Except the word "lie" addresses truth-value, and Pascal's Wager makes no claim that it speaks to the truth-value of the proposition.
But this is exactly the GPs point: Pascal's Wager, like the typical scam artist, focuses the mark's attention on the consequences of a proposition being true, and counts on people having such a strong emotional response to those consequences that they are willing to discount the fact that the proposition is almost certainly false.
The problem with Pascal's Wager in particular is that it applies to any claim of infinite reward/punishment imaginable: it is no more an argument for belief in God (as a policy, not a matter of truth) than it is for belief in Frood, a cosmic entity I just made up who will punish you eternally for non-belief and reward you infinitely for belief, and who also incidentally wants you to send me money.
So where can a person go for real information and/or actual thinking on any topic?
I've been casting around for a while on this question and nothing jumps out. arstechnica is kind of ok, but often gets facts completely wrong and their editorial "explanations" frequently read as if they are written by someone who either lacks understanding of the subject or the audience--they often confuse me, and I'm a physicist with eclectic research experience. Bad Astronomy is also OK.
The basic problem, I think, is that the number of technically knowledgeable people on the Web stays roughly constant (the number of STEM grads in the US has been flat for 25 years, for example) but the total number of people is still increasing.
Empirical fact: lawsuit risk did not stop BP from making poor decisions that resulted in environmental catastrophe.
And then there's there is the fact that the fundamental error in judgement was made by the people most at risk: engineers on the rig, some of whom died in the explosion and fire. They made decisions based on hope, not policy, and died as a result.
Yet for some reason anti-scientific, anti-empirical idiots endlessly repeat the refrain that it "just makes sense" that "the market will take care of it." As someone above noted: people are idiots. And in the modern world, idiots can do a huge amount of damage. Public oversight is the only way of reducing some risks, however imperfect it may be.
Researchers at each of the three universities have built walking robots, differing slightly but based on the same principle.
Sure. The breakthrough myth is a myth. There are (almost) no "breakthroughs". There are small accumulations of knowledge from people who say, "Hey, you remember that cool thing that so-and-so did? Let's do that, but better." Most of the time, it turns out we're no smarter than so-and-so. Sometimes we create an incremental improvement, because we can focus on different aspects of the problem than so-and-so did. After all, we have their results to work from, so we don't have to re-solve the problems they solved.
With sufficient accumulation of such incremental improvements a technology may reach that critical point where it changes from "curiosity" to "practicality", at which point historically ignorant observers herald it as a "breakthrough" when in fact it's an accumulation of small incremental improvements by many people over many iterations. This is not to take away from the last person in the chain, but all the reward and recognition goes to them, and almost none to the people who went before. And importantly, many of the people who went before have always been motivated by the possibility that they will be the last ones in line, and that's an effective way of motivating people, as it turns out.
I guess I just can't tell if the rising cynicism here matches the degrading quality of editing.
They go hand in hand, in part because of the number of ignorant people responding to this story saying "WOW THAT IS SO AMAZING!", which just announces that they have somehow managed to preserve their ignorance of this effect for long enough to be old enough to post on/. but are still posting on/. It makes those of us who have an actual interest in science and technology feel like this isn't really the place we should be.
As well as presenting an 80-year-old effect that has been a stock benchtop demonstration for 20 years as something "new" and "exciting", the marketers (not scientists or engineers) behind this have added the word "quantum" to it, which is so obviously catering to the ignorant it is just sad. I've even seen this described as using "quantum superconductors", which nicely distinguishes them from all the classical superconductors out there...
Google was onto something with gears and with gadgets but with gears gone and gadgets basically having zero development done in 5+ years they have pretty much killed off any really cool way to share, use or access cool or useful tools.
The larger problem for Google is that Gears is gone, Wave is gone, what else will be gone tomorrow?
It's all very well for a company to fail at stuff. Successful companies do it all the time. But Google fails and abandons high-profile "next big thing" projects far too frequently. I'm writing a little application for my own use right now that pulls images from Google Maps (statically--for some reason wxWebView folds up on the.js version, although frustratingly it displays the map correctly before doing so). I'm ok doing that because a) it's for my own use only and b) Maps has been around for long enough that Google isn't going to abandon it.
But... I'd never use any Google service for any commercial offering unless it was at least five years old and so strongly supported and widely used that I had some confidence that it would still be around a year or three down the road. There were probably organizations out there that jumped on Google Wave, for example, and now they have two unpalettable choices: set up their own servers, or move to something else.
