I think there are pretty strict limits to how much flexibility or critical thinking you can put into a brain solely through education. But that notwithstanding, I think that people who talk about "learning how to learn" really overlook the fact that the prerequisite for education is more education.
You can't ask someone to think critically about evolution if they don't have an understanding of genetics. Without an understanding of the underlying facts and theories, all the best arguments for evolution are indistinguishable from rambling gobbledygook. Without an understanding of atomic structures, you can't grasp the isotopic evidence for the age of the universe. Without understanding basic chemistry and reaction rates, it's hard to give much thought to enzymes.
Okay, take another example: I've been building a Ruby on Rails app for the last few months. I bought the Official Books of the Kool-Aid Drinkers, started reading it, and it didn't make a whole lot of sense. But every new thing I learned made the book easier to read. I can read the book at about three times the speed I could when I started, because experience has driven the concepts home. I'm not understanding it better because I've honed my reasoning skills, or learned to more actively engage the book. I'm understanding because I have a framework of facts for new concepts to hang off of.
While I don't object to teaching critical thinking skills, active reading, and effective study habits, focusing too heavily on them--especially to the exclusion of the facts a student needs to understand in order to reason about a subject--ends up short-changing the learner.
Completely ignoring the thread up to this point, let me respond on general principles.
In the ideal world of logic and reason, it is absolutely wrong to determine the truth or falsity of an assertion solely by traits of the person making the assertion. Er, unless the trait happens to be "this person is incapable of making a true statement." But never mind that.
Outside the rather rarified fields of boolean logic and mathematics, we don't have the sort of certainty necessary to construct ironclad logical proofs about most of the things we have to think about. Further, there are too many people making too many claims to actually give everyone a thorough, impartial hearing. So, whether it's fair or not, credibility matters, and arguments against a person's credibility weigh heavily in modern debates.
So the question becomes, "what constitutes a useful criticism of a source's credibility?" People use several approaches. The source is biased. The source is unqualified. The source stands to benefit if we believe it. The source is contradicting itself. The source is unpatriotic. The source was found in a hotel room with an underage girl. The source wants you and everyone around you dead. The source isn't telling you what you already know is true. The source is [fill in the blank]... and therefore wrong.
It's that last part which makes for the logical fallacy, and the grandparent didn't take that final step. He simply pointed out that the source was biased. It's up to us to decide how heavily to weigh that fact as we assess the source's credibility.
Acid rain is caused by sulfur emissions. The EPA did a great job of reducing sulfur emissions in the 1990s.
According to Tim Harford, in "The Undercover Economist" (a really great read), the EPA took advantage of the free market to do it. The industries were claiming that it would cost about $1500 to scrub a ton of sulfur emissions from the atmosphere. So the EPA set up an auction of sulfur blocks, allowing polluters to buy the right to pollute.
The auction determined that the cost of cleaning up sulfur emissions was about $70/ton, because nobody was willing to pay more than that for the right to keep pumping out sulfur.
Score one for the free market and government regulation. I'd like to see the government use more techniques like that.
WTF? I'm not getting sent out to die dude and this *ISN'T* the military and NO i'm not going to die.
I know that, I know you know that, you know I know that, and you know I know you know that. So please, drop your absurd overextension of the analogy and look at the point I'm actually making: the attitude you're glorifying isn't a healthy one, and you're not doing up-and-coming comp-sci majors any favors by spreading it around.
It's one thing to tell the kids that they need to work hard to master their craft, because they do. But I think it's a wholly different thing to tell them to "drink the kool-aid", to believe that smiling your way through absurd hours, death march projects, stupid management tricks, etc. is a sign of commitment or the hallmark of a good coder.
Maybe you believe it all. But it's still precisely what management wants us to believe. They would be overjoyed if we all believed and accepted that our salaries included an expectation of unpaid overtime. They would be thrilled if they didn't have to invest anything in training their workforce, because they've all been conditioned to pick up new skills on their own.
Either you really are the IBM H.R. troll I suggested, or you're in a supremely fortunate position. If you're not working on deathmarch projects (not just projects with ambitious deadlines), if your management has a grasp of what is possible and what isn't, if you usually average about forty hours a week while feeling free to reject unreasonable requests for overtime, and if your sole reward for chewing through a huge pile of work isn't just another huge pile of work, then I think eight out of ten geeks would trade you jobs in a heartbeat. Number nine would have to think about it for fifteen seconds.
You've had the chance to say your piece to the codelets who follow after. Here's mine:
Your employer has no right to ask for unpaid overtime.
Whatever the salary, your employer has no right to ask you not to have a life outside your work.
If your employer is asking you to learn new skills, you should be able to expect their support in learning those skills. If they're not willing to fork over a couple grand to send you to a seminar or bring in a consultant, they should at least be buying you some books and giving you some time away from other projects. Any less than that? See point 1.
If a project is doomed to fail, and your manager doesn't have the spine to say so, demand a competent manager. Your life is too short and your time is too valuable to burn yourself out trying to achieve the impossible.
That bit you read earlier, about the "fuck you money?" He's weird for sniffing money like that, but otherwise it's basically correct. But it shouldn't be a wad of hundreds in your pocket, but six months to a year of living expenses sitting in the bank. That is your ultimate defense against an intolerable employment situation: The ability to walk away and never look back.
