I've seen some real desire for the thin MacBook. Ports and keyboard didn't come up as concerns. It was all about the weight and look.
Meanwhile, the mini is a staple like your daily bread. In cramped offices doing desk work, they're just about ideal. I can't imagine Apple dropping the mini. But now that SATA drives are irrelevant, there's no need for the flat box shape and I actually use most of them on their side, so they could do a lot with a new form factor.
8) b. A yoga mat on the floor, and a screen where you can view Grokkr -- or even better, a park a few mins away where you can get some distance viewing and trees and sky. Maybe with a track where you can spend 10 mins doing short sprints. [1]
[1] There's a view now that short intense exercise is better than long aerobic treadmill pounding sessions. I'm someone lazy and sedentary, with little time, so this helps a lot.
Exposing my own naïveté, I have to say I'm always flabbergasted when the real hacks are easier and quicker than the stuff they claim to do in TV shows.
I'm not sure if AC's get notified of replies, but your point is also important, I agree.
It is about scope and scale and detail. Yes, if you are measuring in miles, then 1.2 miles is about the same as 0.9 miles. But if you aare measuring in feet, then there's a big difference between 10 feet and 100 feet. And it is a bit like that with religions.
They all mostly appeal to the "mythic" function in humans. So they are often all mostly the same, in that wide sense. Modernity killed God, and any religion which still makes belief in God or Gods its central tenet, is pretty much the same.
However, looking more closely, within the level of the actual beliefs, there is obviously a big difference between a Jain doctrine which believes in non-violence, and an Islam doctrine which talks about conquest (conquest so that when all the world is united under Islam, then there will be peace.) And that's a point Sam Harris makes, that if you're going to live in the world of beliefs, some beliefs are better than others.
Basically because, some beliefs, albeit all just blind faith, tend more towards humanism, and some beliefs, tend more towards tribal warlordism. There's an argument that Jesus did something very clever by inserting humanism into the then dominant imperialistic faiths. And this was a point about the founding of Buddhism: Buddha threw out beliefs in gods.
Although, that doesn't stop many in the world practicing Buddhism as a sort of belief system. But at least, what they believe, will tend towards humanism, and to some extent, also a belief in enlightenment, which at least says, your experience of life and suffering is something for you to work out in your own mind and body, rather than by some sort of revolutionary take-over of the planet. And so on.
And I'm no theologian, and all this can be debated. Obviously, you have the problem that every person is actually creating their own interpretations, so there's a lot of differences and it gets hard to generalise about this or that religion when you're talking about a billion here and a billion there. But yeah, they are not all the same in their range of beliefs.
The "scary" I was alluding to is what's called the "mythic-membership" structure of mind and world, where you just are your group and whatever movements the group is making, you follow suit. You aren't mentally able to step outside your group and look at the ideas objectively. But when people become able to do that, self-doubt, then this new level of self-inquiry and self-doubt is very similar to what we call the modern mind, the Western Enlightenment, and the scientific progress it brought.
There's the story of a very clever theologian sitting on a hill one afternoon, and he sees two armies in the field below, about to attack each other. He notices that on both sides, the soldiers are shouting, "God is on our side!!!" and he muses to himself, "well, they can't both be right."
I gather originally, group-think and group-identity around a common myth, is what allowed disparate tribes to unite. Islam is just version 3 after Christianity (v2) and Judaism (v1) and Zoroaster (v0). But because group identity is exactly what you want when fighting a war, it is always inherently weaponisable. Which is perhaps why modern people find religion and ideology inherently scary. Because they are.
The saving grace is that most people, whatever their inherited cultural differences, tend to just want to get on with their lives. And the general movement is towards greater empathy, because humanity does grow, and stats that, there are currently fewer wars overall than in previous times, are to be taken seriously. But that's no consolation to anyone currently unlucky enough to be in the middle of one.
Religions are scary. That's why everyone has to insist that they are all of peace. Because we really need everyone to not feel threatened. Because you don't want to help anyone activate the red button to weaponise them any further.
The Middle East is unfortunately still "developing" and doesn't really have a lot of stable nation states. They have a very difficult transition. And they are actively weaponising religion. But that doesn't mean that the the millions of people who are part of those groups culturally, are intent on any of that crap themselves.
Technology has often caused people's minds to change and develop. For example, the popular novel, and the stories, may have been the big thing which increased people's empathy for others in that period in history. Knowledge (awareness) is often transformative (for the mind).
So is this new world all about "companies controlling the info", or is it that there's so many organisations collecting information that, come 2050, everyone will wake up in the morning knowing what every politician had for breakfast that day and who they are meeting? Will we browse the supermarket aisles and, instead of seeing simple labels like "organic", we'll actually see the whole production chain history of that product?
