That is the reputation Americans have where I live, honest, brave and hardworking.
I think that generally speaking, most Americans are decent people who don't agree with the tone and actions of the current administration. But this administration's actions are destroying many of the core values that the majority of American hold, and it may take decades to repair the damage.
And yet his goober-brained followers hoot and holler and gleefully applaud the destruction of the very things that has made this country such an amazing place.
The text below explains in part why they're so partisan and excuse everything Trump does...I didn't write it but it's a good description of what's going on:
Identity Fusion - aka “Sports team” mode
A majority of the United States is confused by the behavior of ~34% of the rest of the country. To grasp what has happened, you just have to realize that some political supporters have gone into “Sports Teams” mode. They have turned politics into an Identity Fusion issue.
Basically, they have stopped thinking about the representative government as a functional group of public servants. They are thinking about it as if it's their "team" and everything political has become "us versus them."
Some characteristics of a team fanatic (I'm using Trump Supporters as an example because it's currently the most obvious example, but it can apply to both sides to some degree.)
Once you realize this is what's happening, the common attributes are there to see:
- Wearing identifying clothing (hats, badges, colors, logos, slogans) in everyday life. - Loyalty regardless of performance or behavior of their "team." - Instant disrespect for any member of the opposing team based solely on team affiliation. - Hatred of any perceived disloyalty from fellow team fans. - Having rallies and parades even when there is no pending game with the primary goal to celebrate and re-enforce being loyal. - At gatherings, fans chant slogans and/or sing. - Team players (not fans, but players) are 100% supported unless they leave the team. Then they are ostracized and demonized even though they are basically the same person.
A single entity isn't required to have a monopoly of force
It does if it wants to act as the government with the authority to carry out its duties.
the government doesn't have a monopoly of force.
Well they pretty much do. Look around. Who else is legally allowed to roll a tank and a SWAT team up to your house extract you, or pull you over for speeding, or decide who gets the child in a divorce? Who else is legally allowed to use coercion to administer or enforce these actions?
We're not talking personal interactions, like if someone tried to mug you.
We're talking about an entity with the sole legal right to adjudicate disputes and crimes, determine property rights, incarcerate you, etc etc etc. No private entity has those rights; those are supposed to be reserved for the government, which has the ultimate say-so and the power to enforce its decisions.
Be careful to make sure you don't just feel that way because you don't like "the other side" - there's plenty of dirty pool being played by both parties.
Stop with the false equivalency- the GOP and Republicans do this so often and so regularly that they've practically made it into an art form.
Yes, shit goes on with the Democrats too, but the Republicans have been the masters of dirty tricks, voter suppression, and gerrymandering for decades.
Like I said, approximately never. When would you ever need to know the answers to such questions in everyday life?
In my field I have to make calculations all the time. Some are large values and some are in the nanometer range. We mostly use the metric system because we're technical people in a technical field, but the odd Imperial measurement shows up from time to time (like gallons per minute, for example) and then we all just shake our heads.
Seriously, the whole Imperial system is a bad joke. How about you convert 2 fluid ounces to gallons? I'll wait while you get your calculator and conversion chart... *time passes* Oh, okay, it's 0.015625 gallons. But how many are in 2.3 gallons? Oooh, back to the calculator....
How many milliliters in a liter? 1000. How many in 2.3 liters? 2300. No calculator or conversion chart needed.
Believe it or not, some of us make these kinds of caculations every day.
What I object to is the conclusion that "this machine is intelligent". It is not.
Agreed.
-
To justify that conclusion, this would have to be set up quite a bit differently, and then the machine would lose. At least today and for the next few decades.
It'll be a while. I don't know about decades but sooner or later we'll get there. We'll have to define "intelligence" well enough so that we're able to tell if we got there or not.
At some point one of your political parties decided that winning was more important than anything else, and stopped governing in a responsible manner.
Exactly. In the 1960s the Republicans adopted what was called the "Southern Strategy", which "refers to a Republican Party electoral strategy to increase political support among white voters in the South by appealing to racism against African Americans."
Basically the GOP, primarily composed of racist goobers who wanted to live in 1863 rather than 1963, threw in their lot with older white men and religious people, both of whom were on average much more racist than the rest of the country. They hitched their wagon to a dimming star as America inevitably became (becomes) more racially diverse. "Segregation now, segregation forever!" was one of their rallying cries. (Look up "Governor George Wallace" for an example.)
Except their target audience was literally dying off and not being replaced, and the GOP became more and more desperate to hold on to whatever was left of a shrinking base.
