There's no doubt that if you choose a suitably long time scale than something like this is insignificant. But as Keynes famously quipped, in the long run we're all dead. Nobody thinks that global warming will end life on Earth, or make a whit of difference after a few million years have gone by. It's the period everyone currently on Earth can expect to live through that's the problem.
Well evidently the latter -- the eggs of the Zebra Finch are laid on successive days but the species' chick rearing strategy depends on the eggs hatching on the same day. This leaves the nesting pair with chicks at different levels of development, which makes it harder for the parents to care for the brood.
Note that in this case it is likely male children or the female child(ren) of a homo sapiens female that were fertile and passed on the Neanderthal DNA, due to the current lack of observed Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA. Same for the Denisovans, etc. That interpretation is open to future data proving it wrong as more DNA analysis of the population as a whole proceeds.
One of the possibilities that fascinates me is that this lack of mitochondrial DNA evidence for Neanderthal ancestry through the female line may be because we haven't sampled enough of the modern human population; after all as atypical as it is to have your DNA analyzed, it's far, far more rare to have your mitochondrial haplotype analyzed.
Species are generally considered to be separate if they can't breed to create FERTILE offspring. Lots of closely-related species can breed, but the offspring are usually sterile.
Usually sterile, but not always, and not always to the same degree. And therein lies the rub: placing a thing in one category or another implies the difference is discrete and readily observable, but in the cases of populations of organisms differences are along a continuum.
The way high school students are taught about what a species is is simplistic; or at least it seems to be to me after years of working with scientists to support their data needs. I believe you can think of the concept of "species" as describing, not just a population of organisms, but a population of researchers studying those organisms. A taxonomic designation is a tool researchers use to communicate with each other; a division of a population into two species is dependent upon the their communication needs, not some kind of objective Truth.
Inability to crossbreed to produce fertile offspring is certainly one thing that researchers need species to tell them; if two populations can't interbreed then that will certainly force researchers to distinguish between them. But there are other reasons to recognize new species, and I've certainly seen cases where populations that can interbreed to produce entirely viable offspring have been put into two different species. Let me tell you that's a PITA for people who are keeping records. "We collected species X, species Y, and what appears to be an X/Y hybrid..."
It would be really nice if there were some simple, objective, observable criterion for generating a new species designation, but that's not how it works. The way it actually works is some journal editor accepts an article describing the proposed new species. Then after the ensuing argument a consensus is formed that some people like, some people dislike, but most people can live with. It's a matter of how people feel about the impact of the new species on their work, not some objective distinction -- although because objective distinctions like physical traits are involved I think researchers sometimes lose sight of the fact that naming a population with those traits is a mere convention. It's easier to see the essential arbitrariness of the process when you're sitting off on the sidelines watching.
So bottom line: "species" reflects the needs of researchers to communicate with each other, not some kind of objective reality. Reality can force researchers to recognize a new species, but it can't prevent them from doing that.
Well, if this is $300 net, I'll take it. That's how economics works, doesn't it? You stop investing when the marginal return for a dollar spent is a dollar.
No, we know what we're missing (at least in 'Murica), but no one wants to make the Telcos deliver it: nationwide broadband that isn't a joke.
There are still some places in the US where 768K DSL is considered "high speed". You can't telework on that.
I agree that the broadband situation in America is ridiculous, but you don't really need high speed Internet to telecommute. You need to high speed to stream several different video feeds to different devices in your house. Or you need high speed to support an office full of workers -- but that's the scenario we're specifically NOT talking about. We're talking about one or two telecommuters doing office work in the middle of the boonies. To support a single telecommuter you can get by on 768K DSL for most jobs, although you might not be entirely happy with that for other reasons.
Or given the prices differences between a place like San Francisco and, say, the rural Midwest, you can easily take some of the $3000-$4000 you're saving in rent per month and put it into business class Internet services. If you actually had the opportunity to work either in an expensive metro area or telecommute from the cheap boonies you could make it work, if it were something you were really motivated to do. If you say, "gee all they got out there is telco DSL" and throw up your hands, you're not that motivated.
