There are many ways in which people might not believe all or some of the claims on AGW. Believe it or not, there are even climate scientists (Dr. Bas van Geel for instance)...
One way is that the precautionary Principle says you should act before you have sufficient evidence, just in case, for some objectively calculated and totally impartial measure of "sufficient"/sarc. So people can say it is science, but the PP says the science can be quite incomplete. Not 99% incomplete, not 95% incomplete, but just some feeling for how much you'd like to believe you have the answer. An answer about the future of a complex system which behaves chaotically in the short term but is assumed to behave predictably on a long term average, and assumed that the bits we don't understand are not that important (cloud cover) and assumed that the feedbacks drive in one direction and not the other (CO2 -> water, not water -> CO2), and so on. Anyway, the biggest thing to disagree over isn't the science -- science is self correcting and that's why we tend to trust it, although self-correcting can take decades -- the biggest issue is the response to the perceived problem, and that's where it becomes intensely political. That's where you see that what the "deniers" are really "denying" is the notion that you can globally regulate the planet and its people in some sort of quasi-magical order that will make it better for everyone. If the answer to global warming was less regulation the right nuts would be all over it. But the "answer" is for some reason, always posed as being about more regulation, more control, reducing consumption, "reducing greed" as one environmentalist put it to me, and THAT is a political ideology and that's where global warming becomes political, and not about "The Science". That is where it becomes "religious" (reduce greed! it is a sin!) and that is where other countries that don't have the Western notion of Original Sin won't really be too keen on taking a colonialist attitude towards their own development, thank you very much. The only politically adept strategy I can think of personally is about flexibility, adaptability, and technological progress which tends to drive social progress. If the climate is changing for ANY reason, it is changing and hankering for a quiet cabin in the woods living off of solar panels and sustainable local vegetable gardens is not going to fix that -- if you are under 6 feet of snow all year. The world is staggeringly complex, and I'm sorry but "sustainability" as it is often described is just a naive and simplistic notion which is too braindead to cope with -- it denies -- the complexity of the modern world, which is changing far faster and in more ways than ever.
I've always said that the iPhone succeeded not because of the OS but because of affordable capacitive not resistive touch displays, a drop in mobile bandwidth prices and improved batteries more than anything else. [...] Windows 8 is just in the right place at the right time.
I agree about timing. I wonder whether Apple would have released the iPad any sooner, or whether their product intelligence said, there's no point until it is X weight and gives Y hours. Arguably, Apple was just at the right place at the right time. They figured you didn't need a "full Mac OS X" experience, the product would still sell as an iDevice. And touch meant apps need to be made for touch, with new UIs, so again, they figured, no point unless the app is made for touch.
What seems in the air now is whether anybody cares anymore to stick with Windows brand. A touch UI means you lose your old apps anyway. Don't just think of all the things you can do on a PC that you can't do on a tablet, but think of all the things people do on a tablet that they wouldn't do on a PC.
The whole point of ubiquitous computing is that you have a whole bunch of devices. One way or the other it is a post-PC world. Windows tablets can still sell, just like Android sells, and Apple sells. I can't imagine anyone dominating everything. Different markets will probably end up picking different ecosystems. Doctors will be buying Apple, accountants Windows, architects Windows and Apple, sales will be buying Androids, etc. etc. The IT people will do the usual jumps to try to make things run smoothly. Home shopper grannies will be using Kindles, and in the rest of the world, other brands will appear. Those that can't get any traction anywhere will fade. It'll be driven by apps, and apps will drive the adoption. If architects want an A3 sized tablet and the only niche available is a Windows one running some custom touch AutoCAD app, they'll be driven to adopt Windows ecosystem on tablets. But just in that market. It is all about the apps. But nobody will get too excited about any of this. If anything it'll mean even more compatibility headaches. Nobody will dominate, not even Google or "open".
True, and humans aren't entirely on the animal level. We don't just eat and breed, we also "want to have a life", and as people have been getting more well off, their interest in children and in material things has tended to reduce, as they become interested in enlightenment, or dance classes, or holidays. Men become so obsessed with philosophising that they neglect to find a mate. Kinda pathetic biologically.
That sort of culture isn't just part of one group, though.
I recall my Scottish grandmother showing similar contempt for her children when they made moves to improve themselves. It became a life long resentment that destroyed the relationships and the hatred was never healed. Another example from a previous generation, a son and his wife who left Pakistan for the UK, to find better opportunities, was spat at by his mother and she said she hoped they all died on the voyage.
Modern life demands that individuals leave their family and community loyalty behind and go where the opportunities are.
Those who don't shift into that modern mindset will remain poor.
If that sort of attitude sounds hard to believe, you have to bear in mind at that time in Scotland, it was considered wise to have all your teeth pulled when you were a teenager so you wouldn't face medical bills later on. When people are very poor all they have is family loyalty. So what makes you strong is also what holds you back in modern life.
True and as the symbol faded, its essence -- cheap transportation -- became more obvious. A bit like the invention of the standard shipping container -- shipping doesn't need armies of men manually loading cargo, that's not what it is about, it is about being able to send anything anywhere quickly.
The iPad doesn't so much change computing as bring us a bit closer to the point of having computers. The DynaBook was supposed to be a way for any child to learn anything, cheaply, quickly, easily.
Is the iPad a DynaBook? Give one to an old lady who's never used a computer and in 2 minutes she's using it. It is kinda the right idea, in terms of the essence. Does computing need people to know the difference between "programs" and "data" ? Well, maybe not. People say "the internet" they don't say "web client" and "url" and "dynamic pages" and "backend database". Most people who fly don't know anything about routes or altitude or navigation or fuel consumption or any of that; they just "fly".
This is where MS adding a touch interface don't really get it -- it isn't about touch per se. Apple have shown they've been willing and able to strip down computing a bit. Traditionally you could open an app then open a file, or open the file to open the app. Apple said, well, a lot of stuff is no longer about you knowing the file location anyway, like web sites, databases, email, etc., they all manage storage themselves. So let's wrap it under the app.
The technically minded take interest in all that though, like my plumber knows the routes of all the pipes in my house, but I have no idea what each pipe does or what layout he chose. I just want the essence, ie. I'm cold, push a button and make it warm.
Do we want users learning about computing or do we want them spending that time learning what they want to learn? Which might be computing but it might be a million other topics.
MS "designers" took an idea from 1930's Swiss poster design and thought they could build a UI out of it.
