Remember VIOS? It was a first stab at being the metaverse inspired by 'Snowcrash'. It had billboards, property ownership (with auctions and prime locations), chat, the usual easy-to-implement stuff. Unfortunately it lacked the hard-to-implement stuff like avatars, voice chat, facial expressions, i.e. the things that online social communities actually want most.
I remember I visited its 'downtown' ("port zero" in Snowcrash terms) area. It was a clot of billboards for what were at the time the first net-aware businesses. There were lots of avatarless users roaming around but no social interaction. I considered buying a lot, speculately, and I'm glad I didn't. VIOS vanished without a trace shortly afterward.
Now that I think about it, the whole thing may have been a scam... but they must've put some serious effort into their rich client, because at the time it had a VR MMPOG interface of notable quality.
One you're used to the [pale violetish color of 'white' LED] light, your eyes adjust anyway, so does it really matter if the light is exactly white? After wearing orange ski goggles for about 10 minutes, the snow appears white (or grey?) through them. After removing them, everything looks blue.
The color tone of ambient light has a pronounced effect on human appearance. Depending on your skin tone and hair color, one flavor of light will make you look far more (or less) attractive than others.
I for example look 200% better in incandescent light than in fluourescent's uneven color composition. For this reason, and I am sure I'm not the only woman that feels this way, I don't have any fluourescents in my house. The electricity surcharge for using incandescents is well worth paying for the enhanced feeling of attractiveness. Most women are demonstrably prepared to pay far more than that in order to look good.
Anything which drives down cost in the realestate market is a good thing. With an average home cost of $200K (nationwide) and an average commission of 6% and an average stay lasting 7 years that means realtors are taking about $1,750 per year per household out of the economy, that's almost half as much as my property taxes!
That's an insightful and shocking analysis.
What value add do they bring to the system, they drive around a couple days a week and show houses to buyers or spend a couple days a week showing houses. Other than that they add a house to the MLS. True they help a bit with the paperwork, but that's really not worth 6% of the value of most peoples largest purchase.
Until last week I would've agreed with you, and helped light the torches at the next realtor lynching.
Last week I had a change of heart because I set about to buy a house. That's when I realized how valuable a good realtor really is.
It's important not to score their work along Marxist "physical labor is the only real labor" ideas. Mostly what you're paying for, as a buyer, is their expertise in assessing the value, condition, and livability of a house. Once your realtor understands what you want (and they'll spend the first six house visits figuring this out about you), they can give insights that you would otherwise have to learn the hard way.
The good ones also know what maintenance issues to look for. And of course they guide you through the buying process and give advice on negotiations. My realtor had all sorts of insights into reading between the lines of the seller's listing verbiage.
As a seller you benefit from a similar expertise, except in reverse: a good realtor can show you how to market your house's strong points.
In both cases, their expertise can add or subtract thousands from the closing price. My realtor just led me to a fantastic house for which I signed an offer letter just this past weekend. He's going to get $4500 out of the deal, and I consider that a reasonable fee for an expert consultant.
Also - apparently in spite of --now-- publicly trying to distance themselves from the Sea Shephard, there are credible ties to GP and a ship specifically built to ram and sink whaling ships.
Your use of the word 'terrorist' is sloppy enough to qualify you for employment in the DHS.
The only useful definition of 'terrorist' is "one who credibly threatens violence against uninvolved civilians in order to cause political change". That greenpeace ship has done no such thing. At worst they are criminals; at best, they are justifiable vigilantes; it depends on your point of view, and on your opinion of international fishing agreements.
I'm no fan of greenpeace, but their attacks on whaling ships of ill repute are not terrorism. Terrorism would be setting off bombs inside the civilian areas of those countries which sanction whaling.
No, wrong, there is no "default" point of view that is someone's onus to dispel, except the null hypothesis that it's all due to chance.
It was your onus to prove that "society and culture" are at fault as was claimed. This is so because there is a 'default' hypothesis here: wherever blacks go, we see the same problems, including in nearly-all-black countries. This is the only meaningful 'default' assumption, because no sane person could think it was all due to chance.
And I think you'll find that if you start looking at the socio-economics across countries, especially if you start looking at crime in non-black communities and countries, you'll find that economics first, and politics second, are the dominating factors, not race.
Certainly you've found a strong correllation between black poverty and black crime. Let us assume your assumption about causation is correct. The debate then suddenly changes from "Why are half of them criminals?" to "Why are most of them poor?", which is asking the same question in two different ways. The question underneath both is: why does one race show consistently problematically lower levels of cognitive ability, civility, and self-discipline?
