Domain: psmag.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to psmag.com.
Comments · 69
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Re:Unintended Consequences?
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Re:Like the stock market
Um, you DO KNOW that there are numerous examples of African American police officers using excessive force on African American citizens. Don't you?
https://psmag.com/social-justi... -
Re: But if you take out the Lead
A gas plant doesn't take decades to build or contaminate half the world when it fails. It's also cheaper and more reliable. Capacity factor gas, 40% LOL
No instead natural gas poisons entire neighborhoods like Porter Ranch. Can every single natural gas plant in California has a capacity factor between 40%-45% according to CalISO.
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Re:Well, whales go extinct in 2024
The solution is the same - monitoring the populations and setting quotas accordingly.
But is effective management possible? The IWC was founded in 1946 to manage whaling, and the moratorium came in 1982. So they couldn't figure it out over four decades. From the Wikipedia article on the IWC, I noticed this:
At the IWC's annual meeting in 1991, the Scientific Committee submitted its finding that there existed approximately 761,000 minke whales in Antarctic waters, 87,000 in the northeast Atlantic, and 25,000 in the North Pacific. With such populations, it was submitted, 2000 minke whales could be harvested annually without endangering the population.
That's 2000 animals per year. Suppose 10 countries want to hunt whales. That's 200 whales per country. Have a look at this chart on historical catches. There's a table too. Do you think countries would abide by such a low catch number? Have a look at this article. All while the IWC existed to "manage" things. Of course, we could all agree that only Japan and Norway can hunt substantial numbers, but I don't think that is really fair to the rest of the world.
I think managing whale hunting is like providing safe injection rooms for addicts rather than telling people to eat healthy food. It isn't an activity that should be treated as normal. I don't trust countries to be honest in their reporting, and I think that the way whales are killed is barbaric and many of them suffer.
For whales, some of the whale species are in direct competition with otherwise sustainable fishing, and some are even threatening other vulnerable marine life that's at risk of extinction. Sure, if we stopped overharvesting and polluting the oceans, it would be less of a problem, but fat chance of that.
Fair enough, but at the end of the day, I think that humans will have to face their impact on the planet, particularly with regard to overharvesting. Since 1985, 55,073 whales have been harvested by IWC countries. If that isn't enough to protect other species, we need a new plan.
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It's nothing compared to old coal plants
They seem oddly unconcerned about tering down old coal plants full of asbestoes, PCBs, and radioactive ash and slag.
Talk about a hazardous and expensive clean-up.
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Re: Same here
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Re:From Bullies to Buddies
There any data to back this up? Because so far this sounds like Alcoholics Anonymous or Prosperity Gospel - "look at how great it's worked out for some people!" But you step back and look at results and its pretty much rubbish.
Say you have 100 kids in this Buddies for Bully program and it runs out of money. So you tell the kids to start wearing red socks to school because that will keep the bullies away. Ten of the kids may report an end to the bullying in a month or two - but does it have relation to the socks they put on? And there's still the risk this program would make things worse for some kids - is it worth it if 20 report being better off, but five end up on drugs, two start cutting themselves, and one kid hangs himself?
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Re:In Florida? Really?
If you're going to add some of the context, you should go ahead and add all of it. Florida has decided it's much more OK to shoot a black person than a white person. just one article of many.
It's a little hard to know whether Zimmerman's account of the event is correct, since Trayvon is no longer alive to speak for himself. There were many eyewitness accounts, and none of them were the same. About the only thing everybody can agree on is that Zimmerman followed an unarmed teenager near said teenager's residence, and following some sort of altercation Zimmerman shot the boy.
I see that the mods are apparently from Breitbart or Daily Caller today, so I welcome the -1, Troll. I've got karma to burn.
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Re:This is frightening
really? https://psmag.com/economics/pu...
certain subcultures raised to not work for themselves and to be parasites on others commit most the violent crime, yes.
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Universal Postal Union
There is a good article on it at https://psmag.com/economics/th... Its part of the reason why it is cheaper for consumers to buy directly from overseas than from a local shop
... especially items under 2kg. -
Re: Steampunk rocketry
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Re: Reporting on this is terrible
It was not the site of an ongoing threat.
That's not what the cops were told.
If the cops are not smart enough to know that people lie, then they are not smart enough to be on the street with a gun. Period, the end, case fucking closed.
They showed up at a scene of a murder/hostage scenario.
No, they did not. Which you know. Why are you pretending otherwise?
You must verify that a crime is being committed before acting.
