Well, whether the situation fits the various definitions is a judgment call. It depends on whether you perceive what the property company is doing as productive, or exploiting their middleman position to extort fees they've done nothing to earn -- an activity which would fit all the definitions I listed. I'll leave that up to other readers, since we clearly differ on issues of substance as well as terminology.
a person who displays or demands of others pointlessly precise conformity, fussiness about trivialities, or exaggerated propriety, especially in a self-righteous or irritating manner
There is nothing "frivolous" about being clear when making economic and political statements,
Says the person who draws a distinction between "rent seeking" and "business decisions", as if one were not an instance of the other.
"Rent seeking is the socially costly pursuit of wealth transfers" -- The Encyclopedia of Public Choice, Rowley, Charles, Schneider, Friedrich (Eds.), Springer-Verlag 2003.
"Definition of 'Rent-Seeking' When a company, organization or individual uses their resources to obtain an economic gain from others without reciprocating any benefits back to society through wealth creation." -- Investopedia, http://www.investopedia.com/te..., Accessed June 1 2014.
"The idea that resources are unproductively used in rent-seeking contests has much broader application than the original rent-seeking papers suggested[emphasis mine] The rent-seeking logic has been applied to issues in history, sociology, anthropology, biology and philosophy. The core has also been formalized and analyzed more rigorously, using the tools of modern game theory. The modern rent-seeking literature describes the rational decision to invest in contesting pre-existing wealth or income, rather than undertaking productive activity. [emphasis mine]" -- Congleton, Roger D., Arye L. Hillman, and Kai A. Konrad. "Forty years of research on rent seeking: an overview." The Theory of Rent Seeking: Forty Years of Research 1 (2008).
In other words while rent-seeking in the sense of Anne Krueger's 1974 paper still continues to be an active area of research, the term is used differently in wider areas of economic research.
Oh, yes, and one more citation for you:
"prig (n.): a person who displays or demands of others pointlessly precise conformity, fussiness about trivialities, or exaggerated propriety, especially in a self-righteous or irritating manner." -- "prig." Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House, Inc. 01 Jun. 2014. http://dictionary.reference.co...>.
Cutting yourself a bigger slice of the cake rather than making the cake bigger. Trying to make more money without producing more for customers. Classic examples of rent-seeking, a phrase coined by an economist, Gordon Tullock, include:
a protection racket, in which the gang takes a cut from the shopkeeper's PROFIT; a CARTEL of FIRMS agreeing to raise PRICES; a UNION demanding higher WAGES without offering any increase in PRODUCTIVITY; lobbying the GOVERNMENT for tax, spending or regulatory policies that benefit the lobbyists at the expense of taxpayers or consumers or some other rivals. Whether legal or illegal, as they do not create any value, rent-seeking activities can impose large costs on an economy.
Source The Economist Magazine Dictionary of Economic Terms. I can cite many other sources, but I'm posting this from a phone so you can Google them yourself.
The Wikipedia article is about the rent seeking as described in Anne Kreuger's well-known 1974 paper. However that is only one example of how investors attempt to seek higher than normal profits without creating any utility, which is the more general sense of the word.
And in a sense we were undone by our own economic theories, more specifically by the assumptions in those theories like perfect information. Those oh-so-useful but obviously untrue assumptions have some nasty corner cases.
When people discovered how to create financial instruments that eliminated risk, they thought they'd discovered how to do what was literally impossible. If I had to boil it all down to one sentence, here it is: All these financial institutions thought they were insulating themselves from risk, but when everyone started to do it they ended up coupling themselves to risks other institutions were taking. When everyone is underwriting everyone else's risks, those risks don't disappear, they end up chained together, as if everyone was standing in a circle and leaning on the guy to his right.
Yeah, but doesn't *everything* fall apart with "so long as its being used responsibly". It's great that the military has the weapons it needs to do its job, "as long as they're being used responsibly."
That's not the way to think about this. The way to think about is to ask what can the government do do you that the couldn't do before?
Just like any private enterprise, the government can pull your credit report if it wants to. Now. And you'd better believe they do when they're investigating someone, or even looking for suspects. It's been happening for years now. The Washington DC sniper was a watershed case in the government procuring private sector data mining services to conduct a digital dragnet. Haven't you ever heard of a "fusion center"? The idea that *this* database gives the government any data about you it didn't have or couldn't easily get is silly.
So what can the government do with this database that it couldn't do before? It can find out whether a bank is writing bad mortgages and handing them off like a hot potato.
