As evidence that less impossible is still truly impossible, there is Fermi's Paradox. If it's possible for living things with minds like ours to have evolved elsewhere, and if practical interstellar travel is just out of our reach, we have to wonder why they aren't visiting us.
I've always suspected that the numbers were low, but only from anecdotal evidence: several women I know have talked about being sexually assaulted. But I've been in too many situations in which some woman was being harassed, or some cluster of patriarchs started talking shit when women left the staff room, and so on, to not assume that there's at least as much, if not more, going on when I'm not there to see it, not to mention the stuff that I'm unfortunately almost oblivious to.
Alternately, you could try using larger icons. Then a whole lot of people on Slashdot and elsewhere complain that your user interface looks "childish".
Counting and measurement are the same thing, by definition of "measurement". When you measure something, you just count the number of units.
Only if you've internalized the concept of the number line.
Counting is concerned with discrete values. Measurement is concerned with continuous values. Consider counting sheep in a pen. You'd be using integers -- it doesn't make sense to talk about a fraction of a sheep, except as a joke. Each sheep is understood as a discrete entity, and the number of sheep will be a particular value from a discrete range of values. Now, imagine measuring out some rope. Say you measure out ten meters of rope. You know it's not going to be exactly ten meters -- it will be a little less, or a little more. You can trim off half a meter, a quarter, or any fraction, down to the limits of your perception. You understand the length of the rope to be a particular value in a continuous range of values.
In fact, underneath the unifying metaphor of the number line, we're still talking about different sorts of numbers. Integers are understood as a subset of real numbers, but there are reasons to make the distinction. It's been no small puzzle, to mathematicians, philosophers, and scientists, whether the underlying structure of reality ultimately resolves to discrete values or continuous values.
Years ago, a friend of mine worked for 'Ask Jeeves', which boasted natural language searches. It wasn't doing well in competition with other search engines; the assumption was that their natural language searches didn't work well enough to attract people to use it. My friend told me that, from their internal metrics, they knew that almost none of their users actually even tried to use natural language search terms; they just put in a few key words and hit "Go", just like they do with any other search engine.
Picking out the key words in a phrase to use for a search is a simple cognitive task that even small children can master, and it's actually easier than composing a complete, natural sentence. Most of a natural sentence is there to provide social context and cues about intentions that are irrelevant noise for a machine -- and often, we'd prefer to do without the extra work of providing that information.
Given how many times I've seen people in IT complain that they consider patching software, without extensive internal testing, to be an unacceptable security risk, and how often I've seen the same people deliberately use weak, shared passwords, I'd say there's some need to keep reinforcing the basics.
I don't know why this result is surprising. I thought it was generally understand that counting (there are 10 sheep) and measurement (this fence is 10 feet long) were distinct concepts. The point of the number line is to establish a relationship between the two concepts.
Come to think of it, it should be obvious that a number line relates two distinct concepts, just from the form they usually take. A number line, with its regularly spaced markings perpendicular to the main line, has a form similar to that of a line graph, which shows a relationship between two distinct variables.
That figure really surprised me -- that 79% trust the military, down from 80% in 2002, which is to say it's basically unchanged. It's apparently the most trusted social institution in the US listed in that survey.
I don't know what to make of it, but it does seem rather ominous.
As a socialist, I want state authority to be a direct expression of popular will. A state authority that is not an expression of popular will is not a state authority I want to "do more".
I'd rather Congress did more, if the "more" is understood to mean things like redistributing wealth through progressive taxation, providing desirable social services, and defending civil liberties. I'd rather it did less, if the "less" is understood to mean things like financing invasions and occupations, concentrating wealth through regressive taxation and subsidies to corporations, and undermining civil liberties.
The US Congress, in its present form -- i.e., the entire complex of legislators, staff, party functionaries, lobbyists, donors, PACs, and so on -- is so tied to the interests of the 1%, that it's starting to fail to even maintain the illusion of balancing competing social interests. It is not a direct expression of the popular will.
