I use the Caps Lock at work all the time when I'm drawing plans because some clients have CAD standards in which all letters are supposed to be capitalized. This can be paragraphs in some cases. And for certain headings in spreadsheets and such, I'd rather toggle Caps Lock and type quickly than hold shift as I type.
I need Caps Lock for "note off" in Renoise, a music tracker program that, designed to be operated almost exclusively from the keyboard, makes good use of all the keys. (I could remap it, of course, but I like to keep it standard so I can move around easily.) Renoise uses the Scroll Lock and function keys as well.
How about if Google just deletes any comments written in all caps.
I was being sarcastic with that statement. Hence the unwarranted exclamation mark after "rife." It was meant to illustrate my point by using something roughly opposite of what you said in an obnoxious and hyperbolic manner.
Rife! I've heard of doctors getting banned from medicine the same way. Therefore medicine is rife with stories about doctors getting banned from medicine for improper behavior.
I'm just saying be careful with amplifying some stories you have heard to mean that there is a huge problem. How many doctors are there in this country? Things slip through the cracks all the time. It's the same with welfare. People love to fuss about the one guy who manages to sign up for welfare in several states but forget that he is but one out of many who are trying to be honest and get some help while looking for a job.
Again, I love to harp on this, but it's all too easy to fuss about a single, outlying case. Instead, we all need to use our facilities for reason and think about the big picture and all the evidence pro and con.
In our society, everyone deserves legal representation, even the guilty. Right or wrong, it's just how our system works.
By the way, I think that's part of the reason everyone hates lawyers so much: Half of all lawyers are on the wrong side. And it's their job to game the law for their client. If the law allows them to do something evil, then that was the fault of the legislators who wrote the law.
Lawyers are "self-regulating" which we should all know by now is an inherent conflict of interest that inevitably leads to corruption, regardless of what industry does it.
Professional engineers are self-regulated. State boards of professional engineers, the exams, all that stuff is run by engineers and for engineers. In Florida, for example (which is typical of most states), the only government involvement is a few laws that give the Board its power. And medicine is not all that different.
Luckily we can reason ourselves out of most situations. To continue with my example, the man would just turn off the lights and imagine he's with someone else!
Do we not crash? I guess this could go on forever, and we would probably just be discussing slightly different concepts, but I would say that people crash too, just in a more sophisticated manner. (I admit, maybe that's your whole point.) Anyway, people have nervous breakdowns or succumb to post-traumatic stress disorder and find themselves quite unable to function.
Just a thought: what if we had strongly wired instincts like this? Or is it really mutually exclusive with our intelligence? If there is in fact an inversely proportional relationship, does that mean that smarter beings would have lost the problematic cognitive biases that arise from our brains' usually helpful hard-coded heuristics?
i wouldn't straight off blame the poor chicken for how it's brain is wired. it's like blaming a man for finding a woman unattractive, even if she does have everything that should make good, healthy offspring.
now back to the magpies. what do you suppose this means for their status as individuals or "persons?"
...If you're a Mac fanboy running a network of Apple computers. If anything goes wrong, it's an artistic expression and anyone who criticizes the problem is a closed-minded square who "doesn't get it." Then you sit back in self satisfaction listening to alternative pop, thinking about how hip and different and enlightened you are.
It's funny... I use Linux to demonstrate how different and enlightened I am. Apple is played out. That scene is spent.
If you're going to argue against using gold as money, at least use an argument that makes sense.
I suppose I deserved that for insinuating that the gold standard fanboys are a bunch of troglodytes yearning for the good old days when money was buttons and shiny objects.
OK, here's an argument that hopefully makes a little more sense: Governments can change (and have changed) the official price of specie as easily as they can print or strike more currency. I suppose this is more an argument for the use of gold in everyday transactions rather than against yours, but it is meant to illustrate that a simple gold standard isn't a panacea.
Anyway, of course the economy wouldn't stop growing when we run out of whatever commodity we choose to base our money on. We just have deflation like you say ( or switch to a new commodity if the government's whim blows that way - or the government might decide to change the price of the commodity). But I'm getting off track. Deflation is fine. Interest rates will be lower since we don't need to add inflation to our calculations. A raise at work might actually be a smaller drop than usual in the nominal value of our paychecks. Imagine the conversations around the water cooler: "How'd you make out?" "Me? Great! Only -1%! Last year it was -2%." Blah blah blah. A strange world, but it would make sense after a while.
The argument is a lot deeper of course, but the problem of fiat currency printed by an untrustworthy government is the same problem of having a representative currency's price set by an untrustworthy government. Hopefully we are just arguing past each other about some type of gold standard different from that of the past. The currency competition idea seems to answer some of the concerns. I'll have to give it a closer look.
