Baseline happiness can arguably be negatively correlated to competitiveness, drive and success.
Or not, because people who are depressed feel like it doesn't matter what they do, life's going to suck anyways.
Like I said, arguably. The morbid joke around depression treatment circles is that ECT works because you forget that your life sucks, as soon as you remember (typically in 6 months or so), you're depressed again.
Swing too far in any direction and things usually don't go well, in a population of billions there are plenty of exceptions, but mostly, it's a bad idea to get really happy (like opium users), or really depressed.
Consider, by way of analogy, the way that laser eye surgery was not actually crushed by the Glasses Industrial Complex. It is a comparatively 'premium' priced product, compared to a basic pair of glasses every so often(based on breakage or prescription change) for life; but it offers good immediate-cash-in-hand profits for the producer and is valued by consumers for its great longterm convenience.
Alcon, a major manufacturer of laser eye surgery machines and eyedrops, loses money on the machines, they make it all in the eyedrops.
True. Probably due to my personal crusade history and lack of deep though this morning. I have, on occasion, advocated for development of the retroviral type treatments for much more limited / controlled treatments, and the most common reaction I got was "that's science fiction, we're at least 20 years out from even seeing that work reliably in mice" - this was in 2004ish. The treatment I was advocating (increase local neural photosensitivity to replace electrostimulation with photostimulation, increasing safety and possibly efficacy of implantable neurostimulators) is now well proven in animal models, and even developed to an on/off type switch controllable by the color of light used.
The problem with commercializing anything more complicated than a pill is the immensely profitable nature of pills. If the protein can be stabilized and delivered in a pill, then I bet somebody in some drug company is already studying the problem.
A few years after purchasing my convertible car, I read that driving fast with the top down in the sunshine can release a significant quantity of seratonin compared to driving a sedan, sedately, with the windows rolled up. I also read (in a completely unrelated article) that excess levels of seratonin can lead to involuntary clenching of the jaw muscles and grinding of the teeth. For myself, these two observations appear to work (blast home over the I-195 causeway with the top down, get a case of lock-jaw at the light on Biscayne Blvd, observed both before and after reading the articles.)
I imagine there are many things you can do, besides swallowing a pill, that have similarly profound effects on basic brain chemistry.
Interesting test (party affiliation vs allelle composition), doubt we could get government funding to run a publicly published study though. I bet there are private studies already in the works for the various "political think tanks."
So how long until the protein the long allele encodes is produced and sold as happiness drug?
A long, long time, they've got maintenance pills that do that - why would you spend money to develop a one time treatment when you can sell people daily pills for the rest of their lives instead?
Baseline happiness can arguably be negatively correlated to competitiveness, drive and success. You are naturally happy, so you don't worry about making things better for yourself or your children, you just go with the flow because things are pretty good the way they are.
Check out the decisions of people before and after they go on an SSRI. The small sample of SSRI users I know tend to fall into a complacent, ultimately self destructive, state when they are on the pills for too long (6 months or more). It's not something I've seen widely published in the literature, just personal observation shared between myself and other non-SSRI users about SSRI users we know.
I expect all too many people would simply see it as another 85 years that they HAVE to work at a job they hate.
If they haven't figured out by age 65 how to get by in the world without hating life every day, then it's time for them to move on (to the next life, if you believe such...)
A natural life? For women, its 25, for men its 35; on average. The number one natural cause of death to women is child birth. 85? The real tragedy is that murder is murder. Consider, when a person has nothing let to lose, things change.
I was thinking more to define natural lifespan as the 99.9th percentile in 1900, before medical science was making any major contributions to lifespan, but after technology had started solving problems like the abundance of food and shelter.
In music, as in life, it's not who said it first, it's who said it best (and best will always be a matter of taste... mine falls somewhere between the two artists here.)
Think of factories that do not need workers. Think of fast food places that need no one to work for them. Think of roads that do not need anyone to dig the ditch or run the paint machine.
Think of a machine that does the work of a hundred men picking seeds from cotton... a single farmer that produces food for thousands, oh, wait, got that already. People are already mostly redundant - it's called a "service based economy." Look around, then look around what was happening 200 years ago. Roads that pave themselves are small-time compared to what we've already got.
45, thrown out more cool stuff than I care to posses at the moment, and I tried to join my local occupy event but they didn't get it together until after I had to be at work.
