The Germans pushed for the Euro because they benefitted hugely from artificially devaluing their currency and stimulating exports
I don't get this argument. Devaluing your currency isn't difficult. The Germans, of all people, are aware of that.
As to Greece, they had two problems. One: they were able to borrow cheaply, and instead of investing it in things like infrastructure and training they pissed half of it up the wall and used the rest to speculate on property. Two: none of them paid any tax.
They were "in" the EU when all this happened, yet the EU couldn't in any meaningful sense stop them screwing up?
A few years ago UKIP had (regrettably) as much as 4 million votes. But with Brexit we had 17 million voting to leave. I can't imagine they were all "populist nationalists". One thing I haven't heard much is whether the EU is too big, too complex, and too opaque. I'm personally a European at heart, and am a mix of nationalities, but that doesn't mean I know that the EU, as a political system, works.
I have just one friend in the world, and he sends me messages on like, four different systems. It used to be simpler when he just had an iPhone. Now it seems he can't even agree with himself what to use.
So long as "smart grid" isn't like "smart bomb", ie. yeah it's better, but innocents still die, as it were. The so-called "renewables" can help in some places, but not enough to really make a difference? ie. replace fossil fuels. And it is up to the enthusiasts for renewables to show that they could. I want my green paradise Earth as much as anyone. And humanity is like a cancer that will keep eating everything. So unless renewables actually do work, people will simply keep using coal or whatever they can afford, and nobody can stop that. It isn't a question of whether people are willing to get with the program, it is that when people are stressed, they'll resort to whatever means they can, and if that means completely abandoning green initiatives, then they'll do that. So the first question is just, do renewables actually work to replace base load? It'll only make it harder later if they don't. It is up to champions of renewable energy to SHOW that they can.
The problem with blaming "Islam" is there's a ton of people who consider themselves followers of "Islam" who have virtually nothing in common with this guy.
Just to reply to this point, with such a large group, any generalisation is going to be indeed problematic. And likewise, anyone who doesn't like "western values" is making a generalisation—which values are "western"? many Westerners don't have "western" values, etc. And we also know that under communism, not everyone was a "communist". And that there are many different kinds of "feminists". Etc. There's lots of variables.
But there's also a certain amount of stuff which can happen in concert, which can then combine in very bad ways.
If a religion based on blind belief in a creator, tends to dull the mind a bit, and it also teaches that homosexuality is bad, and that religion is also largely embroiled in cold wars in the Middle East between competing factions (Iran and Saudi Arabia), and combined with the other things that religion teaches, and tends to be heavy handed about oppressing many instincts, in combination with local cultures (in Pakistan it is common to kick dogs if they sniff each other (so I hear)), and on to pof all that, you're gay, and the pressure to conform is heavy, and there's an inclusion of "honour" codes, inherited from tribal times, then perhaps all that sends someone who's already a bit unstable, over the edge, and a question is, who or what is to blame, and the answer is, all that stuff contributed to some degree. Just like, when Pinker asks, how come much of the world seems to have become more peaceful, he has to look at lots of possible contributing factors like, the invention of the modern novel, which often told stories which allowed people to start to identify more with others, and so contributed to a growth in empathy.
And that's the problem: something like religion is both very distant from any particular attack, yet precisely because religion covers so many aspects of life and development (after all, that's why people are religious, it is to better themselves) so religion is also much more involved than we often admit.
And whilst it would be very bad if we tarnished everyone with the same brush, and I have to say I wasn't a fan of Christian fundamentalists any more than any other kind of fundamentalist, it is nevertheless shocking that in a modern age, people will still resort to "faith" as a "reason" for their opinion on this or that issue.
And it's no exaggeration to say that most religions contribute to that. In that sense, even a Jain, insofar as they practice a blind belief, are contributing to the culture of blind belief in other religions, even if the specifics are different. But modernity knows this already. If every blind belief was docile and "just be happy" there would be no problem, although we wouldn't have much technology, but we would have peace. The problem is blind belief can't pick and choose what it is getting indoctrinated with, because it isn't supposed to question, it is just supposed to obey God's laws, which makes it a horror show when combined with ideologies and nuclear weapons.
