I don't get this. I hate capital punishment and would like to see it end. However, if we're going to do this and want to be as humane as possible (seems rather contradictory to me) why not give them something that many people voluntarily do because it's given to be so pleasurable? First, give them the regular does of heroin, then gradually move it up to OD. I've heard that heavy doses of the stuff cause you to "nod off". Then the OD just stops your breathing. What a way to go.
Really though, just stop CP. It's not befitting a modern country. It's irrevocable, and it puts too much power in the hands of the state.
You might wonder how it could be more interesting to be asleep. Why was I asleep anyway? IIRC, there was actually a teachers holiday in our district. Everybody was home from school.
So. I was sleeping in. I was in high school and you know how they always send you in early, so when you get a day off you just. want. sleep. I was a real night owl back then so the night before I must have stayed up pretty late to still be sleeping when it launched.
OK, bear with me now. My mother had a crystal perfume decanter. It was a heavy thing, with a slender 3-sided pyramidal top, about 10 inches high. The top was fragile. From a young age, it was kind of like the glass egg that you weren't supposed to touch. Of course by the time I was in high school you'd think this wouldn't matter very much; but the memory was burned in.
So. I'm having a dream about, of all things the crystal decanter. You know in dreams things can seem far more important than reality. I was dreaming that there was something important in there, something meaningful, and I had taken the lid off and was holding it in my hand. Then I felt it slip--the terror! The dream ended with a noise not entirely unlike shattering crystal, although I didn't drop it in the dream.
The noise was my mother calling. "Turn on the TV. Something awful happened to the Space Shuttle". And then, and only then was I transfixed by the endless replays, the disbelief.
My mother has passed away, it's been over 10 years now. I made sure to pull the decanter out of all the other knick-nacks from the estate. I still have it. You know what? There was already a chip in the top. I guess she told us kids not to go near it because she knew how fragile it was.
As the US government operates outside of many people's interpretation of its constitutional limits, it can only be considered by many to be a criminal organization.
The clock inspired an Iron Maiden classic 80s nuke rock piece. When MTV played videos, nuclear war and/or post nuclear settings were a recurring theme since the cold war was still on and intensified during the Reagan administration. I should make a list of these videos if somebody hasn't already.
Right... because magic pixies will fly in to stop the country with 4x the population and a rapidly modernizing infrastructure from ever catching up with us.
They might have competed well on their own; but did we really have to help them by making it hard for factory workers to find good jobs, and easy for those same workers to find bad jobs and get NINJA loans so they could buy stuff from China?
Forgive me if I err on the side of assuming that a country that has the benefit of a much larger population and the ability to learn from our example is going to develop even faster than we have, and that in the absence of outside interference they will inevitably surpass us.
Actually they didn't learn a whole lot from us. They're re-living the late 19th and early 20th century agrarian-industrial transition, with predictable outcomes. Just google for air quality in China. Whew! I've been known to joke that if the Chinese aren't careful they're going to have a communist revolution on their hands. The conditions that exist there now seem strikingly similar to the conditions that lead to general strikes and violent lock-outs in the US. The environmental conditions seem to be building towards a "Cuyahoga" moment, where a river catches on fire and people realize, too late, what they lost.
That's not "loser talk", that's betting on the fastest horse in a marathon, even if he was a lot slower out of the gate.
If you were in France betting on this, I could see your position; but if you're an American you're not a bettor--you're a jockey. You should not be betting on the race. You should be totally focused on winning. Good analogy. Those Comm School professors and their students, they really did throw the race for money.
Now how exactly free trade now will helps us in the future... I'm less clear on that. It's certainly important to have established a valuable trade relationship before they're in a position to stomp all over us, but at present all we seem to be doing is accelerating their growth at the expense of our own long-term productivity, and there's precious little evidence that long-term good will has ever been a major force in international politics.
OK, some agreement here. I think Nixon's idea of opening up was not bad; but MFN status for China, Nafta, etc. Not so much. Some trade, sure; but striving to break down all barriers? Not so much.
