... was to treat people as allies right from the get-go. No need to be confrontational just to stake your claim, no need to be ingratiating, no need to be anything but yourself. In every environment I've been in, this strategy has worked wonders for me. The few hostile people who are to be found in any environment will generally be vastly outnumbered by people who are either actively friendly or just want to avoid drama, and making allies out of the majority of people will tend to make it very, very difficult for people who will try to make your life hell just because you're a minority. Making nice (not doormat - just nice) has the other benefit of not alienating people the way that trying too hard does.
There is a middle ground. Self-defense. Being an absolute pacifist is not a winning strategy as is being an absolute aggressor. Unless one can be 100% sure of being able to defeat any possible opponent, now or in the future, or 100% sure of being able to hide your nature from any other outside organizations.
An advanced civilization that went around trying to conquer/destroy/assault other civilizations for whatever reason would very quickly find itself a target of other advanced civilizations if only so that those other races could ensure their survival by taking out a hyper-aggressive race that might try to assault them in the future.
It would seem to me that the best policy would be to walk softly and carry a big stick. Long term survival is MUCH more likely if a civilization treads the middle ground between "doormat" and "belligerent asshole." Even if other races have wildly different philosophies and world views, it would seem like being a genocidal asshole would be extremely bad.
Azeroth was poorly itemized. Those late-game instances were pretty poorly done in terms of rewards and so on. TBC has actually been done really well, and thus there would be less of a jump between the quality of level 70 items from TBC and level 71 items in the new expansion - at least, I would hope!
TBC *needed* to give some really kick-ass stuff because unless you were a hard-core raider, the odds of your having anything actually decent were pretty slim. TBC acted as a way to clean the slate. In the next expansion, I am willing to bet that high-end raiding gear will not instantly be replaced within 30 seconds of hitting Northrend - my guess is it'll last until about level 73-75 or so before being replaced. So, people like me - super casual, don't do much instancing at all - we'll get some upgrades right away, but still nothing that'll compare to what the hard-core people have just yet.
Except you can't really quest all the way from 1 to 70. From 58-70, yes. From 1-20, yes. But 20-58 is annoying. There just aren't enough quests - you *have* to grind (either random mobs or through instances) in order to get from 20-58. If they added a whole bunch of new quests in that level range, quests that eliminated the need to spend 2-3 levels killing stuff for no reason or running the same instance over and over, that would be great. Heck, if they just made some of the existing quest hubs less stupidly distant from each other, that'd be great too - having to spend 20-30 minutes travelling across various zones 2-3 times per level just so you can get more quests (or quests that aren't way too difficult) is annoying, not fun, and doesn't do anything productive (unless you count annoying casual players productive).
I want to be able to log in and spend 30-60 minutes playing, not sitting on a stupid bird for half my play-time so I can go spend 5 minutes completing a quest only to have to spend another 10-15 minutes running or flying to another quest. In Outlands they did it just right - there's not a lot of pointless travel and the grinding that is necessary is at least rolled into quests.
Okay, now I get you - and yeah, that does suck, but that's "difficult," not "FORBIDDEN."
I live in the US, and have pretty good insurance, but I needed a treatment where, even with my insurance, it would have cost over $60,000 out of pocket. Instead I went overseas and got equally solid treatment (and a MUCH more congenial recuperative environment as well as VASTLY superior nursing care once I'd left the hospital) that wound up costing a bit under $20,000 including air-fare and accomodations etc. Medical tourism might be the way to go for your mother - either to the US if you can afford it or somewhere with more sane prices if not.
We can barely archive it for 20 years never mind 100 billion.
Incorrect. We can barely archive it for 20 years in a format that is easily accessible digitally.
The human race has archived things over periods spanning thousands of years on clay tablets and stone carvings. If we aren't concerned with fast fast fast access to all that data - if we put the burden of transforming slow-access archived data to fast-access live storage on those hypothetical aliens 100 billion years from now - we could put things out there right now that would last for quite some time, and with enough redundancy and luck, 100 billion years.
Put the burden of putting things from slow but reliable archival storage into fast but fragile live storage on the people downstream. We could create and launch hundreds/thousands/millions/metricshittons (depending on how easy they were to make and when we started making them) of REAL hard copies of our data into space. Follow it up with a very high power broadcast every year/decade/century (or daily, if we have a surplus of power, which we very well could 1000 years from now).
The problem would be figuring out how to give the future people a key to understanding it. But preserving the info? That's easy if you give up the notion of live storage.
I'm not sure how that equates to forbidding you from paying for your mother's health care. You said you were forbidden - which would mean to me that if you did do it (or tried to) you'd be breaking the law or otherwise subject to some kind of penalties. What are those penalties?
I'm curious about this - what do you mean you are forbidden from helping her? What consequences would there be for her and for you if she were to ask to be taken off the waiting list and you were to pay for her to go to a private clinic? I don't know anything about the Canadian system other than the broad strokes.
