Here's some other reasons people resort to violence:
None but the last explain simultaneous peaceful protests, subsequent riots and following looting across the country.
Additionally, a riot is not a protest, stealing is not a protest, arson of shops and homes is not a protest, looting is not a protest,
A protest is what? Is it when someone whispers that they're unhappy and you ignore them?
This might not be the most effective way to protest, and in the short term it will act against the favour of the protestors, but it's certainly a protest. I'm sure the current government is very happy about what's going on - just as Thatcher was happy when people rioted and grinning like a clown over the Falklands. Desperate people resorting to violence make the best targets.
and it should be treated completely differently - if you start looting and burning shops, I'm afraid different rules apply,
What if I start a war and that war involves bombing shops and killing its owners? What if my financial hoodwinking means your finances are ruined and your shop is dismantled? Do different rules apply then? Or is the destruction of one business a tragedy but the destruction of a million businesses a statistic?
you can expect to be treated harshly and to experience violence in your turn
Civilised society would expect its police force to stop you by using means only in proportion to the threat you cause. If you want violent retribution, please move to the Middle East - you sound like you'd be most welcome.
So what is housing benefit, unemployment benefit, free schooling, free medical care, if not help?
Housing benefit does not guarantee you a safe home suitable for a human to live in a dignified manner. It's also in the process of being reduced substantially such that many people in inner London will have to move. Tell me: why do you think some people are homeless for more than a few days? Either it is that everyone who is homeless chooses (i.e. while of sound mind) to live without a home, or not even housing benefit guarantees a safe home. What is more, it is not a requirement for councils to provide housing or even to refer to private housing unless you pass several stringest tests; in my borough, there are zero council houses as the remainder have been sold off over the last few years, so any referrals would be to private housing associations.
Unemployment benefit has many conditions attached to it and is often taken away at the whim of your supervisor (never been on it, but have worked with people reliant on such). Anyway, people don't want £65/week, they want the chance to participate in society - which includes a job. There are always jobs for the bright and the well-connected, but there are simply very few jobs for the average youth in inner London right now. While the looting is a minor part of the riots, emphasised by the appropriate PR machine, do you see riots and subsequent looting in rich, happy communities? No, because people who are rich and happy will go along with the system and buy the TV - there are always exceptions but they are too few and far between for a riot+loot. A necessary prerequisite for simultaneous riots across some country is deep discontent.
Schooling doesn't guarantee you an education. Have you ever worked in a London school? Even the average state school fails at preparing your brain since Thatcher's National Curriculum and sale of exam boards to publishing houses have together created a racket of inflated grades and learning only to pass the test.
The NHS is still plodding along nicely as long as your problems are physical and fairly routine. But if you have a complex mental health problem, you may be waiting for years to see the right person, or not have the appropriate treatment available to you on the NHS at all (it depends a lot on the Trust you're under).
(1) Stop thinking of money as "yours" in some philosophical sense and start understanding it as a way society chooses to allocate resources to those best able to manage it. The extent to which that happens is the extent to which capitalism works - if it stops happening then there will be no-one to protect "your" precious money anyway, as happens when people are looted or their pension funds raided or whatever;
(2) Lots of money is taken from you and mostly wasted on to weapons manufacturers, corporations in public-private partnerships and overpaid civil servants. High tax doesn't imply a working welfare state. Lots of feudal systems collected high taxes and it certainly wasn't for the benefit of the peasants.
Britain hasn't had a recent history of long-term police oppression of freedoms following riots in the style familiar even to Europeans and Americans. What is more, any such action may raise group awareness: "I'm not the only one who feels like this, though I see rioting will not solve the problem." There's always a segment of society that would want anyone who isn't like them to be put in chains and into forced labour, but it's not pervasive. You're right that it will make things feel worse in the shorter term. But when someone is stuck between a rock and a hard place, sometimes he ends up throwing rocks.
I'm not certain that anyone minds an increased police presence per se, though. Has anyone actually objected to seeing uniformed policemen walking around in the street? Much better that than CCTV or plainclothes. What matters is the laws the police are made to enforce and whether they enforce them equitably according to process.
Mod parent up. When people are out of "civilised" ways to put across their message, they resort to violence. This isn't violence with a direct aim - e.g. as the violence by the US in the Middle East is subjugation of strategically important areas - this is violence as a way of saying "I'm fed up and someone to take notice!" If you loved your society, you wouldn't destroy it. If, as a young man (or teen, it seems), you do not feel a sense of belonging and love and support - if you are not given the opportunity to contribute - then why would you value what is around you?
