That's unfair to Albert Einstein. To say that he "fought quantum mechanics to his last breath" fails to acknowledge that he actually helped develop the field, and contributed to it heavily until his death. Yes, he distrusted some of the implied consequences of QM, but that didn't cause him to stick his fingers in his ears and say "La, la, la" until the topic changed. He worked on alternative theories. His efforts weren't irrational. It's more that QM didn't align with his observations of the world, and didn't mesh with other well-understood theories, such as his own general relativity.
All I can say is, most of these points fly in the face of my experience as an American.
I've never heard anyone say they preferred the days of Ma Bell when calling long distance (across town, even) cost $0.28 per minute, in 1970 dollars.
Everyone I've ever heard who blamed borrowers for defaulting, did so because they thought they were stupid and credulous, and in the next breath blamed mortgage companies 10x worse for exploiting that stupidity and credulousness with predatory lending. Again, I've never heard anyone ever say the banks did nothing wrong.
Finally, Wal*Mart IS generally loved, and they are loved _because_ they compete so well, placing downward pressure on prices, unlike Standard Oil and AT&T did. If that ever changes, you can bet people will be crying out for competitive pressures and marketplace diversity, just like they always do.
Why do you say this? Americans I know decry the existence of monopolies, such as Microsoft's and AT&T's back in the 70s. There is backlash against cable monopolies and the idea of Wal*Mart getting too big for anyone's good. We're now talking about the idea of whether banks and insurance companies ought to have size limits before being broken into competing companies, because the failure of any one might create a near-monopolistic situation.
Again with the misunderstanding of what a scientific theory is. There can only BE one theory. There are many hypotheses, but those fall away one by one to become a single, very authoritative, theory. If something better comes along, then the theory of evolution goes away and is replaced by the new theory, be it evolution 1.0.1 or ID 12.6.1.3
In a field of grain, you can grow wheat, barley, rye or oats.
That's very true, of course. But you can't grow wheat, barley, and Ford Pintos. I'm arguing that physics, philosophy, and automobile repair are fields of study, while ID is not. It is a platform. An agenda. It's like saying the people paid by the tobacco companies to falsify studies on the effects of tobacco smoke are conducting science. Apples to orangutans.
The first day of owning a Wii you end up spending more on controllers and games than the console cost.
I don't understand this comment. Are you saying this because the Wii only comes with one controller and one nunchuk, and you have to buy four, whereas the 360 is different? Or are you saying that the cost of the Wiimote ($40) plus nunchuk ($20) plus Wii motion plus ($10 with a game) is too high?
I admit if you bought EVERY controller piece you possibly could right up front it would be a lot of money, but who does that? And is it so different for any other console?
It is my contention that those who have much, stole it from those who have not.
Then you imagine an economic system that sums to zero, which is false. You also imagine that a person who creates something of great value to many, and who asks compensation, is a thief. This is also false.
It is also my contention that those who want to live in a world where they can earn much more than others, through any means, are psychopaths who should be driven into the ocean.
Yes, so long as you place great emphasis on "through any means." Those who want to live in a world where they can earn much more than others through honest labor, innovation, and intelligence are not psychopaths, and are among our greatest treasures.
To covet the "American Dream" is to dream of being a tyrant. To achieve it is to be a tyrant. Neither should be tolerated in a sane and equitable society.
You and I must disagree on this point. Apparently you conceive of financial means as, by definition, a denial of others and an evil. I assume that you live in abject poverty and give away any resources as soon as they are acquired, living only on the charity of others? Or do you take the best paying job available over others whose souls are equally deserving, even though their fortunes have left them in want of equal talents? Are you glad to have what you have, and glad you aren't forced to have less? You have very boldly set a standard that will prove difficult to live up to without hypocrisy.
You are relating the beating of slaves to the capitalistic opportunity to build an economic future limited chiefly by one's own capabilities, which represents the opposite of slavery. In a capitalistic system, no one is "beaten" if they choose not to be productive. They simply live the lifestyle of a person with low productivity. Quoth Office Space: "Well, you don't need a million dollars to do nothing, man. Take a look at my cousin: he's broke, don't do shit."
Is it your contention that, for humans, freedom equates to the ability to live comfortably while contributing nothing to your lifestyle? Surely not. That would be a definition of freedom that defies all others.
So you can describe an implementation of communism where there is not a small group of individuals making decisions with far-reaching consequences? If so, how could this work? You have an economic system based on shared wealth and pooled advantage, yet no central mechanism for evening wealth and ensuring no-one accumulates too much economic power?
