Re-evolution is rather flattering, it implies that we're the end result of evolution; but it's silly to think that our more distant cousins are 'less evolved' than us because they're smaller/not-conscious. They have been around for just as long as we have, and if they have changed less than us that only shows how successful their genes are.
Exactly. Thank you.
Certain species of sharks, for example, haven't changed appreciably in millions of years - they're perfectly adapted to ocean conditions and have never needed to change.
But the part about us being the end result of evolution is the important part: it is that kind of arrogance about our species and our culture we draw into every decision we make about the environment. By believing ourselves to somehow possess a special place in the world, the environment, or the universe, we allow ourselves to subvert its operation, take its survival into our own hands, believe ourselves equal to the "gods" themselves, because only the gods know who should live and who should die. Yet we instead believe that we know who should live and who should die.. and one sees what we do with that kind of power.
Which rather shines a nice bright light on alot of the obviously-terrible-but-nobody-cares things we do to the environment.
"They" fit in perfectly well with the environment, when they deign to do so. There are still literally THOUSANDS of indigenous human cultures remaining on this planet and they "fit in" perfectly well with the environment.
It is us, the pyramid builders, the civilization builders, that bulldoze whole forests to make way for farms and land for livestock. It is OUR culture that does not fit in well with the environment, because rather than understanding we are part of it, we instead think of it as "in the way" and insist on destroying it whenever it suits us.
No, humans 'fit in' with the environment perfectly well. Self-destructive civilizations do not.
"Knocked down all the plumbs" is not the equivalent of "chopped the damn tree down".
1. The kids apparently stripped some branches, not chopped down the tree.
2. The appropriate response to chopping a public tree down STILL is not taking a DNA sample and locking them behind bars. Locking behind bars is for the express purpose of intimidation and physical restraint under the expectation of violence. I have seen lots of kids get taken to the station - and they sit next to an officer until their parents come for them. It is NEVER appropriate for the police to intimidate children the way those officers did.
For kids, the more appropriate response is maybe some community service to repay what they took. For an adult, it is to pay the replacement value of the tree (materials & labor) and if it is a local ordinance, to have a misdimeanor (or the UK equivalent) placed on their record.
If one of the trees had been yours, I don't think you would be making that statement.
When I was 12 and a couple of neighbor kids and I decided to knock down all the plumbs off my neighbor's tree, they didn't call the police and demand DNA samples. They pulled me home by the ear and let my mom deal with me.
You know, I used to believe that free competition would solve everything too. Then I opened my eyes and took stock of how REAL people behave, not the ideal person necessary to make laissez-faire competition work. I tried really hard for a long time to find anything I could to support the theory, but in the end I had to recognize that humans are simply not that noble. That's why regulation exists in the first place - not because people and governments were trying to control what companies would do in the *future*, but because of what they had done in the *past*.
The FCC is a great evil and arguably unconstitutional.
Agreed 150%. Although, I wasn't commenting on the Constitutionality of the FCC, only recognizing how their behavior affects the playing field, given the realistic knowledge that they're here and probably aren't going anywhere anytime soon.
It doesn't need to exist based on a law, it exists fine without any regulation.
The amount of control Telcos are attempting to exert over the internet seems to suggest a flaw in your theory.. sure it would exist 'fine' for those in power, but for disenfranchised humans all over the world who might be hurt by that behavior, I wouldn't call it 'fine.'
As long as government doesn't create monopoly powers through Internet regulations
I frequently read your posts, and sometimes I wonder what you're really after.
The government has ALREADY created monopoly powers for internet companies - unless you want 45 different lines running down your street, you get one, maybe two providers.
The tradeoff that these natural monopolies provide is that they don't get to benefit from being a monopoly (i.e., regulation and price ceilings). It's a non-ideal solution for an unsolveable problem, but it's a necessary solution that is practical, much as the anti-regulation crowd may hate it.
