Google 'the rest of the f*cking US' to learn that it's filled with right-wing xenophobic nutters like you, who swallow Fox News conspiracy theories about "illegals" voting, despite decades of extremely close scrutiny by anti-immigrant groups never turning up more than a tiny handful (out of billions of votes over decades) of actual cases (while *legal* voters are being disenfranchised by the millions based on such fears). Yes, plenty of places like maintaining a substantial immigrant population to provide a cheap labor force, but no, they aren't hoping *all of Mexico* will flood across the border and set up shanty-towns when the cross-border food supply collapses.
You should just let the AC have his local-multiverse-bubble God. After all, it's a pretty weaksauce deity --- certainly not "uncreated; creator of all things, seen and unseen" --- that depends on the parameter configuration in a region of a larger multiverse for existence (omnipotence hardly means being ruled by the laws of physics). And, in a causally-disconnected universe from this one, hardly capable of much harm.
The only God to worry about (or not worry, as your case may be) would be a prerequisite for the possible existence of all possibilities.
And you think Detroit is a *positive* model for demographic shifts *without suffering*? The city's transition from a global model of prosperity to the butt of jokes about crime, unemployment, and poverty seems to indicate that it wasn't so easy for a big chunk of the residents to just pack up and move to more prosperous areas as the auto industry deflated. And the people who could move away mostly found other homes within the same country, with a common language and no major internal barriers to freedom of movement. Now consider needing to relocate city populations across a militarized national border, to a country with a different language and culture which views you as an unwanted parasite.
I'm quite capable of worrying about more than one thing at a time. I agree that mechanization (like past waves of mechanization) brings its own set of disruptive issues.
I think you over-estimate the ease of population migration against hostile opposition. Past mass migrations from rural to city centers have occurred fully with the support of the "powers-that-be," a wealthy investor class who could both consolidate rural smallholdings into today's mega-scale agribusiness and staff factories with dirt-cheap labor. However, once a region has enough impoverished unemployed residents to solidly depress labor prices, there's little incentive to welcome more (and policy turns towards xenophobic exclusion). There are few places in the world today where the ruling class is thinking "yay, displaced climate refugees, that'll boost business!".
How the heck are cities evidence of rapid population movement? The city centers we currently have are typically stable population centers, with firmly rooted local/national identities, for hundreds of years --- they don't move around overnight, across national borders, whenever the "grass is a little greener" on the opposite side. I'm sure "geopolitics will adapt to that reality," but "geopolitical adaptation" in the modern world typically involves a lot of bullets, landmines, cluster-bombs, machete massacres, and rape. The US is building huge, fortified walls to keep people *out* --- and most other countries hold similar attitudes (even if they don't invest such resources in border-control) towards mass-immigration of displaced foreigners. Current conflicts over limited local resources are already bloody messes, which will only be amplified by increasing the volume of struggle.
Of course, large-scale climactic changes over tens or hundreds of thousands of years are a red herring when evaluating the impact of hundred-year rapid timescale changes on human societies that need much longer to adapt without horrific violence and misery. We live in very different places/cities from where we did 10,000 or 100,000 years ago --- but pretty much in the same cities we had 100 years ago. Expecting the populations of entire nations and continents to just up-and-move over a few decades because habitable ranges have shifted (collapsing food and water supplies in once-fertile regions) doesn't play out so well in current geopolitics. As soon as you're ready to welcome a billion refugee immigrants, dislocated by famine, war, and poverty, into your own country, we can get complacent about compressing multi-thousand-year climactic cycles into human-scale time intervals.
Viewing religion as a positive belief in some set of entities from which normative conclusions are drawn, then "atheism" as a simple non-belief in said entities, is indeed not a religion.
However, in a different analysis, one might regard "religion" from an institutional perspective --- as a particular self-reinforcing bundle of beliefs/views/behaviors/social-interactions that actively informs and guides adherents (while impacting non-adherents). In this case, "atheism" is more likely to fall into the same analytical category as (theistic) religions, distinct from "apinkunicornism."
