They don't want someone wearing the shirt to enter the store to pretend to be an employee. The customer might think they're getting excellent customer service from an imposter.
I'm undone.
If you are in Houston, you may stop by any time to pick up your backrub from a geek-appreciative, cynicism-appreciative, wit-appreciative woman.
Nobody rational would ever think that. Nobody is knowingly wrong, so everyone thinks they are right. If two people disagree, the only possibilities are a) they are both wrong and b) one is wrong and one is right. They can't both be right and still disagree. The law of excluded middle pretty much rules that out.
Is that sarcasm?
Rational people can legitimately disagree on any value judgment when they are operating on different time horizons. For example, the Iraq war is ruinously expensive in the short term, but perhaps very profitable (in terms of oil) in the medium term, and possibly massively beneficial (in terms of Middle-East reform) in the long term. The arguments about the Iraq war boil down to which time horizon we should focus on / invest in.
I go so far as to propose that all political arguments are arguments over time horizon.
I think the biggest benefit of an oligarch/monarch is that they have the capacity for intelligent long range planning, of the sort that everyone goddamn HATES, but which really does good things for the world.
It does good things for the particular ruler's worldview, yes. The loss of all the outliers is not without its cost, though.
As an example, I think we should have a higher tax on gasoline to drive down consumption, and increase public transportation and help fund alternative fuel research. Is this possible in our democracy? Not really. Everybody votes against anyone who would even suggest it.
Have you given serious thought to how the opponents might also be right? I realize the whole issue seems so simple to you, but there is a serious and rational counterargument that I'll bet you aren't even aware of. The counterargument is: our time is our most valuable commodity, the source of all other values, and public transportation's real expense is in lost time. Buses and trains seem cheaper when you don't factor in the very high hidden cost of all those people standing around at the station for fifteen minutes.
During World War II, there was mandatory recycling in a number of cities, and that has benefits, but people hated it, and it got repealed as soon as the war ended.
Again, it seems simple to you because you aren't factoring in all the costs that those "shortsighted" people are weighing. The value of their time, spent sorting and hauling or whatever, vastly outweighs the value of the recycled materials.
An absolute ruler has the ability to switch policy overnight.
You say that like it's a good thing. There is a lot of economic value in stability, even if the current stable point is not the absolute most efficient. Change is very expensive when there are contracts and properties and projects running.
Democracies are unwieldy and take years to come to a new policy, and often they contain so many exceptions that they're practically useless.
Your cynicism prevents you from seeing the hidden utility of a slow legislature and judiciary. And the exceptions as often as not exist to transform a "It sounds so simple and perfect!" law into one that isn't so costly to implement.
If you could insure the whole "philosopher king" thing, make sure you have a person as absolute ruler who is both capable and worthy of it, then that would be by far the best system. Since you can't, we go with democracy, not because it's in any way better, but because it limits the possible harm that can come out of government toward the people. However democracy can't save the people from their own shortsightedness, and it's just damn inefficient.
A philosopher king can save us from shortsightedness by delivering us over to narrowmindedness. It's not clear that we should prefer one over the other.
I'll tell you the worse problem with democracy. On the day that the poorest 51% of the population discovers it can vote itself the wealth of the richest 49%, economic collapse is imminent.
P.S. It's not a godwin unless your opponent tries to refute you by drawing a paralle between your argument and Hitler's. I mentioned Nazi Germany to illustrate mankind's willingness to join any evil as long as it is personally profitable.
There were some typos in your post. Here, I'll fix them for you...
Well I'm actually in favor of oligarchy over democracy in that special case where you can get an oligarch who knows what the hell he's doing.
"Well I'm actually in favor of oligarchy over democracy in that special case where you can get an oligarch who aligns the public interests with my private interests."
If there was a way to always pick the best most profitable person to rule, I'd be a die-hard royalist, or fascist, or whatever.
"If there was a way to always pick the most profitable person to rule, I'd be a die-hard royalist, or fascist, or whatever."
Much better now. You should use a spellchecker next time.
Note: I am not criticizing you in particular. I am criticizing humanity. On a very, very, very related note, it was recently revealed that German popular support for the Nazi party blossomed after the Nazis promised to distribute the Jews' expropriated property.
If you are insane enough to open your wifi then for gods sake setup a decent firewall and a proxy so you can log who's been viewing what, otherwise you could find yourself at the wrong end of the law.