It is all a matter of degrees, and Islam is just a worse version of monotheism, even whilst it itself maintains that, it is the best version of monotheism, the most pure version, and even if all of its teachings in the texts were peaceful, all of them, it would still be to blame for any blind belief inspired bigotry and violence, simply because it perpetuates blind belief in the laws of an unseen and perfect divinity. It perpetuates the habit, just as much of New Age perpetuates this habit of anti-reason.
Some say that if Jesus came back, he wouldn't be a Christian, and some say that Buddha started with reason, that he took all the beliefs and threw them out and said, wait, what can we actually find out about human nature? Even though, all these religions end up perpetuating cultures of blind belief in this or that when the become corporate. So if yo
Life is mostly OK (nobody is dropping bombs on us) so freedom is less of an issue. But I've seen a comment by a farming business that they don't like the way all the regs distort the market -- they'd rather things were tougher and leaner and more genuinely competitive. So there is a business argument for Brexit (as well as a business argument for staying in).
Basically, everyone is going to be affected in different ways, and nobody can know the future. Maybe we end up with better deals in some places. But I'm surprised nobody has raised the "too big to fail" argument, that smaller organisations are better and more flexible and can fail less painfully.
Nationality wise, I'm a citizen of the world, I've lived in a bunch of countries. The world is indeed global. Some of those claiming we should stay in Europe say that therefore, we need to look bigger by banding together. Because that's what the world needs now, even more peoples trying to push their collective weight around. And hey if Africa united, then they could push us around too. Great, not.
Doesn't have to be one god. Could be trillions of beings, which would seem like gods to us "down here", yet they could still be constrained/limited at their level. And some of them are participating in the simulation, perhaps even contributing their own resources to it.
Put it this way, it seems to be a better interpretation of what NDEs report, than that they met "God". The NDEs seem to say that the higher level is less constrained, whilst this level is dumbed down, more filtered, and narrow, and that when people die, they "meet themselves", like waking up.
Or maybe the NDE is just a brain fart. But that's not, methinks, the simplest explanation, as we just don't know WHAT consciousness is, and saying it "emerges from the brain" doesn't actually explain anything about it—although one way around this is to just altogether dismiss consciousness' weird properties.
Maybe we are already a billion years in the future, and part of our schooling is to simulate a corporeal existence. Kinda like The Matrix but, with a less mundane red pill. When we die, the Near Death Experience is just the end of the level, and we return to whatever it is we are actually inhabiting, sentiences which were "uploaded" to non-biological existence, half a billion years ago. Cue Buffy's The Trio, dancing in a field, dressed in togas, singing, "We are gods..."
On the other hand, poor and unemployed people with nothing to lose will tear our society apart if that part grows large enough (as has been demonstrated numerous times throughout history) and I fear nobody seems to be taking this situation seriously. We need to find an alternative way to structure our society, and quickly, if we want AI that does all our work for us.
Our social values will need to change, and that's hard. The technology can change and the globe can become connected, but that's all happening on the material side. Meanwhile, on the side of consciousness, psychology, values, attitudes, beliefs, and social contracts, change is VERY slow. Take for example, I was watching a documentary about Obama (I'm in Europe) where protesters were against him on account of Obamacare, because, the documentary showed, those people believed that people are NOT entitled to healthcare unless they've done something to EARN it. Now imagine for a moment that technology makes possible a cradle to grave, reasonable abundance of materials and prosperity for all people. Ok, maybe not "space travel for all", but a good diet, good lifestyle, education available to all interested, to pursue just for the love of it, and so on. Socially, we have thousands of years of beliefs that, PEOPLE ARE NOT ENTITLED TO A FREE LUNCH!
One of the difficulties is that we don't know, psychologically, what is the best environment for any individual to grow and develop to their best, and thereby offer their best to society, or just their family and friends. And I refer everyone back to those old Star Trek episodes where Kirk comes in and destroys a "balanced" society simply because, it doesn't "challenge" its people enough (they are sheep whilst a computer runs things). And generally, it is right-wing, traditional religions, and politics, which maintain this belief that you must be challenged to build your character. That may have been true, or the best understanding, 2000 years ago, but today it is a vastly different world, and we need much better and up-to-date models of human nature.
