Democracy without constitutional limitations is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
Democracy with constitutional limitations is the same, except the wolves have toilet paper. And every other form of government is the wolves skipping formalities.
If the majority of your population are wolves, you're screwed, no matter what form of government you have.
Many people appear to have a great deal of faith in both politicians and governments.
Or little faith in their own ability to fight monsters. Or even little ability to even perceive monstrous as monstrous anymore, having been socialized into believing that the strong should dominate over weak and the only issue in question is the specific form this takes.
Once you've been conditioned into believing it's just and right you lose your livelihood because it happens to benefit a higher-up, is it really that much a stretch to believe they can just plain kill you? It enhances shareholder value to not have you dirty bum begging on the street, and using tax money to feed you would violate sacred property rights. And you're just a looter anyway, not welcome in Galt's Gulch.
All countries conduct espionage to the extent that they prioritize their capabilities, and against targets where they perceive threats and/or opportunities.
All countries keep an eye on their neighbours, just like all people keep a general awareness of their surroundings. All countries don't tap the phones of their neighbours's leaders, or install malware on equipment sold to them, or even spies over. Morals aside, taking hostile action tends to backfire, as the US is learning. Reputation is a resource, and it's stupid to waste it.
The problem with Machtpolitik is that even if you win a few rounds, you can't stop playing without giving away all your ill-gotten gains, and sooner or later you lose. And when you do, you don't get back what you've lost, even if you quit. And sometimes the house wins and everyone loses big time. And the Devil's the dealer.
The US is a good case study: the country is hopelessly in debt and the infrastructure is crumbling, yet it's going to be spending $ 1 trillion for a new fighter. It's madness, but that's the price US pays for the way it fought the Cold War. Ruthlessness doesn't go away and leave you alone just because whatever enemy you conjured it up to win has. That's why it's foolish to ignore morality, even in international politics - especially in international politics, since there's no nice constable to run to if you manage to get in over your head.
You seem to think that double entry bookkeeping doesn't require extra work (significant increase in costs),
No, it doesn't. Entering the numbers into a cell in Excel spreadsheet or to the field of a bookkeeping software require the exact same amount of work.
Also, this is plutonium. It sits in storage and gets moved around only occasionally. And when it does, accounting is the least of the expenses - or do you simply send it in mail?
that it wouldn't reduce usability (far more difficult to produce reports on wider issues),
This is a thoroughly bizarre statement. How is a software specifically designed to handle this type of task less usable than a generic spreadsheet? What "wider issues" does it keep you from reporting?
or that it would make system immune to human errors.
No system is immune to mistakes, but some are inherently more resistant than others.
You are incorrect on all accounts.
And you are making such bizarre statements I doubt you know what double-entry bookkeeping means.
Problem is that skeptical scientists such as Richard Lindzen agree with that 'consensus', because the question is too narrow. Ask something more interesting like, "should we replace all our coal power with renewables because to prevent AGW?" or "is AGW going to be catastrophic?" and you will find that there is no consensus.
And should such consensus emerge, you can always rephrase the question again. Or maybe you'll claim the answer should be ignored since climatologists are not, after all, engineers. Perhaps you'll come up with something more creative. Just as long as it lets you dismiss science that's saying things you don't want to hear while pretending to be scientific.
Climate change scepticism certainly serves as a wonderful demonstration about human capacity for self-deception.
The whole concept of "revenge porn," insofar as it applies to nudes and porn freely made and disseminated, is ever so much "I want my freedom.... but I don't want my choices to have consequences of which I don't approve."
Does this only apply to revenge porn, or would you also blame someone who gets mugged for being out after dark?
We have a term for that behavior. It's called behaving like a child.
No, that's just you attempting to use rhetoric to dismiss a position without actually analysing it.
Just because most of the people graduating with a degree in physics never actually use quantum physics in their jobs does not mean it's pointless to teach quantum physics to students.
Actually, it does. That's exactly what it means. If your "degree in X" doesn't mean you'll be using Y in your work, it's pointless to include Y in said degree, as long as said degree is mainly a qualification for work.