For the most part, I agree with you - I'm a big fan of coming up with market driven ways to solve problems. Honestly, I don't care who sorts the trash as long as it gets sorted and dealt with in a much more long-term-viable way than it currently is.
I also agree that it really isn't just a few random assholes ruining it for everyone - but I do think that sorting requirements, and actually having the waste companies follow through with recycling (in Chicago we have recycling programs, but they actually just take all the sorted trash and put it in the same piles, because, uh, blue bags are pretty, I guess) will get rid of much of the waste. After that, moderate fines will get rid of the majority of the people who still don't want to sort, and finally some kind of extreme fine or community service will deal with the harder-core elements who just refuse to do it. So, there are two parts of the problem - getting people to sort in the first place and then dealing with the ones who won't.
Fines that are trivial - $1.50 per bag - are just going to encourage the problem. What about fines that are punitive? $10 a bag would get my attention. Or $10 per bag up to a limit and then $100 per bag after that. If someone is willing to pay a $10-100 premium per excess or improperly sorted bag of trash, fuck it - let 'em! The fines would cover the cost of having someone sort it. Or spark a business where some enterprising soul could be paid to sort people with more money than time's trash.
Or hit them where it really hurts: low fines for the first 10 bags, but then after that each extra bag = 1 hour of community service sorting other people's trash. I'm pretty sure that an hour of sorting someone's diaper pail would be an effective deterrent. Most of the people who will gladly pay a fine because they think it's cost effective will DEFINITELY balk at the community service obligation.
Or public shaming: post the contents of abuser's trash on the web.
Or... well, any number of things. I imagine there are all kinds of creative solutions out there. My point was not to present some perfect "This is how it should work, and all possible contingencies are answered" comment, it was to say "Just fining them lightly isn't going to do much but encourage it, so let's come up with ways to make reducing waste/sorting trash/being responsible a better option than dealing with the consequences of failing to do so."
Ideally, we'd look for solutions that would get people to be responsible because they like the results of being responsible. Unfortunately, the people that cause problems in the first place aren't likely to get to that point, so finding solutions that make assholes dread the alternative is not a bad idea.
I'd actually heard it from a Community Psychology professor who was talking about unintended consequences when addressing social issues. He probably got it from Freakonomics - he was big on encouraging lightweight but interesting out-of-class readings.
The problem with these sorts of things is that the people who really contribute to the problem will just look at the fee as a way of alleviating their guilt.
True story:
A day-care center was having a real problem with parents arriving late (2-3 hours after they were supposed to) to pick up their kids. So someone at the day-care center had the bright idea of charging $10 per incident if a parent was more than 30 minutes late. Guess what happened? MORE parents showed up late and paid the $10! They felt like the $10 fine made it OK and they stopped trying as hard to avoid being late.
Eventually the problem got solved by making it a 3-strike policy: if you're more than 30 minutes late 3 times you have to find another place to send your kids. They really worked up the guilt angle on this, too - "You know, moving your child to another day-care provider is going to be incredibly disruptive for them" and the inconvenience angle - "You're already struggling to meet your schedule, do you really want to have to take the time to find another place for your child?" Once they instituted that policy, lateness dropped dramatically.
So, I would say that the way to handle people who overproduce trash or don't sort it isn't to just charge them some minimal fine (sorry, but $1.50 so I don't have to fuck around with sorting my garbage? I'm lazy enough to think that's a deal, and I'm sure I'm not the only one). The way to handle it is to make it less convenient or attractive to just make extra trash/not sort it than the other option. I don't have anything specific in mind, but maybe something along the lines of an individual trash allotment, which, if you exceed it, requires that you document the contents of the trash that's exceeding it and pay a moderate fine. If you don't document it you pay a not-so-moderate fine. Make it a bigger pain in the ass to not sort/reduce waste and people will take the easier way. Make it just a matter of throwing a fairly trivial amount of money at a problem, and the biggest problem people will keep their old habits.
And I don't spend any time wondering about either of those explanations. What about that is so difficult for you to understand?
Unless I have some reason to think any particular thing is going to be relevant, I don't bother examining it as a factor. Let me give you a simple example since this seems so difficult for you to get:
I am at a hotel. When I wake up and go outside the door, I see a copy of the NYT hanging in a bag on my door knob. Where did it come from?
Well, the immediate answer I would give is "Probably someone from the hotel staff put it there." Why? Because, in my experience of the world, that is something that happens. I don't go into a tizzy wondering about every possible solution - I go with what, in my experience, is most probable.
But let's pretend that I want to KNOW, not just suspect the answer, because for some reason this is very important to me. So I contact the hotel. And they say that they don't offer that service. Then I might contact the local distributor of the NYT and see. But pretend they, too, say no. So I might contact other likely suspects, in decreasing orde of my estimate of the probability. If, after exhausting all currently existing possibilities that I know about or am able to learn about, I might then posit some new factor, previously unknown.
