More people should try it instead of just repeating the thoughts of others.
That's a bit of a strange thing to say, as your original post, and this subsequent discussion are obviously making arguments. Do you expect anyone to read what you read and change their mind because of it? Or are you just enjoying being right?
The book is interesting in its own right because Diamond pulls together all kinds of research from a ton of different fields and synthesizes it to find out some things that are really cool. Haven't you ever wondered why this civilization on Easter Island made all these giant stone heads, and then disappeared? If you're not going to go out and read all the research papers yourself, reading his book makes a lot of sense. Read the data, assess his arguments, and then make your own decision.
And if you shut that industry down, it will be the poor people who are put out of work, causing them to starve. If you shut down inexpensive farming methods, poor people can't afford basic food. If you shut down inexpensive production methods, poor people can't afford basic goods. Rich people have none of these problems.
Straw man. Nobody said shut the fishing industry down; they say practice sustainable fishing. WRT farming methods, a farming method that will enable sustained farming for the next 500 years is infinitely preferrable to an "inexpensive farming method" that will make food 20% cheaper for 50 years and then make no food for the following 450 years.
Overfishing is hardly relevant to Global Warming or pollution.
It shows the basic principle: being wise stewards of environmental resources is helping the economy and helping poor people; damaging the environment and wasting resources is damaging to the economy and to poor people. Here "wise" implies a cost/benefits analysis.
Environmental advocates (who tend to be elites, and often rich or well off) tend to talk about threats to bears and birds and trees. Often they are blind to the human suffering their policies cause. DDT vs. malaria is commonly cited as an example.
This is another one of the one-liners Diamond addresses. His basic response (I don't have the book handy so I can't quote it direclty) is that he's only ever heard this argument from people who themselves are relatively elite, rich, and well off. The poor people he's met in environmentally damaged areas are keenly aware of the need for better management, but don't have the power (or don't feel they have the power) to do anything about it.
I strongly suggest you read his book. It's a scientific study of past civilizations that have collapsed, as well as past civilizations that were in similar danger of collapsing but made choices to avert disaster. Collapsed civilizations include the Easter Islanders, the Mayans, the Anasazi Indians in New Mexico, and the Greenland Norse. Even if you only check it out of the library and read a few chapters, read the chapters on Easter Island. They're particularly disquieting.
..rich people can afford to pay for environmental spirituality, poor people can't.
Actually, the exact opposite is true. Damaging the environment damages the economy. The rich people can afford to move away, or to protect themselves from the effects of the damaged environment, but poor people can't. For example, if a water supply is polluted with industrial toxins, rich people can afford to ship in bottled water, while poor people have to use whatever's local. If the local fisheries are depleted, rich people can afford to eat imported meats, while poor people will just starve.
There's a great book by Jared Diamond called "Collapse" which should be required reading for every college graduate. Near the end of his book he addresses several "one-liners" wrt environmental care; here's the relevant one:
"The environment has to be balanced against the economy." This quote portrays environmental concerns as a luxury, views measures to solve environmental problems as incurring a net cost, and considers leaving environmental problems unsolved to be a money-saving device. This one-liner puts the truth exactly backwards. Environmental messes cost us huge sums of money both in the short run and in the long run; cleaning up or preventing those messes saves us huge sums in the long run, and often in the short run as well. In caring for the health of our surroundings, just as of our bodies, it is cheaper and preferable to avoid getting sick than to try to cure illnesses after they have developed. Just think of the damage caused by agricultural weeds and pests, non-agricultural pests like water hyacinths and zebra mussels, the recurrent annual costs of combating those pests, the value of lost time when we are stuck in traffic, the financial costs resulting from people getting sick or dying from environmental toxins, cleanup costs for toxic chemicals, the steep increase in fish prices due to depletion of fish stocks, and the value of farmland damaged or ruined by erosion and salinization. It adds up to a few hundred million dollars per year here, tens of billions of dollars there, another billion dollars over here, and so on for hundreds of different problems. For instance, the value of "one statistical life" in the U.S. -- i.e., the cost to the U.S. economy resulting from the death of an average American whom society has gone to the expense of rearing and educating but who dies before a lifetime of contributing to the national economy -- is usually estimated at around $5 million. Even if one takes the conservative estimate of annual U.S. deaths due to air pollution as 130,000, then deaths due to air pollution cost us about $650 billion per year. That illustrates why the U.S. Clean Air Act of 1970, although its cleanup measures do cost money, has yielded estimated net health savings (benefits in excess of costs) of about $1 trillion per year, due to saved lives and reduced health costs.
...there's virtually *nothing* in the way of criticism that a beginner would be able to think of that an expert hadn't thought about already.
While I understand your main point, I think it's important to make the caveat that this is only true when you're talking specifically about the facts relating to your field of expertise. But it's still possible to use true facts as a basis for an argument which itself is not sound. (I'm sorry I can't think of a good example here.)
Re:I think the big questions are "big"
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According to wikipedia, Hubbard's body was cremated, and "The Church of Scientology announced Hubbard had deliberately discarded his body to conduct his research in spirit form." That's quite a bit different than saying that they'd seen his old body come back to life, wounds and all, as Jesus' disciples did.
Believing Hilter escaped to South America is a far cry from believing that Hitler was killed in the bunker, and then rose again from the dead.
This is exactly my point -- even the nuts in Scientology didn't claim (according to Wikipedia) that Hubbard rose from the dead; they claimed something much more believable (and conveniently unfalsifiable). Jesus' disciples claimed that, after being killed, his body was around, talking, touching, eating. Since the people who killed him the first time knew where he was buried, they could have dragged his body out and put a stop to the rumor right away -- so their claim was not only unbelievable, but also quite falsifiable.
