Hey, supply and demand. I'm kinda a freak because I went to school and just studied what interested me without regard to how I was going to apply it to getting a job, but most people I know checked salaries, and went for things where they thought they could make money.
Additonally, once you get out in the field, you start getting a sense of what people make, and what you can do and would like to make, and if you figure you could make more money as an engineer, you go back to school and pick up the degree...None of this stuff is set in stone in high school, or even undergrad level college.
I'm sure I'm not the only one here who remembers the glut of 30-somethings going back to school to get their CS degree in the 90's. If there is demand, people will try to fill that demand, because doing so will profit them personally. Conversely, people who try and fill a non-existent demand will be punished by the market, shuffled into a crappy job.
And for the inevitable people who're going to say, "All the US demand for engineers is being filled by H1-B types" I say good! More engineers in this country means more engineering work has to come to this country, because that's where the engineers are, and that's where the work will be done best. More work for engineers means more demand for engineers, and more engineers with jobs HERE means countless other jobs will be created by the money they'll be spending. Would you rather they stayed where they are already, and brought the work to their country? We can afford to do that for running shoes, but if we start exporting tech industries, that's a bad thing.
Using government funding to force produce a glut of science-types is silly. Better to use the money to kick off industries that require them, and let the rest take care of itself.
You guess wrong. He predicted famine across the board, starting in the first world countries, because they had the highest population growth curves. He failed to predict the decline in birth rates, which does not relate to cost per child, I'm afraid, but rather to decreased need for their labour, and lower child mortality, and he failed to predict the increase in food production.
Famines occur for lots of reasons. War, civil unrest, corrupt governments, and countries like us choosing to produce less food than we could, to keep the price high.
It could, but it won't. Not in our lifetimes. There are a hell of a lot of techniques out there already that do better than break even, and that's with a low adoption rate. As the price of oil rises, the adoption of alternate sources will increase, and there will be tremendous incentives toward improving the technology. Government incentives are chickenfeed compared to what resources the market will bring to bear in the quest for cheap energy.
We could get some inflation. Hell, it could wipe the US out, because we're so damn dependent on oil, thanks to generations of brillant leaders...I doubt it will. But for the market as a whole, it'll be a blip on the radar. People have been predicting doom for centuries over this and that scarce resource because they don't see utilization ever changing, but they always change.
Energy costs are a good example. If they spike, what happens? People pay more for gas, people pay more to heat and cool their homes. Result? People use less gas, and change their home heating and cooling patterns. They insulate their houses. House designs with high energy efficiency become desirable. Car designs with high efficiency also become desirable. Fewer people drive, more people carpool. At the end of the day, the market corrects, and energy prices drop. People don't just tool along with the same usage patterns like morons, which is what everyone predicts. Plastics? Plastics themselves were a substitute for a more scare resource; if they get too expensive, we will substitute something for them.
The trap that everyone falls into is that they can't imagine the utilization of a resource going down. Surely we'll keep using more and more plastic, right? Not if the price goes up. We use it now because its cost efficient. If that changes, we'll use something else.
The shuttle example is terrible...It's an argument against government efficiency that has nothing, zero, to do with economics. Unintentionally you provided a good example of why it's not a good idea to put the government directly in charge of coming up with an oil alternative.
A good example is removable media for computers. Starting with the 3.25 in disk, there were several formats used before the widespread adoption of the CD. Each one of those formats was developed by a company, each one of them enjoyed some niche success, and each one of them failed. They never achieved widespread adoption, most people never knew they existed. It's like DAT tapes and minidisks for audio media...DATs are still used for tape backup, but that's it. And minidisks? They went over well in Japan.
In each case, it's a solution looking for a problem. In each case it failed, because as far as most people were concerned, there was no problem. Then along comes the writeable CD and the MP3, and the market changes overnight. Everyone has to have 'em.
The risk of meddling too much in the market is when you push a solution that turns out to be a bad solution. The government is in a good position to throw a ton of money at a boondoggle (like corn ethanol) just to meet a political agenda. It's a terrible waste of money, especially when they're at the same time artificially raising the price of corn! Maddening!
As for luck, it's not about luck. Look around. There are alternatives everywhere already. They're in early stages. Some of them will prove to be inefficient. But people are out there busting their asses to be there with the answer when the shoe drops.
The thing that will nail humanity is something that no one will see coming. Oil? No way. We've been dodging the natural resources bullet since the beginning of recorded history.
People who freak out about scarcity don't understand economics. Economic pressures drive alternatives and expanded production; we've been seeing this with food since Malthus confidently predicted that food generation could never keep up with current population growth...in 1798.
As the demand rises, people leap to fill it. When Metcalf decided we were going to run out of switching capacity, he was looking at current manufacturing capacity, and a projected increase in demand, and he was sure that capacity could never keep up with demand.
