I'm with you on addicts being sick people and not deserving prison. But it's quite a stretch to call drug dealers "care givers". The dealer's goal isn't to help the addict, it's to extract as much money from them as possible.
Not unlike most corporations, come to think of it.
But if George Washington hadn't spent $100 of the national treasury on fake teeth and cherry trees, the country would have been $100 further in the black in 1835. And when we went back in debt, our debts would have been $100 less, all the way up until today, not accounting for interest & inflation.
The point is, it's silly to complain about relatively small expenditures from a long time ago.
Correlation is not causation. A fraction of autistic people (10%) are naturally gifted at math or creativity, but that doesn't mean that autism causes that talent. It is quite possible that the genetic causes for autism ALSO cause savant syndrome, and that we could cure the former without touching the latter. Even if not, we could cure the 90+% that don't get any benefit from their autism, and leave the savants untouched
All the artifacts and fossils were placed underground by God for us to find. Previously, we had thought it was a test of faith. But now we know he was trying to provide us with nifty 3D printing tech!
I've spent at least a month in each of the following: India, China, the Philippines, Italy, Germany.
Additionally, I have good friends from Vietnam, Burma, Mexico, and Moldova. They didn't come here thinking that they'd get to "lounge in bean bag sized piles of gold" and none of them are eager to leave. I'd imagine most immigrants are similar. People who sneak across the border from Mexico want a better life, and there's more to that than money. They like the safety of a stable country. They like cops that don't demand bribes, and electricity that is on all the time. They like the quality of life, even if they're just part of the middle class.
Did you know Moldova has a breakaway region? Probably not, most people don't even know it's a place. Do you notice when a fire or flood wipes out thousands of homes in the Philippines? Did you realize that so many homes get destroyed each time because most of those homes are made of corrugated steel and cardboard? They have shanty towns bigger than the town I grew up in.
Sure, if you're just comparing to the cream of the crop (Western Europe, Canada, Japan, etc.) then the US is average or worse. But the vast majority of the world's population don't live in nice countries like those. That's not me "cherry pick[ing] a few awful countries". That's the standard of human existence. And it used to be even worse!
Freedom isn't a binary quantity the way life/death is. Only an idiot would trade his life for the freedom to, say, drive drunk.
I'm not in favor of warrantless wiretapping, but you fatalistic woe-is-me drama queens irk me. Life in the US is fucking GREAT. Not perfect, no place is, but if you think things are so terrible, you have absolutely no idea what the rest of the world is like.
We have a tremendous amount of freedom. I can call ruling politicians a bunch of fucking morons, and not be killed for it. I can dance and drink and have sex out of wedlock, and not be killed for it. I can draw pictures of Mohammed and call priests pedos, and not be killed for it. There are a lot of places where you can't do any of that.
In fact, right here in the good ole US of A, it was common for people to get killed if they offended the wrong religion, or had sex with the wrong gender, or were born with the wrong skin color. That was back in the Glory Days that never were. The Glory Days you saw in old movies and sit-coms and convinced yourself were your birthright.
So yeah, push for politicians to not tap our phones, but drop the extremism. It just reveals you to be an angry kid, rather than an informed adult.
He could put a signing statement against it, to try to weaken it, as he did with the NDAA. It's not much, but it's something, which is better than some token gesture that plays well with the/. crowd but has no actual impact.
Of course, in this case I don't think he'll even do a signing statement, because as I recall he's actually in favor of the wire tapping law.
all people are born equal. However, all cultures are not.
That's true, but it flies in the face of your earlier comment that you have little sympathy for people born in the Middle East. Or maybe the two statements can coexist and you're just suffering from a severe empathy-deficiency.
I agree with you that there are objectively bad cultures. They're objectively worse because they reliably produce worse outcomes for their citizens as measured by most any metric you can come up with. But no one chooses to be born there. As you say, we're all born equal. So saying you have no pity for those with the misfortune to be born in a bad place is rather cold-hearted.
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover they can vote themselves largesse out of the public treasury. From that moment on the majority, he said, always vote for the candidate promising the most benefits from the treasury with the result that democracy always collpases over a loose fiscal policy, always to be followed by a dictatorship."
This inevitable outcome sure seems to take a long time in coming. The US has been a democracy for over 200 years, the UK for over 300. Both are still going quite strong, and are nowhere near collapse and dictatorship. Heck, the Iroquois Nations were a democracy for something like 800 years up until the Brits and the French and the Dutch showed up and ruined things.
As it turns out, the mere fact that a given quote is oft repeated doesn't make it true.
And in a world where we don't respect human life, people are just bags of meat, and shooting some holes in them is no different then shooting at a side of pork.
