No phylogenetic trees for you
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A lot of people also assume that science should drive policy, ignoring all of the other factors that are important.
What other factors? Unless you mean ethics, I think that's implicit.Laws can be derived from knowledge of the world (science) and objectives (ethics). We know X, want to achieve Y, here's the best way we can figure out. Or in AI terms, an input and a utility function.
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It's the nice humane thing to say Oh lets bring the migrants in but noone appears to have an idea of what to do with them when they're here. The UK has this weird thing where they will be allowed to stay here but they won't be allowed to work and they'll have limited access to beneifits. They'll be sitting there doing nothing without the means to improve their lives. Qualified as a doctor or software developer. Sorry we don't recoginse your qualifications. Off the the treacle mines with you. Even if you do allow them in to work, the sudden unprojected influx of people will put pressure on school places, houseing, medial centres, the nhs etc... You want to do the humane thing but you already have a populace that isn't doing that well either. Throw the migrants into the mix without any forward thinking and you're just asking for trouble.
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When someone in your city is starving and can't find a job, we all agree (except some Americans I guess) that the government should provide some food and shelter to them, and there would probably be a shitstorm if we just let them die out.
Some people would rather we actually went out and helped those people directly instead of the clusterfuck of government doing it, which everyone (even most of those people I just mentioned) uses to soothe their consciences and ignore the problem, because someone else is taking care of it.
When someone in Africa is dying, we say "poor guy", and maybe donate a dollar to some NGO to feel better.
So it's better to forcefully take someone else's money to feed people than to voluntarily give some of your own?
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What other factors? Unless you mean ethics, I think that's implicit.
Ethics, sure. But also economics.
Laws can be derived from knowledge of the world (science) and objectives (ethics). We know X, want to achieve Y, here's the best way we can figure out. Or in AI terms, an input and a utility function.
Most policies that governments have to deal with don't fit into that neat formula.
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Some people would rather we actually went out and helped those people directly instead of the clusterfuck of government doing it,
Like Batman?
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I fail to see how what the government takes from me is in anyway related to how much I donate to help people in other countries.
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Some people would rather we actually went out and helped those people directly instead of the clusterfuck of government doing it, which everyone (even most of those people I just mentioned) uses to soothe their consciences and ignore the problem, because someone else is taking care of it.
Personally, I prefer we helped get them off the street. Not just hand them a sandwich and say "see you tomorrow".
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You do realize these obvious facts?
I do, but some of my teachers didn't.The issue at the time was geocentism vs. heliocentrism, not whether the Earth is round or not.
No, the issue at the time was the people in power were stupid. Kinda like today, except they have little less leeway now in arguing the facts.On account of international politics? Highly likely. But on matters like this? What the hell would be the point even?
Pros of Columbus being the discoverer of round Earth:- He is forever remembered as genius and visionary, not idiot and scumbag
- Renaissance looks like a 180° turnaround in human history, not "merely" rediscovering the ancient discoveries and improving on them
- Brag rights for Spanish crown
The problem with society is we're in an inconsistent state. We claim we care about people, but we only REALLY care about the people near us, i.e. in our own country.
The real problem is that we care, but we don't know how to help, which makes bad people leech on this good will and make money at our expense.So when a bunch of Middle Eastern people knock at your door, politicians can't just say "sorry I'd rather let you die out there", because we're all pretending that's not true, even though for the most part it is.
And what we should do when those people knock at our door so hard it breaks down? And I mean, literally.
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"Discourse is literally unusable. It also gave every elderly person in my family a heart attack and killed my dog."
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"Discourse is literally unusable. It also gave every elderly person in my family a heart attack and killed my dog."
I'm sorry for your loss, but I don't think Discourse did that to you. You're being unreasonable and paranoid. Take a step back, man.
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the thing that produced this madness in order to try and explain retrograde movement of the other planets in the Solar system?
To be fair, without that madness we would probably have missed out on Spirograph.
http://i.imgur.com/SMnn7DB.pngI fail to see how what the government takes from me is in anyway related to how much I donate to help people in other countries.
I think what @boomzilla is hinting at is that what the government takes from you often just makes things worse.
For example, the US taxpayer funded the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, completely destabilizing Iraq and creating the power vacuum that Daesh is now busily filling at vast human cost. My own taxes currently fund a sweatbox hellhole concentration camp program for refugees picked up at sea, because apparently the right thing to do with refugees is treat them worse than the persecutors they were fleeing in the first place.