What he didn't see is a horde of people looking for ways to make money, who were looking at the same numbers and thinking, "Holy crap! If I make switches I'll be RICH!" Demand drives supply, not the other way around.
You and your knowledge of "economics" can go! We're predicting disaster here!
People have been predicting that we'd run out of item X by time Y for hundreds of years. The reason we don't is because (as you said) when supply dwindles, there is incentive to find news supplies and substitutes.
During WWII, it was thought that we'd completely run out of rubber, and this would kill our war effort, due to lack of tires, hoses, gaskets, etc. Along comes synthetic rubber, and magically we don't run out. These days most rubber is synthetic.
This stuff happens all the time. When oil becomes expensive enough, alternative fuel use will become so desirable that an efficient solution will present itself. Hell, that's why we switched to cars in the first place, because our previous transportation (horses) produced untold...uhh..."pollution". A little Co2 seemed like heaven compared to mountains of horse crap, and it didn't take long before cars needed less maintenance than horses.
There was a time, however, when the car was a choice only the rich could afford, one less reliable and less efficient than a good horse. Economics rarely gets the solution ahead of the problem, which is why it's an uphill battle to force people to switch to alternatives when the alternatives aren't as efficient as what they're already using.
The biggest issue right now is that the government is mucking with the damn problem by subsidizing industries to artificially make petroleum/cars seem more efficient than they actually are. For a bunch of "free market economists" they sure love to give away money to un-free the market. They're also dropping the ball by shouldering the pollution costs created by the fossil fuel industry, instead of passing it back to the industry in the form of taxes and fees. Take away the subsidies and fairly apply the costs to the industry that created them, and you'd see a much broader adoption of alternatives as the prices rose to reflect the "real" costs.
China is a good example of this right now...They're polluting like mad, and passing the costs of that on to their citizens so that they can be super-competitive in the global market against people who have to actually pay some of those costs. It's going to catch up with them in a big way...It's like their propping up our currency. The more the dollar deflates, the more money China dumps down the drain trying to keep the dollar high, at the same time trying to keep their own money as depressed as possible.
As the dollar deflates past a certain point, American goods will become "cheaper" and Chinese goods more expensive, leading to a local manufacturing resurgence, yadda yadda, whereas when the Chinese lose hold of their own money, they're going to have this explosion of costs internally, as well as having to watch their goods become much less competitive globally.
Well, I agree and disagree. Part of our monkey brain loves explosions, and all of our brain longs for concrete things. So a mass of statistics won't wake in the average person the sort of pure dread that a few pictures or a grisly story, will. The media has latched on to this, and now provides a non-stop cycle of abductions, explosions, and product-scare stories, and so the non-abstract-thinking average joe or jane decides that all there is in the world is these types of events, completely missing the point that these events are vanishingly uncommon, and only seem common because they are hilariously over-reported.
I think, in a way, we are wired to appreciate concrete stuff. It'd be hard not to be, on a lot of levels. A lot of how our brains work is absolutely dependent on that sort of perception.
On the other hand, we are all capable of abstract thought. It's unfortunate that this is not really wired into the emotional nerve center of most people, and it is definitely something that needs to be nurtured and cultivated in the population at large. I have no idea how this could be done.
I just think it's a poor way of stating it...It lets people off the hook. It's not their fault, they're insufficiently evolved.
He's using "risk assessment" to mean two different things. Being eaten by a tiger isn't a common problem anymore, but avoiding auto crashes, electrical shorts, etc, all fall into that category, and we react perfectly well to those things. What the bulk of people don't react well to is risk that they can't touch or see; the reason for this is that the body has an instinctive risk-response for things that pose immanent danger, and it doesn't have an instinct for things that pose potential or hypothetical threats. Why would it? Do we really need a fear response over a potential threat? Makes no sense.
I think most people of average or greater intelligence are smart enough to at least understand what is at stake with regards to potential threats. We need to give them education and training, and not just play on their fear of the unknown.
And that means what, exactly? We're evolved for tool use, and our tool use has grown so evolved that we're creating tools that surpass the conception of most members of our species. Does that mean that they need to evolve up to be able to create those things themselves? Not at all. It's a societal division of labor. Someone has to clean the telephones.
A biological population will have many individuals who have differing levels of skill at different tasks. A species as diverse as ours has a great many roles, and not everyone can be a specialist at every role. Saying that, because most individuals can't do X we're not evolved to do X, makes no sense. Clearly we are evolved to the point where some people can do it, and everything from there on out is just differences in individuals.
What he's hypothesizing is a type of Cognitive Closure, and while I had classes with McGinn, and he's a hell of a guy, I don't think that the answer to the question is that people simply aren't able to think about this kind of stuff. The fact that most people choose not to think about it, or are ignorant of it, is not the same as us being unable to think on those terms as a species.
The problem with defining the brain as a patchwork is that there is no conception of what a brain would look like if it were designed. It's like calling an airplane a patchwork, simply because it's made of different parts that are all attached to each other, and all do different things.
