It's 'precisely' the point, because when you pay x billion dollars for the space station, or for more bombs for Iraq, or for AIDS drugs for poor countries, that's money you're not going to spend somewhere else. When Congress agrees to fund NASA, they do because the perceived nonmonetary value of the station exceeds the cost of maintaining it. It's an economic calculation that incorporates some nebulous sense of the total value of the program, which was my whole point from the beginning. Contrast this with your nonsensical statement that the huge wasted expense of the war somehow justifies additional spending rather than less.
I'm done.
I know this is kind of weird...but I've always fantasized abotu sneaking into that vault in Paris and filing a little bit off the kilogram mass standard. And maybe just trimming down the end of the meter stick a bit. On some level I feel like if you could do this, the world would be plunged into chaos within a few weeks.
The world isn't a line item budget, but somebody has to make the decision to fund these things, and there's only so much cash to go around. Go ahead and tell Congress that they really ought to keep paying for the ISS because you, personally, feel that a "few billion dollars is a really cheap price" to avoid setting back manned space flight.
Of course these decisions are made based on things that aren't easily priced, but how much is a space program really worth to you? Should we eliminate foreign aid for poor countries? Welfare? Endowments for the arts? What have we already sacrificed in order to pay for the space program we have?
You can pretend the financial realities don't matter, but you can't have everything. At some point, someone has to be willing to pull the plug. Granted, at the point, I'd rather see them end the war than decomission the ISS, but as you so adroitly pointed out, I'm not part of the cost/benefit analysis on this.
And if we lived in a 'natural' state, we'd all be dead at 30 or so from the parasites or disease from food we've hunted for ourselves, or wiped out by a hazard that current society protects us from. We'd take out our aggression with a little ritualized violence (medieval jousting, maybe, or a rousing game of Aztec soccer where the losing team loses their heads), and every so often satisfy our natural xenophobia by making war on another tribe.
I agree with you so far as to say that our current society produces some undesirable offshoots, and more physical and social activity probably wouldn't hurt anyone, but just because we evolved a certain way doesn't mean we should reject anything that compromises that original way of life. Hell, when agriculture was first developed, there were probably hunter-gatherers who predicted nothing but gloom and doom, but we're still here.
Presumably addiction here means that playing games stimulates the pleasure centers in the brain, which leads players to play more in order to sustain the dopamine rush (or endorphins, or whatever). But can anybody explain to me why this is any different from, say, somebody who loves playing soccer, or playing piano? I know people who get cranky if they don't go to the gym at least once a day--are they addicted? What makes gaming (or gambling, for that matter) an addiction?
Here's your tinfoil hat thought of the day: at least one major drug company is currently working on drugs intended to treat nonspecific 'compulsive' behaviors, and the list of populations they're targeting includes gamblers, overeaters, and gamers. Bit creepy, or is it just me?
The question is what benefit we currently expect to derive from the station (as it will exist through the remainder of its troubled assembly and expected lifespan). If our estimate of that benefit, made today, is valued less than our current estimate of the cost of completetion, then completing the station is just throwing good money after bad. To say that we've already spent too much to stop now is just silly.
Of course, with a situation like this, it's tough to argue that you could really accurately estimate either side of the equation, so speaking as an economist, it beats the hell out of me.
I think you're looking at it backwards. You're looking at the world today and saying, "there's no one 'up and coming' today who came from a background of violent crime" and thinking that this means that criminal enterprise really does wipe out all those stupid enough to engage in it. My point is that the ones who succesfully make the transition to legitimacy are successful precisely because they escape the past so completely that there isn't anyone gunning for them, and they don't carry the stigma of their origin. The ones who succeed aren't the ones you read about in the papers.
