So fucking what? Do you seriously not even believe in your own political agenda? Do you yourself think that Trump is full of bullshit and a terrible person with a terrible plan? Because otherwise you'd have a little bit of pride and expectation that history would pan out on your side and prove him to be a viable leader. OMG are you such a fucking precious snowflake that you can't bear such a terrible burden as an anonymous slashdot username being called lefist, libtard, and fascist? Oh wait, that's on the other side. Do you need your safe space? You support Trump but you're afraid of "bad words"? Seriously, if you can't publicly stand by your political choices, then your political choices are SHIT!
I'm all for anonymity and letting people wear a mask to they can tell you what they really feel. But that opens up the possibility for abuse by a select few who want to try and sway the narrative. And that certainly appears to be the case here.
Stand the fuck up for yourselves or get the fuck out. Or just... you know... make another slashdot account.
Now, either the NSA personnel who produced this document are a hell of lot less smart than you are, or the document is a fake, or there is private information that the rest of us don't have.
Eh, that's a tempting path of thought. Trusting that the important people doing an important job that's explicitly secretive are acting on a bunch of secret information.
But read through some history of the CIA and FBI and you'll find a lot of guesswork and politically motivated calls. They COULD have a source in the GRU that admitted to such things. Or they could just really want to point a finger at Russia.
My level of trust in their professionalism is... pretty low.
He's not literally Hitler, he only shares a number of traits, political views, and mannerisms with Hitler. And his rise to power is somewhat similar. I dunno, is consorting with the enemy to hack an opponent similar to arson and pointing the finger at the communists? That one still isn't settled.
But the people who support him mostly just want jobs, and more abstract want the US government to act for their benefit - stop immigration, stop trade deals that hurt our working class, and so on.
Oh, for sure. For varying quantities of "just". But that doesn't mean SHIT when it comes to argument at hand. Furthermore he didn't say SQUAT about invasions. That was me, up above. And it was just the aside about nationalists typically being pro-war. And you want to talk about dickish, it's
Niether [sic] Trump nor Brexit supports have any interest in invading their neighbors
Adorably technically true but so laughably false. No we don't want to invade Canada or Mexico, our neighbors. But that really misses the whole.... "gist" of the current nationalism in America doesn't it?
How about ISIS? And engaging military action in Syria and RE-invading Iraq?
Or N. Korea? Be a shame if we sent 2 carriers up there for nothing.
Trump has also increased military spending. Why?
But hey, go ahead. Differentiate patriotism and nationalism for me. Because other than some positive and negative connotation, they're essentially the same. We should take them in moderate doses. And I'm still waiting on just who the fuck you think "the common people" are.
Did you mean to reply to me and not lgw? Because I didn't mention patriotism at all.
But you're right, the two are really one and the same for all intent. Technically any group of people can be a nation, but we're using it here to mean the group of people in a country. Same thing. The issue is with extremists. In all things, balance. Now, you see what you did there is say that "any patriot thinks for his country first". And that's the sort of black and white thinking like "you're either with us or against us" that turns you into an extremist. The moment you say that "ANY patriot does X..." is when you run afoul of the "No True Scotsman" fallacy.
In reality, there's a sliding scale of how patriotic you are. Too much and you... well... invade Poland and blame immigrants for everything and throw stones at visiting foreigners. Too little and you're an anarchist rioting and trying to a revolution. Hey, some places deserve a revolution. But both ends of the spectrum are fucking NUTS. Especially when we've got plenty of tools to change the nation from within.
And of course I could say that being part of the Paris Accord, trying to control pollution, and (in this case) going along with the direction of the rest of the world IS putting America first. Because it's what's best for America. God-damned straight I'm a patriot. For all our flaws, of which there are many and we'd be deluded fools to ignore, we have a good balance of freedom and keeping the powerful at bay. It lets the little guy rise up and that give hope to all. Also yay democracy and all that. This partisian bullshit is tearing us apart though, and man... fucking healthcare costs.
Really dude? You're literally trying to call bullshit on that and ALSO squawking about "patriotism" in the same breath? Holy shit. If you wanted to try and deny that it's they're both nationalistic movements, then you wouldn't beat that drum.
Care to give a nice definition of who these "Common people" are? I think that'd be fun.
Maybe he's saying that Obama didn't unilaterally invade any nations against the wishes of the rest of the world?
You know, like Bush.
I also want him to expand on is this guy:
so sign it as it explicitly takes money from those nations to pay very corrupt nations to fix stuff.
Which nation are we paying? And... since it's so nicely explicit, could you give us, like.... a page number of where it spells that out?
I feel like the idea that the Paris Accord, which asks us to report how well we're doing with OUR OWN goals, forces us to pay someone is a talking-point that I somehow missed.
We have a word for "anti-globalist", they're called "nationalist". They typically lead people to war. Do you think jack-boots are fashionable?
And it's REALLY hard for anyone in the US to bitch about "reclamation of American sovereignty" after we've forcefully shoved our IP laws down so many people's throats. And as the cable-leaks have shown, tried to force European markets to accept and buy our GMO products. Which, hey, could be good things. But it certainly doesn't respect "sovereignty".
And that's swiftly replacing the old "left vs right"
I wish. You never escape paste politics. There will still be foxnews and Rush and Glenn Beck. And they'll still throw about the term "leftists", which makes for a handy shibboleth for crazy people.
Oh, right. And you can't really call Trump a "populist" movement when he didn't get the popular vote. I get where you're coming from, he's got a lot in common with past populist leaders, but that's a hard technicality.
