Ever _really_ contemplated killing yourself? Held the knife against your skin, stood on the ledge, faced the oncoming train, or eyed the muzzle, whilst bleakly weighing the pros and cons? Well, don't do it, accidents happen. But if you're a healthy individual with properly functional brain chemistry and a modicum of nurturing, even _reaching_ that point is a fight against instinct. Whether evolved or designed, we're built to live and propagate. Consciously overriding all the programming that wants you to live? It takes _effort_.
By and large, we can't suicide unless we're messed up inside. For example, the usual trick with conditioning a young suicide bomber involves convincing them they won't actually die - that they'll "wake up" in paradise. You use a reward scenario to help trick their brain into equating a perfectly normal living activity - sleep - with something no healthy, rational organism wishes to do - die.
In suicide by bully, it's even more twisted. Instead of a promised reward for dying, it's a guaranteed punishment for living. If a kid is at all religious, then the groundwork for the sleep/death substitution is likely already there, since most kids have an abundance of willingness to believe anything a respected adult tells them (for example, remembering that their parents told them that grandpa had gone to heaven, he's at peace now, etc). Kids don't do long-term strategies very well. They tend to see only the "now" - alive, being hurt, or dead, at peace (like grandpa!).
A kid committing suicide is _not_ about cowardice or bravery. It's about being so bloody messed up that they can't see the bigger picture.
And you can do the same with an adult, it just takes more effort, since their coping mechanisms and critical thinking skills are (usually) well-developed. Hell, the military does a lesser form of it all the time. It's called "boot camp", and it's all about conditioning people to obey potentially suicidal orders instead of their normal instincts.
It's not just the anti-violence zero-tolerance groups. It's also the bureaucracy. You need teachers who care about the kids, both in and out of the classroom. And even then they need to have the _time_ to care - instead of having it eaten up by administrative crap that should have dedicated clerks handling it. That seems to be one of the biggest complaints I have from my teaching friends: dealing with the increasing bureaucracy.
It's not a myth, it's just not a given. Some are cowards. Some are sociopaths. But since the victims are not trained in psychology, the odds of them making the correct assessment? Yeah.
It depends a lot on the staff and the community. I was also bullied at school. With rare exception the teachers did not help, because (at least) one of them was actively encouraging the bullying going on, and the others either did not want to know and/or were themselves being intimidated by the bad staff (that last part I didn't understand until I was in my teens - when you're a little kid, adults are gods, and how can gods be intimidated by anyone?).
When I started having literal nightmares of getting killed at the school, I moved to a different school. Same city, totally different atmosphere. Main reason? The teachers _cared_. The principal _cared_. Not just passive sympathy, they had both a working moral compass and a backbone. They paid attention to what we were doing in class and out of it. They made sure there were adults "walking the beat" during playtime, not just standing in one spot or hidden in a staffroom. Nobody's little angel got to throw pencils - or rocks - with impunity.
It wasn't perfect, I don't know of any school that is, but the kids _knew_ the adults _cared_. It made an incredible difference.
On the other hand, since it's income tax, it's the same nation* wanting the 90% that issued and backed the currency that the income arrived in. And modern currencies are fiat anyway. So you _could_ consider income tax as a way of determining the "net real value" of your disposable income.
*(though not always - as I understand it, the United States insists that its citizens pay US income tax even if they're living in another nation and not receiving any money from US sources)
Yes, seriously. As in, the burn was controlled by the car's safety mechanisms. As in, it did not spread rapidly, it did not explode, it did not turn part of the car into a violently expanding debris field, and nobody got hurt or killed.
Read your linked articles. This paragraph pretty much sums it up:
"Nearly all salmon Americans eat are farm-raised -- grown in dense-packed pens near ocean shores, fed fish meal that can be polluted with toxic PCB chemicals, awash in excrement flushed out to sea and infused with antibiotics to combat unsanitary conditions. Some salmon are raised on farms that use more sustainable methods, but you can't tell from the packaging."
So basically, there's nothing wrong with fish farms that mandating independent monitoring, grading and labeling couldn't solve?:p
By the time typical terrrestrial radio/tv signals get about fifty light years out, they're almost indistinguishable from background noise. High-powered radar (the kind used by the military and in astronomy) has a lot more range, but isn't in the MPAA/RIAA's bailiwick.
.... I think it would depend on the art and the intent. There's a large swathe of grey (and colours too) between my crappy stick figure art and the photorealistic renderings of someone truly talented.:)
The long-winded video you link to, takes a bunch of people who aren't specialised in evolutionary biology, trips them up, and then uses this as a basis to assert that creationism is real. The remainder of the video uses similar pseudo-logic, ending with an advertising pitch. Pfffft.