It's possible to love coding without loving the business crap. Some business crap will always exist, and even a dream job will involve some level of pain and boredom. But if you're not spending a solid 70% of your time doing something you greatly enjoy, it's time to jump ship.
Adopt a zen attitude towards your material possessions. Learn to live cheaply and save a large fraction of your salary, whatever your salary. Otherwise, in accordance with point 5, you'll have no defense when your company decides to turn evil on you.
Don't be afraid to say "no" to unreasonable demands. Don't be afraid to walk away from unreasonable employers.
This message prepared by the Vice President of IBM's Human Resources Department.
Really, this sounds like the sort of spiel my drill sergeants were always giving me, about how kickass the Army was. I remember standing around at parade rest while one of them reeled off all the sucky things he'd had to do that day. "It doesn't matter, privates! Y'know why?"
"I'm gettin' paid!"
Maybe he believed his own speeches, or maybe he was trying to convince himself. But the whole point of these long, highly entertaining speeches was to appeal to our sense of macho. Convince the recruits that they're so tough, so hard core, that they can take anything, and that it was leading them to bright and lucrative careers in the Army. Make them proud of themselves, feed their egos, and get them thinking they're nine feet tall and bulletproof.
Then send them out to die.
You seem to want to mock everyone who wants to have luxuries like hobbies, relationships outside work, and a sub-eighty hour workweek. Or at least question their love of their chosen profession. There's a huge difference between choosing a career you love and choosing never ever to do anything else.
How do you find the time it takes to maintain a healthy relationship with your wife? Eh, maybe you're just really good in the sack.
GLOBAL corporate profits are set to continue to boom this year... led again by Wall Street where the past few weeks have seen companies putting investors on notice that earnings are going to be better, not worse, than expected.
US corporate profits boomed again in 2005, rising 14.6%...
If the government is to blame for anything here, it's for sitting on their asses and watching inflation eat the minimum wage into irrelevance.
Conserving energy and reducing our need for resources will not "strangle our economies." Quite the contrary, it will prepare us for a much richer and cleaner life down the road. Stripping the environment of its long-term health all in the name of God, Oil, and Suburban Tract Housing isn't making life any better for us, much less for those who will have to clean up the mess we've left behind.
We don't want to halt industrial progress. We want to guarantee the future happiness of mankind. That requires that we learn to do more with less, and preserve large amounts of land in its natural state. But despite your mealy-mouthed niceties about "being good stewards", we simply haven't been. We've burned through environmental capital like a dot-com with VC funding and nerf guns.
Oh, and your whole spiel about how we can't know the environmental devastation we might wreak by reducing our CO2 emissions is just hot air.
I didn't say the scientest was frustrated. I said that the purpose of the position which he holds has been frustrated. Slightly different meaning of the word.
If a scientist can be fired for disclosing politically controversial results, or can be forbidden from studying subjects based on any criteria other than the scientific importance of that research, then it's wrong. To engage in science, a scientist absolutely requires the ability to follow wherever the research leads.
You're acting like I want scientists to be totally unaccountable to their employers. I'm not. What I am saying is that they need the freedom to do science, without worrying about politically touchy results capsizing their careers.
The government isn't in the same position as a private employer. An employee of a company is supposed to serve the interests of the company that employs him. A government employee is supposed to serve the people, and if that employee isn't able to do that because of pressures from his immediate employer, then we need to put safeguards in place to mitigate that pressure.
If you can be fired from your fry cook job at any moment, for any reason, and serve entirely at the will of your boss, the implications for your company are minimal.
If the president could fire a Supreme Court justice at any moment, or the chair of the Federal Reserve, or (insert any political appointee who is protected from firing), then the implications for the country are tremendous and dangerous.
There are positions in the government that cannot function unless those holding the positions are protected from undue political influence. If a scientest cannot study important subjects, or cannot publicize the results of those subjects, out of fear of termination, then their entire purpose is frustrated.
If you can't comprehend the need for these protections, then you're confirming all my worst anti-Republican sentiments.
I don't know why they're blathering about the holy grail of realism. Everyone's already said that more realistic graphics don't automatically mean a better game. In some ways, more realistic graphics don't even mean better graphics. Example: I remember seeing a new XBox commercial featuring a basketball game. They were yammering on and on about how "you can see the sweat! My GOD! Did you see how realistically the sweat is streaming down his face? You must go buy this title right now!"
Ummm, yeah. Frankly, it looked gross, like the guy was leaking out his forehead. Maybe even more realism was required to make the effect convincing, but even if they had nailed it, it doesn't really add much to the game.
Regarding the "blending in" point, I think the traditional implementation on an eight bit system was to make every other pixel transparent. And we liked it, dammit!
Don't forget "and be able to buy music once their education nets them some much-needed cash."
You're missing the point of these settlements. The goal isn't to extract the maximum amount of money possible from infringers. It's a shock and awe campaign designed to be as maximally disruptive to defendants as possible, to serve as a warning to any who dare infringe on their beloved copyrights. If the goal was simply to get the money, they wouldn't have a problem with allowing much longer repayment programs.
You're trying to think of the RIAA and its members as a somber, rational actor trying to make money. I'm starting to think of them more as an angry, terrified, caged animal. The behavior I see from them most closely approximates the latter model. Deep in their heart of hearts, they know the end is nigh, and they're going to fight with fang and claw to hold on to their "rightful" revenue streams.
Ok, sounds good. Be nice to animals because she's a veggie.
Wow, I'm glad you two are getting along so well.