While I do think that it is of extreme value to know what problems something (in this case, a paradigm) tries to solve, I do not think that you need to know procedural programming to know object oriented programming.
The problem with procedural programming is that every piece of code can touch every piece of data. The problem is combinatory explosion. If you've never run into that problem, how can you understand the need for a solution?
It might, in most cases, also be beneficial to most people. But as I saw my college classmates go through this (we did procedural Python, then C, then Java), I noticed that many of them had quite a lot of trouble getting rid of the "procedural way" of doing things, and often made more errors than I did when I first learned OOP. Maybe I'm an exception. But, oh well...
I've never been to college, so I wouldn't know. But this is how it worked for me: line-number Basic, C, Object-oriented, functional. I don't know any of these well, but I know what problem each rose to solve - except functional, since it didn't rise to solve problems in programming, but is simply an alternative way of describing algorithms. However, I'm developing a love/hate relationship with Haskell.
I'll disagree on that. We use white space to communicate our programs' block structure to other humans. Why should we use a different syntax to tell the compiler the same information?
Because our visual cortext deals with geometric structure, while the compiler deals with logical structure. It's simply more efficient to tell the compiler the latter, and let the IDE to format the code for easy consumption by the former.
Computers should conform to the needs of humans. Full. Stop.
I agree. And in my experience, it's much easier to have explicit block start/end markers and let the IDE format things than wonder if your bugs are caused by mixed tabs and spaces.
Python eliminates that source of bugs and redundancy by having the compiler's view of the significance of what space match a human's view of significance of white space.
No, it doesn't, and that's precisely the problem. My eye can't tell the difference between 8 spaces and a tab, but the compiler can. And I often find myself refactoring the code in ways that causes space-based alignment to get inconsistent. In languages like Java I just insert braces and tell the compiler to reformat, and all is well; in languages like Python, I'll have a fun time re-indenting hundreds of lines and hoping I get everything right.
"Indentation is logical structure" sounds like a good idea, but it's not. It's a horrible one.
C is very beginner friendly in my opinion. It was my first non-BASIC language. Learning C you learn how those bits and bytes work and how shit gets done. The paradigm is old but not obsolete.
C is not beginner friendly. The reason is that it's not a managed language, so a mistake will have unpredictable consequences, rather than firing an exception like in Java. Yes, you can still do it; I learned C by reverse engineering Nethack sources in pre-Internet days and debugging all errors with printfs ("got here!") and logic, and perhaps that should be the criteria for serious programmers, but that's hardly "beginner friendly".
Personally, I think programmers should start with with line-number Basic, then move to procedural programming, then to object-oriented. You can't really understand a paradigm unless you know the problem it was designed as a response for.
That's not the correct use of the word "coercion", and it's a misuse that indicates a bias regarding economic policy. Coercion indicates the use of force or threat of force by one against another. A person in the wilderness must work or die, and no other person is there to coerce him to work.
You do realize that the entire point of civilization is to make things different from being alone in the wilderness, right? So if they aren't, then the civilization has failed miserably. Also, the conditions in wilderness are not under anyone's control, while the conditions in civilization are.
And I absolutely have a "bias" regarding economic policty: I believe economy exists to serve human needs and as such must address not just efficiency, but also fairness and security. Our current economy fails with all three.
Not automation, but automation combined with free market fundamentalism. The former causes disturbances in economy and the latter prevents efficient safety nets to ensure proper maintenance of human resources who's primary supply of income gets cut by them. This combination makes the economy extremely fragile, both because the resulting lack of flexibility but also because people compensate by overreacting to any negative signal.
That is why countries like Afghanistan, Ethiopia, and Somalia, that wisely avoided the "productivity catastrophe", are doing well, while countries adopting automation, like America, Europe, and Japan, are starving.
United States is starving. Europe makes do with filthy socialism and Japan with the remnants of feudalism. But don't worry, you've succesfully propagandized about the wonders of austerity, so it's unlikely that Europe will rise from depression any time soon.
Workers are lazy and will not produce if they don't have to.
Thank you for being honest about capitalism being based on coercion, disguised as it might be. However, the issue is precisely that we're running out of work that needs to - or even profitably can - be performed by humans, so what's the problem?
