Communism is not a superstition, it is a reasonable, scientifically justifiable social ideal. A communist society would be, in a way, remarkably close to Adam Smith's model (if you dispense with inheritance of capital) -- if it weren't for the high transaction costs of allocating resources and consumption;)
If you want to run with sci-fi examples, even Asimov realized that the only winning long-term social strategy is Communism, and built a communist society to inherit the Empire and the Foundation in the last Foundation book. While he threw in some sci-fi mumbo jumbo to placate people like you (and relax the lower transaction costs problem), he concieved Gaia as a society without property, where the individual was subjugated (err, a part of) the common planetary conscience. About the same as the ideal commie society described in, say, Ivan Yefremov's books (e.g. The Andromeda Nebula) from the mid 50s.
"As time goes, explanations become better, which allows topics to be taught at earlier ages. Of course, there are exceptions, as with everything else, but most of the time this is accurate."
Actually, as time goes, the calculus (and other science) books and aids have become fatter, more colorful and dumbed down -- more like children books. I have three calculus books (the one my parents used in college, the one I used in college and the one kids use in college these days). There is no difference in the topics covered, but the modern book is a lot prettier, considerably more shallow and contains upwards of 1200 pages to present what needed 180 pages only 30 years ago. This is the rule, not the exception.
But that is only incidental to the point that the gap between the "forefront" of science and what is taught in school and university is now desperately wider than it was only 20 years ago, and no amount of "better explanations" will remove that gap. The fact that you need to grow a few generations of suitable teachers before there is staff in place to effectively teach the much larger population using the new, supposedly better, methods is not helping either.
I don't know -- but that is why I think we should have extensions to the human brain rather than machines that fully think for themselves. Solarian robots have always been more appealing to me than R. Daneel Olivaw. Someone was able to stop the robots of Solaria, but the telepathic robots of Aurora transformed the humanity into the precursor of the thinking ocean of Solaris.
IMHO, nipping the risks in the bud is the better strategy.
Education has never worked particularly well. For example, there was a huge effort in the second half of the 20th century to educate people and wean them off superstitions in the Soviet bloc. Since religions were largely suppressed officially, and high-school education with emphasis on physics and math was compulsory, it should have worked reasonably well. However, public education could not overcome superstitions, and there has been a steady presence of various magicians in public life -- from people who would heal you with magic, to politicians who would solve political problems or build nanotech industry with magic. Currently most if not all ex-Eastern bloc experience some sort of revival of religion, especially as a badge to counter the "Islamic threat".
And I doubt if education has worked very well in the US in the past 50 years as well -- IMHO the advances of science in the US were mostly due to brain drain, when the best brains from all over the world moved there to enjoy the rich life post WWII, and by the bias towards making better killing machinery that gave the said brains a little more money than is customary in the typical human society.
But when the knowledge is so much and so advanced that it is too hard to even grasp the basics without spending 10 years in higher education doing hard work and producing nothing obviously "valuable", it is no surprise that most people will find a simplified model of reality that helps them go on with their lives. It is even less surprising when they choose a model that is, on the face, largely compatible with the world they see every day and their way of thinking is deeply rooted in their past.
What the majority wants eventually wins. When there are no external threats, the majority will create its own scarecrows -- usually from the things they understand least. Modern science is high on that list, especially given the many "evil scientist" representations in what Wikipedia calls "modern culture".
Because robots can't be controlled effectively at those distances. And if you build AI that is smart enough to colonize a world, then it is not "the mankind" that is spreading, it is the AI, a.k.a. Skynet.
Also, you somehow missed my advanced concept of bodies evolving to live in space:-P
Or, just maybe, we can consider investing more in biotechnology that will give adaptability to humans, so that they are no longer forced to rely on Earth-like environments to survive. The future generations could be growing their own spacesuits, or harvest interstellar matter, or whatever. It will still be a long journey to a real Earthling, but it will be like a long walk in the park for these new people.
Or we could ship small body factories, and upload brain content over a wifi-to-brainz interface or something. Then, once the first body factory spaceship reaches alpha centauri, the trip from Earth becomes only 4 years;)
Interesting -- and it has to be mentioned that (if I am not mistaken) the speed trains in Europe are operated both on high and low speed tracks -- which is probably making both engineering and management issues harder. Probably one consequence of that operation is a more complex wheel design.
