Let's say everybody does lose their jobs and is unable to buy goods or services. Is it more likely they will (a) resign to slowly starve or (b) start growing and trading for food amongst each other, providing each other the services they can't get from the robot elite, band together for social protection, etc.?
Shutting someone out from one economy just puts in them in another economy.
Ultimately, even if it costs the unsophisticated people more in time and investment to produce the same goods, the robot elitists don't care about *that* cost, they only care how many of the newly minted Robot Supreme Data Coins the poor humans want in exchange for the same service. That's an arbirtary quantity and the poor humans can always offer a lower bid than the robot automation centers.
But, remember, this whole problem came about because we found such an incredibly cheap and efficient way to produce all our resources. So, even though the humans are going to be forced to trade for what the robot elitists consider virtually nothing, for them it will have vast purchasing power since goods are now so cheap.
In general, I don't think keeping people employed is ever going to be a problem. What the onset of robot workers actually means is that relative income for human workers is increasing to where it is too costly for manufacturing companies to compete for their services compared to the other opportunities they have.
The real problem with super-efficient resource generation is its effect on political dynamics. One person controlling half the economy may be perfectly harmless up to the point where they realize they can use that vast wealth to dictate what laws will be passed. But, who knows, maybe at that point we'll all be so well off that it will actually be harder to buy votes and loyalty than it is today.
Personally, I have no interest in making humanity a race of immortal lineage. People get old and die, I am on terms with that. But I am definitely not on terms with taking a gun and shooting someone, even if they are getting on in years. I imagine a similar argument can be made with respect to abortion vs. "self-abortion."
That said, I'm not sure of their ideological affiliation, as it is also of interest for simply improving fertility, but you'd be wrong to think there's not a lot of research done into improving embryonic implantation.
It takes a good deal of cynicism to speculate this is about profit, given that (a) in all cases covering contraception is a whole lot cheaper than providing pre- and post-natal care (b) Hobby Lobby continues to cover all forms of contraception which are not considered to possibly interfere with uteral implantation (c) Hobby Lobby has provided health care and decent wages, including contraceptive coverage long before the mandate was passed (d) They also keep closed on Sundays for religious reasons (Sunday being the most profitable day to be open) (e) There's plenty of much more expensive things covered -- I'm not aware Hobby Lobby attempting to use legal means to wrangle out of any other form of coverage
Investing in funds which invest in companies which among their portfolios develop the contraceptives is not the same as investing in the contraceptives. But what is being said is that that was an accidental investment, which I don't see as unreasonable to believe.
Absolutely true. But despite the common meme this is not about assigning a corporation personhood. A book is not a person either, but if Congress said "You can say what you want, but we're going to ban your book" you would rightfully be up in arms about it, because the book, while not itself a person imbued with constitutional rights, in some ways acts as an extension of such a person, and therefore receives some comparable protections (if you want to look at it that way).
This is the same issue. Mr. Green's religious beliefs are intricately tied into his position as CEO and his ownership of Hobby Lobby. Funnily enough, no one squawks about him giving Sundays off or paying double minimum wage and offering decent benefits, both of which are driven by his religious convictions. If this was not a closely held corporation I imagine he would have been sued by shareholders for such unprofitable decisions long before the ACA became a concern.
To be fair, in the domain of common experience a 7' tall ape man living in the pacific northwest *is* far less crazy than the idea of a subatomic particle being in two places at once.
Many scientists of yesteryear were hardly willing to accept such preposterousness, though I imagine they would not have batted an eye at an undiscovered hominid of unusual cleverness. (In fact, sometimes they seemed to be far too trusting when evidence of new hominids was presented to them.) People can go to the zoo and encounter all sorts of species they never anticipated. Where can they experience quantum mechanics?
It's only through substantial and careful methodological treatment of the evidence that we're able to develop the capacity to distinguish truth which contradicts intuition, accepting the fantastic but real and dismissing the common but false.
My wild and probably quite unpopular thinking on this is as such: the people you describe are perfectly reasonable people. They are drawing reasonable(ish) conclusions. They just lack access to the expanded toolset and and supply of evidence modern science has provided. What if instead of calling their theories a bunch of hocus pocus, we simply sent them on the right trail? Used the Socratic method, as it were. They are clearly already interested in the subject of undiscovered species, so "You think there is a wild ape man? Interesting. I wonder how we could prove its existence. What about DNA evidence? There's this great book called 'Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters.' Maybe we could read it to learn a bit more about genetics and see if it helps us come up with any ideas."
