Who cares about this? Bitcoin is crap, and right-wing "libertarians" just want to find some new scheme to destroy the republics they embrace only as long as they give bosses and landlords the kind of power they had during Monarchy, and if they don't get it they do everything they can to undermine and destroy the republics. They are a bunch of crooks and exploiters.
Use second life a lot, use more virtual systems and things to gauge distance. It really helps. Video games are using metric more and more and it's the first thing that has made me really conceptually shift from the imperial system to the metric one in a sort of innate way. I really like it.
We can still keep old measurements around for songs and poetry, just like old names for places.
How To Really Be An Old Geezer
With the aging Baby Boomers there are now more elderly people in America than ever before. It becomes more apparent that a segment of them
do not know how to age gracefully. Traditionally, this way of life was learned from extensive contact with and careful observation of the
previous generation of elders. In today's fast-paced world this is less and less viable. While not intended to be 100% comprehensive, this
document is a quick HOWTO reference to at least help today's old people get started. The following are the most important points, the
time-tested things you really MUST do in order to be an old person in the modern world.
1. Fuck the younger generations as much and as hard as you possibly can. This point is critical and cannot be overemphasized. Most other
points are related to this one. That's how key it really is. There is one great way to do that, better than all other ways combined:
Vote as a single homogeneous bloc. This is politically very powerful. Use that power to run up massive debts that you have absolutely
no intention of paying. That way, future generations can inherit them. You need to do this even though collectively, you are the single
wealthiest demographic group in existence.
Your attacks on Social Security are the best way to arrange this. Most of you have been lucky enough to be able to take personal
responsibility for your life as stipulated by Madison Avenue and in all the right wing news media sources and started saving for your own
retirement from a young age, and in your mind everyone else should have too, right? So what if people come into hard times, suffer from
mental and physical disabilities, and the like! Vote with the right-wing republican/or market-rule "libertarian" types and do everything you
can to undermine Social Security, social programs and mental health services so that nobody else can get any help and have a lifetime
of homelessness and suffering to look forward to. Remember, the only thing government is good for is being a big huge prison camp for
people who are unlucky or not cutthroat enough to get rich. Helping people? No way. Leave that to places like Canada, Denmark or Sweden.
Sure, they are your children and your grandchildren, but so what? Now that they've grown past early childhood they aren't so cute anymore
anyway. That makes it easy to treat them like you hate their guts even if you don't know you hate them. If you faithfully practice the points
outlined in this document, then soon any guilt you might feel over what you've left for them to inherit will melt away and be replaced by
an insatiable sense of entitlement. In the event this should fail, the constant coverage of the current pointless foreign war that the flower
of our youth is going off to fight will serve as an excellent distraction.
2. Run a homeowner's association. As a retiree, it's not like you have to work for a living anymore. You've got some time on your hands. What
better way to use it than to take your neighbors to court over such worthy matters as the difference between white paint and off-white paint? Those
bastards should have read and memorized their 100-page homeowner's covenant before daring to modify their own property. As an added bonus, any
time they spend in court and not at work means even less opportunity to pay off the debts you've left for them to inherit. Any monies they pay
as a result of losing the lawsuits serves the same goal, so it's a two-for-one!
3. Drive very slowly, particularly on one-lane roads where it's difficult or impossible to safely pass you. Every time you do this means one more
chance to make it hard for someone to get to work on time. That way, not only is a significant chunk of their paycheck taken from them to pay for
your retirement and your medical care, but as an added bonus you add insult to this injury by hindering them from getting to work in the first
place so they c
Nobody had any practical use for radio waves until James Clerk Maxwell developed his equations for describing their behavior (the behavior of photons). It's a similar case with the behavior of other subatomic particles. The research has to happen, and intellectual scientific curiosity has to be encouraged and funded.
Yes, there is an obvious bias of this article, and an obvious ulterior motive. It's an attack on free software, on open source software, and on the very idea of freedom and liberty for people who use computers, and it's cheerleading for right-wing market-rule policies. The person who posted this wants all programming and all software to only have value in terms of restrictions and profitability. They are no friend of linux, no friend of programmers, no friend of end users, and no friend of ours.
The illegal Mexican immigrants are actually technically being "imported" by the Republicans, because conservative right-wing capitalist policies (less regulations and social services, less ability to practice grass-roots politics, less liberty in the face of market rule) make Mexico less of a free country for its people, so they come here where conditions are better. And yes it could mean loss of jobs if it's actually used by fruit growing companies, but this could just backfire on the Republicans like you because the people will be less happy and poorer in the end due to lower employment.
