Sure globalization is great if you ignore the niggling minor problems like pollution and exploitation of desperate workers.
I find it hard to call something "exploitation" when people are voluntarily flocking to these allegedly horrible jobs. If they really felt exploited, they could always go back to subsistence farming. The fact that they don't is evidence that subsistence farming is worse than just about any "exploitative" industrial job.
Also you would have to arbitrarily decide that dying from chronic diseases from living older is better than dying younger from acute diseases.
Neither "you" nor I need to arbitrarily decide this at all. Clearly, when given the choice, people choose the former. How many people let their children die of an acute but preventable disease and say "well, at least she didn't have to worry about dying of cancer at 90." I'm guessing the answer is "not many."
And of course since there is no objective way to measure quality of life we'll just assume that people with the most stuff are the happiest.
The simplest thing to do is give people the option to choose what makes them the happiest. Who are you or I to tell someone what their quality of life should be?
It validates the American lifestyle so Americans, at least, have to approve to avoid cognitive dissonance. The best thing any government could do would be to eliminate the formation of "for-profit" corporations.
You do realize that you are typing on a computer made by a for-profit company, which is processing the characters using a CPU made by a for-profit company, which are being sent over a network adapter (wired or wireless) made by a for-profit company, over a network of networks operated (largely) by for-profit companies, to a website owned and operated by a for-profit company (GKNT on NASDAQ), which stores your comment on servers made by for-profit companies. They certainly have their faults, but Moore's law is not driven by love or solidarity, it's driven by companies relentlessly competing to steal each other's consumers, benefiting all of us in the process.
Their "it's all about the profit" charters have made them a danger to the planet. They have used globalization to avoid doing the right thing environmentally and socially.
So modern medicine, housing, culture, food and plumbing are all "avoid[ing] doing the right thing" socially? What on earth would the "right thing" be?
They have no conscience because no one in a corporation feels personally responsible for the negative impacts of the company.
Is it really meaningful to say that anything other than an individual has a "conscience?" Plus, why is having a conscience so seemingly critical for a company? If a company consistently does things that people don't like, and there are better alternatives, that company will go out of business. It happens all the time, even for the giants.
As they say: "It's not personal, it's just business".
Of course, ripping people off and being a dick is bad, I think we can agree on that. But to a large extent, this is a feature, not a bug. There is just no way you could support the number of people there are if all interactions had to be "personal." The human brain simply lacks the capacity to form personal relationships with a few thousand people, let alone 7 billion (or whatever the population is these days). Having to interact with strangers is simply a fact of modern life that is inseparable from all of the other wondrous benefits it brings.
Globalization is really a corporate phenomena that takes advantage of foolish people who would rather chase what they want rather than what they need.
Again, who gets to decide what someone "needs?" I'd say, let the individual decide what he or she needs. After all, that person is in the best position to know what he or she needs or wants.
Agreed. That's practically unheard of, though they do have the advantage of starting from way behind, and countries in that situation can grow quickly during their catch-up phase.
My question is how do they control inflation with such fast rising wages?
Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon -- Milton Friedman.
It's no longer a free market when there are such huge returns on rent seeking from the government. If the government is granting particular companies or sectors of the economy (like housing) special favors, you are no longer in a Laissez Faire situation.
Everyone agrees that regulatory capture is bad, and if it is present, you no longer have a free market. Where a lot of people disagree is on what to do about it; either reduce the "regulatory" or reduce the "capture."
Heresy! Repent your wicked ways, O vile blasphemer, lest you suffer the eternal wrath of Saint IGNUcius! And furthermore...
Ah, I can't do it anymore. Not only am I too young to have been involved in the Great Editor Wars, I'm just happy to see anyone using a text editor these days. Let us set aside our grievances, for both sides have lost many good men (and women) to the Great Editor Wars, and band together against the new threat: the demon known as the Integrated Devil Eternity (IDE)!
I actually commented about this to my friend while watching it. Not only did they not use meaningless technobabble, but the KDE window decorations were authentic, the output from wget was exactly accurate, and Emacs actually looked like Emacs. All of the bits of code I saw looked real enough, and Perl would be exactly the thing one would have used then for more complicated web spidering (nowadays, it would probably be Perl, Python, or maybe Ruby).
Aside from getting the jargon correct, I was definitely impressed with the details down to the period-accurate GUI elements. I've just become so jaded to the ubiquitous "swirling, beeping, 3D computers" of most Hollywood stuff that something even remotely realistic (let alone dead-on, like Social Network) seems shocking.
austerity programs are exactly what government's *shouldnt* do when the economy sags
Well, if you're a Keynesian. Reasonable people disagree. Not that you're necessarily wrong; there are a lot of top economists who subscribe to a Keynesian view of economic downturns, it's just that there isn't anything approaching a consensus as to whether fiscal stimulus is a good course of action during a recession.
Every dollar they cut from a program is a dollar someone isn't going to be spending next year, so tax revenues will drop even further.
But if they also cut that dollar from taxes, then someone will have an extra dollar to spend on the private sector through consumption or savings, and whether that's better depends on your viewpoint (paradox of thrift vs inefficiency of government spending).
A government with any sense would establish a sustainable cost of operations, borrow money when times are bad, and pay off the loans when times are good.
Agreed, but what level that cost should be is subject to a lot of debate. Should it be 20% of GDP? 70%? 7? That's where much of the disagreement comes from.
P.S. I agree that science spending is one of the last things you want to cut, especially when it's such a minuscule part of the federal budget as it is now.
There is as yet no satisfactory scientific explanation as to why chlorophyll has evolved to "ignore" green and near-green light, which are a major part of the visible spectrum.
