Here you can actually buy stuff, and lots of it has free shipping, may it be to Ouagadougou, Timbuktu or Buttfuck, Idaho.
You know, useful.
As long as you don't mind it possibly not being as-listed and a high chance of it repeatedly falling off the back of a truck, including the delivery truck (which if you read the very fine print they disclaim all responsibility for).
Card games are for meatspace. Theyre a complete waste of modern computing.
Depends on how feasible managing meatspace is. I've been in several CAH games online where a major part of it was that we (the players) were spread over several countries as well as time zones, and one of the major questions of meeting up would be which country is easiest. (Then there's the minor fact that while all of us were in countries that will let citizens of the other countries get tourist visas for the asking, at least one person would be in for a 6-8 hour flight.)
At some point, the ease of meeting up in meatspace for any given activity will drop to the point that it's more efficient to do it via cyberspace.
There are ways out of this. The first is to find one or more partners who have the necessary skills to develop the prototype with him, in return for equity. Not willing to give up equity? Then too bad? Can't convince devs that your idea is not that great/unique/compelling (because we've ALL heard variants of this "my idea is SO great - all you have to do is code it and we'll be rich" bullsh*t)? Again, too bad.
The real "way out of this" is to realize that, since he doesn't have the necessary skills, he either has to acquire them or give up. Not willing to take the years necessary to acquire them? Like the old saying goes, "The will to succeed isn't as important as the will to plan to succeed." Not having a plan that takes the obvious potential obstacles such as the ones you cited into account is a pretty good indicator that you're not the one to invest in. After all, ultimately, people invest in people, not products. The product won't complete itself. You can't hold an incomplete product accountable. You hold the people behind it accountable.
Not only that, but having a dev (team) lined up when you run your KickStarter is a pretty good sign that you're serious about this--though honestly I'd be more inclined to go with a project where the dev(s) are taking at least part of their cut in equity, because that means the dev team actually has motivation to hold up their end. Some amount of wages may be necessary, but equity provides some motivation to release a product good enough to keep selling once people see the end product: This protects me as a backer, and honestly I'd feel more confident about the results if the dev(s), who should know a lot more than I do about the project, feel confident enough to be wanting equity. Particularly with a known good dev team, I'd expect them to not be likely to do that unless they feel sales stand a reasonable chance of being good.
A prototype of some sort is a good way to show that you really do believe in the product you're pitching me, which actually makes a difference. If you don't believe in it well enough to put in the work to show me even a very loose prototype, why should I believe in you enough to give you money? More importantly, why should I give it to you when there's other, equally-interesting projects that have put the effort into their pitches that you didn't?
If you're an established group, knocking out even a quickie prototype may actually be relatively easy--and it helps you narrow down what you actually are going to do once you've got the money. Are you going to make an all-new engine for your video game? Do you actually need to, and even if you really do, can you get a prototype going with an existing engine? (Slap on disclaimers saying that this is a pre-alpha version and significant changes will definitely happen.) This would probably give at least some sense of what sort of budget you may need to look at...
If you've already got a rep for delivering, you may not need to give anything more than "We have the basics pinned down," but you absolutely need the rep for delivering and it certainly would be wise to keep people informed about if there are delays. Even better is having a rep for timely and informative updates as well as one for delivering--not necessarily regular ones, since "We're working on it!" daily is less useful than even a long quarterly report whose tl;dr is "We have reached these milestones, here's some of what we've got to show you now, we expect to be reaching these other milestones soon." (Better would be a report on those milestones being hit as they're hit, as well as a notice when snags are hit and overcome, but still, infrequent informative updates are better than frequent uninformative ones.)
Unless you're picked as the new Anointed One by Big Puiblisher, you also have to do your own marketing; the only 'marketing' they'll give most writers is putting your book on a book store shelf, if you're lucky enough to get a print run and they don't go straight to ebooks. And few people look for a publisher's logo on a book before they buy it.
Don't forget that the Big Publisher may also take the marketing fees out of your royalty checks, even when this is all the marketing anybody can tell they did. They really don't like cutting royalty checks if you're not one of the Anointed Ones or other darlings. Part of why indie is taking off is because the Big Publishers are acting like the Big Recording Companies did at their worst, and while having a print version out on shelves is nice there is a lot to be said about actually getting paid for your labor.
And I haven't paid them dick and STILL don't see any ads.
So you are a free-loading asshole?
Some of us earned it via means other than money. But I'd actually be open to whitelisting everywhere an adserv which promises and delivers malware-free and video-free ads, and even doing things like helping it know what ads to serve me. (I'd see it as cutting down on my need to figure out who actually has what I want: if I can do that, and they don't point any ads my way, then I am fine with figuring they don't want my sale.)
I agree. I'm Canadian where we do allow homosexual marriage (which I'm fine with), but ideally I would like the concept of civil marriage to be done away with. If you believe in a religion that has marriage, then that's fine and feel free to marry/divorce according to that religions customs/beliefs. But, that shouldn't have any effect on our civil lives regarding taxes, benefits etc.
Except there's another sword edge to your stance that you may have missed. There are legal implications to marriage that deal with probate that would also need to change in order for your proposal to work. You seem to leave out inheritance, or are you completely against that in all cases as well? You decouple civil union from marriage and you create another monster of a problem that I don't think you've completely thought through, which is the problem with most ideas/stances like this--not thinking them through. On the surface this idea has appeal, but in practice there are an awful lot of gotchas to overcome for a positive outcome. I really don't see the dissolution of civil unions as the ideal fix.
The majority of people who get married or want to get married do not have a clue about the legal implications of marriage, and in fact getting married is merely the less expensive way to achieve the same legal results.
Part of the problem is that marriage law currently is an entrenched piece of bad code--if it was a program, it would be a piece of crufty, wrongly-documented COBOL woven together of crocks and kluges which properly ought to not work at all--and the most reasonable fix of scrapping it entirely & rewriting from the ground up is going to get anger from all sides.
Civil unions don't have this problem. I doubt you'd even have many people knowing to complain if you enacted the reformed version of marriage codes using 'civil union' in place of 'marriage,' and once you were done...announce that civil unions will now be required for legal recognition. (Basically it'd ultimately be a terminology switch, but one which permits actual useful and practical reforms, especially if you want to also allow polyamorous relationships to have legal recognition.)
