Slashdot Mirror

it seems obvious his intent was to get someone hurt or killed

If I were redesigning the school system, the four major food groups would be reading, writing, arithmetic, and intent is never obvious (keep your head up, and your eyes on a swivel on social media, boys and girls).

You aren't at the mercy of your emotions — your brain creates them — December 2017

She's accurately portraying real research, although I don't even like this talk, because she's skating over necessary context in an unhelpful way.

The way that we see emotions in others are deeply rooted in predictions. So to us, it feels like we just look at someone's face, and we just read the emotion that's there in their facial expressions the way that we would read words on a page. But actually, under the hood, your brain is predicting. It's using past experience based on similar situations to try to make meaning. This time, you're not making meaning of blobs, you're making meaning of facial movements like the curl of a lip or the raise of an eyebrow. And that stone-faced stare? That might be someone who is a remorseless killer, but a stone-faced stare might also mean that someone is stoically accepting defeat, which is in fact what Chechen culture prescribes for someone in Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's situation.

I read a book recently with the title Do No Harm (2014) by Henry Marsh where he devotes half the book to the admission that without the rituals of patient depersonalization, some of the unbelievably desperate and risky procedures would be impossible to perform for any normal person (though a beneficent sociopath—these really do exist—might find a way—including some already in the profession).

This giant farce where the jury stares at the face of a person in a strange, threatening situation, under extreme stress, a person that the jury hardly knows (and has never witnessed interacting in a less artificial context) is strictly for the birds: the birds of not having to take too personally whatever harsh (possibly fatal) judgment the jury decides to hand down.

Some rituals are more for the surgeon than the patient; more for the jury than the accused; more for the police than the perpetrator.

What makes Lisa Feldman Barrett's talk irritating is that she never even mentions FACS.

So you watch the talks given by the people who either a) are world class at actually doing this; or b) are in the business of imparting some dangerous modicum of this skill to law enforcement professional and to the last man and woman a full one third of the talk is the long road from salient observation to supportable interpretation.

There's this thing called mental multitasking, and to judge from 90% of their students, most of the world has never heard of this.

The salient facial micro-twitches can arise from any thought or emotion passing through the other person's head. But no, 100 people surveyed, 99 people are cock sure that the other person's fleeting facial twitch is all about their own narcissistic central concern of the moment.

The experts require a cluster of three to five twitches each in close proximity to the same stress point (which is why police interrogation done correctly involves more circling around than cleaning up after a fender bender on the main runway).

The biology of our best and worst selves — April 2017

Let's look at an example. You have a gun. There's a crisis going on: rioting, violence, people running around. A stranger is running at you in an agitated state -- you can't quite tell if the expression is fr

I'm totally fine with marginalizing them! Ethnic cleansing and violence are BAD. We SHOULD argue with them, we should tell them they're wrong, we should convince them of such, as much as is possible. We should NOT accept their viewpoint.

But we should treat them as human beings, because that's what they are. And if they want to say things that are horribly wrong, offensive, and racist, that's their right--but we should challenge them! Bringing the topic into the open, discussing it, and rebuking it is the only way to change their mind. Suppressing people's views will only result in violence. People either express their views and frustrations with words, or with violence. And I am strongly against violence.

Before you say free speech can't work, it can. If someone can leave the hell that is the Westboro Baptist Church, then ANYONE has a chance.
https://www.ted.com/talks/mega...

No, they don't.

Yes, they do

If your argument was somehow about "AI" specifically, you can see ranton's comment and/or picture how "AI" can become another instance of the example words I linked to.

but that's not why he won. He won on economic populism; by promising the government would solve people's problems. His speeches where chock full of socialist rhetoric. Those ideas are overwhelmingly popular, it's just people don't like to admit to them. It's like this: get a room full of people together and ask them what kind of coffee they like and they'll tell you they want a bold, rich roast. But look at coffee says and what people actually drink and, well, you've got Starbucks frappachinnos and the like. See here. Yeah, it's a Ted Talk, and worse Malcolm Gladwell, but his points are solid (also not his).

tl;dr; It's not racism, it's the economy stupid. That's important because if you start thinking it's racism you'll try to solve the wrong problem, and Trump and his ilk will keep on winning.

I commend the Japanese for understanding and taking action on the realization that this planet needs fewer people. Thank you, guys.

We may only hope that other nations (India and China) and continents (Africa and Americas) follow.

You'd probably be interested in this TED talk on population growth and inevitable starvation. And AGW will only make things worse.

"These traits no longer increase, despite further continuous nutritional, medical, and scientific progress ..."

Perhaps not as much progress has been made as our scientists say then?

It's more a claim that human health has an asymptotic limit that we're approaching.

When it comes to athletics there's basically three ways to beat records, improve the talent pool (more healthy people), improve the training, improve the equipment, and doping.

If Daniel Epstein is to be believed Usain Bolt was only slightly faster than Jesse Owens, which suggests it's almost all equipment and the talent pool, training, and even doping don't make much of a difference for male sprinters.

For any sport there's an optimal physique, and outside of fundamentally changing human biology you can't really do much better.

For longevity most of our improvements have come from nutrition and fixing things that go wrong. But at a certain age we exceed the design specs and a ton of really important things start going wrong at the same time. To really start changing things we'll need to figure out how to replace whole systems, how to replace worn out parts of brains.

Now, I think the study is missing one big thing on the longevity side, obesity. I suspect it's cancelled out a ton of the medical advancements of the past few decades. At some point we're going to solve obesity and at that point we're going to see a big jump in longevity.

Because by default it breaks most of the internet and only the most dedicated of geeks are happy to battle with the frustration of managing whitelists to make basic browsing work.

NoScript doesn't even remotely dent my frustration meter. There's a simple reason for this. If I can't fix the site in two guesses, the site is probably shit, anyway. This isn't sour grapes, either. The correlation is strong, and positive.

Quite regularly, I click onto an unfamiliar web site, it doesn't display properly on first load, I right click the NoScript item at the bottom corner of my FF browser window (full screen, portrait mode, 23" monitor), and up comes a menu that occupies 60% of my vertical real estate. We're talking twenty to thirty foreign page elements.

Man, I can not flee those web sites fast enough.