But at least the invasion of Iraq was an unpopular move. The Aussie concentration camps have wide public support. It's all fuct.
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apparently the right thing to do with refugees
Depends on your goals, presupposing a complete lack of empathy or ethics of course. If your goal is to
then a course of action such as
treat them worse than the persecutors they were fleeing
might be effective.
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The UK has this weird thing where they will be allowed to stay here but they won't be allowed to work and they'll have limited access to beneifits.
Also throw in some sort of insane insistence on punishing anyone who actually helps them.
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You know, the thing that produced this madness in order to try and explain retrograde movement of the other planets in the Solar system?
Which had been so tweaked by Galileo's time that it was significantly more accurate than the earliest Heliocentric models
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As an accurate map of the sky? Sure. Could anyone explain why it happens and find an universal formula that can explain the movement of any given planet without weird planet-specific constants? Nope. Had to wait for Kepler for that.
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He recently almost had a heart attack in another thread, I am not quoting
because mobile & discourse, etc.
Em 01/10/2015 23:28, "Lorne Kates" use-the-contact-form@thedailywtf.com
escreveu:
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That's the second time I've seen one of your posts leak e-mail details
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Kinda weird how Lorne and LB_ both have use-the-contact-form@thedailywtf.com as their e-mail address.
Not weird at all how DC shits the bed on snipping out the e-mail "reply header" when it's not in English. Because clearly using other languages is
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does it happen in an unmodified discourse install?
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¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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I looks like email client's automatic quoting to me. I did that once or twice by accident.
Why the quote itself is missing, I do not know. Might even be Discourse this time.
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@riking does this email headers thing happen in other discourses?
my reply seems to have exposed both my email, I dont really care about that except possibly someone could track it in another forum for banning purposes
its no longer visible here, I think admins deleted that.
I think it was just my email that leaked, the email that shows for the person I was replying is server's email.
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Look, you shouldn't just expect any feature of Discourse to actually work without thoroughly testing it first.
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I was responding to anonymous234.
I would argue that if the government did not take the money from us to feed the homeless. The difference between what we give to our "neighbor" and what we give to others (not in this country) would not be that large.
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I think what @boomzilla is hinting at is that what the government takes from you often just makes things worse.
Sort of, but not really. I CBA to go back and read it for you, but I think I said what I meant.
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01/10/2015 23:28, "Lorne Kates" use-the-contact-form@thedailywtf.com
escreveu:I'll bet it leaked because Discourse's post by email handler doesn't speak whatever language escrevu is. Googling suggests Portuguese.
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@fbmac, just in case you were referring to the fact that the envelope exists as an e-mail address leak, it's not; only you and administrators can actually click on it. And "use-the-contact-form@thedailywtf.com" isn't exactly unknown around here.@Onyx said:
Why the quote itself is missing, I do not know. Might even be Discourse this time.
That's an intentional part of the feature.
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So the leak is the part added by gmail, that gmails hides from me by default
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They'll be sitting there doing nothing without the means to improve their lives.
And when they do, you get plenty of the natives saying things like, “All they do is sit around! Why don’t they work for a living?! Lazy bastards!”
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I'll bet it leaked because Discourse's post by email handler doesn't speak whatever language escrevu is. Googling suggests Portuguese.
Toxic hellstew RE for stripping email bits must be more toxically hellstew-y than normal for Discourse?
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Regex for e-mail addresses?
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Personally, I think Gangolf Jobb has an incredibly over-inflated sense of importance. A) His software would be replaced in a week, I bet, even if it weren't for all the other phylogenetic tree software; and B) his action doesn't affect anyone who made the political decisions, which makes it just idiotic ("The politicians made a stupid decision, so I'm going to punish just anyone I can!").
And the best part? His software isn't even on that list.
ADDENDUM: Something I missed: there is also a separate List of phylogenetics software. His software is on that list.
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What do you think was the percentage of people who were educated enough to know that?
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Not just addresses...
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his action doesn't affect anyone who made the political decisions, which makes it just idiotic ("The politicians made a stupid decision, so I'm going to punish just anyone I can!").
It fits perfectly with the rest of his reasoning, which appears to consist of lumping things onto big heaps without regard for nuance.
