Bertrand Russell said something on that order, and then added something like, "The best candidate for the position is someone who doesn't WANT the job."
The obvious problem with that is that if you force me into a position of power I don't want, I have both the motive and the means to destroy you. After which I'll just disappear with the treasury.
The need to eat also has to be controlled else we become huge and heavy. Discipline is a human thing. Animals simply react to instinctive triggers.
So being fat makes you subhuman? Or, in your words, "simply an animal"? And does this mean that it's not murder if the victim was fat, because you can't murder an animal?
Also, does this mean that McDonald's is actually an NSA cover operation aimed for removing human rights from American citizens by fattening them into losing their human status?
Or by outsourcing the janitors and secretaries and keeping the programmers. Gone will be the opportunities to work your way up thru a company from the mailroom to the boardroom.
They're long gone already, if they ever existed. However, the outsourcing problem is easy to deal with: just include subcontractors in the calculation. That is, if you pay some company to clean your toilets for you, then it's their lowest-pay employee, if that's less than your lowest-pay employee, who determines your maximum wage. And of course, if they are buying goods or services from someone, those companies get pulled into the equation, and so forth.
In other words, you wanna cut costs by shipping jobs to Slavelabouristan? Fine, but you'll take a paycut yourself and so will anyone who's doing business with you. Let's see if you can think of some other way to stay competitive - and if you can't, that's okay: someone more competent will, and you'll still earn a living wage in your new janitorial or burger-flipping position. It's just "creative destruction" getting rid of deadwood, amirite?
Or just call the BP. That should get rid of both oil and every living thing within hundred miles with one swift strike. Now that's real free-market efficiency !-)
Mostly tulips. I still wait for the day when someone tries to cash in a sensible amount of money. Not some 100s but rather some 100,000s. If that holds, the currency will hold water. If that doesn't go down well and causes the price to plummet, it's a tulip.
Hasn't this happened several times already? Someone sells a large number of Bitcoins, the market crashes, then recovers in hours or days.
The thing is, unlike tulips Bitcoins have utility (easy value transfer over long distances), so the "natural" price tends to go slowly up as the market and with it that utility grow. With tulips that never happened, so once the bubble burst the price plummeted back to "pretty decorative flower" level.
Compare with gold, which is basically a 10,000 year bubble: people hoard it because they expect other people to hoard it too. Most of the utility comes from this speculation; while there's some utility beyond that, it accounts for a tiny fraction of the price. Yet gold is usually considered a safe investment, and that very belief makes it so.
Astroturfers on Slashdot keep posting these stories as if Bitcoin matters. It is a scam and once the governments shut down the illegal transactions it will disappear.
Bitcoin matters because it fills a need in the digital era: small cheap transactions that don't take days to complete (banks), depend on the goodwill of untrustworthy entities (PayPal, Visa) nor require a monthly fee to participate in (Visa). Even if a government were to shut it down a new one would simply pop right up, thus all said government would really accomplish was to hurt their own economic development.
This is especially true of the developed economies which import physical goods and export intangibles: it's the latter which are likely candidates for Bitcoin payments, so banning Bitcoin would make it harder for people to give you money. And whatever else can be said about them, I think we can all agree that politicians are unlikely to turn down easy money.
Think of Bitcoin as Cash 2.0 for the Internet era. Or at least one of the candidates. Most likely the winning candidate due to the network effect, but even if it isn't, one will be.
No, it makes us disciplined. A useful skill, at least in moderation, but hardly the defining factor of humanity.
If we give in to animal instincts then we are not human but simply an animal.
That you survived long enough to learn to write means you've given in to your animalistic need to eat and live quite a lot of times. In other words, your philosophy might need some further thought.
Can someone explain to me how, for a project like setting up exchanges for Obamacare, NoSQL database systems is a rational choice?
Well, the obvious answer is that someone involved has goals other than the site succeeding, such as lining their pockets or even outright sabotage. After the government shutdown fiasco, the latter sadly can't be ruled out; the US is basically at Civil Cold War at this point.