The only time I ever get frustrated is with sites that put Amazon bucket numbers into page element URLs. For those I fire up Chromium (plug-in naked), which I only use for pages where NoScript on Firefox interferes with something I actually want to access. Then I shut Chromium down again. This happens roughly a few times per week.

Still doesn't dent my frustration meter.

And it's not like I'm generally a cool cucumber. I'm easily enraged/outraged by many things I encounter.

This TED talk had me hitting the fucking ceiling.

The first secret of design is ... noticing — March 2015

We all know what he's talking about. As human beings, we get used to everyday things really fast. As a product designer, it's my job to see those everyday things, to feel them, and try to improve upon them. For example, see this piece of fruit? See this little sticker? That sticker wasn't there when I was a kid. But somewhere as the years passed, someone had the bright idea to put that sticker on the fruit. Why? So it could be easier for us to check out at the grocery counter.

Well that's great, we can get in and out of the store quickly. But now, there's a new problem. When we get home and we're hungry and we see this ripe, juicy piece of fruit on the counter, we just want to pick it up and eat it. Except now, we have to look for this little sticker. And dig at it with our nails, damaging the flesh. Then rolling up that sticker -- you know what I mean. And then trying to flick it off your fingers. (Applause) It's not fun, not at all.

But something interesting happened. See the first time you did it, you probably felt those feelings. You just wanted to eat the piece of fruit. You felt upset. You just wanted to dive in. By the 10th time, you started to become less upset and you just started peeling the label off. By the 100th time, at least for me, I became numb to it. I simply picked up the piece of fruit, dug at it with my nails, tried to flick it off, and then wondered, "Was there another sticker?"

I've never become numb to removing a fruit sticker. There was never anything to become numb about, in the first place.

Every night lately I've been reading my wife a chapter of Henry Marsh's excellent book Do No Harm. She confessed last night that she's getting a bit tired of cute 12-year-olds with brain cancer and lovely, long red hair bleeding to death on the OR table (this is rare, actually, but there's a chapter on it).

Ten to the fucking power of nine fruit stickers, in every second chapter.

Welcome to real life, all you Tony Fadell bird brains.

How do we raise the cost of CO2 naturally? Well, for one it is going to rise as we keep using it up. The price goes down naturally with increased technology and economy of scale.

In other words, you propose doing nothing, except for the one thing (fixing nuclear regulations) that might annoy those anti-nuclear liberals. The problem with this of course is that most fossil fuel reserves must stay in the ground, which won't happen naturally.

It's actually worse than that because most articles that explain how "most fossil fuel reserves must stay in the ground" haven't even considered clathrates / methane hydrates, a new CO2-emitting fuel source that is now being explored.

So why not the Republican climate change solution?

I agree, nuclear regulations need improvement in the USA, particularly to facilitate GenIVs and Molten Salt Reactors - offering higher safety at lower cost, but hindered by the current regulatory regime.

But solar energy with no subsidies has already become cheaper than coal near the equator. Look up Swanson's law - the Moore's law of solar. It's hard to imagine solar panels ever being useful during cloudy Canadian winters, but solar in the south plus nuclear in the north makes a lot of sense.

People keep spreading lies about such a great company, who constantly give a lot back to open source projects, privacy, and other freedom organisations.

Most people here have clearly never used ddg, otherwise they would know that ddg don't discriminate in their results; thus unlike google, they don't narrow your world view and only feed you left-wing or right-wing content (i.e. they don't bubble you). Thus, their search results come from hundreds of sources, including their own bot, and sometimes from yahoo, bing, and yandex.

Third, yes, you can customise duckduckgo to regional searches and well as other parameters.

I switched to duckduckgo almost 4 years ago now, completely. And I've never once visited google for at least over 6 years now! (before ddg, I was using bing)

Nothing but extinction is perhaps inaccurate. It has brought us many things, and it will also bring us extinction.

And how did you draw that conclusion? We've only seen capitalism do the exact opposite:

https://www.ted.com/talks/hans...

https://www.gapminder.org/tool...

Nobody says capitalism is perfect. In fact, it's analogous to democracy: Many problems, but the best system we've ever come up with. Unless you have a better idea (communism and socialism have been soundly proven to be big giant flops) then what the hell are you ranting about? Let's see if you can come up with a better idea than democracy too while you're at it.

Put on your scientist hat on and look at history like actual scientists and historians have done. The profession consensus is that the link between capitalism and success outside of the expansion of capitalism, i.e. technological or social progress, is a correlation, not a causation.

Where the fuck are you getting this from? Some communist blog/forum? Newsflash: Capitalism has allowed technology to scale at an exponential rate due to private citizens investing massive amounts of money toward that end; this is not a coincidence. Hell, the Soviet Union, for all of the resources it had at its disposal to improve its military technology, was still using vacuum tubes in its fighter jets when the US had moved to integrated circuits long before. The same integrated circuits that were made practical for mass production in 1958 by three US companies, and that now power most of the technology we enjoy today.

Here's a bit of data that should drive the point home, especially when correlated with countries that have come from some other system to capitalism.

https://www.gapminder.org/tool...

Take a look at China for example; the government began adopting capitalist practices around 1980, and not long after that (roughly 1988,) you see their bubble quickly heading in the direction of higher average purchasing power (shown in that chart as income.) Granted, China had an enormous pile of untapped labor, that doesn't erase the fact that prior to these changes, such labor couldn't have ever been tapped because nobody could invest into the needed infrastructure (not even the government could.)

Hans Rosling (scientist, by the way) explains this data rather well:

https://www.ted.com/talks/hans...

And chances are, you score worse than the monkeys in this test:

https://www.ted.com/talks/hans...

By the way, until he died, he dedicated his career to educating academics, and to a lesser extent, people like you:

rather than generating data, Rosling has spent the past two decades communicating data gathered by others. He relays facts that he thinks many academics have been too slow to appreciate and argues that researchers are ignorant about the state of health and wealth around the world. That’s dangerous. “Campuses are full of siloed people who do advocacy about things they don’t understand,” he says.

http://www.nature.com/news/thr...

