Because I can't afford a better one, either not at all or not without giving up something else I want, which would mean a lower quality of life for me. And the same goes for all your examples: every time I prioritize energy saving I also de-prioritize some other concern. It might be a reasonable tradeoff in some cases, but it's still a tradeoff, and just as importantly it's a tradeoff you're demanding I make - you don't have a car, and if you don't need one that's wonderful for you, but I'd have to add an hour or more to my commute both ways without one, leading to a lower quality of life (less free time) for me.
Ever increasing energy consumption is a nightmare scenario. I want my phone to last a week on a tiny light weight battery, that's progress.
Manufacturing, transporting and running that phone - and cell towers, let's not forget about infrastructure needed to run it - still uses more energy than not having one and accepting the resulting lack of communication. It's to you what a car is to me. Every single time you're about to talk about conserving energy, understand you're basically asking other people to give up their phones. Then consider the billions of people still living in abject poverty; should they ever get wealthy enough to get their own cellphones, all those billions of phones are going to use a lot more energy than zero phones.
Ever increasing energy consumption is an inevitable side effect of progress. The difference between a dead rock and one covered in moss is that one of them is using energy and the other isn't. And the difference between us and Dark Ages is that we are better at tapping and controlling energy flows. We can and should see if we can optimize our usage, but the only alternative to long-term increase is to give up - to sit here and wait for Sun to die and kill us all in the progress, if nothing else gets us first, which seems unlikely.
All that said, I'm in favour of heavily investing in renewable energy production, precisely to ensure we have a sufficient supply. In the long run, we'll have to switch to solar simply because it's the most abundant source available by far, especially once we venture beyond Earth. But completely unrealistic plans that involve people who are already just barely getting by buying a new car, doing a large-scale renowation of their home (and insulation does have its limits due to the need for ventilation) and apparently not being allowed to have kids on top of that are simply getting in the way.
Says a guy wasting power posting on Slashdot. But that's what it always comes down to with such suggestions: your uses of energy are important, other people are merely wasting it.
Even if humanity was perfect, reduced consumption would in practice mean the misery of rationing with the added effect of having lights go off suddenly when someone else more important needs power or generation drops. But since humans are not perfect, it in practice means no electricity for the masses.
Then there's the developing countries which are currently using little power and are trying to change that. Are you going to tell them to endure poverty forever, then keep bombing their infrastructure back to stone age every few years when they tell you to go to Hell and continue developing - thus increasing their energy use - instead?
Every future where energy consumption is reduced or even stays the same is a nightmare scenario. Every "better tomorrow" scenario requires (vastly) increased energy consumption. Plans which include reducing energy consumption are noise at best and actively harmful for humanity at worst.
The only thing that's a joke here is listening to the marketing "experts" bitch about how the impact of blocking ads will somehow cost billions.
I haven't seen that kind of bullshit valuation since buying diamonds from a retail chain.
Or since someone last tried to tell the future from chicken guts. Economy is the religion of our culture and economists are its high priests, always preaching the word of their patron companies. It's why Cold War took on aspects of a holy war, and why people get so ridiculously attached to particular economic ideas.
The guys who wrote the report aren't trying to bullshit anyone, they're simply using their religion's version of Hell semi-casually to express displeasure, with the assumption that the reader understands it's hyperbole.
It's like Windows is following the Gnome crowd. "Let's hide configurations, because letting the user adjust the workspace to his work is confusing!"
It is. Microsoft and Gnome are marketing to companies. And companies want to treat their employees as interchangeable cogs. That means the desktop needs to be non-configurable in any meaningful way, to ensure any user can be dropped in front of any computer and be instantly up to speed without having to learn anything. So as far as Microsoft and Gnome are concerned, personalization is a bad thing.
Will the cryptoloons and techno-anarchists ever give up trying to push their awful solution everywhere and anywhere in hopes of a price bump?
No. Completely mechanizing currency is attractive, because removing the human element supposedly makes it immune to corruption. Also, Bitcoin is modeled after the gold standard which happens to be fashionable right now, along with anarcho-capitalism in general. Dunno what happens when the continuing economic tailspin breaks that spell, but assuming a total collapse is averted people will still need to make payments online, sometimes without donating to PayPal or the banks in the process.