No, the reason we aren't all working from our cabins in the mountains is that it isn't really that attractive a thing to do, as much as we like it in theory.
I know this well because I developed for the Newton, and am familiar with a number of tablet-like solutions that go back even further.
The Newton was ahead of its time, but not that far ahead of its time; it was a text-centric device like a Palm Pilot -- no watching movies or playing MP3s. And for certain kinds of stuff (e.g. the kind of field data collection stuff I was working on) the Newton (with its AA batteries, low power consumption monochrome screen and PCMCIA card interfaces) was actually a pretty practical solution. It just fell far, far short of the "personal digital assistant" vision. Primarily it just didn't have the right form factor for something you would carry on your person all the time.
It's still 136 years. Or put another way, roughly two human lifetimes or about five generations. In other words, a long time for a human being.
Indeed it is always possible to choose a longer yardstick by which comparison something else will seem like a short time. 4.5 billion years? Meh; the half life of a proton is on the order of 10^33 years. But then so what?
It may be true that 136 years is a short time compared to 4.5 billion, but utterly irrelevant.
I'm pretty much on the same page as you; the idea that we'd all be contractors telecommuting from any old place ignored a lot of things about people and organizations, including the fact that people have a life outside of work that makes a big difference inside of work. It ignores things like job and investor networking, which of course can be done on social media and LinkedIn, but the fact that so many people are doing that only makes face time that much more of a competitive advantage. Do not underestimate the social power of lunch. Or (shudder) *golf*. Those things sure as hell beats posting on someone's wall as form of social connection.
But the "everyone will be a telecommuter thing" still might happen. The toughest thing in technology often isn't predicting what will happen, but when. It was pretty clear to many of us that tablets were the future, but Microsoft jumped the gun in 2001 with it's tablet PC initiative; you needed several things to make tablets work: batteries that could deliver sufficient energy without weight; power efficient processors with the performance to support new innovations in UI design with enough responsiveness to create a "direct manipulation" UX.
If the everyone-is-a-telecommuter scenario is in our future, it'll be because of something we're missing now that we have no idea we're missing.
1. An accused criminal gets the key witnesses in the case wiped before the trial.
More easy and likely for the cops to plant false memories. In fact I'd say trivially easy, and combined with the unwarranted faith people have in human memory as some kind of infallible recording device, very effective I'd say at getting the desired result.
If you've been following the science of this topic, the idea that memories an somehow be destroyed is not particularly surprising; the only problem I have with is the term "wiped", which implies that memories are faithful recordings to begin with. Memory and imagination are intimately connected; in most cases when we recall a memory, unless it is highly traumatic most of the detail we put into that picture is imagined. While it is clear *something* is stored and retrieved, most of what we experience in a memory is made up on the fly, and that stuff gets incorporated into the pre-existing memory. As one neuroscientist I read put it, the best way to keep a person's memory of an event accurate is to put that person in a coma so he can't recall it. And if you think about it from an evolutionary standpoint this kind of unreliable memory gets the job of imprinting survival promoting behaviors done by connecting two other pre-existing faculties -- vague associative memory and imagination. It doesn't require evolving the entirely novel memory architecture needed to store sensory experience exactly.
So it's extremely easy to corrupt a memory; in fact memory corruption is a natural process. The difference between corruption and erasure is only a matter of degree.
That is one of those Wikipedia articles which is a bit vague about what it means. It's doesn't make sense to intend to say that glass transmits 90% of incident light regardless of the thickness. The Wikipedia entry references a single optical "element", so I'd take "the transmissivity of one element (two surfaces) is about 90%," to mean that 10% is the lower limit of light loss for a single lens of arbitrary thinness.