Also, if I am living in this society, why, exactly, am I interested in working my ass off to create innovative solutions to any of society's problems? It would seem that I could just live as well as anyone off the fat of the economic system, should there prove to be any.
Capitalism is the idea that a small group of individuals ought to be able to make unilateral decisions with wide reaching consequences according to their own arbitrary whims.
Is that not the very definition of working communism? A central authority of chosen individuals making decisions for everyone according to their necessarily flawed understanding of what is best? And I don't think Capitalism is that idea. That may be an unintended consequence, sometimes, but that's hardly the fault of the philosophy. It's merely a feature of human relations. Communism, on the other hand, uses it as its primary mechanism of action.
What saved him? God didn't save him, nor did Jesus, or the Bible, which is what you are implying. What "saved" him was a shrewd appeal to an operational technicality in the court proceedings. Namely, the idea of "swearing to tell the whole truth". The religious part of it was just icing on a farcical cake.
It should be made clear that the people to whom Zappa refers (knowingly or not) are MBAs who do a bad job at their eventual jobs. This notion of an unfeeling horror at the helm of a company of soul-less androids wrecking everything they touch for the sake of pure profit is nonsense. Corporations are simply groups of people gathered for a goal, one important factor of which is financial.
Go to any business school of ANY repute, and you will find instructors who give TOOLS to future business workers. Just like programmers gave managers the tool called "spreadsheet", business schools give tools like finance, accounting, operations, and so on. A very real component of this education is a notion of what is right, not just what is expedient or lucrative. In fact, every class I've ever seen has a powerful component of quality built in, along with philosophy and discussion about why quality is worth doing, how much, and when.
If some students fail to absorb this message, or fail to make use of it in the workplace, that is hardly a mark against the education, especially since so many of them do.
I disagree. Bush has been pissing off real conservatives ever since he took office.
If you recall, in 2000 Bush ran on a VERY conservative platform: lower taxes, increase moral accountability in the executive office, lower taxes, rein in U.S. spending and nation-building, and lower taxes.
At almost every turn since his election, Bush has failed to actually follow through with his conservative campaign rhetoric, and has instead adopted a starkly neo-con agenda that his political base rejects. No real conservative presides over the largest increase in deficit spending and national debt in U.S. history. At least Reagan had a legitimate evil empire to fight. Bush has done this to us over IRAQ of all things!
The only reason he got re-elected in 2004 was that his conservative base harbors a really screwed up pseudo-romantic notion that you should never change presidents in the middle of a war, which is just about the worst ideological and electoral precedent I can imagine. Plus John Kerry was so underwhelming that he was about a half-notch above Mondale in his electability.
Anyway, Bush is not remotely a conservative. More like an Authoritarian Centrist. It's a pretty ugly combination.
I agree that the disks sound like the best option for you.
I, on the other hand, bought a DVD RW drive about three years ago and have burned exactly one DVD, just to try it out the day I installed it. I've found no good reason to burn DVDs at all. I've burned a few dozen CDs, mostly for playback in an audio CD player, but that hardly justifies the DVD RW expense.
The thing is, I don't burn movies, and if I have data enough to fill a DVD, I generally want instant rewritable access to it, so I want it on a hard drive or, at worst, a flash drive. I eventually bought an external 500 GB drive for that reason, and my DVD RW drive is gathering dust.
So I ended up paying $51 (I was a very late adopter) for one half-burned DVD that I didn't even need. I know better now, so I'll just be buying flash.
But you'll pay $175 for the drive you need to play the $1 disk (assuming you wait for the inevitable price drops after the initial $1200 early adopter tax).
Which means you'd need to use about 17 disks before the cheap disks even start paying off compared to 17 $10 solid state drives, and you STILL don't have the performance advantage.
Again, there are unique reasons to use disks, but price may or may not be one of them until the medium is ubiquitous and about to be replaced by a new one, like DVDs are today.
As the energy efficiency of industrial processes increases, a kilowatt-hour in the hand becomes more valuable (since it will pay for a greater quantity of efficiently-manufactured goods than inefficiently-manufactured ones). Are you sure about that? It doesn't sound quite right.
I agree that the same amount of energy will ENABLE more productivity, but does that really mean that the energy becomes more valuable? If I have one kilowatt-hour of energy, and the overall efficiency of industry is such that industry needs less energy, then the value of the energy itself would seem to be lower, since its scarcity is likely to be lower, and the demand is lower.