The only thing I'm nervous about in these data are confounding variables (the old correlation versus causation bit). For example, I'm too lazy to play with the numbers right now, but I seem to recall that even greenhouse gas numbers look like the CPI chart. But I do realize it's only an example, and we don't have space for a full econometric analysis here on Slashdot.
Of course not: each bit of gold/silver simply buys more stuff.
Continue my thought experiment, then, into the future so far that each atom of gold is worth, say, a galaxy class starship. But what if I want to exchange my pocket change for gold? I guess I just get a quark or two shaved off of a gold bar? Oh! Never mind. I forgot that by then gold-pressed latinum is the gold standard. (Or gold-pressed latinum standard?... Whatever, it's the Cadillac of precious metals.)
Sorry, I had to make the joke. I do find the reply to my reply thought provoking. I already spent my (or my boss's) morning on my first comment. Now I have to waste the afternoon in some sort of endless Wikipedia search on money! Thanks!
I know this is not the main thrust of the comment, but it's not practical for money to be backed by gold, diamonds, beads, or fragments of mirrors. Money is backed by what you can buy with it. Then, you say, "what if the economy collapses and no one trusts the dollar anymore?" Well, I don't know about you, but I can't eat gold. Or any other precious metal for that matter. "But you can use the gold to buy food." Ah, only because people trust gold as having value while paper money doesn't. Stepping back a step further, each seems to me to be about as useful as the other for its intrinsic physical properties.
But I got off track. The main reason precious metals don't make sense as money is the fact that they don't account for the growth of the economy. To simplify things, let's create a little thought experiment and take it to the extreme. What happens when there is no more gold left to pile up in Fort Knox? Does the economy stop growing at that instant? No. People continue to innovate and create value out of nothing using only their minds and bodies. What do we do then? Switch to another precious metal of which we have more? Switch to commodities?
Or we can just trust eachother. You make something cool and sell it to someone. I make something cool and you use the money you got in your last transaction to buy my cool thing off me. We're just bartering in a huge pool with a little bit of paper to smooth the process.
To address the concerns of the last poster, all we can do is try to be as transparent as possible. And even then, the economy knows what's happening. The government increases the money supply and the inflation numbers will show it, whether they tell us or not. Just like with anything else we buy and sell. Increase supply and the money value of each individual unit drops.
Isn't that like a woman saying, "I know he beats me, but he bought me a nice car so I'll stay" ? yeah, but apparently the nice car was worth the beating. just look at fear factor.
Animal protein may have helped humans evolve. However, farming (in particular high-energy grains) helped us civilize. Civilization is a greater achievement than just owning a big, juicy brain.
I'm not sure if all vegans agree with me, but I consider adult people eminently capable of helping themselves (what with their big, animal protein filled brains). Whereas animals, like children, tug at my heartstrings. It's not about their capacity to grow or do good in this world, or even whether they have a soul (that might, in fact, make mortal life appear *less* valuable to me). It's solely about their ability to feel fear and pain; feelings I, as an animal, am familiar with and can so empathize.
As for watching animals kill eachother on the Discovery Channel, that solidifies my opinion that, as having civilized and advanced technologically beyond the point of requiring the infliction of pain to survive or even enjoy ones self, I need not contribute to the suffering in the world (animal or human).
Finally, to address another common point, I am personally pro-life, but I am not comfortable telling someone else how to act with regards to such a personal issue. Similarly, I want people to see that avoiding meat isn't tough at all and seems like the right moral thing to do, but I don't moralize in their faces about it any more than I would try to explain why they should take a closer look at why free-trade is a good thing or why immigration doesn't lower wages as much as people think.
Why did you flip out on veganism like that? From your own link to Wikipedia, veganism is defined by vegans as "way of living which seeks to exclude -- as far as is possible and practical -- all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose" (emphasis added). So if I'm stuck on a desert island with Bambi, I will probably eat it as it is "impossible or impractical" to survive otherwise. But back in civilized society, there is no need. (There really is no need; don't believe the people that say you need animal protein, certain vitamins, whatever.) Just like in civilized society there should be no need to fight for things that we can use logic to divvy up reasonably. That's the whole reason we civilized ourselves, to share resources in a controlled manner instead of fighting for them. And if we can manage to continue to consider our societal groups as covering ever wider areas (family to tribe to nation to continent to planet), we will ultimately not feel the need to fight over things like waterholes and oil fields.
Anyway, your rabid anti-veganism, I must say, just makes you sound unreasonable. It's like how Cartman (and my republican grandfather) hates hippies. What the hell did a hippie ever do to anybody?!
THAT's what psychologists need to study; why do people hate hippies, pacifists, and other TOTALLY INNOCUOUS PEOPLE who, if they hurt anyone by their behavior, only could possibly hurt themselves?