Communists/socialists here on slashdot always like to slam capitalism as if there's a much better way to go, but we've honestly been there and tried those, and they're all crap. They don't understand, at all, that the world is doing nothing but improving, as the data there very clearly shows. And contrary to popular belief, "megacorps" (as they're often described here, as if this is a cyberpunk novel) are a lot less powerful than they were in ages past. The first publicly traded corporation to exist the Dutch East India Company, at its peak had a net worth of $7 trillion in today's dollars back in 1675. Let that sink in for a minute. They also had the power to raise armies, declare war, jail and execute people who didn't pay their bills, and they had the largest monopoly the world has ever seen. As time has gone on, we've seen this power continually decrease, whereas right now the biggest companies have no martial powers at all, and the number of monopolies that exist is getting smaller and smaller, and the ones that remain have very tiny impact compared to the ones that existed in the past.

Put on your scientist hat on and look at history like actual scientists and historians have done. The profession consensus is that the link between capitalism and success outside of the expansion of capitalism, i.e. technological or social progress, is a correlation, not a causation.

Where the fuck are you getting this from? Some communist blog/forum? Newsflash: Capitalism has allowed technology to scale at an exponential rate due to private citizens investing massive amounts of money toward that end; this is not a coincidence. Hell, the Soviet Union, for all of the resources it had at its disposal to improve its military technology, was still using vacuum tubes in its fighter jets when the US had moved to integrated circuits long before. The same integrated circuits that were made practical for mass production in 1958 by three US companies, and that now power most of the technology we enjoy today.

Here's a bit of data that should drive the point home, especially when correlated with countries that have come from some other system to capitalism.

https://www.gapminder.org/tool...

Take a look at China for example; the government began adopting capitalist practices around 1980, and not long after that (roughly 1988,) you see their bubble quickly heading in the direction of higher average purchasing power (shown in that chart as income.) Granted, China had an enormous pile of untapped labor, that doesn't erase the fact that prior to these changes, such labor couldn't have ever been tapped because nobody could invest into the needed infrastructure (not even the government could.)

Hans Rosling (scientist, by the way) explains this data rather well:

https://www.ted.com/talks/hans...

And chances are, you score worse than the monkeys in this test:

https://www.ted.com/talks/hans...

By the way, until he died, he dedicated his career to educating academics, and to a lesser extent, people like you:

rather than generating data, Rosling has spent the past two decades communicating data gathered by others. He relays facts that he thinks many academics have been too slow to appreciate and argues that researchers are ignorant about the state of health and wealth around the world. That’s dangerous. “Campuses are full of siloed people who do advocacy about things they don’t understand,” he says.

http://www.nature.com/news/thr...

Communists/socialists here on slashdot always like to slam capitalism as if there's a much better way to go, but we've honestly been there and tried those, and they're all crap. They don't understand, at all, that the world is doing nothing but improving, as the data there very clearly shows. And contrary to popular belief, "megacorps" (as they're often described here, as if this is a cyberpunk novel) are a lot less powerful than they were in ages past. The first publicly traded corporation to exist the Dutch East India Company, at its peak had a net worth of $7 trillion in today's dollars back in 1675. Let that sink in for a minute. They also had the power to raise armies, declare war, jail and execute people who didn't pay their bills, and they had the largest monopoly the world has ever seen. As time has gone on, we've seen this power continually decrease, whereas right now the biggest companies have no martial powers at all, and the number of monopolies that exist is getting smaller and smaller, and the ones that remain have very tiny impact compared to the ones that existed in the past.

exactly. how rich other people are is un important. what matters is how well off the bottom is doing. and in a world full of billions of people (some would say a few billion too many) we are clearly better off today than we were in the past as a species

And here is the best presentation I've seen that demonstrates it: https://www.ted.com/talks/hans...

https://www.ted.com/conversati...

"$2.85 billion in tax credits over 15 years." To say it's a loss of tax revenue is like saying my iPod of pirated music is worth 8 billion.

150 years ago when tractors started to be used for farming, Henry Ford couldn't build a factory in China and throw some bags of rice around and have people work for him to build cars.

It's a totally moot point because there wasn't any need for this to begin with. The domestic laborers were already cheap. Everybody in his time were MUCH poorer than they are today. Just to give you an idea:

Today's poor can afford cars, high resolution big screen TVs, mobile phones, personal computers, and food is so easy to afford that many poor people are obese. The poor of Ford's era didn't even have indoor plumbing, white clothing was only for rich people because only the rich could afford to work in conditions where white clothing wouldn't always get dirty, and only rich people could afford to eat often enough to become fat (the "rich mans clubs" back then were called fat man's clubs, where one had to weigh at least 200 lbs for the privilege of being a member.)

People don't generally benefit from greater technology, because as technology advances, expectations grow, requirements grow.

Are you really THAT stupid? So you mean that a mathematician wouldn't benefit from a calculator because now his expectations grow? So he's equally well off if he has to manually calculate the square root of 38.2382 by hand as part of a much larger equation? Seriously dude, you're fucking retarded if you can't see the problem with this. Being dumb enough to buy into Marxist school of thought is one thing, but this is a whole other level of retarded.

Another point that many people miss is that every single family today should not just be slightly more wealthy than they were in the 70's, they should be roughly doubly as wealthy

They are, very much so. In fact, let's even compare them to the 80's:

- 55" TVs in the 80s were so expensive, only the rich could afford them, and they had vastly inferior picture quality to the ones today that can be afforded by the poor.
- Car phones were only affordable by very rich people to begin with, the areas they worked in were very limited, and they had a very high per minute fee with no data capability. Today's smartphones are small enough to fit in your pocket, can reach almost anywhere in the US, voice service is so cheap that carriers like T-Mobile let you make calls from anywhere in North America to anywhere in North America with unlimited minutes for a flat fee, in addition to providing greatly more bandwidth than 2400 baud modems of the era.
- Personal computers of the 80s were very expensive and much slower than the ones today, some of them costing as much as $5,000, which today translates to $15,000. Nowadays you can even find homeless people carrying around laptops that would put those to shame.
- VHS players cost a few hundred dollars in the 80's. Nowadays you can find blu-ray players for as cheap as $25 brand new.

These are all material goods, and therefore, wealth. And there are many, many other examples, like the price of food, the price of travel, etc, all being cheaper now than in the past.

What you perceive as 'even the poor are more wealthy' today is a small bump from what should have been a doubling of wealth that never manifested.

And you base this on what, besides absolutely nothing?