Amen. I'd also like to see it give high priority to media when the user permits it. I don't mind if my text takes a few extra seconds to render while music is playing in the background. I do mind if the music burps because I've loaded a new document.
Back in the 90s a business student told me we needed free trade with China because they would become more powerful than us. That's one kind of loser talk.
The other kind of loser talk is from the parent. It's hubris.
Overestimating an opponent (note, not an enemy, an opponent) and underestimating are both bad IMHO.
If I had to lose sleep over one thing about our military, it'd be aircraft carriers in a naval battle with China. Giant siting ducks. They've been the backbone of the navy for decades now. Just think about that. That's an awful long time for opponents to think about strategies against it.
We shouldn't be beating our chest and bragging. We should be figuring out what to do if carriers become sitting ducks under some new weapons system. WW2 proved the carrier. WW3 might disprove it.
We should also take a page from their book--the Art of War, and try to prevent opponents from becoming enemies. We've been doing a pretty sucky job of that lately.
Just keep reducing the work week, while keeping salaries constant. Corporations will bitch; but these are the same corporations that are making huge productivity gains and paying CEOs millions of dollars to destroy companies. The've got the money. The salaried workers will take more vacations, helping the hospitality industry, or they'll invent new things on their own time.
Work week will be the new economic management tool. We don't know if the consequences of excessively short work weeks will cause other problems; but it's worth trying. It can't be any worse than the attempt to manage interest rates. The challenge will be to find a "sweet spot" for hours worked. We want a certain level of employment; but we don't want to create a labor shortage or social problems due to idleness.
When the robots really take over, that'll be the big problem--lots of people willing to volunteer for work, but no actual work, and lots of idleness. That could cause serious health and crime problems simply because people are bored. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it though. The current system requires people to invent stupid shit like apps that track other people and shove ads at them. You could argue that's already a case of people committing crimes because of the system. If those people didn't have to work, what would they do that might be better for society than some tracking ad platform?
I've seen a lot of (relatively) cheap apartments in San Francisco that don't come with a kitchen .
Are those even legal?
That's a good question; but I couldn't find a good source in a timely manner. I did pull up a number of local news articles that said there were 10,000 to 30,000 illegal apartments in San Francisco. I'm sure many of them don't have kitchens; but I don't know if a kitchen is a legal requirement for what we would normally think of as an apartment. Since the city is so expensive and crowded, there are a lot of creative living arrangements one step up from the street. I'm sure a lot of them don't involve a kitchen.
You're reading too much into that line. phantomfive saw past that; but a lot of you didn't. Pleaes read the thread between me and phantomfive before knee-jerking on that one line. TIA.
Go back and read the rest of my replies on this thread. We do indeed understand that soda is bad for you. The quoted line was not intended to imply that one should drink soda like water.
I'd step back even further and say it's a repackaging of wiring things together. Once we got away from magnetic cores and punched-cards, wiring things together wasn't modeled in code very much. If all of that were really great, we would have already been doing more spreadsheet and/or circuit-simulator based programming. That's not to say it doesn't have some nifty applications. Aren't there some cool GUI front ends to audio processors that work that way?
The low-income people you've talked to, are they able to keep a 'fridge running? I suppose if they live in public housing, they get a 'fridge; but it's hard enough for regular people to manage their food prep and prevent spoilage. How practical is it for them to buy fresh veggies and use them up before they spoil? I've found that the best way to prepare veggies and keep them tasty is to steam or stir-fry. I used to hate vegetables too, until my late aunt showed me how to steam broccoli. Wow! What a revelation.
Anyway, I think we have general agreement on a lot here. If the people you're talking to are homeless though, or don't have a proper kitchen then all bets are off. I've seen a lot of (relatively) cheap apartments in San Francisco that don't come with a kitchen. Hot-plating can be done, but it's tricky. So then the poor are dealing with microwaves and processed crap because they don't have a kitchen. Vicious circle.
