I'm a second year law student, and I for one would hate to do without my laptop. I can type about 5 times faster than I can handwrite, and when I need to make corrections or additions to earlier notes, I can do it in an organized manner without scribbling things out and squeezing things in the margins and whatnot. When it comes time to put it in to outline form, organized notes are key. Also, taking exams using SofTest is a godsend.
Given that tuition my school costs about $1/minute for every lecture attended, you wouldn't figure too many students would be interested in screwing off, but it happens. There's only so many hours of Tax Law you can take before your mind craves escape. But still, lectures for some subjects and some professors frankly are a waste of time. You can read the materials and commercial briefs on your own and get everything you need. Listening to rambling philosophical ruminations is a terrible waste of preciously limited supply of time. The ABA requires minimum attendance of 80% of classes, which is fine, but when you have the inevitable 12 hours of studying or outlining to catch up on, skipping classes would help.
One professor I had last year for Property Law banned laptops from her classroom. She was a rather feminist type. I heard that the reason she banned them was because a student the year before had a screen saver which featured a hot chick who would loose an article of clothing after every couple minutes. The guys in the back of the class would all be like "awwww!" when he moved the mouse to take notes, and the timer would be reset to fully clothed.
I have actually found it distracting when someone is playing WoW or whatever in front of me in lecture, but I don't think there should be a universal ban. Law classes are pretty intimate settings and usually everyone pretty much knows everyone. The vast majority of the time students in a class can just handle these problems one-on-one.
Before we would have a war with the machines, I predict we would incrementally start merging with them. Before humans would face extinction through being obsolete, we may recognize the danger and some people would opt to attempt merging. If the rapid and uncontrolled AI self-evolution were to take off before we could recognize it or stop it, then ok, we might be doomed. If, however, the process of AI self evolution has fits and starts and would take several decades, we may have time to investigate biological integration.
There wouldn't be a shortage of technophiles in the future for those willing to have implants interfacing directly with their brain. With enough progress in safety, the potential for greatly enhanced communications, productivity, memory, entertainment, and pleasure would be very tempting. If nothing else, normal minds trapped in non-functional bodies, like paraplegics and degenerative disease sufferers (Lou Gherig's, muscular dystrophy, etc.) will plead their case. After the technology is developed and continually enhanced, then possibly AI complexity will grow in parallel with a human cyborg partnership. As soon as a few generations of adults become accustomed and comfortable with implants, they may eventually come to have their children enhanced as well. As new the pre-implanted generation grows up, they may then choose to have their infant children immediately implanted, or possibly in the womb.
A process likely to proceed in parallel to AI development is biological intelligence enhancement. Because we already have all of the basic DNA blueprints to build a functional intelligent creature, we could alter the code to have greatly enhanced brains. It's was found after his death that Einstein was born with an extra 15% of grey matter in an atypical grooveless structure on the surface of his parietal lobe--in the area responsible for spatial, mathematical and abstract thought. It was solely due to a rare genetic mutation. Probably with some relatively minor tweaks of the human genome sequence, large progress may be made in creating biologically enhanced super-intelligence. When one wishes to assemble a large tractor, it's much easier to improve upon an existing design for something like as a lawnmower and scale up, rather than start from scratch with a jumbled pile of scrap metal spare parts. If merging and biologically improving, we would likely carry our hard-wires goals in to the AI age for a time with us.
Merging aside, I believe it's somewhat debatable whether or not an AI race would be stable in the sense of maintaining core goals anchoring it to a particular type of behavior. AI having some consistent "meaning of life" motivating them. For organic beings, hard-wired goals can be locally overcome in cases (suicide, self-sacrifice, living platonically, etc.), but natural biological-race individuals can't erase the evolutionary behavioral instincts in them which direct most of their code goal values. With most of mankind's endevors, it is usually an expression of the primitive instincts burned in to him which helped him survive well in the wilds of Africa. Man had a overwhelming and constantly present sense of self-preservation. For his family, tribe and group he had a bonding and self-sacrifice instinct with them as well. He has an instinct to commit violence when needed against other groups of humans was instinctual to protect territory or assets. In times of famine, the instinct was to steal or pillage from others to survive. Males have an instinct to follow orders of a leader, women have instinct to communicate and share information. To some degree these instinct can be overridden when needed, but in the long term trend they provide a powerful harness guiding overall behavior.
Assuming you could change any goal short of self survival, what "wants" would you want to change? After changing those wants, iteratively changing the fundamental wants dozens or thousands of times, what is left of the original wants? Where would the seed of th
Somehow I get the feeling like this isn't so much information traveling instantaneously, but more generated in one place, split in to two identical pieces, and sent in opposite directions. For example say I fliped a coin, then without looking covered it with a sheet, clips two halves of the coin down and cut it in two with tin snips. Then, again without looking or disturbing it within the clip, I ship one half of the unrevealed coin off to Timbuktu. I call up the person holding the coin and check mine and presto: they're both heads!
I'm obviously missing some mysterious aspect to the experiment here since I'm dense on quantum entanglement. But, is anyone saying that the photon reacts in some way at the exact same time, like it's sitting there in it's funky indeterminate state and on it's own it observably goes 'poof' to pick a quantum state at an exact point in time? We can observe that moment in time it changes independent of knowing when the other is being measured? That is, opposed to the photon going 'poof' whenever I happen choose to measure it, like an hour later? Seems to make a big difference. One can be explained by saying the two halves were always in fact in a given state but we couldn't know about it until we measured at least one half (cause the other one always matches). The other way actually entails synchronized moments in some sort of "absolute time". Which, seems somewhat impossible to me as there is no such thing as absolute time according to relativity..
It's my suspicion that politicians and such want to find a reason why people do terrible crimes. The theory of stopping violent and psychotic behavior by cutting out some of the 'underlying triggers' for it, is an arbitrary rationalization for what 'causes' it to happen. It seems a desperate belief that sick people are in some external way more made to do the things they do. How in God's name otherwise can a human being contemplate murder (or other nefarious acts) simply for pleasure?? Maybe it's easier to blame a thing, than an outwardly normal-looking person who is integrated in modern society. That would make it a more controllable problem in society, which is a desperate belief as well.
They are probably backed up by stick-in-the-mud conservative and religious components who generally oppose any lascivious influence in society anyway. Which seems like an odd mix because the two camps are so different. One group can try an externalize and absolve blame for anti-social behavior by identifying a trigger for it, as liberals can take the crime away from the criminal. On the other hand, religious and conservative groups have no problem centering a crime in a criminal, but like the concept of controlling external influences to society on principal alone. For them, even those people who never plan on and never will commit a crime deserve to have their deviant pleasure taken away.
Both sides with their agendas are foolish in thinking deviant crime can be affected with porous and wasteful laws like this.
Yes chaos theory is always there, and I agree that it's irrelevant. In a rarified system with several hard-to-accurately-measure inputs, it can be said that the unknown, unmeasured initial conditions deterministically did 'cause' the evental pattern after all the self-feedback loops complete. This thinking is what leads people down the primrose path of theorizing, "If I just could figure out how to accurately measure the inputs, AND the dynamics of the system, THEN maybe I can predict the outputs.. (step 4: profit!)"
But for one, it's more like a Heisenberg principal, the only way to accurately measure the smallest required initial input, you would necessarily disrupt and alter those conditions. In the real world, you can never replicate an experiment with the same smallest undisturbed inputs to meaningfully refine research. Also, the dynamic feedback loops involved in the system can be modeled with mathematics only in a most surface sense. One can make pretty fractal pictures with recursive equations. The real dynamics involved in the real-world systems like weather patterns and wars are probably horribly exponentially more complicated than the ones in the pretty screensaver pictures. On both counts, predicting complex systems that seem to have patterned meaning is a fool's errand. Maybe once we get some super-AI going, but not now.
Actually I would say the entire Asimov "Foundation" series buys in to this line of thinking in a big way as well. Somehow, the theory went, there develops a convergence of predictability with a sufficiently large number of indicators, or a large enough base of independent actors in a system. Foolishness, of course. The chaos of mankind churns in so many hidden-feedback ways it's hopeless to predict. History also pivots on small turns--who wins a close 50/50 election 5 years from now? Does an assassination attempt succeed? Do terrorists get spotted and caught before an attack? Does a phone call or e-mail get intercepted by prosecutors? Will a hurricane wipe out a city? It's endless.
If you stare at random static long enough and hard enough, you WILL eventually see patterns. Not that your results mean anything outside of your head, but you will see them via the power of belief, rationalization, and intellectualizing. From what I've seen, sometimes PhD's can be the worst for this (example: Michael Mann and the hockey stick graph), because they try and obfuscate the argument with claiming they are too smart to be understood properly. Dubious scientific claims can start with personal overconfidence, but then are fed by a community with an agenda ('end the war', 'stop global warning', etc.)
Yes, seems like there are two possibilities for messaging:
Any number of possible universes could send messages to a waiting communicator with their versions of what happens in their universes given their unique random quantum fluctuations. A molecule flicks this way or maybe that, which causes a firing of a particular neuron or not, which forms the nucleus of a particular idea in your brain in a particular way. For the first message backwards in time you might decide to say "Hello, Watson", or instead by random chance be cute and say "Hola, Watson" (because, say, time travel in the Terminator suddenly just crossed your mind). Both "Hello.." and "Hola.." and 15 other variations might suddenly come streaming in to the machine in rapid succession. That way you can pretty much change the future at will, and not get in to any traditional Grandfather Dilemmas. Would be probably hard to cut through the noise, especially after all the many thousands of possibilities after only a few minutes, ESPECIALLY if there is a feedback loop generated with possibilities sent back creating their own new possibilities, etc.
Another way would be much more restrictive and intriguing. I'm guessing that if only one future message came through, AND IF you were then absolutely bound by some retroactive version of causality to eventually send that same message.. Then only those believers in the dangers of causality violation would ever get to listen for, or to send a message. The universe would find a way to prevent timelines with inconsistencies and violations. Before a non-believer had a chance to intentionally try and violate causality, 'something' would always happen. The machine would break down. There would be a power blackout. The phone would ring. You would have a heart attack and die. Someone else would rush in and send the right message for you. Anything. Like air rushing in to a vacuum, possibilities would rush in to clean up an inconsistency.
Also, if this actually machine were already successful I doubt anybody would really know about it. It would be very much against a successful creator's interests to reveal its actual existence. Think how utterly powerful it would make one to have such a machine? Unlimited generation of financial funds via market manipulation, the next Buffett. You could predict in advance what you enemies were eventually doing to try and thwart you, maybe be a prescient Gates. If it were the many universes version, you could research many blind alleys and send results back for each one in turn.. like quantum computing, it would never feel like you actually did more than the work of just one research task, since each time you complete research and send the results back, the new timeline created skips actually doing that research and moves on to new research, ad infinitum.