Slashdot Mirror
I use the Caps Lock at work all the time when I'm drawing plans because some clients have CAD standards in which all letters are supposed to be capitalized. This can be paragraphs in some cases. And for certain headings in spreadsheets and such, I'd rather toggle Caps Lock and type quickly than hold shift as I type.
I need Caps Lock for "note off" in Renoise, a music tracker program that, designed to be operated almost exclusively from the keyboard, makes good use of all the keys. (I could remap it, of course, but I like to keep it standard so I can move around easily.) Renoise uses the Scroll Lock and function keys as well.
How about if Google just deletes any comments written in all caps.
I still haven't finished the book. I'm more of a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none kind of guy that makes a point to know just enough to sound smart.
I was being sarcastic with that statement. Hence the unwarranted exclamation mark after "rife." It was meant to illustrate my point by using something roughly opposite of what you said in an obnoxious and hyperbolic manner.
But it appears I failed miserably.
When I first read this comment, I thought it was a joke for the following reason: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Shrugged#Plot
...rife with stories...
Rife! I've heard of doctors getting banned from medicine the same way. Therefore medicine is rife with stories about doctors getting banned from medicine for improper behavior.
I'm just saying be careful with amplifying some stories you have heard to mean that there is a huge problem. How many doctors are there in this country? Things slip through the cracks all the time. It's the same with welfare. People love to fuss about the one guy who manages to sign up for welfare in several states but forget that he is but one out of many who are trying to be honest and get some help while looking for a job.
Again, I love to harp on this, but it's all too easy to fuss about a single, outlying case. Instead, we all need to use our facilities for reason and think about the big picture and all the evidence pro and con.
In our society, everyone deserves legal representation, even the guilty. Right or wrong, it's just how our system works.
By the way, I think that's part of the reason everyone hates lawyers so much: Half of all lawyers are on the wrong side. And it's their job to game the law for their client. If the law allows them to do something evil, then that was the fault of the legislators who wrote the law.
Lawyers are "self-regulating" which we should all know by now is an inherent conflict of interest that inevitably leads to corruption, regardless of what industry does it.
Professional engineers are self-regulated. State boards of professional engineers, the exams, all that stuff is run by engineers and for engineers. In Florida, for example (which is typical of most states), the only government involvement is a few laws that give the Board its power. And medicine is not all that different.
Maybe I should have read your response more carefully. Agreed, there is no simple set of inputs that crash all human minds.
Luckily we can reason ourselves out of most situations. To continue with my example, the man would just turn off the lights and imagine he's with someone else!
Do we not crash? I guess this could go on forever, and we would probably just be discussing slightly different concepts, but I would say that people crash too, just in a more sophisticated manner. (I admit, maybe that's your whole point.) Anyway, people have nervous breakdowns or succumb to post-traumatic stress disorder and find themselves quite unable to function.
Just a thought: what if we had strongly wired instincts like this? Or is it really mutually exclusive with our intelligence? If there is in fact an inversely proportional relationship, does that mean that smarter beings would have lost the problematic cognitive biases that arise from our brains' usually helpful hard-coded heuristics?
i wouldn't straight off blame the poor chicken for how it's brain is wired. it's like blaming a man for finding a woman unattractive, even if she does have everything that should make good, healthy offspring. now back to the magpies. what do you suppose this means for their status as individuals or "persons?"
...If you're a Mac fanboy running a network of Apple computers. If anything goes wrong, it's an artistic expression and anyone who criticizes the problem is a closed-minded square who "doesn't get it." Then you sit back in self satisfaction listening to alternative pop, thinking about how hip and different and enlightened you are.
It's funny... I use Linux to demonstrate how different and enlightened I am. Apple is played out. That scene is spent.
If you're going to argue against using gold as money, at least use an argument that makes sense.
I suppose I deserved that for insinuating that the gold standard fanboys are a bunch of troglodytes yearning for the good old days when money was buttons and shiny objects.
OK, here's an argument that hopefully makes a little more sense: Governments can change (and have changed) the official price of specie as easily as they can print or strike more currency. I suppose this is more an argument for the use of gold in everyday transactions rather than against yours, but it is meant to illustrate that a simple gold standard isn't a panacea.
Anyway, of course the economy wouldn't stop growing when we run out of whatever commodity we choose to base our money on. We just have deflation like you say ( or switch to a new commodity if the government's whim blows that way - or the government might decide to change the price of the commodity). But I'm getting off track. Deflation is fine. Interest rates will be lower since we don't need to add inflation to our calculations. A raise at work might actually be a smaller drop than usual in the nominal value of our paychecks. Imagine the conversations around the water cooler: "How'd you make out?" "Me? Great! Only -1%! Last year it was -2%." Blah blah blah. A strange world, but it would make sense after a while.
