Of course it can, that setup happens in the real universe on every level all the time. Science is filled with examples in every field - it's called a "feedback loop". With a completely artificial man-made construct like race, if anything, it's simpler. Physical feedback loops need two components - x causes y which causes another x. With a made-up idea, that idea can perpetuate itself indefinitely and x can cause more without even needing that intermediary y.
While what you say is true of those specific examples almost all scientists are liberals. So if anything the trend is slightly in the opposite direction.
When it comes to anti-science beliefs you just can't top a climate-denying, creationist bible-thumper - and the republicans got *all* of those.
How goes the joke... A UN poll asked the question "What, in your opinion, would be the best solution the problem of food shortages in the the rest of the world ?"
The poll was a miserable failure: People in China, Russia, and North Korea didn't understand the word "opinion." People in Canada and Western Europe didn't understand the word "shortages". People in South America didn't understand the word "solution". People in Australia didn't understand the word "problem". People in Africa didn't understand the word "food"
And people in America didn't understand the phrase: "the rest of the world"
>You mention contradictory views (I suppose you're referring to the philosophical positions / stances) but can there be anymore contradictory foolishness than holding the position that one has a "right to ones body" as far as abortion is concerned but at the same time have no right to ones body as far as drugs or seat-belts are concerned?
You do know that modern liberals (the voters at least) overwhelmingly support legalizing all drugs ? And empirical rationalists like me support it even louder. I support it because of empirical proof that legalization is the secret to almost entirely ending addiction problems. Of course all the places that are data points for that experiment also have universal healthcare and the other half of the solution is to treat addiction as a public health problem rather than a legal one. Libertarians abolitionists don't impress me since they overwhelmingly reject universal healthcare despite the absolutely overwhelming empirical evidence that it works massively better (and cheaper) than any other system yet attempted (which is why most liberals are not very happy with obamacare. They'll defend it because it's better than what was before but that's a pragmatic refusal to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, which is rather sad when the perfect is well known and empirically proven).
But mostly - libertarians lose the plot entirely with their beloved belief in low taxes and small government. Firstly because it never happens but when you vote for a politician who promissed it he will use your vote to take money from the needy and transfer it to the rich. Which is the only thing any small government republican has ever actually done. Not one has yet actually shrank the military - which at well over half the federal budget is so damn big that you could pay for full European style welfare by cutting just 10% from it. Even better - go for UBI, which modern libertarians have entirely forgotten about despite the fact that people like Hayek had championed it - which means you can get rid of that whole burocracy you claim to hate so much, no need to pay for the burocrats or to do any privacy-invading checks. It costs less and the benefits are so massive that in practise the cost is usually negative (which is to say the savings it produces in other areas are bigger than the cost) - and that's before you factor in the massive economic growth it spurs. Unlike "tax cuts for the rich" - UBI growth is empirically proven, while tax cuts for the rich have a 100-year history of being disproven.
Don't trust Austrian economics - it's not scientific - in fact it roundly rejects empiricism. Hayek and Von Mises both said things that ammount to: "You should keep believing despite all the proof to the contrary because social sciences should not be disprovable by facts and experiences". Which is really just a roundabout way of saying "this is an economic theology" - and like all theologies it's one massive disaster and absolutely useless for understanding anything about the actual economy, predicting anything about it's behaviour (seeing as Von Mises actually declared that doing so is outside the scope of Austrian economics it's fundamentally useless since that's the sole reason to do economics - ever) or making wise policy choices (which should be informed by something that can predict it's reaction to signals with at least reasonable accuracy). And that's before you even get to the horror of having "unquestionable" axioms which are poorly defined and filled with ambigous phrases that are constantly used to justify whatever conclusions make sociopaths feel good about themselves and deny all others.
In short, when I called libertarianism the most internally contradictory and absolutely irrational philosophy extant today - I was speaking as somebody trained in philosophy (and notably: logic and critical thinking).
Dude... did you write this entire rambling piece by just randomly clicking and dragging phrases from some website ? Because you reused about half of them over and over. Not wearing a seatbelt not only risks your life - it's provably a risk on the lives of others. Since they did not consent to taking that risk, you have no right to impose it on them. How big the risk is has nothing to do with that. Anytime you subject me to any risk I did not consent to you are intruding on *my* liberty.
