From that wikipedia page (with some emphasis from me):
the warmest period of the last 2,000 years prior to the 20th century in the Northern Hemisphere very likely occurred between 950 and 1100. Proxy records show peak warmth occurred at different times for different regions, indicating that the Medieval Warm Period was not a time of globally uniform change. Temperatures in some regions matched or exceeded recent temperatures in these regions, but globally the Medieval Warm Period was cooler than recent global temperatures.
So, one, it wasn't warmer then than it is now, and two, it was not global.
What it all really lays bare is the pure greed and nihilism of the capitalist system, oh, and the complete idiocy of morons on the Internet who follow them.
Fixed that for you.
And no, this is not a call for communism, it's just an observation that (unchecked, free-market) capitalism seems almost inherently designed to cause this type of greed and nihilism (not to mention an ever-increasing wealth gap).
Those terms are not mutually exclusive. The US is a federal presidential constitutional republic, but that does not mean it isn't also a democracy - i.e. a government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives.
There are precious few direct democracies in the world, Switzerland perhaps counts since they do tend to have nation-wide votes on issues more often than other countries, but most western countries- including the US - are representative democracies. Apart from that they can be monarchies (UK, Sweden), republics (US, France), or some other form of state; but they are all of them democracies.
There are any number of places here on Earth -- e.g. the deep sea floor -- where we could stuff a handful of people underground many orders of magnitude more cheaply and very likely more profitably.
The average depth of both the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans is roughly 4 km. At that depth, the pressure difference to a 1-atmosphere habitat is about 400 atmospheres. Compare that to the moon, where the difference is merely 1 atmosphere of pressure.
There have been many more people on the moon than have been down on the deep sea floor. Twelve people have walked (and some even drove cars) on the moon, but only three people have ever been down to the bottom of the Marianas trench (and none of those ever exited their vehicle).
In short, exploring and living in the depths of the sea is magnitudes harder (and therefore expensive) than exploring and living on the moon due to pressure differentials alone.
That's impossible. You'll always end up with people who want to own their own means of production, and you'll need to oppress them.
Communism entails common ownership of the means of production - meaning those people already do own their own means of production. Only if you take that away from them and give it to the state, like in Marxist-Leninist "communism", you need to oppress those people. Hence why some people think Marxism-Leninism as practised in the USSR, or Maoism as practised in the PRC isn't communism at all, but the aforementioned state capitalism.
They had a communist party, whose goal was to achieve communism, but they were fully aware they hadn't gotten there yet.
I don't know that their goal ever was to achieve communism; they may have said that they were, but they were de facto implementing state capitalism.
There was a brief period after the Russian revolution when there was true socialism striving for communism, but then the Bolsheviks took power and re-branded themselves as the Communist Party, and it was pretty much straight state capitalism from there on out.
"Such a condition of affairs may be called state capitalism, but it would be fantastic to consider it in any sense Communistic...Soviet Russia, it must now be obvious, is an absolute despotism politically and the crassest form of state capitalism economically"
- Emma Goldman, There Is No Communism in Russia, 1935
Their propaganda was very effective in disguising their state capitalism as communism though - to their own people, but obviously it was quite effective on the US populace as well. It doesn't help that people in the US keep mixing up communism and socialism as one and the same either (and both being somehow bad).
The USSR-style "communism" (i.e. state capitalism) was bad, yes. Socialism in and of itself isn't necessarily bad, nor is communism (if it is implemented as communism and not corrupted into state capitalism or despotism or some other perversion), and socialist democracies, like most of the EU states, aren't bad places to live at all. There are indeed some quite good arguments that US-style capitalism is actually worse than European-style socialist democracy in many ways, but perhaps that is best left for another discussion - it tends to rile up the Americans:)
Volcanoes [...] let out more greenhouse gases than all human created machinery - from cars to planes to everything that emits carbon dioxide
Eh, no: "Volcanoes emit around 0.3 billion tonnes of CO2 per year. This is about 1% of human CO2 emissions which is around 29 billion tonnes per year."