Stop saying people are more wealthy today. They are not.

If you actually think this, then you're dumber than the monkeys in this video, as Hans Rosling demonstrates:

https://www.ted.com/talks/hans...

I'm sure you'll hate this video and dismiss it, however, because it goes against every communist propaganda talking point you've ever spewed. But unfortunately for you, the numbers don't lie here; only your propaganda does.

In fact, your entire mindset about different economic classes and class warfa

And what are you basing this on? Contrary to common belief here on slashdot and among pessimists, there is no shrinking middle class, and there never was a middle class to begin with. Defining people by classes, let alone classes based solely on their income is an incredibly stupid idea, and it in no way reflects reality. This whole idea was purported long ago by communists who were using it as propaganda to divide a wedge between people so they could start a civil war. In fact, your entire argument is based on this mindset.

The best way to look at this is based on wealth, not income. And yes, the two are very different. For example, I make roughly 50% of what somebody of my same job makes in San Francisco, yet I'm easily more wealthy. The reason for this is because wealth is defined by material goods, not money, and my money buys me more material goods than the guy in SF who pays three times as much rent for inferior housing to what I have, and has to spend two hours in traffic per day while I only spend 30 minutes in traffic per day.

The reason you (and many others) think the middle class is declining is that we keep moving the income goalpost higher and higher over time, without at all taking into account what people are able to do with their money. Hans Rosling described it quite well:

https://www.ted.com/talks/hans...

In other words, today's poor, with all of the material goods they have, would have been defined as rich 100 years ago. The way all of this automation will turn out is actually quite intuitive: We'll all be wealthier while doing less work.

https://www.ted.com/talks/ben_... Here's a great Ted talk about differences and their interpretation. The point is that the differences are really not that big and don't tell anything about individuals. What the Google Engineer actually said a few times in his memo.

Written language evolved from drawing pictograms on cave walls to remember hunting strategies, to writing on clay tablets to keep track of money, legal agreements, then finding that writing on paper is far easier and allowed knowledge to be shared in the most compact physical means possible.

Perhaps a USB stick full of PDF documents is now more compact than a box of books. Then Youtube and other online videos replace the need for the USB stick.

Or, perhaps those who wish others to take a particular course of action should work harder to make sure that they communicate clearly

Depends on what you mean by "clearly", but most likely no. Those who wish others to take a particular course of action should work harder to make sure that they communicate in ways that are proven to make others to take a particular course of action. "Clear" communication need not be always the way forward - see why .

The simplicity of the word "carbon", as compared with that of "carbon-di-oxide" clearly makes it a winner. Especially when people who are involved (voters, shareholders etc.) have no clue what both of the words mean.

After simplicity achieves the first goal - of not losing your audience, you can appeal to their emotions in other ways. Sharing your dreams, for example.

Let's ban clothes washers too.

https://www.ted.com/talks/hans...

Because jobs.

if you live in a forested area solar is a no go.

Sure you can do solar energy. You just cut down the trees and salt the soil with herbicides. Plenty of solar energy that way.

I'm not serious about cutting down the trees but solar does have an energy density problem, even in the tropics.

I encourage people to watch this video: https://www.ted.com/talks/davi...

Dr. MacKay does some math on renewable energy and the numbers are interesting. One interesting comparison is the means of measuring consumption and production of energy, both can be measured as a density of watts per square meter. In much of Europe consumption of energy is about 1W/m^2. The video uses the UK as an example but the numbers would be similar in other developed nations.

Solar power produces about 5 W/m^2, which means a nation would have to cover 20% of their land in solar PV panels to achieve a standard of living like the UK. Wind gets about half with 2.5 W/m^2. Concentrated solar does better with 20 W/m^2. Biomass is rather pathetic with 0.5 W/m^2.

What really wins out though is nuclear with 1000 W/m^2. A common gigawatt nuclear power plant fits inside one square kilometer.

I keep hearing how wind and solar are getting cheaper all the time. What happens to the price of those energy sources when they start competing for land with croplands, living spaces, and each other? As Dr. MacKay pointed out this does not have to be in your backyard, it can be in some other person's backyard. What happens though to a nation that relies on another for energy to heat their homes? I'm sure everyone can find examples on how that does not go well.

Why does it have to be wind and solar to make heat pumps feasible? Why won't other energy sources do?

Also, wind and solar have an area problem, well laid out by the late Dr. MacKay.
https://www.ted.com/talks/davi...

The video is nearly 20 minutes but worth every minute. I'll highlight what I mean on the "area problem". Energy consumption and production can be compared by density, as in power over area. Developed nations like much of Europe consume energy at a rate of about 1 watt per square meter. Compare this with wind, solar, hydro, and bio-fuels which produce 0.5 to 20 watts per square meter. This means nation sized areas needed to meet nation sized needs, from far larger than the nation has to a still significant portion like 5%.

Nuclear power on the other hand has an energy density of 1000 watts per square meter, a gigawatt plant will easily fit in a square kilometer with a nice grass verge about it for safety and security. Granted this is not total area used, since mining was not accounted for but it still gives a ball park to deal with and mining was not accounted for to get the materials for the windmills and solar collectors. Wind and solar take roughly ten times the material for the same power produced compared to nuclear.

Land is a cost for energy production. Claiming that wind and solar can compete on cost with nuclear in the long term is suspect if only because of the land area required. I say long term because as expensive nuclear power is today, due to the complexities of building them, such costs will go down. If competing for large areas of land for energy then land prices will go up. I don't care if we are talking about Manhattan or Death Valley, land gets cheaper as demand goes down.

Watch this:
https://www.ted.com/talks/davi...

There's more to the energy problem than the price. Land area is a problem as well. We need land to collect the sun and wind, that same land is needed to grow crops. It may be trivial to get crops and wind to share *SOME* of this land area but that does not work for solar power. With wind, sun, and food competing for the same limited land area then all of them start getting expensive real quick.

Displacing so much land with bio-fuels, wind, and solar just sounds like a way to get in the interesting situation of having to choose between starving to death or freezing to death. Reducing energy needs with efficiency gains can only go so far. You cannot "reduce, recycle, reuse" your way to zero, people need energy.

Also nuclear is heavy subsidied, who do you think pays the billions of pounds to have a plant decomissioned? It's the tax payers.