The looters coming in after the riots are being emphasised because it's pretty hard to argue about the social plight of someone who runs off with a 42 inch TV "because I can". There is a massive PR exercise to paint this as merely thieves thieving. There's also a PC exercise to avoid pointing out the cultural make-up of rioters - predominantly black in some areas, white in others - because people are so afraid of thinking they're implying "black people are criminals!" rather than "youths in black communities in central London are alienated and have no voice, no meaningful representation and no opportunity to do anything about it". We have moved on from overt police racism of the '80s (and well done to the police for doing that) but we have not moved on from the power dominance of a single culture in Britain.
Unfortunately, in any class struggle (sorry, Torys, that's exactly what it is!), these sorts of organic riots tend to result in more oppression. It may do something to raise awareness, but absent an organised army it is only joint peaceful action which tends to effect change. In particular, had the unions not been so far up New Labour's arse over the last decade that the wider working population would be forgiven for remembering who they were created to serve, they would have opposed changing market and labour conditions.
In short, it still takes a village to raise a child. Even the most stable and loving family (which, as anyone knows, inner London is full of) can only do so much. When the average boy turns 16 - and we're not talking about the geniuses of the world, but the majority of average ability - society has the choice to lift him up or to leave him to fend on his own. Where resources exceed demand, he might be able to do the latter. Where they do not, what should he endure? And, if you have not helped him, what gives you the right to tell him what is right and wrong? Even if you think you have some natural superiority, what makes you think the young man will listen?
Reading that "eloquent" English slowed me down far more than reading a foreign language
Really? The older style is more Latinate and a Western polyglot ought to be familiar with it.
and possibly even more than reading legalese
A small proportion of legal documents are deliberately written to confuse but the greater proportion of legal writing is clear and unambiguous. Understand:
(i) There is a handful of rules which apply to interpreting sentence structure, conjunctions, pronouns, etc., some of which may be specified in legislation (e.g. the Interpretation Acts of the UK Parliament);
(ii) Specific terms often have meanings established through legislation and case law: consider in your own profession how many words carry more detailed meaning to you than they would to the layman and what would happen if you always used a layman's interpretation;
(iii) Intent (of Parliament) and compatibility (esp. with the ECHR - sorry, Toryboys!) rules are applied where ambiguities remain.
Put another way, the rules for interpreting legal language are much more clearly defined and methodical than the rules for interpreting everyday language. It just requires a bit of learning and practice to know what those rules are. This is absolutely necessary when attempting to define a fair, unambiguous system using an ambiguous human language. This is, or ought to be, schoolboy stuff.
Perhaps it is simply language which is specific and does not admit easy reinterpretation which bothers you? Modern language is all about not committing yourself lest you be held responsible for your work.
I wish people still expressed themselves with such eloquence. This used to be one of the first skills taught to a young gentleman - now it is rarely taught at all.
Perhaps the problem is lack of gentlemen (and ladies).
I am a [ Apple user ] of [ unknown age ] looking to organise an attack at [ any and all Apple stores ]. But keep it under your [ iPads ]!!! I wouldn't want them shutting down allllll [ Apple stores ].
I am a [ socialist ] of [ long hair ] looking to organise an attack at [ within 20 miles of every single government building ]. But keep it under your [ Lenin caps ]!!! I wouldn't want them shutting down allllll [ places where young people gather ].
Driving a car is about control and feeling manly. The aggressive drivers who cause accidents are those least likely to want control taken away from them - they'd rather drive unsafely and get there 2 minutes faster, convinced that they have the largest penis. The car, road and oil network is largely a government-corporation subsidised and very effectively marketed power trip.
While you may be able to replace 50% of the drivers at random and find that they produce fewer horrible accidents than the remaining 50%, you're also taking away the whole point in driving a car as opposed to using public transportation.
When you look at the fairly arbitrary formulae and subjective criteria used in calculating the individual and overall metrics (please take the time to read through them!) and consider that the difference between Bahrain (10th) and Australia (3rd) is under 5 points, I'm not sure you can say much at all about the ordering of any countries in this range.
Agreed re possibly heritable personality traits influencing happiness, although much more than that is needed to use this as an explanation for the differences in happiness levels across countries.
It might be that happier populations prefer more socialism (or can stand it, anyway).
While unhappy people are better coped to stand extreme poverty/anarchy/military dictatorship? Points for effort.:-) Research is already more sophisticated than this: the sorts of stressors which are known to reduce happiness are less likely to be encountered in a country with a social safety net.