And of course, even if they all gave it up, the USA would continue marketing Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
7 transactions per second, costs more the traditions methods, no consumer protections, easy to get ripped off, impossible to use securely.
Consumer protections are independent of the payment method. Also, the only "traditional method" cheaper than Bitcoin transfer is handing someone cash in person, which is not possible over the Internet.
Just let it die, already, the experiment failed.
There doesn't seem to be any indication whatsoever of failure. What do you base this assertion on?
And nobody definitely has any sympathy for you either. But smart people will still defend your rights because an attack against your rights is an attack against everyone's rights, no matter how much you might "deserve" it.
They victimized themselves with their own stupidity.
No, they didn't. Their stupidity made it easy to victimize them. You aren't any less guilty just because your victim is weak and helpless.
Just treat the things like vehicles: they're restricted to roads/air corriors except for the last step of the trip, can't enter anyone's property without permission, and must obey drone traffick laws (whatever those will be). Then you can put safety nets on routes with heavy traffick.
In other words, drones need to be fully automatic with politeness programmed in.
How the hell is it the job of the governement to tell private companies who they should hire?
Because the price you pay for not having to worry about the consequences of your actions is either taking orders from someone who will, or destruction.
Race is the most meaningless metric of all when it comes to evaluating an ideal workforce.
In a country free of racism it would be. America is not even close to that, thus searching for statistical anomalies is essential to keep racism's effects below whatever treshold the populace will tolerate, which tends to get lower with time.
The last thing minority activists want is for competence to become the deciding factor when determining who to hire. If competence can be overridden by the color of someones skin than that only bolsters the idea that there are inferior races that need to be graded on a different scale.
Do you go to a job interview dressed like a bum? Of course not, appearances affect perceptions. But while you can always wear nicer clothes, unless you're Hannibal Lecter you can't wear a nicer skin. Consequently, for competence to be the deciding factor when determining who to hire the racial bias needs to be canceled out, which of course means that some people will end up in better positions than the incorrect, racism-tainted model suggests they should.
Discrimination is a vicious circle of misinformation: perceptions of current generation guide where people are likely to end up in life, which in turn guides the perceptions of future generations. It's self-sustaining and thus won't end on its own, yet is both unjust and a huge liability to the society it infects, hence the need for Affirmative Action and similar programs. Think of them as adjusting your sights after noticing your shots tend to miss the target with a bias.
Standing around waiting for the world to be fair will only guarantee failure propped up by an appalling entitlement complex.
Yes, it would fail. So why do you complain when someone's doing something to make it more fair?
Also, as a matter of fact everyone is entitled to fair treatment. There's nothing appalling in that.
Unfortunately, it's true that a lot of leftists cry about "Islamophobia" and that's too bad. Islam is a fascist ideology diametrically opposed to everything leftists say they hold dear, so I really can't understand how they can maintain the cognitive dissonance.
There is nothing contradictory in defending someone when they're being attacked, and opposing them when they're doing the attacking.
Depending upon how one reads the first commandment " take not life, which Allah hath made sacred, except by way of justice and law"
Obeying such commands requires faith: you need to be able to trust that the Power issuing them has things in hand. This is true whether the Power in question is the transcendent Creator or, say, your local legal system (or, as is becoming increasingly important, the international system). Lacking such faith/trust, you're left with the options of being the doomed moral victor or seeking to be the biggest bully around.
Work 80 hour weeks bleeding for a company, watch them give a $20k bonus to the asshole who shows up late and leave early, then just fucking shut up.
So does unpaid overtime get any better if your boss and/or the shareholders get to reap the benefits instead? That kinda backs my point, you know.
The only reason you don't have a problem with this is because you're the under-working, overpaid shitbag leeching off of others.
No, just smart enough to realize that if I succumb to divide and conquer tactics, I'll be working those 80-hour weeks too soon enough. Unionize, accept that this means that even the asshole who shows up late and leaves early benefits, and enjoy your new 40-hour workweeks.