There are certainly a lot of ways in which our bodies are capable of adapting that would benefit us in the modern age. As for the perception of risk, I don't see it. Risk perception will never "evolve" to extend to the realm of the abstract, simply because it's much more beneficial to the body as a whole to have a designated response set for concrete risk...The kind that will kill you right now. People have proven to be able to train their instinctive risk-responses to a variety of situations, and that is what is going to apply to this sort of risk; training, and education, not evolution.
The evolution argument is disproven by Schneier himself; how could he be thinking about it if we hadn't already evolved to make it possible? It's like saying humanity had to evolve to have the correct response when someone pointed a gun at them; it was a new threat, presumably the first person to be shot didn't see it coming, but the guy standing next to him learned to jump for cover in record time.
I think the problems we're dealing with are of that nature. Most people aren't used to visualizing risk on the sort of scale that they're seeing it. It's not that they're unable, it's that they're uneducated.
That's part of it, but you're still more likely to die in a bus or taxi accident, and they're not viewed with the same unreasoning fear though they also lack control.
We are all soothed by familiar routine. This is the purpose of disaster drills, so if your building does catch fire, your mind will move into that pre-built track, and move effectively, without being paralyzed by the need to act conflicting with the fact that you have no idea of what to do. Planes are not only outside our control, they're outside most people's experience, so an event which is no more significant than a bus running through a pothole, elicits a greater level of fear due to it being an unknown, rather than a familiar, occurrence.
I'm not sure what the hell you're talking about. Are you saying that B.S is an evolutionary biologist? I think he'd be a bit surprised to be so described, since as far as I know, his background is almost entirely compsci and crypto (and physics).
Mine on the other hand is primarily cognitive science, which, as it happens, does include a bit of neuroscience, more than enough to dispel the whole "patchwork" assertion. And while my formal training in evolutionary biology is somewhat lacking, I think the uncontestable claim that humanity is a competitive animal will be seconded by anyone with even the weakest background in biology.
I would argue that there is no "evolution" that we can make as a species that will cause this problem to go away...It's a problem of software, not hardware.
Teaching people ethics isn't going to help though...If we could just teach everyone to be nice, we'd have done it a long time ago. Millenia of evolution have taught us about competition for scarce resources, and that expresses itself in all kinds of anti-social behaviours, and it always has. Sure, the instinct to protect the herd is in there as well, but I'd argue that we've been a lot more successful at suborning that instinct. In many people it only seems to express itself in times of extreme stress.
This is actually a hot psychological topic right now; humanities tendency to poorly conceptualize risk. We're far more worried about diseases we're unlikely to catch, than ones we are. Plane crashes are scary because planes aren't familiar to most people; poor understanding of the risks magnifies fear. People always worry about the stereotypical malicious strangers, when most assaults come from people you already know.
I think mostly he's just pointing all this out as background to the tendency to poorly appreciate risk. He's basically saying, "People apply more worry to splashy things that aren't likely to happen, and therefore we have these huge data breaches because who cares about SSNs when the terrorists could be blowing up a nuke plant?"
The only place where I think he's totally off base is calling the brain "a patchwork". It's not, in fact. It's extremely finely tuned to do what we need it to do...It makes us ferociously competitive animals, and that is proven rather than disproven, by all the security problems that we've been having. If we weren't competitive, we wouldn't have problems. The fact that not everyone works at the same level is irrelevant.
We're not evolved for space flight either. You can't apply "evolution" as a blanket to tool use at the level we've taken it; we have evolved a capacity for abstract thought which allows us to create highly complex tools...Saying that we're not evolved to assess risk on a level as abstract as this is disingenous...When was the last time a virus jumped out of your computer and ate you? There is no evolutionary pressure involved with such intellectual pursuits.
It's perhaps more accurate to say that only a few people are capable of truly understanding this stuff at all, and for the rest it's just black magic. Of course they don't appreciate the risk. I guess B.S was trying to find a rational reason why people just categorically don't understand security when applied to technology, but I think it's more just that they're doing well to be able to use the tech at all. We're going to have to have a lot higher skill level among users before we can expect them to truly appreciate security.
Yea, I work at a newspaper, and I know a lot of people who consider themselves "fluent" in technology because they use computers every day, and have a job that deals with the internets.
The reality is, being comfortable with using consumer technology, and having the skillset it would take to make your own MySpace page, counts as computer literacy for a lot of people. I got a rush job on a piece of web code the other day because it was something their little widget bar couldn't produce...I ended up generating a couple of pages of code, and when I got done they asked me to "send it to them so they could put it up online"...This is mostly perl and javascript, mind you, and they can't host anything but the most minor javascript and pure html.
So I sent 'em the Perl, just to watch 'em squirm. It was all file handling code; I guess they thought all you needed to manage file uploads was a webform with a file button...Select the little file and the web fairies carry it across the tubes and put it where you want it.