Everyone I've seen rail against regulation on the grounds that "regulation never encourages competition" always seems to forget that Net Neutrality proponents are only trying to restore the very balance that DID exist, the balance that the FCC removed last year.
Maybe you got lucky and found a deal or something.. I didn't buy a standalone DVD player until last year because I was waiting for the price to come down. Prior to that, if I wanted to watch a DVD movie, I would watch it on my computer.
I do remember your typical DVD player being around that price range in 2000.
While we like to tell ourselves that tribal ancestors had a hard, short, brutish life, early contact with American natives tell quite a different story; that where the Spanish could expect to live to the ripe old age of 42, native peoples could expect to live to their 90's and some, even older, oweing to a extremely varied (largely but not exclusively) vegetarian diet; a diet consisting not only of staples available on the land but also of crops of corn and grains, meat from domesticated animals, gardens containing a dozen varieties of fruits and vegetables.
With regards to disease, there is no evidence that native populations experienced disease to any worse degree than did Old World populations; and the long life spans would seem to indicate that whatever diseases they did experience, they were sufficiently able to deal with.
And as for injuries experienced 'on the job' so to speak.. take a look at current statistics indicating how frequently people are physically injured these days. An 'easier' life doesn't necessarily mean fewer broken bones.
* Sidenote.. I really am a moron because I never save my research on this subject since it seems to come up so infrequently. I always end up doing it all over again whenver someone asks.. so before someone feels the need to 'attack back' so to speak [a common occurrance on Slashdot, apparently.. I will be visiting far less often, once this thread dies], try doing your own searches because my Google-Fu on this subject is somewhat lacking. The best resources I've read on this subject aren't online yet.
It is IMPOSSIBLE for our current farming and distribution to be less efficient than our tribal ancestors.
I as much as aluded to the fact that we're more efficient. And we are, by thousands of times.
What we don't question is whether efficiency is a good thing; we merely assume it is, because we have the underlying assumption that continually increased production, and a continually increasing population, is a good thing. Only recently have we begun to guess that a constantly expanding population is probably not a good idea.
But we still won't stop being so damn efficient.
About 98% of our world's population is alive today only because we are more efficient.
Exactly right - and all it would take is a possibly very small imbalance to imperil all those lives. We've always been able to avoid that possibility because we always had room to expand, but we're running now into the problem of "Do we use this land for houses or agriculture?" - the expansion has to end at some point.
You: Originality never existed. Me: It did, but hasn't for a long time, because people remake the same stuff over and over. You: Hollywood has been imitative, repititive[sic], and unwilling (in the main) to do anything really orginal for decades.
Unless I'm missing something, we're on the same page.
(in all browsers but IE. In IE the requests can go anywhere).
I'm not sure about that. I ran into the same security restrictions in IE that exists in the other browsers using AJAX. The only solution to the problem was to get rid of the 'www' in the URL, EVER - so users always browse on http://thesite.com./
By the way, about your sig:
"Coming tonight at 11 - Someting ordinary in your home that can KILL YOU! Now back to The Family Guy."
I hate when stations do that. It's like.. if it's so deadly isn't it kind of your obligation to tell me what it is without forcing me to watch an hour of advertisements?
Because JS is the "wave of the future"! Everyone wants JS, even for crap like viewing an image! Who needs the [img] tag, let's pepper the html with document.write, because that makes everything so much easier!
Uhh...
Yeah really I don't get it either.
I always browse with JS turned off and only enable it when I really, absolutely need to, or on sites I really trust. I figure, any other sites are a)using it for fluff I don't care about (like fancy dropdown menus that have no business using JS) or b) probably trying to do stuff with my computer I don't want to do anyway.
What I don't understand is why the other two who replied to you had to be so visceral about it. A simple "No, no, here's what you can do to make sure things are secure" would have sufficed, but instead one had to resort to calling you a troll and the other had to call you a con.
Alas, I'm realizing that is a common experience on Slashdot. I always imagined geeks who were full of themselves, I guess I had to come here to really find them.
