I wonder how much of the rise in Libertarianism in the last 50-odd years is the result of genuine interest in largely unfettered capitalism and tiny government and how much of it is a kind of way to latch onto a kind of political conservatism that allows for non-traditional personal behavior (pot smoking, sex, etc).
I'm sort of convinced that most people are into it for its contrarian appeal than as any sort of organized socio-political system, especially as one with any realistic chance of implementation.
I'd guess its way more complex than any of this. I'm sure she had a really good employment contract with a ton of conditions surrounding an involuntary termination of her contract -- large cash payouts, no non-disparagement, no forced mediation, and free to disclose any information not held under any specific non-disclosure contracts.
Her main leverage against involuntary termination, though, is that firing a corporate officer for negligence is an admission of corporate negligence and makes the corporation much easier to sue for damages.
So I'm sure she and her lawyer worked this out with Equifax and their lawyers and she got everything she had coming for involuntary termination and then some for agreeing to blanket non-disclosure and non-disparagement agreements. Nobody admits anything like liability, and as long as we're not admitting any liability someone else still has to prove there was any negligence involved.
It's certainly heretical to the doctrine of "Libertarianism" but I think there is a kind of neo-Libertarianism out there that generally aligns with traditional Libertarianism but rejects Libertarianism's reflexive and doctrinaire support for existing corporate power structures.
I think there's a notion in this neo-Libertarianism that too much corporate power is just as bad if not worse than too much government power. Democratically elected governments are at least nominally constrained by constitutions and civil rights protections, while corporations appear increasingly unconstrained, by either government or by the market forces which are supposed to constrain them.
I think these notions are what drive some Libertarian-leaning people to find Bernie appealing, despite his obviously socialistic policy goals.
And I think to a certain extent, people tire of the recursive logic of doctrinaire Libertarianism. Defending general corporate behavior under the guise of individual freedom and then rejecting criticism of specific corporate abuses which actually constrain individual freedom as being the result of government power and non-libertarian policies. "$Corporation should be free to do whatever it was. If we had real Libertarian government, $Corporation couldn't do that specific thing,"
There seems to be no room in Libertarianism to acknowledge the abusive levels of power for which concentrated economic wealth is capable of or any room to accept government regulation is likely the only way to mitigate them, at least in the real world we live in, which is unlikely to ever be organized under "real Libertarian" policies.
Will you let me know what sub to watch for the debate, or will it just make the front page? Or do I have to wait for the whining thread in r/conspiracy about how the mods conspired to kill the debate on CIA mind control music ruining internet security?
I think the credit reporting agencies are a special racket -- their customers are the lenders, lenders who stand to profit when they can charge the highest possible risk premium to borrowers.
The credit reporting agencies have a moral hazard to increase the incremental perceived risk of borrowers. It makes their risk assessments appear more accurate (lenders only care about borrowers whose incurred risks don't include a risk premium) and allows lenders to charge a higher risk premium to borrowers.
It's closed system where consumers have little recourse and where lenders and credit reporters can collude to their individual benefit.
I think the reason that nothing serious will come of this is because it only really affects personal finances.
Some portion of the affected 143M will be victims of credit fraud and their credit scores will decline as a result. They will then end up paying a risk premium to borrow money, when, in fact, they don't represent the actual level of risk they pay a premium for. It's actually an increased level of profit for lenders.
At the margins, though, I would expect *some* lenders and sellers of financed products to be concerned about this. If a large amount of fraud came out of this, they could suffer writeoffs and potentially reduced sales as already high-risk consumers were pushed out of credit markets. But mostly I would expect the people vulnerable to fraud to be those with credit/identity worth stealing.
Bottom line, consumers pay and some corner of the lending and sales market experiences added friction and a dip in sales.
First of all, I don't think that "isolationism" is necessarily the only alternative to "globalization", and while nationalism and isolationism may be compatible, I don't think globalization is necessarily exclusive of nationalism.
I'd also like some kind of working definition of what "globalism" even means. Does it mean just the free movement of goods and people across national borders, or does it mean more than that? And almost no one who claims to support "free movement" *really* supports truly unfettered movement of goods and people across borders.
Mostly the industrial advocates of "globalism" really mean selective free movement to their benefit -- imports of cheap labor, the ability to produce products abroad for import with no import duties and the barring of competitors, competitive products and the use of intellectual property law to guarantee national monopolies.
I don't know, but I'd guess liberal advocates of globalism are supportive of free human movement across borders as a kind of cultural pluralism, but usually people from that perspective are also willing to support economic restrictions on cross-border trade to promote labor rights or environmental concerns.