BUT, all these advantages would only work if you kept the machine a secret. After all, what good does predicting your enemy's movements, if he can predict yours too? What good would markets be if hundreds of future-reading people were trying to manipulate them? And, if it were common knowledge that it's even possible to build such a machine, every government in the world would rush in to create their own in the name of national security. Much less effective without a monopoly on the information. So if it's out there, don't count on hearing about it.
This is part of the philosophy of the modern criminal justice system. Heavy maximum sentences are simply a bargaining chip granted to prosecutors to efficiently dispose of cases that probably don't merit a trial. Prosecutors in the real world are the de facto judge and jury 90% of the time, due to the fact that they have the discretion to pick and chose cases to prosecute with draconian penalties. The best you can hope for is to pick responsible, reasonable people for that position. Prosecutors examine the evidence, make personal judgments on their facts and the applicable law, and file a laundry list of charges totaling 40 years if they so choose. At that point defense attorneys are often forced to tell a defendant not to risk it and plead guilty to a negotiated subset of the charges. The overwhelming volume of 'justice' is handled in backrooms this way. The rules of criminal procedure actively encourage it.
That's the struggle between the principles of civil liberties and the pragmatism of limiting crime in society. On the one hand, we demand a certain amount of accuracy for the sake of human dignity (not convicting the innocent), but on the other we demand that the streets be made safe and lawlessness be tamed. The only way to have it both ways it to place regular human beings (prosecutors and defense attorneys) in a position to arbitrarily dish out justice on an informal level. All of the myriad of technical rules and protections used in trials are a great amount of overhead. Trials are only necessary in close-call cases, for most defendants it's an unnecessary waste of resources.
So, we end up with a game where ridiculously oppressively harsh sentences are always threatened but rarely handed out. That was it creates the psychological impression that a defendant (and his lawyer) should sit down, shut up, and be 'thankful' to only get a 4-year sentence. If it weren't this way, every blatantly guilty and heinous criminals would always demand their day in court. I personally object to the forced informality of it all, but it's just the reality of a real-world system.
I tend to agree with MikeRT in that the threat of violence IS the ultimate underpinning of society, even modern society. It's very egalitarian and liberal to say otherwise. I've seen liberals before with quite a noble and affectionate, but naïve faith in the habit of man to perpetually abide by rules designed for the common good. We're all 10 days worth of missed meals away from barbarity. History is awash with blood caused by human nature, and it's not any recent physiological evolution in our moral conscious that has emerged to staunch it, it's our technological advancement in the delivery of more violence. Do you think that civilized society wouldn't tolerate death and destruction? All of the industrial nations of WWII sure did. This century has seen an unprecedented, methodical advance of death via war, it was simply a predictable combination of fundamental human nature with technology. Intellectual men designed, built, and eventually preemptively used the nuclear bomb on civilian targets. Only the eventual threat of much more violence (nuclear detente) has acted to stabilize the situation.
Skim the first couple chapters of Harvard political philosopher Robert Nozick's book "Anarchy, State, and Utopia", it's fascinating stuff. The science and patterns of the power via violence aren't that hard to map out, given 2,000 years of examples. Armies, war, sieges, treaties, alliances, and betrayals. What would happen if there were no police? No criminal courts or jails? No military? How long would polite, civilized society take to break down without them? A month, a year, maybe two? If someone from a bad part of town likes and wants your car, what's to stop them otherwise? Survival of the fittest kicks in. If you chose not to pay your taxes at all, what happens? Today they eventually come to arrest you. Don't want to be arrested? They will shoot you if you attempt to resist. Since the threat of violence ultimately hangs over you, might as well pay your taxes.
No culture is immune to breakdown, though it would occur faster for some than others. Theft, rioting, retaliations, then small protection groups, and eventually large collective defensive agencies would emerge. These are how governments gel and get formed in the first place, for protection. Protection against violence by having a monopoly on the "legal" sanctioned delivery of all violence within a given geographical area. These are eternal, essential features of governments of mankind, underpinning any intellectually decorative constructs.
Freedom of speech is an essential part of a civilized and dynamically evolving society... but does that really accurately describe about 70% of the world? Sure modern technology has had an impact on countries like China. But has their culture changed from within on its own, or has it been dragged there against its metaphorical will? They recognize the economic advantages of embracing a relationship with the rest of the world, but still they don't wish to dilute their own cultural system; they cling to their old systems.
Some societies in the world are glued together with conformist, repressive, traditionalist, xenophobic, nepotistic, and corrupt elements. Given their resource scarcity and population pressures, they don't know how to keep the system operating any other way. Is it really a fair assumption that all populations of the world ought to eventually become capitalistic democracies with civil liberties like internet freedom since that's basically the 'optimal state of mankind'? It worked so well for the last remaining superpower, so that makes it self-evident, right? Is it a causative factor?
But look how well that concept has worked out for example in Iraq. Yes, the US has gone in and tried their best to stabilize that situation and set up a stable democratic government with civil liberties and all. But the population has such deep cultural hatreds, mistrusts, cowardliness, and divisiveness that it overcomes their desire for unity and civility. Forced civility is just not ever gonna happen there. Like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, freedom of expression and free access to information fall well below priorities like physical safety, avoidance of political turmoil, and economic security.
I believe any one sole human being is perfectly capable of civility and is mature enough to benefit from privileges like free speech. That is, given a chance for him or her to grow up in a society that is functionally healthy and not struggling for survival. Societies that struggle to survive (i.e. keeping riots down, feeding themselves, their currency from collapsing, from going to war with neighbors, ruining their natural environment, etc.) though mostly aren't ready to stand on their own two feet while entrusting their populations with freedoms. I'm sure some here will disagree, and claim that freedoms can CAUSE societies to be healthy. I tend to think that freedoms are definitely needed to KEEP a society healthy, but disagree that they can make one healthy if it didn't start off that way.
I believe truly healthy societies are historically paved with courage and sacrifice of a critical mass of individuals (the blood of patriots), an embrace of change, natural competitiveness and ambition, and unity of population. If you lack one or more those things, personal freedoms can't create them or replace them.
Sure this would have some limited utilitarian use. But you know what I do to things I think I'll need later? I record them and put it in a sorted order so I can get it quickly under what circumstances I need it. I summarize what's truly important. I prioritize important things when I write them down, and I put miscellaneous information (instruction books, meeting notes, etc.) in places I know if/when I'll later need them. What good is a big indiscriminate pile of information of years of your life that in paper form would look like a wall of filing cabinets 20 feet high and 100 feet long? 90% of that information would be fairly useless. In searching archives of some always-on recorder, I would likely waste a lot of time trying to find what I need, and probably often think I found what I needed when I didn't really.
Intelligent memory is about organizing, sorting, remembering what's important. What good are computer search algorithms going to do you for always-on recordation? If you aren't intelligent enough to make sense of a jumble of information by identifying meaning, and then sorting and tagging it up as it occurs, a computer can't do that for you. At least not for a long time until AI is maybe as common-sense and intelligent as we are. If that day ever comes, would this look to augment existing memory, or replace it with crutches? Sounds like a de-evolution to me. At best you would end up reliving large swaths of recorded experiences (conversations, books, sights, sounds) of your life with tweezers trying to search for and grasp what was important.
Rather than being a productivity tool, I can see many people using technology like this as an emotional escape. Given the detail level, it would have a life of it's own. Look back in vivid detail on the big game that your won in high school, the hot date you had, getting married, when your kids were young and playful, when you were thin and in shape, your vacations, parties, past friends, and youth. We're meant to have memories fade in order to seek to make new ones.
Yes, it's unfortunate that when a convenient but unconventional usage of technology passes some threshold level of popularity, the powers-that-be come crashing in to regulate (i.e. eliminate) it. Look at peer-to-peer, or internet radio.. everything was fine when less than 1% of the general population knew of or used these services. They stayed under the radar. But when tech-savvy entrepreneurs got a hold of the idea and really made it take off to the masses, that's when it more or was spoiled. Special interests get involved, which make Congress gets involved, then hardware makers may get involved, international treaties get passes, etc. All the sudden it threatens everyone's perceived slice of the pie. Those days get ever closer as the previously safe harbors of technology get filled with more and more frustrated ex-users of conventional technology.
One may wonder if MythTV will survive legislative/regulatory scrutiny if everyone and their cousin starts using it. Historically speaking, I doubt it. Entertainment broadcasts will be made proprietary and encrypted, non-record flags will (somehow) be implemented, and open-source circumventions made illegal. Thus throwing us back down in to the pack with all the other consumer drones. Hacks against the machine are great to have, but keep your fingers crossed that they don't get too popular. There will always be a way to hack, but the powers-that-be won't stop creating barriers until they're satisfied that only 1% of the population KNOWS how to do that hack. At some point, the hack will be such a pain in the butt to implement that you, along with 98/100 other people, would rather just pay the stupid fee and take their functionality.
Just like paper junk mail, TV advertisers expect not to reach the vast majority of the people who are exposed to their pitch. Having a confirmed buyer response rate of 2% would make most advertiser's head spin, with a phenomenal ad-budget-to-profit ratio of 10:1. So what about the irritation level of the other 98% or people? To them, who cares.
While part of the game (to the show or movie producers) is to boost the total viewing audience numbers, some segments of that audience just aren't likely to buy anyway. The "do what you're told" types will buy more often. Those frustrated, stubborn, independent-minded persons that aren't likely to buy based on simplistic advertising can mute, surf, leave, complain, or boycott all they want. Unless the 1-2% confirmed base starts to waiver, that's the only time fear will sink in to advertisers.
The problem will probably get worse over the next 10-20 years as zombified TV watchers learn to take it, and TiVo becomes a tool for the money. Luckily Myth and other products will always be a voice of dissent, even if not supported by mainstream media companies. Hopefully broadcast flags and such won't get life via corporate influence.
I don't really count any kid over the age of about 13 as "a child" predicating protection for all types of innocence. I didn't mean the legal definition of child. I said small children, but probably should have clarified that. Small, like 3 to 7.
Sex, in my perfectly arbitrary and pigheaded but probably realistic opinion, should not occur for any kid no matter what maturity level until at least age 15. For immature ones, not until 17. That's maybe too young for some, and too old for others, but everyone agrees that there does exist some age which has to serve as a minimum to have it. As far as the 'talk' goes, obviously if parents don't talk to kids by middle school then their kids will find out things on their own, if not by late grade school. Information accurate then if they obtain it by other sources that you? Doubtful. But deference could possibly be paid to parents who do have a minimum and are trying to stick by it.
If one of my kids old enough to have genuine curiosity, and seems circumstantially knowledgeable about a subject to ask a reasonably intelligent question, then I will tell them the truth about it. Part of the maturity to handle knowledge is the ability to independently ask the question in the first place. Do I think though it's likely I would tell them what a 'Hot Carl' is? Simply put, no--even though I did see it on South Park the other day. It's not necessary for them to know that. My guess is you wouldn't want to tell your daughter about it either. Knowledge is often times hoisted on kids without their asking, by the world directly or indirectly by the world through their friends.