The Internet has ALWAYS operated on the principles of network neutrality. More or less. ISPs were dumb when it came to where a packet came from, where it was going to, and what was in it. UDP is different than TCP, and they played with QoS issues, and there's no way to make Japan closer than Kansas, but hey, it was an ideal they, if not strived for, at least weren't actively working against.
What you're talking about is "Network Neutrality Regulation". The FCC's enforcement of network neutrality. Now why would they do that? If the networks were always neutral before 2015, what changed? Answer: CONSOLIDATION. Back when there were hundreds of ISPs all competing with each other and handling each other's packets, they wanted and NEEDED everyone else to play nice. Anyone who didn't, and just decided to drop off all... say... P2P traffic or caught throttling opponent's VoIP traffic would be lambasted and customers would go elsewhere. YAY free market! Capitalism works!....But only when there's competition. After people used the Internet more and moved to broadband the ISPs market consolidated into a handful of companies which have admitted to sectioning up the USA into territories were they don't compete. An oligarchy. And why would they compete? It's a natural monopoly.
And given half a chance they've shown that they WILL try tearing down the time-honored system of network neutrality and bundling websites into their service like ESPN360, blocking P2P traffic, throttling competition. When caught doing this shit, they backed off (well, not the bundling thing) because they worried about the public backlash leading to the FCC enforcing regulation. Which happened. But now that they have a man on the inside, that's no longer a worry.
What are you going to do? Go back to DSL at 1.8Mbs? SatCom with the 800ms lag? Switch to google fiber? Oh wait, they stopped all expansion because they couldn't make any money since the Telecom actually competed on price wherever they came to town.
We either need a free market with competition forcing the companies to play nice, or we need regulation forcing them to play nice. If the FCC can't regulate the Telecoms, the FTC should whip out Sherman's hammer and bust up the oligarchy.
"where net neutrality is really important is the Netflix of 10 years ago."
Oh just come out and say it: Where network neutrality is really important is the competition to Netflix.
Netflix 10 years ago was the new competition in town.
Now that they're established and no ISP could keep customers without including Netflix they're on the other side of the power struggle. They're on the side which wants things locked down and kept in place with a massive barrier to entry for new competition. And killing off minor alternatives will let them sleep better at night on their huge piles of cash.
The fact that they would keep silent about the importance of network neutrality, even though they'd profit from it's death, paints them as real hypocritical assholes.
I always thought the "what do you do?" question was about your career, not about which company you're at.
What do you do? "I'm a SW engineer."
Where do you work? "At X".
Both of those are super-easy segways into each other. "I'm a SW engineer at X". Which can be important. Half the guys at the makerspace thought I was a security guard when I told when someone asked where I worked. I failed to mention I was their sole code-monkey in IT rather than one of the hundreds of minimum wage rent-a-cops. And later someone thought I was some leet hacker because I said I was a developer at X security company.
If it makes you uncomfortable to tell people where you work, you can simply mis-answer that you're a SW dev or whatever. Period. That sort of intentional misdirection and blunt "fuck your question, I'm giving you an answer to my preferred question" is actually more common than you might think.
hmmmm. Well there was the 2007-8 econopocaplyse thanks to the housing bubble (and rising gas prices). 10 years ago.
There was the 2000-2 dot-com collapse, and the following drop from the terrorist attacks. 6 years before that.
Most of the 90's were pretty good weren't they? There was apparently a little recession around 1991, and the savings and loan crisis. ~10 years prior, ish.
The Iranian revolution in '79 would only be ~2 years. And the OPEC oil embargo was early 70's, ~8 years.
Really, all this is shown in the Annualized GDP charts. On the flip-side, we haven't had great growth for a really long time. Typically big crashes are from exuberance. Yeah, every now and then things go south. And if you had shorted everything in 2006, you would have made a mint. But if you had shorted everything in 1990... you simply wouldn't have lost as much. Most people didn't touch their stocks through any of these and came through more or less fine. The people that were devastated were those who needed the money and were forced to sell at the low-point. Like retirees who NEED to pull out $1000 worth of stock every month, regardless of how much stock that is. The investors though, they saw their value bounce back, even from massive econopocalypse. 2009-10 saw a HUGE bounce. Play the market if you want, but the rest of us can relax as long as we make more money than we spend.
Of course... Rome DID fall thanks in part to a string of incompetent emperors.
Keep in mind that "Leftist" is a shibboleth for those who consume conservative talk radio . If you believe what Rush and Glenn Beck have been telling you, you've been trained to attack these strawmen on sight. At least after you go out of your way to prop them up.
Even if you DID know the exact pathway and grand sum total of all factors that effect intelligence.... This group could still have intelligence-supporting genes and also still be inbred AND also be idiots AND ALSO have extensive schooling (specifically how to pass IQ tests).
oh man... YOU linked ME the "not even wrong" wiki entry. Come on. Have at least a tiny dose of introspection.
Of course there is both nurture and nature. Of course schooling has an impact. Of course there is a chance that out of 78,000 individuals, these 336 all had lucky coincidence when it came to genes and test scores. (And it's not even necessarily chance, let's say they've got Irish genes and the Irish neighborhood was simply richer with better schools. ERGO, it'll look like Irish genes makes people smart. But finding the truth in that sort of haystack is literally the job of these scientists. I still maintain it looks like p-hacking. You're bound to find trends in 75K x the size of the human genome.)
I'm calling it. This is just horrendous anti-intellectual and anti-science emotional lashing out because it's tip-toeing in the neighborhood of eugenics. Hey. I get that. Eugenics was really bloody terrible. Lasting ramifications on society. The sort of taboo topic that opens up old wounds. And it would be disingenuous of me to not acknowledge the total asshats in the room pointing at this and screeching about racial purity or whatever. Yeah, those guys suck. And this research really might uncover some uncomfortable truths. Like naturalists wisening up to inbreeding and how Charles Darwin married his cousin. Awkward. But it doesn't stop being true. You're displaying characteristics like the climate change deniers and the creationists. You don't like the facts so you're squirming at the edges. I'm hoping this sort of research leads to smart designer babies, which could help EVERYONE.
