no, but there is no reason to regulate every business under the sun either. The governments role is not to tell people what they can and cant do with minor exceptions
The problem is, businesses are people but unlike humans are only expected to care about "shareholder value". If you're trying to keep a horde of rules-lawyering sociopathic demigods from murdering people and destroying the entire planet for profit and the only tool you have is regulation then of course you'll end up with an ever-thickening rulebook. You are, after all, trying to enumerate badness against professional lawyers.
If you want less regulation, then you have to change social values so that people and organizations will consider more than just their personal benefit when making decisions. But that would mean acknowledging raw capitalism isn't sufficient to be the sole guide for society or even economy. So I guess it'll have to wait until current collapse forces the issue. Until then, choke on your regulations.
Ban people with an opposing point of view? Google deciding intentionally what's "true" and "not true"? Only people with approved viewpoints get a chance to place ideas out there?
"I hate Jews" is a point of view. "There was no Holocaust" is a flat-out lie. You are entitled to your own opinions and interpretations, but not your own facts. The latter makes you wilfully insane.
And frankly, Turkey is being a moron here. They could simply ignore all this, it happened 100 years ago after all. Or they could issue an official apology. They could even frame the Armenians as nasty people who had it coming, evil as such approach might be. But instead they pick the one strategy that has no chance of success whatsoever: pretending nothing ever happened. It's enough to make one question whether someone in Turkey wishes to ride a national persecution complex to power.
looks more like some moron bragging about his overclocked computer running for 48 hours straight at 4.7 ghz, and after that much time wasted he wanted to get back to watching cute cat videos or something so he shut it down with nothing to show for it.
You do realize modern computers can multitask, right? And even Windows supports setting process priority. So it's not like he can't watch videos while the thing is running in the background, it'll just run a bit slower.
The point of the holographic principle is not that one can imagine a 3D encoding onto a 2D surface, e.g. a holograph, but that the maximum possible information in a volume is not proportional to volume, but to surface area. That implies the fundamental mechanics of the universe can't be something like "voxels".
Perhaps it could, but those voxels/cells aren't really independent. General Relativity requires space to be differentiable (smooth) which in turn means that value of one cell limits possible values for nearby cells. Laws of physics could also be understood as rules of how values can vary across time- and lightlike paths. Put these effects together, and I suspect the result is the holographic principle.
Massachusetts just shut down it's offshore wind farm program and more are dying (a welcome event for those of us that pay our own bills )
And who would that be? Last I checked, coal, gas and oil let you shit your externalities all over other people's environment (and lungs, real estate and insurance costs), and nuclear is impossible due to political reasons.
Wind is more expensive than fossil fuels only as long as you force me to suck up the fumes from your smokestack and tailpipe and consequently die horribly from lung cancer for free. Not to mention the fact fossils will run out eventually, leaving to future generations sitting in the dark if the alternatives are not in place by then.
Also, yes, we do buy more than we used to buy. That is called keeping the economy running, and if we weren't buying all those gadgets and trinkets and things *you* don't think are necessary our economy would be in even worse shape. As for the credit card debt, if wages were at least keeping even with what they have historically been people wouldn't have to fall back on so much credit debt now would they.
So what happens when credit cards are all maxed out and people have to lower their spending? Why companies will have to lay off people, leading to even less demand, leading to more layouts, and so forth until the economic tailspin turns into an outright economic and social collapse. Yet no company can unilaterally rise wages to ward off this disaster, because even if it made them more competitive due to a workforce that wouldn't hate them quite so much, the shareholders would complain, since the money could be going to them instead.
If only there were a party who could simply order everyone to rise wages, like it or not, to meet some kind of minimum standard high enough to keep the market working. Or, even better, simply pay a minimal income unconditionally to everyone.
A terrorist has a nuclear weapon in his backpack and is 10 blocks away from where he plans to set it off. He also plans to die, so if you confront him, he'll just set it off anyway.
The sniper who is supposed to shoot the bad guy has his shot blocked by a girl on her daddy's shoulders. He doesn't have a clear shot.
Do you shoot through the girl to hit the bad guy in that case?
Well, the girl is less likely to die from a bullet wound than a nuclear bomb going off right next to her, so it's not really an ethical dilemma, any more than performing a risky medical operation to save that girl's life afterwards would be.
