The idea is that if you're stuck in a code, only by explaining line by line your reasoning to someone (or even a rubber duck), it'll help you to find the solution yourself.
Similar principle in designing buildings. When the architect is sketching, it is called "having a conversation with himself",
I do the same writing scripts, when I get stuck, I write (in the comments) what I'm thinking, and by writing down thought 1, that makes space to have thought 2.
Kinda like a pipe, or stack, you pop the first one off, so you can see the next one.
Sounds largely right, also because in order to understand a problem one often has to try to solve it, ie. a new idea, and then by wondering why the idea sucks, so start to understand the nature of the problem better. What people call "iteration".
Meeting with others is a good way to discover why your solution sucks.
Staying quiet in solitude with the mind wandering, is a good way to generate new ideas. [1]
Brainstorming kinda does these in reverse, trying to generate ideas in the high pressure confusion of external stimulus, and then people go off on their own to wonder why the whole thing sucked so badly.
[1] Under the shower if you're most people, but also drinking ale if you're Inspector Morse, playing your violin if you're Sherlock Holmes, and so on.
Penniless student protesters don't make a democracy. Monied interests make a democracy (or a cleptocracy, depending on your political view). The "peaceful-west" is an illusion, in the west there are major geopolitical conflicts that have involved the west all throughout the short history of democracy, it is simply that they have not recently touched our shores because of our economic/military might. Strength (economic and military) keeps the relative peace, democracy simply allows the tribal factions a temporary pressure outlet. Without the economic might to drown the dissent, democracy simply isn't enough of a pressure relief. You can't give a country an economy (or democracy), they need to learn to fish...
Yes, and, well, there's two aspects, the economic material conditions, and the inner ethics and attitudes of people. And the two develop hand in hand, where advances in one allow advances in the other and vice versa.
So you can't build a modern economy on tribalism, but crucially, once you do have a modern economy, that tends to water down any serious tribalism.
This is more or less same as what you're saying, just that, there's a subtle difference. In a modern society, people don't feel tribal, and so they don't mind which "tribe" wins the election. (Lots of caveats to add to this in a moment.) Yes, Republicans and Democrats are very tribal, but at the end of the day, the people accept the winner, and by accept I mean, they don't start a civil war when the other side wins.
But in a truly tribal society (excuse allusions to no true Scotsman) there can be no democracy because no tribe will accept being led by a figurehead from another tribe. And that is partly what happened to Lebanon. They tried to keep the power balanced between the various different ethnic groups, but because it was all based on trying to keep balance between groups, the thing eventually fell apart at the first insult. Literally it became civil war.
Whereas, in the West, things are less tribal, ie. despite all the identity politics, we are not breaking out into civil wars after each election. And that's the sense in which I mean, "more peaceful". People are just not going to start forming militias just because their own group lost this or that.
Maybe because there is no power vacuum, as a modern nation distributes power around various institutions and elites and classes. Maybe because people just don't want to fight, as they have cultural memory of world wars. But basically, people are more "peaceful". I guess it all goes hand in hand.
But yes, our peace is largely also part and parcel of bombing various places around the world.
I don't think most people really understand why the West is (more or less) organised, developed, peaceful, democratic (more or less).
And I wish there was a simple answer. But the list of factors just keeps growing. There are many lands in the world where nation states just will not start up, no matter how much aid is given nor ordinance be dropped.
A major factor is the tribal nature of societies, which don't transition well into nationhood because its government institutions become tribal, nepotistic, and so simply raise resentment amongst the youth who are not well connected. Look at the global corruption index for a measure of why having fair, open, meritocratic, institutions are essential for countries to "work". And how do you make an institution meritocratic and fair if everyone you hire is tribalistic and used to the tribal loyalty and connections way of doing business?
Then, that's just one factor. And don't get me wrong, I'm not saying tribes are bad. They have been humanity's answer to social order for 50,000 years or more. It ain't going anywhere anytime soon.
A place like the UK started to rewrite the social rules starting with the Magna Carta 800 years ago. It has had time to work its way into the institutions.
Then, on top of that, you have a regional war between Saudi Arabia and Iran. They run proxy wars though all sorts of groups, in a region where population growth and failed modernity has provided a lot of young unemployed men who love the idea of brotherhood and so readily form militias and want to kick ass. All that weaponry funding is coming from somewhere, namely the Saudis and Iranians and in turn, their Western allies and their Russian and Chinese allies.
And that's just for starters, before we even get to the 100 shades of Islam and the authoritarian nature of that religion which on the one hand, makes people want to have a peaceful, ordered, highly moral life, yet on the other hand, is quite uncompromising and has a retro-revival ethos going, making it highly puritanical, and is being actively weaponised by various political and religious leaders.
And that's before we even get into more complex factors.
So basically, no, just repatriating migrants and getting tough with regimes isn't going to get very far.
Climate science is "systems science". It is very much a hard science; however, there'll always be uncertainties for political ideologues to talk up. We've got about a 10% of creating a disaster, and no second planet earth yo move to, and that alone means we should be talking about appropriate actions, and not *if* there's a problem. It's very easy for the oil industry to sow fear, uncertainty and doubt over the science, which is just a tried and true political game. The scientists themselves will not (by and large) explain what to do -- that's not their expertise -- but they are convinced that there is a problem, and their reasons are clearly explained. Skepticalscience.com has a summary of "skeptic arguments" and what scientists say. You can always read the peer reviewed literature yourself. But somehow I think you'll just retreat back to your blog and news sites, which give you the information you want to believe.
Look, I am sure you won't like this or agree, but as a human being, I can only say it as best as I have come to see it, and from trying to follow this issue over the last 15 years or so, there's a couple of things I see quite clearly, albeit, had I not read the stuff I read, I would not see it this way, but for what it is worth, as reasoned debate here's a couple of key points:
All of us are part of one sub culture or another and we all make value judgements. The environmental movement is a values driven culture, and is broadly about human's place in the ecosystem, which is a values judgement which says that humanity is one species on the planet. That particular values judgement downplays the role of human, seeing human as just another species. That's kinda the deep ecology view. Now there's variations on that, as not everyone goes that far, but that is an example of values judgements. That humans are less valuable than forests.
Now your values judgements may or may not line up with that. That's not my point. My point is that you are making values judgements, one sort or another, as for example, all the people who say we must act, and then pick solutions which are base do the belief that humans are essentially selfish and consume too much and don't know how to live in balance.
People who say that would not, for example, say that a human is a part of nature, created by nature, and that a human is merely living out their natural competition and drive in evolutionary natural selection to become the dominant species and transform as much raw material as possible into survival advantage, and that therefore the answer to running out of resources is to go to space and mine asteroids, because that's what nature does, expand and propagate life as fas as possible.
Can you see the implied values judgements in saying that humans should cut back on consumption? Now I'm not saying that's a wrong judgment, but it is a judgment, ie. ethics and not facts, it is a human ethical judgement, and only then do people decide what we "must" do to combat climate change. Instead, people who don't have this judgment about selfishness will more normally go for the "adapt" with "new technology" ideas, rather than the "reduce" and "consume less" ideas.
Climate change as an issue about solutions is all about values judgements. And that's why oil companies as symbols of big bad polluting uncaring capitalism are seen as the only ones driving the politics, whereas the good guys like wind are seen as just doing the right thing based on the facts.
