This is some years ago, maybe things have changed but I think the data coming back from the API is what confused our users most. Since it wasn't the full fire-hose, the API results were often inconsistent. Sometimes tweets you'd expect to be there wouldn't show, sometimes there seemed to be whole swaths of data missing from more recent days, sometimes it was date ranges, or sometimes it was baffling random. We dabbled with Gnip but unfortunately the pricing was way out of our range. Gnip seemed to be more aimed at large companies with deep pockets. Instead it just came a little used feature of our product that got more or less ignored. I don't think the Twitter API product was terrible, it just fell short of our users expectations and we couldn't explain our way out of it.
Link or not, I do think videogames are still too one-dimensional in dealing out death. Also I really don't get why male teenie fantasies have to evolve around the closest approximation to real war we can produce. Battlefield 1 was the pinnacle: Celebrating the massakre that WW1 war as something enjoyable left an awkward taste behind. Yes, the GFX were aweseome and I'm sure the leveldesign and the gameplay were top notch.... But why again do we have to simulate and fetishize real war as close as possible?
I read an article about a scandinavian dad who had exact same discussion with his teenage boys. He made an agreement with them: They would travel to israel and talk with israeli and hamas veterans and visit the places where they hang out and tell their stories. After that, the boys could play whatever they chose to.... Smart dad. I don't know how that turned out though.
I do get Unreal Tournament CTF, Tribes CTF, Xonotic CTF and Quake 3 Arena CTF. Bouncing around through space with teleporters, strange gaming levels and respawning instantly once your fragged and shooting bizar weapons that don't exist in the real world is all-out fun. And the direkt link to violence I don't see in both cases.... I do get stress and anxiety issues when playing these games for an extended period of time though.
Very noble argument of you however I'm shocked at your blindness to our basic human nature. We are a violent species. It's hard to undo millions (or billions, depending on how you want to look at it) of years of evolution. No matter how much nurturing we do to overcome our nature, it comes as prepackaged as a built-in feature. We all have our genetic variations, and certainly some people are more violent than others. Regardless, it's better to be aware, accept, and control it than to deny its existence.
As a resident of the east bay, earning 100k and being able to own a house can be a problem so I sympathize with them.
But if your making 200k+ then you're just being jealous.
I wouldn't, he makes 60% more than you. At 100K, I can sort of understand your plight with such high housing costs. At 160K and more? Nope. Yes, I'm sorry the multiple lattes a day, subscription to blue apron, freshly pressed juices, student loans, the loan on their Audi A3, and all the other daily and monthly expenses are difficult to balance with their 160K+ salaries. 1st world problems. Those salaries are no where near what the average US Joe&Jane make, likewise I doubt their lifestyles are anything like what an average Joe&Jane is.
If you paid for an undergrad degree at a research institution, and didn't understand that you should have been working in some famous professor's lab to actually get your education, you're going to be pretty upset when you get out.
And didn't understand... because someone should have taught you that when you were 14, so this basically blames the schools for not properly educating kids about the ways of the world. Fair enough.
I'd suggest it goes a little further though. The left has a bias or belief that problems are the fault of society, whereas the right tends to bias to the belief that problems are the fault of the individual. Now, the problem is that, the left tends to be more associated with education (because if society and its institutions are the problem, then those are the institutions which need to be improved, and education needs to be improved). So the left is more idealistic about the role of education. See it is implicit. But what you're saying is, from more of a right wing point of view, hey nobody should be an idiot, or ignorant, to the fact that the world is competitive and selfish place, and that individuals have to learn to handle this, mostly via self control and character building and smarts (so don't come crying when you become a victim).
And that, I think, is fair enough, as there is no real difference between the "individual" and "society", as ideological categories, because we are always both, we are all individuals and we all live in society and are part of social institutions. Individuals have agency. Groups have communion. And we always act and function in both. So the problems are often found in both places. (A way forward for politics is to become both left and right wing).
So I would just add that, I agree in the sense that, our society needs to spend more time acclimatising kids to "how the world works", as by nature, humans are both competitive and cooperative. And we need to be educated to understand when and where each one is the dominant driver. So I do agree, it is right to tell people that they need to wise up about American universities. But I wouldn't blame kids for not knowing that already, if they haven't been taught.
Sure sounds like someone advocating the smart middle instead of ideological lefts and rights. Yay!
That can not and will not ever happen because they are fundamentally opposed entities. The Libertarian party's core tenet is fuck you, I'm eating, and the Green party's core tenet is wait, I live here. Ne'er the twain shall meet. If we had a less-insane Libertarian party which cared about the environment, then you wouldn't need a Green party.
Wow, you have quite the narrow view of people don't you? I guess in your world people are just cookies that fit predefined shapes. Yes, all green party people are the same. All libertarians are the same. People are groups they're not individuals, that's an insane idea! Most libertarians I know (not the ones the media likes to snap up) do in fact care about the environment. It falls within their core tenet because they care about protecting the rights, liberties, and livelihoods of all individuals... hey, that includes the environment too because I don't want you to poo in my backyard or the air I breathe. The big difference between libertarians and green party is *how* they do it. That's where the chasm lies.
There is overwhelming evidence that Climate Change is real. The problem isn't the evidence, but your refusal (for whatever reason) to accept it. It's the exact same attitude as anti-vaxxers or anti-evolution people. The evidence is overwhelming, yet instead of accepting that the evidence exists and adjusting their opinions accordingly, they double-down on their pre-conceived notions because of some kind of emotional investment in what they believe.
