>> Neither. I'm not saying he could have gotten rich off of the proceeds of the book. I'm saying he could have founded a religion with much less hassle by avoiding the whole angel story. There were tons of restorationist congregations staring in the early 19th century, and some got rather large. Given his talents (his people skills, as you put it) he could easily have creatd one of those and lived in comfort and respectability and wealth and power all his days.
I can see how you would believe that, and I don't discount the notion completely. But looking as Smith's career, it's clear that he always thought big. His message wasn't supposed to be "a restoration", but "The Restoration", the one that had been expected for millenia, which would sweep all other religions, all other powers and principalities from the Earth. You see this as a byproduct of his divine mandate, while I see it as a sure sign of unchecked megalomania. I'm sure we'll have to agree to disagree on that point, but if you are trying to prove that Smith wasn't motivated by a desire for power, and attempting to prove it by showing other routes to the same end, then you have to at least engage with the detractors who say that Smith's personality might not have been drawn to your alternative paths.
Re: sycophants and insulation
I'm not saying that Smith was unaware of his detractors, or even that he was physically separated from them all the time. I'm talking more about the sort of separation that separates you and I. I think he put his enemies into a tiny box marked "people I don't have to respect or listen to at all", and listened primarily to those who told him he was The Lord's Prophet. It makes it easier to dismiss the accusations of your enemies that way, even when they're saying things that you need to hear, or even when they have you in their physical custody.
George Bush's insulation is enforced by the full mechanisms of the state, and therefore is much less permeable. But the effects are similar.
Re: I did not have sex with those women. You deleted the corroborating links I provided, then accused me of not showing evidence.
Had you even skimmed those links, you would see that the evidence for Joseph Smith's sexual promiscuity comes not from one embittered detractor, but from many of his polygamous wives themselves, often speaking under oath. These were not angry ex-mormons, but women who still regarded themselves as both faithful Mormons and the wives of Joseph Smith. Additional corroboration comes from the friends and relatives of these women, who attest that Smith roomed with these women some evenings. Finally, there is the letter kept by Newell K. Whitney regarding his daughter, Sarah Anne. It explains to her that, on a specific evening, they could meet without Emma's knowledge, and that he had a room all to himself.[src]. There is no indication that Whitney (who served in prominent callings until his death in 1850) kept the letter with the intention of harming the prophet.*
The evidence is overwhelming. Smith had sex with his plural wives. You claimed otherwise, but if you have a shred of rationality about you then you'd better make peace with the facts. Continue to claim that Smith wasn't motivated by lust, and that his actions were right in the sight of God, and that the fact is compatible with his role as First Prophet of the Last Dispensation. But you have to accept the fact that sex was had. By allowing that, understand that you're saying that Smith reaped benefits from polygamy as well as heartache, which undermines the entire thrust of your argument.
Another thing that I think undermines your argument: why did Smith marry so many, and usually so young? Sure, I saw some statistical analysis saying that Smith's wives weren't unusually young, given the normal age differences between partners at the time. But that's just it. The marriages from the census data were entered into precisely becau
>>>> You made the overreaching claims, saying that his life was unmitigated suckage, which no sane person would have chosen. I merely pointed out a few inconvenient truths that undermined your claims. Many people would choose to be king for a day, rather than a peasant for a lifetime.
>> I don't think you've successfully undermined my point. Many people would choose king for a day over peasant for a lifetime. No sane person would choose king for a day over king for a week or amonth, however. And that's the choice you're asking people to believe Smith made.
Again, you seem to be claiming that a non-inspired Joseph Smith would have had both the foresight to foresee the consequences of his actions and the temperament needed to avoid the unpleasant courses.
>>>> I reserve judgment, since the only evidence you seem to offer is your unwavering faith in Smith's extraordinary talents.
>> This is nonsense. I don't believe Smith was that talented. But the only explanation for producing a work of the magnitude of the Book of Mormon are divine inspiration and talent. So, presuming he had no divine inspiration, he must have had immense talent. Why would someone with that level of talent choose a life of poverty when he could have lived much more comfortably?
I think you're overestimating both the economic opportunities available to 19th century writers and the literary merits of the Book of Mormon. Mark Twain (a far more talented, yet hardly wealthy author) called it "chloroform in print." Sure, it's got some cool (if often implausible) battle scenes. But it also has boring, repetitive moralizing, a dozen chapters cribbed from Isaiah, and enough "and it came to passes" to choke a curelom. No wonder Smith had trouble selling the copyright.
His authorial talents were impressive, but let's not overstate them. His real talents were in his people skills. His ability to attract a following, to create loyalty in his followers, to know how to convince people. But none of those talents would have made him more than moderately successful unless you couple them to a message that purports to be greater than the man.
That's one of the reasons why your "most people hated him" argument falls flat for me. Smith was kind of like George Bush today, spending most of his time surrounded by loyalists and admirers. So what if most of the world hates you, so long as the people nearest you are telling you that you're wonderful and your enemies are evil, crazy, stupid, or all of the above? Sure, people left in anger, but Smith mostly interacted with those who stayed. That completely changes the cost/benefit calculations.
>>>> You make it sound as though Smith had some sort of crystal ball (or a stone in a hat, perhaps) which allowed him to foresee all the consequences of his actions.
>> Good grief, man. This isn't pscyhohistory and he's not Hari Seldon. I'm talking about really, really basic stuff. Like "If they tried to kill you for saying you saw an angel and translating gold plates, maybe another work of translation might not increase your safety or prosperity." It doesn't take clairvoyance to see that, it takes basic intelligence.
I take your "good grief" and return it in kind. People fail in their grandiose schemes all the time, and you generally discover that they're acting on their own best understanding of how to achieve them. To prove that an act is altruistic, you have to do more than prove that the actor failed to make a buck off it.
The things Smith did were divisive. Everything you can point to that drove away some of his members caused others to cling to him all the more tightly. Maybe Smith understood that fundamental of human nature: If you demand great sacrifice from another, they'll usually find a way to convince themselves that it was the best thing they could have done.* Or maybe he wasn't that calculating.
The point is, you're trying to paint as obviously self-destructive, so obviously
I never claimed that he "did it for the money". In fact, I went out of my way to avoid making that accusation. You made the overreaching claims, saying that his life was unmitigated suckage, which no sane person would have chosen. I merely pointed out a few inconvenient truths that undermined your claims. Many people would choose to be king for a day, rather than a peasant for a lifetime.
You're trying to force me into an untenable choice: that Smith was either a prophet of God or an emotionless, calculating mastermind, a homo economicus whose only goal was to maximize his own personal enrichment.
I doubt either is the case. Perhaps there were more peaceful paths to wealth that Smith could have taken. I reserve judgment, since the only evidence you seem to offer is your unwavering faith in Smith's extraordinary talents. If the paths were there, it doesn't follow that Smith saw them, much less that he had the inclination or the temperament to take them. He was charismatic, but also divisive and megalomaniacal. Perhaps a quiet, peaceful life just isn't in the cards for some people.
