Well you, quite correctly, pointed out that there are three options on the table:
You're assuming the binary solution set of "increase" and "decrease" instead of the trinary "increase", "static" and "decrease".
You originally decried the idea of increasing lifespans. And my postulating the inverse of your original statement drew derision from you. That kind of leaves "static" as your last fallback.
Or there's the possibility that you're just never truly happy.
Ah, in that case, the correct response would be along the lines of: "No, I like things the way they are now."
Which, glancing at the current trend, still doesn't seem like a grand idea. Perhaps if you take into account the hope of India and China becoming first-world nations and following the trend where their birth rate decline.
There have been some studies, and I'm sorry that I don't have a source on hand, that losing mental capacity is more a matter of not using it than natural degregation. Barring diseases (and a lot of diseases are pretty synonymous with your body falling apart) if you don't stop exercising your mind you'll stay mentally sharp. Too many people retire, get put in a home, and simply "kill time" all the while they rot. Look at cultures where the elderly are still needed and for lack of a better word, still work. People will still go senile when they have strokes, Alzheimer, and syphilis finally kicks in, but it doesn't mean that everyone that gets old gets stupid.
1) No the GP didn't make a particularly good point. It amounts to "oh noes, multiple things in the air! Oh the collisions!". And he throws in "drones" in there for some reason. It might have been a vaguely good point if he actually mentioned what his brother has said at the supposed collision between an airship and a drone, but decided to simply chuckle as his own unspoken joke instead.
2) Correct, the sarcasm is unwanted, and more importantly unwarranted, as there would be no "balls of flames". Specifically because the Aeroscraft (which is a horrible fucking name btw, it's like they let an 's' crawl out from their southern drawl mid sentence) is filled with helium, not hydrogen, and drones are typically smaller. And they don't currently carry babies. so wtf?
Given that they have things that take off vertically, and things that take off horizontally, I don't imagine it's all that crazy of an idea that airports could service airships as well.
You just have to look at the "solutions" people are proposing to see their worldview and political outlook. If the science didn't support their worldview, they'd look for some other way to justify it. A worldview (and we all have one) is self-justifying, self-validating, it-looks-like-a-duck-because-i'm-obsessed-with-ducks.
Wait, what? I'm sorry, but it looks like you're trying to turn the term "worldview" into "religion". And that' just not right. People can have their view of the world shattered. Traveling abroad often does that. Getting out of academia and having to work for a living often does that. There are plenty of things that don't initially fit my world view: People being Microsoft fanboys, people losing a lot of money on lotto, homicidal cults. Initially they just don't make sense, so we seek to explain them. Sometimes the answer is "because they're fucking stupid", and often there's a deeper reason for that stupidity. Other times there is literally something wrong with their head. Someone with a vastly different worldview would have a different explanation for why people like Microsoft ("Big corporations are respectable because they're so successful" [yeah, I heard that one from a friend]) or why murderers exist ("Satan touched them"), and that leads to radically different proposed solutions.
And then the "solution" will be a function of people's worldview.
Well, of course it will. If you think that the world revolves around money you're not going to propose a solution that hinges on goodwill and self-sacrifice. That'd be fucking stupid. Seriously, "worldview" is not "religion". Stop that. Just stop. We have words for this. If "religion" has too much baggage for your tastes, you can try ideology, philosophy, or make up your own -ism.
ok, what if we're facing AGW, what's the solution?
Well I'm for more nuclear. More solar and wind power too. And I don't think anyone is against hydro power. Specifically, that's to offset the effects of coal. And oil if we switch to more electrically powered transportation. Short term? We're going to have to dedicate money to disaster recovery for places not expecting that sort of weather and to shore up infrastructure not made for the new climate. Long term, and I mean super-long term, how about we get off of this rock? A space elevator would work wonders for that. How about we get hoping on that carbon nanotube production?
Wow, that'd be almost as bad as the existence of some sort of centralized computer controlled mechanism for directing traffic. You know, something with red and green lights. Oh wait, we have those. But yeah traffic lights are totally ripe for abuse. Imagine if someone could control those. They could certainly stop traffic or cause accidents. I wonder why it's not a rampant problem afflicting society.... oh wait. This isn't a cyberpunk novel. Most street lights run on dumb timers and don't have any input. Others (try) to sense the presence of traffic. More and more allow cops to send a signal to them to change their state in an ordered and controlled manner. It's like you can make a system that's plenty secure enough for the vast usage by the populace.