Eventually they realized that counting on just white men to vote in sufficient numbers was a losing game- they were going to be a minority as the country matured...and so they threw out their morals, ethics, sense of fair play, and honesty because that was literally the only way they could remain in the game. "Cheat cheat cheat" was the name of the game. Voter suppression and gerrymandering are the province of the GOP/Republicans, and while it occurs on the left, it's a fraction of what occurs on the right. This is a fucking fact although I'm sure many here will dispute it.
So to boil it down, the entire country swerved out from under them, moving toward the left, while at the same time the GOP was veering madly to the right. It's why they're so out of touch with the average American. The GOP became irrelevant in the 1970s and early 80s and have remained so ever since. They've become "The Party of No" because that's about all that they know how to do anymore.
Laws are government force enforced with violence. Is this what you really want?
Yes, that is what I want.
Some entity MUST be the "ultimate authority" and have a monopoly on the use of force. That's the way governments work unless you're a libertarian living in la-la land.
Would you rather that your heavily-armed, meth-smoking neighbor to be the decider of who gets to do what?
Why didn't she do it when Democrats were in control of the House, the Senate, and the Presidency?
Because the Republicans filibustered everything almost never let anything come to the floor for a vote.
They hated Obama with a passion that went beyond rational thought and fucktards like Mitch McConnell were willing to wreck the legislative process in order to frustrate anything he did.
Mitch McConnell is a genuine impediment to democracy- his bushwacking of the Merrick Garland appointment (for example) is a clear demonstration that he's using his power as a sword instead of a shield.
From Mitch's own mouth: "One of my proudest moments was when I looked Barack Obama in the eye and I said, 'Mr. President, you will not fill the Supreme Court vacancy.'"
Yes, machines are faster, but they are utterly dumb on a level humans cannot even reach while staying functional.
Sometimes fast is better than smart.
No one cares how smart you are if your opponent gets the first 20 shots in while you're still drawing your gun. But you'll be the smartest bullet-riddled corpse they ever saw.
If by "blitheringly idiotic" you mean "has worked just fine", then sure, lol
Sure and leeches "worked just fine" until something better came a long.
The fact that you mention carrying an "instant pocket converter" is proof right there that something better is needed (I'm sure the irony escapes you). With the metric system there's no need to have a converter, you can do it all in your head on-the-fly without thinking about it.
Quick, how many inches in 2.65 miles? I'll wait while you get your instant pocket converter out and punch in the numbers.
How many cm in 2.65 kilometers? Easy- 2650 meters times 100, or 265,000. Oh yeah, that was hard.
You are saying that nautical miles and knots are silly? What about feet and yards?
As an American, I admit that I'm regularly embarrassed by the fact that on the entire planet, only America, Liberia, and Myanmar still use Imperial measurements. Some people I know refer to Imperial as "Barbarian Units".
Feet, yards, inches, pints, quarts- it's impossible to deny that the whole damn thing is blitheringly idiotic.
Now, I remember literally about 50 fuckin years ago hearing this excited buzz about how the US was going to switch to the metric system "in phases". Woo hoo!
And of course, a bunch of good ol' American goobers and numbnuts instantly came out of the woodwork against it and screamed bloody murder as if it would lead to nuclear war.
And this is weird, but some of the strongest, most strident opposition came from churches and clergy, the holy god-fearin' folk. WTF? Why?
I never did figure that one out. I mean, what was it about the metric system was it that scared the bejeesus out of them? Of all things, the metric system? I repeat: WTF?
Anyway, the furthest we've gotten is that we're now printing both measurement systems on the labels of most consumer goods (and that awe-inspiring milestone was reached like goddamn 30 years ago).
So yeah at this pace my great grandchildren might grow up under the much more rational metric system but I myself wouldn't bet 5 bucks on it.
The average user doesn't need to. Let the experts be experts, but for the love of fucking god put more detail in error messages than "Something went wrong:-("
New error message...
"Something went wrong, please see the stack trace below for more details:
You're correct, and that was my mistake. I should have said that it can help normalize an irregular heartbeat (or whatever term is accurate).
As for training on them, I agree 100%. An emergency situation is not the best time to learn anything.
I opened ours up at lunch one day and went through the manual- it looks very straightforward to use. I think most people could get the gist of it in a 15 or 20 minute session.
It's a perfect example of a somewhat-smart gadget that can help save lives, even in relatively untrained hands. And that's why I think a "smart stethoscope" is a great idea too. There's no real downside to it that I can think of.
Is it likely to be a useful, cost-effective way to help the target audience? Yes, I think so.