Which I guess under the circumstances is pretty predictable.
I guess where I'd start is with the facts. I'd build a model for how much it would cost, additional staff needed, how much it would bring in, support (and under the circumstances enforcement) costs, what competitors the users could turn to, what the content providers would be willing to pay (if anything) etc. I wouldn't do the new business idea any favors; I'd be objective and hard-nosed about it as possible. If the new service selling your residents to content providers isn't going to be profitable, then the whole idea goes no farther.
It's a safe bet that the business wouldn't be as profitable as the directors think, simply because it's usually a lot harder to make money in an unfamiliar business than you hoped it would be. It's easy enough in the abstract to believe the new idea will be like printing money, but in fact you're still trying to get people to part with their money, which is going to cost you *your* money. And you think, "Gee we got 15,000 customers, we can charge content providers a pretty penny for access." But is 15000 so large a potential customer base that content providers will adjust to a new way of doing business just for *you*? The big guys like Apple and Netflix and Amazon will probably just laugh at you and leave you twisting slowly, slowly in the wind rather than pay you a dime and invite every two-bit Internet baron to shake them down too. So maybe contact some of the big guys and just ask them how much they'd be willing to pay up and what kinds of services they'd expect in return. Those services are important!!! It's usually the unanticipated support costs that kill gold-egg-laying IT geese.
As for the small guys, well, they probably don't have much money to cough up. But it'd still be worth contacting some local business that needs access to your 15000 customers and taking them for a test shakedown, just to show you were a good soldier and looked in the sofa cushions for loose change. That kind of pathetic detail often drives home the futility of a hare-brained scheme. People when they come up with a brainstorm like this imagine piles of money-for-nuthin rolling in, so a bit of a reality check is healthy.
In other words, I would start with due diligence before you contemplate waving the bloody shirt. If, against all expectation, the idea proves to be promising, well I'd discreetly get an idea how your existing customers will react to having some of the Internet sites they need throttled. Remember, you're dealing with the dream of money-for-nuthin. Your job, your responsibility to your employers is to show them what it will really cost them in money, headaches and reputation.
Disclaimer: My comment/question isn't based upon any scientific background, so feel free to throw mud on my theory.
So, if a species is only found in a tiny area, is that species really viable?
Answer: often it is. Many species show signs of having done through a "genetic bottleneck" and subsequently grew to considerable populations. In the 1890s, there were fewer than 30 northern elephant seals in the whole world. Today there are hundreds of thousands, but back then a single project could have wiped them out. All the cheetahs in the world today descended from only seven individuals that lived ten thousand years ago. But they subsequently went on to be a highly successful species, with a range that covered all of Africa and Central and South Asia. Even humanity went through a population bottleneck 100,000 years ago. We could well have gone extinct.
If their survival is that fragile, that they can't survive outside of that area, is there value in making the effort to helping them, or are they more likely to go extinct anyway?
You're mixing up different questions: whether there is value in making efforts to help endangered species (which is an philosophical question, not a scientific one), or whether they're likely to go extinct "anyway" (which is an exercise in prognostication).
"Anyway" is a loaded term. Extinction *is* a natural process, but we are living in a period extinction rates unprecedented in the lifetime of our species. That means that the vast majority of species facing extinction face it as the result of human activities. Where merely tweaking an activity can save a species from extinction, say placing a facility *here* rather than *there*, that doesn't seem like too much to ask.
And taking steps to protect endangered species works. Not 100% of the time, of course, but enough of the time to show it's worth giving it a try. I'm old enough to remember when seeing a bald eagle was a once-in-a-lifetime event. When I was a small kid, there were maybe a thousand bald eagles in all the contiguous 48 states. Today there are about ten thousand nesting pairs. As a result of conservation efforts, most conservation efforts are no longer needed. It's still a thrill for me to see a nesting pair soaring over some pond, but it's actually a very commonplace sight these days. I suppose if you don't remember a time when seeing an eagle was a rare even than seeing a wild bison is today, you might not realize how successful a conservation program can be.
You're missing the point. The *specifics* of the site, particularly the specific *species* it hosts, makes a difference. That's why you check. Sometimes its not *what* you are building that's the problem, but where you're proposing to build it.
The outline at least of the process is reasonable. Before you start bulldozing, you check to see what it is you'll be demolishing and what the impact on your neighbors will be.
