The best way to distribute an online magazine and avoid piracy:
Step 1: Distribute the magazine.
Step 2: Don't sail a boat around the coast of Somalia, or through the Red Sea.
Simple
Not to mention progressives. Because you know, it takes not knowing anything about 20th century to think that leftist ideas don't lead to mass starvation.
Is it seriously your argument: Working towards social equality causes starvation because Stalin and Mao (and probably Pol Pot)?
There are some serious gaps in your education my friend. I don't have the hours it would take to correct this unfortunately.
The answer isn't to simply shift power around. It's to devolve and extinguish power completely.
Can't be done. Someone will always be stronger, smarter, or have a hold on someone else.
The best answer I know is to dilute power. It never goes away but giving a huge number of smaller groups and individuals power makes it less dangerous as no one group or individual has a lot.
This is why I wish at times it were possible to rewrite human nature--essentially strip out the greed, petty cruelty, and shortsighted stupidity and distribute the fix like a software patch. Society would work a lot better if we didn't have these flaws.
The human mind is very malleable, it is in fact possible for each individual to modify his own nature to a significant degree. There are techniques to train you mind and modify your behaviour in pretty much any way you like. I have yet to find any reliable ways to change other people though.
Sorry if I am a bit slow on the uptake, but if the mastermind of the 11/09/01 attacks was taken into custody in march 2003, why did the US invade Iraq 17 days later? Why did they then invade Afghanistan? Why did Osama Bin Laden get shot in the face? I seem to remember each of these acts was justified as being designed to punish/find the perpetrators of those attacks....
Superman quartz crystals just look like bigger than average quartz crystals, and we can't garuntee the why or how of such a thing would be found. So it needs to really stick out and scream "I am special".
This is the primary point. We now have this technology, but if I were wandering around and found one of these crystals from an ancient civilisation I wouldn't recognise it. I wouldn't call up these researchers and ask them to access the data. I would go "hmm thats a larger than usual piece of quartz" and walk on. Quartz isn't even rare or valuable. Even making it scream I am special wouldn't help much. You could carve it into the shape of something intricate and recognisable. Then I would pick it up, but it would end up in a museum and never be read. The finder would use the same excuse that we always use, completely without evidence, whenever we discover something interesting from antiquity: "It must have had some religious significance".
Your first 2 points use the word "will". That is the big difference between Pike and Eaton in the two articles - The former is talking about the actual realities we face now, and the other is talking about an ideal world that could be. Yes it is true electric cars could be viable as a primary means of mass transit at some point in the future. Yes it is true electric cars are not currently viable as a means of mass transit. I am going to switch my brand of cigarettes because in the future lung transplants are going to be much cheaper, safer and more widely available.
As for the third point - maybe people in France and Sweden should buy electric cars, but no one else. It is also the case that The power those countries are producing is already being used. To convert their entire vehicle fleet to electric would mean massive power generation increases. Maybe in an ideal world that expansion would also consist purely of nuclear/hydro/wind. Maybe they will figure out cold fusion. Maybe, one day, electric cars could be viable somewhere...
That is a bullshit excuse for greedy exploitation and you know it. I could lock a 5 year old girl in my basement and make the same argument. The world isn't asking the US to bail them out it is asking the US to stop fucking everything up. This was already explained in the post you replied to which you failed to comprehend though so I don't know why I am bothering to repeat it.
A better question is not how, but why? The limit where a higher income stops improving your quality of life is around 75k (that's Euros I think so you might want to ask for about 100k if you are in the US). I would prefer to do something useful with my life than chase after the unachievable and pointless goal of having limitless money.
...elderly friend of mine who is absolutely certain that the entire threat from population growth is entirely due to the horrible white races he is part of.
Technically he is has a point. There is a direct, almost perfect correlation between poverty and population growth. Given that much of the poverty on an international scale is due to the fact that the more developed nations do nothing to cooperate with furthering world development, and in many cases actually work to prevent it, there is certainly some blame to be placed there.
Well here is something to make you feel disgusted again: How many people in 2012 in the US were killed by terrorism (soldiers don't count)? How many people died in the US in 2012 due to malnutrition? How many people in the US in 2012 died in freak weather events? Prescription drugs? Inadequate health care? In jail while awaiting trial on marijuana possession charges? Assault rifle killing sprees? Go look up some statistics, I'll wait.
Law abiding governments have nothing to worry about from whistleblowers. Only war criminals, the corrupt and the dishonest should fear the activities of the media.
