In what you might call spiritual terms, yes. Morality is largely a human construct. As a social species we need rules of conduct, but the nature of those rules has varied wildly in time and space.
Except the Big Bang didn't create the Earth. It created a soup of energy and particles. The earth didn't come along for another 7 billion years or so. The Genesis account is not a scientific theory, and the verse you pull out is so vague that it really doesn't have any scientific utility at all. And the Genesis cosmography myth only gets more scientifically troublesome as you proceed, and requires even more artful interpretations to get past problems like the Earth existing before the Sun.
The real question isn't "is there a God?" The question we will ultimately face is "Is God necessary?" It's where my atheism stems. It's not a rejection of the concept, some sort of fist shaking at the Heavens because of what I view as trite complaints about the Problem of Evil. It comes down to my view, as unscientific as it may be, that I simply cannot see a necessity for such a being to exist. If a Prime Mover is needed, and we have to, in Aristotlean fashion, declare that that being be uncaused, primarily to escape an infinite regression problem, then parsimony would seem to dictate that if we have two entities; God and the Universe, I will take the property "uncaused", move it to the Universe, the which I know exists, and eliminate the entity that I do not, and perhaps can never know exists.
Oh, and I feel the same way about multiverse theory. While it's likely possible that within a generation or two we may be able to actually test string theory, and thus, at least indirectly test concepts like branes, for the moment string theory represents a lovely mathematical model that we really can't know whether it has any association to reality or not. It remains fundamentally a set of mathematical models, much as God represents a theological model, and both are burdened by being purely metaphysical and philosophical problems with no empirical backing.
Russia's chief problem these days is that, despite all the outward pretensions of being the Great Bear of the Czarist and Russian eras, much of its power is inherited from its own past. Syria is just about as distant a military campaign as it can hope to involve itself in. NATO may not be as big as it wants to be in Eastern Europe, but it has encroached into a number of Warsaw Pact states. Sure Ukraine has been split apart, but even there, the fact that a large portion of that nation remains outside Moscow's ability to control demonstrates just how far Russia has fallen in the last quarter century. Yes, it still has nukes, and it is largely because of those nukes that it has the international prestige it has, but the damage wreaked upon its economy even by the partial sanctions shows its vulnerability. Cyberwarfare is a potent weapon, as are the older mundane methods of terrorizing defectors, and it has shown some ability at sowing divisions among its rivals, but this is a nation that has fallen far.
Good catch. So he keeps his position as senior manager, loses the position of chairman which means, at least technically, he loses the ability to set the overall direction of the company, and dilution of his effective authority over the board means he very much becomes purely management now, and can be overridden, dismissed from the board, or even fired as CEO.
Honestly, this is the way most public companies have to go. At some point, if you are publicly trading and have a significant number of shareholders, the company is supposed to be about their interests, and not about yours'.
The Chairman is a position on the board of directors. The board of directors represents the shareholders, and in general does not manage the day to day affairs of the business; but rather hires a Chief Executive Officer (who in many organizations is the only actual direct employee of the board of directors) as the most senior manager. The board oversees long-term strategies, approves annual budgets, and in most private companies is elected by shareholders who hold common shares (one vote per common share). If Musk is no longer on the board of directors, even if he remains CEO, it is conceivable that the board could fire him, or at least intervene. He will be subordinate to the board, which is why I think the SEC is also requiring the number of directors be bumped up to dilute any control he may have over the board.
The chief issue my company is facing is contractual requirements of software being sufficiently up to date to receive security updates. In just over 24 months Office 2010 be EOL, meaning we have to upgrade sooner rather than later.
If paying for it bothers you, well you're going to pay for it anyways in societal costs. More health care, more law enforcement involvement, more broken homes. If you're sole metric is taxes, then you really are missing the bigger picture.
The general theory has been since 1945 that it's probably best if Germany's defense is largely taken care of by other people. A unified German state with a strong military has prosecuted three major wars, one of which was pretty damned successful (the Franco-Prussian War), and two of which required the combined might of the Allied Powers to defeat. Those last two wars are the most destructive conflicts in human history, so I'd say guaranteeing Germany's territorial integrity is in everyone's best interests.
Yes, it's an important point. Once again the American studio system saw an opportunity with HBO, but didn't see the inherent threat that that implied. So long as the network-air/network-cable cabals reigned supreme, HBO was still reliant on either pushing over the cable companies or via satellite (which is how I first saw HBO on a friend's satellite system in the 1980s). I have to believe that Netflix looked at HBO's successes and shortcomings and realized that the Internet afforded the opportunity to avoid having to bother with the traditional TV hegemony entirely. Of course now it's in a race with other players as the likes of Disney begin pushing towards their own streaming services, but that's fine, providing the big ISPs aren't allowed to start picking winners.
