Actually, I was wrong. Turns out Illinois has now passed a law which makes it illegal (potentially) to leave any child under 14 home alone.
So, that covers 13-year-olds. It's officially illegal to leave your teenager alone in some states.
Granted, the law states that the parents must be neglectful or disregard the child's welfare by leaving a 13-year-old alone, but if the cases I cited in my previous post are any clue to how police will actually behave, the reality is that they'll arrest parents (and potentially take kids away into foster care) if there's any excuse.
Basically, it's easier to give into the concerns of the noisy neighbor or the local busybody and arrest the parents than to try to justify leaving the parents alone despite the complaint. If something DID happen to the kid (unlikely, but it could happen), the police would get blamed. So they call CPS and slap on the cuffs.
True, but the age is rising all the time. Did you know that it's now grounds for arrest if you leave an 11-year-old alone in a car while you go into a store?
Apparently an 11-year-old (who requested to stay in the car, as I often did at that age too when my mom went shopping) might be in danger of suffocation or overheating or whatever. Note in the article: Police said the car interior temp had risen to 85 degrees (!!) before they arrived, apparently just in the nick of time. And apparently the police must have determined that the 11-year-old had no other possible course of action (with that temperature rising to... moderately warm... levels), like rolling down the window, opening the door, or... heavens -- going into the store and joining her mother!
In a few years, this will be moved up to teenagers. Particularly if there's some sort of high-profile abduction or something. It doesn't matter how rare it is.
And if you think this arrest is an isolated case, you'd be wrong. Look around a bit and you'll see plenty of cases of parents being arrested in recent years for letting preteens (9-, 10-, 11-year-olds) walk alone to/from a local neighborhood park or playing there alone. Heck, parents have even been arrested when an 11-year-old boy was alone playing in HIS OWN YARD for a while.
(By the way, of course leaving young kids in a locked car is a horrible thing, and many do die each year. But presumably an 11-year-old has a few more options than being stuck in a car seat until they die of heat stroke.)
Just in the past couple years, the age for arresting parents for "endangering" them by leaving them alone for a few minutes has risen from somewhere around 7 or 8 up to at least 11. Teens aren't that far off.
I can't tell you how many people I have seen who can barely control their own kid in public because it's a screeching howling little ball of evil which won't take no for an answer, and that's while they're still young enough to be in a stroller.
You're right that 90%+ of the time, this is a parenting problem. When I had a kid, I was determined not to be "that guy." Infants obviously don't understand discipline, but once your kid gets to be a toddler, he/she will generally understand rewards.
I still remember the first few times I took my son out to a restaurant, which wasn't really regular until he was over a year old. We chose a family "diner" place so it wouldn't be too disruptive no matter what happened. But maybe 2 out of the first 5 times we had a dinner out, he started throwing a tantrum in the middle of dinner. So, my wife and I would take him out, and he wouldn't get the yummy food he had.
It was annoying. It was frustrating as we'd take turns with him outside while the other struggled to finish dinner or got take-out. But we weren't going to be "those people."
And guess what? He learned. By the time he was 3, we could take him to a formal dinner at a REALLY nice restaurant, and he'd sit there and be fine throughout the meal. Sure, he'd get bored and wiggle around in his seat or lie down or whatever sometimes, but he'd NEVER be allowed to go running around or even wandering around and pestering other people. I was appalled when I went out to meals with some friends and they let their kids start running around and shouting -- even at a relatively informal place.
Then again, I don't have or want kids, so maybe I'm just a little biased.
I find that most people with kids don't understand the kind of pressure you're under and the kind of discipline it takes to get your kid to learn appropriate manners. And it's even harder today, I think, because increasing numbers of parents don't enforce such rules -- which means your kid is stuck watching all those other jerks and thinking "Why can't I run around and scream like a maniac? It looks fun!" So you have to deal with some relapses when they learn bad habits from other kids.
Anyhow, one thing I'd say is that you should generally try to cut parents a little slack when there's nothing they can do. If you're in a restaurant, and the kid is out of control, you take him/her out of the restaurant. Done. End of story. But if you're on a plane and the little kid has a tantrum, you can't just "step outside" for a "time out."
Believe me -- most of the parents I know who fly with little kids only do so when it's absolutely necessary. They generally hate it, because they know these kind of disasters and tantrums can happen -- even for the "best-behaved" kids. And then you have a bunch of people sitting around and judging you.
All of this said -- I will say that all kids are different. And like I said earlier, 90% of the time, it's the parents' fault. But some fraction of the time, parents just get stuck with a crazy kid. I've seen this -- I know families with 4 kids and one of the middle kids is just a disaster... misbehaves all the time, etc. Sometimes it really is just the kid's personality, and some kids are harder than others. It's thus hard to judge people and know what's really going on when a kid acts out.
I can't say how it works where you are but in the US money has value because if you don't accept it as payment you'll find yourself in legal trouble. The government swinging its hammer is a persuasive force.
That's not quite true. The US government does not force anyone to accept dollars as payments. If you want to open a barter shop and trade goats as your only form of "payment," you can do so.
What the government does say is the following:
(1) US money (dollars) is "legal tender" for all debts. That means if you already owe something to someone, legally you can repay that debt in dollars, and they must accept it. If you go to a store, you generally don't "owe debt" in advance. If you want to acquire goods from the store, you'll have to agree to the terms of their payment contract, whatever they are. Most contracts are implicitly created by exchange of dollars, but if your store has a contract that says, "I'll give you this slaughtered and processed cow in exchange for five goats," that's perfectly valid. If you don't show up with the goats, and the guy gives you the cow anyway, then you now are "in debt," and legally the guy must accept a dollar valuation of his payment if he sues you in court.
But you can't compel him to give you the cow in the first place just by offering the amount of dollars that "five goats" should be worth.
(2) Taxation laws still apply, though. If you start entering into such contracts on a large scale and making "profits" (even in goats), you'll still owe the government taxes on your gains. And the government generally doesn't accept goats as payment for taxes. So the real reason most businesses are forced to deal in cash is because they ultimately must pay taxes in cash. Even if they wanted to use a barter system to deal with everyday transactions, eventually they need to get their hands on some significant dollars to pay the taxes.
From a practical standpoint, any large-scale business that tried to operate without cash transactions would be flagged for close monitoring by the IRS, and unless you had detailed documentation of the valuation of assets you were trading in lieu of cash, you'd end up with tax penalties or in prison for tax fraud.
That's the real reason most businesses deal in cash in the US. And thus the real reason the US currency has (a certain minimum) value has fundamentally to do with taxation policies.
"I have concern about a PlayStation that my grandchildren might use," she said, "and a predator getting on the other end, and talking to them, and it's all encrypted. I think there really is reason to have the ability, with a court order, to be able to get into that."
You could be involved with your kids and *you* be in charge of who they are communicating with via your playstation
Not only that, but kids have ALWAYS had clandestine communications. When Senator Feinstein was a teenager, I'd bet a lot money that she went for a walk alone with her friends sometimes. You go to the park, you walk in the woods or the meadow (in more rural areas), or whatever. Those communications may not have been formally "encrypted," but they were the private communications of the kids nonetheless. Back then, if you proposed having someone walk around with a microphone or tail your kid to monitor all communications, just in case something bad might happen -- well, people would think you were insane.
And, you know what? Child abduction rates and violent crimes against kids were likely greater back then. At least for the past 40 years or so since child crime statistics have been accurately kept, the trend has basically been down, down, down. And the vast majority of such crimes are perpetrated by family members and close family friends, not random strangers -- met on the internet or elsewhere.
Yes, it is true that your kids or grandkids may have greater contact with strangers through the internet and electronic communications than in previous generations. And that's why monitoring what they do IN PERSON is important. If they're in your house, watch what your grandkids are doing. Ask who they're talking to on the Playstation if it seems weird. Be involved.
This nonsense about justifying encryption backdoors is coming from a combination of completely out-of-whack fears with little basis in reality. Child crime is down, but our fears of it are higher than ever (particularly when it comes to strangers, who are the least likely to harm your kids). Terrorist acts are few and far between (despite recent activity), yet we're more worried about them rather than actual dangers that are hundreds or even thousands of times more likely to kill us (driving, obesity and other "bad" health habits, etc.).
People have always had fears driven by sensationalism -- see Renaissance paintings of Hellfire and read old-fashioned "fire and brimstone" sermons, for example. These modern fears are almost as loopy.
Even if he crashes the price many bitcoin users won't care, how the price changed since yesterday won't matter. They just use bitcoins for transfers or payments, they aren't holding bitcoins. They immediately convert to bitcoin as needed and from bitcoin immediately. Especially so for merchants, well that is their 3rd party payment processors do, the merchants never see or touch a bitcoin themselves. The 3rd party converts the merchant's fiat price to bitcoin in real-time, collects the coins and pays the merchant in fiat currency immediately.
They will care if during these transactions there's some sort of "flash crash" where companies start losing money. Maybe it won't be the end users or maybe not the merchants -- but somebody is holding the coins during the transaction and making the whole thing work. If the value takes a severe enough nosedive and becomes too volatile, it makes it risky for the intermediaries to keep handling the exchanges.
Also, they will care if bitcoins become so worthless that they are no longer feasible for these sorts of transactions. Everyone seems to assume that this could never happen because they assume currencies only devalue like that in hyperinflation due to "printing money," and they assume bitcoin must therefore be immune due to its limited pool.
Except there are loads of things in the world that are somewhat rare but no one finds value in. There are a limited number of rocks in my backyard -- much smaller than the number of bitcoins. But I'd have a hard time convincing anyone to use "rocks from my backyard" as a medium of exchange with enough consistent value to justify it.
Only the speculators will get hurt, well, that is if they sell in the panic.
Ah, you're a true believer -- just stay in for the "long haul," and the price is guaranteed to go up.
See, that depends on one significant assumption -- i.e., that nothing better will have come along before this happens. It's the same as any speculation, any stock, any company. Sometimes it takes months, sometimes years, sometimes decades, and sometimes even longer than a century -- but almost all "innovative" companies or ideas will eventually be outdone by something newer and better.
