What problems? You seem to think that there's some "immoral" reason against the sale of organs. But we have here an example where something which is supposedly moral "kills" a lot of people each year through organ shortages.
FTFY.
If there's an express train to human dystopia, it's a booster-spice rat race, with the fittest undead gaining semi-permanent tenure in every elite economic and political station.
Along with a butterfly in Chile, or more than one butterfly, or even an untold number of butterflies.
It's really too bad we can't put markets in charge of heavenly orbits, as that would finally solve the N-body problem. People just aren't thinking big enough.
Now, Obama awards no-bid contracts to companies to fix healthcare.gov and there isn't a single peep of outrage.
There's trolling and there's chickenshit. This is both.
President Obama wakes up every morning knee deep in outrage astroturf manufactured on an industrial scale by one of the most powerful snowblowers that civilization has ever known. Your unpeeping post of insincere outrage is but the smallest intestinal worm inside this giant elephant.
Gridlock plays to conservative interests. Some of us are capable of parsing the tea leaves around the ugly fallout. It's not an act of patriotism to actively sabotage every elected administration where you voted for the defeated candidates. Until that lamentably pervasive attitude changes nothing that gets accomplished in Washington is going to look pretty by any external metric.
By all accounts the Obama administration has been disappointing. Unfortunately, disappointing is the new normal. Too many self-serving interests in America are determined to keep it that way.
Let's look at what happened when the Republicans decided to act quickly in a crisis: $700 billion injected into TARP under practically no oversight at all.
As of Dec. 7, 2013, SIGTARP had "pursued criminal charges against 107 senior bank officers, most of whom have been sentenced to prison."
As I recall it, a huge chunk of the TARP money was already moving before SIGTARP, the oversight office, had a working light bulb.
A December 31, 2008 Associated Press article stated, "Government officials overseeing a $700 billion bailout have acknowledged difficulties tracking the money and assessing the program's effectiveness."
Have clue, will parse. Try it some day. Start by noticing the difference between millions and billions.
My only extension in Chrome is Google Docs. Somehow I think the malware authors will have trouble obtaining that one.
In Firefox I have fifteen different extensions, many of which are restrictive in nature: they break websites by defeating cookies and scripts. Many of the rest are small (but vital) user-interface tweaks. Firefox is where I impose my own will on the web. Chrome is where I retreat for the bog-standard experience. Even if my chrome profile is suffering from a cookie cabal infestation (Hello Facebook, whom I've never visited), they're not going to manage to observe much, it's less than one percent of my total web activity. If I have to temporarily allow more than three cookies, over to Chrome it goes. By this point I know I haven't arrived at the URL by accident. I'm not exposing myself to a broadside salvo from a typo squatter. It's almost always an intrusiveness arms race with a content aggregator, where multiple alternate sources of information have let me down, or left small holes to fill, to where it's worth scraping the bottom half of the barrel. I use Chrome so little I could browse by default incognito, but that might look suspicious in other ways. When it comes to prying eyes, two is company (the site you are actually willing to visit), four is pervy, and forty is a pervy gang bang.
On my Android phone, there are very few permissions I allow the applications to demand, so as far as I'm concerned the actual size of the Android market is about 10% of what it pretends to be.
Buttercup: You just can't get good help around here.
Buttercup's mother: What's wrong with stable boy? Horse has never been in finer condition.
Buttercup: Yes, but he drools and stares at my tits all day.
Yes, there's a lot of volunteers in the Android ecosystem to help with the chores if you're willing to leave your blouse unbuttoned all day. Not me. I also disabled automatic update on Android so that I don't exchange fluids with every update of every program, no matter how briefly.
When my Firefox updates, and brings all my plug-ins with it, I wince and bear it. What else can you do?
Since we're all about analogies here, I'll arrange for exactly three haystacks to be set up in a field right off a busy highway. Then I'll put exactly three needles in those haystacks for you to go find, which is very much akin to asking the Slashdot community to go find the most abused three lines of code in the known universe.
Those would be context-free haystacks. But you're right, this is the kind of question where the last quarter mile becomes exponentially more inane.
I'm pretty sure it was Kahneman's book that had a section on how the human mind is remarkably able and willing to make heuristic comparisons of superficially incomparable magnitudes. Is French vanilla better than French kissing? Surprisingly, the human brain puts this kind of thing into a fairly robust order, across individuals and populations, IMDRDDM (if my dim recollections don't deceive me).
More interesting is the question about the subroutine longest embedded and most frequently invoked which turns out to return wrong values for common operations, only the code which calls the subroutine nevertheless does the right thing with the wrong value, because it too contains a weird bug which is not superficially obvious when glancing through the source code, such as dependence on an uninitialized value.
The trope here is two sides of a formal interface, one where the formal requirements are obvious and well understood, which manage to collaborate to turn two egregious coding booboos into a paragon of durable and stable deployment.
Then one day a programmer notices the dependence on the uninitialized value, which would clearly produce a severe failure if fed the correct inputs, and he thinks "surely this hasn't been running for thirty years deployed on hundreds of thousands of nodes, and never triggered a fatal anomaly" and yet there it is.
Then he could author a genre sequel in the Thompson tradition entitled On Trusting Time and Track Record. Inside a black box, no one knows if you're a cluster fuck.
Janine Benyus has a message for inventors: When solving a design problem, look to nature first. There you'll find inspired designs for making things waterproof, aerodynamic, solar-powered and more.
What you won't find in nature are formal interfaces. Most of mother nature's cleverest hacks were discovered by pillaging haystacks.
They'll also innovate their way out of problems if there's a strong economic case for doing so.
Yes, they do. A typical innovation is to move head office to a foreign country so if they get in too much legal trouble in one place, they can continue to operate elsewhere.
If at all possible, the first recourse in the private sector is to innovate your way out of bearing the downside. Contrary to your ideological end cap, this happens a great deal more often than just the companies who've gained some form of monopoly power. It would be tedious just to list the corporate inventiveness on this front (some of which is criminal, not that this makes much difference when prosecutors are left holding an empty cage.)
Skilling was sentenced to 24 years in prison for his role in the Enron debacle. Under the deal, he could shave nearly a decade off the 15 years remaining on his prison term.
He must have given a lot of blow jobs during his years in the can to collect enough cigarettes to make whole his many victims, justifying his early release for good behaviour.
Actually solving the problem is the private-sector recourse of last resort, unless it leads to a future business model where there's a substantial likelihood of being able to innovate your way out of bearing the downside. Now there's an incentive to get the saliva flowing in the profit motive.
The government isn't better or worse, just different. The worst outcomes occurs as a collaboration between the government and the private sector. Regulatory capture is a transaction between hookers and johns to bugger the public purse.
