Actually it's "useful" in the way mathematics stuff is always beautifully useless. You see, if you wanted to do echolocation with a piano (or any other 88-note instrument), this would be the piece that gave you maximum information on the target.
Believe it or not, if you played this music often you would (after a loong time) become able to hear the differences in the room the music was played in, just by the sound.
Bats use this to accomplish something that seems implausibly difficult, some species use it to dive through moving branches composing the upper level of a forest, in the dark (and they're blind or near-blind anyway), filled with environmental sounds and general noises, at ~ 180 km/h. When stationary they can use the tones to see through walls, and tell from the outside if anything in a room or cave is moving or not, including the rhythm of it's movement.
First of all, your point does not actually contradict mine. Why does the UN describe the US as non-free ? Simple: the UN is one vote per member, and the vast majority of it's members have the troublesome (for them) combo of being non-free, have a population that wants more freedom than they have, and are governments that are not capable of defending against the US for even a few weeks.
The UN council is filled with Gadhaffis, I assume you do not find it all that hard to understand that the US just lost popularity with them in the past few months ? Needless to say, state media of all these countries have reviewed their views of the US accordingly. Read Xinhua every now and then, and please remember that compared to the press of, say Iran or Bolivia they are pretty nice and fair in their coverage of the US. In Iran's national press you read about failed experiments on babies by the US military biweekly.
As for your point, the US may be corrupt, partially corrupt, or not corrupt at all. What measures it's "corruptness" is how much it goes against the interest of the people it governs. Regardless of that fact, the following holds : People in China - see how the US is corrupted "somewhat" - versus their own government which is 100% corrupt by definition* People in Northern African countries - see how the US is corrupted "somewhat" - versus their own government which is 100% corrupt by definition People in most of Asia - ditto Southern America - ditto (with a few large exceptions) Most of Africa - ditto Russia - ditto
* obviously this means that the government does not represent the interests of the people they're governing - at all. Also known as the democratic standard
There are 3 democratic countries with relatively large populations - the US, the EU, and India. Democracy represents about 1.5-2 billion people worldwide, depending on where your standard is (e.g. you could easily make the point that India lacks several essential freedoms that Americans have, you could even make a decent point that the EU is not a free democratic nation (because there is no separation between powers - both the legislature (which is the commission, not parliament, despite the name) and the executive powers lie in the commission. The justice has at least a modicum of independence, but not really since the same people that run the commission elect judges (who need to get re-elected every 6 years by -the same people as- the commission).
Other governments are either tiny, or are not democratic at all.
You know what that means ? At the very least 60% of people alive today do not live in a democracy. If you are being pedantic, excluding India will bring that up to 80%, excluding the EU for the really pedantic brings the number over 90%.
So "the US government has been corrupted" - you can make that argument. But it's not nearly as bad as the governments 60-90% of people live under. Americans are -at the very least- amongst the 10% most free people on this planet by the standard of participation in their own government - and that's assuming the US government has been corrupted. If it hasn't, Americans are the most free 4% of this planet.
That might be different if there weren't so many blowhard vegetarians screaming murder. I mean the ones in Bikini's (or less) are cute. The rest are not.
Exactly that. The rest of the world will start to see the US as a rogue state. Regardless of the what the rest of the world thinks or how they vote in global democratic institutions,
This is pretty close to the definition of "sovereignty".
What the world hates about the US is simple : it's success. It makes questions like "why doesn't dictator make our coutry as good as America" very hard to answer. Replace "dictator " with allah(or his paedophile prophet), communist party, king, strongman,... and all other such disgusting organizations.
All of these want America terminated, for obvious reasons, they feel threatened (probably for good reason). They can't hope to get anything done in open conflict, so they propagandize. Like how the US refusal to sell weapons to Saddam was met with articles of starving children, and the US actually caved to this, of course.
Of course the perception of idiots will be affected by this. Adults with a normal level of intelligence should not be fooled.
Besides the United States is not innocent of committing atrocities either so far the US is the only nation to ever detonate nuclear weapons on a civilian population for example(the intentional targeting of civilians and causing superfluous damage with systematic bombardment was forbidden even before the Geneva conventions by the Hague convention to which the United States is a signatory).
And of course, according to you that means it was never done ? Law != reality. Many signatories of those treaties, from Iraq to Sudan have done things that massively violate those treaties. There were no consequences from the UN. Besides, have you looked into what the other side in that conflict did ? Google "Japan rapes". And that's not all Japan did, ordered by the emperor, yes, but with the vast majority of the Japanese population behind him.
It baffles the mind that people can make moral comparisons like this. Yes perfect would not, at all, be the correct word to use. The best in the world ? With a large margin. And please don't start about states that are protected by US military forces are "better", like Western European forces. They wouldn't exist right now if it wasn't for US "atrocities".
They still had nothing to do with Normandy. The LN was heavily pro-Hitler, and was the organisation behind the Poland demilitarization. It is also the organization that negotiated the treaty of Versailles and thus is widely considered to carry the bulk of the blame for causing WWII in the first place. For different reasons they're also responsible for WWI.