As a side note, I can't help but notice that even propaganda no longer tries to argue I'm better off with capitalism, but focuses on negging and attempts to play people against each other. It has a taste of desperation in it, almost like even those spouting it no longer really believe their own message but simply go along due to force of habit.
And this company is doing the equivalent of paying a private on his first day the same as a Colonel who's been in the army for ten years.
Who could have guessed that would cause problems?
...Why should it? The Colonel's authority does not derive from his pay, it derives from his rank. If anything, the pay for the private should be higher, since he has a shittier job.
Differences in pay exist for a reason: Because different people perform functions of different value to the company.
Differences in pay exist because capitalism grew out of feudalism and inherited the hierarchical structure of nobility and serfs. Quoth the summary: "Some employees quit because they felt it was unfair to double the pay of some new hires while the longest-serving staff members got small or no raises." In other words, the king favored the peasants so the aristocrats, fearing they would no longer be supported by them, threw a hissy fit.
It's an interesting look at one of the contradictions between capitalism's nominal values (maximizing your personal profit) and actual ideological structure (quitting because someone else got a rise, rather than because you got a better offer somewhere else). The important question is whether such irrationality is something that can be removed once it starts causing too much trouble, or if the entire system will collapse - in other words, what shape the next wave of communism will take, and whether it'll be the final one or if capitalism can recover again.
It's bizarre how these people just show up with one thought: AMERIKKKA BAD and will not be dissuaded from this conclusion.
Is that what this is really about? The fear that admitting any wrongdoing makes US the villain of the story when it's quite obviously the hero, and all that's being discussed is whether using nukes as a finishing move against the villain went too far? A debate which, in a world where a suitcase/shipping container nuke is a potential threat, US would probably be better off losing, I might add.
I guess national cults never really went away, and perhaps they can't - perhaps a nation requires reverence from its citizens to be able to perform its tasks. But the idea that these "national spirits" can't make mistakes and deserve unquestioning obedience needs to go. It's not true, and will only get more destructive as we continue getting stronger. Accurate feedback is important.
The world will deride him for doing stupid things, but what matters is how the North Korean's perceive it. You can bet they all praise "Dear Leader" for his strong defiance of the Imperialist Japan and most will actually believe what they are saying.
Countries like North Korea are like nation-sized McDonald's restaurants: none believe the corporate bullshit, and the management knows perfectly well they don't, but everyone play their roles anyway while the clown in charge rakes in the profits. It's a little piece of Hell on Earth.
The United States had a million Purple Hearts manufactured to award to the soldiers expected to be killed or wounded in action in the invasion of Japan.
[...]
Murray Peshkin does not have to take pride in his work, but he should not feel that he is party to a war crime either.
So does this mean we should stop vilifying Al-Qaeda which, after all, is using the only strategy which has any chance of success? And ISIS has little to offer new recruits besides sex slaves and free reign for the darkness inside, so I guess that's okay too.
Or does expediency only justify your tribe's actions? Why do you think that'll end any better for you than it did for Japan or Germany?
Of course this is all ignoring the fact that Japan was beaten. The only things in question were the timetable and terms of its surrender. US also had other tools besides invasion and city-nuking at its disposal, such as a blockade or demonstrating the bomb on an uninhabited target. Frankly, the whole thing smells of having a billion-dollar project take on a life of its own ("we've spent a billion taxpayer dollars on this, we have to use it on something!") coupled with racism further fed by wartime propaganda ("ain't a crime to burn them yellow rats!").
It's simple: you don't. It's right there in the First Amendment: any speech is legal, as long as it isn't something along the lines of yelling "fire" in a theater.
However, the thing everyone keeps missing is that some random internet site (in this case, Reddit) is owned by some other person or entity, and they can censor stuff on their own site as much as they want.
And since everyplace online or offline is owned by someone, this ends up being a rather clever way to render that First Amendment null and void in practice while still paying it lip service in speeches.
Oh well, there will be a new version of First Amendment taking into account the realities of modern world eventually or, preferably, a technical solution, for example in the form of one of those anonymizing p2p networks taking off for real.
People tend to idolize too easily. It seems to be part of why we have such a disparity in incomes in this country. Steve Jobs could not have done anything without the engineers at Apple. Credit needs to be spread around more.
