that argument, that if you're not paying that somehow we can't care about you,
No no no Zucky boy, that's not the argument. We know you most assuredly care about us... but only to the extent that we are the product. Don't pretend you don't know the quote. Reframing the issue like you tried to do isn't going to earn you any points here. You care about users, but you care a LOT more about customers.
In a shocking discovery today, scientists have confirmed that the sun is flat and simply rotates to face Earth.
Local Flat-Sun advocate commented "Of course it's flat, anyone can see that plain as day" before attempting to thrash our reporter with his white cane.
So? I don't think they even care what their "fanbase" does. Because their fanbase, core or otherwise, is not part of their business model.
Their core business model sells the access to and data of the masses (in aggregate) to advertisers and market analysis types. (and possibly those trying to sway elections. They have the same business model as Facebook after all).
Apple probably cares what their "core fanbase" thinks, and possibly what they do. But that's because Apple is essentially monetizing fashion in the tech industry. And keeping Apple products as the "hip new thing" year after year is an important business function so they can keep cranking out overpriced rounded corners. But I'd say they probably just assume their core fanbase will of course buy Apple and doing otherwise is unthinkable. It'd be like NOT buying ugg boots and spiced guaciochino free-range-soy latte smoothies from Starbucks. They're locked in. It's cultural identity at this point. Apple probably cares more about what their fringe fanbase is thinking of buying. "Swing voters" if you will. The real people who steer fashion and determine what is hip to the sheeple. You know, the sort that market analysis and advertiser types are trying to find: Impressionable douchbags with money to burn.
Sorry, "tech fashion" makes my cynicism go into overdrive.
"have lost some or most of their functions" the key word there is "some". If once fertile virgin soil now requires amendments in order to be productive, that's a lost function.
Well congrats for pointing out the weasel word that let's them make spurious claims while remaining technically true. But it doesn't change the fact that this is fear-mongering bullshit.
Put another way 75% of Earth is no longer pristine.
Justice Department officials believe that these "mechanisms allowing access to the data" exist without weakening the devices' security against hacking.
Utter fucking bullshit. Because "Allowing access" is the bloody fucking definition of "weakening security". oh oh, but they claim "Against hacking". What they're trotting out is a system called "Symphony". It stores a copy of the keys. You want to send a secure message, you have to let symphony be able to read it. And everyone promises that these keys will only ever be read by police with a warrant. The vital question is "What if the symphony database gets hacked?" A whole hell of a lot of trading with insider knowledge could take place without anyone knowing and those with the knowledge could get super-bloody rich. Hell, it might be happening right now. How would we even know?
But these shmucks are at least thinking one step ahead of that:
The idea is that when devices encrypt themselves, they would generate a special access key that could unlock their data without the owner’s passcode. This electronic key would be stored on the device itself, inside part of its hard drive that would be separately encrypted — so that only the manufacturer, in response to a court order, could open it.
Then the question simply becomes: "What if someone at the manufacturer loses, sells, or mishandles these MASTER-KEYS to the BACKDOOR?" This isn't even bank-run organizations or super-secret three-letter-agencies being trusted to secure these things. This is Apple and Facebook and Sony and Huawei. Do you trust them to handle the secrets of your senators?
FURTHERMORE, this is completely useless as anyone with 2 braincells that doesn't want the justice department to have a backdoor, will simply NOT USE these services. The only way this will help catch the people we want caught is if they OUTLAW any alternative. Somehow on a world-wide level. Ha, good luck with that.
First off, why the hell are you directing traffic to a bullshit aggregator when the original paper is RIGHT THERE?
Second, wtf are they talking about? Ah: "examining cases where users of one community are mobilized by negative sentiment to comment in another community." ie, "Brigading" for anyone not in the know.
Third, The paper never mentions "Drama", they're exclusively talking about this sort of conflict that comes from brigading. IE, 1% of reddit communities do the brigading thing. (Because that's what they can track. Of course they can't track all drama in Reddit, it'd just be a list of all posts)
Fourth, The paper says 1% of communities, not 1% of users. Which is, kind of a DUH statement. There are topics which are political and those who are dedicated towards shifting other people's opinions, but most aren't. Nobody in ELI5 is going to be wing-nut extremist educationalist rousing the masses to explain, en-mass, complex topics in simple terms to other communities.