Irrelevant. There is limited land and people need food, light, heat, and transportation. Pay for it one way or pay for it another, you will pay for it. No matter how you slice it you have three choices, fossil fuels, nuclear power, or partying like it's 1799.

I've seen the math here:
https://www.ted.com/talks/davi...

Dr. MacKay is using the United Kingdom as an example but it would be easy to extrapolate to France or any other 1st world nation. He gives some examples in his talk.

The "Cliff Notes" version is this:
Nuclear power produces 1000 W/m^2. Wind, solar, and other renewable energy sources produce something like 2.5 to 20 W/m^2. Consumption for UK, France, and many other European nations is about 1 W/m^2. So, if France wants to meet energy demands with wind, sun, and rain then they will have to cover at somewhere between 5% and 20% of it's land area with renewable energy producers. Or, they can use some other nation's land area, like Libya, if they ask nicely.

Using nuclear, on the other hand, takes very little of France's land, and that is where they get much of their energy now.

I'm pretty sure that the French are insane. If you have a counter example then please share with the rest of the class.

Where's the nursing for boys show, Mr. Equality of Outcome?

Since the proportion of male/female nursing students already outweighs say the male/female law student ratio, perhaps that's already taken care of. But maybe there's something to your suggestion for shows to encourage boys into the lower paid jobs traditionally the province of female workers: soon that's all boys will be able to get. Already something like 60% of professional jobs are occupied by women, in a decade or two it will approach 80%. Maybe a show for boys to "foster engagement" with cleaning other people's houses? 'boi-maid' we could call it. ;)

As I wrote "it's simple madness for men to allow girls equal access to education" and programs aimed at actually accelerating the decline of men, are at least as dangerous as the "threat" of pr0n or gaming psychologists are whining on about. (But just in case they are onto someting, maybe some shows encouraging girls to become pr0n-addicted gamers? ... OTHO we already have a proven male-domination saving device in sharia law.)

And why are you calling me Mr Equality of Outcome? I simply pointed out, contra OP, that it involves no contradiction to advocate against racism, while at the same time advocating for equal employment levels on the basis of sex. That correction of OP's mistake of thinking is clearly neutral as to the desirability of that outcome, yes?

Humans, huh? ... Highly illogical.

Yeah, sounds doable conceptually but no idea about the packaging of it, although compute power could be off-board. Dynamic refocus could be tricky I think... probably needs eye tracking so the glasses know where the eyes are looking through the lenses, but yeah, you could have a fluid or viscous layer and use a combination of pressure and if you're brave perhaps magnetic attraction/repulsion between the outer layers to shape the lens. Most folks would just use a servo motor or linear drive through and forgo the extra lens shaping step.

You could probably skip the eye tracking if you used a range-finder and the wearer got used to moving their head with relatively fixed eye position.

Or, buy something like this: https://www.wired.com/2010/07/fluid-filled-adjustable-eye-glasses/

Talk is here: https://www.ted.com/talks/josh_silver_demos_adjustable_liquid_filled_eyeglasses

I agree with everything he said except instead of 'globalists' I would have said 'oligarchs'. Whether or not they're globalists or not is immaterial. They're the 0.1% who receive representation by congress when everyone else does not.

That they can be ousted or resisted by picking one of their political parties is laughable. They decide who wins the primaries, then we get to pick from their candidate pool: http://www.ted.com/talks/lawre...

The choice between D and R isn't freedom or representation, but a box to contain us.

It's an oxymoron because it's full of shit.

https://www.ted.com/talks/hans...

If technology was truly making us all unequal, then none of what he says would be true.

Watch this.

Well, it makes sense, considering she literally has been pushing for this kind of funding for the arts, and even has a Ted talk and book about it.

She spoke at a TED talk recently and she's for the free sharing of digital content.

Heck, or you could let a brain researcher Jill Bolte Taylor: My stroke of insight describe it.

/Oblg. Not exactly Brain Surgery

One would think, but it turns out there are ways to smear it out over time. Check out this TED talk, which has some interesting stuff about how they can do this over time, even with interferometry.

What you fail to understand here is the Greed I wish to solve for is not Greed stemming from the average man. It is the particular flavor of Greed that is creating this clusterfuck. The humans who literally have billions and are still not satisfied and demand more.

What part about the words "hedonic treadmill" don't you understand? Go look up what that term means and then think about what you just said here. It perfectly explains what you're complaining about, and the hedonic treadmill applies to all people, from hobos to billionaires.

That chasm between the handful of humans who own half the wealth on the planet isn't shrinking. The proverbial treadmill may exist at all levels, but it is out of fucking control at the highest levels. We need to stop fucking "observing" the phenomenon of never being content at that level, and solve for it, so we can stop dividing the human race between the 1% who control and manipulate the 99%.

THAT is the Greed that we need to solve for, and for the benefit of all mankind.

No, it won't benefit anybody. All it will do is effectively cap economic growth and make people poorer, which is exactly what you end up with when you try to "fix" these things. Yes, it is true that the rich get richer, however the poor are also getting richer. Does the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest increase over time? Yes. However that does not in any way mean that the poor are getting poorer, and in fact the poor are not getting poorer, and in fact their quality of life is always improving, which is something that can actually be proven with hard numbers and statistics:

https://www.ted.com/talks/hans...

By the way, I'm willing to bet that you'd score worse than the chimpanzees in Hans Rosling's test.

In the past, shifts in technology resulted in humans being put out of a job. The answer was always "go find another one", or "go get educated".

The discussion at hand here has to do with the next, and likely last evolution of technology, which is automation and AI replacing the concept of human employment. CEOs today would rather hire robots than pay humans $15/hour minimum wage. That greedy mentality is merely the tip of the iceberg. AI engines that can comb through thousands of legal cases in minutes will outperform any human lawyer with regards to research. Robotics working with precision that will eliminate human error in the surgical room. Autonomous cars removing the need for human drivers and any related employment. Within the next half-century, automation and AI will likely be able do any job a human is doing today, and probably better. Unless we solve for Greed, the chasm between those who control automation and AI and the rest of the human race will continue to grow, perhaps well beyond care or concern for the unemployed masses. Go get an education? What the hell for? There's nothing for humans to actually go do anymore. The wealthiest billionaires on the planet have no desire today to part ways with the majority of their riches in order to better the planet, so I fail to see how that would ever change in the future.