I'd honestly be all for year-round calendars if it wasn't for the fact that I suspect that the primary reason they're getting pushed is that the switch would be used to hide increasing the number of days of school. It's one thing if you're just redistributing the number of days in the breaks--and another entirely if you're decreasing them.
This is especially important, since one of the advantages of a year-round schedule is that you should be able to actually give more days off, since shorter breaks mean less time wasted covering again the material you did before the break. In fact, this is really the only justification for the change: if there isn't research backing up the assertion that something, anything, will improve educational outcomes, it is a waste of time & money and abusive to the kids.
Switching how the money is given out to 'educational outcomes' from 'time spent warming seats with asses' would do the trick wonderfully, and a lot of the objections can be solved by having the outcome be defined in terms of improvement with only critical milestones needing to be met on schedule. (The latter may only be penalized if you promote the child to the next grade before they've met the particular milestone: Little Johnny will have mastered basic literacy by the time he enters Nth grade, but he can spend as long as needed in N-1th grade.)
You don't need a downed aircraft to do that kind of research though, you can just go out and look for something, maybe something that isn't even there.
You do, however, need funding, and which means that you have to pick a something that people will fund you looking for. Securing the money necessary to do basic research is amazingly difficult, especially when the honest answer is that your work is not expected to be of practical use to anybody but fellow researchers for whom it will lower the costs of doing their research.
Thus, it needs to have a good perceived value, and people need to believe there is a good chance it will be found. Getting money to search for polar bears in Honolulu is highly unlikely to happen.
There probably is very little expectation of actually finding the downed plane at this point, but people currently will fund any search that looks to be in the right area & actually finding it would prove we've gotten to the point where we can find such things.
You are of course correct for the initial search, but at some point you hit diminishing returns. Even if the failure were a technical one, the value of locating the wreck and determining the cause is likely of limited value. There are only so many systems that can fail, and we already do thorough failure modes analyses when designing aircraft. That's why flying is so safe these days.
You forget to factor in that sometimes the point of the search will (has, likely, already) become more than anything else a way to improve and prove the techniques used to search, and hopefully they're keeping good records.
There will, I assure you, be scientists waiting patiently to mine the data for things useful to their own research, that they would have been unable to justify the costs of doing themselves. It's like basic research that way.
The fact that you cannot foresee all consequences is not a fundamental error of consequentialism, any more than not knowing all applicable virtues and which to prioritize is a fundamental problem or not knowing exactly what God wanted in every specific instance is a fundamental problem. It's a complication. All moral systems have to deal with human fallibility, and the lack of omniscience is one fallibility that consequentialism has. I've met some very, very good people, but none who were absolutely always acting morally. I'm not interested in arguments for ethical systems that require perfection, since everybody fails in that case.
Let's consider a situation in which somebody else will be badly hurt unless you lie. A consequentialist will weigh the harm done in each case. Somebody who believes in the virtues of telling the truth and helping others will have to make a choice of virtues. A deontologist will have to decide what God requires in that instance. A sanctimonious asshole will try to remain morally pure, disregarding the consequences to others. In this case, we see that the consequentialist has more philosophical support for ambiguous situations than a virtue ethicist or deontologist.
I am overall a consequentialist, but I am one who is fully aware of how people work. One of the things you can rely on is people denying responsibility for their choices as much as possible, and consequentialism leaves a big one called "But I meant well!" even when the only person they meant well towards was themselves.
This could be simply avoided by requiring the ends must justify the means, and not the ends you intended but the ends you actually reached.
The test with consequentialist systems, therefore, is how it places your obligations should you discover that a choice you made was not the right one? Are you obligated to act to minimize harm? Are you not morally responsible simply because you had good intentions?
Oh, and how do we define what is a good consequence and to whom? Can I trust you to care about my own opinions when you say you're acting in my benefit?
Or are you going to just be another in a long line of people who mean well but did great wrongs in pursuit of an unattainable good end?
Ultimately, it's not that the ends justify the means, but that they must ultimately do so. This is a lot easier when you don't have too much needing justifying...
Being a role-player, "lying about a die roll" has no strict ethical value to me: if I'm a player, it's unethical, but if I'm the DM, it's just part of the job !;) I never lied about die roll as a player, and would never do it, so you can consider me to be "very ethical"... but on the other hand, in a setup like that experiment (when the harm of lying is not clear at all) or as a DM, I don't have any issue with lying.
The harm is, you will have people less willing to play with you once they find out that you will lie about die rolls.
If you're a player. As GP states, I want a GM who will fudge the dice rolls (or not even roll them) occasionally to make the story better. Sometimes the dice are wrong. Yes, it's a game. But it's not fun when your characters face too little or overwhelming danger.
No, it can apply to a GM too: I do want to go for the story, but I would prefer the transparency of unrolled dice--I want to be able to tell when it's the dice or the GM if things do end up facing too little or overwhelming danger, as you put it. If it's the dice I can live with it, particularly since I am fine with tormenting my PCs; if it's the GM I will be Not Amused.
It's hard to tell with a GM who isn't open which it is.
When I GM, I sometimes will flat-out skip rolling because there's no point other than to buy time--if the player's roll hits outside of a given window in some of the systems I'll run, there's no chance my roll will change the outcome significantly...and I can figure out what this window is on the fly. A few times, when it's getting a bit absurdly difficult, I will just flat-out give them it and say as much. (Sometimes this required waiting until the laughter died down, though.)
Consequentialism ethics say they being ethical is judging acts for the consequences it has on people. For consequentialist, lying (or stealing, or killing) aren't bad in thesmselves, but only because they have bad consequences (ie, they hurt people). For a consequentialist, stealing something that would be wasted. For example, after a natural disaster, a supermarket is wrecked and has no staff anymore, and food products are getting rotten, there is no harm done in taking them, so it's ethical to do so.
If you look at that setup, well, what harm is done by lying? Not much, so while virtue ethics and deontology would still prevent people from lying, consequentialism doesn't. Maybe the answer is just that people growing in DDR, less exposed to religion, are more consequentialist ? Which doesn't make them less ethical, none of the three system is clearly the "best", it's a highly contested topic (I tend to lean towards consequentialism myself, but don't completly reject the other two).
