If you can't be bothered to pre-register to vote, or need to be pestered to vote, then you probably get 100% of your info on candidate's and issues from the mailers and TV/radio commercials. In other words, you've just digested a load of garbage and have nothing with which to make an informed choice.
US has a two-party system, which means that the only relevant information is party affiliation. Just decide whether you want a theocratic plutocracy or a slightly less extreme secular plutocracy and vote for Republican or Democrat accordingly.
If you just want a job and are looking to do something theoretical, rethink your career choice.
So you're saying if I'm not independently wealthy I should know my place and not aspire above my station, and instead leave the "gentleman careers" for the nobility?
Without the resources of a college or university. Where are you going to get all the equipment for, say, science courses? This is prohibitively expensive.
Oh, you were suggesting that I pay for your "real education" while being excluded from it. Why in blazes would I?
How about people who just want a job go elsewhere?
How about people who want an exclusive "real education" pay for it themselves, rather than demand that those with jobs subsidize their hobbies while being barred from partaking in them?
We need to become much more selective about who we give loans and grants for colleges and universities.
Who's we? I am certainly not going to exclude myself and my kin from something paid with my taxes. And you already stated above you can't pay for it yourself.
Most people are unintelligent, so that's not surprising.
It is unwise to insult people you are trying to get charity from.
Because then you can ensure that they'll know exactly what they need to for their specific job, which applies even to people with pieces of paper.
Does exact match bring sufficient additional efficiency to pay itself back in a reasonable time? Apparently not, since businesses in general aren't doing so.
So does coal and nuclear. No-one wants to live near those either.
Less people have to for the same amount of power generated. Also, don't underestimate the "out of sight, out of mind" -effect - a nuclear power plant is far less conspicious than acres after acres of windmills. Finally, the complaints about windmills are typically about the appearance, noise and other actual effects while the complaints about nuclear are about highly unlikely disaster scenarios, which eventually fade from people's minds when nothing happens.
Off shore wind, far enough out that no-one can complain, is getting cheaper all the time.
You could put it mid-Atlantic and someone will complain. Everything has consequences - or at least potential consequences - and nothing whatsoever is acceptable to an enviromentalist. Or at least that's what it seems like to me.
If you are going to shoot down renewables because they are expensive or need some investment then you had better do the same with coal and nuclear, and get ready for the lights to go out.
Which seems the most likely result right now. Also, the main problem with renewables is that since efficient grid-scale storage doesn't exist nor seems likely to exist anytime soon, reaching anything approaching reliability with them requires a long-term coordinated - centrally planned, with all objections to any part of the plan overruled - rollout, which is simply not possible in a democratic, capitalistic society. By contrast, a nuclear coal or nuclear plant can be simply built and hooked into the grid by a single, if large, company.
Those that make bad choices, and don't try deserve to be stuck where they are.
That someone made bad choices in no way entitles Mickey Dee to be effectively subsidized by tax money in their quest to give as many people as possible various horrible metabological illnesses. Minimum wage needs to be high enough that the employee doesn't need any kind of additional support, otherwise you're simply building a corporate welfare state.
Also, I'm not entirely certain what you mean by "deserving" here. Are bad - by which I presume you mean economically unsuccesfull - choices some kind of sin that needs to be punished?
An intelligent human can decide not to fuck unprotected if they can't afford to raise the consequences of their actions.
An intelligent human should also realize that a society where people can't afford to have children is doomed. A Mensa member might comprehend that it's not possible to know your economic fortunes for two decades or so it takes to rise a kid. And a once-in-a-century genius could even hypothesize it's cheaper to ensure children have a stable and safe environment to grow up in than to deal with the consequences if they don't, even after we factor in the horrendous consequence of poor single mothers not having maximally miserable lives.
Education. And education is not just so you can get a job, but so you can be a well-rounded human being and have an understanding of the universe around you.
People who just want a job should go to trade schools.