Look, just because you demonstrate that a certain bunch of city folk don't understand how to run a dairy farm, doesn't mean cows don't exist, and it certainly doesn't mean I'm going to believe you know how to run a cattle ranch, no matter how much gloss you put on your fancy investment brochure.
I actually agree - frankly, I was surprised that "revenge pics" would require specific legislation, I would've thought the abundance of existing laws would already cover it (harrassment, publication without a model release, etc, etc, etc, etc).
I was just noting that there are real differences between hearsay and testimony. Yes, you can lie with pictures - just as you can lie with testimony - but that doesn't change the fundamentals.
The trouble is their record-keeping is thorough enough to record there was a past issue, but not thorough enough to record that it was their own fault.
Imagine a gigantic sheet and stretch it out flat and taut. This is space. Take a marble and set it rolling across the sheet. This is your light particle. It reaches the other side.
Now attach a weight under the sheet so that it dips in the middle. This is the gravity of a star. Take the marble again and roll it across the sheet so it goes through the dip and keeps going. The curved path of the marble describes the influence of gravity upon the light particle.
Now imagine the weight is so heavy that the dip is effectively vertical at its heart, a hole in the sheet. This is the gravity of a black hole. Take the marble again and roll it across the sheet. If it gets too close, it rolls into the hole and doesn't come out.
Even the "nice" investors still want a _monetary_ return, and if that means watering down the game's ambitions so they can pump up the ROI a few points, they're going to push for that.
Which is different from getting your funding from the players, who would be delighted to push for the complete opposite, because they want an _entertainment_ return.
The key response is that the people writing the fake reviews didn't know the business was fake. For a blunt example, if you offer to murder people in return for money, someone pays you to murder Bob, you sneak into what you think is Bob's house, you put two rounds into what you think is Bob's head, and then the lights come on and it's a cardboard silhouette and the police are putting you in cuffs, you don't get to walk free just because you didn't actually kill a person named Bob.
The astroturfers were writing deceitful reviews in return for money. To be blunt: fraud. Which is illegal - and unethical - regardless of whether the act involved an (unknown to them) fake business or one of the many real businesses they'd previously serviced (evidence of which was uncovered in the operation).
If I may be politely bold, your comments sound suspiciously like your brain is subconsciously looking for some way to rationalize a conditioned response to actions taken by those you hold in poor repute rather than acknowledge an occasion where they actually appear to be behaving properly (ironically, this kind of conditioning is often experienced by those working in law enforcement for long periods of time).
Let's say you own a yoghurt shop. You are honest about your product. You rely on paid advertising ("Person X liked our yoghurt so much, he agreed to be in this ad for it!") and word of mouth advertising (your customers telling people how good your yoghurt is).
Another yoghurt shop opens. Its owner is not honest. Like you, they rely on paid advertising, except their Person Y who claims to like their yoghurt has never eaten a single mouthful of it, and word of mouth advertising, except the "customers" are actually astroturfers who've been paid under the table to make up comments.
Your business suffers, not because your yoghurt is worse, but because people who would've bought your yoghurt buy the other shop's yoghurt instead - based on a lie.
Should it be legal to redirect the spending of others by lying? Should it be legal to increase one's wealth by lying? Should it be legal to damage the livelihoods of other people by lying?
From the original government media release, "By producing fake reviews, these companies violated multiple state laws against false advertising and engaged in illegal and deceptive business practices."
Hmm. I wouldn't presume to use the word "can't" about any such being. Seems to me that's dipping our toes in the same kind of hubris as the people who claim a ribs-from-clay God. We could have a non-interventionist God; we could have a subtle-interventionist God; we could have a big-interventionist God and we're in the control group; we could have (insert X).
We just don't know. It seems to bug a lot of people.:)
Which is rather ironic, since a God who can design from scratch an internally-consistent universe, that produces sapience and consciousness as an emergent phenomenon arising from random fluctuations of nothing, strikes me as infinitely more impressive.
A lot of people want God in a convenient human-scaled box they can control, and they don't like it when science points out the box is way too small.
Slashdot Mirror
Ever _really_ contemplated killing yourself? Held the knife against your skin, stood on the ledge, faced the oncoming train, or eyed the muzzle, whilst bleakly weighing the pros and cons? Well, don't do it, accidents happen. But if you're a healthy individual with properly functional brain chemistry and a modicum of nurturing, even _reaching_ that point is a fight against instinct. Whether evolved or designed, we're built to live and propagate. Consciously overriding all the programming that wants you to live? It takes _effort_.