Except if they're not cute and cuddly.
Yeah, the Shark Anti-Defamation League will be ripping her head off.
Calling your accuser a moron does much to further your image as someone who is innocent.
Writing a sarcastic point-by-point rebuttal doesn't do much to further your image as a person with a life. Oh, wait.
So you're admitting you're a pirate. Acceptance is the first step.
So you admit you're an asshat who gets some sort of cheap thrill out of watching a young woman forced out of college for downloading music. I doubt there are any steps you can take toward recovery.
Almost only counts in hand grenades and horseshoes.
And in Slashdot posting, where you almost made some point beyond "the rules are the rules because they are the rules so obey the rules because breaking the rules is bad, mmmkay?"
Your life and circumstances are irrelevant to the situation. You chose to make a decision about whether to pay for a product or service. You chose not to pay. The RIAAs business sense tells them that to allow people to not pay for the product would mean they and the music industry would not survive. Self preservation and all that.
You are a person without sympathy. You are a drone. You have elevated a set of stupid, arbitrary, outdated, harmful laws designed to protect the profits of an increasingly irrelevant industry above both reason and compassion.
Which is exactly what is taking place.
If the punishment for speeding was having both arms cut off, you'd be the one wielding the chainsaw.
No one said the penalty would be pleasant.
Or sane, or just, or right, or anything other than a transfer of wealth from struggling college students to pampered execs who can afford the best legislation money can buy.
Which goes back to my opening remarks about your lack of resolve about being a vegetarian and being kind to all animals.
She's whining because she got caught and contradicts herself about being cruel to animals. Guess what girlie, you're boned. Suck it up and deal with it. Maybe you'll learn something about taking something which isn't yours and being nice to all animals.
Smooth Wombat: Fearlessly standing up for the rich and the powerful since uid 796938. His courage is an inspiration to us all.
I'm not sure this is the best idea. Pre-loading *anything* adds to the cost of building the system. Plus, if you pre-load something, your customers will often have the gall to expect it to work properly, support all the hardware. They may also expect support for software issues. All these things drive up costs for people who would be happy to take the burdens of installing and tweaking on themselves.
So, as a "businessman and entrepreneur," you believe that a person's only recourse, in the face of egregious and even immoral business practices, is "If you don't like their policies, don't buy their products?"
Isn't that a little like someone in the 1850's saying, "If you don't like Southern slavery, don't buy cotton?"
There are--and should be--limits to the sort of contracts two people can enter into, and I would never, ever enter into business dealings with somebody who believed that the gold standard of business ethics is, "If I can get them to sign something, it's fair game."
If you find it hard to keep yourself motivated on a project, one solution is to pair up with someone who shares your interest in the project. Admittedly, it's not always easy to find someone with similar interests and complementary skills. But if you do, having another person to bat around ideas with can be a wonderful experience.
All the enviro-weenies I know are just ecstatic over hybrids and wind farms, and many are even grudgingly supportive of nuclear power.
It shouldn't even need to be said that environmentalists are not a monolithic group. But in your case, it seems an exception needs to be made. Environmentalists come in all shapes and sizes, with all sorts of preferences and agendas, with all sorts of views on modern life. It makes as much sense to say what you did as it makes for me to claim that, because you have articulated a right-wing position, you must have everything in common with those nutjobs in Alabama who were chaining themselves to the Ten Commandments to keep them from being removed.
I'm not in favor of destroying "industrial society." That would require the deaths of billions of people, because it is industrial society that sustains us. I am, however, in favor of slimming it down somewhat. We need to be using fewer resources, and using them in a more efficient and more egalitarian way. So long as we put the pursuit of our own material wealth ahead of everything else, we'll continue lurching from environmental crisis to environmental crisis, destroying any remaining wilderness and slaughtering inconvenient wildlife as we go along. I don't believe we're wise enough or humble enough to hold ourselves back.
My ideal world of vegetarian diets, walkable communities, locally grown organic food, and kickass mass transit systems may not be a world you would enjoy living in. But if you have two honest brain cells to rub together, you can't compare that to calling for the elimination of industrial society.
Yeah, nothing more libertarian and small-government than enormous subsidies to the nuclear power industry.
The spent fuel is a real problem. Yucca Mountain isn't big enough (and may not be safe enough) for our needs. And while there may be enough easily extractable uranium for our current level of use, a sudden spike in consumption could use it up quickly. Breeder reactors could greatly extend the supply, but at the cost of potential nuclear proliferation (I don't see the occasional nuking of downtown Manhattan as an acceptable cost of a nuclear energy policy).
I'm not beyond being convinced that nuclear power should be a big component of our energy production. But I think the boosters are still too glib about the downsides. Plus, your willingness to ignore these issues even as you decry all environmentalists as obstructionists makes me doubt your seriousness.
I think a lot of people could seriously improve their gas mileage. I've always gotten about six or seven mpg better than the rest of my family, even driving the same car.
* Have a stick-shift? Spend more time in higher gears. (When going downhill, I often throw it into neutral) * Driving 55 instead of 75 will save you enormously. Driving 75 cuts many cars' fuel economy by a quarter. Remember kids, air drag goes up with the square of your speed. * When coming to a red light, start slowing down well before you need to stop. If the light turns green, you may still be going 20MPH, which is far better than starting from a complete stop. The more accelerating and decelerating you do, the worse your mileage gets. * Get yourself one of those 150MPG carburetors that the oil industry has been keeping under wraps. For $25, I'll send you the plans!