Here's the concluding paragraphs of Michael I. Norton taking the piss out of Hayekian overreach in his Edge.org essay Markets Are Bad; Markets Are Good:
When we think of groups, we think of the conditions under which groups are likely to behave well or behave poorly. We don't often think of them as self-correcting, as always performing well over time, or most importantly, as either inherently good or inherently bad.
Applying the same logic to markets—think of them in this context as "groups writ large"—will assist with the development of a richer and more accurate theory of when and why markets are likely to have terrible or uplifting consequences.
Mainly they behave well when something firmly bars the gate to behaving badly. Greenspan believed that Wall Street corporations could successfully police each other, if the government stayed out of the way.
Greenspan, 82, acknowledged under questioning that he had made a "mistake" in believing that banks, operating in their own self-interest, would do what was necessary to protect their shareholders and institutions. Greenspan called that "a flaw in the model... that defines how the world works."
Oops. By the downside-mitigating innovations of Goldman Sachs, who picked up the cheque for that mess? "Too big to fail" was cleverly crafted.
Unfortunately, markets are not some automatic panacea for all that ails the human condition. They are just one little piece of the puzzle that sometimes weave extraordinary magic. America's founding fathers weren't a market. They were just a bunch of extremely astute men well aware of how easily it all goes wrong, who sat down and tried to do the right thing, acting on moral sentiments rather than market incentives. What tangle of corporate i
How did you like this bit from Sean Carroll suggesting that "falsifiability" is the scientific concept overdue for retirement?
Modern physics stretches into realms far removed from everyday experience, and sometimes the connection to experiment becomes tenuous at best.... The cosmological multiverse and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics posit other realms that are impossible for us to access directly. Some scientists, leaning on Popper, have suggested that these theories are non-scientific because they are not falsifiable.
The truth is the opposite. Whether or not we can observe them directly, the entities involved in these theories are either real or they are not. Refusing to contemplate their possible existence on the grounds of some a priori principle, even though they might play a crucial role in how the world works, is as non-scientific as it gets.
If you think the rift between economics and social science is deep, take a look at your roots.
To the degree that the educated public knows and respects the scientific tradition, it's because of the adherence to falsifiability. That's the economic foundation of getting what we pay for. I wouldn't go so far as to argue that the multiverse (and the statistical landscape--bleh) is not actually physics, but it sure as hell isn't physics resting on the foundation that has conferred upon physics its esteem and respect as a hard science over the last four centuries.
Let's reopen the question about why we're funding this kind of work on the public purse. He's smoking a crack pipe if he thinks he can flush falsifiability and still keep his cozy budget. Personally I celebrate renegade artists and crackpots like Garrett Lisi—Kepler was equally nutty and he punched through. I think Carroll should sleep in a van on a Hawaiian beach and get back to us when his awe-inspiring kaleidoscopic symmetries collapse to a waveform we can actually test (yes, I know Dyson took a pot shot at collapsing waveforms on that same forum). Perhaps Carroll will cough up on the beach a core idea for the next consolidation of physics beyond the standard model. I'll cheer for him every step of the way. Meanwhile, no falsifiability means no public funds. He can grovel at the knees of the Templetons who find this new kind of science somehow majestic.
I'm not a physicist. I did study physics. I'm not an economist. I have listened to nearly every EconTalk dating back to 2005. I think his crush on Hayek is misguided. This doesn't stop me from tuning in, because most of his guests are smart.
Even with economics, there's an enormous rift between mathematical economics, the study of models that barely reflect reality, and narrative economics, where people try to convince each other that a stimulus actually works or it doesn't work, and no reference back to the raw data ever settles the matter.
Economic policy advisors are no better than sociologists.
Taleb's primary point—and he's totally right—is that analytic models that are always right except during rare events are complete dogshit, though it you can get traction on it, you might make off with a lode for a short while. The mere presence of a nearly infallible player in an economic market precipitates rare events of the nastiest kind. If I were teleported back to Edge 2005 to write a little essay for What do you believe true even though you cannot prove it? that could be my starting point.
You should read Assumptions Economists Make, which describes economics from the perspective of Jonathan Schlefer, a political scientist who got his hands dirty.
I don't know why you think you need to look outside your own disciplines of physics and economics to find people playing fast and loose with the scientific method.
This is nothing but a freshman exercise in tearing the word "parity" a new asshole. What did that kind word ever do to you to deserve this?
Wake me up when the next generation's Rowling adds a million words to the literary canon composed with one hand in her pocket and the other one fingering Swype.
I lose no freedom using a card. The "company" handling my CC transaction is the same that would handle my cash-equivelent debit card. The banking system is broken, but I'd be stupid to not use the programs to my best advantage.
If my conception of a free market, what the credit card companies are doing is collusion, and I would ban the practice. Many people think they believe in free markets who only believe in commerce.
If the credit card company is providing a service the customer is willing to pay for, the customer can elect to pay the premium, without penalizing those of us who pay by other means.
That's what a real free market looks like: clearly marked prices subject to conscious decision making. Once this governance mechanism is hidden under fatuous rebates, the invisible hand falls into a deep coma.
But hey, if it floats your boat, sell your backbone.
I've had a lifetime sleep disorder which I've spent the last three decades dissecting. If you have a real disorder, you're getting a lot of well-intentioned yet useless advice about general well being.
So many times in my life I've heard "we all go without sleep, you just learn to deal with it". These are people who can't tell the difference between a nose bleed and haemophilia, because they've never been there.
There are many illnesses which are thought to impact sleep quality. Among these are depression and fibromyalgia. It's not unlikely that depression causes poor sleep, and poor sleep leads to poor memory. Poor sleep alone by another cause is a good depression mimic. A psychologist will understand your symptomatology, but your underlying condition—if it is not actually depression—might not respond to the usual drugs.
On the bright side, some drugs which are considered to be antidepressants actually provide benefits because they directly treat sleep disruption.
Low doses of amitriptyline are commonly used to treat FM. I experienced improved sleep quality, and a boost in initiative and motivation. I also had a fuzzy head for the first half of my day, every day. This wasn't a winning trade off for writing code. This drug (in my body, and by some accounts in the literature) has some kind of weird, antagonistic relationship with caffeine. By the time I consumed enough caffeine to clear the fuzzy brain, I lost all the sleep benefits.
Most people way overdose with caffeine. Once you start chasing the tolerance effect (tolerance begins in as little as a week or two in novice coffee drinkers) you end up drinking about three times as much as you need to get a small increase in net buzz. All that extra caffeine in your body is not friendly to your adrenal system, and it's known to mildly disturb your sleep architecture. The nose-bleeders can ignore this term, if they wish. We sleep haemophiliacs can't afford to play marbles in a rose bush.