So what happens when a light has a communication error and the car ends up in a bad crash? who is at fault[?]
Uh.... wait.... When the stoplight, the piece of equipment installed by the city and responsible for the right of way on the road, has an error, like showing two green lights when one of them should be red, which causes two cars to crash into each other? That scenario? I imagine the city is at fault. You know, cause we depend on them not fucking up street lights.
Why is no one commenting on this?....ok, so apparently
"Our Cadillac also supports V2V and V2I communications," Rajkumar explains. This communication allows the SRX to connect with designed traffic lights and other vehicles that are equipped with the technology,
There are systems in place to help driverless cars. Neat. But I imagine that if they fuck that up, it'd be very similar to fucking up which light they turn on. And I imagine that's simple and direct enough that even the courts and juries could see that. Everyone is jumping on the legal issues surrounding driverless cars, but this isn't one of them. There's nothing new about this issue. The role of street lights are established. We know how they're supposed to work. When they lie to us, we are not responsible.
Seriously people, get your lawyeritis checked out because it's acting up. Remember when you were excited about the technology and not insurance and liability?
DAMN GOOD QUESTION! And a tough one to answer. And this is where the skeptics need to start barking at, not the fact that it's happening. Because there are indeed a disturbing number of crackpots that want to make everyone live in grass huts, or fire lasers off into space, or build giant solar reflectors or some shit. And you're right there: Aint' gonna happen.
Personally though: NUCLEAR! Also maybe start a fund to help relocate industries, alter infrastructures, and generally adapt to the changes. We already provide relief through FEMA and such, so that's already "planned for", but we should expect to have to pay more to it. And we should get it through our collective psyche that we don't want to build in certain places. That we shouldn't rebuild it in the same spot after it gets destroyed the first dozen times.
There's some serious concerns if the natural ecosystem isn't going to be able to adapt. I mean, I hope it's not a mass-extinction sort of scenario, but maybe seed vaults and the like aren't so crazy.
All that's responding to the change. As for reversing the trend.... uh....? I got nothing except nuclear power. Or how about we get our asses to space? It'd be nice if we humanity had redundancy when it comes to planets.
Actually actually actually, you specifically called out "these same people", presumably NOAA scientists that the article is linking to. While it was formed in the 1970's, NOAA had the sort of actual scientists that didn't support the "global cooling" theory. Sorry, your example is a school teacher who perpetrated what she saw as current science events as seen by media. Sadly, it was untrue. Similar to how a social science teacher today would talk about how drones are a threat to civilians and how they'll be banned some day.
Do you remember any teachers telling you that certain parts of your tongue had different taste buds? That the tip was for salty things, and the back was for bitter things? It's simply untrue. A mistranslation of a german text back in 1901 started it. It's been disproven multiple times, and yet I was taught it in school by my teacher around 1990. I'm sure it was "in the coursework". These sort of untruths simply have a life of their own.
Also, what personal attacks are you seeing right now? Because all I see is the one guy telling the GP to go fuck himself while posting a link to global cooling.... which actually points out the global cooling fallacy. It's actually a pretty good example of what we're talking about. Bit of a read though.
I can agree with your other points but "the amount of damage it caused" is really more a function of unwise building techniques. The fact that a hurricane was going to hit New York and cause damage and at least 10' of flooding was certain- it was just a question of when
Right, just a question of "is it going to get hit with a hurricane next year or next millennium?", "Are we going to have to have to rebuild the entire infrastructure every 5 years or is the mean time to storm of that scale 3 times the expected lifetime of all this equipment. It all comes down to a question of when. And when the answer to that questions shifts from 500 years to 5 years, you start to do things differently. The building techniques would be "unwise" if they expected that sort of storm with a reasonable frequency.
Take the sea-level projections. If it rises a meter that'll have some serious effects. On a geological timescale it's almost guaranteed. If it happens in the next 100 years... eh... If it happens next year, holy fuckin shit!
