That's what makes this tricky. From the point of view of professional ethics, avoiding harm to the users is paramount. But some of the things that are justified by professional ethics can be bad for your career, like going around your boss's back to your boss's boss. Depending on the corporate culture and how old you are, it could be a career ending move. If you're under 30 and obviously have marketable skills, go for it. If you're over 40 and have a family to support, you want to bring your spouse in on the decision. In fact you probably want a lawyer too.
From a pure CYA standpoint, documenting everything but not rocking the boat might well be the safest position to take *for you personally*. It may be very bad for your company and your product's users.
Ah yes, the culture of "zing". It's much more important to catch a politician (or more likely, one of his staff) in a typo than to pay attention to the substance of what he's written.
If either the pol or one of his staff is semi-literate, why should anyone take him seriously?
Well, that's begging the question. We don't *know* that Senator Markey or anyone on his staff are illiterate; we only know that they aren't as careful with proofreading as they could be.
That said, I'll attempt to answer your question: because he (or his staff) is raising a serious, important point. That's not enough for you to listen to him? It's not enough that he served thirty years on the House Committee on Communications and Technology either? He (and his staff and the secretarial pool in his office) have to be *infallible* in matters of proofreading before you'll listen?
Ah yes, the culture of "zing". It's much more important to catch a politician (or more likely, one of his staff) in a typo than to pay attention to the substance of what he's written.
My hat's off to you. You, sir, are obviously a genius.
Seriously, if an electrical load at a friggin' school poses any measurable risk of fire before tripping the breaker, there's a much bigger moral crime being committed here than the theft of $0.05.
Agreed. I think the wrong part is treating the cost to secure the site as *damage*. That seems to be just as sloppy reasoning as "I only did it for a minute." At most I would consider the marginal cost of fixing the site right away as damage, and even that's questionable.
Sure. That Methane Clathrate is at the bottom of the sea, so it can't possibly do any harm.
Those scientists should stop messing about with things like the bottom of the ocean. If God wanted us to know about stuff on the bottom of the ocean he'd have put that bit on top.
I think you've got the wrong end of the stick. I think anything sounds homogeneous to someone who doesn't listen carefully, e.g., someone who doesn't care for the genre.
When Charlie Parker went out for chicken and waffles after a gig, he used to listen to country music on the juke box. This was Charlie Parker arguably the greatest god in the serious jazz fanatic's pantheon. When the other musicians would complain that country music was corny, Bird would simply say, "Listen."
The problem with the recording industry is that it is not in the business of producing music. It is in the business of producing and exploiting hits. I had this epiphany when struggling with the iTunes Store one day. "Why is the interface so bad? Why do they make me fight my way to what I want to buy?" Then it hit me: the iTunes Store was trying to steer me to what everyone else was buying. It's part of the hit industry.
It's no wonder that kids listen to music on YouTube these days. True, it's *free*, but to me there's an even bigger advantage. It finds me what I want, even if its a bit odd and even (gasp) non-commercial. The other day I was reading an old murder mystery got a hankering to listen to some old English music hall songs. That's practically a major project on iTunes but on YouTube you just pop "British Music Hall Songs" in the search box and Bob's your uncle.
This is an example of "begging the question". "Randomness" is not a property of a number, it is a property of a sequence.
This sounds like splitting hairs, but it actually makes a lot of confusing things clearer if instead of asking "Is this number random?" you ask "Was this number produced by a process that generates a random sequence?"
Lets take the example of a combination. "0000000" is just as random as "3115435", but "0000000" was generated by a process which spits out easily keyed-in, easy-for-humans-to-remember numbers. In other words it's generated by a process that is biased towards spitting out numbers like "0000000" and "1234567".
Well, measured by what they spend, they get a whole lot less healthcare. Measured by outcomes, they've got measurably better health
They've got slightly higher longevity figures (82 vs 79), expected years of healthy life (70 vs 67) and significantly lower infant mortality rates (4.27 per 1000 vs. 5.9), while at the same time spending LOTS less money (as of 2010, US: $8233 vs. Canada:$4,445). The per capita cost discrepancy is even more dramatic when you consider that at the time 17% of Americans had no insurance at all, and an unknown number more were under-insured with junk plans.
So what the figures show is that Americans get more health care, Canadians get better health outcomes.