It could be that specific chemical properties of chlorophyll make it more expensive (in terms of the amount of energy required to produce each molecule) to synthesize green-absorbent light is greater than the marginal increase in energy produced. It could be that the current structure of chlorophyll is at a local maximum for efficiency, and that evolving an alternative molecule would require first using a much less-efficient molecule and then improving from there. Evolution and evolutionary processes are great at finding local maxima, but can completely miss higher maxima further away.
As far as "why green?" I imagine that if and when we know why chlorophyll ignores green light, the answer will be something like, "green-ignoring photosynthesizing pigments out-competed the other photosynthesizing pigments because of reason X, and alternative colored pigments are different enough from chlorophyll that photoautotrophs have not jumped to using those alternatives."
The answer to "why reason X?" likely has something to do with the difficulty of the organic systems at the time to produce pigments more efficient than chlorophyll relative to the energy return of the increased efficiency.
Ultimately, some of the "why" depends on the specific emission spectrum of sunlight received at ocean level on the Earth, which is determined by the size and composition of the Sun and the composition of the Earth's atmosphere. The "why" of that is because of the random scattering of interstellar dust which eventually became our solar system. I guess, if you really wanted, you could place some idea of a supernatural being or force there, saying,
god(s) arranged the chaotic interactions of interstellar dust such that one particular blob of dust formed into a G2V-class star with a black body temperature of 5777 K, then seeded one particular planet (through the tendency of certain elements to cluster around Earth as opposed to Mars or Venus, as well as bombardment by asteroids) with a mixture of elements such that a certain kind of organic life arose which evolved photoautotrophs which, because of the relative abundance of certain elements, the relative presence of various wavelengths of light at sea-level, the photosynthetic efficiency of different pigments, and the energy and cellular machinery required to produce said pigments, chlorophyll, which does not efficiently absorb green light, ended up becoming the dominating pigment used in photosynthesis. And that is how god(s) made the grass green.
In other words, a "god(s) of tweaking things at the margins," which doesn't exactly fill me with awe. Plus, given the sheer size of the universe, it's easy to believe that our planet and everything about it arose out of dumb luck. Essentially, a restatement of the weak (tautological) anthropic principle "conditions that are observed in the universe must allow the observer to exist."
Integration into American society? Surely you jest! These folks do not want to become "Americans" - they want to stick with Spanish and live in "Little Mexico" enclaves.
Citation needed.
They are not interested in joining American culture in the least little bit. There is no integration going to happen.
So what? Seriously, is "American culture" (as if there is a single culture for the whole country) so fragile or valuable that we really need to worry about it changing or being destroyed? Every single other time there has been a scare about immigrants or ethnic or religious groups "coming in" and "failing to integrate" into American society, and this being a bad thing, everything is still fine.
Go back and look at what people said about the Irish Catholics coming over in the late 1800's. They were going to destroy the good, Protestant, way of life and corrupt the lifeblood of the country. Or they pretty much did their own thing, integrated somewhat, changed the culture somewhat, and everything is fine. Same with Japanese and Chinese immigrants. Turns out they mostly didn't want to turn over the US to the Japanese emperor and now we have sushi and General Tao's chicken. As far as I can see, the most noticeable effects of the various waves of immigration over the centuries has been the world's best selection of different varieties of foods and really attractive multi-racial people. If the current wave of Latino immigration plays out anything like every single other immigration wave in US (and likely world) history, the result will be more delicious burritos, sexy new blends of ethnicities, and more Salsa dancing, none of which strike me as a bad thing.
The manufacturing jobs will not be coming back and the people that were earning $25,000 a year at them are going to have to find somewhere else to get paid - probably from the Government.
Manufacturing jobs have "left" almost entirely as a result of productivity increasing faster than demand. Did you know that the US is by far the world's largest manufacturer? Larger than China, India, and Brazil combined? That the US's share of global manufacturing output (20%) has remained unchanged for roughly the past four decades? We are making far far more than we ever have and are doing so with fewer people.
The new immigrants (legal and illegal) do not want any part of America other than wages to send to their starving families back where they came from.
So what, and why is this a bad thing? Shouldn't we be anti people starving to death? If a bunch of people want to exchange their skills and labor for money, why in $DIETY's name would we want to stop them?
The US has disclosure rules that protect investors in companies that have more than 500 investors. Goldman Sachs is creating a scheme where they are the singular investor, but then other investors buy into their shares of Facebook. This prevents Facebook from having to disclose certain information that is considered critical in deciding to invest in a company or not, and allows them to sell shares without informing the public about what they're buying.
Far be it from me to defend GS, but why do these investors need protecting in the first place? How about if a company has shady financials, looks to be a bubble (100x price/earnings!?), and isn't showing you all of their information, you DON'T INVEST IN THEM? If you think that they are way overvalued and will become the next MySpace, don't give them your money. Nobody is forcing you to do so.
I can sort of understand a certain amount of safety regulation for boring old deposit banks, people need a place to put their money without having to be part-time financial auditors, but if you don't think an investment in Facebook will pay off, then don't make one.
...and note that the debt to GDP ratio of the PIIGS are *better* that of the USA. Compared to the PIIGS, the USA is a mismanaged banana republic.
This seemed fishy to me when I first saw it, and it turns out that this is way off. According to the 2010 stats of the CIA World Factbook, the US has the 36th highest (public) debt to GDP ratio at 58.90%.
Here are the countries of PIIGS compared to the US:
Portugal, 15th, 83.20%
Italy, 8th 118.10%
Ireland, 11th 98.50%
Greece, 5th 144.00%
Spain, 27th 63.40%
And, because it was referenced earlier,
Iceland, 6th, 123.80%
So, rather than being worse than the PIIGS countries, the US has a lower public debt to GDP ratio than any of them, and, with the exception of Spain, is vastly lower. Also, note that the US's debt to GDP is lower than that of the UK (76.50%), France (83.50%), or Germany (74.80%).
Now, that's not to say that this level of public debt is good, or that it shouldn't be lowered (it isn't and it should), but in terms of debt to GDP, the US is better off than most of the large European economies.