Also if you get rid of the immigrant labor you'll have more people from your own country doing low wage jobs and more people likely to form unions who you can't throw out of the country if they go on strike. Nice try but your logic may be your undoing.
Thanks for perfectly illustrating why we are in this situation. "This is America!" is a meaningless phrase. You didn't do shit when they busted the unions. You didn't do shit when the easier jobs were shipped over there. You didn't do shit while the Congress continued to cut taxes for corporations so they could sell us out. You just sat there, with that smug look on your face, saying "Yeah boy! This is America! We believe in the Market, not in that damn Government interference. Why pay more for TV set? That's stupid, when we can all just put it on a credit card for half the price."
Do me a fucking solid favor. Go find the largest object you can imagine shoving up your ass, and then sit on it. Because it's a good primer on what the next thirty years is going to be like for you.
I couldn't have said it better myself. People like Nixon and Reagan used a dictatorship countries' slave labor to undermine the American labor movement and now it's going to come back at us.
I just watched the video about JediMind on the web, It's clearly a great product, but using that name was just absurd, and even though there is no direct copyright on the term, it is clear they should not have used it. KineticMind would have been a better name. It's just a shame they did something like that. The focus should be on how this product will help disabled people and how we can use brain signals to control devices, and not on a lawsuit over a trademark from a SciFi movie.
None of this actually matters. It doesn't matter if we "trust" the scientists or not. We know what is going on. We aren't stupid. The oil companies, tire companies, steel companies, etc. are out to maximize profits. They have covered the earth with roads, crushed the "small is beautiful" idea, used advertising to make us demand and buy more... we're heating up the earth by burning fossil fuels, but it makes businessmen money. It makes perfect sense for Conservatives and so-called "Libertarian" capitalist right-wingers to tell us all its a lie and just natural stuff or whatever for as long as possible. The longer they tell us its not really happening, or were not the cause, the longer the money rolls in. It is happening no matter what the scientists do or say, it is happening no matter how you look at the data, trust this or that person, think this or that. It is happening, and the humans who make money off it are acting perfectly "rational" in doing everything they can to deny it as long as possible. It's obvious as the nose on anyone face that this would happen. It doesn't matter what Al Gore or Rush Limbaugh or anyone else says. It's happening, we're causing it with our oil based economy, and all that really, really matters is when the average, ordinary people will say "enough". It looks like they won't, and we will keep going "Drill baby drill", and millions will be displaced, and millions will die. But it doesn't really matter, because life for most of us isn't real. it is just a dream. People in far off undemocratic or dictatorship countries make all our goods now. We don't feel the sting of our economy, of our products we use... we have no real unions to speak of, no real democratic or even libertarian (in the anarchist/socialist sense) power. There is just people playing these games, and us complaining about the weather which gets crazier all the time because of more and more moisture in the atmosphere.
How to Find Current NVIDIA Driver Version (on your computer) in Windows XP:
START menu >> Control Panel >> NVIDIA Control Panel >> Help Menu >> System Information
What the slashdot summery didn't mention was that the "individualists" were actually authoritarian capitalist/free market Ayn Rand types, and the "communitarians" were really left libertarian/progressive libertarian/libertarian socialist/Noam Chomsky oriented types.
The Rand types embrace authority and the destruction of the earth via pollution and the extinction of humanity via forced-technology driven by profit motive. The Chomsky types prefer grass roots, humanitarian, individualism-for-the-rest-of-us (and not just the elite) solutions. Why does this not surprise anyone?
Well, actually that isn't true. There is overwhelming proof that "all things in moderation" is true and a good rule to follow. You simply graph the use or intake of any prime motivator (sugar, internet/web, sex, humor, games) and you will see an area of the graph that represents enjoyment with low consequences... then you will see an area where it overflows into ruining a persons life because of not paying attention to other obligations, lack of exercise, body cant handle it because it's too much, other people hurt by ones actions and retaliating, missing all appointments, and so on.
However, in this case, there's no proof that beating World of Warcraft has negative consequences. All we have to go on is a South Park episode where idiotic characters were depicted as becoming grossly overweight after playing the game (as opposed to, say, watching TV or spending time at work or in Church)
This is fluff of the type I used to see in WIRED, PCWorld, etc years ago. It is corporate back-patting garbage, of little interest to nerds and real programmers and engineers, many of us still unemployed because the Republicans destroyed America's economy. This is made-up tripe... kings and commissars anointing themselves with badges and awards for pretending to care about those of us below them. The emperor has no clothes. The idea of real and tangible freedom still shines brighter and truer than these corporate priests.