Really. I'm asking. Of what use is this little half-remembered statistic of yours?
Does it show that we could easily add a hundred billion more people to the planet? No.
Does it say anything about the number of people the Earth can actually sustain? No.
Does it prove anything even remotely relevant to this discussion? No.
All it proves is that you can fit x humans in a y by z box. It doesn't say how to get the food, water, energy, and medical care needed to keep our six billion New Mexicans alive. It doesn't say how much farmland it will take to sustain them. It doesn't say how much environmental damage will be done by all the processes needed to provide what they need, or how long that environmental degradation is sustainable.
The number of people the Earth can sustain has jack all to do with the number of people who can physically fit on its surface.
A tax on fuel is actually an exceptional idea. It's better than mandating fuel efficiency standards. It's better than taxing SUVs. It's better than subsidies for hybrids, or subsidies for mass transit. If the goal is to reduce the CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere, then a tax on fuel is the way to go. Let the market decide the best way to reduce the need for fuel.
But what about the poor? What about them? It's funny how Republicans trot out "think of the poor" at the oddest times. I was doing some research on minimum wage laws a while back, and came across a study (funded by the hotel and restaurant industries) that worried that raising the minimum wage might disqualify some of the working poor from receiving means-tested government benefits. Oh, and then there's "think of the birdies," which only gets used when they're trying to prevent wind farms. When Republicans start talking about how something will be "bad for the poor," I find myself looking at the idea more favorably.
Two points: First, a fuel tax doesn't need to burden the poor. It's not hard to look at everyone's income tax forms, decide how much fuel a family like that ought to be using, and then cut them checks to make up the shortfall. A check, mind you. Not credits to be used at your local gas station. If you send credits, then you've simply undone the incentives for fuel economy for lots of people. But if you send them money, they can decide whether to spend it on buying fuel, or cut back on their fuel consumption so they can buy something else.
Second: Who is going to get hit hardest by the effects of climate change? If Katrina is any indication, it will be the poor. The poor get hit hardest by floods, because they have the most difficult time leaving. The poor get hit hardest by famine, because they have the most difficult time finding food. The poor get hit hardest by plagues, because they have the hardest time affording medical treatment. You name any ill consequence of global warming, and it's the poor who will feel the worst effects of it. The rich will be fine so long as they can use their Hummers to drive over the piles of bodies that block their escape.
You're right. People aren't willing to change their lifestyles until it's clear to them that those lifestyles are unsustainable. Which is why a fuel tax is a good idea: It makes sure that consumers' decisions factor in the expected ill effects of their purchases. Markets cannot make ideal decisions while externalities exist.
No, historically the biggest threats to life on Earth have been sudden marine O2 depletion, big, honkin' asteroids, volcanoes, and humanity. Wikipedia will guide the way.
Living space isn't really a problem for humanity. You know the old statistic that says if we were all shoved together so that we had the population density of Manhattan, we could easily fit the entire population of the world into New York State. There has never been a global shortage of elbow room, and there never will be.
Instead, the limiting factors are our ability to produce food, water, and energy for ourselves. Global warming will greatly speed the rate of desertification, destroying valuable farmland. The unfreezing of tundra isn't going to counter this, because it's not going to unfreeze into agriculturally valuable land. It will most likely take centuries to become valuable, and by then we'll all have starved to death anyways.
We don't have the resources to provide everyone currently living on the Earth with a decent life. Throwing another several billion into the mix is like saying, "I'm driving at 90 miles an hour, and feeling pretty safe. So I guess I'm okay to speed up to 180."
According to the site, climatologists estimate that the sun is responsible for up to 1/3 of the temperature increase we've seen over the last hundred years.
If anything, this is evidence that we should be more concerned about our effects on the environment. The climate is in for some serious adjustments in an evolutionary instant, and the last thing we should be doing is throwing more fuel on the fire.
"I don't think you want to start getting into a free-will debate with me here, however. I think I'm generally fairly well-informed on most scientific, theological, and philosophical issues, but free-will is my hobby-horse."
That is, by far, the most insulting thing you possibly could have said.
Think about it. I wouldn't want to get into a debate with you because you have some deep insight into the subject? Seriously, do I sound that dogmatic?
I'm a big fan of Dennett, and I've seen a handful of attempted rebuttals. I found them somewhat lacking, but I'm willing to listen. The last book of his I read was "Freedom Evolves," if that helps.
Then again, your handle sounds strangely familiar, you have more than a touch of intellectual arrogance, and you're ridiculously prolific. There's a chance you're one of those alt.religion.mormon types who think that scoring points in a debate shows you have the bigger penis... well, I tired of that particular game long ago.
Yes, I understand that there may be "something more" than physical matter, and that making a blanket statement saying "nothing more" requires going beyond what I can absolutely say for certain. But the possibility doesn't keep me up nights. I don't see the necessity for it. I don't see the evidence for it. I only see the emotional appeal of that something else, that would keep people believing it against reason. You can argue that I've embraced the physicality of mental states as a key component of my rejection of God. That's fine. We both have not-entirely-logical reasons for believing as we do.
As for why we find sunsets beautiful... it's an interesting question. But is it important? I'm not sure. The feeling feels very important to us monkey-apes, but does what does the feeling prove about us, or about the world at large? I think it's rather self-centered to believe that an explanation for the universe is inadequate until it explains our emotions in a way that we find satisfying. I could personally write my perception of beauty off as a mere evolutionary artifact, without diminishing the feeling itself.
