The next step is to put speed monitoring machines in cars. To start your car you swipe your credit card through the machine. Then, every time you exceed the speed limit the machine beeps and spits out a reciept for your already paid ticket. Happy motoring!
Murder, rape, and other terrible crimes happen in every country in the world every day, even when there isn't a war going on. War just changes the participants.
Strange! I have almost the exact same experience in my flying dreams. Getting into the air is like jumping, though sometimes I have trouble doing it at first. Once I am in the air I swim to stay up. However, at times I am able to realize that the jumping and swimming is unnecessary. Then all I have to do is think about it and I can take off with no effort at all.
Most of my flying dreams have another recurring theme in that I talk to people I know while flying and ask them why they can't fly too.
I love this idea. It reveals the difference between people who really want to worship something they believe to be greater than themselves and those who are just using their professed religion to dominate, subjugate, manipulate, and fleece the masses.
By this I mean that almost every religion that has a personified diety acknowledges that God posesses omniscience and omnipotence. They also, by and large, acknowledge the fallability of man. Now I ask you, what omniscient and omnipotent God needs fallible mankind to help, protect, or assist Him?
A God like that doesn't need your help. If you are helping God, or protecting God, you probably need to re-examine where your motivations, beliefs, and actions actually come from. Doubly so if your actions are violent, judgemental, or vituperous.
Regulations are just another method of channeling the money to the *right* people and preventing competetion.
Sure they start out as a way of helping The People. That is how they are sold to the voters. However, as an interesting byproduct of how byzantine government regulations are, the only people qualified to oversee them when the first wave of burecrats move on are the people who work for the companies who were affected by those regualtions. I have no doubt strategic, continued, leveraged, and large donations from those companies have a persuasive effect as well.
So by generation 2 of beaurecrats you have swapped out government employees with past industry employees and now the fox is running the hen house. They then merrily go about restructuring enforcement of the current regulations and writing new ones that make it cost prohibitive for anyone not on the playing field to enter the game. This leads to a regulatorily supported limited market where only a few early adopters who are sufficiently capitalized can keep up with the regulatory changes. Anyone else who comes along and wants to dip their foot in the pool will have to pay the piper, and his fees are ludicrous.
So yeah, regulations are a good thing--kinda. They are, as all government laws, subject to manipulation and are so malleable due to lack of oversight and guiding ethics of the players that what starts out as a good thing ends up being a lap dog of the entities it was meant to restrain.
Hey, hey! Calm the fuck down. It's not rape. Don't you realize that being locked away from women for years in a building that is overflowing with sex pheremones from testosterone doped double Y chromosome types will eventually wear down even the most homophobic gay-bashers known to mankind? As a friend of mine likes to say, "We didn't rape anyone. After a week or two they are begging for some dick."
The funny part is not that people in prison are raped. The funny part is they engage in consensual homosexual sex and quite enjoy it. Lastly, the term he used should be indicative of the intent. It's not "I'm-gonna-get-anally-raped prison!" it's "pound-me-in-the-ass prison." The quote itself is phrased as a request. Think about it.
"We don't need to fear and change the government, we need to fear and change the power corporations have over us."
What?!? The US government, who ostensibly is responsible for protecting its citizens, is either gutlessly allowing or complicity helping companies to defraud, damage, shakedown, and systematically disenfranchise the American public. Our elected officials have the hands of big business shoved so far up their collective asses every time I watch Cspan I think it's the damn Muppet show. What's worse, the politicians appear to absolutely LOVE IT. They continually vote en masse for appropriations and measures that erode our rights all the while saying "those multimillion dollar corporate contributions had absolutely nothing to do with how hard we are fucking the American public here." From the DMCA and Mickey's infinite copyright to H1Bs, unrestrained immigration, and insane corporate bailouts the government can't seem to suck enough of the crack smoke billowing out if the rectums of the corporate lobbyists. Soon enough, if it hasn't already happened, our legislators will be unabashedly outsourcing their bill writing to their large corporate donors' legal teams.
In short, this battle has been waged for over 100 years, with business interests and government on one side and with the "people" on the other. They have been in bed together, off and on, for much longer than most of us have been alive. Also, consider the fact that companies have larger resources and greater influence than people individually do. And in an age where "wedge issues" are adroitly wielded by our government against their own electorate in an attempt to fracture and divide them is it any wonder the united front of a corporate entity has such influence, or that our government views us with such contempt?