Yet, we use lots of energy so any solution will be a big solution, and wind farms are not little friendly wind mills, they are billion dollar installations, and before long they'll be trillion dollars' worth of installations, and that by definition is big energy, and I find it hard to believe that those big companies don't have vested interests in promoting the idea of man made climate change and decarbonisation.
And nuclear has a vested interest too. Now we may say they are
Um, the point is, dare I say this, that there's very hard science and there's soft science. There's findings which are highly testable, repeatedly, and there's findings which are verging on the non-reproduceable. And whilst science tends to self-correct, sometimes, just sometimes, it can take decades for that self-correction to take place, simply because as you say, it is impossible to remove any bias and error all the time, yet science as a practice must go on.
We are just now, for example, a big example, witnessing a 100% reversal in the thinking behind dietary advice which was the basis for public health advice for the last 50 years. It seems it was soo wrong, that it actually created the epidemic of obesity, diabetes, and maybe even dementia. But this correction is ongoing, and we'll probably need another 50 years to know whether this correction is actually correct.
And it was all science. Albeit, given the limitations of what you can do to people in a lab, it was all soft science, but despite it being soft, the authorities and people in charge still pushed it as pretty definitive and correct. See, that's risk.
Put aside all the politics and questions of morality and ethics and whether humans are too stupid to do the right thing, there is always risk that the big theory is wrong, dead wrong, and that it will have consequences. And when you look at what things like, "97% of scientists are in consensus" are actually based on, you can see it is being oversold, for the sake of "saving the planet".
We cannot, well some people do, rule out the bias of "expert bias". It happens. We know it happens, from time to time. Especially when there is apparent consensus. I used to believe global warming 100% and assume it was all correct, because I normally trust science, but then started to wonder why people were touting consensus and virtual certainty.
Science, the one thing is needs to be in practice, is self-correcting, but once people declare consensus and virtual certainty, we can no longer know whether it can be trusted because that one thing, self-correction, it being open to question by anybody, "on the word of no-one", as the motto used to go, goes out the window.
It cannot self-correct if any dissenting scientists gets lambasted as deniers. It may be right it may be wrong. Wait another 100 years to find out.
Act in the meantime as you see fit. May the consequences be on your head.
I am surprised that anyone serious about security would ever install a web browser password plugin for their password management software. It seems logical that it is just a bug away from password compromise.
Oh I agree. I think people have been recommending password managers despite the, "all your eggs in one internet connected basket" thing.
Unfortunately there aren't many options. All I can think of is an air-gapped encrypted tablet whose sole purpose is to keep passwords. And then physically typing them.
Which makes the bunch of random words the much more attractive way; easy to read and type.
The US budget isn't like your household budget. First of all, the federal debt is in dollars and not, say, euros. Do you know where dollars come from? The Federal government is the only source of dollars in the world. The dollar is a fiat currency. The Fed can, and does, create billions of dollars with the stroke of a keyboard. So, imagine that, whenever you were short of money, you could put some in your checking account by typing a number in your computer. Then, your budget would be like the Federal budget.
The long and short of it is, the Federal debt isn't really a big deal. The Right likes to harp on it because it's another way to attack "Big Government", one of their bogeymen. Why? Because it's the Federal government which creates the consumer protections big business hates, a.k.a., regulations. Does the Right really not understand how the economy works? Do they really think giving money to rich people will somehow spur growth, even though we've known for decades that it's quite the opposite? Do they really not understand how a fiat currency works? Are they unable to see that decades of right-wing economics have made the rich richer, and the poor poorer? Or do they just not care as long as they get their way? Clearly the working people voting them in don't get it.
But the trouble is that there is so much fake money piling up.
People want growth, but real growth, not fake growth.
There has been a break between real value (what money should be) and fake value (printing paper, financial derivatives, housing bubbles, etc.)
The system has been grossly corrupted. It is arguably a worse problem than whether some people are more rich, on paper, than other people, when most of the "rich" is indeterminate paper crap.
The fact that it isn't "real" debt is very much part of the problem of why so many people are becoming poorer.
The players all got far too clever and fooled themselves into thinking they were creating real value.
Humans will be involved only in maintaining the robots, and not in the actual assembly process, since they slow the entire process down to "human speed".
As long as the robot still needs someone to bring it its alcohol (if it's Bender) then I'm sure we humans can find a job.
Now I just need someone to bring me my caffeine so I can stay awake 24/7.
This is the big issue, and whilst the monotheistic abrahamic religions are all basically the same, they are also somewhat different. And a big debate is whether those differences matter or not. Some people, Moslem Islamic academics, argue that it is not reformable the way Christianity was. Some argue that the natural progress of authoritarian to modern is a natural developmental process which will unfold for all societies sooner or later.
Of course, a bigoted view will simply paint all with the same brush. The debate for modern liberals though, is more about, how do you estimate how many percent of the hundreds of millions or billions, will tend over the decades, towards a reformed Islam? I don't think anyone can answer that.
There are arguments that, Jesus did something very strange (if he existed), namely, he inserted the idea of personal freedom into what would otherwise be an authoritarian and dogmatic imperialistic religion. He was Buddha for the West. And that kernel eventually helped the empire (Christianity) fall. Whereas other branches of the monotheistic belief didn't have that. There's the argument that Islam is "wholistic" ie. covers everything and hasn't had the necessary separation of church and state which Europe discovered was necessary after decades of wars. There's also the argument that the obsession with purity is part of a "all or nothing" view in Islam which is uncompromising, totalitarian, and without compromise, there can be no modern culture or model. (Moslems themselves write books stating this). Plus Jesus was never a tribal warrior. So many argue that there are differences and they do matter. But those are all opinions.
I think life goes on and I'm a big believer in change being chaotic and unexpected, so regardless of how many reasons there are for why "Islam is different", I figure it'll change as everything changes, in an evolutionary way.
Yes, and this goes to the question of what makes a modern state. It isn't just ballot boxes. Nor is it a complete absence of tribalistic-minded people.
Every nation has those, because the tribal mindset is a stage everyone goes through at age 8 onwards... and many stay there. So there's always a tribal tendency in society.
What really makes a modern state is probably in the character of its institutions. Like the famous Yes Minister where politicians simply come and go, whilst the real control and continuity is in the civil service.
And in turn, do the people in those institutions retain a sense of resisting corruption. For all its faults, there is a huge contrast between the USA where everyone seems to be clear and hold dear the notion of free gun ownership as a civil right, compared to the "state" of Turkey where Erdogan somehow managed to fire thousands and thousands of people on the spot from their jobs in various institutions, just because he perceived them to possibly have links to his opponents.
I mean who wakes up in the morning and says, hey today I'm going to totally change the character of all the nation's important institutions, and people go along with it?? Of course, Turkey is sitting next to a war zone, and Saddam was praised for at least retaining control, so perhaps this is just Turkey returning to a level which it is more comfortable at. And authoritarianism is a stage that most societies have gone through or are going through. It isn't bad as such. It is what can be managed.
In any case, any pretence of it being similar to Europe is over.
The problem here is people going along with the flow and stampeding into fields which are either fashionable at the time, or else subject to big public messages around skills shortages.
[....]