Google is building up a reputation as the 'Net's number one source of AbandonWare, and that accumulation of abandoned projects will hurt them a great deal. They are the Little Marketer Who Cried Hype: when they come out with something really great in five years time there will be no one willing to adopt it, and the failure and abandonment of Google's experimental and innovative offerings will become a self-sustaining cycle.
If Jobs is like Ford, Ritchie is like Nicolaus Otto, inventor of the four-stroke engine. The kinds of contribution to the world they made are fundamentally different, but Ford wouldn't have existed without Otto, and no one remembers Otto, and that's kind of sad.
It doesn't take away from Ford to say that--the legacy he built is still with us today. But the achievements of inventors and innovators like Otto and Ritchie don't get the notice they deserve, except amongst the tiny minority who appreciate that that they built the foundations upon which the Fords and the Jobs of the world raised their towers.
What if the robot can't see the top of my pants? (My shirt is loose and blouses over)
Then the umpire can't either. If the umpire can infer the location of the top of the strike zone, so can the robot.
What if my shoulders are angled? (Where's the 'top'?)
Umpires apply a heuristic to solve this problem. So will the robot.
What if I have loose pants and a locked knee stance? (Where's my knee, and thus the hollow below the cap?)
Umpires apply a heuristic to solve this problem. So will the robot.
When does the robot determine the boundaries of the zone? (If it's at the windup, I'll crouch during it then stand up. If it's as the pitch comes in, I'll squat on high strikes)
Over the same time range that umpires do. It is not clear why you are insisting arbitrarily and without any reason whatsoever that the robot must determine the boundaries of the zone from a single time-point. Is that the way umpires do it? If not, why would you insist that a robot do it that way, rather than doing what umpires do? And no, "umpires do something mysterious and magical that can't be captured by heuristics" is not an argument: it is a baseless and probably false assertion.
Time to dump the military romanticism of the 18th century
Yes, it is, but the consequence is not to reduce the armed forces to a professional core and a citizen's militia whose mandate is national defense not fighting wars. Wars are not and cannot ever be anything but the result of irrationality, romantic or otherwise. Unless it is in direct, on-the-ground defense of their homes soldiers all fight for non-rational reasons, and wars are always fought for non-rational reasons.
By all means dump military romanticism. You'll end up like the Swiss: heavily armed, peaceful and neutral.
You have to remember that your company has no loyalty to you.
This is 100% true 95% of the time. If he's in the other 5% (or less) it may be worth staying for the intangibles, which will include a greater degree of employment security than he would get elsewhere.
But the first-order answer to the question, "Should I be loyal to the company?" is a resounding NO.
Agreed. He is a toned down version of the guy that invented the MYT engine
Toned down? The MYT engine doesn't require any new physics magic. Dunno if it works as well as claimed or not, but on the face of it the concept is perfectly plausible and really quite clever.
It's a false premise to presume next big things aren't based on previous things. That always are.
Yes but...
The bigness of the big things is getting smaller and further between.
My grandmother was born in 1884. By the time she was 50 (1934) electrification was commonplace, radio was commonplace, moving pictures were commonplace, commercial air travel was commonplace, automobiles were commonplace, telephones were commonplace, and television had been invented, if not commercialized. None of those things EXISTED--except electrification--when she was born, and some were still considered impossible, like heavier-than-air flight.
In the 50 years between 1961 and today, computers have become commonplace, the Internet has become commonplace, cell phones have become commonplace.
The pace of technological change as it affects everyday life has been slowing down for most of this century, with the focus of innovation being more on making existing technologies more convenient and efficient. Henry Ford purportedly said that if he'd asked his customers what they wanted they would have told him, "A faster horse." We've been mostly building faster horses for the past 50 years. There's nothing wrong with that, because we're starting with an amazing amount of cool stuff previous generations invented, but we shouldn't pretend otherwise.
As it happens, I do think we're starting to see an increase in the rate of technological change, particularly in the growth of embedded and mobile intelligence in the past ten years--but that may be just me getting old, too...
Almost every war ever was started over natural resources (WW 1 being a fairly large exception), and quite a few were started over food resources (part of Hitler's goal in WW2 was to get access to more arable land in Eastern Europe).
Actually, no war has ever been started over access to food resources, although I agree that is the claim that people--including Hitler--frequently use to justify war.