I can say in the spirit of democratic freedom that all parents should be allowed to raise their children in the way they want. Spank/don't spank, chores/no chores, curfew/no curfew, etc. You can let you kids run wild or lock them up, that's your right. It's just tilting a windmills.. a futile wish--that we lived in a world where more parents watched their kids before they run wild, and a didn't have to put up with such a salivating world that made a buck off them in the process whenever it could.
I'll ask, does an average small child need to know what orgasms are all about? Maybe yours asked, and you chose to tell her. That's just you. The world makes no such distinction; it sends information out to everyone. I'm not really getting to make that choice at that point, the world has preempted my choice. By sending my kids out in to the world, I'm losing part of my choice to raise them with innocence.
What value is innocence in a small child? I don't have a scientific answer for that. It's an intuitive feeling about a natural developmental process for a human being. For their sake, it's the one period time in your life they can feel really safe, that the world is simple, and life has pleasures that aren't complicated or bad for them. They don't have to explore parts of their emotional makeup that haven't physiologically caught up to anything yet. Along those lines.
Nothing will come of this. The world will churn along, young kids will learn to curse as they always have, kids will smoke weed as they always have, they'll pair off and sneak off to the woods a little younger. The next Britany will come along, wearing pasties in her new video. Parents will be busy and unconcerned. Some parents will be dismayed and wish it were different. Nothing new.
Yes I agree with the judge's assessment of the issue.
That having been said though I can sympathize to some degree, because of being a parent of small children myself, with trying to protect the innocence of children. What is the value of simple innocence? That is, not knowing what sex is about, what things like violence, drugs, cruelty, vulgarity, illness, death, mortal fear, etc. are all about. All kids lose it eventually, so what's the big deal? Why not let that that accidental and fumbly process just happen whenever it does as a natural consequence of living in modern society?
Because children are entitled to their innocence during their childhood, that's why. It's part of my job as a dad to insulate them for a time. This is the time when the world should be simple and their focus shouldn't be on maturing in adult ways. Playing with cool toys, making friends, running outside should be their experiences. There's all the rest of their lives left for maturing to the ways of the world.
Before people slam an unpopular 'thinkaboutthechildren' opinion, I'll clarify I'm not saying that all adults should forgo their rights to enjoy adult-oriented activities and materials. COPA is stupid and parents should take responsible for keeping a vigilant eye on what their kids are in to... innocence is lost incrementally and it occurs when parents aren't habitually looking, not all at once with just one slip.
Parenting is a fairly big job though. Both parents working to pay bills, and school, errands, daycare, activities, etc., it's a lot. A lot more so than single, childless folks making 70 in WoW can probably appreciate. When kids are sent out in to a world that glorifies so much sex appeal in the media, violence in the games, gloomy / sensational stuff on the news, parenting becomes that much harder. Vigilance isn't enough sometimes, because their friends get in to stuff where their parents haven't be so vigilant. When society in general is so awash in it, you have to practically build a sandbag wall around the house and homeschool your kids to keep it away.
It's a corny, but take Santa Clause for example. (Beyond the possibly greedy materialistic take on the whole custom) Santa is a really cute thing for kids to believe in. It's an innocent belief that is fantastic, generous, and exciting for them. It requires a little bit of teamwork by the older siblings and family and friends to keep the idea going, since the gig will be up soon enough on its own. Why rush to strip away an innocent belief like that? Isn't it worth the little bit of work to protect the secret? It's really not that big of a put-out for anyone.
As a parent I can appreciate the unrealistic wish that the world might have a little more respect for innocence in their stampede towards vulgar, hedonistic salaciousness in their day-to-day lives. Not that it's worth turning the world upside down for, but I can understand the wish for a little more teamwork.
Globalization suppresses normal diversification in a given country's economy. Anything that can sub-contracted out to a foreign land just disappears from this country's employment profile and those left have to cluster in to a shortening list of professions left. The jobs that are left here become either less skilled, or in management. There can be only so many managerial staff in the economy, we probably have too many as it is. The country has already lost the vast majority of its manufacturing industry; what's in store for us? Will we eventually end up a nation of nothing but fast-food burger flippers and managers for workers in other countries?
We may possibly get an overall monetary benefit as a country from offshoring, but you have to ask, who is getting that benefit?
Today: We produce X locally, paying a worker named 'Joe' $20 per widget object X, the employer sells X for $100, (ignoring other static production/distribution costs) the employer keeps, say, $80 of profit for every X object sold. Joe gets to feed his family off a living wage---he's not ripping anyone off or being lazy. He makes his $20/day.
Tomorrow: We hire someone offshore and pay them $4 per X built. The employer is not going to pass quite all the savings off to the consumer because competitive pressures aren't forcing him to. He sells each X for $90 now, raking in $86 in profit now. Now, someone in a third world country has $4 for their effort and can buy a flush toilet, the business owner/stockholders of the Widgets, Inc. company have $6 extra of profit in their pocket, the consumer saved 10% ($10) on the cost of the product. Woo-hoo! Everybody wins. Except.. Joe unfortunately now has to find another job not paying as much, possibly something unskilled like being a waiter. He makes a lot less than what he did before, now he only makes $10/day. Rinse and repeat times 10 million Joes. He took a 50% pay cut to subsidize a bunch of other people in society and across the world.
The overall net shift of wealth in America due to offshoring:
A) Money previously being earned in wages is taken from employee workers.
Some part of it gets transferred to each of:
B) Business owners/stockholders
C) Consumers of the product being made
D) Third world countries
Possibly the country as a whole might be getting a net benefit. Not have to pay money for higher wages to Americans can be seen as "net benefit" since we aren't paying our own workers more money. Maybe that is seen as a "wasteful" cost. My main beef here anyway is that any net benefit gained mainly goes to the rich. The class of "the rich" in America are mostly made up by groups (B) and (C). Jobless people and waiters (the 'recycled') are not often a part of buying consumers getting a benefit in group (C). So, it's really a net loss in economic wealth for a large group of (A) people. Like other economic theory proposed by Conservatives and Libertarians (e.g. trickle down economics), it's mostly an excluse to justify a massive shift of middle-class wealth to the hands of a few.
Of course job recycling is nothing new in the economy. A decline of something like horse buggy whip production has traditionally always been replaced by something like automobile production. I would have disagreed 100 years ago with attempting to halt technological progress, as I absolutely do now. I'm not a Luddite trying to stop technological progress, it's the lifeblood of economic growth. But the difference now from 100 years ago is that by removing a high-tech job now from the American workforce, we AREN'T replacing it with a higher paying job in a newer technological field. All other previous economic cycles had somewhere higher to grow to. The off-shoring process now replaces skilled jobs in America with lower paying and/or less skilled jobs chiefly characterized by the fact that they simply cannot be easily off-shored (being a barber, a waiter, etc).
Seems like you must be a big fan of "24", circletimessquare. You said that situations in reality are not a purified struggle between black and white, but more gray against gray. Therefore a little bad must be committed in order to achieve a larger good. But justifying things like questionably illegal searches, or for that matter Jack Bauer-style torture, the context used to ultimately justify those acts that ARE black and white. One must make many assumptions to create the rarefied scenario where the ends clearly justify the means because there are no unknowns... it's simply 'known' who is guilty, it's 'known' that certain techniques in question will be effective, it's 'known' what all the negative side affects will be in the short and long term, it's 'known' what the consequences of inaction are, it's 'known' that justice is the true pure motivation and not any other subversive or personal intent by the actors involved. It's like a tv show where you get to see all the camera angles, cue the heroic music.
The unknowns are obviously never clear cut in reality. In real life how often investigators.. detectives, prosecutors, etc., get it wrong and are fallible may surprise you. If you ask a cop, many will say that they would rather send 5 innocent people to jail then let one true criminal go free--often on the theory that 'they probably did something else bad anyway'. When we create classes of crimes where rules can be bent, simply based on the bona fide 'good intent' of these people, it spells trouble. Some day domestic Guantanamos may begin appearing due to the sheer pragmatic appeal of it... and anyone who thinks that is a good idea has already swallowed the kool-aid, in my opinion.
What happens when we lose any respect for the rights of criminals, no matter what the crime? What happens when arbitrary imprisonment or torture becomes ok, based on any type of plausible claim of urgent need? Over the long term we all lose respect for our own privacy, our own personal freedoms, our own value for human life. Respect for these concepts are not a normal part of the human condition. America is unique, utterly unique in world history, in that we so enshrined and fought for in our culture a universal respect for these artificial concepts. 99% of mankind's history was those powerful stepping carte blanche on the weak, the rich over the poor, race vs. race, the State over the peon-people. Shown by historical example mankind's natural cultural state tends to be oppressive and brutal, and it take a huge ballast to counterbalance that tendency.
There seems to be an assumption along the way that 'good' lawful people and 'bad' criminal people are totally unrelated subjects... it's simply us vs. them. The truth is there is a cultural dynamic between the groups. How efficient do we demand our system be? How much are we willing to sacrifice in the name of actual or perceived safety? What role, if any, should compassion and forgiveness play? How do people react to their treatment? What is most effective, rather than what feels the best? To me, the conservative sentiment of "shoot them all and let God sort them out" is an unfortunate regression based on emotion and not on thought or civility. To them I hope they would recognize some day that the situations in the real world are not so simple as prepackaged 24 episodes.
All my life I called myself a Conservative, and voted as such, up until the last few years. Mostly in response to my disgust with the irresponsibility of the Republican party (the usual: Iraq, civil right abuses, secrecy/combativeness/hubris of the executive branch, the budgetary waste, questionable tax cuts, etc.) led me to refute that party. I've never been a strong proponent of a welfare/entitlement state though. I believe human nature in its natural state can turn lazy and unmotivated; therefore many often need a swift kick in the pants to get going. Ambition and self-sufficiency isn't natural to all.. it's part of what lets the small-fry be so easily taken advantage of.
I have investigated Libertarianism as an alternative. I grew up reading a lot of pulp Heinlein, and was influenced at a young age by his staunch sense of self-reliance. I admit it's not for everyone, but it works for me. In that spirit I've studied a diverse set of things...engineering (electrical), IT (which I now work in), history, philosophy, survival training, and I'm in law school now.
I met the vice-presidential candidate for the Libertarian party, Richard Campagna, at a small gathering 3 years ago while he was running for office. I found him to be highly academically knowledgeable and intellectually consistent in his positions. I had the opportunity to ask him about a few topics: economics (he's obviously a laissez-fairist), military intervention (he carried the banner of isolationism), personal rights (very much the liberal), and such. While I didn't agree with everything he said, the views were an a la carte sampling that, on balance, were appealing as an alternative to the only two choices available today.
