No. "an animal that instinctively behaves in a way that tends to cause survival"
You're personifying. I may as well say that a tomato wants to live. If personifying is reasonable, then you'd better not kill her. ("her" meaning the tomato)
Just look at the word "humanely". It's something that has to do with humans. Concepts like "torture" and "cruelty" are human concepts. These concepts should not apply to non-humans.
People who enjoy the "torture" of animals are very similar to people who get upset about it: both are personifying animals. That's a mental weakness.
Animals don't give a damn about animals. The worm eating a dog's brain doesn't feel remorse. The aligator eating a kitten doesn't contemplate any ethical issues. Food is food.
There isn't any reason for us to see things differently, and many of us don't. Most people have no problem setting out a mouse trap or cutting up a tasty fish.
You're having trouble because you've gotten some sort of mental disconnect from nature (yes indeed, critters eat other critters) or because you really have some difficulty with the distinction between your own species and the rest.
Scientific experiments have shown that many animals killed for food, leather and fur are as intelligent as some of the smarter dogs we love. The next time you see a news piece about what the Chinese and Asians do to dogs and get disgusted remember that. We do the same to animals who have just as much intelligence and capacity to suffer.
Therefore, eating dogs is not wrong.
For sure it's environmentally friendly to eat unwanted dogs instead of injecting them with toxic chemicals and burning fuel to cremate them. They probably taste pretty good; it's too bad I'd have to fly overseas to get one without legal trouble.
Before asking whether there is an actual correlation between ethnicity (which BTW is a rather fuzzy concept) and behavior, I would ask who is interested in knowing, and most importantly why are they interested in knowing.
You're right. If we want to breed humans of superior intellect, choosing by ethnicity is a piss-poor way to go about it. There is no good reason to rely on the moderate association between intellect and ethnicity when we can simply use IQ tests to determine who goes into the gas chamber.
we didn't really evolve that much since we got ourselves these big brainy things that we use for thinking.
We seem to have lost most of our body hair since then. What were you expecting, wings and stingers?
We're evolving faster than ever before because our environment is changing faster than ever before. The creation of modern human civilization is a massive environmental change, and that's an understatement because there just aren't words to fully express such a level of environmental change.
Evolutionary changes need not be physically obvious. They can involve digestion (lactose tolerance), the immune system (the 1% who are immune to HIV), or the mind (behavior that defeats birth control).
If you want to know what future humans will be like, simply look at the selection pressure. The biggest reason why people fail to have surviving offspring is birth control. This can be overcome by increased desire to have kids, or by a tendency to fail in the use of birth control.
In other words - we are a hell of a lot more complex animals then foxes.
I wouldn't bet on that. We're less complex than our Christmas trees; they have way more DNA than we do, probably because defending a non-mobile organism requires extreme chemical complexity.
Also, we stopped fiddling with evolving our pigmentation back when we discovered clothing.
Secondly, the "random" collection of spiritual writings were written (among others) by the disciples of Jesus
OK, and who determined that?
Hint: he has an office surrounded by Rome and he wears a funny hat
There are **lots** of ancient scrolls that people have thought to be written by the disciples of Jesus. (many more than in the Bible) If the Pope's determination of which ones are legitimate is not infallible, then your Bible could contain random junk.
It is somewhat unsurprising that a Catholic is blissfully unaware that nowhere in the New Testament is there any mention of Peter being named to this office, that Jesus even established the Papacy, or that Peter was even regarded as a bishop.
This only matters if your religeon is defined by the content of a book.
Seeing as the Bible was put together by the Pope about 1600 years ago, it's really contradictory to suggest that the Bible can have more authority than the Pope.
copyright lengths are still less than a hundred years
In the USA:
If created by a corporation, the term is 95 years from publication. (could be less if they didn't publish for 25 years)
If created by an individual, the term is 70 years past their death. A person could survive 30 years or more. In the extreme, copyright can persist for more than 200 years! There is thus an incentive public domain supporters to kill the person. Assuming the copyright was assigned/licenced to a corporation, that corporation has an incentive to insist on extreme life-saving measures and vigorously fight any living will or family member that might cause the plug to be pulled.