There's no hard and fast secret to avoiding finding yourself in a similar situation, but as a general rule, keeping your skills sufficiently flexible to allow for a bit of direction-change and doing what you can to avoid lemming-rushes will generally help manage your risks.
With ageing population, globalisation, automation, growing debts, etc. the common factor is change, and as has been pointed out decades ago, whilst corporations can move across continents, adapting to change, people are social creatures and do not easily move. So whilst there is truth to "on your bike" to find a job, the logical conclusion of that is that everyone a) act as an individual, and b) not get married, and c) become citizen of every country.
But that's just the start. The old "bureaucratic" model of education (that you go to the building where the desks are with all the smart learned people) is falling, as it is also a model that's too "social" to adapt to rapid change. Universities, wonderful as they are, have to perpetuate their own reason for existing, they have their own culture, and they went with this notion that everyone should go to university.
In the globalised chaotic world, that's not really tenable anymore. Everyone does have to learn, but what they learn has to change according to circumstance and opportunities. People are starting to talk about needing three different careers in one lifetime. There's no way you can just stop for 4 years and go take a new degree style course, not for most people, if that model is based on young people with few or no dependants or attachments.
The model has to change. I think people will simply start incorporating learning as part of working, and the old bureaucratic model will cut back to certain specialties. In the old days, most things were apprenticeships. Before bureaucracies and factories, people learnt by doing. Somehow we need to reincorporate that model even though now is a time when many jobs are more about knowledge. But the alternative is the bleak social disaster towns which are left in the wake of the big companies which got up and left.
After supplying 1KW the company claims they gave you 5KW. Same issue in: Taxi meters; scales in the cheese shop; the calendar in the hotel calculating how many nights you stayed; your decorator painting by the hour; etc. And some professions' whole purpose for existing is to count, eg. quantity surveying.
It's the government's job (usually is) to regulate and settle these sorts of disputes quickly so that they are not a drag on society.
I gather the notion of design patterns came from an architect (buildings) who visited Italian towns to try to find out why they "worked". In other words, he was trying to learn from established experience. And the film director Ridley Scott said that the voice of experience is what he calls intuition. In a way it is the opposite of math puzzles. It's having enough experience in organising things that you start to intuitively foresee that some arrangements will turn out more simple and elegant and maintainable.
I'm thinking there's the notion that, individual citizens can afford to lead peaceful lives, so long as the group/nation is being protected by force and power. But then those individuals, who pride themselves on being peaceful, can't place that peaceful morality onto those who are doing the protection.
In the old days, the power would be the King, who was a dictator. Today we have a sort of more distributed power... not quite democracy where everyone votes on everything and everything is transparent, but at least, there's a variety of groups and interests, and they are funded by taxation, so in effect, normal people are paying taxes to the groups which are doing the protection.
And I think it is honest to say, so long as things are fairly stable, so long as individuals can afford to lead peaceful lives, we do implicitly agree with there being powerful groups who have to do the protecting. We individuals can afford to be peaceful because we contracted out *our* dirty work to others.
It is one of the many specialisations which allow modern societies to work. Just like how I don't have to get my hands dirty growing my own vegetables.
And I agree with you that these things have to exist, and if we didn't have them, well, look at what happened to the Native Americans who met with a more technically powerful people who couldn't resist a land grab.
Of course just as a King could abuse his own power, how do we know these groups are not abusing their power? But however one tries to answer that, I think one has to judge it from the point of view of the task of being powerful enough to protect, rather than the morality of common person who lives a peaceful sheltered life.
You really need something like ZFS which puts a checksum on every file and verifies it, so if it does get an error it can resolve it.
In a small enterprise, I've been down this road of what to do, and the worst problem was, it seems to me, the not knowing whether the bits are there and safe.
How many backups should I keep? How can I trust this one rather than that one? When does a backup turn bad? What if weird hardware does a weird thing? And so on.
With ZFS I can scrub, I can get notifications, I can send filesystems to remote pools, and because stuff is just a file, not in some archive package, I can idle my hours browsing through files to see they are openable and readable, as one last sporadic manual check by human.
Snapshots and volume management are icing on the cake as far as I'm concerned, very useful, but without checksums, would be elaborate theatre. Just yesterday I was dismayed to see a drive in a desktop with a desktop filesystem, showing signs that it had been suffering silent data corruption for a long time. But the backups are in ZFS pools which go back years, and so all is not lost.
I love ZFS, and as for the other issues people raise, data does need to be watched, whatever tech one is using.
Point is, I don't think guns and phones matter much to whether this is a free country. It is all in the intangible subtleties of the culture. It is in the common sense of the people. If that goes, we're fucked.
Unfortunately that is simply false. When the Government is setup to be a tyranny, it only takes the right person in office to make it so. The "common sense" of the people should never let the Government get to the point where it's people have no natural rights (personal liberty).
Many Western countries are setup just like the UK, where the wrong person in power means absolute tyranny. It's taken the UK about 15 years to kill free speech, but anything today deemed "hate speech" will land you in jail. The UK, France, and countless others used to be the Bastions of Free speech that everyone else tried to emulate. Not any longer.
I don't know enough about the politics to know whether you're right. One thing though, my point for what it is worth, is that you seem to be looking at the external aspects, like, what are the laws and do people have arms, whereas I'm wondering more about the internal aspects, what do ordinary people, and politicians, in this country, feel is common sense and appropriate. For example, law says you have to divulge your encryption password, or be thrown in jail for 2 years. But I don't, as far as I know, see this law being abused. It is probably there mainly to catch the bad people.
You are right, if the laws make it easy for tyrants, then the first tyrant could take over... but I figure it is more about the character of the institutions which are commonplace in the nation. So instead of looking at gun ownership, I'd look at the corruption index listing. How corrupt is the ordinary person, politician, and crucially, civil servant?
If too many people, including civil servants, the intelligence agencies, and all manner of government institutions, are all reasonably honest, and don't like corruption, then it is hard for a tyrant to really get a grip on anything. That I think is far more important than gun ownership. In other words, if one needs guns, then one has other, worse problems. The "mafia" was called "our thing" because people didn't trust the government.
Corruption is corruption. It is no different if the government is corrupt or the corruption is in the people, either way it is bad news. If people need guns because they believe the government is corrupt, who is going to stop the people becoming corrupt?
The problem started way before the admin entered the command. The root cause is that you can do this by entering a command in the first place. This sort of thing should be part of a change-controlled configuration management system, and the change should be reviewed before it gets rolled out, it should be rolled out on a staged basis to a single cluster, and it should get rolled back if it breaks things.
Yes, and I gather, similarly, airline safety is about the systems (culture/procedures/tech) which allowed the individual to make the mistake. Even the way a checklist is written, is critical (what to leave out is as important as what to include).
And I gather like with a new drug, you don't give all your subjects the same injection all together. Wait and see if the first survives, then go on.
And it is always kinda fascinating how, the system one builds to cope with one set of scenarios, in turn creates a new set of scenarios.
Like when a wife dragged her husband over and, gesturing gracefully towards the Mac cube and display siting on the shop table, she said to her husband, "now... this!"
The husband in his infinite wisdom said, "ah, no, no that's just the power supply, the computer is under the table somewhere."
(Male) consumer didn't get it. Cube died, perhaps not just because it was overpriced.