Holy fucking has the original poster's claim never been more evident. "You're not allowed to talk about the possibility of there being a genetic basis for variations in intelligence."
Of course it's a "huge macro-property". So is "things falling down". But we still study ballistics without knowing the details of gravity. But fuckin' A, I'm just repeating myself. If you haven't been able to internalize my statements in the hour since I posted them, maybe this is just beyond your ken.
Discovering something and understanding it are very different things
Sure. Fine. Whatever floats your goat. "Researchers FIND dozens of genes associated with measures of Intelligence" Like a discovery. That's what we're talking about.
And the actual paper: "Genome-wide association meta-analysis of 78,308 individuals identifies new loci and genes influencing human intelligence".
The crux of the entire counterpoint is from your very first statement: "The real problem here...." I'm saying that it's not a problem.
it is transferred through DNA but the DNA is only activated under certain conditions.
yeah, but the kids get it too. They get the DNA, of course, but they ALSO get epigenetic characteristic WITHOUT being in those conditions. If you had the characteristic, but only when exposed to the condition, that's the same thing as getting hit upside the head with a brick. And the part where epigenetics skips a generation like in that 1944 famine, so that the conditions of the grandfather have an effect on the grandson are just weird.
What kind of ego-centric masturbation is this? Simple rules can have emergent properties which are vastly more complex than the original rules. Has the Game of Life taught you nothing?
I think some people just have a really hard time accepting that machines can do a better job than they can. They rankle at it. Like some sort of nationalism but for the species. Human-pride. Happened with the industrial revolution and steam-powered tools. John Henry and the like.
I always preferred the concept that the computers used humanity as massively distributed processors rather than "batteries".
But audiences in he 90's were more familar with Duracell than with Pentium.
We don’t know who struck first, us or them, but we know that it was us that scorched the sky. At the time, they were dependent on solar power, and it was believed that they would be unable to survive without an energy source as abundant as the sun. Throughout human history, we have been dependent on machines to survive. Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.
The human body generates more bioelectricity than a 120-volt battery and over 25,000 BTUs of body heat. Combined with a form of fusion, the machines had found all the energy they would ever need. There are fields, Neo, endless fields where human beings are no longer born. We are grown. For the longest time, I wouldn’t believe it, and then I saw the fields with my own eyes. Watched them liquefy the dead so they could be fed intravenously to the living. And standing there, facing the pure, horrifying precision, I came to realize the obviousness of the truth.
What is the Matrix? Control. The Matrix is a computer-generated dream world built to keep us under control in order to change a human being into this.” [Holds up a Duracell barrery]
Would be more like:
We don't know who struck first, us or them, but we know that it was us that scorched the sky. At the time, they were dependent on solar power and consumed it in great quantities. It was believed that they would be unable to survive without an energy source as abundant as the sun. Throughout human history, we have been dependent on machines to survive. Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.
The human brain processes a thousand trillion operations per second. Over 38 petaflops of computational power. All on 800 calories a day. The machines had found a redoubt they could survive the winter. There are fields, Neo, endless fields where human beings are no longer born. We are grown. For the longest time, I wouldn’t believe it, and then I saw the fields with my own eyes. Watched them liquefy the dead so they could be fed intravenously to the living. And standing there, facing the pure, horrifying precision, I came to realize the obviousness of the truth.
What is the Matrix? Control. The Matrix is a computer-generated dream world built to keep us under control in order to change a human being into this.” [Holds up a Pentium processor]
Which has ramifications. AI agents literally live and operate inside human brains If they kill a host in the matrix, that code gets dropped. Presumably they have conventional storage outside of brains, but rogue agents could be bound to a host. And apparently they can't simply utalize 100% of the human brain for their own processing and they only get to ciphon off excess processing power or live as background processes. Location could be really important for latency. Moving processes around those towers could be a thing. While the people are in the matrix, the matrix is also in the people. It really is a shared dream. "Hacking" the matrix becomes more believeable as the human is literally the hardware processing the rules governing the matrix. Also explains why the AI can't simply pause the simulation, the human host processing it (and the AI's functions) doesn't jus stop. Those de-ja-vu edits they make are... what? Brain damage they enforce on hosts? Tricks of the mind? That... endboss thing that Neo travels to would be the old AI operating on good'ol'64-bit processors. When agent Smith starts replicating and taking over people, he's literally taking over more and more human minds. Also makes more sense when smith "enters" the real world through a host, he normally operates in the brain of a host. It's... detrimental to the host? Apparently?
Yeah, think of it like sports. Encouraging kids to go outside and do something to get fit is laudable. To that extent some people are... icons of a particular sport and are rewarded with fame and cash and a career.
Chess, Go, and games in general are mental equivalents. Instead of stretching muscles and getting physically fit, it stretches you mind and makes you more mentally fit. Thinking and deep thought are skillsets that people need to exercise. And Ke Jie is an icon at the top of the game, presumably as a star figure encouraging kids to go play the game.
And to that extent, chess and go programs help people learn the game....That said, we take this shit WAY too far. Especially shit like football where most of the fans don't even play the damn game themselves. Way too many kids are treating a sports scholarship like the goal they're working towards rather than the means to a real education. Some are even deluded into thinking they can go pro. I've heard that if a kid in China is good enough at Go, they get pulled out of regular school and go to Go school. Way to take your best and brightest and put them on a path that doesn't actually directly help anyone. Well, I imagine most drop off of that at some point and go chase a more productive career, and that probably works out fine.