You're viewing Roman Catholics through the window of protestant belief. That's about as valid as a Muslim viewing your religion through the window of his belief: protestants do all sorts of stuff that Muhammed didn't teach!
From the Roman Catholic viewpoint, things are of course different. The Bible itself was assembled by the Pope about 1600 years ago; how could it possibly take priority over the Pope? Without the authority of the Pope, we wouldn't even have a Bible! We'd just have a loose and random collection of generally spiritual writings with varying value, including a huge pile of stuff that didn't make it into the Bible.
You can also spend every free moment watching TV. Or reading books. Or pumping iron.
Of those, only TV is purposely calculated to keep you there forever.
Yep, TV is pretty bad. It doesn't seem to be as effective as video games though. It's like the difference between pot and meth. Games are a more serious problem than TV, but either can mess you up.
There is also an underlying problem with his argument: the way he presents the problem, in function of the ‘risk’, cleverly plants the assumption that video games are ‘damaging’ in a way that makes it seem beyond debate.
Yes, video games are damaging.
One of the problems with studies of the matter is that people often confuse the issue. They compare violent video games against non-violent ones, or they compare violent video games against a lack of video games, and then they try to make some conclusion related to game content.
It's not the content!
When you spend every free moment of your teen years on a video game addiction, you're messing up your mind. You're missing out on real face-to-face human interaction, from which you might learn social skills. You're coming to expect instant gratification and constant entertainment, but the real world isn't going to live up to such expectations.
Ever hear the term "EverCrack"? Games destroy lives. Relationships and jobs are lost or never found to begin with. People skip classes and even skip sleep so that they can satisfy their addiction.
Ever try to pull a game addict (maybe a loved one) away from his game? If you try, you'll find that they are completely irrational about the issue.
I pretty much lost a brother to this shit. He'd mod me down for pointing out the obvious, except he can't because he's surely playing a game right this very moment.
We used to commit people to mental institutions. About 50 years ago, court decisions put an end to that. They go out on the streets by choice and we can't stop them.
Today we wait until they commit a serious crime. We then get a court order to force them to take medication, allowing us to claim that they are mentally competant to stand trial. Of course they resist this, both in times of sanity (not wanting punishment) and insanity (the pills are mind control devices from the CIA). The jurors know that an innocent-by-insanity decision puts a dangerous person back on the street the moment he temporarily starts taking pills, so the jurors don't give a damn and just convict the nutjob like any other criminal.
(within boundaries: clearly a suicidal individual should be helped, and if that takes Prozac to accomplish as a bridge, then that's fine)
Prozac makes a crummy bridge. It tends to collapse, and it's damn expensive to get the many tons of it that you'd need. Even with low-dose generic equivalents, you're looking at $0.20 per "pill" (and I'll get to that in a moment), which comes to about a million dollars per cubic meter. A respectible bridge is going to need at least 1000 cubic meters of material, so that comes to about a billion dollars minimum. Worse yet, it seems that Prozac is only available in capsule form. Capsules are too slipery to build even an arch bridge. You may be able to get the capsules sticky enough to bond if you moisten them, but why take risks with such a non-standard construction material? You'd be paying an arm and a leg. Admittedly it's artistic and it could make a statement of some kind, but I really don't think this is the way to go. You may even encounter difficulty getting a large enough prescription.
If you really want to help a suicidal individual, take them to any normal concrete or steel bridge. It's way faster, cheaper, reliable, etc.
There's no more "factory jobs" out there that will feed a family like even 15 years ago. All kids are pushed to perform in ways I'm not asked to, and I'm attending college both on campus and/or online and work full time. Frankly I think that's overkill but "education" seems to think that everybody should be trying to go to Harvard rather than state school.
We currently have little use for the people who are unfit for advanced education. We eliminated their jobs via protective measures that made them uncompetitive on the world market: environmental protection, worker safety, short work weeks, disability protection, minimum wage, etc. Other parts of the world have been happy to take the jobs, and they even ship us back much of the pollution via global winds and ocean currents!
Idle poor people tend to end up in jail. One can argue if that's worse than a dangerous job or not.