Well, not exactly. There's several books by Arabs, Moslems, etc. who point out that there really is an Islamic ideology which aims to take over the world. Think of it like Communism. Certainly, Western Islamophobia exists, but so does Islamic Westphobia. And this isn't to paint everyone with the same brush. They are quite clear though, that Islamism, or whatever you want to call it, exists, and it isn't just a reaction to bigotry and marginalisation. Besides, too often, even the general public notices that this or that young radical, actually came from a nice middle class neighbourhood and was studying medicine at university. It is an ideology. It blocks reasoned thinking. And it has some support at all levels. When the OIC (representing 57 Muslim countries) claims that "universal human rights" are ok but ONLY the ones which don't contradict Islam, that's part of the problem. Yes, Islamophobia exists, but it isn't what's driving the ideology.
Basically, the end of taxis and busses, ie. no more paid drivers.
I wonder how the costs would work out though. If you don't have to pay drivers, would they be cheap enough for everyone? I guess it could be a human right, like how some countries make broadband a human right, but obviously, some people will pay more for better quality cars.
I wonder how much of the current cost of taxi services is the drivers?
I think you hit the nail on the head, in that, the only sane way to explain this stuff, isn't with clever analogies, it is by just setting out the actual things themselves. And it isn't hard to do that. There's only three or four things which need to be understood and then people can see where API fits.
Interesting, and I always like hearing what people have learn from real and long experience. But I think there's a certain amount of begging the question. If you believe things should be more disciplined in an engineering sense, then sure, any or many problems which come up, can be seen to be due to lack of good engineering. Alternatively, someone could believe that problems came up due to a lack of good intuition about the nature of the project.
But whilst some languages can look more disciplined, it is harder to say anything about which languages are better for working more intuitively. I'm no programmer, but what few books I read about programming, or how to program, or how to think about programming, sound like they are searching for a "logical answer" to the issue, yet what they come up with often reads as just a bunch of rules of thumb learnt from experience in certain contexts with certain kinds of projects.
Which is fine, but the moment one starts pretending that these rules of thumb are a discipline like engineering, the moment in a sense, it seems to me, one misses the point. Take the whole thing about "design patterns": that idea came from Alexander's A Pattern Language, which was some guy taking tours of Italian towns and trying to come up with some rules of thumb for why some of the piazzas felt so nice. They are hints, intuitive reflections, artistic observations, and not "engineering".
Likewise, given projects can become so large, there might be more of a case for saying that, management rules about how to organise people and collaborate, have much more to do with the nature of the project than "engineering". A language might not be better for a project because it is more "engineering" like, but because it makes it easier for managers to control what people are doing, for example.
If there is one thing that strikes me as hard about code, even in the paltry little script stuff I do for work, it is that the hard thing about code is in how to organise it. I mean one can organise it, but it is easy to organise it wrong.
Was it carved up, though, or was there nothing to carve up in the first place? Nation states didn't exist in the area, and telling lots of tribes they now belong to a nation, any nation, didn't make any sense. So it remained at the level of strong men and despots.
It might be peer to peer. IOW, you're running your own simulation, or a part of it, and the Near Death Experiences people claim, are just you or they, coming out of the simulation.
Almost certainly? Things can go wrong and it not be anything more than a fluke. So we'd need some real evidence, not just beliefs that this or that must be a bad influence.
Whilst guns and smoking are hardly the best examples to compare to, there is perhaps a subtler point, which is maybe a bit more obvious with say, the example of alcohol. Are people's lives ruined by alcohol, or is it that they have a pre-existing problem in their mental development which results in life problems? And so actually, the drinking may just be a way to temporarally escape from and forget, all the damage they are suffering from, on account of their poor mental development, rather than the damage being caused by the alcohol itself? What is known as a "dry alcoholic" who doesn't drink yet continues to have big problems. And that's perhaps what the earlier poster was implying, that like guns, the real issue isn't banning, it is that people have to handle guns responsibly, and people have to drink responsibly, as simply banning the thing doesn't get at the real root cause, namely the person's own character. Of course a lot of left v. right politics comes down to, how to go about solving "character" problems, but whatever one's politics, there is this issue of how to help people become better, but still, human psychology is just very poorly understood. There was a documentary about obsessive compulsive behaviour which was ruining people's lives, like obsessive cleanliness, and the brain scans showed that they were just wired up a bit differently. Their lives were ruined and it was nothing to do with all the ads on TV for cleaning products.
