You don't come across "problems" applying supply and demand any more than you come across "problems" applying Newton's laws of gravitation to the Earth's revolution around the sun, or "problems" when calculating the hypotenuse of a right triangle. Supply and demand is a provable scientific law.
You don't... actually believe that the law of supply and demand is in any way comparable to physics or geometry, right? Then again, you compared it to Newton's gravity laws (which are incorrect) so perhaps you do.
How much energy gets used up in the extraction of oil has nothing at all to do with how much energy is in the oil itself.
True but irrelevant, as the main use of oil is as an energy source, and if you need to burn more than a gallon of oil to get a gallon out of the ground you're making a net loss, no matter how much oil costs.
Note that it takes more oil to produce a gallon of corn ethanol than the corn ethanol itself provides!
So what is it that I'm supposed to note? That you just wasted oil to get a smaller quantify of inferior fuel, thus hastening the onset of peak oil? I do presume that you meant to use that ethanol for fuel rather than drinking, given the context of this conversation.
We don't heat homes on any large scale with electricity, and we don't power computers on any large scale with hydrocarbons.
As it happens, the most common sources of electric power are coal, oil and gas.
As the cost of extracting oil goes up, as it takes more and more external resources to pump, the price will go up. As the price goes up, consumption necessarily must go down in proportion to other products, because it will start taking up more and more of people's incomes.
It takes energy (and thus oil) to manufacture and transport goods, which is means that their price goes up as the price of oil goes up. The price of everything goes up, since you simply can't expand or even maintain production and distribution without energy, so there's less stuff for people to compete over. This, of course, leads to an economic collapse and eventually mass death when the amount of production per person falls below the level of being able to satisfy actual physical needs.
At the point when gasoline is $50/gallon, we'll start looking for electric cars.
At the point when gasoline is $50/gallon, the chances are you're dead. If you aren't, you aren't looking at electric cars because nobody can move the raw materials to the factory or the finished good to the consumer. Or generate the electricity to run the things, for that matter.
For some people, electricity is already more efficient (remember not all forms of energy have equal utility for different uses).
Electricity is a way to transport energy, not produce it. It needs to be generated, and thus doesn't really help here.
Also at $50/gallon, It'll become profitable to do ridiculous things to get at this oil, for the benefit of the remaining few people who still depend on oil more than any other form of energy (this is that law of decreasing marginal utility, when gas is at $50/gal, it will only go to the very most urgent of uses).
Only if the infrastructure necessary to support either this need or those ridiculous things - such as a large and varied manufacturing base - still exists, which is unlikely. Also, again, if you need more oil for those ridiculous things than you extract with them, you're running a loss no matter what the price of oil is.
You don't ever "run out" of oil. Grab a stupid econ 101 textbook and learn the rest why.
Many civilizations have collapsed due to resource scarcity, for reasons outlined above. The laws of physics trump the laws of economics./p>
"judge not" has a great deal of context around it and does not mean "judge not" at all.
And so we go from "judge not" to "judge harshly, confident on your moral superiority" in just two three short paragraphs, one of which was an ad hominem. Ah, the wonders of theology!
New York Times is a newspaper. Data centers host websites. The rumour mill on various social websites and in-depth analysis on various Wiki projects doesn't really leave newspapers with much living space. It's only natural that they'd try to tar a competitor that's pretty much obsoleted them.
One of the strongest motivating factors for people to get on facebook is to connect with/stalk others. For example, to find out if that person you just met and want to date is single or god forbid married with children. Having fake names diminishes this utility.
If I'm connecting to a person I already know, I can ask them their Facebook ID off-band. If I'm not, what do I care what the real name behind the ID happens to be? Either they're interesting enough to bother interacting with or they're not.
But thank you for giving yet another reason to use different pseudonyms everywhere: it makes you harder to stalk.
But even this misses the point of the article: A higher price will cause supply to go up, and demand to go down. This is called the law of supply and demand, maybe you've heard of it.