That said, an "absolutely no screening" line really is a horrendously stupid idea. Why WOULDN'T they attack it?
Because there are only a few terrorists in the world? Because they're mostly stupid and poorly organized?
I would definitely fly the "absolutely no screening" line, especially after the massive discounts they would likely give out if (in the extremely unlikely event) another attack did occur.
It's easy to say it's a flawed system. What isn't easy is to create a system that isn't flawed.
How about we use the same system that we use for our commuter trains, i.e. nothing? Maybe a few bomb-sniffing dogs wandering around and a metal detector (or a non-functional metal-detector-looking box, for some theater)? How many more people would die from terrorist attacks? Probably fewer than die every day in car crashes. Terrorism just isn't a big deal.
And what do you suppose happens when the people we put in charge of public safety say "terrorism is extremely rare" to explain why they did nothing to stop an attack just like the ones that already happened.
If we lived in a country of grown-ups? The TSA would say, "eh, shit happens," and everyone would go about their business, just like we do every day when a few people die somewhere in a car crash.
I like and agree with the bulk of your post, but took issue to this part:
That's where evolution kicks in, people born in different generations have different ways of interacting and thinking. Some are behind their times while others are ahead which I see as a normal mutation, if you will, that can be a succesful one or a failing one.
That's not an example of evolution at work; no meaningful differences are expected between one or two generations. That is much more an example of social and cultural norms learned early in life remaining relatively static later into life. As the social or cultural norm changes, the next generation learns a slightly different set of norms. No meaningful genetic difference exists between that small a number of generations.
Differences attributable to evolution would only become apparent in a larger population over the course of tens, hundreds, or thousands of generations.
Looking at the referenced book itself, "Science Vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think" by Elaine Ecklund, on page 35 (viewable on Google Books), it says:
About 36 percent of scientists have some form of a belief in God. When this same question about belief in God is asked of members of the general public, about 94 percent claim belief. [...] About 28 percent of scientists who are part of a religious tradition do not know whether or not they believe in God.
This study was explicitly limited to scientists from the following "top" universities, according to the University of Florida's annual report of the "Top American Research Universities":
Columbia University
Cornell University
Duke University
Harvard University
Johns Hopkins University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Princeton University
Stanford University
University of Pennsylvania
University of California at Berkeley
University of California, Los Angeles
University of Chicago
University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
University of Washington, Seattle
University of Wisconsin, Madison
University of Southern California
Washington University
Yale University
In other words: according to the source you cite, no, most (64%) of the top scientists do not believe in God.
While this demonstrates basic concepts of evolution, it is still a far cry from demonstrated evolution of matter into super complex biological organisms.
It's not about "matter" evolving into "complex organisms," it is about "simple organisms" evolving into "complex organisms." Evolution isn't concerned with how life arose, only how it changed after arising.
BTW,
Given that, in the case of our species, quite a number of steps would have required that both parents acquired the exact same mutation at the exact same time that gave them some kind of key evolutionary advantage that helped them survive longer/better than people without it,
No.
Why would both parents need to acquire a trait at the same time? Either parent could pass on the trait, and beneficial traits would tend to spread throughout the population. More complex traits don't need to arise all at once, so a beneficial trait could arise in a small segment of the population and then gradually spread as those possessing the trait out-competed those without it. This is really basic evolutionary theory.
and also considering the fact that there's not exactly a tendency in nature to organize (chances are worse than just picking the right color out of the hat)
I have no idea what this means. "Organize" in what sense? Ironically, the word "organize" comes from "organs," which were evolved by... nature! The primary defining characteristic of all life is organizing. The most basic function of a cell is separating the interior from the exterior; when a cell ceases to segregate internal from external, it is no longer alive. Life is, literally, the organization of simpler compounds into organs, cells, and populations.
I would say that it's a VERY valid question to raise about evolution, at least our own evolution.
What is a "VERY valid question?" What question are you raising?
Not to say that there's intelligence behind evolution, but that perhaps there's something more to it than we're seeing or thinking of. It's best not to think we know exactly how it all happened.
That's why we are still researching it. We know the general mechanism (inherited genetic differences), but there are a ton of specifics left to figure out. The impressive thing about it is that a random number generator and a fitness function will give rise to amazingly complex results (either natural organisms or simulations). None of this requires any kind of mysterious, magical "intelligent designer" guiding the process. I may be overly cynical, but suggesting that evolution does have some "guiding hand" is a way to weasel ID nonsense into the conversation.
Let me start by saying that I mostly agree with your points, and am intending to further discussion rather than bash you. It's always hard to tell on the Internet.
really care about banning gay marriage
I care about retaining the meaning of the word marriage.
Why? This is something I hear a lot in the gay marriage debate but have never really understood. Obviously, you can't speak for all people who hold this view, but I'd like to try to understand this sentiment better.
For the purpose of comparison, my position on this is that I care about the meaning of the word "marriage" only insofar as it is an English word which allows for unambiguous communication. I care as much about the meaning of the word "marriage" as I do about the word "house" or "fire." In other words, it would be a shame if the word "marriage" had to be substituted for a much longer explanation in order to accurately convey a particular meaning. As a specific cultural institution, I don't really care about preserving it.
So my question is, "what do you mean by 'retaining the meaning of the word marriage' and why is that important?" I genuinely don't understand this sentiment and would like to try to understand it better.
I really could care less about gays living together, and quite honestly I think that the tax/medical/whatever benefits available to married couples should be extended to any two cohabitating people. [...]
We seem to be in perfect agreement about this. I might go further and remove the words "two" and "cohabitating," but I'm still thinking about that one.
abortion
Ah, the concept that a human isn't human because it's still in inside its mother.