Only after Britain and France launched the largest land invasion in history on their Western flank, and even then it took ten months of concerted effort by all three Allied Powers to bring Germany to its knees.
Germany came damned close to dominating much of Europe, and if it had kept the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, it might not have had an Eastern Front at all. That was a strategic blunder driven as much by the Nazis perverse race views as by any military necessity to drive the Communists east of the Urals. As it was, it took the combined might of the British Empire, the United States and the Soviet Union to beat Germany. We're talking the pre-eminent military powers of the mid-20th century. As to WWI, well, Germany lost because of a revolution in Germany itself, and France and Britain were just exhausted by four years of war, and certainly the domestic situation in those two countries was only marginally better than Germany's. All things being equal, if the Kaiser's regime hadn't been toppled, 1919 promised to be even more terrible than 1914-1918.
But really, there's more German history from 1945 to present than from 1914 to 1945, and even when considering that period, it's useful to ponder how Germany managed, even in the 1920s, to rebuild much of its industry (with generous American loans I'll freely admit) and be in a position that by 1939 it felt confident enough to light the fuse on the Second World War.
It gets even more complicated. Nutrition during development in childhood has a pretty significant effect on cognitive ability, so even if you win the genetic lottery, you can still lose if you're born in to extreme poverty where caloric and nutritional intake is too low during developmental years. There's a lot of research to back that up, indicating that while cognition certainly has a genetic component, like all complex traits, there are significant environmental components as well; nutrition, exposure to heavy metals and other toxins, exposure to violence, maternal depression, and so on and so forth.
The funny thing is that the subscription model long predates Netflix's and Amazon's forays into original programming. HBO has been around for nearly fifty years as a premium service, and has done fairly well with it, enough that is able to produce a good deal of original programming, which it in turn is either now directly streaming online or has sold in certain national markets to other streaming services. What we're seeing here is simply a repeat of what happened to the music industry 15 years ago, where a total lack of foresight, despite the notion of directly delivering the media product via a subscription service being floated for a long time leading to the industry suddenly going 'WTF!" And as the unholy alliance between the cable companies and the major networks continues to fray (after all, what the hell does a cable company care whether the TV show being sent across its network is via TV signal or IP packets), watch the traditional studio model collapse completely.
And to some extent the agrarian system did collapse, and beginning with the Industrial Revolution in Britain, you started to see many agrarian workers heading to the cities to work in the factories and related forms of employment. But we're rapidly running out of places where displaced workers can go to find new work. When even service industry jobs like cashiers at department and grocery stores are becoming extraneous, where is it you imagine those people are going to go? For the skilled workers in many fields employment is guaranteed, at least for now, but as we've seen with low-skilled blue collar workers in industrial settings, automation means they end up going from relatively high-paying jobs to more service-oriented jobs, and now that even McDonalds is becoming increasingly automated, even that far less than ideal replacement work is fading away.
At some point, as automation begins to out perform even the cheap labor of developing countries, it isn't just Western low-skilled and service industry workers who are going to find themselves unemployed and unemployable by robots and AI.
The farm hands of the 18th and 19th centuries had options, even if those options were far from ideal. Where precisely do you suggest a single mom with two kids or some 55 year old divorcee getting back on their feet go when all the tills at Walmart are replaced by scanners and two or three floor managers to keep things rolling along smoothly?
This isn't the Industrial Revolution. We've been watching the process of increasing automation for nearly fifty years, and from where I sit, I can see major industrial centers like Detroit basically depopulating. For the moment the system is buoyed by a need for service industry workers, but in part that low unemployment will simply drive automation even faster as businesses give up on finding employees and invest in automation. And then, at some point when unemployment starts to rise those traditional back stops will no longer be there.
Indeed. I'm sure this is just some custom build of Samba, probably with a dead-simple log in interface (not that Samba is all that hard to connect to Active Directory these days). It's an interesting option, and I might even consider it for some of our systems where something like Google Docs would be more than sufficient.
Let's be pretty clear. The reason at least Boris Johnson wanted Brexit was he saw it as a pathway to Number 10. I do agree about Farage and Rees-Mogg (the latter looks and talks like a Bond villain for chrissake). All in all, Brexit was a good example of a rightfully angry electorate picking the wrong tool to fix a problem. The good thing is that it appears that the Tories as a group seem to backing May and the Chequers Agreement, in no small part because apart from Rees-Mogg's little cabal, no one really wants Boris Johnson to be PM, and also because everyone understands all too clearly that Europe is Britain's largest trading partner, and falling back on WTO rules would devastate the financial industry.