This is basically a strawman argument. Nobody is discussing getting rid of cell phone service and and replacing it with POTS. The question with respect to disasters is whether POTS adds anything * vs. plowing the resources that would be used to maintain POTS into something else*.
That last bit is important. It's obvious that having both POTS and cell coverage provides you with some level of redundancy that you don't get if you only have one or the other. POTS also provides enough power to run a basic analog phone, which is a big advantage. But it's not clear to me that some kind of digital service couldn't run over the same wires while providing enough juice for something like a digital analog to emergency POTS voice service. Somebody would have to come up with specific proposals.
Sure, but under your proposal they can't *stop* printing money, even in an inflationary economy.
In effect you might as well tax people; sure *money* isn't changing hands, but your ability to buy things is reduced by inflation, which has the same practical effect as taxation: you can't buy as many widgets with your savings. In fact inflation skews the market away from savings and investment and more toward immediate consumption.
In any case the Fed doesn't literally *print money*. The Treasury does that, but it has ZERO effect on the supply of money to the economy. Under our system you can't get money into the economy just by printing it, because you can't just give it away. What the Fed does primarily is *lend* money, which is different than just handing out freshly minted dollar bills because the money has to be paid back. It can also buy Treasury securities in "open market operations", which is not unlike your solution of the Fed handing over currency to the US government, only (a) it involves a middle-man and (b) the federal government has to pay the Fed when the securities mature.
So the way the Fed gets money into the economy is quite a bit different than just printing currency and handing it over to anyone, even the government, because money created by lending or open market operations is automatically un-created at a later date. Money that the Fed creates will eventually have to return to the place it was created. Simply printing money and handing it over to someone, even the government, is irreversible.
Well, there *was* Tiberius enjoying his teams little boys and girls in Capri while Sejanus ran his reign of terror for him. At least if you believe Suetonius, who lived a couple centuries before Constantine, so he's unlikely to have been a Christian.
I think the idea that people didn't start having orgies until modern times strains credulity. They just weren't such a fixture of Roman life as people today imagine. That's why the behavior of Tiberius or Messilina were considered scandalous. Traditional Roman virtue emphasized self-discipline and service to the state, but in the imperial period and late Republic powerful people began to realize that if they had enough power, nobody could restrain them.
Anyhow, it shows how little power scandal has to dislodge people in influential positions. It's only people in precarious positions that get topped by sex scandals.
I've hear this criticism leveled at Picasso, but Picasso *could* draw; he'd have been a great realist if he wanted to be. As you begin to study the things that set a good painting apart from a mediocre one, you start to see that not all of them have to do with accurate draftsmanship or the subjects chosen. You begin to pay more attention to the interplay composition, balance, geometry, and shading. These are things that exist *apart* from the things represented; they can exist *without* anything represented at all.
Once you've reached the level of appreciation that understands what sets apart a great painting, it's natural to then begin to focus on those things. That leads to stripping away things which matter not at all (subject matter) or somewhat less (fine detail, accurate perspective), and gradually you find yourself on the road to abstract art. It is this process of thinking about art that I suspect confers cognitive benefits on art students.
Now what the *market* will pay for a piece of art is totally irrelevant to what art is. But a single white line *can* be art. The problem is that you've come in at the end of a long conversation about "what is art?" You've missed everything but the exclamation point at the end.
Think of it this way. I can buy a quality blue crew neck tee shirt for about eight bucks; something you could wear with jeans and look OK. But decorate that tee so it looks like an old London police box, and suddenly the market value goes to $20. Why? We all know what the tardis looks like on the outside. Because it makes you part of a cultural conversation.
The objection to a white stripe being art seems to be, "I could do that, where's my 44 mil?" Without defending the prices paid at auction for any particular piece of art, some of which clearly is driven by greed and irrationality, what collectors are paying for is the exclamation point at the end of the conversation. Sure you could paint a white stripe, but you weren't part of the conversation.
Suppose our Tardis tee shirt is one of a kind, hand-printed and signed by Tom Baker. It goes at auction for $100. Does that seem irrationally high to you, given that you can buy an equally good tee shirt for $8? If I put *my* signature on a Tardis tee shirt, that would actually *lower* its market value, but the signature of one of the actors who played The Doctor *raises* the market value. Does that seem irrational? If you'd never heard of the doctor, science fiction, fandom or TV for that matter, it *would* seem crazy to pay $100 for a tee shirt with a sharpie stain on it.