Emotions matter, contrary to your faux-high-minded crap. Indeed, it's easy to argue that they're the only thing that matters. You can't rape a child and say, "Heh, she enjoyed it at the time! It's just society, man, that like, poisoned her thoughts, man." Children don't understand sex well enough to consent to it, and that "mental destruction" that you hand-wave away is just as devastating as physical scarring.
Well for starters, I much prefer that we have some sort of body regulating taxis, if only to ensure the driver of the car I step into isn't going to rape me, murder me, and dump my body in a ditch.
I know, I know, the free market could handle that! If my driver murders me, I should just not hire him in the future!
A global economy means that all wages experience downward pressure towards the lowest common denominator. Either we pay the Chinese more, or we accept Chinese wages in the US. I know which approach I prefer.
As to robots, you're absolutely right. Which is why we need to transition away from such rigid capitalism as soon as possible. By the end of the 21st century, there's going to be a lot less work for humans to do. That can either be a good thing, with people having more time to enjoy life, or a terrible thing, where we punish those not lucky enough to be born into a robot-factory-owning family.
And for what it's worth, I don't bear any particular ill will towards Apple over this. By all accounts, they hold their contractors to higher standards than most. They just happen to be the most visible, so they end up serving as the face of the whole industry.
Remember when people were proud to own USA items? Perhaps it is time to bring that back.
The minute "people" are willing to spend $1500 on a phone that currently costs $550, you'll see iPhones built right here in the good ol' USA. You can be the first. What's that? Not interested? Oh, sorry, never mind then, hypocrite.
Bullshit. There was a story on Slashdot several months back that included a breakdown of the costs involved in the iPhone. Manufacturing labor is only around 3%. Their workers are paid $350 a month. Paying an American worker a decent wage (say around $42k per year) would cost ten times that, for a 27% increase in the price of the phones. But making them in the US means you don't have to pay as much on shipping. I don't have numbers on hand for how much that costs, but let's ballpark it at 2% of the total phone's cost. That means that you're looking at at most a 25% price hike to build those phones in the US. Not the 200% increase that you pulled out of your ass.
Now, I'm not saying those jobs necessarily should come to the US. There's nothing that makes Americans more entitled to work than Chinese people. But whoever builds the phones should be getting a good wage. Treating people anywhere in the world as near-slave labor just so we can save $150 on our phones every two years is simply disgraceful.
It's akin to Papa John complaining that giving his workers healthcare would make the pizzas cost an extra quarter. Are we as a society really so greedy that we think that's a bad deal?
What a short memory you seem to have. The Democrats crossed the aisle to pass a lot of Bush's proposals.
They passed his massive tax cuts.
They passed his unfunded Medicare expansion.
They passed No Child Left Behind.
They passed that bill designed to gut the Postal Service by forcing them to pay for decades of retirement benefits up front.
Republicans, on the other hand, have voted in lockstep against every Obama proposal, with the sole exception of the stimulus, which got (IIRC) three GOP votes. Even though many of the proposals were identical to their own ideas, they filibustered everything, because they wanted to make him at failure at any cost.
This is unique in the country's history. Never before have politicians taken such a scorched earth approach to destroying their opponent.
Can you really not follow such a simple idea through to its logical conclusion? What happens if we reinforce this behavior by rewarding the GOP for it? They'll keep doing it, of course. Which means that no Democratic congress will ever again pass a law, unless they have a supermajority.
Now, that leaves us with two possible outcomes. Either the Democratics stick to their morals (unlikely!) and we get single-party rule by the GOP. Or the Democrats adopt the same tactics, and no one on either side can pass any laws any more. That outcome would be disastrous.
No partisanship here. Simple logic. Look at what's happening. It's not hard to see where we're headed.
Oh, absolutely the Dems are bad. But they're nothing like the present-day Republicans. To paraphrase Isaac Asimov:
"If you think the Republicans are good, you're wrong. If you think the Democrats are good, you're wrong. But if you think that thinking the Democrats are good is just as wrong as thinking the Republicans are good, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
That's the core concept behind false equivalency. "X is bad, Y is bad, therefore X and Y are equally bad." It's a rhetorical trick that exploits the fact that words like "bad" can have widely varying meanings.
Both parties have been bad for at least as long as I've been alive. But the Republicans have gotten much, much worse over the past four years. If we turn a blind eye to that, they'll have no incentive to get better, and the Democrats will have to adopt their tactics. I don't want this new level of badness to become the new normal.
ps - Side note, blame the Republicans all you want, remembering that the other parties are not innocent of the same problem - arguing anything for the sake of it.
