This is one reason I'm really impressed by Elon Musk. After making a fortune in Paypal, he went on to found other businesses that look like they'll be highly successful (and also Hyperloop).He has multiple independent successes, which means he's got actual extraordinary ability instead of luck.
Steve Jobs had a sense of style. He had a genius available to exploit, and the lack of morals necessary for the exploitation. He lucked into a field, going from phone phreaking (an occupation that was illegal but made up for it by not paying well) to making premade computers.
He had some abilities to an extraordinary degree. He became rich on starting a company in a field that was about to become big, having a sense of style, having a sense of what was possible, and being an egocentric bastard.
OK, how do I become charismatic? I do well enough. I have a wife and son I love very much, and I have some very good friends. I'm not inspirational. I can't read people enough to feed them what they want. (There was a time, before I was married, when I would have loved to have women throw their bodies at me.) If I can't learn to be charismatic, then knowing where charisma can get me does me no good.
Since I don't have much charisma, and can't catch the flying bodies and put them to work for me, I don't see how I'm going to get a nonprofit going that will catapult me into the big time.
Unless you're unusually smart (I am), anything you can learn, lots of other people can learn also. This puts you in a competitive market without a significant advantage, and you're not going to get rich that way.
Most people aren't rich. If you are rich, there's one or more reasons for that. The reasons could be that you were born upper-class, that you're really lucky, or that you had exceptional (not ordinary) ability.
Back around 1980, starting a software company was expanding into a wide-open field, and it was possible to do very well without doing anything else extraordinary. That's no longer the case, and the fact that it's easy to start a software company means that most people can do it if they have a decent idea. In order to make it big, you have to have an idea that's either highly insightful or really lucky.
Greed is essentially unlimited. When money becomes irrelevant to your lifestyle, because you can buy anything that's on sale that you want, it serves as a way of keeping score among your peers.
However, wealth, like most other things, comes with diminishing returns. I live a very comfortable life, and it wouldn't be all that much better if I earned five times as much as I do. (Not that I'd refuse it - see first paragraph). Also, humans hate loss more than they love gain.
Also, in the US, success at some level can be life-or-death, because of the screwed-up health care system. If I've got a job with good medical insurance, given my recent health history, I wouldn't want to leave it.
True. I can wiggle my ears independently, which I suspect is rarer than having my level of programming ability, but guess which I can get paid well for?
Most of that family achieved upper-middle-class status by hard work and initiative. One achieved upper-class status by risking everything they had on something that looked like the Next Big Thing and managing to survive.
Lots of people bet heavily on the Next Big Thing, worked hard, and wound up somewhere from upper-middle-class and bankruptcy.
The lesson is that, if you work hard and show initiative, you can probably get into the upper middle class.
There's no evidence that Gates recognized special circumstances. He got into software early on, but lots of people did that. I was programming mainframes and my TRS-80 when the IBM PC came out. He completely missed the future of the Internet, and his GUI development followed Apple's. His idea of a tablet was a heavy and expensive portable device running XP. Microsoft made its name initially by producing what was arguably the best BASIC for 8-bit home computers, but there were plenty of other BASICs.
He lucked into a developing field, and was very good at it and worked hard, and in the normal course of events would have become a very successful businessman. His mother tipped him off to an opportunity and his father wrote up the contract that meant his version of Seattle Computer Club's QDOS would be on almost every IBM PC, without giving IBM control of the software.
Conservatives wouldn't have opposed assisted suicides.
The modern miserable excuses for Conservatives are full of things they don't want anyone doing, and suicide is one of those things that (I've heard) the Bible is against.
Nobody has a right to health care — to assert such a right is to advocate slavery.
Dead wrong, of course. Slavery is when you have no choice of what to do specifically. I have had to work during most of my adult life, but I was able to choose what I wanted to do (as long as someone was willing to pay me for it), so it wasn't slavery. I pay some of my money in taxes, and that isn't slavery. If we decide to pay for medical care for everyone, using taxes, and hiring people who chose to make a living in health care, no slavery is happening.
Even if we were to stipulate for a second, that a child has a right to health care, that's irrelevant. The child is not capable of exercising that right
The child is capable of receiving good health care. Someone else does have to enforce that right. In most cases, letting the parents decide what's best for their children works well. In some cases, it doesn't, and someone should intervene for the sake of the child. In some cases, this means finding other people to take care of the child, and the government usually tries to avoid detailed decisions.