One thing I always feel about the UK is that it muddles along, understated and common. There's a wartime picture of a row of houses which have been bombed out, and the wife, in her little headscarf and coat, is stepping out the front door (what's left of it) to find her husband some milk for breakfast. I always think that sums up the British character. Unmoved, muddle along, and if there is a crisis, it's that we're out of Jaffa Cakes.
The Americans on the other hand, always have "a situation" and it has to be big like a mountain. Everything has to be big and impressive. I recall the time an American tourist stepped out of his van to ask me directions to the "University campus". I tried to explain that the small town didn't have a campus, rather the university buildings were all scattered about the town (after all it had grown over a thousand years). But no, he says, "No you don't understand, I want the University campus!" Which left me a little bemused as having lived there for years, I'd never come across this "campus" he spoke of, so I waved him towards town where he'd see a bunch of old buildings.
Point is, I don't think guns and phones matter much to whether this is a free country. It is all in the intangible subtleties of the culture. It is in the common sense of the people. If that goes, we're fucked.
I'd venture to say that the most important qualities in a worker are not measurable and nor would most people have even heard about these other qualities in a theoretical way.
As an example of how things might be, in an alternate reality, is to look back to 1890 or something, when there was a proposal that the normal method of training architects, which was by apprenticeship, be replaced by a university qualification. The master builders of the time wrote a manifesto saying that all the key qualities of a good and creative builder architect, were not formally testable. The only way to know was to learn by apprenticeship working in a company which was doing real projects, where the person could demonstrate their aptitude for learning (you could only learn by doing) or quickly show that they lacked the artistic, technical, engineering, financial, service, and humanistic aptitudes needed to become a good architect. But the university "qualification" thing gained supremacy and then you got buildings which looked like concrete brutalist monsters which people were expected to live in whilst the architects were giving themselves awards.
Besides, most people don't really understand themselves, or how their group works, because humans are largely operating in intuitive unconscious modes, so the thought that you can "test" someone in the space of 15 mins is just self delusion. Yes people come to conclusions but they are largely down to who has the best intuition. But then people may confuse what they did consciously (we asked these clever questions) with what they did unconsciously (we sensed that our team likes more empathy or ambition or tribal values or whatever... and we picked up this person had more empathy or ambition or tribal values or... (insert other innumerable unknown unconscious qualities)).
I think the point is, these tests are not really tests, they're just a way to start a conversation. And what people conclude is more about, did the person play along with our silly tests, because we are intuitively looking for compliance and professionalism, or because we are actually looking for people who show some independence, or people who show some intuitive grasp of what unwritten codes to follow regarding which interests are really being served, and so on, plus whatever else.
Even if it was, it was highly preventable. The risk of failure of these things is well known...
The risk was entirely obvious.
Very true.
Plus it was an unnecessary risk. Cars and planes and phone batteries and things, all have a balance of risk to benefit, which kinda set the "accident" threshold. A truck driver who knows he has a health condition which may cause him to pass out, is not "accidental". A person who knowingly transmits AIDS is not accidental. And so on. Otherwise it starts to sound like something out of Goodfellas, "hey there wasn't anything we could have done about it."
A person who is trying to be careful isn't going to fly drones over a crowd. And as for that TV company which dropped a drone on a skiier's head...
You look at humans and see consciousness. I look at humans and see life. I see no difference between the two.
Nope there's a slight difference in how the word consciousness is used. I do NOT look at humans and see consciousness. If I look at other humans, all I can see is brains (and life, as you put it), and if I think about it, I assume those brains are conscious. BUT I cannot see their consciousness. Only I can "see" my consciousness, and it isn't even a seeing in any normal sense of, a subject looking at an object, because for me, consciousness is the subject, or to get religious, the Supreme Subject or Supreme Self, but that woo language isn't necessary, albeit poetic, it is just that, if I wasn't conscious, then I would experience nothing, and not even nothing, there could be no sense of "experiencing nothing" because experience itself, of anything, would simply not be, for me. I would not be. The analogies for consciousness are that it is a mirror on which everything is reflected, but the mirror itself is not made of anything, it is more like "space" or "emptiness". Again, poetic, but just that's consciousness.
Life is consciousness, and vice versa.
You experience consciousness as the ability to think, to say to yourself, "this is why I am doing this."
Again, not quite. Descartes said, "I think therefore I am" but he was mistranslated! It was more like, "Being, therefore Existence". A dog may be sentient, but that doesn't mean it has thoughts about itself. Man 500,000 years ago may have been sentient, but the contents of his experience didn't include thought out questions like, "why am I doing this", rather, he may have operated purely on instinct, but also, experienced his life, or given he didn't have the thought, "my life", he may simply have experienced running down large animals and experienced his hunger satiated by the flesh. Likewise elephants might be sentient but because they lack the neurones for abstract reasoning, they just hang about in their herd and look for water, experiencing life on the savannah like that.
Sadly, the FMRI machine, transcranial magnets, and some modern science experiments have shown that consciousness is just a side effect, a plausible explanation of our actions fed to the conscious mind by the real workhorse of human action and thought, the non-verbal parts of the brain. For instance, say you decide to move your arm. TOO LATE! Your brain started sending the signal before you consciously thought if it, before you decided, before you thought. Then thought is merely the reflected afterimage of non-conscious/non-verbal modules of the brain, the part of the brain that thinks it is the motivator, the initiator of action when in reality it is merely the translator of actions and thoughts into verbally accessible structures and experiential sensory phenomena. It is almost as if consciousness is just the "seminal memory," an altered version of events that gives the verbal part of the brain an understanding of what has just happened in terms it can relate to, but which actually deviate quite strikingly from actual reality.
Seeing thought and consciousness as the illusion they are, realizing that the actual human experience of life is inaccessible to the verbal mind, and therefore not able to be experienced truthfully, and that every verbalization of experience is fundamentally flawed with the untruths inherent in our experience of reality as "thinking beings" with "consciousness" becomes a little disorienting. Better to take the observation of "life" and "consciousness" outside the organism which we have proven has issues (massive ones!) with internal consistency, objectivity of experience, and even cause and effect.
From outside we see a complex system, reacting to the environment based on a system of internal rules. We call it life. It has movement, structure, and seeming purpose. An issue arises though. This is is in many ways functionally indisting
I mostly agree, plus there's a level of semantics to what we choose to call "genius".
And there's also, not to be ignored, a thing about "emergence". That's when certain conditions make something new possible. And that's a bit different to incremental change. For example, hypothetically, the world has 197 countries (or so) and you could incrementally see blocks merging until maybe there's just 3 counties. Now the difference between 197 and 3 seems big, while the difference between 3 and 0 is small, yet the move from 3 to 0 is arguably the most significant change, as at that point, a very different world becomes possible, a world without borders.
There's other names for this sort of thing, like "network effect" and "tipping point" and so on. A lot of things are around but don't actually make a big impact until there's sufficient adoption. In that sense a company can make an impact if they, through deals and marketing, manage to promote adoption, even if their own technical contribution was minimal.
And it's weird with social things like religion -- if just a few people believe it then it is a crazy whako cult, but if millions believe it then it is a religion and worthy of respect and tax exemptions. O_o
Slashdot Mirror
The idea is that if you're stuck in a code, only by explaining line by line your reasoning to someone (or even a rubber duck), it'll help you to find the solution yourself.