We're also ignoring biological reality. People naturally start families as they complete puberty, but we fail to prepare them for supporting families at that time. School drags on for years, offering neither vocational training nor more advanced studies. Tracking is schools is very inflexible, with a student who falls behind becoming permanently stuck in a slower (not merely later) track. For this reason, and because we are hesitant to face the anger and political power of parents with dumb/violent/lazy kids, we don't track kids early. Accepting biological reality would mean adjusting our educational system to ensure that most people would be fully capable of supporting a family around age 16, give or take a couple years. The dumber ones would have useful vocational skills, the brighter ones would have the equivalent of a non-joke 4-year college degree, and very few would be left needing either additional education or prison. We made everything all generic and watered-down though, resulting in near-worthless high school diplomas that merely mean you mostly showed up for class. Neither the bright nor the dim are well-served by this waste of time.
BTW, providing **social** rewards for academic success would go a long way toward motivating students. (money, the right to wander out for fresh air, more in-game time, parking rights, etc.)
For those that do go to college, we mislead and abuse them. We give loans for degrees that offer little hope of providing an income to pay off the loan, then we don't provide a reasonable way to escape the responsibility for repayment. Sure, you can get that interpretive dance degree! It's little wonder that so many people can point to an unemployed college graduate they personally know as an example of why education is worthless. Even the people who make wise choices get stuck spending too much time listening to non-technical professors pushing personal political agendas.
Ever wonder why so many people get communications degrees now? It's because they need to prove that they have the writing skills that used to be expected of those graduating from 5th grade or 6th grade. Ouch. Without some sort of college degree, nobody will believe that you have the basic literacy required for simple office work.
So you are suggesting that there exists a sub class of humans which are more likely to be mentally ill? Seems like a straight path towards eugenics to me.
Wouldn't it be nice if future generations were smarter, more mentally stable, and less disabled?
Any dog breeder can trivially show you what happens when the defective ones breed. It's downright idiotic to suggest that things are any different with humans.
Right now we're doing the exact opposite of what any breeder would do. The results are entirely predictable.
The majority of data generated and used in a hospital is of a well-known classified type: personal information like name and address; medical indexing information like diagnosis codes and procedure codes that convey paragraphs of standard information with a simple alpha-numeric designator; drug names and dosage instructions; and yes, insurance and billing information. The non-text data like MRI, X-Ray, and other imaging have been cast into industry-standard data formats. The problem is most decidedly not the data, either in its volume or diversity, but with perspective.
And... you FAIL.
The patient gives you the WRONG name. A new procedure is invented. The WRONG code is used; it's easier to screw up a code than a plain-English description.
If you need that translated into billing data, have a non-doctor do that. They can do this the next day.
We are over ambitious. The more code we write, the more bugs we create.
The trouble with hospital data is that it is messy. You have to accept that.
It's tempting to design a hospital data system with specific fields for each item, every procedure enumerated, and every field validated. You want to normalize your data. You want it neat and tidy. You can work very hard trying to enforce this. You're screwed though, because life isn't like that.
You'd be better off with relatively "dumb" software, almost like a wiki, that lets you efficiently handle arbitrary text and arbitrary data blobs. It needs fast Google-style search. It needs to allow arbitrary associations so you can handle stuff like a patient claiming to have the same social security number as a different patient or a patient who claims to have a different identity than he did the last time he visited.
Then you need to keep medical staff away from both paper and computers. Data entry is for data entry specialists.
Firefox chose a JIT based on trace caching. It's a bit like the Pentium 4, translating stuff based on various assumptions and hoping that unexpected branches won't happen.
Not that it's the same problem space, but we all know how well that worked out for the Pentium 4.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Some of that stuff doesn't get X-rayed. Imagine what a self-propelled wheelchair could contain.
(We made a really nice explosion with just a charcoal briquette.)
Dust explosion? (liquid oxygen works too AFAIK)
Corn starch, a hair dryer, and a buddy down-wind with a match would probably be effective.
Of course, none of this lets you turn the plane into a cruise missile.
an animal who wants to live
No. "an animal that instinctively behaves in a way that tends to cause survival"
You're personifying. I may as well say that a tomato wants to live. If personifying is reasonable, then you'd better not kill her. ("her" meaning the tomato)
Just look at the word "humanely". It's something that has to do with humans. Concepts like "torture" and "cruelty" are human concepts. These concepts should not apply to non-humans.