And what will that kind of awareness do to the development of the human mind? We may look back at today's age and wonder in amazement at how simple-minded all our news and views about the world were. It may mean the end of ideologies and most religions. We're only just beginning.
OK, they can't be separated in the sense that, we want a better world, a world that works better. In other words, it is ethical to base decisions rationally on science and on trying to help the environment and all the people of the world. But, that's just one kind of ethics! There are other values/ethics, You see, other people have different worldviews. Not everyone feels they are a global citizen in a fragile ecosystem. Most people base their ethics on quite different pictures of the world. To illustrate with an extreme example, Hitler involves his scientists and asks them how to most effectively win the war. Ghengis Khan involves his scientists, who tell him climate change may cause famines, and he says, great, that'll wipe out my enemies! See, the facts don't drive any one particular ethical view. Facts are cold lifeless value-less things. But many scientists will wrap their facts into their own values system, their own worldview, and then the public will reject the facts when they smell the values the scientists are also driving. I'm not saying it is bad to have humanistic values. I'm saying it is bad to implicitly assume one's own values are the only "true" values and that others don't have any other values worth mentioning. So if facts are to take their proper place, they have to be separated from the ethics. And the ethics need to be debated on their own. All too often, some scientific idea will appear about fighting climate change using some new technology that'll provide more energy, and people will reject it because it runs counter to their values which say that humans are greedy and consuming too much. And to add another layer of muck on top, all the spin doctors working in PR can just take all these different values and use them to frame their own agendas. So my suggestion is, start to disentangle it all, let facts be facts, let facts be examined in a cold-headed way, and let values be values, let people debate and contrast their values and get their values out into the open, and then maybe the PR people will have fewer opportunities to spin things.
Yes, nuclear. Although at this point, "climate change" is mostly just competition between various big energy companies and their political links. The people who actually want to see human population reduced, with a reduction in human "greed", are a tiny percentage, and probably always will be, because that view was just a bad philosophy. May as well become a Jain. But for the majority of people, including the, what, is it a billion? without electricity, the only way is forward. But, and here's the rub, because energy and industry and science have become politically tangled up with "ethics" and "saving the planet", in other words, science got mixed with values, it is now near impossible to say anything sensible and factual on the subject. Nevertheless, energy companies will continue to exploit this "moral landscape" as the way to spin everything. If a big oil company can figure out how to make a profit from carbon taxes, they'll support carbon taxes. They just will. And especially if that gives them a competitive edge over the nuclear industry. It amazes me how many people continue to believe that this is all about "doing the right thing to save the planet". It is all politics now. And scientists don't exactly have a great track record of not getting themselves influenced by various industry and political interests. And maybe that's too cynical, but it is a factor. Why else would we have been pursuing non-nuclear "solutions" so hard?
If the chasm continues to grow, how come there are 350 million middle class Chinese? [1] Where did they come from? And where did all the wealth of the American middle class originally come from? I am simply taking a longer time range/perspective. 2000 years ago, nobody could fly. Today, maybe a quarter of the world can afford to fly once. And alongside that, some can even afford to pay for a space trip. Now I'm not claiming it is all trickle down. We are individuals and social systems and it has to work both ways, healthy for the individual and healthy for the society (and when Americans can find some new party which can do that, good for them).
What creates wealth is invention and ingenuity, specifically, inventing stuff of real worth, not just paper made-up worth. And there, it is human brains and education and a human drive for knowledge which drives things. And a lot of that looks like greed, but it isn't.
So I'm not really talking about a few bankers. Remember the earlier poster was alluding to greed in the broad context of the "sands of time" and "humanity" and "suffering". Well that's a long time before bankers appeared in 1400 and something. And I'm saying, if you're going to look at that big picture, there are other factors: human ingenuity, human drives, some of which look like greed, but are natural drives for "more" of everything. And "slavery" today is nothing like "slavery" of centuries ago.
No human mind can wake up in the morning and say, "I am stopping, I am complete, I want nothing and need nothing." Well, a few end up in a cave, like Sri Ramana Maharshi. They have to be spoon fed. They're effectively dead to the world. Some think that's a good thing. But for the 7 to 10 billion others, that's not how the mind works. The mind keeps going, keeps developing, keeps imagining new possibilities. Like how everyone moans about "greed". I'm saying, that idea is outdated. Think of something new. People have been moaning about greed for thousands of years, yet the "problem" is supposedly worse than ever. Well, maybe it is a misunderstanding of human nature.
[1] I don't recall the exact figure, but it was some amazingly huge number.