How to make it a more direct expression of the popular will, or alternately, how to construct a form of government that is, is no small question. But to begin with, I believe it's necessary to avoid the trap of accepting the idea that bigger or smaller government is, in itself, the issue, or even a meaningful question.
Among other things, a form letter suggests laziness on the part of managers.
There is such a thing as competent management, and much of the work of a competent manager is assessing the abilities, potential, and morale of individual members of the team. Firing people by form letter suggests that the managers aren't doing that assessment. They're likely hiring people, then ignoring them, and if they're ignoring them, they can't distinguish between a useless team member and an underutilized team member with great potential.
There's a global context, and a local context. You can fairly precisely and objectively describe the characteristics of an automobile engine, but you may not have any use for one. But other people, other places, do.
Come to think of it, part of the idea about accumulated wealth is accumulated labor, and I was arguing that labor is basically recognizing utility, which is subjective, so a complex object is labor layered upon labor, like layers of a pearl. So, yes, in that sense, it's ultimately all subjective. One can imagine a world in which no one wants an automobile engine, for instance. But in the context of a world in which, for the moment, it's a given that some people want automobile engines, you can talk about the qualities of an automobile engine as an automobile engine objectively.
Hmm, maybe we disagree on the definition of ruler.
Possibly.
A lot of radical left thought is about distinguishing between formal structures of power, and real structures which encompass those formal structures. A lot of radical leftists make the mistake of oversimplifying, or assuming that things are so obvious that it requires no argument. It's not like Bill Gates can simply issue orders to Barack Obama; it's more subtle than that.
The primary difference is that we would stop pretending force can be used legitimately, except in self-defense.
Panspermia seems like it would make for a good handwave in science fiction why humans could find edible food on an alien planet, or have to worry about alien diseases. I have a hard time believing life could actually spread from planet to planet this way. But I'm not a physicist or biologist.
I'm reminded of a cover of the National Review, shown here, which depicted Al Gore, Bill Clinton, and Hillary Clinton, in the style of racist caricatures of Asians, a style you'd see in newspapers in the 1920s or 1930s. A lot of people complained, particularly Asian-American groups, naturally. About that time, I saw a television news show featuring a spokesperson from an Asian-American group, and the editor of the National Review. The editor said that, as the Clintons were not Asian, the cover could not be racist, and then he went on to accuse the spokesperson of racism, for suggesting that caricatures of the Clintons resembled Asian people.
It was the most spectacular demonstration of arrogant sociopathic sophistry that I can recall.
This is the first time I've heard of demands for ransom. I suppose it shouldn't be a surprise that's the motive, and come to think of it, it shouldn't be a surprise that corporations aren't eager to admit to having been extorted.
That sounds needlessly complex. Why not just say the value of everything is subjective? What does that theory explain? (and no I didn't bother reading Wikipedia on it, so ignore me if this is dumb)
Mostly because I'm picking apart the concept of value, and pointing out that an element of it is subjective, not the whole thing. Most descriptions of the labor theory of value wouldn't mention the subjective elements at all. In particular: exchange value is objective; most often, most aspects of use value can be assessed objectively, but not all.
What do you mean by "social goal"? How does this differ from personal goals?
Obviously, it's a goal for a group, rather than for an individual. Look at what's discussed in public. "Economic growth", and other closely related concepts, feature prominently and frequently in campaign statements from US politicians, commentary from pundits, and so forth. It looks to me like a lot of the liberal-versus-conservative debate takes the form of, on the one hand, "We need to make progress on other social goals in order to continue economic growth", versus, "Economic growth will bring progress on other social goals as a natural consequence", both formulations pointing to economic growth as the primary social goal.
Who thinks consuming more means a higher quality of life?
It's said directly less often now than it was a few decades ago. I find it implicit in criticisms of arguments for sustainability, as in, people will argue that limiting carbon production means condemning Africa to perpetual poverty.
Who buys 100s of paper cups a month rather than reusing a mug (assuming its not a sanitation issue)?
