Again, I feel confident in asserting that the God in question is the Christian one.
That's a confusion of names only.
Heine wasn't the only Christian thinker who noticed something odd in Germany's approach to Christianity. I haven't the reference at hand, but I've read about several such thinkers, Catholic and Protestant alike, wondering over a span of centuries on how twisted the German way of "being Christian" was. They were all quite positive that whatever the reason, the Christianization of Germany (in the deep sense of a worldview change) never completed, that German brands of Christianity kept showing an undercurrent of deeply held nordic pagan beliefs, practices and approaches, and that over time this would undoubtedly result in extremes of violence.
That's why Heine mentions Thor specifically. Lots and lots of Germans in his time (and back then way more than the current 93% called themselves Christian) professed to believe in the Christian god, but when he looked at them he saw mostly Thor believers who happened to have renamed him Christ, rebranded his Hammer into a Cross (and similarly with other paraphernalia), but weren't actually Christian since their mindset wasn't that of Christianity.
By that line of reasoning, Nietzsche appears to endorse all dictators, no matter how oppressive. Undoubtedly Hitler took inspiration from Nietzsche's writings, but I think by creating a captive state and denying others the chance to ascend, the level of perversion exceeds what can reasonably be called legitimate relatedness.
Yes, that's the critic he'd made to oppression tendencies of any caliber: that insofar as they pursue perfect peace and perfect conformity, they're pursuing death, as life is struggle and anyone desiring life must increase the opportunities for struggle to flourish.
However, a Nietzschean-inspired non-follower of Nietzsche would be fine if he replied thus: "And why should I value life? I value myself, not this precious 'life via struggle' of yours!" To which Nietzsche would nod, wink and smile in agreement, for he found a true master, creator of his own perspectives, someone so radically independent that he managed to not even depart from mere platonic perspectives, but even from Nietzsche's own anti-platonic one, not becoming slave to neither. But an agreement with a hidden side, for when two such masters collide neither gives up, the end result being struggle, and thus life.
In more practical terms that means that dictators, even if horrible to their own populations, are "Nietzschean nice" as long as they don't become too successful in the international arena, since at some point either two such dictators are posed to clash (Hitler vs. Stalin, Tito vs. Stalin, Stalin vs. Mao etc.) or then one such dictator will clash with a democracy, those "struggles" fulfilling "life" (whatever that means).
If that sounds horrible, that's because it is. As Nietzsche himself made clear in his speech about god's death, his atheism goes so deeply that it kills not only the mythical god, but also the philosophical ones, those still followed (slavehood) by the other, standard atheists. You end up beyond not only supernatural deities, but also beyond all the secular ones: "history", "equality", "justice", "freedom", "peace", "reason", "good", "evil" etc. And in the end, only the beliefs of masters, namely, "good for me", "bad for me", remain.
Every officer, Waffen SS or Wehrmacht, swore their oaths "by almighty God". One of the first treaties signed by the reich was the Reichskonkordant with the Vatican. Protip: the Vatican has never repudiated that treaty. Mein Kampf mentions doing 'the work of God' many times.
The question is: "yes, but which God?" Let me quote Wikipedia's article on Heinrich Heine, a famous 19th century German Jew poet converted into Christianity who provided the answer:
In 1834, 99 years before Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party seized power in Germany, Heine wrote in his work "The History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany":
"Christianity - and that is its greatest merit - has somewhat mitigated that brutal Germanic love of war, but it could not destroy it. Should that subduing talisman, the cross, be shattered, the frenzied madness of the ancient warriors, that insane Berserk rage of which Nordic bards have spoken and sung so often, will once more burst into flame. This talisman is fragile, and the day will come when it will collapse miserably. Then the ancient stony gods will rise from the forgotten debris and rub the dust of a thousand years from their eyes, and finally Thor with his giant hammer will jump up and smash the Gothic cathedrals. (...)
"Do not smile at my advice -- the advice of a dreamer who warns you against Kantians, Fichteans, and philosophers of nature. Do not smile at the visionary who anticipates the same revolution in the realm of the visible as has taken place in the spiritual. Thought precedes action as lightning precedes thunder. German thunder is of true Germanic character; it is not very nimble, but rumbles along ponderously. Yet, it will come and when you hear a crashing such as never before has been heard in the world's history, then you know that the German thunderbolt has fallen at last. At that uproar the eagles of the air will drop dead, and lions in the remotest deserts of Africa will hide in their royal dens. A play will be performed in Germany which will make the French Revolution look like an innocent idyll."
The majority of the NSDAP platform was always about appealing to conservative Christian sentiment
I'd say conservative Germanic sentiment. There were actually Christian-based fascisms, most prominent of which that of the Ustashi in Croatia. Germany's was quite different.