Now, here's the kicker: If, at any point in that investigation before I learn the actual cause, I were to be asked if it was possible that a chocolate teapot from space magiced up the newspaper, I would say "Sure." But I would still continue to investigate other, more probable (based on my sense of probability) causes first. Simply acknowledging the possibility of something does not then make it as probable as all other options.
Again - this seems to be pretty obvious and straightforward to me. I suspect that you're being obtuse intentionally to make a point, so how about you just make your point directly?
You are basing your comment off of a false assumption: that I take all possible explanations as being equally likely and give them each the same amount of attention and consideration. I don't.
I can cheerfully admit that anything anyone says to me is *possibly* true, but I'm not an idiot so I don't get stuck on the search for chocolate teapots. Just because two things may both be *possible* doesn't mean that they are both as *probable*. I personally find it possible - but very, very improbable - that God exists, and because of the low probability I assign to the existence of God, I don't waste a lot of time pondering "God did it" as a likely cause for various phenomena.
Is the concept of relative levels of probability and appropriate distribution of resources really THAT difficult for you to understand, or were you intentionally being obtuse?
It's because they are usually throwing that out there after a less than exhaustive search, hell, even after a less than cursory search.
The amount of actual searching for God has been even less, relative to the size and lifespan of the universe, than a search for shipwrecks in a 1x1 centimeter square of the Pacific. Even more, most of it has been limited to thought experiments and not even any kind of actual search with any kind of rigor (however that would actually work). So saying that because there's no evidence for God is a strong sign that God doesn't exist is really pretty premature, and arrogantly assumes that we've done a much deeper search than we actually have. And this applies to anything - not just God. "Oh, we haven't figured out how to cure cancer yet, therefore we never will." "All attempts at cloning humans have had problems, therefore it'll never happen." "Nobody has ever lived past 150 years of age, therefore no one ever will." The amount of solution space searched in these particular cases may *seem* large to an individual, but that isn't the scale that matters.
Now, don't get me wrong - I'm NOT saying that we should look for God. I don't care, and I don't think God is necessary. The only time I'd advocate actually looking for God is if there were some theory in which it seemed like God was a requirement for that theory to be true and if we had some way that seemed reasonable to think would actually turn up evidence. As of yet, this hasn't happened - despite the best efforts of the ID people to claim bananas and peanut butter are proof of God. All I am saying is that if we're going to use an absence of evidence to say God doesn't exist, then it should at least be after an exhaustive search, whatever that entails. Me, I just cut out the need for that search by using other reasons to not need to worry about this whole God thing.
How much of the univese has been scanned for God? What techniques have been used? I daresay that SETI has been more exhaustive than the SGE, by any scientific metric. You might say that the Search for God's Existence is unimportant, but let me ask you this: You claim that people are willing to kill you over a disagreement about God; how many people are willing to kill you over a disagreement about whether or not ET exists? Surely, by your own argument that people willing to kill you makes something important should apply here?
My problem with your comments is that you're attempting to come from the angle of science, but you are absolutely wrongheaded with your statement that absence of evidence is evidence of absence, ESPECIALLY given that the search to date has been rather far from exhaustive. It would be like saying "Hey, I have a building with 500,000 rooms, and I thought about looking in one of those rooms for something, but since just thinking about it didn't find the thing, it obviously isn't in the building at all."
What's funny is that I personally could give a shit about whether or not God exists, am very much into SETI, and generally hold the view that God probably doesn't exist while ET probably does, despite there being roughly the same amount of evidence for both (none) - so in a way, I agree with you on some things. You responded to someone asking for empirical evidence with a claim that was based on very non-empirical evidence - which is exactly the same tactic the ID people use when trying to defend ID when people call it nonsense.
It's okay to just say, "In my gut I don't believe that God exists." There's no shame in not being certain. But there should be a lot of shame attached to trying to make it seem like there's real evidence when there is none, just so you can support your gut instinct. That's not science, it's sophistry.
Those constraints don't apply to the supreme being worshiped by the tribes of Abraham, ergo it would be surprising if he didn't pay attention to everything. And play Ski-ball at the same time.
Yeah. He stole my bonus when I was at the arcade, too - I was so going to get the 20,000 tickets for a perfect game and then whoosh, bearded old guy comes in, summons a host of angels and they just drop the balls in for Him.
God does play dice with the universe, and even worse, the He cheats.
Actually, I have fat fingers - I have never been able to pick my nose. Seriously, I have a pair of tweezers I keep around purely for the purpose of getting the hardened nose-goblins out of there during allergy season. Clearly we live in a godless universe or one in which God hates me.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Someone who actually understood what empirical evidence was would understand that.