This is an issue which I doubt will ever really be "fully" resolved, since it is so subjective. Does human life begin at conception? Does it begin at the act unprotected sex? When the sperm and egg plasma membranes fuse? When the haploid egg and sperm cells fuse to create a diploid zygote? When the heart starts beating, or when a certain amount of brain function is achieved? Is it at birth, or when the baby begins to respirate, or when it can see? Are sperm and egg cells alive? (well, yes) When are they considered human? Is it wrong to allow an egg to go unfertilized?
There is no real answer to these questions, since they all depend on such subjective opinions of what constitutes a human or "potential human." Since it will always be arbitrary, we choose an arbitrary point at which to make the cutoff, birth being an unambiguous one. The problem I have with moving the cutoff earlier (and especially within the first trimester) is that it then include morning-after pills and intrauterine devices, since they act after fertilization, but prevent implantation (well, for morning-after pills, it seems like the research isn't completely settled on that point). Are we allowed to induce medical abortions through drugs like Mifepristone? It's a sticky subject.
Tell me, are there other places a human can be where they aren't human? Maybe we could re-define Gitmo as a womb, from a legal standpoint, so that the prisoners held there don't have to be treated humanely.
I think you have to be careful with slippery-slope arguments, since they can often be used to argue for or against any position. Obviously, any legislation about whether someone is "legally a human" should be extremely specific and inflexible, so that problems such as "defining Gitmo to be a womb" are as hard as possible.
stem cell research
Same old FUD. I must admit, I'm not surprised. I'm not against stem cell research. I'm against killing unborn children to harvest their stem cells, but first of all that isn't necessary and secondly those stem cells have been spectacularly ineffective anyway.
What has this guy taken over so far? 2/3rds of the US auto industry, the entire banking industry, and now the healthcare system. Yeah, do we want to allow them to take over the private network infrastructure too?
They can't even get unemployment back under 9%.
Do you see the problem with these two paragraphs? The first one is arguing against government intervention in the economy, while the second is complaining about complaining about insufficient (positive) government intervention in the economy.
Now, it would be perfectly reasonable to say, "the federal government has shown itself to be ineffective at managing the economy, as evidenced by its recent mismanagement of the banking and auto industries, so I don't want them having as big of a hand in the economy." That means that they don't have as much of an ability to make positive changes to the economy, since they have less control. Obviously, things like setting interest rates and taxes are very different from purchasing ownership of a company, but I read your comment (perhaps incorrectly) as being against expanding federal government influence in the economy in general, not just specifically those cases where it achieves this through direct acquisitions.
It is inconsistent to say "I don't want the government involved in the economy, but I want them to fix it!"
History has proven that whenever you give government power that CAN be abused, it WILL be abused.
Hmm - let's for a minute imagine that you are the person in charge of an essential utility (say an electrical retailer with the new "smart meters" installed) and you are under attack. You are not coping, your countermeasures are not working. Bit by bit, your network fall under the control of your attacker and people are slowly but surely getting their power turned off.
Ah, you're looking for Bruce Schneier's essay on the dangers of worst-case thinking. Are smart meters actually going to be able to shut off power remotely? Are power systems actually going to be that vulnerable to a wide-scale attack? Maybe, maybe not, but imagining a worst-case scenario and then creating policy based on it is still just creating policy based on something imaginary. Would you give the president the power to order all adults under 5 feet to a volcano just because I can imagine Sauron's armies attacking the Pentagon?
Lets add to that scenario that it is the middle of winter in one of the northern states, so people are starting to freeze to death.
So in this fantasy future, all blankets, coats, and things-which-can-be-burnt-to-generate-heat have been lost to the mists of time? I'm sorry, but I don't buy that this scenario is actually realistic.
And that's not even taking into account the fact that this will be abused should it pass.
There was a really interesting talk I saw a few years back about Failure-Oblivious Computing (original paper (PDF), Google PDF viewer) which would deal with certain kinds of memory errors, like reading or writing past the end of a buffer, by ignoring them and moving on. For reads, if the program tried to read from a bad address, the system would figure out something random to return, and if you tried to write out of bounds, rather than throwing and exception (or segfaulting), it would just ignore the extra writes. This sounds horrifying and seems like it could not possibly work, but it turned out that for (certain kinds of) mostly-correct programs, they could literally ignore errors and things would mostly work.
I can't find a link for it now, but towards the end of the talk, they stress-tested the failure-oblivious compiler by manually introducing off-by-one errors into the source code and seeing what happened. They tried this with a video codec, and found that certain loop bounds were essential for things like determining branch targets, but that a significant number could be fudged and you would still end up with a recognizable video. Obviously, it was degraded from full working order, but you could still make out what was happening in the picture.
The point being that there are certain kinds of faults which a program can tolerate (slightly inaccurate pixel colors, minor graphical garbling of text or images), and there are faults which it cannot (like figuring out a branch target).
I doubt the whole world will move to highly fault-tolerant or failure-oblivious computing any time soon, but it could be an interesting niche for a coprocessor, and/or in certain domains.
Well, you're right, but "I can show you two power plants" is not a good argument. It's fairly easy to take a look at the DOE list of US electricity sources to see that we get (as of 2009) 48.2% of our energy from coal, 1.1% from petroleum liquids and "petroleum coke" (whatever that is). Another 21.4% comes from natural gas, which I guess could be considered oil, but usually is in a separate category.
It would definitely be accurate to say that most of our energy comes from fossil fuels or non-renewable resources, but we actually only get a small amount of our electricity from oil.
I would like to add that the other thing that people tend to forget is that subsidies don't just magically appear out of thin air, that money comes from somewhere. If the government spends $1 trillion per year (which is about how much the oil subsidy is) less on oil and gas, that's $1 trillion which can be spent on other things (or deducted from taxes, though I can't imagine the government just giving that money back).
Slashdot Mirror
Sure globalization is great if you ignore the niggling minor problems
like pollution and exploitation of desperate workers.