Very few people actively take into consideration the non-existence of pink unicorns when pondering philosophical/normative questions. Many "strong atheists," however, specifically use the "godlessness" of the world as a key motivation and organizing principle for developing non-theistic worldviews, highlighting and deconstructing philosophical issues previously addressed by appeal-to-deity. Furthermore, they specifically seek out and interact with others on the unifying ground of "atheism," forming institutional structures larger than isolated personal non-beliefs: hence the production of atheist conventions, books, and even shoes (which have not developed around "apinkunicormism," aside from when that is used as a proxy for atheism).
From an institutional analysis perspective, "atheism" is developing similar structures to religion (and competing with, or filling the void left by, older theisms). As such, atheists should be self-reflective that many institutional problems ascribed to religion may also be operative within atheist communities. A reflexive revulsion to at least occasionally thinking of oneself as "having a religion" creates a barrier to challenging the shared institutional dysfunctions that can exist in both theistic and atheistic communities.
Especially for something that you can't see with your naked eyes, what makes a projection "wrong"? Do you also complain whenever you see a Mercator projection (or other sphere-projected-to-a-rectangle) map? The external spherical projection makes it easy to visualize large-angular-field structures along with small, which are awkward to view from "inside" (without really strong/funky perspective distortion).
Another issue with a fungible commodity like Bitcoin is that, by adding to the market rage for it (increasing the price), you're encouraging others to burn more (horribly non-green) resources to create their own. Even if you have completely free, clean, green energy for making Bitcoin, by giving publicity and support to this fundamentally ecologically disastrous project, you're helping to push the price up --- thus making it worthwhile for someone else to fire up their coal-powered mining rig. You can see similar patterns with other fungible extractable commodities --- as the price goes up, new and more ecologically damaging mines go into operation (because it's worthwhile to tear up even more mountains and dump more arsenic to get a smaller amount of material). If you really want to "go green" (in a meaningful rather than empty-nerd-PR-only manner), then you shouldn't be encouraging growing the market for super-energy-expensive resources.
Check out the flat-rate priority mail boxes. Especially for dense items, they're often the best deal, and hard to beat for convenience even when cobbling together your own packaging might save a few cents.
Actually, probably not. Kids swallow funny things all the time; the human digestive system is fortunately pretty good at just passing it through (or humankind would have gone extinct tens of thousands of years ago). The specific problem with strong magnets (that monopoly pieces don't have) isn't that the individual parts are unusually dangerous on their own. Rather, that a kid swallows one (which starts its migration into the intestine), then a second a bit later: once the two magnets "find" each other across some internal tissue barrier (like between two adjacent folds of the large intestine), they'll clamp together --- sticking in place, and eventually killing and perforating whatever tissue was in-between. So, now the kid has a perforated gut leaking straight into their abdominal cavity, so a few days later they unexpectedly get very sick (massive infection of all their internal organs), and die.
So, you bring your toddler over to a friend's house, and see a plastic squirt gun and a teddy bear on the coffee table --- double-check that the squirt gun is really a squirt gun, and it's no problem, right?
After your toddler blows her head off, you realize that the teddy bear was a loaded custom-designed teddy-bear-shaped semi-automatic pistol with the safety off.
That's the problem with the magnet systems --- they look like fairly harmless kids' toys, so unless a parent already *knows* how dangerous the clusters of shiny marbles in their geeky friend's apartment are (like they would know a gun-shaped gun is), they're unlikely to be sufficiently protective of their child until a few days too late.
The biggest change is that the new private company gets to hoover several more truckloads of the public's money into their investors pockets, compared to the current system. While they talk about reducing the cost of orbiting and maintaining the satellites, they're vague about what the pricing and licensing details are for the government "buying back" the data they need --- and I'd place a pretty big bet that the data won't be distributed freely to the general public like NOAA and NWS do. Net result: government has lower annual costs on paper because they are no longer providing useful, free, public weather data (the reason to have *any* costs in the first place), which instead must be bought (at a higher overall cost to society) from these government-monopoly-granted profiteers.
??? I'm afraid I've honestly lost the thread of what you are saying here --- what "lousy choice" of mine are you referring to?
