You aren't using the same definition of "proof" as I am. You're talking about a process that a person might go through to try to convince *themselves* (but no one else) of God's existence.
Okay, maybe I'm dense. How do you force someone to settle out of court? Can you explain, please?Your lawyers convince them that they'll lose -- or even that they *might* lose, and if they do it will ruin them. If you have good lawyers, and particularly if your victim does not, this isn't that hard.
That's it. Your victim agrees to pay you $X (or whatever other conditions you get him to agree to) and in exchange you drop your lawsuit. A judge never evaluates it.
An interesting dilemma. Some people are complaining about how their company limits their vacation days, to which the answer tends to be "start your own or suck it up". Yet here comes something like this, just to keep people on their toes, should they fall for believing that they can go it alone.
I guess the answer to "how do I succeed in life?" is "You don't, LOL!"
It doesn't work that way. You don't have to land big fish to survive. If you are starting a business completely solo (i.e., not even with a handful of friends), you simply DON'T try to provide any kind of 24-7/365 support. *Any* company would be foolish to hire you (because you'd be a fool to offer it!). Fortunately, there are plenty of services you can offer without including 24-7, 365 days-a-year support... or you can subcontract out the support component, etc. etc..
Perhaps you've heard the phrase "starting small": this is what people are talking about. If you're a network guy, you would start out supporting networks that are only active during the workday and shut down during the holidays, for instance (you can even handle contracts with decent-sized schools on this principle), or you would do contract jobs (for instance where a small business needs help getting their network set up or upgraded, but won't need instant support if something goes wrong... and probably can't afford that level of support anyway).
If your business grows and you get some employees (who can handle things for each other during vacations!), then you can consider bigger support contracts.
The other route, of course, is somehow getting lots of funding and *launching* your business with scads of employees. Possible, but apparently sometimes dangerous.
So how many sects of people who don't believe in Santa Claus?
That's the problem, isn't it? I can take a concept that's impossible according to natural law (i.e., magic required), and just state that I see utterly no reason to believe in it. What do I call myself? Neither choice is good.
If I said I was an asantist all of the Santa-believers would say "ah, but then you have to PROVE that Santa doesn't exist before you can say that... otherwise you're just another blind believer like us!"
Well, because Santa uses magic, perhaps he is actually personally providing children presents, but magically inserting memories into the parents' minds, making them think *they* bought the presents. And the poor kids who got no presents just all happened to be bad at some point during the year. Can I actively *disprove* that?
But I'll be damned if I say I'm santagnostic. If I do the Santaists will say, "ah hah -- even YOU admit that Santa may exist! Look, everyone -- even hard-core science people believe that Santa may exist!".
Same thing with God. I'm not "agnostic" -- we have plenty of knowledge about many of the things people say God did, and none of that knowledge actually supports the God suggestion. Of course I can't prove that God *doesn't* exist because you can't prove the non-existence of anything, but science is about levels of certainty based on evidence, and that level is plenty high in the "sorry but there's no God" camp to say "atheist"....but people seem to think that implies a definitive proof.
Is atheism a sect? Of course not, any more than there's a "sect" of people who did well in biology class in high school. It's just a question of "do you consider the evidence" or "do you ignore it".
I'm the sort of asantist who, if suddenly there *were* a ton of valid evidence that appeared, directly supporting the existence of Santa, would update my viewpoint. Same thing with atheism, though in both cases it's extraordinarily unlikely to happen. This is NOT like theism, where in fact there already IS a ton of evidence contradicting their faith, yet they persist.
And yes, there is proof for a God. I'm not using my existence or what I believe as an attempted proof as you assert; that would be downright silly.
Maybe you mentioned it in another post I haven't read, but could you perhaps provide some info on this "proof for a God"? If it's explained online, provide a link... if its your own invention, hey, put it online and provide a link. Or link your post.
There are plenty of people who will be happy to explain the problems to you. It's not as if no one has tried to build a proof for God. It's a problem that's extremely well understood by now, and if you believe in God, that's called "faith", because there's no evidence supporting it.
It seems like "belief" is actually a word more appropriate to science than it is to religion. "Faith" is a better word for religious tenets. From m-w.com (emphasis mine):
Belief: 1 : a state or habit of mind in which trust or confidence is placed in some person or thing 2 : something believed; especially : a tenet or body of tenets held by a group 3 : conviction of the truth of some statement or the reality of some being or phenomenon especially when based on examination of evidence synonyms BELIEF, FAITH, CREDENCE, CREDIT mean assent to the truth of something offered for acceptance. BELIEF may or may not imply certitude in the believer "my belief that I had caught all the errors". FAITH almost always implies certitude even where there is no evidence or proof "an unshakable faith in God". CREDENCE suggests intellectual assent without implying anything about grounds for assent . CREDIT may imply assent on grounds other than direct proof "gave full credit to the statement of a reputable witness".
Faith: 1 a : allegiance to duty or a person : LOYALTY b (1) : fidelity to one's promises (2) : sincerity of intentions 2 a (1) : belief and trust in and loyalty to God (2) : belief in the traditional doctrines of a religion b (1) : firm belief in something for which there is no proof (2) : complete trust 3 : something that is believed especially with strong conviction; especially : a system of religious beliefs "the Protestant faith"
Certainly we "believe" in the results of well-designed scientific experiments, well-supported theories, etc., because there are solid reasons to believe in them. We don't have "faith" that science has all the answers, or is always right -- that would be a religious-style mistake. Some people have faith that science will eventually answer X or Y, but again, that's not science itself; it's wishful thinking.
But maybe in the future, we'll uncover different ways of doing science (eg reductionism vs holism, experimentation vs modelling, triple-blind statistical analysis, analysis of negative results, etc), and discover that the word "science" is really insufficient to cover these different ways of conducting science.
I think the main point other posters are trying to make is that it's quite a large jump from "different ways of doing science" to something that the word "science" is insufficient to cover. Can you imagine a tangible example? I can't. The problem is that yes, of *course* we're going to come up with new ways to observe the world around us, but those are either fabrications ("when I was on that new drug, I saw people's colors, and they were all green except THESE guys who were purple!"), or they're in some way repeatable observations that can be used to build knowledge ("interestingly, young man, 99% of the participants of this study saw those same men as purple...") - in which case, that's science.
But that's what you're trying to do when you attempt convince others who have a relationship with God that He doesn't exist. In fact, you're not only trying to assert a negative proof, but you're trying to assert a negative proof that's trivially disproved. Do you see how irrational that is yet?
Hold on, are you reading what you're writing?
No one's trying to "assert a negative proof". You are making a huge *positive* assertion that a supernatural being exists AND has a personal relationship with you, has unlimited power and knowledge, wants your praise, listens to your prayers, performs supernatural miracles, etc.. We're just pointing out that because you're claiming things that are impossible according to everything we understand about natural law, hearsay from thousands of years ago won't really cut it as "evidence".
The "evidence" for God's existence is solely that lots of people think God exists. There's no other evidence.
There's also plenty of historical evidence to show the human beings invent magic or supernatural explanations to explain the things we don't understand. We've always done it. Our inventions simply get more complex (or more subtle) as we actually figure out the mechanisms of natural phenomena. If you're assessing that particular "evidence" for God, it's much better explained by "we made it up because we didn't understand nature" rather than "the supernatural stuff is real".
So I'm not an "agnostic" about God any more than I'm agnostic about Santa Claus and magical unicorns. "Atheist" means "without Gods", so that's the closer description.
Dawkins does indeed talk about science-accepting Christians. He feels they are *still* damaging their children by teaching them to respect and honor faith as something valuable, as something that's a source of wisdom.
Most of these Christians also tell their kids that Grandma is in heaven with Grandpa now, and she's happy. They tell their kids that God is watching and he'll know when they do something bad. They take their kids to church, where the kids are told (and made to recite) that God art in heaven and is the creator of heaven and earth, Jesus is his only son (and is also God), Mary was a virgin who gave birth, and various miracles actually happened.
I didn't grow up in a fundamentalist family by any stretch of the imagination (just fairly standard suburban Roman Catholic), but I was fed all of this stuff as a kid, and it took a long time to go back and really "clean house" in my brain to toss out all of that.
At some point standing in church reciting lines with the crowd like "it is right to give Him thanks and praise", and stuff like the Nicene Creed every week started to creep me out. But most people go on saying we believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth... his only son born of the Virgin Mary, etc. on the third day he rose again in fulfillment of the scriptures, he will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, etc. etc.., every week.