I don't care who says it, tea partiers, tea drinkers, tea baggers, whatever. The label doesn't matter; it's the message that counts. The government is raperizing the American people like we are indigenous natives. This shit has got to stop.
The Arizona statutes only mimic and uphold the unenforced federal laws already on the books. In other words, if the federal government was enforcing their own laws Arizona would not need to pass any new initiatives.
Correlation does not equal causation. People who want to kill other people will find an excuse to do so.
Christianity is all about freedom. For instance, God did not stop Satan from tempting Adam and Eve even though God abhors temptation and sin. Similarly, he did not stop Adam and Eve from partaking of the fruit. Eons before this, God did not stop Satan and his followers from changing their minds about God's dominion and revolting. Even today, God does not enforce his beliefs on people nor does He advocate doing so. He did this because freedom is the ultimate gift of God to mankind and is the reason man was created in God's (mental) image.
You, like many others, have failed to distinguish the murderer from the message, and the oppressor from his excuse. The Bible forbids and decries such behavior from cover to cover, and yet you still insist that Christianity itself is responsible for people who commit those acts. Could you be any more obtuse?
Let's break it down: 1) Christian rule book says "Don't murder" 2) Person commits murder, claims to do it for Christianity 3) You say "It's Christianity!"
In the case of Christianity, it's the person, not the religion at the root of the problems you state. Some people will find any reason they can to justify their actions, no matter how unsuitable, incongruous, or inconsistent that reason and action are. Just be cognizant enough to discern the difference and don't let murderers, bombers, and tyrants masquerading as Christians dictate your thoughts about a religion that specifically prohibits those actions. I hate to say it like this, but doing so belies either an irrationallly intence presupposed prejudice against Christianity for which you are searching for justification, or a simplemindedness that is staggering in its vacuosity. As you seem to have your faculties about you I will go with option 3, that you misunderstand or are unaware of what the Bible says on these subjects, possibly having been misinformed at the hands of those who conform to the previous two categories I mentioned.
Side note: as an orthodox fundamental Christian I believe, as the Bible teaches, that government is a tool of humanity instituted by God to provide freedom to those who live under it. The purpose of this freedom is to allow each and every human self determination, as this is consistent with the will of God for mankind while they are on Earth. Therefore, as an instrument of freedom, government should not restrict the rights of people where they do not conflict with the sovereign rights of life, privacy, property. This includes granting an exclusive franchise to individuals or groups based on age (subject to limits of self determination), race, sex, economic condition, or religion. In conclusion, this specifically means the government should not concern itself with the sex of partners who apply for a legally sanctioned recognition of their relatioship, like marriage. In addition, they should not force, coerce, or mandate churches to perform ceremonies that conflict with their religious beliefs.
Great post and very thought provoking. I conjecture that maybe you do not go far enough with your estimation of fundamental differences between "us" and "them" (if they exist.)
By this I mean that our understanding of the universe is inexorably tied to our physical and mental construction. Our observations, experiemts, knowledge, and eventually our interactions with the universe are mandated by our characteristics as carbon based life forms. Assuming that alien intelligence resembles ours in any way seem to be hubris of the highest sort.
As a microcosm consider humans who seem to understand the world in a different way than most others. Whether they are left handed (right brained), dyslexic, savant, genius, synesthetic, or insane there are humans who process information differently from the majority of humanity and as a result see relationships and perform mental feats that baseline humans find suprising and extraordinary. Now consider a thinking being that has absolutely nothing in common with human mentality, brain structure, sensory organs, genetic and historical heritage, social norms, physical characteristics, or even hierarchy of needs (Maslo.) How much more suprising and different will their experience of the universe be? It could very well be that the universe they live in, though physically the same as ours, is expereintially so different that we would not have the ability to communicate. Even something as "universal" as mathematics might not apply to their thinking.
There is really no way to tell until we make first contact (if we ever do) what alien life will be like. There are literally hundreds of explanations of why we havent heard from aliens yet. Anything from different modes of communication to the lack of necessity of communication as we have developed (radio, light, etc.) to the non-exitence of alien life altogether. Hopefully we will one day find out why we havent heard from anyone else in the universe. If we do discover alien life I pray it becomes a stepping stone to greater understanding of ourselves and the universe we live in.
I remember once clicking on an article link on the main page of/. that was redirected to goatse. It was removed shortly after and the article was updated with a "link removed because of random redirects" message.
