'remote windowing feature'? That's like saying http has a 'remote web page download feature' because you can connect to an http server from another machine. The whole point of X is that it is a network protocol from the ground up. It's designed for environments where applications are run over networks; unfortunately nowadays the PC model of computing has won, which is why 'remote windowing' looks like an extra 'feature'.
The article specifically cites evidence for an important genetic component of handedness, and the model is constructed around that evidence. The authors didn't have to 'show' this, as it has already been shown.
Perhaps you are confusing evolutionary modelling (a mathematical technique which describes very general processes of information transfer) with theorising about human origins (an empirical investigation which sometimes uses evolutionary models, along with other sorts of models and lots of physical evidence).
This paper is an example of the former, not the latter. It argues that, because there is a process of 'selection' involved in athletic try-outs, it may be possible to apply some evolutionary models to explain the outcomes of that process. It then shows that the data are indeed consistent with the predictions of that model.
It has absolutely nothing to do with cave men, or Neanderthals. Neither does the vast majority of the field of mathematics which we call evolutionary theory.
The model in the paper specifically allows for two possible equilibria: one in which right-handed people dominate, and one in which left-handed people do. We just happen to be in the right-handed equilibrium (by chance).
I think you'll find that outside North America, most of the Western world does walk extensively, and makes extensive use of public transport. There are even a few enclaves of civilisation in the US itself, like New York City, where this exotic practice can be seen without leaving your sacred soil.
No, no, how can they have been telling us for thousands of years? Every Chinese person knows China has 5000 years of history, while the West has approximately 5 years of history. There were some reported sightings of Westerners once in the Ming dynasty, but this has since been discovered to have been a hoax, constructed from a bearded monkey on stilts.
That's exactly the main problem with conspiracy theories, which makes them unfalsifiable and thus unscientific. (basically, if there's no way to prove it wrong, there's no way to prove it right either)
Wow, in the course of two lines, you've managed both to invoke Popper's long-discredited theory in the philosophy of science (falsificationism) and to misunderstand it completely.
If you want to know why your second line makes no sense, read the work you are (possibly unknowingly) referencing: Popper's 'The Logic of Scientific Discovery'. lf you want to know why no philosopher of science is a falsificationist anymore, read any philosophy of science written since 1965 (and a good deal before then too). I recommend Wesley Salmon, Bas van Fraassen, or an introductory textbook.
Or you can just go on mindlessly spouting this nonsense about scientific theories having to be 'falsifiable'. Popper's ghost will thank you--he's lonely these days.
yes, but the vast majority of scientific research is not carried out with funding from the people with the most money; it is carried out with smaller grants from medium-sized organisations, governments, etc. it may be the case that some particularly high profile research is more connected to those who have the most money, because the same people will pay for press coverage. but that is a tiny proportion of the bulk of scientific research.
again, if it were not, science would be an utter failure.
yes, science costs money and money has a tendency to influence people.
but it is a gross exaggeration to say that funders of research consistently have a specific result they would like to be produced. many funders, for example those who hope to make money by engineering things using the products of research, or those who want treatments found for diseases (e.g. groups set up by parents of autistic children) are actually just interested in truth, because they have an interest in the truth being found.
moreover, even in cases in which funders are looking for some skewed result, it is still going too far to say that scientists will consistently produce bogus results. yes, you can expect that to be the case with powerful funders who have the resources and ingenuity to find the right scientists who will produce the right results. but there are also a hell of a lot of scientists out there who, because of their training in scientific values, are likely to feel that a professional code of practice stands in the way, and either get funding from somewhere else, or stand by their results.
that is, in fact, why science is in general so successful. if it were all built on people making things up that people want to hear (as charlatan postmoderns influenced by dodgy arguments by people like bruno latour would have us believe), then there would be no particle accelerators, no aeroplanes, no polio vaccine, no computers, etc etc.
in other words, the proof is in the pudding. the pudding isn't perfect--it is, after all, a human product--but it IS pudding, and there's plenty of it.
Pregnant women have depressed immune systems, and the immune system of the foetus is not fully developed. They thus fall into the general category of people with immune systems that are not fully functional.