To Hans Roslings credit, has the quality of life across the planet improved? Yes. My point is it could be a hell of a lot better for a lot more people if the wealthy elite actually embraced the concept of being content, and shared wealth to help millions. Of course, the other impact of reducing natural disaster deaths and people living longer is managing finite resources against an ever-growing population, which will eventually fight against the goal of ever-improving metrics. Forget the Greed problem for a minute. Think the planet can sustain a population of 12 billion? 20 billion? How hard i

What you fail to understand here is the Greed I wish to solve for is not Greed stemming from the average man. It is the particular flavor of Greed that is creating this clusterfuck. The humans who literally have billions and are still not satisfied and demand more.

What part about the words "hedonic treadmill" don't you understand? Go look up what that term means and then think about what you just said here. It perfectly explains what you're complaining about, and the hedonic treadmill applies to all people, from hobos to billionaires.

THAT is the Greed that we need to solve for, and for the benefit of all mankind.

No, it won't benefit anybody. All it will do is effectively cap economic growth and make people poorer, which is exactly what you end up with when you try to "fix" these things. Yes, it is true that the rich get richer, however the poor are also getting richer. Does the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest increase over time? Yes. However that does not in any way mean that the poor are getting poorer, and in fact the poor are not getting poorer, and in fact their quality of life is always improving, which is something that can actually be proven with hard numbers and statistics:

https://www.ted.com/talks/hans...

By the way, I'm willing to bet that you'd score worse than the chimpanzees in Hans Rosling's test.

As far as the average man, all it will take is a single generation of the global Welfare state in place for humans to be humbled enough to be content.

No, that won't actually work. UBI for example essentially just proposes adjusting the money supply, but it doesn't do anything at all to adjust the supply of finite resources. If anything, it would make it worse. The thing is, you're making a very flawed assumption that money is the endgame for wealth, but the reality is that ownership of material goods is wealth. Poor people today have more access to material goods than at any other point in history.

When governments make policy decisions based on this bad understanding, they tend to ruin their economy and end up making their population poor. Venezuela is a great example of this. France's Hollande also found out the hard way why your ideology doesn't work (his country started seeing massive tax revenue decreases when he decided to retaliate against the rich for earning so much.)

I believe, something like that has already been done by Marcin Jakubowski and the Civilization starter kit, see the Ted presentation.

He's already been in zero-G

They are free to license the movies they make to whom they wish, in whatever manner they wish. You and I are also free to not consume their product, but it is their product. We may not agree to the regional releases, various licensing restrictions or media availability or delay dates, but stupid as we may believe their go-to-market strategy is it still is their right to execute it as they see fit.

I also have the right to leave my wallet on the bar every time I go the the washroom and expect it to be there when I get back.

In a world filled with rational, responsible people, the media companies' IP claims sound pretty fair and reasonable. In a world filled with normal people who get annoyed, frustrated, indignant, and generally ill-willed and emotional with media companies' and distributors' behaviour, not so much. Yes, copyright infringement is wrong but it's also a very human thing to do; we're predisposed to sharing; and being ass holes means fewer people are going to feel so compelled do the right thing by them. The fact that millions of people are sharing media that tells us that, and that it's a systemic, not an individual culpability issue. File sharing isn't going to go away no matter how much the media companies would like it to. The sensible thing to do is understand the context and work with it rather than sitting back like King Canute, giving out orders, and declaring that the music on an iPod is worth $8 billion: https://www.ted.com/talks/rob_... In short, the media companies are responsible for their own poor marketing and distribution decisions.

Sorry, I got carried away there. I see I missed your point about efficiency and automation taking away all the jobs. It's been said before -- automation and machinery took away about 90% of the jobs we had 100 years ago, but today we're all better off for it. We'll invent new jobs and new industries. People can solve complex scientific problems through distributed gamification of them (like the protein folding game, for example). Imagine being a professional video game player, but one that makes a real contribution to the sphere of human knowledge. And people can organize and curate information and other systems, re-test all those medical studies that haven't been retested or verified, etc, etc, etc... And the world will be a better place. But it won't happen unless we EDUCATE the children and the masses and SUPPORT the efforts to make the world a better place for everyone. The top 1% could easily fund the entire education system of our country by themselves. That money could get us better quality of teachers (anyone here have kids? Isn't it alarming to you how many of the teachers can't really do their jobs?) ...

Actually, I could write a book on this. Maybe I should go do that. Maybe some of you should too. Or better yet, go start a movement. Here's a brief instructional video -- https://www.ted.com/talks/dere...
Don't be afraid to be the lone nut. Just turn off the TV, do something useful and make a difference for crying out loud.

Hear, hear!

I am convinced that most people are inherently honest and would gladly pay for what they watch, if given the chance. And I remember a TED talk by Amanda Palmer saying the same thing.

But what do they ask us to pay for? Exclusive rights wars, clumsy proprietary players, limited play periods.

If the studios and distributors had any brains at all, they would acknowledge that limiting the spread of the files is a lost war, they would give easy access to them and a wide variety of payment methods, including an open “I have watched something from you for free (I will not tell you if it was legally or not), I would like to give back” donate form. And they would actually charge for extra features such as earlier access.

I even suspect a lot of pirates would respect that and not compete with the paying extra features.

At this time, as far as I know, only Crunchyroll gets it almost right.

Really? Then why was it OK when Bill Clinton had sex with an intern?

The price of shame — March 2015

At the age of 22, I fell in love with my boss, and at the age of 24, I learned the devastating consequences.

The Republican weaponization of Clinton's misdeed was to claim that this behaviour made Bill unfit to govern. (If powerful men having extramarital affairs with young women was incompatible with leadership, well, the vast sweep of history does not so record.)

Family values aside, the power imbalance creates the risk that Bill would abuse his immense power to cover up the vastly exaggerated blot on his record. The Republicans actually knew that anyone with an accurate base rate of human history / human culture would not regard his behaviour as incompatible with leadership—though a common and damning blot nevertheless, so the tactic was to escalate the stakes until Bill felt compelled to lie about it—which, unfortunately, was extremely easy to anticipate.