I think you misunderstand the concept of "greed". First, it is a concept, not an ontological entity. Second, as a concept dreamt up by humans, it served some purpose in how we model the world around us and our relationship to others. Third, those models may have been useful 4000 years ago, and 2000, and maybe 200 years ago, but one day they will no longer be useful. Fourth, just consider that the average wealth and amenities available to you today, would only be available to kings in previous generations. Cotton, for example, used to be a luxury material. And as for electricity, we used to do that with slaves. So no, greed isn't the cause of human suffering. And some maintain, for example, your more Tibetan Buddhists, that all is perfect anyway, and it is our rejection of life that is the cause of suffering, not whether you are driving an SUV or having to walk 5 miles to fetch water. So here's a general idea: our continuing technical advancements, which are an expression of our human creativity, a creativity which emerged out of Nature's continuing evolution, is an endless process, an endless change and transformation, and when we as humans invent something new, that's Nature exploring (blindly) new possibilities. And that's fine. "Greed" as a concept was one such invented notion which served a purpose. But it ain't got much to do with the cause of suffering, as understood by the highest levels of Buddhist thought. And, caveat, greed and its renunciation are practices which some people do feel they want to engage in, and that's fine for them, that's known as the path of renunciation. But humanity as a whole need not imagine itself in such limiting models, because there is also, if we want to look at this in moral or ethical terms, there is also the path of transformation and the path of natural perfection which is no path at all. As it were. Anyway, most of our progress has led to a reduction in physical and emotional suffering (you don't have to be a slave, you don't have to die of some insect bite whilst hunting) and the "suffering" we experience today is of a more rarefied quality. It is more psychological. And "renunciation" and calling people greedy, actually can increase that psychological suffering, and that's not necessary. Quite simply, if birds have the capcity to build nests, and humans have the capacity to build cities powered by fusion, that's fine with nature, and the more time we have to sit around being ourselves, the more time we can relax and yeah, not feel the need to be "greedy". So it all works out eventually.
Thanks, interesting. I'm an avid meat and seafood eater, so I'm kinda vague with the term "meat". Another interesting point is the biomechanics of our lower leg and foot, which make us efficient runners -- not fast runners, just efficient -- which with the loss of hair, for sweating and cooling, makes us good for endurance running and running down large animals. Well, I wish, being at a desk all day. Anyway, it would be interesting how we actually got the initial start, whether it was on the savannah, or living by the shores of water bodies, or some combination of both.
Lierre Keith makes a good point, that returning to natural grazing cows would be a huge benefit for the environment. Yes, I'm a methane fart denier. But her concern is with biodiversity, and all that tofu and grain is coming from stripping the land back to monocultures. I'm all for eating meat grown in a lab, if needed, but as humans, we have small digestive systems and big brains, and we didn't evolve that way eating veggies. But that's evolution for you, a lot of trial and error. Like this with the babies. Apparently there's a case that if the baby comes out "clean" via cesarian, its biome won't get booted up properly and it'll end up with various conditions later in life. So ya have to smear the face with mommy juices and poop. Because nature is just not interested in whether something looks disgusting, nor whether it is a competition between hunter and prey, nature just works how it works. That's my thought for the day, methinks.
I imagine that's something like how constructing buildings (architecture) relies on engineering, and often it helps to know why a column has to be where it is, and what other possibilities there may be, to support the floor in some other way, but most of what the architect does is actually planning the layouts and elevations and how the building relates to the site and the people and their activities.
So I would imagine that a lot of the "discipline" in large projects isn't so much about pure engineering, it is often more about organising parts into systems which can be developed over time.
Like how the architect knows that where they put the hotel restaurant is going to affect where the kitchen goes and therefore where the store room goes and hence where the service entrance will likely be, and that you don't want to end up having to tear up the plan and start again because you've ended up with the service entrance being located right next to the main entrance.
Brits, why did you let them do this? You're letting them take your freedom and letting them grant themselves powers that will keep you out of the loop and perpetuate their own power, preventing you from being able to do anything about it in the future...
I could as easily ask "Yanks, why did you let them do this?" about any number of assaults on freedom and privacy committed by the US government. The US has been running headlong down the same road for 15 years and change, with nary a peep from Joe and Jane Average.
Every time the government of a supposed 'free' country pulls shit like this, two things happen. First, the fact that the terrorists have already won their war against free countries becomes more and more obvious. Second, the differences between the 'free' nations and the terrorist states becomes harder and harder to discern.
There is a difference though between, the government's physical power (police, surveillance, etc.) and what they use it for.
USA has its share of people who value owning guns, and although that gives the individual a level of power which the Brits might think of as, well, just plain obsessive and weird, a citizen of USA can maintain that they have no bad intentions around how they use that power. And that is a fair point.
Same principle goes for how we say, "oppressive dictatorship" to distinguish from beneficial ones, or "Islamic terrorism" to distinguish from plain ordinary peoples' Islam.
Put it this way, if a nation seriously needs a well organised militia to keep its leaders in check, then that nation is already so far down the plug hole that you may as well "nuke it from orbit", as they comically say.