Because forensic analysts have determined the same gun used to kill the president may have been used to kill the Joint Chiefs. Because they think someone else may have used your gun. Because they believe the person who sold you your gun is an accomplice. Because you are contesting your confession.
It's a rather cynical view that the only point of trying someone for a crime is to send them to prison for that crime. The point is to find out the truth and mete out justice accordingly. That requires a full evaluation of all of the evidence. In this case, the lawyer has admitted the evidence exists and is located on the harddrive, but it's not clear how the details of that evidence will affect the case and subseqeunt sentencing.
Frankly, I stopped wearing a digital watch because I noticed when I forgot it class passed by much more quickly and enjoyably than when I was counting away the minutes until it was over. Also, it lead to the rude habbit to be checking my watch when conversing or keeping company with someone, as if I was just waiting to get away.
Having technology always at the ready is at least mildly antisocial, especially when it's visible to others. If I'm sitting down to do work then I want my full laptop. I will carry a smartphone for alarms, texting, important email, GPS, etc., but that stays in my pocket until it's needed, I don't fiddle with it and distract myself while I have any kind of company or other work to do. If there were useful features that only a smartwatch could perform, then I would carry the smartwatch in my pocket. I absolutely don't want some gaudy box on my wrist which can distract me from whatever I am presently doing. For the most part, each feature you add to it is another reason I don't want it.
The fact of the matter is that there are far too many people who want faculty positions compared to the number of available positions. I quote directly from our university president, "I can get professors anywhere."
This is detrimental to learning as well. Some adjunct faculty, desperate to keep jobs, rely on easy courses and popularity with students to stay employed. Many others feel obligated to help students beyond the limited office hours they're paid for, essentially working for free in order to get the students the help they need. At a time when tuition prices are rising faster than ever, why are we skimping on the most fundamental aspect of college?
There is pressure from the administration to buffer grades, as that effects various important statistics for the school, and it's far easier for them to give out As rather than worry about complaints and legal action etc., but otherwise the administration couldn't give a rats arse about how popular the professors are with the students. They care most about how much research money the professor is bringing in. Maybe at some big private school where you have legacies and wealthy donnors to worry about the administration actually cares about the students' feelings.
No one goes into a professorship expecting a 9-5 job, but pointing out professors are spending extra time with their students isn't really making the case the situtation is detrimental for education, either. When you get your degree, you have a decision -- do I enjoy doing research/teaching so much that I go into academia, or do I want a profitable career and go into industry? Professors aren't in it for the money. They're the sort of people who just wouldn't fit anywhere else. You don't need to pay them well. The professors making $40k tend to work as hard and spend as much time in the lab as the professors making $80k. I'll bet many would work for room and board if you gave them a nice lab to go with it.
If you want to improve the situation, your options are either establish some legal minimums, or curb the excess of academics by providing either positions for them and/or doing a better job of training people for other positions. Unless you're an engineer, most bachelors degrees are more or less geared toward becoming an academic, even though relatively few people will wind up in academia, and it doesn't help this situation when you have a flood of graduates who aren't really sure what they can do with themselves besides stay in the university environment.
Unequal application of the law is always a challenge to our freedoms, including free speech. When two men are fighting, you are commiting far less of a crime by pinning both down than by pinning just one down while the other pommels him. If libel laws were "loosened" to apply only to liberals and not to conservatives, that would not be a gain in freedom as you propose: that would become far more of an affront to free spech than the fully implemented law ever was. Allowing trademarks to some and not others is the same sort of distortion.
Trademarks are a (very limited) restriction on free speech, but they also increase our freedom to express ourselves through the cultivation of a particular symbol. A government which decides it will make political assessments on whether to grant that freedom is not upholding the principles of free speech. Whether the term Redskins is actually offensive is a matter of ongoing social debate, and the government should not be deciding the answer.
Or set the tone yourself by posting words of encouragement. As someone who has never quite mastered the hug or unsolicited complement or prying into what's bothering people, I find the broadcast medium of facebook a means of providing what I can. I mostly post humor (which has helped me through dark times), mix in occasional inspiration quotes from people like Emerson, Longfellow, Thoreau, Kierkegaard, some art I find beautiful, and try to be open about my struggles and the good places they have lead.
