Half joking aside, would you agree that the only atheist sub-group(s) that come close to understanding this would be the Buddhists because it frees a person of all the dogma & symbology?
It depends on the Buddhist branch. Buddhism, being faithful to the middle path, isn't actually atheist, but indifferent to the debate. Certain schools go about not talking about gods at all, such as Zen or Jodo Shinshu; others acknowledge gods but don't care about them, such as Theravada; and others still fully embrace them, such as the Vajrayana schools. Also, all of them have dogmas and tons of symbolism, the freeing of which comes at the end of the process, not its middle. So, not quite.
But there are self-professed Atheist schools that almost get there. The Bayesian one is the most advanced in that regards, at least as far as I can judge these things. See for instance this essay of theirs for an example: Timeless Physics. It's the closest I've ever seen a non-mystic getting to grasp the notion of the Absolute. IMHO, if there's actual potential in Atheism, it's going to be developed by them, just give it a few centuries or, best case scenario, decades.
I'm very curious how you were able to come to see/be the full potential of Atheism -- knowing both its strengths and weaknesses? It is very rare to find a person who has that deep grasp of the fundamentals.
Well, I've had this habit of going after both sides on any argument then attempting to identify the common ground upon which they're battling and build from there for as long as I remember myself studying anything. and as such my intellectual references ended up spread all over the board. Over time it adds up.:-)
By the way: Currently I'm a polytheist, following both Shinto and the Shingon Buddhist school (esoteric Vajrayana), with a background in Continental Philosophy and the Traditionalist School of Rene Guenon. I've also written more on the theism vs. atheism debate replying to questions on Quora, so maybe you're interested. Too bad I still haven't had time to collect these bits and pieces into more permanent texts. Anyway, let's keep in touch!
Think Facebook is going to try to track down Mommy or Daddy to confirm that it really was them that gave approval?
Just wonder about the possibilities! All signup forms would have an additional field for one to submit a scan of an official ID card. Failure to provide it would set your account to kid status and cut you out of basically everything. Providing it would destroy any resemblance of anonymity, everywhere, for everyone.
Then, at a later stage, website operator could become frustrated enough to require the establishment of a central identification service. Managed by the government, of course. Something OpenID-based or -inspired. Universal single sign on, and absolutely everything you do linked to your real identity!
Oh, the unending joys of "think of the children!"...
You cannot compare the IQ scores of two different tests.
Which is why people who actually use it for something prefer talking in terms of percentiles, which, AFAIK, correlates well with different IQ testing methodologies in that someone who achieves, say, 90.2% percentile in one test is probably going to be near that in another, even if not at the exact same 90.2%. In any case, you'll know your ability of grasping abstract patterns is better than about 90% of the global population, and that there are roughly 700 million people around who have that same ability at a similar or higher level than you.
You are claiming that no one can have a limited run of something. If a book is out of print, then anyone can copy it? That is absurd.
No, that's simple sound justice. Copyright is a monopoly 7+ billion people are granting a single individual for the SOLE purpose of advancing the culture. Said individual has at a minimum the obligation of repaying said monopoly by making his monopolized content available, otherwise he's just not helping advance the culture at all.
That doesn't mean he shouldn't be allowed to provide different material expressions of his content. He could do a "limited numbered signed official premium deluxe gold plus plus 2.0 run" for 20 times the standard price, all the while still releasing the bare contents for the masses at standard market prices. But do the later no matter what, or you lose your monopoly by not following with the complementary cultural duty to the cultural right you were granted. That's how things should work.
Thank you. Also, I apologize for the many grammatical errors. I should have revised the text before posting.
About Atheism, I wholeheartedly agree, at least when it comes to its more intellectual, less militant branches. An atheist who's in love with nature and/or with the laws that govern nature is pretty much devoting himself to something that's higher and beyond, while simultaneously within and closest than anything else might be, even his own mind. This means that, taken at its full potential, Atheism is a fully meditative path. Too bad most atheists don't ever become conscious of this.
However, a lack of distribution does not invalidate their copyright.
It should. A right (to restrict distribution) without a corresponding duty (to do said distribution yourself) is unbalanced. And worldwide distribution at that. 'N' years without publishing and presto, right lost, similar to what happens with trademarks. (See also my answer to the OP for more on this notion.)
