You used instinct in place of intuition in the above. They are often used semantically to mean the same thing, although this is technically not correct, as you say.
By the way, spending a lot of energy taking one line of argument and then switching to semantics when you've lost is a dead giveaway that your position is intractable.
You are using a few very examples and not accounting for all the ones that may have been lost.
Your argument has become, "Well, that's just what we *know*! What about what we *don't* know?!" We don't know about the aliens on Seti Alpha Prime, so there must be aliens. Your position is absurd.
You are using these few examples from a tiny minority of civilizations to assert that there was a consensus across not just nations, but across the entire world. Do you see how utterly absurd that is?
All of Europe got their astronomy from Greece--or, more accurately, from Rome, who traded philosophy with Greece on a regular basis. That includes the Arabs. China missed the boat until Europe traded astronomy with the Chinese--that is, the Chinese unified under the Chin dynasty. The Cherokee of the United States--the second largest North American indigenous group--believed the Earth was an island in the center of an endless ocean. The Norse reasoned the Earth was flat until they did some fancy reasoning with an apple and a candle (impressive, that). The Mayans and other Central American indigenous tribes believed in a flat earth theory. The Ancient Egyptians left writings in the pyramids describing the Nun, the great circular ocean surrounding the disc which was the Earth, all a flat plane. The oldest record of any map of the Earth is from Babylon, in the region now called Iraq; it and supplemental writings portray a flat earth theory.
These groups account for approximately the entire spread of human population across the Earth, and for all of the great ancient societies, including the Europeans, the Native Americans, the Egyptians, the Arabs, and the Asians.
You suggest there must, somewhere, be an extreme minority of humans who, upon developing the ability to think and reason, also were bestowed with the knowledge and understanding of a round earth despite such evidence as the ground under their feet being flat and things falling downward (Aristotle's theory of gravitation was that all things moved downward toward the CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE; Galileo was earliest with starting a modern theory of gravitation, followed by Hooke suggesting that objects move toward each other).
Developing a round-earth theory has always been a matter of extreme evidence and consideration: circumnavigation of the earth, heavy application of geometry, climatological analysis and extreme lateral thinking, and other manners of high technology are required. People intuited that the moon itself was a disc rather than a sphere--never mind the face perfectly facing the earth; it looks like a circle, so it is a circle. Even reasoning the circle is visible because it is the extreme circumference of a sphere and, thus, intuiting that the earth under your feet is also a sphere raises a hell of a lot of confusing questions (you'd have to develop a cosmic model to explain why this makes sense) and, firstly, requires you to determine that the Earth, the Sun, and the Moon are similar types of things (which is silly: the sun and moon are in the sky; the Earth is on the ground!).
You make the absurd proposition that these things are trivialities.
People don't like uncomfortable truths. Google ranks things based on behavioral data suggesting what you're *expecting* when you punch in a search term. That means behaviors showing "black teens" is tied in people's minds to "criminals" will naturally lead to Google showing you criminals if you punch in "black teens" as a search term. It's *disturbing* to realize many people--perhaps yourself included--readily associate black teens with criminals, and so it must be Google's fault.
Orson Scott Card wrote a passage where he described a woman walking home past some teenagers break dancing to rap coming out of their ghetto blasters and smiling at her with gold teeth. He then immediately pointed out that the reader--if the reader is American--has almost certainly pictured this scene with a middle-aged white woman, black teens, and the threat of rape, entirely based on the rap, the shitty neighborhood, and the mild sense of unease. Nobody did anything threatening, but someone had gold teeth and smiled at a woman, so it must be a black man getting ready to follow a white woman down a dark alley and rape her.
Most people who don't even buy into those assessments recognize the pattern and subtitle on the normal societal perception that's fed to us repeatedly. We all have the same reactions regardless of our personal understanding of the matter because we all recognize what everyone else will intend, at the very least. None of us wants to admit to the implications that our first thoughts might be that these people are bad and must be black people, so we blame someone or something else.
Microsoft would be able to absorb all Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Search users into Outlook and Bing circa 2008. It's a good strategy if they think the brand dominance is worth $44 billion.
Between 2011 and 2014, Yahoo had a total net (after-taxes, after-expenses) income of ~$9.75 billion. If Microsoft backed down out of it after 2014, folding Yahoo operations into Outlook and Bing, that's a raw $16 billion in profits. Yahoo took a $4.3 billion loss in 2015, cutting that back to $12 billion; but Microsoft might have folded all of Yahoo into Microsoft operations and converted their brand and business away, eliminating the source of that loss.
That gives Microsoft a $3 billion patent portfolio to sell or hold, about $20 billion of total profits, and a cost of $25 billion over 6 years or around $4.2 billion per year, in theory; their losses might be less and their profits might be greater thanks to the dominance of the Bing brand. Sheer market saturation might have moved more people to Bing and Outlook, breaking Google's dominance and flooding Microsoft with even more profits.
Note that Microsoft had $17.5 billion of net income in 2008, $23 billion in 2011, and $20 billion in 2013 and 2014. Picking up Yahoo for $44 billion wouldn't have significantly injured Microsoft if it didn't pan out, and might have paid out *huge* if it did.
I would have thrown a $44 billion bid for Yahoo in 2008 if I was Microsoft.
It is unlikely all such progress would fade away, and certainly not for that.
Your premise is that healthcare will get cheaper, and then it can get more expensive as new technology arrives. The first problem is people will then move their spending away from healthcare, and the market will no longer bear expensive treatments. The *second* problem is the general advancement of technology means the next latest-and-greatest technology is... relatively expensive: it's as expensive as our shiny new stuff now stands in comparison to the medical industry, and will stand so in a future where the cost of medical care is much smaller.
In short, a shiny, new, expensive thing now costs 10% of the 6% we spend on medical care (0.6%), thus is *quite* expensive; and, in the future, when the level of technology has advanced to the point that we're buying more and better medical care with only 1% of our income, the new devices would also be quite expensive, reflecting 10% of the total medical expense--or 0.1%.
That's how it's always worked, in the long stretch. Today, we spend 6% of our income on more and better medical care, while in 1950 it was only 5%; and before that, medical care was scarce and expensive, with real medicine and surgery reserved for the wealthiest families because the middle-class simply couldn't afford to buy healthcare. Our healthcare now has increased to include wellness and preventative measures; in the future it will expand to include new drugs and machines and other treatments, and all the while our technology to research and *construct* those drugs and machines will improve, such that constructing a brand new type of machine doesn't incur a cost reflecting so much of the total income.
Socialized medicine would tend to restrict the default payment level for healthcare (the demand market); and further expense from supplemental private insurance (which is suddenly *cheap* because the entire span of public healthcare is not on their heads!) would reflect the consumer market's demand for newer treatments. In an economic system where socialized healthcare is viable, the only likely outcome from such a structure is *more* money diverted to newer treatments, creating a demand driver for technical progress.
Perhaps you should stick to arguments over whether socialized healthcare is or is not currently viable and cheaper than privatized healthcare. I have no immediate opinion on that analysis.
It means circa 600BC, the Greeks considered and debated the possibility of a round earth, drawing postulates in the form "IF the earth were round...". Circa 300BC, the Greeks had decided the earth is definitely round, and that the consideration of a flat earth was factually incorrect.
Just acknowledge that the records do not exist to be able to speculate on this.
What are you talking about? We know Pythagoreas proposed the round earth hypothesis in ancient Greece; and Aristotle provided empirical evidence arguing that the earth is indeed round based on real, groundbreaking observations in 330BC. Indian scholars still believed in the flat earth model for a few *hundred* years after that; and, oddly enough, the land-locked country of China retained a flat-earth hypothesis until after the unification of the five territories under the Chin dynasty in the 1600s AD--yes, that's about 400 years ago. Indigenous cultures in the Americas also held to a flat earth theory, right up until invasion by Europeans.
