I really don't care about nuclear power itself (as I've already said, if I had to have a power plant in my backyard a nuclear one is better than many other options). However, "worst case" means what it says and due to that is completely useless. And that's the only point I'm trying (and failing) to make.
You are failing to make your point because you are wrong. "Worst case" doesn't mean what it says, precisely because it is completely useless; rather, "worst case" means "worst case where the expected utility (desirability * probability of occurrence) is below some reasonable treshold". This is typical usage of English (and other human languages), which often leaves out things which the listener should be able to figure out himself to achieve greater efficiency of communication; pretending that you are unable to comprehend the intended meaning of one very common message - "worst case" - to achieve "victory" in debate in splitting hairs at best and outright lying at worst.
TL;DR playing dumb doesn't make a convincing point.
Although 98% water, beer is a diuretic because it contains alcohol. That means you should not drink too much and never replace water with beer. To avoid headaches and hangovers caused by dehydration you should always have a glass of water between each glass of alcohol you drink.
Unless alcohol's diuretic effects only count for the specific water molecules ingested from the beer mug alongside their ethanol brethen, I don't really see how this advice would do you any good over simply drink weaker beer.
Also, beer usually varies from 0.5 to 6% alcohol per volume, with 4.6 being a typical amount, thus your quote seems to be saying that beer can contain more 104% of its own contents. Verily it is a brew concocted by the very gods themselves, unchained by logic and mathematics of mere mortals.
Here's a simple way to rule out things that didn't give us civilization. Were there civilizations without those things?
2+2=4 is true. Therefore, 1+3=4 cannot be true.
Do you see the fault at this logic?
If so that would indicate that item is not required for civilization. The Maui of New Zealand and other polynesians for example did not have dogs or beer but certainly met the requirements of a civilization. Dogs and beer are therefore not a requirement of civilization.
Ah, but we're talking about what specific combo gave us civilization, not what might have been able to do so. Current global culture is mostly descended from beer-making and dog-breeding cultures of Mediterranean, with some influence by China and Japan, while the influence of Polynesians is not really noticeable. So the Internet certainly was built on a foundation of beer and MAD, which explains quite a bit.
The real problem is that mobile phone calls disconnect all the time, and for a number of reasons. So terminating a call prematurely isn't always a definitive, "fuck you, you've been hung up on."
This problem is easy to solve:simply say "fuck you" before disconnecting.
The problem is, under a more or less Marxist system, once people realize they will never earn more then X amount the bureaucratic class (which is usually the owning class at that point) is unable to find workers to fulfill the bare minimum needed roles to keep everyone at the same level as they were per-socialist reform. So you have a collapse.
A Marxist system is one where the people who make the ball bearings get the profit from selling them, and no one gets paid just because they own a factory. What you described is pretty much the current capitalistic system - if you're at the bottom of the pile, you'll stay there, unless you get very lucky. And being there - being a minimum-wage worker - means that you will have a very low standard of living, and even that is in constant jeopardy since it's impossible to save up money since you simply can't spare any.
Anyway, even if you give everyone basic income, you can still get people to make ball bearings by paying them more, making the working conditions better, etc. Of course (some of) that will increase your costs, possibly to the point where your business becomes unprofitable; but if that is the case, then your profitability was always based on exploiting desperate people - wage slavery, in other words - so you should go bankrupt.
This sorta happened in the U.S.S.R. when people realized that working in the ball bearing factories was no better then handing out bread on bread lines. So then they had to force people to build ball bearings, which caused dissent. I wasn't around for it, I'm just guessing on complete lay mans knowledge.
Well, the dissent might also have had something about U.S.S.R being the second most brutal dictatorships in history (after China), and many of its member nations having been conquered and joined by force.
Also, people who do work they hate due to threat of starvation are not any happier about it than people who do it due to threat of being shot.
If you had plenty of people who did actually want to work though (lets say make ball bearings) and some other way of rewarding these people rather then their stipend, you would get around the very same issue I think were talking about.
