LEGO City Undercover-CODEX Hack Online
Lorita Swartzwelder
Definitely annoying. One of the biggest things I want an exact phrase search for is in order to detect plagiarism; enter a suspicious sentence from a student paper, and see if the paper is cut and pasted from the internet.
I had the same feeling six years ago when they started tailoring results depending on who was asking. I mean, I see the motivation, but I really liked the days when you could send somebody a google query and expect it to be as deterministic as a URL.
When I think of social problems now, my first and main method of evaluation is to think of myself in the same room as someone with the problem, and consider whether I would feel the need to arrange help if I could, possibly interfering (or at least being heavy-handed) in the process. I could be entirely naive, but I actually do think that there is a lot of similarity (although not to the extent of consensus, certainly) in attitudes toward such situations, at least within if not across cultures. We spend much more energy arguing about what is happening or may happen than arguing about who is and is not suffering.
My sort-of cynical guess is that societies do best when they can harness one or more of those toward pro-social ends. Capitalism does a really nice job of harnessing greed (which can be really destructive in all kinds of ways) toward pro-social ends. I want all the marbles, so I build a whole industry or invent the industrial research lab. The baker wants to get paid, so somehow this results in me being able to get bread.
Any society where people care a lot about their reputation, and where your reputation is positively correlated with pro-social behavior, harnesses pride. My tendency toward pride makes me want to do pro-social things so I can have higher standing. I build monuments to myself in the form of libraries and museums and schools which people benefit from for centuries to come. (But they remember the name Carnegie.)
I have faith that just as modern Americans, despite possessing enormous material wealth by historical standards, manage to find lots more things they would like to have, so will their descendants after another order of magnitude or two increase.
OTOH, the wealthiest societies in the world now seem to have less of powerful people terrorizing the peasants than the poor societies. Mugabe and Mao and Idi Amin were not rulers of wealthy societies, but they certainly got plenty of opportunity for imposing their will on others and treating their enemies with cruelty and terror.
I recently had a conversation with a prominent biochemist concerned about nutrition. One set of related points he made struck me as relevant to some questions that get discussed here as well as to our nutritional practices. They were:
Given this, it seems perfectly understandable for humans to hate and fear the Minbari and pragmatic for the Earth Alliance to prepare for the possibility of a second Earth-Minbari war. Yet the show stakes out the clear position that being wary of and arming yourself against people who have attempted genocide against you a decade ago and are currently spoiling for a fight is bigotry and warmongering.
In the interstellar arms race, Earth is North Korea. EarthGov does not understand this. Sinclair (and Sheridan, later) do. If anything shatters the fragile peace between Earth and Minbar, every human will die screaming. For this reason, peace is essential.
But the aliens get to have more nuance. I just watched the episode with the Christian Scientist aliens and they had a surprising amount of depth despite that they literally killed their own kid over a made-up alien religion. The episode with the Dilgar war criminal also had more nuance than I expect from a Mengele allegory, although it was obnoxious that Deathwalker herself was such a one-dimensional character.
Even the psi corps, despite the quasi SS uniforms, get some sympathetic treatment. Granted, an awful lot of that is Walter Koenig playing the absolute hell out of the part to make himself sympathetic,
Add in the Narn who sold Earth Alliance weapons during the war and it seems like pro-Earth groups like Home Guard should see the majority of the aliens in the show as natural allies. Their hatred and distrust of the Minbari and Vorlons makes sense but attacking random Centauri teenagers seems totally out of left field.
Where does the average EA citizen see any of those? Narn arms traders during the war would count, but I think their role was minimized in the propaganda. The Centauri would have counted in the first contact era, but their imperialistic deception I think scotched that. The setting is fairly well designed to make xenophobia a plausible response, with almost all aliens falling into the Bad, Weakling, or Inscrutable categories as superficially viewed from Earth.
The original Mr. X > The Nazis saw the Japanese as circumstial allies against the British, but also as ultimately future enemies that would have to be destroyed at some point (same deal as with the Soviets, really, just on a longer timescale). According to the anecdote, Nazi officials who visited Japanese held prisonner camps in Manchuria were appaled by what they saw and went home with the certitude that they were far morally superior to these yellow barbarians.
At worst, there is no actual notion to defend the idea that all surplus value belongs to the labor that created it, in which case there is equal moral (or lack thereof) justification for the Capitalist class to organize and liquidate any movement that attempts to appropriate their property. Helicopter rides and all.
The point is that the value of the labor is the value of capital + labor + process improvement, insofar as that process improvement hypothetically decreases the need for labor. Under capitalism, the value of the process improvement is captured at least in part by the owner, not the worker, and I see no reason why this process is exploitative.
So, if your theory is true, it seems like we should see ever-greater poverty and hardship among the people living in capitalist societies, the longer they remain capitalist. And greater hardship, the freer the markets.
But on the other hand, knowing in advance what most customers are going to order is a huge advantage for a restaurant. In my sordid past I actually worked a grill (not very efficiently, mind you) and I doubt that would wind up as the bottleneck.
The issue as far as I can see it is that sudden popularity means that you either have to reduce your quality or turn customers away. Often when a restaurant was popular for their novel food 20 years ago they are mostly serving variations on their old theme so they can produce hundreds of solid, but not spectacular, meals a night while some guy down the road is experimenting with Ugandan inspired burritos.
A third solution, which iirc some European cities have started to experimenting with, is effectively to impose quotas on tourism, so that certain places can only be visited by a fixed maximum number of people per day/week/month/etc. Though this means some places we ended up booked months in advance, making impromptu tourism even more difficult.
If expanding operations is impossible or undesirable, they can continue operating in their new high-price, high-quality equilibrium, and lower prices back the way things were if and when the fad ends. The biggest problem with this second option is that Stanich is ideologically committed to continue providing his burgers to the local regulars who helped build the business up in the first place. Is it legal to check IDs at the door and charge the higher prices to people whose registered addresses are outside the city the restaurant is located in? That could separate the tourists attracted by the article from the locals. Actually, if Stanich knows the regulars personally, he can just give them a discount and sell them the burgers at the old price. Though you would need to worry about burger re-sellers (analogous to scalpers in the Burning Man scenario above). No to-go orders at local prices, then (to-go orders being the equivalent of transferable tickets); otherwise you are going to get some local ordering a dozen to-go hamburgers at local prices and re-selling them to tourists at somewhere between the local price and the tourist price.
Surely human fear of non-existence has evolved just like our animal fear of danger, but these are different things. There must have been a period in human evolution in which instinctive fear of existential danger existed but not yet fear of non-existence.
No.
Brain uploading would make these definitions more complicated, though. There would be intermediates between dying and not dying. If I was restarted from a saved state right after my birth, forgetting my entire life since then, that would be very close to dying. Erasing the last few hours would definitely not like dying, while erasing my memories since I was (say) 12 would be somewhere in-between.
Also, our consciousness through time could be represented by a tree rather than a line if copies are made. If two copies were made of someone, say, in early childhood, those would arguably end up different persons.
After even a slightly different experience for a few seconds, you and your clone will be thinking different things for the rest of your lives. So if you had to kill yourself in that moment, you would feel the same survival instinct that makes it very difficult.
Imagine that your brain has been perfectly cloned and put in a box, hooked up to sensory feeds coming live from your own head. The box-brain has the exact same thoughts as you do because it has the same memories and the exact same experiences. It feels completely independent and in control of your body, even though it has no real control.
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