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https://aeon.co/essays/we-are-...

THE VAX ISSUE FOR ME IS SIMPLE: The issue is not the efficacy of vaccines but the vaccine obligation. Why are they mandatory when they have no undergone RCT or double blind testing like any other drug? Why "confuse" two subjects so differently? We dont because of profit. https://t.co/1AFfBlwI1V

— Jack Kruse (@DrJackKruse) March 5, 2018

Values and vaccines Parents who reject vaccination are making a rational choice – they prefer to put their children above the public good

https://aeon.co/essays/where-d...

There's some interesting philosophy behind swearing and where the words get their power, and moreover, how one can use normally inoffensive words to be thoroughly offensive.

Whether you happen to like it or not, society places certain emphasis on words, and you can't claim that this doesn't matter. Indeed, I'm sure that you wouldn't swear profusely in front of your boss, or tell a police officer to go fuck themselves when they're giving you a ticket, or let loose on a judge in a courtroom. There is context to this propriety, of course, but there's something to be said for extending the courtesy you give to someone that has some power or influence over you to someone that is merely your colleague, or someone new that is relatively powerless.

Anyway, the article is interesting. :)

Actually the US has a very good and widespread welfare system. It is called the US Department of Defence. The only difference is that, when joining that Welfare program you are expected to do work of sorts, which is fine by me.

https://aeon.co/essays/how-the...

If you could get something like the DoD, but where people can do non-military work for a few years in exchange for the social and medical benefits (or for even longer) then maybe it would be better. Germany used to have Social Work as an alternative to conscription which worked out really well for it provided hospitals and old age homes and such with a steady supply of labour for a year and young people got something out of it (and most I know who did it say they are glad they did). When Germany stopped conscription it is these social institutions that suffered the most.

https://aeon.co/ideas/the-eart...

Food for thought.

WW2 ended in 1945. In the 1950's, Germany was already the second largest economy. A decimated, war torn country with no industry doesn't give you the second largest economy in the world. Germany's rebuilding took very little time considering the impact of the war, and the drain of intellectual value foisted on them by the US and UK governments; it took years, not decades.

Your very first assertion started out factually incorrect, so you're failing right out of the gate here. Germany was never at any point the second largest economy after the war, that was without a doubt the USSR. Germany's position kept going down from distant third until the noughties, where it remains at 5th, just behind India. More to my point here, you know the UK and France were still dismantling Germany's heavy industry until 1950s, right? And yes, Germany's economy did recover quickly, but primarily because of three things:

- The guy the US appointed to run Germany's economy made a pretty daring (yet, common sense under freshwater, read: Milton Friedman's, economics) move that even the US felt was a bad idea at the time: He ordered the removal all price controls, thus introducing a free market to Germany. This did the initial part almost overnight.
- The Marshall Plan, which fed enough dollars into Europe that they were able to import capital goods (i.e. earth movers, industrial equipment) that they wouldn't have otherwise been able to obtain due to a lack of purchasing power.
- The reconstruction boom, which every postwar economy experienced, not just Germany's.

That does NOT mean their industrial capability suddenly recovered to its pre-war levels. While the rest of the world was still rebuilding, the US was already in just the right place, and was growing even faster than the rest of the world as a result of its giant head start, making the US the top economy (by GDP) for the first time ever, until just recently. The same is also true of Japan, especially given Douglas MacArthur, who was Japan's governor at that time, made an effort to reconstruct Japan, with the direct assistance from the US, who paid laborers to travel there and assist. (By the way, the US didn't ask for reparations from anybody, while European countries did.) While virtually all countries experienced large growth, the country that by far experienced the fastest growth was the US, until 1973 when the first major postwar global recession happened.

China also rediscovered capitalism at this time, by the way, and their growth rate almost overnight began to outpace that of the US. Also for those who don't know, China has had the world's highest GDP by far until about the turn of the century, and stayed that way until communism ended.

Anyways, getting back to the original topic of why the US did exceptionally well at the time:

Fortunately we were carried further by having built industries that the rest of the world had not scaled to just yet, like our large aerospace manufacturing and heavy industrial equipment manufacturing industries for example. While the rest of the world has mostly (but not entirely) caught up to our industrial capability (hence those jobs are largely gone, but nonetheless it remains a large portion of our GDP) we now have by far the largest tech industry as our ace in the hole, which continues to carry us forward. And yes, presently the rest of the world is hopelessly dependent upon our tech industry, just like they were for our manufacturing industry in the past, so we're still in this game, just not with the same jobs.