Clearly your first comment told me all I needed to know about your lack of intent to have a discussion on this matter
In a sense, this is true --- I wasn't particularly initiating a discussion with the poster "damn_registrars," or personally aiming my comments at him/her. I have no idea who damn_registrars is, and don't particularly care, either. I was responding to a fictional image of my own creation --- a hypothetical uptight, phone-obsessed traveler gripped by irrational ire at the prospect of losing his pocket-brain for a few minutes (and displaying symptoms normally associated with impatient children). This may not be you --- indeed, it's probably not you --- but your post generated the opportunity to present the image (which I think is a "truthful stereotype" of our culture, symptomatic of worse problems than FAA bungling). The discussion (on a public discussion forum) was aimed to engage SlashDot as a whole, rather than a personal exchange of criticisms between "femtobyte" and "damn_registrars." Yet, you took my response quite personally (we're both pseudonymous strangers on an internet forum --- don't worry so much about what others say or read about you), and flung yourself into a moralistic mudslinging brawl, interspersing preachy comments about "maturity" and "civility" with evidence that you have mastered neither. I kept expecting you to eventually catch on --- either to start leading the conversation by example towards substantive discussion, or show the personal maturity and security to walk away from a childish spat. But, six responses in, and you still seem to revel in a discussion that you deemed worthless from the start.
Funny, you have "no reason to read" my posts, yet keep responding. Don't you have some important calendars to check? Or a "serious conversation of any depth" to bother with, instead of sputtering in thin-skinned indignation at internet insults? Five responses with your own "silly name calling and baseless assumptions," and you haven't figured out that you are simply highlighting the absurd hilarity of your claims to "maturity"?
If you're sufficiently interested in aerial photography --- enough for the takeoff/landing restrictions on camera use to register at a troublesome level of suckage --- then there are ways to have a lot more fun than grabbing a hasty tarmac snapshot through a grungy window. Find your nearest small/hobbyist airfield, and charter an hour to putter around in a little Cessna; you can dangle your camera straight out an open window (or at least through an intentionally pre-cleaned one), and swoop around to frame the best views on request. If you don't care enough to bother with this, then it is unlikely you are over-severely slighted of valuable opportunities on regular flights.
This is why I ascribe little value to demanding "civilized and mature" discussions: such dialog often degrades to puffery over who is more "civilized" and "mature," rather than engagement with issues of underlying substance. If you want more "maturity" in discussions, then either lead by example in upholding a higher standard of substantive engagement, or don't waste your time responding in kind to childish petulance.
Since your single-minded focus on "balance and maturity" diverted you from taking the high road and engaging with the substance rather than the irksome style of my original post, let me spell out more directly the basis of my original polemical critique:
Animus against the FAA's restrictive electronics regulations arises, on one level, from (valid) concerns that the system is arbitrary, autocratic, archaic, and unhelpfully over-conservative. However, typical responses to the FAA's problems are simultaneously symptomatic of another class of cultural dysfunction separate from (and, to me, more worrisome than) issues with bureaucratic/regulatory incompetence. Specifically, is society in the thrall of a techno-centric "cult of productivity," compelling people to feel that time not available for checking mobile-phone calendars is "wasted"? Is the concept of "patience," and the ability to engage one's mind in the temporary absence of electronic prostheses, being lost? I think it is a tragedy for people to forget (or, for a younger generation, never learn) what to do when confronted with the prospect of a few moments of time for the mind to wander (undirected by our omnipresent pocket-taskmasters), and consider such moments an affront rather than an opportunity.
If you think feisty disputation originated with the internet, you've missed out on all the fun parts of the last millennium-and-a-half-or-so of Western literature (and probably non-Western, too, but I'm unfamiliar with that canon).
Nevertheless, you are posting on Slashdot, so I'm afraid you'll have to move along if you are a purist for non-internet-style discourse ("I'm sorry, but this is abuse.... Ah yes, you want room 12A, Just along the corridor.").
I, for one, am quite content not being "balanced and mature" --- especially if this means that I get to dance to the orchestra of fancy in my mind during takeoff and landing, instead of stewing in impotent rage against temporary electronics restrictions.
why can't we check out calendars while the attendant is giving the same safety talk we've seen dozens - if not hundreds - of times?
Why can't you wait five minutes, and do so during the *long and boring* plane flight you're about to sit through? Do you regularly discover last-minute scheduling conflicts that need to be resolved by leaping from a plane mid-takeoff? Do you have less patience than the screaming three-year-old in the seat behind you? Is your quality productive work time aboard airplanes so valuable that you cannot afford a five minute break? I recommend you learn to relax once in a little while --- being in a constant state of hyperventilating panic is seriously bad for your life expectancy.