This is why you don't link to a bullshit opinion pieces re-interpreting a paper. Does slashdot even have editors anymore?
Yeah man, did you read what he was suggesting? That the "moral code" would go away and there would be "the total eradication of the opposition forces by any means necessary. For example,... nukes and/or indiscriminately used nerve gas, biological agents etc.etc." If the people leading the military (or the underlings) tried that shit, you'd have rebellion within the military. Or you'd have half the military trying to put down the dogs.
Has there even ever been an armed rebellion in a real* democracy? I mean, there must have been, but I can't think of any off the top of my head. Even the whiskey rebellion was more of a protest. There wasn't any real thought of overthrowing the government.
if things were literally at the stage where armed revolt was the only remaining recourse, these moral codes would no longer stand in the way.
That doesn't seem to be the case. The complaints about war-crimes and violations of the Geneva convention are still alive an well in the balklands, Sri-lanka, Syria, Sudan, and Libya. It's an axe over the neck of every general that's tempted to just kill them all and let god sort them out. There are exceptions where war-crimes are never prosecuted, but any sort of civil war in America would have a TON of cameras everywhere and our generals are more politicians than warriors.
Besides, they also need to worry about their OWN troops defecting to the rebellion. Tell an Iowa farm-boy to start dropping bombs on Des Moines indiscriminately and he's going to take his plane somewhere else. Which we saw happen in the Libyan civil war.
Without a foreign govt. (or two, or three) propping up the militia
I'm pretty sure we could get Trudeau to smuggle in some Tim Hortons for the war effort against the Trumpets. Honestly, who hasn't he pissed off internationally?
But most likely what would happen is Russia/China would roll in while the US is scuffling with itself and kick the shit out of both sides.
Naw, I doubt they even WANT to try and be an occupying force. More likely they'd take the pause in PAX AMERICANA to swallow up some of their neighbors. Like Georgia, Ukraine, and Taiwan.
I've yet to see anyone make a decent case of how guns would be a useful and/or effective means of remedying that.
see: Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam. The US military is really damn good at blowing stuff up but terrible at policing a nation that doesn't want them there. They've gotten better, for sure, but a bunch of pissed hicks with rifles ---That they are not allowed to indiscriminately exterminate wholesale--- have been able to sustain a conflict with the most powerful military in the world for a decade+. No, the idiots aren't going to storm the gates guns blazing. Well.... successfully anyway.
We are WAY WAY WAY far away from revolution. Too many people are well fed and content for that to be a serious concern. But if it comes to it, I wouldn't discount a sustained distributed sniper campaign. But personally, I think strong encryption should be protected under the 2nd amendment.
The best weapon against a whole lot of things is well informed populace. Education is THE long-term solution for nearly every problem. That includes things like war. If we could have just informed the populace of Germany and Russia about the truth of the matter, I doubt they would have been so hawkish. But there are unknowns in the world and people with fucked up beliefs. So as a safeguard against idiots, we have a military. In a similar vein, we have the 2nd amendment.
What about people advertising guns? Gun manufacturers don't buy advertising now?
Their business model is built around targeted marketing. They can't slap a "gun" tag on these videos and let advertisers pick and choose who they target? I'd be fine with Google simply stepping back and letting the free market drive the price and payout for various tags. Of course, that would mean more transparency for what happens money-wise behind the curtain.
I'm not so sure he's lying. There's a handful of ways that regulating social media could help out facebook. They'd have to pay to jump through the hoops to meet compliance, whatever that looks like..... but so would all the competition. Imagine you're 4 guys in college cooking up a facebook-killer like every damn fool was doing ~5 years ago. Now you're going to fail because you have zero hope of complying, or even affording to know if you comply, with the laws and regulation surrounding the industry. (Where as before you were going to fail because everyone liked facebook and they were the dominant player). With regulation, even if it sounds like it would make them behave better, it's a deathknell for competition. A barrier to entry. If facebook is legitimately worried about competition taking away their user-base (their product), then digging themselves in with some regulation makes sense.
