and the scientists just did not read the memo explaining this. I think for this serious but not grave act of oppression we shall remove their white privilege by castrating, taring and then hunting them to the city limits...
but Putin is doing this - he waves his dick. This does not cause much besides wave of hysteria in msm - this in turn has a mass and causes many disturbances - some cannot sleep, some lose their cool and have sex w/o protection and some others exit EU or vote Trump into office. The amount of heat caused by waving the dick itself is also minimal but the amount of heat generated by over excited journalists may cause serious damage to our planet. Therefore I think we will have to remove: Putin, Trump and all the journalists that are so agitated about the two all the time.
It is a nice comparison but I like to remind you comrade that back then all monks are evil because they were all penis owners and even worse - possibly they possessed well defined sexual identity which they (possibly - records differ on that) suppressed. They were also mostly white and privileged sexist and Islamophobic as hell. You should publish self-criticism asap and next time refer either to other period of our history and other social group or amend it appropriately so as to avoid offending sensitive, oppressed minorities or their self-professed and mostly brainless but very agitated defenders.
There must be something inherently problematic about computers as any hobby attached to it ends up in parent's cellar as a virgin while people collecting stamps got laid - my father was collecting too so I know. Maybe the amount of time the habit required was not as much as the pr0n/spreadsheets collection?
Is the VPN not sold with an argument about protecting privacy? If so then any abuse of it would be invalidating the commercial claim which in some jurisdictions is a crime which is prosecuted if people complain.
the AI does not need kill your or mine worthless body. It is enough if it deletes you from records and you cannot go to work or come back to your place, maybe even your car will not start because owner has been digitally deleted.
What if the loss is catastrophic for you and few other poor souls but you cannot prove anything because there is no paper trail and digital traces are gone?
If the draining is going to be catastrophic i.e. system collapse, then the first thing that is going to happen to you if you show the money (or whatever else you have stashed) will be a rape and rob action by a group of muscled and armed men. If you are lucky they will enslave you instead of killing. If the draining is not related to system collapse but rather to government or organized crime (this includes finance industry) action then your stashed money may appear illegal and you may be robbed of your cash by the state first and then raped by the inmates of the prison where you are going to rot. That is if you are lucky. If you are unlucky you will end up w/o food under the bridge or on a body dump depending on sort of the government you will have at the time.
I wonder what happens when the last ICE car will be banned in Germany while you ban also coal and nuclear power. I guess you may hope for Russian gas but that produces NOx too - OMG!!! We should hope then that the ICE driven tracks will bring riot police on time to protect the ruling green elite when the proles march to their quarters. I hope I will manage to leave Germany by then.
You take your pick, I take mine. Yours was on day when most of Germans suffered from heavy headaches etc. and did not work (1.1.2018) and on 1.1 when Germans do not work either. On nother days especially in January but this season for instance on 14.12.2018 and 10.1.2019 the grid had to take emergency measures to prevent frequency going too low (that is how overload manifests itself in a power grid). That happens regularly in January because of prevailing weather conditions. There is no battery from Tesla that can support whole country for 3 weeks as it sometimes happens. But that is not important - get this: Germans pay other countries for taking over excess electricity that wind and solar produce. They pay others to take it. No wonder they pay the highest prices for electricity on the local market. I guess this should be no surprise - the bolsheviki that rule here have miserable success record in anything even remotely touching economy.
They actually are razing forests (in nature reservations among other places) to build wind parks. The human seeded trees in Hambacher forests that they did not raze because of some green maniacs protests is just peanuts.
Germans will switch it off no matter the cost if their masters decided that this is in their 'best' interests. When the little Austrian was in power they went with it till the ammunition ran out - they will do that with coal and anything else they get sold as cure for their Weltschmerz.
As for energy production - the levels of what wind and solar produced increased significantly over the years, yet w/o coal and nuclear their grid would have collapsed in January (for weather reasons - every year the same story) and regularly the emergency measures have to be taken (taking some big users off the grid for short time). Fact is that Germans have to import energy on regular basis while often enough they have to pay other countries to buy excess energy produced by their wind parks and solar panels. No wonder prices of energy for local customers are highest in EU. For similarly misguided policies you can look at California. I wonder what will happen to their industries when the energy delivery is not more guaranteed. I guess the architects and engineers Merkel imported of late will fix all that in no time.