And think about how children are inculcated with such a sense that religion is an inarguable source of "right/wrong" information that many of those children are thus far easier to be manipulated later. Is a politician religious? Then he'll probably know right from wrong, won't he? Of course you've noticed how politicians attack this angle for all their worth.
Dawkins also talks about (and actively debates with) scientists and others who argue that religion and science occupy different magisteria -- the idea that they answer different kinds of questions, and thus they don't conflict because they don't overlap. His argument is that of *course* they overlap. If science came up with DNA evidence that Jesus really was born somehow outside of the bounds of normal human sexual reproduction, he guarantees you wouldn't hear religious leaders saying "nope; doesn't count -- science is a separate realm from religion". Instead, religion purports to answer questions that either are impossible to answer (like "why are we here" and "what's our purpose in life") or questions that science has no solid answers for currently (like "how the the universe begin"). His response is basically: some questions are simply invalid questions, and some science cannot yet answer... but why in the world would our own invented mythology have a better chance somehow at answering these problems? We might as well use explanations based on the ancient Greek pantheon... it's the same thing.
I'm another absolutely non-depressive atheist. I tend to feel there are definitely some internal physical/chemical reasons for general temperament and tendencies to depression... it's not that I'm never unhappy, I have just found that when I wake up in the morning things settle back into perspective, I make a plan to deal with whatever was making me unhappy, and life goes on.
So sometimes just walking outside and feeling the sun on my face can make my happy -- but I'm also damned sure that none of the natural beauty I see in the world came from a supernatural being that sits around wanting our praise and considering our prayers.
Personally, I'm glad to live in a world where, when shitty things happen, we don't have to pray for some insight into why God wanted little Bobby to be hit by the truck, or why God lets really nasty birth defects happen, etc. etc.. If I'm grieving over something, I don't want to have to also wrap my head around the idea that "it's all in God's plan" to get any solace. That wouldn't help me. I don't want to pray for little Bobby's soul, I want to put up a fence, get the speed limit lowered, get speed bumps installed... actually *do* something instead of waiting for the "lesson" to sink in, whatever that hell that would be (maybe Bobby didn't confess about hitting his sister last week? Or... God just wanted him back home? Yeah, that's it.).
If there's nothing that can be done, then I want to understand more about what actually happened; how some birth defects are inevitable because of the mutant sludge left over in our genes during our evolution, how this pain is actually carried through my nerves and what it's doing in my brain, what researchers are experimenting with nowadays that might save someone else with my disease in 60 years.
And more -- life is an amazing and awesome, sometimes terrifying process; feeding off itself and being reborn in all its myriad forms. All this on our own little planet hurtling through spaces we can hardly grasp; and there are so many depths we have yet to explore.
My personal smallness doesn't freak me out -- it kind of comforts me. We all choose our frame of reference, all the time -- if I achieve something, I can be glad of the very real sphere in which it makes a difference, take pride in a little appreciation and earned respect. If I screw something up... well, in the larger scheme of things, it's an awfully tiny thing, isn't it?
Sorry for the rambling. I just agree pretty strongly with the idea that the real world is so much richer and meaningful than the blinkered religious interpretation.
Unfortunately, I don't see any good solution to the pump-and-dump scams -- that's a much more complicated money trail. But we CAN stop the penis-enlargement spam by finding a way to stop the companies PAYING the spammers.
You mentioned Blue Security, which was seriously starting to make a difference (but had a huge Achilles heel in their business model...).
If enough dedicated developers are willing to help out on the slowly withering Okopipi project (founded to develop a decentralized version of Blue Security's system), it could quickly become a serious player in actually STOPPING spam, not just filtering it better for techies (which does *nothing* to discourage actual spammers).
The principle is the same as Blue Security used -- for every spam delivered to an Okopipi user (and reported as spam into the local Okopipi client), the advertised website gets an single generic opt-out request submitted automatically via the same client, generally submitting this request into the spamvertizers order forms, as that's often the only functional feedback mechanism they have (text something like "an unsolicited email advertising this product was sent to an Okopipi user: please visit okopipi.org for details on cleaning your lists").
There are obviously technical hurdles to surmount, and security issues to tackle, but a lot of design work addressing these is complete... right now the main issue is the project needs more smart, experienced programmers who can finalize designs, trash nonessential features, and get coding.
I'm personally trying to fire things up again, but there's no way I could do this kind of project solo.
...which is more disturbing? Climbing over 20 people to get out to the bathroom, or sending a discreet text message?
Man, I would absolutely *love* to see this phone you've got that can drain urine via 'discreet text message.'
"hld yr phone ovr guttr - sndng pss in 10 scnds"
Seriously, your comparison doesn't mean much (I think the GP was talking more about how we get so used to multitasking we never shut it all off and enjoy something directly)...but I agree there are cases this would be useful. Say you and the Significant Other were late for the concert, and the SO dropped you at the door to grab seats while she parks and runs back.
The SO is racing towards the main hall -- and she doesn't have to fiddle with buttons while running, she can *speak* a text message into the phone. "did it start? where r u sitting?". Your phone vibrates silently; you can text back (without making noise by taking a call) "lites dn but doors still open - balcny aisle 3 on rt".
Yeah, it's not a feature to die for, but what the heck. Sometimes we don't have hands and eyes free to text. Sometimes we don't want to make noise by talking. It makes some sense to let users mix & match the options.
You know in America something like 43% of the population believes the Earth is around 10,000 years old? The politicians all play to that. Even the supposedly less-right-wing dems talk about God all the freakin' time. God must be blessing America so often He has no time to do much of anything else.
Europe isn't like that. Politicians do stupid things, they trick people by manipulating their fear or racism, etc. etc., just like in the US, but at least the huge "if you vote against me you're going against what God wants" manipulation doesn't come up. They have to at least pretend to use reason.
About the headscarf thing... they were trying to keep the schools a secular institution (which I agree with), but screwed it up by not being consistent, and also picking something that's almost impossible to really nail down. Does letting students wear a headscarf really endorse religion? Can they reasonably ban everything that's remotely connected to religion? Yeah, not so much.
But that's simple stupidity with maybe a little racism mixed in, not preaching.
My brother and his wife moved to the Netherlands a few years ago; he had worked for a Dutch company in California, and arranged to be transferred. They still don't speak Dutch fluently -- but everyone in the Netherlands studies English in school (and many are perfectly fluent), so it's easy for them to get by.
They moved out of the US mostly to be closer to his wife's family in France.
I moved out of the US this summer. My wife and I now live in rural southern France, in the corner near the Mediterranean and the Spanish border. We both speak French, more or less; my wife's completely fluent, and mine is pretty good. I bought a car here (a diesel 1994 Renault Clio that gets 45 miles to the gallon, which good since diesel is almost $5/gallon... regular gas is even more expensive).
I'm still working for the same clients (doing web development) back in the US, plus running a few sites of my own; I'm paid in US dollars, and pay US taxes, with a US address that's technically a mail-fowarding company. I call into conference calls using Skype.
But I live surrounded by vineyards, and weather is lovely. The food is good, and the people I've met are warm and friendly.
We moved to try something different. We'd lived in the northern US for long enough, and wanted to move someplace that would never get 4 feet of snow, but most parts of the southern US seemed unappealing in the extreme. The paperwork to move to Europe was a pain, but in the US we'd been through the process of getting my wife a green card after we married, and this was easier *plus* pretty much everyone was very friendly and helpful (is the INS friendly in the US? No.).
It's nice to be distanced a bit from all the political $#!# in the US, too. It's not like we're hiding our heads in the sand, and I'm still voting, but I simply don't check the news more than a few times a month. France has their own elections coming up, and their own political problems, but at least they're *different* problems. And at least we can escape the non-stop hypocritical religious rhetoric, which is what I hate the most about US politicians. The problems don't go away, but I'm not doing any *less* about them and I sleep better at night.
Think about it -- watching people argue on television doesn't do a damned thing for any cause, it just gives you that sick feeling that doesn't go away.
Of course, there's always that crazy concept that you might actually get something out of your schooling besides the salary boost after graduation.
You know, like actual knowledge and skills (and the important ones transcend simply knowing your way around X or Y programming language). You're right, after a few years the school you went to won't matter so much. Because knowing WTF you're doing will take priority.
Suddenly, choosing the cheapest school doesn't seem so obvious.