No individual of any species anywhere ever kills another member of the same species over food resource competition, because it never under any circumstances makes evolutionary sense to do so. There are two reasons for this: the first is that when facing a shortage of food resources the optimal use of scare capability is to do things that will increase an individual's access to food. The second is that when faced with an individual of the same species an individual is always facing a relative--and in most species over most of their evolutionary history, a close relative at that. So in a fight to the death the individual is risking their own destruction for the sake of reducing their own fitness by killing a relative.
The only resource that any individual of any species ever fights to the death over is a mating opportunity. It is worth risking death for a mating opportunity because the payoff is a very high probability of the brass ring of evolutionary competition: offspring. We see this in the most extreme case amongst purely vegetarian species like elk and cariboo, where males will risk death in mate competition. In species were mate competition is low, such as bonobo, murder is rare--even though both male and female bonobos hunt and kill other animals.
Murder has nothing at all to do with hunting behaviour because the fundamental nature of any individual's relationship with members of its own species is completely different from its relationship with individuals of other species. Individuals of other species are resources or nuisances. Individuals of the same species are primarily mating opportunities or competitors, and only secondarily resources or nuisances. "Society" is a mechanism for making the resource/nuisance axis dominant over the opportunity/competitor axis--and this is generally not a bad thing.
"War" is nothing but the continuation of mate competition by other means, as Clauswitz might have said had he known about evolution instead of being stuck analyzing human behaviour in pre-scientific terms. This does not mean that war is all about opportunities to rape the other side's women, although a great deal of that goes on. It is also about disrupting domestic society to create opportunities that would not otherwise exist at home.
As such, all other "reasons" given for war are confabulations. In this post-Freudian age it should come as no surprise that actual motivations for human behaviour are obscure even to the actors. In the case of the Germans in WWII, for example, food security was the purported excuse for war, but war was by no means the most obvious or rational approach to the problem, which could equally well have been solved by scientific agriculture and free trade. It's not like the Germans didn't have any experts in the chemistry of nitrogen-rich compounds, as the inhabitants of London learned too well. The difference is that war had a very small chance of actually solving the "problem" while scientific agriculture had a very low risk of leaving Germany without one brick sitting on top of another. I know what choice a rational animal would make, every single time.
Unfortunately the world is still full of stupid, irrational, unreflective people to whom war "just makes sense" as an approach to perceived problems of scarcity. Because of course the best way to deal with any perceived scarcity is to systematically engage in wide-spread and mutually destructive conflict, which will inevitably create... more scarcity.
You appear to be saying that raising the minimum wage has no bad effects, only good ones.
?
He's doing nothing of the kind. He's pointing out that a very large body of actual data demonstrate that the proposition, "Normally constituted minimum wage laws designed to provide basic subsistence wages for low-paid workers do not increase unemployment." That is what people mean by and have implemented as minimum wage laws, you know: basic subsistence wages.
You have completely fabricated your beliefs about what he is saying based on god knows what. Certainly not anything he has said, which could in no wise be used to support claims that arbitrarily high minimum wage laws would be a good thing. That claim is a straw person purely of your own making, made doubly funny by being in response to a comment that points out Republican's inability to understand the higher-order effects of economic changes. You should perhaps read Hazlett's "Economics in One Lesson" before making your side of this debate look even more foolish than it already does.
I don't think he understands how the rest of us view (modern) conservatives.
From the article: "New power turbines would come to market that remove the sulfur and the mercury from coal before combustion, burning only the hydrogen"
I'd say he has grasped modern conservatism in its incoherent essentials.
But Jesus made it very clear that there's only two commandments for a Christian that really matter
No, he didn't. He made it very clear that "not one jot" of the law will pass away until the establishment of his father's kingdom.
Matthew 5:17-20
"17 Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. 18 I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. 19 Anyone who breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. 20 For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven."
He could hardly be clearer than that, but that doesn't stop cafeteria Christians like you from cherry-picking.
"Not one jot" of which will pass away until Jesus' father's kingdom is established.
You've arbitrarily picked one side of one of the more glaring contradictions in the New Testament. You have zero justification for doing this. Many of your co-religionists pick--or rather cherry-pick--the other side of the contradiction.
Furthermore, the NT is full of additional prohibitions and pronouncements, some from Jesus himself, which is a little weird if those two laws are the only things that matter. I know if I were a teacher I'd put a lot more emphasis on the only thing that matters and a lot less on complex nuances that future generations would use to justify everything from taxation to slavery.