Uh, I'm a software engineer working in Iowa on avionics. Embedded hardware that's part of an OBOGS unit. It let's fighter pilots breath. I was born in Omaha Nebraska. I'm part of the local hackerspace, founded a fencing salle, and regularly go to a symphony. Crown Royal and Maker's Mark is about the cheapest whiskey I'll stomach. I prefer rock and techno. I work with Indians and Chinese (and a lot of old white guys). I am, in short, "from the city". In Iowa. Deal with it.
Damn straight you're burning karma. You know that little voice in your head telling you to post AC? That's your conscious reminding you that you're a dumbass.
Dude, chill. From a story-maker's perspective, ANY sort of evidence for convergent evolution is all they need to justify aliens being bipedal and have faces and things.
Secondly, why do you even assume that alien life would have DNA? It's just one method of storing build instructions. There are probably others.
Finally, and this is the main thrust of the story here, even though DNA is "chemical in origin" that doesn't make one damn bit of difference to, say, aerodynamics. If an ecosystem develops flight through evolution or if the Wright brothers strap some wings to their bikes, both want to generate lift, and reduce weight and drag. If a rat from around alpha centari developed flight, it would have some very similar qualities to the birds and planes of Earth. And I'd even go so far as to say that it'd have similar genetic coding instructions. That's harder to compare when the source code is in a different language, but even when it's Java vs C, you can point to a section and say that it helps the rat shit constantly to reduce weight whenever possible.
The argument is that there's a "perfect end-goal" that is, of course, quite similar to our own form because we're egotistical asshats like that and it's cheaper to put an actor in a monkey suit than pay for CGI. But if there's an optimal end-state for evolution on the whole, instead of specific functions like flight, swimming, eating burrowing mammals, etc. then you can argue that other races with entirely different evolutionary envrionment, code-base, and process, will all converge to something similar.
That's... certainly one way that a lot of people hope it goes. And, in theory, it can happen just like that. But, uh, historically it hasn't really been so. Oh, yeah, that's right, it HAS happened before. We're talking about technological revolutions which make the majority of the work able to be done by a few people. Remember that 80% of us use to do nothing but farm. Hard back-breaking labor. It's kind of surprising, but something as simple as rotating the crops made for more production, bottoming the price of food, causing a lot of people to move into the city to make a buck. And that swelling of the cities (and all prior events leading to it) is arguably a cause for the Renaissance. Good times. But it's not like everyone just kicked back and didn't do any work after they moved to the cities.
Another example is the industrial revolution. Weaving used to be a manual process and it took a lot of people with a specific skill to make fabric. In comes the automated loom and all those people are out of a job. Now... where did all those profits from cloth sales go? Did it feed the Mr Lud and his starving family? No, part of it went to the army to squash the Luddite riots. Just because there's a better way, better efficiency, with work being done thanks to the miracle of technology, doesn't mean that everyone benefits equally. Indeed, a lot of people just thrown to the curb while the wealthy get even richer. At some point there's riots. At some point there are revolutions.
Hence why things like the Gini coefficient are so important. Hence why we have a progressive tax code. Hence why rugged individualism isn't going to cut it in an age where everything is changing way faster than we're used to dealing with. We have to make it easy to pick yourself up again and go do something else. And we have to do so without making it too easy and tempting just to live on the dole the rest of your days.
It's a beautiful dream. One where all the work is done by machines and we ain't gotta work no more. But that big rock candy mountain is nothing more than a dream. And here in the real world, you're going to have to justify your existence. So when the auto-google-code'o'matic comes and puts all the programmers out of a job, we'll have to switch gears and learn how to do something else.
Uh, that argument is easier to shoot down than that: No the courts, police, and military do not enforce acceptance of US currency. You are not forced to accept US dollars as a form of payment. You can refuse to do business with someone. You can refuse to do business with someone unless they pay in goats or whatever.
The exception to that, however, is that the USD is legal tender, and is a valid form of paying off debts. You know, like one that the US government places on you. Like taxes and fines. You gotta pay that in USD. Probably. I dunno, maybe you could talk the IRS into accepting goats. I don't think they have to accept goats, but they might go for it.