Anarchy. Nice concept, but rather hard to achieve in practice, even more so the larger the society it needs to encompass.
Don't get me wrong, the ideal society in my eyes would be a communistic anarchy, but I have little hope it will ever come to pass. Perhaps once we have fusion power and multiple-material 3D printing all over the world it could work, but that's likely to be long after I'm gone. Oh, and we probably need to go through some kind of revolution - or more likely catastrophe - for everyone to give up the current system as bad and some kind of revelation for people to see that communistic anarchy would be good. But it would be great to live in such a society.
Actually most automated voices are female because a female voice is easier to hear against background noise.
Nah:
Early human factors research in aircraft and other domains indicated that female voices were more authoritative to male pilots and crew members and were more likely to get their attention. Much of this research was based on pilot experiences, particularly in combat situations, where the pilots were being guided by female air traffic controllers. They reported being able to most easily pick out the female voice from amid the flurry of radio chatter.
More recent research, however, carried out since more females have been employed as pilots and air traffic controllers, indicates that the original popular hypothesis may be unreliable. General human factors wisdom now indicates largely that, either due to current culture or changing attitudes, an automated female voice is no more or less effective than a male voice.
Edworthy and colleagues in 2003, based at Plymouth University in UK, for example, found that both acoustic and non-acoustic differences between male and female speakers were negligible. Therefore, they recommended, the choice of speaker should depend on the overlap of noise and speech spectra. Female voices did, however, appear to have an advantage in that they could portray a greater range of urgencies because of their usually higher pitch and pitch range. They reported an experiment showing that knowledge about the sex of a speaker has no effect on judgments of perceived urgency, with acoustic variables accounting for such differences.
Arrabito in 2009, however, at Defence Research and Development Canada in Toronto, found that with simulated cockpit background radio traffic, a male voice rather than a female voice, in a monotone or urgent annunciaton style, resulted in the largest proportion of correct and fastest identification response times to verbal warnings, regardless of the gender of the listener.
you want to dramatically expand government expenses and raise taxes?
[citation needed]
Most of the people advocating UBI point to the fact that the gains from reducing the bureaucracy concerning welfare to approximately zero means a dramatically reduced governmental expense, not an increase.
Whether taxes would need to be raised or not depends on many factors, not the least of which is how large the UBI needs to be. Some sectors could see raised taxes, some could see lowered.
since free movement of people is one of founding principles of EU - it can't happen.
That's free movement of workers within the EU, i.e. if you already live in an EU state, you're free to pick up and go seek employment in another EU state. If you're not already living in an EU state, you don't fall under that principle.
“This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.” - Woody Guthrie, typescript to "This Land Is Your Land"
Also, perhaps not so incidentally "The melody came from a tune that A.P. Carter had found and recorded with Sarah and Maybelle Carter prior to 1934 and was not original to Guthrie." (Wikipedia)
Yes. Why are you mixing metric (meters, kilogram) with Imperial units (hour)? Shouldn't you be using a base 10 system for keeping time if you're going to be a pompous ass?
It isn't metric either, but it is among the non-SI units mentioned in the SI. The second, along with the other units in the GP, is not only metric but also part of the SI system that most of the world uses these days.
There was for example little or no "collateral damage" when we bombed Japan, or for that matter Dresden.
There was huge amounts of what we today call collateral damage, but back then they didn't use the term "collateral damage".
It was more or less seen as inevitable that there would be civilian losses and damage to civilian infrastructure even if the intended target was military (as it almost invariably was, with some notable exceptions - the Blitz for example specifically targeted civilians and civilian infrastructure).
It wasn't until the 1991 Gulf War "collateral damage" started to get used as "unintended civilian losses".
Capitalism allows the unrestricted exchange of things, including those things necessary for human life, between human beings. That statement can be made of no other economic system.