There's two problems in applying the law of supply and demand to oil:
1) The largest possible supply is limited. After all, there's just a limited amount of oil in the crust, and it will only be replaced at geological time scales (if ever - it's entirely possible that the specific conditions that originally resulted in oil formation won't be repeated again). There's another limit related to net energy oil extraction - that is, a point where extracting a barrel of oil requires more energy than said barrel will produce when burned. So yes, the supply (total extracted oil) will go up, but only asymptotically growing towards a limit, rather than towards infinity. That also means that there's a third limit: the point where the curve showing total extracted oil starts to flatten, meaning that the rate of extraction starts to slow, also known as peak oil.
2) The lowest possible demand is effectively limited, at least if we want to not die. We need to move stuff around, power agriculture, power industry, and power our homes. Homes and factories can be connected to the power grid, so we could in theory power them with nuclear power, but transportation can't. Current batteries have nowhere near the energy densities or safety where they could replace oil as a mobile energy source, and even if they did, we simply do not have the economic resources to replace old vehicles and do the necessary grid upgrades to power hundreds of millions of electric cars in the economic chaos caused by an oil price shock.
Basically, the law of supply and demand only works on luxury goods (you can live without) whose supply can be easily scaled by anyone who wishes to enter the field (no cartels controlling a significant chunk of the supply, barriers of entry or natural limits). None of these is true for oil, thus it won't obey the law of supply and demand except accidentally.
But of course a website using a slogan "Free minds and free markets" would have every incentive to pretend otherwise, since all solutions basically come down, at the very least, to government manipulating the price of oil to ensure a slow, steady increase to allow adaptation rather than a sudden "price wall" the economy would crash headfirst against.
The supposition of AGC has ever been that a static climate is a desirable thing, despite the fact that such a thing has never existed in the history of the Earth, and never will.
Large chances in climate have usually been accompanied by extinction waves. So yes, stability is desirable, whether absolute stability over long period is possible or not.
You jest, but speculate with me. I thought of the best way to spend a wish, and at first I thought "Everyone would live a long, happy life". But, in terms of progress, this is the worst wish anyone could have.
Sometimes philosophy lets us convince ourselves of really stupid shit. Let's indeed speculate and examine your conclusions.
People would die happy starving to death.
No, because then their lives would be cut short by starvation and thus not be long.
People would be happy letting pedophiles live out their psychosis.
But doing so with real children would likely make the children unhappy - that is, after all, why said practice is frowned upon - so your wish would logically lead to either invention of sex-bots, or simply legalizing lolicon (where it's currently banned). Or perhaps in the explosion of lucid-dreaming skills.
The odds of what makes people happy is so dynamic, that you couldn't have a world of everyone getting along without parish
Not really. Some people have mental disorders and must always have their way or control others. Healthy people don't get unhappy because they failed to get something they wanted - say, a sports car, a horse, a cute blond in the bar - but will simply say "oh well" and get on with their life. So, your wish would actually result in a drastic decrease in mental illnesses - and physical ones too, of course.
Humans simply don't have the enzymes to live like cows. No amount of romanticizing an extreme lifestile will change that.
If "living like a cow" is an actual lifestyle, then humans obviously have all the necessary enzymes to do so. Otherwise it would run out of practitioners pretty soon through natural selection.
Also, cows eat grass; the matter under debate is if humans can survive on vegetables/mushrooms/seeds/root vegetables/grain/whatever, which is quite a different matter. Since vegans presumably exist, and survive for years and decades on said diet, the answer seems to be "yes".
Whether strict vegan diet is healthy is a different matter. Whether it's healthier than the average Western diet is yet another.
The vote tallying and verifying software needs to be open source of course. If that is being tampered with, there is nothing anyone can do to insure a fair vote.
Of course there is: don't use software. Use paper ballots and hand-count them.
It's like saying "but what if someone bribes ALL the election officials?" Well, then you're screwed. No amount of procedure or auditing can save you.
Wrong. Bring the box to hold the votes to the voting location. Open it in front of whoever cares to be present and demonstrate it's empty. Lock it, and commence voting. At the end of the day, open the box and count the votes. Phone the results to a tallying center. The tallying center sums the numbers from its voting locations, passes the sum to a higher-level tallying center, and publishes the numbers. The officials never have an opportunity to cheat.
