making the typical leap from "helmet law" to "creeping socialist state" is not an argument in and of itself. It is a rhetorical device used to explain to retards who never studied history that they will eventually be personally affected by invasive social-behaviour laws just as those who choose to ride motorcycles are today.
If we're just talking about performing these psychological experiments on yourself, no harm done. I'm not sure I'm entirely convinced of the ability of a person to 'train' himself, but, whatever.
I don't want anyone to get the idea that they'd be doing their children a favor by doing anything to them 'randomly', though. More likely, it'd just make them neurotic.
Your analysis is flawed in that you assume it is better for a person to work hard even when there is no reward. That is not what is best for the individual; that is what is best for 'society'. When there is no work to be done, it is best for the individual to rest and relax. Your mother is undoubtedly trained to extract what is best for 'society' from her students, rather than to aid them in doing what is best for themselves.
Thank you for the more full explanation. Believe me. My idiot parents tried this shit on me and did a damn crappy job of it. Please don't encourage anyone else to try to do the same without explaining the implications fully.
It's amazing that I haven't ever heard of this before now. I fit your description *exactly*, and from what I've seen the past few minutes searching sites on the 'net, I fit a lot of the other stereotypes of those with delayed-phase syndrome as well. I am *much* more clear-headed and productive after ~10PM. I tend to sleep for 12 hours at a time.
Before now, I thought it might be some sort of sleep apnea, because I do snore terribly, but I typically feel rested and I don't ever nap during the day unless I've done extensive exercise. A friend's father was recently diagnosed with sleep apnea. He said the doctor could tell just by looking at him: he had *huge* bags under his eyes, with a droopy facial expression and apparently other obvious physical characteristics. I don't think that fits me very well.
I remember describing my sleep schedule to a friend a few years ago. It's as though I have a longer "day" than everyone else; I wake up two hours later every day. Eventually, my schedule "rolls over" and I can maintain normal sleep patterns for a while. Invariably, though, I tend to fall back into the same pattern. I've often stayed up for 24+ hours straight and tried to go to bed at a decent hour the next day, but that only works temporarily.
I tried sleeping pills and that worked for a while. It helped me go to bed, but it didn't seem to help with waking up.
I discovered Melatonin about a year ago and that helps tremendously. It doesn't help that I don't see the daylight often, which should be another reason programmers are susceptible. I've thought about using a tanning bed a few times a week, but I don't know exactly whether that would help or hurt.
I'm sorry you haven't heard. Welcome to Socialist America. Anyone who doesn't talk to others, doesn't participate in mind-numbingly stupid group tasks such as football games and county fairs, doesn't really bother or interact with anyone else in society in any noticeable way, is a sociopath.
It's probably listed in the DSM somewhere, along with dislike of foreigners and unwillingness to interbreed with other races.
Face it, you're reckless disregard for everyone else is harming us all.
People aren't dogs. If a person does a task and *expects* to be rewarded, but isn't, it would tend to reduce the probability of her wanting to "delay gratification" again, regardless of the reward.
Heh, heh. I've had a lot of experiences like those. Teachers seem to know when a blizzard will occur, and assign papers accordingly.
I've also noticed that I spend a lot of time *thinking* about what I'm going to do before I sit down to do it. If I don't have a clear mental image of what I want to do, it doesn't happen until it's forced (usually the night before).
The only thing I can suggest is to find someone to bounce ideas off of. That always seems to get the creative juices flowing.
(picks up "Six Not-So-Easy Pieces" by Richard Feynman next to computer)
In this fundamental physics book, Feynman describes all of the states of physical matter and the laws of symmetry that go along with them. When discussing the right and left-handed rules, he asks the obvious question of whether they are arbitrarily chosen; whether right-handed means anything other than in opposition to left-handed. He asks this to spur our interest in discovering the basis for the symmetry of physical laws.