Over the years many have taken time to thank me for encouraging them (sometimes they are persons who have never interacted with me on facebook but eventually tell me in person), occasionally I receive a private message from someone who needs a friend, an ear, or advice, and other times they post something about their struggles and I am able to approach them about it. There is a lot to be said if you have the social skills to offer these things in person. But most of us are accustomed to the "Hi, how are you?" "Oh, I'm fine" routine where it is impolite to turn someone's general courtesy into a demand for their time and sympathy. The rules are different on social media, where all information is broadcast and can be ignored as easily as it is read. Why not let us introverts do something good with that?
I don't know if I can claim credit in anyway, but over the years the character of what is posted among my peers on facebook has definitely become more positive. Perhaps people have simply realized they don't enjoy the drama and the complaining. Or maybe a few of us have had an impact. But this study seems to show that having a positive impact is something you can set out to do. Pursuing that may be worth considering.
And people would buy toys with lead paint in them too if the price was low and they weren't aware of the risks of lead paint. Does that mean the regulations preventing them are wrong?
Children are assumed to lack the capacity to make intelligent decisions for their well-being. They receive both additional protections, and are denied most of the rights which are granted to adults. Regulating toys may hold up in that philosophy, in as much as they are intended for children. However, adults are still allowed to purchase products which contain lead, such as solder, because the assumption is they can adequately assess the risks, and have the right to decide accordingly.
Certainly, we can treat average citizens as too ignorant to tend for their own welfare, and provide state protection, but just as with children, these adults are being denied certain rights and freedoms in exchange. There are many proxies for this question, among them, whether people should be allowed to purchase firearms or drugs, even though they are capable of doing damage, depending on the decisions of the user.
Which is how the regulations came into effect in the first place -- the public was tired of getting into cabs that weren't insured or maintained properly.
The question is how necessary are the regulations, and, especially, how applicable the regulations which were written specifically for taxis in a different era are nowadays.
This is one of the major problems with government solutions--they have an awful lot of momentum. It's hard to make changes when changes are warranted.
Do I really care how well-maintained the transport car is? Why does it need to exceed rules established for cars in general? Are poorly maintained vehicles as much of an issue with modern automobiles as it was when the law was passed? Does the ability of users in Uber and Lyft to rate drivers completely solve the problem since they can vote down drivers with unpleasant or unreliable rides? Is it now so easy to flag down a new driver that the car breaking down is not a particular issue?
How important is a multimillion dollar insurance package? Is this actually improving the situation for people who would otherwise be walking or taking their own vehicles or a friend's vehicle without such a high insurance coverage? Would it possibly make more sense to transition to a system in which passengers carry insurance instead of drivers?
The situation is simply not the same as it was when these laws were passed. Back then, these laws provided possibly needed solutions. Now, if the problems they were intended to solve even exist, there may be better solutions. The question is whether the state is going to step in and forbid citizens from pursuing these solutions, on the premise the state is once-and-always-correct, or if we are going to let citizens experiment and make their own decisions.
In the first year of implementation, hourly minimum wage will be raised to either $10 or $11 according to the employer size category. By 2021, hourly minimum wage across the board should be at or above $15. Seattle is the first city to implement a living wage for its lowest earners
Santa Fe has had a living wage since 2003, presently at $10.66. San Francisco implemented a living wage shortly thereafter, presently at $10.74. I'm sure there are others at this point.
By all means, less likely views should be marginalized, but they should be marginalized as a side effect of their having only a marginal chance of being correct, not because you've built up some vicious characterization of their adherents. It's interesting that in the reasons you list for your opposition -- politics, religion, mental illness (?) -- you forgot to include anything about their explanations of the observed phenomena being less satisfactory.
My first problem with this attitude is, who decides when the best response is simply treating the adherents as unworthy neanderthals and making sure that no legitimate scientific criticisms get swept in? Will that be you? I don't trust that this is always going to work out. I do, however, always trust in a dispassioned comparison of evidence, or at least, there's nothing I trust more.
My second problem is that it much more difficult to reason with people when you start your arguments by giving them a bloody nose. At that point they're just in it to retaliate for the bloody nose, assuming they don't stop reading entirely. IMHO you are making it ten times more difficult to actually stamp out these bad thinkings just so you can have the satisfication of wielding a few insults. What does referring to anyone snidely actual accomplish in the scientific discourse?
IMHO the article written is not of publishable quality. (The journal it *did* get published in has a very low impact factor of 1.3.) It's badly written, poorly supported, and subject to substantial methodological errors.