The courts and such most certainly don't have control over the dollar... that, in theory, is the Fed, but even that is pretty questionable.
I work hard. I worry about retirement, about having kids. I can't AFFORD to spend "extra" to go green. I will do what is cheapest. If, in the long run, a 30 mpg car helps my pocketbook over a 50 mpg car, I'll get it. I make no apologies.
You worry about having kids. That's normal. Are you worrying about the cost of having kids or the costs that they might incur?
Because "in the long run" it's going to be awfully expensive when your children, say, get cancer, have to pay their Sorry-we-fucked-over-Java reparations, have to relocate away from the newly classified flood zones, have to ship in potable water, have to pay extra for bread because the wheat zone decided to move a few parallels north.
Those are REALLY expensive things that your kids might have to pay for. And collectively, if any of this climate change scaremongering is true, they're going to pay for it one way or another. It might even be you paying for it, if you live long enough or get unlucky. It's like an education. It might be expensive, but ignorance is usually more expensive.
If you were just looking out for yourself, and you didn't expect to live very long, your argument would be valid. But if you plan of having kids... well... it's time you started looking at the long term costs and realize that your pocketbook depends on larger issues just as much as it depends on how much you put in and take out. As sappy as it is, we're all in this together.
Uh, yes. Well, the value behind it at least. That $20USD is in a fiat currency. It's not worth anything other than what other's will trade for it. It has no intrinsic value. You value it as $20 because everyone else values it at $20.
That's... actually perfectly fine. It's not sad at all. That's just normal bragging. Ok, I guess it could be a little uncouth, but the alternative is an intentional FOR-PROFIT outfit of misdirection and lies. The sort of con-artist "in" that let's them pilfer the banks of naive and ignorant investors. It borders on organized criminal fraud. Bragging about your own company because you have something to profit from it isn't on the same level. It's almost expected.
No, the fact that they're getting paid to do it is the sad part. It's "Shilling".
Art and science. Both have an unlimited amount of effort that could be thrown at them. A lot of people don't have the sort of mental capacity or creativity to do meaningful or desirable work in those realms. But if you're looking for what to do with the masses you could do a lot worse than steering them into art and science.
Well the weather here is terrible for one. More importantly though, while we have a mass of geeks, I'm not sure we really have a critical mass that's required for "idea guys" to come in and tempt ill-content quality geeks to abandon everything at the shot for the big-time. Although there's some minor action around the universities because fresh grads haven't gotten a job yet and aren't tied down, per se. I mean, if I was shown a job offer for a startup with a good idea, I'm not sure I'd abandon my secure position for it. We have enough to start a few hackerspaces, but not quite enough to foster a startup culture.
And that's just it. The startup culture. Even now you have those people that flock to Silicon valley because they want to go make their million. That applies to idea guys looking for investors and makers, investors looking for the next big thing, and people with the actual skills to go make it happen. The downside to that startup culture is that you've got a WHOLE BOATLOAD of bullshit to deal with. The same sort of fame that attracts the money, ideas, and skills also attracts a wide range of con artists, delusional fanatics, assholes, douchbags, soulless profiteers, mercenaries, fakers, and a general corrupting influence of having to wade through that much bullshit. It's certainly not for everyone. The same way that being a quant-dev isn't for everyone. You know, people with souls. Nor is being a web-dev where the damn toolchain keeps changing. Nor is being a low-level bit-head that works on embedded devices where you have to implement atoi yet again. And security takes a certain breed of geek too.
But anyway, the startup culture takes a certain type, and while we have some of those guys around here, I don't think we have enough to attract the crazy shmucks with a half-baked idea nor enough to attract idiots with other people's money.
What we do have is cheaper land prices, cheaper power, some quality grads, a small group of tech-based employers with a talent pool, and we're not in California. Problem is, if you want to go cheap, why not go to the third-world?
Slashdot Mirror
Well goodness me, that's fascinating.
Do tell then, do you think it would be best if the average lifespan of humans were to decrease, remain more or less static, or increase?
Well you, quite correctly, pointed out that there are three options on the table:
You're assuming the binary solution set of "increase" and "decrease" instead of the trinary "increase", "static" and "decrease".