Meanwhile there is simply no evidence that, say, a well-run state healthcare service or the opportunity to be protected from homelessness makes anyone unhappy. Mismanagement or limited availability of such programmes may cause stress, but then you'd need evidence that private sector management and availability is better.
I'm going to have to pass on your CATO link, sorry! A literature review by a group of ideologues is unlikely to give me an unbiased overview regardless of which end of the political spectrum has pre-written its conclusion.
This illustrates the absurdity of the metric. I spent most of my childhood with under $1.25/day "purchasing power" but it didn't matter because I had what I need provided for me. The World Bank and IMF have the principle of pushing developing countries to privatise (read "withdraw") services which people actually need to survive (shelter, sanitation, healthcare, etc.) and then get all giddy about the fact that now fewer people are too poor to buy half a Big Mac a day.
Losing friends and family members sucks. Longer lifespans make that less common.
Please think that statement through:-).
since you don't like the metrics I was using for happiness levels
I didn't reject your study, although I think it's not the best. But I did perhaps take from it other than what you wanted me to: the conclusion that almost half the people in the USA are struggling from day to day. In all but a handful of countries, this is so. We really need to sort our shit out at home, on Earth.
But there's no good moral or ethical reason that proximity should translate into moral importance.
Well, all endeavours are practical, and it's a lot easier to help local people about whom you have a good understanding and who form part of a community which is already under your supervision. There's also the benefit of having a cohesive community without pockets of extreme poverty. Humans are social animals, and the aim is to look after humans.
Put bluntly, if you give $100/week locally to someone who is too mentally ill to work, you may allow them to maintain themselves while they are on a programme of recovery and you may stop them from stealing on the streets. But before you consider $10/week to someone healthy but destitute half way across the world, you will have to help battle transport/corruption/crime/illness/etc before that $10 is really going to give the foreigner a fighting chance. To help individuals you must build societies, and you cannot help a society abroad without first maintaining a society at home (it is the society at home which provides the assistance!).
The priority is minimising suffering of people right now - but it is not "all that matters". The welfare of existing generations in the future and of future generations also matters. Though we must always remember that we are dealing with individuals just like ourselves, each and every one with a single chance at life and no choice about when are where that chance appeared.
But the survival of the species per se does not really matter. We might evolve quite a bit over the coming billion years. Who knows? Blunt speciesism is as racism.
It wouldn't be the worst idea if some tried. People are obsessed with thinking their viewpoint is marginalised, but there are a whole lot of people in the US struggling and not taken in by Kodos, Kang or the Koch brothers' experiment. The might listen to a group of rational men who get a thrill out of problem-solving rather than power-mongering.
But I think choosing to work for NASA already says a lot about your priorities. Your mind can change as you grow, of course.
As for up-and-coming scientists, people forget that withdrawal of labour is the most powerful collective tool of the common man. There are too many scientists who have become cogs in military-industrial production lines. The majority of NASA's resources are directed toward this: creating blueprints for the likes of Lockheed and Boeing. Good, clever people must take a stand and say I am not going to work for you - I want to do something better. I am not arguing against space science. I am arguing against what has happened to space science. It is not a worthy money vacuum.
The metric of life-expectancy is used so much because it matters. People don't like dying early.
No-one has an informed opinion on the experience of dying itself. Do you have any evidence that people in general want, per se, "to live a long time"? Perhaps you mean that people want more time to do stuff? This requires much more than just being alive.
And there are very few things that are more unpleasant for parents than for them to lose a child.
This happens mostly in countries where people don't have access to appropriate resources and yet continue to get pregnant a lot - perhaps out of the belief that enough children will survive to look after them in old age. For the majority of history, infant death was routine and did not cause the majority of people to become chronically unhappy, although our Western bubbles of privilege allow us the luxury of thinking too much about the children.
Anyway, the science required for birth control and basic nutrition/sanitation is not very sophisticated. But resources are not appropriately allocated.
If you do insist on metrics that attempt to look specifically at happiness levels then in fact the US is one of the happiest countries (#14 by this ranking
The methodology in that study is questionable, and the fact that you care about ranking (USA! USA!) over absolute results even more so. To begin, I read almost half the people in the US struggling to live. I then note that the Scandinavian mixed economies are predictably on top, and that the mighty USA has only 7% fewer struggling (but 2% more suffering!) than the glorious socialist republic of Turkmenistan.
So does that make it more ok for European space launches?
