Other than DRM and the like, I believe Blue-Ray is better than HD-DVD simply because it has more storeage space. A BR-RW disc will be a much more interesting aquisition than a HD-RW disc once both become available.
But that brings some questions on what the future will hold. Maybe this?
a) Blue Ray & HD-DVD Writer Drive
b) Blue Ray Writer & HD-DVD Reader Combo Drive
c) HD-DVD Writer & Blue Ray Reader Combo Drive
d) Blue Ray & HD-DVD Reader, DVD Writer Combo Drive
e) Blue Ray Reader & DVD Writer Combo Drive
f) HD-DVD Reader & DVD Writer Combo Drive
g) Blue Ray, HD-DVD & DVD Reader, CD Writer Combo Driver
Not really. Or, at least, not outside USA/EU/Japan. I myself don't have a standalone DVD player, I watch them in my low budget computer, if at all. My PAL-M TV set (I'm in Brazil), for instance, still has a 4-head VCR player connected to it and that's pretty enough for all the (lack of) interest I have in movies, given that even the Blockbuster stores still get VHS tapes with the newest releases. Granted, the DVD section is by now the biggest and greatest, but it's clear that VHS tapes still make a lot of success around here, and will keep making for some time.
All you said is what I mean by "rich". The modern version of this delusion is precisely exchange rate manipulation, the belief that by exporting more through artificially deflated currency you're achieving something.
The truth is that by doing so you're just forcing your population to subsidize (through work) the purchases made by foreigners. Why? Because if a gadget would sell for 'x' (in the foreign currency) under a market generated exchange ratio, now it'll sell for, let's say, 'x/2'. So, you'll have to produce 2 of those gadgets to obtain the same 'x' value, hence, to work double to gain the same real compensation.
And this is even more so, since by doing so and thus increasing exportation, you also diminish the amount of goods available in the internal market, thus producing inflation in the local currency (less goods, same amount of bills, more bills needed to purchase a given good).
One of the most insane nonsenses devised by macroeconomic economists is the notion of "trade balance" that fuels the above.
Now, China is a completely different matter. It uses the economy as a weapon, so much as to employing slave labor to make many export goods even more cheap. If they get to the point that using the "money weapon" becomes a reasonable option, they won't mind their people starving by using it. Search the 'net and you'll find tons of information on this, and more.
Actually, you Americans have such a low inflation rate despite the amount of paper money printed by your central bank because most of this paper ends up in the dollar reserves of foreign central banks. This happens because all those foreign central banks believe that having tons of dollar bills stored equals their countries being "rich" (much in the same way as the XVII century merchantilists believed that having tons of gold stored away meant their countries were "rich"). Since all these bills aren't running around in the real American economy, they don't make prices go up.
If (or when) those central banks decide spending those dollars by sending them back to the USA, the violent increase in the amount of bills in the economy will make the inflationary American bubble crash hard. Good prices will double, triple, or even more.
And why? Simple: because if you had 'x' tons of goods and 'y' tons of bills, thus 'y' being able to buy 'x', now you'll have the same 'x' tons of goods, but '3y' tons of bills, meaning '3y' = 'x'.
Now, guess which country is planning to do exactly that? If you guessed "China", you guessed right. They see themselves as enemies of the USA, and they see all the dollar bills they accumulated as just another weapon among many.
There's a single feature in MS Word that makes me like it more than OOo Write: tables.
Table support in Write is 30 years behind Word. I can't mouse select a line and change arbitrarily its cells' sizes. I can't madly mix and merge cells. I can't draw a table by mouse the exact way (layout) I wish it to have. I can't enter a cell properties and change them the way I need. And so on. Of course, I can't import complex table layouts (and I have tons of them, which allow me to print information to pre-printed papers) from Word into Write without everything getting corrupted.
Each time a new OOo versions is launched I download it, install it, go straight to the tables menu, create one and try messing around with it as I do in Word. Each time I see I can't do it, so I uninstall OOo and keep using Word. The day I download it and see its table support reached MS Office level is the day I'm switching office apps for good. Until then, there's no way I'd do that.
If the odds were 1 in 1,000,000 (EXACTLY one in a million) I would have been concerned, for as Pratchett's Law (named after the great living sage Terry Pratchett) wisely states, anything whose possibility is one in one million (EXACTLY one in one million) always happens.
That not being the case then we're left with the far more optimistic Murphy's Law, a sure relief.