Homer and Hesiod described the earth as a flat disc. Even Thales believed the earth was flat, and Aristotle's proposition of a round earth was based on Euclid's work which followed Thales's own explorations of mathematics--the mathematicians who made it possible to theorize and demonstrate a spherical earth without the power to circumnavigate themselves believed the earth was a flat disc. Anaximenes argued that the Earth, the Sun, and the Moon were flat discs riding on air, and explained their ability to ride on air was due to their flatness, which made them glide like leaves on the wind (a spherical body could not stay afloat as such). Hecataeus claimed the Earth was a circular disc floating in water; Herodotus claimed Hecataeus was an idiot because the ends of the earth only fall off to an infinite drop.
The old Nordic concept of cosmology (back when Odin was King of the Gods in Asgard) maintained a vast ocean surrounding the flat plane of the earth, with Yggdrasil the World Tree in the center, and the great sneak Jormungandr swimming in the sea. They later inferred that the earth must be round by comparing the shadows cast by an apple and the climatography of the earth, creating a global climate model along with their new round earth theory.
The Chinese described the sky and stars as an umbrella (Kai Tian theory) or an egg (Hun Tian theory) surrounding the earth, with the earth as the yolk at the center. Until after 1600AD, no Chinese scholar or philosopher had ever been recorded objecting to the idea that the earth were a *square*, geometrically flat, while the sky was round. It was simply a thing they knew about the earth, a thing that made sense: The earth is the flat ground below your feet, not a round ball that you wander half-way around and fall off.
Do you just want to pretend inconvenient facts don't exist?
What's the point anyway?
The point is the obvious and instinctual is also often wrong. The entire point of a thinking society and a philosophy of engagement--of questioning and investigating, rather than accepting what you're told and what you bluntly see--is to understand what is beyond the shade of your blurred, narrow vision. A society which lives entirely by its instincts follows its state and religious leaders and generally builds itself on superstition and subservience.
The earth is flat. It is also round. It is large enough to have the luxury of being both at the same time.
Your instincts tell you the world is flat under your feet even if it is round 28 miles out; yet that is incorrect. The world has a large radius of curvature, and it is very much curved under your feet, and the curvature is slight such that you do not perceive it by close inspection, and such that it is overwhelmed by noise at small distances (the ground is bumpy--sometimes to an extreme).
Have they fixed the problem where X-Ray, UV, and visible light are stopped by walls, and yet people are still too dumb to figure out microwave bluetooth signals aren't high-energy enough to cause cancer or brain damage? Do we have a patch that at least informs them that light is also EMR, the same kind of radio waves as bluetooth and wifi, but stationed between your cell phone's signal and cancer-causing ultraviolet rays, so these people all panic and go running into the sea like lemmings?
One of the perks of purchasing a gaming console from Sony and Microsoft is knowing that neither company will launch an upgraded version of their respective console for around six to seven years.
Launching a 32GB WiiU Delux alongside the 8GB WiiU was a bold move for Nintendo; previously, they'd only released handhelds in multiple colors or with smaller or larger form factors. The Wii got a mini-version that nobody bought; the Gameboy got the Gameboy Pocket, while the Gameboy Advance got the Gameboy Advance SP and Gameboy Advance Micro. Even the DS only got the DSXL (bigger screen), while the 3DS got the 3DSXL and the 2DS (runs 3DS software without 3D display). These are all budget options or larger screens on handhelds, which can only output to their built-in screen; the WiiU Delux was the first Nintendo console to offer a functional upgrade (all other revisionary hardware ran the same software with the same results if following the same actions).
Sony and Microsoft have a long history of upgrading consoles to have bigger and better specs, rather than simply slimmed form and budget options. A lot of "you bought an XBox so you can have an XBox until the next console comes out, but not really, because you're going to have to buy a new XBox because new games are going to preload 60GB of content to the hard disk and you're going to experience 40 minute load times without XBox with HD-DVD!"
I know the history of the idea of a flat earth; round earth is an extremely old concept, speculated upon in 600BC, but not really accepted as a physical fact until 300BC. Now those numbers are really interesting: Thales started investigating the mathematical basis of Geometry in 600BC; Euclid published his famous texts on the mathematics of Geometry in 300BC. Euclid's writings include the observation that a triangle's angles all add up to 180 degrees; however, the Greeks observed that you could make three turns while sailing and end up where you started, yet the angles didn't add up to 180 degrees, thus leading to the *entire* field of non-Euclidean geometry, starting with the projection of two-dimensional geometric shapes onto a sphere.
So, yes, some 3000 years ago, people actually believed the earth was flat.
At one point, respiration cost a lot. The original Iron Lung was basically invented in 1670, but was impractical--too complex to build; of course they could do it on that technology, and then someone could hand-operate it 24/7, and the technology to make steel could do so with ~200 times the labor of modern steel-making techniques. They'd have to hand-hammer plate steel instead of rolling it; and blast furnaces were charcoal-driven until the 1700s. Hot-blast furnaces in the 1830s century revolutionized steelmaking: previous blast furnaces produced under 400 tonnes of iron with the same labor (cost) that a hot-blast furnace used to output 80,000 tonnes, meaning pre-hot-blast iron literally cost over 200 times as much.
The Drinker respirator was used to treat polio in 1928; and Emerson invented a *much* less-expensive respirator in 1931. The Both respirator cost £2000 British pounds in 1936, and £1500 in 1950; Edward Both developed a device in 1950 that cost only £100 and performed the same function.
Why do you think MRI machines can't get cheaper, when food, respirators, medicines, aluminum, cars, books, housing, and even MRI devices *have* gotten cheaper throughout the history of their existence?
Am I the only one who finds it strange Tesla mailed this agreement, pre-filled with the make and model of the car, to the customer, yet didn't pre-fill the customer's information? I'm not saying it's a forgery--they could have a stock document for each model, with just the "Model S" part changed (they have Model S, Model X, and Roadster, come on; the default is probably Model S and you just hit print)--just that there's a minor scuff on the armor of this bullet-proof case.
I'd like to see if this plays out to another potato user trying to scam and discredit Tesla or if it's legitimate. The story says that Tesla's ball joint issue came from one user complaining loudly, and then another user doing his own investigation and discovering a *lot* of Tesla users have been complaining loudly about this issue and nobody else in the world noticed. We've had the whole world blink and miss something right in our faces before; we've also had idiots try to fabricate evidence to extract money from someone or slander a business. Which one is it this time?
There's a lot of intersection. Faster per-capita GDP growth means better welfare systems, higher standard-of-living at the bottom, less homelessness and hunger, greater access to healthcare, and the like in any future time frame. Society has a lot of secondary drivers related to holding to its form.
Good for the economy is a term that needs defining. You eventually get into evaluating if something is good for the economy. But you never define what good for the economy would be. And that precedes evaluating potential actions.
Uh, the explanation that followed did outline the increase in per-capita wealth.
Let's therefore use the most common definition, the measure of the economy is the GDP. Obviously, higher GDP -> better economy. Therefore, something "good" for the economy raises GDP.
Raising per-capita GDP (not just flat GDP) necessarily means individuals are wealthier and the standard-of-living of the poorest of poor is better. Food is more plentiful and luxuries come down from the rich to the hands of the poor.
There is no reason something cannot raise GDP and be bad for the majority of the people in a country. I mean that "technically" and "logically." There are a lot of examples involving horrible human rights abuses (e.g. slavery.) I don't want to delve into them.
Slavery tends to expend a large amount of labor resources for minimal gain in developed economies, often reducing wealth. Slaves must be fed and cared for, because replacing a slave is expensive (you have to raise a child first off, which is difficult due the amount of food and care consumed by non-productive birthing women and their children; and raising a strong, healthy child is more productive than raising a weak slave, so you're looking at about a quarter million dollar replacement cost between maintaining the pregnant mother and raising the child to maybe 8-10 years old). Slaves require management techniques which produce poor results and prevent large gains; they work okay in a field with hand tools, but not in a field 15 times as productive using complex farm management techniques and large mechanical tooling--not unless you train them well enough to revolt with terrifying effectiveness.
