My point is that there was a decline in loyalty. A decline in willingness to contribute.
And my point is that a state is not entitled to loyalty or servitude any more than, say, a corporation would be. It needs to pay for them. In practice, that means "bread and circuses", altough things like public healthcare works too.
Soldiers were at time given land on the frontier. The freebies referred to are those given to the later citizens living in the city of Rome, citizens who largely no longer answered the call to service when their fellow citizens on the frontier were being attacked.As their ancestors once did.
Their ancestors lived in a city-state and were answering the call to defend their own homes, not some stranger who lives on another side of the continent, where they couldn't get to even if they wanted to.
Also, they're not their "fellow citizens", they're subjects of the Emperor. It's not their Empire, it's his, so let him take care of it. Which is a perfectly reasonable stance. Why should the average peon care if the lord of the land is Roman Emperor or the King of Franks? And that again gets us to bread and circuses, brought to you by the Emperor and the Empire. Look how good you have it under us! Be inspired to give a shit!
Nationalism is a recent invention, and whether it's a good idea is questionable at the very best.
Because the concept of citizenship transformed from one heavy on responsibility to one heavy with entitlement.
Responsibility to what, exactly speaking? Foreign conqueror? An abstract concept of a nation? "All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?" Do you perhaps think a shorter list inspires more loyalty?
Romans no longer felt the need to personally defend their frontier, as compared to their ancestors who effectively had universal conscription.
So bread is a "freebie" but the blood in my veins is public property? Really? And what's this talk about "my" frontier - I don't own any land, so what's my stake defending your frontier?
The only way it could be my frontier was if I owned a share of the state, but in that case the bread and circuses are not "freebies", they're the dividend I'm entitled to as a shareholder. Or you can go fight the Huns by yourself while I walk away. Choose freely.
NSA is on the east coast, Yellowbone will just kill the west coast, and starve the rest of the world a little.
If Yellowstone erupts, it's the end for the USA. And even if the country by some miracle survives, it won't have the resources to waste on either playing superpower or gathering data "just because". It would be hard pressed to even power the data center.
That's not very interesting. What would interest me is AI that shapes and modifies the game while you play it, based on your taste and play style.
Having read some dungeon/game/whatever master guides for some roleplaying games for fun, I've noticed the part that gets paid most attention to is the "how to keep the players fenced in the area you've prepared" section. Conclusion: adapting to unexpected actions by players would require a superhuman AI, at least in the opinion of people who make games for a living.
It maintains anonymity since you can choose who knows about your vote, but also ensures accurate accounting.
"If you don't choose to show me your vote, and if it isn't what I told you to vote, it'll be bad for your kneecaps, employment prospects and children."
Or if you don't like double negatives: any mechanism that does something will eventually fail to do so.
This is actually incorrect. A mechanism that has a fixed chance of failure per year has its chances of still working approach zero as the number of years approaches inifinity. On the other hand, a mechanism that has a chance of failure that asymptotically nears zero as time goes by - for example, a medical researcher finding ways to fix one possible failure mode after another - has a finite chance of still working after inifinite number of years.
While that's impressive for a small rodent, and while they do indeed have some impressive cancer resistance mechanisms (resistance, not immunity), if you were to start genetically modifying them to live, say, thrice as long, cases of cancer would inevitably start appearing.
And you know this... how? Because "would inevitably" sounds a lot like circular reasoning to me.
To use GP's simplistic terminology, their cellular reproduction mechanism is built to wear down slower, but that doesn't mean it doesn't wear at all.
Which would be relevant if cancer was associated with this wear-down, but it isn't. Little kids get cancer; people who look like walking corpses from age might not, despite their repair - or "cellular reproduction" - mechanisms being all but completely broken by time.
GP's somewhat simplistic statement is essentially correct.
GP's statement about biology is unfounded speculation, while their statement about entropy is correct in the same sense as the statement "if you live long enough, all the atoms in your body will spontaneously quantum tunnel to form a black hole, killing you" is correct: yes, it could happen and it's impossible to guarantee it won't and given long enough it will, it's just that the actual arrangement of material in your body makes it unlikely to be a problem in any reasonable time period.
In other words, the laws of thermodynamics don't have any real relevance to a discussion about curing diseases.
The OP's point is that it's akin to saying all heart disease can be treated the same since the basic problem is that the blood stops flowing.