Perhaps, but it's nice once you've dealt with your problems at home to care about your fellow man even if he lives half way across the world.
Also, I'm a bit confused about how this claim relates to your primary claim about either civilization collapsing (happiness levels are not a good metric for likelyhood of civilization to collapse),
Happiness levels certainly lag other indicators of collapse, but they are a good indicator. You have to make sure to ask the right questions to the right people, of course.
and this also seems disconnected from your other claim about how these resources should go more to people who are suffering severely, since the people in the West who are not well off by Western standards are generally pretty well off compared to people in the developing world.
Any sensible resource allocation exercise is going to do better bringing everyone in a local unit up to a certain standard of living before it tackles the guy half way across the world. It should also be careful not to use simplistic metrics to judge that people living locally are better off - this is a legacy of the White Man Burden fallacy. The fat, uneducated chimney smoker in the run-down estate might have access to healthcare when he succumbs to cancer and heart attack, but he may not be "better off" than the healthy guy living as part of an apparently more "primitive" region who plays an active part in his community but dies at 40 from a simple medical condition.
Well, I was talking about the civilisation containing NASA - i.e. Western civilisation - and it has got much worse since the '80s.
There is no denying that science has improved life over the past few hundred years and that it is still bringing better things to the developing world. But that's far from what I was referring to.
The metrics of life expectancy (particular infant) and daily wage are also passionately overused. Ask instead: do people have the opportunity to be productive? Are they protected from personal risk? Most importantly: are they happy?
Do people want to live in a world where they can't even dream? Where they have to sign a registry and wait for the next open slot to have a child?
Two incredible strawmen. Suggesting we don't spend billions on space research and that we educate people on birth control is not the same as stopping people from dreaming and forcing people to wait for a ticket before they can have a child.
Ask the people suffering if they love life. If they do, then hey, good enough.
What does this mean? If they aren't killing themselves then life must be good enough and we can forget about them?
Why do we have to make everybody's life better at the expense of our own?
You don't have to. But you're advocating making better the life of people who are already doing well.
Well destroying hope is a good way to make people not want to live, isn't it?
If you only get hope out of people exploring Mars then you may be narrowminded/obsessed/something wrong.
You're a terrible human with the shittiest outlook on life, because you're also a hypocrit, as I'm sure you haven't sold your house and clothes and lowered your lifestyle to barely surviving
No, you're right, I still post on Slashdot from time to time. But I don't think the problem's entirely soluble. Humans are dicks. This doesn't mean we have to make things worse.
Somebody should enjoy themselves, somebody should be comfortable, and somebody should be able to achieve a dream instead of all of us living a life of sacrifice trying to stop the inevitable doom that threatens us all.
This seems to be a frequent way for guilt to manifest itself. "Someone has to be on top - and it's cool because I want it to be meeeee!"
it's because you wanted it more than those who didn't make the cut
This is bullshit '80s everyone-can-do-it fantasy. Some people are smarter and/or have more opportunities than others - life's unfair like that.
eliminating greed and selfishness is the solution, and good luck with that.
Completely agree. The Second World War brought welfare states to various Western European countries which reduced suffering dramatically and demonstrated how it can be done. Unfortunately, the process has been reversed since the '80s/'90s.
Some countries have done very well at educating people to reduce the native birth rate.
But we're doing really bad at educating the rest. (Some might say it's intentional, as overpopulation implies desperation implies cheap labour. What do you say?)
How about all the people that got paid? what about all the companies that will be making new products from the tech for this probe. Oh wait, that's10 years down the road and as such well beyond your ability to grasp.
If "people will get paid" is a justification for resource allocation to any given endeavour then why not employ as many people as you can to build endless paper chains?
Besides, it doesn't matter whether our species survives: our species does not collectively feel or think or suffer like some supernatural entity and we would do well to detach ourselves from such quasi-religion. What matters is the known and well-understood experience of existing individuals living in various conditions.
So what you're saying is that it's OK to behave like a lawyer as long as there are lawyers?
We are not lacking resources on earth. We just fail to apply science to distribute them properly and to educate on birth control.
There is not a substantial risk of a large asteroid coming and wiping us out in the near future. We are far more likely to be wiped out by ourselves by continuing our current approach of competitive greed and resource squandering. Get your priorities straight.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's some other reasons people resort to violence:
None but the last explain simultaneous peaceful protests, subsequent riots and following looting across the country.