I get 80% of the benefit from caffeine drinking two cups a day, with 7-8 g of ground coffee and 120 g of water per cup. I drink one immediately on waking, and the second cup six hours later (four to seven hours is an acceptable range). This is half what I was drinking the first time I thought I'd achieved moderation. Don't ask me about my pre-moderation coffee consumption. I've learned that it takes my body about three weeks to accept a coffee reduction of 30% as being perfectly normal. The key is to use a gram scale, because for the first ten days your brain is working overtime on how to cheat the system. Never drink a coffee you don't make yourself while cutting back: you'll feel glorious and your brain won't let you forget it.
Half of an amitriptyline dose metabolises into an equally cheap drug, nortriptyline. Weirdly, both sides of the AT metabolism are active. When I discovered this, I thought "why don't I just try the NT half by itself". This was a good call: almost as much sleep benefit, way less fuzzy brain.
I get a condition I call "clutch slip" where the cognitive side of my mind is well aware of all things I need to be doing, but I completely lack some mysterious edge to dive into these tasks and do them. The nose-bleed assholes are going to fuck this up again. Yes, I can actually force myself to grin and bear it and do the work. No, applying the lash does not get me past this clutch-slip psychological barrier to the promised land of actually becoming absorbed in the work. If only. I'd pray for that to happen, even at the risk of being socially rejected by all my heroes in the afterlife we all vehemently reject. Worse, the caliber of my work is shit warmed over. In other words, what passes in this life as mediocrity.
Have you ever had the experience where you're in some life or death struggle with a complex regex or an XSLT script to sanitize an input file and suddenly you realize, "you know, I could run this through tools A, B, C, and
Well, here we do not talk about knowledge that have no immediate application. We talk about knowledge that by definition (the unobservable beyond the universe) will never have application.
I vote for the observable universe to be named the falsifiable universe, the notion of the universe that experimental physicists inhabit in mind and body.
I've long regarded the unobservable universe as akin to an analytic continuation.
Analytic continuation often succeeds in defining further values of a function, for example in a new region where an infinite series representation in terms of which it is initially defined becomes divergent.
Far from being useless, these are tremendously useful in suggesting new ways to approach the mathematics of the original function.
So we have two things here: the falsifiable universe, and its intellectually stimulating analytic continuation.
If you're burning through chalk and pencils on an exponent growth curve, you'll soon give the analytic continuation some terse symbols, such as i and by the human psychology of oft-masterbated terse symbols, you'll come to regard it as being as real as any other symbol dripping down from the Matrix.
If you're lucky, at some point the unobservables all cancel out, and you're left with an insight into the falsifiable universe, arrived at through a mathematical worm hole. Mathematics folds in on itself in mysterious ways, no quantum particles required, so far as I've been able to tell.
The first requirement of a falsifiable universe is the state of being casually connected. If the falsification process is embedded in the falsifiable universe, there are additional requirements: you're dealing at least with a self-falsifiable universe. Falsification, it turns out, itself sits pretty far up the food chain.
Here's a good gig. Posit some primitive element amenable to nearly limitless analytic continuation, such that it can never be shown that there does not exist a continuation capable of collapsing back through some miracle of symbolic reduction to a testable statement about the falsifiable universe.
Congratulations. You have now made it permanently impossible to tell whether you're doing physics or not. It's important that the math is in some way highly constrained and very difficult, or it becomes immediately obvious that the playground exceeds the project.
If the constraints are difficult enough that you can tell the difference between the really smart people and the really, really smart people, and an Ed Witten or two comes along from time to time to humiliate the really, really smart people you've at least got the foundations in place for a credible intellectual discipline. If not physics, at least it's a sport.
It's just too bad that most of the people doing quantum-cosmic analytic continuation pass themselves off as physicists. Different rules, different discipline, whether or not they share the first twenty years of the same education. You can tell there's a lot of strain over this because the string people mutter the word "testable" as often as Microsoft mutters the word "innovation"—and to equal effect.
If we had a nice standard of elegance E and a proven theorem stating that all theories of physics more elegant than e are necessarily true, we could mend the house.
But we haven't yet written down the most surpassingly elegant equation that's actually false as witnessed in the falsifiable universe. Without an objective decision point, it's just a bunch of exceedingly smart guys refusing to kill their darlings.
landscape : consumption :: portrait : production
on
4K Is For Programmers
·
· Score: 1
Last self-reply.
Sometimes you just want to read the bottom of a long article on the top half of a tall display within a screen-maximized Firefox instance. It's Firefox that causes the problem in the first place, making pessimistic assumptions about deployable pixels.
I can hear it whispering churlishly "you should be thankful that content is on the screen at all" never mind that it's forcing me to hold my head at an awkward angle. I suppose a Firefox designer afflicted with use-case blindness could argue that if I don't want to incline my head downwards, I should maximize my view port to the top half of my tall display.
Wrong.
The peripheral viewing area is extremely valuable when zooming around and regaining your bearings. Excess horizontal area is pretty much useless for anything other than turning your browser window into a strip mall.
There was a problem with the above configuration. The part of the portrait display that sits an inch off my desk is not ideal for long term viewing. I put a Tilda instance down there. This is always on top, but there's still more than enough vertical space above it to hold any web page I'm referencing concurrently.
The problem is that by default, the web page won't continuing scrolling past the bottom. I either have to resize the web window (what's the point of a hot-key if you're right back to dragging digital ditches?) or I have to pop Tilda away briefly.
Problem solved with a Stylish tweak. body:after { content: '**********'; color: #505050; display: block; text-align: center; font-size: 1vmax; padding-bottom: 40vh !important; }
This adds a blank region to the bottom of every page large enough to let me scroll any content above my always-on-top console window. It adds some text just so I know that my script is messing with stuff.
The problem that you describe is just an indicator that our software has not yet evolved for this type of display. Solutions to the problems that you have described are sure to pop up as creative individuals start a race toward different solutions.
Yeah, and disappear again just as quickly as your favourite distro decides the form-factor is greener on the other side. What's your crystal prognosis for solutions willing to make a commitment and settle in the for the long haul?
It wasn't all bad news. After my perfectly configured window-key window management accelerators suffered an ignomble fate, I bothered myself to flip my right-hand 21" IPS into portrait orientation. This has been a god-send. In combination with NoSquint, I'm able to size almost every web site so the third-column cruft vanishes into the non-pixel margins. I have twice the normal vertical depth with which to scan the actual text. It's truly glorious.
My left-side panel dates back from before the HD craze. It's nearly as big, but closer to square, and despite this—because I'm stubborn to the last drop—they have identical pixel dimensions.
I wouldn't actually gain much with this 4k display, but I'd consider it for my workstation at the office, which is not my primary work location.
Kodak was replaced by a whole slew of companies that make components for digital cameras, cell phones, picture hosting, digital frames, etc.
