a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work
TFA says more time spent thinking correlates with less time spent in physical activity.
Work should still be considered virtuous; just be sure to include "thinking" in your definition of work. Society already does this; to the extent that it usually provides more financial rewards for intellectual labor than it does for physical labor.
After receiving a call from someone impersonating an IRS agent, I went to the FCC web site. There was a feature to chat with a live person (I think that feature is gone now).
I reported all the information about this caller, and stated that I wanted to press charges against him for falsely representing himself as an IRS agent (over what was likely a phone call that crossed state lines). The FCC employee was taken aback. Press charges? We don't do that.
I said, I thought the FCC is responsible for enforcing certain laws, and aren't you obligated to take some sort of action when a victim wishes to press charges?
You can also blind a human driver by shining a sufficiently bright light in the eyes. This fact has not caused anyone to say, "even though human drivers are quite capable, there's still no substitute for a good horse."
calling upon a foreign power to target his opponent by attacking federal government computer systems, though? That's much, much worse.
Um, the 30,000 emails that were deleted were never stored on a federal government computer system. That is one of the fishiest things about this matter.
Do you realize that the system they were stored on is now offline, and therefore impossible to attack? Trump realizes this, and that is what makes his joke funny. You don't seem to realize it.
that's essentially the same thing as officials in the presidential administration just giving the classified information to a journalist and encouraging them to publish it.
It is in no way the same thing.
When an administration leaks information, it wants the information to be published, and it puts thought into exactly what information will be leaked and to whom it will be leaked.
On the other hand, we know that some effort was made to keep the email server secure (about as well as a small two-bit IT firm could manage), and there were scared reactions when weird behavior made people think that it might have been hacked; and if it was hacked, the operators of the server had absolutely no control over which entities hacked it, or what subset of the stored information was exfiltrated.
Yeah, that sounds like "essentially the same thing."
I'm unsure why you think you should have to "earn" healthcare.
Somebody has to "earn" it; doctors' salaries (to name just one category of healthcare costs) don't pay themselves. There are four ways that healthcare (or health insurance) can be paid for:
(1) out of the patient's assets (2) by a wealth redistribution program (people other than the patient pay for it, coercively) (3) by charitable contributions (people other than the patient pay for it, voluntarily; for example, Shriners Hospitals are funded this way) (4) some combination of the above.
The system used in the U.S. is some-combination-of-the-above (4). As per-capita GDP grows, and people become more able and willing to be charitable, the ethical way to govern would be to shift sources of funding away from the coercive (2) and toward the voluntary (3). Note that the most efficient economic decisions are made when people spend their own money (1), not when they spend other people's money (2 and 3).
We have a whole new insurance industry around supplemental insurance now to cover things that used to be covered by normal insurance.
What country do you live in? Here in the U.S., "normal" insurance is now required to cover even frivolous things like gender reassignment surgery.
The people forced to provide those goods and services for those that haven't earned them are the real slaves.
That's really quite consistent with the definition of slavery. To the extent that the fruits of your labor are confiscated, you are enslaved.
If, between local, state and federal government, 60% of your income is confiscated, you are 60% enslaved.
This assertion does not break down just because some of the confiscated funds are directed back to you in the form of government benefits. Traditional slaves received meager food, clothing and housing benefits too.
Am I an anarchist who believes we should all be 0% enslaved? No, I have a gut feeling that society would thrive best if we were all about 17% enslaved.
Charitable giving continued its upward trend in 2015, as an estimated $373 billion was given to charitable causes. For the second year in a row, total giving reached record levels, and taking 2014 and 2015 together, charitable giving has increased over 10% (using inflation-adjusted dollars).
The wonderful thing about that $373 billion redistribution of wealth is that it was not coerced by any government.
High-income people tend to give more of their income to charity, in percentage terms as well as in absolute terms, than middle-class people. (Of course there are exceptions to that rule: Bidens gave average of $369 to charity a year.) That explains why, say, 3% GDP growth results in greater-than-3% growth in charitable contributions. Most of that $373 billion in philanthropic donations was given by -- according to you -- "psychopaths who parasitically prey upon the rest of society".