Well... yes, you can: replace the heart. It's not necessarily the safest or most efficient way to treat a particular form of heart disease, but it will work on everything from bullet wounds to clogged arteries to faulty valves.
So when we're all sitting around collecting checks, where do the goods and services come from?
From businesses able and willing to pay their employees enough and treat them well enough that they can get them to work for them without needing the threat of dying in a ditch as a stick. Mr. Peyna can't do so, thus either whatever he's selling is simply not valuable enough to make a buck without being subsidized by other's misery, or he's simply a lousy businessman. Either way, his continued business represents economic perversion, not efficiency.
And yes, it's likely that you can't afford some goods and services when they're provided at their real cost (= what they cost when no one has a literal or proverbial gun against their head). At that point you need to choose whether you live without them until someone figures a more efficient way to provide them (such as automation), or join a long list of oppressors preying on their fellow man. And if you choose the latter - if you choose to join the proud tradition of every slavemaster, colonial empire and tyrant in history - do understand what you've chosen: that the best you can hope is that you'll die before your world crumbles like an obsolete bad dream it is as humanity continues to advance. But, at least you'll have plenty of cheap crap to distract yourself from having no future. I can't say if that's worth it; ask Ku Klux Klan.
For the end result it doesn't matter - the world tends towards the state of least oppression, since that's most stable, since it has least rebels - but it would be a lot less painful to make the journey in a planned, controlled manner rather than letting social pressures grow bad enough for a revolt.
People spending huge swaths of their leisure time playing games where they go to strip clubs and kill hookers.
Sure sounds like fucking Spiritual Malaise to me.
But it's not. It's simply people doing the same thing they've always done, but using less resources and bothering less bystanders while doing so. The very fact that you consider people playing cops and robbers a sign of spiritual malaise means you're living in such utopian times you've lost all sense of perspective.
But what he failed to grasp was that the mindset of people in general changes.
No, it doesn't. Plato the philosopher dreamed of an utopia ruled by philosopher kings, while thousands of years later Asimov the writer thinks "creative types" - such as writers - will be the true elite of mankind.
This guy was a genius to conclude that robots would be doing a lot of the labor that men used to do, and since the people would be so great in numbers, they'd get bored to such an extent that would cause them mental repercussions. This is beyond what anyone would have been able to experience up to the 60's, in my opinion.
"Idle hands are the devil's tools" -St. Jerome, around 400 AD.
To quote the Asimov quote in the article, "I can make about A.D. 2014 is that in a society of enforced leisure, the most glorious single word in the vocabulary will have become work!". Enforced leisure is called unemployment. And yes, the most glorious single word seems more and more to be 'work'.
"Enforced leisure" doesn't make sense as a concept, since leisure is simply time when you don't have any pressing issues of survival at hand. Unemployment is not leisure any more than time spent desperately trying to find water in a desert would be. And Asimov was implying that work would be glorified since people were searching for meaning in their lives (and, oddly for a writer to assume, apparently unable to find it except in manual labour), while in our society work is glorified because our economic model is breaking down with automation, leaving more and more people destitute.
In other words, Asimov's prediction failed utterly. And it always had an undercurrent of "I can find purpose in writing but the unwashed masses can't", which is utter horseshit.
Rather than pay my employees more so I can stay in business, but make less money myself, I too could simply not work and make a decent wage.
Your business is obviously not providing much, if any, added value if you can't make it profitable without an endless supply of desperate people to exploit. It would be an awesome boost to economy to have such living dead enterprises go under and release the resources they've tie up for the use of actually profitable ones.
Automatically recording information about the general area of an important location: awesome. Giving you a reliable idea of which direction you should be looking, or some other way of limiting the scope of your search so it's not "needle in haystack" hunting: great. Showing you exactly where and what your target is and completely eliminating any need for exploration: bad.
Yes, but automatically recording conversations and coordinates doesn't change this balance at all. All it means is that if some alien gives you an exact location - for example, if the Zog-Fot-Pik tell you the location of their homeworld - you don't need to play secretary and write it down. And once you have dozens of coordinates - and you will - you don't need to go through pages and pages of notes to see if any happen to be near, you see it right there on the map.
Exploration is fun. The details of cartography are not. So let the computer handle the latter.
Making poor Linda suffer for the fact that this unfortunate job has been foisted upon her would not achieve anything. Statistically Linda is highly likely to be a single mom or one half of a low income family and I can't blame her for not being reluctant to take a stand over this and risk losing her job over it.