Now if a very thin silica glass lens transmits 90% of the light falling on it, then clearly it'd be very difficult to conceive of a material that transmits 10% more light than that. However you can achieve whatever level of attenuation you wish by making your piece of glass sufficiently (possibly absurdly) thick. The three inch thick glass panes used in giant ocean tanks are noticeably more opaque than air. Clearly it's physically possible for a material to transmit 10% more light than the same thickness of glass -- for a sufficient thickness. Particularly if the index of refraction of that material is closer to air.
Of course that's where we get to the point that the summary is badly written too. Silica glass *is* very transparent; insufficient transparency isn't a problem in window applications, if there's a problem it's that the material is too transparent. That's why we have dark tinting and anti-IR coating. So it's not clear why we would care that the material can transmit 10% more light. Clearly the story got garbled somewhere along the way.
You know what's going to happen if you rely on a pager, don't you? Nobody will know how to contact you on that.
Which, indeed, is a feature -- not a bug. Anyone you want to reach you you give them the secret formula: call my pager's phone #, and when you hear the beep enter your phone number followed by #. Or if you need to send text, send an email to myPagerPhoneNumber@provider.com. If you can't handle that I don't want to hear from you.
Oh, and a feature phone is fine solution if it's OK that you can't be reached when you're in a tunnel or some other places the VHF phone band can't reach but typical pager frequencies can.
Re:First Name Basis? Rude.
on
Carly Is Out
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· Score: 1
Grammer ignorami. Proper nouns should NEVER be preceded by articles.
Oh, the definite article is very commonly used before proper nouns, most often place names or geographical features (e.g. "The Mississippi (River)").
Sometimes "the" is used purely customarily (particularly in names translated from other languages like "The Ukraine" or "The Maghreb" ), but its primary function is to distinguish between nouns referring to specific things a speaker is expected to be aware of, and generic things that are just being introduced into the discourse: "a ball [which I haven't mentioned up until now] broke Mr. Smith's window; Mr. Smith kept the ball [which I just mentioned]."
In particular proper nouns which sound like they might be generic will sometimes customarily get a "the" tacked on to indicate the audience is expected to picture the well-known thing rather than some unknown one ("The United States", "The Great Lakes", "The Big Easy"). "The Donald" is a definite article usage of this type, with an bit of ironic deprecation mixed in.
By the way the plural of "ignoramus" is "ignoramuses", not "ignorami". That is because "ignoramus" was never a noun in Latin; rather it is a conjugation of the verb ignorare (to be unacquainted with, to ignore). "Ignoramus" entered English as a legal term to mean "we take no notice of" (e.g. a witness whose testimony is irrelevant because he has no firsthand knowledge).
If the market decides that it's not important for people to have this, then the only way to change that is for the people who need it to somehow become rich. If the regulators decide people shouldn't have this, then the voters can change that. And if you factor in the increased independence and productivity of the recipients, it might not cost that much.
Of course the way we do it now is we force employers to make accommodations. That's better than nothing, but statistically the public is still paying; the burden is just randomly concentrated on a few unlucky employers.
I kind of think Cleese of all people should know better. What do you do when you're a clever young snot? You offend your elders. The time comes for every Young Turk to discover what it's like for the Old Turks.
Since when have we reached the point where you aren't allowed to annoy or offend people?
Since never. You're still allowed to offend people, but it's never been the case you could do that with impunity.
The only thing that has really changed is that communication on a mass scale is literally too cheap to meter. That means putative offenses and the dudgeon that follows on them can spread across the globe in minutes rather than taking days or weeks to spread through your immediate circle of face-to-face acquaintances. So without people changing one bit, the circumstances in which they interact in have changed dramatically. For things to go back to the way they used to be people would actually have to stop being the same as they've always been.
Well good luck with that. People tend to be stubborn idiots. College students tend to be inexperienced stubborn idiots. That means they're trying to find their place in the world, and the way an inexperienced idiot would do that is to try to change the world. And if there's enough of them working together (using cheap global communications?) then they might even succeed. Sometimes that's even a good thing, but it's never pretty.