Additionally, a riot is not a protest, stealing is not a protest, arson of shops and homes is not a protest, looting is not a protest,
A protest is what? Is it when someone whispers that they're unhappy and you ignore them?
This might not be the most effective way to protest, and in the short term it will act against the favour of the protestors, but it's certainly a protest. I'm sure the current government is very happy about what's going on - just as Thatcher was happy when people rioted and grinning like a clown over the Falklands. Desperate people resorting to violence make the best targets.
and it should be treated completely differently - if you start looting and burning shops, I'm afraid different rules apply,
What if I start a war and that war involves bombing shops and killing its owners? What if my financial hoodwinking means your finances are ruined and your shop is dismantled? Do different rules apply then? Or is the destruction of one business a tragedy but the destruction of a million businesses a statistic?
you can expect to be treated harshly and to experience violence in your turn
Civilised society would expect its police force to stop you by using means only in proportion to the threat you cause. If you want violent retribution, please move to the Middle East - you sound like you'd be most welcome.
So what is housing benefit, unemployment benefit, free schooling, free medical care, if not help?
Housing benefit does not guarantee you a safe home suitable for a human to live in a dignified manner. It's also in the process of being reduced substantially such that many people in inner London will have to move. Tell me: why do you think some people are homeless for more than a few days? Either it is that everyone who is homeless chooses (i.e. while of sound mind) to live without a home, or not even housing benefit guarantees a safe home. What is more, it is not a requirement for councils to provide housing or even to refer to private housing unless you pass several stringest tests; in my borough, there are zero council houses as the remainder have been sold off over the last few years, so any referrals would be to private housing associations.
Unemployment benefit has many conditions attached to it and is often taken away at the whim of your supervisor (never been on it, but have worked with people reliant on such). Anyway, people don't want £65/week, they want the chance to participate in society - which includes a job. There are always jobs for the bright and the well-connected, but there are simply very few jobs for the average youth in inner London right now. While the looting is a minor part of the riots, emphasised by the appropriate PR machine, do you see riots and subsequent looting in rich, happy communities? No, because people who are rich and happy will go along with the system and buy the TV - there are always exceptions but they are too few and far between for a riot+loot. A necessary prerequisite for simultaneous riots across some country is deep discontent.
Schooling doesn't guarantee you an education. Have you ever worked in a London school? Even the average state school fails at preparing your brain since Thatcher's National Curriculum and sale of exam boards to publishing houses have together created a racket of inflated grades and learning only to pass the test.
The NHS is still plodding along nicely as long as your problems are physical and fairly routine. But if you have a complex mental health problem, you may be waiting for years to see the right person, or not have the appropriate treatment available to you on the NHS at all (it depends a lot on the Trust you're under).
You s
(1) Stop thinking of money as "yours" in some philosophical sense and start understanding it as a way society chooses to allocate resources to those best able to manage it. The extent to which that happens is the extent to which capitalism works - if it stops happening then there will be no-one to protect "your" precious money anyway, as happens when people are looted or their pension funds raided or whatever;
(2) Lots of money is taken from you and mostly wasted on to weapons manufacturers, corporations in public-private partnerships and overpaid civil servants. High tax doesn't imply a working welfare state. Lots of feudal systems collected high taxes and it certainly wasn't for the benefit of the peasants.
Britain hasn't had a recent history of long-term police oppression of freedoms following riots in the style familiar even to Europeans and Americans. What is more, any such action may raise group awareness: "I'm not the only one who feels like this, though I see rioting will not solve the problem." There's always a segment of society that would want anyone who isn't like them to be put in chains and into forced labour, but it's not pervasive. You're right that it will make things feel worse in the shorter term. But when someone is stuck between a rock and a hard place, sometimes he ends up throwing rocks.
I'm not certain that anyone minds an increased police presence per se, though. Has anyone actually objected to seeing uniformed policemen walking around in the street? Much better that than CCTV or plainclothes. What matters is the laws the police are made to enforce and whether they enforce them equitably according to process.
Mod parent up. When people are out of "civilised" ways to put across their message, they resort to violence. This isn't violence with a direct aim - e.g. as the violence by the US in the Middle East is subjugation of strategically important areas - this is violence as a way of saying "I'm fed up and someone to take notice!" If you loved your society, you wouldn't destroy it. If, as a young man (or teen, it seems), you do not feel a sense of belonging and love and support - if you are not given the opportunity to contribute - then why would you value what is around you?
