"...I'm not suggesting that playing a video game is the same thing as riding a motorcycle..."
No, because depending on how you weight the advantages, it's BETTER.
When one weighs the advantages/disadvantages, it's closer than we probbaly assume by reflex: - motorcycle: $10,000+ vs $50 for a video game. - motorcycle: $ for gas, gear, consumables; video game: no ongoing cost (except later obesity effects...) - motorcycle: you have to go out into a world that, let's face it, is usually too hot, too cold, filled with bugs. Game: you sit in your perfectly comfortable home. Plus, you can pause what's going on to go eat, take a dump, etc. - motorcycle: can break down, leaving you miles from home and with a huge expense. Game: no risk. - motorcycle: much larger than zero risk of being killed by some dipshit talking on his cellphone or putting on her makeup while driving. Game: no risk (again, except for ongoing obesity). This is non-trivial for a generation that's grown up sheltered from all harm. - real motorcycling is dull; you have to drive the speed limit (approximately), stop at stop signs, stay on the road, etc. Video games have no such contstraints.
As the verisimilitude of games increases to the point of photorealism (have you seen recent racing games?), there really is less motivation to go through the hassle, cost, risk, and discomfort of actually doing something.
And, I suspect, that the generations that have grown up with video games are probably able to more easily immerse themselves effortlessly.
I'm 46. This sort of calculus really makes me sad because everything in my gut says "go outside and do stuff"...but I'm honestly challenged to come up with winning reasons to do so. The only 'winning' argument is that as my wealth increases, the marginal cost of dollars-spent on entertainment gets to be less of a motivator - $70 on green fees is more of a (shrug, oh well expensive) than the inconceivable price point it would have been in my 20s.
Again, that universalist argument could be applied with equal vigor to language.
English is by FAR the most widely spoken language in the world (Chinese is of course the highest NATIVE language, but as far as people who speak *some* of it, English is nearly 3/4 of the planet).
So as soon as the world dispenses with the silly particularism and ethocentricity of languages, I'll be on-board with dumping the US measurement system.
I'd only also point out that 0.5% of the world states are superpowers, and 100% of them use the US measurement system. Coincidence?
First, not everyone needs or cares to convert units. If I need to know how far it is to the next town, I don't care that "miles" is hard to convert to feet or yards, because I'm not GOING to. I use the unit appropriate to the scale I'm working in, and conversions are largely irrelevant in general life.
Second, base 10 is useful for computers and digital applications, but in fact it's a rather inconvenient number system. 10 can't be divided into integers twice, nor can it easily be divided into integers of 3 or 4. Base 12 (ala the foot-inch relationship, the one place where conversions are fairly common) can be easily fractionalized by 2, 3, 4, and 6. If the base 10 system is so universally perfect, how many hours are in your day? Minutes in your hour? Days in your year?
Finally, your universalist argument could be applied in toto to languages. Why have all these silly little national languages, when by *far* the bulk of the world speaks English? So why don't we just universally adopt English and dispense with all that native-language particularism?
OK I must be COMPLETELY misunderstanding something.
First I keep hearing about "the Chinese have a monopoly on rare earths". Now NASA is talking about people mining rare earths on the moon? (Both the article, and it's original referent at Phys.org refer to 'rare earth elements', although I'm inclined to believe that Phys.org *may* have been using an unfortunately-confusing term for 'elements that are indeed rare on earth' like He3.)
RARE EARTHS ARE (largely) NOT RARE AT ALL. They simply don't exist in concentrated veins. The processing is dirty and polluting, which is the only reason China might be considered to have a 'corner' on the market - they don't give a shit about their pollution.
As much as we NIMBY rare-earth refining, it can't be so bad that we're seriously willing to go to the MOON to do it?
Alexa says/. is 37% Indian-origin, 27% US - I find that hard to believe, given the amount of time they spend on bullshit US political issues. Their total % only reaches about 70-some percent.
Celsius merely replaces one set of 'arbitrary' reference points (human warmest/typical =100 and coldest/typical = 0) with another (the freezing/boiling points of a hypothetically-pure water in a specific set of pressure circumstances = 0/100 respectively).
Aside from that, it's what people grew up & are comfortable with. Well, the only other difference is that I don't see Americans being evangelical about trying to convince anyone to use their system. (Shrug)
It's probably hard for people in other countries to understand, but the Metric Conversion Act merely indicated that the metric system was the PREFERRED system, not the "required" system. Further, Executive Order 12770 is relevant only to government agencies.