A "tile" is neither an icon nor a widget nor a window. You get a little teensy bit of info that's probably not useful, and will require you to tap it and go into the app anyway to do anything. So what have you gained? The little bit of info makes the tile big and so to pay for it, the UI has to have this massive area to scroll. And in keeping with the Swiss design, most of that space has to be blank. Because white space looks great on big posters, and you'll be really glad you wasted it on a 10" screen (not). They say they copied it from metro transport signage. Yes, you know that stuff that is *huge* and you typically want to glance at very quickly as you zoom past. Ideal, really, for a small computer -- which you keep in your gaze for long concentrated periods -- when you think about it (not).
It is the sort of idea someone should have come up with at 11am on their trip to Starbucks, sketched out by the afternoon, and then thrown in the trash by evening.
The popularization of curated computing is the worst thing ever done in the history of computing (for the industry itself and users, of course worse things have been done using computers). And that's all Apple's fault.
"Curated" as they are "services". It isn't the same as the water company curating the water supply, so when I run the tap the water is safe, but there is an element of that. But for those kinds of benefits, it does suggest Apple will become the dominant service. But I don't hate my water company for being a monopoly, I'd hate them is they provided a bad service and I was stuck with them. So this isn't as yet quite the same as Microsoft, although it could be in 5 years or so.
There could be more open interoperability between platforms -- Apple didn't even want to allow native apps on the iPhone to begin with, it was all to be web apps -- but native code just always seems to perform better, and look better. The market is making a lot of these choices, including the app developers. People seem to want mobile computing and networking.
On the plus side, tablets are far from essential, and people are not as yet relying on them exclusively, although some vertical applications already do. So things could shift quickly even if Apple remained dominant for a few years. What's the cost of replacing one tablet with a different one? Not much.
Maybe we'll see different industries standardise on different platforms. Maybe airlines use iOS, medical industry uses Android, travelling sales people use Windows, etc. I think it would be quite hard for Apple to truly become a global monopoly on computing.
That's right. The "healthy" side of ASBOs is that there are a lot of things which are bad but not technically illegal. Dropping money in the street is not illegal. Screaming loudly during sex is not illegal. But paedophiles have been known to drop money outside school gates to entice children to pick it up and come over and offer it back. Some woman was screaming loudly during sex repeatedly and ignoring requests from neighbours that she quieten down. So do you let it go on, or do the authorities have something to do? ASBOs are very specific, there's maybe a few dozen in one city per year, and you have to apply to a judge to have one granted. I'm not saying I agree or disagree with them, they are quite scary, but so are some of the things people do "legally". The ones I've heard about, judges just don't like granting ASBOs. The ASBO has to be very specific. If the police catch you breaching the terms of the ASBO then they can arrest you. People often say that ASBOs don't work because half the time people breach them anyway, but that's the point -- breaching it allows the police to arrest you.
I consider myself pro-science, open to catastrophic scenarios, but also wary of cultural bias (I've lived in enough places to see how culture can affect a whole country even when the world is telling them they are wrong). Yours is the best post I've seen in a few years. It does really come down to separating the science from the politics. The political AGW crowd makes no reservations about accusing the motives and ethics of others. Big oil only interested in profit is destroying the planet, like the tobacco companies destroyed your health. OK, but the political AGW people are upholding their own ethical stance, their own sense of morality, for the planet and future generations, and THOSE ethical judgements also deserve scrutiny. Did you know that Apartheid was morally linked to a sense of natural order which came from ecology? The Western Buddhist types get it wrong -- simply being devoted to a higher morality and devoted to the good of the world and a higher consciousness does't automatically grant you knowledge of how to make that goodness a reality in practical social ways. It is those kinds of really hard questions that the political AGW crowd need to be willing to face, because feeling you are taking a higher moral stance is one thing, but actually knowing in practice what is a good solution is another thing entirely. People can be highly morally and ethically driven to do the right thing. But the biggest problem with global warming -- and global warming is just one instance of a whole class of global problems that go beyond national boundaries and seem to require some sort of global system -- the biggest problem is we don't know how to create a global system that can deal with global problems. Political AGW seem to claim more than enough practical certainty to believe that we have to act. OK, but who knows how to make the global system act? On ANYTHING? The "truth" is not enough. The globe isn't just 200 countries, it is a set of cultures that live in different ages. The Americans can't even sort out their own Republican v Democrat differences, which on a global scale, are negligibly different, and yet, the two sides sorta often hate each other, and yet, we're somehow going to unite the world under one main cause? It is one ecosystem but each culture sees that ecosystem from a very different place. People often severely underestimate the cultural differences around the world, which is ironic given how much people love to travel and "celebrate" other cultures. The reason global warming politically won't work is the same as why USA utterly failed in Afghanistan, and is still failing after 10 years -- it is a different culture, radically different, the people as a whole just don't share the same values, and there's no reason why they should, and no way to change them. They are adapted to their environment using the best cultural systems they know, codes that go back much longer than democracy or even authoritarian government. I picked up a little book, "What About China?" which purported to answer the global warming political issue of, why should the West commit to emissions cuts when China is industrialising? I was really curious to know, because I'd like to think I'm open minded. So I read the book, and it says, "we should set the good example." The naivety was astounding. China, considered itself the centre of the world and civilisation for so long that it figured the rest of the world wasn't even worth exploring, is now going to put the environment ahead of production because they want to follow the good example set by America? The irony of global warming politics is that the AGW crowd don't understand the world. They don't understand the diversity of culture. They're a clique (millions in a world of billions) who can only see their own moral stance, and can't understand the moral stances of others. This makes them as much part of the problem as anyone else in the global arena, because the world is culturally deeply fractured, and their approach of vilifying others only adds to that fragmentation. George W. Bush or Al Gore -- they both have an Us v Them attitude.
For the consumer, "fragmentation" and "differentiation" are mapped as "confusion" and "getting that I want", respectively.
If a consumer knows why they're choosing something -- because they understand the pros and cons of all the competitors, then that's differentiation. I think this is reflected in your comment, where you know app compatibility doesn't depend on screen size or skin, for instance.
But if the particular consumer shopping that day doesn't understand all the differences, then "Android" as a brand, is fragmented.
I think what Google might do, if they want to keep Android as the OS that runs on hardware from multiple manufacturers/brands (and not turn into Googrola), is to advertise Android in a way that helps the consumer understand how to make choice. Otherwise, they'll be lured into the strict vertical model of Apple, which works for Apple, but isn't obvious that should work for anyone else. Apple's brand image was built over decades as "different" and "alternative" and "the one". Google's brand image, to my mind, as a person who Googles every day, and jumped to Google right away from, what was it, AltaVista, ick, doesn't fit that, and probably never will. Google isn't about the unique choice, one that's specially designed -- it is about open access to a variety of information, and helping me understand stuff. I think they kinda need to do that for Android, ie. customer education, advertise to take people through that sense of -- and here they can copy Apple's ads by way of showing how people use it in life -- showing how different people with different requirements went about choosing a particular handset.