Some fair points, but one quibble. It took more than a generation or two, for integration to happen in South Africa. There's a balance between people living a sort of self imposed segregation, and them wanting to change the country's laws to enforce it. And it isn't about food and music, it is the critical issues like women's rights and gay rights and what kind of education children receive, where the law has to draw the line at something and that law needs to apply to everyone. People demonise Islam, but there is perhaps a little too much with the, no separation of church and state, and a little too much of the literalist readings. And everyone is different as an individual, there's no need to paint everyone with the same brush. And there may be some general patterns, as is the case with all countries which are gradually changing laws and attitudes towards women and gays and so on.
A study can measure people's reactions today (robots that look human, will elicit patterns from the human world), but if such robots become commonplace, the meaning and context will shift.
People might take their familiarity with robots and let that influence their feelings about people. That people should behave in colder, more logical ways, and that you shouldn't expect empathy from others, merely accurate understanding, etc. Similar to how the machine was seen as de-humanising, that we'd become more "machine-like", so too with the mind and feelings and the body, we may start to adapt to behaving with people more like we'll adapt to behave with machines.
On the other had, arguably the machine never dehumanised us, it just gave us more freedom, and so all these concerns about human-machine interactions are silly. Once you learn it is a robot and it has no innate feeling of "private parts", we'll all know the difference and it'll be totally obvious. Like nobody freaks out when a car goes past at speed.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't get this argument. Devaluing your currency isn't difficult. The Germans, of all people, are aware of that.
As to Greece, they had two problems.
One: they were able to borrow cheaply, and instead of investing it in things like infrastructure and training they pissed half of it up the wall and used the rest to speculate on property.
Two: none of them paid any tax.
They were "in" the EU when all this happened, yet the EU couldn't in any meaningful sense stop them screwing up?
But populist nationalism?
A few years ago UKIP had (regrettably) as much as 4 million votes. But with Brexit we had 17 million voting to leave. I can't imagine they were all "populist nationalists". One thing I haven't heard much is whether the EU is too big, too complex, and too opaque. I'm personally a European at heart, and am a mix of nationalities, but that doesn't mean I know that the EU, as a political system, works.
I have just one friend in the world, and he sends me messages on like, four different systems. It used to be simpler when he just had an iPhone.
Now it seems he can't even agree with himself what to use.
So long as "smart grid" isn't like "smart bomb", ie. yeah it's better, but innocents still die, as it were. The so-called "renewables" can help in some places, but not enough to really make a difference? ie. replace fossil fuels. And it is up to the enthusiasts for renewables to show that they could. I want my green paradise Earth as much as anyone. And humanity is like a cancer that will keep eating everything. So unless renewables actually do work, people will simply keep using coal or whatever they can afford, and nobody can stop that. It isn't a question of whether people are willing to get with the program, it is that when people are stressed, they'll resort to whatever means they can, and if that means completely abandoning green initiatives, then they'll do that. So the first question is just, do renewables actually work to replace base load? It'll only make it harder later if they don't. It is up to champions of renewable energy to SHOW that they can.
The problem with blaming "Islam" is there's a ton of people who consider themselves followers of "Islam" who have virtually nothing in common with this guy.
Just to reply to this point, with such a large group, any generalisation is going to be indeed problematic. And likewise, anyone who doesn't like "western values" is making a generalisation—which values are "western"? many Westerners don't have "western" values, etc. And we also know that under communism, not everyone was a "communist". And that there are many different kinds of "feminists". Etc. There's lots of variables.
But there's also a certain amount of stuff which can happen in concert, which can then combine in very bad ways.