Each subject comparison is based entirely on the subjective evaluation of a random med student. It doesn't seem like they even provided them with standard protocols. They just assumed that any discrepancies represented factual errors in the wikipedia article. They didn't make comparison to other sources or even internal to the literature.
It would be lovely if they would actually include some of the assertions they evaluated. But frankly I would put infinitely more faith in the Wikipedia articles cited than this particular report. Certainly they represent better and more substantial writing.
"Now the downside to this is more time on hold." Do we really all want to converge on resources for the hearing-disabled and make their wait time even longer?
I would call sparsely populated a significant security advantage. Post proper signage and you don't have to supply much doubt than any unauthorized person in the vicinity is up to no good. None of the fake delivery guy nonsense that works in the movies. You stand a good chance of intercepting the hostiles before they even are close enough to see the facility.
As any bank robber can tell you, the most important part of the operation is the getaway. Walking in and taking what you want at gunpoint is comparatively easy. The next step is to get out of there and lose the authorities by getting to where you can hide and blend in. When the getaway involves hundreds of miles of empty single access road? You're screwed. No criminal or terrorist force is going to come close to matching what the government can dish out for firepower. Their only hope is to get away before the government can mobilize, which, in this case, they have plenty of time to do.
Also, I believe these contaminants are buried deep underground. That's foolproof security. A lock can be picked to bypass having to use the official key. When the security mechanism is a million tonnes of rock there is no shortcut, the terrorists are stuck using the exact same equipment and accessways as everyone else to extract the waste.
The final step is to get the radioactive waste to the target, which is a population area. Terrorists might not care what population area it is, which means by storing it near *any* population area you have saved them the trouble of doing any work to get it to its target. Having access to it for just a few minutes could be enough to do all the damage they want to do. Not so with a remote site.
It's easy enough to simulate martian conditions here on earth, which is a more controlled and far cheaper means of experiment. It was found that certain lichen can do quite well, although note that this was on the assumption that water would be available.
It would probably be best not to introduce earth microbes before a full terraforming plan is developed. The population might explode, consume all the available micronutrients, and then die off. Or it might become a pest, inhibiting the release of other, more useful microorganisms later on. And it might obscure any extant martian microorganisms or micoorganism fossils when those could provide a far better template than earth-based extremophiles. We'll want something robust and sustainable, a planned ecosystem genetically engineered to produce all the right byproducts and which changes in concert with the alterations to atmosphere, global temperature, and soil composition without any unintended extinction events.
No, slaughter is indiscriminate killing. Reducing casualties is a definite move away from that. While attaching a cost to war is one way of prohibiting it -- hence the success of M.A.D. -- the problem is someday you do wind up having to pay that cost. Overall it's better to reduce the cost than trying to make it as frightful as you can.
But if soldiers can be made obsolete, perhaps killing people can be made obsolete as well. Just as women and children have sometimes enjoyed a certain immunity for not being part of the military forces, when the main threat and the main production force on both sides is robotic, why would the humans be attacked at all when their influence on the outcome is only marginal and doing so would open your own humans to retaliation?
I went the opposite route of never taking notes to taking meticulous notes. But I found in my upper level courses that my brain simply could not keep up with the material at hand. It was instead most important that I had the notes to refer back to for doing the homework, which was where I would actually figure out the material. Trusting only to my brain capabilities during that hour, I never would have parsed it into anything comprehensible. I would also go back and create a comprehensive table of contents for my notes which forced me to review them, figure what was important, figure out how it all related, and left me with a very handy tool for referring back to the material.
Of course, that only worked in classes with good lecturers in the first place.
In any case, we live in age where the professor only needs to deliver a solid lecture once and put it on youtube. I feel it would be better to do that and use the hour to answer questions and work problems -- things which actually do require the instructor's physical presence.
Actually, humans have done a good job of surviving famine and other food stresses by adopting long term storage strategies. It's fundamental to agriculture -- usually your crop is not producing 365 days of the year. Humans unable to ration and protion themselves would be less likely to survive because food availability is rather variable. We're not just eating machines. And there are plenty of places historical and contemporary places with high food aviailability and no significant obesity problem. Compare America to Japan. It really is the content of the diet which is at issue (as well as a more leisurely lifestyle) not simply the availability of the food.
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Let's say everybody does lose their jobs and is unable to buy goods or services. Is it more likely they will (a) resign to slowly starve or (b) start growing and trading for food amongst each other, providing each other the services they can't get from the robot elite, band together for social protection, etc.?
Shutting someone out from one economy just puts in them in another economy.