Re:I think the big questions are "big"
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I wasn't aware that Scientologists claim that L. Ron Hubbard rose from the dead, or that Hitler had a group of followers who claimed that he'd risen from the dead. (Hitler didn't die in public anyway.) You're going to have to give me some references if you want me to believe it.:-)
Re:I think the big questions are "big"
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The Mormons believe Joseph E. Smith was in congress with angels and recorded what he saw on metallic scrolls to make the Book of Mormon. Scientology is an even younger and equally absurd religion.
You're not making a distinction between what people will believe other people tell them, and what people will say they saw themselves. Joseph Smith was murdered; but he was never captured by the government and told that he had to recant all this nonsense about metallic scrolls and so on or be fed to lions. And he was the only one who saw it; there weren't 11 other people who claimed also to see the scrolls, 10 of whom were also killed for sticking to their story when they could have gotten off scotch-free by recanting. Same thing with L. Ron Hubbard. He wasn't arrested by the government and told to recant or be killed, after seeing half of his friends be killed in the previous decades. From what I know of them (and admittedly it's not a lot), the "they were lying" hypothesis fits. I don't think it fits for Jesus' disciples.
Note that I'm not expecting you to believe that, as a result of a short slashdot discussion. My point is just to demonstrate that you can reason about a past event, even one which is claimed to be supernatural, such as Jesus' resurrection, without resorting to asserting "God did it."
The best you can do is a produce an explanation of greater parsimony and plead with an individual that no, God did not kill their cat and leave tire marks on its back, it's much more reasonable to infer that a car ran it over.
But that's true whether you admit the supernatural or not. My father, for instance, is schizophrenic, and has to deal with paranoia. So how do you convince someone that no one is tapping their phone lines, that there's a perfectly logical alternate explanation for whatever they think proves it? If they wish to persist in believing it, they can always find logical justifications. (See UFO theorists.) Admitting "God did it" into the pool of possible hypotheses doesn't change that equation.
Furthermore, even if you admit that there is a "God" who "does" things, that doesn't mean you can't reasonably believe that God DIDN'T do it. I believe God did miracles in the past, and I believe he can do them today. However, I approach most claims of "showy" miracles or direct messages from God with skepticism. Sure, God may have done it; but you're going to have to convince me that there's a good reason to believe He did it.
To summarize: 1) You can reason about the Resurrection, and I believe reach a conclusion true or false, without having to resort to either "God did it" or "We know that people don't come back form the dead" (blind faith or blind disbelief), and 2) admitting the hypothesis that God may have done it does NOT mean that discussion and reason are at an end. They are just as effective (or ineffective) whether or not the discussion involves supernatural elements.
Re:I think the big questions are "big"
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So, suppose that Jesus really did just die. Then, inexplicably, a bunch of his followers, within 40 days after him being killed, run around telling everyone that he's alive and risen from the dead. Were they lying? Were they deceived? Were they crazy? Or were they telling the truth? There have been lots of examples of charismatic leaders gathering a following who thought he was something special. But how many other leaders, after being killed in a very public way, had their followers proclaim them still alive?
If they were deceived, how did that happen? It's not like they didn't "know that dead people don't come back to life, particularly after three days, at which point...putrefaction is well on its way." They probably saw more death than you do (unless you work in a hospital or a morgue).
If they were lying, why did all of them hold to the lie, even though for eleven of them holding to it meant death? Lots of people die for something they think is true; but who, given the chance to recant, would die for something they know is a lie? And not just one, but eleven people over the course of a few decades?
If they were crazy, why was there nothing else crazy in what they said? How can twelve people have the same totally irrational delusion, and then go on to be sound leaders and teachers for decades, and set up an institution that would grow and dominate half the world?
This is what I'm talking about by reasoning. Obviously it's a complex question and there's a lot of alternatives to explore and consider; I don't expect to convince you in a slashdot post. But my point stands: If Jesus died and stayed dead around 33 AD, then there should be evidence that reasonably points in that direction, without having to assume a priori that dead people cannot, under any conditions, rise from the dead.
The reviewer talks about wanting to find the flaw in the argument. One flaw in the argument against tariffs is that it stops too soon. In the "free trade" scenario, he neglects to point out that now you have a trade deficit with a foreign country. Until you understand what "trade deficit" means and why it's bad, you can't see why the argument shouldn't stop where it is.
I'm certainly not an economist, but here's my understanding. Economy, at its heart, is just people doing things for each other. Before money, you could do trade-swaps: I'll make you a bow and arrow if you'll cook me some food. But what if the trade swaps aren't equal effort? And what if I don't want what you have to sell? If there are three people, we can work out an arrangement: you give me two chickens, I'll give him a goat, and he'll make you a bow and arrow. But anything more complicated is essentially impossible to do, until money was invented. Money works because for the most part it organizes everyone's activity, so that everyone can do something valuable for "society", and get something valuable back. (Obviously there are lots of other ways of making money that don't add value to anyone; but still the global effect is to organize everyone's efforts fairly effectively.)
Now back to the tariff scenario. If you give $80 to the local, then he will (probably) spend that $80 locally as well; which means the money keeps flowing around, and will eventually come back to the person who spent $80 instead of $60. However, if you give $60 to the foreigner, you've just taken $60 out of the system: that's less money that will flow around other people and come back to you -- unless the foreigner (or someone else from his country) buys $60 worth of local goods. That lack of $60 has cascading effects that eventually impact the whole economy.