For example, these features could enable instant start up of PCs and prevent drive recorders from losing data after a sudden break in power in the future. As substitutes for system LSI-embedded SRAM, MRAM can provide even more value as they are expected to enable extremely low power dissipation of system LSIs because they can sleep when they are not in use and wake up instantly."
Now we can throw a rootkit into memory and have it chill there forever!
On a related note, non-volatile system memory will completely change the game for forensics experts. Right now, when they come and grab your computers, all memory contents are lost... and clever people also disable the swapfile. With MRAM, all that is out the window.
Watch for a new meme in the next years, categorizing the use of volatile RAM as a presumption of guilt.
Just go on and get a mug out, get a thermometer into the cup, and drink a gulp of 205 degree F liquid.
In addition to what was been replied to you already, let me point out that the temperature is the reason why coffee straws are so slender. When it's hot, one can drink only teensy sips, and only after the coffee has passed through a tube whose ratio of surface area to cross-sectional area is high (for cooling).
Two bad the spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a private 767. I am not even and extremist when it comes to things like that. Hey if they wanted a private jet a Gulfstream IV is very nice as is the Citation X. A converted airliner that could carry well over 200 people for your private toy.
Surely what they do with their own money is their own business. Presumably some people were happy to give money to the founders in exchange for shares of Google stock, and that's why the founders are rich now.
The original poster was levelling a criticism in the economic/moral realm -- which means: he was criticizing the cost/benefit ratio of owning a private 767, and implying that it is also a net social loss. Your reply is situated in the completely different realm of politics. While it is true that Google has the political freedom to waste their money, and it is true that politics is a derivative of economics/morality, your statement is totally orthogonal.
We are all aware that we still have a lot of political freedom... and that freedom is exactly why cost/benefit arguments are important to have.
There's still solar particles out there, however sparse.. normally they move too fast for devices on earth to measure... at this point the device will be going faster than solar particles... kind of cool that the device has "outrun" it's home star.
If that is true, then the device will begin slowing down, ever so gradually, as it runs into random interstellar particles, and as it runs over the slower particles of the solar wind.
I'd be going for the 'most bang for the buck', IE go after the most debilitating diseases first - the ones we have good tests for, can detect early in a pregnancy, or easily test embryos for artificial insemination.
Those are good thoughts. Maybe I'm too cynical, but I see stupidity, tribalism, and free-riding as the most socially costly maladies that could be cured by genetic modifications. Diseases are a distant second, sort of like how terrorism has our attention but in reality is actually a very small contributor to the death rate.
And we could increase the tendencies to be dumb, obedient, hard working, and short-lived, thereby making us into the people that governments and corporations would dream us to be.
Do you really want to start going down that road? I don't like companies messing casually with plant genomes...Do you really want to jack some patented gene sequences into your kids? If they breed is it going to violate someone's copyright?
Given the choice between the random genetic accidents of nature, and the guided decisions of parents and/or governments, I agree it's a perilous tradeoff. However, it seems probable that the first genetic improvements for babies will be discovered and offered by the free market, with parents free to download/purchase them as they see fit. Would you object to that?
I don't trust parents to preach (i.e. to vote) rationally, but I do trust them to practice (i.e. to spend) rationally on their own children. Offering a two-standard-deviation IQ upgrade (for example) to prospective parents would be a gigantic boon to everyone involved... even to us obsolete types, and to the children whose parents couldn't afford it, simply because the world gets better, safer, and more comfortable when it's full of smart people.
I don't have any particular opinion about human cloning, except for the fact that I don't see any actual point in it. Animal cloning is done to strengthen the breed, technically, so either we're advocating some kind of eugenics, which is just inherently a bad idea, or we're catering to people's mistaken desire to have a genetic duplicate of a dead person, which is also a pretty bad idea.
Eugenics is inherently bad?
If eugenics is defined as "improving humans through genetic selection or modification", that seems to me to be inherently good.
It only goes bad when the sought improvements are not rational -- such as, for example, attempts to make us all Christians, or blonde, or obedient.
Consider all the rational improvements that could be made through genetic improvements: we could increase tendencies to be smart, scientific, responsible, just, good-natured, conscientious, or whatever other characteristics are found to have genetic inputs.
Or were you just being sloppy with your words when you said 'inherently'? IMO you should've said 'historically'.