So the questions are:
1) Would - not just could - the engineers of Apple had created iWhatever without Jobs?
2) Is that a bad thing? That is, is iWhatever's existence of net positivive or negative utility?
3) Assuming the utility is positive and high, let's say a million times average human's lifetime contributions, does that still mean Jobs should be paid million times average human's lifetime earnings? Utility of money does not scale linearly, and ultimately the whole system of rewarding people for their work only exists to help society provide the goods and services Joe Average needs or desires; if the rewards for the best get so high that they start to hinder Joe's ability to afford stuff, they have turned against their reason for existence.
As soon as I saw the article in the Firehose, I knew they wouldn't be able to resist the SJW's siren call and it'd end up on SJWdot.
And, having spotted your favorite subject, you jumped right in.
See the endless parade of stupid SJW articles like this one. See the lack of actual news for nerds - things like Comic-Con go entirely unreported.
"News for nerds, stuff that matters." Well, you're making a strong case here that "SJW"'s matter, at least to some nerds. Especially since some of us still remember the social stigma that once made the concept meaningful, and can't help but see parallels to other groups. Indeed, I have far more sympathy for any SJW than for Anonymous Coward who apparently blames Slashdot for not skipping an article despite knowing from the headline they'd hate it.
So what does it mean that capitalism is founded on that very idea, that everyone will do what is in their own best interest?
It means that the ideological structure of capitalism will eventually get in the way of human progress, which seems to be happening now, and needs to be replaced. The question is, will this happen through reform or revolution?
Slashdot Mirror
Because I can't afford a better one, either not at all or not without giving up something else I want, which would mean a lower quality of life for me. And the same goes for all your examples: every time I prioritize energy saving I also de-prioritize some other concern. It might be a reasonable tradeoff in some cases, but it's still a tradeoff, and just as importantly it's a tradeoff you're demanding I make - you don't have a car, and if you don't need one that's wonderful for you, but I'd have to add an hour or more to my commute both ways without one, leading to a lower quality of life (less free time) for me.
Manufacturing, transporting and running that phone - and cell towers, let's not forget about infrastructure needed to run it - still uses more energy than not having one and accepting the resulting lack of communication. It's to you what a car is to me. Every single time you're about to talk about conserving energy, understand you're basically asking other people to give up their phones. Then consider the billions of people still living in abject poverty; should they ever get wealthy enough to get their own cellphones, all those billions of phones are going to use a lot more energy than zero phones.
Ever increasing energy consumption is an inevitable side effect of progress. The difference between a dead rock and one covered in moss is that one of them is using energy and the other isn't. And the difference between us and Dark Ages is that we are better at tapping and controlling energy flows. We can and should see if we can optimize our usage, but the only alternative to long-term increase is to give up - to sit here and wait for Sun to die and kill us all in the progress, if nothing else gets us first, which seems unlikely.
All that said, I'm in favour of heavily investing in renewable energy production, precisely to ensure we have a sufficient supply. In the long run, we'll have to switch to solar simply because it's the most abundant source available by far, especially once we venture beyond Earth. But completely unrealistic plans that involve people who are already just barely getting by buying a new car, doing a large-scale renowation of their home (and insulation does have its limits due to the need for ventilation) and apparently not being allowed to have kids on top of that are simply getting in the way.
Says a guy wasting power posting on Slashdot. But that's what it always comes down to with such suggestions: your uses of energy are important, other people are merely wasting it.
Even if humanity was perfect, reduced consumption would in practice mean the misery of rationing with the added effect of having lights go off suddenly when someone else more important needs power or generation drops. But since humans are not perfect, it in practice means no electricity for the masses.
Then there's the developing countries which are currently using little power and are trying to change that. Are you going to tell them to endure poverty forever, then keep bombing their infrastructure back to stone age every few years when they tell you to go to Hell and continue developing - thus increasing their energy use - instead?
Every future where energy consumption is reduced or even stays the same is a nightmare scenario. Every "better tomorrow" scenario requires (vastly) increased energy consumption. Plans which include reducing energy consumption are noise at best and actively harmful for humanity at worst.