We're talking about the society of the United States, of which blacks are just one part, and you therefore can't consider black culture in the U.S. in isolation.
True enough. Luckily enough there are plenty of other countries that are nearly all black and have always been so. Guess what you'll find there?
And if you think the society as it arose was an automatic effect of them being here, I think you've got your history backwards. Besides, go back in time, and we could just as easily be talking about violence in Italian American or Irish American communities. Think that's an inherent problem of those people too?
Nope, we have plenty of data showing that whatever problems those cultures had, they've sorted it out.
Haha, this sounds just like the "women don't want to work with computers!" If this is your tack, step one is ask what they want, not assume that their desires just happen to perfectly match your social biases.
It's a rare person who can answer that question with honesty and accuracy. It'd be a fool's errand to figure out what an entire race 'wants'.
An easier question to answer is: where do they succeed and prosper today? I'll tell you two places: sports teams, and the military. Both environments offer a lot of structure. And that's why I suspect that a free democracy does not offer them sufficient structure to rise to the esteem of the other races.
That arguments ridiculous. There's nothing inherent in being black that makes them more likely to commit crimes, the root cause is in society and culture.
Because the black crime/poverty/violence problem crosses cultures, and even pervades black countries, the onus is on you to prove that the problem is external.
Furthermore, for your point to be useful, you must show that the "society and culture" problem is solvable. By this I mean it's useless to blame their culture if such a culture automatically arises wherever they go, as would happen if the culture itself has strong genetic roots (and how could it not?).
I suspect the real problem here is that sceptical/leftist ideology insists that all cultures are equivalent, as a consequence of its core disbelief in true/right/false/wrong. And if all cultures are indeed equivalent, yet some cultures fail miserably, it must be because another culture is holding them down, right?
Maybe some day you'll have your fill of the dissonance that these ideas must surely cause you. Right now, because we are looking for external blame, we are unable to develop an effective solution. What if some races/ethnicities/cultures/ideologies need a different kind of political environment in order to flourish? Would you withhold it from them in order to prop up your belief that the races are identical?
you don't defeat your enemies by engaging in their tactics. that just makes you the moral equivalent of your enemy, thereby nullifying any moral high ground you claim to have, thereby nullifying any reason any citizen of your country or ally of your country would side with you
The putative "high ground" you would have us claim here is: "We do not dabble in cyber hacking." If we take that position, and fancy ourselves morally superior for doing so, then the next (and inevitable) cyberwar will be over very very quickly.
More generally, Sun Tzu was right: a constant preparation for war is the only way to avoid one. Being beloved by other nations is not a useful goal, because their adoration is worth exactly zilch. It is cheaper instead to be feared, so that we don't then have to expend any resources fighting off an invasion -- be it cyber or physical, against us or against an ally.
Humans are not a peaceful species. Peaceful humans get devoured. Humans will leave you in peace only if you seem dangerous.
Nah. Religion is a rootkit. Once you get it installed, it prevents you from seeing certain files in your filesystem or inspecting certain processes, but your CPU otherwise works normally.
Can someone explain why the prototype pinto crashing and burning, and causing two fatalities, is funny?
Because humor is mankind's way of dealing with failure and our own mortality? See if you can find a metacategory that contains all the things you laugh at. (I think it was Heinlein that first noticed this.)
In any case, the guy screwed the wing struts into the pinto's door panels with sheet-metal screws. It's not like the crash was, you know, surprising. His death is not one for which heaven will grant an appeal hearing.
Never underestimate the power of xenophobia on any public mob.
I know you're being flippant, but xenophobia can be very rational.
Some cultures area more productive than others, and they all compete with each other for resources -- consisting mostly of land, energy, and minds. Sometimes that competition devolves to open war, other times to guerilla war, but nowadays mostly to ideological subversion. The current "all cultures are equivalent" drumbeat is an example of this kind of attack.
When one culture has developed an efficient pattern -- one capable of producing vast amounts of safety and comfort and making it available in some proportion to all of its members -- then it is rational for that culture to adjust its pattern to breed resistance to changes that other cultures try to introduce into it. Xenophobia is probably the cheapest way to mobilize that kind of resistance en masse.
Again, it's a survival advantage to be able to produce enough of an excess of nutrients, so you can survive (and make enough of a reserve to divide too) even with 3-4 fungal cells around you, all living off you.
Well fortunately, online criminals have no way of pretending to be someone else so it should be a relatively painless procedure for businesses to check their identities.
