And the lists go on. I'm surrounded by warnings that if a good actions puts yourself at risk, then the action is BAD. And I weep a little...
Fact is, though, that if you try to stop a shooter, the chances of you ending up on the victim list is a lot higher than you ending up the hero who stopped him.
Same thing for violence. I used to do martial arts. One of the things you learn is that most black belts get their asses kicked in a streetfight. Again, unless you are trained for this particular kind of events, your "heroism" will very likely make things worse, not better.
Then again, it all depends on context. For the cash of some fast food chain, you'd be stupid to risk even a minor injury. If your friends or SO is at risk, though, things change dramatically. I'd certainly take down anyone who lays hands on my girl, and I'd go for a killing blow. Better to justify myself to a judge (or a doctor in case I fail) later than to be sorry for life.
But at your workplace, where it's most likely some cash that is at stake, that advise is very likely the right thing to do.
Now, I'm actually in favor of some form of universal medical insurance, because I think it does provide a net benefit to society. But I don't think that means we need to make obscenely expensive treatments available to everyone.
Last I checked, nobody was demanding something insane like that. So it looks like we don't even have an argument here.
They certainly believe in standing up for what they think is right. You could call that both political and activist. Now you can proceed to call their belief, their methods or their behaviour childish, inappropriate or whatever - but then again, I'm sure that all of those are terms that politicans have at times used to belittle their opponents.
There is a bit more than lulz to it. They're not targetting random sites, for example.
I know it says 15 years, but I have a feeling that if China really decided to withhold rare earth minerals for an extended time we'd find a supply a bit faster.
It's not about finding the supply. It's about building up the whole industry again, pretty much from scratch.
That means we have roughly 104 years worth of rare earth ore reserves, I think we'll be just fine.
A supermarket full of food and drinks doesn't mean you'll be just fine if it's 100 miles away and you're in the middle of a desert. How much you have in the ground doesn't mean shit if you can't get it out in anywhere near the timeframe that you'll be needing it.
What part of "limit research" did you fail to understand?
The part where "limit" equals "ban".
I've tried to find the details, but couldn't. Maybe you can find the actual statement from the conference, instead of one bloggers quip? To me, "limit" means what the dictionary says, and in the context of research into a dangerous technology most likely means that experiments and other actions whose consequences may be dangerous are disallowed.
Environmental catastrophe might be preferable to being ruled by enviros like you.
That is a decision that you can make for yourself, but not for others. If you cause and environmental catastrophy because you prefer freedom to survival, you are a mass murderer, plain and simple.
Besides, your anger is misplaced. My interest in the environment goes as far as it needs to secure survival, and no further. I do dislike people recklessly endangering others, though. Play with your own life all you like, none of my business. But you don't get to play with mine.
But what if the treatment costs $1,000? What if it costs $1,000,000? What if it would cost $1,000,000,000?
Check if you can find a dollar amount in the Hippocratic Oath:
I swear to fulfill, to the best of my ability and judgment, this covenant:
I will respect the hard-won scientific gains of those physicians in whose steps I walk, and gladly share such knowledge as is mine with those who are to follow.
I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures [that] are required, avoiding those twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism.
I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon's knife or the chemist's drug.
I will not be ashamed to say "I know not," nor will I fail to call in my colleagues when the skills of another are needed for a patient's recovery.
I will respect the privacy of my patients, for their problems are not disclosed to me that the world may know. Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is given to me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God.
I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the person's family and economic stability. My responsibility includes these related problems, if I am to care adequately for the sick.
I will prevent disease whenever I can, for prevention is preferable to cure.
I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm.
If I do not violate this oath, may I enjoy life and art, respected while I live and remembered with affection thereafter. May I always act so as to preserve the finest traditions of my calling and may I long experience the joy of healing those who seek my help.
Not there? Well, there you have it.
And that is why you need health insurance. Because the doctor will never decide that a treatment is too expensive for this patient. Of course, with resources being limited, we as a society need to make that decision sometimes. There are two ways we have in the west to deal with that task. One is to have the government decide, usually through an agency or ministry. The UK has a system like that. The other is the insurance way.
Pick one of those, or come up with a third. That's the acceptable options in a civilized society. The american way of every man for himself is from the stone age.
Like so many things, we fortunately don't have to discuss what "usability" means. The term has been defined by ISO as "The extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in a specified context of use."