No one is saying that this is the end-all be-all solution to solve this problem, but it can help and I think it's obvious that it has a lot of potential. Just because it's not perfect or doesn't meet your ideal criteria isn't enough of a reason to not use it.
I remember when people said the same about cellphones- "They're too expensive, not useful enough, you'd have to construct cell towers all over the entire country, they need batteries, there are already payphones everywhere..." etc etc etc.
And yet most of us carry one every day and never think twice about it.
This is the stuff AI (or what passes for AI) can help solve- all sorts of fiddly problems that can benefit from the introduction of a "smart tool". I'm all for smarter gadgets and diagnostics that can help give regular/untrained people the ability to deal with various problems.
I mean, HELLO, this is what computers are meant to do- to help us do things we couldn't otherwise do.
Sure, maybe the wizards at the Mayo Clinic won't use it, but they aren't the target audience. I can see where this could be useful in all sorts of circumstances. On the battlefield, for one, but also in places where people trained to decipher the sounds heard through a stethoscope are far and few between.
It's like the super-simple AEDs (Automated External Defibrillator) that you see in offices and stores- they're simple enough that almost anyone can use one to restart a heart. My office has one and looks pretty straightforward to use.
Gadgets like a smarter stethoscope could help save some lives, and that's a good thing.
Slashdot Mirror
That is the reputation Americans have where I live, honest, brave and hardworking.
I think that generally speaking, most Americans are decent people who don't agree with the tone and actions of the current administration. But this administration's actions are destroying many of the core values that the majority of American hold, and it may take decades to repair the damage.
And yet his goober-brained followers hoot and holler and gleefully applaud the destruction of the very things that has made this country such an amazing place.
The text below explains in part why they're so partisan and excuse everything Trump does...I didn't write it but it's a good description of what's going on:
Identity Fusion - aka “Sports team” mode
A majority of the United States is confused by the behavior of ~34% of the rest of the country. To grasp what has happened, you just have to realize that some political supporters have gone into “Sports Teams” mode. They have turned politics into an Identity Fusion issue.
Basically, they have stopped thinking about the representative government as a functional group of public servants. They are thinking about it as if it's their "team" and everything political has become "us versus them."
Some characteristics of a team fanatic (I'm using Trump Supporters as an example because it's currently the most obvious example, but it can apply to both sides to some degree.)
Once you realize this is what's happening, the common attributes are there to see:
- Wearing identifying clothing (hats, badges, colors, logos, slogans) in everyday life.
- Loyalty regardless of performance or behavior of their "team."
- Instant disrespect for any member of the opposing team based solely on team affiliation.
- Hatred of any perceived disloyalty from fellow team fans.
- Having rallies and parades even when there is no pending game with the primary goal to celebrate and re-enforce being loyal.
- At gatherings, fans chant slogans and/or sing.
- Team players (not fans, but players) are 100% supported unless they leave the team. Then they are ostracized and demonized even though they are basically the same person.
A single entity isn't required to have a monopoly of force
It does if it wants to act as the government with the authority to carry out its duties.
the government doesn't have a monopoly of force.
Well they pretty much do. Look around. Who else is legally allowed to roll a tank and a SWAT team up to your house extract you, or pull you over for speeding, or decide who gets the child in a divorce? Who else is legally allowed to use coercion to administer or enforce these actions?
We're not talking personal interactions, like if someone tried to mug you.
We're talking about an entity with the sole legal right to adjudicate disputes and crimes, determine property rights, incarcerate you, etc etc etc. No private entity has those rights; those are supposed to be reserved for the government, which has the ultimate say-so and the power to enforce its decisions.
Fuck you, Ajit Pai, you crooked little scumbag. My only regret is that you won't be prosecuted for this and all your other sleazy crimes.
The government has a monopoly on premeditated force. I can act with legal force for defense as an example.
What's your point?
Be careful to make sure you don't just feel that way because you don't like "the other side" - there's plenty of dirty pool being played by both parties.
Stop with the false equivalency- the GOP and Republicans do this so often and so regularly that they've practically made it into an art form.
Yes, shit goes on with the Democrats too, but the Republicans have been the masters of dirty tricks, voter suppression, and gerrymandering for decades.
Like I said, approximately never. When would you ever need to know the answers to such questions in everyday life?
In my field I have to make calculations all the time. Some are large values and some are in the nanometer range. We mostly use the metric system because we're technical people in a technical field, but the odd Imperial measurement shows up from time to time (like gallons per minute, for example) and then we all just shake our heads.