It's not a matter of crashing or not crashing. It's a matter of getting the stoichiometrically correct ratio of fuel to oxygen, then providing it with a spark.
I'm not saying you wouldn't get a deflagration of some sort, even a shock wave "boom!", but it would be nearly impossible to liberate more than a tiny percentage of the energy in a hydrogen tank with ambient oxygen in an explosion. You might get a bang, followed by impressive fireball as the rising hydrogen meets fresh air, but nothing like a bomb. The greatest danger would come in tightly weathertripped garages, where hydrogen might for a short time concentrate, but that could be mitigated by ventilation.
Natural gas may be less explosive than hydrogen, but it's piped into millions of enclosed spaces every day. It's the enclosure that makes it potentially dangerous; one of the safety factors in natural gas is that it is lighter than air and tends to disperse quickly. Hydrogen is even lighter and disperses even more quickly, even though it is more explosive.
Single answer to all your questions: because we're adaptable. We don't *like* these things, because they violate our social wiring. But we can live with them.
Well, presumably you get most of the energy back when you burn it, minus thermodynamic losses of course. You can't compare gasoline to H2 in this respect: gasoline is an energy *source*; H2 is an energy *transfer medium*.
As a transfer medium it has many advantages and disadvantages. The chief disadvantages is that it doesn't pack much energy in per volume at a reasonable pressure, and that it is difficult to transport. I've seen suggestions that the hydrogen atoms be bound to some kind of molecule that is liquid at room temperature, but yields up the hydrogen more easily than water does. This could be handled much as gasoline is handled.
While it is true hydrogen *can* explode, the fact that it is lighter than air means it seldom will achieve sufficient density to support significant explosions. The gas used to heat homes is also lighter than air, which is why though gas service is very common in homes, explosions are exceedingly rare. Hydrogen is even lighter and diffuses faster.
Which is not to say it won't explode from time to time, but large explosions will probably be rarer than homes demolished by gas explosions.
We also have compassion, cooperation and communication. Those are the "killer features" of human behavior, the things that make us the most adaptable animal species ever. These are such fundamental features of what it means to be human that it's easy to take them for granted.
You mention enslavement, pillage and plunder, and those make my point. Until you have built a society beyond small nomadic hunter-gatherer bands, slavery makes no sense. Pillage and plunder as well are meaningless until your species has at least developed agriculture, and the social ability to band together to attack people who have converted agricultural surplus into property.
But in the end it isn't about being nice, it's about being adaptable. Being nice -- the things that make others want to spend time with us and cooperate with us -- just happens to be the best basic pattern for building a species with maximum behavioral adaptability. But it makes sense that we ALSO retain the ability to be not-nice. From time to time it's useful for survival -- just less than the 100% of the time that social Darwinists would have us believe. There are times when turning on your neighbor at least ensures someone from the neighborhood survives.
It's a tautology: a behaviorally adaptable species manifests many different kinds of behaviors. So it seems plausible that our distant ancestors made both love AND war with the other human species on the planet.
Remember, though: it was a much less populated planet in the Early Paleolithic. Even in the more populated Late Paleolithic period there were fewer people in the whole world than there are in the Portland OR metropolitan area today. There were maybe 3000 in all of Europe. If in all that underpopulated land you happened to meet another band of humans, which would be better for your genetic legacy? Exchanging genes or exchanging attacks? Screwing or stoning?
You think totalitarianism doesn't come from above? Who do you think is higher on the political food chain, the consumer or corporations?
You expect consumers to care about privacy, but what does it cost him to care? You almost can't buy a decent TV these days that's not "smart". So he has to put a packet analyzer on the network port and figure out if the thing is phoning home?
No, this a place where the consumer reasonably feels he ought to be protected by government regulation.
Back in 1972 the US Department of Health Education and Welfare developed a landmark report which anticipated a lot of the electronic privacy issues of the following 40 years. The report was prepared under squeaky clean Elliot Richardson, who was shifted from HEW to DoD shortly before the report came out. He was replaced by Caspar Weinberger (later Reagans' Sec'y of Defense, and mixed up with Iran Contra). If you read the report it is capped with a conclusion which doesn't seem to match: we can't really be sure about what's going to happen in the future, so we should avoid regulating any potential privacy abuses by the private sector until they become problems. That's the philosophy which controls the US approach to consumer data privacy to this day. Consumers have to figure out that their data is being abused, then win a political fight against companies who've invested money in the business of exploiting their data.
