No, you're not living on through your children, you're beginning the process of iterating; you will die and someone else will take your place. Iterative design is all about fixing mistakes in the previous version (you) and trying to find a way to create adult humans who are capable of dealing with any problem that crosses their path (your child).
"No but yes."
Of course "you" can be improved through your children.
Why? What is magically different about the intelligence community that they somehow evade the problems which are rife throughout the US government?
It is in the interest of relevant parties for an intelligence agency to act efficiently, collecting intelligence, whereas with most other departments it is in the interest of relevant parties for it to act fairly inefficiently, collecting revenue.
My view is that the very story shows you are wrong. The creeping incompetence and corruption which affects every other part of the federal government also infects US intelligence.
You may wish to review your understanding of "military intelligence". Just because a military department purchases some technology which claims to help with intelligence gathering it doesn't mean it's operating through an intelligence agency.
But both processes pale into insignificance compared to the effort invested into properly bringing up children once born. If the reason you're not adopting is "it's difficult", I question your dedication to bringing up a child.
What is your point? I don't know much about how US government works behind the scenes, but in the UK any release by almost every department of government or civil service is designed to effect a particular goal, not to inform. If something is released by government to suggest the impotence of a particular department and grave consequences of that impotence, for example, it is because representative and popular support for increased budget or powers is sought.
For example, all the "CIA/FBI/NSA/etc were clueless" released after 9/11 was just a pretext for increasing their surveillance powers and introducing various privacy-intruding Acts, none of which had anything to do with solving whatever problem caused 9/11 in the first place.
I certainly don't regard the FAA as an intelligence agency. But:
TI saw examples of ignorance and incompetence in positions of authority and consequence that have scarred me for life. Most people don't know anything, and they don't know anything about what they might know if they did know anything, and they don't know any way to figure out the extent of their ignorance if they did want to know (which they don't).
It's fairly typical for geeks to recount times where they felt they were surrounded by clueless idiots controlling everything around them. Yet, oddly enough, the organisations still manage to function and nothing happens to indicate a serious failure of operation. Perhaps you overestimated the extent of incompetence, or were yourself finding something hard to understand and assumed someone else was acting irrationally?
This, of course, started a witch hunt which ended with Tom being interviewed by his superior. It went something like this:
So Tom's boss, who might not have been responsible for the hiring decision, is only guilty of not properly reviewing the employment application before the meeting - perhaps assuming (perhaps due to changed regulations?) that ever having smoked marijuana excluded you from Tom's position. Many government positions involving significant responsibility allow for taking soft drugs in youth providing you admit to it and you're not doing drugs any more.
I really fail to see anything particularly awful about that exchange. The boss was corrected and Tom retained his position.
Publicised "evidence" for WMDs in Iraq was produced for nothing but political reasons. The intelligence agencies don't care whether you blame them or not. They're not going anywhere, and they will carry on producing accurate reports for people who need to know.
The above does not apply to the rest of government, where any old shit will go
For another, it's often the more competent branches of government in less incompetent countries which have exposed the con. The fact that some ministry in Thailand or Kurdistan was involved - and probably knew what it was doing and was engaged in some money laundering operation anyway - has little impact on security in the US and the UK.
Of course it's not true. Contrary to government-is-full-of-idiots lore, intelligence agencies aren't easy to become part of and you don't just get random contractors walking in and making sales pitches. Anything involved with signals processing requires you to not just be a mathematician but a fucking good one - something you must prove with academic records and with copious testing. And that's before all the lengthy background checks and character suitability which might just let you get in the building. Even though I'm in the right discipline with good academic results and have a nice conservative background, I fail on "not being academically brilliant enough" and "not loving my country enough".
The above does not apply to the rest of government, where any old shit will go - especially, in the UK, if the minister / civil servant with decision-making powers stands to benefit personally from giving a contract to a particular private entity. I imagine the same applies in US land, despite the suggestion of a fair bidding process. (That's how Halliburton works, right?)
And are none of the "negative consequences" subjective? Put another way, are they negative consequences based on your ideas of what is positive/negative, or are they negative consequences based on the kid's idea of what is positive/negative?