Unfortunately, this leads to a rather bleak conclusion about the future of our societies. After all, if Linda won't stand up to creeping tyranny, then who will? China?
Perhaps it's time to admit you can't have a free society when people's income depends on other people's goodwill and institute guaranteed minimum income sufficient to live on. The alternative seems to be continued Finlandization of individuals in relation to corporations and political entities their livelihood depends on. As has been noted, you never know who might be posting pictures of you partying on your free time to Facebook, and how they might affect your future employment prospects. The world is becoming a panopticon; the only real question is: do you want the warden to have power over you?
I do worry that they'll have to dumb it down for a modern audience and that worries me. SC3 suffered from this a bit. For example, you really had to take notes to complete SC2 unless you'd played it a dozen times before -- someone would mention a planet and star system in the middle of the conversation and if you forgot it you may never be able to get back to it. I LOVED that aspect of old games, but with pop-up maps and waypoints listed in auto-populated journals, newer games put this aspect on auto pilot. That's fine for many games -- it puts you deeper into actual gameplay, but it's an aspect I would sorely miss in SC2 if it weren't there.
I wouldn't. Automatically log every conversation and mark any coordinates mentioned, with a link back to the log. Why in blazes shouldn't the computer handle a simple and, frankly, tedious bookkeeping task? Removing manual copy-pasting of text is not "dumbing down" a game.
BTC does not fill any niche. What is it that BTC allows me to do that I cannot do through the bank, using any currency of my choice?
Transfer money in a matter of minutes rather than days. Transfer money without having to pay the bank for the privilege. Get notification of incoming transactions in real time without having to pay the bank for the privilege. Be able to transfer money to organizations my bank or government might disagree with, such as Wikileaks. And, as events in Cypros so demonstrated, not have to worry about my account being suddenly frozen because some supernational institution is pondering whether it'll confiscate it for reasons that have nothing to do with me.
The problem with that line of though is there is a wealth of empirical data to back up the theory.
There's a wealth of empirical data to back almost any economic theory. When you have the entire history of the world to draw from, you will find examples of "condition A is true, then B happens" for almost all values of A and B. On the other hand, every situation is unique, so you can't really isolate the causal relationship between A and B. And on the third tentacle, people have money riding on convincing others (and often themselves) that such causal relationships exist or don't exist. The end result is that economics is a hopeless, confused mess with zero predictive power.
By "metal", you most likely mean iron. Iron ore is a product of the initial oxidization of the oceans by the first photosynthesizing organisms, which the modern plants descend from. Therefore, it is clearly an agricultural product.
Also, since iron nucleus are formed inside stellar furnaces by nuclear fusion they can be considered a form of nuclear waste. Are you trying to kill Mother Earth just for your musical enjoyment, you maniac?
Slashdot should return to providing apolitical discussion concerning science and technology.
There are no such things as apolitical discussions. Even if the topic was apolitical (and the only way it could be if it was utterly meaningless to anyone) before, the second you have a discussion politics enter the picture in the form of power games and status. Catholic church's contraceptives ban is an excellent example of just that.
For that matter, if religious institutions can claim being persecuted just because they're required to follow the same laws as everyone else, that does have some implications to science too.
What I don't understand is the people saying they shouldn't even try.
People aren't saying they shouldn't try, people are saying they aren't trying, for any reasonable definition of "try".
Compare: if I start making noises about becoming the next world heavyweight boxing champion, good luck to me. Except I'm a middle-aged fatso who hasn't been in a fight since I was a kid, and I haven't began a Herculean training regimen to seek my (unlikely to begin with) dreams, or even so much as memorized the rules of boxing, I'm just asking for sponsors. Wouldn't you be just a little bit spectical about this "ultranova for champ" project?
Slashdot Mirror
And my point is that a state is not entitled to loyalty or servitude any more than, say, a corporation would be. It needs to pay for them. In practice, that means "bread and circuses", altough things like public healthcare works too.
Their ancestors lived in a city-state and were answering the call to defend their own homes, not some stranger who lives on another side of the continent, where they couldn't get to even if they wanted to.
Also, they're not their "fellow citizens", they're subjects of the Emperor. It's not their Empire, it's his, so let him take care of it. Which is a perfectly reasonable stance. Why should the average peon care if the lord of the land is Roman Emperor or the King of Franks? And that again gets us to bread and circuses, brought to you by the Emperor and the Empire. Look how good you have it under us! Be inspired to give a shit!