That might be seen as a problem. But in industrialized countries, the thing is, children are seen as a liability, not an asset. Children cost a LOT of money to raise in an industrialized country.
True, but that's so because people also require a lot of themselves and hold too high expectations. Even if we adjust for differing living costs, I know people who rise very well 5 or 6 children while earning half or less of what (comparatively) a middle American makes. I also know people who earn twice as much as upper-middle class Americans (and that's A LOT of money here) who do a very poor job of rising even a single child. It all depends on where each person puts his priorities.
If people didn't have to worry about making tons of money just to have a place to live and support themselves, and had more free time to spend with their kids, they'd probably have more of them.
Historically this doesn't seem accurate. The more technology, gadgets, money, big houses, health etc. one has, the more she wants to enjoy life for enjoyment's sake. The last 100 years history makes that plain clear.
In third-world countries, people just pop out kids without thinking about it, and live in poverty and misery with all their kids. Doesn't sound like a good alternative to me.
So the question actually is: where's the point of equilibrium?
I think this is incorrect. The Dark Ages preceded the Middle Ages, and came immediately after Rome withdrew from most of Europe. But Medieval times weren't all that great either.
You seem to have a screwed-up notion of retirement. Ideally, retired people wouldn't be supported by working people; they'd support themselves, usually by their own investments (money saved) from when they were working. If their living costs were small, they could also get by on sporadic or part-time jobs.
Yes, true. Problem is, most countries see such a investment-for-retirement scheme as being excessively "capitalistic" and "socially unjust". I favour it, and think everyone should adopt it, but that's not what usually happens. Most coutries make each and every working person contribute compulsively a given percent of his monthly income to the government so that the whole amount can be distributed among the retired ones.
Here in Brazil the amount is 11% of income, so that 9 working persons contribute enough to pay one person's retirement. It would work, provided there were only one retired person per 9 working one, and provided all working persons were registered (what doesn't happen, only 50% are). Both condition not happening, the individual retirement wage lowers each year.
I don't know what's the American system. If it's the investment based one, so far so good. You'll surely have less problems in the long run.
Also, if technology significantly reduced the effects of aging and extended normal lifespans, people simply wouldn't need to retire as early. Where is it mandated that you retire at 65? If you can expect to live to 200, and be healthy and active until 180, for instance, then why would you need to save enough money for 65-200 instead of just working until you're 150 or so?
I wholeheartedly agree! The problem here is that no one likes losing "rights". Suppose a presidential candidate includes in his political program the increase of retirement age. Do you think he would get elected? Or, do you think the representatives who voted in favour of such a law would get reelected?
The article I linked you shows an example taken from an European country, where such a proposal appeared. It was abandoned almost as fast as it was proposed. People protested so much that no politician dared going forward with it. To get elected is always more important than to do the right thing.
The thing is simple: if people get to live 150 years, they'll want to retire at 65 and enjoy retirement for the remaining 85 years of their lives. This doesn
First off, your irrelevant conservative social ideas are just stupid.
This is a so liberal way of arguing.:) Anyway, maybe you're interested in knowing that I'm not American. I'm a very 3rd-worldly Brazilian living in Brazil, nice to meet you.
Regarding conservatism, it suffices to say that there's as much divergence among those who declare themselves as such as there is among those who declare themselves liberals. So, there're conservatives who approve of immigration and there're those who don't, and I'm among the later (I'm also among the anti-copyright conservatives).
Anyway, you're right in that more educated people vote democrat. Now, the problem for democrats is that they use to have only slightly more than one children per woman, what means that their number use to halve each generation, while conservatives use to have two or more children, what means their number either stays stable or increases. Go figure what that'll mean in two or three generations. This article has more information on this.
Now, back to the topic at hand: what constitutes an "improved" society? This topic, in this discussion, really has nothing to do with social values, unless you're a Luddite.
It depends. You mention free time and talk about the "Dark Ages" (an expression, by the way, that no scholar of history still uses, since it's only Renaissance anti-medieval propaganda). The point is that, no matter how many machines you have working in place of actual people, the ones who pay taxes will still be the people, not those machines. So, if you wanna all retired people to have the same standard of living that the working ones'll have, the working ones will still need to make the whole amount of money necessary to pay their own needs as well as those of the retired. So, if the working/retired rate is 1:1, each working person will need to make money enough for himself and for another retired person. If it's 1:2, each working person will need to make enough money for himself and for two retired persons. If it's 1:3, enough for himself and for three retired persons. And so on.