Traditionally, trade schools have been for more "hands on" jobs like a plumber or an electrician, while college has been for more theoretical ones like a geologist or a mathematician. I don't think there's ever been any institution for pure self-improvement without a goal of increasing your productivity in some way, nor am I convinced that's even a coherent concept - a tree is known by its fruits, after all.
True, and then colleges turn into poor imitations of trade schools, making it more difficult for intelligent people to find a real education.
Nothing stops you from starting a web forum for the purposes of education, like Khan academy has done, or even renting a set of physical buildings for this purpose - after all, if your goal is education rather than employability, you don't need any official accreditation. Of course you might have trouble convincing the students to pay the upkeep of such an institution, but that simply goes to show that "real education" isn't worth its price for most people.
Perhaps employers should stop requiring you to have pieces of paper so often, and actually offer job training and test their potential employees. It used to be more common, and it still happens in the better work environments.
Why provide training when that simply makes the employee more likely to get a better job elsewhere? You'd need lifelong careers to be the rule for this to make sense, and that seems unlikely to return without massive cultural shifts.
Yes, but still... It'll be a while before we run out of ocean:)
Ocean no, shoreline yes. Especially shoreline where no one influental enough to block development happens to live. Windmills suffer considerably from NIMBY. All renewables do, due to the vast areas required by them.
Where are they going to get enough biomass? Farms aren't going to grow low value biomass instead of high value food.
Food is biomass, and according to Wikipedia, half of all food - 100 kg per person per year - is wasted. Dunno if it would be enough to cover the need, but a low-cost, low-maintenance, high-reliability gas generator could potentially have markets, at least in apartment buildings, assuming it's actually possible to build one.
Fun fact, even a datacenter in the middle of a desert can cool every piece of equipment inside via a process known as evaporative cooling; using a heat exchanger connected to an underground water tank or adequate commercial supply, the differential in humidity inside causes heat to be evaporated in the desert sun.
Another fun fact: deserts rarely have water mains or a native surplus of water.
This proves global warming causes carbon dioxide, not the other way around! It's all a conspiracy by those rich and powerful scientists and tree huggers against poor widdle oil tycoons!
Hypothetically, what do you suggest for when the experts are untrustworthy?
How do you decide an expert is untrustworthy? Because based on what I've seen, climate change is denied solely because people don't like its implications.
The money could easily have been instead placed in public service reminders to not 'text and drive' and putting rumble strips at the sides of highways, almost certainly saving more lives.
So why wasn't it, before the incident? Because the will wasn't there. The money didn't come out of some other, potentially more effective public safety measure, so whatever the reason they weren't implemented is, this isn't it.
Just look at the loving way in which the residents of "free" public housing maintain their residences out of gratitude to the all-caring government.
Are you suggesting it would be better for the residents of public housing to be sleeping out in the streets? Or are you saying they should be thrown out because it would somehow benefit you?
Also, the reason government charity exists is because the private sector failed to either provide people the means to take care of themselves or to ensure that they nonetheless are taken care of. It is foolish to blame the government for trying to mitigate the consequences of private sector failures. Even an arrogant sociopath who doesn't care about consequences to others and doesn't believe he could ever fall on hard times should still care about the consequences to himself should enough people have nothing to lose but their chains.
Truly, public housing solved poverty to exactly the same degree that free broadband will "solve" the digital divide. I'm sure that the upstanding U.S. citizens who live in public housing will take it upon themselves to learn how to code and contribute Open Source software to the world in complete gratitude for this benevolent entitlement.
Whether they'll use broadband to program or to post on Slashdot, at least they'll have it. Which, in modern world, opens up all kinds low- or zero-cost opportunities for entertainment, participation and networking.
Is that the real issue here? Are you afraid the huge and growing number of poor people will start seeing themselves as a unified group capable of fighting back? Surely you realize that it's going to happen anyway, and the sooner it does, the less dramatic their demands are going to be?
Movie studios have traditionally price discriminated, offering a limited viewing window at a lower price than an indefinite window.