And on this, I'm definitely a consequentialist. Being a role-player, "lying about a die roll" has no strict ethical value to me: if I'm a player, it's unethical, but if I'm the DM, it's just part of the job !;) I never lied about die roll as a player, and would never do it, so you can consider me to be "very ethical"... but on the other hand, in a setup like that experiment (when the harm of lying is not clear at all) or as a DM, I don't have any issue with lying.
The harm is, you will have people less willing to play with you once they find out that you will lie about die rolls.
The problem and fundamental error of consequentialism is that it ultimately assumes that you can know the harm your choices shall/have caused. It presumes omniscience--in fact, arguably it imposes upon a moral actor who wishes to remain ethical an obligation to know absolutely everything.
Of course, if you're simply looking for a way to self-justify actions which in virtue or deontology ethics are wrong, claiming consequentialism as your school is a pretty good tactic...
Some schools of consequentialism solve this problem simply by having a positive obligation to avoid/minimize harm: Using your example... If I'm going to steal something because it's going to be wasted, first I need to make sure it really is. This means I may even have the supermarket opt to give me the food products, because this is a win-win situation--I can arrange it so the situation benefits all of us, especially if I pitch my request as "Donate the food, it'll get you good will & the goods removed, and we both know you would have to write it off anyway."
Families are mostly feudalistic, and faith based orgs are unsurprisingly cults with charismatic leaders fleecing flocks. What planet are you on?
My guess is Earth, so the question really is where you are.
Communistic and socialistic groups that are completely voluntary lack most of the problems, and certainly are not automatically feudalistic (all feudalistic aspects actually come from feudalism being an attempt to scale up the family) or 'cults with charismatic leaders fleecing flocks' as you seem to believe. All it really takes is the entire group being in agreement to pool resources, and it being voluntary can actually be quite an effective incentive to keep getting along.
It may fall apart, but to some extent this is both natural and desirable, especially when it was originally formed as an ad hoc group anyway.
(Incidentally: Many monastic sects--Christian and otherwise--are communist, especially when they actually do follow the rules of their order. An individual monastic might not own anything more than their clothes, with the group itself owning everything else.)
We'd have "Attention Slavery" that rewards group think and attention whoring.
I'd much rather have an anonymous task based system than something that rewarded sycophants and celebrities.
But I recognize this might very well be the currency that Main Stream America's been waiting for.
Look on the bright side, we might finally be able to prove the whole cycle of silence theory via having a way of tracking the dropping reputation of somebody who dares commit such heresies of daring question the group's dogmas, like doubting the One True Holy Solution to life's ills or daring point out internal inconsistencies.
And all without the ethical problems caused by being the ones to set up the experiment, since all we're doing is just observing.
You mean back in the era when you did not have to call it an herbal supplement to make outrageous claims about what your miracle drug did?
The two are related, actually: the sellers of patent medicine were the original drug dealers and operated when there was no such thing as an illegal drug. A lot of them were perfectly happy to add cocaine or opiates as they were discovered, so their 'medicines' had more than the placebo effect going to them, and patent medicine formulas were like the Coca-Cola formula--industry secrets.
End result was that a lot of people ended up addicts without knowing.
This, of course, made the patent medicine sellers quite happy. Addicted customers who don't even know what in the formula they're addicted to can't switch brands: you've basically got captive customers.
The thing is? When I say 'a lot,' I mean that by modern standards--patent medicines were sold cheap, typically, were widely available, and all classes of society used them.
The laws got made roughly when it hit critical mass, and there were enough addicts suffering the bad effects of addiction that it was the dead, rotting elephant in the room...
No, this is the old "Reefer Madness" mentality, meant to make happy both the Puritans and the prison profiteers while keeping the politicians in an elevated state of power.
What actually happens, and Portugal ran this experiment with a sample size of over 8 million people during the past decade, is that when drug use is decriminalized, the usage rate quickly falls to about half.
Most of those are people who are no longer afraid to seek treatment. Some are folks who wind up court-ordered to get treatment, and a few were drug users who were only doing it because drugs seemed cool because they were illegal.
At the end, though, the incontrovertible fact is that the community has half the number of drug users as it did under Prohibition. Prohibitionists are responsible for a doubling of the drug usage rate in the community. Does that seem counter-intuitive? So what? The data is in.
My problem is that at least in the US, the disease model of addiction is used like a get-out-of-jail-free card: "I'm sick so you can't be mean to me by saying I should be responsible and seek treatment!" You see it used a lot for anything that would require lifestyle changes.
I'd go for the middle ground: Decriminalize drug use, up the penalties if your drug use causes you to break laws and put a permanent end to the ability to claim 'intoxication' as a defense when it was a voluntarily obtained state.
The other, probably easier option is to actually make it very, very clear that seeking treatment is safe--because it seems that actually we're doing every part of that except the publicity. This may be more a job for an ad firm than politicians, unless we do need to make it very explicit within the law that this can't be used against somebody.
Sometimes the old way of doing things is not worth saving.
And sometimes it is, despite the supposed inefficiencies. That's what the French government thinks, and there are similar opinions in other European countries.
Personally, I'm not sure this particular law is so helpful, but anything that prevents Europe from becoming a cultural wasteland at least gets my sympathy. There is more in life than just financial efficiency.
In this case: Financial efficiency=less expensive books=greater ability for those on small or limited funds to buy books.
Of course, if you want to prevent Europe from becoming a cultural wasteland, what should matter most is optimizing the financial efficiency of the government itself--either to lower costs of living so people have more money to spend on such activities, or increase the funds that can actually be used for something desirable, such as sponsoring operas.
The abstract is still up, but not only is the link to the full text no longer working, the paper is not on the list for the issue of the Epilepsy & Behavior that the citation PubMed gives for it says it ought to be in. The full text would make it clear exactly what sort of consciousness is being altered here.
This seems to be a problem with Epilepsy & Behavior, in that a lot of what they're listed as having in the current issue of the journal on PubMed they don't list as in it on their own site. This does not strike me as a desirable thing in a scientific journal. (Yes, I did take the time to check through PubMed to see if this was a unique-to-this-paper issue or something else, and they've got a few articles that would be of...greater interest to me if I was more confident of their editorial practices.)