This is of course completely OT but worthy a discussion on its own especially the trends in Germany reflect the ones in other countries of the West. We indeed do not have freedom of speech in Germany, at least not the US way. The truth however is that freedoms not only of speech are being limited of late everywhere in the West. Hate speech makes a difference. What we do not have: state run censorship. The posts discussing for instance discussing advancements of the religion of freedom are regularly removed or demonetized. We also have state run propaganda (Germany has what used to be called GEZ and is a tax like fee to cover costs of companies controlled by governments of provinces (called Land in German). The main stream media plays as the state owned ones do. There are places where one can get alternatives so it is not as bad as it sounds. Yet it is more effective than what communists did in the east of Europe before. Most of German media have closed the forums they offered for discussion of their articles or censor them heavily. The most interesting was the event in Chemnitz last year where the Chancellor detected manhunts although there were none - mainstream media continued bashing the protesters (against inactivity of the authorities in face of massive violence by some new citizens) in spite of no facts supporting the reports. A chief of security service (Verfassungsschutz) has been fired for telling Kaiserin is naked (brrrr).
I think this is about 40% that comes from coal. The fact that Germany has used lignite and did not renew the power producing infrastructure based on coal etc is that Green party prevented it - almost every time an attempt has been made to make to build new more effective power plant so that old ones can be closed was stopped by greens. Similarly with nuclear plants - the way Germany made the transition to non-nuclear made the operators use the old ones and close newer (and safer) ones - rational from their i.e. economic perspective. As far as I can tell Greens have become the most counterproductive force in terms of protecting environment. Some say it is the revenge of the rich over the plebs. I do not know if that is true but the way this goes is just silly. As stated elsewhere - what it does is not saving the environment but removing industrial infrastructure from Germany - I would be surprised if many operators of industrial equipment that requires large quantities of electricity stayed in Germany post 2038. Not because of the phasing out of coal in electricity production (which may or not happen) but because the policy is irrational and erratic and does not guarantee that production is at all possible which is also put in question by profitability in view of constantly raising prices of electricity. Because the renewables are so volatile Germans will have to install quite a lot of gas powered plants to cover that. Putin will be happy although with current suit of policymakers in Germany I can imagine that they may actually force us to buy expensive liquefied gas from US. They do not give a shit anyway - their future is probably more secure than the rulers of NK while approaching their impact on economy.
We have that already - the big industrial consumers are being switched off when frequency goes below certain level (which is the way the imbalance between demand and available power manifests itself) - last such event was this month. The nuclear power plants are planned to stop production in few years time. If coal is to be stopped too then Germans have 3 options left: import, gas or blackouts. Judging on the ruling hysteria the ICE will be illegal in a year or two in Germany which means that they want all go electric in transport. This will surely 'improve' the situation. So they will build lots of gas powered generators and import lost of the stuff from France and Poland? Assuming that this all will work I wonder what will happen with the price - electricity in Germany is already most expensive in EU. This whole nonsense will not make it cheaper. I suppose this all means that at the end that the rich liberal elite will just have to be escorted trough unlit streets by armed guards so that proles do not cut their throats. Happens already anyway. German is a rich country so they can replace all the power plants with dynamos and hire new citizens to drive them. They just be good for something.
the fight of verbal abuse and accusations of treason by different fractions of/. readership commences as desired/expected.