Anyone ever read the Foundation books? I think of the technologically illiterate maintenance people, who just go through the motions, replacing parts, without understanding how any of the systems work. They can use it, but it's still magic as far as they're concerned, and the instant they step out of their comfort zone, they're lost.
The more you repress it, the more it spreads. Where I live in GA we have this massive number of "massage parlors" that (curiously) advertise heavily on the interstate with large billboards featuring scantily clad women.
Now while you can probably also get a massage at these establishments, it is generally understood that this is not all you can get if you were so inclined. And the public outcry? Nil.
Now, dancing, even "bikini" dancing, which is the only kind not zoned out in the county I live in, is the subject of vigorous public debate. Place just opened up a couple of months ago not far from where I live. "Massage" parlor (with unusually long hours) opened up next door at about the same time. Public outcry over the girls in swimwear? Vast. Public outcry over the suspiciously placed massage parlor? Nil.
Yea, it's a pain to upgrade. It's always a pain to upgrade.
Use XP for a year, then go back to win2k, and tell me honestly that you don't miss anything. I moved from a shop that was 100% XP to a win2k shop, and it was miserable. Sadly, the new shop even had a site license for XP, so there was no money issue, but they were just sticking with what they knew.
Whereas you, noble and virtuous, will refuse. You will tell your pregnant wife, and your three kids, "Okay, we're all going to die so that the people outside can go on living their corrupt and venal lives like we don't exist."
I haven't been in that situation, so I'm not quite sure what I'd do. It'll depend on a lot of things. How long do I stay in quarantine if there is no food? How long if no water? No vague attempt at medical aid from the outside? No idea.
But you apparently know...Unlike all the "trample your fellow man" sheep of the world, you'd never act in anything but a selfless manner.
Or you're talking out of your ass. I've seen a lot of people talk a big line, and the bigger the line, the faster they crack when the shit hits the fan.
Who are you saving? What are you actually doing? You're just torturing some slob for dated information that's not going to help anyone. And torture is a crappy way of getting accurate information anyhow...Witness all the people who "confessed" to witchcraft during the inquisition, and the witch trials.
Traditional intelligence gathering methods were sufficient to get the information that would have stopped 9/11, if the methods of analysis were good enough. Now, they're gathering so much more information, and I've seen no proof that their methods of analysis have improved by anything even resembling a similar amount...Basically, they're drowning themselves in un-analyzed crap information, while giving concrete examples to the people who think that we're corrupt torturers, that we are in fact, corrupt torturers, and screwing the people at home who're finding it hard to think we really are the good guys when we're torturing POWs, and yes, if we're "at war" with terror, then people we capture in the war, are POWs...That's what it means.
In short, it's stupid, it's pointless, and it's immoral. We may be forgiven for taking the moral low road for an end like saving a million people, but when you take the moral low road for a worthless end, you should expect to be strung up by your nuts for it. Make no mistake; you sacrifice a human life because of something you think is right, that's still murder...If enough other people think you were right to do so, society may forgive you. Otherwise, they may put your ass in the electric chair.
The maximun centrifuge capacity of the cockroach has not been determined. An estimate could be made from the shoe and floor result.
Fire with slingshot at a wall
This would be a test of the sudden deceleration trauma limit of the cockroach, which is expected to be significantly higher than the crush point. The experiment has not been performed.
Tensile strength
Not determined.
Though Explosion (A cockroach at ground zero of an M60 cherry bomb survived) is freakin tailor-made for the mythbusters.
These kinds of "dilemma's" are nothing but intellectual masturbation. I'll tell you right now: in a real world situation, that man or that dog would be a greasy spot if it was only thought that their death would save 100,000 people.
And as for the reverse, you can bet, in a quarantine situation, they would kill as many as it took (or as they could) to keep the sick separated from the well. It's the only thing that can be done in that situation, 1, 100, or 1,000,000. The reverse also holds: if you were stuck in a quarantine, and you believed yourself or your family to be in danger of being infected, you'd do whatever you could to break quarantine, even at the risk of infecting countless others...That's why they defend barricades with guns, not pamphlets on disease control.
The desire to protect yourself and your loved ones trumps it all, when it comes down to it. That's just human nature.
The radical "oh noes protect teh animals" crowd on the far left are as embarrassing to the normal left-of-center types like myself, as the whack-job "I will kill to protect teh fetuses" crowd are (or ought to be) to the right-of-center types.
If you take a rational position (conservation/responsible procreation) and you drive it to the absolute extreme, you are a moron. If you attribute it to someone you disagree with, you are an asshole.
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Hey, supply and demand. I'm kinda a freak because I went to school and just studied what interested me without regard to how I was going to apply it to getting a job, but most people I know checked salaries, and went for things where they thought they could make money.