I doubt there'll be a second referendum, so I think Britain is facing exit from the EU, but with a Soft Brexit that will go some distance towards protecting key industries, preventing the re-establishment of a border between Ireland and Northern Ireland, as well as undermining any new attempts by Scottish nationalists to use Brexit as a hinge point to make a bid for a new referendum (all of these demonstrate just how insane putting an entire nation's economic welfare and unity in the hands of an angry electorate). But I also suspect that we'll probably be looking at re-entry of the UK into the EU at some point in the next 25 years, and this time without the special considerations (goodbye pound sterling).
It's like you read the first sentence of my post, but not the rest.
The point was that unlike, say, English, which did absorb quite a bit of Latin vocabulary via Norman French, French didn't "absorb" Latin syntax and vocabulary, it is a descendant of Latin. It is what Latin came to be in the former Gaulish provinces after about six or seven hundred years of linguistic evolution. That isn't the same as the propensity of Germanic languages to hoover up words.
Technically French is Latin, or rather a descendant language of the Vulgar Latin spoken on Rome's Gaulish provinces. It adopted some words of Celtic and Germanic origin, but is a Romance language like Spanish, Italian, Romanian, Gallacian and Portuguese. It didn't borrow Latin words, it was Latin, with about 1500 years of linguistic evolution.
In a way, it won't matter any more. When even the robots are built by robots, it's going to come down to transportation costs. It's going to be a lot cheaper to have a robot manufacturing facility in Michigan building robots for the mid-west, to be shipped via driverless trucks or whatever other automated transportation system, than to put them on a slow boat from China. It's not going to make American manufacturing jobs come back, but it will mean at the very least the manufacturing is more localized to take advantage of supply chains. And of course, you'll have millions of Chinese factory workers raging against the machine just like folks in Western rust belts are these days. It's already happening as some manufacturing in China migrates to India, where they work even cheaper than the Chinese. But once you all but cut out the worker on the factory floor, it simply becomes a problem of "what's the cheapest way to get my widget to market".
Slashdot Mirror
In what you might call spiritual terms, yes. Morality is largely a human construct. As a social species we need rules of conduct, but the nature of those rules has varied wildly in time and space.
Except the Big Bang didn't create the Earth. It created a soup of energy and particles. The earth didn't come along for another 7 billion years or so. The Genesis account is not a scientific theory, and the verse you pull out is so vague that it really doesn't have any scientific utility at all. And the Genesis cosmography myth only gets more scientifically troublesome as you proceed, and requires even more artful interpretations to get past problems like the Earth existing before the Sun.
The real question isn't "is there a God?" The question we will ultimately face is "Is God necessary?" It's where my atheism stems. It's not a rejection of the concept, some sort of fist shaking at the Heavens because of what I view as trite complaints about the Problem of Evil. It comes down to my view, as unscientific as it may be, that I simply cannot see a necessity for such a being to exist. If a Prime Mover is needed, and we have to, in Aristotlean fashion, declare that that being be uncaused, primarily to escape an infinite regression problem, then parsimony would seem to dictate that if we have two entities; God and the Universe, I will take the property "uncaused", move it to the Universe, the which I know exists, and eliminate the entity that I do not, and perhaps can never know exists.
Oh, and I feel the same way about multiverse theory. While it's likely possible that within a generation or two we may be able to actually test string theory, and thus, at least indirectly test concepts like branes, for the moment string theory represents a lovely mathematical model that we really can't know whether it has any association to reality or not. It remains fundamentally a set of mathematical models, much as God represents a theological model, and both are burdened by being purely metaphysical and philosophical problems with no empirical backing.
The Russian trolls are just pissed their activities are being curtailed.
Russia's chief problem these days is that, despite all the outward pretensions of being the Great Bear of the Czarist and Russian eras, much of its power is inherited from its own past. Syria is just about as distant a military campaign as it can hope to involve itself in. NATO may not be as big as it wants to be in Eastern Europe, but it has encroached into a number of Warsaw Pact states. Sure Ukraine has been split apart, but even there, the fact that a large portion of that nation remains outside Moscow's ability to control demonstrates just how far Russia has fallen in the last quarter century. Yes, it still has nukes, and it is largely because of those nukes that it has the international prestige it has, but the damage wreaked upon its economy even by the partial sanctions shows its vulnerability. Cyberwarfare is a potent weapon, as are the older mundane methods of terrorizing defectors, and it has shown some ability at sowing divisions among its rivals, but this is a nation that has fallen far.