There's more to it than low bid. Federal procurement rules are complicated; they're supposed to make sure that the US government gets the best possible price, but what often happens is that they force the government to buy from a small pool of companies specializing in taking government money, rather than on the open market. Big IT contractors tend to spin off subsidiaries to handle the specialized accounting and project management requirements.
I've seen this first hand working as a contractor with state and local public health agencies when West Nile Virus hit. In truth WNV was no worse than a lot of things they'd already been dealing with, but it was on the news and there was a huge political demand to "do something about it fast", which in Washington terms means "spend this money right away". The problem is that you *can't* just sign a deal with the feds to burn a million dollars (or a thousand dollars, which is practically the same thing in federal terms). You've got already be set up to absorb lots of federal money, fast. What the country needed was just a *little bit more* of marginal funding spent on agencies and companies already working in the field, but politically connected federal contractors who had no idea what they were doing or who to deal with came swarming out of the woodwork because Congress was making it rain. They even shafted *government workers*. The CDC has the top vector borne disease surveillance experts in the world in Fort Collins, but most of the money ended up elsewhere. Fort Collin was a cottage operation that couldn't spend the money fast enough.
The Federal Government has two modes it operates well in: long term projects that require institutional memory and slowly built capacity, and *war*. Most people don't see it, but there are many government operations that are both financially efficient and a bargain, like the Fort Collins vector borne infectious disease center. The government is actually good at those things. It's also good at invading foreign countries and topping *their* governments. It's the stuff in between those extremes the government is lousy at handling. Ordinary projects that aren't part of some long established program become "the moral equivalent of war". Most of the time you don't need the moral equivalent of war, you just need a well-run project.
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Yes, dagnebbit. If only them long-haired hippies with their free love, LDS and bell-bottom trousers would go away, TEPCO would have this licked.
it's a question of professional ethics.
That's what makes this tricky. From the point of view of professional ethics, avoiding harm to the users is paramount. But some of the things that are justified by professional ethics can be bad for your career, like going around your boss's back to your boss's boss. Depending on the corporate culture and how old you are, it could be a career ending move. If you're under 30 and obviously have marketable skills, go for it. If you're over 40 and have a family to support, you want to bring your spouse in on the decision. In fact you probably want a lawyer too.
From a pure CYA standpoint, documenting everything but not rocking the boat might well be the safest position to take *for you personally*. It may be very bad for your company and your product's users.
If either the pol or one of his staff is semi-literate, why should anyone take him seriously?
Well, that's begging the question. We don't *know* that Senator Markey or anyone on his staff are illiterate; we only know that they aren't as careful with proofreading as they could be.
That said, I'll attempt to answer your question: because he (or his staff) is raising a serious, important point. That's not enough for you to listen to him? It's not enough that he served thirty years on the House Committee on Communications and Technology either? He (and his staff and the secretarial pool in his office) have to be *infallible* in matters of proofreading before you'll listen?
Ah yes, the culture of "zing". It's much more important to catch a politician (or more likely, one of his staff) in a typo than to pay attention to the substance of what he's written.
My hat's off to you. You, sir, are obviously a genius.
Seriously, if an electrical load at a friggin' school poses any measurable risk of fire before tripping the breaker, there's a much bigger moral crime being committed here than the theft of $0.05.
Agreed. I think the wrong part is treating the cost to secure the site as *damage*. That seems to be just as sloppy reasoning as "I only did it for a minute." At most I would consider the marginal cost of fixing the site right away as damage, and even that's questionable.
Sure. That Methane Clathrate is at the bottom of the sea, so it can't possibly do any harm.
Those scientists should stop messing about with things like the bottom of the ocean. If God wanted us to know about stuff on the bottom of the ocean he'd have put that bit on top.
I think you've got the wrong end of the stick. I think anything sounds homogeneous to someone who doesn't listen carefully, e.g., someone who doesn't care for the genre.
When Charlie Parker went out for chicken and waffles after a gig, he used to listen to country music on the juke box. This was Charlie Parker arguably the greatest god in the serious jazz fanatic's pantheon. When the other musicians would complain that country music was corny, Bird would simply say, "Listen."