That's particularly true in the case of bitcoin, which is sort of frozen in its current state. Even if people want currency with the features you mention, you have no guarantee that people won't start migrating to something better in the future... whether that's next year or in 10 years or longer, you can't know. And at that point, everyone who invested in bitcoin itself and the infrastructure which supports it could lose big. Will it happen? I don't know, but the first version of some innovation on the scene is rarely the best final product that ends up being adopted widely.
No, RTFA, too much sleep (more than nine hours) is seen as unhealthy too.
Or maybe sick people sleep a lot. It is likely the causation is the other way around. While TFA is quick to say that the sleeping causes the deaths, the study itself only says they are "associated".
Actually, the STUDY explicitly says exactly what you just did about causation. From the Discussion section:
It is biologically plausible that short sleep duration may increase mortality risk through adverse endocrinologic, immunologic, and metabolic effects [48,49,50] or through chronic inflammation [47,51,52]. The mechanism for the association between long sleep duration and mortality is not well understood [17,47]. Most studies suggest that long sleep duration tends to be associated with sleep fragmentation, fatigue, depression, and underlying disease and poor health [53]. Therefore, the observed association between long sleep duration and all-cause mortality could be due to "reverse causality" or residual confounding [17,54]. An interesting observation from the current study is that risk combinations involving long sleep duration, prolonged sitting, and/or physical inactivity tended to be among those with the strongest associations with mortality, with HRs ranging from 2 to above 4. These associations remained significant and of similar magnitude after excluding deaths within the first 2 y of follow-up (S2 Table). This may suggest that the underlying characteristics associated with such behavioral patterns involving long sleep, sedentariness, and inactivity, perhaps not limited to major occult disease or failing health, may have contributed to the elevated risk for morality.
And they also note a few other things, like the fact that the "long sleep" problem tends to be a better marker for bad things with older people. This study didn't control for the fact that older people tend to sleep less or at least have trouble sleeping in longer blocks (compared to younger people). So it makes some intuitive sense that when you have an older person who also sleeps really long, it may be associated with some other problem (depression, disease, etc.), which is more likely to lead to a greater mortality.
"You, sir, are the result of an illicit conjugation"
It'll certainly bring the class back into insults.
Especially if we include bad puns and grammar humor: "You, sir, be being the result of an illicit conjugation."
Hmm... actually come to think of it, we already have such a spell-checker. I eventually had to turn of iPhone's Autocorrect when it would refuse to allow me to use the word "its". It would always just change it to "it's". Yes, Apple, English does actually have a third-person possessive pronoun, so stop making me to look like an illiterate idiot when I forget to correct your "autocorrect." Perhaps they've fixed this now, but it was only one of a number of perfectly valid words that Autocorrect wouldn't let me use.
Sorry to self-reply, but I messed up one of the links. Here's a link to another story with graphs that have more recent (and long-term) data on college graduation rates.
The point about graduation rates is not percentages, it's that everyone who wants to has an opportunity to do so. It seems like boys could do with a little more encouragement in some areas, but then again so could girls in others.
It's also important to note that both sexes are graduating college at the highest rates EVER in the U.S. (See, for example, graphs here and here, showing percentages of young people with bachelor's degrees over the past few decades.)
It's true that the growth in women's graduation rates has gone up faster than men's, and now women do graduate at greater rates than men. But men are still graduating at higher rates than EVER before.
So, we can debate what these numbers mean and whether they are a disturbing trend. Maybe men need more motivation. Or maybe women realize that a pay gap still exists -- for whatever reason. Even if that pay gap is mostly because women don't tend to like to work ridiculously long hours and because they take off a few years from careers to raise kids or whatever... even IF that's the reason for the pay gap, women still have an incentive to try to earn more, and college degrees are known to help with that.
So, maybe both sexes are making rational choices here? Maybe men are going to college at greater rates than ever, because they realize the opportunities it provides. But perhaps more men are willing to have a go at a career without the degree, figuring that they can make up for it with long hours and hard work, etc. Whereas women have a stronger incentive to pursue the degree, since it allows them a better start and a greater chance of overcoming the pay gap (no matter what the cause of that pay gap is).
Maybe. I'm not saying this is the explanation, but it's one way to look at it. Or maybe we should be concerned about the fact that men's graduation rates aren't growing as fast as women's. But one thing we need to recognize is the BOTH SEXES are graduating at higher rates -- it's just that the men's growth is slower.
It's too complex a subject to be boiled down to a sentence.
Agreed. And that goes for many of the issues in GP's rant. For example, regarding women getting custody of children in divorces, it used to be the case that there was something called the tender years doctrine where courts would award custody to women by default (particularly for young children).
But the vast majority of states have now passed laws requiring parents to be treated equally. The problem in most divorces is the same one GP mentions about "working long hours." Courts are predisposed to assure continuity for kids. If the mother has been the primary caregiver and the father has basically been absent except for a couple hours on weekends, it's harder to argue that the children should be forced to go with the father.
Is this "fair"? Maybe not in some cases. But there is a logic to saying that if a father hasn't been there for his kids for years, that expecting him to raise them by himself may be more difficult both on him and the kids.
So -- here's a bit of advice for fathers. I've seen a lot of bad divorces happen among friends, family, colleagues, etc. Spend time with your kids. Seriously. If you love them, take the time and do stuff with them while they're small. You may think that "if I just work a little longer tonight" or "if I just come in on Saturday" then you'll get the promotion and get more money and whatever. Guess what? Most kids just want to see their dad. The extra money you might get rarely makes up for being gone all the time.
By benefiting (mostly) rich white people instead of (mostly) poor minorities, it helps rake in campaign contributions from the Right People
Your entire post was hilarious; but I especially loved this bit. You've obviously never ridden on an urban mass transit system of any kind.
Nice way to except a quotation from GP without context and earn yourself some karma.
But while GP's post was over-the-top, his general point that buses are more important to the urban poor and subways tend to be built without the poor in mind is largely accurate. If you don't believe me, you might start with some articles like this and this, or maybe this recent survey of public transport riders in NYC, which showed the median income was significantly lower for those who used the bus as well as the subway, and even lower for those who used the bus alone.
Basically, for most big cities in the U.S. it works like this:
- Rich people have their own drivers.
- Upper middle class people who live in the suburbs drive themselves. If they live in the city, they take taxis.
- Most middle class people who live in the city take the subway. If they live in the suburbs, they drive to a commuter rail and take that.
- Poor people can't afford cars. They can't live in the suburbs, and if they do, they usually can't afford to live in the ones with convenient commuter rail service. If they live in the city, they often can't afford to live in the more popular areas right next to subway lines. (Those that can often live in rent-control neighborhoods which prevent the convenient subway-adjacent areas from being overrun by young professionals with more money.) The poor disproportionately live in the areas of the city that aren't served by subways, so they end up taking buses (because they can't afford cars) or doing a hybrid commute by bus until they can get to a subway line.
It's clear from this post and another reply that you don't understand the reality of where subway/rail lines get constructed. They are VERY expensive, and poor areas tend not to have the tax revenue to justify them. So, poor areas get the much cheaper buses.
You see a lot of poor people riding subways and light rail in the city for two reasons: (1) the subways run through the most popular business districts in major cities, so even if a poor person starts on a bus, they likely find a connection to a subway convenient to get to work, and (2) dense urban areas tend to have a lot of poor areas located between middle-class and richer areas. So when a subway/rail is built to connect the middle-class areas, it will likely end up running through poor areas anyway.
If you look at most major cities in the Northeast U.S. which have had subways for many years, you'll likely find plenty of examples of poor areas that have been promised a subway/rail line for decades. But they rarely get built. It's much easier and cheaper to extend a new commuter rail line to another suburb, and it's more lucrative to get middle-class riders who can pay premium fares. Expanding the inner-city subway system often requires expensive and complex digging through dense areas, and for what? To get the relatively low fares that the city mostly gets from poor people on buses or taking subway connections from buses anyway.
It's lovely that you see some minorities in your subway commute, but GP had a legitimate point about the expense of rail vs. buses and where the former gets prioritized. The poor generally end up taking the bus in most cities.
I think the article here is using "shibboleth" to mean not just a tired cliche or trope, but "a cliche or trope that, when used, distinguishes that author from 'real' sci-fi authors," which is sort of in line with the literal definition of the term.
Except that's actually the OPPOSITE of the meaning of the term. A Shibboleth is used to identify members who belong to a group. (In the original story, those who weren't group members said "sibboleth" instead, because their language didn't have an "sh" sound.)
It also has come to mean a cliche associated with the members of a group or even a meaningless cliche in general.
But this guy is trying to use it to mean a cliche that says you are NOT part of the desired group. Maybe he should have called them "sibboleths" instead... but then no one would understand the reference.
To clarify with an example, saying: "Whether to have space explosions transmit sounds is a shibboleth of hard SciFi" is good, since it characterizes the idea of something that can determine the in-group status. Similarly, saying "Having no sound transmitted through a vacuum in a space explosion is a shibboleth of hard SciFi" also makes sense, since the practice of the in-group is identified.
Saying "Hearing audible sound traveling in space from an explosion is a hard SciFi shibboleth," on the other hand, gets things a bit backwards. It's possible to understand this sentence, but only if you already know what it's supposed to mean. If you didn't know what the real-world version of how sound acts in space was, this sentence might appear to suggest the opposite of what TFA would intend it to mean.
I'm not really sure it's academia's fault, but more that the entertainment industry got a bit carried away with stories about future AI, and now people think that if it doesn't look like that, then it's not AI, all the while missing the massive advances in computing that AI research has netted them...
Where did the "entertainment industry" get these ideas from? From AI researchers in the 1950s, that's where!
In 1950, you had Turing declaring that by the year 2000, we'd have computers so fluent in natural language that you could debate appropriate word substitutions in Shakespearean sonnets with them in complex metaphors. Today we have chatbots that claim to "pass the Turing test" by pretending to be a non-responsive teenager who doesn't really know English that well.
In 1956, you had the Dartmouth Conference declaring that they thought most of the major problems of AI (like natural language processing, abstraction of concepts, creativity, etc.) could probably be solved in a couple of months with 10 dudes thinking hard.
That kind of optimism lasted for a couple decades at least in the AI academic world, and it's not surprising at all that pop culture listened to those academics.
