Paypal provides a relatively safe mask for my bank account online, which means I trust 1 company to not have a security breach instead of a dozen or more. It's a fantastic service. I don't honestly care about anyone's perceived unforgivable injustices from a private, opt-in, and largely free to use company.
It seems somewhat unwise to not care of other people's experiences with a company you trust with your bank account. And Paypal certainly seems to be involved in a lot of scandals, usually of the "we've decided not to pay money we owe to you" variety.
Of course the real issue here is that you need to trust a company with your bank account at all. We need a better online payment system; perhaps some kind of "temporary debit card" service, where you could get a Visa Electron that expires immediately after the predetermined amount is withdrawn? Or just do what we did here in Finland, where you're redirected to your bank's page to set a wire transfer order, and the bank then tells the merchant's computers instantly after it has happened.
Science and empirical method represents only a very tiny, self-referential fraction of what is intuited about the universe.
Yes, you can intuit quite a bit. For example, the Greek intuited that the universe is made of four elements: Fire, Air, Earth and Water. If you don't test your intuitions, how do you know they're actually correct? And if you do test them, well, we have a name for that: science.
Science encompasses everything that can be known. "Intuiting" is just a fancier name for making wild guesses.
Objectivity is more of a myth than Flying Spaghetti monsters (see Critical Theory; Post-modernism).
So, is that an objective truth or just your subjective opinion ?^)
Yes killing them is a bit extreme but I think it's reached the point that We The Peopleneed to stand up and try all of our elected federal representatives for Treason. Should they be convicted, they then loose all rights, responsibilities and gains while in office before we execute them for said crime of treason.
"Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort."
Which of these actions are you accusing your elected officials of? Please give details.
This may be the only way to regain control of our government and begin cleaning up the fucking mess they damn idiots have created.
You have control over your government through elections. That you don't use it implies that the majority of your countrymen are happy with the way things are. Killing their elected officials is nothing more than forcing your will on them through violence; in other words, setting yourself up as a tyrant.
you can't actually read the signals, when the train travels > 250km/h. Even in 1980, designers of the TGV (270 then, 320-350km/h now) knew this, and the signalling is done using what is called cab-signal, which puts the display within the cabin.
You can simply put several signal posts in a row, and read the red/amber/green streak that goes by the cabin.
Some slower but WAY busier lines also need to get away with the old block system, in order to reduce the spacing.
Ah, the good old "throw safety out of the window to increase profits" way of managing things.
In Paris, the two primary suburban lines (RER A and B) use what is called 'permissive' spacing, (SACEM on A, KVBP or KCVP on B), in order to reduce space between trains -- SACEM can space trains under 5 meters apart under stressed conditions.
Seeing how this is less than the length of a single train car, why don't you just join the trains? Or build more rails, or if that is impossible, build a subway?
5 meters is an insanely close spacing even for regular cars in suburban speeds; for trains, it's insane.
Actually yes that's correct. What do you think would happen to that corporation if it came out they were tracking everybody like this? They'd be run out of business quite fast. (mobile phones are a different story as people receive significant benefit from said 'tracking'; i.e. the mobile connectivity).
So a corporation that tracked everyone would get run out of business, except the corporations that actually do, which don't?
Well, we could simply remove that "inconvenience" part and also rise the benefits. If that means people will stay at home rather than work for Wal-Mart, McDonald's and other associated hellholes, is that any great loss to the society? It seems to me that minimum-wage employers contribute nothing but heart disease and killing off of small business to the society.
Alternatively, you could offer free education and generous benefits to any who's willing to study. This would both help the people by giving them a way to improve their station in life through meaningful work and the society by creating a better-educated population. Again, the only lusers are those "businesses" which depend on having lots of desperate people around for exploitation.
Whether it's either of these or some other solution, one must be found, for having increasing amounts of increasingly desperate and bitter people around will eventually lead to the same end result it always has before.