Plentiful item with lowered demand? Sounds like lowered value to me.
I think, though, that if you look at the population numbers, the percentage of the population that is "slow growth" or "negative growth" is insignificant compared to the percentage that is "hyper growth," such as China and India have been over the last few decades.
It's hard to say for sure what will happen when all the world's countries are at today's state-of-the-art level of technology. Obviously, at that point, that current top countries will be even further along. The question is, is there an absolute level of technology that enables a reduction in population growth, or is that level of technology always going to be relative to whatever the state of the art is?
AND, is this reduction in population growth simply a result of short-term economic or cultural pressures driven by resource scarcity? Meaning, if we suddenly discover how to create lots more energy and grow lots more food, will we still be compelled to limit population growth, even in the wealthy advanced societies?
Where do you start? You basically repeated the same point three times:
If you think these organisms are "better," you are guilty of overlaying a value judgement on a valueless matter. Natural selection does not "strenghten the remaining gene pool," because there is no guarantee that yesterday's adaptations will actually help in tomorrow's environment. Tell that to the countless species that have existed that don't now because an offshoot of their species evolved past them. You're point is logically "correct," but manages to completely deny reality. It's like saying that adapting to earth's gravity isn't necessarily "better" because the earth could be blown up by an asteroid and its gravity field distributed across the solar system. Given the tendency of environmental conditions to change gradually, often on geological scales, "culling of the weak" is indeed a practical and effective tool for making a species "better" within its current environment, which is ALL that matters.
No, biology does not demand anything, you silly. Stop wishfully thinking that science justifies your sick cosmological fantasies, and engage biology seriously if you do so. (And for that matter, engage seriously the actual history of European colonialism, that you're glorifying there.) As you should well know, "biology" is simply a code word for "survival." Survival does indeed demand many things, and if a very large rock is currently speeding toward this very large rock, then our species (read: our "biology") absolutely demands that we spread our genetic code beyond it.
As for the rest of that statement, you seem to have some lingering issues about colonialism, which is fine. Some of your ancestors must have been on the "losing" end of a colonial expedition, which is also fine. You seem to think that there was a "moral" component missing from them, which is fine too. However, the reality is that humans have the same need to challenge each other for resources as other animals do. Some of your ancestors challenged some of your other ancestors for resources, the losers lost, and now you're morally uppity about it. I know you WANT to believe that strong/weak designations don't exist, but the reality is that they do, and they matter.
My personal opinion is we need to concentrate on having LESS people in the Universe rather than spreading out. This goes against every biological imperative ever experienced by any life form on earth. And for good reason.
The way species improve themselves is to expand until they fill their available space to the limit, and beyond, of sustainability. Once that is reached, a die-off culls the weak and strengthens the remaining gene pool for further adaptation and expansion. This is species survival, and humans are just as good at it as any other life form.
Once we fill this planet to the breaking point (which we will), we'll either die off, improving the "herd", or we'll send parts of us away to seed nearby star systems. Death, life, freedom, poverty, and exploration are all the reasons we need, just like our forefathers who struck out across oceans to find new land for colonization.
I'm afraid this notion of "fewer humans on earth" is fundamentally nonsense. Biology demands that we expand and multiply, or die trying.
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Bastards
That's unfair to Albert Einstein. To say that he "fought quantum mechanics to his last breath" fails to acknowledge that he actually helped develop the field, and contributed to it heavily until his death. Yes, he distrusted some of the implied consequences of QM, but that didn't cause him to stick his fingers in his ears and say "La, la, la" until the topic changed. He worked on alternative theories. His efforts weren't irrational. It's more that QM didn't align with his observations of the world, and didn't mesh with other well-understood theories, such as his own general relativity.
All I can say is, most of these points fly in the face of my experience as an American.
I've never heard anyone say they preferred the days of Ma Bell when calling long distance (across town, even) cost $0.28 per minute, in 1970 dollars.
Everyone I've ever heard who blamed borrowers for defaulting, did so because they thought they were stupid and credulous, and in the next breath blamed mortgage companies 10x worse for exploiting that stupidity and credulousness with predatory lending. Again, I've never heard anyone ever say the banks did nothing wrong.
Finally, Wal*Mart IS generally loved, and they are loved _because_ they compete so well, placing downward pressure on prices, unlike Standard Oil and AT&T did. If that ever changes, you can bet people will be crying out for competitive pressures and marketplace diversity, just like they always do.