I find it hard to call something "exploitation" when people are voluntarily
flocking to these allegedly horrible jobs. If they really felt exploited, they
could always go back to subsistence farming. The fact that they don't is
evidence that subsistence farming is worse than just about any "exploitative"
industrial job.
Also you would have to arbitrarily decide that dying from chronic
diseases from living older is better than dying younger from acute
diseases.
Neither "you" nor I need to arbitrarily decide this at all. Clearly, when given
the choice, people choose the former. How many people let their children die of
an acute but preventable disease and say "well, at least she didn't have to
worry about dying of cancer at 90." I'm guessing the answer is "not many."
And of course since there is no objective way to measure quality of life
we'll just assume that people with the most stuff are the happiest.
The simplest thing to do is give people the option to choose what makes them the
happiest. Who are you or I to tell someone what their quality of life should be?
It validates the American lifestyle so Americans, at least, have to
approve to avoid cognitive dissonance. The best thing any government could do
would be to eliminate the formation of "for-profit" corporations.
You do realize that you are typing on a computer made by a for-profit company,
which is processing the characters using a CPU made by a for-profit company,
which are being sent over a network adapter (wired or wireless) made by a
for-profit company, over a network of networks operated (largely) by for-profit
companies, to a website owned and operated by a for-profit company (GKNT on
NASDAQ), which stores your comment on servers made by for-profit companies. They
certainly have their faults, but Moore's law is not driven by love or
solidarity, it's driven by companies relentlessly competing to steal each
other's consumers, benefiting all of us in the process.
Their "it's all about the profit" charters have made them a danger to the
planet. They have used globalization to avoid doing the right thing
environmentally and socially.
So modern medicine, housing, culture, food and plumbing are all "avoid[ing]
doing the right thing" socially? What on earth would the "right thing" be?
They have no conscience because no one in a corporation feels personally
responsible for the negative impacts of the company.
Is it really meaningful to say that anything other than an individual has a
"conscience?" Plus, why is having a conscience so seemingly critical for a
company? If a company consistently does things that people don't like, and there
are better alternatives, that company will go out of business. It happens all
the time, even for the giants.
As they say: "It's not personal, it's just business".
Of course, ripping people off and being a dick is bad, I think we can agree on
that. But to a large extent, this is a feature, not a bug. There is just no way
you could support the number of people there are if all interactions had to be
"personal." The human brain simply lacks the capacity to form personal
relationships with a few thousand people, let alone 7 billion (or whatever the
population is these days). Having to interact with strangers is simply a fact of
modern life that is inseparable from all of the other wondrous benefits it
brings.
Globalization is really a corporate phenomena that takes advantage of
foolish people who would rather chase what they want rather than what they
need.
Again, who gets to decide what someone "needs?" I'd say, let the individual
decide what he or she needs. After all, that person is in the best position to
know what he or she needs or wants.
Wow, a whole 14% increase in that per year?
14% a year is huge.
Agreed. That's practically unheard of, though they do have the advantage of starting from way behind, and countries in that situation can grow quickly during their catch-up phase.
My question is how do they control inflation with such fast rising wages?
Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon -- Milton Friedman.
It's no longer a free market when there are such huge returns on rent seeking from the government. If the government is granting particular companies or sectors of the economy (like housing) special favors, you are no longer in a Laissez Faire situation.
Everyone agrees that regulatory capture is bad, and if it is present, you no longer have a free market. Where a lot of people disagree is on what to do about it; either reduce the "regulatory" or reduce the "capture."
except I'd be using vi instead of emacs.
Heresy! Repent your wicked ways, O vile blasphemer, lest you suffer the eternal wrath of Saint IGNUcius! And furthermore...
Ah, I can't do it anymore. Not only am I too young to have been involved in the Great Editor Wars, I'm just happy to see anyone using a text editor these days. Let us set aside our grievances, for both sides have lost many good men (and women) to the Great Editor Wars, and band together against the new threat: the demon known as the Integrated Devil Eternity (IDE)!
I actually commented about this to my friend while watching it. Not only did they not use meaningless technobabble, but the KDE window decorations were authentic, the output from wget was exactly accurate, and Emacs actually looked like Emacs. All of the bits of code I saw looked real enough, and Perl would be exactly the thing one would have used then for more complicated web spidering (nowadays, it would probably be Perl, Python, or maybe Ruby).
Aside from getting the jargon correct, I was definitely impressed with the details down to the period-accurate GUI elements. I've just become so jaded to the ubiquitous "swirling, beeping, 3D computers" of most Hollywood stuff that something even remotely realistic (let alone dead-on, like Social Network) seems shocking.
austerity programs are exactly what government's *shouldnt* do when the economy sags
Well, if you're a Keynesian. Reasonable people disagree. Not that you're necessarily wrong; there are a lot of top economists who subscribe to a Keynesian view of economic downturns, it's just that there isn't anything approaching a consensus as to whether fiscal stimulus is a good course of action during a recession.
Every dollar they cut from a program is a dollar someone isn't going to be spending next year, so tax revenues will drop even further.
But if they also cut that dollar from taxes, then someone will have an extra dollar to spend on the private sector through consumption or savings, and whether that's better depends on your viewpoint (paradox of thrift vs inefficiency of government spending).
A government with any sense would establish a sustainable cost of operations, borrow money when times are bad, and pay off the loans when times are good.
Agreed, but what level that cost should be is subject to a lot of debate. Should it be 20% of GDP? 70%? 7? That's where much of the disagreement comes from. P.S. I agree that science spending is one of the last things you want to cut, especially when it's such a minuscule part of the federal budget as it is now.
Why would we want to punish anyone for keeping money from falling into the smoldering crater that is the American auto industry?
There is as yet no satisfactory scientific explanation as to why chlorophyll has evolved to "ignore" green and near-green light, which are a major part of the visible spectrum.
