Thank you. Is more of a tiny house/cabin then or a just a bit more remote typical suburban home? I'm interested in that whole tiny house movement, but it seems to be hard to find good, quiet nice spots to live here in Europe compared to the U.S. For some reason, my personal standards seem to rise with respect to the awesomeness of the plot of land to build on and at the same time they fall with the amount of space available inside:D
[...] many people that kill themselves do so because they are in the grips of simple biochemical processes [...]
and
[...] many young people just kill themselves because they don't feel they fit into the world, or because they fall in love with someone that doesn't reciprocate. [...]
Do you see these groups as largely overlapping or distinct?
So tell me why Esther Vilar's very valid criticism of feminism didn't really enter the social sciences for some 40 years now? How is this properly dealing with a complex problem?!
Are there? The only ones I was aware of were coal to oil type conversions or hydrogen production. What options are there for a petroleum substitute that doesn't require something like coal?
I would say we have no other option than nuclear and this will become VERY evident in the next decade or so.
Oil prices are going up. The talk about peak oil does make sense.
But peak uranium and thorium are still a VERY LONG way out!
As soon as it really starts to impact our lifestyle, I bet that people will start building nuclear power plants again. Our current squabbles and distake for nuclear power is just the sign of decadent NIMBYs.
People talk about (nuclear) WW3 because of Ukraine. So that would be a devastating war about oil resources, using nuclear power in entirely the wrong way. How crazy is that??!
I think there's a kind of deep inability on the part of adults to distinguish between rough play that got a little out of hand and a bully who's completely out of control. I can't see any school policy fixing that.
I would say some adults, but not all. I had my share of bullying in school, but there were teachers who actually were quite aware of who was the asshole. However, many teachers seem to be unfortunately emotionally blind to these kinds of situations. Or they just don't want to deal with it. I don't understand it.
No, I think you misread me. What I am saying is: Lets say you are an engineer in Iran and you work on WMDs and know they are going to be used. Working on them wouldn't be ethical.
I think what I am trying to say is the old 'I have just been following orders' thing. And in a way, because of 'ethical' implications, I believe 'working in and with the system' -and maybe even things such as change control- might have parallels to that idea of 'just following orders'.
As others said, the best thing the engineer could have done (if I understand everything right), is to go public and say: We have this flaw, we need to fix it!
I think the next best thing actually is to not follow change control guidelines - in that way 'orders' - and fix the problem, even though management says that he should bury the data that says that the switch is faulty, and hide from management that you fixed it. Of course, 'next best' could and probably should already be considered as some sort of 'bad'.
I might misunderstand the whole situation though and it what sense the engineers did/didn't make the situation worse.
Professional Engineers have an obligation to act ethically, not an obligation to be right all the time.
Not saying you are wrong, but 'acting ethically' can be complicated: If you engineer WMDs or similar, is it ethical to adhere to the design and workflow guidelines of the change control system?
I understand that in almost all cases, it makes a lot of sense to work according to the rules. And if the rules came into place from ethical considerations, it is ethical to follow the rules. But that's not necessarily true in all cases.
First of all, science is trying to better understand the world, by making models predicting something. It isn't engineering.
In that sense, I think science is always a refinement of the understand of reality. Of course, there is now quantum mechanics and there is relativity. But if you go back in time before that, most of the basic ideas in (mechanical) engineering are pretty much settled since Newton got hit by the apple. And if there are humans in a 1000 years, they will still be ruled to a large extent by gravity!
I think we are approaching at least a phase where experiments and 'engineering' (and here I call everything except fundamental physics 'engineering') has to catch up with our knowledge of physics. In the sense of testing and exploiting what we learned about reality so far. The LHC and Icecube, examples for machines for doing fundamental (particle) physics, are already km-scale. Maybe we need to be able to see more subtle effects and maybe on scales that are either inaccessible or not easily accessible to us to make new 'great' discoveries? If so, I think, yes, science is indeed running out of 'great' discoveries. But maybe because we will need (I guess a VERY long time) to catch up with our engineering first.
Lets take about the scenario 'nuclear annihilation': Tell me what you think will happen if the nukes vaporize a significant fraction of civilian nuclear power plants and their inventory.
Also, what happens to the already depleted oil resources? They magically reset, 'start at level 1' again?
I actually looked at the beta site and I do have to say that it looks truly horrible, yes. So, although everything is offtopic everywhere today, apparently, let me also chime and say:
Please keep the old system in place. It wasn't broken, so please don't fix it.