We can argue about what should be sufficient to red light a project, but since the project got the green light the project's owners don't have anything to complain about. Like breaking ground (which comes later), passing the environmental impact review is an important but routine milestone in a project.
In Clifford Simak's novel "WAY STATION", intelligent beings "traveled" between the stars using machines that created a perfect copy of themselves at the destination (and simultaneously destroyed the original). Since the copy contained all the original's memories it was for all measurable purposes teleportation.
"there isn't enough money in the world to pay for a launch system", but wait there is enough money for a $1 trillion dollar program that has NOT achieved its stated desired results as verified by the GAO!
That's because launch system designs don't just appear out thin air. They have to be paid for.
What's more, there isn't enough money in the world to pay for a launch system project that is "privatized" the way politicians mean "privatized": undertaken by contractors with no competition and no money of their own at stake.
Well, here's one possible effect and cause scenario that occurred to me.
Start with a healthy person who has a generally positive view of humanity. That doesn't mean he believes every human is good and honest; he relies on his critical thinking to know when an offer is too good to be true and his social perception to sense when someone is trying to put one over on him.
Now give him some brain damage so that his critical thinking and social perception don't work so well any longer. How does he react? He falls back on simple, generalized rules. Since he can no longer tell a dishonest man or scheme from an honest one, he takes the default position that everyone and everything is dishonest.
You can see this at operation in the country. I've lived over fifty years in this country and cynicism is at an all-time high. But strangely enough, so is credulity. We've become a nation of cynical suckers.
We've already bettered typical human cognition in various limited ways (rote computation, playing chess). So in a sense we are already living in the age of intelligent machines, except those machines are idiot savants. As software becomes more capable in new areas like pattern recognition, we're more apt to prefer reliable idiot savants than somewhat capable generalists.
So the biggest practical impediment to creating something which is *generally* as capable as the human brain is opportunity costs. It'll always be more handy to produce a narrowly competent system than a broadly competent one.
The other issue is that we as humans are the sum of our experiences, experiences that no machine will ever have unless it is designed to *act* human from infancy to adulthood, something that is bound to be expensive, complicated, and hard to get right. So even if we manage to create machine intelligence as *generally* competent as humans, chances are it won't think and feel the same way we do, even if we try to make that happen.
But, yes, it's clearly *possible* for some future civilization to create a machine which is, in effect equivalent to human intelligence. It's just not going to be done, if it is ever done, for practical reasons.
Of course you should stand up when someone else is bullied. What I object is drawing generalizations about nerds, or men from the fact that some men, and some nerds, don't know how to behave.
This kind of overgeneralization is pernicious. For one thing, that actually feeds into the misconception that such behavior is somehow normal for men. "You politically correct folks have it in for *men* who act like *men*!" "No, we have it in for people who act like jerks."
I remember once, years, ago, a friend of mine told me she wanted her new boyfirend to spend time hanging out with me.
"Why?" I asked.
"So he can see that men aren't icky," she said.
I was mortified. In a weird way people on both extremes of this issue agree on the way "men behave"; they just disagree on whether it's icky or not. Well, bugger that.
I generally agree with the tenor of your post; yes we do have to stand up for what's right. But... but... but... is the problem here really an absence of moral clarity? Do we really need to stand up and say, "going on a murder spree is wrong!"?
Or lets be a little more serious, would it have made a difference if more of us got up and said, "misogyny is wrong" ? Alright, MISOGYNY IS WRONG.
I understand feeling the need to stand up and say *something*, but a world in which that makes any difference to anything other than our feelings is beyond anything I can imagine. Maybe doing something to make ourselves feel better is important. Maybe it will alleviate *other* ills. But I don't think standing up to misogyny it's going to stop crazy guys from going on a rampage, especially *this* crazy guy, who had a lot more problems than misogyny.
If we need to do anything in response to this situation, it would be to find t a better way to respond to someone who has obviously lost it and is making threats of violence. That's a lot harder than just standing up and being counted, though.
First of all, let's point out the obvious: Rodgers killed twice as many men as women.
Which doesn't mean I'm saying violence against women isn't a serious problem, or that I don't care about the two women he killed. Gad are we really that simple-minded that it has to be one or the other? I'm only saying that Rodgers shouldn't be held up as THE paradigm for the way men treat women. Rodgers knew when he posted his manifesto that he was, in effect, writing his own obituary. He deliberately framed his future actions in full, cynical knowledge of society's sexism.