For example, if your son believes that married women should serve a particular role in society, do you argue that his wife's career options become limited to be a "negative consequence" or just a "consequence"? What if he considers that it is positive for only one member in a married household to have significant career options, because that means the marketplace is such that it is more affordable to maintain a single-parent-working household with one parent available to actually bring up the kids? Do you counter that a person shouldn't be restricted in society based merely on some feature they were/weren't born with? And isn't that stepping into moral territory?
I know I'm banging the point and I appreciate the input you're making in this thread, but I'm really trying to show how hard it is to fulfil any role of care without allowing your beliefs to rub off on the person you're caring for.
I would attempt to dissuade them from such behaviors by forming a logical argument. Apart from that, no.
Well, until your son Bootlick Bob gets his sister Hippie Hannah arrested by reporting her for saying something nasty and oh so easily misinterpretable about the President at the dinner table... but maybe it takes a family who lived through a civil war to observe what happens in the extreme case. (OK, the worst case is that they join opposing sides and shoot at each other, a disturbing feature of several civil wars.)
Anyway, your "logical argument" would rely on various premises which come down to a subjective moral code. To put it in cold, practical terms, there are many people who are well off and fairly secure under the sort of oppressive government Bootlick Bob might dream of becoming part of.
Which has nothing to do with their personal beliefs.
Well, there's the belief that you should submit to nature. But what we're discussing is whether having kids means you're living through your kids, and that is so regardless of what your personal beliefs about anything are. So it's really all of the above.
If you want, I can argue that mental activity is just a subset of biological activity;-).
ou have to specifically try to live through your child to have that great of an effect. Genes aren't all that is required.
The extent to which genetics have an effect can be argued, but the effect is clearly not insignificant. And you are still living through your biological children by virtue of having passed around half your genes to them, even if you make no effort after conception. Of course, the average non-absent parent does so much more "living through them" than that.
They want their children to be at a standard ideal to them but which they're too weak to achieve - or maybe they feel they don't need to achieve it as long as the children do;
They do want their kids to be like them: hypocrites who are well able to condemn some act and hide all evidence of engaging in it, despite doing that very thing behind closed doors.
I agree. That's why it's a waste of time worrying so much over such things.
Most people have bases for living which are far more complex and involved than, "Well, I don't want to be raped and murdered or run over by a car... apart from that, whatever happens is cool."
And these bases will get passed on to the children.
Even if the few posts you've made to this thread, you've shown some fairly strong opinions. What happens if someone under your care ends up being an oppressive-government-worshipping, relative/friend-monitoring (report errant behaviour in the family, citizen!) baby factory? Do you perceive that this approach puts them in danger? Will you try to do anything about it?
All these reasons are just nature manifesting the default desire of sexual beings to pass on their genes, which is passing on the essence of your existence to someone else.
You speak as if there was a choice. I maintain that if you pass on your genes to someone then you are necessarily living through them - it doesn't matter what you do afterwards. You have taken the most fundamental thing that makes up you and you have used it to make up about half of the most fundamental thing that makes up them.
An answer in context would be more helpful. Who decides which activities you can get up to online are dangerous? Who decides which activities you get up to as a result of things you do online (e.g. meeting up) are dangerous?
It's likely that "meeting a murdering rapist who is considering you as his/her next victim" is universally agreed as dangerous. But the chance of that is very small. What about the decision on the danger levels of everything else?
We have sufficient technology to maintain a population of constant size in comfort with reduced working hours. It just requires us not to continually consume more and to prevent hoarding. But then who can feel like they're a master of the universe?
They both follow some of my traits, both genetic and social. I can do nothing about the genetic - that`s the way it is. The social comes along for the ride - I am a strong male role model (not necessarily the best you understand, but a strong one none the less), children are built to pick up on this and follow those that appear to be in some measure successful. Of course this is instinctive, not intentional - children almost never think the words - "I like them, I`m going to copy them" even if as an adult you can perceive that that is what they`re doing.
Precisely.
It will happen for genetic and social reasons you describe. It will happen whether you claim you intend it to happen or not.
