The reason why Silicon Valley billionaires like UBI is that they know technology is creating a growing underclass who cannot afford to buy food, let alone Netflix subscriptions. What do to? I know: get the taxpayers to pay for Netflix, Spotify, YouTube Red,... subscriptions, iPhones, FitBits, etc.
Don't get me wrong: I like the idea of UBI. The empirical, non-ideologically driven research and evidence is clear that it's superior in every way to most, if not all, alternative forms of social welfare. All I'm saying is don't take the techno-elite's support for it as altruism: it's just financial common sense for them and their shareholders. After all, they don't pay tax, so they won't have to pay their share of the UBI tax burden Talk about a win-win!
Owning less stuff is a good thing. Our minds are poisoned by attachment to stuff. Our attachment to stuff is poisoning our planet. What planet is this dude on?
Can someone explain please how the USA government has jurisdiction over the moon, or any other "celestial body"? Granting property rights over something implies jurisdiction and/or ownership. Is the moon US property now? When did that happen?
And, with all due respect to the million of intelligent and ethical USA citizens who might read this, do you understand now why the majority of the non-USS population of Earth regards the USA as arrogant and supremely hypocritical? It seems more and more that the underlying moral authority of the USA's actions outside its own borders is simply: might is right. Can this act be interpreted in any other way?
"Overall, this indicates an incredible amount of sloppiness and laziness in the peer-review field."
I disagree with this statement, but it has some merit. I hope my insider experience can give some insight for those who care. The main problem is that "the peer review field" is ambiguous. It could include publishers, but also researchers, journal editors and reviewers. The last three are not paid jobs, they are part of the general job of being an academic. But academics are pressured more and more to publish more (note, not do more or better research, but to publish more highly cited papers in highly cited journals) while at the same time teaching more students with fewer resources. Like almost every worker in the world, we too in our ivory towers are pressured to do more with less (and to be happy while doing it, and thankful for a job).
I peer review a dozen or so articles per year, and have been doing so for about 20 years. During this time I have learned that the peer review system has many problems, but no-one has proposed a better alternative that has gained popularity (OK, one field has. See below). The biggest problem is that peer reviewers and journal editors are not paid, so their only motivation to do a good job is some sense of social responsibility (If I submit articles that other people review for free, then I should return the favour.).
And everyone knows that academic publishers, like other intermediaries from the pre-digital world, are extracting economic rents while trying to protect models based on scarcity, manual labour and other factors that no longer apply in today's world. But who can do anything about that? Our systems of remuneration and promotion are so intimately tied to the outdated commercial publication model (impact factors) that no-one seems willing to upset the status quo. Physics seems to have broken away with arXiv (http://arxiv.org/) but no other field has, to my knowledge, repeated this amazing feat. But the academics' lack of courage in challenging the status quo is not a result of protecting cozy economic rent-seeking; rather it's a reaction to that fact that when all our resources are being stripped away, we become extremely risk-averse (i.e. we want to protect what we've got).
Bottom line: more trustworthy science can be promoted only by funding researchers to such a level that they have decent job security (as much as anyone can these days) and adequate resources to do the job, so that they are not tempted to cut corners just to keep their job!
All this discussion, of course, ignores that far bigger cause of untrustworthy science: commercialism. Scientists typically depend on short-term grants, and must show "results" to get more grants (i.e. keep putting food on the table for their family). And funding agencies may have non-scientific motives, and very rarely understand the deep truth behind the aphorism "Fast, cheap, good: pick any two".
Where did the writer of that story get the idea that artificial meat is genetically modified? Does the writer know anything at all about the subject of their story?
Unbelievably stupid idea. I'm sorry to the citizens of the USA, but is it any wonder that most of the rest of the world thinks that your country is populated, at least 50%, by morons? Global warming? Peak oil? Pollution? Oh wait: Intelligent Design. God will no doubt save you.
Quote: "Still, as architect Peter Calthorpe wrote in 1985: 'The city is the most environmentally benign form of human settlement. Each city dweller consumes less land, less energy, less water, and produces less pollution than his counterpart in settlements of lower densities."
