I predict that if Kerry is behind more than he is now at the time of the last debate, then he will viloate the debate rules and take direct unrehearsed questions from audience members.
He almost has to. It is almost a certainty that most of the political commentators on cable news shows will call the first debate a Bush win no matter what happens. That is what they did after the Gore-Bush debates, even after Bush made several major mistakes during the debate. And those cable tv commentators are widely watched. And most of them favor Bush (no surprise, as they are all making millions).
So, I think it likely that Kerry will be behind 5 or more points going into the last debate. He almost has to do something like disregarding the moderator questions (or answering them quickly, then taking questions from the audience. If he gives the right explanation, what can Bush do? If he walks out, he will plummet in the polls. Kerry can make Bush like bad this way, and set himself up as somewhat of a maverick, which is a perception he desperately needs.
I would hope that shadow debate by cobb and badnarik gets some play, as it will help set the stage for kerry's debate move, as it will build a background awareness among the voters that the Bush-Kerry debates are staged affairs, thus justifying kerry's move.
I guess I am probably not showing the proper amount of obesiance to those at the top of the hierarchy, but I just have to know why humans spend so much time pondering the minutaie of those at the top of the hierarchy?
maybe the reason you are able to do this and the reason why others are not able to do this is that they and you have different brain structures? Maybe some part of their brains do not work quite right? maybe some part of their endocrinal or nervous system is slightly flawed? The body is very complicated and we do not yet understand it.
THere are thousands of ways that organisms can be flawed. Just because we do understand these differences and flaws YET does not mean they do not exist.
You and others here on this thread boast and gloat about how virtuous you are, but apparently your thinking about this is superficial. Healthful desires and discipline are not necessarily there for everyone.
Let's put you on the court with an NBA player and let him your every shot because he towers over you by a foot. You would complain that his genetics give him an advantage, but you are doing the same thing here. Did it ever occur to you that what a person does is influenced not entirely by will, but biologically?
You and the other posters on this thread sicken and frighten me. I come here to post and try to teach you young people human decency because I know you need it. Many of you are isolated from good human morals and need guidance. You need a community. Modern AMerica lifestyle has taken that from you. But I try to give you moral guidance anyway. I may be engaged in a futile pursuit, but I think I am doing the right thing.
What is even more sickening is how our political system and corporate media is encouraging this type of morality, this type of darwinistic, predatory capitalism. This is just wrong.
If it is lives they want to save, how about all the millions of working class people who die obesity, cancer, heart disease, etc? Instead we pay to make sure some elite figurehead won't have his hair rumpled by teenaged girls.
First we have to build an awareness of the manipulation put over on people via "patriotism" and worship of the constitution and rich people, celebrities, etc.
To do that, you have to get into the minds of people via mass media. Unfortunately, when it comes to politics, the mass media is closed to anything but vapid gossip and horseracing aspects of campaigns. No surprise, there....
Just as the young men were sacrificed on the altar of patriotism in every bogus, cooked-up war in history, courtesy of munitions manufacturers in early wars, now they are sacrificed on the altar of labor market manipulations, courtesy of multinational corporations....
That is the problem with America--it is a captive pseudo-democracy: a playground for the investors, rather than a country, for the people and by the people, like so many countries in Europe really are.
Wake up, my fellow Americans--we need a NEW Constitution, instead of the slaveowner-written piece of crap we have.
you wrote:
Why would people, in the future, bother waking you up?
Why do we bother to save people nowadays? If some person without a friend or relative in the world collapses in front of a hospital in America or Europe or many other places in the world, they are brought inside and emergency procedures are initiated. But why?
As a frozen person from the past, the future people will OWE ME. I helped build the world they inhabit.
Don't get me wrong, I see that it might be interesting for them from an archeological perspective. But it would be an awful lot of work to wake everybody up.
Well, their science will be more advanced. In the 40s, how much would it have cost to do many of the computative tasks that our computers do today? Thousands? Millions?