Sometimes the author is neither giving the work away nor selling it.
Which is why I use to suggest anti-copyright activists should start hammering into their (and their opponents) discourse the much needed counter-concept of "copyduty".
Copyright discussions are always about currently on-sale IP, but the tons upon tons of nowhere-to-be-legally-found copyrighted content out there that's dying is quite worrisome. From the three branches of IP, trademark is the only one that comes with a duty: if you don't actively use and protect your trademark, you lose it. Copyrights and patents should be the same. In fact, as much as I'm against copyrights as a matter of principle, I wouldn't mind an eternal one provided lack of worldwide (because: Internet!) publishing/manufacturing for 'n' years after creation/invention caused it to automatically expire. Sure, some extremely successful stuff would go on under tight corporate control for centuries, but the huge amount of stuff that would end up freed would more than make up for that.
Let's start talking about copyduty whenever possible. It's a must.
"The easiest form of parochialism to fall into is to assume that we are smarter than the past generations, that our thinking is necessarily more sophisticated. This may be true in science and technology, but not necessarily so in wisdom."
The technical term for that sentiment is "chronocentrism", but it also applies the other way around. Many conservatives, for example, have a tendency of considering the past wiser than the present just because it's the past, when proper conservatism means conserving what works and drop what doesn't so that a permanent application of critical thinking is always needed.
But I'd like to provide two more examples to yours, these from oriental religions. I didn't find the exact quotation, but Buddhism has the notion that its teachings are like the raft that helps one to cross a river: once you've crossed it, why would you take the raft on you back and go carrying it? In fact, the concept gave rise to the notion that you can have many rafts, hence the different Buddhist schools with somewhat conflicting teachings (and mythologies), each adapted to a different personality type and/or culture, and no special preoccupation about which one might be the most "literally correct'. Similarly, Shinto has the concept of "following the spirit of Great Nature", i.e., if you're actually engaged in this you don't need a hand-me-down moral code, a theology, a bare-bones doctrine or even a consistent mythology, as those are all relative to times and places and needed more by those who don't follow the path, while those who do follow the path get, by virtue of the practice, a certain instinctive understanding, conditioned by one's standing in life, of what to do (or not) at every moment.
Alas, as it happens in Western religions, lots of people either (or both) don't grasp any of this and go on very literally minded...
This is the techie BS about giving everyone 10-hour work weeks that has come up empty for over a century now.
No, it hasn't. If you're okay in getting a good living standard by the standards of 100 years ago, you can get it by working about that much. Now, if you want a good living standard by the current standards, you'll have to work quite a bit more than that to achieve it.
If Mr. X owns a house-building robot, why would he have it build Ms. Y a house for free?
You're looking at it in the short term. What I envision is a long term scenario in which house-building robots are a dime a dozen, as is everything else because no hard labor is done by human anymore, not even the hard labor of repairing defective robots, given they repair themselves and keep building more and more of themselves with asteroid-mined metal and such. The more offer there is (and one that grows exponentially at that), in a scenario where demand doesn't increase, the cheaper the price, until it reaches the point where it becomes, for all practical purposes, basically zero.
What we really need is some kind of low cost "FreeBox" appliance running some kind of fully cryptographed, non-open-Internet-connected, private, distributed, point-to-point, wireless network, perhaps running the Freenet project or something similar, that people could attach to their routers and instantly get access to it alongside their commercial Internet connection. That, and people willing to install it all around, so that whenever you go you get anonymous access to the parallel network. And a law or judicial decision protecting such nodes as free speech. I don't see any other way for an open network to remain available on the long run...
there are a few kingly benefits you left off.... power, servants, social respect by the general public. A begger has none of these things and is largely powerless and cast off. Those things do mean something, you know.
True, but in a socialist setting, which is what the OP proposes, you'd have neither power nor servants either, so that wouldn't change. The remaining detail would be social respect, but that one can be lost if the person violates the explicit or implicit rules of any social setting. So, maybe we wouldn't have beggars proper, but we'd have social cast offs of some kind or another all the same.
Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems like you assume no one saves for their own retirement during their working career?
