Well, assuming it's a subject-related design job, an IT guy can actually get replaced with much more ease than, say, a civil engineer (because of the whole 'everyone and their mother and their mother's dog has had an IT degree since 1993' thing). In general, though, yeah, everyone's replaceable. After seeing seven or eight bosses in the last few years, I'm going to add that everyone's replaceable, especially managers. So you might consider watching your own back while you're reminding the rest of us how vulnerable we are.
Yeah, I'd like a standard deviation on that one, too. However, since it's a made-up number in an article that's the validity equivalent of cross posting "Missing link found!" to alt.creationism and alt.darwinistehhot, I wouldn't count on it.
Um, enhancing ourselves through biology and cybernetics would be well within what defines us as human. Using the biological definition, we're still human as long as our descendents can breed with each other. Using the "man vs. beast" definition, the use of technology to make us greater than our natural abilities permits is what defines us as human in the first place. Even the modern concept of 'soul' would not particularly be violated by prosthetic addition, because we've drifted away from the midaeval soul as the sum total of a beings identity and moved to the hippieish 'ghost in the machine' definition of soul.
I'll also note that your whole argument stems from the assumption that the human race will be in some sort of competition with its tools. Frankly, there's no reason to think anything will compete with us as a race unless we design it that way. As individuals, sure, you'll lose your job if a robotic assembly line can do it better, but you only got the job in the first place because of the existing technology that let you steal the job from the rug weaver in africa (or whatever). Live by the sword, die by the sword.
Actually, a drunken sailor spends all his money on alcohol and gambling, then, when he run out, takes a job on another ship to a new port. No debt involved, unless he was really bad at gambling.
Not to say that this doesn't accurately describe how i spend my money, but you might wanna watch your similes.
You know, developing some social graces, or at least pushing your strategies of interpersonal interaction beyond where they were when you were three years old ("I'm dumb? Well, you're stupid!") would probably cause your job to become a bit more enjoyable.
Yeah, damn those people for taking pride in their success. Y'know, for someone complaining about people being rich when there are poor people around, you seem to own a lot of electronic equipment worth a ton of food and clothing to some indian beggar.
Now drink your prune juice, there are children starving in india.
And christians and Jews never wear turbans, right? Good to know "towelhead" isn't targetting Arabic muslims.
And White people never have deep tans, right? So 'darkie' isn't a racist epithet either!
The fact that the association doesn't make sense doesn't mean there isn't one. "Redneck" is equivalent to the less popular epithet "white trash". Therefore, in the infinitely wise laws of comedy, only white people may use the term.
Well, it is written in a phonetic manner, it's just written in a manner that was phonetic under the dialects in which the written language was formed, which is not necessarily phonetic in modern dialects. We don't shift spelling too much to keep up with dialects because I, as a Texan, enjoy actually being able to read the notes my professor, a Louisianan, writes on the board, and he enjoys knowing wha the hell I'm trying to say when he grades my reports. Similar principles apply to business.
In conclusion, ifnya vist Nawlins ymait unnstan wut I talkin bot.
Nite is still not proper American english. Nor is 'Lazer' (on a side note, 'laser' has only been a word for a few decades, it's one of those anoying converted acronyms that pop up occasionally). I can't particularly spell the fourth example, either, but I'm pretty sure the american version has an s in there somewhere. Terrorize is just 'cause the letter 'z' is awesome, and 'color' is a result of genuine differences in dialect.
So good try, 2/5 ain't bad. Maybe 3/5, if license (sp?) is actually spelled the way you claim in American english.
Yes, because there will be no idiomatic or dialect-based differences in regional versions of the language that will screw up the uneducated in a purely phonetic spelling system, no, sir.
And poor neighborhoods never have an altered dialect from the standardised version of the language shared by those that take the effort to educate themselves, nope.
Okay, sarcasm aside, the educated have a better command of the language because they put a lot of work into making it so. Anyone can do it without formal education by reading a lot of known proper english, so there's really no reason to sympathise with the purposefully ignorant.
If by "uniquely American" you mean "A Universal Human Behaviour", then yes, exactly.
This is exactly what the World needs: something that allows the populace to think even less in their everyday lives. The aversion to expending a little extra effort seems to be a uniquely Human thing. We invent all of these fertilization, refrigeration, and irrigation techniques to save us from having to grow/hunt for our own food. Then we all get fat and develop health problems from the resulting extended lifespan and overabundance of nutrients. So now we pack it into offices where we track little green pieces of paper all day, and perform hobbies we actually enjoy instead of being out seeking food 20 hours a day, seven days a week. Mindboggling. Taking mental shortcuts will be just as beneficial.