The problem is, this entire ridiculous scenario is an example of an idea - that ethics can be set aside if needed - fighting for existence. Ideas aren't passive things; they're encoded by living neural cells in human brains, and neurons have a basic drive to be used. So once you accept the idea of ethical exceptions in principle, that idea will always whisper in your ear in every situation, even ones that don't involve any immediate danger.
So the question is: given two imperfect options - absolute ethical commandment and a slippery slope - which one is likely to cause less destruction?
So what you are saying is that it's up to Hollywood to dictate what is acceptable in society?
How do you learn what is acceptable in a society? By watching people do stuff and get praised or reviled for it. What does Hollywood do? Show people doing stuff and get labeled heroes or villains. They're an efficient propaganda machine, for good or ill.
But in that case, what's the advantage of implanting it?
It gives the powerful yet another way to assert their dominance over the less so. And because the powerful are only so because of a system that backs their baseless claims of superiority, and can only continue as long as the powerless keep buying the lie, new ways to propagandize are always needed. All the little ritualistic humiliations society is so fond of, from drug tests to getting groped by the TSA, ultimately come down to the same message: "you are nothing and must obey your masters."
It's a sick, if fascinating, game. It's also one that can't go on forever, since effecively crippling people cripples their society too, yet that society still contains a very strong cultral leftover from feudalism. So what we really have here is a narrative of equality fighting a narrative of hierarchy, leading to very confused people doing completely irrational things - like wiretapping everyone in the name of freedom - without really understanding why.
Obviously a good person is not going to sell it to black hats.
You mean a law-abiding person. A good person does not prey on innocents, but Corporate America provides plenty of food satisfying any reasonable standard of sufficient sinfulness you care to set to qualify as an acceptable target.
It's why movies that want robbers seem heroic often use casinos as targets: no one's going to shed a single tear when those who exploit people's dreams to fleece them get victimized in turn.
That's because the elderly suffered much more stringent brainwashing as children that leads them to say that they "support those who fight for our freedom" while also promoting a police state worse than Orwells worst nightmare.
It's questionable if even North Korea is worse than Oceania. And the US, where government wiretapping is actually debated publicly, is neither a police state, dystopia nor an Orwellian nightmare. No state that let's you make such claims about them unpunished is, by definition.
Why can't we simply treat the US as an ordinary nation that's mostly benevolent but has its darker side, rather than trying to pretend it's either the Messiah or the Devil? Both titles are already taken.
I get that it's a business decision and that sometimes you have to make the hard call, but that doesn't mean you have to be a douchebag about it.
Sure you do. Being a douchebag to your victims inhumanizes them and thus makes you feel less guilty about mistreating them. It's why it's such a common practice of various corrupt security forces the world over.
And if people are willing to risk their lives and freedom to get an illegal drug that just makes them high, what makes you think laws will prevent them from getting a drug that makes them more money?
People risk future revenue in order to get high. Getting high is an end in itself, money is just a means towards an end. So you have the relative priorities backwards there. Not that getting temporarily smarter couldn't be a very pleasant high...
Also, drugs that get you high are almost impossible to stop because they're either made by nature, like cannabis, easy to make, like meth, or ridiculously potent (so a single good chemist is capable of supplying the entire world), like LSD. Custom-designed nootropes would likely have very complex structure and thus require a pharmaceutical company, and a high-end one at that.
You don't think I should be able to cancel that buy order due to the new information?
No, you shouldn't. You tried to profit from random events going your way, so now you just have to deal with the fact that your lottery ticket was empty.
Partners have always had the power in law firms -- but how long can they maintain power when their underlings are so much smarter and more ambitious?
They can't, which is why it won't happen. People at the top are there because they're very good at hamstringing competition. So the only legal performance enhancers will be those that are either inefficient, like coffee, or too expensive for you to afford.
Of course the situation will change once more efficient things like direct brain-computer hookups become available to top dogs; but until then, all the little muffs will be kept down.
If you can't sleep at night because you sold out people who were counting on you, that's your problem.
Profits are private, costs are public. Do whatever it takes to make a buck, for you never have to suffer the consequences of your actions or face your victims. That's the fantasy modern capitalism is built on: that the only thing that matters is you.