If a religion based on blind belief in a creator, tends to dull the mind a bit, and it also teaches that homosexuality is bad, and that religion is also largely embroiled in cold wars in the Middle East between competing factions (Iran and Saudi Arabia), and combined with the other things that religion teaches, and tends to be heavy handed about oppressing many instincts, in combination with local cultures (in Pakistan it is common to kick dogs if they sniff each other (so I hear)), and on to pof all that, you're gay, and the pressure to conform is heavy, and there's an inclusion of "honour" codes, inherited from tribal times, then perhaps all that sends someone who's already a bit unstable, over the edge, and a question is, who or what is to blame, and the answer is, all that stuff contributed to some degree. Just like, when Pinker asks, how come much of the world seems to have become more peaceful, he has to look at lots of possible contributing factors like, the invention of the modern novel, which often told stories which allowed people to start to identify more with others, and so contributed to a growth in empathy.
And that's the problem: something like religion is both very distant from any particular attack, yet precisely because religion covers so many aspects of life and development (after all, that's why people are religious, it is to better themselves) so religion is also much more involved than we often admit.
And whilst it would be very bad if we tarnished everyone with the same brush, and I have to say I wasn't a fan of Christian fundamentalists any more than any other kind of fundamentalist, it is nevertheless shocking that in a modern age, people will still resort to "faith" as a "reason" for their opinion on this or that issue.
And it's no exaggeration to say that most religions contribute to that. In that sense, even a Jain, insofar as they practice a blind belief, are contributing to the culture of blind belief in other religions, even if the specifics are different. But modernity knows this already. If every blind belief was docile and "just be happy" there would be no problem, although we wouldn't have much technology, but we would have peace. The problem is blind belief can't pick and choose what it is getting indoctrinated with, because it isn't supposed to question, it is just supposed to obey God's laws, which makes it a horror show when combined with ideologies and nuclear weapons.
It is all a matter of degrees, and Islam is just a worse version of monotheism, even whilst it itself maintains that, it is the best version of monotheism, the most pure version, and even if all of its teachings in the texts were peaceful, all of them, it would still be to blame for any blind belief inspired bigotry and violence, simply because it perpetuates blind belief in the laws of an unseen and perfect divinity. It perpetuates the habit, just as much of New Age perpetuates this habit of anti-reason.
Some say that if Jesus came back, he wouldn't be a Christian, and some say that Buddha started with reason, that he took all the beliefs and threw them out and said, wait, what can we actually find out about human nature? Even though, all these religions end up perpetuating cultures of blind belief in this or that when the become corporate. So if yo
Life is mostly OK (nobody is dropping bombs on us) so freedom is less of an issue. But I've seen a comment by a farming business that they don't like the way all the regs distort the market -- they'd rather things were tougher and leaner and more genuinely competitive. So there is a business argument for Brexit (as well as a business argument for staying in).
Basically, everyone is going to be affected in different ways, and nobody can know the future. Maybe we end up with better deals in some places. But I'm surprised nobody has raised the "too big to fail" argument, that smaller organisations are better and more flexible and can fail less painfully.
Nationality wise, I'm a citizen of the world, I've lived in a bunch of countries. The world is indeed global. Some of those claiming we should stay in Europe say that therefore, we need to look bigger by banding together. Because that's what the world needs now, even more peoples trying to push their collective weight around. And hey if Africa united, then they could push us around too. Great, not.
How about focussing on what we can do best.
Doesn't have to be one god. Could be trillions of beings, which would seem like gods to us "down here", yet they could still be constrained/limited at their level. And some of them are participating in the simulation, perhaps even contributing their own resources to it.
Put it this way, it seems to be a better interpretation of what NDEs report, than that they met "God". The NDEs seem to say that the higher level is less constrained, whilst this level is dumbed down, more filtered, and narrow, and that when people die, they "meet themselves", like waking up.
Or maybe the NDE is just a brain fart. But that's not, methinks, the simplest explanation, as we just don't know WHAT consciousness is, and saying it "emerges from the brain" doesn't actually explain anything about it—although one way around this is to just altogether dismiss consciousness' weird properties.