Why does your "rational person" irrationally apply a weight of -inf to death? Death is bad, but not so bad as, e.g., living 50 years in excruciating torment. Once you attach a finite weight of -$BIG_AMOUNT to death, the unexpected bear dilemma becomes perfectly tractable.
Of course, I agree that perfect rationality "doesn't work," because there's no "pure logic" reason to assign any particular "expected_gain" to any event. On a pure mathematical basis, why is "having your testicles smashed" any worse than "getting a free sandwich"? Logic only helps after starting with a giant heap of a-rational (distinct from irrational) initial axioms (like "my pain is bad" and "sandwich is tasty is good"), which imbue the cosmos with non-rationally-derived "meaning."
On the other hand, there's still a large space between "good programmer" and "non-programmer" where most people can advance with education.
Lots of kids get piano lessons. While very few of them turn out to be the next Mozart (or even professional-level concert pianists), just about any kid that you sit down at a piano and grind through standard lessons can achieve a reasonable level of proficiency (aside from the small portion of the population born anomalously tone/rhythm-deaf). Even if they never need to play the piano for a job, or even a hobby, learning to play provides generally beneficial mental stimulation that bleeds over to other areas. It's also the best way to find the kids who can be concert-pianist material, and teach everyone else to at least appreciate the skill necessary to advance beyond merely competent playing.
The same is likely true for programming. While only a few kids will have the "excruciatingly logical" attributes to be super programmers, I suspect just about all of them will benefit from stretching their symbolic logic capabilities a bit beyond whatever they started with, and achieve a basic level of proficiency (and an increased appreciation for truly artful coders).
Slashdot Mirror
Google 'the rest of the f*cking US' to learn that it's filled with right-wing xenophobic nutters like you, who swallow Fox News conspiracy theories about "illegals" voting, despite decades of extremely close scrutiny by anti-immigrant groups never turning up more than a tiny handful (out of billions of votes over decades) of actual cases (while *legal* voters are being disenfranchised by the millions based on such fears). Yes, plenty of places like maintaining a substantial immigrant population to provide a cheap labor force, but no, they aren't hoping *all of Mexico* will flood across the border and set up shanty-towns when the cross-border food supply collapses.
Unenlightened pseudonymous coward here.
You should just let the AC have his local-multiverse-bubble God. After all, it's a pretty weaksauce deity --- certainly not "uncreated; creator of all things, seen and unseen" --- that depends on the parameter configuration in a region of a larger multiverse for existence (omnipotence hardly means being ruled by the laws of physics). And, in a causally-disconnected universe from this one, hardly capable of much harm.
The only God to worry about (or not worry, as your case may be) would be a prerequisite for the possible existence of all possibilities.
And you think Detroit is a *positive* model for demographic shifts *without suffering*? The city's transition from a global model of prosperity to the butt of jokes about crime, unemployment, and poverty seems to indicate that it wasn't so easy for a big chunk of the residents to just pack up and move to more prosperous areas as the auto industry deflated. And the people who could move away mostly found other homes within the same country, with a common language and no major internal barriers to freedom of movement. Now consider needing to relocate city populations across a militarized national border, to a country with a different language and culture which views you as an unwanted parasite.
I'm quite capable of worrying about more than one thing at a time. I agree that mechanization (like past waves of mechanization) brings its own set of disruptive issues.
I think you over-estimate the ease of population migration against hostile opposition. Past mass migrations from rural to city centers have occurred fully with the support of the "powers-that-be," a wealthy investor class who could both consolidate rural smallholdings into today's mega-scale agribusiness and staff factories with dirt-cheap labor. However, once a region has enough impoverished unemployed residents to solidly depress labor prices, there's little incentive to welcome more (and policy turns towards xenophobic exclusion). There are few places in the world today where the ruling class is thinking "yay, displaced climate refugees, that'll boost business!".