Let me make what should be an obvious point here: we shouldn't accept Rodgers' framing of his actions, for the simple reason he was a twisted person with a nasty agenda. Yes, his stated views on women were ugly, but going by his actions he hated *humanity* and chose targets of opportunity. He not only robbed James Hong, George Chen, David Wang and Christopher Michael-Martinez of collectively some two hundred years of lifespan. He successfully exploited our knee-jerk credulity so as to erase those kids from our consciousness as victims of his crimes.
As for "what is wrong with nerds?", that begs the question. Is there a problem with "nerds"? What is a "nerd" anyway?
The reason for media nerd chic is that feeling marginalized is ironically something most people can identify with. So is feeling emotionally vulnerable, and sometimes even isolated. And we all make regrettable and sometimes embarrassing mistakes in conducting our relationships with other people. But that doesn't mean we can't understand that "no means no", or that it's unpleasant and threatening to have unwanted attentions forced on you.
So if by "nerd" you mean "aggressively unpleasant person who blames other people for their reaction to his obnoxious behavior," well most of us aren't that kind of "nerd". The blockhead opinions of people like that have nothing to do with us.
If by "nerd" you mean "non-coformist who'd rather live with some degree of social marginalization than not act like himself," then you have to show us that this is tantamount to being an obnoxious and possibly violent twerp, which I don't think it is.
Those idiots who cheered Rodgers on are not my fault either. Maybe they're in part my problem, as they are a problem for everyone who has to live in the same society as they do. I may feel *concern* over their actions, but I don't feel a shred of guilt. Somebody else made them blockheads, not me.
Well... I've had a second generation Kindle; a Nook Color; and a second generation Kindle Paperwhite. I agree that the primary desiderata for an ebook reader are reading convenience and comfort. That doesn't mean that the ability to mark up texts or even to enter text isn't useful for most readers some of the time, and for a few readers quite a lot of the time.
There's more than one kind of reading. I often do in-depth novel reviews, sometimes detailed critiques of unpublished manuscripts. I find the highlighting and note-taking functions indispensable. On my paperwhite they're more than adequate for most readers, but for me I often give up and return to reading on my laptop.
Textbooks are another example of a different kind of reading. They don't work that well on eBook readers, (a) because the eBook readers are designed for novels and don't display things like diagrams and pages of equations well and (b) they don't lend themselves to being dog-eared, marked in the margins, or stuck with yellow stickies.
At this point the Paperwhite is nearly the perfect casual novel-reading machine. Oh, the stuff it does do could be improved in various marginal ways, but not so's I'd toss my perfectly good Paperwhite aside and shell out a hundred or two bucks for a better casual novel reading machine. But I would consider it for one that had better highlighting and markup, or which worked better for journal article PDFs and textbooks.
That's the key if you're a device designer: knowing when the marginal effort should be put into bells and whistles and when it should be put into basics. Steve Jobs was a master of that. He knew when the time was ripe to field a *basic product*, and then coached the early adopters on the upgrade treadmill with regular additions of well-thought-out marginal improvements.
There is no "belief" for evolutionary principles. It is not a system of religious thought.
Well, to play devil's advocate for a moment, that would leave "belief" up to the opinions of the individual.
Imagine Alice and Bob are both physical anthropologists. They both agree that evolution is the parsimonious explanation for the fossil record, but Alice believes it actually happened; Bob, an evangelical Christian, thinks of it as a useful model.
We all have a number of useful models in our head we know are untrue, or rather mostly untrue. I have a number of inconsistent models of the atom in my head, including a laughably wrong on in which the atom looks like a miniature solar system. That's the one I use when, for example, I need a mental picture of an atom's behavior in static electricity. My picture of the Solar System, for that matter, is schematic. It even has lines along which the planets travel, as if they were slotted into grooves rather than moving in general relativistic geodesics.
Now on technical questions of physical anthropology, Alice and Bob are in complete agreement. If there is such a thing as "scientific literacy", they are functionally equivalent. Their areas of disagreement aren't scientific, they're *metaphysical*. Alice contemptuously calls Bob's beliefs "Last Thursdayism", but name calling, even clever name calling, isn't much of an argument. There's no basis whatsoever upon which they can resolve their disagreements, which, happily, takes that disagreement outside the realm of science.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure they exist. And that woman you met on Craigslist you pay to have sex with you is your "girlfriend".