No, you must act according to the information you have,
The information they have was that a crime was reported, not that one was occurring. It's not acceptable to kill someone because a crime was reported.
You're right. Next time the cops get a call about a violent person (which happens thousands of times a day) they should just stay home and tell the people calling 911 that it's probably just that one in a million scenario where a malicious hoaxer is screwing with somebody, and too bad.
That's not what I said, and only a total piece of shit cop sucker like you would claim otherwise. They should send the team out, and then the team should verify that shots should be fired before firing shots.
The victim did absolutely nothing wrong here
I agree. And the cop made a call that turned out to be wrong. The problem is you seem to be implying that their mistake was in "participating" (showing up in the first place)
That's not even close to what I said. Are you a total fucking moron with no reading comprehension skills, or are you deliberately attempting to twist my words to make it look like you have a valid argument? You're arguing against something I never said, nor implied.
Racist trollbag detected
Ah, yet another holier-than-thou, I'm-smarter-than-you person who can't grasp the difference between language and skin color. Right out of the toxic SJW playbook.
Everyone with two brain cells to rub together knows that when someone is crying about immigrants and crime, they're being racist. We know that because immigrants a) are actually members of races, unlike the average American and b) commit less crimes than the average, not more. Thus, any time someone is crying about crime and immigration, we know them to be a racist shitbag who ignores the facts in order to depict foreigners as evil.
they are killing us in record numbers
This is factually incorrect. Which you know. Why are you pretending otherwise?
It is factually correct, and it only seems incorrect if you trust police statistics, which are outright lies which ignore half of the killings.
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Re: Murder charges all around...
Oh, come on. Learn to use an internet search engine.
900k 'sworn officers' - http://www.nleomf.org/facts/en...
(although other sources suggest 1.1m people working in law enforcement, so the 1 million number stated may not be inaccurate)
1093 deaths in 2016 - https://psmag.com/social-justi...40 million times a year feels like a terrible under-estimate - that would involve each police officer contacting the public just 40-45 times a year. Less than once a week. Reality is likely to be an average of multiple times a day.
E.g. there are approximately 240 million 911 calls a year (https://www.nena.org/?page=911Statistics) so even though a lot of those wouldn't be answered, responded to, or require police attention, it's reasonable to assume they account for somewhere between 10 and 60 million interactions a year even without the various traffic stops, patrols and other police work going on. -
Re:Redundancy
I would like to know the environmental impact of the cables, though. Doggerbank is home to a lot of fish species, precisely because the water isn't that deep. Many of which have electricity sensing organs. Signal cables are bad enough for some types of sharks. It needs to be investigated what the impact is for power cables, both those lying on the ocean floor and those hanging from the windmillls.
Electrical transmission by submarine Power cable has been around for quite some time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and is in regular use in both fresh and salt water.
There aren't a lot of studies about this, my conjecture about that is that the cables are pretty well wrapped. Anyhow here's one study https://psmag.com/environment/... The conclusion is that three feet away from the cables, the field is pretty much undetectable.
My conclusion is that it is not an issue.
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Re: So What?
That's because he is dishonest. Compare: https://psmag.com/social-justi... (which mentions that "GMOs as allergens" has been debunked)
http://www.supermarketnews.com... (lots of products have undeclared allergens that could cause problems for consumers)His favorite (only?) example wouldn't even need to be labeled under his labeling proposal because the corn in question was accidentally crossbred with a GMO -- it wasn't itself a GMO.
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Re:Hey, cable companies:
I'm gonna quit Frontier ASAP for backing this kind of nonsense...
http://www.telecompetitor.com/...
https://muninetworks.org/conte...
https://www.benton.org/headlin...
https://psmag.com/the-fight-ov...
" AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner, CenturyLink, Verizon, Frontier. To stay in power, they’ve fought against cities and municipalities in state legislatures across the country.
“It’s been kind of a war,” says Christopher Mitchell, the director of the Community Broadband Networks Initiative. “It’s rare for states to do much [Internet] building. Cities want to invest in more competition. But states, acting on behalf of cable and telephone companies, prevent that from happening.” " -
Snoop on that
For anyone still wondering why the snooper charter is a very very bad idea... and this is only a single problem out of a huge list.
Here's what to expect:https://www.wired.com/2013/09/...
http://animalnewyork.com/2014/...
http://www.kiro7.com/news/inve...
http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news...
http://wncn.com/2016/02/10/nc-...
https://psmag.com/when-your-st...https://www.techdirt.com/artic...