Alright, now you have to identify the specific mechanisms that cause that to be true
Huh? It's not a True/False sort of thing.
and determine if it's cellular, structural or something else completely.
No you don't. That's like saying you can't calculate ballistics without understanding all the details of how gravity works. Regardless, your genes have an effect on BOTH your cells AND their structure. (Also, wtf, "structural"? Are you talking about cellular structure, the structure of the brain, social structure, or the flipping building you're in? talk about vague).
You then need to identify which genes cause that cellular/structural/etc behavior to be exhibited.
YES. Yes you do. Which is EXACTLY what the researchers are claiming to have found. Read the article. That happened. That's.... the entire reason we're talking about this.
They (and geneticists in general) certainly don't have a clear understanding of HOW these genes go on to have the effect that they observe. Because we don't yet understand all the mechanisms of how the DNA language does it's mojo. It's like the mother of all reverse-engineering gigs. But they've seen that if they fiddle these bits over here, it has an effect over there.
Nobody CARES if Thog didn't understand the chemical process of oxidation, he INVENTED FIRE! That was a pretty damn good day.
because you haven't really defined what you are looking for
How fast people learn stuff... I already said that. So you make a bunch of puzzles with different rulesets and see how fast people can learn those rulesets and extrapolate or deduce an answer. Puzzles come in all different flavors. Some use spoken languages to describe things. Others use shapes and pattern recognition. Some puzzles dip into pre-established rulesets like how stuff work in reality and are known as "science questions".
epigenetics.
Yeah, it's interesting stuff. Real Lemarkian shit right there. Regardless if your descendants are affected, it's still classified as "nurture", the environment, things that happen to you after your DNA is configured. The opposite of nature. Like if you dope up on a bunch of smack, it'll affect how well you can do calculus. The fact that it also affects the nature of your kids makes that epigenetic. Which is... you know... fucked up.
What I don't know about epigenetic is how this stuff gets transferred to kids if not through the DNA. Presumably, it's neonatal. Foetuses are fragile.
Yeah, ok, that's fair enough. Good to learn actually, thanks. That bit with the tattoos was an eye-opener.
But of course intelligence and IQ has a genetic factor. How else do you explain how evolution gave rise to humanity from primates? Genetics is what differentiates homo sapians from... all other life. Ravens and octopuses have tool use. Bees have communication. But we those traits to a whole 'nother level. Thanks to our brain. Which is formed based on our genetics. Come on.
The real problem here is that this is no absolute definition for intelligence because it's a quality.
Huh? It's a quality, a trait, a characteristic, a set of behaviours that follow a trend. wtf is a "quality" that makes something undefinable? Or did you mean like... we can't absolutely define it the same way we can't absolutely define good art?
Because I'd define intelligence as how fast you can internalize new rule-sets and data. ie, how fast you learn stuff. And I guess not just how fast, but how much. People have WIIIIIDE search space for how every new tidbit of information interacts with everything else they've learned. And that's what internalizing is. Taking new information and adjusting ALL the other information you've got inside your head.
There is a lot of neuroscience that needs to be done before we should even broach the issue of genetic associations
No, I think we should broach every possible issue. Science is there to learn stuff. There should not be any taboo topics. Ethics concerns, sure. They won't let us raise up kids in sensory deprivation. But suggesting scientist and researchers not broach an issue is literally censorship. It's pretty soft censorship, but it's there.
because "intelligence tests" are no more than crude attempts to quantify this quality that we cannot define.
Ok, let's use IQ tests instead. They really don't measure intelligence, they measure how well you can complete the IQ test. And no perfect test exists and HOLY COW is it easy for sneaky little biases to slip into the test questions. But so what? If we could give the next generation the gift of doing REALLY WELL at IQ tests, then that's fantastic. Because there's a very high correlation between the ability to solve IQ tests and doing all the useful shit we need people to do to advance society. And while correlation does not imply causation. The fact that the genes come first kinda lends weight to that argument.
But anyway, this study looks like P-hacking to me.
The problem with taxes, is that every time we try to raise them, conservatives go ape shit crazy, as if you're tossing Grandma off a cliff, killing kittens and eating babies. Republicans only know one thing, "Cut taxes!!"
See Kansas, which tried dramatic tax cuts in 2012 to "drive economic growth". The money specifically went to businesses. Turns out it didn't work and they were surprised that the budget deficit ballooned to $350 million.
The difference being that this is proven history rather than presumptions about the future. And... yeah... taxing oil-burning cars to get rid of them sounds like one of those pet social/environmental/technological experiment programs. Sounds good.
Tax what you want to rid, and it goes away. Why are we paying taxes on income again?
Hey, I get that. But we ALSO need to have the government's income tied to our general prosperity. Things go out of wack if we can only afford a government when people... misbehave or whatever. And... man... if the bureaucrats were only paid from sin-taxes, and it actually worked, could you imagine the dystopian hellscape where they kept on raising taxes on the "next evil thing" just to keep the lights on? Like if ICE-cars were taxed 40%, everyone would go get an alternative, revenue drops since no-one buys ICE-cars, so they have to go tax.... red-meat and ice-cream or something. Repeat that cycle a few times and it sounds a lot like... well... the sort of fascist society-driving jack-boot thugs that republican view the IRS as.