I think "our problems" run even deeper than that. We seem to be always fixated lately on finding a solution for everything in society and chase a very diffuse idea of 'good' ideas and 'bad' ideas. I have the impression we would be ironically much better off if we accept that a lot of our problems are inherently part of the human conditition and are not solvable per se. That there will always be a murky middleground for a lot of our structures in our society, and never a perfect one. The weird form of perfectionism we are chasing seems to be not unlike the total salvation that suicidal religious cults are striving for.
this is totally unrelated to this post of yours. In the C+= discussion thread, you post about a tweet on twitter calling for job terminations or similar, the link is broken now, do you have a backup somewhere?
Yet, he could still have suffered from something in relation to society that caused this depression even in his earlier age, and that could still be the sole source for his depression. That is my point. That you can't cleanly separate that out.
And, no, I don't think that 'evil government' at all cuts it when it comes to influence from people around you that can make you depressed. Not at all. I am also talking, for example, more about the day-to-day strain on social ties if you are someone who stands out from the crowd. Which I guess he always has been.
You say that, but there are underlying causes for depression.
Very often, those underlying causes are related to brain chemistry, not external factors.
Well... are you able to seperate them out? Really? With good, hard science? If so, how? I would be curious to know, as I strongly believe this is not possible at all.
I don't anyone think has ever or can really designed a good experiment that seperates the chemical causes for imbalance from external factors like a fucked up society. You would need to put people's brain into simulation tanks, right from their birth. Psychiatry certainly knows a lot more about brain chemistry than a while ago, but that still does not make it able to cleanly seperate those factors and there is always an element of 'social science' when talking about a diagnosis like depression, making the whole endeavour not so much hard science at all. Even if it sounds like that, with all the chemistry thrown in. You are studying an insanely highly nonlinear system here and I assert that you are simply not able to cleanly separate cause and effect.
It might be true that there are cases where you miss a protein or two and your brain starts to misbehave and there is a clear correlation and maybe even a known chain of events leading to depression. But generalizing to every case as it being an illness right away is just a sign of you being under control of the worldwide system that wants to convert us all to drones. Yes, I am half-joking, but only half.
If you want to argue that, well, depression is a clinical term, so therefore it is an illness, you are stating a tautology. A (group of) biased human beings sets those standards on what is a depression. And that even though you might define it like that, it still does not say so much about the actual causes of what has been defined a depression.
Hey, I think that part of the reason for this is that lots of people started to give psychologists lots of authority in their minds, over their minds. They are the reincarnation of priests in former times. And, as a natural scientist, I must say that in times when
weak correlations of fMRI studies are suddenly the 'answer' to how people work
and people who fall too far away from the regression line are non-existant in those views and when
psychology has a dozens if not hundreds of competing theories of how people tick, all beginning with the mostly made-up work of Freud
I think that questioning the authority psychologists have and are given is extremely important.
Basic conditioning studies from biology are about the only thing that are supported by sufficient evidence to use for describing what is going on in our brains. And findings from the _medical_ field of neurology. Falsifiable stuff!
Conditioning to not question authority is probably one of the strongest things going on in modern society.
I am amazed! Is this slashdot? The slashdot I know?
Sure there is a speculative bubble! Maybe even the price of BTC drops below $1 again. There are lots of crazy get-rich-quick people on the bitcoin market now, it will continue to swing wildly. Bubbles will form and burst.
But noone really mentioned here yet, that there _is_ actually a value in certificates (what bitcoins basically are) which you can transmit free from any bank account with just a P2P client. Because it is just an agreement between users, the real value may be low. It may also be very low because there is no government backing. But there is a value in being able to transact numbers freely!
I would have expected a more thoughtful discussion here on slashdot. Actually it makes me kind of sad. I wonder whether most people here grew old and a bit too inflexible in their lines of thought?
Bitcoins may well become a completely failed experiment. But that's what they are right now. A new kind of economic _experiment_. Comparing it to a ponzi scheme (you didn't call it that, but others here did, quick and repeatedly) is just stupid. I have expected to see people around here at least being open to new ideas!
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you. Is more of a tiny house/cabin then or a just a bit more remote typical suburban home? I'm interested in that whole tiny house movement, but it seems to be hard to find good, quiet nice spots to live here in Europe compared to the U.S. For some reason, my personal standards seem to rise with respect to the awesomeness of the plot of land to build on and at the same time they fall with the amount of space available inside :D
You are living my dream! Are you living alone or with family in your house?