Anyway, just brush that off, take the good from what they had to say, and leave it at that.
Really, why people need to think of this place as a place to fight...
There's also the matter of keeping alive. Something which is far easier now than then.
That's actually an unbelievably complex subject. It would seem straightforward: food is easy to obtain now:
1. Go to grocery store. 2. Pick food off shelf. 3. Pay. 4. ??? 5. Eat.
In raw energy expended (if you want to count calories), we expend - maybe - 10% of what our ancestors did.
But then.. we work 40-60? hour weeks to do it; I should think if our ancestors had been so busy hunting/gathering/toiling, they wouldn't have had much time for culture building, which is not what fossil and artifact histories show us - our ancestors spent, apparently, MOST of their time building culture, suggesting that obtaining the requirements of life was much easier than we think.
There's also a strange calculation that leaves me wondering where it really leads.
As an example, say it expends 200 calories for you to get up, shower, get in the car, go shopping, get home, carry groceries inside and put your groceries away. Grab a snack.
That same effort would have taken one of our tribal ancestors (or even not so tribal - even 200 years ago it) - perhaps 2000 calories to do the same task, because it would have taken several hours of more intense physical activity (not hard activity, really, but certainly an elevated heart rate and muscle exertion).
But.. how much energy did it take to put that food on the store shelves?
First you have the farmers, who have to plant vast 10,000 acre fields of say, corn. They spend months and thousands of man hours maintaining these fields until they're ready to be picked, when huge machines expend thousands of gallons of fuel to harvest the field. Then, dozens of trucks transport the corn over thousands of miles (and another several hundred gallons of fuel) to distribution centers, where hundreds of people sort, run machinery, process paperwork, load and unload, etc.
Finally, the corn goes out on trucks to be delivered to grocery stores, to be unloaded and placed on shelves/bins/whatever.
Compare that to the measly 2000 calories your tribal ancestor burned, and wonder if our lives are really easier.. or if we're only burning 140,000x as much energy to make it APPEAR easier.
Like I said, I'm not really sure where that kind of math takes me. But it's an interesting idea.
I agree. Once we realize that all we have to do is kill off 90-99% of the human population to reach a more idyllic time, then civilization is doomed. And we have to get rid of all the gadgets and comfortable things too.
I'm not sure if you were being serious or sarcastic, but neither of those measures is really necessary. All that is necessary is a change of vision, and by that I mean, a change in the way people look at their place in the world. Unfortunately, that is all but impossible, so yeah. 99% of the population dying is pretty much the only way we can expect to survive.
Depending on who you call your ancestors, you can find examples of "massive" or "waged" wars as far back as recorded history. Think Sargon of Mesopotamia, Alexander the Great, the Khan family, Sundiata, etc.
If you read diaries and chronicles of the Britons from 1000AD, or the Romans another 1000 years earlier, you will recognize the author as a person you could easily have known. About the only difference is ancient authors betray little of the self-consciousness, second guessing, or low self esteem modern (meaning post-1900s) journals contain.
I have no trouble imagining great migrations (Celts, Turks, Sea People, Sudanese) to be driven just as often by the desire for conquest and power itself than purely pragmatic necessity.
Sorry, I should have been more specific - by our ancestors, I mean our tribal ancestors, e.g., the ones who existed before what we call "The Agricultural Revolution" approximately 10-12,000 years ago.
For your specific examples, I fully agree. We are simply the descendents of a line of culture-bringers that have existed for many thousands of years. By culture-bringers, I mean people who want/need to force everyone to live by their code of life, rather than just leaving others alone.
That's a remarkably poor understanding of control and war. Security isn't the only reason wars are waged. Another is merely grabbing something that someone else has.
And MY point was that only our culture looks at the world that way. Otherwise, our ancestors would have taken control over much more of the world than they did LONG before we ever came along (they had a nice 150,000 year lead on us. If it were really that important to them, they would have done it). The poor understanding of human history is yours - you believe human history to be OUR history - thoroughly negelecting the histories of the thousands of cultures we destroyed, who did NOT need to take over the world, on our march to world domination.
