Humans now face tremendous new selection pressure: birth control
Failing to defeat birth control is every bit as selective as being eaten by a lion. Look at the traits that allow people to defeat birth control, and you can predict the future of humanity. Here are the most likely:
1. high hormone levels in the woman (arms race with birth control pills) 2. stupidity, impulsiveness, and lack of concern for long-term consequences 3. an actual desire for children rather than sex
All are being strongly selected for, but it is #3 that delivers the ultimate crushing defeat to birth control. The first two traits are only favored in the absense of the third; in people with a passionate desire to make kids there will be selection against stupidity.
You can thus predict a temporary drop in typical intelligence, and a long-term increase in family size. Ultimately we return to the age-old situation of huge families, with the resulting resource consumption problems and early death.
I haven't checked the current model year, but in the 2001 model year the Dodge Durango had lots of headroom. I'm only mildly tall, but I got the feeling I could sit up straight and wear a big Texas-style hat while driving.
It's typical to get an extra inch of room if you get a trim package that lacks a sunroof/moonroof hole in the top. The mechanism eats up space.
It's normal for a compiler to substitute 1 to 5 assembly instructions in place of a library call, especially if the number of bytes is known to be small. It runs faster.
I'm thinking memcpy_s is a library call though. That makes it slower.
All those people moving up from Massachusetts took away the freedom. They liked NH because it was free for them, but all wanted laws to oppress the things they didn't care about. End result, it's not free anymore.
So the old man jumps off his cliff. He'd had enough.
That goal is survival. OK, it's anthropomorphizing to call it a "goal", as if there were thought or desire involved, but that's of no importance. Survival (long term Nth generation) is effectively the goal.
The relevant error is to think that the survival goal of evolution must somehow coincide with the qualities that we humans desire or respect. No way! If passionate religion or inability to comprehend birth control make it more likely that you have surviving descendents in the Nth generation, then those traits get selected for. It's perfectly valid, and even likely, that evolution selects against people who accept evolution.:-)
Note that modern society could allow the island effect to apply worldwide. After all, the Earth itself is a sort of island in space.
If you get her pregnant, you pay child support. It doesn't matter how you get her pregnant. Even if her friends hold you down so she can hop on top and rape you, you still pay child support. Even if she fishes your used condom out of a dumpster near your apartment and uses it to get pregnant, you still pay child support.
Seriously: guys lose in court ALL THE TIME. There is zero defense if it is your kid.
It's crazy enough to trust a condom that you personally buy, protect from damage (keeping it in sight at all times), and flush down the toilet. Trusting anything less is WAY WAY insane.
Plus some of us think it's about more than money: kids need fathers AND mothers.
You're already forced to trust all sorts of troublesome people with your info. All sorts of random employees at all sorts of places are illegally looking at your info, providing it to their friends, and even selling it. We might as well toss aside all the ineffective obstructions so that we can all benefit from a fully public database.
If some stuff is embarrasing, good! Maybe it'll be an extra incentive to avoid catching that disease.
There is a pretty decent argument for mandatory testing and/or quarantine. If we did that, all communicable diseases would be gone. Think about it: GONE. All that disability, suffering, misery, pain, death... gone.
BTW, there is something to be said for non-private thoughts too. If that could work: Fraud would go away. We'd never wrongfully convict the innocent. We'd stop electing liars.
Patients should be able to have full access to all records pertaining to them on demand from any medical facility in a timely fashion (in an electronic system, within 1 business day would be charitable), and at no more cost than a nominal administration fee
That's offensive. Better: all records should be on the web within 8 hours of creation. Some *.gov website would do nicely, especially since I might forget the name of my old doctor or he might go out of business. I don't want to search 666 different places for my records!
Make it public and permanent, possibly with portions hidden by court order. Let me add a rebuttal whenever I wish.
Nobody dares to ask a potential boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse to provide all health records. It's not romantic.
Even if you did ask, you couldn't know if you got all the records.
Ommisions mean you get incurable and/or fatal diseases. Assuming you don't just die, you are less able to find somebody else without lying about your new disease.
Omissions mean that, one fine day after you've started a family, you discover that your spouse was hiding a genetic heart condition that will kill most of your kids (and spouse too) before age 40.
Doctors may sometimes lie, but random people lie very often. What do you think your date will say if you ask about diseases or hidden health problems?