The only problem is that each voting location needs to cover a large enough area for the box to act as an effective anonymizer.
And even if the code IS flawed or abusable, once that's fixed, the data can be run through it again and be verified and return correct results after the fact, insuring both accurate AND complete results.
What data? The votes that were recorded by malfunctioning software and thus can't be trusted? Or did you just invent a whole new way of cheating? "Oh dear, the voting machines used in my opponent's base areas seem to be flawed. I guess we must throw away their records since they can't be trusted. Good thing the manufacturer sent a different model to my precints."
Corporations deserve/require a voice in government too.
No, they don't. Their owners already have a voice. Why would they deserve to speak with additional voices through entities that only exist as legal fiction? Should I be able to vote once for every pseudonym I use on the Internet?
Our system of investment would crumble along with our economy if it wasn't there. The government has to be conducive to business if you expect jobs and/or a middle class of people.
When corporations get a voice in the government they don't have any incentive to make things conductive to business. They have an incentive to make things hard for their competitors and conductive to the kind of financial games that led to the current crisis. Oh, and to allow employee abuse.
If anything, giving corporations a voice in government would make it harder to start new ones since the existing ones have every incentive to pre-emptively fight against competition.
You don't have to try very hard when you're trying to convince rich people that it's okay to be selfish dicks. Or, for that matter, convince poor people that they will stop being poor if they just try hard enough, ironically enough.
The American Dream is basically just the worst bits of Christian religious doctrine repackaged: if you do everything that's expected of you, you get to heaven/rich, so there's no point in trying to improve the lot of the damned/poor, since they deserve their fate and it would just be a distraction anyway, perhaps even making them try less hard (because why give everything for a goal that doesn't decide everything?) to escape it (the "moral hazard" theory). In fact, one of the joys of the blessed/rich is looking down on the suffering of the damned/poor.
It's pretty twisted, but it's always worked well with those trying to silence either their conscience or their despair. So it shouldn't come as any great surprise that the secular version (which still contains semi-mystical features like "The Invisible Hand") has had a resurgence along with the explicitly supernatural one, attracts the same crowd, and inspires similar levels of fundamentalism and calls for doctrinal purity - for example, compare the "Obama is a socialist" and Obama is a muslim" memes.
Nasty stuff, but it does explain how Christian Right came to be despite the Right being pretty much an antithesis - huge military, tough on crime, screw the poor - of anything Jesus said.
This incident just illustrates the point that nuclear isn't well regulated enough and probably never will be.
Regulated well enough for what?
Current population densities and quality of life are not possible without large-scale power production. Both agriculture and industry require it, as does infrastructure such as transportation, running water, sewage treatment etc. So unless you're willing to condemn most people to death and the rest to a miserable life at barely subsistence level, you need to produce energy, and lots of it. But how? Solar and wind can't do so, and water is pretty much tapped out. Fossil fuels can, but causes huge enviromental damage and besides the fuel is running out. That leaves nuclear.
So, regulated well enough for what? That it beats starving to death in the dark? Sure it is. That it's better than a power source that can produce huge amounts of power yet is totally safe (which is impossible - energy is inherently dangerous)? Well, reality can never beat fantasy, but it's highly irresponsible to make decisions that affect billions of people and the future of the entire species based on daydreams, no matter how pleasant or nightmarish they might be. Something else? Please elaborate.
What part of LEG sounds like monkey brain prosthetic?:-)
The part where you bring up a prostethic leg in the context of repairing an alleged brain malfunction when there's another story about correcting brain malfunction (induced by cocaine) on monkeys with a brain prosthethic near this.
Likewise it may seem to us like a transplanted leg would be superior to a prosthetic. It may BE superior for someone who has just lost their leg. In practice, it might be a liability for someone who is already well adapted to their prosthetic. It's not as if they'll hop off the surgical table and go for a jog.They may even go from Olympic contender to barely managing to limp with a cane.