Hold on, I have another:
This is exactly what the first world needs: something that allows the populace to think even less in their everyday lives. The aversion to expending a little extra effort seems to be a uniquely 'Industrialized country' thing. We invent all of these vehicles to save us from having to walk. Then we all get to travel around the world and accomplish our tasks and come back in 1/100th of the time we should be taking to swim from new york to Glasgow. So now we pack the time saved into university education, where we learn to read and write, do complex math, and design more pointless technological shortcuts. Mindboggling. Taking mental shortcuts will be just as beneficial.
Normally, I'd keep going for another five or six paragraphs, but I need to get to work. Suffice it to say that, while I agree that the idea is a bit trivial, your argument to the point is basically "In my day, we walked sixteen miles to school through six feet of driving snow... every day... uphill both ways! Damn young'uns, get off my lawn!" which is kind of uselessly hypocritical, as there's always someone spending a little more effort than you that could make the same complaint.
In conclusion, laziness is the mother of invention. Don't knock it.
So you're saying you've never been doing something one way and then realized another way was probably better, without a specific event triggering the realization? You must have a really, really boring job. Glad I'm in science instead.
It helped that there was a large public sentiment in favor of the colonies back in the mother country, too. Didn't necessarily mean ol' George was forced to quit, but it did mean that there was never a real popular opposition to him calling it off.
Actually, fire controls have caused a lot of areas that used to be plains (northern Texas and OK, for example) to become fairly thickly forested. Deforestation here isn't really unbalancing things so much as bringing us closer to how it used to be. Also, CO2 is far from the only variable in climate regulation.
Welcome to the world of ecology, where nothing is constant and sweeping gerealizations are stupid.
Yes, because we're obviously just stading there going "Nature, you will cool down by five degrees Centigrade! By my mandate as master of beasts, I command it!" Definitely not approaching it as an engineering problem by researching the underlying mechanisms and tweaking them or anything.
Eh, the poles are about as reflective as they're going to get. Adding tinfoil wouldn't really help. Plus it'll corrode, and Sn ions, while slightly better than lead, are not really something you want to dump into an area connected to the world's water en masse. Same for Al, if you were using 'tinfoil' to mean 'aluminum foil'.
And even if you solve the corrosion problem, occasional precipitation would just cover it up anyhow.
Good that we haven't lost our ability to think in hyperbole on/., though. A lot of cool projects began that way.
Eh, we need to learn weather control at this point regardless of global warming and whatnot. Our population is too large and our value on human life too high to let god keep smacking us about whenever he rolls over in his sleep. Global temperature is just one aspect of what we need to learn to control.
Experience loss is generally more hurtful than gear loss if you play a magic-user of any kind, or anything but a warrior-derived class. Gear loss is not a real obstacle to getting a bigger fireball or another d6 on the backstab, while not advancing a level is.
Then, you can take the unimaginative route and play a melee character (whose power only varies incrementally from level to level), but in that case you're probably not in it for the challenge anyhow.
The other advantage of the exp loss system is that every idiot and their pet monkey doesn't hit the level cap, and you can actually level past the point where you have to deal with inept or annoying people. Of course, since inept players often don't want a game, just a way to feel powerful, this means that the exp loss games, while better games in general, are not as populated as World of Warcraft.
Moderates stir no one to action because they have reasonable expectations of what people will do, and get them to do it no problem, no stirring necessary. Likewise, they aren't catalysts for revolution because they are competent enough to change the system without breaking it.
With moderates left in charge of things, slavery would definitely be gone by now (because there isn't any reason to keep it around at this point), and Civil rights probably wouldn't have been an issue because the effort to deal with the new political conditions following abolition would have followed a path of greater compromise. As for women's sufferage, I dunno about that one, as the moderate position on the subject at the time was complete apathy rather than a real balanced stance. (Contrast to the moderate position on slavery during the time it existed, which was 'well, this isn't really completely ethically sound, but we need the institution to keep going or our economy will get buggered'.)
The cold war was essentially won by a moderate position ("well, they're our enemies, but we don't necessarily need to attack them, nor do we need to just perform a holding action... let's scare them into breaking their own economy") and the midaeval islamic empire was kept cohesive through use of a moderate stance (sure, allah is the one god and all, but we don't necessarily need to persecute the other religions, we'll just make it economically advantageous to me muslim). Also, every time a country has undergone a successful revolution, the 'successful' part has come from the new regime's moderation in the determination of policy.