You originally decried the idea of increasing lifespans.
And my postulating the inverse of your original statement drew derision from you.
That kind of leaves "static" as your last fallback.
Or there's the possibility that you're just never truly happy.
Ah, in that case, the correct response would be along the lines of:
"No, I like things the way they are now."
Which, glancing at the current trend, still doesn't seem like a grand idea.
Perhaps if you take into account the hope of India and China becoming first-world nations and following the trend where their birth rate decline.
It's called "the inverse".
If A then B. So.... If !A then !B?
Come on dude...
There have been some studies, and I'm sorry that I don't have a source on hand, that losing mental capacity is more a matter of not using it than natural degregation. Barring diseases (and a lot of diseases are pretty synonymous with your body falling apart) if you don't stop exercising your mind you'll stay mentally sharp. Too many people retire, get put in a home, and simply "kill time" all the while they rot. Look at cultures where the elderly are still needed and for lack of a better word, still work. People will still go senile when they have strokes, Alzheimer, and syphilis finally kicks in, but it doesn't mean that everyone that gets old gets stupid.
So.... by that logic... are you suggesting we shorten the lifespan of the everyone? Does that seem like a good idea to you?
Is everyone off their meds?
1) No the GP didn't make a particularly good point. It amounts to "oh noes, multiple things in the air! Oh the collisions!". And he throws in "drones" in there for some reason. It might have been a vaguely good point if he actually mentioned what his brother has said at the supposed collision between an airship and a drone, but decided to simply chuckle as his own unspoken joke instead.
2) Correct, the sarcasm is unwanted, and more importantly unwarranted, as there would be no "balls of flames". Specifically because the Aeroscraft (which is a horrible fucking name btw, it's like they let an 's' crawl out from their southern drawl mid sentence) is filled with helium, not hydrogen, and drones are typically smaller. And they don't currently carry babies. so wtf?
Given that they have things that take off vertically, and things that take off horizontally, I don't imagine it's all that crazy of an idea that airports could service airships as well.
SKY TRUCKERS!!!
You just have to look at the "solutions" people are proposing to see their worldview and political outlook. If the science didn't support their worldview, they'd look for some other way to justify it. A worldview (and we all have one) is self-justifying, self-validating, it-looks-like-a-duck-because-i'm-obsessed-with-ducks.
Wait, what? I'm sorry, but it looks like you're trying to turn the term "worldview" into "religion". And that' just not right. People can have their view of the world shattered. Traveling abroad often does that. Getting out of academia and having to work for a living often does that. There are plenty of things that don't initially fit my world view: People being Microsoft fanboys, people losing a lot of money on lotto, homicidal cults. Initially they just don't make sense, so we seek to explain them. Sometimes the answer is "because they're fucking stupid", and often there's a deeper reason for that stupidity. Other times there is literally something wrong with their head. Someone with a vastly different worldview would have a different explanation for why people like Microsoft ("Big corporations are respectable because they're so successful" [yeah, I heard that one from a friend]) or why murderers exist ("Satan touched them"), and that leads to radically different proposed solutions.
And then the "solution" will be a function of people's worldview.
Well, of course it will. If you think that the world revolves around money you're not going to propose a solution that hinges on goodwill and self-sacrifice. That'd be fucking stupid. Seriously, "worldview" is not "religion". Stop that. Just stop. We have words for this. If "religion" has too much baggage for your tastes, you can try ideology, philosophy, or make up your own -ism.
ok, what if we're facing AGW, what's the solution?
Well I'm for more nuclear. More solar and wind power too. And I don't think anyone is against hydro power. Specifically, that's to offset the effects of coal. And oil if we switch to more electrically powered transportation. Short term? We're going to have to dedicate money to disaster recovery for places not expecting that sort of weather and to shore up infrastructure not made for the new climate. Long term, and I mean super-long term, how about we get off of this rock? A space elevator would work wonders for that. How about we get hoping on that carbon nanotube production?