So I guess we can infer from this that Jesus was either a spectacularly incompetent teacher--saying on the one hand that everything was summed up in those two laws and on the other that not one jot of the ancient law would pass away until kingdom come--or the Bible has been adulterated in subsequent generations, making it entirely untrustworthy as a record of what Jesus was about.
I'd say religion and science are pretty orthogonal.
Right. Science deals with reality, including all of human action and human motivations, the contents of our imaginations and fantasies, and so on.
Religion deals with everything that is not real. Otherwise religion makes claims about reality, which can be put to a wide variety of scientific tests, from asking, "WHY do you think it is wrong for women to drive cars or speak in church?" and "WHY do you think Allah/God/Jaweh exists?" So long as religion impacts any human behaviour whatsoever it is precisely parallel to science, and can be subject to perfectly ordinary Bayesian tests.
Discarding the moral teachings that have been handed down over thousands of years is equally ridiculous.
Why? Being old is not authoritative. At least, not to a scientist.
"He who spares the rod hates his son" is not sound moral teaching, it's a license for child abuse. Hitting their kids makes savages feel better, it doesn't improve the kids.
Some of what Jesus said has withstood basic scientific scrutiny, but science is the decider here. When an old moral teaching is proven to be false--to lead to outcomes other than the intended outcome--it is to be discarded. When an entire corpus of moral teaching is dependent upon a ridiculous mythology and bizarre bronze age notion of moral arithmetic, it is to be questioned all the way down to the ground.
Religion should be considered a useful source of moral hypotheses, nothing more. It is grist for science's mill.
That also assumes other bio-metrics such as height, build, gait, etc are not analyzed to determine if the person is the same.
None of which can be defeated by anything as simple as a mask, like wearing a fat suit and/or platform shoes...
That said, I've done a lot of work in various pattern analysis applications and have to wonder if it isn't my moral duty to separate the security-industrial complex from some of the American taxpayer's money...
If you look at all those detainees released from GitMo, [cnn.com] you'll find a lot of them, 25%, have wound up being captured or KiAs so it stands to the governments backward logic that once you're on the list, you stay on the list.
Conversely, we can conclude that 75% of them did nothing but happen to be standing in the wrong place at the wrong time? Not counting the illegally detailed child soldiers like Omar Kadr, of course.
There are many prophecies in the Bible, all of which have come true.
And yet no where in the Bible is the verse that reads, "And God said unto His prophet: 'Tell my people that much disease is not caused by evil, but by tiny creatures living in foul waters and growing upon dead flesh and fecal matter. Tell my people to keep food covered to prevent flies from landing upon it, especially raw meat, for flies can carry these tiny creatures with them when they land on feces and then on meat. Tell my people that bread-mold contains a substance that will harm these tiny creatures and if they are sick and they eat of it they may find ease. Tell my people to wash any open wounds in vinegar or spirits of wine, which kill these tiny creatures. Tell my people to boil any water they drink, and to build public works to carry offal and effluent away from their homes, for these tiny creatures live upon such, and will spread disease amongst my people. Tell my people that this is the word of the Lord, and they may think for themselves of many ways to avoid the bad effects of these tiny creatures which do much good as well as harm."
Weird, eh? All those 100% accurate predictions but not one single word of useful advice on the germ theory of disease, which is easily expressible in the conceptual lexicon of the bronze age. It's not like it would take a miracle or anything to put it in, and it would have saved untold numbers of lives over thousands of years. What's up with that?
You must already know that a badly run government-owned operation can cause harm to employees and customers and the economy, too, just as a badly run co-op, or any other group organized under any other system.
This is why one needs effective division of power in any system, and why social and liberal democracy are the most sane political positions to take within such a system. A social democrat would LIKE the government to do everything but recognizes without the discipline of the market certain types of failure and corruption will overwhelm the system. A liberal democrat would LIKE the market to do everything, but recognizes without the oversight and intervention of government certain types of failure and corruption will overwhelm the system.
A flaming ignorant nutjob will ignores all that and promotes the hell out of their crazy abstract fantasy, to the detriment of all but their favoured few, be they Party members or corporate oligarchs.
Slashdot Mirror
Except the word "lie" addresses truth-value, and Pascal's Wager makes no claim that it speaks to the truth-value of the proposition.
But this is exactly the GPs point: Pascal's Wager, like the typical scam artist, focuses the mark's attention on the consequences of a proposition being true, and counts on people having such a strong emotional response to those consequences that they are willing to discount the fact that the proposition is almost certainly false.