Here is the really terrifying part of the hysteria around these laws: A similarly redirected link, this time to a FBI child porn honeypot, posted in an article titled "George Lucas aplolgises for Jar-Jar, takes own life" would land all of/. in prison.
There is a fundamental incongruity, a wrongness in execution of unforgivable scale, when a government dedicated to liberty has the ability to destroy a person's life because they posess a picture of something.
My true test of a good novel is not how well it reads, but how well it re-reads. Case in point, I read Battlefield in my early 20s and liked it. Due to its hefty size it was shelvled for about 5 years before re-reading. When I did it was as if all the luster seeped out of the pages and puddled on the shelf below it. I could hardly make it through the second time. I only finished by stubborn willpower and morbid curiosity.
First infections are usually spread before symptoms occur. Incubation period, read about it.
Second, not all money spent on health care is spent on communicable diseases. Cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and trauma problems probably account for a majority of the spending on health care.
Third, even after starting treatment for a communicable disease it can still be transmitted to others.
"However, in this case the *stepfather* left a gun around that killed a child that wasn't his."
Two things. First, the mother was within three feet of the child when the incident ocurred, not the stepfather. Second, I know many stepfathers who would shoot *you* for implying their stepchild is not "his." Just because a child is not of your own blood doesn't mean you can't care for them in the same way a biological parent would. Adoptive parents who love their children and abusive biological parents are just two examples of how your logic fails.
Most "religious" people I know, and know of, do not "feel spiritual." They learn about their religion as a self-help course directed by God, as a guide/law book for morality, or as a compulsion ingrained into them as a child and reinforced with inner feelings of guilt.
The people I know who tell me thay have "felt spiritual" are dope-heads, "chrismatic" worshippers, new-age spiritualists, kooky weirdos, and psychics. This observation matches much better with your first statement of people who feel spitirual not using their whole brain.
I think the supporting (or contradicting) evidence you seek has yet to be seen. By this I mean we have insufficiently advanced technology to prove or disprove either side. Either way it turns out, I think the search for an AI system analogous to the human mind will reveal more about that mind than all our previous efforts to combined.
"Nerds do not memorize meaningless trivia without good reason."
I thought all nerds memorized meaningless trivia. Then again, maybe its just me. It has always been a trait I expressed, even before I actively fed it by reading encyclopedias, dictionaries, and anything else I could get my hands on. Howerver, my nerdy friends are similar. This behevior could be because:
a) they are good at memorization b) they crave knowledge c) they see the potential to correlate (previously) unrealted fields of knowledge d) they like to spread knowledge to others e) its fun at parties. Ok, like we go to parties...its fun when you gather with other geeks to play DnD and stuff.
As an aside, I have noticed resentment and even outright derision from colleagues that do not posess my level of vocabulary and broad trivia knowledge. That I can handle, being on the outside of the cliques and groups is something I dealt with during gradeshcool and high school. What I see as even worse, though, is a marked lack of curiosity about the world in general in most 20-somethings (even those in college!). Maybe lack of curiosity is not stong enough. I see them actively ignoring avenues of self enrichment, asking questions and then turning away from the answers, limiting their academic performance to the bare minimum necessary to pass, and relying on memorization rather than understanding and internalizing the knowledge.
Again maybe this is just the people in my preiphery, but I can't help feeling like most of the young people I see stigmatize above average intelligence and look at people funny when they read wikipedia instead of watching youtube.
For some reason the assumption is that everyone wants the same size slice of pizza. I disagree. I prefer a pizza with a variety of slice sizes.
For instance, large slices are good for large appetites/people (men), while medium and small slices are good for smaller appetitets/people(women and children). Also, the small ones are a perfect finisher when you have just consumed a number of large slices and are just about to bust.
Also, the slice porportion and their accompanying aesthetics are important. Somedays the fat-looking big slices that are almost a fourth of the pizza look best. Other times the skinny ones that are so slim they can't even legitamately accommodate an intact piece of pepperoni appeal to me. Proportion can weigh as heavily as quantity and distribution of toppings when it comes to choosing the perfect slice.
Personally, I would be interested in a cutting pattern that guaranteed the most variety of slice sizes.
Not to sound insensetive, but the rule has never been "You are paid in-line with the amount of work you do." Just look at salaried programmers that put in death-march hours near the end of projects for an example.