I'm not at all denigrating the significant advancements which have been made. But my "goalposts" for "real" AI have not been moved since Turing's original test was declared 65 years ago, which Turing thought would be possible to pass with flying colors 15 years ago.
But we have hardware and software many orders of magnitude larger and more complex than Turing dreamed of, but we haven't made significant dents in many of those Dartmouth Conference goals.
You can't blame this on the "entertainment industry." The early AI guys were overly ambitious and thought the problems were much more easy to solve than they seem to be.
Biblically the devil is not in Hell yet. He has been cast out of heaven but will not be imprisoned in hell until after the Second Coming of Christ. I know in popular culture they like to speak of him ruling in Hell and tormenting the lost souls but that doesn't follow the scripture.
See, the problem with your assertion is that it depends on centuries of theologians who conflated a bunch of these things (which are all distinct concepts, often from different traditions with different attributes), made assumptions about how they relate to each other, and tried to figure out consistency in a bunch of inconsistent passages.
What you're really referring to is the passage in Revelation 20:10, which implies that the devil ("diabolos") won't be imprisoned in the "lake of fire" until after the coming of Christ. But what is your basis for declaring the "lake of fire" to be synonymous with the English word "Hell," instead of assuming that Hell could be equated with one of the other concepts already mentioned? And how do you know the "devil" isn't in any of the others? The Book of Job notes that Satan wanders about to all sorts of places and is even brought to talk to God. How do you know Satan doesn't wander into any of these other haunts?
Some people also note that the greatest feature of Hell is "eternal torment," and the Bible identifies the most significant feature of eternal torment to be separation from God. Since most Christians agree that the "devil" (whatever that is -- word problems there too... are we talking Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub etc.? -- these guys were all different) has already been cast out of Heaven, he has already been separated from God and is thus already suffering the primary torment of "Hell," whether or not he is physically located in the "Lake of Fire."
And how do we determine that the "diabolos" (devil) who is cast into the Lake of Fire (if that is indeed "Hell") is the same as Satan or the fallen angel or Lucifer or whoever?
Basically, rather than saying what you did:
Biblically the devil is not in Hell yet
You should say:
Biblically the Diabolos has not been cast into the Lake of Fire yet. But centuries of debates and random equivalencies created by Church dogma have led to a common interpretation that this "diabolos" is the same as what were likely understood in Biblical times to be distinct entities such as Satan and Lucifer, and the "Lake of Fire" is now equated with various conceptions of "Hell" which had different terms and would have been viewed as distinct in Biblical times. Thus, according to the Biblical text combined with a crapload of random church dogma, the traditional popular culture image "doesn't follow the scripture."
This is in no small part due to a moving of the goal-posts.
No it isn't moving the goal posts.
It depends on what you think the "goal posts" are. I would argue that the opposite of "aging" isn't "living forever." It's, well, NOT AGING.
What is "aging"? Most of it associate it with the kind of stuff you and GP both bring up, i.e., gradual degradation in various parts of the body and mind. One can cure "aging" partially by reducing that sort of degradation.
Unless you are literal believer in the story of Methuselah, we have never observed any human living longer than 125 years or so. Plenty of people have lived into their 100s before most of what we consider modern medicine was available. They just had to be incredibly lucky to live that long without something else coming along to kill them first.
Again, stopping aging is a separate issue from life extension. Suppose you had a car whose engine was just going to die around 200,000 miles no matter what -- it was just part of the design. But the other parts would gradually degrade, meaning that the best part of the lifespan of the car was the first 50,000 miles, followed by random repairs and problems for the next 50,000, and at that point you'd be better off just selling the car because after 100,000 miles the thing just required repair after repair to just keep it going. The engine was still good, but it had "aged" and become useless.
But what if you could "cure" that aging for all the other car parts and have a car that ran great for all 200,000 miles of the engine's lifespan? I think almost everyone would agree that that would be fantastic and would be a significant advance in "reducing the aging" of the vehicle. Even though it completely "died" at the same time, curing "aging" is still a significant improvement and benefit.
And in that sense, we ARE moving the goalposts, because many of those traditional elements of aging can be delayed or halted for a while -- which allows more and more people to make use of those "extra miles" getting up toward 100 years.
So here is the question: if you can give me some gene therapy that will prevent me from just sorta shutting down in my middle 90s, as so many of my relatives have great, but how does that mean I die ultimately. Does it mean I am going stroke out or something. Does it mean I am going to live for years with conditions that are debilitating? Is that even what I want.
Again, you're confusing aging with life extension. The very definition of "curing aging" has to do with keeping you in a state where you aren't debilitated by the problems of "old age." If you just extend life, you haven't actually cured aging.
For my own anecdote, the sister of one of my great-grandparents lived to 106. I remember going to visit her when she was 102 and finding her in the garden vigorously digging and turning over the soil. Even when she was 100 years old, she probably looked (and apparently felt) like somebody who was typically 70 or 75, maybe younger.
Figuring out how to do THAT sort of thing would actually be working toward a cure for aging. Personally, I don't know whether I'd want to live much more than 100 years (if that). But if you told me I could live those full 100 years in great health, I'd commend you for curing aging and raise a toast to you.
The people seeking immortality are the crazier ones. The ones who just want to stop aging are pursuing a more useful goal.
(Actually, 3D Nand doesn't work this way at all. But this Hitachi video still has to go down as one of the most entertaining and ridiculous explanations of new ways to cram bits in. It's common to do stuff like this today, I suppose, but in 2005, this kind of video release was pretty awesome.)
However, I will also say: I was writing quickly and informally referencing the idea of "too much." "Too much of them" is common in colloquial idiomatic English when referencing a mass of something (i.e., "too much of that sort of thing" even if multiple types of things fall into that category), rather than emphasizing the individual components.
Its supposed to be something that gives you a deep insight into some area of knowledge that you didn't possess before.
Actually, I think this misses some nuance in the use of the English word "profound" and the source of "profundity."
What makes something "profound" is often the same kind of thing that makes a mathematical proof "elegant": a certain kind of generalization combined with terseness or compactness. Often the problem with "elegant" proofs and with "profound" statements is that they don't explain their complexity explicitly. An elegant proof can therefore be rather non-intuitive, or even if it makes sense, it's not clear why it should work at the start. The terseness and efficiency is sometimes valued over detailed discussion.
It's the same thing with many "profound" statements. Their "profundity" depends on context and with a listener realizing that a "deeper" meaning lies in a brief comment which at first may seem confusing and complex, or over-generalized, or even an obvious platitude.
The willingness to see something as profound thus depends on the audience and the kind of knowledge they are expected to apply to generate the complexity out of the short statement.
For example, if you said "Life is like a box of chocolates" to different people, the profundity level will probably vary significantly:
- To a normal person: "Yeah, stupid Forrest Gump reference. Stupid platitude."
- To someone stoned: "Wow, yeah man, Life *IS* like a box of chocolates -- freakin' deep!"
- To a chocolate maker over the age of 30 by a customer: "Really stupid Forrest Gump reference."
- To a young chocolate maker (who likely has never seen the movie) by an old master chef: "Wow... there must be deep meaning in this, and there is! The arrangement of chocolates is a metaphor for X, and the box shows the way our life is delineated into a certain period, with the assortment showing...." etc.
The same statement can be a source of different levels of meaning. TFA seems to assume that most people who find profundity are like the stoned person -- they have impaired cognitive abilities which lead them to think things are deep when they aren't.
But I'd also argue that some people tend to be like the young chocolate maker listening to the master chef -- if they read something spoken or written by a source which seems like it ought to be profound, they go searching for meaning and make up connections even if they weren't intended. (Maybe the master chocolate maker was just making a dumb Forrest Gump reference too, but didn't realize his young apprentice wouldn't get it.)
I haven't read the original study in detail yet, so perhaps this is addressed -- but it seems to me if you put out a bunch of statements and ask people whether they are "profound," you're priming them to look for deep meanings, even when they aren't there.
It's well-known that people have fundamental cognitive biases that lead them to search for order even in randomness. When you do a study and hint that something might be "profound," people will start trying to find more complex hidden meanings.
The problem is that stupider people are more used to believing that authority figures must be saying something significant, even if they don't understand it. So what the study might REALLY be measuring is the tendency to believe that things which are associated with "profundity" are more likely to be "profound," e.g., if your professor or mentor or whomever says something and then says, "It's that profound?", you are primed to try to find some meaning in it, even if it's nonsense. Stupid people are more likely to fall for this, because they are simply more used to professors saying stuff they don't understand anyway -- not necessarily because they actually find profound meaning in it.
TL;DR: The study may simply be measuring how stupid people don't tend to underst
Actually, they are used correctly. The cognitive abilities the study used were verbal and fluid intelligence and numeracy. Thus, i.e. rightly denotes the complete list.
Actually, there's a further nuance to all this. The summary quotes the Washington Post:
Those more receptive to bull**** are less reflective, lower in cognitive ability (i.e., verbal and fluid intelligence, numeracy), are more prone to ontological confusions [beliefs in things for which there is no empirical evidence (i.e. that prayers have the ability to heal)] and conspiratorial ideation, are more likely to hold religious and paranormal beliefs, and are more likely to endorse complementary and alternative medicine.
The first "i.e." is actually in the original study, and as you point out, it is used correctly to reference the complete list of things they were studying.
The second "i.e." is, you will note, in brackets, because this is an explanation inserted by the Washington Post writer. The original sentence from the study reads:
Those more receptive to bull**** are less reflective, lower in cognitive ability (i.e., verbal and fluid intelligence, numeracy), are more prone to ontological confusions and conspiratorial ideation, are more likely to hold religious and paranormal beliefs, and are more likely to endorse complementary and alternative medicine.
Hence, it's the WASHINGTON POST which doesn't know how to use "i.e." correctly. If you read the original study, it's clear that it has a LOT of "e.g" and "i.e." In fact, it probably has a little too much of them, but they appear to be used correctly.
Yes, and you could buy a floppy disk drive very cheaply too. Nobody uses those anymore either.