The problem is, every now and then you might catch a glimpse of the portrait showing your real face. Because you are nothing but the sum of your actions, them - and their consequences - being your form when viewed from afar, so the being such behaviour harms the most is the same one you did it all for. And thus you're caught in a trap of your own making, lacking the guts to admit the truth and thus being unable to stop harming yourself.
Flesh dies, memory fades, but a push you gave the world to the direction of your choice, however small, remains your contribution for ever.
A law that is violated in my garden every Spring as the seeds germinate, take root, send up leaves, and decrease atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Plants are engines powered by the Sun. The very purpose of those leaves is to tap the flow of solar energy. When the giant celestial nuclear reactor is taken into account, the entropy of the entire system is increasing.
There is something fundamentally wrong about the fundamental "laws" of thermodynamics. Put succinctly, they fail to take into account that these "laws" do not apply to the observer, who is not necessarily decaying into his constituent parts during the process of observation.
Your body is using an external source of energy - the food you eat - to fight the decay.
Incorrect. Abstract mathematical objects are not "encoded within the observable universe"
Sure they are. The set of concepts that humans can conceive are those which human brains, either directly or through tools like computers, can handle. Human brains evolved in the context usually called "the observable universe", so all concepts - including but not limited to abstract mathematical objects - we can think about are encoded within it, just in a real roundabout way. In other words, you can not know anything that isn't encoded in your causal past; even the very notion of abstraction only exists because it's inherent in the physical universe to such a degree that evolution encoded the principle into your brain.
And besides, the notion that math is supernatural - something that exists above physical reality, independent of it - is an unproven and probably unprovable assertion.
Meh. Didn't we hear the same argument when color TV was introduced? Or CDs, Digital TV, Digital cameras, Fly by wire, the Internet etc etc every other technology implementation ever?
Cassettes and analog cameras weren't banned. They simply fell out of favor because CDs and digital cameras were way superior as far as the end user was concerned. By contrast, digital tv and digital radio don't benefit the end user, they'll simply let parts of the spectrum be auctioned off; so they require legislation to force the end users to pay the costs for the transition so someone else can profit.
What is 'general intelligence'? (Anything like Colonel Panic?)
Self-metaprogramming, basically. You are smart if you can repurpose existing neural circuits to handle new problems (because that way your consciousness is freed to consider things like consequences, and specialized circuit is of course faster than general-purpose one), you learn fast if you can build such circuits fast, and you are insightful if you can examine your own mental subroutines and how they work - if you actually learn to reprogram them consciously you'll likely find a new religion or something.
It does not follow that being able to understand calculus gives you peace, happiness and longevity.
70 years is equivalent to 411,222,120,000,000 miles. It might not actually be longer, but it sure sounds bigger:).
It's not a debate that I mean to stir up 3-deep in a Slashdot thread, but just to say that the vast majority of people at most places on the political spectrum agree: Those that have the ability to succeed, should have the opportunity to. It's just the mechanics they disagree on that are sometimes, sadly, mutually exclusive.
The disagreement is about what happens to those who won't succeed, to Joe Average and Joe Hobo. Currently, Joe Average's position is getting worse and worse, which is a huge problem because modern economy can't actually work without them having money to act as consumers. And as the economy stalls and enters a tailspin, Joe Succesful shifts the blame to Joe Hobo, closing his eyes from the approaching ground because doing something about it would require taking a break from his personal interests to visit the cockpit, and getting Joe Average to get along with it because pretending bad things only happen to deserving people is a pleasant fantasy.
Of course such situations are always rectified eventually, the only question remains whether it's by recycling the wreckage.
Slashdot Mirror
Little chance of that: "200 miles underground". Unless the summary got meters and miles confused, but Slashdot editors wouldn't make such a mistake.
The problem is, businesses are people but unlike humans are only expected to care about "shareholder value". If you're trying to keep a horde of rules-lawyering sociopathic demigods from murdering people and destroying the entire planet for profit and the only tool you have is regulation then of course you'll end up with an ever-thickening rulebook. You are, after all, trying to enumerate badness against professional lawyers.