Much like your comments, I agree that the natural and inevitable end of an unregulated system is the rich getting richer. Those inordinately ambitious and greedy individuals will find long-term ways to manipulate the system to their own gain: tax avoidance plans, collusionary business practices, insider investment schemes, executive pay larceny, crooked corporate accounting, hired Washington special interest lobbyists, benefits and pension cutback schemes, monopolies, kickbacks and bribes, litigious abuse, punitive contract terms, etc., you name it, all help to create millionaire-style wealthy people. Institutionalized corruption, often practiced by a small number within a corporation is a key path. Prices for products and services are kept artificially high for consumers (e.g. a copy of Windows XP or Vista), while salaries have pressures to keep them artificially low (as in using offshore and illegal alien workers). Libertarians puzzle me btw when they support offshoring, like a tool.
The wealthiest top 10% of the population own 70% of the available wealth in America. Honestly, that ratio is beyond my concept of any kind of reasonably fair or natural distribution of wealth. Proportionally speaking, for every $100 in tax cuts arranged for by the government (say, handed out to an average 10 people), 1 guy out of 10 keeps $70, while the other 9 of 10 get to keep about $3 each. Great bargain for the small guy in that tax cut.. $3, versus $70. Tax cuts in America simply reinforce an already unbalanced economic distribution of wealth.
It's certainly an argument against laissez-faire to me.. much the same way monopolies naturally form given time, an ultra-rich class will naturally form over time, vacuuming up the available wealth mostly produced by the population at large. The system as a whole is dragged down from it's full potential when either forms. This is a quote I came across a few years ago by John Galbraith. I think it's true: "The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness." I think it's true about Conservatism, and Libertarianism has that somewhat in common. I have little sympathy for the ultra-rich who 'earned' their riches and 'ju
Curiosity, loneliness. There's always the possibility of undiscovered physics, since it's unlikely that any species can ever be sure they've really discovered it all. No matter how advanced a species it, they might want to search for an even older, more experienced race to teach them. Maybe they hope to find a old race that has records of even older races. They might find us incidentally in the process.
Perverse pleasure in hunting and killing. Some members of mankind hunt other lesser species for pleasure, it's a throwback to our survival days. Any species that has survives to old age may through Darwinism have to be deeply xenophobically aggressive. Think Borg, a.k.a. the biggest kid on the block.
Self protection. If you assume that the physics of this universe has some practical limit in terms of technology (miniaturization, energy harnessing, quantum randomness, speed as a function of light, etc) then time to develop it would tend an equalizing factor among various civilizations. Given 1 million years to independently develop technology, I'll bet pretty much every species gets a hold of all the same basic stuff. Anything that is possible given the physics in this universe. Magnetic pulse laser cannons,.5c rail guns, electromagnetic force shields, light-bending camouflage exteriors, antimatter/fusion/ion drives, whatever. The possibility that anyone can eventually develop this stuff might be a troubling contingency for them.
For example today: Right now the hostile Arab states aren't at all very much for the American military to worry about handling--at least in terms of them launching a traditional organized invasion on our soil. What if we sat and did nothing about them for 500 years? After that time, what would we have versus them? It might be time then to get worried, when THEY have AI self-guiding, stealthy, multi-mini-black-hole warhead-tipped ICBMs capable of being launched from offshore ultra-silent submarines? I doubt that defensive technologies can counter offensive technologies forever. We are very fragile beings, after all.
Given the relatively short time span for advancements in technology (a mere thousands of years), it might be in the best survival interest of other species to keep tabs on the competition before they get too far out of control. It might also even be in their interest to 'run silent' while gathering this information. After all, what advantage is there in broadcasting one's existence? It would be like showing your poker hand to everyone at the table. The more prudent approach might be to let others broadcast themselves, whether advanced or not, and then decide if you want to reciprocate to just them selectively. Just like living in a really tough neighborhood. It's possible that all of the noisy, eager species have been eliminated so far due to this survival-rule reality. And it would explain the silence.
This war on terrorism is our new Cold War. It will last a generation or two.
Because we are at war it is necessary to engage in certain behaviors--renditions, torture,
domestic spying, secret prisons, etc.
We cannot tell you what we are doing because it would compromise national security during a
time of war.
The courts cannot review what we are doing because it will compromise national security during
a time of war.
Any newspaper reporter or news outlet that reports a leak of these programs can be put under
oath and forced to reveal sources, under threat of going to jail for contempt.
Only select members of Congress can know what we are doing. But they cannot tell anyone because it will compromise national security.
When Congress passes laws, the president has the right to ignore these law if he believes they
infringe upon his war powers or his role as Commander in Chief.
The courts cannot review the president's decision in rule no. 7 because it would compromise
national security.
These rules have the very convenient effect of disabling ALL of the checks and balances on the executive branch of the government. Frankly, unless many thousands of Americans are dying, violence is erupting everywhere, and this country is teetering on the brink of economic/political oblivion, I see no reason to install an emergency autocratic government. Even if we were at that point, I would still want some above-board cost/benefit arguments explained to me as to how I'm going to be safer in reality (as to just "feeling" safer) by giving up some of my civil liberties and watching the world learn to hate us.
Much like the rest of his political strategy (Iraq war, etc), Bush puts forward nothing but a flim-flam job of justifying inflated neo-con theories of the use of discretionary executive force. How nice it would be to make all the trains run exactly on time, if we could just arrest anyone who used to make them run late? Fascism has a certain appeal when you don't realize that it actually is fascism.
We need checks and balances in the country.. anybody who doesn't believe that should closely read the Federalist Papers. Those guys were certified geniuses in the realistic exercise of power. They had the benefit of 1,000 years of European wars and history to examine human nature at its Machiavellian worst. They knew EXACTLY what they were doing when they set up checks on presidential power, they envisioned internal and external threats to the country every bit as clear and present as they are today.
Yes I guess I buy it based on the facts that for dark matter:
Nobody can detect any direct, or any other indirect evidence of the existence of this substance.
It does not scale down to explain why the Voyager probes are closer to the sun then they should be.
Fantastic claims (this stuff makes up 90% of the universe?) need extrodinary proof. Very lacking here.
Occam's Razor points toward something that does not need so many mysterious properties. It has to be basically undetectable in any normal sense (on Earth or out there), unreactive to radiation or heat, and uniquely distributed away from regular matter.
At least with a tweak in an existing formula, it explains the primary phenomenon without employing an invented tool to get there. It's like you could just put out a formula for predicting how gravity behaves, or say "there are leprechauns are racing around pulling down on things". The intermediate explanation is fantastic and unneeded.
If I remember reading the article right a few days ago in the magazine, I believe it mentions some sort of memory-shifting metal that reacts to heat. He can expose a coil of the stuff to the sun so when heated up during the day, the coil would wind itself up. Possibly he could use a large magnifying glass to get the temperature up high enough. During night when the temp goes down it would unwind and thus drive the clock. Alternating coils mechanically exposed to the sun on alternating days would keep the mechanics going for some time. Memory metal has a very high fatigue resistance. Memory metal info here).
Science today is much much more highly specialized and major discoveries do not come from a single researcher working in his garage any more. It takes a fleet of people in a sector all attacking small bits of the problem, fueled by grants from univerties, businesses, and governments. You really can't compare the judgment that a single individual would use for evaluating the worth of research into technology 'X', versus a collective body acting like a board of people serving as proxies for spending billions of dollars of other people's money. It would be like comparing the decisions a parent raising their kid to how the nation runs it's entire school system.
A much more methodological technique is used when collective bodies evaluate potential payoffs of research. They don't go on an unexplainable 'gut feeling'. They try to figure in a) the probability of success for the given goal, b) the rough uncertainty factor in that estimation of that probability of success, c) probability of side-benefits, d) likely certainty level of that, e) probability of cost-overrun risk, etc.
Over the long run, this is the most efficient way to spend research dollars. It's not as exciting or daring or 'romantic' or whatever as a lone, bold explorer ignoring the odds and the naysayers. But this is why Intel, Pfizer, NASA, Bowing, MIT, and others are generally the best research and development organizations in the world.
Thank you for the supportive comment on the book, I agree wholeheartedly.
What Crichton did, in my view, was to bring up some reasonable objections that any reasonably intelligent non-scientists person looking at the raw data and methods might bring up. For example.. "So, most raw temperature measurements are actually 'corrected' for the heat-island effects due to all the concrete and asphalt use around cities to find the 'true' temperature?..oh, really? And most temperature readings have traditionally been taken around cities. And who decides what these altertion factors are now, versus how much/how quickly they shifted for various different cities in the world over the last 50 years? Oh, different researchers choose their own factors.. you don't say? That's interesting. And while melting in some places, the Antarctic ice sheet is overall actually growing, not shrinking? Hmmm. I was given the opposite impression by some people."
Crichton included a long bibliography of scientific studies done--he directly quotes and draws upon hundreds of published scientific papers. Things peer reviewed and published in periodicals like Science, Nature, Technology Review, Geology, Journal of Climate, Journal of Animal Ecology, etc. He quotes Harvard professors and Nobel prize winners who doubt the theory.
Heck for that matter, see the 20,000 PhD's and trained scientists who recently signed a petition from the National Academy of Sciences officially casting doubt on global warming: http://www.oism.org/pproject/. The petition states: "There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate."
Crichton is a experienced researcher for science subjects, I don't think this can be denied. He is mainly calling out a warning against consensus science for disputed theories like secondhand smoke, global warning, and nuclear winter.
All of the criticisms I have heard or read in response to the book (including in this posting) are ad homenim attacks on Crichton. This actually indeed does strengthen his case because of the suspiciously weak retorts to his claims. I have never seen any sort of direct refutation on the facts and merits of his claim. Critics simply offer up "you can trust me, he's a nothing but a hack"... honestly this isn't what it takes to dissuade me of a factual claim, especially when that claim has the ring of truth to it. I would like to hear someone directly counter his scientific claims. Nobody is denying that the data has to get massaged in various way in order to come to the given conclusion.
Obviously a scientists needs to admit that they do not know everything. But the same token, they need to take a realistic view on the uncertainty. Due to the potential consequences, it seems that scientists have taken an excusatory view on shaky methods used in the research and uncertainty levels attached to conclusions.
The majority needs sound, unchallengeable science to back up counterclaims, not raw data that massaged in to place to support a popular claim. Poor science can get popular and be touted as truth. Scientific reality isn't established through majority rule, and it seems the world hasn't learned that yet.
I feel compelled to submit a long quote from Michael Crichton's book State of Fear (he has it posted online as well at http://www.crichton-official.com/fear/index.html under Excerpts, Author's Message). It was an illuminating book. I, like most people, figured a smoke/fire deal must be going on for global warming--even though I never looked deeply in to it before. Crichton did a LOT of basic research on the subject and came to the conclusion that the scientific methods were highly flawed, the claims unjustified, and the conclusions had so much intrinsic uncertainty as to be unusable for any practical policy decisions. The scientific community for some reason has taken a real bath on this one.
This is a synopsis of Crichton's views, what he wrote in the appendix of his book. The particular flaws in 'estimation science' (an oxymoron?) are detailed during the main book.