People, in general, want to accomplish things. That is where the very concept of a "hobby" comes from. What turns many into couch potatoes is precisely doing jobs they hate because the alternative is starvation and being treated as slaves by their employers because, well, that's what they are. Laziness is a reaction to that kind of abuse, not the natural state of a human being.
And of course employers would reward their employees with money, just like they do now. The difference is that under guaranteed minimum income system, an employee doesn't have to keep the job at all costs; he'll have to give up luxuries if he doesn't, but he'll still be able to put food on the table even if he doesn't. Thus power is moved from employers to employees, preventing the former from preying on the latter and probably moving workforce to things that benefit society more, since employees can now be picky and choose jobs that offer satisfaction, rather than just money.
But so far, pretty much even communist, socialist economies run on some form of currency.
We aren't talking about eliminating currency, we're talking about guaranteed minimum income.
If US companies *need* to force techies to put in the 60+ hour weeks to stay competitive, perhaps they're doing something wrong.
Yeah. They're wasting 108 hours per week. It's no wonder they're doing badly. The very fact that people in the field live to be 40 in the first place means that they're not being squeezed as hard as they could be.
Amphetamines have been invented, bith... bict... bo... girl dogs.
Of course exercise takes a time commitment. It's only your FUCKING HEALTH. Why shouldn't it take a time commitment?
Why should it? Excercise does not make your muscles or cardiovascular system stronger. It triggers some chemical flags which cue your body to improve them. So why should one assume that merely triggering the system would take any significant time?
The need for excercise is something human evolution will likely weed away eventually, assuming civilization doesn't collapse. It's a holdover from our earlier days: bigger muscles require more energy to upkeep, so only grow as much as you need. Now that energetic food is over-abundant, and physical work ever diminishing, it's not going to stay with us.
1 hour for making dinner, and eating it with the family
Make a large batch at once and microwave portions as needed. It's fast, easy, healthy, and some foods (particularly soups) actually get better the more times they get re-warmed.
Early Christianity might have been a hippie commune, but the Catholic Church is another kind of enterprise entirely: "Mighty fine soul you have there, pity if it caught fire or something. Better buy some insurance."
Contraception for good family planning is critical for assuring that the next generation is raised healthy, happy, and smart (not in squalid desperation with ill-prepared, over-burdened parents), thus most capable to take up the responsibility of being humankind.
Uneducated masses desperate for opium of religion for their pain are easy to manipulate, and the Catholic Church has certainly proven beyond any shadow of doubt that it places its own interests above the interests or wellbeing of its members, especially children. From that perspective, it's all too easy to see why it would be against birth control.
And while, we are all beholden to this society, the minute you take off the pressure for people to work you will see massive amounts of unemployment over what we have now.
To put it bluntly: so what? Labour shortage is good for the working class, since competition drives up wages and working conditions, and bad for the owning class for the same reason. Is there some particular reason for the society to keep providing cheap labour for McDonald's and Wal-Mart at the expense of its weakest members?
Why achieve 'consensus' when we could let the fork fester, and have two virtual currencies floating wildly against one another as well as USD?
You joke, but... why not? Have multiple blockchains with different rules and some kind of mechanism to trade between them in-network - maybe some kind of auction system - and let people decide how much faith they have in various rulesets. Or better yet, have a single blockchain with multiple logical chains. Even if Bitcoin fails, it could prove interesting.
We could even build a distributed stock exchange atop Bitcoin: a company issues stocks as a generation event, paying the normal transaction fee to have it accepted into the blockchain, after which it generates dividend-transactions, which can then be redeemed by the current owners of the stock at any later time.
There is no "theory of mutual destruction" with Iran or North Korea. There is them launching a nuke, us shooting it down over the ocean, then them getting invaded by the entire civilized world.
The "civilized world" won't be invading North Korea, no matter what they do. Doing so would invite a conflict with China, and too much manufacturing has been offshored there to risk that.
Iran, on the other hand, doesn't need to nuke the USA to destroy it. Instead they can nuke Israel, leading to a local nuclear war in Middle East, thus simultaneously causing world economy to crash from sudden lack of oil and sending the US internal politics into a chaos due to the religious significance Israel has for many Americans. Hit the weak point for massive damage, in other words.
