True. But the kicker is that there's zero evidence that the "why" answers of religion are in any way better than anyone elses random guesses. And in a few ways they're distinctly WORSE.
The purpose of your life is to please a "loving" God who will nevertheless send you straight to HELL if you fail to unquestionably do as he says ?
That's true mostly because religion retreats from those areas where science arrives. Because it cannot compete, seeing as science actually *works*.
Religion used to have opinions on lightning. (Thor, the god of thunder being angry blabla) But that's no longer sustainable now that science has a better explanation, one that makes sense and fits the observations. Science can quantify ligthning, they can predict it, they can shield you from it, they can even harness it.
The same is true for disease. Draught. Variations in the mechanical properties of iron. (it's brittle because of high carbon-content, not because you failed to sacrifice a hen while melting it...)
Today, religion is mostly stuck at "why", since there's very few areas left where religions answer to "how" aren't laughable.
No you don't. But you *do* need to believe that the world is regular, i.e. that there are rules which the world follows. If there are no rules, then obviously the quest to discover them is fruitless.
Not much: All adult males in a strike-zone are militants. A strike-zone is an area where the US military is making a strike, thus all adult males hit by US strikes are by definition militants.
Drone strikes certainly work in killing people, often even bad people. The problem is that if you kill one bad person, but in the process radicalize the population where two new persons are now willing to use violence against the US, you're not really closer to your goal.
Hypocrisy is always higher where norms are stricter. People *pretend* in public to adhere to very strict rules, but in practice they're human, so in private they're no better than the rest of us.
Demand celibacy from priests, and see what happens. It's not unique to Iran. Thus when puritanical conservative folks complain about "moral degradation", they're really just complaining that ordinary folks do in public the stuff they've -always- been doing in private.
That's true for some. But the people of Iran are diverse, and most young people have some influence over whom they marry. This can range from a pretty free choice (though often with more constraints than we're used to) to "which one of these 4 candidates do you prefer ?" kinda choice.
Overall, I'd say men in Iran has more freedom than women, but you are completely correct that the restrictive religion dominating society there poses severe limitations on the freedom of both genders.
Yeah. I've said the same thing to some Iranian friends of mine. The higher divorce-rate in Norway compared to Iran, is not a sign that marriages work less well here. It's just a sign that people have a CHOICE, and can actually divorce rather than spend the rest of their lives in a miserable love-less marriage.
That's simple math. Price x copies_sold x royalty_rate = earnings. Ebooks should have less overhead, so the author should get a much higher fraction of the sale-price. Perhaps 75% or something of that nature.
So if a book is $10 then the author would make $7.50 and you'd need to sell 10K books/year in order to be able to live solely from your writing. (maybe slightly less if there's spin-off income from your writing, but something of that magnitude)
Todays paperbacks pay a much smaller fraction of the income to the author, because there's a lot more intermediaries involved and each of them takes a slice.
Yeah okay, let's run with those. I waste 0.16KWh/workday, or about 35 KWh/year. Half of the year heating of the offices is required, thus the added heat is partially repaid. Let's say overall I waste 25 KWh/year.
This costs on the order of $5/year. At my current salary (including overhead), that's equivalent to 3 minutes and 30 seconds of working. In a *year*.
I could turn it of manually, 230 workdays, times 2, for a total of 460 times a year. Question is, can I turn of my PC 460 times in less than 3 and a half minutes ?
Yes, if the clicks required to ask my pc to sleep take less than 0.46 seconds on the average. This might actually be the case, seeing that I have a sleep-button in the upper-left corner of my keyboard, and hitting it when I leave might be doable in less than half a second extra.
Yes, and the calculation is more often needed: "I want to go to something X km away, how much gas do I need?" is more real-world relevant than "I've got Y gallons of gas, how far can I possibly travel?"
Yeah, but -current- batteries drain in a few hours of actual heavy use, and you definitely don't want to have to be cabled to be able to play a game for an hour.
Maybe I'm biased - I run. Having enough capacity to track by GPS and HR-sensor an entire run, while playing music or Zombies Run, *and* still have adequate battery-capacity that I feel reasonably sure I can make a call or two if something should happen is a MUST for me. I run up to half-marathons, so 3 hours of active use (though with the screen off) is an absolute must.