If we can just obtain a few more decades of economic growth, we will be able to have a more robust social safety net than the one we have now, funded entirely by voluntary contributions. Government will be able to get out of the wealth redistribution business, and focus on the sole job it was created to do: securing our rights.
For that reason, I'm betting the economy will never be permitted to grow that much. Restoring that limited, Jeffersonian scope to government is anathema to too many people.
The historical trend is for workweeks to steadily become shorter and shorter. But that trend has been interrupted and for some reason we've become stuck on the concept that a workweek is supposed to be 40 hours.
I'm not saying that capitalism is the problem, but our rigid adherance to certain extreme forms of free market economics...
Correct, there's nothing inherent in capitalism that says workweeks should be 40 hours.
One solution would be for the Department of Labor to index the length of the workweek, just as tax brackets are indexed to inflation to prevent bracket creep.
A better solution would not involve government at all. Salaries are just numbers that are freely negotiated between employers and individual employees, and the length of the workweek should be handled in the exact same way. (The problem, you see, is that it doesn't occur to most people that this particular degree of freedom should be one of the things that defines a truly free market.)
Employers always strive to attract quality employees, and they would gain a powerful edge if their initial offer to applicants could include, say, a 28-hour workweek. 40 hours was a rather arbitrary length when it was instituted, and it's even more arbitrary today.
The only times I've ever heard of an actual prosecution for mishandling has been when the person was suspected of actual spying, or in Manning's case, whistleblowing
I'm surprised that you've not heard of the David Petraeus case.
In January 2015, officials reported the FBI and Justice Department prosecutors had recommended bringing felony charges against Petraeus for allegedly providing classified information to his biographer, Paula Broadwell (with whom he was having an affair), while serving as the director of the CIA. Eventually, Petraeus pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor charge of mishandling classified information... On April 23, 2015, a federal judge sentenced Petraeus to two years' probation plus a fine of $100,000. The fine was more than double the amount the Justice Department had requested.
In 1978, when the Labor Force Participation Rate was only 63% and the national debt was only $0.77 trillion, Carter talked about economic "malaise" and a high "misery index."
We do everything we can to sterilize the probes, but microbes are very good at getting everywhere and hiding out.
Fortunately, that fact hasn't stopped us from sending landers and rovers to Mars.
If Galileo had crashed on Europa, and microbes were later found living on Europa, their DNA would easily tell us whether we're looking at something that originated on Earth.
A bigger problem would be, what if invasive-species-earth-microbes make the native microbes go extinct?
But it seems unlikely that a species that has adapted to Earth's environment, when introduced to Europa, would crowd out species that have adapted to Europa's environment.
If 1000 Teslas follow almost exactly the same course down a particular stretch of road, and then some road construction workers put down temporary paint that shifts the lanes, will the next Tesla smugly take the old course (knocking down traffic cones, or worse, in the process) ?
Parent is far more informative than most "+5 Informative" posts.
This is why scores should not be capped at +5 -- so we have a way to distinguish between really good posts, which are written many times per day, and outstanding posts, which come along more rarely.
The nuclei point "in a particular direction", whatever that means. If they all point in the same direction that would certainly be interesting, but it's not clear.
Thank you. All pear-shaped objects, even pears, "literally point towards a direction in space." TFA utterly fails to explain how one can then make the leap to saying this proves "there's a well-defined direction in time and we will always travel from past to present".
But as an aside, if the arrow of time suddenly did reverse, think how odd that would be to experience. We wouldn't be able to see, because photons would be exiting our pupils instead of entering them; we would literally be "un-seeing" sights and unthinking our thoughts. We would walk backwards into concert halls in order to un-listen to musicians. Our emotional states would be the result of things that haven't happened yet. Educated people would become de-educated. Graves would be un-dug; aborted fetuses would spring back to life, and the arguments about whether it is ethical to abort them would be un-had. The "undo" command on every computer would effectively become a "do" command. Later, those computers' operating systems would be uninstalled, and then they would be un-manufactured.