How the heck are cities evidence of rapid population movement? The city centers we currently have are typically stable population centers, with firmly rooted local/national identities, for hundreds of years --- they don't move around overnight, across national borders, whenever the "grass is a little greener" on the opposite side. I'm sure "geopolitics will adapt to that reality," but "geopolitical adaptation" in the modern world typically involves a lot of bullets, landmines, cluster-bombs, machete massacres, and rape. The US is building huge, fortified walls to keep people *out* --- and most other countries hold similar attitudes (even if they don't invest such resources in border-control) towards mass-immigration of displaced foreigners. Current conflicts over limited local resources are already bloody messes, which will only be amplified by increasing the volume of struggle.
Of course, large-scale climactic changes over tens or hundreds of thousands of years are a red herring when evaluating the impact of hundred-year rapid timescale changes on human societies that need much longer to adapt without horrific violence and misery. We live in very different places/cities from where we did 10,000 or 100,000 years ago --- but pretty much in the same cities we had 100 years ago. Expecting the populations of entire nations and continents to just up-and-move over a few decades because habitable ranges have shifted (collapsing food and water supplies in once-fertile regions) doesn't play out so well in current geopolitics. As soon as you're ready to welcome a billion refugee immigrants, dislocated by famine, war, and poverty, into your own country, we can get complacent about compressing multi-thousand-year climactic cycles into human-scale time intervals.
Viewing religion as a positive belief in some set of entities from which normative conclusions are drawn, then "atheism" as a simple non-belief in said entities, is indeed not a religion.
However, in a different analysis, one might regard "religion" from an institutional perspective --- as a particular self-reinforcing bundle of beliefs/views/behaviors/social-interactions that actively informs and guides adherents (while impacting non-adherents). In this case, "atheism" is more likely to fall into the same analytical category as (theistic) religions, distinct from "apinkunicornism."
Very few people actively take into consideration the non-existence of pink unicorns when pondering philosophical/normative questions. Many "strong atheists," however, specifically use the "godlessness" of the world as a key motivation and organizing principle for developing non-theistic worldviews, highlighting and deconstructing philosophical issues previously addressed by appeal-to-deity. Furthermore, they specifically seek out and interact with others on the unifying ground of "atheism," forming institutional structures larger than isolated personal non-beliefs: hence the production of atheist conventions, books, and even shoes (which have not developed around "apinkunicormism," aside from when that is used as a proxy for atheism).
From an institutional analysis perspective, "atheism" is developing similar structures to religion (and competing with, or filling the void left by, older theisms). As such, atheists should be self-reflective that many institutional problems ascribed to religion may also be operative within atheist communities. A reflexive revulsion to at least occasionally thinking of oneself as "having a religion" creates a barrier to challenging the shared institutional dysfunctions that can exist in both theistic and atheistic communities.
SI unit prefixes are readily available anytime you need them.
-femtobyte
Especially for something that you can't see with your naked eyes, what makes a projection "wrong"? Do you also complain whenever you see a Mercator projection (or other sphere-projected-to-a-rectangle) map? The external spherical projection makes it easy to visualize large-angular-field structures along with small, which are awkward to view from "inside" (without really strong/funky perspective distortion).
Another issue with a fungible commodity like Bitcoin is that, by adding to the market rage for it (increasing the price), you're encouraging others to burn more (horribly non-green) resources to create their own. Even if you have completely free, clean, green energy for making Bitcoin, by giving publicity and support to this fundamentally ecologically disastrous project, you're helping to push the price up --- thus making it worthwhile for someone else to fire up their coal-powered mining rig. You can see similar patterns with other fungible extractable commodities --- as the price goes up, new and more ecologically damaging mines go into operation (because it's worthwhile to tear up even more mountains and dump more arsenic to get a smaller amount of material). If you really want to "go green" (in a meaningful rather than empty-nerd-PR-only manner), then you shouldn't be encouraging growing the market for super-energy-expensive resources.
Check out the flat-rate priority mail boxes. Especially for dense items, they're often the best deal, and hard to beat for convenience even when cobbling together your own packaging might save a few cents.