For anybody who studied the subject of misinformation and propaganda it is clear that the media outlets however honest will do what they are told to do by their masters. The rest of us just fumes over what others propose. I recall the excitement when FB 'supported' uprising after elections was all over in the news. I had my doubts back then and I have them now - neither the uprising was 100% honest and coming from the 'masses' nor the pushback by the state stayed far behind. I hear some stories by formerly respected media outlets are revealed as fakes sometimes months later. There is bias - all of us have it. It is difficult to raise above that. Most do not even try. Journalists are like the rest of us. These days the 'principles' are often more important than facts so facts lose. This shows very nicely when we all can rally around the cause - which is why Iran Air Flight 655 received different treatment (human tragedy) than Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (crime against humanity etc although I admit the wikipedia article now is much nuanced now then it used to be). At some point an intelligent and educated individual has to stop and ask themselves - what is true and how can they be sure? Wait and see is my take on it. If there was a wide spread conspiracy we find out eventually. There is a problem here - or actually two. We usually have to make decisions much faster than the truth takes to reveal itself and some conspiracies are small enough to be successful. Not sure what solution there is. I just realize that the times when a person and their close friends could say - "it's enough, time to go" and indeed migrate 'further west' are gone. You can see how this changed - in middle ages in Europe this was actually 'further east' - but where do we go now? There is no place to go and settle where one can built a society based on own rules and (at least for some time) be left alone with it. So we have to accept that we are ruled by corrupt people, surrounded by idiots and lying or misinformed messengers. and governed by coalitions or conspiracies to protect us from 'terrorists'' and there are indeed real terrorists too that try to kill us. Come to think of it: nothing has changed over millennia other than the speed the spin is given to the news only now we have machine guns and the nukes. 40ya most of the spin in the West was antisoviet and on average (probably?) right leaning. Now sometimes outright marxist views on civil liberties and reality seem to prevail and Putin and Trump are always guilty. From what I see it is not betterthan on court of Nero. At least we have aspirin to get headaches away now. Unless of course you should not take it because some other company influenced the general advice and aspirin is now deemed dangerous to life (almost as bad as the stuff NK serves to unloved members of the ruling family).
When I was younger I was wondering if future it is going to be like star wars of star trek. The reality is we are being served Idiocracy. No hope providing sequel to that...
.. gets surprised - how else are you going to lead research and proof results? I mean only way there were no surprise were if you had preset results and you 'proved' them to be true every time. There are places and there were times, this was how science worked. I recalled reading that during the siege of Leningrad (took 3years and people were starving to death) the advice from soviet scientists have been modified to include reality instead of dogma as to provide people with home grown food the most efficient way possible. Seems the threat of millions dying is sometimes the only thing that helps. I think we should be happy if modern day scientists get surprised often instead of proving dogma is true? I wonder however if that is not being washed away by the sjw - after all if even particles can fight for justice as recent controversy surrounding Mr Strumia then the truth is not the goal anymore especially if it disturbs the prevailing mindset. Number of events on US campuses (and elsewhere in the West) where certain speakers have been refused entry or being shouted away by 'oppressed' shows me that the campus is not a place for open mind anymore. If that is so there how do we get 'surprising' results when the students become scientists?
This is how you can get surprised by the champion of 'free market capitalism': I checked in wikipedia - in 2001 changes have been introduced to the way electricity is sold in Cal. and the result is that indeed the price for customers is set by commission and the company is forced to provide as much electricity as the customers want. This can work only if commission increases the prices to cover the costs including the ones caused by speculating individuals. Even if these speculators were not there or had mercy and did not suck the money out of PG&E it was destined to fall - no commission made of elected individuals can increase the price sufficiently if elections are coming. Usual consequence of such situation is that either government takes active role in providing such regulated goods while PG&E would be just selling it to government or the company goes bust at some point in near future. Such schemes always fail eventually and this has been seen throughout history of mankind - sometimes it just takes longer for zombies like PG&E to fall. How this has anything to do with (however induced and whether existent or not) climate change I really cannot fathom. OTOH the church of man induced climate change is just a fact of life. I wonder how this will go. Maybe Californians should start producing their own electricity in their homes? I am sure/.ers here would support such action independently of whether everybody can actually do that or not (hint: people in apartment blocks have limited to no chance of providing for themselves). It seems to me that human population density has crossed the line of what is allowed given average human stupidity. At least in California it did.