This is a non-story. One subject? Really? Let's seen an actual study with multiple subjects and some deeper analysis into what might be going on. As it stands this is a non-story.
Odds are that multiple subjects will only happen if multiple people with neurological trauma in the same area can be found. This is sort of a story, but more in the 'we can justify looking for people with this specific trauma' sense.
Unless you're actually willing to volunteer, in which case I suppose somebody might be able to locate a neurosurgeon both competent enough to inflict precisely-targeted brain damage & sufficiently lacking in ethics to do so on somebody who volunteered.
Some crashes, at least, have been traced back to issues with people caused by flaws in systems revealed through extensive use--some of them probably ought to have been anticipated, others really could only have been anticipated in the sense that it's not sane to assume you will catch everything.
Think of it as the infinite monkeys theorem of design testing: the more monkeys and the more time those monkeys have to bang on the system, the more likely flaws will be found. The onus here lies on those designing the system: assume that catastrophic systems failures will happen. The goal should be to make them rare, and to ensure that it will not take an unusually well-experienced & trained pilot to manage to do a controlled crash in case of an emergency.
If nothing else, it's a lot less of a PR mess if you're doing your debugging of a mostly-intact plane that hit with no fatalities, and probably also easier to figure out what happened.
Healthcare is a form of compensation, just like your wages, your employer can not tell you how to spend your wages, why can they tell me what healthcare services I can utilize? Also, companies don't "pay" for healthcare like its some sort of charity they generously give to there subjects, employees pay for it themselves by providing work for the company!
Actually, by purchasing my healthcare for me, my employer can and does tell me what healthcare services I & my family can utilize through which healthcare they opt to purchase for me.
The healthcare one employer purchased for my family wanted to send me for some necessary surgery several hours away to a low-tier hospital (one which is on the local list of ones to avoid if you're fond of breathing, as I recall) by a doctor using absurdly antique methods. I had to pay out-of-pocket to get it done at a top-tier hospital located about ten minutes away, by a surgeon who uses modern methods.
Oh, yes, and this was during the brief period where they were actually willing to cover it at all, instead of assuming that some corp suit knows a specialized field of medicine better than people who are licensed to actually practice it.
This was actually normal, and while on paper I was covered for more than just routine checkups, in practice that was the only thing they could be gotten to cover. The closest they ever came to covering anything else I needed at the time, they wanted to go with the cheapest, lousiest kludge possible--and, I should add, some of them would have only been legal if the necessary loopholes had been inserted into the laws.
Give me the money instead, and let me purchase my own healthcare.
...
The worst part is that they often have absolutely no idea how much they don't know, thus they think that the little they do know is sufficient. At least people with even just some academic background will know that there's a whole helluva lot they don't know, even after years of study and experience....
I have actually found the worst offenders of this are not the self taught, but the ones with master degrees and PhDs. They usually do not understand the entire system, and let their ideology cover good sense. And I have yet to see that work out.
From the sound of it, you either want the handful of self-taught who will actually are actively seeking to improve their skills, or somebody who stopped at a bachelors. You're unlikely to get the first group staying long in a CS program, though--have you any idea how mind-numbing it is to sit there with very little to do most of the time, waiting in hope of this week finally finding something new?
Odds are, the reason you needed to prove you lived there was because there were people who were neither paying the fee for renting a space nor living at the apartments who were taking up spaces--some places issue placards and/or specific spots that go with the place, sometimes entirely because the place has had problems with non-residents using the lot as a public parking lot to the point of crowding out residents.
That said, there still needs to be sufficient spaces for residents' use, and it should be made clear before any money changes hands that this goes on--with a chance to ask questions like "So, is the fee charged for any guest parking, or just when there's a game?"
totally people are addicted to working longer hours. Not, maybe, and this is just a shot in the dark here, the proles are being taken advantage of by the bourgeoisie, business as usual.
You say that like socialism is the solution, when it's the problem--all it does is let the ruling classes say and perhaps even truly believe that in screwing the plebeians they are doing them a favor.
When you make it expensive to employ additional people, you're going to ensure giving people overtime is favored over adding another employee, even when it would be otherwise preferred to have an additional employee.
When you make it expensive to have somebody work full-time, you increase the number of part-time workers--and the number of people having to work two part-time jobs in order to pay bills.
There is a problem when you set up the economy so that a company can be punished for deciding to be kind to their workers and not make a single worker do the labor of many...
Corporate welfare isn't the problem as much as bureaucrat welfare & the granting of functional monopolies to large corporations by screwing the smaller guys for them.
What about people with other health conditions who cannot tolerate the vaccine?
They would benefit in the event of an oubreak in there area. They could be notified directly that there was an outbreak in the area so that they could then decide to leave the hot zone before becoming infected. I don't think anyone is claiming vaccines should be administered to those at high risk for adverse events (egg allgies, or previous adverse reactions to similar vaccines). However, unvaccinated people do pose a risk not only to themselves, but to others. Being able to mitigate those risks would help everyone.
To be clear, I approve of something like this for the US (where I live) but only if the list is maintained by health officals only. I see no reason for this to be publicly available information. I have no business knowing if you are vaccinated, but the WHO or CDC does in the event of a legitimate risk in your area.
It should also certainly be possible for somebody to make a request for a copy of this record with, at most, only a little more trouble than one can get a copy of their normal medical records.
Beyond a certain critical mass of vaccinations, additional vaccinations are subject to diminishing returns.
Very true, but that critical mass is around 95%. The original article makes it clear that in Canada, the vaccination rates are nowhere near that number. Articles I've read in the US place the rates below that number as well. Especially in regions where non-medical vaccination abstentions are high (religious groups, Wealthy communities suffering from the misconception that vaccines are related to autism, etc.).
Ironically enough, the vaccine that this misconception is most often associated with, the MMR vaccine, is actually one that prevents autism. (One of the known causes is in utero exposure to rubella, and the vaccine needs to be gotten before pregnancy.) Getting to critical mass also basically means that as few exceptions as possible ought to be made, especially as we learn more about the immune system and how long immunity actually lasts (or doesn't)--which is a reason to be wary of vaccines that promise most of their payoff decades down the line until it's been around for decades.
