While I never use cursive anymore, I find knowing how to read it is useful - I remember not being able to understand it at all before learning how to write it. The greater purpose in my opinion is for assisting in the development of fine motor skills, which all people will benefit from. So I put it in the same category of basic art classes - probably not critical to the core education of most students, but will improve their manual dexterity, and possibly give them an appreciation for skills which they don't possess.
1) Nobody is logical, or rational. A rational person would starve in front of the first closed door he finds. Why ?
So....the rational person would choose to do nothing and die rather than do something and die. How is this rational?
3) What can the human mind do ? A human mind copies what it senses
And if all minds (and bodies) were created equal, then the next Einstein would have studied under him, and advanced quickly from his points, just as Einstein studied under someone just as good as him but without the greater weight of experience that Einstein was given due to his additional mentors. Except this isn't how it happened. And the reason why is because we aren't created identical.
4) EVERY other thing you can do is a "trick" (for lack of a better word, if you want to, use "meme", but know that walking, breathing, coughing, even shitting is a meme that is learned), stored in what might be called RAM in your head.
And yet, some runners are better than others, not because of lack of desire or lack or training, but because of relative lack of ability (they still easily beat 99% of the population).
Sometimes even knowing what the trick is isn't enough to know when it's the right time to use it. The flaws compound from there. Certainly, experience explains some of it, but we aren't just a bunch of cogs, identically toothed and sized. We have strengths and weaknesses, not merely due to our experiences. And even if it is due entirely to our experiences, no two people live identical lives, so people will have more or less capacity to incorporate those memes, or to recognize when best to use them
When did you last hear one of them say they disagree with God, about anything? When did someone say, "That seems like a good act to me, but I heard God is against it, so I've decided to work against my own perception of good, and instead do what I think is evil. Because I'm wrong about what's good and evil." (Or better yet, instead of choosing perceived evil for God's sake, how about this: "I'll be punished in purgatory for my disobedience, but that's a price I choose to pay: it's up to us to make a stand against the divine tyrant, and hopefully, through our acts of conviction and sacrifice, persuade him to change his opinion.") It doesn't happen.
I suppose you've never seen someone say smoking is bad and then light up, or say that sleeping around is bad and then proceed to do so. If you look around a little harder I'm sure you can find people who are morally compromised, by their own standards and not mine, even in the religious realm. After all, religious people are people, too. In fact, we have a whole tradition built around this - it's called the New Year Resolution, which can be loosely defined as: things someone wishes they did, but haven't done before and, statistically, won't do for very long now.
Thus, even if no one were watching or guiding, mystics know the right thing to do. Whatever they decide to do, well, I'm sure God would have decided the same thing. Thus, God watching them doesn't count, because being watched by God is no different than being watched by yourself. A mystic is wise enough and informed enough, compassionate enough and uncompromising enough -- a paragon of ideal virtue in every way -- to be qualified to act as their own divine judge. This makes your "ultimate test" irrelevant and useless.
As for your pious statements, I suggest you read the Bible. Many people who were claimed to be loved by God did some truly horrible things, got called out by it, and acknowledged the error of their ways. Very very few were considered to be good enough to get a direct ticket to heaven. Whether you agree with it or not, your statements have no basis on the actual document in question, and if you wish to categorically criticize something you should choose to become informed first.
I've met plenty of Christians, religious types, and atheists whose worldview can be summed up as "I'm right even when I'm not consistent, and anyone who disagrees with me is hopelessly uninformed (and could benefit from trying to be more like me)." So maybe this is more of a people issue, and a generalization as opposed to a universal truth.
Do you have the right to deliberately harm others, so long as it's "just" emotional harm?
Freedom of speech means nothing if you qualify it with "as long as it doesn't offend anyone." Anything worth saying offended someone, up to and including "having slaves is wrong." Should we stop saying that, or agree that, while being offended is your right (as is any feeling you may have), you don't have a right to ask me to not say something that offends you.