You could have a different personal definition, but if you want to engage in an exchange with others, it would be better to follow the common one.
So, if you want an in-depth discussion, you need to first a) specify which users we are talking about b) specify which goals we are talking about c) specify the context of use
If we're talking about regular computer users for private use in their home on a desktop PC, then installing software is a secondary concern, setting up the desktop background and screensaver are primary concerns, panes in a file browser are tertiary at best, and setting up an Internet connection is tricky because half of them will ask their geeky son, brother or nephew without even trying.
The really important things are neither of those. The really important things are the day-to-day actions of the typical user for his day-to-day goals. The usability of the e-mail client and browser is probably ten times as important as the usability of the OS or window manager for this. However, there are things that make or break usability even here. For example, the "ribbons" thing has been ripped to shreds by every usability expert outside Microsoft. Hiding seldom-used menu options sounds like a good idea at first, studies have shown it confuses people because the menus keep changing.
So what can a good OS do, UI-wise? It can provide the proper "context for use". Stuff like Expose makes the average user happier than virtual desktops (or the Mac equivalent, Spaces) because an overview perspective is closer to his everyday experience than panning around a number of desks. And, despite me personally prefering to have at least 3 buttons on my mouse, a single mouse button is probably better for average users, quite a lot of them don't even get the concept of "right click".
Now if you're talking about geeks as the specified users, then a lot of things change.:-)
Hypothesis:/. postings don't establish constitutionality or lack thereof, the courts do.
I'll leave the rest to the interested readers.:-)
Really, what is it with you stupid americans and your socialism paranoia? This goes way beyond sanity.
Now you may want the doctors to simply let people croak who can't pay their medical bills anymore. But there's this thing called the hippocratic oath. That's hippocratic after the old greek Hippocrates guy, not hypocritic, which americans have more experience with.
Oh, and the stupid "confiscation of property" argument has been tried before, to make all taxes illegal. Guess what, the courts disagree, the argument has been put down, you can beat a dead horse if you like, but you should stop trying to ride it.
Do a little exercise. Invent a user interface that people are going to know how to use and give access to the most needed features.
Thanks, but I'll pass on that. Because I know that I am not a usability expert. I know enough about the topic to avoid the dumbest mistakes, and spot them when others make them, but then again I'd never call myself a painter just because I can spot the differences between a da Vinci and a kid abusing some crayons and a perfectly innocent piece of paper.
People are used to
And that is a factor in usability. But it is not the only one. People act as if "that's how the guy with the largest market share does it" were the only aspect you'd ever have to consider.
Linux does not possess a reality distortion field. But it does have a good UI.
No, it does have a UI that closely resembles what most people are used to. That says nothing about quality. Coke is a popular drink, that doesn't mean it is an essential part of a good diet.
I'm not sure about that. When there was a privacy scandel in a nation-wide retail chain here in Germany last year, there were loud cries for new laws, harsher penalties and other changes in the system that allowed it to happen in the first place.
When a single child porn case hits the news, there are cries for more laws.
When the catholic church scandal broke, there was a lot of outrage, but no calls for any laws. Everyone acted as if it were not a legal question, as if the church were above the law, and the moral outrage were what mattered. It was really strange.
Demanding they stop lecturing other people about stuff that they don't live up to themselves, for starters.
Also: Terminating their access to potential victims, I'd have thought that's a no-brainer. I still don't understand how they are allowed to run child care centers, schools, etc. after this.
Confiscating their internal documents as evidence and so they can't continue the cover-up.
Passing a few laws to clearly make the church responsible for misconduct conducted by its clerics - not for the past (you can't make something illegal retroactively), but as a clear signal that they need to get their act together now, or else...
I'm sure someone whose job it is and who's not just posting to/. could easily come up with a much longer list of countermeasures that could have been taken.
Please don't tell me you seriously think the church has been treated the same way that, say, a local community kindergarden would have.
Note that the Long strategy is on the order of years where what these guys are doing is more like minutes and hours.
That was 1995 or so.
These days, automated trades don't even register on your charts unless you got to seconds or less in resolution. One company I know about regularily trades in millisecond timeframes.
Every time I checked, both KDE and Gnome were pretty much busy copying whatever the latest UI abominations out of Redmond were at the time. Their UI design people completely ignore usability, and the fact that Microsoft can inflict great usability pains on their users simply because they have so many and most of them are locked in.