A solution's effectiveness is a tertiary concern for a government agency when addressing a problem. The agency's primary concern is to increase its own power. The secondary concern is to receive public approbation by doing something very visible. A "no-fly list" like this one is the perfect implemention of an agency's two main goals.
That's only 90% crazy though. Sometimes, the function of law-enforcement is just to remind everyone that law enforcement exists. After all, whether any random soul will cross the line from dove to hawk mostly depends his assessment of law enforcement's effectiveness. Therefore, an appearance of effectiveness is often just as good as actual effectiveness.
But not in this case. The bad guys know exactly how to beat the list (fake or stolen credentials) and they can even test whether they've succeeded. Therefore, this "no-fly list" creates a false sense of security, which means that people will be overall less safe.
But why should someone who just fantasizes about sex with children be treated as a criminal?
Because BEST CASE is someone who doesn't act on their desires. That is the best case. Figure everyone is somewhere close to the middle of best/worse case scenario. That is the law of averages.
No "law of averages" says any such thing.
It so happens that most natural continua fall onto bell-shaped curves, but you have ZERO data about the distribution of paedophilic urges in humanity.
More generally, if a social issue seems simple to you, then you do not understand it. After all, the fewer the data points, the smoother the curve.
The best (IMHO), self-contained theologies (I'm thinking of those like C.S. Lewis), can be reasoned by the human condition. i.e. Lewis' Moral Law.
Lewis' theory says:
1. I feel altruistic urges.
2. Nature, self-interested whore that she is, would never give a mortal creature altruistic urges.
3. Therefore God must have put the urges there.
A moderate objection to point one is that not everyone has altruistic urges.
A severe objection to point two is that altrui-social behavior is demonstrably beneficial to every member of a tribe, and therefore it will evolve in all social creatures.
An obvious objection to point three is that it's stupid. Of all the explanations for a seemingly inexplicable data point, saying "An invisible ghost in the sky did it!!!1!" is the least useful.
Lewis's theory is useless bunk. Its only function is to give religionists a feeling of rationality.
Then where the hell is my flying car, and why do 80% of my countrymen still believe in bronze-age myths?
Your flying car is delayed while awaiting an engine with higher power-density and higher reliability at lower cost, and a smart enough flight/navigation computer to operate the vehicle in the traffic densities that would be encountered after widespread adoption.
The bronze-age myths persist because religions are ideological rootkits, most of your brethren have been rooted, and the rootkits all include strong imperatives to infect one's offspring. You can't put a stop to the rootkits because society depends on them and hence is patterned to persecute any cleanup effort. Nor can you design a more infectious rational alternative rootkit because you can't rationally answer the universe's many sources of cognitive dissonance, chief among them "you will end", "they'll get away with it", and "religions are rootkits".
In the end you just have to search for and then surround yourself with those occasional outliers, those people who are honest enough to look the universe's uncaring meaninglessness squarely in the eye without reaching for a scripture to anaesthetize themselves with.
Well said. The game is very different in a civil war, although the bad guys are *still* watching CNN to see if we are going to turn tail and run.
Simply acknowledging the fact that Iraq is in a state of civil war also greatly informs our endgame view. The people fighting in Iraq aren't going to cheer, declare a victory, and just stop if--when--we leave. Oh, no, it's going to be a mess and nobody is going to be a be able to claim a victory. This includes Al Qaeda, a Sunni organization whose kinsmen will likely be marginalized and ethnically cleansed. Furthermore, we can't wait this out. Whether we stay in Iraq for 16 months or 100 years, unless we do something to dramatically alter the underlying conflict, there will be violence and instability when we leave.
Indeed. I'd say we just need to divide the Iraqis up along ethnic lines, and balkanize the place... but there's no way to balkanize Iraq because its natural resources are not evenly distributed. Not to mention the pro-Shiite meddling from Iran and anti-Kurd meddling from Turkey.
Maybe brutal dictatorship is the only way to keep three ethnic clans of (what we should acknowledge is) a warrior culture living together.
A better way to look at this is through a cost-benefit analysis. Does a prolonged U.S. presence in Iraq realistically offer a better outcome and does this justify the cost in money and U.S. serviceman lives over such a longer period? I hate to say it, but the math doesn't add up.
I rather think you don't hate to say it.
In any case, your cost-benefit analysis must include the cost of oil. Iraq's taps are flowing again, and giving the oil price spike from the entry of China and India into a market whose demand is already inelastic, Iraq's n-billion barrel/year contribution to the world oil market is nothing to sneeze at. It's hard to know what the price per barrel would be if Iraq were not now pumping, but it is possible that the subsequent reduction in oil prices has more than paid for the entire Iraq war.