I beg to differ. Any number of economic systems allow for unrestricted exchange of things between human beings; capitalism is hardly unique in that aspect.
Capitalism is more inherently humane than any other system.
A system where both the means of production and the end product of labour is torn from the worker's hands and given to the company owner to distribute as he sees fit can never be called humane; it is more akin to slavery than anything else, especially when the system rewards the company owner for distributing as little as possible back to the worker.
Corporations - those with publicly held stock (ownership) - are a method for funding large activities and protecting those among the owners who have no control over the corporation's actions.
Why would anyone without control over a corporation's actions ever be allowed to call themselves "owner" of that corporation? They're financiers, money-lenders. This notion that they're somehow entitled to an ever-increasing return on their investment is one of the more troubling aspects of capitalism, since it allows money to generate more money without anything other than more money actually being produced.
Those who run corporations can and have been sent to prison for illegal activities.
I don't think I argued this doesn't happen - although it probably happens far, far less than it should. But then again, who makes the laws? In many places, it's the same people that run the corporations. Indirectly, of course, through lobbying, campaign financing, and just plain old good-old-boys networking.
"State Capitalism" is an oxymoron..
You could at least have googled it. It's not like I came up with the term here and now.
A state monopoly on business prevents the freedom that must necessarily coexist with capitalism.
While I don't disagree that a state monopoly on business prevents freedom, it is because capitalism by its very nature prevents individual freedom. As a wage labourer, you have no true freedom; you're only free to go from one (hopefully gilded) cage to the next, from one master to another, always a slave. We can't all be bosses.
You can refuse to be a customer and/or employee of a business and they can't shoot, jail or rob you.
You can refuse to be a customer and/or employee of a business, but you can't refuse to be a customer and/or employee to all of them.
Capitalism is inherently inhumane, putting the good of non-humans (corporations) before humans, as well as sociopathic in forcing the majority of humans to labour for the privileged few (company owners).
And before someone wilfully misunderstands me: Soviet Union-style "communism" (in quotes because it's communistic in name only; it was really state capitalism) was worse, but that doesn't mean capitalism is good; it's just a tad bit less worse in some aspects (and worse in others)
And rather hazardous, what with the radiation from solar storms, the risk of hull breaches from (micro)meteorites, the problem with cooling/heating, the lack of oxygen (or anything to create oxygen from), and so on and so forth.
It's not exactly a walk in the park.
Yes, the pressure difference is just 1 atmosphere rather than then 1 atmosphere/10 meters of the ocean, but on the other hand there's no DNA- and electronics-destroying radiation in the ocean, you're actually inside a very efficient heat sink, and have all the oxygen-containing molecules you'd ever want, and you're a lot less likely to get your hull punctured.
Bottom line is that neither space nor the deep sea are "easy", and that's part of the reason we don't generally go on vacation there.
"Remember, half the people you meet are dumber than the average."
While not strictly true, because of median/mean ambiguity, the word "dumber", and that you probably don't meet statistically random samples of people, it's still useful because it makes people think "waitaminute, that can't be right" - and then they have to realize that it's probably not, but IQ is also not some objective measure of dumb/smart. It's probably not really a good measure of anything but the ability to do well on IQ tests.
An IQ score only has meaning in relative terms of the population on which it is measured, as "IQ 100" is by definition just the median test score of a certain population. Each standard deviation up or down is +15/-15 points, so 85-115 should contain about 68.2% of the population, with only 2.1% or so being lower than 70 and another 2.1% being higher than 130.
past the life expectancy of anyone we could conceivably give a crap about.
I'll be long dead in 2100. My son will be dead in 2100. His children though, my grandchildren, may very well be alive in 2100. Their children, my grand-grandchildren, are very likely to be alive in 2100 My nieces and nephews, born between 2009 and 2015, may very well be alive in 2100.
And conceivable for you or not, but I do "give a crap" about them, even the ones not born yet.