There is no reason that a child should be put on antibiotics every time they get sick with a cold. Colds work themselves out in a matter of days. The reason some doctors prescribe them for every cold you get is that the antibiotics will work fast.
Antibiotics don't do anything for cold, because cold is caused by a virus (actually a lot of different viruses with similar symptoms, which is why you'll never develop an immunity to them all), and antibiotics only work against bacteria.
Thank you for demonstrating my point.
However your immune system doesn't have to work very hard at all and doesn't develop immunities to what you caught. Its like working out a muscle. If you don't use it it atrophies.
Your immune system will develop an immunity to any foreign substance it encounters, it simply takes some time (and developing immunity means it will moun the immune response faster the next time, with any luck before you have a chance to develop symptoms). This is entirely unrelated to how hard it has to work, which is why vaccines work.
Thank you for demonstrating my point again.
You put too much faith in doctors. They aren't any smarter than anyone else and some of them are guaranteed to be idiots.
Stupid or not, they have been educated on medicine while Joe Average hasn't been. Add the fact that hysteric over-reaction is all the rage nowadays, and it's Joe you shouldnt put any faith in.
Our unemployment system works like this. It is VERY inconvenient to be dependent on it, so people try not to rely on it if at all possible, but it keeps them from hitting rock bottom if they really for some reason have to use it for a while.
The problem with this is that large unemployment figures seem to have become permanent features of both US economy, and the economies of developed nations in general. In this kind of situation - where you simply can't find work, since there's none to have, and are constantly punished for that despite being unable to do anything about it - you'll be teaching helplessness instead; in other words, you get the exact opposite of what you wanted.
Our unemployment system is built on the assumption that there's a labour shortage, and you need to get everyone you possibly can to seek jobs. What we have instead is a job shortage, so the motivation-by-whip not only causes completely pointless misery, but also - according to the article I Iinked to - actually harms people and through that the economy and society. It conditions people to ignore opportunities and simply sit there, passively taking whatever comes their way.
Of course, one might speculate if this isn't entirely intentional: after all, if you desire to establish yourself as a tyrant, the first thing you need is to ensure the population won't resist you. And we certainly have no shortage of would-be tyrants amongst the corporate and political elite.
My parents fed me antibiotics so I would get well. Around 15 my parents heard that antibiotics are bad to give kids too much and I stopped being made to take them.
You know, some people say that antibiotics and other medicines should be used according to the advice of a doctor, who is actually trained to evaluate when they'll do more good than harm, rather than someone who doesn't know and thus bases his decisions on rumours, obsessions, etc. I know it sounds crazy, but... maybe there's something to it?
If you're willing to sacrifice others to meet your goals, you will simply replace the current tyrant with yourself. The only real difference between tyranny and freedom is that under tyranny, people are considered expendable, and under freedom they're not. Everything else is just details.
This is the truth that seems to be too hard for most revolutionaries to swallow, thus they usually result in repressive dictatorships, no matter what their nominal goals were. Though times require a strong backbone, least you crawl in the filth and get dirty.
"People who have no money don't know how to handle money" doesn't imply "people who have money know how to handle it".
Besides, Wall Street traders made a killing, then left the resulting mess to be paid for by the rest of us. So it seems to me that they know how to handle money just fine; it's their morality that is lacking.
Why? The only reason we need to continually "grow the economy" is because the population is growing. If we had a stable population, we could have a stable economy and relax a bit.
Given a stable population, the economy will still continue growing, because people keep on inventing new things and more efficient ways of doing old things. What we can get rid of with stable population is trying to accelerate the pace of the growth with artificial "bubbles", and rather invest in real growth through science and technology, or knowledge and skill if you prefer those terms.
Deflation is the absolute scourge of the banker, as the entire basis of their wealth and control is inflation.
Deflation helps the banker just as much as everyone else, if not more; after all, his money gains value with no risk just like everyone else's, and he has more of it.
