Allow me to give a modern day example. a modern day woman wearing a hijab can melt you with her eyes. She might be covered from head to to otherwise. Covering a woman's body is often something that spurs interest. But we didn't evolve clothed, so if your logic holds, we should have died out long before clothing was developed, because no one would be interested.
While lust is fun, it's not what led to our species surviving (as you seem to agree with later).
So sex should be as absolutely difficult to obtain and rare as possible in order to generate interest? Ugh. Aside from the physiological and instinctual problems that would create, it sounds like a recipe for extreme sexual repression, sexual assault, and control. Dreary indeed, and seriously unnatural.
Not at all what I said. It seems to work out pretty well the way we do it in modern society; not that rare, not super common, and a lot of fun. I am absolutely not suggesting sexual repression but if it were as meaningless as in the book, it would be pointless and not even worth bothering (at least pointless past your teen years when you get it out of your system)
What an odd question. But okay, I'll answer. There is a learning process that young people go through with regards to sex and emotional attachments. To say I didn't like the young ladies I consorted with would be untrue. But it was all completely consensual, all fun, "wanna go get breakfast?"and there were no victims. Going out on the town, meeting young ladies who are also looking for an enjoyable evening out is not by definition and end game in itself. Men age and become more discriminating and the first blush of virility and lust dies down, women start to think about having children, and obtaining a support structure which enables raising them. There is nothing inconsistent with the concept of settling down after the so called sowing wild oats.
This is why I think we fundamentally agree. First, as you say here, survival of the species is not about sowing wild outs but creating a support structure for raising kids. Second, once you get past childhood immaturity, it really is more a social activity. Sure sex is fun, but if you can have as much as you want with whomever you want and it means nothing more to either of you than saying hi to a casual acquaintance it loses all meaning (once you mature past the kid in a candy store phase of life).
Who's talking about a deep emotional connection. For a lot of those "not always good boys", a huge part of the pleasure is the hunt and challenge, feeling a visceral victory. In Brave New World, that kind of sex is also lost.
150 years ago, seeing a little flash of a woman's ankle was on the same tier as we would put full nudity today. So, last time a girl showed you her ankle, how thrilling was it for you? As something becomes commonplace and easy, it loses value. I'm sure you'd enjoy being handed a large gold bar right now. If all the sand in the world were turned into gold, then how much would you like that gold bar? You'd probably toss it in the garbage.
And if you were such a great pick up artist in your teens and 20's, why did you stop. Try it now, you won't enjoy it nearly as much, not because the sex is less good, but because it has become too mundane for you. If you haven't experienced declining marginal utility in your life, it's hard to believe you've left your teen years.
Wasting your life away on soma because life sucks so bad. And the point Huxley tried to make is that when sex is more casual than saying "hi" it loses all meaning and pleasure.
Plus the whole thing about humans being interchangeable assembly line products. Process people on the assembly line to run the assembly line.
True, the Science would be sounds but the Nobel committee is as corrupt as the IOC these days.
How did the inventor of the blue LED win a Nobel prize while the inventor of the LED (including red, orange, yellow, and green) didn't share it even though he's still alive.
It's all corruption and politics. And don't even get started on Peace and Literature.
The summary did not say the battery can provide 6MW to the grid, and neither did I about my AA battery.
It said it can store energy equal to 6MW. but a MW is not a measure of energy and I in my post I misused it exactly the same way the summary did.
As for your request to about a 2000W electric kettle, why don't you google supercaps. You should be able to run the kettle off a few dollars worth of capacitor bank. For a few seconds.
I use photographic camera flashes that do use about 6MW of power. And since I use 3 at once, that's closer to 20MW. For about 1/10,000th of a second at a time. They are 640Ws flashes with a 1/10,000th second strobe time.
The 10 megawatt (MW) solar farm, in Clayhill, Bedfordshire, can generate enough electricity to power around 2,500 homes and also has a 6 MW battery storage facility on site.
Well I have a AA battery that's over 6 gigawatts....that is will store more than 6 gigawatt-microseconds of energy
So if we can reduce mortality rate 99% while also doing some small amount of harm, we shouldn't do it? Because if you don't think sheer human stupidity kills ten's of thousands of people a year on the roads, I just don't know what you look at when you drive.
And if you think every step along the way in medical advances for birth did no further harm, you are sadly ignorant of medicine and history.
Doctors wanted little to do with women's issues, pretty much every thing they did between the 15th and 20th centuries was wild guesses that did a huge amount of harm. But int he 15th century the mother's mortality rate was so high that women would have to create their will as soon as they found out they were pregnant.