You make it sound as though Smith had some sort of crystal ball (or a stone in a hat, perhaps) which allowed him to foresee all the consequences of his actions. That's absurd, because it ignores the possibility that Smith was trying for wealth, and simply made some really gross miscalculations.
Much of the suffering in Smith's life could have been avoided had he renounced his propheteering. You might be surprised to know it, but I believe that Smith believed in his own spiritual mission, which was more important to him than any wealth he ever might have accumulated. But that's not to say that Smith would turn down power and prestige if it came to him. He certainly didn't in Nauvoo.
Oh, and let's not pretend that Kirtland was an impoverished wasteland either.
>> And there's no evidence - not one scrap - of sexual promiscuity.
Are you claiming that in the "he never had sex with anyone but Emma" sense, or the "he was sealed to every last woman before he had sex with them" sense? If the former, then your argument is with the historical record, not me. If the latter, then you have a highly selective -- and frankly creepy -- definition of fidelity.
Now, how *was* Lucy Harris going to alter those pages?
>>>> he enjoyed enormous personal gain when people believed him.
>> This is utter rubbish. Joseph Smith enjoyed nothing but deprivation and persecution as a result of his claims. He lived in poverty virtually his entire life. He may have enjoyed some brief measure of comfort in Nauvoo in the years before he was killed, but the fact is that if he wanted to make a bunch of cash it would have been trivial to do so, given his talents, without going through all the trouble of getting himself driven out of several states and eventually shot to death.
Joseph Smith's life included times of deprivation, suffering, abandonment, heartache, and loss. He also had, from time to time, the sort of power and adulation that most men would never dream to hope for. He was the mayor of Nauvoo, which was once a bigger city than Chicago. When he resided there, he lived in a mansion (at least by the standards of the time). He had tens of thousands of followers, and while some turned against him, many more remained loyal. He was "celestially married" to over thirty different women. As commander of the Nauvoo Legion, he was in charge of a bigger standing army than the rest of Illinois put together. He once ran for president. His name lives on nearly two centuries after his death.
Fame, money, power, wall-to-wall pussy. If that's deprivation, sign me up. You could argue that the bad outweighed the good, or that none of that proves that he was "just in it for the money." But you cannot say that Smith never benefited materially from the organization he founded. After all, how much of that would he have accomplished if he'd stuck to farming?
>>>> That makes no sense, because such a forgery would be impossible to accomplish.
>> Your counterargument doesn't work because it's begging the question. If Joseph Smith had complete freedom to make up any damn story he pleased, then Mrs. Harris's plot would be futile. He could simply create an entirely different story and ten be good to go.
Given how intelligently you've conducted yourself in the past, your level of confusion here is amazing. Of course, Joseph Smith didn't have "complete freedom to make up any damn story he pleased." He had to recreate what he'd done previously, with enough fidelity to convince everyone that he was translating from a physical record. A simple feat, if he really had the plates, but impossible if he didn't.
Now, if we presume that this act of translation (despite the supposed supernatural aid) was like a normal translation, then Smith wouldn't be able to recreate his previous work word-for-word. But there would at least be a sentence-to-sentence correlation, hitting all the same plot points, keeping all the actions of all the minor characters, and so on.
You could argue that even the minor changes would be enough to discredit it in the eyes of many. So what? The Church has been discredited by a lot of things in a lot of eyes, and the Church seems hardly the worse for it. So it seems unlikely to me that God would prohibit Smith from retranslating anything based on what folks might say. It certainly didn't keep Him from introducing polygamy, and we all know what people said about that.
So we get to Smith's actual claim: That Lucy Harris was going to alter the text of his first attempt in such a way that it would utterly discredit the Book of Mormon. I have but three questions:
1) What form would such a forgery have taken? In other words, what sort of textual changes would have accomplished the feat?
2) How would Lucy Harris have accomplished such a forgery? I doubt she was a Hoffmanesque forger, or a master of imitating her husband's handwriting. Plus it was written in pen, and Wikipedia says Wite-out wasn't invented until 1966.
3) Why would this, alone among the many controversies and disputes surrounding the early Church, have doomed Mormonism? Especially with Martin Harris having seen the first translation, and being able to vouch for the adulteration?
Smith's "being trapped" is predicated entirely on the notion that attempting a second translation of the plates would somehow discredit him. I just don't see how that would be possible without assuming amazing skills on Lucy Harris' part.
>>>> When Smith heard the news, he abandoned all work on the plates for two months. Then, "following the instruction of the Lord," he continued where he left off, translating to the end of the work. When he was finally done, he revealed that a new section of the plates told the first part of the story, but in a completely different way.
>> At least you have the story straight. That's a good recount.
At least we have an agreement on the chronology. But it seems very convenient to me that there just happened to be a second source, hitherto unknown to prophet and scribe alike, that filled in the gap left by the 116 pages, without requiring Smith to recreate his previous work. Oh, wait. Divine foresight. Now I get it.
To me, at least, the chronology absolutely screams out that that the Tanner's theory is correct: Lucy Harris destroyed the pages, Smith knew he would be outed as a fraud if he tried to recreate his work, and he spent months depressed before he came up with his "second set of plates" escape plan.
>>>> I'm sorry, but unless you're blinded by the notion that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God, it should be easy to see that Smith was just coming up with flimsy excuses for his own inability to recreate his work, despite having both a written record to work from and supernatural aid.
Joseph translated 116 pages. He gave the pages to Martin Harrison. Martin Harrison lost the pages. Joseph Smith believed that they had been altered so that if he retranslated them the re translation would not match the original. Thus he did not retranslate them.
Was it because he couldn't? Or because he was legitimately avoiding a trap? It seems silly to say "he couldn't" because it makes no sense to say he was somehow less capable of translating non-existent plates the second time than the first time.
Martin Harris, not Martin Harrison. And I would respond that Smith's "defense" is incoherent.
His claim was that Harris' wife didn't really destroy the pages, but was in fact keeping them hidden so that, when he retranslated that section, she could make alterations to it and thus "prove" that he couldn't reproduce it. Thus he would be proven a fraud, which the Lord Almighty didn't want him to do.
That makes no sense, because such a forgery would be impossible to accomplish. Think about the target she had to hit: take two translations of the same work (probably with a few changes of phrase and such, because translation isn't an exact science), and change one of them so that it appeared that the two were two retellings of the same complex story, by an imaginative guy who didn't have any notes to work from.
Now, two translations of the same work are going to have the same structure, the same plot, the same who-did-what-to-who. Two retellings of a complex story? You're going to forget plot points, swap names around, rearrange sentences. For Harris' wife to produce such a thing, in Martin Harris' handwriting (Harris was the original scribe for that portion) would be a supreme feat of forgery.