By and large, we can't suicide unless we're messed up inside. For example, the usual trick with conditioning a young suicide bomber involves convincing them they won't actually die - that they'll "wake up" in paradise. You use a reward scenario to help trick their brain into equating a perfectly normal living activity - sleep - with something no healthy, rational organism wishes to do - die.
In suicide by bully, it's even more twisted. Instead of a promised reward for dying, it's a guaranteed punishment for living. If a kid is at all religious, then the groundwork for the sleep/death substitution is likely already there, since most kids have an abundance of willingness to believe anything a respected adult tells them (for example, remembering that their parents told them that grandpa had gone to heaven, he's at peace now, etc). Kids don't do long-term strategies very well. They tend to see only the "now" - alive, being hurt, or dead, at peace (like grandpa!).
A kid committing suicide is _not_ about cowardice or bravery. It's about being so bloody messed up that they can't see the bigger picture.
And you can do the same with an adult, it just takes more effort, since their coping mechanisms and critical thinking skills are (usually) well-developed. Hell, the military does a lesser form of it all the time. It's called "boot camp", and it's all about conditioning people to obey potentially suicidal orders instead of their normal instincts.
It's not just the anti-violence zero-tolerance groups. It's also the bureaucracy. You need teachers who care about the kids, both in and out of the classroom. And even then they need to have the _time_ to care - instead of having it eaten up by administrative crap that should have dedicated clerks handling it. That seems to be one of the biggest complaints I have from my teaching friends: dealing with the increasing bureaucracy.
It's not a myth, it's just not a given. Some are cowards. Some are sociopaths. But since the victims are not trained in psychology, the odds of them making the correct assessment? Yeah.
It depends a lot on the staff and the community. I was also bullied at school. With rare exception the teachers did not help, because (at least) one of them was actively encouraging the bullying going on, and the others either did not want to know and/or were themselves being intimidated by the bad staff (that last part I didn't understand until I was in my teens - when you're a little kid, adults are gods, and how can gods be intimidated by anyone?).
When I started having literal nightmares of getting killed at the school, I moved to a different school. Same city, totally different atmosphere. Main reason? The teachers _cared_. The principal _cared_. Not just passive sympathy, they had both a working moral compass and a backbone. They paid attention to what we were doing in class and out of it. They made sure there were adults "walking the beat" during playtime, not just standing in one spot or hidden in a staffroom. Nobody's little angel got to throw pencils - or rocks - with impunity.
It wasn't perfect, I don't know of any school that is, but the kids _knew_ the adults _cared_. It made an incredible difference.
On the other hand, since it's income tax, it's the same nation* wanting the 90% that issued and backed the currency that the income arrived in. And modern currencies are fiat anyway. So you _could_ consider income tax as a way of determining the "net real value" of your disposable income.
*(though not always - as I understand it, the United States insists that its citizens pay US income tax even if they're living in another nation and not receiving any money from US sources)
In your "around here" that isn't a utopia, do they have a 90% top tax bracket?
The problem is not "can my 35cm concrete wall resist a tornado's 200-400+ km/h winds better than a truck?"
The problem is "can my 35cm concrete wall resist a tornado's 200-400+ km/h winds _hitting it with a truck_?"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jLB4Mz4V10
Hopefully the answer is yes, but I still wouldn't want to find out the hard way.
Yes, seriously. As in, the burn was controlled by the car's safety mechanisms. As in, it did not spread rapidly, it did not explode, it did not turn part of the car into a violently expanding debris field, and nobody got hurt or killed.
Please mod parent up.
Read your linked articles. This paragraph pretty much sums it up:
"Nearly all salmon Americans eat are farm-raised -- grown in dense-packed pens near ocean shores, fed fish meal that can be polluted with toxic PCB chemicals, awash in excrement flushed out to sea and infused with antibiotics to combat unsanitary conditions. Some salmon are raised on farms that use more sustainable methods, but you can't tell from the packaging."
So basically, there's nothing wrong with fish farms that mandating independent monitoring, grading and labeling couldn't solve? :p
By the time typical terrrestrial radio/tv signals get about fifty light years out, they're almost indistinguishable from background noise. High-powered radar (the kind used by the military and in astronomy) has a lot more range, but isn't in the MPAA/RIAA's bailiwick.
http://io9.com/are-we-screwing-ourselves-by-transmitting-radio-signals-493800730
.... I think it would depend on the art and the intent. There's a large swathe of grey (and colours too) between my crappy stick figure art and the photorealistic renderings of someone truly talented. :)
The long-winded video you link to, takes a bunch of people who aren't specialised in evolutionary biology, trips them up, and then uses this as a basis to assert that creationism is real. The remainder of the video uses similar pseudo-logic, ending with an advertising pitch. Pfffft.