No, the real problem with deflation is that people are less willing to invest, since you need a higher return on investment to justify doing so when the alternative is just sitting there and letting your buying power increase on its own.
The world waits with baited breath for your solutions for increasing energy generation, food production, and water purification.
Nuclear power.
Oh and all this while we are about to run out of the millions of years of solar energy we just burned up in the form of fossil fuels.
No problem, nuclear reactors are far more efficient per unit volume or mass than either the Sun or fossil fuel engines. They also don't pollute, except in extreme disaster cases.
Oh, you expected someone else to figure these things out. I see.
It would be sufficient for the rest of you to stop getting in the way. We could solve global warming right away if you simply let engineers and scientists to work. But no, people first ask for an efficient new power source and then go "wah, it's powerful, I'm scared!".
The worst enemy to the preservation of either nature or humanity in this world is Greenpace.
Transportation fuel is a more finite resource than fuel for generating electricity. You could get rid of coal fired power plants by building nuclear ones, and frankly I think we ought to, but you can't replace gasoline with thorium, uranium, deuterium or anything else along the same lines.
Once you have plentiful energy, couldn't you just rebuild oil from atmospheric carbon and water? The plants do just that, after all.
Perhaps gene-manipulated algae, grown under solar lamps powered by nuclear power - or perhaps we should bite the bullet and turn seas into fuel farms?
Wow, so giving people free money and food doesn't help them out of poverty? Imagine that.
Not when the local warlord keeps on stealing it all because there's no strong central goverment stopping him.
Let Africa fix their own problems. They're adults, they can handle it. The sooner we stop babying them and pretending that all of their problems are everyone else's fault instead of their own responsibility to deal with, the better off they (and the rest of the world) will be.
Cool. Now this may surprise you, but adults often run into things they can't handle, such as illness, bad luck, the aggression of other adults, etc. That's why adults have this thing called "society", which is a kind of mutual support system - everyone pays taxes, and the collected funds are used to develop and maintain infrastructure that helps everyone, and also to help those who need it directly.
Now, Africa's problems are nobody's fault but their own, because colonialism ended decades ago and most other former colonies are doing just fine; but it makes sense for us to push the idea that one should help those in need, because that way we increase the likelihood that we get aid should we ever need it. Also, helping Africa to get its act together also increases the chances that they'll contribute to the wellbeing of the human race, which includes us. Finally, doing so opposes the idea of "everyone for themselves", which is the cornerstone of laissez-faire capitalism, which has caused tremendous damage to our economies over the last couple of decades, culminating in the current financial crisis.
In short, both cold utilitarian reason and bleeding-heart humanitarianism seem to agree that helping those in need makes sense; and Africa sure needs help.
I dunno what fools see, but how this will likely end is that the developing countries populations stabilize as their standard of living rises, after which the global population will slightly decline.
No, the real challenge waiting human race is the looming energy crisis: can we produce enough energy to bring a high standard of living to everyone without completely destroying the environment in the process? Or, in other words: can we get over our fear of nuclear power in time?
You mean like a car where you have to pay for gas in order to keep it running?
Do you have to buy that gas from the manufacturer or through him? Is there something stopping you from using whatever additives you desire?
But yes, cars are going in worse direction: many newer ones are made intentionally difficult to service without the manufacturer's specialized tools. This is a trend that's noticeable else where too: for example, consider printers with a challenge-response authentication for the printhead/ink refill. In such cases, have you actually bought something? Or have you merely leased it, but in such a manner that you pay a greater initial price and are on your own, should anything go wrong?
I don't want a society where I don't own and am not allowed to do what I want with my own things.
Well, Finland does have a state-mandated police-provided blocklist, supposedly to fight child porn, which also blocks sites that point out that most of the sites on the list have nothing to do with child porn.
But Apple fights like hell to keep their secrets secret, obviously irresistible for hackers.
Apple doesn't fight to keep their secrets secret, it fights to sell you their iCake yet keep it too.