While many nations put limits on free speech, the flaw in the logic is listed above (with the exception of causing immediate and irreparable harm). You are left with the unsavory choice of letting someone decide what isn't appropriate, usually the government. This leaves the inevitability of the government becoming both corrupt enough for people to speak out and willing to do something about it. Is it worth not offending some people and losing a tool in stemming the tide of government corruption?
I bought a 3D TV because it was cheaper than any others. Turns out LG was making proprietary glasses for each TV, and so, when last year's is done, nobody wants a TV with no glasses when you have to special order them for $300 each (not available in stores). They've switched to passive glasses now, but used proprietary active glasses previously, changing with each model year, and not available across all sets.
But the point is I have a 3D TV and got it for $300 less than the 2D of the same size and features.
This is one of the reasons why I haven't bought a 3D TV. I'm okay with passive (half my family already wears glasses), and I find it good enough at the theaters. Damned if I'm going to buy some active system, even if it is superior for 3D. Those proprietary glasses (why are they always proprietary?!) are going to suck the money out of your pocket and either need to be constantly charged or just sit on a shelf collecting dust. The other reason is I have no intention of paying a premium for a TV with a different, precisely-applied film on the screen basically the key difference for passive 3D screens). Even I, who is a fan of 3D, have no intention of using it all the time. If it costs much more than a comparable 2D screen, I'm not buying it.
Farmable land in the north (Canada and Russia) will increase significantly due to global warming.
Thawed tundra is not particularly farmable.
There is plenty of perfectly good farmland that would have greatly increased productivity if it had another few weeks of growing season. Tundra not required.
I was taught about 'stale greens' when I got my license. There were a few systems. The only one I used was that you had a stale green when the pedestrian walk sign went to stop. Still not a great system, and not in place at all lights.
Well, since the DOJ is involved, I'd make it a Federal Civil rights abuse case as well against the officers. The police in this nation have become more like paramilitary thugs in most places. Here's just a recent more pointed example. They do have a difficult job to do and yes, there's nearly a 100% chance that every time they arrest somebody or go about conducting their business, they'll be recorded by a phone or some other device. They just need to get used to it and do their job and stop abusing the public!
"Wow, three ridiculous demands!" said the police officer...
People talk about US decline and I wonder when did the US ever get to pinnacle of righteousness and prosperity to they are supposed to declining from?
Pinnacles are where things stop going up and start going down. Rosa Parks sitting in the front of the bus? Going up. Little kids getting groped in the name of security in a highly insecure queue? Going down. When the overall trend is downward, yep, that's called a decline.
Yes, this isn't unusual. I think the common phrase used in TVLand when this was done in the Eastern Bloc was, "Papers, please!" An excellent role model.
Sad to think there are countries that were in the Eastern Bloc that now have freedoms that Americans don't.
Wow, who pissed in your cornflakes, buddy? If you actually read what I said there, it's the complete separation of church and state on the marriage front, moreso than what we have now. As far as I know, church marriages generally carry legal repercussions in the United States, whereas with what I described, the only impact of a church marriage would be within the realm of the church (which could require a civil union as one of their conditions).
As for Monaco, it's their country and their rules. If they want to require a headstand contest to see who gets to wear the pants in the relationship, what has that to do with you? Besides, I don't know if you've noticed, but royalty tends to do a lot more hoop jumping than the average person in all circumstances. Why do you seem surprised by it happening in yet another part of their lives?
And yet, I think the gay marriage types wouldn't appreciate having the two terms be civil union and holy union. I really don't care about the terms, just make one civil and one religious, with legal issues pertaining to one and conditions within the church pertaining to the other.
Aaron Swartz is responsible for what happened to Aaron Swartz. Yes, the Feds played hard and dirty, but they didn't invent those tactics with Swartz. When you taunt a rattlesnake, you don't blame the rattlesnake for doing what a rattlesnake does when it bites you.
But I can blame people for behaving like rattlesnakes, and a government for supporting that behavior..
I think Morocco has something worth looking into - there is a disjoin between civil union and marriage. I'm not sure of the details, but I noticed some reference to it when the Prince married a commoner, and the hoops to jump through for it to be okay.
So here's my idea, very loosely based on that.
Make a new contract, call it civil union. Put some rules in place for how it works, and the tax ramifications involved. Whether more than two people are allowed to take part in this becomes a legal issue, and bypasses the whole "Well, if gay marriage is okay, why isn't polygamy?" issue. This is the part the government cares about, and gives you legal entitlements, such as tax breaks/penalties and insurance benefits. Existing marriages can be grandfathered in to also being civil unions
Make marriage an entirely ceremonial process/contract, as governed by the institutions that wish to perform it. It doesn't need to be regulated by government, because it has no legal ramifications. Whichever institutions design the contract can have their own rules regarding it, such as who you can marry and how many marriages you can be in at one time. This would still allow Catholics, for example, to not allow remarriages (under Catholic authority) without annulling previous marriages.
The traditionalists get to retain the sanctity of marriage (whatever that means in this day an age), the liberals get to have their gay union sanctioned by the government, with ensuing benefits (which are already allowed in many areas), we have the benefit of not having non-governmental authorities performing contracts of a rather unique nature, and those non-governmental authorities no longer need to worry about being required to be inclusive to non-standard groups (since the ceremony has no legal ramifications, anyway). Everybody wins?
You assume that all wolves will submit to dominance. Where do lone wolves come from? Also, even with dogs, within my lifetime it was an accepted opinion that if a sheep dog attacked a sheep that it would have to be put down. Realistically, it is no longer safe to use for work. Some further reading here and here. Some of the responses, up to and including euthanasia, sound rather brutal to me, and that's with domesticated dogs. That's what I was referring to: not the choice between beating the animal or just whacking it on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper, but killing it or exerting a dominance response typical to a wolf pack (which would be rather brutal to many modern humans).
Perhaps submissiveness isn't the proper term. Like in the silver fox article, perhaps more friendliness to humans and willingness to cooperate. The difference between, "This pup turned out well, we want more like him," and "This pup didn't turn out very well. We'll let it live, but we don't want any litters from him."
As to dogs responding well to humans, there are too many species of animal with that response for me to believe it's a fortuitous accident, as least not so much that it can't be replicated with many creatures with a social structure conducive to having a leader. Horses, cows, dogs, chickens, elephants and more have all exhibited this trait (and all have complex social structures). After a certain point, calling it an accident is a bit of a reach.
Well, certainly. After all, people don't look much like Australopithecus, yet here we are. But that still doesn't negate the value of a "tame" wolf. Sure, the term is incorrect, as you stated, but even a wolf pup will have value, alerting to intruders, and being more than eager to hunt. Also, they might be more inclined to stay with their blended pack if there are potential mates present. Sure, you'd have to be brutal with them, to make sure humans maintain the alpha position, and probably culling the overly-dominant (read: normal) wolves.
Also, if you read about the silver fox domestication program, 30 generations of selecting for friendliness towards humans (little more than one human lifetime in prehistoric times) led to physical alterations in the species. Apparently, some of these changes happen rather quickly.
I think the editor just has an axe to grind with capitalism. Granted its not perfect, but neither is democracy. However both have historically worked better than the alternatives.
Unfortunately, capitalism is such a general term that it means almost nothing. It's kind of like saying "mammals do pretty well in most environments". It doesn't say much about humans, or if I want to visit some of those locales. Free market capitalism seems to have as many problems as heavily regulated capitalism, just different problems. Like most things, it probably works best with a certain balance, which has rarely if ever been achieved.
True, but the important distinction between wolves and dogs is that except for rare wolves with inherently submissive personalities, the wolf will also want to lead the pack.
What do you think you'd get if you spent generations of killing off the less submissive captured wolves while keeping the more submissive ones, and breeding them with each other? Dogs, perhaps?
Someone here has a sig about taxes being the price of civilization.
True, but there are (at least) two ways of looking at it. The first is to see it as moral, a needed contribution to keep society healthy and just. The second is to see it as extortion, $600/month per person is what the barbarians want in exchange for not burning your precious city to the ground.
Okay, so you decide you won't pay Dirk the Dane to not burn your house to the ground. But you can't stop on your own, and let's just face it, you're a farmer and not a very good fighter. So you and a number of neighbors get together and decide to hire Sven the Savior to protect your land - and the plus is, he only wants $400/month (for now, anyways) from each of you, and he'll protect you from more than just Dirk. But after a while all of you don't want to have to bother talking to Sven every day, so you elect (uh oh, starting to sound like government) Farmer Joe to talk to him - after all, you all trust him, and he knows exactly what you're looking for. This takes almost no time at all for Joe, so he does it for free (or maybe he has a deal with Sven, and Sven is happy to pay him $20/month to end the ceaseless meetings).
Continue that train of thought much further and you have full-blown civilization. So, who exactly pays for your police force? And sure, it's probably better than Dane geld, but what if the Danes already live next door? What if one of the options were to give these Danes the opportunity to find a niche in your community besides raping and pillaging?
This is a silly example
200/100 = 2x
100/0 = Infinite
This reminds me of a joke I heard.
An accountant and an economist are walking in the park together. As they pass a pond they see a frog. The economist says to the accountant, "I'll pay you $40 to lick that frog." The accountant thinks about it for a moment, agrees to lick the frog, and the economist gives him his $40. As they continue, they see another frog, and the account says to the economist, "I'll pay you $40 to lick that frog." The economist agrees, licks the frog, and gets his $40. The accountant then says, "Well, what was the point of that? Now we've both licked a frog and have nothing to show for it!" The economist replies, "True, but the economy has seen an increase of $80!"
So, after a lot of reading, I've come to the conclusion that economists aren't very rational people.
No, it's one of the dumbest ideas I've seen spread across the Internet lately.
and modern capitalism's worst fear (how can you enslave those who have choice?), giving me two reasons to love it.
How are you going to give a 'universal basic income' to everyone without enslaving those who produce that wealth in the first place? They have a choice: until you send them to the inevitable gulags, they can say 'screw you' and stay at home instead of working.
I suppose you'd rather spend the money on these shiftless people via private industries taking the burden of under-performers, and pay for additional policing and prisons to deal with the people who aren't suited or willing to work to support themselves? That sounds like a much more economical solution. Oh right, taxes are being used to deal with those issues already.
Someone here has a sig about taxes being the price of civilization. There is a balance between Dane geld and social support. The people who aren't willing or able to fit into the normal molds of civilization are going to have a cost one way or another. I personally prefer a better method than letting them freeze or starve to death in the streets.
Jobs knew how to manipulate people into wanting what he had to sell them. He was an excellent salesman.
He was an excellent salesman, certainly fallible, and with a well-earned reputation for his RDF. However, he did a damn good job of knowing what people did want!
I guess a bad sense is still a sense, so, ok.
So if you're saying Jobs had a bad sense of taste, yours--by comparison--is better? Why should we believe you? The corpus of Jobs' legacy is in front of us.
Sure, in aesthetics, Steve did pretty well. I'll grant you the attention to detail. But he did screw up in aesthetics and design oversight more than once. For my exhibits, I present Quicktime and iTunes. Quicktime committed the sin of pretending that a graphical interface could easily mimic a physical interface, leaving parts of the UI able to slide off the edge of the screen. iTunes is just a poor interface, and seems to me to be one of the least intuitive products released by Apple (I'll admit that my use of their products is narrow in scope). I honestly think the only reason iTunes does as well as it does is because it's the simplest interface for dealing with iOS hardware. That, also, is a design choice, and a poor one in my opinion.
Reminds me of all the times my daughter would sit in the backseat of my car with a friend and they'd be texting each other... wtf?
Let me clue you in. This is what they do when they want to talk about stuff that they don't want the person in the front seat to know about. I have to admit that I've used the same technique a few times when at the restaurant with some friends, and once when visiting my girlfriend's parents.
Slashdot Mirror
While I never use cursive anymore, I find knowing how to read it is useful - I remember not being able to understand it at all before learning how to write it. The greater purpose in my opinion is for assisting in the development of fine motor skills, which all people will benefit from. So I put it in the same category of basic art classes - probably not critical to the core education of most students, but will improve their manual dexterity, and possibly give them an appreciation for skills which they don't possess.
1) Nobody is logical, or rational. A rational person would starve in front of the first closed door he finds. Why ?
So....the rational person would choose to do nothing and die rather than do something and die. How is this rational?
3) What can the human mind do ? A human mind copies what it senses
And if all minds (and bodies) were created equal, then the next Einstein would have studied under him, and advanced quickly from his points, just as Einstein studied under someone just as good as him but without the greater weight of experience that Einstein was given due to his additional mentors. Except this isn't how it happened. And the reason why is because we aren't created identical.
4) EVERY other thing you can do is a "trick" (for lack of a better word, if you want to, use "meme", but know that walking, breathing, coughing, even shitting is a meme that is learned), stored in what might be called RAM in your head.
And yet, some runners are better than others, not because of lack of desire or lack or training, but because of relative lack of ability (they still easily beat 99% of the population).
Sometimes even knowing what the trick is isn't enough to know when it's the right time to use it. The flaws compound from there. Certainly, experience explains some of it, but we aren't just a bunch of cogs, identically toothed and sized. We have strengths and weaknesses, not merely due to our experiences. And even if it is due entirely to our experiences, no two people live identical lives, so people will have more or less capacity to incorporate those memes, or to recognize when best to use them
When did you last hear one of them say they disagree with God, about anything? When did someone say, "That seems like a good act to me, but I heard God is against it, so I've decided to work against my own perception of good, and instead do what I think is evil. Because I'm wrong about what's good and evil." (Or better yet, instead of choosing perceived evil for God's sake, how about this: "I'll be punished in purgatory for my disobedience, but that's a price I choose to pay: it's up to us to make a stand against the divine tyrant, and hopefully, through our acts of conviction and sacrifice, persuade him to change his opinion.") It doesn't happen.
I suppose you've never seen someone say smoking is bad and then light up, or say that sleeping around is bad and then proceed to do so. If you look around a little harder I'm sure you can find people who are morally compromised, by their own standards and not mine, even in the religious realm. After all, religious people are people, too. In fact, we have a whole tradition built around this - it's called the New Year Resolution, which can be loosely defined as: things someone wishes they did, but haven't done before and, statistically, won't do for very long now.
Thus, even if no one were watching or guiding, mystics know the right thing to do. Whatever they decide to do, well, I'm sure God would have decided the same thing. Thus, God watching them doesn't count, because being watched by God is no different than being watched by yourself. A mystic is wise enough and informed enough, compassionate enough and uncompromising enough -- a paragon of ideal virtue in every way -- to be qualified to act as their own divine judge. This makes your "ultimate test" irrelevant and useless.
As for your pious statements, I suggest you read the Bible. Many people who were claimed to be loved by God did some truly horrible things, got called out by it, and acknowledged the error of their ways. Very very few were considered to be good enough to get a direct ticket to heaven. Whether you agree with it or not, your statements have no basis on the actual document in question, and if you wish to categorically criticize something you should choose to become informed first.
I've met plenty of Christians, religious types, and atheists whose worldview can be summed up as "I'm right even when I'm not consistent, and anyone who disagrees with me is hopelessly uninformed (and could benefit from trying to be more like me)." So maybe this is more of a people issue, and a generalization as opposed to a universal truth.
Do you have the right to deliberately harm others, so long as it's "just" emotional harm?
Freedom of speech means nothing if you qualify it with "as long as it doesn't offend anyone." Anything worth saying offended someone, up to and including "having slaves is wrong." Should we stop saying that, or agree that, while being offended is your right (as is any feeling you may have), you don't have a right to ask me to not say something that offends you.
While many nations put limits on free speech, the flaw in the logic is listed above (with the exception of causing immediate and irreparable harm). You are left with the unsavory choice of letting someone decide what isn't appropriate, usually the government. This leaves the inevitability of the government becoming both corrupt enough for people to speak out and willing to do something about it. Is it worth not offending some people and losing a tool in stemming the tide of government corruption?
I bought a 3D TV because it was cheaper than any others. Turns out LG was making proprietary glasses for each TV, and so, when last year's is done, nobody wants a TV with no glasses when you have to special order them for $300 each (not available in stores). They've switched to passive glasses now, but used proprietary active glasses previously, changing with each model year, and not available across all sets. But the point is I have a 3D TV and got it for $300 less than the 2D of the same size and features.
This is one of the reasons why I haven't bought a 3D TV. I'm okay with passive (half my family already wears glasses), and I find it good enough at the theaters. Damned if I'm going to buy some active system, even if it is superior for 3D. Those proprietary glasses (why are they always proprietary?!) are going to suck the money out of your pocket and either need to be constantly charged or just sit on a shelf collecting dust. The other reason is I have no intention of paying a premium for a TV with a different, precisely-applied film on the screen basically the key difference for passive 3D screens). Even I, who is a fan of 3D, have no intention of using it all the time. If it costs much more than a comparable 2D screen, I'm not buying it.
I first read that as "they were not stupid, british creatures".
And since you could easily read that in English, you clearly aren't French.
Thawed tundra is not particularly farmable.
There is plenty of perfectly good farmland that would have greatly increased productivity if it had another few weeks of growing season. Tundra not required.
I was taught about 'stale greens' when I got my license. There were a few systems. The only one I used was that you had a stale green when the pedestrian walk sign went to stop. Still not a great system, and not in place at all lights.
Well, since the DOJ is involved, I'd make it a Federal Civil rights abuse case as well against the officers. The police in this nation have become more like paramilitary thugs in most places. Here's just a recent more pointed example. They do have a difficult job to do and yes, there's nearly a 100% chance that every time they arrest somebody or go about conducting their business, they'll be recorded by a phone or some other device. They just need to get used to it and do their job and stop abusing the public!
"Wow, three ridiculous demands!" said the police officer...
People talk about US decline and I wonder when did the US ever get to pinnacle of righteousness and prosperity to they are supposed to declining from?
Pinnacles are where things stop going up and start going down. Rosa Parks sitting in the front of the bus? Going up. Little kids getting groped in the name of security in a highly insecure queue? Going down. When the overall trend is downward, yep, that's called a decline.
Yes, this isn't unusual. I think the common phrase used in TVLand when this was done in the Eastern Bloc was, "Papers, please!" An excellent role model.
Sad to think there are countries that were in the Eastern Bloc that now have freedoms that Americans don't.
Wow, who pissed in your cornflakes, buddy? If you actually read what I said there, it's the complete separation of church and state on the marriage front, moreso than what we have now. As far as I know, church marriages generally carry legal repercussions in the United States, whereas with what I described, the only impact of a church marriage would be within the realm of the church (which could require a civil union as one of their conditions).
As for Monaco, it's their country and their rules. If they want to require a headstand contest to see who gets to wear the pants in the relationship, what has that to do with you? Besides, I don't know if you've noticed, but royalty tends to do a lot more hoop jumping than the average person in all circumstances. Why do you seem surprised by it happening in yet another part of their lives?
And yet, I think the gay marriage types wouldn't appreciate having the two terms be civil union and holy union. I really don't care about the terms, just make one civil and one religious, with legal issues pertaining to one and conditions within the church pertaining to the other.
Aaron Swartz is responsible for what happened to Aaron Swartz. Yes, the Feds played hard and dirty, but they didn't invent those tactics with Swartz. When you taunt a rattlesnake, you don't blame the rattlesnake for doing what a rattlesnake does when it bites you.
But I can blame people for behaving like rattlesnakes, and a government for supporting that behavior..
I think Morocco has something worth looking into - there is a disjoin between civil union and marriage. I'm not sure of the details, but I noticed some reference to it when the Prince married a commoner, and the hoops to jump through for it to be okay.
So here's my idea, very loosely based on that.
Make a new contract, call it civil union. Put some rules in place for how it works, and the tax ramifications involved. Whether more than two people are allowed to take part in this becomes a legal issue, and bypasses the whole "Well, if gay marriage is okay, why isn't polygamy?" issue. This is the part the government cares about, and gives you legal entitlements, such as tax breaks/penalties and insurance benefits. Existing marriages can be grandfathered in to also being civil unions
Make marriage an entirely ceremonial process/contract, as governed by the institutions that wish to perform it. It doesn't need to be regulated by government, because it has no legal ramifications. Whichever institutions design the contract can have their own rules regarding it, such as who you can marry and how many marriages you can be in at one time. This would still allow Catholics, for example, to not allow remarriages (under Catholic authority) without annulling previous marriages.
The traditionalists get to retain the sanctity of marriage (whatever that means in this day an age), the liberals get to have their gay union sanctioned by the government, with ensuing benefits (which are already allowed in many areas), we have the benefit of not having non-governmental authorities performing contracts of a rather unique nature, and those non-governmental authorities no longer need to worry about being required to be inclusive to non-standard groups (since the ceremony has no legal ramifications, anyway). Everybody wins?
You assume that all wolves will submit to dominance. Where do lone wolves come from? Also, even with dogs, within my lifetime it was an accepted opinion that if a sheep dog attacked a sheep that it would have to be put down. Realistically, it is no longer safe to use for work. Some further reading here and here. Some of the responses, up to and including euthanasia, sound rather brutal to me, and that's with domesticated dogs. That's what I was referring to: not the choice between beating the animal or just whacking it on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper, but killing it or exerting a dominance response typical to a wolf pack (which would be rather brutal to many modern humans).
Perhaps submissiveness isn't the proper term. Like in the silver fox article, perhaps more friendliness to humans and willingness to cooperate. The difference between, "This pup turned out well, we want more like him," and "This pup didn't turn out very well. We'll let it live, but we don't want any litters from him."
As to dogs responding well to humans, there are too many species of animal with that response for me to believe it's a fortuitous accident, as least not so much that it can't be replicated with many creatures with a social structure conducive to having a leader. Horses, cows, dogs, chickens, elephants and more have all exhibited this trait (and all have complex social structures). After a certain point, calling it an accident is a bit of a reach.
Well, certainly. After all, people don't look much like Australopithecus, yet here we are. But that still doesn't negate the value of a "tame" wolf. Sure, the term is incorrect, as you stated, but even a wolf pup will have value, alerting to intruders, and being more than eager to hunt. Also, they might be more inclined to stay with their blended pack if there are potential mates present. Sure, you'd have to be brutal with them, to make sure humans maintain the alpha position, and probably culling the overly-dominant (read: normal) wolves.
Also, if you read about the silver fox domestication program, 30 generations of selecting for friendliness towards humans (little more than one human lifetime in prehistoric times) led to physical alterations in the species. Apparently, some of these changes happen rather quickly.
I think the editor just has an axe to grind with capitalism. Granted its not perfect, but neither is democracy. However both have historically worked better than the alternatives.
Unfortunately, capitalism is such a general term that it means almost nothing. It's kind of like saying "mammals do pretty well in most environments". It doesn't say much about humans, or if I want to visit some of those locales. Free market capitalism seems to have as many problems as heavily regulated capitalism, just different problems. Like most things, it probably works best with a certain balance, which has rarely if ever been achieved.
True, but the important distinction between wolves and dogs is that except for rare wolves with inherently submissive personalities, the wolf will also want to lead the pack.
What do you think you'd get if you spent generations of killing off the less submissive captured wolves while keeping the more submissive ones, and breeding them with each other? Dogs, perhaps?
True, but there are (at least) two ways of looking at it. The first is to see it as moral, a needed contribution to keep society healthy and just. The second is to see it as extortion, $600/month per person is what the barbarians want in exchange for not burning your precious city to the ground.
Okay, so you decide you won't pay Dirk the Dane to not burn your house to the ground. But you can't stop on your own, and let's just face it, you're a farmer and not a very good fighter. So you and a number of neighbors get together and decide to hire Sven the Savior to protect your land - and the plus is, he only wants $400/month (for now, anyways) from each of you, and he'll protect you from more than just Dirk. But after a while all of you don't want to have to bother talking to Sven every day, so you elect (uh oh, starting to sound like government) Farmer Joe to talk to him - after all, you all trust him, and he knows exactly what you're looking for. This takes almost no time at all for Joe, so he does it for free (or maybe he has a deal with Sven, and Sven is happy to pay him $20/month to end the ceaseless meetings).
Continue that train of thought much further and you have full-blown civilization. So, who exactly pays for your police force? And sure, it's probably better than Dane geld, but what if the Danes already live next door? What if one of the options were to give these Danes the opportunity to find a niche in your community besides raping and pillaging?
This is a silly example 200/100 = 2x 100/0 = Infinite
This reminds me of a joke I heard.
An accountant and an economist are walking in the park together. As they pass a pond they see a frog. The economist says to the accountant, "I'll pay you $40 to lick that frog." The accountant thinks about it for a moment, agrees to lick the frog, and the economist gives him his $40. As they continue, they see another frog, and the account says to the economist, "I'll pay you $40 to lick that frog." The economist agrees, licks the frog, and gets his $40. The accountant then says, "Well, what was the point of that? Now we've both licked a frog and have nothing to show for it!" The economist replies, "True, but the economy has seen an increase of $80!"
So, after a lot of reading, I've come to the conclusion that economists aren't very rational people.
But universal basic income is a sound idea,
No, it's one of the dumbest ideas I've seen spread across the Internet lately.
and modern capitalism's worst fear (how can you enslave those who have choice?), giving me two reasons to love it.
How are you going to give a 'universal basic income' to everyone without enslaving those who produce that wealth in the first place? They have a choice: until you send them to the inevitable gulags, they can say 'screw you' and stay at home instead of working.
I suppose you'd rather spend the money on these shiftless people via private industries taking the burden of under-performers, and pay for additional policing and prisons to deal with the people who aren't suited or willing to work to support themselves? That sounds like a much more economical solution. Oh right, taxes are being used to deal with those issues already.
Someone here has a sig about taxes being the price of civilization. There is a balance between Dane geld and social support. The people who aren't willing or able to fit into the normal molds of civilization are going to have a cost one way or another. I personally prefer a better method than letting them freeze or starve to death in the streets.
Except that, with the accuracy of Apple Maps, you ask them to black out Texas, and it'll be New Jersey that disappears off the maps!
I fail to see this as a bad thing.
It still leaves Texas on the maps, so net neutral.
Jobs knew how to manipulate people into wanting what he had to sell them. He was an excellent salesman.
He was an excellent salesman, certainly fallible, and with a well-earned reputation for his RDF. However, he did a damn good job of knowing what people did want!
I guess a bad sense is still a sense, so, ok.
So if you're saying Jobs had a bad sense of taste, yours--by comparison--is better? Why should we believe you? The corpus of Jobs' legacy is in front of us.
Sure, in aesthetics, Steve did pretty well. I'll grant you the attention to detail. But he did screw up in aesthetics and design oversight more than once. For my exhibits, I present Quicktime and iTunes. Quicktime committed the sin of pretending that a graphical interface could easily mimic a physical interface, leaving parts of the UI able to slide off the edge of the screen. iTunes is just a poor interface, and seems to me to be one of the least intuitive products released by Apple (I'll admit that my use of their products is narrow in scope). I honestly think the only reason iTunes does as well as it does is because it's the simplest interface for dealing with iOS hardware. That, also, is a design choice, and a poor one in my opinion.
Reminds me of all the times my daughter would sit in the backseat of my car with a friend and they'd be texting each other... wtf?
Let me clue you in. This is what they do when they want to talk about stuff that they don't want the person in the front seat to know about. I have to admit that I've used the same technique a few times when at the restaurant with some friends, and once when visiting my girlfriend's parents.