Hobbes had a radical hatred of violence. I feel that violence is a natural part of the human experience. The reservation of violence to the State interferes with the natural experience of violence by man. It should be tempered, but not removed entirely.
Medicine interferes with the natural experience of dying from dysentry or infected papercuts. Clothes interfere with the natural experience of freezing, and food production with the natural experience of starving. Houses interfere with the natural experience of waking to a bear gnawing at your feet. Naturalistic fallacy is a fallacy because nature is a murderous bitch.
You and people like you are welcome to make each other's lives short, vicious and brutal up while trying to earn your Darwin awards, but I for one am damn glad a Leviathan stands ready to squeeze you like a bug if you try that crap with me. Which, come to think of it, should fit your own worldview perfectly well, unless of course it's yourself you see as the 500-pound gorilla ruling the jungle.
Honestly, I've read some dumb shit on this site before, but you just made the new record. Congratulations.
So even if it gets warmer humans will do what they always have done - adapt co conditions as the change.
Actually, quite a few civilizations have simply collapsed when faced with changing climate. What makes you think one that already has trouble keeping infrastructure running isn't going to join them?
It really takes an extraordinary amount of luck, over an extraordinary amount of time, for sentient life to form.
Life begun on Earth almost as soon as the surface cooled enough to get liquid water. It's been a pretty much monotonous increase in complexity since then.
And, as we've seen in the last century, it also takes a lot of luck for a technological society to not destroy itself.
We'll have World War III sooner or later. Probably sooner, because the generation which remembers WWII is mostly dead. The important question is: how much will our society and technology regress in the aftermath?
Because other than abandoning Facebook (which is the real solution), people who actually need to use facebook are better off not being an asshole and stop using adblock.
And why do they "need" to use Facebook? Because Facebook is trying hard to push its tentacles everywhere on the Net. Adblock might hinder that by hindering Facebook's profitability, thus making those people better off.
I run adops for a network that gets 20 million impressions per day, on average there is one complaint every 5 days, nearly always on an Android phone in Europe or Australia. Assuming the real reporting rate is 10 times higher, that is still a 1 in 100,000,000 chance of junk ad if you live in the US and a 1 in 10,000,000 if you live in Europe or Australia.
Your ads are definitely junk - I just bought a lawnmower, I'm not going to get another one - but the reason I run adblocker is that they're animated and thus too distracting. If it moves or blinks it dies, and if that's not possible the page gets closed. If your ad didn't catch my interest when I first saw it, it's never going to, now matter how many times it draws my eye away from actual content.
The reason shit ads even appear at all is because people refuse to keep their nose out of the sewers of the internet like 4chan/8chan,
With that attitude you couldn't sell ice water in Sahara.
Even if it did I'm puzzled why you think that would be a worthy goal.
Like I said: freedom. As long as humans depend on one another for anything important, the end result will always be a hierarchy of some kind.
Replicators and holodecks? Seriously? Stop watching TV shows and learn some physics. Basically you are saying that you have some piece of technology that magically can make anything from raw energy.
"Replicator" is an archetypal example of a fully automated manufacturing system, capable of going from placing an order to delivering the goods without requiring any human labour whatsoever, no matter how it's implemented behind the scenes. "Holodeck" is the same for services. One would think that was kinda obvious.
But even if somehow it worked, it still wouldn't obviate the need for an economy because you cannot actually eliminate scarcity. The universe is finite and most of it is inaccessible to us and is likely to remain so.
Clothes are scarce. Movie tickets are scarce. But I can't really opt out of the former, while it's been years since I've bothered with the latter.
The utility of goods and services follows an s-curve: it asymptotically nears a finite value on either extreme. Economy become obsolete when the increase in utility you could get from economic activity becomes less than the negative utility of having to spend your time and effort for it.
Automation has worked so far only because demand has always grown to match supply, but there is no guarantee that will continue to be the case.