Here's a well researched paper on all of this, by the way:

https://aeon.co/essays/how-eco...

And in 1961, Kennedy would give the country a direction with a decree to go to the moon.

Actually that was a huge burden on our economy at the time. In today's dollars, that would be about $122 billion, and its economic returns weren't an

I read a short article about this a few months ago. Apparently, some folks simulated a bunch of stuff using a MOND model and got galaxies with distributions of dwarf satellites that looked like what you can see around the Milky Way and Andromeda. Using a dark matter model, they got galaxies with spherical distributions of dwarf satellites, which is something you don't see. There's almost certainly room for quibbling about the results/models/stuff here. It's still a fascinating subject and people are doing real work on it.

(I've lost access to the mailing address my old /. account is associated with, hence AC here.)

If your wife tells me you drove off to work an hour ago, and your commute is half an hour, it is reasonable to assume you actually are at work.

The thing is, you sign up as a Republican, and on the way to work, the company who employs you suddenly turns into Trump University, and then one day, like Morning Joe, you announce to the public: "you know what, I'm just not into working for Trump University even though I'm going to continue to be a Conservative".

Now, it is true that a blind partisan Democrat can be assumed to still be a Democrat ten years later (even if they did nominate loathsome Hilary), but do we really know the guy ticked off "blind" and "partisan" and "until death do us part" on his original Democrat Vow of Perpetual Allegiance?

I'm sure there are many Obama Democrats who signed up because of Obama, and then checked out of politics during the last election cycle when the Dems nominated a previously-owned, pant-suited, Wall St toady (if they hadn't already checked out halfway through Obama's first term, when he proved to be a colossal disappointment in standing up to the financial sector).

Furthermore, we have strong evidence of the great Democrat check-out in the form of Trump's ghastly victory. We're not even sure he could have won this election running against a ham sandwich, although he did win this election running against "crooked" Hillary. Even though Trump personally thinks Hillary is infinitely worse than a ham sandwich, he still finds time to brag about his victory as a meaningful achievement.

Hillary: high bar or low bar? Pick one.

For myself, the most effective thing I could do politically would be to register with my regional party on the right (I'm not American) so I could help nip against the darling single-issue candidates of the Christian Right in the bud at the nomination stage. This affiliation wouldn't be too hard for me to pull off, because I actually believe in the good half of Libertarianism—compassionate Libertarian wouldn't even be that far from the truth (though my opportunities to fully align myself are thin on the ground).

Then I would be, by American standards, a registered Republican. I'd be happy enough and it would all go swimmingly until Scaramucci shows up, and only then, I would totally blow my cover.

Anthony Scaramucci in 2010: Wall Street feels like a 'pinata'

There are hapless Greenpeacers on the left who say equally ridiculous things (splitting desk with head ridiculous), but they're into Volvos and macrame and other mostly harmless things, whereas Scaramucci is a spoiled child of privilege, and I just can't stand fucktards who defend their ridiculous views by pointing at their bank accounts—in a disgusting show-boat of glitzy ad hominem argument (the good half of Libertarianism believes that all men are created equal, the bad half of Libertarianism believes that all dollars are created equal; a die-hard Conservative is someone who conveniently neglects the difference when ideology hits the ballot box).

People are complex.

America's hidden philosophy — 18 July 2017

Rational choice theory therefore had to be elevated from an empirical theory covering certain empirical contexts into a normative theory of the proper operation of the human mind itself. It had to become a universal philosophy. Only then could it justify the US' self-assumed global mission of bringing free elections and free markets to the entire world.

I didn't like this article much, but it did make one or two good points. Rational choice theory has long aligned itself with reductive analysis.

All that was needed was to t

There is more to research, no offense, than to try random stuff to see if it helps. Or to use your technique at various problems until it works. Remember p=0.05 is probably pretty terrible (many people say it should be abandoned)

IF this study had some degree of veracity the next question would be (and again in the proper scientific method it would be the first question) "what is the biological plausibility that adjusting your spine would lead to a significant reduction in BP"

(without hand waving about "parasympathetic nervous system response")

The brain is an information processing machine, with inputs and outputs.

It really isn't and this method of thinking about the brain isn't helping to figure out how it actually works. This gives a decent overview of why the brain isn't a computer.