And just so you don't think the UN is much different, there's the many "incidents". From the UN ordered genocides in Katanga in 1947 to the UN-sanctioned rapes, including child rapes, in Western Sahara, Congo, Haiti, Liberia, Sudan and Burundi and Ivory Coast (sanctioned because the UN prevented prosecution of the responsible parties).
UN troops were standing at a stonestrow distance from the Srebrenica massacres, the Rwanda genocides, lots of Sudanese genocides (they did prevent the locals from organizing themselves of course), Hezbollah rocket attacks against civilians,... and so on and so forth.
So yes the US is vastly superior in almost all respects to the UN. No doubt about it.
You're damn right. They haven't even tried to tack this on to the tail end of a Child Protection bill yet.
Why the hell would a government that isn't democratic feel the need to do such a thing ? This will pass, because the commisionaires (not a reference, actual title) of the EU have high-paying side-"jobs" in big companies. And for no other reason.
The EU doesn't even pretend that the passing of this law has any democratic component (the passing "or non-passing" will be done by the aptly-named commission, irrespective of parliament's decision, which is merely advisory). It is not requested by any specific European political party, it is just the initiative of one of the commission.
And when a dictator hands a piece of paper to be rubber-stamped at a powerless "parliament", why is there any doubt what will happen ? The Duma never once refused Stalin, and the "parliament" will not refuse Barosso.
This legislation was initiated straight from the offices of the head "ex-"(?)socialist/communist currently occupying the top post in the EU. This is the ONLY position in the EU government that has sovereignty (can decide to make -and break- laws of it's own accord). He "proposed" this law, and has done so for many other laws, implementing some of them regardless of the parliament's opposition, others without even asking parliament. Not that there is much opposition from parliament at all.
And when our little ex-communist decides to implement anti-workers policies, and there was some token opposition from parliament, he went ahead anyway.
Other than dissolution of the EU, there is no way to stop this.
You can't make an entire population stateless at the same time you control their territory.
Of course you can. Every middle eastern muslim country has laws doing exactly that. And please don't forget that Lebanon's version of this is quite mild. The Jordanian army has been accused multiple times of running parts of their own population into the desert, claiming they "were palestinians". There is little doubt that SA does worse than that.
Exactly what is going to collapse, aside from a few politician's grossly overinflated salaries and private jets, due to defunding unesco ?
Nothing.
The US will protect it's own history just as it has always done, as will any other state. Unesco is at best a rubber-stamper, with never any real involvement or sponsorship.
Wow... sanity. Of course countries can take back embassies.
You can even do it Iranian-style and no-one would really care. But according to established procedures, of course, a country can request any ambassador to leave, and whatever restrictions the land has, cease. Unlike several members of the UN "council", the US would probably actually give them time to get out without getting shot.
I don't get how you get to the US being the bad guy here ? It's beyond moronic. The US parliament has sovereignty, and that means they can do *whatever* they want.
Also, the UN is an organisation guilty of several genocides, organised rapes, occupations and worse. The UN publicly supports slavery, genocide and more TODAY (e.g. Sudan's membership and support). Their predecessor, the League of Nations, is the carries blame for causing *both* world-wars, and carries blame for demanding several countries give themselves up to Hitler (the league of nations got Poland to demobilize WHILE THEY WERE BEING ATTACKED, FULLY KNOWING WHAT WAS HAPPENING, and attempting to do the same to Britain multiple times). They are incapable of having the moral high ground in any discussion. Anything done to the UN will not compare to what the UN has done to it's victims.
I hope I can convince you to relegate your "environmental karma" to the fiction department, where frankly all such nonsense belongs. Karma has a (very) dark side, the caste system. But that's entirely beside the point. "Environmental karma" is bogus because:
Your extinction theories are not how evolution works, except in a rudimentary absolutist pre-20th century understanding perhaps. So let's this time include theories from the 20th century (imagine that, biology did not stop evolving after Darwin...). Here's the idea of what happens if a predator eats PCB infected fish.
A population of predators eats a population of PCB resistant fish. Some of the fish will be infected with a virus. Some of the virusses inside the fish will have copied the resistant version of the gene into the viral DNA. Happens all the time. In practice every lifeform is constantly infected with hundreds of different viruses, so this is not as unlikely as you would think.
Some of the predators will get infected with the fish. Some of the female predators will get their eggs infected, some of the males their balls (or equivalent...). BTW: it's usually the males that get their eggs ("sperma") infected. Look up how it works, and it will be obvious why. These fish, with the "infected" genes, being ever so slightly more active (evolution massacres entire races because they're 1% worse performers in a matter of a dozen generations, sometimes faster) take over the entire population. For fish, with generation lengths of at most 1 year, mostly less than that, we're talking a decade or less.