And that's just the first couple of flavors of "globalism" that come to mind, and both of them aren't exactly in alignment. One is not very selective on the human side, but likes some economic restrictions, and one is semi-selective about the human side (to the extent it supports their business goals) but also highly selective on the economic side (again, to their specific business goals).
I think you overstate "normalizing" when describing a subreddit subscription as "normalizing" as well as confusing cause and effect of fat hating. I'd wager the majority of those subscribers didn't visit the sub regularly and none of them had positive or neutral views of fat people -- they didn't become fat haters because they saw the sub.
If Reddit was comprised of some small number of subreddits, I could see where this would be a problem but the quantity of subs and their isolation makes this seem like much less of a problem. These people are still fat hating, they're just doing it in a slightly less visible manner.
Reliability increases in controlled maintenance conditions.
To me it seems like its a moral hazard to control both reliability and the repair channel. Since the vendor profits from repair exclusivity, they have a perverse incentive to decrease reliability because they profit from its repair.
If they can't control who fixes the units, poor reliability is likely to have its greatest impact on dealerships who do warranty repairs. Dealership reimbursement for warranty work is lower margin than non-warranty work, so dealers faced with large warranty work will be likely to push for reliability improvement because it pushes out non-warranty work and cuts their shop margin.
Designs with poor long-term reliability problems are more likely to be exposed by independent repair facilities who understand the reliability issues and aren't afraid to talk about them since they have no material incentive to mask them. This negative word of mouth is likely to create pressure on the brand to improve reliability.
All of this would be different if the product was sold with some kind of long-term controlled maintenance warranty, but there's still a moral hazard to cut corners on reliability because you can also cut warranty support resources but I would ordinarily expect that if that much effort was put into a total package they would be less inclined to do so.
Apple's closed ecosystem devices seem like a weird choice for this purpose. Apple are famously uncooperative about hardware and software functions they don't approve of and their support systems is highly oriented towards individual consumers.
Am I missing something about their flexibility in industrial markets? This mostly seems like the device being chosen because someone in management thinks the user interface is easy and their staff might be familiar with it, not that it's an otherwise good technical choice for its purpose.
I had exposure to a client who was using iPod touches as part of some shipping assembly line and it was nothing but problems.
But in a sub does overt anything mean much? You aren't likely to stumble across niche subs like that by accident. Hell, I still find useful normal subs I didn't know existed because finding subs by topic isn't all that easy on reddit, especially if the title and description don't contain the right key words.
I mentioned all the BLIS errors I got when I had the car in for something else and the mechanic said not to bother, it was probably working normally, as in not very well.
I think the audible warnings my wife's Acura gets for lane changes are way more useful than visual alerts on the mirrors (although I suppose both is even better).
I suppose some of the driving assistance stuff like lane warnings has helpful use cases, but maybe I overestimate the general public's ability to drive sanely, cell phone use, etc.
My 2007 Volvo has the crudest form of semi-autonomy, distance-sensing cruise control, and I have to tell you it's the one must-have feature I would look for in another car.
My system is pretty ancient technology wise, but it works in traffic down to 20 MPH and I use it all the time. Obviously I'm still driving and have to pay attention, but it really does make driving a lot simpler, especially in slow-and-go traffic.
I'm less impressed with the blind-spot system -- I get an orange light by the mirrors if the blind spot is occupied, but decades of driving instinct honed without it makes it mostly superfluous. My wife's Acura has a similar system but it gives an auditory beep, but still if you've had any experience driving without depending on a system like that you still check your blind spot manually.
I'm not sure the lane guidance features are really all that useful unless you're prone to dangerously sleep-deprived driving.
At the end of the day, until cars are physically redesigned around totally autonomous driving, allowing, say, seats that swivel sideways so you can use a laptop or something, we'll still be sitting in "the driving position" with a steering wheel in front of us, making it hard to be too distracted or do much else but supervise the driving.
I'm sure my idea is as fuzzy as its communication, but it's not the cultural homogenization per se, but the technological homogenization.
The Chinese or the Indians or the Arabs won't develop those catalyst technologies because technologically they've totally adopted our technological paradigm. It's like a disease, once they've experienced it, there's no going back.
And of course it's impossible to imagine a world where major cultures were both living so isolated and developing in parallel enough to contribute significant ideas to each other. That world hasn't really existed for 1000-odd years.
In many ways, the West held the lead in science and technology and the rest of the world more or less caught up with it, by and large copying Western science and technology.
Does this imitation help or hurt innovation? Is it possible that without globalism, Chinese or Indians would have developed ideas that are considered present-day innovations in the West?