All things associated with additional layer(s) between sovereign and the actual decision making may be necessary in big societies (more people than 9) but they also dilute legitimacy due to proxy layers. This may also mean that voters for particular proxy do not have much in common with voters for another proxy which makes accepting the decisions that are not to one's liking difficult or impossible. In other words democracy is difficult in scaling. If you use it for government system, then it will require a skilled and charismatic leader. But these can do good and evil as skills & charisma have nothing to do with moral. Talking about moral - the hypermoral that modern assholes mob preach is nothing but - the vulgodemocrats have no clue about democracy or about human rights, they just blather about it or otherwise abuse it,
It may be that with increasing population density you get less and less freedom, More diversity may also mean less and less freedom but also less and less democracy exactly because you decisions are limited by considerations of minority rights. In modern western society rights of common men especially of common hetero men are less than appreciated. When we celebrated freedom at the fall of communism few decades ago, we expected to live in freedom and democracy was means to to achieve it. It could have been.
I appreciate your sentiment and for long years I was convinced about that too. In fact I still think the only thing that can save democracy is practice. There are significant obstacles tho. The bigger the society governed by democracy the bigger the problems with legitimacy and the social glue needed for the whole system to work for at least majority if not for all. It kind of work in counties of the Swiss federation. Yet you can see where this leads when the people decide against establishment and external forces of oppression. You could see it for instance in Greece when they voted against certain policies (as reasonable or not they may have been) and have been then forced to accept them anyway by their government. The marxist hysteria that goes through each of the western societies claiming superiority of feelings and ideology over facts and reason is another. Add to this what the IQ distribution in a population tells you - if 10% cannot be even drafted into the military to become a cannon fodder due to their low ability yet they have the same voting rights as you do - and slashdot readers, even those infected with social justice syndrome have above average analytical skills - what does that tell you about quality of decisions made in a group including such a mix? . Throughout history democracy's success is rather based on accident than efficiency. Possibly it allows for easier removal of unwanted politicians or preventing dynasties but when society stabilizes itself into oligarchy it is just a failure anyway and it can hardly work in times of fast arriving challenges. Same histoy books show that, there is no system that is durable and just. No matter what after a while the corruption and/or dementia start to plague any system. Add to this religions that see themselves entitled to control society and politics as well as industry (there is at least one that does that and has success in achieving such control in many states all around the world mostly bringing suffering and oppression to most involved) and conflicts that are usually resolved by discussion and compromise become unsolvable meaning that whoever wins the vote will have to oppress the ones that lost it, just as well as the ones that lost it will see themselves as rightful defenders of democracy and justice including use of violence if need be. I am not sure if there is cure for this. I suppose not. So exercise in democracy while working for some time will have to have order shaking bumps changing social order and fixing it for some time till next bump arises. I personally think we are close to such set of bumps. The technology, demography, politics all seem to exacerbate problems at the moment. No amount of democracy can fix shaking and pain caused by the bumps. A skillful leadership (democratically elected or not) may help.
I wonder what is this social science, you talk about? I mean science is a way to find explanations for things based on facts and reason. According to wikipedia and my dictionary the word comes from Latin word meaning 'knowledge'. How does social science with significant 'social justice' element (i.e. bias) fit into this? If even particle physics does exclude people based on their (male) gender then social science cannot really be better.
As for your claims of them social 'scientists' not having done full analysis just yet and hushing with their significant results. This is just plain wrong - in modern times a claim of females being oppressed has such political weight that no serious scientist should have claims based on partial data. Then there is this other thing: besides ex.boyfriends having the urge to call their former better parts names - how many of the bad words (assuming they are really bad and not something like: 'this was a mistake because...' or 'you looked better in another rock' etc) were written by females? This again causes serious problem in our culture sliding ever faster into matriarchat.
Yet another thought I had - according to modern social science the gender thing is nothing more than a cultural construct. How does that work here - are these abused females sure about their identity and how many of the abusers can be culturally identified as males and females and how does that look like in a comparison between all combinations?