Sadly, the rule has always been "You are paid what you can negotiate." And in the case of someone with a disorder like this, they will never have the perspicacity to negotiate a good wage for their service, no matter how miraculous and invaluable they seem to the rest of us.
Your fears are sound. It may never become an issue, though. The stigma of workers with "disorders" will keep most companies from tapping into this resurce, and the philanthropic-shield effect of "giving a retarded guy a job" (as incorrect as that sentiment is, most will see it in that light) will deflect most of the outrage and invective.
Furthermore, a "disorder" with certain characteristic traits can't be a stereotype by definition. You either have the disorder and thus the accompanying traits,, or you don't. Arguing that people with autism are being stereotyped when you state they prefer repetetive tasks and have an eye for divergence is like arguing that it is stereotyping to say white people are white.
OCD is a scary disorder. I had a friend that developed it when we were in college. Her "rituals" ran the gamut from hand washing, counting while performing unecessary repetetive actions, number fixations, packing and unpacking her backpack repeatedly to make sure her books/homework was actually in there, etc. Before the onset she was a particularly bright, cheerful, and atractive young woman. After a few months with OCD she just looked haunted.
She got some treatment initially from some groups the school set her up with. Sadly, I think I set her back in her recovery substantially with a single sentence. She mentioned they had her on a regimen of "negative feedback." I inquired what that meant and she pointed out a sturdy rubber band around her wrist. "Every time I begin a ritual I snap the rubber band. The pain becomes associated with the ritual and eventually you will stop." Her eyes brightened when she said this, indicating it was working for her. Unthinking, I replied "Yeah, at least until you start a ritual about the number of times you snap the rubber band." The next time I saw her she was on some serious medication.
What do you call a vehicle that is limited to 450 cars, that is available in only two states, and even then by invitation only, is not made on a production line, cannot be bought or sold by the driver, and only costs $850 per month though the build cost is over $150,000? Sound like a beta to you? It does to me.
Slashdot Mirror
The next step is to put speed monitoring machines in cars. To start your car you swipe your credit card through the machine. Then, every time you exceed the speed limit the machine beeps and spits out a reciept for your already paid ticket. Happy motoring!
Murder, rape, and other terrible crimes happen in every country in the world every day, even when there isn't a war going on. War just changes the participants.
Strange! I have almost the exact same experience in my flying dreams. Getting into the air is like jumping, though sometimes I have trouble doing it at first. Once I am in the air I swim to stay up. However, at times I am able to realize that the jumping and swimming is unnecessary. Then all I have to do is think about it and I can take off with no effort at all.
Most of my flying dreams have another recurring theme in that I talk to people I know while flying and ask them why they can't fly too.
I'm protecting God.
I love this idea. It reveals the difference between people who really want to worship something they believe to be greater than themselves and those who are just using their professed religion to dominate, subjugate, manipulate, and fleece the masses.
By this I mean that almost every religion that has a personified diety acknowledges that God posesses omniscience and omnipotence. They also, by and large, acknowledge the fallability of man. Now I ask you, what omniscient and omnipotent God needs fallible mankind to help, protect, or assist Him?
A God like that doesn't need your help. If you are helping God, or protecting God, you probably need to re-examine where your motivations, beliefs, and actions actually come from. Doubly so if your actions are violent, judgemental, or vituperous.
Regulations are just another method of channeling the money to the *right* people and preventing competetion.
Sure they start out as a way of helping The People. That is how they are sold to the voters. However, as an interesting byproduct of how byzantine government regulations are, the only people qualified to oversee them when the first wave of burecrats move on are the people who work for the companies who were affected by those regualtions. I have no doubt strategic, continued, leveraged, and large donations from those companies have a persuasive effect as well.
So by generation 2 of beaurecrats you have swapped out government employees with past industry employees and now the fox is running the hen house. They then merrily go about restructuring enforcement of the current regulations and writing new ones that make it cost prohibitive for anyone not on the playing field to enter the game. This leads to a regulatorily supported limited market where only a few early adopters who are sufficiently capitalized can keep up with the regulatory changes. Anyone else who comes along and wants to dip their foot in the pool will have to pay the piper, and his fees are ludicrous.
So yeah, regulations are a good thing--kinda. They are, as all government laws, subject to manipulation and are so malleable due to lack of oversight and guiding ethics of the players that what starts out as a good thing ends up being a lap dog of the entities it was meant to restrain.