The quote:
A novel such as State of Fear, in which so many divergent views are expressed, may lead the reader to wonder where, exactly, the author stands on these issues. I have bee reading environmental texts for three years, in itself a hazardous undertaking. But I have had an opportunity to look at a lot of data, and to consider many points of view. I conclude:
We know astonishingly little about every aspect of the environment, from its past history, to its present state, to how to conserve and protect it. In every debate, all sides overstate the extent of existing knowledge and its degree of certainty.
Atmospheric carbon dioxide is increasing, and human activity is the probable cause.
We are also in the midst of a natural warming trend that began about 1850, as we emerged from a four-hundred-year old cold spell known as the "Little Ice Age."
Nobody knows how much of the present warming trend might be a natural phenomenon.
Nobody knows how much of the present warming trend might be man-made.
Nobody knows how much warming will occur in the next century. The computer models vary by 400 percent, de facto proof that nobody knows. But if I had to guess --- the only thing anyone is doing, really --- I would guess the increase will be 0.812436 degrees C. There is no evidence that my guess about the state of the world one hundred years from now is any better or worse than anyone else's. (We can't "assess" the future, nor can we "predict" it. These are euphemisms. We can only guess. And informed guess is just a guess.)
I suspect that part of the observed surface warming will ultimately be attributable to human activity. I suspect that the principal human effect will come from land use, and that the atmospheric component will be minor.
Before making expensive policy decisions on the basis of climate models, I think it is reasonable to require that those models predict future temperatures accurately for a period of ten years. Twenty would be better.
I think for anyone to believe in impending resource scarcity, after two hundred years of such false alarms, is kind of weird. I don't know whether such a belief today is best ascribed to ignorance of history, sclerotic dogmatism, unhealthy love of Malthus, or simple pigheadedness, but it is evidently a hardly perennial in human calculation.
There are many reasons to shift away from fossil fuels, and we will do so in the next century without legislation, financial incentives, carbon-conservation programs, or the interminable yammering of fearmongers. So far as I know, nobody had to ban horse transportation in the early twentieth century.
I suspect the people of 2100 will be much richer than we are, consume more energy, have a smaller global population, and enjoy more wilderness than we have today. I don't think we have to worry about them.
The current near-hysterical preoccupation with safety is at best a waste of resources and a crimp on the human spirit, and at worst an invitation to totalitarianism. Public education is desperately needed.
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I'm a second year law student, and I for one would hate to do without my laptop. I can type about 5 times faster than I can handwrite, and when I need to make corrections or additions to earlier notes, I can do it in an organized manner without scribbling things out and squeezing things in the margins and whatnot. When it comes time to put it in to outline form, organized notes are key. Also, taking exams using SofTest is a godsend.
Given that tuition my school costs about $1/minute for every lecture attended, you wouldn't figure too many students would be interested in screwing off, but it happens. There's only so many hours of Tax Law you can take before your mind craves escape. But still, lectures for some subjects and some professors frankly are a waste of time. You can read the materials and commercial briefs on your own and get everything you need. Listening to rambling philosophical ruminations is a terrible waste of preciously limited supply of time. The ABA requires minimum attendance of 80% of classes, which is fine, but when you have the inevitable 12 hours of studying or outlining to catch up on, skipping classes would help.
One professor I had last year for Property Law banned laptops from her classroom. She was a rather feminist type. I heard that the reason she banned them was because a student the year before had a screen saver which featured a hot chick who would loose an article of clothing after every couple minutes. The guys in the back of the class would all be like "awwww!" when he moved the mouse to take notes, and the timer would be reset to fully clothed.
I have actually found it distracting when someone is playing WoW or whatever in front of me in lecture, but I don't think there should be a universal ban. Law classes are pretty intimate settings and usually everyone pretty much knows everyone. The vast majority of the time students in a class can just handle these problems one-on-one.
Before we would have a war with the machines, I predict we would incrementally start merging with them. Before humans would face extinction through being obsolete, we may recognize the danger and some people would opt to attempt merging. If the rapid and uncontrolled AI self-evolution were to take off before we could recognize it or stop it, then ok, we might be doomed. If, however, the process of AI self evolution has fits and starts and would take several decades, we may have time to investigate biological integration.
There wouldn't be a shortage of technophiles in the future for those willing to have implants interfacing directly with their brain. With enough progress in safety, the potential for greatly enhanced communications, productivity, memory, entertainment, and pleasure would be very tempting. If nothing else, normal minds trapped in non-functional bodies, like paraplegics and degenerative disease sufferers (Lou Gherig's, muscular dystrophy, etc.) will plead their case. After the technology is developed and continually enhanced, then possibly AI complexity will grow in parallel with a human cyborg partnership. As soon as a few generations of adults become accustomed and comfortable with implants, they may eventually come to have their children enhanced as well. As new the pre-implanted generation grows up, they may then choose to have their infant children immediately implanted, or possibly in the womb.
A process likely to proceed in parallel to AI development is biological intelligence enhancement. Because we already have all of the basic DNA blueprints to build a functional intelligent creature, we could alter the code to have greatly enhanced brains. It's was found after his death that Einstein was born with an extra 15% of grey matter in an atypical grooveless structure on the surface of his parietal lobe--in the area responsible for spatial, mathematical and abstract thought. It was solely due to a rare genetic mutation. Probably with some relatively minor tweaks of the human genome sequence, large progress may be made in creating biologically enhanced super-intelligence. When one wishes to assemble a large tractor, it's much easier to improve upon an existing design for something like as a lawnmower and scale up, rather than start from scratch with a jumbled pile of scrap metal spare parts. If merging and biologically improving, we would likely carry our hard-wires goals in to the AI age for a time with us.
Merging aside, I believe it's somewhat debatable whether or not an AI race would be stable in the sense of maintaining core goals anchoring it to a particular type of behavior. AI having some consistent "meaning of life" motivating them. For organic beings, hard-wired goals can be locally overcome in cases (suicide, self-sacrifice, living platonically, etc.), but natural biological-race individuals can't erase the evolutionary behavioral instincts in them which direct most of their code goal values. With most of mankind's endevors, it is usually an expression of the primitive instincts burned in to him which helped him survive well in the wilds of Africa. Man had a overwhelming and constantly present sense of self-preservation. For his family, tribe and group he had a bonding and self-sacrifice instinct with them as well. He has an instinct to commit violence when needed against other groups of humans was instinctual to protect territory or assets. In times of famine, the instinct was to steal or pillage from others to survive. Males have an instinct to follow orders of a leader, women have instinct to communicate and share information. To some degree these instinct can be overridden when needed, but in the long term trend they provide a powerful harness guiding overall behavior.
Assuming you could change any goal short of self survival, what "wants" would you want to change? After changing those wants, iteratively changing the fundamental wants dozens or thousands of times, what is left of the original wants? Where would the seed of th
Somehow I get the feeling like this isn't so much information traveling instantaneously, but more generated in one place, split in to two identical pieces, and sent in opposite directions. For example say I fliped a coin, then without looking covered it with a sheet, clips two halves of the coin down and cut it in two with tin snips. Then, again without looking or disturbing it within the clip, I ship one half of the unrevealed coin off to Timbuktu. I call up the person holding the coin and check mine and presto: they're both heads!
I'm obviously missing some mysterious aspect to the experiment here since I'm dense on quantum entanglement. But, is anyone saying that the photon reacts in some way at the exact same time, like it's sitting there in it's funky indeterminate state and on it's own it observably goes 'poof' to pick a quantum state at an exact point in time? We can observe that moment in time it changes independent of knowing when the other is being measured? That is, opposed to the photon going 'poof' whenever I happen choose to measure it, like an hour later? Seems to make a big difference. One can be explained by saying the two halves were always in fact in a given state but we couldn't know about it until we measured at least one half (cause the other one always matches). The other way actually entails synchronized moments in some sort of "absolute time". Which, seems somewhat impossible to me as there is no such thing as absolute time according to relativity..
It's my suspicion that politicians and such want to find a reason why people do terrible crimes. The theory of stopping violent and psychotic behavior by cutting out some of the 'underlying triggers' for it, is an arbitrary rationalization for what 'causes' it to happen. It seems a desperate belief that sick people are in some external way more made to do the things they do. How in God's name otherwise can a human being contemplate murder (or other nefarious acts) simply for pleasure?? Maybe it's easier to blame a thing, than an outwardly normal-looking person who is integrated in modern society. That would make it a more controllable problem in society, which is a desperate belief as well.
They are probably backed up by stick-in-the-mud conservative and religious components who generally oppose any lascivious influence in society anyway. Which seems like an odd mix because the two camps are so different. One group can try an externalize and absolve blame for anti-social behavior by identifying a trigger for it, as liberals can take the crime away from the criminal. On the other hand, religious and conservative groups have no problem centering a crime in a criminal, but like the concept of controlling external influences to society on principal alone. For them, even those people who never plan on and never will commit a crime deserve to have their deviant pleasure taken away.
Both sides with their agendas are foolish in thinking deviant crime can be affected with porous and wasteful laws like this.
Yes chaos theory is always there, and I agree that it's irrelevant. In a rarified system with several hard-to-accurately-measure inputs, it can be said that the unknown, unmeasured initial conditions deterministically did 'cause' the evental pattern after all the self-feedback loops complete. This thinking is what leads people down the primrose path of theorizing, "If I just could figure out how to accurately measure the inputs, AND the dynamics of the system, THEN maybe I can predict the outputs.. (step 4: profit!)"
But for one, it's more like a Heisenberg principal, the only way to accurately measure the smallest required initial input, you would necessarily disrupt and alter those conditions. In the real world, you can never replicate an experiment with the same smallest undisturbed inputs to meaningfully refine research. Also, the dynamic feedback loops involved in the system can be modeled with mathematics only in a most surface sense. One can make pretty fractal pictures with recursive equations. The real dynamics involved in the real-world systems like weather patterns and wars are probably horribly exponentially more complicated than the ones in the pretty screensaver pictures. On both counts, predicting complex systems that seem to have patterned meaning is a fool's errand. Maybe once we get some super-AI going, but not now.
Actually I would say the entire Asimov "Foundation" series buys in to this line of thinking in a big way as well. Somehow, the theory went, there develops a convergence of predictability with a sufficiently large number of indicators, or a large enough base of independent actors in a system. Foolishness, of course. The chaos of mankind churns in so many hidden-feedback ways it's hopeless to predict. History also pivots on small turns--who wins a close 50/50 election 5 years from now? Does an assassination attempt succeed? Do terrorists get spotted and caught before an attack? Does a phone call or e-mail get intercepted by prosecutors? Will a hurricane wipe out a city? It's endless.
If you stare at random static long enough and hard enough, you WILL eventually see patterns. Not that your results mean anything outside of your head, but you will see them via the power of belief, rationalization, and intellectualizing. From what I've seen, sometimes PhD's can be the worst for this (example: Michael Mann and the hockey stick graph), because they try and obfuscate the argument with claiming they are too smart to be understood properly. Dubious scientific claims can start with personal overconfidence, but then are fed by a community with an agenda ('end the war', 'stop global warning', etc.)