Wow, that'd be almost as bad as the existence of some sort of centralized computer controlled mechanism for directing traffic. You know, something with red and green lights. Oh wait, we have those. But yeah traffic lights are totally ripe for abuse. Imagine if someone could control those. They could certainly stop traffic or cause accidents. I wonder why it's not a rampant problem afflicting society.... oh wait. This isn't a cyberpunk novel. Most street lights run on dumb timers and don't have any input. Others (try) to sense the presence of traffic. More and more allow cops to send a signal to them to change their state in an ordered and controlled manner. It's like you can make a system that's plenty secure enough for the vast usage by the populace.
So what happens when a light has a communication error and the car ends up in a bad crash? who is at fault[?]
Uh.... wait.... When the stoplight, the piece of equipment installed by the city and responsible for the right of way on the road, has an error, like showing two green lights when one of them should be red, which causes two cars to crash into each other? That scenario? I imagine the city is at fault. You know, cause we depend on them not fucking up street lights.
Why is no one commenting on this? ....ok, so apparently
"Our Cadillac also supports V2V and V2I communications," Rajkumar explains. This communication allows the SRX to connect with designed traffic lights and other vehicles that are equipped with the technology,
There are systems in place to help driverless cars. Neat. But I imagine that if they fuck that up, it'd be very similar to fucking up which light they turn on. And I imagine that's simple and direct enough that even the courts and juries could see that. Everyone is jumping on the legal issues surrounding driverless cars, but this isn't one of them. There's nothing new about this issue. The role of street lights are established. We know how they're supposed to work. When they lie to us, we are not responsible.
Seriously people, get your lawyeritis checked out because it's acting up. Remember when you were excited about the technology and not insurance and liability?
DAMN GOOD QUESTION! And a tough one to answer. And this is where the skeptics need to start barking at, not the fact that it's happening. Because there are indeed a disturbing number of crackpots that want to make everyone live in grass huts, or fire lasers off into space, or build giant solar reflectors or some shit. And you're right there: Aint' gonna happen.
Personally though: NUCLEAR! Also maybe start a fund to help relocate industries, alter infrastructures, and generally adapt to the changes. We already provide relief through FEMA and such, so that's already "planned for", but we should expect to have to pay more to it. And we should get it through our collective psyche that we don't want to build in certain places. That we shouldn't rebuild it in the same spot after it gets destroyed the first dozen times.
There's some serious concerns if the natural ecosystem isn't going to be able to adapt. I mean, I hope it's not a mass-extinction sort of scenario, but maybe seed vaults and the like aren't so crazy.
All that's responding to the change. As for reversing the trend.... uh....? I got nothing except nuclear power. Or how about we get our asses to space? It'd be nice if we humanity had redundancy when it comes to planets.
Actually actually actually, you specifically called out "these same people", presumably NOAA scientists that the article is linking to. While it was formed in the 1970's, NOAA had the sort of actual scientists that didn't support the "global cooling" theory. Sorry, your example is a school teacher who perpetrated what she saw as current science events as seen by media. Sadly, it was untrue. Similar to how a social science teacher today would talk about how drones are a threat to civilians and how they'll be banned some day.
Do you remember any teachers telling you that certain parts of your tongue had different taste buds? That the tip was for salty things, and the back was for bitter things? It's simply untrue. A mistranslation of a german text back in 1901 started it. It's been disproven multiple times, and yet I was taught it in school by my teacher around 1990. I'm sure it was "in the coursework". These sort of untruths simply have a life of their own.
Also, what personal attacks are you seeing right now? Because all I see is the one guy telling the GP to go fuck himself while posting a link to global cooling.... which actually points out the global cooling fallacy. It's actually a pretty good example of what we're talking about. Bit of a read though.
I can agree with your other points but "the amount of damage it caused" is really more a function of unwise building techniques. The fact that a hurricane was going to hit New York and cause damage and at least 10' of flooding was certain- it was just a question of when
Right, just a question of "is it going to get hit with a hurricane next year or next millennium?", "Are we going to have to have to rebuild the entire infrastructure every 5 years or is the mean time to storm of that scale 3 times the expected lifetime of all this equipment. It all comes down to a question of when. And when the answer to that questions shifts from 500 years to 5 years, you start to do things differently. The building techniques would be "unwise" if they expected that sort of storm with a reasonable frequency.
