Delta1212

Yes, and part of proposing solutions to government problems is working through all of those problems and seeing whether things actually work, how they should work, where they need to be shored up, where potential pitfalls are, what might need to be compromised and ultimately whether it's even a good idea at all. There is a reason that government is and always has been a complicated issue. Things that seem like simple fixes offen aren't, and every idea has unintended consequences and complications. Nobody is attacking this idea just to be mean or because they don't like you. It's being picked apart because there are a ton of issues with it on a practical level that you don't seem to have acknowledged or addressed.

So, is everyone paying the same rate under this system for each service or does the price fluctuate with income?

If the government doesn't control the funding for police services, what control do they have over them exactly?

Who is going to enforce the regulation that I have approved/trained staff on my private security force? Who is going to enforce the collection of the subscriptions? If we had a government made up of educated experts in a vareity of fields, I think that would solve a lot of problem, but we don't and I don't see how your system would do anything to change that. And finally, the private prison system in the US is a massive human rights disaster. The reason we have the highest incarceration rate in the world is that we've set up a system where people make money off of locking us up. Holding that up as an example doesn't inspire confidence in the benefits of your proposed system.

What if I don't want to pay for the services?

About that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_Poland "government is obliged to provide free health care to young children, pregnant women, disabled people and to the elderly." The healthcare of anyone who has private insurance is also subsidized by the government fund. So yeah, taxes are paying for your healthcare and that of those people you just mentioned and apparently you don't even realize it. It's not really a linear progression and you can't extrapolate like that. Automation is likely to ramp up as the technology, so the rate at which jobs are being replaced will be much faster at the halfway point than at the beginning. Extrapolating from that, it should be much less than an additional 10 years for the second half to be completed. On the flipside, as automation begins to saturate the job market, you're going to run into those edge case situations where, for whatever reason, it is much harder to replace live people with automation and that's going to slow things down again or potentially stop them all together before full automation is achieved.

These are actual questions about the practicality of how this system works. You can't just say "people will subscribe to it like insurance", you have to cover the details of edge cases and the like. People think taxation is a benefit to the poor because it is a system whereby you can enforce payment based on means rather than need. This benefits people who do not have the means to pay for a service. Subscription models benefit those who have means over those who have need. So, again, what is to stop me from setting up a competing police force that enforces different laws? Do people who fail to subscribe to police protection still receive police protection and, if so, why should I bother subscribing to it? If not, does that mean a person can commit crimes against people who cannot afford it with impunity? If a house catches fire and the homeowner hasn't paid for fire protection, will the fire department let it burn to the ground? I not, why bother paying for fire protection? What if it is a danger to the property of someone who has paid for fire protection? These re serious questions that need to be dealt with if you actually want such a system, not ones you can brush off as "immature."

What if I want to start my own private police force and enforce my own laws. Can people subscribe to my competing service? Is it legal to murder someone who can't afford a police subscription? If my neighbor's house catches fire and he hasn't been paying for fire brigade service, are they going to wait until my house catches fire to do anything about it?

So anyone who lacks empathy should go out and murder and loot because there is no other reason for them not to do it? If your premise is that empathy should be enough on its own, then sure. I'll agree with that. That doesn't mean it's the only thing that matters at all.

I did. I just figured out the full numbering convention, and it uses the version of the quote that has "word" instead of the second name. So, for the record: "What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet."

What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Right number of letters and the a's match. The name's don't though. Actually, I can fix that: What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other number would smell as sweet. Now it matches perfectly.

Time dilation affects the time experienced by the bullet as compared with other frames, not the velocity that other frames see it moving at.

What about peaking through the cracks between the fingers on my up-raised hand?

It's amazing how consistent a predictor of accuracy the formatting of a post is.

Even if it could be measured, any relativistic effects in the horizontal direction wouldn't effect the vertical motion, which is still the same for both pellets.

There is meaning embedded in more than just the words. We were having a debate about how feasible it is to encode relational information in the manner you are describing, which is a concern that is central to whether one of your premises holds true. Do you intend all of the information in a communication to be encoded by number, in which case they must be order and context agnostic, or are you merely saying that you can can create a cipher for any given language that replaces words with numbers? Edit: If the latter, then I whole-heartedly accept that this is very obviously true.

Which is why you ignore complicated set-ups when speaking about the general case and assume that extra variables are being ignored when a general statement is made. It's the same thing as saying that two objects of different masses fall at the same rate in Earth's gravity. Yes, this is not the case if you take into account variable surface area and wind resistance, or drop the objects in the middle of a tornado, or place a strong electromagnet underneath them and make one of the objects out or iron. Being able to recognize and accept spherical cows is an important skill.