"Kick in the pants"
Well, whether the situation fits the various definitions is a judgment call. It depends on whether you perceive what the property company is doing as productive, or exploiting their middleman position to extort fees they've done nothing to earn -- an activity which would fit all the definitions I listed. I'll leave that up to other readers, since we clearly differ on issues of substance as well as terminology.
Says the person who draws a distinction between "rent seeking" and "business decisions", as if one were not an instance of the other.
I see irony is not one of your strong suits.
I'm back at my computer so here you go:
"Rent seeking is the socially costly pursuit of wealth transfers" -- The Encyclopedia of Public Choice, Rowley, Charles, Schneider, Friedrich (Eds.), Springer-Verlag 2003.
"Definition of 'Rent-Seeking' When a company, organization or individual uses their resources to obtain an economic gain from others without reciprocating any benefits back to society through wealth creation." -- Investopedia, http://www.investopedia.com/te..., Accessed June 1 2014.
"The idea that resources are unproductively used in rent-seeking contests has much broader application than the original rent-seeking papers suggested[emphasis mine] The rent-seeking logic has been applied to issues in history, sociology, anthropology, biology and philosophy. The core has also been formalized and analyzed more rigorously, using the tools of modern game theory. The modern rent-seeking literature describes the rational decision to invest in contesting pre-existing wealth or income, rather than undertaking productive activity. [emphasis mine]" -- Congleton, Roger D., Arye L. Hillman, and Kai A. Konrad. "Forty years of research on rent seeking: an overview." The Theory of Rent Seeking: Forty Years of Research 1 (2008).
In other words while rent-seeking in the sense of Anne Krueger's 1974 paper still continues to be an active area of research, the term is used differently in wider areas of economic research.
Oh, yes, and one more citation for you:
"prig (n.): a person who displays or demands of others pointlessly precise conformity, fussiness about trivialities, or exaggerated propriety, especially in a self-righteous or irritating manner." -- "prig." Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House, Inc. 01 Jun. 2014. http://dictionary.reference.co...>.
I did.
Rent-seeking
Cutting yourself a bigger slice of the cake rather than making the cake bigger. Trying to make more money without producing more for customers. Classic examples of rent-seeking, a phrase coined by an economist, Gordon Tullock, include:
a protection racket, in which the gang takes a cut from the shopkeeper's PROFIT;
a CARTEL of FIRMS agreeing to raise PRICES;
a UNION demanding higher WAGES without offering any increase in PRODUCTIVITY;
lobbying the GOVERNMENT for tax, spending or regulatory policies that benefit the lobbyists at the expense of taxpayers or consumers or some other rivals.
Whether legal or illegal, as they do not create any value, rent-seeking activities can impose large costs on an economy.
Source The Economist Magazine Dictionary of Economic Terms. I can cite many other sources, but I'm posting this from a phone so you can Google them yourself.
The Wikipedia article is about the rent seeking as described in Anne Kreuger's well-known 1974 paper. However that is only one example of how investors attempt to seek higher than normal profits without creating any utility, which is the more general sense of the word.
You mean stop disagreeing with Wikipedia.
Honestly it is kind of what you would expect that kind of organisation to be doing..
And that's supposed to be reassuring?
And in a sense we were undone by our own economic theories, more specifically by the assumptions in those theories like perfect information. Those oh-so-useful but obviously untrue assumptions have some nasty corner cases.
When people discovered how to create financial instruments that eliminated risk, they thought they'd discovered how to do what was literally impossible. If I had to boil it all down to one sentence, here it is: All these financial institutions thought they were insulating themselves from risk, but when everyone started to do it they ended up coupling themselves to risks other institutions were taking. When everyone is underwriting everyone else's risks, those risks don't disappear, they end up chained together, as if everyone was standing in a circle and leaning on the guy to his right.
Yeah, but doesn't *everything* fall apart with "so long as its being used responsibly". It's great that the military has the weapons it needs to do its job, "as long as they're being used responsibly."
That's not the way to think about this. The way to think about is to ask what can the government do do you that the couldn't do before?
Just like any private enterprise, the government can pull your credit report if it wants to. Now. And you'd better believe they do when they're investigating someone, or even looking for suspects. It's been happening for years now. The Washington DC sniper was a watershed case in the government procuring private sector data mining services to conduct a digital dragnet. Haven't you ever heard of a "fusion center"? The idea that *this* database gives the government any data about you it didn't have or couldn't easily get is silly.
So what can the government do with this database that it couldn't do before? It can find out whether a bank is writing bad mortgages and handing them off like a hot potato.