It really all comes back to how in the West we often see the view that it is OK for USA and UK and France to have nukes, but not OK for Iran or North Korea to have them. It isn't about the physical power, it is about the intentions.
And I dunno if the UK can be trusted with this level of surveillance. We hope their intentions are generally OK.
So it is really a technical issue about, can it be implemented and people still be able to do ordinary business? Or does breaking everyone's comms just F**k things up too much?
But, but,but they have free health care. And one day, in the future, they'll get all of their energy from unicorn farts. Just believe and it will come true.
Free at point of delivery.
We charged you earlier, we charged you later, but we didn't charge you when you turned up with a life-critical wound from a horrific accident involving Christmas lights, brussels sprouts, and grandma's hairpin.
Not that I don't have sympathy with the view that I shouldn't be contributing to the 20 billion a year it costs to look after diabetes, whilst I take care with my own diet so that I never become such a burden on the system. But I see the issue there as being more about all the bad public heath advice which caused a diabetes epidemic, and not that I should not be paying for others' faults.
Anyway, my life has been saved by the NHS, and yeah it costs something like 2000 GBP per person. But I'd be interested to see that adjusted for income brackets.
In fact, every organism expands to the limits of the resources and competition. Living on the edge of starvation is the default condition.
In fact, only until the agricultural revolution was this ever any other way. This enabled a massive population increase. The second occurrence was the industrial revolution, which yielded another massive population increase from which the world is still undergoing.
The former yielded the first kings, etc, because it permitted a small fraction of the population to live above subsistence. The industrial revolution and modern economics (capitalism) was the first time in the existence of any population that large fractions of a species lived in a state better than that.
Agriculture, from the point of view of human diet, was a huge compromise, it now seems, if you follow the Paleo movement. We started evolving maybe 2 million years ago, and in all that time we grew to become adapted to hunting and some gathering, but essentially, we are very fit for sweaty long distance running, and with some tracking, can eventually run other big animals to death. But then we invented agriculture, which was only 10 or 12 thousand years ago. Then with modern farming we changed the nature of the stuff we were growing even further. And all this is taken as a *hint* that we are not adapted to modern diets largely comprised of industrially grown grains and sugars. Those paleo ancestors didn't have to carb load to run the distances they did, their bodies were adapted to run on fat stores, and modern athletes are starting to experiment with this and discover that yeah, you really can burn better on fat. So then, was agriculture a huge mistake?
Well, it got us here, it allowed our populations to grow, allowed more people to live together, and as you say, have Kings and later Parliaments, and so the whole social structure adapted and evolved to the need to integrate ever larger numbers. Empires worked for thousands of years but they eventually crumbled under the sheer weight of their own expansive and "too hard to administer" centralised control.
So we eventually created the "individual" and say that the individual should have more power to make local decisions, and so you have the notion that, in a modern economy, the brain power is more distributed, and so can process more variables, more local differences, and so the system still manages to work, when an empire would have crumbled already.
So that brings me to the point of this, and that is, agriculture and industrialisation, Empires and Democracies, have got us this far, but what is next?
The world is still developing, but many of the cultures are still recoiling at globalisation and development. People compare humanity to a petri dish and imagine that we will at some point reach the edge of the dish, and having consumed everything, collapse. Because, you know, humans have the brain power of an amoeba.
I think what is closer to the truth is that we have always and always shall be faced with the problem of survival. We faced it when we were hunter gatherers, we faced it when we were dying of the plague in medieval Europe, we faced it again and again and always shall face it. We are living biological machines in an environment which is nicely-called "Nature" but nature is a bitch.
So the question is how to survive, and a fashionable answer is that we should stop consuming. Well, that's like trying to breathe more slowly when you are trapped in a hole with limited air. Sure... that'll buy you some time, but that is not sustainable. The real answers are about inventing a way to get out of the hole.
As humans we have imagination and creativity and reason and intuition, and "sustainability" means inventing a heck of a lot of new stuff, yes, stuff, which will then make life easier for everyone. The natural birth rate for people, women if their children survive, is 2 children per couple. We don't overpopulate because we have too
I'd like to see people from China commenting. I take it their culture and history are quite different to the West. They see themselves as a civilisation and there is a lot of nuance around morality and ethics. To our ears, as the post tag says, this is all quite *strange* But when you have a growing middle class of what, 250 million? and a desire to reduce corruption at all levels, this whole social capital thing might make more sense... just not in a way we understand. I mean, as a Westerner I just think, Brazil (the film) and ludicrous bureaucracy. But to Chinese, it might work in a different way.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, and time travel in the 22nd century.
I've seen some real desire for the thin MacBook. Ports and keyboard didn't come up as concerns. It was all about the weight and look.