However, I agree with your main point. People need to stop fucking like rabbits. I see religion as being a serious factor in this, because most religions *insist* that people fuck like rabbits for "the greater glory of god" or some bullshit. The Catholic Church, for example, consider contraceptives to be Bad(tm).
We're eating this planet alive with our collective greed and self-obsession, and nobody seems to care. I hate to say it, but we *need* another world war to thin down the numbers.
We hand out condoms for free in many places in Africa affected by AIDS and most people refuse to use them and it has nothing to do with their religion. They have every incentive to avoid unprotected sex and stop producing children. Yet, they still do. Sure, while it's easy and mentally satisfying to simplify the problem and blame religion. The reality of the situation is far, far, far more complex. You have to dig into the fundamentals of human nature and begin to unravel the hundreds of reasons why groups of people make bad decisions. Cultural, psychological, economical, biological, etc. There are 1000's of factors and yes, religion is certainly mixed into that soup of reasons. Being greedy and self obsessive is definitely part of our programming, it's not easy to override our basic instincts.
What about the fact that species die out all the time? Like before we were here? Actually, some of them dying out are the reason we are here now! It happens. It will happen to us. It will suck when it is our turn, but it will still happen.
Sure, of course. But I think you're making a very large oversight by ignoring to recognize the rate of change over time. That's like saying there's no difference between a vehicle that accelerates from 0-100km/hr in 30 seconds from vehicle car that can do it in 2 seconds. Big difference. Rate of change matters. When you're trying to figure out where you are now and then calculating how far we're going to be in the future after a fixed period of time you're going to get very different results based on that figure. Then we can talk about scale, it's easier to affect the rate of change on something small like a 2-passenger car (or your backyard's ecosystem) than it is to affect the rate of change on a seafaring super tanker (or a continent's ecosystem). It's critical to keep everything in the proper perspective. If you don't, you're going to draw fundamentally flawed conclusions.
I guess if you don't know that science is NOT THE SAME as "millennial proverbs" in a general sense, you might not be cut out for either? Hey, new proverb! Except I'm old.
Stop being so dumb, it's making your generation look bad.
I'm guessing he probably meant proverbs that have spanned millennia. Not proverbs created by a single generation. Hopefully most people are smart enough to realize your brash jump to conclusion doesn't accurately represent your "generation" like you just projected. Never stops surprising me people really think these "generations" live inside defined boundaries of us vs. them. Oh, how hard it is for us to shed that tribal mentality that's coded into us from birth,
I'd be willing to bet they were paid for their services. If so, that would be only reason other major email providers haven't done this yet. They're haven't been as desperate for revenue like Yahoo. It's very likely there will come a time when they will be. That's one of those facets of this problem not getting enough attention. Everyone's much more "trustworthy" when they're stable financially, even corporations. Can you still continue to trust them with your valuable personal data when their luck begins to run out?
FFS the planet is NOT going to die, there's nothing to 'save' it from. Evidence abounds proving there's been *huge* climate changes in the past prior to mankind doing jack shit like farming, storing water or cooking our meals the Earth has continued to live on and support life and will continue to do so despite a single degree shift in global temperatures. Animals, insects and plants will adjust and continue on like they have through greater changes the last several *Billion* years.
You need to be reminded that we are also indigenous to the planet and have every right to live on it just like every creature you mentioned.
If you feel like mankind must be removed from the planet then please prove the conviction of your position by starting with yourself.
A very good example of someone intelligent saying nothing untrue but coming to the wrong conclusions. Yes, there certainly have been giant shifts in climate in this planet without any human involvement whatsoever. This in no way precludes humanity's ability to cause a catastrophe. That's like saying your grass lawn only gets wet when it rains, and it can never be made wet any other way (be it intentionally or accidentally). Of course the earth will in all most likelihood continue supporting life in the event of a climate catastrophe in some shape or form. What if 1000, 10000's, 100000's, if not a million plant and animal species can die off in the process. You're surprisingly OK with that? If water levels rise and we need to spend trillions of dollars moving/rebuilding cities, infrastructure, and agricultural centers. You'd still be OK with that? You think there will be no massive economic crisis because of that? If these were preventable events, we shouldn't try to do something? The problem is, we're not entirely certain how bad things could get but we do know they can get very bad. Maybe it'll only cost $50 trillion, maybe only $10 trillion, or maybe 90% of human population will get eliminated. Maybe all? We don't know what we don't know. The earth has also seen mass extinction events of 90+% species, so it would not be unprecedented. Even if humanity survived it would be a huge set back for humanity's progress. When you put humanity's long term survival in the shopping cart, all of those high short term costs start looking mighty cheap all of a sudden. Don't you think? You can debate all day over the costs, it's difficult to say because it's far from being conclusive. But to say there would be cost and no effect would be dead wrong. In fact that's the *only* one wrong conclusion you can make.
As for people who say we should remove ourselves from the planet are the far extreme or just trolls, don't pay attention to them. All we just need to stop proverbial !@*$'ing where we eat and sleep.
This is what my biggest problem is. The only options $300 installation and free 5 Mbps service, or $70 a month 1 Gbps service. The first option is too slow, even if there is no monthly bill, and the second option is more than I want to spend for internet. I would love a $40 option even if it was only 50-100 Mbps. 100 Mbps would be enough to have 4 Netflix Ultra HD 4K streams going at the same time, or just have everybody on HD 1080p streams and still have plenty of bandwidth left over. Giving me 1 Gbps internet does not give me any noticeable internet service than giving me 100 Mbps except when I see the bill at the end of the month.
Am I missing something here? That's how much I currently pay for fiber internet here in Western New York, $72.99/mo for 25/5mb. Why the hell doesn't Google Fiber come out here, I'd love to kick Verizon FIOS to the curb for a lateral price move. I don't have any other bundled services, internet only.