You're right, people are satisfied with the risk. So why try and reduce it?
A couple of hundred years ago, infant mortality was around 40% and maternal mortality around 10%. Getting pregnant was literally fatal 10% of the time. Yet most women still did it. I guess they were satisfied with the risk . What fools people are for developing medical technology to reduce that risk. And now all the foolish doctors have taken on malpractice liability for nothing.
The thing is, currently 50,000 people a year die on American roads. Even if self-driving cars could reduce that number 99%, rather than getting credit for saving 49,500 people a year, these car companies would be ripped apart for "murdering" 500 people a year. Rather than winning accolades for saving 10's of thousands of lives, they'd be sued for hundreds of millions a year for those hundreds of deaths.
You need legislation to prevent that kind of liability, and it will save many, many lives. It just won't save everyone.
Computer Science degrees aren't supposed to lead to jobs as "coders". That's like saying someone with a degree in mechanical engineering aren't getting a good return on their investment in the degree when they get a job doing oil changes.
You can learn coding in a couple of days. Computer science is something different.
The problem is that, somewhat alarmingly, the word "consciousness" is often used in the literature as if it entailed or implied more than just the qualities of experience. Dijksterhuis and Nordgren, for instance, insisted that "it is very important to realize that attention is the key to distinguish between unconscious thought and conscious thought.
So they're redefining thought so broadly that most animals are conscious too by their definition and the pretending they have some revolutionary insight when all they have done is confused themselves about what they are talking about.
Babies are not conscious. I could see my child make the transition from not recognizing herself to recognizing herself in a mirror; that's a pretty strong test thought not definitive in itself.
Humans do not innately learn consciousness at all, and it was a very recent discovery and it is something that is taught, not picked up automatically: https://www.amazon.ca/Origin-C...
Helen Keller's own accounts of her youth strongly support that idea.
1 day after binge watching, you're testing their memory on details from yesterday. 1 day after the weekly group, you're asking them the same questions about details from 36 days ago. Do you remember details of a show you watched over a month ago as well as what you saw last night?
Really? So no degree and you expect saving half your money for 7-10 years should let you retire comfortably to wealth? Wow. I'm familiar with rich dad, poor dad, it's a way to make money from suckers.
Let's say you amazingly make $80k somehow without a degree. You clear $50k and save $25k and keep it up for 10 years. At 10% return, you'll have $400,000. At 20% return it would be $650,000. Now remember you can't invest 50% of your pay tax free, so when you pay taxes every year, you'll actually have:
$345,000 at 10% or
$483,000 at 20%
As insane as it is, let's look the 20%. Now after 10 years, you've got about 1/2 million in the bank. You're about 30 years old at this point, so you can't just spend all your investment income; you have to factor in for a good 60 years of inflation. Let's grow your investment 3% per year to compensate for inflation. Your gross income is $100,000, you clear $70,000 after tax. From this you have to put back 3% of $500,000 or $15,000 meaning you've got $55,000 to spend every year. And that amount will grow through your life with cost of living. But you need to account for private health insurance since you're not going to be working
So you've lived though your 20's with an austere existence saving half your money while most people that age are out enjoying their lives, already a huge sacrifice. And your income is far to look to really do much with, do you plan to sit at home your whole life in a rented apartment, only ever buy used cars, never travel, never visit a nice restaurant. What a horrible waste of a life.
And add to that...how in the world are you going to *safely* make 20% interest. Because of the risky investments, all you need is a nice 20% market correction in the next 60 years and you'll lose a big chunk of your income for the rest of your life.
If you could make 10% safely instead of 20 (which is still pretty amazing), you;d have the $345k after 10 years, giving you $34k pretax income. At that income range you'd barely pay tax, but you'd still have to put back 3% of your next egg every year to account for inflation, which will cost you about $10k. So...you're going to have $25,000/year for the rest of your life, corrected for inflation. Out of that you still need to pay for health insurance.
How is a net income of $25k "enjoying a wealthy retirement"? And you'll still be ruined by the first market correction in the next 60 years.
Plus, don't forget this is all based on you having had a job with a $80k starting salary to walk away from after 10 years.
tl;dr. That;'s a horrible idea put forth by people who want to make money selling books and seminars and only fallen for by suckers who are bad at math.
But for jobs in Kernel/hardware level development, coding webpages for a dotcom startup was career suicide anyway. I would have had the same 3 years of hell like you and when the market recovered the prestige jobs were going to the new batch of grads, not someone 5 years out. Which is kind of my point about the field being horrible; 5 years out of school, 1 hiccup in the industry, and I was screwed out of any job that would use what I went to school for.
One friend of mine from school actually washed out because she couldn't handle multivariable calculus which was a CS degree requirement at the time. She switched to a BA and BEd joint program, which she cruised through on autopilot, got a teaching job easily with math and computers as teachables and is currently vice principal at a private school. She's doing a lot better career-wise and financially than anyone in our group who finished our original degree.
Please....coding or tech support is no more skilled or high paying than a job doing oil changes on cars all day. And just as changing oil is not a career in the automotive industry, coding is not a career in computer science. Your first clue should be all the coding boot camps that teach you the "profession" in less time than it takes to learn to do oil changes.
For one thing, taking a "programming" job makes it a lot harder to move back into a "computer science" job. It just doesn't look goo on your resume.
For another, the job I did end up taking pays more than a "programming" job though not nearly as lucrative as what I was promised during the last tech bubble, I just really, really hate it. As I would really, really hate a programming job.
And today, we're in a similar sort of tech bubble with idiotic articles like the one here leading a whole new generation into the same mistake. If you're smart enough to do CS at a *good school*, do engineering or science instead.
Not sure if you're throwing the word "programming job" around loosely or really mean the distinction, but there's a huge difference between the work I was doing and "programming".
I had a single job interview question for at a major OS developer you're heard of in their kernel group that involved spending most of a day at a white board in front of a panel of project managers, not just creating a good, elegant and workable design, but also walking them through my thought process and design decisions. The whole interview lasted 4 days. On an internship before I graduated, I was writing graphics card drivers. At that job doing the set top box, I had to teach the hardware engineers how MPEG video worked because they had to build a hardware decoder into the silicon.
I was not remotely interested in a low paying "programming job" especially when as others have mentioned in this thread cost of living in these areas is very high.
Slashdot Mirror
Allow me to give a modern day example. a modern day woman wearing a hijab can melt you with her eyes. She might be covered from head to to otherwise. Covering a woman's body is often something that spurs interest. But we didn't evolve clothed, so if your logic holds, we should have died out long before clothing was developed, because no one would be interested.
While lust is fun, it's not what led to our species surviving (as you seem to agree with later).
So sex should be as absolutely difficult to obtain and rare as possible in order to generate interest? Ugh. Aside from the physiological and instinctual problems that would create, it sounds like a recipe for extreme sexual repression, sexual assault, and control. Dreary indeed, and seriously unnatural.
Not at all what I said. It seems to work out pretty well the way we do it in modern society; not that rare, not super common, and a lot of fun. I am absolutely not suggesting sexual repression but if it were as meaningless as in the book, it would be pointless and not even worth bothering (at least pointless past your teen years when you get it out of your system)
What an odd question. But okay, I'll answer. There is a learning process that young people go through with regards to sex and emotional attachments. To say I didn't like the young ladies I consorted with would be untrue. But it was all completely consensual, all fun, "wanna go get breakfast?"and there were no victims. Going out on the town, meeting young ladies who are also looking for an enjoyable evening out is not by definition and end game in itself. Men age and become more discriminating and the first blush of virility and lust dies down, women start to think about having children, and obtaining a support structure which enables raising them. There is nothing inconsistent with the concept of settling down after the so called sowing wild oats.
This is why I think we fundamentally agree. First, as you say here, survival of the species is not about sowing wild outs but creating a support structure for raising kids. Second, once you get past childhood immaturity, it really is more a social activity. Sure sex is fun, but if you can have as much as you want with whomever you want and it means nothing more to either of you than saying hi to a casual acquaintance it loses all meaning (once you mature past the kid in a candy store phase of life).
I don't want a tablet. I don't want a laptop that acts like a tablet. I don't want google spyware pre-installed. I don't want chromeOS.
I do want a powerful and open laptop.
So there is nothing to like about this product.
Who's talking about a deep emotional connection. For a lot of those "not always good boys", a huge part of the pleasure is the hunt and challenge, feeling a visceral victory. In Brave New World, that kind of sex is also lost.
150 years ago, seeing a little flash of a woman's ankle was on the same tier as we would put full nudity today. So, last time a girl showed you her ankle, how thrilling was it for you? As something becomes commonplace and easy, it loses value. I'm sure you'd enjoy being handed a large gold bar right now. If all the sand in the world were turned into gold, then how much would you like that gold bar? You'd probably toss it in the garbage.
And if you were such a great pick up artist in your teens and 20's, why did you stop. Try it now, you won't enjoy it nearly as much, not because the sex is less good, but because it has become too mundane for you. If you haven't experienced declining marginal utility in your life, it's hard to believe you've left your teen years.