To illustrate, he imagines a conversation between a human and a distant alien, the purpose of which is for the human to communicate to the alien, after describing the human body and anything else of import, which hand is the left and which is the right, in order to know on which side to place the human heart. After dismissing a few possible physical phenomena by which this information could be conveyed, Feynman describes an instance (during a weak decay of a cobalt nucleus) in which the emitted electron always has a left angular momentum. This, he says, can be used to indicate to our alien friend which is left and which is right. Hold onto that for a second...
In the next section, he describes antimatter. He first theorizes that, other than annhilating each other on contact, objects made entirely of antimatter would not be noticeably different from those made of matter: It is one of the principles of the symmetry of physics, the equations seem to show, that if a clock, say, were made of matter on one hand, and then we made the same clock of antimatter, it would run in this (exact same) way. He then adds the example of the left-handed beta decay above by constructing a theoretical antimatter clock made of cobalt nuclei. He speculates that since left and right-handed matter clocks could be constructed to behave differently, thus violating the law of mirror symmetry, that antimatter clocks would also behave dissimilarly depending upon their handedness.
He goes through all of that to simply tell us that a left-handed matter clock is equivalent in every way to a right-handed antimatter clock. Unfortunately for sci-fi novelists, changing matter to antimatter merely alters the handedness of the particles, rather than actually violating symmetry or having any other noticeable effect. Of course, his lectures are no longer cutting-edge and the book only gives a laymans description of the underlying physics, but it doesn't look too good.
Feynman ends up concluding:
So, if our Martian is made of antimatter and we give him instructions to make this "right" handed model like us, it will, of course, come out the other way around. What would happen when [...] we each have taught the other to make space ships and we meet halfway in empty space? We have instructed each other on our traditions, and so forth, and the two of us come rushing out to shake hands. Well, if he puts out his left hand, watch out!
Problems with your analysis (ie. capitalism + socialism != communism): as more jobs are automated, unemployment doesn't suck as much and everyone ends up on holiday eventually
The problem with this is that as long as there is a free market and wealth disparity, the rich will *find* non-automated jobs for the poor to do. The "minimum wage" will never rise because the standard of living for the upper class will continue to rise at the expense of the lower classes. As a consequence, unemployment would always suck *relative* to the employed up to and until the last job is replaced by machine. I see now that the rest of your post talks about this... oh, well.
I have to say I like your concept that the benefits afforded to the unemployed would be slightly less than the minimum working wage. I think it would be better as more of a "living benefit" that every person gets rather than a benefit of unemployment. That would make it easier to transition between the two states (un/employed) as opportunity presents itself, as it would neither prevent a 'welfare' recipient from re-joining the workforce nor reward him for *not* working when there is opportunity available. Also, that would eliminate the problem with determining the minimum working wage, as it would always be $0.01/hr or whatever over the pre-determined "living benefit".
Not *yet* of course. Computers and every other technology increased employment demands temporarily as people learned how to use them. Once that happened, though, the bubble burst and (suprise!) lots of un(der)employed computer techs.
One day a corporate CEO will wake up and decide that robots are the next big thing. Within 6 months every company in the US will have to *immediately* implement this groundbreaking robot technology. Employment will rise, and fall just as sharply once the robots are in place.
The thing is that most of those "new jobs" will be things like "running on treadmill" and "riding stationary bicycle" because 1) we're all too fat anyways and 2) there won't be enough damn power to run all of those humanoid robots otherwise.
I think you've (partly) answered your own question. Without having testerone-crazed young men hanging around, the only options are to either draft them into the police force or the military. Either way, organizing possible gangsters into tools of government oppression doesn't seem to be a much better solution to the problem. I see forced sterilization making a comeback.
I knew someone would mention Jackass. That's not what I meant by "people doing seemingly foolish things". I meant that entertainment itself is foolish, when you think about it, yet it is a highly valued skill in almost every society.
The kid is obviously pretty good at entertaining, if only because lots of us have thought about doing something like that and that's probably what most of us would look like doing so. Normal people who have the guts to live out their normal lives and be themselves while letting everyone watch make great entertainers.