So, I guess what I mean is:
*citation needed*
Why do you say this? Americans I know decry the existence of monopolies, such as Microsoft's and AT&T's back in the 70s. There is backlash against cable monopolies and the idea of Wal*Mart getting too big for anyone's good. We're now talking about the idea of whether banks and insurance companies ought to have size limits before being broken into competing companies, because the failure of any one might create a near-monopolistic situation.
Awesome! I have a one GB mp4 that I'd like your help getting onto a CD-ROM...
Also, a GB of JPEGs and a GB of FLACs.
Thanks so much.
It is *one* theory
Again with the misunderstanding of what a scientific theory is. There can only BE one theory. There are many hypotheses, but those fall away one by one to become a single, very authoritative, theory. If something better comes along, then the theory of evolution goes away and is replaced by the new theory, be it evolution 1.0.1 or ID 12.6.1.3
In a field of grain, you can grow wheat, barley, rye or oats.
That's very true, of course. But you can't grow wheat, barley, and Ford Pintos. I'm arguing that physics, philosophy, and automobile repair are fields of study, while ID is not. It is a platform. An agenda. It's like saying the people paid by the tobacco companies to falsify studies on the effects of tobacco smoke are conducting science. Apples to orangutans.
I'm sure this was unintentional, but it is insulting in the extreme to label ID a 'field'.
The first day of owning a Wii you end up spending more on controllers and games than the console cost.
I don't understand this comment. Are you saying this because the Wii only comes with one controller and one nunchuk, and you have to buy four, whereas the 360 is different? Or are you saying that the cost of the Wiimote ($40) plus nunchuk ($20) plus Wii motion plus ($10 with a game) is too high?
I admit if you bought EVERY controller piece you possibly could right up front it would be a lot of money, but who does that? And is it so different for any other console?
It is my contention that those who have much, stole it from those who have not.
Then you imagine an economic system that sums to zero, which is false. You also imagine that a person who creates something of great value to many, and who asks compensation, is a thief. This is also false.
It is also my contention that those who want to live in a world where they can earn much more than others, through any means, are psychopaths who should be driven into the ocean.
Yes, so long as you place great emphasis on "through any means." Those who want to live in a world where they can earn much more than others through honest labor, innovation, and intelligence are not psychopaths, and are among our greatest treasures.
To covet the "American Dream" is to dream of being a tyrant. To achieve it is to be a tyrant. Neither should be tolerated in a sane and equitable society.
You and I must disagree on this point. Apparently you conceive of financial means as, by definition, a denial of others and an evil. I assume that you live in abject poverty and give away any resources as soon as they are acquired, living only on the charity of others? Or do you take the best paying job available over others whose souls are equally deserving, even though their fortunes have left them in want of equal talents? Are you glad to have what you have, and glad you aren't forced to have less? You have very boldly set a standard that will prove difficult to live up to without hypocrisy.
You are relating the beating of slaves to the capitalistic opportunity to build an economic future limited chiefly by one's own capabilities, which represents the opposite of slavery. In a capitalistic system, no one is "beaten" if they choose not to be productive. They simply live the lifestyle of a person with low productivity. Quoth Office Space: "Well, you don't need a million dollars to do nothing, man. Take a look at my cousin: he's broke, don't do shit."
Is it your contention that, for humans, freedom equates to the ability to live comfortably while contributing nothing to your lifestyle? Surely not. That would be a definition of freedom that defies all others.
So you can describe an implementation of communism where there is not a small group of individuals making decisions with far-reaching consequences? If so, how could this work? You have an economic system based on shared wealth and pooled advantage, yet no central mechanism for evening wealth and ensuring no-one accumulates too much economic power?
Also, if I am living in this society, why, exactly, am I interested in working my ass off to create innovative solutions to any of society's problems? It would seem that I could just live as well as anyone off the fat of the economic system, should there prove to be any.
Capitalism is the idea that a small group of individuals ought to be able to make unilateral decisions with wide reaching consequences according to their own arbitrary whims.
Is that not the very definition of working communism? A central authority of chosen individuals making decisions for everyone according to their necessarily flawed understanding of what is best? And I don't think Capitalism is that idea. That may be an unintended consequence, sometimes, but that's hardly the fault of the philosophy. It's merely a feature of human relations. Communism, on the other hand, uses it as its primary mechanism of action.
...you certainly write well for a two year old!
In case you were curious about other things:
- Bill Gates will not send you any money for forwarding an email.
- The Nigerian royal family is not interested in giving you money.
- Your penis will grow larger all by itself until you're about 17. No need to respond to those emails either.