If you want less regulation, then you have to change social values so that people and organizations will consider more than just their personal benefit when making decisions. But that would mean acknowledging raw capitalism isn't sufficient to be the sole guide for society or even economy. So I guess it'll have to wait until current collapse forces the issue. Until then, choke on your regulations.
"I hate Jews" is a point of view. "There was no Holocaust" is a flat-out lie. You are entitled to your own opinions and interpretations, but not your own facts. The latter makes you wilfully insane.
And frankly, Turkey is being a moron here. They could simply ignore all this, it happened 100 years ago after all. Or they could issue an official apology. They could even frame the Armenians as nasty people who had it coming, evil as such approach might be. But instead they pick the one strategy that has no chance of success whatsoever: pretending nothing ever happened. It's enough to make one question whether someone in Turkey wishes to ride a national persecution complex to power.
You do realize modern computers can multitask, right? And even Windows supports setting process priority. So it's not like he can't watch videos while the thing is running in the background, it'll just run a bit slower.
Perhaps it could, but those voxels/cells aren't really independent. General Relativity requires space to be differentiable (smooth) which in turn means that value of one cell limits possible values for nearby cells. Laws of physics could also be understood as rules of how values can vary across time- and lightlike paths. Put these effects together, and I suspect the result is the holographic principle.
Every decision which has consequences to anyone or anything else is a political decision.
And who would that be? Last I checked, coal, gas and oil let you shit your externalities all over other people's environment (and lungs, real estate and insurance costs), and nuclear is impossible due to political reasons.
Wind is more expensive than fossil fuels only as long as you force me to suck up the fumes from your smokestack and tailpipe and consequently die horribly from lung cancer for free. Not to mention the fact fossils will run out eventually, leaving to future generations sitting in the dark if the alternatives are not in place by then.
So what happens when credit cards are all maxed out and people have to lower their spending? Why companies will have to lay off people, leading to even less demand, leading to more layouts, and so forth until the economic tailspin turns into an outright economic and social collapse. Yet no company can unilaterally rise wages to ward off this disaster, because even if it made them more competitive due to a workforce that wouldn't hate them quite so much, the shareholders would complain, since the money could be going to them instead.
If only there were a party who could simply order everyone to rise wages, like it or not, to meet some kind of minimum standard high enough to keep the market working. Or, even better, simply pay a minimal income unconditionally to everyone.
Wait, what?
Well, the girl is less likely to die from a bullet wound than a nuclear bomb going off right next to her, so it's not really an ethical dilemma, any more than performing a risky medical operation to save that girl's life afterwards would be.
The problem is, this entire ridiculous scenario is an example of an idea - that ethics can be set aside if needed - fighting for existence. Ideas aren't passive things; they're encoded by living neural cells in human brains, and neurons have a basic drive to be used. So once you accept the idea of ethical exceptions in principle, that idea will always whisper in your ear in every situation, even ones that don't involve any immediate danger.
So the question is: given two imperfect options - absolute ethical commandment and a slippery slope - which one is likely to cause less destruction?
How do you learn what is acceptable in a society? By watching people do stuff and get praised or reviled for it. What does Hollywood do? Show people doing stuff and get labeled heroes or villains. They're an efficient propaganda machine, for good or ill.
Yes.
It gives the powerful yet another way to assert their dominance over the less so. And because the powerful are only so because of a system that backs their baseless claims of superiority, and can only continue as long as the powerless keep buying the lie, new ways to propagandize are always needed. All the little ritualistic humiliations society is so fond of, from drug tests to getting groped by the TSA, ultimately come down to the same message: "you are nothing and must obey your masters."
It's a sick, if fascinating, game. It's also one that can't go on forever, since effecively crippling people cripples their society too, yet that society still contains a very strong cultral leftover from feudalism. So what we really have here is a narrative of equality fighting a narrative of hierarchy, leading to very confused people doing completely irrational things - like wiretapping everyone in the name of freedom - without really understanding why.
You mean a law-abiding person. A good person does not prey on innocents, but Corporate America provides plenty of food satisfying any reasonable standard of sufficient sinfulness you care to set to qualify as an acceptable target.
It's why movies that want robbers seem heroic often use casinos as targets: no one's going to shed a single tear when those who exploit people's dreams to fleece them get victimized in turn.
