The two words started out synonymous. The word libertarian was coined by Proudhon and he specifically stated that he coined the phrase as an alternate name for anarchism in his treatise because the French government of the time had banned "anarchist literature".
Outside of the US (the only place in the world where people in favor of capitalism call themselves libertarians - everywhere else socialist-libertarian is a tautology) the two terms are still incredibly close in meaning. Libertarians differ from anarchist in their proposed replacement of the nation-state structure not in their shared desire to get rid of it. Most libertarians embrace the idea of direct democracy, having every citizen vote on every single issue, combined with massive decentralization (to prevent a tyranny of the majority problem) - most anarchists favor the same. But while most anarchists favor political equality libertarians generally hold that economic equality is just as important and that, in fact, economic imbalance must always lead to power-imbalance. Then again communist-anarchist philosophy says the exact same thing (but with a radically different proposal on how to reach it - libertarians favor an open-market with mutualist worker-run businesses rather than top-down hierarchic businesses while anarcho-communists favor a money-less society without even inter-business competition).
The short version is - what Americans think they know about political philosophy is atrociously incomplete, ignorant and mostly just plain wrong and the rest of the planet tends to scorn the people you call libertarians for being, well not libertarian at all. Ironically - one of the great libertarians of our time is an American. But very few American's would call him that, least of all the people American's call libertarians. Rand Paul is NOT a libertarian (Rue Paul is actually more of one !) - but if you want to find a real libertarian, go look up Noam Chomsky.
Thinking back to my study years - one thing stands out to me: the lecturers who loved teaching were good teachers, the others usually not. The good teachers who loved their subject saw even undergraduate classes as... well recruiting platforms. By sharing that passion they got the next generation of people who would be working in their labs and keeping their field going after they left. Having done both arts and technical studies though - I must agree with the sentiment that arts courses tend to have the best teachers. My best teacher was for a theoretical drama and film studies course. The lecturer was a highly rated actor/director and he brought those skills into his classroom. Reading consisted of the scripts for the piece we were studying, and classes was all discussion of those scripts. Learning why Shakespeare wrote anachronistically and how this tied into the historical perspective of when he wrote was actually fun. When he wanted to convey something of the feel of a particular monologue... he'd jump into character and act out the part to gales of laughter, and resulting in a lesson you never forgot. And he actively engaged with his students all the time, he encouraged differing viewpoints and rewarded those that were well backed up. The thing is, he had a knack for finding good humor in anything really important, and would explain it with a joke - and to this day I can quote all those core points, because jokes are easy to remember and makes it easy to understand. That was a great teacher.
Number 2 spot must go to my philosophy lecturer, that was a much more technical course since I specifically did the philosophy specialization in logic and critical thinking - which is almost mathematical in it's structure (well in a real sense, a large part of that course is about what lies beneath mathematics) - and there the lecturer was by no means funny - on the contrary he was very serious, but he was passionate about his class - and he made a highly abstract course incredibly topical. The course included a discussion on science, non-science and pseudo-science and he made a point of encouraging debate on this (for example: was acupuncture science or pseudo-science ? His believe: it began as pseudo-science and is still largely practiced that way but it did subject itself to the scientific method later and those practitioners who did so, and accepted the scientific explanations for why it (sometimes) worked (as opposed to the mystical explanations it started from) have a better product: because they only sell what works and it works all the time). That was a delightful class (and it was fun to watch the liberal arts students who took philosophy to fill out a grade requirement squirm when he shot astrology down:P )
Either way - those were both in different ways great lecturers. My CS lecturers on the other hand were generally dry and boring. They didn't seem to be passionate about their fields nor to be engaged with their students. They wrote their textbooks but being researchers they saw lecturing as a boring job they may as well try to cash in on. I learned as much from self-study and books as I ever learned in their classes - and I think the main reason is simply that they were not engaged with their students. That's not to say that no lecturers are engaged with their students in these fields, merely that the ones I had were not but I do believe there is something of a trend there. The courses that focus on highly technical things attract highly technical people and those are often not great teachers, the human sciences attract people drawn to humanity, it's arts and it's thought - and they make great teachers because their students are a subset of that which interests them.
>The goal of the religious right has more to do with ideology and power.
Oh I absolutely agree. But the politicians who say what the religious right wants to hear care about money and power more than ideology. That even goes lower down the ranks than just politicians. How many times have we seen corruption charges laid against evangelical leaders ? How many "faith healers" are out there scamming people ? Count homeopaths and other peddlers in pseudoscientific quackery into the mix and you have a global multi-trillion dollar industry derived from exploiting the gullability of the religious right.
>And I know I wouldn't hire him as a computer security expert, if he claims that his wi-fi setup was done by his wife clicking OK a few times.
I wouldn't be so sure about that one. Have you noticed how many great plumbers have horrible plumbing in their own houses? Hell a lot of geeks I know have their own computers in a complete mess with cables all around the place. Why ? We work on this stuff all day, we get home, the last thing we want to do now is spend more time setting up computer stuff. We instead just watch a movie or (like me) log into wow with my fiance and go run some battlegrounds. I am fully aware that her PC's hard-drive will need a replacement soon. I know that my backup strategy is... well attrocious, but do I really want to spend my leisure time doing exactly the same things I do at work all day ? In fact, worse - at work I'm a senior software engineer, do I really want to go home and do helldesk work ?
Sheez last time I had a burned-out CPU I refused to fix it myself, I am fully capable of it, but I chose to take it to a good store where I trust the techs and have them fix it. Not because I can't, but because I really don't want to spend my away-from-office time doing crummy jobs like hardware replacements, stuff I worked very hard to get AWAY from in my professional life.
So basically, he may be a network security expert, he may even be a very good one - the state of his home wifi doesn't say anything about that. It merely proves Schneier's law: when security is done at the cost of convenience, convenience *always* wins.
It's much simpler than that. For hundreds of years religiously motivated parents tried to discourage their sons from masturbating by warning that they will grow hairy palms if they do (completely untrue of course). That's what the joke is about.
Except that your analogy is flawed. Driving up the price of assasinations does not hugely increase the number of people who commit them. If anything it makes the market more exclusive. In the case of child porn - there is a massive supporting market needed for it to happen, and that market is dependent on that high price. Driving it up means lots more gets made and distributed. Shutting that down will greatly reduce the incidence.
Now I may agree that one is one too many, but I also know that even the most horrible police state won't achieve that. So we HAVE to be pragmatic and try to bring it to the lowest possible level. Providing true justice for those victims where we couldn't prevent it. That's the other factor - those high prices buy the kind of minds and technology that lets the perpetrators get away. Without that support structure, many more of them would get caught, convicted and punished. When the law makes it less likely that victims will get justice and increases the number of victims in the first place it must be considered a failure. If all the money we spend on prosecuting child-porn posession and trying to filter it was instead spent on investigating and prosecuting child-abuse cases we'd have a much higher arrest and conviction rate - and that would greatly reduce the rate of child abuse in the world.
You don't get to let more kids suffer without hope of their abusers being punished in the name of an all-or-nothing ideology.
You say my argument doesn't hold water, but the reality is you haven't offered anything better. The studies I refer to show that we could greatly reduce the problem with better use of resources. You have shown NOTHING. You demand a zero-rate, but you offer NO way to get there, while arguing with me and thus (presumably) supporting censorship - so your answer is that if we can't save EVERYBODY we should save NOBODY ? Since we can't stop EVERY abuser before they do it, we should act in a stupid and emotional way rather than letting rational decisions allow us to protect as many children as possible ?
>How do you explain that marijuana is outlawed? Why don't they just tax it?
Because governments in democratic countries don't just care about governmental profit, the people in them care about election. Marijuana was initially outlawed because of industry lobbying. Hemp is made from the male marijuana plant, generally it's THC is too low to be worth smoking - but the cotton industry in America (at the time one of the most powerful) saw a genuine competitive threat from hemp, and lobbied to have the plant outlawed to protect their business. Much like the RIAA and the internet today actually.