The problem with the recording industry is that it is not in the business of producing music. It is in the business of producing and exploiting hits. I had this epiphany when struggling with the iTunes Store one day. "Why is the interface so bad? Why do they make me fight my way to what I want to buy?" Then it hit me: the iTunes Store was trying to steer me to what everyone else was buying. It's part of the hit industry.
It's no wonder that kids listen to music on YouTube these days. True, it's *free*, but to me there's an even bigger advantage. It finds me what I want, even if its a bit odd and even (gasp) non-commercial. The other day I was reading an old murder mystery got a hankering to listen to some old English music hall songs. That's practically a major project on iTunes but on YouTube you just pop "British Music Hall Songs" in the search box and Bob's your uncle.
This is an example of "begging the question". "Randomness" is not a property of a number, it is a property of a sequence.
This sounds like splitting hairs, but it actually makes a lot of confusing things clearer if instead of asking "Is this number random?" you ask "Was this number produced by a process that generates a random sequence?"
Lets take the example of a combination. "0000000" is just as random as "3115435", but "0000000" was generated by a process which spits out easily keyed-in, easy-for-humans-to-remember numbers. In other words it's generated by a process that is biased towards spitting out numbers like "0000000" and "1234567".
Well, measured by what they spend, they get a whole lot less healthcare. Measured by outcomes, they've got measurably better health
They've got slightly higher longevity figures (82 vs 79), expected years of healthy life (70 vs 67) and significantly lower infant mortality rates (4.27 per 1000 vs. 5.9), while at the same time spending LOTS less money (as of 2010, US: $8233 vs. Canada:$4,445). The per capita cost discrepancy is even more dramatic when you consider that at the time 17% of Americans had no insurance at all, and an unknown number more were under-insured with junk plans.
So what the figures show is that Americans get more health care, Canadians get better health outcomes.
This is basically a strawman argument. Nobody is discussing getting rid of cell phone service and and replacing it with POTS. The question with respect to disasters is whether POTS adds anything * vs. plowing the resources that would be used to maintain POTS into something else*.
That last bit is important. It's obvious that having both POTS and cell coverage provides you with some level of redundancy that you don't get if you only have one or the other. POTS also provides enough power to run a basic analog phone, which is a big advantage. But it's not clear to me that some kind of digital service couldn't run over the same wires while providing enough juice for something like a digital analog to emergency POTS voice service. Somebody would have to come up with specific proposals.
Sure, but under your proposal they can't *stop* printing money, even in an inflationary economy.
In effect you might as well tax people; sure *money* isn't changing hands, but your ability to buy things is reduced by inflation, which has the same practical effect as taxation: you can't buy as many widgets with your savings. In fact inflation skews the market away from savings and investment and more toward immediate consumption.
In any case the Fed doesn't literally *print money*. The Treasury does that, but it has ZERO effect on the supply of money to the economy. Under our system you can't get money into the economy just by printing it, because you can't just give it away. What the Fed does primarily is *lend* money, which is different than just handing out freshly minted dollar bills because the money has to be paid back. It can also buy Treasury securities in "open market operations", which is not unlike your solution of the Fed handing over currency to the US government, only (a) it involves a middle-man and (b) the federal government has to pay the Fed when the securities mature.
So the way the Fed gets money into the economy is quite a bit different than just printing currency and handing it over to anyone, even the government, because money created by lending or open market operations is automatically un-created at a later date. Money that the Fed creates will eventually have to return to the place it was created. Simply printing money and handing it over to someone, even the government, is irreversible.
Well, there *was* Tiberius enjoying his teams little boys and girls in Capri while Sejanus ran his reign of terror for him. At least if you believe Suetonius, who lived a couple centuries before Constantine, so he's unlikely to have been a Christian.
I think the idea that people didn't start having orgies until modern times strains credulity. They just weren't such a fixture of Roman life as people today imagine. That's why the behavior of Tiberius or Messilina were considered scandalous. Traditional Roman virtue emphasized self-discipline and service to the state, but in the imperial period and late Republic powerful people began to realize that if they had enough power, nobody could restrain them.
Anyhow, it shows how little power scandal has to dislodge people in influential positions. It's only people in precarious positions that get topped by sex scandals.