Insurance agents, bus drivers, taxi drivers, chauffeurs and hired drivers are also going to see far fewer jobs.
All of these different levels of people will still be here. They will still have bills and need to eat and have shelter, but WHAT are they supposed to do when their jobs go away?
Just piggy backing on what you said here because you're actually understating the effect on insurance from car automation. It's certainly not *just* insurance agents. Personal auto insurance is a ~$125B industry today. Not even including commercial auto! That doesn't just affect the local agent a consumer works with, it's the entire industry. From executives, accountants, actuaries, underwriters, analysts, IT, software vendors, everyone. By some estimates, this industry will shrink in excess of 50% by 2040.
Society has failed structurally to provide many with the opportunities and tools to keep a viable career path open for their working lifetime.
Why is it society's responsibility to teach you job skills? Society (by which you obviously mean the government) already gives everyone 13 years of education (K-12), and if you walk away from that with no job skill that can't be better done with a servo motor, that is your own fault. I don't think there will be a big revolutionary change if we change the schools to teach for, say, 13 and a half years. People that are willing to learn will continue to do well, and the rest won't.
No, society doesn't have to mean government but it does include it. It's the entire collective, both people and its government. Either way, I used to once agree with you 100% about 5-10 years ago. Since then I've realized I was being naive. Not everyone is smart, ambitious, and young as myself or the group of people I associate myself with. We're talking about 9,000 men and women who may have done nothing but work their factory line, every day, every week, ever year, for what? The past 5, 10, 20, maybe even 40 years? The reality is our brains lose their edge very quickly. It's hard to keep it in good shape when you have a mind numbing job like that. Though no doubt, I'm confident some percentage of those 9,000 did retool/reinvent themselves after losing their jobs. I'm still sure many of them didn't. I'm sorry but the reality is they're going to be left behind. I'm sure the odds of getting left behind increase significantly if they're 50 or older. We need a culture change, we need a society change, we need an education change, we need to at least improve something somewhere. I really don't have a good solution. However, I do know expecting them to do it themselves is exactly why where we are today.
Sure, if we could change the world such that everyone retains their youthful, ambitious, flexible, mind during their entire employment career, regardless of the career path they chose, then yes, that would be the ultimate solution. But that's just not reality.
Good thing there's a better approach then. We can merely wait a few decades and get better data than all that awesome data you mention. The future can't be faked.
Funny how you're so confident and then when questioned, it's "Science is not about being sure." Well, my view is that when you use science to justify a massive restructuring of all human society, you better be backed by a lot more than that.
Really? You never act on any evidence unless it's 100% certain, if and only if it's 100% certain? For health, profession, traveling, disease, safety, investments, anything? You never make estimates or take precautionary measures on anything? It's almost like you're insisting you only see things in black and white. I somehow very, very much doubt that.
Casting aside the science for a moment. I imagine nearly everyone, including you, is willing to take measured precautions to protect themselves even if the is nothing more than mere shreds of evidence to cause harm. Science enter stage right, there's plenty of evidence supporting climate change. Climate change has been happening since this damned planet formed. Only debatable questions are who, what, when, and how much. The current "sensationalized" theory on the table is predicting a a couple degrees increase in temperate in the next 100 years. The temperature is not even that big of a damned deal, 2 degrees doesn't hurt anybody much. It's all the other far more adverse effects on the global planet. Acidity of the ocean, rising sea water, changing weather patterns. Why do those things matter? Because we've invested trillions, trillions, and trillions of dollars building things like agriculture, residential, infrastructure, canals, water ways in the world with certain assumptions that are unwinding before our eyes. I'm not sure if you really intend to portray yourself is not caring about protecting our society until it's far too late to reverse it.
How about just "do the right thing" right? It's a shame it's very difficult to litigate morality or ethics. People will always find both a reason and a workaround.
And Facebook, an app that just eats cycles and battery life on both iOS and Android. That such a major player as Facebook writes such a shitty awful resource hogging app frankly shocks me... until I remember iTunes on Windows.
Oh I very much doubt it's an accident at all. Facebook makes their living off gathering information from its users, aggregating, and selling/advertising. I can guarantee that's at least partially if not entirely why their app is "resource hogging".
Wasn't it already figured out that trying to blow nukes off on an asteroid surface would achieve approximately JACK SHIT?
They're not sufficiently powerful to break up mass, and due to being nuked in space, the kinetic transfer is significantly less, therefore "deflection" wouldn't happen either.
Well you figured that out pretty quickly. Obviously you plotted out your formula out proving its impossibility on the back of a paper napkin, right? Can you show your math before you start discrediting your fellow scientists on this idea? You can figure this out on a napkin if you want to using the formula below as a starting point and then estimating the mass, velocity, and kinetic energy of an incoming asteroid. You could calculate how much kinetic energy is needed to deflect an asteroid.
It has been estimated that a velocity change of just 3.5/t × 10^-2 ms^-1 (where t is the number of years until potential impact) is needed to successfully deflect a body on a direct collision trajectory. In addition, under certain circumstances, much smaller velocity changes are needed. wikipedia
Where is the money to provide this "Universal Basic Income" going to come from?
How will employers that still have a workforce respond in terms of existing wages?
How much inflation will this cause? What will happen to home prices/rents/leases/etc costs?
Don't seeing it working realistically until human nature changes dramatically...