But lets not get carried away by comparing the prices on the cars you bought used. For a direct comparison, lets stick with MSRP.
But you can only buy cars that actually exist on the market, so until and unless EVs are available used, the choice is between a used cheap GV and an expensive new EV, so those are what the potential buyers will be comparing. And apart from the extra price immediately disqualifying many customers, there's also deprecation to consider: car value drops the fastest in the beginning, so it makes more economic sense to buy used, even if you could afford a new one.
All it does is limit the pay of people who actually achieve. This can be gotten around reletively simply too with deferments into stock options.
No, it limits the pay of CEOs. And even they can get more pay simply by paying their underlings more. Which is only fair, since it's those underlings who actually did the work for the achievement the CEO is taking credit for.
That said, I agree with you conlusion about the actual results. Sociopathic professional looters have no trouble finding new and exciting ways to game the system and crashing the economy again and again and again. Once systemic corruption takes hold, as it has, it's almost impossible to purge.
Oh well. Times have changed before, they will change again, and given the increasing pace of change I'd say they're about to. It'll be exciting to see what'll replace global capitalism, and whether it'll be an improvement.
German might disagree, they are at 5% now and projecting to be at 25% by 2050.
More to the point, german politicians are making promises that won't succeed or fail until long after they've left office. I guess it's fair to say they're trying, but it's far too early to make any predictions about the actual outcome.
The idea of a 'state' in the modern sense is also fairly new (until the rise, and then the fall, of absolute monarchy, what we would think of as 'state power' was massively diffused through assorted feudal mechanisms); but cultures whose normative social structures are autonomous individuals, property, and private contract? Pretty much unheard of.
Actually, isn't that the whole idea of feudalism? The local lord owns the land and extracts absolutely binding oaths of loyalty from anyone who wants to work it, turning them into serfs (because that pesky government isn't there to limit the freedom of contract), and enforces his private law with his private army on his private land. In other words, libertarian utopia.
So, do libertarians actually want feudalism or do they have some reason to believe things would turn out differently this time around? Because I'm not seeing any.
The big difference between republicans and democrats is that republicans tend to make policy decisions based on calculations while democrats base theirs on wishes.
No. Politicians and regular people of all stripes make their political decisions based on ideology and then rationalize them afterwards. Except when they don't bother and simply assert that they're rational and "the other party" is irrational - or at least "tend to" be, which gives a convenient way to dismiss any evidence to the contrary as exceptions to the rule.
I think the problem is that most human thought is still stuck in the "greek period", where what matters is aesthetic and religious/ideological appeal rather than connection with reality. Physics escaped it, and have advcanced tremendously as a result; the question is, how do we move politics and economy from the realm of faith to the realm of science?
But when the road is covered in ice and snow, you don't need more power
Sure you do: you're compressing the snow. That means more rolling resistance.
Ice might work in your favour, being hard, but then again you need studs to drive on it, which work by puncturing it, so that hardness might also work against you. Can't win:(.
A sit-in (physical force) at a restaurant (something) is designed to hurt their business. Therefore, an act of violence.
A sit-in is not physical force. The "something" spoken of in the definition is a physical object, not an abstraction like business. Changing the meaning of common words like "violence" for the sake of your argument means you've taken leave of reality and embarked on the path of madness. That's a rather high price to pay for pretending you're right on a pseudonymous Internet forum, don't you think?
Right now it's valued at $730, 2 weeks ago it was $200 and a few months ago it crashed.
You cannot run a business with currencies this volatile.
Sure you can, you just need a buffer fund that allows you to delay any currency exchanges until a favorable time. Which also serves to reduce volatility.
In other words, you need to keep some cash reserves on hand, for all currencies you use.
So, because it's possible to pay for parking in a few places with conkers, you think conkers are a currency?
Depends. Does whoever you're paying to then use the conkers to pay for other things? If yes, then yes, they are being used as a currency (physical tokens representing abstracted value, to be exact).
Existing is mighty suspicious. 100% of all crimes in history were performed by people who existed at the time. Better search every existing person you come across, just to be sure.