It's probably also worth mentioning that Nietzsche's philosophies were (a) so misunderstood by popular culture that by the time Hitler used them it was in direct contradiction of some of his objectives
I hear this argument a lot, but although Nietzsche would most certainly object to Hitler and Nazism, he'd also object to attempts to distance them from his philosophy. When reading many of Nietzsche's theses, hypotheses and theories one has a tendency to forget that first and foremost he was a critic of anyone who merely follows another's ideas. For him there are no truths, only perspectives. Master is him who creates his own perspective and goes with it no matter what other thinks, slave is him who is incapable of creating a perspective and instead subjects himself to another's perspective. Which is why Nietzsche was hypercritical of Christianism and other Platonisms, which he understood as slave movements, while at the same time being quite fond of Jesus and Plato, as they were masters, creators of perspectives. From Nietzsche's own perspective then Hitler would be a-okay, a master perspective creator, while his followers (and victims) outright despised as mere slaves of Hitlers ideas. If anything, what Nietzsche would mostly criticize in Hitler would be his platonic tendencies towards the construction of a perpetual peace by way of the elimination of all his enemies in the process of constructing his thousand years reich. A true Nietzschean superman is him who never utterly destroys his enemies but lets them live and becomes stronger again so as to provide a permanent challenge, both contenders striving to overcome the other, enjoying the struggle to the end and hoping, if possible, to extend it into perpetuity.
In true Nietzschean fashion then I can reply that the perspective according which Hitler wasn't a follower of Nietzsche is as valid as that according which he was an almost perfect follower of Nietzsche, as both as as valid a anything else. Perspective for perspective, construct yours!;-)
I get the feeling you watch a lot of the History Channel. Stop doing that.
She slaps this wad of shit with pictures of this bearded white guy (Jesus was brown!)
That isn't as bad as it sound. Historically imagery of Jesus and other biblical folk has always been adjust to the target culture. Europeans and derived use to see the blonde Jesus because that's the picture typically used in medieval Europe among white people, but if you seek around you find lots of additional Jesuses, from the brown to the asian. Chinese Jesus in particular is awesome. You have no idea that's a Christian drawing unless someone tells you, otherwise your tendency is to assume it's a random Chinese historical/mythical event or another, what with everyone looking Chinese and wearing Chinese peasant clothes and having Chinese mountains as background etc.
Because of christainity. III Reich was christian to the bone. And nazi murderers had "Gott mit Uns" on their belt buckles.
Nope. It was nordic neopaganism coupled with 18th century ocultism and a few crazy 19th philosophies, the main one of which (Nietzsche's) was in turn inspired by a radical form of greek paganism. On top of all the crazy the Nazis paid some lip service for the German Christians who wouldn't quite like to know about this mess.
In a way. If you have an old e-mail address ending in "@hotmail.com" it's still valid but only as an alias of your new "@outlook.com" one (if you take the trouble of creating one).
Also, Outlook.com is quite nice now that Google scrapped the free Apps version. Last time I checked Microsoft was providing 500 or so e-mail accounts for free for domain owners. The all Metro interface is somewhat meh but whatever, for a free service (that you can replace anytime given you own the domain) it works well enough.
Well, one could calculate the total amount of force used by the hacker while pressing his keys and retaliate proportionally. One trembling punch and two pokes per hacked site should be about right.
I can't think of a single subject that we were able to "finish" studying. So, I'm unsure how this is supposed to be interperted.
In the two senses:
a) First, that you cannot study what you cannot interact with (you can speculate, but that's philosophy, not science);
b) Second, that no matter what the subject, if you keep asking "why" you reach some point at which you start looping, i.e., you reach its axioms.
A first cause is such an ending point. If you were to attempt asking what the cause of a first cause is, the answer would be either "none", otherwise what you thought of as a first cause actually isn't and you must go one step further until you reach the end of the line (the Aristotelian position), or that the first cause is "its own cause" (the Cartesian-Spinozan position). The self-cause option, by the way, is sometimes adopted by modern-day atheists when they argue against theists: it's the basis for the argument that the Universe itself can very well be its own cause (there are counter-arguments to this, but that's not relevant here). In one form or another though, the first cause axioms remains there as such, forever referring back to itself.
However, general relativity and quantum mechanics should have dispelled the idea that the universe works in general like things work in our everyday experience, or that its workings conform to our intuitions about how it does or should work.
Not this one, though. General relativity and quantum mechanics both have the prerequisite of a context to happen, hence, the context is the cause. And even further refinements of both, for example string theory, require math and logic laws as causes.
Note that the ancient Greek concept of "cause" is broader that the modern one. We don't tend to think of math and logic as causative. They did. That's actually a weakness in our imagining of what "science" is, since it comes full of external assumptions that lack a clear place in the overall architecture of the method.
If you accept the axiom and arguments, you end up with a paradox, not an existence proof.
It's a mathematical style of proof: reduction to absurdity. If there the chain of causes is infinite, then we don't exist, because to reach our present moment of wondering about these kinds would require infinite time. Therefore, there is (at least one) cause that doesn't require previous causes. In fact, the original argument doesn't require the first cause to be unique. More than one is fine.
So: a) we know it is "there", some"where"; b) we know it isn't anything from among our experience, since everything we experience is clearly a result of other causes; c) whatever it is, it isn't observable, since observing it would be interacting with it, thus changing it in some way, what contradicts the conclusion that it isn't caused by anything.
Maybe another, better way to put it would be thus: everything we experience has a cause, but there must be something that doesn't, otherwise we wouldn't be here experiencing anything at all. The definition that "everything has a cause" refers then only to those things we can experience. It's a general principle, not a universal one.
