"I'd like to do science on you for hours in my basement."
Which is exactly what would happen. Maybe not me or you or in someone's basement. But if you outlaw experimenting on animals the research would be performed on humans instead. Probably prisoners, the mentally ill, or homeless people.
""Doing the science is the right answer every time" is an absurd statement. The risks of experimentation must be balanced with the expected rewards. Or do you think we should resume testing hydrogen bombs by exploding them in random areas where we hope there aren't any people?"
What does that have to do with whether doing the science is the right answer every time? There is no science in testing hydrogen bombs, that's engineering not science, the science is old news. We were also talking about animal testing, that is risking humans not animals. And finally, that doesn't we don't do the science in the way that causes the least damage.
"Was that really worth it to have another confirmation that splitting atoms makes things boom? No, and it was done more for political intimidation tactic than for science."
Exactly. I said doing the science, not doing random crap with no scientific value that someone might call science.
"Probably not much, but at least, "this bomb design is not so flawed that it won't at least sometimes go boom when activated". It was science."
"Will there be an underground cosmetics market like the illegal drug market if we outlaw potentially unsafe new chemicals in cosmetics and don't allow them to be tested? No, silly, of course not."
I think you seriously underestimate the market in this case. I see no reason this wouldn't be different than treatments that are currently outlawed like human growth hormone therapies and some flavors of plastic surgery. There is ALREADY a thriving black market here.
"We've got plenty of cosmetics and we really don't as a society need anymore."
I think you'll find that women, especially over 40, will disagree with you strongly here.
"Nonsense. The FDA could outlaw any new, untested cosmetics, not have a procedure for testing/approving them, and no one would even blink except some wacko libertarian whiners."
I'm not a "libertarian whiner" but I am opposed to how far the government overreaches into my life. I'd certainly have a problem with this. I don't recall giving my right to decide what I want to ingest, inject, inhale, or apply to my skin to the FDA or to anyone like you who agrees with the FDA making those decisions. Since that authority lies 100% with me 0% of of the people who have a say are in favor of it.
Congress has the authority to empower a FDA that makes sure items are labeled/advertised correctly, manufactured in a safe way, that documentation and education materials are provided, and that they are secured when they actually are sold across state lines. Those fall under the commerce clause and the general welfare. Nothing else the FDA is doing is even actually legal. I doubt many would want to see it expanded.
I realize you aren't making the case that we shouldn't test on animals here. But tell that to someone with a hideous scar on their face who can't get a job.
Cosmetics aren't going anywhere so they have to be tested. They aren't tested on animals to find out pretty they make them. They are tested on animals to make sure the chemicals don't have unintended side-effects, this is the same reason we try to test medications on animals before humans. If you take animals out of cosmetics testing you run the risk of humans having serious side-effects from being the test subjects.
In some ways it makes more sense to test cosmetics than drugs on animals. Someone volunteering for a drug trial is probably broken in a way that the drug might fix and the mere concept carries the a generally understood idea of the risk involved. And generally a drug trial is testing only one isolated chemical combined with known non-reactive substances. Participating in a cosmetics trial is something people would consent to thinking it was safe and "just some lipstick" when in reality they the test subject of a compound containing dozens or hundreds of chemicals few if any of which have been tested previously and that have a very high probability of untested interactions even if they have been tested in isolation before.
I think they should ask a chimp in the wild face-to-face.
"But many don't agree that we should blind rabbits to test cosmetics."
And yet they'll still enjoy the benefits. Their cruelty-free products are build on generations of animal testing. If something contained in them is found to be risky it will be tested on animals.
"The only basis needed is self interest. Human Life > Animal Life" "But no human life is at risk in the case of this chimp."
I'm sorry, were you under the impression that it was possible logically agree with one of those statements and not the other? Well it is possible to agree that the only basis needed is self interest without agreeing human life > animal life. Especially if you aren't a human. But it isn't possible to go the other direction. Nobody said anything about something having to be life and death, all aspects of human life > all aspects of animal life. Also, the animals that had their skin melted off testing cosmetics, saved the skin of not only humans but the next generation of animals being tested on. And since we obviously didn't expect their skin to melt off, we learned something about chemical interactions that might advance the production of rocket fuel 200 years from now and save us from a doomsday event.