Meanwhile, the mini is a staple like your daily bread. In cramped offices doing desk work, they're just about ideal. I can't imagine Apple dropping the mini. But now that SATA drives are irrelevant, there's no need for the flat box shape and I actually use most of them on their side, so they could do a lot with a new form factor.
Quite. I bought a new Mac Pro: it's called an HP Z series workstation.
8) b. A yoga mat on the floor, and a screen where you can view Grokkr -- or even better, a park a few mins away where you can get some distance viewing and trees and sky. Maybe with a track where you can spend 10 mins doing short sprints. [1]
[1] There's a view now that short intense exercise is better than long aerobic treadmill pounding sessions. I'm someone lazy and sedentary, with little time, so this helps a lot.
Exposing my own naïveté, I have to say I'm always flabbergasted when the real hacks are easier and quicker than the stuff they claim to do in TV shows.
I'm not sure if AC's get notified of replies, but your point is also important, I agree.
It is about scope and scale and detail. Yes, if you are measuring in miles, then 1.2 miles is about the same as 0.9 miles. But if you aare measuring in feet, then there's a big difference between 10 feet and 100 feet. And it is a bit like that with religions.
They all mostly appeal to the "mythic" function in humans. So they are often all mostly the same, in that wide sense. Modernity killed God, and any religion which still makes belief in God or Gods its central tenet, is pretty much the same.
However, looking more closely, within the level of the actual beliefs, there is obviously a big difference between a Jain doctrine which believes in non-violence, and an Islam doctrine which talks about conquest (conquest so that when all the world is united under Islam, then there will be peace.) And that's a point Sam Harris makes, that if you're going to live in the world of beliefs, some beliefs are better than others.
Basically because, some beliefs, albeit all just blind faith, tend more towards humanism, and some beliefs, tend more towards tribal warlordism. There's an argument that Jesus did something very clever by inserting humanism into the then dominant imperialistic faiths. And this was a point about the founding of Buddhism: Buddha threw out beliefs in gods.
Although, that doesn't stop many in the world practicing Buddhism as a sort of belief system. But at least, what they believe, will tend towards humanism, and to some extent, also a belief in enlightenment, which at least says, your experience of life and suffering is something for you to work out in your own mind and body, rather than by some sort of revolutionary take-over of the planet. And so on.
And I'm no theologian, and all this can be debated. Obviously, you have the problem that every person is actually creating their own interpretations, so there's a lot of differences and it gets hard to generalise about this or that religion when you're talking about a billion here and a billion there. But yeah, they are not all the same in their range of beliefs.
The "scary" I was alluding to is what's called the "mythic-membership" structure of mind and world, where you just are your group and whatever movements the group is making, you follow suit. You aren't mentally able to step outside your group and look at the ideas objectively. But when people become able to do that, self-doubt, then this new level of self-inquiry and self-doubt is very similar to what we call the modern mind, the Western Enlightenment, and the scientific progress it brought.
There's the story of a very clever theologian sitting on a hill one afternoon, and he sees two armies in the field below, about to attack each other. He notices that on both sides, the soldiers are shouting, "God is on our side!!!" and he muses to himself, "well, they can't both be right."
No.
No.
Neeeoooooope.
Well, I can hope. :)
I gather originally, group-think and group-identity around a common myth, is what allowed disparate tribes to unite. Islam is just version 3 after Christianity (v2) and Judaism (v1) and Zoroaster (v0). But because group identity is exactly what you want when fighting a war, it is always inherently weaponisable. Which is perhaps why modern people find religion and ideology inherently scary. Because they are.
The saving grace is that most people, whatever their inherited cultural differences, tend to just want to get on with their lives. And the general movement is towards greater empathy, because humanity does grow, and stats that, there are currently fewer wars overall than in previous times, are to be taken seriously. But that's no consolation to anyone currently unlucky enough to be in the middle of one.
Religions are scary. That's why everyone has to insist that they are all of peace. Because we really need everyone to not feel threatened. Because you don't want to help anyone activate the red button to weaponise them any further.
The Middle East is unfortunately still "developing" and doesn't really have a lot of stable nation states. They have a very difficult transition. And they are actively weaponising religion. But that doesn't mean that the the millions of people who are part of those groups culturally, are intent on any of that crap themselves.
Technology has often caused people's minds to change and develop. For example, the popular novel, and the stories, may have been the big thing which increased people's empathy for others in that period in history. Knowledge (awareness) is often transformative (for the mind).
So is this new world all about "companies controlling the info", or is it that there's so many organisations collecting information that, come 2050, everyone will wake up in the morning knowing what every politician had for breakfast that day and who they are meeting? Will we browse the supermarket aisles and, instead of seeing simple labels like "organic", we'll actually see the whole production chain history of that product?
And what will that kind of awareness do to the development of the human mind? We may look back at today's age and wonder in amazement at how simple-minded all our news and views about the world were. It may mean the end of ideologies and most religions. We're only just beginning.