This was back when the US government had fewer abilities to simply order its citizens (you know, the ones laughably in charge?) to do what it wants on a whim.
I'd say whoever made the light fixtures, and sold them for general use emitting that much interference is really the person against whom they should be acting.
The article says the lights are made by GE, who was aware that some of their ballasts were causing interference. IF the building owner was advised, and they failed to replace them, then they're at fault. If GE's replacement program was chintzy (ie they'd replace the fixture, but building owners had to pay for labor, for example), then they should be the target here.
In a sense, this is "look how incompetent the government is at implementing tech" story, but in another this could be interpreted as an attempt to trivialize what happened with healthcare.gov. "Oh gosh, nothing ever goes right for the government so what happened with healthcare.gov is par for the course (shrug)."
Except the healthcare.gov disaster was LEGISLATIVE, the constant, ongoing, still-unresolved tech catastrophe was only the impact-crater.
The fact that NASA's computer-replacement program was a boondoggle was meaningless, compared to the tech-failure of a program whose use was MANDATED by law.
The best part about Slashdot for me was really the people who visited it. This site had one of the most intelligent communities around. This is how the site was successful IMO. Really good people massed together behind it. Finding and promoting articles was one thing but the commentary was where it really took off. Almost every time I viewed a story what I found more interesting was the story that developed below it. I really didn't know of another site where I could have attempted to follow a debate about nuclear fusion, and found a debate about Apple only a page apart. This was taken away as the best and brightest around here left when they were fed up with these beta changes, and Slashdot as a quality site died. The new site took away from the comments and the user driven atmosphere and plastered it with pictures and wasted space. This protest may have seemed futile at first to the bigwigs at the top here, but like I said the best part about this site was the comments. Therefore, if the only comments left were ones complaining about beta, it was going to be a very accurate view of the future of Slashdot from here onward when the beta continued.
Ftfy.
What I think is hilarious is that they can spend resources building the betabomination, but we still use markup from like 1991. Hey guys, there's better forum code out there, where you can even EDIT POSTS!/noveltyshock.
"I fail to see how Hayek's work proscribes any action useful in our current economic situation."
And this tends to be the most persistent critique of Hayek. "I don't like Hayek, because he doesn't tell us what to do to fix this."
The fact is, in real life, sometimes the best course IS to do nothing, and let matters take their course. Meddling isn't always useful. In fact, sometimes doing ANYTHING is worse than doing nothing.
I heard anecdotally that in "lost in the wilderness" situation, children often survive where adults don't, as children KNOW they're powerless to accomplish anything, so they will simply curl up and wait where they are. Adults, on the other hand, feel compelled to "do something" usually involving moving around, making them harder for rescuers to find.
Unless you live in a Hollywood movie (or are a Keynesian, apparently), saying "well, there MUST be a solution" is not necessarily true.
The original framers of the constitution recognized this at the founding of the republic.
"The Congress shall have Power To...promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries...."
Nobody objects to people having the protection of a limited copyright so that they can profit from their ideas. Everyone - including, I'd argue, most copyright holders but excepting apparently their very successful lobbyists and tame congresspeople - agrees that "copyright" != "rights to exclusivity in perpetuity so that person and their heirs never have to work again".
I'm curious by what criteria you actually distinguish criminals, fraudsters, and government? The distinction has grown increasingly fuzzy or, perhaps, irrelevant.
I don't know if being able to diagnose a disease means you know how to cure it.
If we're all Keynesians, why aren't we all breaking windows to improve the economy? The theory is utterly stupid EVEN IN THEORY, much less in application.
Increasing money supply doesn't magically make people want to consume, all it really does is threaten blackmail to people "stupid" enough to try to save money.
Keynes was, like Freud, a brilliant man whose observations are seminal to our understanding of his field, but who was in many ways overwhelmingly wrong.
I'll take Adam Smith, Frederic Bastiat, and ultimately Friedrich Hayek over JMK, thanks
No, you're right: this article is a whinging "boo hoo, look how hard it's been to be a coder with a vagina" which - as you can tell from the rest of the comments, pretty much nobody buys.
PARTICULARLY from a very young person with pretty much zero actual life experience.
The whole "less pay for equal jobs" has been disproven so many times that the only reason one could continue to whine about it is because it's an article of quasi-religious faith, not fact or justification.
Deeply fulfilling career choices in which men are marginalized, ridiculed, trivialized, and outright mocked.