When you think about it, our brains evolved over time and so will have been built on top of something approximating simpler organisms around us today, which is to say a purely reactive nervous system like that of a Jellyfish. Add in the fact that sensory deprivation causes us to become unhinged and sensory overload can be quite debilitating as well, we dream when we sleep .etc, then it seems that our senses are things that our higher level brain functions are built on top of.

So we aren't information processing machines as such, we are of course biological nervous systems and complicated ones at that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

A supervisor at IBM Research pointed this out to me -- a big challenge the farming villagers face in hiring Samurai is that they do not know what makes a good one...

A deeper issue in your post is discussed in "Have Fun at Work" by W. L. Livingston
https://www.amazon.com/Have-Fu...
"The practical abilities of engineers are buried and ignored by institutions whose sole objective is their own survival. Whereas the individual engineer has a publicly admitted duty of care for his fellow beings, institutions have no such concern, for their aims take no account of the human cost of their activities. This Handbook provides the recipe for the survival of the practical professional. The Handbook is offered to serve the needs of the professional engineer but it demands a much wider readership for it examines the interactions between the responsible individual and the supra-human entities that constrain and control him."

He provides examples of presenting suitable candidates to organizations desperately in need of them who the organizations reject in their ignorance of their true needs.

Bottom line: interviews are a game. They don't have to make sense. You chose (and also demonstrated) you did not want to play the game. So, they effectively screened you out as a non-game-player.

Of course, it is possible those organizations may collapse because of screening out such people -- but that tends to be the nature of most organizations and potentially self-limiting social processes. And those reasons are not all bad -- given that humans evolved in a context of living in cooperative hunter/gather tribes who in a sense were playing a collective game together.

See also:
https://aeon.co/essays/you-don...
"How organisations enshrine collective stupidity and employees are rewarded for checking their brains at the office door ... One well-known firm that Mats Alvesson and I studied for our book The Stupidity Paradox (2016) said it employed only the best and the brightest. When these smart new recruits arrived in the office, they expected great intellectual challenges. However, they quickly found themselves working long hours on 'boring' and 'pointless' routine work. After a few years of dull tasks, they hoped that they'd move on to more interesting things. But this did not happen. As they rose through the ranks, these ambitious young consultants realised that what was most important was not coming up with a well-thought-through solution. It was keeping clients happy with impressive PowerPoint shows. Those who did insist on carefully thinking through their client's problems often found their ideas unwelcome. If they persisted in using their brains, they were often politely told that the office might not be the place for them. ..."

And:
http://disciplinedminds.tripod...
"Who are you going to be? That is the question.
In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline."
The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typic

This whole approach to me reeks to substance dualism; the human brain is a computer, a very advanced one at that, but it's just a computer. there is no 'soul' that somehow makes the human brain the only thing that's capable of intelligent operations.

Start here...https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer

Fact check? Not. Google whores for hillary http://www.democracynow.org/20... http://www.zerohedge.com/news/... https://theintercept.com/2016/... https://aeon.co/essays/how-the... http://thehill.com/policy/tech... http://observer.com/2016/08/te...

This is not a common human trait, abnormalities and mutations exist, as is to be expected.

I'd consider the more extreme biological abnormalities as neither male or female but "other" biologically. They are different, neither male or female in the typical sense.

But biology aren't what people are fighting here, people tend to accept biology a lot more than they do "my gender is pizza because I like it".

An interesting read on some issues with the concept of "gender". Sometimes I think people just don't think things through.

The idea that being male or female has anything to do with anything other than sex is an invention of the 60's.

It pushes certain things as associated with males and females that aren't necessarily the case. If you support people being able to be people you should support the reduction/cessation for male/female for use for anything other than what it is actually talking about, the biological sex.

2) Humans come in at at least 12 sexes - these includes visible hermaphrodites (of several kinds) but the vast majority of whom are utterly indistinguishable from "male" or "female" because none of the differences are external. Sex is determined by chromosomes. XX is female, XY is male. But those are not the only ones out there. XXY is extremely common - and physically indistinguishable from female - but tend to have higher average testosterone levels - several olympic gold medalists have been XXY and the olympic committee banned XXY women from competing until the 1990s unless they also suffered from another condition that prevented the absorbtion of testosterone (see now there is yet another mechanism - even if you have male or female hormons of the right amounts many people are born unable to absorb those hormones properly).