If you as a couple give birth to and bring up a child, you are creating a variant of a miniature you. You as a single person aren't precisely creating a miniature you because (i) you have the genetic input of two people; (ii) you have the environmental input of two people and the wider world; but the greatest part of your child is the genetic and social mix of you and your partner. If you didn't intend this, you made a mistake in having and bringing up children.
Merely "not liking" doesn't really have consequences. At best "not liking" leads to "complaining", seen by the majority as "whining" and summarily ignored.
They agree with an option, and they show their agreement by going through with it rather than going through with any of the other options available to them. This is what matters.
So is paranoia, which is inefficient beyond belief. The result is that you end up wasting a great amount of time and resources on pointless endeavors whilst only succeeding in worsening your relationship with others.
Deployed effectively, it allows you to nip an emerging hazard in the bud as early as possible. "Your relationship with others" is rarely a concern when there's a power imbalance and you're the one with way more power. Machiavelli writes succinctly on this.
If the government, who can change the rules as they please, is allowed to spy on its own citizens and treat each and every one of them as criminals, then abuse will surely follow.
There are genuinely lots of old pervs out there effectively grooming teens for sex - the idea that every male over the age of 24 is a potential kiddie fiddler is very much a belief system about human nature reaching quasi-religious hysteria;
The child will somehow be harmed by interacting with anyone on a particular prejudiced list - is there a problem meeting up with someone who is older and male if the guy has no sexual interest whatsoever (e.g. may have a common hobby)? When I was young I used to meet up with older geeks quite a bit and none of them tried to sex me. What would happen if I were a 14 year old girl today with an interest in, say, amateur radio? How would today's hysterical world react to me hanging around a load of 50 plus men in tatty shacks?
Is flirting harmful? Is cybersex the same as rape? I wonder how my parents would have reacted to some of my chat logs when I was 15 (in the days when the Internet was a new and scary place and it wasn't "normal" for teens to have Internet access, let alone go online unsupervised), sometimes with members of the same and opposite sex who I knew to be twice my age.
Insert all the usual arguments about a physically and mentally healthy 14 year old meeting a 16 year old and them getting up to stuff and it being labelled as statutory rape.
There is one fairly uncontroversial danger: meeting some stranger who will force you to have sex or to be otherwise sexually abused. The risk is obviously non-zero, but how often does that actually happen? How much of everything else is a real danger rather than a fear by the parent subjected onto the child? IOW, how many "wrong guys" really are there? "Wrong"ness is defined by a belief system.
The greatest abuse risk a child runs of abuse (including sexual) is, by a huge margin, from parents/carers/close family.
Slashdot Mirror
No, you're not living on through your children, you're beginning the process of iterating; you will die and someone else will take your place. Iterative design is all about fixing mistakes in the previous version (you) and trying to find a way to create adult humans who are capable of dealing with any problem that crosses their path (your child).
"No but yes."
Of course "you" can be improved through your children.
Why? What is magically different about the intelligence community that they somehow evade the problems which are rife throughout the US government?
It is in the interest of relevant parties for an intelligence agency to act efficiently, collecting intelligence, whereas with most other departments it is in the interest of relevant parties for it to act fairly inefficiently, collecting revenue.
My view is that the very story shows you are wrong. The creeping incompetence and corruption which affects every other part of the federal government also infects US intelligence.
You may wish to review your understanding of "military intelligence". Just because a military department purchases some technology which claims to help with intelligence gathering it doesn't mean it's operating through an intelligence agency.
But both processes pale into insignificance compared to the effort invested into properly bringing up children once born. If the reason you're not adopting is "it's difficult", I question your dedication to bringing up a child.
What is your point? I don't know much about how US government works behind the scenes, but in the UK any release by almost every department of government or civil service is designed to effect a particular goal, not to inform. If something is released by government to suggest the impotence of a particular department and grave consequences of that impotence, for example, it is because representative and popular support for increased budget or powers is sought.
For example, all the "CIA/FBI/NSA/etc were clueless" released after 9/11 was just a pretext for increasing their surveillance powers and introducing various privacy-intruding Acts, none of which had anything to do with solving whatever problem caused 9/11 in the first place.
You insult your cat. If cats could talk, they wouldn't; the vanity of man revolts from the serene indifference of the cat; etc.