Is 10,000 years of searching for something and failing to find it compelling? Sure. Personally, I'm not persuaded that there is a God or Gods, and I'd say that the lack of evidence is certainly a component of that. However I still am intellectually honest enough to admit that it isn't 100% positive proof.
How do I deal with this uncertainty? By pretty much ignoring the question of God/Gods except when it has a direct impact on my life. One such way that it impacts my life is in our educational system - I'm opposed to pseudo-science being taught in schools. Pseudo-science that includes ID and nonsense like that, but also that includes concepts like "And despite what some people will tell you, total lack of evidence for the existence of something, despite 10,000 years of continual searching, is pretty good evidence that the thing does not exist." It's not good evidence that the thing does not exist - it's good evidence that whatever means we have been using to look for it, if it does exist, are not sufficient to detect it. There's a difference there, and it's not a terribly subtle one.
Also, I should note that I find your comment ironic, considering your username.
You're describing an agnostic - someone who is not certain of the existence of God or Gods (though they may be ALMOST certain of it, based on available evidence or the lack thereof).
An atheist is making a positive statement that they do not believe in God or Gods, period. Atheism is as much a belief as theism - it's a belief that the person in question *knows* the truth about the existence of God or Gods.
I don't think that it is possible to know the truth, for certain, about the non-existence of God or Gods. It isn't possible to prove a negative in the case of God. God, if one exists, would by definition have powers that violate any logical framework we can devise, and thus would be perfectly able to handle the paradox of existing in a universe where it's possible to prove that God does not exist. God is beyond paradox, by definition. So, for someone to say that God or Gods cannot and do not exist - true atheism - they are stating a belief. A belief based, ironically, on faith that there's no validity to the other guy's faith.
Personally, I'm an apatheist/agnostic. I'm not being glib - but I really don't know if God or Gods exist, and even if they did and could prove it, I still wouldn't care to worship them. I'm pretty sure that God or Gods don't exist in any ways that matter outside of being concepts used by some human beings for various purposes. I have no evidence for the existence of God or Gods, and as explained above, it's not possible for any real evidence for the non-existence of God or Gods, so I just choose to leave the question open as being more or less irrelevant. If something changes - if there were to be discovered some kind of irrefutable proof that God or Gods existed, that would be interesting, but I still don't know that I'd feel compelled to worship them or do what they say.
I will say that I've always found the poles in these discussions to be interesting. Absolute theists and absolute atheists alike are convinced that their understanding about God or Gods is the only correct one and that anyone who disagrees with them is an awful, pathetic creature that's ruining things for everyone else. Same behavior, slightly different window-dressing.
For what it's worth, I think that the real problem isn't theist vs. atheist, it's true believers (of whatever sort) vs. skeptics.
Next time you might want to choose examples that *your* science actually has some real victories in... you know like has their 'science' built an iPhone?
No, but their science has taught some to transcend the desire for an iPhone. Everyone knows that the Enlightened One prefers the Helio Ocean's dual slider design.
I never said I've never asked a stupid question. However, I will say that I've always made every effort to find the answer on my own first unless it was incredibly convenient - like, I had a question and a person who'd know the answer was literally standing next to me.
This? This is a dumb question and it's a shallow question, and it's a question that has answers that should be obvious to anyone at that level in life.
A good question would have been: "Oh, hey, here's a problem I ran into at school - how do other people handle wanting to be cash only when the world is increasingly focused on credit and bank accounts?" That could have lead to an interesting discussion on privacy, anonymity, etc. Stuff that would be good fodder here.
But he didn't ask that question. His question was, "I'm a college student who is too stupid to figure out that I can get a money order or cashier's check to pay for something where they refuse to take cash. Rather than try any of the solutions that should be obvious to someone who is a college student - such as the aforementioned money order/cashier's check or getting in touch with a supervisor or seeing if I could give someone else the money and have them pay it, I choose instead to ask people on the Internet. What should I do?"
If someone is really that helpless and a college student, then they have issues far surpassing a distrust of banks, and I stand by my statement that they will be steamrolled by life.
Standard, modular batteries that can be easily swapped out.
Drive up, back into a device that'll open your car, pull out the spent battery, check the power on it, and pop in a freshly charged battery, charging you only for the difference between the fresh battery and the one you turned in.
On top of that, the question itself is fucking stupid.
"Dear Slashdot - I'm having trouble opening a jar of pickles. WHAT DO I DO?!"
"Dear Slashdot - my mom won't let me have boys over unless we stay in the living room. Any advice?"
I mean, the guy is in college and rather than solve a trivial problem on his own, he needs to ask the fucking Internet?!
Here's my helpful suggestion to the person asking the original question: Just give up. Seriously. If you can't figure out how to do something simple like this on your own, the rest of life is going to steamroll you.