Ah yes, I see. You were talking about the usefulness to a particular person who knows how to use a prosthethic but not a "real" leg, while I was thinking about the usefulness of prosthethics vs. meat & bone legs in general. My apologies.
As for the rest, that is a big part of why I say it may be offered but not insisted upon. It is a huge can of worms. Lets just say I have zero confidence in our legislators or judges to make the right call there if we allow for ANY compulsory treatments.
So... sucks for anyone who happens to get paranoid delusions?
It's not that I disagree with you, it's just that I don't think not allowing any compulsory treatments will really do much more than screw people over another way. I'm not sure there is a good solution to this problem. Nobody can be trusted with this power, yet the potential benefits of understanding how brains work are too great to leave well enough alone.
Also, if you really understand how someone's brain works, you'd presumably be able to figure out inputs that alter their internal state so that they'll to accept the treatment, no matter what their reaction to a simple question might normally be. Does that count as coercion? Because while you're free from forceful coercion, the end result is nonetheless that you can not refuse the offer.
In the case of the sociopath, they don't have to be cured if they don't want to be, but at the same time society is not obligated to allow a sociopath to harm others.
I really don't see how the society can prevent them, unless we start punishing (imprisonment, socipath registry, do-not-fly list...) people simply for being sociopaths (or perverts, or communists, or atheists, or whatever), and if we do, well... that can of worms is now the Dune edition.
By the same token, you wouldn't insist that they give up their prosthetic in favor of a more normal looking but potentially less useful transplanted leg.
Are you referring to the monkey brain prosthetics two stories up from this one, or is this yet another example of Just World Fallacy (you couldn't possibly just be shafted, so every problem you got saddled with must have some kind of at-least-equal payback)?
You might offer that choice.
This, actually, rises a question: as our knowledge of brain increases, at what point do we stop needing consent from misworking circuits to apply repairs? Probably not at autistics, but should we listen to the protests of a sociopath who insists that he doesn't want to feel empathy (but will almost certainly go on to harm lots of people if not cured)? How about a crazy religious fanatic? Or even anyone with any kind of religious beliefs at all - they're enemies of reason, after all? Or shall we go another route and cure atheists of their childish need to rebel against clear and obvious gospel truth, whatever that might be? A republican (or anyone you disagree with politically)? A drug addict? A delusional paranoid? An anti-vaccination activist?
This whole thing is opening a huge can of worms, and since people still sometimes publicly defend eugenics (of the forced sterilization of people they consider inferior variety) even on Slashdot, I'm not at all certain humanity can handle it in a way that won't turn into a horror movie very fast.
They'll care when I bust-down the door with a semiautomatic and start tearing them open with bullets.
No, they won't. After all, you'll only kill servants. The IP barons of the 1% sit safely behind their fortresses and simply have their PR people use the incident to push for tighter gun control for peons.
"From time to time the Tree of Liberty must be watered with the blood of Patriots and Tyrants. Protest is its natural fertilizer." - Thomas Jefferson
And just like Jefferson failed to end his own tyranny over his slaves, the people who quote him end up doing nothing effective, thus the tree stays a seed, living or dead is anyone's guess. That's the history of humanity in a nutshell. And there it shall remain.
P.S. This is the worst Australian government of my lifetime. Even if I agreed with their policies, and I don't, I'd despise them for their incompetence. They like to busy themselves in all sorts of minor matters and bugger it up every time.
/blockquote>
That sounds like something a troll would say!
My views are obviously true, thus you can't possibly honestly disagree with them, thus you must be arguing in bad faith - in other words, trolling. It's a quick comeback which eliminates the need for examining one's own believes, thus also eliminating any possibility of experiencing the distress of being shown wrong. This kind of logic shows up in every single religion-related debate (on all sides), and politics seems to be a de facto secular faith to lots people.
Which, of course, is precisely the point of laws like this. Labeling disagreeing people as trolls is already the favorite debate tactic in most political forums and -discussions, so why not extend it to meatspace?
CP pics you can fap to if you're a sicko, and that's all that matters.
Actually, no. What matters is keeping people, including but not limited to children, safe. Making sure "sickos" don't get any satisfaction is at the very least orthogonal and quite possibly counter-productive to this goal. In no case is it justified to pass laws that hurt someone just because you don't like him.