The reason people are so conventional is what economists call "agency costs". They aren't minimizing risk to their employers, they're minimizing risk to themselves.
Well, I think this is one of those cases where there's an umbrella rule that serve purpose, but which might also have sensible exceptions. In this case the rule is that selecting embryo sex is something that ought to be discouraged.
There are lots of reasons to discourage selecting offspring sex, some of which a reasonable person might disagree with. For example some would object that it's playing God. Others might say say that it's wrong to value persons of one sex more than others. I don't find those particular objections compelling, but one thing I do find convincing is that changing the almost 1:1 balance of reproductive age men and women could destabilize society in various ways. But note that under that particular objection we could certainly tolerate exceptions that are relatively rare. For example the slight discrepancy between the number of males who identify as gay and the number of females who identify as lesbian has no practical impact on straight people. Clearly an exception in this case would only affect a handful of people and is not a concern under the demographic balance argument.
The knee-jerk controversy that follows any proposal to do something which as a rule of thumb is frowned upon does serve a useful function. Because of confirmation bias, people tend to be blind to unintended consequences of things they've decided to do. Making them address those consequences is, within reason, a good idea.
Anyhow, that explains why restricting this to male embryos is more controversial than allowing either sex. Doing it at all is controversial because of the burden a failure could put on future society and the potential suffering it could cause.
Well it is; at least all that pink-is-for-girls, blue-is-for-boys rubbish is. People who are biologically male can wear high heels and enjoy chick flicks, but they can't pass on mitochondrial DNA, which is the relevant point here.
I agree with you in the general case; an important corollary to "the customer is always right" is that you really need to choose your customers wisely. But in this case the person complaining has a point. A customer has a right to expect prompt and timely service, or at least an apology if circumstances preclude that. If the customer doesn't accept a suitable apology then it's worth considering whether to "fire" him as somebody who just refuses to be pleased. And only then.
Now if you're offering the customer bargain basement prices you might reasonably hold yourself to a somewhat relaxed standard. But if you're charging top dollar it's unrealistic to expect customers to accept anything less than exemplary service.
Well, I do believe in protecting my employees from actual abuse. If a customer actually abused someone who worked for me and there were no extenuating circumstances, I'd terminate the relationship if it were at all feasible. But criticism isn't the same is abuse. Expressing your unhappiness with service isn't abuse. Even though those things might make some people feel bad -- feel as if they were receiving abuse -- that doesn't makeit abuse.
Abuse is by definition unreasonable and inexcusable.
For many years I spent nearly half my time traveling, and needless to say I learned to take air travel itinerary mess-ups in stride. Missed my connecting flight? Well, put me on the next flight. No more flights there today? OK make sure the hotel you put me in is reasonable. Lost my luggage? Well when you find it here's where to send it. What I found hard to take were the reactions of my fellow passengers to bad news. I don't mean just reacting angrily to bad news, because that's understandable. I don't get angry because having been through this all before and I know it always works out OK in the end, but it's excusable for people who aren't so accustomed to air travel to react badly to bad news. What's not excusable is them reacting angrily then not backing down. There's nothing the person behind the counter can do to make the problem go away instantly, so no purpose can possibly be served by berating them. What's more your venting is delaying service to people who may need it more urgently than you do. That is abusive behavior.
I have to say that this particular incident has definitely lowered my admiration for Musk and Tesla. A company has to be able to deal with criticism and unhappy customers. Everybody screws up some time, and if a company can't deal with an unhappy customer then it's not a company that anyone would be wise to do business with.
Slashdot Mirror
There's no doubt that if you choose a suitably long time scale than something like this is insignificant. But as Keynes famously quipped, in the long run we're all dead. Nobody thinks that global warming will end life on Earth, or make a whit of difference after a few million years have gone by. It's the period everyone currently on Earth can expect to live through that's the problem.