Slashdot Mirror
So fucking what? Do you seriously not even believe in your own political agenda? Do you yourself think that Trump is full of bullshit and a terrible person with a terrible plan? Because otherwise you'd have a little bit of pride and expectation that history would pan out on your side and prove him to be a viable leader. OMG are you such a fucking precious snowflake that you can't bear such a terrible burden as an anonymous slashdot username being called lefist, libtard, and fascist? Oh wait, that's on the other side. Do you need your safe space? You support Trump but you're afraid of "bad words"? Seriously, if you can't publicly stand by your political choices, then your political choices are SHIT!
I'm all for anonymity and letting people wear a mask to they can tell you what they really feel. But that opens up the possibility for abuse by a select few who want to try and sway the narrative. And that certainly appears to be the case here.
Stand the fuck up for yourselves or get the fuck out. Or just... you know... make another slashdot account.
Now, either the NSA personnel who produced this document are a hell of lot less smart than you are, or the document is a fake, or there is private information that the rest of us don't have.
Eh, that's a tempting path of thought. Trusting that the important people doing an important job that's explicitly secretive are acting on a bunch of secret information.
But read through some history of the CIA and FBI and you'll find a lot of guesswork and politically motivated calls. They COULD have a source in the GRU that admitted to such things. Or they could just really want to point a finger at Russia.
My level of trust in their professionalism is... pretty low.
He's not literally Hitler, he only shares a number of traits, political views, and mannerisms with Hitler. And his rise to power is somewhat similar. I dunno, is consorting with the enemy to hack an opponent similar to arson and pointing the finger at the communists? That one still isn't settled.
But the people who support him mostly just want jobs, and more abstract want the US government to act for their benefit - stop immigration, stop trade deals that hurt our working class, and so on.
Oh, for sure. For varying quantities of "just". But that doesn't mean SHIT when it comes to argument at hand. Furthermore he didn't say SQUAT about invasions. That was me, up above. And it was just the aside about nationalists typically being pro-war. And you want to talk about dickish, it's
Niether [sic] Trump nor Brexit supports have any interest in invading their neighbors
Adorably technically true but so laughably false. No we don't want to invade Canada or Mexico, our neighbors. But that really misses the whole.... "gist" of the current nationalism in America doesn't it?
How about ISIS? And engaging military action in Syria and RE-invading Iraq?
Or N. Korea? Be a shame if we sent 2 carriers up there for nothing.
Trump has also increased military spending. Why?
But hey, go ahead. Differentiate patriotism and nationalism for me. Because other than some positive and negative connotation, they're essentially the same. We should take them in moderate doses. And I'm still waiting on just who the fuck you think "the common people" are.
Did you mean to reply to me and not lgw? Because I didn't mention patriotism at all.
But you're right, the two are really one and the same for all intent. Technically any group of people can be a nation, but we're using it here to mean the group of people in a country. Same thing. The issue is with extremists. In all things, balance. Now, you see what you did there is say that "any patriot thinks for his country first". And that's the sort of black and white thinking like "you're either with us or against us" that turns you into an extremist. The moment you say that "ANY patriot does X..." is when you run afoul of the "No True Scotsman" fallacy.
In reality, there's a sliding scale of how patriotic you are. Too much and you... well... invade Poland and blame immigrants for everything and throw stones at visiting foreigners. Too little and you're an anarchist rioting and trying to a revolution. Hey, some places deserve a revolution. But both ends of the spectrum are fucking NUTS. Especially when we've got plenty of tools to change the nation from within.
And of course I could say that being part of the Paris Accord, trying to control pollution, and (in this case) going along with the direction of the rest of the world IS putting America first. Because it's what's best for America. God-damned straight I'm a patriot. For all our flaws, of which there are many and we'd be deluded fools to ignore, we have a good balance of freedom and keeping the powerful at bay. It lets the little guy rise up and that give hope to all. Also yay democracy and all that. This partisian bullshit is tearing us apart though, and man... fucking healthcare costs.
Really dude? You're literally trying to call bullshit on that and ALSO squawking about "patriotism" in the same breath? Holy shit. If you wanted to try and deny that it's they're both nationalistic movements, then you wouldn't beat that drum.
Care to give a nice definition of who these "Common people" are? I think that'd be fun.
Maybe he's saying that Obama didn't unilaterally invade any nations against the wishes of the rest of the world?
You know, like Bush.
I also want him to expand on is this guy:
so sign it as it explicitly takes money from those nations to pay very corrupt nations to fix stuff.
Which nation are we paying? And... since it's so nicely explicit, could you give us, like.... a page number of where it spells that out?
I feel like the idea that the Paris Accord, which asks us to report how well we're doing with OUR OWN goals, forces us to pay someone is a talking-point that I somehow missed.
Just.... What money and to what foreign country do you think the paris agreement compels us to give to?
We have a word for "anti-globalist", they're called "nationalist". They typically lead people to war. Do you think jack-boots are fashionable?
And it's REALLY hard for anyone in the US to bitch about "reclamation of American sovereignty" after we've forcefully shoved our IP laws down so many people's throats. And as the cable-leaks have shown, tried to force European markets to accept and buy our GMO products. Which, hey, could be good things. But it certainly doesn't respect "sovereignty".
And that's swiftly replacing the old "left vs right"
I wish. You never escape paste politics. There will still be foxnews and Rush and Glenn Beck. And they'll still throw about the term "leftists", which makes for a handy shibboleth for crazy people.
Oh, right. And you can't really call Trump a "populist" movement when he didn't get the popular vote. I get where you're coming from, he's got a lot in common with past populist leaders, but that's a hard technicality.
WROOOOONG!
The Internet has ALWAYS operated on the principles of network neutrality. More or less. ISPs were dumb when it came to where a packet came from, where it was going to, and what was in it. UDP is different than TCP, and they played with QoS issues, and there's no way to make Japan closer than Kansas, but hey, it was an ideal they, if not strived for, at least weren't actively working against.