The problem with Pascal's Wager in particular is that it applies to any claim of infinite reward/punishment imaginable: it is no more an argument for belief in God (as a policy, not a matter of truth) than it is for belief in Frood, a cosmic entity I just made up who will punish you eternally for non-belief and reward you infinitely for belief, and who also incidentally wants you to send me money.
I've always had two issues with articles on geothermal
I've always had two issues with people on /.: their complete lack of mathematical and physical literacy and awareness of scales.
So where can a person go for real information and/or actual thinking on any topic?
I've been casting around for a while on this question and nothing jumps out. arstechnica is kind of ok, but often gets facts completely wrong and their editorial "explanations" frequently read as if they are written by someone who either lacks understanding of the subject or the audience--they often confuse me, and I'm a physicist with eclectic research experience. Bad Astronomy is also OK.
The basic problem, I think, is that the number of technically knowledgeable people on the Web stays roughly constant (the number of STEM grads in the US has been flat for 25 years, for example) but the total number of people is still increasing.
Do you see how this works?
Why, yes, in fact, I do: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_litigation
Empirical fact: lawsuit risk did not stop BP from making poor decisions that resulted in environmental catastrophe.
And then there's there is the fact that the fundamental error in judgement was made by the people most at risk: engineers on the rig, some of whom died in the explosion and fire. They made decisions based on hope, not policy, and died as a result.
Yet for some reason anti-scientific, anti-empirical idiots endlessly repeat the refrain that it "just makes sense" that "the market will take care of it." As someone above noted: people are idiots. And in the modern world, idiots can do a huge amount of damage. Public oversight is the only way of reducing some risks, however imperfect it may be.
Researchers at each of the three universities have built walking robots, differing slightly but based on the same principle.
Sure. The breakthrough myth is a myth. There are (almost) no "breakthroughs". There are small accumulations of knowledge from people who say, "Hey, you remember that cool thing that so-and-so did? Let's do that, but better." Most of the time, it turns out we're no smarter than so-and-so. Sometimes we create an incremental improvement, because we can focus on different aspects of the problem than so-and-so did. After all, we have their results to work from, so we don't have to re-solve the problems they solved.
With sufficient accumulation of such incremental improvements a technology may reach that critical point where it changes from "curiosity" to "practicality", at which point historically ignorant observers herald it as a "breakthrough" when in fact it's an accumulation of small incremental improvements by many people over many iterations. This is not to take away from the last person in the chain, but all the reward and recognition goes to them, and almost none to the people who went before. And importantly, many of the people who went before have always been motivated by the possibility that they will be the last ones in line, and that's an effective way of motivating people, as it turns out.
I guess I just can't tell if the rising cynicism here matches the degrading quality of editing.
They go hand in hand, in part because of the number of ignorant people responding to this story saying "WOW THAT IS SO AMAZING!", which just announces that they have somehow managed to preserve their ignorance of this effect for long enough to be old enough to post on /. but are still posting on /. It makes those of us who have an actual interest in science and technology feel like this isn't really the place we should be.
As well as presenting an 80-year-old effect that has been a stock benchtop demonstration for 20 years as something "new" and "exciting", the marketers (not scientists or engineers) behind this have added the word "quantum" to it, which is so obviously catering to the ignorant it is just sad. I've even seen this described as using "quantum superconductors", which nicely distinguishes them from all the classical superconductors out there...
Google was onto something with gears and with gadgets but with gears gone and gadgets basically having zero development done in 5+ years they have pretty much killed off any really cool way to share, use or access cool or useful tools.
The larger problem for Google is that Gears is gone, Wave is gone, what else will be gone tomorrow?
It's all very well for a company to fail at stuff. Successful companies do it all the time. But Google fails and abandons high-profile "next big thing" projects far too frequently. I'm writing a little application for my own use right now that pulls images from Google Maps (statically--for some reason wxWebView folds up on the .js version, although frustratingly it displays the map correctly before doing so). I'm ok doing that because a) it's for my own use only and b) Maps has been around for long enough that Google isn't going to abandon it.
But... I'd never use any Google service for any commercial offering unless it was at least five years old and so strongly supported and widely used that I had some confidence that it would still be around a year or three down the road. There were probably organizations out there that jumped on Google Wave, for example, and now they have two unpalettable choices: set up their own servers, or move to something else.