Well they aren't any more, when it's obvious that even the Surge has come up short on its objectives. But there was a time, not so long ago, when I think these "analysts" had a rather substantial influence on the electorate's feelings about the war in Iraq. They don't any more because everything they've said has turned out to be pure bullshit, but the US probably wouldn't be in this position if these puppets hadn't been delivering the White House's script on the major networks on a nightly basis.
War is a contest of wills. It ends when one side decides they can't win. That decision is based very much on each side's assessment of the other side's morale.
Right now in Iraq, the bad guys can turn on CNN and see that America is teetering on the decision to give up and leave. That fact alone keeps them going -- they know that they just have to hold on a little bit longer and then they'll have it.
If they turned on the television, and every American channel was full of people breathing fire, publicly demanding that Iraq be nuked, they'd realize that they'll never prevail against so motivated an adversary. That realization, and only that realization, will end the war.
There are many, many objections to be made against our decision to start the war, against our continued involvement in the war, and against our tactics and strategy within the war. But here in the middle of the war is not the time to voice these objections.
After it's over, you can hang all our generals and pillory the CIA and impeach the President, fine, I don't care. But while our soldiers are still in danger, and while the bad guys are still watching our media to see if they are wearing us down, will you please shut the hell up and cheer for our side?!
You don't have to mean it, and afterward you can recant and tell anyone who will listen that the whole war was wrong wrong wrong... but until then, the enemy is watching our media and we need them to fear what they see. The sooner they give up, the fewer people get shot and the quicker it ends.
Also, the Monster power filters are actually very good units, I've taken a multimeter to them and done some tests. However, everything else that comes out of that company is total snake oil.
What qualities of a power filter can be assessed with a multimeter?
Acording to Dr. Roy G. Biv, redshifting yellow light would make it appear more orange (or . ..you know . . . red). Of course, you could blueshift the yellow light into green, you just need to go through the intersection backawards. At relativistic speeds.
I'm sorry, I'm going to have to confiscate your geek card.
Blueshift, which means shifting to higher frequencies, occurs when two light-emitters approach each other. Galaxies are redshifted because they are racing away from us. If a car driver wanted the yellow light to appear green, he would need to race towards it.
Don't you remember those funky anime-esque movies in high-school physics, with the guys on motorcycles driving past each other with blue and red clothing on?
1. Open bank account.
2. Sell account information. 3. Close bank account. Repeat.
4. Receive calls from police re: fraudulent activity linked to your bank accounts.
5. Receive visit from FBI re: money laundering in your bank accounts.
6. Receive audit from SEC re: stock purchases linked your accounts in a stock-pumping scam.
7. Receive long sentence from federal judge.
8. Receive anniversary gift from your prison boyfriend Bubba.
Repeat.
What ever happened to personal responsibility? just about every vice in our society now is handled by psychologists instead of jail guards.
It may be more efficient, socially speaking, to find a problem's root cause than it is to attempt reconditioning via punishments. This is so because conditioning can only exert so much influence upon a brain, and that might not be enough if the brain in question has some crucial malfunction (such as psychopathy).
In any case, nobody knows for sure how much influence our genetics has on our day-to-day behavior, but if the amount is nonzero than it is useful to pursue avenues of genetic improvement. Imagine if we could stack every person's genetic deck in favor of intelligence, or of responsibility.
For those behaviors that are unquestionably bad, such as psychopathy, we need to find a cure -- something better than "lock them all up forever". And eugenics may be the only cure for it, at least for the foreseeable future.
A sad fact is that people don't really go all the places they are supposed to go and honest enumerators don't last long in places that stick to quotas. GPS and time tracking devices will prove that the enumerator actually visted each and every place they should have.
Indeed. During the 2000 census I personally knew one gal who sat at home making up the answers on her census sheets, rather than going out and hoofing it as promised. Sometimes humans just leave me dumbstruck. If I was queen of the world I would have smited her right then and there: sorry hon, egregious free-riding doesn't fly any more.
As another poster pointed out, a GPS track of an enumerator's travels would not positively tell us whether they'd visited the relevant homes, because we don't always know who is in which home. But the enumerators don't know that. As far as they are concerned, any one of their reports could be checked against the GPS location in which it was entered. That would bring compliance back up.
I agree with your overall point, but there is a difference between lies and bias. Example:
Truth: Joe went to the store to buy milk. Bias #1: Joe, once again being the dutiful husband, went to the store to get some milk. Bias #2: Joe, once again leaving his wife home alone with the child, went to the store to get some milk.