At any moment the total mount of money in the world, no matter what the number is, equals the total amount of goods and services available (this isn't exactly so due to marginal utility, but it's a good enough approximation for our purposes). In other words, possessing a certain amount of "money" means only that you have access to a certain percentage of the total currently existing amount of goods and services, not to an absolute amount of goods and services, that is, that the "1" in a "$1" bill means that it gives you access to "1 / worldwide_total_money" of "worldwide_existing_goods_and_services". Consequently, if the total amount of goods and services available becomes smaller due to there having less and less people around producing goods and services, then your $1 becomes able to purchase proportionally less. Similarly, it the total amount of money increases, but the total amount of goods and services doesn't, then that $1 also becomes able to purchase proportionally less.
So, for your saved money for retirement to retain its purchasing power, two things must absolutely be avoided: the government creating money at a higher speed than that of the worldwide output of goods and services and/or said output decreasing on its own. And the later is precisely what happens when we have less than 4 to 9 people working for each retiree: you drop this proportion, you drop the amount of goods and services; you drop the amount of goods and services, you drop the amount of goods and services that any given amount of money, saved or not, can purchase.
Look around you how the massive improvements in productivity (industrial, agricultural, etc) is distributed... Does it look like it's split evenly among everyone?
No, but why should it be? The fact a modern day beggar lives better than a Middle Ages king, with more food, more health, more clothes, more shoes, more transportation and basically more of everything compared to the latter, except for a title and a castle, is more than good enough. Equality is a false goal. The true goal is the improvement of humanity's base level. As long as it's pushing up, I'm contented.
Yes, with the added implication that those robots are nationalized/ controlled by the state/ heavily taxed such that their production benefits the people.
Not necessarily. A fully robotized / low birth rate world would be, for all practical purposes, basically non-scarce, specially if fusion power happens. At the extreme you'd be able to have everyone not interested in doing anything useful sitting in their robot-built homes getting perma-high with their robot-farmed drug of choice. And on top of that a minority of non-drug addicted folk going around doing their mostly creative stuff, commercially or not. A government going out of its way to carefully control this second group would just be messing for messing's sake, with no actual good reason behind it. As for the first, yes, I think it might be needed, but even so most of everything would be automated, including robots repairing other robots, so any required interference would be minimal anyway.
Where I live, the sender pays for text messages. Problem solved. I don't get any spam.
Here in Brazil the sender pays, but I still receive spam. It so happens that the phone company can partner with a spammer so that he pays much, much less for sending spam SMS than normal people do. At least they make the official spammers offer an opt-out, but any time a new company signs up with them, I start receiving brand new spam. ~sigh~
Unfortunately that just isn't practically feasible. You need between 4 and 9 people working and paying between 10% and 20% of their production in taxes or something similar so as to enough goods and services for the retired. Why is that? Well, if the amount one pays up is 10% of his produced goods/services, that means she gets to keep about 90% of his produced goods/services on which to live (exchanging them with other people by way of money, but money is only an abstract number people use to exchange actually livable-on goods and services, which is why I'm saying "goods/services" all the time). So, assuming that person will need to keep receiving the same amount of goods/services after retirement, she'll need someone to come and provide her those same "90% of a produced goods/services", meaning 9 working people each giving up 10% of their own produced goods/services.
Before social security the way you had to do it was straightforward: get 10 kids and they'll provide you the needed goods/services once you cannot work anymore. Nowadays, with social security, this simple, direct relationship, is hidden from the common folk, who just don't notice it. But the need for 4 to 9 people working for each retiree remains, which on a low 1-children-per-couple society means there's a permanent need of 3 to 8 "other someones" for each retiree, which gets filled by immigrants and/or native (and usually poor) huge-families. That's a hack solution though. Once the other people-supplying countries rise on their living standards and their people start having less children, it stops working. And then basically bad solutions remain, with a single good one:
a) "paying" less and less (i.e., providing less actual goods/services) to retirees, thus reducing their actual standard of living;
b) rising real taxes (not the nominal ones that affect only abstract "money" numbers, but actual taxes on actually produced goods/services) more and more to keep paying them what they need, thus reducing their actual standard of living;
c) move tons of people from their current, not-actually-directly-useful goods/services production, back into doing stuff that people really need, thus reducing their actual standard of living;
d) engage on old style "loot and plunder" wars so as to acquire more actual goods (not services in this case) than you can produce, so as to give your people a higher standard of living than they would be able to develop;
e) go back to having lots of babies per couple, thus depleting natural resource even faster;
f) rise the age of retirement so as to keep the proportion stable, what only works if most people take care to actually die at some reasonable age that doesn't stress the balance, otherwise this will become a hack solution too;
And so on and so forth.