You actually checked with the Kelley Blue Book or CarProof that the companies making digital phones, etc. aren't sopping up employees already discarded long before the Kodak disgorgement? This is the kind of set mapping that gives libertarianism a bad name: the vague presumption that the new necessarily has greater cardinality than the old.
In this lame conception, when the old industries fade and fail and fling off a finitude, a new industry springs up able to sop up an infinitude, and then the next neonatal industry incumbent (only in California does one encounter a neonatal incumbent) continues the aleph-upmanship and so it goes that progress Cantors along.
Nobody wants to spend $300 dollars on a console that ties up your $500 TV while your using it and buy a few $60 games on top of it, when you can just download a game on your phone that you already have and spend $4 on it.
I don't see the original post. Kinda interesting if there never was one. In any case, whatever it's origins, it's a fine example of the use case bigotry genre.
This is the kind of thing frequently heard expressed by a person riding the special-needs short bus—as in, not comprehending the needs of others worth a damn. The longer one lives life the more one realizes that we are all special needs in some dimension, which is why the fascist unification of consumer sentiment sucks ass.
From my perspective, ? what the hell else would you do ? with a $500 television if you subscribe to Telus Optik 50, and you haven't even installed the television modem—as I haven't—because the default content available represents negative value: for every good show one manages to watch, there's an equal amount of cognitive filth to studiously avoid.
Studious avoidance is an expensive activity. Ask any college drop-out. Or read any of the recent science on the will-power muscle, which suggests that the effort expended successfully avoiding the tempting (but awful) TV program is quite likely to show up as inferior decision making later that evening when you juggle your retire savings plan.
I suppose that "Nobody" is just a youthful code word for "Nobody who is anybody" after first screening out the educated, the thoughtful, and the literate in order to better isolate the spending demographic of happening now.
When I was a growing up in Canada, we were bombarded on television with the slogan: "Cancer can be beaten." Google informs me that the Canadian Cancer Society unveiled this slogan on 2 January 1969.
Blasted with this slogan on TV, even when I was very young I thought it was the dumbest thing I'd ever heard coming from a technological elite. "Cancer isn't just some pathogenic disease, it's an incremental systems malfunction" I used to say to myself.
Turns out the slogan was first invented to help people seek medical attention when they discovered a possible cancer symptom, rather than freaking out and modelling their behaviour after the strong-and-silent-and-dying-inside heroes from the 1950s. By my teenage years, the use of the slogan had shifting mainly toward the appeal for funding fundamental research. This was the only version I knew.
It's not a given that the genetic system needs to decay. But there's a metabolic cost to flawless genetic replication, and evolution seems to have decided that the price is not worth paying: that which makes us immortal saps our youthful vigour. Without youthful vigour, a species risks becoming one of many, many dead-end side branches on the tree of evolution.
In the world of memes, the desire to live forever is cancer. If this meme ever succeeds in achieving its goal, it will prove fatal to the host organism—the human species.
Immortality is stasis. In order for stasis to thrive, any form of vigorous external change (evolution acting on other forms of life) must be thoroughly trampled. Immortality is the nirvana of paranoid jackboots.
'If it turned out that Snowden did give information to the Russians or Chinese (or if intelligence assessments show that the leaks did substantial damage to national security, something that hasn't been proved in public), then I'd say all talk of a deal is off â" and I assume the Times editorial page would agree.'
This is one of those propositions that can only ever be in the past tense in a single logical state: busted.
These one-way allegations have a way of never dying, or at least not until it's back page news. Meanwhile, they muddy the waters a great deal just hanging there.
Neither is it self-evidently clear that the NSA's voraciousness is separable, to where informed public debate can exist with only one-half of the picture (aka the domestic half).
I think this article translates to: "it's our policy to never grant clemency under any conditions just in case we later discover a game-changing fact".
The option of a conditional clemency is fraught with unsolvable issues. Snowden could attest that he's never actually done any entirely non-clement things, and if were subsequently learned otherwise, his clemency could be revoked. This would be "clement until proven guilty".
Only for this to be workable, one would have to have a way to prove that the NSA never plants leaks of its own information to gain what it dearly wants—have I got a bridge to sell you—as there's no way to prove that a leak originated from Snowden unless the substance of the leak contains information one can verify the NSA never had at that time.
Good luck with that.
And somehow the subtext of all this seems to imply that the NSA's proven snookery (illegitimately authorized as far as the eye can see) should take a back seat to Snowden's unproven snookery (the worst things he might have done).
I don't blame the NSA for the lamentable standards of civic discourse. But neither can the agency hide from their legacy of operating behind a thick smoke screen of democratic false impressions.
I personally found it upbeat yet vacuous. He doesn't specify whether in the topology of his gratitude vector space, there's a primary node where all the gratitude goes in, and no gratitude comes out (presumably due to Hawking radiation, all that gratitude is re-emitted from the fearful symmetry as cosmic love). Asimov, of course, never held the majority standard for spiritual malaise.
I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great, spectacularly prolific writer and scientist, Dr. Isaac Asimov in that essentially functionless capacity. At an A.H.A. memorial service for my predecessor I said, âoeIsaac is up in Heaven now.â That was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. It rolled them in the aisles. Mirth! Several minutes had to pass before something resembling solemnity could be restored.
And yet... the majority of the world's population continues to itch for any hint of a master honour roll for special snowflakes, no matter how shallowly disguised.
China did it. But yeah, it's really not a problem for first-worlders. Asimov didn't see that coming.
Brave New World was published in 1931. Asimov would have been thoroughly familiar with it. Nineteen Eighty-Four is not the only game in town concerning the control of the masses. First, we have all the drugs. Second, we do have laws forcing parents to turn their children over to the puppy mill of public education which--along with mass culture--promptly fills their heads full of all kinds of garbage, that only the most strenuous parental exertion can hope to mitigate.
So you can have a large family, but at some deep level, it's not entirely yours.
It amazes me the number of people attracted to the purity cult concerning the foods they eat (local/non-GMO/vegetarian/unprocessed), who barely blink over the obnoxiousness of the vast majority of the thousands of media impressions we soak in each day, the end result of which is that a billion people cared about two seconds of Janet Jackson's nipple.
We live in a society where it's a permanent, relentless battle to resist the frivolous.
We have this notion of "parental controls". We can keep our children ignorant of how sex functions in the real world (as opposed to the retail world), though this electronic chastity belt is ultimately futile if your child has half a brain. We can pretend we're filtering out violence. Yet most violence is social, and you can really only filter graphic depictions (unless sex is also involved, in which case social aggression is also considered graphic).
What you really want to filter out is not sex or violence, but stupidity, and for this the "parental control" widget has no back-lit chicklet engraved with an undiscoverable hieroglyphic rune. In 90% of MSM political coverage, they're not even trying, to put it kindly.