What saved him? God didn't save him, nor did Jesus, or the Bible, which is what you are implying. What "saved" him was a shrewd appeal to an operational technicality in the court proceedings. Namely, the idea of "swearing to tell the whole truth". The religious part of it was just icing on a farcical cake.
Open your eyes, indeed.
How can a pregnancy be aborted if there is no pregnancy at all?
It should be made clear that the people to whom Zappa refers (knowingly or not) are MBAs who do a bad job at their eventual jobs. This notion of an unfeeling horror at the helm of a company of soul-less androids wrecking everything they touch for the sake of pure profit is nonsense. Corporations are simply groups of people gathered for a goal, one important factor of which is financial.
Go to any business school of ANY repute, and you will find instructors who give TOOLS to future business workers. Just like programmers gave managers the tool called "spreadsheet", business schools give tools like finance, accounting, operations, and so on. A very real component of this education is a notion of what is right, not just what is expedient or lucrative. In fact, every class I've ever seen has a powerful component of quality built in, along with philosophy and discussion about why quality is worth doing, how much, and when.
If some students fail to absorb this message, or fail to make use of it in the workplace, that is hardly a mark against the education, especially since so many of them do.
Sadly I don't have mod points, but I laughed.
I disagree. Bush has been pissing off real conservatives ever since he took office.
If you recall, in 2000 Bush ran on a VERY conservative platform: lower taxes, increase moral accountability in the executive office, lower taxes, rein in U.S. spending and nation-building, and lower taxes.
At almost every turn since his election, Bush has failed to actually follow through with his conservative campaign rhetoric, and has instead adopted a starkly neo-con agenda that his political base rejects. No real conservative presides over the largest increase in deficit spending and national debt in U.S. history. At least Reagan had a legitimate evil empire to fight. Bush has done this to us over IRAQ of all things!
The only reason he got re-elected in 2004 was that his conservative base harbors a really screwed up pseudo-romantic notion that you should never change presidents in the middle of a war, which is just about the worst ideological and electoral precedent I can imagine. Plus John Kerry was so underwhelming that he was about a half-notch above Mondale in his electability.
Anyway, Bush is not remotely a conservative. More like an Authoritarian Centrist. It's a pretty ugly combination.
I agree that the disks sound like the best option for you.
I, on the other hand, bought a DVD RW drive about three years ago and have burned exactly one DVD, just to try it out the day I installed it. I've found no good reason to burn DVDs at all. I've burned a few dozen CDs, mostly for playback in an audio CD player, but that hardly justifies the DVD RW expense.
The thing is, I don't burn movies, and if I have data enough to fill a DVD, I generally want instant rewritable access to it, so I want it on a hard drive or, at worst, a flash drive. I eventually bought an external 500 GB drive for that reason, and my DVD RW drive is gathering dust.
So I ended up paying $51 (I was a very late adopter) for one half-burned DVD that I didn't even need. I know better now, so I'll just be buying flash.
But you'll pay $175 for the drive you need to play the $1 disk (assuming you wait for the inevitable price drops after the initial $1200 early adopter tax).
Which means you'd need to use about 17 disks before the cheap disks even start paying off compared to 17 $10 solid state drives, and you STILL don't have the performance advantage.
Again, there are unique reasons to use disks, but price may or may not be one of them until the medium is ubiquitous and about to be replaced by a new one, like DVDs are today.
I agree that the same amount of energy will ENABLE more productivity, but does that really mean that the energy becomes more valuable? If I have one kilowatt-hour of energy, and the overall efficiency of industry is such that industry needs less energy, then the value of the energy itself would seem to be lower, since its scarcity is likely to be lower, and the demand is lower.
Plentiful item with lowered demand? Sounds like lowered value to me.
This is a very good point.
I think, though, that if you look at the population numbers, the percentage of the population that is "slow growth" or "negative growth" is insignificant compared to the percentage that is "hyper growth," such as China and India have been over the last few decades.
It's hard to say for sure what will happen when all the world's countries are at today's state-of-the-art level of technology. Obviously, at that point, that current top countries will be even further along. The question is, is there an absolute level of technology that enables a reduction in population growth, or is that level of technology always going to be relative to whatever the state of the art is?
AND, is this reduction in population growth simply a result of short-term economic or cultural pressures driven by resource scarcity? Meaning, if we suddenly discover how to create lots more energy and grow lots more food, will we still be compelled to limit population growth, even in the wealthy advanced societies?
Only time will tell, unfortunately.