Google is building up a reputation as the 'Net's number one source of AbandonWare, and that accumulation of abandoned projects will hurt them a great deal. They are the Little Marketer Who Cried Hype: when they come out with something really great in five years time there will be no one willing to adopt it, and the failure and abandonment of Google's experimental and innovative offerings will become a self-sustaining cycle.
If Jobs is like Ford, Ritchie is like Nicolaus Otto, inventor of the four-stroke engine. The kinds of contribution to the world they made are fundamentally different, but Ford wouldn't have existed without Otto, and no one remembers Otto, and that's kind of sad.
It doesn't take away from Ford to say that--the legacy he built is still with us today. But the achievements of inventors and innovators like Otto and Ritchie don't get the notice they deserve, except amongst the tiny minority who appreciate that that they built the foundations upon which the Fords and the Jobs of the world raised their towers.
What if the robot can't see the top of my pants? (My shirt is loose and blouses over)
Then the umpire can't either. If the umpire can infer the location of the top of the strike zone, so can the robot.
What if my shoulders are angled? (Where's the 'top'?)
Umpires apply a heuristic to solve this problem. So will the robot.
What if I have loose pants and a locked knee stance? (Where's my knee, and thus the hollow below the cap?)
Umpires apply a heuristic to solve this problem. So will the robot.
When does the robot determine the boundaries of the zone? (If it's at the windup, I'll crouch during it then stand up. If it's as the pitch comes in, I'll squat on high strikes)
Over the same time range that umpires do. It is not clear why you are insisting arbitrarily and without any reason whatsoever that the robot must determine the boundaries of the zone from a single time-point. Is that the way umpires do it? If not, why would you insist that a robot do it that way, rather than doing what umpires do? And no, "umpires do something mysterious and magical that can't be captured by heuristics" is not an argument: it is a baseless and probably false assertion.
Time to dump the military romanticism of the 18th century
Yes, it is, but the consequence is not to reduce the armed forces to a professional core and a citizen's militia whose mandate is national defense not fighting wars. Wars are not and cannot ever be anything but the result of irrationality, romantic or otherwise. Unless it is in direct, on-the-ground defense of their homes soldiers all fight for non-rational reasons, and wars are always fought for non-rational reasons.
By all means dump military romanticism. You'll end up like the Swiss: heavily armed, peaceful and neutral.
You have to remember that your company has no loyalty to you.
This is 100% true 95% of the time. If he's in the other 5% (or less) it may be worth staying for the intangibles, which will include a greater degree of employment security than he would get elsewhere.
But the first-order answer to the question, "Should I be loyal to the company?" is a resounding NO.
The second-order answer is, "It depends."
Agreed. He is a toned down version of the guy that invented the MYT engine
Toned down? The MYT engine doesn't require any new physics magic. Dunno if it works as well as claimed or not, but on the face of it the concept is perfectly plausible and really quite clever.
It's a false premise to presume next big things aren't based on previous things. That always are.
Yes but...
The bigness of the big things is getting smaller and further between.
My grandmother was born in 1884. By the time she was 50 (1934) electrification was commonplace, radio was commonplace, moving pictures were commonplace, commercial air travel was commonplace, automobiles were commonplace, telephones were commonplace, and television had been invented, if not commercialized. None of those things EXISTED--except electrification--when she was born, and some were still considered impossible, like heavier-than-air flight.
In the 50 years between 1961 and today, computers have become commonplace, the Internet has become commonplace, cell phones have become commonplace.
The pace of technological change as it affects everyday life has been slowing down for most of this century, with the focus of innovation being more on making existing technologies more convenient and efficient. Henry Ford purportedly said that if he'd asked his customers what they wanted they would have told him, "A faster horse." We've been mostly building faster horses for the past 50 years. There's nothing wrong with that, because we're starting with an amazing amount of cool stuff previous generations invented, but we shouldn't pretend otherwise.
As it happens, I do think we're starting to see an increase in the rate of technological change, particularly in the growth of embedded and mobile intelligence in the past ten years--but that may be just me getting old, too...
Almost every war ever was started over natural resources (WW 1 being a fairly large exception), and quite a few were started over food resources (part of Hitler's goal in WW2 was to get access to more arable land in Eastern Europe).
Actually, no war has ever been started over access to food resources, although I agree that is the claim that people--including Hitler--frequently use to justify war.