When time runs in that direction, everything seems rather pointless, does it not? It seems that there's a good reason time does not run in that direction.
A choice between saving 10 lives and saving one life? Why does anyone consider that to be a dilemma? It's a no-brainer.
Kill the one to save the 10, for a net savings of 9 lives. If any machine is programmed to do the opposite (kill 10 to save one, for a net loss of 9 lives), we should seriously think about bringing criminal charges against the programmer.
Hopefully, the driving ability of AIs will improve to the point where cars will no longer need to be equipped with expensive airbags. (Yes, you would have to get almost all of the human-driven cars off the road first, to get rid of the threat that they pose.)
It's perfectly acceptable to send unclassified messages over SIPRNet or JWICS. There is a maximum level of classification authorized for every network; you can go lower, but you can't go higher.
Things do get overclassified sometimes, but not for the bogus reason you gave.
Regarding the notorious private server, even messages marked C (Confidential) were not authorized to be there.
I've had classical piano training. I've noticed that male pianists tend to venture further into extremes of volume than female pianists. During fortissimo passages, males really pound the keys, and during pianissimo passages, they seek out the lightest possible touch.
In other words, males tend to utilize the full available dynamic range more than female pianists.
So I'm not surprised they do so when rating TV shows.
Slashdot Mirror
a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work
TFA says more time spent thinking correlates with less time spent in physical activity.
Work should still be considered virtuous; just be sure to include "thinking" in your definition of work. Society already does this; to the extent that it usually provides more financial rewards for intellectual labor than it does for physical labor.
After receiving a call from someone impersonating an IRS agent, I went to the FCC web site. There was a feature to chat with a live person (I think that feature is gone now).
I reported all the information about this caller, and stated that I wanted to press charges against him for falsely representing himself as an IRS agent (over what was likely a phone call that crossed state lines). The FCC employee was taken aback. Press charges? We don't do that.
I said, I thought the FCC is responsible for enforcing certain laws, and aren't you obligated to take some sort of action when a victim wishes to press charges?
They didn't know, and they took no such action.
You can also blind a human driver by shining a sufficiently bright light in the eyes. This fact has not caused anyone to say, "even though human drivers are quite capable, there's still no substitute for a good horse."
... by a painted tunnel.
calling upon a foreign power to target his opponent by attacking federal government computer systems, though? That's much, much worse.
Um, the 30,000 emails that were deleted were never stored on a federal government computer system. That is one of the fishiest things about this matter.
Do you realize that the system they were stored on is now offline, and therefore impossible to attack? Trump realizes this, and that is what makes his joke funny. You don't seem to realize it.
that's essentially the same thing as officials in the presidential administration just giving the classified information to a journalist and encouraging them to publish it.
It is in no way the same thing.
When an administration leaks information, it wants the information to be published, and it puts thought into exactly what information will be leaked and to whom it will be leaked.
On the other hand, we know that some effort was made to keep the email server secure (about as well as a small two-bit IT firm could manage), and there were scared reactions when weird behavior made people think that it might have been hacked; and if it was hacked, the operators of the server had absolutely no control over which entities hacked it, or what subset of the stored information was exfiltrated.
Yeah, that sounds like "essentially the same thing."
a solution for people like my friend, who have a 60 dollar window each month between paying all their bills and adding to their debt.
Your friend should not be buying Comcast's crap, even in a good month.
I'm unsure why you think you should have to "earn" healthcare.
Somebody has to "earn" it; doctors' salaries (to name just one category of healthcare costs) don't pay themselves. There are four ways that healthcare (or health insurance) can be paid for:
(1) out of the patient's assets
(2) by a wealth redistribution program (people other than the patient pay for it, coercively)
(3) by charitable contributions (people other than the patient pay for it, voluntarily; for example, Shriners Hospitals are funded this way)
(4) some combination of the above.