Good catch. So he keeps his position as senior manager, loses the position of chairman which means, at least technically, he loses the ability to set the overall direction of the company, and dilution of his effective authority over the board means he very much becomes purely management now, and can be overridden, dismissed from the board, or even fired as CEO.
Honestly, this is the way most public companies have to go. At some point, if you are publicly trading and have a significant number of shareholders, the company is supposed to be about their interests, and not about yours'.
The Chairman is a position on the board of directors. The board of directors represents the shareholders, and in general does not manage the day to day affairs of the business; but rather hires a Chief Executive Officer (who in many organizations is the only actual direct employee of the board of directors) as the most senior manager. The board oversees long-term strategies, approves annual budgets, and in most private companies is elected by shareholders who hold common shares (one vote per common share). If Musk is no longer on the board of directors, even if he remains CEO, it is conceivable that the board could fire him, or at least intervene. He will be subordinate to the board, which is why I think the SEC is also requiring the number of directors be bumped up to dilute any control he may have over the board.
The chief issue my company is facing is contractual requirements of software being sufficiently up to date to receive security updates. In just over 24 months Office 2010 be EOL, meaning we have to upgrade sooner rather than later.
If paying for it bothers you, well you're going to pay for it anyways in societal costs. More health care, more law enforcement involvement, more broken homes. If you're sole metric is taxes, then you really are missing the bigger picture.
The general theory has been since 1945 that it's probably best if Germany's defense is largely taken care of by other people. A unified German state with a strong military has prosecuted three major wars, one of which was pretty damned successful (the Franco-Prussian War), and two of which required the combined might of the Allied Powers to defeat. Those last two wars are the most destructive conflicts in human history, so I'd say guaranteeing Germany's territorial integrity is in everyone's best interests.
Yes, it's an important point. Once again the American studio system saw an opportunity with HBO, but didn't see the inherent threat that that implied. So long as the network-air/network-cable cabals reigned supreme, HBO was still reliant on either pushing over the cable companies or via satellite (which is how I first saw HBO on a friend's satellite system in the 1980s). I have to believe that Netflix looked at HBO's successes and shortcomings and realized that the Internet afforded the opportunity to avoid having to bother with the traditional TV hegemony entirely. Of course now it's in a race with other players as the likes of Disney begin pushing towards their own streaming services, but that's fine, providing the big ISPs aren't allowed to start picking winners.
Only after Britain and France launched the largest land invasion in history on their Western flank, and even then it took ten months of concerted effort by all three Allied Powers to bring Germany to its knees.
Germany came damned close to dominating much of Europe, and if it had kept the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, it might not have had an Eastern Front at all. That was a strategic blunder driven as much by the Nazis perverse race views as by any military necessity to drive the Communists east of the Urals. As it was, it took the combined might of the British Empire, the United States and the Soviet Union to beat Germany. We're talking the pre-eminent military powers of the mid-20th century. As to WWI, well, Germany lost because of a revolution in Germany itself, and France and Britain were just exhausted by four years of war, and certainly the domestic situation in those two countries was only marginally better than Germany's. All things being equal, if the Kaiser's regime hadn't been toppled, 1919 promised to be even more terrible than 1914-1918.
But really, there's more German history from 1945 to present than from 1914 to 1945, and even when considering that period, it's useful to ponder how Germany managed, even in the 1920s, to rebuild much of its industry (with generous American loans I'll freely admit) and be in a position that by 1939 it felt confident enough to light the fuse on the Second World War.
It gets even more complicated. Nutrition during development in childhood has a pretty significant effect on cognitive ability, so even if you win the genetic lottery, you can still lose if you're born in to extreme poverty where caloric and nutritional intake is too low during developmental years. There's a lot of research to back that up, indicating that while cognition certainly has a genetic component, like all complex traits, there are significant environmental components as well; nutrition, exposure to heavy metals and other toxins, exposure to violence, maternal depression, and so on and so forth.
The funny thing is that the subscription model long predates Netflix's and Amazon's forays into original programming. HBO has been around for nearly fifty years as a premium service, and has done fairly well with it, enough that is able to produce a good deal of original programming, which it in turn is either now directly streaming online or has sold in certain national markets to other streaming services. What we're seeing here is simply a repeat of what happened to the music industry 15 years ago, where a total lack of foresight, despite the notion of directly delivering the media product via a subscription service being floated for a long time leading to the industry suddenly going 'WTF!" And as the unholy alliance between the cable companies and the major networks continues to fray (after all, what the hell does a cable company care whether the TV show being sent across its network is via TV signal or IP packets), watch the traditional studio model collapse completely.