Might also mention that the axiom refutes the existence of free will, or, if you prefer the incompatible conclusion to the axiom, only the uncaused cause can have will. Neither conclusion is likely to be popular among the people who think this is a good argument for the existence of their god(s).
I don't see why that would be a problem. If there is no free will, there is no free will. Simple as that.
Religionists really ought to kick this one to the curb and find a better argument to justify their belief in God. The problem is, these arguments are defense mechanisms for rationalizing dearly held beliefs, so the people who offer them have negative motivation to think critically about them.
Aristotle lived among polytheists. His arguments destroys any possibility of anthropomorphic gods, and even unanthropomorphized, any resulting god(s) wouldn't even remotely care about anything but himself/themselves. How is that "a defense mechanism for rationalizing a dearly held belief"?
Now, let me say this: "psychologism" is one of the weakest arguments out there. Refuting when one says "x" by arguing not about "x", but about the possible hidden reasons for this or that person to say "x", is only a subtler form of the cheapest trick in the pack: attacking the person, not the idea. Don't follow this path.
The big bang theory is nothing more than the best model we have that best fits observations.
So is "god", at least the technical one deduced in Aristotelian physics: everything is caused by something else; you cannot have an infinite chain of previous causes as it'd take infinite time for any effect to happen, including your own existence; therefore, there is necessarily a first cause that is cause of everything but at the same time isn't caused by anything else (nor, by extension, affected). Let's name this first cause "god" since it fulfills the technical requirements for something to be considered one (immortality and indestructibility -- ancient Greek theology wasn't very subtle) and... proceed to study something else, as this part is done and there's nothing to add to it.
Admittedly such a "mechanical god" has no or almost no similarity with what we picture when we hear the term. Modernly you could even rename it to something else, let's say, "the stuff", and that'd be fine. In any case, its a "god" that comes directly from modelling observed causation. Nothing unscientific about it.
Back in the 1930s I guess it was talkies, so they brought in the Hayes Code.
Actually, the discussion goes back at least 2400 years. It was one of the points of difference between Plato and Aristotle. Plato thought media (theater, poetry and music back then) caused people to emulate what was being presented, while Aristotle was of the opinion it actually helped people release the tension and thus not go around killing, raping and such.
Generation after generation afterwards -- at what amounts to at least 120 generations, give or take -- there have been people arguing for either camps, with no consensual conclusion having ever been reached.
While I'm certainly not a fan of many of the recent more authoritarian changes the US has undergone, the paranoid ramblings that come out of some people on Slashdot are quite ridiculous.
The problem is that over time all the many tiny bits of authoritarianism add up. Sure, it's pure fantasy to say things are like that now, or will be like that next month, year or even decade. But let things pile up over 50 or 100 years and see the result.
In fact, some political theorists, Antonio Gramsci being the most known although the members of the Frankfurt School also have dwelt in this line of reasoning, have proposed that a slow method doing small changes of decades is the correct way to go about doing a revolution in any country with a decentralized power structure. That's because such countries, differently from those in which power is strongly centralized, cannot be changed overnight by "merely" replacing the all powerful central power structure via a violent revolution and starting giving new orders. Decentralized ones, on the other hand, have from hundreds to many thousands of power centers, up to and including at the individual level, so that violently overcoming one results in merely upsetting all the others, who then rebel and fight back. Thus, the "revolution" (supposing this term is even valid in this context) must be done very slowly, below the pain threshold that'd cause a majority of the different power centers to rebel, letting their natural leaders die their natural deaths all the while the new generations grow already used to the slightly changed cultural landscape, and going through this cycle as many times as needed until generations down the line the end result is achieved.
The problem with thinking this possible is that it'd require conspiracy-level dedication from generations of revolutionaries too, not to mention their goals would also change wildly over time. Very unlikely, to say the least. In any case, the core of the argument, that things can turn 180 if you let them go their way 1 at a time, remains valid even if there's no one actively directing it, as most probably there isn't. Give things the right push at the start and some kind of political inertia (the proverbial "I don't care, it isn't my problem") can very well keep them going just because.
Robin: Now with MySQL I remember you having I don’t know, I guess annual big company-wide meetings.
Mårten: Correct. Yes. And we have the same tradition at Eucalyptus, we have at least an annual all-hands meeting typically in Santa Barbara but we may do it elsewhere as well, where we bring everybody together to the degree it is possible. We have had challenges with visas for everybody so we actually have employees who didn’t get visas to the US which is very sad. That was the reason we didn’t do the MySQL meetings in the US, the last one we did here was in Orlando.
I've read somewhere it's currently way more expensive to get raw materials from e-waste than to directly mine them from the earth. At some point, when natural mines are all but exhausted, that'll change, but not for now. By then we'll see current waste deposits become the new mines (plus recycling becoming the norm). Then at some point the waste mines themselves will be exhausted and we'll be left with full, continuous, permanent recycling of everything, no more waste deposits at all.
Video chat and Siri are perfect examples of where Apple didn't really invent anything or innovate much. They just hyped those features and tried to make them cool.
What's strange about how Apple does that is that they don't actually spend much in advertising. I remember reading somewhere that Samsung spends about 14 times more than Apple on advertising, and even that isn't enough to turn Samsung's smartphones and tables into the huge profit sources that the iPhone and iPad are.