OK, they can't be separated in the sense that, we want a better world, a world that works better. In other words, it is ethical to base decisions rationally on science and on trying to help the environment and all the people of the world. But, that's just one kind of ethics! There are other values/ethics, You see, other people have different worldviews. Not everyone feels they are a global citizen in a fragile ecosystem. Most people base their ethics on quite different pictures of the world. To illustrate with an extreme example, Hitler involves his scientists and asks them how to most effectively win the war. Ghengis Khan involves his scientists, who tell him climate change may cause famines, and he says, great, that'll wipe out my enemies! See, the facts don't drive any one particular ethical view. Facts are cold lifeless value-less things. But many scientists will wrap their facts into their own values system, their own worldview, and then the public will reject the facts when they smell the values the scientists are also driving. I'm not saying it is bad to have humanistic values. I'm saying it is bad to implicitly assume one's own values are the only "true" values and that others don't have any other values worth mentioning. So if facts are to take their proper place, they have to be separated from the ethics. And the ethics need to be debated on their own. All too often, some scientific idea will appear about fighting climate change using some new technology that'll provide more energy, and people will reject it because it runs counter to their values which say that humans are greedy and consuming too much. And to add another layer of muck on top, all the spin doctors working in PR can just take all these different values and use them to frame their own agendas. So my suggestion is, start to disentangle it all, let facts be facts, let facts be examined in a cold-headed way, and let values be values, let people debate and contrast their values and get their values out into the open, and then maybe the PR people will have fewer opportunities to spin things.
Yes, nuclear. Although at this point, "climate change" is mostly just competition between various big energy companies and their political links. The people who actually want to see human population reduced, with a reduction in human "greed", are a tiny percentage, and probably always will be, because that view was just a bad philosophy. May as well become a Jain. But for the majority of people, including the, what, is it a billion? without electricity, the only way is forward. But, and here's the rub, because energy and industry and science have become politically tangled up with "ethics" and "saving the planet", in other words, science got mixed with values, it is now near impossible to say anything sensible and factual on the subject. Nevertheless, energy companies will continue to exploit this "moral landscape" as the way to spin everything. If a big oil company can figure out how to make a profit from carbon taxes, they'll support carbon taxes. They just will. And especially if that gives them a competitive edge over the nuclear industry. It amazes me how many people continue to believe that this is all about "doing the right thing to save the planet". It is all politics now. And scientists don't exactly have a great track record of not getting themselves influenced by various industry and political interests. And maybe that's too cynical, but it is a factor. Why else would we have been pursuing non-nuclear "solutions" so hard?
If the chasm continues to grow, how come there are 350 million middle class Chinese? [1] Where did they come from? And where did all the wealth of the American middle class originally come from? I am simply taking a longer time range/perspective. 2000 years ago, nobody could fly. Today, maybe a quarter of the world can afford to fly once. And alongside that, some can even afford to pay for a space trip. Now I'm not claiming it is all trickle down. We are individuals and social systems and it has to work both ways, healthy for the individual and healthy for the society (and when Americans can find some new party which can do that, good for them).
What creates wealth is invention and ingenuity, specifically, inventing stuff of real worth, not just paper made-up worth. And there, it is human brains and education and a human drive for knowledge which drives things. And a lot of that looks like greed, but it isn't.
So I'm not really talking about a few bankers. Remember the earlier poster was alluding to greed in the broad context of the "sands of time" and "humanity" and "suffering". Well that's a long time before bankers appeared in 1400 and something. And I'm saying, if you're going to look at that big picture, there are other factors: human ingenuity, human drives, some of which look like greed, but are natural drives for "more" of everything. And "slavery" today is nothing like "slavery" of centuries ago.
No human mind can wake up in the morning and say, "I am stopping, I am complete, I want nothing and need nothing." Well, a few end up in a cave, like Sri Ramana Maharshi. They have to be spoon fed. They're effectively dead to the world. Some think that's a good thing. But for the 7 to 10 billion others, that's not how the mind works. The mind keeps going, keeps developing, keeps imagining new possibilities. Like how everyone moans about "greed". I'm saying, that idea is outdated. Think of something new. People have been moaning about greed for thousands of years, yet the "problem" is supposedly worse than ever. Well, maybe it is a misunderstanding of human nature.
[1] I don't recall the exact figure, but it was some amazingly huge number.