There's nothing to "believe" in when it comes to science (it works either way) but if the fear of death makes people interested, that's great.
"It always remains a scandal of philosophy and universal human reason that the existence of things outside us... should have to be assumed merely on faith, and that if it occurs to anyone to doubt it, we should be unable to answer him with a satisfactory proof" -Kant
Science is based on the faith that there is an objective universe. Can you prove the existence of this objective reality? If not, then there is something to believe when it comes to science.
If the electric car is aimed to replace the median gasoline consuming car, then the comparison makes sense.
Yes but in that case it also makes sense to replace the median gasoline car with a new gasoline car. If we need to make a choice between replacing with new efficient ICEs or new electric cars, then we need to compare those two cars. The correct comparison to the Tesla Roadster when comparing efficiency is the Lotus Elise, as they use the same chassis, cater to the same market segment, and are generally alike in every significant way except fuel type. If you want to find out whether electric powered cars in general are better than gasoline powered cars in general, you have to do a like vs like comparison or your numbers are irrelevant.
When the Prius first got popular the same thing was said about it. Was soon proved false.
Now that everyone has finishes wanking on about which car is the fastest, I feel there are some relevant points here that are often ignored or misunderstood. Firstly this was not proved false about the Prius. In New Zealand Toyota was taken to court and lost a false advertising suit because of their emissions claims. Not because the emissions of the power stations were not taken into account, but because their tail pipe emission figures were much higher than they claimed.
As to the Tesla, I was one of the researchers on a paper that investigated the Tesla as an example of the impact of electric cars a few years ago when the tesla was still very new. This paper was totally ignored when it came out but the findings match what seems to be generally accepted at least here in this thread: that electric cars are currently roughly as efficient and polluting as modern ICE cars. The Honda Civic seems to be the example of choice. This conclusion was ridiculed by many at the time. We did not however take into account the cost of battery manufacturing (at the time specific data about that was very hard to come by) as the article referred to here did.
A few things that I learned in this process that are relevant to the current discussion: 1) The "average" ICE vehicle is something like a 10 year old station wagon, so 'better than the average ICE vehicle' is not good at all. Modern super efficient ICE vehicles are significantly more efficient and less polluting than they were even 5 years ago. 2) It is claimed that the original article "fails to account for the carbon emissions resulting from the production of gasoline". This may or may not be true, I didn't analyse the data from that article. Information about the efficiency of the entire gasoline production process from the well to the tank is easily available and included as a matter of course by any credible researcher. The information is so easy to obtain and used so widely that one would have to make a deliberate decision to disclude the information in a study like this. 3) All electricity is not equal. Both articles make the mistake to some degree of treating the power grid like some giant universal constant. The article that says the tesla is bad at least specifies US power production, the one disputing it doesn't specify as far as I see. There are vast differences across various states. One US state has close to 90% coal power, in this state the Tesla pollutes at least as much as a decent modern diesel SUV. In other states there is a lot of Hydro power, in these states the Tesla has quite attractive pollution stats. 4) How you drive makes a massive difference. If you drive the Tesla like a sports car (it is a sports car), then the Honda Civic will have much better pollution numbers.
This is a complex issue, and I would lean towards believing Nathan Weiss article if I had to choose one without a careful analysis of their data and methods, because he shows a lot of his numbers and the article is longer. The Green Car Reports article is only half a page and shows no numbers at all.
I love this particular idiotic argument, it cracks me up. "The earth is a self regulating system therefore whatever humans do to it, it will just compensate, therefore we can pollute as much as we want."
My reply is always "Your body is a self regulating system therefore whatever you do to it it will just compensate. You can prove the validity of your hypothesis about the planet by simply quaffing a few litres of industrial bleach."
As a loyal customer of Deutsche Bahn, I would just like to say: The paint jobs on the trains are as boring as snot, please pay graffiti artists to liven them up.
It is subjective. The scientific method requires one to not only see what works, but demonstrate objectively to others that it works. Ingenuity, as mentioned above, only requires you to find what works for yourself and implement that. They are similar but one involves far less documentation and the testing is less rigorous.
Here's the skinny for those who think that anxiety and depression are just something that weak people complain about.
Can you explain to me where it is written that existential distress = anxiety and depression?