I work independantly as well. It can be tough to work up the motivation to get going on things, and I occasionally have the experience of realising at 10pm that I've spent about an hour of billable time that day -- the rest was running errands, procrastinating, websurfing, reading news, socializing, etc.. Sometimes I'll then work another 7 hours, which sometimes works okay (sometimes my brain really starts clicking only late at night)... but of course makes it that much harder to get started the next morning.
Of course, the answer is self-discipline, time management, etc., but there are a lot of factors that affect how successful I am at that. Here's what I'm watching properly during the times that things are really working well:
* Personal physical factors: I avoid caffeine, because it keeps me "awake" but destroys my focus. If I'm really focused, I simply won't get sleepy anyway. I avoid all alcohol during the week, and avoid sugary things at night, because those both affect my sleep patterns and sharpness in the morning. Proper sleep also makes a huge difference to focus... if I only slept 3-4 hours, even if I'm wide awake things just don't seem to get done.
* Project factors: an interesting project that uses my knowledge/skills but also brings in some new things is much easier to work on. Boring projects (just solving the same old problems again in a slightly different way), overly tedious/frustrating projects (like cleaning up someone else's mess or working with really buggy APIs), or overly daunting projects (working with a new language, in a domain only vaguely understood)... that's when I end up bouncing off the work into random other activities like a stone skipping off water.
* Work organization: I try to stop periodically to make priorities lists and to-do lists, and to break down tasks into smaller and smaller sections. It's important for scheduling purposes already, but the mental benefits are also huge. You can hit lots of little goals to keep you going, like "just get this query finished, send that email, then I can break for lunch".
* Breaks: get up and walk around when you're stuck. Don't just sit in your chair (or take a break by going off to check/.) -- walk around and maybe get some fresh air. Let your mind play with the problem and come up with some new solutions to test out before you go sit down again.
Now I just need to follow my own rules *all* the time....
Maybe you're trolling, but I figure there are enough people out there who seriously think something like that to make replying worthwhile.
I personally believe that copyright is immoral because of the restrictions it places on citizens (especially in a digital age where information duplication is so easy and beneficial). As far as I'm concerned, any artist can set a bounty on their work creation (go around asking for $x to make a given thing), or ask for donations, or whatever. But they do not have the right to control their work after it has passed into public view.
This argument frustrates me to no end because it's so very short-sighted. Of course current copyright laws need revision, but if you simply did away with copyright, everything you're enjoying now would disappear so fast your head would spin. I'm sure you don't like DRM-locked music, and you're probably pro open-source... but if we enacted your "everything is public domain" you would basically force all but hobbyist music into extreme DRM lockdown, and open-source would also lose all its advantages.
Think about it. My wife's a writer, so I tend to come at it from that angle first. She spent about 7 years writing her first novel. Her publisher is giving her an advance, and she'll get a bonus plus royalties once her advance is covered by sales. The publisher pays her editor, plus pays for all advertisement costs, managing book tours, printing and distribution, etc.. Even with good advertising, there's no guarantee they'll make money -- in fact, they usually don't; they make up for it by sometimes finding a book that really sells well and makes them enough money to cover the losses from rest of the authors in their stable. The money they pay my wife won't be huge (divided over the 7 years of work), but hopefully she'll get the next book out quicker, and hopefully she can build name recognition to increase future sales. She also retains film and foreign rights for a separate, future contract, so that's another possible source of income from this book.
Now let's imagine as soon as the first copy is released (in paper or online) *any* publisher can print and sell it, make a movie out of it, etc. without paying her a dime. Surprise; of course the standard publishers will go out of business immediately, and only printers will survive, competing to print the cheapest copies. None of them will be able to affort to advertise, because the competitors (without the advertising costs, but reaping the benefits) will wipe them out. My wife would have two options: * Set up a website to plead for donations. Of course, the actually published books (hard copy or electronic) needn't bother to link her site, and she'd have no money for advertising, but let's say 10,000 generous fans who picked up the book at the beach for $1.50 googled her name (a ridiculous overestimate, since no one will be advertising her book), stopped by and contributed a buck. Great, honey, you just netted an average of $1,428 annually, which may just about cover hosting the site and payment processing fees. * Stop writing books, or relegate writing to a spare-time hobby.
Let's look at the music POV since that's what you were discussing. Musicians need money to simply survive, plus recording, mastering, advertising, distribution (yes, even online distribution)... all costs money, and lots of people besides the musicians themselves need to get paid somehow to do all that, or they can't survive either. Welcome to capitalism, right? After paying for this stuff the music labels likewise lose money on many bands that just don't pan out into good sales, but they make up for it with the pop stars that make it big.
Now let's take away the revenue stream entirely. The recording companies go away -- that's what you wanted, right? -- and only some touring management companies remain. Bands that are already well-known can probably do just fine touring and pay for some advertising out of that, though concerts will likely get a lot more expensive (si
Yet many civilizations embraced human torture and sacrifice, and many embraced peace and understanding.
If a human sacrifice is required to appease the gods (and protect everyone), it isn't so clearly immoral anymore. You have to remember that a lot of practices that we think are evil now were based on different ideas about what was good for the people. Now we know better, so we know it's a bad idea.
There have also been plenty of cultures divided into strata, where interactions within a group would be generally non-abusive and fair, but a member of a "lower" group could be abused in some way. The concepts of morality that allowed this work seemed logical (and would be backed up with edicts from god(s) and examples of the deserving value of the superior group), but there's always that inconsistency, that flaw that becomes apparent when we encounter someone from a "lower" group who doesn't fit the type, who's actually smarter and/or more skilled than the supposedly superior group. These start to prove the falseness of the model, and gradually ideas change -- the lower group becomes more dissatisfied, the higher group becomes less confident of their correctness. We deal with the world using models of reality, and when they are repeatedly proven false, we try to correct them; that's how we learn.
That's the entire point, which you seem to have missed. If infants are amoral and can be molded to hold any sort of morality from pure hedonism to self sacrificing altruism, then how can anyone say humans in general are "moral"?
Infants cannot be molded like that. They will still have the same basic instincts even if you teach them nonsense. They become thinking entities at some point, and will start using their brains to try to figure out how things work, and how to make themselves happy. They might not get very far, depending on how badly their education was mangled. But they'll try to make sense of the ideas they've been taught, and draw some conclusions of their own along the way (that will be passed down to their offspring, and so on). Somewhere along the line someone will come up with the idea, again, that an eye for an eye sucks for everyone involved. Etc..
Isn't morality simply a behavioral trait of humans within some given society? It would be much better to speak of the morality of specific human societies, not humanity in general. The fact that we have prisons proves that there are individuals who don't hold to today's general morality.
The fact that we have prisons also proves that those individuals comprise small enough of a minority that they can be fully stopped and restrained by the majority. I'm certainly not arguing that individuals will always behave the way the majority thinks is moral. They won't even always behave the way *they themselves* think is moral -- their urges, learned precepts, etc. are often going to be in conflict. That's life; we balance conflicting forces.
Since humans can adapt to any given society, it implies that basically they are amoral and simply take on the morality of their society so that they can survive.
Humans can't adapt to any given society. Humans break down in societies/situations that require them to act in a way that's simply too strongly against their instincts and/or logical reasoning. They rebel (even if it means death). They flee (even if it means death). They commit suicide (even... yeah).
Witness the ability of mobs and people lost in the wilderness to abandon all sense of morality and act purely hedonistically.
Actually, I've never witnessed this. I have spent time lost in the wilderness -- it was stressful, but I never thought of taking a hatchet to anyone's head. Does that happen often? I hear a lot more stories about how people went to heroic lengths to save the group. Mobs (as seen on TV) can be frightening -- that's a sort of dark side to our cooperative instincts; once you're in a group of people it's possible to act without stopping to thin
If morals are just best practices, doesn't that imply amorality as the initial state?
No -- humans survived and thrived as a species based on our "best practices" (and our natural ability to teach & learn). So it's natural for groups of humans to develop and pass on morality of some kind.
Are you talking about infants as the "initial state"? Sure, at that stage of development, humans aren't yet moral agents. They're basically helpless, and their main job is to make sure Mom remembers to feed them and keep them safe. You can't draw any conclusions about adult humans based on that alone.
So saying that infants are "amoral" doesn't really mean anything. What conclusions can you draw from that? Kangaroos, when they're first born, don't hop at all. They just crawl into the pouch. I'm not going to conclude from this observation that they're "naturally non-hopping creatures", and suspect that adult kangaroos are always on the brink of slipping back into this natural, non-hopping state.