Do any of those scenarios benefit in any way from having a few thousand extra missiles lying around?
Yes. Even politicians are still people, so their emotional response to "attack a country that can blow you up 200 times over" is different to "attack a country that can blow you up 2 times over", even if the actual result of these actions is exact same. The point of MAD is intimidation, and having a stockpile that's way over the top is a way of trying to ensure even reality-challenged people get the message.
Of course, the real fun starts when this fails and these supersized stockpiles actually get used.
My display is not necessarily directly connected to the computer I run my applications on.
But it almost certainly is, so it makes more sense to optimize for that and handle special cases with things like VNC - which also has benefits which remote X doesn't have, such as the ability disconnect from the remote machine without force-quitting the apps through X disconnect.
If you ask me, now's the time to buy land farther north. It's only going to go up in value as natural resources like water become scarce in heavily populated areas.
If water becomes scarce enough in heavily populated areas to justify transporting it continental distances, I very much doubt anyone is going to be interested in protecting your property rights. You'll be trampled by a flood of refugees fleeing the drought.
A civil society is not going to stay civil if food or water run out.
There are also certain areas where budget shouldn't matter: Writing. Dialogue. Acting. Etc.
Money is a convenient way of abstracting resources. Time is a resource. The phrase "time equals money" simply means that you can substitute one for another (do something yourself or hire someone else to do it for you) and you only have a limited amount of both.
Good writing requires an investment: either you hire a good writer to do it for you or you write, edit, proofread, let other people read and criticize, rewrite accordingly, etc. Every project has a limited budget, and writing comes out of it. And that means that budget matters for the quality of writing.
I have no idea why you would even suggest something that obviously false.
Can my city survive a flood/fire/bridge collapse/attack from a renowned overgrown Japanese reptile?
Oh yeah. Start a fire or a riot in SC2000, let the game run for a while (make the viewpoint window as small as possible to maximize speed), and enjoy your firestorm/open rebellion.
Or the original, where fires could rage for decades as the city grew around the burning squares.
I mean, he was damn inefficient at redistributing money - like all socialists.
This rises a question: how to model our economics from now on? After all, socialism failed. So did capitalism. So is there any model that gives Joe Average a reasonable standard of living - including financial security - and doesn't result in economic meltdowns every few years?
Post-death processing is heavily regulated in most states, and like most regulation it tends to drive up prices and limit entry into the field. It is a splendid example of Fascism.
Actually, no it isn't. In fact it has nothing to do with fascism whatsoever. It might, however, be an example of regulatory capture.
Do you just use words like "fascism" randomly with no understanding whatsoever of their meaning?
Indeed. Let us not let the people who run e-mail servers push their responsibility of dealing with spam to everyone else. You want to run one, you install a spam filter, rather than insist that I install an anti-virus.
After all, I could just as easily claim that the only reason these botnets exist in the first place is that you aren't performing adequate filtering on your e-mail server, thus making them profitable, thus increasing my risks through no fault of mine, so why shouldn't you be liable for any effects they might have for my computer? Why should I be liable for the consequences of your inadequately secured system instead?
After all, system administrators should learn the most basic precautions as a practical solution to their problems with spam, thus coping with the unpleasant reality that most systems are managed by non-professionals, right?
PCs can if the game designers are smart become immortal on PC.
But if a game is immortal, it will compete with its own sequel (or any other game the developers might launch in the future). From a commercial point of view, it makes much more sense to make disposable games - ones that are fun for a single playthrough and then get forgotten. Games with lots of eye candy and little content. In other words, the exact kind of games we've been getting.
The other way is microtransactions and forced obsolescence. Always-on connection requirement makes both simple, which is likely the real reason why the new SimCity features it. All of which is yet another reason to avoid it.
Slashdot Mirror
You are failing to make your point because you are wrong. "Worst case" doesn't mean what it says, precisely because it is completely useless; rather, "worst case" means "worst case where the expected utility (desirability * probability of occurrence) is below some reasonable treshold". This is typical usage of English (and other human languages), which often leaves out things which the listener should be able to figure out himself to achieve greater efficiency of communication; pretending that you are unable to comprehend the intended meaning of one very common message - "worst case" - to achieve "victory" in debate in splitting hairs at best and outright lying at worst.