See the difference?
Good answer.
Continuing this example, here is a demonstration of an even nastier form of bias, first pointed out by Goldberg in _Bias_:
Commentator: "Now we'd like to hear both sides of the milk-buying debate. Should Joe have gone to the store for milk, leaving his wife and child alone? First, let's hear from Hillary Clinton." Clinton: "There should be a milk delivery agency, so that Joe can remain at home where he is needed. It takes a village, you know."
Commentator: "Thanks for that insight, Mrs. Clinton. Now let's hear from Ron Paul, a conservative."
Paul: "The government's got no right to say anything about how Joe runs his household."
Commentator: "Thank you, Mr. Paul. Food for thought, all of it. That's our show for the night, thanks for watching."
Notice how the commentator described Ron Paul as "a conservative", but added no similar adjectives to his introduction of Hillary Clinton? It is as though Paul's words require a disclaimer because he is a conservative, rather than ordinary and normal (no disclaimer needed) like Clinton.
I'd say both definitions are (a) grossly inadquate as a basis for categorising political viewpoints which are massively more complicated and (b) merely attitudes that do not necessarily equate to the outcomes of any given policy. The divisive split between "left" and "right" is one of the things that most cripples democracy in the USA, today. By labelling something as belonging to one faction or another, serious consideration of the merits of a particular action can be derailed.
Serious consideration is derailed, indeed, but it's not a conspiracy. It is simply human nature to find simple categories with which to make predictions and choices. Any consideration of nuances, shades of grey, contradiction and ambiguity, requires a lot of mental energy... not to mention more mental hardware than many people have to begin with.
Mental energy is a more precious resource than money, and even more than time. We all have more time than we have energy -- that's why we come home at night and "vege out".
This is why most political arguments are fights over categorization... once a thing has been categorized (and we all feel an urgent need to do so for any issues that remain expensively uncategorized), we can apply very simple logic when dealing with it again. White hat, good guy; black hat, bad guy.
An example: although ethanol logically belongs in the category of "mind-altering addictive substances", we lack the political will to admit it, because if we announce "alcohol is in the category of 'drug'", we'll then be obliged to apply our "drug == bad" logic to it.
Lord knows how I ever got hooked up with this godforsaken species. Where's the damned mothership already?
These ideologies generally consider private ownership of means of production and the resulting power structures no different than those of the state, and thus an anathema to freedom; there is no difference between coercing someone with threat of a bullet to the head and threat of starvation. I'm inclined to agree [...]
From the luxury of the "threat of starvation" you claim to see no reason to prefer it over the "threat of a bullet to the head". I hope, for your sake as well as mine, that you never experience the actual difference between the two. You might then find reason to prefer "nature's corcion" (which is lawful, predictable, and rationally tractable) from man-made coercion (which is whimsical and inevitably anti-rational).
Slashdot Mirror
Remember VIOS? It was a first stab at being the metaverse inspired by 'Snowcrash'. It had billboards, property ownership (with auctions and prime locations), chat, the usual easy-to-implement stuff. Unfortunately it lacked the hard-to-implement stuff like avatars, voice chat, facial expressions, i.e. the things that online social communities actually want most.
I remember I visited its 'downtown' ("port zero" in Snowcrash terms) area. It was a clot of billboards for what were at the time the first net-aware businesses. There were lots of avatarless users roaming around but no social interaction. I considered buying a lot, speculately, and I'm glad I didn't. VIOS vanished without a trace shortly afterward.
Now that I think about it, the whole thing may have been a scam... but they must've put some serious effort into their rich client, because at the time it had a VR MMPOG interface of notable quality.
The color tone of ambient light has a pronounced effect on human appearance. Depending on your skin tone and hair color, one flavor of light will make you look far more (or less) attractive than others.
I for example look 200% better in incandescent light than in fluourescent's uneven color composition. For this reason, and I am sure I'm not the only woman that feels this way, I don't have any fluourescents in my house. The electricity surcharge for using incandescents is well worth paying for the enhanced feeling of attractiveness. Most women are demonstrably prepared to pay far more than that in order to look good.
That's an insightful and shocking analysis.
Until last week I would've agreed with you, and helped light the torches at the next realtor lynching.
Last week I had a change of heart because I set about to buy a house. That's when I realized how valuable a good realtor really is.
It's important not to score their work along Marxist "physical labor is the only real labor" ideas. Mostly what you're paying for, as a buyer, is their expertise in assessing the value, condition, and livability of a house. Once your realtor understands what you want (and they'll spend the first six house visits figuring this out about you), they can give insights that you would otherwise have to learn the hard way.