Ultimately, even if it costs the unsophisticated people more in time and investment to produce the same goods, the robot elitists don't care about *that* cost, they only care how many of the newly minted Robot Supreme Data Coins the poor humans want in exchange for the same service. That's an arbirtary quantity and the poor humans can always offer a lower bid than the robot automation centers.
But, remember, this whole problem came about because we found such an incredibly cheap and efficient way to produce all our resources. So, even though the humans are going to be forced to trade for what the robot elitists consider virtually nothing, for them it will have vast purchasing power since goods are now so cheap.
In general, I don't think keeping people employed is ever going to be a problem. What the onset of robot workers actually means is that relative income for human workers is increasing to where it is too costly for manufacturing companies to compete for their services compared to the other opportunities they have.
The real problem with super-efficient resource generation is its effect on political dynamics. One person controlling half the economy may be perfectly harmless up to the point where they realize they can use that vast wealth to dictate what laws will be passed. But, who knows, maybe at that point we'll all be so well off that it will actually be harder to buy votes and loyalty than it is today.
Personally, I have no interest in making humanity a race of immortal lineage. People get old and die, I am on terms with that. But I am definitely not on terms with taking a gun and shooting someone, even if they are getting on in years. I imagine a similar argument can be made with respect to abortion vs. "self-abortion."
That said, I'm not sure of their ideological affiliation, as it is also of interest for simply improving fertility, but you'd be wrong to think there's not a lot of research done into improving embryonic implantation.
It takes a good deal of cynicism to speculate this is about profit, given that
(a) in all cases covering contraception is a whole lot cheaper than providing pre- and post-natal care
(b) Hobby Lobby continues to cover all forms of contraception which are not considered to possibly interfere with uteral implantation
(c) Hobby Lobby has provided health care and decent wages, including contraceptive coverage long before the mandate was passed
(d) They also keep closed on Sundays for religious reasons (Sunday being the most profitable day to be open)
(e) There's plenty of much more expensive things covered -- I'm not aware Hobby Lobby attempting to use legal means to wrangle out of any other form of coverage
Investing in funds which invest in companies which among their portfolios develop the contraceptives is not the same as investing in the contraceptives. But what is being said is that that was an accidental investment, which I don't see as unreasonable to believe.
Absolutely true. But despite the common meme this is not about assigning a corporation personhood. A book is not a person either, but if Congress said "You can say what you want, but we're going to ban your book" you would rightfully be up in arms about it, because the book, while not itself a person imbued with constitutional rights, in some ways acts as an extension of such a person, and therefore receives some comparable protections (if you want to look at it that way).
This is the same issue. Mr. Green's religious beliefs are intricately tied into his position as CEO and his ownership of Hobby Lobby. Funnily enough, no one squawks about him giving Sundays off or paying double minimum wage and offering decent benefits, both of which are driven by his religious convictions. If this was not a closely held corporation I imagine he would have been sued by shareholders for such unprofitable decisions long before the ACA became a concern.
To be fair, in the domain of common experience a 7' tall ape man living in the pacific northwest *is* far less crazy than the idea of a subatomic particle being in two places at once.
Many scientists of yesteryear were hardly willing to accept such preposterousness, though I imagine they would not have batted an eye at an undiscovered hominid of unusual cleverness. (In fact, sometimes they seemed to be far too trusting when evidence of new hominids was presented to them.) People can go to the zoo and encounter all sorts of species they never anticipated. Where can they experience quantum mechanics?
It's only through substantial and careful methodological treatment of the evidence that we're able to develop the capacity to distinguish truth which contradicts intuition, accepting the fantastic but real and dismissing the common but false.
My wild and probably quite unpopular thinking on this is as such: the people you describe are perfectly reasonable people. They are drawing reasonable(ish) conclusions. They just lack access to the expanded toolset and and supply of evidence modern science has provided. What if instead of calling their theories a bunch of hocus pocus, we simply sent them on the right trail? Used the Socratic method, as it were. They are clearly already interested in the subject of undiscovered species, so "You think there is a wild ape man? Interesting. I wonder how we could prove its existence. What about DNA evidence? There's this great book called 'Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters.' Maybe we could read it to learn a bit more about genetics and see if it helps us come up with any ideas."
Because forensic analysts have determined the same gun used to kill the president may have been used to kill the Joint Chiefs. Because they think someone else may have used your gun. Because they believe the person who sold you your gun is an accomplice. Because you are contesting your confession.