Take the sea-level projections. If it rises a meter that'll have some serious effects. On a geological timescale it's almost guaranteed. If it happens in the next 100 years... eh... If it happens next year, holy fuckin shit!
Uh, I'm a software engineer working in Iowa on avionics. Embedded hardware that's part of an OBOGS unit. It let's fighter pilots breath. I was born in Omaha Nebraska. I'm part of the local hackerspace, founded a fencing salle, and regularly go to a symphony. Crown Royal and Maker's Mark is about the cheapest whiskey I'll stomach. I prefer rock and techno. I work with Indians and Chinese (and a lot of old white guys). I am, in short, "from the city". In Iowa. Deal with it.
Damn straight you're burning karma. You know that little voice in your head telling you to post AC? That's your conscious reminding you that you're a dumbass.
Dude, chill. From a story-maker's perspective, ANY sort of evidence for convergent evolution is all they need to justify aliens being bipedal and have faces and things.
Secondly, why do you even assume that alien life would have DNA? It's just one method of storing build instructions. There are probably others.
Finally, and this is the main thrust of the story here, even though DNA is "chemical in origin" that doesn't make one damn bit of difference to, say, aerodynamics. If an ecosystem develops flight through evolution or if the Wright brothers strap some wings to their bikes, both want to generate lift, and reduce weight and drag. If a rat from around alpha centari developed flight, it would have some very similar qualities to the birds and planes of Earth. And I'd even go so far as to say that it'd have similar genetic coding instructions. That's harder to compare when the source code is in a different language, but even when it's Java vs C, you can point to a section and say that it helps the rat shit constantly to reduce weight whenever possible.
The argument is that there's a "perfect end-goal" that is, of course, quite similar to our own form because we're egotistical asshats like that and it's cheaper to put an actor in a monkey suit than pay for CGI. But if there's an optimal end-state for evolution on the whole, instead of specific functions like flight, swimming, eating burrowing mammals, etc. then you can argue that other races with entirely different evolutionary envrionment, code-base, and process, will all converge to something similar.
That's... certainly one way that a lot of people hope it goes. And, in theory, it can happen just like that. But, uh, historically it hasn't really been so. Oh, yeah, that's right, it HAS happened before. We're talking about technological revolutions which make the majority of the work able to be done by a few people. Remember that 80% of us use to do nothing but farm. Hard back-breaking labor. It's kind of surprising, but something as simple as rotating the crops made for more production, bottoming the price of food, causing a lot of people to move into the city to make a buck. And that swelling of the cities (and all prior events leading to it) is arguably a cause for the Renaissance. Good times. But it's not like everyone just kicked back and didn't do any work after they moved to the cities.
Another example is the industrial revolution. Weaving used to be a manual process and it took a lot of people with a specific skill to make fabric. In comes the automated loom and all those people are out of a job. Now... where did all those profits from cloth sales go? Did it feed the Mr Lud and his starving family? No, part of it went to the army to squash the Luddite riots. Just because there's a better way, better efficiency, with work being done thanks to the miracle of technology, doesn't mean that everyone benefits equally. Indeed, a lot of people just thrown to the curb while the wealthy get even richer. At some point there's riots. At some point there are revolutions.
Hence why things like the Gini coefficient are so important. Hence why we have a progressive tax code. Hence why rugged individualism isn't going to cut it in an age where everything is changing way faster than we're used to dealing with. We have to make it easy to pick yourself up again and go do something else. And we have to do so without making it too easy and tempting just to live on the dole the rest of your days.
It's a beautiful dream. One where all the work is done by machines and we ain't gotta work no more. But that big rock candy mountain is nothing more than a dream. And here in the real world, you're going to have to justify your existence. So when the auto-google-code'o'matic comes and puts all the programmers out of a job, we'll have to switch gears and learn how to do something else.
Uh, that argument is easier to shoot down than that: No the courts, police, and military do not enforce acceptance of US currency. You are not forced to accept US dollars as a form of payment. You can refuse to do business with someone. You can refuse to do business with someone unless they pay in goats or whatever.