You should also try studying some philosophy; philosophy of mind has been the subject matter of thousands of books, theories, discussions, and theses all the way back to Plato.
Slashdot Mirror
It's the name of a starship in Iain Banks' novel "Player of Games".
Their other drone ship, "Of Course I Still Love You" is also named after a starship in that novel.
You should check out Banks' Culture series of novels, they're really good reads.
The thing we need to remember is that this has happened before, during the so-called "Medieval Warm Period". This global rise in temperatures happened between 950 AD and 1250 AD
From that wikipedia page (with some emphasis from me):
So, one, it wasn't warmer then than it is now, and two, it was not global.
What it all really lays bare is the pure greed and nihilism of the capitalist system, oh, and the complete idiocy of morons on the Internet who follow them.
Fixed that for you.
And no, this is not a call for communism, it's just an observation that (unchecked, free-market) capitalism seems almost inherently designed to cause this type of greed and nihilism (not to mention an ever-increasing wealth gap).
Republic, not democracy.
Those terms are not mutually exclusive. The US is a federal presidential constitutional republic, but that does not mean it isn't also a democracy - i.e. a government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives.
There are precious few direct democracies in the world, Switzerland perhaps counts since they do tend to have nation-wide votes on issues more often than other countries, but most western countries- including the US - are representative democracies. Apart from that they can be monarchies (UK, Sweden), republics (US, France), or some other form of state; but they are all of them democracies.
There are any number of places here on Earth -- e.g. the deep sea floor -- where we could stuff a handful of people underground many orders of magnitude more cheaply and very likely more profitably.
The average depth of both the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans is roughly 4 km. At that depth, the pressure difference to a 1-atmosphere habitat is about 400 atmospheres. Compare that to the moon, where the difference is merely 1 atmosphere of pressure.
There have been many more people on the moon than have been down on the deep sea floor. Twelve people have walked (and some even drove cars) on the moon, but only three people have ever been down to the bottom of the Marianas trench (and none of those ever exited their vehicle).
In short, exploring and living in the depths of the sea is magnitudes harder (and therefore expensive) than exploring and living on the moon due to pressure differentials alone.
That's impossible. You'll always end up with people who want to own their own means of production, and you'll need to oppress them.
Communism entails common ownership of the means of production - meaning those people already do own their own means of production. Only if you take that away from them and give it to the state, like in Marxist-Leninist "communism", you need to oppress those people. Hence why some people think Marxism-Leninism as practised in the USSR, or Maoism as practised in the PRC isn't communism at all, but the aforementioned state capitalism.
They had a communist party, whose goal was to achieve communism, but they were fully aware they hadn't gotten there yet.
I don't know that their goal ever was to achieve communism; they may have said that they were, but they were de facto implementing state capitalism.
There was a brief period after the Russian revolution when there was true socialism striving for communism, but then the Bolsheviks took power and re-branded themselves as the Communist Party, and it was pretty much straight state capitalism from there on out.
"Such a condition of affairs may be called state capitalism, but it would be fantastic to consider it in any sense Communistic...Soviet Russia, it must now be obvious, is an absolute despotism politically and the crassest form of state capitalism economically"
- Emma Goldman, There Is No Communism in Russia, 1935
Their propaganda was very effective in disguising their state capitalism as communism though - to their own people, but obviously it was quite effective on the US populace as well. It doesn't help that people in the US keep mixing up communism and socialism as one and the same either (and both being somehow bad).
The USSR-style "communism" (i.e. state capitalism) was bad, yes. Socialism in and of itself isn't necessarily bad, nor is communism (if it is implemented as communism and not corrupted into state capitalism or despotism or some other perversion), and socialist democracies, like most of the EU states, aren't bad places to live at all. There are indeed some quite good arguments that US-style capitalism is actually worse than European-style socialist democracy in many ways, but perhaps that is best left for another discussion - it tends to rile up the Americans :)
Volcanoes [...] let out more greenhouse gases than all human created machinery - from cars to planes to everything that emits carbon dioxide
Eh, no: "Volcanoes emit around 0.3 billion tonnes of CO2 per year. This is about 1% of human CO2 emissions which is around 29 billion tonnes per year."