OK, I see what you mean. You didn't mean to imply oatmeal was on the buzzfeed list. I get it now (after hitting Submit of course).
Anyway, oatmeal. Good. Rice? Not so much. Why? Glycemic index. I've know this first hand. I was raised eating enriched long-grain rice. As an adult, I figured out that my tendency to "crash" after dinner was directly correlated to eating rice for dinner.
I've moved towards eating less white rice, and only eating it at lunch when I'm not tired and won't crash. I've tried brown rice, but it seems to do the same thing at dinner, even though they claim it has a lower GI (however, that's a recent experiment possibly ruined by the fact that I had a cold when I tried it).
A lot of the cheap foods you mention have a high GI or are starchy. Maybe "wild" rice can be had cheaply without the high GI, but now we're cycling back to things that the poor and uneducated won't figure out. Heck it took me long enough, and I've got a batchelor's degree. I've known professionals doing much better than me money-wise; but they have terrible diets.
Anyway, I get what you said. Aside from all that, calories/dollar is obviously not the only metric you should use. You need veggies and proteins, which will result in fewer calories/dollar, but less chance of diabetes from eating cheap starches and sugars all the time.
Is your link broken or were you not expecting me to follow it? The link has the top five items as:
Wendy's fries: 249, Five Guys fries: 265, Wendy's Frosty: 280, A specific Duncan donut: 357, Bananas 656.
Oatmeal is not even on that list. However, I have oatmeal in my kitchen and the package says 150 cal/serving, 30 servings per container. That's 4500 calories in the container and I would have to pay $5/container for it to be 900 calories. I know I pay much less, $3-$4 depending on sales and stuff so oatmeal is indeed an excellent healthy source of cheap calories. I didn't mean to imply fast food was the only way. I just said it was the most obvious way for poor people who don't know any better.
Google for "calories per dollar". Most of the foods at the top of the list are junk like fast-food burgers and pizza. Papa John's advertises that they accept EBT (I think it's because the pizza is frozen and you have to heat it, so that's OK). That's probably a good calorie/dollar ratio on their pizza. (No, I don't work for PJ's). The one food that's considered healthy on those lists is bananas; but you'd have to eat like a gorilla to get a full meal from them. A good rule of thumb is to eat like Mexicans. Beans and rice have excellent calories/dollar if you don't mind what beans do. Throw in just a bit of cheese and meat on the side and you can feed yourself cheaply.
Anyway, healthy food *can* be had for less than junk, but you really have to think about it. The typical EBT recipient is not even likely to make the leap of logic to google for "calories per dollar" or think about healthy food. Also, those who are working poor are pressed for time. Have you ever tried to get from afordable housing to low-wage work via public transit? I've seen people doing that riding the opposite way on the Metro--working people living in DC going out to the 'burbs on the train, transferring to a bus to get to some office park where they answer the phones. You're so tired at the end of the day, the fast-food place near your house is all you've got time for.
Do have employees running around in trucks to check things, or actively monitoring larger systems that need constant attention. Do charge customers more money to support those extra employees. Do make decisions based on daily dumps from mag tapes somebody drove over to the central office. Note, I'm not saying that's a bad idea. I'm just pointing out the trade. I bet a lot of things were done like that up into the 1980s. I have personally driven mag tapes from one office to another. It helped me earn spending money for when I went back to school. Maybe we fix the employment problem and the security problem by dialing back technology just a bit?
The Paleo diet might be efficient for the species to survive. Individuals in a modern context? Not so much. You're talking about a species of hunter-gatherers who lived in small bands. A good strategy might be having the women pop out a baby every other year, men who die at 40, and a handful of post-menopausal women live to 50 to care for the extra children. That's probably not what you're expecting with the Paleo Diet.
If longevity is your goal, I think you're better off studying the habits of people who live in regions with long life spans. There seems to be a general consensus that happiness and daily physical activity are important. Diet is just a part of it.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't get this. I hate capital punishment and would like to see it end. However, if we're going to do this and want to be as humane as possible (seems rather contradictory to me) why not give them something that many people voluntarily do because it's given to be so pleasurable? First, give them the regular does of heroin, then gradually move it up to OD. I've heard that heavy doses of the stuff cause you to "nod off". Then the OD just stops your breathing. What a way to go.