Li-ion batteries provide 100 - 260 watt-hours pro kg. Substantially less than that, and it just can't compete. Which is currently the case of course, typical supercaps today stores 3 to 5 watt-hours pro kg. (but there's lab-grade ones that do an order of magitude better at 50-100 Wh/kg)
And 10 Watt-hours (i.e. the equivalent of 50 grams of Li-ion batteries) released in a second really -is- 36 KW worth of power, or if you like it better, 10 seconds worth of 3.6 KW. Which one happens, depends on how quickly the catastrophic discharge happens. Typical supercaps today -do- fully discharge in a second.
If they are to be useful, they need to store substantial amounts of energy. A Samsung SIV has a 2600 mAh at 3.7V -- anything that's substantially less for the same size ain't gonna cut it, because even with fast charging, you aren't gonna want to charge ten times a day.
10 Watt-hours isn't a HUGE energy-amount, but it's not trivial either. Charging in 20 seconds means supplying the device with about 2 kilowatts of power. A catastrophic short-circuit discharge that drains the supercap in a second while melting large parts of the phone delivers about 40 kilowatts of heat over a period of one second.
This ain't a "small harmless spark".
Then again, supercaps cannot -actually- replace batteries, because their energy-storage sucks even more than batteries do, and batteries are already plenty sucky. (a litre of diesel is 10 Kwh....)
You also don't find USA-levels of greenhouse-deniers in Japan, South-Africa or India.
USA is however much more important for the climate than Ghana. Thus the harm caused by misinformed americans is much bigger than it would be if the misinformed people lived elsewhere.
I know, my point was that human psychology ain't that different, so when people in USA widely believes that "the scientists are still debating" while people in Norway, Germany and South-Africa generally believe that "the sciencetists pretty much agree", the reason for the difference ain't psychology.
The reason for the difference is a well-funded deliberate campaign of misinformation from industry and the right in USA.
It's pretty clear that -whatever- problems arise from climate change, you're more likely to be able to compensate for them, the more resources you have.
Who's gonna starve if food-prices triple ? The rich, or the poor ?
The thing is, it's quite likely the brunt of suffering will hit those today -least- repsonsible for the problem. It's a fair bet that Europe and North-America will be able to adapt better than poorer societies.
And even if not, if say food-production goes down, and prices go up, guess who will still be able to afford to buy food ?
This makes it amoral. It's not moral to create problems for others, while reaping the benefits for yourself.
Yes. But distribution is a bigger problem the more capital and less manual work is left.
Imagine digging a trench with shovels. The difference between a good and a poor digger is perhaps a factor of 2 or 3, essentially all healthy adults has something to contribute, even if some are better.
Then replace it with a robotic digging-machine. Now suddenly, there's no reason why a tiny group of people couldn't own them all, leaving the rest out of income.
Put simpler: Capital is much more concentrated in the hands of a few than available-working-hours is. The question is what to do with the large majority which is without substantial capital.
Most corporations are owned mostly by the top 5% in wealth. What's your plan for the other 95% of us ?
That's nice, but it's like megaherz, over a certain minimum, it doesn't really matter. Especially not small differences like factors of two.
I've got a fibre-optical link, and yeah, there's GB available for it, but I, like 90%+ of the subscribers opt to subscribe for only 100Mb/s, because a) it's slightly cheaper, and b) there's few practical differences between 100Mb/s and 1Gb/s.
Yes sure, in some situations it matters. Are these situations worth an extra $15/month subscription-fee ? Not for me. And not for most people.
Yeah. Purely symbolic. I could turn the lights of for an hour every year for the rest of my life, and the sum total of saved electricity would be comparable to the energy I'd save if I'd swap one of my least energy-efficient bulbs for a modern LED one.
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True. But the kicker is that there's zero evidence that the "why" answers of religion are in any way better than anyone elses random guesses. And in a few ways they're distinctly WORSE.
The purpose of your life is to please a "loving" God who will nevertheless send you straight to HELL if you fail to unquestionably do as he says ?