No individual of any species anywhere ever kills another member of the same species over food resource competition, because it never under any circumstances makes evolutionary sense to do so. There are two reasons for this: the first is that when facing a shortage of food resources the optimal use of scare capability is to do things that will increase an individual's access to food. The second is that when faced with an individual of the same species an individual is always facing a relative--and in most species over most of their evolutionary history, a close relative at that. So in a fight to the death the individual is risking their own destruction for the sake of reducing their own fitness by killing a relative.
The only resource that any individual of any species ever fights to the death over is a mating opportunity. It is worth risking death for a mating opportunity because the payoff is a very high probability of the brass ring of evolutionary competition: offspring. We see this in the most extreme case amongst purely vegetarian species like elk and cariboo, where males will risk death in mate competition. In species were mate competition is low, such as bonobo, murder is rare--even though both male and female bonobos hunt and kill other animals.
Murder has nothing at all to do with hunting behaviour because the fundamental nature of any individual's relationship with members of its own species is completely different from its relationship with individuals of other species. Individuals of other species are resources or nuisances. Individuals of the same species are primarily mating opportunities or competitors, and only secondarily resources or nuisances. "Society" is a mechanism for making the resource/nuisance axis dominant over the opportunity/competitor axis--and this is generally not a bad thing.
"War" is nothing but the continuation of mate competition by other means, as Clauswitz might have said had he known about evolution instead of being stuck analyzing human behaviour in pre-scientific terms. This does not mean that war is all about opportunities to rape the other side's women, although a great deal of that goes on. It is also about disrupting domestic society to create opportunities that would not otherwise exist at home.
As such, all other "reasons" given for war are confabulations. In this post-Freudian age it should come as no surprise that actual motivations for human behaviour are obscure even to the actors. In the case of the Germans in WWII, for example, food security was the purported excuse for war, but war was by no means the most obvious or rational approach to the problem, which could equally well have been solved by scientific agriculture and free trade. It's not like the Germans didn't have any experts in the chemistry of nitrogen-rich compounds, as the inhabitants of London learned too well. The difference is that war had a very small chance of actually solving the "problem" while scientific agriculture had a very low risk of leaving Germany without one brick sitting on top of another. I know what choice a rational animal would make, every single time.
Unfortunately the world is still full of stupid, irrational, unreflective people to whom war "just makes sense" as an approach to perceived problems of scarcity. Because of course the best way to deal with any perceived scarcity is to systematically engage in wide-spread and mutually destructive conflict, which will inevitably create... more scarcity.
You appear to be saying that raising the minimum wage has no bad effects, only good ones.
?
He's doing nothing of the kind. He's pointing out that a very large body of actual data demonstrate that the proposition, "Normally constituted minimum wage laws designed to provide basic subsistence wages for low-paid workers do not increase unemployment." That is what people mean by and have implemented as minimum wage laws, you know: basic subsistence wages.
You have completely fabricated your beliefs about what he is saying based on god knows what. Certainly not anything he has said, which could in no wise be used to support claims that arbitrarily high minimum wage laws would be a good thing. That claim is a straw person purely of your own making, made doubly funny by being in response to a comment that points out Republican's inability to understand the higher-order effects of economic changes. You should perhaps read Hazlett's "Economics in One Lesson" before making your side of this debate look even more foolish than it already does.
I don't think he understands how the rest of us view (modern) conservatives.
From the article: "New power turbines would come to market that remove the sulfur and the mercury from coal before combustion, burning only the hydrogen"
I'd say he has grasped modern conservatism in its incoherent essentials.
When I see Darwin's evolution, I see God's hand behind it."
Spoken like someone who has never seen evolution in action. It operates on humans mostly via dead babies.
God's hand?
If god is a sadistic serial killer, I guess, which would at least be consistent with most of the divine behaviour described in the OT.
But Jesus made it very clear that there's only two commandments for a Christian that really matter
No, he didn't. He made it very clear that "not one jot" of the law will pass away until the establishment of his father's kingdom.
Matthew 5:17-20
"17 Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. 18 I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. 19 Anyone who breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. 20 For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven."
He could hardly be clearer than that, but that doesn't stop cafeteria Christians like you from cherry-picking.
Everything else is details.
"Not one jot" of which will pass away until Jesus' father's kingdom is established.
You've arbitrarily picked one side of one of the more glaring contradictions in the New Testament. You have zero justification for doing this. Many of your co-religionists pick--or rather cherry-pick--the other side of the contradiction.