And while I'd agree with you that there's really no piece of property for which I'd be willing to risk 20 years in prison for, that's a personal value judgment. If I had no education, no prospects, and no one to live for, who's to say what risks I might be willing to take? For example, research has shown that the typical crack dealer makes less than minimum wage for a job in which he could easily be killed or arrested. Why? Because he hopes to be one of the few who climbs the ladder and reaches a better paying, more prestigious position. The odds are long, but the prize is so big, and the alternatives so sparse, that it seems like a good idea.
Using violence as a means to an end may be morally improper, but that doesn't necessarily make it dumb. Without citing specific examples, there are a number of times in 'The Sopranos' where a little violence serves as a very effective may of removing some roadbloack, or of conveying a message. A thug beating someone with a bat for looking at him the wrong way is "dumb;" a capo judiciously ordering an act of violence is strategic. It seems pretty obvious to me that as long as people don't automatically have their every wish fulfilled, there will be some people who will be willing to steal or extort to get what they want, and sometimes it works. Of course, as you point out, mroe often it seems to ends in tragedy. That's largely the point of the Godfather trilogy: Michael enters the family believing that within a few years he'll be able to buy his family legitimacy and leave behind their violent past, only to realize that he will never escape, and ultimately the penalty for his sins is visited upon his children.
And really, don't kid yourself. The Kennedy family is probably the single best example of a family making the transition from shady to legitimate in our modern time, but they're certainly not the only ones to have done it.
And if you think back to season one, when Junior's hitmen go after Tony, they blast his bottle of orange juice, but fail to kill him. To me, that was always sort of the show's way of indicating that, unlike the characters themselves, they acknowledged all that Godfather trivia but they weren't bound by it. Contrast that with Christopher's "Lucas Brasi sleeps with the fishes!"
You have completely refuted my post with your laser-like focus on the matter at issue.
To be honest with you, I was pretty happy watching BSG, until they decided midway through this season that they were willing to sacrifice consistency of the characters and sensible plotting in service of the mythology.
The season 2 finale shook everything up in a way that was dramatic, but completely organic. It made sense that things happened the way they did, and so it was genuinely suspenseful. The season 3 finale, on the other hand, pissed away the arc about Baltar on trial with a well-delivered, but legally irrelevant speech from Apollo, and then tried to manufacture suspense by creating the 'cliffhanger' of whether or not half the cast are really Cylons.
I sat grimly through half a season of filler episodes on child labor, and busted airlocks, but the finale was too much. Hopefully the final season will turn things around.
Ooh, ooh! Maybe in the last episode, all the cast members could listen to some Jimi Hendrix music and decide that they're ALL CYLONS! And the colonies weren't really destroyed--it was just some kind of CRAZY hallucination, like Starbuck really being dead! Then the series finale could suck as many balls as the season 3 finale!
The problem is that most 'true believers' aren't just content to hold their own beliefs, and to indoctrinate their kids while they're young and accepting. All the born-agains I know says that it's also god's will for them to convert others and "bring us to Christ's truth." That's not tolerance, and if the rational people of the world refuse to make a stand against this kind of ancient bullshit, then religious mania will take us over. Just look at the 'moral majority' of the 70s carrying Reagan into office, or our current situation with George Bush.
And it's ridiculous to put religious belief on par with scientific explanations for how things came to be. Science generates hypotheses; those hypotheses are tested with observation and experiment, and the ones that hold up become theories, which will be amended or rejected when contradictory evidence is found. When science doesn't know an answer, it speculates, but it does not proclaim. Contrast this with religion, which tells us god made everything, and our brains can't comprehend the awesomeness of it all. What proof do they offer for these extraordinary claims? Oh, no proof, see, because it's all about faith--believing DESPITE the fact that all they really have to back it up is a book, and the words of 'holy men' who, of course, have a vested interest in keep the sheeple flocking in one direction.
Religion is poison to rationality, and we lose sight of that at our own peril.
I enjoyed the show, but I feel okay that it ended where it did. The so-called cliffhanger pretty well summed up the whole spirit of the show: stuff's really messed up, some people will descend into savagery, but others will hang together and try to keep things soldiering on. Sure, if they did decide to bring it back, we might learn how that final battle would have ended, but where to from there? Better to end on something of a high point* than to fizzle through a second, lackluster season.