You say
[...] many people that kill themselves do so because they are in the grips of simple biochemical processes [...]
and
[...] many young people just kill themselves because they don't feel they fit into the world, or because they fall in love with someone that doesn't reciprocate. [...]
Do you see these groups as largely overlapping or distinct?
So tell me why Esther Vilar's very valid criticism of feminism didn't really enter the social sciences for some 40 years now? How is this properly dealing with a complex problem?!
So true and frightening. From 1992!
Stuff is definitely getting weird.
Are there? The only ones I was aware of were coal to oil type conversions or hydrogen production. What options are there for a petroleum substitute that doesn't require something like coal?
http://science.slashdot.org/st...
There are options to generate synthetic fuel using nuclear power, though!
I would say we have no other option than nuclear and this will become VERY evident in the next decade or so.
Oil prices are going up. The talk about peak oil does make sense.
But peak uranium and thorium are still a VERY LONG way out!
As soon as it really starts to impact our lifestyle, I bet that people will start building nuclear power plants again. Our current squabbles and distake for nuclear power is just the sign of decadent NIMBYs.
People talk about (nuclear) WW3 because of Ukraine. So that would be a devastating war about oil resources, using nuclear power in entirely the wrong way. How crazy is that??!
I think there's a kind of deep inability on the part of adults to distinguish between rough play that got a little out of hand and a bully who's completely out of control. I can't see any school policy fixing that.
I would say some adults, but not all. I had my share of bullying in school, but there were teachers who actually were quite aware of who was the asshole. However, many teachers seem to be unfortunately emotionally blind to these kinds of situations. Or they just don't want to deal with it. I don't understand it.
sorry mismoderated. replying to revoke moderation.
No, I think you misread me. What I am saying is: Lets say you are an engineer in Iran and you work on WMDs and know they are going to be used. Working on them wouldn't be ethical.
I think what I am trying to say is the old 'I have just been following orders' thing. And in a way, because of 'ethical' implications, I believe 'working in and with the system' -and maybe even things such as change control- might have parallels to that idea of 'just following orders'.
As others said, the best thing the engineer could have done (if I understand everything right), is to go public and say: We have this flaw, we need to fix it!
I think the next best thing actually is to not follow change control guidelines - in that way 'orders' - and fix the problem, even though management says that he should bury the data that says that the switch is faulty, and hide from management that you fixed it. Of course, 'next best' could and probably should already be considered as some sort of 'bad'.
I might misunderstand the whole situation though and it what sense the engineers did/didn't make the situation worse.
Professional Engineers have an obligation to act ethically, not an obligation to be right all the time.
Not saying you are wrong, but 'acting ethically' can be complicated: If you engineer WMDs or similar, is it ethical to adhere to the design and workflow guidelines of the change control system?
I understand that in almost all cases, it makes a lot of sense to work according to the rules. And if the rules came into place from ethical considerations, it is ethical to follow the rules. But that's not necessarily true in all cases.
First of all, science is trying to better understand the world, by making models predicting something. It isn't engineering.
In that sense, I think science is always a refinement of the understand of reality. Of course, there is now quantum mechanics and there is relativity. But if you go back in time before that, most of the basic ideas in (mechanical) engineering are pretty much settled since Newton got hit by the apple. And if there are humans in a 1000 years, they will still be ruled to a large extent by gravity!
I think we are approaching at least a phase where experiments and 'engineering' (and here I call everything except fundamental physics 'engineering') has to catch up with our knowledge of physics. In the sense of testing and exploiting what we learned about reality so far. The LHC and Icecube, examples for machines for doing fundamental (particle) physics, are already km-scale. Maybe we need to be able to see more subtle effects and maybe on scales that are either inaccessible or not easily accessible to us to make new 'great' discoveries? If so, I think, yes, science is indeed running out of 'great' discoveries. But maybe because we will need (I guess a VERY long time) to catch up with our engineering first.
Lets take about the scenario 'nuclear annihilation': Tell me what you think will happen if the nukes vaporize a significant fraction of civilian nuclear power plants and their inventory.
Also, what happens to the already depleted oil resources? They magically reset, 'start at level 1' again?
Sorry, replying only because i mis-moderated.
Sorry, replying to you, because I accidentally moderated as off-topic.
735c9a1a20b2819611a86ea28b86beb0 2caae0817b267308f0f9292bafc3513d
I actually looked at the beta site and I do have to say that it looks
truly horrible, yes. So, although everything is offtopic everywhere today,
apparently, let me also chime and say:
Please keep the old system in place. It wasn't broken, so please don't fix it.