I completely understand your cynicism because I agree but I don't see an amount specified in the article. If it's something meager like $7K-$15K then I'm not sure it would truly change much of anything. I mean in the US, I think we more or less already have this under different names and parameters? I would be of the opinion that welfare, medicaid, medicare, social security, and the standard tax deduction all touch the spirit of a "universal basic income" except through complex rules, inclusions, and exclusions. I think current laws' end result is trying surgically pinpoint the people that need it "more" but than others. More or less they favor the people that are old, impoverished, or crippled but even those doing well still get some minimal benefits annually. Without knowing all of the rules it would be hard for me to be supportive or not but if they did away with all of the other existing systems of support I would certainly be in favor of overhauling and simplifying the entire system top to bottom. Now if the amount was something like $30K or more, my opinion would shift drastically.
I personally believe marijuana usage should be legalized. It's no more harmful than other substances like alcohol or tobacco for example. That being said, I would strongly discourage my kids and friends from using the substance. Granted this is just my personal anecdotal evidence, but any of my friends, or anyone at all I know that has ever smoked pot on a regular prolonged basis seemed to have been completely robbed of any serious ambition. It seems like nothing really much mattered to them anymore, they were perfectly happy being mediocre people. Go home, chill, and smoke pot. Just my personal observations, not scientific facts.
My opinions may not carry much currency because they're purely anecdotal. I still believe the US education system is one of the best in the world but at the same time I think our sometimes lack-luster education and performance results are far more culturally based than anyone gives it credit. Growing up as a US-born child of an immigrant family may give me a very biased perspective but I use it all the time nonetheless. My story is typical for many immigrants, it's practically a cliche. My parents didn't know English and came to the US with $400 in their pocket in the early 80s. Yes, we were on welfare, yes we collected food stamps, yes my family took terrible low skill and low earning jobs like cleaning, harvesting, and the like, yes we grew up in the inner city being the 1 of 2 Caucasian families in the entire neighborhood, yes we had 3 generations living in one household, and yes English was not my first language.
But we climbed the *#!@ out of there as fast as we could, because that's why we came to the US: to do well. We came with ambitions, with the belief that education was one thing the "man", whether it's a Soviet government or oppressive oligarchy, could not take away from you. Not doing well in school simply was not an option. My mother get her degree and my father got a decent job at a factory. While my parents certainly did well for themselves, the next generation, like myself, we did even better. I can say from my limited exposure to the education system, at least here in NY, is that very, very, very few of my classmates had the same ambitions. In fact, most would have seen me as being aggressively competitive but in my eyes and my parents I was only allowed to see myself as still not trying hard enough. I admit that half of my class mates were brighter than me, but I'm sorry to say that few of them tried half as hard nor did as well.
If every kid had that ambition you'd have to be scared of what the US could do instead of can't do. Unfortunately it's my observation that many kids *and* their adult parents here in the US lack any self control. They are far too wrapped up in finding the next source of entertainment than setting up a future for themselves, family, and country. Be it TV, alcohol, music, fame, partying, drugs, games, and sports (yes, I said sports, let your verbal abuse fly!). There's nothing wrong with any of those things are just fine per se, as long as they're done in moderation.
I don't know much of anything about that mining company specifically but just want to remind everyone that just b/c a company goes out of business it doesn't mean the participants didn't have a good run while it lasted. You'd hope someone founding or running a company would throw everything they had into it to make it work. But it's certainly not uncommon to see exactly the opposite, people extracting so much wealth out of the business that it's driven into the ground.
Then why are you not fighting pollution, instead of CO2 which plants need to live?
The whole problem I have with you WarmMongers is that you in fact have essentially ended the fight against real pollution to tilt against the CO2 windmill, all for the sake of making a few people (not you BTW) rich.
So why can't you do both? I seriously doubt there were many so-called environmentalists that didn't say "boo". Anyone I know thought it was a complete disaster, environmentalist or not. Unfortunately there are tens of thousands of disasters like this, both big and small, short and long. The great lakes, oceans, farm run off, on and on and on... nearly all environmentalists care about all of them so I have no idea what you're getting "sickened" at. Either way, I hope you would at least admit that if the current estimates of warming, 2-3 degrees in the next 50-100 years, if "true", would inflict far more damage globally than one river locally? Even if it's not during our lifetimes.
Of course plants need CO2 to live, exactly who is advocating taking it all away? The argument is about moderation, not complete elimination? Not sure if you're just being deliberately facetious there or what.
We need new regulations for drones, because they've changed the game in terms of privacy.
We need laws to protect people from spying, both by private parties and government entities, via drones.
We need laws that say you can't just fly a drone over someone else's property and follow them around, or look in their windows, or whatever. We need regulations to define reasonable expectation of privacy directly to drones.
IMO, we need to have some ability for people to defend themselves from these things as well, whether it's jamming them, shooting them down on your property, whatever.
Agreeing vehemently. I mean I've always agreed with this, but it just kicked up a notch last month when the obnoxious neighbor in my neighborhood decided to get a drone with a mounted camera. You know the neighbor that never says/waves hello, holds ginormous parties that block traffic on our street, cranks the music, "uses" his punching bag while keeping his garage door open, likes to rev his boat's engine while mounted on-trailer for hours, and oh... and a Cadillac Escalade for each and every family member. Yes, those kinds of neighbors. Apparently he finds it very entertaining to fly his drone around the neighborhood, land on people's driveways, go in their backyards, flying around above everyone's houses - mind you which 50% of our neighborhood has skylights which naturally isn't easy to install curtains on. It's people like that, who lack common sense, that *need* to be regulated and unfortunately ruin it for everyone else.