Why don't the people from the future who keep screwing with the present at least leave behind some helpful graffiti?
Why did Higgs have to nickname it "The God Particle"? Didn't he have any idea of how silly that was? He could have figured out it was a bad idea because someone wrote a whole mystical book ("The Tao of Physics") just because someone named something in particle physics "The Eightfold Way" - it had nothing to do with mysticism, it was just a way of putting particles into patterns that insinuated some deeper structural possibilities. (like, say, being made of quarks, or having consistent characteristics like spin, charge, etc)
Besides, every time we finally see proof of some hypothetical "god particle", a new hypothetical one comes along.
You can't name scientific stuff after mystical or religious things without expecting people to behave kind of goofy.
Giving us what we want..what they were intended to do, in a short and simple way? Come on. Why should Symantec be any different from MTV? They will give us what we don't want while riding on their past claim to fame.
This was popularized by Vernor Vinge which is where I recalled reading about it. There are many reasons to celebrate Raymond Kurzweil. In my opinion, his is "work" in nutrition and his near-religion called futurology are not in those reasons. He has become a vocal proponent of a dream to become god-like. I do not share that dream and I wish him the best of luck in his endeavors. I just cringe every time I read of the "singularity being near" or the ability to live forever coming about. If it's going to happen, just sit back and let it happen. I feel he has done a great disservice to the field of artificial intelligence by promising unrealistic things in interviews to the lay person. Disappointment is a sure fire way to get yourself branded as a snake oil salesman religious nut.
What about Max T. O'Connor AKA "Max More"? I thought he was the one responsible for the futurist/transhumanist/singulatiry religion/wishful thinking, not to mention magazines like MONDO 2000, WIRED, and now H+. I never heard of Ray Kurzweil before, but I guess it's mostly because I prefer to read about actual science and not evangelism.
My experience with actual virtual reality and other technologies has led me to be somewhat less than hopefull about technologies based on corporate activity. There is an inherent corporate profit-motive that holds back and retards technological progress and affordability at a basic level. Most "extropians", "transhumanists", and such seem to also believe the whole religion is a vindication fro capitalism, which, if we just sit back and dont complain as our bosses order us around, will someday deliver the priomised land.
My friend in the army (stationed in Iraq) told me a couple months ago the way the insurgents were assassinating some soldiers was by using information from sites like myspace and facebook. I'm not surprised at all that this rule has been adopted.
The problem with stuff like this is it's intended to crush dissent against institutions like big business and governmental power, things which democracy and liberty in stuff like the Constitution of the United States were meant to keep the government stable and the people happy, because they would adjust their lives to the reality of their social and physical environment.
If Americans all know they are being watched all the time and more and more "odd" behavior (not simply disliking your boss) they will appear "normal" on the outside yet will be increasingly psychologically screwed up on the inside. Didn't the 50's tell us anything?
Human history has been a sort of narrative of the struggle between the people at large against the desire for small groups to amass control over their lives in order to extract wealth, etc.
If Americans are monitored and watched all the time, how will the USA be fundamentally different from Maoist China? It's obvious this sort of technology would be used by the ruling powers... business, religion, the military, the police... to ultimately control human beings even when the reason human beings are disobeying the authorities is because something is fundamentally wrong with the authorities way of thinking.
If you destroy the social contract (the unwritten rule that the ruling powers will only be allowed to rule so long as they actually serve the interests of the people who created the power in the first place as a means of managing more complicated things) you pave the way for a culture that produces nothing new, and gives birth to uninspired youth, and has no inoculation against forces that will eventually destroy that society because it isn't flexible in the face of chaotic nature at all.
Well, technically the star is already gone, if that's going to be visible any time soon. Though interestingly if we could reach it within our lifetimes we'd have to go back in time to do so and so it would still be there, pulsating like some giant infected slug, lol.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh you meant FROM Adam Sandler movies. :)
Oh really? What about the horrifying scene in "8 Crazy Nights" with the deer?
Don't worry, you'll get lots of nice storms once they strip-mine a few of those mountains.