Nationalism is a recent invention, and whether it's a good idea is questionable at the very best.
Responsibility to what, exactly speaking? Foreign conqueror? An abstract concept of a nation? "All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?" Do you perhaps think a shorter list inspires more loyalty?
So bread is a "freebie" but the blood in my veins is public property? Really? And what's this talk about "my" frontier - I don't own any land, so what's my stake defending your frontier?
The only way it could be my frontier was if I owned a share of the state, but in that case the bread and circuses are not "freebies", they're the dividend I'm entitled to as a shareholder. Or you can go fight the Huns by yourself while I walk away. Choose freely.
If Yellowstone erupts, it's the end for the USA. And even if the country by some miracle survives, it won't have the resources to waste on either playing superpower or gathering data "just because". It would be hard pressed to even power the data center.
Having read some dungeon/game/whatever master guides for some roleplaying games for fun, I've noticed the part that gets paid most attention to is the "how to keep the players fenced in the area you've prepared" section. Conclusion: adapting to unexpected actions by players would require a superhuman AI, at least in the opinion of people who make games for a living.
"If you don't choose to show me your vote, and if it isn't what I told you to vote, it'll be bad for your kneecaps, employment prospects and children."
Constipation?
Pity they didn't have xkcd back then.
This is actually incorrect. A mechanism that has a fixed chance of failure per year has its chances of still working approach zero as the number of years approaches inifinity. On the other hand, a mechanism that has a chance of failure that asymptotically nears zero as time goes by - for example, a medical researcher finding ways to fix one possible failure mode after another - has a finite chance of still working after inifinite number of years.
And you know this ... how? Because "would inevitably" sounds a lot like circular reasoning to me.
Which would be relevant if cancer was associated with this wear-down, but it isn't. Little kids get cancer; people who look like walking corpses from age might not, despite their repair - or "cellular reproduction" - mechanisms being all but completely broken by time.
GP's statement about biology is unfounded speculation, while their statement about entropy is correct in the same sense as the statement "if you live long enough, all the atoms in your body will spontaneously quantum tunnel to form a black hole, killing you" is correct: yes, it could happen and it's impossible to guarantee it won't and given long enough it will, it's just that the actual arrangement of material in your body makes it unlikely to be a problem in any reasonable time period.
In other words, the laws of thermodynamics don't have any real relevance to a discussion about curing diseases.
Well... yes, you can: replace the heart. It's not necessarily the safest or most efficient way to treat a particular form of heart disease, but it will work on everything from bullet wounds to clogged arteries to faulty valves.
From businesses able and willing to pay their employees enough and treat them well enough that they can get them to work for them without needing the threat of dying in a ditch as a stick. Mr. Peyna can't do so, thus either whatever he's selling is simply not valuable enough to make a buck without being subsidized by other's misery, or he's simply a lousy businessman. Either way, his continued business represents economic perversion, not efficiency.
And yes, it's likely that you can't afford some goods and services when they're provided at their real cost (= what they cost when no one has a literal or proverbial gun against their head). At that point you need to choose whether you live without them until someone figures a more efficient way to provide them (such as automation), or join a long list of oppressors preying on their fellow man. And if you choose the latter - if you choose to join the proud tradition of every slavemaster, colonial empire and tyrant in history - do understand what you've chosen: that the best you can hope is that you'll die before your world crumbles like an obsolete bad dream it is as humanity continues to advance. But, at least you'll have plenty of cheap crap to distract yourself from having no future. I can't say if that's worth it; ask Ku Klux Klan.
For the end result it doesn't matter - the world tends towards the state of least oppression, since that's most stable, since it has least rebels - but it would be a lot less painful to make the journey in a planned, controlled manner rather than letting social pressures grow bad enough for a revolt.
But it's not. It's simply people doing the same thing they've always done, but using less resources and bothering less bystanders while doing so. The very fact that you consider people playing cops and robbers a sign of spiritual malaise means you're living in such utopian times you've lost all sense of perspective.
No, it doesn't. Plato the philosopher dreamed of an utopia ruled by philosopher kings, while thousands of years later Asimov the writer thinks "creative types" - such as writers - will be the true elite of mankind.
