There is nothing now. It is everywhere, it is nowhere. It permeates the whole universe. The thing is, nothing is *nothing*. It doesn't look like anything, it doesn't have any gravitational pull, it doesn't radiate, it doesn't reflect light, it doesn't affect the universe in any way. It doesn't interfere with us *at all*. It has no effects or consequences whatsoever. It has no physical existence, no thing can come from it, therefore it cannot produce anything. It's just nothing -- timeless, spaceless, pure nothingness. The universe and nothing are not opposites; they do not cancel each other out or annihilate each other. They have no effect on each other. There is no difference between nothing 'being' here or not 'being' here. It's exactly the same.
It's confusing to say that the universe 'came from' nothing. The universe wasn't produced by nothing. Currently, the universe exists, and also there is nothing. At some point in the past, the past didn't exist. When the universe didn't exist, there was only nothing.
"Your argument seems to be that "everything we don't have a cure for should just be accepted, and everything we think we have a cure for should be covered by the government.""
I never said that. You are putting words in my mouth. What my argument is that we as a society, whether it's a government program, a university, a pharmaceutical research lab, private insurance companies, non-profit foundations, or just plain ol' individuals paying doctors for their services, we don't have unlimited funds to turn the Earth into a painless utopia. We have to decide how to distribute our resources wisely against various competing needs, such as medicine, food, clothing and shelter, and relaxation and rest, to make the best out of life with what we have.
The facts of life are that we have limited resources to solve our unlimited problems. One one end of the extreme spectrum, we could do absolutely nothing but have a party until we all drop dead of starvation because nobody is growing and preparing food. On the other end of the extreme spectrum, we could embark on a crash course and enlist the entire world population to study diseases so rare, they afflict less than 100 people. Everybody would spend 80 hours weeks studying medicine and genetics and researching new drugs and treatments. They would only eat one meal a day so as not to cut into our precious rare-disease research time.
Our, we could try to wisely use our limited resources to maximize the benefit to society. Some diseases are just so rare and so difficult to treat that it's just not worth the money. Sooner or later, your body will get so old that it will become too expensive to maintain it, and you will die of a cold, or the flu, or a blood clot. Sometimes we have to accept hardship and loss and just carry on with our everyday lives.
Read my personal history in this post. I was hospitalized age 13 for observation and diagnosed with dysthymia. I was one of the first children prescribed prozac in the early 90s. I have a right to speak about depression.
"In general, you may have a point, but the spinach example is ridiculous. We had a product that was known to contain E. coli and was making large amounts of people sick (I think a couple hundred reported cases). What were they supposed to do, let a known infected product stay on the market and get more people sick? What good is the FDA (or USDA) if they don't actually do anything when they find a problem? I'd be pretty pissed if the government let contaminated food stay on the shelves."
How sick were the people? Usually food poisoning is just some vomiting and diarrhea. Yes, the spinach case was so severe that people died, but IIRC, that was like 10 people. I'll bet right now, there are thousands of cases of food poisoning across the US. Do you know what that means? The US food supply is unsafe! We should pull *all* the food off the shelf right now, less another person be struck ill.
I think you get the point I'm making. For every person that gets food poisoning, there are thousands, or more likely tens or hundreds of thousands, who get nourished. We can't interrupt
I think I have a right to speak about depression. At third grade I started showing symptoms of depression. From there began a long series of social workers, counselors, psychologists, and psychiatrists. I was prescribed norpramin, a tri-cyclic anti-depressant. That phase finally culminated when I was hospitalized in a mental hospital at age 13 for observation. I was one of the first children to be put on prozac, the new wonder drug of the time. My final diagnosis at that point was dysthymia.
Since then, I have had bouts of depression, and sought out professional psychaitric help and took prescription depression medication at my own volition. I've been diagnosed with bi-polar disorder and Asperger's syndrome.
What I believe at this point in my life is that we, as Americans, don't know how to relax and take care of ourselves mentally. We as a society have told ourselves that happiness comes from material posessions and work. For me, what brought me real relief from my depression was to stop worrying about what other people think of me, and start loving myself without reserve. This sounds silly and new-agey, I know, but it really did/does work, at least for me. I stopped thinking "I'm a loser because I don't have a good job/girl friend/house" and started thinking, really believing, that I was good enough and deserved love. Previously, I was very harsh on myself and demanded excellence. I graduated from OSU with two degrees, Summa cum laude. But I thought I wasn't good enough because I didn't get Magna cum laude. If you hold yourself to too high of a standard, you will always dissapoint yourself and consider yourself a failure. That's what I thought of myself. I graduated Magna cum laude, but thought of myself as a failure! No wonder I was depressed. Anyway, I decided, "fuck that way of thinking, I like who I am and I do a good job." And you know what? I did do a good job.