An alternative OS needs to provide something better, not just a cheap copy.
There are a few innovations and advances, I'll grant that. But the main interfaces are crap, pure and simple. Because usability is expensive. You simply can not create good usability at a programmer's desk. You need user testing, labs, feedback cycles and, most importantly, a clear vision. Some non-programmer understanding of design would also help a lot.
It's alot easier to get out of industries than it is to get in. I suspect this won't be the last industry we'll want to redevelop. It was foolish to get out of it in the first place.
I'm sure the responsible managers got a huge bonus for the cost savings they created.
France after the revolution was chaos for multiple reasons, and putting it down to them abolishing the church is a gross oversimplification, and that is putting it nicely. It may or may not have contributed, in a system as complex as a society, there is no way to know for sure.
However, "begging" is totally off. While the church was allowed to re-establish itself, it never again was as powerful and it was still kept out of many of its former power positions. In 1804, Napoleon crowned himself, clearly demonstrating that the power to make the king no longer rested with the church. That's 15 years after the revolution.
Pull the religion plug and the entire society flushes down the drain.
Good joke. Especially given that data doesn't support it even in the least. We have tons of societies going down the drain without the religion plug being pulled. And then we have all the socialist countries' histories, where you can say a lot of bad things especially about how their economy sucked and they were oppressive dictatorships and tyrannies - but their civil society wasn't any worse than in the west. In fact, in Germany where we have the most direct comparison many people today claim that in retrospect, with all the bad things, the society in the west was/is cold and impersonal compared to a warmer and closer society in the (former) east.
So, let's see your evidence. Which society went down the drain and there is a clear link between that and religion being pulled?
In a stretch, I could name one - but you'll like that one even less than not having one at all. It's called the Roman Empire and the religion plug pulling that certainly contributed to its downfall was the abolishing of the old roman religion and the acceptance of christianity as the state religion. After that, it was all downhill.
Indeed, the New Testament speaks to this very issue:
In a time when christians were a minority.
Do not forget that the behaviour of groups changes with their relative power. Minorities usually act differently from majorities. Many groups radically change their behaviour once they get strong enough to force their views on others. It's not a surprising thing.
People who quote the bible are forgetting an important detail: Christian scholars are bad programmers - they keep changing the API, but they've stopped updating the documentation.
No, it's not ironic as people automatically hold them to higher standards for exactly that reason.
Do they, really?
If any other organisation had been discovered has having a long history of child abuse and institutionalized cover-up, what do you think the public reaction would have been? I dare to say that organisation would not exist anymore. A law to ban it, seize all its assets and imprison its leaders would have been proposed quickly, and probably passed easily.
No, the church is not really held to a higher standard. What happens, however, is that there is a visabled morality gap, and that is what is different to most other organisations. Very few organisations apart from the church make moral claims, and those that do are usually limited to some subset, depending on whatever it is they are for or against. So for most organisations, if they were caught in an our-old-male-bosses-fuck-young-boys-and-we-knew-about-it scandal, their evil would be measured as-is, because it stands for itself. A bank does not usually have bylaws regulating sex. The church, however, has long lists of bylaws regulating not only itself but everyone else, so it provides a point of comparison. The bank acted against general consensus of what is proper and what not, the church in addition acted against what it goes around lecturing everyone else.
But still, we do not hold it to it. It gives the scandal more depth, but frankly, holding someone to something implies a little more than being a bit more angry than usual.
When taking a stupid position on a social issue can be observed directly to lead to a giant spike in defection, along with a corresponding giant financial loss, I think this gives the Church of Finland plenty of incentive to reconsider their social policies to keep up with social progress.
I'm not sure if you get the concept of a religion right. A religion does not "keep up" with anything. It already knows the one and only truth, because it's written in their holy books.
Ok, truth to be told, they will probably find a "more suitable interpretation" in the book. Why an omnipotent being can't express itself so clearly that it doesn't need interpretation is one of those things I'll never get, but hey.:-)
All of this is a symptom of how far the stock market has branched from its purposes - it's not just a way people have involved distributed judgement of the worthiness of societal ventures anymore,
It hasn't been that for at least 50 years. Speculation has been the dominant market force for a very, very long time. It just never made as much headlines until recently.
now we have huge parasites in the system, feeding on each other.