It could be that specific chemical properties of chlorophyll make it more expensive (in terms of the amount of energy required to produce each molecule) to synthesize green-absorbent light is greater than the marginal increase in energy produced. It could be that the current structure of chlorophyll is at a local maximum for efficiency, and that evolving an alternative molecule would require first using a much less-efficient molecule and then improving from there. Evolution and evolutionary processes are great at finding local maxima, but can completely miss higher maxima further away.
As far as "why green?" I imagine that if and when we know why chlorophyll ignores green light, the answer will be something like, "green-ignoring photosynthesizing pigments out-competed the other photosynthesizing pigments because of reason X, and alternative colored pigments are different enough from chlorophyll that photoautotrophs have not jumped to using those alternatives."
The answer to "why reason X?" likely has something to do with the difficulty of the organic systems at the time to produce pigments more efficient than chlorophyll relative to the energy return of the increased efficiency.
Ultimately, some of the "why" depends on the specific emission spectrum of sunlight received at ocean level on the Earth, which is determined by the size and composition of the Sun and the composition of the Earth's atmosphere. The "why" of that is because of the random scattering of interstellar dust which eventually became our solar system. I guess, if you really wanted, you could place some idea of a supernatural being or force there, saying,
god(s) arranged the chaotic interactions of interstellar dust such that one particular blob of dust formed into a G2V-class star with a black body temperature of 5777 K, then seeded one particular planet (through the tendency of certain elements to cluster around Earth as opposed to Mars or Venus, as well as bombardment by asteroids) with a mixture of elements such that a certain kind of organic life arose which evolved photoautotrophs which, because of the relative abundance of certain elements, the relative presence of various wavelengths of light at sea-level, the photosynthetic efficiency of different pigments, and the energy and cellular machinery required to produce said pigments, chlorophyll, which does not efficiently absorb green light, ended up becoming the dominating pigment used in photosynthesis. And that is how god(s) made the grass green.
In other words, a "god(s) of tweaking things at the margins," which doesn't exactly fill me with awe. Plus, given the sheer size of the universe, it's easy to believe that our planet and everything about it arose out of dumb luck. Essentially, a restatement of the weak (tautological) anthropic principle "conditions that are observed in the universe must allow the observer to exist."
Integration into American society? Surely you jest! These folks do not want to become "Americans" - they want to stick with Spanish and live in "Little Mexico" enclaves.
Citation needed.
They are not interested in joining American culture in the least little bit. There is no integration going to happen.
So what? Seriously, is "American culture" (as if there is a single culture for the whole country) so fragile or valuable that we really need to worry about it changing or being destroyed? Every single other time there has been a scare about immigrants or ethnic or religious groups "coming in" and "failing to integrate" into American society, and this being a bad thing, everything is still fine.
Go back and look at what people said about the Irish Catholics coming over in the late 1800's. They were going to destroy the good, Protestant, way of life and corrupt the lifeblood of the country. Or they pretty much did their own thing, integrated somewhat, changed the culture somewhat, and everything is fine. Same with Japanese and Chinese immigrants. Turns out they mostly didn't want to turn over the US to the Japanese emperor and now we have sushi and General Tao's chicken. As far as I can see, the most noticeable effects of the various waves of immigration over the centuries has been the world's best selection of different varieties of foods and really attractive multi-racial people. If the current wave of Latino immigration plays out anything like every single other immigration wave in US (and likely world) history, the result will be more delicious burritos, sexy new blends of ethnicities, and more Salsa dancing, none of which strike me as a bad thing.
The manufacturing jobs will not be coming back and the people that were earning $25,000 a year at them are going to have to find somewhere else to get paid - probably from the Government.
Manufacturing jobs have "left" almost entirely as a result of productivity increasing faster than demand. Did you know that the US is by far the world's largest manufacturer? Larger than China, India, and Brazil combined? That the US's share of global manufacturing output (20%) has remained unchanged for roughly the past four decades? We are making far far more than we ever have and are doing so with fewer people.
The new immigrants (legal and illegal) do not want any part of America other than wages to send to their starving families back where they came from.
So what, and why is this a bad thing? Shouldn't we be anti people starving to death? If a bunch of people want to exchange their skills and labor for money, why in $DIETY's name would we want to stop them?
The US has disclosure rules that protect investors in companies that have more than 500 investors. Goldman Sachs is creating a scheme where they are the singular investor, but then other investors buy into their shares of Facebook. This prevents Facebook from having to disclose certain information that is considered critical in deciding to invest in a company or not, and allows them to sell shares without informing the public about what they're buying.
Far be it from me to defend GS, but why do these investors need protecting in the first place? How about if a company has shady financials, looks to be a bubble (100x price/earnings!?), and isn't showing you all of their information, you DON'T INVEST IN THEM? If you think that they are way overvalued and will become the next MySpace, don't give them your money. Nobody is forcing you to do so.
I can sort of understand a certain amount of safety regulation for boring old deposit banks, people need a place to put their money without having to be part-time financial auditors, but if you don't think an investment in Facebook will pay off, then don't make one.
...and note that the debt to GDP ratio of the PIIGS are *better* that of the USA. Compared to the PIIGS, the USA is a mismanaged banana republic.
This seemed fishy to me when I first saw it, and it turns out that this is way off. According to the 2010 stats of the CIA World Factbook, the US has the 36th highest (public) debt to GDP ratio at 58.90%. Here are the countries of PIIGS compared to the US:
And, because it was referenced earlier,
So, rather than being worse than the PIIGS countries, the US has a lower public debt to GDP ratio than any of them, and, with the exception of Spain, is vastly lower. Also, note that the US's debt to GDP is lower than that of the UK (76.50%), France (83.50%), or Germany (74.80%). Now, that's not to say that this level of public debt is good, or that it shouldn't be lowered (it isn't and it should), but in terms of debt to GDP, the US is better off than most of the large European economies.
