From the original poster:
"...I wish it could be banished (along with the Insert/Delete pair)..."
If you wish for the Insert and Delete keys to be banished, you must be right handed. We left handers, who use a mouse in our left hands, enjoy using the Ctrl+Insert, Shift+Insert, and Shift+Delete key combos for copy, paste, and cut. It's hard to do Ctrl+V with your right hand.
Or maybe you just use VI.
"As a side note, my sister-in-law that's currently in college was struggling with depression and a lack of friends until she started doing RPGs. Now she's got as many friends as she could wish for"
She used a ninth level spell just to get some friends?
"why should society pay for someone who ruined their own lives...?"
Was there an implication that society would pay for this procedure, rather than the one receiving it? I don't have a problem with some idiot buying himself a replacement liver (or pancreas, or whatever) with his own dollars. If we're talking about forcing me to buy it for him, then I agree completely.
The machine separates the input material into things the yeast can eat and things it can't. Things the yeast can eat get turned into ethanol which is burned in the engine. Things the yeast can't eat are heated in a low-oxygen environment and gasified. The gases are then burned in the engine. No toxic fumes (other than what you'd normally get out of an ICE, presumably).
Thanks for giving me the benefit of the sanity doubt.:-)
If we go to the extreme end of technology and we have enough smart and flexible robots that they can build and do everything for us, we still have limited energy (maybe) and raw materials (definitely). The cost of any service would be nothing, but goods would still have a cost. How do we handle that? I dunno; but we're a long way from that. Any discussion about what we do now need not take such a scenario into account. Note that when I say that capitalism has done the most good for people, I'm using the past tense (or perfect tense, if we want to get really pedantic:-) . In recorded history, it's done the best. We haven't progressed technologically to the point that we can toss it out.
As for American capitalism not making you happy, remember. Only you can make you happy.:-) Seriously, though, that's more a philosophical point. I don't think any economic system can make people happy, but there are certainly some that can make people unhappy. At least, the ones without the swords.
As to letting people die for lack of health care, I never said we should have no charity. I only said it isn't the government's job and nobody should tell me how much to give or to whom I should give it. I've given thousands to various charities since I graduated, and I'll keep giving.
And about how much we spend destroying life vs saving it; 2005 defense spending was less than just Social Security spending, not including Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, housing assistance, social programs, education, etc. There just isn't enough tax money out there to give every citizen best-in-class medical care, even if you thought it were ethical to use tax money to do so. Check out this budget info from whitehouse.gov, page 58: http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2007/pdf/hi st.pdf
If you do get that time machine worked out, let me know. I'd like to take my money out of Lucent in late 1999.:-)
Have a great day. It's been good discussing this with you.
Sorry; I wasn't trying to say you were arguing for communism and all of the ills that come with it. You had said that communism was a good, if impractical, idea and I was saying that I believe it to be a bad, and also impractical, idea.
Straw man: when someone falsely claims that his opponent in a debate is taking a certain position. This is often a more extreme version of the opponent's actual position. The position is chosen so that it may easily be shown to be flawed.
I didn't mean to say you were saying, "We should be communist." My intent was to encourage you to rethink the idea that communism is a good idea; I actually think it's a very bad idea.
Sorry if I come across as having black-and-white thinking. I do think we need some government controls on the economy, just less than we have now. The Americans without health insurance probably do disagree with me, but that doesn't give them the right to force me to pay for their health care. That is a type of slavery and quite wrong. The ends do not justify the means.
I am awake to reality. I know that telling someone who is dying of cancer that no, he can't force me to pay for his medical care, is not in that person's best health care interests. It is, however, in society's best interests long-term. Capitalism, for all its flaws, has helped more people live better lives than any other economic system (anarchy, socialism, its brother fascism, feudalism, communism, or whatever else I can think of).
We have already made great progress; the great majority of the poor in the US have sufficient food, housing, and even have cell phones and entertainment undreamed of a hundred years ago. They also have free emergency health care and access to most prescription drugs free of charge. Most pharmaceutical companies have free drug programs for the indigent. There are many better ways to reform health care in the US than socializing it.
When we have robots who can do everything for us, there will still be those who will put more effort into bettering their lives than others. They will live better. We will also, forever, have limited resources. Even if labor is free, materials won't be. Read "The Diamond Age" by Stephenson for an example.
This is, by the way, the longest running thread I've ever been in on slashdot.:-)
Robin Hood didn't rob the rich and give to the poor, he robbed the tax collector and gave the money back to the people.:-)
I believe communism to be immoral for a variety of reasons, beyond what we've discussed. Here's a few... - It requires atheism. I'm not an atheist, so I don't like that. I'm also not a theocrat, so don't panic.:-)
- It requires the complete submission of the individual to the state. I find that concept abhorrent for whole baskets-full of reasons.