Most of these are coming directly from security agencies and the police itself, but what do people think will happen once ISPs and multiple governmental agencies are able to log content from Internet users? Be prepared folks. It's not about only about you doing bad and questionable things. It's specially about all the people with access to your private lives willing to ruin it or turn it into a profitable business.
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Re:The nature of the Trump-fans is pretty obvious
There's a clear subset of Trump fans that are extremely authoritarian https://psmag.com/donald-trump-s-appeal-to-the-authoritarian-personality-b5a0e8820a6e#.l9khk8wf5 and Trump supporters in the primaries were on average more authoritarian than supporters of other Republican candidate http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/01/donald-trump-2016-authoritarian-213533 but this isn't all Trump supporters. Moreover, the evidence here suggests a Denial of Service attack by a small set of coordinated people, so it really doesn't say much about Trump supporters as a whole.
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Re:Hollywood aren't the consumers
Is there any actual evidence of this? Statistics of box-office receipts versus sexual appeal, or something?
How about this?
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Re:Wonder what the RNC is doing about now?
That's probably because education makes one less conservative in general, and most reporters are well-educated.
If you have a good education, you are less likely to believe climate change is a scientific conspiracy, or that the world is 6k years old, for example.
It'd be really good if the partisan hacks grew up at one point and realize that's not actually true. Some of the most ignorant people I've ever met were very well educated and claimed they were worldly. I'm sure you're going but, but that's just your viewpoint! Really, ask yourself how many well educated people you know who are completely ignorant on the basic things that your average high-school or tradesman knows off the top of their head. You can also read this if you're bored.
And due to your critical thinking skills, you learn to actually check the Bible to see if homosexuality is condemned more often than greed & gluttony rather than just accept a pastor's weighting.
Then again, the left(in general) has a serious problem with those and "social justice" don't they? If you have to retreat to your safe spaces every time someone says something that's contrary to your worldview and you need to ban speech in order to push your point of view, perhaps they need to get their shit together like conservatives did and get rid of the extremists. Oh, I'm sure you're going but-hur-dur conservatives never did that. And here's that fancy reminder that they did, right through the 90's and 00's. The left on the otherhand decided to embrace people like Hillary, Merkel, and so on who are pushing authoritarian agendas, wanting to ban things on the internet that have viewpoints contrary to their opinions. Remember it was Hillary and Tipper Gore that wanted to ban "rap music" and "video games" not people on the right. Much like it is today with social media, and them banning conservatives and other people who have view points contrary to what those platforms consider acceptable. It's those same people on the left that are pushing for no-platform policies, and claiming that men can't talk about reproductive rights in any form.
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Re: Elect Trump for Honest Government
Unless it brings the system down, it doesn't matter...
The system itself is broken...
That's how we got into Iraq, the fatuous logic that good motivations can't make a bad situation worse, often far, far worse.
But this kind of logic will always be with us, because it's a smug, tweetable, free pass on the hard work of coming up with and implementing a workable solution (and what idiot wants to attempt that anyway amid the boo-bird chorus of polarized politics?)
30 Shocking Domestic Violence Statistics That Remind Us It's An Epidemic
The Huffpo doesn't spin it this way, but these numbers are likely at the lowest levels since the invention of suburbia. I can't say much more than that, because before the invention of suburbia we probably weren't even keeping score.
The "system" is what brought a pretty terrible thing out of the closet. Sucks to be assaulted by a violent intruder? How about sharing your bed with a violent chest-thumper every damn day?
Software: Maintain or Replace?
But there is a tendency - fuelled by taxpayer money - to leap to replacement quickly, rather than doing maintenance. I have rarely seen a system improved by creating a new one...because the new one is loaded with the same flaws (indeed, new ones) as the legacy system that it replaced.
But of course, the hazards involved with ripping and replacing the current political system are much smaller than ripping and replacing some aging government cost-control system. I mean, gosh, look at how well rip and replace worked in Russia.
The Not-So-Great Professor: Jeffrey Sachs' Incredible Failure to Eradicate Poverty in Africa
The early sections of Nina Munk's book about the economist Jeffrey Sachs read like a celebration of a boy genius. No, strike that: Sachs piles up so many achievements so quickly that the word genius sounds somehow inadequate.
By the age of 13, he was taking college math. Later, he got near-perfect scores on his SATs and graduated summa cum laude from Harvard, where by 28 he was a tenured professor. Two years later, he was advising the Bolivian government on how to administer economic "shock therapy," designed to break the spell of hyperinflation. This led to an even bigger triumph: masterminding Poland's transition to a market economy in 1989, as communism collapsed in Eastern Europe.