That said, an "absolutely no screening" line really is a horrendously stupid idea. Why WOULDN'T they attack it?
Because there are only a few terrorists in the world? Because they're mostly stupid and poorly organized?
I would definitely fly the "absolutely no screening" line, especially after the massive discounts they would likely give out if (in the extremely unlikely event) another attack did occur.
It's easy to say it's a flawed system. What isn't easy is to create a system that isn't flawed.
How about we use the same system that we use for our commuter trains, i.e. nothing? Maybe a few bomb-sniffing dogs wandering around and a metal detector (or a non-functional metal-detector-looking box, for some theater)? How many more people would die from terrorist attacks? Probably fewer than die every day in car crashes. Terrorism just isn't a big deal.
And what do you suppose happens when the people we put in charge of public safety say "terrorism is extremely rare" to explain why they did nothing to stop an attack just like the ones that already happened.
If we lived in a country of grown-ups? The TSA would say, "eh, shit happens," and everyone would go about their business, just like we do every day when a few people die somewhere in a car crash.
The two of them deserve Nobel Peace Prizes to recognize them for the heroes they are.
I like and agree with the bulk of your post, but took issue to this part:
That's where evolution kicks in, people born in different generations have different ways of interacting and thinking. Some are behind their times while others are ahead which I see as a normal mutation, if you will, that can be a succesful one or a failing one.
That's not an example of evolution at work; no meaningful differences are expected between one or two generations. That is much more an example of social and cultural norms learned early in life remaining relatively static later into life. As the social or cultural norm changes, the next generation learns a slightly different set of norms. No meaningful genetic difference exists between that small a number of generations.
Differences attributable to evolution would only become apparent in a larger population over the course of tens, hundreds, or thousands of generations.
Otherwise, I really like your post.
And according to that link,
Fully half of these top scientists are religious.
Looking at the referenced book itself, "Science Vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think" by Elaine Ecklund, on page 35 (viewable on Google Books), it says:
About 36 percent of scientists have some form of a belief in God. When this same question about belief in God is asked of members of the general public, about 94 percent claim belief. [...] About 28 percent of scientists who are part of a religious tradition do not know whether or not they believe in God.
This study was explicitly limited to scientists from the following "top" universities, according to the University of Florida's annual report of the "Top American Research Universities":
In other words: according to the source you cite, no, most (64%) of the top scientists do not believe in God.
While this demonstrates basic concepts of evolution, it is still a far cry from demonstrated evolution of matter into super complex biological organisms.
It's not about "matter" evolving into "complex organisms," it is about "simple organisms" evolving into "complex organisms." Evolution isn't concerned with how life arose, only how it changed after arising.
BTW,
Given that, in the case of our species, quite a number of steps would have required that both parents acquired the exact same mutation at the exact same time that gave them some kind of key evolutionary advantage that helped them survive longer/better than people without it,
No.
Why would both parents need to acquire a trait at the same time? Either parent could pass on the trait, and beneficial traits would tend to spread throughout the population. More complex traits don't need to arise all at once, so a beneficial trait could arise in a small segment of the population and then gradually spread as those possessing the trait out-competed those without it. This is really basic evolutionary theory.
and also considering the fact that there's not exactly a tendency in nature to organize (chances are worse than just picking the right color out of the hat)
I have no idea what this means. "Organize" in what sense? Ironically, the word "organize" comes from "organs," which were evolved by... nature! The primary defining characteristic of all life is organizing. The most basic function of a cell is separating the interior from the exterior; when a cell ceases to segregate internal from external, it is no longer alive. Life is, literally, the organization of simpler compounds into organs, cells, and populations.
I would say that it's a VERY valid question to raise about evolution, at least our own evolution.
What is a "VERY valid question?" What question are you raising?
Not to say that there's intelligence behind evolution, but that perhaps there's something more to it than we're seeing or thinking of. It's best not to think we know exactly how it all happened.
That's why we are still researching it. We know the general mechanism (inherited genetic differences), but there are a ton of specifics left to figure out. The impressive thing about it is that a random number generator and a fitness function will give rise to amazingly complex results (either natural organisms or simulations). None of this requires any kind of mysterious, magical "intelligent designer" guiding the process. I may be overly cynical, but suggesting that evolution does have some "guiding hand" is a way to weasel ID nonsense into the conversation.
Let me start by saying that I mostly agree with your points, and am intending to further discussion rather than bash you. It's always hard to tell on the Internet.
really care about banning gay marriage
I care about retaining the meaning of the word marriage.
Why? This is something I hear a lot in the gay marriage debate but have never really understood. Obviously, you can't speak for all people who hold this view, but I'd like to try to understand this sentiment better.
For the purpose of comparison, my position on this is that I care about the meaning of the word "marriage" only insofar as it is an English word which allows for unambiguous communication. I care as much about the meaning of the word "marriage" as I do about the word "house" or "fire." In other words, it would be a shame if the word "marriage" had to be substituted for a much longer explanation in order to accurately convey a particular meaning. As a specific cultural institution, I don't really care about preserving it.
So my question is, "what do you mean by 'retaining the meaning of the word marriage' and why is that important?" I genuinely don't understand this sentiment and would like to try to understand it better.
I really could care less about gays living together, and quite honestly I think that the tax/medical/whatever benefits available to married couples should be extended to any two cohabitating people. [...]
We seem to be in perfect agreement about this. I might go further and remove the words "two" and "cohabitating," but I'm still thinking about that one.
abortion
Ah, the concept that a human isn't human because it's still in inside its mother.