My employer, and a few past employers. I've seen a few places where employers bought basic ceramic mugs, by contrast. There may be, as you suggest, secondary reasons, but the reason I use that as an illustration is that I'd think most people would understand that using mugs instead of cups is both more ecological and more pleasant.
Consumerism only works because people implicitly know that their money loses value over time. Fix this. Make it so that saving lets you buy the same thing for cheaper later, and you have fixed everything you are talking about.
"Money" doesn't have any meaning outside of a system of exchange. It's an abstract unit of measurement for comparing commodities in exchanges. If it's not being used in exchanges, it doesn't exist. It's only because of credit systems that it appears to exist , and that's because the banking system is using money in its accounts to make exchanges.
What you want to save are material resources, and most people don't really have any but their own ability to perform labor. Someone who owns land with timber or mineral resources can refrain from extracting those resources; most people do not own land, or similar material resources.
It has nothing to do with the virtues of capitalism and everything to do with central banking.
I'm at a loss what capitalism means if it doesn't mean either "a system that prioritizes accumulation of capital" or "rule by capitalists" (i.e., the people who control accumulated capital).
Centralized banking is a result of the scale of capitalism. The only way capitalism could function without centralized banking is by regressing to a smaller scale. Aside from the massive amount of destruction that would be required for such a regression, you'd have small capitalists competing to become larger capitalists, which is to say, the same thing all over again, including establishing credit systems.
A commodity has a dual nature: exchange value, and use value. Exchange value is price; use value is socially determined, which is to say it may have a subjective element to it. Recognizing use value, through empathy with human subjectivity, is the part where human creativity comes into play, and why labor is indispensable in the process of production. I think that doesn't get enough attention.
So I tend to think of modern capitalism as being largely based upon the fallacy of the broken window. Replacing broken windows is an opportunity cost for the community as a whole, but it still looks like a good deal for the glazier, and we've got a society run by glaziers.
I'm sure this occurs, not so ready to jump to the conclusion it is a driving factor behind "modern capitalism" (by which I assume you mean corporatism)
I'm pretty sure I mean capitalism. Specifically, I mean organizing society around maximizing profit and accumulating capital as the highest social goals. Accumulating capital is a good thing, but I think we've got too much of a good thing.
One of the problems with maximizing profit as a social goal is that profit emerges in a cycle of production and consumption, so there's an ideal of making that cycle turn over as rapidly as possible. But consuming more doesn't necessarily mean a higher quality of life. And you don't exactly need to live in a commune to see that a reusable ceramic mug is better than a month's supply of paper cups.
That situation sounds like the accounts I've heard of Europe in the Plague years. Survivors of the bubonic plague inherited the wealth of the dead, suddenly changing a lot of assumptions about feudal class relations.
Assets and resources went down quite a lot in WW2. I've read Marxist accounts that describe this as what really ended the Great Depression and led to the Long Boom of 1940-1972. Traditionally, Marxists expected economic crises to get worse and worse each time, with shallower booms and deeper busts. The idea is that over time, as assets accumulate, when you invest in new and improved production, you're spending a relatively larger proportion on assets like machinery, infrastructure, and so on, and a smaller proportion on labor. But labor is the part that actually creates new wealth, and is the real source of profit; so the profit margin tends to decline. To make things worse, the main thing you produce is more assets for further production. There are all sorts of complicating factors, of course. But the upshot is, one way to resolve an economic crisis is to destroy lots and lots of assets; then not only is there plenty of business to be had producing more productive assets, but the ratio of productive assets to labor has gone down, so the profit margin increases.
So I tend to think of modern capitalism as being largely based upon the fallacy of the broken window. Replacing broken windows is an opportunity cost for the community as a whole, but it still looks like a good deal for the glazier, and we've got a society run by glaziers.
I know "good luck" is an innocuous expression of goodwill, but it always seems a little weird to wish someone good luck in a matter that's supposed to be decided solely through legal reasoning -- especially when it's the judge wishing luck.
Slashdot Mirror
MIT Open Courseware is a good project.
And everyone knows the Wikimedia Foundation, but they can use more help.