There are no dems "just as bad"... well except maybe Dianne Feinstein but she's not running for president. I agree it's a pity that the second major party is so far round the bend you can open winebottles with them because it weakens democracy when the democrats could run Jeffrey Dahmer and win because voters would say "Okay sure he is a gay serial killer but at least *his* crazy is fairly predictable and his not touting an economic policy that has consistently and absolutely failed every time it's been tried for the last 35 years".
But the reality is that, that is where we stand... at this stage even the worst democratic candidates would win because "horrible lying politician" beats "batshit-crazy ranting guy in the park".
Personally - I think the best candidate running is Bernie. Sane policies that have been remarkably successful everywhere they've been implemented (all of Western Europe), a career that speaks of incredible honesty and integrity, responsive enough to listen when voters tell him what to consider instead of telling them what to think (look as his race-policy proposal drafted after he encountered blacklivesmatter protestors - he actually went back, thought about what these voters were telling him and amended his ideas to consider what they were right about) and a career that makes him the single most effective legislator in all of Washington (even if almost nobody knows this - but not being a glory-hound is just more reason to like the guy) and still standing by an absolutely firm commitment not to engage in negative campaigning or accept big donations from lobbyists. Sane and honest... America hasn't had a candidate like this since Lincoln - whether he can win is another matter though... and if he did, I fear he may well end up *like* Lincoln (shot at the very least, and probably only after the South starts a second civil war).
Unless his actual presidency turns out to have literally *nothing* in common with his actual campaign that's the only possible outcome.
The world hasn't been itching for a fight this bad since 1914... and Trumps is saying and doing all the wrong things, he is stoking fires that ought to be getting put out.
Face it, he really is White ISIS. The fact that his policy proposals are literally word for word* the Nuremberg laws means we can expect no different outcome than what those led to.
*Well except for one word. He replaced "Jew" with "Muslim".
Well his abilities has been tested in his career as a businessman ? So... how good was he at that ?
Well he got started by being born with a bloody huge silver spoon up his pimply ass. Over the years he has turned his inheritance to a worth of 2 billion odd dollars. If he had invested his inheritance in a fund that tracked the S&P index it would be worth 8 billion.
Simply put, Trump the negotiator only made about a quarter as much money over 3 decades as the stock market did in the period that included the biggest recession since the depression. One quarter as good as terrible.
His race policies. The Southern Strategy was word for word a rewrite of Goldwater's policies with only two changes:
1) He took out the promise to repeal the civil rights act (which is not the same as supporting the idea) 2) He replaced Goldwater's "nigger nigger nigger" with dogwhistles that meant the exact same thing - like I said, subtler language, exactly the same platform.
>Far too liberal for today's pure-minded Conservatives
Then again, so was Reagan. They all love him and practically say his name in prayer, but his actual policies were slightly to the left of Obama's on almost everything.
Of course, they also seem to have very short memories for scandals... like when they called the IRS scandal the worst scandal in American history. I think any sane person would reserve that title for "slavery". Even that aside there are much worse scandals in American history. McCarthyism was far worse, watergate of course - and the one every republican hapily pretends wasn't really real: the Iran/Contra scandal (after all - a republican cannot possibly admit that Reagan and North committed and got away with high treason).
You can smell the libertarian ridiculousness on this one a mile away. The most empirically disproven and internally contradictory philosophy extant today - yet for some bizarre reason prevalent on slashdot - supposedly a place where fans of the scientific method congregate...
The federalist papers were abandoned with damn good reason - it was a terrible idea.
And while it's true that a government can be a dangerous thing - the whole point of elections is to avoid that, campaign finance reform will do much more to secure the liberties you love than limiting the size of the only thing that can reign in big business would, it's the only way to let elections actually represent the will of at least the majority of people. And as it happens the classic liberals that libertarians claim to be like - were a hell of a lot *less* extreme than libertarians - they favoured regulations and high taxes and they loved welfare so much that having a welfare system was a requirement before a territory was even allowed to apply for statehood !