Historically it sort of seemed to work like that -- technological development within a given cultural paradigm seems to stagnate and then some contact is made with another culture and some foreign idea gets incorporated and innovation takes off.
It's like in a vacuum, a culture is blind to some concepts or ideas that aren't really revolutionary in some other culture, but when combined with the first culture's knowledge become a kind of catalyst.
Anyway, I wonder if the homogenization of the world has made this lost to humanity now. Everybody's operating more or less on these Western concepts of science and technology and we no longer have the external influence available. Where we used to have the external influences, we now just have copies of our own ideas. Sometimes even better copies than we made the first time around, but still just copies.
I'd like to see more analytics done to determine if there are "key critics" who are capable of swinging all the reviews generally positive or generally negative.
I kind of have the idea that movie reviews are kind of an echo chamber where after a few key critics establish a positive or negative trend, most of the other critics line up behind them.
I'd wager that a lot of movie criticism is just content generation on a content provider's industrial schedule -- quick movie summary, quick rehash of other critic opinons and a dash of their own opinion, and then on to the next release for the next column refresh.
I'd also guess that a lot of it is also completely fraudulent -- unoriginal, lacking in any criticism and not much more than a summary of the plot, more publicity than criticism.
I would imagine that the kinds of MBAs that define a business as a firm that continually grows its revenue and profits also define a career as a working path that leads to continuous advancement of position.
Trouble is, I don't think it's necessary to define either by those terms. I think there's a fair number of businesses that manage to stay mostly the same size with just enough growth to offset inflation and slowly adapt to changing circumstances.
I think a career could be the same way, especially in something like IT. If I had stayed in the job I took in 1993, I would have been in the same position (network manager) that I obtained in 2001 and would have seen Netware 3.1, 3.11, 4.1, Windows 2000, XP/2003, 7/2008, 8/2012, and now probably some 10/2016, in addition to a VMware, networked storage, and the ancillary changes in switching, VPNs, wireless, etc.
Why would that not have been "a career"? Why would it require a bunch of job changes and some relentless march into middle management?
For example, there is no way that anyone is going to own a boat that requires a week to charge using solar just to go from one side of a lake to another.
Check out the Greenline hybrid -- supposedly it can make about 4 knots solely off the solar panels covering the salon and somewhat faster (9 knots?) for a number of hours off battery alone. It also has a single diesel which uses some kind of clutch mechanism to run as a generator, turn the prop shaft or both. I'm guessing they run the generator as a motor when running off electric power.
I boat on an inland lake (as do millions of other Americans) and most of the time we don't go that far -- maybe 10 miles in a day, usually with a long period spent at anchor swimming and lounging, and our use pattern is really common. I think an electric setup or probably some kind of hybrid setup would totally be practical. The distances we have to travel don't make running at planing speeds very useful, it's like 4-5 times the fuel consumption for 2 times the speed improvement.
So I think for this category of boating, an all-electric boat would almost be practical. We have 30A shore power for charging and if the range on batteries was only 20 miles at about 9 knots (roughly hull speed without planing) it would be more than adequate. It'd probably make sense to have a generator option for battery charging or running in ICE-electric mode. Plus electric motors would make propulsion simpler, we could eliminate the need for a transmission to step down shaft speeds or provide reverse gearing.
Our boat has twin gasoline 350s, so there's a lot of space and weight bearing, probably more than enough to have a 10kw generator and batteries.
One thing that did seem semi-legitimate was wandering campus for hours and discovering interesting quirks of campus architecture.
The stupid concrete amphitheater built in the early 1970s that nobody ever used? As it turns out, it's a pretty perfect parabola and produces some interesting audio effects if you stand at the focus.
There were other bits about campus buildings we had never noticed despite being in or around these buildings every day for classes.
I do think there's something in there about having the experience of transcendental enlightenment, even if the subject matter is silly. For the group of people I hung out with, it was often tied to something one of us had in a class, so I think having an emotional connection to ideas added something to the experience.
I've seen so many of these microdosing of LSD articles that I can't keep the fresh bullshit from the stale bullshit, but I'm mostly convinced that nobody has said its *necessary*, just that they felt it was "useful" for lack of a better word.
About the closest I've seen to someone advocating for it as a beneficial *therapy* was a severe depression sufferer who didn't get relief from the usual anti-depression drugs.
In the case of computer-type office work, I think most of this whole microdosing thing (and I'd throw in ADHD with it, too, for the most part) is that we've organized and rationalized work to about the general functional limits of human productivity. We're just not well made for sitting in cubicles doing highly focused tasks 50 hours a week, which is probably more like 100 hours a week if you add in off-work screen time. People are either not doing the work well, or they're getting it done but losing themselves to stress, depression and anxiety.