Morality just happens to be what has evolved as a compromise between hedonism and idealism. Well, don't forget that "hedonism" isn't such a simple route. We're all hedonists, in a way -- there's pleasure in accomplishing difficult tasks, in helping others, avoiding guilt, etc. etc.. The stereotypical rock star lifestyle isn't successful hedonism at all (though that's what people tend to think hedonism is...) -- they tend to go self-destructive, or end up like Michael Jackson. Think he's happy?
You're still talking about Billy's selfish urges as the only "natural" thing.
My point is that it's just as "natural" for you to teach him how to balance that initial urge with wiser behavior that will help him to be happier.
The instinctual part of him gives him the urge to just grab the toy, sure. But it also gives him a propensity to learn quickly from you, and it gives him (once he starts to get it right) reinforcement through very positive emotions as he makes friends, earns respect, etc..
It's not that you've "taught him to overcome his naturally-selfish instincts". You're teaching is a requisite part of his natural development; if you don't, he's going to be way out of whack from his natural balance, and NOT a successful human being who's likely to reproduce.
Another way to put it: he's not "naturally selfish" -- he's naturally in a balance between selfish urges and social urges (both of these are a mix of instinct and instruction), and that lets him interact successfully and happily with others while still acting to a degree in self-interest. That selfish pull isn't bad in the normal balance -- without it, he'd sacrifice himself totally for the needs of others (and be appreciated, but probably not live very long...).
Except that history clearly demonstrates, time and time again, what invariably happens when ordinary citizens are left with only their own morals to keep them honest - and it ain't pretty.
Time and time again, those citizens form trained police forces to manage the irresponsible/criminal minority. There's usually a period in there where vigilantes manage "justice", but that gets messy.
It ain't pretty? It doesn't seem so horrible.
Think about it -- if most people actually enjoyed living in a dog-eat-dog world, that is exactly how we would all be living. Sure, we all have urges to take the shortcut to success by just taking what that other guy already has. But we hate being "that other guy" so much that it pushes things back in a sane direction.
Most religions have some notion of an afterlife of pain or punishment, or karmic balance, or some such - i.e. consequences.
More importantly, doing "bad" things tends to have much more immediate consequences. Most immoral things are "bad" because you are harming someone else. Someone who will, in all likelihood, not be very happy about it, and will try to: 1) stop you from doing it again and/or 2) harm you in return: perhaps physically, or (for example) telling everyone what you did harms you socially.
Of course, if you don't get caught and aren't suspected, you don't need to worry about that directly. But we're social animals; we have some instincts and passed-on skills (empathy, conscience, etc.) to help us live in cooperative groups.
Also, any parent will tell you the importance of teaching children about right vs. wrong. Have you ever really thought about what that says about our inborn tendencies? Why would that lesson need to be taught, if we weren't essentially amoral by nature?
That lesson needs to be taught, perhaps, because we're essentially *stupid* by nature. We've evolved into a species that passes on essential knowledge to our offspring via teaching (because it works a lot better than only passing on slowly-evolved instincts!). If you raise kids without passing on the essentials (including how to interact with others), you're sending them out into the world as cripples, and they're going to screw up a lot and be miserable. That's not their "natural state" -- normally, this knowledge would have been passed on. In the natural human state, the parent teaches the child.
Questions like "are we essentially amoral or moral" aren't really answerable just because they don't match up well with the real situation. Morality is the "best practices" we've figured out over time: how to live and cooperate with other people with a minimum of frustration and fighting. A kid might figure out some of that stuff on his own ("damn, I punch just one girl and now nobody wants to talk to me..."), just like he might figure out a hammer is for hitting things with... but without teaching, he's not going to master it any more than he'd master driving a car out into traffic if he found one sitting in the garage one day.
Further, look at how that lesson is taught. Do we teach our children to avoid being bad simply because it's bad? Or do we teach them that being bad has consequences?
If you teach your kid that he'll get punished when he grabs Billy's toy, he learns that *you* don't want him to grab toys. If you teach him to observe that Billy is sad when his toy is stolen, and Billy might be his friend if they share toys instead, and it feels good to have a friend... well, you're teaching him how to act even when you're not around, for starters. You're also giving him skills he can use in many other situations.
I conceed that most creators aren't in charge of marketing their own products, but I don't view that as justification to continue the current process. Entertainment is the only industry I can think of where the content producer has little or no role in marketing their product
I'm not sure if I understand this point -- which are the industries you're talking about where the content creator *is* the primary marketer for their product? Obviously marketing campaigns that involve the creator but are funded and managed by someone else (like music videos) don't count against my original point, because it still requires that 3rd party with large resources who can support a lot of creators based on the occasional huge seller. Most creators -- writing cookbooks, songs, novels, nonfiction, technical books, whatever -- are individuals or a few individuals, who almost never have those kinds of resources (unless they were one of the tiny minority who *already* had a massive success -- marketed by that 3rd party -- and *now* they have plenty of cash).
However, there are very limited cases where any form of entertainment -- book, music, film, or otherwise -- is a "long term" source of income. Most books aren't even printed for 5 years;
Really? Where are you getting that idea from? Go browse through Borders or Barnes and Nobles, or any music store. Are you seriously saying almost all of those books, albums, etc. were created in the past 5 years? That would be strange, outside of the "new releases" section.
In most cases, the desire to "have it now" will trump any small savings made by waiting, and five years is a LONG time to wait.
There's a lot money in paperback sales, of course -- basically a cheaper version of the original hardcover that's not available for a while. Obviously people do buy hardcover books, and some people would buy the copyright-protected materials when they are first released. But I know the majority of the books I read and music I listen to (and buy) are more than 5 years old, and I tend towards paperbacks when they're available. I don't want what's *newest*, I want what's *best*. I don't know what most people's purchasing tendencies are, but remember that even diminishing returns are *returns*, and the publishing houses and authors are currently depending on that money.
Really, how do you buy books? Do you buy only latest releases, or do you find an author you like based on recommendations and start reading all of their books? When I was a kid (and reading all the time) I spend my time going through stuff by (at different times) Roald Dahl, CS Lewis, Ray Bradbury, Steven King, Isaac Asimov, etc. etc., as well as authors that looked good but I've forgotten now... but never based on what was new, just what I liked. And listening to music that was mostly created 15-20 years earlier. If you like the Harry Potter books, and had a cousin who was getting to about that level, you'd buy him the first one, right? Not the latest.
It was never about "being compelled to wait that long" for a newly-released book -- there was an overwhelming number of books that looked wonderful, so of course I only chose the paperbacks if I was buying them.
So I think your gut instincts on how this would work are wrong, though I don't have the useful statistics to hand either... The other main point I'd make is asking what exactly is *lost* with a 50-year copyright, i.e., what are we sacrificing? You need to have a grasp on both sides of the equation. I can imagine laws to "rescue" content that's been out-of-print and totally unavailable for a given length of time, but that's not at all the same thing as curtailing copyright for *everything* down to 5 years (which has obvious costs for no great benefits that I can think of.. other than "punishing" Disney, which doesn't actually gain me anything).
the first customer could then copy his copy and spread it across the whole, wide world.
True, and far more so with the internet. That's lovely in the short run for the general public. All music, free! All movies, free! But... some works takes decades and/or a lot of money to produce. If the creators have no way to make money from their creation, that means they won't have the money to make another, and they certainly won't be able to fund anything that's expensive to create.
You'll still have some books left, because amateurs will write them in their spare time, and some writers will be able to survive on grants, teaching positions, etc.. You'll still have some music, because some bands enjoy touring and can make enough money from it to support themselves. Some other bands will still get together and practice Saturday afternoons when they're off work, and record themselves in someone's garage. Other "bands" won't actually make their own music at all -- they'll just copy other folks' tracks and rename them, then distribute them from their own website. Hey, it's public domain... it's legal.
Movies -- would films except hobby files continue to exist? As soon as the first theater got a copy of the film, they could legally start selling or giving away copies to every other theater. It's public domain work -- could a contract stop them from doing that? They'd have no reason to pay the movie studio for public domain work, so the studio would lose all revenue. I don't know, maybe they'd get around this with strict contracts and massive secrecy and encryption. They couldn't sell DVDs, either, because as soon as one sold, boom, it's on the internet and you'll never sell another, so new movies would probably become theater-only entertainment, with pat-downs on your way in to detect hidden video cameras (assuming the studios and theaters could work out some kind of deal to replace copyright).