I'll gladly give up my health info to the world in exchange for getting the same info about other people. Dangerous hazards, like sick people, need warnings.
This is more important than listing where sex offenders live. This is more important that listing where asbestos has been dumped. If I catch drug-resistant tuberculosis and HIV from you, I'm going to die really soon. If you're hearing voices that tell you to kill people, then I need to be careful. I certainly can't rely on you to warn me.
Your right to privacy ends where it conflicts with my right to live without getting your diseases.
I guess you could claim that you're a dude who likes chicks, but would suddenly prefer dudes if converted to a chick. I don't think that's the normal feeling.
Any non-gay interpretation is really reaching, and surely more offensive. Suppose you thought you were a fish trapped in a man's body. You want surgery to fix it. We'd **all** think "WTF?!?!?" and consider you absolutely insane. Interesting question: would it be ethical for a surgeon to make a best-effort attempt at giving such a person his desired fish body? If this is somehow different from gender reassignment, please explain.
Quietly invent a nice system, sneak it into Tibet (if not invented there), convince a pro-Chinese Tibetian politician to advocate it, and then the Dalai Lama can announce that he reluctantly accepts the idea and wishes to avoid needless incompatibility.
If you ride that system twice each weekday, you'll be a crime victim every 1.5 years. Their own numbers, not including all the unreported crimes, show this.
I guess some of you city folk consider that normal, and don't really see a problem...? Over a 40-year career it's maybe a couple rapes, a half dozen violent beatings, a half dozen muggings, a dozen thefts, and a single career-ending murder? (plus some trivial assaults and thefts you don't bother to report)
Us non-city folk think HOLY SHIT when we see those numbers. In a dozen years with a car commute, the worst I've had was some asshole con artist abusing my car in the parking lot. Nobody has ever taken my stuff or even threatened me with bodily harm.
And I don't believe there are very many people out there who are not capable of doing anything. Even someone with very low intelligence and very poor education
It's not just a lack of technical ability.
Consider low work ethic, feelings of entitlement, lack of anger management, walking off the job, vandalizing the job site, threatening stares, inappropriate touching of coworkers, sleeping on the job, failing to show up on time, failing to show up every day, stealing from the job site, and plain old violence.
It's expensive to even tolerate the presence of such people. You need managers who are fearless, compassionate, intelligent, and honest. Worse yet, any customers would need to be fearless.
Picture a downtown sidewalk getting sweeped. The sweeper has an interesting tatoo on his forehead. It's a swastika, or the words "FUCK YOU", or similar. As you approach, he leers at you. He then comments on your sexual attractiveness. The sidewalk isn't really getting clean. Maybe the equipment is used to knock the bark off a street tree or to scratch gang symbols into the side of a business.
There's just no use for such people. Even when not technically committing crime, they are undesirable to have around.
Our society simply isn't prepared to deal with this problem in any remotely logical manner.
Simply put, some people's lives are a net loss to society.
You suggest "babysitter", but imagine the outcry when some bonehead abuses the kids. Imagine a babysitter who locks a kid in a shed all day, quiets a screaming baby with heroin, or gives all the kids a disease.
Your other suggestions aren't much better. Some people simply aren't fit to be employed anywhere, and no amount of effort will fix that.
Our general "solution", if you can call it that, is to have these people in and out of prison until they get themselves killed somehow. They commit crime to support themselves: muggings, theft, identity theft, etc.
We don't have the balls to just euthanize the worthless trash. Instead, we let them live shitty lives while harming society.
Slashdot Mirror
The point is that you can be pretty darn sure that the person is NOT more skilled or knowledgeable.
Though imperfect, desire to hack on personal projects is a damn good lameness filter.
We have more than enough evidence to conclude that
kids do better in intact 2-parent families.
Casting tradition aside isn't without a cost.
Humans now face tremendous new selection pressure: birth control
Failing to defeat birth control is every bit as selective as being eaten by a lion. Look at the traits that allow people to defeat birth control, and you can predict the future of humanity. Here are the most likely:
1. high hormone levels in the woman (arms race with birth control pills)
2. stupidity, impulsiveness, and lack of concern for long-term consequences
3. an actual desire for children rather than sex
All are being strongly selected for, but it is #3 that delivers the ultimate crushing defeat to birth control. The first two traits are only favored in the absense of the third; in people with a passionate desire to make kids there will be selection against stupidity.