With the current state of automation, it's no longer assured that more goods means more jobs.
If you make human labor more expensive, then the cost of goods increases, and the jobs decrease. If, then, you follow up by providing a lower-labor alternative (automation, or any other technology in history), you rapidly remove jobs. With human labor being more expensive, more buying power must return to the consumer base before replacement jobs are created.
In other words: it's trivial to create an economic situation in which something like "automation" (new industrial technology) *more rapidly* replaces jobs, and those jobs come back *more slowly*.
Policies such as the elimination of sales taxes, the replacement of payroll taxes with business income taxes, and the provision of an increase in lower-wage incomes by supplementing with a non-wage income (essentially UBI) reverses both of these. Human labor becomes more competitive with technical labor, and so paying the expense of retaining a human-labor process while the cost of new technology comes down can pay a *lot* of return; businesses will speculate and carry out staged roll-out on schedules which vary based on their risk appetite and risk tolerances. At the same time, the amount of consumer take-home increases relative to the amount an employer pays the employee, and so consumer buying power recovers more quickly, and the jobs lost in the transition are replaced with new jobs in a shorter time frame.
By that manner, you reduce peak unemployment and shorten the duration of unemployment in technical progress. This prevents huge recessions in response to technological steps forward, such as the upcoming automation transition.
there's no reason to think that businesses with freed up assets (no longer needed for stabilization) will spend them on innovation, as opposed to wastefully buying fancier art for the executive suite.
It's not necessarily innovation. If I can afford a $28
Actually, a lot of low-development countries expend high amounts of labor on food production. In North America, it's usually under 2%; in Africa, it can be as high as 40% of the labor force.
When you expand production beyond a certain amount, the secondary resources feeding that production require more effort to collect. Run out of fertile land and you can grow more by bringing fertilizer and irrigation to rocky soil; that may yield less, and so you have to farm a greater area of soil, requiring more fertilizer and more irrigation per land area, *plus* more direct human time spent traversing a larger area to harvest the same amount of food. Increasing the labor of chemists, oil producers, miners, machinists, and so forth to produce the machines, chemicals, fuels, and blunt manual labor involved in food production means you have to pay all these additional wages per unit food, and so food becomes expensive.
Find a way to increase scale--grow food more densely (intensive farming) or grow food on lower-quality land with only *slightly* more human labor than on high-quality land--and you uncap scarcity. Sensing abundance, the population grows. So it is, so it's always been; a violation of this principle would lead to a chunk of the poorest of society simply starving away, so changing this trend is not only unlikely (no precipitating reason), but impossible.
I predict a future in which alternate energy sources become necessarily cheaper. Advances in solar and wind will replace some of the oil and coal; advances in nuclear or a breakthrough technology (e.g. space energy, high-efficiency geothermal) will replace all of it when these exceed the cost of oil (which will increase with more resource exhaustion, and decrease with better drilling technology). The reduced load on the EPA will allow their budget to channel toward creating a strategic oil reserve by scrubbing the atmosphere of CO2, converting it to oil which we can store in the ground. On today's technology, a reasonable budget can thus sequester 1 day's worth of CO2 in 1 year of operation; further technical progress will accelerate that over the next 300 years, and starting at a stable point necessarily means movement goes in the direction of reversal from day one, even if slowly.
That is the least-economically-disruptive outcome and the most likely.
Different approaches work because of different internal translation layers and habitual thinking behaviors. All people learn best the same way; to cope with not being told how the brain functions and how learning works, people find various strategies which produce similar results.
Tailored approaches can lead to inefficient learning and, as a result, to the observation that some students are just dumber than other, more brilliant students. All students appear to learn best by adjusting the study strategy to fit their learned, habitual behavior; if that behavior is inefficient, an adjusted strategy will produce better results than an unadjusted strategy, and worse results than an adjusted strategy fitting a student who is internally using a different method. Importantly, this produces worse results than adjusting the student's internal strategies toward optimum.
The crude example is the perception of people as visual, auditory, or kinesthetic learners. All people are primarily visual learners: the brain stores visual information better than anything. Memory is associative, and auditory cues tie directly to visual-spatial memory; while physically performing a task enables spatial analysis, producing large amounts of visual-spatial information. How a person responds to any such data determines how well they learn from it: people who fail to turn visual data into spatial data, who don't reflect on new information, and who don't turn verbal information into visual and then spatial data tend to behave as kinesthetic learners. If you take these same people and teach them to project the other types of information together, they become substantially-similar to learners of other types.
People will always have a preference for a learning method--they'll want to see it, to read instructions, or to get their hands on it. Teaching them other methods allows them to load their brains using more-effective strategies, and then access all of that information through the comfort of exercising their favorite learning method. Doing something in a way which you most prefer draws upon the least amount of energy and is thus most comfortable and enjoyable; it doesn't necessarily produce the best results, and instead provides a great way to reflect on, reframe, and reprocess information being learned, strengthening learning.
I've eventually learned to use many strategies for learning, and don't consider myself any particular type of learner. Visual learning provides me with images to work from and of which to project spatial estimations. Auditory learning--really, just "learning by words"--gives me a logical semantic to follow. Kinesthetic learning allows me to store event memory, increase the basis for visual learning, refine spatial data, and otherwise create large amounts of additional information and link existing information together. I leverage everything I can use.
People all have the same neurological facilities. They're not cats and gerbils and monkeys with varied cerebral anatomy.
Tinder groups? That's not a Kik thing? There's all kinds of ads on Craigslist about Kik swingers groups; it became a media phenomena among the self-described tabloid news (as opposed to the self-denying tabloid news that permeates American culture) after they got bored with furries and online cybersex mucks (Wired...).
My instincts tell me the world is flat and the sun orbits the earth. You make the ridiculous argument that the moon orbits the earth, but the earth orbits the sun; how can that be true when they both cross the sky?
How much swap should we set up? How much swap is optimal? How much swap do you need? Does your usage differ from my usage?
I originally worked out a management daemon because I wanted to use up to a certain amount of memory for compressed paging *without* using a fixed-sized on-disk backend (zswap), and that's not currently possible. Much of the time, my RAM compresses to 25% of its original size; often it's compressed to 33%; and large workloads including difficult-to-compress data (e.g. video) will come out of LZO at 90% of their original size. I can't just create swap of a given size and say that fits.
In short: setting up swap is an incredibly complex task requiring a high degree of knowledge about unpredictable workloads. You can only guess with a reasonable accuracy in terms of best-case, and will then get burned by corner cases.
Imagine if you had to select a hard disk based on "how much disk space I will use eventually," and having unused disk space had serious consequences up to and including system instability. That's what selecting a swap size is like.
The verbiage also claims Tinder has special features to help find orgies.... like what? Last I heard it was swipe left, swipe right, you matched, hook up. Is there a setting for "Find sex parties"?
It is technically impossible for something to be good for the economy as a whole but bad for the people.
In the short term, that which is good for the economy as a whole increases consumer spending power and creates jobs. Jobs are necessary for production of goods, and thus are created by demand for more goods. Any sustainable practice of economy which improves this flow of consumer buying power improves the lives of the people.
In the long term, the sustained strength of an economy as such reduces business risk. This reduction allows businesses to expend those resources, no longer spent on insuring themselves against uncertainty, in more risky endeavors. That means technical progress. Technical progress reduces the amount of jobs needed to produce a certain set of products, which reduces their cost; this eventually transfers to the consumer, and the consumer can buy more and better products, creating the demand for replacement jobs, ending with the same employment and more goods per person. This technical progress is responsible for such phenomena as the reduction in food costs (30% of the median household income in 1950, 11% today), the increase in access to healthcare (5% of income in 1950, 6% today buying more and better healthcare), and the viability of welfare in general.