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... was to treat people as allies right from the get-go. No need to be confrontational just to stake your claim, no need to be ingratiating, no need to be anything but yourself. In every environment I've been in, this strategy has worked wonders for me. The few hostile people who are to be found in any environment will generally be vastly outnumbered by people who are either actively friendly or just want to avoid drama, and making allies out of the majority of people will tend to make it very, very difficult for people who will try to make your life hell just because you're a minority. Making nice (not doormat - just nice) has the other benefit of not alienating people the way that trying too hard does.
There is a middle ground. Self-defense. Being an absolute pacifist is not a winning strategy as is being an absolute aggressor. Unless one can be 100% sure of being able to defeat any possible opponent, now or in the future, or 100% sure of being able to hide your nature from any other outside organizations.
An advanced civilization that went around trying to conquer/destroy/assault other civilizations for whatever reason would very quickly find itself a target of other advanced civilizations if only so that those other races could ensure their survival by taking out a hyper-aggressive race that might try to assault them in the future.
It would seem to me that the best policy would be to walk softly and carry a big stick. Long term survival is MUCH more likely if a civilization treads the middle ground between "doormat" and "belligerent asshole." Even if other races have wildly different philosophies and world views, it would seem like being a genocidal asshole would be extremely bad.
You're missing something tho -
Azeroth was poorly itemized. Those late-game instances were pretty poorly done in terms of rewards and so on. TBC has actually been done really well, and thus there would be less of a jump between the quality of level 70 items from TBC and level 71 items in the new expansion - at least, I would hope!
TBC *needed* to give some really kick-ass stuff because unless you were a hard-core raider, the odds of your having anything actually decent were pretty slim. TBC acted as a way to clean the slate. In the next expansion, I am willing to bet that high-end raiding gear will not instantly be replaced within 30 seconds of hitting Northrend - my guess is it'll last until about level 73-75 or so before being replaced. So, people like me - super casual, don't do much instancing at all - we'll get some upgrades right away, but still nothing that'll compare to what the hard-core people have just yet.
Except you can't really quest all the way from 1 to 70. From 58-70, yes. From 1-20, yes. But 20-58 is annoying. There just aren't enough quests - you *have* to grind (either random mobs or through instances) in order to get from 20-58. If they added a whole bunch of new quests in that level range, quests that eliminated the need to spend 2-3 levels killing stuff for no reason or running the same instance over and over, that would be great. Heck, if they just made some of the existing quest hubs less stupidly distant from each other, that'd be great too - having to spend 20-30 minutes travelling across various zones 2-3 times per level just so you can get more quests (or quests that aren't way too difficult) is annoying, not fun, and doesn't do anything productive (unless you count annoying casual players productive).
I want to be able to log in and spend 30-60 minutes playing, not sitting on a stupid bird for half my play-time so I can go spend 5 minutes completing a quest only to have to spend another 10-15 minutes running or flying to another quest. In Outlands they did it just right - there's not a lot of pointless travel and the grinding that is necessary is at least rolled into quests.
Okay, now I get you - and yeah, that does suck, but that's "difficult," not "FORBIDDEN."
I live in the US, and have pretty good insurance, but I needed a treatment where, even with my insurance, it would have cost over $60,000 out of pocket. Instead I went overseas and got equally solid treatment (and a MUCH more congenial recuperative environment as well as VASTLY superior nursing care once I'd left the hospital) that wound up costing a bit under $20,000 including air-fare and accomodations etc. Medical tourism might be the way to go for your mother - either to the US if you can afford it or somewhere with more sane prices if not.
We can barely archive it for 20 years never mind 100 billion.
Incorrect. We can barely archive it for 20 years in a format that is easily accessible digitally.
The human race has archived things over periods spanning thousands of years on clay tablets and stone carvings. If we aren't concerned with fast fast fast access to all that data - if we put the burden of transforming slow-access archived data to fast-access live storage on those hypothetical aliens 100 billion years from now - we could put things out there right now that would last for quite some time, and with enough redundancy and luck, 100 billion years.
Put the burden of putting things from slow but reliable archival storage into fast but fragile live storage on the people downstream. We could create and launch hundreds/thousands/millions/metricshittons (depending on how easy they were to make and when we started making them) of REAL hard copies of our data into space. Follow it up with a very high power broadcast every year/decade/century (or daily, if we have a surplus of power, which we very well could 1000 years from now).
The problem would be figuring out how to give the future people a key to understanding it. But preserving the info? That's easy if you give up the notion of live storage.
I'm not sure how that equates to forbidding you from paying for your mother's health care. You said you were forbidden - which would mean to me that if you did do it (or tried to) you'd be breaking the law or otherwise subject to some kind of penalties. What are those penalties?
I'm curious about this - what do you mean you are forbidden from helping her? What consequences would there be for her and for you if she were to ask to be taken off the waiting list and you were to pay for her to go to a private clinic? I don't know anything about the Canadian system other than the broad strokes.