Besides all this, I do not think we can have facts and reason based arguments about such subjects so I apologize and commit for searching of reeducation camp in the vicinity, being white old male etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I know it is off topic but it is an important matter. I read somewhere that penis is a social construct so its length is too.....
and the scientists just did not read the memo explaining this. I think for this serious but not grave act of oppression we shall remove their white privilege by castrating, taring and then hunting them to the city limits...
but Putin is doing this - he waves his dick. This does not cause much besides wave of hysteria in msm - this in turn has a mass and causes many disturbances - some cannot sleep, some lose their cool and have sex w/o protection and some others exit EU or vote Trump into office. The amount of heat caused by waving the dick itself is also minimal but the amount of heat generated by over excited journalists may cause serious damage to our planet. Therefore I think we will have to remove: Putin, Trump and all the journalists that are so agitated about the two all the time.
It is a nice comparison but I like to remind you comrade that back then all monks are evil because they were all penis owners and even worse - possibly they possessed well defined sexual identity which they (possibly - records differ on that) suppressed. They were also mostly white and privileged sexist and Islamophobic as hell. You should publish self-criticism asap and next time refer either to other period of our history and other social group or amend it appropriately so as to avoid offending sensitive, oppressed minorities or their self-professed and mostly brainless but very agitated defenders.
There must be something inherently problematic about computers as any hobby attached to it ends up in parent's cellar as a virgin while people collecting stamps got laid - my father was collecting too so I know. Maybe the amount of time the habit required was not as much as the pr0n/spreadsheets collection?
Is the VPN not sold with an argument about protecting privacy? If so then any abuse of it would be invalidating the commercial claim which in some jurisdictions is a crime which is prosecuted if people complain.
the AI does not need kill your or mine worthless body. It is enough if it deletes you from records and you cannot go to work or come back to your place, maybe even your car will not start because owner has been digitally deleted.
What if the loss is catastrophic for you and few other poor souls but you cannot prove anything because there is no paper trail and digital traces are gone?
If the draining is going to be catastrophic i.e. system collapse, then the first thing that is going to happen to you if you show the money (or whatever else you have stashed) will be a rape and rob action by a group of muscled and armed men. If you are lucky they will enslave you instead of killing. If the draining is not related to system collapse but rather to government or organized crime (this includes finance industry) action then your stashed money may appear illegal and you may be robbed of your cash by the state first and then raped by the inmates of the prison where you are going to rot. That is if you are lucky. If you are unlucky you will end up w/o food under the bridge or on a body dump depending on sort of the government you will have at the time.
I wonder what happens when the last ICE car will be banned in Germany while you ban also coal and nuclear power. I guess you may hope for Russian gas but that produces NOx too - OMG!!! We should hope then that the ICE driven tracks will bring riot police on time to protect the ruling green elite when the proles march to their quarters. I hope I will manage to leave Germany by then.
You take your pick, I take mine. Yours was on day when most of Germans suffered from heavy headaches etc. and did not work (1.1.2018) and on 1.1 when Germans do not work either. On nother days especially in January but this season for instance on 14.12.2018 and 10.1.2019 the grid had to take emergency measures to prevent frequency going too low (that is how overload manifests itself in a power grid). That happens regularly in January because of prevailing weather conditions. There is no battery from Tesla that can support whole country for 3 weeks as it sometimes happens. But that is not important - get this: Germans pay other countries for taking over excess electricity that wind and solar produce. They pay others to take it. No wonder they pay the highest prices for electricity on the local market. I guess this should be no surprise - the bolsheviki that rule here have miserable success record in anything even remotely touching economy.
They actually are razing forests (in nature reservations among other places) to build wind parks. The human seeded trees in Hambacher forests that they did not raze because of some green maniacs protests is just peanuts.
Germans will switch it off no matter the cost if their masters decided that this is in their 'best' interests. When the little Austrian was in power they went with it till the ammunition ran out - they will do that with coal and anything else they get sold as cure for their Weltschmerz.
As for energy production - the levels of what wind and solar produced increased significantly over the years, yet w/o coal and nuclear their grid would have collapsed in January (for weather reasons - every year the same story) and regularly the emergency measures have to be taken (taking some big users off the grid for short time). Fact is that Germans have to import energy on regular basis while often enough they have to pay other countries to buy excess energy produced by their wind parks and solar panels. No wonder prices of energy for local customers are highest in EU. For similarly misguided policies you can look at California. I wonder what will happen to their industries when the energy delivery is not more guaranteed. I guess the architects and engineers Merkel imported of late will fix all that in no time.