Re:I think the big questions are "big"
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The way that God, or at least the Judeo-Christian god is formulated, it cannot be done.
I won't address this question; but I will say that the way Christianity is formulated it can be done. The Bible says: "If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith....And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep[i.e., died] in Christ are lost." 1 Corinthians 15:13-14,17-18. So basically, what happened to Jesus after he was killed? If he died and nothing else, then, according to the Bible, Christianity isn't true, everything Christians teach and believe and all their religious activities are pointless, and after you die nothing happens.
And the thing about that is that now you can actually look at evidence and reason about it.
First of all, current kills, not potential difference (=voltage). Both 110 and 220V are plenty to overcome the resistance of the human body so from that perspective there's hardly a difference.
Current kills, but the amount of current you get goes up with voltage, and down with resistance. Ohms law: V=IR right? So given that R, the resistance of the human body is constant, doubling the voltage means doubling the current. In other words, there's more current flowing over the wires in the US, but if you grab one of those mains, there will be more current flowing through your body in Europe.
(Three volts is enough to "overcome the resistance of the human body". Haven't you ever grabbed two ends of a ohmmeter, one in each hand, and measured your own resistance? That's how the scientology "diagnostic" machines work.)
I think his advice for how to really get more women in science is applicable here too:
When employers are seriously about hiring more people with certain qualifications, they pay them more. Harvard University, where this entire debate occurred, earned $4.5 billion in investment income in 2006. The basic operation of the university, research and teaching, was cashflow-neutral and therefore Harvard could spend this $4.5 billion in any way that it chooses. Typically universities spend their tax-free investment winnings on lavish real estate development, e.g., $200 million buildings by signature architects that Saddam Hussein or a Saudi royal would have been proud to include among his palaces, and thus we may infer that lavish new buildings are a real priority for them.
With control of the budget at a university, one could change the sex ratio in science and math very quickly. Here's how it might look:
female undergraduates majoring in science or math pay no tuition, room, or board fees. If a woman maintains an A average, she gets a stipend of $10,000 per year to spend however she wishes.
female graduate students in science and math earn $70,000 per year, about triple what male graduate students earn.
female assistant professors in science and math earn a starting salary of $300,000 per year, up there with the average medical specialist
female tenured professors in science and math get paid $500,000 per year, comparable to what a high-talent professional might earn in mid-career
What would this cost? The Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences employs 700 professors, only a small portion of whom are in science or math. Suppose that our goal is to switch 200 faculty positions from being held by men to being held by women. That would cost approximately $50 million per year in incremental salary by the preceding schedule. Adding in the costs for a (well-paid) mostly-female population of math and science students, it would be difficult to get to a cost of $100 million per year, or only about 1/45th of investment income.
If a woman scientist is worth more to the university and to society than a male scientist, she should be paid more. The fact that she isn't indicates that this issue is lower priority than any of the things that the universities does spend money on, e.g., those palatial new buildings.
Reporters wear shoes, drink fluids, use toothpaste and shampoo, but hearing about those inconveniences hasn't made an iota of difference.
If reporters were required to walk through the airport and the airplane without shoes entirely, we'd hear about it for sure. And if fluids, toothpaste and toothbrushes were both expensive and used for several hours between security at the point of departure and security at the point of arrival, we'd hear about it too.
My point is that your analogy isn't very analogous.
however no one should have to put up with an organized intimidation process which is the new method of choice.
So the problem isn't so much that the information was revealed, but that it was (perhaps) posted in a way designed to foster intimidation? I.e., this is pretty much the same as militant anti-abortion groups posting names, phone numbers, and home addresses of abortion doctors? On the one hand, all you're doing is posting names and addresses, which is to some degree public information. On the other hand, the reason you're posting it is that you know that "someone" "may" cause the person grief of some sort.
I forget what the precedent was wrt the abortion doctors. Is there actually a law against this kind of thing (and can there be)? Or do you just have to wait until people start threatening you and then pursue legal action?
Whatever it is, the law needs to be consistent... but ideally, as you say, intimidation shouldn't happen.
Voting on who OTHER PEOPLE can and can't marry bothers me on a deep level
Is this actually true, or is it really only that you don't have a problem in this specific instance (e.g., homosexual marriage)?
For instance, would you support marriage laws that allowed closer familial marriages, like father/daughter, mother/son, sister/brother? Those laws certainly come under "who OTHER PEOPLE can and can't marry".
What about polygamy -- can a man marry two women, or a woman mary two men, or two men and two women all marry in one big "spousal unit",. receiving all of the legal privileges of marriage from the government and employers? That comes under "who OTHER PEOPLE can and can't marry" as well. (In this case, someone may respond "If you're not marrying one person, then it's not actually marriage." To which culturally conservative people can respond, "How is that different than saying, If you're not marrying one person of the opposite gender, then it's not actually marriage".)
If you would support those things, then you are surprisingly consistent. Most people who say what you said, I suspect, really mean that they don't see any problem with homosexual marriage, and *therefore* it bothers them to see other people interfering with them. (Just like I would be rather bothered to find people concerning themselves with inter-racial marriage, for instance.)
For the record, I happen to believe that "marriage" means "one man and one woman". But I would support legal domestic unions, with the same legal privileges as "marriage" unions, between two people of whatever gender. Not quite willing to support polygamy yet...
Not to mention the main point of the lawsuits themselves: to spread FUD and limit the adoption of Linux.