Yes the EPA leads to government, to an extent, picking winners and losers - that's because it's an issue where the market cannot be trusted (no the market does not always get it right) - what the EPA protects has no value to those who would destroy it and those who value it has no power to defend it, the EPA is a system that provides that power.
Sooner or later, valuable things end up in a tragedy of the commons scenario - then you have only *one* choice - regulation. Libertarians always claim privatization is the way to avoid that, but that's the dumbest idea in history because privatization *by definition* destroys the commons - it's not a commons anymore ! More-over it is the ultimate theft by the government (for people who hate taxes to support that is really insane). Taking that which *all* get to enjoy, and by force of law letting one person gain sole access to it (which he may or may not let others get if they can afford it) is to steal from the poor to give to the rich. And to steal from the many to give to the one.
Go read rationalwiki's page on libertarianism - you probably won't find a less biassed source in the world (they whack the moonbats with cluebats very gleefuily) - their standard is very simple: the sceptical scientific method, ideas should be believed if and only if they can be empirically tested and the conclusions they draw from the evidence are logically sound. LIbertarianism fails both tests spectacularly - and it's economics are a disaster in waiting that has caused massive hardship whenever it's been attempted (mostly because it's all based on Austrian school - which is not an economic theory so much as an economic theology).
I know I'm probably wasting my breath, if you could reason with libertarians there wouldn't be any libertarians... but maybe, just maybe, you're still recently joined to the cult enough that you may still be open to considering the possiblity that the unquestionable axioms ought to be questioned.
> to circumvent the constitutional separation of powers
You mean like when congress tries to involve itself in foreign affairs or when state governors try to ban refugees ? Both matters on which the constitution is abundantly clear that the executive branch (that is - the president and his cabinet) have exclusive power ?
There's just one problem with your story. That indolent society ? Has literally never existed. It's entirely a fantasy of the extreme economic right. Ayn Rand cultists happilly embrace the fantasy that basically everybody else is a lazy moocher.
Reality just doesn't agree. Study after study after study has consistently proven the opposite to be true - people hate not being busy. That's why under universal income schemes employment consistently goes *up* - people who suddenly have enough money to live on without having to work keep working, and the ones who weren't invest in education so they can get jobs, some start businesses. Actual productivity goes up and per-individual it declines a mere 9% (nearly all of which is invested in either childcare or further education).
The fantasy has no basis in reality.
That said - progress is not a result of productivity (at least, not as measured in "hard work"). By that measure the most productive people on earth are also, consistently, the poorest. The people who need to work the hardest just to survive. No, progress is the reward of laziness.
Once somebody was too lazy to go gathering fruit - and planted trees right outside his shelter and invented farming. Once, somebody was too lazy to carry heavy stuff around anymore and invented the wheel to make it easier. Once somebody was too lazy to hunt and started domesticating livestock. But even moreso - time not spent on having to work is where the non-obvious progress starts. The pattern persists, as a software engineer - I specialize in automation of build and deployment systems. I've built a career out of being too lazy to ever do the same process twice. If I have to do it more than once, I write code to do it for me in future. Which means that it always ends up being done predictably without risk of human error interfering.
I used semi-metaphoric examples above, now I'll cite one for which the archeological evidence is overwhelming (just to show my conjectures above aren't based on nothing). About 11-thousand years ago, people settled in the fertile crescent reached a level of farming where for the first time they produced enough extra food that they had to build a kind of building never needed before: a grain store. They had lots of free time because a little farming once a season would feed them the whole year. They then proceeded to do something nobody had done before - with all that free time they start caring about a pursuit with no apparent survival value at all: the aesthetics of their homes. These people invented the first plaster. The plaster they invented was made from limestone. Making limestone plaster requires keeping that limestone at a heat level of around 1000 degrees celcius consistently for many days. To do that, they had to go way beyond "fire" and take our ability to control fire to an entirely new and unprecedented level. And not long after, those techniques would form the cornerstone of an entire new industry which would change the world forever: smelting and smithing.
The techniques they developed and the time they "wasted" just to not have mud-colored walls - would be the key to change the stone age into the bronze age and later the iron age. All because they had lots of free time, and nothing much to do with it.