The good ones also know what maintenance issues to look for. And of course they guide you through the buying process and give advice on negotiations. My realtor had all sorts of insights into reading between the lines of the seller's listing verbiage.
As a seller you benefit from a similar expertise, except in reverse: a good realtor can show you how to market your house's strong points.
In both cases, their expertise can add or subtract thousands from the closing price. My realtor just led me to a fantastic house for which I signed an offer letter just this past weekend. He's going to get $4500 out of the deal, and I consider that a reasonable fee for an expert consultant.
Your use of the word 'terrorist' is sloppy enough to qualify you for employment in the DHS.
The only useful definition of 'terrorist' is "one who credibly threatens violence against uninvolved civilians in order to cause political change". That greenpeace ship has done no such thing. At worst they are criminals; at best, they are justifiable vigilantes; it depends on your point of view, and on your opinion of international fishing agreements.
I'm no fan of greenpeace, but their attacks on whaling ships of ill repute are not terrorism. Terrorism would be setting off bombs inside the civilian areas of those countries which sanction whaling.
It was your onus to prove that "society and culture" are at fault as was claimed. This is so because there is a 'default' hypothesis here: wherever blacks go, we see the same problems, including in nearly-all-black countries. This is the only meaningful 'default' assumption, because no sane person could think it was all due to chance.
Certainly you've found a strong correllation between black poverty and black crime. Let us assume your assumption about causation is correct. The debate then suddenly changes from "Why are half of them criminals?" to "Why are most of them poor?", which is asking the same question in two different ways. The question underneath both is: why does one race show consistently problematically lower levels of cognitive ability, civility, and self-discipline?
True enough. Luckily enough there are plenty of other countries that are nearly all black and have always been so. Guess what you'll find there?
Nope, we have plenty of data showing that whatever problems those cultures had, they've sorted it out.
It's a rare person who can answer that question with honesty and accuracy. It'd be a fool's errand to figure out what an entire race 'wants'.
An easier question to answer is: where do they succeed and prosper today? I'll tell you two places: sports teams, and the military. Both environments offer a lot of structure. And that's why I suspect that a free democracy does not offer them sufficient structure to rise to the esteem of the other races.
Because the black crime/poverty/violence problem crosses cultures, and even pervades black countries, the onus is on you to prove that the problem is external.
Furthermore, for your point to be useful, you must show that the "society and culture" problem is solvable. By this I mean it's useless to blame their culture if such a culture automatically arises wherever they go, as would happen if the culture itself has strong genetic roots (and how could it not?).
I suspect the real problem here is that sceptical/leftist ideology insists that all cultures are equivalent, as a consequence of its core disbelief in true/right/false/wrong. And if all cultures are indeed equivalent, yet some cultures fail miserably, it must be because another culture is holding them down, right?
Maybe some day you'll have your fill of the dissonance that these ideas must surely cause you. Right now, because we are looking for external blame, we are unable to develop an effective solution. What if some races/ethnicities/cultures/ideologies need a different kind of political environment in order to flourish? Would you withhold it from them in order to prop up your belief that the races are identical?
The putative "high ground" you would have us claim here is: "We do not dabble in cyber hacking." If we take that position, and fancy ourselves morally superior for doing so, then the next (and inevitable) cyberwar will be over very very quickly.
More generally, Sun Tzu was right: a constant preparation for war is the only way to avoid one. Being beloved by other nations is not a useful goal, because their adoration is worth exactly zilch. It is cheaper instead to be feared, so that we don't then have to expend any resources fighting off an invasion -- be it cyber or physical, against us or against an ally.
Humans are not a peaceful species. Peaceful humans get devoured. Humans will leave you in peace only if you seem dangerous.
Nah. Religion is a rootkit. Once you get it installed, it prevents you from seeing certain files in your filesystem or inspecting certain processes, but your CPU otherwise works normally.
Because humor is mankind's way of dealing with failure and our own mortality? See if you can find a metacategory that contains all the things you laugh at. (I think it was Heinlein that first noticed this.)
In any case, the guy screwed the wing struts into the pinto's door panels with sheet-metal screws. It's not like the crash was, you know, surprising. His death is not one for which heaven will grant an appeal hearing.
I know you're being flippant, but xenophobia can be very rational.
Some cultures area more productive than others, and they all compete with each other for resources -- consisting mostly of land, energy, and minds. Sometimes that competition devolves to open war, other times to guerilla war, but nowadays mostly to ideological subversion. The current "all cultures are equivalent" drumbeat is an example of this kind of attack.