As evidence that less impossible is still truly impossible, there is Fermi's Paradox. If it's possible for living things with minds like ours to have evolved elsewhere, and if practical interstellar travel is just out of our reach, we have to wonder why they aren't visiting us.
I've always suspected that the numbers were low, but only from anecdotal evidence: several women I know have talked about being sexually assaulted. But I've been in too many situations in which some woman was being harassed, or some cluster of patriarchs started talking shit when women left the staff room, and so on, to not assume that there's at least as much, if not more, going on when I'm not there to see it, not to mention the stuff that I'm unfortunately almost oblivious to.
Great scott. Someone actually got the frakking point of the article.
Alternately, you could try using larger icons. Then a whole lot of people on Slashdot and elsewhere complain that your user interface looks "childish".
Counting and measurement are the same thing, by definition of "measurement". When you measure something, you just count the number of units.
Only if you've internalized the concept of the number line.
Counting is concerned with discrete values. Measurement is concerned with continuous values. Consider counting sheep in a pen. You'd be using integers -- it doesn't make sense to talk about a fraction of a sheep, except as a joke. Each sheep is understood as a discrete entity, and the number of sheep will be a particular value from a discrete range of values. Now, imagine measuring out some rope. Say you measure out ten meters of rope. You know it's not going to be exactly ten meters -- it will be a little less, or a little more. You can trim off half a meter, a quarter, or any fraction, down to the limits of your perception. You understand the length of the rope to be a particular value in a continuous range of values.
In fact, underneath the unifying metaphor of the number line, we're still talking about different sorts of numbers. Integers are understood as a subset of real numbers, but there are reasons to make the distinction. It's been no small puzzle, to mathematicians, philosophers, and scientists, whether the underlying structure of reality ultimately resolves to discrete values or continuous values.
Years ago, a friend of mine worked for 'Ask Jeeves', which boasted natural language searches. It wasn't doing well in competition with other search engines; the assumption was that their natural language searches didn't work well enough to attract people to use it. My friend told me that, from their internal metrics, they knew that almost none of their users actually even tried to use natural language search terms; they just put in a few key words and hit "Go", just like they do with any other search engine.
Picking out the key words in a phrase to use for a search is a simple cognitive task that even small children can master, and it's actually easier than composing a complete, natural sentence. Most of a natural sentence is there to provide social context and cues about intentions that are irrelevant noise for a machine -- and often, we'd prefer to do without the extra work of providing that information.
Given how many times I've seen people in IT complain that they consider patching software, without extensive internal testing, to be an unacceptable security risk, and how often I've seen the same people deliberately use weak, shared passwords, I'd say there's some need to keep reinforcing the basics.
I don't know why this result is surprising. I thought it was generally understand that counting (there are 10 sheep) and measurement (this fence is 10 feet long) were distinct concepts. The point of the number line is to establish a relationship between the two concepts.
Come to think of it, it should be obvious that a number line relates two distinct concepts, just from the form they usually take. A number line, with its regularly spaced markings perpendicular to the main line, has a form similar to that of a line graph, which shows a relationship between two distinct variables.
That figure really surprised me -- that 79% trust the military, down from 80% in 2002, which is to say it's basically unchanged. It's apparently the most trusted social institution in the US listed in that survey.
I don't know what to make of it, but it does seem rather ominous.
As a socialist, I want state authority to be a direct expression of popular will. A state authority that is not an expression of popular will is not a state authority I want to "do more".
I'd rather Congress did more, if the "more" is understood to mean things like redistributing wealth through progressive taxation, providing desirable social services, and defending civil liberties. I'd rather it did less, if the "less" is understood to mean things like financing invasions and occupations, concentrating wealth through regressive taxation and subsidies to corporations, and undermining civil liberties.
The US Congress, in its present form -- i.e., the entire complex of legislators, staff, party functionaries, lobbyists, donors, PACs, and so on -- is so tied to the interests of the 1%, that it's starting to fail to even maintain the illusion of balancing competing social interests. It is not a direct expression of the popular will.