As far as your "go a little bit in the opposite direction until it's balanced"...sincerely: when do you say "it's fixed"?
When does the sexism preference in the other direction end? What's your quantifiable measure? You must have one, because otherwise you're just campaigning for some sort of eternal punitive bullshit.
I'm not just trolling or being ironic but genuine when I ask: how in the hell did you get there?
American Exceptionalism has to do with a unique collection of circumstances that meant that the US is in a way intrinsically different in viewpoint and execution than any other state of comparable size/power. Many of these circumstances are individually shared with other states, but not collectively. 1) it was a country by design - rather than founded/developed by indigenous peoples and evolving from there, it was a designed system based on principles of Humanism and the Enlightenment and has been called "the lifeboat FROM history". It was implemented by imported peoples (to the sad detriment of the people who were here first) who had little other basis outside this sort of 'intellectual concept' on which to be unified. Other examples: Canada, Australia 2) physical security - once the mid-19th century passed, and the convulsions of the civil war completed (themselves the logical conclusion of a gaping flaw in the original design, above) - the US was effectively secure from invasion or any existential threat. Example: Australia 3) resource independence - the US is fortunately lucky in having ample food, freshwater, critical raw materials, coal, gas, and now oil. The closest any other state is to this level of security would probably be Russia...but they don't have food, which is pretty damned important. 4) heterogeneity - the US is a genuinely polycultural society; from language, to culture, to food, to culture, to religion the US is (I'd argue) far more adaptable and opportunistic when it comes to absorbing new peoples/ideas. Some might even assert that the US's (supposed) constant 'race' or 'culture' issues are, at root, an issue only faced BECAUSE of this poly-ethnic structure and the absorption process...more ethnically monolithic states/cultures don't have nearly such problems since it's easier for them to shrug off new inclusions. Example: UK, Canada.
There are probably more, but these are the first that come to mind.
It really doesn't have anything to do with a Manichean worldview at ALL?
"...encourage the development and widespread use of technological advances in providing video, telecommunications and broadband services at competitive rates..."
At the same time that they hand out local monopolies to the carriers. BRILLIANT. Not contradictory at all.
Slashdot Mirror
"...I'm not suggesting that playing a video game is the same thing as riding a motorcycle..."
No, because depending on how you weight the advantages, it's BETTER.
When one weighs the advantages/disadvantages, it's closer than we probbaly assume by reflex:
- motorcycle: $10,000+ vs $50 for a video game.
- motorcycle: $ for gas, gear, consumables; video game: no ongoing cost (except later obesity effects...)
- motorcycle: you have to go out into a world that, let's face it, is usually too hot, too cold, filled with bugs. Game: you sit in your perfectly comfortable home. Plus, you can pause what's going on to go eat, take a dump, etc.
- motorcycle: can break down, leaving you miles from home and with a huge expense. Game: no risk.
- motorcycle: much larger than zero risk of being killed by some dipshit talking on his cellphone or putting on her makeup while driving. Game: no risk (again, except for ongoing obesity). This is non-trivial for a generation that's grown up sheltered from all harm.
- real motorcycling is dull; you have to drive the speed limit (approximately), stop at stop signs, stay on the road, etc. Video games have no such contstraints.
As the verisimilitude of games increases to the point of photorealism (have you seen recent racing games?), there really is less motivation to go through the hassle, cost, risk, and discomfort of actually doing something.
And, I suspect, that the generations that have grown up with video games are probably able to more easily immerse themselves effortlessly.
I'm 46. This sort of calculus really makes me sad because everything in my gut says "go outside and do stuff"...but I'm honestly challenged to come up with winning reasons to do so. The only 'winning' argument is that as my wealth increases, the marginal cost of dollars-spent on entertainment gets to be less of a motivator - $70 on green fees is more of a (shrug, oh well expensive) than the inconceivable price point it would have been in my 20s.
...one can then ALSO see the sorts of personal bias a scientist has.
This also helps identify if they're peddling some sort of politically-motivated mendacity.
Again, that universalist argument could be applied with equal vigor to language.
English is by FAR the most widely spoken language in the world (Chinese is of course the highest NATIVE language, but as far as people who speak *some* of it, English is nearly 3/4 of the planet).
So as soon as the world dispenses with the silly particularism and ethocentricity of languages, I'll be on-board with dumping the US measurement system.
I'd only also point out that 0.5% of the world states are superpowers, and 100% of them use the US measurement system. Coincidence?