One of the main reasons Novell signed its MS deal was that there were so many people who actually believed that Linux was risky, specifically because of what SCO did. That directly impacts Linux vendors (RedHat, Novell, IBM, &c) and their potential customers, businesses who could have saved money, had more reliable servers, and lower MS lock-in. The trickle-down effects of that are much wider: any Linux developer or Linux user is thus a little poorer because of that, as is anyone who ever used any service by any of the companies that might have used Linux but didn't (i.e., basically everyone). Then add the network effects (or lack thereof) for Linux, which would have meant a wider adoption of desktop linux and weakening of the MS stranglehold.
The sum of all of those negative consequences, though each one may look small, is really huge. There's a reason MS invested in the company, and it paid off big-time.
Just imagining the opt-out at the end of the "stalker" messages made me laugh out loud:
Amber, ran into a little problem at the hotel. After I'm done visiting you, I'm going to go back and sort out that front desk Muppet.
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You have received this stalking message because you subscribed to it on Toyota.com. To stop receiving this and other stalking
messages from Toyota, or to add stronger hints of sexual violence to the messages, please go to your user page:
http://toyota.com/my/stalker/messages
You can log in and change your preferences from there.
Unless they got really creative with the opt-in...
That's exactly what happened. She didn't purposely sign up to be stalked. One of her friends signed her up. To get her to "opt-in", she was sent an online quiz, and as part of the quiz she "signed" an EULA opting in to the "marketing campaign".
Her lawyer's point is that she didn't realize she was opting into being stalked; she thought she was opting in to take a stupid online quiz. You can't pretend that signing the thing is "informed consent", when the whole point of the quiz was to hide the fact that you were about to sign up for this "marketing campaign".
I think this comment demonstrates the principle pretty well.
Making sexist remarks, ok, I can understand how that might be seen as being sexist. But how is asking a woman out considered sexist behaviour? Face it, if I were to join a group that's 98.5% women and demonstrate that I share an interest with all of them then I strongly suspect I'd get asked out too. Would I complain that their behaviour was sexist? No. Obviously not.
Can you really not imagine how it would make a woman uncomfortable to be asked out by someone every other LUG meeting? Not by someone who had already established a relationship of mutual respect and interest, and was reasonably confident that there could be mutual romantic interest as well, but by a guy who is just so excited to meet his "dream girl" who knows Linux, or worse yet, the guy who wanted to ask "how to talk to girls"?
And that's really the problem: not that the 40 guys at the LUG are overtly sexist, but that their individual choices, made as a group, have a strong deterrent effect. It's just a fact that when women come to a group that's so overwhelmingly male-dominated, they get male attention that makes them uncomfortable. They get the same kind of unwanted male attention in lower doses when the gender ratio is 50/50, so they're a little used to it; but when it's 40-to-1, it's a bit too much to take. (I suppose it's a bit like the Slashdot Effect, actually: each slashdotter is following a link to a web page, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do; but the total effect is melted servers. At the LUG, each individual guy just says to himself, "Wow, what a cool girl! I wonder if she'd go out with me? Can't hurt to ask!" but the overall effect is overload.)
So the question for you is: will you try to find out and understand what things you and the people around you in FOSS are doing, quite innocently and unintentionally, that discourage women, and try to change them? Or will you insist on judging women as basically the same as you, but more curvy, and say, "That wouldn't bother me, so why should it bother them"?
OK, how are we supposed to disagree without being "in denial"?
Well, you could start by actually taking a hard look and seeing if what's being said is true, instead of being knee-jerk defensive.
I haven't seen any posts here saying, "I know several women in FOSS, and I asked them if sexism was a problem, and they said 'No, I don't know what they're talking about.'" What I see mostly is people making a bunch of arguments without actually asking, "Could this be true? Might there be something in this?" And actually listening to people (in this case, especially women) before arguing. The difference between "I've listened to what you said, and thought about it, but I disagree" and denial is pretty obvious.
Again, if 1.5% of the FOSS developers are women, and only 0.1% of the comments are sexist, what is the REAL problem that you're trying to "solve"?
First, have you talked to any of the 1.5% and asked them if they experience sexism?
Secondly, sexism isn't binary. Some things, like joking about rape or putting up naked pictures are on one end of the scale; those are in the 0.1%. But there are a much larger number of interactions: posts, subtle body language, even just the lack of encouragement that might be present for men but not for women. Those aren't as obvious, but their total effect is significant.
Finally, consider how many posts an active FOSS developer might read in a week. Let's say that a woman is moderately active in a project, and has 50 interactions (e-mail, forum post, IRC, &c) per day. That's about 1500 interactions per month. Now, let's assume that your 0.1% is accurate. That's 3 overtly sexist interactions every 2 months. Now add to that the 2% of subtly sexist interactions, and the 5% of unintentionally sexist stuff, and ask yourself: how much crap can a person put up with before they're sick of it? How long would you work for pay for a company where someone insulted you three times every two months, much less do volunteer work in such an organization?
That's the problem some people are trying to solve: Computer science culture, and FOSS even more so, is extremely discouraging towards women. The vast majority of it is completely unintentional, but it all adds up.
Uum, have you ever talked about this subject with a woman in computers or engineering? If you had, you wouldn't be asking this question. I really think this attitude is part of the problem. The first thing I did when someone mentioned sexism in FOSS was to look into it. Why *are* there so few women in CS departments, and fewer yet in FOSS projects? If you do, you can easily find lots of answers. Start by browsing this bibliography, maybe ask some women in IT or engineering you know.