TL;DR playing dumb doesn't make a convincing point.
Unless alcohol's diuretic effects only count for the specific water molecules ingested from the beer mug alongside their ethanol brethen, I don't really see how this advice would do you any good over simply drink weaker beer.
Also, beer usually varies from 0.5 to 6% alcohol per volume, with 4.6 being a typical amount, thus your quote seems to be saying that beer can contain more 104% of its own contents. Verily it is a brew concocted by the very gods themselves, unchained by logic and mathematics of mere mortals.
2+2=4 is true. Therefore, 1+3=4 cannot be true.
Do you see the fault at this logic?
Ah, but we're talking about what specific combo gave us civilization, not what might have been able to do so. Current global culture is mostly descended from beer-making and dog-breeding cultures of Mediterranean, with some influence by China and Japan, while the influence of Polynesians is not really noticeable. So the Internet certainly was built on a foundation of beer and MAD, which explains quite a bit.
But you can add the words "using an algorithm" at the end of the description of the concept in your patent application.
This problem is easy to solve:simply say "fuck you" before disconnecting.
A Marxist system is one where the people who make the ball bearings get the profit from selling them, and no one gets paid just because they own a factory. What you described is pretty much the current capitalistic system - if you're at the bottom of the pile, you'll stay there, unless you get very lucky. And being there - being a minimum-wage worker - means that you will have a very low standard of living, and even that is in constant jeopardy since it's impossible to save up money since you simply can't spare any.
Anyway, even if you give everyone basic income, you can still get people to make ball bearings by paying them more, making the working conditions better, etc. Of course (some of) that will increase your costs, possibly to the point where your business becomes unprofitable; but if that is the case, then your profitability was always based on exploiting desperate people - wage slavery, in other words - so you should go bankrupt.
Well, the dissent might also have had something about U.S.S.R being the second most brutal dictatorships in history (after China), and many of its member nations having been conquered and joined by force.
Also, people who do work they hate due to threat of starvation are not any happier about it than people who do it due to threat of being shot.
People, in general, want to accomplish things. That is where the very concept of a "hobby" comes from. What turns many into couch potatoes is precisely doing jobs they hate because the alternative is starvation and being treated as slaves by their employers because, well, that's what they are. Laziness is a reaction to that kind of abuse, not the natural state of a human being.
And of course employers would reward their employees with money, just like they do now. The difference is that under guaranteed minimum income system, an employee doesn't have to keep the job at all costs; he'll have to give up luxuries if he doesn't, but he'll still be able to put food on the table even if he doesn't. Thus power is moved from employers to employees, preventing the former from preying on the latter and probably moving workforce to things that benefit society more, since employees can now be picky and choose jobs that offer satisfaction, rather than just money.
We aren't talking about eliminating currency, we're talking about guaranteed minimum income.
Yeah. They're wasting 108 hours per week. It's no wonder they're doing badly. The very fact that people in the field live to be 40 in the first place means that they're not being squeezed as hard as they could be.
Amphetamines have been invented, bith... bict... bo... girl dogs.
Why should it? Excercise does not make your muscles or cardiovascular system stronger. It triggers some chemical flags which cue your body to improve them. So why should one assume that merely triggering the system would take any significant time?
The need for excercise is something human evolution will likely weed away eventually, assuming civilization doesn't collapse. It's a holdover from our earlier days: bigger muscles require more energy to upkeep, so only grow as much as you need. Now that energetic food is over-abundant, and physical work ever diminishing, it's not going to stay with us.
Make a large batch at once and microwave portions as needed. It's fast, easy, healthy, and some foods (particularly soups) actually get better the more times they get re-warmed.
Every single day?
Well, in that case your options are to be born a mutant or wait for scientists to turn those genes into fitness injections.
You don't have to. Your two-party system is quite efficient at keeping them out.
Free?
Early Christianity might have been a hippie commune, but the Catholic Church is another kind of enterprise entirely: "Mighty fine soul you have there, pity if it caught fire or something. Better buy some insurance."