Additonally, once you get out in the field, you start getting a sense of what people make, and what you can do and would like to make, and if you figure you could make more money as an engineer, you go back to school and pick up the degree...None of this stuff is set in stone in high school, or even undergrad level college.
I'm sure I'm not the only one here who remembers the glut of 30-somethings going back to school to get their CS degree in the 90's. If there is demand, people will try to fill that demand, because doing so will profit them personally. Conversely, people who try and fill a non-existent demand will be punished by the market, shuffled into a crappy job.
And for the inevitable people who're going to say, "All the US demand for engineers is being filled by H1-B types" I say good! More engineers in this country means more engineering work has to come to this country, because that's where the engineers are, and that's where the work will be done best. More work for engineers means more demand for engineers, and more engineers with jobs HERE means countless other jobs will be created by the money they'll be spending. Would you rather they stayed where they are already, and brought the work to their country? We can afford to do that for running shoes, but if we start exporting tech industries, that's a bad thing.
Using government funding to force produce a glut of science-types is silly. Better to use the money to kick off industries that require them, and let the rest take care of itself.
You guess wrong. He predicted famine across the board, starting in the first world countries, because they had the highest population growth curves. He failed to predict the decline in birth rates, which does not relate to cost per child, I'm afraid, but rather to decreased need for their labour, and lower child mortality, and he failed to predict the increase in food production.
Famines occur for lots of reasons. War, civil unrest, corrupt governments, and countries like us choosing to produce less food than we could, to keep the price high.
It could, but it won't. Not in our lifetimes. There are a hell of a lot of techniques out there already that do better than break even, and that's with a low adoption rate. As the price of oil rises, the adoption of alternate sources will increase, and there will be tremendous incentives toward improving the technology. Government incentives are chickenfeed compared to what resources the market will bring to bear in the quest for cheap energy.
We could get some inflation. Hell, it could wipe the US out, because we're so damn dependent on oil, thanks to generations of brillant leaders...I doubt it will. But for the market as a whole, it'll be a blip on the radar. People have been predicting doom for centuries over this and that scarce resource because they don't see utilization ever changing, but they always change.
Energy costs are a good example. If they spike, what happens? People pay more for gas, people pay more to heat and cool their homes. Result? People use less gas, and change their home heating and cooling patterns. They insulate their houses. House designs with high energy efficiency become desirable. Car designs with high efficiency also become desirable. Fewer people drive, more people carpool. At the end of the day, the market corrects, and energy prices drop. People don't just tool along with the same usage patterns like morons, which is what everyone predicts. Plastics? Plastics themselves were a substitute for a more scare resource; if they get too expensive, we will substitute something for them.
The trap that everyone falls into is that they can't imagine the utilization of a resource going down. Surely we'll keep using more and more plastic, right? Not if the price goes up. We use it now because its cost efficient. If that changes, we'll use something else.
The shuttle example is terrible...It's an argument against government efficiency that has nothing, zero, to do with economics. Unintentionally you provided a good example of why it's not a good idea to put the government directly in charge of coming up with an oil alternative.
A good example is removable media for computers. Starting with the 3.25 in disk, there were several formats used before the widespread adoption of the CD. Each one of those formats was developed by a company, each one of them enjoyed some niche success, and each one of them failed. They never achieved widespread adoption, most people never knew they existed. It's like DAT tapes and minidisks for audio media...DATs are still used for tape backup, but that's it. And minidisks? They went over well in Japan.
In each case, it's a solution looking for a problem. In each case it failed, because as far as most people were concerned, there was no problem. Then along comes the writeable CD and the MP3, and the market changes overnight. Everyone has to have 'em.
The risk of meddling too much in the market is when you push a solution that turns out to be a bad solution. The government is in a good position to throw a ton of money at a boondoggle (like corn ethanol) just to meet a political agenda. It's a terrible waste of money, especially when they're at the same time artificially raising the price of corn! Maddening!
As for luck, it's not about luck. Look around. There are alternatives everywhere already. They're in early stages. Some of them will prove to be inefficient. But people are out there busting their asses to be there with the answer when the shoe drops.
The thing that will nail humanity is something that no one will see coming. Oil? No way. We've been dodging the natural resources bullet since the beginning of recorded history.
People who freak out about scarcity don't understand economics. Economic pressures drive alternatives and expanded production; we've been seeing this with food since Malthus confidently predicted that food generation could never keep up with current population growth...in 1798.
As the demand rises, people leap to fill it. When Metcalf decided we were going to run out of switching capacity, he was looking at current manufacturing capacity, and a projected increase in demand, and he was sure that capacity could never keep up with demand.
What he didn't see is a horde of people looking for ways to make money, who were looking at the same numbers and thinking, "Holy crap! If I make switches I'll be RICH!" Demand drives supply, not the other way around.
You and your knowledge of "economics" can go! We're predicting disaster here!