Well evidently the latter -- the eggs of the Zebra Finch are laid on successive days but the species' chick rearing strategy depends on the eggs hatching on the same day. This leaves the nesting pair with chicks at different levels of development, which makes it harder for the parents to care for the brood.
I believe, in my gut, that no one was prosecuted.
Apparently you think with your colon. Not surprising, judging from the product of that process.
Note that in this case it is likely male children or the female child(ren) of a homo sapiens female that were fertile and passed on the Neanderthal DNA, due to the current lack of observed Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA. Same for the Denisovans, etc. That interpretation is open to future data proving it wrong as more DNA analysis of the population as a whole proceeds.
One of the possibilities that fascinates me is that this lack of mitochondrial DNA evidence for Neanderthal ancestry through the female line may be because we haven't sampled enough of the modern human population; after all as atypical as it is to have your DNA analyzed, it's far, far more rare to have your mitochondrial haplotype analyzed.
Species are generally considered to be separate if they can't breed to create FERTILE offspring. Lots of closely-related species can breed, but the offspring are usually sterile.
Usually sterile, but not always, and not always to the same degree. And therein lies the rub: placing a thing in one category or another implies the difference is discrete and readily observable, but in the cases of populations of organisms differences are along a continuum.
The way high school students are taught about what a species is is simplistic; or at least it seems to be to me after years of working with scientists to support their data needs. I believe you can think of the concept of "species" as describing, not just a population of organisms, but a population of researchers studying those organisms. A taxonomic designation is a tool researchers use to communicate with each other; a division of a population into two species is dependent upon the their communication needs, not some kind of objective Truth.
Inability to crossbreed to produce fertile offspring is certainly one thing that researchers need species to tell them; if two populations can't interbreed then that will certainly force researchers to distinguish between them. But there are other reasons to recognize new species, and I've certainly seen cases where populations that can interbreed to produce entirely viable offspring have been put into two different species. Let me tell you that's a PITA for people who are keeping records. "We collected species X, species Y, and what appears to be an X/Y hybrid..."
It would be really nice if there were some simple, objective, observable criterion for generating a new species designation, but that's not how it works. The way it actually works is some journal editor accepts an article describing the proposed new species. Then after the ensuing argument a consensus is formed that some people like, some people dislike, but most people can live with. It's a matter of how people feel about the impact of the new species on their work, not some objective distinction -- although because objective distinctions like physical traits are involved I think researchers sometimes lose sight of the fact that naming a population with those traits is a mere convention. It's easier to see the essential arbitrariness of the process when you're sitting off on the sidelines watching.
So bottom line: "species" reflects the needs of researchers to communicate with each other, not some kind of objective reality. Reality can force researchers to recognize a new species, but it can't prevent them from doing that.
Well, if this is $300 net, I'll take it. That's how economics works, doesn't it? You stop investing when the marginal return for a dollar spent is a dollar.
No, we know what we're missing (at least in 'Murica), but no one wants to make the Telcos deliver it: nationwide broadband that isn't a joke.
There are still some places in the US where 768K DSL is considered "high speed". You can't telework on that.
I agree that the broadband situation in America is ridiculous, but you don't really need high speed Internet to telecommute. You need to high speed to stream several different video feeds to different devices in your house. Or you need high speed to support an office full of workers -- but that's the scenario we're specifically NOT talking about. We're talking about one or two telecommuters doing office work in the middle of the boonies. To support a single telecommuter you can get by on 768K DSL for most jobs, although you might not be entirely happy with that for other reasons.
Or given the prices differences between a place like San Francisco and, say, the rural Midwest, you can easily take some of the $3000-$4000 you're saving in rent per month and put it into business class Internet services. If you actually had the opportunity to work either in an expensive metro area or telecommute from the cheap boonies you could make it work, if it were something you were really motivated to do. If you say, "gee all they got out there is telco DSL" and throw up your hands, you're not that motivated.