Your coffin (and your remains) might get destroyed in a nuclear war, or lost, in the meantime. As soon as we get those warp coils or infinite improbability drives working and start exploring the galaxy, your coffin might end up abandoned on a planet.
Why bother to get out of the bed tomorrow? You might as well just get run over by a bus? Why bother to do anything?
How would the future civilization know that they are the ones to wake you up?
Well, I am pretty sure we will be part of history. I'm not really worried about that.....
If I was to request to be frozen when I died, I wouldn't expect to be thawed and resurrected,
I am not worried about that.
But there are real concerns about storage--natural disasters, social unrest, a mixture of pandering politicians and religious fundamentalists, etc.
These sorts of concerns tell me that revival is certainly no sure thing....but cryonics sure does beat the hell out of the alternative....
you wrote: Perhaps, but if that part of the brain is what contains who I am, my memories and my experiences, and that is destroyed, then as far as I'm concerned, I'm dead.
Well, we already know that personhood is distributed at least somewhat. We know this from people who have had brain damage. What happens thes is that you might change or lose some functionality. But there is no one special part that is go/no-go for personhood.
Even if my brain is salvaged, the resulting person that happens to have my cerebellum, medulla and occipital lobe is no more me than someone to whom I've donated by kidneys.
Well, that is just plain wrong! Your brain IS YOU! Your kidneys aint you!
Puhleeze!
As for time being on my side, you are assuming that these cryo companies/trusts/entities will have live that long. Pharaoh Rameses was buried with all kinds of stuff to help him in his afterlife... the Egyptians' beliefs aside, that stuff sure did not last tens of thousands of years.
If some of the brain structure is destroyed, then obviously the information contained within that structure is not recoverable.
However, there are two points to consider:
1. what defines destruction? If I write your name on notepaper and then tear the paper in half, is the information destroyed? How about into 10 pieces? 1000 pieces? 1 million? How about if I tear it into 1 billion pieces and then put it in a vault for 100 years. Is the information on the note still lost, or can the technology of that age recover your name from the billion pieces.
So what I am saying is that "destruction" is defined by the technology of a particular place in time. And when in liquid nitrogen, time is on your side.
A particular damaging freeze may indeed render a part of a brain effectively "destroyed" in the year 2500 A.D. But what about the year 10,000 A.D.? What about 25,000 A.D. Destruction and recovery are only relevant to a particular time. And time, as you may have noticed, tends to move on. As does technology.
2. Destruction of PART of the brain may not preclude eventual revival, even if the destruction is indeed complete for ALL time periods. We know little about the brain, but from what we do know, it seems likely that not all of the brain is irreplacable with respect to "personhood".
If a certain brain part A is lost irreparably, perhaps that part can be replaced with a generic functional substitute. Not all of our brains are likely to be unique. Plug and play may be viable for some parts.
One common tactic of cryonics skeptics is to say that during freezing, the brain cells are destroyed by ice. Not true! I guess these skeptics have never heard of cryopreservative solutions (sophicsticated antifreezes). They are perfused into the brain and inhibit ice formation to a great degree.
Besides, even if ice crystals do form, during revival, technologies yet undeveloped should be able to deduce the former brain structure from what is still there.
First off, cryonics is not a scam. Period. No one has ever made a damn off of cryonics, although it is filled with libertarians who all used to think it would be quite lucrative someday. And it probably will be, although it is nowhere near that now. Instead, it has bankrupted a few people. You need to understand that cryonics companies are not nonprofits with the monies in a trust. Cryonics members are heavily involved in the operation of these companies themselves. It is quite a political thing....trust me!
As for the chances of success: yes, I think it somewhat likely that I will be revived someday in some form via some type of futuristic neuroarchaeology.
As far as I can tell, all of what humans are is in the brain, stored as some sort of information. Whatever you know or remember or think or feel, it all comes from your brain, or nearly all of it.
So, if you lose one brain cell tonight when you sleep, are you not the same person tomorrow? What if you lose 1000 cells? A million? Where is the threshold? IF you lose the memory of your first football game, as you no longer the same person?