Millions of Spice Girls album sales say otherwise.
Actually, quite the opposite. There's "substance" in there, only not of the kind we'd like there to be. Specifically, something in their music causes tons of endorphin to be released in those who hear it. Other flashy and (so to speak) substanceless bands don't cause this effect and thus aren't successful.
Discovering and becoming able to consistently replicate whatever causes that is the holy grail of anyone seeking power. So far that's been done more by trial and error than by careful planning, but once the doors to that minor piece of human psychology become widely open we're doomed.
So you claim - but the vast spread between the two numbers you give tells a different story. The numbers says you're wrong - because otherwise there wouldn't be a need for the most expensive block to be paying sixty times a month more.
It could be made so that the values would be the same, it's just a matter of dividing the cost plus profit equally among all customers, much easier in fact. But that results in this little problem: while very successful 65 years old senior can have enough money to spend on top-of-the-line health insurance if he planned his retirement right, a fresh-from-high-school youngster doesn't. So, this is more a matter of adjusting prices due to the customer's paying power than anything else.
Also, to make thing clear: a middle-of-the-line senior package can be had by $300/month. It's what my 87-years old aunt pays. There are cheaper options too, although I'm not aware of the exact cost (I guess about $200/month or so). In any case all of them cover the exact same government mandated list of health issues, treatments, exams and the like.
As for the minor differentiation between what is or isn't an insurance, that's irrelevant. What matters is that the companies that provide these services have statistical models that allow them to do what the government says they must do while charging their customers what they can and will pay and turning a healthy profit in the end. It's what all insurances companies do: deal with individual uncertainties that in aggregate become statistical certainties. That's all there is to it.
what you describe here is not insurance but a payment scheme managed by 3rd party
Let me give you two numbers. The worst insurance we have, for the cheapest age bracket, local area only, cheapest hospitals etc. etc. etc., costs about $25/month/person. All treatments included, no restrictions. The most expensive top-of-the-line insurance for the most expensive age bracket (65+ seniors) with all bells and whistles, global range etc. costs about $1500/month/person. And those are values for when you pay it all by yourself. Family, business and other kinds of collective contracts get even lower prices.
Yes, there are a few people within this system that end up costing hundreds of times more than what they personally pay, but spread over the entire range of paying customers as a fixed cost of doing business their weight is at most cents for the other paying individuals. By removing them the above prices might go down a little, perhaps to $24.50 and $1490 respectively. Their tail in the bell curve represent such a minor part of the actuarial tables that arguing over this feels cheap to anyone but the executives and accountants that believe they should perfectly optimize those individuals away. Furthermore, I doubt any price reduction would actually happen. A few CEOs would get some bigger bonus, a few investors would get slightly larger dividends, lots of people would be left to happily die away, and that'd be it.
What does an insurance company have to do with it?
Something along these lines:
1) pay $x to insurance company 2) feel ill 3) go to doctor 4) have insurance company pay $x*20 to doctor 5) get better
It's an actuarial calculation. The sum of everyone paying to the insurance company must be more than the sum of what doctors are charging from the insurance company. So, the insurance company searches for ways to widen the difference as much as possible all the while staying competitive with the other insurance companies.
The problem with the US system is that you don't have laws stating that that insurance companies cannot deny pre-existing conditions, must provide treatment for basically everything, and cannot charge differently due to you being a high-demanding customer, only being allowed to increase prices due to age and even so within pre-defined limits. If such laws existed insurance premiums would be calculated in a way as to make it all work by simply charging the huge number of younger and healthier customers slightly more. It's how it works here in Brazil. You get private insurance, you get treatment for almost everything. Insurance companies here compete only in terms of time from diagnostic to procedure (the faster it is the more you pay, with the government determining a maximum limit), the list of hospitals you get access to (the fancier and most renowned ones cost more) and niceties (private vs. multiple patient room, free choice of doctor vs. pre-approved ones, automatic access to expensive exams vs. pre-screened and subject to authorization, private ambulance/air-transport/etc. included or not, coverage area, discounts on medications etc.), but not in what they cover or for whom. Oh, and insurance companies must compete with the government provided free health coverage, which is admittedly bad to the extreme but in being free imposes a maximum limit on private insurance's premiums before people think paying isn't worth it anymore.
When these impositions were made lots of insurance companies couldn't adapt and went bankrupt. Then the surviving ones wen't into merges and reorganizations. Nowadays the ones that remain in business are doing fine even with the government continually expanding the list of procedures they must cover and materials they must provide.
I use GoG a lot too, but find myself wishing that I could download and install those games via steam as well.
This. I have about 100 games from GOG and love their DRM-less nature but were they to partner with Steam and offer some kind of "manage in Steam" upgrade for 5% to 10% of a game's price I'd surely go for it. (Not all of them at once though.)
Slashdot Mirror
Again, I feel confident in asserting that the God in question is the Christian one.
That's a confusion of names only.
Heine wasn't the only Christian thinker who noticed something odd in Germany's approach to Christianity. I haven't the reference at hand, but I've read about several such thinkers, Catholic and Protestant alike, wondering over a span of centuries on how twisted the German way of "being Christian" was. They were all quite positive that whatever the reason, the Christianization of Germany (in the deep sense of a worldview change) never completed, that German brands of Christianity kept showing an undercurrent of deeply held nordic pagan beliefs, practices and approaches, and that over time this would undoubtedly result in extremes of violence.