My father and brother suffer from anxiety attacks, and my wife and sister from depression. I would never dream of telling anyone they are weak or should 'suck it up' when suffering from such problems. I resent the implication that I was doing so. Given that existential distress does not appear to be a commonly used phrase in medicine, I simply added the meanings of the respective words together.
Perhaps I phrased it wrong but it was not my intention to assign purpose or direction objectively. I was speaking to the human mentality that assumes artificial purpose and direction as a mechanism for understanding and categorising social concepts. To rephrase what I said in terms of "the heterogeneous amalgamation of memes that we label as culture": Distress of an existential nature (as distinct from anxiety and depression which I refer to as such and see no reason to invent new terms for) is part of a psychological feedback mechanism which regulates certain aspects of society. Human beings manufacture a sense of purpose and direction in order to help establish priorities and goals for behaviour. When the priorities and goals of an individual differ from those of society at large or those around them, this results in a feeling of distress which in isolation, can prompt the affected individual to attempt to change their priorities and goals, and when shared by a larger group, can prompt the group to attempt to change the priorities and goals of the society or culture that they are part of. In terms of social evolution, an individual or group having different goals and priorities than their surrounding cultural substrate can result in inefficiency of social function. It is therefore a natural evolutionary development that a psychological tool has evolved to help the individual sense when this is the case, and to prompt them to attempt to resolve the conflict.
You will have to excuse me for not understanding that existential distress means extreme anxiety. My father suffers from this and I have never heard it referred to as existential distress. A google search resulted in a bunch of articles about buddhism, this article which doesn't mention anxiety and describes existential distress as "hopelessness, burden to others, loss of sense of dignity, desire for death or loss of will to live [1] and threats to self identity". There is no mention of anxiety. Typing existential distress into wikipedia leads to a page about Solastalgia and the will to live. Given the lack of any real meaning for this term to be found I simply used my own knowledge of the words "existential" and "distress" and assumed a meaning based on that.
I am still not convinced existential distress means anxiety attacks, but if anxiety attacks are what this drug can treat then that is great and I retract my comments about it being a bad idea.
Slashdot Mirror
The best way to distribute an online magazine and avoid piracy: Step 1: Distribute the magazine. Step 2: Don't sail a boat around the coast of Somalia, or through the Red Sea. Simple
Not to mention progressives. Because you know, it takes not knowing anything about 20th century to think that leftist ideas don't lead to mass starvation.
Is it seriously your argument: Working towards social equality causes starvation because Stalin and Mao (and probably Pol Pot)?
There are some serious gaps in your education my friend. I don't have the hours it would take to correct this unfortunately.
The answer isn't to simply shift power around. It's to devolve and extinguish power completely.
Can't be done. Someone will always be stronger, smarter, or have a hold on someone else.
The best answer I know is to dilute power. It never goes away but giving a huge number of smaller groups and individuals power makes it less dangerous as no one group or individual has a lot.
This is why I wish at times it were possible to rewrite human nature--essentially strip out the greed, petty cruelty, and shortsighted stupidity and distribute the fix like a software patch. Society would work a lot better if we didn't have these flaws.
The human mind is very malleable, it is in fact possible for each individual to modify his own nature to a significant degree. There are techniques to train you mind and modify your behaviour in pretty much any way you like. I have yet to find any reliable ways to change other people though.
Sorry if I am a bit slow on the uptake, but if the mastermind of the 11/09/01 attacks was taken into custody in march 2003, why did the US invade Iraq 17 days later? Why did they then invade Afghanistan? Why did Osama Bin Laden get shot in the face? I seem to remember each of these acts was justified as being designed to punish/find the perpetrators of those attacks....
Superman quartz crystals just look like bigger than average quartz crystals, and we can't garuntee the why or how of such a thing would be found. So it needs to really stick out and scream "I am special".
This is the primary point. We now have this technology, but if I were wandering around and found one of these crystals from an ancient civilisation I wouldn't recognise it. I wouldn't call up these researchers and ask them to access the data. I would go "hmm thats a larger than usual piece of quartz" and walk on. Quartz isn't even rare or valuable. Even making it scream I am special wouldn't help much. You could carve it into the shape of something intricate and recognisable. Then I would pick it up, but it would end up in a museum and never be read. The finder would use the same excuse that we always use, completely without evidence, whenever we discover something interesting from antiquity: "It must have had some religious significance".
We got there first. We claimed it. What more do you want?
Speaking of which, the Nacotchtank want to know when they can move back into the whitehouse.