I think "our problems" run even deeper than that. We seem to be always fixated lately on finding a solution for everything in society and chase a very diffuse idea of 'good' ideas and 'bad' ideas. I have the impression we would be ironically much better off if we accept that a lot of our problems are inherently part of the human conditition and are not solvable per se. That there will always be a murky middleground for a lot of our structures in our society, and never a perfect one.
The weird form of perfectionism we are chasing seems to be not unlike the total salvation that suicidal religious cults are striving for.
Hey Wonko,
this is totally unrelated to this post of yours. In the C+= discussion thread, you post about a tweet on twitter calling for job terminations or similar, the link is broken now, do you have a backup somewhere?
Cheers & thanks!
This is actually not a new idea. In East Germany, the STASI is alleged to have done that:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/352461.stm
Pretty scary and brutal stuff.
Yet, he could still have suffered from something in relation to society that caused this depression even in his earlier age, and that could still be the sole source for his depression. That is my point. That you can't cleanly separate that out.
And, no, I don't think that 'evil government' at all cuts it when it comes to influence from people around you that can make you depressed. Not at all. I am also talking, for example, more about the day-to-day strain on social ties if you are someone who stands out from the crowd. Which I guess he always has been.
You say that, but there are underlying causes for depression.
Very often, those underlying causes are related to brain chemistry, not external factors.
Well... are you able to seperate them out? Really? With good, hard science? If so, how? I would be curious to know, as I strongly believe this is not possible at all.
I don't anyone think has ever or can really designed a good experiment that seperates the chemical causes for imbalance from external factors like a fucked up society. You would need to put people's brain into simulation tanks, right from their birth. Psychiatry certainly knows a lot more about brain chemistry than a while ago, but that still does not make it able to cleanly seperate those factors and there is always an element of 'social science' when talking about a diagnosis like depression, making the whole endeavour not so much hard science at all. Even if it sounds like that, with all the chemistry thrown in. You are studying an insanely highly nonlinear system here and I assert that you are simply not able to cleanly separate cause and effect.
It might be true that there are cases where you miss a protein or two and your brain starts to misbehave and there is a clear correlation and maybe even a known chain of events leading to depression. But generalizing to every case as it being an illness right away is just a sign of you being under control of the worldwide system that wants to convert us all to drones. Yes, I am half-joking, but only half.
If you want to argue that, well, depression is a clinical term, so therefore it is an illness, you are stating a tautology. A (group of) biased human beings sets those standards on what is a depression. And that even though you might define it like that, it still does not say so much about the actual causes of what has been defined a depression.
Hey, I think that part of the reason for this is that lots of people started to give psychologists lots of authority in their minds, over their minds. They are the reincarnation of priests in former times. And, as a natural scientist, I must say that in times when
weak correlations of fMRI studies are suddenly the 'answer' to how people work
and people who fall too far away from the regression line are non-existant in those views and when
psychology has a dozens if not hundreds of competing theories of how people tick, all beginning with the mostly made-up work of Freud
I think that questioning the authority psychologists have and are given is extremely important.
Basic conditioning studies from biology are about the only thing that are supported by sufficient evidence to use for describing what is going on in our brains. And findings from the _medical_ field of neurology. Falsifiable stuff!
Conditioning to not question authority is probably one of the strongest things going on in modern society.
Notify me when:
- checking your DNA is as cheap as checking the validity of a bitcoin
- you can actually transfer poocoin through the internet
Disclaimer: I have a few BTC.
I am amazed! Is this slashdot? The slashdot I know?
Sure there is a speculative bubble! Maybe even the price of BTC drops below $1 again. There are lots of crazy get-rich-quick people on the bitcoin market now, it will continue to swing wildly. Bubbles will form and burst.
But noone really mentioned here yet, that there _is_ actually a value in certificates (what bitcoins basically are) which you can transmit free from any bank account with just a P2P client. Because it is just an agreement between users, the real value may be low. It may also be very low because there is no government backing. But there is a value in being able to transact numbers freely!
I would have expected a more thoughtful discussion here on slashdot. Actually it makes me kind of sad. I wonder whether most people here grew old and a bit too inflexible in their lines of thought?
Bitcoins may well become a completely failed experiment. But that's what they are right now. A new kind of economic _experiment_. Comparing it to a ponzi scheme (you didn't call it that, but others here did, quick and repeatedly) is just stupid. I have expected to see people around here at least being open to new ideas!