Basically, I think you're giving the middle path a bit of a shorter shrift than it deserves. It's damn useful, and, while it doesn't necessarily make sudden changes to the world, it does make lasting ones (in fact, comparing your average peaceful policy change to your average revolution, I'd say much more lasting than the extremist-caused changes).
There's an industry based on coming up with stupid shit to sue people over. It's why prosecutors can afford to only charge for winning cases. Example: almost any medical malpractice trial.
People. Knew. Tobacco. Was. Bad. For. Them. Since. The. Seventeenth. Century. The fact that it was a little more bad than expected doesn't mean that smokers are not idiots essentially responsible for their own health problems. Well, the ones that sue over it are idiots, anyhow. Those that accept responsibility and try to bully their own HMO into actually providing them with medical care for once instead are just humanly flawed.
While I agree that stupidity is eternal (the outcomes of many of the aforementioned lawsuits being ample evidence), the divorce rate could easily go down. Also, two working parents is not 'scraping by' with full-time jobs in any first-world country. Unless you're talking about scraping by for the next payment on that 12 foot plasma television. Well, I suppose if neither parent had any clue how to spend money, it's possible... ok, sure, I'll accept your point under the universality of idiocy principle.
I also agree with this paragraph. Those of us who want things done properly will do them properly. The rest will jack around, and (while this is mean, i'm going to add 'hopefully' here) fail miserably, and a few will rebound to complain about how they miss the good old days while trying to make up lost ground on those that got it right the first time.
Ok, this post officially indicates I have to much time to waste on message boards. Back to my useful activities.
Um, no. Civil law is to deal specifically with things that aren't criminal. If it carries a jail sentence, it needs to be a jury court with a public prosecutor and defender, evidence gathered under warrant, and police oversight. If we start jailing people for civil offenses, we're just going to turn America into a fricking Dickens novel, and then we won't even be able to microwave a burrito without twenty-seven minutes of narration, and where would we be, then?
Defense is the wrong word, as it implies that it actually prevents bad things from happening.
Perhaps the word you're looking for is 'relief'? Humans relieve emotions by externalizing them, communicating them to others to deal with and leaving their own mind clear to continue doing things that it finds productive. At least, that's what I do. It doesn't defend against anything, but it orders the mind and puts priorities in an appropriate order.
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Well, assuming it's a subject-related design job, an IT guy can actually get replaced with much more ease than, say, a civil engineer (because of the whole 'everyone and their mother and their mother's dog has had an IT degree since 1993' thing). In general, though, yeah, everyone's replaceable. After seeing seven or eight bosses in the last few years, I'm going to add that everyone's replaceable, especially managers. So you might consider watching your own back while you're reminding the rest of us how vulnerable we are.
Yeah, I'd like a standard deviation on that one, too. However, since it's a made-up number in an article that's the validity equivalent of cross posting "Missing link found!" to alt.creationism and alt.darwinistehhot, I wouldn't count on it.
Um, enhancing ourselves through biology and cybernetics would be well within what defines us as human. Using the biological definition, we're still human as long as our descendents can breed with each other. Using the "man vs. beast" definition, the use of technology to make us greater than our natural abilities permits is what defines us as human in the first place. Even the modern concept of 'soul' would not particularly be violated by prosthetic addition, because we've drifted away from the midaeval soul as the sum total of a beings identity and moved to the hippieish 'ghost in the machine' definition of soul.
I'll also note that your whole argument stems from the assumption that the human race will be in some sort of competition with its tools. Frankly, there's no reason to think anything will compete with us as a race unless we design it that way. As individuals, sure, you'll lose your job if a robotic assembly line can do it better, but you only got the job in the first place because of the existing technology that let you steal the job from the rug weaver in africa (or whatever). Live by the sword, die by the sword.
Actually, a drunken sailor spends all his money on alcohol and gambling, then, when he run out, takes a job on another ship to a new port. No debt involved, unless he was really bad at gambling.
Not to say that this doesn't accurately describe how i spend my money, but you might wanna watch your similes.
You know, developing some social graces, or at least pushing your strategies of interpersonal interaction beyond where they were when you were three years old ("I'm dumb? Well, you're stupid!") would probably cause your job to become a bit more enjoyable.
Yeah, damn those people for taking pride in their success. Y'know, for someone complaining about people being rich when there are poor people around, you seem to own a lot of electronic equipment worth a ton of food and clothing to some indian beggar.
Now drink your prune juice, there are children starving in india.
Yeah, that would be kind of like trying to wire money to Santa Claus.
And christians and Jews never wear turbans, right? Good to know "towelhead" isn't targetting Arabic muslims.
And White people never have deep tans, right? So 'darkie' isn't a racist epithet either!