Video game consoles might just go away entirely. Or they'd get very, very expensive, and the console developers will fund all game development with that extra revenue. Certainly, standalone PC games would go away. We might go back to video games only existing in arcades, because then the creators can make it as difficult as possible for others to copy the (public domain) games they create.
Does this all sound good to you? Copyright exists for a reason. It's gotten out of hand over time, but that doesn't mean it has no purpose.
Slashdot Mirror
You aren't using the same definition of "proof" as I am.
You're talking about a process that a person might go through to try to convince *themselves* (but no one else) of God's existence.
More on this in the other thread.
Okay, maybe I'm dense. How do you force someone to settle out of court? Can you explain, please?Your lawyers convince them that they'll lose -- or even that they *might* lose, and if they do it will ruin them. If you have good lawyers, and particularly if your victim does not, this isn't that hard.
That's it. Your victim agrees to pay you $X (or whatever other conditions you get him to agree to) and in exchange you drop your lawsuit. A judge never evaluates it.
An interesting dilemma. Some people are complaining about how their company limits their vacation days, to which the answer tends to be "start your own or suck it up". Yet here comes something like this, just to keep people on their toes, should they fall for believing that they can go it alone.
I guess the answer to "how do I succeed in life?" is "You don't, LOL!"
It doesn't work that way. You don't have to land big fish to survive. If you are starting a business completely solo (i.e., not even with a handful of friends), you simply DON'T try to provide any kind of 24-7/365 support. *Any* company would be foolish to hire you (because you'd be a fool to offer it!). Fortunately, there are plenty of services you can offer without including 24-7, 365 days-a-year support... or you can subcontract out the support component, etc. etc..
Perhaps you've heard the phrase "starting small": this is what people are talking about. If you're a network guy, you would start out supporting networks that are only active during the workday and shut down during the holidays, for instance (you can even handle contracts with decent-sized schools on this principle), or you would do contract jobs (for instance where a small business needs help getting their network set up or upgraded, but won't need instant support if something goes wrong... and probably can't afford that level of support anyway).
If your business grows and you get some employees (who can handle things for each other during vacations!), then you can consider bigger support contracts.
The other route, of course, is somehow getting lots of funding and *launching* your business with scads of employees. Possible, but apparently sometimes dangerous.
So how many sects of people who don't believe in Santa Claus?
...but people seem to think that implies a definitive proof.
That's the problem, isn't it? I can take a concept that's impossible according to natural law (i.e., magic required), and just state that I see utterly no reason to believe in it. What do I call myself? Neither choice is good.
If I said I was an asantist all of the Santa-believers would say "ah, but then you have to PROVE that Santa doesn't exist before you can say that... otherwise you're just another blind believer like us!"
Well, because Santa uses magic, perhaps he is actually personally providing children presents, but magically inserting memories into the parents' minds, making them think *they* bought the presents. And the poor kids who got no presents just all happened to be bad at some point during the year. Can I actively *disprove* that?
But I'll be damned if I say I'm santagnostic. If I do the Santaists will say, "ah hah -- even YOU admit that Santa may exist! Look, everyone -- even hard-core science people believe that Santa may exist!".
Same thing with God. I'm not "agnostic" -- we have plenty of knowledge about many of the things people say God did, and none of that knowledge actually supports the God suggestion. Of course I can't prove that God *doesn't* exist because you can't prove the non-existence of anything, but science is about levels of certainty based on evidence, and that level is plenty high in the "sorry but there's no God" camp to say "atheist".
Is atheism a sect? Of course not, any more than there's a "sect" of people who did well in biology class in high school. It's just a question of "do you consider the evidence" or "do you ignore it".
I'm the sort of asantist who, if suddenly there *were* a ton of valid evidence that appeared, directly supporting the existence of Santa, would update my viewpoint. Same thing with atheism, though in both cases it's extraordinarily unlikely to happen. This is NOT like theism, where in fact there already IS a ton of evidence contradicting their faith, yet they persist.
And yes, there is proof for a God. I'm not using my existence or what I believe as an attempted proof as you assert; that would be downright silly.
Maybe you mentioned it in another post I haven't read, but could you perhaps provide some info on this "proof for a God"? If it's explained online, provide a link... if its your own invention, hey, put it online and provide a link. Or link your post.
There are plenty of people who will be happy to explain the problems to you. It's not as if no one has tried to build a proof for God. It's a problem that's extremely well understood by now, and if you believe in God, that's called "faith", because there's no evidence supporting it.
Time to dig up the word definition, eh?
It seems like "belief" is actually a word more appropriate to science than it is to religion. "Faith" is a better word for religious tenets.
From m-w.com (emphasis mine):
Belief:
1 : a state or habit of mind in which trust or confidence is placed in some person or thing
2 : something believed; especially : a tenet or body of tenets held by a group
3 : conviction of the truth of some statement or the reality of some being or phenomenon especially when based on examination of evidence
synonyms BELIEF, FAITH, CREDENCE, CREDIT mean assent to the truth of something offered for acceptance. BELIEF may or may not imply certitude in the believer "my belief that I had caught all the errors". FAITH almost always implies certitude even where there is no evidence or proof "an unshakable faith in God". CREDENCE suggests intellectual assent without implying anything about grounds for assent . CREDIT may imply assent on grounds other than direct proof "gave full credit to the statement of a reputable witness".
Faith:
1 a : allegiance to duty or a person : LOYALTY b (1) : fidelity to one's promises (2) : sincerity of intentions
2 a (1) : belief and trust in and loyalty to God (2) : belief in the traditional doctrines of a religion b (1) : firm belief in something for which there is no proof (2) : complete trust
3 : something that is believed especially with strong conviction; especially : a system of religious beliefs "the Protestant faith"
Certainly we "believe" in the results of well-designed scientific experiments, well-supported theories, etc., because there are solid reasons to believe in them. We don't have "faith" that science has all the answers, or is always right -- that would be a religious-style mistake. Some people have faith that science will eventually answer X or Y, but again, that's not science itself; it's wishful thinking.
But maybe in the future, we'll uncover different ways of doing science (eg reductionism vs holism, experimentation vs modelling, triple-blind statistical analysis, analysis of negative results, etc), and discover that the word "science" is really insufficient to cover these different ways of conducting science.
I think the main point other posters are trying to make is that it's quite a large jump from "different ways of doing science" to something that the word "science" is insufficient to cover. Can you imagine a tangible example? I can't. The problem is that yes, of *course* we're going to come up with new ways to observe the world around us, but those are either fabrications ("when I was on that new drug, I saw people's colors, and they were all green except THESE guys who were purple!"), or they're in some way repeatable observations that can be used to build knowledge ("interestingly, young man, 99% of the participants of this study saw those same men as purple...") - in which case, that's science.
But that's what you're trying to do when you attempt convince others who have a relationship with God that He doesn't exist. In fact, you're not only trying to assert a negative proof, but you're trying to assert a negative proof that's trivially disproved. Do you see how irrational that is yet?
Hold on, are you reading what you're writing?
No one's trying to "assert a negative proof". You are making a huge *positive* assertion that a supernatural being exists AND has a personal relationship with you, has unlimited power and knowledge, wants your praise, listens to your prayers, performs supernatural miracles, etc.. We're just pointing out that because you're claiming things that are impossible according to everything we understand about natural law, hearsay from thousands of years ago won't really cut it as "evidence".
The "evidence" for God's existence is solely that lots of people think God exists. There's no other evidence.
There's also plenty of historical evidence to show the human beings invent magic or supernatural explanations to explain the things we don't understand. We've always done it. Our inventions simply get more complex (or more subtle) as we actually figure out the mechanisms of natural phenomena. If you're assessing that particular "evidence" for God, it's much better explained by "we made it up because we didn't understand nature" rather than "the supernatural stuff is real".
So I'm not an "agnostic" about God any more than I'm agnostic about Santa Claus and magical unicorns. "Atheist" means "without Gods", so that's the closer description.
Dawkins does indeed talk about science-accepting Christians. He feels they are *still* damaging their children by teaching them to respect and honor faith as something valuable, as something that's a source of wisdom.
Most of these Christians also tell their kids that Grandma is in heaven with Grandpa now, and she's happy. They tell their kids that God is watching and he'll know when they do something bad. They take their kids to church, where the kids are told (and made to recite) that God art in heaven and is the creator of heaven and earth, Jesus is his only son (and is also God), Mary was a virgin who gave birth, and various miracles actually happened.