People who enjoy the "torture" of animals are very similar to people who get upset about it: both are personifying animals. That's a mental weakness.
Animals don't give a damn about animals. The worm eating a dog's brain doesn't feel remorse. The aligator eating a kitten doesn't contemplate any ethical issues. Food is food.
There isn't any reason for us to see things differently, and many of us don't. Most people have no problem setting out a mouse trap or cutting up a tasty fish.
You're having trouble because you've gotten some sort of mental disconnect from nature (yes indeed, critters eat other critters) or because you really have some difficulty with the distinction between your own species and the rest.
Scientific experiments have shown that many animals killed for food, leather and fur are as intelligent as some of the smarter dogs we love. The next time you see a news piece about what the Chinese and Asians do to dogs and get disgusted remember that. We do the same to animals who have just as much intelligence and capacity to suffer.
Therefore, eating dogs is not wrong.
For sure it's environmentally friendly to eat unwanted dogs instead of injecting them with toxic chemicals and burning fuel to cremate them. They probably taste pretty good; it's too bad I'd have to fly overseas to get one without legal trouble.
Before asking whether there is an actual correlation between ethnicity (which BTW is a rather fuzzy concept) and behavior, I would ask who is interested in knowing, and most importantly why are they interested in knowing.
You're right. If we want to breed humans of superior intellect, choosing by ethnicity is a piss-poor way to go about it. There is no good reason to rely on the moderate association between intellect and ethnicity when we can simply use IQ tests to determine who goes into the gas chamber.
we didn't really evolve that much since we got ourselves these big brainy things that we use for thinking.
We seem to have lost most of our body hair since then. What were you expecting, wings and stingers?
We're evolving faster than ever before because our environment is changing faster than ever before. The creation of modern human civilization is a massive environmental change, and that's an understatement because there just aren't words to fully express such a level of environmental change.
Evolutionary changes need not be physically obvious. They can involve digestion (lactose tolerance), the immune system (the 1% who are immune to HIV), or the mind (behavior that defeats birth control).
If you want to know what future humans will be like, simply look at the selection pressure. The biggest reason why people fail to have surviving offspring is birth control. This can be overcome by increased desire to have kids, or by a tendency to fail in the use of birth control.
In other words - we are a hell of a lot more complex animals then foxes.
I wouldn't bet on that. We're less complex than our Christmas trees; they have way more DNA than we do, probably because defending a non-mobile organism requires extreme chemical complexity.
Also, we stopped fiddling with evolving our pigmentation back when we discovered clothing.
You forget sexual selection, particularly mate choice and ornaments. (more)
We're letting them do that because we don't see it coming and/or don't have the balls to wipe them out first.
after the others start seeing the benefits of reading, the popularity will grow
Nope. There are two very human reactions:
1. Don't admit that you can't read. Avoid situations where it would be obvious to others.
2. Claim that reading is unimportant. Say that people who waste time on reading are nerds.
Secondly, the "random" collection of spiritual writings were written (among others) by the disciples of Jesus
OK, and who determined that?
Hint: he has an office surrounded by Rome and he wears a funny hat
There are **lots** of ancient scrolls that people have thought to be written by the disciples of Jesus. (many more than in the Bible) If the Pope's determination of which ones are legitimate is not infallible, then your Bible could contain random junk.
It is somewhat unsurprising that a Catholic is blissfully unaware that nowhere in the New Testament is there any mention of Peter being named to this office, that Jesus even established the Papacy, or that Peter was even regarded as a bishop.
This only matters if your religeon is defined by the content of a book.
Seeing as the Bible was put together by the Pope about 1600 years ago, it's really contradictory to suggest that the Bible can have more authority than the Pope.
copyright lengths are still less than a hundred years
In the USA:
If created by a corporation, the term is 95 years from publication. (could be less if they didn't publish for 25 years)
If created by an individual, the term is 70 years past their death. A person could survive 30 years or more. In the extreme, copyright can persist for more than 200 years! There is thus an incentive public domain supporters to kill the person. Assuming the copyright was assigned/licenced to a corporation, that corporation has an incentive to insist on extreme life-saving measures and vigorously fight any living will or family member that might cause the plug to be pulled.