The catch of course was that they were a little smarter, they made up a plausible reason. Decades of lies later, most conservatives are sold on the horrors of marijuana (regardless of facts) so now no politician who endorses it's legalization has any real hope of being elected - and more importantly - will lose massive and vital campaign money from corporations too afraid of ticking off their bible-belt customers.
But it all began because of lobying - campaign contributions and lobby funds which is PERSONAL profit for politicians (including the salary if elected) was obtained by banning it and it just escalated from there - even though today cotton has nothing like the economic power it has a century ago.
The other factor is that governments really DO want to maximize profit and they are smart enough to know that the more they keep the population in line the better they can do so. This is why the oppose anything that they feel may make people less obedient. The fear with regard to marijuana is virtually unfounded (but it's certainly true with more really-addictive substances). Orwell pointed this out clearly in 1984 with the party's massive campaigns against sex. "The junior anti-sex league" etc. and states outright: they fear sex, because it's a primal drive more powerful than obedience. They fear the power of sex to lead to love, for which people will face any odds.
The same argument can be made about marijuana and it's not at all a coincidence that the SAME people tend to be in favor of legislation that demonizes BOTH.
The proper word is "regardless". The Ir prefix indicates a meaning opposite to the normal meaning of the word - as in Irresponsible for example. So Irregardless would (if it was a word) literally mean: NOT DESPITE rest of sentence.
I could see the argument for it being a word - but the reality is that if it was it would mean the opposite of what everybody thinks it means. Regardless already means "despite what follows" (e.g. that the example here-after does not disprove a trend), while irregardless would actually mean "this example proves the trend even though you think it doesn't".
Now that's just cumbersome conversation - and frankly you can say the exact same thing by just leaving out "regardless" as by tacking an Ir onto it with a lot less room for confusion.
The incorrect popular usage of irregardless is, in fact, a tautological use but a proper tautology should still make sense and not be completely ambiguous in meaning - on the contrary tautologies are meant to be forms of accentuation, an oxymoron-tautology is essentially a linguistic disaster. More-over all tautologies consist of two synonymous WORDS used together (often combined into one word) - so while the use follows the pattern of a tautology it does not follow the proper format of a tautology (Ir is a prefix, it is not a word).
Basically - no, it's not a word and it shouldn't be one and even if it was it's meaning would be the exact opposite of what people think it means.
The point where it was NOT just state capitalism. That's about all that the USSR ever achieved as well. Replacing many corrupt employers with ONE corrupt employer is not communism at all, not even a little bit and that's all that any of the so-called "communist states" ever did.
True communism can only be anarchic, which rules them all out. The very concept demands that the means of production be owned AND MANAGED BY the people who DO the production.
You may agree or not agree with that ideal - but it's a simple fact that no so-called "communist state" has ever achieved it, or even really tried to.
Numerous studies have shown that banning child pornography possession actually exacerbates the problem of child mollestation and worse the problem of production of child pornography (by making the possession illegal you drive up the price - much like drug prohibition - thus making the industry more attractive). Currently some of the greatest security minds alive are getting very rich building smuggling networks for child pornography. The money is there because it's illegal. If possession is legal the market value drops massively and so the production and distribution is far less attractive. You don't NEED censorship to deal with the production - it's already illegal because it involves molestation. The more valuable the product is however, the more likely people who may otherwise by afraid of the law will consider the risk worthwhile - especially those not directly involved in the activities but rather acting as secondaries for a slice of the pie (like those security experts). So if anything - censoring child pornography has made the problem of child pornography WORSE.
>Banning of hate literature
This is another example where the "common sense" prediction is false. Banning hate literature does not in any way reduce the presence of hate, all it does is drive hate-groups further underground. This gives them a sense of legitimacy, increases the risk of them resorting to violent and criminal actions (and feeling justified - every hate group believes they are reacting to persecution rather than the cause of it). Instead by not restricting their speech, we are capable of debating with them - which means we may actually convince a few (impossible to do when people don't want to admit they hold a certain view in public).
Basically both your cases are prime examples of why some of us are opposed to all censorship. Without exception any censorship always exacerbates whatever problem it was meant to address and without exception it always causes massive additional problems which can never be fully predicted upfront. Therefore it makes no sense to ever be in favor of any censorship. To use a popular slogan version: censorship is always more obscene than that which it censors.
>Being the anti-social person that I am, I have no interest in meeting the thousands of anonymous "friends"
Actually there's more to it than that. This ties in directly with their decision to offer a real-money auction house. If you don't do everything in your power to prevent cheating - then that auction house will be rife with fraud, people posting a billion duped items etc. - which would massively devalue it for all players and make it unattractive to use.
Done right, once the initial rush is sated, I see no reason why somebody who enjoys gaming to the point of grinding at "job" levels couldn't make a moderate living off of playing and selling on said AH. But that possibility basically requires them making every effort to prevent cheating. I'm not sure the always-on will really help though. WoW is always on, and they have basically shut down cheaters by now, there's hardly any cheating left. Yet gold-sellers and farmers still exist, only now they steal other people's account details to get the content of those people's characters, convert that to gold and sell it. Basically they couldn't effectively bot-farm anymore, so now they let the good players farm for them (crowdsourcing ?) and just steal the results.
I haven't seen anything yet in d3 that will suddenly stop THAT !
>Whether the question "accounts for the consequences of unqualified professional services" is a separate question as to whether or not it raises the cost of providing those services.
No. It isn't. Because the cost of those consequences must be considered part of the cost of the service. If an unlicensed doctor messes up an operation and now you need four more operations and years of drugs to recover, then the cost of the condition for which you sought treatment has been massively increased. It could be shown that licensed services lead to a price that's higher for the same service, than it would be unlicensed when the quality of the service is the same. However the reality is that the quality of the service is the reason for licensing and quality is a fundamental aspect of how we measure value. Licensing of services increases both the price AND the value of the service. However you can only say that it increases the COST of the service if the increase in value is LESS than the increase in the price.
Liberals would argue that in nearly all cases the value increase significantly exceeds the cost increase so much so as to create an over-all massive cost decrease (my example shows one case where this happens). And this analogy only shows the DIRECT cost of that value reduction, the indirect costs are orders of magnitude more. Bad doctors mean much longer times off-sick from work. Meaning much higher risk of being unemployed at the end of it. That's months or years of income lost which is ALSO a cost of not licensing the service, it's lost productivity to your employer either way, it's a massive cost to the economy.
More-over most licensing of services happen in situations where the cost of unlicensed services is far more than mere monetary cost. It involves very real risk of costs of human health and even lives. What should we consider the value of a human life to be ? The funeral costs are hardly the whole financial loss there after-all. At the very least you have to add in the entire plausible earnings of that person for the rest of their life-expectancy had the services been licensed as well as adding their entire likely expenditure over that period as a loss to the entire economy - and all their productivity is lost to the economy as well. Right there you have millions of dollars worth of losses. And that's not even close to the real loss. Most people, like me, believe the true value of a human life to be infinite - that no amount of money is ever too much to spend to save a loved one, therefore no amount of cost saving is big enough to let them die for. The potential cost in human lives exceed any potential saving of unlicensed services (as if I hadn't already proven that there wouldn't be any) by an order of infinity.
And because COST is defined as price per VALUE not just price, there is nothing economically unenlightened about arguing that the COST of a service goes UP in the absence of professional licensing, by massive amounts.
The sad irony of the world is that we've left the decisions about these matters up to people who think that there is a saving which is big enough to let people die for. A lot of them work for medical insurance companies - who will do everything in their power to avoid paying for a procedure if they can possibly fight it out until you die without it to save them the money (after taking your premiums for ever). And to people like that, there is no saving too SMALL to let your loved ones die for.
In a world without licensed professionals, those would be your doctors, your electricians, your bridge-designers...
Even if the licensing really DID add a true cost increase, the result would be a world where hardly anybody would WANT to live.
So when I pay my electrician, I am GLAD there is a licensing authority that ensured a minimal level of competence before letting him sell his services - because even if that means I'm paying him 500% more than he could otherwise charge, it is still orders of magnitude less than the costs I'd risk otherwise - not least would be the death of my family and loss of all my possessions when his bad wiring burned my house down.