"Science and engineering may not lead to utopia, but more often than not it improves the situation. Saying "C'est la vie" and pretending there isn't anything wrong only helps when a situation is completely beyond your control, which shouldn't be very often."
Again, I'm trying hard to make it clear that there should be a balance. There are a lot of things in our lives that are completely beyond our control. Accidents, aging, illness, and death. Perhaps in this century or the next, they will figure out the secrets of eternal youth. Until that time, we have to deal with balding, flabby stomachs, wrinkles, less energy, and eventually death.
Pretending there isn't anything wrong when something is obviously wrong is a problem. By the same token, undertaking desperate, fruitless effort to fix a problem that you can do absolutely nothing about is a recipe for a nervous breakdown. All I'm saying is that there needs to be a balance between work and relaxation. I'm not saying give up all science and research
You have a great point. I took great care to not idealize neither American nor Bolivian life or culture. There are good and bad elements and both.
"I greatly admire The Something Must be Done philosophy."
I agree. I don't want to eat raw meat that's been sitting out in the sun all day. However, pulling spinach from the shelves *all over the nation* because 10 people died of food poisoning is a severe over-reaction, IMHO. I think there needs to be a healthy balance between "Something must be done" and an acceptance of life.
Yes, your mom has a rare form of cancer. The best that the Mayo clinic can do is give her three months, if you want to spend a million dollars. You know what? Your mom is going to die. The best thing you can do for yourself, psychologically, is mourn and accept it. Not that it's easy to do, but no amount of work and and science will save your parents or you from death. As a society, we could take those millions of dollars spent on rare diseases, and immunize young children. We don't have to undertake hysterical, desperate work at all costs when life presents a problem to you.
Here in the US people are overworked and stressed out, taking anti-depressants because their lives aren't perfect. We don't know how to enjoy the simple, everydayness of life. That doesn't mean that we stop doing any science and research. Life is not a paradise, and pretending that science and engineering will make it so will only lead you to disappointment with life.
"What is it about train system efficiency that inculcates a preference for or against fascism in the general populace?"
This might sound kind of silly, but hear me out. I think it's a question of whether society as a whole prioritizes the lives of individuals, or the regular functioning of societal institutions.
Will the train wait for you if you are running two minutes late? Or will it leave exactly on time? What if you are going to visit your sick mother in the hospital? Will the conductor let you on if you run up at the last minute, after the doors have closed, tears in your eyes?
Are the people in charge sticklers for the rules, or will the allow an except for your particular life story and situation? Are we cogs in the machine, to be cast off in the ditch if we are unable to keep up with the machinations of the city? Are we here to support the institutions, or are the institutions here to make our lives easier?
I grew up in the US and got used to reliable infrastructure. I have done a lot of travelling in South American since I was in college, and it has really changed my perspective. Not that I am saying that one is better (I'll get to fascism later), but just observing at this point.
I just got back from Bolivia. In La Paz, any body with a car can put a sign on their windshield and do their own taxi service. Anybody can set down a blanket on the sidewalk and start selling potatoes or trinkets to tourists. Open air markets have fresh meat rotting in the high-altitude sun, and freshly picked vegetables sitting out in the open, dirt still on them. There are no police who are going to stop you, there are no taxes to pay.
There *are* registered, licensed taxis, and regular retail shops like we are used to here in the United States. However, official institutions don't have total control over every aspect of life like they do here. Here in the US, you need permission to do wipe your ass, pardon the expression. But in Bolivia, at least, informal 'institutions' exist alongside the official ones.
In La Paz, there are full-size vans that run regular routes as taxi/buses. After 5 O'clock, when people are getting off of work, they will squeeze in as many people as can fit. Everyone is just trying to get home to their families, and nobody is going to throw you off if you are just sitting one butt-cheek on the edge of a seat. I've ridden several times in crowded, swaying full-size buses over dirt roads on mountains. I'm agnostic, but I prayed an awful lot.
Now, of course, there are a lot more deaths due to safety hazards in Bolivia, in traffic and in homes. A lot of people get food poisoning. I think Bolivians are more accepting of the suffering and death in general.