Which I guess under the circumstances is pretty predictable.
I guess where I'd start is with the facts. I'd build a model for how much it would cost, additional staff needed, how much it would bring in, support (and under the circumstances enforcement) costs, what competitors the users could turn to, what the content providers would be willing to pay (if anything) etc. I wouldn't do the new business idea any favors; I'd be objective and hard-nosed about it as possible. If the new service selling your residents to content providers isn't going to be profitable, then the whole idea goes no farther.
It's a safe bet that the business wouldn't be as profitable as the directors think, simply because it's usually a lot harder to make money in an unfamiliar business than you hoped it would be. It's easy enough in the abstract to believe the new idea will be like printing money, but in fact you're still trying to get people to part with their money, which is going to cost you *your* money. And you think, "Gee we got 15,000 customers, we can charge content providers a pretty penny for access." But is 15000 so large a potential customer base that content providers will adjust to a new way of doing business just for *you*? The big guys like Apple and Netflix and Amazon will probably just laugh at you and leave you twisting slowly, slowly in the wind rather than pay you a dime and invite every two-bit Internet baron to shake them down too. So maybe contact some of the big guys and just ask them how much they'd be willing to pay up and what kinds of services they'd expect in return. Those services are important!!! It's usually the unanticipated support costs that kill gold-egg-laying IT geese.
As for the small guys, well, they probably don't have much money to cough up. But it'd still be worth contacting some local business that needs access to your 15000 customers and taking them for a test shakedown, just to show you were a good soldier and looked in the sofa cushions for loose change. That kind of pathetic detail often drives home the futility of a hare-brained scheme. People when they come up with a brainstorm like this imagine piles of money-for-nuthin rolling in, so a bit of a reality check is healthy.
In other words, I would start with due diligence before you contemplate waving the bloody shirt. If, against all expectation, the idea proves to be promising, well I'd discreetly get an idea how your existing customers will react to having some of the Internet sites they need throttled. Remember, you're dealing with the dream of money-for-nuthin. Your job, your responsibility to your employers is to show them what it will really cost them in money, headaches and reputation.
Is privacy requires work.
But you should say more: "Violating privacy requires work too. The difference is nobody is making money from privacy."
Disclaimer: My comment/question isn't based upon any scientific background, so feel free to throw mud on my theory.
So, if a species is only found in a tiny area, is that species really viable?
Answer: often it is. Many species show signs of having done through a "genetic bottleneck" and subsequently grew to considerable populations. In the 1890s, there were fewer than 30 northern elephant seals in the whole world. Today there are hundreds of thousands, but back then a single project could have wiped them out. All the cheetahs in the world today descended from only seven individuals that lived ten thousand years ago. But they subsequently went on to be a highly successful species, with a range that covered all of Africa and Central and South Asia. Even humanity went through a population bottleneck 100,000 years ago. We could well have gone extinct.
If their survival is that fragile, that they can't survive outside of that area, is there value in making the effort to helping them, or are they more likely to go extinct anyway?
You're mixing up different questions: whether there is value in making efforts to help endangered species (which is an philosophical question, not a scientific one), or whether they're likely to go extinct "anyway" (which is an exercise in prognostication).
"Anyway" is a loaded term. Extinction *is* a natural process, but we are living in a period extinction rates unprecedented in the lifetime of our species. That means that the vast majority of species facing extinction face it as the result of human activities. Where merely tweaking an activity can save a species from extinction, say placing a facility *here* rather than *there*, that doesn't seem like too much to ask.
And taking steps to protect endangered species works. Not 100% of the time, of course, but enough of the time to show it's worth giving it a try. I'm old enough to remember when seeing a bald eagle was a once-in-a-lifetime event. When I was a small kid, there were maybe a thousand bald eagles in all the contiguous 48 states. Today there are about ten thousand nesting pairs. As a result of conservation efforts, most conservation efforts are no longer needed. It's still a thrill for me to see a nesting pair soaring over some pond, but it's actually a very commonplace sight these days. I suppose if you don't remember a time when seeing an eagle was a rare even than seeing a wild bison is today, you might not realize how successful a conservation program can be.
You're missing the point. The *specifics* of the site, particularly the specific *species* it hosts, makes a difference. That's why you check. Sometimes its not *what* you are building that's the problem, but where you're proposing to build it.
The outline at least of the process is reasonable. Before you start bulldozing, you check to see what it is you'll be demolishing and what the impact on your neighbors will be.