>It's still a given in any culture with a hope of long-term survival. Without this, a culture lacks the cohesion required to prevent being overrun by others. (other things are required too of course, like a decent birth rate and the ability to defend land)
This kind of logic is exactly what drives racism and most of the evil bigotry in the world. And it's a shortsightedly stupid way to think about things - that is just plain wrong. Historically the longest living cultures have consistently been those that embraced change, embraced other cultures and homogenized with them. The greek and roman cultures were both like that. If you study greek mythology you will find Zeus having dozens of wives one after the other, In fact, if you look a bit closer you learn that each of them is the name of a mothergoddess from some culture the Greeks conquered. The first thing they did each time: take the local deity and marry her to their OWN chief deity - voila, end of any religious dissagreement with the new subjects. Then take elements of their culture into Greek culture, and they are much more ready to accept elements of Greek culture into their own. Thus came an empire of almost 2000 years, the Romans really just took over the Greek empire (so much so that 200 years after the fall of the Roman republic in the time of the Apostles Greek was still a lingua franca throughout the empire). By incorporating Greek culture into Roman culture they could do so, by repeating the methodology of acceptance and homogenization they preserved their world and empire for another 1500 (that's 3500 that's really Greek culture), and even then only the Western Empire failed - the Eastern Empire still lasted another 900 years after that !
No culture since then has been that long-lived, no empire has come close to that longevity - exactly because they didn't homogenized, didn't treat other cultures with tolerance and mutual sharing of ideals and knowledge. Cultural reservationism is a doomed enterprize. And in our world of global communication it's more doomed than ever before. The simple reality is that a one-world-culture is the only logical outcome. The only choice we have is how much bloodshed we'll have before we get to that inevitable result. Those cultures that provide the least bloodshed, and the most tolerance are likely to have the biggest influence on the cultural mergers and ultimately the biggest impact on the resulting world human-culture.
That's cultural longevity. It may not be the kind you want, but sorry for you, it's the only kind that can possibly exist in the future. Take it, or leave it -and the only way to leave it is to kill yourself.
The Hitler line of thinking (preserve culture by wiping out all others) doesn't work - you will always lose. You can't kill all the people in your own culture who have empathy and humanity with different people. You can't kill all the different people and you sure can't force them all to be like you without some reciprocity.
In short. Die now, or accept that cultural homogenization is inevitable and dedicate your efforts to achieving it with the least bloodshed and maximum utility possible. Work to show the best of your culture other cultures so they will want to adopt that, and work to adopt the best of theirs so they will respect you for it. Now THAT is how you build a society worth living in.
>8. Emotional understanding of a person and emotional destruction of a person are mutually exclusive actions.
This is just plain false. The very existence of psychological torture proves that you can understand somebodies emotions and then proceed to destroy them emotionally. If anything well-developed abilities at empathy makes those who would do so more effective.
Scientists largely believe now that empathy was developed as a defense mechanism. We evolved the ability to try and understand another person's thoughts and feelings primarily to allows us to better tell if we can trust that person, and recognize if they are lying. We turned it into a positive thing over time, that could build better social bonds, but it didn't start out that way and there is no reason it cannot be used in a negative way now (the new uses did not remove the originals - or prevent other more destructive new uses from developing).
The best generals are the ones who can predict the enemy's actions. The most destructive battles are fought by the leaders with the most empathy for the opponents.
Even then your entire rational is flawed as it fundamentally violates Aristotle's first law of logic. A thing cannot be other than itself. Emotion by definition is not rational, logic by definition is rational. Therefore emotion cannot be logical.
This is not entirely a bad thing. Human's are better off for having both.
If you want to make statements about logic I highly recomend you learn something about the subject first. For starters there are two major branches of logic. Inductive and Deductive logic. Only deductive logic results in necessary truth. And that comes with a caveat: deductive logic if properly followed means that if all the propositions are true, the conclusion MUST be true, if any of the propositions is false the conclusion MUST also be false.
More-over deductive logic cannot and never should be, directly applied to the real world. It doesn't work. It only applies to highly abstract constructs. Mathematics is built on deductive logic. Therefore it provides (within it's own framework) absolute truth. If I have an apple, and add another I will have two apples, and this will never change. But in the real world - no two apples are the same size. So the weight of "apple mass" has changed by a different number. That's what I meant by (within it's own framework). The degree of truth is dependent on the level of abstraction. To get the mass of apples, I must in the first case measure each apple's weight individually. That is to - get the truth in a more detailed abstraction my propositions must also be made more detailed.
Science mostly relies on inductive logic, and a fundamental part of the definition of inductive logic is that it NEVER gives you truth. It only gives you high probability. A scientific experiment is a prime example of inductive logic. If I boil water, and it boils at the same temperature ten of 100 degrees celcius times- I can say with high probability that water at that temperature will boil. If I do it a million times the probability has gone up a lot. But it still isn't "truth". Just one out of a million times where it boils at a different temperature proves the theory false. That's easy to do, just get higher above sea-level. On top of Mount Everest water boils at about 7 degrees celcius. So we have to refine our theory - and now all we can say is "at sea-level, all other things being equal, water will boil at 100 degrees celcius". That's science in a nutshell. Inductive logic, highly reliable (and increasingly moreso) results, but never truth. Because "all other things being equal" is an impossible suggestion. There will always be more to learn.
Don't try to analyze emotions with logic - it's as useless as the auditors in Terry Pratchett breaking down great works of art into component atoms in their fruitless search for "beauty" and being perplexed that the pigments of these beautiful works do not contain some special and previously unknown
>What about the heavy metals sewage often contains? Which farmer would use that? I realize this is Africa we're talking here about but still.
This is the solid waste that's left *after* massive cleaning operations. And what goes into the fertilizer should be purely organic. Heavy metals and such get filtered out earlier in the process, like I said it's long and with many different steps (including activated carbon filtering as well).
That said - South Africa really shouldn't be compared to the worst of Africa (and neither should most of the rest). The country has by far the best infrastructure on the continent and it also has some of the best Universities in the world with (among other things) some of the best engineering departments there are. There's a reason South African trained engineers get scooped up by Canadian, European and US companies - they are good. BMW has most of their research funding going to the engineering department of a South African university - and obviously they use the results of said research to develop new products for their cars.
Now it's true that no South African university is MIT but they are not very far behind and certainly can keep up with at least the non-Ivy-league US schools (and in some cases even the Ivy Leagues). Remember that this country is the most likely candidate for the Square Kilometer Array - the largest radio-telescope network ever planned. South Africa did the world's first heart-transplant.
While the country has many problems - we do have a lot of know-how (for now anyway, if we can stifle the brain-drain effect of our brightest minds emigrating), and this is the sort of thing we're good at.
Ever wonder how the evil appartheid government kept the economy going during the sanction years when (among other things) we couldn't buy oil ? We have no oil, but we do have very rich coal resources, and we developed the first oil-from-coal process - and it kept all our cars and trucks and engines running. We have had access to oil for two decades now, and we still make most of our fuel that way - which means we buy only about 40% of the oil we require even now. Our electricity networks are safer than yours, all houses have earth-leakage protection (which automatically shuts off all power-systems in the event of a leak-to-ground, that has saved countless lives as almost any human-electric-shock event is a leak-to-ground as well).
Short answer: water has always been in short supply, we know how to do stuff in this country and cleaning water for re-use is among the things we do BEST.
South Africa, being a dry country, has been doing this for years. All sewage gets sent to treatment farms, where it is cleaned, and the water from it are then placed back in the river systems from where it is used for irrigation, drinking water and everything else - just like rain water.
South Africa also boasts that the water from the treatment plants are cleaner than rain water. My father is an electrical engineer and helped design one of the plants (the electrical systems obviously). The process is quite spectacular - and moreso than what is described here. For starters the first phase includes the sewage being cleaned by specially cultured bacteria to break it down, before chemical cleaning, filtering etc. step by step turns it back into pure H20. The two main waste products from the process is methane and solid waste. The solid waste is used to create fertilizers. The methane is burned off (being a clean-burning gas) but quite a few people here have converted their cars to run on methane (any gasoline car can be converted) and fill up there - for the moment at least (since the demand is pretty low and they have massive amounts they need to get rid off) the sewage treatment farms don't even charge them. Fill up the car, no cost.