Who cares about this? Bitcoin is crap, and right-wing "libertarians" just want to find some new scheme to destroy the republics they embrace only as long as they give bosses and landlords the kind of power they had during Monarchy, and if they don't get it they do everything they can to undermine and destroy the republics. They are a bunch of crooks and exploiters.
Use second life a lot, use more virtual systems and things to gauge distance. It really helps. Video games are using metric more and more and it's the first thing that has made me really conceptually shift from the imperial system to the metric one in a sort of innate way. I really like it.
We can still keep old measurements around for songs and poetry, just like old names for places.
How To Really Be An Old Geezer With the aging Baby Boomers there are now more elderly people in America than ever before. It becomes more apparent that a segment of them do not know how to age gracefully. Traditionally, this way of life was learned from extensive contact with and careful observation of the previous generation of elders. In today's fast-paced world this is less and less viable. While not intended to be 100% comprehensive, this document is a quick HOWTO reference to at least help today's old people get started. The following are the most important points, the time-tested things you really MUST do in order to be an old person in the modern world. 1. Fuck the younger generations as much and as hard as you possibly can. This point is critical and cannot be overemphasized. Most other points are related to this one. That's how key it really is. There is one great way to do that, better than all other ways combined: Vote as a single homogeneous bloc. This is politically very powerful. Use that power to run up massive debts that you have absolutely no intention of paying. That way, future generations can inherit them. You need to do this even though collectively, you are the single wealthiest demographic group in existence. Your attacks on Social Security are the best way to arrange this. Most of you have been lucky enough to be able to take personal responsibility for your life as stipulated by Madison Avenue and in all the right wing news media sources and started saving for your own retirement from a young age, and in your mind everyone else should have too, right? So what if people come into hard times, suffer from mental and physical disabilities, and the like! Vote with the right-wing republican/or market-rule "libertarian" types and do everything you can to undermine Social Security, social programs and mental health services so that nobody else can get any help and have a lifetime of homelessness and suffering to look forward to. Remember, the only thing government is good for is being a big huge prison camp for people who are unlucky or not cutthroat enough to get rich. Helping people? No way. Leave that to places like Canada, Denmark or Sweden. Sure, they are your children and your grandchildren, but so what? Now that they've grown past early childhood they aren't so cute anymore anyway. That makes it easy to treat them like you hate their guts even if you don't know you hate them. If you faithfully practice the points outlined in this document, then soon any guilt you might feel over what you've left for them to inherit will melt away and be replaced by an insatiable sense of entitlement. In the event this should fail, the constant coverage of the current pointless foreign war that the flower of our youth is going off to fight will serve as an excellent distraction. 2. Run a homeowner's association. As a retiree, it's not like you have to work for a living anymore. You've got some time on your hands. What better way to use it than to take your neighbors to court over such worthy matters as the difference between white paint and off-white paint? Those bastards should have read and memorized their 100-page homeowner's covenant before daring to modify their own property. As an added bonus, any time they spend in court and not at work means even less opportunity to pay off the debts you've left for them to inherit. Any monies they pay as a result of losing the lawsuits serves the same goal, so it's a two-for-one! 3. Drive very slowly, particularly on one-lane roads where it's difficult or impossible to safely pass you. Every time you do this means one more chance to make it hard for someone to get to work on time. That way, not only is a significant chunk of their paycheck taken from them to pay for your retirement and your medical care, but as an added bonus you add insult to this injury by hindering them from getting to work in the first place so they c
Nobody had any practical use for radio waves until James Clerk Maxwell developed his equations for describing their behavior (the behavior of photons). It's a similar case with the behavior of other subatomic particles. The research has to happen, and intellectual scientific curiosity has to be encouraged and funded.
Yes, there is an obvious bias of this article, and an obvious ulterior motive. It's an attack on free software, on open source software, and on the very idea of freedom and liberty for people who use computers, and it's cheerleading for right-wing market-rule policies. The person who posted this wants all programming and all software to only have value in terms of restrictions and profitability. They are no friend of linux, no friend of programmers, no friend of end users, and no friend of ours.
The illegal Mexican immigrants are actually technically being "imported" by the Republicans, because conservative right-wing capitalist policies (less regulations and social services, less ability to practice grass-roots politics, less liberty in the face of market rule) make Mexico less of a free country for its people, so they come here where conditions are better. And yes it could mean loss of jobs if it's actually used by fruit growing companies, but this could just backfire on the Republicans like you because the people will be less happy and poorer in the end due to lower employment. Also if you get rid of the immigrant labor you'll have more people from your own country doing low wage jobs and more people likely to form unions who you can't throw out of the country if they go on strike. Nice try but your logic may be your undoing.