Do you want data to survive poor implementation in the firmware? For best results, you'll probably need two totally different devices and some means of keeping them synchronised. (Though a number of Buffallo's Linkstation products can support a separate external USB disk for backup of the NAS itself).
I own a Buffalo Linkstation 250GB, and it supports automatic backups to an external USB disk. You can schedule the backups to occur any time of any day of the week, and you can choose which parent directories to backup.
Unfortunately, the backup routine is buggy. About one backup out of three, or more frequently if I include more directories, it will hang. After a hang, the whole NAS becomes unresponsive and must be rebooted.
Tech-support is located in Austin and they are prompt, friendly, and helpless. There are no firmware updates to fix the problem, and it seems doubtful that there ever will be. The hard-drive business moves too fast, and the margins are too small, for a company like Buffalo to devote any resources to this sort of thing.
The moral of the story is: if you buy Buffalo, save your receipt, and test the backup routines many times with the drive full of data before you throw the box away.
I always struggled to focus through a microscope as a kid, and this looks like a great inexpensive present for a little kid since every cool chemistry kit is totally nerfed now.
The problem you had, and that my own son had last Christmas, is that cheap microscopes don't have "widefield" eyepieces.
If you spend a little more (typically $100-$150 on Ebay) you can get a good-quality student-grade microscope with a widefield eyepiece. And nowadays, many come with 640x480 webcams, or at least webcam attachment points.
The webcams are USB, so it's trivial to capture images and print them out for science projects. That's vastly more useful than a TV-out.
Why not make a satellite hitch ride on one of these comets to the outer reaches of the solar system. Assuming they go there once every round, even hitching Halley's comet will get us further than Pioneer 1&2 have been in a shorter time, without wasting any precious fuel.
To hitch a ride on a passing comet, you can do one of two things:
1. Match velocities, and then land on it. -or-
2. Not match velocities, and then get smashed to bits by it.
Method 2 easily achieves your goal of travelling to the outer reaches of the solar system "without wasting any precious fuel". However, your satellite will no longer be functional, or even identifiable. But other than that, yeah, it's a great idea.:)
(Tell me Mrs. Lincoln, other than that, how did you enjoy the theatre?)
The problem here is clear. What if I need a brain because of a stroke, head trauma, or something?
The key here is clearly to keep the clone sedated, and do a nightly robocopy or rsync to keep it updated. Also, the clone should be stored offsite, probably in a fireproof vault.
Ah, but now you've got to answer the "transporter question": if you could duplicate yourself perfectly, would that duplicate be 'you'?
Certainly the duplicate would insist that it was indeed 'you', because it genuinely thinks that it is. But, if we destroyed your original body, would your consciousness resume in the duplicate? Or would this-instance-of-you end, and someone exactly like you take over?
There's no way ever to know the answer, yet it's a critical question when it comes to brain-duping. It's the secular version of the old religious question of what is contained in the spirit (and is thus eternal) versus what is contained in the brain (and is thus lost upon death).
Probably the biggest blessing of all from Wal-mart, is the fact that they function as a collective bargaining agent -- against manufacturers and on behalf of American consumers. They bring enormous price pressure to bear on producers. They are a "virtual union" of the middle and lower classes, and the result has been cheaper everything.
This may be part of the cause of the recent housing boom. Because housewares are so much cheaper now, many more people can finally fit a house payment into their budget.
Well, in terraforming terms, finding stuff to make up the Martian atmosphere probably isn't that hard. There are significant CO2 ice caps, and there may be significant water available with modest effort. CO2 plus plants gives you O2. Also, there is some good evidence to suggest that the icecaps' existence is bistable -- that is, if you could mostly evaporate them, the additional greenhouse effect would warm the planet enough to finish the job and keep it that way.
Eh... better to leave Mars alone. It will be the perfect home for any future silicon-based intelligent life, because it lacks the two chemicals (water and oxygen) that play such hell with metal components.
Assuming that humans can overcome their "OMG we'll be obsolete!" paranoia about post-humans, it would be teh awesome if carbon-based intelligence on Earth could coexist peacefully with silicon-based intelligence on Mars. Assuming.
Not bloody likely, of course, but it's an awesome thought. Terraforming Mars would waste that fantastic opportunity, all for the sake of the outdated "meat86" system architecture.