Similar principle in designing buildings. When the architect is sketching, it is called "having a conversation with himself",
I do the same writing scripts, when I get stuck, I write (in the comments) what I'm thinking, and by writing down thought 1, that makes space to have thought 2.
Kinda like a pipe, or stack, you pop the first one off, so you can see the next one.
Sounds largely right, also because in order to understand a problem one often has to try to solve it,
ie. a new idea, and then by wondering why the idea sucks, so start to understand the nature of the problem better.
What people call "iteration".
Meeting with others is a good way to discover why your solution sucks.
Staying quiet in solitude with the mind wandering, is a good way to generate new ideas. [1]
Brainstorming kinda does these in reverse, trying to generate ideas in the high pressure confusion of external stimulus,
and then people go off on their own to wonder why the whole thing sucked so badly.
[1] Under the shower if you're most people, but also drinking ale if you're Inspector Morse, playing your violin if you're Sherlock Holmes, and so on.
Penniless student protesters don't make a democracy. Monied interests make a democracy (or a cleptocracy, depending on your political view). The "peaceful-west" is an illusion, in the west there are major geopolitical conflicts that have involved the west all throughout the short history of democracy, it is simply that they have not recently touched our shores because of our economic/military might. Strength (economic and military) keeps the relative peace, democracy simply allows the tribal factions a temporary pressure outlet. Without the economic might to drown the dissent, democracy simply isn't enough of a pressure relief. You can't give a country an economy (or democracy), they need to learn to fish...
Yes, and, well, there's two aspects, the economic material conditions, and the inner ethics and attitudes of people. And the two develop hand in hand, where advances in one allow advances in the other and vice versa.
So you can't build a modern economy on tribalism, but crucially, once you do have a modern economy, that tends to water down any serious tribalism.
This is more or less same as what you're saying, just that, there's a subtle difference. In a modern society, people don't feel tribal, and so they don't mind which "tribe" wins the election. (Lots of caveats to add to this in a moment.) Yes, Republicans and Democrats are very tribal, but at the end of the day, the people accept the winner, and by accept I mean, they don't start a civil war when the other side wins.
But in a truly tribal society (excuse allusions to no true Scotsman) there can be no democracy because no tribe will accept being led by a figurehead from another tribe. And that is partly what happened to Lebanon. They tried to keep the power balanced between the various different ethnic groups, but because it was all based on trying to keep balance between groups, the thing eventually fell apart at the first insult. Literally it became civil war.
Whereas, in the West, things are less tribal, ie. despite all the identity politics, we are not breaking out into civil wars after each election. And that's the sense in which I mean, "more peaceful". People are just not going to start forming militias just because their own group lost this or that.
Maybe because there is no power vacuum, as a modern nation distributes power around various institutions and elites and classes. Maybe because people just don't want to fight, as they have cultural memory of world wars. But basically, people are more "peaceful". I guess it all goes hand in hand.
But yes, our peace is largely also part and parcel of bombing various places around the world.
I don't think most people really understand why the West is (more or less) organised, developed, peaceful, democratic (more or less).
And I wish there was a simple answer. But the list of factors just keeps growing. There are many lands in the world where nation states just will not start up, no matter how much aid is given nor ordinance be dropped.
A major factor is the tribal nature of societies, which don't transition well into nationhood because its government institutions become tribal, nepotistic, and so simply raise resentment amongst the youth who are not well connected. Look at the global corruption index for a measure of why having fair, open, meritocratic, institutions are essential for countries to "work". And how do you make an institution meritocratic and fair if everyone you hire is tribalistic and used to the tribal loyalty and connections way of doing business?
Then, that's just one factor. And don't get me wrong, I'm not saying tribes are bad. They have been humanity's answer to social order for 50,000 years or more. It ain't going anywhere anytime soon.
A place like the UK started to rewrite the social rules starting with the Magna Carta 800 years ago. It has had time to work its way into the institutions.
Then, on top of that, you have a regional war between Saudi Arabia and Iran. They run proxy wars though all sorts of groups, in a region where population growth and failed modernity has provided a lot of young unemployed men who love the idea of brotherhood and so readily form militias and want to kick ass. All that weaponry funding is coming from somewhere, namely the Saudis and Iranians and in turn, their Western allies and their Russian and Chinese allies.
And that's just for starters, before we even get to the 100 shades of Islam and the authoritarian nature of that religion which on the one hand, makes people want to have a peaceful, ordered, highly moral life, yet on the other hand, is quite uncompromising and has a retro-revival ethos going, making it highly puritanical, and is being actively weaponised by various political and religious leaders.
And that's before we even get into more complex factors.
So basically, no, just repatriating migrants and getting tough with regimes isn't going to get very far.
Climate science is "systems science". It is very much a hard science; however, there'll always be uncertainties for political ideologues to talk up. We've got about a 10% of creating a disaster, and no second planet earth yo move to, and that alone means we should be talking about appropriate actions, and not *if* there's a problem. It's very easy for the oil industry to sow fear, uncertainty and doubt over the science, which is just a tried and true political game. The scientists themselves will not (by and large) explain what to do -- that's not their expertise -- but they are convinced that there is a problem, and their reasons are clearly explained. Skepticalscience.com has a summary of "skeptic arguments" and what scientists say. You can always read the peer reviewed literature yourself. But somehow I think you'll just retreat back to your blog and news sites, which give you the information you want to believe.
Look, I am sure you won't like this or agree, but as a human being, I can only say it as best as I have come to see it, and from trying to follow this issue over the last 15 years or so, there's a couple of things I see quite clearly, albeit, had I not read the stuff I read, I would not see it this way, but for what it is worth, as reasoned debate here's a couple of key points:
All of us are part of one sub culture or another and we all make value judgements. The environmental movement is a values driven culture, and is broadly about human's place in the ecosystem, which is a values judgement which says that humanity is one species on the planet. That particular values judgement downplays the role of human, seeing human as just another species. That's kinda the deep ecology view. Now there's variations on that, as not everyone goes that far, but that is an example of values judgements. That humans are less valuable than forests.
Now your values judgements may or may not line up with that. That's not my point. My point is that you are making values judgements, one sort or another, as for example, all the people who say we must act, and then pick solutions which are base do the belief that humans are essentially selfish and consume too much and don't know how to live in balance.
People who say that would not, for example, say that a human is a part of nature, created by nature, and that a human is merely living out their natural competition and drive in evolutionary natural selection to become the dominant species and transform as much raw material as possible into survival advantage, and that therefore the answer to running out of resources is to go to space and mine asteroids, because that's what nature does, expand and propagate life as fas as possible.
Can you see the implied values judgements in saying that humans should cut back on consumption? Now I'm not saying that's a wrong judgment, but it is a judgment, ie. ethics and not facts, it is a human ethical judgement, and only then do people decide what we "must" do to combat climate change. Instead, people who don't have this judgment about selfishness will more normally go for the "adapt" with "new technology" ideas, rather than the "reduce" and "consume less" ideas.
Climate change as an issue about solutions is all about values judgements. And that's why oil companies as symbols of big bad polluting uncaring capitalism are seen as the only ones driving the politics, whereas the good guys like wind are seen as just doing the right thing based on the facts.
Yet, we use lots of energy so any solution will be a big solution, and wind farms are not little friendly wind mills, they are billion dollar installations, and before long they'll be trillion dollars' worth of installations, and that by definition is big energy, and I find it hard to believe that those big companies don't have vested interests in promoting the idea of man made climate change and decarbonisation.