It's a rather cynical view that the only point of trying someone for a crime is to send them to prison for that crime. The point is to find out the truth and mete out justice accordingly. That requires a full evaluation of all of the evidence. In this case, the lawyer has admitted the evidence exists and is located on the harddrive, but it's not clear how the details of that evidence will affect the case and subseqeunt sentencing.
Frankly, I stopped wearing a digital watch because I noticed when I forgot it class passed by much more quickly and enjoyably than when I was counting away the minutes until it was over. Also, it lead to the rude habbit to be checking my watch when conversing or keeping company with someone, as if I was just waiting to get away.
Having technology always at the ready is at least mildly antisocial, especially when it's visible to others. If I'm sitting down to do work then I want my full laptop. I will carry a smartphone for alarms, texting, important email, GPS, etc., but that stays in my pocket until it's needed, I don't fiddle with it and distract myself while I have any kind of company or other work to do. If there were useful features that only a smartwatch could perform, then I would carry the smartwatch in my pocket. I absolutely don't want some gaudy box on my wrist which can distract me from whatever I am presently doing. For the most part, each feature you add to it is another reason I don't want it.
The fact of the matter is that there are far too many people who want faculty positions compared to the number of available positions. I quote directly from our university president, "I can get professors anywhere."
This is detrimental to learning as well. Some adjunct faculty, desperate to keep jobs, rely on easy courses and popularity with students to stay employed. Many others feel obligated to help students beyond the limited office hours they're paid for, essentially working for free in order to get the students the help they need. At a time when tuition prices are rising faster than ever, why are we skimping on the most fundamental aspect of college?
There is pressure from the administration to buffer grades, as that effects various important statistics for the school, and it's far easier for them to give out As rather than worry about complaints and legal action etc., but otherwise the administration couldn't give a rats arse about how popular the professors are with the students. They care most about how much research money the professor is bringing in. Maybe at some big private school where you have legacies and wealthy donnors to worry about the administration actually cares about the students' feelings.
No one goes into a professorship expecting a 9-5 job, but pointing out professors are spending extra time with their students isn't really making the case the situtation is detrimental for education, either. When you get your degree, you have a decision -- do I enjoy doing research/teaching so much that I go into academia, or do I want a profitable career and go into industry? Professors aren't in it for the money. They're the sort of people who just wouldn't fit anywhere else. You don't need to pay them well. The professors making $40k tend to work as hard and spend as much time in the lab as the professors making $80k. I'll bet many would work for room and board if you gave them a nice lab to go with it.
If you want to improve the situation, your options are either establish some legal minimums, or curb the excess of academics by providing either positions for them and/or doing a better job of training people for other positions. Unless you're an engineer, most bachelors degrees are more or less geared toward becoming an academic, even though relatively few people will wind up in academia, and it doesn't help this situation when you have a flood of graduates who aren't really sure what they can do with themselves besides stay in the university environment.
It's like saying, "I'll get around to it when pigs fly," except in this case the pigs are being strapped to very large rockets.
Unequal application of the law is always a challenge to our freedoms, including free speech. When two men are fighting, you are commiting far less of a crime by pinning both down than by pinning just one down while the other pommels him. If libel laws were "loosened" to apply only to liberals and not to conservatives, that would not be a gain in freedom as you propose: that would become far more of an affront to free spech than the fully implemented law ever was. Allowing trademarks to some and not others is the same sort of distortion.
Trademarks are a (very limited) restriction on free speech, but they also increase our freedom to express ourselves through the cultivation of a particular symbol. A government which decides it will make political assessments on whether to grant that freedom is not upholding the principles of free speech. Whether the term Redskins is actually offensive is a matter of ongoing social debate, and the government should not be deciding the answer.
Or set the tone yourself by posting words of encouragement. As someone who has never quite mastered the hug or unsolicited complement or prying into what's bothering people, I find the broadcast medium of facebook a means of providing what I can. I mostly post humor (which has helped me through dark times), mix in occasional inspiration quotes from people like Emerson, Longfellow, Thoreau, Kierkegaard, some art I find beautiful, and try to be open about my struggles and the good places they have lead.
Over the years many have taken time to thank me for encouraging them (sometimes they are persons who have never interacted with me on facebook but eventually tell me in person), occasionally I receive a private message from someone who needs a friend, an ear, or advice, and other times they post something about their struggles and I am able to approach them about it. There is a lot to be said if you have the social skills to offer these things in person. But most of us are accustomed to the "Hi, how are you?" "Oh, I'm fine" routine where it is impolite to turn someone's general courtesy into a demand for their time and sympathy. The rules are different on social media, where all information is broadcast and can be ignored as easily as it is read. Why not let us introverts do something good with that?