The looters coming in after the riots are being emphasised because it's pretty hard to argue about the social plight of someone who runs off with a 42 inch TV "because I can". There is a massive PR exercise to paint this as merely thieves thieving. There's also a PC exercise to avoid pointing out the cultural make-up of rioters - predominantly black in some areas, white in others - because people are so afraid of thinking they're implying "black people are criminals!" rather than "youths in black communities in central London are alienated and have no voice, no meaningful representation and no opportunity to do anything about it". We have moved on from overt police racism of the '80s (and well done to the police for doing that) but we have not moved on from the power dominance of a single culture in Britain.
Unfortunately, in any class struggle (sorry, Torys, that's exactly what it is!), these sorts of organic riots tend to result in more oppression. It may do something to raise awareness, but absent an organised army it is only joint peaceful action which tends to effect change. In particular, had the unions not been so far up New Labour's arse over the last decade that the wider working population would be forgiven for remembering who they were created to serve, they would have opposed changing market and labour conditions.
In short, it still takes a village to raise a child. Even the most stable and loving family (which, as anyone knows, inner London is full of) can only do so much. When the average boy turns 16 - and we're not talking about the geniuses of the world, but the majority of average ability - society has the choice to lift him up or to leave him to fend on his own. Where resources exceed demand, he might be able to do the latter. Where they do not, what should he endure? And, if you have not helped him, what gives you the right to tell him what is right and wrong? Even if you think you have some natural superiority, what makes you think the young man will listen?
Is teaching by example not teaching?
Reading that "eloquent" English slowed me down far more than reading a foreign language
Really? The older style is more Latinate and a Western polyglot ought to be familiar with it.
and possibly even more than reading legalese
A small proportion of legal documents are deliberately written to confuse but the greater proportion of legal writing is clear and unambiguous. Understand:
(i) There is a handful of rules which apply to interpreting sentence structure, conjunctions, pronouns, etc., some of which may be specified in legislation (e.g. the Interpretation Acts of the UK Parliament);
(ii) Specific terms often have meanings established through legislation and case law: consider in your own profession how many words carry more detailed meaning to you than they would to the layman and what would happen if you always used a layman's interpretation;
(iii) Intent (of Parliament) and compatibility (esp. with the ECHR - sorry, Toryboys!) rules are applied where ambiguities remain.
Put another way, the rules for interpreting legal language are much more clearly defined and methodical than the rules for interpreting everyday language. It just requires a bit of learning and practice to know what those rules are. This is absolutely necessary when attempting to define a fair, unambiguous system using an ambiguous human language. This is, or ought to be, schoolboy stuff.
Perhaps it is simply language which is specific and does not admit easy reinterpretation which bothers you? Modern language is all about not committing yourself lest you be held responsible for your work.
I wish people still expressed themselves with such eloquence. This used to be one of the first skills taught to a young gentleman - now it is rarely taught at all.
Perhaps the problem is lack of gentlemen (and ladies).
Gentlemen!!! First they came for me...
I am a [ Apple user ] of [ unknown age ] looking to organise an attack at [ any and all Apple stores ]. But keep it under your [ iPads ]!!! I wouldn't want them shutting down allllll [ Apple stores ].
I am a [ socialist ] of [ long hair ] looking to organise an attack at [ within 20 miles of every single government building ]. But keep it under your [ Lenin caps ]!!! I wouldn't want them shutting down allllll [ places where young people gather ].
Driving a car is about control and feeling manly. The aggressive drivers who cause accidents are those least likely to want control taken away from them - they'd rather drive unsafely and get there 2 minutes faster, convinced that they have the largest penis. The car, road and oil network is largely a government-corporation subsidised and very effectively marketed power trip.
While you may be able to replace 50% of the drivers at random and find that they produce fewer horrible accidents than the remaining 50%, you're also taking away the whole point in driving a car as opposed to using public transportation.
When you look at the fairly arbitrary formulae and subjective criteria used in calculating the individual and overall metrics (please take the time to read through them!) and consider that the difference between Bahrain (10th) and Australia (3rd) is under 5 points, I'm not sure you can say much at all about the ordering of any countries in this range.
Agreed re possibly heritable personality traits influencing happiness, although much more than that is needed to use this as an explanation for the differences in happiness levels across countries.
It might be that happier populations prefer more socialism (or can stand it, anyway).
While unhappy people are better coped to stand extreme poverty/anarchy/military dictatorship? Points for effort. :-) Research is already more sophisticated than this: the sorts of stressors which are known to reduce happiness are less likely to be encountered in a country with a social safety net.