“God is dead.” -- Friedrich Nietzsche
“Friedrich Nietzsche is dead.” -- God
Actually, probably not. Kids swallow funny things all the time; the human digestive system is fortunately pretty good at just passing it through (or humankind would have gone extinct tens of thousands of years ago). The specific problem with strong magnets (that monopoly pieces don't have) isn't that the individual parts are unusually dangerous on their own. Rather, that a kid swallows one (which starts its migration into the intestine), then a second a bit later: once the two magnets "find" each other across some internal tissue barrier (like between two adjacent folds of the large intestine), they'll clamp together --- sticking in place, and eventually killing and perforating whatever tissue was in-between. So, now the kid has a perforated gut leaking straight into their abdominal cavity, so a few days later they unexpectedly get very sick (massive infection of all their internal organs), and die.
So, you bring your toddler over to a friend's house, and see a plastic squirt gun and a teddy bear on the coffee table --- double-check that the squirt gun is really a squirt gun, and it's no problem, right?
After your toddler blows her head off, you realize that the teddy bear was a loaded custom-designed teddy-bear-shaped semi-automatic pistol with the safety off.
That's the problem with the magnet systems --- they look like fairly harmless kids' toys, so unless a parent already *knows* how dangerous the clusters of shiny marbles in their geeky friend's apartment are (like they would know a gun-shaped gun is), they're unlikely to be sufficiently protective of their child until a few days too late.
The biggest change is that the new private company gets to hoover several more truckloads of the public's money into their investors pockets, compared to the current system. While they talk about reducing the cost of orbiting and maintaining the satellites, they're vague about what the pricing and licensing details are for the government "buying back" the data they need --- and I'd place a pretty big bet that the data won't be distributed freely to the general public like NOAA and NWS do. Net result: government has lower annual costs on paper because they are no longer providing useful, free, public weather data (the reason to have *any* costs in the first place), which instead must be bought (at a higher overall cost to society) from these government-monopoly-granted profiteers.
So now you blame me for your lousy choice.
??? I'm afraid I've honestly lost the thread of what you are saying here --- what "lousy choice" of mine are you referring to?
Clearly your first comment told me all I needed to know about your lack of intent to have a discussion on this matter
In a sense, this is true --- I wasn't particularly initiating a discussion with the poster "damn_registrars," or personally aiming my comments at him/her. I have no idea who damn_registrars is, and don't particularly care, either. I was responding to a fictional image of my own creation --- a hypothetical uptight, phone-obsessed traveler gripped by irrational ire at the prospect of losing his pocket-brain for a few minutes (and displaying symptoms normally associated with impatient children). This may not be you --- indeed, it's probably not you --- but your post generated the opportunity to present the image (which I think is a "truthful stereotype" of our culture, symptomatic of worse problems than FAA bungling). The discussion (on a public discussion forum) was aimed to engage SlashDot as a whole, rather than a personal exchange of criticisms between "femtobyte" and "damn_registrars." Yet, you took my response quite personally (we're both pseudonymous strangers on an internet forum --- don't worry so much about what others say or read about you), and flung yourself into a moralistic mudslinging brawl, interspersing preachy comments about "maturity" and "civility" with evidence that you have mastered neither. I kept expecting you to eventually catch on --- either to start leading the conversation by example towards substantive discussion, or show the personal maturity and security to walk away from a childish spat. But, six responses in, and you still seem to revel in a discussion that you deemed worthless from the start.
Funny, you have "no reason to read" my posts, yet keep responding. Don't you have some important calendars to check? Or a "serious conversation of any depth" to bother with, instead of sputtering in thin-skinned indignation at internet insults? Five responses with your own "silly name calling and baseless assumptions," and you haven't figured out that you are simply highlighting the absurd hilarity of your claims to "maturity"?
If you're sufficiently interested in aerial photography --- enough for the takeoff/landing restrictions on camera use to register at a troublesome level of suckage --- then there are ways to have a lot more fun than grabbing a hasty tarmac snapshot through a grungy window. Find your nearest small/hobbyist airfield, and charter an hour to putter around in a little Cessna; you can dangle your camera straight out an open window (or at least through an intentionally pre-cleaned one), and swoop around to frame the best views on request. If you don't care enough to bother with this, then it is unlikely you are over-severely slighted of valuable opportunities on regular flights.
This is why I ascribe little value to demanding "civilized and mature" discussions: such dialog often degrades to puffery over who is more "civilized" and "mature," rather than engagement with issues of underlying substance. If you want more "maturity" in discussions, then either lead by example in upholding a higher standard of substantive engagement, or don't waste your time responding in kind to childish petulance.
Since your single-minded focus on "balance and maturity" diverted you from taking the high road and engaging with the substance rather than the irksome style of my original post, let me spell out more directly the basis of my original polemical critique:
Animus against the FAA's restrictive electronics regulations arises, on one level, from (valid) concerns that the system is arbitrary, autocratic, archaic, and unhelpfully over-conservative. However, typical responses to the FAA's problems are simultaneously symptomatic of another class of cultural dysfunction separate from (and, to me, more worrisome than) issues with bureaucratic/regulatory incompetence. Specifically, is society in the thrall of a techno-centric "cult of productivity," compelling people to feel that time not available for checking mobile-phone calendars is "wasted"? Is the concept of "patience," and the ability to engage one's mind in the temporary absence of electronic prostheses, being lost? I think it is a tragedy for people to forget (or, for a younger generation, never learn) what to do when confronted with the prospect of a few moments of time for the mind to wander (undirected by our omnipresent pocket-taskmasters), and consider such moments an affront rather than an opportunity.
Care to pull any more shit out of your ass in this discussion, or are you done now?
^^^ And there, ladies and gentlemen, is the rage-free tranquility of a balanced and mature mind.
Perhaps if we were all never separated from our smartphones, we too could achieve such an enlightened state.
If you think feisty disputation originated with the internet, you've missed out on all the fun parts of the last millennium-and-a-half-or-so of Western literature (and probably non-Western, too, but I'm unfamiliar with that canon).
Nevertheless, you are posting on Slashdot, so I'm afraid you'll have to move along if you are a purist for non-internet-style discourse ("I'm sorry, but this is abuse. ... Ah yes, you want room 12A, Just along the corridor.").
I, for one, am quite content not being "balanced and mature" --- especially if this means that I get to dance to the orchestra of fancy in my mind during takeoff and landing, instead of stewing in impotent rage against temporary electronics restrictions.
Commentary in the polemical mode need not appear "balanced and mature" to make its point.
why can't we check out calendars while the attendant is giving the same safety talk we've seen dozens - if not hundreds - of times?
Why can't you wait five minutes, and do so during the *long and boring* plane flight you're about to sit through? Do you regularly discover last-minute scheduling conflicts that need to be resolved by leaping from a plane mid-takeoff? Do you have less patience than the screaming three-year-old in the seat behind you? Is your quality productive work time aboard airplanes so valuable that you cannot afford a five minute break? I recommend you learn to relax once in a little while --- being in a constant state of hyperventilating panic is seriously bad for your life expectancy.
Why does your "rational person" irrationally apply a weight of -inf to death? Death is bad, but not so bad as, e.g., living 50 years in excruciating torment. Once you attach a finite weight of -$BIG_AMOUNT to death, the unexpected bear dilemma becomes perfectly tractable.
Of course, I agree that perfect rationality "doesn't work," because there's no "pure logic" reason to assign any particular "expected_gain" to any event. On a pure mathematical basis, why is "having your testicles smashed" any worse than "getting a free sandwich"? Logic only helps after starting with a giant heap of a-rational (distinct from irrational) initial axioms (like "my pain is bad" and "sandwich is tasty is good"), which imbue the cosmos with non-rationally-derived "meaning."
On the other hand, there's still a large space between "good programmer" and "non-programmer" where most people can advance with education.
Lots of kids get piano lessons. While very few of them turn out to be the next Mozart (or even professional-level concert pianists), just about any kid that you sit down at a piano and grind through standard lessons can achieve a reasonable level of proficiency (aside from the small portion of the population born anomalously tone/rhythm-deaf). Even if they never need to play the piano for a job, or even a hobby, learning to play provides generally beneficial mental stimulation that bleeds over to other areas. It's also the best way to find the kids who can be concert-pianist material, and teach everyone else to at least appreciate the skill necessary to advance beyond merely competent playing.
The same is likely true for programming. While only a few kids will have the "excruciatingly logical" attributes to be super programmers, I suspect just about all of them will benefit from stretching their symbolic logic capabilities a bit beyond whatever they started with, and achieve a basic level of proficiency (and an increased appreciation for truly artful coders).