Here in the US, people seem to have what I call a hysteria of action. If something bad happens to anyone , Sometime Must Be Done, so that nobody ever has to suffer ever again. If a child dies in a shooting, all guns everywhere must be registered and locked up. If somebody gets food poisoning, we must institute totally new rules and procedures about handling food. If somebody dies in a car accident, we have to put air-bags on the roofs of all new cars. If somebody dies of a rare, expensive disease, we must establish a new non-profit so that nobody ever need suffer this disease again. If something bad ever manages to happen again, it was because somebody was lazy, not doing their job, and they must be fired. America is a paradise, and if bad things happen, it's somebody's fault for not doing their job.
Anyway, relating this to Nazi-ism, what kind of person throws people into the oven? I believe the same attitude of the person who makes sure that the trains run on time, regardless of who actually needs to go where. They prioritize the machine above the person. All of the death camp guards were just doing their jobs, following orders, doing what they were told. It didn't matter that this prisoner had a life and a family; he needed to be loaded up on the train or suffocated
Passports are for getting back into your country, not for leaving. Leave any time you want. However, anybody who wants to get in to Britain must show that they have a right to be there.
On the most abstract level, you can argue that this is just another step needed to verify the identity of the person presenting a passport to enter Britain. But personally I'm highly suspicious of this.
I don't know about Bill Gates, but William H. Gates Sr., the father of Bill Gates, supports the inheritance tax.
From Now with Bill Moyers: "There's a campaign to restore the inheritance tax. And it's being led, believe it or not, by some of the country's richest people including Bill Gates, Sr...."
From Alternet.org: "Case Against Inheritance Tax Is Bogus", By Chuck Collins and Bill Gates, Sr., AlterNet. Posted September 15, 2005.
The reason is obvious -- without the inheritance tax, the US would develop a wealthy aristocratic class. This is one of the main reasons the founding fathers broke away from Britain and developed a constitutional Republic.
I remember something from my days of getting an anthropology degree where some scientists was trying to guess the approximate date when humans first started wearing clothing. Tools made from bone and rock last a long time, so you can easily get a good idea of when people started making new types of tools. But stuff like clothing, rope, or weaving rots away pretty quickly, so finding them in archaeological digs is pretty rare.
IIRC, there are two types of lice or fleas. One kind lived on human skin and hair, and the other preferred clothing and blankets and lived only in artificial fabrics. The scientists were trying to see when the fabric-preferring bugs diverged from a common ancestor by examining the genetics. Really clever!
"I'm willing to go along with your theory, but you don't say what the selective pressure specifically was, other than that there was some. You have effectively said nothing other than "Human consciousness and intelligence evolved."
I did specify "knowledge retention"."
Can you explain how knowledge retention acts as a selective pressure?
" Aside from those we have verified that those animal you outlined have a lot of the "mental" traits we associate with people. Chimps can use tools, elephants have religion and society, etc.. The major difference is we have very dextrous hands while even chimps don't have as much control as us and we've build upon 4000+ years of human knowledge."
My contention was that the selective pressure was plant toxins that our non-humans encountered in their foraging activities. If you're going to take risks and try eating new plants while strolling in the woods, the person who was able to get themself through a bad trip ( which is a sure bet when you're eating random plants ) without getting themselves killed would have increased reproductive success.
Which is ridicoulous. Avoiding those plants would convey a more significant advantage then being able to weather the trip. And if you have dipped into the drug culture you'll find the intelligent and un intelligent will both be hugging each other and saying retarded things to each other on Exstacy. There is no functional difference. It depends more on your resistance to drugs as opposed to your intelligence."
Avoiding those plants would be great, if that were actually possible. The problem is that plants don't have a big sign on them that says "poison -- don't eat". Some chemicals that are poisonous to certain animals are not poisonous to others. For instance, squirrels can eat buckeyes, while humans will get sick on them. Some plants are violently poisonous. If an early human ancestor ate the leaf from a jimsonweed plant, and it gave him a heart attack, or drove him to run off of a cliff from the panic attack, how does a dead human communicate to others that the jimsonweed is deadly poisonous?
If an organism encounters a brand new plant that it's never seen before, and has never ever heard anything about it, how does it know whether or not its poisonous? It wouldn't. And for an explorative, risk-taking animal like a chimpanzee or human, they are going to encounter a lot more poisons than a picky, grazing animal with a good sense of smell such as an antelope.
"Drug culture" permeates all of human activity. From drinking tea and coffee in the morning, to drinking beer and wine on the evening and weekends, to taking medicines when you get sick, all people everywhere take drugs on a daily basis.
My guess is that the responsibility falls on the individual or organization that put the camera up. I wonder if corporations are legal persons in France like they are in the United States.