First, not everyone needs or cares to convert units. If I need to know how far it is to the next town, I don't care that "miles" is hard to convert to feet or yards, because I'm not GOING to. I use the unit appropriate to the scale I'm working in, and conversions are largely irrelevant in general life.
Second, base 10 is useful for computers and digital applications, but in fact it's a rather inconvenient number system. 10 can't be divided into integers twice, nor can it easily be divided into integers of 3 or 4. Base 12 (ala the foot-inch relationship, the one place where conversions are fairly common) can be easily fractionalized by 2, 3, 4, and 6. If the base 10 system is so universally perfect, how many hours are in your day? Minutes in your hour? Days in your year?
Finally, your universalist argument could be applied in toto to languages. Why have all these silly little national languages, when by *far* the bulk of the world speaks English? So why don't we just universally adopt English and dispense with all that native-language particularism?
OK I must be COMPLETELY misunderstanding something.
First I keep hearing about "the Chinese have a monopoly on rare earths".
Now NASA is talking about people mining rare earths on the moon?
(Both the article, and it's original referent at Phys.org refer to 'rare earth elements', although I'm inclined to believe that Phys.org *may* have been using an unfortunately-confusing term for 'elements that are indeed rare on earth' like He3.)
RARE EARTHS ARE (largely) NOT RARE AT ALL.
They simply don't exist in concentrated veins. The processing is dirty and polluting, which is the only reason China might be considered to have a 'corner' on the market - they don't give a shit about their pollution.
As much as we NIMBY rare-earth refining, it can't be so bad that we're seriously willing to go to the MOON to do it?
Alexa says /. is 37% Indian-origin, 27% US - I find that hard to believe, given the amount of time they spend on bullshit US political issues. Their total % only reaches about 70-some percent.
Celsius merely replaces one set of 'arbitrary' reference points (human warmest/typical =100 and coldest/typical = 0) with another (the freezing/boiling points of a hypothetically-pure water in a specific set of pressure circumstances = 0/100 respectively).
Aside from that, it's what people grew up & are comfortable with.
Well, the only other difference is that I don't see Americans being evangelical about trying to convince anyone to use their system. (Shrug)
It's probably hard for people in other countries to understand, but the Metric Conversion Act merely indicated that the metric system was the PREFERRED system, not the "required" system.
Further, Executive Order 12770 is relevant only to government agencies.
This was back when the US government had fewer abilities to simply order its citizens (you know, the ones laughably in charge?) to do what it wants on a whim.
American website reporting largely to Americans is going to use American measures.
You want to report in Celsius, start your own?
Anyway, people who want a genuinely objective temperature scale use Kelvin.
I'd say whoever made the light fixtures, and sold them for general use emitting that much interference is really the person against whom they should be acting.
The article says the lights are made by GE, who was aware that some of their ballasts were causing interference. IF the building owner was advised, and they failed to replace them, then they're at fault. If GE's replacement program was chintzy (ie they'd replace the fixture, but building owners had to pay for labor, for example), then they should be the target here.
Because you want to discourage charitable fundraising unless the state APPROVES of it? This is pretty goofy.
Is it ironic that comment comes from an anonymous coward?
This doesn't say anywhere that it has to be reproducible by industry, just by anyone.
Methinks you're trying too hard to argue against something that's patently obvious, for your own political motivations.
In a sense, this is "look how incompetent the government is at implementing tech" story, but in another this could be interpreted as an attempt to trivialize what happened with healthcare.gov. "Oh gosh, nothing ever goes right for the government so what happened with healthcare.gov is par for the course (shrug)."
Except the healthcare.gov disaster was LEGISLATIVE, the constant, ongoing, still-unresolved tech catastrophe was only the impact-crater.
The fact that NASA's computer-replacement program was a boondoggle was meaningless, compared to the tech-failure of a program whose use was MANDATED by law.
Ftfy.
What I think is hilarious is that they can spend resources building the betabomination, but we still use markup from like 1991. Hey guys, there's better forum code out there, where you can even EDIT POSTS! /noveltyshock.
BETA SUCKS
"I fail to see how Hayek's work proscribes any action useful in our current economic situation."
And this tends to be the most persistent critique of Hayek.
"I don't like Hayek, because he doesn't tell us what to do to fix this."
The fact is, in real life, sometimes the best course IS to do nothing, and let matters take their course. Meddling isn't always useful. In fact, sometimes doing ANYTHING is worse than doing nothing.