In the real world - your first society would still be scrabbling to produce barely enough to survive ten-thousand years later, while their neighbours will be building aeroplanes by then. We have plenty of examples of that as well. In harsher climates where the energy yield from available food is low, domesticable animals are rare or non-existent and it takes enormous effort and ingenuity to survive, all the effort and inguinuity goes into just surviving. There is nothing left for progress, and ten thousand years later they still have to chop down an entire tree and spend days mulching it to get enough food to do the next one, because they have never had the resources to overproduce enough to be able ot be lazy.
Once a month, every month forever, to go and remind them that trying to get rid of or weaken encryption through legislation is 1) Impossible to enforce 2) Guaranteed to give more power to criminals than to law enforcement (as it always has) - because any backdoor can be entered by bad guys as well as good guys and bad guys don't usually bother with getting a warrant first 3) An absolutely unconscionably severe assault on freedom of speech 4) Stifling to research that is critical to the national security of the united states. 5) Pretty much mathematically impossible to achieve
Hopefully each congressman may notice *one* of these reasons, all of them true.
I mean, I have no hope it would actually work... but at least when it blows up in their faces (again) we would be able to say "I told you so".
Careful thats what they said about Goldwater. Then he won the nomination. Sure he lost the general but 4 years later Nixon won with Goldwater's policies wrapped in subtler language. Trump could spell a fascist victory in subtler language for another gop candidate in 2020...
Slashdot Mirror
Yes... but you are basically claiming that a brown bulldog and a white bulldog are not the same breed !
> "racism" can't be cause _and_ effect
Of course it can, that setup happens in the real universe on every level all the time. Science is filled with examples in every field - it's called a "feedback loop". With a completely artificial man-made construct like race, if anything, it's simpler. Physical feedback loops need two components - x causes y which causes another x. With a made-up idea, that idea can perpetuate itself indefinitely and x can cause more without even needing that intermediary y.
You mean we will get porn shot with decent rather than terrible lighting ?
Who would watch that ?
Odd - democrats in general have been rather in favour of green tech, on account of not denying climate science.
While what you say is true of those specific examples almost all scientists are liberals. So if anything the trend is slightly in the opposite direction.
When it comes to anti-science beliefs you just can't top a climate-denying, creationist bible-thumper - and the republicans got *all* of those.
Except TFA clearly states this happened in Woodland not Woodlawn.
So ... did you make the same typo several times ? Or is it possible you are thinking of entirely the wrong town ?
How goes the joke...
A UN poll asked the question "What, in your opinion, would be the best solution the problem of food shortages in the the rest of the world ?"
The poll was a miserable failure:
People in China, Russia, and North Korea didn't understand the word "opinion."
People in Canada and Western Europe didn't understand the word "shortages".
People in South America didn't understand the word "solution".
People in Australia didn't understand the word "problem".
People in Africa didn't understand the word "food"
And people in America didn't understand the phrase: "the rest of the world"
Places like Woodland exist purely as places for people to come from, not go to.
Im ready to call an outcome: Trump wins that town in the primaries.
If he gets the nomination he wins that town in the general too.
>You mention contradictory views (I suppose you're referring to the philosophical positions / stances) but can there be anymore contradictory foolishness than holding the position that one has a "right to ones body" as far as abortion is concerned but at the same time have no right to ones body as far as drugs or seat-belts are concerned?
You do know that modern liberals (the voters at least) overwhelmingly support legalizing all drugs ? And empirical rationalists like me support it even louder. I support it because of empirical proof that legalization is the secret to almost entirely ending addiction problems. Of course all the places that are data points for that experiment also have universal healthcare and the other half of the solution is to treat addiction as a public health problem rather than a legal one. Libertarians abolitionists don't impress me since they overwhelmingly reject universal healthcare despite the absolutely overwhelming empirical evidence that it works massively better (and cheaper) than any other system yet attempted (which is why most liberals are not very happy with obamacare. They'll defend it because it's better than what was before but that's a pragmatic refusal to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, which is rather sad when the perfect is well known and empirically proven).