The way I see it, humans were built from the ground up to consider themselves special, to take especial interest in their own feelings and interests. The march of science has simply been one mind-expanding blow to our self-centeredness after another.
Still, you implied that there were so many that it would be impossible to sort through them all without some sort of organizational scheme. Now you look like you're backing down from your claim.
I've come up with one example: Adam and Eve. Look where it got them.
Love is an emotion. Emotions are brain states. We have the capabilities to study brain states in excellent depth. We also have evolutionary models that seem to do an excellent job of predicting why we have the emotions we do. Love, jealousy, regret, shame, and anger are all logical consequences of our existence as social animals.
So, in what sense is "love" not a quantifiable phenomenon? Is it because no scientific study can fully convey the feeling of being with your lover? So what? Dry scientific prose can't convey the beauty of a sunset, but it can still say in fine detail why the clouds happen to be that particular color this evening.
Everything that goes on in our brains is the result of interactions in the brain matter. Those who say otherwise are expressing a false and misguided hope that somehow they are "something more", because they believe that an attachment to causality turns them into "mindless robots." Still, interactions within matter are open to scientific study. Love is therefore quantifiable, in a way that God is decidedly not.
Slashdot Mirror
I think there are pretty strict limits to how much flexibility or critical thinking you can put into a brain solely through education. But that notwithstanding, I think that people who talk about "learning how to learn" really overlook the fact that the prerequisite for education is more education.
You can't ask someone to think critically about evolution if they don't have an understanding of genetics. Without an understanding of the underlying facts and theories, all the best arguments for evolution are indistinguishable from rambling gobbledygook. Without an understanding of atomic structures, you can't grasp the isotopic evidence for the age of the universe. Without understanding basic chemistry and reaction rates, it's hard to give much thought to enzymes.
Okay, take another example: I've been building a Ruby on Rails app for the last few months. I bought the Official Books of the Kool-Aid Drinkers, started reading it, and it didn't make a whole lot of sense. But every new thing I learned made the book easier to read. I can read the book at about three times the speed I could when I started, because experience has driven the concepts home. I'm not understanding it better because I've honed my reasoning skills, or learned to more actively engage the book. I'm understanding because I have a framework of facts for new concepts to hang off of.
While I don't object to teaching critical thinking skills, active reading, and effective study habits, focusing too heavily on them--especially to the exclusion of the facts a student needs to understand in order to reason about a subject--ends up short-changing the learner.
Completely ignoring the thread up to this point, let me respond on general principles.
In the ideal world of logic and reason, it is absolutely wrong to determine the truth or falsity of an assertion solely by traits of the person making the assertion. Er, unless the trait happens to be "this person is incapable of making a true statement." But never mind that.
Outside the rather rarified fields of boolean logic and mathematics, we don't have the sort of certainty necessary to construct ironclad logical proofs about most of the things we have to think about. Further, there are too many people making too many claims to actually give everyone a thorough, impartial hearing. So, whether it's fair or not, credibility matters, and arguments against a person's credibility weigh heavily in modern debates.
So the question becomes, "what constitutes a useful criticism of a source's credibility?" People use several approaches. The source is biased. The source is unqualified. The source stands to benefit if we believe it. The source is contradicting itself. The source is unpatriotic. The source was found in a hotel room with an underage girl. The source wants you and everyone around you dead. The source isn't telling you what you already know is true. The source is [fill in the blank]... and therefore wrong.
It's that last part which makes for the logical fallacy, and the grandparent didn't take that final step. He simply pointed out that the source was biased. It's up to us to decide how heavily to weigh that fact as we assess the source's credibility.
Acid rain is caused by sulfur emissions. The EPA did a great job of reducing sulfur emissions in the 1990s.
According to Tim Harford, in "The Undercover Economist" (a really great read), the EPA took advantage of the free market to do it. The industries were claiming that it would cost about $1500 to scrub a ton of sulfur emissions from the atmosphere. So the EPA set up an auction of sulfur blocks, allowing polluters to buy the right to pollute.
The auction determined that the cost of cleaning up sulfur emissions was about $70/ton, because nobody was willing to pay more than that for the right to keep pumping out sulfur.
Score one for the free market and government regulation. I'd like to see the government use more techniques like that.
It's one thing to tell the kids that they need to work hard to master their craft, because they do. But I think it's a wholly different thing to tell them to "drink the kool-aid", to believe that smiling your way through absurd hours, death march projects, stupid management tricks, etc. is a sign of commitment or the hallmark of a good coder.
Maybe you believe it all. But it's still precisely what management wants us to believe. They would be overjoyed if we all believed and accepted that our salaries included an expectation of unpaid overtime. They would be thrilled if they didn't have to invest anything in training their workforce, because they've all been conditioned to pick up new skills on their own.
Either you really are the IBM H.R. troll I suggested, or you're in a supremely fortunate position. If you're not working on deathmarch projects (not just projects with ambitious deadlines), if your management has a grasp of what is possible and what isn't, if you usually average about forty hours a week while feeling free to reject unreasonable requests for overtime, and if your sole reward for chewing through a huge pile of work isn't just another huge pile of work, then I think eight out of ten geeks would trade you jobs in a heartbeat. Number nine would have to think about it for fifteen seconds.