Nor do most cultures control "everything we touch". If you look at modern democracies like the US or the European ones, they exercise a remarkable lack of control over their citizens' lives.
I look around at how China, the UK, and the US are currently treating their citizens and I wonder how you can say that with a straight face.
I didn't say "most cultures control everything we touch." I said OUR culture does - and by our culture, I mean to exclude the world's remaining indigenous and tribal cultures.
Hehe, Score -1 Troll. Looks like someone didn't like seeing their precious little view of paradise be crushed.
Not that that wasn't expected. In fact, I've never had a positive response when I tell people the straight truth about the world they live in.. because nobody is interested in the truth.
I've found it much more effective to sort of 'fudge' the truth until someone is paying enough attention to actually show them new ideas; people in our culture are uncommonly good at avoiding new ideas unless their survival is at stake (and sometimes even then...)
If you find yourself saying "Gee, TV sure is bad these days" then there's a fair chance you celebrated your 35th birthday recently...
Gee, TV sure is bad these days.
Oh wait, I'm firmly entrenched in that 18-34 age group. Well, I still think TV is bad these days. In fact, I pretty much only watch reruns, in the little time I actually have available for TV watching.
Slashdot Mirror
Certain species of sharks, for example, haven't changed appreciably in millions of years - they're perfectly adapted to ocean conditions and have never needed to change.
But the part about us being the end result of evolution is the important part: it is that kind of arrogance about our species and our culture we draw into every decision we make about the environment. By believing ourselves to somehow possess a special place in the world, the environment, or the universe, we allow ourselves to subvert its operation, take its survival into our own hands, believe ourselves equal to the "gods" themselves, because only the gods know who should live and who should die. Yet we instead believe that we know who should live and who should die.. and one sees what we do with that kind of power.
Which rather shines a nice bright light on alot of the obviously-terrible-but-nobody-cares things we do to the environment.
"They" fit in perfectly well with the environment, when they deign to do so. There are still literally THOUSANDS of indigenous human cultures remaining on this planet and they "fit in" perfectly well with the environment.
It is us, the pyramid builders, the civilization builders, that bulldoze whole forests to make way for farms and land for livestock. It is OUR culture that does not fit in well with the environment, because rather than understanding we are part of it, we instead think of it as "in the way" and insist on destroying it whenever it suits us.
No, humans 'fit in' with the environment perfectly well. Self-destructive civilizations do not.
2. The appropriate response to chopping a public tree down STILL is not taking a DNA sample and locking them behind bars. Locking behind bars is for the express purpose of intimidation and physical restraint under the expectation of violence. I have seen lots of kids get taken to the station - and they sit next to an officer until their parents come for them. It is NEVER appropriate for the police to intimidate children the way those officers did.
For kids, the more appropriate response is maybe some community service to repay what they took. For an adult, it is to pay the replacement value of the tree (materials & labor) and if it is a local ordinance, to have a misdimeanor (or the UK equivalent) placed on their record.
In no way did the police respond appropriately.
That is the appropriate response.
If that sounds ok to anyone in the name of 'the public good', I have to wonder what they really consider 'the public good'.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=192794&cid=15
What he said.
You know, I used to believe that free competition would solve everything too. Then I opened my eyes and took stock of how REAL people behave, not the ideal person necessary to make laissez-faire competition work. I tried really hard for a long time to find anything I could to support the theory, but in the end I had to recognize that humans are simply not that noble. That's why regulation exists in the first place - not because people and governments were trying to control what companies would do in the *future*, but because of what they had done in the *past*.
Agreed 150%. Although, I wasn't commenting on the Constitutionality of the FCC, only recognizing how their behavior affects the playing field, given the realistic knowledge that they're here and probably aren't going anywhere anytime soon.
The amount of control Telcos are attempting to exert over the internet seems to suggest a flaw in your theory.. sure it would exist 'fine' for those in power, but for disenfranchised humans all over the world who might be hurt by that behavior, I wouldn't call it 'fine.'