Does that satisfy you ? We *cannot* kill any significant part of nature. No matter how hard we try to do so. Nor can Krishna relegate "evil" species to dalit status and make slaves out of them, so you can you please not scare people with such eventualities ?
That species expansion only happens if natural barriers go up. Global transport is the real cause of species extinction'. The fact that people and goods move to all regions of this planet, bringing new diseases, new rodents, cats, dogs, and sometimes even new predators to all remote regions of this planet, where they proceed to destroy the local fauna that never evolved a defense against them. We're connecting the islands, google "island species".
The parties the most responsible for species extinction are probably the British empire, the east-india trading company and the Spanish kingdom. Remember : species' diversity loss is not exactly a recent problem.
It's not oil, it's not poison, it's not heavy metals (not even the music), it's not co2, it's not rising sea level, it's none of those things. It's tourism, discoveries and transport, and it doesn't matter *at all* whether said tourism happened by unpowered sailing ships, or kerosene-spewing 747's. You want to save species and races (including the diversity in human races) ?. Destroy tourism. Destroy international trade. Destroy *every* long distance interaction you can think of, first and most important in things to destroy would probably be the internet.
You want to save species diversity ? Break the connection, restore the islands. (read up a bit on island species on google and you will understand what this means). If this is not done, expect one human race to become utterly dominant (> 90% of the population) in at least 99 human species that didn't make it. For most animal and plant species this number will be far, far higher. The vast majority of species created by evolution... lose. Link the habitats, even for memes, and where there used to be 300 countries and, for example, languages, there will remain only one. Every Western European, from Swedish kids, to Italian infants speak English, it's only a matter of time till they decide that's the easiest way to communicate. The only languages that seem to be pushing back are French and Chinese. Please remember that there are currently 394 lan
Let me ask you a question. Have you given 5 seconds of thought to the kind of mathematical demands this would place upon those feedback mechanisms ? We do not, of course, need to 'determine their combined' effect in an instant, but we must actually find a formula that is not just true today, but that remains true. So these functions must be statistically significantly different. Needless to say, even the functions used in the models are not statistically different (meaning it is not possible to calculate the model used for a certain prediction given that prediction).
So the real demand this places upon the weather, is that weather systems must be simpler than the weather simulations we use for prediction.
Do you seriously think that's true ?
2) we can determine what the large ones are
This is just a special case of 1). This only works, obviously, if the large ones are large enough, when combined. In the series sum(1/(2^n)) they are large enough, in the series sum(1/n) they're not. That's just the first of many, many problems that these sorts of series can have. They must be convergent (most climate models are divergent).
On top of that, you're dependent upon our ability to calculate the large ones accurately. That depends on the exact formulas used of course, and obviously the functions used in climate models are computable functions, but they do not match the ones the real world uses. It is perfectly known that the "real" functions that embody the effects are not computable. But that's not the biggest problem by far.
Sadly, climate theory fails on both counts. But there's more. Climate theory, extremely simplified is a formula that allows to calculate w(t+1) = F(w(t)) where w is the function setting earth's athmospheric properties (weather, climate,...), and F is our knowledge of climate. This is the way climate works in real life as well. The weather at time x is the direct cause of the weather at time x + e (where e is a planck length).
Okay, given that we're trying to calculate w(t + 100year), what we do is we calculate F(F(F(F(F(F(F(F(F.....(w(t))))))))). That is how models work.
Now let's model the error bars. As a general indication F(w(t)) is accurate to within about 2 degrees with delta t being 3 days (mostly because we don't really know all that much about w(t), the current weather. We know cloud cover, measured temperatures at ~ 1000 sites and a few other things. This is obviously much less than the state of the entire weather system). This, of course, makes F(F(w(t)) accurate to within 4 degrees. You see where this is going ? Incidentally, as said above nature works with a delta t of 1 planck lenth. You know what the best model works with ? 1 week. Nature looks at every atom separately. The best climate model only looks at blocks of air 100x100x100 meters. How many atoms is that ? How accurate can such a prediction be ? Google temperature and chaos.
So how did climate science solve this you ask ? Ah simple, it's called "poisson sampling", a technique from computer simulation. You'll soon understand why statisticians rejected this method long ago. You simply pretend that there is no error, and you calculate F(w(t)), F(w(t) + 0.1), F(w(t) - 0.03) and other random variations, and you average out the outcomes. This doesn't actually reduce the error, of course, and if you inspect the actual simulation results you see that different runs have vastly different outcomes. I've seen numbers from -10 to +25 degrees, which may be a bit on the extreme side, but not absurdly so. Of course, poisson sampling has a few downsides. First, it only provides 'realistic' results, not accurate ones (it only gives you one possible outcome, which looks good, but there is no mathematical relation between that outcome and what a perfectly simulated model would predict). Second, you're supposed to run your model hundreds to thousands of times. BUT climate model
Don't worry. All research of the past 50 years points at the fact that it isn't possible to actually make robots that obey the 3 laws either. At least when we're talking about the non-fictional variety.