The system used in the U.S. is some-combination-of-the-above (4). As per-capita GDP grows, and people become more able and willing to be charitable, the ethical way to govern would be to shift sources of funding away from the coercive (2) and toward the voluntary (3). Note that the most efficient economic decisions are made when people spend their own money (1), not when they spend other people's money (2 and 3).
We have a whole new insurance industry around supplemental insurance now to cover things that used to be covered by normal insurance.
What country do you live in? Here in the U.S., "normal" insurance is now required to cover even frivolous things like gender reassignment surgery.
The people forced to provide those goods and services for those that haven't earned them are the real slaves.
That's really quite consistent with the definition of slavery. To the extent that the fruits of your labor are confiscated, you are enslaved.
If, between local, state and federal government, 60% of your income is confiscated, you are 60% enslaved.
This assertion does not break down just because some of the confiscated funds are directed back to you in the form of government benefits. Traditional slaves received meager food, clothing and housing benefits too.
Am I an anarchist who believes we should all be 0% enslaved? No, I have a gut feeling that society would thrive best if we were all about 17% enslaved.
it purely aligns with greed, rather than need
The facts disagree:
Charitable giving continued its upward trend in 2015, as an estimated $373 billion was given to charitable causes. For the second year in a row, total giving reached record levels, and taking 2014 and 2015 together, charitable giving has increased over 10% (using inflation-adjusted dollars).
The wonderful thing about that $373 billion redistribution of wealth is that it was not coerced by any government.
High-income people tend to give more of their income to charity, in percentage terms as well as in absolute terms, than middle-class people. (Of course there are exceptions to that rule: Bidens gave average of $369 to charity a year.) That explains why, say, 3% GDP growth results in greater-than-3% growth in charitable contributions. Most of that $373 billion in philanthropic donations was given by -- according to you -- "psychopaths who parasitically prey upon the rest of society".
If we can just obtain a few more decades of economic growth, we will be able to have a more robust social safety net than the one we have now, funded entirely by voluntary contributions. Government will be able to get out of the wealth redistribution business, and focus on the sole job it was created to do: securing our rights.
For that reason, I'm betting the economy will never be permitted to grow that much. Restoring that limited, Jeffersonian scope to government is anathema to too many people.
UBI is a nice idea for countries who have their economy in order with the goal of long term prosperity.
Even if that statement is correct, this does not look like a country with its economy in order.
The historical trend is for workweeks to steadily become shorter and shorter. But that trend has been interrupted and for some reason we've become stuck on the concept that a workweek is supposed to be 40 hours.
I'm not saying that capitalism is the problem, but our rigid adherance to certain extreme forms of free market economics...
Correct, there's nothing inherent in capitalism that says workweeks should be 40 hours.
One solution would be for the Department of Labor to index the length of the workweek, just as tax brackets are indexed to inflation to prevent bracket creep.
A better solution would not involve government at all. Salaries are just numbers that are freely negotiated between employers and individual employees, and the length of the workweek should be handled in the exact same way. (The problem, you see, is that it doesn't occur to most people that this particular degree of freedom should be one of the things that defines a truly free market.)
Employers always strive to attract quality employees, and they would gain a powerful edge if their initial offer to applicants could include, say, a 28-hour workweek. 40 hours was a rather arbitrary length when it was instituted, and it's even more arbitrary today.
You may have heard that sealing your phone in a bag of rice will extract moisture. Here's a hygroscopic product that works even better: DampRid.
Even so, sometimes it takes a long time. Don't give up on that device. It may power on after a few weeks or months in the bag of DampRid.
The only times I've ever heard of an actual prosecution for mishandling has been when the person was suspected of actual spying, or in Manning's case, whistleblowing
I'm surprised that you've not heard of the David Petraeus case.