We can argue about what should be sufficient to red light a project, but since the project got the green light the project's owners don't have anything to complain about. Like breaking ground (which comes later), passing the environmental impact review is an important but routine milestone in a project.
In Clifford Simak's novel "WAY STATION", intelligent beings "traveled" between the stars using machines that created a perfect copy of themselves at the destination (and simultaneously destroyed the original). Since the copy contained all the original's memories it was for all measurable purposes teleportation.
"there isn't enough money in the world to pay for a launch system", but wait there is enough money for a $1 trillion dollar program that has NOT achieved its stated desired results as verified by the GAO!
Head Start = No Start
QED.
Go for a little walk, breathe some fresh air.
... only you might want to avoid crowded places.
That's because launch system designs don't just appear out thin air. They have to be paid for.
What's more, there isn't enough money in the world to pay for a launch system project that is "privatized" the way politicians mean "privatized": undertaken by contractors with no competition and no money of their own at stake.
Well, here's one possible effect and cause scenario that occurred to me.
Start with a healthy person who has a generally positive view of humanity. That doesn't mean he believes every human is good and honest; he relies on his critical thinking to know when an offer is too good to be true and his social perception to sense when someone is trying to put one over on him.
Now give him some brain damage so that his critical thinking and social perception don't work so well any longer. How does he react? He falls back on simple, generalized rules. Since he can no longer tell a dishonest man or scheme from an honest one, he takes the default position that everyone and everything is dishonest.
You can see this at operation in the country. I've lived over fifty years in this country and cynicism is at an all-time high. But strangely enough, so is credulity. We've become a nation of cynical suckers.
We've already bettered typical human cognition in various limited ways (rote computation, playing chess). So in a sense we are already living in the age of intelligent machines, except those machines are idiot savants. As software becomes more capable in new areas like pattern recognition, we're more apt to prefer reliable idiot savants than somewhat capable generalists.
So the biggest practical impediment to creating something which is *generally* as capable as the human brain is opportunity costs. It'll always be more handy to produce a narrowly competent system than a broadly competent one.
The other issue is that we as humans are the sum of our experiences, experiences that no machine will ever have unless it is designed to *act* human from infancy to adulthood, something that is bound to be expensive, complicated, and hard to get right. So even if we manage to create machine intelligence as *generally* competent as humans, chances are it won't think and feel the same way we do, even if we try to make that happen.
But, yes, it's clearly *possible* for some future civilization to create a machine which is, in effect equivalent to human intelligence. It's just not going to be done, if it is ever done, for practical reasons.
Of course you should stand up when someone else is bullied. What I object is drawing generalizations about nerds, or men from the fact that some men, and some nerds, don't know how to behave.
This kind of overgeneralization is pernicious. For one thing, that actually feeds into the misconception that such behavior is somehow normal for men. "You politically correct folks have it in for *men* who act like *men*!" "No, we have it in for people who act like jerks."
I remember once, years, ago, a friend of mine told me she wanted her new boyfirend to spend time hanging out with me.
"Why?" I asked.
"So he can see that men aren't icky," she said.
I was mortified. In a weird way people on both extremes of this issue agree on the way "men behave"; they just disagree on whether it's icky or not. Well, bugger that.
I generally agree with the tenor of your post; yes we do have to stand up for what's right. But... but... but... is the problem here really an absence of moral clarity? Do we really need to stand up and say, "going on a murder spree is wrong!"?
Or lets be a little more serious, would it have made a difference if more of us got up and said, "misogyny is wrong" ? Alright, MISOGYNY IS WRONG.
I understand feeling the need to stand up and say *something*, but a world in which that makes any difference to anything other than our feelings is beyond anything I can imagine. Maybe doing something to make ourselves feel better is important. Maybe it will alleviate *other* ills. But I don't think standing up to misogyny it's going to stop crazy guys from going on a rampage, especially *this* crazy guy, who had a lot more problems than misogyny.
If we need to do anything in response to this situation, it would be to find t a better way to respond to someone who has obviously lost it and is making threats of violence. That's a lot harder than just standing up and being counted, though.
First of all, let's point out the obvious: Rodgers killed twice as many men as women.
Which doesn't mean I'm saying violence against women isn't a serious problem, or that I don't care about the two women he killed. Gad are we really that simple-minded that it has to be one or the other? I'm only saying that Rodgers shouldn't be held up as THE paradigm for the way men treat women. Rodgers knew when he posted his manifesto that he was, in effect, writing his own obituary. He deliberately framed his future actions in full, cynical knowledge of society's sexism.