Can anyone in their right mind take this seriously? How much land, energy, water, produce and pollution is made outside cities in order to produce the food and material goods that are transporting into cities for city-dwellers to consume? It also seems reasonable that cities produce a more materialistic lifestyle than small towns.
Was Calthorpe's statement based on any actual research, or just armchair bluster?
Someone? If you mean to imply that I should have written that instead of "one", please reconsider. Both "one" and "someone" are grammatically correct and consistent with current usage. However I'm not perfect of course: I mis-spelled "preferably" !
Given that you make both a spelling mistake and a grammatical error in the first 100 words or so of this post ("Writting tools" for a "relative complex" piece of software, I think the best tool you can use is another person, preferably one who can write!
Given that you make both a spelling mistake and a grammatical error in the first 100 words or so of this post ("Writting tools" for a "relative complex" piece of software, I think the best tool you can use is another person, prefarably one who can write!
Which country's education system are we talking about here? Do you realise that the Internet is a global communications system that anyone from around the world can join in?
From the story:
"For quite a while global warming has been presented in the public forum as a universally accepted scientific reality."
This is plainly not true. For as long as the global warming issue has been in the public consciousness, it has been referred to as "the global warming debate". There has always been strong opinion and evidence on both sides of this issue. Where have you been, Arthur Dent?
Let me sum up all those words in the article in two questions:
Does anything worthwhile or of interest happen outside the USA?
Why should people in the USA care about the wellbeing of foreigners?
In other words: "We are not part of a global culture, we are Fortress America and have everything we could ever want right here."
The views expressed in the article are part of the reason why the rest of the world regards the average American as at best ignorant and naive, and at worst simply lame. I sincerely hope the writer was below the legal age to vote.
I find this comment difficult to believe. Band in a Box is a bunch of preset sequences and samples. This person's definition of "musician" versus "professional" is very strange. (I am an amateur musician, but I believe there is such a thing as a professional musician.)
Perhaps ElektroSchock can tell me where I'm wrong?
Slashdot Mirror
The reason why Silicon Valley billionaires like UBI is that they know technology is creating a growing underclass who cannot afford to buy food, let alone Netflix subscriptions. What do to? I know: get the taxpayers to pay for Netflix, Spotify, YouTube Red, ... subscriptions, iPhones, FitBits, etc.
Don't get me wrong: I like the idea of UBI. The empirical, non-ideologically driven research and evidence is clear that it's superior in every way to most, if not all, alternative forms of social welfare. All I'm saying is don't take the techno-elite's support for it as altruism: it's just financial common sense for them and their shareholders. After all, they don't pay tax, so they won't have to pay their share of the UBI tax burden Talk about a win-win!
Owning less stuff is a good thing. Our minds are poisoned by attachment to stuff. Our attachment to stuff is poisoning our planet. What planet is this dude on?
Can someone explain please how the USA government has jurisdiction over the moon, or any other "celestial body"? Granting property rights over something implies jurisdiction and/or ownership. Is the moon US property now? When did that happen?
And, with all due respect to the million of intelligent and ethical USA citizens who might read this, do you understand now why the majority of the non-USS population of Earth regards the USA as arrogant and supremely hypocritical? It seems more and more that the underlying moral authority of the USA's actions outside its own borders is simply: might is right. Can this act be interpreted in any other way?
"Overall, this indicates an incredible amount of sloppiness and laziness in the peer-review field."
I disagree with this statement, but it has some merit. I hope my insider experience can give some insight for those who care. The main problem is that "the peer review field" is ambiguous. It could include publishers, but also researchers, journal editors and reviewers. The last three are not paid jobs, they are part of the general job of being an academic. But academics are pressured more and more to publish more (note, not do more or better research, but to publish more highly cited papers in highly cited journals) while at the same time teaching more students with fewer resources. Like almost every worker in the world, we too in our ivory towers are pressured to do more with less (and to be happy while doing it, and thankful for a job).
I peer review a dozen or so articles per year, and have been doing so for about 20 years. During this time I have learned that the peer review system has many problems, but no-one has proposed a better alternative that has gained popularity (OK, one field has. See below). The biggest problem is that peer reviewers and journal editors are not paid, so their only motivation to do a good job is some sense of social responsibility (If I submit articles that other people review for free, then I should return the favour.).
And everyone knows that academic publishers, like other intermediaries from the pre-digital world, are extracting economic rents while trying to protect models based on scarcity, manual labour and other factors that no longer apply in today's world. But who can do anything about that? Our systems of remuneration and promotion are so intimately tied to the outdated commercial publication model (impact factors) that no-one seems willing to upset the status quo. Physics seems to have broken away with arXiv (http://arxiv.org/) but no other field has, to my knowledge, repeated this amazing feat. But the academics' lack of courage in challenging the status quo is not a result of protecting cozy economic rent-seeking; rather it's a reaction to that fact that when all our resources are being stripped away, we become extremely risk-averse (i.e. we want to protect what we've got).
Bottom line: more trustworthy science can be promoted only by funding researchers to such a level that they have decent job security (as much as anyone can these days) and adequate resources to do the job, so that they are not tempted to cut corners just to keep their job!
All this discussion, of course, ignores that far bigger cause of untrustworthy science: commercialism. Scientists typically depend on short-term grants, and must show "results" to get more grants (i.e. keep putting food on the table for their family). And funding agencies may have non-scientific motives, and very rarely understand the deep truth behind the aphorism "Fast, cheap, good: pick any two".
Where did the writer of that story get the idea that artificial meat is genetically modified? Does the writer know anything at all about the subject of their story?
Unbelievably stupid idea. I'm sorry to the citizens of the USA, but is it any wonder that most of the rest of the world thinks that your country is populated, at least 50%, by morons? Global warming? Peak oil? Pollution? Oh wait: Intelligent Design. God will no doubt save you.
Quote: "Still, as architect Peter Calthorpe wrote in 1985: 'The city is the most environmentally benign form of human settlement. Each city dweller consumes less land, less energy, less water, and produces less pollution than his counterpart in settlements of lower densities."
Can anyone in their right mind take this seriously? How much land, energy, water, produce and pollution is made outside cities in order to produce the food and material goods that are transporting into cities for city-dwellers to consume? It also seems reasonable that cities produce a more materialistic lifestyle than small towns.
Was Calthorpe's statement based on any actual research, or just armchair bluster?
All those are good questions, but ignores the biggest flaw of all in this story, which is presuming that Americans are an unbiased sample of Humans.
Someone? If you mean to imply that I should have written that instead of "one", please reconsider. Both "one" and "someone" are grammatically correct and consistent with current usage. However I'm not perfect of course: I mis-spelled "preferably" !
Given that you make both a spelling mistake and a grammatical error in the first 100 words or so of this post ("Writting tools" for a "relative complex" piece of software, I think the best tool you can use is another person, preferably one who can write!
Given that you make both a spelling mistake and a grammatical error in the first 100 words or so of this post ("Writting tools" for a "relative complex" piece of software, I think the best tool you can use is another person, prefarably one who can write!
I see that you are not scientifically minded, so I will not reply further to your trolling.
Which country's education system are we talking about here? Do you realise that the Internet is a global communications system that anyone from around the world can join in?
From the story: "For quite a while global warming has been presented in the public forum as a universally accepted scientific reality." This is plainly not true. For as long as the global warming issue has been in the public consciousness, it has been referred to as "the global warming debate". There has always been strong opinion and evidence on both sides of this issue. Where have you been, Arthur Dent?
Let me sum up all those words in the article in two questions:
In other words: "We are not part of a global culture, we are Fortress America and have everything we could ever want right here."
The views expressed in the article are part of the reason why the rest of the world regards the average American as at best ignorant and naive, and at worst simply lame. I sincerely hope the writer was below the legal age to vote.
I find this comment difficult to believe. Band in a Box is a bunch of preset sequences and samples. This person's definition of "musician" versus "professional" is very strange. (I am an amateur musician, but I believe there is such a thing as a professional musician.) Perhaps ElektroSchock can tell me where I'm wrong?
Ardour is a hard disk recorder. Muse is a MIDI sequencer with some support for audio tracks. They are not competitive, but complementary.