*I say something of a high point because upon reviewing, it's clear how much better the early episodes were compared to the later ones. The more we learned about the bombs and the plot behind them, the less interesting the whole story became.
And my point is that most gamers have no desire to commit violent actions. Video games aren't a corrupting influence that creates violent intention where formerly there was none. If a kid is inclined to violence, he's going to do something violent. If he's a heavy gamer, it might be game-influenced. If he likes movies, maybe he'll act out a film scene. The media may influence the form, but it doesn't magically create the desire to harm other people.
To speak to your example, if the idiot kids hurt emulating wrestling were big comic fans instead, they might have tried to fly like Superman. Or if they enjoyed extreme sports, maybe they'd have tried some kind of atheletic stunt. The point is, wrestling is merely tangential--the root cause is lack of common sense, and restricting access to wrestling won't address that.
People like to blame video games because it's a lot easier than addressing the root causes of youth violence, lousy upbringing probably being the chief one. Until we see otherwise happy, well-adjusted kids from stable families turning into murderous zombies because they played GTA, there are better uses for our preventive efforts.
"It's about the lack of self control and discipline that causes kids to recreate what they see/do in a videogame."
I think that to suggest that it's self control and discipline that prevents kids from acting out what they do in games is pretty damn absurd. Do you think that every kid (or even most) who plays Counterstrike is thinking, "man, it would be so great to go machine gun my school...ah, but I really shouldn't."
I don't think most people have any desire to act out violently in real life. If a kid comes from a lousy background, or has rotten parents, then those things may be sufficient to send him down a dangerous path without video games having anything to do with it.
Do you really think that one of these people who is susceptible to media violence is going to watch '24' one night and think, "hey, yeah, it might be fun to tie some guy to a chair and torture him"?
Violent media may inspire the form of violent action--for example, I recall the case of two criminals who tried to kill their victims by making them swallow drain cleaner after they saw it in a 'Dirty Harry' movie. But would you really argue that but for the movie, they wouldn't have have sufficient "violent tendencies" to kill people?
Rules or no rules, there seem to be a lot of Jack Bauers, Supermen, and Jesuses. And from personal experience, the mail alias system at my alma mater allows you to set up nearly anything as your e-mail name, which in turn makes it possible to call yourself pretty much whatever you want in facebook.
If you read the article, it isn't even clear at this point that the kid who's being suspended was involved in producing the video, either by acting up in the classroom or by assisting in filming it. It sounds like all he did was post a link to it on his Myspace page, and the school is busting him because they want him to rat out the people who DID make it.
I'd argue that 9/11 was a different beast in this case, because most hijackings don't end in a mass slaughter. I believe that (at least until 9/11) the conventional wisdom was to cooperate with the hijacker on the grounds that it increases the likelihood of a non-lethal resolution for everyone involved. However, the passengers on United 93 knew what the hijackers intended, and made the decision to fight based on the knowledge that if they didn't, they were dead anyway.
In the school shooting context though, you're right. Neither the Columbine shooters nor Cho gave any indication that they were going to stop killing until they were forced to stop, and in this case, a mob-style attack is probably the best response. But then, of course, how do you motivate people to charge when they all know that the first person to rush is most likely to be shot down? (In fact, one VT cadet tried to tackle Cho from behind, but was immediately shot and killed). Nobody wants to be first to the party. So while hiding may not work, there's still a strong incentive to keep your head down and hope somebody else will save your ass.
I seriously doubt you'll ever see a school district encouraging students to "mob" a shooter, because the parents of every kid blown away in the process of doing so will sue the hell out of the school district.