I don't know if I can claim credit in anyway, but over the years the character of what is posted among my peers on facebook has definitely become more positive. Perhaps people have simply realized they don't enjoy the drama and the complaining. Or maybe a few of us have had an impact. But this study seems to show that having a positive impact is something you can set out to do. Pursuing that may be worth considering.
The word "tenure" itself was based on an expectation that it would take ten years to get there.
It actually stems from the Latin word tenere meaning to hold, as in tenant, tenacity, etc. It's not etymologically related to the number ten.
And people would buy toys with lead paint in them too if the price was low and they weren't aware of the risks of lead paint. Does that mean the regulations preventing them are wrong?
Children are assumed to lack the capacity to make intelligent decisions for their well-being. They receive both additional protections, and are denied most of the rights which are granted to adults. Regulating toys may hold up in that philosophy, in as much as they are intended for children. However, adults are still allowed to purchase products which contain lead, such as solder, because the assumption is they can adequately assess the risks, and have the right to decide accordingly.
Certainly, we can treat average citizens as too ignorant to tend for their own welfare, and provide state protection, but just as with children, these adults are being denied certain rights and freedoms in exchange. There are many proxies for this question, among them, whether people should be allowed to purchase firearms or drugs, even though they are capable of doing damage, depending on the decisions of the user.
Which is how the regulations came into effect in the first place -- the public was tired of getting into cabs that weren't insured or maintained properly.
The question is how necessary are the regulations, and, especially, how applicable the regulations which were written specifically for taxis in a different era are nowadays.
This is one of the major problems with government solutions--they have an awful lot of momentum. It's hard to make changes when changes are warranted.
Do I really care how well-maintained the transport car is? Why does it need to exceed rules established for cars in general? Are poorly maintained vehicles as much of an issue with modern automobiles as it was when the law was passed? Does the ability of users in Uber and Lyft to rate drivers completely solve the problem since they can vote down drivers with unpleasant or unreliable rides? Is it now so easy to flag down a new driver that the car breaking down is not a particular issue?
How important is a multimillion dollar insurance package? Is this actually improving the situation for people who would otherwise be walking or taking their own vehicles or a friend's vehicle without such a high insurance coverage? Would it possibly make more sense to transition to a system in which passengers carry insurance instead of drivers?
The situation is simply not the same as it was when these laws were passed. Back then, these laws provided possibly needed solutions. Now, if the problems they were intended to solve even exist, there may be better solutions. The question is whether the state is going to step in and forbid citizens from pursuing these solutions, on the premise the state is once-and-always-correct, or if we are going to let citizens experiment and make their own decisions.
In the first year of implementation, hourly minimum wage will be raised to either $10 or $11 according to the employer size category. By 2021, hourly minimum wage across the board should be at or above $15. Seattle is the first city to implement a living wage for its lowest earners
Santa Fe has had a living wage since 2003, presently at $10.66. San Francisco implemented a living wage shortly thereafter, presently at $10.74. I'm sure there are others at this point.
Anakin Skywalker spent a lot of time with the dark side and look how much body mass he was able to lose.
If you don't care about things like memories, about six billion bits: http://www.tmsoft.com/article-...
By all means, less likely views should be marginalized, but they should be marginalized as a side effect of their having only a marginal chance of being correct, not because you've built up some vicious characterization of their adherents. It's interesting that in the reasons you list for your opposition -- politics, religion, mental illness (?) -- you forgot to include anything about their explanations of the observed phenomena being less satisfactory.
My first problem with this attitude is, who decides when the best response is simply treating the adherents as unworthy neanderthals and making sure that no legitimate scientific criticisms get swept in? Will that be you? I don't trust that this is always going to work out. I do, however, always trust in a dispassioned comparison of evidence, or at least, there's nothing I trust more.
My second problem is that it much more difficult to reason with people when you start your arguments by giving them a bloody nose. At that point they're just in it to retaliate for the bloody nose, assuming they don't stop reading entirely. IMHO you are making it ten times more difficult to actually stamp out these bad thinkings just so you can have the satisfication of wielding a few insults. What does referring to anyone snidely actual accomplish in the scientific discourse?