So, if what you are as a person is stored as information, and not all of that information is needed to be the same person, can enough of that information someday be recovered through neuroarcheaology in the distant future?
Surely not tomorrow! 10 years from now? 100? 1000? 10,000 years? Once you get into the Liquid nitrogen, chemical processes for all practical purposes stop. You can last for thousands of years unchanged.
So, if the technology to recover your "information" is not available in N years, then wait K years, and try again. Increment time interval and repeat until done.
Anyway, at least it does ease the sting of death. When I breath my last, I will go knowing that there is a chance I will wake up in a future where people live thousands or even millions of years. And why not billions of years? Who knows what fate awaits the universe? We do not even yet understand what the universe really is....
....I have a contract for cryostasis upon legal death with Alcor, and I plan to post on Slashdot soon after I am revived.
I wonder if my gmail account will be full?
You guys are seriously reaching!
on
The Jobs Crunch
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· Score: 1
This is all ya got?
I guess the Limbaugh/Rockwell/Friedman/Rand/AEI script just plays out after awhile, huh?
Re:We WANT high labor costs! It's a Good Thing!
on
The Jobs Crunch
·
· Score: 1
you wrote: Europeans accept higher unemployment, lower consumption of consumer goods, they maintain a highly educated workforce, and they have legislated a redistribution of wealth.
They also have a welfare state that pays them benefits far beyond what we have. Years of unemployment, for example. Universal healthcare. Tuition-free universities. (Benefits vary from country to country, but without dispute, their welfare state dwarfs our own).
And they still have had to accept scaling back their benefits.
NO, very recently, the elite have gotten away with some shenanigans, especially in Germany. They will be put in their place shortly. Unlike America, most EU countries have a true democracy.
Does the political and social will and ability exist in the US to do the same?
All of my posts in this thread pretty much speak directly to this issue. What I am doing here is helping to create that will. Actually, I am helping people to see what is going on. At least I hope so.
Even by usual Slashdot standards, it's stunning that the above crap actually got modded up.
Nice tone!
His argument, explicitly spelled out, is that he buys foreign goods because they are cheaper than American goods and that if he bought American goods he would have less money for the rent and therefore, he argues, the government should FORCE him (and you and me and everyone else) to pay higher prices for all goods, bringing the foreign ones at least up to the price of the American ones he's unwilling to pay for, and thus to have less money to pay the rent. And someone somewhere bought into this?
As Joe EveryAmerican, my real wages have been dropping for decades, in large part because of globalization, immigration, paltry minimum wage raises and anti-union laws. I need to buy carefully to survive and to give my childrn the best chance to survive. If I buy American product A at cost $N, I have $K-N left over to survive and leave to my children, and everyone else buys foreign product B at cost $N/2, they have $K-N/2 left over. They are their children will outcompete me for living space (they get the good neighborhood, while me and my children get the bad neighborhood).
What my govt should do is not place me in such a harsh competitive environment. That is what I pay them to do--to provide for my General Welfare, and provide my and my children with the best possible quality of life.
Leaving asside the morality of forcing foreigners
They and their fellow citizens pay their govt to look out for them, and I and my fellow citizens pay our govt to look out for us. All of us, not just the rich and the corporations. When my govt places the welfare of foreigners ahead of my own, they commit treason.
you actually want the government to FORCE you to pay higher prices because it's not a choice you'd make on your own? This is insanity.
No, I pay my govt to place me in the best position. Making me compete against low wages foreigners is treason.
What if I owned a business and hired a manager who put the interests of competing businesses ahead of my own business?
Slashdot Mirror
I predict that if Kerry is behind more than he is now at the time of the last debate, then he will viloate the debate rules and take direct unrehearsed questions from audience members.
He almost has to. It is almost a certainty that most of the political commentators on cable news shows will call the first debate a Bush win no matter what happens. That is what they did after the Gore-Bush debates, even after Bush made several major mistakes during the debate. And those cable tv commentators are widely watched. And most of them favor Bush (no surprise, as they are all making millions).