If you fall into this general category, it is important to avoid foods including honey, unpasteurised dairy products, pasteurised soft cheeses, raw/undercooked eggs, and any kind of food that has not been prepared in a particularly sanitary way. What all of these foods have in common is simply that they may bear pathogens that are perfectly well dealt with by an ordinary person's immune system, but that a depressed immune system may have trouble with.
There is absolutely no harm in a person with a normally functioning immune system eating these foods, just as there is no harm in a person eating foods they are not allergic to, just because some people are.
The UK bans unpasteurised products? That's funny--the unpasteurised cheese I regularly buy at Waitrose, Sainsbury's, and the local farmer's market must all be illegal!
FYI, pasteurisation is not required here in the UK, nor is it required almost anywhere else except the US. There is no good reason for it at all, particularly in the case of cheese, where any cheese older than a couple of months is harmless for anyone with a normal immune system who is not pregnant. People can take care of themselves, if food is properly labelled and people are educated; in the same way I do not eat dish detergent, a pregnant woman would not eat unpasteurised cheese. If you doubt the viability of this, consider the fact that most countries in the world do not require pasteurisation, and yet (miraculously!) do not have particularly high rates of related illnesses, miscarriages left and right, etc.
By your definition of observable, we can apparently observe quarks, because we can set up tests for them of some kind. But then phlogiston theorists also observed phlogiston; for they set up tests for it, and those tests came back positive. This makes the word 'observe' rather empty and the distinction between observable and unobservable useless. It seems much more sensible to say that phlogiston theorists observed goings on in their experimental apparatus, like fires, certain colours of air, and so on, and that they inferred the existence of phlogiston, an unobservable entity, to explain the phenomena; the same way we today observe the same phenomena and infer the existence of oxygen.
And of course you cannot observe 'the fall of objects due to gravitation'. All you can observe is the fall of objects. If you could observe that it was due to gravitation, there would have been no need for Newton, because no one would have ever subscribed to Aristotelian physics--everyone would have been a Newtonian from birth!
if your behavior is just an effect of the physics in your brain, why are you IN IT? Why do you experience it?
It is not a coherent idea that 'you' are 'in' your brain; that is just Cartesian mind-body dualism, which suffers from many problems, not least of which is the problem that if the 'mind' is a distinct kind of substance from the body, how are we to explain their interaction?
I would answer your question with the simple proposition: You just are your brain/nervous system/body and all its processual workings and external relations. There is no separate 'you' that attaches somehow onto a body; you simply are that body. The question of how 'you' are 'in' it then becomes completely meaningless.
You can go on to ask some kind of metaphysical question like, 'How can it be that matter (like the brain) feels?' to which there are several possible answers. Whitehead's answer was that feeling is an inherent property of all matter; a slightly more reasonable answer is that feeling is just an emergent property of nervous systems--that is what nervous systems do. And being self-aware in exactly the way you are is just what human nervous systems do.
To try to ask any further questions about it without positing some kind of untenable mind-body dualism or idealism is like asking the question 'What happened before the universe began?' (that question of course also being meaningless, because time itself began at the beginning of the universe, so there is by definition nothing before it)
In modern science you not only have evolution, you also have biologically inspired sociology, computational neuroscience and a number of other disciplines that you just cannot understand if you believe in a human soul.
This really depends on how you conceive of a human soul. While you are quite correct that over the last 500 years, science has provided knowledge about many aspects of the world that trumps religious belief for various reasons, this does not imply that science has or will trump religious belief per se. That is, religions tend to have large bodies of knowledge around them, much of which refers to facts about the world and will inevitably be shown to be false by things like science, but they also have certain beliefs which have nothing to do with what science is capable of investigating.
For example, the idea of a soul: you can be a complete determinist, you can think that all operations of the mind are really operations of the brain, etc, but you can still believe in a soul. You could, for example, say that what does the feeling of your various mental states is the soul, and that this soul somehow goes on to occupy another body in another universe when you die, thereby continuing some kind of feeling (even without memory of the first time around). Or whatever.
The point is, science can say nothing about that, as with many other religious beliefs, such as the existence of gods. Only religion itself and philosophy can actually argue against core religious beliefs.