Also I have zero faith in congress or the FCC having any clue how to regulation Tech, information, the Internet, or social media. He might just be bluffing. It's an easy bluff when you know the other guy has a single pair of jacks.
Naw, you're thinking the First Amendment. Free speech is an ideal that came out of the age of Enlightenment that predates our government.
But at least you add a little twist on this talking point. You're right, no one is forcing you to uphold ideals like democracy, republics, inalienable rights, and free speech. They're ideals. But if you don't support this sort of stuff you're not doing your civil duty and are generally a terrible person. Anti-social. The sort that tears down civilization and perverts it. I'm not a fan of this trend I'm seeing in my party just because some people are saying things they don't like. Don't they remember "the man" trying to shut down hippies protesting war? It's not just something for someone else to worry about.
This is most certainly censorship by Google, and I honestly think less of them for it. There's some good things to censor, but this isn't.
"Embryonic" here is a TYPE of stem cells, it's not describing their origin. They make embryonic stem cells from adult skin cells.
Here you go. They found a way to reprogram adult cells to act like embryonic stem cells. And that's what we want. We want the capabilities. They can induce pluripotent, meaning it can change into a wider selection of different types of cells.
Come on dude.... just... is it not possible to lay down your arms? Just declare victory and walk away. You didn't want a thing to happen and now it doesn't have to, there's no need. Do you really have to keep on with the lashing out and brow beating and calling people murderers?
You're not saving anyone here, by anyone's definition. Is the fight for the fight's sake really more important than:
Diseases and conditions where stem cell treatment is being investigated include: Diabetes[75] Rheumatoid arthritis[75] Parkinson's disease[75] Alzheimer's disease[75] Osteoarthritis[75] Stroke and traumatic brain injury repair[76] Learning disability due to congenital disorder [77] Spinal cord injury repair [78] Heart infarction [79] Anti-cancer treatments [80] Baldness reversal[81] Replace missing teeth [82] Repair hearing [83] Restore vision [84] and repair damage to the cornea[85] Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis [86] Crohn's disease [87] Wound healing [88] Male infertility due to absence of spermatogonial stem cells [89]
Jesus fucking christ. As said elsewhere, they can make stem cells from SKIN CELLS and there's really no need to involve fetuses. This is old news. It's been around for a long time. We have real-world technological solutions to the problems that plague us, BUT NO, some people just can't bury a hatchet and will keep fighting battle well after the war was lost.
Of course for all the good done in the world with medical advancement, there's a few willfully ignorant asshats that make me wonder if humanity is worth saving. When can we engineer this problem away?
I remember when stem cell therapy was first making the news and getting people excited. It's really nice to read when that sort of basic research pays off with applied medicine. It's seeing the sci-fi books come to you and makes the future look a little more bright.
Also, from skin cells making the entire political debate kinda moot. Some people will never bury the hatchet. Once a term is associated with politics, it'll always live under a shadow. Kinda sucks.
but I don't think this presents a long term concern. If something is detrimental towards human survival, those traits which enable it or succumb to it will be selected against in the long run.
Detrimental towards human survival? Like travelling faster than 30mph? Because we routinely place ourselves in situations that evolution has had NO WAY of preparing us for. Natural selection operates on the scale of GENERATIONS. And thanks to low selective pressure, we're nearly identical to humans of 2000 years ago. While there was a period of seperation where some groups started drifting their own way, that's been muddied by a lot of out-breeding. In an evolutionary sense, sure, long-term we've really got no worries. Other than extinction. In the short term though, I'm plenty well worried about three generations of soul-crushing 50% unemployment. Thanks to technology. Not to be a luddite or anything, but they had legitimate qualm and they represent about the worst-case scenario. We've been through this once before, we don't want a repeat.
What a mature citizen of the digital age should be competent at is spotting and confirming the veracity of the news AND reconstructing the reputational path of the piece of information in question, evaluating the intentions of those who circulated it, and figuring out the agendas of those authorities that lent it credibility. BECAUSE doing so helps verify the truth of the matter, which is the ultimate goal.