It's more like putting your tent behind a duck blind, instead of a small wooden fence. If they don't realize it's there, they won't start scheming how to get in. With the resources available, they can get it, but they won't even try if they're not made aware it's there. Security through obscurity, has protected me and my property while living in a bad part of Miami for over 15 years.
our society doesn't like paying people who don't work, needed or not.
And, if you've lived a natural life, don't provide for yourself, and don't have anyone willing to provide for you, there's the door - 85 years is enough for anyone who hasn't managed to find a place in society. If the miracles of technology make more resources available and we can support older deadbeats, I think we should (some of the world's greatest people were deadbeats at one time or another...)
I imagine if there were a mandatory Kevorkian law in place, people who were not self-sufficient, but sufficiently loved, admired, despised (in a good way), or otherwise valued by their friends and neighbors, would be sponsored by those people to keep them around. The hard thing will be when resources are stretched too thin and you have to decide who to sponsor.
People would also have to learn how to accept when someone doesn't want sponsorship because life is actually painful for them.
Couldn't you find, when looking long enough, ANYTHING; like the complete works of Shakespeare (written in the original Klingon?).
First trick is to determine the encoding scheme. Even going for a relatively efficient 5 bit character, finding "i think, therefore i am." in a transcendental stream of bits will (statistically) take 2^120 bits. Every 2^10 is roughly equivalent to 10^3, so 2^120 is more or less 10^36. (If you want to include capital letters in your encoding scheme, that will increase your character size and scale up the search time accordingly.)
If you're content to find "ROSEBUD" that's only 2^35, or less than 35 billion digits to search. Choose your encoding and get cracking, it's in there somewhere.
Or, put another way: How can you tell? Who can verify that the method is correct? Do we even have a good independent check on the first 1 trillion digits?
Slashdot Mirror
The Core value of the Modern Republican is try to keep things the way they use to be. So in essence they are happy with the way thing were.
Man, they must have been suffering ever since the steam engine started to change things, and change has only been accelerating since then.
Baseline happiness can arguably be negatively correlated to competitiveness, drive and success.
Or not, because people who are depressed feel like it doesn't matter what they do, life's going to suck anyways.
Like I said, arguably. The morbid joke around depression treatment circles is that ECT works because you forget that your life sucks, as soon as you remember (typically in 6 months or so), you're depressed again.
Swing too far in any direction and things usually don't go well, in a population of billions there are plenty of exceptions, but mostly, it's a bad idea to get really happy (like opium users), or really depressed.
Sadly not an option for me at the moment :( This economy is not so kind to graduates.
My convertible is a 1991 Mazda Miata - decent ones go for about $1500 these days.
Consider, by way of analogy, the way that laser eye surgery was not actually crushed by the Glasses Industrial Complex. It is a comparatively 'premium' priced product, compared to a basic pair of glasses every so often(based on breakage or prescription change) for life; but it offers good immediate-cash-in-hand profits for the producer and is valued by consumers for its great longterm convenience.
Alcon, a major manufacturer of laser eye surgery machines and eyedrops, loses money on the machines, they make it all in the eyedrops.
Sounds like you didn't understand.
True. Probably due to my personal crusade history and lack of deep though this morning. I have, on occasion, advocated for development of the retroviral type treatments for much more limited / controlled treatments, and the most common reaction I got was "that's science fiction, we're at least 20 years out from even seeing that work reliably in mice" - this was in 2004ish. The treatment I was advocating (increase local neural photosensitivity to replace electrostimulation with photostimulation, increasing safety and possibly efficacy of implantable neurostimulators) is now well proven in animal models, and even developed to an on/off type switch controllable by the color of light used.
The problem with commercializing anything more complicated than a pill is the immensely profitable nature of pills. If the protein can be stabilized and delivered in a pill, then I bet somebody in some drug company is already studying the problem.
A few years after purchasing my convertible car, I read that driving fast with the top down in the sunshine can release a significant quantity of seratonin compared to driving a sedan, sedately, with the windows rolled up. I also read (in a completely unrelated article) that excess levels of seratonin can lead to involuntary clenching of the jaw muscles and grinding of the teeth. For myself, these two observations appear to work (blast home over the I-195 causeway with the top down, get a case of lock-jaw at the light on Biscayne Blvd, observed both before and after reading the articles.)
I imagine there are many things you can do, besides swallowing a pill, that have similarly profound effects on basic brain chemistry.
Interesting test (party affiliation vs allelle composition), doubt we could get government funding to run a publicly published study though. I bet there are private studies already in the works for the various "political think tanks."
So how long until the protein the long allele encodes is produced and sold as happiness drug?