"Idle hands are the devil's tools" -St. Jerome, around 400 AD.
"Enforced leisure" doesn't make sense as a concept, since leisure is simply time when you don't have any pressing issues of survival at hand. Unemployment is not leisure any more than time spent desperately trying to find water in a desert would be. And Asimov was implying that work would be glorified since people were searching for meaning in their lives (and, oddly for a writer to assume, apparently unable to find it except in manual labour), while in our society work is glorified because our economic model is breaking down with automation, leaving more and more people destitute.
In other words, Asimov's prediction failed utterly. And it always had an undercurrent of "I can find purpose in writing but the unwashed masses can't", which is utter horseshit.
Your business is obviously not providing much, if any, added value if you can't make it profitable without an endless supply of desperate people to exploit. It would be an awesome boost to economy to have such living dead enterprises go under and release the resources they've tie up for the use of actually profitable ones.
Yes, but automatically recording conversations and coordinates doesn't change this balance at all. All it means is that if some alien gives you an exact location - for example, if the Zog-Fot-Pik tell you the location of their homeworld - you don't need to play secretary and write it down. And once you have dozens of coordinates - and you will - you don't need to go through pages and pages of notes to see if any happen to be near, you see it right there on the map.
Exploration is fun. The details of cartography are not. So let the computer handle the latter.
Unfortunately, this leads to a rather bleak conclusion about the future of our societies. After all, if Linda won't stand up to creeping tyranny, then who will? China?
Perhaps it's time to admit you can't have a free society when people's income depends on other people's goodwill and institute guaranteed minimum income sufficient to live on. The alternative seems to be continued Finlandization of individuals in relation to corporations and political entities their livelihood depends on. As has been noted, you never know who might be posting pictures of you partying on your free time to Facebook, and how they might affect your future employment prospects. The world is becoming a panopticon; the only real question is: do you want the warden to have power over you?
I wouldn't. Automatically log every conversation and mark any coordinates mentioned, with a link back to the log. Why in blazes shouldn't the computer handle a simple and, frankly, tedious bookkeeping task? Removing manual copy-pasting of text is not "dumbing down" a game.
Transfer money in a matter of minutes rather than days. Transfer money without having to pay the bank for the privilege. Get notification of incoming transactions in real time without having to pay the bank for the privilege. Be able to transfer money to organizations my bank or government might disagree with, such as Wikileaks. And, as events in Cypros so demonstrated, not have to worry about my account being suddenly frozen because some supernational institution is pondering whether it'll confiscate it for reasons that have nothing to do with me.
There's a wealth of empirical data to back almost any economic theory. When you have the entire history of the world to draw from, you will find examples of "condition A is true, then B happens" for almost all values of A and B. On the other hand, every situation is unique, so you can't really isolate the causal relationship between A and B. And on the third tentacle, people have money riding on convincing others (and often themselves) that such causal relationships exist or don't exist. The end result is that economics is a hopeless, confused mess with zero predictive power.
And yet the Bitcoin blockchain keeps getting transactions.
By "metal", you most likely mean iron. Iron ore is a product of the initial oxidization of the oceans by the first photosynthesizing organisms, which the modern plants descend from. Therefore, it is clearly an agricultural product.
Also, since iron nucleus are formed inside stellar furnaces by nuclear fusion they can be considered a form of nuclear waste. Are you trying to kill Mother Earth just for your musical enjoyment, you maniac?
Because you live in a pack/herd/society, and that means not always getting your own way.
So don't expect other people to care about your wishes, either.
There are no such things as apolitical discussions. Even if the topic was apolitical (and the only way it could be if it was utterly meaningless to anyone) before, the second you have a discussion politics enter the picture in the form of power games and status. Catholic church's contraceptives ban is an excellent example of just that.
For that matter, if religious institutions can claim being persecuted just because they're required to follow the same laws as everyone else, that does have some implications to science too.
Well, their version of it, anyway.
People aren't saying they shouldn't try, people are saying they aren't trying, for any reasonable definition of "try".
Compare: if I start making noises about becoming the next world heavyweight boxing champion, good luck to me. Except I'm a middle-aged fatso who hasn't been in a fight since I was a kid, and I haven't began a Herculean training regimen to seek my (unlikely to begin with) dreams, or even so much as memorized the rules of boxing, I'm just asking for sponsors. Wouldn't you be just a little bit spectical about this "ultranova for champ" project?