It wouldn't be funny if it weren't true. Ballmer's dance was hilarious and embarrassing because that's not the way one would expect a corporate CEO to behave. This, otoh, is exactly how everyone who walked out of 'Episode I' wanted to behave and I'll bet quite a few more actually did. It isn't "stupid" or "embarrassing" at all. It's normal.
Once we get to the point were everyone can get pretty much what every they want at almost no cost there will be little need for people to work.
Even Marx knew that. The point that people need to get *now* is that it will happen much sooner than that; and it will happen gradually. Large numbers of people doing menial jobs will be replaced by machines very soon simply because it is becoming cheaper to pay people not to work than it is to put up with their inefficiencies. Society will have no way to adapt other than, as you say, reverting to social/communism. As those are boogy-words to USians and the whole situation has the tendency to be easily subverted, that conversion will not be easy and instantaneous.
Look, I just downloaded the video and I don't think he looks stupid at all. It's obvious that he spent a little time working out the choreography of his performance and that's commendable considering it's something he just did for fun.
The people who spent the time to add sound and video effects obviously felt his work was worth adding to, otherwise they wouldn't have done it.
I'll admit, it's the funniest thing I've seen in a long time, but that shouldn't make it embarrassing for him. Lots of people make a good living doing seemingly foolish things. Lots of people did nerdy stuff like this in highschool just for the experience and that has turned out to benefit them later in life.
I feel like an ass whenever I'm on camera mostly because I don't have the ability to entertain people. This kid seems to have attracted a large audience and a lot of attention. He should take that as a sign that he's doing something right.
1500 watts would be absolutely useless to any type of consumer vehicle. That's 2 horsepower. Your (push) lawnmower has more power. Try riding that across country.
Besides, I'm sure they're using ultra-light ultra-expensive solar cells that you couldn't afford. The things you put on your house would barely generate enough energy to compensate for their own weight.
You don't have to wait. You can get 0% interest* on anything you want. I bet you'd change your tune if one of your cars dropped a transmission or required any other major service. We live in a 'throw away' society.
I used to drive an '89 until things slowly started crapping-out on it. It runs, but it needs a new transmission. The guy at the salvage yard said it wasn't worth having it towed to them.
Granted, used car prices have gone way down, but it's almost cheaper to buy a new car considering the things they put into gasoline nowadays will just destroy anything older than a '95.
It looks like you're right. The FLSA and minimum wage don't apply to US citizens working for US businesses in foreign countries. It's not that they couldn't, but they don't.
It'll be Pakistan. Putting American 'interests' in India is just our way of making sure it's Pakistan.
That means that when the Indians want to take Kashmir for good, and Pakistan threatens to lob a nuke into India instead, they'll be lots of Americans there 'on business' whose immediate interests would be harmed as a result. American 'interests' means American forces, which means labeling Pakistan a 'terrorist state' and taking 'pre-emptive action' to protect those 'interests'.
I'm afraid the poster above is right; the only jobs left in the US will be the 'defense' industry. It's time to learn how to be okay with being an imperialist or moving to Europe.
I don't know where you've been living, but cars don't get 'fixed' anymore, they get 'replaced' with cheap imports. If by 'learn to fix cars' you mean 'build robots that fix cars', you might be on to something; otherwise, there's no way you can compete with the robots that build new cars in Asia.
Here's your chance to come up with something convincing, because "It's in India" won't cut it. US Citizenship has nothing to do with your location on the planet.
In unix symlinks pointing to symlinks just to point to a.conf file in another directory.
I used to think this was stupid, too; like SCO's hellish directory structure. It's invaluable, though, if you find you need to configure a package on a read-only filesystem, like Knoppix, for instance.
I'm sure you've realized this by now and are undoubtedly flogging yourself for having made such an outrageous error on the shrine of geekdom that is Slashdot, but he was talking about actual *desktop* computers, not a cluster.
It's okay, though, I was imagining a Beowulf too...
Actually, I was shocked to notice this one day at the courthouse, the state/city does actually prosecute the *tools* used in the commission of a crime. That's how they can *confiscate* cars, guns, drugs, etc... by bringing charges against them. Better make sure your car hasn't done anything illegal, like speeding, or else it might find itself in car prison.