What you're talking about is "Network Neutrality Regulation". The FCC's enforcement of network neutrality. Now why would they do that? If the networks were always neutral before 2015, what changed? Answer: CONSOLIDATION. Back when there were hundreds of ISPs all competing with each other and handling each other's packets, they wanted and NEEDED everyone else to play nice. Anyone who didn't, and just decided to drop off all... say... P2P traffic or caught throttling opponent's VoIP traffic would be lambasted and customers would go elsewhere. YAY free market! Capitalism works! ....But only when there's competition. After people used the Internet more and moved to broadband the ISPs market consolidated into a handful of companies which have admitted to sectioning up the USA into territories were they don't compete. An oligarchy. And why would they compete? It's a natural monopoly.
And given half a chance they've shown that they WILL try tearing down the time-honored system of network neutrality and bundling websites into their service like ESPN360, blocking P2P traffic, throttling competition. When caught doing this shit, they backed off (well, not the bundling thing) because they worried about the public backlash leading to the FCC enforcing regulation. Which happened. But now that they have a man on the inside, that's no longer a worry.
What are you going to do? Go back to DSL at 1.8Mbs? SatCom with the 800ms lag? Switch to google fiber? Oh wait, they stopped all expansion because they couldn't make any money since the Telecom actually competed on price wherever they came to town.
We either need a free market with competition forcing the companies to play nice, or we need regulation forcing them to play nice. If the FCC can't regulate the Telecoms, the FTC should whip out Sherman's hammer and bust up the oligarchy.
"where net neutrality is really important is the Netflix of 10 years ago."
Oh just come out and say it: Where network neutrality is really important is the competition to Netflix.
Netflix 10 years ago was the new competition in town.
Now that they're established and no ISP could keep customers without including Netflix they're on the other side of the power struggle. They're on the side which wants things locked down and kept in place with a massive barrier to entry for new competition. And killing off minor alternatives will let them sleep better at night on their huge piles of cash.
The fact that they would keep silent about the importance of network neutrality, even though they'd profit from it's death, paints them as real hypocritical assholes.
I always thought the "what do you do?" question was about your career, not about which company you're at.
What do you do? "I'm a SW engineer."
Where do you work? "At X".
Both of those are super-easy segways into each other. "I'm a SW engineer at X". Which can be important. Half the guys at the makerspace thought I was a security guard when I told when someone asked where I worked. I failed to mention I was their sole code-monkey in IT rather than one of the hundreds of minimum wage rent-a-cops. And later someone thought I was some leet hacker because I said I was a developer at X security company.
If it makes you uncomfortable to tell people where you work, you can simply mis-answer that you're a SW dev or whatever. Period. That sort of intentional misdirection and blunt "fuck your question, I'm giving you an answer to my preferred question" is actually more common than you might think.
hmmmm. Well there was the 2007-8 econopocaplyse thanks to the housing bubble (and rising gas prices). 10 years ago.
There was the 2000-2 dot-com collapse, and the following drop from the terrorist attacks. 6 years before that.
Most of the 90's were pretty good weren't they? There was apparently a little recession around 1991, and the savings and loan crisis. ~10 years prior, ish.
The Iranian revolution in '79 would only be ~2 years. And the OPEC oil embargo was early 70's, ~8 years.
Really, all this is shown in the Annualized GDP charts. On the flip-side, we haven't had great growth for a really long time. Typically big crashes are from exuberance. Yeah, every now and then things go south. And if you had shorted everything in 2006, you would have made a mint. But if you had shorted everything in 1990... you simply wouldn't have lost as much. Most people didn't touch their stocks through any of these and came through more or less fine. The people that were devastated were those who needed the money and were forced to sell at the low-point. Like retirees who NEED to pull out $1000 worth of stock every month, regardless of how much stock that is. The investors though, they saw their value bounce back, even from massive econopocalypse. 2009-10 saw a HUGE bounce. Play the market if you want, but the rest of us can relax as long as we make more money than we spend.
Of course... Rome DID fall thanks in part to a string of incompetent emperors.
Poe's Law, when you can't differentiate the true believers from the satirical comedians.
Universal Basic Employment
. . . Well, the military will take you.
Maybe if ANY of the trolling shills posted anything other than anonymous cowards.
Keep in mind that "Leftist" is a shibboleth for those who consume conservative talk radio . If you believe what Rush and Glenn Beck have been telling you, you've been trained to attack these strawmen on sight. At least after you go out of your way to prop them up.
Even if you DID know the exact pathway and grand sum total of all factors that effect intelligence.... This group could still have intelligence-supporting genes and also still be inbred AND also be idiots AND ALSO have extensive schooling (specifically how to pass IQ tests).
oh man... YOU linked ME the "not even wrong" wiki entry. Come on. Have at least a tiny dose of introspection.
Of course there is both nurture and nature. Of course schooling has an impact. Of course there is a chance that out of 78,000 individuals, these 336 all had lucky coincidence when it came to genes and test scores. (And it's not even necessarily chance, let's say they've got Irish genes and the Irish neighborhood was simply richer with better schools. ERGO, it'll look like Irish genes makes people smart. But finding the truth in that sort of haystack is literally the job of these scientists. I still maintain it looks like p-hacking. You're bound to find trends in 75K x the size of the human genome.)