Anything that is not observable has nothing to do with science
Just a nitpick here--I don't think this view is at all defensible, nor would it be defended by any contemporary philosopher of science. The view you seem to be referring to is instrumentalism, the old fashioned view that scientific theories are just black boxes which calculate relationships between phenomena, and therefore things like electrons are complete fictions. That view was found to be indefensible for a variety of reasons; theoretical conjunction could not be justified, and it seemed to go against scientific practice. In this day and age, most sophisticated anti-realists subscribe to a view like that of Bas van Fraassen, which requires and refers to unobservables while remaining agnostic about their existence. And scientific realism has also become more respectable than it used to be for various reasons. But virtually no one denies anymore that science concerns itself with unobservables.
The key point here is not unobservables, but unobservables the existence of which cannot be tested in some way or at least inferred from other entities which can be tested. Testability is the criterion you are looking for here (and please don't say falsifiability, as that is another whole tin of worms).
The Vatican does not have a vote in the General Assembly. It has permanent observer status, and in 2004 was granted ordinary membership but without a vote.
I would question the logic behind this. What any shareholding institution does is try to maximise profits for its own shareholders. You are correct in thinking this is probably intertemporal profit maximisation. However, when you consider that the profits from period 1 will probably be reinvested in period 2, then with a sufficiently large capital market, i.e. assuming there are abundant opportunities for reinvestment, there will be many situations in which shareholding institutions can best intertemporally profit maximise by maximising profit in period 1 at the expense of future profits of the firm concerned, then pull out investment from that firm and reinvest in whatever firm maximises returns in period 2.
You might claim that this would be stopped by firms being valued based on future profits; but there are several factors that militate against this. One of them is that if every investor is doing the same, i.e. short-term maximising, then there will be no where else for capital to flow. Another is that imperfect information may prevent investors from knowing that long-term investment has been neglected. And even without these, only one speculator is needed at the margin to make sure share prices do not reflect fundamentals.
Moreover, given a moderately competitive market, if other firms are short-run maximising in a way that makes them temporarily more competitive, a firm that long-run maximises may go out of business because of not being able to compete in the short-run. So short-run maximisation is self-reinforcing.
The bottom line is that intertemporal profit maximisation for the *investor*, who can freely move his investments about between firms, by no means necessarily matches up with intertemporal profit maximisation for any given *firm*. Therefore there is good reason to expect attention only to short run gains at the expense of the long run.
*we* are just as much a part of nature as mice, Elephants, and Bumblebees.
That is true.
Whatever actions we take are normal, natural, and probably expected for a species at our level of technological development.
It follows from 'We are part of nature' that 'Whatever actions we take are natural'. However it does not follow that 'Whatever actions we take are normal' or 'expected'. As for 'normal': What do you mean by normal? If we take actions that are different to the actions we usually take, these are abnormal in that context, etc. So I don't see how you can say that whatever actions we take are 'normal'.
As for 'probably expected for a species at our level of technological development': As you suggest, we have no evidence at all about any other species with our level of technological development, and therefore we have no way of knowing whether human social development is following some kind of general path followed by other species; but this is really irrelevant. If what you are trying to argue here is that determinism at a species level is true, and therefore we cannot really change our actions anyway, then I would argue that this fails for the same reason as the analogous argument fails on the individual level; that reason is compatibilism. If you are not familiar with the philosophical arguments behind this, the basic point is that we can accept determinism while still accepting that we have control over what we do: if what I am is defined as the product of all past interactions I have had, then I (i.e. that product) am making decisions in the moment--i.e. I do not have free will, but I am still making decisions. The same applies to the species. Clearly if you look at all the paths and dead-ends human history has taken, you can see many thousands of ways of life, existence, and development (if you are not aware of this, study some anthropology). To argue that what we are doing now is inevitable is disingenuous.
our actions cannot be construed as "destroying nature".
That is ludicrous. Yes, we are part of nature. But we can destroy it, just as we can destroy ourselves. You are exploiting an ambiguity in the term nature, which sometimes means 'Earth' and sometimes means 'the way things are'. Obviously the latter meaning is useless because any statement using it is tautological. Clearly the point when people say 'destroying nature' is 'destroying Earth', which we are part of, and just as we can destroy ourselves, our own house, our own community, we can destroy our own planet.