And nuclear has a vested interest too. Now we may say they are
Um, the point is, dare I say this, that there's very hard science and there's soft science. There's findings which are highly testable, repeatedly, and there's findings which are verging on the non-reproduceable. And whilst science tends to self-correct, sometimes, just sometimes, it can take decades for that self-correction to take place, simply because as you say, it is impossible to remove any bias and error all the time, yet science as a practice must go on.
We are just now, for example, a big example, witnessing a 100% reversal in the thinking behind dietary advice which was the basis for public health advice for the last 50 years. It seems it was soo wrong, that it actually created the epidemic of obesity, diabetes, and maybe even dementia. But this correction is ongoing, and we'll probably need another 50 years to know whether this correction is actually correct.
And it was all science. Albeit, given the limitations of what you can do to people in a lab, it was all soft science, but despite it being soft, the authorities and people in charge still pushed it as pretty definitive and correct. See, that's risk.
Put aside all the politics and questions of morality and ethics and whether humans are too stupid to do the right thing, there is always risk that the big theory is wrong, dead wrong, and that it will have consequences. And when you look at what things like, "97% of scientists are in consensus" are actually based on, you can see it is being oversold, for the sake of "saving the planet".
We cannot, well some people do, rule out the bias of "expert bias". It happens. We know it happens, from time to time. Especially when there is apparent consensus. I used to believe global warming 100% and assume it was all correct, because I normally trust science, but then started to wonder why people were touting consensus and virtual certainty.
Science, the one thing is needs to be in practice, is self-correcting, but once people declare consensus and virtual certainty, we can no longer know whether it can be trusted because that one thing, self-correction, it being open to question by anybody, "on the word of no-one", as the motto used to go, goes out the window.
It cannot self-correct if any dissenting scientists gets lambasted as deniers.
It may be right it may be wrong. Wait another 100 years to find out.
Act in the meantime as you see fit. May the consequences be on your head.
I am surprised that anyone serious about security would ever install a web browser password plugin for their password management software. It seems logical that it is just a bug away from password compromise.
Oh I agree. I think people have been recommending password managers despite the, "all your eggs in one internet connected basket" thing.
Unfortunately there aren't many options. All I can think of is an air-gapped encrypted tablet whose sole purpose is to keep passwords. And then physically typing them.
Which makes the bunch of random words the much more attractive way; easy to read and type.
We are 20 fucking trillion dollars in debt.
What the fuck so you want?
The US budget isn't like your household budget. First of all, the federal debt is in dollars and not, say, euros. Do you know where dollars come from? The Federal government is the only source of dollars in the world. The dollar is a fiat currency. The Fed can, and does, create billions of dollars with the stroke of a keyboard. So, imagine that, whenever you were short of money, you could put some in your checking account by typing a number in your computer. Then, your budget would be like the Federal budget.
The long and short of it is, the Federal debt isn't really a big deal. The Right likes to harp on it because it's another way to attack "Big Government", one of their bogeymen. Why? Because it's the Federal government which creates the consumer protections big business hates, a.k.a., regulations.
Does the Right really not understand how the economy works? Do they really think giving money to rich people will somehow spur growth, even though we've known for decades that it's quite the opposite? Do they really not understand how a fiat currency works? Are they unable to see that decades of right-wing economics have made the rich richer, and the poor poorer? Or do they just not care as long as they get their way? Clearly the working people voting them in don't get it.
But the trouble is that there is so much fake money piling up.
People want growth, but real growth, not fake growth.
There has been a break between real value (what money should be) and fake value (printing paper, financial derivatives, housing bubbles, etc.)
The system has been grossly corrupted. It is arguably a worse problem than whether some people are more rich, on paper, than other people, when most of the "rich" is indeterminate paper crap.
The fact that it isn't "real" debt is very much part of the problem of why so many people are becoming poorer.
The players all got far too clever and fooled themselves into thinking they were creating real value.
Humans will be involved only in maintaining the robots, and not in the actual assembly process, since they slow the entire process down to "human speed".
As long as the robot still needs someone to bring it its alcohol (if it's Bender) then I'm sure we humans can find a job.
Now I just need someone to bring me my caffeine so I can stay awake 24/7.
Anyone managed to train a dog barrista?
This is the big issue, and whilst the monotheistic abrahamic religions are all basically the same, they are also somewhat different. And a big debate is whether those differences matter or not. Some people, Moslem Islamic academics, argue that it is not reformable the way Christianity was. Some argue that the natural progress of authoritarian to modern is a natural developmental process which will unfold for all societies sooner or later.
Of course, a bigoted view will simply paint all with the same brush. The debate for modern liberals though, is more about, how do you estimate how many percent of the hundreds of millions or billions, will tend over the decades, towards a reformed Islam? I don't think anyone can answer that.
There are arguments that, Jesus did something very strange (if he existed), namely, he inserted the idea of personal freedom into what would otherwise be an authoritarian and dogmatic imperialistic religion. He was Buddha for the West. And that kernel eventually helped the empire (Christianity) fall. Whereas other branches of the monotheistic belief didn't have that. There's the argument that Islam is "wholistic" ie. covers everything and hasn't had the necessary separation of church and state which Europe discovered was necessary after decades of wars. There's also the argument that the obsession with purity is part of a "all or nothing" view in Islam which is uncompromising, totalitarian, and without compromise, there can be no modern culture or model. (Moslems themselves write books stating this). Plus Jesus was never a tribal warrior. So many argue that there are differences and they do matter. But those are all opinions.
I think life goes on and I'm a big believer in change being chaotic and unexpected, so regardless of how many reasons there are for why "Islam is different", I figure it'll change as everything changes, in an evolutionary way.
Yes, and this goes to the question of what makes a modern state. It isn't just ballot boxes. Nor is it a complete absence of tribalistic-minded people.
Every nation has those, because the tribal mindset is a stage everyone goes through at age 8 onwards... and many stay there. So there's always a tribal tendency in society.
What really makes a modern state is probably in the character of its institutions. Like the famous Yes Minister where politicians simply come and go, whilst the real control and continuity is in the civil service.
And in turn, do the people in those institutions retain a sense of resisting corruption. For all its faults, there is a huge contrast between the USA where everyone seems to be clear and hold dear the notion of free gun ownership as a civil right, compared to the "state" of Turkey where Erdogan somehow managed to fire thousands and thousands of people on the spot from their jobs in various institutions, just because he perceived them to possibly have links to his opponents.
I mean who wakes up in the morning and says, hey today I'm going to totally change the character of all the nation's important institutions, and people go along with it?? Of course, Turkey is sitting next to a war zone, and Saddam was praised for at least retaining control, so perhaps this is just Turkey returning to a level which it is more comfortable at. And authoritarianism is a stage that most societies have gone through or are going through. It isn't bad as such. It is what can be managed.
In any case, any pretence of it being similar to Europe is over.
The problem here is people going along with the flow and stampeding into fields which are either fashionable at the time, or else subject to big public messages around skills shortages.
[....]
There's no hard and fast secret to avoiding finding yourself in a similar situation, but as a general rule, keeping your skills sufficiently flexible to allow for a bit of direction-change and doing what you can to avoid lemming-rushes will generally help manage your risks.