But mostly - libertarians lose the plot entirely with their beloved belief in low taxes and small government. Firstly because it never happens but when you vote for a politician who promissed it he will use your vote to take money from the needy and transfer it to the rich. Which is the only thing any small government republican has ever actually done. Not one has yet actually shrank the military - which at well over half the federal budget is so damn big that you could pay for full European style welfare by cutting just 10% from it.
Even better - go for UBI, which modern libertarians have entirely forgotten about despite the fact that people like Hayek had championed it - which means you can get rid of that whole burocracy you claim to hate so much, no need to pay for the burocrats or to do any privacy-invading checks. It costs less and the benefits are so massive that in practise the cost is usually negative (which is to say the savings it produces in other areas are bigger than the cost) - and that's before you factor in the massive economic growth it spurs. Unlike "tax cuts for the rich" - UBI growth is empirically proven, while tax cuts for the rich have a 100-year history of being disproven.
Don't trust Austrian economics - it's not scientific - in fact it roundly rejects empiricism. Hayek and Von Mises both said things that ammount to: "You should keep believing despite all the proof to the contrary because social sciences should not be disprovable by facts and experiences".
Which is really just a roundabout way of saying "this is an economic theology" - and like all theologies it's one massive disaster and absolutely useless for understanding anything about the actual economy, predicting anything about it's behaviour (seeing as Von Mises actually declared that doing so is outside the scope of Austrian economics it's fundamentally useless since that's the sole reason to do economics - ever) or making wise policy choices (which should be informed by something that can predict it's reaction to signals with at least reasonable accuracy).
And that's before you even get to the horror of having "unquestionable" axioms which are poorly defined and filled with ambigous phrases that are constantly used to justify whatever conclusions make sociopaths feel good about themselves and deny all others.
In short, when I called libertarianism the most internally contradictory and absolutely irrational philosophy extant today - I was speaking as somebody trained in philosophy (and notably: logic and critical thinking).
Dude... did you write this entire rambling piece by just randomly clicking and dragging phrases from some website ? Because you reused about half of them over and over.
Not wearing a seatbelt not only risks your life - it's provably a risk on the lives of others. Since they did not consent to taking that risk, you have no right to impose it on them. How big the risk is has nothing to do with that. Anytime you subject me to any risk I did not consent to you are intruding on *my* liberty.
There are no dems "just as bad"... well except maybe Dianne Feinstein but she's not running for president.
I agree it's a pity that the second major party is so far round the bend you can open winebottles with them because it weakens democracy when the democrats could run Jeffrey Dahmer and win because voters would say "Okay sure he is a gay serial killer but at least *his* crazy is fairly predictable and his not touting an economic policy that has consistently and absolutely failed every time it's been tried for the last 35 years".
But the reality is that, that is where we stand... at this stage even the worst democratic candidates would win because "horrible lying politician" beats "batshit-crazy ranting guy in the park".
Personally - I think the best candidate running is Bernie. Sane policies that have been remarkably successful everywhere they've been implemented (all of Western Europe), a career that speaks of incredible honesty and integrity, responsive enough to listen when voters tell him what to consider instead of telling them what to think (look as his race-policy proposal drafted after he encountered blacklivesmatter protestors - he actually went back, thought about what these voters were telling him and amended his ideas to consider what they were right about) and a career that makes him the single most effective legislator in all of Washington (even if almost nobody knows this - but not being a glory-hound is just more reason to like the guy) and still standing by an absolutely firm commitment not to engage in negative campaigning or accept big donations from lobbyists.
Sane and honest... America hasn't had a candidate like this since Lincoln - whether he can win is another matter though... and if he did, I fear he may well end up *like* Lincoln (shot at the very least, and probably only after the South starts a second civil war).
>Where we go from there is anybody's guess.
It's an easy guess: world war 3.
Unless his actual presidency turns out to have literally *nothing* in common with his actual campaign that's the only possible outcome.
The world hasn't been itching for a fight this bad since 1914... and Trumps is saying and doing all the wrong things, he is stoking fires that ought to be getting put out.
Face it, he really is White ISIS.