What a ridiculous comparison. Floppies were limited in their design capacity, and Apple's decision to start phasing them out in 1998 (I believe) was ALSO premature. Why? Because there wasn't a good alternative on the market yet for those who needed to transfer files. Zipdisks were fine, but they were pricey, buggy, and annoying. CD-ROMs were write-only. CD-RWs were unreliable and often unsupported in some readers. It was really the USB flash drive which finally replaced the floppy, but that didn't come around until 2000. Once they became cheap and popular, most computer companies finally started dropping floppy drives.
On the other hand, lots of people complained about Apple's decision to drop the optical drive on the MacBook Air, but I thought they were behind the times on that one. I've been using laptops (ultraportables) that didn't come with an optical drive since 2005. The reality is if you wanted the lightest, smallest laptop, why would you carry an optical drive around with you?
And yet they are still useful periodically, so when I built my current desktop, obviously I put an optical drive in. The choice is for a specific use case -- you want the lightest thinnest possible thing, why not get rid of something bulky? You could always buy a USB optical drive, which I've been using with every laptop I've had since 2005. For bigger laptops ("desktop replacements"), an optical drive can still be useful depending on what you do.
So digital audio to the speaker is the future, and then it might as well be wireless. Or you'd have to define a new physical connector which supplies power and a digital signal.
What the heck are you talking about? Why do you think you need to replace the physical connector to get the advantages in digital signal you want? You can ALREADY buy a bluetooth headset and use it with current technology. Your argument doesn't make any sense -- "There are some things that you can't do with the analog audio connector, and if you wanted to do them that way, you'd need other complicated things." NO -- if you want those things, you just buy BLUETOOTH now.
The only difference Apple's decision here makes is that we're all forced to buy more expensive tech to do a rather simple task. The vast majority of people don't care about the audio things you're talking about -- they listen on the crappiest set of earbuds they can buy.
Except now you want to force them to bulk UP those crappy earbuds with a battery and a Bluetooth connection.
Frankly, I don't want to have another device with batteries to deal with. It's already enough to worry about to plug in my phone and tablet to charge. Now I need to be ready to replace the battery in my headphones or charge them too?
Sorry, but even if the cost for wireless was similar, that's just too much of a pain for little benefit. To me, it's the same as wireless mice and keyboards. I bought my first wireless mouse in 2005, I think. It was cool for a couple weeks. Then I had to replace the battery. Then I decided it wasn't necessary. I've never bought another wireless mouse or keyboard since. If I had a specific use case where running a wire was annoying (e.g., controlling a TV across the room or whatever), then sure, I'd use one. But I don't need to have a wireless mouse to "declutter my desk." Dealing with batteries is just annoying unless there's a significant tangible advantage.
Same thing with this headphone thing. I'm not going to deal with batteries to power my headphones unless there's a real advantage. I do actually have Bose noise-cancelling headphones, which are awesome for when I use them, and yes they require batteries. But that's for a use case like airplanes where there's a real advantage. On a daily basis if I'm out for a walk or whatever, I don't want to deal with my battery in my earbuds going dead... just so Apple can shave another fraction of a millimeter off the thickness of its devices. (And of course, that's not the real reason -- they want to see you buy some expensive connector or other peripherals.)
Suppose there was a just a single serial killer out there that killed one person every year for the past 25 years. Population doubles every 23 years or so. So it looks like he has cut his death rate in half, when it has actually stayed the same.
I'm not sure I understand your point here. In your hypothetical situation where the world only has one serial killer murdering people, suppose there are 1000 people at the beginning. The serial killer is killing 1 person each year, so I have a 0.1% of being murdered this year. There is also 0.1% of the population (the serial killer) which is going around killing other people.
In 25 years, if the population is 2000, now my chances of being murdered by this guy are 0.05%, and only 0.05% of our population is composed of murderous wackos.
How is that NOT an improvement in overall safety of society? Granted, this particular guy hasn't improved in terms of his murderous tendencies, and it's a tragedy that people are still being killed.
But if your goal is to measure the collective safety of a society, wouldn't you rather live in a place where the murder rate was 1 in 2000 vs. 1 in 1000?
I agree that there are times when it's helpful to talk about raw numbers and other times when percentages are better. But isn't "whether the world is a violent place?" one situation where you'd be more interested in percentages, since those reflect the overall tendency of human interactions? Violence is not just the result of one serial killer -- it's often a collective societal thing.
Or, to put it another way, if the population was decreasing steadily (instead of increasing), would you still be telling us we need to look at "raw numbers" instead of percentages? If we had a society of 1 million with 10,000 murders per year (1% -- probably good numbers for medieval society), and the next year due to plague we had a society of 100,000 but still with 10,000 murders per year (10%), wouldn't you be concerned about the increase rather than the fact that the raw number is the same?? ("Oh, I know 1 in 10 of you will be killed by random violence this year, but keep in mind -- our raw numbers are still at pre-plague levels! You're still as safe as houses!")
I don't blame the news cycle. Do we really needs news headlines like: "People all over the world go about regular business, all goes fine"?
No, we don't need articles like that, which would be pointless.
What we do need (and what I think TFA is arguing for) is perspective. Whether you're talking about overall violent crime rate, child abductions, campus rape, whatever -- the general trend over the past couple decades has been DOWN.
Yes, there are still terrible things happening. And we should work to try to make things better. But there's a difference between focusing on the bad things to make the world better and just being an irrational pessimist with no perspective of history.
I say this as someone who used to be an irrational pessimist. I was the sort of person back in my early 20s who thought, "I can't imagine ever having children -- I mean, who would bring a child into a world that's so terrible?"
I look back at that perspective and realize that my viewpoint was shaped by the news. It was shaped by the continuous clamor of politicians trying to make things sound worse and worse because it was to their advantage in making a case that they were the answer to improvement.
There's more and easier access to information now, and more important stuff is being reported, and that's a good thing. Keep the bad news coming.
Agreed. But maybe -- just maybe -- it might be good to have the news in perspective once in a while. Not "People go about their daily business, and all's fine," but at least an acknowledgement of "Terrible thing X is happening. We still need to improve a lot, but let's just note things have been moving in the right direction on issue X for the past 30 years" or whatever.
And every day, somewhere, something really bad happened.
And people have trouble determining how likely that event is going to happen to them anytime soon [normally, a lottery ticket is more likely to hit].
Yes, or evaluating the chances of dying a plane crash vs. a car. (Driving your car is a LOT more dangerous.) Or the probability of a terrorist event. Etc.
People are really bad about evaluating probability, and our fears are shaped by whatever the news media can dig up about the scariest things going on.
I agree with a lot of TFA, though what's missing is the LONG-term perspective. There's a lot of graphs from the late 20th-century on showing how things (particularly violence) are trending downward, but I still remember the first time I saw a graph of the estimated murder rate over the past few centuries. Hint -- it has basically dropped pretty precipitously since the days of medieval Europe.
Granted, the numbers are more speculative, but I think most people just have no freakin' clue how dangerous and terrible life was in the past. Everybody wants to pretend to be the "lord and lady" at the Renaissance fair, but the reality for most common folk was that you struggled to grow enough food to survive the winter. Every year. You were lucky if even half of your children survived to adulthood.
And in those sorts of life-and-death situations, life was -- frankly -- "cheaper" than today. You could get a finger or hand cut off in a random bar fight or a street brawl. If you committing anything resembling a crime, the authorities would likely do it for you. If you tried to leave town, you were very likely to be robbed, stripped, raped, or killed by random "highwaymen."
The trend toward improvement has continued through most of the 20th century and into our current one. Trust me -- you do NOT want to live in a poor urban center of the early 1900s compared to one today. A lot of violence is down compared to a generation or two ago, and it's certainly a heck of a lot better than it was several generations ago. Yes, kids used to roam the street without care late at night or whatever "back in the day," but they were much, much more likely to abducted or suffer a violent attack or whatever back then than they are today. The "golden age" which people are nostalgic for never existed.
What has changed is that we are more fearful of certain things, NOT that such things (in most cases) have actually gotten worse.
Thorium yields 99% of the energy immediately, which reduces the need for cooling after the fact by a factor of 10... plus in a Thorium reactor...
I just wanted to say thanks for fulfilling the third slot in the Slashdot nuclear energy discussion trifecta.
Every time nuclear power comes up here, there's always bound to be three main types of posts:
(1) "Well, duh, we should be using nuclear reactors all the time. Hell, I'd build one in my basement... well, it's my Mom's basement, actually. They're clean and wonderful and shoot out magical rainbow unicorns!" This may also be coupled with conspiracy theory laden rant about why nuclear isn't popular.
(2) "ACK! Nuclear! Do you know how long that stuff takes to decay?! I'm generally a libertarian wacko (like everyone else here) who is into legalized everything, but nuclear? NIMBY!!" This may also be coupled with a conspiracy theory laden rant about why other alternative energies haven't taken over sooner.
(3) "Thorium's the answer, obviously!" This may also be coupled with a conspiracy theory laden rant about why thorium isn't used everywhere.
I'm thankful that you fulfilled category (3), so now I can stop reading this Slashdot thread.
I second using a site like pcpartspicker. It can help you avoid some petty technical mistakes, like buying an under capacity CPU cooler, or a power supply without enough of the correct connectors and voltages for your cards.
Agreed. I'd usually check the specs for everything before ordering, but if you're doing it for the first time, many of these sites really help with creating something that's likely to be compatible with itself.
One thing I've noticed about homebuilt rigs is that they are occasionally louder than normal. I think a lot of builders don't think about noise or airflow, and a lot of the cabinetmakers just provide a bunch of fan mounting points but they can't really consider the cooling needs of the particular motherboard and CPU you're dealing with.
Actually, achieving quiet is one of the main reasons I started building my own computers. I couldn't stand the noise of normal desktops, so I deliberate chose cases, etc. based on recommendations from "quiet PC" websites.
The whole point of building your own is that you can customize for what you want. For me, one of the top priorities is quiet, and thus I start by choosing parts that satisfy that. I choose the rest of the parts assuming they will work with the "quiet" components. If you're building a high-end gaming PC (not my thing) **AND** you also want quiet, you'll just need to research your choices to achieve what you want.
Slashdot Mirror
Teens aren't that far off.
Actually, I was wrong. Turns out Illinois has now passed a law which makes it illegal (potentially) to leave any child under 14 home alone.