So, I think it likely that Kerry will be behind 5 or more points going into the last debate. He almost has to do something like disregarding the moderator questions (or answering them quickly, then taking questions from the audience. If he gives the right explanation, what can Bush do? If he walks out, he will plummet in the polls. Kerry can make Bush like bad this way, and set himself up as somewhat of a maverick, which is a perception he desperately needs.
I would hope that shadow debate by cobb and badnarik gets some play, as it will help set the stage for kerry's debate move, as it will build a background awareness among the voters that the Bush-Kerry debates are staged affairs, thus justifying kerry's move.
and just how is that supposed to impeach or discredit my comment?
I guess I am probably not showing the proper amount of obesiance to those at the top of the hierarchy, but I just have to know why humans spend so much time pondering the minutaie of those at the top of the hierarchy?
maybe the reason you are able to do this and the reason why others are not able to do this is that they and you have different brain structures? Maybe some part of their brains do not work quite right? maybe some part of their endocrinal or nervous system is slightly flawed? The body is very complicated and we do not yet understand it.
THere are thousands of ways that organisms can be flawed. Just because we do understand these differences and flaws YET does not mean they do not exist.
You and others here on this thread boast and gloat about how virtuous you are, but apparently your thinking about this is superficial. Healthful desires and discipline are not necessarily there for everyone.
Let's put you on the court with an NBA player and let him your every shot because he towers over you by a foot. You would complain that his genetics give him an advantage, but you are doing the same thing here. Did it ever occur to you that what a person does is influenced not entirely by will, but biologically?
You and the other posters on this thread sicken and frighten me. I come here to post and try to teach you young people human decency because I know you need it. Many of you are isolated from good human morals and need guidance. You need a community. Modern AMerica lifestyle has taken that from you. But I try to give you moral guidance anyway. I may be engaged in a futile pursuit, but I think I am doing the right thing.
What is even more sickening is how our political system and corporate media is encouraging this type of morality, this type of darwinistic, predatory capitalism. This is just wrong.
Do me a favor--rent the movei THEY LIVE.
Oh, well if it is crowds that are dangerous, maybe we ought to outlaw cities!
you are living in the past. Have you not heard of Free Speech Zones?
before they look out for us.
If it is lives they want to save, how about all the millions of working class people who die obesity, cancer, heart disease, etc? Instead we pay to make sure some elite figurehead won't have his hair rumpled by teenaged girls.
Typical of the human critter....
First we have to build an awareness of the manipulation put over on people via "patriotism" and worship of the constitution and rich people, celebrities, etc.
To do that, you have to get into the minds of people via mass media. Unfortunately, when it comes to politics, the mass media is closed to anything but vapid gossip and horseracing aspects of campaigns. No surprise, there....
Just as the young men were sacrificed on the altar of patriotism in every bogus, cooked-up war in history, courtesy of munitions manufacturers in early wars, now they are sacrificed on the altar of labor market manipulations, courtesy of multinational corporations....
"I still think that document is pretty much a work of genius."
Oh, it is a work of genius, all right. It set up this country right in the pocket of the investor. It could hardly have done a better job.
But it sucks if you aint in the top 30 percent or so....
That is the problem with America--it is a captive pseudo-democracy: a playground for the investors, rather than a country, for the people and by the people, like so many countries in Europe really are.
Wake up, my fellow Americans--we need a NEW Constitution, instead of the slaveowner-written piece of crap we have.
Oh, go ahead and mod me down as Flameebait.
you wrote:
Why would people, in the future, bother waking you up?
Why do we bother to save people nowadays? If some person without a friend or relative in the world collapses in front of a hospital in America or Europe or many other places in the world, they are brought inside and emergency procedures are initiated. But why?
As a frozen person from the past, the future people will OWE ME. I helped build the world they inhabit.
Don't get me wrong, I see that it might be interesting for them from an archeological perspective. But it would be an awful lot of work to wake everybody up.