The fact that his policy proposals are literally word for word* the Nuremberg laws means we can expect no different outcome than what those led to.
*Well except for one word. He replaced "Jew" with "Muslim".
Well his abilities has been tested in his career as a businessman ? So... how good was he at that ?
Well he got started by being born with a bloody huge silver spoon up his pimply ass. Over the years he has turned his inheritance to a worth of 2 billion odd dollars.
If he had invested his inheritance in a fund that tracked the S&P index it would be worth 8 billion.
Simply put, Trump the negotiator only made about a quarter as much money over 3 decades as the stock market did in the period that included the biggest recession since the depression.
One quarter as good as terrible.
His race policies. The Southern Strategy was word for word a rewrite of Goldwater's policies with only two changes:
1) He took out the promise to repeal the civil rights act (which is not the same as supporting the idea)
2) He replaced Goldwater's "nigger nigger nigger" with dogwhistles that meant the exact same thing - like I said, subtler language, exactly the same platform.
>Far too liberal for today's pure-minded Conservatives
Then again, so was Reagan. They all love him and practically say his name in prayer, but his actual policies were slightly to the left of Obama's on almost everything.
Of course, they also seem to have very short memories for scandals... like when they called the IRS scandal the worst scandal in American history. I think any sane person would reserve that title for "slavery". Even that aside there are much worse scandals in American history. McCarthyism was far worse, watergate of course - and the one every republican hapily pretends wasn't really real: the Iran/Contra scandal (after all - a republican cannot possibly admit that Reagan and North committed and got away with high treason).
You can smell the libertarian ridiculousness on this one a mile away. The most empirically disproven and internally contradictory philosophy extant today - yet for some bizarre reason prevalent on slashdot - supposedly a place where fans of the scientific method congregate...
The federalist papers were abandoned with damn good reason - it was a terrible idea.
And while it's true that a government can be a dangerous thing - the whole point of elections is to avoid that, campaign finance reform will do much more to secure the liberties you love than limiting the size of the only thing that can reign in big business would, it's the only way to let elections actually represent the will of at least the majority of people.
And as it happens the classic liberals that libertarians claim to be like - were a hell of a lot *less* extreme than libertarians - they favoured regulations and high taxes and they loved welfare so much that having a welfare system was a requirement before a territory was even allowed to apply for statehood !
Yes the EPA leads to government, to an extent, picking winners and losers - that's because it's an issue where the market cannot be trusted (no the market does not always get it right) - what the EPA protects has no value to those who would destroy it and those who value it has no power to defend it, the EPA is a system that provides that power.
Sooner or later, valuable things end up in a tragedy of the commons scenario - then you have only *one* choice - regulation. Libertarians always claim privatization is the way to avoid that, but that's the dumbest idea in history because privatization *by definition* destroys the commons - it's not a commons anymore ! More-over it is the ultimate theft by the government (for people who hate taxes to support that is really insane). Taking that which *all* get to enjoy, and by force of law letting one person gain sole access to it (which he may or may not let others get if they can afford it) is to steal from the poor to give to the rich. And to steal from the many to give to the one.
Go read rationalwiki's page on libertarianism - you probably won't find a less biassed source in the world (they whack the moonbats with cluebats very gleefuily) - their standard is very simple: the sceptical scientific method, ideas should be believed if and only if they can be empirically tested and the conclusions they draw from the evidence are logically sound. LIbertarianism fails both tests spectacularly - and it's economics are a disaster in waiting that has caused massive hardship whenever it's been attempted (mostly because it's all based on Austrian school - which is not an economic theory so much as an economic theology).
I know I'm probably wasting my breath, if you could reason with libertarians there wouldn't be any libertarians... but maybe, just maybe, you're still recently joined to the cult enough that you may still be open to considering the possiblity that the unquestionable axioms ought to be questioned.
> to circumvent the constitutional separation of powers
You mean like when congress tries to involve itself in foreign affairs or when state governors try to ban refugees ? Both matters on which the constitution is abundantly clear that the executive branch (that is - the president and his cabinet) have exclusive power ?