Sounds awfully like feminism or progressivism to me.
They can become religions, certainly. Progressivism has a built-in sense of destiny - a divine plan - and feminism began as a demand for more just world and developed a weird cult-like fringe later.
Ideologies are generally counterproductive my friend, except Buddhism, and that only because its first and last instructions are to reject ideologies, including this one.
Go ahead and reject ideologies, then. Now how will you get food? You can't just buy it, after all, without interacting with the local economic system in ways acceptable to that system - and if you do, you're not rejecting its values in any meaningful way.
This is what I meant when I said people aren't really in control of their destiny: believe what you will, but you'll still obey the overlords or die.
What I do know is that as long as there are people there will be something person A wants from person B and vice versa, and with that basis for trade there will be an economy, and something akin to jobs.
There is, however, an important difference between working to get food and working to get concert tickets. Current economy is ultimately based on coercion: work or die, or at least be extremely miserable. A society where all basic production is automated could guarantee an unconditional middle-class income to its members, so working would be strictly a matter of personal ambition.
Then again, we could already have an unconditional minimum income - and likely end up with a more efficient economy, since it's the coercion-based hierarchy that's the main source of inefficiency in corporations - yet don't do that for ideological reasons. So that suggests we'll see the nightmare scenario of ever-increasing wealth concentration and worsening dystopia instead.
Ayn Rand may have been batshit crazy about some things, but she also was accurate on some of her observations of human nature.
Batshit crazy or just a cynical and calculating con(wo)man. Either would be consistent with flattering the powerful and letting them pretend to be the victims rather than the victimizers...
Wow, quite a distortion you came up with there. Granted, Marx did say some interesting things but the question should be why communism would allow companies to build machines that remove income from humans? For that matter, why is a "capitalist Republic" allowing it now?
Because a system, once build, is more than just a sum of its parts. It has independent existence and motives. What that means is that neither communism, nor capitalism, nor USA nor China, are under human control, so why would they serve human interests, except incidentally? Yes, these systems have human actors making decisions, but these humans can only make decisions within parameters given by the system itself - a Foxconn CEO must do whatever it takes to keep Foxconn "competitive", and if he won't, he'll be replaced by someone who will, and likely severely punished. An American politician must accept a system-approved role - a set of political positions - if he wants to be elected. A dictator, while seemingly free, faces the same situation, except the punishment for disobedience is death rather than merely dropping out. Human beings, even those seemingly in control, are little more than agent-slaves of the Lovecraftian monstrosity they've conjured.
No one wanted World War I, yet it still happened. Neither the Soviets nor the Americans wanted the world to end, yet they came within hair's width of blowing it all up during the Cuban crisis. Chinese don't want to breath a poisonous fume, yet Peking's air is just that. People regularly refer to "the market" like it was a living thing that needs to be appeased and soothed and definitely not something anyone can control - because, in some ways, it is.
Human beings aren't in control of their own nor the destiny of the world, and haven't been since civilization began. I suspect this is the real reason religions keep popping up: beneath the bizarre cruft all traditions tend to accumulate, they present a perfectly accurate picture of the everyday experience of living in a world ruled by utterly inhuman and mostly invisible forces. For example, "Free Market" is, for all intents and purposes, the god of capitalism, gets treated that way by everyone, has sacrifices performed to it, has temples and priests trying to predict its capricious whims, is the object of fundamentalist faith - I've had people define a human's very right to live in terms of body ownership - and doctrinal conflicts, etc. Someone who wasn't indoctrinated to the system from birth could hardly avoid classifying this all as a typical religion.
Nice put down if we were not speculating about something nobody has observed. Of course we are using examples from the land of make-believe.
I once read a story about an alien who didn't have to eat because it was powered by a perpetual motion engine. Does such an alien make a good example of something we might actually encounter? No, because it's at odds with reality as we know it.
Just because we are using imaginary examples doesn't mean all such examples are equally credible.
The cops get bolder every year, and people just go along.