Hey, hey! Calm the fuck down. It's not rape. Don't you realize that being locked away from women for years in a building that is overflowing with sex pheremones from testosterone doped double Y chromosome types will eventually wear down even the most homophobic gay-bashers known to mankind? As a friend of mine likes to say, "We didn't rape anyone. After a week or two they are begging for some dick."
The funny part is not that people in prison are raped. The funny part is they engage in consensual homosexual sex and quite enjoy it. Lastly, the term he used should be indicative of the intent. It's not "I'm-gonna-get-anally-raped prison!" it's "pound-me-in-the-ass prison." The quote itself is phrased as a request. Think about it.
"We don't need to fear and change the government, we need to fear and change the power corporations have over us."
What?!? The US government, who ostensibly is responsible for protecting its citizens, is either gutlessly allowing or complicity helping companies to defraud, damage, shakedown, and systematically disenfranchise the American public. Our elected officials have the hands of big business shoved so far up their collective asses every time I watch Cspan I think it's the damn Muppet show. What's worse, the politicians appear to absolutely LOVE IT. They continually vote en masse for appropriations and measures that erode our rights all the while saying "those multimillion dollar corporate contributions had absolutely nothing to do with how hard we are fucking the American public here." From the DMCA and Mickey's infinite copyright to H1Bs, unrestrained immigration, and insane corporate bailouts the government can't seem to suck enough of the crack smoke billowing out if the rectums of the corporate lobbyists. Soon enough, if it hasn't already happened, our legislators will be unabashedly outsourcing their bill writing to their large corporate donors' legal teams.
In short, this battle has been waged for over 100 years, with business interests and government on one side and with the "people" on the other. They have been in bed together, off and on, for much longer than most of us have been alive. Also, consider the fact that companies have larger resources and greater influence than people individually do. And in an age where "wedge issues" are adroitly wielded by our government against their own electorate in an attempt to fracture and divide them is it any wonder the united front of a corporate entity has such influence, or that our government views us with such contempt?
I don't care who says it, tea partiers, tea drinkers, tea baggers, whatever. The label doesn't matter; it's the message that counts. The government is raperizing the American people like we are indigenous natives. This shit has got to stop.
The Arizona statutes only mimic and uphold the unenforced federal laws already on the books. In other words, if the federal government was enforcing their own laws Arizona would not need to pass any new initiatives.
Correlation does not equal causation. People who want to kill other people will find an excuse to do so.
Christianity is all about freedom. For instance, God did not stop Satan from tempting Adam and Eve even though God abhors temptation and sin. Similarly, he did not stop Adam and Eve from partaking of the fruit. Eons before this, God did not stop Satan and his followers from changing their minds about God's dominion and revolting. Even today, God does not enforce his beliefs on people nor does He advocate doing so. He did this because freedom is the ultimate gift of God to mankind and is the reason man was created in God's (mental) image.
You, like many others, have failed to distinguish the murderer from the message, and the oppressor from his excuse. The Bible forbids and decries such behavior from cover to cover, and yet you still insist that Christianity itself is responsible for people who commit those acts. Could you be any more obtuse?
Let's break it down:
1) Christian rule book says "Don't murder"
2) Person commits murder, claims to do it for Christianity
3) You say "It's Christianity!"
In the case of Christianity, it's the person, not the religion at the root of the problems you state. Some people will find any reason they can to justify their actions, no matter how unsuitable, incongruous, or inconsistent that reason and action are. Just be cognizant enough to discern the difference and don't let murderers, bombers, and tyrants masquerading as Christians dictate your thoughts about a religion that specifically prohibits those actions. I hate to say it like this, but doing so belies either an irrationallly intence presupposed prejudice against Christianity for which you are searching for justification, or a simplemindedness that is staggering in its vacuosity. As you seem to have your faculties about you I will go with option 3, that you misunderstand or are unaware of what the Bible says on these subjects, possibly having been misinformed at the hands of those who conform to the previous two categories I mentioned.
Side note: as an orthodox fundamental Christian I believe, as the Bible teaches, that government is a tool of humanity instituted by God to provide freedom to those who live under it. The purpose of this freedom is to allow each and every human self determination, as this is consistent with the will of God for mankind while they are on Earth. Therefore, as an instrument of freedom, government should not restrict the rights of people where they do not conflict with the sovereign rights of life, privacy, property. This includes granting an exclusive franchise to individuals or groups based on age (subject to limits of self determination), race, sex, economic condition, or religion. In conclusion, this specifically means the government should not concern itself with the sex of partners who apply for a legally sanctioned recognition of their relatioship, like marriage. In addition, they should not force, coerce, or mandate churches to perform ceremonies that conflict with their religious beliefs.