It was Asimov who postulated the discipline of psychohistory, in which the vacuous can be distinguished from the salient by the vigorous cranking of some vast algorithmic matrix. We've become very, very good at the vigorous cranking of vast algorithmic matrices, yet I have no channel where political figures never intrude on my consciousness unless in the act of making a substantive statement. I don't even want the operatic comedy of "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job!" Whatever.
Many security bugs are really failures to implement correctly a requirement of the form "No matter what the input to this program is, it must not do X."
This is a special case of Sherlock's theorem:
Once you have eliminated the disallowed, whatever remains, however unintuitive, must be the robust.
It's far easier to debug a sin of omission than a sin of commission. If a piece of code never performs a disallowed function (e.g. leaking memory, failing to sanitize user input) then all failures that remain are sins of omission: the program doesn't actually transfer the file requested, out of excessive restraint on some edge case the programmer never even considered.
Well, the programmer needs to get in there and consider the omission in the harsh light of day. Then the specification document needs to be updated.
And questions need to be asked about the user environment when an edge case is tripped three years into a heavy use cycle.
The only way to achieve software up-front with no failure modes and no functional omissions is to massively gold-plate the validation process, and this rarely works anyway.
I'm never happier writing code than when I'm subtracting stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
FTFY.
If there's an express train to human dystopia, it's a booster-spice rat race, with the fittest undead gaining semi-permanent tenure in every elite economic and political station.
Along with a butterfly in Chile, or more than one butterfly, or even an untold number of butterflies.
It's really too bad we can't put markets in charge of heavenly orbits, as that would finally solve the N-body problem. People just aren't thinking big enough.
There's trolling and there's chickenshit. This is both.
President Obama wakes up every morning knee deep in outrage astroturf manufactured on an industrial scale by one of the most powerful snowblowers that civilization has ever known. Your unpeeping post of insincere outrage is but the smallest intestinal worm inside this giant elephant.
Gridlock plays to conservative interests. Some of us are capable of parsing the tea leaves around the ugly fallout. It's not an act of patriotism to actively sabotage every elected administration where you voted for the defeated candidates. Until that lamentably pervasive attitude changes nothing that gets accomplished in Washington is going to look pretty by any external metric.
By all accounts the Obama administration has been disappointing. Unfortunately, disappointing is the new normal. Too many self-serving interests in America are determined to keep it that way.
Let's look at what happened when the Republicans decided to act quickly in a crisis: $700 billion injected into TARP under practically no oversight at all.
As I recall it, a huge chunk of the TARP money was already moving before SIGTARP, the oversight office, had a working light bulb.
Have clue, will parse. Try it some day. Start by noticing the difference between millions and billions.
My only extension in Chrome is Google Docs. Somehow I think the malware authors will have trouble obtaining that one.
In Firefox I have fifteen different extensions, many of which are restrictive in nature: they break websites by defeating cookies and scripts. Many of the rest are small (but vital) user-interface tweaks. Firefox is where I impose my own will on the web. Chrome is where I retreat for the bog-standard experience. Even if my chrome profile is suffering from a cookie cabal infestation (Hello Facebook, whom I've never visited), they're not going to manage to observe much, it's less than one percent of my total web activity. If I have to temporarily allow more than three cookies, over to Chrome it goes. By this point I know I haven't arrived at the URL by accident. I'm not exposing myself to a broadside salvo from a typo squatter. It's almost always an intrusiveness arms race with a content aggregator, where multiple alternate sources of information have let me down, or left small holes to fill, to where it's worth scraping the bottom half of the barrel. I use Chrome so little I could browse by default incognito, but that might look suspicious in other ways. When it comes to prying eyes, two is company (the site you are actually willing to visit), four is pervy, and forty is a pervy gang bang.
On my Android phone, there are very few permissions I allow the applications to demand, so as far as I'm concerned the actual size of the Android market is about 10% of what it pretends to be.
Buttercup: You just can't get good help around here.
Buttercup's mother: What's wrong with stable boy? Horse has never been in finer condition.
Buttercup: Yes, but he drools and stares at my tits all day.
Yes, there's a lot of volunteers in the Android ecosystem to help with the chores if you're willing to leave your blouse unbuttoned all day. Not me. I also disabled automatic update on Android so that I don't exchange fluids with every update of every program, no matter how briefly.
When my Firefox updates, and brings all my plug-ins with it, I wince and bear it. What else can you do?
Those would be context-free haystacks. But you're right, this is the kind of question where the last quarter mile becomes exponentially more inane.
I'm pretty sure it was Kahneman's book that had a section on how the human mind is remarkably able and willing to make heuristic comparisons of superficially incomparable magnitudes. Is French vanilla better than French kissing? Surprisingly, the human brain puts this kind of thing into a fairly robust order, across individuals and populations, IMDRDDM (if my dim recollections don't deceive me).
More interesting is the question about the subroutine longest embedded and most frequently invoked which turns out to return wrong values for common operations, only the code which calls the subroutine nevertheless does the right thing with the wrong value, because it too contains a weird bug which is not superficially obvious when glancing through the source code, such as dependence on an uninitialized value.
The trope here is two sides of a formal interface, one where the formal requirements are obvious and well understood, which manage to collaborate to turn two egregious coding booboos into a paragon of durable and stable deployment.
Then one day a programmer notices the dependence on the uninitialized value, which would clearly produce a severe failure if fed the correct inputs, and he thinks "surely this hasn't been running for thirty years deployed on hundreds of thousands of nodes, and never triggered a fatal anomaly" and yet there it is.
Then he could author a genre sequel in the Thompson tradition entitled On Trusting Time and Track Record. Inside a black box, no one knows if you're a cluster fuck.
Janine Benyus: Biomimicry in action
What you won't find in nature are formal interfaces. Most of mother nature's cleverest hacks were discovered by pillaging haystacks.
Yes, they do. A typical innovation is to move head office to a foreign country so if they get in too much legal trouble in one place, they can continue to operate elsewhere.
If at all possible, the first recourse in the private sector is to innovate your way out of bearing the downside. Contrary to your ideological end cap, this happens a great deal more often than just the companies who've gained some form of monopoly power. It would be tedious just to list the corporate inventiveness on this front (some of which is criminal, not that this makes much difference when prosecutors are left holding an empty cage.)
Here's one they actually caught. Enron convict Jeffrey Skilling has reached a deal to be released early from prison
He must have given a lot of blow jobs during his years in the can to collect enough cigarettes to make whole his many victims, justifying his early release for good behaviour.
Actually solving the problem is the private-sector recourse of last resort, unless it leads to a future business model where there's a substantial likelihood of being able to innovate your way out of bearing the downside. Now there's an incentive to get the saliva flowing in the profit motive.