Furthermore, the NT is full of additional prohibitions and pronouncements, some from Jesus himself, which is a little weird if those two laws are the only things that matter. I know if I were a teacher I'd put a lot more emphasis on the only thing that matters and a lot less on complex nuances that future generations would use to justify everything from taxation to slavery.
So I guess we can infer from this that Jesus was either a spectacularly incompetent teacher--saying on the one hand that everything was summed up in those two laws and on the other that not one jot of the ancient law would pass away until kingdom come--or the Bible has been adulterated in subsequent generations, making it entirely untrustworthy as a record of what Jesus was about.
I'd say religion and science are pretty orthogonal.
Right. Science deals with reality, including all of human action and human motivations, the contents of our imaginations and fantasies, and so on.
Religion deals with everything that is not real. Otherwise religion makes claims about reality, which can be put to a wide variety of scientific tests, from asking, "WHY do you think it is wrong for women to drive cars or speak in church?" and "WHY do you think Allah/God/Jaweh exists?" So long as religion impacts any human behaviour whatsoever it is precisely parallel to science, and can be subject to perfectly ordinary Bayesian tests.
Discarding the moral teachings that have been handed down over thousands of years is equally ridiculous.
Why? Being old is not authoritative. At least, not to a scientist.
"He who spares the rod hates his son" is not sound moral teaching, it's a license for child abuse. Hitting their kids makes savages feel better, it doesn't improve the kids.
Some of what Jesus said has withstood basic scientific scrutiny, but science is the decider here. When an old moral teaching is proven to be false--to lead to outcomes other than the intended outcome--it is to be discarded. When an entire corpus of moral teaching is dependent upon a ridiculous mythology and bizarre bronze age notion of moral arithmetic, it is to be questioned all the way down to the ground.
Religion should be considered a useful source of moral hypotheses, nothing more. It is grist for science's mill.
That also assumes other bio-metrics such as height, build, gait, etc are not analyzed to determine if the person is the same.
None of which can be defeated by anything as simple as a mask, like wearing a fat suit and/or platform shoes...
That said, I've done a lot of work in various pattern analysis applications and have to wonder if it isn't my moral duty to separate the security-industrial complex from some of the American taxpayer's money...
If you look at all those detainees released from GitMo, [cnn.com] you'll find a lot of them, 25%, have wound up being captured or KiAs so it stands to the governments backward logic that once you're on the list, you stay on the list.
Conversely, we can conclude that 75% of them did nothing but happen to be standing in the wrong place at the wrong time? Not counting the illegally detailed child soldiers like Omar Kadr, of course.
There are many prophecies in the Bible, all of which have come true.
And yet no where in the Bible is the verse that reads, "And God said unto His prophet: 'Tell my people that much disease is not caused by evil, but by tiny creatures living in foul waters and growing upon dead flesh and fecal matter. Tell my people to keep food covered to prevent flies from landing upon it, especially raw meat, for flies can carry these tiny creatures with them when they land on feces and then on meat. Tell my people that bread-mold contains a substance that will harm these tiny creatures and if they are sick and they eat of it they may find ease. Tell my people to wash any open wounds in vinegar or spirits of wine, which kill these tiny creatures. Tell my people to boil any water they drink, and to build public works to carry offal and effluent away from their homes, for these tiny creatures live upon such, and will spread disease amongst my people. Tell my people that this is the word of the Lord, and they may think for themselves of many ways to avoid the bad effects of these tiny creatures which do much good as well as harm."
Weird, eh? All those 100% accurate predictions but not one single word of useful advice on the germ theory of disease, which is easily expressible in the conceptual lexicon of the bronze age. It's not like it would take a miracle or anything to put it in, and it would have saved untold numbers of lives over thousands of years. What's up with that?
You must already know that a badly run government-owned operation can cause harm to employees and customers and the economy, too, just as a badly run co-op, or any other group organized under any other system.
This is why one needs effective division of power in any system, and why social and liberal democracy are the most sane political positions to take within such a system. A social democrat would LIKE the government to do everything but recognizes without the discipline of the market certain types of failure and corruption will overwhelm the system. A liberal democrat would LIKE the market to do everything, but recognizes without the oversight and intervention of government certain types of failure and corruption will overwhelm the system.
A flaming ignorant nutjob will ignores all that and promotes the hell out of their crazy abstract fantasy, to the detriment of all but their favoured few, be they Party members or corporate oligarchs.