There's a possible good solution, which is to invest HEAVILY in robotics, and by proxy EVEN MORE heavily in sustainable energy sources to power them, so that we can at some point replace the currently required exponent growth of goods/services-producing people with tons upon tons of goods/services-producing robots.
That's the only one that will actually allow for a globally-sustainable low birth rate. Everything else will get us into a bad ending.
B: Some employers equate staying home sick with "not being a team player" (or some variant thereof) and will actively discourage any time off unless forced
What begs the question: does "spreading your sickness to the whole office through uncontrollable coughing", immediately followed by "50% drop in performance for a week due to all the staff being sick", count as proper team play?
Constitutional parliamentary monarchy with a actually powerful monarch, not the figurehead-only type. You get the benefits of the fast changes brought by democratic change with the added consistency of someone pushing for very long term goals, as the monarch, contrary to a mere dictator, has to actually think on what, precisely, his great-great-great-grandchild is going to inherit.
Yes this, now mind you it is even worse with my grandmother as she is hard core christian. She thinks everyone is good and can be trustworthy
Hmm... the Bible is full of quotes to the effect that one should be very careful at trusting another person. Two I know about are "I send you forth as sheep among wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves." (Matthew 10:16) and "Cursed is the man who trusts in man" (Jeremiah 17:5). There are probably more. Maybe you could tell her to keep those in mind? Perhaps even print them in a huge type and fix them as portraits near her phone and computer? I know my own grandma surely benefits from these, as I keep remembering her that's how she's supposed to react and so far she managed to avoid being scammed.
Re:Did Zuckerberg ever have to get past HR?
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Just Say No To College
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· Score: 1, Interesting
Unlike a high school diploma, the path to a bachelor's degree isn't exactly cheap.
It depends on how you go about it. There's an articulist at LewRockwell.com, Gary North, an anti-establishment Christian libertarian, who routinely writes about alternative paths one can use to obtain a bachelor's degree for VERY little, roughly $11k to $15k (total). It seems he sells an ebook about this for about $100, but if you Google him you'll find articles providing the gist of the method, which basically boils down to mixing "(1) night school, (2) dual-track (high school/college), (3) daytime community college, (4) quizzing out (CLEP, DSST), (5) distance learning, (6) portfolio courses (life experience), and (7) in-state resident tuition" (from http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north988.html).
Good thing here in Brazil we have some very good free universities with a single requirement of passing on a high enough position in an (admittedly hard due mainly to competition) entrance exam, but nothing more. I can't imagine myself spending $200k+ on a bachelor's degree. If I lived in the US I'd most certainly try every single approach in the above list, no second thoughts about it. $200k+ is, simply put, completely and utterly insane.
But these desktop OSes (Windows 8, unity etc) will mostly be running on regular computers without touch screens
The impression I have is that people are slightly missing the point on the proper way to interact with this new generation of OSes. It isn't that they're touch-screen-focused, but actually only touch-focused, meaning you need some form of touch to use them as they're meant to be properly used, but not that you're limited to screens for that purpose. Replacing your standard mouse for either a touch pad or a touch mouse will provide the required input interface. For instance, last time I passed in front of an Apple store I noticed the displayed desktops all had touch pads, not mouses, so this seems to be the new default "over there".
My guess then is that it's probably only a matter of time before other PC vendors catch up, specially now with Windows 8 making it into almost a requirement. In the near future then, only the cheapest of the cheap desktops will still come with non-touch mouses. Everything else will provide a touch input of one kind of another.
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Half joking aside, would you agree that the only atheist sub-group(s) that come close to understanding this would be the Buddhists because it frees a person of all the dogma & symbology?