In January 2015, officials reported the FBI and Justice Department prosecutors had recommended bringing felony charges against Petraeus for allegedly providing classified information to his biographer, Paula Broadwell (with whom he was having an affair), while serving as the director of the CIA. Eventually, Petraeus pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor charge of mishandling classified information... On April 23, 2015, a federal judge sentenced Petraeus to two years' probation plus a fine of $100,000. The fine was more than double the amount the Justice Department had requested.
In 1978, when the Labor Force Participation Rate was only 63% and the national debt was only $0.77 trillion, Carter talked about economic "malaise" and a high "misery index."
In 2016, when the Labor Force Participation Rate is only 63% and the national debt is $17.3 trillion, the administration brags about how sustained and robust the "recovery" has been.
We do everything we can to sterilize the probes, but microbes are very good at getting everywhere and hiding out.
Fortunately, that fact hasn't stopped us from sending landers and rovers to Mars.
If Galileo had crashed on Europa, and microbes were later found living on Europa, their DNA would easily tell us whether we're looking at something that originated on Earth.
A bigger problem would be, what if invasive-species-earth-microbes make the native microbes go extinct?
But it seems unlikely that a species that has adapted to Earth's environment, when introduced to Europa, would crowd out species that have adapted to Europa's environment.
I'm not sure of the value of Fleet Learning.
If 1000 Teslas follow almost exactly the same course down a particular stretch of road, and then some road construction workers put down temporary paint that shifts the lanes, will the next Tesla smugly take the old course (knocking down traffic cones, or worse, in the process) ?
Tell me something reassuring about this.
Parent is far more informative than most "+5 Informative" posts.
This is why scores should not be capped at +5 -- so we have a way to distinguish between really good posts, which are written many times per day, and outstanding posts, which come along more rarely.
This is the first time I've ever heard "false confidence" described as a positive.
False confidence always leads to errors and small or large disasters sooner or later.
If men indeed have greater false confidence than women, the best way to reach gender equality is to instill less false confidence in men.
The nuclei point "in a particular direction", whatever that means. If they all point in the same direction that would certainly be interesting, but it's not clear.
Thank you. All pear-shaped objects, even pears, "literally point towards a direction in space." TFA utterly fails to explain how one can then make the leap to saying this proves "there's a well-defined direction in time and we will always travel from past to present".
But as an aside, if the arrow of time suddenly did reverse, think how odd that would be to experience. We wouldn't be able to see, because photons would be exiting our pupils instead of entering them; we would literally be "un-seeing" sights and unthinking our thoughts. We would walk backwards into concert halls in order to un-listen to musicians. Our emotional states would be the result of things that haven't happened yet. Educated people would become de-educated. Graves would be un-dug; aborted fetuses would spring back to life, and the arguments about whether it is ethical to abort them would be un-had. The "undo" command on every computer would effectively become a "do" command. Later, those computers' operating systems would be uninstalled, and then they would be un-manufactured.
When time runs in that direction, everything seems rather pointless, does it not? It seems that there's a good reason time does not run in that direction.
A choice between saving 10 lives and saving one life? Why does anyone consider that to be a dilemma? It's a no-brainer.
Kill the one to save the 10, for a net savings of 9 lives. If any machine is programmed to do the opposite (kill 10 to save one, for a net loss of 9 lives), we should seriously think about bringing criminal charges against the programmer.
Hopefully, the driving ability of AIs will improve to the point where cars will no longer need to be equipped with expensive airbags. (Yes, you would have to get almost all of the human-driven cars off the road first, to get rid of the threat that they pose.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
It's perfectly acceptable to send unclassified messages over SIPRNet or JWICS. There is a maximum level of classification authorized for every network; you can go lower, but you can't go higher.
Things do get overclassified sometimes, but not for the bogus reason you gave.
Regarding the notorious private server, even messages marked C (Confidential) were not authorized to be there.
I've had classical piano training. I've noticed that male pianists tend to venture further into extremes of volume than female pianists. During fortissimo passages, males really pound the keys, and during pianissimo passages, they seek out the lightest possible touch.
In other words, males tend to utilize the full available dynamic range more than female pianists.
So I'm not surprised they do so when rating TV shows.