> If the Chinese government can not mange themselves out of this situation they will be facing 3 billion angry citizens looking for some answers.
I'm not so sure about that. The depth of Confucian philosophy in the people of China is... extreme. Their belief in an ordered state and the nation over the individual is practically unbendable and this leaves them unwilling and unable to question their government.
Go ask a chinese exchange student at your local university what he thinks of Tiananmen Square. Most likely answer: "Oh it was just some rambunctious students". Then show them a youtube video and watch the look of absolute shock on their faces. The reason the Chinese don't criticize their government the way we do is because their entire upbringing makes the idea of questioning the government and the very suggestion that the government could be flawed unthinkable to them.
They have no difficulty doing the same thing to other governments but that's because those governments do not expound the Confucian philosophy they almost religiously cling to. And they base their complaints on that !
A friend of mine spends an English teacher who spent some time teaching in China. She told me how she once gave a class of thirteen year olds the assignment to write an essay on something they dislike. A choice quote from one: "I hate Ma Ying-jeou (president of Taiwan) he does not have the mandate of heaven, he just won a popularity contest".
And here's the thing - every single essay was about the same thing. When asked what they dislike most, every teenager in China cites the democratically elected president of their closest neighbor (who claims he ought to be the rule of mainland China - which is a consideration). But they don't hate him for calling himself the President of the Republic of China. They hate him for being ELECTED. They hate and despise the idea of a ruler being chosen by citizens as opposed to being chosen by God.
Their view of the party is nothing less than naked monarchism. Now monarchism in the West began to decline when the French people were hungry enough to genuinely rebel, and overcame their believe in the sanctity of monarchy enough to chop the king's head off. But they didn't have Confucianism, Christianity is a lot more favorable to questioning power (not nearly enough - but it's history has made it far more so, there was never a time when Confucianism was officially oppressed by the reigning government).
Just go back a century before the French revolution - to the first ever real rebellion in Europe, which was the peasant's revolt in Britain though. The peasant's there were revolting against the aristocratic rule, but they couldn't shake their belief in the god-given beneficence of the monarch - they put their trust in the reigning child-king Richard and honestly believed that the aristocrats who oppressed them were doing so behind his back. They revolted against the government with the STATED AIM of restoring power to the head of that government ! The end result: Richard played along until he got them in the open, then betrayed them and had every one of the rebel leaders executed. The peasant's revolt died an inglorious death. It did have one major impact though - it showed that farmers with flail's and pitchforks CAN give an army a run for it's money - and not long after, the French took that lesson to heart, along with the other lesson which went "if your monarchic government is corrupt, then so is the king who runs it".
All of this took hundreds of years to develop from the willing selection of monarchs as god-chosen rulers before the middle-ages though, and just a few hundred years to forget. By the early twentieth century it became almost fashionable in Europe to elect dictators who could not be un-elected and most of Europe were ruled by them soon, with the happy support of their people. Two of them (Hitler and Musolini) were particularly insane and their expansionism and joining-of-forces ultimately became world war 2.
And your own analogy explains why. In your analogy - the star from the milky way headed toward the Magellan system has gravity, so do the stars in Magellan. Gravity is an attactive force (or to be Einsteinian, the bend it produces in space-time curves TOWARD the sources) which improves the odds of a collision. It doesn't have to be on-target, if it's just close enough to one, it will curve round and strike it. Electric charges can be both attractive and repulsive depending on which combination you have. Now if you inhaled pure anti-protons you could almost guarantee it couldn't collide, because your lungs do NOT produce that much force. Anti-protons have the same charge as the electrons surrounding normal matter in your body - so they'll repulse each other and your odds of a collision is zero. There's nowhere near enough force to produce a collision.
But Anti-hydrogen is a different matter, it's got a positron on the outside. That means it has a positive charge, while normal matter have their negative charges on the outside. That means it will be attracted to the matter in your body. It doesn't have to be aimed at it, it gets attracted to it. We KNOW those attractions work, because they happen ALL THE TIME. Every chemical reaction in the world, every compound molecule has it's origins in the electric attraction between opposite charges in particles. The rules are slightly different when it's matter+matter since their outside charges are actually repulsive, but the way electrons work they can share orbits etc. etc. which is why it all works - ultimately it happens because the electrons of one atom are attracted to the protons in another. If anything... antimatter/matter collisions are MORE likely than ordinary chemical reactions because they don't depend on the opposing/spin rule, the positrons around anti-hydrogen are directly attracted to the electrons around normal hydrogen (for simplicity think hydrogen but the same goes for heavier elements and indeed compounds) and they will actively RUSH into collision.
Positrons emtering the orbit of electrons are not going to peacefully share it like another electron would...
>You know, most of the energy sources we use today are sources that we haven't produced
Most ? Correction: all. Basic law of physics. All the energy in the universe was already there at the big bang. We've made some of that energy do useful things, using chemical reactions and other processes to take it from some stored form of potential energy into a active energy - usually kinetic which we can then use to convert it into some other useful form (such as electric).
In the end though - every bit of energy - even the antimatter energy was there at the big bang. That produced the matter, and matter = energy. Stars collide or explode and created uranium which drives nuclear power. But they all began with simple hydrogen.
Antimatter isn't nearly as exotic as most people imagine. It's just particles with their charges reversed. An antiproton (or negatron as it's sometimes called) is just a proton with a negative electric charge. A positron is just a postively-charged electron. Even when we "make" antimatter we're not producing anything, we're just reversing the charges - a process that takes a lot of energy to do.
Now the theory suggested that the earth's magnetic field will produce a layer of anti-protons- we've now confirmed this to be true. That's the same process of "production" - but without cost to us, it uses energy that we can't use anyway. Much the same way that fossil fuels aren't made by us, but the energy they contain did come from somewhere -it's solar energy from a few billion years ago, stored until now. We refine the fossil fuels to burn more efficiently, but we don't produce gasoline.
The interesting thing about anti-matter is how it reacts with normal matter. A positron + a negatron produces a reaction that releases a massive amount of energy - the same energy as a nuclear-fission reaction really since it decays the particles and good old E=mc2 kicks in, but it doesn't have nearly the same problems with fall-out radiation. This could make it very useful if we can get sufficient quantities without spending a fortune converting ordinary matter ourselves.
There is a catch however - it's very hard to store. Because anti-matter reacts with matter, it's hard to make a non-reactive container for it. In the 1930's Kurt Vonnegutt says the chemistry faculty at Harvard (where he studied) often played with the question "if you discovered a universal solvent - what would you store it in ?"
With a slight twist, antimatter brings up the same question - it's about a close to a universal solvent as we've ever gotten (among normal matter - the closest thing to a universal solvent is... surprise... water).
Yet, oddly, nuclear power-plants produce more energy than they use for refinement - otherwise why would we build them ?
The problem with a nuclear bomb over a reactor is simple - the bomb releases all the energy at once - and it is effectively wasted. It knocks down buildings, kills people and then dissipates into the air.
The same amount of energy carefully released slowly over a long time can run a generator with great efficiency producing far more electricity than we used to refine the fuel - and that's despite the inherent losses in electricity generation.
Which makes me doubt your conclusion, I am by no means sure that the energy the bomb releases is less than what we took to refine the fuel - since the energy was already in the fuel, we just extracted the fuel. If it was, there is no way that even the most efficient nuclear power plant could run at a profit. It's wasted energy, but you'll be hard-pressed to convince me it's really a nett-loss.
Slashdot Mirror
The two words started out synonymous. The word libertarian was coined by Proudhon and he specifically stated that he coined the phrase as an alternate name for anarchism in his treatise because the French government of the time had banned "anarchist literature".