All aspects of US keep getting worse. The only thing everyone in the country seem to agree with is that the system itself is their enemy. Add normalization of corruption, the complete dysfunction of the political system, and an economy that's increasingly unable to provide security, comfort or even hope for the better to most citizens, and this starts looking a lot like a collapse in process.
Nations live and die by their perceived legitimacy amongst their citizens, and US is losing its. Just look at the +5 Insightful you got. The story where the representative of national authority is the villain is overcoming the story where they're the hero, despite all the propaganda being pushed out by the Hollywood, tv, etc. The main thing keeping the whole mess still together is the national cult - flag-waving patriotism - but even that's being overcome by tribalism.
Oh well. It'll be "interesting" to see whether China or Russia will assert itself as the new superpower after US is gone.
The panels collect dust, pollen, bird crap, snow, younameit, and either someone has to go there physically and spend time cleaning them up or you have to have some sort of a robotic system for that.
Isn't one of the main problems we're facing right now that we're running out of jobs that are both low-skill yet necessary enough to keep our economy going to be worth paying a decent wage for?
I think it would be wiser to spend the big money on improving solar panel and battery tech.
If you're serious about solar, you don't necessarily need better tech, you just need enough investment money to build massive solar-thermal plants in the desert. These produce energy through heat-driven turbines, thus they don't require solar panels, can be as efficient as material science lets them (the hot end is the surface of the Sun, so theoretical efficiency is a bit over 94%), and can store energy in the form of molten salt (or stone, or steel, if you want to be extreme), allowing them to produce electricity all night long.
It's a weird paradox: renewables suffer from their reputation of being small-scale, down to people installing solar panels in their rooftops, when in reality most of their problems could be easily solved through massive-scale planning (because then you can rely on the law of averages to overcome individual variance). We could cut our economies free from the limits of fossils, we just lack the will.
Slashdot Mirror
Democracy with constitutional limitations is the same, except the wolves have toilet paper. And every other form of government is the wolves skipping formalities.
If the majority of your population are wolves, you're screwed, no matter what form of government you have.
Or little faith in their own ability to fight monsters. Or even little ability to even perceive monstrous as monstrous anymore, having been socialized into believing that the strong should dominate over weak and the only issue in question is the specific form this takes.
Once you've been conditioned into believing it's just and right you lose your livelihood because it happens to benefit a higher-up, is it really that much a stretch to believe they can just plain kill you? It enhances shareholder value to not have you dirty bum begging on the street, and using tax money to feed you would violate sacred property rights. And you're just a looter anyway, not welcome in Galt's Gulch.
All countries keep an eye on their neighbours, just like all people keep a general awareness of their surroundings. All countries don't tap the phones of their neighbours's leaders, or install malware on equipment sold to them, or even spies over. Morals aside, taking hostile action tends to backfire, as the US is learning. Reputation is a resource, and it's stupid to waste it.
The problem with Machtpolitik is that even if you win a few rounds, you can't stop playing without giving away all your ill-gotten gains, and sooner or later you lose. And when you do, you don't get back what you've lost, even if you quit. And sometimes the house wins and everyone loses big time. And the Devil's the dealer.
The US is a good case study: the country is hopelessly in debt and the infrastructure is crumbling, yet it's going to be spending $ 1 trillion for a new fighter. It's madness, but that's the price US pays for the way it fought the Cold War. Ruthlessness doesn't go away and leave you alone just because whatever enemy you conjured it up to win has. That's why it's foolish to ignore morality, even in international politics - especially in international politics, since there's no nice constable to run to if you manage to get in over your head.
No, it doesn't. Entering the numbers into a cell in Excel spreadsheet or to the field of a bookkeeping software require the exact same amount of work.
Also, this is plutonium. It sits in storage and gets moved around only occasionally. And when it does, accounting is the least of the expenses - or do you simply send it in mail?
This is a thoroughly bizarre statement. How is a software specifically designed to handle this type of task less usable than a generic spreadsheet? What "wider issues" does it keep you from reporting?
No system is immune to mistakes, but some are inherently more resistant than others.
And you are making such bizarre statements I doubt you know what double-entry bookkeeping means.