Well, their science will be more advanced. In the 40s, how much would it have cost to do many of the computative tasks that our computers do today? Thousands? Millions?
Your coffin (and your remains) might get destroyed in a nuclear war, or lost, in the meantime. As soon as we get those warp coils or infinite improbability drives working and start exploring the galaxy, your coffin might end up abandoned on a planet.
Why bother to get out of the bed tomorrow? You might as well just get run over by a bus? Why bother to do anything?
How would the future civilization know that they are the ones to wake you up?
Well, I am pretty sure we will be part of history. I'm not really worried about that.....
If I was to request to be frozen when I died, I wouldn't expect to be thawed and resurrected,
I am not worried about that.
But there are real concerns about storage--natural disasters, social unrest, a mixture of pandering politicians and religious fundamentalists, etc.
These sorts of concerns tell me that revival is certainly no sure thing....but cryonics sure does beat the hell out of the alternative....
Yeah, we know. In fact all the early cryopreservatives we used were glucose based.
Now, I think the primary component is iceblockers similar to the protein based antifreezes developed by anarctic fish.
you wrote:
Perhaps, but if that part of the brain is what contains who I am, my memories and my experiences, and that is destroyed, then as far as I'm concerned, I'm dead.
Well, we already know that personhood is distributed at least somewhat. We know this from people who have had brain damage. What happens thes is that you might change or lose some functionality. But there is no one special part that is go/no-go for personhood.
Even if my brain is salvaged, the resulting person that happens to have my cerebellum, medulla and occipital lobe is no more me than someone to whom I've donated by kidneys.
Well, that is just plain wrong! Your brain IS YOU! Your kidneys aint you!
Puhleeze!
As for time being on my side, you are assuming that these cryo companies/trusts/entities will have live that long. Pharaoh Rameses was buried with all kinds of stuff to help him in his afterlife... the Egyptians' beliefs aside, that stuff sure did not last tens of thousands of years.
yeah, thanks, I'll keep that in mind. However, I tend to prefer my solutions a bit more, um, tangible.....
If some of the brain structure is destroyed, then obviously the information contained within that structure is not recoverable.
However, there are two points to consider:
1. what defines destruction? If I write your name on notepaper and then tear the paper in half, is the information destroyed? How about into 10 pieces? 1000 pieces? 1 million? How about if I tear it into 1 billion pieces and then put it in a vault for 100 years. Is the information on the note still lost, or can the technology of that age recover your name from the billion pieces.
So what I am saying is that "destruction" is defined by the technology of a particular place in time. And when in liquid nitrogen, time is on your side.
A particular damaging freeze may indeed render a part of a brain effectively "destroyed" in the year 2500 A.D. But what about the year 10,000 A.D.? What about 25,000 A.D.
Destruction and recovery are only relevant to a particular time. And time, as you may have noticed, tends to move on. As does technology.
2. Destruction of PART of the brain may not preclude eventual revival, even if the destruction is indeed complete for ALL time periods. We know little about the brain, but from what we do know, it seems likely that not all of the brain is irreplacable with respect to "personhood".
If a certain brain part A is lost irreparably, perhaps that part can be replaced with a generic functional substitute. Not all of our brains are likely to be unique. Plug and play may be viable for some parts.
you pay monthly installment payments for life insurance policies and dues. Total usually about $60-150/month.
One common tactic of cryonics skeptics is to say that during freezing, the brain cells are destroyed by ice. Not true! I guess these skeptics have never heard of cryopreservative solutions (sophicsticated antifreezes). They are perfused into the brain and inhibit ice formation to a great degree.
Besides, even if ice crystals do form, during revival, technologies yet undeveloped should be able to deduce the former brain structure from what is still there.
mistake there--of the three operational companies, two (the two largest companies) are definitely nonprofits, and the other I am not sure.
First off, cryonics is not a scam. Period. No one has ever made a damn off of cryonics, although it is filled with libertarians who all used to think it would be quite lucrative someday. And it probably will be, although it is nowhere near that now. Instead, it has bankrupted a few people. You need to understand that cryonics companies are not nonprofits with the monies in a trust. Cryonics members are heavily involved in the operation of these companies themselves. It is quite a political thing....trust me!