That said, it can certainly be argued that the continued circulation of real CP continues making a victim of the people depicted in it. After all, if one were to be raped one probably wouldn't want a tape made of the incident to continue circulating the Net for years to come and serve as fap material to others. The solution, then, is to manufacture victimless CP, such as drawings and 3D animations.
In other words, if pedophiles are allowed to satisfy their urges on lolicon and Poser animations (and in future, robots) so they can behave like normal people the rest of the time, everyone wins. The only "downside" is that some imperfect people will not be destroyed by or for their imperfections, which annoys another type of imperfect person - the same kind who perpetrated every witch hunt in history - to no end. So the question is: how could we put that witch-burning pedophile-hunting zeal to a good use, or failing that, at the very least aim it somewhere it won't harm anyone? Could the SEC perhaps employ them?
That "corporation in hollywood" probably spent millions of dollars on lobbying and bribery. In exchange for that, they get treated exactly as they deserve.
Fixed that for you.
IP in general and copyright law in particular passed the point of having not the tiniest shred of moral authority long ago. There's no moral obligation whatsoever to obey them.
Laws are only respected as long as they're respectable. Copyright law is not: it's a harlot, a corporate crack whore, a fist that's been tightened till every last speck of stardust has slipped trough the fingers. Hollywood only has itself to blame, it's their own attempt to increase their rights without limit at the expense of everyone else that got theirs jury nullified at the court of public opinion.
Ads lower the signal-to-noise ratio by saturating the environment with irrelevant misinformation. Even if every ad was 100% honest and trustworthy, they would still distract you from more relevant inputs. But of course they are typically extremely dishonest and manipulative.
Furthermore, ads perpetuate the idea that life's purpose is to work your ass of so you can consume an endless stream of useless (and sometimes actively harmful) crap. They do their part in making people waste their lives chasing after a winning lottery ticket for the benefit of the 1% at the top who run the lottery. They feed various neurosis and addictions to manipulate people into spending their hard-earned cash to try and fix imaginary problems by illogical means of buying an unrelated product.
An ad campaign is basically information warfare. People disliking them is simply their self-protection instincts at work.
Slashdot Mirror
And yet my first tought upon reading this was "so this is how the Greeks use the bailout we gave them."
Oh, well. At least we now know that all that whining about budget cuts was all lies, since they can fund an inquisition. Nobody expected that.
You don't... actually believe that the law of supply and demand is in any way comparable to physics or geometry, right? Then again, you compared it to Newton's gravity laws (which are incorrect) so perhaps you do.
True but irrelevant, as the main use of oil is as an energy source, and if you need to burn more than a gallon of oil to get a gallon out of the ground you're making a net loss, no matter how much oil costs.
So what is it that I'm supposed to note? That you just wasted oil to get a smaller quantify of inferior fuel, thus hastening the onset of peak oil? I do presume that you meant to use that ethanol for fuel rather than drinking, given the context of this conversation.
As it happens, the most common sources of electric power are coal, oil and gas.
It takes energy (and thus oil) to manufacture and transport goods, which is means that their price goes up as the price of oil goes up. The price of everything goes up, since you simply can't expand or even maintain production and distribution without energy, so there's less stuff for people to compete over. This, of course, leads to an economic collapse and eventually mass death when the amount of production per person falls below the level of being able to satisfy actual physical needs.
At the point when gasoline is $50/gallon, the chances are you're dead. If you aren't, you aren't looking at electric cars because nobody can move the raw materials to the factory or the finished good to the consumer. Or generate the electricity to run the things, for that matter.
Electricity is a way to transport energy, not produce it. It needs to be generated, and thus doesn't really help here.
Only if the infrastructure necessary to support either this need or those ridiculous things - such as a large and varied manufacturing base - still exists, which is unlikely. Also, again, if you need more oil for those ridiculous things than you extract with them, you're running a loss no matter what the price of oil is.