So, no matter how much the technology advances, if there's always less and less people entering the work force, these people will need to work more and more to pay all their bills and the bills of the retired, no matter what these bills are about (nursing robots, voyages to health centers in Mars, genetic rejuvenation therapy, whatever).
Labor saving devices will only actually save labor if there're lots of working people to have their labor saved, so that the proportion is something like 10:1, not 1:10. Other than that, it'll be more and more work, always.
So you think mob rule is the way to achieve a better society to live in?
See my answer to diggitzz. This is subjective. It all depends on what one "feels" is "a better society". Just as an example, think on the expectations of liberals and conservatives. A "better society" for a conservative would be the a living nightmare for a liberal, as well as a "better society" for a liberal would be seen as a fully degenerated society for a conservative (as a conservative I surely feel so).
But I agree with the problem you point in democracy. I surely prefer an aristocratic solution, where something that was decided is carried along years in future, without things changing at every few years. And when a voting was necessary, only people with a clear understanding of politics should be allowed to vote, not everyone.
Anyway, you should ask yourself why an "improving society" is better than a "non-improving" one, for many people would surely say that "improving" is precisely the problem. For instance, "improved" societies have fewer children thanks to the means developed to prevent or abort pregnancy, what in turn means less and less people paying taxes, thus a need to either increasing taxes every year, with in the end even a 100% tax not being enough to pay everything, and/or allowing massive immigration from countries where the pregnancy rates are higher, with in the end the immigrants becoming the majority of population, thus of electors, thus able to change the laws as they see fit (read "sharia" there).
Were not for those "improvements" and the above outcome wouldn't be even a possibility, much less an almost certainty, what means that a long term-thinking government who wanted to keep its society as its society should actually "unimprove" things by prohibiting contraceptive means and abortion and even by granting subsidies to couples according to the number of children they had.
So, where does this takes us? I have actually no idea.:)
You're right, but for the wrong reasons. This isn't an issue of scientists wanting more money than they're worth, it's an issue of the people (and corporations, etc) being largely unable to realize the long-term benefits of fundamental scientific research.
Yes and no. "Money" is an objective expression of subjective "feelings", more specifically of felt needs, so the "value" of money is also ultimately subjective.
For example, when you purchase today's newspaper, you do so because you "feel" that those pieces of written paper have a higuer "value" for you than the two green printed pieces of papers in your pocket. It's the same with the newspaper seller: he "feels" that your green pieces of paper have a higuer "value" (for him) than the newspaper in his hand.
What you "feel" the newspaper is "worth", another person might think as being "too much", so that she would prefer to keep her pieces of green paper to herself instead of exchanging them for a newspaper. The same goes for the newspaper seller: if you offer him less green paper than he "feels" the newspaper is "worth", he'll prefer to keep the newspaper, while another newspaper seller might "feel" that amount of green paper you offered is "worth" more than the newspaper and agree to exchange it.
What this means is that you "feel" that science is more important, while others don't. And you "feel" this way because you "feel" engineering derived from scientific research is a nice thing, "feel" that having more physical knowledge is good in itself, "feel" that the long term is way more important ("valuable") than the short one, and so on. Others disagree, and no matter how much arguments you make to support your feelings, they can do as best as you no supporting theirs.
For instance, how would you answer to one who argued that *all* research funding currently destined to space research should be put into improving crops? He clearly "feels" food is more important than NASA. And what would you answer to one that said that both are wrong, that all this money should be spent in actually making crops so feed the starving people in the world? This one "feels" that scientific research is secondary to the most basic human needs, after all (he would argue), people will die before those researches get results, and it's most important to first save them, and only after that to pursued research.
As for myself, I "feel" that philosophical research is more important than scientific research, for philosophy is the basis upon which science is constructed, thus better philosophy meaning ultimately better science, not to mention the fact that a good philosophy stays alive far more than any science, just look at the far reaching results of Aristotle developing the "nature" concept.
Most scientists and engineers would disagree with me. That's because they're usually unaware of the philosophy they follow, since they learned it in College as being "the obvious thing" (what includes Aristotle's "nature" and much, much more). So, how about me asking for government to finance philosophical research more than scientific research? No "nice things" would come from it at first grance, such as new engineering marvels, but lots of new sciences might arise from this in some decades or centuries, and those new sciences would then lead to discoveries that might be later engineered.
What do you "feel" about this proposal? About my prefering the extremely HUGE long term vs. you prefering the "mere" long term?;)
The bottom line is that there's no set of objective values with which to measure who is right. When the government decides to do this instead of that, while the people would prefer to to that instead of this, these are simple two subjective "feelings" that chocked and one win. Neither is by itself "better" than the other.
