The upside to that is that people are likely to take their reputation more seriously, in a truly 'Global Community' sense. I suspect you'd see a drop in the amount of trolling and similar antisocial behavior, for instance.
There are actually people who are into raw milk, suggesting that the analogy is perhaps not quite appropriate - unless you're suggesting that society is likely to develop an energetic Luddite business community.
I think you're mistaken in ascribing intent to parasites. Parasites have no intent beyond reproducing. In some situations they may exploit their niche (in this case, hypothetically, dinosaurs) to a degree of overburdening it and seriously harming or destroying it. Usually the niche - if it itself is biological - will end up compensating; or, more precisely, those entities that survive have come upon a compensation accidentally. If the parasite is still able to feed off the compensated niche organism, they'll continue to survive. If there is none, then it will die.
Suffice to say, it's a valid theory. People need to stop thinking of evolution as having intent ascribed to it. It really is a comedy of errors.
Answer me this: In America, who has sovereignty? We the actual citizens, or foreigners?
Actually, the Constitution is the supreme law and sovereign of the land. So, you know, the power of the 'Citizens' is actually significantly limited - by necessity. (That is, after all, the point of government.) Furthermore, the Constitution explicitly says in article six that the treaties made lawfully under the Constitution also stand as law, and that the states and citizens must abide by them.
Therefore, in a very real way 'foreigners' have a say in our rules; simply because we agreed to let them have a say. You can't simply dismiss them.
Look, all institutions with significant finances require rigorous auditing. We require it for business - why not for our government? They say that no one wants to see how sausage or laws are made: but it's exactly that opinion that keeps us out of the loop and powerless.
More controls. More transparency. Fewer single points of failure. It's the only solution.
I agree with virtually everything you've said save for losing on abortion. I don't think that losing on that issue will motivate people as much as you think, and losing that will be a severe blow. Realize that the left's 'base' is very different than it used to be; they didn't grow up without abortion as a right, and don't necessarily understand what it means. Further, there are a lot of cultural issues pushing them away from activism.
The best for the left - and government in general - will be to have quick and transparent reporting of exactly what the government is doing.
The idea behind the secret ballot is to prevent things such as fraud, blackmail and coercion. I would much rather have to go through the rigmarole to make the voting process transparent and verifiable without having to resort to stripping away a basic protection that would leave me and everyone open to having real barbarian tactics used. Without a secret ballot you *have* to vote the way your social environment votes, or you're going to have some real difficulties. And that, in a democracy, is just not right.
It is arguable that the time-spent-on measurement is something of a red herring. Why might a programmer spend a lot of time on whitespace? The predominant reason is that it has to be readable. Economically it's a bad idea to spend your time on reducing your consumption of something plentiful (CPU cycles) at the cost of something that is not plentiful (programmer-hours, which, btw = $$$).
With most projects - by which I mean most business projects, because that is where most development occurs; in a business - looking at 'simple' programs is not as clear an indicator of what path you should take as you might like. There are certainly tradeoffs - writing nice, elegant, compact code that utilizes multithreading may, in fact, improve your bottom line. But it's currently a riskier proposition than I think good business sense indicates. The first and only measure is functionality. Only where it can improve functionality will these concerns be addressed.
That is until the research institutions can pathfind to a better way of doing things. But it's not as simple as deciding multithreading is the wave of the future - even if it is.
Question, though: why do you still call them 'Unidentified Flying Objects' when you've clearly established beyond any reasonable doubt that they're Grey scout ships from Zeta Reticuli? I mean, they're identified flying objects then.
Because the acronym "IFO" is already in wide use in the government?
While that would be the first signal sent to our new alien overlords, presumably if they were aware enough to catch it, they caught all the ones sense. It's far more likely that they bomb the bejeezus out of us for our nutzoid obsession with cars and Britney Spears than it is that the triggering act will be Hitler - a problem we pretty publicly dealt with. Hell, we have satellites broadcasting the History channel doing nothing but trumpeting our defeat over that guy.
No, I see it as far more likely they only started listening in - assuming they're listening at all - long after the start of our being galactic blabbermouths. Only people who are models of humanity's own self-importance would really find it likely that it is otherwise.
Note that you might speciate even without losing the ability to cross breed. There are plenty of animals that can cross breed; one might even wonder if the surge in nonspecific infertility in 1st world nations is not the result, to some degree, of speciation effects.
Pardon for exaggerating. I didn't have the number on hand.
But I think your numbers are totally erroneous:
(United States, as of 2000/2001)
the mean wealth was $144,000 per person.
10% of the population owned 71% of the wealth
the top 1% controlled 38%.
the bottom 40% owned less than 1% of the nation's wealth.
That's from Wikipedia. You might look at their comparison of the Tax Burden compared to Wealth - it's fascinating how tracks so closely! Don't you think? In a country with a maximum marginal tax rate of 35%, I think you can see why I'm not crying for all those poor rich people who have to pay so much.
Personally, I hate it when people pretend it's somehow hard to be rich, or somehow unfair to them.
Is it possible to object to unions without raising that boogeyman? I mean, come on. The cold war is over. "Communism" didn't destroy democracy or freedom - in fact, it didn't come remotely close. There seems to be a cultural, pathological fear of communism that simply isn't justified. Especially when it means that the 2% of the country with 98% of the money get to have their way, all the time.
Every problem you cite with unions comes from specific trade union examples, none of which seem worth arguing about. The technology industry is radically different and would suggest a radically different formulation. I mean, unless you really believe that technology workers should be so only at the whim of corporate overlords.
"I'd rather get my compensation because my employer loves me, rather than because they fear me."
Wow. I'd like to know who you work for that they 'love' you. I know they might say that, but look at the money, and ask yourself again how much they love you. It's certainly not within orders of magnitude of how much they love themselves.
"The last paragraph is why unions appeared. Much as that seems to be a swearword for many nerds."
Why is that? Why is it that the intelligentsia seems to think that they can compete individually against large, organized corporations? Yes, unions are like any other institution; subject to sloth, corruption and bureaucracy. But the alternative is being a wage slave, even if the wage is higher. And it is enslavement; it's not nerds who are making the biggest bucks. The few cases in which that is true skew the perception of the average case, which is not at all as rosy.
Plus, you'd think a bunch of smart people could come up with a better-formulated union.
"Not all mutations are good, but with our advanced medicine, poor mutations are now survivable."
Don't get me wrong - I'm a big fan of humans. But human arrogance is what makes you think you can identify the difference between a 'poor' mutation and a 'good' one. Way back in the day, as the story goes, some proto-humans started walking upright, causing all sorts of back problems that persist until today. Good or bad?
Or that whole forebrain thing; and certainly the individual relative lack of strength and speed. Hairlessness; it certainly makes winters cold! But the thing is that every mutation has a cost and a benefit, and only the long term will tell whether that mutation is viable - which is a far cry yet from an objective determination of 'good' or 'bad'.
When you have a set of mutations that is viable, regardless of their qualitative comparisons to the status-quo niche of the parent species, that is called speciation. There is a natural division of species over time, as adaptive success leads to less selection pressure, which in turn leads to a wider range of mutations that can, over the short term survive in order to determine long term viability as the niche market shifts.
And the upshot is that there is no good or bad; just different. You can bet that humans will eventually evolve into different species, perhaps sooner than expected. We aren't going 'forward', we're going in all directions - behaving on a genetic level like a gases tend to behave in regards to their physical environment; by spreading out to fill it.
I prefer two spaces as well; inevitably people set their tabs to different widths, which means they use different numbers of tabs to line things up to make code look 'clean'. When it gets to your machine/IDE it generally looks garbled because *your* tabs are, of course, different.
But, worse than that, when you're using tabs you might throw in a space or two to line things up - and then things really become difficult to read. Better to keep it all as spaces, in my opinion. Tabs are for things like theses, where print formatting should be taking up more of your time. But, then, I'm very clearly a visually oriented thinker, so the garbled text thing really irks me.
While I agree that there is a reality that I have observed us to coexist in, I have only some evidence that objectively speaking that is the same shared reality that you have observed us to exist in. For the vast majority of purposes this should be sufficient for a person to be able to rely upon, but it in no way 'proves' an absolute truth.
I might also quibble that physics holds a sway over all things. Math is simply a construct used as a partial language to help describe the world.
I will grant, though, that if you proved any one absolute truth the discussion would be moot.
...suggests that it may not actually be true that there is an absolute truth. Even the statement "There is... such a thing [as absolute truth], it's just that nobody really knows for sure" is logically contradictory. We actually have no proof of absolute truth; only some evidence to support it, and the distinct logical possibility it doesn't exist.
What you teach to a student and what you allow to be in the comprehensive collection of a culture's knowledge are two entirely different things. What is taught in school will always have some political or cultural slant to it; specifically because teaching time is an incredibly limited resource. It's not that teaching students about the Flying Spaghetti Monster doesn't have value - it's that teaching them about evolution will get you more mileage. You have to make those trade-offs in a curriculum.
There is no significant resource crunch in Wikipedia - at least that cannot be hurdled with a little clever organization. The point of Wikipedia is not to present a tailored, lean set of articles. Rather, it is to present everything. Everything and it's brother. And then some. This is what I think people fail to realize is a substantive difference between Wikipedia and traditional encyclopedias; they have no effective maximum size. There is no point in excluding something. There is only a point in organizing it differently, and calling it what it is: a mainstream theory or a competing metaphysical model or a fringe cultural icon.
"First, you must keep a clean spirit. Second, you must look things in the face and know them for what they are." - Marc Anthony
Any war on an {insert your chosen abstract concept here} is ridiculous. The War on Drugs resembles a war, and perhaps even is a war, but it's not a war 'on drugs'. It's a war against particular drug cartels. It may even be several separate wars. But by calling it an abstract war, you confuse yourself. Note that the Allies declared war on the Axis countries in World War II, not on Invaders. Fighting Invaders might be a good idea. Having a War on Invaders, on the other hand, is a really bad idea, because your objectives are entirely unclear.
It just goes to show you should never confuse people with concepts. You'll be way off.
Well, I can hardly say much to counter that without whipping out equally unsubstantiated and meaningless-to-the-conversation credentials. I am sure, though, that if you're as widely read as all that, you will recognize that the many different forms the discussion has taken over the years have, at least in a few cases, suggested exactly what I'm positing; that the well-ordered society encourages ethical behavior by punishing unethical behavior through laws - whether or not you actually agree with that point.
If, on the other hand, you were only ever objecting to my not crediting a field of study near and dear to your heart with the specific territory you hold to be the case, let me sincerely apologize. I recognize that moral philosophy has rather a weight of academic years behind it, and there is a traditional standard there that it is by no means wrong to adhere to. I do not hold it to be relevant in this case, but I appreciate your disagreeing with that idea.
Slashdot Mirror
Like Alan Greenspan?
The upside to that is that people are likely to take their reputation more seriously, in a truly 'Global Community' sense. I suspect you'd see a drop in the amount of trolling and similar antisocial behavior, for instance.
There are actually people who are into raw milk, suggesting that the analogy is perhaps not quite appropriate - unless you're suggesting that society is likely to develop an energetic Luddite business community.
Many parasites kill their hosts (as intended).
I think you're mistaken in ascribing intent to parasites. Parasites have no intent beyond reproducing. In some situations they may exploit their niche (in this case, hypothetically, dinosaurs) to a degree of overburdening it and seriously harming or destroying it. Usually the niche - if it itself is biological - will end up compensating; or, more precisely, those entities that survive have come upon a compensation accidentally. If the parasite is still able to feed off the compensated niche organism, they'll continue to survive. If there is none, then it will die.
Suffice to say, it's a valid theory. People need to stop thinking of evolution as having intent ascribed to it. It really is a comedy of errors.
Answer me this: In America, who has sovereignty? We the actual citizens, or foreigners?
Actually, the Constitution is the supreme law and sovereign of the land. So, you know, the power of the 'Citizens' is actually significantly limited - by necessity. (That is, after all, the point of government.) Furthermore, the Constitution explicitly says in article six that the treaties made lawfully under the Constitution also stand as law, and that the states and citizens must abide by them.
Therefore, in a very real way 'foreigners' have a say in our rules; simply because we agreed to let them have a say. You can't simply dismiss them.
Look, all institutions with significant finances require rigorous auditing. We require it for business - why not for our government? They say that no one wants to see how sausage or laws are made: but it's exactly that opinion that keeps us out of the loop and powerless.
More controls. More transparency. Fewer single points of failure. It's the only solution.
I agree with virtually everything you've said save for losing on abortion. I don't think that losing on that issue will motivate people as much as you think, and losing that will be a severe blow. Realize that the left's 'base' is very different than it used to be; they didn't grow up without abortion as a right, and don't necessarily understand what it means. Further, there are a lot of cultural issues pushing them away from activism.
The best for the left - and government in general - will be to have quick and transparent reporting of exactly what the government is doing.
The idea behind the secret ballot is to prevent things such as fraud, blackmail and coercion. I would much rather have to go through the rigmarole to make the voting process transparent and verifiable without having to resort to stripping away a basic protection that would leave me and everyone open to having real barbarian tactics used. Without a secret ballot you *have* to vote the way your social environment votes, or you're going to have some real difficulties. And that, in a democracy, is just not right.
It is arguable that the time-spent-on measurement is something of a red herring. Why might a programmer spend a lot of time on whitespace? The predominant reason is that it has to be readable. Economically it's a bad idea to spend your time on reducing your consumption of something plentiful (CPU cycles) at the cost of something that is not plentiful (programmer-hours, which, btw = $$$).
With most projects - by which I mean most business projects, because that is where most development occurs; in a business - looking at 'simple' programs is not as clear an indicator of what path you should take as you might like. There are certainly tradeoffs - writing nice, elegant, compact code that utilizes multithreading may, in fact, improve your bottom line. But it's currently a riskier proposition than I think good business sense indicates. The first and only measure is functionality. Only where it can improve functionality will these concerns be addressed.
That is until the research institutions can pathfind to a better way of doing things. But it's not as simple as deciding multithreading is the wave of the future - even if it is.
Yes, but the Soviet Union was not near so well broadcast. ;)
Question, though: why do you still call them 'Unidentified Flying Objects' when you've clearly established beyond any reasonable doubt that they're Grey scout ships from Zeta Reticuli? I mean, they're identified flying objects then.
Because the acronym "IFO" is already in wide use in the government?
While that would be the first signal sent to our new alien overlords, presumably if they were aware enough to catch it, they caught all the ones sense. It's far more likely that they bomb the bejeezus out of us for our nutzoid obsession with cars and Britney Spears than it is that the triggering act will be Hitler - a problem we pretty publicly dealt with. Hell, we have satellites broadcasting the History channel doing nothing but trumpeting our defeat over that guy.
No, I see it as far more likely they only started listening in - assuming they're listening at all - long after the start of our being galactic blabbermouths. Only people who are models of humanity's own self-importance would really find it likely that it is otherwise.
I'm so happy someone here understands probability distributions. I was beginning to worry...
Note that you might speciate even without losing the ability to cross breed. There are plenty of animals that can cross breed; one might even wonder if the surge in nonspecific infertility in 1st world nations is not the result, to some degree, of speciation effects.
But I'm wildly speculating there.
Pardon for exaggerating. I didn't have the number on hand.
But I think your numbers are totally erroneous:
(United States, as of 2000/2001)
- the mean wealth was $144,000 per person.
- 10% of the population owned 71% of the wealth
- the top 1% controlled 38%.
- the bottom 40% owned less than 1% of the nation's wealth.
That's from Wikipedia. You might look at their comparison of the Tax Burden compared to Wealth - it's fascinating how tracks so closely! Don't you think? In a country with a maximum marginal tax rate of 35%, I think you can see why I'm not crying for all those poor rich people who have to pay so much.Personally, I hate it when people pretend it's somehow hard to be rich, or somehow unfair to them.
"Unions are like communism."
Is it possible to object to unions without raising that boogeyman? I mean, come on. The cold war is over. "Communism" didn't destroy democracy or freedom - in fact, it didn't come remotely close. There seems to be a cultural, pathological fear of communism that simply isn't justified. Especially when it means that the 2% of the country with 98% of the money get to have their way, all the time.
Every problem you cite with unions comes from specific trade union examples, none of which seem worth arguing about. The technology industry is radically different and would suggest a radically different formulation. I mean, unless you really believe that technology workers should be so only at the whim of corporate overlords.
"I'd rather get my compensation because my employer loves me, rather than because they fear me."
Wow. I'd like to know who you work for that they 'love' you. I know they might say that, but look at the money, and ask yourself again how much they love you. It's certainly not within orders of magnitude of how much they love themselves.
"The last paragraph is why unions appeared. Much as that seems to be a swearword for many nerds."
Why is that? Why is it that the intelligentsia seems to think that they can compete individually against large, organized corporations? Yes, unions are like any other institution; subject to sloth, corruption and bureaucracy. But the alternative is being a wage slave, even if the wage is higher. And it is enslavement; it's not nerds who are making the biggest bucks. The few cases in which that is true skew the perception of the average case, which is not at all as rosy.
Plus, you'd think a bunch of smart people could come up with a better-formulated union.
"Not all mutations are good, but with our advanced medicine, poor mutations are now survivable."
Don't get me wrong - I'm a big fan of humans. But human arrogance is what makes you think you can identify the difference between a 'poor' mutation and a 'good' one. Way back in the day, as the story goes, some proto-humans started walking upright, causing all sorts of back problems that persist until today. Good or bad?
Or that whole forebrain thing; and certainly the individual relative lack of strength and speed. Hairlessness; it certainly makes winters cold! But the thing is that every mutation has a cost and a benefit, and only the long term will tell whether that mutation is viable - which is a far cry yet from an objective determination of 'good' or 'bad'.
When you have a set of mutations that is viable, regardless of their qualitative comparisons to the status-quo niche of the parent species, that is called speciation. There is a natural division of species over time, as adaptive success leads to less selection pressure, which in turn leads to a wider range of mutations that can, over the short term survive in order to determine long term viability as the niche market shifts.
And the upshot is that there is no good or bad; just different. You can bet that humans will eventually evolve into different species, perhaps sooner than expected. We aren't going 'forward', we're going in all directions - behaving on a genetic level like a gases tend to behave in regards to their physical environment; by spreading out to fill it.
I prefer two spaces as well; inevitably people set their tabs to different widths, which means they use different numbers of tabs to line things up to make code look 'clean'. When it gets to your machine/IDE it generally looks garbled because *your* tabs are, of course, different. But, worse than that, when you're using tabs you might throw in a space or two to line things up - and then things really become difficult to read. Better to keep it all as spaces, in my opinion. Tabs are for things like theses, where print formatting should be taking up more of your time. But, then, I'm very clearly a visually oriented thinker, so the garbled text thing really irks me.
While I agree that there is a reality that I have observed us to coexist in, I have only some evidence that objectively speaking that is the same shared reality that you have observed us to exist in. For the vast majority of purposes this should be sufficient for a person to be able to rely upon, but it in no way 'proves' an absolute truth.
I might also quibble that physics holds a sway over all things. Math is simply a construct used as a partial language to help describe the world.
I will grant, though, that if you proved any one absolute truth the discussion would be moot.
...suggests that it may not actually be true that there is an absolute truth. Even the statement "There is ... such a thing [as absolute truth], it's just that nobody really knows for sure" is logically contradictory. We actually have no proof of absolute truth; only some evidence to support it, and the distinct logical possibility it doesn't exist.
What you teach to a student and what you allow to be in the comprehensive collection of a culture's knowledge are two entirely different things. What is taught in school will always have some political or cultural slant to it; specifically because teaching time is an incredibly limited resource. It's not that teaching students about the Flying Spaghetti Monster doesn't have value - it's that teaching them about evolution will get you more mileage. You have to make those trade-offs in a curriculum.
There is no significant resource crunch in Wikipedia - at least that cannot be hurdled with a little clever organization. The point of Wikipedia is not to present a tailored, lean set of articles. Rather, it is to present everything. Everything and it's brother. And then some. This is what I think people fail to realize is a substantive difference between Wikipedia and traditional encyclopedias; they have no effective maximum size. There is no point in excluding something. There is only a point in organizing it differently, and calling it what it is: a mainstream theory or a competing metaphysical model or a fringe cultural icon.
"First, you must keep a clean spirit. Second, you must look things in the face and know them for what they are." - Marc Anthony
Any war on an {insert your chosen abstract concept here} is ridiculous. The War on Drugs resembles a war, and perhaps even is a war, but it's not a war 'on drugs'. It's a war against particular drug cartels. It may even be several separate wars. But by calling it an abstract war, you confuse yourself. Note that the Allies declared war on the Axis countries in World War II, not on Invaders. Fighting Invaders might be a good idea. Having a War on Invaders, on the other hand, is a really bad idea, because your objectives are entirely unclear.
It just goes to show you should never confuse people with concepts. You'll be way off.
Well, I can hardly say much to counter that without whipping out equally unsubstantiated and meaningless-to-the-conversation credentials. I am sure, though, that if you're as widely read as all that, you will recognize that the many different forms the discussion has taken over the years have, at least in a few cases, suggested exactly what I'm positing; that the well-ordered society encourages ethical behavior by punishing unethical behavior through laws - whether or not you actually agree with that point.
If, on the other hand, you were only ever objecting to my not crediting a field of study near and dear to your heart with the specific territory you hold to be the case, let me sincerely apologize. I recognize that moral philosophy has rather a weight of academic years behind it, and there is a traditional standard there that it is by no means wrong to adhere to. I do not hold it to be relevant in this case, but I appreciate your disagreeing with that idea.