Seriously, the whole Imperial system is a bad joke. How about you convert 2 fluid ounces to gallons? I'll wait while you get your calculator and conversion chart... *time passes* Oh, okay, it's 0.015625 gallons. But how many are in 2.3 gallons? Oooh, back to the calculator....
How many milliliters in a liter? 1000. How many in 2.3 liters? 2300. No calculator or conversion chart needed.
Believe it or not, some of us make these kinds of caculations every day.
"Bitcoin is Worth Less Than the Cost To Mine It"
Heh heh, not if you steal the electricity and the computing time.
I mean, that's what I heard.
What I object to is the conclusion that "this machine is intelligent". It is not.
Agreed.
-
To justify that conclusion, this would have to be set up quite a bit differently, and then the machine would lose. At least today and for the next few decades.
It'll be a while. I don't know about decades but sooner or later we'll get there. We'll have to define "intelligence" well enough so that we're able to tell if we got there or not.
They are a libertarian, and so they believe in magic.
And they can't even agree on a definition of "magic".
Poll 500 libertarians and you'll get 500 definitions of what a "libertarian" is.
At some point one of your political parties decided that winning was more important than anything else, and stopped governing in a responsible manner.
Exactly. In the 1960s the Republicans adopted what was called the "Southern Strategy", which "refers to a Republican Party electoral strategy to increase political support among white voters in the South by appealing to racism against African Americans."
Basically the GOP, primarily composed of racist goobers who wanted to live in 1863 rather than 1963, threw in their lot with older white men and religious people, both of whom were on average much more racist than the rest of the country. They hitched their wagon to a dimming star as America inevitably became (becomes) more racially diverse. "Segregation now, segregation forever!" was one of their rallying cries. (Look up "Governor George Wallace" for an example.)
Except their target audience was literally dying off and not being replaced, and the GOP became more and more desperate to hold on to whatever was left of a shrinking base.
Eventually they realized that counting on just white men to vote in sufficient numbers was a losing game- they were going to be a minority as the country matured...and so they threw out their morals, ethics, sense of fair play, and honesty because that was literally the only way they could remain in the game. "Cheat cheat cheat" was the name of the game. Voter suppression and gerrymandering are the province of the GOP/Republicans, and while it occurs on the left, it's a fraction of what occurs on the right. This is a fucking fact although I'm sure many here will dispute it.
So to boil it down, the entire country swerved out from under them, moving toward the left, while at the same time the GOP was veering madly to the right. It's why they're so out of touch with the average American. The GOP became irrelevant in the 1970s and early 80s and have remained so ever since. They've become "The Party of No" because that's about all that they know how to do anymore.
Laws are government force enforced with violence.
Is this what you really want?
Yes, that is what I want.
Some entity MUST be the "ultimate authority" and have a monopoly on the use of force. That's the way governments work unless you're a libertarian living in la-la land.
Would you rather that your heavily-armed, meth-smoking neighbor to be the decider of who gets to do what?
Why didn't she do it when Democrats were in control of the House, the Senate, and the Presidency?
Because the Republicans filibustered everything almost never let anything come to the floor for a vote.
They hated Obama with a passion that went beyond rational thought and fucktards like Mitch McConnell were willing to wreck the legislative process in order to frustrate anything he did.
Mitch McConnell is a genuine impediment to democracy- his bushwacking of the Merrick Garland appointment (for example) is a clear demonstration that he's using his power as a sword instead of a shield.
From Mitch's own mouth: "One of my proudest moments was when I looked Barack Obama in the eye and I said, 'Mr. President, you will not fill the Supreme Court vacancy.'"
Is that how government is supposed to work?
Yes, machines are faster, but they are utterly dumb on a level humans cannot even reach while staying functional.
Sometimes fast is better than smart.
No one cares how smart you are if your opponent gets the first 20 shots in while you're still drawing your gun. But you'll be the smartest bullet-riddled corpse they ever saw.
If by "blitheringly idiotic" you mean "has worked just fine", then sure, lol
Sure and leeches "worked just fine" until something better came a long.
The fact that you mention carrying an "instant pocket converter" is proof right there that something better is needed (I'm sure the irony escapes you). With the metric system there's no need to have a converter, you can do it all in your head on-the-fly without thinking about it.
Quick, how many inches in 2.65 miles? I'll wait while you get your instant pocket converter out and punch in the numbers.
How many cm in 2.65 kilometers? Easy- 2650 meters times 100, or 265,000. Oh yeah, that was hard.
This is not really beating a human fairly. If you could click that fast then sure, but otherwise it's not a fair fight.