We've had that since the first investment companies came into existence. It took what, three weeks at best?, until someone realized that investing in the future of a company is slow and risky, while cashing in on the expectations of those who are still dumb enough to do that is faster and safer - there are few things as certain as the stupidity of a large group of people.
I would pay for glasses that remove advertisement from the real world. In fact, I'd pay quite a lot.
Ads are one of the "unseen evils". By now we know that the processing and even the filtering out that our brains do take up more of our awareness than we become aware of. Advertisement has been positively linked to road accidents, for example, as it is a distracting factor.
In any big city today, you are literally bombarded by advertisement, and all of it has been designed by psychological warfare...sorry, "advertisement experts" to be maximally distracting...sorry, "noticeable". It's a huge burden on your mind, and the only reason you don't notice is that the filtering process isn't conscious.
I'd pay quite a bit for a technology that allows me to concentrate on what is actually important and/or interesting in my environment.
This is only news for real-time feeds. For anything that is not live (and you can verify that it's live! A lot of what you see labeled "live" on TV actually isn't!), assume that the stream has been messed with, already today. Most of the times, it is "artistic" messing - improving picture quality, editing out distracting background content, cleaning up artifacts, etc.
a rather extreme biblical literacy approach (which the Catholic Church hasn't had for well over a thousand years).
Apparently your time capsule went off course. This is the 21st century, not the 31st. All the inquisition and science suppression stuff was much less than a thousand years ago. Heck, Galileo was forced to "admit error" in 1633, and his predecessor Foscarini had a book banned in 1616 specifically because it did not align with the "holy book".
It's been a hundred years at best that the church hasn't had extremist views.
does not stimulate the pursuit of what is true, the truth.
I'm sorry, but I'm not taking advise on the truth from someone who heads and organisation that is so at odds with the truth, it defies definition.
Where was his love for the truth for the past, say 20 or so years during all of which he has in both his Pope and his former role been actively covering up child abuse?
Slashdot Mirror
And the lists go on. I'm surrounded by warnings that if a good actions puts yourself at risk, then the action is BAD. And I weep a little...
Fact is, though, that if you try to stop a shooter, the chances of you ending up on the victim list is a lot higher than you ending up the hero who stopped him.
Same thing for violence. I used to do martial arts. One of the things you learn is that most black belts get their asses kicked in a streetfight. Again, unless you are trained for this particular kind of events, your "heroism" will very likely make things worse, not better.
Then again, it all depends on context. For the cash of some fast food chain, you'd be stupid to risk even a minor injury. If your friends or SO is at risk, though, things change dramatically. I'd certainly take down anyone who lays hands on my girl, and I'd go for a killing blow. Better to justify myself to a judge (or a doctor in case I fail) later than to be sorry for life.
But at your workplace, where it's most likely some cash that is at stake, that advise is very likely the right thing to do.
Now, I'm actually in favor of some form of universal medical insurance, because I think it does provide a net benefit to society. But I don't think that means we need to make obscenely expensive treatments available to everyone.
Last I checked, nobody was demanding something insane like that. So it looks like we don't even have an argument here.
Depends on your definition.
They certainly believe in standing up for what they think is right. You could call that both political and activist. Now you can proceed to call their belief, their methods or their behaviour childish, inappropriate or whatever - but then again, I'm sure that all of those are terms that politicans have at times used to belittle their opponents.
There is a bit more than lulz to it. They're not targetting random sites, for example.
I know it says 15 years, but I have a feeling that if China really decided to withhold rare earth minerals for an extended time we'd find a supply a bit faster.
It's not about finding the supply. It's about building up the whole industry again, pretty much from scratch.
That means we have roughly 104 years worth of rare earth ore reserves, I think we'll be just fine.
A supermarket full of food and drinks doesn't mean you'll be just fine if it's 100 miles away and you're in the middle of a desert. How much you have in the ground doesn't mean shit if you can't get it out in anywhere near the timeframe that you'll be needing it.
What part of "limit research" did you fail to understand?
The part where "limit" equals "ban".
I've tried to find the details, but couldn't. Maybe you can find the actual statement from the conference, instead of one bloggers quip? To me, "limit" means what the dictionary says, and in the context of research into a dangerous technology most likely means that experiments and other actions whose consequences may be dangerous are disallowed.
Environmental catastrophe might be preferable to being ruled by enviros like you.