So, that covers 13-year-olds. It's officially illegal to leave your teenager alone in some states.
Granted, the law states that the parents must be neglectful or disregard the child's welfare by leaving a 13-year-old alone, but if the cases I cited in my previous post are any clue to how police will actually behave, the reality is that they'll arrest parents (and potentially take kids away into foster care) if there's any excuse.
Basically, it's easier to give into the concerns of the noisy neighbor or the local busybody and arrest the parents than to try to justify leaving the parents alone despite the complaint. If something DID happen to the kid (unlikely, but it could happen), the police would get blamed. So they call CPS and slap on the cuffs.
Not likely if they're teenagers.
True, but the age is rising all the time. Did you know that it's now grounds for arrest if you leave an 11-year-old alone in a car while you go into a store?
Apparently an 11-year-old (who requested to stay in the car, as I often did at that age too when my mom went shopping) might be in danger of suffocation or overheating or whatever. Note in the article: Police said the car interior temp had risen to 85 degrees (!!) before they arrived, apparently just in the nick of time. And apparently the police must have determined that the 11-year-old had no other possible course of action (with that temperature rising to... moderately warm... levels), like rolling down the window, opening the door, or... heavens -- going into the store and joining her mother!
In a few years, this will be moved up to teenagers. Particularly if there's some sort of high-profile abduction or something. It doesn't matter how rare it is.
And if you think this arrest is an isolated case, you'd be wrong. Look around a bit and you'll see plenty of cases of parents being arrested in recent years for letting preteens (9-, 10-, 11-year-olds) walk alone to/from a local neighborhood park or playing there alone. Heck, parents have even been arrested when an 11-year-old boy was alone playing in HIS OWN YARD for a while.
(By the way, of course leaving young kids in a locked car is a horrible thing, and many do die each year. But presumably an 11-year-old has a few more options than being stuck in a car seat until they die of heat stroke.)
Just in the past couple years, the age for arresting parents for "endangering" them by leaving them alone for a few minutes has risen from somewhere around 7 or 8 up to at least 11. Teens aren't that far off.
I can't tell you how many people I have seen who can barely control their own kid in public because it's a screeching howling little ball of evil which won't take no for an answer, and that's while they're still young enough to be in a stroller.
You're right that 90%+ of the time, this is a parenting problem. When I had a kid, I was determined not to be "that guy." Infants obviously don't understand discipline, but once your kid gets to be a toddler, he/she will generally understand rewards.
I still remember the first few times I took my son out to a restaurant, which wasn't really regular until he was over a year old. We chose a family "diner" place so it wouldn't be too disruptive no matter what happened. But maybe 2 out of the first 5 times we had a dinner out, he started throwing a tantrum in the middle of dinner. So, my wife and I would take him out, and he wouldn't get the yummy food he had.
It was annoying. It was frustrating as we'd take turns with him outside while the other struggled to finish dinner or got take-out. But we weren't going to be "those people."
And guess what? He learned. By the time he was 3, we could take him to a formal dinner at a REALLY nice restaurant, and he'd sit there and be fine throughout the meal. Sure, he'd get bored and wiggle around in his seat or lie down or whatever sometimes, but he'd NEVER be allowed to go running around or even wandering around and pestering other people. I was appalled when I went out to meals with some friends and they let their kids start running around and shouting -- even at a relatively informal place.
Then again, I don't have or want kids, so maybe I'm just a little biased.
I find that most people with kids don't understand the kind of pressure you're under and the kind of discipline it takes to get your kid to learn appropriate manners. And it's even harder today, I think, because increasing numbers of parents don't enforce such rules -- which means your kid is stuck watching all those other jerks and thinking "Why can't I run around and scream like a maniac? It looks fun!" So you have to deal with some relapses when they learn bad habits from other kids.
Anyhow, one thing I'd say is that you should generally try to cut parents a little slack when there's nothing they can do. If you're in a restaurant, and the kid is out of control, you take him/her out of the restaurant. Done. End of story. But if you're on a plane and the little kid has a tantrum, you can't just "step outside" for a "time out."
Believe me -- most of the parents I know who fly with little kids only do so when it's absolutely necessary. They generally hate it, because they know these kind of disasters and tantrums can happen -- even for the "best-behaved" kids. And then you have a bunch of people sitting around and judging you.
All of this said -- I will say that all kids are different. And like I said earlier, 90% of the time, it's the parents' fault. But some fraction of the time, parents just get stuck with a crazy kid. I've seen this -- I know families with 4 kids and one of the middle kids is just a disaster... misbehaves all the time, etc. Sometimes it really is just the kid's personality, and some kids are harder than others. It's thus hard to judge people and know what's really going on when a kid acts out.
I can't say how it works where you are but in the US money has value because if you don't accept it as payment you'll find yourself in legal trouble. The government swinging its hammer is a persuasive force.
That's not quite true. The US government does not force anyone to accept dollars as payments. If you want to open a barter shop and trade goats as your only form of "payment," you can do so.
What the government does say is the following:
(1) US money (dollars) is "legal tender" for all debts. That means if you already owe something to someone, legally you can repay that debt in dollars, and they must accept it. If you go to a store, you generally don't "owe debt" in advance. If you want to acquire goods from the store, you'll have to agree to the terms of their payment contract, whatever they are. Most contracts are implicitly created by exchange of dollars, but if your store has a contract that says, "I'll give you this slaughtered and processed cow in exchange for five goats," that's perfectly valid. If you don't show up with the goats, and the guy gives you the cow anyway, then you now are "in debt," and legally the guy must accept a dollar valuation of his payment if he sues you in court.
But you can't compel him to give you the cow in the first place just by offering the amount of dollars that "five goats" should be worth.
(2) Taxation laws still apply, though. If you start entering into such contracts on a large scale and making "profits" (even in goats), you'll still owe the government taxes on your gains. And the government generally doesn't accept goats as payment for taxes. So the real reason most businesses are forced to deal in cash is because they ultimately must pay taxes in cash. Even if they wanted to use a barter system to deal with everyday transactions, eventually they need to get their hands on some significant dollars to pay the taxes.
From a practical standpoint, any large-scale business that tried to operate without cash transactions would be flagged for close monitoring by the IRS, and unless you had detailed documentation of the valuation of assets you were trading in lieu of cash, you'd end up with tax penalties or in prison for tax fraud.
That's the real reason most businesses deal in cash in the US. And thus the real reason the US currency has (a certain minimum) value has fundamentally to do with taxation policies.
"I have concern about a PlayStation that my grandchildren might use," she said, "and a predator getting on the other end, and talking to them, and it's all encrypted. I think there really is reason to have the ability, with a court order, to be able to get into that."
You could be involved with your kids and *you* be in charge of who they are communicating with via your playstation
Not only that, but kids have ALWAYS had clandestine communications. When Senator Feinstein was a teenager, I'd bet a lot money that she went for a walk alone with her friends sometimes. You go to the park, you walk in the woods or the meadow (in more rural areas), or whatever. Those communications may not have been formally "encrypted," but they were the private communications of the kids nonetheless. Back then, if you proposed having someone walk around with a microphone or tail your kid to monitor all communications, just in case something bad might happen -- well, people would think you were insane.
And, you know what? Child abduction rates and violent crimes against kids were likely greater back then. At least for the past 40 years or so since child crime statistics have been accurately kept, the trend has basically been down, down, down. And the vast majority of such crimes are perpetrated by family members and close family friends, not random strangers -- met on the internet or elsewhere.
Yes, it is true that your kids or grandkids may have greater contact with strangers through the internet and electronic communications than in previous generations. And that's why monitoring what they do IN PERSON is important. If they're in your house, watch what your grandkids are doing. Ask who they're talking to on the Playstation if it seems weird. Be involved.
This nonsense about justifying encryption backdoors is coming from a combination of completely out-of-whack fears with little basis in reality. Child crime is down, but our fears of it are higher than ever (particularly when it comes to strangers, who are the least likely to harm your kids). Terrorist acts are few and far between (despite recent activity), yet we're more worried about them rather than actual dangers that are hundreds or even thousands of times more likely to kill us (driving, obesity and other "bad" health habits, etc.).
People have always had fears driven by sensationalism -- see Renaissance paintings of Hellfire and read old-fashioned "fire and brimstone" sermons, for example. These modern fears are almost as loopy.
Even if he crashes the price many bitcoin users won't care, how the price changed since yesterday won't matter. They just use bitcoins for transfers or payments, they aren't holding bitcoins. They immediately convert to bitcoin as needed and from bitcoin immediately. Especially so for merchants, well that is their 3rd party payment processors do, the merchants never see or touch a bitcoin themselves. The 3rd party converts the merchant's fiat price to bitcoin in real-time, collects the coins and pays the merchant in fiat currency immediately.
They will care if during these transactions there's some sort of "flash crash" where companies start losing money. Maybe it won't be the end users or maybe not the merchants -- but somebody is holding the coins during the transaction and making the whole thing work. If the value takes a severe enough nosedive and becomes too volatile, it makes it risky for the intermediaries to keep handling the exchanges.
Also, they will care if bitcoins become so worthless that they are no longer feasible for these sorts of transactions. Everyone seems to assume that this could never happen because they assume currencies only devalue like that in hyperinflation due to "printing money," and they assume bitcoin must therefore be immune due to its limited pool.
Except there are loads of things in the world that are somewhat rare but no one finds value in. There are a limited number of rocks in my backyard -- much smaller than the number of bitcoins. But I'd have a hard time convincing anyone to use "rocks from my backyard" as a medium of exchange with enough consistent value to justify it.
Only the speculators will get hurt, well, that is if they sell in the panic.
Ah, you're a true believer -- just stay in for the "long haul," and the price is guaranteed to go up.
See, that depends on one significant assumption -- i.e., that nothing better will have come along before this happens. It's the same as any speculation, any stock, any company. Sometimes it takes months, sometimes years, sometimes decades, and sometimes even longer than a century -- but almost all "innovative" companies or ideas will eventually be outdone by something newer and better.
That's particularly true in the case of bitcoin, which is sort of frozen in its current state. Even if people want currency with the features you mention, you have no guarantee that people won't start migrating to something better in the future... whether that's next year or in 10 years or longer, you can't know. And at that point, everyone who invested in bitcoin itself and the infrastructure which supports it could lose big. Will it happen? I don't know, but the first version of some innovation on the scene is rarely the best final product that ends up being adopted widely.