- Any number of possible universes could send messages to a waiting communicator with their versions of what happens in their universes given their unique random quantum fluctuations. A molecule flicks this way or maybe that, which causes a firing of a particular neuron or not, which forms the nucleus of a particular idea in your brain in a particular way. For the first message backwards in time you might decide to say "Hello, Watson", or instead by random chance be cute and say "Hola, Watson" (because, say, time travel in the Terminator suddenly just crossed your mind). Both "Hello.." and "Hola.." and 15 other variations might suddenly come streaming in to the machine in rapid succession. That way you can pretty much change the future at will, and not get in to any traditional Grandfather Dilemmas. Would be probably hard to cut through the noise, especially after all the many thousands of possibilities after only a few minutes, ESPECIALLY if there is a feedback loop generated with possibilities sent back creating their own new possibilities, etc.
- Another way would be much more restrictive and intriguing. I'm guessing that if only one future message came through, AND IF you were then absolutely bound by some retroactive version of causality to eventually send that same message.. Then only those believers in the dangers of causality violation would ever get to listen for, or to send a message. The universe would find a way to prevent timelines with inconsistencies and violations. Before a non-believer had a chance to intentionally try and violate causality, 'something' would always happen. The machine would break down. There would be a power blackout. The phone would ring. You would have a heart attack and die. Someone else would rush in and send the right message for you. Anything. Like air rushing in to a vacuum, possibilities would rush in to clean up an inconsistency.
Also, if this actually machine were already successful I doubt anybody would really know about it. It would be very much against a successful creator's interests to reveal its actual existence. Think how utterly powerful it would make one to have such a machine? Unlimited generation of financial funds via market manipulation, the next Buffett. You could predict in advance what you enemies were eventually doing to try and thwart you, maybe be a prescient Gates. If it were the many universes version, you could research many blind alleys and send results back for each one in turn.. like quantum computing, it would never feel like you actually did more than the work of just one research task, since each time you complete research and send the results back, the new timeline created skips actually doing that research and moves on to new research, ad infinitum.BUT, all these advantages would only work if you kept the machine a secret. After all, what good does predicting your enemy's movements, if he can predict yours too? What good would markets be if hundreds of future-reading people were trying to manipulate them? And, if it were common knowledge that it's even possible to build such a machine, every government in the world would rush in to create their own in the name of national security. Much less effective without a monopoly on the information. So if it's out there, don't count on hearing about it.
This is part of the philosophy of the modern criminal justice system. Heavy maximum sentences are simply a bargaining chip granted to prosecutors to efficiently dispose of cases that probably don't merit a trial. Prosecutors in the real world are the de facto judge and jury 90% of the time, due to the fact that they have the discretion to pick and chose cases to prosecute with draconian penalties. The best you can hope for is to pick responsible, reasonable people for that position. Prosecutors examine the evidence, make personal judgments on their facts and the applicable law, and file a laundry list of charges totaling 40 years if they so choose. At that point defense attorneys are often forced to tell a defendant not to risk it and plead guilty to a negotiated subset of the charges. The overwhelming volume of 'justice' is handled in backrooms this way. The rules of criminal procedure actively encourage it.
That's the struggle between the principles of civil liberties and the pragmatism of limiting crime in society. On the one hand, we demand a certain amount of accuracy for the sake of human dignity (not convicting the innocent), but on the other we demand that the streets be made safe and lawlessness be tamed. The only way to have it both ways it to place regular human beings (prosecutors and defense attorneys) in a position to arbitrarily dish out justice on an informal level. All of the myriad of technical rules and protections used in trials are a great amount of overhead. Trials are only necessary in close-call cases, for most defendants it's an unnecessary waste of resources.
So, we end up with a game where ridiculously oppressively harsh sentences are always threatened but rarely handed out. That was it creates the psychological impression that a defendant (and his lawyer) should sit down, shut up, and be 'thankful' to only get a 4-year sentence. If it weren't this way, every blatantly guilty and heinous criminals would always demand their day in court. I personally object to the forced informality of it all, but it's just the reality of a real-world system.
I tend to agree with MikeRT in that the threat of violence IS the ultimate underpinning of society, even modern society. It's very egalitarian and liberal to say otherwise. I've seen liberals before with quite a noble and affectionate, but naïve faith in the habit of man to perpetually abide by rules designed for the common good. We're all 10 days worth of missed meals away from barbarity. History is awash with blood caused by human nature, and it's not any recent physiological evolution in our moral conscious that has emerged to staunch it, it's our technological advancement in the delivery of more violence. Do you think that civilized society wouldn't tolerate death and destruction? All of the industrial nations of WWII sure did. This century has seen an unprecedented, methodical advance of death via war, it was simply a predictable combination of fundamental human nature with technology. Intellectual men designed, built, and eventually preemptively used the nuclear bomb on civilian targets. Only the eventual threat of much more violence (nuclear detente) has acted to stabilize the situation.
Skim the first couple chapters of Harvard political philosopher Robert Nozick's book "Anarchy, State, and Utopia", it's fascinating stuff. The science and patterns of the power via violence aren't that hard to map out, given 2,000 years of examples. Armies, war, sieges, treaties, alliances, and betrayals. What would happen if there were no police? No criminal courts or jails? No military? How long would polite, civilized society take to break down without them? A month, a year, maybe two? If someone from a bad part of town likes and wants your car, what's to stop them otherwise? Survival of the fittest kicks in. If you chose not to pay your taxes at all, what happens? Today they eventually come to arrest you. Don't want to be arrested? They will shoot you if you attempt to resist. Since the threat of violence ultimately hangs over you, might as well pay your taxes.
No culture is immune to breakdown, though it would occur faster for some than others. Theft, rioting, retaliations, then small protection groups, and eventually large collective defensive agencies would emerge. These are how governments gel and get formed in the first place, for protection. Protection against violence by having a monopoly on the "legal" sanctioned delivery of all violence within a given geographical area. These are eternal, essential features of governments of mankind, underpinning any intellectually decorative constructs.
Freedom of speech is an essential part of a civilized and dynamically evolving society... but does that really accurately describe about 70% of the world? Sure modern technology has had an impact on countries like China. But has their culture changed from within on its own, or has it been dragged there against its metaphorical will? They recognize the economic advantages of embracing a relationship with the rest of the world, but still they don't wish to dilute their own cultural system; they cling to their old systems.
Some societies in the world are glued together with conformist, repressive, traditionalist, xenophobic, nepotistic, and corrupt elements. Given their resource scarcity and population pressures, they don't know how to keep the system operating any other way. Is it really a fair assumption that all populations of the world ought to eventually become capitalistic democracies with civil liberties like internet freedom since that's basically the 'optimal state of mankind'? It worked so well for the last remaining superpower, so that makes it self-evident, right? Is it a causative factor?
But look how well that concept has worked out for example in Iraq. Yes, the US has gone in and tried their best to stabilize that situation and set up a stable democratic government with civil liberties and all. But the population has such deep cultural hatreds, mistrusts, cowardliness, and divisiveness that it overcomes their desire for unity and civility. Forced civility is just not ever gonna happen there. Like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, freedom of expression and free access to information fall well below priorities like physical safety, avoidance of political turmoil, and economic security.
I believe any one sole human being is perfectly capable of civility and is mature enough to benefit from privileges like free speech. That is, given a chance for him or her to grow up in a society that is functionally healthy and not struggling for survival. Societies that struggle to survive (i.e. keeping riots down, feeding themselves, their currency from collapsing, from going to war with neighbors, ruining their natural environment, etc.) though mostly aren't ready to stand on their own two feet while entrusting their populations with freedoms. I'm sure some here will disagree, and claim that freedoms can CAUSE societies to be healthy. I tend to think that freedoms are definitely needed to KEEP a society healthy, but disagree that they can make one healthy if it didn't start off that way.
I believe truly healthy societies are historically paved with courage and sacrifice of a critical mass of individuals (the blood of patriots), an embrace of change, natural competitiveness and ambition, and unity of population. If you lack one or more those things, personal freedoms can't create them or replace them.
Sure this would have some limited utilitarian use. But you know what I do to things I think I'll need later? I record them and put it in a sorted order so I can get it quickly under what circumstances I need it. I summarize what's truly important. I prioritize important things when I write them down, and I put miscellaneous information (instruction books, meeting notes, etc.) in places I know if/when I'll later need them. What good is a big indiscriminate pile of information of years of your life that in paper form would look like a wall of filing cabinets 20 feet high and 100 feet long? 90% of that information would be fairly useless. In searching archives of some always-on recorder, I would likely waste a lot of time trying to find what I need, and probably often think I found what I needed when I didn't really.
Intelligent memory is about organizing, sorting, remembering what's important. What good are computer search algorithms going to do you for always-on recordation? If you aren't intelligent enough to make sense of a jumble of information by identifying meaning, and then sorting and tagging it up as it occurs, a computer can't do that for you. At least not for a long time until AI is maybe as common-sense and intelligent as we are. If that day ever comes, would this look to augment existing memory, or replace it with crutches? Sounds like a de-evolution to me. At best you would end up reliving large swaths of recorded experiences (conversations, books, sights, sounds) of your life with tweezers trying to search for and grasp what was important.
Rather than being a productivity tool, I can see many people using technology like this as an emotional escape. Given the detail level, it would have a life of it's own. Look back in vivid detail on the big game that your won in high school, the hot date you had, getting married, when your kids were young and playful, when you were thin and in shape, your vacations, parties, past friends, and youth. We're meant to have memories fade in order to seek to make new ones.
Yes, it's unfortunate that when a convenient but unconventional usage of technology passes some threshold level of popularity, the powers-that-be come crashing in to regulate (i.e. eliminate) it. Look at peer-to-peer, or internet radio.. everything was fine when less than 1% of the general population knew of or used these services. They stayed under the radar. But when tech-savvy entrepreneurs got a hold of the idea and really made it take off to the masses, that's when it more or was spoiled. Special interests get involved, which make Congress gets involved, then hardware makers may get involved, international treaties get passes, etc. All the sudden it threatens everyone's perceived slice of the pie. Those days get ever closer as the previously safe harbors of technology get filled with more and more frustrated ex-users of conventional technology.
One may wonder if MythTV will survive legislative/regulatory scrutiny if everyone and their cousin starts using it. Historically speaking, I doubt it. Entertainment broadcasts will be made proprietary and encrypted, non-record flags will (somehow) be implemented, and open-source circumventions made illegal. Thus throwing us back down in to the pack with all the other consumer drones. Hacks against the machine are great to have, but keep your fingers crossed that they don't get too popular. There will always be a way to hack, but the powers-that-be won't stop creating barriers until they're satisfied that only 1% of the population KNOWS how to do that hack. At some point, the hack will be such a pain in the butt to implement that you, along with 98/100 other people, would rather just pay the stupid fee and take their functionality.