The argument is a lot deeper of course, but the problem of fiat currency printed by an untrustworthy government is the same problem of having a representative currency's price set by an untrustworthy government. Hopefully we are just arguing past each other about some type of gold standard different from that of the past. The currency competition idea seems to answer some of the concerns. I'll have to give it a closer look.
The only thing I'm nervous about in these data are confounding variables (the old correlation versus causation bit). For example, I'm too lazy to play with the numbers right now, but I seem to recall that even greenhouse gas numbers look like the CPI chart. But I do realize it's only an example, and we don't have space for a full econometric analysis here on Slashdot.
Of course not: each bit of gold/silver simply buys more stuff.
Continue my thought experiment, then, into the future so far that each atom of gold is worth, say, a galaxy class starship. But what if I want to exchange my pocket change for gold? I guess I just get a quark or two shaved off of a gold bar? Oh! Never mind. I forgot that by then gold-pressed latinum is the gold standard. (Or gold-pressed latinum standard? ... Whatever, it's the Cadillac of precious metals.)
Sorry, I had to make the joke. I do find the reply to my reply thought provoking. I already spent my (or my boss's) morning on my first comment. Now I have to waste the afternoon in some sort of endless Wikipedia search on money! Thanks!
I know this is not the main thrust of the comment, but it's not practical for money to be backed by gold, diamonds, beads, or fragments of mirrors. Money is backed by what you can buy with it. Then, you say, "what if the economy collapses and no one trusts the dollar anymore?" Well, I don't know about you, but I can't eat gold. Or any other precious metal for that matter. "But you can use the gold to buy food." Ah, only because people trust gold as having value while paper money doesn't. Stepping back a step further, each seems to me to be about as useful as the other for its intrinsic physical properties.
But I got off track. The main reason precious metals don't make sense as money is the fact that they don't account for the growth of the economy. To simplify things, let's create a little thought experiment and take it to the extreme. What happens when there is no more gold left to pile up in Fort Knox? Does the economy stop growing at that instant? No. People continue to innovate and create value out of nothing using only their minds and bodies. What do we do then? Switch to another precious metal of which we have more? Switch to commodities?
Or we can just trust eachother. You make something cool and sell it to someone. I make something cool and you use the money you got in your last transaction to buy my cool thing off me. We're just bartering in a huge pool with a little bit of paper to smooth the process.
To address the concerns of the last poster, all we can do is try to be as transparent as possible. And even then, the economy knows what's happening. The government increases the money supply and the inflation numbers will show it, whether they tell us or not. Just like with anything else we buy and sell. Increase supply and the money value of each individual unit drops.
Animal protein may have helped humans evolve. However, farming (in particular high-energy grains) helped us civilize. Civilization is a greater achievement than just owning a big, juicy brain.
I'm not sure if all vegans agree with me, but I consider adult people eminently capable of helping themselves (what with their big, animal protein filled brains). Whereas animals, like children, tug at my heartstrings. It's not about their capacity to grow or do good in this world, or even whether they have a soul (that might, in fact, make mortal life appear *less* valuable to me). It's solely about their ability to feel fear and pain; feelings I, as an animal, am familiar with and can so empathize.
As for watching animals kill eachother on the Discovery Channel, that solidifies my opinion that, as having civilized and advanced technologically beyond the point of requiring the infliction of pain to survive or even enjoy ones self, I need not contribute to the suffering in the world (animal or human).
Finally, to address another common point, I am personally pro-life, but I am not comfortable telling someone else how to act with regards to such a personal issue. Similarly, I want people to see that avoiding meat isn't tough at all and seems like the right moral thing to do, but I don't moralize in their faces about it any more than I would try to explain why they should take a closer look at why free-trade is a good thing or why immigration doesn't lower wages as much as people think.
Why did you flip out on veganism like that? From your own link to Wikipedia, veganism is defined by vegans as "way of living which seeks to exclude -- as far as is possible and practical -- all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose" (emphasis added). So if I'm stuck on a desert island with Bambi, I will probably eat it as it is "impossible or impractical" to survive otherwise. But back in civilized society, there is no need. (There really is no need; don't believe the people that say you need animal protein, certain vitamins, whatever.) Just like in civilized society there should be no need to fight for things that we can use logic to divvy up reasonably. That's the whole reason we civilized ourselves, to share resources in a controlled manner instead of fighting for them. And if we can manage to continue to consider our societal groups as covering ever wider areas (family to tribe to nation to continent to planet), we will ultimately not feel the need to fight over things like waterholes and oil fields.
Anyway, your rabid anti-veganism, I must say, just makes you sound unreasonable. It's like how Cartman (and my republican grandfather) hates hippies. What the hell did a hippie ever do to anybody?!
THAT's what psychologists need to study; why do people hate hippies, pacifists, and other TOTALLY INNOCUOUS PEOPLE who, if they hurt anyone by their behavior, only could possibly hurt themselves?