Seriously, why do waitresses get paid more than particle physicists?
Simple: because economy is ruled by offer and demand, and nothing else. Since there's a higher demand/offer relationship for waitresses than there's for particle physicists, waitresses wages use to be higher.
There are some ways to change this:
a) Particle physicists to begin to heavily marketing to capitalists the marvelous things their businesses would get by opening job positions for particle physicists. With a higher demand, higher wages.
Also, they could argue heavily on how extremely useless waitresses really are, so that the demand for them would lower and so their wages.:)
b) Particle physicists to begin to heavily discourage young people from entering the field. For example, by refusing to give science journalists ideas for articles. This way, the offer of particle physicist will become lower, and thus the wages of the already existing ones would go up.
c) The above solutions are free market one, meaning that they are based on the freedom of the individuals to act or not act as they see fit. The third solution is the anti-free market one, i.e., for particle physicists to lobby the government for subsidies and such. This way, the money that people aren't willing to voluntarily give to particle physicist is actually taken from them by force and then given to particle physicists.
Currently a lot of the wages of science practitioners is earned by way of method "c". Scientists are usually poor at convincing people to give them money, so they usually prefer to indirectly impose their will. Nothing so much different from RIAA or software makers, who also despise free market, or from the unions, who don't like it either, or from the sueing specialists, who also earn tons of money by using the power of state police in their favour.
I already purchase games online! That's how: I go to an online store, find the game, click the purchase button, and in a matter of few hours it's available for me to install. Way faster than downloading AND with the supreme advantage of not expending any of my bandwidth!
AFAIK, such a gun would be very useless. I remember reading somewhere that the energy of a micro black-holes is equal, more or less, to that you'd obtain by letting a flying fly to hit a door by accident.:)
False. Western countries did this when Lenin fakely turned to capitalism after 1917's Russia revolution, a move he called "New Economic Policy" (NEP). The idea is simple and effective: be friend to capitalist powers until they make you rich, no matter how many years this takes, then use the money to further advance the revolution. So, when Lenin had the money he thought necessary he revoked NEP and made Russia the piece of shit it became in the next 50~60 years.
Why does this work? Because capitalists are ultimately dumb: they believe that because *they* love money then everyone loves money too. The truth is that Communists don't love money. Money, for them, is just a mena. What they love is power. Absolute power.
China is playing the same game Lenin played on the '20s. Each and every big business there has either state companies or army officers as partners, which take their share in the profits to fuel the Party tirany and China's war machine. Once they get to the point they believe they can win a war with USA they *will* put that on table and close the regime. No doubt about it.
By the way, Russia itself is also playing this game. Or do you think that "ex-"KGB officers running the government is a mere coincidence? As someone else said, it's as if after Germany was defeated in WW2 the Gestapo had assumed the government. Would anyone believe that such an hypothetic Gestapo-ruled Germany weren't nazi anymore just because they were appeasing the Allied powers and acting nice on TV? Go figure...
LOL! Not a single one of those 157 countries will do anything related to Kyoto protocol. Most of them are authoritarian regimes whose promises mean nothing. They signed it only to be able to make *the USA* follow it if the USA were to sign it. In the real world, even Germany is reviewing it's environmental laws for its industry to come out of stagnation.
Now, did you realy believe corrupt countries such as Russia and China would follow the Kyoto rules? If you did, what a wishfull thinker you showed yourself to be...
First, there's that guy, Bill Clinton, who allowed sensitive information to be leaked to China while forbidding security agencies to investigate and helping CIA to be almost destroyed.
After that, there's this other nice guy, George Soros, who thinks the treason par... I mean, the democratic party is so nice he must purchase it by both financing every kind of subversive liberal cause in existence as well as financing its elections, what the party heads of course love. A man who, of course, also loves China:
Slashdot Mirror
Other than DRM and the like, I believe Blue-Ray is better than HD-DVD simply because it has more storeage space. A BR-RW disc will be a much more interesting aquisition than a HD-RW disc once both become available.
But that brings some questions on what the future will hold. Maybe this?
a) Blue Ray & HD-DVD Writer Drive
b) Blue Ray Writer & HD-DVD Reader Combo Drive
c) HD-DVD Writer & Blue Ray Reader Combo Drive
d) Blue Ray & HD-DVD Reader, DVD Writer Combo Drive
e) Blue Ray Reader & DVD Writer Combo Drive
f) HD-DVD Reader & DVD Writer Combo Drive
g) Blue Ray, HD-DVD & DVD Reader, CD Writer Combo Driver
h) Others?