I am very aware of those types, and would consider them "genetic abnormalities" rather than the norm, nobody said there can't be "male, female, other" when speaking entirely on biology

The idiocy we want to stop is "my gender is pizza", "I am a man because I like beer" and things of that nature, basically the entire idea of gender.

Some interesting reading. I don't think this whole "lets call gender anything we want" business was entirely thought through. It seems quite lazy and makeshift, being whatever people want while condemning those who refuse to "see the light".

I get (for reasons that I cannot really explain but no doubt are some sort of karmic burden predestined for all time) lots of people who write me with their own special "unified theory of everything"

There was an article on ... the Science new site, IIRC. "Science reports" or something like that ... a week or two ago about some jobbing post-doc who covered her bills between research contracts doing Skype sessions with "autodidacts" (I think that was the term she used), trying to help them to express their ideas effectively - and in the process lead them to some of their more egregious errors.

If you're going to wade through bullshit, you might as well get paid for it. Ah, found it.

Reposted from an earlier post on Slashdot on Fri April 15, 2016 09:50 PM:

"Writing in the New Republic in 2014, Jonathan Zittrain, professor of international law at Harvard University, pointed out that, given the massive amount of information it has collected about its users, Facebook could easily send such messages only to people who support one particular party or candidate, and that doing so could easily flip a close election – with no one knowing that this has occurred. And because advertisements, like search rankings, are ephemeral, manipulating an election in this way would leave no paper trail."

"Are there laws prohibiting Facebook from sending out ads selectively to certain users? Absolutely not; in fact, targeted advertising is how Facebook makes its money. Is Facebook currently manipulating elections in this way? No one knows..."

https://aeon.co/essays/how-the...

Now we know.

See, now we know.

Philosophers have been talking about this idea for a REALLY long time. The idea is called "Simulated Reality": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and many philosophers have mused over it over the years... including big names like Descartes.

Here is a nice little interview that describes some of the basic ideas of how VR relates to philosophy: https://aeon.co/videos/new-rea...

It's funny to me that so many people here are dismissive of the idea or think Musk is off his rocker... you just haven't taken enough philosophy classes (or thought long enough about the ideas!) :-)

https://aeon.co/essays/your-br...

I found the above-linked essay pretty interesting, because he points out what should probably be obvious in hindsight, but easily gets lots in all the "noise" about A.I.

Basically, he argues that the human brain doesn't really "process" or "store" information anything like a computer. We used those flawed analogies all the time when describing how someone's brain works -- but they're no more accurate than the popular medical theory in the past that everything was fluid-based. The truth is -- a computer is a great tool for storing a bunch of data for selective retrieval, and you can use that to an extent to fake intelligence (a la Apple's "Siri", Microsoft's "Cortana", or other such agents). But it's nothing more than an illusion crafted by the software developer. Investing more time, effort and money into such projects is likely to result only in creating more believable "pretend intelligence" as the data-pool it pulls responses from increases in size and scope. You're still no further towards a goal of making a computer that's "self aware" or can think for itself.

Facebook (especially) has the power to use the Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME) to influence what people see, and that has been proven to have a strong influence on how people vote:

As one might expect, familiarity levels with the candidates was high – between 7.7 and 8.5 on a scale of 10. We predicted that our manipulation would produce a very small effect, if any, but that’s not what we found. On average, we were able to shift the proportion of people favouring any given candidate by more than 20 per cent overall and more than 60 per cent in some demographic groups. Even more disturbing, 99.5 per cent of our participants showed no awareness that they were viewing biased search rankings – in other words, that they were being manipulated.

On the other hand, if they did decide to influence people politically, would you be able to tell it was happening.

Completely correct. And not just Facebook, but Google and others as well.

There was a fascinating (and disturbing) Aeon essay posted a couple of months ago on this very subject. The short version is that there are many ways to subtly influence people's opinions without them ever knowing they have been targeted, and there is already significant effort and money being spent in this arena (and not just in the obvious case of advertising).

One only need to look at the Facebook "experiment" from 2014 to see what's easily possible and already being done (and that's just the one reported on in the news).

Facebook is just a forum

No, Facebook is an advertising platform. Facebook exists to manipulate its product (the users) into buying goods and services from its customers (the advertisers). Might as well flip an election using the same techniques.