More fundamentally, the only reason anyone really cares about 'saving nature', except for the stereotyped crazy environmentalist whom I have yet to meet, is because nature--construed as the ecosystem of which we are a part--serves human ends and is necessary for us to survive and thrive. Clearly the major part of human existence--labour--is devoted to transforming nature for our own ends, not to just preserving it the way it is. But the whole point of environmentalism is that we have to be conscious about the unintentional effects that this has, not so that we stop transforming nature, which we have always been doing, but so that we do it in a more intelligent way.
Capitalism is a real system, economics is a theory about that system. In the real system of capitalism, i.e. what really exists, there is no such thing as perfect information, perfect competition, market clearing equilibria, non-sticky prices, etc. Arbitrage (e.g. scalping) is rampant. Monopoly power is rampant. That IS capitalism. Maybe you have some kind of dream idea of some kind of capitalism (like 'warm and fluffy capitalism') where everything works perfectly, but if we're talking about the real world, this is as smoothly functioning as capitalism gets.
It is an obvious triviality that everyone is biased, and therefore every news source is biased. But we have developed certain social institutions that bind themselves by practices and rules that are intended to filter out as much of that bias as possible by taking into account multiple views and removing emotionally charged presentation. Or more precisely, the bias is made the same as whatever the general bias is of the community or society concerned, rather than simply being the bias of one side. This is the difference between listening to someone on a soapbox and listening to someone who is part of a scientific or journalistic community.
For example, this is part of why science works so well. In science, you get lots of little contributions by biased individuals, but because they are peer reviewed and some of them (experiments) are repeated, and this happens over a large and diverse community that is nevertheless following the same rules of conduct, the result generally averages out to something whose only bias is toward the very principles of science itself.
Journalistic organisations (with the exception of overtly biased ones) are 'supposed' to act in the same kind of way. They know their journalists, editors, etc, are all biased as individuals, so they follow a strong code of journalistic and editorial conduct to try to remove whatever bias there may be toward one side or another. That is why, for example, British interviewers will typically interview *everyone* extremely harshly, regardless of whether or not they deserve it, or whether or not the reporter agrees with them. It is a way of making sure you don't let anyone off easy so that the impact of your own personal bias is minimised.
The difference between the BBC and an organisation like Sky or Fox News is that the BBC tries very hard to follow its own rules. Those rules, incidentally, do include an explicit bias: they claim they are biased in favour of liberal democracies. But within that framework, the BBC tries to eliminate internal bias. The evidence that they have succeeded in that comes from the millions around the world who see the BBC as the only impartial news source, the only one that could be trusted (for example, in Eastern Europe, no one would trust Radio Free Europe, run by the Americans, because they knew it was propaganda, but everyone trusted the BBC). The fact is it works. Whereas Fox News intentionally biases its news in a very skewed, very particular direction. Fox is not interested in being unbiased, it is interested in making money. The BBC is providing a public service and they know it, so journalistic ethics mostly prevail.
You really don't need to know anything about British history to know a modicum of world geography.
The name of the country is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, for short the United Kingdom or UK.
England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are the administrative subdivisions of the United Kingdom. They are not countries in the sense of being autonomous legal entities that enter into treaties etc, although sometimes people confusingly refer to them as 'countries' (partly because they used to be countries). They are analogous to California, Iowa, Ohio, etc.
The word 'Britain' is generally used as a synonym for the United Kingdom, although 'Great Britain' specifically means the landmass which comprises England, Wales and Scotland, i.e. the UK minus Northern Ireland. The 'British Isles' refers to the UK, the various Crown dependencies (Isle of Man, Channel Islands etc), plus (usually) the Republic of Ireland, which is a separate country altogether.
Using 'England' as a synonym for the UK is an insult to Scottish people, Welsh people, and Northern Irish. London is not the capital of England, it is the capital of the UK. It is very simple.
Slashdot Mirror
What is this "kernel" memory you speak of?
(If only Iraq had been set up with the same model - thongs might have gone very differently there.).