Like most geeks, never seen a system he couldn't fix better. Until something blew up so spectacularly, he either got the grey beard gene forever, or curled up and hid in a closet somewhere.
Of course, if you watch enough superhero movies, you just need to put the word out ("the system is broken!") and somehow Jeffery will get the bat signal, and he'll patiently hand-stitch some brightly coloured, stretchy fabric (you'd be amazing what else he found in that stiff bottom drawer with all his grandmother's old Jane Fonda work-out videos) into the peacock man-cape he always dreamed about while he was acing his SATs (painstakingly ripping and replacing the crotch seam six times to achieve the optimally brash yet task-focused fit—they don't call him "Dr Sacks" for nothing) and then he'll spring out the window, and who knows, maybe he can actually fly. I guess we'll find out.
Either way, news at 11.
That all that matters these days.
Entertainment.
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Re:Are YOU counting the costs?
America's latest 500 year rainstorm is underway right now in Louisiana:
https://psmag.com/americas-lat...This tends to reduce agricultural output and habitable land.
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Re:It is not a justification for more surveillance
There was drastically less terrorism. I can't really think of any significant Europe terrorist attacks between WW2 and the late 90s.
Obviously never heard of the Red Army Faction. This is your chance to start having Bader-Meinhof moments.
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Re:Seriously? This is well studied.
Milgram's experiment has been pretty thoroughly discredited
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Re:Obedience Experiment
Milgram's experiments have been widely discredited.
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Re:Finally!
"Seeketh ye not affirmation from others, for content is the man who seeketh not, but hath affirmation within himself."
http://www.psmag.com/health-an...
According to the above content, drinking is awesome. I affirm this by drinking. Unfortunately, my girlfriend broke up with me.
Morale: sometimes you gotta dance as though there are a few people watching.
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Re:Citation [Re:It's wrong because...]
You're mixing two different arguments here.
What allot forget is that our modern society exists because of cheap energy.
Nobody is forgetting that. But it is irrelevant to the point. The point being made was that the anti-science strategy used to cast doubt on climate science uses the techniques previously used by the tobacco companies and before that by the creationists to cast doubt on science.
So yes, it will take quite a bit of convincing for most people that oil is a bad thing.
nevertheless the strategies used to cast doubt on climate science are the same techniques previously used by the tobacco companies and creationists.
If you don't like those references, there are plenty more. The techniques used are the same, and in some cases, the actual people are the same as well.
http://www.skepticalscience.co...
http://www.psmag.com/nature-an...
http://www.earthmagazine.org/a... -
Re:If...
You seem to be under some illusions about the working conditions of University professors. Most of your professors are adjuncts, working part time for less than minimum wage.
You're upset because your professor didn't contact you way before the first class to tell you what the expectations were? Guess what? The University probably hadn't even gotten around to hiring her yet. And even if they had, they reserved the right to say "just kidding" and cancel it at the last minute.
You want someone to blame for the poor quality of your education? It's not your professors. It's the "dooshbags" they are working for.
I am sorry to hear that you are out an extra $50 for the cost of a new textbook. Your professor, who makes about $20,000 a year by working at three different schools with no benefits, no job security and no support from their employer, knows what that feels like.
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Re:Sounds good
Yes! Moar regulation is moar freedom! To believe otherwise brands you as economically ignorant! The trouble with ignorance is that it feels so much like expertise.
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Dunning-Kruger poster children
"The trouble with ignorance is that it feels so much like expertise." We Are All Confident Idiots
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Noise is a safety feature.
Noise helps pedestrians be aware of that two-ton piece of metal and plastic hurdling down the road. If a vehicle is too silent, it increases the risk of pedestrian-vehicle accidents. Noise is good, and we may as well may it something we're familiar with.
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Re:A known "Fact"?
Does science say womens' and mens' brains are identical? No, it doesn't. There are differences. If you don't believe me, ask your doctor. Also, try to explain why most women feel like woman and most men feel like man.
Did I say men don't have feelings? No, I didn't. I merely suggested they might _EXPERIENCE_ them _LESS INTENSELY_. Basically like all humans experience emotions at a different level of intensity. I was merely suggesting there might be some bias coming from gender.
Do you have any numbers to back up your claim of "so many men in prison for crimes of passion"? I couldn't find any. Only thing I could find even remotely applicable was an article on how men are more likely to get longer sentences for crimes of passion. http://www.psmag.com/legal-aff...