People have been predicting that we'd run out of item X by time Y for hundreds of years. The reason we don't is because (as you said) when supply dwindles, there is incentive to find news supplies and substitutes.
During WWII, it was thought that we'd completely run out of rubber, and this would kill our war effort, due to lack of tires, hoses, gaskets, etc. Along comes synthetic rubber, and magically we don't run out. These days most rubber is synthetic.
This stuff happens all the time. When oil becomes expensive enough, alternative fuel use will become so desirable that an efficient solution will present itself. Hell, that's why we switched to cars in the first place, because our previous transportation (horses) produced untold...uhh..."pollution". A little Co2 seemed like heaven compared to mountains of horse crap, and it didn't take long before cars needed less maintenance than horses.
There was a time, however, when the car was a choice only the rich could afford, one less reliable and less efficient than a good horse. Economics rarely gets the solution ahead of the problem, which is why it's an uphill battle to force people to switch to alternatives when the alternatives aren't as efficient as what they're already using.
The biggest issue right now is that the government is mucking with the damn problem by subsidizing industries to artificially make petroleum/cars seem more efficient than they actually are. For a bunch of "free market economists" they sure love to give away money to un-free the market. They're also dropping the ball by shouldering the pollution costs created by the fossil fuel industry, instead of passing it back to the industry in the form of taxes and fees. Take away the subsidies and fairly apply the costs to the industry that created them, and you'd see a much broader adoption of alternatives as the prices rose to reflect the "real" costs.
China is a good example of this right now...They're polluting like mad, and passing the costs of that on to their citizens so that they can be super-competitive in the global market against people who have to actually pay some of those costs. It's going to catch up with them in a big way...It's like their propping up our currency. The more the dollar deflates, the more money China dumps down the drain trying to keep the dollar high, at the same time trying to keep their own money as depressed as possible.
As the dollar deflates past a certain point, American goods will become "cheaper" and Chinese goods more expensive, leading to a local manufacturing resurgence, yadda yadda, whereas when the Chinese lose hold of their own money, they're going to have this explosion of costs internally, as well as having to watch their goods become much less competitive globally.
Well, I agree and disagree. Part of our monkey brain loves explosions, and all of our brain longs for concrete things. So a mass of statistics won't wake in the average person the sort of pure dread that a few pictures or a grisly story, will. The media has latched on to this, and now provides a non-stop cycle of abductions, explosions, and product-scare stories, and so the non-abstract-thinking average joe or jane decides that all there is in the world is these types of events, completely missing the point that these events are vanishingly uncommon, and only seem common because they are hilariously over-reported.
I think, in a way, we are wired to appreciate concrete stuff. It'd be hard not to be, on a lot of levels. A lot of how our brains work is absolutely dependent on that sort of perception.
On the other hand, we are all capable of abstract thought. It's unfortunate that this is not really wired into the emotional nerve center of most people, and it is definitely something that needs to be nurtured and cultivated in the population at large. I have no idea how this could be done.
I just think it's a poor way of stating it...It lets people off the hook. It's not their fault, they're insufficiently evolved.
He's using "risk assessment" to mean two different things. Being eaten by a tiger isn't a common problem anymore, but avoiding auto crashes, electrical shorts, etc, all fall into that category, and we react perfectly well to those things. What the bulk of people don't react well to is risk that they can't touch or see; the reason for this is that the body has an instinctive risk-response for things that pose immanent danger, and it doesn't have an instinct for things that pose potential or hypothetical threats. Why would it? Do we really need a fear response over a potential threat? Makes no sense.
I think most people of average or greater intelligence are smart enough to at least understand what is at stake with regards to potential threats. We need to give them education and training, and not just play on their fear of the unknown.
And that means what, exactly? We're evolved for tool use, and our tool use has grown so evolved that we're creating tools that surpass the conception of most members of our species. Does that mean that they need to evolve up to be able to create those things themselves? Not at all. It's a societal division of labor. Someone has to clean the telephones.
A biological population will have many individuals who have differing levels of skill at different tasks. A species as diverse as ours has a great many roles, and not everyone can be a specialist at every role. Saying that, because most individuals can't do X we're not evolved to do X, makes no sense. Clearly we are evolved to the point where some people can do it, and everything from there on out is just differences in individuals.
What he's hypothesizing is a type of Cognitive Closure, and while I had classes with McGinn, and he's a hell of a guy, I don't think that the answer to the question is that people simply aren't able to think about this kind of stuff. The fact that most people choose not to think about it, or are ignorant of it, is not the same as us being unable to think on those terms as a species.
The problem with defining the brain as a patchwork is that there is no conception of what a brain would look like if it were designed. It's like calling an airplane a patchwork, simply because it's made of different parts that are all attached to each other, and all do different things.