- It rewards sloth and punishes enterprise.
- It puts the government in total control of production and distribution; these are two of several things that governments suck at.
- It concentrates all political power in a central beurocratic [sp?] authority. This leads to the extreme corruption and unresponsiveness.
And I could go on. It's bad. I don't like it. And all this without the obvious "it'll never work" point. Many of these downsides also apply to making the country "a little bit" communist, to varying degrees.
I also disagree that health care and education should be socialized; these are two more things the government sucks at. I think every area should have a school run by their local government and every parent should get an annual education voucher. They can use that voucher to send their kids to the local government school or (if one is available) to a private school. We'd have many more private schools (religious and secular), and probably a lot better public schools.
And why should the government control and (just as bad) pay for health care? Why should poor people be able to force doctors, suppliers, and everyone else work for them without compensation? That's what taxpayer subsidized health care is. This is beside the point that, once again, the government will do a bad job at it.
I don't understand the argument that the free market should be used for everything except the things that are important. If it's so good at everything else, why would it be bad for the important stuff?
I agree that it'll likely take something like a revolt to change the system, which is why I'm very much for the FairTax. It is slightly progressive, but much much flatter than what we have now. I would consider the implementation of the FairTax to be a minor tax revolt (no bloodshed necessary).
The rest of your discussion, which I can sympathize with to a degree, boils down to "From each according to his ability, to each according to need." This is one of the main tenets of communism, which I am very, very strongly against. I don't think anybody should get a free ride, and I don't think we have the right to take a greater proportion of a rich person's money simply because it means he won't starve. Among other things it violates equal protection under the law.
Don't worry, I do totally understand your point, I just don't agree with it. I'm more for the strict libertarian interpretation where everybody pays the same percentage in taxes. I also believe in doing good for my common man; I just don't believe it's the government's job to do it. I believe that's the job of private charities and individual acts of kindness. I am strongly against involuntary, compulsory, we'll-decide-how-to-spend-your-charity-dollars-and -how-much-you-have-to-give charity through taxation. I also believe that such taxation is unconstitutional in the US, but the Supreme Court either doesn't agree or doesn't care.
OK. So you aren't saying that a flat tax is unfair or immoral, just that it would be perceived as such by too many people in the US today. Interesting. So all I have to do now is convince a few tens of millions of Americans that it would be fair and we're in. All I need is a day-time talk show and a 20x boost in charisma.:-)
I enjoy being derided by someone with an outlandishly hateful sig such as yours. I guess I deserve such treatment for posting on slashdot and saying, not that I like George Bush or that I think he did the right thing, but that me might not have had evil intentions. Now THAT was naive of me.
Look up Hawking Radiation. Big black holes emit very dim, low frequency light. Smaller ones emit brighter and higher frequency stuff. The curve is exponential, so when the black hole gets really really small (planetary mass maybe? I don't recall), they throw off great gobs of gamma rays and disappear.
The problem is that long before they get that small, they gobble up more cosmic background radiaiton than they emit, so they reach a sort of energy equilibrium with the universe. We'll have to wait for the background radiation to cool off due to universe expansion for the little black holes to go pop.
That second paragraph is based on info at wikipedia, so take it with a little bit of net-salt.:-)
In General Relativity, gravity is the warping of space you refer to. The warp is the path light would take when travelling through that region. Everything with mass warps space-time a bit, and black holes do so a lot; so much so that any light you emit inside the event horizon bends around until it's in the singularity no matter where you aimed it initially.
Gravitons are a proposed quantum paritcle, and black holes and quantum physics haven't been reconciled yet. The warping-of-space-time explaination doesn't have the "why can gravitons get out" problem. I don't know what the quantum physics answer will be.
I'm not certain, but you might be thinking about frame dragging. Rotating objects drag space-time around with them; the more massive the object, the stronger the effect. Because black holes tend to the massive side and can spin very very fast the frame dragging effect can be very strong near the event horizon.
Because of this effect, it is impossible not to orbit a rapidly spinning black hole as you fall in; you'll get dragged around along with space-time. I'm guessing (without having actually heard or read this) that you may only get centrifugal force for your angular velocity that exceeds the speed at which space-time is rotating. Otherwise, as far as space-time is concerned, you're just falling straight in. The end effect of this is that objects that appear to be rotating around the black hole to a distant observer may actually be falling straight in.