If you check Roe vs. Wade, you will see that it's not a blanket ban on abortions, but has restrictions on government action (giving people freedom, of course) that vary by time spent gestating. That pretty much reflects the closest thing we have to a consensus on abortion. Therefore, the government is perfect capable of banning late-term abortions except for the life-or-death reasons that are the only reason late-term abortions are currently performed for.
Technically, we have claims that people posted verified negative reviews and had them deleted. It's easy to make claims like that even if they aren't true, and a lot of anti-Clinton people are well known to lie without regard to the facts.
Given that, I'm interested in the fact that no real news organization has covered it.
The big difference is that a private organization can only say "you can't publish that here", while government censorship would be "you can't publish that". A private organization can't stop you from saying what you like.
For Conservatives, life beings at conception and ends at birth. (In some cases, it starts again at brain death.)
For Liberals, once you're born, you're alive. At that point, you're an independent human being, to be treated as such. This means that parental rights are limited, since a child has rights to health care. You're confusing parental rights with individual rights. The individual right to proper health care overrides parental rights.
People have been surprised at the behavior of programs they created. Computer programs insist on behaving in ways other than the ones they were consciously written for.
Lots of things are not inherent in the Standard Model, but are emergent phenomenon. Assuming I'm conscious, that doesn't mean that any individual quark or lepton in my body is. If I can create a poem, it doesn't mean any individual molecule in my body can. There is no scientific reason to think everything is conscious. Some mystics report that everything is conscious, but not by a repeatable objective technique, so science can't investigate it. (Science can investigate the beliefs, but not whether the beliefs are true or false.)
Lucid dreaming is not evidence of anything going on outside the body. Near-death experiences are reasonably consistent with other near-death experiences, but we have no way to tell whether there's any connection with anything outside the body. Out-of-body experiences are normally not verifiable. There's also the issue that accounts of out-of-body experiences may be lies or misunderstanding of what really happened, perhaps involving something unconsciously perceived. If, before 2015, you had been able to have OOB where you could accurately describe things in the next room, you could have collected a million dollars from the James Randi Educational Foundation. In fact, nobody demonstrated paranormal abilities to them. That's not to say there are no paranormal abilities, but it is evidence.
The problem I had with quantum mechanics and free will is that quantum stuff is either deterministic or random, and randomness is not what I consider free will. If I rolled dice to select my reaction to things, nobody would consider the rolling to be free will.
There's also the fact that some of my allegedly free will decisions can be reliably predicted. If I'm hungry, and am offered a choice between a slice of pepperoni pizza and something with green peppers on it, I'm taking the pepperoni. There's no outside compulsion, and I am free to select either slice. If free will exists, this would seem to be it, but the result is utterly predictable.
Yup. Humans can see finer details than cats. Cats can see some gradations humans can't, as their something-or-other curve is shifted rather than smaller, but I don't think that's much help.
Way back when, researchers tested to see if cats saw color, and determined that they didn't. Dissection of cat eyes showed that cats do have cone cells in their eyes, and further tests showed that cats can indeed distinguish by color, although not nearly as well as humans can. The original experiments apparently failed to sufficiently interest the test cats.
Babies don't have much control over their bodies when born, so it's really hard to run tests on them because scoring the tests has to depend on something observable.
Okay, so they want me to consider a vendor that charges for everything, saves money where it can, and has lockin. And they want me to choose Oracle over that vendor? They're nuts!
I read your posts. If I misunderstood them, I apologize.
I vote in state elections (counting the Presidential election), district elections, county elections, and city elections. Obviously my vote is more significant the fewer people are eligible and willing to vote. However, I still don't know what your point is, other than mistaking misunderstanding for rage mode. Are we just in agreement?
I didn't know much about him at that time. The Clinton releases I would feel better about if he'd done one large dump rather than spacing things out for increased political effect.
He is a foreigner who deliberately influenced a US election in ways other than just infodumping.
Start with some extremely suspicious behavior, compounded with obvious lies, around the rape allegations. I got really annoyed by people who swallowed whatever he said, no matter how implausible, no matter how wrong. His political campaigning against Clinton showed that he isn't an impartial truth dumper.
He sure seemed interested in getting Trump elected. (It wasn't that he just released dirt on CLinton, but the way he dribbled it out for maximum political effect). I don't know if he's a Kremlin front, but he's not an impartial publisher.