As a side note, I can't wait for those neighbors to move out:)
Slashdot Mirror
This is some years ago, maybe things have changed but I think the data coming back from the API is what confused our users most. Since it wasn't the full fire-hose, the API results were often inconsistent. Sometimes tweets you'd expect to be there wouldn't show, sometimes there seemed to be whole swaths of data missing from more recent days, sometimes it was date ranges, or sometimes it was baffling random. We dabbled with Gnip but unfortunately the pricing was way out of our range. Gnip seemed to be more aimed at large companies with deep pockets. Instead it just came a little used feature of our product that got more or less ignored. I don't think the Twitter API product was terrible, it just fell short of our users expectations and we couldn't explain our way out of it.
Link or not, I do think videogames are still too one-dimensional in dealing out death. Also I really don't get why male teenie fantasies have to evolve around the closest approximation to real war we can produce. Battlefield 1 was the pinnacle: Celebrating the massakre that WW1 war as something enjoyable left an awkward taste behind. Yes, the GFX were aweseome and I'm sure the leveldesign and the gameplay were top notch. ... But why again do we have to simulate and fetishize real war as close as possible?
I read an article about a scandinavian dad who had exact same discussion with his teenage boys. He made an agreement with them: They would travel to israel and talk with israeli and hamas veterans and visit the places where they hang out and tell their stories. After that, the boys could play whatever they chose to. ... Smart dad. I don't know how that turned out though.
I do get Unreal Tournament CTF, Tribes CTF, Xonotic CTF and Quake 3 Arena CTF. Bouncing around through space with teleporters, strange gaming levels and respawning instantly once your fragged and shooting bizar weapons that don't exist in the real world is all-out fun. And the direkt link to violence I don't see in both cases. ... I do get stress and anxiety issues when playing these games for an extended period of time though.
Very noble argument of you however I'm shocked at your blindness to our basic human nature. We are a violent species. It's hard to undo millions (or billions, depending on how you want to look at it) of years of evolution. No matter how much nurturing we do to overcome our nature, it comes as prepackaged as a built-in feature. We all have our genetic variations, and certainly some people are more violent than others. Regardless, it's better to be aware, accept, and control it than to deny its existence.
As a resident of the east bay, earning 100k and being able to own a house can be a problem so I sympathize with them.
But if your making 200k+ then you're just being jealous.
I wouldn't, he makes 60% more than you. At 100K, I can sort of understand your plight with such high housing costs. At 160K and more? Nope. Yes, I'm sorry the multiple lattes a day, subscription to blue apron, freshly pressed juices, student loans, the loan on their Audi A3, and all the other daily and monthly expenses are difficult to balance with their 160K+ salaries. 1st world problems. Those salaries are no where near what the average US Joe&Jane make, likewise I doubt their lifestyles are anything like what an average Joe&Jane is.
If you paid for an undergrad degree at a research institution, and didn't understand that you should have been working in some famous professor's lab to actually get your education, you're going to be pretty upset when you get out.
And didn't understand... because someone should have taught you that when you were 14, so this basically blames the schools for not properly educating kids about the ways of the world. Fair enough.
I'd suggest it goes a little further though. The left has a bias or belief that problems are the fault of society, whereas the right tends to bias to the belief that problems are the fault of the individual. Now, the problem is that, the left tends to be more associated with education (because if society and its institutions are the problem, then those are the institutions which need to be improved, and education needs to be improved). So the left is more idealistic about the role of education. See it is implicit. But what you're saying is, from more of a right wing point of view, hey nobody should be an idiot, or ignorant, to the fact that the world is competitive and selfish place, and that individuals have to learn to handle this, mostly via self control and character building and smarts (so don't come crying when you become a victim).
And that, I think, is fair enough, as there is no real difference between the "individual" and "society", as ideological categories, because we are always both, we are all individuals and we all live in society and are part of social institutions. Individuals have agency. Groups have communion. And we always act and function in both. So the problems are often found in both places. (A way forward for politics is to become both left and right wing).
So I would just add that, I agree in the sense that, our society needs to spend more time acclimatising kids to "how the world works", as by nature, humans are both competitive and cooperative. And we need to be educated to understand when and where each one is the dominant driver. So I do agree, it is right to tell people that they need to wise up about American universities. But I wouldn't blame kids for not knowing that already, if they haven't been taught.
Sure sounds like someone advocating the smart middle instead of ideological lefts and rights. Yay!
That can not and will not ever happen because they are fundamentally opposed entities. The Libertarian party's core tenet is fuck you, I'm eating, and the Green party's core tenet is wait, I live here. Ne'er the twain shall meet. If we had a less-insane Libertarian party which cared about the environment, then you wouldn't need a Green party.
Wow, you have quite the narrow view of people don't you? I guess in your world people are just cookies that fit predefined shapes. Yes, all green party people are the same. All libertarians are the same. People are groups they're not individuals, that's an insane idea! Most libertarians I know (not the ones the media likes to snap up) do in fact care about the environment. It falls within their core tenet because they care about protecting the rights, liberties, and livelihoods of all individuals... hey, that includes the environment too because I don't want you to poo in my backyard or the air I breathe. The big difference between libertarians and green party is *how* they do it. That's where the chasm lies.
There is overwhelming evidence that Climate Change is real. The problem isn't the evidence, but your refusal (for whatever reason) to accept it. It's the exact same attitude as anti-vaxxers or anti-evolution people. The evidence is overwhelming, yet instead of accepting that the evidence exists and adjusting their opinions accordingly, they double-down on their pre-conceived notions because of some kind of emotional investment in what they believe.
However, I agree with your main point. People need to stop fucking like rabbits. I see religion as being a serious factor in this, because most religions *insist* that people fuck like rabbits for "the greater glory of god" or some bullshit. The Catholic Church, for example, consider contraceptives to be Bad(tm).