It hasn't been the case for several decades now. Consumer and public debt kept the economy going for a while, but while letting them grow indefinitely is possible from purely economic viewpoint, the ideological superstructure supporting Capitalism doesn't allow that, thus the ever worse crises following one another as the system goes through its death throes. And with Communism still suffering from Lenin and Stalin, I'd say our best hope would be to make a dash for Singularity and hope Skynet will feel charitable - or at least some sense of duty - towards its makers.
Tech itself is fascinating, but I don't really understand the enthusiasm to use it for everything.
Technology, and specifically automation, holds the promise of self-sufficiency. If you can manufacture everything you need by yourself - if you have a replicator for material goods and a holodeck for services - then economy becomes something you can opt out of. In other words, technology might make people free.
What is the impact of this outside of the UK ? Since they are brexiting anyway the damage may be limited to just a single (potentially shrinking) country.
UK certainly seems to be dragging its feet on the matter. Maybe we should simply kick them out so we can get on with our lives?
I will argue that doctors, firemen, first responders, etc do more important important work than "creators"
... and I would argue that they don't. A fireman is basically a commodity.
Which is irrelevant to the question of how important the job is.
One fireman can usually do anything another fireman can do. That is not true with artists.
An artist can paint a picture, and so can another. They might not be exactly the same, but chances are either will serve just fine. And this is even more true in the realm of industrial design, which is most relevant here.
An artist is just a cog in the machine, just like everyone else. It's the public attention span which limits how many get to the top, not shortage of talent.
Power and wealth aren't related, except perhaps tangentially.
Wealth is economic power: the ability to spend resources.
Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Judging by the behaviour of Wall Street and the rich in general, I'd have to say you hit the nail on the head there.
Centralized government is corruption. The ONLY fix is to restrict centralized governance, and make it more local. It is more difficult to fund power if you have to curry favors over a broad group of people, rather than a few "Powerful elites" in a far away city.
Even our current national governments are too small to keep multinational corporations in check, thus more and more power escapes democratic control.
This is one tenant of Libertarianism in a nutshell.
Libertarianism is the belief that property rights are more important than human rights. It's about as corrupt as you can get.
The government put chips in your head while you were sleeping.
Cool, free upgrade. Does this mean I can browse the Net with my thoughts? Connect to other drivers to figure out what they're going to do? Shared dream instances?
I don't imagine a movie set is any different than any other potentially dangerous work space.
Putting a hydraulic press with enough power to crush bone and no safety interlocks in the middle of a walkway in any other work space would get you sued, too.
If you don't own shares in the company, it's none of your business how much the owners (=shareholders) pay the CEO.
The shareholders don't pay the CEO. The company pays both the shareholders and the CEO. And the company - and for that matter the entire concept of ownership - is legal fiction created by Us The People. We have every right and duty to ensure our creations perform the purposes for which they were created, rather than run rampant or be perverted or looted by parasites.
If a company also happens to enrich shareholders, good for them, but its purpose is to organize economic activity. Shares are just a way to rise capital.
Because it's a bear market. And Microsoft is a has-been who can't make anyone want to "upgrade" to their newest OS even for free. So their future, if they are to have any, is in acquiring other, possibly relevant companies, and that's best done in a bear market when they're cheap.
With any hint of self interest (enlightened or otherwise), and the system eventually breaks down.
So has every other system so far. Capitalism itself only managed to survive it's previous near-fatal crisis by taking a huge step to the left. And it seems to be undergoing a slow-motion collapse of ever worse conditions for ever greater amounts of people stuck at the bottom as those at the top confiscate all the resources for their own use.
The point of a basic income is to get power over those receiving it.
How do you use unconditional, inalienable entitlement to wield power over someone? You can't revoke it because it's unconditional and inalienable, after all.
If anything, basic income will make it harder to wield power over anyone, especially the poor. And that, of course, is the real reason why it's opposed.
The idea that its purpose is to help the weak is propaganda for suckers.
"Sucker" here meaning anyone who cares about the fate of the weak, or entertains the notion that they might ever be one.
Of course, in a more socialist society - such as one with basic income - it just plain doesn't matter as much whether you're a "sucker" or not, because the consequences of losing aren't as severe. You'll have a roof over you head, clothes on your back and food on your table no matter what. And that'll make it harder to use FUD for propaganda purposes, like you're doing here.