And should such consensus emerge, you can always rephrase the question again. Or maybe you'll claim the answer should be ignored since climatologists are not, after all, engineers. Perhaps you'll come up with something more creative. Just as long as it lets you dismiss science that's saying things you don't want to hear while pretending to be scientific.
Climate change scepticism certainly serves as a wonderful demonstration about human capacity for self-deception.
A proper double-entry bookkeeping system, with every location an account. Why hack together a solution when the problem was solved centuries ago?
Does this only apply to revenge porn, or would you also blame someone who gets mugged for being out after dark?
No, that's just you attempting to use rhetoric to dismiss a position without actually analysing it.
Actually, it does. That's exactly what it means. If your "degree in X" doesn't mean you'll be using Y in your work, it's pointless to include Y in said degree, as long as said degree is mainly a qualification for work.
Haskell. Pure functions combined with monads are pretty awesome concepts once you really grasp them.
The problem with procedural programming is that every piece of code can touch every piece of data. The problem is combinatory explosion. If you've never run into that problem, how can you understand the need for a solution?
I've never been to college, so I wouldn't know. But this is how it worked for me: line-number Basic, C, Object-oriented, functional. I don't know any of these well, but I know what problem each rose to solve - except functional, since it didn't rise to solve problems in programming, but is simply an alternative way of describing algorithms. However, I'm developing a love/hate relationship with Haskell.
Because our visual cortext deals with geometric structure, while the compiler deals with logical structure. It's simply more efficient to tell the compiler the latter, and let the IDE to format the code for easy consumption by the former.
I agree. And in my experience, it's much easier to have explicit block start/end markers and let the IDE format things than wonder if your bugs are caused by mixed tabs and spaces.
The problem is, if you're doing commercial development, you're not driving your bike, you're driving a company-owner truck.
C is not beginner friendly. The reason is that it's not a managed language, so a mistake will have unpredictable consequences, rather than firing an exception like in Java. Yes, you can still do it; I learned C by reverse engineering Nethack sources in pre-Internet days and debugging all errors with printfs ("got here!") and logic, and perhaps that should be the criteria for serious programmers, but that's hardly "beginner friendly".
Personally, I think programmers should start with with line-number Basic, then move to procedural programming, then to object-oriented. You can't really understand a paradigm unless you know the problem it was designed as a response for.
You do realize that the entire point of civilization is to make things different from being alone in the wilderness, right? So if they aren't, then the civilization has failed miserably. Also, the conditions in wilderness are not under anyone's control, while the conditions in civilization are.
And I absolutely have a "bias" regarding economic policty: I believe economy exists to serve human needs and as such must address not just efficiency, but also fairness and security. Our current economy fails with all three.
Not automation, but automation combined with free market fundamentalism. The former causes disturbances in economy and the latter prevents efficient safety nets to ensure proper maintenance of human resources who's primary supply of income gets cut by them. This combination makes the economy extremely fragile, both because the resulting lack of flexibility but also because people compensate by overreacting to any negative signal.
United States is starving. Europe makes do with filthy socialism and Japan with the remnants of feudalism. But don't worry, you've succesfully propagandized about the wonders of austerity, so it's unlikely that Europe will rise from depression any time soon.
Thank you for being honest about capitalism being based on coercion, disguised as it might be. However, the issue is precisely that we're running out of work that needs to - or even profitably can - be performed by humans, so what's the problem?
They can become religions, certainly. Progressivism has a built-in sense of destiny - a divine plan - and feminism began as a demand for more just world and developed a weird cult-like fringe later.
Go ahead and reject ideologies, then. Now how will you get food? You can't just buy it, after all, without interacting with the local economic system in ways acceptable to that system - and if you do, you're not rejecting its values in any meaningful way.
This is what I meant when I said people aren't really in control of their destiny: believe what you will, but you'll still obey the overlords or die.
There is, however, an important difference between working to get food and working to get concert tickets. Current economy is ultimately based on coercion: work or die, or at least be extremely miserable. A society where all basic production is automated could guarantee an unconditional middle-class income to its members, so working would be strictly a matter of personal ambition.