Great post and very thought provoking. I conjecture that maybe you do not go far enough with your estimation of fundamental differences between "us" and "them" (if they exist.)
By this I mean that our understanding of the universe is inexorably tied to our physical and mental construction. Our observations, experiemts, knowledge, and eventually our interactions with the universe are mandated by our characteristics as carbon based life forms. Assuming that alien intelligence resembles ours in any way seem to be hubris of the highest sort.
As a microcosm consider humans who seem to understand the world in a different way than most others. Whether they are left handed (right brained), dyslexic, savant, genius, synesthetic, or insane there are humans who process information differently from the majority of humanity and as a result see relationships and perform mental feats that baseline humans find suprising and extraordinary. Now consider a thinking being that has absolutely nothing in common with human mentality, brain structure, sensory organs, genetic and historical heritage, social norms, physical characteristics, or even hierarchy of needs (Maslo.) How much more suprising and different will their experience of the universe be? It could very well be that the universe they live in, though physically the same as ours, is expereintially so different that we would not have the ability to communicate. Even something as "universal" as mathematics might not apply to their thinking.
There is really no way to tell until we make first contact (if we ever do) what alien life will be like. There are literally hundreds of explanations of why we havent heard from aliens yet. Anything from different modes of communication to the lack of necessity of communication as we have developed (radio, light, etc.) to the non-exitence of alien life altogether. Hopefully we will one day find out why we havent heard from anyone else in the universe. If we do discover alien life I pray it becomes a stepping stone to greater understanding of ourselves and the universe we live in.
"...unprotected......why I pull out......wait for the `coming to stop before.....my left hand...."
That is what I got from your sentence. One of us needs to get laid.
I remember once clicking on an article link on the main page of /. that was redirected to goatse. It was removed shortly after and the article was updated with a "link removed because of random redirects" message.
Here is the really terrifying part of the hysteria around these laws: A similarly redirected link, this time to a FBI child porn honeypot, posted in an article titled "George Lucas aplolgises for Jar-Jar, takes own life" would land all of /. in prison.
There is a fundamental incongruity, a wrongness in execution of unforgivable scale, when a government dedicated to liberty has the ability to destroy a person's life because they posess a picture of something.
My true test of a good novel is not how well it reads, but how well it re-reads. Case in point, I read Battlefield in my early 20s and liked it. Due to its hefty size it was shelvled for about 5 years before re-reading. When I did it was as if all the luster seeped out of the pages and puddled on the shelf below it. I could hardly make it through the second time. I only finished by stubborn willpower and morbid curiosity.
Infection is a horrible analogy.
First infections are usually spread before symptoms occur. Incubation period, read about it.
Second, not all money spent on health care is spent on communicable diseases. Cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and trauma problems probably account for a majority of the spending on health care.
Third, even after starting treatment for a communicable disease it can still be transmitted to others.
"However, in this case the *stepfather* left a gun around that killed a child that wasn't his."
Two things. First, the mother was within three feet of the child when the incident ocurred, not the stepfather. Second, I know many stepfathers who would shoot *you* for implying their stepchild is not "his." Just because a child is not of your own blood doesn't mean you can't care for them in the same way a biological parent would. Adoptive parents who love their children and abusive biological parents are just two examples of how your logic fails.
Most "religious" people I know, and know of, do not "feel spiritual." They learn about their religion as a self-help course directed by God, as a guide/law book for morality, or as a compulsion ingrained into them as a child and reinforced with inner feelings of guilt.
The people I know who tell me thay have "felt spiritual" are dope-heads, "chrismatic" worshippers, new-age spiritualists, kooky weirdos, and psychics. This observation matches much better with your first statement of people who feel spitirual not using their whole brain.
I think the supporting (or contradicting) evidence you seek has yet to be seen. By this I mean we have insufficiently advanced technology to prove or disprove either side. Either way it turns out, I think the search for an AI system analogous to the human mind will reveal more about that mind than all our previous efforts to combined.
"Nerds do not memorize meaningless trivia without good reason."