How to make it a more direct expression of the popular will, or alternately, how to construct a form of government that is, is no small question. But to begin with, I believe it's necessary to avoid the trap of accepting the idea that bigger or smaller government is, in itself, the issue, or even a meaningful question.
Among other things, a form letter suggests laziness on the part of managers.
There is such a thing as competent management, and much of the work of a competent manager is assessing the abilities, potential, and morale of individual members of the team. Firing people by form letter suggests that the managers aren't doing that assessment. They're likely hiring people, then ignoring them, and if they're ignoring them, they can't distinguish between a useless team member and an underutilized team member with great potential.
There's a global context, and a local context. You can fairly precisely and objectively describe the characteristics of an automobile engine, but you may not have any use for one. But other people, other places, do.
Come to think of it, part of the idea about accumulated wealth is accumulated labor, and I was arguing that labor is basically recognizing utility, which is subjective, so a complex object is labor layered upon labor, like layers of a pearl. So, yes, in that sense, it's ultimately all subjective. One can imagine a world in which no one wants an automobile engine, for instance. But in the context of a world in which, for the moment, it's a given that some people want automobile engines, you can talk about the qualities of an automobile engine as an automobile engine objectively.
Hmm, maybe we disagree on the definition of ruler.
Possibly.
A lot of radical left thought is about distinguishing between formal structures of power, and real structures which encompass those formal structures. A lot of radical leftists make the mistake of oversimplifying, or assuming that things are so obvious that it requires no argument. It's not like Bill Gates can simply issue orders to Barack Obama; it's more subtle than that.
The primary difference is that we would stop pretending force can be used legitimately, except in self-defense.
Sounds good to me.
Panspermia seems like it would make for a good handwave in science fiction why humans could find edible food on an alien planet, or have to worry about alien diseases. I have a hard time believing life could actually spread from planet to planet this way. But I'm not a physicist or biologist.
Bravo.
I'm reminded of a cover of the National Review, shown here, which depicted Al Gore, Bill Clinton, and Hillary Clinton, in the style of racist caricatures of Asians, a style you'd see in newspapers in the 1920s or 1930s. A lot of people complained, particularly Asian-American groups, naturally. About that time, I saw a television news show featuring a spokesperson from an Asian-American group, and the editor of the National Review. The editor said that, as the Clintons were not Asian, the cover could not be racist, and then he went on to accuse the spokesperson of racism, for suggesting that caricatures of the Clintons resembled Asian people.
It was the most spectacular demonstration of arrogant sociopathic sophistry that I can recall.
This is the first time I've heard of demands for ransom. I suppose it shouldn't be a surprise that's the motive, and come to think of it, it shouldn't be a surprise that corporations aren't eager to admit to having been extorted.
That sounds needlessly complex. Why not just say the value of everything is subjective? What does that theory explain? (and no I didn't bother reading Wikipedia on it, so ignore me if this is dumb)
Mostly because I'm picking apart the concept of value, and pointing out that an element of it is subjective, not the whole thing. Most descriptions of the labor theory of value wouldn't mention the subjective elements at all. In particular: exchange value is objective; most often, most aspects of use value can be assessed objectively, but not all.
What do you mean by "social goal"? How does this differ from personal goals?
Obviously, it's a goal for a group, rather than for an individual. Look at what's discussed in public. "Economic growth", and other closely related concepts, feature prominently and frequently in campaign statements from US politicians, commentary from pundits, and so forth. It looks to me like a lot of the liberal-versus-conservative debate takes the form of, on the one hand, "We need to make progress on other social goals in order to continue economic growth", versus, "Economic growth will bring progress on other social goals as a natural consequence", both formulations pointing to economic growth as the primary social goal.
Who thinks consuming more means a higher quality of life?
It's said directly less often now than it was a few decades ago. I find it implicit in criticisms of arguments for sustainability, as in, people will argue that limiting carbon production means condemning Africa to perpetual poverty.
Who buys 100s of paper cups a month rather than reusing a mug (assuming its not a sanitation issue)?