I think you're right, come to think of it...
The government has ALREADY created monopoly powers for internet companies - unless you want 45 different lines running down your street, you get one, maybe two providers.
The tradeoff that these natural monopolies provide is that they don't get to benefit from being a monopoly (i.e., regulation and price ceilings). It's a non-ideal solution for an unsolveable problem, but it's a necessary solution that is practical, much as the anti-regulation crowd may hate it.
Everyone I've seen rail against regulation on the grounds that "regulation never encourages competition" always seems to forget that Net Neutrality proponents are only trying to restore the very balance that DID exist, the balance that the FCC removed last year.
Maybe you got lucky and found a deal or something.. I didn't buy a standalone DVD player until last year because I was waiting for the price to come down. Prior to that, if I wanted to watch a DVD movie, I would watch it on my computer.
I do remember your typical DVD player being around that price range in 2000.
While we like to tell ourselves that tribal ancestors had a hard, short, brutish life, early contact with American natives tell quite a different story; that where the Spanish could expect to live to the ripe old age of 42, native peoples could expect to live to their 90's and some, even older, oweing to a extremely varied (largely but not exclusively) vegetarian diet; a diet consisting not only of staples available on the land but also of crops of corn and grains, meat from domesticated animals, gardens containing a dozen varieties of fruits and vegetables.
With regards to disease, there is no evidence that native populations experienced disease to any worse degree than did Old World populations; and the long life spans would seem to indicate that whatever diseases they did experience, they were sufficiently able to deal with.
And as for injuries experienced 'on the job' so to speak.. take a look at current statistics indicating how frequently people are physically injured these days. An 'easier' life doesn't necessarily mean fewer broken bones.
* Sidenote.. I really am a moron because I never save my research on this subject since it seems to come up so infrequently. I always end up doing it all over again whenver someone asks.. so before someone feels the need to 'attack back' so to speak [a common occurrance on Slashdot, apparently.. I will be visiting far less often, once this thread dies], try doing your own searches because my Google-Fu on this subject is somewhat lacking. The best resources I've read on this subject aren't online yet.
What we don't question is whether efficiency is a good thing; we merely assume it is, because we have the underlying assumption that continually increased production, and a continually increasing population, is a good thing. Only recently have we begun to guess that a constantly expanding population is probably not a good idea.
But we still won't stop being so damn efficient.
Exactly right - and all it would take is a possibly very small imbalance to imperil all those lives. We've always been able to avoid that possibility because we always had room to expand, but we're running now into the problem of "Do we use this land for houses or agriculture?" - the expansion has to end at some point.
There is?
:D
Hmm, already having NoScript, I didn't see the ad.
It works!
Sorry, it was part of your post, not your sig. I'm a moron.
I'm pretty sure we just said the same thing.
You: Originality never existed.
Me: It did, but hasn't for a long time, because people remake the same stuff over and over.
You: Hollywood has been imitative, repititive[sic], and unwilling (in the main) to do anything really orginal for decades.
Unless I'm missing something, we're on the same page.
By the way, about your sig:
I hate when stations do that. It's like.. if it's so deadly isn't it kind of your obligation to tell me what it is without forcing me to watch an hour of advertisements?
Because JS is the "wave of the future"! Everyone wants JS, even for crap like viewing an image! Who needs the [img] tag, let's pepper the html with document.write, because that makes everything so much easier!
Uhh...
Yeah really I don't get it either.
I always browse with JS turned off and only enable it when I really, absolutely need to, or on sites I really trust. I figure, any other sites are a)using it for fluff I don't care about (like fancy dropdown menus that have no business using JS) or b) probably trying to do stuff with my computer I don't want to do anyway.
What I don't understand is why the other two who replied to you had to be so visceral about it. A simple "No, no, here's what you can do to make sure things are secure" would have sufficed, but instead one had to resort to calling you a troll and the other had to call you a con.