Slashdot Mirror
making the typical leap from "helmet law" to "creeping socialist state" is not an argument in and of itself. It is a rhetorical device used to explain to retards who never studied history that they will eventually be personally affected by invasive social-behaviour laws just as those who choose to ride motorcycles are today.
If we're just talking about performing these psychological experiments on yourself, no harm done. I'm not sure I'm entirely convinced of the ability of a person to 'train' himself, but, whatever.
I don't want anyone to get the idea that they'd be doing their children a favor by doing anything to them 'randomly', though. More likely, it'd just make them neurotic.
Your analysis is flawed in that you assume it is better for a person to work hard even when there is no reward. That is not what is best for the individual; that is what is best for 'society'. When there is no work to be done, it is best for the individual to rest and relax. Your mother is undoubtedly trained to extract what is best for 'society' from her students, rather than to aid them in doing what is best for themselves.
Thank you for the more full explanation. Believe me. My idiot parents tried this shit on me and did a damn crappy job of it. Please don't encourage anyone else to try to do the same without explaining the implications fully.
It means that Thunderbird is now 0.4% cooler than it was before. It's a major improvement.
It's amazing that I haven't ever heard of this before now. I fit your description *exactly*, and from what I've seen the past few minutes searching sites on the 'net, I fit a lot of the other stereotypes of those with delayed-phase syndrome as well. I am *much* more clear-headed and productive after ~10PM. I tend to sleep for 12 hours at a time.
Before now, I thought it might be some sort of sleep apnea, because I do snore terribly, but I typically feel rested and I don't ever nap during the day unless I've done extensive exercise. A friend's father was recently diagnosed with sleep apnea. He said the doctor could tell just by looking at him: he had *huge* bags under his eyes, with a droopy facial expression and apparently other obvious physical characteristics. I don't think that fits me very well.
I remember describing my sleep schedule to a friend a few years ago. It's as though I have a longer "day" than everyone else; I wake up two hours later every day. Eventually, my schedule "rolls over" and I can maintain normal sleep patterns for a while. Invariably, though, I tend to fall back into the same pattern. I've often stayed up for 24+ hours straight and tried to go to bed at a decent hour the next day, but that only works temporarily.
I tried sleeping pills and that worked for a while. It helped me go to bed, but it didn't seem to help with waking up.
I discovered Melatonin about a year ago and that helps tremendously. It doesn't help that I don't see the daylight often, which should be another reason programmers are susceptible. I've thought about using a tanning bed a few times a week, but I don't know exactly whether that would help or hurt.
I'm sorry you haven't heard. Welcome to Socialist America. Anyone who doesn't talk to others, doesn't participate in mind-numbingly stupid group tasks such as football games and county fairs, doesn't really bother or interact with anyone else in society in any noticeable way, is a sociopath.
It's probably listed in the DSM somewhere, along with dislike of foreigners and unwillingness to interbreed with other races.
Face it, you're reckless disregard for everyone else is harming us all.
People aren't dogs. If a person does a task and *expects* to be rewarded, but isn't, it would tend to reduce the probability of her wanting to "delay gratification" again, regardless of the reward.
Heh, heh. I've had a lot of experiences like those. Teachers seem to know when a blizzard will occur, and assign papers accordingly.
I've also noticed that I spend a lot of time *thinking* about what I'm going to do before I sit down to do it. If I don't have a clear mental image of what I want to do, it doesn't happen until it's forced (usually the night before).
The only thing I can suggest is to find someone to bounce ideas off of. That always seems to get the creative juices flowing.
In this fundamental physics book, Feynman describes all of the states of physical matter and the laws of symmetry that go along with them. When discussing the right and left-handed rules, he asks the obvious question of whether they are arbitrarily chosen; whether right-handed means anything other than in opposition to left-handed. He asks this to spur our interest in discovering the basis for the symmetry of physical laws.