We're eating this planet alive with our collective greed and self-obsession, and nobody seems to care. I hate to say it, but we *need* another world war to thin down the numbers.
We hand out condoms for free in many places in Africa affected by AIDS and most people refuse to use them and it has nothing to do with their religion. They have every incentive to avoid unprotected sex and stop producing children. Yet, they still do. Sure, while it's easy and mentally satisfying to simplify the problem and blame religion. The reality of the situation is far, far, far more complex. You have to dig into the fundamentals of human nature and begin to unravel the hundreds of reasons why groups of people make bad decisions. Cultural, psychological, economical, biological, etc. There are 1000's of factors and yes, religion is certainly mixed into that soup of reasons. Being greedy and self obsessive is definitely part of our programming, it's not easy to override our basic instincts.
What about the fact that species die out all the time? Like before we were here? Actually, some of them dying out are the reason we are here now! It happens. It will happen to us. It will suck when it is our turn, but it will still happen.
Sure, of course. But I think you're making a very large oversight by ignoring to recognize the rate of change over time. That's like saying there's no difference between a vehicle that accelerates from 0-100km/hr in 30 seconds from vehicle car that can do it in 2 seconds. Big difference. Rate of change matters. When you're trying to figure out where you are now and then calculating how far we're going to be in the future after a fixed period of time you're going to get very different results based on that figure. Then we can talk about scale, it's easier to affect the rate of change on something small like a 2-passenger car (or your backyard's ecosystem) than it is to affect the rate of change on a seafaring super tanker (or a continent's ecosystem). It's critical to keep everything in the proper perspective. If you don't, you're going to draw fundamentally flawed conclusions.
I guess if you don't know that science is NOT THE SAME as "millennial proverbs" in a general sense, you might not be cut out for either? Hey, new proverb! Except I'm old.
Stop being so dumb, it's making your generation look bad.
I'm guessing he probably meant proverbs that have spanned millennia. Not proverbs created by a single generation. Hopefully most people are smart enough to realize your brash jump to conclusion doesn't accurately represent your "generation" like you just projected. Never stops surprising me people really think these "generations" live inside defined boundaries of us vs. them. Oh, how hard it is for us to shed that tribal mentality that's coded into us from birth,
I'd be willing to bet they were paid for their services. If so, that would be only reason other major email providers haven't done this yet. They're haven't been as desperate for revenue like Yahoo. It's very likely there will come a time when they will be. That's one of those facets of this problem not getting enough attention. Everyone's much more "trustworthy" when they're stable financially, even corporations. Can you still continue to trust them with your valuable personal data when their luck begins to run out?
FFS the planet is NOT going to die, there's nothing to 'save' it from. Evidence abounds proving there's been *huge* climate changes in the past prior to mankind doing jack shit like farming, storing water or cooking our meals the Earth has continued to live on and support life and will continue to do so despite a single degree shift in global temperatures. Animals, insects and plants will adjust and continue on like they have through greater changes the last several *Billion* years.
You need to be reminded that we are also indigenous to the planet and have every right to live on it just like every creature you mentioned.
If you feel like mankind must be removed from the planet then please prove the conviction of your position by starting with yourself.
A very good example of someone intelligent saying nothing untrue but coming to the wrong conclusions. Yes, there certainly have been giant shifts in climate in this planet without any human involvement whatsoever. This in no way precludes humanity's ability to cause a catastrophe. That's like saying your grass lawn only gets wet when it rains, and it can never be made wet any other way (be it intentionally or accidentally). Of course the earth will in all most likelihood continue supporting life in the event of a climate catastrophe in some shape or form. What if 1000, 10000's, 100000's, if not a million plant and animal species can die off in the process. You're surprisingly OK with that? If water levels rise and we need to spend trillions of dollars moving/rebuilding cities, infrastructure, and agricultural centers. You'd still be OK with that? You think there will be no massive economic crisis because of that? If these were preventable events, we shouldn't try to do something? The problem is, we're not entirely certain how bad things could get but we do know they can get very bad. Maybe it'll only cost $50 trillion, maybe only $10 trillion, or maybe 90% of human population will get eliminated. Maybe all? We don't know what we don't know. The earth has also seen mass extinction events of 90+% species, so it would not be unprecedented. Even if humanity survived it would be a huge set back for humanity's progress. When you put humanity's long term survival in the shopping cart, all of those high short term costs start looking mighty cheap all of a sudden. Don't you think? You can debate all day over the costs, it's difficult to say because it's far from being conclusive. But to say there would be cost and no effect would be dead wrong. In fact that's the *only* one wrong conclusion you can make.
As for people who say we should remove ourselves from the planet are the far extreme or just trolls, don't pay attention to them. All we just need to stop proverbial !@*$'ing where we eat and sleep.
Pretty sure this AI knows neither at this time.
This is what my biggest problem is. The only options $300 installation and free 5 Mbps service, or $70 a month 1 Gbps service. The first option is too slow, even if there is no monthly bill, and the second option is more than I want to spend for internet. I would love a $40 option even if it was only 50-100 Mbps. 100 Mbps would be enough to have 4 Netflix Ultra HD 4K streams going at the same time, or just have everybody on HD 1080p streams and still have plenty of bandwidth left over. Giving me 1 Gbps internet does not give me any noticeable internet service than giving me 100 Mbps except when I see the bill at the end of the month.
Am I missing something here? That's how much I currently pay for fiber internet here in Western New York, $72.99/mo for 25/5mb. Why the hell doesn't Google Fiber come out here, I'd love to kick Verizon FIOS to the curb for a lateral price move. I don't have any other bundled services, internet only.
