rosencrantz

This is why intent has to be inferred. See http://thelawdictionary.org/criminal-intent/for a short intro on how that is done. If your model rules out actions that have harmful consequences but that are perfectly fine within the model it's time for a revision. Before I forget: Fraud is based on intent too. How do you differentiate between manslaughter and murder in your model? Are they the same? Are they different?

No, it does not. Either you left the banana peel there by negligence. You are then guilty when somebody trips over it and falls. Or you left if there specifically for somebody to trip over. In any case you are guilty. Of course they are. If this were not the case there would be no murder cases at all and there would be no difference between manslaughter and murder.

As is leaving a banana. I don't get what being observable adds to a moral judgment on actions. An action that is not observable did not happen and can't be judged. Sometimes you can infer the intent from given circumstances. But in law the difference between actions that happen in neglect or with full intention are only gradual, not in principle. Giving up what we learned through the development of the legal over the centuries seems like a pretty bad idea. In fact, you would go back to even the oldest legal work, the Codex Hammurabi

This leaves out a lot of actions that are seen as negative like omission, negligence, conspiracy, and fraud.

You can hear the collective sigh of relief from physicists all over the world when you listen closely.

Your model does not work properly. You can not violate the NAP and still be guilty. Suppose you leave a banana peel on a stairway. Did you violate the NAP? No, if at all you violated Aesthetic Preferable Behaviour. Five minutes later somebody trips over the peel and breaks his or her neck. According to your model, you have not violated the NAP thus everything is fine. After all, the banana peel has no agency and you did not intent to kill that specific person.

Look what twitter did to Microsoft's Tay https://twitter.com/geraldmellor/status/712880710328139776

I read Russian, so thanks

The history of the Soviet space program is fascinating. I recently saw a documentary on Koroljov and was intrigued. Can you point me to other material?

It's fascinating to look into history and to realize that this concept was used succesfully by empires with a diverse population. The Persians, Turks, and Mongols were multicultural societies with relatively few conflicts. They understood however, that conflict arises when cultures meet. So they set the groundrules that it's ok for you to have your own culture and laws as long as you accept that when there is a conflict between your culture and the empire, the empire has the last say. They also made sure that different cultures within a city were physically seperated with walls. And if there was a conflict between ethnicities there would be arbitration by an imperial magistrate. That is the reason why cities of those empires consist of several mini cities within one city all demarcated by walls.

That's a good point. In short, the important number to look for is the marginal cost of production. How much does it cost to make one more unit. An industrial revolution can only happen in a society where wages are already relatively high. If you had a cheap abundant labour force there would be no need to invest in a machinery that reduces the human factor. During the time of the fighting Empires in China, later emperor Qin installed a war economy that produced weapons en masse. All the parts for spears, crossbows and so on were standardized and the place of their origin did not matter. That allowed Qin to outcompete the other empires and finally to be victorious. People often wonder why China did not pick up on that and followed the path to more industries and to have an Industrial Revolution 2000 years before the West. The reason is the marginal cost of production due to an abundance of cheap labour. The difference of the marginal costs of production was not gi enough to allow investments in labour saving devices and to profit from the investment.

You forgot that we mainstream sheeples watch The Right Stuff and Apollo 18 24/7.

Compared to moderate rebels, IS terrorists and the like, US marines are paragons of virtue and rationality.

No, they are based on Muslim ideology. The Muslims do what they are told to. Nothing more, nothing less.

See how long you can have a free society when there is a major terrorist attack every week.

Today, Belgium's capitol has been hit by numerous blasts. Perhaps this is a response to the arrest of the remainining Paris attackers. In any case, it shows that even in a city with high security you can't be secure when terrorists live among you.

The smallest unit is an individual and the context that person is in. We don't exist in isolation. Rather, we are embedded in society, like nodes in a graph. The impact a person can have is measurable by signal intelligence. Somebody like Stef can reach a lot of people and change the way they think. The represenation of his social context is much more complex than me. If there was a unit of influence it would be logarithmic since the distribution of social relations and their importance follows the power law.

While this is true, banks create money in a free society too. When silver and gold coins were accepted as money, goldsmiths were used as vaults. You brought your money to them and you got a note as a receipt. Over time, people used these notes to pay bills and so on. All was fine and dandy until the goldsmiths realized that it seldom occured that all people that had deposits cashed in their receipts at the same time. When this is the case, you can issue credits and offer other financial services that exceed the money you have stored in your vault. Add to that you can apply the fractional reserve system to these receipts and you have the phenomenon that goldsmiths (or private banks in that case) seem to be able to create money out of thin air.

I played with my father and a friend.

Original sin is a doctrine of the Catholic and subsequent Protestant sects that claims that since because Adam has sinned we all are born sinners. It was developed by Augustine to fight Manicheism and to explain why so few people are Christians. The gnostics said that we live in an evil world and that we have to purify ourselves. Augustine opposed that and said that only the Catholic church can redeem those who are born from hell. Jews and the Orthodox churches on the other hand don't know original sin. They say that Adam has sinned and subsequently everybody since then has sinned. The main difference between Conservative and Leftist ideologies is connected to original sin or corruptibility. Leftists say that man is born good, but society / class structure makes him bad. When you change those, all men and women will be perfect persons. However, if you don't adapt to the Leftist ideology you are a bad person and you have to be purged because there is no more excuse for you to be evil. Conservative thinkers on the other hand claim that man is born corrupted or with the tendency to be corrupted. Hence you need a state / family unit to guide you.

This is a great idea, but there is no need to invent the wheel twice since there is already Deontic Logic: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-deontic/

I played it like crazy when I was 14 to 15. Good to know it's still around.

Because IQ is not an absolute number, it is measured relative to a population. This means that the average IQ today by definition has to be 100 for a standard population. Compared to previous tests, the average IQ now can translate to a higher IQ back then (the Flynn effect).

Yeah, it's a spoof on the AI game. I liked playing that a lot. However, it has been found that there is a winning strategy for black. I read that the AI played on its own. In the last few years we began to rely heavily on neuronal networks in areas that require a lot of computation, say the computation of mechanical parts or the development of new drugs. The problem there is that we can't comprehend the reason why the neuronal network chose one approach over another. We only see the result but the network does not give any reason why it preferred A over B. The reason why the AI won seems to be, that it used both decision trees and learning. It could take moves into account that could be bad, but in reality give you an advantage. A human player does not take those into accout so we are at an disadvantage.