There. Fixed it for her.
On the surface, I have to agree that a web of trust would be really handy when it comes to weeding out bullshit. And I think everyone does this passively to some extent. We all know a few news sources which are full of bullshit. And hey, I trust foxnews.... to put a spin on stories of a certain flavor. Take that into account and you can learn a lot about what's going on in the world as well as how groups of people view it. And just because I used to hold CNN in high regard doesn't mean that they can't change their ways.
But the end-goal remains the discovery of what is true. Don't lose sight of that. If an absolute pile of scum and deluded bigotry and willful ignorance says something that's true, it doesn't stop being true. If you distrust someone, but verify what they said, that can be a very powerful learning experience. And we want that right? All those bigotted, hill-billy rural hicks prepping for the purge and societal collapse due to satanically influenced socialists... They don't trust us, but we want them to research and verify the facts. Right?
You're asking this out of ignorance. That's ok, it's curable. It hits me too how god-damn COMPLICATED things used to be back in the day.
But come on, trains to go a train-yard to get maintenance. This isn't some madmax scenario where they crawl under the hood while it's travelling to fix stuff. Although that'd be cool.... (I'm tentatively excited about that movie "Engine Heart".) And YES, my grandpa used to ride the caboose of UP trains with a flashlight. He was a glorified back-up blinking light. That's it. They used to employ people for this.
Not to burst your bubble or anything, but Venezuela is democratic. There are a bunch of examples of good socialist democracies, but you can't ignore the bad one. Things did not go well for Venezuela depending upon their oil income and reducing the work-week.
Slashdot Mirror
that argument, that if you're not paying that somehow we can't care about you,
No no no Zucky boy, that's not the argument. We know you most assuredly care about us... but only to the extent that we are the product. Don't pretend you don't know the quote. Reframing the issue like you tried to do isn't going to earn you any points here. You care about users, but you care a LOT more about customers.
What you do is connect people.... to advertisers.
In a shocking discovery today, scientists have confirmed that the sun is flat and simply rotates to face Earth.
Local Flat-Sun advocate commented "Of course it's flat, anyone can see that plain as day" before attempting to thrash our reporter with his white cane.
So? I don't think they even care what their "fanbase" does. Because their fanbase, core or otherwise, is not part of their business model.
Their core business model sells the access to and data of the masses (in aggregate) to advertisers and market analysis types. (and possibly those trying to sway elections. They have the same business model as Facebook after all).
Apple probably cares what their "core fanbase" thinks, and possibly what they do. But that's because Apple is essentially monetizing fashion in the tech industry. And keeping Apple products as the "hip new thing" year after year is an important business function so they can keep cranking out overpriced rounded corners. But I'd say they probably just assume their core fanbase will of course buy Apple and doing otherwise is unthinkable. It'd be like NOT buying ugg boots and spiced guaciochino free-range-soy latte smoothies from Starbucks. They're locked in. It's cultural identity at this point. Apple probably cares more about what their fringe fanbase is thinking of buying. "Swing voters" if you will. The real people who steer fashion and determine what is hip to the sheeple. You know, the sort that market analysis and advertiser types are trying to find: Impressionable douchbags with money to burn.
Sorry, "tech fashion" makes my cynicism go into overdrive.
"have lost some or most of their functions" the key word there is "some". If once fertile virgin soil now requires amendments in order to be productive, that's a lost function.
Well congrats for pointing out the weasel word that let's them make spurious claims while remaining technically true. But it doesn't change the fact that this is fear-mongering bullshit.
Put another way 75% of Earth is no longer pristine.
I don't want my dead fingers to be more useful to the cops than my living fingers. That's a bad-mojo sort of incentive brewing right there.
Justice Department officials believe that these "mechanisms allowing access to the data" exist without weakening the devices' security against hacking.
Utter fucking bullshit. Because "Allowing access" is the bloody fucking definition of "weakening security". oh oh, but they claim "Against hacking". What they're trotting out is a system called "Symphony". It stores a copy of the keys. You want to send a secure message, you have to let symphony be able to read it. And everyone promises that these keys will only ever be read by police with a warrant. The vital question is "What if the symphony database gets hacked?" A whole hell of a lot of trading with insider knowledge could take place without anyone knowing and those with the knowledge could get super-bloody rich. Hell, it might be happening right now. How would we even know?