Just like paper junk mail, TV advertisers expect not to reach the vast majority of the people who are exposed to their pitch. Having a confirmed buyer response rate of 2% would make most advertiser's head spin, with a phenomenal ad-budget-to-profit ratio of 10:1. So what about the irritation level of the other 98% or people? To them, who cares.
While part of the game (to the show or movie producers) is to boost the total viewing audience numbers, some segments of that audience just aren't likely to buy anyway. The "do what you're told" types will buy more often. Those frustrated, stubborn, independent-minded persons that aren't likely to buy based on simplistic advertising can mute, surf, leave, complain, or boycott all they want. Unless the 1-2% confirmed base starts to waiver, that's the only time fear will sink in to advertisers.
The problem will probably get worse over the next 10-20 years as zombified TV watchers learn to take it, and TiVo becomes a tool for the money. Luckily Myth and other products will always be a voice of dissent, even if not supported by mainstream media companies. Hopefully broadcast flags and such won't get life via corporate influence.
I don't really count any kid over the age of about 13 as "a child" predicating protection for all types of innocence. I didn't mean the legal definition of child. I said small children, but probably should have clarified that. Small, like 3 to 7.
Sex, in my perfectly arbitrary and pigheaded but probably realistic opinion, should not occur for any kid no matter what maturity level until at least age 15. For immature ones, not until 17. That's maybe too young for some, and too old for others, but everyone agrees that there does exist some age which has to serve as a minimum to have it. As far as the 'talk' goes, obviously if parents don't talk to kids by middle school then their kids will find out things on their own, if not by late grade school. Information accurate then if they obtain it by other sources that you? Doubtful. But deference could possibly be paid to parents who do have a minimum and are trying to stick by it.
If one of my kids old enough to have genuine curiosity, and seems circumstantially knowledgeable about a subject to ask a reasonably intelligent question, then I will tell them the truth about it. Part of the maturity to handle knowledge is the ability to independently ask the question in the first place. Do I think though it's likely I would tell them what a 'Hot Carl' is? Simply put, no--even though I did see it on South Park the other day. It's not necessary for them to know that. My guess is you wouldn't want to tell your daughter about it either. Knowledge is often times hoisted on kids without their asking, by the world directly or indirectly by the world through their friends.
I can say in the spirit of democratic freedom that all parents should be allowed to raise their children in the way they want. Spank/don't spank, chores/no chores, curfew/no curfew, etc. You can let you kids run wild or lock them up, that's your right. It's just tilting a windmills.. a futile wish--that we lived in a world where more parents watched their kids before they run wild, and a didn't have to put up with such a salivating world that made a buck off them in the process whenever it could.
I'll ask, does an average small child need to know what orgasms are all about? Maybe yours asked, and you chose to tell her. That's just you. The world makes no such distinction; it sends information out to everyone. I'm not really getting to make that choice at that point, the world has preempted my choice. By sending my kids out in to the world, I'm losing part of my choice to raise them with innocence.
What value is innocence in a small child? I don't have a scientific answer for that. It's an intuitive feeling about a natural developmental process for a human being. For their sake, it's the one period time in your life they can feel really safe, that the world is simple, and life has pleasures that aren't complicated or bad for them. They don't have to explore parts of their emotional makeup that haven't physiologically caught up to anything yet. Along those lines.
Nothing will come of this. The world will churn along, young kids will learn to curse as they always have, kids will smoke weed as they always have, they'll pair off and sneak off to the woods a little younger. The next Britany will come along, wearing pasties in her new video. Parents will be busy and unconcerned. Some parents will be dismayed and wish it were different. Nothing new.
Yes I agree with the judge's assessment of the issue.
That having been said though I can sympathize to some degree, because of being a parent of small children myself, with trying to protect the innocence of children. What is the value of simple innocence? That is, not knowing what sex is about, what things like violence, drugs, cruelty, vulgarity, illness, death, mortal fear, etc. are all about. All kids lose it eventually, so what's the big deal? Why not let that that accidental and fumbly process just happen whenever it does as a natural consequence of living in modern society?
Because children are entitled to their innocence during their childhood, that's why. It's part of my job as a dad to insulate them for a time. This is the time when the world should be simple and their focus shouldn't be on maturing in adult ways. Playing with cool toys, making friends, running outside should be their experiences. There's all the rest of their lives left for maturing to the ways of the world.
Before people slam an unpopular 'thinkaboutthechildren' opinion, I'll clarify I'm not saying that all adults should forgo their rights to enjoy adult-oriented activities and materials. COPA is stupid and parents should take responsible for keeping a vigilant eye on what their kids are in to... innocence is lost incrementally and it occurs when parents aren't habitually looking, not all at once with just one slip.
Parenting is a fairly big job though. Both parents working to pay bills, and school, errands, daycare, activities, etc., it's a lot. A lot more so than single, childless folks making 70 in WoW can probably appreciate. When kids are sent out in to a world that glorifies so much sex appeal in the media, violence in the games, gloomy / sensational stuff on the news, parenting becomes that much harder. Vigilance isn't enough sometimes, because their friends get in to stuff where their parents haven't be so vigilant. When society in general is so awash in it, you have to practically build a sandbag wall around the house and homeschool your kids to keep it away.
It's a corny, but take Santa Clause for example. (Beyond the possibly greedy materialistic take on the whole custom) Santa is a really cute thing for kids to believe in. It's an innocent belief that is fantastic, generous, and exciting for them. It requires a little bit of teamwork by the older siblings and family and friends to keep the idea going, since the gig will be up soon enough on its own. Why rush to strip away an innocent belief like that? Isn't it worth the little bit of work to protect the secret? It's really not that big of a put-out for anyone.
As a parent I can appreciate the unrealistic wish that the world might have a little more respect for innocence in their stampede towards vulgar, hedonistic salaciousness in their day-to-day lives. Not that it's worth turning the world upside down for, but I can understand the wish for a little more teamwork.
We may possibly get an overall monetary benefit as a country from offshoring, but you have to ask, who is getting that benefit?
The overall net shift of wealth in America due to offshoring:
Some part of it gets transferred to each of:
Possibly the country as a whole might be getting a net benefit. Not have to pay money for higher wages to Americans can be seen as "net benefit" since we aren't paying our own workers more money. Maybe that is seen as a "wasteful" cost. My main beef here anyway is that any net benefit gained mainly goes to the rich. The class of "the rich" in America are mostly made up by groups (B) and (C). Jobless people and waiters (the 'recycled') are not often a part of buying consumers getting a benefit in group (C). So, it's really a net loss in economic wealth for a large group of (A) people. Like other economic theory proposed by Conservatives and Libertarians (e.g. trickle down economics), it's mostly an excluse to justify a massive shift of middle-class wealth to the hands of a few.
Of course job recycling is nothing new in the economy. A decline of something like horse buggy whip production has traditionally always been replaced by something like automobile production. I would have disagreed 100 years ago with attempting to halt technological progress, as I absolutely do now. I'm not a Luddite trying to stop technological progress, it's the lifeblood of economic growth. But the difference now from 100 years ago is that by removing a high-tech job now from the American workforce, we AREN'T replacing it with a higher paying job in a newer technological field. All other previous economic cycles had somewhere higher to grow to. The off-shoring process now replaces skilled jobs in America with lower paying and/or less skilled jobs chiefly characterized by the fact that they simply cannot be easily off-shored (being a barber, a waiter, etc).
Seems like you must be a big fan of "24", circletimessquare. You said that situations in reality are not a purified struggle between black and white, but more gray against gray. Therefore a little bad must be committed in order to achieve a larger good. But justifying things like questionably illegal searches, or for that matter Jack Bauer-style torture, the context used to ultimately justify those acts that ARE black and white. One must make many assumptions to create the rarefied scenario where the ends clearly justify the means because there are no unknowns... it's simply 'known' who is guilty, it's 'known' that certain techniques in question will be effective, it's 'known' what all the negative side affects will be in the short and long term, it's 'known' what the consequences of inaction are, it's 'known' that justice is the true pure motivation and not any other subversive or personal intent by the actors involved. It's like a tv show where you get to see all the camera angles, cue the heroic music.
The unknowns are obviously never clear cut in reality. In real life how often investigators.. detectives, prosecutors, etc., get it wrong and are fallible may surprise you. If you ask a cop, many will say that they would rather send 5 innocent people to jail then let one true criminal go free--often on the theory that 'they probably did something else bad anyway'. When we create classes of crimes where rules can be bent, simply based on the bona fide 'good intent' of these people, it spells trouble. Some day domestic Guantanamos may begin appearing due to the sheer pragmatic appeal of it... and anyone who thinks that is a good idea has already swallowed the kool-aid, in my opinion.
What happens when we lose any respect for the rights of criminals, no matter what the crime? What happens when arbitrary imprisonment or torture becomes ok, based on any type of plausible claim of urgent need? Over the long term we all lose respect for our own privacy, our own personal freedoms, our own value for human life. Respect for these concepts are not a normal part of the human condition. America is unique, utterly unique in world history, in that we so enshrined and fought for in our culture a universal respect for these artificial concepts. 99% of mankind's history was those powerful stepping carte blanche on the weak, the rich over the poor, race vs. race, the State over the peon-people. Shown by historical example mankind's natural cultural state tends to be oppressive and brutal, and it take a huge ballast to counterbalance that tendency.
There seems to be an assumption along the way that 'good' lawful people and 'bad' criminal people are totally unrelated subjects... it's simply us vs. them. The truth is there is a cultural dynamic between the groups. How efficient do we demand our system be? How much are we willing to sacrifice in the name of actual or perceived safety? What role, if any, should compassion and forgiveness play? How do people react to their treatment? What is most effective, rather than what feels the best? To me, the conservative sentiment of "shoot them all and let God sort them out" is an unfortunate regression based on emotion and not on thought or civility. To them I hope they would recognize some day that the situations in the real world are not so simple as prepackaged 24 episodes.
All my life I called myself a Conservative, and voted as such, up until the last few years. Mostly in response to my disgust with the irresponsibility of the Republican party (the usual: Iraq, civil right abuses, secrecy/combativeness/hubris of the executive branch, the budgetary waste, questionable tax cuts, etc.) led me to refute that party. I've never been a strong proponent of a welfare/entitlement state though. I believe human nature in its natural state can turn lazy and unmotivated; therefore many often need a swift kick in the pants to get going. Ambition and self-sufficiency isn't natural to all.. it's part of what lets the small-fry be so easily taken advantage of.
I have investigated Libertarianism as an alternative. I grew up reading a lot of pulp Heinlein, and was influenced at a young age by his staunch sense of self-reliance. I admit it's not for everyone, but it works for me. In that spirit I've studied a diverse set of things...engineering (electrical), IT (which I now work in), history, philosophy, survival training, and I'm in law school now.
I met the vice-presidential candidate for the Libertarian party, Richard Campagna, at a small gathering 3 years ago while he was running for office. I found him to be highly academically knowledgeable and intellectually consistent in his positions. I had the opportunity to ask him about a few topics: economics (he's obviously a laissez-fairist), military intervention (he carried the banner of isolationism), personal rights (very much the liberal), and such. While I didn't agree with everything he said, the views were an a la carte sampling that, on balance, were appealing as an alternative to the only two choices available today.