Consumers watching Apple ads are getting the message that they can expect to do everything on their iPads. Now that right there is the opposite of fragmentation and the opposite of confusion. Yet that is exactly how customers need to understand Android. You can do lots and it helps to make choices but look, let us help you here: these are the things to consider when choosing, to figure out how it suits you and your lifestyle and work.
Then you can walk into a shop and ignore the salesman's crap, and knowing what you are looking for, pick the best handset that suits you.
There's also an argument that nature seems to "copy". Once it has done something, it seems to do it again more quickly. Now Star Trek was written to not be so alien looking that the audience couldn't relate to it. And I do get bored with endless forehead-ridge variations. Trek was like that for reasons of TV writing. But humanoids, or things that are sorta upright with four limbs, might be quite common anyway, simply because nature seems to repeat stuff. We might imagine some small change early on in evolution that would have made a very different outcome millions of years later, but life seems also pretty stable, in that, it sorta keeps to a pattern for a long time, then suddenly something changes and the new pattern spreads rapidly, but then it stays the same for a long time, and so on. I don't know if people know why and how patterns in nature spread rapidly. Like, suddenly there is a new species. (I'm not being creationist *spit* *spit* and there is this photocopier-like behaviour which suggests some additional blind and automatic mechanisms which we don't know about, or that we're somehow overestimating how many paths are actually available in the system). It is the "stays the same" and "copies" part that might suggest that alien worlds are similar to Earth. Why? Because Earth isn't special and because nature made it happen here, so we know it can happen, and therefore it is probably happening in a similar way elsewhere. (Of course I wouldn't bet on what aliens look like, but seeing as they're out there across the vast expanse of space, expecting them to be completely different, following a different path, is one view, but expecting them to be very similar, because nature and the universe "likes" to copy stuff, is another.)
Yes it is a land grab. But it is land nobody else seems to have known existed. People said "the iPad is just a giant iPhone, what's the point?? LOL!!". Well it turns out that if you make something very much like an iPad it can sell really well. Really, nobody should want an iPad, nor an Android tablet (no real keyboard for a start). These companies should just ignore the iPad, after all it is just a fad./sarc I don't know how much control and power Apple or any company ought to have in fairness legally for what Apple did, but the patent system seems woefully broken for promoting innovation. It seems to hold back innovators whilst rewarding leeches.
Plus there's another issue: sometimes someone setting a standard by force can be beneficial in other ways. If the government can't do it (because they're too lame) then companies might, by playing hard and winning in the market. A monopoly isn't in itself bad for the consumer -- it can at times render other benefits to the consumer. The trouble is of course if you really want to have an Android 10" tablet and there are none available. But then other people might like to have ebooks and media go digital sooner -- technical progress -- so, that infrastructure needs forcing on the industry by a company with the power to do so. When I board a plane I don't care if it is an Airbus or a Boeing, I care about the convenience and price so that I can use the flight to get on with what I really want to do. Google is a pretty big monopoly but for the time being I don't care, there's too many benefits to having it for other things.
If the iPad as a force can help drive innovation in other ways, like drag publishers out of the Jurassic period, then that's one benefit. It is like a monogamous relationship -- there are benefits to be had that you don't get with an "open" relationship, and likewise sometimes it is better to not be in a relationship.
Open or closed, and choice or standard, aren't principles; they're just states. And sometimes one state is more useful and sometimes the other state is more useful.
At the moment, I feel the tablet form factor is still too new and untrusted for real work, so it needs a lot of control and focus -- so I'd prefer there not be a lot of competitors. Tablets need to become accepted as a real new platform. Once that happens, get the monopoly to break up.
The question is, for me, if Android tablets had been first to market, would we be seeing so much interest in tablets as a new platform?
Or would they just be, "giant iPods, what's the point, LOL?"
The tablet needs a really good working trustable ecosystem to get established as a real viable platform.
The difference is whether the people rioting have higher moral principles than the people they're protesting against.
The real tragedy for these kids is that they've somehow been raised to not know that setting fire to buildings where there are flats with people sleeping in above them might be like, a really bad thing to do, and that stealing just for the sake of stealing is also really bad, and that they have been raised or educated to have very little desire to make themselves better, to work hard, and would rather sit drinking in the early hours of the morning and claim that the riot was great fun. That is the tragedy. They aren't "disaffected", they're worse, they are damaged young people.
Their environment has failed them, both with their parents perhaps for being too insular culturally, and with their schools for being too liberal and not setting boundaries and discipline and a work ethic, and the companies that are too right wing and too busy looking after their own money interests than considering how to create jobs for very disadvantaged kids, and the government both on the left and the right for wasting money on stupid schemes that didn't work and then cutting that money, and all the bleeding hearts in-between who make a career out of "talking" and "community relations" and criticising the police instead of coming up with real solutions for developing these kids into healthy adults. It is so fucking tragic.
The girlfriend of the guy shot by the police said that these riots have nothing to do with the shooting. She said people are just using it as an excuse. She defended her boyfriend, said he'd never have been carrying a gun, but she also said the riots have nothing to do with that shooting. It is just people looting, and she was upset by it.
Many people are trying to figure out why the youth are disaffected, and why they don't seem to know that it is a really bad thing to do to set fire to shops when people live above them and may burn to death. See pics of woman leaping from first floor window into arms of police.
Everyone is wondering why the journalists can interview these kids the next day and they reply, "oh yeah, we got wine to drink now we looted that shop and we're having a really good time, and we really hope it goes off again tonight!" (said the two young girls, words to that effect).
Trouble is, nobody really knows why these kids have been raised so badly and why the schools have taught them so badly and why their culture hasn't encouraged them to aspire to working hard and why there aren't enough job opportunities that suit their level of ability. It is tragic for them.
But also, people who can "think for themselves" and "not conform" have their own way of making decisions, like, "I just want a simple device that works for XYZ, as I'm too busy doing my real job where my skills and talents and creativity are focussed."
If your skills and talents are IT stuff then fine, but being an IT geek doesn't mean you're the only person who can think for themselves. Slight bias there with how you're framing the word "individuals".
In our little department (100 users) we're about to ditch our eMacs and iLamps. We've bought plenty of iMacs and minis over the years, but a single Leopard image has worked across all of them, including the iLamps. We are not big enough to need server racks, so a few Mac Pro servers aren't a space problem. With imaging tools, netboot, Apple Remote Desktop, LDAP, and network accounts, we've profided reasonably OK for our users. We are now moving to Lion, which is cheap and gives us full disk encryption, which these days we need, as well as the ability to manage iDevices, and yes it does obsolete our 5+ year old Macs, but that's not too bad when you've had 9 year old Macs in service.
Though admittedly I've seen at least one version of the graph which had error bars so enormous that it was easily consistent with the Medieval Warming Period; but you don't see those when it's reused in newspapers and documentaries.
Exactly. The scientists themselves know the error bars are there, and the uncertainties are there. So the science was working. But then something happened and it is like they dumbed it down for the public, believing the public wouldn't act with such uncertainty. So they pretended to be certain or virtually certain when they spoke to the public. Of course, as scientists, the public mood or wisdom is not something they knew much about. They misjudged the public's common sense. Oh sure you see the occasional psychology paper trying to explain denialism as some sort of mental condition. They just ignored the public's common sense, that with something so uncertain, there are worse and more likely things to worry about.
This is very controversial, but I'll post it as a pointer rather than because I know it to be true. You can split any view down into whether it allows questioning and reinterpretation, and whether it doesn't. A lot of people from various faiths will say that you have to read the texts and interpret them to find something good in them. You might look for the spirit of something that was written two thousand years ago in different life conditions and which has been messed up my multiple reinterpretations since. So Ok they retain their faith, because on some level they believe in spirituality, but they also know they are interpreting the texts, so the texts are open to question. This kind of religious person just gets along. The other kind doesn't believe in interpretation, they believe the text is read literally, and actually, they don't realise that they themselves are interpreting the text when they read it (their own subjective interpretation)
Now, the Arab Islamic world had both types in it, those who would interpret and those who took it literally. So they had a big formal theological debate about it. The interpreters said that it was a text written by men at an earlier time and you had to translate it to use it properly in the present. The other side, the literalists, said that the text was not written, the text was "unwritten" and exists forever as the mind of god. Well, they had a big debate and the literalists won. So, Islam had that debate and the literalists won it a thousand years ago and haven't changed since.
One of the arguments the literalists made was that you can be as clever as you like trying to reinterpret texts, but if someone else has more power and can just kill you, what difference does it make? So they only thing to worry about, they reasoned, was seizing power. Seize power and force everyone to submit to the one true "unwritten true forever" text. Hence the violent aspects of the text (which were written by a tribal warrior because back in the day, that's what people did) are especially well preserved even in the MODERN day.
As for patterns, for me as a person there is a wealth of information/data/content out there, some of it my own, and with hardware now able to do a lot on a small device, there are a range of devices from something that fits on a keyring to gigantic displays, and some processing can be done on the keyring and some in massive datacentres. I'd like to take advantage of all of it. The general pattern is about how to make all of it work in concert. "Pervasive computing" where data can be accessed in multiple ways, presented to suit the device, and flung about from one device to another whilst preserving security and integrity. It is something about how Twitter is (or used to be) a service with a protocol and everyone could create different types of clients, like there are different types of buildings. We need something like that for all our other data. Services that can present a document in high fidelity on a desktop screen, but as mere monotype -- and still editable -- text on a phone. It is almost like Model-View-Controller but where Model is in the cloud and View and Controller are whichever gadgets you have at hand, such as your personal iPod (or similar) touchscreen that was in you pocket, in concert with the plasma in the conference room, authenticated with a key from your physical keychain.
People's perspectives evolve and change according to life's problems and circumstances.
Yes, at the end of the day, it is just a perspective. Like, I like chocolate, you like vanilla. But humanity has also grown and changed through many generations of people experiencing problems, suffering, calamities, etc., and trying to find a better way to deal with those problems. Einstein said, words to the effect, you can't solve a problem at the same level of thinking [perspective] which created it.
The general broad picture [perspective] we have today is that humanity evolved. So for say, 100,000 years we were all just disparate tribes. This was fine: "my perspective is tribal", "I am linked by blood", "my tribe is my blood" etc. But eventually, those tribes started competing, and the tribal perspective said, "they are not our tribe, not our blood, so it is ok to kill them." So say we had 50,000 years of tribal wars. Any tribe that comes into contact with another tribe easily starts a war. "Invade their village, kill their men, batter their babies' bodies against rocks, steal and rape their women, make them our blood so our tribe will be bigger and more powerful."
Sooner or later, that perspective is creating more problems than it solves. General suffering increases, all tribes are losing out.
So, somehow, someone has a new idea that all tribes should be united, but the problem is, they have different blood, and different kings. So somehow, we don't know how, a new perspective appears, perhaps just because evolution is always trying random shit, and the new perspective is, "we are all united under one leader who is not one mortal king but a higher king, a king that can be king of all tribes."
The new "king" is basically an idea, an image, and perhaps because humans were evolving cognitively and were becoming more able to handle images and concepts, and so they realised in their new perspective that they could unite tribes not under one mortal king (who would die, and start blood feuds for succession) but under something that could never die a mortal death: A CONCEPT.
So yes, now that we are living 10,000 years later, such myths about gods and stuff and divine rules are silly. They are silly because our modern rational cognition gives us a much higher perspective, ie. we understand it is just a myth.
But at the time, when the ability to create concepts was still an innovation, it was the god concept, the king of kings, that could unite as a percpective in tribal minds, could unite separate tribes and thus, REDUCE bloodshed.
Today we are struggling with shifting from a nationalistic perspective to a truly global perspective, again as a way to reduce unnecessary suffering.
But remember, each new perspective is gradual and builds on top of what came before. And the whole planet isn't all living in Western style households where it is safe and they can sit and watch TV and study and learn and get educated at university. Much of the world is still very poor but also very tribal. This is why things like Christianity and Islam are spreading in Africa, even as Europe has growing Atheist population.
Yes, man can hardly govern himself, and that's a modern perspective from the quiet safety of the Freudian couch, but before you get anywhere near a safe stable neighbourhood, humans have to grow through several perspectives, and one of the earliest is the tribal perspective.
Go to a poor run down area, like northern Pakistan, or some inner city Western ghetto, and you see tribal warlord gang culture, ie. perspectives.
They are just perspectives, but given humans only have perspectives with which to handle life as they perceive it, we have to take a lot of interest in how perspectives develop from one to another, how someone goes from becoming a gang member, who views everyone as an enemy, to a perspective where someone feels that their neighbours are their friends, to a perspective where people feel secure enough to start a business and even trade with stra
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There are many ways in which people might not believe all or some of the claims on AGW. Believe it or not, there are even climate scientists (Dr. Bas van Geel for instance)...
One way is that the precautionary Principle says you should act before you have sufficient evidence, just in case, for some objectively calculated and totally impartial measure of "sufficient" /sarc. So people can say it is science, but the PP says the science can be quite incomplete. Not 99% incomplete, not 95% incomplete, but just some feeling for how much you'd like to believe you have the answer. An answer about the future of a complex system which behaves chaotically in the short term but is assumed to behave predictably on a long term average, and assumed that the bits we don't understand are not that important (cloud cover) and assumed that the feedbacks drive in one direction and not the other (CO2 -> water, not water -> CO2), and so on. Anyway, the biggest thing to disagree over isn't the science -- science is self correcting and that's why we tend to trust it, although self-correcting can take decades -- the biggest issue is the response to the perceived problem, and that's where it becomes intensely political. That's where you see that what the "deniers" are really "denying" is the notion that you can globally regulate the planet and its people in some sort of quasi-magical order that will make it better for everyone. If the answer to global warming was less regulation the right nuts would be all over it. But the "answer" is for some reason, always posed as being about more regulation, more control, reducing consumption, "reducing greed" as one environmentalist put it to me, and THAT is a political ideology and that's where global warming becomes political, and not about "The Science". That is where it becomes "religious" (reduce greed! it is a sin!) and that is where other countries that don't have the Western notion of Original Sin won't really be too keen on taking a colonialist attitude towards their own development, thank you very much. The only politically adept strategy I can think of personally is about flexibility, adaptability, and technological progress which tends to drive social progress. If the climate is changing for ANY reason, it is changing and hankering for a quiet cabin in the woods living off of solar panels and sustainable local vegetable gardens is not going to fix that -- if you are under 6 feet of snow all year. The world is staggeringly complex, and I'm sorry but "sustainability" as it is often described is just a naive and simplistic notion which is too braindead to cope with -- it denies -- the complexity of the modern world, which is changing far faster and in more ways than ever.
Don't forget to also examine the pork sausages and bacon.
Anything else un-Islamic they could be carrying? A copy of "Feminism is for Everybody"? A CND flag? A kilt?
I've always said that the iPhone succeeded not because of the OS but because of affordable capacitive not resistive touch displays, a drop in mobile bandwidth prices and improved batteries more than anything else. [...] Windows 8 is just in the right place at the right time.
I agree about timing. I wonder whether Apple would have released the iPad any sooner, or whether their product intelligence said, there's no point until it is X weight and gives Y hours. Arguably, Apple was just at the right place at the right time. They figured you didn't need a "full Mac OS X" experience, the product would still sell as an iDevice. And touch meant apps need to be made for touch, with new UIs, so again, they figured, no point unless the app is made for touch.
What seems in the air now is whether anybody cares anymore to stick with Windows brand. A touch UI means you lose your old apps anyway. Don't just think of all the things you can do on a PC that you can't do on a tablet, but think of all the things people do on a tablet that they wouldn't do on a PC.
The whole point of ubiquitous computing is that you have a whole bunch of devices. One way or the other it is a post-PC world. Windows tablets can still sell, just like Android sells, and Apple sells. I can't imagine anyone dominating everything. Different markets will probably end up picking different ecosystems. Doctors will be buying Apple, accountants Windows, architects Windows and Apple, sales will be buying Androids, etc. etc. The IT people will do the usual jumps to try to make things run smoothly. Home shopper grannies will be using Kindles, and in the rest of the world, other brands will appear. Those that can't get any traction anywhere will fade. It'll be driven by apps, and apps will drive the adoption. If architects want an A3 sized tablet and the only niche available is a Windows one running some custom touch AutoCAD app, they'll be driven to adopt Windows ecosystem on tablets. But just in that market. It is all about the apps. But nobody will get too excited about any of this. If anything it'll mean even more compatibility headaches. Nobody will dominate, not even Google or "open".
True, and humans aren't entirely on the animal level. We don't just eat and breed, we also "want to have a life", and as people have been getting more well off, their interest in children and in material things has tended to reduce, as they become interested in enlightenment, or dance classes, or holidays. Men become so obsessed with philosophising that they neglect to find a mate. Kinda pathetic biologically.
That sort of culture isn't just part of one group, though.
I recall my Scottish grandmother showing similar contempt for her children when they made moves to improve themselves. It became a life long resentment that destroyed the relationships and the hatred was never healed. Another example from a previous generation, a son and his wife who left Pakistan for the UK, to find better opportunities, was spat at by his mother and she said she hoped they all died on the voyage.
Modern life demands that individuals leave their family and community loyalty behind and go where the opportunities are.
Those who don't shift into that modern mindset will remain poor.
If that sort of attitude sounds hard to believe, you have to bear in mind at that time in Scotland, it was considered wise to have all your teeth pulled when you were a teenager so you wouldn't face medical bills later on. When people are very poor all they have is family loyalty. So what makes you strong is also what holds you back in modern life.
True and as the symbol faded, its essence -- cheap transportation -- became more obvious. A bit like the invention of the standard shipping container -- shipping doesn't need armies of men manually loading cargo, that's not what it is about, it is about being able to send anything anywhere quickly.
The iPad doesn't so much change computing as bring us a bit closer to the point of having computers. The DynaBook was supposed to be a way for any child to learn anything, cheaply, quickly, easily.
Is the iPad a DynaBook? Give one to an old lady who's never used a computer and in 2 minutes she's using it. It is kinda the right idea, in terms of the essence. Does computing need people to know the difference between "programs" and "data" ? Well, maybe not. People say "the internet" they don't say "web client" and "url" and "dynamic pages" and "backend database". Most people who fly don't know anything about routes or altitude or navigation or fuel consumption or any of that; they just "fly".
This is where MS adding a touch interface don't really get it -- it isn't about touch per se. Apple have shown they've been willing and able to strip down computing a bit. Traditionally you could open an app then open a file, or open the file to open the app. Apple said, well, a lot of stuff is no longer about you knowing the file location anyway, like web sites, databases, email, etc., they all manage storage themselves. So let's wrap it under the app.
The technically minded take interest in all that though, like my plumber knows the routes of all the pipes in my house, but I have no idea what each pipe does or what layout he chose. I just want the essence, ie. I'm cold, push a button and make it warm.
Do we want users learning about computing or do we want them spending that time learning what they want to learn? Which might be computing but it might be a million other topics.
MS "designers" took an idea from 1930's Swiss poster design and thought they could build a UI out of it.
A "tile" is neither an icon nor a widget nor a window. You get a little teensy bit of info that's probably not useful, and will require you to tap it and go into the app anyway to do anything. So what have you gained? The little bit of info makes the tile big and so to pay for it, the UI has to have this massive area to scroll. And in keeping with the Swiss design, most of that space has to be blank. Because white space looks great on big posters, and you'll be really glad you wasted it on a 10" screen (not). They say they copied it from metro transport signage. Yes, you know that stuff that is *huge* and you typically want to glance at very quickly as you zoom past. Ideal, really, for a small computer -- which you keep in your gaze for long concentrated periods -- when you think about it (not).
It is the sort of idea someone should have come up with at 11am on their trip to Starbucks, sketched out by the afternoon, and then thrown in the trash by evening.
The popularization of curated computing is the worst thing ever done in the history of computing (for the industry itself and users, of course worse things have been done using computers). And that's all Apple's fault.
"Curated" as they are "services". It isn't the same as the water company curating the water supply, so when I run the tap the water is safe, but there is an element of that. But for those kinds of benefits, it does suggest Apple will become the dominant service. But I don't hate my water company for being a monopoly, I'd hate them is they provided a bad service and I was stuck with them. So this isn't as yet quite the same as Microsoft, although it could be in 5 years or so.
There could be more open interoperability between platforms -- Apple didn't even want to allow native apps on the iPhone to begin with, it was all to be web apps -- but native code just always seems to perform better, and look better. The market is making a lot of these choices, including the app developers. People seem to want mobile computing and networking.
On the plus side, tablets are far from essential, and people are not as yet relying on them exclusively, although some vertical applications already do. So things could shift quickly even if Apple remained dominant for a few years. What's the cost of replacing one tablet with a different one? Not much.
Maybe we'll see different industries standardise on different platforms. Maybe airlines use iOS, medical industry uses Android, travelling sales people use Windows, etc. I think it would be quite hard for Apple to truly become a global monopoly on computing.
In other news, kids are used to frequent task shifting and tuning into multiple things at the same time.
That's right. The "healthy" side of ASBOs is that there are a lot of things which are bad but not technically illegal. Dropping money in the street is not illegal. Screaming loudly during sex is not illegal. But paedophiles have been known to drop money outside school gates to entice children to pick it up and come over and offer it back. Some woman was screaming loudly during sex repeatedly and ignoring requests from neighbours that she quieten down. So do you let it go on, or do the authorities have something to do? ASBOs are very specific, there's maybe a few dozen in one city per year, and you have to apply to a judge to have one granted. I'm not saying I agree or disagree with them, they are quite scary, but so are some of the things people do "legally". The ones I've heard about, judges just don't like granting ASBOs. The ASBO has to be very specific. If the police catch you breaching the terms of the ASBO then they can arrest you. People often say that ASBOs don't work because half the time people breach them anyway, but that's the point -- breaching it allows the police to arrest you.
I consider myself pro-science, open to catastrophic scenarios, but also wary of cultural bias (I've lived in enough places to see how culture can affect a whole country even when the world is telling them they are wrong). Yours is the best post I've seen in a few years. It does really come down to separating the science from the politics. The political AGW crowd makes no reservations about accusing the motives and ethics of others. Big oil only interested in profit is destroying the planet, like the tobacco companies destroyed your health. OK, but the political AGW people are upholding their own ethical stance, their own sense of morality, for the planet and future generations, and THOSE ethical judgements also deserve scrutiny. Did you know that Apartheid was morally linked to a sense of natural order which came from ecology? The Western Buddhist types get it wrong -- simply being devoted to a higher morality and devoted to the good of the world and a higher consciousness does't automatically grant you knowledge of how to make that goodness a reality in practical social ways. It is those kinds of really hard questions that the political AGW crowd need to be willing to face, because feeling you are taking a higher moral stance is one thing, but actually knowing in practice what is a good solution is another thing entirely. People can be highly morally and ethically driven to do the right thing. But the biggest problem with global warming -- and global warming is just one instance of a whole class of global problems that go beyond national boundaries and seem to require some sort of global system -- the biggest problem is we don't know how to create a global system that can deal with global problems. Political AGW seem to claim more than enough practical certainty to believe that we have to act. OK, but who knows how to make the global system act? On ANYTHING? The "truth" is not enough. The globe isn't just 200 countries, it is a set of cultures that live in different ages. The Americans can't even sort out their own Republican v Democrat differences, which on a global scale, are negligibly different, and yet, the two sides sorta often hate each other, and yet, we're somehow going to unite the world under one main cause? It is one ecosystem but each culture sees that ecosystem from a very different place. People often severely underestimate the cultural differences around the world, which is ironic given how much people love to travel and "celebrate" other cultures. The reason global warming politically won't work is the same as why USA utterly failed in Afghanistan, and is still failing after 10 years -- it is a different culture, radically different, the people as a whole just don't share the same values, and there's no reason why they should, and no way to change them. They are adapted to their environment using the best cultural systems they know, codes that go back much longer than democracy or even authoritarian government. I picked up a little book, "What About China?" which purported to answer the global warming political issue of, why should the West commit to emissions cuts when China is industrialising? I was really curious to know, because I'd like to think I'm open minded. So I read the book, and it says, "we should set the good example." The naivety was astounding. China, considered itself the centre of the world and civilisation for so long that it figured the rest of the world wasn't even worth exploring, is now going to put the environment ahead of production because they want to follow the good example set by America? The irony of global warming politics is that the AGW crowd don't understand the world. They don't understand the diversity of culture. They're a clique (millions in a world of billions) who can only see their own moral stance, and can't understand the moral stances of others. This makes them as much part of the problem as anyone else in the global arena, because the world is culturally deeply fractured, and their approach of vilifying others only adds to that fragmentation. George W. Bush or Al Gore -- they both have an Us v Them attitude.
For the consumer, "fragmentation" and "differentiation" are mapped
as "confusion" and "getting that I want", respectively.
If a consumer knows why they're choosing something -- because they understand the pros and cons of all the competitors, then that's differentiation. I think this is reflected in your comment, where you know app compatibility doesn't depend on screen size or skin, for instance.
But if the particular consumer shopping that day doesn't understand all the differences, then "Android" as a brand, is fragmented.
I think what Google might do, if they want to keep Android as the OS that runs on hardware from multiple manufacturers/brands (and not turn into Googrola), is to advertise Android in a way that helps the consumer understand how to make choice. Otherwise, they'll be lured into the strict vertical model of Apple, which works for Apple, but isn't obvious that should work for anyone else. Apple's brand image was built over decades as "different" and "alternative" and "the one". Google's brand image, to my mind, as a person who Googles every day, and jumped to Google right away from, what was it, AltaVista, ick, doesn't fit that, and probably never will. Google isn't about the unique choice, one that's specially designed -- it is about open access to a variety of information, and helping me understand stuff. I think they kinda need to do that for Android, ie. customer education, advertise to take people through that sense of -- and here they can copy Apple's ads by way of showing how people use it in life -- showing how different people with different requirements went about choosing a particular handset.
Consumers watching Apple ads are getting the message that they can expect to do everything on their iPads. Now that right there is the opposite of fragmentation and the opposite of confusion. Yet that is exactly how customers need to understand Android. You can do lots and it helps to make choices but look, let us help you here: these are the things to consider when choosing, to figure out how it suits you and your lifestyle and work.
Then you can walk into a shop and ignore the salesman's crap, and knowing what you are looking for, pick the best handset that suits you.
There's also an argument that nature seems to "copy". Once it has done something, it seems to do it again more quickly. Now Star Trek was written to not be so alien looking that the audience couldn't relate to it. And I do get bored with endless forehead-ridge variations. Trek was like that for reasons of TV writing. But humanoids, or things that are sorta upright with four limbs, might be quite common anyway, simply because nature seems to repeat stuff. We might imagine some small change early on in evolution that would have made a very different outcome millions of years later, but life seems also pretty stable, in that, it sorta keeps to a pattern for a long time, then suddenly something changes and the new pattern spreads rapidly, but then it stays the same for a long time, and so on. I don't know if people know why and how patterns in nature spread rapidly. Like, suddenly there is a new species. (I'm not being creationist *spit* *spit* and there is this photocopier-like behaviour which suggests some additional blind and automatic mechanisms which we don't know about, or that we're somehow overestimating how many paths are actually available in the system). It is the "stays the same" and "copies" part that might suggest that alien worlds are similar to Earth. Why? Because Earth isn't special and because nature made it happen here, so we know it can happen, and therefore it is probably happening in a similar way elsewhere. (Of course I wouldn't bet on what aliens look like, but seeing as they're out there across the vast expanse of space, expecting them to be completely different, following a different path, is one view, but expecting them to be very similar, because nature and the universe "likes" to copy stuff, is another.)
Yes it is a land grab. But it is land nobody else seems to have known existed. People said "the iPad is just a giant iPhone, what's the point?? LOL!!". Well it turns out that if you make something very much like an iPad it can sell really well. Really, nobody should want an iPad, nor an Android tablet (no real keyboard for a start). These companies should just ignore the iPad, after all it is just a fad. /sarc I don't know how much control and power Apple or any company ought to have in fairness legally for what Apple did, but the patent system seems woefully broken for promoting innovation. It seems to hold back innovators whilst rewarding leeches.
Plus there's another issue: sometimes someone setting a standard by force can be beneficial in other ways. If the government can't do it (because they're too lame) then companies might, by playing hard and winning in the market. A monopoly isn't in itself bad for the consumer -- it can at times render other benefits to the consumer. The trouble is of course if you really want to have an Android 10" tablet and there are none available. But then other people might like to have ebooks and media go digital sooner -- technical progress -- so, that infrastructure needs forcing on the industry by a company with the power to do so. When I board a plane I don't care if it is an Airbus or a Boeing, I care about the convenience and price so that I can use the flight to get on with what I really want to do. Google is a pretty big monopoly but for the time being I don't care, there's too many benefits to having it for other things.
If the iPad as a force can help drive innovation in other ways, like drag publishers out of the Jurassic period, then that's one benefit. It is like a monogamous relationship -- there are benefits to be had that you don't get with an "open" relationship, and likewise sometimes it is better to not be in a relationship.
Open or closed, and choice or standard, aren't principles; they're just states. And sometimes one state is more useful and sometimes the other state is more useful.
At the moment, I feel the tablet form factor is still too new and untrusted for real work, so it needs a lot of control and focus -- so I'd prefer there not be a lot of competitors. Tablets need to become accepted as a real new platform. Once that happens, get the monopoly to break up.
The question is, for me, if Android tablets had been first to market, would we be seeing so much interest in tablets as a new platform?
Or would they just be, "giant iPods, what's the point, LOL?"
The tablet needs a really good working trustable ecosystem to get established as a real viable platform.
The difference is whether the people rioting have higher moral principles than the people they're protesting against.
The real tragedy for these kids is that they've somehow been raised to not know that setting fire to buildings where there are flats with people sleeping in above them might be like, a really bad thing to do, and that stealing just for the sake of stealing is also really bad, and that they have been raised or educated to have very little desire to make themselves better, to work hard, and would rather sit drinking in the early hours of the morning and claim that the riot was great fun. That is the tragedy. They aren't "disaffected", they're worse, they are damaged young people.
Their environment has failed them, both with their parents perhaps for being too insular culturally, and with their schools for being too liberal and not setting boundaries and discipline and a work ethic, and the companies that are too right wing and too busy looking after their own money interests than considering how to create jobs for very disadvantaged kids, and the government both on the left and the right for wasting money on stupid schemes that didn't work and then cutting that money, and all the bleeding hearts in-between who make a career out of "talking" and "community relations" and criticising the police instead of coming up with real solutions for developing these kids into healthy adults. It is so fucking tragic.
The girlfriend of the guy shot by the police said that these riots have nothing to do with the shooting. She said people are just using it as an excuse. She defended her boyfriend, said he'd never have been carrying a gun, but she also said the riots have nothing to do with that shooting. It is just people looting, and she was upset by it.
Er, the Egyptian bloggers have been saying, words to the effect, we protested for democracy, but you people are rioting to loot and burn?
The Egyptians know how to make this distinction.
Many people are trying to figure out why the youth are disaffected, and why they don't seem to know that it is a really bad thing to do to set fire to shops when people live above them and may burn to death. See pics of woman leaping from first floor window into arms of police.
Everyone is wondering why the journalists can interview these kids the next day and they reply, "oh yeah, we got wine to drink now we looted that shop and we're having a really good time, and we really hope it goes off again tonight!" (said the two young girls, words to that effect).
Trouble is, nobody really knows why these kids have been raised so badly and why the schools have taught them so badly and why their culture hasn't encouraged them to aspire to working hard and why there aren't enough job opportunities that suit their level of ability. It is tragic for them.
But also, people who can "think for themselves" and "not conform" have their own way of making decisions, like, "I just want a simple device that works for XYZ, as I'm too busy doing my real job where my skills and talents and creativity are focussed."
If your skills and talents are IT stuff then fine, but being an IT geek doesn't mean you're the only person who can think for themselves. Slight bias there with how you're framing the word "individuals".
In our little department (100 users) we're about to ditch our eMacs and iLamps. We've bought plenty of iMacs and minis over the years, but a single Leopard image has worked across all of them, including the iLamps. We are not big enough to need server racks, so a few Mac Pro servers aren't a space problem. With imaging tools, netboot, Apple Remote Desktop, LDAP, and network accounts, we've profided reasonably OK for our users. We are now moving to Lion, which is cheap and gives us full disk encryption, which these days we need, as well as the ability to manage iDevices, and yes it does obsolete our 5+ year old Macs, but that's not too bad when you've had 9 year old Macs in service.