There are certainly a lot of ways in which our bodies are capable of adapting that would benefit us in the modern age. As for the perception of risk, I don't see it. Risk perception will never "evolve" to extend to the realm of the abstract, simply because it's much more beneficial to the body as a whole to have a designated response set for concrete risk...The kind that will kill you right now. People have proven to be able to train their instinctive risk-responses to a variety of situations, and that is what is going to apply to this sort of risk; training, and education, not evolution.
The evolution argument is disproven by Schneier himself; how could he be thinking about it if we hadn't already evolved to make it possible? It's like saying humanity had to evolve to have the correct response when someone pointed a gun at them; it was a new threat, presumably the first person to be shot didn't see it coming, but the guy standing next to him learned to jump for cover in record time.
I think the problems we're dealing with are of that nature. Most people aren't used to visualizing risk on the sort of scale that they're seeing it. It's not that they're unable, it's that they're uneducated.
That's part of it, but you're still more likely to die in a bus or taxi accident, and they're not viewed with the same unreasoning fear though they also lack control.
We are all soothed by familiar routine. This is the purpose of disaster drills, so if your building does catch fire, your mind will move into that pre-built track, and move effectively, without being paralyzed by the need to act conflicting with the fact that you have no idea of what to do. Planes are not only outside our control, they're outside most people's experience, so an event which is no more significant than a bus running through a pothole, elicits a greater level of fear due to it being an unknown, rather than a familiar, occurrence.
I'm not sure what the hell you're talking about. Are you saying that B.S is an evolutionary biologist? I think he'd be a bit surprised to be so described, since as far as I know, his background is almost entirely compsci and crypto (and physics).
Mine on the other hand is primarily cognitive science, which, as it happens, does include a bit of neuroscience, more than enough to dispel the whole "patchwork" assertion. And while my formal training in evolutionary biology is somewhat lacking, I think the uncontestable claim that humanity is a competitive animal will be seconded by anyone with even the weakest background in biology.
I would argue that there is no "evolution" that we can make as a species that will cause this problem to go away...It's a problem of software, not hardware.
Teaching people ethics isn't going to help though...If we could just teach everyone to be nice, we'd have done it a long time ago. Millenia of evolution have taught us about competition for scarce resources, and that expresses itself in all kinds of anti-social behaviours, and it always has. Sure, the instinct to protect the herd is in there as well, but I'd argue that we've been a lot more successful at suborning that instinct. In many people it only seems to express itself in times of extreme stress.
Yea, but to you it looks like sloppy code, and to them it looks like Volapuk.
This is actually a hot psychological topic right now; humanities tendency to poorly conceptualize risk. We're far more worried about diseases we're unlikely to catch, than ones we are. Plane crashes are scary because planes aren't familiar to most people; poor understanding of the risks magnifies fear. People always worry about the stereotypical malicious strangers, when most assaults come from people you already know.
I think mostly he's just pointing all this out as background to the tendency to poorly appreciate risk. He's basically saying, "People apply more worry to splashy things that aren't likely to happen, and therefore we have these huge data breaches because who cares about SSNs when the terrorists could be blowing up a nuke plant?"
The only place where I think he's totally off base is calling the brain "a patchwork". It's not, in fact. It's extremely finely tuned to do what we need it to do...It makes us ferociously competitive animals, and that is proven rather than disproven, by all the security problems that we've been having. If we weren't competitive, we wouldn't have problems. The fact that not everyone works at the same level is irrelevant.
We're not evolved for space flight either. You can't apply "evolution" as a blanket to tool use at the level we've taken it; we have evolved a capacity for abstract thought which allows us to create highly complex tools...Saying that we're not evolved to assess risk on a level as abstract as this is disingenous...When was the last time a virus jumped out of your computer and ate you? There is no evolutionary pressure involved with such intellectual pursuits.
It's perhaps more accurate to say that only a few people are capable of truly understanding this stuff at all, and for the rest it's just black magic. Of course they don't appreciate the risk. I guess B.S was trying to find a rational reason why people just categorically don't understand security when applied to technology, but I think it's more just that they're doing well to be able to use the tech at all. We're going to have to have a lot higher skill level among users before we can expect them to truly appreciate security.
Yea, I work at a newspaper, and I know a lot of people who consider themselves "fluent" in technology because they use computers every day, and have a job that deals with the internets.
The reality is, being comfortable with using consumer technology, and having the skillset it would take to make your own MySpace page, counts as computer literacy for a lot of people. I got a rush job on a piece of web code the other day because it was something their little widget bar couldn't produce...I ended up generating a couple of pages of code, and when I got done they asked me to "send it to them so they could put it up online"...This is mostly perl and javascript, mind you, and they can't host anything but the most minor javascript and pure html.
So I sent 'em the Perl, just to watch 'em squirm. It was all file handling code; I guess they thought all you needed to manage file uploads was a webform with a file button...Select the little file and the web fairies carry it across the tubes and put it where you want it.