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lumping things onto big heaps
To be fair, that's a good way to avoid having to pay rich landowners while travelling.
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What do you think the percentage of people who can cite Kepler's law today yet still know the basic shape of the Solar system?
Now yes, I know, education system today and blah blah blah, fine, maybe common folk still thought about flat Earth, hell, for some purposes (for small enough areas) we approximate it to flat as well. But the cartographers, navigators and hell, regular sailors that travelled to far lands didn't, and that's what matters. The blank statement "people thought the Earth was flat" would imply they all lived in constant fear of falling off the edge, and people who travelled with Columbus, and later, Magellan, were mad men who happened to be right. Yeah,.. no.
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Columbus thought the Earth was pear-shaped
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Many things tend to go pear-shaped sooner or later, maybe he was just ahead of his time?
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Columbus thought the Earth was pear-shaped
He thought that Asia was much larger than it really is.
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He thought that Asia was much larger than it really is.
There's actually a lot of debate over how/why Columbus thought he could sail west and find land in a reasonable amount of time, in opposition to all science and reason of the time. Did he have access to Norse documents about Greenland, for example?
Orson Scott Card theorized he was told to by time travelers, because his original plan (to go east and join the Crusades) was somehow even MORE disruptive to human history.
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There's actually a lot of debate over how/why Columbus thought he could sail west and find land in a reasonable amount of time, in opposition to all science and reason of the time.
Well, a drastically wrong map would be a fairly simple reason. Maps of the time were not particularly accurate, especially once you got further away from the Mediterranean. If you're doing mainly coastal trade and not sailing direct across the ocean, you don't need especially accurate sea charts except for the descriptions of the coast along which you sail. Getting the angles of the bearings right… nothing like as important, and even a fairly small error will compound. Getting the angles wrong around Cape Comorin would have had a particularly fundamental impact on the calculations, and it would have been rather more difficult than usual to cross-check as there's not really many options for reliable triangulation there. (Yes, this got cleared up later, but major points were a complicated problem for the types of charts produced in Europe in the middle ages.)
There may have been traders who did have accurate maps of the (northern) Indian ocean, but they don't seem to have been communicating the contents of their charts much with Europe at that time. Probably quite focused on holding their hugely profitable spice trade monopolies rather than advancing the overall state of human knowledge; not a daft move, really.
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Nope.
Time travel.
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Orson Scott Card theorized he was told to by time travelers, because his original plan (to go east and join the Crusades) was somehow even MORE disruptive to human history.
Card should have known better: the last crusade of any significance (the plan to relieve the siege of Belgrade following the fall of Constantinople) ended nearly forty years earlier without even leaving Italy. While the Hussite wars are sometimes called a Crusade, they were over by the time Columbus started looking for patronage, too. The closest thing to a crusade actually happening around 1485-1492 would have been the suppression of the Waldensians, and that was in southern France.
Actually, I'm guessing that Card actually did know this, but decided that a good story was worth a bit of an anachronism.
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What do you think the percentage of people who can cite Kepler's law today yet still know the basic shape of the Solar system?
A lot smaller than the percentage of people who have a vague idea of what the solar system looks like from pictures in their textbooks, but who have never heard of Kepler's Law, or Kepler himself for that matter. A lot of people (I won't say 'most') know that the planets have elliptical orbits, but all but a handful would be hard pressed to even guess as to why.
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Card should have known better:
Oh I look forward to the amount of pedantic dickweedery we're about to experience about a THEORY made by a CHARACTER in a FICTIONAL NOVEL INVOLVING TIME TRAVEL.
the last crusade of any significance (the plan to relieve the siege of Belgrade following the fall of Constantinople) ended nearly forty years earlier without even leaving Italy.
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That was just a theory given by one of the characters in the book (obviously they don't know what Columbus did instead because they could only view the post-change history
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40 years isn't very long at all in a society which basically hasn't fundamentally changed in over 500 years. You have no idea how slooowly things moved before the modern era. It's not like the Catholic Church was any weaker in Columbus' time or any less interested in recapturing the holy lands than they were 40 years earlier.
Actually, I'm guessing that Card actually did know this, but decided that a good story was worth a bit of an anachronism.
Oh, so you're well aware you're making a DUMB FUCK POST BY A MORON, you're just doing it anyway.
Ugh.
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