I didn't grow up in a fundamentalist family by any stretch of the imagination (just fairly standard suburban Roman Catholic), but I was fed all of this stuff as a kid, and it took a long time to go back and really "clean house" in my brain to toss out all of that.
At some point standing in church reciting lines with the crowd like "it is right to give Him thanks and praise", and stuff like the Nicene Creed every week started to creep me out. But most people go on saying we believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth... his only son born of the Virgin Mary, etc. on the third day he rose again in fulfillment of the scriptures, he will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, etc. etc.., every week.
And think about how children are inculcated with such a sense that religion is an inarguable source of "right/wrong" information that many of those children are thus far easier to be manipulated later. Is a politician religious? Then he'll probably know right from wrong, won't he? Of course you've noticed how politicians attack this angle for all their worth.
Dawkins also talks about (and actively debates with) scientists and others who argue that religion and science occupy different magisteria -- the idea that they answer different kinds of questions, and thus they don't conflict because they don't overlap. His argument is that of *course* they overlap. If science came up with DNA evidence that Jesus really was born somehow outside of the bounds of normal human sexual reproduction, he guarantees you wouldn't hear religious leaders saying "nope; doesn't count -- science is a separate realm from religion". Instead, religion purports to answer questions that either are impossible to answer (like "why are we here" and "what's our purpose in life") or questions that science has no solid answers for currently (like "how the the universe begin"). His response is basically: some questions are simply invalid questions, and some science cannot yet answer... but why in the world would our own invented mythology have a better chance somehow at answering these problems? We might as well use explanations based on the ancient Greek pantheon... it's the same thing.
I'm another absolutely non-depressive atheist. I tend to feel there are definitely some internal physical/chemical reasons for general temperament and tendencies to depression... it's not that I'm never unhappy, I have just found that when I wake up in the morning things settle back into perspective, I make a plan to deal with whatever was making me unhappy, and life goes on.
So sometimes just walking outside and feeling the sun on my face can make my happy -- but I'm also damned sure that none of the natural beauty I see in the world came from a supernatural being that sits around wanting our praise and considering our prayers.
Personally, I'm glad to live in a world where, when shitty things happen, we don't have to pray for some insight into why God wanted little Bobby to be hit by the truck, or why God lets really nasty birth defects happen, etc. etc.. If I'm grieving over something, I don't want to have to also wrap my head around the idea that "it's all in God's plan" to get any solace. That wouldn't help me. I don't want to pray for little Bobby's soul, I want to put up a fence, get the speed limit lowered, get speed bumps installed... actually *do* something instead of waiting for the "lesson" to sink in, whatever that hell that would be (maybe Bobby didn't confess about hitting his sister last week? Or... God just wanted him back home? Yeah, that's it.).
If there's nothing that can be done, then I want to understand more about what actually happened; how some birth defects are inevitable because of the mutant sludge left over in our genes during our evolution, how this pain is actually carried through my nerves and what it's doing in my brain, what researchers are experimenting with nowadays that might save someone else with my disease in 60 years.
And more -- life is an amazing and awesome, sometimes terrifying process; feeding off itself and being reborn in all its myriad forms. All this on our own little planet hurtling through spaces we can hardly grasp; and there are so many depths we have yet to explore.
My personal smallness doesn't freak me out -- it kind of comforts me. We all choose our frame of reference, all the time -- if I achieve something, I can be glad of the very real sphere in which it makes a difference, take pride in a little appreciation and earned respect. If I screw something up... well, in the larger scheme of things, it's an awfully tiny thing, isn't it?
Sorry for the rambling. I just agree pretty strongly with the idea that the real world is so much richer and meaningful than the blinkered religious interpretation.
Excellent point.
Unfortunately, I don't see any good solution to the pump-and-dump scams -- that's a much more complicated money trail. But we CAN stop the penis-enlargement spam by finding a way to stop the companies PAYING the spammers.
You mentioned Blue Security, which was seriously starting to make a difference (but had a huge Achilles heel in their business model...).
If enough dedicated developers are willing to help out on the slowly withering Okopipi project (founded to develop a decentralized version of Blue Security's system), it could quickly become a serious player in actually STOPPING spam, not just filtering it better for techies (which does *nothing* to discourage actual spammers).
The principle is the same as Blue Security used -- for every spam delivered to an Okopipi user (and reported as spam into the local Okopipi client), the advertised website gets an single generic opt-out request submitted automatically via the same client, generally submitting this request into the spamvertizers order forms, as that's often the only functional feedback mechanism they have (text something like "an unsolicited email advertising this product was sent to an Okopipi user: please visit okopipi.org for details on cleaning your lists").
There are obviously technical hurdles to surmount, and security issues to tackle, but a lot of design work addressing these is complete... right now the main issue is the project needs more smart, experienced programmers who can finalize designs, trash nonessential features, and get coding.
I'm personally trying to fire things up again, but there's no way I could do this kind of project solo.
"hld yr phone ovr guttr - sndng pss in 10 scnds"
Seriously, your comparison doesn't mean much (I think the GP was talking more about how we get so used to multitasking we never shut it all off and enjoy something directly)
The SO is racing towards the main hall -- and she doesn't have to fiddle with buttons while running, she can *speak* a text message into the phone. "did it start? where r u sitting?". Your phone vibrates silently; you can text back (without making noise by taking a call) "lites dn but doors still open - balcny aisle 3 on rt".
Yeah, it's not a feature to die for, but what the heck. Sometimes we don't have hands and eyes free to text. Sometimes we don't want to make noise by talking. It makes some sense to let users mix & match the options.
You know in America something like 43% of the population believes the Earth is around 10,000 years old? The politicians all play to that. Even the supposedly less-right-wing dems talk about God all the freakin' time. God must be blessing America so often He has no time to do much of anything else.
Europe isn't like that. Politicians do stupid things, they trick people by manipulating their fear or racism, etc. etc., just like in the US, but at least the huge "if you vote against me you're going against what God wants" manipulation doesn't come up. They have to at least pretend to use reason.
About the headscarf thing... they were trying to keep the schools a secular institution (which I agree with), but screwed it up by not being consistent, and also picking something that's almost impossible to really nail down. Does letting students wear a headscarf really endorse religion? Can they reasonably ban everything that's remotely connected to religion? Yeah, not so much.
But that's simple stupidity with maybe a little racism mixed in, not preaching.
My brother and his wife moved to the Netherlands a few years ago; he had worked for a Dutch company in California, and arranged to be transferred. They still don't speak Dutch fluently -- but everyone in the Netherlands studies English in school (and many are perfectly fluent), so it's easy for them to get by.
They moved out of the US mostly to be closer to his wife's family in France.
I moved out of the US this summer. My wife and I now live in rural southern France, in the corner near the Mediterranean and the Spanish border. We both speak French, more or less; my wife's completely fluent, and mine is pretty good. I bought a car here (a diesel 1994 Renault Clio that gets 45 miles to the gallon, which good since diesel is almost $5/gallon... regular gas is even more expensive).
I'm still working for the same clients (doing web development) back in the US, plus running a few sites of my own; I'm paid in US dollars, and pay US taxes, with a US address that's technically a mail-fowarding company. I call into conference calls using Skype.
But I live surrounded by vineyards, and weather is lovely. The food is good, and the people I've met are warm and friendly.
We moved to try something different. We'd lived in the northern US for long enough, and wanted to move someplace that would never get 4 feet of snow, but most parts of the southern US seemed unappealing in the extreme. The paperwork to move to Europe was a pain, but in the US we'd been through the process of getting my wife a green card after we married, and this was easier *plus* pretty much everyone was very friendly and helpful (is the INS friendly in the US? No.).
It's nice to be distanced a bit from all the political $#!# in the US, too. It's not like we're hiding our heads in the sand, and I'm still voting, but I simply don't check the news more than a few times a month. France has their own elections coming up, and their own political problems, but at least they're *different* problems. And at least we can escape the non-stop hypocritical religious rhetoric, which is what I hate the most about US politicians. The problems don't go away, but I'm not doing any *less* about them and I sleep better at night.
Think about it -- watching people argue on television doesn't do a damned thing for any cause, it just gives you that sick feeling that doesn't go away.
So anyway, it's possible.
Of course, there's always that crazy concept that you might actually get something out of your schooling besides the salary boost after graduation.
