5DFractalTetris

Ain't this me?

People are quick to forget that the human mind is a firewall in computing environments. A car that can be remotely turned off by satellite signal is not a car with which I would want to share the road. Process automation will probably create the Runaway Train effect in due time.

I consider all distinguishing characteristics between people or groups of people to be projections utilized by human minds to motivate and bring forth highly-ritualized purifying violence, which ranges in intensity from inconsequential name-calling to full-scale genocide. My best historical example of this from pre-modernity was the 13th Century Cathar Purge, where the War refrain "Kill them all and let God sort them out" originates, and continues forth until this day. Records point to a similar practice within the Aztec regime, with self-sacrifice a common action to sustain the empire.

Given the advanced bureaucratic practices common to empires in precolonial America, it seems the Aztecs simply required regular sacrificial deaths (via suicide or homicide) to maintain their office, in addition to regularly liquifying prisoners or the enslaved. Like a death camp which ran on self-motivated suicide, for reasons of cosmic accounting.

Perhaps divine retribution is a better explanation than ritual sacrifice in theocratic regimes, in the case that a god or a group of gods require the death of the mortal body so the soul can face metaphysical justice for Earthly sin.

However, regardless of the metaphysical beliefs of a state, any entity of sufficient size & organization will often be recognized by an individual as possibly having godlike power over the individual's body. Whether or not that truth actually ritualizes state-sanctioned violence, or the diffused psychological impact of that violence can be called a sacrifice, is a matter of opinion; however, being that it is state-sanctioned it is obviously distinct from murder, and because these punishments often have no deterrent effect on the populace, their true nature is in camera obscura.

Disagree completely. Capital punishment has always been little more than ritual sacrifice. War itself may be little more than ritual sacrifice.

Because it evolved. You cannot outrun these.

...But could you match a platform to a slipcoach's velocity?

...It's unusual to me that Australians do police.

I have someone to chat to and they're aren't a bot, and maybe they have like a lifetime of experiences from a nation I will never really know and cannot really imagine. It's cool and I have utmost respect for it. I've worked with humans from places where food is considered sacred and given away for free, places where the Volkswagen is almost the only auto to be found, and humans who have survived genocides. They are worth a premium, sirs!!

MIT developed a molten glass extruder recently although I'm not sure it can do borosilicate: http://matter.media.mit.edu/environments/details/glass-ii

I am interested in the amount of specialized glasswork required by the institution. I also doubt that the glassware of tomorrow's science is even remotely like the glassware of today's. The next glassworker is more of a materials scientist, with glassware as a skill, probably; in much the same way as a programmer may know both Java and Python.

What about individuals who prefer tent dwelling and regular work (paid and volunteer) but eschew both illegal drug use and unemployment?

I have a tent I could call a home but am not entirely comfortable crashing wherever I can, although generally I like being outside as much as possible. Tent dwelling is also historically well-respected, hard housing being the niche of farmers and royalty. I'd go as far to say that if people in tents aren't safe it's not a good neighborhood, because tents are fragile. They're also not garbage: some of them are fireproof and UV resistant with two or three shells. And, if you've never built housing, I can tell you: it is a huge chore for hundreds of people, including chemical workers, lumberjacks, metalworkers, and coal miners.

Why not build a Black Rock City where the Burn never stops? If cities sponsored that niche, the gig economy would ramp up to "unstoppable machine" instantly. Sociologically, there's not much difference between a tent city at a festival and an apartment building with a range of incomes, in terms of deviancy and community struggles. From a housing and urban development perspective, some of the new textiles are better and more sustainable than industrial construction.

Excellent question. I think there's no philosophy to discuss, it is simply, "That person is driving a car in their clothes."

It's the cargo cult of Western Civilization, when Plato, Aristotle, Greece, and Rome are taught. Universities and teachers invoke the grandeur and largesse of ancient empires and philosophers, in the hope that the future will be more like the semblance of an idealized past. Whereas Greece and Rome had the shield and spear, now these have been replaced by technologically-advanced militaries, the same which created the cargo cults Feynman mentioned.

For one thing, Plato and Aristotle both assert that there's some sort of absolute truth or order to the world, but many other human traditions reject this idea and offer a variety of counterpoints. My favorite is that the questions of material/immaterial, monism/dualism are irrelevant, and that the universe is presided over by tricksters of various sorts with almost nothing to do with the co-occurring human world. There's Coyote, Loki, Anansi, Hermes, many mythical characters from across traditions who would have both Plato and Aristotle know they're merely daft professors, and there's no such thing as atoms nor caves.

These ideas and their idealized past always center on the idea of a natural human order. This arises from, in Plato, the idea that each mind is imprisoned in a series of closed cabinets, and can achieve perfect knowledge of neither truth nor justice; in Aristotle, from a first-moving cause within a universe in which all things are bound by a certain causality. Rome utilized an initiate religion which was used to structure business hours, and you can trivially extrapolate to Darwin and Victorian society, or wherever you like. And, generally speaking, things aren't great for people without the "advanced literacy." Philosophers from around the same era would lampoon all of these notions: Heraclitus insisted there was no cause and effect, Diogenes insisted there could be neither ideals nor wisdom. Even today you can find physicists who are skeptical of causality outside of controlled experiments.

When you look at alternatives to the Great Civilizations of the West and Near East, many of them vanished without written record (I wrote from my laptop, as a technology professional) or created massive citadels and then abandoned them the way one leaves behind sand castles (common throughout the Americas). The apocalypse prophecy of the Hopi tradition, Koyaanisqatsi, states that the world ends when people begin to mine for minerals. Note that after the fall of the Roman Empire, steel was lost to civilization (outside of China? Can't remember) for a long time. But of course, you can think of perhaps ten traditions, without using Google, where the end times have always been upon us.