This is of course completely OT but worthy a discussion on its own especially the trends in Germany reflect the ones in other countries of the West. We indeed do not have freedom of speech in Germany, at least not the US way. The truth however is that freedoms not only of speech are being limited of late everywhere in the West. Hate speech makes a difference. What we do not have: state run censorship. The posts discussing for instance discussing advancements of the religion of freedom are regularly removed or demonetized. We also have state run propaganda (Germany has what used to be called GEZ and is a tax like fee to cover costs of companies controlled by governments of provinces (called Land in German). The main stream media plays as the state owned ones do. There are places where one can get alternatives so it is not as bad as it sounds. Yet it is more effective than what communists did in the east of Europe before. Most of German media have closed the forums they offered for discussion of their articles or censor them heavily. The most interesting was the event in Chemnitz last year where the Chancellor detected manhunts although there were none - mainstream media continued bashing the protesters (against inactivity of the authorities in face of massive violence by some new citizens) in spite of no facts supporting the reports. A chief of security service (Verfassungsschutz) has been fired for telling Kaiserin is naked (brrrr).
I think this is about 40% that comes from coal. The fact that Germany has used lignite and did not renew the power producing infrastructure based on coal etc is that Green party prevented it - almost every time an attempt has been made to make to build new more effective power plant so that old ones can be closed was stopped by greens. Similarly with nuclear plants - the way Germany made the transition to non-nuclear made the operators use the old ones and close newer (and safer) ones - rational from their i.e. economic perspective. As far as I can tell Greens have become the most counterproductive force in terms of protecting environment. Some say it is the revenge of the rich over the plebs. I do not know if that is true but the way this goes is just silly. As stated elsewhere - what it does is not saving the environment but removing industrial infrastructure from Germany - I would be surprised if many operators of industrial equipment that requires large quantities of electricity stayed in Germany post 2038. Not because of the phasing out of coal in electricity production (which may or not happen) but because the policy is irrational and erratic and does not guarantee that production is at all possible which is also put in question by profitability in view of constantly raising prices of electricity. Because the renewables are so volatile Germans will have to install quite a lot of gas powered plants to cover that. Putin will be happy although with current suit of policymakers in Germany I can imagine that they may actually force us to buy expensive liquefied gas from US. They do not give a shit anyway - their future is probably more secure than the rulers of NK while approaching their impact on economy.
Actually last coal mine was closed 2018. Lignite is still being mined.
We have that already - the big industrial consumers are being switched off when frequency goes below certain level (which is the way the imbalance between demand and available power manifests itself) - last such event was this month. The nuclear power plants are planned to stop production in few years time. If coal is to be stopped too then Germans have 3 options left: import, gas or blackouts. Judging on the ruling hysteria the ICE will be illegal in a year or two in Germany which means that they want all go electric in transport. This will surely 'improve' the situation. So they will build lots of gas powered generators and import lost of the stuff from France and Poland? Assuming that this all will work I wonder what will happen with the price - electricity in Germany is already most expensive in EU. This whole nonsense will not make it cheaper. I suppose this all means that at the end that the rich liberal elite will just have to be escorted trough unlit streets by armed guards so that proles do not cut their throats. Happens already anyway. German is a rich country so they can replace all the power plants with dynamos and hire new citizens to drive them. They just be good for something.
the fight of verbal abuse and accusations of treason by different fractions of /. readership commences as desired/expected.