Lying to formal body of review is considered incompatible with leadership, sort of, incrementally, since not all that long ago. For example, it barely extends as far back as the Reagan's Iran–Contra affair. (Some people roll with family values and view Clinton's offense as the worse offense. I happen to roll with geopolitical transparency, and so I view Reagan's offense as the worse offense—he appointed those clucks, and it was his ultimate responsibility to know all the big shit).

Bill was plenty smart enough to figure out that the public perception battle would play out exactly as it did, leaving him boxed into a corner where he could—according to his established character—only choose to lie (perhaps he overestimated his power to blow off the investigation, but even there, had he succeeded, he would have mortgaged a sizeable fraction of his presidential energy in ruthlessly defending his momentary gratification).

Clearly, his judgment in this matter fell short of the mark by any standard.

However, I rate it not quite as bald as boasting about sexual harassment with a camera rolling. Whatever Bill purportedly said to Donald on the golf course (that was "far worse" in Donald's personal judgement), there was no film at eleven after the fact.

The modern world contains a lot of cameras and microphones. Trump's world has contained many cameras and microphones since way back. A prudent man in his position wouldn't be openly bragging about his magical power to get away with sexual harassment just to impress Billy Bush. And it's not like Donald didn't have a front row vantage point on Bill sinking his own boat through which to consider and amend his own standard of personal conduct. Donald had every opportunity to know better, and the penny never dropped.

So in summary, a whole lot of things are "not okay" but still the world largely spins as it has always done for thousands of years.

I enjoyed watching Hans Rosling's TED talk and visiting his dollar street web application. It's so hard to get a feel for what it is like to live in another country, so I can't judge how much difference $40 per month per couple would make. But I believe people, goods and services are generally free to move around Kenya, so it will be interesting to see what effect this has on the economy outside of the target villages and how the demographics of each village changes during the experiment.

And extra douchey on your part to insult those people doing the hard labor that keeps the wheels of the economy turning. I hope someday Mike Rowe finds you and gives you a coal tar and raw sewage enema.

You're the one being a douche here because you're totally (and deliberately?) misinterpreting what I'm saying. And actually I'm glad you mentioned Mike Rowe because, unlike you, he actually has a level head about this. The Mike Rowe jobs tend to pay much more than walmart. In fact everything I've said is fully consistent with what Mike Rowe says.

https://www.ted.com/talks/mike...

Take for example, some garbage men make about $50k/year, some as high as $60k/year, with the median being about $34k/year. The problem is, few people want the stigma of being a garbage man. But in truth, I'd much rather be a garbage man than work at walmart or mcdonalds. Why? Well, with those kinds of jobs you're stuck in one place, doing the same shit over and over again, while dealing with asshole customers that look down their nose at you. Garbage men meanwhile get to drive around town much the same as a trucker would, and it's not quite as monotonous as being a trucker.

Oh, and guess who narrated this commercial?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Not all jobs at walmart or mcdonalds suck by the way, just the crappy floor jobs that you see people working as a customer.

"Cause doesn't matter, only the effect."
And this is incredibly myopic, if you actually plan to take corrective action, instead of amelioratory action.
If your engine is breaking down, an amelioritory action would be to slow down and turn it off to prevent more damage. To try to FIX it - as we assert we're trying to do with AGW - you /have/ to have SOME idea what the problem is.

If you want to see a list of 10 things more important and solvable than climate change, here you go - it's a great talk.
https://www.ted.com/talks/bjor...

10 items that are all known, understood, and at much lower investments will have more substantial, tangible, immediate, and significant benefits for more people.
Here's the gist, in short:
- NO city will last forever
- NO 'current beautiful vacation spots' will last forever

Cussing out a federal agency or not is not a measurement of degree of bias. It is merely indicative of a key difference between liberals and conservatives. Conservatives tend to respect authority, it's considered a key value to them. Liberals tend to question and be critical of authority.

There are a number of such key value differences between conservatives and liberals - and strong science to back up that concept.
Conservatives tend to value in-group loyalty extremely highly. Hence conservatives tend to be anti-immigrant and generally don't mix much with people of different cultures or values or ethnicities. They say things like "take care of our own first".
Liberals on the other hand tend to attach almost no value whatsoever to in-group loyalty, it's just not a value they care about. So they'll form their social groups across any and all lines, they'll care equally for a sick child of a neighbour or the sick child of an immigrant - they don't see a difference.

Conservatives are, in general, far more anxious than liberals - they simply are more afraid (so the whole "snowflake" and "safe space" thing is doubly-stupid) - and you can see that in the way so many conservative arguments are framed around "the threat". Conservatives argue we can't save millions of refugee lives because a few of the refugees may be terrorist - but even if we deem these the most astoundingly wonderfully effective terrorists in history, and assume they can kill thousands - that doesn't make any sense to a liberal. The threat is tiny, so they don't focus on it - and besides the outcome even if the threat happens isn't that bad to them - since they don't value in-group loyalty that much the cannot consider "a thousand of our own" to be a greater loss than "millions of them". To a liberal - there is no "ours" or "them".

https://www.ted.com/talks/jona...

These are differences in fundamental morality. Note - not in LEVEL of morality. Both groups are highly moral - and indeed both believe the other to be entirely IMMORAL - but that's because the moral values they subscribe to are completely different.
So yeah, cussing out the FBI is not a big deal for a liberal - if they did something WTF-worthy then they deserve to get WTF'd. To a conservative it goes against that deep respect for authority moral - and so seems like a huge deal. Breitbart wouldn't run that because their readership would be offended. This is key to understanding the birther movement. Why was it so important to them to try and prove Obama was not a legitimate president - why would they cling to such an obvious piece of bullshit ? Because resisting the greatest authority in the land, despising him as much as they wanted to - well that goes against their morality, the only way to square the circle was to convince themselves his authority was not legitimate. You can see the inverse of the same process happening right now as Trump flat-out lies about crowd-sizes and TV-ratings, and denies having lost the popular vote on utterly spurious grounds. Why would he CARE ? He's president, the highest authority in the land. He won the election and he was inaugurated - why wouldn't he just be happy - why make such a big deal of those things ? Because he helped plant the seed that respect for authority only applies to legitimate authority, and anything that calls even the slightest question over the legitimacy of his authority (and certainly over the degree of mandate he got from voters) is perceived as a very real threat to him. He cannot imagine that anybody would obey him in anything if they think his authority is not absolutely 100% legitimate and mandated. Which is doubly quixotic fear because frankly the people who are resisting him couldn't care less. They would be resisting just as much if he HAD won the popular vote. They care about WHAT he is doing - they question authority, they don't respect it by default and how legitimate it is doesn't enter into the equation at all. The only reason they keep bringing it up is because of how nicely it gets under his skin.