It depends on the Buddhist branch. Buddhism, being faithful to the middle path, isn't actually atheist, but indifferent to the debate. Certain schools go about not talking about gods at all, such as Zen or Jodo Shinshu; others acknowledge gods but don't care about them, such as Theravada; and others still fully embrace them, such as the Vajrayana schools. Also, all of them have dogmas and tons of symbolism, the freeing of which comes at the end of the process, not its middle. So, not quite.
But there are self-professed Atheist schools that almost get there. The Bayesian one is the most advanced in that regards, at least as far as I can judge these things. See for instance this essay of theirs for an example: Timeless Physics. It's the closest I've ever seen a non-mystic getting to grasp the notion of the Absolute. IMHO, if there's actual potential in Atheism, it's going to be developed by them, just give it a few centuries or, best case scenario, decades.
I'm very curious how you were able to come to see/be the full potential of Atheism -- knowing both its strengths and weaknesses? It is very rare to find a person who has that deep grasp of the fundamentals.
Well, I've had this habit of going after both sides on any argument then attempting to identify the common ground upon which they're battling and build from there for as long as I remember myself studying anything. and as such my intellectual references ended up spread all over the board. Over time it adds up. :-)
By the way: Currently I'm a polytheist, following both Shinto and the Shingon Buddhist school (esoteric Vajrayana), with a background in Continental Philosophy and the Traditionalist School of Rene Guenon. I've also written more on the theism vs. atheism debate replying to questions on Quora, so maybe you're interested. Too bad I still haven't had time to collect these bits and pieces into more permanent texts. Anyway, let's keep in touch!
Think Facebook is going to try to track down Mommy or Daddy to confirm that it really was them that gave approval?
Just wonder about the possibilities! All signup forms would have an additional field for one to submit a scan of an official ID card. Failure to provide it would set your account to kid status and cut you out of basically everything. Providing it would destroy any resemblance of anonymity, everywhere, for everyone.
Then, at a later stage, website operator could become frustrated enough to require the establishment of a central identification service. Managed by the government, of course. Something OpenID-based or -inspired. Universal single sign on, and absolutely everything you do linked to your real identity!
Oh, the unending joys of "think of the children!"...
You cannot compare the IQ scores of two different tests.
Which is why people who actually use it for something prefer talking in terms of percentiles, which, AFAIK, correlates well with different IQ testing methodologies in that someone who achieves, say, 90.2% percentile in one test is probably going to be near that in another, even if not at the exact same 90.2%. In any case, you'll know your ability of grasping abstract patterns is better than about 90% of the global population, and that there are roughly 700 million people around who have that same ability at a similar or higher level than you.
You are claiming that no one can have a limited run of something. If a book is out of print, then anyone can copy it? That is absurd.
No, that's simple sound justice. Copyright is a monopoly 7+ billion people are granting a single individual for the SOLE purpose of advancing the culture. Said individual has at a minimum the obligation of repaying said monopoly by making his monopolized content available, otherwise he's just not helping advance the culture at all.
That doesn't mean he shouldn't be allowed to provide different material expressions of his content. He could do a "limited numbered signed official premium deluxe gold plus plus 2.0 run" for 20 times the standard price, all the while still releasing the bare contents for the masses at standard market prices. But do the later no matter what, or you lose your monopoly by not following with the complementary cultural duty to the cultural right you were granted. That's how things should work.
Thank you. Also, I apologize for the many grammatical errors. I should have revised the text before posting.
About Atheism, I wholeheartedly agree, at least when it comes to its more intellectual, less militant branches. An atheist who's in love with nature and/or with the laws that govern nature is pretty much devoting himself to something that's higher and beyond, while simultaneously within and closest than anything else might be, even his own mind. This means that, taken at its full potential, Atheism is a fully meditative path. Too bad most atheists don't ever become conscious of this.
However, a lack of distribution does not invalidate their copyright.
It should. A right (to restrict distribution) without a corresponding duty (to do said distribution yourself) is unbalanced. And worldwide distribution at that. 'N' years without publishing and presto, right lost, similar to what happens with trademarks. (See also my answer to the OP for more on this notion.)
Sometimes the author is neither giving the work away nor selling it.
Which is why I use to suggest anti-copyright activists should start hammering into their (and their opponents) discourse the much needed counter-concept of "copyduty".