At least with microdoses of LSD they're not using something that's likely to be too likely to turn into a long term problem like amphetamines or opioids, at least for the usual definitions of microdoses I've seen used (just below perceptible side effects).
I don't get why some people have a moral bee in their bonnet about this kind of thing.
If its bogus, then these so-called creative types do worse, fail at their jobs and people not invested in the idea of taking LSD do better and replace them.
If its not bogus, then maybe they do better at their jobs and the only real outrage is we all don't have access to micro doses of LSD.
In either case, the argument for moral outrage doesn't seem to accomplish much. If LSD is hokum, then their failure is your moral justice. If they're right, though, your moral outrage isn't justified at all -- you're basically arguing people shouldn't take LSD because it's beneficial.
My guess is like most things, the truth is in the middle. Some people get some minor benefit and some people get some minor detraction from the experience, but power and authority being what they are, these same people get to decide what's success and what's failure, and they just define it as success.
If you want to be outraged about something, be outraged at that -- that people who do the judging are also the ones that judge themselves and set the standard, too.
At to the main point, no. Acid doesn't give you 'profound' thoughts. It lowers the standard for 'profound' until stupid ideas seem profound to you. Write your profound insights down, so you won't forget, read them when you're sober. You'll just shake your head.
Can confirm. Experienced transcendental levels of profundity after hours of in-depth conversation. A group of us were convinced that we had obtained some new level of understanding which we had all managed to forget somehow.
A portable cassette recorder was obtained for the next session, and a recording made.
Upon playback, 4 fools were heard laughing and talking over each other saying "Yes! That's it! It *all* makes sense." Absolutely nothing profound was discovered.
The last time I opened a bank account, they asked for two forms of identification, a driver's license "and something else that could be verified."
I gave the bank guy behind the desk my concealed carry permit.
He looked at it funny and said "umm...I don't think this is something we can use."
I asked why not? In order to obtain it, I had to pass an extensive criminal background check. I can't use it to open a bank account, but I can use it to legally walk into a bank and sit in front of a banker with a loaded handgun? You'd prefer something that any criminal could easily obtain, like a bogus credit card?
He squirmed some more and I gave him a credit card.
I did the same thing when I got contacted by a job recruiter. They wanted me to come in for a pre-interview at the recruiter offices. This recruiter had mostly been recruiting for low-level temp staff and they gave everyone who came in a bunch of forms, including one that required your SSN and an agreement to conduct a credit check. I left that form blank.
The interview went well enough, I was interviewed by a local staffer and someone from HQ who was helping them ramp up their "high value employee" recruiting. They were positive enough and said they wanted to send me in for an in-person interview with the actual company hiring for the position. The local staffer looked through the forms and stopped at the credit check form.
"You didn't fill this out? Why?"
"Nobody has offered me a job, and I work in IT. I don't know how you keep track of this information nor do I feel like an initial interview is appropriate to provide your company with a blank check to dig in my credit history. If I am going to be offered the job, I am more than willing to submit to a credit check, but at this stage of the process I don't think it's worth extending my own personal identity theft risk."
The local staffer got really pissed, and said "I think you're hiding something, like bad debts or a criminal record, you need to sign this form." His mentor from HQ looked pretty shocked as his behavior, too, like "don't fuck this up".
I plopped down my concealed carry permit and said "Here's your proof. You don't get one of these without the sheriff's department doing an extensive criminal background check. This is a guarantee I don't have a criminal record, and I've already agreed to have my credit checked when I'm offered a job contingent on my credit."
The interview ended at that point and I never heard from them again.
It seems more and more obvious that the utility value for smartphones generally peaked some time ago - messaging/email, web, photos and apps to some degree anywhere you are seems like the primary utility function of the smartphone.
Yet companies like Apple are on this business treadmill where they think they have to re-invent it every year in order to keep selling phones. They mostly coasted on the fact that the next model improved some aspects -- CPU, storage, photo quality -- some noticeable increment, but they didn't really increase the basic utility value.
It really seems like they've hit the point where not even technical incremental improvement adds very much, and now they're needlessly altering the experience just to sell new phones.
Maybe this works with some segment of the population, but will people generally start rebelling against this? Most of these changes don't seem like a better experience, at best the *same* experience that requires re-learning, at worst a lesser experience.
Slashdot Mirror
What's the difference between being smart enough to comprehend the material and smart enough to get away with cheating?