This is america bitch.
We'll build a fucking nailgun.
In what factory, you jingoist ignorant fuck?!
Thanks for perfectly illustrating why we are in this situation. "This is America!" is a meaningless phrase. You didn't do shit when they busted the unions. You didn't do shit when the easier jobs were shipped over there. You didn't do shit while the Congress continued to cut taxes for corporations so they could sell us out. You just sat there, with that smug look on your face, saying "Yeah boy! This is America! We believe in the Market, not in that damn Government interference. Why pay more for TV set? That's stupid, when we can all just put it on a credit card for half the price."
Do me a fucking solid favor. Go find the largest object you can imagine shoving up your ass, and then sit on it. Because it's a good primer on what the next thirty years is going to be like for you.
I couldn't have said it better myself. People like Nixon and Reagan used a dictatorship countries' slave labor to undermine the American labor movement and now it's going to come back at us.
I just watched the video about JediMind on the web, It's clearly a great product, but using that name was just absurd, and even though there is no direct copyright on the term, it is clear they should not have used it. KineticMind would have been a better name. It's just a shame they did something like that. The focus should be on how this product will help disabled people and how we can use brain signals to control devices, and not on a lawsuit over a trademark from a SciFi movie.
If the brain is being used stupidly then it will grow stupidly. If you use it "Smartly" it will grow in a "smart" way.
None of this actually matters. It doesn't matter if we "trust" the scientists or not. We know what is going on. We aren't stupid. The oil companies, tire companies, steel companies, etc. are out to maximize profits. They have covered the earth with roads, crushed the "small is beautiful" idea, used advertising to make us demand and buy more... we're heating up the earth by burning fossil fuels, but it makes businessmen money. It makes perfect sense for Conservatives and so-called "Libertarian" capitalist right-wingers to tell us all its a lie and just natural stuff or whatever for as long as possible. The longer they tell us its not really happening, or were not the cause, the longer the money rolls in. It is happening no matter what the scientists do or say, it is happening no matter how you look at the data, trust this or that person, think this or that. It is happening, and the humans who make money off it are acting perfectly "rational" in doing everything they can to deny it as long as possible. It's obvious as the nose on anyone face that this would happen. It doesn't matter what Al Gore or Rush Limbaugh or anyone else says. It's happening, we're causing it with our oil based economy, and all that really, really matters is when the average, ordinary people will say "enough". It looks like they won't, and we will keep going "Drill baby drill", and millions will be displaced, and millions will die. But it doesn't really matter, because life for most of us isn't real. it is just a dream. People in far off undemocratic or dictatorship countries make all our goods now. We don't feel the sting of our economy, of our products we use... we have no real unions to speak of, no real democratic or even libertarian (in the anarchist/socialist sense) power. There is just people playing these games, and us complaining about the weather which gets crazier all the time because of more and more moisture in the atmosphere.
This has nothing to do with Apple specifically, this is what capitalism with its outsourcing & all it's other nasty features does to human beings.
"Reason" magazine is just a crappy neo-objectivist right-wing rag. It's what Andrew Ryan reads while sitting on the potty.
How to Find Current NVIDIA Driver Version (on your computer) in Windows XP: START menu >> Control Panel >> NVIDIA Control Panel >> Help Menu >> System Information
What the slashdot summery didn't mention was that the "individualists" were actually authoritarian capitalist/free market Ayn Rand types, and the "communitarians" were really left libertarian/progressive libertarian/libertarian socialist/Noam Chomsky oriented types. The Rand types embrace authority and the destruction of the earth via pollution and the extinction of humanity via forced-technology driven by profit motive. The Chomsky types prefer grass roots, humanitarian, individualism-for-the-rest-of-us (and not just the elite) solutions. Why does this not surprise anyone?