Anarchy. Nice concept, but rather hard to achieve in practice, even more so the larger the society it needs to encompass.
Don't get me wrong, the ideal society in my eyes would be a communistic anarchy, but I have little hope it will ever come to pass. Perhaps once we have fusion power and multiple-material 3D printing all over the world it could work, but that's likely to be long after I'm gone. Oh, and we probably need to go through some kind of revolution - or more likely catastrophe - for everyone to give up the current system as bad and some kind of revelation for people to see that communistic anarchy would be good. But it would be great to live in such a society.
I'm not holding my breath that I ever will.
A novella and novelette is the same thing; a story with a length somewhere between a short story and a novel.
Actually most automated voices are female because a female voice is easier to hear against background noise.
Nah:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
it's illegal to plan to do a bad thing
Found the bug.
That's thoughtcrime, something a civilized nation really shouldn't have.
you want to dramatically expand government expenses and raise taxes?
[citation needed]
Most of the people advocating UBI point to the fact that the gains from reducing the bureaucracy concerning welfare to approximately zero means a dramatically reduced governmental expense, not an increase.
Whether taxes would need to be raised or not depends on many factors, not the least of which is how large the UBI needs to be. Some sectors could see raised taxes, some could see lowered.
since free movement of people is one of founding principles of EU - it can't happen.
That's free movement of workers within the EU, i.e. if you already live in an EU state, you're free to pick up and go seek employment in another EU state. If you're not already living in an EU state, you don't fall under that principle.
“This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.”
- Woody Guthrie, typescript to "This Land Is Your Land"
Also, perhaps not so incidentally "The melody came from a tune that A.P. Carter had found and recorded with Sarah and Maybelle Carter prior to 1934 and was not original to Guthrie." (Wikipedia)
Yes. Why are you mixing metric (meters, kilogram) with Imperial units (hour)? Shouldn't you be using a base 10 system for keeping time if you're going to be a pompous ass?
The hour isn't an Imperial unit.
It isn't metric either, but it is among the non-SI units mentioned in the SI. The second, along with the other units in the GP, is not only metric but also part of the SI system that most of the world uses these days.
How's that for pompous? ;)
There was for example little or no "collateral damage" when we bombed Japan, or for that matter Dresden.
There was huge amounts of what we today call collateral damage, but back then they didn't use the term "collateral damage".
It was more or less seen as inevitable that there would be civilian losses and damage to civilian infrastructure even if the intended target was military (as it almost invariably was, with some notable exceptions - the Blitz for example specifically targeted civilians and civilian infrastructure).
It wasn't until the 1991 Gulf War "collateral damage" started to get used as "unintended civilian losses".
Capitalism allows the unrestricted exchange of things, including those things necessary for human life, between human beings. That statement can be made of no other economic system.
I beg to differ. Any number of economic systems allow for unrestricted exchange of things between human beings; capitalism is hardly unique in that aspect.
Capitalism is more inherently humane than any other system.
A system where both the means of production and the end product of labour is torn from the worker's hands and given to the company owner to distribute as he sees fit can never be called humane; it is more akin to slavery than anything else, especially when the system rewards the company owner for distributing as little as possible back to the worker.
Corporations - those with publicly held stock (ownership) - are a method for funding large activities and protecting those among the owners who have no control over the corporation's actions.
Why would anyone without control over a corporation's actions ever be allowed to call themselves "owner" of that corporation? They're financiers, money-lenders. This notion that they're somehow entitled to an ever-increasing return on their investment is one of the more troubling aspects of capitalism, since it allows money to generate more money without anything other than more money actually being produced.
Those who run corporations can and have been sent to prison for illegal activities.
I don't think I argued this doesn't happen - although it probably happens far, far less than it should. But then again, who makes the laws? In many places, it's the same people that run the corporations. Indirectly, of course, through lobbying, campaign financing, and just plain old good-old-boys networking.
"State Capitalism" is an oxymoron..
You could at least have googled it. It's not like I came up with the term here and now.
A state monopoly on business prevents the freedom that must necessarily coexist with capitalism.
While I don't disagree that a state monopoly on business prevents freedom, it is because capitalism by its very nature prevents individual freedom. As a wage labourer, you have no true freedom; you're only free to go from one (hopefully gilded) cage to the next, from one master to another, always a slave. We can't all be bosses.
As someone (Churchill?) once said paraphrased, "Capitalism is bad except compared to all of the alternatives."
It was democracy Churchill commented on, not capitalism.
I hope I don't need to point out that democracy and capitalism aren't the same thing, or that one does not presuppose the other?
You can refuse to be a customer and/or employee of a business and they can't shoot, jail or rob you.
You can refuse to be a customer and/or employee of a business, but you can't refuse to be a customer and/or employee to all of them.
Capitalism is inherently inhumane, putting the good of non-humans (corporations) before humans, as well as sociopathic in forcing the majority of humans to labour for the privileged few (company owners).
And before someone wilfully misunderstands me: Soviet Union-style "communism" (in quotes because it's communistic in name only; it was really state capitalism) was worse, but that doesn't mean capitalism is good; it's just a tad bit less worse in some aspects (and worse in others)
If you are critical about patriotism, you can go to hell.
Patriotism; the well-dressed, smiling sociopath brother of xenophobia, racism, and intolerance.
Space? Space is easy. It's just big.
And hard to get to.
And rather hazardous, what with the radiation from solar storms, the risk of hull breaches from (micro)meteorites, the problem with cooling/heating, the lack of oxygen (or anything to create oxygen from), and so on and so forth.
It's not exactly a walk in the park.
Yes, the pressure difference is just 1 atmosphere rather than then 1 atmosphere/10 meters of the ocean, but on the other hand there's no DNA- and electronics-destroying radiation in the ocean, you're actually inside a very efficient heat sink, and have all the oxygen-containing molecules you'd ever want, and you're a lot less likely to get your hull punctured.
Bottom line is that neither space nor the deep sea are "easy", and that's part of the reason we don't generally go on vacation there.
"Remember, half the people you meet are dumber than the average."
While not strictly true, because of median/mean ambiguity, the word "dumber", and that you probably don't meet statistically random samples of people, it's still useful because it makes people think "waitaminute, that can't be right" - and then they have to realize that it's probably not, but IQ is also not some objective measure of dumb/smart. It's probably not really a good measure of anything but the ability to do well on IQ tests.
An IQ score only has meaning in relative terms of the population on which it is measured, as "IQ 100" is by definition just the median test score of a certain population. Each standard deviation up or down is +15/-15 points, so 85-115 should contain about 68.2% of the population, with only 2.1% or so being lower than 70 and another 2.1% being higher than 130.
past the life expectancy of anyone we could conceivably give a crap about.
I'll be long dead in 2100.
My son will be dead in 2100.
His children though, my grandchildren, may very well be alive in 2100.
Their children, my grand-grandchildren, are very likely to be alive in 2100
My nieces and nephews, born between 2009 and 2015, may very well be alive in 2100.
And conceivable for you or not, but I do "give a crap" about them, even the ones not born yet.
There is no scientific explanation for the phenomenon of consciousness - no theory about how it arises, not even a definition of what qualifies.
There are several scientific theories - multitudes even - about what consciousness is, how it arises, and what qualifies.
You should also try studying some philosophy; philosophy of mind has been the subject matter of thousands of books, theories, discussions, and theses all the way back to Plato.