Though admittedly I've seen at least one version of the graph which had error bars so enormous that it was easily consistent with the Medieval Warming Period; but you don't see those when it's reused in newspapers and documentaries.
Exactly. The scientists themselves know the error bars are there, and the uncertainties are there. So the science was working. But then something happened and it is like they dumbed it down for the public, believing the public wouldn't act with such uncertainty. So they pretended to be certain or virtually certain when they spoke to the public. Of course, as scientists, the public mood or wisdom is not something they knew much about. They misjudged the public's common sense. Oh sure you see the occasional psychology paper trying to explain denialism as some sort of mental condition. They just ignored the public's common sense, that with something so uncertain, there are worse and more likely things to worry about.
This is very controversial, but I'll post it as a pointer rather than because I know it to be true. You can split any view down into whether it allows questioning and reinterpretation, and whether it doesn't. A lot of people from various faiths will say that you have to read the texts and interpret them to find something good in them. You might look for the spirit of something that was written two thousand years ago in different life conditions and which has been messed up my multiple reinterpretations since. So Ok they retain their faith, because on some level they believe in spirituality, but they also know they are interpreting the texts, so the texts are open to question. This kind of religious person just gets along. The other kind doesn't believe in interpretation, they believe the text is read literally, and actually, they don't realise that they themselves are interpreting the text when they read it (their own subjective interpretation)
Now, the Arab Islamic world had both types in it, those who would interpret and those who took it literally. So they had a big formal theological debate about it. The interpreters said that it was a text written by men at an earlier time and you had to translate it to use it properly in the present. The other side, the literalists, said that the text was not written, the text was "unwritten" and exists forever as the mind of god. Well, they had a big debate and the literalists won. So, Islam had that debate and the literalists won it a thousand years ago and haven't changed since.
One of the arguments the literalists made was that you can be as clever as you like trying to reinterpret texts, but if someone else has more power and can just kill you, what difference does it make? So they only thing to worry about, they reasoned, was seizing power. Seize power and force everyone to submit to the one true "unwritten true forever" text. Hence the violent aspects of the text (which were written by a tribal warrior because back in the day, that's what people did) are especially well preserved even in the MODERN day.
True.
As for patterns, for me as a person there is a wealth of information/data/content out there, some of it my own, and with hardware now able to do a lot on a small device, there are a range of devices from something that fits on a keyring to gigantic displays, and some processing can be done on the keyring and some in massive datacentres. I'd like to take advantage of all of it. The general pattern is about how to make all of it work in concert. "Pervasive computing" where data can be accessed in multiple ways, presented to suit the device, and flung about from one device to another whilst preserving security and integrity. It is something about how Twitter is (or used to be) a service with a protocol and everyone could create different types of clients, like there are different types of buildings. We need something like that for all our other data. Services that can present a document in high fidelity on a desktop screen, but as mere monotype -- and still editable -- text on a phone. It is almost like Model-View-Controller but where Model is in the cloud and View and Controller are whichever gadgets you have at hand, such as your personal iPod (or similar) touchscreen that was in you pocket, in concert with the plasma in the conference room, authenticated with a key from your physical keychain.
But honey, how would you feel if I rescued you from an inner city estate?
EXTERMINATE.
Well ok, how about if I hoisted you out of a killer taxi in a wedding dress?
EXTERMINATE.
Waited 2000 years by your side?
EXTERMINATE.
Flowers?
EXTERMINATE.
People's perspectives evolve and change according to life's problems and circumstances.
Yes, at the end of the day, it is just a perspective. Like, I like chocolate, you like vanilla. But humanity has also grown and changed through many generations of people experiencing problems, suffering, calamities, etc., and trying to find a better way to deal with those problems.
Einstein said, words to the effect, you can't solve a problem at the same level of thinking [perspective] which created it.
The general broad picture [perspective] we have today is that humanity evolved. So for say, 100,000 years we were all just disparate tribes. This was fine: "my perspective is tribal", "I am linked by blood", "my tribe is my blood" etc. But eventually, those tribes started competing, and the tribal perspective said, "they are not our tribe, not our blood, so it is ok to kill them." So say we had 50,000 years of tribal wars. Any tribe that comes into contact with another tribe easily starts a war. "Invade their village, kill their men, batter their babies' bodies against rocks, steal and rape their women, make them our blood so our tribe will be bigger and more powerful."
Sooner or later, that perspective is creating more problems than it solves. General suffering increases, all tribes are losing out.
So, somehow, someone has a new idea that all tribes should be united, but the problem is, they have different blood, and different kings. So somehow, we don't know how, a new perspective appears, perhaps just because evolution is always trying random shit, and the new perspective is, "we are all united under one leader who is not one mortal king but a higher king, a king that can be king of all tribes."
The new "king" is basically an idea, an image, and perhaps because humans were evolving cognitively and were becoming more able to handle images and concepts, and so they realised in their new perspective that they could unite tribes not under one mortal king (who would die, and start blood feuds for succession) but under something that could never die a mortal death: A CONCEPT.
So yes, now that we are living 10,000 years later, such myths about gods and stuff and divine rules are silly. They are silly because our modern rational cognition gives us a much higher perspective, ie. we understand it is just a myth.
But at the time, when the ability to create concepts was still an innovation, it was the god concept, the king of kings, that could unite as a percpective in tribal minds, could unite separate tribes and thus, REDUCE bloodshed.
Today we are struggling with shifting from a nationalistic perspective to a truly global perspective, again as a way to reduce unnecessary suffering.
But remember, each new perspective is gradual and builds on top of what came before. And the whole planet isn't all living in Western style households where it is safe and they can sit and watch TV and study and learn and get educated at university. Much of the world is still very poor but also very tribal. This is why things like Christianity and Islam are spreading in Africa, even as Europe has growing Atheist population.
Yes, man can hardly govern himself, and that's a modern perspective from the quiet safety of the Freudian couch, but before you get anywhere near a safe stable neighbourhood, humans have to grow through several perspectives, and one of the earliest is the tribal perspective.
Go to a poor run down area, like northern Pakistan, or some inner city Western ghetto, and you see tribal warlord gang culture, ie. perspectives.
They are just perspectives, but given humans only have perspectives with which to handle life as they perceive it, we have to take a lot of interest in how perspectives develop from one to another, how someone goes from becoming a gang member, who views everyone as an enemy, to a perspective where someone feels that their neighbours are their friends, to a perspective where people feel secure enough to start a business and even trade with stra