That is a decision that you can make for yourself, but not for others. If you cause and environmental catastrophy because you prefer freedom to survival, you are a mass murderer, plain and simple.
Besides, your anger is misplaced. My interest in the environment goes as far as it needs to secure survival, and no further. I do dislike people recklessly endangering others, though. Play with your own life all you like, none of my business. But you don't get to play with mine.
But what if the treatment costs $1,000? What if it costs $1,000,000? What if it would cost $1,000,000,000?
Check if you can find a dollar amount in the Hippocratic Oath:
I swear to fulfill, to the best of my ability and judgment, this covenant:
I will respect the hard-won scientific gains of those physicians in whose steps I walk, and gladly share such knowledge as is mine with those who are to follow.
I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures [that] are required, avoiding those twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism.
I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon's knife or the chemist's drug.
I will not be ashamed to say "I know not," nor will I fail to call in my colleagues when the skills of another are needed for a patient's recovery.
I will respect the privacy of my patients, for their problems are not disclosed to me that the world may know. Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is given to me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God.
I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the person's family and economic stability. My responsibility includes these related problems, if I am to care adequately for the sick.
I will prevent disease whenever I can, for prevention is preferable to cure.
I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm.
If I do not violate this oath, may I enjoy life and art, respected while I live and remembered with affection thereafter. May I always act so as to preserve the finest traditions of my calling and may I long experience the joy of healing those who seek my help.
Not there? Well, there you have it.
And that is why you need health insurance. Because the doctor will never decide that a treatment is too expensive for this patient. Of course, with resources being limited, we as a society need to make that decision sometimes. There are two ways we have in the west to deal with that task. One is to have the government decide, usually through an agency or ministry. The UK has a system like that. The other is the insurance way.
Pick one of those, or come up with a third. That's the acceptable options in a civilized society. The american way of every man for himself is from the stone age.
Like so many things, we fortunately don't have to discuss what "usability" means. The term has been defined by ISO as "The extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in a specified context of use."
You could have a different personal definition, but if you want to engage in an exchange with others, it would be better to follow the common one.
So, if you want an in-depth discussion, you need to first
a) specify which users we are talking about
b) specify which goals we are talking about
c) specify the context of use
If we're talking about regular computer users for private use in their home on a desktop PC, then installing software is a secondary concern, setting up the desktop background and screensaver are primary concerns, panes in a file browser are tertiary at best, and setting up an Internet connection is tricky because half of them will ask their geeky son, brother or nephew without even trying.
The really important things are neither of those. The really important things are the day-to-day actions of the typical user for his day-to-day goals. The usability of the e-mail client and browser is probably ten times as important as the usability of the OS or window manager for this. However, there are things that make or break usability even here. For example, the "ribbons" thing has been ripped to shreds by every usability expert outside Microsoft. Hiding seldom-used menu options sounds like a good idea at first, studies have shown it confuses people because the menus keep changing.
So what can a good OS do, UI-wise? It can provide the proper "context for use". Stuff like Expose makes the average user happier than virtual desktops (or the Mac equivalent, Spaces) because an overview perspective is closer to his everyday experience than panning around a number of desks. And, despite me personally prefering to have at least 3 buttons on my mouse, a single mouse button is probably better for average users, quite a lot of them don't even get the concept of "right click".
Now if you're talking about geeks as the specified users, then a lot of things change. :-)
Hypothesis: /. postings don't establish constitutionality or lack thereof, the courts do.
I'll leave the rest to the interested readers. :-)
Really, what is it with you stupid americans and your socialism paranoia? This goes way beyond sanity.
Now you may want the doctors to simply let people croak who can't pay their medical bills anymore. But there's this thing called the hippocratic oath. That's hippocratic after the old greek Hippocrates guy, not hypocritic, which americans have more experience with.
Oh, and the stupid "confiscation of property" argument has been tried before, to make all taxes illegal. Guess what, the courts disagree, the argument has been put down, you can beat a dead horse if you like, but you should stop trying to ride it.
So, you'd rather support trying it out, consequences be damned?
As I read it, it is not research that is being banned, but actually deploying it, even if you call it "experiment".
Do a little exercise. Invent a user interface that people are going to know how to use and give access to the most needed features.