"To be a journalist, you should have to publish what you record. What other business does the government have in defining a journalist, except the essential operation that defines them."
Is this opinion based on French jurisprudence? This sounds suspiciously American. I don't really know much about the French system, but they may not have a constitution, or any natural rights inherent in their system. The government might have total authority to define who a journalist is.
I just did some preliminary googling, and I didn't see anything about journalism or the press in the French constitution.
"And if you don't publish, then how is it illegal to have a record of what your own senses experienced?"
Apparently, they just passed a law making it illegal. I mean, didn't you read the article?;)
Isn't part of claustrophobia the sound clues that tell you you're in a tight space? I don't know it , so I don't know. But I heard that MRIs make a racket.
Yeah, but when you are outside, don't you see the ground that things are resting on? I'm guessing that when they said "if a room were to be coated with this material, switching on the lights would only illuminate the items in the room and not the walls" they meant the floor too. But also, the items would appear to cohere in space as if they were on a floor. Which they are.
I heard an internet rumor on a conspiracy website somewhere that Saddam Hussein had some fortune-telling system to decide which safe-house to stay at when he was on the run from the US military. Supposedly, his system, which involved some 'meaningful' rocks thrown on the ground, told him which one to go to, but there was speculation that it functioned randomly, like dice, so his choices were just random chance.
"If you want to preserve anonymity, you can't let someone have any method of verifying their own vote, or someone could force them to turn over that ability to check their vote."
I'm not proposing that someone be able to verify their own vote at any time. What I'm proposing is that each voter be able to verify that their vote is counted in the official tally at the time of their vote.
Here is one scenario. This gets a bit complicated, so stay with me on this one:
Registered voter goes to polling station to vote.
Poll worker verifies that person is a registered voter.
Poll worker gives voter random set of mathemagical single-use encryption strings.
Poll worker gives the registered voter the official tally. This is an encrypted string that literally is the election count. It's encrypted, so the poll worker cannot decrypt and read it.
The voter decrypts the tally, adds in his/her encrypted voting string, and re-encrypts the tally.
The voter gives the encrypted tally string back to the poll worker.
The poll worker checks the encrypted string against some mathemagical hashing algorithm. The hashing algorithm only tells the poll worker if the election string is still valid, but not what the actual counts are.
If the hash checks out, the poll worker then hands the encrypted tally to the next verified voter.
If the hash fails the check, that means the voter tried to cheat, or added nonsense into the tally, or simply made a mistake. The voter can try again, the poll worker can turn them away, etc.
At the close of the polls, all of the tallies are decrypted, and they are already tallied and added up. Winners are shortly announced. Nobody knows which encryption strings belong to who, so there can be no coercion, and the voter is confident that his/her vote was counted when they cast their ballot.
Of course, I'm writing more science-fiction than a well-thought-through proposal. I'm certain you can find some mistakes or errors in logic. But this is the basic idea: Stalin said that it only matters who counts the vote. In a democracy, we want one man, one vote. I think that with encryption, we can put in the hands of each voter the power to affect the election by exactly one vote, instead of relying on volunteers and partisans.
What we really need to do electronic voting is secure tallying. We need a public, verifiable way of checking that the tallies are legitimate. We also need to make sure that they are also anonymous.
Any proposed method of verifying your electronic vote, whether it's a paper receipt, a bar code, or a website that you can check later on, is susceptible to being left out of the tally. So what if the website reports that it has correctly recorded your vote? You have no way of knowing whether your verified vote is counted in the official tally. Even if you see a vote exactly like yours in the official tally, it may or may not belong to you. With anonymous voting, several people might be looking at a single ballot, all thinking it was the one that they cast.
I'm trying to imagine a system where we can all have verified votes and make sure that they are affecting the official tally, but still maintain anonymity in the vote. Voting is basically a system where each voter can affect the outcome of the election by exactly one vote, for each office and issue. Perhaps a system where each voter adds encrypted strings of their vote to the official tally. Each voter can decrypt the official tally string and see that their vote has affect the tally. At the end of the election the last voter turns their decryption string to the officials, and the tallies are decrypted.
As you can tell, I'm not a mathematician nor a computer scientist. Please feel free to chime in and criticize or offer new ideas.
Slashdot Mirror
There is nothing now. It is everywhere, it is nowhere. It permeates the whole universe. The thing is, nothing is *nothing*. It doesn't look like anything, it doesn't have any gravitational pull, it doesn't radiate, it doesn't reflect light, it doesn't affect the universe in any way. It doesn't interfere with us *at all*. It has no effects or consequences whatsoever. It has no physical existence, no thing can come from it, therefore it cannot produce anything. It's just nothing -- timeless, spaceless, pure nothingness. The universe and nothing are not opposites; they do not cancel each other out or annihilate each other. They have no effect on each other. There is no difference between nothing 'being' here or not 'being' here. It's exactly the same.