There exist not only standards, but also products you can compare your solution against. For example, the Shinkansen has a safety record that is hard to believe -- no dead, only a few hurt, and only one derailment during a rather strong earthquake. There is a reason it has taken all countries with successful high-speed train networks years and huge investment to get where there are. Engineering isn't simple, and problems aren't readily solved by party directives.
I, for one, have made the point about safety biting the Chinese fast train in the ass just after they start the service many times. I think it is a very good thing that they are reacting the good way -- by slowing the rail, and looking into the trouble, instead of, you know, just running the trains at full speed and collecting the bodies.
Moving between randomly similar (or randomly dissimilar) badly documented environments is a lot worse than moving an application from one documented API to another. And I'm speaking from experience doing both.
TFA says the major concern is price, not ecological considerations. Apparently someone in the gubbermint is betting that chicken fat will be cheaper than kerosene in a decade or two.
No, things aren't different, you just ignore the context in which people live, then slap arbitrary labels on stuff, and think you've discovered something major and important. All you do with your statement "money has no intrinsic value" is to implicitly and wrongly ignore the knowledge of how a complex (as in "built by more than a few individuals" complex) economy operates and assume instead that individuals live by themselves and don't trade. If you learn how trade works, relax your bad assumptions and accept the obvious fact that transaction costs in an economy are real, you can "rediscover" the "intrinsic value" of money that I pointed out above quite easily.
I can justify the statement "wood has no intrinsic value" just as easily if I choose (like you do) to arbitrarily ignore the knowledge of woodworking and construction. Does wood have an "intrinsic value" in a society (or to an individual) that has no knowledge about cutting trees to make beams and boards or building houses out of wood? Did oil have value in the 15th century? How about uranium ore? How about iron ore in the bronze age?
You will be able to if you can control the land on your own. This may turn out to be a difficult scenario if your government decides to use your land to pay its debt off. Appropriating the land isn't a very hard trick for a government to do.
Money does have "intrinsic" value -- it lowers transaction costs in the economy both for trade and for investment. As such, the concept will likely be present in all economies that have more goods and services to trade than the average person can comfortably keep in their head.
Reasonable estimates don't put the total extra cancer death toll due to Chernobyl at more than 1000, so I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that your figure of 10,000 is either totally fabricated or based on faulty assumptions.
Conservative estimates put the total death toll due to Chernobyl at a lot more than 1000. See, for example, this paper , which estimates the death toll in Europe, excluding some of the damaged zones, at more than 10 times your number, and mentions a number of difficulties in establishing the actual toll, the biggest being nobody counting long-term. The comment in the paper on the lack of research on the long-term exposure to low doses is also quite informative.
Comparing the right of the public to information with crying "Fire" in a theater plainly shows you have no idea what you're talking about. That is especially true for Japan -- a country whose government has a history of covering up industrial disasters (look up Minamata, for example), and whose nuclear industry is practically unanswerable to anyone.
Just last week TEPCO was outed to have ordered subcontractors at the Fukushima-1 site not to record exposures over the legal minimum. Helping these people to cover up information further instead of sending them to jail is a disgrace.
I am not sure if the examiner was the resident Indiana Jones, but if they were, I'd give them all kinds of thrills by listing the major discoveries in the 20th century. That said, I can see how going into the kind of political and economic analysis that is the current fashion in history might have been a danger in the late 19th:)
I'm in without a time machine, if I can have the Latin and the Greek replaced with any one of with Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Russian, Arabic or my native language, or Russian, Spanish and my native language if I had to take it when I was college age. The math is fairly easy, and I may even surprise the creator of this exam with my knowledge of history -- just because the field has moved on somewhat since 1869. I am also quite familiar with the works they have their Latin and Greek quotes from, although I haven't read them in original.