Or since someone last tried to tell the future from chicken guts. Economy is the religion of our culture and economists are its high priests, always preaching the word of their patron companies. It's why Cold War took on aspects of a holy war, and why people get so ridiculously attached to particular economic ideas.
The guys who wrote the report aren't trying to bullshit anyone, they're simply using their religion's version of Hell semi-casually to express displeasure, with the assumption that the reader understands it's hyperbole.
It is. Microsoft and Gnome are marketing to companies. And companies want to treat their employees as interchangeable cogs. That means the desktop needs to be non-configurable in any meaningful way, to ensure any user can be dropped in front of any computer and be instantly up to speed without having to learn anything. So as far as Microsoft and Gnome are concerned, personalization is a bad thing.
No. Completely mechanizing currency is attractive, because removing the human element supposedly makes it immune to corruption. Also, Bitcoin is modeled after the gold standard which happens to be fashionable right now, along with anarcho-capitalism in general. Dunno what happens when the continuing economic tailspin breaks that spell, but assuming a total collapse is averted people will still need to make payments online, sometimes without donating to PayPal or the banks in the process.
And of course, even if they all gave it up, the USA would continue marketing Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
Consumer protections are independent of the payment method. Also, the only "traditional method" cheaper than Bitcoin transfer is handing someone cash in person, which is not possible over the Internet.
There doesn't seem to be any indication whatsoever of failure. What do you base this assertion on?
And nobody definitely has any sympathy for you either. But smart people will still defend your rights because an attack against your rights is an attack against everyone's rights, no matter how much you might "deserve" it.
No, they didn't. Their stupidity made it easy to victimize them. You aren't any less guilty just because your victim is weak and helpless.
Just treat the things like vehicles: they're restricted to roads/air corriors except for the last step of the trip, can't enter anyone's property without permission, and must obey drone traffick laws (whatever those will be). Then you can put safety nets on routes with heavy traffick.
In other words, drones need to be fully automatic with politeness programmed in.
Isn't investing in R&D a good thing?
That's very rarely true. The typical result of showing ignorance is being corrected. What do you gain by keeping up (false) appearances?
Because the price you pay for not having to worry about the consequences of your actions is either taking orders from someone who will, or destruction.
In a country free of racism it would be. America is not even close to that, thus searching for statistical anomalies is essential to keep racism's effects below whatever treshold the populace will tolerate, which tends to get lower with time.
Do you go to a job interview dressed like a bum? Of course not, appearances affect perceptions. But while you can always wear nicer clothes, unless you're Hannibal Lecter you can't wear a nicer skin. Consequently, for competence to be the deciding factor when determining who to hire the racial bias needs to be canceled out, which of course means that some people will end up in better positions than the incorrect, racism-tainted model suggests they should.
Discrimination is a vicious circle of misinformation: perceptions of current generation guide where people are likely to end up in life, which in turn guides the perceptions of future generations. It's self-sustaining and thus won't end on its own, yet is both unjust and a huge liability to the society it infects, hence the need for Affirmative Action and similar programs. Think of them as adjusting your sights after noticing your shots tend to miss the target with a bias.
Yes, it would fail. So why do you complain when someone's doing something to make it more fair?
Also, as a matter of fact everyone is entitled to fair treatment. There's nothing appalling in that.
There is nothing contradictory in defending someone when they're being attacked, and opposing them when they're doing the attacking.
Obeying such commands requires faith: you need to be able to trust that the Power issuing them has things in hand. This is true whether the Power in question is the transcendent Creator or, say, your local legal system (or, as is becoming increasingly important, the international system). Lacking such faith/trust, you're left with the options of being the doomed moral victor or seeking to be the biggest bully around.
So does unpaid overtime get any better if your boss and/or the shareholders get to reap the benefits instead? That kinda backs my point, you know.
No, just smart enough to realize that if I succumb to divide and conquer tactics, I'll be working those 80-hour weeks too soon enough. Unionize, accept that this means that even the asshole who shows up late and leaves early benefits, and enjoy your new 40-hour workweeks.
As a side note, I can't help but notice that even propaganda no longer tries to argue I'm better off with capitalism, but focuses on negging and attempts to play people against each other. It has a taste of desperation in it, almost like even those spouting it no longer really believe their own message but simply go along due to force of habit.