Your first 2 points use the word "will". That is the big difference between Pike and Eaton in the two articles - The former is talking about the actual realities we face now, and the other is talking about an ideal world that could be. Yes it is true electric cars could be viable as a primary means of mass transit at some point in the future. Yes it is true electric cars are not currently viable as a means of mass transit. I am going to switch my brand of cigarettes because in the future lung transplants are going to be much cheaper, safer and more widely available.
As for the third point - maybe people in France and Sweden should buy electric cars, but no one else. It is also the case that The power those countries are producing is already being used. To convert their entire vehicle fleet to electric would mean massive power generation increases. Maybe in an ideal world that expansion would also consist purely of nuclear/hydro/wind. Maybe they will figure out cold fusion. Maybe, one day, electric cars could be viable somewhere...
Everyone can see the emperor has no clothes. No proof is required.
That is a bullshit excuse for greedy exploitation and you know it. I could lock a 5 year old girl in my basement and make the same argument. The world isn't asking the US to bail them out it is asking the US to stop fucking everything up. This was already explained in the post you replied to which you failed to comprehend though so I don't know why I am bothering to repeat it.
A better question is not how, but why? The limit where a higher income stops improving your quality of life is around 75k (that's Euros I think so you might want to ask for about 100k if you are in the US). I would prefer to do something useful with my life than chase after the unachievable and pointless goal of having limitless money.
...elderly friend of mine who is absolutely certain that the entire threat from population growth is entirely due to the horrible white races he is part of.
Technically he is has a point. There is a direct, almost perfect correlation between poverty and population growth. Given that much of the poverty on an international scale is due to the fact that the more developed nations do nothing to cooperate with furthering world development, and in many cases actually work to prevent it, there is certainly some blame to be placed there.
Well here is something to make you feel disgusted again: How many people in 2012 in the US were killed by terrorism (soldiers don't count)? How many people died in the US in 2012 due to malnutrition? How many people in the US in 2012 died in freak weather events? Prescription drugs? Inadequate health care? In jail while awaiting trial on marijuana possession charges? Assault rifle killing sprees? Go look up some statistics, I'll wait.
Law abiding governments have nothing to worry about from whistleblowers. Only war criminals, the corrupt and the dishonest should fear the activities of the media.
There's nothing to "believe" in when it comes to science (it works either way) but if the fear of death makes people interested, that's great.
"It always remains a scandal of philosophy and universal human reason that the existence of things outside us ... should have to be assumed merely on faith, and that if it occurs to anyone to doubt it, we should be unable to answer him with a satisfactory proof" -Kant
Science is based on the faith that there is an objective universe. Can you prove the existence of this objective reality? If not, then there is something to believe when it comes to science.
If the electric car is aimed to replace the median gasoline consuming car, then the comparison makes sense.
Yes but in that case it also makes sense to replace the median gasoline car with a new gasoline car. If we need to make a choice between replacing with new efficient ICEs or new electric cars, then we need to compare those two cars. The correct comparison to the Tesla Roadster when comparing efficiency is the Lotus Elise, as they use the same chassis, cater to the same market segment, and are generally alike in every significant way except fuel type. If you want to find out whether electric powered cars in general are better than gasoline powered cars in general, you have to do a like vs like comparison or your numbers are irrelevant.
When the Prius first got popular the same thing was said about it. Was soon proved false.
Now that everyone has finishes wanking on about which car is the fastest, I feel there are some relevant points here that are often ignored or misunderstood. Firstly this was not proved false about the Prius. In New Zealand Toyota was taken to court and lost a false advertising suit because of their emissions claims. Not because the emissions of the power stations were not taken into account, but because their tail pipe emission figures were much higher than they claimed.
As to the Tesla, I was one of the researchers on a paper that investigated the Tesla as an example of the impact of electric cars a few years ago when the tesla was still very new. This paper was totally ignored when it came out but the findings match what seems to be generally accepted at least here in this thread: that electric cars are currently roughly as efficient and polluting as modern ICE cars. The Honda Civic seems to be the example of choice. This conclusion was ridiculed by many at the time. We did not however take into account the cost of battery manufacturing (at the time specific data about that was very hard to come by) as the article referred to here did.
A few things that I learned in this process that are relevant to the current discussion:
1) The "average" ICE vehicle is something like a 10 year old station wagon, so 'better than the average ICE vehicle' is not good at all. Modern super efficient ICE vehicles are significantly more efficient and less polluting than they were even 5 years ago.