I've probably put enough conjecture and botched explainations in there to attract the attention of a real physicist, so just hang on for the real explanation.:-)
"Wouldn't surprise me too much if this were true; but in either case the audience of youtube is so predominately young and radically liberal, that even if there was more conservative-friendly material on that site it would all get rated out of existence pretty quickly, methinks."
"This is perhaps one of the stupidist comments I've ever heard... For example, if you need some kind of filter on your smoke stacks, someone needs to build those."
Perhaps a better argument would be to claim that, in response the Kyoto restrictions, someone will invent a new way to generate power that is more efficient. The new method would consume less fuel to produce the same amount of power, thus reducing the power company's fuel costs. That would, of course, assume that the new method was not significantly more expensive to implement.
Perhaps you should also avoid claiming that someone's argument is the stupidest you've ever heard when you yourself are invoking an argument that was debunked 150 years ago.
"Now, if we could only get our duly elected officials to protect us from REAL threats... like broken levies in major metropolitan areas, lack of affordable healthcare, homelessness, etc."
Or, maybe even something the U.S. Constitution actually says they should do!
Sorry if you were talking about state and local officials, but it hacks me off that for some reason everybody in this country thinks the federal government owes them food, a home, a job, and a doctor. Where the heck does that come from?
I know a lot of people here are irked about the cellphone comparison, but did you stop to consider that this may not be a digital chip? Transistors can also build analog amplifiers, mixers, frequency multipliers, and other lovely gizmos. Comparing the frequency of this chip to the RF frequency of a cellphone may be entirely appropriate.
Slashdot Mirror
From the original poster: "...I wish it could be banished (along with the Insert/Delete pair)..." If you wish for the Insert and Delete keys to be banished, you must be right handed. We left handers, who use a mouse in our left hands, enjoy using the Ctrl+Insert, Shift+Insert, and Shift+Delete key combos for copy, paste, and cut. It's hard to do Ctrl+V with your right hand. Or maybe you just use VI.
"As a side note, my sister-in-law that's currently in college was struggling with depression and a lack of friends until she started doing RPGs. Now she's got as many friends as she could wish for"
She used a ninth level spell just to get some friends?
"why should society pay for someone who ruined their own lives...?"
Was there an implication that society would pay for this procedure, rather than the one receiving it? I don't have a problem with some idiot buying himself a replacement liver (or pancreas, or whatever) with his own dollars. If we're talking about forcing me to buy it for him, then I agree completely.
The machine separates the input material into things the yeast can eat and things it can't. Things the yeast can eat get turned into ethanol which is burned in the engine. Things the yeast can't eat are heated in a low-oxygen environment and gasified. The gases are then burned in the engine. No toxic fumes (other than what you'd normally get out of an ICE, presumably).
Because they'd either go out of business or stop investing in such new drugs. Anyway, if you don't believe me, I found Pfizer's indigent drug assistance program in one google: http://www.pfizer.com/pfizer/subsites/philanthropy /access/index.jsp
Here's their page detailing international AIDS/HIV grants:
http://www.pfizer.com/pfizer/subsites/philanthropy /caring/global.health.hiv.intl.jsp
Thanks for giving me the benefit of the sanity doubt. :-)
:-) . In recorded history, it's done the best. We haven't progressed technologically to the point that we can toss it out.
:-) Seriously, though, that's more a philosophical point. I don't think any economic system can make people happy, but there are certainly some that can make people unhappy. At least, the ones without the swords.
i st.pdf
:-)
If we go to the extreme end of technology and we have enough smart and flexible robots that they can build and do everything for us, we still have limited energy (maybe) and raw materials (definitely). The cost of any service would be nothing, but goods would still have a cost. How do we handle that? I dunno; but we're a long way from that. Any discussion about what we do now need not take such a scenario into account. Note that when I say that capitalism has done the most good for people, I'm using the past tense (or perfect tense, if we want to get really pedantic
As for American capitalism not making you happy, remember. Only you can make you happy.
As to letting people die for lack of health care, I never said we should have no charity. I only said it isn't the government's job and nobody should tell me how much to give or to whom I should give it. I've given thousands to various charities since I graduated, and I'll keep giving.
And about how much we spend destroying life vs saving it; 2005 defense spending was less than just Social Security spending, not including Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, housing assistance, social programs, education, etc. There just isn't enough tax money out there to give every citizen best-in-class medical care, even if you thought it were ethical to use tax money to do so. Check out this budget info from whitehouse.gov, page 58:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2007/pdf/h
If you do get that time machine worked out, let me know. I'd like to take my money out of Lucent in late 1999.