The government isn't better or worse, just different. The worst outcomes occurs as a collaboration between the government and the private sector. Regulatory capture is a transaction between hookers and johns to bugger the public purse.
Here's the concluding paragraphs of Michael I. Norton taking the piss out of Hayekian overreach in his Edge.org essay Markets Are Bad; Markets Are Good:
Mainly they behave well when something firmly bars the gate to behaving badly. Greenspan believed that Wall Street corporations could successfully police each other, if the government stayed out of the way.
Greenspan admits 'mistake' that helped crisis
Oops. By the downside-mitigating innovations of Goldman Sachs, who picked up the cheque for that mess? "Too big to fail" was cleverly crafted.
Unfortunately, markets are not some automatic panacea for all that ails the human condition. They are just one little piece of the puzzle that sometimes weave extraordinary magic. America's founding fathers weren't a market. They were just a bunch of extremely astute men well aware of how easily it all goes wrong, who sat down and tried to do the right thing, acting on moral sentiments rather than market incentives. What tangle of corporate i
How did you like this bit from Sean Carroll suggesting that "falsifiability" is the scientific concept overdue for retirement?
If you think the rift between economics and social science is deep, take a look at your roots.
To the degree that the educated public knows and respects the scientific tradition, it's because of the adherence to falsifiability. That's the economic foundation of getting what we pay for. I wouldn't go so far as to argue that the multiverse (and the statistical landscape--bleh) is not actually physics, but it sure as hell isn't physics resting on the foundation that has conferred upon physics its esteem and respect as a hard science over the last four centuries.
Let's reopen the question about why we're funding this kind of work on the public purse. He's smoking a crack pipe if he thinks he can flush falsifiability and still keep his cozy budget. Personally I celebrate renegade artists and crackpots like Garrett Lisi—Kepler was equally nutty and he punched through. I think Carroll should sleep in a van on a Hawaiian beach and get back to us when his awe-inspiring kaleidoscopic symmetries collapse to a waveform we can actually test (yes, I know Dyson took a pot shot at collapsing waveforms on that same forum). Perhaps Carroll will cough up on the beach a core idea for the next consolidation of physics beyond the standard model. I'll cheer for him every step of the way. Meanwhile, no falsifiability means no public funds. He can grovel at the knees of the Templetons who find this new kind of science somehow majestic.
I'm not a physicist. I did study physics. I'm not an economist. I have listened to nearly every EconTalk dating back to 2005. I think his crush on Hayek is misguided. This doesn't stop me from tuning in, because most of his guests are smart.
Even with economics, there's an enormous rift between mathematical economics, the study of models that barely reflect reality, and narrative economics, where people try to convince each other that a stimulus actually works or it doesn't work, and no reference back to the raw data ever settles the matter.
Economic policy advisors are no better than sociologists.
Taleb's primary point—and he's totally right—is that analytic models that are always right except during rare events are complete dogshit, though it you can get traction on it, you might make off with a lode for a short while. The mere presence of a nearly infallible player in an economic market precipitates rare events of the nastiest kind. If I were teleported back to Edge 2005 to write a little essay for What do you believe true even though you cannot prove it? that could be my starting point.
You should read Assumptions Economists Make, which describes economics from the perspective of Jonathan Schlefer, a political scientist who got his hands dirty.
In Economics, You Are What You Model
I don't know why you think you need to look outside your own disciplines of physics and economics to find people playing fast and loose with the scientific method.
This is nothing but a freshman exercise in tearing the word "parity" a new asshole. What did that kind word ever do to you to deserve this?
Wake me up when the next generation's Rowling adds a million words to the literary canon composed with one hand in her pocket and the other one fingering Swype.
That page at Business Insider really hit the bell on my NoScript. I counted roughly twenty-five cookies in the pop-up menu.
Kinda makes me miss dial-up.
What excuse does the Harper government have to burn first, ask "if" later?
Under transparency, there is no "if".
If my conception of a free market, what the credit card companies are doing is collusion, and I would ban the practice. Many people think they believe in free markets who only believe in commerce.
If the credit card company is providing a service the customer is willing to pay for, the customer can elect to pay the premium, without penalizing those of us who pay by other means.
That's what a real free market looks like: clearly marked prices subject to conscious decision making. Once this governance mechanism is hidden under fatuous rebates, the invisible hand falls into a deep coma.
But hey, if it floats your boat, sell your backbone.
I've had a lifetime sleep disorder which I've spent the last three decades dissecting. If you have a real disorder, you're getting a lot of well-intentioned yet useless advice about general well being.
So many times in my life I've heard "we all go without sleep, you just learn to deal with it". These are people who can't tell the difference between a nose bleed and haemophilia, because they've never been there.
There are many illnesses which are thought to impact sleep quality. Among these are depression and fibromyalgia. It's not unlikely that depression causes poor sleep, and poor sleep leads to poor memory. Poor sleep alone by another cause is a good depression mimic. A psychologist will understand your symptomatology, but your underlying condition—if it is not actually depression—might not respond to the usual drugs.
On the bright side, some drugs which are considered to be antidepressants actually provide benefits because they directly treat sleep disruption.
Low doses of amitriptyline are commonly used to treat FM. I experienced improved sleep quality, and a boost in initiative and motivation. I also had a fuzzy head for the first half of my day, every day. This wasn't a winning trade off for writing code. This drug (in my body, and by some accounts in the literature) has some kind of weird, antagonistic relationship with caffeine. By the time I consumed enough caffeine to clear the fuzzy brain, I lost all the sleep benefits.
Most people way overdose with caffeine. Once you start chasing the tolerance effect (tolerance begins in as little as a week or two in novice coffee drinkers) you end up drinking about three times as much as you need to get a small increase in net buzz. All that extra caffeine in your body is not friendly to your adrenal system, and it's known to mildly disturb your sleep architecture. The nose-bleeders can ignore this term, if they wish. We sleep haemophiliacs can't afford to play marbles in a rose bush.
I get 80% of the benefit from caffeine drinking two cups a day, with 7-8 g of ground coffee and 120 g of water per cup. I drink one immediately on waking, and the second cup six hours later (four to seven hours is an acceptable range). This is half what I was drinking the first time I thought I'd achieved moderation. Don't ask me about my pre-moderation coffee consumption. I've learned that it takes my body about three weeks to accept a coffee reduction of 30% as being perfectly normal. The key is to use a gram scale, because for the first ten days your brain is working overtime on how to cheat the system. Never drink a coffee you don't make yourself while cutting back: you'll feel glorious and your brain won't let you forget it.