Why two fibres ? You can do full-duplex on a single fiber. Not that the price-differential would be much anyway.
That's true mostly because religion retreats from those areas where science arrives. Because it cannot compete, seeing as science actually *works*.
Religion used to have opinions on lightning. (Thor, the god of thunder being angry blabla) But that's no longer sustainable now that science has a better explanation, one that makes sense and fits the observations. Science can quantify ligthning, they can predict it, they can shield you from it, they can even harness it.
The same is true for disease. Draught. Variations in the mechanical properties of iron. (it's brittle because of high carbon-content, not because you failed to sacrifice a hen while melting it...)
Today, religion is mostly stuck at "why", since there's very few areas left where religions answer to "how" aren't laughable.
No you don't. But you *do* need to believe that the world is regular, i.e. that there are rules which the world follows. If there are no rules, then obviously the quest to discover them is fruitless.
Not much: All adult males in a strike-zone are militants. A strike-zone is an area where the US military is making a strike, thus all adult males hit by US strikes are by definition militants.
Drone strikes certainly work in killing people, often even bad people. The problem is that if you kill one bad person, but in the process radicalize the population where two new persons are now willing to use violence against the US, you're not really closer to your goal.
Hypocrisy is always higher where norms are stricter. People *pretend* in public to adhere to very strict rules, but in practice they're human, so in private they're no better than the rest of us.
Demand celibacy from priests, and see what happens. It's not unique to Iran. Thus when puritanical conservative folks complain about "moral degradation", they're really just complaining that ordinary folks do in public the stuff they've -always- been doing in private.
That's true for some. But the people of Iran are diverse, and most young people have some influence over whom they marry. This can range from a pretty free choice (though often with more constraints than we're used to) to "which one of these 4 candidates do you prefer ?" kinda choice.
Overall, I'd say men in Iran has more freedom than women, but you are completely correct that the restrictive religion dominating society there poses severe limitations on the freedom of both genders.
Yeah. I've said the same thing to some Iranian friends of mine. The higher divorce-rate in Norway compared to Iran, is not a sign that marriages work less well here. It's just a sign that people have a CHOICE, and can actually divorce rather than spend the rest of their lives in a miserable love-less marriage.
True. But reduce and remove -some- parts of overhead, while leaving other parts intact, and the overall result is still a reduction.
That's simple math. Price x copies_sold x royalty_rate = earnings. Ebooks should have less overhead, so the author should get a much higher fraction of the sale-price. Perhaps 75% or something of that nature.
So if a book is $10 then the author would make $7.50 and you'd need to sell 10K books/year in order to be able to live solely from your writing. (maybe slightly less if there's spin-off income from your writing, but something of that magnitude)
Todays paperbacks pay a much smaller fraction of the income to the author, because there's a lot more intermediaries involved and each of them takes a slice.
Yeah okay, let's run with those. I waste 0.16KWh/workday, or about 35 KWh/year. Half of the year heating of the offices is required, thus the added heat is partially repaid. Let's say overall I waste 25 KWh/year.
This costs on the order of $5/year. At my current salary (including overhead), that's equivalent to 3 minutes and 30 seconds of working. In a *year*.
I could turn it of manually, 230 workdays, times 2, for a total of 460 times a year. Question is, can I turn of my PC 460 times in less than 3 and a half minutes ?
Yes, if the clicks required to ask my pc to sleep take less than 0.46 seconds on the average. This might actually be the case, seeing that I have a sleep-button in the upper-left corner of my keyboard, and hitting it when I leave might be doable in less than half a second extra.
But it's not precisely huge savings either way.
Yes, and the calculation is more often needed: "I want to go to something X km away, how much gas do I need?" is more real-world relevant than "I've got Y gallons of gas, how far can I possibly travel?"
Yeah, but -current- batteries drain in a few hours of actual heavy use, and you definitely don't want to have to be cabled to be able to play a game for an hour.
Maybe I'm biased - I run. Having enough capacity to track by GPS and HR-sensor an entire run, while playing music or Zombies Run, *and* still have adequate battery-capacity that I feel reasonably sure I can make a call or two if something should happen is a MUST for me. I run up to half-marathons, so 3 hours of active use (though with the screen off) is an absolute must.