Have a great day. It's been good discussing this with you.
Sorry; I wasn't trying to say you were arguing for communism and all of the ills that come with it. You had said that communism was a good, if impractical, idea and I was saying that I believe it to be a bad, and also impractical, idea.
:-)
Straw man: when someone falsely claims that his opponent in a debate is taking a certain position. This is often a more extreme version of the opponent's actual position. The position is chosen so that it may easily be shown to be flawed.
I didn't mean to say you were saying, "We should be communist." My intent was to encourage you to rethink the idea that communism is a good idea; I actually think it's a very bad idea.
Sorry if I come across as having black-and-white thinking. I do think we need some government controls on the economy, just less than we have now. The Americans without health insurance probably do disagree with me, but that doesn't give them the right to force me to pay for their health care. That is a type of slavery and quite wrong. The ends do not justify the means.
I am awake to reality. I know that telling someone who is dying of cancer that no, he can't force me to pay for his medical care, is not in that person's best health care interests. It is, however, in society's best interests long-term. Capitalism, for all its flaws, has helped more people live better lives than any other economic system (anarchy, socialism, its brother fascism, feudalism, communism, or whatever else I can think of).
We have already made great progress; the great majority of the poor in the US have sufficient food, housing, and even have cell phones and entertainment undreamed of a hundred years ago. They also have free emergency health care and access to most prescription drugs free of charge. Most pharmaceutical companies have free drug programs for the indigent. There are many better ways to reform health care in the US than socializing it.
When we have robots who can do everything for us, there will still be those who will put more effort into bettering their lives than others. They will live better. We will also, forever, have limited resources. Even if labor is free, materials won't be. Read "The Diamond Age" by Stephenson for an example.
This is, by the way, the longest running thread I've ever been in on slashdot.
Robin Hood didn't rob the rich and give to the poor, he robbed the tax collector and gave the money back to the people. :-)
:-)
I believe communism to be immoral for a variety of reasons, beyond what we've discussed. Here's a few...
- It requires atheism. I'm not an atheist, so I don't like that. I'm also not a theocrat, so don't panic.
- It requires the complete submission of the individual to the state. I find that concept abhorrent for whole baskets-full of reasons.
- It rewards sloth and punishes enterprise.
- It puts the government in total control of production and distribution; these are two of several things that governments suck at.
- It concentrates all political power in a central beurocratic [sp?] authority. This leads to the extreme corruption and unresponsiveness.
And I could go on. It's bad. I don't like it. And all this without the obvious "it'll never work" point. Many of these downsides also apply to making the country "a little bit" communist, to varying degrees.
I also disagree that health care and education should be socialized; these are two more things the government sucks at. I think every area should have a school run by their local government and every parent should get an annual education voucher. They can use that voucher to send their kids to the local government school or (if one is available) to a private school. We'd have many more private schools (religious and secular), and probably a lot better public schools.
And why should the government control and (just as bad) pay for health care? Why should poor people be able to force doctors, suppliers, and everyone else work for them without compensation? That's what taxpayer subsidized health care is. This is beside the point that, once again, the government will do a bad job at it.
I don't understand the argument that the free market should be used for everything except the things that are important. If it's so good at everything else, why would it be bad for the important stuff?
I agree that it'll likely take something like a revolt to change the system, which is why I'm very much for the FairTax. It is slightly progressive, but much much flatter than what we have now. I would consider the implementation of the FairTax to be a minor tax revolt (no bloodshed necessary).
The rest of your discussion, which I can sympathize with to a degree, boils down to "From each according to his ability, to each according to need." This is one of the main tenets of communism, which I am very, very strongly against. I don't think anybody should get a free ride, and I don't think we have the right to take a greater proportion of a rich person's money simply because it means he won't starve. Among other things it violates equal protection under the law.
Don't worry, I do totally understand your point, I just don't agree with it. I'm more for the strict libertarian interpretation where everybody pays the same percentage in taxes. I also believe in doing good for my common man; I just don't believe it's the government's job to do it. I believe that's the job of private charities and individual acts of kindness. I am strongly against involuntary, compulsory, we'll-decide-how-to-spend-your-charity-dollars-and -how-much-you-have-to-give charity through taxation. I also believe that such taxation is unconstitutional in the US, but the Supreme Court either doesn't agree or doesn't care.
OK. So you aren't saying that a flat tax is unfair or immoral, just that it would be perceived as such by too many people in the US today. Interesting. So all I have to do now is convince a few tens of millions of Americans that it would be fair and we're in. All I need is a day-time talk show and a 20x boost in charisma. :-)
I am curious -- why do you say that a flat tax is an inherently bad idea? I don't know that I've heard arguments to that effect before.