Well, actually that isn't true. There is overwhelming proof that "all things in moderation" is true and a good rule to follow. You simply graph the use or intake of any prime motivator (sugar, internet/web, sex, humor, games) and you will see an area of the graph that represents enjoyment with low consequences... then you will see an area where it overflows into ruining a persons life because of not paying attention to other obligations, lack of exercise, body cant handle it because it's too much, other people hurt by ones actions and retaliating, missing all appointments, and so on. However, in this case, there's no proof that beating World of Warcraft has negative consequences. All we have to go on is a South Park episode where idiotic characters were depicted as becoming grossly overweight after playing the game (as opposed to, say, watching TV or spending time at work or in Church)
This is fluff of the type I used to see in WIRED, PCWorld, etc years ago. It is corporate back-patting garbage, of little interest to nerds and real programmers and engineers, many of us still unemployed because the Republicans destroyed America's economy. This is made-up tripe... kings and commissars anointing themselves with badges and awards for pretending to care about those of us below them. The emperor has no clothes. The idea of real and tangible freedom still shines brighter and truer than these corporate priests.
Why don't the people from the future who keep screwing with the present at least leave behind some helpful graffiti? Why did Higgs have to nickname it "The God Particle"? Didn't he have any idea of how silly that was? He could have figured out it was a bad idea because someone wrote a whole mystical book ("The Tao of Physics") just because someone named something in particle physics "The Eightfold Way" - it had nothing to do with mysticism, it was just a way of putting particles into patterns that insinuated some deeper structural possibilities. (like, say, being made of quarks, or having consistent characteristics like spin, charge, etc) Besides, every time we finally see proof of some hypothetical "god particle", a new hypothetical one comes along. You can't name scientific stuff after mystical or religious things without expecting people to behave kind of goofy.
Giving us what we want..what they were intended to do, in a short and simple way? Come on. Why should Symantec be any different from MTV? They will give us what we don't want while riding on their past claim to fame.
This was popularized by Vernor Vinge which is where I recalled reading about it. There are many reasons to celebrate Raymond Kurzweil. In my opinion, his is "work" in nutrition and his near-religion called futurology are not in those reasons. He has become a vocal proponent of a dream to become god-like. I do not share that dream and I wish him the best of luck in his endeavors. I just cringe every time I read of the "singularity being near" or the ability to live forever coming about. If it's going to happen, just sit back and let it happen. I feel he has done a great disservice to the field of artificial intelligence by promising unrealistic things in interviews to the lay person. Disappointment is a sure fire way to get yourself branded as a snake oil salesman religious nut.
What about Max T. O'Connor AKA "Max More"? I thought he was the one responsible for the futurist/transhumanist/singulatiry religion/wishful thinking, not to mention magazines like MONDO 2000, WIRED, and now H+. I never heard of Ray Kurzweil before, but I guess it's mostly because I prefer to read about actual science and not evangelism. My experience with actual virtual reality and other technologies has led me to be somewhat less than hopefull about technologies based on corporate activity. There is an inherent corporate profit-motive that holds back and retards technological progress and affordability at a basic level. Most "extropians", "transhumanists", and such seem to also believe the whole religion is a vindication fro capitalism, which, if we just sit back and dont complain as our bosses order us around, will someday deliver the priomised land.
My friend in the army (stationed in Iraq) told me a couple months ago the way the insurgents were assassinating some soldiers was by using information from sites like myspace and facebook. I'm not surprised at all that this rule has been adopted.
The problem with stuff like this is it's intended to crush dissent against institutions like big business and governmental power, things which democracy and liberty in stuff like the Constitution of the United States were meant to keep the government stable and the people happy, because they would adjust their lives to the reality of their social and physical environment. If Americans all know they are being watched all the time and more and more "odd" behavior (not simply disliking your boss) they will appear "normal" on the outside yet will be increasingly psychologically screwed up on the inside. Didn't the 50's tell us anything? Human history has been a sort of narrative of the struggle between the people at large against the desire for small groups to amass control over their lives in order to extract wealth, etc. If Americans are monitored and watched all the time, how will the USA be fundamentally different from Maoist China? It's obvious this sort of technology would be used by the ruling powers... business, religion, the military, the police... to ultimately control human beings even when the reason human beings are disobeying the authorities is because something is fundamentally wrong with the authorities way of thinking. If you destroy the social contract (the unwritten rule that the ruling powers will only be allowed to rule so long as they actually serve the interests of the people who created the power in the first place as a means of managing more complicated things) you pave the way for a culture that produces nothing new, and gives birth to uninspired youth, and has no inoculation against forces that will eventually destroy that society because it isn't flexible in the face of chaotic nature at all.
Well, technically the star is already gone, if that's going to be visible any time soon. Though interestingly if we could reach it within our lifetimes we'd have to go back in time to do so and so it would still be there, pulsating like some giant infected slug, lol.