IMHO the article written is not of publishable quality. (The journal it *did* get published in has a very low impact factor of 1.3.) It's badly written, poorly supported, and subject to substantial methodological errors.
Each subject comparison is based entirely on the subjective evaluation of a random med student. It doesn't seem like they even provided them with standard protocols. They just assumed that any discrepancies represented factual errors in the wikipedia article. They didn't make comparison to other sources or even internal to the literature.
It would be lovely if they would actually include some of the assertions they evaluated. But frankly I would put infinitely more faith in the Wikipedia articles cited than this particular report. Certainly they represent better and more substantial writing.
"Now the downside to this is more time on hold."
Do we really all want to converge on resources for the hearing-disabled and make their wait time even longer?
I would call sparsely populated a significant security advantage. Post proper signage and you don't have to supply much doubt than any unauthorized person in the vicinity is up to no good. None of the fake delivery guy nonsense that works in the movies. You stand a good chance of intercepting the hostiles before they even are close enough to see the facility.
As any bank robber can tell you, the most important part of the operation is the getaway. Walking in and taking what you want at gunpoint is comparatively easy. The next step is to get out of there and lose the authorities by getting to where you can hide and blend in. When the getaway involves hundreds of miles of empty single access road? You're screwed. No criminal or terrorist force is going to come close to matching what the government can dish out for firepower. Their only hope is to get away before the government can mobilize, which, in this case, they have plenty of time to do.
Also, I believe these contaminants are buried deep underground. That's foolproof security. A lock can be picked to bypass having to use the official key. When the security mechanism is a million tonnes of rock there is no shortcut, the terrorists are stuck using the exact same equipment and accessways as everyone else to extract the waste.
The final step is to get the radioactive waste to the target, which is a population area. Terrorists might not care what population area it is, which means by storing it near *any* population area you have saved them the trouble of doing any work to get it to its target. Having access to it for just a few minutes could be enough to do all the damage they want to do. Not so with a remote site.
It's easy enough to simulate martian conditions here on earth, which is a more controlled and far cheaper means of experiment. It was found that certain lichen can do quite well, although note that this was on the assumption that water would be available.
It would probably be best not to introduce earth microbes before a full terraforming plan is developed. The population might explode, consume all the available micronutrients, and then die off. Or it might become a pest, inhibiting the release of other, more useful microorganisms later on. And it might obscure any extant martian microorganisms or micoorganism fossils when those could provide a far better template than earth-based extremophiles. We'll want something robust and sustainable, a planned ecosystem genetically engineered to produce all the right byproducts and which changes in concert with the alterations to atmosphere, global temperature, and soil composition without any unintended extinction events.
No, slaughter is indiscriminate killing. Reducing casualties is a definite move away from that. While attaching a cost to war is one way of prohibiting it -- hence the success of M.A.D. -- the problem is someday you do wind up having to pay that cost. Overall it's better to reduce the cost than trying to make it as frightful as you can.
But if soldiers can be made obsolete, perhaps killing people can be made obsolete as well. Just as women and children have sometimes enjoyed a certain immunity for not being part of the military forces, when the main threat and the main production force on both sides is robotic, why would the humans be attacked at all when their influence on the outcome is only marginal and doing so would open your own humans to retaliation?
We clearly need to capture this whale and study it.
I went the opposite route of never taking notes to taking meticulous notes. But I found in my upper level courses that my brain simply could not keep up with the material at hand. It was instead most important that I had the notes to refer back to for doing the homework, which was where I would actually figure out the material. Trusting only to my brain capabilities during that hour, I never would have parsed it into anything comprehensible. I would also go back and create a comprehensive table of contents for my notes which forced me to review them, figure what was important, figure out how it all related, and left me with a very handy tool for referring back to the material.
Of course, that only worked in classes with good lecturers in the first place.
In any case, we live in age where the professor only needs to deliver a solid lecture once and put it on youtube. I feel it would be better to do that and use the hour to answer questions and work problems -- things which actually do require the instructor's physical presence.
Actually, humans have done a good job of surviving famine and other food stresses by adopting long term storage strategies. It's fundamental to agriculture -- usually your crop is not producing 365 days of the year. Humans unable to ration and protion themselves would be less likely to survive because food availability is rather variable. We're not just eating machines. And there are plenty of places historical and contemporary places with high food aviailability and no significant obesity problem. Compare America to Japan. It really is the content of the diet which is at issue (as well as a more leisurely lifestyle) not simply the availability of the food.