Slashdot Mirror
This is one reason I'm really impressed by Elon Musk. After making a fortune in Paypal, he went on to found other businesses that look like they'll be highly successful (and also Hyperloop).He has multiple independent successes, which means he's got actual extraordinary ability instead of luck.
Steve Jobs had a sense of style. He had a genius available to exploit, and the lack of morals necessary for the exploitation. He lucked into a field, going from phone phreaking (an occupation that was illegal but made up for it by not paying well) to making premade computers.
He had some abilities to an extraordinary degree. He became rich on starting a company in a field that was about to become big, having a sense of style, having a sense of what was possible, and being an egocentric bastard.
OK, how do I become charismatic? I do well enough. I have a wife and son I love very much, and I have some very good friends. I'm not inspirational. I can't read people enough to feed them what they want. (There was a time, before I was married, when I would have loved to have women throw their bodies at me.) If I can't learn to be charismatic, then knowing where charisma can get me does me no good.
Since I don't have much charisma, and can't catch the flying bodies and put them to work for me, I don't see how I'm going to get a nonprofit going that will catapult me into the big time.
Unless you're unusually smart (I am), anything you can learn, lots of other people can learn also. This puts you in a competitive market without a significant advantage, and you're not going to get rich that way.
Most people aren't rich. If you are rich, there's one or more reasons for that. The reasons could be that you were born upper-class, that you're really lucky, or that you had exceptional (not ordinary) ability.
Back around 1980, starting a software company was expanding into a wide-open field, and it was possible to do very well without doing anything else extraordinary. That's no longer the case, and the fact that it's easy to start a software company means that most people can do it if they have a decent idea. In order to make it big, you have to have an idea that's either highly insightful or really lucky.
Greed is essentially unlimited. When money becomes irrelevant to your lifestyle, because you can buy anything that's on sale that you want, it serves as a way of keeping score among your peers.
However, wealth, like most other things, comes with diminishing returns. I live a very comfortable life, and it wouldn't be all that much better if I earned five times as much as I do. (Not that I'd refuse it - see first paragraph). Also, humans hate loss more than they love gain.
Also, in the US, success at some level can be life-or-death, because of the screwed-up health care system. If I've got a job with good medical insurance, given my recent health history, I wouldn't want to leave it.
True. I can wiggle my ears independently, which I suspect is rarer than having my level of programming ability, but guess which I can get paid well for?
Most of that family achieved upper-middle-class status by hard work and initiative. One achieved upper-class status by risking everything they had on something that looked like the Next Big Thing and managing to survive.
Lots of people bet heavily on the Next Big Thing, worked hard, and wound up somewhere from upper-middle-class and bankruptcy.
The lesson is that, if you work hard and show initiative, you can probably get into the upper middle class.
There's no evidence that Gates recognized special circumstances. He got into software early on, but lots of people did that. I was programming mainframes and my TRS-80 when the IBM PC came out. He completely missed the future of the Internet, and his GUI development followed Apple's. His idea of a tablet was a heavy and expensive portable device running XP. Microsoft made its name initially by producing what was arguably the best BASIC for 8-bit home computers, but there were plenty of other BASICs.
He lucked into a developing field, and was very good at it and worked hard, and in the normal course of events would have become a very successful businessman. His mother tipped him off to an opportunity and his father wrote up the contract that meant his version of Seattle Computer Club's QDOS would be on almost every IBM PC, without giving IBM control of the software.
Ah, I see. Let me just say that you're wrong and that we agree.
The modern miserable excuses for Conservatives are full of things they don't want anyone doing, and suicide is one of those things that (I've heard) the Bible is against.
Dead wrong, of course. Slavery is when you have no choice of what to do specifically. I have had to work during most of my adult life, but I was able to choose what I wanted to do (as long as someone was willing to pay me for it), so it wasn't slavery. I pay some of my money in taxes, and that isn't slavery. If we decide to pay for medical care for everyone, using taxes, and hiring people who chose to make a living in health care, no slavery is happening.
The child is capable of receiving good health care. Someone else does have to enforce that right. In most cases, letting the parents decide what's best for their children works well. In some cases, it doesn't, and someone should intervene for the sake of the child. In some cases, this means finding other people to take care of the child, and the government usually tries to avoid detailed decisions.
If you check Roe vs. Wade, you will see that it's not a blanket ban on abortions, but has restrictions on government action (giving people freedom, of course) that vary by time spent gestating. That pretty much reflects the closest thing we have to a consensus on abortion. Therefore, the government is perfect capable of banning late-term abortions except for the life-or-death reasons that are the only reason late-term abortions are currently performed for.