For anybody who studied the subject of misinformation and propaganda it is clear that the media outlets however honest will do what they are told to do by their masters. The rest of us just fumes over what others propose. I recall the excitement when FB 'supported' uprising after elections was all over in the news. I had my doubts back then and I have them now - neither the uprising was 100% honest and coming from the 'masses' nor the pushback by the state stayed far behind. I hear some stories by formerly respected media outlets are revealed as fakes sometimes months later. There is bias - all of us have it. It is difficult to raise above that. Most do not even try. Journalists are like the rest of us. These days the 'principles' are often more important than facts so facts lose. This shows very nicely when we all can rally around the cause - which is why Iran Air Flight 655 received different treatment (human tragedy) than Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (crime against humanity etc although I admit the wikipedia article now is much nuanced now then it used to be). At some point an intelligent and educated individual has to stop and ask themselves - what is true and how can they be sure? Wait and see is my take on it. If there was a wide spread conspiracy we find out eventually. There is a problem here - or actually two. We usually have to make decisions much faster than the truth takes to reveal itself and some conspiracies are small enough to be successful. Not sure what solution there is. I just realize that the times when a person and their close friends could say - "it's enough, time to go" and indeed migrate 'further west' are gone. You can see how this changed - in middle ages in Europe this was actually 'further east' - but where do we go now? There is no place to go and settle where one can built a society based on own rules and (at least for some time) be left alone with it. So we have to accept that we are ruled by corrupt people, surrounded by idiots and lying or misinformed messengers. and governed by coalitions or conspiracies to protect us from 'terrorists'' and there are indeed real terrorists too that try to kill us. Come to think of it: nothing has changed over millennia other than the speed the spin is given to the news only now we have machine guns and the nukes. 40ya most of the spin in the West was antisoviet and on average (probably?) right leaning. Now sometimes outright marxist views on civil liberties and reality seem to prevail and Putin and Trump are always guilty. From what I see it is not betterthan on court of Nero. At least we have aspirin to get headaches away now. Unless of course you should not take it because some other company influenced the general advice and aspirin is now deemed dangerous to life (almost as bad as the stuff NK serves to unloved members of the ruling family).
When I was younger I was wondering if future it is going to be like star wars of star trek. The reality is we are being served Idiocracy. No hope providing sequel to that...
.. gets surprised - how else are you going to lead research and proof results? I mean only way there were no surprise were if you had preset results and you 'proved' them to be true every time. There are places and there were times, this was how science worked. I recalled reading that during the siege of Leningrad (took 3years and people were starving to death) the advice from soviet scientists have been modified to include reality instead of dogma as to provide people with home grown food the most efficient way possible. Seems the threat of millions dying is sometimes the only thing that helps. I think we should be happy if modern day scientists get surprised often instead of proving dogma is true? I wonder however if that is not being washed away by the sjw - after all if even particles can fight for justice as recent controversy surrounding Mr Strumia then the truth is not the goal anymore especially if it disturbs the prevailing mindset. Number of events on US campuses (and elsewhere in the West) where certain speakers have been refused entry or being shouted away by 'oppressed' shows me that the campus is not a place for open mind anymore. If that is so there how do we get 'surprising' results when the students become scientists?
This is how you can get surprised by the champion of 'free market capitalism': I checked in wikipedia - in 2001 changes have been introduced to the way electricity is sold in Cal. and the result is that indeed the price for customers is set by commission and the company is forced to provide as much electricity as the customers want. This can work only if commission increases the prices to cover the costs including the ones caused by speculating individuals. /.ers here would support such action independently of whether everybody can actually do that or not (hint: people in apartment blocks have limited to no chance of providing for themselves). It seems to me that human population density has crossed the line of what is allowed given average human stupidity. At least in California it did.
Even if these speculators were not there or had mercy and did not suck the money out of PG&E it was destined to fall - no commission made of elected individuals can increase the price sufficiently if elections are coming. Usual consequence of such situation is that either government takes active role in providing such regulated goods while PG&E would be just selling it to government or the company goes bust at some point in near future. Such schemes always fail eventually and this has been seen throughout history of mankind - sometimes it just takes longer for zombies like PG&E to fall. How this has anything to do with (however induced and whether existent or not) climate change I really cannot fathom. OTOH the church of man induced climate change is just a fact of life.
I wonder how this will go. Maybe Californians should start producing their own electricity in their homes? I am sure
That may all be t rue. It makes me think however that the society where all these tricks are necessary is on a wrong path.
If the train AI is really intelligent somebody surely will suit for real cruelty - this much boredom etc.