Is it a different kind of intelligence or a question of morality?
I wonder how much of the rise in Libertarianism in the last 50-odd years is the result of genuine interest in largely unfettered capitalism and tiny government and how much of it is a kind of way to latch onto a kind of political conservatism that allows for non-traditional personal behavior (pot smoking, sex, etc).
I'm sort of convinced that most people are into it for its contrarian appeal than as any sort of organized socio-political system, especially as one with any realistic chance of implementation.
I'd guess its way more complex than any of this. I'm sure she had a really good employment contract with a ton of conditions surrounding an involuntary termination of her contract -- large cash payouts, no non-disparagement, no forced mediation, and free to disclose any information not held under any specific non-disclosure contracts.
Her main leverage against involuntary termination, though, is that firing a corporate officer for negligence is an admission of corporate negligence and makes the corporation much easier to sue for damages.
So I'm sure she and her lawyer worked this out with Equifax and their lawyers and she got everything she had coming for involuntary termination and then some for agreeing to blanket non-disclosure and non-disparagement agreements. Nobody admits anything like liability, and as long as we're not admitting any liability someone else still has to prove there was any negligence involved.
It's certainly heretical to the doctrine of "Libertarianism" but I think there is a kind of neo-Libertarianism out there that generally aligns with traditional Libertarianism but rejects Libertarianism's reflexive and doctrinaire support for existing corporate power structures.
I think there's a notion in this neo-Libertarianism that too much corporate power is just as bad if not worse than too much government power. Democratically elected governments are at least nominally constrained by constitutions and civil rights protections, while corporations appear increasingly unconstrained, by either government or by the market forces which are supposed to constrain them.
I think these notions are what drive some Libertarian-leaning people to find Bernie appealing, despite his obviously socialistic policy goals.
And I think to a certain extent, people tire of the recursive logic of doctrinaire Libertarianism. Defending general corporate behavior under the guise of individual freedom and then rejecting criticism of specific corporate abuses which actually constrain individual freedom as being the result of government power and non-libertarian policies. "$Corporation should be free to do whatever it was. If we had real Libertarian government, $Corporation couldn't do that specific thing,"
There seems to be no room in Libertarianism to acknowledge the abusive levels of power for which concentrated economic wealth is capable of or any room to accept government regulation is likely the only way to mitigate them, at least in the real world we live in, which is unlikely to ever be organized under "real Libertarian" policies.
Will you let me know what sub to watch for the debate, or will it just make the front page? Or do I have to wait for the whining thread in r/conspiracy about how the mods conspired to kill the debate on CIA mind control music ruining internet security?
I think the credit reporting agencies are a special racket -- their customers are the lenders, lenders who stand to profit when they can charge the highest possible risk premium to borrowers.
The credit reporting agencies have a moral hazard to increase the incremental perceived risk of borrowers. It makes their risk assessments appear more accurate (lenders only care about borrowers whose incurred risks don't include a risk premium) and allows lenders to charge a higher risk premium to borrowers.
It's closed system where consumers have little recourse and where lenders and credit reporters can collude to their individual benefit.
I think the reason that nothing serious will come of this is because it only really affects personal finances.
Some portion of the affected 143M will be victims of credit fraud and their credit scores will decline as a result. They will then end up paying a risk premium to borrow money, when, in fact, they don't represent the actual level of risk they pay a premium for. It's actually an increased level of profit for lenders.
At the margins, though, I would expect *some* lenders and sellers of financed products to be concerned about this. If a large amount of fraud came out of this, they could suffer writeoffs and potentially reduced sales as already high-risk consumers were pushed out of credit markets. But mostly I would expect the people vulnerable to fraud to be those with credit/identity worth stealing.
Bottom line, consumers pay and some corner of the lending and sales market experiences added friction and a dip in sales.
First of all, I don't think that "isolationism" is necessarily the only alternative to "globalization", and while nationalism and isolationism may be compatible, I don't think globalization is necessarily exclusive of nationalism.
I'd also like some kind of working definition of what "globalism" even means. Does it mean just the free movement of goods and people across national borders, or does it mean more than that? And almost no one who claims to support "free movement" *really* supports truly unfettered movement of goods and people across borders.
Mostly the industrial advocates of "globalism" really mean selective free movement to their benefit -- imports of cheap labor, the ability to produce products abroad for import with no import duties and the barring of competitors, competitive products and the use of intellectual property law to guarantee national monopolies.
I don't know, but I'd guess liberal advocates of globalism are supportive of free human movement across borders as a kind of cultural pluralism, but usually people from that perspective are also willing to support economic restrictions on cross-border trade to promote labor rights or environmental concerns.