Such stabilizing actions lengthen the deployment time of labor-reducing technologies, shorten the duration of transitional unemployment from technical progress, increase the pace of technical progress in general, and even allow us to reduce per-capita working hours in trade (instead of being 20% richer, we can all work 4 days, 32 hours per week; this is also why we no longer work 10-16 hour days 6 days per week, as was the subject of political debate in 1880-1920 before the 8-hour-day gained traction).
All business activities consume labor, producing a product or service in return. All revenue-generating business activities necessarily consume part of the income of the population, transferring part of that to consumers for later spending. That means an activity which makes the maximum amount of money may be harmful to the economy: if it consumes little labor but charges high prices, you have something called "economic rent", which leads to a reduction in employment; if it consumes large amounts of labor and produces something of little use, you have a simple reduction of wealth (we do all this work and spend all our money and we get nothing for it!).
Evaluating what's good for an economy is hard. You've seemed to sidetrack on evaluating what's good for a society, which is even more complex, and is contexted to the current state of that society. For example: Greece has a very openly-sexual society; making America more openly-sexual would necessarily expose more teenagers and younger children to the concept of sex, and our society aims to purge the very awareness of any such thing from the minds of people under roughly 14, and then minimize the amount of sexual conduct they're aware of and exposed to thereafter. Attempting to convert either of these to the other would be necessarily harmful to that society.
Tobacco is a more clear-cut case, although not entirely. While I dislike tobacco, and I understand alcohol has lower toxicity and is harmless in reasonable consumption, I also understand the immense cultural impact of tobacco and alcohol. The harm in smoking a half a gram of tobacco at the end of the day (or week!) is not comparable to the harm of smoking four packs of cigarettes, and *is* comparable to the harm (or lack thereof) of simply not smoking; and, in fact, second-hand smoke has been shown harmless (but highly annoying) by many scientific studies (exactly zero studies have found a link between second-hand smoke and *any* health effects). The harm of tobacco is largely cultural, in that we smoke entirely too much and in a harmful manner; at the same time, the image of a pipe or a detective with a cigarette is a long-standing cultural artifact of tobacco, and many people enjoy a tobacco hobby which does limit itself to small amounts on an infrequent basis. While tobacco is clearly harmful, it's not necessarily so to a great degree.
Number one is probably the fact that many of these students simply have fewer resources than other college students. They are more likely to have to work part-time (even multiple part-time jobs) while taking classes, just to pay for school. They are more likely to have more complicated family responsibilities at a younger age, which also sucks up a lot of time.
I *know* I can fix that.
Other people depend on innate abilities that they don't have to think about. (And when I say "innate," I don't necessary mean they were born with it: I also include things that for whatever reason a talented kid may have figured out in processing the world when he/she was very young, and it's become so ingrained in the very way they think and process information that they are completely unaware of how different it is from other people.)
I'm one of those people, although I've taken it to an unhealthy extreme in some places. A *very* unhealthy extreme. It doesn't stack up to structured skills, but it does make people think I'm some kind of super-brain.
Getting my superior mind powers to fall over for the tiniest reason is pretty trivial. By far the most severe is the black box effect: I use an extreme form of analogical thinking which includes defining analogical boundaries (i.e. I specifically determine how the two things I'm associating are *not* similar), and can immediately understand anything as a combination of bits and pieces of attributes of other things; show me something I can't associate to *anything* I already know and I'll spend literally years poking and prodding at it as something I have no capacity to understand without hand-holding.
So much for super-brain.
as I noted above, sometime for "disadvantaged" students the problems aren't just a lack of learning/study skills. In many cases they are also dealing with personal struggles FAR greater than students who are more well-off ever could imagine.
Often, stress is reduced by understanding. Citing out how people are different because their situation is different makes people feel less-bad about themselves because they understand *why* their performance is worse, and can take actions to correct it. The limitations are due to the situation, and they can focus on fixing what they can fix, and understand why they can't fix other things in terms other than "it really looks like my friends are all smarter than me."
This is wholly relevant when the prevalent mode of thinking is "they can do better if we just cheer them on." Maybe they *can* do better, and maybe you can use something stronger than a pep talk to get them moving along. If their internal deficiencies aren't the problem, then it must be an external problem; and you handle that by pointing it out to them, not by telling them everyone has the same problems when they don't.
first they needed a shift in attitude, which often came from realizing they weren't alone in their struggles
I disagree with the method, but not the mechanism. I couldn't very well say anything about the brain's consumption of energy and operation under stress otherwise. I only maintain that positive results give positive reinforcement and reduce stress, and that a person's unique environmental factors should not be portrayed to them as something everyone is experiencing--because that is a flat lie and they will wonder wtf is wrong with them when they see everyone else is handling those struggles far more easily.
Some people have superior internal strategies--I'm one of those people; I always did great without structure because my brain internally dissects everything. Of particular note, I don't deal well with inconsistent data: when I have new knowledge, I compare it to all other knowledge I possess, and resolve any inconsistencies. This has lead to reasoning out information I haven't yet been given, or identifying when someone gave me a simplification of a concept which is just plain incorrect. The effect is so striking that, on a few occasions, I've been able to reason out things people don't want anyone knowing simply by spending too much time around them--even things their actions and words don't obviously imply, just based on models of consistency ("a person developing this particular set of behaviors most commonly has experienced..."). It's reflexive for me.
I still don't come anywhere near a number of great people (many of whom are assholes, somehow; please explain how such infantile people as Brad Spengler, Ulrich Drepper, and Theo da Raadt manage to wield great mental abilities while being such narrow-minded children); and I've steadily found my two biggest flaws to be motivational (I spend almost zero time studying anything; my self-activation is shitty, and my response-inhibition is unrivaled by all except firewalkers) and structural (applying enhanced study techniques gives a *huge* return over my baseline intelligence).
There is a commonality here. The manner in which I think is an extreme form of reflection. Students who practice reflection in a non-extreme way universally learn much faster and better than students who try to cram material bluntly into their tiny little skulls. I've observed the same of memory: instead of mnemonics systems (which would let me memorize facts and figures rapidly), I use basic association, storage, and visualization strategies, which lets me sort and access my memories in a less-efficient but still highly-effective manner, and works *extremely* well for people who think they simply have bad memories. The techniques of basic arithmetic taught in Japanese schools produce students who are unrecognizable as individuals of normal intellect to the rest of the world.
All of these things are some manner of structure. Reflection is a structured activity: it is a task you perform during and after learning new information. Mnemonic systems are highly-structured; and basic mnemonic behaviors including association and visualization are more structured than simply letting information hit you and hoping it sticks, even if the only step is "stop and think about that for 4 seconds". Basic arithmetic operations are a highly-structured task when using a soroban, and those tasks translate to highly-structured mental operations which produce human calculators.
It's true that applying structure takes additional energy--as I pointed out: learning to establish and modify schedules requires energy, and carrying out this activity after you've become practiced in it takes less energy. The point is not to "do fine"; the point is to *maximize*, to produce the absolute best strategy. Such strategies are complex and state-based, which is why they're called "strategies" and not "algorithms".
there are many other things that can cause people to struggle. There is your budget; roommates; not punching some asshole who desperately deserves it; whether to spend the weekend with the spelunking club or the skydiving club; do I go out with the blonde or the slightly less attractive redhead (okay, that's not a struggle, it's the redhead), when should I stop drinking in order to avoid getting my face written on with a sharpie (or worse).
That's stress. Stress is normal and healthy. Too much and unhealthy stress is often called "strain"; struggling implies failure to thrive.
You're not struggling just because life is hard; you're struggling because you can't keep up with life. For problems which are not intractable, we can fix the root cause.
I don't think everyone struggles with academics, though some would argue that if you aren't then you need a bigger load or a more difficult program.
Don't increase load to failure; increase load to capacity.
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You used instinct in place of intuition in the above. They are often used semantically to mean the same thing, although this is technically not correct, as you say.
By the way, spending a lot of energy taking one line of argument and then switching to semantics when you've lost is a dead giveaway that your position is intractable.