Uneducated masses desperate for opium of religion for their pain are easy to manipulate, and the Catholic Church has certainly proven beyond any shadow of doubt that it places its own interests above the interests or wellbeing of its members, especially children. From that perspective, it's all too easy to see why it would be against birth control.
To put it bluntly: so what? Labour shortage is good for the working class, since competition drives up wages and working conditions, and bad for the owning class for the same reason. Is there some particular reason for the society to keep providing cheap labour for McDonald's and Wal-Mart at the expense of its weakest members?
You joke, but... why not? Have multiple blockchains with different rules and some kind of mechanism to trade between them in-network - maybe some kind of auction system - and let people decide how much faith they have in various rulesets. Or better yet, have a single blockchain with multiple logical chains. Even if Bitcoin fails, it could prove interesting.
We could even build a distributed stock exchange atop Bitcoin: a company issues stocks as a generation event, paying the normal transaction fee to have it accepted into the blockchain, after which it generates dividend-transactions, which can then be redeemed by the current owners of the stock at any later time.
The "civilized world" won't be invading North Korea, no matter what they do. Doing so would invite a conflict with China, and too much manufacturing has been offshored there to risk that.
Iran, on the other hand, doesn't need to nuke the USA to destroy it. Instead they can nuke Israel, leading to a local nuclear war in Middle East, thus simultaneously causing world economy to crash from sudden lack of oil and sending the US internal politics into a chaos due to the religious significance Israel has for many Americans. Hit the weak point for massive damage, in other words.
Yes. Even politicians are still people, so their emotional response to "attack a country that can blow you up 200 times over" is different to "attack a country that can blow you up 2 times over", even if the actual result of these actions is exact same. The point of MAD is intimidation, and having a stockpile that's way over the top is a way of trying to ensure even reality-challenged people get the message.
Of course, the real fun starts when this fails and these supersized stockpiles actually get used.
If water becomes scarce enough in heavily populated areas to justify transporting it continental distances, I very much doubt anyone is going to be interested in protecting your property rights. You'll be trampled by a flood of refugees fleeing the drought.
A civil society is not going to stay civil if food or water run out.
Money is a convenient way of abstracting resources. Time is a resource. The phrase "time equals money" simply means that you can substitute one for another (do something yourself or hire someone else to do it for you) and you only have a limited amount of both.
Good writing requires an investment: either you hire a good writer to do it for you or you write, edit, proofread, let other people read and criticize, rewrite accordingly, etc. Every project has a limited budget, and writing comes out of it. And that means that budget matters for the quality of writing.
I have no idea why you would even suggest something that obviously false.
Oh yeah. Start a fire or a riot in SC2000, let the game run for a while (make the viewpoint window as small as possible to maximize speed), and enjoy your firestorm/open rebellion.
Or the original, where fires could rage for decades as the city grew around the burning squares.
Now now, I'm sure being able to force obsolescence also had a part in this.
Is it selling? The people who haven't bought it yet probably aren't going to, considering the reputation it has already got.
This rises a question: how to model our economics from now on? After all, socialism failed. So did capitalism. So is there any model that gives Joe Average a reasonable standard of living - including financial security - and doesn't result in economic meltdowns every few years?
Actually, no it isn't. In fact it has nothing to do with fascism whatsoever. It might, however, be an example of regulatory capture.
Do you just use words like "fascism" randomly with no understanding whatsoever of their meaning?
Indeed. Let us not let the people who run e-mail servers push their responsibility of dealing with spam to everyone else. You want to run one, you install a spam filter, rather than insist that I install an anti-virus.
After all, I could just as easily claim that the only reason these botnets exist in the first place is that you aren't performing adequate filtering on your e-mail server, thus making them profitable, thus increasing my risks through no fault of mine, so why shouldn't you be liable for any effects they might have for my computer? Why should I be liable for the consequences of your inadequately secured system instead?
After all, system administrators should learn the most basic precautions as a practical solution to their problems with spam, thus coping with the unpleasant reality that most systems are managed by non-professionals, right?