But these shmucks are at least thinking one step ahead of that:
The idea is that when devices encrypt themselves, they would generate a special access key that could unlock their data without the owner’s passcode. This electronic key would be stored on the device itself, inside part of its hard drive that would be separately encrypted — so that only the manufacturer, in response to a court order, could open it.
Then the question simply becomes: "What if someone at the manufacturer loses, sells, or mishandles these MASTER-KEYS to the BACKDOOR?" This isn't even bank-run organizations or super-secret three-letter-agencies being trusted to secure these things. This is Apple and Facebook and Sony and Huawei. Do you trust them to handle the secrets of your senators?
FURTHERMORE, this is completely useless as anyone with 2 braincells that doesn't want the justice department to have a backdoor, will simply NOT USE these services. The only way this will help catch the people we want caught is if they OUTLAW any alternative. Somehow on a world-wide level. Ha, good luck with that.
First off, why the hell are you directing traffic to a bullshit aggregator when the original paper is RIGHT THERE?
Second, wtf are they talking about? Ah: "examining cases where users of one community are mobilized by negative sentiment to comment in another community." ie, "Brigading" for anyone not in the know.
Third, The paper never mentions "Drama", they're exclusively talking about this sort of conflict that comes from brigading. IE, 1% of reddit communities do the brigading thing. (Because that's what they can track. Of course they can't track all drama in Reddit, it'd just be a list of all posts)
Fourth, The paper says 1% of communities, not 1% of users. Which is, kind of a DUH statement. There are topics which are political and those who are dedicated towards shifting other people's opinions, but most aren't. Nobody in ELI5 is going to be wing-nut extremist educationalist rousing the masses to explain, en-mass, complex topics in simple terms to other communities.
This is why you don't link to a bullshit opinion pieces re-interpreting a paper. Does slashdot even have editors anymore?
Yeah man, did you read what he was suggesting? That the "moral code" would go away and there would be "the total eradication of the opposition forces by any means necessary. For example, ... nukes and/or indiscriminately used nerve gas, biological agents etc.etc." If the people leading the military (or the underlings) tried that shit, you'd have rebellion within the military. Or you'd have half the military trying to put down the dogs.
Has there even ever been an armed rebellion in a real* democracy? I mean, there must have been, but I can't think of any off the top of my head. Even the whiskey rebellion was more of a protest. There wasn't any real thought of overthrowing the government.
*Terms and conditions apply
if things were literally at the stage where armed revolt was the only remaining recourse, these moral codes would no longer stand in the way.
That doesn't seem to be the case. The complaints about war-crimes and violations of the Geneva convention are still alive an well in the balklands, Sri-lanka, Syria, Sudan, and Libya. It's an axe over the neck of every general that's tempted to just kill them all and let god sort them out. There are exceptions where war-crimes are never prosecuted, but any sort of civil war in America would have a TON of cameras everywhere and our generals are more politicians than warriors.
Besides, they also need to worry about their OWN troops defecting to the rebellion. Tell an Iowa farm-boy to start dropping bombs on Des Moines indiscriminately and he's going to take his plane somewhere else. Which we saw happen in the Libyan civil war.
Without a foreign govt. (or two, or three) propping up the militia
I'm pretty sure we could get Trudeau to smuggle in some Tim Hortons for the war effort against the Trumpets. Honestly, who hasn't he pissed off internationally?
But most likely what would happen is Russia/China would roll in while the US is scuffling with itself and kick the shit out of both sides.
Naw, I doubt they even WANT to try and be an occupying force. More likely they'd take the pause in PAX AMERICANA to swallow up some of their neighbors. Like Georgia, Ukraine, and Taiwan.
Owning an AK wasn't illegal or grounds to be black-bagged in Iraq and Afghanistan. (I dunno about Vietnam).