"Writing in the New Republic in 2014, Jonathan Zittrain, professor of international law at Harvard University, pointed out that, given the massive amount of information it has collected about its users, Facebook could easily send such messages only to people who support one particular party or candidate, and that doing so could easily flip a close election – with no one knowing that this has occurred. And because advertisements, like search rankings, are ephemeral, manipulating an election in this way would leave no paper trail."

"Are there laws prohibiting Facebook from sending out ads selectively to certain users? Absolutely not; in fact, targeted advertising is how Facebook makes its money. Is Facebook currently manipulating elections in this way? No one knows..."

https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-alters-our-thoughts

Now we know.

Meanwhile, here's a fine article on the thing that I'm describing. https://aeon.co/essays/why-are...

On the face of it, it seems so simple: you eat more than you burn -> you get fatter. However, that doesn't address the question of why people eat more than they need, and especially why it turns out to be almost impossible for most to stop doing it.

Nowhere in your argument did you consider or mention that gut bacteria varies from person to person and has quite a bit to do with how many calories get converted into fat. Lean people seemingly have better gut bacteria, and studies have shown that transplanting a lean persons bacteria to an overweight person can help them shed pounds.

There are other issues with weight gain and weight loss that have more to do with simplistic "just eat less" advice. It's a mutlifaceted problem and no two people have exactly the same mix of causes. Lab animals, with the most regulated diets of any living thing in the world, have been gaining weight and scientists don't know why. Unfortunately as a society we celebrate the people who run a mile and drop 50 pounds and expect everyone to be the same if only they had more willpower.

Also, eating is literally necessary to live. People talk about being addicted to food, well yes, and we're addicted to oxygen and water too dumbasses. Our bodies are trying to hold onto every calorie possible in case there's no next meal for a while, it's survival biology.

If you say: "Kill gays," it's hate speech, granted. But if you say: "It's a bad idea to let millions of Muslims into Europe, because their holy book instructs them to kill gays," somehow that is "hate speech" against Muslims. Even more idiotically, it's considered "racism" even though Islam is a religion and not a race.

The crackdown on "incorrect" thoughts is reaching absurdities. Criticize feminism on Twitter, and you'll get banned. They'll even suppress the protest hashtag #FreeStacy by disabling autocomplete for it. But somehow the hashtag #KillAllWhiteMen is nothing for the "Trust and Safety Council" to be concerned about.

A 15-year-old student in the UK visited the UKIP website in class. His teachers then reported him to the police, who interrogated him for hours.

If that isn't enough to frighten you, here's some research about how easily Google could game elections by skewing search results in favor of one candidate or another, and how Facebook could do the same with targeted ads and by deciding what shows up on your wall. And the leadership of both companies are Hillary fans. That doesn't mean that they'll do it, but they have the motive, means, and opportunity to do so. And how would we know if they had?

https://aeon.co/opinions/is-it...

being easier to learn surely helps

Sure, it might help, but that doesn't mean that's the primary reason for adoption.

For English, the reason for its world-wide dominance can be attributed to (mainly) two things: the British Navy and American technical superiority post WWII.

The British Navy is responsible because that's what allowed the English to galavant across the world forging (one of) the largest empires ever known. India, Hong Kong, Austrailia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States, and various other colonies in a large part of the world all speak English because England could send out ships to conquer or colonize them, and then defend them when attacked. What's more, they were lucky to do it in an economically enhancing way, in contrast with places like Spain, which sucked the riches out of their colonies and then collapsed because of it. London is (arguably) the economic capitol of the world, meaning that if you want to speak to investors, you want to speak in English.

American techincal superiority post WWII comes out in two ways. The first is the obvious military dominance. America is the military superpower on the block, and if you want to be friendly with them, your diplomats should speak English. With that military & technical superiority comes economic superiority: American dollars are a safe place to put your money, so if you're wealthy, you better learn English to invest wisely, or at least hire an accountant who can.

The second is simply that Americans, being practically alone on the continent with English speakers, are monoglots. This means that when they develop some technical advance they don't pause to consider the linguistic issues. Translation is an afterthought, so technical developments are all in English. For example, hardly anyone attempts to translate "computer" - these new technical items all get English loanwords. Also, scientific development reduced itself to being primarily English 1 2.