When one culture has developed an efficient pattern -- one capable of producing vast amounts of safety and comfort and making it available in some proportion to all of its members -- then it is rational for that culture to adjust its pattern to breed resistance to changes that other cultures try to introduce into it. Xenophobia is probably the cheapest way to mobilize that kind of resistance en masse.
Ah yes, just like my real life.
A solution's effectiveness is a tertiary concern for a government agency when addressing a problem. The agency's primary concern is to increase its own power. The secondary concern is to receive public approbation by doing something very visible. A "no-fly list" like this one is the perfect implemention of an agency's two main goals.
That's only 90% crazy though. Sometimes, the function of law-enforcement is just to remind everyone that law enforcement exists. After all, whether any random soul will cross the line from dove to hawk mostly depends his assessment of law enforcement's effectiveness. Therefore, an appearance of effectiveness is often just as good as actual effectiveness.
But not in this case. The bad guys know exactly how to beat the list (fake or stolen credentials) and they can even test whether they've succeeded. Therefore, this "no-fly list" creates a false sense of security, which means that people will be overall less safe.
No "law of averages" says any such thing.
It so happens that most natural continua fall onto bell-shaped curves, but you have ZERO data about the distribution of paedophilic urges in humanity.
More generally, if a social issue seems simple to you, then you do not understand it. After all, the fewer the data points, the smoother the curve.
Lewis' theory says:
A moderate objection to point one is that not everyone has altruistic urges.
A severe objection to point two is that altrui-social behavior is demonstrably beneficial to every member of a tribe, and therefore it will evolve in all social creatures.
An obvious objection to point three is that it's stupid. Of all the explanations for a seemingly inexplicable data point, saying "An invisible ghost in the sky did it!!!1!" is the least useful.
Lewis's theory is useless bunk. Its only function is to give religionists a feeling of rationality.
Your flying car is delayed while awaiting an engine with higher power-density and higher reliability at lower cost, and a smart enough flight/navigation computer to operate the vehicle in the traffic densities that would be encountered after widespread adoption.
The bronze-age myths persist because religions are ideological rootkits, most of your brethren have been rooted, and the rootkits all include strong imperatives to infect one's offspring. You can't put a stop to the rootkits because society depends on them and hence is patterned to persecute any cleanup effort. Nor can you design a more infectious rational alternative rootkit because you can't rationally answer the universe's many sources of cognitive dissonance, chief among them "you will end", "they'll get away with it", and "religions are rootkits".
In the end you just have to search for and then surround yourself with those occasional outliers, those people who are honest enough to look the universe's uncaring meaninglessness squarely in the eye without reaching for a scripture to anaesthetize themselves with.
Well said. The game is very different in a civil war, although the bad guys are *still* watching CNN to see if we are going to turn tail and run.
Indeed. I'd say we just need to divide the Iraqis up along ethnic lines, and balkanize the place... but there's no way to balkanize Iraq because its natural resources are not evenly distributed. Not to mention the pro-Shiite meddling from Iran and anti-Kurd meddling from Turkey.
Maybe brutal dictatorship is the only way to keep three ethnic clans of (what we should acknowledge is) a warrior culture living together.
I rather think you don't hate to say it.
In any case, your cost-benefit analysis must include the cost of oil. Iraq's taps are flowing again, and giving the oil price spike from the entry of China and India into a market whose demand is already inelastic, Iraq's n-billion barrel/year contribution to the world oil market is nothing to sneeze at. It's hard to know what the price per barrel would be if Iraq were not now pumping, but it is possible that the subsequent reduction in oil prices has more than paid for the entire Iraq war.
War is a contest of wills. It ends when one side decides they can't win. That decision is based very much on each side's assessment of the other side's morale.
Right now in Iraq, the bad guys can turn on CNN and see that America is teetering on the decision to give up and leave. That fact alone keeps them going -- they know that they just have to hold on a little bit longer and then they'll have it.
If they turned on the television, and every American channel was full of people breathing fire, publicly demanding that Iraq be nuked, they'd realize that they'll never prevail against so motivated an adversary. That realization, and only that realization, will end the war.
There are many, many objections to be made against our decision to start the war, against our continued involvement in the war, and against our tactics and strategy within the war. But here in the middle of the war is not the time to voice these objections.
After it's over, you can hang all our generals and pillory the CIA and impeach the President, fine, I don't care. But while our soldiers are still in danger, and while the bad guys are still watching our media to see if they are wearing us down, will you please shut the hell up and cheer for our side?!