Half of an amitriptyline dose metabolises into an equally cheap drug, nortriptyline. Weirdly, both sides of the AT metabolism are active. When I discovered this, I thought "why don't I just try the NT half by itself". This was a good call: almost as much sleep benefit, way less fuzzy brain.
I get a condition I call "clutch slip" where the cognitive side of my mind is well aware of all things I need to be doing, but I completely lack some mysterious edge to dive into these tasks and do them. The nose-bleed assholes are going to fuck this up again. Yes, I can actually force myself to grin and bear it and do the work. No, applying the lash does not get me past this clutch-slip psychological barrier to the promised land of actually becoming absorbed in the work. If only. I'd pray for that to happen, even at the risk of being socially rejected by all my heroes in the afterlife we all vehemently reject. Worse, the caliber of my work is shit warmed over. In other words, what passes in this life as mediocrity.
Have you ever had the experience where you're in some life or death struggle with a complex regex or an XSLT script to sanitize an input file and suddenly you realize, "you know, I could run this through tools A, B, C, and
I vote for the observable universe to be named the falsifiable universe, the notion of the universe that experimental physicists inhabit in mind and body.
I've long regarded the unobservable universe as akin to an analytic continuation.
Analytic continuation
Far from being useless, these are tremendously useful in suggesting new ways to approach the mathematics of the original function.
So we have two things here: the falsifiable universe, and its intellectually stimulating analytic continuation.
If you're burning through chalk and pencils on an exponent growth curve, you'll soon give the analytic continuation some terse symbols, such as i and by the human psychology of oft-masterbated terse symbols, you'll come to regard it as being as real as any other symbol dripping down from the Matrix.
If you're lucky, at some point the unobservables all cancel out, and you're left with an insight into the falsifiable universe, arrived at through a mathematical worm hole. Mathematics folds in on itself in mysterious ways, no quantum particles required, so far as I've been able to tell.
The first requirement of a falsifiable universe is the state of being casually connected. If the falsification process is embedded in the falsifiable universe, there are additional requirements: you're dealing at least with a self-falsifiable universe. Falsification, it turns out, itself sits pretty far up the food chain.
Here's a good gig. Posit some primitive element amenable to nearly limitless analytic continuation, such that it can never be shown that there does not exist a continuation capable of collapsing back through some miracle of symbolic reduction to a testable statement about the falsifiable universe.
Congratulations. You have now made it permanently impossible to tell whether you're doing physics or not. It's important that the math is in some way highly constrained and very difficult, or it becomes immediately obvious that the playground exceeds the project.
If the constraints are difficult enough that you can tell the difference between the really smart people and the really, really smart people, and an Ed Witten or two comes along from time to time to humiliate the really, really smart people you've at least got the foundations in place for a credible intellectual discipline. If not physics, at least it's a sport.
It's just too bad that most of the people doing quantum-cosmic analytic continuation pass themselves off as physicists. Different rules, different discipline, whether or not they share the first twenty years of the same education. You can tell there's a lot of strain over this because the string people mutter the word "testable" as often as Microsoft mutters the word "innovation"—and to equal effect.
If we had a nice standard of elegance E and a proven theorem stating that all theories of physics more elegant than e are necessarily true, we could mend the house.
But we haven't yet written down the most surpassingly elegant equation that's actually false as witnessed in the falsifiable universe. Without an objective decision point, it's just a bunch of exceedingly smart guys refusing to kill their darlings.
Last self-reply.
Sometimes you just want to read the bottom of a long article on the top half of a tall display within a screen-maximized Firefox instance. It's Firefox that causes the problem in the first place, making pessimistic assumptions about deployable pixels.
I can hear it whispering churlishly "you should be thankful that content is on the screen at all" never mind that it's forcing me to hold my head at an awkward angle. I suppose a Firefox designer afflicted with use-case blindness could argue that if I don't want to incline my head downwards, I should maximize my view port to the top half of my tall display.
Wrong.
The peripheral viewing area is extremely valuable when zooming around and regaining your bearings. Excess horizontal area is pretty much useless for anything other than turning your browser window into a strip mall.
There was a problem with the above configuration. The part of the portrait display that sits an inch off my desk is not ideal for long term viewing. I put a Tilda instance down there. This is always on top, but there's still more than enough vertical space above it to hold any web page I'm referencing concurrently.
The problem is that by default, the web page won't continuing scrolling past the bottom. I either have to resize the web window (what's the point of a hot-key if you're right back to dragging digital ditches?) or I have to pop Tilda away briefly.
Problem solved with a Stylish tweak.
body:after {
content: '**********';
color: #505050;
display: block;
text-align: center;
font-size: 1vmax;
padding-bottom: 40vh !important;
}
This adds a blank region to the bottom of every page large enough to let me scroll any content above my always-on-top console window. It adds some text just so I know that my script is messing with stuff.
Yeah, and disappear again just as quickly as your favourite distro decides the form-factor is greener on the other side. What's your crystal prognosis for solutions willing to make a commitment and settle in the for the long haul?
It wasn't all bad news. After my perfectly configured window-key window management accelerators suffered an ignomble fate, I bothered myself to flip my right-hand 21" IPS into portrait orientation. This has been a god-send. In combination with NoSquint, I'm able to size almost every web site so the third-column cruft vanishes into the non-pixel margins. I have twice the normal vertical depth with which to scan the actual text. It's truly glorious.
My left-side panel dates back from before the HD craze. It's nearly as big, but closer to square, and despite this—because I'm stubborn to the last drop—they have identical pixel dimensions.
I wouldn't actually gain much with this 4k display, but I'd consider it for my workstation at the office, which is not my primary work location.
You actually checked with the Kelley Blue Book or CarProof that the companies making digital phones, etc. aren't sopping up employees already discarded long before the Kodak disgorgement? This is the kind of set mapping that gives libertarianism a bad name: the vague presumption that the new necessarily has greater cardinality than the old.
In this lame conception, when the old industries fade and fail and fling off a finitude, a new industry springs up able to sop up an infinitude, and then the next neonatal industry incumbent (only in California does one encounter a neonatal incumbent) continues the aleph-upmanship and so it goes that progress Cantors along.
I don't see the original post. Kinda interesting if there never was one. In any case, whatever it's origins, it's a fine example of the use case bigotry genre.
This is the kind of thing frequently heard expressed by a person riding the special-needs short bus—as in, not comprehending the needs of others worth a damn. The longer one lives life the more one realizes that we are all special needs in some dimension, which is why the fascist unification of consumer sentiment sucks ass.
From my perspective, ? what the hell else would you do ? with a $500 television if you subscribe to Telus Optik 50, and you haven't even installed the television modem—as I haven't—because the default content available represents negative value: for every good show one manages to watch, there's an equal amount of cognitive filth to studiously avoid.