Yes, Iraqi thongs have always been a disappointment. But let's be fair to them, they are miles ahead in the mankini industry.
'remote windowing feature'? That's like saying http has a 'remote web page download feature' because you can connect to an http server from another machine. The whole point of X is that it is a network protocol from the ground up. It's designed for environments where applications are run over networks; unfortunately nowadays the PC model of computing has won, which is why 'remote windowing' looks like an extra 'feature'.
The article specifically cites evidence for an important genetic component of handedness, and the model is constructed around that evidence. The authors didn't have to 'show' this, as it has already been shown.
Perhaps you are confusing evolutionary modelling (a mathematical technique which describes very general processes of information transfer) with theorising about human origins (an empirical investigation which sometimes uses evolutionary models, along with other sorts of models and lots of physical evidence).
This paper is an example of the former, not the latter. It argues that, because there is a process of 'selection' involved in athletic try-outs, it may be possible to apply some evolutionary models to explain the outcomes of that process. It then shows that the data are indeed consistent with the predictions of that model.
It has absolutely nothing to do with cave men, or Neanderthals. Neither does the vast majority of the field of mathematics which we call evolutionary theory.
The model in the paper specifically allows for two possible equilibria: one in which right-handed people dominate, and one in which left-handed people do. We just happen to be in the right-handed equilibrium (by chance).
I think you'll find that outside North America, most of the Western world does walk extensively, and makes extensive use of public transport. There are even a few enclaves of civilisation in the US itself, like New York City, where this exotic practice can be seen without leaving your sacred soil.
No, no, how can they have been telling us for thousands of years? Every Chinese person knows China has 5000 years of history, while the West has approximately 5 years of history. There were some reported sightings of Westerners once in the Ming dynasty, but this has since been discovered to have been a hoax, constructed from a bearded monkey on stilts.
That's exactly the main problem with conspiracy theories, which makes them unfalsifiable and thus unscientific.
(basically, if there's no way to prove it wrong, there's no way to prove it right either)
Wow, in the course of two lines, you've managed both to invoke Popper's long-discredited theory in the philosophy of science (falsificationism) and to misunderstand it completely.
If you want to know why your second line makes no sense, read the work you are (possibly unknowingly) referencing: Popper's 'The Logic of Scientific Discovery'. lf you want to know why no philosopher of science is a falsificationist anymore, read any philosophy of science written since 1965 (and a good deal before then too). I recommend Wesley Salmon, Bas van Fraassen, or an introductory textbook.
Or you can just go on mindlessly spouting this nonsense about scientific theories having to be 'falsifiable'. Popper's ghost will thank you--he's lonely these days.
yes, but the vast majority of scientific research is not carried out with funding from the people with the most money; it is carried out with smaller grants from medium-sized organisations, governments, etc. it may be the case that some particularly high profile research is more connected to those who have the most money, because the same people will pay for press coverage. but that is a tiny proportion of the bulk of scientific research.
again, if it were not, science would be an utter failure.
yes, science costs money and money has a tendency to influence people.
but it is a gross exaggeration to say that funders of research consistently have a specific result they would like to be produced. many funders, for example those who hope to make money by engineering things using the products of research, or those who want treatments found for diseases (e.g. groups set up by parents of autistic children) are actually just interested in truth, because they have an interest in the truth being found.
moreover, even in cases in which funders are looking for some skewed result, it is still going too far to say that scientists will consistently produce bogus results. yes, you can expect that to be the case with powerful funders who have the resources and ingenuity to find the right scientists who will produce the right results. but there are also a hell of a lot of scientists out there who, because of their training in scientific values, are likely to feel that a professional code of practice stands in the way, and either get funding from somewhere else, or stand by their results.
that is, in fact, why science is in general so successful. if it were all built on people making things up that people want to hear (as charlatan postmoderns influenced by dodgy arguments by people like bruno latour would have us believe), then there would be no particle accelerators, no aeroplanes, no polio vaccine, no computers, etc etc.
in other words, the proof is in the pudding. the pudding isn't perfect--it is, after all, a human product--but it IS pudding, and there's plenty of it.