No, RTFA, too much sleep (more than nine hours) is seen as unhealthy too.
Or maybe sick people sleep a lot. It is likely the causation is the other way around. While TFA is quick to say that the sleeping causes the deaths, the study itself only says they are "associated".
Actually, the STUDY explicitly says exactly what you just did about causation. From the Discussion section:
It is biologically plausible that short sleep duration may increase mortality risk through adverse endocrinologic, immunologic, and metabolic effects [48,49,50] or through chronic inflammation [47,51,52]. The mechanism for the association between long sleep duration and mortality is not well understood [17,47]. Most studies suggest that long sleep duration tends to be associated with sleep fragmentation, fatigue, depression, and underlying disease and poor health [53]. Therefore, the observed association between long sleep duration and all-cause mortality could be due to "reverse causality" or residual confounding [17,54]. An interesting observation from the current study is that risk combinations involving long sleep duration, prolonged sitting, and/or physical inactivity tended to be among those with the strongest associations with mortality, with HRs ranging from 2 to above 4. These associations remained significant and of similar magnitude after excluding deaths within the first 2 y of follow-up (S2 Table). This may suggest that the underlying characteristics associated with such behavioral patterns involving long sleep, sedentariness, and inactivity, perhaps not limited to major occult disease or failing health, may have contributed to the elevated risk for morality.
And they also note a few other things, like the fact that the "long sleep" problem tends to be a better marker for bad things with older people. This study didn't control for the fact that older people tend to sleep less or at least have trouble sleeping in longer blocks (compared to younger people). So it makes some intuitive sense that when you have an older person who also sleeps really long, it may be associated with some other problem (depression, disease, etc.), which is more likely to lead to a greater mortality.
"You, sir, are the result of an illicit conjugation"
It'll certainly bring the class back into insults.
Especially if we include bad puns and grammar humor: "You, sir, be being the result of an illicit conjugation."
Hmm... actually come to think of it, we already have such a spell-checker. I eventually had to turn of iPhone's Autocorrect when it would refuse to allow me to use the word "its". It would always just change it to "it's". Yes, Apple, English does actually have a third-person possessive pronoun, so stop making me to look like an illiterate idiot when I forget to correct your "autocorrect." Perhaps they've fixed this now, but it was only one of a number of perfectly valid words that Autocorrect wouldn't let me use.
Sorry to self-reply, but I messed up one of the links. Here's a link to another story with graphs that have more recent (and long-term) data on college graduation rates.
The point about graduation rates is not percentages, it's that everyone who wants to has an opportunity to do so. It seems like boys could do with a little more encouragement in some areas, but then again so could girls in others.
It's also important to note that both sexes are graduating college at the highest rates EVER in the U.S. (See, for example, graphs here and here, showing percentages of young people with bachelor's degrees over the past few decades.)
It's true that the growth in women's graduation rates has gone up faster than men's, and now women do graduate at greater rates than men. But men are still graduating at higher rates than EVER before.
So, we can debate what these numbers mean and whether they are a disturbing trend. Maybe men need more motivation. Or maybe women realize that a pay gap still exists -- for whatever reason. Even if that pay gap is mostly because women don't tend to like to work ridiculously long hours and because they take off a few years from careers to raise kids or whatever... even IF that's the reason for the pay gap, women still have an incentive to try to earn more, and college degrees are known to help with that.
So, maybe both sexes are making rational choices here? Maybe men are going to college at greater rates than ever, because they realize the opportunities it provides. But perhaps more men are willing to have a go at a career without the degree, figuring that they can make up for it with long hours and hard work, etc. Whereas women have a stronger incentive to pursue the degree, since it allows them a better start and a greater chance of overcoming the pay gap (no matter what the cause of that pay gap is).
Maybe. I'm not saying this is the explanation, but it's one way to look at it. Or maybe we should be concerned about the fact that men's graduation rates aren't growing as fast as women's. But one thing we need to recognize is the BOTH SEXES are graduating at higher rates -- it's just that the men's growth is slower.
It's too complex a subject to be boiled down to a sentence.
Agreed. And that goes for many of the issues in GP's rant. For example, regarding women getting custody of children in divorces, it used to be the case that there was something called the tender years doctrine where courts would award custody to women by default (particularly for young children).
But the vast majority of states have now passed laws requiring parents to be treated equally. The problem in most divorces is the same one GP mentions about "working long hours." Courts are predisposed to assure continuity for kids. If the mother has been the primary caregiver and the father has basically been absent except for a couple hours on weekends, it's harder to argue that the children should be forced to go with the father.
Is this "fair"? Maybe not in some cases. But there is a logic to saying that if a father hasn't been there for his kids for years, that expecting him to raise them by himself may be more difficult both on him and the kids.
So -- here's a bit of advice for fathers. I've seen a lot of bad divorces happen among friends, family, colleagues, etc. Spend time with your kids. Seriously. If you love them, take the time and do stuff with them while they're small. You may think that "if I just work a little longer tonight" or "if I just come in on Saturday" then you'll get the promotion and get more money and whatever. Guess what? Most kids just want to see their dad. The extra money you might get rarely makes up for being gone all the time.
And if you
By benefiting (mostly) rich white people instead of (mostly) poor minorities, it helps rake in campaign contributions from the Right People
Your entire post was hilarious; but I especially loved this bit. You've obviously never ridden on an urban mass transit system of any kind.
Nice way to except a quotation from GP without context and earn yourself some karma.
But while GP's post was over-the-top, his general point that buses are more important to the urban poor and subways tend to be built without the poor in mind is largely accurate. If you don't believe me, you might start with some articles like this and this, or maybe this recent survey of public transport riders in NYC, which showed the median income was significantly lower for those who used the bus as well as the subway, and even lower for those who used the bus alone.
Basically, for most big cities in the U.S. it works like this:
- Rich people have their own drivers.
- Upper middle class people who live in the suburbs drive themselves. If they live in the city, they take taxis.
- Most middle class people who live in the city take the subway. If they live in the suburbs, they drive to a commuter rail and take that.
- Poor people can't afford cars. They can't live in the suburbs, and if they do, they usually can't afford to live in the ones with convenient commuter rail service. If they live in the city, they often can't afford to live in the more popular areas right next to subway lines. (Those that can often live in rent-control neighborhoods which prevent the convenient subway-adjacent areas from being overrun by young professionals with more money.) The poor disproportionately live in the areas of the city that aren't served by subways, so they end up taking buses (because they can't afford cars) or doing a hybrid commute by bus until they can get to a subway line.
It's clear from this post and another reply that you don't understand the reality of where subway/rail lines get constructed. They are VERY expensive, and poor areas tend not to have the tax revenue to justify them. So, poor areas get the much cheaper buses.
You see a lot of poor people riding subways and light rail in the city for two reasons: (1) the subways run through the most popular business districts in major cities, so even if a poor person starts on a bus, they likely find a connection to a subway convenient to get to work, and (2) dense urban areas tend to have a lot of poor areas located between middle-class and richer areas. So when a subway/rail is built to connect the middle-class areas, it will likely end up running through poor areas anyway.
If you look at most major cities in the Northeast U.S. which have had subways for many years, you'll likely find plenty of examples of poor areas that have been promised a subway/rail line for decades. But they rarely get built. It's much easier and cheaper to extend a new commuter rail line to another suburb, and it's more lucrative to get middle-class riders who can pay premium fares. Expanding the inner-city subway system often requires expensive and complex digging through dense areas, and for what? To get the relatively low fares that the city mostly gets from poor people on buses or taking subway connections from buses anyway.
It's lovely that you see some minorities in your subway commute, but GP had a legitimate point about the expense of rail vs. buses and where the former gets prioritized. The poor generally end up taking the bus in most cities.
I think the article here is using "shibboleth" to mean not just a tired cliche or trope, but "a cliche or trope that, when used, distinguishes that author from 'real' sci-fi authors," which is sort of in line with the literal definition of the term.
Except that's actually the OPPOSITE of the meaning of the term. A Shibboleth is used to identify members who belong to a group. (In the original story, those who weren't group members said "sibboleth" instead, because their language didn't have an "sh" sound.)
It also has come to mean a cliche associated with the members of a group or even a meaningless cliche in general.
But this guy is trying to use it to mean a cliche that says you are NOT part of the desired group. Maybe he should have called them "sibboleths" instead... but then no one would understand the reference.
To clarify with an example, saying: "Whether to have space explosions transmit sounds is a shibboleth of hard SciFi" is good, since it characterizes the idea of something that can determine the in-group status. Similarly, saying "Having no sound transmitted through a vacuum in a space explosion is a shibboleth of hard SciFi" also makes sense, since the practice of the in-group is identified.
Saying "Hearing audible sound traveling in space from an explosion is a hard SciFi shibboleth," on the other hand, gets things a bit backwards. It's possible to understand this sentence, but only if you already know what it's supposed to mean. If you didn't know what the real-world version of how sound acts in space was, this sentence might appear to suggest the opposite of what TFA would intend it to mean.
I'm not really sure it's academia's fault, but more that the entertainment industry got a bit carried away with stories about future AI, and now people think that if it doesn't look like that, then it's not AI, all the while missing the massive advances in computing that AI research has netted them...
Where did the "entertainment industry" get these ideas from? From AI researchers in the 1950s, that's where!
In 1950, you had Turing declaring that by the year 2000, we'd have computers so fluent in natural language that you could debate appropriate word substitutions in Shakespearean sonnets with them in complex metaphors. Today we have chatbots that claim to "pass the Turing test" by pretending to be a non-responsive teenager who doesn't really know English that well.
In 1956, you had the Dartmouth Conference declaring that they thought most of the major problems of AI (like natural language processing, abstraction of concepts, creativity, etc.) could probably be solved in a couple of months with 10 dudes thinking hard.
That kind of optimism lasted for a couple decades at least in the AI academic world, and it's not surprising at all that pop culture listened to those academics.
I'm not at all denigrating the significant advancements which have been made. But my "goalposts" for "real" AI have not been moved since Turing's original test was declared 65 years ago, which Turing thought would be possible to pass with flying colors 15 years ago.