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It's 'precisely' the point, because when you pay x billion dollars for the space station, or for more bombs for Iraq, or for AIDS drugs for poor countries, that's money you're not going to spend somewhere else. When Congress agrees to fund NASA, they do because the perceived nonmonetary value of the station exceeds the cost of maintaining it. It's an economic calculation that incorporates some nebulous sense of the total value of the program, which was my whole point from the beginning. Contrast this with your nonsensical statement that the huge wasted expense of the war somehow justifies additional spending rather than less. I'm done.
I know this is kind of weird...but I've always fantasized abotu sneaking into that vault in Paris and filing a little bit off the kilogram mass standard. And maybe just trimming down the end of the meter stick a bit. On some level I feel like if you could do this, the world would be plunged into chaos within a few weeks.
You're my hero for knowing the lyrics to that song. Seriously, that's fantastic.
The world isn't a line item budget, but somebody has to make the decision to fund these things, and there's only so much cash to go around. Go ahead and tell Congress that they really ought to keep paying for the ISS because you, personally, feel that a "few billion dollars is a really cheap price" to avoid setting back manned space flight.
Of course these decisions are made based on things that aren't easily priced, but how much is a space program really worth to you? Should we eliminate foreign aid for poor countries? Welfare? Endowments for the arts? What have we already sacrificed in order to pay for the space program we have?
You can pretend the financial realities don't matter, but you can't have everything. At some point, someone has to be willing to pull the plug. Granted, at the point, I'd rather see them end the war than decomission the ISS, but as you so adroitly pointed out, I'm not part of the cost/benefit analysis on this.
And if we lived in a 'natural' state, we'd all be dead at 30 or so from the parasites or disease from food we've hunted for ourselves, or wiped out by a hazard that current society protects us from. We'd take out our aggression with a little ritualized violence (medieval jousting, maybe, or a rousing game of Aztec soccer where the losing team loses their heads), and every so often satisfy our natural xenophobia by making war on another tribe.
I agree with you so far as to say that our current society produces some undesirable offshoots, and more physical and social activity probably wouldn't hurt anyone, but just because we evolved a certain way doesn't mean we should reject anything that compromises that original way of life. Hell, when agriculture was first developed, there were probably hunter-gatherers who predicted nothing but gloom and doom, but we're still here.
Presumably addiction here means that playing games stimulates the pleasure centers in the brain, which leads players to play more in order to sustain the dopamine rush (or endorphins, or whatever). But can anybody explain to me why this is any different from, say, somebody who loves playing soccer, or playing piano? I know people who get cranky if they don't go to the gym at least once a day--are they addicted? What makes gaming (or gambling, for that matter) an addiction?
Here's your tinfoil hat thought of the day: at least one major drug company is currently working on drugs intended to treat nonspecific 'compulsive' behaviors, and the list of populations they're targeting includes gamblers, overeaters, and gamers. Bit creepy, or is it just me?
The question is what benefit we currently expect to derive from the station (as it will exist through the remainder of its troubled assembly and expected lifespan). If our estimate of that benefit, made today, is valued less than our current estimate of the cost of completetion, then completing the station is just throwing good money after bad. To say that we've already spent too much to stop now is just silly. Of course, with a situation like this, it's tough to argue that you could really accurately estimate either side of the equation, so speaking as an economist, it beats the hell out of me.
I think you're looking at it backwards. You're looking at the world today and saying, "there's no one 'up and coming' today who came from a background of violent crime" and thinking that this means that criminal enterprise really does wipe out all those stupid enough to engage in it. My point is that the ones who succesfully make the transition to legitimacy are successful precisely because they escape the past so completely that there isn't anyone gunning for them, and they don't carry the stigma of their origin. The ones who succeed aren't the ones you read about in the papers. And while I'd agree with you that there's really no piece of property for which I'd be willing to risk 20 years in prison for, that's a personal value judgment. If I had no education, no prospects, and no one to live for, who's to say what risks I might be willing to take? For example, research has shown that the typical crack dealer makes less than minimum wage for a job in which he could easily be killed or arrested. Why? Because he hopes to be one of the few who climbs the ladder and reaches a better paying, more prestigious position. The odds are long, but the prize is so big, and the alternatives so sparse, that it seems like a good idea.