No, the reason we aren't all working from our cabins in the mountains is that it isn't really that attractive a thing to do, as much as we like it in theory.
I know this well because I developed for the Newton, and am familiar with a number of tablet-like solutions that go back even further.
The Newton was ahead of its time, but not that far ahead of its time; it was a text-centric device like a Palm Pilot -- no watching movies or playing MP3s. And for certain kinds of stuff (e.g. the kind of field data collection stuff I was working on) the Newton (with its AA batteries, low power consumption monochrome screen and PCMCIA card interfaces) was actually a pretty practical solution. It just fell far, far short of the "personal digital assistant" vision. Primarily it just didn't have the right form factor for something you would carry on your person all the time.
Out of 4.5 billion... or 6000?
It's still 136 years. Or put another way, roughly two human lifetimes or about five generations. In other words, a long time for a human being.
Indeed it is always possible to choose a longer yardstick by which comparison something else will seem like a short time. 4.5 billion years? Meh; the half life of a proton is on the order of 10^33 years. But then so what?
It may be true that 136 years is a short time compared to 4.5 billion, but utterly irrelevant.
I'm pretty much on the same page as you; the idea that we'd all be contractors telecommuting from any old place ignored a lot of things about people and organizations, including the fact that people have a life outside of work that makes a big difference inside of work. It ignores things like job and investor networking, which of course can be done on social media and LinkedIn, but the fact that so many people are doing that only makes face time that much more of a competitive advantage. Do not underestimate the social power of lunch. Or (shudder) *golf*. Those things sure as hell beats posting on someone's wall as form of social connection.
But the "everyone will be a telecommuter thing" still might happen. The toughest thing in technology often isn't predicting what will happen, but when. It was pretty clear to many of us that tablets were the future, but Microsoft jumped the gun in 2001 with it's tablet PC initiative; you needed several things to make tablets work: batteries that could deliver sufficient energy without weight; power efficient processors with the performance to support new innovations in UI design with enough responsiveness to create a "direct manipulation" UX.
If the everyone-is-a-telecommuter scenario is in our future, it'll be because of something we're missing now that we have no idea we're missing.
136 years is a few milliseconds on climatic and geologic time scales.
No, it's 136 years.
1. An accused criminal gets the key witnesses in the case wiped before the trial.
More easy and likely for the cops to plant false memories. In fact I'd say trivially easy, and combined with the unwarranted faith people have in human memory as some kind of infallible recording device, very effective I'd say at getting the desired result.
If you've been following the science of this topic, the idea that memories an somehow be destroyed is not particularly surprising; the only problem I have with is the term "wiped", which implies that memories are faithful recordings to begin with. Memory and imagination are intimately connected; in most cases when we recall a memory, unless it is highly traumatic most of the detail we put into that picture is imagined. While it is clear *something* is stored and retrieved, most of what we experience in a memory is made up on the fly, and that stuff gets incorporated into the pre-existing memory. As one neuroscientist I read put it, the best way to keep a person's memory of an event accurate is to put that person in a coma so he can't recall it. And if you think about it from an evolutionary standpoint this kind of unreliable memory gets the job of imprinting survival promoting behaviors done by connecting two other pre-existing faculties -- vague associative memory and imagination. It doesn't require evolving the entirely novel memory architecture needed to store sensory experience exactly.
So it's extremely easy to corrupt a memory; in fact memory corruption is a natural process. The difference between corruption and erasure is only a matter of degree.
That is one of those Wikipedia articles which is a bit vague about what it means. It's doesn't make sense to intend to say that glass transmits 90% of incident light regardless of the thickness. The Wikipedia entry references a single optical "element", so I'd take "the transmissivity of one element (two surfaces) is about 90%," to mean that 10% is the lower limit of light loss for a single lens of arbitrary thinness.