Anyone ever read the Foundation books? I think of the technologically illiterate maintenance people, who just go through the motions, replacing parts, without understanding how any of the systems work. They can use it, but it's still magic as far as they're concerned, and the instant they step out of their comfort zone, they're lost.
The more you repress it, the more it spreads. Where I live in GA we have this massive number of "massage parlors" that (curiously) advertise heavily on the interstate with large billboards featuring scantily clad women.
Now while you can probably also get a massage at these establishments, it is generally understood that this is not all you can get if you were so inclined. And the public outcry? Nil.
Now, dancing, even "bikini" dancing, which is the only kind not zoned out in the county I live in, is the subject of vigorous public debate. Place just opened up a couple of months ago not far from where I live. "Massage" parlor (with unusually long hours) opened up next door at about the same time. Public outcry over the girls in swimwear? Vast. Public outcry over the suspiciously placed massage parlor? Nil.
Yea, it's a pain to upgrade. It's always a pain to upgrade.
Use XP for a year, then go back to win2k, and tell me honestly that you don't miss anything. I moved from a shop that was 100% XP to a win2k shop, and it was miserable. Sadly, the new shop even had a site license for XP, so there was no money issue, but they were just sticking with what they knew.
What, are you waiting for XP service pack 8?
XP is definitely a step up from 2k. Now Vista...Not so much. Maybe a step up from 3.1 or something.
Whereas you, noble and virtuous, will refuse. You will tell your pregnant wife, and your three kids, "Okay, we're all going to die so that the people outside can go on living their corrupt and venal lives like we don't exist."
I haven't been in that situation, so I'm not quite sure what I'd do. It'll depend on a lot of things. How long do I stay in quarantine if there is no food? How long if no water? No vague attempt at medical aid from the outside? No idea.
But you apparently know...Unlike all the "trample your fellow man" sheep of the world, you'd never act in anything but a selfless manner.
Or you're talking out of your ass. I've seen a lot of people talk a big line, and the bigger the line, the faster they crack when the shit hits the fan.
Actually, I think that's morally indefensible.
Who are you saving? What are you actually doing? You're just torturing some slob for dated information that's not going to help anyone. And torture is a crappy way of getting accurate information anyhow...Witness all the people who "confessed" to witchcraft during the inquisition, and the witch trials.
Traditional intelligence gathering methods were sufficient to get the information that would have stopped 9/11, if the methods of analysis were good enough. Now, they're gathering so much more information, and I've seen no proof that their methods of analysis have improved by anything even resembling a similar amount...Basically, they're drowning themselves in un-analyzed crap information, while giving concrete examples to the people who think that we're corrupt torturers, that we are in fact, corrupt torturers, and screwing the people at home who're finding it hard to think we really are the good guys when we're torturing POWs, and yes, if we're "at war" with terror, then people we capture in the war, are POWs...That's what it means.
In short, it's stupid, it's pointless, and it's immoral. We may be forgiven for taking the moral low road for an end like saving a million people, but when you take the moral low road for a worthless end, you should expect to be strung up by your nuts for it. Make no mistake; you sacrifice a human life because of something you think is right, that's still murder...If enough other people think you were right to do so, society may forgive you. Otherwise, they may put your ass in the electric chair.
They skipped the three best!
Centrifuge
The maximun centrifuge capacity of the cockroach has not been determined. An estimate could be made from the shoe and floor result.
Fire with slingshot at a wall
This would be a test of the sudden deceleration trauma limit of the cockroach, which is expected to be significantly higher than the crush point. The experiment has not been performed.
Tensile strength
Not determined.
Though Explosion (A cockroach at ground zero of an M60 cherry bomb survived) is freakin tailor-made for the mythbusters.
Hell, I might do it for fun.
These kinds of "dilemma's" are nothing but intellectual masturbation. I'll tell you right now: in a real world situation, that man or that dog would be a greasy spot if it was only thought that their death would save 100,000 people.
And as for the reverse, you can bet, in a quarantine situation, they would kill as many as it took (or as they could) to keep the sick separated from the well. It's the only thing that can be done in that situation, 1, 100, or 1,000,000. The reverse also holds: if you were stuck in a quarantine, and you believed yourself or your family to be in danger of being infected, you'd do whatever you could to break quarantine, even at the risk of infecting countless others...That's why they defend barricades with guns, not pamphlets on disease control.
The desire to protect yourself and your loved ones trumps it all, when it comes down to it. That's just human nature.
I belong to PETA...People Eating Tasty Animals.
The radical "oh noes protect teh animals" crowd on the far left are as embarrassing to the normal left-of-center types like myself, as the whack-job "I will kill to protect teh fetuses" crowd are (or ought to be) to the right-of-center types.
If you take a rational position (conservation/responsible procreation) and you drive it to the absolute extreme, you are a moron. If you attribute it to someone you disagree with, you are an asshole.