Outside of the US (the only place in the world where people in favor of capitalism call themselves libertarians - everywhere else socialist-libertarian is a tautology) the two terms are still incredibly close in meaning. Libertarians differ from anarchist in their proposed replacement of the nation-state structure not in their shared desire to get rid of it.
Most libertarians embrace the idea of direct democracy, having every citizen vote on every single issue, combined with massive decentralization (to prevent a tyranny of the majority problem) - most anarchists favor the same.
But while most anarchists favor political equality libertarians generally hold that economic equality is just as important and that, in fact, economic imbalance must always lead to power-imbalance.
Then again communist-anarchist philosophy says the exact same thing (but with a radically different proposal on how to reach it - libertarians favor an open-market with mutualist worker-run businesses rather than top-down hierarchic businesses while anarcho-communists favor a money-less society without even inter-business competition).
The short version is - what Americans think they know about political philosophy is atrociously incomplete, ignorant and mostly just plain wrong and the rest of the planet tends to scorn the people you call libertarians for being, well not libertarian at all.
Ironically - one of the great libertarians of our time is an American. But very few American's would call him that, least of all the people American's call libertarians. Rand Paul is NOT a libertarian (Rue Paul is actually more of one !) - but if you want to find a real libertarian, go look up Noam Chomsky.
Thinking back to my study years - one thing stands out to me: the lecturers who loved teaching were good teachers, the others usually not. The good teachers who loved their subject saw even undergraduate classes as... well recruiting platforms. By sharing that passion they got the next generation of people who would be working in their labs and keeping their field going after they left.
Having done both arts and technical studies though - I must agree with the sentiment that arts courses tend to have the best teachers. My best teacher was for a theoretical drama and film studies course. The lecturer was a highly rated actor/director and he brought those skills into his classroom. Reading consisted of the scripts for the piece we were studying, and classes was all discussion of those scripts.
Learning why Shakespeare wrote anachronistically and how this tied into the historical perspective of when he wrote was actually fun. When he wanted to convey something of the feel of a particular monologue... he'd jump into character and act out the part to gales of laughter, and resulting in a lesson you never forgot.
And he actively engaged with his students all the time, he encouraged differing viewpoints and rewarded those that were well backed up. The thing is, he had a knack for finding good humor in anything really important, and would explain it with a joke - and to this day I can quote all those core points, because jokes are easy to remember and makes it easy to understand. That was a great teacher.
Number 2 spot must go to my philosophy lecturer, that was a much more technical course since I specifically did the philosophy specialization in logic and critical thinking - which is almost mathematical in it's structure (well in a real sense, a large part of that course is about what lies beneath mathematics) - and there the lecturer was by no means funny - on the contrary he was very serious, but he was passionate about his class - and he made a highly abstract course incredibly topical. The course included a discussion on science, non-science and pseudo-science and he made a point of encouraging debate on this (for example: was acupuncture science or pseudo-science ? His believe: it began as pseudo-science and is still largely practiced that way but it did subject itself to the scientific method later and those practitioners who did so, and accepted the scientific explanations for why it (sometimes) worked (as opposed to the mystical explanations it started from) have a better product: because they only sell what works and it works all the time). That was a delightful class (and it was fun to watch the liberal arts students who took philosophy to fill out a grade requirement squirm when he shot astrology down :P )
Either way - those were both in different ways great lecturers. My CS lecturers on the other hand were generally dry and boring. They didn't seem to be passionate about their fields nor to be engaged with their students. They wrote their textbooks but being researchers they saw lecturing as a boring job they may as well try to cash in on. I learned as much from self-study and books as I ever learned in their classes - and I think the main reason is simply that they were not engaged with their students.
That's not to say that no lecturers are engaged with their students in these fields, merely that the ones I had were not but I do believe there is something of a trend there.
The courses that focus on highly technical things attract highly technical people and those are often not great teachers, the human sciences attract people drawn to humanity, it's arts and it's thought - and they make great teachers because their students are a subset of that which interests them.
*innocent whistle*
I don't know WHAT you are talking about...
>The goal of the religious right has more to do with ideology and power.
Oh I absolutely agree. But the politicians who say what the religious right wants to hear care about money and power more than ideology. That even goes lower down the ranks than just politicians. How many times have we seen corruption charges laid against evangelical leaders ? How many "faith healers" are out there scamming people ? Count homeopaths and other peddlers in pseudoscientific quackery into the mix and you have a global multi-trillion dollar industry derived from exploiting the gullability of the religious right.
>And I know I wouldn't hire him as a computer security expert, if he claims that his wi-fi setup was done by his wife clicking OK a few times.
I wouldn't be so sure about that one. Have you noticed how many great plumbers have horrible plumbing in their own houses? Hell a lot of geeks I know have their own computers in a complete mess with cables all around the place. Why ? We work on this stuff all day, we get home, the last thing we want to do now is spend more time setting up computer stuff. We instead just watch a movie or (like me) log into wow with my fiance and go run some battlegrounds. I am fully aware that her PC's hard-drive will need a replacement soon. I know that my backup strategy is ... well attrocious, but do I really want to spend my leisure time doing exactly the same things I do at work all day ? In fact, worse - at work I'm a senior software engineer, do I really want to go home and do helldesk work ?
Sheez last time I had a burned-out CPU I refused to fix it myself, I am fully capable of it, but I chose to take it to a good store where I trust the techs and have them fix it. Not because I can't, but because I really don't want to spend my away-from-office time doing crummy jobs like hardware replacements, stuff I worked very hard to get AWAY from in my professional life.
So basically, he may be a network security expert, he may even be a very good one - the state of his home wifi doesn't say anything about that. It merely proves Schneier's law: when security is done at the cost of convenience, convenience *always* wins.
It's much simpler than that. For hundreds of years religiously motivated parents tried to discourage their sons from masturbating by warning that they will grow hairy palms if they do (completely untrue of course).
That's what the joke is about.
Except that your analogy is flawed. Driving up the price of assasinations does not hugely increase the number of people who commit them. If anything it makes the market more exclusive.
In the case of child porn - there is a massive supporting market needed for it to happen, and that market is dependent on that high price. Driving it up means lots more gets made and distributed.
Shutting that down will greatly reduce the incidence.
Now I may agree that one is one too many, but I also know that even the most horrible police state won't achieve that. So we HAVE to be pragmatic and try to bring it to the lowest possible level. Providing true justice for those victims where we couldn't prevent it.
That's the other factor - those high prices buy the kind of minds and technology that lets the perpetrators get away. Without that support structure, many more of them would get caught, convicted and punished. When the law makes it less likely that victims will get justice and increases the number of victims in the first place it must be considered a failure.
If all the money we spend on prosecuting child-porn posession and trying to filter it was instead spent on investigating and prosecuting child-abuse cases we'd have a much higher arrest and conviction rate - and that would greatly reduce the rate of child abuse in the world.
You don't get to let more kids suffer without hope of their abusers being punished in the name of an all-or-nothing ideology.
You say my argument doesn't hold water, but the reality is you haven't offered anything better. The studies I refer to show that we could greatly reduce the problem with better use of resources. You have shown NOTHING. You demand a zero-rate, but you offer NO way to get there, while arguing with me and thus (presumably) supporting censorship - so your answer is that if we can't save EVERYBODY we should save NOBODY ?
Since we can't stop EVERY abuser before they do it, we should act in a stupid and emotional way rather than letting rational decisions allow us to protect as many children as possible ?
>How do you explain that marijuana is outlawed? Why don't they just tax it?
Because governments in democratic countries don't just care about governmental profit, the people in them care about election. Marijuana was initially outlawed because of industry lobbying. Hemp is made from the male marijuana plant, generally it's THC is too low to be worth smoking - but the cotton industry in America (at the time one of the most powerful) saw a genuine competitive threat from hemp, and lobbied to have the plant outlawed to protect their business. Much like the RIAA and the internet today actually.
The catch of course was that they were a little smarter, they made up a plausible reason. Decades of lies later, most conservatives are sold on the horrors of marijuana (regardless of facts) so now no politician who endorses it's legalization has any real hope of being elected - and more importantly - will lose massive and vital campaign money from corporations too afraid of ticking off their bible-belt customers.