When Smith heard the news, he abandoned all work on the plates for two months. Then, "following the instruction of the Lord," he continued where he left off, translating to the end of the work. When he was finally done, he revealed that a new section of the plates told the first part of the story, but in a completely different way.
I'm sorry, but unless you're blinded by the notion that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God, it should be easy to see that Smith was just coming up with flimsy excuses for his own inability to recreate his work, despite having both a written record to work from and supernatural aid.
I've already got my laptop making hourly requests to a non-existent image on a website I control. So if it ever goes walking, I might get an IP address from that. As someone pointed out, I might want to create a guest account, so that the thief would be willing to use the laptop as-is.
But what other sensory information does my laptop have? One thought: Wifi. Even before it connects, it can give you the names of wireless networks nearby. If you could somehow upload that list to a server you control, there is a small chance you might be able to wardrive your way to victory. But command-line wifi utilities seem to be rare. Any ideas?
You did not answer to the fact that in any given area during an average year, there can be several days without substantial wind or direct sunlight. What then?
Actually, I thought I did, at least for CSP. Big heat reservoirs. Topping off with natural gas. For wind power, a good grid system averages away much of the problem, since multiple dispersed regions can compensate for the failure of any single wind installation.
Also, you're overstating the problem. The vast majority of our infrastructure can handle temporary electrical interruptions. That which can't is already backed up by batteries or generators.
Geothermal: Unless you're willing to start waving some papers around, I'm happy to trust the MIT people rather than you. Also, geothermal heating and cooling systems *are* a form of geothermal energy, a form which works well just about anywhere, and could easily displace a huge slice of our current fossil fuel use. So why shouldn't it be part of the discussion when we're trying to figure out how much energy we'll need in the future?
That's what makes me particularly hopeful for non-nuclear alternative energy: given the huge resource inefficiencies yet to be wrung out of the current economy, I see no need for alternative energy to replace every kilowatt of our current consumption. As each kilowatt is used more efficiently, and you can run the economy on fewer and fewer of them, all sorts of options for energy generation open up.
Hell, I have a laptop that an eight year old can power with a hand crank. Draws about five watts. If everything starts sipping energy like that, the scope of the entire energy infrastructure (generation, backups, reservoirs, and failovers alike) is greatly reduced.
Concentrating solar is already down to about $0.09-$0.12/kWh, which isn't surprising since it uses reflectors instead of photovoltaics. As the size of the installation goes up, the cost per unit of energy goes down and the size of the heat reservoir goes up. That means, a really big installation could act as a massive battery, allowing it to continue delivering energy even when the sky goes dark for days at a time. Also remember that the energy generation is indirect: sun heats oil, which in turn heats water to drive a steam turbine. It would be perfectly reasonable to have an alternative method of heating the oil (natural gas, for example) if Mr. Burns temporarily disables the sun.
In short, your main objection (that people need a steady source of power) is irrelevant. Hospital life support won't fail, air conditioning won't give out, and cities won't resort to cannibalism because they've lost Internet access.
Your claim that geothermal only works in Iceland is bogus as well. Geothermal heating and cooling can work just about anywhere, even with tiny, single home installations. Electricity generation is more capital-intensive, but the expense is mostly a product of the depth to which you have to drill and pump to extract the heat. Thanks to frantic research by the oil industry, we're getting much better at that sort of thing. According to this recent study, a pitifully small amount of government-funded R&D could turn geothermal into a major supplier of power for the U.S. The report is over 300 pages long, but you only really need to read chapter 1.
Re: $10000/year. In this case, I was merely trying to point out the fallacy of the original poster's implication that reducing CO2 emissions could only be done by making our lives 80% suckier. But, yes, I am something of a collectivist. We've seen the failures of unmitigated corporate capitalism around the globe, from Iraq to Russia to South America, and people are frankly sick of it. Strong welfare states that represent the interests of the people they govern do far better at alleviating poverty and producing useful economic work than statist corporate regimes.
Read Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, and maybe you'll think differently about the benevolence of our corporate overlords, and perhaps consider the hidden costs of our almighty "standard of living."
The "unintended consequences" are as follows. The rich drive the economy. If we burden the rich with regulations that make it hard for them to rape the planet as they see fit, they'll stop blessing us with their efforts, and the economy will crumble and we'll have to resort to cannibalism.
Ayn Rand said it. I believe it. That settles it.
The right wing has been holding environmentalists at bay with threats of economic armageddon for decades now. I think their threats have always been hollow, but they make more sense once you take any proposal for significant wealth distribution off the table (which the right has somehow managed to do).
There is no technology in existance that can provide all of the USA's electricity without carbon, except for nuclear. Things like wind and solar can only provide about 10-15% of the USA's current demand because they only work when the sun shines and the wind blows.
This is such a pernicious, pervasive non-point that I'm physically compelled to respond. Concentrating solar power doesn't stop when the sun goes down. While it's getting sunlight, it fills a heat reservoir that can be drained during the night. There are other ways to buffer the energy from renewables, ranging from the batteries of plugin hybrids to pushing water uphill, to the option you specifically mentioned: hydrogen.
That option alone should have shut you up about "it only works when the sun shines and the wind blows." Also, you forgot geothermal energy, which is far more consistent a source than solar or wind, and (like the other renewable options) has the potential to eventually become major producers at "cheaper than coal" prices.
An 80% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2050 is a reasonable goal, without drastic cuts to our standard of living. I haven't heard anything out of your mouth to indicate otherwise; just a bunch of "No We Can't!" All the things you claim we will have to give up (other than airplanes) could be run off electricity from renewable sources. There is plenty of sun, plenty of wind, and the technology for harvesting it is getting rapidly cheaper. When it comes to computers specifically, my OLPC pulls about 5 watts, and is more than adequate for most tasks. So it seems likely that we could provide a lot of the value we derive from computers even in an energy-starved world.
An 80% reduction in CO2 emissions isn't the same as an 80% reduction in energy usage, and neither of the two necessarily equates to an 80% reduction in economic activity, and none of the preceding things requires an 80% reduction in our well-being. You could argue the last point, but hedonic studies seem to indicate that, beyond $10K/year of income, additional income does very little to make us happy. It just gets swamped by the things that money can't buy. So even if we have to reduce our consumption drastically, it may not make us feel noticeably worse off, if we go about it in the right way.
Have you considered, even for a brief moment, that Bush's policies have put about a hundred million times more CO2 into the atmosphere than Al Gore's house?
George Bush building a green house is about as laudable as Bill Gates giving a five spot to charity: the magnitude of the missed opportunity more than negates the action.
. The US employment picture in the middle of a bad recession is still better than that of the rest of the advanced economies during boom times.
I fail to see how your point could be construed any other way. Clearly, you do. I think you're cutting a little close with that semantic scalpel of yours.
Huh? It "fakes" threading by using independent processes that communicate via the database. Somebody tell those UNIX posers that they're not fooling anybody.