So you're telling me I can get ~everything~ I want and need to consume. Even if I put the bare minimum effort (or no effort.) However no matter what I do, I can not become more than "middle class."
No, you'll get a guaranteed minimum share of the whole pie. If you want that share to be larger in absolute terms, you'll have to grow the whole pie. You can't benefit yourself at other people's expense, you can only benefit yourself by benefiting everyone else as well. On the other hand, all effort you put into growing the pie actually grows the pie, rather than get confiscated and moved to a tax haven by a fat cat.
You can't become more than middle class, but you can make "middle class" mean "my own star system".
In the long term, no one will work, and the whole thing will collapse on itself. As socialism and communism always does.
Russia seems to be failing at capitalism and democracy just as hard as it failed at communism, or perhaps even harder since at least the Bolsheviks did succeed at industrializing the country and beating the Nazis. Should we declare those things hopeless pipe dreams too?
What if I plug you into the matrix? You'll have everything you can possibly dream of.
Isn't that the premise behind the entire entertainment industry - and, for that matter, daydreaming: to let people leave this world behind for a while?
Slashdot Mirror
Medicine interferes with the natural experience of dying from dysentry or infected papercuts. Clothes interfere with the natural experience of freezing, and food production with the natural experience of starving. Houses interfere with the natural experience of waking to a bear gnawing at your feet. Naturalistic fallacy is a fallacy because nature is a murderous bitch.
You and people like you are welcome to make each other's lives short, vicious and brutal up while trying to earn your Darwin awards, but I for one am damn glad a Leviathan stands ready to squeeze you like a bug if you try that crap with me. Which, come to think of it, should fit your own worldview perfectly well, unless of course it's yourself you see as the 500-pound gorilla ruling the jungle.
Honestly, I've read some dumb shit on this site before, but you just made the new record. Congratulations.
Which is kinda ironic for a forum once centered around new technology. We've gotten old :(.
Less sunlight means less primary production which means less food and slower recapture of carbon dioxide. Also, it makes solar panels less effective.
Actually, quite a few civilizations have simply collapsed when faced with changing climate. What makes you think one that already has trouble keeping infrastructure running isn't going to join them?
Life begun on Earth almost as soon as the surface cooled enough to get liquid water. It's been a pretty much monotonous increase in complexity since then.
We'll have World War III sooner or later. Probably sooner, because the generation which remembers WWII is mostly dead. The important question is: how much will our society and technology regress in the aftermath?
I honestly can't tell if you're serious or not. The correct answer is obviously "yes".
And why do they "need" to use Facebook? Because Facebook is trying hard to push its tentacles everywhere on the Net. Adblock might hinder that by hindering Facebook's profitability, thus making those people better off.
Your ads are definitely junk - I just bought a lawnmower, I'm not going to get another one - but the reason I run adblocker is that they're animated and thus too distracting. If it moves or blinks it dies, and if that's not possible the page gets closed. If your ad didn't catch my interest when I first saw it, it's never going to, now matter how many times it draws my eye away from actual content.
With that attitude you couldn't sell ice water in Sahara.
Like I said: freedom. As long as humans depend on one another for anything important, the end result will always be a hierarchy of some kind.
"Replicator" is an archetypal example of a fully automated manufacturing system, capable of going from placing an order to delivering the goods without requiring any human labour whatsoever, no matter how it's implemented behind the scenes. "Holodeck" is the same for services. One would think that was kinda obvious.
Clothes are scarce. Movie tickets are scarce. But I can't really opt out of the former, while it's been years since I've bothered with the latter.
The utility of goods and services follows an s-curve: it asymptotically nears a finite value on either extreme. Economy become obsolete when the increase in utility you could get from economic activity becomes less than the negative utility of having to spend your time and effort for it.
It hasn't been the case for several decades now. Consumer and public debt kept the economy going for a while, but while letting them grow indefinitely is possible from purely economic viewpoint, the ideological superstructure supporting Capitalism doesn't allow that, thus the ever worse crises following one another as the system goes through its death throes. And with Communism still suffering from Lenin and Stalin, I'd say our best hope would be to make a dash for Singularity and hope Skynet will feel charitable - or at least some sense of duty - towards its makers.