I'm sure you'll continue fighting your imaginary strawman, but I shall have no further part in it.
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Re:This study is...
Studies like this can be highly culturally dependent. Other psychological studies have found Americans, and to a slightly lesser degree, Europeans, willing to help anonymous strangers. But when the same results were run on people form tribal societies, the results were wildly different. Here is one example.
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Re: I can simply ignore all health and diet advice
Cigarettes are undeniably bad. So are trans-fats, alcohol overconsumption, and too much stress.
The alcohol one is quite tricky. Yes, it's true that health outcomes for heavy alcohol consumption are often somewhat worse that moderate drinkers (in most studies). But there have been quite a few studies that show that heavy drinkers still do better than those who abstain completely. I wouldn't quite go as far as recommendations in this article, but the consensus of many, many studies that have included hundreds of thousands (probably millions) of people is that people who drink have better health outcomes, and heavy drinkers still do a lot better than abstainers.
So, is "alcohol overconsumption" "undeniably bad"? I don't know, but the evidence seems to suggest that it's less bad than other seemingly "better" choices, like not drinking at all.
(Note that these studies do NOT say that alcohol is the DIRECT cause of the better health outcomes, only that it is highly correlated. Most scientists don't think the effect is so much about alcohol protecting the body so much as it guards against depression, alleviates stress, helps social interactions which contribute toward better mental and physical health, etc.)
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Re:Articles on the elementary education imbalance?
Why would we include biological sciences in the category of STEM fields? The whole point of defining the STEM fields the way we do is to exclude healthcare and medicine, because these aren't relevant to the economic development factors correlated to engineering, technology and basic science -- there is a gender gap in the basic biological sciences and medical research.
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Re:Check your local fracking mixture
CCl4 is not soluble is water, and would not make hydrocarbons more mobile or more soluble. It would however, readily dissolve in hydrocarbon fluids
You mean like diesel fuel?
where it would be difficult and expensive to separate.
The petroleum is going into a fractional distillation column. Its whole purpose is to perform this kind of separation. While the process might be difficult and expensive, it is a process which the petroleum will undergo anyway.
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We Aren't the World: Why Americans Make Bad Study
"This is just fascinating: Joe Henrich and his colleagues are shaking the foundations of psychology and economics, and explain why social science studies of Westerners — and Americans in particular — don't really tell us about the human condition: 'Given the data, they concluded that social scientists could not possibly have picked a worse population from which to draw broad generalizations. Researchers had been doing the equivalent of studying penguins while believing that they were learning insights applicable to all birds.'"
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Re:Deep dive
More likely Baader-Meinhof phenomenon
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Re:Obama's police state?
As far as I can tell, the test where specifically using people, who knew they were inflicting harm onto someone else - to the point of making it look like the learner had suffered a heart attack, and they knew why.
They knew they were in a Pych experiment. They did not know, though (because it was not the case) that their chosen career was to enforce the law fairly and equally. There is a bit of a difference.
And then there's THIS. And THIS.
In the latter case, the authors argue that the people involved are, in fact, making a moral judgment about what they are doing and consciously deciding to do it anyway. Which means they ARE acting on their own, though they might refuse to take responsibility for it later. Claiming "I was just taking orders," for example. -
Re:From the article...
Wikipedia disagrees with you, and neither the OED or Webster's defines "technological singularity".
The technological singularity, or simply the singularity, is a hypothetical moment in time when artificial intelligence will have progressed to the point of a greater-than-human intelligence, radically changing civilization, and perhaps human nature.[1] Because the capabilities of such an intelligence may be difficult for a human to comprehend, the technological singularity is often seen as an occurrence (akin to a gravitational singularity) beyond which the future course of human history is unpredictable or even unfathomable.[2]
Technology has always displaced human labor. As to Wikipedia's definition, which is what this thread is about, as someone who knows how computers work, down to the schematics of the gates inside your processor (read The TTL Handbook some time) and has programmed in hand-assembled machine code and written a program on a Z-80 computer and 16k of RAM that fooled people into believing it was actually sentient, I'm calling bullshit on the first part of the definition (first put forward in 1958 by Von Neuman when my Sinclair had more power than the computers of his day).
As to the second part, it's already happened. The world today is nothing like the world was in 1964. Both civilization and "human nature" (read this) have changed radically in the last fifty years. Doubtless it changed as much in the 1st half of the 20th century, and someone from Jefferson's time would be completely lost in today's world.