It's like saying that a dog is faking being a cat, because it has fur.
I think he may have a point with #2. Rails could be generating much more sophisticated scaffolding. My ideal: you put more validation information in the migration, then auto-generate the model and views from that. You tell the DB that the information in this field will be no more than five characters long. It not only keeps that constraint in the database (which is good), but the model also protects the DB from seeing invalid information. The view can also be generated to reflect the information (the field is automatically five chars wide, and disables the submit button if the user overfills it). validates_format_of could even prevent a form field from accepting characters that make no sense in its context.
Hmmm... Maybe I do want Rails to write the app for me.
Maybe this isn't a great idea, but it's always been one of my pet peeves about rails: you have to duplicate validation information between models and their migrations. Want to change zip_code from a 5 character input to 10? Changing validates_length_of in the model isn't enough. Can't forget to write a new migration to rejigger the DB. So I mostly leave such limits out of the migrations, even though it would be nice to have the DB enforcing them. After all, multiple apps might interact with the DB.
Well, you did say that the employment picture in the US is better than any other industrialized nation, and I did manage to find a few counterexamples, even going strictly by percentage. But I do regret the use of the term "bollocks." It was unnecessary and inflammatory.
Your point B is bollocks. Japan has consistently had a lower unemployment rate than the U.S., as have the Netherlands and Denmark. EU-wide unemployment has been falling over the last ten years, so there are 4 million fewer unemployed in the EU than there were in 1996 [src].
Sure, their overall unemployment rate is around 7%-8% (compared to our 4%-5%). But you can't just compare our apples to their oranges. There are several ways of judging "the unemployment picture." One is to say, "if I'm unemployed here, how difficult is it for me to find a job?" Another is to say, "if I'm unemployed here, how bad does it suck?" In the U.S., with its stingier unemployment benefits and its employment-based healthcare system, it's far more risky to be unemployed. A third way is to ask, "If I'm unemployed, how difficult will it be to get a job with the wages and benefits that are important to me?" If you're hoping to land a job with 6 weeks vacation, you're better off looking in Germany. If you want a job that pays a living wage, you're probably also better off looking in Europe (depending on the sort of job you're looking for). If you want a job that gives you health insurance, best to look in America. In the EU, you probably already have it.
This term seems to have been coined with people like yourself in mind.
Neither the selfish or the selfless system "credit contributions fairly." One is based on how much you can take within the current rules (including the ability to break contracts when you know your opponent will have difficulty enforcing it). The other is based on intuitions about the value of respective contributions that may not be realistic. At least when both parties are being selfless, some fuzziness is allowed, because neither party needs the scales to balance perfectly.
You seem to think that the goal of any effort should be to maximize its efficiency at delivering economically measurable outcomes. Sorry, but the outcomes most people value aren't the ones that plug easily into economic formulas. By your logic, having dinner at McDonalds is "efficient", because it's chock full of market-forces goodness, while having dinner over at my parents' is wasteful. There is no price tag on it, so how do I know how much elder care they've banked for their final years? Since they charged me nothing for it, how do they know they'll be repaid for their efforts?
This elaborate network of unspoken favors and obligations, guided by raw emotions, is really the currency of mankind. We've been using it since before we dropped from the trees. Monetary systems, with their continuously compounding interests and their structured investment vehicles, they're babes in the woods by comparison. As recent headlines indicate, they're blunt, inelegant tools that we don't understand as well as we thought.
A system of selfishness doesn't require people to "be productive" in order to gain. It's usually far easier to just exploit loopholes in the system to steal from the value that already exists.
Don't think that the "credit" that accrues to the "politically apt" is mere funny money with no real value. In fact, it probably contributes far more to most peoples' sense of happiness than the currency you favor. How many people who work for epic jerks today would take a 20% pay cut to be under the charge of someone who showed them more respect, someone who valued their work and expressed appreciation for their ideas? Or at least someone who wouldn't sell them up the river for a 1.3% additional return on investment? I think people would be happy to trade a little efficiency for more "political adeptness" (that goes double when you consider that most of the fruits of all this newfound efficiency has gone straight into the pockets of a tiny elite, but I digress).
The way you describe the pitfalls of "sensitivity", it seems to me that you have some real difficulties with what they call "emotional intelligence". Me too. People are often frustrating and confusing to me. But rather than recognize that there may be a useful skill that you're deficient in, you've adopted a worldview where your weakness is twisted into a perceived strength, and the skill you lack is a moral impediment that causes lesser people to corrupt ideal systems with their well-intended incompetence. Maybe a thousand generations hence, your kind will have driven wasteful, socially mediated transactions from the species. No, really, it could happen. But you may want to put yourself into cryofreeze until then, because I don't think that being on the bleeding edge of this trend is going to work to your advantage today.
Perfectionism must necessitate introverted effort of keeping ones concentration on the subjects of ones imagination. "Sensitivity" to others means allowing consideration of how other people feel to interrupt ones own train of thought on persistent basis. One so easily distracted cannot be so deeply concentrated.
I've had some success working for non-profits. Depending on their needs and the skills of their staff, there might be a big hole in the organization for you to fill.
The danger is that, if you're the most tech-savvy person around, you have nobody to learn from. Nobody is there to show you a better way, and it's very easy to get comfortable, and never expand your horizons. A non-profit might be a great place to build small and simple (yet incredibly useful) apps, but without discipline and study, you'll probably plateau.
Try internationalizing an app, just for fun. Write one in a new language, then port it back to the language you expect it will be maintained in. Build a test harness for an app. Integrate one with a database. Watch the staff as they use you app, and see how they're using (and misusing) it, to get an idea of what constitutes an intuitive interface. Learn to talk about technology with people from different backgrounds and different levels of experience. Study their entire workflow, and try to figure out which parts could be done more efficiently.
Non-profits are often a lot like any small business where IT isn't a core competency. If you can build a tiny web app that will allow them to do something in ten seconds that once took them three minutes, you will be hailed as a god.
I just did the calculations, and it looks like, even with a relatively cheap electric rate (.07/kWH), you would be paying over 2.5 times as much for electric heat as you would for natural gas heat.
A kWH of electricity represents about 3800 BTUs of electricity, so it would take 263 kWH to offset 1 decatherm of heating energy (which my natural gas company charges about $7 for).
Another correction: heat energy isn't 100% efficient. It's more like 30%, if you compare the heat embodied in a chunk of coal to the amount of heat put off by the light bulb. Natural gas distribution is far more efficient than that, but I can't give an exact number.
Then remember that the light bulbs are on the ceiling, where the heat is doing almost no good whatsoever. So even if electric heat is a given, it's better to use an actual electric heater with a fan.
Typing with your brain would be awesome. Being all carpal-tunneled like I am, I'd be happy to devote months to brain-typing. Way more time than I spent learning Dvorak.