I enjoy being derided by someone with an outlandishly hateful sig such as yours. I guess I deserve such treatment for posting on slashdot and saying, not that I like George Bush or that I think he did the right thing, but that me might not have had evil intentions. Now THAT was naive of me.
"Bush wrecked the country"
Just want to make one little comment. Iraq is indeed in a sorry state, but Saddam broke it. Bush tried, and failed, to fix it.
Look up Hawking Radiation. Big black holes emit very dim, low frequency light. Smaller ones emit brighter and higher frequency stuff. The curve is exponential, so when the black hole gets really really small (planetary mass maybe? I don't recall), they throw off great gobs of gamma rays and disappear. The problem is that long before they get that small, they gobble up more cosmic background radiaiton than they emit, so they reach a sort of energy equilibrium with the universe. We'll have to wait for the background radiation to cool off due to universe expansion for the little black holes to go pop. That second paragraph is based on info at wikipedia, so take it with a little bit of net-salt. :-)
In General Relativity, gravity is the warping of space you refer to. The warp is the path light would take when travelling through that region. Everything with mass warps space-time a bit, and black holes do so a lot; so much so that any light you emit inside the event horizon bends around until it's in the singularity no matter where you aimed it initially.
Gravitons are a proposed quantum paritcle, and black holes and quantum physics haven't been reconciled yet. The warping-of-space-time explaination doesn't have the "why can gravitons get out" problem. I don't know what the quantum physics answer will be.
I'm not certain, but you might be thinking about frame dragging. Rotating objects drag space-time around with them; the more massive the object, the stronger the effect. Because black holes tend to the massive side and can spin very very fast the frame dragging effect can be very strong near the event horizon.
:-)
Because of this effect, it is impossible not to orbit a rapidly spinning black hole as you fall in; you'll get dragged around along with space-time. I'm guessing (without having actually heard or read this) that you may only get centrifugal force for your angular velocity that exceeds the speed at which space-time is rotating. Otherwise, as far as space-time is concerned, you're just falling straight in. The end effect of this is that objects that appear to be rotating around the black hole to a distant observer may actually be falling straight in.
I've probably put enough conjecture and botched explainations in there to attract the attention of a real physicist, so just hang on for the real explanation.
After scanning the posts on this topic, I crave a -1 Inhumanly Tasteless moderation option.
"What's wrong with being conservative? One word: greed."
OK, I've already posted something on this thread that'll make me unpopular, so why stop now?
being conservative != greed
To a conservative, wanting to take someone else's money is being greedy. To a liberal, wanting to keep your own money is being greedy.
"Wouldn't surprise me too much if this were true; but in either case the audience of youtube is so predominately young and radically liberal, that even if there was more conservative-friendly material on that site it would all get rated out of existence pretty quickly, methinks."
:%s/youtube/slashdot/g
Hmm...
I know, cheap shot, but it was too easy.
"This is perhaps one of the stupidist comments I've ever heard... For example, if you need some kind of filter on your smoke stacks, someone needs to build those."
n _window
This is true, but the power companies will have to purchase those filters. You've just provided an example of the Parable of the Broken Window.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broke
Perhaps a better argument would be to claim that, in response the Kyoto restrictions, someone will invent a new way to generate power that is more efficient. The new method would consume less fuel to produce the same amount of power, thus reducing the power company's fuel costs. That would, of course, assume that the new method was not significantly more expensive to implement.
Perhaps you should also avoid claiming that someone's argument is the stupidest you've ever heard when you yourself are invoking an argument that was debunked 150 years ago.
"Now, if we could only get our duly elected officials to protect us from REAL threats... like broken levies in major metropolitan areas, lack of affordable healthcare, homelessness, etc."
Or, maybe even something the U.S. Constitution actually says they should do!
Sorry if you were talking about state and local officials, but it hacks me off that for some reason everybody in this country thinks the federal government owes them food, a home, a job, and a doctor. Where the heck does that come from?
"the potential for abuse seems pretty severe...."
Because we're running out of space?
I saw a different report on the research that says they were embryonic cells, and that the embryos were destroyed in the process.
I know a lot of people here are irked about the cellphone comparison, but did you stop to consider that this may not be a digital chip? Transistors can also build analog amplifiers, mixers, frequency multipliers, and other lovely gizmos. Comparing the frequency of this chip to the RF frequency of a cellphone may be entirely appropriate.