That's why Heine mentions Thor specifically. Lots and lots of Germans in his time (and back then way more than the current 93% called themselves Christian) professed to believe in the Christian god, but when he looked at them he saw mostly Thor believers who happened to have renamed him Christ, rebranded his Hammer into a Cross (and similarly with other paraphernalia), but weren't actually Christian since their mindset wasn't that of Christianity.
By that line of reasoning, Nietzsche appears to endorse all dictators, no matter how oppressive. Undoubtedly Hitler took inspiration from Nietzsche's writings, but I think by creating a captive state and denying others the chance to ascend, the level of perversion exceeds what can reasonably be called legitimate relatedness.
Yes, that's the critic he'd made to oppression tendencies of any caliber: that insofar as they pursue perfect peace and perfect conformity, they're pursuing death, as life is struggle and anyone desiring life must increase the opportunities for struggle to flourish.
However, a Nietzschean-inspired non-follower of Nietzsche would be fine if he replied thus: "And why should I value life? I value myself, not this precious 'life via struggle' of yours!" To which Nietzsche would nod, wink and smile in agreement, for he found a true master, creator of his own perspectives, someone so radically independent that he managed to not even depart from mere platonic perspectives, but even from Nietzsche's own anti-platonic one, not becoming slave to neither. But an agreement with a hidden side, for when two such masters collide neither gives up, the end result being struggle, and thus life.
In more practical terms that means that dictators, even if horrible to their own populations, are "Nietzschean nice" as long as they don't become too successful in the international arena, since at some point either two such dictators are posed to clash (Hitler vs. Stalin, Tito vs. Stalin, Stalin vs. Mao etc.) or then one such dictator will clash with a democracy, those "struggles" fulfilling "life" (whatever that means).
If that sounds horrible, that's because it is. As Nietzsche himself made clear in his speech about god's death, his atheism goes so deeply that it kills not only the mythical god, but also the philosophical ones, those still followed (slavehood) by the other, standard atheists. You end up beyond not only supernatural deities, but also beyond all the secular ones: "history", "equality", "justice", "freedom", "peace", "reason", "good", "evil" etc. And in the end, only the beliefs of masters, namely, "good for me", "bad for me", remain.
Every officer, Waffen SS or Wehrmacht, swore their oaths "by almighty God". One of the first treaties signed by the reich was the Reichskonkordant with the Vatican. Protip: the Vatican has never repudiated that treaty. Mein Kampf mentions doing 'the work of God' many times.
The question is: "yes, but which God?" Let me quote Wikipedia's article on Heinrich Heine, a famous 19th century German Jew poet converted into Christianity who provided the answer:
In 1834, 99 years before Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party seized power in Germany, Heine wrote in his work "The History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany":
"Christianity - and that is its greatest merit - has somewhat mitigated that brutal Germanic love of war, but it could not destroy it. Should that subduing talisman, the cross, be shattered, the frenzied madness of the ancient warriors, that insane Berserk rage of which Nordic bards have spoken and sung so often, will once more burst into flame. This talisman is fragile, and the day will come when it will collapse miserably. Then the ancient stony gods will rise from the forgotten debris and rub the dust of a thousand years from their eyes, and finally Thor with his giant hammer will jump up and smash the Gothic cathedrals. (...)
"Do not smile at my advice -- the advice of a dreamer who warns you against Kantians, Fichteans, and philosophers of nature. Do not smile at the visionary who anticipates the same revolution in the realm of the visible as has taken place in the spiritual. Thought precedes action as lightning precedes thunder. German thunder is of true Germanic character; it is not very nimble, but rumbles along ponderously. Yet, it will come and when you hear a crashing such as never before has been heard in the world's history, then you know that the German thunderbolt has fallen at last. At that uproar the eagles of the air will drop dead, and lions in the remotest deserts of Africa will hide in their royal dens. A play will be performed in Germany which will make the French Revolution look like an innocent idyll."
The majority of the NSDAP platform was always about appealing to conservative Christian sentiment
I'd say conservative Germanic sentiment. There were actually Christian-based fascisms, most prominent of which that of the Ustashi in Croatia. Germany's was quite different.
It's probably also worth mentioning that Nietzsche's philosophies were (a) so misunderstood by popular culture that by the time Hitler used them it was in direct contradiction of some of his objectives
I hear this argument a lot, but although Nietzsche would most certainly object to Hitler and Nazism, he'd also object to attempts to distance them from his philosophy. When reading many of Nietzsche's theses, hypotheses and theories one has a tendency to forget that first and foremost he was a critic of anyone who merely follows another's ideas. For him there are no truths, only perspectives. Master is him who creates his own perspective and goes with it no matter what other thinks, slave is him who is incapable of creating a perspective and instead subjects himself to another's perspective. Which is why Nietzsche was hypercritical of Christianism and other Platonisms, which he understood as slave movements, while at the same time being quite fond of Jesus and Plato, as they were masters, creators of perspectives. From Nietzsche's own perspective then Hitler would be a-okay, a master perspective creator, while his followers (and victims) outright despised as mere slaves of Hitlers ideas. If anything, what Nietzsche would mostly criticize in Hitler would be his platonic tendencies towards the construction of a perpetual peace by way of the elimination of all his enemies in the process of constructing his thousand years reich. A true Nietzschean superman is him who never utterly destroys his enemies but lets them live and becomes stronger again so as to provide a permanent challenge, both contenders striving to overcome the other, enjoying the struggle to the end and hoping, if possible, to extend it into perpetuity.