I certainly don't regard the FAA as an intelligence agency. But:
TI saw examples of ignorance and incompetence in positions of authority and consequence that have scarred me for life. Most people don't know anything, and they don't know anything about what they might know if they did know anything, and they don't know any way to figure out the extent of their ignorance if they did want to know (which they don't).
It's fairly typical for geeks to recount times where they felt they were surrounded by clueless idiots controlling everything around them. Yet, oddly enough, the organisations still manage to function and nothing happens to indicate a serious failure of operation. Perhaps you overestimated the extent of incompetence, or were yourself finding something hard to understand and assumed someone else was acting irrationally?
This, of course, started a witch hunt which ended with Tom being interviewed by his superior. It went something like this:
So Tom's boss, who might not have been responsible for the hiring decision, is only guilty of not properly reviewing the employment application before the meeting - perhaps assuming (perhaps due to changed regulations?) that ever having smoked marijuana excluded you from Tom's position. Many government positions involving significant responsibility allow for taking soft drugs in youth providing you admit to it and you're not doing drugs any more.
I really fail to see anything particularly awful about that exchange. The boss was corrected and Tom retained his position.
Publicised "evidence" for WMDs in Iraq was produced for nothing but political reasons. The intelligence agencies don't care whether you blame them or not. They're not going anywhere, and they will carry on producing accurate reports for people who need to know.
Your post made me sad. Not for me or for you, but for your six children.
Learn to read, Sir. For one:
The above does not apply to the rest of government, where any old shit will go
For another, it's often the more competent branches of government in less incompetent countries which have exposed the con. The fact that some ministry in Thailand or Kurdistan was involved - and probably knew what it was doing and was engaged in some money laundering operation anyway - has little impact on security in the US and the UK.
Of course it's not true. Contrary to government-is-full-of-idiots lore, intelligence agencies aren't easy to become part of and you don't just get random contractors walking in and making sales pitches. Anything involved with signals processing requires you to not just be a mathematician but a fucking good one - something you must prove with academic records and with copious testing. And that's before all the lengthy background checks and character suitability which might just let you get in the building. Even though I'm in the right discipline with good academic results and have a nice conservative background, I fail on "not being academically brilliant enough" and "not loving my country enough".
The above does not apply to the rest of government, where any old shit will go - especially, in the UK, if the minister / civil servant with decision-making powers stands to benefit personally from giving a contract to a particular private entity. I imagine the same applies in US land, despite the suggestion of a fair bidding process. (That's how Halliburton works, right?)
And are none of the "negative consequences" subjective? Put another way, are they negative consequences based on your ideas of what is positive/negative, or are they negative consequences based on the kid's idea of what is positive/negative?
For example, if your son believes that married women should serve a particular role in society, do you argue that his wife's career options become limited to be a "negative consequence" or just a "consequence"? What if he considers that it is positive for only one member in a married household to have significant career options, because that means the marketplace is such that it is more affordable to maintain a single-parent-working household with one parent available to actually bring up the kids? Do you counter that a person shouldn't be restricted in society based merely on some feature they were/weren't born with? And isn't that stepping into moral territory?
I know I'm banging the point and I appreciate the input you're making in this thread, but I'm really trying to show how hard it is to fulfil any role of care without allowing your beliefs to rub off on the person you're caring for.
I would attempt to dissuade them from such behaviors by forming a logical argument. Apart from that, no.
Well, until your son Bootlick Bob gets his sister Hippie Hannah arrested by reporting her for saying something nasty and oh so easily misinterpretable about the President at the dinner table... but maybe it takes a family who lived through a civil war to observe what happens in the extreme case. (OK, the worst case is that they join opposing sides and shoot at each other, a disturbing feature of several civil wars.)
Anyway, your "logical argument" would rely on various premises which come down to a subjective moral code. To put it in cold, practical terms, there are many people who are well off and fairly secure under the sort of oppressive government Bootlick Bob might dream of becoming part of.
Which has nothing to do with their personal beliefs.
Well, there's the belief that you should submit to nature. But what we're discussing is whether having kids means you're living through your kids, and that is so regardless of what your personal beliefs about anything are. So it's really all of the above.