But it all began because of lobying - campaign contributions and lobby funds which is PERSONAL profit for politicians (including the salary if elected) was obtained by banning it and it just escalated from there - even though today cotton has nothing like the economic power it has a century ago.
The other factor is that governments really DO want to maximize profit and they are smart enough to know that the more they keep the population in line the better they can do so. This is why the oppose anything that they feel may make people less obedient. The fear with regard to marijuana is virtually unfounded (but it's certainly true with more really-addictive substances). Orwell pointed this out clearly in 1984 with the party's massive campaigns against sex. "The junior anti-sex league" etc. and states outright: they fear sex, because it's a primal drive more powerful than obedience. They fear the power of sex to lead to love, for which people will face any odds.
The same argument can be made about marijuana and it's not at all a coincidence that the SAME people tend to be in favor of legislation that demonizes BOTH.
The proper word is "regardless".
The Ir prefix indicates a meaning opposite to the normal meaning of the word - as in Irresponsible for example. So Irregardless would (if it was a word) literally mean: NOT DESPITE rest of sentence.
I could see the argument for it being a word - but the reality is that if it was it would mean the opposite of what everybody thinks it means. Regardless already means "despite what follows" (e.g. that the example here-after does not disprove a trend), while irregardless would actually mean "this example proves the trend even though you think it doesn't".
Now that's just cumbersome conversation - and frankly you can say the exact same thing by just leaving out "regardless" as by tacking an Ir onto it with a lot less room for confusion.
The incorrect popular usage of irregardless is, in fact, a tautological use but a proper tautology should still make sense and not be completely ambiguous in meaning - on the contrary tautologies are meant to be forms of accentuation, an oxymoron-tautology is essentially a linguistic disaster. More-over all tautologies consist of two synonymous WORDS used together (often combined into one word) - so while the use follows the pattern of a tautology it does not follow the proper format of a tautology (Ir is a prefix, it is not a word).
Basically - no, it's not a word and it shouldn't be one and even if it was it's meaning would be the exact opposite of what people think it means.
The point where it was NOT just state capitalism. That's about all that the USSR ever achieved as well.
Replacing many corrupt employers with ONE corrupt employer is not communism at all, not even a little bit and that's all that any of the so-called "communist states" ever did.
True communism can only be anarchic, which rules them all out. The very concept demands that the means of production be owned AND MANAGED BY the people who DO the production.
You may agree or not agree with that ideal - but it's a simple fact that no so-called "communist state" has ever achieved it, or even really tried to.
>Banning of child pornography
Numerous studies have shown that banning child pornography possession actually exacerbates the problem of child mollestation and worse the problem of production of child pornography (by making the possession illegal you drive up the price - much like drug prohibition - thus making the industry more attractive). Currently some of the greatest security minds alive are getting very rich building smuggling networks for child pornography. The money is there because it's illegal. If possession is legal the market value drops massively and so the production and distribution is far less attractive. You don't NEED censorship to deal with the production - it's already illegal because it involves molestation. The more valuable the product is however, the more likely people who may otherwise by afraid of the law will consider the risk worthwhile - especially those not directly involved in the activities but rather acting as secondaries for a slice of the pie (like those security experts).
So if anything - censoring child pornography has made the problem of child pornography WORSE.
>Banning of hate literature
This is another example where the "common sense" prediction is false. Banning hate literature does not in any way reduce the presence of hate, all it does is drive hate-groups further underground. This gives them a sense of legitimacy, increases the risk of them resorting to violent and criminal actions (and feeling justified - every hate group believes they are reacting to persecution rather than the cause of it). Instead by not restricting their speech, we are capable of debating with them - which means we may actually convince a few (impossible to do when people don't want to admit they hold a certain view in public).
Basically both your cases are prime examples of why some of us are opposed to all censorship. Without exception any censorship always exacerbates whatever problem it was meant to address and without exception it always causes massive additional problems which can never be fully predicted upfront.
Therefore it makes no sense to ever be in favor of any censorship.
To use a popular slogan version: censorship is always more obscene than that which it censors.
Damn why doesn't /. have a "Like" button right now ! I love that !
I did say "if you follow all the laws of logic properly"... you broke about three others with your example. To start with: you begged the question.
>Being the anti-social person that I am, I have no interest in meeting the thousands of anonymous "friends"
Actually there's more to it than that. This ties in directly with their decision to offer a real-money auction house. If you don't do everything in your power to prevent cheating - then that auction house will be rife with fraud, people posting a billion duped items etc. - which would massively devalue it for all players and make it unattractive to use.
Done right, once the initial rush is sated, I see no reason why somebody who enjoys gaming to the point of grinding at "job" levels couldn't make a moderate living off of playing and selling on said AH. But that possibility basically requires them making every effort to prevent cheating.
I'm not sure the always-on will really help though. WoW is always on, and they have basically shut down cheaters by now, there's hardly any cheating left. Yet gold-sellers and farmers still exist, only now they steal other people's account details to get the content of those people's characters, convert that to gold and sell it. Basically they couldn't effectively bot-farm anymore, so now they let the good players farm for them (crowdsourcing ?) and just steal the results.
I haven't seen anything yet in d3 that will suddenly stop THAT !
>Whether the question "accounts for the consequences of unqualified professional services" is a separate question as to whether or not it raises the cost of providing those services.
No. It isn't. Because the cost of those consequences must be considered part of the cost of the service. If an unlicensed doctor messes up an operation and now you need four more operations and years of drugs to recover, then the cost of the condition for which you sought treatment has been massively increased.
It could be shown that licensed services lead to a price that's higher for the same service, than it would be unlicensed when the quality of the service is the same. However the reality is that the quality of the service is the reason for licensing and quality is a fundamental aspect of how we measure value.
Licensing of services increases both the price AND the value of the service. However you can only say that it increases the COST of the service if the increase in value is LESS than the increase in the price.
Liberals would argue that in nearly all cases the value increase significantly exceeds the cost increase so much so as to create an over-all massive cost decrease (my example shows one case where this happens). And this analogy only shows the DIRECT cost of that value reduction, the indirect costs are orders of magnitude more. Bad doctors mean much longer times off-sick from work. Meaning much higher risk of being unemployed at the end of it. That's months or years of income lost which is ALSO a cost of not licensing the service, it's lost productivity to your employer either way, it's a massive cost to the economy.
More-over most licensing of services happen in situations where the cost of unlicensed services is far more than mere monetary cost. It involves very real risk of costs of human health and even lives. What should we consider the value of a human life to be ? The funeral costs are hardly the whole financial loss there after-all. At the very least you have to add in the entire plausible earnings of that person for the rest of their life-expectancy had the services been licensed as well as adding their entire likely expenditure over that period as a loss to the entire economy - and all their productivity is lost to the economy as well.
Right there you have millions of dollars worth of losses.
And that's not even close to the real loss. Most people, like me, believe the true value of a human life to be infinite - that no amount of money is ever too much to spend to save a loved one, therefore no amount of cost saving is big enough to let them die for.
The potential cost in human lives exceed any potential saving of unlicensed services (as if I hadn't already proven that there wouldn't be any) by an order of infinity.
And because COST is defined as price per VALUE not just price, there is nothing economically unenlightened about arguing that the COST of a service goes UP in the absence of professional licensing, by massive amounts.
The sad irony of the world is that we've left the decisions about these matters up to people who think that there is a saving which is big enough to let people die for. A lot of them work for medical insurance companies - who will do everything in their power to avoid paying for a procedure if they can possibly fight it out until you die without it to save them the money (after taking your premiums for ever).
And to people like that, there is no saving too SMALL to let your loved ones die for.
In a world without licensed professionals, those would be your doctors, your electricians, your bridge-designers...
Even if the licensing really DID add a true cost increase, the result would be a world where hardly anybody would WANT to live.
So when I pay my electrician, I am GLAD there is a licensing authority that ensured a minimal level of competence before letting him sell his services - because even if that means I'm paying him 500% more than he could otherwise charge, it is still orders of magnitude less than the costs I'd risk otherwise - not least would be the death of my family and loss of all my possessions when his bad wiring burned my house down.