Technically, we have claims that people posted verified negative reviews and had them deleted. It's easy to make claims like that even if they aren't true, and a lot of anti-Clinton people are well known to lie without regard to the facts.
Given that, I'm interested in the fact that no real news organization has covered it.
The big difference is that a private organization can only say "you can't publish that here", while government censorship would be "you can't publish that". A private organization can't stop you from saying what you like.
For Conservatives, life beings at conception and ends at birth. (In some cases, it starts again at brain death.)
For Liberals, once you're born, you're alive. At that point, you're an independent human being, to be treated as such. This means that parental rights are limited, since a child has rights to health care. You're confusing parental rights with individual rights. The individual right to proper health care overrides parental rights.
People have been surprised at the behavior of programs they created. Computer programs insist on behaving in ways other than the ones they were consciously written for.
Lots of things are not inherent in the Standard Model, but are emergent phenomenon. Assuming I'm conscious, that doesn't mean that any individual quark or lepton in my body is. If I can create a poem, it doesn't mean any individual molecule in my body can. There is no scientific reason to think everything is conscious. Some mystics report that everything is conscious, but not by a repeatable objective technique, so science can't investigate it. (Science can investigate the beliefs, but not whether the beliefs are true or false.)
Lucid dreaming is not evidence of anything going on outside the body. Near-death experiences are reasonably consistent with other near-death experiences, but we have no way to tell whether there's any connection with anything outside the body. Out-of-body experiences are normally not verifiable. There's also the issue that accounts of out-of-body experiences may be lies or misunderstanding of what really happened, perhaps involving something unconsciously perceived. If, before 2015, you had been able to have OOB where you could accurately describe things in the next room, you could have collected a million dollars from the James Randi Educational Foundation. In fact, nobody demonstrated paranormal abilities to them. That's not to say there are no paranormal abilities, but it is evidence.
The problem I had with quantum mechanics and free will is that quantum stuff is either deterministic or random, and randomness is not what I consider free will. If I rolled dice to select my reaction to things, nobody would consider the rolling to be free will.
There's also the fact that some of my allegedly free will decisions can be reliably predicted. If I'm hungry, and am offered a choice between a slice of pepperoni pizza and something with green peppers on it, I'm taking the pepperoni. There's no outside compulsion, and I am free to select either slice. If free will exists, this would seem to be it, but the result is utterly predictable.
Yes, but are you conscious? There are people eminently qualified (Daniel Dennet?) to have opinions on the matter that don't think so.
One thing we do know is that less behavior is conscious than we perceive.
Yup. Humans can see finer details than cats. Cats can see some gradations humans can't, as their something-or-other curve is shifted rather than smaller, but I don't think that's much help.
Way back when, researchers tested to see if cats saw color, and determined that they didn't. Dissection of cat eyes showed that cats do have cone cells in their eyes, and further tests showed that cats can indeed distinguish by color, although not nearly as well as humans can. The original experiments apparently failed to sufficiently interest the test cats.
Babies don't have much control over their bodies when born, so it's really hard to run tests on them because scoring the tests has to depend on something observable.
Okay, so they want me to consider a vendor that charges for everything, saves money where it can, and has lockin. And they want me to choose Oracle over that vendor? They're nuts!
I read your posts. If I misunderstood them, I apologize.
I vote in state elections (counting the Presidential election), district elections, county elections, and city elections. Obviously my vote is more significant the fewer people are eligible and willing to vote. However, I still don't know what your point is, other than mistaking misunderstanding for rage mode. Are we just in agreement?
I didn't know much about him at that time. The Clinton releases I would feel better about if he'd done one large dump rather than spacing things out for increased political effect.
He is a foreigner who deliberately influenced a US election in ways other than just infodumping.
Right. Reread what you wrote. You're agreeing that Assange was doing his best to stop Clinton from being elected, and you're making excuses for why.
Start with some extremely suspicious behavior, compounded with obvious lies, around the rape allegations. I got really annoyed by people who swallowed whatever he said, no matter how implausible, no matter how wrong. His political campaigning against Clinton showed that he isn't an impartial truth dumper.
He sure seemed interested in getting Trump elected. (It wasn't that he just released dirt on CLinton, but the way he dribbled it out for maximum political effect). I don't know if he's a Kremlin front, but he's not an impartial publisher.