There's just one problem with your story. That indolent society ? Has literally never existed. It's entirely a fantasy of the extreme economic right. Ayn Rand cultists happilly embrace the fantasy that basically everybody else is a lazy moocher.
Reality just doesn't agree. Study after study after study has consistently proven the opposite to be true - people hate not being busy. That's why under universal income schemes employment consistently goes *up* - people who suddenly have enough money to live on without having to work keep working, and the ones who weren't invest in education so they can get jobs, some start businesses. Actual productivity goes up and per-individual it declines a mere 9% (nearly all of which is invested in either childcare or further education).
The fantasy has no basis in reality.
That said - progress is not a result of productivity (at least, not as measured in "hard work"). By that measure the most productive people on earth are also, consistently, the poorest. The people who need to work the hardest just to survive.
No, progress is the reward of laziness.
Once somebody was too lazy to go gathering fruit - and planted trees right outside his shelter and invented farming. Once, somebody was too lazy to carry heavy stuff around anymore and invented the wheel to make it easier. Once somebody was too lazy to hunt and started domesticating livestock.
But even moreso - time not spent on having to work is where the non-obvious progress starts.
The pattern persists, as a software engineer - I specialize in automation of build and deployment systems. I've built a career out of being too lazy to ever do the same process twice. If I have to do it more than once, I write code to do it for me in future. Which means that it always ends up being done predictably without risk of human error interfering.
I used semi-metaphoric examples above, now I'll cite one for which the archeological evidence is overwhelming (just to show my conjectures above aren't based on nothing). About 11-thousand years ago, people settled in the fertile crescent reached a level of farming where for the first time they produced enough extra food that they had to build a kind of building never needed before: a grain store. They had lots of free time because a little farming once a season would feed them the whole year. They then proceeded to do something nobody had done before - with all that free time they start caring about a pursuit with no apparent survival value at all: the aesthetics of their homes. These people invented the first plaster. The plaster they invented was made from limestone. Making limestone plaster requires keeping that limestone at a heat level of around 1000 degrees celcius consistently for many days. To do that, they had to go way beyond "fire" and take our ability to control fire to an entirely new and unprecedented level.
And not long after, those techniques would form the cornerstone of an entire new industry which would change the world forever: smelting and smithing.
The techniques they developed and the time they "wasted" just to not have mud-colored walls - would be the key to change the stone age into the bronze age and later the iron age.
All because they had lots of free time, and nothing much to do with it.
In the real world - your first society would still be scrabbling to produce barely enough to survive ten-thousand years later, while their neighbours will be building aeroplanes by then. We have plenty of examples of that as well. In harsher climates where the energy yield from available food is low, domesticable animals are rare or non-existent and it takes enormous effort and ingenuity to survive, all the effort and inguinuity goes into just surviving. There is nothing left for progress, and ten thousand years later they still have to chop down an entire tree and spend days mulching it to get enough food to do the next one, because they have never had the resources to overproduce enough to be able ot be lazy.
Laziness as you think
Yep, idiots do sometimes run as democrats. Still beats the GOP where being one is apparently a job requirement.
Once a month, every month forever, to go and remind them that trying to get rid of or weaken encryption through legislation is
1) Impossible to enforce
2) Guaranteed to give more power to criminals than to law enforcement (as it always has) - because any backdoor can be entered by bad guys as well as good guys and bad guys don't usually bother with getting a warrant first
3) An absolutely unconscionably severe assault on freedom of speech
4) Stifling to research that is critical to the national security of the united states.
5) Pretty much mathematically impossible to achieve
Hopefully each congressman may notice *one* of these reasons, all of them true.
I mean, I have no hope it would actually work... but at least when it blows up in their faces (again) we would be able to say "I told you so".
Quotes are protected under fair use principles in all Berne Convention signatory countries. They couldn't come knocking even if they did want to.
And when he proposed every single Nuremberg law you didnt see it ?
Careful thats what they said about Goldwater. Then he won the nomination. Sure he lost the general but 4 years later Nixon won with Goldwater's policies wrapped in subtler language. Trump could spell a fascist victory in subtler language for another gop candidate in 2020...
Probably both. Media attention can gain you new customers - but only good staff can keep them.