I think you misunderstand the concept of "greed". First, it is a concept, not an ontological entity. Second, as a concept dreamt up by humans, it served some purpose in how we model the world around us and our relationship to others. Third, those models may have been useful 4000 years ago, and 2000, and maybe 200 years ago, but one day they will no longer be useful. Fourth, just consider that the average wealth and amenities available to you today, would only be available to kings in previous generations. Cotton, for example, used to be a luxury material. And as for electricity, we used to do that with slaves. So no, greed isn't the cause of human suffering. And some maintain, for example, your more Tibetan Buddhists, that all is perfect anyway, and it is our rejection of life that is the cause of suffering, not whether you are driving an SUV or having to walk 5 miles to fetch water. So here's a general idea: our continuing technical advancements, which are an expression of our human creativity, a creativity which emerged out of Nature's continuing evolution, is an endless process, an endless change and transformation, and when we as humans invent something new, that's Nature exploring (blindly) new possibilities. And that's fine. "Greed" as a concept was one such invented notion which served a purpose. But it ain't got much to do with the cause of suffering, as understood by the highest levels of Buddhist thought. And, caveat, greed and its renunciation are practices which some people do feel they want to engage in, and that's fine for them, that's known as the path of renunciation. But humanity as a whole need not imagine itself in such limiting models, because there is also, if we want to look at this in moral or ethical terms, there is also the path of transformation and the path of natural perfection which is no path at all. As it were. Anyway, most of our progress has led to a reduction in physical and emotional suffering (you don't have to be a slave, you don't have to die of some insect bite whilst hunting) and the "suffering" we experience today is of a more rarefied quality. It is more psychological. And "renunciation" and calling people greedy, actually can increase that psychological suffering, and that's not necessary. Quite simply, if birds have the capcity to build nests, and humans have the capacity to build cities powered by fusion, that's fine with nature, and the more time we have to sit around being ourselves, the more time we can relax and yeah, not feel the need to be "greedy". So it all works out eventually.
Indeed. Here's my prediction for the future: it won't work, until it does.
And didn't Edison quip something about, I just discovered 10,000 ways not to invent the electric light bulb...
Thanks, interesting. I'm an avid meat and seafood eater, so I'm kinda vague with the term "meat". Another interesting point is the biomechanics of our lower leg and foot, which make us efficient runners -- not fast runners, just efficient -- which with the loss of hair, for sweating and cooling, makes us good for endurance running and running down large animals. Well, I wish, being at a desk all day. Anyway, it would be interesting how we actually got the initial start, whether it was on the savannah, or living by the shores of water bodies, or some combination of both.
Lierre Keith makes a good point, that returning to natural grazing cows would be a huge benefit for the environment. Yes, I'm a methane fart denier. But her concern is with biodiversity, and all that tofu and grain is coming from stripping the land back to monocultures. I'm all for eating meat grown in a lab, if needed, but as humans, we have small digestive systems and big brains, and we didn't evolve that way eating veggies. But that's evolution for you, a lot of trial and error. Like this with the babies. Apparently there's a case that if the baby comes out "clean" via cesarian, its biome won't get booted up properly and it'll end up with various conditions later in life. So ya have to smear the face with mommy juices and poop. Because nature is just not interested in whether something looks disgusting, nor whether it is a competition between hunter and prey, nature just works how it works. That's my thought for the day, methinks.
There's an expression I'm fond of:
"Organisms organise."
I imagine that's something like how constructing buildings (architecture) relies on engineering, and often it helps to know why a column has to be where it is, and what other possibilities there may be, to support the floor in some other way, but most of what the architect does is actually planning the layouts and elevations and how the building relates to the site and the people and their activities.
So I would imagine that a lot of the "discipline" in large projects isn't so much about pure engineering, it is often more about organising parts into systems which can be developed over time.
Like how the architect knows that where they put the hotel restaurant is going to affect where the kitchen goes and therefore where the store room goes and hence where the service entrance will likely be, and that you don't want to end up having to tear up the plan and start again because you've ended up with the service entrance being located right next to the main entrance.
Brits, why did you let them do this? You're letting them take your freedom and letting them grant themselves powers that will keep you out of the loop and perpetuate their own power, preventing you from being able to do anything about it in the future...
I could as easily ask "Yanks, why did you let them do this?" about any number of assaults on freedom and privacy committed by the US government. The US has been running headlong down the same road for 15 years and change, with nary a peep from Joe and Jane Average.
Every time the government of a supposed 'free' country pulls shit like this, two things happen. First, the fact that the terrorists have already won their war against free countries becomes more and more obvious. Second, the differences between the 'free' nations and the terrorist states becomes harder and harder to discern.
There is a difference though between, the government's physical power (police, surveillance, etc.) and what they use it for.
USA has its share of people who value owning guns, and although that gives the individual a level of power which the Brits might think of as, well, just plain obsessive and weird, a citizen of USA can maintain that they have no bad intentions around how they use that power. And that is a fair point.
Same principle goes for how we say, "oppressive dictatorship" to distinguish from beneficial ones, or "Islamic terrorism" to distinguish from plain ordinary peoples' Islam.