To illustrate, he imagines a conversation between a human and a distant alien, the purpose of which is for the human to communicate to the alien, after describing the human body and anything else of import, which hand is the left and which is the right, in order to know on which side to place the human heart. After dismissing a few possible physical phenomena by which this information could be conveyed, Feynman describes an instance (during a weak decay of a cobalt nucleus) in which the emitted electron always has a left angular momentum. This, he says, can be used to indicate to our alien friend which is left and which is right. Hold onto that for a second...
In the next section, he describes antimatter. He first theorizes that, other than annhilating each other on contact, objects made entirely of antimatter would not be noticeably different from those made of matter: It is one of the principles of the symmetry of physics, the equations seem to show, that if a clock, say, were made of matter on one hand, and then we made the same clock of antimatter, it would run in this (exact same) way. He then adds the example of the left-handed beta decay above by constructing a theoretical antimatter clock made of cobalt nuclei. He speculates that since left and right-handed matter clocks could be constructed to behave differently, thus violating the law of mirror symmetry, that antimatter clocks would also behave dissimilarly depending upon their handedness.
He goes through all of that to simply tell us that a left-handed matter clock is equivalent in every way to a right-handed antimatter clock. Unfortunately for sci-fi novelists, changing matter to antimatter merely alters the handedness of the particles, rather than actually violating symmetry or having any other noticeable effect. Of course, his lectures are no longer cutting-edge and the book only gives a laymans description of the underlying physics, but it doesn't look too good.
Feynman ends up concluding:
Problems with your analysis (ie. capitalism + socialism != communism) :
as more jobs are automated, unemployment doesn't suck as much and everyone ends up on holiday eventually
The problem with this is that as long as there is a free market and wealth disparity, the rich will *find* non-automated jobs for the poor to do. The "minimum wage" will never rise because the standard of living for the upper class will continue to rise at the expense of the lower classes. As a consequence, unemployment would always suck *relative* to the employed up to and until the last job is replaced by machine. I see now that the rest of your post talks about this... oh, well.
I have to say I like your concept that the benefits afforded to the unemployed would be slightly less than the minimum working wage. I think it would be better as more of a "living benefit" that every person gets rather than a benefit of unemployment. That would make it easier to transition between the two states (un/employed) as opportunity presents itself, as it would neither prevent a 'welfare' recipient from re-joining the workforce nor reward him for *not* working when there is opportunity available. Also, that would eliminate the problem with determining the minimum working wage, as it would always be $0.01/hr or whatever over the pre-determined "living benefit".
Not *yet* of course. Computers and every other technology increased employment demands temporarily as people learned how to use them. Once that happened, though, the bubble burst and (suprise!) lots of un(der)employed computer techs.
One day a corporate CEO will wake up and decide that robots are the next big thing. Within 6 months every company in the US will have to *immediately* implement this groundbreaking robot technology. Employment will rise, and fall just as sharply once the robots are in place.
The thing is that most of those "new jobs" will be things like "running on treadmill" and "riding stationary bicycle" because 1) we're all too fat anyways and 2) there won't be enough damn power to run all of those humanoid robots otherwise.
I think you've (partly) answered your own question. Without having testerone-crazed young men hanging around, the only options are to either draft them into the police force or the military. Either way, organizing possible gangsters into tools of government oppression doesn't seem to be a much better solution to the problem. I see forced sterilization making a comeback.
I knew someone would mention Jackass. That's not what I meant by "people doing seemingly foolish things". I meant that entertainment itself is foolish, when you think about it, yet it is a highly valued skill in almost every society.
The kid is obviously pretty good at entertaining, if only because lots of us have thought about doing something like that and that's probably what most of us would look like doing so. Normal people who have the guts to live out their normal lives and be themselves while letting everyone watch make great entertainers.
It wouldn't be funny if it weren't true. Ballmer's dance was hilarious and embarrassing because that's not the way one would expect a corporate CEO to behave. This, otoh, is exactly how everyone who walked out of 'Episode I' wanted to behave and I'll bet quite a few more actually did. It isn't "stupid" or "embarrassing" at all. It's normal.