Copyright discussions are always about currently on-sale IP, but the tons upon tons of nowhere-to-be-legally-found copyrighted content out there that's dying is quite worrisome. From the three branches of IP, trademark is the only one that comes with a duty: if you don't actively use and protect your trademark, you lose it. Copyrights and patents should be the same. In fact, as much as I'm against copyrights as a matter of principle, I wouldn't mind an eternal one provided lack of worldwide (because: Internet!) publishing/manufacturing for 'n' years after creation/invention caused it to automatically expire. Sure, some extremely successful stuff would go on under tight corporate control for centuries, but the huge amount of stuff that would end up freed would more than make up for that.
Let's start talking about copyduty whenever possible. It's a must.
"The easiest form of parochialism to fall into is to assume that we are smarter than the past generations, that our thinking is necessarily more sophisticated. This may be true in science and technology, but not necessarily so in wisdom."
The technical term for that sentiment is "chronocentrism", but it also applies the other way around. Many conservatives, for example, have a tendency of considering the past wiser than the present just because it's the past, when proper conservatism means conserving what works and drop what doesn't so that a permanent application of critical thinking is always needed.
But I'd like to provide two more examples to yours, these from oriental religions. I didn't find the exact quotation, but Buddhism has the notion that its teachings are like the raft that helps one to cross a river: once you've crossed it, why would you take the raft on you back and go carrying it? In fact, the concept gave rise to the notion that you can have many rafts, hence the different Buddhist schools with somewhat conflicting teachings (and mythologies), each adapted to a different personality type and/or culture, and no special preoccupation about which one might be the most "literally correct'. Similarly, Shinto has the concept of "following the spirit of Great Nature", i.e., if you're actually engaged in this you don't need a hand-me-down moral code, a theology, a bare-bones doctrine or even a consistent mythology, as those are all relative to times and places and needed more by those who don't follow the path, while those who do follow the path get, by virtue of the practice, a certain instinctive understanding, conditioned by one's standing in life, of what to do (or not) at every moment.
Alas, as it happens in Western religions, lots of people either (or both) don't grasp any of this and go on very literally minded...
This is the techie BS about giving everyone 10-hour work weeks that has come up empty for over a century now.
No, it hasn't. If you're okay in getting a good living standard by the standards of 100 years ago, you can get it by working about that much. Now, if you want a good living standard by the current standards, you'll have to work quite a bit more than that to achieve it.
If Mr. X owns a house-building robot, why would he have it build Ms. Y a house for free?
You're looking at it in the short term. What I envision is a long term scenario in which house-building robots are a dime a dozen, as is everything else because no hard labor is done by human anymore, not even the hard labor of repairing defective robots, given they repair themselves and keep building more and more of themselves with asteroid-mined metal and such. The more offer there is (and one that grows exponentially at that), in a scenario where demand doesn't increase, the cheaper the price, until it reaches the point where it becomes, for all practical purposes, basically zero.
The same reason there are so few tor exit nodes.
What we really need is some kind of low cost "FreeBox" appliance running some kind of fully cryptographed, non-open-Internet-connected, private, distributed, point-to-point, wireless network, perhaps running the Freenet project or something similar, that people could attach to their routers and instantly get access to it alongside their commercial Internet connection. That, and people willing to install it all around, so that whenever you go you get anonymous access to the parallel network. And a law or judicial decision protecting such nodes as free speech. I don't see any other way for an open network to remain available on the long run...
there are a few kingly benefits you left off.... power, servants, social respect by the general public. A begger has none of these things and is largely powerless and cast off. Those things do mean something, you know.
True, but in a socialist setting, which is what the OP proposes, you'd have neither power nor servants either, so that wouldn't change. The remaining detail would be social respect, but that one can be lost if the person violates the explicit or implicit rules of any social setting. So, maybe we wouldn't have beggars proper, but we'd have social cast offs of some kind or another all the same.
Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems like you assume no one saves for their own retirement during their working career?