You can thus predict a temporary drop in typical intelligence, and a long-term increase in family size. Ultimately we return to the age-old situation of huge families, with the resulting resource consumption problems and early death.
If we let the kids grow up, they become terrorists.
Women give birth to future terrorists.
If you go broke or endanger your health (note: either can lead to the other) then I'm forced to pay for the resulting mess.
When an ambulance hauls your unconcious body into a hospital and you get treated, your failure to pay the bill causes rates to rise for me.
When you default on your loans, interest rates rise for me.
When you turn to crime to pay for your habits, you may mug or burglarize me.
When you fail to pay your share of taxes, a greater burden falls on me.
I haven't checked the current model year, but in the 2001 model year the Dodge Durango had lots of headroom. I'm only mildly tall, but I got the feeling I could sit up straight and wear a big Texas-style hat while driving.
It's typical to get an extra inch of room if you get a trim package that lacks a sunroof/moonroof hole in the top. The mechanism eats up space.
It's normal for a compiler to substitute 1 to 5 assembly instructions in place of a library call, especially if the number of bytes is known to be small. It runs faster.
I'm thinking memcpy_s is a library call though. That makes it slower.
All those people moving up from Massachusetts took away the freedom. They liked NH because it was free for them, but all wanted laws to oppress the things they didn't care about. End result, it's not free anymore.
So the old man jumps off his cliff. He'd had enough.
The real winners were JPEG and FLASH.
People used to encode most web images with GIF. Now they use JPEG. Yes, even for line art and text.
People used to encode most web animations with GIF. Now they use FLASH.
MNG and APNG never took off. Neither got much browser support. MNG wasn't compatible with anything. APNG was way too late to the party.
It's free, from the BBC. It's never blocky because it uses wavelets.
That goal is survival. OK, it's anthropomorphizing to call it a "goal", as if there were thought or desire involved, but that's of no importance. Survival (long term Nth generation) is effectively the goal.
The relevant error is to think that the survival goal of evolution must somehow coincide with the qualities that we humans desire or respect. No way! If passionate religion or inability to comprehend birth control make it more likely that you have surviving descendents in the Nth generation, then those traits get selected for. It's perfectly valid, and even likely, that evolution selects against people who accept evolution. :-)
Note that modern society could allow the island effect to apply worldwide. After all, the Earth itself is a sort of island in space.
If you get her pregnant, you pay child support. It doesn't matter how you get her pregnant. Even if her friends hold you down so she can hop on top and rape you, you still pay child support. Even if she fishes your used condom out of a dumpster near your apartment and uses it to get pregnant, you still pay child support.
Seriously: guys lose in court ALL THE TIME. There is zero defense if it is your kid.
It's crazy enough to trust a condom that you personally buy, protect from damage (keeping it in sight at all times), and flush down the toilet. Trusting anything less is WAY WAY insane.
Plus some of us think it's about more than money: kids need fathers AND mothers.
You're already forced to trust all sorts of troublesome people with your info. All sorts of random employees at all sorts of places are illegally looking at your info, providing it to their friends, and even selling it. We might as well toss aside all the ineffective obstructions so that we can all benefit from a fully public database.
If some stuff is embarrasing, good! Maybe it'll be an extra incentive to avoid catching that disease.
There is a pretty decent argument for mandatory testing and/or quarantine. If we did that, all communicable diseases would be gone. Think about it: GONE. All that disability, suffering, misery, pain, death... gone.
BTW, there is something to be said for non-private thoughts too. If that could work: Fraud would go away. We'd never wrongfully convict the innocent. We'd stop electing liars.
Patients should be able to have full access to all records pertaining to them on demand from any medical facility in a timely fashion (in an electronic system, within 1 business day would be charitable), and at no more cost than a nominal administration fee
That's offensive. Better: all records should be on the web within 8 hours of creation. Some *.gov website would do nicely, especially since I might forget the name of my old doctor or he might go out of business. I don't want to search 666 different places for my records!
Make it public and permanent, possibly with portions hidden by court order. Let me add a rebuttal whenever I wish.
Nobody dares to ask a potential boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse to provide all health records. It's not romantic.
Even if you did ask, you couldn't know if you got all the records.
Ommisions mean you get incurable and/or fatal diseases. Assuming you don't just die, you are less able to find somebody else without lying about your new disease.