A long, long time, they've got maintenance pills that do that - why would you spend money to develop a one time treatment when you can sell people daily pills for the rest of their lives instead?
Baseline happiness can arguably be negatively correlated to competitiveness, drive and success. You are naturally happy, so you don't worry about making things better for yourself or your children, you just go with the flow because things are pretty good the way they are.
Check out the decisions of people before and after they go on an SSRI. The small sample of SSRI users I know tend to fall into a complacent, ultimately self destructive, state when they are on the pills for too long (6 months or more). It's not something I've seen widely published in the literature, just personal observation shared between myself and other non-SSRI users about SSRI users we know.
Sorry, but I'm not sure how i can see this working out for the better
Better for some, worse for some, same old pile of distasteful stuff to do for most.
I expect all too many people would simply see it as another 85 years that they HAVE to work at a job they hate.
If they haven't figured out by age 65 how to get by in the world without hating life every day, then it's time for them to move on (to the next life, if you believe such...)
A little pithy for my taste, but yes, he did it well - and nice return to topic with immortality.
A natural life? For women, its 25, for men its 35; on average. The number one natural cause of death to women is child birth. 85? The real tragedy is that murder is murder. Consider, when a person has nothing let to lose, things change.
I was thinking more to define natural lifespan as the 99.9th percentile in 1900, before medical science was making any major contributions to lifespan, but after technology had started solving problems like the abundance of food and shelter.
In music, as in life, it's not who said it first, it's who said it best (and best will always be a matter of taste... mine falls somewhere between the two artists here.)
Think of factories that do not need workers. Think of fast food places that need no one to work for them. Think of roads that do not need anyone to dig the ditch or run the paint machine.
Think of a machine that does the work of a hundred men picking seeds from cotton... a single farmer that produces food for thousands, oh, wait, got that already. People are already mostly redundant - it's called a "service based economy." Look around, then look around what was happening 200 years ago. Roads that pave themselves are small-time compared to what we've already got.
45, thrown out more cool stuff than I care to posses at the moment, and I tried to join my local occupy event but they didn't get it together until after I had to be at work.
Yes, when it first came out, must admit I can't remember much beyond bad paintings of domes and worse costumes.
It's more like putting your tent behind a duck blind, instead of a small wooden fence. If they don't realize it's there, they won't start scheming how to get in. With the resources available, they can get it, but they won't even try if they're not made aware it's there. Security through obscurity, has protected me and my property while living in a bad part of Miami for over 15 years.
our society doesn't like paying people who don't work, needed or not.
And, if you've lived a natural life, don't provide for yourself, and don't have anyone willing to provide for you, there's the door - 85 years is enough for anyone who hasn't managed to find a place in society. If the miracles of technology make more resources available and we can support older deadbeats, I think we should (some of the world's greatest people were deadbeats at one time or another...)
I imagine if there were a mandatory Kevorkian law in place, people who were not self-sufficient, but sufficiently loved, admired, despised (in a good way), or otherwise valued by their friends and neighbors, would be sponsored by those people to keep them around. The hard thing will be when resources are stretched too thin and you have to decide who to sponsor.
People would also have to learn how to accept when someone doesn't want sponsorship because life is actually painful for them.
Yes, but my neighbors' 12 year old doesn't know that....
lots of people don't get life even half figured out by 50.
Or ever.
Stepping into the machine early is always a respectable option. (Quoth Def Leppard: It's better to burn out, than fade away.)
Couldn't you find, when looking long enough, ANYTHING; like the complete works of Shakespeare (written in the original Klingon?).
First trick is to determine the encoding scheme. Even going for a relatively efficient 5 bit character, finding "i think, therefore i am." in a transcendental stream of bits will (statistically) take 2^120 bits. Every 2^10 is roughly equivalent to 10^3, so 2^120 is more or less 10^36. (If you want to include capital letters in your encoding scheme, that will increase your character size and scale up the search time accordingly.)
If you're content to find "ROSEBUD" that's only 2^35, or less than 35 billion digits to search. Choose your encoding and get cracking, it's in there somewhere.
>All that CO2 for nothing!
All those digits were calculated with Occupy San Fran bicycle-powered laptops, you insensitive clod!
How many cans of beans were consumed by those bicycle powering homo-sapiens? I doubt their internal microbial colonies are carbon sequestering.
Or, put another way: How can you tell? Who can verify that the method is correct? Do we even have a good independent check on the first 1 trillion digits?