Confusing, isn't it?
Not really. Or, at least, not outside USA/EU/Japan. I myself don't have a standalone DVD player, I watch them in my low budget computer, if at all. My PAL-M TV set (I'm in Brazil), for instance, still has a 4-head VCR player connected to it and that's pretty enough for all the (lack of) interest I have in movies, given that even the Blockbuster stores still get VHS tapes with the newest releases. Granted, the DVD section is by now the biggest and greatest, but it's clear that VHS tapes still make a lot of success around here, and will keep making for some time.
All you said is what I mean by "rich". The modern version of this delusion is precisely exchange rate manipulation, the belief that by exporting more through artificially deflated currency you're achieving something.
The truth is that by doing so you're just forcing your population to subsidize (through work) the purchases made by foreigners. Why? Because if a gadget would sell for 'x' (in the foreign currency) under a market generated exchange ratio, now it'll sell for, let's say, 'x/2'. So, you'll have to produce 2 of those gadgets to obtain the same 'x' value, hence, to work double to gain the same real compensation.
And this is even more so, since by doing so and thus increasing exportation, you also diminish the amount of goods available in the internal market, thus producing inflation in the local currency (less goods, same amount of bills, more bills needed to purchase a given good).
One of the most insane nonsenses devised by macroeconomic economists is the notion of "trade balance" that fuels the above.
Now, China is a completely different matter. It uses the economy as a weapon, so much as to employing slave labor to make many export goods even more cheap. If they get to the point that using the "money weapon" becomes a reasonable option, they won't mind their people starving by using it. Search the 'net and you'll find tons of information on this, and more.
Google already have the "Personal Diary" service. It's called Blogger.
YOU could do yourself a favour reading some good criticism of macroeconomics nonsense.
Actually, you Americans have such a low inflation rate despite the amount of paper money printed by your central bank because most of this paper ends up in the dollar reserves of foreign central banks. This happens because all those foreign central banks believe that having tons of dollar bills stored equals their countries being "rich" (much in the same way as the XVII century merchantilists believed that having tons of gold stored away meant their countries were "rich"). Since all these bills aren't running around in the real American economy, they don't make prices go up.
If (or when) those central banks decide spending those dollars by sending them back to the USA, the violent increase in the amount of bills in the economy will make the inflationary American bubble crash hard. Good prices will double, triple, or even more.
And why? Simple: because if you had 'x' tons of goods and 'y' tons of bills, thus 'y' being able to buy 'x', now you'll have the same 'x' tons of goods, but '3y' tons of bills, meaning '3y' = 'x'.
Now, guess which country is planning to do exactly that? If you guessed "China", you guessed right. They see themselves as enemies of the USA, and they see all the dollar bills they accumulated as just another weapon among many.
There's a single feature in MS Word that makes me like it more than OOo Write: tables.
Table support in Write is 30 years behind Word. I can't mouse select a line and change arbitrarily its cells' sizes. I can't madly mix and merge cells. I can't draw a table by mouse the exact way (layout) I wish it to have. I can't enter a cell properties and change them the way I need. And so on. Of course, I can't import complex table layouts (and I have tons of them, which allow me to print information to pre-printed papers) from Word into Write without everything getting corrupted.
Each time a new OOo versions is launched I download it, install it, go straight to the tables menu, create one and try messing around with it as I do in Word. Each time I see I can't do it, so I uninstall OOo and keep using Word. The day I download it and see its table support reached MS Office level is the day I'm switching office apps for good. Until then, there's no way I'd do that.
If the odds were 1 in 1,000,000 (EXACTLY one in a million) I would have been concerned, for as Pratchett's Law (named after the great living sage Terry Pratchett) wisely states, anything whose possibility is one in one million (EXACTLY one in one million) always happens.
That not being the case then we're left with the far more optimistic Murphy's Law, a sure relief.
That might be seen as a problem. But in industrialized countries, the thing is, children are seen as a liability, not an asset. Children cost a LOT of money to raise in an industrialized country.
True, but that's so because people also require a lot of themselves and hold too high expectations. Even if we adjust for differing living costs, I know people who rise very well 5 or 6 children while earning half or less of what (comparatively) a middle American makes. I also know people who earn twice as much as upper-middle class Americans (and that's A LOT of money here) who do a very poor job of rising even a single child. It all depends on where each person puts his priorities.