In true Nietzschean fashion then I can reply that the perspective according which Hitler wasn't a follower of Nietzsche is as valid as that according which he was an almost perfect follower of Nietzsche, as both as as valid a anything else. Perspective for perspective, construct yours! ;-)
I get the feeling you watch a lot of the History Channel. Stop doing that.
Nope, I don't.
She slaps this wad of shit with pictures of this bearded white guy (Jesus was brown!)
That isn't as bad as it sound. Historically imagery of Jesus and other biblical folk has always been adjust to the target culture. Europeans and derived use to see the blonde Jesus because that's the picture typically used in medieval Europe among white people, but if you seek around you find lots of additional Jesuses, from the brown to the asian. Chinese Jesus in particular is awesome. You have no idea that's a Christian drawing unless someone tells you, otherwise your tendency is to assume it's a random Chinese historical/mythical event or another, what with everyone looking Chinese and wearing Chinese peasant clothes and having Chinese mountains as background etc.
But man, how atheists go on and on and on and on and on....
As a friend of mine used to say: "Atheists are very boring. All they talk about is god, god, god..."
Because of christainity. III Reich was christian to the bone. And nazi murderers had "Gott mit Uns" on their belt buckles.
Nope. It was nordic neopaganism coupled with 18th century ocultism and a few crazy 19th philosophies, the main one of which (Nietzsche's) was in turn inspired by a radical form of greek paganism. On top of all the crazy the Nazis paid some lip service for the German Christians who wouldn't quite like to know about this mess.
In a way. If you have an old e-mail address ending in "@hotmail.com" it's still valid but only as an alias of your new "@outlook.com" one (if you take the trouble of creating one).
Also, Outlook.com is quite nice now that Google scrapped the free Apps version. Last time I checked Microsoft was providing 500 or so e-mail accounts for free for domain owners. The all Metro interface is somewhat meh but whatever, for a free service (that you can replace anytime given you own the domain) it works well enough.
They just can't !!
Carbon machines can. Why couldn't silicon ones?
Actually, scratch that. With graphene circuits coming around in a few years it'll be carbon machines all the way.
Well, one could calculate the total amount of force used by the hacker while pressing his keys and retaliate proportionally. One trembling punch and two pokes per hacked site should be about right.
I can't think of a single subject that we were able to "finish" studying. So, I'm unsure how this is supposed to be interperted.
In the two senses:
a) First, that you cannot study what you cannot interact with (you can speculate, but that's philosophy, not science);
b) Second, that no matter what the subject, if you keep asking "why" you reach some point at which you start looping, i.e., you reach its axioms.
A first cause is such an ending point. If you were to attempt asking what the cause of a first cause is, the answer would be either "none", otherwise what you thought of as a first cause actually isn't and you must go one step further until you reach the end of the line (the Aristotelian position), or that the first cause is "its own cause" (the Cartesian-Spinozan position). The self-cause option, by the way, is sometimes adopted by modern-day atheists when they argue against theists: it's the basis for the argument that the Universe itself can very well be its own cause (there are counter-arguments to this, but that's not relevant here). In one form or another though, the first cause axioms remains there as such, forever referring back to itself.
That
However, general relativity and quantum mechanics should have dispelled the idea that the universe works in general like things work in our everyday experience, or that its workings conform to our intuitions about how it does or should work.
Not this one, though. General relativity and quantum mechanics both have the prerequisite of a context to happen, hence, the context is the cause. And even further refinements of both, for example string theory, require math and logic laws as causes.
Note that the ancient Greek concept of "cause" is broader that the modern one. We don't tend to think of math and logic as causative. They did. That's actually a weakness in our imagining of what "science" is, since it comes full of external assumptions that lack a clear place in the overall architecture of the method.
If you accept the axiom and arguments, you end up with a paradox, not an existence proof.
It's a mathematical style of proof: reduction to absurdity. If there the chain of causes is infinite, then we don't exist, because to reach our present moment of wondering about these kinds would require infinite time. Therefore, there is (at least one) cause that doesn't require previous causes. In fact, the original argument doesn't require the first cause to be unique. More than one is fine.
So: a) we know it is "there", some"where"; b) we know it isn't anything from among our experience, since everything we experience is clearly a result of other causes; c) whatever it is, it isn't observable, since observing it would be interacting with it, thus changing it in some way, what contradicts the conclusion that it isn't caused by anything.
Maybe another, better way to put it would be thus: everything we experience has a cause, but there must be something that doesn't, otherwise we wouldn't be here experiencing anything at all. The definition that "everything has a cause" refers then only to those things we can experience. It's a general principle, not a universal one.
Might also mention that the axiom refutes the existence of free will, or, if you prefer the incompatible conclusion to the axiom, only the uncaused cause can have will. Neither conclusion is likely to be popular among the people who think this is a good argument for the existence of their god(s).