If you want, I can argue that mental activity is just a subset of biological activity ;-).
ou have to specifically try to live through your child to have that great of an effect. Genes aren't all that is required.
The extent to which genetics have an effect can be argued, but the effect is clearly not insignificant. And you are still living through your biological children by virtue of having passed around half your genes to them, even if you make no effort after conception. Of course, the average non-absent parent does so much more "living through them" than that.
This could be seen two ways:
I agree. That's why it's a waste of time worrying so much over such things.
Most people have bases for living which are far more complex and involved than, "Well, I don't want to be raped and murdered or run over by a car... apart from that, whatever happens is cool."
And these bases will get passed on to the children.
Even if the few posts you've made to this thread, you've shown some fairly strong opinions. What happens if someone under your care ends up being an oppressive-government-worshipping, relative/friend-monitoring (report errant behaviour in the family, citizen!) baby factory? Do you perceive that this approach puts them in danger? Will you try to do anything about it?
All these reasons are just nature manifesting the default desire of sexual beings to pass on their genes, which is passing on the essence of your existence to someone else.
You speak as if there was a choice. I maintain that if you pass on your genes to someone then you are necessarily living through them - it doesn't matter what you do afterwards. You have taken the most fundamental thing that makes up you and you have used it to make up about half of the most fundamental thing that makes up them.
An answer in context would be more helpful. Who decides which activities you can get up to online are dangerous? Who decides which activities you get up to as a result of things you do online (e.g. meeting up) are dangerous?
It's likely that "meeting a murdering rapist who is considering you as his/her next victim" is universally agreed as dangerous. But the chance of that is very small. What about the decision on the danger levels of everything else?
Why do people have their own children?
We have sufficient technology to maintain a population of constant size in comfort with reduced working hours. It just requires us not to continually consume more and to prevent hoarding. But then who can feel like they're a master of the universe?
They both follow some of my traits, both genetic and social. I can do nothing about the genetic - that`s the way it is. The social comes along for the ride - I am a strong male role model (not necessarily the best you understand, but a strong one none the less), children are built to pick up on this and follow those that appear to be in some measure successful. Of course this is instinctive, not intentional - children almost never think the words - "I like them, I`m going to copy them" even if as an adult you can perceive that that is what they`re doing.
Precisely.
It will happen for genetic and social reasons you describe. It will happen whether you claim you intend it to happen or not.
If you as a couple give birth to and bring up a child, you are creating a variant of a miniature you. You as a single person aren't precisely creating a miniature you because (i) you have the genetic input of two people; (ii) you have the environmental input of two people and the wider world; but the greatest part of your child is the genetic and social mix of you and your partner. If you didn't intend this, you made a mistake in having and bringing up children.
Merely "not liking" doesn't really have consequences. At best "not liking" leads to "complaining", seen by the majority as "whining" and summarily ignored.
They agree with an option, and they show their agreement by going through with it rather than going through with any of the other options available to them. This is what matters.
OK, but who decides what is a danger? IOW, who decides what is potentially harmful? what is actually harmful?
So is paranoia, which is inefficient beyond belief. The result is that you end up wasting a great amount of time and resources on pointless endeavors whilst only succeeding in worsening your relationship with others.
Deployed effectively, it allows you to nip an emerging hazard in the bud as early as possible. "Your relationship with others" is rarely a concern when there's a power imbalance and you're the one with way more power. Machiavelli writes succinctly on this.
If the government, who can change the rules as they please, is allowed to spy on its own citizens and treat each and every one of them as criminals, then abuse will surely follow.
Depending on how you define "abuse", yes.
A parent may have one or more beliefs:
There is one fairly uncontroversial danger: meeting some stranger who will force you to have sex or to be otherwise sexually abused. The risk is obviously non-zero, but how often does that actually happen? How much of everything else is a real danger rather than a fear by the parent subjected onto the child? IOW, how many "wrong guys" really are there? "Wrong"ness is defined by a belief system.
The greatest abuse risk a child runs of abuse (including sexual) is, by a huge margin, from parents/carers/close family.
Yes yes and IQ can be increased just by trying really hard. Sorry, bud, nature's not fair and political correctness won't change that.