But perhaps the greatest reason is that due to the technical and economic dominance of the United States, this was where the big media companies sprouted. (Assisted, no doubt, by having a large population which could appreciate the programming without translation issues.) You want to watch the hottest movies an television everyone is talking about? You better know English, or you're waiting several months until a (poorly done) dub is availible. Or you can watch it with subtitles, which means that you're slowly and subconciously being taught English by hearing the sounds in relation to meanings.

So it's not the ease of learning that's the primary reason English is so globally dominant. Granted, if English was really hard to learn, it might not have had the same rate of uptake. (e.g. if Finland was in England's place, we might all be speaking a pidgin Finnish instead of "true" Finnnish.) But ease of use is not the reason for uptake. (For example, even if Luxembourgish - just as an example - was the easiest language in the world to learn and use practically no one would speak it, because there would be no reason to.)

From "Our quantum problem", Adrian Kent
http://aeon.co/magazine/scienc...

"...Its great rival was first set out in a 1957 paper and Princeton PhD thesis written by one of the stranger figures in the history of 20th-century physics, Hugh Everett III. Rather unromantically, and very unusually for a highly original thinker and talented physicist, Everett abandoned theoretical physics after he had published his big idea. A good deal of his subsequent career was spent in military consultancy, advising the US on strategies for fighting and ‘winning’ a nuclear war against the USSR, and the bleakness of this chosen path presumably contributed to his chain-smoking, alcoholism and depression. Everett died of a heart attack at the age of 51; possibly we can infer something of his own ultimate assessment of his life’s worth from the fact that he instructed his wife to throw his ashes in the trash. And yet, despite his detachment from academic life (some might say from all of life), Everett’s PhD work eventually became enormously influential.

One way of thinking about his ideas on quantum theory is that our difficulties in getting a description of quantum reality arise from a tension between the mathematics – which, as we have seen, tells us to make calculations involving many different possible stories about what might have really happened – and the apparently incontrovertible fact that, at the end of an experiment, we see that only one thing actually did happen. This led Everett to ask a question that seems at first sight stupid, but which turns out to be very deep: how do we know that we only get one outcome to a quantum experiment? What if we take the hint from the mathematics and consider a picture of reality in which many different things actually do happen – everything, in fact, that quantum theory allows? And what if we take this to its logical conclusion and accept the same view of cosmology, so that all the different possible histories of the evolution of the universe are realised? We end up, Everett argued, with what became known as a ‘many worlds’ picture of reality, one in which it is constantly forming new branches describing alternative – but equally real – future continuations of the same present state..."

this is not a surprise. i have good 3d visual modelling ability, which allowed me to assess gaps between vehicles and drive at 30mph near curbs or bollards in width-restricted areas with an inch to spare either side, for example. i remember one day, a former partner and i, driving along a motorway. approximately fifty times throughout an hour-long journey, she would drive in the middle lane directly up to the back of a car in front at more than 15mph faster than the other vehicle, *apply the brakes* when the vehicle in front was only 8 to 10 metres away, and then and *only then* look in the side mirror to see if it was safe to change lane.

by contrast i would be constantly looking left, right and back (which is actually very tiring), would know where all vehicles were, even up to a mile away in either direction, and, using 3D modelling based on speeds and locations of other vehicles, would *predict* whether it was necessary for me to speed up or slow down in order to merge into faster (or slower) traffic in order to overtake vehicles *plural* in front. or, in some cases, whether to simply sit there happily at the speed of the vehicles in front.

now, this person - my former partner - drove an average of *four to five hours* per day like this. but if they are anything to go by, i am honestly and genuinely not surprised to hear that there are people who cannot judge distances, for whom the world is 2D, devoid of depth and the awareness that goes with it.

*that having been said*... the addition of "features" that apply the brakes without permission seem like an incredibly bad idea. i am reminded of a discussion recently... allow me to quote:

"We inadvertently built our own panic and short-sightedness into
the very systems designed to protect us from our worst impulses"

http://aeon.co/magazine/techno...

then, also, there is the failure of the three laws of robotics (yes, asimov's work demonstrated that the three laws are an *outright failure*, not a success). the three laws basically provided robots that *prevented* humanity from taking risks. on a species-level, the three laws *terminated* our evolution and advancement.

so, honestly, i have to say that if people cannot have the good sense to be sufficiently aware when driving a 1500 kilogramme object that is capable of causing death to themselves and those in the immediate vicinity, then please, with much respect and love, give them family a darwin award, be glad that they weren't driving in *your* vicinity at the time, and be glad that our species gene pool's "average spacial awareness" capability just went up a tiny notch.