Slashdot Mirror
Here you can actually buy stuff, and lots of it has free shipping, may it be to Ouagadougou, Timbuktu or Buttfuck, Idaho.
You know, useful.
As long as you don't mind it possibly not being as-listed and a high chance of it repeatedly falling off the back of a truck, including the delivery truck (which if you read the very fine print they disclaim all responsibility for).
You know, scammy.
Card games are for meatspace. Theyre a complete waste of modern computing.
Depends on how feasible managing meatspace is. I've been in several CAH games online where a major part of it was that we (the players) were spread over several countries as well as time zones, and one of the major questions of meeting up would be which country is easiest. (Then there's the minor fact that while all of us were in countries that will let citizens of the other countries get tourist visas for the asking, at least one person would be in for a 6-8 hour flight.)
At some point, the ease of meeting up in meatspace for any given activity will drop to the point that it's more efficient to do it via cyberspace.
There are ways out of this. The first is to find one or more partners who have the necessary skills to develop the prototype with him, in return for equity. Not willing to give up equity? Then too bad? Can't convince devs that your idea is not that great/unique/compelling (because we've ALL heard variants of this "my idea is SO great - all you have to do is code it and we'll be rich" bullsh*t)? Again, too bad.
The real "way out of this" is to realize that, since he doesn't have the necessary skills, he either has to acquire them or give up. Not willing to take the years necessary to acquire them? Like the old saying goes, "The will to succeed isn't as important as the will to plan to succeed." Not having a plan that takes the obvious potential obstacles such as the ones you cited into account is a pretty good indicator that you're not the one to invest in. After all, ultimately, people invest in people, not products. The product won't complete itself. You can't hold an incomplete product accountable. You hold the people behind it accountable.
Not only that, but having a dev (team) lined up when you run your KickStarter is a pretty good sign that you're serious about this--though honestly I'd be more inclined to go with a project where the dev(s) are taking at least part of their cut in equity, because that means the dev team actually has motivation to hold up their end. Some amount of wages may be necessary, but equity provides some motivation to release a product good enough to keep selling once people see the end product: This protects me as a backer, and honestly I'd feel more confident about the results if the dev(s), who should know a lot more than I do about the project, feel confident enough to be wanting equity. Particularly with a known good dev team, I'd expect them to not be likely to do that unless they feel sales stand a reasonable chance of being good.
A prototype of some sort is a good way to show that you really do believe in the product you're pitching me, which actually makes a difference. If you don't believe in it well enough to put in the work to show me even a very loose prototype, why should I believe in you enough to give you money? More importantly, why should I give it to you when there's other, equally-interesting projects that have put the effort into their pitches that you didn't?
If you're an established group, knocking out even a quickie prototype may actually be relatively easy--and it helps you narrow down what you actually are going to do once you've got the money. Are you going to make an all-new engine for your video game? Do you actually need to, and even if you really do, can you get a prototype going with an existing engine? (Slap on disclaimers saying that this is a pre-alpha version and significant changes will definitely happen.) This would probably give at least some sense of what sort of budget you may need to look at...
If you've already got a rep for delivering, you may not need to give anything more than "We have the basics pinned down," but you absolutely need the rep for delivering and it certainly would be wise to keep people informed about if there are delays. Even better is having a rep for timely and informative updates as well as one for delivering--not necessarily regular ones, since "We're working on it!" daily is less useful than even a long quarterly report whose tl;dr is "We have reached these milestones, here's some of what we've got to show you now, we expect to be reaching these other milestones soon." (Better would be a report on those milestones being hit as they're hit, as well as a notice when snags are hit and overcome, but still, infrequent informative updates are better than frequent uninformative ones.)
Unless you're picked as the new Anointed One by Big Puiblisher, you also have to do your own marketing; the only 'marketing' they'll give most writers is putting your book on a book store shelf, if you're lucky enough to get a print run and they don't go straight to ebooks. And few people look for a publisher's logo on a book before they buy it.
Don't forget that the Big Publisher may also take the marketing fees out of your royalty checks, even when this is all the marketing anybody can tell they did. They really don't like cutting royalty checks if you're not one of the Anointed Ones or other darlings. Part of why indie is taking off is because the Big Publishers are acting like the Big Recording Companies did at their worst, and while having a print version out on shelves is nice there is a lot to be said about actually getting paid for your labor.
And I haven't paid them dick and STILL don't see any ads.
So you are a free-loading asshole?
Some of us earned it via means other than money. But I'd actually be open to whitelisting everywhere an adserv which promises and delivers malware-free and video-free ads, and even doing things like helping it know what ads to serve me. (I'd see it as cutting down on my need to figure out who actually has what I want: if I can do that, and they don't point any ads my way, then I am fine with figuring they don't want my sale.)
I agree. I'm Canadian where we do allow homosexual marriage (which I'm fine with), but ideally I would like the concept of civil marriage to be done away with. If you believe in a religion that has marriage, then that's fine and feel free to marry/divorce according to that religions customs/beliefs. But, that shouldn't have any effect on our civil lives regarding taxes, benefits etc.
Except there's another sword edge to your stance that you may have missed. There are legal implications to marriage that deal with probate that would also need to change in order for your proposal to work. You seem to leave out inheritance, or are you completely against that in all cases as well? You decouple civil union from marriage and you create another monster of a problem that I don't think you've completely thought through, which is the problem with most ideas/stances like this--not thinking them through. On the surface this idea has appeal, but in practice there are an awful lot of gotchas to overcome for a positive outcome. I really don't see the dissolution of civil unions as the ideal fix.
The majority of people who get married or want to get married do not have a clue about the legal implications of marriage, and in fact getting married is merely the less expensive way to achieve the same legal results.
Part of the problem is that marriage law currently is an entrenched piece of bad code--if it was a program, it would be a piece of crufty, wrongly-documented COBOL woven together of crocks and kluges which properly ought to not work at all--and the most reasonable fix of scrapping it entirely & rewriting from the ground up is going to get anger from all sides.
Civil unions don't have this problem. I doubt you'd even have many people knowing to complain if you enacted the reformed version of marriage codes using 'civil union' in place of 'marriage,' and once you were done...announce that civil unions will now be required for legal recognition. (Basically it'd ultimately be a terminology switch, but one which permits actual useful and practical reforms, especially if you want to also allow polyamorous relationships to have legal recognition.)