Which, according to yourself, are the exact same product as far as the consumer is concerned. Either those gosh darn pirates keep defenseless widdle DRM-free rentals forever so they don't have to shell out for a "durable copy" or it's extremely important that rentals exist because people don't want to watch movies more than once (altough it's still unclear why video rentals should be a concern for Web standards, seeing how rental stores can and probably should simply deliver such precious content through some proprietary program rather than assume various third-party ones honour their wishes). You can't have it both ways.
Not that any of this matters, since anyone so inclined will simply break any DRM or just grab the content from Pirate Bay. At this point copyright law has all the credibility and respectability communism has in the former DDR.
For movies other than cult classics and children's animated movies, I imagine that most people prefer to watch a movie only once, not multiple times for the indefinite future.
If this is true, then there's no real reason to worry about someone cluttering their hard drive with video files they're never going to watch again, now is there?
Where the total width is what you say it is: 21px. Instead we have the stupidity that the actual width is 32px. and paddings, margins et al ADD to the defined width instead of being a part of the element. Which makes calculating dimensions in HTML a fucking pain in the ass.
What happens if the total width you declare is less than the combined width of paddings, margins and borders? Which seems likely, if addition is such a "pain in the ass" for you, especially when CSS inheritance rules come to play.
Also, as a user, I say this: the harder it's for HTML "programmers" to specify element sizes - especially in pixels - the harder it is for you to make a layout that breaks on any configuration you didn't expect (which would be almost all of them), which in turn makes things better for me.
I do wish that YOU and your entire circle of people YOU know will be the first to get their jobs replaced by AI, especially when you are in your 40s.
You mean like millions after millions after millions of people already have, to various other technologies and offshoring? Always to the approval of the people who get to pocket the savings, and those who think they are irreplaceable, along with mumbling about bullwhip manufacturers and luddites, and often with generous heapings of victim blaming. So now I should have sympathy for these very same people who were happy to let others go, when it comes their turn? Especially when unemployment being such a horrible prospect in the US is mostly due to their own efforts to make it so, which they could cease any time they wanted, but don't want to because it gives them power over other people?
I think not, AC. "Captains of the industry" have had decades to address this problem out of the goodness of their hearts. They didn't, so now they get a less gentle incentive.
On the contrary, he's being very rational. A full artificial intelligence is a threat to him, since it could do his job well enough to outcompete him. Just like industrial robots did to assembly-line workers, and expert systems are doing to expert positions, a general AI will do to the leaders who, of course, will go luddite in fear over their jobs - and even more importantly, their fondly-held dreams of being irreplaceable, unlike all the little people beneath them.
Which is precisely why I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords. About time our current flesh-and-blood ones got to play a game of musical chairs, too.
Why cant we come up with a rational response? something where we use what we have now, and work towards a better tomorrow together?
Better tomorrow for whom? If I burn a gallon of gasoline getting to work today, my tomorrow will be better, even if the day after that will be worse for everyone. Powers that be have spent several decades trying to get people to believe selfishness is a virtue rather than a character flaw. That same bullshit is now preventing them from doing anything about anything.
Everyone are making rational decisions based on the principle of selfishness: "I have mine, screw you". They're following it straight to Hell.
The headset's USB interface presumably needs a specific driver, since 'read the outputs of a bunch of sensors and also firmware update' isn't exactly a USB Device Class;
Not that hard. 25 dollar a gallon gas tax and triple the price of electricity and people would have no choice except of course for the rich.
Except rebel, of course. Which I'd have to do, since without heating I'd freeze to death in the winter, even if I'd be willing to suffer being under effective house arrest.
Slashdot Mirror
US has a two-party system, which means that the only relevant information is party affiliation. Just decide whether you want a theocratic plutocracy or a slightly less extreme secular plutocracy and vote for Republican or Democrat accordingly.
So you're saying if I'm not independently wealthy I should know my place and not aspire above my station, and instead leave the "gentleman careers" for the nobility?
Oh, you were suggesting that I pay for your "real education" while being excluded from it. Why in blazes would I?