Meanwhile there is simply no evidence that, say, a well-run state healthcare service or the opportunity to be protected from homelessness makes anyone unhappy. Mismanagement or limited availability of such programmes may cause stress, but then you'd need evidence that private sector management and availability is better.
I'm going to have to pass on your CATO link, sorry! A literature review by a group of ideologues is unlikely to give me an unbiased overview regardless of which end of the political spectrum has pre-written its conclusion.
This illustrates the absurdity of the metric. I spent most of my childhood with under $1.25/day "purchasing power" but it didn't matter because I had what I need provided for me. The World Bank and IMF have the principle of pushing developing countries to privatise (read "withdraw") services which people actually need to survive (shelter, sanitation, healthcare, etc.) and then get all giddy about the fact that now fewer people are too poor to buy half a Big Mac a day.
Losing friends and family members sucks. Longer lifespans make that less common.
Please think that statement through :-).
since you don't like the metrics I was using for happiness levels
I didn't reject your study, although I think it's not the best. But I did perhaps take from it other than what you wanted me to: the conclusion that almost half the people in the USA are struggling from day to day. In all but a handful of countries, this is so. We really need to sort our shit out at home, on Earth.
But there's no good moral or ethical reason that proximity should translate into moral importance.
Well, all endeavours are practical, and it's a lot easier to help local people about whom you have a good understanding and who form part of a community which is already under your supervision. There's also the benefit of having a cohesive community without pockets of extreme poverty. Humans are social animals, and the aim is to look after humans.
Put bluntly, if you give $100/week locally to someone who is too mentally ill to work, you may allow them to maintain themselves while they are on a programme of recovery and you may stop them from stealing on the streets. But before you consider $10/week to someone healthy but destitute half way across the world, you will have to help battle transport/corruption/crime/illness/etc before that $10 is really going to give the foreigner a fighting chance. To help individuals you must build societies, and you cannot help a society abroad without first maintaining a society at home (it is the society at home which provides the assistance!).
The priority is minimising suffering of people right now - but it is not "all that matters". The welfare of existing generations in the future and of future generations also matters. Though we must always remember that we are dealing with individuals just like ourselves, each and every one with a single chance at life and no choice about when are where that chance appeared.
But the survival of the species per se does not really matter. We might evolve quite a bit over the coming billion years. Who knows? Blunt speciesism is as racism.
It wouldn't be the worst idea if some tried. People are obsessed with thinking their viewpoint is marginalised, but there are a whole lot of people in the US struggling and not taken in by Kodos, Kang or the Koch brothers' experiment. The might listen to a group of rational men who get a thrill out of problem-solving rather than power-mongering.
But I think choosing to work for NASA already says a lot about your priorities. Your mind can change as you grow, of course.
As for up-and-coming scientists, people forget that withdrawal of labour is the most powerful collective tool of the common man. There are too many scientists who have become cogs in military-industrial production lines. The majority of NASA's resources are directed toward this: creating blueprints for the likes of Lockheed and Boeing. Good, clever people must take a stand and say I am not going to work for you - I want to do something better. I am not arguing against space science. I am arguing against what has happened to space science. It is not a worthy money vacuum.
Is this like the "at least we don't torture people as much as some other countries do" argument for torture?
The metric of life-expectancy is used so much because it matters. People don't like dying early.
No-one has an informed opinion on the experience of dying itself. Do you have any evidence that people in general want, per se, "to live a long time"? Perhaps you mean that people want more time to do stuff? This requires much more than just being alive.
And there are very few things that are more unpleasant for parents than for them to lose a child.
This happens mostly in countries where people don't have access to appropriate resources and yet continue to get pregnant a lot - perhaps out of the belief that enough children will survive to look after them in old age. For the majority of history, infant death was routine and did not cause the majority of people to become chronically unhappy, although our Western bubbles of privilege allow us the luxury of thinking too much about the children.
Anyway, the science required for birth control and basic nutrition/sanitation is not very sophisticated. But resources are not appropriately allocated.
If you do insist on metrics that attempt to look specifically at happiness levels then in fact the US is one of the happiest countries (#14 by this ranking
The methodology in that study is questionable, and the fact that you care about ranking (USA! USA!) over absolute results even more so. To begin, I read almost half the people in the US struggling to live. I then note that the Scandinavian mixed economies are predictably on top, and that the mighty USA has only 7% fewer struggling (but 2% more suffering!) than the glorious socialist republic of Turkmenistan.
So does that make it more ok for European space launches?