All things associated with additional layer(s) between sovereign and the actual decision making may be necessary in big societies (more people than 9) but they also dilute legitimacy due to proxy layers. This may also mean that voters for particular proxy do not have much in common with voters for another proxy which makes accepting the decisions that are not to one's liking difficult or impossible. In other words democracy is difficult in scaling. If you use it for government system, then it will require a skilled and charismatic leader. But these can do good and evil as skills & charisma have nothing to do with moral. Talking about moral - the hypermoral that modern assholes mob preach is nothing but - the vulgodemocrats have no clue about democracy or about human rights, they just blather about it or otherwise abuse it, It may be that with increasing population density you get less and less freedom, More diversity may also mean less and less freedom but also less and less democracy exactly because you decisions are limited by considerations of minority rights. In modern western society rights of common men especially of common hetero men are less than appreciated. When we celebrated freedom at the fall of communism few decades ago, we expected to live in freedom and democracy was means to to achieve it. It could have been.
I appreciate your sentiment and for long years I was convinced about that too. In fact I still think the only thing that can save democracy is practice. There are significant obstacles tho. The bigger the society governed by democracy the bigger the problems with legitimacy and the social glue needed for the whole system to work for at least majority if not for all. It kind of work in counties of the Swiss federation. Yet you can see where this leads when the people decide against establishment and external forces of oppression. You could see it for instance in Greece when they voted against certain policies (as reasonable or not they may have been) and have been then forced to accept them anyway by their government. The marxist hysteria that goes through each of the western societies claiming superiority of feelings and ideology over facts and reason is another. Add to this what the IQ distribution in a population tells you - if 10% cannot be even drafted into the military to become a cannon fodder due to their low ability yet they have the same voting rights as you do - and slashdot readers, even those infected with social justice syndrome have above average analytical skills - what does that tell you about quality of decisions made in a group including such a mix? . Throughout history democracy's success is rather based on accident than efficiency. Possibly it allows for easier removal of unwanted politicians or preventing dynasties but when society stabilizes itself into oligarchy it is just a failure anyway and it can hardly work in times of fast arriving challenges. Same histoy books show that, there is no system that is durable and just. No matter what after a while the corruption and/or dementia start to plague any system. Add to this religions that see themselves entitled to control society and politics as well as industry (there is at least one that does that and has success in achieving such control in many states all around the world mostly bringing suffering and oppression to most involved) and conflicts that are usually resolved by discussion and compromise become unsolvable meaning that whoever wins the vote will have to oppress the ones that lost it, just as well as the ones that lost it will see themselves as rightful defenders of democracy and justice including use of violence if need be. I am not sure if there is cure for this. I suppose not. So exercise in democracy while working for some time will have to have order shaking bumps changing social order and fixing it for some time till next bump arises. I personally think we are close to such set of bumps. The technology, demography, politics all seem to exacerbate problems at the moment. No amount of democracy can fix shaking and pain caused by the bumps. A skillful leadership (democratically elected or not) may help.
I wonder what is this social science, you talk about? I mean science is a way to find explanations for things based on facts and reason. According to wikipedia and my dictionary the word comes from Latin word meaning 'knowledge'. How does social science with significant 'social justice' element (i.e. bias) fit into this? If even particle physics does exclude people based on their (male) gender then social science cannot really be better.
As for your claims of them social 'scientists' not having done full analysis just yet and hushing with their significant results. This is just plain wrong - in modern times a claim of females being oppressed has such political weight that no serious scientist should have claims based on partial data. Then there is this other thing: besides ex.boyfriends having the urge to call their former better parts names - how many of the bad words (assuming they are really bad and not something like: 'this was a mistake because...' or 'you looked better in another rock' etc) were written by females? This again causes serious problem in our culture sliding ever faster into matriarchat.
Yet another thought I had - according to modern social science the gender thing is nothing more than a cultural construct. How does that work here - are these abused females sure about their identity and how many of the abusers can be culturally identified as males and females and how does that look like in a comparison between all combinations?
Besides all this, I do not think we can have facts and reason based arguments about such subjects so I apologize and commit for searching of reeducation camp in the vicinity, being white old male etc.