You are using a few very examples and not accounting for all the ones that may have been lost.
Your argument has become, "Well, that's just what we *know*! What about what we *don't* know?!" We don't know about the aliens on Seti Alpha Prime, so there must be aliens. Your position is absurd.
You are using these few examples from a tiny minority of civilizations to assert that there was a consensus across not just nations, but across the entire world. Do you see how utterly absurd that is?
All of Europe got their astronomy from Greece--or, more accurately, from Rome, who traded philosophy with Greece on a regular basis. That includes the Arabs. China missed the boat until Europe traded astronomy with the Chinese--that is, the Chinese unified under the Chin dynasty. The Cherokee of the United States--the second largest North American indigenous group--believed the Earth was an island in the center of an endless ocean. The Norse reasoned the Earth was flat until they did some fancy reasoning with an apple and a candle (impressive, that). The Mayans and other Central American indigenous tribes believed in a flat earth theory. The Ancient Egyptians left writings in the pyramids describing the Nun, the great circular ocean surrounding the disc which was the Earth, all a flat plane. The oldest record of any map of the Earth is from Babylon, in the region now called Iraq; it and supplemental writings portray a flat earth theory.
These groups account for approximately the entire spread of human population across the Earth, and for all of the great ancient societies, including the Europeans, the Native Americans, the Egyptians, the Arabs, and the Asians.
You suggest there must, somewhere, be an extreme minority of humans who, upon developing the ability to think and reason, also were bestowed with the knowledge and understanding of a round earth despite such evidence as the ground under their feet being flat and things falling downward (Aristotle's theory of gravitation was that all things moved downward toward the CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE; Galileo was earliest with starting a modern theory of gravitation, followed by Hooke suggesting that objects move toward each other).
Developing a round-earth theory has always been a matter of extreme evidence and consideration: circumnavigation of the earth, heavy application of geometry, climatological analysis and extreme lateral thinking, and other manners of high technology are required. People intuited that the moon itself was a disc rather than a sphere--never mind the face perfectly facing the earth; it looks like a circle, so it is a circle. Even reasoning the circle is visible because it is the extreme circumference of a sphere and, thus, intuiting that the earth under your feet is also a sphere raises a hell of a lot of confusing questions (you'd have to develop a cosmic model to explain why this makes sense) and, firstly, requires you to determine that the Earth, the Sun, and the Moon are similar types of things (which is silly: the sun and moon are in the sky; the Earth is on the ground!).
You make the absurd proposition that these things are trivialities.
People don't like uncomfortable truths. Google ranks things based on behavioral data suggesting what you're *expecting* when you punch in a search term. That means behaviors showing "black teens" is tied in people's minds to "criminals" will naturally lead to Google showing you criminals if you punch in "black teens" as a search term. It's *disturbing* to realize many people--perhaps yourself included--readily associate black teens with criminals, and so it must be Google's fault.
Orson Scott Card wrote a passage where he described a woman walking home past some teenagers break dancing to rap coming out of their ghetto blasters and smiling at her with gold teeth. He then immediately pointed out that the reader--if the reader is American--has almost certainly pictured this scene with a middle-aged white woman, black teens, and the threat of rape, entirely based on the rap, the shitty neighborhood, and the mild sense of unease. Nobody did anything threatening, but someone had gold teeth and smiled at a woman, so it must be a black man getting ready to follow a white woman down a dark alley and rape her.
Most people who don't even buy into those assessments recognize the pattern and subtitle on the normal societal perception that's fed to us repeatedly. We all have the same reactions regardless of our personal understanding of the matter because we all recognize what everyone else will intend, at the very least. None of us wants to admit to the implications that our first thoughts might be that these people are bad and must be black people, so we blame someone or something else.
Microsoft would be able to absorb all Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Search users into Outlook and Bing circa 2008. It's a good strategy if they think the brand dominance is worth $44 billion.
Between 2011 and 2014, Yahoo had a total net (after-taxes, after-expenses) income of ~$9.75 billion. If Microsoft backed down out of it after 2014, folding Yahoo operations into Outlook and Bing, that's a raw $16 billion in profits. Yahoo took a $4.3 billion loss in 2015, cutting that back to $12 billion; but Microsoft might have folded all of Yahoo into Microsoft operations and converted their brand and business away, eliminating the source of that loss.
That gives Microsoft a $3 billion patent portfolio to sell or hold, about $20 billion of total profits, and a cost of $25 billion over 6 years or around $4.2 billion per year, in theory; their losses might be less and their profits might be greater thanks to the dominance of the Bing brand. Sheer market saturation might have moved more people to Bing and Outlook, breaking Google's dominance and flooding Microsoft with even more profits.
Note that Microsoft had $17.5 billion of net income in 2008, $23 billion in 2011, and $20 billion in 2013 and 2014. Picking up Yahoo for $44 billion wouldn't have significantly injured Microsoft if it didn't pan out, and might have paid out *huge* if it did.
I would have thrown a $44 billion bid for Yahoo in 2008 if I was Microsoft.
It is unlikely all such progress would fade away, and certainly not for that.
Your premise is that healthcare will get cheaper, and then it can get more expensive as new technology arrives. The first problem is people will then move their spending away from healthcare, and the market will no longer bear expensive treatments. The *second* problem is the general advancement of technology means the next latest-and-greatest technology is ... relatively expensive: it's as expensive as our shiny new stuff now stands in comparison to the medical industry, and will stand so in a future where the cost of medical care is much smaller.
In short, a shiny, new, expensive thing now costs 10% of the 6% we spend on medical care (0.6%), thus is *quite* expensive; and, in the future, when the level of technology has advanced to the point that we're buying more and better medical care with only 1% of our income, the new devices would also be quite expensive, reflecting 10% of the total medical expense--or 0.1%.
That's how it's always worked, in the long stretch. Today, we spend 6% of our income on more and better medical care, while in 1950 it was only 5%; and before that, medical care was scarce and expensive, with real medicine and surgery reserved for the wealthiest families because the middle-class simply couldn't afford to buy healthcare. Our healthcare now has increased to include wellness and preventative measures; in the future it will expand to include new drugs and machines and other treatments, and all the while our technology to research and *construct* those drugs and machines will improve, such that constructing a brand new type of machine doesn't incur a cost reflecting so much of the total income.
Socialized medicine would tend to restrict the default payment level for healthcare (the demand market); and further expense from supplemental private insurance (which is suddenly *cheap* because the entire span of public healthcare is not on their heads!) would reflect the consumer market's demand for newer treatments. In an economic system where socialized healthcare is viable, the only likely outcome from such a structure is *more* money diverted to newer treatments, creating a demand driver for technical progress.
Perhaps you should stick to arguments over whether socialized healthcare is or is not currently viable and cheaper than privatized healthcare. I have no immediate opinion on that analysis.
what is that supposed to mean?
It means circa 600BC, the Greeks considered and debated the possibility of a round earth, drawing postulates in the form "IF the earth were round...". Circa 300BC, the Greeks had decided the earth is definitely round, and that the consideration of a flat earth was factually incorrect.
Just acknowledge that the records do not exist to be able to speculate on this.
What are you talking about? We know Pythagoreas proposed the round earth hypothesis in ancient Greece; and Aristotle provided empirical evidence arguing that the earth is indeed round based on real, groundbreaking observations in 330BC. Indian scholars still believed in the flat earth model for a few *hundred* years after that; and, oddly enough, the land-locked country of China retained a flat-earth hypothesis until after the unification of the five territories under the Chin dynasty in the 1600s AD--yes, that's about 400 years ago. Indigenous cultures in the Americas also held to a flat earth theory, right up until invasion by Europeans.