Now if a very thin silica glass lens transmits 90% of the light falling on it, then clearly it'd be very difficult to conceive of a material that transmits 10% more light than that. However you can achieve whatever level of attenuation you wish by making your piece of glass sufficiently (possibly absurdly) thick. The three inch thick glass panes used in giant ocean tanks are noticeably more opaque than air. Clearly it's physically possible for a material to transmit 10% more light than the same thickness of glass -- for a sufficient thickness. Particularly if the index of refraction of that material is closer to air.
Of course that's where we get to the point that the summary is badly written too. Silica glass *is* very transparent; insufficient transparency isn't a problem in window applications, if there's a problem it's that the material is too transparent. That's why we have dark tinting and anti-IR coating. So it's not clear why we would care that the material can transmit 10% more light. Clearly the story got garbled somewhere along the way.
You know what's going to happen if you rely on a pager, don't you? Nobody will know how to contact you on that.
Which, indeed, is a feature -- not a bug. Anyone you want to reach you you give them the secret formula: call my pager's phone #, and when you hear the beep enter your phone number followed by #. Or if you need to send text, send an email to myPagerPhoneNumber@provider.com. If you can't handle that I don't want to hear from you.
Oh, and a feature phone is fine solution if it's OK that you can't be reached when you're in a tunnel or some other places the VHF phone band can't reach but typical pager frequencies can.
Grammer ignorami. Proper nouns should NEVER be preceded by articles.
Oh, the definite article is very commonly used before proper nouns, most often place names or geographical features (e.g. "The Mississippi (River)").
Sometimes "the" is used purely customarily (particularly in names translated from other languages like "The Ukraine" or "The Maghreb" ), but its primary function is to distinguish between nouns referring to specific things a speaker is expected to be aware of, and generic things that are just being introduced into the discourse: "a ball [which I haven't mentioned up until now] broke Mr. Smith's window; Mr. Smith kept the ball [which I just mentioned]."
In particular proper nouns which sound like they might be generic will sometimes customarily get a "the" tacked on to indicate the audience is expected to picture the well-known thing rather than some unknown one ("The United States", "The Great Lakes", "The Big Easy"). "The Donald" is a definite article usage of this type, with an bit of ironic deprecation mixed in.
By the way the plural of "ignoramus" is "ignoramuses", not "ignorami". That is because "ignoramus" was never a noun in Latin; rather it is a conjugation of the verb ignorare (to be unacquainted with, to ignore). "Ignoramus" entered English as a legal term to mean "we take no notice of" (e.g. a witness whose testimony is irrelevant because he has no firsthand knowledge).
I didn't read this as saying "open == secure"; rather I read it as "secure -> open", which is a very different thing.
The difference is what can be done about it.
If the market decides that it's not important for people to have this, then the only way to change that is for the people who need it to somehow become rich. If the regulators decide people shouldn't have this, then the voters can change that. And if you factor in the increased independence and productivity of the recipients, it might not cost that much.
Of course the way we do it now is we force employers to make accommodations. That's better than nothing, but statistically the public is still paying; the burden is just randomly concentrated on a few unlucky employers.
Oh, it is self-correcting. It's just that the process of correction isn't so nice for the people who have to live through it.
I kind of think Cleese of all people should know better. What do you do when you're a clever young snot? You offend your elders. The time comes for every Young Turk to discover what it's like for the Old Turks.
Since when have we reached the point where you aren't allowed to annoy or offend people?
Since never. You're still allowed to offend people, but it's never been the case you could do that with impunity.
The only thing that has really changed is that communication on a mass scale is literally too cheap to meter. That means putative offenses and the dudgeon that follows on them can spread across the globe in minutes rather than taking days or weeks to spread through your immediate circle of face-to-face acquaintances. So without people changing one bit, the circumstances in which they interact in have changed dramatically. For things to go back to the way they used to be people would actually have to stop being the same as they've always been.