Insurance agents, bus drivers, taxi drivers, chauffeurs and hired drivers are also going to see far fewer jobs.
All of these different levels of people will still be here. They will still have bills and need to eat and have shelter, but WHAT are they supposed to do when their jobs go away?
Just piggy backing on what you said here because you're actually understating the effect on insurance from car automation. It's certainly not *just* insurance agents. Personal auto insurance is a ~$125B industry today. Not even including commercial auto! That doesn't just affect the local agent a consumer works with, it's the entire industry. From executives, accountants, actuaries, underwriters, analysts, IT, software vendors, everyone. By some estimates, this industry will shrink in excess of 50% by 2040.
Society has failed structurally to provide many with the opportunities and tools to keep a viable career path open for their working lifetime.
Why is it society's responsibility to teach you job skills? Society (by which you obviously mean the government) already gives everyone 13 years of education (K-12), and if you walk away from that with no job skill that can't be better done with a servo motor, that is your own fault. I don't think there will be a big revolutionary change if we change the schools to teach for, say, 13 and a half years. People that are willing to learn will continue to do well, and the rest won't.
No, society doesn't have to mean government but it does include it. It's the entire collective, both people and its government. Either way, I used to once agree with you 100% about 5-10 years ago. Since then I've realized I was being naive. Not everyone is smart, ambitious, and young as myself or the group of people I associate myself with. We're talking about 9,000 men and women who may have done nothing but work their factory line, every day, every week, ever year, for what? The past 5, 10, 20, maybe even 40 years? The reality is our brains lose their edge very quickly. It's hard to keep it in good shape when you have a mind numbing job like that. Though no doubt, I'm confident some percentage of those 9,000 did retool/reinvent themselves after losing their jobs. I'm still sure many of them didn't. I'm sorry but the reality is they're going to be left behind. I'm sure the odds of getting left behind increase significantly if they're 50 or older. We need a culture change, we need a society change, we need an education change, we need to at least improve something somewhere. I really don't have a good solution. However, I do know expecting them to do it themselves is exactly why where we are today.
Sure, if we could change the world such that everyone retains their youthful, ambitious, flexible, mind during their entire employment career, regardless of the career path they chose, then yes, that would be the ultimate solution. But that's just not reality.
Good thing there's a better approach then. We can merely wait a few decades and get better data than all that awesome data you mention. The future can't be faked. Funny how you're so confident and then when questioned, it's "Science is not about being sure." Well, my view is that when you use science to justify a massive restructuring of all human society, you better be backed by a lot more than that.
Really? You never act on any evidence unless it's 100% certain, if and only if it's 100% certain? For health, profession, traveling, disease, safety, investments, anything? You never make estimates or take precautionary measures on anything? It's almost like you're insisting you only see things in black and white. I somehow very, very much doubt that.
Casting aside the science for a moment. I imagine nearly everyone, including you, is willing to take measured precautions to protect themselves even if the is nothing more than mere shreds of evidence to cause harm. Science enter stage right, there's plenty of evidence supporting climate change. Climate change has been happening since this damned planet formed. Only debatable questions are who, what, when, and how much. The current "sensationalized" theory on the table is predicting a a couple degrees increase in temperate in the next 100 years. The temperature is not even that big of a damned deal, 2 degrees doesn't hurt anybody much. It's all the other far more adverse effects on the global planet. Acidity of the ocean, rising sea water, changing weather patterns. Why do those things matter? Because we've invested trillions, trillions, and trillions of dollars building things like agriculture, residential, infrastructure, canals, water ways in the world with certain assumptions that are unwinding before our eyes. I'm not sure if you really intend to portray yourself is not caring about protecting our society until it's far too late to reverse it.
How about just "do the right thing" right? It's a shame it's very difficult to litigate morality or ethics. People will always find both a reason and a workaround.
I have two objections to GM crops: biodiversity and lock-in (though they don't both apply to the same crops).
This, this! Not the other alarmist crap, should be the biggest worry with GMO products.
And Facebook, an app that just eats cycles and battery life on both iOS and Android. That such a major player as Facebook writes such a shitty awful resource hogging app frankly shocks me... until I remember iTunes on Windows.
Oh I very much doubt it's an accident at all. Facebook makes their living off gathering information from its users, aggregating, and selling/advertising. I can guarantee that's at least partially if not entirely why their app is "resource hogging".
Wasn't it already figured out that trying to blow nukes off on an asteroid surface would achieve approximately JACK SHIT?
They're not sufficiently powerful to break up mass, and due to being nuked in space, the kinetic transfer is significantly less, therefore "deflection" wouldn't happen either.
Well you figured that out pretty quickly. Obviously you plotted out your formula out proving its impossibility on the back of a paper napkin, right? Can you show your math before you start discrediting your fellow scientists on this idea? You can figure this out on a napkin if you want to using the formula below as a starting point and then estimating the mass, velocity, and kinetic energy of an incoming asteroid. You could calculate how much kinetic energy is needed to deflect an asteroid.
It has been estimated that a velocity change of just 3.5/t × 10^-2 ms^-1 (where t is the number of years until potential impact) is needed to successfully deflect a body on a direct collision trajectory. In addition, under certain circumstances, much smaller velocity changes are needed. wikipedia
Where is the money to provide this "Universal Basic Income" going to come from? How will employers that still have a workforce respond in terms of existing wages? How much inflation will this cause? What will happen to home prices/rents/leases/etc costs? Don't seeing it working realistically until human nature changes dramatically...