The biggest problem, AFAICT, is that it's so easy for people of any majority group (white / black / men / women) to unintentionally act in ways towards a minority group that make it really tough for them. It's tough to be a man in social work, it's tough to be a white guy in an all-black school, it's tough to be a skinny geek in a room full of beefy jocks, it's tough to be a woman in FOSS development. That means that any majority group needs to make an extra effort to counteract that. That's why we're talking to you about FOSS, instead of about men in social work. You're in a position to do something about this problem.
The fact that group discrimination happens elsewhere is irrelevant. The fact is that it's hard for women in FOSS, which means that there aren't very many, which means that FOSS loses out big-time. If nothing else, a large demographic highly talented and capable people who could be contributing to FOSS are not because of irrelevant reasons. Furthermore, I believe that men and women are different in more than just their bodies, and that the difference is valuable. FOSS loses a lot more by having almost no women than they would by having almost no blue-eyed individuals.
So instead of being reactive and saying, "Prove that it's really sexism", why don't you actively look for ways in which you or people around you may be unintentionally contributing to the problem? As others have said, it's only a tiny minority that are overtly sexist; the majority only do things unintentionally. But the effect is still there, and it's real.
A handwritten note or letter, irrespective of whether it's to a girlfriend you're looking to woo, a boss you want to thank, an interviewer you want to impress, or to a family member with whom you want to share something personal, is far more effective (and meaningful) than a piece of paper spit out of a laserjet printer.
A beautiful hand-drawn picture will be more personal than a Hallmark card, and a personally-performed serenade will be more personal than playing romantic music on the radio as well, if you've chosen to invest years of your life making that an art. But we don't force people to learn drawing or music in school for that reason. It may be important to learn to read cursive, and it may be laudable to learn calligraphy, but that doesn't mean that we should lament that people who were never going to write beautiful cursive anyway will only be printing or typing.
1) Have a point. What is the goal of your presentation? e.g., "I want everyone to walk out of the room knowing that..." try to keep this relatively short, like 3 major, related points. Then focus everything in your presentation around getting across those points. Depending on the type of presentation, I may work the points in to the introduction and the conclusion; but they have to be there implicitly, otherwise your talk will likely just be a bunch of random information, and your audience won't remember much.
2) Consider where your audience is coming from. You can keep an audience's attention in several ways, but one simple straightforward way is to start with something from the audience's perspective, and keep coming back to the audience's perspective. If you start with a story that connects with them, and then every time you finish some new piece of information you say, "Now, you may be thinking X. Well,..." and respond to that, hopefully in a way that will lead to your next point.
3) People remember pictures about 1000x more easily than words, and stories about 100x more easily than plain prose points. Use pictures and stories, but make sure your pictures and stories actually support your point from #1. If you just tell a good joke, or share a crazy-looking picture, everyone will laugh and enjoy the presentation; but if it doesn't have anything to do with your points, they'll remember the picture or the story but not your points. In that case, you might as well have given them a stand-up comedy routine.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a bit of a strange thing to say, as your original post, and this subsequent discussion are obviously making arguments. Do you expect anyone to read what you read and change their mind because of it? Or are you just enjoying being right?
The book is interesting in its own right because Diamond pulls together all kinds of research from a ton of different fields and synthesizes it to find out some things that are really cool. Haven't you ever wondered why this civilization on Easter Island made all these giant stone heads, and then disappeared? If you're not going to go out and read all the research papers yourself, reading his book makes a lot of sense. Read the data, assess his arguments, and then make your own decision.
Straw man. Nobody said shut the fishing industry down; they say practice sustainable fishing. WRT farming methods, a farming method that will enable sustained farming for the next 500 years is infinitely preferrable to an "inexpensive farming method" that will make food 20% cheaper for 50 years and then make no food for the following 450 years.
It shows the basic principle: being wise stewards of environmental resources is helping the economy and helping poor people; damaging the environment and wasting resources is damaging to the economy and to poor people. Here "wise" implies a cost/benefits analysis.
This is another one of the one-liners Diamond addresses. His basic response (I don't have the book handy so I can't quote it direclty) is that he's only ever heard this argument from people who themselves are relatively elite, rich, and well off. The poor people he's met in environmentally damaged areas are keenly aware of the need for better management, but don't have the power (or don't feel they have the power) to do anything about it.
I strongly suggest you read his book. It's a scientific study of past civilizations that have collapsed, as well as past civilizations that were in similar danger of collapsing but made choices to avert disaster. Collapsed civilizations include the Easter Islanders, the Mayans, the Anasazi Indians in New Mexico, and the Greenland Norse. Even if you only check it out of the library and read a few chapters, read the chapters on Easter Island. They're particularly disquieting.
Actually, the exact opposite is true. Damaging the environment damages the economy. The rich people can afford to move away, or to protect themselves from the effects of the damaged environment, but poor people can't. For example, if a water supply is polluted with industrial toxins, rich people can afford to ship in bottled water, while poor people have to use whatever's local. If the local fisheries are depleted, rich people can afford to eat imported meats, while poor people will just starve.
There's a great book by Jared Diamond called "Collapse" which should be required reading for every college graduate. Near the end of his book he addresses several "one-liners" wrt environmental care; here's the relevant one:
While I understand your main point, I think it's important to make the caveat that this is only true when you're talking specifically about the facts relating to your field of expertise. But it's still possible to use true facts as a basis for an argument which itself is not sound. (I'm sorry I can't think of a good example here.)