Much like your comments, I agree that the natural and inevitable end of an unregulated system is the rich getting richer. Those inordinately ambitious and greedy individuals will find long-term ways to manipulate the system to their own gain: tax avoidance plans, collusionary business practices, insider investment schemes, executive pay larceny, crooked corporate accounting, hired Washington special interest lobbyists, benefits and pension cutback schemes, monopolies, kickbacks and bribes, litigious abuse, punitive contract terms, etc., you name it, all help to create millionaire-style wealthy people. Institutionalized corruption, often practiced by a small number within a corporation is a key path. Prices for products and services are kept artificially high for consumers (e.g. a copy of Windows XP or Vista), while salaries have pressures to keep them artificially low (as in using offshore and illegal alien workers). Libertarians puzzle me btw when they support offshoring, like a tool.
The wealthiest top 10% of the population own 70% of the available wealth in America. Honestly, that ratio is beyond my concept of any kind of reasonably fair or natural distribution of wealth. Proportionally speaking, for every $100 in tax cuts arranged for by the government (say, handed out to an average 10 people), 1 guy out of 10 keeps $70, while the other 9 of 10 get to keep about $3 each. Great bargain for the small guy in that tax cut.. $3, versus $70. Tax cuts in America simply reinforce an already unbalanced economic distribution of wealth.
It's certainly an argument against laissez-faire to me.. much the same way monopolies naturally form given time, an ultra-rich class will naturally form over time, vacuuming up the available wealth mostly produced by the population at large. The system as a whole is dragged down from it's full potential when either forms. This is a quote I came across a few years ago by John Galbraith. I think it's true: "The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness." I think it's true about Conservatism, and Libertarianism has that somewhat in common. I have little sympathy for the ultra-rich who 'earned' their riches and 'ju
- Curiosity, loneliness. There's always the possibility of undiscovered physics, since it's unlikely that any species can ever be sure they've really discovered it all. No matter how advanced a species it, they might want to search for an even older, more experienced race to teach them. Maybe they hope to find a old race that has records of even older races. They might find us incidentally in the process.
- Perverse pleasure in hunting and killing. Some members of mankind hunt other lesser species for pleasure, it's a throwback to our survival days. Any species that has survives to old age may through Darwinism have to be deeply xenophobically aggressive. Think Borg, a.k.a. the biggest kid on the block.
- Self protection. If you assume that the physics of this universe has some practical limit in terms of technology (miniaturization, energy harnessing, quantum randomness, speed as a function of light, etc) then time to develop it would tend an equalizing factor among various civilizations. Given 1 million years to independently develop technology, I'll bet pretty much every species gets a hold of all the same basic stuff. Anything that is possible given the physics in this universe. Magnetic pulse laser cannons,
.5c rail guns, electromagnetic force shields, light-bending camouflage exteriors, antimatter/fusion/ion drives, whatever. The possibility that anyone can eventually develop this stuff might be a troubling contingency for them.
For example today: Right now the hostile Arab states aren't at all very much for the American military to worry about handling--at least in terms of them launching a traditional organized invasion on our soil. What if we sat and did nothing about them for 500 years? After that time, what would we have versus them? It might be time then to get worried, when THEY have AI self-guiding, stealthy, multi-mini-black-hole warhead-tipped ICBMs capable of being launched from offshore ultra-silent submarines? I doubt that defensive technologies can counter offensive technologies forever. We are very fragile beings, after all.Given the relatively short time span for advancements in technology (a mere thousands of years), it might be in the best survival interest of other species to keep tabs on the competition before they get too far out of control. It might also even be in their interest to 'run silent' while gathering this information. After all, what advantage is there in broadcasting one's existence? It would be like showing your poker hand to everyone at the table. The more prudent approach might be to let others broadcast themselves, whether advanced or not, and then decide if you want to reciprocate to just them selectively. Just like living in a really tough neighborhood. It's possible that all of the noisy, eager species have been eliminated so far due to this survival-rule reality. And it would explain the silence.
- This war on terrorism is our new Cold War. It will last a generation or two.
- Because we are at war it is necessary to engage in certain behaviors--renditions, torture,
domestic spying, secret prisons, etc.
- We cannot tell you what we are doing because it would compromise national security during a
time of war.
- The courts cannot review what we are doing because it will compromise national security during
a time of war.
- Any newspaper reporter or news outlet that reports a leak of these programs can be put under
oath and forced to reveal sources, under threat of going to jail for contempt.
- Only select members of Congress can know what we are doing. But they cannot tell anyone because it will compromise national security.
- When Congress passes laws, the president has the right to ignore these law if he believes they
infringe upon his war powers or his role as Commander in Chief.
- The courts cannot review the president's decision in rule no. 7 because it would compromise
national security.
These rules have the very convenient effect of disabling ALL of the checks and balances on the executive branch of the government. Frankly, unless many thousands of Americans are dying, violence is erupting everywhere, and this country is teetering on the brink of economic/political oblivion, I see no reason to install an emergency autocratic government. Even if we were at that point, I would still want some above-board cost/benefit arguments explained to me as to how I'm going to be safer in reality (as to just "feeling" safer) by giving up some of my civil liberties and watching the world learn to hate us.Much like the rest of his political strategy (Iraq war, etc), Bush puts forward nothing but a flim-flam job of justifying inflated neo-con theories of the use of discretionary executive force. How nice it would be to make all the trains run exactly on time, if we could just arrest anyone who used to make them run late? Fascism has a certain appeal when you don't realize that it actually is fascism.
We need checks and balances in the country.. anybody who doesn't believe that should closely read the Federalist Papers. Those guys were certified geniuses in the realistic exercise of power. They had the benefit of 1,000 years of European wars and history to examine human nature at its Machiavellian worst. They knew EXACTLY what they were doing when they set up checks on presidential power, they envisioned internal and external threats to the country every bit as clear and present as they are today.
Occam's Razor points toward something that does not need so many mysterious properties. It has to be basically undetectable in any normal sense (on Earth or out there), unreactive to radiation or heat, and uniquely distributed away from regular matter.
At least with a tweak in an existing formula, it explains the primary phenomenon without employing an invented tool to get there. It's like you could just put out a formula for predicting how gravity behaves, or say "there are leprechauns are racing around pulling down on things". The intermediate explanation is fantastic and unneeded.
As far as I have read, actually, MOND explains very well things that even dark matter does not. http://www.astro.umd.edu/~ssm/mond/MOND_sub.pdf
If I remember reading the article right a few days ago in the magazine, I believe it mentions some sort of memory-shifting metal that reacts to heat. He can expose a coil of the stuff to the sun so when heated up during the day, the coil would wind itself up. Possibly he could use a large magnifying glass to get the temperature up high enough. During night when the temp goes down it would unwind and thus drive the clock. Alternating coils mechanically exposed to the sun on alternating days would keep the mechanics going for some time. Memory metal has a very high fatigue resistance. Memory metal info here).
Science today is much much more highly specialized and major discoveries do not come from a single researcher working in his garage any more. It takes a fleet of people in a sector all attacking small bits of the problem, fueled by grants from univerties, businesses, and governments. You really can't compare the judgment that a single individual would use for evaluating the worth of research into technology 'X', versus a collective body acting like a board of people serving as proxies for spending billions of dollars of other people's money. It would be like comparing the decisions a parent raising their kid to how the nation runs it's entire school system.
A much more methodological technique is used when collective bodies evaluate potential payoffs of research. They don't go on an unexplainable 'gut feeling'. They try to figure in a) the probability of success for the given goal, b) the rough uncertainty factor in that estimation of that probability of success, c) probability of side-benefits, d) likely certainty level of that, e) probability of cost-overrun risk, etc.
Over the long run, this is the most efficient way to spend research dollars. It's not as exciting or daring or 'romantic' or whatever as a lone, bold explorer ignoring the odds and the naysayers. But this is why Intel, Pfizer, NASA, Bowing, MIT, and others are generally the best research and development organizations in the world.
Thank you for the supportive comment on the book, I agree wholeheartedly.
..oh, really? And most temperature readings have traditionally been taken around cities. And who decides what these altertion factors are now, versus how much/how quickly they shifted for various different cities in the world over the last 50 years? Oh, different researchers choose their own factors.. you don't say? That's interesting. And while melting in some places, the Antarctic ice sheet is overall actually growing, not shrinking? Hmmm. I was given the opposite impression by some people."
What Crichton did, in my view, was to bring up some reasonable objections that any reasonably intelligent non-scientists person looking at the raw data and methods might bring up. For example.. "So, most raw temperature measurements are actually 'corrected' for the heat-island effects due to all the concrete and asphalt use around cities to find the 'true' temperature?
Crichton included a long bibliography of scientific studies done--he directly quotes and draws upon hundreds of published scientific papers. Things peer reviewed and published in periodicals like Science, Nature, Technology Review, Geology, Journal of Climate, Journal of Animal Ecology, etc. He quotes Harvard professors and Nobel prize winners who doubt the theory.
Heck for that matter, see the 20,000 PhD's and trained scientists who recently signed a petition from the National Academy of Sciences officially casting doubt on global warming: http://www.oism.org/pproject/. The petition states: "There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate."
Crichton is a experienced researcher for science subjects, I don't think this can be denied. He is mainly calling out a warning against consensus science for disputed theories like secondhand smoke, global warning, and nuclear winter.
All of the criticisms I have heard or read in response to the book (including in this posting) are ad homenim attacks on Crichton. This actually indeed does strengthen his case because of the suspiciously weak retorts to his claims. I have never seen any sort of direct refutation on the facts and merits of his claim. Critics simply offer up "you can trust me, he's a nothing but a hack"... honestly this isn't what it takes to dissuade me of a factual claim, especially when that claim has the ring of truth to it. I would like to hear someone directly counter his scientific claims. Nobody is denying that the data has to get massaged in various way in order to come to the given conclusion.
Obviously a scientists needs to admit that they do not know everything. But the same token, they need to take a realistic view on the uncertainty. Due to the potential consequences, it seems that scientists have taken an excusatory view on shaky methods used in the research and uncertainty levels attached to conclusions.
The majority needs sound, unchallengeable science to back up counterclaims, not raw data that massaged in to place to support a popular claim. Poor science can get popular and be touted as truth. Scientific reality isn't established through majority rule, and it seems the world hasn't learned that yet.
This is a synopsis of Crichton's views, what he wrote in the appendix of his book. The particular flaws in 'estimation science' (an oxymoron?) are detailed during the main book.
The quote:
A novel such as State of Fear, in which so many divergent views are expressed, may lead the reader to wonder where, exactly, the author stands on these issues. I have bee reading environmental texts for three years, in itself a hazardous undertaking. But I have had an opportunity to look at a lot of data, and to consider many points of view. I conclude: