What is your evidence that resources per capita in the aggregate will decrease?
Let's ignore the fact that the universe is finite, which puts an absolute upper limit on available resources (barring inter-dimensional travel). At any given time, we have access to a finite pool of resources. In the past, that pool was so large compared to the human population that no amount of per capita consumption could make a dent in it (except at local levels, where populations farmed/hunted themselves out and had to move). As technology has grown, so has that pool of resources, as well as our ability to utilize them. But so has the population, and our per capita consumption rate. The only thing currently keeping us ahead in the consumption curve is that technological progress is adding previously unavailable resources to the pool and increasing our efficiency in exploiting them faster than we can consume them. At least, we think so. It's possible we're currently behind on the consumption curve and are depleting an unquantified surplus. But let's assume we're currently ahead.
Resources are a linear factor, technology is the real accelerator. And we need an exponential function in order to keep up with population growth. So the crux of your argument is that technology is currently growing at an exponential rate. As you suggest, let's look at all of human history. The current growth curve is unprecedented. There is really no reason to suppose it will, or even can, continue to grow exponentially. Your argument sounds exactly like my realtor's argument in the mid 2000s, trying to talk me into buying an overpriced house. "House prices have never gone down, there's always more people, OF COURSE your house will be worth more than you paid for it in 5 years". In fact, every human endeavor ever has failed to continue with unlimited growth. Why should technological progress be the exception to that rule? Hell, there is no real reason to believe there is not some absolute ceiling on mankind's technological progress. If the speed of light is an absolute barrier to velocity in the universe, what other absolute barriers are there? How close are we to running into them? We don't know. In general, assuming important questions will turn out to have the most favorable answer possible and then acting on that assumption is a recipe for disaster. I've always found it odd that a core tenet of the "conservative" party's financial philosophy is based on boundless optimism about the future. Hardly seems conservative to me, but I understand words do funny things across disciplines.
Wealth is not stuff. It is the intelligent arrangement and usage of stuff. Infinite wealth is possible from even tiny amounts of raw materials - it is just harder.
So wealth = intelligence * stuff. Since stuff is obviously finite, I guess you are asserting that intelligence (or technological know-how) is infinite? Even assuming the upper limits of intelligence is unbounded (very doubtful), it is demonstrably not today. So you are relying on the rate at which intelligence increases to accelerate more than the rate at which stuff is decreasing. Which means you feel justified to consume resources at any level you desire, in the belief that future generations will be clever enough to figure out how to prosper with whatever resources they have left. And if they can't, fuck em, right? I mean, just like the poor of today, if they can't prosper with what they have, they deserve what they (don't) get.
But sure, anyone that disagrees with your assumptions and attitudes towards other people is just TOO STUPID to understand your enlightened point of view. Gotcha.
I don't have a problem leaving engine design or game development or medicine to experts, why is it a problem here?
The difference is that the three disciplines you mention are subject to the laws of the universe. We can not negotiate, compromise, or otherwise modify the laws of the universe to give us a system we like better. Human law, on the other hand, is nothing but a system cobbled together through negotiation and compromise with other humans. Hopefully, the experts' education and experience gives them more insight, but that is no reason to give them the ONLY input on what society deems to be proper human interactions.
the rich will mostly prefer liberty over fraternity
It seems to me that preferring liberty over fraternity (conformity, in this case) is an admirable quality. I don't understand why the GP thinks this quality is limited to the rich, nor do I understand why you think accusing (?) the rich of possessing this quality is scapegoating them.
Uh, the Japanese mostly practiced Shintoism and Buddhism. Neither of which really has a concept of "gods" similar to that found in Western religions. They did worship the Emperor, but it wasn't the same thing as the Egyptian deification of the Pharaoh. It was more a form of nationalism that the state piggy-backed on the tradition of ancestor worship, which is religious in the sense that it deals with what happens after death, and the tradition of Bushido, which has nothing to do with religion. It didn't have anything whatsoever to do with being rewarded in the afterlife, but everything to do with honor/shame in this world. Kamikaze was much more of a culturally motivated thing than religious.
If We the People could organize and come together on the scale necessary to make a violent revolution so obviously the will of the People that the military would refuse to engage, we could far more easily come together to ELECT the government we want. Remember, it would have to be a HUGE percentage of the population that rose up to cause desertions and whatnot amongst the military/police forces responsible for putting violent unrest down. Otherwise, it's just a few more Wacos, slightly more violent suppression of "riots" or "protests". We already incarcerate millions due to drugs - "we" wouldn't hesitate to incarcerate millions more due to "domestic terrorism".
What I said was that parents should be the final arbiters of what their children are taught because the state ought to have no right to impose much beyond standards of minimum education on children.
And how does that work, exactly? One teacher, 30 kids, 30 different sets of parental beliefs about what should and should not be taught. If the parents are that concerned, they can home school. Can't afford homeschooling? Then I guess they want to use the publicly funded, thus publicly directed resources. If they don't like the publicly directed curriculum, they are free to run for the local school board and influence public policy. Just like everyone else.
It isn't that there is a Top One Percent that most people get pissed about. If they were just wealthier than everyone else, most people would be okay with that. It's the manner in which they appear to have rigged the system to their benefit, and our detriment, that has everyone all pissed. "The system" is no longer working for a growing number of people, so a growing number of people are getting pissed at "The system" and those that it benefits.
Another common fallacy is assuming people are rational. They are not. Since we are discussing how the average consumer values privacy, taking into account common irrational decision making processes is not only valid, it's necessary.
What are you, a robot? Actual human beings that spend large amounts of time together, as in say a work environment, tend to engage in this human ritual known as "getting to know each other". That is, we share little bits of information about who we are, on a personal level, in order to connect to our fellow human beings, on a personal level. One common one, especially on Mondays, is "What did you do this weekend?" If one engaged in a social activity with another human being, generally that information is shared. If that other human being is what we call a "significant other", their name tends to get repeated due to multiple weekends spent engaged in social activities with this person. If one is uncomfortable with the idea of revealing that one is in a homosexual relationship, this common form of human interaction can become stressful. I must either lie about the exact nature of this relationship, or attempt to avoid too much discussion of it in order to avoid the natural human curiosity repeated mentions of "Bob" will bring about in my coworkers.
You know, we don't have to guess. S&P said why they downgraded the US' credit rating. "More broadly, the downgrade reflects our view that the effectiveness,
stability, and predictability of American policymaking and political
institutions have weakened at a time of ongoing fiscal and economic
challenges to a degree more than we envisioned when we assigned a
negative outlook to the rating on April 18, 2011". This was in conjunction with Congress playing chicken with the debt ceiling, threatening not to raise it, which would have resulted in the US failing to meet some financial obligations. It is indisputable fact that the US credit rating was downgraded b/c the political leadership valued playing politics over doing what was necessary to meet the US' financial obligations. Whether this was due to the Tea Party's influence or not is perhaps debatable.
What I find particularly ludicrous about "money == speech" is that it is only accepted in the political arena. Substituting any other context makes the statement absurd. "Yes, officer, I gave that woman money to have sex with me. Since when is it illegal to talk a woman into sex?" "Yes, I gave that interviewer money to hire me. Since when can't I speak on my own behalf in an interview?" It just doesn't work.
That's certainly a possibility, although a frightening one. I can't imagine anything other than truly scary secret knowledge that would make the current path of the executive branch a wise one. Fortunately, I find it more likely that it isn't secret knowledge so much as hidden influences that acted on both Presidents. When you're new to that incredible level of responsibility, having several people that have been in the game for decades come to you and explain why THIS course of action is best and THAT course of action could very well be catastrophic makes it difficult to ignore their advice. I find it very credible that there are persuasive, influential power brokers that sit behind the scenes that are truly the ones guiding much of public policy. And these players and their goals and their worldview doesn't change every 4 or 8 years.
Coast to coast? Driving 400 miles away from the coast will barely get you out of my coastal state, taking the most direct route. I personally don't drive much, but my parents frequently (2 or 3 times a month) travel a 300 mile round trip to visit their grand kids. Without leaving the state.
That's actually why it's so polarized. They keep ratcheting up the hyperbole and partisan rancor in order to disguise the fact that there really is no difference in core policies. It's like identical twins talking loudly about how they totally have different haircuts.
I think today the respect for wealth is more attributable to people's desire to be rich, and the inherent ability for humans to rationalize. "I want to be rich, I am a good person, therefore there must be something about being rich that is worth respect." It's not even conscious, most people would say they want to be rich because either they don't want to have to work or they want the nicer things in life. Neither of which are qualities to necessarily respect (not that I find anything inherently objectionable about them, either). But everyone is the hero of their own story, so the scumbag brain convinces them that their lazy or greedy desires are minor quirks and that deep down, they want to be rich for some undefined admirable reason. That's also a reason people despise wealthy assholes so much more than poor assholes. The wealthy asshole is providing direct evidence contrary to my irrational desires, causing friction between what I want and my ability to rationalize it. People HATE having their bubbles burst.
The thing is, assuming morality is evenly distributed across humanity independent of wealth, you still have more "evil" perpetrated by the rich. A poor immoral person can go out and rob maybe half a dozen people before being caught and put in jail. A rich immoral person can destroy the lives of hundreds or thousands of people, often escaping the legal or moral consequences of their actions. So, immorality in the wealthy is a much larger social problem than immorality in the poor. It is perfectly natural for the average, decent person to despise the powerful person that abuses his fellow man more than the relatively powerless person - the scale of abuse is much greater.
Rating how a teacher does their job isn't easy. How well the students do on a test? Measured against how other students performed on the same test that year? Measured against how previous years' students performed on that test? Measured against how those same students performed on different tests in previous years? Do a before and after test? Over what time frame do you look? A single year (one bad class could ruin a teacher)? Five years (a bad teacher gets to screw five groups of kids)?
No Child Left Behind took this approach and applied it to schools. And everyone I know in education says it made things worse, not better. In large part because it is really hard to quantify "good" teaching vs "bad" teaching based on test scores.
*sigh* The representative for the program said that the provided lunch should have been considered suitable, they are investigating this incident b/c, according to the "nanny state" it shouldn't have happened. The "real story" is unclear, but at worst, it is the story of a human being making a mistake and doing his job poorly.
Some people will buy into any absurd nonsense just to win a petty argument.
Accepting a single example of miscommunication as "shit happens, move on" is not absurd. If this revealed some flaws in the guidelines being used, or if you want to debate the practice of having food inspectors for childrens' lunches, fine. Suggesting that a single instance of minor human failure is an indictment of an entire system is, well, absurd.
I enjoyed that series, but it could use some serious restructuring. There are really 3 or 4 stories that only tangentially relate to one another, all being told at the same time. Breaking them apart and telling them separately would cut down on the confusion in the first half of the series (wait, who is this and where are we?), as well as allow him to spend some time on the scenes that are only alluded to. Although, I understand that Esslemont's work fills in some of those gaps. I haven't read him, yet.
I can second the annoyingly blatant proselytizing philosophy in this series. Goodkind also fell victim to the Jordan problem - the middle of his series just kind of wanders around, looking for a conclusion to the plot. Let's hope Sanderson does a better job than Goodkind's inane deus ex machina.
I don't know about awesome. If you just read the "prime" series, the ones by Erikson, there are so many plot gaps filled in by the "secondary" series that it quickly becomes confusing. He also keeps introducing completely new people/places/plots and spending 600 pages on them before giving you any idea whatsoever how they relate to what you've read already. There are really 3 or 4 separate stories that have some slight overlap where the protagonists of each story briefly interact with the other protagonists. Each story in itself is engaging, but the structure could use quite a bit of overhauling.
Slashdot Mirror
What is your evidence that resources per capita in the aggregate will decrease?
Let's ignore the fact that the universe is finite, which puts an absolute upper limit on available resources (barring inter-dimensional travel). At any given time, we have access to a finite pool of resources. In the past, that pool was so large compared to the human population that no amount of per capita consumption could make a dent in it (except at local levels, where populations farmed/hunted themselves out and had to move). As technology has grown, so has that pool of resources, as well as our ability to utilize them. But so has the population, and our per capita consumption rate. The only thing currently keeping us ahead in the consumption curve is that technological progress is adding previously unavailable resources to the pool and increasing our efficiency in exploiting them faster than we can consume them. At least, we think so. It's possible we're currently behind on the consumption curve and are depleting an unquantified surplus. But let's assume we're currently ahead.
Resources are a linear factor, technology is the real accelerator. And we need an exponential function in order to keep up with population growth. So the crux of your argument is that technology is currently growing at an exponential rate. As you suggest, let's look at all of human history. The current growth curve is unprecedented. There is really no reason to suppose it will, or even can, continue to grow exponentially. Your argument sounds exactly like my realtor's argument in the mid 2000s, trying to talk me into buying an overpriced house. "House prices have never gone down, there's always more people, OF COURSE your house will be worth more than you paid for it in 5 years". In fact, every human endeavor ever has failed to continue with unlimited growth. Why should technological progress be the exception to that rule? Hell, there is no real reason to believe there is not some absolute ceiling on mankind's technological progress. If the speed of light is an absolute barrier to velocity in the universe, what other absolute barriers are there? How close are we to running into them? We don't know. In general, assuming important questions will turn out to have the most favorable answer possible and then acting on that assumption is a recipe for disaster. I've always found it odd that a core tenet of the "conservative" party's financial philosophy is based on boundless optimism about the future. Hardly seems conservative to me, but I understand words do funny things across disciplines.
Wealth is not stuff. It is the intelligent arrangement and usage of stuff. Infinite wealth is possible from even tiny amounts of raw materials - it is just harder.
So wealth = intelligence * stuff. Since stuff is obviously finite, I guess you are asserting that intelligence (or technological know-how) is infinite? Even assuming the upper limits of intelligence is unbounded (very doubtful), it is demonstrably not today. So you are relying on the rate at which intelligence increases to accelerate more than the rate at which stuff is decreasing. Which means you feel justified to consume resources at any level you desire, in the belief that future generations will be clever enough to figure out how to prosper with whatever resources they have left. And if they can't, fuck em, right? I mean, just like the poor of today, if they can't prosper with what they have, they deserve what they (don't) get.
But sure, anyone that disagrees with your assumptions and attitudes towards other people is just TOO STUPID to understand your enlightened point of view. Gotcha.
I don't have a problem leaving engine design or game development or medicine to experts, why is it a problem here?
The difference is that the three disciplines you mention are subject to the laws of the universe. We can not negotiate, compromise, or otherwise modify the laws of the universe to give us a system we like better. Human law, on the other hand, is nothing but a system cobbled together through negotiation and compromise with other humans. Hopefully, the experts' education and experience gives them more insight, but that is no reason to give them the ONLY input on what society deems to be proper human interactions.
the rich will mostly prefer liberty over fraternity
It seems to me that preferring liberty over fraternity (conformity, in this case) is an admirable quality. I don't understand why the GP thinks this quality is limited to the rich, nor do I understand why you think accusing (?) the rich of possessing this quality is scapegoating them.
Uh, the Japanese mostly practiced Shintoism and Buddhism. Neither of which really has a concept of "gods" similar to that found in Western religions. They did worship the Emperor, but it wasn't the same thing as the Egyptian deification of the Pharaoh. It was more a form of nationalism that the state piggy-backed on the tradition of ancestor worship, which is religious in the sense that it deals with what happens after death, and the tradition of Bushido, which has nothing to do with religion. It didn't have anything whatsoever to do with being rewarded in the afterlife, but everything to do with honor/shame in this world. Kamikaze was much more of a culturally motivated thing than religious.
If We the People could organize and come together on the scale necessary to make a violent revolution so obviously the will of the People that the military would refuse to engage, we could far more easily come together to ELECT the government we want. Remember, it would have to be a HUGE percentage of the population that rose up to cause desertions and whatnot amongst the military/police forces responsible for putting violent unrest down. Otherwise, it's just a few more Wacos, slightly more violent suppression of "riots" or "protests". We already incarcerate millions due to drugs - "we" wouldn't hesitate to incarcerate millions more due to "domestic terrorism".
What I said was that parents should be the final arbiters of what their children are taught because the state ought to have no right to impose much beyond standards of minimum education on children.
And how does that work, exactly? One teacher, 30 kids, 30 different sets of parental beliefs about what should and should not be taught. If the parents are that concerned, they can home school. Can't afford homeschooling? Then I guess they want to use the publicly funded, thus publicly directed resources. If they don't like the publicly directed curriculum, they are free to run for the local school board and influence public policy. Just like everyone else.
It isn't that there is a Top One Percent that most people get pissed about. If they were just wealthier than everyone else, most people would be okay with that. It's the manner in which they appear to have rigged the system to their benefit, and our detriment, that has everyone all pissed. "The system" is no longer working for a growing number of people, so a growing number of people are getting pissed at "The system" and those that it benefits.
Another common fallacy is assuming people are rational. They are not. Since we are discussing how the average consumer values privacy, taking into account common irrational decision making processes is not only valid, it's necessary.
What are you, a robot? Actual human beings that spend large amounts of time together, as in say a work environment, tend to engage in this human ritual known as "getting to know each other". That is, we share little bits of information about who we are, on a personal level, in order to connect to our fellow human beings, on a personal level. One common one, especially on Mondays, is "What did you do this weekend?" If one engaged in a social activity with another human being, generally that information is shared. If that other human being is what we call a "significant other", their name tends to get repeated due to multiple weekends spent engaged in social activities with this person. If one is uncomfortable with the idea of revealing that one is in a homosexual relationship, this common form of human interaction can become stressful. I must either lie about the exact nature of this relationship, or attempt to avoid too much discussion of it in order to avoid the natural human curiosity repeated mentions of "Bob" will bring about in my coworkers.
You know, we don't have to guess. S&P said why they downgraded the US' credit rating. "More broadly, the downgrade reflects our view that the effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policymaking and political institutions have weakened at a time of ongoing fiscal and economic challenges to a degree more than we envisioned when we assigned a negative outlook to the rating on April 18, 2011". This was in conjunction with Congress playing chicken with the debt ceiling, threatening not to raise it, which would have resulted in the US failing to meet some financial obligations. It is indisputable fact that the US credit rating was downgraded b/c the political leadership valued playing politics over doing what was necessary to meet the US' financial obligations. Whether this was due to the Tea Party's influence or not is perhaps debatable.
Name one international body that actually accomplishes things AND is less politically motivated than the US government.
The IMF. They accomplish things and are motivated by greed, not politics.
Hey, you didn't say it had to be a positive example.
What I find particularly ludicrous about "money == speech" is that it is only accepted in the political arena. Substituting any other context makes the statement absurd. "Yes, officer, I gave that woman money to have sex with me. Since when is it illegal to talk a woman into sex?" "Yes, I gave that interviewer money to hire me. Since when can't I speak on my own behalf in an interview?" It just doesn't work.
That's certainly a possibility, although a frightening one. I can't imagine anything other than truly scary secret knowledge that would make the current path of the executive branch a wise one. Fortunately, I find it more likely that it isn't secret knowledge so much as hidden influences that acted on both Presidents. When you're new to that incredible level of responsibility, having several people that have been in the game for decades come to you and explain why THIS course of action is best and THAT course of action could very well be catastrophic makes it difficult to ignore their advice. I find it very credible that there are persuasive, influential power brokers that sit behind the scenes that are truly the ones guiding much of public policy. And these players and their goals and their worldview doesn't change every 4 or 8 years.
Coast to coast? Driving 400 miles away from the coast will barely get you out of my coastal state, taking the most direct route. I personally don't drive much, but my parents frequently (2 or 3 times a month) travel a 300 mile round trip to visit their grand kids. Without leaving the state.
That's actually why it's so polarized. They keep ratcheting up the hyperbole and partisan rancor in order to disguise the fact that there really is no difference in core policies. It's like identical twins talking loudly about how they totally have different haircuts.
I think today the respect for wealth is more attributable to people's desire to be rich, and the inherent ability for humans to rationalize. "I want to be rich, I am a good person, therefore there must be something about being rich that is worth respect." It's not even conscious, most people would say they want to be rich because either they don't want to have to work or they want the nicer things in life. Neither of which are qualities to necessarily respect (not that I find anything inherently objectionable about them, either). But everyone is the hero of their own story, so the scumbag brain convinces them that their lazy or greedy desires are minor quirks and that deep down, they want to be rich for some undefined admirable reason. That's also a reason people despise wealthy assholes so much more than poor assholes. The wealthy asshole is providing direct evidence contrary to my irrational desires, causing friction between what I want and my ability to rationalize it. People HATE having their bubbles burst.
The thing is, assuming morality is evenly distributed across humanity independent of wealth, you still have more "evil" perpetrated by the rich. A poor immoral person can go out and rob maybe half a dozen people before being caught and put in jail. A rich immoral person can destroy the lives of hundreds or thousands of people, often escaping the legal or moral consequences of their actions. So, immorality in the wealthy is a much larger social problem than immorality in the poor. It is perfectly natural for the average, decent person to despise the powerful person that abuses his fellow man more than the relatively powerless person - the scale of abuse is much greater.
Rating how a teacher does their job isn't easy. How well the students do on a test? Measured against how other students performed on the same test that year? Measured against how previous years' students performed on that test? Measured against how those same students performed on different tests in previous years? Do a before and after test? Over what time frame do you look? A single year (one bad class could ruin a teacher)? Five years (a bad teacher gets to screw five groups of kids)?
No Child Left Behind took this approach and applied it to schools. And everyone I know in education says it made things worse, not better. In large part because it is really hard to quantify "good" teaching vs "bad" teaching based on test scores.
Wait, how do we know he didn't sell the code? B/c he said he didn't?
*sigh* The representative for the program said that the provided lunch should have been considered suitable, they are investigating this incident b/c, according to the "nanny state" it shouldn't have happened. The "real story" is unclear, but at worst, it is the story of a human being making a mistake and doing his job poorly.
Some people will buy into any absurd nonsense just to win a petty argument.
Accepting a single example of miscommunication as "shit happens, move on" is not absurd. If this revealed some flaws in the guidelines being used, or if you want to debate the practice of having food inspectors for childrens' lunches, fine. Suggesting that a single instance of minor human failure is an indictment of an entire system is, well, absurd.
I enjoyed that series, but it could use some serious restructuring. There are really 3 or 4 stories that only tangentially relate to one another, all being told at the same time. Breaking them apart and telling them separately would cut down on the confusion in the first half of the series (wait, who is this and where are we?), as well as allow him to spend some time on the scenes that are only alluded to. Although, I understand that Esslemont's work fills in some of those gaps. I haven't read him, yet.
I can second the annoyingly blatant proselytizing philosophy in this series. Goodkind also fell victim to the Jordan problem - the middle of his series just kind of wanders around, looking for a conclusion to the plot. Let's hope Sanderson does a better job than Goodkind's inane deus ex machina.
I don't know about awesome. If you just read the "prime" series, the ones by Erikson, there are so many plot gaps filled in by the "secondary" series that it quickly becomes confusing. He also keeps introducing completely new people/places/plots and spending 600 pages on them before giving you any idea whatsoever how they relate to what you've read already. There are really 3 or 4 separate stories that have some slight overlap where the protagonists of each story briefly interact with the other protagonists. Each story in itself is engaging, but the structure could use quite a bit of overhauling.