I've hear this criticism leveled at Picasso, but Picasso *could* draw; he'd have been a great realist if he wanted to be. As you begin to study the things that set a good painting apart from a mediocre one, you start to see that not all of them have to do with accurate draftsmanship or the subjects chosen. You begin to pay more attention to the interplay composition, balance, geometry, and shading. These are things that exist *apart* from the things represented; they can exist *without* anything represented at all.
Once you've reached the level of appreciation that understands what sets apart a great painting, it's natural to then begin to focus on those things. That leads to stripping away things which matter not at all (subject matter) or somewhat less (fine detail, accurate perspective), and gradually you find yourself on the road to abstract art. It is this process of thinking about art that I suspect confers cognitive benefits on art students.
Picasso's landscapes are a good place to start to see this process at work. My favorites are the Factory at Horta de Ebro and the Reservoir at Horta, which you can see are still quite representational without being realistic.
Now what the *market* will pay for a piece of art is totally irrelevant to what art is. But a single white line *can* be art. The problem is that you've come in at the end of a long conversation about "what is art?" You've missed everything but the exclamation point at the end.
Think of it this way. I can buy a quality blue crew neck tee shirt for about eight bucks; something you could wear with jeans and look OK. But decorate that tee so it looks like an old London police box, and suddenly the market value goes to $20. Why? We all know what the tardis looks like on the outside. Because it makes you part of a cultural conversation.
The objection to a white stripe being art seems to be, "I could do that, where's my 44 mil?" Without defending the prices paid at auction for any particular piece of art, some of which clearly is driven by greed and irrationality, what collectors are paying for is the exclamation point at the end of the conversation. Sure you could paint a white stripe, but you weren't part of the conversation.
Suppose our Tardis tee shirt is one of a kind, hand-printed and signed by Tom Baker. It goes at auction for $100. Does that seem irrationally high to you, given that you can buy an equally good tee shirt for $8? If I put *my* signature on a Tardis tee shirt, that would actually *lower* its market value, but the signature of one of the actors who played The Doctor *raises* the market value. Does that seem irrational? If you'd never heard of the doctor, science fiction, fandom or TV for that matter, it *would* seem crazy to pay $100 for a tee shirt with a sharpie stain on it.
What they should have done is get Jeff Bridges to play Whitfield Diffie. Then the jury would be impressed.
It's not a matter of crashing or not crashing. It's a matter of getting the stoichiometrically correct ratio of fuel to oxygen, then providing it with a spark.
I'm not saying you wouldn't get a deflagration of some sort, even a shock wave "boom!", but it would be nearly impossible to liberate more than a tiny percentage of the energy in a hydrogen tank with ambient oxygen in an explosion. You might get a bang, followed by impressive fireball as the rising hydrogen meets fresh air, but nothing like a bomb. The greatest danger would come in tightly weathertripped garages, where hydrogen might for a short time concentrate, but that could be mitigated by ventilation.
Natural gas may be less explosive than hydrogen, but it's piped into millions of enclosed spaces every day. It's the enclosure that makes it potentially dangerous; one of the safety factors in natural gas is that it is lighter than air and tends to disperse quickly. Hydrogen is even lighter and disperses even more quickly, even though it is more explosive.
Single answer to all your questions: because we're adaptable. We don't *like* these things, because they violate our social wiring. But we can live with them.
In nature there are no "bug". There are just things that *are*. But compassion works for our species, if not always for the individual.
Well, presumably you get most of the energy back when you burn it, minus thermodynamic losses of course. You can't compare gasoline to H2 in this respect: gasoline is an energy *source*; H2 is an energy *transfer medium*.
As a transfer medium it has many advantages and disadvantages. The chief disadvantages is that it doesn't pack much energy in per volume at a reasonable pressure, and that it is difficult to transport. I've seen suggestions that the hydrogen atoms be bound to some kind of molecule that is liquid at room temperature, but yields up the hydrogen more easily than water does. This could be handled much as gasoline is handled.
While it is true hydrogen *can* explode, the fact that it is lighter than air means it seldom will achieve sufficient density to support significant explosions. The gas used to heat homes is also lighter than air, which is why though gas service is very common in homes, explosions are exceedingly rare. Hydrogen is even lighter and diffuses faster.
Which is not to say it won't explode from time to time, but large explosions will probably be rarer than homes demolished by gas explosions.