Frankly, it's about time this idiocy stops. In no other business can you sell someone a device, then charge for its use. And program industry with their "licensing" nonsense is even worse. Can't these creeps be dragged to the court and dealt with, so the industries can heal and start working according to the normal concepts of "buying" and "selling"?
This reminds me of the PS3 debacle: The system was attacked after Sony removed the playground "other OS", I believe that a more open approach for iDevices (like store-independent software installation) would decrease the breaking attempts.
"I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further." - Sony
If you run a pizza shop with all the licences and all the taxes paid, you could still do a bit a grey market work by letting trusted friends pay in cash without sales tax or a receipt , keep the cash in your pocket, but leave the expenses on the official books.
Thus leaving other people to pay for the road that lets you get raw materials and customers and law enforcement that prevents local thugs from breaking your kneecaps if you don't pay an "insurance" - or, for that matter, any other pizza shop owners from simply killing you to reduce competition. Yes, I guess that would increase profits.
I wonder if there's any "alternative society" movements that aren't just about justifying tax evasion at their heart?
If I took the pill, I wouldn't be taking responsibility for what I feel.
Are you responsible for what you feel? Do you have any actual direct control over it?
Also, "responsibility" means taking the long-term consequences of your actions into account, not blaming them on other people, etc. The long-term effects of being constantly miserable and apathetic are likely to be very negative to both you and everyone around you. Given that, in what way is suffering depression a more responsible choice than simply taking the pill?
What is the biological reasoning behind people who are depressed anyway? How can it be evolutionary? Surely it doesn't serve any good purpose besides feeding predators?
Heart disease doesn't serve any good purpose either, it's simply a malfunction the body. Brains can also malfunction, especially when acting in circumstances very different than what they evolved in, and depression is one of the possible failure modes.
Perhaps it's a side effect of sapience? (of which sapience is a side effect of something else) Perhaps are consciousness and sapience is so unbelievably complex that it simply has 'failures' from times to time, overstimulation or sensitivity. In that case, that makes the pill more like a mechanical fix rather than a cop out.
Does it matter? Either way, it works and solves the problem. Is there some particular reason why one should suffer depression when it can be fixed?
And animals get depressed too, or at least exhibit all the symptoms.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems somewhat unwise to not care of other people's experiences with a company you trust with your bank account. And Paypal certainly seems to be involved in a lot of scandals, usually of the "we've decided not to pay money we owe to you" variety.
Of course the real issue here is that you need to trust a company with your bank account at all. We need a better online payment system; perhaps some kind of "temporary debit card" service, where you could get a Visa Electron that expires immediately after the predetermined amount is withdrawn? Or just do what we did here in Finland, where you're redirected to your bank's page to set a wire transfer order, and the bank then tells the merchant's computers instantly after it has happened.
"Steroids are awesome."
Yes, you can intuit quite a bit. For example, the Greek intuited that the universe is made of four elements: Fire, Air, Earth and Water. If you don't test your intuitions, how do you know they're actually correct? And if you do test them, well, we have a name for that: science.
Science encompasses everything that can be known. "Intuiting" is just a fancier name for making wild guesses.
So, is that an objective truth or just your subjective opinion ?^)
Well, according to this story, a line has been drawn. So what's your problem?
You can simply put several signal posts in a row, and read the red/amber/green streak that goes by the cabin.
Ah, the good old "throw safety out of the window to increase profits" way of managing things.
Seeing how this is less than the length of a single train car, why don't you just join the trains? Or build more rails, or if that is impossible, build a subway?
5 meters is an insanely close spacing even for regular cars in suburban speeds; for trains, it's insane.
So a corporation that tracked everyone would get run out of business, except the corporations that actually do, which don't?
Well, we could simply remove that "inconvenience" part and also rise the benefits. If that means people will stay at home rather than work for Wal-Mart, McDonald's and other associated hellholes, is that any great loss to the society? It seems to me that minimum-wage employers contribute nothing but heart disease and killing off of small business to the society.