Really though, just stop CP. It's not befitting a modern country. It's irrevocable, and it puts too much power in the hands of the state.
Well I guess that means Microsoft has complete control of other people PCs.
You mean, like they write software that oh... operates the system or something?
It was the "Kennedy Moment" of my generation.
You might wonder how it could be more interesting to be asleep. Why was I asleep anyway? IIRC, there was actually a teachers holiday in our district. Everybody was home from school.
So. I was sleeping in. I was in high school and you know how they always send you in early, so when you get a day off you just. want. sleep. I was a real night owl back then so the night before I must have stayed up pretty late to still be sleeping when it launched.
OK, bear with me now. My mother had a crystal perfume decanter. It was a heavy thing, with a slender 3-sided pyramidal top, about 10 inches high. The top was fragile. From a young age, it was kind of like the glass egg that you weren't supposed to touch. Of course by the time I was in high school you'd think this wouldn't matter very much; but the memory was burned in.
So. I'm having a dream about, of all things the crystal decanter. You know in dreams things can seem far more important than reality. I was dreaming that there was something important in there, something meaningful, and I had taken the lid off and was holding it in my hand. Then I felt it slip--the terror! The dream ended with a noise not entirely unlike shattering crystal, although I didn't drop it in the dream.
The noise was my mother calling. "Turn on the TV. Something awful happened to the Space Shuttle". And then, and only then was I transfixed by the endless replays, the disbelief.
My mother has passed away, it's been over 10 years now. I made sure to pull the decanter out of all the other knick-nacks from the estate. I still have it. You know what? There was already a chip in the top. I guess she told us kids not to go near it because she knew how fragile it was.
As the US government operates outside of many people's interpretation of its constitutional limits, it can only be considered by many to be a criminal organization.
FTFY
The clock inspired an Iron Maiden classic 80s nuke rock piece. When MTV played videos, nuclear war and/or post nuclear settings were a recurring theme since the cold war was still on and intensified during the Reagan administration. I should make a list of these videos if somebody hasn't already.
They might have competed well on their own; but did we really have to help them by making it hard for factory workers to find good jobs, and easy for those same workers to find bad jobs and get NINJA loans so they could buy stuff from China?
Actually they didn't learn a whole lot from us. They're re-living the late 19th and early 20th century agrarian-industrial transition, with predictable outcomes. Just google for air quality in China. Whew! I've been known to joke that if the Chinese aren't careful they're going to have a communist revolution on their hands. The conditions that exist there now seem strikingly similar to the conditions that lead to general strikes and violent lock-outs in the US. The environmental conditions seem to be building towards a "Cuyahoga" moment, where a river catches on fire and people realize, too late, what they lost.
If you were in France betting on this, I could see your position; but if you're an American you're not a bettor--you're a jockey. You should not be betting on the race. You should be totally focused on winning. Good analogy. Those Comm School professors and their students, they really did throw the race for money.
OK, some agreement here. I think Nixon's idea of opening up was not bad; but MFN status for China, Nafta, etc. Not so much. Some trade, sure; but striving to break down all barriers? Not so much.
Amen. I'd also like to see it give high priority to media when the user permits it. I don't mind if my text takes a few extra seconds to render while music is playing in the background. I do mind if the music burps because I've loaded a new document.
Back in the 90s a business student told me we needed free trade with China because they would become more powerful than us. That's one kind of loser talk.
The other kind of loser talk is from the parent. It's hubris.
Overestimating an opponent (note, not an enemy, an opponent) and underestimating are both bad IMHO.
If I had to lose sleep over one thing about our military, it'd be aircraft carriers in a naval battle with China. Giant siting ducks. They've been the backbone of the navy for decades now. Just think about that. That's an awful long time for opponents to think about strategies against it.