This is an issue which I doubt will ever really be "fully" resolved, since it is so subjective. Does human life begin at conception? Does it begin at the act unprotected sex? When the sperm and egg plasma membranes fuse? When the haploid egg and sperm cells fuse to create a diploid zygote? When the heart starts beating, or when a certain amount of brain function is achieved? Is it at birth, or when the baby begins to respirate, or when it can see? Are sperm and egg cells alive? (well, yes) When are they considered human? Is it wrong to allow an egg to go unfertilized?
There is no real answer to these questions, since they all depend on such subjective opinions of what constitutes a human or "potential human." Since it will always be arbitrary, we choose an arbitrary point at which to make the cutoff, birth being an unambiguous one. The problem I have with moving the cutoff earlier (and especially within the first trimester) is that it then include morning-after pills and intrauterine devices, since they act after fertilization, but prevent implantation (well, for morning-after pills, it seems like the research isn't completely settled on that point). Are we allowed to induce medical abortions through drugs like Mifepristone? It's a sticky subject.
Tell me, are there other places a human can be where they aren't human? Maybe we could re-define Gitmo as a womb, from a legal standpoint, so that the prisoners held there don't have to be treated humanely.
I think you have to be careful with slippery-slope arguments, since they can often be used to argue for or against any position. Obviously, any legislation about whether someone is "legally a human" should be extremely specific and inflexible, so that problems such as "defining Gitmo to be a womb" are as hard as possible.
stem cell research
Same old FUD. I must admit, I'm not surprised. I'm not against stem cell research. I'm against killing unborn children to harvest their stem cells, but first of all that isn't necessary and secondly those stem cells have been spectacularly ineffective anyway.
I'm against killing unborn chil
Why a web interface? seriously...
The web interface allows you to order beer from any web enabled device, such as a smart phone!
Or a car!
What has this guy taken over so far? 2/3rds of the US auto industry, the entire banking industry, and now the healthcare system. Yeah, do we want to allow them to take over the private network infrastructure too?
They can't even get unemployment back under 9%.
Do you see the problem with these two paragraphs? The first one is arguing against government intervention in the economy, while the second is complaining about complaining about insufficient (positive) government intervention in the economy.
Now, it would be perfectly reasonable to say, "the federal government has shown itself to be ineffective at managing the economy, as evidenced by its recent mismanagement of the banking and auto industries, so I don't want them having as big of a hand in the economy." That means that they don't have as much of an ability to make positive changes to the economy, since they have less control. Obviously, things like setting interest rates and taxes are very different from purchasing ownership of a company, but I read your comment (perhaps incorrectly) as being against expanding federal government influence in the economy in general, not just specifically those cases where it achieves this through direct acquisitions.
It is inconsistent to say "I don't want the government involved in the economy, but I want them to fix it!"
History has proven that whenever you give government power that CAN be abused, it WILL be abused.
Here, we are in agreement.
Hmm - let's for a minute imagine that you are the person in charge of an essential utility (say an electrical retailer with the new "smart meters" installed) and you are under attack. You are not coping, your countermeasures are not working. Bit by bit, your network fall under the control of your attacker and people are slowly but surely getting their power turned off.
Ah, you're looking for Bruce Schneier's essay on the dangers of worst-case thinking. Are smart meters actually going to be able to shut off power remotely? Are power systems actually going to be that vulnerable to a wide-scale attack? Maybe, maybe not, but imagining a worst-case scenario and then creating policy based on it is still just creating policy based on something imaginary. Would you give the president the power to order all adults under 5 feet to a volcano just because I can imagine Sauron's armies attacking the Pentagon?
Lets add to that scenario that it is the middle of winter in one of the northern states, so people are starting to freeze to death.
So in this fantasy future, all blankets, coats, and things-which-can-be-burnt-to-generate-heat have been lost to the mists of time? I'm sorry, but I don't buy that this scenario is actually realistic.
And that's not even taking into account the fact that this will be abused should it pass.
There was a really interesting talk I saw a few years back about Failure-Oblivious Computing (original paper (PDF), Google PDF viewer) which would deal with certain kinds of memory errors, like reading or writing past the end of a buffer, by ignoring them and moving on. For reads, if the program tried to read from a bad address, the system would figure out something random to return, and if you tried to write out of bounds, rather than throwing and exception (or segfaulting), it would just ignore the extra writes. This sounds horrifying and seems like it could not possibly work, but it turned out that for (certain kinds of) mostly-correct programs, they could literally ignore errors and things would mostly work.
I can't find a link for it now, but towards the end of the talk, they stress-tested the failure-oblivious compiler by manually introducing off-by-one errors into the source code and seeing what happened. They tried this with a video codec, and found that certain loop bounds were essential for things like determining branch targets, but that a significant number could be fudged and you would still end up with a recognizable video. Obviously, it was degraded from full working order, but you could still make out what was happening in the picture.
The point being that there are certain kinds of faults which a program can tolerate (slightly inaccurate pixel colors, minor graphical garbling of text or images), and there are faults which it cannot (like figuring out a branch target).
I doubt the whole world will move to highly fault-tolerant or failure-oblivious computing any time soon, but it could be an interesting niche for a coprocessor, and/or in certain domains.
Well, you're right, but "I can show you two power plants" is not a good argument. It's fairly easy to take a look at the DOE list of US electricity sources to see that we get (as of 2009) 48.2% of our energy from coal, 1.1% from petroleum liquids and "petroleum coke" (whatever that is). Another 21.4% comes from natural gas, which I guess could be considered oil, but usually is in a separate category.
It would definitely be accurate to say that most of our energy comes from fossil fuels or non-renewable resources, but we actually only get a small amount of our electricity from oil.
Spot on.
I would like to add that the other thing that people tend to forget is that subsidies don't just magically appear out of thin air, that money comes from somewhere. If the government spends $1 trillion per year (which is about how much the oil subsidy is) less on oil and gas, that's $1 trillion which can be spent on other things (or deducted from taxes, though I can't imagine the government just giving that money back).