You're viewing Roman Catholics through the window of protestant belief. That's about as valid as a Muslim viewing your religion through the window of his belief: protestants do all sorts of stuff that Muhammed didn't teach!
From the Roman Catholic viewpoint, things are of course different. The Bible itself was assembled by the Pope about 1600 years ago; how could it possibly take priority over the Pope? Without the authority of the Pope, we wouldn't even have a Bible! We'd just have a loose and random collection of generally spiritual writings with varying value, including a huge pile of stuff that didn't make it into the Bible.
You can also spend every free moment watching TV. Or reading books. Or pumping iron.
Of those, only TV is purposely calculated to keep you there forever.
Yep, TV is pretty bad. It doesn't seem to be as effective as video games though. It's like the difference between pot and meth. Games are a more serious problem than TV, but either can mess you up.
FWIW, my home has no TV for this reason.
There is also an underlying problem with his argument: the way he presents the problem, in function of the ‘risk’, cleverly plants the assumption that video games are ‘damaging’ in a way that makes it seem beyond debate.
Yes, video games are damaging.
One of the problems with studies of the matter is that people often confuse the issue. They compare violent video games against non-violent ones, or they compare violent video games against a lack of video games, and then they try to make some conclusion related to game content.
It's not the content!
When you spend every free moment of your teen years on a video game addiction, you're messing up your mind. You're missing out on real face-to-face human interaction, from which you might learn social skills. You're coming to expect instant gratification and constant entertainment, but the real world isn't going to live up to such expectations.
Ever hear the term "EverCrack"? Games destroy lives. Relationships and jobs are lost or never found to begin with. People skip classes and even skip sleep so that they can satisfy their addiction.
Ever try to pull a game addict (maybe a loved one) away from his game? If you try, you'll find that they are completely irrational about the issue.
I pretty much lost a brother to this shit. He'd mod me down for pointing out the obvious, except he can't because he's surely playing a game right this very moment.
We used to commit people to mental institutions. About 50 years ago, court decisions put an end to that. They go out on the streets by choice and we can't stop them.
Today we wait until they commit a serious crime. We then get a court order to force them to take medication, allowing us to claim that they are mentally competant to stand trial. Of course they resist this, both in times of sanity (not wanting punishment) and insanity (the pills are mind control devices from the CIA). The jurors know that an innocent-by-insanity decision puts a dangerous person back on the street the moment he temporarily starts taking pills, so the jurors don't give a damn and just convict the nutjob like any other criminal.
(within boundaries: clearly a suicidal individual should be helped, and if that takes Prozac to accomplish as a bridge, then that's fine)
Prozac makes a crummy bridge. It tends to collapse, and it's damn expensive to get the many tons of it that you'd need. Even with low-dose generic equivalents, you're looking at $0.20 per "pill" (and I'll get to that in a moment), which comes to about a million dollars per cubic meter. A respectible bridge is going to need at least 1000 cubic meters of material, so that comes to about a billion dollars minimum. Worse yet, it seems that Prozac is only available in capsule form. Capsules are too slipery to build even an arch bridge. You may be able to get the capsules sticky enough to bond if you moisten them, but why take risks with such a non-standard construction material? You'd be paying an arm and a leg. Admittedly it's artistic and it could make a statement of some kind, but I really don't think this is the way to go. You may even encounter difficulty getting a large enough prescription.
If you really want to help a suicidal individual, take them to any normal concrete or steel bridge. It's way faster, cheaper, reliable, etc.
There's no more "factory jobs" out there that will feed a family like even 15 years ago. All kids are pushed to perform in ways I'm not asked to, and I'm attending college both on campus and/or online and work full time. Frankly I think that's overkill but "education" seems to think that everybody should be trying to go to Harvard rather than state school.
We currently have little use for the people who are unfit for advanced education. We eliminated their jobs via protective measures that made them uncompetitive on the world market: environmental protection, worker safety, short work weeks, disability protection, minimum wage, etc. Other parts of the world have been happy to take the jobs, and they even ship us back much of the pollution via global winds and ocean currents!
Idle poor people tend to end up in jail. One can argue if that's worse than a dangerous job or not.