Thanks, but I'll pass on that. Because I know that I am not a usability expert. I know enough about the topic to avoid the dumbest mistakes, and spot them when others make them, but then again I'd never call myself a painter just because I can spot the differences between a da Vinci and a kid abusing some crayons and a perfectly innocent piece of paper.
People are used to
And that is a factor in usability. But it is not the only one. People act as if "that's how the guy with the largest market share does it" were the only aspect you'd ever have to consider.
Linux does not possess a reality distortion field. But it does have a good UI.
No, it does have a UI that closely resembles what most people are used to. That says nothing about quality. Coke is a popular drink, that doesn't mean it is an essential part of a good diet.
I'm not sure about that. When there was a privacy scandel in a nation-wide retail chain here in Germany last year, there were loud cries for new laws, harsher penalties and other changes in the system that allowed it to happen in the first place.
When a single child porn case hits the news, there are cries for more laws.
When the catholic church scandal broke, there was a lot of outrage, but no calls for any laws. Everyone acted as if it were not a legal question, as if the church were above the law, and the moral outrage were what mattered. It was really strange.
And what would that be?
Demanding they stop lecturing other people about stuff that they don't live up to themselves, for starters.
Also: Terminating their access to potential victims, I'd have thought that's a no-brainer. I still don't understand how they are allowed to run child care centers, schools, etc. after this.
Confiscating their internal documents as evidence and so they can't continue the cover-up.
Passing a few laws to clearly make the church responsible for misconduct conducted by its clerics - not for the past (you can't make something illegal retroactively), but as a clear signal that they need to get their act together now, or else...
I'm sure someone whose job it is and who's not just posting to /. could easily come up with a much longer list of countermeasures that could have been taken.
Please don't tell me you seriously think the church has been treated the same way that, say, a local community kindergarden would have.
Note that the Long strategy is on the order of years where what these guys are doing is more like minutes and hours.
That was 1995 or so.
These days, automated trades don't even register on your charts unless you got to seconds or less in resolution. One company I know about regularily trades in millisecond timeframes.
and amazing strides in usability
Uh, where?
Every time I checked, both KDE and Gnome were pretty much busy copying whatever the latest UI abominations out of Redmond were at the time. Their UI design people completely ignore usability, and the fact that Microsoft can inflict great usability pains on their users simply because they have so many and most of them are locked in.
An alternative OS needs to provide something better, not just a cheap copy.
There are a few innovations and advances, I'll grant that. But the main interfaces are crap, pure and simple. Because usability is expensive. You simply can not create good usability at a programmer's desk. You need user testing, labs, feedback cycles and, most importantly, a clear vision. Some non-programmer understanding of design would also help a lot.
It's alot easier to get out of industries than it is to get in. I suspect this won't be the last industry we'll want to redevelop. It was foolish to get out of it in the first place.
I'm sure the responsible managers got a huge bonus for the cost savings they created.
Nice story, but false to facts.
France after the revolution was chaos for multiple reasons, and putting it down to them abolishing the church is a gross oversimplification, and that is putting it nicely. It may or may not have contributed, in a system as complex as a society, there is no way to know for sure.
However, "begging" is totally off. While the church was allowed to re-establish itself, it never again was as powerful and it was still kept out of many of its former power positions. In 1804, Napoleon crowned himself, clearly demonstrating that the power to make the king no longer rested with the church. That's 15 years after the revolution.
Pull the religion plug and the entire society flushes down the drain.
Good joke. Especially given that data doesn't support it even in the least. We have tons of societies going down the drain without the religion plug being pulled. And then we have all the socialist countries' histories, where you can say a lot of bad things especially about how their economy sucked and they were oppressive dictatorships and tyrannies - but their civil society wasn't any worse than in the west. In fact, in Germany where we have the most direct comparison many people today claim that in retrospect, with all the bad things, the society in the west was/is cold and impersonal compared to a warmer and closer society in the (former) east.
So, let's see your evidence. Which society went down the drain and there is a clear link between that and religion being pulled?
In a stretch, I could name one - but you'll like that one even less than not having one at all. It's called the Roman Empire and the religion plug pulling that certainly contributed to its downfall was the abolishing of the old roman religion and the acceptance of christianity as the state religion. After that, it was all downhill.
Indeed, the New Testament speaks to this very issue:
In a time when christians were a minority.
Do not forget that the behaviour of groups changes with their relative power. Minorities usually act differently from majorities. Many groups radically change their behaviour once they get strong enough to force their views on others. It's not a surprising thing.