A 30 mile radius? A little overkill I think.
Pretty soon it'll be 300. You know, for security.
Are they expect a fleet of Slaughterbots to show up?
I mean, honestly, that would be kinda cool.
You are saying that nautical miles and knots are silly? What about feet and yards?
As an American, I admit that I'm regularly embarrassed by the fact that on the entire planet, only America, Liberia, and Myanmar still use Imperial measurements. Some people I know refer to Imperial as "Barbarian Units".
Feet, yards, inches, pints, quarts- it's impossible to deny that the whole damn thing is blitheringly idiotic.
Now, I remember literally about 50 fuckin years ago hearing this excited buzz about how the US was going to switch to the metric system "in phases". Woo hoo!
And of course, a bunch of good ol' American goobers and numbnuts instantly came out of the woodwork against it and screamed bloody murder as if it would lead to nuclear war.
And this is weird, but some of the strongest, most strident opposition came from churches and clergy, the holy god-fearin' folk. WTF? Why?
I never did figure that one out. I mean, what was it about the metric system was it that scared the bejeesus out of them? Of all things, the metric system? I repeat: WTF?
Anyway, the furthest we've gotten is that we're now printing both measurement systems on the labels of most consumer goods (and that awe-inspiring milestone was reached like goddamn 30 years ago).
So yeah at this pace my great grandchildren might grow up under the much more rational metric system but I myself wouldn't bet 5 bucks on it.
Repeat after me. JAVASCRIPT IS NOT A PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE.
Stop being such a peckerwood. Javascript is a programming language.
The average user doesn't need to. Let the experts be experts, but for the love of fucking god put more detail in error messages than "Something went wrong :-("
New error message...
"Something went wrong, please see the stack trace below for more details:
b34d33f 908012cfb2743909 3b111ff17676a 22596f83
b1027d2857a 3ab0ec91d2ddeee 6fbffb6cfcea f3dd74
63052684 1df79ecf7d 2e8 79a1585b3a168 c4a 3929275
699 60b3b1a 8f00 b9 35b6 eb51c8d0818291a 95cf8c 65c
1ff92 468a 224a2df7b 465907 ef a852 1668d720 8fc337
Thank you for choosing Microso558ef4a53bb033cc82"
AEDs don't restart hearts.
You're correct, and that was my mistake. I should have said that it can help normalize an irregular heartbeat (or whatever term is accurate).
As for training on them, I agree 100%. An emergency situation is not the best time to learn anything.
I opened ours up at lunch one day and went through the manual- it looks very straightforward to use. I think most people could get the gist of it in a 15 or 20 minute session.
It's a perfect example of a somewhat-smart gadget that can help save lives, even in relatively untrained hands. And that's why I think a "smart stethoscope" is a great idea too. There's no real downside to it that I can think of.
I find your arguments less than compelling.
Is it a perfect solution? No.
Is it likely to be a useful, cost-effective way to help the target audience? Yes, I think so.
No one is saying that this is the end-all be-all solution to solve this problem, but it can help and I think it's obvious that it has a lot of potential. Just because it's not perfect or doesn't meet your ideal criteria isn't enough of a reason to not use it.
I remember when people said the same about cellphones- "They're too expensive, not useful enough, you'd have to construct cell towers all over the entire country, they need batteries, there are already payphones everywhere..." etc etc etc.
And yet most of us carry one every day and never think twice about it.
Some. Yet the title clearly claims millions.
What's your point?
Out of billions, "some" could easily be "millions".
This is the stuff AI (or what passes for AI) can help solve- all sorts of fiddly problems that can benefit from the introduction of a "smart tool". I'm all for smarter gadgets and diagnostics that can help give regular/untrained people the ability to deal with various problems.
I mean, HELLO, this is what computers are meant to do- to help us do things we couldn't otherwise do.
Sure, maybe the wizards at the Mayo Clinic won't use it, but they aren't the target audience. I can see where this could be useful in all sorts of circumstances. On the battlefield, for one, but also in places where people trained to decipher the sounds heard through a stethoscope are far and few between.
It's like the super-simple AEDs (Automated External Defibrillator) that you see in offices and stores- they're simple enough that almost anyone can use one to restart a heart. My office has one and looks pretty straightforward to use.
Gadgets like a smarter stethoscope could help save some lives, and that's a good thing.
"Windows Setup Error Messages Will Soon Actually Help Fix Problems"
Ha ha, yeah sure they will. As if the average Windows user will be able to understand a KB article and formulate a fix from it.