I don't see why that would be a problem. If there is no free will, there is no free will. Simple as that.
Religionists really ought to kick this one to the curb and find a better argument to justify their belief in God. The problem is, these arguments are defense mechanisms for rationalizing dearly held beliefs, so the people who offer them have negative motivation to think critically about them.
Aristotle lived among polytheists. His arguments destroys any possibility of anthropomorphic gods, and even unanthropomorphized, any resulting god(s) wouldn't even remotely care about anything but himself/themselves. How is that "a defense mechanism for rationalizing a dearly held belief"?
Now, let me say this: "psychologism" is one of the weakest arguments out there. Refuting when one says "x" by arguing not about "x", but about the possible hidden reasons for this or that person to say "x", is only a subtler form of the cheapest trick in the pack: attacking the person, not the idea. Don't follow this path.
Are you actually suggesting that it is scientific to stop studying that which we do not comprehend?
I don't follow. What wasn't comprehended, comprehensible or perhaps incomplete in that conclusion?
The big bang theory is nothing more than the best model we have that best fits observations.
So is "god", at least the technical one deduced in Aristotelian physics: everything is caused by something else; you cannot have an infinite chain of previous causes as it'd take infinite time for any effect to happen, including your own existence; therefore, there is necessarily a first cause that is cause of everything but at the same time isn't caused by anything else (nor, by extension, affected). Let's name this first cause "god" since it fulfills the technical requirements for something to be considered one (immortality and indestructibility -- ancient Greek theology wasn't very subtle) and... proceed to study something else, as this part is done and there's nothing to add to it.
Admittedly such a "mechanical god" has no or almost no similarity with what we picture when we hear the term. Modernly you could even rename it to something else, let's say, "the stuff", and that'd be fine. In any case, its a "god" that comes directly from modelling observed causation. Nothing unscientific about it.
Back in the 1930s I guess it was talkies, so they brought in the Hayes Code.
Actually, the discussion goes back at least 2400 years. It was one of the points of difference between Plato and Aristotle. Plato thought media (theater, poetry and music back then) caused people to emulate what was being presented, while Aristotle was of the opinion it actually helped people release the tension and thus not go around killing, raping and such.
Generation after generation afterwards -- at what amounts to at least 120 generations, give or take -- there have been people arguing for either camps, with no consensual conclusion having ever been reached.
While I'm certainly not a fan of many of the recent more authoritarian changes the US has undergone, the paranoid ramblings that come out of some people on Slashdot are quite ridiculous.
The problem is that over time all the many tiny bits of authoritarianism add up. Sure, it's pure fantasy to say things are like that now, or will be like that next month, year or even decade. But let things pile up over 50 or 100 years and see the result.
In fact, some political theorists, Antonio Gramsci being the most known although the members of the Frankfurt School also have dwelt in this line of reasoning, have proposed that a slow method doing small changes of decades is the correct way to go about doing a revolution in any country with a decentralized power structure. That's because such countries, differently from those in which power is strongly centralized, cannot be changed overnight by "merely" replacing the all powerful central power structure via a violent revolution and starting giving new orders. Decentralized ones, on the other hand, have from hundreds to many thousands of power centers, up to and including at the individual level, so that violently overcoming one results in merely upsetting all the others, who then rebel and fight back. Thus, the "revolution" (supposing this term is even valid in this context) must be done very slowly, below the pain threshold that'd cause a majority of the different power centers to rebel, letting their natural leaders die their natural deaths all the while the new generations grow already used to the slightly changed cultural landscape, and going through this cycle as many times as needed until generations down the line the end result is achieved.
The problem with thinking this possible is that it'd require conspiracy-level dedication from generations of revolutionaries too, not to mention their goals would also change wildly over time. Very unlikely, to say the least. In any case, the core of the argument, that things can turn 180 if you let them go their way 1 at a time, remains valid even if there's no one actively directing it, as most probably there isn't. Give things the right push at the start and some kind of political inertia (the proverbial "I don't care, it isn't my problem") can very well keep them going just because.
Robin: Now with MySQL I remember you having I don’t know, I guess annual big company-wide meetings.
Mårten: Correct. Yes. And we have the same tradition at Eucalyptus, we have at least an annual all-hands meeting typically in Santa Barbara but we may do it elsewhere as well, where we bring everybody together to the degree it is possible. We have had challenges with visas for everybody so we actually have employees who didn’t get visas to the US which is very sad. That was the reason we didn’t do the MySQL meetings in the US, the last one we did here was in Orlando.
Why don't such things surprise me at all anymore?
The dream of being able to punch someone through the internet took a step forward today.
This is nothing. Now every sith lord out there will be able to force chocke through the Internet. Much more satisfying.
Isn't there a lot of precious metal in E-waste?
I've read somewhere it's currently way more expensive to get raw materials from e-waste than to directly mine them from the earth. At some point, when natural mines are all but exhausted, that'll change, but not for now. By then we'll see current waste deposits become the new mines (plus recycling becoming the norm). Then at some point the waste mines themselves will be exhausted and we'll be left with full, continuous, permanent recycling of everything, no more waste deposits at all.