If people didn't have to worry about making tons of money just to have a place to live and support themselves, and had more free time to spend with their kids, they'd probably have more of them.
Historically this doesn't seem accurate. The more technology, gadgets, money, big houses, health etc. one has, the more she wants to enjoy life for enjoyment's sake. The last 100 years history makes that plain clear.
In third-world countries, people just pop out kids without thinking about it, and live in poverty and misery with all their kids. Doesn't sound like a good alternative to me.
So the question actually is: where's the point of equilibrium?
I think this is incorrect. The Dark Ages preceded the Middle Ages, and came immediately after Rome withdrew from most of Europe. But Medieval times weren't all that great either.
See here.
You seem to have a screwed-up notion of retirement. Ideally, retired people wouldn't be supported by working people; they'd support themselves, usually by their own investments (money saved) from when they were working. If their living costs were small, they could also get by on sporadic or part-time jobs.
Yes, true. Problem is, most countries see such a investment-for-retirement scheme as being excessively "capitalistic" and "socially unjust". I favour it, and think everyone should adopt it, but that's not what usually happens. Most coutries make each and every working person contribute compulsively a given percent of his monthly income to the government so that the whole amount can be distributed among the retired ones.
Here in Brazil the amount is 11% of income, so that 9 working persons contribute enough to pay one person's retirement. It would work, provided there were only one retired person per 9 working one, and provided all working persons were registered (what doesn't happen, only 50% are). Both condition not happening, the individual retirement wage lowers each year.
I don't know what's the American system. If it's the investment based one, so far so good. You'll surely have less problems in the long run.
Also, if technology significantly reduced the effects of aging and extended normal lifespans, people simply wouldn't need to retire as early. Where is it mandated that you retire at 65? If you can expect to live to 200, and be healthy and active until 180, for instance, then why would you need to save enough money for 65-200 instead of just working until you're 150 or so?
I wholeheartedly agree! The problem here is that no one likes losing "rights". Suppose a presidential candidate includes in his political program the increase of retirement age. Do you think he would get elected? Or, do you think the representatives who voted in favour of such a law would get reelected?
The article I linked you shows an example taken from an European country, where such a proposal appeared. It was abandoned almost as fast as it was proposed. People protested so much that no politician dared going forward with it. To get elected is always more important than to do the right thing.
The thing is simple: if people get to live 150 years, they'll want to retire at 65 and enjoy retirement for the remaining 85 years of their lives. This doesn
First off, your irrelevant conservative social ideas are just stupid.
:) Anyway, maybe you're interested in knowing that I'm not American. I'm a very 3rd-worldly Brazilian living in Brazil, nice to meet you.
;)
This is a so liberal way of arguing.
Regarding conservatism, it suffices to say that there's as much divergence among those who declare themselves as such as there is among those who declare themselves liberals. So, there're conservatives who approve of immigration and there're those who don't, and I'm among the later (I'm also among the anti-copyright conservatives).
Anyway, you're right in that more educated people vote democrat. Now, the problem for democrats is that they use to have only slightly more than one children per woman, what means that their number use to halve each generation, while conservatives use to have two or more children, what means their number either stays stable or increases. Go figure what that'll mean in two or three generations. This article has more information on this.
Now, back to the topic at hand: what constitutes an "improved" society? This topic, in this discussion, really has nothing to do with social values, unless you're a Luddite.
It depends. You mention free time and talk about the "Dark Ages" (an expression, by the way, that no scholar of history still uses, since it's only Renaissance anti-medieval propaganda). The point is that, no matter how many machines you have working in place of actual people, the ones who pay taxes will still be the people, not those machines. So, if you wanna all retired people to have the same standard of living that the working ones'll have, the working ones will still need to make the whole amount of money necessary to pay their own needs as well as those of the retired. So, if the working/retired rate is 1:1, each working person will need to make money enough for himself and for another retired person. If it's 1:2, each working person will need to make enough money for himself and for two retired persons. If it's 1:3, enough for himself and for three retired persons. And so on.
So, no matter how much the technology advances, if there's always less and less people entering the work force, these people will need to work more and more to pay all their bills and the bills of the retired, no matter what these bills are about (nursing robots, voyages to health centers in Mars, genetic rejuvenation therapy, whatever).
Labor saving devices will only actually save labor if there're lots of working people to have their labor saved, so that the proportion is something like 10:1, not 1:10. Other than that, it'll be more and more work, always.