According to wikipedia, Hubbard's body was cremated, and "The Church of Scientology announced Hubbard had deliberately discarded his body to conduct his research in spirit form." That's quite a bit different than saying that they'd seen his old body come back to life, wounds and all, as Jesus' disciples did.
Believing Hilter escaped to South America is a far cry from believing that Hitler was killed in the bunker, and then rose again from the dead.
This is exactly my point -- even the nuts in Scientology didn't claim (according to Wikipedia) that Hubbard rose from the dead; they claimed something much more believable (and conveniently unfalsifiable). Jesus' disciples claimed that, after being killed, his body was around, talking, touching, eating. Since the people who killed him the first time knew where he was buried, they could have dragged his body out and put a stop to the rumor right away -- so their claim was not only unbelievable, but also quite falsifiable.
I wasn't aware that Scientologists claim that L. Ron Hubbard rose from the dead, or that Hitler had a group of followers who claimed that he'd risen from the dead. (Hitler didn't die in public anyway.) You're going to have to give me some references if you want me to believe it. :-)
You're not making a distinction between what people will believe other people tell them, and what people will say they saw themselves. Joseph Smith was murdered; but he was never captured by the government and told that he had to recant all this nonsense about metallic scrolls and so on or be fed to lions. And he was the only one who saw it; there weren't 11 other people who claimed also to see the scrolls, 10 of whom were also killed for sticking to their story when they could have gotten off scotch-free by recanting. Same thing with L. Ron Hubbard. He wasn't arrested by the government and told to recant or be killed, after seeing half of his friends be killed in the previous decades. From what I know of them (and admittedly it's not a lot), the "they were lying" hypothesis fits. I don't think it fits for Jesus' disciples.
Note that I'm not expecting you to believe that, as a result of a short slashdot discussion. My point is just to demonstrate that you can reason about a past event, even one which is claimed to be supernatural, such as Jesus' resurrection, without resorting to asserting "God did it."
But that's true whether you admit the supernatural or not. My father, for instance, is schizophrenic, and has to deal with paranoia. So how do you convince someone that no one is tapping their phone lines, that there's a perfectly logical alternate explanation for whatever they think proves it? If they wish to persist in believing it, they can always find logical justifications. (See UFO theorists.) Admitting "God did it" into the pool of possible hypotheses doesn't change that equation.
Furthermore, even if you admit that there is a "God" who "does" things, that doesn't mean you can't reasonably believe that God DIDN'T do it. I believe God did miracles in the past, and I believe he can do them today. However, I approach most claims of "showy" miracles or direct messages from God with skepticism. Sure, God may have done it; but you're going to have to convince me that there's a good reason to believe He did it.
To summarize: 1) You can reason about the Resurrection, and I believe reach a conclusion true or false, without having to resort to either "God did it" or "We know that people don't come back form the dead" (blind faith or blind disbelief), and 2) admitting the hypothesis that God may have done it does NOT mean that discussion and reason are at an end. They are just as effective (or ineffective) whether or not the discussion involves supernatural elements.
So, suppose that Jesus really did just die. Then, inexplicably, a bunch of his followers, within 40 days after him being killed, run around telling everyone that he's alive and risen from the dead. Were they lying? Were they deceived? Were they crazy? Or were they telling the truth? There have been lots of examples of charismatic leaders gathering a following who thought he was something special. But how many other leaders, after being killed in a very public way, had their followers proclaim them still alive?
If they were deceived, how did that happen? It's not like they didn't "know that dead people don't come back to life, particularly after three days, at which point...putrefaction is well on its way." They probably saw more death than you do (unless you work in a hospital or a morgue).
If they were lying, why did all of them hold to the lie, even though for eleven of them holding to it meant death? Lots of people die for something they think is true; but who, given the chance to recant, would die for something they know is a lie? And not just one, but eleven people over the course of a few decades?
If they were crazy, why was there nothing else crazy in what they said? How can twelve people have the same totally irrational delusion, and then go on to be sound leaders and teachers for decades, and set up an institution that would grow and dominate half the world?
This is what I'm talking about by reasoning. Obviously it's a complex question and there's a lot of alternatives to explore and consider; I don't expect to convince you in a slashdot post. But my point stands: If Jesus died and stayed dead around 33 AD, then there should be evidence that reasonably points in that direction, without having to assume a priori that dead people cannot, under any conditions, rise from the dead.
The reviewer talks about wanting to find the flaw in the argument. One flaw in the argument against tariffs is that it stops too soon. In the "free trade" scenario, he neglects to point out that now you have a trade deficit with a foreign country. Until you understand what "trade deficit" means and why it's bad, you can't see why the argument shouldn't stop where it is.
I'm certainly not an economist, but here's my understanding. Economy, at its heart, is just people doing things for each other. Before money, you could do trade-swaps: I'll make you a bow and arrow if you'll cook me some food. But what if the trade swaps aren't equal effort? And what if I don't want what you have to sell? If there are three people, we can work out an arrangement: you give me two chickens, I'll give him a goat, and he'll make you a bow and arrow. But anything more complicated is essentially impossible to do, until money was invented. Money works because for the most part it organizes everyone's activity, so that everyone can do something valuable for "society", and get something valuable back. (Obviously there are lots of other ways of making money that don't add value to anyone; but still the global effect is to organize everyone's efforts fairly effectively.)
Now back to the tariff scenario. If you give $80 to the local, then he will (probably) spend that $80 locally as well; which means the money keeps flowing around, and will eventually come back to the person who spent $80 instead of $60. However, if you give $60 to the foreigner, you've just taken $60 out of the system: that's less money that will flow around other people and come back to you -- unless the foreigner (or someone else from his country) buys $60 worth of local goods. That lack of $60 has cascading effects that eventually impact the whole economy.