Homer and Hesiod described the earth as a flat disc. Even Thales believed the earth was flat, and Aristotle's proposition of a round earth was based on Euclid's work which followed Thales's own explorations of mathematics--the mathematicians who made it possible to theorize and demonstrate a spherical earth without the power to circumnavigate themselves believed the earth was a flat disc. Anaximenes argued that the Earth, the Sun, and the Moon were flat discs riding on air, and explained their ability to ride on air was due to their flatness, which made them glide like leaves on the wind (a spherical body could not stay afloat as such). Hecataeus claimed the Earth was a circular disc floating in water; Herodotus claimed Hecataeus was an idiot because the ends of the earth only fall off to an infinite drop.
The old Nordic concept of cosmology (back when Odin was King of the Gods in Asgard) maintained a vast ocean surrounding the flat plane of the earth, with Yggdrasil the World Tree in the center, and the great sneak Jormungandr swimming in the sea. They later inferred that the earth must be round by comparing the shadows cast by an apple and the climatography of the earth, creating a global climate model along with their new round earth theory.
The Chinese described the sky and stars as an umbrella (Kai Tian theory) or an egg (Hun Tian theory) surrounding the earth, with the earth as the yolk at the center. Until after 1600AD, no Chinese scholar or philosopher had ever been recorded objecting to the idea that the earth were a *square*, geometrically flat, while the sky was round. It was simply a thing they knew about the earth, a thing that made sense: The earth is the flat ground below your feet, not a round ball that you wander half-way around and fall off.
Do you just want to pretend inconvenient facts don't exist?
What's the point anyway?
The point is the obvious and instinctual is also often wrong. The entire point of a thinking society and a philosophy of engagement--of questioning and investigating, rather than accepting what you're told and what you bluntly see--is to understand what is beyond the shade of your blurred, narrow vision. A society which lives entirely by its instincts follows its state and religious leaders and generally builds itself on superstition and subservience.
The earth is flat. It is also round. It is large enough to have the luxury of being both at the same time.
Your instincts tell you the world is flat under your feet even if it is round 28 miles out; yet that is incorrect. The world has a large radius of curvature, and it is very much curved under your feet, and the curvature is slight such that you do not perceive it by close inspection, and such that it is overwhelmed by noise at small distances (the ground is bumpy--sometimes to an extreme).
Have they fixed the problem where X-Ray, UV, and visible light are stopped by walls, and yet people are still too dumb to figure out microwave bluetooth signals aren't high-energy enough to cause cancer or brain damage? Do we have a patch that at least informs them that light is also EMR, the same kind of radio waves as bluetooth and wifi, but stationed between your cell phone's signal and cancer-causing ultraviolet rays, so these people all panic and go running into the sea like lemmings?
One of the perks of purchasing a gaming console from Sony and Microsoft is knowing that neither company will launch an upgraded version of their respective console for around six to seven years.
Launching a 32GB WiiU Delux alongside the 8GB WiiU was a bold move for Nintendo; previously, they'd only released handhelds in multiple colors or with smaller or larger form factors. The Wii got a mini-version that nobody bought; the Gameboy got the Gameboy Pocket, while the Gameboy Advance got the Gameboy Advance SP and Gameboy Advance Micro. Even the DS only got the DSXL (bigger screen), while the 3DS got the 3DSXL and the 2DS (runs 3DS software without 3D display). These are all budget options or larger screens on handhelds, which can only output to their built-in screen; the WiiU Delux was the first Nintendo console to offer a functional upgrade (all other revisionary hardware ran the same software with the same results if following the same actions).
Sony and Microsoft have a long history of upgrading consoles to have bigger and better specs, rather than simply slimmed form and budget options. A lot of "you bought an XBox so you can have an XBox until the next console comes out, but not really, because you're going to have to buy a new XBox because new games are going to preload 60GB of content to the hard disk and you're going to experience 40 minute load times without XBox with HD-DVD!"
Firefox has become the tyrant it has replaced.
The RAM and CPU are usually BGA; the SSD is complex and prohibitive to BGA, so they use an MSATA. You can always pop in a 256GB Samsung EVO 850.
Well they *are* responsible for Firefox.
I know the history of the idea of a flat earth; round earth is an extremely old concept, speculated upon in 600BC, but not really accepted as a physical fact until 300BC. Now those numbers are really interesting: Thales started investigating the mathematical basis of Geometry in 600BC; Euclid published his famous texts on the mathematics of Geometry in 300BC. Euclid's writings include the observation that a triangle's angles all add up to 180 degrees; however, the Greeks observed that you could make three turns while sailing and end up where you started, yet the angles didn't add up to 180 degrees, thus leading to the *entire* field of non-Euclidean geometry, starting with the projection of two-dimensional geometric shapes onto a sphere.
So, yes, some 3000 years ago, people actually believed the earth was flat.
At one point, respiration cost a lot. The original Iron Lung was basically invented in 1670, but was impractical--too complex to build; of course they could do it on that technology, and then someone could hand-operate it 24/7, and the technology to make steel could do so with ~200 times the labor of modern steel-making techniques. They'd have to hand-hammer plate steel instead of rolling it; and blast furnaces were charcoal-driven until the 1700s. Hot-blast furnaces in the 1830s century revolutionized steelmaking: previous blast furnaces produced under 400 tonnes of iron with the same labor (cost) that a hot-blast furnace used to output 80,000 tonnes, meaning pre-hot-blast iron literally cost over 200 times as much.
The Drinker respirator was used to treat polio in 1928; and Emerson invented a *much* less-expensive respirator in 1931. The Both respirator cost £2000 British pounds in 1936, and £1500 in 1950; Edward Both developed a device in 1950 that cost only £100 and performed the same function.
Why do you think MRI machines can't get cheaper, when food, respirators, medicines, aluminum, cars, books, housing, and even MRI devices *have* gotten cheaper throughout the history of their existence?
Am I the only one who finds it strange Tesla mailed this agreement, pre-filled with the make and model of the car, to the customer, yet didn't pre-fill the customer's information? I'm not saying it's a forgery--they could have a stock document for each model, with just the "Model S" part changed (they have Model S, Model X, and Roadster, come on; the default is probably Model S and you just hit print)--just that there's a minor scuff on the armor of this bullet-proof case.
I'd like to see if this plays out to another potato user trying to scam and discredit Tesla or if it's legitimate. The story says that Tesla's ball joint issue came from one user complaining loudly, and then another user doing his own investigation and discovering a *lot* of Tesla users have been complaining loudly about this issue and nobody else in the world noticed. We've had the whole world blink and miss something right in our faces before; we've also had idiots try to fabricate evidence to extract money from someone or slander a business. Which one is it this time?
There's a lot of intersection. Faster per-capita GDP growth means better welfare systems, higher standard-of-living at the bottom, less homelessness and hunger, greater access to healthcare, and the like in any future time frame. Society has a lot of secondary drivers related to holding to its form.
Good for the economy is a term that needs defining. You eventually get into evaluating if something is good for the economy. But you never define what good for the economy would be. And that precedes evaluating potential actions.
Uh, the explanation that followed did outline the increase in per-capita wealth.
Let's therefore use the most common definition, the measure of the economy is the GDP. Obviously, higher GDP -> better economy. Therefore, something "good" for the economy raises GDP.
Raising per-capita GDP (not just flat GDP) necessarily means individuals are wealthier and the standard-of-living of the poorest of poor is better. Food is more plentiful and luxuries come down from the rich to the hands of the poor.
There is no reason something cannot raise GDP and be bad for the majority of the people in a country. I mean that "technically" and "logically." There are a lot of examples involving horrible human rights abuses (e.g. slavery.) I don't want to delve into them.
Slavery tends to expend a large amount of labor resources for minimal gain in developed economies, often reducing wealth. Slaves must be fed and cared for, because replacing a slave is expensive (you have to raise a child first off, which is difficult due the amount of food and care consumed by non-productive birthing women and their children; and raising a strong, healthy child is more productive than raising a weak slave, so you're looking at about a quarter million dollar replacement cost between maintaining the pregnant mother and raising the child to maybe 8-10 years old). Slaves require management techniques which produce poor results and prevent large gains; they work okay in a field with hand tools, but not in a field 15 times as productive using complex farm management techniques and large mechanical tooling--not unless you train them well enough to revolt with terrifying effectiveness.