>It's still a given in any culture with a hope of long-term survival. Without this, a culture lacks the cohesion required to prevent being overrun by others. (other things are required too of course, like a decent birth rate and the ability to defend land)
This kind of logic is exactly what drives racism and most of the evil bigotry in the world. And it's a shortsightedly stupid way to think about things - that is just plain wrong.
Historically the longest living cultures have consistently been those that embraced change, embraced other cultures and homogenized with them. The greek and roman cultures were both like that.
If you study greek mythology you will find Zeus having dozens of wives one after the other, In fact, if you look a bit closer you learn that each of them is the name of a mothergoddess from some culture the Greeks conquered.
The first thing they did each time: take the local deity and marry her to their OWN chief deity - voila, end of any religious dissagreement with the new subjects. Then take elements of their culture into Greek culture, and they are much more ready to accept elements of Greek culture into their own.
Thus came an empire of almost 2000 years, the Romans really just took over the Greek empire (so much so that 200 years after the fall of the Roman republic in the time of the Apostles Greek was still a lingua franca throughout the empire).
By incorporating Greek culture into Roman culture they could do so, by repeating the methodology of acceptance and homogenization they preserved their world and empire for another 1500 (that's 3500 that's really Greek culture), and even then only the Western Empire failed - the Eastern Empire still lasted another 900 years after that !
No culture since then has been that long-lived, no empire has come close to that longevity - exactly because they didn't homogenized, didn't treat other cultures with tolerance and mutual sharing of ideals and knowledge.
Cultural reservationism is a doomed enterprize. And in our world of global communication it's more doomed than ever before. The simple reality is that a one-world-culture is the only logical outcome. The only choice we have is how much bloodshed we'll have before we get to that inevitable result.
Those cultures that provide the least bloodshed, and the most tolerance are likely to have the biggest influence on the cultural mergers and ultimately the biggest impact on the resulting world human-culture.
That's cultural longevity. It may not be the kind you want, but sorry for you, it's the only kind that can possibly exist in the future. Take it, or leave it -and the only way to leave it is to kill yourself.
The Hitler line of thinking (preserve culture by wiping out all others) doesn't work - you will always lose. You can't kill all the people in your own culture who have empathy and humanity with different people. You can't kill all the different people and you sure can't force them all to be like you without some reciprocity.
In short. Die now, or accept that cultural homogenization is inevitable and dedicate your efforts to achieving it with the least bloodshed and maximum utility possible. Work to show the best of your culture other cultures so they will want to adopt that, and work to adopt the best of theirs so they will respect you for it.
Now THAT is how you build a society worth living in.
>8. Emotional understanding of a person and emotional destruction of a person are mutually exclusive actions.
This is just plain false. The very existence of psychological torture proves that you can understand somebodies emotions and then proceed to destroy them emotionally. If anything well-developed abilities at empathy makes those who would do so more effective.
Scientists largely believe now that empathy was developed as a defense mechanism. We evolved the ability to try and understand another person's thoughts and feelings primarily to allows us to better tell if we can trust that person, and recognize if they are lying. We turned it into a positive thing over time, that could build better social bonds, but it didn't start out that way and there is no reason it cannot be used in a negative way now (the new uses did not remove the originals - or prevent other more destructive new uses from developing).
The best generals are the ones who can predict the enemy's actions. The most destructive battles are fought by the leaders with the most empathy for the opponents.
Even then your entire rational is flawed as it fundamentally violates Aristotle's first law of logic. A thing cannot be other than itself.
Emotion by definition is not rational, logic by definition is rational.
Therefore emotion cannot be logical.
This is not entirely a bad thing. Human's are better off for having both.
If you want to make statements about logic I highly recomend you learn something about the subject first. For starters there are two major branches of logic. Inductive and Deductive logic. Only deductive logic results in necessary truth. And that comes with a caveat: deductive logic if properly followed means that if all the propositions are true, the conclusion MUST be true, if any of the propositions is false the conclusion MUST also be false.
More-over deductive logic cannot and never should be, directly applied to the real world. It doesn't work. It only applies to highly abstract constructs. Mathematics is built on deductive logic. Therefore it provides (within it's own framework) absolute truth. If I have an apple, and add another I will have two apples, and this will never change.
But in the real world - no two apples are the same size. So the weight of "apple mass" has changed by a different number. That's what I meant by (within it's own framework). The degree of truth is dependent on the level of abstraction.
To get the mass of apples, I must in the first case measure each apple's weight individually. That is to - get the truth in a more detailed abstraction my propositions must also be made more detailed.
Science mostly relies on inductive logic, and a fundamental part of the definition of inductive logic is that it NEVER gives you truth. It only gives you high probability.
A scientific experiment is a prime example of inductive logic. If I boil water, and it boils at the same temperature ten of 100 degrees celcius times- I can say with high probability that water at that temperature will boil. If I do it a million times the probability has gone up a lot. But it still isn't "truth". Just one out of a million times where it boils at a different temperature proves the theory false.
That's easy to do, just get higher above sea-level. On top of Mount Everest water boils at about 7 degrees celcius.
So we have to refine our theory - and now all we can say is "at sea-level, all other things being equal, water will boil at 100 degrees celcius".
That's science in a nutshell. Inductive logic, highly reliable (and increasingly moreso) results, but never truth. Because "all other things being equal" is an impossible suggestion. There will always be more to learn.
Don't try to analyze emotions with logic - it's as useless as the auditors in Terry Pratchett breaking down great works of art into component atoms in their fruitless search for "beauty" and being perplexed that the pigments of these beautiful works do not contain some special and previously unknown
The man who drove the no software patents project in the EU and kept them out for years is not a patent expert according to you ?
>What about the heavy metals sewage often contains? Which farmer would use that? I realize this is Africa we're talking here about but still.
This is the solid waste that's left *after* massive cleaning operations. And what goes into the fertilizer should be purely organic. Heavy metals and such get filtered out earlier in the process, like I said it's long and with many different steps (including activated carbon filtering as well).
That said - South Africa really shouldn't be compared to the worst of Africa (and neither should most of the rest). The country has by far the best infrastructure on the continent and it also has some of the best Universities in the world with (among other things) some of the best engineering departments there are.
There's a reason South African trained engineers get scooped up by Canadian, European and US companies - they are good. BMW has most of their research funding going to the engineering department of a South African university - and obviously they use the results of said research to develop new products for their cars.
Now it's true that no South African university is MIT but they are not very far behind and certainly can keep up with at least the non-Ivy-league US schools (and in some cases even the Ivy Leagues).
Remember that this country is the most likely candidate for the Square Kilometer Array - the largest radio-telescope network ever planned. South Africa did the world's first heart-transplant.
While the country has many problems - we do have a lot of know-how (for now anyway, if we can stifle the brain-drain effect of our brightest minds emigrating), and this is the sort of thing we're good at.
Ever wonder how the evil appartheid government kept the economy going during the sanction years when (among other things) we couldn't buy oil ?
We have no oil, but we do have very rich coal resources, and we developed the first oil-from-coal process - and it kept all our cars and trucks and engines running. We have had access to oil for two decades now, and we still make most of our fuel that way - which means we buy only about 40% of the oil we require even now. Our electricity networks are safer than yours, all houses have earth-leakage protection (which automatically shuts off all power-systems in the event of a leak-to-ground, that has saved countless lives as almost any human-electric-shock event is a leak-to-ground as well).
Short answer: water has always been in short supply, we know how to do stuff in this country and cleaning water for re-use is among the things we do BEST.
Now your phrasing in this version I wholeheartedly agree on.
South Africa, being a dry country, has been doing this for years. All sewage gets sent to treatment farms, where it is cleaned, and the water from it are then placed back in the river systems from where it is used for irrigation, drinking water and everything else - just like rain water.
South Africa also boasts that the water from the treatment plants are cleaner than rain water. My father is an electrical engineer and helped design one of the plants (the electrical systems obviously). The process is quite spectacular - and moreso than what is described here. For starters the first phase includes the sewage being cleaned by specially cultured bacteria to break it down, before chemical cleaning, filtering etc. step by step turns it back into pure H20.