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Re:Plagiarism
+5 funny, Bhudda wouldn't have sued anyone (great parody, good job) Christ isn't happy either, he doesn't much like lawyers. Or greedy, selfish people, and neither does Bhudda.
There isn't a single religion I know of except mammon worshipers (the US's primary religion) that have anything good to say about society's actions. It seems society has forgotten everything ever said by any sage or wise man and has become sociopathic.
Selfishness and greed and having no thought for your fellow man are not normal. Someone needs to find a cure for our sick society before it succumbs completely to this deadly disease.
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Re:Wow
You and the guy you responded to are victims of your own culture. We are the weirdest people in the world. This ape-like chest thumping needs to evolve out of our species, along with selfishness and greed. And the thing is, it isn't genetics that need to evolve, it's our sick culture.
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Re:I drive more
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Re:Jesus H. Christ on a crutch!
Porn may tip the favor for a particular coin but there is one market that can make Bitcoin or any given altcoin an huge (relative to current) market.
Marijuana is a Schedule I drug no matter what any State's laws say. This Federal classification means that banks cannot do direct business with dealers, transporters, processors or growers of it. Several publications have covered this problem.
People in the trade are either working in very grey banking situations or dealing with large amounts of cash. Having to pay your $20,000 taxes this quarter with a duffle bag of twenties is a perfect situation for robbery. Pot dispensaries on Colorado, USA are starting to figure out that they don't need banks to deal with Bitcoin or other altcoins. Right there could be a real Business-to-Business revolution for digital currency.
Sure, today a digital coin is mostly useful for transactions. A business would have to convert between cash and coin at the ends. And even when you can go bitcoin from customer to suppliers for your business you'll still need to get out cash.
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Re:Isn't this the ultimate goal?
In fact, Everest has been climbed by a helicopter (and it was unbelievably difficult and dangerous) and some really impressive music has been composed by what is far from a strong AI (even if it is relatively formulaic).
But neither of these two things have anything to do with my actual point.
Even in a hypothetical world where excellence itself is obviated by technology, or some race of superior beings, or even by mere changing tastes, the challenge itself still exists. Every time someone faces an obstacle it is a reflection on their own upbringing and personal history, and that is equally if not more important than the actual magnitude of (artistic) accomplishment. Even if—no, when—all you say about human standards of beauty fades, and there is nothing left remotely humanlike to judge subjective aesthetics, the achievements of those who lived and worked and created will not be diminished. Neither the sands of time nor the mountainous shoulders of giants yet unborn having any bearing upon this.
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Re:Students at American universities
what's civics class? No serious, the point is taken and a good point. Here is a great article I found earlier this year about it: http://www.psmag.com/magazines/pacific-standard-cover-story/joe-henrich-weird-ultimatum-game-shaking-up-psychology-economics-53135/
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Re:I don't get it...
why do researchers feel they need to study tribal communties to learn about society?
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Re:Dear Slashdot...
What does that say about us, as a people? That we are human beings, and humans have something called "human nature".
Um, I'm afraid You're wrong. That theory/myth was recently smashed; there is no such thing as "human nature," only cultural nature. "All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be", as Pink Floyd so artfully puts it.
"Money" is just an easy way to keep track of the value of "stuff"
And you've fallen prey to exactly what the linked article was talking about. What's the value of rain? What's the value of clean air? What's the value of someone's empathy? Your values are sadly skewed.
Obama ran in 2008 on closing the terrorist prison in Guantanamo Bay. It was a major campaign promise. Still hasn't been closed 5 years later. Why?
Because he was blocked by Congress from sending them overseas, and blocked by the states from putting them in normal prisons.
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Re:You what?
This article about the terrible made-for-tv movie Sharknado comes to mind
[...] Taking the naive route allows low-budget films to appeal to both informed genre-movie nerds who get laughs out of feeling superior to the film, and unsuspecting mainstream viewers who are right at the filmâ(TM)s levelâ"and believe it or not, those people exist. When Lando jumped on Twitter during the premiere of a new Syfy movie, he was surprised to find that some people out there were actually terrified by a sharktopus. Then there are those viewers who are dumb enough to watch the movie, but smart enough to be offended.
I definitely fell into the latter category when it came to the Starship Troopers sequels.
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Re:But..
Your scenario only applies to Weird societies. The prisoner's dilemma doesn't work the same in all cultures; and in fact, it only plays out that way in western societies.
Link supplied by
/.'s resident biologist, Samantha Wright