It's questionable if even North Korea is worse than Oceania. And the US, where government wiretapping is actually debated publicly, is neither a police state, dystopia nor an Orwellian nightmare. No state that let's you make such claims about them unpunished is, by definition.
Why can't we simply treat the US as an ordinary nation that's mostly benevolent but has its darker side, rather than trying to pretend it's either the Messiah or the Devil? Both titles are already taken.
Sure you do. Being a douchebag to your victims inhumanizes them and thus makes you feel less guilty about mistreating them. It's why it's such a common practice of various corrupt security forces the world over.
People risk future revenue in order to get high. Getting high is an end in itself, money is just a means towards an end. So you have the relative priorities backwards there. Not that getting temporarily smarter couldn't be a very pleasant high...
Also, drugs that get you high are almost impossible to stop because they're either made by nature, like cannabis, easy to make, like meth, or ridiculously potent (so a single good chemist is capable of supplying the entire world), like LSD. Custom-designed nootropes would likely have very complex structure and thus require a pharmaceutical company, and a high-end one at that.
No, you shouldn't. You tried to profit from random events going your way, so now you just have to deal with the fact that your lottery ticket was empty.
They can't, which is why it won't happen. People at the top are there because they're very good at hamstringing competition. So the only legal performance enhancers will be those that are either inefficient, like coffee, or too expensive for you to afford.
Of course the situation will change once more efficient things like direct brain-computer hookups become available to top dogs; but until then, all the little muffs will be kept down.
Profits are private, costs are public. Do whatever it takes to make a buck, for you never have to suffer the consequences of your actions or face your victims. That's the fantasy modern capitalism is built on: that the only thing that matters is you.
The problem is, every now and then you might catch a glimpse of the portrait showing your real face. Because you are nothing but the sum of your actions, them - and their consequences - being your form when viewed from afar, so the being such behaviour harms the most is the same one you did it all for. And thus you're caught in a trap of your own making, lacking the guts to admit the truth and thus being unable to stop harming yourself.
Flesh dies, memory fades, but a push you gave the world to the direction of your choice, however small, remains your contribution for ever.
Plants are engines powered by the Sun. The very purpose of those leaves is to tap the flow of solar energy. When the giant celestial nuclear reactor is taken into account, the entropy of the entire system is increasing.
Your body is using an external source of energy - the food you eat - to fight the decay.
Sure they are. The set of concepts that humans can conceive are those which human brains, either directly or through tools like computers, can handle. Human brains evolved in the context usually called "the observable universe", so all concepts - including but not limited to abstract mathematical objects - we can think about are encoded within it, just in a real roundabout way. In other words, you can not know anything that isn't encoded in your causal past; even the very notion of abstraction only exists because it's inherent in the physical universe to such a degree that evolution encoded the principle into your brain.
And besides, the notion that math is supernatural - something that exists above physical reality, independent of it - is an unproven and probably unprovable assertion.
Cassettes and analog cameras weren't banned. They simply fell out of favor because CDs and digital cameras were way superior as far as the end user was concerned. By contrast, digital tv and digital radio don't benefit the end user, they'll simply let parts of the spectrum be auctioned off; so they require legislation to force the end users to pay the costs for the transition so someone else can profit.
Self-metaprogramming, basically. You are smart if you can repurpose existing neural circuits to handle new problems (because that way your consciousness is freed to consider things like consequences, and specialized circuit is of course faster than general-purpose one), you learn fast if you can build such circuits fast, and you are insightful if you can examine your own mental subroutines and how they work - if you actually learn to reprogram them consciously you'll likely find a new religion or something.
70 years is equivalent to 411,222,120,000,000 miles. It might not actually be longer, but it sure sounds bigger :).
The disagreement is about what happens to those who won't succeed, to Joe Average and Joe Hobo. Currently, Joe Average's position is getting worse and worse, which is a huge problem because modern economy can't actually work without them having money to act as consumers. And as the economy stalls and enters a tailspin, Joe Succesful shifts the blame to Joe Hobo, closing his eyes from the approaching ground because doing something about it would require taking a break from his personal interests to visit the cockpit, and getting Joe Average to get along with it because pretending bad things only happen to deserving people is a pleasant fantasy.
Of course such situations are always rectified eventually, the only question remains whether it's by recycling the wreckage.