And that's just the first couple of flavors of "globalism" that come to mind, and both of them aren't exactly in alignment. One is not very selective on the human side, but likes some economic restrictions, and one is semi-selective about the human side (to the extent it supports their business goals) but also highly selective on the economic side (again, to their specific business goals).
I think you overstate "normalizing" when describing a subreddit subscription as "normalizing" as well as confusing cause and effect of fat hating. I'd wager the majority of those subscribers didn't visit the sub regularly and none of them had positive or neutral views of fat people -- they didn't become fat haters because they saw the sub.
If Reddit was comprised of some small number of subreddits, I could see where this would be a problem but the quantity of subs and their isolation makes this seem like much less of a problem. These people are still fat hating, they're just doing it in a slightly less visible manner.
Reliability increases in controlled maintenance conditions.
To me it seems like its a moral hazard to control both reliability and the repair channel. Since the vendor profits from repair exclusivity, they have a perverse incentive to decrease reliability because they profit from its repair.
If they can't control who fixes the units, poor reliability is likely to have its greatest impact on dealerships who do warranty repairs. Dealership reimbursement for warranty work is lower margin than non-warranty work, so dealers faced with large warranty work will be likely to push for reliability improvement because it pushes out non-warranty work and cuts their shop margin.
Designs with poor long-term reliability problems are more likely to be exposed by independent repair facilities who understand the reliability issues and aren't afraid to talk about them since they have no material incentive to mask them. This negative word of mouth is likely to create pressure on the brand to improve reliability.
All of this would be different if the product was sold with some kind of long-term controlled maintenance warranty, but there's still a moral hazard to cut corners on reliability because you can also cut warranty support resources but I would ordinarily expect that if that much effort was put into a total package they would be less inclined to do so.
Apple's closed ecosystem devices seem like a weird choice for this purpose. Apple are famously uncooperative about hardware and software functions they don't approve of and their support systems is highly oriented towards individual consumers.
Am I missing something about their flexibility in industrial markets? This mostly seems like the device being chosen because someone in management thinks the user interface is easy and their staff might be familiar with it, not that it's an otherwise good technical choice for its purpose.
I had exposure to a client who was using iPod touches as part of some shipping assembly line and it was nothing but problems.
But in a sub does overt anything mean much? You aren't likely to stumble across niche subs like that by accident. Hell, I still find useful normal subs I didn't know existed because finding subs by topic isn't all that easy on reddit, especially if the title and description don't contain the right key words.
I mentioned all the BLIS errors I got when I had the car in for something else and the mechanic said not to bother, it was probably working normally, as in not very well.
I think the audible warnings my wife's Acura gets for lane changes are way more useful than visual alerts on the mirrors (although I suppose both is even better).
I suppose some of the driving assistance stuff like lane warnings has helpful use cases, but maybe I overestimate the general public's ability to drive sanely, cell phone use, etc.
My 2007 Volvo has the crudest form of semi-autonomy, distance-sensing cruise control, and I have to tell you it's the one must-have feature I would look for in another car.
My system is pretty ancient technology wise, but it works in traffic down to 20 MPH and I use it all the time. Obviously I'm still driving and have to pay attention, but it really does make driving a lot simpler, especially in slow-and-go traffic.
I'm less impressed with the blind-spot system -- I get an orange light by the mirrors if the blind spot is occupied, but decades of driving instinct honed without it makes it mostly superfluous. My wife's Acura has a similar system but it gives an auditory beep, but still if you've had any experience driving without depending on a system like that you still check your blind spot manually.
I'm not sure the lane guidance features are really all that useful unless you're prone to dangerously sleep-deprived driving.
At the end of the day, until cars are physically redesigned around totally autonomous driving, allowing, say, seats that swivel sideways so you can use a laptop or something, we'll still be sitting in "the driving position" with a steering wheel in front of us, making it hard to be too distracted or do much else but supervise the driving.
I'm sure my idea is as fuzzy as its communication, but it's not the cultural homogenization per se, but the technological homogenization.
The Chinese or the Indians or the Arabs won't develop those catalyst technologies because technologically they've totally adopted our technological paradigm. It's like a disease, once they've experienced it, there's no going back.
And of course it's impossible to imagine a world where major cultures were both living so isolated and developing in parallel enough to contribute significant ideas to each other. That world hasn't really existed for 1000-odd years.
In many ways, the West held the lead in science and technology and the rest of the world more or less caught up with it, by and large copying Western science and technology.