With ageing population, globalisation, automation, growing debts, etc. the common factor is change, and as has been pointed out decades ago, whilst corporations can move across continents, adapting to change, people are social creatures and do not easily move. So whilst there is truth to "on your bike" to find a job, the logical conclusion of that is that everyone a) act as an individual, and b) not get married, and c) become citizen of every country.
But that's just the start. The old "bureaucratic" model of education (that you go to the building where the desks are with all the smart learned people) is falling, as it is also a model that's too "social" to adapt to rapid change. Universities, wonderful as they are, have to perpetuate their own reason for existing, they have their own culture, and they went with this notion that everyone should go to university.
In the globalised chaotic world, that's not really tenable anymore. Everyone does have to learn, but what they learn has to change according to circumstance and opportunities. People are starting to talk about needing three different careers in one lifetime. There's no way you can just stop for 4 years and go take a new degree style course, not for most people, if that model is based on young people with few or no dependants or attachments.
The model has to change. I think people will simply start incorporating learning as part of working, and the old bureaucratic model will cut back to certain specialties. In the old days, most things were apprenticeships. Before bureaucracies and factories, people learnt by doing. Somehow we need to reincorporate that model even though now is a time when many jobs are more about knowledge. But the alternative is the bleak social disaster towns which are left in the wake of the big companies which got up and left.
Spot on.
After supplying 1KW the company claims they gave you 5KW. Same issue in: Taxi meters; scales in the cheese shop; the calendar in the hotel calculating how many nights you stayed; your decorator painting by the hour; etc. And some professions' whole purpose for existing is to count, eg. quantity surveying.
It's the government's job (usually is) to regulate and settle these sorts of disputes quickly so that they are not a drag on society.
I gather the notion of design patterns came from an architect (buildings) who visited Italian towns to try to find out why they "worked". In other words, he was trying to learn from established experience. And the film director Ridley Scott said that the voice of experience is what he calls intuition. In a way it is the opposite of math puzzles. It's having enough experience in organising things that you start to intuitively foresee that some arrangements will turn out more simple and elegant and maintainable.
I'm thinking there's the notion that, individual citizens can afford to lead peaceful lives, so long as the group/nation is being protected by force and power. But then those individuals, who pride themselves on being peaceful, can't place that peaceful morality onto those who are doing the protection.
In the old days, the power would be the King, who was a dictator. Today we have a sort of more distributed power... not quite democracy where everyone votes on everything and everything is transparent, but at least, there's a variety of groups and interests, and they are funded by taxation, so in effect, normal people are paying taxes to the groups which are doing the protection.
And I think it is honest to say, so long as things are fairly stable, so long as individuals can afford to lead peaceful lives, we do implicitly agree with there being powerful groups who have to do the protecting. We individuals can afford to be peaceful because we contracted out *our* dirty work to others.
It is one of the many specialisations which allow modern societies to work. Just like how I don't have to get my hands dirty growing my own vegetables.
And I agree with you that these things have to exist, and if we didn't have them, well, look at what happened to the Native Americans who met with a more technically powerful people who couldn't resist a land grab.
Of course just as a King could abuse his own power, how do we know these groups are not abusing their power? But however one tries to answer that, I think one has to judge it from the point of view of the task of being powerful enough to protect, rather than the morality of common person who lives a peaceful sheltered life.
You really need something like ZFS which puts a checksum on every file and verifies it, so if it does get an error it can resolve it.
In a small enterprise, I've been down this road of what to do, and the worst problem was, it seems to me, the not knowing whether the bits are there and safe.
How many backups should I keep? How can I trust this one rather than that one? When does a backup turn bad? What if weird hardware does a weird thing? And so on.
With ZFS I can scrub, I can get notifications, I can send filesystems to remote pools, and because stuff is just a file, not in some archive package, I can idle my hours browsing through files to see they are openable and readable, as one last sporadic manual check by human.
Snapshots and volume management are icing on the cake as far as I'm concerned, very useful, but without checksums, would be elaborate theatre. Just yesterday I was dismayed to see a drive in a desktop with a desktop filesystem, showing signs that it had been suffering silent data corruption for a long time. But the backups are in ZFS pools which go back years, and so all is not lost.
I love ZFS, and as for the other issues people raise, data does need to be watched, whatever tech one is using.
Otherwise it is just Schrödinger's bits.
Point is, I don't think guns and phones matter much to whether this is a free country. It is all in the intangible subtleties of the culture. It is in the common sense of the people. If that goes, we're fucked.
Unfortunately that is simply false. When the Government is setup to be a tyranny, it only takes the right person in office to make it so. The "common sense" of the people should never let the Government get to the point where it's people have no natural rights (personal liberty).
Many Western countries are setup just like the UK, where the wrong person in power means absolute tyranny. It's taken the UK about 15 years to kill free speech, but anything today deemed "hate speech" will land you in jail. The UK, France, and countless others used to be the Bastions of Free speech that everyone else tried to emulate. Not any longer.
I don't know enough about the politics to know whether you're right. One thing though, my point for what it is worth, is that you seem to be looking at the external aspects, like, what are the laws and do people have arms, whereas I'm wondering more about the internal aspects, what do ordinary people, and politicians, in this country, feel is common sense and appropriate. For example, law says you have to divulge your encryption password, or be thrown in jail for 2 years. But I don't, as far as I know, see this law being abused. It is probably there mainly to catch the bad people.
You are right, if the laws make it easy for tyrants, then the first tyrant could take over... but I figure it is more about the character of the institutions which are commonplace in the nation. So instead of looking at gun ownership, I'd look at the corruption index listing. How corrupt is the ordinary person, politician, and crucially, civil servant?
If too many people, including civil servants, the intelligence agencies, and all manner of government institutions, are all reasonably honest, and don't like corruption, then it is hard for a tyrant to really get a grip on anything. That I think is far more important than gun ownership. In other words, if one needs guns, then one has other, worse problems. The "mafia" was called "our thing" because people didn't trust the government.
Corruption is corruption. It is no different if the government is corrupt or the corruption is in the people, either way it is bad news. If people need guns because they believe the government is corrupt, who is going to stop the people becoming corrupt?
The problem started way before the admin entered the command. The root cause is that you can do this by entering a command in the first place. This sort of thing should be part of a change-controlled configuration management system, and the change should be reviewed before it gets rolled out, it should be rolled out on a staged basis to a single cluster, and it should get rolled back if it breaks things.
Yes, and I gather, similarly, airline safety is about the systems (culture/procedures/tech) which allowed the individual to make the mistake. Even the way a checklist is written, is critical (what to leave out is as important as what to include).
And I gather like with a new drug, you don't give all your subjects the same injection all together. Wait and see if the first survives, then go on.
And it is always kinda fascinating how, the system one builds to cope with one set of scenarios, in turn creates a new set of scenarios.
Quite. Now if consumers cared, that's different.
Like when a wife dragged her husband over and, gesturing gracefully towards the Mac cube and display siting on the shop table, she said to her husband, "now... this!"
The husband in his infinite wisdom said, "ah, no, no that's just the power supply, the computer is under the table somewhere."
(Male) consumer didn't get it. Cube died, perhaps not just because it was overpriced.
5) Disarm the general public
6) kill free speech
The UK is right on track.