Alternatively, you could offer free education and generous benefits to any who's willing to study. This would both help the people by giving them a way to improve their station in life through meaningful work and the society by creating a better-educated population. Again, the only lusers are those "businesses" which depend on having lots of desperate people around for exploitation.
Whether it's either of these or some other solution, one must be found, for having increasing amounts of increasingly desperate and bitter people around will eventually lead to the same end result it always has before.
Antibiotics don't do anything for cold, because cold is caused by a virus (actually a lot of different viruses with similar symptoms, which is why you'll never develop an immunity to them all), and antibiotics only work against bacteria.
Thank you for demonstrating my point.
Your immune system will develop an immunity to any foreign substance it encounters, it simply takes some time (and developing immunity means it will moun the immune response faster the next time, with any luck before you have a chance to develop symptoms). This is entirely unrelated to how hard it has to work, which is why vaccines work.
Thank you for demonstrating my point again.
Stupid or not, they have been educated on medicine while Joe Average hasn't been. Add the fact that hysteric over-reaction is all the rage nowadays, and it's Joe you shouldnt put any faith in.
The problem with this is that large unemployment figures seem to have become permanent features of both US economy, and the economies of developed nations in general. In this kind of situation - where you simply can't find work, since there's none to have, and are constantly punished for that despite being unable to do anything about it - you'll be teaching helplessness instead; in other words, you get the exact opposite of what you wanted.
Our unemployment system is built on the assumption that there's a labour shortage, and you need to get everyone you possibly can to seek jobs. What we have instead is a job shortage, so the motivation-by-whip not only causes completely pointless misery, but also - according to the article I Iinked to - actually harms people and through that the economy and society. It conditions people to ignore opportunities and simply sit there, passively taking whatever comes their way.
Of course, one might speculate if this isn't entirely intentional: after all, if you desire to establish yourself as a tyrant, the first thing you need is to ensure the population won't resist you. And we certainly have no shortage of would-be tyrants amongst the corporate and political elite.
You know, some people say that antibiotics and other medicines should be used according to the advice of a doctor, who is actually trained to evaluate when they'll do more good than harm, rather than someone who doesn't know and thus bases his decisions on rumours, obsessions, etc. I know it sounds crazy, but... maybe there's something to it?
Seriously, what the heck?
If you're willing to sacrifice others to meet your goals, you will simply replace the current tyrant with yourself. The only real difference between tyranny and freedom is that under tyranny, people are considered expendable, and under freedom they're not. Everything else is just details.
This is the truth that seems to be too hard for most revolutionaries to swallow, thus they usually result in repressive dictatorships, no matter what their nominal goals were. Though times require a strong backbone, least you crawl in the filth and get dirty.
"People who have no money don't know how to handle money" doesn't imply "people who have money know how to handle it".
Besides, Wall Street traders made a killing, then left the resulting mess to be paid for by the rest of us. So it seems to me that they know how to handle money just fine; it's their morality that is lacking.
Given a stable population, the economy will still continue growing, because people keep on inventing new things and more efficient ways of doing old things. What we can get rid of with stable population is trying to accelerate the pace of the growth with artificial "bubbles", and rather invest in real growth through science and technology, or knowledge and skill if you prefer those terms.
Deflation helps the banker just as much as everyone else, if not more; after all, his money gains value with no risk just like everyone else's, and he has more of it.
No, the real problem with deflation is that people are less willing to invest, since you need a higher return on investment to justify doing so when the alternative is just sitting there and letting your buying power increase on its own.
Nuclear power.
No problem, nuclear reactors are far more efficient per unit volume or mass than either the Sun or fossil fuel engines. They also don't pollute, except in extreme disaster cases.
It would be sufficient for the rest of you to stop getting in the way. We could solve global warming right away if you simply let engineers and scientists to work. But no, people first ask for an efficient new power source and then go "wah, it's powerful, I'm scared!".