Oh well, I guess some people are just naturally well adapted to police states.
You are very wrong. That is not Liberty, its Tyranny. The 4th EXPLICITLY prohibits this sort of behavior.
No, it's perfectly constitutional: if you drive on a road, you might cross a state border at some point, after which the contents of your blood or the blood itself could be extracted and resold, therefore inspecting them clearly falls under the Interstate Commerce Clause.
Because the explicit command causes unintended side effects in drives manufactured prior to the command's introduction.
Such as? The post you linked to explicitly said they were simply guessing.
On the other hand, compression algorithms do have plenty of weird side effects, from increased latency to randomly varying write speeds to the impossibility of estimating actual free space - because for every bit a lossless compression algorithm shaves off one file, it must add to some other file (because if a bigger file is made to look like a smaller file, the smaller file that looks like its compressed form must be moved out of the way, and the only place with room is what the bigger file just vacated). Thus some files are actually made bigger than their size implies.
Any file system supporting "secure" deletion should be filling deleted files' sectors in the background anyway.
Secure against what, exactly speaking? Even physical hard drives can remap blocks. And how many files actually need to be unrecoverable? Not many. And drives are cheap. So, if you store sensitive information, don't trust "secure erase" or even "drive wipers", just physically destroy the drive when you're done with it (but if you're too cheap for that, a drive wiper is still better than trusting an OS "secure" delete; even if the OS is trustworthy, filling the entire drive with garbage several times over has a much higher chance of pushing out your secret data than filling just a tiny fraction of it, as "secure" delete does). And given that, "secure" deletion is a pointless waste of resources that will actually lower people's security by giving them promises it can't keep.
Somebody calculated that when you give a child an MRI, that child has a 1/10,000 increased risk of brain cancer.
Unknown person calculated by an unknown method based on unknown data set that a person of unknown but low-ish age has a 1/10,000 increased risk over an unknown period compared to an unknown test group.
Why couldn't an operating system just write a big block of 0xFF bytes to an unused sector, which the SSD's controller would compress into an efficient representation of a low-information-content sector, instead of needing a dedicated command?
Why go to the trouble of implementing a command implicitly when you can implement it explicitly and avoid unintended side effects? Not to mention operating systems would still need to change the way they handle the disk to support the 0xFF method, and it would take up bandwidth needlessly.
Not with cops it shouldn't. They're there to upkeep the law, not make arrests or write tickets. If you start measuring performance, by those stats or any other, you create perverse incentives to, for example, search random people for made-up reasons or even plant evidence (because they need to arrest someone for a crime, least "unsolved crimes" statistic goes up).
I once worked in a factory where we got bonuses for going for a number of days without accidents. The result was that people hid the accidents from management, which then made investment decisions based on the delusion that the place was totally safe, with predictable results. That, and a number of other situations have led me to believe that you can't actually measure performance in almost any case: any metric always summs up and thus abstracts what is being measured, so people will always find loopholes and have incentives to use them.
Even something so monomaniacally focused on a single thing as economy tends to lead to spectacularly bad decisions as soon as performance bonuses get involved, so I'm extremely worried about how "cops that get results" get them, exactly speaking.
Slashdot Mirror
The obvious problem with that is that if you force me into a position of power I don't want, I have both the motive and the means to destroy you. After which I'll just disappear with the treasury.
So being fat makes you subhuman? Or, in your words, "simply an animal"? And does this mean that it's not murder if the victim was fat, because you can't murder an animal?
Also, does this mean that McDonald's is actually an NSA cover operation aimed for removing human rights from American citizens by fattening them into losing their human status?
They're long gone already, if they ever existed. However, the outsourcing problem is easy to deal with: just include subcontractors in the calculation. That is, if you pay some company to clean your toilets for you, then it's their lowest-pay employee, if that's less than your lowest-pay employee, who determines your maximum wage. And of course, if they are buying goods or services from someone, those companies get pulled into the equation, and so forth.