It's confusing to say that the universe 'came from' nothing. The universe wasn't produced by nothing. Currently, the universe exists, and also there is nothing. At some point in the past, the past didn't exist. When the universe didn't exist, there was only nothing.
My hope is that more computer science majors go into law enforcement.
"Your argument seems to be that "everything we don't have a cure for should just be accepted, and everything we think we have a cure for should be covered by the government.""
I never said that. You are putting words in my mouth. What my argument is that we as a society, whether it's a government program, a university, a pharmaceutical research lab, private insurance companies, non-profit foundations, or just plain ol' individuals paying doctors for their services, we don't have unlimited funds to turn the Earth into a painless utopia. We have to decide how to distribute our resources wisely against various competing needs, such as medicine, food, clothing and shelter, and relaxation and rest, to make the best out of life with what we have.
The facts of life are that we have limited resources to solve our unlimited problems. One one end of the extreme spectrum, we could do absolutely nothing but have a party until we all drop dead of starvation because nobody is growing and preparing food. On the other end of the extreme spectrum, we could embark on a crash course and enlist the entire world population to study diseases so rare, they afflict less than 100 people. Everybody would spend 80 hours weeks studying medicine and genetics and researching new drugs and treatments. They would only eat one meal a day so as not to cut into our precious rare-disease research time.
Our, we could try to wisely use our limited resources to maximize the benefit to society. Some diseases are just so rare and so difficult to treat that it's just not worth the money. Sooner or later, your body will get so old that it will become too expensive to maintain it, and you will die of a cold, or the flu, or a blood clot. Sometimes we have to accept hardship and loss and just carry on with our everyday lives.
Read my personal history in this post. I was hospitalized age 13 for observation and diagnosed with dysthymia. I was one of the first children prescribed prozac in the early 90s. I have a right to speak about depression.
"In general, you may have a point, but the spinach example is ridiculous. We had a product that was known to contain E. coli and was making large amounts of people sick (I think a couple hundred reported cases). What were they supposed to do, let a known infected product stay on the market and get more people sick? What good is the FDA (or USDA) if they don't actually do anything when they find a problem? I'd be pretty pissed if the government let contaminated food stay on the shelves."
How sick were the people? Usually food poisoning is just some vomiting and diarrhea. Yes, the spinach case was so severe that people died, but IIRC, that was like 10 people. I'll bet right now, there are thousands of cases of food poisoning across the US. Do you know what that means? The US food supply is unsafe! We should pull *all* the food off the shelf right now, less another person be struck ill.
I think you get the point I'm making. For every person that gets food poisoning, there are thousands, or more likely tens or hundreds of thousands, who get nourished. We can't interrupt
I think I have a right to speak about depression. At third grade I started showing symptoms of depression. From there began a long series of social workers, counselors, psychologists, and psychiatrists. I was prescribed norpramin, a tri-cyclic anti-depressant. That phase finally culminated when I was hospitalized in a mental hospital at age 13 for observation. I was one of the first children to be put on prozac, the new wonder drug of the time. My final diagnosis at that point was dysthymia.
Since then, I have had bouts of depression, and sought out professional psychaitric help and took prescription depression medication at my own volition. I've been diagnosed with bi-polar disorder and Asperger's syndrome.
What I believe at this point in my life is that we, as Americans, don't know how to relax and take care of ourselves mentally. We as a society have told ourselves that happiness comes from material posessions and work. For me, what brought me real relief from my depression was to stop worrying about what other people think of me, and start loving myself without reserve. This sounds silly and new-agey, I know, but it really did/does work, at least for me. I stopped thinking "I'm a loser because I don't have a good job/girl friend/house" and started thinking, really believing, that I was good enough and deserved love. Previously, I was very harsh on myself and demanded excellence. I graduated from OSU with two degrees, Summa cum laude. But I thought I wasn't good enough because I didn't get Magna cum laude. If you hold yourself to too high of a standard, you will always dissapoint yourself and consider yourself a failure. That's what I thought of myself. I graduated Magna cum laude, but thought of myself as a failure! No wonder I was depressed. Anyway, I decided, "fuck that way of thinking, I like who I am and I do a good job." And you know what? I did do a good job.