The worst enemy to the preservation of either nature or humanity in this world is Greenpace.
Once you have plentiful energy, couldn't you just rebuild oil from atmospheric carbon and water? The plants do just that, after all.
Perhaps gene-manipulated algae, grown under solar lamps powered by nuclear power - or perhaps we should bite the bullet and turn seas into fuel farms?
Not when the local warlord keeps on stealing it all because there's no strong central goverment stopping him.
Cool. Now this may surprise you, but adults often run into things they can't handle, such as illness, bad luck, the aggression of other adults, etc. That's why adults have this thing called "society", which is a kind of mutual support system - everyone pays taxes, and the collected funds are used to develop and maintain infrastructure that helps everyone, and also to help those who need it directly.
Now, Africa's problems are nobody's fault but their own, because colonialism ended decades ago and most other former colonies are doing just fine; but it makes sense for us to push the idea that one should help those in need, because that way we increase the likelihood that we get aid should we ever need it. Also, helping Africa to get its act together also increases the chances that they'll contribute to the wellbeing of the human race, which includes us. Finally, doing so opposes the idea of "everyone for themselves", which is the cornerstone of laissez-faire capitalism, which has caused tremendous damage to our economies over the last couple of decades, culminating in the current financial crisis.
In short, both cold utilitarian reason and bleeding-heart humanitarianism seem to agree that helping those in need makes sense; and Africa sure needs help.
I dunno what fools see, but how this will likely end is that the developing countries populations stabilize as their standard of living rises, after which the global population will slightly decline.
No, the real challenge waiting human race is the looming energy crisis: can we produce enough energy to bring a high standard of living to everyone without completely destroying the environment in the process? Or, in other words: can we get over our fear of nuclear power in time?
Do you have to buy that gas from the manufacturer or through him? Is there something stopping you from using whatever additives you desire?
But yes, cars are going in worse direction: many newer ones are made intentionally difficult to service without the manufacturer's specialized tools. This is a trend that's noticeable else where too: for example, consider printers with a challenge-response authentication for the printhead/ink refill. In such cases, have you actually bought something? Or have you merely leased it, but in such a manner that you pay a greater initial price and are on your own, should anything go wrong?
I don't want a society where I don't own and am not allowed to do what I want with my own things.
Well, Finland does have a state-mandated police-provided blocklist, supposedly to fight child porn, which also blocks sites that point out that most of the sites on the list have nothing to do with child porn.
Apple doesn't fight to keep their secrets secret, it fights to sell you their iCake yet keep it too.
Frankly, it's about time this idiocy stops. In no other business can you sell someone a device, then charge for its use. And program industry with their "licensing" nonsense is even worse. Can't these creeps be dragged to the court and dealt with, so the industries can heal and start working according to the normal concepts of "buying" and "selling"?
"I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further." - Sony
If you have a profession, in the sense that you work for a living, you are not an Alpha, at least not in our society.
Thus leaving other people to pay for the road that lets you get raw materials and customers and law enforcement that prevents local thugs from breaking your kneecaps if you don't pay an "insurance" - or, for that matter, any other pizza shop owners from simply killing you to reduce competition. Yes, I guess that would increase profits.
I wonder if there's any "alternative society" movements that aren't just about justifying tax evasion at their heart?
Are you responsible for what you feel? Do you have any actual direct control over it?
Also, "responsibility" means taking the long-term consequences of your actions into account, not blaming them on other people, etc. The long-term effects of being constantly miserable and apathetic are likely to be very negative to both you and everyone around you. Given that, in what way is suffering depression a more responsible choice than simply taking the pill?
Heart disease doesn't serve any good purpose either, it's simply a malfunction the body. Brains can also malfunction, especially when acting in circumstances very different than what they evolved in, and depression is one of the possible failure modes.
Does it matter? Either way, it works and solves the problem. Is there some particular reason why one should suffer depression when it can be fixed?
And animals get depressed too, or at least exhibit all the symptoms.