I think you hit the needle on the head. I think business and people in general are to afraid to loose what they have, so are afraid to use anything that is untried and new in their environments because there's the possibility of loss, whatever that loss may be, financial, medical, etc. Wish it was like the 50-60's when scientists and engineers thought big!
Next time you are sitting on a tort or product-liability jury, remember that feeling.
The world has changed because we, as a society, via our juries, have switched from "buyer beware" to "seller beware". Only now are we seeing the mass casualties washing ashore. And everything is padded, roped off, banned, covered in uselessly vague warning labels, and painted bright yellow.
It's the same nannies that want to tell you that you can't smoke in your house, or you can't have a big mac or supersize your fries. These people don't usually tend to be conservatives. It's happens to be the people that say things like, "we are going to take things away from you for the common good."
Are you sure that the restrictions are coming from outside the home?
Now that I'm a parent myself, I can see where the *real* restrictions are coming from. Nowadays we invest a gigantic sum of money, time, attention, and heart into each of our children. And we don't have very many of them. As a result, each child represents a colossal investment... and so our risk/reward analyses can't help but tilt towards overprotection.
Long ago, parents had four or six or eight children, and didn't have any time to devote to them anyway (what with bringing in the crops and cooking and keeping the house). The loss of a child, then, was not a show-stopper. In fact it was expected. As a result, parents allowed their children to take far greater risks.
What has happened to parenting is rational, given the change in resources-devoted-per-child. The intractable problem is that children may not be able to function well after being reared in a glass display case.
I don't think there's any solution, either. I try to be rational, and I abhor the feminization of our society, and I force myself to let them take risks... and yet I still can't give them near the leeway that I know darn well they need. I think we're just screwed.
Hopefully genetic engineering or virtual reality can save us.
As a pessimist, I personally am happier than every optimist I know. Here's why I'm always happy [...]
That's truer than you know. The whole secret to being content, or to satisfying others, is the management of expectations.
If I promise you two cookies, but only give you one, you're disappointed.
If I promise you two cookies, and give you two, you're satisfied, mostly.
If I promise you two cookies, and give you three, you're overjoyed.
Or look at it in reverse: the joy you get from two cookies depends very much on the number you were promised earlier... so, if your provider is wise, he or she will have promised you only one.
This explains soooo much about humans. It is especially relevant in romantic relationships... people tend to overpromise themselves during courtship, which means a lot of disappointment later after the New Relationship Energy wears off.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm undone.
If you are in Houston, you may stop by any time to pick up your backrub from a geek-appreciative, cynicism-appreciative, wit-appreciative woman.
Is that sarcasm?
Rational people can legitimately disagree on any value judgment when they are operating on different time horizons. For example, the Iraq war is ruinously expensive in the short term, but perhaps very profitable (in terms of oil) in the medium term, and possibly massively beneficial (in terms of Middle-East reform) in the long term. The arguments about the Iraq war boil down to which time horizon we should focus on / invest in.
I go so far as to propose that all political arguments are arguments over time horizon.
It does good things for the particular ruler's worldview, yes. The loss of all the outliers is not without its cost, though.
Have you given serious thought to how the opponents might also be right? I realize the whole issue seems so simple to you, but there is a serious and rational counterargument that I'll bet you aren't even aware of. The counterargument is: our time is our most valuable commodity, the source of all other values, and public transportation's real expense is in lost time. Buses and trains seem cheaper when you don't factor in the very high hidden cost of all those people standing around at the station for fifteen minutes.
Again, it seems simple to you because you aren't factoring in all the costs that those "shortsighted" people are weighing. The value of their time, spent sorting and hauling or whatever, vastly outweighs the value of the recycled materials.
You say that like it's a good thing. There is a lot of economic value in stability, even if the current stable point is not the absolute most efficient. Change is very expensive when there are contracts and properties and projects running.
Your cynicism prevents you from seeing the hidden utility of a slow legislature and judiciary. And the exceptions as often as not exist to transform a "It sounds so simple and perfect!" law into one that isn't so costly to implement.
A philosopher king can save us from shortsightedness by delivering us over to narrowmindedness. It's not clear that we should prefer one over the other.
I'll tell you the worse problem with democracy. On the day that the poorest 51% of the population discovers it can vote itself the wealth of the richest 49%, economic collapse is imminent.
P.S. It's not a godwin unless your opponent tries to refute you by drawing a paralle between your argument and Hitler's. I mentioned Nazi Germany to illustrate mankind's willingness to join any evil as long as it is personally profitable.