One thing I always feel about the UK is that it muddles along, understated and common. There's a wartime picture of a row of houses which have been bombed out, and the wife, in her little headscarf and coat, is stepping out the front door (what's left of it) to find her husband some milk for breakfast. I always think that sums up the British character. Unmoved, muddle along, and if there is a crisis, it's that we're out of Jaffa Cakes.
The Americans on the other hand, always have "a situation" and it has to be big like a mountain. Everything has to be big and impressive. I recall the time an American tourist stepped out of his van to ask me directions to the "University campus". I tried to explain that the small town didn't have a campus, rather the university buildings were all scattered about the town (after all it had grown over a thousand years). But no, he says, "No you don't understand, I want the University campus!" Which left me a little bemused as having lived there for years, I'd never come across this "campus" he spoke of, so I waved him towards town where he'd see a bunch of old buildings.
Point is, I don't think guns and phones matter much to whether this is a free country. It is all in the intangible subtleties of the culture. It is in the common sense of the people. If that goes, we're fucked.
I'd venture to say that the most important qualities in a worker are not measurable and nor would most people have even heard about these other qualities in a theoretical way.
As an example of how things might be, in an alternate reality, is to look back to 1890 or something, when there was a proposal that the normal method of training architects, which was by apprenticeship, be replaced by a university qualification. The master builders of the time wrote a manifesto saying that all the key qualities of a good and creative builder architect, were not formally testable. The only way to know was to learn by apprenticeship working in a company which was doing real projects, where the person could demonstrate their aptitude for learning (you could only learn by doing) or quickly show that they lacked the artistic, technical, engineering, financial, service, and humanistic aptitudes needed to become a good architect. But the university "qualification" thing gained supremacy and then you got buildings which looked like concrete brutalist monsters which people were expected to live in whilst the architects were giving themselves awards.
Besides, most people don't really understand themselves, or how their group works, because humans are largely operating in intuitive unconscious modes, so the thought that you can "test" someone in the space of 15 mins is just self delusion. Yes people come to conclusions but they are largely down to who has the best intuition. But then people may confuse what they did consciously (we asked these clever questions) with what they did unconsciously (we sensed that our team likes more empathy or ambition or tribal values or whatever... and we picked up this person had more empathy or ambition or tribal values or ... (insert other innumerable unknown unconscious qualities)).
I think the point is, these tests are not really tests, they're just a way to start a conversation. And what people conclude is more about, did the person play along with our silly tests, because we are intuitively looking for compliance and professionalism, or because we are actually looking for people who show some independence, or people who show some intuitive grasp of what unwritten codes to follow regarding which interests are really being served, and so on, plus whatever else.
Low carbing is a real education in what food is really made of.
I don't know about the US but at least in the UK the labelling is fairly sane, as far as I know.
Even if it was, it was highly preventable. The risk of failure of these things is well known...
The risk was entirely obvious.
Very true.
Plus it was an unnecessary risk. Cars and planes and phone batteries and things, all have a balance of risk to benefit, which kinda set the "accident" threshold. A truck driver who knows he has a health condition which may cause him to pass out, is not "accidental". A person who knowingly transmits AIDS is not accidental. And so on. Otherwise it starts to sound like something out of Goodfellas, "hey there wasn't anything we could have done about it."
A person who is trying to be careful isn't going to fly drones over a crowd. And as for that TV company which dropped a drone on a skiier's head...
You look at humans and see consciousness. I look at humans and see life. I see no difference between the two.
Nope there's a slight difference in how the word consciousness is used. I do NOT look at humans and see consciousness. If I look at other humans, all I can see is brains (and life, as you put it), and if I think about it, I assume those brains are conscious. BUT I cannot see their consciousness. Only I can "see" my consciousness, and it isn't even a seeing in any normal sense of, a subject looking at an object, because for me, consciousness is the subject, or to get religious, the Supreme Subject or Supreme Self, but that woo language isn't necessary, albeit poetic, it is just that, if I wasn't conscious, then I would experience nothing, and not even nothing, there could be no sense of "experiencing nothing" because experience itself, of anything, would simply not be, for me. I would not be. The analogies for consciousness are that it is a mirror on which everything is reflected, but the mirror itself is not made of anything, it is more like "space" or "emptiness". Again, poetic, but just that's consciousness.
Life is consciousness, and vice versa.
You experience consciousness as the ability to think, to say to yourself, "this is why I am doing this."
Again, not quite. Descartes said, "I think therefore I am" but he was mistranslated! It was more like, "Being, therefore Existence". A dog may be sentient, but that doesn't mean it has thoughts about itself. Man 500,000 years ago may have been sentient, but the contents of his experience didn't include thought out questions like, "why am I doing this", rather, he may have operated purely on instinct, but also, experienced his life, or given he didn't have the thought, "my life", he may simply have experienced running down large animals and experienced his hunger satiated by the flesh. Likewise elephants might be sentient but because they lack the neurones for abstract reasoning, they just hang about in their herd and look for water, experiencing life on the savannah like that.
Sadly, the FMRI machine, transcranial magnets, and some modern science experiments have shown that consciousness is just a side effect, a plausible explanation of our actions fed to the conscious mind by the real workhorse of human action and thought, the non-verbal parts of the brain. For instance, say you decide to move your arm. TOO LATE! Your brain started sending the signal before you consciously thought if it, before you decided, before you thought. Then thought is merely the reflected afterimage of non-conscious/non-verbal modules of the brain, the part of the brain that thinks it is the motivator, the initiator of action when in reality it is merely the translator of actions and thoughts into verbally accessible structures and experiential sensory phenomena. It is almost as if consciousness is just the "seminal memory," an altered version of events that gives the verbal part of the brain an understanding of what has just happened in terms it can relate to, but which actually deviate quite strikingly from actual reality.
Seeing thought and consciousness as the illusion they are, realizing that the actual human experience of life is inaccessible to the verbal mind, and therefore not able to be experienced truthfully, and that every verbalization of experience is fundamentally flawed with the untruths inherent in our experience of reality as "thinking beings" with "consciousness" becomes a little disorienting. Better to take the observation of "life" and "consciousness" outside the organism which we have proven has issues (massive ones!) with internal consistency, objectivity of experience, and even cause and effect.
From outside we see a complex system, reacting to the environment based on a system of internal rules. We call it life. It has movement, structure, and seeming purpose. An issue arises though. This is is in many ways functionally indisting
I mostly agree, plus there's a level of semantics to what we choose to call "genius".
And there's also, not to be ignored, a thing about "emergence". That's when certain conditions make something new possible. And that's a bit different to incremental change. For example, hypothetically, the world has 197 countries (or so) and you could incrementally see blocks merging until maybe there's just 3 counties. Now the difference between 197 and 3 seems big, while the difference between 3 and 0 is small, yet the move from 3 to 0 is arguably the most significant change, as at that point, a very different world becomes possible, a world without borders.
There's other names for this sort of thing, like "network effect" and "tipping point" and so on. A lot of things are around but don't actually make a big impact until there's sufficient adoption. In that sense a company can make an impact if they, through deals and marketing, manage to promote adoption, even if their own technical contribution was minimal.
And it's weird with social things like religion -- if just a few people believe it then it is a crazy whako cult, but if millions believe it then it is a religion and worthy of respect and tax exemptions. O_o