There are several paradoxes in the laws, and of course there's Godel's theorem. There's paradoxes and unknows in any non-trivial set of laws.
Absolutely. And it is at that point that money goes away (though the actual going away part might be exceedingly unpleasant for a time). The rich who own the means to make products have no one to sell them to, and the poor who have nothing either revolt and take back all the resources that the rich have gobbled up or, less likely, get together with the rich and forge a money-less society.
Or, alternatively, humans banding together do not manage to beat the robots (required for the revolution step), and capitalism happily hums along for another 10000 years. Now this may sound dramatic, but given the fact that robots can easily live where humans cannot hope to, from space to underwater, and many other places. For the robots to win, there doesn't even have to be a fight.
It's the way evolution works. Just like we eradicated neanderthals, without any significant battles. For the end result Darwin desired, not battling may be a far superior option.
You're the type of guy that likes to point out that there is a perfect cure for cancer called "Smith & Wesson", right ?
Evolution = only good news for not-yet-born people
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You do realize that in evolution babies get the advantages and parents... well... die, right ?
It is *much* easier to create a hyperintelligent baby (a robot with a computer for a brain) than to transfer an existing brain into a robot. Orders of magnitude easier, at least.
This is similar to a halting problem, you want to have a program that could analyze and "understand" itself to the point that it could rewrite itself in a better way... If it were possible to create such a program then it would probably not exist at all, because whoever would write it would also knew better ways to write it - and it's turtles all the way down to understanding the "ultimate optimal form" of such a program and writing it in that form so it is no longer capable of self-imrpovement.
The halting problem has nothing to do with this. By your reasoning humans are impossible (having improved on themselves in many domains). Guess what... they're not. Which must obviously mean that humans are fundamentally limited in the problems they can understand, not that they are somehow magically above the problem.
Furthermore the halting problem is only a problem if you want to find the "optimal" intelligence. The one that can't be improved upon. To improve upon any specific intelligence, human or otherwise, the halting problem is totally irrelevant.
How about instead of ascribing all these magical properties to the human brain, we assume there is nothing special about the human brain ? Neurons are a certain kind of imitation machines. They do not "really" think, which I realize is a hard pill to swallow, and it means human intelligence is in the software, in culture and practices, not hardware. You would not describe a human baby growing up in isolation as intelligent, in fact, you would probably describe it as a plant, or at the very best as a robot stuck in a loop. Yes, really.
This makes a lot of sense once you stop seeing human beings as a sort of angelic miracles that will put and end to the randomness of darwin's law of the jungle, and instead see the obvious truth : that human beings and brains are an extension and amplification of DNA, and will create and thrive in a "law of the jungle" set of circumstances, which is only temporarily masked during periods of massive expansion. Given that DNA which is nothing but a copy machine created us, it makes perfect sense for human brains themselves being copy machines too.
I would like to point out another small "detail" fact. Everybody knows about weird "synchronizations" that occur when you put humans together. Have 2 women live next to eachother, and their periods will synchronize. But it goes quite a bit farther than that. Suppose we measure 2 people's brainwaves (which is basically measuring the pattern in which large amounts of neurons are firing together). They are somewhat different (if these 2 people are from the same culture/region, not that different at all). Now put the 2 people in the same room, with instructions to completely ignore the other guy, doing different stuff. Bang, the brainwaves synchronize. There is no good measure of how similar 2 brainwaves are, but the waves will phase-shift until they phase-lock and they will remain locked. That's not all that happens, they actually start to synchronize further. That's from merely being in the same room as someone else, giving them zero attention. When talking to the other guy, it becomes basically impossible to tell the waves apart. Our brainwaves do not just synchronize to eachother, but they attempt to synchronize with everything. This probably means that one of the major shifts in human thinking was the rise of electricity, causing everybody to think at ~50 Hz, the frequency at which all light sources, all electronic audio sourc
The blowing up part was figuratively. For using water you'd need continued power, but if you used reflective aerosols you wouldn't need power. And you'd only need the capacity to deliver a few hundred kilograms in the upper athmosphere of relatively trivial chemical compounds. Trivial, because they have to be as light as possible.
So by "blowing up" I mean "drop the temperature by 20 degrees", which would basically start a new ice age. If done with aerosols, once this starts, it's unstoppable.
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Actually it's "useful" in the way mathematics stuff is always beautifully useless. You see, if you wanted to do echolocation with a piano (or any other 88-note instrument), this would be the piece that gave you maximum information on the target.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_echolocation#Acoustic_features
Believe it or not, if you played this music often you would (after a loong time) become able to hear the differences in the room the music was played in, just by the sound.
Bats use this to accomplish something that seems implausibly difficult, some species use it to dive through moving branches composing the upper level of a forest, in the dark (and they're blind or near-blind anyway), filled with environmental sounds and general noises, at ~ 180 km/h. When stationary they can use the tones to see through walls, and tell from the outside if anything in a room or cave is moving or not, including the rhythm of it's movement.
First of all, your point does not actually contradict mine. Why does the UN describe the US as non-free ? Simple: the UN is one vote per member, and the vast majority of it's members have the troublesome (for them) combo of being non-free, have a population that wants more freedom than they have, and are governments that are not capable of defending against the US for even a few weeks.
The UN council is filled with Gadhaffis, I assume you do not find it all that hard to understand that the US just lost popularity with them in the past few months ? Needless to say, state media of all these countries have reviewed their views of the US accordingly. Read Xinhua every now and then, and please remember that compared to the press of, say Iran or Bolivia they are pretty nice and fair in their coverage of the US. In Iran's national press you read about failed experiments on babies by the US military biweekly.
As for your point, the US may be corrupt, partially corrupt, or not corrupt at all. What measures it's "corruptness" is how much it goes against the interest of the people it governs. Regardless of that fact, the following holds :
People in China - see how the US is corrupted "somewhat" - versus their own government which is 100% corrupt by definition*
People in Northern African countries - see how the US is corrupted "somewhat" - versus their own government which is 100% corrupt by definition
People in most of Asia - ditto
Southern America - ditto (with a few large exceptions)
Most of Africa - ditto
Russia - ditto
* obviously this means that the government does not represent the interests of the people they're governing - at all. Also known as the democratic standard
There are 3 democratic countries with relatively large populations - the US, the EU, and India. Democracy represents about 1.5-2 billion people worldwide, depending on where your standard is (e.g. you could easily make the point that India lacks several essential freedoms that Americans have, you could even make a decent point that the EU is not a free democratic nation (because there is no separation between powers - both the legislature (which is the commission, not parliament, despite the name) and the executive powers lie in the commission. The justice has at least a modicum of independence, but not really since the same people that run the commission elect judges (who need to get re-elected every 6 years by -the same people as- the commission).
Other governments are either tiny, or are not democratic at all.
You know what that means ? At the very least 60% of people alive today do not live in a democracy. If you are being pedantic, excluding India will bring that up to 80%, excluding the EU for the really pedantic brings the number over 90%.
So "the US government has been corrupted" - you can make that argument. But it's not nearly as bad as the governments 60-90% of people live under. Americans are -at the very least- amongst the 10% most free people on this planet by the standard of participation in their own government - and that's assuming the US government has been corrupted. If it hasn't, Americans are the most free 4% of this planet.
Another safety protection from 2 year olds is putting it on a counter.
You don't have a 2 year-old kid, do you ? Sure they can't reach it directly, but if they're interested, they will get there.
That might be different if there weren't so many blowhard vegetarians screaming murder. I mean the ones in Bikini's (or less) are cute. The rest are not.
Exactly that. The rest of the world will start to see the US as a rogue state. Regardless of the what the rest of the world thinks or how they vote in global democratic institutions,
This is pretty close to the definition of "sovereignty".
What the world hates about the US is simple : it's success. It makes questions like "why doesn't dictator make our coutry as good as America" very hard to answer. Replace "dictator " with allah(or his paedophile prophet), communist party, king, strongman, ... and all other such disgusting organizations.
All of these want America terminated, for obvious reasons, they feel threatened (probably for good reason). They can't hope to get anything done in open conflict, so they propagandize. Like how the US refusal to sell weapons to Saddam was met with articles of starving children, and the US actually caved to this, of course.
Of course the perception of idiots will be affected by this. Adults with a normal level of intelligence should not be fooled.
Besides the United States is not innocent of committing atrocities either so far the US is the only nation to ever detonate nuclear weapons on a civilian population for example(the intentional targeting of civilians and causing superfluous damage with systematic bombardment was forbidden even before the Geneva conventions by the Hague convention to which the United States is a signatory).
And of course, according to you that means it was never done ? Law != reality. Many signatories of those treaties, from Iraq to Sudan have done things that massively violate those treaties. There were no consequences from the UN. Besides, have you looked into what the other side in that conflict did ? Google "Japan rapes". And that's not all Japan did, ordered by the emperor, yes, but with the vast majority of the Japanese population behind him.
It baffles the mind that people can make moral comparisons like this. Yes perfect would not, at all, be the correct word to use. The best in the world ? With a large margin. And please don't start about states that are protected by US military forces are "better", like Western European forces. They wouldn't exist right now if it wasn't for US "atrocities".
They still had nothing to do with Normandy. The LN was heavily pro-Hitler, and was the organisation behind the Poland demilitarization. It is also the organization that negotiated the treaty of Versailles and thus is widely considered to carry the bulk of the blame for causing WWII in the first place. For different reasons they're also responsible for WWI.
And just so you don't think the UN is much different, there's the many "incidents". From the UN ordered genocides in Katanga in 1947 to the UN-sanctioned rapes, including child rapes, in Western Sahara, Congo, Haiti, Liberia, Sudan and Burundi and Ivory Coast (sanctioned because the UN prevented prosecution of the responsible parties).
UN troops were standing at a stonestrow distance from the Srebrenica massacres, the Rwanda genocides, lots of Sudanese genocides (they did prevent the locals from organizing themselves of course), Hezbollah rocket attacks against civilians, ... and so on and so forth.
So yes the US is vastly superior in almost all respects to the UN. No doubt about it.
You're damn right. They haven't even tried to tack this on to the tail end of a Child Protection bill yet.
Why the hell would a government that isn't democratic feel the need to do such a thing ? This will pass, because the commisionaires (not a reference, actual title) of the EU have high-paying side-"jobs" in big companies. And for no other reason.
The EU doesn't even pretend that the passing of this law has any democratic component (the passing "or non-passing" will be done by the aptly-named commission, irrespective of parliament's decision, which is merely advisory). It is not requested by any specific European political party, it is just the initiative of one of the commission.
And when a dictator hands a piece of paper to be rubber-stamped at a powerless "parliament", why is there any doubt what will happen ? The Duma never once refused Stalin, and the "parliament" will not refuse Barosso.
This legislation was initiated straight from the offices of the head "ex-"(?)socialist/communist currently occupying the top post in the EU. This is the ONLY position in the EU government that has sovereignty (can decide to make -and break- laws of it's own accord). He "proposed" this law, and has done so for many other laws, implementing some of them regardless of the parliament's opposition, others without even asking parliament. Not that there is much opposition from parliament at all.
And when our little ex-communist decides to implement anti-workers policies, and there was some token opposition from parliament, he went ahead anyway.
Other than dissolution of the EU, there is no way to stop this.
Hmmm let's look at the UN's history ... now let's look at the USA's history (including recent) ...
No I'm pretty sure I want the UN down, and the US standing. I Pray you never face a UN "fix" for a situation, in fact I pray I'll never do so either.
You can't make an entire population stateless at the same time you control their territory.
Of course you can. Every middle eastern muslim country has laws doing exactly that. And please don't forget that Lebanon's version of this is quite mild. The Jordanian army has been accused multiple times of running parts of their own population into the desert, claiming they "were palestinians". There is little doubt that SA does worse than that.
So what's your point ?
Unesco dedicated to education and culture ....
that's a -sad- joke, right ?
Dedicated to giving politician's nephews millions in unearned salaries ? Sure.
Exactly what is going to collapse, aside from a few politician's grossly overinflated salaries and private jets, due to defunding unesco ?
Nothing.
The US will protect it's own history just as it has always done, as will any other state. Unesco is at best a rubber-stamper, with never any real involvement or sponsorship.
Wow ... sanity. Of course countries can take back embassies.
You can even do it Iranian-style and no-one would really care. But according to established procedures, of course, a country can request any ambassador to leave, and whatever restrictions the land has, cease. Unlike several members of the UN "council", the US would probably actually give them time to get out without getting shot.
I don't get how you get to the US being the bad guy here ? It's beyond moronic. The US parliament has sovereignty, and that means they can do *whatever* they want.
Also, the UN is an organisation guilty of several genocides, organised rapes, occupations and worse. The UN publicly supports slavery, genocide and more TODAY (e.g. Sudan's membership and support). Their predecessor, the League of Nations, is the carries blame for causing *both* world-wars, and carries blame for demanding several countries give themselves up to Hitler (the league of nations got Poland to demobilize WHILE THEY WERE BEING ATTACKED, FULLY KNOWING WHAT WAS HAPPENING, and attempting to do the same to Britain multiple times). They are incapable of having the moral high ground in any discussion. Anything done to the UN will not compare to what the UN has done to it's victims.
I hope I can convince you to relegate your "environmental karma" to the fiction department, where frankly all such nonsense belongs. Karma has a (very) dark side, the caste system. But that's entirely beside the point. "Environmental karma" is bogus because :
Your extinction theories are not how evolution works, except in a rudimentary absolutist pre-20th century understanding perhaps. So let's this time include theories from the 20th century (imagine that, biology did not stop evolving after Darwin ...). Here's the idea of what happens if a predator eats PCB infected fish.
A population of predators eats a population of PCB resistant fish. Some of the fish will be infected with a virus. Some of the virusses inside the fish will have copied the resistant version of the gene into the viral DNA. Happens all the time. In practice every lifeform is constantly infected with hundreds of different viruses, so this is not as unlikely as you would think.
Some of the predators will get infected with the fish. Some of the female predators will get their eggs infected, some of the males their balls (or equivalent ...). BTW: it's usually the males that get their eggs ("sperma") infected. Look up how it works, and it will be obvious why. These fish, with the "infected" genes, being ever so slightly more active (evolution massacres entire races because they're 1% worse performers in a matter of a dozen generations, sometimes faster) take over the entire population. For fish, with generation lengths of at most 1 year, mostly less than that, we're talking a decade or less.
Does that satisfy you ? We *cannot* kill any significant part of nature. No matter how hard we try to do so. Nor can Krishna relegate "evil" species to dalit status and make slaves out of them, so you can you please not scare people with such eventualities ?
That species expansion only happens if natural barriers go up. Global transport is the real cause of species extinction'. The fact that people and goods move to all regions of this planet, bringing new diseases, new rodents, cats, dogs, and sometimes even new predators to all remote regions of this planet, where they proceed to destroy the local fauna that never evolved a defense against them. We're connecting the islands, google "island species".
The parties the most responsible for species extinction are probably the British empire, the east-india trading company and the Spanish kingdom. Remember : species' diversity loss is not exactly a recent problem.
It's not oil, it's not poison, it's not heavy metals (not even the music), it's not co2, it's not rising sea level, it's none of those things. It's tourism, discoveries and transport, and it doesn't matter *at all* whether said tourism happened by unpowered sailing ships, or kerosene-spewing 747's. You want to save species and races (including the diversity in human races) ?. Destroy tourism. Destroy international trade. Destroy *every* long distance interaction you can think of, first and most important in things to destroy would probably be the internet.
You want to save species diversity ? Break the connection, restore the islands. (read up a bit on island species on google and you will understand what this means). If this is not done, expect one human race to become utterly dominant (> 90% of the population) in at least 99 human species that didn't make it. For most animal and plant species this number will be far, far higher. The vast majority of species created by evolution ... lose. Link the habitats, even for memes, and where there used to be 300 countries and, for example, languages, there will remain only one. Every Western European, from Swedish kids, to Italian infants speak English, it's only a matter of time till they decide that's the easiest way to communicate. The only languages that seem to be pushing back are French and Chinese. Please remember that there are currently 394 lan
1) we can determine their combined effect
Let me ask you a question. Have you given 5 seconds of thought to the kind of mathematical demands this would place upon those feedback mechanisms ? We do not, of course, need to 'determine their combined' effect in an instant, but we must actually find a formula that is not just true today, but that remains true. So these functions must be statistically significantly different. Needless to say, even the functions used in the models are not statistically different (meaning it is not possible to calculate the model used for a certain prediction given that prediction).
So the real demand this places upon the weather, is that weather systems must be simpler than the weather simulations we use for prediction.
Do you seriously think that's true ?
2) we can determine what the large ones are
This is just a special case of 1). This only works, obviously, if the large ones are large enough, when combined. In the series sum(1/(2^n)) they are large enough, in the series sum(1/n) they're not. That's just the first of many, many problems that these sorts of series can have. They must be convergent (most climate models are divergent).
On top of that, you're dependent upon our ability to calculate the large ones accurately. That depends on the exact formulas used of course, and obviously the functions used in climate models are computable functions, but they do not match the ones the real world uses. It is perfectly known that the "real" functions that embody the effects are not computable. But that's not the biggest problem by far.
Sadly, climate theory fails on both counts. But there's more. Climate theory, extremely simplified is a formula that allows to calculate w(t+1) = F(w(t)) where w is the function setting earth's athmospheric properties (weather, climate, ...), and F is our knowledge of climate. This is the way climate works in real life as well. The weather at time x is the direct cause of the weather at time x + e (where e is a planck length).
Okay, given that we're trying to calculate w(t + 100year), what we do is we calculate F(F(F(F(F(F(F(F(F.....(w(t))))))))). That is how models work.
Now let's model the error bars. As a general indication F(w(t)) is accurate to within about 2 degrees with delta t being 3 days (mostly because we don't really know all that much about w(t), the current weather. We know cloud cover, measured temperatures at ~ 1000 sites and a few other things. This is obviously much less than the state of the entire weather system). This, of course, makes F(F(w(t)) accurate to within 4 degrees. You see where this is going ? Incidentally, as said above nature works with a delta t of 1 planck lenth. You know what the best model works with ? 1 week. Nature looks at every atom separately. The best climate model only looks at blocks of air 100x100x100 meters. How many atoms is that ? How accurate can such a prediction be ? Google temperature and chaos.
So how did climate science solve this you ask ? Ah simple, it's called "poisson sampling", a technique from computer simulation. You'll soon understand why statisticians rejected this method long ago. You simply pretend that there is no error, and you calculate F(w(t)), F(w(t) + 0.1), F(w(t) - 0.03) and other random variations, and you average out the outcomes. This doesn't actually reduce the error, of course, and if you inspect the actual simulation results you see that different runs have vastly different outcomes. I've seen numbers from -10 to +25 degrees, which may be a bit on the extreme side, but not absurdly so. Of course, poisson sampling has a few downsides. First, it only provides 'realistic' results, not accurate ones (it only gives you one possible outcome, which looks good, but there is no mathematical relation between that outcome and what a perfectly simulated model would predict). Second, you're supposed to run your model hundreds to thousands of times. BUT climate model
It is a sad commentary on human intelligence that after 4 posts on the subject, nobody has pointed out what humans do when they don't like laws.
here it is
Funny, that painting on the right, you might want to look up who "dr. guilletin" was, they sadly neglected that part in the propaganda paintings.