False equivalence. The Democrats have never focused so single-mindedly on the destruction of a president. You're just telling yourself that the Dems are just as bad as a defense mechanism.
Only one party threatened to cut off unemployment benefits for millions if they didn't get a tax cut extension for the rich.
Only one party forced the country to default on its debts in order to force major budget cuts to both military and domestic program, and then even had the gall to try to renege on the military cuts.
Only one party proposed cap and trade as a capitalist alternative to environmental regulations, and then called it socialism when the other guys tried to implement it.
Only one party proposed an individual mandate as a capitalist alternative to single-payer health care, and then screamed about "death panels" when the other guys tried to implement it.
Only one party proposed giving illegal immigrants a path to citizenship through military service or college, and then screamed "amnesty!" when the other guys tried to implement it.
The Republicans today are nothing like those of the 90s or 80s or 70s or any other point in time. They're nothing like this country has ever seen. They've realized that politics is just a game, and they can break the game by refusing to negotiate on anything. Our country cannot survive that sort of game-breaking exploit. If people like you don't wise up and punish them for it, we're through.
The question is "Why does the world exist?" not "Why is the world able to support life?"
There is a real answer to question of why the world exists. We don't know it, and it might not be possible for us to know it, but there is a reason. And that reason is most certainly not "Because humans exist to ask about it!"
The second question, which is the one that the anthropic principle is meant to address, is down to chance. There was a chance that the universe ended up with the right parameters to support conscious life, and since we're here, this universe obviously hit that chance, no matter how remote the odds were.
If you wake up one morning and there isn't a cast iron statue of a giraffe in your yard, you wouldn't ask why not. But that's not a reason for the statue to be there.
I also distinctly remember them complaining when the Obamas grew some arugula in their gardens. Apparently growing a lettuce commonly used to top soups and pizzas and baked potatoes makes them elitist snobs. And don't forget how they eviscerated Kerry over his windsurfing (an elitist hobby!).
It's effective. Scream and holler about how awful someone is every day, and eventually the hatred starts to rub off on the public.
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I'm with you on addicts being sick people and not deserving prison. But it's quite a stretch to call drug dealers "care givers". The dealer's goal isn't to help the addict, it's to extract as much money from them as possible.
Not unlike most corporations, come to think of it.
They didn't call it "the troubles" at all. You're thinking of Ireland, or maybe Russia.
But if George Washington hadn't spent $100 of the national treasury on fake teeth and cherry trees, the country would have been $100 further in the black in 1835. And when we went back in debt, our debts would have been $100 less, all the way up until today, not accounting for interest & inflation.
The point is, it's silly to complain about relatively small expenditures from a long time ago.
Is this another naturally occurring state of carbon that should be called something else?
Yes.
Correlation is not causation. A fraction of autistic people (10%) are naturally gifted at math or creativity, but that doesn't mean that autism causes that talent. It is quite possible that the genetic causes for autism ALSO cause savant syndrome, and that we could cure the former without touching the latter. Even if not, we could cure the 90+% that don't get any benefit from their autism, and leave the savants untouched
Sounds like most of the people who show up in PUGs.
All the artifacts and fossils were placed underground by God for us to find. Previously, we had thought it was a test of faith. But now we know he was trying to provide us with nifty 3D printing tech!
Which countries have you been in?
I've spent at least a month in each of the following: India, China, the Philippines, Italy, Germany.
Additionally, I have good friends from Vietnam, Burma, Mexico, and Moldova. They didn't come here thinking that they'd get to "lounge in bean bag sized piles of gold" and none of them are eager to leave. I'd imagine most immigrants are similar. People who sneak across the border from Mexico want a better life, and there's more to that than money. They like the safety of a stable country. They like cops that don't demand bribes, and electricity that is on all the time. They like the quality of life, even if they're just part of the middle class.
Did you know Moldova has a breakaway region? Probably not, most people don't even know it's a place. Do you notice when a fire or flood wipes out thousands of homes in the Philippines? Did you realize that so many homes get destroyed each time because most of those homes are made of corrugated steel and cardboard? They have shanty towns bigger than the town I grew up in.
Sure, if you're just comparing to the cream of the crop (Western Europe, Canada, Japan, etc.) then the US is average or worse. But the vast majority of the world's population don't live in nice countries like those. That's not me "cherry pick[ing] a few awful countries". That's the standard of human existence. And it used to be even worse!
Freedom isn't a binary quantity the way life/death is. Only an idiot would trade his life for the freedom to, say, drive drunk.
I'm not in favor of warrantless wiretapping, but you fatalistic woe-is-me drama queens irk me. Life in the US is fucking GREAT. Not perfect, no place is, but if you think things are so terrible, you have absolutely no idea what the rest of the world is like.