Let me make what should be an obvious point here: we shouldn't accept Rodgers' framing of his actions, for the simple reason he was a twisted person with a nasty agenda. Yes, his stated views on women were ugly, but going by his actions he hated *humanity* and chose targets of opportunity. He not only robbed James Hong, George Chen, David Wang and Christopher Michael-Martinez of collectively some two hundred years of lifespan. He successfully exploited our knee-jerk credulity so as to erase those kids from our consciousness as victims of his crimes.
As for "what is wrong with nerds?", that begs the question. Is there a problem with "nerds"? What is a "nerd" anyway?
The reason for media nerd chic is that feeling marginalized is ironically something most people can identify with. So is feeling emotionally vulnerable, and sometimes even isolated. And we all make regrettable and sometimes embarrassing mistakes in conducting our relationships with other people. But that doesn't mean we can't understand that "no means no", or that it's unpleasant and threatening to have unwanted attentions forced on you.
So if by "nerd" you mean "aggressively unpleasant person who blames other people for their reaction to his obnoxious behavior," well most of us aren't that kind of "nerd". The blockhead opinions of people like that have nothing to do with us.
If by "nerd" you mean "non-coformist who'd rather live with some degree of social marginalization than not act like himself," then you have to show us that this is tantamount to being an obnoxious and possibly violent twerp, which I don't think it is.
Those idiots who cheered Rodgers on are not my fault either. Maybe they're in part my problem, as they are a problem for everyone who has to live in the same society as they do. I may feel *concern* over their actions, but I don't feel a shred of guilt. Somebody else made them blockheads, not me.
Well... I've had a second generation Kindle; a Nook Color; and a second generation Kindle Paperwhite. I agree that the primary desiderata for an ebook reader are reading convenience and comfort. That doesn't mean that the ability to mark up texts or even to enter text isn't useful for most readers some of the time, and for a few readers quite a lot of the time.
There's more than one kind of reading. I often do in-depth novel reviews, sometimes detailed critiques of unpublished manuscripts. I find the highlighting and note-taking functions indispensable. On my paperwhite they're more than adequate for most readers, but for me I often give up and return to reading on my laptop.
Textbooks are another example of a different kind of reading. They don't work that well on eBook readers, (a) because the eBook readers are designed for novels and don't display things like diagrams and pages of equations well and (b) they don't lend themselves to being dog-eared, marked in the margins, or stuck with yellow stickies.
At this point the Paperwhite is nearly the perfect casual novel-reading machine. Oh, the stuff it does do could be improved in various marginal ways, but not so's I'd toss my perfectly good Paperwhite aside and shell out a hundred or two bucks for a better casual novel reading machine. But I would consider it for one that had better highlighting and markup, or which worked better for journal article PDFs and textbooks.
That's the key if you're a device designer: knowing when the marginal effort should be put into bells and whistles and when it should be put into basics. Steve Jobs was a master of that. He knew when the time was ripe to field a *basic product*, and then coached the early adopters on the upgrade treadmill with regular additions of well-thought-out marginal improvements.
There is no "belief" for evolutionary principles. It is not a system of religious thought.
Well, to play devil's advocate for a moment, that would leave "belief" up to the opinions of the individual.
Imagine Alice and Bob are both physical anthropologists. They both agree that evolution is the parsimonious explanation for the fossil record, but Alice believes it actually happened; Bob, an evangelical Christian, thinks of it as a useful model.
We all have a number of useful models in our head we know are untrue, or rather mostly untrue. I have a number of inconsistent models of the atom in my head, including a laughably wrong on in which the atom looks like a miniature solar system. That's the one I use when, for example, I need a mental picture of an atom's behavior in static electricity. My picture of the Solar System, for that matter, is schematic. It even has lines along which the planets travel, as if they were slotted into grooves rather than moving in general relativistic geodesics.
Now on technical questions of physical anthropology, Alice and Bob are in complete agreement. If there is such a thing as "scientific literacy", they are functionally equivalent. Their areas of disagreement aren't scientific, they're *metaphysical*. Alice contemptuously calls Bob's beliefs "Last Thursdayism", but name calling, even clever name calling, isn't much of an argument. There's no basis whatsoever upon which they can resolve their disagreements, which, happily, takes that disagreement outside the realm of science.