Why would robots act any different ?
Don't worry. All research of the past 50 years points at the fact that it isn't possible to actually make robots that obey the 3 laws either. At least when we're talking about the non-fictional variety.
There are several paradoxes in the laws, and of course there's Godel's theorem. There's paradoxes and unknows in any non-trivial set of laws.
Absolutely. And it is at that point that money goes away (though the actual going away part might be exceedingly unpleasant for a time). The rich who own the means to make products have no one to sell them to, and the poor who have nothing either revolt and take back all the resources that the rich have gobbled up or, less likely, get together with the rich and forge a money-less society.
Or, alternatively, humans banding together do not manage to beat the robots (required for the revolution step), and capitalism happily hums along for another 10000 years. Now this may sound dramatic, but given the fact that robots can easily live where humans cannot hope to, from space to underwater, and many other places. For the robots to win, there doesn't even have to be a fight.
It's the way evolution works. Just like we eradicated neanderthals, without any significant battles. For the end result Darwin desired, not battling may be a far superior option.
WoW players grind boars for 1XP a piece.
Not quite the same thing as murdering people in real life.
You're right. But then, the first murder would bring a 100% increase in available resources if you kept it hidden.
There's of course a difference. The only reason robots would have difficulty is because of the massive number of humans they have to take care of.
Which, of course, suggests a very easy solution to that problem.
You're the type of guy that likes to point out that there is a perfect cure for cancer called "Smith & Wesson", right ?
You do realize that in evolution babies get the advantages and parents ... well ... die, right ?
It is *much* easier to create a hyperintelligent baby (a robot with a computer for a brain) than to transfer an existing brain into a robot. Orders of magnitude easier, at least.
This is similar to a halting problem, you want to have a program that could analyze and "understand" itself to the point that it could rewrite itself in a better way... If it were possible to create such a program then it would probably not exist at all, because whoever would write it would also knew better ways to write it - and it's turtles all the way down to understanding the "ultimate optimal form" of such a program and writing it in that form so it is no longer capable of self-imrpovement.
The halting problem has nothing to do with this. By your reasoning humans are impossible (having improved on themselves in many domains). Guess what ... they're not. Which must obviously mean that humans are fundamentally limited in the problems they can understand, not that they are somehow magically above the problem.
Furthermore the halting problem is only a problem if you want to find the "optimal" intelligence. The one that can't be improved upon. To improve upon any specific intelligence, human or otherwise, the halting problem is totally irrelevant.
How about instead of ascribing all these magical properties to the human brain, we assume there is nothing special about the human brain ? Neurons are a certain kind of imitation machines. They do not "really" think, which I realize is a hard pill to swallow, and it means human intelligence is in the software, in culture and practices, not hardware. You would not describe a human baby growing up in isolation as intelligent, in fact, you would probably describe it as a plant, or at the very best as a robot stuck in a loop. Yes, really.
This makes a lot of sense once you stop seeing human beings as a sort of angelic miracles that will put and end to the randomness of darwin's law of the jungle, and instead see the obvious truth : that human beings and brains are an extension and amplification of DNA, and will create and thrive in a "law of the jungle" set of circumstances, which is only temporarily masked during periods of massive expansion. Given that DNA which is nothing but a copy machine created us, it makes perfect sense for human brains themselves being copy machines too.
Start here
I would like to point out another small "detail" fact. Everybody knows about weird "synchronizations" that occur when you put humans together. Have 2 women live next to eachother, and their periods will synchronize. But it goes quite a bit farther than that. Suppose we measure 2 people's brainwaves (which is basically measuring the pattern in which large amounts of neurons are firing together). They are somewhat different (if these 2 people are from the same culture/region, not that different at all). Now put the 2 people in the same room, with instructions to completely ignore the other guy, doing different stuff. Bang, the brainwaves synchronize. There is no good measure of how similar 2 brainwaves are, but the waves will phase-shift until they phase-lock and they will remain locked. That's not all that happens, they actually start to synchronize further. That's from merely being in the same room as someone else, giving them zero attention. When talking to the other guy, it becomes basically impossible to tell the waves apart. Our brainwaves do not just synchronize to eachother, but they attempt to synchronize with everything. This probably means that one of the major shifts in human thinking was the rise of electricity, causing everybody to think at ~50 Hz, the frequency at which all light sources, all electronic audio sourc
All of these societies have one singular leader per tribe, who rules by violence. So yes, (tiny) dictatorships.
Mind if I ask why not ? Their argument boils down to "DRM for me, but not for you".
At least microsoft makes it two-sided.
The blowing up part was figuratively. For using water you'd need continued power, but if you used reflective aerosols you wouldn't need power. And you'd only need the capacity to deliver a few hundred kilograms in the upper athmosphere of relatively trivial chemical compounds. Trivial, because they have to be as light as possible.
So by "blowing up" I mean "drop the temperature by 20 degrees", which would basically start a new ice age. If done with aerosols, once this starts, it's unstoppable.