2) It is claimed that the original article "fails to account for the carbon emissions resulting from the production of gasoline". This may or may not be true, I didn't analyse the data from that article. Information about the efficiency of the entire gasoline production process from the well to the tank is easily available and included as a matter of course by any credible researcher. The information is so easy to obtain and used so widely that one would have to make a deliberate decision to disclude the information in a study like this.
3) All electricity is not equal. Both articles make the mistake to some degree of treating the power grid like some giant universal constant. The article that says the tesla is bad at least specifies US power production, the one disputing it doesn't specify as far as I see. There are vast differences across various states. One US state has close to 90% coal power, in this state the Tesla pollutes at least as much as a decent modern diesel SUV. In other states there is a lot of Hydro power, in these states the Tesla has quite attractive pollution stats.
4) How you drive makes a massive difference. If you drive the Tesla like a sports car (it is a sports car), then the Honda Civic will have much better pollution numbers.
This is a complex issue, and I would lean towards believing Nathan Weiss article if I had to choose one without a careful analysis of their data and methods, because he shows a lot of his numbers and the article is longer. The Green Car Reports article is only half a page and shows no numbers at all.
I love this particular idiotic argument, it cracks me up. "The earth is a self regulating system therefore whatever humans do to it, it will just compensate, therefore we can pollute as much as we want."
My reply is always "Your body is a self regulating system therefore whatever you do to it it will just compensate. You can prove the validity of your hypothesis about the planet by simply quaffing a few litres of industrial bleach."
As a loyal customer of Deutsche Bahn, I would just like to say: The paint jobs on the trains are as boring as snot, please pay graffiti artists to liven them up.
Zero in on the source of the cyberattack, and end it. If it's just a script kiddie, maybe you use a Tomahawk instead.
They are talking about Stuxnet. You want to fire tomahawks at Washington and Tel Aviv? I don't think the government is going to go for that idea.
It is subjective. The scientific method requires one to not only see what works, but demonstrate objectively to others that it works. Ingenuity, as mentioned above, only requires you to find what works for yourself and implement that. They are similar but one involves far less documentation and the testing is less rigorous.
Here's the skinny for those who think that anxiety and depression are just something that weak people complain about.
Can you explain to me where it is written that existential distress = anxiety and depression?
My father and brother suffer from anxiety attacks, and my wife and sister from depression. I would never dream of telling anyone they are weak or should 'suck it up' when suffering from such problems. I resent the implication that I was doing so. Given that existential distress does not appear to be a commonly used phrase in medicine, I simply added the meanings of the respective words together.
Perhaps I phrased it wrong but it was not my intention to assign purpose or direction objectively. I was speaking to the human mentality that assumes artificial purpose and direction as a mechanism for understanding and categorising social concepts. To rephrase what I said in terms of "the heterogeneous amalgamation of memes that we label as culture": Distress of an existential nature (as distinct from anxiety and depression which I refer to as such and see no reason to invent new terms for) is part of a psychological feedback mechanism which regulates certain aspects of society. Human beings manufacture a sense of purpose and direction in order to help establish priorities and goals for behaviour. When the priorities and goals of an individual differ from those of society at large or those around them, this results in a feeling of distress which in isolation, can prompt the affected individual to attempt to change their priorities and goals, and when shared by a larger group, can prompt the group to attempt to change the priorities and goals of the society or culture that they are part of. In terms of social evolution, an individual or group having different goals and priorities than their surrounding cultural substrate can result in inefficiency of social function. It is therefore a natural evolutionary development that a psychological tool has evolved to help the individual sense when this is the case, and to prompt them to attempt to resolve the conflict.
You will have to excuse me for not understanding that existential distress means extreme anxiety. My father suffers from this and I have never heard it referred to as existential distress. A google search resulted in a bunch of articles about buddhism, this article which doesn't mention anxiety and describes existential distress as "hopelessness, burden to others, loss of sense of dignity, desire for death or loss of will to live [1] and threats to self identity". There is no mention of anxiety. Typing existential distress into wikipedia leads to a page about Solastalgia and the will to live. Given the lack of any real meaning for this term to be found I simply used my own knowledge of the words "existential" and "distress" and assumed a meaning based on that.
I am still not convinced existential distress means anxiety attacks, but if anxiety attacks are what this drug can treat then that is great and I retract my comments about it being a bad idea.
Sure go ahead