Welcome to the Party, comrade. We're happy to receive you.
...Why should it? The Colonel's authority does not derive from his pay, it derives from his rank. If anything, the pay for the private should be higher, since he has a shittier job.
Differences in pay exist because capitalism grew out of feudalism and inherited the hierarchical structure of nobility and serfs. Quoth the summary: "Some employees quit because they felt it was unfair to double the pay of some new hires while the longest-serving staff members got small or no raises." In other words, the king favored the peasants so the aristocrats, fearing they would no longer be supported by them, threw a hissy fit.
It's an interesting look at one of the contradictions between capitalism's nominal values (maximizing your personal profit) and actual ideological structure (quitting because someone else got a rise, rather than because you got a better offer somewhere else). The important question is whether such irrationality is something that can be removed once it starts causing too much trouble, or if the entire system will collapse - in other words, what shape the next wave of communism will take, and whether it'll be the final one or if capitalism can recover again.
Interesting times we live in.
Is that what this is really about? The fear that admitting any wrongdoing makes US the villain of the story when it's quite obviously the hero, and all that's being discussed is whether using nukes as a finishing move against the villain went too far? A debate which, in a world where a suitcase/shipping container nuke is a potential threat, US would probably be better off losing, I might add.
I guess national cults never really went away, and perhaps they can't - perhaps a nation requires reverence from its citizens to be able to perform its tasks. But the idea that these "national spirits" can't make mistakes and deserve unquestioning obedience needs to go. It's not true, and will only get more destructive as we continue getting stronger. Accurate feedback is important.
Countries like North Korea are like nation-sized McDonald's restaurants: none believe the corporate bullshit, and the management knows perfectly well they don't, but everyone play their roles anyway while the clown in charge rakes in the profits. It's a little piece of Hell on Earth.
So does this mean we should stop vilifying Al-Qaeda which, after all, is using the only strategy which has any chance of success? And ISIS has little to offer new recruits besides sex slaves and free reign for the darkness inside, so I guess that's okay too.
Or does expediency only justify your tribe's actions? Why do you think that'll end any better for you than it did for Japan or Germany?
Of course this is all ignoring the fact that Japan was beaten. The only things in question were the timetable and terms of its surrender. US also had other tools besides invasion and city-nuking at its disposal, such as a blockade or demonstrating the bomb on an uninhabited target. Frankly, the whole thing smells of having a billion-dollar project take on a life of its own ("we've spent a billion taxpayer dollars on this, we have to use it on something!") coupled with racism further fed by wartime propaganda ("ain't a crime to burn them yellow rats!").
And since everyplace online or offline is owned by someone, this ends up being a rather clever way to render that First Amendment null and void in practice while still paying it lip service in speeches.
Oh well, there will be a new version of First Amendment taking into account the realities of modern world eventually or, preferably, a technical solution, for example in the form of one of those anonymizing p2p networks taking off for real.
So the questions are:
1) Would - not just could - the engineers of Apple had created iWhatever without Jobs?
2) Is that a bad thing? That is, is iWhatever's existence of net positivive or negative utility?
3) Assuming the utility is positive and high, let's say a million times average human's lifetime contributions, does that still mean Jobs should be paid million times average human's lifetime earnings? Utility of money does not scale linearly, and ultimately the whole system of rewarding people for their work only exists to help society provide the goods and services Joe Average needs or desires; if the rewards for the best get so high that they start to hinder Joe's ability to afford stuff, they have turned against their reason for existence.
And, having spotted your favorite subject, you jumped right in.
"News for nerds, stuff that matters." Well, you're making a strong case here that "SJW"'s matter, at least to some nerds. Especially since some of us still remember the social stigma that once made the concept meaningful, and can't help but see parallels to other groups. Indeed, I have far more sympathy for any SJW than for Anonymous Coward who apparently blames Slashdot for not skipping an article despite knowing from the headline they'd hate it.
So, no more golden parachutes?
It means that the ideological structure of capitalism will eventually get in the way of human progress, which seems to be happening now, and needs to be replaced. The question is, will this happen through reform or revolution?