Because it's an illustration of the fact that lateral velocity does not directly impact vertical acceleration due to gravity. Many people are used to thinking of bullets as going "in a straight line" so they make for a dramatic example of the effect. In the real world, obviously, variations in the terrain over distances and other factors can affect which hits the ground first, but the point of the example is that if the bullets have to fall the same distance to the ground, they will hit at the same time. If the distance changes either because of a hill, or a ditch or the curvature of the Earth or any number of other things, then you obviously won't get the same result.

My maternal grandparents, as well.

Exactly, it can't be. Which means that you'd need to pin down the additional information that is conveyed by understanding the context and include that in any string meant to encode the meaning of the work. Best case scenario, sentences would need the "index number"-equivalent of heavy footnotes in order to fully capture the meaning of anything written that way.

I agree. You could, though, assign information about the participants of a conversation as well as things like body language (if present) and intonation. You'd probably also need to include something that would designate the existence of an ambiguity in the communication with separate index numbers for when meanings are part of a mutually exclusive or complementary layered ambiguity. For instance, if I say something like: I'm just no good at jokes, you see Although I've language skill and joie de vivre When asked to spell a word Every one I've spelt When asked to smell the flowers Every one I've smelt But when asked to make a joke, I must confront That every single time I simply punt Given the context, the meaning of the final two lines is ambiguous, with the alternatives changing both the tense and essential meaning. Does the fact that it rhymes convey additional information that needs to be accounted for? Surely a similar sentiment delivered in the format of a Shakespearian sonnet has a different meaning than one delivered through a series of limericks, even if the content is otherwise pretty much identical. I do think that it is possible to account for all of this, at least in principle though certainly not in practice, but as Strange points out above, I'm not sure how it affects what Doctordick is envisioning. Yes, this is why I referenced case systems. The real difficulty in all of this is that words aren't really the base unit of semantic information in a language, because additional meaning is conveyed through the relationship between words. Languages use a vareity of tricks to illustrate these relationships including the morphology of the words, the order of the words, tone and inflection, prepositions and so on. If you want to strip away all of those extra features of the language so that you're dealing with semantic information that is conveyed solely by the "words" (or index numbers) then you need to account for all of that extra information either by having an additional index number for each variation on a given concept, or by assigning index numbers to larger concepts that encompass the whole relationship (i.e. A number for "dog bites man" that is distinct from numbers for man, dog and bite). If you don't do this and retain word order or connective words that otherwise lack semantic meaning on their own or what have you, then it isn't really a distinct system of encoding meaning, it's just a substitution cipher for a given language.

You could have multiple versions of verbs to demarcate their presence in sub-clauses. You'd need to generate the numbers algorithmically to have anything approaching usability since you could have infinite recursion in a sentence if you wanted to, but something as simple as tacking on five zeroes to the end of a number and then adding the value for whatever nested position in the sentence that verb occupies could work if you then disallow five zeroes in a row from appearing in any indexed numbers outside that context. You'd need to do the same for every version of every noun though in order to maintain its association with the correct verb in the sentence. Haning it algorithmically like that would allow you to generate new indices on the fly for edge cases like that kind of really deep recursion, though. And again, I'm not saying that this is actually practical, which is a requirement for any machine translation solution. I'm operating in a purely "in principle, given infinite time" standpoint here.

I'm not sure I agree. I mean, yes, if you use a simple substitution cipher replacing words with numbers, this is true. But you don't strictly have to do it that way. You could have separate index numbers cover concepts that would all be grouped into a single word in English, and have different index numbers depending on context. Word order isn't strictly necessary as a carrier of meaning if you embed the syntactic meaning within the particular number itself, the way that languages with a case system tend to have more flexible word orders than English because the order doesn't convey the same semantic information. You'd need an ungodly number of variations on a single theme and I'm not sure that it is at all possible to pull off on a practical level let alone to actually use such a system if it could be created, but any thought which could feasibly be accurately written down, even if it required an entire book and multiple languages to accurately describe all of the nuance in the thought, could be ascribed an index number.

If you have no idea what the source of a communication is, I'm not sure you could determine even a rough probability of the source of that communication believing that it is true. I think it is also possible to come up with a probability of the source of a communication believing their statement to be true without having understood it, either through some degree of meta-analysis of the communication or because I have misunderstood the communication and come up with a probability based on that misunderstanding. Edit: On further reflection, and reviewing your previous post, I think that my second concern is the more important. You'be determined a potentially true relationship that someone who understands a communication will place some probability on that communication being true. I could quibble a bit here, but I'm willing to go with that as a true statement since I think you could nail down some definitions a bit more specifically in a way that makes it true. However, that is a "If A then B" relationship, where A is "understanding" and B is "determining the truth probability." In order to define understanding as determining the truth probability, you need a "If B then A" relationship as well, and I don't think that holds up as well as the former argument does.

Doctordick, no one is disagreeing that any meaning that can be expressed through human language can also be represented using a sequence of numbers if you want to so represent it. We're just waiting to hear why this matters.