Pregnant women have depressed immune systems, and the immune system of the foetus is not fully developed. They thus fall into the general category of people with immune systems that are not fully functional.
If you fall into this general category, it is important to avoid foods including honey, unpasteurised dairy products, pasteurised soft cheeses, raw/undercooked eggs, and any kind of food that has not been prepared in a particularly sanitary way. What all of these foods have in common is simply that they may bear pathogens that are perfectly well dealt with by an ordinary person's immune system, but that a depressed immune system may have trouble with.
There is absolutely no harm in a person with a normally functioning immune system eating these foods, just as there is no harm in a person eating foods they are not allergic to, just because some people are.
The UK bans unpasteurised products? That's funny--the unpasteurised cheese I regularly buy at Waitrose, Sainsbury's, and the local farmer's market must all be illegal!
FYI, pasteurisation is not required here in the UK, nor is it required almost anywhere else except the US. There is no good reason for it at all, particularly in the case of cheese, where any cheese older than a couple of months is harmless for anyone with a normal immune system who is not pregnant. People can take care of themselves, if food is properly labelled and people are educated; in the same way I do not eat dish detergent, a pregnant woman would not eat unpasteurised cheese. If you doubt the viability of this, consider the fact that most countries in the world do not require pasteurisation, and yet (miraculously!) do not have particularly high rates of related illnesses, miscarriages left and right, etc.
By your definition of observable, we can apparently observe quarks, because we can set up tests for them of some kind. But then phlogiston theorists also observed phlogiston; for they set up tests for it, and those tests came back positive. This makes the word 'observe' rather empty and the distinction between observable and unobservable useless. It seems much more sensible to say that phlogiston theorists observed goings on in their experimental apparatus, like fires, certain colours of air, and so on, and that they inferred the existence of phlogiston, an unobservable entity, to explain the phenomena; the same way we today observe the same phenomena and infer the existence of oxygen.
And of course you cannot observe 'the fall of objects due to gravitation'. All you can observe is the fall of objects. If you could observe that it was due to gravitation, there would have been no need for Newton, because no one would have ever subscribed to Aristotelian physics--everyone would have been a Newtonian from birth!
if your behavior is just an effect of the physics in your brain, why are you IN IT? Why do you experience it?
It is not a coherent idea that 'you' are 'in' your brain; that is just Cartesian mind-body dualism, which suffers from many problems, not least of which is the problem that if the 'mind' is a distinct kind of substance from the body, how are we to explain their interaction?
I would answer your question with the simple proposition: You just are your brain/nervous system/body and all its processual workings and external relations. There is no separate 'you' that attaches somehow onto a body; you simply are that body. The question of how 'you' are 'in' it then becomes completely meaningless.
You can go on to ask some kind of metaphysical question like, 'How can it be that matter (like the brain) feels?' to which there are several possible answers. Whitehead's answer was that feeling is an inherent property of all matter; a slightly more reasonable answer is that feeling is just an emergent property of nervous systems--that is what nervous systems do. And being self-aware in exactly the way you are is just what human nervous systems do.
To try to ask any further questions about it without positing some kind of untenable mind-body dualism or idealism is like asking the question 'What happened before the universe began?' (that question of course also being meaningless, because time itself began at the beginning of the universe, so there is by definition nothing before it)
In modern science you not only have evolution, you also have biologically inspired sociology, computational neuroscience and a number of other disciplines that you just cannot understand if you believe in a human soul.
This really depends on how you conceive of a human soul. While you are quite correct that over the last 500 years, science has provided knowledge about many aspects of the world that trumps religious belief for various reasons, this does not imply that science has or will trump religious belief per se. That is, religions tend to have large bodies of knowledge around them, much of which refers to facts about the world and will inevitably be shown to be false by things like science, but they also have certain beliefs which have nothing to do with what science is capable of investigating.
For example, the idea of a soul: you can be a complete determinist, you can think that all operations of the mind are really operations of the brain, etc, but you can still believe in a soul. You could, for example, say that what does the feeling of your various mental states is the soul, and that this soul somehow goes on to occupy another body in another universe when you die, thereby continuing some kind of feeling (even without memory of the first time around). Or whatever.