"Science and engineering may not lead to utopia, but more often than not it improves the situation. Saying "C'est la vie" and pretending there isn't anything wrong only helps when a situation is completely beyond your control, which shouldn't be very often."
Again, I'm trying hard to make it clear that there should be a balance. There are a lot of things in our lives that are completely beyond our control. Accidents, aging, illness, and death. Perhaps in this century or the next, they will figure out the secrets of eternal youth. Until that time, we have to deal with balding, flabby stomachs, wrinkles, less energy, and eventually death.
Pretending there isn't anything wrong when something is obviously wrong is a problem. By the same token, undertaking desperate, fruitless effort to fix a problem that you can do absolutely nothing about is a recipe for a nervous breakdown. All I'm saying is that there needs to be a balance between work and relaxation. I'm not saying give up all science and research
You have a great point. I took great care to not idealize neither American nor Bolivian life or culture. There are good and bad elements and both.
"I greatly admire The Something Must be Done philosophy."
I agree. I don't want to eat raw meat that's been sitting out in the sun all day. However, pulling spinach from the shelves *all over the nation* because 10 people died of food poisoning is a severe over-reaction, IMHO. I think there needs to be a healthy balance between "Something must be done" and an acceptance of life.
Yes, your mom has a rare form of cancer. The best that the Mayo clinic can do is give her three months, if you want to spend a million dollars. You know what? Your mom is going to die. The best thing you can do for yourself, psychologically, is mourn and accept it. Not that it's easy to do, but no amount of work and and science will save your parents or you from death. As a society, we could take those millions of dollars spent on rare diseases, and immunize young children. We don't have to undertake hysterical, desperate work at all costs when life presents a problem to you.
Here in the US people are overworked and stressed out, taking anti-depressants because their lives aren't perfect. We don't know how to enjoy the simple, everydayness of life. That doesn't mean that we stop doing any science and research. Life is not a paradise, and pretending that science and engineering will make it so will only lead you to disappointment with life.
"What is it about train system efficiency that inculcates a preference for or against fascism in the general populace?"
This might sound kind of silly, but hear me out. I think it's a question of whether society as a whole prioritizes the lives of individuals, or the regular functioning of societal institutions.
Will the train wait for you if you are running two minutes late? Or will it leave exactly on time? What if you are going to visit your sick mother in the hospital? Will the conductor let you on if you run up at the last minute, after the doors have closed, tears in your eyes?
Are the people in charge sticklers for the rules, or will the allow an except for your particular life story and situation? Are we cogs in the machine, to be cast off in the ditch if we are unable to keep up with the machinations of the city? Are we here to support the institutions, or are the institutions here to make our lives easier?
I grew up in the US and got used to reliable infrastructure. I have done a lot of travelling in South American since I was in college, and it has really changed my perspective. Not that I am saying that one is better (I'll get to fascism later), but just observing at this point.
I just got back from Bolivia. In La Paz, any body with a car can put a sign on their windshield and do their own taxi service. Anybody can set down a blanket on the sidewalk and start selling potatoes or trinkets to tourists. Open air markets have fresh meat rotting in the high-altitude sun, and freshly picked vegetables sitting out in the open, dirt still on them. There are no police who are going to stop you, there are no taxes to pay. There *are* registered, licensed taxis, and regular retail shops like we are used to here in the United States. However, official institutions don't have total control over every aspect of life like they do here. Here in the US, you need permission to do wipe your ass, pardon the expression. But in Bolivia, at least, informal 'institutions' exist alongside the official ones.
In La Paz, there are full-size vans that run regular routes as taxi/buses. After 5 O'clock, when people are getting off of work, they will squeeze in as many people as can fit. Everyone is just trying to get home to their families, and nobody is going to throw you off if you are just sitting one butt-cheek on the edge of a seat. I've ridden several times in crowded, swaying full-size buses over dirt roads on mountains. I'm agnostic, but I prayed an awful lot.
Now, of course, there are a lot more deaths due to safety hazards in Bolivia, in traffic and in homes. A lot of people get food poisoning. I think Bolivians are more accepting of the suffering and death in general.
Here in the US, people seem to have what I call a hysteria of action. If something bad happens to anyone , Sometime Must Be Done, so that nobody ever has to suffer ever again. If a child dies in a shooting, all guns everywhere must be registered and locked up. If somebody gets food poisoning, we must institute totally new rules and procedures about handling food. If somebody dies in a car accident, we have to put air-bags on the roofs of all new cars. If somebody dies of a rare, expensive disease, we must establish a new non-profit so that nobody ever need suffer this disease again. If something bad ever manages to happen again, it was because somebody was lazy, not doing their job, and they must be fired. America is a paradise, and if bad things happen, it's somebody's fault for not doing their job.