You know, like actual knowledge and skills (and the important ones transcend simply knowing your way around X or Y programming language). You're right, after a few years the school you went to won't matter so much. Because knowing WTF you're doing will take priority.
Suddenly, choosing the cheapest school doesn't seem so obvious.
I work independantly as well. It can be tough to work up the motivation to get going on things, and I occasionally have the experience of realising at 10pm that I've spent about an hour of billable time that day -- the rest was running errands, procrastinating, websurfing, reading news, socializing, etc.. Sometimes I'll then work another 7 hours, which sometimes works okay (sometimes my brain really starts clicking only late at night)... but of course makes it that much harder to get started the next morning.
/.) -- walk around and maybe get some fresh air. Let your mind play with the problem and come up with some new solutions to test out before you go sit down again.
Of course, the answer is self-discipline, time management, etc., but there are a lot of factors that affect how successful I am at that. Here's what I'm watching properly during the times that things are really working well:
* Personal physical factors: I avoid caffeine, because it keeps me "awake" but destroys my focus. If I'm really focused, I simply won't get sleepy anyway. I avoid all alcohol during the week, and avoid sugary things at night, because those both affect my sleep patterns and sharpness in the morning. Proper sleep also makes a huge difference to focus... if I only slept 3-4 hours, even if I'm wide awake things just don't seem to get done.
* Project factors: an interesting project that uses my knowledge/skills but also brings in some new things is much easier to work on. Boring projects (just solving the same old problems again in a slightly different way), overly tedious/frustrating projects (like cleaning up someone else's mess or working with really buggy APIs), or overly daunting projects (working with a new language, in a domain only vaguely understood)... that's when I end up bouncing off the work into random other activities like a stone skipping off water.
* Work organization: I try to stop periodically to make priorities lists and to-do lists, and to break down tasks into smaller and smaller sections. It's important for scheduling purposes already, but the mental benefits are also huge. You can hit lots of little goals to keep you going, like "just get this query finished, send that email, then I can break for lunch".
* Breaks: get up and walk around when you're stuck. Don't just sit in your chair (or take a break by going off to check
Now I just need to follow my own rules *all* the time....
Then your little brother notices that the router keeps logs... "MOM!!!!"
Maybe you're trolling, but I figure there are enough people out there who seriously think something like that to make replying worthwhile.
I personally believe that copyright is immoral because of the restrictions it places on citizens (especially in a digital age where information duplication is so easy and beneficial). As far as I'm concerned, any artist can set a bounty on their work creation (go around asking for $x to make a given thing), or ask for donations, or whatever. But they do not have the right to control their work after it has passed into public view.
This argument frustrates me to no end because it's so very short-sighted. Of course current copyright laws need revision, but if you simply did away with copyright, everything you're enjoying now would disappear so fast your head would spin. I'm sure you don't like DRM-locked music, and you're probably pro open-source... but if we enacted your "everything is public domain" you would basically force all but hobbyist music into extreme DRM lockdown, and open-source would also lose all its advantages.
Think about it. My wife's a writer, so I tend to come at it from that angle first. She spent about 7 years writing her first novel. Her publisher is giving her an advance, and she'll get a bonus plus royalties once her advance is covered by sales. The publisher pays her editor, plus pays for all advertisement costs, managing book tours, printing and distribution, etc.. Even with good advertising, there's no guarantee they'll make money -- in fact, they usually don't; they make up for it by sometimes finding a book that really sells well and makes them enough money to cover the losses from rest of the authors in their stable. The money they pay my wife won't be huge (divided over the 7 years of work), but hopefully she'll get the next book out quicker, and hopefully she can build name recognition to increase future sales. She also retains film and foreign rights for a separate, future contract, so that's another possible source of income from this book.
Now let's imagine as soon as the first copy is released (in paper or online) *any* publisher can print and sell it, make a movie out of it, etc. without paying her a dime. Surprise; of course the standard publishers will go out of business immediately, and only printers will survive, competing to print the cheapest copies. None of them will be able to affort to advertise, because the competitors (without the advertising costs, but reaping the benefits) will wipe them out. My wife would have two options:
* Set up a website to plead for donations. Of course, the actually published books (hard copy or electronic) needn't bother to link her site, and she'd have no money for advertising, but let's say 10,000 generous fans who picked up the book at the beach for $1.50 googled her name (a ridiculous overestimate, since no one will be advertising her book), stopped by and contributed a buck. Great, honey, you just netted an average of $1,428 annually, which may just about cover hosting the site and payment processing fees.
* Stop writing books, or relegate writing to a spare-time hobby.
Let's look at the music POV since that's what you were discussing. Musicians need money to simply survive, plus recording, mastering, advertising, distribution (yes, even online distribution)... all costs money, and lots of people besides the musicians themselves need to get paid somehow to do all that, or they can't survive either. Welcome to capitalism, right? After paying for this stuff the music labels likewise lose money on many bands that just don't pan out into good sales, but they make up for it with the pop stars that make it big.
Now let's take away the revenue stream entirely. The recording companies go away -- that's what you wanted, right? -- and only some touring management companies remain. Bands that are already well-known can probably do just fine touring and pay for some advertising out of that, though concerts will likely get a lot more expensive (si
Yet many civilizations embraced human torture and sacrifice, and many embraced peace and understanding.
If a human sacrifice is required to appease the gods (and protect everyone), it isn't so clearly immoral anymore. You have to remember that a lot of practices that we think are evil now were based on different ideas about what was good for the people. Now we know better, so we know it's a bad idea.
There have also been plenty of cultures divided into strata, where interactions within a group would be generally non-abusive and fair, but a member of a "lower" group could be abused in some way. The concepts of morality that allowed this work seemed logical (and would be backed up with edicts from god(s) and examples of the deserving value of the superior group), but there's always that inconsistency, that flaw that becomes apparent when we encounter someone from a "lower" group who doesn't fit the type, who's actually smarter and/or more skilled than the supposedly superior group. These start to prove the falseness of the model, and gradually ideas change -- the lower group becomes more dissatisfied, the higher group becomes less confident of their correctness. We deal with the world using models of reality, and when they are repeatedly proven false, we try to correct them; that's how we learn.
That's the entire point, which you seem to have missed. If infants are amoral and can be molded to hold any sort of morality from pure hedonism to self sacrificing altruism, then how can anyone say humans in general are "moral"?
Infants cannot be molded like that. They will still have the same basic instincts even if you teach them nonsense. They become thinking entities at some point, and will start using their brains to try to figure out how things work, and how to make themselves happy. They might not get very far, depending on how badly their education was mangled. But they'll try to make sense of the ideas they've been taught, and draw some conclusions of their own along the way (that will be passed down to their offspring, and so on). Somewhere along the line someone will come up with the idea, again, that an eye for an eye sucks for everyone involved. Etc..
Isn't morality simply a behavioral trait of humans within some given society? It would be much better to speak of the morality of specific human societies, not humanity in general. The fact that we have prisons proves that there are individuals who don't hold to today's general morality.
The fact that we have prisons also proves that those individuals comprise small enough of a minority that they can be fully stopped and restrained by the majority. I'm certainly not arguing that individuals will always behave the way the majority thinks is moral. They won't even always behave the way *they themselves* think is moral -- their urges, learned precepts, etc. are often going to be in conflict. That's life; we balance conflicting forces.
Since humans can adapt to any given society, it implies that basically they are amoral and simply take on the morality of their society so that they can survive.
Humans can't adapt to any given society. Humans break down in societies/situations that require them to act in a way that's simply too strongly against their instincts and/or logical reasoning. They rebel (even if it means death). They flee (even if it means death). They commit suicide (even... yeah).
Witness the ability of mobs and people lost in the wilderness to abandon all sense of morality and act purely hedonistically.
Actually, I've never witnessed this. I have spent time lost in the wilderness -- it was stressful, but I never thought of taking a hatchet to anyone's head. Does that happen often? I hear a lot more stories about how people went to heroic lengths to save the group. Mobs (as seen on TV) can be frightening -- that's a sort of dark side to our cooperative instincts; once you're in a group of people it's possible to act without stopping to thin
If morals are just best practices, doesn't that imply amorality as the initial state?
No -- humans survived and thrived as a species based on our "best practices" (and our natural ability to teach & learn). So it's natural for groups of humans to develop and pass on morality of some kind.