There were some typos in your post. Here, I'll fix them for you...
"Well I'm actually in favor of oligarchy over democracy in that special case where you can get an oligarch who aligns the public interests with my private interests."
"If there was a way to always pick the most profitable person to rule, I'd be a die-hard royalist, or fascist, or whatever."
Much better now. You should use a spellchecker next time.
Note: I am not criticizing you in particular. I am criticizing humanity. On a very, very, very related note, it was recently revealed that German popular support for the Nazi party blossomed after the Nazis promised to distribute the Jews' expropriated property.
Or you can cascade two wireless routers: http://slashdot.org/~inviolet/journal/164310
On a related note, non-volatile system memory will completely change the game for forensics experts. Right now, when they come and grab your computers, all memory contents are lost... and clever people also disable the swapfile. With MRAM, all that is out the window.
Watch for a new meme in the next years, categorizing the use of volatile RAM as a presumption of guilt.
In addition to what was been replied to you already, let me point out that the temperature is the reason why coffee straws are so slender. When it's hot, one can drink only teensy sips, and only after the coffee has passed through a tube whose ratio of surface area to cross-sectional area is high (for cooling).
The original poster was levelling a criticism in the economic/moral realm -- which means: he was criticizing the cost/benefit ratio of owning a private 767, and implying that it is also a net social loss. Your reply is situated in the completely different realm of politics. While it is true that Google has the political freedom to waste their money, and it is true that politics is a derivative of economics/morality, your statement is totally orthogonal.
We are all aware that we still have a lot of political freedom... and that freedom is exactly why cost/benefit arguments are important to have.
If that is true, then the device will begin slowing down, ever so gradually, as it runs into random interstellar particles, and as it runs over the slower particles of the solar wind.
Those are good thoughts. Maybe I'm too cynical, but I see stupidity, tribalism, and free-riding as the most socially costly maladies that could be cured by genetic modifications. Diseases are a distant second, sort of like how terrorism has our attention but in reality is actually a very small contributor to the death rate.
Given the choice between the random genetic accidents of nature, and the guided decisions of parents and/or governments, I agree it's a perilous tradeoff. However, it seems probable that the first genetic improvements for babies will be discovered and offered by the free market, with parents free to download/purchase them as they see fit. Would you object to that?
I don't trust parents to preach (i.e. to vote) rationally, but I do trust them to practice (i.e. to spend) rationally on their own children. Offering a two-standard-deviation IQ upgrade (for example) to prospective parents would be a gigantic boon to everyone involved... even to us obsolete types, and to the children whose parents couldn't afford it, simply because the world gets better, safer, and more comfortable when it's full of smart people.
Eugenics is inherently bad?
If eugenics is defined as "improving humans through genetic selection or modification", that seems to me to be inherently good.
It only goes bad when the sought improvements are not rational -- such as, for example, attempts to make us all Christians, or blonde, or obedient.
Consider all the rational improvements that could be made through genetic improvements: we could increase tendencies to be smart, scientific, responsible, just, good-natured, conscientious, or whatever other characteristics are found to have genetic inputs.
Or were you just being sloppy with your words when you said 'inherently'? IMO you should've said 'historically'.
To my eye, the issue hinges on how long the founder has been dead...
The tax-exempt thing is an effect, rather than a distinguishing characteristic.
I own a Buffalo Linkstation 250GB, and it supports automatic backups to an external USB disk. You can schedule the backups to occur any time of any day of the week, and you can choose which parent directories to backup.
Unfortunately, the backup routine is buggy. About one backup out of three, or more frequently if I include more directories, it will hang. After a hang, the whole NAS becomes unresponsive and must be rebooted.
Tech-support is located in Austin and they are prompt, friendly, and helpless. There are no firmware updates to fix the problem, and it seems doubtful that there ever will be. The hard-drive business moves too fast, and the margins are too small, for a company like Buffalo to devote any resources to this sort of thing.
The moral of the story is: if you buy Buffalo, save your receipt, and test the backup routines many times with the drive full of data before you throw the box away.
The problem you had, and that my own son had last Christmas, is that cheap microscopes don't have "widefield" eyepieces.
If you spend a little more (typically $100-$150 on Ebay) you can get a good-quality student-grade microscope with a widefield eyepiece. And nowadays, many come with 640x480 webcams, or at least webcam attachment points.