I've yet to see anyone make a decent case of how guns would be a useful and/or effective means of remedying that.
see: Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam. The US military is really damn good at blowing stuff up but terrible at policing a nation that doesn't want them there. They've gotten better, for sure, but a bunch of pissed hicks with rifles ---That they are not allowed to indiscriminately exterminate wholesale--- have been able to sustain a conflict with the most powerful military in the world for a decade+. No, the idiots aren't going to storm the gates guns blazing. Well.... successfully anyway.
We are WAY WAY WAY far away from revolution. Too many people are well fed and content for that to be a serious concern. But if it comes to it, I wouldn't discount a sustained distributed sniper campaign. But personally, I think strong encryption should be protected under the 2nd amendment.
The best weapon against a whole lot of things is well informed populace. Education is THE long-term solution for nearly every problem. That includes things like war. If we could have just informed the populace of Germany and Russia about the truth of the matter, I doubt they would have been so hawkish. But there are unknowns in the world and people with fucked up beliefs. So as a safeguard against idiots, we have a military. In a similar vein, we have the 2nd amendment.
What about people advertising guns? Gun manufacturers don't buy advertising now?
Their business model is built around targeted marketing. They can't slap a "gun" tag on these videos and let advertisers pick and choose who they target? I'd be fine with Google simply stepping back and letting the free market drive the price and payout for various tags. Of course, that would mean more transparency for what happens money-wise behind the curtain.
I'm not so sure he's lying. There's a handful of ways that regulating social media could help out facebook. They'd have to pay to jump through the hoops to meet compliance, whatever that looks like..... but so would all the competition. Imagine you're 4 guys in college cooking up a facebook-killer like every damn fool was doing ~5 years ago. Now you're going to fail because you have zero hope of complying, or even affording to know if you comply, with the laws and regulation surrounding the industry. (Where as before you were going to fail because everyone liked facebook and they were the dominant player). With regulation, even if it sounds like it would make them behave better, it's a deathknell for competition. A barrier to entry. If facebook is legitimately worried about competition taking away their user-base (their product), then digging themselves in with some regulation makes sense.
Also I have zero faith in congress or the FCC having any clue how to regulation Tech, information, the Internet, or social media. He might just be bluffing. It's an easy bluff when you know the other guy has a single pair of jacks.
Naw, you're thinking the First Amendment. Free speech is an ideal that came out of the age of Enlightenment that predates our government.
But at least you add a little twist on this talking point. You're right, no one is forcing you to uphold ideals like democracy, republics, inalienable rights, and free speech. They're ideals. But if you don't support this sort of stuff you're not doing your civil duty and are generally a terrible person. Anti-social. The sort that tears down civilization and perverts it. I'm not a fan of this trend I'm seeing in my party just because some people are saying things they don't like. Don't they remember "the man" trying to shut down hippies protesting war? It's not just something for someone else to worry about.
This is most certainly censorship by Google, and I honestly think less of them for it. There's some good things to censor, but this isn't.
oh fuck. after all that I only now realized I glossed over the bit where, yes, they did use an embryo.
ok. ok, sorry about that.
Lemme rephrase. You can be pissed about this one all you want, but if you wanted the exact same procedure done, you wouldn't have to use any embryo.
I'm actually kinda curious why they didn't just sidestep that whole issue.
"Embryonic" here is a TYPE of stem cells, it's not describing their origin. They make embryonic stem cells from adult skin cells.
Here you go. They found a way to reprogram adult cells to act like embryonic stem cells. And that's what we want. We want the capabilities. They can induce pluripotent, meaning it can change into a wider selection of different types of cells.
Come on dude.... just... is it not possible to lay down your arms? Just declare victory and walk away. You didn't want a thing to happen and now it doesn't have to, there's no need. Do you really have to keep on with the lashing out and brow beating and calling people murderers?