In other words, you wanna cut costs by shipping jobs to Slavelabouristan? Fine, but you'll take a paycut yourself and so will anyone who's doing business with you. Let's see if you can think of some other way to stay competitive - and if you can't, that's okay: someone more competent will, and you'll still earn a living wage in your new janitorial or burger-flipping position. It's just "creative destruction" getting rid of deadwood, amirite?
Or just call the BP. That should get rid of both oil and every living thing within hundred miles with one swift strike. Now that's real free-market efficiency !-)
Hasn't this happened several times already? Someone sells a large number of Bitcoins, the market crashes, then recovers in hours or days.
The thing is, unlike tulips Bitcoins have utility (easy value transfer over long distances), so the "natural" price tends to go slowly up as the market and with it that utility grow. With tulips that never happened, so once the bubble burst the price plummeted back to "pretty decorative flower" level.
Compare with gold, which is basically a 10,000 year bubble: people hoard it because they expect other people to hoard it too. Most of the utility comes from this speculation; while there's some utility beyond that, it accounts for a tiny fraction of the price. Yet gold is usually considered a safe investment, and that very belief makes it so.
Bitcoin matters because it fills a need in the digital era: small cheap transactions that don't take days to complete (banks), depend on the goodwill of untrustworthy entities (PayPal, Visa) nor require a monthly fee to participate in (Visa). Even if a government were to shut it down a new one would simply pop right up, thus all said government would really accomplish was to hurt their own economic development.
This is especially true of the developed economies which import physical goods and export intangibles: it's the latter which are likely candidates for Bitcoin payments, so banning Bitcoin would make it harder for people to give you money. And whatever else can be said about them, I think we can all agree that politicians are unlikely to turn down easy money.
Think of Bitcoin as Cash 2.0 for the Internet era. Or at least one of the candidates. Most likely the winning candidate due to the network effect, but even if it isn't, one will be.
No, it makes us disciplined. A useful skill, at least in moderation, but hardly the defining factor of humanity.
That you survived long enough to learn to write means you've given in to your animalistic need to eat and live quite a lot of times. In other words, your philosophy might need some further thought.
Well, the obvious answer is that someone involved has goals other than the site succeeding, such as lining their pockets or even outright sabotage. After the government shutdown fiasco, the latter sadly can't be ruled out; the US is basically at Civil Cold War at this point.
But you can only buy cars that actually exist on the market, so until and unless EVs are available used, the choice is between a used cheap GV and an expensive new EV, so those are what the potential buyers will be comparing. And apart from the extra price immediately disqualifying many customers, there's also deprecation to consider: car value drops the fastest in the beginning, so it makes more economic sense to buy used, even if you could afford a new one.
No, it limits the pay of CEOs. And even they can get more pay simply by paying their underlings more. Which is only fair, since it's those underlings who actually did the work for the achievement the CEO is taking credit for.
That said, I agree with you conlusion about the actual results. Sociopathic professional looters have no trouble finding new and exciting ways to game the system and crashing the economy again and again and again. Once systemic corruption takes hold, as it has, it's almost impossible to purge.
Oh well. Times have changed before, they will change again, and given the increasing pace of change I'd say they're about to. It'll be exciting to see what'll replace global capitalism, and whether it'll be an improvement.
More to the point, german politicians are making promises that won't succeed or fail until long after they've left office. I guess it's fair to say they're trying, but it's far too early to make any predictions about the actual outcome.
Actually, isn't that the whole idea of feudalism? The local lord owns the land and extracts absolutely binding oaths of loyalty from anyone who wants to work it, turning them into serfs (because that pesky government isn't there to limit the freedom of contract), and enforces his private law with his private army on his private land. In other words, libertarian utopia.
So, do libertarians actually want feudalism or do they have some reason to believe things would turn out differently this time around? Because I'm not seeing any.
No. Politicians and regular people of all stripes make their political decisions based on ideology and then rationalize them afterwards. Except when they don't bother and simply assert that they're rational and "the other party" is irrational - or at least "tend to" be, which gives a convenient way to dismiss any evidence to the contrary as exceptions to the rule.