And maybe all under sharia.
So you think mob rule is the way to achieve a better society to live in?
:)
See my answer to diggitzz. This is subjective. It all depends on what one "feels" is "a better society". Just as an example, think on the expectations of liberals and conservatives. A "better society" for a conservative would be the a living nightmare for a liberal, as well as a "better society" for a liberal would be seen as a fully degenerated society for a conservative (as a conservative I surely feel so).
But I agree with the problem you point in democracy. I surely prefer an aristocratic solution, where something that was decided is carried along years in future, without things changing at every few years. And when a voting was necessary, only people with a clear understanding of politics should be allowed to vote, not everyone.
Anyway, you should ask yourself why an "improving society" is better than a "non-improving" one, for many people would surely say that "improving" is precisely the problem. For instance, "improved" societies have fewer children thanks to the means developed to prevent or abort pregnancy, what in turn means less and less people paying taxes, thus a need to either increasing taxes every year, with in the end even a 100% tax not being enough to pay everything, and/or allowing massive immigration from countries where the pregnancy rates are higher, with in the end the immigrants becoming the majority of population, thus of electors, thus able to change the laws as they see fit (read "sharia" there).
Were not for those "improvements" and the above outcome wouldn't be even a possibility, much less an almost certainty, what means that a long term-thinking government who wanted to keep its society as its society should actually "unimprove" things by prohibiting contraceptive means and abortion and even by granting subsidies to couples according to the number of children they had.
So, where does this takes us? I have actually no idea.
You're right, but for the wrong reasons. This isn't an issue of scientists wanting more money than they're worth, it's an issue of the people (and corporations, etc) being largely unable to realize the long-term benefits of fundamental scientific research.
;)
Yes and no. "Money" is an objective expression of subjective "feelings", more specifically of felt needs, so the "value" of money is also ultimately subjective.
For example, when you purchase today's newspaper, you do so because you "feel" that those pieces of written paper have a higuer "value" for you than the two green printed pieces of papers in your pocket. It's the same with the newspaper seller: he "feels" that your green pieces of paper have a higuer "value" (for him) than the newspaper in his hand.
What you "feel" the newspaper is "worth", another person might think as being "too much", so that she would prefer to keep her pieces of green paper to herself instead of exchanging them for a newspaper. The same goes for the newspaper seller: if you offer him less green paper than he "feels" the newspaper is "worth", he'll prefer to keep the newspaper, while another newspaper seller might "feel" that amount of green paper you offered is "worth" more than the newspaper and agree to exchange it.
What this means is that you "feel" that science is more important, while others don't. And you "feel" this way because you "feel" engineering derived from scientific research is a nice thing, "feel" that having more physical knowledge is good in itself, "feel" that the long term is way more important ("valuable") than the short one, and so on. Others disagree, and no matter how much arguments you make to support your feelings, they can do as best as you no supporting theirs.
For instance, how would you answer to one who argued that *all* research funding currently destined to space research should be put into improving crops? He clearly "feels" food is more important than NASA. And what would you answer to one that said that both are wrong, that all this money should be spent in actually making crops so feed the starving people in the world? This one "feels" that scientific research is secondary to the most basic human needs, after all (he would argue), people will die before those researches get results, and it's most important to first save them, and only after that to pursued research.
As for myself, I "feel" that philosophical research is more important than scientific research, for philosophy is the basis upon which science is constructed, thus better philosophy meaning ultimately better science, not to mention the fact that a good philosophy stays alive far more than any science, just look at the far reaching results of Aristotle developing the "nature" concept.
Most scientists and engineers would disagree with me. That's because they're usually unaware of the philosophy they follow, since they learned it in College as being "the obvious thing" (what includes Aristotle's "nature" and much, much more). So, how about me asking for government to finance philosophical research more than scientific research? No "nice things" would come from it at first grance, such as new engineering marvels, but lots of new sciences might arise from this in some decades or centuries, and those new sciences would then lead to discoveries that might be later engineered.
What do you "feel" about this proposal? About my prefering the extremely HUGE long term vs. you prefering the "mere" long term?
The bottom line is that there's no set of objective values with which to measure who is right. When the government decides to do this instead of that, while the people would prefer to to that instead of this, these are simple two subjective "feelings" that chocked and one win. Neither is by itself "better" than the other.
Seriously, why do waitresses get paid more than particle physicists?