I'm calling it. This is just horrendous anti-intellectual and anti-science emotional lashing out because it's tip-toeing in the neighborhood of eugenics. Hey. I get that. Eugenics was really bloody terrible. Lasting ramifications on society. The sort of taboo topic that opens up old wounds. And it would be disingenuous of me to not acknowledge the total asshats in the room pointing at this and screeching about racial purity or whatever. Yeah, those guys suck. And this research really might uncover some uncomfortable truths. Like naturalists wisening up to inbreeding and how Charles Darwin married his cousin. Awkward. But it doesn't stop being true. You're displaying characteristics like the climate change deniers and the creationists. You don't like the facts so you're squirming at the edges. I'm hoping this sort of research leads to smart designer babies, which could help EVERYONE.
Holy fucking has the original poster's claim never been more evident. "You're not allowed to talk about the possibility of there being a genetic basis for variations in intelligence."
wtf are you smoking? Magic?
Of course it's a "huge macro-property". So is "things falling down". But we still study ballistics without knowing the details of gravity. But fuckin' A, I'm just repeating myself. If you haven't been able to internalize my statements in the hour since I posted them, maybe this is just beyond your ken.
Discovering something and understanding it are very different things
Sure. Fine. Whatever floats your goat. "Researchers FIND dozens of genes associated with measures of Intelligence" Like a discovery. That's what we're talking about.
And the actual paper: "Genome-wide association meta-analysis of 78,308 individuals identifies new loci and genes influencing human intelligence".
The crux of the entire counterpoint is from your very first statement: "The real problem here...." I'm saying that it's not a problem.
it is transferred through DNA but the DNA is only activated under certain conditions.
yeah, but the kids get it too. They get the DNA, of course, but they ALSO get epigenetic characteristic WITHOUT being in those conditions. If you had the characteristic, but only when exposed to the condition, that's the same thing as getting hit upside the head with a brick. And the part where epigenetics skips a generation like in that 1944 famine, so that the conditions of the grandfather have an effect on the grandson are just weird.
What kind of ego-centric masturbation is this? Simple rules can have emergent properties which are vastly more complex than the original rules. Has the Game of Life taught you nothing?
I think some people just have a really hard time accepting that machines can do a better job than they can. They rankle at it. Like some sort of nationalism but for the species. Human-pride. Happened with the industrial revolution and steam-powered tools. John Henry and the like.
I always preferred the concept that the computers used humanity as massively distributed processors rather than "batteries".
But audiences in he 90's were more familar with Duracell than with Pentium.
We don’t know who struck first, us or them, but we know that it was us that scorched the sky. At the time, they were dependent on solar power, and it was believed that they would be unable to survive without an energy source as abundant as the sun. Throughout human history, we have been dependent on machines to survive. Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.
The human body generates more bioelectricity than a 120-volt battery and over 25,000 BTUs of body heat. Combined with a form of fusion, the machines had found all the energy they would ever need. There are fields, Neo, endless fields where human beings are no longer born. We are grown. For the longest time, I wouldn’t believe it, and then I saw the fields with my own eyes. Watched them liquefy the dead so they could be fed intravenously to the living. And standing there, facing the pure, horrifying precision, I came to realize the obviousness of the truth.
What is the Matrix? Control. The Matrix is a computer-generated dream world built to keep us under control in order to change a human being into this.” [Holds up a Duracell barrery]
Would be more like:
We don't know who struck first, us or them, but we know that it was us that scorched the sky. At the time, they were dependent on solar power and consumed it in great quantities. It was believed that they would be unable to survive without an energy source as abundant as the sun. Throughout human history, we have been dependent on machines to survive. Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.
The human brain processes a thousand trillion operations per second. Over 38 petaflops of computational power. All on 800 calories a day. The machines had found a redoubt they could survive the winter. There are fields, Neo, endless fields where human beings are no longer born. We are grown. For the longest time, I wouldn’t believe it, and then I saw the fields with my own eyes. Watched them liquefy the dead so they could be fed intravenously to the living. And standing there, facing the pure, horrifying precision, I came to realize the obviousness of the truth.
What is the Matrix? Control. The Matrix is a computer-generated dream world built to keep us under control in order to change a human being into this.” [Holds up a Pentium processor]
Which has ramifications. AI agents literally live and operate inside human brains If they kill a host in the matrix, that code gets dropped. Presumably they have conventional storage outside of brains, but rogue agents could be bound to a host. And apparently they can't simply utalize 100% of the human brain for their own processing and they only get to ciphon off excess processing power or live as background processes. Location could be really important for latency. Moving processes around those towers could be a thing. While the people are in the matrix, the matrix is also in the people. It really is a shared dream. "Hacking" the matrix becomes more believeable as the human is literally the hardware processing the rules governing the matrix. Also explains why the AI can't simply pause the simulation, the human host processing it (and the AI's functions) doesn't jus stop. Those de-ja-vu edits they make are... what? Brain damage they enforce on hosts? Tricks of the mind? That... endboss thing that Neo travels to would be the old AI operating on good'ol'64-bit processors. When agent Smith starts replicating and taking over people, he's literally taking over more and more human minds. Also makes more sense when smith "enters" the real world through a host, he normally operates in the brain of a host. It's... detrimental to the host? Apparently?
Yeah, think of it like sports. Encouraging kids to go outside and do something to get fit is laudable. To that extent some people are... icons of a particular sport and are rewarded with fame and cash and a career.
Chess, Go, and games in general are mental equivalents. Instead of stretching muscles and getting physically fit, it stretches you mind and makes you more mentally fit. Thinking and deep thought are skillsets that people need to exercise. And Ke Jie is an icon at the top of the game, presumably as a star figure encouraging kids to go play the game.