The point is, science can say nothing about that, as with many other religious beliefs, such as the existence of gods. Only religion itself and philosophy can actually argue against core religious beliefs.
Anything that is not observable has nothing to do with science
Just a nitpick here--I don't think this view is at all defensible, nor would it be defended by any contemporary philosopher of science. The view you seem to be referring to is instrumentalism, the old fashioned view that scientific theories are just black boxes which calculate relationships between phenomena, and therefore things like electrons are complete fictions. That view was found to be indefensible for a variety of reasons; theoretical conjunction could not be justified, and it seemed to go against scientific practice. In this day and age, most sophisticated anti-realists subscribe to a view like that of Bas van Fraassen, which requires and refers to unobservables while remaining agnostic about their existence. And scientific realism has also become more respectable than it used to be for various reasons. But virtually no one denies anymore that science concerns itself with unobservables.
The key point here is not unobservables, but unobservables the existence of which cannot be tested in some way or at least inferred from other entities which can be tested. Testability is the criterion you are looking for here (and please don't say falsifiability, as that is another whole tin of worms).
Please offer some data to support the idea that the majority of countries in the world are 'dictatorships'.
The Vatican does not have a vote in the General Assembly. It has permanent observer status, and in 2004 was granted ordinary membership but without a vote.
a l_organizations
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_See#Internation
I would question the logic behind this. What any shareholding institution does is try to maximise profits for its own shareholders. You are correct in thinking this is probably intertemporal profit maximisation. However, when you consider that the profits from period 1 will probably be reinvested in period 2, then with a sufficiently large capital market, i.e. assuming there are abundant opportunities for reinvestment, there will be many situations in which shareholding institutions can best intertemporally profit maximise by maximising profit in period 1 at the expense of future profits of the firm concerned, then pull out investment from that firm and reinvest in whatever firm maximises returns in period 2.
You might claim that this would be stopped by firms being valued based on future profits; but there are several factors that militate against this. One of them is that if every investor is doing the same, i.e. short-term maximising, then there will be no where else for capital to flow. Another is that imperfect information may prevent investors from knowing that long-term investment has been neglected. And even without these, only one speculator is needed at the margin to make sure share prices do not reflect fundamentals.
Moreover, given a moderately competitive market, if other firms are short-run maximising in a way that makes them temporarily more competitive, a firm that long-run maximises may go out of business because of not being able to compete in the short-run. So short-run maximisation is self-reinforcing.
The bottom line is that intertemporal profit maximisation for the *investor*, who can freely move his investments about between firms, by no means necessarily matches up with intertemporal profit maximisation for any given *firm*. Therefore there is good reason to expect attention only to short run gains at the expense of the long run.
That is true.
It follows from 'We are part of nature' that 'Whatever actions we take are natural'. However it does not follow that 'Whatever actions we take are normal' or 'expected'. As for 'normal': What do you mean by normal? If we take actions that are different to the actions we usually take, these are abnormal in that context, etc. So I don't see how you can say that whatever actions we take are 'normal'.
As for 'probably expected for a species at our level of technological development': As you suggest, we have no evidence at all about any other species with our level of technological development, and therefore we have no way of knowing whether human social development is following some kind of general path followed by other species; but this is really irrelevant. If what you are trying to argue here is that determinism at a species level is true, and therefore we cannot really change our actions anyway, then I would argue that this fails for the same reason as the analogous argument fails on the individual level; that reason is compatibilism. If you are not familiar with the philosophical arguments behind this, the basic point is that we can accept determinism while still accepting that we have control over what we do: if what I am is defined as the product of all past interactions I have had, then I (i.e. that product) am making decisions in the moment--i.e. I do not have free will, but I am still making decisions. The same applies to the species. Clearly if you look at all the paths and dead-ends human history has taken, you can see many thousands of ways of life, existence, and development (if you are not aware of this, study some anthropology). To argue that what we are doing now is inevitable is disingenuous.