I think you're wrong about the hat thing, though. Back when they introduced the Walkman, a lot of people assumed it would be a flop because who the hell would want to wear earphones that make you look like a robot space alien? And let's not get started on people with the hands-free cell phones. You look ridiculous. Trust me on this. But the point is, if the technology is sufficiently useful, fashion sensibility will adapt.
I think a resurgence of bald is a more likely outcome.
I guess it would be impossible to just let the late person go in the next boarding phase. It would also be absurd to use the system, but allow parents to board with their young children. After all, the solution is being proposed by a physicist, and we all know that the stuff they come up with never pans out in the real world.
Stick to your Big Bangs and your quantum tunneling, Einsteins, and leave airport management to the people who brought us shoe-fetish security theater.
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>> Neither. I'm not saying he could have gotten rich off of the proceeds of the book. I'm saying he could have founded a religion with much less hassle by avoiding the whole angel story. There were tons of restorationist congregations staring in the early 19th century, and some got rather large. Given his talents (his people skills, as you put it) he could easily have creatd one of those and lived in comfort and respectability and wealth and power all his days.
I can see how you would believe that, and I don't discount the notion completely. But looking as Smith's career, it's clear that he always thought big. His message wasn't supposed to be "a restoration", but "The Restoration", the one that had been expected for millenia, which would sweep all other religions, all other powers and principalities from the Earth. You see this as a byproduct of his divine mandate, while I see it as a sure sign of unchecked megalomania. I'm sure we'll have to agree to disagree on that point, but if you are trying to prove that Smith wasn't motivated by a desire for power, and attempting to prove it by showing other routes to the same end, then you have to at least engage with the detractors who say that Smith's personality might not have been drawn to your alternative paths.
Re: sycophants and insulation
I'm not saying that Smith was unaware of his detractors, or even that he was physically separated from them all the time. I'm talking more about the sort of separation that separates you and I. I think he put his enemies into a tiny box marked "people I don't have to respect or listen to at all", and listened primarily to those who told him he was The Lord's Prophet. It makes it easier to dismiss the accusations of your enemies that way, even when they're saying things that you need to hear, or even when they have you in their physical custody.
George Bush's insulation is enforced by the full mechanisms of the state, and therefore is much less permeable. But the effects are similar.
Re: I did not have sex with those women. You deleted the corroborating links I provided, then accused me of not showing evidence.
Had you even skimmed those links, you would see that the evidence for Joseph Smith's sexual promiscuity comes not from one embittered detractor, but from many of his polygamous wives themselves, often speaking under oath. These were not angry ex-mormons, but women who still regarded themselves as both faithful Mormons and the wives of Joseph Smith. Additional corroboration comes from the friends and relatives of these women, who attest that Smith roomed with these women some evenings. Finally, there is the letter kept by Newell K. Whitney regarding his daughter, Sarah Anne. It explains to her that, on a specific evening, they could meet without Emma's knowledge, and that he had a room all to himself.[src]. There is no indication that Whitney (who served in prominent callings until his death in 1850) kept the letter with the intention of harming the prophet.*
The evidence is overwhelming. Smith had sex with his plural wives. You claimed otherwise, but if you have a shred of rationality about you then you'd better make peace with the facts. Continue to claim that Smith wasn't motivated by lust, and that his actions were right in the sight of God, and that the fact is compatible with his role as First Prophet of the Last Dispensation. But you have to accept the fact that sex was had. By allowing that, understand that you're saying that Smith reaped benefits from polygamy as well as heartache, which undermines the entire thrust of your argument.
Another thing that I think undermines your argument: why did Smith marry so many, and usually so young? Sure, I saw some statistical analysis saying that Smith's wives weren't unusually young, given the normal age differences between partners at the time. But that's just it. The marriages from the census data were entered into precisely becau
>>>> You made the overreaching claims, saying that his life was unmitigated suckage, which no sane person would have chosen. I merely pointed out a few inconvenient truths that undermined your claims. Many people would choose to be king for a day, rather than a peasant for a lifetime.
>> I don't think you've successfully undermined my point. Many people would choose king for a day over peasant for a lifetime. No sane person would choose king for a day over king for a week or amonth, however. And that's the choice you're asking people to believe Smith made.
Again, you seem to be claiming that a non-inspired Joseph Smith would have had both the foresight to foresee the consequences of his actions and the temperament needed to avoid the unpleasant courses.
>>>> I reserve judgment, since the only evidence you seem to offer is your unwavering faith in Smith's extraordinary talents.
>> This is nonsense. I don't believe Smith was that talented. But the only explanation for producing a work of the magnitude of the Book of Mormon are divine inspiration and talent. So, presuming he had no divine inspiration, he must have had immense talent. Why would someone with that level of talent choose a life of poverty when he could have lived much more comfortably?
I think you're overestimating both the economic opportunities available to 19th century writers and the literary merits of the Book of Mormon. Mark Twain (a far more talented, yet hardly wealthy author) called it "chloroform in print." Sure, it's got some cool (if often implausible) battle scenes. But it also has boring, repetitive moralizing, a dozen chapters cribbed from Isaiah, and enough "and it came to passes" to choke a curelom. No wonder Smith had trouble selling the copyright.
His authorial talents were impressive, but let's not overstate them. His real talents were in his people skills. His ability to attract a following, to create loyalty in his followers, to know how to convince people. But none of those talents would have made him more than moderately successful unless you couple them to a message that purports to be greater than the man.
That's one of the reasons why your "most people hated him" argument falls flat for me. Smith was kind of like George Bush today, spending most of his time surrounded by loyalists and admirers. So what if most of the world hates you, so long as the people nearest you are telling you that you're wonderful and your enemies are evil, crazy, stupid, or all of the above? Sure, people left in anger, but Smith mostly interacted with those who stayed. That completely changes the cost/benefit calculations.
>>>> You make it sound as though Smith had some sort of crystal ball (or a stone in a hat, perhaps) which allowed him to foresee all the consequences of his actions.
>> Good grief, man. This isn't pscyhohistory and he's not Hari Seldon. I'm talking about really, really basic stuff. Like "If they tried to kill you for saying you saw an angel and translating gold plates, maybe another work of translation might not increase your safety or prosperity." It doesn't take clairvoyance to see that, it takes basic intelligence.
I take your "good grief" and return it in kind. People fail in their grandiose schemes all the time, and you generally discover that they're acting on their own best understanding of how to achieve them. To prove that an act is altruistic, you have to do more than prove that the actor failed to make a buck off it.
The things Smith did were divisive. Everything you can point to that drove away some of his members caused others to cling to him all the more tightly. Maybe Smith understood that fundamental of human nature: If you demand great sacrifice from another, they'll usually find a way to convince themselves that it was the best thing they could have done.* Or maybe he wasn't that calculating.