Overall, I'd say these days it is much easier to get an education adequate for the exam than it was when it was written. Maybe it is even a good idea to use this and actually get it;)
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Communism is not a superstition, it is a reasonable, scientifically justifiable social ideal. A communist society would be, in a way, remarkably close to Adam Smith's model (if you dispense with inheritance of capital) -- if it weren't for the high transaction costs of allocating resources and consumption ;)
If you want to run with sci-fi examples, even Asimov realized that the only winning long-term social strategy is Communism, and built a communist society to inherit the Empire and the Foundation in the last Foundation book. While he threw in some sci-fi mumbo jumbo to placate people like you (and relax the lower transaction costs problem), he concieved Gaia as a society without property, where the individual was subjugated (err, a part of) the common planetary conscience. About the same as the ideal commie society described in, say, Ivan Yefremov's books (e.g. The Andromeda Nebula) from the mid 50s.
"As time goes, explanations become better, which allows topics to be taught at earlier ages. Of course, there are exceptions, as with everything else, but most of the time this is accurate."
Actually, as time goes, the calculus (and other science) books and aids have become fatter, more colorful and dumbed down -- more like children books. I have three calculus books (the one my parents used in college, the one I used in college and the one kids use in college these days). There is no difference in the topics covered, but the modern book is a lot prettier, considerably more shallow and contains upwards of 1200 pages to present what needed 180 pages only 30 years ago. This is the rule, not the exception.
But that is only incidental to the point that the gap between the "forefront" of science and what is taught in school and university is now desperately wider than it was only 20 years ago, and no amount of "better explanations" will remove that gap. The fact that you need to grow a few generations of suitable teachers before there is staff in place to effectively teach the much larger population using the new, supposedly better, methods is not helping either.
I don't know -- but that is why I think we should have extensions to the human brain rather than machines that fully think for themselves. Solarian robots have always been more appealing to me than R. Daneel Olivaw. Someone was able to stop the robots of Solaria, but the telepathic robots of Aurora transformed the humanity into the precursor of the thinking ocean of Solaris.
IMHO, nipping the risks in the bud is the better strategy.
Education has never worked particularly well. For example, there was a huge effort in the second half of the 20th century to educate people and wean them off superstitions in the Soviet bloc. Since religions were largely suppressed officially, and high-school education with emphasis on physics and math was compulsory, it should have worked reasonably well. However, public education could not overcome superstitions, and there has been a steady presence of various magicians in public life -- from people who would heal you with magic, to politicians who would solve political problems or build nanotech industry with magic. Currently most if not all ex-Eastern bloc experience some sort of revival of religion, especially as a badge to counter the "Islamic threat".
And I doubt if education has worked very well in the US in the past 50 years as well -- IMHO the advances of science in the US were mostly due to brain drain, when the best brains from all over the world moved there to enjoy the rich life post WWII, and by the bias towards making better killing machinery that gave the said brains a little more money than is customary in the typical human society.
But when the knowledge is so much and so advanced that it is too hard to even grasp the basics without spending 10 years in higher education doing hard work and producing nothing obviously "valuable", it is no surprise that most people will find a simplified model of reality that helps them go on with their lives. It is even less surprising when they choose a model that is, on the face, largely compatible with the world they see every day and their way of thinking is deeply rooted in their past.
What the majority wants eventually wins. When there are no external threats, the majority will create its own scarecrows -- usually from the things they understand least. Modern science is high on that list, especially given the many "evil scientist" representations in what Wikipedia calls "modern culture".
I expect you to vote, Mr. Bond.
She's too old for this, and she'll sue you to oblivion.
What is the ultimate success in the free market then?
Because robots can't be controlled effectively at those distances. And if you build AI that is smart enough to colonize a world, then it is not "the mankind" that is spreading, it is the AI, a.k.a. Skynet.
Also, you somehow missed my advanced concept of bodies evolving to live in space :-P
Or, just maybe, we can consider investing more in biotechnology that will give adaptability to humans, so that they are no longer forced to rely on Earth-like environments to survive. The future generations could be growing their own spacesuits, or harvest interstellar matter, or whatever. It will still be a long journey to a real Earthling, but it will be like a long walk in the park for these new people.
Or we could ship small body factories, and upload brain content over a wifi-to-brainz interface or something. Then, once the first body factory spaceship reaches alpha centauri, the trip from Earth becomes only 4 years ;)
Where did I say "Monster cables are expensive"?
Maybe someone can give them a bunch of Monster Cable stock, and they can get even?
Interesting -- and it has to be mentioned that (if I am not mistaken) the speed trains in Europe are operated both on high and low speed tracks -- which is probably making both engineering and management issues harder. Probably one consequence of that operation is a more complex wheel design.