Maybe we are already a billion years in the future, and part of our schooling is to simulate a corporeal existence. Kinda like The Matrix but, with a less mundane red pill. When we die, the Near Death Experience is just the end of the level, and we return to whatever it is we are actually inhabiting, sentiences which were "uploaded" to non-biological existence, half a billion years ago. Cue Buffy's The Trio, dancing in a field, dressed in togas, singing, "We are gods..."
On the other hand, poor and unemployed people with nothing to lose will tear our society apart if that part grows large enough (as has been demonstrated numerous times throughout history) and I fear nobody seems to be taking this situation seriously. We need to find an alternative way to structure our society, and quickly, if we want AI that does all our work for us.
Our social values will need to change, and that's hard. The technology can change and the globe can become connected, but that's all happening on the material side. Meanwhile, on the side of consciousness, psychology, values, attitudes, beliefs, and social contracts, change is VERY slow. Take for example, I was watching a documentary about Obama (I'm in Europe) where protesters were against him on account of Obamacare, because, the documentary showed, those people believed that people are NOT entitled to healthcare unless they've done something to EARN it. Now imagine for a moment that technology makes possible a cradle to grave, reasonable abundance of materials and prosperity for all people. Ok, maybe not "space travel for all", but a good diet, good lifestyle, education available to all interested, to pursue just for the love of it, and so on. Socially, we have thousands of years of beliefs that, PEOPLE ARE NOT ENTITLED TO A FREE LUNCH!
One of the difficulties is that we don't know, psychologically, what is the best environment for any individual to grow and develop to their best, and thereby offer their best to society, or just their family and friends. And I refer everyone back to those old Star Trek episodes where Kirk comes in and destroys a "balanced" society simply because, it doesn't "challenge" its people enough (they are sheep whilst a computer runs things). And generally, it is right-wing, traditional religions, and politics, which maintain this belief that you must be challenged to build your character. That may have been true, or the best understanding, 2000 years ago, but today it is a vastly different world, and we need much better and up-to-date models of human nature.
Well, not exactly. There's several books by Arabs, Moslems, etc. who point out that there really is an Islamic ideology which aims to take over the world. Think of it like Communism. Certainly, Western Islamophobia exists, but so does Islamic Westphobia. And this isn't to paint everyone with the same brush. They are quite clear though, that Islamism, or whatever you want to call it, exists, and it isn't just a reaction to bigotry and marginalisation. Besides, too often, even the general public notices that this or that young radical, actually came from a nice middle class neighbourhood and was studying medicine at university. It is an ideology. It blocks reasoned thinking. And it has some support at all levels. When the OIC (representing 57 Muslim countries) claims that "universal human rights" are ok but ONLY the ones which don't contradict Islam, that's part of the problem. Yes, Islamophobia exists, but it isn't what's driving the ideology.
Indeed. Of the (only) 100 desktops I deal with, exactly one had a 3TB Seagate, and it failed.
Basically, the end of taxis and busses, ie. no more paid drivers.
I wonder how the costs would work out though. If you don't have to pay drivers, would they be cheap enough for everyone? I guess it could be a human right, like how some countries make broadband a human right, but obviously, some people will pay more for better quality cars.
I wonder how much of the current cost of taxi services is the drivers?
I think you hit the nail on the head, in that, the only sane way to explain this stuff, isn't with clever analogies, it is by just setting out the actual things themselves. And it isn't hard to do that. There's only three or four things which need to be understood and then people can see where API fits.
Wow, finally a moment where Slashdotters can make a political insult without being at all off-topic.
Nazi !!!
Once again Veep seems like a documentary.
Interesting, and I always like hearing what people have learn from real and long experience. But I think there's a certain amount of begging the question. If you believe things should be more disciplined in an engineering sense, then sure, any or many problems which come up, can be seen to be due to lack of good engineering. Alternatively, someone could believe that problems came up due to a lack of good intuition about the nature of the project.
But whilst some languages can look more disciplined, it is harder to say anything about which languages are better for working more intuitively. I'm no programmer, but what few books I read about programming, or how to program, or how to think about programming, sound like they are searching for a "logical answer" to the issue, yet what they come up with often reads as just a bunch of rules of thumb learnt from experience in certain contexts with certain kinds of projects.