The point is, you're trying to paint as obviously self-destructive, so obviously
I never claimed that he "did it for the money". In fact, I went out of my way to avoid making that accusation. You made the overreaching claims, saying that his life was unmitigated suckage, which no sane person would have chosen. I merely pointed out a few inconvenient truths that undermined your claims. Many people would choose to be king for a day, rather than a peasant for a lifetime.
You're trying to force me into an untenable choice: that Smith was either a prophet of God or an emotionless, calculating mastermind, a homo economicus whose only goal was to maximize his own personal enrichment.
I doubt either is the case. Perhaps there were more peaceful paths to wealth that Smith could have taken. I reserve judgment, since the only evidence you seem to offer is your unwavering faith in Smith's extraordinary talents. If the paths were there, it doesn't follow that Smith saw them, much less that he had the inclination or the temperament to take them. He was charismatic, but also divisive and megalomaniacal. Perhaps a quiet, peaceful life just isn't in the cards for some people.
You make it sound as though Smith had some sort of crystal ball (or a stone in a hat, perhaps) which allowed him to foresee all the consequences of his actions. That's absurd, because it ignores the possibility that Smith was trying for wealth, and simply made some really gross miscalculations.
Much of the suffering in Smith's life could have been avoided had he renounced his propheteering. You might be surprised to know it, but I believe that Smith believed in his own spiritual mission, which was more important to him than any wealth he ever might have accumulated. But that's not to say that Smith would turn down power and prestige if it came to him. He certainly didn't in Nauvoo.
Oh, and let's not pretend that Kirtland was an impoverished wasteland either.
>> And there's no evidence - not one scrap - of sexual promiscuity.
Are you claiming that in the "he never had sex with anyone but Emma" sense, or the "he was sealed to every last woman before he had sex with them" sense? If the former, then your argument is with the historical record, not me. If the latter, then you have a highly selective -- and frankly creepy -- definition of fidelity.
Now, how *was* Lucy Harris going to alter those pages?
>>>> he enjoyed enormous personal gain when people believed him.
>> This is utter rubbish. Joseph Smith enjoyed nothing but deprivation and persecution as a result of his claims. He lived in poverty virtually his entire life. He may have enjoyed some brief measure of comfort in Nauvoo in the years before he was killed, but the fact is that if he wanted to make a bunch of cash it would have been trivial to do so, given his talents, without going through all the trouble of getting himself driven out of several states and eventually shot to death.
Joseph Smith's life included times of deprivation, suffering, abandonment, heartache, and loss. He also had, from time to time, the sort of power and adulation that most men would never dream to hope for. He was the mayor of Nauvoo, which was once a bigger city than Chicago. When he resided there, he lived in a mansion (at least by the standards of the time). He had tens of thousands of followers, and while some turned against him, many more remained loyal. He was "celestially married" to over thirty different women. As commander of the Nauvoo Legion, he was in charge of a bigger standing army than the rest of Illinois put together. He once ran for president. His name lives on nearly two centuries after his death.
Fame, money, power, wall-to-wall pussy. If that's deprivation, sign me up. You could argue that the bad outweighed the good, or that none of that proves that he was "just in it for the money." But you cannot say that Smith never benefited materially from the organization he founded. After all, how much of that would he have accomplished if he'd stuck to farming?
>>>> That makes no sense, because such a forgery would be impossible to accomplish.
>> Your counterargument doesn't work because it's begging the question. If Joseph Smith had complete freedom to make up any damn story he pleased, then Mrs. Harris's plot would be futile. He could simply create an entirely different story and ten be good to go.
Given how intelligently you've conducted yourself in the past, your level of confusion here is amazing. Of course, Joseph Smith didn't have "complete freedom to make up any damn story he pleased." He had to recreate what he'd done previously, with enough fidelity to convince everyone that he was translating from a physical record. A simple feat, if he really had the plates, but impossible if he didn't.
Now, if we presume that this act of translation (despite the supposed supernatural aid) was like a normal translation, then Smith wouldn't be able to recreate his previous work word-for-word. But there would at least be a sentence-to-sentence correlation, hitting all the same plot points, keeping all the actions of all the minor characters, and so on.
You could argue that even the minor changes would be enough to discredit it in the eyes of many. So what? The Church has been discredited by a lot of things in a lot of eyes, and the Church seems hardly the worse for it. So it seems unlikely to me that God would prohibit Smith from retranslating anything based on what folks might say. It certainly didn't keep Him from introducing polygamy, and we all know what people said about that.
So we get to Smith's actual claim: That Lucy Harris was going to alter the text of his first attempt in such a way that it would utterly discredit the Book of Mormon. I have but three questions:
1) What form would such a forgery have taken? In other words, what sort of textual changes would have accomplished the feat?
2) How would Lucy Harris have accomplished such a forgery? I doubt she was a Hoffmanesque forger, or a master of imitating her husband's handwriting. Plus it was written in pen, and Wikipedia says Wite-out wasn't invented until 1966.
3) Why would this, alone among the many controversies and disputes surrounding the early Church, have doomed Mormonism? Especially with Martin Harris having seen the first translation, and being able to vouch for the adulteration?
Smith's "being trapped" is predicated entirely on the notion that attempting a second translation of the plates would somehow discredit him. I just don't see how that would be possible without assuming amazing skills on Lucy Harris' part.
>>>> When Smith heard the news, he abandoned all work on the plates for two months. Then, "following the instruction of the Lord," he continued where he left off, translating to the end of the work. When he was finally done, he revealed that a new section of the plates told the first part of the story, but in a completely different way.
>> At least you have the story straight. That's a good recount.
At least we have an agreement on the chronology. But it seems very convenient to me that there just happened to be a second source, hitherto unknown to prophet and scribe alike, that filled in the gap left by the 116 pages, without requiring Smith to recreate his previous work. Oh, wait. Divine foresight. Now I get it.
To me, at least, the chronology absolutely screams out that that the Tanner's theory is correct: Lucy Harris destroyed the pages, Smith knew he would be outed as a fraud if he tried to recreate his work, and he spent months depressed before he came up with his "second set of plates" escape plan.
>>>> I'm sorry, but unless you're blinded by the notion that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God, it should be easy to see that Smith was just coming up with flimsy excuses for his own inability to recreate his work, despite having both a written record to work from and supernatural aid.
>> Well, as I've already pointed out, you
His claim was that Harris' wife didn't really destroy the pages, but was in fact keeping them hidden so that, when he retranslated that section, she could make alterations to it and thus "prove" that he couldn't reproduce it. Thus he would be proven a fraud, which the Lord Almighty didn't want him to do.
That makes no sense, because such a forgery would be impossible to accomplish. Think about the target she had to hit: take two translations of the same work (probably with a few changes of phrase and such, because translation isn't an exact science), and change one of them so that it appeared that the two were two retellings of the same complex story, by an imaginative guy who didn't have any notes to work from.