The two main waste products from the process is methane and solid waste. The solid waste is used to create fertilizers. The methane is burned off (being a clean-burning gas) but quite a few people here have converted their cars to run on methane (any gasoline car can be converted) and fill up there - for the moment at least (since the demand is pretty low and they have massive amounts they need to get rid off) the sewage treatment farms don't even charge them. Fill up the car, no cost.
> If the Chinese government can not mange themselves out of this situation they will be facing 3 billion angry citizens looking for some answers.
I'm not so sure about that. The depth of Confucian philosophy in the people of China is... extreme. Their belief in an ordered state and the nation over the individual is practically unbendable and this leaves them unwilling and unable to question their government.
Go ask a chinese exchange student at your local university what he thinks of Tiananmen Square. Most likely answer: "Oh it was just some rambunctious students".
Then show them a youtube video and watch the look of absolute shock on their faces. The reason the Chinese don't criticize their government the way we do is because their entire upbringing makes the idea of questioning the government and the very suggestion that the government could be flawed unthinkable to them.
They have no difficulty doing the same thing to other governments but that's because those governments do not expound the Confucian philosophy they almost religiously cling to. And they base their complaints on that !
A friend of mine spends an English teacher who spent some time teaching in China. She told me how she once gave a class of thirteen year olds the assignment to write an essay on something they dislike.
A choice quote from one:
"I hate Ma Ying-jeou (president of Taiwan) he does not have the mandate of heaven, he just won a popularity contest".
And here's the thing - every single essay was about the same thing. When asked what they dislike most, every teenager in China cites the democratically elected president of their closest neighbor (who claims he ought to be the rule of mainland China - which is a consideration). But they don't hate him for calling himself the President of the Republic of China. They hate him for being ELECTED. They hate and despise the idea of a ruler being chosen by citizens as opposed to being chosen by God.
Their view of the party is nothing less than naked monarchism. Now monarchism in the West began to decline when the French people were hungry enough to genuinely rebel, and overcame their believe in the sanctity of monarchy enough to chop the king's head off. But they didn't have Confucianism, Christianity is a lot more favorable to questioning power (not nearly enough - but it's history has made it far more so, there was never a time when Confucianism was officially oppressed by the reigning government).
Just go back a century before the French revolution - to the first ever real rebellion in Europe, which was the peasant's revolt in Britain though. The peasant's there were revolting against the aristocratic rule, but they couldn't shake their belief in the god-given beneficence of the monarch - they put their trust in the reigning child-king Richard and honestly believed that the aristocrats who oppressed them were doing so behind his back.
They revolted against the government with the STATED AIM of restoring power to the head of that government ! The end result: Richard played along until he got them in the open, then betrayed them and had every one of the rebel leaders executed.
The peasant's revolt died an inglorious death. It did have one major impact though - it showed that farmers with flail's and pitchforks CAN give an army a run for it's money - and not long after, the French took that lesson to heart, along with the other lesson which went "if your monarchic government is corrupt, then so is the king who runs it".
All of this took hundreds of years to develop from the willing selection of monarchs as god-chosen rulers before the middle-ages though, and just a few hundred years to forget. By the early twentieth century it became almost fashionable in Europe to elect dictators who could not be un-elected and most of Europe were ruled by them soon, with the happy support of their people. Two of them (Hitler and Musolini) were particularly insane and their expansionism and joining-of-forces ultimately became world war 2.
Peopl
> the subatomic particles will not collide.
That's just wrong.
And your own analogy explains why.
In your analogy - the star from the milky way headed toward the Magellan system has gravity, so do the stars in Magellan. Gravity is an attactive force (or to be Einsteinian, the bend it produces in space-time curves TOWARD the sources) which improves the odds of a collision. It doesn't have to be on-target, if it's just close enough to one, it will curve round and strike it.
Electric charges can be both attractive and repulsive depending on which combination you have.
Now if you inhaled pure anti-protons you could almost guarantee it couldn't collide, because your lungs do NOT produce that much force. Anti-protons have the same charge as the electrons surrounding normal matter in your body - so they'll repulse each other and your odds of a collision is zero. There's nowhere near enough force to produce a collision.
But Anti-hydrogen is a different matter, it's got a positron on the outside. That means it has a positive charge, while normal matter have their negative charges on the outside. That means it will be attracted to the matter in your body.
It doesn't have to be aimed at it, it gets attracted to it. We KNOW those attractions work, because they happen ALL THE TIME.
Every chemical reaction in the world, every compound molecule has it's origins in the electric attraction between opposite charges in particles.
The rules are slightly different when it's matter+matter since their outside charges are actually repulsive, but the way electrons work they can share orbits etc. etc. which is why it all works - ultimately it happens because the electrons of one atom are attracted to the protons in another.
If anything... antimatter/matter collisions are MORE likely than ordinary chemical reactions because they don't depend on the opposing/spin rule, the positrons around anti-hydrogen are directly attracted to the electrons around normal hydrogen (for simplicity think hydrogen but the same goes for heavier elements and indeed compounds) and they will actively RUSH into collision.
Positrons emtering the orbit of electrons are not going to peacefully share it like another electron would...
>You know, most of the energy sources we use today are sources that we haven't produced
Most ? Correction: all.
Basic law of physics. All the energy in the universe was already there at the big bang. We've made some of that energy do useful things, using chemical reactions and other processes to take it from some stored form of potential energy into a active energy - usually kinetic which we can then use to convert it into some other useful form (such as electric).
In the end though - every bit of energy - even the antimatter energy was there at the big bang. That produced the matter, and matter = energy. Stars collide or explode and created uranium which drives nuclear power. But they all began with simple hydrogen.
Antimatter isn't nearly as exotic as most people imagine. It's just particles with their charges reversed. An antiproton (or negatron as it's sometimes called) is just a proton with a negative electric charge. A positron is just a postively-charged electron.
Even when we "make" antimatter we're not producing anything, we're just reversing the charges - a process that takes a lot of energy to do.
Now the theory suggested that the earth's magnetic field will produce a layer of anti-protons- we've now confirmed this to be true. That's the same process of "production" - but without cost to us, it uses energy that we can't use anyway.
Much the same way that fossil fuels aren't made by us, but the energy they contain did come from somewhere -it's solar energy from a few billion years ago, stored until now. We refine the fossil fuels to burn more efficiently, but we don't produce gasoline.
The interesting thing about anti-matter is how it reacts with normal matter. A positron + a negatron produces a reaction that releases a massive amount of energy - the same energy as a nuclear-fission reaction really since it decays the particles and good old E=mc2 kicks in, but it doesn't have nearly the same problems with fall-out radiation.
This could make it very useful if we can get sufficient quantities without spending a fortune converting ordinary matter ourselves.
There is a catch however - it's very hard to store. Because anti-matter reacts with matter, it's hard to make a non-reactive container for it. In the 1930's Kurt Vonnegutt says the chemistry faculty at Harvard (where he studied) often played with the question "if you discovered a universal solvent - what would you store it in ?"
With a slight twist, antimatter brings up the same question - it's about a close to a universal solvent as we've ever gotten (among normal matter - the closest thing to a universal solvent is... surprise... water).
Yet, oddly, nuclear power-plants produce more energy than they use for refinement - otherwise why would we build them ?
The problem with a nuclear bomb over a reactor is simple - the bomb releases all the energy at once - and it is effectively wasted. It knocks down buildings, kills people and then dissipates into the air.
The same amount of energy carefully released slowly over a long time can run a generator with great efficiency producing far more electricity than we used to refine the fuel - and that's despite the inherent losses in electricity generation.
Which makes me doubt your conclusion, I am by no means sure that the energy the bomb releases is less than what we took to refine the fuel - since the energy was already in the fuel, we just extracted the fuel. If it was, there is no way that even the most efficient nuclear power plant could run at a profit.
It's wasted energy, but you'll be hard-pressed to convince me it's really a nett-loss.