Does this imitation help or hurt innovation? Is it possible that without globalism, Chinese or Indians would have developed ideas that are considered present-day innovations in the West?
Historically it sort of seemed to work like that -- technological development within a given cultural paradigm seems to stagnate and then some contact is made with another culture and some foreign idea gets incorporated and innovation takes off.
It's like in a vacuum, a culture is blind to some concepts or ideas that aren't really revolutionary in some other culture, but when combined with the first culture's knowledge become a kind of catalyst.
Anyway, I wonder if the homogenization of the world has made this lost to humanity now. Everybody's operating more or less on these Western concepts of science and technology and we no longer have the external influence available. Where we used to have the external influences, we now just have copies of our own ideas. Sometimes even better copies than we made the first time around, but still just copies.
Who makes up the critics counted for RT scores?
I'd like to see more analytics done to determine if there are "key critics" who are capable of swinging all the reviews generally positive or generally negative.
I kind of have the idea that movie reviews are kind of an echo chamber where after a few key critics establish a positive or negative trend, most of the other critics line up behind them.
I'd wager that a lot of movie criticism is just content generation on a content provider's industrial schedule -- quick movie summary, quick rehash of other critic opinons and a dash of their own opinion, and then on to the next release for the next column refresh.
I'd also guess that a lot of it is also completely fraudulent -- unoriginal, lacking in any criticism and not much more than a summary of the plot, more publicity than criticism.
I would imagine that the kinds of MBAs that define a business as a firm that continually grows its revenue and profits also define a career as a working path that leads to continuous advancement of position.
Trouble is, I don't think it's necessary to define either by those terms. I think there's a fair number of businesses that manage to stay mostly the same size with just enough growth to offset inflation and slowly adapt to changing circumstances.
I think a career could be the same way, especially in something like IT. If I had stayed in the job I took in 1993, I would have been in the same position (network manager) that I obtained in 2001 and would have seen Netware 3.1, 3.11, 4.1, Windows 2000, XP/2003, 7/2008, 8/2012, and now probably some 10/2016, in addition to a VMware, networked storage, and the ancillary changes in switching, VPNs, wireless, etc.
Why would that not have been "a career"? Why would it require a bunch of job changes and some relentless march into middle management?
For example, there is no way that anyone is going to own a boat that requires a week to charge using solar just to go from one side of a lake to another.
Check out the Greenline hybrid -- supposedly it can make about 4 knots solely off the solar panels covering the salon and somewhat faster (9 knots?) for a number of hours off battery alone. It also has a single diesel which uses some kind of clutch mechanism to run as a generator, turn the prop shaft or both. I'm guessing they run the generator as a motor when running off electric power.
I boat on an inland lake (as do millions of other Americans) and most of the time we don't go that far -- maybe 10 miles in a day, usually with a long period spent at anchor swimming and lounging, and our use pattern is really common. I think an electric setup or probably some kind of hybrid setup would totally be practical. The distances we have to travel don't make running at planing speeds very useful, it's like 4-5 times the fuel consumption for 2 times the speed improvement.
So I think for this category of boating, an all-electric boat would almost be practical. We have 30A shore power for charging and if the range on batteries was only 20 miles at about 9 knots (roughly hull speed without planing) it would be more than adequate. It'd probably make sense to have a generator option for battery charging or running in ICE-electric mode. Plus electric motors would make propulsion simpler, we could eliminate the need for a transmission to step down shaft speeds or provide reverse gearing.
Our boat has twin gasoline 350s, so there's a lot of space and weight bearing, probably more than enough to have a 10kw generator and batteries.
One thing that did seem semi-legitimate was wandering campus for hours and discovering interesting quirks of campus architecture.
The stupid concrete amphitheater built in the early 1970s that nobody ever used? As it turns out, it's a pretty perfect parabola and produces some interesting audio effects if you stand at the focus.
There were other bits about campus buildings we had never noticed despite being in or around these buildings every day for classes.
I do think there's something in there about having the experience of transcendental enlightenment, even if the subject matter is silly. For the group of people I hung out with, it was often tied to something one of us had in a class, so I think having an emotional connection to ideas added something to the experience.
I've seen so many of these microdosing of LSD articles that I can't keep the fresh bullshit from the stale bullshit, but I'm mostly convinced that nobody has said its *necessary*, just that they felt it was "useful" for lack of a better word.
About the closest I've seen to someone advocating for it as a beneficial *therapy* was a severe depression sufferer who didn't get relief from the usual anti-depression drugs.