As for the chances of success: yes, I think it somewhat likely that I will be revived someday in some form via some type of futuristic neuroarchaeology.
As far as I can tell, all of what humans are is in the brain, stored as some sort of information. Whatever you know or remember or think or feel, it all comes from your brain, or nearly all of it.
So, if you lose one brain cell tonight when you sleep, are you not the same person tomorrow? What if you lose 1000 cells? A million? Where is the threshold? IF you lose the memory of your first football game, as you no longer the same person?
So, if what you are as a person is stored as information, and not all of that information is needed to be the same person, can enough of that information someday be recovered through neuroarcheaology in the distant future?
Surely not tomorrow! 10 years from now? 100? 1000? 10,000 years? Once you get into the Liquid nitrogen, chemical processes for all practical purposes stop. You can last for thousands of years unchanged.
So, if the technology to recover your "information" is not available in N years, then wait K years, and try again. Increment time interval and repeat until done.
Anyway, at least it does ease the sting of death. When I breath my last, I will go knowing that there is a chance I will wake up in a future where people live thousands or even millions of years. And why not billions of years? Who knows what fate awaits the universe? We do not even yet understand what the universe really is....
....I have a contract for cryostasis upon legal death with Alcor, and I plan to post on Slashdot soon after I am revived.
I wonder if my gmail account will be full?
This is all ya got?
I guess the Limbaugh/Rockwell/Friedman/Rand/AEI script just plays out after awhile, huh?
you wrote:
Europeans accept higher unemployment, lower consumption of consumer goods, they maintain a highly educated workforce, and they have legislated a redistribution of wealth.
They also have a welfare state that pays them benefits far beyond what we have. Years of unemployment, for example. Universal healthcare. Tuition-free universities. (Benefits vary from country to country, but without dispute, their welfare state dwarfs our own).
And they still have had to accept scaling back their benefits.
NO, very recently, the elite have gotten away with some shenanigans, especially in Germany. They will be put in their place shortly. Unlike America, most EU countries have a true democracy.
Does the political and social will and ability exist in the US to do the same?
All of my posts in this thread pretty much speak directly to this issue. What I am doing here is helping to create that will. Actually, I am helping people to see what is going on. At least I hope so.
You wrote:
Even by usual Slashdot standards, it's stunning that the above crap actually got modded up.
Nice tone!
His argument, explicitly spelled out, is that he buys foreign goods because they are cheaper than American goods and that if he bought American goods he would have less money for the rent and therefore, he argues, the government should FORCE him (and you and me and everyone else) to pay higher prices for all goods, bringing the foreign ones at least up to the price of the American ones he's unwilling to pay for, and thus to have less money to pay the rent. And someone somewhere bought into this?
As Joe EveryAmerican, my real wages have been dropping for decades, in large part because of globalization, immigration, paltry minimum wage raises and anti-union laws. I need to buy carefully to survive and to give my childrn the best chance to survive. If I buy American product A at cost $N, I have $K-N left over to survive and leave to my children, and everyone else buys foreign product B at cost $N/2, they have $K-N/2 left over. They are their children will outcompete me for living space (they get the good neighborhood, while me and my children get the bad neighborhood).
What my govt should do is not place me in such a harsh competitive environment. That is what I pay them to do--to provide for my General Welfare, and provide my and my children with the best possible quality of life.
Leaving asside the morality of forcing foreigners
They and their fellow citizens pay their govt to look out for them, and I and my fellow citizens pay our govt to look out for us. All of us, not just the rich and the corporations. When my govt places the welfare of foreigners ahead of my own, they commit treason.
you actually want the government to FORCE you to pay higher prices because it's not a choice you'd make on your own? This is insanity.
No, I pay my govt to place me in the best position. Making me compete against low wages foreigners is treason.
What if I owned a business and hired a manager who put the interests of competing businesses ahead of my own business?