Alas, I'm realizing that is a common experience on Slashdot. I always imagined geeks who were full of themselves, I guess I had to come here to really find them.
Anyway, just brush that off, take the good from what they had to say, and leave it at that.
Really, why people need to think of this place as a place to fight...
1. Go to grocery store.
2. Pick food off shelf.
3. Pay.
4. ???
5. Eat.
In raw energy expended (if you want to count calories), we expend - maybe - 10% of what our ancestors did.
But then.. we work 40-60? hour weeks to do it; I should think if our ancestors had been so busy hunting/gathering/toiling, they wouldn't have had much time for culture building, which is not what fossil and artifact histories show us - our ancestors spent, apparently, MOST of their time building culture, suggesting that obtaining the requirements of life was much easier than we think.
There's also a strange calculation that leaves me wondering where it really leads.
As an example, say it expends 200 calories for you to get up, shower, get in the car, go shopping, get home, carry groceries inside and put your groceries away. Grab a snack.
That same effort would have taken one of our tribal ancestors (or even not so tribal - even 200 years ago it) - perhaps 2000 calories to do the same task, because it would have taken several hours of more intense physical activity (not hard activity, really, but certainly an elevated heart rate and muscle exertion).
But.. how much energy did it take to put that food on the store shelves?
First you have the farmers, who have to plant vast 10,000 acre fields of say, corn. They spend months and thousands of man hours maintaining these fields until they're ready to be picked, when huge machines expend thousands of gallons of fuel to harvest the field. Then, dozens of trucks transport the corn over thousands of miles (and another several hundred gallons of fuel) to distribution centers, where hundreds of people sort, run machinery, process paperwork, load and unload, etc.
Finally, the corn goes out on trucks to be delivered to grocery stores, to be unloaded and placed on shelves/bins/whatever.
Compare that to the measly 2000 calories your tribal ancestor burned, and wonder if our lives are really easier.. or if we're only burning 140,000x as much energy to make it APPEAR easier.
Like I said, I'm not really sure where that kind of math takes me. But it's an interesting idea.
I'm not sure if you were being serious or sarcastic, but neither of those measures is really necessary. All that is necessary is a change of vision, and by that I mean, a change in the way people look at their place in the world. Unfortunately, that is all but impossible, so yeah. 99% of the population dying is pretty much the only way we can expect to survive.
Not many people want to hear that.
Sorry, I should have been more specific - by our ancestors, I mean our tribal ancestors, e.g., the ones who existed before what we call "The Agricultural Revolution" approximately 10-12,000 years ago.
For your specific examples, I fully agree. We are simply the descendents of a line of culture-bringers that have existed for many thousands of years. By culture-bringers, I mean people who want/need to force everyone to live by their code of life, rather than just leaving others alone.
I look around at how China, the UK, and the US are currently treating their citizens and I wonder how you can say that with a straight face.
I didn't say "most cultures control everything we touch." I said OUR culture does - and by our culture, I mean to exclude the world's remaining indigenous and tribal cultures.
Hehe, Score -1 Troll. Looks like someone didn't like seeing their precious little view of paradise be crushed.
Not that that wasn't expected. In fact, I've never had a positive response when I tell people the straight truth about the world they live in.. because nobody is interested in the truth.
I've found it much more effective to sort of 'fudge' the truth until someone is paying enough attention to actually show them new ideas; people in our culture are uncommonly good at avoiding new ideas unless their survival is at stake (and sometimes even then...)
Those are my regulars too!
Let me guess, you also like Futurama and perhaps Family Guy? It's interesting how people in the same intellectual groups watch the same shows...
I'm not sure if that says something about geeks, something about those particular shows, or only something about all the OTHER shows we don't watch...
Gee, TV sure is bad these days.
Oh wait, I'm firmly entrenched in that 18-34 age group. Well, I still think TV is bad these days. In fact, I pretty much only watch reruns, in the little time I actually have available for TV watching.