In the case of computer-type office work, I think most of this whole microdosing thing (and I'd throw in ADHD with it, too, for the most part) is that we've organized and rationalized work to about the general functional limits of human productivity. We're just not well made for sitting in cubicles doing highly focused tasks 50 hours a week, which is probably more like 100 hours a week if you add in off-work screen time. People are either not doing the work well, or they're getting it done but losing themselves to stress, depression and anxiety.
At least with microdoses of LSD they're not using something that's likely to be too likely to turn into a long term problem like amphetamines or opioids, at least for the usual definitions of microdoses I've seen used (just below perceptible side effects).
As opposed to promoting other licit drugs?
I don't get why some people have a moral bee in their bonnet about this kind of thing.
If its bogus, then these so-called creative types do worse, fail at their jobs and people not invested in the idea of taking LSD do better and replace them.
If its not bogus, then maybe they do better at their jobs and the only real outrage is we all don't have access to micro doses of LSD.
In either case, the argument for moral outrage doesn't seem to accomplish much. If LSD is hokum, then their failure is your moral justice. If they're right, though, your moral outrage isn't justified at all -- you're basically arguing people shouldn't take LSD because it's beneficial.
My guess is like most things, the truth is in the middle. Some people get some minor benefit and some people get some minor detraction from the experience, but power and authority being what they are, these same people get to decide what's success and what's failure, and they just define it as success.
If you want to be outraged about something, be outraged at that -- that people who do the judging are also the ones that judge themselves and set the standard, too.
At to the main point, no. Acid doesn't give you 'profound' thoughts. It lowers the standard for 'profound' until stupid ideas seem profound to you. Write your profound insights down, so you won't forget, read them when you're sober. You'll just shake your head.
Can confirm. Experienced transcendental levels of profundity after hours of in-depth conversation. A group of us were convinced that we had obtained some new level of understanding which we had all managed to forget somehow.
A portable cassette recorder was obtained for the next session, and a recording made.
Upon playback, 4 fools were heard laughing and talking over each other saying "Yes! That's it! It *all* makes sense." Absolutely nothing profound was discovered.
The last time I opened a bank account, they asked for two forms of identification, a driver's license "and something else that could be verified."
I gave the bank guy behind the desk my concealed carry permit.
He looked at it funny and said "umm...I don't think this is something we can use."
I asked why not? In order to obtain it, I had to pass an extensive criminal background check. I can't use it to open a bank account, but I can use it to legally walk into a bank and sit in front of a banker with a loaded handgun? You'd prefer something that any criminal could easily obtain, like a bogus credit card?
He squirmed some more and I gave him a credit card.
I did the same thing when I got contacted by a job recruiter. They wanted me to come in for a pre-interview at the recruiter offices. This recruiter had mostly been recruiting for low-level temp staff and they gave everyone who came in a bunch of forms, including one that required your SSN and an agreement to conduct a credit check. I left that form blank.
The interview went well enough, I was interviewed by a local staffer and someone from HQ who was helping them ramp up their "high value employee" recruiting. They were positive enough and said they wanted to send me in for an in-person interview with the actual company hiring for the position. The local staffer looked through the forms and stopped at the credit check form.
"You didn't fill this out? Why?"
"Nobody has offered me a job, and I work in IT. I don't know how you keep track of this information nor do I feel like an initial interview is appropriate to provide your company with a blank check to dig in my credit history. If I am going to be offered the job, I am more than willing to submit to a credit check, but at this stage of the process I don't think it's worth extending my own personal identity theft risk."
The local staffer got really pissed, and said "I think you're hiding something, like bad debts or a criminal record, you need to sign this form." His mentor from HQ looked pretty shocked as his behavior, too, like "don't fuck this up".
I plopped down my concealed carry permit and said "Here's your proof. You don't get one of these without the sheriff's department doing an extensive criminal background check. This is a guarantee I don't have a criminal record, and I've already agreed to have my credit checked when I'm offered a job contingent on my credit."
The interview ended at that point and I never heard from them again.
It seems more and more obvious that the utility value for smartphones generally peaked some time ago - messaging/email, web, photos and apps to some degree anywhere you are seems like the primary utility function of the smartphone.
Yet companies like Apple are on this business treadmill where they think they have to re-invent it every year in order to keep selling phones. They mostly coasted on the fact that the next model improved some aspects -- CPU, storage, photo quality -- some noticeable increment, but they didn't really increase the basic utility value.
It really seems like they've hit the point where not even technical incremental improvement adds very much, and now they're needlessly altering the experience just to sell new phones.
Maybe this works with some segment of the population, but will people generally start rebelling against this? Most of these changes don't seem like a better experience, at best the *same* experience that requires re-learning, at worst a lesser experience.