The webcams are USB, so it's trivial to capture images and print them out for science projects. That's vastly more useful than a TV-out.
To hitch a ride on a passing comet, you can do one of two things:
1. Match velocities, and then land on it. -or-
2. Not match velocities, and then get smashed to bits by it.
Method 2 easily achieves your goal of travelling to the outer reaches of the solar system "without wasting any precious fuel". However, your satellite will no longer be functional, or even identifiable. But other than that, yeah, it's a great idea. :)
(Tell me Mrs. Lincoln, other than that, how did you enjoy the theatre?)
Well said.
Unfortunately, what's done is done, idiots did idiotic things, for sure. But I wonder: do you want us to win in Iraq?
I'm alarmed to observe that a lot of folks, particularly those who politically postured against the war, wish for us to lose. Do you?
Ah, but now you've got to answer the "transporter question": if you could duplicate yourself perfectly, would that duplicate be 'you'?
Certainly the duplicate would insist that it was indeed 'you', because it genuinely thinks that it is. But, if we destroyed your original body, would your consciousness resume in the duplicate? Or would this-instance-of-you end, and someone exactly like you take over?
There's no way ever to know the answer, yet it's a critical question when it comes to brain-duping. It's the secular version of the old religious question of what is contained in the spirit (and is thus eternal) versus what is contained in the brain (and is thus lost upon death).
Liquid and gaseous water, dude. Those are what cause corrosion. Permafrost and ice caps wouldn't cause any troubles for mechanized life.
Probably the biggest blessing of all from Wal-mart, is the fact that they function as a collective bargaining agent -- against manufacturers and on behalf of American consumers. They bring enormous price pressure to bear on producers. They are a "virtual union" of the middle and lower classes, and the result has been cheaper everything.
This may be part of the cause of the recent housing boom. Because housewares are so much cheaper now, many more people can finally fit a house payment into their budget.
Eh... better to leave Mars alone. It will be the perfect home for any future silicon-based intelligent life, because it lacks the two chemicals (water and oxygen) that play such hell with metal components.
Assuming that humans can overcome their "OMG we'll be obsolete!" paranoia about post-humans, it would be teh awesome if carbon-based intelligence on Earth could coexist peacefully with silicon-based intelligence on Mars. Assuming.
Not bloody likely, of course, but it's an awesome thought. Terraforming Mars would waste that fantastic opportunity, all for the sake of the outdated "meat86" system architecture.
Funny... when *I* ravish the women of my foes, I don't ever hear lamentations. You must be doing it wrong.
Next time you are sitting on a tort or product-liability jury, remember that feeling.
The world has changed because we, as a society, via our juries, have switched from "buyer beware" to "seller beware". Only now are we seeing the mass casualties washing ashore. And everything is padded, roped off, banned, covered in uselessly vague warning labels, and painted bright yellow.
Are you sure that the restrictions are coming from outside the home?
Now that I'm a parent myself, I can see where the *real* restrictions are coming from. Nowadays we invest a gigantic sum of money, time, attention, and heart into each of our children. And we don't have very many of them. As a result, each child represents a colossal investment... and so our risk/reward analyses can't help but tilt towards overprotection.
Long ago, parents had four or six or eight children, and didn't have any time to devote to them anyway (what with bringing in the crops and cooking and keeping the house). The loss of a child, then, was not a show-stopper. In fact it was expected. As a result, parents allowed their children to take far greater risks.
What has happened to parenting is rational, given the change in resources-devoted-per-child. The intractable problem is that children may not be able to function well after being reared in a glass display case.
I don't think there's any solution, either. I try to be rational, and I abhor the feminization of our society, and I force myself to let them take risks... and yet I still can't give them near the leeway that I know darn well they need. I think we're just screwed.
Hopefully genetic engineering or virtual reality can save us.
That's truer than you know. The whole secret to being content, or to satisfying others, is the management of expectations.
If I promise you two cookies, but only give you one, you're disappointed.
If I promise you two cookies, and give you two, you're satisfied, mostly.
If I promise you two cookies, and give you three, you're overjoyed.
Or look at it in reverse: the joy you get from two cookies depends very much on the number you were promised earlier... so, if your provider is wise, he or she will have promised you only one.
This explains soooo much about humans. It is especially relevant in romantic relationships... people tend to overpromise themselves during courtship, which means a lot of disappointment later after the New Relationship Energy wears off.