But we have hardware and software many orders of magnitude larger and more complex than Turing dreamed of, but we haven't made significant dents in many of those Dartmouth Conference goals.
You can't blame this on the "entertainment industry." The early AI guys were overly ambitious and thought the problems were much more easy to solve than they seem to be.
Biblically the devil is not in Hell yet. He has been cast out of heaven but will not be imprisoned in hell until after the Second Coming of Christ. I know in popular culture they like to speak of him ruling in Hell and tormenting the lost souls but that doesn't follow the scripture.
Meh. It depends on what you mean by Hell. Do you mean Hades or Gehenna or Sheol or the Lake of Fire, or something else?
See, the problem with your assertion is that it depends on centuries of theologians who conflated a bunch of these things (which are all distinct concepts, often from different traditions with different attributes), made assumptions about how they relate to each other, and tried to figure out consistency in a bunch of inconsistent passages.
What you're really referring to is the passage in Revelation 20:10, which implies that the devil ("diabolos") won't be imprisoned in the "lake of fire" until after the coming of Christ. But what is your basis for declaring the "lake of fire" to be synonymous with the English word "Hell," instead of assuming that Hell could be equated with one of the other concepts already mentioned? And how do you know the "devil" isn't in any of the others? The Book of Job notes that Satan wanders about to all sorts of places and is even brought to talk to God. How do you know Satan doesn't wander into any of these other haunts?
Some people also note that the greatest feature of Hell is "eternal torment," and the Bible identifies the most significant feature of eternal torment to be separation from God. Since most Christians agree that the "devil" (whatever that is -- word problems there too... are we talking Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub etc.? -- these guys were all different) has already been cast out of Heaven, he has already been separated from God and is thus already suffering the primary torment of "Hell," whether or not he is physically located in the "Lake of Fire."
And how do we determine that the "diabolos" (devil) who is cast into the Lake of Fire (if that is indeed "Hell") is the same as Satan or the fallen angel or Lucifer or whoever?
Basically, rather than saying what you did:
Biblically the devil is not in Hell yet
You should say:
Biblically the Diabolos has not been cast into the Lake of Fire yet. But centuries of debates and random equivalencies created by Church dogma have led to a common interpretation that this "diabolos" is the same as what were likely understood in Biblical times to be distinct entities such as Satan and Lucifer, and the "Lake of Fire" is now equated with various conceptions of "Hell" which had different terms and would have been viewed as distinct in Biblical times. Thus, according to the Biblical text combined with a crapload of random church dogma, the traditional popular culture image "doesn't follow the scripture."
This is in no small part due to a moving of the goal-posts.
No it isn't moving the goal posts.
It depends on what you think the "goal posts" are. I would argue that the opposite of "aging" isn't "living forever." It's, well, NOT AGING.
What is "aging"? Most of it associate it with the kind of stuff you and GP both bring up, i.e., gradual degradation in various parts of the body and mind. One can cure "aging" partially by reducing that sort of degradation.
Unless you are literal believer in the story of Methuselah, we have never observed any human living longer than 125 years or so. Plenty of people have lived into their 100s before most of what we consider modern medicine was available. They just had to be incredibly lucky to live that long without something else coming along to kill them first.
Again, stopping aging is a separate issue from life extension. Suppose you had a car whose engine was just going to die around 200,000 miles no matter what -- it was just part of the design. But the other parts would gradually degrade, meaning that the best part of the lifespan of the car was the first 50,000 miles, followed by random repairs and problems for the next 50,000, and at that point you'd be better off just selling the car because after 100,000 miles the thing just required repair after repair to just keep it going. The engine was still good, but it had "aged" and become useless.
But what if you could "cure" that aging for all the other car parts and have a car that ran great for all 200,000 miles of the engine's lifespan? I think almost everyone would agree that that would be fantastic and would be a significant advance in "reducing the aging" of the vehicle. Even though it completely "died" at the same time, curing "aging" is still a significant improvement and benefit.
And in that sense, we ARE moving the goalposts, because many of those traditional elements of aging can be delayed or halted for a while -- which allows more and more people to make use of those "extra miles" getting up toward 100 years.
So here is the question: if you can give me some gene therapy that will prevent me from just sorta shutting down in my middle 90s, as so many of my relatives have great, but how does that mean I die ultimately. Does it mean I am going stroke out or something. Does it mean I am going to live for years with conditions that are debilitating? Is that even what I want.
Again, you're confusing aging with life extension. The very definition of "curing aging" has to do with keeping you in a state where you aren't debilitated by the problems of "old age." If you just extend life, you haven't actually cured aging.
For my own anecdote, the sister of one of my great-grandparents lived to 106. I remember going to visit her when she was 102 and finding her in the garden vigorously digging and turning over the soil. Even when she was 100 years old, she probably looked (and apparently felt) like somebody who was typically 70 or 75, maybe younger.
Figuring out how to do THAT sort of thing would actually be working toward a cure for aging. Personally, I don't know whether I'd want to live much more than 100 years (if that). But if you told me I could live those full 100 years in great health, I'd commend you for curing aging and raise a toast to you.
The people seeking immortality are the crazier ones. The ones who just want to stop aging are pursuing a more useful goal.
I still don't understand how 3D Nand works or why it's so much cheaper but I'm glad it exists.
Why, you know, your bits can just Get Perpendicular!
(Actually, 3D Nand doesn't work this way at all. But this Hitachi video still has to go down as one of the most entertaining and ridiculous explanations of new ways to cram bits in. It's common to do stuff like this today, I suppose, but in 2005, this kind of video release was pretty awesome.)
Yes, of course you're right.
However, I will also say: I was writing quickly and informally referencing the idea of "too much." "Too much of them" is common in colloquial idiomatic English when referencing a mass of something (i.e., "too much of that sort of thing" even if multiple types of things fall into that category), rather than emphasizing the individual components.
Its supposed to be something that gives you a deep insight into some area of knowledge that you didn't possess before.
Actually, I think this misses some nuance in the use of the English word "profound" and the source of "profundity."
What makes something "profound" is often the same kind of thing that makes a mathematical proof "elegant": a certain kind of generalization combined with terseness or compactness. Often the problem with "elegant" proofs and with "profound" statements is that they don't explain their complexity explicitly. An elegant proof can therefore be rather non-intuitive, or even if it makes sense, it's not clear why it should work at the start. The terseness and efficiency is sometimes valued over detailed discussion.
It's the same thing with many "profound" statements. Their "profundity" depends on context and with a listener realizing that a "deeper" meaning lies in a brief comment which at first may seem confusing and complex, or over-generalized, or even an obvious platitude.
The willingness to see something as profound thus depends on the audience and the kind of knowledge they are expected to apply to generate the complexity out of the short statement.
For example, if you said "Life is like a box of chocolates" to different people, the profundity level will probably vary significantly:
- To a normal person: "Yeah, stupid Forrest Gump reference. Stupid platitude."
- To someone stoned: "Wow, yeah man, Life *IS* like a box of chocolates -- freakin' deep!"
- To a chocolate maker over the age of 30 by a customer: "Really stupid Forrest Gump reference."
- To a young chocolate maker (who likely has never seen the movie) by an old master chef: "Wow... there must be deep meaning in this, and there is! The arrangement of chocolates is a metaphor for X, and the box shows the way our life is delineated into a certain period, with the assortment showing...." etc.
The same statement can be a source of different levels of meaning. TFA seems to assume that most people who find profundity are like the stoned person -- they have impaired cognitive abilities which lead them to think things are deep when they aren't.
But I'd also argue that some people tend to be like the young chocolate maker listening to the master chef -- if they read something spoken or written by a source which seems like it ought to be profound, they go searching for meaning and make up connections even if they weren't intended. (Maybe the master chocolate maker was just making a dumb Forrest Gump reference too, but didn't realize his young apprentice wouldn't get it.)
I haven't read the original study in detail yet, so perhaps this is addressed -- but it seems to me if you put out a bunch of statements and ask people whether they are "profound," you're priming them to look for deep meanings, even when they aren't there.
It's well-known that people have fundamental cognitive biases that lead them to search for order even in randomness. When you do a study and hint that something might be "profound," people will start trying to find more complex hidden meanings.
The problem is that stupider people are more used to believing that authority figures must be saying something significant, even if they don't understand it. So what the study might REALLY be measuring is the tendency to believe that things which are associated with "profundity" are more likely to be "profound," e.g., if your professor or mentor or whomever says something and then says, "It's that profound?", you are primed to try to find some meaning in it, even if it's nonsense. Stupid people are more likely to fall for this, because they are simply more used to professors saying stuff they don't understand anyway -- not necessarily because they actually find profound meaning in it.
TL;DR: The study may simply be measuring how stupid people don't tend to underst
Actually, they are used correctly. The cognitive abilities the study used were verbal and fluid intelligence and numeracy. Thus, i.e. rightly denotes the complete list.
Actually, there's a further nuance to all this. The summary quotes the Washington Post:
Those more receptive to bull**** are less reflective, lower in cognitive ability (i.e., verbal and fluid intelligence, numeracy), are more prone to ontological confusions [beliefs in things for which there is no empirical evidence (i.e. that prayers have the ability to heal)] and conspiratorial ideation, are more likely to hold religious and paranormal beliefs, and are more likely to endorse complementary and alternative medicine.
The first "i.e." is actually in the original study, and as you point out, it is used correctly to reference the complete list of things they were studying.
The second "i.e." is, you will note, in brackets, because this is an explanation inserted by the Washington Post writer. The original sentence from the study reads:
Those more receptive to bull**** are less reflective, lower in cognitive ability (i.e., verbal and fluid intelligence, numeracy), are more prone to ontological confusions and conspiratorial ideation, are more likely to hold religious and paranormal beliefs, and are more likely to endorse complementary and alternative medicine.
Hence, it's the WASHINGTON POST which doesn't know how to use "i.e." correctly. If you read the original study, it's clear that it has a LOT of "e.g" and "i.e." In fact, it probably has a little too much of them, but they appear to be used correctly.
Yes, and you could buy a floppy disk drive very cheaply too. Nobody uses those anymore either.