How about people who want an exclusive "real education" pay for it themselves, rather than demand that those with jobs subsidize their hobbies while being barred from partaking in them?
Who's we? I am certainly not going to exclude myself and my kin from something paid with my taxes. And you already stated above you can't pay for it yourself.
It is unwise to insult people you are trying to get charity from.
Does exact match bring sufficient additional efficiency to pay itself back in a reasonable time? Apparently not, since businesses in general aren't doing so.
Less people have to for the same amount of power generated. Also, don't underestimate the "out of sight, out of mind" -effect - a nuclear power plant is far less conspicious than acres after acres of windmills. Finally, the complaints about windmills are typically about the appearance, noise and other actual effects while the complaints about nuclear are about highly unlikely disaster scenarios, which eventually fade from people's minds when nothing happens.
You could put it mid-Atlantic and someone will complain. Everything has consequences - or at least potential consequences - and nothing whatsoever is acceptable to an enviromentalist. Or at least that's what it seems like to me.
Which seems the most likely result right now. Also, the main problem with renewables is that since efficient grid-scale storage doesn't exist nor seems likely to exist anytime soon, reaching anything approaching reliability with them requires a long-term coordinated - centrally planned, with all objections to any part of the plan overruled - rollout, which is simply not possible in a democratic, capitalistic society. By contrast, a nuclear coal or nuclear plant can be simply built and hooked into the grid by a single, if large, company.
That someone made bad choices in no way entitles Mickey Dee to be effectively subsidized by tax money in their quest to give as many people as possible various horrible metabological illnesses. Minimum wage needs to be high enough that the employee doesn't need any kind of additional support, otherwise you're simply building a corporate welfare state.
Also, I'm not entirely certain what you mean by "deserving" here. Are bad - by which I presume you mean economically unsuccesfull - choices some kind of sin that needs to be punished?
An intelligent human should also realize that a society where people can't afford to have children is doomed. A Mensa member might comprehend that it's not possible to know your economic fortunes for two decades or so it takes to rise a kid. And a once-in-a-century genius could even hypothesize it's cheaper to ensure children have a stable and safe environment to grow up in than to deal with the consequences if they don't, even after we factor in the horrendous consequence of poor single mothers not having maximally miserable lives.
Traditionally, trade schools have been for more "hands on" jobs like a plumber or an electrician, while college has been for more theoretical ones like a geologist or a mathematician. I don't think there's ever been any institution for pure self-improvement without a goal of increasing your productivity in some way, nor am I convinced that's even a coherent concept - a tree is known by its fruits, after all.
Nothing stops you from starting a web forum for the purposes of education, like Khan academy has done, or even renting a set of physical buildings for this purpose - after all, if your goal is education rather than employability, you don't need any official accreditation. Of course you might have trouble convincing the students to pay the upkeep of such an institution, but that simply goes to show that "real education" isn't worth its price for most people.
Why provide training when that simply makes the employee more likely to get a better job elsewhere? You'd need lifelong careers to be the rule for this to make sense, and that seems unlikely to return without massive cultural shifts.
Ocean no, shoreline yes. Especially shoreline where no one influental enough to block development happens to live. Windmills suffer considerably from NIMBY. All renewables do, due to the vast areas required by them.
Food is biomass, and according to Wikipedia, half of all food - 100 kg per person per year - is wasted. Dunno if it would be enough to cover the need, but a low-cost, low-maintenance, high-reliability gas generator could potentially have markets, at least in apartment buildings, assuming it's actually possible to build one.
Another fun fact: deserts rarely have water mains or a native surplus of water.
So, Republicans, does this about sum it up?
How do you decide an expert is untrustworthy? Because based on what I've seen, climate change is denied solely because people don't like its implications.
So why wasn't it, before the incident? Because the will wasn't there. The money didn't come out of some other, potentially more effective public safety measure, so whatever the reason they weren't implemented is, this isn't it.
Just combine a taser with an automatic targeting system and mount them in streetlights.