So no, the cussing is entirely unrelated to the degree of bias - it's merely indicative of the moral differences between the target audiences.

Agreed. If you think you are one of those, or know somebody that might be like that, I encourage you to read the book Quiet by Susan Cain and/or subscribe to the author's blog on the subject. Ms. Cain, in spite of being an introvert, is a great public speaker, and you may enjoy her TED talk about introversion.

So attacking 'random blogs and op eds' for what they are, and not arguing their proposed facts (I trust them by default no more than I do the AGW academics), is that the scientific equivalent of the lawyers' dictum: "if you can't argue the facts, attack the source"? Because it smells like it.

1) I never said the grant money gravy train is their motivation. I don't believe there is that much money in it either. Yet...the left has been peddling a constant stream of foretold disasters 'just around the corner' for my entire lifetime (50 years) - from peak oil, to mass starvation, to DDT, to the catastrophic danger of nuclear power, to ANYthing to do with Republicans in office, to imminent nuclear war, to climate change. Same chorus, different fucking verse. I don't care to speculate WHY they do it (I don't honestly care) but they've been hammering away INSISTING the sky is 'just about to fall any moment now if we don't (X) right away'.

2) You're certainly right in my experience, but I think you are either mistakenly or deliberately disregarding the omnipresent herd mentality in academia as well. Sure, *maybe* 1% will hit the academic jackpot of overturning some orthodoxy by discovering ulcers are bacterial or a reactionless drive that nobody can explain. 99% will go down in ignominy as fools (maybe to be validated someday, long after they're dead and don't care any more).

I'm not proposing any sort of vast left-wing conspiracy, I'm not HRC, seeing conspiracies instead of recognizing my own shortcomings.
No, what I'm suggesting is that there are a number of factions on the left that, while they may not be singing explicitly from the same sheet of music, are certainly comfortable harmonizing together and seeking goals that are in the same ballpark. Combined with the echo-chamber of eco-marxist, hard-leftist academia in the US, it's certainly plausible without imagining some sort of coordinating cabal. It's really more the Left's thing to see the Koch brothers behind everything, or to posit some grey eminence pulling hypothetical strings (it was Cheney from 2000-2007).
No, I think it's far easier to observe herd mentality, plus well-meaning but gullible, naive people, all very comfortable agreeing with each other.

And as far as AGW is concerned, I don't even honestly dispute it, because I don't really care. My position on it is much like Bjorn Lomborgs: there are a CRAPTON of more tangible, direct, better uses of resources to improve the lives of the poorest half of humanity than chasing some stupid AGW chimera to save 0.5 deg C over the next century.
https://www.ted.com/talks/bjor...

Another interesting TED Talk on the subject:
https://www.ted.com/talks/davi...

Dr. MacKay goes through the math on what it would take to replace fossil fuels with carbon free energy. A couple notable statistics is that it would take a 5x increase in nuclear power or a 20x increase in wind power for the UK to provide current energy needs carbon free. This is an older video, and a nuclear reactor or two have been shut down since so it's likely closer to 6x now.

The resources needed for wind or solar to meet current energy needs for nations like the USA or UK are mind boggling. On the other hand we know we have enough manufacturing capacity to build up enough nuclear power to meet all our energy needs. The resources needed might still be mind blowing but it is manageable.

Near the end of Dr. MacKay's talk he speaks of energy conservation in a way that reminds me of Amory Lovins talks on "negawatts". Lovins likes to give these very convincing talks on how we can solve the world's energy problems with energy efficiency and "green" energy but the difference is that after thinking about MacKay's talk you don't get the feeling that you've just been shoveled a bunch of BS. Lovins will give a talk with a lot of optimism but in the end he lacks any real numbers and a lot of hope that new technology can save us. Dr. MacKay gives real numbers and after doing the math with him it seems quite obvious that nuclear power must be part of the energy solution or we will end up with some very expensive energy that relies on favorable weather, favorable relations with neighboring nations (since there would be a reliance on freely buying and selling of energy), and technological developments favorable to wind and solar.

I saw this quite interesting video on TED Talks:
https://www.ted.com/talks/mich...

The speaker makes a rather compelling case for using nuclear power. We've been making great gains in wind and solar world wide but that growth is overshadowed by gains in fossil fuel use. The one energy source that has had the greatest reductions in CO2 emissions is nuclear power and we're shutting them down at a rate greater than we're opening new ones.

Those that think we can reduce our carbon footprint without nuclear is just plain fooling themselves. We simply cannot. This includes the current administration. Trump is far from the biggest advocate for reducing carbon output but he might actually be someone that would actually create the carbon reductions that Obama has failed to do.

Sure, Obama gave some lukewarm support for nuclear power at the end of his administration, but he had eight years with his pen and phone and failed to merely allow nuclear power to grow. These nuclear power companies aren't looking for a handout like wind and solar, they are just looking for permission to build. Obama from the beginning only made happy mouth noises for nuclear power, talking about "funding research" which never came.

I am optimistic now with Trump coming into office that the government might actually do something about climate change and build some nuclear power plants. Obama's policies of funding solar panel companies that didn't build any solar panels, and electric car companies that didn't build any cars, did nothing. If Trump starts handing out licenses to build nuclear power plants at a rate greater than replacement then he'd be doing more in building just one new nuclear power plant than what Obama has done in his entire eight years in office. Mr. Michael Shellenberger did the math in his speech, just a handful of new nuclear power plants could do more to reduce carbon output than wind or solar could ever do.

Words mean nothing to me. It's action that counts. Obama might have said a lot about how we need to stop global warming but he did next to nothing to stop it. Trump might be nothing more than a carnival barker in a trucker hat but if he puts people in the EPA, Energy, and NRC that will make nuclear power grow then he could do more to stop global warming in his first 100 days than Obama did in his entire political career.