Studious avoidance is an expensive activity. Ask any college drop-out. Or read any of the recent science on the will-power muscle, which suggests that the effort expended successfully avoiding the tempting (but awful) TV program is quite likely to show up as inferior decision making later that evening when you juggle your retire savings plan.
I suppose that "Nobody" is just a youthful code word for "Nobody who is anybody" after first screening out the educated, the thoughtful, and the literate in order to better isolate the spending demographic of happening now.
When I was a growing up in Canada, we were bombarded on television with the slogan: "Cancer can be beaten." Google informs me that the Canadian Cancer Society unveiled this slogan on 2 January 1969.
Blasted with this slogan on TV, even when I was very young I thought it was the dumbest thing I'd ever heard coming from a technological elite. "Cancer isn't just some pathogenic disease, it's an incremental systems malfunction" I used to say to myself.
Turns out the slogan was first invented to help people seek medical attention when they discovered a possible cancer symptom, rather than freaking out and modelling their behaviour after the strong-and-silent-and-dying-inside heroes from the 1950s. By my teenage years, the use of the slogan had shifting mainly toward the appeal for funding fundamental research. This was the only version I knew.
It's not a given that the genetic system needs to decay. But there's a metabolic cost to flawless genetic replication, and evolution seems to have decided that the price is not worth paying: that which makes us immortal saps our youthful vigour. Without youthful vigour, a species risks becoming one of many, many dead-end side branches on the tree of evolution.
In the world of memes, the desire to live forever is cancer. If this meme ever succeeds in achieving its goal, it will prove fatal to the host organism—the human species.
Immortality is stasis. In order for stasis to thrive, any form of vigorous external change (evolution acting on other forms of life) must be thoroughly trampled. Immortality is the nirvana of paranoid jackboots.
This is one of those propositions that can only ever be in the past tense in a single logical state: busted.
These one-way allegations have a way of never dying, or at least not until it's back page news. Meanwhile, they muddy the waters a great deal just hanging there.
Neither is it self-evidently clear that the NSA's voraciousness is separable, to where informed public debate can exist with only one-half of the picture (aka the domestic half).
I think this article translates to: "it's our policy to never grant clemency under any conditions just in case we later discover a game-changing fact".
The option of a conditional clemency is fraught with unsolvable issues. Snowden could attest that he's never actually done any entirely non-clement things, and if were subsequently learned otherwise, his clemency could be revoked. This would be "clement until proven guilty".
Only for this to be workable, one would have to have a way to prove that the NSA never plants leaks of its own information to gain what it dearly wants—have I got a bridge to sell you—as there's no way to prove that a leak originated from Snowden unless the substance of the leak contains information one can verify the NSA never had at that time.
Good luck with that.
And somehow the subtext of all this seems to imply that the NSA's proven snookery (illegitimately authorized as far as the eye can see) should take a back seat to Snowden's unproven snookery (the worst things he might have done).
I don't blame the NSA for the lamentable standards of civic discourse. But neither can the agency hide from their legacy of operating behind a thick smoke screen of democratic false impressions.
Cynicism is an input as well as an output. Caveat inputer.
Of the last twenty TED talks, this one has the most views by nearly a two to one margin over the runner up:
David Steindl-Rast: Want to be happy? Be grateful
I personally found it upbeat yet vacuous. He doesn't specify whether in the topology of his gratitude vector space, there's a primary node where all the gratitude goes in, and no gratitude comes out (presumably due to Hawking radiation, all that gratitude is re-emitted from the fearful symmetry as cosmic love). Asimov, of course, never held the majority standard for spiritual malaise.
And yet ... the majority of the world's population continues to itch for any hint of a master honour roll for special snowflakes, no matter how shallowly disguised.
Brave New World was published in 1931. Asimov would have been thoroughly familiar with it. Nineteen Eighty-Four is not the only game in town concerning the control of the masses. First, we have all the drugs. Second, we do have laws forcing parents to turn their children over to the puppy mill of public education which--along with mass culture--promptly fills their heads full of all kinds of garbage, that only the most strenuous parental exertion can hope to mitigate.
So you can have a large family, but at some deep level, it's not entirely yours.
It amazes me the number of people attracted to the purity cult concerning the foods they eat (local/non-GMO/vegetarian/unprocessed), who barely blink over the obnoxiousness of the vast majority of the thousands of media impressions we soak in each day, the end result of which is that a billion people cared about two seconds of Janet Jackson's nipple.
We live in a society where it's a permanent, relentless battle to resist the frivolous.
We have this notion of "parental controls". We can keep our children ignorant of how sex functions in the real world (as opposed to the retail world), though this electronic chastity belt is ultimately futile if your child has half a brain. We can pretend we're filtering out violence. Yet most violence is social, and you can really only filter graphic depictions (unless sex is also involved, in which case social aggression is also considered graphic).
What you really want to filter out is not sex or violence, but stupidity, and for this the "parental control" widget has no back-lit chicklet engraved with an undiscoverable hieroglyphic rune. In 90% of MSM political coverage, they're not even trying, to put it kindly.
It was Asimov who postulated the discipline of psychohistory, in which the vacuous can be distinguished from the salient by the vigorous cranking of some vast algorithmic matrix. We've become very, very good at the vigorous cranking of vast algorithmic matrices, yet I have no channel where political figures never intrude on my consciousness unless in the act of making a substantive statement. I don't even want the operatic comedy of "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job!" Whatever.
Wake me up when it reaches the level of 'Heck of a job, Brownie' calls Bush inattentive 'fratboy'.
That could be riddled with a hundred falsehoods, disto
Just off the top of my head:
What McNamara doesn't do is out himself as a sadistic tyrant bent on personal glory, so his book wasn't warmly received.
Do I need to attribute that?
When is the last time you admitted you never let the facts interfere with a cherished aspersion?
Oh, but wait ... these admissions don't count. Please, please, tell me why.
This is a special case of Sherlock's theorem:
It's far easier to debug a sin of omission than a sin of commission. If a piece of code never performs a disallowed function (e.g. leaking memory, failing to sanitize user input) then all failures that remain are sins of omission: the program doesn't actually transfer the file requested, out of excessive restraint on some edge case the programmer never even considered.
Well, the programmer needs to get in there and consider the omission in the harsh light of day. Then the specification document needs to be updated.
And questions need to be asked about the user environment when an edge case is tripped three years into a heavy use cycle.
The only way to achieve software up-front with no failure modes and no functional omissions is to massively gold-plate the validation process, and this rarely works anyway.
I'm never happier writing code than when I'm subtracting stupid.
Yeah, I hang out all the time in public spaces with KH-11 prosumer cameras concealed behind 1970s ceiling tiles in every room and corridor.
It's this increasingly common tag line on the article submissions that makes Slashdot news for slack-jawed mooncalves.