For the most part, I agree with you - I'm a big fan of coming up with market driven ways to solve problems. Honestly, I don't care who sorts the trash as long as it gets sorted and dealt with in a much more long-term-viable way than it currently is.
I also agree that it really isn't just a few random assholes ruining it for everyone - but I do think that sorting requirements, and actually having the waste companies follow through with recycling (in Chicago we have recycling programs, but they actually just take all the sorted trash and put it in the same piles, because, uh, blue bags are pretty, I guess) will get rid of much of the waste. After that, moderate fines will get rid of the majority of the people who still don't want to sort, and finally some kind of extreme fine or community service will deal with the harder-core elements who just refuse to do it. So, there are two parts of the problem - getting people to sort in the first place and then dealing with the ones who won't.
I'll take a look at that book.
Fines that are trivial - $1.50 per bag - are just going to encourage the problem. What about fines that are punitive? $10 a bag would get my attention. Or $10 per bag up to a limit and then $100 per bag after that. If someone is willing to pay a $10-100 premium per excess or improperly sorted bag of trash, fuck it - let 'em! The fines would cover the cost of having someone sort it. Or spark a business where some enterprising soul could be paid to sort people with more money than time's trash.
Or hit them where it really hurts: low fines for the first 10 bags, but then after that each extra bag = 1 hour of community service sorting other people's trash. I'm pretty sure that an hour of sorting someone's diaper pail would be an effective deterrent. Most of the people who will gladly pay a fine because they think it's cost effective will DEFINITELY balk at the community service obligation.
Or public shaming: post the contents of abuser's trash on the web.
Or... well, any number of things. I imagine there are all kinds of creative solutions out there. My point was not to present some perfect "This is how it should work, and all possible contingencies are answered" comment, it was to say "Just fining them lightly isn't going to do much but encourage it, so let's come up with ways to make reducing waste/sorting trash/being responsible a better option than dealing with the consequences of failing to do so."
Ideally, we'd look for solutions that would get people to be responsible because they like the results of being responsible. Unfortunately, the people that cause problems in the first place aren't likely to get to that point, so finding solutions that make assholes dread the alternative is not a bad idea.
I'd actually heard it from a Community Psychology professor who was talking about unintended consequences when addressing social issues. He probably got it from Freakonomics - he was big on encouraging lightweight but interesting out-of-class readings.
I never said "deny them waste removal."
I did say "make it a big pain in the ass so that not following the rules is a less attractive option."
The problem with these sorts of things is that the people who really contribute to the problem will just look at the fee as a way of alleviating their guilt.
True story:
A day-care center was having a real problem with parents arriving late (2-3 hours after they were supposed to) to pick up their kids. So someone at the day-care center had the bright idea of charging $10 per incident if a parent was more than 30 minutes late. Guess what happened? MORE parents showed up late and paid the $10! They felt like the $10 fine made it OK and they stopped trying as hard to avoid being late.
Eventually the problem got solved by making it a 3-strike policy: if you're more than 30 minutes late 3 times you have to find another place to send your kids. They really worked up the guilt angle on this, too - "You know, moving your child to another day-care provider is going to be incredibly disruptive for them" and the inconvenience angle - "You're already struggling to meet your schedule, do you really want to have to take the time to find another place for your child?" Once they instituted that policy, lateness dropped dramatically.
So, I would say that the way to handle people who overproduce trash or don't sort it isn't to just charge them some minimal fine (sorry, but $1.50 so I don't have to fuck around with sorting my garbage? I'm lazy enough to think that's a deal, and I'm sure I'm not the only one). The way to handle it is to make it less convenient or attractive to just make extra trash/not sort it than the other option. I don't have anything specific in mind, but maybe something along the lines of an individual trash allotment, which, if you exceed it, requires that you document the contents of the trash that's exceeding it and pay a moderate fine. If you don't document it you pay a not-so-moderate fine. Make it a bigger pain in the ass to not sort/reduce waste and people will take the easier way. Make it just a matter of throwing a fairly trivial amount of money at a problem, and the biggest problem people will keep their old habits.
And I don't spend any time wondering about either of those explanations. What about that is so difficult for you to understand?
Unless I have some reason to think any particular thing is going to be relevant, I don't bother examining it as a factor. Let me give you a simple example since this seems so difficult for you to get:
I am at a hotel. When I wake up and go outside the door, I see a copy of the NYT hanging in a bag on my door knob. Where did it come from?
Well, the immediate answer I would give is "Probably someone from the hotel staff put it there." Why? Because, in my experience of the world, that is something that happens. I don't go into a tizzy wondering about every possible solution - I go with what, in my experience, is most probable.