Using violence as a means to an end may be morally improper, but that doesn't necessarily make it dumb. Without citing specific examples, there are a number of times in 'The Sopranos' where a little violence serves as a very effective may of removing some roadbloack, or of conveying a message. A thug beating someone with a bat for looking at him the wrong way is "dumb;" a capo judiciously ordering an act of violence is strategic. It seems pretty obvious to me that as long as people don't automatically have their every wish fulfilled, there will be some people who will be willing to steal or extort to get what they want, and sometimes it works. Of course, as you point out, mroe often it seems to ends in tragedy. That's largely the point of the Godfather trilogy: Michael enters the family believing that within a few years he'll be able to buy his family legitimacy and leave behind their violent past, only to realize that he will never escape, and ultimately the penalty for his sins is visited upon his children. And really, don't kid yourself. The Kennedy family is probably the single best example of a family making the transition from shady to legitimate in our modern time, but they're certainly not the only ones to have done it.
And if you think back to season one, when Junior's hitmen go after Tony, they blast his bottle of orange juice, but fail to kill him. To me, that was always sort of the show's way of indicating that, unlike the characters themselves, they acknowledged all that Godfather trivia but they weren't bound by it. Contrast that with Christopher's "Lucas Brasi sleeps with the fishes!"
You have completely refuted my post with your laser-like focus on the matter at issue.
To be honest with you, I was pretty happy watching BSG, until they decided midway through this season that they were willing to sacrifice consistency of the characters and sensible plotting in service of the mythology.
The season 2 finale shook everything up in a way that was dramatic, but completely organic. It made sense that things happened the way they did, and so it was genuinely suspenseful. The season 3 finale, on the other hand, pissed away the arc about Baltar on trial with a well-delivered, but legally irrelevant speech from Apollo, and then tried to manufacture suspense by creating the 'cliffhanger' of whether or not half the cast are really Cylons.
I sat grimly through half a season of filler episodes on child labor, and busted airlocks, but the finale was too much. Hopefully the final season will turn things around.
Ooh, ooh! Maybe in the last episode, all the cast members could listen to some Jimi Hendrix music and decide that they're ALL CYLONS! And the colonies weren't really destroyed--it was just some kind of CRAZY hallucination, like Starbuck really being dead! Then the series finale could suck as many balls as the season 3 finale!
backwards compatible guitar--isn't that what Jimi Hendrix played?
Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk.
The problem is that most 'true believers' aren't just content to hold their own beliefs, and to indoctrinate their kids while they're young and accepting. All the born-agains I know says that it's also god's will for them to convert others and "bring us to Christ's truth." That's not tolerance, and if the rational people of the world refuse to make a stand against this kind of ancient bullshit, then religious mania will take us over. Just look at the 'moral majority' of the 70s carrying Reagan into office, or our current situation with George Bush.
And it's ridiculous to put religious belief on par with scientific explanations for how things came to be. Science generates hypotheses; those hypotheses are tested with observation and experiment, and the ones that hold up become theories, which will be amended or rejected when contradictory evidence is found. When science doesn't know an answer, it speculates, but it does not proclaim. Contrast this with religion, which tells us god made everything, and our brains can't comprehend the awesomeness of it all. What proof do they offer for these extraordinary claims? Oh, no proof, see, because it's all about faith--believing DESPITE the fact that all they really have to back it up is a book, and the words of 'holy men' who, of course, have a vested interest in keep the sheeple flocking in one direction.
Religion is poison to rationality, and we lose sight of that at our own peril.
Some of the contractors might tell you it actually took a lot longer, but Satan just sent them here to deceive us.
