and the majority disapprove of Congress, how is that working out for us?
Honestly disapproval means nothing as apparently none of the mentioned have done enough to sufficiently get people off their butts. Well the Republicans offended a lot of their conservative base to cause a splinter group, but as whole most Americans are completely satisfied as verbally only expressing disapproval.
As in, doing whatever requires no effort or the least amount of it.
What are they supposed to do? A large (in american politics terms) group of people tried really hard to get 'hope and change' elected and look at what that did?
By 'get people off their butts' what do you mean exactly? Not patronizing, just curious what you think a solution would be, other than trying to get someone you believe in elected (to president in the above case). Are you suggesting some sort of revolt or more physical action than campaigning and voting?
It seems that there really isn't much option for change as far as actual politics go... As South Park noted, you usually get the choice between A Giant Douche and A Turd Sandwich.
That's all well and good, but why do you think that an independent candidate can make a difference? Particularly in an entrenched 2 party system, that would likely marginalize them to the extreme, and can barely make progress on its own? If we could somehow vote to have more than 2 parties, I'd be all about that, but it seems highly unlikely given the current state of things.
I agree it would be a change but how can you be certain that independent 'party' person will be any better than the previous crop of Rs and Ds? Especially (and some may call this tin-foil hattery) if there is a massive surveillance regime in place that is digging up (or can dig up) dirt on any politician for blackmail?
Most of the people I talk to say things like "I would vote for this independent candidate because I believe in his ideals and his statements. But I cant vote for him because it's like throwing my vote away."
IE People in my circles generally vote against democrats or against republicans (actually Im Canadian so it's more like vote against Liberals vs against Conservatives... but you get the idea). They dont care about the person their voting for, they are voting to keep someone out.
My concern is that the two major parties are basically the same, so the dichotomy isn't rep vs dem; it's voting for what you believe in vs voting for what you don't believe in. If you vote for what you dont believe in, you are truly throwing away your vote.
There is no proof that an indy would be better than mainstream, but politics is never about proof, and always about trust. You have to trust that the person you're voting for will do whats right for you. If you get your trust broken, that's a different kettle of fish entirely.
If you truly favour one politician in the mainstream, then by all means vote for them. But if you're just voting against someone, you are throwing your vote away.
I've often wondered why they don't send a dragline digger to Mars, so they can dig a decent trench. When Spirit's wheel broke and they started dragging it along, digging a little trench, they made a nice discovery and that was with something not designed to dig at all.
If they could get a few feet down, who knows what they could find?!
The Exomars project will land a 2 metre vertical drill on the surface, sampling much deeper than anything done so far.
It's just a question of priorities. Drilling 4cm into a rock with a specific surface abrasion tool is a long way from plunging a 2 metre metal shaft into unknown terrain. Engineering this so it has no chance of jamming, breaking, overheating etc is not gonna be a trivial task. How do you lubricate a drill without contaminating the environment and with such a wide temperature variation?
Makes it harder to what compunds are indigenous and what you just brought yourself. No use shouting Eureka over some organic compound in a hole you just spilled oil in.
In general great effort is made to ensure that probes don't contain any biological contaminates so if we do discover signs of life we're very certain it wasn't a microbe that hitched a ride.
As far as contamination from drilling (due to lubricants or something else entirely) I imagine that the desire for general cleanliness is for much the same reason. If we're going to spend hundreds of millions of billions of dollars on a probe to another world we want to be really confident anything interesting we find is actually from that world and not Earth.
It may have been big, but curiosity has a scoop to scoop up dirt, a drill, and a laser that can vaporize rock to look inside of them. It's not like the rovers can only look at the surface.
It depends on the virus strain, in some strains it's the young and strong who die easy due to having a stronger immune system reaction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytokine_storm
There is a huge difference though, in that millions and millions of people get the flu, and very small percentage of people die. With things like bird/swine flu, a much, much higher percentage of people die.
I think in the short term, companies that develop these things will behave ethically without any oversight (by making machines "enjoy" what they are doing) because doing something else would be inefficient or counterproductive. Why would you make an expensive thinking machine miserable? Humans that are happy are way more productive - and machines that are based off humans will be as well.
In the long term, if and when these things become mass-produced and cheap, people may want to do terrible things to them, in the same vein as animal torture. That may be when laws get put in place to protect them.