The exception to that, however, is that the USD is legal tender, and is a valid form of paying off debts. You know, like one that the US government places on you. Like taxes and fines. You gotta pay that in USD. Probably. I dunno, maybe you could talk the IRS into accepting goats. I don't think they have to accept goats, but they might go for it.
The courts and such most certainly don't have control over the dollar... that, in theory, is the Fed, but even that is pretty questionable.
I work hard. I worry about retirement, about having kids. I can't AFFORD to spend "extra" to go green. I will do what is cheapest. If, in the long run, a 30 mpg car helps my pocketbook over a 50 mpg car, I'll get it. I make no apologies.
You worry about having kids. That's normal. Are you worrying about the cost of having kids or the costs that they might incur?
Because "in the long run" it's going to be awfully expensive when your children, say, get cancer, have to pay their Sorry-we-fucked-over-Java reparations, have to relocate away from the newly classified flood zones, have to ship in potable water, have to pay extra for bread because the wheat zone decided to move a few parallels north.
Those are REALLY expensive things that your kids might have to pay for. And collectively, if any of this climate change scaremongering is true, they're going to pay for it one way or another. It might even be you paying for it, if you live long enough or get unlucky. It's like an education. It might be expensive, but ignorance is usually more expensive.
If you were just looking out for yourself, and you didn't expect to live very long, your argument would be valid. But if you plan of having kids... well... it's time you started looking at the long term costs and realize that your pocketbook depends on larger issues just as much as it depends on how much you put in and take out. As sappy as it is, we're all in this together.
Uh, yes. Well, the value behind it at least. That $20USD is in a fiat currency. It's not worth anything other than what other's will trade for it. It has no intrinsic value. You value it as $20 because everyone else values it at $20.
Otherwise it's just a slip of paper.
That's... actually perfectly fine. It's not sad at all. That's just normal bragging. Ok, I guess it could be a little uncouth, but the alternative is an intentional FOR-PROFIT outfit of misdirection and lies. The sort of con-artist "in" that let's them pilfer the banks of naive and ignorant investors. It borders on organized criminal fraud. Bragging about your own company because you have something to profit from it isn't on the same level. It's almost expected.
No, the fact that they're getting paid to do it is the sad part. It's "Shilling".
Art and science. Both have an unlimited amount of effort that could be thrown at them. A lot of people don't have the sort of mental capacity or creativity to do meaningful or desirable work in those realms. But if you're looking for what to do with the masses you could do a lot worse than steering them into art and science.
I'm pretty sure people are employed to loudly name-drop companies in conversation at various Starbucks in Silicon Valley.
Well the weather here is terrible for one. More importantly though, while we have a mass of geeks, I'm not sure we really have a critical mass that's required for "idea guys" to come in and tempt ill-content quality geeks to abandon everything at the shot for the big-time. Although there's some minor action around the universities because fresh grads haven't gotten a job yet and aren't tied down, per se. I mean, if I was shown a job offer for a startup with a good idea, I'm not sure I'd abandon my secure position for it. We have enough to start a few hackerspaces, but not quite enough to foster a startup culture.
And that's just it. The startup culture. Even now you have those people that flock to Silicon valley because they want to go make their million. That applies to idea guys looking for investors and makers, investors looking for the next big thing, and people with the actual skills to go make it happen. The downside to that startup culture is that you've got a WHOLE BOATLOAD of bullshit to deal with. The same sort of fame that attracts the money, ideas, and skills also attracts a wide range of con artists, delusional fanatics, assholes, douchbags, soulless profiteers, mercenaries, fakers, and a general corrupting influence of having to wade through that much bullshit. It's certainly not for everyone. The same way that being a quant-dev isn't for everyone. You know, people with souls. Nor is being a web-dev where the damn toolchain keeps changing. Nor is being a low-level bit-head that works on embedded devices where you have to implement atoi yet again. And security takes a certain breed of geek too.
But anyway, the startup culture takes a certain type, and while we have some of those guys around here, I don't think we have enough to attract the crazy shmucks with a half-baked idea nor enough to attract idiots with other people's money.
What we do have is cheaper land prices, cheaper power, some quality grads, a small group of tech-based employers with a talent pool, and we're not in California. Problem is, if you want to go cheap, why not go to the third-world?
It means a lot to the people with a vote.