My employer, and a few past employers. I've seen a few places where employers bought basic ceramic mugs, by contrast. There may be, as you suggest, secondary reasons, but the reason I use that as an illustration is that I'd think most people would understand that using mugs instead of cups is both more ecological and more pleasant.
Consumerism only works because people implicitly know that their money loses value over time. Fix this. Make it so that saving lets you buy the same thing for cheaper later, and you have fixed everything you are talking about.
"Money" doesn't have any meaning outside of a system of exchange. It's an abstract unit of measurement for comparing commodities in exchanges. If it's not being used in exchanges, it doesn't exist. It's only because of credit systems that it appears to exist , and that's because the banking system is using money in its accounts to make exchanges.
What you want to save are material resources, and most people don't really have any but their own ability to perform labor. Someone who owns land with timber or mineral resources can refrain from extracting those resources; most people do not own land, or similar material resources.
It has nothing to do with the virtues of capitalism and everything to do with central banking.
I'm at a loss what capitalism means if it doesn't mean either "a system that prioritizes accumulation of capital" or "rule by capitalists" (i.e., the people who control accumulated capital).
Centralized banking is a result of the scale of capitalism. The only way capitalism could function without centralized banking is by regressing to a smaller scale. Aside from the massive amount of destruction that would be required for such a regression, you'd have small capitalists competing to become larger capitalists, which is to say, the same thing all over again, including establishing credit systems.
A commodity has a dual nature: exchange value, and use value. Exchange value is price; use value is socially determined, which is to say it may have a subjective element to it. Recognizing use value, through empathy with human subjectivity, is the part where human creativity comes into play, and why labor is indispensable in the process of production. I think that doesn't get enough attention.
I'm basically talking about about Marx's labor theory of value and the the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. The Wikipedia articles explain them more clearly than I can.
I'm sure this occurs, not so ready to jump to the conclusion it is a driving factor behind "modern capitalism" (by which I assume you mean corporatism)
I'm pretty sure I mean capitalism. Specifically, I mean organizing society around maximizing profit and accumulating capital as the highest social goals. Accumulating capital is a good thing, but I think we've got too much of a good thing.
One of the problems with maximizing profit as a social goal is that profit emerges in a cycle of production and consumption, so there's an ideal of making that cycle turn over as rapidly as possible. But consuming more doesn't necessarily mean a higher quality of life. And you don't exactly need to live in a commune to see that a reusable ceramic mug is better than a month's supply of paper cups.
I'm at the eleventh hour of a twelve hour night shift, so it wouldn't surprise me if I blundered in the details. What strikes you as off?
That situation sounds like the accounts I've heard of Europe in the Plague years. Survivors of the bubonic plague inherited the wealth of the dead, suddenly changing a lot of assumptions about feudal class relations.
Assets and resources went down quite a lot in WW2. I've read Marxist accounts that describe this as what really ended the Great Depression and led to the Long Boom of 1940-1972. Traditionally, Marxists expected economic crises to get worse and worse each time, with shallower booms and deeper busts. The idea is that over time, as assets accumulate, when you invest in new and improved production, you're spending a relatively larger proportion on assets like machinery, infrastructure, and so on, and a smaller proportion on labor. But labor is the part that actually creates new wealth, and is the real source of profit; so the profit margin tends to decline. To make things worse, the main thing you produce is more assets for further production. There are all sorts of complicating factors, of course. But the upshot is, one way to resolve an economic crisis is to destroy lots and lots of assets; then not only is there plenty of business to be had producing more productive assets, but the ratio of productive assets to labor has gone down, so the profit margin increases.
So I tend to think of modern capitalism as being largely based upon the fallacy of the broken window. Replacing broken windows is an opportunity cost for the community as a whole, but it still looks like a good deal for the glazier, and we've got a society run by glaziers.
I know "good luck" is an innocuous expression of goodwill, but it always seems a little weird to wish someone good luck in a matter that's supposed to be decided solely through legal reasoning -- especially when it's the judge wishing luck.