Put it this way, if a nation seriously needs a well organised militia to keep its leaders in check, then that nation is already so far down the plug hole that you may as well "nuke it from orbit", as they comically say.
It really all comes back to how in the West we often see the view that it is OK for USA and UK and France to have nukes, but not OK for Iran or North Korea to have them. It isn't about the physical power, it is about the intentions.
And I dunno if the UK can be trusted with this level of surveillance. We hope their intentions are generally OK.
So it is really a technical issue about, can it be implemented and people still be able to do ordinary business? Or does breaking everyone's comms just F**k things up too much?
But, but,but they have free health care. And one day, in the future, they'll get all of their energy from unicorn farts. Just believe and it will come true.
Free at point of delivery.
We charged you earlier, we charged you later, but we didn't charge you when you turned up with a life-critical wound from a horrific accident involving Christmas lights, brussels sprouts, and grandma's hairpin.
Not that I don't have sympathy with the view that I shouldn't be contributing to the 20 billion a year it costs to look after diabetes, whilst I take care with my own diet so that I never become such a burden on the system. But I see the issue there as being more about all the bad public heath advice which caused a diabetes epidemic, and not that I should not be paying for others' faults.
Anyway, my life has been saved by the NHS, and yeah it costs something like 2000 GBP per person. But I'd be interested to see that adjusted for income brackets.
One thing to check is how they treat Ahmedi Muslims.
or siri
Que?
I know nothing.
In fact, every organism expands to the limits of the resources and competition. Living on the edge of starvation is the default condition.
In fact, only until the agricultural revolution was this ever any other way. This enabled a massive population increase. The second occurrence was the industrial revolution, which yielded another massive population increase from which the world is still undergoing.
The former yielded the first kings, etc, because it permitted a small fraction of the population to live above subsistence. The industrial revolution and modern economics (capitalism) was the first time in the existence of any population that large fractions of a species lived in a state better than that.
Agriculture, from the point of view of human diet, was a huge compromise, it now seems, if you follow the Paleo movement. We started evolving maybe 2 million years ago, and in all that time we grew to become adapted to hunting and some gathering, but essentially, we are very fit for sweaty long distance running, and with some tracking, can eventually run other big animals to death. But then we invented agriculture, which was only 10 or 12 thousand years ago. Then with modern farming we changed the nature of the stuff we were growing even further. And all this is taken as a *hint* that we are not adapted to modern diets largely comprised of industrially grown grains and sugars. Those paleo ancestors didn't have to carb load to run the distances they did, their bodies were adapted to run on fat stores, and modern athletes are starting to experiment with this and discover that yeah, you really can burn better on fat. So then, was agriculture a huge mistake?
Well, it got us here, it allowed our populations to grow, allowed more people to live together, and as you say, have Kings and later Parliaments, and so the whole social structure adapted and evolved to the need to integrate ever larger numbers. Empires worked for thousands of years but they eventually crumbled under the sheer weight of their own expansive and "too hard to administer" centralised control.
So we eventually created the "individual" and say that the individual should have more power to make local decisions, and so you have the notion that, in a modern economy, the brain power is more distributed, and so can process more variables, more local differences, and so the system still manages to work, when an empire would have crumbled already.
So that brings me to the point of this, and that is, agriculture and industrialisation, Empires and Democracies, have got us this far, but what is next?
The world is still developing, but many of the cultures are still recoiling at globalisation and development. People compare humanity to a petri dish and imagine that we will at some point reach the edge of the dish, and having consumed everything, collapse. Because, you know, humans have the brain power of an amoeba.
I think what is closer to the truth is that we have always and always shall be faced with the problem of survival. We faced it when we were hunter gatherers, we faced it when we were dying of the plague in medieval Europe, we faced it again and again and always shall face it. We are living biological machines in an environment which is nicely-called "Nature" but nature is a bitch.
So the question is how to survive, and a fashionable answer is that we should stop consuming. Well, that's like trying to breathe more slowly when you are trapped in a hole with limited air. Sure... that'll buy you some time, but that is not sustainable. The real answers are about inventing a way to get out of the hole.
As humans we have imagination and creativity and reason and intuition, and "sustainability" means inventing a heck of a lot of new stuff, yes, stuff, which will then make life easier for everyone. The natural birth rate for people, women if their children survive, is 2 children per couple. We don't overpopulate because we have too
I'd like to see people from China commenting. I take it their culture and history are quite different to the West. They see themselves as a civilisation and there is a lot of nuance around morality and ethics. To our ears, as the post tag says, this is all quite *strange* But when you have a growing middle class of what, 250 million? and a desire to reduce corruption at all levels, this whole social capital thing might make more sense... just not in a way we understand. I mean, as a Westerner I just think, Brazil (the film) and ludicrous bureaucracy. But to Chinese, it might work in a different way.
He has, just from a chair over in the far right of the room.