At any moment the total mount of money in the world, no matter what the number is, equals the total amount of goods and services available (this isn't exactly so due to marginal utility, but it's a good enough approximation for our purposes). In other words, possessing a certain amount of "money" means only that you have access to a certain percentage of the total currently existing amount of goods and services, not to an absolute amount of goods and services, that is, that the "1" in a "$1" bill means that it gives you access to "1 / worldwide_total_money" of "worldwide_existing_goods_and_services". Consequently, if the total amount of goods and services available becomes smaller due to there having less and less people around producing goods and services, then your $1 becomes able to purchase proportionally less. Similarly, it the total amount of money increases, but the total amount of goods and services doesn't, then that $1 also becomes able to purchase proportionally less.
So, for your saved money for retirement to retain its purchasing power, two things must absolutely be avoided: the government creating money at a higher speed than that of the worldwide output of goods and services and/or said output decreasing on its own. And the later is precisely what happens when we have less than 4 to 9 people working for each retiree: you drop this proportion, you drop the amount of goods and services; you drop the amount of goods and services, you drop the amount of goods and services that any given amount of money, saved or not, can purchase.
Look around you how the massive improvements in productivity (industrial, agricultural, etc) is distributed... Does it look like it's split evenly among everyone?
No, but why should it be? The fact a modern day beggar lives better than a Middle Ages king, with more food, more health, more clothes, more shoes, more transportation and basically more of everything compared to the latter, except for a title and a castle, is more than good enough. Equality is a false goal. The true goal is the improvement of humanity's base level. As long as it's pushing up, I'm contented.
Yes, with the added implication that those robots are nationalized/ controlled by the state/ heavily taxed such that their production benefits the people.
Not necessarily. A fully robotized / low birth rate world would be, for all practical purposes, basically non-scarce, specially if fusion power happens. At the extreme you'd be able to have everyone not interested in doing anything useful sitting in their robot-built homes getting perma-high with their robot-farmed drug of choice. And on top of that a minority of non-drug addicted folk going around doing their mostly creative stuff, commercially or not. A government going out of its way to carefully control this second group would just be messing for messing's sake, with no actual good reason behind it. As for the first, yes, I think it might be needed, but even so most of everything would be automated, including robots repairing other robots, so any required interference would be minimal anyway.
Where I live, the sender pays for text messages. Problem solved. I don't get any spam.
Here in Brazil the sender pays, but I still receive spam. It so happens that the phone company can partner with a spammer so that he pays much, much less for sending spam SMS than normal people do. At least they make the official spammers offer an opt-out, but any time a new company signs up with them, I start receiving brand new spam. ~sigh~
Stop people having so many damn kids.
Unfortunately that just isn't practically feasible. You need between 4 and 9 people working and paying between 10% and 20% of their production in taxes or something similar so as to enough goods and services for the retired. Why is that? Well, if the amount one pays up is 10% of his produced goods/services, that means she gets to keep about 90% of his produced goods/services on which to live (exchanging them with other people by way of money, but money is only an abstract number people use to exchange actually livable-on goods and services, which is why I'm saying "goods/services" all the time). So, assuming that person will need to keep receiving the same amount of goods/services after retirement, she'll need someone to come and provide her those same "90% of a produced goods/services", meaning 9 working people each giving up 10% of their own produced goods/services.
Before social security the way you had to do it was straightforward: get 10 kids and they'll provide you the needed goods/services once you cannot work anymore. Nowadays, with social security, this simple, direct relationship, is hidden from the common folk, who just don't notice it. But the need for 4 to 9 people working for each retiree remains, which on a low 1-children-per-couple society means there's a permanent need of 3 to 8 "other someones" for each retiree, which gets filled by immigrants and/or native (and usually poor) huge-families. That's a hack solution though. Once the other people-supplying countries rise on their living standards and their people start having less children, it stops working. And then basically bad solutions remain, with a single good one:
a) "paying" less and less (i.e., providing less actual goods/services) to retirees, thus reducing their actual standard of living;
b) rising real taxes (not the nominal ones that affect only abstract "money" numbers, but actual taxes on actually produced goods/services) more and more to keep paying them what they need, thus reducing their actual standard of living;
c) move tons of people from their current, not-actually-directly-useful goods/services production, back into doing stuff that people really need, thus reducing their actual standard of living;
d) engage on old style "loot and plunder" wars so as to acquire more actual goods (not services in this case) than you can produce, so as to give your people a higher standard of living than they would be able to develop;
e) go back to having lots of babies per couple, thus depleting natural resource even faster;
f) rise the age of retirement so as to keep the proportion stable, what only works if most people take care to actually die at some reasonable age that doesn't stress the balance, otherwise this will become a hack solution too;
And so on and so forth.