There exist not only standards, but also products you can compare your solution against. For example, the Shinkansen has a safety record that is hard to believe -- no dead, only a few hurt, and only one derailment during a rather strong earthquake. There is a reason it has taken all countries with successful high-speed train networks years and huge investment to get where there are. Engineering isn't simple, and problems aren't readily solved by party directives.
I, for one, have made the point about safety biting the Chinese fast train in the ass just after they start the service many times. I think it is a very good thing that they are reacting the good way -- by slowing the rail, and looking into the trouble, instead of, you know, just running the trains at full speed and collecting the bodies.
Moving between randomly similar (or randomly dissimilar) badly documented environments is a lot worse than moving an application from one documented API to another. And I'm speaking from experience doing both.
TFA says the major concern is price, not ecological considerations. Apparently someone in the gubbermint is betting that chicken fat will be cheaper than kerosene in a decade or two.
No, you're just confusing the concept of money in general and that of fiat money.
No, things aren't different, you just ignore the context in which people live, then slap arbitrary labels on stuff, and think you've discovered something major and important. All you do with your statement "money has no intrinsic value" is to implicitly and wrongly ignore the knowledge of how a complex (as in "built by more than a few individuals" complex) economy operates and assume instead that individuals live by themselves and don't trade. If you learn how trade works, relax your bad assumptions and accept the obvious fact that transaction costs in an economy are real, you can "rediscover" the "intrinsic value" of money that I pointed out above quite easily.
I can justify the statement "wood has no intrinsic value" just as easily if I choose (like you do) to arbitrarily ignore the knowledge of woodworking and construction. Does wood have an "intrinsic value" in a society (or to an individual) that has no knowledge about cutting trees to make beams and boards or building houses out of wood? Did oil have value in the 15th century? How about uranium ore? How about iron ore in the bronze age?
You will be able to if you can control the land on your own. This may turn out to be a difficult scenario if your government decides to use your land to pay its debt off. Appropriating the land isn't a very hard trick for a government to do.
Money does have "intrinsic" value -- it lowers transaction costs in the economy both for trade and for investment. As such, the concept will likely be present in all economies that have more goods and services to trade than the average person can comfortably keep in their head.
Reasonable estimates don't put the total extra cancer death toll due to Chernobyl at more than 1000, so I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that your figure of 10,000 is either totally fabricated or based on faulty assumptions.
Conservative estimates put the total death toll due to Chernobyl at a lot more than 1000. See, for example, this paper , which estimates the death toll in Europe, excluding some of the damaged zones, at more than 10 times your number, and mentions a number of difficulties in establishing the actual toll, the biggest being nobody counting long-term. The comment in the paper on the lack of research on the long-term exposure to low doses is also quite informative.
Doh. Legal MAXIMUM, of course.
Comparing the right of the public to information with crying "Fire" in a theater plainly shows you have no idea what you're talking about. That is especially true for Japan -- a country whose government has a history of covering up industrial disasters (look up Minamata, for example), and whose nuclear industry is practically unanswerable to anyone.
Just last week TEPCO was outed to have ordered subcontractors at the Fukushima-1 site not to record exposures over the legal minimum. Helping these people to cover up information further instead of sending them to jail is a disgrace.
And here I am, reprogramming my phone with pliers, soldering iron, some wires, a(n) USB connector and a resistor. I must be doing something wrong.
I am not sure if the examiner was the resident Indiana Jones, but if they were, I'd give them all kinds of thrills by listing the major discoveries in the 20th century. That said, I can see how going into the kind of political and economic analysis that is the current fashion in history might have been a danger in the late 19th :)
I'm in without a time machine, if I can have the Latin and the Greek replaced with any one of with Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Russian, Arabic or my native language, or Russian, Spanish and my native language if I had to take it when I was college age. The math is fairly easy, and I may even surprise the creator of this exam with my knowledge of history -- just because the field has moved on somewhat since 1869. I am also quite familiar with the works they have their Latin and Greek quotes from, although I haven't read them in original.
Overall, I'd say these days it is much easier to get an education adequate for the exam than it was when it was written. Maybe it is even a good idea to use this and actually get it ;)