Technology, and specifically automation, holds the promise of self-sufficiency. If you can manufacture everything you need by yourself - if you have a replicator for material goods and a holodeck for services - then economy becomes something you can opt out of. In other words, technology might make people free.
UK certainly seems to be dragging its feet on the matter. Maybe we should simply kick them out so we can get on with our lives?
Which is irrelevant to the question of how important the job is.
An artist can paint a picture, and so can another. They might not be exactly the same, but chances are either will serve just fine. And this is even more true in the realm of industrial design, which is most relevant here.
An artist is just a cog in the machine, just like everyone else. It's the public attention span which limits how many get to the top, not shortage of talent.
Wealth is economic power: the ability to spend resources.
Judging by the behaviour of Wall Street and the rich in general, I'd have to say you hit the nail on the head there.
Even our current national governments are too small to keep multinational corporations in check, thus more and more power escapes democratic control.
Libertarianism is the belief that property rights are more important than human rights. It's about as corrupt as you can get.
Because we all know there's nothing more efficient at turning a schoolkid away from something than having the school tell them it's bad.
Cool, free upgrade. Does this mean I can browse the Net with my thoughts? Connect to other drivers to figure out what they're going to do? Shared dream instances?
If people kept telling him it follows that he knew, but just didn't care.
Putting a hydraulic press with enough power to crush bone and no safety interlocks in the middle of a walkway in any other work space would get you sued, too.
If the R2 had wanted to kill him, he'd be dead. This was just a friendly little chat about... respect.
And he still has his other kneecap. Just saying.
The shareholders don't pay the CEO. The company pays both the shareholders and the CEO. And the company - and for that matter the entire concept of ownership - is legal fiction created by Us The People. We have every right and duty to ensure our creations perform the purposes for which they were created, rather than run rampant or be perverted or looted by parasites.
If a company also happens to enrich shareholders, good for them, but its purpose is to organize economic activity. Shares are just a way to rise capital.
Because it's a bear market. And Microsoft is a has-been who can't make anyone want to "upgrade" to their newest OS even for free. So their future, if they are to have any, is in acquiring other, possibly relevant companies, and that's best done in a bear market when they're cheap.
It does the CEO a lot of good, since having it on books earns him a bonus, and "they" don't matter. Selfishness is good, amirite?
So has every other system so far. Capitalism itself only managed to survive it's previous near-fatal crisis by taking a huge step to the left. And it seems to be undergoing a slow-motion collapse of ever worse conditions for ever greater amounts of people stuck at the bottom as those at the top confiscate all the resources for their own use.
How do you use unconditional, inalienable entitlement to wield power over someone? You can't revoke it because it's unconditional and inalienable, after all.
If anything, basic income will make it harder to wield power over anyone, especially the poor. And that, of course, is the real reason why it's opposed.
"Sucker" here meaning anyone who cares about the fate of the weak, or entertains the notion that they might ever be one.
Of course, in a more socialist society - such as one with basic income - it just plain doesn't matter as much whether you're a "sucker" or not, because the consequences of losing aren't as severe. You'll have a roof over you head, clothes on your back and food on your table no matter what. And that'll make it harder to use FUD for propaganda purposes, like you're doing here.
No, you'll get a guaranteed minimum share of the whole pie. If you want that share to be larger in absolute terms, you'll have to grow the whole pie. You can't benefit yourself at other people's expense, you can only benefit yourself by benefiting everyone else as well. On the other hand, all effort you put into growing the pie actually grows the pie, rather than get confiscated and moved to a tax haven by a fat cat.
You can't become more than middle class, but you can make "middle class" mean "my own star system".
Russia seems to be failing at capitalism and democracy just as hard as it failed at communism, or perhaps even harder since at least the Bolsheviks did succeed at industrializing the country and beating the Nazis. Should we declare those things hopeless pipe dreams too?
Isn't that the premise behind the entire entertainment industry - and, for that matter, daydreaming: to let people leave this world behind for a while?