Many civilizations have collapsed due to resource scarcity, for reasons outlined above. The laws of physics trump the laws of economics./p>
And so we go from "judge not" to "judge harshly, confident on your moral superiority" in just two three short paragraphs, one of which was an ad hominem. Ah, the wonders of theology!
New York Times is a newspaper. Data centers host websites. The rumour mill on various social websites and in-depth analysis on various Wiki projects doesn't really leave newspapers with much living space. It's only natural that they'd try to tar a competitor that's pretty much obsoleted them.
If I'm connecting to a person I already know, I can ask them their Facebook ID off-band. If I'm not, what do I care what the real name behind the ID happens to be? Either they're interesting enough to bother interacting with or they're not.
But thank you for giving yet another reason to use different pseudonyms everywhere: it makes you harder to stalk.
There's two problems in applying the law of supply and demand to oil:
1) The largest possible supply is limited. After all, there's just a limited amount of oil in the crust, and it will only be replaced at geological time scales (if ever - it's entirely possible that the specific conditions that originally resulted in oil formation won't be repeated again). There's another limit related to net energy oil extraction - that is, a point where extracting a barrel of oil requires more energy than said barrel will produce when burned. So yes, the supply (total extracted oil) will go up, but only asymptotically growing towards a limit, rather than towards infinity. That also means that there's a third limit: the point where the curve showing total extracted oil starts to flatten, meaning that the rate of extraction starts to slow, also known as peak oil.
2) The lowest possible demand is effectively limited, at least if we want to not die. We need to move stuff around, power agriculture, power industry, and power our homes. Homes and factories can be connected to the power grid, so we could in theory power them with nuclear power, but transportation can't. Current batteries have nowhere near the energy densities or safety where they could replace oil as a mobile energy source, and even if they did, we simply do not have the economic resources to replace old vehicles and do the necessary grid upgrades to power hundreds of millions of electric cars in the economic chaos caused by an oil price shock.
Basically, the law of supply and demand only works on luxury goods (you can live without) whose supply can be easily scaled by anyone who wishes to enter the field (no cartels controlling a significant chunk of the supply, barriers of entry or natural limits). None of these is true for oil, thus it won't obey the law of supply and demand except accidentally.
But of course a website using a slogan "Free minds and free markets" would have every incentive to pretend otherwise, since all solutions basically come down, at the very least, to government manipulating the price of oil to ensure a slow, steady increase to allow adaptation rather than a sudden "price wall" the economy would crash headfirst against.
Large chances in climate have usually been accompanied by extinction waves. So yes, stability is desirable, whether absolute stability over long period is possible or not.
Sometimes philosophy lets us convince ourselves of really stupid shit. Let's indeed speculate and examine your conclusions.
No, because then their lives would be cut short by starvation and thus not be long.
But doing so with real children would likely make the children unhappy - that is, after all, why said practice is frowned upon - so your wish would logically lead to either invention of sex-bots, or simply legalizing lolicon (where it's currently banned). Or perhaps in the explosion of lucid-dreaming skills.
Not really. Some people have mental disorders and must always have their way or control others. Healthy people don't get unhappy because they failed to get something they wanted - say, a sports car, a horse, a cute blond in the bar - but will simply say "oh well" and get on with their life. So, your wish would actually result in a drastic decrease in mental illnesses - and physical ones too, of course.
If "living like a cow" is an actual lifestyle, then humans obviously have all the necessary enzymes to do so. Otherwise it would run out of practitioners pretty soon through natural selection.
Also, cows eat grass; the matter under debate is if humans can survive on vegetables/mushrooms/seeds/root vegetables/grain/whatever, which is quite a different matter. Since vegans presumably exist, and survive for years and decades on said diet, the answer seems to be "yes".
Whether strict vegan diet is healthy is a different matter. Whether it's healthier than the average Western diet is yet another.
Of course there is: don't use software. Use paper ballots and hand-count them.
Wrong. Bring the box to hold the votes to the voting location. Open it in front of whoever cares to be present and demonstrate it's empty. Lock it, and commence voting. At the end of the day, open the box and count the votes. Phone the results to a tallying center. The tallying center sums the numbers from its voting locations, passes the sum to a higher-level tallying center, and publishes the numbers. The officials never have an opportunity to cheat.