Are you suggesting it would be better for the residents of public housing to be sleeping out in the streets? Or are you saying they should be thrown out because it would somehow benefit you?
Also, the reason government charity exists is because the private sector failed to either provide people the means to take care of themselves or to ensure that they nonetheless are taken care of. It is foolish to blame the government for trying to mitigate the consequences of private sector failures. Even an arrogant sociopath who doesn't care about consequences to others and doesn't believe he could ever fall on hard times should still care about the consequences to himself should enough people have nothing to lose but their chains.
Whether they'll use broadband to program or to post on Slashdot, at least they'll have it. Which, in modern world, opens up all kinds low- or zero-cost opportunities for entertainment, participation and networking.
Is that the real issue here? Are you afraid the huge and growing number of poor people will start seeing themselves as a unified group capable of fighting back? Surely you realize that it's going to happen anyway, and the sooner it does, the less dramatic their demands are going to be?
Which, according to yourself, are the exact same product as far as the consumer is concerned. Either those gosh darn pirates keep defenseless widdle DRM-free rentals forever so they don't have to shell out for a "durable copy" or it's extremely important that rentals exist because people don't want to watch movies more than once (altough it's still unclear why video rentals should be a concern for Web standards, seeing how rental stores can and probably should simply deliver such precious content through some proprietary program rather than assume various third-party ones honour their wishes). You can't have it both ways.
Not that any of this matters, since anyone so inclined will simply break any DRM or just grab the content from Pirate Bay. At this point copyright law has all the credibility and respectability communism has in the former DDR.
If this is true, then there's no real reason to worry about someone cluttering their hard drive with video files they're never going to watch again, now is there?
What happens if the total width you declare is less than the combined width of paddings, margins and borders? Which seems likely, if addition is such a "pain in the ass" for you, especially when CSS inheritance rules come to play.
Also, as a user, I say this: the harder it's for HTML "programmers" to specify element sizes - especially in pixels - the harder it is for you to make a layout that breaks on any configuration you didn't expect (which would be almost all of them), which in turn makes things better for me.
You mean like millions after millions after millions of people already have, to various other technologies and offshoring? Always to the approval of the people who get to pocket the savings, and those who think they are irreplaceable, along with mumbling about bullwhip manufacturers and luddites, and often with generous heapings of victim blaming. So now I should have sympathy for these very same people who were happy to let others go, when it comes their turn? Especially when unemployment being such a horrible prospect in the US is mostly due to their own efforts to make it so, which they could cease any time they wanted, but don't want to because it gives them power over other people?
I think not, AC. "Captains of the industry" have had decades to address this problem out of the goodness of their hearts. They didn't, so now they get a less gentle incentive.
And since nothing is ever perfect this works as a nice nonspecific excuse to oppose any change at all.
+5 Funny.
On the contrary, he's being very rational. A full artificial intelligence is a threat to him, since it could do his job well enough to outcompete him. Just like industrial robots did to assembly-line workers, and expert systems are doing to expert positions, a general AI will do to the leaders who, of course, will go luddite in fear over their jobs - and even more importantly, their fondly-held dreams of being irreplaceable, unlike all the little people beneath them.
Which is precisely why I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords. About time our current flesh-and-blood ones got to play a game of musical chairs, too.
Better tomorrow for whom? If I burn a gallon of gasoline getting to work today, my tomorrow will be better, even if the day after that will be worse for everyone. Powers that be have spent several decades trying to get people to believe selfishness is a virtue rather than a character flaw. That same bullshit is now preventing them from doing anything about anything.
Everyone are making rational decisions based on the principle of selfishness: "I have mine, screw you". They're following it straight to Hell.
03h and FEh?
An accelemeter is really just a joystick with six axes, as is a 3D locator.
Except rebel, of course. Which I'd have to do, since without heating I'd freeze to death in the winter, even if I'd be willing to suffer being under effective house arrest.
Even if what you propose was physically possible, a hibernating society is not really a solution.
Every word is a weasel word for a big enough weasel.