I think the problem is that most human thought is still stuck in the "greek period", where what matters is aesthetic and religious/ideological appeal rather than connection with reality. Physics escaped it, and have advcanced tremendously as a result; the question is, how do we move politics and economy from the realm of faith to the realm of science?
Sure you do: you're compressing the snow. That means more rolling resistance.
Ice might work in your favour, being hard, but then again you need studs to drive on it, which work by puncturing it, so that hardness might also work against you. Can't win :(.
A sit-in is not physical force. The "something" spoken of in the definition is a physical object, not an abstraction like business. Changing the meaning of common words like "violence" for the sake of your argument means you've taken leave of reality and embarked on the path of madness. That's a rather high price to pay for pretending you're right on a pseudonymous Internet forum, don't you think?
Sure you can, you just need a buffer fund that allows you to delay any currency exchanges until a favorable time. Which also serves to reduce volatility.
In other words, you need to keep some cash reserves on hand, for all currencies you use.
Depends. Does whoever you're paying to then use the conkers to pay for other things? If yes, then yes, they are being used as a currency (physical tokens representing abstracted value, to be exact).
"The obvious path is humble, safe but pays the wages of a cook, not a champion." -Jade Empire
Existing is mighty suspicious. 100% of all crimes in history were performed by people who existed at the time. Better search every existing person you come across, just to be sure.
Oh well, I guess some people are just naturally well adapted to police states.
No, it's perfectly constitutional: if you drive on a road, you might cross a state border at some point, after which the contents of your blood or the blood itself could be extracted and resold, therefore inspecting them clearly falls under the Interstate Commerce Clause.
Such as? The post you linked to explicitly said they were simply guessing.
On the other hand, compression algorithms do have plenty of weird side effects, from increased latency to randomly varying write speeds to the impossibility of estimating actual free space - because for every bit a lossless compression algorithm shaves off one file, it must add to some other file (because if a bigger file is made to look like a smaller file, the smaller file that looks like its compressed form must be moved out of the way, and the only place with room is what the bigger file just vacated). Thus some files are actually made bigger than their size implies.
Secure against what, exactly speaking? Even physical hard drives can remap blocks. And how many files actually need to be unrecoverable? Not many. And drives are cheap. So, if you store sensitive information, don't trust "secure erase" or even "drive wipers", just physically destroy the drive when you're done with it (but if you're too cheap for that, a drive wiper is still better than trusting an OS "secure" delete; even if the OS is trustworthy, filling the entire drive with garbage several times over has a much higher chance of pushing out your secret data than filling just a tiny fraction of it, as "secure" delete does). And given that, "secure" deletion is a pointless waste of resources that will actually lower people's security by giving them promises it can't keep.
Unknown person calculated by an unknown method based on unknown data set that a person of unknown but low-ish age has a 1/10,000 increased risk over an unknown period compared to an unknown test group.
Sounds legit.
Why go to the trouble of implementing a command implicitly when you can implement it explicitly and avoid unintended side effects? Not to mention operating systems would still need to change the way they handle the disk to support the 0xFF method, and it would take up bandwidth needlessly.
Not with cops it shouldn't. They're there to upkeep the law, not make arrests or write tickets. If you start measuring performance, by those stats or any other, you create perverse incentives to, for example, search random people for made-up reasons or even plant evidence (because they need to arrest someone for a crime, least "unsolved crimes" statistic goes up).
I once worked in a factory where we got bonuses for going for a number of days without accidents. The result was that people hid the accidents from management, which then made investment decisions based on the delusion that the place was totally safe, with predictable results. That, and a number of other situations have led me to believe that you can't actually measure performance in almost any case: any metric always summs up and thus abstracts what is being measured, so people will always find loopholes and have incentives to use them.
Even something so monomaniacally focused on a single thing as economy tends to lead to spectacularly bad decisions as soon as performance bonuses get involved, so I'm extremely worried about how "cops that get results" get them, exactly speaking.