The fact that the association doesn't make sense doesn't mean there isn't one. "Redneck" is equivalent to the less popular epithet "white trash". Therefore, in the infinitely wise laws of comedy, only white people may use the term.
Most of Hamas' militant activities are "seemingly terrorist" because they are terrorist. Other than that, no arguments with your post.
Well, it is written in a phonetic manner, it's just written in a manner that was phonetic under the dialects in which the written language was formed, which is not necessarily phonetic in modern dialects. We don't shift spelling too much to keep up with dialects because I, as a Texan, enjoy actually being able to read the notes my professor, a Louisianan, writes on the board, and he enjoys knowing wha the hell I'm trying to say when he grades my reports. Similar principles apply to business.
In conclusion, ifnya vist Nawlins ymait unnstan wut I talkin bot.
Well, the language is based on "that sounds about right". That's kind of a rule.
Nite is still not proper American english. Nor is 'Lazer' (on a side note, 'laser' has only been a word for a few decades, it's one of those anoying converted acronyms that pop up occasionally). I can't particularly spell the fourth example, either, but I'm pretty sure the american version has an s in there somewhere. Terrorize is just 'cause the letter 'z' is awesome, and 'color' is a result of genuine differences in dialect.
So good try, 2/5 ain't bad. Maybe 3/5, if license (sp?) is actually spelled the way you claim in American english.
Yes, because there will be no idiomatic or dialect-based differences in regional versions of the language that will screw up the uneducated in a purely phonetic spelling system, no, sir.
And poor neighborhoods never have an altered dialect from the standardised version of the language shared by those that take the effort to educate themselves, nope.
Okay, sarcasm aside, the educated have a better command of the language because they put a lot of work into making it so. Anyone can do it without formal education by reading a lot of known proper english, so there's really no reason to sympathise with the purposefully ignorant.
If by "uniquely American" you mean "A Universal Human Behaviour", then yes, exactly.
This is exactly what the World needs: something that allows the populace to think even less in their everyday lives. The aversion to expending a little extra effort seems to be a uniquely Human thing. We invent all of these fertilization, refrigeration, and irrigation techniques to save us from having to grow/hunt for our own food. Then we all get fat and develop health problems from the resulting extended lifespan and overabundance of nutrients. So now we pack it into offices where we track little green pieces of paper all day, and perform hobbies we actually enjoy instead of being out seeking food 20 hours a day, seven days a week. Mindboggling. Taking mental shortcuts will be just as beneficial.
Hold on, I have another:
This is exactly what the first world needs: something that allows the populace to think even less in their everyday lives. The aversion to expending a little extra effort seems to be a uniquely 'Industrialized country' thing. We invent all of these vehicles to save us from having to walk. Then we all get to travel around the world and accomplish our tasks and come back in 1/100th of the time we should be taking to swim from new york to Glasgow. So now we pack the time saved into university education, where we learn to read and write, do complex math, and design more pointless technological shortcuts. Mindboggling. Taking mental shortcuts will be just as beneficial.
Normally, I'd keep going for another five or six paragraphs, but I need to get to work. Suffice it to say that, while I agree that the idea is a bit trivial, your argument to the point is basically "In my day, we walked sixteen miles to school through six feet of driving snow... every day... uphill both ways! Damn young'uns, get off my lawn!" which is kind of uselessly hypocritical, as there's always someone spending a little more effort than you that could make the same complaint.
In conclusion, laziness is the mother of invention. Don't knock it.
So you're saying you've never been doing something one way and then realized another way was probably better, without a specific event triggering the realization? You must have a really, really boring job. Glad I'm in science instead.
It helped that there was a large public sentiment in favor of the colonies back in the mother country, too. Didn't necessarily mean ol' George was forced to quit, but it did mean that there was never a real popular opposition to him calling it off.
Actually, fire controls have caused a lot of areas that used to be plains (northern Texas and OK, for example) to become fairly thickly forested. Deforestation here isn't really unbalancing things so much as bringing us closer to how it used to be. Also, CO2 is far from the only variable in climate regulation.
Welcome to the world of ecology, where nothing is constant and sweeping gerealizations are stupid.
Yes, because we're obviously just stading there going "Nature, you will cool down by five degrees Centigrade! By my mandate as master of beasts, I command it!" Definitely not approaching it as an engineering problem by researching the underlying mechanisms and tweaking them or anything.
Eh, the poles are about as reflective as they're going to get. Adding tinfoil wouldn't really help. Plus it'll corrode, and Sn ions, while slightly better than lead, are not really something you want to dump into an area connected to the world's water en masse. Same for Al, if you were using 'tinfoil' to mean 'aluminum foil'.