I'd honestly be all for year-round calendars if it wasn't for the fact that I suspect that the primary reason they're getting pushed is that the switch would be used to hide increasing the number of days of school. It's one thing if you're just redistributing the number of days in the breaks--and another entirely if you're decreasing them.
This is especially important, since one of the advantages of a year-round schedule is that you should be able to actually give more days off, since shorter breaks mean less time wasted covering again the material you did before the break. In fact, this is really the only justification for the change: if there isn't research backing up the assertion that something, anything, will improve educational outcomes, it is a waste of time & money and abusive to the kids.
Switching how the money is given out to 'educational outcomes' from 'time spent warming seats with asses' would do the trick wonderfully, and a lot of the objections can be solved by having the outcome be defined in terms of improvement with only critical milestones needing to be met on schedule. (The latter may only be penalized if you promote the child to the next grade before they've met the particular milestone: Little Johnny will have mastered basic literacy by the time he enters Nth grade, but he can spend as long as needed in N-1th grade.)
You don't need a downed aircraft to do that kind of research though, you can just go out and look for something, maybe something that isn't even there.
You do, however, need funding, and which means that you have to pick a something that people will fund you looking for. Securing the money necessary to do basic research is amazingly difficult, especially when the honest answer is that your work is not expected to be of practical use to anybody but fellow researchers for whom it will lower the costs of doing their research.
Thus, it needs to have a good perceived value, and people need to believe there is a good chance it will be found. Getting money to search for polar bears in Honolulu is highly unlikely to happen.
There probably is very little expectation of actually finding the downed plane at this point, but people currently will fund any search that looks to be in the right area & actually finding it would prove we've gotten to the point where we can find such things.
You are of course correct for the initial search, but at some point you hit diminishing returns. Even if the failure were a technical one, the value of locating the wreck and determining the cause is likely of limited value. There are only so many systems that can fail, and we already do thorough failure modes analyses when designing aircraft. That's why flying is so safe these days.
You forget to factor in that sometimes the point of the search will (has, likely, already) become more than anything else a way to improve and prove the techniques used to search, and hopefully they're keeping good records.
There will, I assure you, be scientists waiting patiently to mine the data for things useful to their own research, that they would have been unable to justify the costs of doing themselves. It's like basic research that way.
The fact that you cannot foresee all consequences is not a fundamental error of consequentialism, any more than not knowing all applicable virtues and which to prioritize is a fundamental problem or not knowing exactly what God wanted in every specific instance is a fundamental problem. It's a complication. All moral systems have to deal with human fallibility, and the lack of omniscience is one fallibility that consequentialism has. I've met some very, very good people, but none who were absolutely always acting morally. I'm not interested in arguments for ethical systems that require perfection, since everybody fails in that case.
Let's consider a situation in which somebody else will be badly hurt unless you lie. A consequentialist will weigh the harm done in each case. Somebody who believes in the virtues of telling the truth and helping others will have to make a choice of virtues. A deontologist will have to decide what God requires in that instance. A sanctimonious asshole will try to remain morally pure, disregarding the consequences to others. In this case, we see that the consequentialist has more philosophical support for ambiguous situations than a virtue ethicist or deontologist.
I am overall a consequentialist, but I am one who is fully aware of how people work. One of the things you can rely on is people denying responsibility for their choices as much as possible, and consequentialism leaves a big one called "But I meant well!" even when the only person they meant well towards was themselves.
This could be simply avoided by requiring the ends must justify the means, and not the ends you intended but the ends you actually reached.
The test with consequentialist systems, therefore, is how it places your obligations should you discover that a choice you made was not the right one? Are you obligated to act to minimize harm? Are you not morally responsible simply because you had good intentions?
Oh, and how do we define what is a good consequence and to whom? Can I trust you to care about my own opinions when you say you're acting in my benefit?
Or are you going to just be another in a long line of people who mean well but did great wrongs in pursuit of an unattainable good end?
Ultimately, it's not that the ends justify the means, but that they must ultimately do so. This is a lot easier when you don't have too much needing justifying...
Being a role-player, "lying about a die roll" has no strict ethical value to me: if I'm a player, it's unethical, but if I'm the DM, it's just part of the job ! ;) I never lied about die roll as a player, and would never do it, so you can consider me to be "very ethical"... but on the other hand, in a setup like that experiment (when the harm of lying is not clear at all) or as a DM, I don't have any issue with lying.
The harm is, you will have people less willing to play with you once they find out that you will lie about die rolls.
If you're a player. As GP states, I want a GM who will fudge the dice rolls (or not even roll them) occasionally to make the story better. Sometimes the dice are wrong. Yes, it's a game. But it's not fun when your characters face too little or overwhelming danger.
No, it can apply to a GM too: I do want to go for the story, but I would prefer the transparency of unrolled dice--I want to be able to tell when it's the dice or the GM if things do end up facing too little or overwhelming danger, as you put it. If it's the dice I can live with it, particularly since I am fine with tormenting my PCs; if it's the GM I will be Not Amused.
It's hard to tell with a GM who isn't open which it is.
When I GM, I sometimes will flat-out skip rolling because there's no point other than to buy time--if the player's roll hits outside of a given window in some of the systems I'll run, there's no chance my roll will change the outcome significantly...and I can figure out what this window is on the fly. A few times, when it's getting a bit absurdly difficult, I will just flat-out give them it and say as much. (Sometimes this required waiting until the laughter died down, though.)
Consequentialism ethics say they being ethical is judging acts for the consequences it has on people. For consequentialist, lying (or stealing, or killing) aren't bad in thesmselves, but only because they have bad consequences (ie, they hurt people). For a consequentialist, stealing something that would be wasted. For example, after a natural disaster, a supermarket is wrecked and has no staff anymore, and food products are getting rotten, there is no harm done in taking them, so it's ethical to do so.
If you look at that setup, well, what harm is done by lying? Not much, so while virtue ethics and deontology would still prevent people from lying, consequentialism doesn't. Maybe the answer is just that people growing in DDR, less exposed to religion, are more consequentialist ? Which doesn't make them less ethical, none of the three system is clearly the "best", it's a highly contested topic (I tend to lean towards consequentialism myself, but don't completly reject the other two).