But let's pretend that I want to KNOW, not just suspect the answer, because for some reason this is very important to me. So I contact the hotel. And they say that they don't offer that service. Then I might contact the local distributor of the NYT and see. But pretend they, too, say no. So I might contact other likely suspects, in decreasing orde of my estimate of the probability. If, after exhausting all currently existing possibilities that I know about or am able to learn about, I might then posit some new factor, previously unknown.
Now, here's the kicker: If, at any point in that investigation before I learn the actual cause, I were to be asked if it was possible that a chocolate teapot from space magiced up the newspaper, I would say "Sure." But I would still continue to investigate other, more probable (based on my sense of probability) causes first. Simply acknowledging the possibility of something does not then make it as probable as all other options.
Again - this seems to be pretty obvious and straightforward to me. I suspect that you're being obtuse intentionally to make a point, so how about you just make your point directly?
You are basing your comment off of a false assumption: that I take all possible explanations as being equally likely and give them each the same amount of attention and consideration. I don't.
I can cheerfully admit that anything anyone says to me is *possibly* true, but I'm not an idiot so I don't get stuck on the search for chocolate teapots. Just because two things may both be *possible* doesn't mean that they are both as *probable*. I personally find it possible - but very, very improbable - that God exists, and because of the low probability I assign to the existence of God, I don't waste a lot of time pondering "God did it" as a likely cause for various phenomena.
Is the concept of relative levels of probability and appropriate distribution of resources really THAT difficult for you to understand, or were you intentionally being obtuse?
It's because they are usually throwing that out there after a less than exhaustive search, hell, even after a less than cursory search.
The amount of actual searching for God has been even less, relative to the size and lifespan of the universe, than a search for shipwrecks in a 1x1 centimeter square of the Pacific. Even more, most of it has been limited to thought experiments and not even any kind of actual search with any kind of rigor (however that would actually work). So saying that because there's no evidence for God is a strong sign that God doesn't exist is really pretty premature, and arrogantly assumes that we've done a much deeper search than we actually have. And this applies to anything - not just God. "Oh, we haven't figured out how to cure cancer yet, therefore we never will." "All attempts at cloning humans have had problems, therefore it'll never happen." "Nobody has ever lived past 150 years of age, therefore no one ever will." The amount of solution space searched in these particular cases may *seem* large to an individual, but that isn't the scale that matters.
Now, don't get me wrong - I'm NOT saying that we should look for God. I don't care, and I don't think God is necessary. The only time I'd advocate actually looking for God is if there were some theory in which it seemed like God was a requirement for that theory to be true and if we had some way that seemed reasonable to think would actually turn up evidence. As of yet, this hasn't happened - despite the best efforts of the ID people to claim bananas and peanut butter are proof of God. All I am saying is that if we're going to use an absence of evidence to say God doesn't exist, then it should at least be after an exhaustive search, whatever that entails. Me, I just cut out the need for that search by using other reasons to not need to worry about this whole God thing.
How much of the univese has been scanned for God? What techniques have been used? I daresay that SETI has been more exhaustive than the SGE, by any scientific metric. You might say that the Search for God's Existence is unimportant, but let me ask you this: You claim that people are willing to kill you over a disagreement about God; how many people are willing to kill you over a disagreement about whether or not ET exists? Surely, by your own argument that people willing to kill you makes something important should apply here?
My problem with your comments is that you're attempting to come from the angle of science, but you are absolutely wrongheaded with your statement that absence of evidence is evidence of absence, ESPECIALLY given that the search to date has been rather far from exhaustive. It would be like saying "Hey, I have a building with 500,000 rooms, and I thought about looking in one of those rooms for something, but since just thinking about it didn't find the thing, it obviously isn't in the building at all."
What's funny is that I personally could give a shit about whether or not God exists, am very much into SETI, and generally hold the view that God probably doesn't exist while ET probably does, despite there being roughly the same amount of evidence for both (none) - so in a way, I agree with you on some things. You responded to someone asking for empirical evidence with a claim that was based on very non-empirical evidence - which is exactly the same tactic the ID people use when trying to defend ID when people call it nonsense.
It's okay to just say, "In my gut I don't believe that God exists." There's no shame in not being certain. But there should be a lot of shame attached to trying to make it seem like there's real evidence when there is none, just so you can support your gut instinct. That's not science, it's sophistry.
Those constraints don't apply to the supreme being worshiped by the tribes of Abraham, ergo it would be surprising if he didn't pay attention to everything. And play Ski-ball at the same time.
Yeah. He stole my bonus when I was at the arcade, too - I was so going to get the 20,000 tickets for a perfect game and then whoosh, bearded old guy comes in, summons a host of angels and they just drop the balls in for Him.
God does play dice with the universe, and even worse, the He cheats.
Actually, I have fat fingers - I have never been able to pick my nose. Seriously, I have a pair of tweezers I keep around purely for the purpose of getting the hardened nose-goblins out of there during allergy season. Clearly we live in a godless universe or one in which God hates me.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Someone who actually understood what empirical evidence was would understand that.