We're also ignoring biological reality. People naturally start families as they complete puberty, but we fail to prepare them for supporting families at that time. School drags on for years, offering neither vocational training nor more advanced studies. Tracking is schools is very inflexible, with a student who falls behind becoming permanently stuck in a slower (not merely later) track. For this reason, and because we are hesitant to face the anger and political power of parents with dumb/violent/lazy kids, we don't track kids early. Accepting biological reality would mean adjusting our educational system to ensure that most people would be fully capable of supporting a family around age 16, give or take a couple years. The dumber ones would have useful vocational skills, the brighter ones would have the equivalent of a non-joke 4-year college degree, and very few would be left needing either additional education or prison. We made everything all generic and watered-down though, resulting in near-worthless high school diplomas that merely mean you mostly showed up for class. Neither the bright nor the dim are well-served by this waste of time.
BTW, providing **social** rewards for academic success would go a long way toward motivating students. (money, the right to wander out for fresh air, more in-game time, parking rights, etc.)
For those that do go to college, we mislead and abuse them. We give loans for degrees that offer little hope of providing an income to pay off the loan, then we don't provide a reasonable way to escape the responsibility for repayment. Sure, you can get that interpretive dance degree! It's little wonder that so many people can point to an unemployed college graduate they personally know as an example of why education is worthless. Even the people who make wise choices get stuck spending too much time listening to non-technical professors pushing personal political agendas.
Ever wonder why so many people get communications degrees now? It's because they need to prove that they have the writing skills that used to be expected of those graduating from 5th grade or 6th grade. Ouch. Without some sort of college degree, nobody will believe that you have the basic literacy required for simple office work.
Laws will not repress crimes of poverty. The real answer is for the society afflicted to make certain that no person suffers poverty.
Uh, so we put them out of their suffering?
So you are suggesting that there exists a sub class of humans which are more likely to be mentally ill? Seems like a straight path towards eugenics to me.
Wouldn't it be nice if future generations were smarter, more mentally stable, and less disabled?
Any dog breeder can trivially show you what happens when the defective ones breed. It's downright idiotic to suggest that things are any different with humans.
Right now we're doing the exact opposite of what any breeder would do. The results are entirely predictable.
Uh, sure...
Instead a mere typo turns that (number 932574)
into leg amputation (number 923574) and you lop
off the poor guy's leg.
Really, numeric codes are terrible. It's hard to
imagine a worse way to do things.
Then there's that popular code (number 572962)
which means "other", and all the times somebody
picks the closest match because no code exists.
The majority of data generated and used in a hospital is of a well-known classified type: personal information like name and address; medical indexing information like diagnosis codes and procedure codes that convey paragraphs of standard information with a simple alpha-numeric designator; drug names and dosage instructions; and yes, insurance and billing information. The non-text data like MRI, X-Ray, and other imaging have been cast into industry-standard data formats. The problem is most decidedly not the data, either in its volume or diversity, but with perspective.
And... you FAIL.
The patient gives you the WRONG name. A new procedure is invented. The WRONG code is used; it's easier to screw up a code than a plain-English description.
If you need that translated into billing data, have a non-doctor do that. They can do this the next day.
Have a secretary work with the doctor. (probably reporting to him and standing next to him as he works)
Keyboards spread disease. They are covered in germs. Doctors shouldn't be touching them.
We are over ambitious. The more code we write, the more bugs we create.
The trouble with hospital data is that it is messy. You have to accept that.
It's tempting to design a hospital data system with specific fields for each item, every procedure enumerated, and every field validated. You want to normalize your data. You want it neat and tidy. You can work very hard trying to enforce this. You're screwed though, because life isn't like that.
You'd be better off with relatively "dumb" software, almost like a wiki, that lets you efficiently handle arbitrary text and arbitrary data blobs. It needs fast Google-style search. It needs to allow arbitrary associations so you can handle stuff like a patient claiming to have the same social security number as a different patient or a patient who claims to have a different identity than he did the last time he visited.
Then you need to keep medical staff away from both paper and computers. Data entry is for data entry specialists.
Firefox chose a JIT based on trace caching. It's a bit like the Pentium 4, translating stuff based on various assumptions and hoping that unexpected branches won't happen.
Not that it's the same problem space, but we all know how well that worked out for the Pentium 4. :-)