Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:How surprising,... (Score 1) 478

by slew (#56751228) Attached to: Suicide Rates Are Up 30 Percent Since 1999, CDC Says

Suicide because of pessimism about the state of the world is actually a good thing. To make the world a better place, we need all the hard-working, non-substance-abusing optimists we can find. The more of you existential pessimists we can get to autodarwinate, the better off the rest of us are.

The people who deserve the most sympathy are those who have personal problems. We need a better mental health system. Small wonder that the closure of state mental hospitals nationwide has given us homelessness and suicide rising in tandem.

Although I agree that we need a better mental health system, I don't agree that people who deserve the most sympathy are those that have personal problems. Why single them out for sympathy when you throw the "mere" pessimists under the bus?

Comment Re:How surprising,... (Score 1) 478

by slew (#56751162) Attached to: Suicide Rates Are Up 30 Percent Since 1999, CDC Says

Then we have the internet, it's giving the poor access to see what's going on in the world better, they can see just how rich the rich are becoming, they can see the death of the world better than ever before, they can communicate with each other (as I am right now) elaborating on why there's little hope.

Co2 is up, heat is up, methane bubbles are going off in siberia, animals are dying out, bees are dying off, America is slowly crumbling into debt. (no, I'm not American)

Um...while I'll agree it's depressing to learn how people are fucking up the country and in fact the earth itself I'd rather know than be blissfully ignorant. Maybe that's just me.

People are not killing themselves over rising CO2 levels, people are killing themselves over crippling depression. When I think of things that depress me CO2 only makes it to #10 (and only because I enjoy diving and it is destroying reefs that it took many thousands of years to build). Money and family issues are like...99% of this among people that didn't already have problems. Incidentally these suicides also account for something like 50% of the "gun violence" we have in the USA.

And there are more suicide deaths than auto/traffic deaths in the US, which means we should worry about that at least as much as we do auto safety...

Although the suicide deaths among teens and early twenties is still the highest, an alarming trend in the last few years of increased suicide of 50yo+ (almost a 50% jump in the last decade). Some have noted that the jump in suicide rates of older people seems to correspond with the addiction rates seen in the opioid crisis as applied to people as they get older. That might be a better explanation than standby narratives like money and family (which have always been problems throughout history in varying amounts). I remember the 1970's in the USA, today is *much* better than the 70's...

Anyhow...

Comment Re:How surprising,... (Score 1) 478

by slew (#56750888) Attached to: Suicide Rates Are Up 30 Percent Since 1999, CDC Says

I've been on this Earth now for almost 59 years.

And may I say you still look pretty good for your age? And you appear to have most of your faculties. I salute you members of the Greatest Generation. Sometime, you'll have to tell us what it was like when Vietnam invaded California and how you charged your phones at Woodstock.

As a matter of fact Vietnam *did* invade California in the '70s and '80s (currently about 350,000 which is the largest number of Vietnamese outside of Vietnam 160K is San Jose alone)...

They didn't have many phones at woodstock (very rural area), but they did have *telegrams* (kindof like ancient form of SMS, not the anonymous peer-to-peer messaging app)...

One of the telegrams received by the act Iron Butterfly from the event promoters has been immortalized in history...

For reasons I can't go into / Until you are here / Clarifying your situation / Knowing you are having problems / You will have to find / Other transportation / Unless you plan not to come.

This telegram was apparently in response to a request to have a helicopter sent for them to bypass the traffic jam...

Oh yeah, BTW 59 isn't really part of the greatest generation, they are the boomers. Boomers are the ones that protested Vietnam, not the generation that experienced WWII and built the world we have to day. People born before 1924 (and saw WWII) are part of the greatest generation...

Comment Re:Every gods-be-damned WEEK. (Score 1) 117

_I_ didn't. My family - my mother in law specifically - may very well have. She still can't get over our marriage and yes she is the cranky old bat type.

I highly doubt these companies require consent from everyone involved. Those databases are used by Government agencies after all.

And sometimes those databases are used to catch a serial killer...

Of course the serial killer didn't give any consent, but he was apparently identified anyhow by tracing through a third cousin who uploaded their dna profile...

Comment Re:Gives a whole new meaning: Who's your daddy? (Score 1) 117

I'm going to go to space and change mine so it's no longer useful to them. Then I'll be able to count on one hand the seven reasons I'm never doing business with them again.

You don't have to go that far, Chernobyl and Fukushima are both accessible w/o a rocket...

Comment Re:Goodbye Games (Score 1) 269

by slew (#56732188) Attached to: Apple Deprecates OpenGL and OpenCL in macOS 10.14 Mojave

There will be no more support for cross-platform games on the Mac, then, I guess. Until someone makes a translation layer that will translate OpenGL calls to Metal, that is.