Germany has had such a system for decades, and is the power house of Europe.
And to some extent the agrarian system did collapse, and beginning with the Industrial Revolution in Britain, you started to see many agrarian workers heading to the cities to work in the factories and related forms of employment. But we're rapidly running out of places where displaced workers can go to find new work. When even service industry jobs like cashiers at department and grocery stores are becoming extraneous, where is it you imagine those people are going to go? For the skilled workers in many fields employment is guaranteed, at least for now, but as we've seen with low-skilled blue collar workers in industrial settings, automation means they end up going from relatively high-paying jobs to more service-oriented jobs, and now that even McDonalds is becoming increasingly automated, even that far less than ideal replacement work is fading away.
At some point, as automation begins to out perform even the cheap labor of developing countries, it isn't just Western low-skilled and service industry workers who are going to find themselves unemployed and unemployable by robots and AI.
The farm hands of the 18th and 19th centuries had options, even if those options were far from ideal. Where precisely do you suggest a single mom with two kids or some 55 year old divorcee getting back on their feet go when all the tills at Walmart are replaced by scanners and two or three floor managers to keep things rolling along smoothly?
This isn't the Industrial Revolution. We've been watching the process of increasing automation for nearly fifty years, and from where I sit, I can see major industrial centers like Detroit basically depopulating. For the moment the system is buoyed by a need for service industry workers, but in part that low unemployment will simply drive automation even faster as businesses give up on finding employees and invest in automation. And then, at some point when unemployment starts to rise those traditional back stops will no longer be there.
Indeed. I'm sure this is just some custom build of Samba, probably with a dead-simple log in interface (not that Samba is all that hard to connect to Active Directory these days). It's an interesting option, and I might even consider it for some of our systems where something like Google Docs would be more than sufficient.
Let's be pretty clear. The reason at least Boris Johnson wanted Brexit was he saw it as a pathway to Number 10. I do agree about Farage and Rees-Mogg (the latter looks and talks like a Bond villain for chrissake). All in all, Brexit was a good example of a rightfully angry electorate picking the wrong tool to fix a problem. The good thing is that it appears that the Tories as a group seem to backing May and the Chequers Agreement, in no small part because apart from Rees-Mogg's little cabal, no one really wants Boris Johnson to be PM, and also because everyone understands all too clearly that Europe is Britain's largest trading partner, and falling back on WTO rules would devastate the financial industry.
I doubt there'll be a second referendum, so I think Britain is facing exit from the EU, but with a Soft Brexit that will go some distance towards protecting key industries, preventing the re-establishment of a border between Ireland and Northern Ireland, as well as undermining any new attempts by Scottish nationalists to use Brexit as a hinge point to make a bid for a new referendum (all of these demonstrate just how insane putting an entire nation's economic welfare and unity in the hands of an angry electorate). But I also suspect that we'll probably be looking at re-entry of the UK into the EU at some point in the next 25 years, and this time without the special considerations (goodbye pound sterling).
Thanks Ivan. Always good to get the view from sunny St. Petersburg.
If it isn't for the actual companies providing services, the Internet wouldn't have much of a purpose.
I think it's cute you imagine in a few decades anyone will be using diesel.
It's like you read the first sentence of my post, but not the rest.
The point was that unlike, say, English, which did absorb quite a bit of Latin vocabulary via Norman French, French didn't "absorb" Latin syntax and vocabulary, it is a descendant of Latin. It is what Latin came to be in the former Gaulish provinces after about six or seven hundred years of linguistic evolution. That isn't the same as the propensity of Germanic languages to hoover up words.
Technically French is Latin, or rather a descendant language of the Vulgar Latin spoken on Rome's Gaulish provinces. It adopted some words of Celtic and Germanic origin, but is a Romance language like Spanish, Italian, Romanian, Gallacian and Portuguese. It didn't borrow Latin words, it was Latin, with about 1500 years of linguistic evolution.
In a way, it won't matter any more. When even the robots are built by robots, it's going to come down to transportation costs. It's going to be a lot cheaper to have a robot manufacturing facility in Michigan building robots for the mid-west, to be shipped via driverless trucks or whatever other automated transportation system, than to put them on a slow boat from China. It's not going to make American manufacturing jobs come back, but it will mean at the very least the manufacturing is more localized to take advantage of supply chains. And of course, you'll have millions of Chinese factory workers raging against the machine just like folks in Western rust belts are these days. It's already happening as some manufacturing in China migrates to India, where they work even cheaper than the Chinese. But once you all but cut out the worker on the factory floor, it simply becomes a problem of "what's the cheapest way to get my widget to market".