And on this, I'm definitely a consequentialist. Being a role-player, "lying about a die roll" has no strict ethical value to me: if I'm a player, it's unethical, but if I'm the DM, it's just part of the job ! ;) I never lied about die roll as a player, and would never do it, so you can consider me to be "very ethical"... but on the other hand, in a setup like that experiment (when the harm of lying is not clear at all) or as a DM, I don't have any issue with lying.
The harm is, you will have people less willing to play with you once they find out that you will lie about die rolls.
The problem and fundamental error of consequentialism is that it ultimately assumes that you can know the harm your choices shall/have caused. It presumes omniscience--in fact, arguably it imposes upon a moral actor who wishes to remain ethical an obligation to know absolutely everything.
Of course, if you're simply looking for a way to self-justify actions which in virtue or deontology ethics are wrong, claiming consequentialism as your school is a pretty good tactic...
Some schools of consequentialism solve this problem simply by having a positive obligation to avoid/minimize harm: Using your example... If I'm going to steal something because it's going to be wasted, first I need to make sure it really is. This means I may even have the supermarket opt to give me the food products, because this is a win-win situation--I can arrange it so the situation benefits all of us, especially if I pitch my request as "Donate the food, it'll get you good will & the goods removed, and we both know you would have to write it off anyway."
Families are mostly feudalistic, and faith based orgs are unsurprisingly cults with charismatic leaders fleecing flocks. What planet are you on?
My guess is Earth, so the question really is where you are.
Communistic and socialistic groups that are completely voluntary lack most of the problems, and certainly are not automatically feudalistic (all feudalistic aspects actually come from feudalism being an attempt to scale up the family) or 'cults with charismatic leaders fleecing flocks' as you seem to believe. All it really takes is the entire group being in agreement to pool resources, and it being voluntary can actually be quite an effective incentive to keep getting along.
It may fall apart, but to some extent this is both natural and desirable, especially when it was originally formed as an ad hoc group anyway.
(Incidentally: Many monastic sects--Christian and otherwise--are communist, especially when they actually do follow the rules of their order. An individual monastic might not own anything more than their clothes, with the group itself owning everything else.)
We'd have "Attention Slavery" that rewards group think and attention whoring. I'd much rather have an anonymous task based system than something that rewarded sycophants and celebrities. But I recognize this might very well be the currency that Main Stream America's been waiting for.
Look on the bright side, we might finally be able to prove the whole cycle of silence theory via having a way of tracking the dropping reputation of somebody who dares commit such heresies of daring question the group's dogmas, like doubting the One True Holy Solution to life's ills or daring point out internal inconsistencies.
And all without the ethical problems caused by being the ones to set up the experiment, since all we're doing is just observing.
You mean back in the era when you did not have to call it an herbal supplement to make outrageous claims about what your miracle drug did?
The two are related, actually: the sellers of patent medicine were the original drug dealers and operated when there was no such thing as an illegal drug. A lot of them were perfectly happy to add cocaine or opiates as they were discovered, so their 'medicines' had more than the placebo effect going to them, and patent medicine formulas were like the Coca-Cola formula--industry secrets.
End result was that a lot of people ended up addicts without knowing.
This, of course, made the patent medicine sellers quite happy. Addicted customers who don't even know what in the formula they're addicted to can't switch brands: you've basically got captive customers.
The thing is? When I say 'a lot,' I mean that by modern standards--patent medicines were sold cheap, typically, were widely available, and all classes of society used them.
The laws got made roughly when it hit critical mass, and there were enough addicts suffering the bad effects of addiction that it was the dead, rotting elephant in the room...
No, this is the old "Reefer Madness" mentality, meant to make happy both the Puritans and the prison profiteers while keeping the politicians in an elevated state of power.
What actually happens, and Portugal ran this experiment with a sample size of over 8 million people during the past decade, is that when drug use is decriminalized, the usage rate quickly falls to about half.
Most of those are people who are no longer afraid to seek treatment. Some are folks who wind up court-ordered to get treatment, and a few were drug users who were only doing it because drugs seemed cool because they were illegal.
At the end, though, the incontrovertible fact is that the community has half the number of drug users as it did under Prohibition. Prohibitionists are responsible for a doubling of the drug usage rate in the community. Does that seem counter-intuitive? So what? The data is in.
My problem is that at least in the US, the disease model of addiction is used like a get-out-of-jail-free card: "I'm sick so you can't be mean to me by saying I should be responsible and seek treatment!" You see it used a lot for anything that would require lifestyle changes.
I'd go for the middle ground: Decriminalize drug use, up the penalties if your drug use causes you to break laws and put a permanent end to the ability to claim 'intoxication' as a defense when it was a voluntarily obtained state.
The other, probably easier option is to actually make it very, very clear that seeking treatment is safe--because it seems that actually we're doing every part of that except the publicity. This may be more a job for an ad firm than politicians, unless we do need to make it very explicit within the law that this can't be used against somebody.
Sometimes the old way of doing things is not worth saving.
And sometimes it is, despite the supposed inefficiencies. That's what the French government thinks, and there are similar opinions in other European countries.
Personally, I'm not sure this particular law is so helpful, but anything that prevents Europe from becoming a cultural wasteland at least gets my sympathy. There is more in life than just financial efficiency.
In this case: Financial efficiency=less expensive books=greater ability for those on small or limited funds to buy books.
Of course, if you want to prevent Europe from becoming a cultural wasteland, what should matter most is optimizing the financial efficiency of the government itself--either to lower costs of living so people have more money to spend on such activities, or increase the funds that can actually be used for something desirable, such as sponsoring operas.
The abstract is still up, but not only is the link to the full text no longer working, the paper is not on the list for the issue of the Epilepsy & Behavior that the citation PubMed gives for it says it ought to be in. The full text would make it clear exactly what sort of consciousness is being altered here.
This seems to be a problem with Epilepsy & Behavior, in that a lot of what they're listed as having in the current issue of the journal on PubMed they don't list as in it on their own site. This does not strike me as a desirable thing in a scientific journal. (Yes, I did take the time to check through PubMed to see if this was a unique-to-this-paper issue or something else, and they've got a few articles that would be of...greater interest to me if I was more confident of their editorial practices.)
