of the covid virus. Humans are tuned to know that different names imply different behavior. Just like hurricanes have different names. Each kind requires different preparations.
It is just fascinating how unaware public institutions are of how to express public safety messages in a manner that intuitively encapsulates the concern. The virus is problematic because it does not remain the same.
But too many overlook this reality and believe that whatever worked in the past will work today. This fallacy is more obvious when you give it another name (i.e. Delta). How you prepare for a hurricane is different because you is different by virtue of an assignment of a name.
OMG! This is a very sad clip for me. I was inspired by Carl Sagan's Cosmos when I was growing up. I just realized that decades of us have grown up without the same inspiration. They instead were inspired by an anti-science agenda.
If Carl Sagan is so critically important to the survival of civilization then why is it that we have so few Carl Sagans?
Because present civilization selects out the Carl Sagans of this world. Sagan was denied tenure at Harvard due to (1) his interests were too broad across many areas (2) his well-publicized scientific advocacy was perceived as borrowing the ideas of others. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan
Here's my thesis as to why there are so many stupid people in this world. Stupid people are employing competence in language as a substitute for competence in thinking. Observe very closely and you'll see that there's no relationship between eloquence and effective thinking.
The people at the top are there because they appear to look and sound better. Human cognitive bias has enough of a constant pressure to elevate people beyond their competence level. Meanwhile, many competent people are stuck below the glass ceiling.
This affliction is most obvious when we hear managers sprinkle their speech in buzzwords. The use of buzzwords doesn't make one more intelligent. But many perhaps believe that it does!