:)
Simple: because economy is ruled by offer and demand, and nothing else. Since there's a higher demand/offer relationship for waitresses than there's for particle physicists, waitresses wages use to be higher.
There are some ways to change this:
a) Particle physicists to begin to heavily marketing to capitalists the marvelous things their businesses would get by opening job positions for particle physicists. With a higher demand, higher wages.
Also, they could argue heavily on how extremely useless waitresses really are, so that the demand for them would lower and so their wages.
b) Particle physicists to begin to heavily discourage young people from entering the field. For example, by refusing to give science journalists ideas for articles. This way, the offer of particle physicist will become lower, and thus the wages of the already existing ones would go up.
c) The above solutions are free market one, meaning that they are based on the freedom of the individuals to act or not act as they see fit. The third solution is the anti-free market one, i.e., for particle physicists to lobby the government for subsidies and such. This way, the money that people aren't willing to voluntarily give to particle physicist is actually taken from them by force and then given to particle physicists.
Currently a lot of the wages of science practitioners is earned by way of method "c". Scientists are usually poor at convincing people to give them money, so they usually prefer to indirectly impose their will. Nothing so much different from RIAA or software makers, who also despise free market, or from the unions, who don't like it either, or from the sueing specialists, who also earn tons of money by using the power of state police in their favour.
In a word: yes.
Study about Lenin and the NEP and you'll understand why increasing commercial contacts with totalitarian regimes actually empowers them.
I already purchase games online! That's how: I go to an online store, find the game, click the purchase button, and in a matter of few hours it's available for me to install. Way faster than downloading AND with the supreme advantage of not expending any of my bandwidth!
AFAIK, such a gun would be very useless. I remember reading somewhere that the energy of a micro black-holes is equal, more or less, to that you'd obtain by letting a flying fly to hit a door by accident. :)
False. Western countries did this when Lenin fakely turned to capitalism after 1917's Russia revolution, a move he called "New Economic Policy" (NEP). The idea is simple and effective: be friend to capitalist powers until they make you rich, no matter how many years this takes, then use the money to further advance the revolution. So, when Lenin had the money he thought necessary he revoked NEP and made Russia the piece of shit it became in the next 50~60 years.
Why does this work? Because capitalists are ultimately dumb: they believe that because *they* love money then everyone loves money too. The truth is that Communists don't love money. Money, for them, is just a mena. What they love is power. Absolute power.
China is playing the same game Lenin played on the '20s. Each and every big business there has either state companies or army officers as partners, which take their share in the profits to fuel the Party tirany and China's war machine. Once they get to the point they believe they can win a war with USA they *will* put that on table and close the regime. No doubt about it.
By the way, Russia itself is also playing this game. Or do you think that "ex-"KGB officers running the government is a mere coincidence? As someone else said, it's as if after Germany was defeated in WW2 the Gestapo had assumed the government. Would anyone believe that such an hypothetic Gestapo-ruled Germany weren't nazi anymore just because they were appeasing the Allied powers and acting nice on TV? Go figure...
LOL! Not a single one of those 157 countries will do anything related to Kyoto protocol. Most of them are authoritarian regimes whose promises mean nothing. They signed it only to be able to make *the USA* follow it if the USA were to sign it. In the real world, even Germany is reviewing it's environmental laws for its industry to come out of stagnation.
Now, did you realy believe corrupt countries such as Russia and China would follow the Kyoto rules? If you did, what a wishfull thinker you showed yourself to be...
Everyone is wrong.
Intelligent Design isn't science.
Creationism isn't science.
And Evolution isn't science either.
None of the 3 is science simply because all of them take efficient causality as if it was the same as formal causality.
That's what happens when people not study Aristotle: both sides start talking nonsense.
First, there's that guy, Bill Clinton, who allowed sensitive information to be leaked to China while forbidding security agencies to investigate and helping CIA to be almost destroyed.
l e.asp?indid=644
l e.asp?indid=977o s.htm
http://www.discoverthenetwork.com/individualProfi
After that, there's this other nice guy, George Soros, who thinks the treason par... I mean, the democratic party is so nice he must purchase it by both financing every kind of subversive liberal cause in existence as well as financing its elections, what the party heads of course love. A man who, of course, also loves China:
http://www.discoverthenetwork.com/individualProfi
http://www.rense.com/general61/thecaseofgeorgesor
And now, Google, a major contributor to the treas... sorry, to the *democratic* party, also explicitly enters the gang.
Oh, this was "such" a surprise. As if liberals weren't like that...