Then again, we could already have an unconditional minimum income - and likely end up with a more efficient economy, since it's the coercion-based hierarchy that's the main source of inefficiency in corporations - yet don't do that for ideological reasons. So that suggests we'll see the nightmare scenario of ever-increasing wealth concentration and worsening dystopia instead.
Batshit crazy or just a cynical and calculating con(wo)man. Either would be consistent with flattering the powerful and letting them pretend to be the victims rather than the victimizers...
Because a system, once build, is more than just a sum of its parts. It has independent existence and motives. What that means is that neither communism, nor capitalism, nor USA nor China, are under human control, so why would they serve human interests, except incidentally? Yes, these systems have human actors making decisions, but these humans can only make decisions within parameters given by the system itself - a Foxconn CEO must do whatever it takes to keep Foxconn "competitive", and if he won't, he'll be replaced by someone who will, and likely severely punished. An American politician must accept a system-approved role - a set of political positions - if he wants to be elected. A dictator, while seemingly free, faces the same situation, except the punishment for disobedience is death rather than merely dropping out. Human beings, even those seemingly in control, are little more than agent-slaves of the Lovecraftian monstrosity they've conjured.
No one wanted World War I, yet it still happened. Neither the Soviets nor the Americans wanted the world to end, yet they came within hair's width of blowing it all up during the Cuban crisis. Chinese don't want to breath a poisonous fume, yet Peking's air is just that. People regularly refer to "the market" like it was a living thing that needs to be appeased and soothed and definitely not something anyone can control - because, in some ways, it is.
Human beings aren't in control of their own nor the destiny of the world, and haven't been since civilization began. I suspect this is the real reason religions keep popping up: beneath the bizarre cruft all traditions tend to accumulate, they present a perfectly accurate picture of the everyday experience of living in a world ruled by utterly inhuman and mostly invisible forces. For example, "Free Market" is, for all intents and purposes, the god of capitalism, gets treated that way by everyone, has sacrifices performed to it, has temples and priests trying to predict its capricious whims, is the object of fundamentalist faith - I've had people define a human's very right to live in terms of body ownership - and doctrinal conflicts, etc. Someone who wasn't indoctrinated to the system from birth could hardly avoid classifying this all as a typical religion.
I once read a story about an alien who didn't have to eat because it was powered by a perpetual motion engine. Does such an alien make a good example of something we might actually encounter? No, because it's at odds with reality as we know it.
Just because we are using imaginary examples doesn't mean all such examples are equally credible.
Just like there are no muggers, only unarmed people?
All aspects of US keep getting worse. The only thing everyone in the country seem to agree with is that the system itself is their enemy. Add normalization of corruption, the complete dysfunction of the political system, and an economy that's increasingly unable to provide security, comfort or even hope for the better to most citizens, and this starts looking a lot like a collapse in process.
Nations live and die by their perceived legitimacy amongst their citizens, and US is losing its. Just look at the +5 Insightful you got. The story where the representative of national authority is the villain is overcoming the story where they're the hero, despite all the propaganda being pushed out by the Hollywood, tv, etc. The main thing keeping the whole mess still together is the national cult - flag-waving patriotism - but even that's being overcome by tribalism.
Oh well. It'll be "interesting" to see whether China or Russia will assert itself as the new superpower after US is gone.
Isn't one of the main problems we're facing right now that we're running out of jobs that are both low-skill yet necessary enough to keep our economy going to be worth paying a decent wage for?
If you're serious about solar, you don't necessarily need better tech, you just need enough investment money to build massive solar-thermal plants in the desert. These produce energy through heat-driven turbines, thus they don't require solar panels, can be as efficient as material science lets them (the hot end is the surface of the Sun, so theoretical efficiency is a bit over 94%), and can store energy in the form of molten salt (or stone, or steel, if you want to be extreme), allowing them to produce electricity all night long.
It's a weird paradox: renewables suffer from their reputation of being small-scale, down to people installing solar panels in their rooftops, when in reality most of their problems could be easily solved through massive-scale planning (because then you can rely on the law of averages to overcome individual variance). We could cut our economies free from the limits of fossils, we just lack the will.