We have a tremendous amount of freedom. I can call ruling politicians a bunch of fucking morons, and not be killed for it. I can dance and drink and have sex out of wedlock, and not be killed for it. I can draw pictures of Mohammed and call priests pedos, and not be killed for it. There are a lot of places where you can't do any of that.
In fact, right here in the good ole US of A, it was common for people to get killed if they offended the wrong religion, or had sex with the wrong gender, or were born with the wrong skin color. That was back in the Glory Days that never were. The Glory Days you saw in old movies and sit-coms and convinced yourself were your birthright.
So yeah, push for politicians to not tap our phones, but drop the extremism. It just reveals you to be an angry kid, rather than an informed adult.
He could put a signing statement against it, to try to weaken it, as he did with the NDAA. It's not much, but it's something, which is better than some token gesture that plays well with the /. crowd but has no actual impact.
Of course, in this case I don't think he'll even do a signing statement, because as I recall he's actually in favor of the wire tapping law.
all people are born equal. However, all cultures are not.
That's true, but it flies in the face of your earlier comment that you have little sympathy for people born in the Middle East. Or maybe the two statements can coexist and you're just suffering from a severe empathy-deficiency.
I agree with you that there are objectively bad cultures. They're objectively worse because they reliably produce worse outcomes for their citizens as measured by most any metric you can come up with. But no one chooses to be born there. As you say, we're all born equal. So saying you have no pity for those with the misfortune to be born in a bad place is rather cold-hearted.
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover they can vote themselves largesse out of the public treasury. From that moment on the majority, he said, always vote for the candidate promising the most benefits from the treasury with the result that democracy always collpases over a loose fiscal policy, always to be followed by a dictatorship."
This inevitable outcome sure seems to take a long time in coming. The US has been a democracy for over 200 years, the UK for over 300. Both are still going quite strong, and are nowhere near collapse and dictatorship. Heck, the Iroquois Nations were a democracy for something like 800 years up until the Brits and the French and the Dutch showed up and ruined things.
As it turns out, the mere fact that a given quote is oft repeated doesn't make it true.
They're obviously in alphabetical order.
And in a world where we don't respect human life, people are just bags of meat, and shooting some holes in them is no different then shooting at a side of pork.
Emotions matter, contrary to your faux-high-minded crap. Indeed, it's easy to argue that they're the only thing that matters. You can't rape a child and say, "Heh, she enjoyed it at the time! It's just society, man, that like, poisoned her thoughts, man." Children don't understand sex well enough to consent to it, and that "mental destruction" that you hand-wave away is just as devastating as physical scarring.
Well for starters, I much prefer that we have some sort of body regulating taxis, if only to ensure the driver of the car I step into isn't going to rape me, murder me, and dump my body in a ditch.
I know, I know, the free market could handle that! If my driver murders me, I should just not hire him in the future!
If you want to get pedantic, brake lights are an electronic communication device. But it's pretty clearly not what they mean.
I really don't know what Romney gives a damn about. It seems like he's been on both sides of every issue so who can tell what he believes?
Isn't it obvious? He believes, quite firmly, that he should be president.
A global economy means that all wages experience downward pressure towards the lowest common denominator. Either we pay the Chinese more, or we accept Chinese wages in the US. I know which approach I prefer.
As to robots, you're absolutely right. Which is why we need to transition away from such rigid capitalism as soon as possible. By the end of the 21st century, there's going to be a lot less work for humans to do. That can either be a good thing, with people having more time to enjoy life, or a terrible thing, where we punish those not lucky enough to be born into a robot-factory-owning family.
And for what it's worth, I don't bear any particular ill will towards Apple over this. By all accounts, they hold their contractors to higher standards than most. They just happen to be the most visible, so they end up serving as the face of the whole industry.
Remember when people were proud to own USA items? Perhaps it is time to bring that back.
The minute "people" are willing to spend $1500 on a phone that currently costs $550, you'll see iPhones built right here in the good ol' USA. You can be the first. What's that? Not interested? Oh, sorry, never mind then, hypocrite.
Bullshit. There was a story on Slashdot several months back that included a breakdown of the costs involved in the iPhone. Manufacturing labor is only around 3%. Their workers are paid $350 a month. Paying an American worker a decent wage (say around $42k per year) would cost ten times that, for a 27% increase in the price of the phones. But making them in the US means you don't have to pay as much on shipping. I don't have numbers on hand for how much that costs, but let's ballpark it at 2% of the total phone's cost. That means that you're looking at at most a 25% price hike to build those phones in the US. Not the 200% increase that you pulled out of your ass.