People who quote the bible are forgetting an important detail: Christian scholars are bad programmers - they keep changing the API, but they've stopped updating the documentation.
No, it's not ironic as people automatically hold them to higher standards for exactly that reason.
Do they, really?
If any other organisation had been discovered has having a long history of child abuse and institutionalized cover-up, what do you think the public reaction would have been? I dare to say that organisation would not exist anymore. A law to ban it, seize all its assets and imprison its leaders would have been proposed quickly, and probably passed easily.
No, the church is not really held to a higher standard. What happens, however, is that there is a visabled morality gap, and that is what is different to most other organisations. Very few organisations apart from the church make moral claims, and those that do are usually limited to some subset, depending on whatever it is they are for or against. So for most organisations, if they were caught in an our-old-male-bosses-fuck-young-boys-and-we-knew-about-it scandal, their evil would be measured as-is, because it stands for itself. A bank does not usually have bylaws regulating sex. The church, however, has long lists of bylaws regulating not only itself but everyone else, so it provides a point of comparison. The bank acted against general consensus of what is proper and what not, the church in addition acted against what it goes around lecturing everyone else.
But still, we do not hold it to it. It gives the scandal more depth, but frankly, holding someone to something implies a little more than being a bit more angry than usual.
When taking a stupid position on a social issue can be observed directly to lead to a giant spike in defection, along with a corresponding giant financial loss, I think this gives the Church of Finland plenty of incentive to reconsider their social policies to keep up with social progress.
I'm not sure if you get the concept of a religion right. A religion does not "keep up" with anything. It already knows the one and only truth, because it's written in their holy books.
Ok, truth to be told, they will probably find a "more suitable interpretation" in the book. Why an omnipotent being can't express itself so clearly that it doesn't need interpretation is one of those things I'll never get, but hey. :-)
All of this is a symptom of how far the stock market has branched from its purposes - it's not just a way people have involved distributed judgement of the worthiness of societal ventures anymore,
It hasn't been that for at least 50 years. Speculation has been the dominant market force for a very, very long time. It just never made as much headlines until recently.
now we have huge parasites in the system, feeding on each other.
We've had that since the first investment companies came into existence. It took what, three weeks at best?, until someone realized that investing in the future of a company is slow and risky, while cashing in on the expectations of those who are still dumb enough to do that is faster and safer - there are few things as certain as the stupidity of a large group of people.
I would pay for glasses that remove advertisement from the real world. In fact, I'd pay quite a lot.
Ads are one of the "unseen evils". By now we know that the processing and even the filtering out that our brains do take up more of our awareness than we become aware of. Advertisement has been positively linked to road accidents, for example, as it is a distracting factor.
In any big city today, you are literally bombarded by advertisement, and all of it has been designed by psychological warfare...sorry, "advertisement experts" to be maximally distracting...sorry, "noticeable". It's a huge burden on your mind, and the only reason you don't notice is that the filtering process isn't conscious.
I'd pay quite a bit for a technology that allows me to concentrate on what is actually important and/or interesting in my environment.
F1 cars will be red instead of filled with sponsors.
You mean like before everything was invaded by advertisement? Wow, what an improvement!
(yes, slashdot, I can type more than one comment every 20 minutes, I have 10 fingers, not two... argh...)
This is only news for real-time feeds. For anything that is not live (and you can verify that it's live! A lot of what you see labeled "live" on TV actually isn't!), assume that the stream has been messed with, already today. Most of the times, it is "artistic" messing - improving picture quality, editing out distracting background content, cleaning up artifacts, etc.
a rather extreme biblical literacy approach (which the Catholic Church hasn't had for well over a thousand years).
Apparently your time capsule went off course. This is the 21st century, not the 31st. All the inquisition and science suppression stuff was much less than a thousand years ago. Heck, Galileo was forced to "admit error" in 1633, and his predecessor Foscarini had a book banned in 1616 specifically because it did not align with the "holy book".
It's been a hundred years at best that the church hasn't had extremist views.
does not stimulate the pursuit of what is true, the truth.
I'm sorry, but I'm not taking advise on the truth from someone who heads and organisation that is so at odds with the truth, it defies definition.
Where was his love for the truth for the past, say 20 or so years during all of which he has in both his Pope and his former role been actively covering up child abuse?