To place faith in one particular myth, philosophy, or history as always defining of an individual person or their world, or somehow superior to another, is to err. Individual world-theories are often the o-rings of our society, to be puzzled out by inspectors like Feynman long after they fail catastrophically, but in other places their graceful interaction can indeed change the world forever and for the better.

Not sure what all these words will mean to you but I hope they helped you understand where my mind has wandered lately.

I've known one U.S. karoshi. Beyond that, I know maybe four or five individuals, myself included, in private and public sector U.S. roles, who have overwork habits: cigarettes and/or coffee, fasting diets, sleeplessness, social isolation, second jobs and volunteer schedules which seem necessary to hold their communities together. Probably all the truckers who die in their 40s or 50s are overwork deaths.

Truckers and office worker overwork deaths are probably among the most absurd, though I don't have figures regarding light industrial factories. The millenary lifestyle of agriculture and correspondence with the bureaucratic authorities is mostly lost, as arable land is commodified into multi-million dollar "lottery property" which renders a life without the risk of overwork death, and with happiness and a modest, long-duration passive income, almost entirely inaccessible to those not born into a family holding that sort of land. I don't know if that's entirely true but I've been doing research and the bootstraps by which I might hoist myself do indeed seem mythical.

Not all citizens are guaranteed a pension or benefits, and cannot necessarily access roles which do. The pensions and their management are a political talking point ("Candidate X will disrupt pensions"), which is outward and openly-admitted evidence of corruption, and where the situation becomes even more troubling.

This is not merely something a company could fix, at least not in the U.S.A..

I agree with the second statement. As for the first one, there's some other stuff in there too: Mythologies, religions, Foucault, philosophy of science. Why some wear t-shirts and eschew the automobile, while others drive cars in grass skirts.

Many of my professors loved the idea of the cargo cult, the horror and glory of it. So, don't be fooled: You may discover a bit of cargo cult within modern studies of Plato and Aristotle.

The lesson that one should never take candy from strangers does not seem like an acceptable place to practice human experimentation, especially on children.

Pre-undergraduate education is nothing like the University level. Some of the students have never been in a laboratory, some of them didn't have user-serviceable cars or bicycles or computers, even those who "have coded" might not really "be programming," and authority figures who could fix everything almost magically basically were their lives for 18 years. That's before you examine eccentricities and differences in upbringing. And, before addressing the "not not totalitarian" practice of 'Zero Tolerance' and its sizable human cost. As the other user said, that adds up. I wouldn't be surprised if kids doing gun violence in schools are reacting to a false image of society which they're getting from people for whom tardiness results in detention.

I still can't weld like some of my friends. They're so brilliant, it'd take me years to catch up.

Anyway: if you really want to sell students on becoming the complete Scientific Humanist Who Delicately Breaks Rules AND Can Fix Anything, which you seem to fancy, start off the laboratories with "LSD Synthesis: from Ergot to Your Homemade Blotter Art" and then break the thermal cycler before the next lab, with the phosphorescence plasmids.

And, yes, in the U.S. and elsewhere, I would expect some (perhaps milder than I imagine) difficulties with that; and, no, I don't really condone drug use but I think you can see where I'm coming from with this reasoning.

It used to be said that certain kings or personages were made of glass and that if you touched them, they would shatter and the kingdom would fall. Much like a regular private hot bath, I fail to see the value of a Glass King.

Once I visited the UK and some kids threw lit firecrackers into my scarf. Then all the adults kept drinking. I assume America is currently behind the times, Europe having since updated the myth to Atomic Motorcycle Danger King.

This failure has something to do with Americans having enjoyed Downton Abbey more than Mad Max: Fury Road. My investigation continues.

I grew up in the Danger Zone and it was dull.

I could tell you but it'd void your cake's warranty.

I wonder what the competing groups were eating. Also a very standard practice to replace the Conquered's diet with that of the Conquerors.

I think it's "Survival of the Fittest Ecosystem," actually. So not like, "Humans are fittest," but instead, "Human eating corn cow sheep soy etc. while building machines is fittest"

It's all about self-refueling self-replicating water-burning probes. Map the Oort Cloud like that and you'll make a penny!!

Politics is bad because it runs on people. We are shitty hardware for being nice to one another.

...but also, "Thx 1138" is basically perfect cinema and my life was better for it. Thank you, Mr. Lucas.

Reminding me that a cornerstone of my childhood was a series of cinematic figurine advertisements cribbed from one of Kurosawa's weaker pictures doesn't heal the wounds any faster.

Man makes panda of man.

People are watching us constantly, everyone has more-or-less enough food, there's a ton of shiny stuff and panda tasks in the enclosure, there's nasty loud machines everywhere, and if you have some young they're like this tiny very-vulnerable creature who will be shortly moved to a different enclosure to be watched by different creatures.

May not be economic!!

Interesting. I notice I have been downvoted as well. Thanks for the slap on the back, everybody.

Their business intelligence practice has gotten so much faster that they're probably planning 100 years out.

I think I would enjoy trucking, but as a person born in the 1990s, I grew up in an area supplied entirely by trucks with no substantial agricultural land. One of the retail airstrips with the movie theater and a mall and a supermarket. Our community was connected by automobile transit, internet, and telephone.

I wouldn't want anyone still living like this to go hungry--we don't make the choice to enter the world we find ourselves in, as far as I know--but I can't stomach that lifestyle for myself or my children, or the kin of anyone I've known or met. When I was young it was thrilling, with engines and freeways and drive-thrus. My friends bought cheap sports cars and motorbikes, and there was 100 years of movies to watch.

Now I am older, and I find it inhumane.