Then you missed the point of the book.
Wasting your life away on soma because life sucks so bad. And the point Huxley tried to make is that when sex is more casual than saying "hi" it loses all meaning and pleasure.
Plus the whole thing about humans being interchangeable assembly line products. Process people on the assembly line to run the assembly line.
Except that they also want to criminalize using encrypted proxies. Because only terrorists use encryption, right?
Remember, 1984 was a British book and that's what the British got.
Brave New World was an American book and that's what the Americans got.
And 1984 was a paradise compared to Brave New World.
True, the Science would be sounds but the Nobel committee is as corrupt as the IOC these days.
How did the inventor of the blue LED win a Nobel prize while the inventor of the LED (including red, orange, yellow, and green) didn't share it even though he's still alive.
It's all corruption and politics. And don't even get started on Peace and Literature.
The summary did not say the battery can provide 6MW to the grid, and neither did I about my AA battery.
It said it can store energy equal to 6MW. but a MW is not a measure of energy and I in my post I misused it exactly the same way the summary did.
As for your request to about a 2000W electric kettle, why don't you google supercaps. You should be able to run the kettle off a few dollars worth of capacitor bank. For a few seconds.
I use photographic camera flashes that do use about 6MW of power. And since I use 3 at once, that's closer to 20MW. For about 1/10,000th of a second at a time. They are 640Ws flashes with a 1/10,000th second strobe time.
The 10 megawatt (MW) solar farm, in Clayhill, Bedfordshire, can generate enough electricity to power around 2,500 homes and also has a 6 MW battery storage facility on site.
Well I have a AA battery that's over 6 gigawatts. ...that is will store more than 6 gigawatt-microseconds of energy
So if we can reduce mortality rate 99% while also doing some small amount of harm, we shouldn't do it? Because if you don't think sheer human stupidity kills ten's of thousands of people a year on the roads, I just don't know what you look at when you drive.
And if you think every step along the way in medical advances for birth did no further harm, you are sadly ignorant of medicine and history.
http://mentalfloss.com/article/50513/historical-horror-childbirth
Doctors wanted little to do with women's issues, pretty much every thing they did between the 15th and 20th centuries was wild guesses that did a huge amount of harm. But int he 15th century the mother's mortality rate was so high that women would have to create their will as soon as they found out they were pregnant.
You're right, people are satisfied with the risk. So why try and reduce it?
A couple of hundred years ago, infant mortality was around 40% and maternal mortality around 10%. Getting pregnant was literally fatal 10% of the time. Yet most women still did it. I guess they were satisfied with the risk . What fools people are for developing medical technology to reduce that risk. And now all the foolish doctors have taken on malpractice liability for nothing.
The thing is, currently 50,000 people a year die on American roads. Even if self-driving cars could reduce that number 99%, rather than getting credit for saving 49,500 people a year, these car companies would be ripped apart for "murdering" 500 people a year. Rather than winning accolades for saving 10's of thousands of lives, they'd be sued for hundreds of millions a year for those hundreds of deaths.
You need legislation to prevent that kind of liability, and it will save many, many lives. It just won't save everyone.
Well they did just fire their CEO, CIO, and CSO, and I'm sure heads did roll in their security group....so that is actually possible.
Drug dealers have a better product.
Computer Science degrees aren't supposed to lead to jobs as "coders". That's like saying someone with a degree in mechanical engineering aren't getting a good return on their investment in the degree when they get a job doing oil changes.
You can learn coding in a couple of days. Computer science is something different.
The problem is that, somewhat alarmingly, the word "consciousness" is often used in the literature as if it entailed or implied more than just the qualities of experience. Dijksterhuis and Nordgren, for instance, insisted that "it is very important to realize that attention is the key to distinguish between unconscious thought and conscious thought.
So they're redefining thought so broadly that most animals are conscious too by their definition and the pretending they have some revolutionary insight when all they have done is confused themselves about what they are talking about.
Babies are not conscious. I could see my child make the transition from not recognizing herself to recognizing herself in a mirror; that's a pretty strong test thought not definitive in itself.
Humans do not innately learn consciousness at all, and it was a very recent discovery and it is something that is taught, not picked up automatically:
https://www.amazon.ca/Origin-C...
Helen Keller's own accounts of her youth strongly support that idea.
That's the worst thing you saw in the study?
1 day after binge watching, you're testing their memory on details from yesterday. 1 day after the weekly group, you're asking them the same questions about details from 36 days ago. Do you remember details of a show you watched over a month ago as well as what you saw last night?