You're not saving anyone here, by anyone's definition. Is the fight for the fight's sake really more important than:
Diseases and conditions where stem cell treatment is being investigated include:
Diabetes[75]
Rheumatoid arthritis[75]
Parkinson's disease[75]
Alzheimer's disease[75]
Osteoarthritis[75]
Stroke and traumatic brain injury repair[76]
Learning disability due to congenital disorder [77]
Spinal cord injury repair [78]
Heart infarction [79]
Anti-cancer treatments [80]
Baldness reversal[81]
Replace missing teeth [82]
Repair hearing [83]
Restore vision [84] and repair damage to the cornea[85]
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis [86]
Crohn's disease [87]
Wound healing [88]
Male infertility due to absence of spermatogonial stem cells [89]
Jesus fucking christ. As said elsewhere, they can make stem cells from SKIN CELLS and there's really no need to involve fetuses. This is old news. It's been around for a long time. We have real-world technological solutions to the problems that plague us, BUT NO, some people just can't bury a hatchet and will keep fighting battle well after the war was lost.
Of course for all the good done in the world with medical advancement, there's a few willfully ignorant asshats that make me wonder if humanity is worth saving. When can we engineer this problem away?
The search-space presented by all these repetitive arguments for why AI doesn't exist would bore an AI to SHED_TEARS.sh
I remember when stem cell therapy was first making the news and getting people excited. It's really nice to read when that sort of basic research pays off with applied medicine. It's seeing the sci-fi books come to you and makes the future look a little more bright.
Grab your partner dosie-do!
What's intelligence? Here we GO!
Also, from skin cells making the entire political debate kinda moot. Some people will never bury the hatchet. Once a term is associated with politics, it'll always live under a shadow. Kinda sucks.
but I don't think this presents a long term concern. If something is detrimental towards human survival, those traits which enable it or succumb to it will be selected against in the long run.
Detrimental towards human survival? Like travelling faster than 30mph? Because we routinely place ourselves in situations that evolution has had NO WAY of preparing us for. Natural selection operates on the scale of GENERATIONS. And thanks to low selective pressure, we're nearly identical to humans of 2000 years ago. While there was a period of seperation where some groups started drifting their own way, that's been muddied by a lot of out-breeding. In an evolutionary sense, sure, long-term we've really got no worries. Other than extinction. In the short term though, I'm plenty well worried about three generations of soul-crushing 50% unemployment. Thanks to technology. Not to be a luddite or anything, but they had legitimate qualm and they represent about the worst-case scenario. We've been through this once before, we don't want a repeat.
What a mature citizen of the digital age should be competent at is spotting and confirming the veracity of the news AND reconstructing the reputational path of the piece of information in question, evaluating the intentions of those who circulated it, and figuring out the agendas of those authorities that lent it credibility. BECAUSE doing so helps verify the truth of the matter, which is the ultimate goal.
There. Fixed it for her.
On the surface, I have to agree that a web of trust would be really handy when it comes to weeding out bullshit. And I think everyone does this passively to some extent. We all know a few news sources which are full of bullshit. And hey, I trust foxnews.... to put a spin on stories of a certain flavor. Take that into account and you can learn a lot about what's going on in the world as well as how groups of people view it. And just because I used to hold CNN in high regard doesn't mean that they can't change their ways.
But the end-goal remains the discovery of what is true. Don't lose sight of that. If an absolute pile of scum and deluded bigotry and willful ignorance says something that's true, it doesn't stop being true. If you distrust someone, but verify what they said, that can be a very powerful learning experience. And we want that right? All those bigotted, hill-billy rural hicks prepping for the purge and societal collapse due to satanically influenced socialists... They don't trust us, but we want them to research and verify the facts. Right?
What could they all possibly do?
You're asking this out of ignorance. That's ok, it's curable. It hits me too how god-damn COMPLICATED things used to be back in the day.
But come on, trains to go a train-yard to get maintenance. This isn't some madmax scenario where they crawl under the hood while it's travelling to fix stuff. Although that'd be cool.... (I'm tentatively excited about that movie "Engine Heart".) And YES, my grandpa used to ride the caboose of UP trains with a flashlight. He was a glorified back-up blinking light. That's it. They used to employ people for this.
Not to burst your bubble or anything, but Venezuela is democratic. There are a bunch of examples of good socialist democracies, but you can't ignore the bad one. Things did not go well for Venezuela depending upon their oil income and reducing the work-week.
(Oh hey, Chavez is dead.)