You've had the chance to say your piece to the codelets who follow after. Here's mine:
This message prepared by the Vice President of IBM's Human Resources Department.
Really, this sounds like the sort of spiel my drill sergeants were always giving me, about how kickass the Army was. I remember standing around at parade rest while one of them reeled off all the sucky things he'd had to do that day. "It doesn't matter, privates! Y'know why?"
"I'm gettin' paid!"
Maybe he believed his own speeches, or maybe he was trying to convince himself. But the whole point of these long, highly entertaining speeches was to appeal to our sense of macho. Convince the recruits that they're so tough, so hard core, that they can take anything, and that it was leading them to bright and lucrative careers in the Army. Make them proud of themselves, feed their egos, and get them thinking they're nine feet tall and bulletproof.
Then send them out to die.
You seem to want to mock everyone who wants to have luxuries like hobbies, relationships outside work, and a sub-eighty hour workweek. Or at least question their love of their chosen profession. There's a huge difference between choosing a career you love and choosing never ever to do anything else.
How do you find the time it takes to maintain a healthy relationship with your wife? Eh, maybe you're just really good in the sack.
If the government is to blame for anything here, it's for sitting on their asses and watching inflation eat the minimum wage into irrelevance.
Conserving energy and reducing our need for resources will not "strangle our economies." Quite the contrary, it will prepare us for a much richer and cleaner life down the road. Stripping the environment of its long-term health all in the name of God, Oil, and Suburban Tract Housing isn't making life any better for us, much less for those who will have to clean up the mess we've left behind.
We don't want to halt industrial progress. We want to guarantee the future happiness of mankind. That requires that we learn to do more with less, and preserve large amounts of land in its natural state. But despite your mealy-mouthed niceties about "being good stewards", we simply haven't been. We've burned through environmental capital like a dot-com with VC funding and nerf guns.
Oh, and your whole spiel about how we can't know the environmental devastation we might wreak by reducing our CO2 emissions is just hot air.
I didn't say the scientest was frustrated. I said that the purpose of the position which he holds has been frustrated. Slightly different meaning of the word.
If a scientist can be fired for disclosing politically controversial results, or can be forbidden from studying subjects based on any criteria other than the scientific importance of that research, then it's wrong. To engage in science, a scientist absolutely requires the ability to follow wherever the research leads.
You're acting like I want scientists to be totally unaccountable to their employers. I'm not. What I am saying is that they need the freedom to do science, without worrying about politically touchy results capsizing their careers.
The government isn't in the same position as a private employer. An employee of a company is supposed to serve the interests of the company that employs him. A government employee is supposed to serve the people, and if that employee isn't able to do that because of pressures from his immediate employer, then we need to put safeguards in place to mitigate that pressure.
You fail to see the difference?
If you can be fired from your fry cook job at any moment, for any reason, and serve entirely at the will of your boss, the implications for your company are minimal.
If the president could fire a Supreme Court justice at any moment, or the chair of the Federal Reserve, or (insert any political appointee who is protected from firing), then the implications for the country are tremendous and dangerous.
There are positions in the government that cannot function unless those holding the positions are protected from undue political influence. If a scientest cannot study important subjects, or cannot publicize the results of those subjects, out of fear of termination, then their entire purpose is frustrated.
If you can't comprehend the need for these protections, then you're confirming all my worst anti-Republican sentiments.
s/subjective/tentative/
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
To interject two thingies:
I don't know why they're blathering about the holy grail of realism. Everyone's already said that more realistic graphics don't automatically mean a better game. In some ways, more realistic graphics don't even mean better graphics. Example: I remember seeing a new XBox commercial featuring a basketball game. They were yammering on and on about how "you can see the sweat! My GOD! Did you see how realistically the sweat is streaming down his face? You must go buy this title right now!"
Ummm, yeah. Frankly, it looked gross, like the guy was leaking out his forehead. Maybe even more realism was required to make the effect convincing, but even if they had nailed it, it doesn't really add much to the game.
Regarding the "blending in" point, I think the traditional implementation on an eight bit system was to make every other pixel transparent. And we liked it, dammit!
Don't forget "and be able to buy music once their education nets them some much-needed cash."
You're missing the point of these settlements. The goal isn't to extract the maximum amount of money possible from infringers. It's a shock and awe campaign designed to be as maximally disruptive to defendants as possible, to serve as a warning to any who dare infringe on their beloved copyrights. If the goal was simply to get the money, they wouldn't have a problem with allowing much longer repayment programs.
You're trying to think of the RIAA and its members as a somber, rational actor trying to make money. I'm starting to think of them more as an angry, terrified, caged animal. The behavior I see from them most closely approximates the latter model. Deep in their heart of hearts, they know the end is nigh, and they're going to fight with fang and claw to hold on to their "rightful" revenue streams.
Yeah, the Shark Anti-Defamation League will be ripping her head off.
Writing a sarcastic point-by-point rebuttal doesn't do much to further your image as a person with a life. Oh, wait.
So you admit you're an asshat who gets some sort of cheap thrill out of watching a young woman forced out of college for downloading music. I doubt there are any steps you can take toward recovery.
And in Slashdot posting, where you almost made some point beyond "the rules are the rules because they are the rules so obey the rules because breaking the rules is bad, mmmkay?"
You are a person without sympathy. You are a drone. You have elevated a set of stupid, arbitrary, outdated, harmful laws designed to protect the profits of an increasingly irrelevant industry above both reason and compassion.