If Apple follows their standard game plan, no apps that translation layers not available in source form will be allowed on the platform. Fortunately, Valve has convinced MoltenVK to release their Vulkan 2 Metal translation layers in open source to allow this.

Unfortunately, Vulkan isn't OpenGL, but it's OpenGL evolved, so unless there is someone that wants to do this for backward compatibility purposes, OpenGL is dead...
Earth

The World Set a New Record For Renewable Power in 2017, But Emissions Are Still Rising (qz.com) 306

Posted by msmash from the room-for-improvements dept.
In 2017, the world deployed an ever-expanding amount of solar and wind power, setting a new record for renewable-power capacity added to the grid. From a report: In fact, the money spent on renewable installations was more than twice the sum spent on nuclear and fossil-fuel power, according to the annual Global Status Report published by renewables policy group REN21. Over the past 10 years, global installed renewable-power capacity, which includes hydropower, has doubled.

That growth, however, isn't enough to reduce emissions. World demand for energy increased by 2.1% last year, and low-carbon sources could not keep pace. As a result, the word's energy-related carbon emissions rose by 1.7%, the first rise in four years. It's an important reminder that, despite all the talk about the growth of renewables, we still rely heavily on fossil fuels.

Comment Re:Lab grown are not special, they're not real? (Score 1) 415

by slew (#56702190) Attached to: De Beers To Sell Diamonds Made In a Lab

Then lab grown diamonds need to fight them at their own game. create some flawed diamonds and challenge De Beers to detect the real ones. Then when they inevitiably fail you market the "perfect diamond", we can create the flawed diamonds De Beers sells you if you want, or for a cheaper price we can sell you perfection, something De Beers used to put an extreme premium on until others worked out how to create it.

If you get the right spokesperson to spin your story...

Comment Re:Why do they not want the experience? (Score 2) 223

by slew (#56702162) Attached to: More Firms Used Facebook To Block Older Job Seekers, Lawsuit Alleges

I can't keep up with what middle aged is, our life expectancy seems to jump up every time I approach it.

Because that's how life expectancy works.

I get the feeling I'll be 200 and being called a whipper snapper by 230 year olds.

The older you get the longer your life expectancy... Only the oldest person in the world can outlive his or her own life expectancy. For the rest of us, there is always someone older.

This is related to the common misconception that prehistoric men died around 35. That's really because the life expectancy at birth is skewed by high infant mortality rates. Skeletal remains show a significant fraction lived past 65, and comparison with modern day hunter gatherers in a study by Gurven and Kaplan show that modal adult life span (not life expectancy) likely in the range 68–78 years if you reached the age of 15 for prehistoric hunter-gathers which isn't too different than say the Victorian age which many regard as the beginning of the modern era...

Comment Re:Wrong word (Score 1) 223

by slew (#56702058) Attached to: More Firms Used Facebook To Block Older Job Seekers, Lawsuit Alleges

Of course, if you don't care about the applicant's age there is no problem, but if you do then Facebook offers handy tools to save you some cash.

Sure, you save cash by getting to hire cheap labor by avoiding directly discriminating against applicants...
Or did you mean in the advertising bill for impressions?
All the same, you save some cash right ;^)

Comment Re:Thought-crimes (Score 1) 223

by slew (#56701732) Attached to: More Firms Used Facebook To Block Older Job Seekers, Lawsuit Alleges

Lying is wrong, Murder is wrong. Intent may be important to determining the gravity of the wrongness. But it should not decide, whether it is wrong at all.

Right or wrong is merely window dressing for the masses. If a child "accidentially" kills a person by their act and they aren't charged with a crime is it not "wrong"?

Comment Re:Lab grown are not special, they're not real? (Score 1) 415

by slew (#56700732) Attached to: De Beers To Sell Diamonds Made In a Lab

Not special maybe, though more special and rare than the abundant but artificially limited supply of mined ones. As for not real? WTF? they are as real as any other diamond, what makes a diamond is its chemical makeup and structure not whether it was lab created or mined.

Just a matter of semantics. If a diamond is defined as being dug up from the ground, then it isn't a diamond even if it has the same chemical makeup and structure.

Some people call this type of semantics the No True Scotsman fallacy.

It's just human nature to think my run-off-the-mill stuff is something special. Entire industries are built on this kind of thinking: art, antiques, sports memorabilia, comic book collections, pet rocks...

Even worse, people use this type of thing to denigrate other people all the time or single them out for exclusion. For example people that look down on programmers that don't get degrees but learned as a hobby (or if they did, they didn't get their degree from a *prestigious* toilet paper producer). Or the time worn old-wealth vs new-wealth. Or the traditional immigrant vs the new-immigrant, ...

Even when it is all the same, mine is better... Can't you see that? ;^)

Slashdot Top Deals

The Tao is like a glob pattern: used but never used up. It is like the extern void: filled with infinite possibilities.

Close