There's a possible good solution, which is to invest HEAVILY in robotics, and by proxy EVEN MORE heavily in sustainable energy sources to power them, so that we can at some point replace the currently required exponent growth of goods/services-producing people with tons upon tons of goods/services-producing robots.
That's the only one that will actually allow for a globally-sustainable low birth rate. Everything else will get us into a bad ending.
And they get double rewards for convincing the captured programmer to start developing in PHP!
They're lucky they're not in the middle of a lawsuit
In other words: when lawyers took over.
The guy should be fired for needless risk to not only the people, but the building in general.
When did being utterly devoid of courage and constantly afraid of every single thing under the sun became a virtue?
"USA, land of the restrained, home of the fearful"?
B: Some employers equate staying home sick with "not being a team player" (or some variant thereof) and will actively discourage any time off unless forced
What begs the question: does "spreading your sickness to the whole office through uncontrollable coughing", immediately followed by "50% drop in performance for a week due to all the staff being sick", count as proper team play?
Gotta be a better way.
Constitutional parliamentary monarchy with a actually powerful monarch, not the figurehead-only type. You get the benefits of the fast changes brought by democratic change with the added consistency of someone pushing for very long term goals, as the monarch, contrary to a mere dictator, has to actually think on what, precisely, his great-great-great-grandchild is going to inherit.
Yes this, now mind you it is even worse with my grandmother as she is hard core christian. She thinks everyone is good and can be trustworthy
Hmm... the Bible is full of quotes to the effect that one should be very careful at trusting another person. Two I know about are "I send you forth as sheep among wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves." (Matthew 10:16) and "Cursed is the man who trusts in man" (Jeremiah 17:5). There are probably more. Maybe you could tell her to keep those in mind? Perhaps even print them in a huge type and fix them as portraits near her phone and computer? I know my own grandma surely benefits from these, as I keep remembering her that's how she's supposed to react and so far she managed to avoid being scammed.
Unlike a high school diploma, the path to a bachelor's degree isn't exactly cheap.
It depends on how you go about it. There's an articulist at LewRockwell.com, Gary North, an anti-establishment Christian libertarian, who routinely writes about alternative paths one can use to obtain a bachelor's degree for VERY little, roughly $11k to $15k (total). It seems he sells an ebook about this for about $100, but if you Google him you'll find articles providing the gist of the method, which basically boils down to mixing "(1) night school, (2) dual-track (high school/college), (3) daytime community college, (4) quizzing out (CLEP, DSST), (5) distance learning, (6) portfolio courses (life experience), and (7) in-state resident tuition" (from http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north988.html).
Good thing here in Brazil we have some very good free universities with a single requirement of passing on a high enough position in an (admittedly hard due mainly to competition) entrance exam, but nothing more. I can't imagine myself spending $200k+ on a bachelor's degree. If I lived in the US I'd most certainly try every single approach in the above list, no second thoughts about it. $200k+ is, simply put, completely and utterly insane.
but Russia Today? seriously? there's no sincerity here
If you want to have your mind blown, here's a Pravda (Pravda!) article warning Americans about Obama's socialist tendencies. Go figure...
But these desktop OSes (Windows 8, unity etc) will mostly be running on regular computers without touch screens
The impression I have is that people are slightly missing the point on the proper way to interact with this new generation of OSes. It isn't that they're touch-screen-focused, but actually only touch-focused, meaning you need some form of touch to use them as they're meant to be properly used, but not that you're limited to screens for that purpose. Replacing your standard mouse for either a touch pad or a touch mouse will provide the required input interface. For instance, last time I passed in front of an Apple store I noticed the displayed desktops all had touch pads, not mouses, so this seems to be the new default "over there".
My guess then is that it's probably only a matter of time before other PC vendors catch up, specially now with Windows 8 making it into almost a requirement. In the near future then, only the cheapest of the cheap desktops will still come with non-touch mouses. Everything else will provide a touch input of one kind of another.