What a ridiculous comparison. Floppies were limited in their design capacity, and Apple's decision to start phasing them out in 1998 (I believe) was ALSO premature. Why? Because there wasn't a good alternative on the market yet for those who needed to transfer files. Zipdisks were fine, but they were pricey, buggy, and annoying. CD-ROMs were write-only. CD-RWs were unreliable and often unsupported in some readers. It was really the USB flash drive which finally replaced the floppy, but that didn't come around until 2000. Once they became cheap and popular, most computer companies finally started dropping floppy drives.
On the other hand, lots of people complained about Apple's decision to drop the optical drive on the MacBook Air, but I thought they were behind the times on that one. I've been using laptops (ultraportables) that didn't come with an optical drive since 2005. The reality is if you wanted the lightest, smallest laptop, why would you carry an optical drive around with you?
And yet they are still useful periodically, so when I built my current desktop, obviously I put an optical drive in. The choice is for a specific use case -- you want the lightest thinnest possible thing, why not get rid of something bulky? You could always buy a USB optical drive, which I've been using with every laptop I've had since 2005. For bigger laptops ("desktop replacements"), an optical drive can still be useful depending on what you do.
So digital audio to the speaker is the future, and then it might as well be wireless. Or you'd have to define a new physical connector which supplies power and a digital signal.
What the heck are you talking about? Why do you think you need to replace the physical connector to get the advantages in digital signal you want? You can ALREADY buy a bluetooth headset and use it with current technology. Your argument doesn't make any sense -- "There are some things that you can't do with the analog audio connector, and if you wanted to do them that way, you'd need other complicated things." NO -- if you want those things, you just buy BLUETOOTH now.
The only difference Apple's decision here makes is that we're all forced to buy more expensive tech to do a rather simple task. The vast majority of people don't care about the audio things you're talking about -- they listen on the crappiest set of earbuds they can buy.
Except now you want to force them to bulk UP those crappy earbuds with a battery and a Bluetooth connection.
Frankly, I don't want to have another device with batteries to deal with. It's already enough to worry about to plug in my phone and tablet to charge. Now I need to be ready to replace the battery in my headphones or charge them too?
Sorry, but even if the cost for wireless was similar, that's just too much of a pain for little benefit. To me, it's the same as wireless mice and keyboards. I bought my first wireless mouse in 2005, I think. It was cool for a couple weeks. Then I had to replace the battery. Then I decided it wasn't necessary. I've never bought another wireless mouse or keyboard since. If I had a specific use case where running a wire was annoying (e.g., controlling a TV across the room or whatever), then sure, I'd use one. But I don't need to have a wireless mouse to "declutter my desk." Dealing with batteries is just annoying unless there's a significant tangible advantage.
Same thing with this headphone thing. I'm not going to deal with batteries to power my headphones unless there's a real advantage. I do actually have Bose noise-cancelling headphones, which are awesome for when I use them, and yes they require batteries. But that's for a use case like airplanes where there's a real advantage. On a daily basis if I'm out for a walk or whatever, I don't want to deal with my battery in my earbuds going dead... just so Apple can shave another fraction of a millimeter off the thickness of its devices. (And of course, that's not the real reason -- they want to see you buy some expensive connector or other peripherals.)
Suppose there was a just a single serial killer out there that killed one person every year for the past 25 years. Population doubles every 23 years or so. So it looks like he has cut his death rate in half, when it has actually stayed the same.
I'm not sure I understand your point here. In your hypothetical situation where the world only has one serial killer murdering people, suppose there are 1000 people at the beginning. The serial killer is killing 1 person each year, so I have a 0.1% of being murdered this year. There is also 0.1% of the population (the serial killer) which is going around killing other people.
In 25 years, if the population is 2000, now my chances of being murdered by this guy are 0.05%, and only 0.05% of our population is composed of murderous wackos.
How is that NOT an improvement in overall safety of society? Granted, this particular guy hasn't improved in terms of his murderous tendencies, and it's a tragedy that people are still being killed.
But if your goal is to measure the collective safety of a society, wouldn't you rather live in a place where the murder rate was 1 in 2000 vs. 1 in 1000?
I agree that there are times when it's helpful to talk about raw numbers and other times when percentages are better. But isn't "whether the world is a violent place?" one situation where you'd be more interested in percentages, since those reflect the overall tendency of human interactions? Violence is not just the result of one serial killer -- it's often a collective societal thing.
Or, to put it another way, if the population was decreasing steadily (instead of increasing), would you still be telling us we need to look at "raw numbers" instead of percentages? If we had a society of 1 million with 10,000 murders per year (1% -- probably good numbers for medieval society), and the next year due to plague we had a society of 100,000 but still with 10,000 murders per year (10%), wouldn't you be concerned about the increase rather than the fact that the raw number is the same?? ("Oh, I know 1 in 10 of you will be killed by random violence this year, but keep in mind -- our raw numbers are still at pre-plague levels! You're still as safe as houses!")
I don't blame the news cycle. Do we really needs news headlines like: "People all over the world go about regular business, all goes fine"?
No, we don't need articles like that, which would be pointless.
What we do need (and what I think TFA is arguing for) is perspective. Whether you're talking about overall violent crime rate, child abductions, campus rape, whatever -- the general trend over the past couple decades has been DOWN.
Yes, there are still terrible things happening. And we should work to try to make things better. But there's a difference between focusing on the bad things to make the world better and just being an irrational pessimist with no perspective of history.
I say this as someone who used to be an irrational pessimist. I was the sort of person back in my early 20s who thought, "I can't imagine ever having children -- I mean, who would bring a child into a world that's so terrible?"
I look back at that perspective and realize that my viewpoint was shaped by the news. It was shaped by the continuous clamor of politicians trying to make things sound worse and worse because it was to their advantage in making a case that they were the answer to improvement.
There's more and easier access to information now, and more important stuff is being reported, and that's a good thing. Keep the bad news coming.
Agreed. But maybe -- just maybe -- it might be good to have the news in perspective once in a while. Not "People go about their daily business, and all's fine," but at least an acknowledgement of "Terrible thing X is happening. We still need to improve a lot, but let's just note things have been moving in the right direction on issue X for the past 30 years" or whatever.
And every day, somewhere, something really bad happened.
And people have trouble determining how likely that event is going to happen to them anytime soon [normally, a lottery ticket is more likely to hit].
Yes, or evaluating the chances of dying a plane crash vs. a car. (Driving your car is a LOT more dangerous.) Or the probability of a terrorist event. Etc.
People are really bad about evaluating probability, and our fears are shaped by whatever the news media can dig up about the scariest things going on.
I agree with a lot of TFA, though what's missing is the LONG-term perspective. There's a lot of graphs from the late 20th-century on showing how things (particularly violence) are trending downward, but I still remember the first time I saw a graph of the estimated murder rate over the past few centuries. Hint -- it has basically dropped pretty precipitously since the days of medieval Europe.
Granted, the numbers are more speculative, but I think most people just have no freakin' clue how dangerous and terrible life was in the past. Everybody wants to pretend to be the "lord and lady" at the Renaissance fair, but the reality for most common folk was that you struggled to grow enough food to survive the winter. Every year. You were lucky if even half of your children survived to adulthood.
And in those sorts of life-and-death situations, life was -- frankly -- "cheaper" than today. You could get a finger or hand cut off in a random bar fight or a street brawl. If you committing anything resembling a crime, the authorities would likely do it for you. If you tried to leave town, you were very likely to be robbed, stripped, raped, or killed by random "highwaymen."
The trend toward improvement has continued through most of the 20th century and into our current one. Trust me -- you do NOT want to live in a poor urban center of the early 1900s compared to one today. A lot of violence is down compared to a generation or two ago, and it's certainly a heck of a lot better than it was several generations ago. Yes, kids used to roam the street without care late at night or whatever "back in the day," but they were much, much more likely to abducted or suffer a violent attack or whatever back then than they are today. The "golden age" which people are nostalgic for never existed.
What has changed is that we are more fearful of certain things, NOT that such things (in most cases) have actually gotten worse.
Thorium yields 99% of the energy immediately, which reduces the need for cooling after the fact by a factor of 10... plus in a Thorium reactor...
I just wanted to say thanks for fulfilling the third slot in the Slashdot nuclear energy discussion trifecta.
Every time nuclear power comes up here, there's always bound to be three main types of posts:
(1) "Well, duh, we should be using nuclear reactors all the time. Hell, I'd build one in my basement... well, it's my Mom's basement, actually. They're clean and wonderful and shoot out magical rainbow unicorns!" This may also be coupled with conspiracy theory laden rant about why nuclear isn't popular.
(2) "ACK! Nuclear! Do you know how long that stuff takes to decay?! I'm generally a libertarian wacko (like everyone else here) who is into legalized everything, but nuclear? NIMBY!!" This may also be coupled with a conspiracy theory laden rant about why other alternative energies haven't taken over sooner.
(3) "Thorium's the answer, obviously!" This may also be coupled with a conspiracy theory laden rant about why thorium isn't used everywhere.
I'm thankful that you fulfilled category (3), so now I can stop reading this Slashdot thread.
I second using a site like pcpartspicker. It can help you avoid some petty technical mistakes, like buying an under capacity CPU cooler, or a power supply without enough of the correct connectors and voltages for your cards.
Agreed. I'd usually check the specs for everything before ordering, but if you're doing it for the first time, many of these sites really help with creating something that's likely to be compatible with itself.
One thing I've noticed about homebuilt rigs is that they are occasionally louder than normal. I think a lot of builders don't think about noise or airflow, and a lot of the cabinetmakers just provide a bunch of fan mounting points but they can't really consider the cooling needs of the particular motherboard and CPU you're dealing with.
Actually, achieving quiet is one of the main reasons I started building my own computers. I couldn't stand the noise of normal desktops, so I deliberate chose cases, etc. based on recommendations from "quiet PC" websites.
The whole point of building your own is that you can customize for what you want. For me, one of the top priorities is quiet, and thus I start by choosing parts that satisfy that. I choose the rest of the parts assuming they will work with the "quiet" components. If you're building a high-end gaming PC (not my thing) **AND** you also want quiet, you'll just need to research your choices to achieve what you want.