Anyway, relating this to Nazi-ism, what kind of person throws people into the oven? I believe the same attitude of the person who makes sure that the trains run on time, regardless of who actually needs to go where. They prioritize the machine above the person. All of the death camp guards were just doing their jobs, following orders, doing what they were told. It didn't matter that this prisoner had a life and a family; he needed to be loaded up on the train or suffocated
Passports are for getting back into your country, not for leaving. Leave any time you want. However, anybody who wants to get in to Britain must show that they have a right to be there.
On the most abstract level, you can argue that this is just another step needed to verify the identity of the person presenting a passport to enter Britain. But personally I'm highly suspicious of this.
How do you know the meeting was bugged?
"Say what? Most of the founding fathers were part of the wealthy aristocratic class."
I was referring specifically to titled aristocracy. You know, a system of ruling Lords with specific titles.
But, you do have a point -- if an aristocracy arose in the US, they would be 'unofficial' aristocrats, just like the founding fathers were.
"He opposes the inheritance tax, like his dad..."
..."
I don't know about Bill Gates, but William H. Gates Sr., the father of Bill Gates, supports the inheritance tax.
From Now with Bill Moyers: "There's a campaign to restore the inheritance tax. And it's being led, believe it or not, by some of the country's richest people including Bill Gates, Sr.
From Alternet.org: "Case Against Inheritance Tax Is Bogus", By Chuck Collins and Bill Gates, Sr., AlterNet. Posted September 15, 2005.
The reason is obvious -- without the inheritance tax, the US would develop a wealthy aristocratic class. This is one of the main reasons the founding fathers broke away from Britain and developed a constitutional Republic.
I was referring to another article about other research. RTFC.
I was indicating that I didn't remember if the research was centered around fleas or lice.
I was using artificial to mean 'man-made'. I guess the phrase 'artificial fabrics' is kind of redundant in this context.
I remember something from my days of getting an anthropology degree where some scientists was trying to guess the approximate date when humans first started wearing clothing. Tools made from bone and rock last a long time, so you can easily get a good idea of when people started making new types of tools. But stuff like clothing, rope, or weaving rots away pretty quickly, so finding them in archaeological digs is pretty rare.
IIRC, there are two types of lice or fleas. One kind lived on human skin and hair, and the other preferred clothing and blankets and lived only in artificial fabrics. The scientists were trying to see when the fabric-preferring bugs diverged from a common ancestor by examining the genetics. Really clever!
"I'm willing to go along with your theory, but you don't say what the selective pressure specifically was, other than that there was some. You have effectively said nothing other than "Human consciousness and intelligence evolved."
I did specify "knowledge retention"."
Can you explain how knowledge retention acts as a selective pressure?
" Aside from those we have verified that those animal you outlined have a lot of the "mental" traits we associate with people. Chimps can use tools, elephants have religion and society, etc.. The major difference is we have very dextrous hands while even chimps don't have as much control as us and we've build upon 4000+ years of human knowledge."
My contention was that the selective pressure was plant toxins that our non-humans encountered in their foraging activities. If you're going to take risks and try eating new plants while strolling in the woods, the person who was able to get themself through a bad trip ( which is a sure bet when you're eating random plants ) without getting themselves killed would have increased reproductive success.
Which is ridicoulous. Avoiding those plants would convey a more significant advantage then being able to weather the trip. And if you have dipped into the drug culture you'll find the intelligent and un intelligent will both be hugging each other and saying retarded things to each other on Exstacy. There is no functional difference. It depends more on your resistance to drugs as opposed to your intelligence."
Avoiding those plants would be great, if that were actually possible. The problem is that plants don't have a big sign on them that says "poison -- don't eat". Some chemicals that are poisonous to certain animals are not poisonous to others. For instance, squirrels can eat buckeyes, while humans will get sick on them. Some plants are violently poisonous. If an early human ancestor ate the leaf from a jimsonweed plant, and it gave him a heart attack, or drove him to run off of a cliff from the panic attack, how does a dead human communicate to others that the jimsonweed is deadly poisonous?
If an organism encounters a brand new plant that it's never seen before, and has never ever heard anything about it, how does it know whether or not its poisonous? It wouldn't. And for an explorative, risk-taking animal like a chimpanzee or human, they are going to encounter a lot more poisons than a picky, grazing animal with a good sense of smell such as an antelope.