I heard anecdotally that in "lost in the wilderness" situation, children often survive where adults don't, as children KNOW they're powerless to accomplish anything, so they will simply curl up and wait where they are. Adults, on the other hand, feel compelled to "do something" usually involving moving around, making them harder for rescuers to find.
Unless you live in a Hollywood movie (or are a Keynesian, apparently), saying "well, there MUST be a solution" is not necessarily true.
Apparently you're not reading enough news, if you think the NYT doesn't have an agenda to push.
If you don't notice it, you probably just agree with it.
The original framers of the constitution recognized this at the founding of the republic.
"The Congress shall have Power To...promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries...."
Nobody objects to people having the protection of a limited copyright so that they can profit from their ideas. Everyone - including, I'd argue, most copyright holders but excepting apparently their very successful lobbyists and tame congresspeople - agrees that "copyright" != "rights to exclusivity in perpetuity so that person and their heirs never have to work again".
I'm curious by what criteria you actually distinguish criminals, fraudsters, and government? The distinction has grown increasingly fuzzy or, perhaps, irrelevant.
I don't know if being able to diagnose a disease means you know how to cure it.
If we're all Keynesians, why aren't we all breaking windows to improve the economy? The theory is utterly stupid EVEN IN THEORY, much less in application.
Increasing money supply doesn't magically make people want to consume, all it really does is threaten blackmail to people "stupid" enough to try to save money.
Keynes vs Hayek rap battle:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... "Fear the Boom and Bust"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... "Fight of the Century"
Keynes was, like Freud, a brilliant man whose observations are seminal to our understanding of his field, but who was in many ways overwhelmingly wrong.
I'll take Adam Smith, Frederic Bastiat, and ultimately Friedrich Hayek over JMK, thanks
No, you're right: this article is a whinging "boo hoo, look how hard it's been to be a coder with a vagina" which - as you can tell from the rest of the comments, pretty much nobody buys.
PARTICULARLY from a very young person with pretty much zero actual life experience.
"...How many products do you use that haven't increased in price for that long?..."
Pretty much none. Of course, the government (of both parties) has been telling me "inflation's at/near 0%" for longer than that....
The whole "less pay for equal jobs" has been disproven so many times that the only reason one could continue to whine about it is because it's an article of quasi-religious faith, not fact or justification.
Nursing.
Teaching.
Being a homemaker.
Deeply fulfilling career choices in which men are marginalized, ridiculed, trivialized, and outright mocked.
As far as your "go a little bit in the opposite direction until it's balanced"...sincerely: when do you say "it's fixed"?
When does the sexism preference in the other direction end? What's your quantifiable measure? You must have one, because otherwise you're just campaigning for some sort of eternal punitive bullshit.
I'm not just trolling or being ironic but genuine when I ask: how in the hell did you get there?
American Exceptionalism has to do with a unique collection of circumstances that meant that the US is in a way intrinsically different in viewpoint and execution than any other state of comparable size/power. Many of these circumstances are individually shared with other states, but not collectively.
1) it was a country by design - rather than founded/developed by indigenous peoples and evolving from there, it was a designed system based on principles of Humanism and the Enlightenment and has been called "the lifeboat FROM history". It was implemented by imported peoples (to the sad detriment of the people who were here first) who had little other basis outside this sort of 'intellectual concept' on which to be unified. Other examples: Canada, Australia
2) physical security - once the mid-19th century passed, and the convulsions of the civil war completed (themselves the logical conclusion of a gaping flaw in the original design, above) - the US was effectively secure from invasion or any existential threat. Example: Australia
3) resource independence - the US is fortunately lucky in having ample food, freshwater, critical raw materials, coal, gas, and now oil. The closest any other state is to this level of security would probably be Russia...but they don't have food, which is pretty damned important.
4) heterogeneity - the US is a genuinely polycultural society; from language, to culture, to food, to culture, to religion the US is (I'd argue) far more adaptable and opportunistic when it comes to absorbing new peoples/ideas. Some might even assert that the US's (supposed) constant 'race' or 'culture' issues are, at root, an issue only faced BECAUSE of this poly-ethnic structure and the absorption process...more ethnically monolithic states/cultures don't have nearly such problems since it's easier for them to shrug off new inclusions. Example: UK, Canada.
There are probably more, but these are the first that come to mind.
It really doesn't have anything to do with a Manichean worldview at ALL?
"...encourage the development and widespread use of technological advances in providing video, telecommunications and broadband services at competitive rates..."
At the same time that they hand out local monopolies to the carriers.
BRILLIANT. Not contradictory at all.