I won't address this question; but I will say that the way Christianity is formulated it can be done. The Bible says: "If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. ...And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep[i.e., died] in Christ are lost." 1 Corinthians 15:13-14,17-18. So basically, what happened to Jesus after he was killed? If he died and nothing else, then, according to the Bible, Christianity isn't true, everything Christians teach and believe and all their religious activities are pointless, and after you die nothing happens.
And the thing about that is that now you can actually look at evidence and reason about it.
Current kills, but the amount of current you get goes up with voltage, and down with resistance. Ohms law: V=IR right? So given that R, the resistance of the human body is constant, doubling the voltage means doubling the current. In other words, there's more current flowing over the wires in the US, but if you grab one of those mains, there will be more current flowing through your body in Europe.
(Three volts is enough to "overcome the resistance of the human body". Haven't you ever grabbed two ends of a ohmmeter, one in each hand, and measured your own resistance? That's how the scientology "diagnostic" machines work.)
This is related to this guy's really insightful article about why there are so few women inscience. Short answer: they found better jobs.
I think his advice for how to really get more women in science is applicable here too:
If reporters were required to walk through the airport and the airplane without shoes entirely, we'd hear about it for sure. And if fluids, toothpaste and toothbrushes were both expensive and used for several hours between security at the point of departure and security at the point of arrival, we'd hear about it too.
My point is that your analogy isn't very analogous.
It maps to the way we say it in the US. In England, they say "1 April" ("One april") , not "April 1st".
After I joined the military, I prefer big-endian dates (20100401) because it's easiest to sort by date order.
So the problem isn't so much that the information was revealed, but that it was (perhaps) posted in a way designed to foster intimidation? I.e., this is pretty much the same as militant anti-abortion groups posting names, phone numbers, and home addresses of abortion doctors? On the one hand, all you're doing is posting names and addresses, which is to some degree public information. On the other hand, the reason you're posting it is that you know that "someone" "may" cause the person grief of some sort.
I forget what the precedent was wrt the abortion doctors. Is there actually a law against this kind of thing (and can there be)? Or do you just have to wait until people start threatening you and then pursue legal action?
Whatever it is, the law needs to be consistent... but ideally, as you say, intimidation shouldn't happen.
Is this actually true, or is it really only that you don't have a problem in this specific instance (e.g., homosexual marriage)?
For instance, would you support marriage laws that allowed closer familial marriages, like father/daughter, mother/son, sister/brother? Those laws certainly come under "who OTHER PEOPLE can and can't marry".
What about polygamy -- can a man marry two women, or a woman mary two men, or two men and two women all marry in one big "spousal unit",. receiving all of the legal privileges of marriage from the government and employers? That comes under "who OTHER PEOPLE can and can't marry" as well. (In this case, someone may respond "If you're not marrying one person, then it's not actually marriage." To which culturally conservative people can respond, "How is that different than saying, If you're not marrying one person of the opposite gender, then it's not actually marriage".)
If you would support those things, then you are surprisingly consistent. Most people who say what you said, I suspect, really mean that they don't see any problem with homosexual marriage, and *therefore* it bothers them to see other people interfering with them. (Just like I would be rather bothered to find people concerning themselves with inter-racial marriage, for instance.)
For the record, I happen to believe that "marriage" means "one man and one woman". But I would support legal domestic unions, with the same legal privileges as "marriage" unions, between two people of whatever gender. Not quite willing to support polygamy yet...
Not to mention the main point of the lawsuits themselves: to spread FUD and limit the adoption of Linux.
One of the main reasons Novell signed its MS deal was that there were so many people who actually believed that Linux was risky, specifically because of what SCO did. That directly impacts Linux vendors (RedHat, Novell, IBM, &c) and their potential customers, businesses who could have saved money, had more reliable servers, and lower MS lock-in. The trickle-down effects of that are much wider: any Linux developer or Linux user is thus a little poorer because of that, as is anyone who ever used any service by any of the companies that might have used Linux but didn't (i.e., basically everyone). Then add the network effects (or lack thereof) for Linux, which would have meant a wider adoption of desktop linux and weakening of the MS stranglehold.
The sum of all of those negative consequences, though each one may look small, is really huge. There's a reason MS invested in the company, and it paid off big-time.
That's exactly what happened. She didn't purposely sign up to be stalked. One of her friends signed her up. To get her to "opt-in", she was sent an online quiz, and as part of the quiz she "signed" an EULA opting in to the "marketing campaign".
Her lawyer's point is that she didn't realize she was opting into being stalked; she thought she was opting in to take a stupid online quiz. You can't pretend that signing the thing is "informed consent", when the whole point of the quiz was to hide the fact that you were about to sign up for this "marketing campaign".
I think this comment demonstrates the principle pretty well.
Can you really not imagine how it would make a woman uncomfortable to be asked out by someone every other LUG meeting? Not by someone who had already established a relationship of mutual respect and interest, and was reasonably confident that there could be mutual romantic interest as well, but by a guy who is just so excited to meet his "dream girl" who knows Linux, or worse yet, the guy who wanted to ask "how to talk to girls"?