Now, two translations of the same work are going to have the same structure, the same plot, the same who-did-what-to-who. Two retellings of a complex story? You're going to forget plot points, swap names around, rearrange sentences. For Harris' wife to produce such a thing, in Martin Harris' handwriting (Harris was the original scribe for that portion) would be a supreme feat of forgery.
When Smith heard the news, he abandoned all work on the plates for two months. Then, "following the instruction of the Lord," he continued where he left off, translating to the end of the work. When he was finally done, he revealed that a new section of the plates told the first part of the story, but in a completely different way.
I'm sorry, but unless you're blinded by the notion that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God, it should be easy to see that Smith was just coming up with flimsy excuses for his own inability to recreate his work, despite having both a written record to work from and supernatural aid.
I've already got my laptop making hourly requests to a non-existent image on a website I control. So if it ever goes walking, I might get an IP address from that. As someone pointed out, I might want to create a guest account, so that the thief would be willing to use the laptop as-is.
But what other sensory information does my laptop have? One thought: Wifi. Even before it connects, it can give you the names of wireless networks nearby. If you could somehow upload that list to a server you control, there is a small chance you might be able to wardrive your way to victory. But command-line wifi utilities seem to be rare. Any ideas?
Also, you're overstating the problem. The vast majority of our infrastructure can handle temporary electrical interruptions. That which can't is already backed up by batteries or generators.
Geothermal: Unless you're willing to start waving some papers around, I'm happy to trust the MIT people rather than you. Also, geothermal heating and cooling systems *are* a form of geothermal energy, a form which works well just about anywhere, and could easily displace a huge slice of our current fossil fuel use. So why shouldn't it be part of the discussion when we're trying to figure out how much energy we'll need in the future?
That's what makes me particularly hopeful for non-nuclear alternative energy: given the huge resource inefficiencies yet to be wrung out of the current economy, I see no need for alternative energy to replace every kilowatt of our current consumption. As each kilowatt is used more efficiently, and you can run the economy on fewer and fewer of them, all sorts of options for energy generation open up.
Hell, I have a laptop that an eight year old can power with a hand crank. Draws about five watts. If everything starts sipping energy like that, the scope of the entire energy infrastructure (generation, backups, reservoirs, and failovers alike) is greatly reduced.
Concentrating solar is already down to about $0.09-$0.12/kWh, which isn't surprising since it uses reflectors instead of photovoltaics. As the size of the installation goes up, the cost per unit of energy goes down and the size of the heat reservoir goes up. That means, a really big installation could act as a massive battery, allowing it to continue delivering energy even when the sky goes dark for days at a time. Also remember that the energy generation is indirect: sun heats oil, which in turn heats water to drive a steam turbine. It would be perfectly reasonable to have an alternative method of heating the oil (natural gas, for example) if Mr. Burns temporarily disables the sun.
In short, your main objection (that people need a steady source of power) is irrelevant. Hospital life support won't fail, air conditioning won't give out, and cities won't resort to cannibalism because they've lost Internet access.
Your claim that geothermal only works in Iceland is bogus as well. Geothermal heating and cooling can work just about anywhere, even with tiny, single home installations. Electricity generation is more capital-intensive, but the expense is mostly a product of the depth to which you have to drill and pump to extract the heat. Thanks to frantic research by the oil industry, we're getting much better at that sort of thing. According to this recent study, a pitifully small amount of government-funded R&D could turn geothermal into a major supplier of power for the U.S. The report is over 300 pages long, but you only really need to read chapter 1.
Re: $10000/year. In this case, I was merely trying to point out the fallacy of the original poster's implication that reducing CO2 emissions could only be done by making our lives 80% suckier. But, yes, I am something of a collectivist. We've seen the failures of unmitigated corporate capitalism around the globe, from Iraq to Russia to South America, and people are frankly sick of it. Strong welfare states that represent the interests of the people they govern do far better at alleviating poverty and producing useful economic work than statist corporate regimes.
Read Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, and maybe you'll think differently about the benevolence of our corporate overlords, and perhaps consider the hidden costs of our almighty "standard of living."
The "unintended consequences" are as follows. The rich drive the economy. If we burden the rich with regulations that make it hard for them to rape the planet as they see fit, they'll stop blessing us with their efforts, and the economy will crumble and we'll have to resort to cannibalism.
Ayn Rand said it. I believe it. That settles it.
The right wing has been holding environmentalists at bay with threats of economic armageddon for decades now. I think their threats have always been hollow, but they make more sense once you take any proposal for significant wealth distribution off the table (which the right has somehow managed to do).
That option alone should have shut you up about "it only works when the sun shines and the wind blows." Also, you forgot geothermal energy, which is far more consistent a source than solar or wind, and (like the other renewable options) has the potential to eventually become major producers at "cheaper than coal" prices.
An 80% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2050 is a reasonable goal, without drastic cuts to our standard of living. I haven't heard anything out of your mouth to indicate otherwise; just a bunch of "No We Can't!" All the things you claim we will have to give up (other than airplanes) could be run off electricity from renewable sources. There is plenty of sun, plenty of wind, and the technology for harvesting it is getting rapidly cheaper. When it comes to computers specifically, my OLPC pulls about 5 watts, and is more than adequate for most tasks. So it seems likely that we could provide a lot of the value we derive from computers even in an energy-starved world.
An 80% reduction in CO2 emissions isn't the same as an 80% reduction in energy usage, and neither of the two necessarily equates to an 80% reduction in economic activity, and none of the preceding things requires an 80% reduction in our well-being. You could argue the last point, but hedonic studies seem to indicate that, beyond $10K/year of income, additional income does very little to make us happy. It just gets swamped by the things that money can't buy. So even if we have to reduce our consumption drastically, it may not make us feel noticeably worse off, if we go about it in the right way.
Have you considered, even for a brief moment, that Bush's policies have put about a hundred million times more CO2 into the atmosphere than Al Gore's house?
George Bush building a green house is about as laudable as Bill Gates giving a five spot to charity: the magnitude of the missed opportunity more than negates the action.
Huh? It "fakes" threading by using independent processes that communicate via the database. Somebody tell those UNIX posers that they're not fooling anybody.
It's like saying that a dog is faking being a cat, because it has fur.
I think he may have a point with #2. Rails could be generating much more sophisticated scaffolding. My ideal: you put more validation information in the migration, then auto-generate the model and views from that. You tell the DB that the information in this field will be no more than five characters long. It not only keeps that constraint in the database (which is good), but the model also protects the DB from seeing invalid information. The view can also be generated to reflect the information (the field is automatically five chars wide, and disables the submit button if the user overfills it). validates_format_of could even prevent a form field from accepting characters that make no sense in its context.
Hmmm... Maybe I do want Rails to write the app for me.