The whole study is fatally flawed.
You imagine wrong. Which is the entire point.
And slashdot gets stupider yet.
So, prove P=NP, win $1 million. Makes sense, why is this nonsense even here?
Really? So no degree and you expect saving half your money for 7-10 years should let you retire comfortably to wealth? Wow. I'm familiar with rich dad, poor dad, it's a way to make money from suckers.
Let's say you amazingly make $80k somehow without a degree. You clear $50k and save $25k and keep it up for 10 years. At 10% return, you'll have $400,000. At 20% return it would be $650,000. Now remember you can't invest 50% of your pay tax free, so when you pay taxes every year, you'll actually have:
$345,000 at 10% or
$483,000 at 20%
As insane as it is, let's look the 20%. Now after 10 years, you've got about 1/2 million in the bank. You're about 30 years old at this point, so you can't just spend all your investment income; you have to factor in for a good 60 years of inflation. Let's grow your investment 3% per year to compensate for inflation. Your gross income is $100,000, you clear $70,000 after tax. From this you have to put back 3% of $500,000 or $15,000 meaning you've got $55,000 to spend every year. And that amount will grow through your life with cost of living. But you need to account for private health insurance since you're not going to be working
So you've lived though your 20's with an austere existence saving half your money while most people that age are out enjoying their lives, already a huge sacrifice. And your income is far to look to really do much with, do you plan to sit at home your whole life in a rented apartment, only ever buy used cars, never travel, never visit a nice restaurant. What a horrible waste of a life.
And add to that...how in the world are you going to *safely* make 20% interest. Because of the risky investments, all you need is a nice 20% market correction in the next 60 years and you'll lose a big chunk of your income for the rest of your life.
If you could make 10% safely instead of 20 (which is still pretty amazing), you;d have the $345k after 10 years, giving you $34k pretax income. At that income range you'd barely pay tax, but you'd still have to put back 3% of your next egg every year to account for inflation, which will cost you about $10k. So...you're going to have $25,000/year for the rest of your life, corrected for inflation. Out of that you still need to pay for health insurance.
How is a net income of $25k "enjoying a wealthy retirement"? And you'll still be ruined by the first market correction in the next 60 years.
Plus, don't forget this is all based on you having had a job with a $80k starting salary to walk away from after 10 years.
tl;dr. That;'s a horrible idea put forth by people who want to make money selling books and seminars and only fallen for by suckers who are bad at math.
Well said. That actually puts it nicely.
Yet we continue to encourage young people to major in it.
But for jobs in Kernel/hardware level development, coding webpages for a dotcom startup was career suicide anyway. I would have had the same 3 years of hell like you and when the market recovered the prestige jobs were going to the new batch of grads, not someone 5 years out. Which is kind of my point about the field being horrible; 5 years out of school, 1 hiccup in the industry, and I was screwed out of any job that would use what I went to school for.
One friend of mine from school actually washed out because she couldn't handle multivariable calculus which was a CS degree requirement at the time. She switched to a BA and BEd joint program, which she cruised through on autopilot, got a teaching job easily with math and computers as teachables and is currently vice principal at a private school. She's doing a lot better career-wise and financially than anyone in our group who finished our original degree.
Please....coding or tech support is no more skilled or high paying than a job doing oil changes on cars all day. And just as changing oil is not a career in the automotive industry, coding is not a career in computer science. Your first clue should be all the coding boot camps that teach you the "profession" in less time than it takes to learn to do oil changes.
For one thing, taking a "programming" job makes it a lot harder to move back into a "computer science" job. It just doesn't look goo on your resume.
For another, the job I did end up taking pays more than a "programming" job though not nearly as lucrative as what I was promised during the last tech bubble, I just really, really hate it. As I would really, really hate a programming job.
And today, we're in a similar sort of tech bubble with idiotic articles like the one here leading a whole new generation into the same mistake. If you're smart enough to do CS at a *good school*, do engineering or science instead.
Not sure if you're throwing the word "programming job" around loosely or really mean the distinction, but there's a huge difference between the work I was doing and "programming".
I had a single job interview question for at a major OS developer you're heard of in their kernel group that involved spending most of a day at a white board in front of a panel of project managers, not just creating a good, elegant and workable design, but also walking them through my thought process and design decisions. The whole interview lasted 4 days. On an internship before I graduated, I was writing graphics card drivers. At that job doing the set top box, I had to teach the hardware engineers how MPEG video worked because they had to build a hardware decoder into the silicon.
I was not remotely interested in a low paying "programming job" especially when as others have mentioned in this thread cost of living in these areas is very high.