Video chat and Siri are perfect examples of where Apple didn't really invent anything or innovate much. They just hyped those features and tried to make them cool.
What's strange about how Apple does that is that they don't actually spend much in advertising. I remember reading somewhere that Samsung spends about 14 times more than Apple on advertising, and even that isn't enough to turn Samsung's smartphones and tables into the huge profit sources that the iPhone and iPad are.
Millions of Spice Girls album sales say otherwise.
Actually, quite the opposite. There's "substance" in there, only not of the kind we'd like there to be. Specifically, something in their music causes tons of endorphin to be released in those who hear it. Other flashy and (so to speak) substanceless bands don't cause this effect and thus aren't successful.
Discovering and becoming able to consistently replicate whatever causes that is the holy grail of anyone seeking power. So far that's been done more by trial and error than by careful planning, but once the doors to that minor piece of human psychology become widely open we're doomed.
So you claim - but the vast spread between the two numbers you give tells a different story. The numbers says you're wrong - because otherwise there wouldn't be a need for the most expensive block to be paying sixty times a month more.
It could be made so that the values would be the same, it's just a matter of dividing the cost plus profit equally among all customers, much easier in fact. But that results in this little problem: while very successful 65 years old senior can have enough money to spend on top-of-the-line health insurance if he planned his retirement right, a fresh-from-high-school youngster doesn't. So, this is more a matter of adjusting prices due to the customer's paying power than anything else.
Also, to make thing clear: a middle-of-the-line senior package can be had by $300/month. It's what my 87-years old aunt pays. There are cheaper options too, although I'm not aware of the exact cost (I guess about $200/month or so). In any case all of them cover the exact same government mandated list of health issues, treatments, exams and the like.
As for the minor differentiation between what is or isn't an insurance, that's irrelevant. What matters is that the companies that provide these services have statistical models that allow them to do what the government says they must do while charging their customers what they can and will pay and turning a healthy profit in the end. It's what all insurances companies do: deal with individual uncertainties that in aggregate become statistical certainties. That's all there is to it.
Holy shit, where do you live?
Brazil. Worse than the USA in absolutely everything except for private health insurance prices. :-)
what you describe here is not insurance but a payment scheme managed by 3rd party
Let me give you two numbers. The worst insurance we have, for the cheapest age bracket, local area only, cheapest hospitals etc. etc. etc., costs about $25/month/person. All treatments included, no restrictions. The most expensive top-of-the-line insurance for the most expensive age bracket (65+ seniors) with all bells and whistles, global range etc. costs about $1500/month/person. And those are values for when you pay it all by yourself. Family, business and other kinds of collective contracts get even lower prices.
Yes, there are a few people within this system that end up costing hundreds of times more than what they personally pay, but spread over the entire range of paying customers as a fixed cost of doing business their weight is at most cents for the other paying individuals. By removing them the above prices might go down a little, perhaps to $24.50 and $1490 respectively. Their tail in the bell curve represent such a minor part of the actuarial tables that arguing over this feels cheap to anyone but the executives and accountants that believe they should perfectly optimize those individuals away. Furthermore, I doubt any price reduction would actually happen. A few CEOs would get some bigger bonus, a few investors would get slightly larger dividends, lots of people would be left to happily die away, and that'd be it.
What does an insurance company have to do with it?
Something along these lines:
1) pay $x to insurance company
2) feel ill
3) go to doctor
4) have insurance company pay $x*20 to doctor
5) get better
It's an actuarial calculation. The sum of everyone paying to the insurance company must be more than the sum of what doctors are charging from the insurance company. So, the insurance company searches for ways to widen the difference as much as possible all the while staying competitive with the other insurance companies.
The problem with the US system is that you don't have laws stating that that insurance companies cannot deny pre-existing conditions, must provide treatment for basically everything, and cannot charge differently due to you being a high-demanding customer, only being allowed to increase prices due to age and even so within pre-defined limits. If such laws existed insurance premiums would be calculated in a way as to make it all work by simply charging the huge number of younger and healthier customers slightly more. It's how it works here in Brazil. You get private insurance, you get treatment for almost everything. Insurance companies here compete only in terms of time from diagnostic to procedure (the faster it is the more you pay, with the government determining a maximum limit), the list of hospitals you get access to (the fancier and most renowned ones cost more) and niceties (private vs. multiple patient room, free choice of doctor vs. pre-approved ones, automatic access to expensive exams vs. pre-screened and subject to authorization, private ambulance/air-transport/etc. included or not, coverage area, discounts on medications etc.), but not in what they cover or for whom. Oh, and insurance companies must compete with the government provided free health coverage, which is admittedly bad to the extreme but in being free imposes a maximum limit on private insurance's premiums before people think paying isn't worth it anymore.
When these impositions were made lots of insurance companies couldn't adapt and went bankrupt. Then the surviving ones wen't into merges and reorganizations. Nowadays the ones that remain in business are doing fine even with the government continually expanding the list of procedures they must cover and materials they must provide.
It works.
I use GoG a lot too, but find myself wishing that I could download and install those games via steam as well.
This. I have about 100 games from GOG and love their DRM-less nature but were they to partner with Steam and offer some kind of "manage in Steam" upgrade for 5% to 10% of a game's price I'd surely go for it. (Not all of them at once though.)