You don't have to mean it, and afterward you can recant and tell anyone who will listen that the whole war was wrong wrong wrong... but until then, the enemy is watching our media and we need them to fear what they see. The sooner they give up, the fewer people get shot and the quicker it ends.
What qualities of a power filter can be assessed with a multimeter?
A scope, maybe. But a multimeter?
I'm sorry, I'm going to have to confiscate your geek card.
Blueshift, which means shifting to higher frequencies, occurs when two light-emitters approach each other. Galaxies are redshifted because they are racing away from us. If a car driver wanted the yellow light to appear green, he would need to race towards it.
Don't you remember those funky anime-esque movies in high-school physics, with the guys on motorcycles driving past each other with blue and red clothing on?
4. Receive calls from police re: fraudulent activity linked to your bank accounts.
5. Receive visit from FBI re: money laundering in your bank accounts.
6. Receive audit from SEC re: stock purchases linked your accounts in a stock-pumping scam.
7. Receive long sentence from federal judge.
8. Receive anniversary gift from your prison boyfriend Bubba.
Repeat.
It may be more efficient, socially speaking, to find a problem's root cause than it is to attempt reconditioning via punishments. This is so because conditioning can only exert so much influence upon a brain, and that might not be enough if the brain in question has some crucial malfunction (such as psychopathy).
In any case, nobody knows for sure how much influence our genetics has on our day-to-day behavior, but if the amount is nonzero than it is useful to pursue avenues of genetic improvement. Imagine if we could stack every person's genetic deck in favor of intelligence, or of responsibility.
For those behaviors that are unquestionably bad, such as psychopathy, we need to find a cure -- something better than "lock them all up forever". And eugenics may be the only cure for it, at least for the foreseeable future.
Indeed. During the 2000 census I personally knew one gal who sat at home making up the answers on her census sheets, rather than going out and hoofing it as promised. Sometimes humans just leave me dumbstruck. If I was queen of the world I would have smited her right then and there: sorry hon, egregious free-riding doesn't fly any more.
As another poster pointed out, a GPS track of an enumerator's travels would not positively tell us whether they'd visited the relevant homes, because we don't always know who is in which home. But the enumerators don't know that. As far as they are concerned, any one of their reports could be checked against the GPS location in which it was entered. That would bring compliance back up.
Good answer.
Continuing this example, here is a demonstration of an even nastier form of bias, first pointed out by Goldberg in _Bias_:
Commentator: "Now we'd like to hear both sides of the milk-buying debate. Should Joe have gone to the store for milk, leaving his wife and child alone? First, let's hear from Hillary Clinton."
Clinton: "There should be a milk delivery agency, so that Joe can remain at home where he is needed. It takes a village, you know."
Commentator: "Thanks for that insight, Mrs. Clinton. Now let's hear from Ron Paul, a conservative."
Paul: "The government's got no right to say anything about how Joe runs his household."
Commentator: "Thank you, Mr. Paul. Food for thought, all of it. That's our show for the night, thanks for watching."
Notice how the commentator described Ron Paul as "a conservative", but added no similar adjectives to his introduction of Hillary Clinton? It is as though Paul's words require a disclaimer because he is a conservative, rather than ordinary and normal (no disclaimer needed) like Clinton.
Serious consideration is derailed, indeed, but it's not a conspiracy. It is simply human nature to find simple categories with which to make predictions and choices. Any consideration of nuances, shades of grey, contradiction and ambiguity, requires a lot of mental energy... not to mention more mental hardware than many people have to begin with.
Mental energy is a more precious resource than money, and even more than time. We all have more time than we have energy -- that's why we come home at night and "vege out".
This is why most political arguments are fights over categorization... once a thing has been categorized (and we all feel an urgent need to do so for any issues that remain expensively uncategorized), we can apply very simple logic when dealing with it again. White hat, good guy; black hat, bad guy.
An example: although ethanol logically belongs in the category of "mind-altering addictive substances", we lack the political will to admit it, because if we announce "alcohol is in the category of 'drug'", we'll then be obliged to apply our "drug == bad" logic to it.
Lord knows how I ever got hooked up with this godforsaken species. Where's the damned mothership already?
From the luxury of the "threat of starvation" you claim to see no reason to prefer it over the "threat of a bullet to the head". I hope, for your sake as well as mine, that you never experience the actual difference between the two. You might then find reason to prefer "nature's corcion" (which is lawful, predictable, and rationally tractable) from man-made coercion (which is whimsical and inevitably anti-rational).