If the punishment for speeding was having both arms cut off, you'd be the one wielding the chainsaw.
Or sane, or just, or right, or anything other than a transfer of wealth from struggling college students to pampered execs who can afford the best legislation money can buy.
Shut up. Sharks deserve what they get.
Smooth Wombat: Fearlessly standing up for the rich and the powerful since uid 796938. His courage is an inspiration to us all.
I'm not sure this is the best idea. Pre-loading *anything* adds to the cost of building the system. Plus, if you pre-load something, your customers will often have the gall to expect it to work properly, support all the hardware. They may also expect support for software issues. All these things drive up costs for people who would be happy to take the burdens of installing and tweaking on themselves.
So, as a "businessman and entrepreneur," you believe that a person's only recourse, in the face of egregious and even immoral business practices, is "If you don't like their policies, don't buy their products?"
Isn't that a little like someone in the 1850's saying, "If you don't like Southern slavery, don't buy cotton?"
There are--and should be--limits to the sort of contracts two people can enter into, and I would never, ever enter into business dealings with somebody who believed that the gold standard of business ethics is, "If I can get them to sign something, it's fair game."
If you find it hard to keep yourself motivated on a project, one solution is to pair up with someone who shares your interest in the project. Admittedly, it's not always easy to find someone with similar interests and complementary skills. But if you do, having another person to bat around ideas with can be a wonderful experience.
All the enviro-weenies I know are just ecstatic over hybrids and wind farms, and many are even grudgingly supportive of nuclear power.
It shouldn't even need to be said that environmentalists are not a monolithic group. But in your case, it seems an exception needs to be made. Environmentalists come in all shapes and sizes, with all sorts of preferences and agendas, with all sorts of views on modern life. It makes as much sense to say what you did as it makes for me to claim that, because you have articulated a right-wing position, you must have everything in common with those nutjobs in Alabama who were chaining themselves to the Ten Commandments to keep them from being removed.
I'm not in favor of destroying "industrial society." That would require the deaths of billions of people, because it is industrial society that sustains us. I am, however, in favor of slimming it down somewhat. We need to be using fewer resources, and using them in a more efficient and more egalitarian way. So long as we put the pursuit of our own material wealth ahead of everything else, we'll continue lurching from environmental crisis to environmental crisis, destroying any remaining wilderness and slaughtering inconvenient wildlife as we go along. I don't believe we're wise enough or humble enough to hold ourselves back.
My ideal world of vegetarian diets, walkable communities, locally grown organic food, and kickass mass transit systems may not be a world you would enjoy living in. But if you have two honest brain cells to rub together, you can't compare that to calling for the elimination of industrial society.
Yeah, nothing more libertarian and small-government than enormous subsidies to the nuclear power industry.
The spent fuel is a real problem. Yucca Mountain isn't big enough (and may not be safe enough) for our needs. And while there may be enough easily extractable uranium for our current level of use, a sudden spike in consumption could use it up quickly. Breeder reactors could greatly extend the supply, but at the cost of potential nuclear proliferation (I don't see the occasional nuking of downtown Manhattan as an acceptable cost of a nuclear energy policy).
I'm not beyond being convinced that nuclear power should be a big component of our energy production. But I think the boosters are still too glib about the downsides. Plus, your willingness to ignore these issues even as you decry all environmentalists as obstructionists makes me doubt your seriousness.
I need to break out my bike again.
I think a lot of people could seriously improve their gas mileage. I've always gotten about six or seven mpg better than the rest of my family, even driving the same car.
* Have a stick-shift? Spend more time in higher gears. (When going downhill, I often throw it into neutral)
* Driving 55 instead of 75 will save you enormously. Driving 75 cuts many cars' fuel economy by a quarter. Remember kids, air drag goes up with the square of your speed.
* When coming to a red light, start slowing down well before you need to stop. If the light turns green, you may still be going 20MPH, which is far better than starting from a complete stop. The more accelerating and decelerating you do, the worse your mileage gets.
* Get yourself one of those 150MPG carburetors that the oil industry has been keeping under wraps. For $25, I'll send you the plans!
For more tips, check out fueleconomy.gov
Who cares how crowded we are?
Really. I'm asking. Of what use is this little half-remembered statistic of yours?
Does it show that we could easily add a hundred billion more people to the planet? No.
Does it say anything about the number of people the Earth can actually sustain? No.
Does it prove anything even remotely relevant to this discussion? No.
All it proves is that you can fit x humans in a y by z box. It doesn't say how to get the food, water, energy, and medical care needed to keep our six billion New Mexicans alive. It doesn't say how much farmland it will take to sustain them. It doesn't say how much environmental damage will be done by all the processes needed to provide what they need, or how long that environmental degradation is sustainable.
The number of people the Earth can sustain has jack all to do with the number of people who can physically fit on its surface.
A tax on fuel is actually an exceptional idea. It's better than mandating fuel efficiency standards. It's better than taxing SUVs. It's better than subsidies for hybrids, or subsidies for mass transit. If the goal is to reduce the CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere, then a tax on fuel is the way to go. Let the market decide the best way to reduce the need for fuel.