With the current state of automation, it's no longer assured that more goods means more jobs.
If you make human labor more expensive, then the cost of goods increases, and the jobs decrease. If, then, you follow up by providing a lower-labor alternative (automation, or any other technology in history), you rapidly remove jobs. With human labor being more expensive, more buying power must return to the consumer base before replacement jobs are created.
In other words: it's trivial to create an economic situation in which something like "automation" (new industrial technology) *more rapidly* replaces jobs, and those jobs come back *more slowly*.
Policies such as the elimination of sales taxes, the replacement of payroll taxes with business income taxes, and the provision of an increase in lower-wage incomes by supplementing with a non-wage income (essentially UBI) reverses both of these. Human labor becomes more competitive with technical labor, and so paying the expense of retaining a human-labor process while the cost of new technology comes down can pay a *lot* of return; businesses will speculate and carry out staged roll-out on schedules which vary based on their risk appetite and risk tolerances. At the same time, the amount of consumer take-home increases relative to the amount an employer pays the employee, and so consumer buying power recovers more quickly, and the jobs lost in the transition are replaced with new jobs in a shorter time frame.
By that manner, you reduce peak unemployment and shorten the duration of unemployment in technical progress. This prevents huge recessions in response to technological steps forward, such as the upcoming automation transition.
there's no reason to think that businesses with freed up assets (no longer needed for stabilization) will spend them on innovation, as opposed to wastefully buying fancier art for the executive suite.
It's not necessarily innovation. If I can afford a $28
Actually, a lot of low-development countries expend high amounts of labor on food production. In North America, it's usually under 2%; in Africa, it can be as high as 40% of the labor force.
When you expand production beyond a certain amount, the secondary resources feeding that production require more effort to collect. Run out of fertile land and you can grow more by bringing fertilizer and irrigation to rocky soil; that may yield less, and so you have to farm a greater area of soil, requiring more fertilizer and more irrigation per land area, *plus* more direct human time spent traversing a larger area to harvest the same amount of food. Increasing the labor of chemists, oil producers, miners, machinists, and so forth to produce the machines, chemicals, fuels, and blunt manual labor involved in food production means you have to pay all these additional wages per unit food, and so food becomes expensive.
Find a way to increase scale--grow food more densely (intensive farming) or grow food on lower-quality land with only *slightly* more human labor than on high-quality land--and you uncap scarcity. Sensing abundance, the population grows. So it is, so it's always been; a violation of this principle would lead to a chunk of the poorest of society simply starving away, so changing this trend is not only unlikely (no precipitating reason), but impossible.
I predict a future in which alternate energy sources become necessarily cheaper. Advances in solar and wind will replace some of the oil and coal; advances in nuclear or a breakthrough technology (e.g. space energy, high-efficiency geothermal) will replace all of it when these exceed the cost of oil (which will increase with more resource exhaustion, and decrease with better drilling technology). The reduced load on the EPA will allow their budget to channel toward creating a strategic oil reserve by scrubbing the atmosphere of CO2, converting it to oil which we can store in the ground. On today's technology, a reasonable budget can thus sequester 1 day's worth of CO2 in 1 year of operation; further technical progress will accelerate that over the next 300 years, and starting at a stable point necessarily means movement goes in the direction of reversal from day one, even if slowly.
That is the least-economically-disruptive outcome and the most likely.
Different approaches work because of different internal translation layers and habitual thinking behaviors. All people learn best the same way; to cope with not being told how the brain functions and how learning works, people find various strategies which produce similar results.
Tailored approaches can lead to inefficient learning and, as a result, to the observation that some students are just dumber than other, more brilliant students. All students appear to learn best by adjusting the study strategy to fit their learned, habitual behavior; if that behavior is inefficient, an adjusted strategy will produce better results than an unadjusted strategy, and worse results than an adjusted strategy fitting a student who is internally using a different method. Importantly, this produces worse results than adjusting the student's internal strategies toward optimum.
The crude example is the perception of people as visual, auditory, or kinesthetic learners. All people are primarily visual learners: the brain stores visual information better than anything. Memory is associative, and auditory cues tie directly to visual-spatial memory; while physically performing a task enables spatial analysis, producing large amounts of visual-spatial information. How a person responds to any such data determines how well they learn from it: people who fail to turn visual data into spatial data, who don't reflect on new information, and who don't turn verbal information into visual and then spatial data tend to behave as kinesthetic learners. If you take these same people and teach them to project the other types of information together, they become substantially-similar to learners of other types.
People will always have a preference for a learning method--they'll want to see it, to read instructions, or to get their hands on it. Teaching them other methods allows them to load their brains using more-effective strategies, and then access all of that information through the comfort of exercising their favorite learning method. Doing something in a way which you most prefer draws upon the least amount of energy and is thus most comfortable and enjoyable; it doesn't necessarily produce the best results, and instead provides a great way to reflect on, reframe, and reprocess information being learned, strengthening learning.
I've eventually learned to use many strategies for learning, and don't consider myself any particular type of learner. Visual learning provides me with images to work from and of which to project spatial estimations. Auditory learning--really, just "learning by words"--gives me a logical semantic to follow. Kinesthetic learning allows me to store event memory, increase the basis for visual learning, refine spatial data, and otherwise create large amounts of additional information and link existing information together. I leverage everything I can use.
People all have the same neurological facilities. They're not cats and gerbils and monkeys with varied cerebral anatomy.
Tinder groups? That's not a Kik thing? There's all kinds of ads on Craigslist about Kik swingers groups; it became a media phenomena among the self-described tabloid news (as opposed to the self-denying tabloid news that permeates American culture) after they got bored with furries and online cybersex mucks (Wired...).
My instincts tell me the world is flat and the sun orbits the earth. You make the ridiculous argument that the moon orbits the earth, but the earth orbits the sun; how can that be true when they both cross the sky?
Easier? Yes. Better? No.
How much swap should we set up? How much swap is optimal? How much swap do you need? Does your usage differ from my usage?
I originally worked out a management daemon because I wanted to use up to a certain amount of memory for compressed paging *without* using a fixed-sized on-disk backend (zswap), and that's not currently possible. Much of the time, my RAM compresses to 25% of its original size; often it's compressed to 33%; and large workloads including difficult-to-compress data (e.g. video) will come out of LZO at 90% of their original size. I can't just create swap of a given size and say that fits.
In short: setting up swap is an incredibly complex task requiring a high degree of knowledge about unpredictable workloads. You can only guess with a reasonable accuracy in terms of best-case, and will then get burned by corner cases.
Imagine if you had to select a hard disk based on "how much disk space I will use eventually," and having unused disk space had serious consequences up to and including system instability. That's what selecting a swap size is like.
The verbiage also claims Tinder has special features to help find orgies. ... like what? Last I heard it was swipe left, swipe right, you matched, hook up. Is there a setting for "Find sex parties"?
It is technically impossible for something to be good for the economy as a whole but bad for the people.
In the short term, that which is good for the economy as a whole increases consumer spending power and creates jobs. Jobs are necessary for production of goods, and thus are created by demand for more goods. Any sustainable practice of economy which improves this flow of consumer buying power improves the lives of the people.
In the long term, the sustained strength of an economy as such reduces business risk. This reduction allows businesses to expend those resources, no longer spent on insuring themselves against uncertainty, in more risky endeavors. That means technical progress. Technical progress reduces the amount of jobs needed to produce a certain set of products, which reduces their cost; this eventually transfers to the consumer, and the consumer can buy more and better products, creating the demand for replacement jobs, ending with the same employment and more goods per person. This technical progress is responsible for such phenomena as the reduction in food costs (30% of the median household income in 1950, 11% today), the increase in access to healthcare (5% of income in 1950, 6% today buying more and better healthcare), and the viability of welfare in general.