Perhaps, but it's nice once you've dealt with your problems at home to care about your fellow man even if he lives half way across the world.
Also, I'm a bit confused about how this claim relates to your primary claim about either civilization collapsing (happiness levels are not a good metric for likelyhood of civilization to collapse),
Happiness levels certainly lag other indicators of collapse, but they are a good indicator. You have to make sure to ask the right questions to the right people, of course.
and this also seems disconnected from your other claim about how these resources should go more to people who are suffering severely, since the people in the West who are not well off by Western standards are generally pretty well off compared to people in the developing world.
Any sensible resource allocation exercise is going to do better bringing everyone in a local unit up to a certain standard of living before it tackles the guy half way across the world. It should also be careful not to use simplistic metrics to judge that people living locally are better off - this is a legacy of the White Man Burden fallacy. The fat, uneducated chimney smoker in the run-down estate might have access to healthcare when he succumbs to cancer and heart attack, but he may not be "better off" than the healthy guy living as part of an apparently more "primitive" region who plays an active part in his community but dies at 40 from a simple medical condition.
Well, I was talking about the civilisation containing NASA - i.e. Western civilisation - and it has got much worse since the '80s.
There is no denying that science has improved life over the past few hundred years and that it is still bringing better things to the developing world. But that's far from what I was referring to.
The metrics of life expectancy (particular infant) and daily wage are also passionately overused. Ask instead: do people have the opportunity to be productive? Are they protected from personal risk? Most importantly: are they happy?
Do people want to live in a world where they can't even dream? Where they have to sign a registry and wait for the next open slot to have a child?
Two incredible strawmen. Suggesting we don't spend billions on space research and that we educate people on birth control is not the same as stopping people from dreaming and forcing people to wait for a ticket before they can have a child.
Ask the people suffering if they love life. If they do, then hey, good enough.
What does this mean? If they aren't killing themselves then life must be good enough and we can forget about them?
Why do we have to make everybody's life better at the expense of our own?
You don't have to. But you're advocating making better the life of people who are already doing well.
Well destroying hope is a good way to make people not want to live, isn't it?
If you only get hope out of people exploring Mars then you may be narrowminded/obsessed/something wrong.
You're a terrible human with the shittiest outlook on life, because you're also a hypocrit, as I'm sure you haven't sold your house and clothes and lowered your lifestyle to barely surviving
No, you're right, I still post on Slashdot from time to time. But I don't think the problem's entirely soluble. Humans are dicks. This doesn't mean we have to make things worse.
Somebody should enjoy themselves, somebody should be comfortable, and somebody should be able to achieve a dream instead of all of us living a life of sacrifice trying to stop the inevitable doom that threatens us all.
This seems to be a frequent way for guilt to manifest itself. "Someone has to be on top - and it's cool because I want it to be meeeee!"
it's because you wanted it more than those who didn't make the cut
This is bullshit '80s everyone-can-do-it fantasy. Some people are smarter and/or have more opportunities than others - life's unfair like that.
eliminating greed and selfishness is the solution, and good luck with that.
Completely agree. The Second World War brought welfare states to various Western European countries which reduced suffering dramatically and demonstrated how it can be done. Unfortunately, the process has been reversed since the '80s/'90s.
Fucking is not the same as having children.
Some countries have done very well at educating people to reduce the native birth rate.
But we're doing really bad at educating the rest. (Some might say it's intentional, as overpopulation implies desperation implies cheap labour. What do you say?)
How about all the people that got paid? what about all the companies that will be making new products from the tech for this probe. Oh wait, that's10 years down the road and as such well beyond your ability to grasp.
If "people will get paid" is a justification for resource allocation to any given endeavour then why not employ as many people as you can to build endless paper chains?
The universe is all one basket.
Besides, it doesn't matter whether our species survives: our species does not collectively feel or think or suffer like some supernatural entity and we would do well to detach ourselves from such quasi-religion. What matters is the known and well-understood experience of existing individuals living in various conditions.
I shan't blow my own trumpet, but to give examples from my cousins: one's in demography and another is an agricultural engineer.
So... food, disease control, resource allocation, that sort of thing. Lots of fertile ground.
So what you're saying is that it's OK to behave like a lawyer as long as there are lawyers?
We are not lacking resources on earth. We just fail to apply science to distribute them properly and to educate on birth control.
There is not a substantial risk of a large asteroid coming and wiping us out in the near future. We are far more likely to be wiped out by ourselves by continuing our current approach of competitive greed and resource squandering. Get your priorities straight.