We shouldn't be beating our chest and bragging. We should be figuring out what to do if carriers become sitting ducks under some new weapons system. WW2 proved the carrier. WW3 might disprove it.
We should also take a page from their book--the Art of War, and try to prevent opponents from becoming enemies. We've been doing a pretty sucky job of that lately.
Just keep reducing the work week, while keeping salaries constant. Corporations will bitch; but these are the same corporations that are making huge productivity gains and paying CEOs millions of dollars to destroy companies. The've got the money. The salaried workers will take more vacations, helping the hospitality industry, or they'll invent new things on their own time.
Work week will be the new economic management tool. We don't know if the consequences of excessively short work weeks will cause other problems; but it's worth trying. It can't be any worse than the attempt to manage interest rates. The challenge will be to find a "sweet spot" for hours worked. We want a certain level of employment; but we don't want to create a labor shortage or social problems due to idleness.
When the robots really take over, that'll be the big problem--lots of people willing to volunteer for work, but no actual work, and lots of idleness. That could cause serious health and crime problems simply because people are bored. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it though. The current system requires people to invent stupid shit like apps that track other people and shove ads at them. You could argue that's already a case of people committing crimes because of the system. If those people didn't have to work, what would they do that might be better for society than some tracking ad platform?
That's a good question; but I couldn't find a good source in a timely manner. I did pull up a number of local news articles that said there were 10,000 to 30,000 illegal apartments in San Francisco. I'm sure many of them don't have kitchens; but I don't know if a kitchen is a legal requirement for what we would normally think of as an apartment. Since the city is so expensive and crowded, there are a lot of creative living arrangements one step up from the street. I'm sure a lot of them don't involve a kitchen.
You're reading too much into that line. phantomfive saw past that; but a lot of you didn't. Pleaes read the thread between me and phantomfive before knee-jerking on that one line. TIA.
Go back and read the rest of my replies on this thread. We do indeed understand that soda is bad for you. The quoted line was not intended to imply that one should drink soda like water.
I'd step back even further and say it's a repackaging of wiring things together. Once we got away from magnetic cores and punched-cards, wiring things together wasn't modeled in code very much. If all of that were really great, we would have already been doing more spreadsheet and/or circuit-simulator based programming. That's not to say it doesn't have some nifty applications. Aren't there some cool GUI front ends to audio processors that work that way?
How does RP handle dupes?
I know I put in my $0.02 previously, so I won't bother again.
The low-income people you've talked to, are they able to keep a 'fridge running? I suppose if they live in public housing, they get a 'fridge; but it's hard enough for regular people to manage their food prep and prevent spoilage. How practical is it for them to buy fresh veggies and use them up before they spoil? I've found that the best way to prepare veggies and keep them tasty is to steam or stir-fry. I used to hate vegetables too, until my late aunt showed me how to steam broccoli. Wow! What a revelation.
Anyway, I think we have general agreement on a lot here. If the people you're talking to are homeless though, or don't have a proper kitchen then all bets are off. I've seen a lot of (relatively) cheap apartments in San Francisco that don't come with a kitchen. Hot-plating can be done, but it's tricky. So then the poor are dealing with microwaves and processed crap because they don't have a kitchen. Vicious circle.
We need to do a better job teaching people.
Agreed, totally.
A CEO of MSFT, doubling-down on the Metro fiasco, vs. Janet Yellen, Quadrupling-down on QE.
This is why you can't win shorting badly run companies these days.
OK, I see what you mean. You didn't mean to imply oatmeal was on the buzzfeed list. I get it now (after hitting Submit of course).
Anyway, oatmeal. Good. Rice? Not so much. Why? Glycemic index. I've know this first hand. I was raised eating enriched long-grain rice. As an adult, I figured out that my tendency to "crash" after dinner was directly correlated to eating rice for dinner.
I've moved towards eating less white rice, and only eating it at lunch when I'm not tired and won't crash. I've tried brown rice, but it seems to do the same thing at dinner, even though they claim it has a lower GI (however, that's a recent experiment possibly ruined by the fact that I had a cold when I tried it).