Even Marx knew that. The point that people need to get *now* is that it will happen much sooner than that; and it will happen gradually. Large numbers of people doing menial jobs will be replaced by machines very soon simply because it is becoming cheaper to pay people not to work than it is to put up with their inefficiencies. Society will have no way to adapt other than, as you say, reverting to social/communism. As those are boogy-words to USians and the whole situation has the tendency to be easily subverted, that conversion will not be easy and instantaneous.
Look, I just downloaded the video and I don't think he looks stupid at all. It's obvious that he spent a little time working out the choreography of his performance and that's commendable considering it's something he just did for fun.
The people who spent the time to add sound and video effects obviously felt his work was worth adding to, otherwise they wouldn't have done it.
I'll admit, it's the funniest thing I've seen in a long time, but that shouldn't make it embarrassing for him. Lots of people make a good living doing seemingly foolish things. Lots of people did nerdy stuff like this in highschool just for the experience and that has turned out to benefit them later in life.
I feel like an ass whenever I'm on camera mostly because I don't have the ability to entertain people. This kid seems to have attracted a large audience and a lot of attention. He should take that as a sign that he's doing something right.
1500 watts would be absolutely useless to any type of consumer vehicle. That's 2 horsepower. Your (push) lawnmower has more power. Try riding that across country.
Besides, I'm sure they're using ultra-light ultra-expensive solar cells that you couldn't afford. The things you put on your house would barely generate enough energy to compensate for their own weight.
You either hate shootings in all cases or you don't, no matter who the victim is.
When it's your grandma shooting someone who tries to mug her, you'd change your mind.
Overly-broad patents don't hurt people, people who use overly-broad patents as a weapon hurt people.
You don't have to wait. You can get 0% interest* on anything you want. I bet you'd change your tune if one of your cars dropped a transmission or required any other major service. We live in a 'throw away' society.
I used to drive an '89 until things slowly started crapping-out on it. It runs, but it needs a new transmission. The guy at the salvage yard said it wasn't worth having it towed to them.
Granted, used car prices have gone way down, but it's almost cheaper to buy a new car considering the things they put into gasoline nowadays will just destroy anything older than a '95.
It looks like you're right. The FLSA and minimum wage don't apply to US citizens working for US businesses in foreign countries. It's not that they couldn't, but they don't.
It'll be Pakistan. Putting American 'interests' in India is just our way of making sure it's Pakistan.
That means that when the Indians want to take Kashmir for good, and Pakistan threatens to lob a nuke into India instead, they'll be lots of Americans there 'on business' whose immediate interests would be harmed as a result. American 'interests' means American forces, which means labeling Pakistan a 'terrorist state' and taking 'pre-emptive action' to protect those 'interests'.
I'm afraid the poster above is right; the only jobs left in the US will be the 'defense' industry. It's time to learn how to be okay with being an imperialist or moving to Europe.
I don't know where you've been living, but cars don't get 'fixed' anymore, they get 'replaced' with cheap imports. If by 'learn to fix cars' you mean 'build robots that fix cars', you might be on to something; otherwise, there's no way you can compete with the robots that build new cars in Asia.
Why not?
Here's your chance to come up with something convincing, because "It's in India" won't cut it. US Citizenship has nothing to do with your location on the planet.
I used to think this was stupid, too; like SCO's hellish directory structure. It's invaluable, though, if you find you need to configure a package on a read-only filesystem, like Knoppix, for instance.
I'm sure you've realized this by now and are undoubtedly flogging yourself for having made such an outrageous error on the shrine of geekdom that is Slashdot, but he was talking about actual *desktop* computers, not a cluster.
It's okay, though, I was imagining a Beowulf too...
Actually, I was shocked to notice this one day at the courthouse, the state/city does actually prosecute the *tools* used in the commission of a crime. That's how they can *confiscate* cars, guns, drugs, etc... by bringing charges against them. Better make sure your car hasn't done anything illegal, like speeding, or else it might find itself in car prison.