Li-ion batteries provide 100 - 260 watt-hours pro kg. Substantially less than that, and it just can't compete. Which is currently the case of course, typical supercaps today stores 3 to 5 watt-hours pro kg. (but there's lab-grade ones that do an order of magitude better at 50-100 Wh/kg)
And 10 Watt-hours (i.e. the equivalent of 50 grams of Li-ion batteries) released in a second really -is- 36 KW worth of power, or if you like it better, 10 seconds worth of 3.6 KW. Which one happens, depends on how quickly the catastrophic discharge happens. Typical supercaps today -do- fully discharge in a second.
If they are to be useful, they need to store substantial amounts of energy. A Samsung SIV has a 2600 mAh at 3.7V -- anything that's substantially less for the same size ain't gonna cut it, because even with fast charging, you aren't gonna want to charge ten times a day.
10 Watt-hours isn't a HUGE energy-amount, but it's not trivial either. Charging in 20 seconds means supplying the device with about 2 kilowatts of power. A catastrophic short-circuit discharge that drains the supercap in a second while melting large parts of the phone delivers about 40 kilowatts of heat over a period of one second.
This ain't a "small harmless spark".
Then again, supercaps cannot -actually- replace batteries, because their energy-storage sucks even more than batteries do, and batteries are already plenty sucky. (a litre of diesel is 10 Kwh....)
You can still get that information over here, it's typically printed on the receipt.
So the sticker will say simply â19.95 or whatever, but the receipt will list the actual item-cost and the taxes separately.
You also don't find USA-levels of greenhouse-deniers in Japan, South-Africa or India.
USA is however much more important for the climate than Ghana. Thus the harm caused by misinformed americans is much bigger than it would be if the misinformed people lived elsewhere.
I know, my point was that human psychology ain't that different, so when people in USA widely believes that "the scientists are still debating" while people in Norway, Germany and South-Africa generally believe that "the sciencetists pretty much agree", the reason for the difference ain't psychology.
The reason for the difference is a well-funded deliberate campaign of misinformation from industry and the right in USA.
It's pretty clear that -whatever- problems arise from climate change, you're more likely to be able to compensate for them, the more resources you have.
Who's gonna starve if food-prices triple ? The rich, or the poor ?
The thing is, it's mostly typical of -american- psychology at this point. The views in Europe are a lot more in line with the science.
The thing is, it's quite likely the brunt of suffering will hit those today -least- repsonsible for the problem. It's a fair bet that Europe and North-America will be able to adapt better than poorer societies.
And even if not, if say food-production goes down, and prices go up, guess who will still be able to afford to buy food ?
This makes it amoral. It's not moral to create problems for others, while reaping the benefits for yourself.
Yes. But distribution is a bigger problem the more capital and less manual work is left.
Imagine digging a trench with shovels. The difference between a good and a poor digger is perhaps a factor of 2 or 3, essentially all healthy adults has something to contribute, even if some are better.
Then replace it with a robotic digging-machine. Now suddenly, there's no reason why a tiny group of people couldn't own them all, leaving the rest out of income.
Put simpler: Capital is much more concentrated in the hands of a few than available-working-hours is. The question is what to do with the large majority which is without substantial capital.
Most corporations are owned mostly by the top 5% in wealth. What's your plan for the other 95% of us ?
Features that are smaller than the wavelength of the light you use to view them with aren't even debatable from a theorhethical standpoint.
That's nice, but it's like megaherz, over a certain minimum, it doesn't really matter. Especially not small differences like factors of two.
I've got a fibre-optical link, and yeah, there's GB available for it, but I, like 90%+ of the subscribers opt to subscribe for only 100Mb/s, because a) it's slightly cheaper, and b) there's few practical differences between 100Mb/s and 1Gb/s.
Yes sure, in some situations it matters. Are these situations worth an extra $15/month subscription-fee ? Not for me. And not for most people.
Yeah. Purely symbolic. I could turn the lights of for an hour every year for the rest of my life, and the sum total of saved electricity would be comparable to the energy I'd save if I'd swap one of my least energy-efficient bulbs for a modern LED one.