I enjoyed the show, but I feel okay that it ended where it did. The so-called cliffhanger pretty well summed up the whole spirit of the show: stuff's really messed up, some people will descend into savagery, but others will hang together and try to keep things soldiering on. Sure, if they did decide to bring it back, we might learn how that final battle would have ended, but where to from there? Better to end on something of a high point* than to fizzle through a second, lackluster season.
*I say something of a high point because upon reviewing, it's clear how much better the early episodes were compared to the later ones. The more we learned about the bombs and the plot behind them, the less interesting the whole story became.
And my point is that most gamers have no desire to commit violent actions. Video games aren't a corrupting influence that creates violent intention where formerly there was none. If a kid is inclined to violence, he's going to do something violent. If he's a heavy gamer, it might be game-influenced. If he likes movies, maybe he'll act out a film scene. The media may influence the form, but it doesn't magically create the desire to harm other people.
To speak to your example, if the idiot kids hurt emulating wrestling were big comic fans instead, they might have tried to fly like Superman. Or if they enjoyed extreme sports, maybe they'd have tried some kind of atheletic stunt. The point is, wrestling is merely tangential--the root cause is lack of common sense, and restricting access to wrestling won't address that.
People like to blame video games because it's a lot easier than addressing the root causes of youth violence, lousy upbringing probably being the chief one. Until we see otherwise happy, well-adjusted kids from stable families turning into murderous zombies because they played GTA, there are better uses for our preventive efforts.
"It's about the lack of self control and discipline that causes kids to recreate what they see/do in a videogame."
I think that to suggest that it's self control and discipline that prevents kids from acting out what they do in games is pretty damn absurd. Do you think that every kid (or even most) who plays Counterstrike is thinking, "man, it would be so great to go machine gun my school...ah, but I really shouldn't."
I don't think most people have any desire to act out violently in real life. If a kid comes from a lousy background, or has rotten parents, then those things may be sufficient to send him down a dangerous path without video games having anything to do with it.
Do you really think that one of these people who is susceptible to media violence is going to watch '24' one night and think, "hey, yeah, it might be fun to tie some guy to a chair and torture him"? Violent media may inspire the form of violent action--for example, I recall the case of two criminals who tried to kill their victims by making them swallow drain cleaner after they saw it in a 'Dirty Harry' movie. But would you really argue that but for the movie, they wouldn't have have sufficient "violent tendencies" to kill people?
Rules or no rules, there seem to be a lot of Jack Bauers, Supermen, and Jesuses. And from personal experience, the mail alias system at my alma mater allows you to set up nearly anything as your e-mail name, which in turn makes it possible to call yourself pretty much whatever you want in facebook.
I don't have any mod points, but if I did, you'd probably get one.
If you read the article, it isn't even clear at this point that the kid who's being suspended was involved in producing the video, either by acting up in the classroom or by assisting in filming it. It sounds like all he did was post a link to it on his Myspace page, and the school is busting him because they want him to rat out the people who DID make it.
Just watch out for that black ice, man, or you might find yourself with half a face getting shot down in Finland.
I'd argue that 9/11 was a different beast in this case, because most hijackings don't end in a mass slaughter. I believe that (at least until 9/11) the conventional wisdom was to cooperate with the hijacker on the grounds that it increases the likelihood of a non-lethal resolution for everyone involved. However, the passengers on United 93 knew what the hijackers intended, and made the decision to fight based on the knowledge that if they didn't, they were dead anyway.
In the school shooting context though, you're right. Neither the Columbine shooters nor Cho gave any indication that they were going to stop killing until they were forced to stop, and in this case, a mob-style attack is probably the best response. But then, of course, how do you motivate people to charge when they all know that the first person to rush is most likely to be shot down? (In fact, one VT cadet tried to tackle Cho from behind, but was immediately shot and killed). Nobody wants to be first to the party. So while hiding may not work, there's still a strong incentive to keep your head down and hope somebody else will save your ass.
I seriously doubt you'll ever see a school district encouraging students to "mob" a shooter, because the parents of every kid blown away in the process of doing so will sue the hell out of the school district.