Which is fine, but the moment one starts pretending that these rules of thumb are a discipline like engineering, the moment in a sense, it seems to me, one misses the point. Take the whole thing about "design patterns": that idea came from Alexander's A Pattern Language, which was some guy taking tours of Italian towns and trying to come up with some rules of thumb for why some of the piazzas felt so nice. They are hints, intuitive reflections, artistic observations, and not "engineering".
Likewise, given projects can become so large, there might be more of a case for saying that, management rules about how to organise people and collaborate, have much more to do with the nature of the project than "engineering". A language might not be better for a project because it is more "engineering" like, but because it makes it easier for managers to control what people are doing, for example.
If there is one thing that strikes me as hard about code, even in the paltry little script stuff I do for work, it is that the hard thing about code is in how to organise it. I mean one can organise it, but it is easy to organise it wrong.
Was it carved up, though, or was there nothing to carve up in the first place? Nation states didn't exist in the area, and telling lots of tribes they now belong to a nation, any nation, didn't make any sense. So it remained at the level of strong men and despots.
It might be peer to peer. IOW, you're running your own simulation, or a part of it, and the Near Death Experiences people claim, are just you or they, coming out of the simulation.
Would you care to explain how the 777 is hipster? Does it enjoy thick rimmed glasses, skinny jeans, american spirits and pbr?
Because the 777 is like the mainstream number of the beast 666 but with an ironically off by one error.
Almost certainly? Things can go wrong and it not be anything more than a fluke. So we'd need some real evidence, not just beliefs that this or that must be a bad influence.
Whilst guns and smoking are hardly the best examples to compare to, there is perhaps a subtler point, which is maybe a bit more obvious with say, the example of alcohol. Are people's lives ruined by alcohol, or is it that they have a pre-existing problem in their mental development which results in life problems? And so actually, the drinking may just be a way to temporarally escape from and forget, all the damage they are suffering from, on account of their poor mental development, rather than the damage being caused by the alcohol itself? What is known as a "dry alcoholic" who doesn't drink yet continues to have big problems. And that's perhaps what the earlier poster was implying, that like guns, the real issue isn't banning, it is that people have to handle guns responsibly, and people have to drink responsibly, as simply banning the thing doesn't get at the real root cause, namely the person's own character. Of course a lot of left v. right politics comes down to, how to go about solving "character" problems, but whatever one's politics, there is this issue of how to help people become better, but still, human psychology is just very poorly understood. There was a documentary about obsessive compulsive behaviour which was ruining people's lives, like obsessive cleanliness, and the brain scans showed that they were just wired up a bit differently. Their lives were ruined and it was nothing to do with all the ads on TV for cleaning products.
And there's a bunch of companies called ISIS, after the River Isis, part of River Thames.
Some fair points, but one quibble. It took more than a generation or two, for integration to happen in South Africa. There's a balance between people living a sort of self imposed segregation, and them wanting to change the country's laws to enforce it. And it isn't about food and music, it is the critical issues like women's rights and gay rights and what kind of education children receive, where the law has to draw the line at something and that law needs to apply to everyone. People demonise Islam, but there is perhaps a little too much with the, no separation of church and state, and a little too much of the literalist readings. And everyone is different as an individual, there's no need to paint everyone with the same brush. And there may be some general patterns, as is the case with all countries which are gradually changing laws and attitudes towards women and gays and so on.
Coylehd t agree more.
A study can measure people's reactions today (robots that look human, will elicit patterns from the human world), but if such robots become commonplace, the meaning and context will shift.
People might take their familiarity with robots and let that influence their feelings about people. That people should behave in colder, more logical ways, and that you shouldn't expect empathy from others, merely accurate understanding, etc. Similar to how the machine was seen as de-humanising, that we'd become more "machine-like", so too with the mind and feelings and the body, we may start to adapt to behaving with people more like we'll adapt to behave with machines.
On the other had, arguably the machine never dehumanised us, it just gave us more freedom, and so all these concerns about human-machine interactions are silly. Once you learn it is a robot and it has no innate feeling of "private parts", we'll all know the difference and it'll be totally obvious. Like nobody freaks out when a car goes past at speed.