I completely understand your cynicism because I agree but I don't see an amount specified in the article. If it's something meager like $7K-$15K then I'm not sure it would truly change much of anything. I mean in the US, I think we more or less already have this under different names and parameters? I would be of the opinion that welfare, medicaid, medicare, social security, and the standard tax deduction all touch the spirit of a "universal basic income" except through complex rules, inclusions, and exclusions. I think current laws' end result is trying surgically pinpoint the people that need it "more" but than others. More or less they favor the people that are old, impoverished, or crippled but even those doing well still get some minimal benefits annually. Without knowing all of the rules it would be hard for me to be supportive or not but if they did away with all of the other existing systems of support I would certainly be in favor of overhauling and simplifying the entire system top to bottom. Now if the amount was something like $30K or more, my opinion would shift drastically.
I personally believe marijuana usage should be legalized. It's no more harmful than other substances like alcohol or tobacco for example. That being said, I would strongly discourage my kids and friends from using the substance. Granted this is just my personal anecdotal evidence, but any of my friends, or anyone at all I know that has ever smoked pot on a regular prolonged basis seemed to have been completely robbed of any serious ambition. It seems like nothing really much mattered to them anymore, they were perfectly happy being mediocre people. Go home, chill, and smoke pot. Just my personal observations, not scientific facts.
My opinions may not carry much currency because they're purely anecdotal. I still believe the US education system is one of the best in the world but at the same time I think our sometimes lack-luster education and performance results are far more culturally based than anyone gives it credit. Growing up as a US-born child of an immigrant family may give me a very biased perspective but I use it all the time nonetheless. My story is typical for many immigrants, it's practically a cliche. My parents didn't know English and came to the US with $400 in their pocket in the early 80s. Yes, we were on welfare, yes we collected food stamps, yes my family took terrible low skill and low earning jobs like cleaning, harvesting, and the like, yes we grew up in the inner city being the 1 of 2 Caucasian families in the entire neighborhood, yes we had 3 generations living in one household, and yes English was not my first language.
But we climbed the *#!@ out of there as fast as we could, because that's why we came to the US: to do well. We came with ambitions, with the belief that education was one thing the "man", whether it's a Soviet government or oppressive oligarchy, could not take away from you. Not doing well in school simply was not an option. My mother get her degree and my father got a decent job at a factory. While my parents certainly did well for themselves, the next generation, like myself, we did even better. I can say from my limited exposure to the education system, at least here in NY, is that very, very, very few of my classmates had the same ambitions. In fact, most would have seen me as being aggressively competitive but in my eyes and my parents I was only allowed to see myself as still not trying hard enough. I admit that half of my class mates were brighter than me, but I'm sorry to say that few of them tried half as hard nor did as well.
If every kid had that ambition you'd have to be scared of what the US could do instead of can't do. Unfortunately it's my observation that many kids *and* their adult parents here in the US lack any self control. They are far too wrapped up in finding the next source of entertainment than setting up a future for themselves, family, and country. Be it TV, alcohol, music, fame, partying, drugs, games, and sports (yes, I said sports, let your verbal abuse fly!). There's nothing wrong with any of those things are just fine per se, as long as they're done in moderation.
I don't know much of anything about that mining company specifically but just want to remind everyone that just b/c a company goes out of business it doesn't mean the participants didn't have a good run while it lasted. You'd hope someone founding or running a company would throw everything they had into it to make it work. But it's certainly not uncommon to see exactly the opposite, people extracting so much wealth out of the business that it's driven into the ground.
Then why are you not fighting pollution, instead of CO2 which plants need to live?
The whole problem I have with you WarmMongers is that you in fact have essentially ended the fight against real pollution to tilt against the CO2 windmill, all for the sake of making a few people (not you BTW) rich.
So why can't you do both? I seriously doubt there were many so-called environmentalists that didn't say "boo". Anyone I know thought it was a complete disaster, environmentalist or not. Unfortunately there are tens of thousands of disasters like this, both big and small, short and long. The great lakes, oceans, farm run off, on and on and on... nearly all environmentalists care about all of them so I have no idea what you're getting "sickened" at. Either way, I hope you would at least admit that if the current estimates of warming, 2-3 degrees in the next 50-100 years, if "true", would inflict far more damage globally than one river locally? Even if it's not during our lifetimes.
Of course plants need CO2 to live, exactly who is advocating taking it all away? The argument is about moderation, not complete elimination? Not sure if you're just being deliberately facetious there or what.
We need new regulations for drones, because they've changed the game in terms of privacy.
We need laws to protect people from spying, both by private parties and government entities, via drones.
We need laws that say you can't just fly a drone over someone else's property and follow them around, or look in their windows, or whatever. We need regulations to define reasonable expectation of privacy directly to drones.
IMO, we need to have some ability for people to defend themselves from these things as well, whether it's jamming them, shooting them down on your property, whatever.
Agreeing vehemently. I mean I've always agreed with this, but it just kicked up a notch last month when the obnoxious neighbor in my neighborhood decided to get a drone with a mounted camera. You know the neighbor that never says/waves hello, holds ginormous parties that block traffic on our street, cranks the music, "uses" his punching bag while keeping his garage door open, likes to rev his boat's engine while mounted on-trailer for hours, and oh... and a Cadillac Escalade for each and every family member. Yes, those kinds of neighbors. Apparently he finds it very entertaining to fly his drone around the neighborhood, land on people's driveways, go in their backyards, flying around above everyone's houses - mind you which 50% of our neighborhood has skylights which naturally isn't easy to install curtains on. It's people like that, who lack common sense, that *need* to be regulated and unfortunately ruin it for everyone else.
:)
As a side note, I can't wait for those neighbors to move out