The only problem is that each voting location needs to cover a large enough area for the box to act as an effective anonymizer.
What data? The votes that were recorded by malfunctioning software and thus can't be trusted? Or did you just invent a whole new way of cheating? "Oh dear, the voting machines used in my opponent's base areas seem to be flawed. I guess we must throw away their records since they can't be trusted. Good thing the manufacturer sent a different model to my precints."
No, they don't. Their owners already have a voice. Why would they deserve to speak with additional voices through entities that only exist as legal fiction? Should I be able to vote once for every pseudonym I use on the Internet?
Our system of investment would crumble along with our economy if it wasn't there. The government has to be conducive to business if you expect jobs and/or a middle class of people.
When corporations get a voice in the government they don't have any incentive to make things conductive to business. They have an incentive to make things hard for their competitors and conductive to the kind of financial games that led to the current crisis. Oh, and to allow employee abuse.
If anything, giving corporations a voice in government would make it harder to start new ones since the existing ones have every incentive to pre-emptively fight against competition.
You don't have to try very hard when you're trying to convince rich people that it's okay to be selfish dicks. Or, for that matter, convince poor people that they will stop being poor if they just try hard enough, ironically enough.
The American Dream is basically just the worst bits of Christian religious doctrine repackaged: if you do everything that's expected of you, you get to heaven/rich, so there's no point in trying to improve the lot of the damned/poor, since they deserve their fate and it would just be a distraction anyway, perhaps even making them try less hard (because why give everything for a goal that doesn't decide everything?) to escape it (the "moral hazard" theory). In fact, one of the joys of the blessed/rich is looking down on the suffering of the damned/poor.
It's pretty twisted, but it's always worked well with those trying to silence either their conscience or their despair. So it shouldn't come as any great surprise that the secular version (which still contains semi-mystical features like "The Invisible Hand") has had a resurgence along with the explicitly supernatural one, attracts the same crowd, and inspires similar levels of fundamentalism and calls for doctrinal purity - for example, compare the "Obama is a socialist" and Obama is a muslim" memes.
Nasty stuff, but it does explain how Christian Right came to be despite the Right being pretty much an antithesis - huge military, tough on crime, screw the poor - of anything Jesus said.
Regulated well enough for what?
Current population densities and quality of life are not possible without large-scale power production. Both agriculture and industry require it, as does infrastructure such as transportation, running water, sewage treatment etc. So unless you're willing to condemn most people to death and the rest to a miserable life at barely subsistence level, you need to produce energy, and lots of it. But how? Solar and wind can't do so, and water is pretty much tapped out. Fossil fuels can, but causes huge enviromental damage and besides the fuel is running out. That leaves nuclear.
So, regulated well enough for what? That it beats starving to death in the dark? Sure it is. That it's better than a power source that can produce huge amounts of power yet is totally safe (which is impossible - energy is inherently dangerous)? Well, reality can never beat fantasy, but it's highly irresponsible to make decisions that affect billions of people and the future of the entire species based on daydreams, no matter how pleasant or nightmarish they might be. Something else? Please elaborate.
We'd need more nuclear plants to power the pumps, which would result in more shitstorms, requiring more pumps and so on. It's a vicious cycle.
The part where you bring up a prostethic leg in the context of repairing an alleged brain malfunction when there's another story about correcting brain malfunction (induced by cocaine) on monkeys with a brain prosthethic near this.
Ah yes, I see. You were talking about the usefulness to a particular person who knows how to use a prosthethic but not a "real" leg, while I was thinking about the usefulness of prosthethics vs. meat & bone legs in general. My apologies.
So... sucks for anyone who happens to get paranoid delusions?
It's not that I disagree with you, it's just that I don't think not allowing any compulsory treatments will really do much more than screw people over another way. I'm not sure there is a good solution to this problem. Nobody can be trusted with this power, yet the potential benefits of understanding how brains work are too great to leave well enough alone.