"Drug culture" permeates all of human activity. From drinking tea and coffee in the morning, to drinking beer and wine on the evening and weekends, to taking medicines when you get sick, all people everywhere take drugs on a daily basis.
My guess is that the responsibility falls on the individual or organization that put the camera up. I wonder if corporations are legal persons in France like they are in the United States.
If that's true, that means that only the videographer can publish the video -- no third party.
"To be a journalist, you should have to publish what you record. What other business does the government have in defining a journalist, except the essential operation that defines them."
;)
Is this opinion based on French jurisprudence? This sounds suspiciously American. I don't really know much about the French system, but they may not have a constitution, or any natural rights inherent in their system. The government might have total authority to define who a journalist is.
I just did some preliminary googling, and I didn't see anything about journalism or the press in the French constitution.
"And if you don't publish, then how is it illegal to have a record of what your own senses experienced?"
Apparently, they just passed a law making it illegal. I mean, didn't you read the article?
So, what do you have to do in order to be considered a journalist in France?
Isn't part of claustrophobia the sound clues that tell you you're in a tight space? I don't know it , so I don't know. But I heard that MRIs make a racket.
Yeah, but when you are outside, don't you see the ground that things are resting on? I'm guessing that when they said "if a room were to be coated with this material, switching on the lights would only illuminate the items in the room and not the walls" they meant the floor too. But also, the items would appear to cohere in space as if they were on a floor. Which they are.
I heard an internet rumor on a conspiracy website somewhere that Saddam Hussein had some fortune-telling system to decide which safe-house to stay at when he was on the run from the US military. Supposedly, his system, which involved some 'meaningful' rocks thrown on the ground, told him which one to go to, but there was speculation that it functioned randomly, like dice, so his choices were just random chance.
I'm not proposing that someone be able to verify their own vote at any time. What I'm proposing is that each voter be able to verify that their vote is counted in the official tally at the time of their vote.
Here is one scenario. This gets a bit complicated, so stay with me on this one:
- Registered voter goes to polling station to vote.
- Poll worker verifies that person is a registered voter.
- Poll worker gives voter random set of mathemagical single-use encryption strings.
- Poll worker gives the registered voter the official tally. This is an encrypted string that literally is the election count. It's encrypted, so the poll worker cannot decrypt and read it.
- The voter decrypts the tally, adds in his/her encrypted voting string, and re-encrypts the tally.
- The voter gives the encrypted tally string back to the poll worker.
- The poll worker checks the encrypted string against some mathemagical hashing algorithm. The hashing algorithm only tells the poll worker if the election string is still valid, but not what the actual counts are.
- If the hash checks out, the poll worker then hands the encrypted tally to the next verified voter.
- If the hash fails the check, that means the voter tried to cheat, or added nonsense into the tally, or simply made a mistake. The voter can try again, the poll worker can turn them away, etc.
At the close of the polls, all of the tallies are decrypted, and they are already tallied and added up. Winners are shortly announced. Nobody knows which encryption strings belong to who, so there can be no coercion, and the voter is confident that his/her vote was counted when they cast their ballot.Of course, I'm writing more science-fiction than a well-thought-through proposal. I'm certain you can find some mistakes or errors in logic. But this is the basic idea: Stalin said that it only matters who counts the vote. In a democracy, we want one man, one vote. I think that with encryption, we can put in the hands of each voter the power to affect the election by exactly one vote, instead of relying on volunteers and partisans.
What we really need to do electronic voting is secure tallying. We need a public, verifiable way of checking that the tallies are legitimate. We also need to make sure that they are also anonymous.
Any proposed method of verifying your electronic vote, whether it's a paper receipt, a bar code, or a website that you can check later on, is susceptible to being left out of the tally. So what if the website reports that it has correctly recorded your vote? You have no way of knowing whether your verified vote is counted in the official tally. Even if you see a vote exactly like yours in the official tally, it may or may not belong to you. With anonymous voting, several people might be looking at a single ballot, all thinking it was the one that they cast.
I'm trying to imagine a system where we can all have verified votes and make sure that they are affecting the official tally, but still maintain anonymity in the vote. Voting is basically a system where each voter can affect the outcome of the election by exactly one vote, for each office and issue. Perhaps a system where each voter adds encrypted strings of their vote to the official tally. Each voter can decrypt the official tally string and see that their vote has affect the tally. At the end of the election the last voter turns their decryption string to the officials, and the tallies are decrypted.
As you can tell, I'm not a mathematician nor a computer scientist. Please feel free to chime in and criticize or offer new ideas.