We also have compassion, cooperation and communication. Those are the "killer features" of human behavior, the things that make us the most adaptable animal species ever. These are such fundamental features of what it means to be human that it's easy to take them for granted.
You mention enslavement, pillage and plunder, and those make my point. Until you have built a society beyond small nomadic hunter-gatherer bands, slavery makes no sense. Pillage and plunder as well are meaningless until your species has at least developed agriculture, and the social ability to band together to attack people who have converted agricultural surplus into property.
But in the end it isn't about being nice, it's about being adaptable. Being nice -- the things that make others want to spend time with us and cooperate with us -- just happens to be the best basic pattern for building a species with maximum behavioral adaptability. But it makes sense that we ALSO retain the ability to be not-nice. From time to time it's useful for survival -- just less than the 100% of the time that social Darwinists would have us believe. There are times when turning on your neighbor at least ensures someone from the neighborhood survives.
It's a tautology: a behaviorally adaptable species manifests many different kinds of behaviors. So it seems plausible that our distant ancestors made both love AND war with the other human species on the planet.
Remember, though: it was a much less populated planet in the Early Paleolithic. Even in the more populated Late Paleolithic period there were fewer people in the whole world than there are in the Portland OR metropolitan area today. There were maybe 3000 in all of Europe. If in all that underpopulated land you happened to meet another band of humans, which would be better for your genetic legacy? Exchanging genes or exchanging attacks? Screwing or stoning?
You think totalitarianism doesn't come from above? Who do you think is higher on the political food chain, the consumer or corporations?
You expect consumers to care about privacy, but what does it cost him to care? You almost can't buy a decent TV these days that's not "smart". So he has to put a packet analyzer on the network port and figure out if the thing is phoning home?
No, this a place where the consumer reasonably feels he ought to be protected by government regulation.
Back in 1972 the US Department of Health Education and Welfare developed a landmark report which anticipated a lot of the electronic privacy issues of the following 40 years. The report was prepared under squeaky clean Elliot Richardson, who was shifted from HEW to DoD shortly before the report came out. He was replaced by Caspar Weinberger (later Reagans' Sec'y of Defense, and mixed up with Iran Contra). If you read the report it is capped with a conclusion which doesn't seem to match: we can't really be sure about what's going to happen in the future, so we should avoid regulating any potential privacy abuses by the private sector until they become problems. That's the philosophy which controls the US approach to consumer data privacy to this day. Consumers have to figure out that their data is being abused, then win a political fight against companies who've invested money in the business of exploiting their data.
Double-whoosh on you!
ISON, not ISDN -- Inter Stellar Object Notation .
There's more to it than low bid. Federal procurement rules are complicated; they're supposed to make sure that the US government gets the best possible price, but what often happens is that they force the government to buy from a small pool of companies specializing in taking government money, rather than on the open market. Big IT contractors tend to spin off subsidiaries to handle the specialized accounting and project management requirements.
I've seen this first hand working as a contractor with state and local public health agencies when West Nile Virus hit. In truth WNV was no worse than a lot of things they'd already been dealing with, but it was on the news and there was a huge political demand to "do something about it fast", which in Washington terms means "spend this money right away". The problem is that you *can't* just sign a deal with the feds to burn a million dollars (or a thousand dollars, which is practically the same thing in federal terms). You've got already be set up to absorb lots of federal money, fast. What the country needed was just a *little bit more* of marginal funding spent on agencies and companies already working in the field, but politically connected federal contractors who had no idea what they were doing or who to deal with came swarming out of the woodwork because Congress was making it rain. They even shafted *government workers*. The CDC has the top vector borne disease surveillance experts in the world in Fort Collins, but most of the money ended up elsewhere. Fort Collin was a cottage operation that couldn't spend the money fast enough.
The Federal Government has two modes it operates well in: long term projects that require institutional memory and slowly built capacity, and *war*. Most people don't see it, but there are many government operations that are both financially efficient and a bargain, like the Fort Collins vector borne infectious disease center. The government is actually good at those things. It's also good at invading foreign countries and topping *their* governments. It's the stuff in between those extremes the government is lousy at handling. Ordinary projects that aren't part of some long established program become "the moral equivalent of war". Most of the time you don't need the moral equivalent of war, you just need a well-run project.