I thought all nerds memorized meaningless trivia. Then again, maybe its just me. It has always been a trait I expressed, even before I actively fed it by reading encyclopedias, dictionaries, and anything else I could get my hands on. Howerver, my nerdy friends are similar. This behevior could be because:
a) they are good at memorization
b) they crave knowledge
c) they see the potential to correlate (previously) unrealted fields of knowledge
d) they like to spread knowledge to others
e) its fun at parties. Ok, like we go to parties...its fun when you gather with other geeks to play DnD and stuff.
As an aside, I have noticed resentment and even outright derision from colleagues that do not posess my level of vocabulary and broad trivia knowledge. That I can handle, being on the outside of the cliques and groups is something I dealt with during gradeshcool and high school. What I see as even worse, though, is a marked lack of curiosity about the world in general in most 20-somethings (even those in college!). Maybe lack of curiosity is not stong enough. I see them actively ignoring avenues of self enrichment, asking questions and then turning away from the answers, limiting their academic performance to the bare minimum necessary to pass, and relying on memorization rather than understanding and internalizing the knowledge.
Again maybe this is just the people in my preiphery, but I can't help feeling like most of the young people I see stigmatize above average intelligence and look at people funny when they read wikipedia instead of watching youtube.
For some reason the assumption is that everyone wants the same size slice of pizza. I disagree. I prefer a pizza with a variety of slice sizes.
For instance, large slices are good for large appetites/people (men), while medium and small slices are good for smaller appetitets/people(women and children). Also, the small ones are a perfect finisher when you have just consumed a number of large slices and are just about to bust.
Also, the slice porportion and their accompanying aesthetics are important. Somedays the fat-looking big slices that are almost a fourth of the pizza look best. Other times the skinny ones that are so slim they can't even legitamately accommodate an intact piece of pepperoni appeal to me. Proportion can weigh as heavily as quantity and distribution of toppings when it comes to choosing the perfect slice.
Personally, I would be interested in a cutting pattern that guaranteed the most variety of slice sizes.
Late life conception children are also statistically more likely to be of genius intelligence.
Not to sound insensetive, but the rule has never been "You are paid in-line with the amount of work you do." Just look at salaried programmers that put in death-march hours near the end of projects for an example.
Sadly, the rule has always been "You are paid what you can negotiate." And in the case of someone with a disorder like this, they will never have the perspicacity to negotiate a good wage for their service, no matter how miraculous and invaluable they seem to the rest of us.
Your fears are sound. It may never become an issue, though. The stigma of workers with "disorders" will keep most companies from tapping into this resurce, and the philanthropic-shield effect of "giving a retarded guy a job" (as incorrect as that sentiment is, most will see it in that light) will deflect most of the outrage and invective.
Furthermore, a "disorder" with certain characteristic traits can't be a stereotype by definition. You either have the disorder and thus the accompanying traits,, or you don't. Arguing that people with autism are being stereotyped when you state they prefer repetetive tasks and have an eye for divergence is like arguing that it is stereotyping to say white people are white.
OCD is a scary disorder. I had a friend that developed it when we were in college. Her "rituals" ran the gamut from hand washing, counting while performing unecessary repetetive actions, number fixations, packing and unpacking her backpack repeatedly to make sure her books/homework was actually in there, etc. Before the onset she was a particularly bright, cheerful, and atractive young woman. After a few months with OCD she just looked haunted.
She got some treatment initially from some groups the school set her up with. Sadly, I think I set her back in her recovery substantially with a single sentence. She mentioned they had her on a regimen of "negative feedback." I inquired what that meant and she pointed out a sturdy rubber band around her wrist. "Every time I begin a ritual I snap the rubber band. The pain becomes associated with the ritual and eventually you will stop." Her eyes brightened when she said this, indicating it was working for her. Unthinking, I replied "Yeah, at least until you start a ritual about the number of times you snap the rubber band." The next time I saw her she was on some serious medication.
Question: Is it considered blackmail if the only threat you make is that you will reveal the information if they don't do it themselves?
What do you call a vehicle that is limited to 450 cars, that is available in only two states, and even then by invitation only, is not made on a production line, cannot be bought or sold by the driver, and only costs $850 per month though the build cost is over $150,000? Sound like a beta to you? It does to me.
Also, the fact that Wired magazine explicitly refers to it as a beta test might be a dead giveaway: http://www.wired.com/autopia/2009/07/bmw-mini-e/