Ethically? I bet they will kill them thousands of times during development.
Suppose you, at one stage, have a simulation of a brain that isn't quite there; it talks and sees, but it's audio system doesn't work right. What do you do?
I don't see anything unethical about shutting it off. If nobody is emotionally attached to it, and it doesn't suffer when it is shut off, who is harmed by the shutdown?
As long as they do not care that they could be "shut off", I see nothing wrong with it. If they dislike that notion (like real humans do), then the possibility of shutdown would cause suffering and would be immoral/unethical to allow.
You're assuming that the machines will care about being shut off - we would probably design them so that they don't care about this, because this makes them easier to work with. And then it's no longer unethical.
I don't know. If you can simulate a brain, you can alter it. And if you can alter it, you can make it artificially happy, or simply remove areas hosting willfulness, sleep, sexuality or independent thought. Won't make them suitable for all tasks, but for some it would be more efficient.
Your New Statesman link only talks about pseudoscience and doesn't support your assertion. The mind is an emergent property of the brain. If you can't simulate a mind by simulating a brain, then what in your opinion would it take? Or is it impossible because we all have ineffable souls that the laws of physics mysteriously cannot access?
This is exactly the sort of problem that convinced me that consciousness/mind must be a fundamental part of the (multi/uni)verse, and not something that "emerges" from matter.
I find it terribly unconvincing that a specific arrangement of matter, or even an algorithm in software, just simply "spawns" a discrete consciousness from nothing. It might make sense if there was an underlying "consciousness field" or some such concept that the matter-arrangement tapped into in some manner.
> I find it terribly unconvincing that a specific arrangement of matter, or even an algorithm in software, just simply "spawns" a discrete consciousness from nothing.
It's not only unconvincing but unscientific, a pseudo explanation.
If you did want to stop CNC machines being used in Iran or North Korea, why not just use the GPS chip to disable the machines if they're inside those countries?
I don't see what's to be gained by causing the machines to fail if they've been moved to the other end of a factory.
Thanks for that. Is it also true that those ending in -icillin (amoxicillin, penicillin, etc) come from fungi - a major competitor to bacteria? Or am I mistaken?
Please read something about Russian history. Most early socialists leaders were Jews. Some prominent anti-socialism authors are bordering antisemitism (Solzhenitsyn).
Places at universities were not 'for everyone'. One needed political connections, family history and bribes. If your father would emigrate to west, you may forget about higher education.
Most restricted were elite humanitarian studies (philosophy, film-making...). Technical studies were bit more free, but still had lot of restrictions.
How does any of that contradict the assertion that antisemitism is older than Socialism? Are you denying that antisemitism continued under the Soviet Union, even after the death of Stalin, couched in the language of anti-Zionism?
If you are saying that being Jewish was only one of several reasons for being discriminated against in the Soviet Union, then I agree. If you deny that Jewishness had nothing to do with it and it all had to do with being intellectuals, not having the right connections, etc., then you are losing me.
> Are you denying that antisemitism continued under the Soviet Union
Yes I do. There were so many Jews in soviet party, there is even "theory" that soviet revolution was Jewish conspiracy. [1]. Stalin initially supported Israel state with weapons.
Antisemitism started in 60ties, after Israel becomed US oriented and several people from soviet union emigrated there. After that several soviet jews had relatives on west and were perceived as 'politically unreliable' and potential spies. There were mainly political reasons for discrimination, it really turned into antisemitism in 90ties after soviet union.
So the whole Doctor's Plot purge in the fifties just so happened to target mostly Jews and people with Jewish names? This was the most overtly antisemitic episode in Soviet history. Just because Jews were overrepresented in the Bolshevik Revolution, it doesn't mean that antisemitism simply disappeared overnight. Remember, the most prominent Jew in the Bolshevik Revolution was Leon Trotsky, who became Stalin's enemy.
As for Stalin's initial support of Israel, well, he initially signed a secret non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany as well. One can read too much into foreign policy decisions.
Stalin, despite being non-Russian himself, targeted non-Russians in the Soviet Union in purges and deportations on the pretext that they were politically unreliable and potential spies. You can choose to take these excuses at face value, but in the end you have to recognize that in effect they suffered largely because of being the wrong ethnicity.