Also, if you really understand how someone's brain works, you'd presumably be able to figure out inputs that alter their internal state so that they'll to accept the treatment, no matter what their reaction to a simple question might normally be. Does that count as coercion? Because while you're free from forceful coercion, the end result is nonetheless that you can not refuse the offer.
I really don't see how the society can prevent them, unless we start punishing (imprisonment, socipath registry, do-not-fly list...) people simply for being sociopaths (or perverts, or communists, or atheists, or whatever), and if we do, well... that can of worms is now the Dune edition.
Are you referring to the monkey brain prosthetics two stories up from this one, or is this yet another example of Just World Fallacy (you couldn't possibly just be shafted, so every problem you got saddled with must have some kind of at-least-equal payback)?
You might offer that choice.
This, actually, rises a question: as our knowledge of brain increases, at what point do we stop needing consent from misworking circuits to apply repairs? Probably not at autistics, but should we listen to the protests of a sociopath who insists that he doesn't want to feel empathy (but will almost certainly go on to harm lots of people if not cured)? How about a crazy religious fanatic? Or even anyone with any kind of religious beliefs at all - they're enemies of reason, after all? Or shall we go another route and cure atheists of their childish need to rebel against clear and obvious gospel truth, whatever that might be? A republican (or anyone you disagree with politically)? A drug addict? A delusional paranoid? An anti-vaccination activist?
This whole thing is opening a huge can of worms, and since people still sometimes publicly defend eugenics (of the forced sterilization of people they consider inferior variety) even on Slashdot, I'm not at all certain humanity can handle it in a way that won't turn into a horror movie very fast.
No, they won't. After all, you'll only kill servants. The IP barons of the 1% sit safely behind their fortresses and simply have their PR people use the incident to push for tighter gun control for peons.
And just like Jefferson failed to end his own tyranny over his slaves, the people who quote him end up doing nothing effective, thus the tree stays a seed, living or dead is anyone's guess. That's the history of humanity in a nutshell. And there it shall remain.
Isn't that pretty much any system nowadays? Most desktop computers are limited by their disk-to-memory and memory-to-registers speeds.
And this is precisely the problem: heads you win, tails I lose.
Actually, no. What matters is keeping people, including but not limited to children, safe. Making sure "sickos" don't get any satisfaction is at the very least orthogonal and quite possibly counter-productive to this goal. In no case is it justified to pass laws that hurt someone just because you don't like him.
That said, it can certainly be argued that the continued circulation of real CP continues making a victim of the people depicted in it. After all, if one were to be raped one probably wouldn't want a tape made of the incident to continue circulating the Net for years to come and serve as fap material to others. The solution, then, is to manufacture victimless CP, such as drawings and 3D animations.
In other words, if pedophiles are allowed to satisfy their urges on lolicon and Poser animations (and in future, robots) so they can behave like normal people the rest of the time, everyone wins. The only "downside" is that some imperfect people will not be destroyed by or for their imperfections, which annoys another type of imperfect person - the same kind who perpetrated every witch hunt in history - to no end. So the question is: how could we put that witch-burning pedophile-hunting zeal to a good use, or failing that, at the very least aim it somewhere it won't harm anyone? Could the SEC perhaps employ them?
You must frequent 4chan often to know the contents so well :p
you wouldn't have given yourself away, /b/ro.
Ads lower the signal-to-noise ratio by saturating the environment with irrelevant misinformation. Even if every ad was 100% honest and trustworthy, they would still distract you from more relevant inputs. But of course they are typically extremely dishonest and manipulative.
Furthermore, ads perpetuate the idea that life's purpose is to work your ass of so you can consume an endless stream of useless (and sometimes actively harmful) crap. They do their part in making people waste their lives chasing after a winning lottery ticket for the benefit of the 1% at the top who run the lottery. They feed various neurosis and addictions to manipulate people into spending their hard-earned cash to try and fix imaginary problems by illogical means of buying an unrelated product.
An ad campaign is basically information warfare. People disliking them is simply their self-protection instincts at work.
Thus proving that mere lack of coercion is insufficient to keep such shit from happening, and thus more regulation is needed.