Well good luck with that. People tend to be stubborn idiots. College students tend to be inexperienced stubborn idiots. That means they're trying to find their place in the world, and the way an inexperienced idiot would do that is to try to change the world. And if there's enough of them working together (using cheap global communications?) then they might even succeed. Sometimes that's even a good thing, but it's never pretty.
possibly intentionally.
The reason people are so conventional is what economists call "agency costs". They aren't minimizing risk to their employers, they're minimizing risk to themselves.
Well, I think this is one of those cases where there's an umbrella rule that serve purpose, but which might also have sensible exceptions. In this case the rule is that selecting embryo sex is something that ought to be discouraged.
There are lots of reasons to discourage selecting offspring sex, some of which a reasonable person might disagree with. For example some would object that it's playing God. Others might say say that it's wrong to value persons of one sex more than others. I don't find those particular objections compelling, but one thing I do find convincing is that changing the almost 1:1 balance of reproductive age men and women could destabilize society in various ways. But note that under that particular objection we could certainly tolerate exceptions that are relatively rare. For example the slight discrepancy between the number of males who identify as gay and the number of females who identify as lesbian has no practical impact on straight people. Clearly an exception in this case would only affect a handful of people and is not a concern under the demographic balance argument.
The knee-jerk controversy that follows any proposal to do something which as a rule of thumb is frowned upon does serve a useful function. Because of confirmation bias, people tend to be blind to unintended consequences of things they've decided to do. Making them address those consequences is, within reason, a good idea.
Anyhow, that explains why restricting this to male embryos is more controversial than allowing either sex. Doing it at all is controversial because of the burden a failure could put on future society and the potential suffering it could cause.
Gender is a social construct ;)
Well it is; at least all that pink-is-for-girls, blue-is-for-boys rubbish is. People who are biologically male can wear high heels and enjoy chick flicks, but they can't pass on mitochondrial DNA, which is the relevant point here.
I agree with you in the general case; an important corollary to "the customer is always right" is that you really need to choose your customers wisely. But in this case the person complaining has a point. A customer has a right to expect prompt and timely service, or at least an apology if circumstances preclude that. If the customer doesn't accept a suitable apology then it's worth considering whether to "fire" him as somebody who just refuses to be pleased. And only then.
Now if you're offering the customer bargain basement prices you might reasonably hold yourself to a somewhat relaxed standard. But if you're charging top dollar it's unrealistic to expect customers to accept anything less than exemplary service.
Well, I do believe in protecting my employees from actual abuse. If a customer actually abused someone who worked for me and there were no extenuating circumstances, I'd terminate the relationship if it were at all feasible. But criticism isn't the same is abuse. Expressing your unhappiness with service isn't abuse. Even though those things might make some people feel bad -- feel as if they were receiving abuse -- that doesn't makeit abuse.
Abuse is by definition unreasonable and inexcusable.
For many years I spent nearly half my time traveling, and needless to say I learned to take air travel itinerary mess-ups in stride. Missed my connecting flight? Well, put me on the next flight. No more flights there today? OK make sure the hotel you put me in is reasonable. Lost my luggage? Well when you find it here's where to send it. What I found hard to take were the reactions of my fellow passengers to bad news. I don't mean just reacting angrily to bad news, because that's understandable. I don't get angry because having been through this all before and I know it always works out OK in the end, but it's excusable for people who aren't so accustomed to air travel to react badly to bad news. What's not excusable is them reacting angrily then not backing down. There's nothing the person behind the counter can do to make the problem go away instantly, so no purpose can possibly be served by berating them. What's more your venting is delaying service to people who may need it more urgently than you do. That is abusive behavior.
I have to say that this particular incident has definitely lowered my admiration for Musk and Tesla. A company has to be able to deal with criticism and unhappy customers. Everybody screws up some time, and if a company can't deal with an unhappy customer then it's not a company that anyone would be wise to do business with.