Yes, Stalin killed people of all backgrounds. But so-called reactionary nationalities were specifically targeted for NKVD operations. For example, the NKVD would round up people with Polish-sounding names from telephone books during the Great Purge. Entire peoples were deported to Central Asia—you can't deny an ethnic dimension to his Terror.
Whatever Stalin's initial intentions were for the Doctors' Plot case, it ended up taking on a clearly antisemitic character, with the media hyping up the threat of Zionism. We may note that while Khrushchev denounced the Doctors' Plot as having been fabricated by Stalin, he didn't denounce the antisemitic rhetoric.
As far as I know NKVD did not massacred Jews. A few dozens arrests and closed elite universities does not really compare to tragedies of other nations (hint: I am Polish).
My point is that there were instances of Jews being discriminated against in the Soviet Union, and in the case of the Doctors' Plot, even being targeted in purges. I agree that many other nations suffered far worse under the Soviet regime, though the Soviet Jews obviously suffered much more under different hands during WWII.
Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, but when Anti-Zionist rhetoric is used to condemn anyone with Jewish names, that sounds pretty antisemitic to me.
Antisemitism in USSR was rampant before 60s as well, and in Eastern Slavic regions in general, even before USSR
Read history of cities such as Gomel or Bobruysk.
http://www.jewishgomel.com/en/Jewish-history-og-Gomel
"...
The wave of pogroms in Imperial Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century did not bypass Gomel. From August 29 - September 1, 1903, there was a pogrom in Gomel, during which ten Jews were killed, many were wounded and much Jewish property was looted. A Jewish self-defense was able to rebuff the pogrom, the first time in the history of the Russian Empire. After the pogrom there was a famous trial in Gomel (October 1904 - January 1905, November 1906), where not just the perpetrators of the pogrom were tried but also the 36 members of the Jewish self-defense.
...."
Also please do not forget one of the main drivers for the subsequent prosecutions, a document forgery called 'Protocols'
"...
The Protocols appeared in print in the Russian Empire as early as 1903. The antisemitic tract was published as a serialized set of articles in Znamya, a Black Hundreds newspaper owned by Pavel Krushevan. It appeared again in 1905 as a final chapter (Chapter XII) of a second edition of Velikoe v malom i antikhrist (The Great in the Small & Antichrist), a book by Serge Nilus. In 1906, it appeared in pamphlet form edited by G. Butmi.[25]
..."
So your claim
"... Antisemitism started in 60ties, after Israel becomed US oriented and several people from soviet union emigrated there. ..."
is patently false.
This story in the OP brought tears to my eyes. I was no where near as good in mathematics as E Frenkel, but having a Jewish mother, and half Armenian father (and therefore Armenian last name) -- insured that even if I had 5 times more talent I did -- I would still not win the admission game.
Essentially the 'rektor' (or the dean) of University I was going to, apparently said (and, no, I did not hear it directly) -- that '... he was not going to prepare workforce for israel, and that's why admitting Jews was not in his interest).
Having parents whose last name is Armenian or/and Jewish-sounding, is the an obstacle that could realistically be overcome either by avoiding it (e.g. going to a place where Jews could get in) or 'special friends', or a bribe.
My grandparents, especially my maternal granddad had it much worse. Every time I think I am stressing over things -- all I had to do is to remember what he went through
(Buchenwald than Russian prison, where he was tortured by authorities asking him how he could survive Buchenvald while being a Jew)
Important though that neither my grandparents, nor I, nor my parents -- ever wanted to have some kind of 'affirmative' action or 'institutionalized help' as a repayment for previous mistreatment.
Instead, all we ever wanted is to be treated 'the same'.
I rarely write or reply on this kinds of topics, but seeing this story, and then a Altero's statement based, I presume, on the lack of knowledge, elicited this reply.
Take a look at what I said. I said that after the death of Stalin, antisemitism in the Soviet Union was couched in the language of anti-Zionism. Stalin died in 1953, by which time the state of Israel was already a few years old. Incidentally, Zionism dates from the end of the 19th century.
You maybe quite right, but from materials I presented in this thread one may suggest that there was a policy of enforced brain supply to regional applied sciences institutions, that is why guys were refused entry to Moscow best universities. The reasons for this hidden regulation may have been purely pragmatic.
Okay, I challenge you to eat zero calories and still maintain weight.