Now, I'm not saying those jobs necessarily should come to the US. There's nothing that makes Americans more entitled to work than Chinese people. But whoever builds the phones should be getting a good wage. Treating people anywhere in the world as near-slave labor just so we can save $150 on our phones every two years is simply disgraceful.
It's akin to Papa John complaining that giving his workers healthcare would make the pizzas cost an extra quarter. Are we as a society really so greedy that we think that's a bad deal?
What a short memory you seem to have. The Democrats crossed the aisle to pass a lot of Bush's proposals.
They passed his massive tax cuts.
They passed his unfunded Medicare expansion.
They passed No Child Left Behind.
They passed that bill designed to gut the Postal Service by forcing them to pay for decades of retirement benefits up front.
Republicans, on the other hand, have voted in lockstep against every Obama proposal, with the sole exception of the stimulus, which got (IIRC) three GOP votes. Even though many of the proposals were identical to their own ideas, they filibustered everything, because they wanted to make him at failure at any cost.
This is unique in the country's history. Never before have politicians taken such a scorched earth approach to destroying their opponent.
Can you really not follow such a simple idea through to its logical conclusion? What happens if we reinforce this behavior by rewarding the GOP for it? They'll keep doing it, of course. Which means that no Democratic congress will ever again pass a law, unless they have a supermajority.
Now, that leaves us with two possible outcomes. Either the Democratics stick to their morals (unlikely!) and we get single-party rule by the GOP. Or the Democrats adopt the same tactics, and no one on either side can pass any laws any more. That outcome would be disastrous.
No partisanship here. Simple logic. Look at what's happening. It's not hard to see where we're headed.
Oh, absolutely the Dems are bad. But they're nothing like the present-day Republicans. To paraphrase Isaac Asimov:
"If you think the Republicans are good, you're wrong. If you think the Democrats are good, you're wrong. But if you think that thinking the Democrats are good is just as wrong as thinking the Republicans are good, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
That's the core concept behind false equivalency. "X is bad, Y is bad, therefore X and Y are equally bad." It's a rhetorical trick that exploits the fact that words like "bad" can have widely varying meanings.
Both parties have been bad for at least as long as I've been alive. But the Republicans have gotten much, much worse over the past four years. If we turn a blind eye to that, they'll have no incentive to get better, and the Democrats will have to adopt their tactics. I don't want this new level of badness to become the new normal.
ps - Side note, blame the Republicans all you want, remembering that the other parties are not innocent of the same problem - arguing anything for the sake of it.
False equivalence. The Democrats have never focused so single-mindedly on the destruction of a president. You're just telling yourself that the Dems are just as bad as a defense mechanism.
Only one party threatened to cut off unemployment benefits for millions if they didn't get a tax cut extension for the rich.
Only one party forced the country to default on its debts in order to force major budget cuts to both military and domestic program, and then even had the gall to try to renege on the military cuts.
Only one party proposed cap and trade as a capitalist alternative to environmental regulations, and then called it socialism when the other guys tried to implement it.
Only one party proposed an individual mandate as a capitalist alternative to single-payer health care, and then screamed about "death panels" when the other guys tried to implement it.
Only one party proposed giving illegal immigrants a path to citizenship through military service or college, and then screamed "amnesty!" when the other guys tried to implement it.
The Republicans today are nothing like those of the 90s or 80s or 70s or any other point in time. They're nothing like this country has ever seen. They've realized that politics is just a game, and they can break the game by refusing to negotiate on anything. Our country cannot survive that sort of game-breaking exploit. If people like you don't wise up and punish them for it, we're through.
Your analogy doesn't fit.
The question is "Why does the world exist?" not "Why is the world able to support life?"
There is a real answer to question of why the world exists. We don't know it, and it might not be possible for us to know it, but there is a reason. And that reason is most certainly not "Because humans exist to ask about it!"
The second question, which is the one that the anthropic principle is meant to address, is down to chance. There was a chance that the universe ended up with the right parameters to support conscious life, and since we're here, this universe obviously hit that chance, no matter how remote the odds were.
While that's true, it's not an answer.
If you wake up one morning and there isn't a cast iron statue of a giraffe in your yard, you wouldn't ask why not. But that's not a reason for the statue to be there.
I also distinctly remember them complaining when the Obamas grew some arugula in their gardens. Apparently growing a lettuce commonly used to top soups and pizzas and baked potatoes makes them elitist snobs. And don't forget how they eviscerated Kerry over his windsurfing (an elitist hobby!).
It's effective. Scream and holler about how awful someone is every day, and eventually the hatred starts to rub off on the public.