And that's really the problem: not that the 40 guys at the LUG are overtly sexist, but that their individual choices, made as a group, have a strong deterrent effect. It's just a fact that when women come to a group that's so overwhelmingly male-dominated, they get male attention that makes them uncomfortable. They get the same kind of unwanted male attention in lower doses when the gender ratio is 50/50, so they're a little used to it; but when it's 40-to-1, it's a bit too much to take. (I suppose it's a bit like the Slashdot Effect, actually: each slashdotter is following a link to a web page, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do; but the total effect is melted servers. At the LUG, each individual guy just says to himself, "Wow, what a cool girl! I wonder if she'd go out with me? Can't hurt to ask!" but the overall effect is overload.)
So the question for you is: will you try to find out and understand what things you and the people around you in FOSS are doing, quite innocently and unintentionally, that discourage women, and try to change them? Or will you insist on judging women as basically the same as you, but more curvy, and say, "That wouldn't bother me, so why should it bother them"?
Well, you could start by actually taking a hard look and seeing if what's being said is true, instead of being knee-jerk defensive.
I haven't seen any posts here saying, "I know several women in FOSS, and I asked them if sexism was a problem, and they said 'No, I don't know what they're talking about.'" What I see mostly is people making a bunch of arguments without actually asking, "Could this be true? Might there be something in this?" And actually listening to people (in this case, especially women) before arguing. The difference between "I've listened to what you said, and thought about it, but I disagree" and denial is pretty obvious.
There's plenty to read about if you're willing to look.
First, have you talked to any of the 1.5% and asked them if they experience sexism?
Secondly, sexism isn't binary. Some things, like joking about rape or putting up naked pictures are on one end of the scale; those are in the 0.1%. But there are a much larger number of interactions: posts, subtle body language, even just the lack of encouragement that might be present for men but not for women. Those aren't as obvious, but their total effect is significant.
Finally, consider how many posts an active FOSS developer might read in a week. Let's say that a woman is moderately active in a project, and has 50 interactions (e-mail, forum post, IRC, &c) per day. That's about 1500 interactions per month. Now, let's assume that your 0.1% is accurate. That's 3 overtly sexist interactions every 2 months. Now add to that the 2% of subtly sexist interactions, and the 5% of unintentionally sexist stuff, and ask yourself: how much crap can a person put up with before they're sick of it? How long would you work for pay for a company where someone insulted you three times every two months, much less do volunteer work in such an organization?
That's the problem some people are trying to solve: Computer science culture, and FOSS even more so, is extremely discouraging towards women. The vast majority of it is completely unintentional, but it all adds up.
Uum, have you ever talked about this subject with a woman in computers or engineering? If you had, you wouldn't be asking this question. I really think this attitude is part of the problem. The first thing I did when someone mentioned sexism in FOSS was to look into it. Why *are* there so few women in CS departments, and fewer yet in FOSS projects? If you do, you can easily find lots of answers. Start by browsing this bibliography, maybe ask some women in IT or engineering you know.
The biggest problem, AFAICT, is that it's so easy for people of any majority group (white / black / men / women) to unintentionally act in ways towards a minority group that make it really tough for them. It's tough to be a man in social work, it's tough to be a white guy in an all-black school, it's tough to be a skinny geek in a room full of beefy jocks, it's tough to be a woman in FOSS development. That means that any majority group needs to make an extra effort to counteract that. That's why we're talking to you about FOSS, instead of about men in social work. You're in a position to do something about this problem.
The fact that group discrimination happens elsewhere is irrelevant. The fact is that it's hard for women in FOSS, which means that there aren't very many, which means that FOSS loses out big-time. If nothing else, a large demographic highly talented and capable people who could be contributing to FOSS are not because of irrelevant reasons. Furthermore, I believe that men and women are different in more than just their bodies, and that the difference is valuable. FOSS loses a lot more by having almost no women than they would by having almost no blue-eyed individuals.
So instead of being reactive and saying, "Prove that it's really sexism", why don't you actively look for ways in which you or people around you may be unintentionally contributing to the problem? As others have said, it's only a tiny minority that are overtly sexist; the majority only do things unintentionally. But the effect is still there, and it's real.
A beautiful hand-drawn picture will be more personal than a Hallmark card, and a personally-performed serenade will be more personal than playing romantic music on the radio as well, if you've chosen to invest years of your life making that an art. But we don't force people to learn drawing or music in school for that reason. It may be important to learn to read cursive, and it may be laudable to learn calligraphy, but that doesn't mean that we should lament that people who were never going to write beautiful cursive anyway will only be printing or typing.
Good advice I've gotten for a presentation:
1) Have a point. What is the goal of your presentation? e.g., "I want everyone to walk out of the room knowing that..." try to keep this relatively short, like 3 major, related points. Then focus everything in your presentation around getting across those points. Depending on the type of presentation, I may work the points in to the introduction and the conclusion; but they have to be there implicitly, otherwise your talk will likely just be a bunch of random information, and your audience won't remember much.
2) Consider where your audience is coming from. You can keep an audience's attention in several ways, but one simple straightforward way is to start with something from the audience's perspective, and keep coming back to the audience's perspective. If you start with a story that connects with them, and then every time you finish some new piece of information you say, "Now, you may be thinking X. Well, ..." and respond to that, hopefully in a way that will lead to your next point.
3) People remember pictures about 1000x more easily than words, and stories about 100x more easily than plain prose points. Use pictures and stories, but make sure your pictures and stories actually support your point from #1. If you just tell a good joke, or share a crazy-looking picture, everyone will laugh and enjoy the presentation; but if it doesn't have anything to do with your points, they'll remember the picture or the story but not your points. In that case, you might as well have given them a stand-up comedy routine.