You don't pick and choose because you can't anticipate what science is going to be useful for what later on. Doing the science is the right answer every time, it's who you are going to test on, us or them. Would you prefer cosmetics and their potential side-effects be tested on humans? They can say yes but it is impossible to make an informed choice, if it were possible there wouldn't be any testing.
People are resistant to the idea because there is far too much self-interest tied up in it. What are we supposed to do stop eating all plants and animals and eat only one another? Perform all research on humans? Or are we just supposed to skip all the research and instead of a few suffering to gain knowledge that benefits our interaction with all living things forever we condemn everyone whose suffering would have been alleviated by that knowledge?
I was waiting for this. Corporations aren't even real things, just words on paper and we've given them personhood. Chimps would come before corporations in my mind.
Science has solved most of them by proving they are all based on limited perspective. You are destroying and maiming other creatures with every action you take in every moment of your life. So you can kill yourself or make the conscious decision to keep doing it. It's a little silly to pause and hesitate when doing so would actually benefit you.
The only basis needed is self interest. We are in fact humans, being fair to non-humans waits in line after being fair to humans.
The interesting thing is that the MOST justifiable things human with animals are things that animal rights activists have success fighting. Such as experimentation for science and medicine. These things are temporary efforts that produce results that benefits animals and humans alike forever after.
The abuses that they don't generally fight at all or even advocate (such as the keeping of pets, aka captivity) and especially spaying and neutering are the things we could end with little or no negative impact on the interests of our own species.
It doesn't just need to coincide with our timeframe but also with our timescale. Neurons are actually fairly simple energy patterns all told. If you have lots of them you have intelligence. Something that has a similar pattern that fires on thousand year scales wouldn't be able to perceive us and wouldn't move fast enough to seem intelligent to us.
"A good comparison of Wikipedia, since they are producing an educational product, is to compare them with modern universities, which are all "non-profit" as well. Look at many of the salaries at most colleges and universities, and you'll see many people making in excess of $100,000 per year, and athletic coaches that are paid in excess of $1,000,000 per year. Being classified as "non-profit" clearly does not mean that you have to pay your employees poorly.
And, of course, most universities also solicit funds and donations with the same agressiveness as Wikipedia as well. Got to keep that football and basketball program rolling, after all."
So because modern universities are poorly run and inefficient Wikipedia should be as well? Modern universities exist in their current form because they are largely government funded. The government gives credence to their degrees and therefore conducts the research it funds via the resources that universities produce. As a consequence most very expensive and cutting edge research is performed there and most of the knowledge related to it housed there. Even with the how available, that funding buys tools you just don't have elsewhere. Technology and open information is slowly eroding at that but it isn't there yet.
Modern universities, especially in the US, are a poor resource for education. They are slow to change and adapt. Throughout the vast vast majority of tech employers care far more about what you know, your proven track record, and your ability to learn than they do about degrees. Most employers, especially those with hiring managers who are promoted from engineering positions, would take someone with 10 years of related experience (especially who was still young) over someone with a masters. He'll eventually find one that will pay the same or only slightly less than they would a peer with the experience and the degree on top of it. Pretty much all would take someone doing a similar job at another enterprise of similar size for even two years. So tech is a long way toward already being there.
For science see the problem I mentioned above. For engineering... this is such a broad category, old school engineering fields often have entrenched degree mentality while newer and more flexible engineering areas have less of one. Maths? I'm not really sure this is properly considered a category so much as the common language between the previous areas. If we taught maths as the creative, easy, and flexible thing it is people working in STE would be not just using but developing maths on a daily basis.
Is that Wikipedia is not and does not need to be a stunning marvel of technology. The brilliance is in the concept, not the implementation.
The most talented people in the organization are likely the backend guys who have to make the scaling, redundancy, and infrastructure work on what should be a shoestring budget. Anything on that scale requires extremely gifted and creative people, especially if you can't just throw money at it. Although given a couple years I could certainly do it for an annual upkeep cost of less than two million.
Granted, if it were my brainchild and succeeded to Wikipedia's degree I'd probably give myself a permanent position and an overgenerous salary along with half a dozen other key people who made it happen. That seems fair to me. If our capitalist society thought it was fair for Bill Gates to be the richest man in the world for a few clever business tactics that resulted in windows being widespread the Wikipedia creators should at least have a comfortable life without having to worry about accounting for productivity. And so long at it weren't at the expense of Wikipedia itself I would be okay with a portion of my donation going to the ones who made it possible for this thing that is so valuable I'd volunteer to pay to keep it to exist at all. But even if you give 6 guys $250k/yr that is only $1.5m.
Thinking of the global scale of Wikipedia, the type of data it houses, the kind of bandwidth likely required, etc. I'd think $5m would be a very solid operating budget.
That isn't the norm across the country for IT workers. Are you the self taught and never broke in type or the got burned in some economic shift and fell out of the stream type?
It's not just influence. Nobody wants to see them. I think I speak for the entire internet when I say that we are sick of more and more intrusive advertising.
There is qualified talent all over the country and all over the world. You don't need to look in silicon valley to find someone qualified to work on a wiki. And aside from some of the infrastructure guys (the flavor the DC will usually supply if asked) nobody needs to be in California. For that matter there are plenty of well wired DC's that aren't in California.
"Fair enough, though the same argument would apply to having soldiers in the first place."
Why yes, so it does. I find your logic to be indisputable on this point and conclusive.
"Armies today operate just fine despite the fact that nobody really agrees on who can be morally shot."
Really? If they do so well why are in so much trouble for massive collateral damage and the inability to distinguish combatants and civilians? How is it entire villages get wiped out entirely and mislabeled as combatants on reports as indicated by wikileaks? Why did the US invasion in Iraq indirectly kill millions of Iraqi's via destroyed infrastructure like facilities that do things like purify water?
Oh I see, the metric of doing just fine only considers whether or not they manage to kill SOMEONE. Yes, lets run with that. I'm sure we can all agree on that one.
"He was explaining the Geneva Conventions/etc. That isn't an argument about morality."
He was explaining said conventions as a retort to my claim that humans aren't able to clearly define who can be morally shot and therefore it would be impossible for them to clearly define in an algorithm for an automated killing machine.
"I'm sure those terms all have definitions, and as you point out they exclude most of the folks the US tends to end up shooting at of late."
Probably, but just like every word in the dictionary, all definitions for subjective concepts become circular at some point. "military" is not an objective element, it is subjective and any definition is going to require subjective elements as well. Again, this is why we have judges and why they don't always agree. It's why a lawyer's talent ultimately just comes down to his ability to make a convincing argument and spin those definitions around to match the viewpoint he needs.
Oh I'd definitely use hydraulics. I'd probably use long and wide water filled and UV resistant plastic bladders under water. Use some massive cement blocks to anchor to the sea floor and floating turbine buoys on the surface. I'd set one way valves on the lines that connect the bladder to the buoys and an equal number on the bottom of the bladders.
The force of the wave deforms the bladder which, in still water, has a pressure gradient neutral to that of the surrounding ocean. The deformation will cause a low pressure zone and water will travel upward and blast out the one way valves at the top. That displaced water will be replaced with highly pressurized water by the intake valves at the bottom. The water turns the turbines on the buoys, which would also have blades for wind.
There is probably a better way to handle the pressurized fluid I just used the wave to pump out of the ocean. A generator in the ocean would be tough to keep from corroding.
Slashdot Mirror
"I'd like to do science on you for hours in my basement."
Which is exactly what would happen. Maybe not me or you or in someone's basement. But if you outlaw experimenting on animals the research would be performed on humans instead. Probably prisoners, the mentally ill, or homeless people.
""Doing the science is the right answer every time" is an absurd statement. The risks of experimentation must be balanced with the expected rewards. Or do you think we should resume testing hydrogen bombs by exploding them in random areas where we hope there aren't any people?"
What does that have to do with whether doing the science is the right answer every time? There is no science in testing hydrogen bombs, that's engineering not science, the science is old news. We were also talking about animal testing, that is risking humans not animals. And finally, that doesn't we don't do the science in the way that causes the least damage.
"Was that really worth it to have another confirmation that splitting atoms makes things boom? No, and it was done more for political intimidation tactic than for science."
Exactly. I said doing the science, not doing random crap with no scientific value that someone might call science.
"Probably not much, but at least, "this bomb design is not so flawed that it won't at least sometimes go boom when activated". It was science."
No, that would be engineering.
"Will there be an underground cosmetics market like the illegal drug market if we outlaw potentially unsafe new chemicals in cosmetics and don't allow them to be tested? No, silly, of course not."
I think you seriously underestimate the market in this case. I see no reason this wouldn't be different than treatments that are currently outlawed like human growth hormone therapies and some flavors of plastic surgery. There is ALREADY a thriving black market here.
"We've got plenty of cosmetics and we really don't as a society need anymore."
I think you'll find that women, especially over 40, will disagree with you strongly here.
"Nonsense. The FDA could outlaw any new, untested cosmetics, not have a procedure for testing/approving them, and no one would even blink except some wacko libertarian whiners."
I'm not a "libertarian whiner" but I am opposed to how far the government overreaches into my life. I'd certainly have a problem with this. I don't recall giving my right to decide what I want to ingest, inject, inhale, or apply to my skin to the FDA or to anyone like you who agrees with the FDA making those decisions. Since that authority lies 100% with me 0% of of the people who have a say are in favor of it.
Congress has the authority to empower a FDA that makes sure items are labeled/advertised correctly, manufactured in a safe way, that documentation and education materials are provided, and that they are secured when they actually are sold across state lines. Those fall under the commerce clause and the general welfare. Nothing else the FDA is doing is even actually legal. I doubt many would want to see it expanded.
"Cosmetics are not necessary"
I realize you aren't making the case that we shouldn't test on animals here. But tell that to someone with a hideous scar on their face who can't get a job.
Cosmetics aren't going anywhere so they have to be tested. They aren't tested on animals to find out pretty they make them. They are tested on animals to make sure the chemicals don't have unintended side-effects, this is the same reason we try to test medications on animals before humans. If you take animals out of cosmetics testing you run the risk of humans having serious side-effects from being the test subjects.
In some ways it makes more sense to test cosmetics than drugs on animals. Someone volunteering for a drug trial is probably broken in a way that the drug might fix and the mere concept carries the a generally understood idea of the risk involved. And generally a drug trial is testing only one isolated chemical combined with known non-reactive substances. Participating in a cosmetics trial is something people would consent to thinking it was safe and "just some lipstick" when in reality they the test subject of a compound containing dozens or hundreds of chemicals few if any of which have been tested previously and that have a very high probability of untested interactions even if they have been tested in isolation before.
"Many people would not agree with that."
I think they should ask a chimp in the wild face-to-face.
"But many don't agree that we should blind rabbits to test cosmetics."
And yet they'll still enjoy the benefits. Their cruelty-free products are build on generations of animal testing. If something contained in them is found to be risky it will be tested on animals.
"The only basis needed is self interest. Human Life > Animal Life"
"But no human life is at risk in the case of this chimp."
I'm sorry, were you under the impression that it was possible logically agree with one of those statements and not the other? Well it is possible to agree that the only basis needed is self interest without agreeing human life > animal life. Especially if you aren't a human. But it isn't possible to go the other direction. Nobody said anything about something having to be life and death, all aspects of human life > all aspects of animal life. Also, the animals that had their skin melted off testing cosmetics, saved the skin of not only humans but the next generation of animals being tested on. And since we obviously didn't expect their skin to melt off, we learned something about chemical interactions that might advance the production of rocket fuel 200 years from now and save us from a doomsday event.
You don't pick and choose because you can't anticipate what science is going to be useful for what later on. Doing the science is the right answer every time, it's who you are going to test on, us or them. Would you prefer cosmetics and their potential side-effects be tested on humans? They can say yes but it is impossible to make an informed choice, if it were possible there wouldn't be any testing.
People are resistant to the idea because there is far too much self-interest tied up in it. What are we supposed to do stop eating all plants and animals and eat only one another? Perform all research on humans? Or are we just supposed to skip all the research and instead of a few suffering to gain knowledge that benefits our interaction with all living things forever we condemn everyone whose suffering would have been alleviated by that knowledge?
I was waiting for this. Corporations aren't even real things, just words on paper and we've given them personhood. Chimps would come before corporations in my mind.
"Plenty of humans would rather be a slave then to starve."
All dogs would rather be a slave than to starve, not just plenty of.
I wouldn't go with wolves as my counter example. I'd go with cats.
Science has solved most of them by proving they are all based on limited perspective. You are destroying and maiming other creatures with every action you take in every moment of your life. So you can kill yourself or make the conscious decision to keep doing it. It's a little silly to pause and hesitate when doing so would actually benefit you.
I can think of little that would HINDER scientific progress so much.
Is a zoo really much different than permanent involuntary institutionalization?
I think most people would prefer the death penalty to prison bitch.
*tips hat*
That sir was one of the most clever racism trolls I've ever seen.
Human Life > Animal Life
The only basis needed is self interest. We are in fact humans, being fair to non-humans waits in line after being fair to humans.
The interesting thing is that the MOST justifiable things human with animals are things that animal rights activists have success fighting. Such as experimentation for science and medicine. These things are temporary efforts that produce results that benefits animals and humans alike forever after.
The abuses that they don't generally fight at all or even advocate (such as the keeping of pets, aka captivity) and especially spaying and neutering are the things we could end with little or no negative impact on the interests of our own species.
Why should he? We don't live in the rest of the world. That would be their problem.
It doesn't just need to coincide with our timeframe but also with our timescale. Neurons are actually fairly simple energy patterns all told. If you have lots of them you have intelligence. Something that has a similar pattern that fires on thousand year scales wouldn't be able to perceive us and wouldn't move fast enough to seem intelligent to us.
"A good comparison of Wikipedia, since they are producing an educational product, is to compare them with modern universities, which are all "non-profit" as well. Look at many of the salaries at most colleges and universities, and you'll see many people making in excess of $100,000 per year, and athletic coaches that are paid in excess of $1,000,000 per year. Being classified as "non-profit" clearly does not mean that you have to pay your employees poorly.
And, of course, most universities also solicit funds and donations with the same agressiveness as Wikipedia as well. Got to keep that football and basketball program rolling, after all."
So because modern universities are poorly run and inefficient Wikipedia should be as well? Modern universities exist in their current form because they are largely government funded. The government gives credence to their degrees and therefore conducts the research it funds via the resources that universities produce. As a consequence most very expensive and cutting edge research is performed there and most of the knowledge related to it housed there. Even with the how available, that funding buys tools you just don't have elsewhere. Technology and open information is slowly eroding at that but it isn't there yet.
Modern universities, especially in the US, are a poor resource for education. They are slow to change and adapt. Throughout the vast vast majority of tech employers care far more about what you know, your proven track record, and your ability to learn than they do about degrees. Most employers, especially those with hiring managers who are promoted from engineering positions, would take someone with 10 years of related experience (especially who was still young) over someone with a masters. He'll eventually find one that will pay the same or only slightly less than they would a peer with the experience and the degree on top of it. Pretty much all would take someone doing a similar job at another enterprise of similar size for even two years. So tech is a long way toward already being there.
For science see the problem I mentioned above. For engineering... this is such a broad category, old school engineering fields often have entrenched degree mentality while newer and more flexible engineering areas have less of one. Maths? I'm not really sure this is properly considered a category so much as the common language between the previous areas. If we taught maths as the creative, easy, and flexible thing it is people working in STE would be not just using but developing maths on a daily basis.
Is that Wikipedia is not and does not need to be a stunning marvel of technology. The brilliance is in the concept, not the implementation.
The most talented people in the organization are likely the backend guys who have to make the scaling, redundancy, and infrastructure work on what should be a shoestring budget. Anything on that scale requires extremely gifted and creative people, especially if you can't just throw money at it. Although given a couple years I could certainly do it for an annual upkeep cost of less than two million.
Granted, if it were my brainchild and succeeded to Wikipedia's degree I'd probably give myself a permanent position and an overgenerous salary along with half a dozen other key people who made it happen. That seems fair to me. If our capitalist society thought it was fair for Bill Gates to be the richest man in the world for a few clever business tactics that resulted in windows being widespread the Wikipedia creators should at least have a comfortable life without having to worry about accounting for productivity. And so long at it weren't at the expense of Wikipedia itself I would be okay with a portion of my donation going to the ones who made it possible for this thing that is so valuable I'd volunteer to pay to keep it to exist at all. But even if you give 6 guys $250k/yr that is only $1.5m.
Thinking of the global scale of Wikipedia, the type of data it houses, the kind of bandwidth likely required, etc. I'd think $5m would be a very solid operating budget.
That isn't the norm across the country for IT workers. Are you the self taught and never broke in type or the got burned in some economic shift and fell out of the stream type?
It's not just influence. Nobody wants to see them. I think I speak for the entire internet when I say that we are sick of more and more intrusive advertising.
I expect them to hire devs outside silicon valley?
There is qualified talent all over the country and all over the world. You don't need to look in silicon valley to find someone qualified to work on a wiki. And aside from some of the infrastructure guys (the flavor the DC will usually supply if asked) nobody needs to be in California. For that matter there are plenty of well wired DC's that aren't in California.
"Fair enough, though the same argument would apply to having soldiers in the first place."
Why yes, so it does. I find your logic to be indisputable on this point and conclusive.
"Armies today operate just fine despite the fact that nobody really agrees on who can be morally shot."
Really? If they do so well why are in so much trouble for massive collateral damage and the inability to distinguish combatants and civilians? How is it entire villages get wiped out entirely and mislabeled as combatants on reports as indicated by wikileaks? Why did the US invasion in Iraq indirectly kill millions of Iraqi's via destroyed infrastructure like facilities that do things like purify water?
Oh I see, the metric of doing just fine only considers whether or not they manage to kill SOMEONE. Yes, lets run with that. I'm sure we can all agree on that one.
"He was explaining the Geneva Conventions/etc. That isn't an argument about morality."
He was explaining said conventions as a retort to my claim that humans aren't able to clearly define who can be morally shot and therefore it would be impossible for them to clearly define in an algorithm for an automated killing machine.
"I'm sure those terms all have definitions, and as you point out they exclude most of the folks the US tends to end up shooting at of late."
Probably, but just like every word in the dictionary, all definitions for subjective concepts become circular at some point. "military" is not an objective element, it is subjective and any definition is going to require subjective elements as well. Again, this is why we have judges and why they don't always agree. It's why a lawyer's talent ultimately just comes down to his ability to make a convincing argument and spin those definitions around to match the viewpoint he needs.
Oh I'd definitely use hydraulics. I'd probably use long and wide water filled and UV resistant plastic bladders under water. Use some massive cement blocks to anchor to the sea floor and floating turbine buoys on the surface. I'd set one way valves on the lines that connect the bladder to the buoys and an equal number on the bottom of the bladders.
The force of the wave deforms the bladder which, in still water, has a pressure gradient neutral to that of the surrounding ocean. The deformation will cause a low pressure zone and water will travel upward and blast out the one way valves at the top. That displaced water will be replaced with highly pressurized water by the intake valves at the bottom. The water turns the turbines on the buoys, which would also have blades for wind.
There is probably a better way to handle the pressurized fluid I just used the wave to pump out of the ocean. A generator in the ocean would be tough to keep from corroding.