/., though. A lot of cool projects began that way.
And even if you solve the corrosion problem, occasional precipitation would just cover it up anyhow.
Good that we haven't lost our ability to think in hyperbole on
Eh, we need to learn weather control at this point regardless of global warming and whatnot. Our population is too large and our value on human life too high to let god keep smacking us about whenever he rolls over in his sleep. Global temperature is just one aspect of what we need to learn to control.
Experience loss is generally more hurtful than gear loss if you play a magic-user of any kind, or anything but a warrior-derived class. Gear loss is not a real obstacle to getting a bigger fireball or another d6 on the backstab, while not advancing a level is.
Then, you can take the unimaginative route and play a melee character (whose power only varies incrementally from level to level), but in that case you're probably not in it for the challenge anyhow.
The other advantage of the exp loss system is that every idiot and their pet monkey doesn't hit the level cap, and you can actually level past the point where you have to deal with inept or annoying people. Of course, since inept players often don't want a game, just a way to feel powerful, this means that the exp loss games, while better games in general, are not as populated as World of Warcraft.
Moderates stir no one to action because they have reasonable expectations of what people will do, and get them to do it no problem, no stirring necessary. Likewise, they aren't catalysts for revolution because they are competent enough to change the system without breaking it.
With moderates left in charge of things, slavery would definitely be gone by now (because there isn't any reason to keep it around at this point), and Civil rights probably wouldn't have been an issue because the effort to deal with the new political conditions following abolition would have followed a path of greater compromise. As for women's sufferage, I dunno about that one, as the moderate position on the subject at the time was complete apathy rather than a real balanced stance. (Contrast to the moderate position on slavery during the time it existed, which was 'well, this isn't really completely ethically sound, but we need the institution to keep going or our economy will get buggered'.)
The cold war was essentially won by a moderate position ("well, they're our enemies, but we don't necessarily need to attack them, nor do we need to just perform a holding action... let's scare them into breaking their own economy") and the midaeval islamic empire was kept cohesive through use of a moderate stance (sure, allah is the one god and all, but we don't necessarily need to persecute the other religions, we'll just make it economically advantageous to me muslim). Also, every time a country has undergone a successful revolution, the 'successful' part has come from the new regime's moderation in the determination of policy.
Basically, I think you're giving the middle path a bit of a shorter shrift than it deserves. It's damn useful, and, while it doesn't necessarily make sudden changes to the world, it does make lasting ones (in fact, comparing your average peaceful policy change to your average revolution, I'd say much more lasting than the extremist-caused changes).
There's an industry based on coming up with stupid shit to sue people over. It's why prosecutors can afford to only charge for winning cases. Example: almost any medical malpractice trial.
People. Knew. Tobacco. Was. Bad. For. Them. Since. The. Seventeenth. Century. The fact that it was a little more bad than expected doesn't mean that smokers are not idiots essentially responsible for their own health problems. Well, the ones that sue over it are idiots, anyhow. Those that accept responsibility and try to bully their own HMO into actually providing them with medical care for once instead are just humanly flawed.
While I agree that stupidity is eternal (the outcomes of many of the aforementioned lawsuits being ample evidence), the divorce rate could easily go down. Also, two working parents is not 'scraping by' with full-time jobs in any first-world country. Unless you're talking about scraping by for the next payment on that 12 foot plasma television. Well, I suppose if neither parent had any clue how to spend money, it's possible... ok, sure, I'll accept your point under the universality of idiocy principle.
I also agree with this paragraph. Those of us who want things done properly will do them properly. The rest will jack around, and (while this is mean, i'm going to add 'hopefully' here) fail miserably, and a few will rebound to complain about how they miss the good old days while trying to make up lost ground on those that got it right the first time.
Ok, this post officially indicates I have to much time to waste on message boards. Back to my useful activities.
Um, no. Civil law is to deal specifically with things that aren't criminal. If it carries a jail sentence, it needs to be a jury court with a public prosecutor and defender, evidence gathered under warrant, and police oversight. If we start jailing people for civil offenses, we're just going to turn America into a fricking Dickens novel, and then we won't even be able to microwave a burrito without twenty-seven minutes of narration, and where would we be, then?
Defense is the wrong word, as it implies that it actually prevents bad things from happening.
Perhaps the word you're looking for is 'relief'? Humans relieve emotions by externalizing them, communicating them to others to deal with and leaving their own mind clear to continue doing things that it finds productive. At least, that's what I do. It doesn't defend against anything, but it orders the mind and puts priorities in an appropriate order.