Is 10,000 years of searching for something and failing to find it compelling? Sure. Personally, I'm not persuaded that there is a God or Gods, and I'd say that the lack of evidence is certainly a component of that. However I still am intellectually honest enough to admit that it isn't 100% positive proof.
How do I deal with this uncertainty? By pretty much ignoring the question of God/Gods except when it has a direct impact on my life. One such way that it impacts my life is in our educational system - I'm opposed to pseudo-science being taught in schools. Pseudo-science that includes ID and nonsense like that, but also that includes concepts like "And despite what some people will tell you, total lack of evidence for the existence of something, despite 10,000 years of continual searching, is pretty good evidence that the thing does not exist." It's not good evidence that the thing does not exist - it's good evidence that whatever means we have been using to look for it, if it does exist, are not sufficient to detect it. There's a difference there, and it's not a terribly subtle one.
Also, I should note that I find your comment ironic, considering your username.
I'm going to nit-pick here.
You're describing an agnostic - someone who is not certain of the existence of God or Gods (though they may be ALMOST certain of it, based on available evidence or the lack thereof).
An atheist is making a positive statement that they do not believe in God or Gods, period. Atheism is as much a belief as theism - it's a belief that the person in question *knows* the truth about the existence of God or Gods.
I don't think that it is possible to know the truth, for certain, about the non-existence of God or Gods. It isn't possible to prove a negative in the case of God. God, if one exists, would by definition have powers that violate any logical framework we can devise, and thus would be perfectly able to handle the paradox of existing in a universe where it's possible to prove that God does not exist. God is beyond paradox, by definition. So, for someone to say that God or Gods cannot and do not exist - true atheism - they are stating a belief. A belief based, ironically, on faith that there's no validity to the other guy's faith.
Personally, I'm an apatheist/agnostic. I'm not being glib - but I really don't know if God or Gods exist, and even if they did and could prove it, I still wouldn't care to worship them. I'm pretty sure that God or Gods don't exist in any ways that matter outside of being concepts used by some human beings for various purposes. I have no evidence for the existence of God or Gods, and as explained above, it's not possible for any real evidence for the non-existence of God or Gods, so I just choose to leave the question open as being more or less irrelevant. If something changes - if there were to be discovered some kind of irrefutable proof that God or Gods existed, that would be interesting, but I still don't know that I'd feel compelled to worship them or do what they say.
I will say that I've always found the poles in these discussions to be interesting. Absolute theists and absolute atheists alike are convinced that their understanding about God or Gods is the only correct one and that anyone who disagrees with them is an awful, pathetic creature that's ruining things for everyone else. Same behavior, slightly different window-dressing.
For what it's worth, I think that the real problem isn't theist vs. atheist, it's true believers (of whatever sort) vs. skeptics.
Next time you might want to choose examples that *your* science actually has some real victories in... you know like has their 'science' built an iPhone?
No, but their science has taught some to transcend the desire for an iPhone. Everyone knows that the Enlightened One prefers the Helio Ocean's dual slider design.
I never said I've never asked a stupid question. However, I will say that I've always made every effort to find the answer on my own first unless it was incredibly convenient - like, I had a question and a person who'd know the answer was literally standing next to me.
This? This is a dumb question and it's a shallow question, and it's a question that has answers that should be obvious to anyone at that level in life.
A good question would have been: "Oh, hey, here's a problem I ran into at school - how do other people handle wanting to be cash only when the world is increasingly focused on credit and bank accounts?" That could have lead to an interesting discussion on privacy, anonymity, etc. Stuff that would be good fodder here.
But he didn't ask that question. His question was, "I'm a college student who is too stupid to figure out that I can get a money order or cashier's check to pay for something where they refuse to take cash. Rather than try any of the solutions that should be obvious to someone who is a college student - such as the aforementioned money order/cashier's check or getting in touch with a supervisor or seeing if I could give someone else the money and have them pay it, I choose instead to ask people on the Internet. What should I do?"
If someone is really that helpless and a college student, then they have issues far surpassing a distrust of banks, and I stand by my statement that they will be steamrolled by life.
Easy fix:
Standard, modular batteries that can be easily swapped out.
Drive up, back into a device that'll open your car, pull out the spent battery, check the power on it, and pop in a freshly charged battery, charging you only for the difference between the fresh battery and the one you turned in.
On top of that, the question itself is fucking stupid.
"Dear Slashdot - I'm having trouble opening a jar of pickles. WHAT DO I DO?!"
"Dear Slashdot - my mom won't let me have boys over unless we stay in the living room. Any advice?"
I mean, the guy is in college and rather than solve a trivial problem on his own, he needs to ask the fucking Internet?!
Here's my helpful suggestion to the person asking the original question: Just give up. Seriously. If you can't figure out how to do something simple like this on your own, the rest of life is going to steamroll you.