That is ludicrous. Yes, we are part of nature. But we can destroy it, just as we can destroy ourselves. You are exploiting an ambiguity in the term nature, which sometimes means 'Earth' and sometimes means 'the way things are'. Obviously the latter meaning is useless because any statement using it is tautological. Clearly the point when people say 'destroying nature' is 'destroying Earth', which we are part of, and just as we can destroy ourselves, our own house, our own community, we can destroy our own planet.
More fundamentally, the only reason anyone really cares about 'saving nature', except for the stereotyped crazy environmentalist whom I have yet to meet, is because nature--construed as the ecosystem of which we are a part--serves human ends and is necessary for us to survive and thrive. Clearly the major part of human existence--labour--is devoted to transforming nature for our own ends, not to just preserving it the way it is. But the whole point of environmentalism is that we have to be conscious about the unintentional effects that this has, not so that we stop transforming nature, which we have always been doing, but so that we do it in a more intelligent way.
Capitalism is a real system, economics is a theory about that system. In the real system of capitalism, i.e. what really exists, there is no such thing as perfect information, perfect competition, market clearing equilibria, non-sticky prices, etc. Arbitrage (e.g. scalping) is rampant. Monopoly power is rampant. That IS capitalism. Maybe you have some kind of dream idea of some kind of capitalism (like 'warm and fluffy capitalism') where everything works perfectly, but if we're talking about the real world, this is as smoothly functioning as capitalism gets.
It is an obvious triviality that everyone is biased, and therefore every news source is biased. But we have developed certain social institutions that bind themselves by practices and rules that are intended to filter out as much of that bias as possible by taking into account multiple views and removing emotionally charged presentation. Or more precisely, the bias is made the same as whatever the general bias is of the community or society concerned, rather than simply being the bias of one side. This is the difference between listening to someone on a soapbox and listening to someone who is part of a scientific or journalistic community.
For example, this is part of why science works so well. In science, you get lots of little contributions by biased individuals, but because they are peer reviewed and some of them (experiments) are repeated, and this happens over a large and diverse community that is nevertheless following the same rules of conduct, the result generally averages out to something whose only bias is toward the very principles of science itself.
Journalistic organisations (with the exception of overtly biased ones) are 'supposed' to act in the same kind of way. They know their journalists, editors, etc, are all biased as individuals, so they follow a strong code of journalistic and editorial conduct to try to remove whatever bias there may be toward one side or another. That is why, for example, British interviewers will typically interview *everyone* extremely harshly, regardless of whether or not they deserve it, or whether or not the reporter agrees with them. It is a way of making sure you don't let anyone off easy so that the impact of your own personal bias is minimised.
The difference between the BBC and an organisation like Sky or Fox News is that the BBC tries very hard to follow its own rules. Those rules, incidentally, do include an explicit bias: they claim they are biased in favour of liberal democracies. But within that framework, the BBC tries to eliminate internal bias. The evidence that they have succeeded in that comes from the millions around the world who see the BBC as the only impartial news source, the only one that could be trusted (for example, in Eastern Europe, no one would trust Radio Free Europe, run by the Americans, because they knew it was propaganda, but everyone trusted the BBC). The fact is it works. Whereas Fox News intentionally biases its news in a very skewed, very particular direction. Fox is not interested in being unbiased, it is interested in making money. The BBC is providing a public service and they know it, so journalistic ethics mostly prevail.
Maybe you should die and not burden the rest of us with your sociopathic tendencies?
You really don't need to know anything about British history to know a modicum of world geography.
The name of the country is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, for short the United Kingdom or UK.
England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are the administrative subdivisions of the United Kingdom. They are not countries in the sense of being autonomous legal entities that enter into treaties etc, although sometimes people confusingly refer to them as 'countries' (partly because they used to be countries). They are analogous to California, Iowa, Ohio, etc.
The word 'Britain' is generally used as a synonym for the United Kingdom, although 'Great Britain' specifically means the landmass which comprises England, Wales and Scotland, i.e. the UK minus Northern Ireland. The 'British Isles' refers to the UK, the various Crown dependencies (Isle of Man, Channel Islands etc), plus (usually) the Republic of Ireland, which is a separate country altogether.
Using 'England' as a synonym for the UK is an insult to Scottish people, Welsh people, and Northern Irish. London is not the capital of England, it is the capital of the UK. It is very simple.