Omissions mean that, one fine day after you've started a family, you discover that your spouse was hiding a genetic heart condition that will kill most of your kids (and spouse too) before age 40.
The patient...
stole narcotics and syringes from our office
bounced a check
tried to rape our receptionist
is psychotic; he misreports many symptoms
fails to take his medication
Doctors may sometimes lie, but random people lie very often. What do you think your date will say if you ask about diseases or hidden health problems?
I'll gladly give up my health info to the world in exchange for getting the same info about other people. Dangerous hazards, like sick people, need warnings.
This is more important than listing where sex offenders live. This is more important that listing where asbestos has been dumped. If I catch drug-resistant tuberculosis and HIV from you, I'm going to die really soon. If you're hearing voices that tell you to kill people, then I need to be careful. I certainly can't rely on you to warn me.
Your right to privacy ends where it conflicts with my right to live without getting your diseases.
Get a 12-guage semi-auto with 00 buckshot.
Bonus: very large magazine, pistol grip, and sawed off
phosphorous
depleted uranium
VX
sarin
mustard gas
ebola
They are often mislabeled as gay.
You're a dude. You like dudes. That's gay. :-)
Seriously, by definition, it's gay.
I guess you could claim that you're a dude who likes chicks, but would suddenly prefer dudes if converted to a chick. I don't think that's the normal feeling.
Any non-gay interpretation is really reaching, and surely more offensive. Suppose you thought you were a fish trapped in a man's body. You want surgery to fix it. We'd **all** think "WTF?!?!?" and consider you absolutely insane. Interesting question: would it be ethical for a surgeon to make a best-effort attempt at giving such a person his desired fish body? If this is somehow different from gender reassignment, please explain.
It's not nice to split the exiles from the rest.
Quietly invent a nice system, sneak it into Tibet (if not invented there), convince a pro-Chinese Tibetian politician to advocate it, and then the Dalai Lama can announce that he reluctantly accepts the idea and wishes to avoid needless incompatibility.
If you ride that system twice each weekday, you'll be a crime victim every 1.5 years. Their own numbers, not including all the unreported crimes, show this.
I guess some of you city folk consider that normal, and don't really see a problem...? Over a 40-year career it's maybe a couple rapes, a half dozen violent beatings, a half dozen muggings, a dozen thefts, and a single career-ending murder? (plus some trivial assaults and thefts you don't bother to report)
Us non-city folk think HOLY SHIT when we see those numbers. In a dozen years with a car commute, the worst I've had was some asshole con artist abusing my car in the parking lot. Nobody has ever taken my stuff or even threatened me with bodily harm.
You're going to get a hole in your radiator.
You're going to get hit in the window 30 times.
Two windows will need to be replaced.
And I don't believe there are very many people out there who are not capable of doing anything. Even someone with very low intelligence and very poor education
It's not just a lack of technical ability.
Consider low work ethic, feelings of entitlement, lack of anger management, walking off the job, vandalizing the job site, threatening stares, inappropriate touching of coworkers, sleeping on the job, failing to show up on time, failing to show up every day, stealing from the job site, and plain old violence.
It's expensive to even tolerate the presence of such people. You need managers who are fearless, compassionate, intelligent, and honest. Worse yet, any customers would need to be fearless.
Picture a downtown sidewalk getting sweeped. The sweeper has an interesting tatoo on his forehead. It's a swastika, or the words "FUCK YOU", or similar. As you approach, he leers at you. He then comments on your sexual attractiveness. The sidewalk isn't really getting clean. Maybe the equipment is used to knock the bark off a street tree or to scratch gang symbols into the side of a business.
There's just no use for such people. Even when not technically committing crime, they are undesirable to have around.
Our society simply isn't prepared to deal with this problem in any remotely logical manner.
Simply put, some people's lives are a net loss to society.
You suggest "babysitter", but imagine the outcry when some bonehead abuses the kids. Imagine a babysitter who locks a kid in a shed all day, quiets a screaming baby with heroin, or gives all the kids a disease.
Your other suggestions aren't much better. Some people simply aren't fit to be employed anywhere, and no amount of effort will fix that.
Our general "solution", if you can call it that, is to have these people in and out of prison until they get themselves killed somehow. They commit crime to support themselves: muggings, theft, identity theft, etc.
We don't have the balls to just euthanize the worthless trash. Instead, we let them live shitty lives while harming society.