Are you talking about infants as the "initial state"? Sure, at that stage of development, humans aren't yet moral agents. They're basically helpless, and their main job is to make sure Mom remembers to feed them and keep them safe. You can't draw any conclusions about adult humans based on that alone.
So saying that infants are "amoral" doesn't really mean anything. What conclusions can you draw from that? Kangaroos, when they're first born, don't hop at all. They just crawl into the pouch. I'm not going to conclude from this observation that they're "naturally non-hopping creatures", and suspect that adult kangaroos are always on the brink of slipping back into this natural, non-hopping state.
Morality just happens to be what has evolved as a compromise between hedonism and idealism.
Well, don't forget that "hedonism" isn't such a simple route. We're all hedonists, in a way -- there's pleasure in accomplishing difficult tasks, in helping others, avoiding guilt, etc. etc.. The stereotypical rock star lifestyle isn't successful hedonism at all (though that's what people tend to think hedonism is...) -- they tend to go self-destructive, or end up like Michael Jackson. Think he's happy?
You're still talking about Billy's selfish urges as the only "natural" thing.
My point is that it's just as "natural" for you to teach him how to balance that initial urge with wiser behavior that will help him to be happier.
The instinctual part of him gives him the urge to just grab the toy, sure. But it also gives him a propensity to learn quickly from you, and it gives him (once he starts to get it right) reinforcement through very positive emotions as he makes friends, earns respect, etc..
It's not that you've "taught him to overcome his naturally-selfish instincts". You're teaching is a requisite part of his natural development; if you don't, he's going to be way out of whack from his natural balance, and NOT a successful human being who's likely to reproduce.
Another way to put it: he's not "naturally selfish" -- he's naturally in a balance between selfish urges and social urges (both of these are a mix of instinct and instruction), and that lets him interact successfully and happily with others while still acting to a degree in self-interest. That selfish pull isn't bad in the normal balance -- without it, he'd sacrifice himself totally for the needs of others (and be appreciated, but probably not live very long...).
It ain't pretty? It doesn't seem so horrible.
Think about it -- if most people actually enjoyed living in a dog-eat-dog world, that is exactly how we would all be living. Sure, we all have urges to take the shortcut to success by just taking what that other guy already has. But we hate being "that other guy" so much that it pushes things back in a sane direction.
1) stop you from doing it again and/or
2) harm you in return: perhaps physically, or (for example) telling everyone what you did harms you socially.
Of course, if you don't get caught and aren't suspected, you don't need to worry about that directly. But we're social animals; we have some instincts and passed-on skills (empathy, conscience, etc.) to help us live in cooperative groups.
That lesson needs to be taught, perhaps, because we're essentially *stupid* by nature. We've evolved into a species that passes on essential knowledge to our offspring via teaching (because it works a lot better than only passing on slowly-evolved instincts!). If you raise kids without passing on the essentials (including how to interact with others), you're sending them out into the world as cripples, and they're going to screw up a lot and be miserable. That's not their "natural state" -- normally, this knowledge would have been passed on. In the natural human state, the parent teaches the child.
Questions like "are we essentially amoral or moral" aren't really answerable just because they don't match up well with the real situation. Morality is the "best practices" we've figured out over time: how to live and cooperate with other people with a minimum of frustration and fighting. A kid might figure out some of that stuff on his own ("damn, I punch just one girl and now nobody wants to talk to me..."), just like he might figure out a hammer is for hitting things with... but without teaching, he's not going to master it any more than he'd master driving a car out into traffic if he found one sitting in the garage one day.
If you teach your kid that he'll get punished when he grabs Billy's toy, he learns that *you* don't want him to grab toys. If you teach him to observe that Billy is sad when his toy is stolen, and Billy might be his friend if they share toys instead, and it feels good to have a friend... well, you're teaching him how to act even when you're not around, for starters. You're also giving him skills he can use in many other situations.
I conceed that most creators aren't in charge of marketing their own products, but I don't view that as justification to continue the current process. Entertainment is the only industry I can think of where the content producer has little or no role in marketing their product
I'm not sure if I understand this point -- which are the industries you're talking about where the content creator *is* the primary marketer for their product? Obviously marketing campaigns that involve the creator but are funded and managed by someone else (like music videos) don't count against my original point, because it still requires that 3rd party with large resources who can support a lot of creators based on the occasional huge seller. Most creators -- writing cookbooks, songs, novels, nonfiction, technical books, whatever -- are individuals or a few individuals, who almost never have those kinds of resources (unless they were one of the tiny minority who *already* had a massive success -- marketed by that 3rd party -- and *now* they have plenty of cash).
However, there are very limited cases where any form of entertainment -- book, music, film, or otherwise -- is a "long term" source of income. Most books aren't even printed for 5 years;
Really? Where are you getting that idea from? Go browse through Borders or Barnes and Nobles, or any music store. Are you seriously saying almost all of those books, albums, etc. were created in the past 5 years? That would be strange, outside of the "new releases" section.
In most cases, the desire to "have it now" will trump any small savings made by waiting, and five years is a LONG time to wait.
There's a lot money in paperback sales, of course -- basically a cheaper version of the original hardcover that's not available for a while. Obviously people do buy hardcover books, and some people would buy the copyright-protected materials when they are first released. But I know the majority of the books I read and music I listen to (and buy) are more than 5 years old, and I tend towards paperbacks when they're available. I don't want what's *newest*, I want what's *best*. I don't know what most people's purchasing tendencies are, but remember that even diminishing returns are *returns*, and the publishing houses and authors are currently depending on that money.
Really, how do you buy books? Do you buy only latest releases, or do you find an author you like based on recommendations and start reading all of their books? When I was a kid (and reading all the time) I spend my time going through stuff by (at different times) Roald Dahl, CS Lewis, Ray Bradbury, Steven King, Isaac Asimov, etc. etc., as well as authors that looked good but I've forgotten now... but never based on what was new, just what I liked. And listening to music that was mostly created 15-20 years earlier. If you like the Harry Potter books, and had a cousin who was getting to about that level, you'd buy him the first one, right? Not the latest.
It was never about "being compelled to wait that long" for a newly-released book -- there was an overwhelming number of books that looked wonderful, so of course I only chose the paperbacks if I was buying them.
So I think your gut instincts on how this would work are wrong, though I don't have the useful statistics to hand either... The other main point I'd make is asking what exactly is *lost* with a 50-year copyright, i.e., what are we sacrificing? You need to have a grasp on both sides of the equation. I can imagine laws to "rescue" content that's been out-of-print and totally unavailable for a given length of time, but that's not at all the same thing as curtailing copyright for *everything* down to 5 years (which has obvious costs for no great benefits that I can think of.. other than "punishing" Disney, which doesn't actually gain me anything).
the first customer could then copy his copy and spread it across the whole, wide world.
True, and far more so with the internet. That's lovely in the short run for the general public. All music, free! All movies, free! But... some works takes decades and/or a lot of money to produce. If the creators have no way to make money from their creation, that means they won't have the money to make another, and they certainly won't be able to fund anything that's expensive to create.
You'll still have some books left, because amateurs will write them in their spare time, and some writers will be able to survive on grants, teaching positions, etc.. You'll still have some music, because some bands enjoy touring and can make enough money from it to support themselves. Some other bands will still get together and practice Saturday afternoons when they're off work, and record themselves in someone's garage. Other "bands" won't actually make their own music at all -- they'll just copy other folks' tracks and rename them, then distribute them from their own website. Hey, it's public domain... it's legal.
Movies -- would films except hobby files continue to exist? As soon as the first theater got a copy of the film, they could legally start selling or giving away copies to every other theater. It's public domain work -- could a contract stop them from doing that? They'd have no reason to pay the movie studio for public domain work, so the studio would lose all revenue. I don't know, maybe they'd get around this with strict contracts and massive secrecy and encryption. They couldn't sell DVDs, either, because as soon as one sold, boom, it's on the internet and you'll never sell another, so new movies would probably become theater-only entertainment, with pat-downs on your way in to detect hidden video cameras (assuming the studios and theaters could work out some kind of deal to replace copyright).
Video game consoles might just go away entirely. Or they'd get very, very expensive, and the console developers will fund all game development with that extra revenue. Certainly, standalone PC games would go away. We might go back to video games only existing in arcades, because then the creators can make it as difficult as possible for others to copy the (public domain) games they create.
Does this all sound good to you? Copyright exists for a reason. It's gotten out of hand over time, but that doesn't mean it has no purpose.