But what about the poor? What about them? It's funny how Republicans trot out "think of the poor" at the oddest times. I was doing some research on minimum wage laws a while back, and came across a study (funded by the hotel and restaurant industries) that worried that raising the minimum wage might disqualify some of the working poor from receiving means-tested government benefits. Oh, and then there's "think of the birdies," which only gets used when they're trying to prevent wind farms. When Republicans start talking about how something will be "bad for the poor," I find myself looking at the idea more favorably.
Two points: First, a fuel tax doesn't need to burden the poor. It's not hard to look at everyone's income tax forms, decide how much fuel a family like that ought to be using, and then cut them checks to make up the shortfall. A check, mind you. Not credits to be used at your local gas station. If you send credits, then you've simply undone the incentives for fuel economy for lots of people. But if you send them money, they can decide whether to spend it on buying fuel, or cut back on their fuel consumption so they can buy something else.
Second: Who is going to get hit hardest by the effects of climate change? If Katrina is any indication, it will be the poor. The poor get hit hardest by floods, because they have the most difficult time leaving. The poor get hit hardest by famine, because they have the most difficult time finding food. The poor get hit hardest by plagues, because they have the hardest time affording medical treatment. You name any ill consequence of global warming, and it's the poor who will feel the worst effects of it. The rich will be fine so long as they can use their Hummers to drive over the piles of bodies that block their escape.
You're right. People aren't willing to change their lifestyles until it's clear to them that those lifestyles are unsustainable. Which is why a fuel tax is a good idea: It makes sure that consumers' decisions factor in the expected ill effects of their purchases. Markets cannot make ideal decisions while externalities exist.
No, historically the biggest threats to life on Earth have been sudden marine O2 depletion, big, honkin' asteroids, volcanoes, and humanity. Wikipedia will guide the way.
Living space isn't really a problem for humanity. You know the old statistic that says if we were all shoved together so that we had the population density of Manhattan, we could easily fit the entire population of the world into New York State. There has never been a global shortage of elbow room, and there never will be.
Instead, the limiting factors are our ability to produce food, water, and energy for ourselves. Global warming will greatly speed the rate of desertification, destroying valuable farmland. The unfreezing of tundra isn't going to counter this, because it's not going to unfreeze into agriculturally valuable land. It will most likely take centuries to become valuable, and by then we'll all have starved to death anyways.
We don't have the resources to provide everyone currently living on the Earth with a decent life. Throwing another several billion into the mix is like saying, "I'm driving at 90 miles an hour, and feeling pretty safe. So I guess I'm okay to speed up to 180."
http://www.oar.noaa.gov/spotlite/archive/spot_sunc limate.html
According to the site, climatologists estimate that the sun is responsible for up to 1/3 of the temperature increase we've seen over the last hundred years.
If anything, this is evidence that we should be more concerned about our effects on the environment. The climate is in for some serious adjustments in an evolutionary instant, and the last thing we should be doing is throwing more fuel on the fire.
Think about it. I wouldn't want to get into a debate with you because you have some deep insight into the subject? Seriously, do I sound that dogmatic?
I'm a big fan of Dennett, and I've seen a handful of attempted rebuttals. I found them somewhat lacking, but I'm willing to listen. The last book of his I read was "Freedom Evolves," if that helps.
Then again, your handle sounds strangely familiar, you have more than a touch of intellectual arrogance, and you're ridiculously prolific. There's a chance you're one of those alt.religion.mormon types who think that scoring points in a debate shows you have the bigger penis... well, I tired of that particular game long ago.
Yes, I understand that there may be "something more" than physical matter, and that making a blanket statement saying "nothing more" requires going beyond what I can absolutely say for certain. But the possibility doesn't keep me up nights. I don't see the necessity for it. I don't see the evidence for it. I only see the emotional appeal of that something else, that would keep people believing it against reason. You can argue that I've embraced the physicality of mental states as a key component of my rejection of God. That's fine. We both have not-entirely-logical reasons for believing as we do.
As for why we find sunsets beautiful... it's an interesting question. But is it important? I'm not sure. The feeling feels very important to us monkey-apes, but does what does the feeling prove about us, or about the world at large? I think it's rather self-centered to believe that an explanation for the universe is inadequate until it explains our emotions in a way that we find satisfying. I could personally write my perception of beauty off as a mere evolutionary artifact, without diminishing the feeling itself.
The way I see it, humans were built from the ground up to consider themselves special, to take especial interest in their own feelings and interests. The march of science has simply been one mind-expanding blow to our self-centeredness after another.
Exactly.
Still, you implied that there were so many that it would be impossible to sort through them all without some sort of organizational scheme. Now you look like you're backing down from your claim.
I've come up with one example: Adam and Eve. Look where it got them.
I think he's quite serious, and I agree.
Love is an emotion. Emotions are brain states. We have the capabilities to study brain states in excellent depth. We also have evolutionary models that seem to do an excellent job of predicting why we have the emotions we do. Love, jealousy, regret, shame, and anger are all logical consequences of our existence as social animals.
So, in what sense is "love" not a quantifiable phenomenon? Is it because no scientific study can fully convey the feeling of being with your lover? So what? Dry scientific prose can't convey the beauty of a sunset, but it can still say in fine detail why the clouds happen to be that particular color this evening.
Everything that goes on in our brains is the result of interactions in the brain matter. Those who say otherwise are expressing a false and misguided hope that somehow they are "something more", because they believe that an attachment to causality turns them into "mindless robots." Still, interactions within matter are open to scientific study. Love is therefore quantifiable, in a way that God is decidedly not.