This is a non-story. One subject? Really? Let's seen an actual study with multiple subjects and some deeper analysis into what might be going on. As it stands this is a non-story.
Odds are that multiple subjects will only happen if multiple people with neurological trauma in the same area can be found. This is sort of a story, but more in the 'we can justify looking for people with this specific trauma' sense.
Unless you're actually willing to volunteer, in which case I suppose somebody might be able to locate a neurosurgeon both competent enough to inflict precisely-targeted brain damage & sufficiently lacking in ethics to do so on somebody who volunteered.
Some crashes, at least, have been traced back to issues with people caused by flaws in systems revealed through extensive use--some of them probably ought to have been anticipated, others really could only have been anticipated in the sense that it's not sane to assume you will catch everything.
Think of it as the infinite monkeys theorem of design testing: the more monkeys and the more time those monkeys have to bang on the system, the more likely flaws will be found. The onus here lies on those designing the system: assume that catastrophic systems failures will happen. The goal should be to make them rare, and to ensure that it will not take an unusually well-experienced & trained pilot to manage to do a controlled crash in case of an emergency.
If nothing else, it's a lot less of a PR mess if you're doing your debugging of a mostly-intact plane that hit with no fatalities, and probably also easier to figure out what happened.
Healthcare is a form of compensation, just like your wages, your employer can not tell you how to spend your wages, why can they tell me what healthcare services I can utilize? Also, companies don't "pay" for healthcare like its some sort of charity they generously give to there subjects, employees pay for it themselves by providing work for the company!
Actually, by purchasing my healthcare for me, my employer can and does tell me what healthcare services I & my family can utilize through which healthcare they opt to purchase for me.
The healthcare one employer purchased for my family wanted to send me for some necessary surgery several hours away to a low-tier hospital (one which is on the local list of ones to avoid if you're fond of breathing, as I recall) by a doctor using absurdly antique methods. I had to pay out-of-pocket to get it done at a top-tier hospital located about ten minutes away, by a surgeon who uses modern methods.
Oh, yes, and this was during the brief period where they were actually willing to cover it at all, instead of assuming that some corp suit knows a specialized field of medicine better than people who are licensed to actually practice it.
This was actually normal, and while on paper I was covered for more than just routine checkups, in practice that was the only thing they could be gotten to cover. The closest they ever came to covering anything else I needed at the time, they wanted to go with the cheapest, lousiest kludge possible--and, I should add, some of them would have only been legal if the necessary loopholes had been inserted into the laws.
Give me the money instead, and let me purchase my own healthcare.
... The worst part is that they often have absolutely no idea how much they don't know, thus they think that the little they do know is sufficient. At least people with even just some academic background will know that there's a whole helluva lot they don't know, even after years of study and experience. ...
I have actually found the worst offenders of this are not the self taught, but the ones with master degrees and PhDs. They usually do not understand the entire system, and let their ideology cover good sense. And I have yet to see that work out.
From the sound of it, you either want the handful of self-taught who will actually are actively seeking to improve their skills, or somebody who stopped at a bachelors. You're unlikely to get the first group staying long in a CS program, though--have you any idea how mind-numbing it is to sit there with very little to do most of the time, waiting in hope of this week finally finding something new?
Odds are, the reason you needed to prove you lived there was because there were people who were neither paying the fee for renting a space nor living at the apartments who were taking up spaces--some places issue placards and/or specific spots that go with the place, sometimes entirely because the place has had problems with non-residents using the lot as a public parking lot to the point of crowding out residents.
That said, there still needs to be sufficient spaces for residents' use, and it should be made clear before any money changes hands that this goes on--with a chance to ask questions like "So, is the fee charged for any guest parking, or just when there's a game?"
totally people are addicted to working longer hours. Not, maybe, and this is just a shot in the dark here, the proles are being taken advantage of by the bourgeoisie, business as usual.
You say that like socialism is the solution, when it's the problem--all it does is let the ruling classes say and perhaps even truly believe that in screwing the plebeians they are doing them a favor.
When you make it expensive to employ additional people, you're going to ensure giving people overtime is favored over adding another employee, even when it would be otherwise preferred to have an additional employee.
When you make it expensive to have somebody work full-time, you increase the number of part-time workers--and the number of people having to work two part-time jobs in order to pay bills.
There is a problem when you set up the economy so that a company can be punished for deciding to be kind to their workers and not make a single worker do the labor of many...
Corporate welfare isn't the problem as much as bureaucrat welfare & the granting of functional monopolies to large corporations by screwing the smaller guys for them.
What about people with other health conditions who cannot tolerate the vaccine?
They would benefit in the event of an oubreak in there area. They could be notified directly that there was an outbreak in the area so that they could then decide to leave the hot zone before becoming infected. I don't think anyone is claiming vaccines should be administered to those at high risk for adverse events (egg allgies, or previous adverse reactions to similar vaccines). However, unvaccinated people do pose a risk not only to themselves, but to others. Being able to mitigate those risks would help everyone.
To be clear, I approve of something like this for the US (where I live) but only if the list is maintained by health officals only. I see no reason for this to be publicly available information. I have no business knowing if you are vaccinated, but the WHO or CDC does in the event of a legitimate risk in your area.
It should also certainly be possible for somebody to make a request for a copy of this record with, at most, only a little more trouble than one can get a copy of their normal medical records.
Beyond a certain critical mass of vaccinations, additional vaccinations are subject to diminishing returns.
Very true, but that critical mass is around 95%. The original article makes it clear that in Canada, the vaccination rates are nowhere near that number. Articles I've read in the US place the rates below that number as well. Especially in regions where non-medical vaccination abstentions are high (religious groups, Wealthy communities suffering from the misconception that vaccines are related to autism, etc.).
Ironically enough, the vaccine that this misconception is most often associated with, the MMR vaccine, is actually one that prevents autism. (One of the known causes is in utero exposure to rubella, and the vaccine needs to be gotten before pregnancy.) Getting to critical mass also basically means that as few exceptions as possible ought to be made, especially as we learn more about the immune system and how long immunity actually lasts (or doesn't)--which is a reason to be wary of vaccines that promise most of their payoff decades down the line until it's been around for decades.