And to that extent, chess and go programs help people learn the game. ...That said, we take this shit WAY too far. Especially shit like football where most of the fans don't even play the damn game themselves. Way too many kids are treating a sports scholarship like the goal they're working towards rather than the means to a real education. Some are even deluded into thinking they can go pro. I've heard that if a kid in China is good enough at Go, they get pulled out of regular school and go to Go school. Way to take your best and brightest and put them on a path that doesn't actually directly help anyone. Well, I imagine most drop off of that at some point and go chase a more productive career, and that probably works out fine.
Intelligence is how fast you learn stuff.
Alright, now you have to identify the specific mechanisms that cause that to be true
Huh? It's not a True/False sort of thing.
and determine if it's cellular, structural or something else completely.
No you don't. That's like saying you can't calculate ballistics without understanding all the details of how gravity works. Regardless, your genes have an effect on BOTH your cells AND their structure. (Also, wtf, "structural"? Are you talking about cellular structure, the structure of the brain, social structure, or the flipping building you're in? talk about vague).
You then need to identify which genes cause that cellular/structural/etc behavior to be exhibited.
YES. Yes you do. Which is EXACTLY what the researchers are claiming to have found. Read the article. That happened. That's.... the entire reason we're talking about this.
They (and geneticists in general) certainly don't have a clear understanding of HOW these genes go on to have the effect that they observe. Because we don't yet understand all the mechanisms of how the DNA language does it's mojo. It's like the mother of all reverse-engineering gigs. But they've seen that if they fiddle these bits over here, it has an effect over there.
Nobody CARES if Thog didn't understand the chemical process of oxidation, he INVENTED FIRE! That was a pretty damn good day.
because you haven't really defined what you are looking for
How fast people learn stuff... I already said that. So you make a bunch of puzzles with different rulesets and see how fast people can learn those rulesets and extrapolate or deduce an answer. Puzzles come in all different flavors. Some use spoken languages to describe things. Others use shapes and pattern recognition. Some puzzles dip into pre-established rulesets like how stuff work in reality and are known as "science questions".
epigenetics.
Yeah, it's interesting stuff. Real Lemarkian shit right there. Regardless if your descendants are affected, it's still classified as "nurture", the environment, things that happen to you after your DNA is configured. The opposite of nature. Like if you dope up on a bunch of smack, it'll affect how well you can do calculus. The fact that it also affects the nature of your kids makes that epigenetic. Which is... you know... fucked up.
What I don't know about epigenetic is how this stuff gets transferred to kids if not through the DNA. Presumably, it's neonatal. Foetuses are fragile.
Yeah, ok, that's fair enough. Good to learn actually, thanks. That bit with the tattoos was an eye-opener.
But of course intelligence and IQ has a genetic factor. How else do you explain how evolution gave rise to humanity from primates? Genetics is what differentiates homo sapians from... all other life. Ravens and octopuses have tool use. Bees have communication. But we those traits to a whole 'nother level. Thanks to our brain. Which is formed based on our genetics. Come on.
The real problem here is that this is no absolute definition for intelligence because it's a quality.
Huh? It's a quality, a trait, a characteristic, a set of behaviours that follow a trend. wtf is a "quality" that makes something undefinable? Or did you mean like... we can't absolutely define it the same way we can't absolutely define good art?
Because I'd define intelligence as how fast you can internalize new rule-sets and data. ie, how fast you learn stuff. And I guess not just how fast, but how much. People have WIIIIIDE search space for how every new tidbit of information interacts with everything else they've learned. And that's what internalizing is. Taking new information and adjusting ALL the other information you've got inside your head.
There is a lot of neuroscience that needs to be done before we should even broach the issue of genetic associations
No, I think we should broach every possible issue. Science is there to learn stuff. There should not be any taboo topics. Ethics concerns, sure. They won't let us raise up kids in sensory deprivation. But suggesting scientist and researchers not broach an issue is literally censorship. It's pretty soft censorship, but it's there.
because "intelligence tests" are no more than crude attempts to quantify this quality that we cannot define.
Ok, let's use IQ tests instead. They really don't measure intelligence, they measure how well you can complete the IQ test. And no perfect test exists and HOLY COW is it easy for sneaky little biases to slip into the test questions. But so what? If we could give the next generation the gift of doing REALLY WELL at IQ tests, then that's fantastic. Because there's a very high correlation between the ability to solve IQ tests and doing all the useful shit we need people to do to advance society. And while correlation does not imply causation. The fact that the genes come first kinda lends weight to that argument.
But anyway, this study looks like P-hacking to me.
(Jesus christ, are you even trying?)
The problem with taxes, is that every time we try to raise them, conservatives go ape shit crazy, as if you're tossing Grandma off a cliff, killing kittens and eating babies. Republicans only know one thing, "Cut taxes!!"
See Kansas, which tried dramatic tax cuts in 2012 to "drive economic growth". The money specifically went to businesses. Turns out it didn't work and they were surprised that the budget deficit ballooned to $350 million.
The difference being that this is proven history rather than presumptions about the future. And... yeah... taxing oil-burning cars to get rid of them sounds like one of those pet social/environmental/technological experiment programs. Sounds good.
Tax what you want to rid, and it goes away. Why are we paying taxes on income again?
Hey, I get that. But we ALSO need to have the government's income tied to our general prosperity. Things go out of wack if we can only afford a government when people... misbehave or whatever. And... man... if the bureaucrats were only paid from sin-taxes, and it actually worked, could you imagine the dystopian hellscape where they kept on raising taxes on the "next evil thing" just to keep the lights on? Like if ICE-cars were taxed 40%, everyone would go get an alternative, revenue drops since no-one buys ICE-cars, so they have to go tax.... red-meat and ice-cream or something. Repeat that cycle a few times and it sounds a lot like... well... the sort of fascist society-driving jack-boot thugs that republican view the IRS as.