A lot of the cheap foods you mention have a high GI or are starchy. Maybe "wild" rice can be had cheaply without the high GI, but now we're cycling back to things that the poor and uneducated won't figure out. Heck it took me long enough, and I've got a batchelor's degree. I've known professionals doing much better than me money-wise; but they have terrible diets.
Anyway, I get what you said. Aside from all that, calories/dollar is obviously not the only metric you should use. You need veggies and proteins, which will result in fewer calories/dollar, but less chance of diabetes from eating cheap starches and sugars all the time.
Is your link broken or were you not expecting me to follow it? The link has the top five items as:
Wendy's fries: 249, Five Guys fries: 265, Wendy's Frosty: 280, A specific Duncan donut: 357, Bananas 656.
Oatmeal is not even on that list. However, I have oatmeal in my kitchen and the package says 150 cal/serving, 30 servings per container. That's 4500 calories in the container and I would have to pay $5/container for it to be 900 calories. I know I pay much less, $3-$4 depending on sales and stuff so oatmeal is indeed an excellent healthy source of cheap calories. I didn't mean to imply fast food was the only way. I just said it was the most obvious way for poor people who don't know any better.
Water has ZERO calories vs. a boatload for soda.
Google for "calories per dollar". Most of the foods at the top of the list are junk like fast-food burgers and pizza. Papa John's advertises that they accept EBT (I think it's because the pizza is frozen and you have to heat it, so that's OK). That's probably a good calorie/dollar ratio on their pizza. (No, I don't work for PJ's). The one food that's considered healthy on those lists is bananas; but you'd have to eat like a gorilla to get a full meal from them. A good rule of thumb is to eat like Mexicans. Beans and rice have excellent calories/dollar if you don't mind what beans do. Throw in just a bit of cheese and meat on the side and you can feed yourself cheaply.
Anyway, healthy food *can* be had for less than junk, but you really have to think about it. The typical EBT recipient is not even likely to make the leap of logic to google for "calories per dollar" or think about healthy food. Also, those who are working poor are pressed for time. Have you ever tried to get from afordable housing to low-wage work via public transit? I've seen people doing that riding the opposite way on the Metro--working people living in DC going out to the 'burbs on the train, transferring to a bus to get to some office park where they answer the phones. You're so tired at the end of the day, the fast-food place near your house is all you've got time for.
The complaints do end up lining up one after another in the comments section. So both "cue" and "queue" work.
The resulting thread is exasperating and could take us anywhere, so Q (like on Star Trek) also works.
do NOT connect SCADA systems to the internet.
Do have employees running around in trucks to check things, or actively monitoring larger systems that need constant attention. Do charge customers more money to support those extra employees. Do make decisions based on daily dumps from mag tapes somebody drove over to the central office. Note, I'm not saying that's a bad idea. I'm just pointing out the trade. I bet a lot of things were done like that up into the 1980s. I have personally driven mag tapes from one office to another. It helped me earn spending money for when I went back to school. Maybe we fix the employment problem and the security problem by dialing back technology just a bit?
The Paleo diet might be efficient for the species to survive. Individuals in a modern context? Not so much. You're talking about a species of hunter-gatherers who lived in small bands. A good strategy might be having the women pop out a baby every other year, men who die at 40, and a handful of post-menopausal women live to 50 to care for the extra children. That's probably not what you're expecting with the Paleo Diet.
If longevity is your goal, I think you're better off studying the habits of people who live in regions with long life spans. There seems to be a general consensus that happiness and daily physical activity are important. Diet is just a part of it.
Really?. Oh well, at least you didn't fall for the sig.
Math lies like a dog.
History lies prefer a burger.
Economics? All custard.
Anything else doesn't cut the mustard
That's the way I feel.
Maybe it's all surreal.
Entropy of all that's real.
All you need to know about it is here. After listening to this, your understanding of cosmology won't be that much better, but you'll be happier.