Maybe this isn't a great idea, but it's always been one of my pet peeves about rails: you have to duplicate validation information between models and their migrations. Want to change zip_code from a 5 character input to 10? Changing validates_length_of in the model isn't enough. Can't forget to write a new migration to rejigger the DB. So I mostly leave such limits out of the migrations, even though it would be nice to have the DB enforcing them. After all, multiple apps might interact with the DB.
Well, you did say that the employment picture in the US is better than any other industrialized nation, and I did manage to find a few counterexamples, even going strictly by percentage. But I do regret the use of the term "bollocks." It was unnecessary and inflammatory.
Your point B is bollocks. Japan has consistently had a lower unemployment rate than the U.S., as have the Netherlands and Denmark. EU-wide unemployment has been falling over the last ten years, so there are 4 million fewer unemployed in the EU than there were in 1996 [src].
Sure, their overall unemployment rate is around 7%-8% (compared to our 4%-5%). But you can't just compare our apples to their oranges. There are several ways of judging "the unemployment picture." One is to say, "if I'm unemployed here, how difficult is it for me to find a job?" Another is to say, "if I'm unemployed here, how bad does it suck?" In the U.S., with its stingier unemployment benefits and its employment-based healthcare system, it's far more risky to be unemployed. A third way is to ask, "If I'm unemployed, how difficult will it be to get a job with the wages and benefits that are important to me?" If you're hoping to land a job with 6 weeks vacation, you're better off looking in Germany. If you want a job that pays a living wage, you're probably also better off looking in Europe (depending on the sort of job you're looking for). If you want a job that gives you health insurance, best to look in America. In the EU, you probably already have it.
Also not everyone thinks Europe is the economic wasteland that you do.
This term seems to have been coined with people like yourself in mind.
Neither the selfish or the selfless system "credit contributions fairly." One is based on how much you can take within the current rules (including the ability to break contracts when you know your opponent will have difficulty enforcing it). The other is based on intuitions about the value of respective contributions that may not be realistic. At least when both parties are being selfless, some fuzziness is allowed, because neither party needs the scales to balance perfectly.
You seem to think that the goal of any effort should be to maximize its efficiency at delivering economically measurable outcomes. Sorry, but the outcomes most people value aren't the ones that plug easily into economic formulas. By your logic, having dinner at McDonalds is "efficient", because it's chock full of market-forces goodness, while having dinner over at my parents' is wasteful. There is no price tag on it, so how do I know how much elder care they've banked for their final years? Since they charged me nothing for it, how do they know they'll be repaid for their efforts?
This elaborate network of unspoken favors and obligations, guided by raw emotions, is really the currency of mankind. We've been using it since before we dropped from the trees. Monetary systems, with their continuously compounding interests and their structured investment vehicles, they're babes in the woods by comparison. As recent headlines indicate, they're blunt, inelegant tools that we don't understand as well as we thought.
A system of selfishness doesn't require people to "be productive" in order to gain. It's usually far easier to just exploit loopholes in the system to steal from the value that already exists.
Don't think that the "credit" that accrues to the "politically apt" is mere funny money with no real value. In fact, it probably contributes far more to most peoples' sense of happiness than the currency you favor. How many people who work for epic jerks today would take a 20% pay cut to be under the charge of someone who showed them more respect, someone who valued their work and expressed appreciation for their ideas? Or at least someone who wouldn't sell them up the river for a 1.3% additional return on investment? I think people would be happy to trade a little efficiency for more "political adeptness" (that goes double when you consider that most of the fruits of all this newfound efficiency has gone straight into the pockets of a tiny elite, but I digress).
The way you describe the pitfalls of "sensitivity", it seems to me that you have some real difficulties with what they call "emotional intelligence". Me too. People are often frustrating and confusing to me. But rather than recognize that there may be a useful skill that you're deficient in, you've adopted a worldview where your weakness is twisted into a perceived strength, and the skill you lack is a moral impediment that causes lesser people to corrupt ideal systems with their well-intended incompetence. Maybe a thousand generations hence, your kind will have driven wasteful, socially mediated transactions from the species. No, really, it could happen. But you may want to put yourself into cryofreeze until then, because I don't think that being on the bleeding edge of this trend is going to work to your advantage today.
It requires entertaining the notion that the U.S. isn't #1 at everything. That's a really high hurdle for some people.
I've had some success working for non-profits. Depending on their needs and the skills of their staff, there might be a big hole in the organization for you to fill.
The danger is that, if you're the most tech-savvy person around, you have nobody to learn from. Nobody is there to show you a better way, and it's very easy to get comfortable, and never expand your horizons. A non-profit might be a great place to build small and simple (yet incredibly useful) apps, but without discipline and study, you'll probably plateau.
Try internationalizing an app, just for fun. Write one in a new language, then port it back to the language you expect it will be maintained in. Build a test harness for an app. Integrate one with a database. Watch the staff as they use you app, and see how they're using (and misusing) it, to get an idea of what constitutes an intuitive interface. Learn to talk about technology with people from different backgrounds and different levels of experience. Study their entire workflow, and try to figure out which parts could be done more efficiently.
Non-profits are often a lot like any small business where IT isn't a core competency. If you can build a tiny web app that will allow them to do something in ten seconds that once took them three minutes, you will be hailed as a god.
I just did the calculations, and it looks like, even with a relatively cheap electric rate (.07/kWH), you would be paying over 2.5 times as much for electric heat as you would for natural gas heat.
A kWH of electricity represents about 3800 BTUs of electricity, so it would take 263 kWH to offset 1 decatherm of heating energy (which my natural gas company charges about $7 for).
Another correction: heat energy isn't 100% efficient. It's more like 30%, if you compare the heat embodied in a chunk of coal to the amount of heat put off by the light bulb. Natural gas distribution is far more efficient than that, but I can't give an exact number.
Then remember that the light bulbs are on the ceiling, where the heat is doing almost no good whatsoever. So even if electric heat is a given, it's better to use an actual electric heater with a fan.
Typing with your brain would be awesome. Being all carpal-tunneled like I am, I'd be happy to devote months to brain-typing. Way more time than I spent learning Dvorak.
I think you're wrong about the hat thing, though. Back when they introduced the Walkman, a lot of people assumed it would be a flop because who the hell would want to wear earphones that make you look like a robot space alien? And let's not get started on people with the hands-free cell phones. You look ridiculous. Trust me on this. But the point is, if the technology is sufficiently useful, fashion sensibility will adapt.
I think a resurgence of bald is a more likely outcome.
Have you noticed that nobody with an ID over 500000 can detect sarcasm? I wonder why that is?
We should get a physicist to look into it.
I guess it would be impossible to just let the late person go in the next boarding phase. It would also be absurd to use the system, but allow parents to board with their young children. After all, the solution is being proposed by a physicist, and we all know that the stuff they come up with never pans out in the real world.
Stick to your Big Bangs and your quantum tunneling, Einsteins, and leave airport management to the people who brought us shoe-fetish security theater.