Such stabilizing actions lengthen the deployment time of labor-reducing technologies, shorten the duration of transitional unemployment from technical progress, increase the pace of technical progress in general, and even allow us to reduce per-capita working hours in trade (instead of being 20% richer, we can all work 4 days, 32 hours per week; this is also why we no longer work 10-16 hour days 6 days per week, as was the subject of political debate in 1880-1920 before the 8-hour-day gained traction).
All business activities consume labor, producing a product or service in return. All revenue-generating business activities necessarily consume part of the income of the population, transferring part of that to consumers for later spending. That means an activity which makes the maximum amount of money may be harmful to the economy: if it consumes little labor but charges high prices, you have something called "economic rent", which leads to a reduction in employment; if it consumes large amounts of labor and produces something of little use, you have a simple reduction of wealth (we do all this work and spend all our money and we get nothing for it!).
Evaluating what's good for an economy is hard. You've seemed to sidetrack on evaluating what's good for a society, which is even more complex, and is contexted to the current state of that society. For example: Greece has a very openly-sexual society; making America more openly-sexual would necessarily expose more teenagers and younger children to the concept of sex, and our society aims to purge the very awareness of any such thing from the minds of people under roughly 14, and then minimize the amount of sexual conduct they're aware of and exposed to thereafter. Attempting to convert either of these to the other would be necessarily harmful to that society.
Tobacco is a more clear-cut case, although not entirely. While I dislike tobacco, and I understand alcohol has lower toxicity and is harmless in reasonable consumption, I also understand the immense cultural impact of tobacco and alcohol. The harm in smoking a half a gram of tobacco at the end of the day (or week!) is not comparable to the harm of smoking four packs of cigarettes, and *is* comparable to the harm (or lack thereof) of simply not smoking; and, in fact, second-hand smoke has been shown harmless (but highly annoying) by many scientific studies (exactly zero studies have found a link between second-hand smoke and *any* health effects). The harm of tobacco is largely cultural, in that we smoke entirely too much and in a harmful manner; at the same time, the image of a pipe or a detective with a cigarette is a long-standing cultural artifact of tobacco, and many people enjoy a tobacco hobby which does limit itself to small amounts on an infrequent basis. While tobacco is clearly harmful, it's not necessarily so to a great degree.
Again: analysis is highly-complex and difficult.
Number one is probably the fact that many of these students simply have fewer resources than other college students. They are more likely to have to work part-time (even multiple part-time jobs) while taking classes, just to pay for school. They are more likely to have more complicated family responsibilities at a younger age, which also sucks up a lot of time.
I *know* I can fix that.
Other people depend on innate abilities that they don't have to think about. (And when I say "innate," I don't necessary mean they were born with it: I also include things that for whatever reason a talented kid may have figured out in processing the world when he/she was very young, and it's become so ingrained in the very way they think and process information that they are completely unaware of how different it is from other people.)
I'm one of those people, although I've taken it to an unhealthy extreme in some places. A *very* unhealthy extreme. It doesn't stack up to structured skills, but it does make people think I'm some kind of super-brain.
Getting my superior mind powers to fall over for the tiniest reason is pretty trivial. By far the most severe is the black box effect: I use an extreme form of analogical thinking which includes defining analogical boundaries (i.e. I specifically determine how the two things I'm associating are *not* similar), and can immediately understand anything as a combination of bits and pieces of attributes of other things; show me something I can't associate to *anything* I already know and I'll spend literally years poking and prodding at it as something I have no capacity to understand without hand-holding.
So much for super-brain.
as I noted above, sometime for "disadvantaged" students the problems aren't just a lack of learning/study skills. In many cases they are also dealing with personal struggles FAR greater than students who are more well-off ever could imagine.
Often, stress is reduced by understanding. Citing out how people are different because their situation is different makes people feel less-bad about themselves because they understand *why* their performance is worse, and can take actions to correct it. The limitations are due to the situation, and they can focus on fixing what they can fix, and understand why they can't fix other things in terms other than "it really looks like my friends are all smarter than me."
This is wholly relevant when the prevalent mode of thinking is "they can do better if we just cheer them on." Maybe they *can* do better, and maybe you can use something stronger than a pep talk to get them moving along. If their internal deficiencies aren't the problem, then it must be an external problem; and you handle that by pointing it out to them, not by telling them everyone has the same problems when they don't.
first they needed a shift in attitude, which often came from realizing they weren't alone in their struggles
I disagree with the method, but not the mechanism. I couldn't very well say anything about the brain's consumption of energy and operation under stress otherwise. I only maintain that positive results give positive reinforcement and reduce stress, and that a person's unique environmental factors should not be portrayed to them as something everyone is experiencing--because that is a flat lie and they will wonder wtf is wrong with them when they see everyone else is handling those struggles far more easily.
Some people have superior internal strategies--I'm one of those people; I always did great without structure because my brain internally dissects everything. Of particular note, I don't deal well with inconsistent data: when I have new knowledge, I compare it to all other knowledge I possess, and resolve any inconsistencies. This has lead to reasoning out information I haven't yet been given, or identifying when someone gave me a simplification of a concept which is just plain incorrect. The effect is so striking that, on a few occasions, I've been able to reason out things people don't want anyone knowing simply by spending too much time around them--even things their actions and words don't obviously imply, just based on models of consistency ("a person developing this particular set of behaviors most commonly has experienced..."). It's reflexive for me.
I still don't come anywhere near a number of great people (many of whom are assholes, somehow; please explain how such infantile people as Brad Spengler, Ulrich Drepper, and Theo da Raadt manage to wield great mental abilities while being such narrow-minded children); and I've steadily found my two biggest flaws to be motivational (I spend almost zero time studying anything; my self-activation is shitty, and my response-inhibition is unrivaled by all except firewalkers) and structural (applying enhanced study techniques gives a *huge* return over my baseline intelligence).
There is a commonality here. The manner in which I think is an extreme form of reflection. Students who practice reflection in a non-extreme way universally learn much faster and better than students who try to cram material bluntly into their tiny little skulls. I've observed the same of memory: instead of mnemonics systems (which would let me memorize facts and figures rapidly), I use basic association, storage, and visualization strategies, which lets me sort and access my memories in a less-efficient but still highly-effective manner, and works *extremely* well for people who think they simply have bad memories. The techniques of basic arithmetic taught in Japanese schools produce students who are unrecognizable as individuals of normal intellect to the rest of the world.
All of these things are some manner of structure. Reflection is a structured activity: it is a task you perform during and after learning new information. Mnemonic systems are highly-structured; and basic mnemonic behaviors including association and visualization are more structured than simply letting information hit you and hoping it sticks, even if the only step is "stop and think about that for 4 seconds". Basic arithmetic operations are a highly-structured task when using a soroban, and those tasks translate to highly-structured mental operations which produce human calculators.
It's true that applying structure takes additional energy--as I pointed out: learning to establish and modify schedules requires energy, and carrying out this activity after you've become practiced in it takes less energy. The point is not to "do fine"; the point is to *maximize*, to produce the absolute best strategy. Such strategies are complex and state-based, which is why they're called "strategies" and not "algorithms".
there are many other things that can cause people to struggle. There is your budget; roommates; not punching some asshole who desperately deserves it; whether to spend the weekend with the spelunking club or the skydiving club; do I go out with the blonde or the slightly less attractive redhead (okay, that's not a struggle, it's the redhead), when should I stop drinking in order to avoid getting my face written on with a sharpie (or worse).
That's stress. Stress is normal and healthy. Too much and unhealthy stress is often called "strain"; struggling implies failure to thrive.
You're not struggling just because life is hard; you're struggling because you can't keep up with life. For problems which are not intractable, we can fix the root cause.
I don't think everyone struggles with academics, though some would argue that if you aren't then you need a bigger load or a more difficult program.
Don't increase load to failure; increase load to capacity.