You think they didn't have sugar, fatty foods and exercising decades ago?

They did, but now it is in every thing you eat. Because we love the taste of fat and sugar.

Instead of a special occasion of the day when you eat sugar, it is eaten routinely. That is what is new.

For instance, replacing a piece of bread with a thin layer of bread and jam in the morning with a muffin (so essentially eating cake for breakfast).
Drinks also have vast amounts of sugar in them. A typical Starbucks coffee contains tons of fat and sugar to make it tastier, whereas black coffee does not.

Animals are getting fatter too though. link, link paper

The original article is here, which was obviously not read.

The question asked of Roache was a continuation of a thread about radical life extension, where people are expected to live 1,000 years or more, where Roache has already argued that denying convicts access to life-extending treatments would probably be considered inhumane, and also that it would be like punishing a series of completely different people for the crime of one.

The interviewer then asks:

Would it be unethical to tinker with the brain so that this person experiences a 1,000-year jail sentence in his or her mind?

To which Roache replies:

[...]there is a widely held view that any amount of tinkering with a person’s brain is unacceptably invasive. But you might not need to interfere with the brain directly. There is a long history of using the prison environment itself to affect prisoners’ subjective experience.

.

Through the entire piece, Roache argues for proportional and reasonable punishment, and finishes with the amazingly sensible:

When we ask ourselves whether it’s inhumane to inflict a certain technology on someone, we have to make sure it’s not just the unfamiliarity that spooks us. And more importantly, we have to ask ourselves whether punishments like imprisonment are only considered humane because they are familiar, because we’ve all grown up in a world where imprisonment is what happens to people who commit crimes. Is it really OK to lock someone up for the best part of the only life they will ever have, or might it be more humane to tinker with their brains and set them free?

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I may be expecting more of Slashdotters than they're actually able to deliver, but seriously, imagine a two physical day session at a rehabilitation center that, in the criminal's mind, was a 5 virtual year punitive sentence followed by 3 virtual years of training/rehab. Costs of maintaining imprisonment and reintegration of ex-cons into society is significantly reduced. Prison "culture" is eliminated, because there's no longer any concurrency.

Let's be careful what we wish for, eh?

The fundamental problem with this is that overeating doesn't cause obesity.

Some recent scientific results (*) have clarified obesity, and are completely at odds with every "common knowledge" explanation. The bad news is that we don't know what causes obesity and there's nothing anyone can do [currently] to combat it. The good news is that it's not related to a) what you eat(**) b) how much you eat, c) your willpower, d) genetics, or e) exercise.

Relax, it's not your fault.

In the current model the digestive system presents a river of nutrients, from which the body takes what it needs to maintain a specific weight.The body has a set-point in the manner of a thermometer for how much nutrition to take in, and something in the environment disturbs this set-point(***), resulting in obesity. There is strong statistical evidence that this is not related to the amount or type of food eaten(*) (within dietary reason) or the level of exercise. Over 700 possible factors have been suggested, including Bisphenol-A in packaging, estrogenic compounds in the environment, and water fluoridation.

Your diet worked for you, and that's great; however, it didn't fix your obesity(***): something you did along with the diet changed the environment and your body regained a normal set-point. For this reason, no diet is universal: it's happenstance.

Exercise isn't what fixed your obesity. Again, nothing related to nutrition (within obvious limits) or exercise is the cause of obesity. Something else is at play. Whether exercise is good for you is a different issue; it's just not the cause of your obesity.

Modeling your body as a thermodynamic system sounds logical and "makes sense", but without actually going into starvation it's not the correct description of the problem. You can burn many calories simply by sleeping with fewer covers (more than you can by exercising), but your body will simply take more from the stream. This won't affect your obesity.

* Modern-day laboratory animals are fat, despite having the same diet and exercise as lab animals raised in previous decades. Statistically, the trend is very strong.

** A nutritional balance is necessary (of course). Whether junk food is good for you is a separate issue; however, it's not the cause of your obesity.

*** The difference in caloric intake between normal and obese is about 30 calories/day (about 3 peanut M&Ms), which is roughly 1% of your daily nutritional needs. No diet has this level of resolution, no diet can be this accurate by measuring servings without taking into account the condition of the serving (ie - chicken fattier than average, veggies drier than average, &c.)