Look, just because you demonstrate that a certain bunch of city folk don't understand how to run a dairy farm, doesn't mean cows don't exist, and it certainly doesn't mean I'm going to believe you know how to run a cattle ranch, no matter how much gloss you put on your fancy investment brochure.
https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/the-fallacy-fallacy
I actually agree - frankly, I was surprised that "revenge pics" would require specific legislation, I would've thought the abundance of existing laws would already cover it (harrassment, publication without a model release, etc, etc, etc, etc).
I was just noting that there are real differences between hearsay and testimony. Yes, you can lie with pictures - just as you can lie with testimony - but that doesn't change the fundamentals.
The trouble is their record-keeping is thorough enough to record there was a past issue, but not thorough enough to record that it was their own fault.
It's the difference between hearsay ("Susan told me Tom was in town") and testimony ("I saw Tom in town").
Also known as, "pics or it didn't happen".
And when it comes to pics on the internet, it can also be the difference between "I wouldn't want to see that" and "oh god no, I can't un-see that".
Imagine a gigantic sheet and stretch it out flat and taut. This is space. Take a marble and set it rolling across the sheet. This is your light particle. It reaches the other side.
Now attach a weight under the sheet so that it dips in the middle. This is the gravity of a star. Take the marble again and roll it across the sheet so it goes through the dip and keeps going. The curved path of the marble describes the influence of gravity upon the light particle.
Now imagine the weight is so heavy that the dip is effectively vertical at its heart, a hole in the sheet. This is the gravity of a black hole. Take the marble again and roll it across the sheet. If it gets too close, it rolls into the hole and doesn't come out.
First, if enough potential backers think like you do, the game won't get funded, and you won't get the game.
Also, backers may get the game cheaper and may get early alpha/beta access and the ability to give feedback that helps improve the game.
If the game succeeds, you get a game you would not otherwise have.
Even the "nice" investors still want a _monetary_ return, and if that means watering down the game's ambitions so they can pump up the ROI a few points, they're going to push for that.
Which is different from getting your funding from the players, who would be delighted to push for the complete opposite, because they want an _entertainment_ return.
The key response is that the people writing the fake reviews didn't know the business was fake. For a blunt example, if you offer to murder people in return for money, someone pays you to murder Bob, you sneak into what you think is Bob's house, you put two rounds into what you think is Bob's head, and then the lights come on and it's a cardboard silhouette and the police are putting you in cuffs, you don't get to walk free just because you didn't actually kill a person named Bob.
The astroturfers were writing deceitful reviews in return for money. To be blunt: fraud. Which is illegal - and unethical - regardless of whether the act involved an (unknown to them) fake business or one of the many real businesses they'd previously serviced (evidence of which was uncovered in the operation).
If I may be politely bold, your comments sound suspiciously like your brain is subconsciously looking for some way to rationalize a conditioned response to actions taken by those you hold in poor repute rather than acknowledge an occasion where they actually appear to be behaving properly (ironically, this kind of conditioning is often experienced by those working in law enforcement for long periods of time).
Let's say you own a yoghurt shop. You are honest about your product. You rely on paid advertising ("Person X liked our yoghurt so much, he agreed to be in this ad for it!") and word of mouth advertising (your customers telling people how good your yoghurt is).
Another yoghurt shop opens. Its owner is not honest. Like you, they rely on paid advertising, except their Person Y who claims to like their yoghurt has never eaten a single mouthful of it, and word of mouth advertising, except the "customers" are actually astroturfers who've been paid under the table to make up comments.
Your business suffers, not because your yoghurt is worse, but because people who would've bought your yoghurt buy the other shop's yoghurt instead - based on a lie.
Should it be legal to redirect the spending of others by lying? Should it be legal to increase one's wealth by lying? Should it be legal to damage the livelihoods of other people by lying?
From the original government media release, "By producing fake reviews, these companies violated multiple state laws against false advertising and engaged in illegal and deceptive business practices."
http://www.ag.ny.gov/press-release/ag-schneiderman-announces-agreement-19-companies-stop-writing-fake-online-reviews-and
Hmm. I wouldn't presume to use the word "can't" about any such being. Seems to me that's dipping our toes in the same kind of hubris as the people who claim a ribs-from-clay God. We could have a non-interventionist God; we could have a subtle-interventionist God; we could have a big-interventionist God and we're in the control group; we could have (insert X).
We just don't know. It seems to bug a lot of people. :)
Which is rather ironic, since a God who can design from scratch an internally-consistent universe, that produces sapience and consciousness as an emergent phenomenon arising from random fluctuations of nothing, strikes me as infinitely more impressive.
A lot of people want God in a convenient human-scaled box they can control, and they don't like it when science points out the box is way too small.