Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Goodbye free speech (Score 1) 210

Crimes of passion: by definition these cannot be deterred, a crime of passion is an emotional act done in the moment, it doesn't include any rational thought

False.

When you have a hard-on, why don't you sleep with a gay dude? What pushes you away when you have that emotional feeling of "I need to bone"? Something is embedded deep in your brain to reject that thought right out.

Inside the brain, all rational thought goes through the prefrontal cortex. This is where you reason. Actions flow through areas such as the basal ganglia, which associates memory together--smells, sounds, visual images, facts. Encountering facts conflicting with other facts shuts the PFC down and causes the Amygdala to power up, because the basal ganglia finds a conflict and attempts to avoid reconciliation (energy-demanding).

It's a lot more complex than just that; the short of it is that the brain employs many automatic reasoning centers. One such center is the reasoning of trained consequence: if you do X, some consequence Y will occur. Without thinking about it, you have a fear for your life if you commit a certain crime, because you will have this secret that threatens to tear away freedom or even life. This subconscious impulse overrides your other subconscious impulses until they become demanding enough to, in turn, override it.

This is why people are sharply against killing other people, yet will murder the fuck out of you if you try to kill their child, and then have a psychotic episode as they come to terms (poorly) with having killed someone. The immediate need overrides the other, more established feelings. A trained fear of state execution--created merely by its presence with a sharp lack of other ways you might die today--will intrude on emotional impulses to kill at all levels, right up until the impulse to kill carries such a powerful driver as to smash those other impulses flat.

Deterrent doesn't mean a 100% cure.

Comment Re:And ticket prices? (Score 1) 117

That's because the price isn't "Costs plus a markup", it's "Whatever the market will bear"

"The Market" is the magical part. Price is absolutely not less than cost--you can't stay in business spending $1000 to build computers that you sell for $10, although strategic undercutting happens (10 million volume manufacturer sells at a loss to put 10 thousand volume manufacturer out of business), as well as loss-leader strategies (sell the coffee maker cheap; overcharge on the coffee).

Competition forces the price down to the former by giving the market a choice

Which means if you have the means to produce at a lower cost than any competitor, competition will not lower prices; indeed, you can undercut competition below their costs, driving them out of business.

That means competitive markets are strange beasts, especially with rising costs: if the producers charge $1000 for a product that costs $300, $500, and $700 to produce, rising costs can push you up to $350, $580, $820, and yet the price can stay around $1000 because Mr. $350 doesn't see a need to raise prices yet, and Mr. $820 is trying to cut his costs back by any means necessary. Soon Mr. $820 will have costs over $1000, and will sell his business to a competitor--Mr. $350 will have the most spare capital, and be able to make the best bid.

Let the $820 guy find out how to make shit for $500, and he might undercut the market in a bid to get more market share and attempt a hostile take-over of the $580 business. Maybe not. In any case, a fourth player can make the product for $1100, but market price is $1000, so he can't enter the market.

Comment Re:Goodbye free speech (Score 1) 210

Well yes. People are insane, and have all kinds of ludicrous arguments, especially those which see the world as a single absolute. I often compare ghettos to suburbs in death penalty arguments: in the ghetto, so many murders and so much gang crime make it hard to investigate and identify murderers, and, besides, the murderers are like 99% likely to die by gang rival murder, and 1% likely to even get arrested by police for murder; whereas in suburbs, people aren't as exposed to crime, and reflect on themselves as criminals in terms of "the police will find me, and they will give me the chair", and so encode deep into the core of their subconscious that committing murder means death by state execution. People want to argue that human psychology doesn't contain any such thing that would identify, interpret, and react to the threat of execution for a crime, or that it's absolutely a deterrent.

Ludicrous people are ludicrous.

Comment Re:Drone It (Score 1) 843

I tend to ignore GDP as an indicator because it's utterly useless. My favorite indicator is AGI, and the best indicators are things like per-capita income and proportion of money spent on things. Even those distort: in the 70s, you made $13k and spent $7k on a car; in 2014, you made $65k and spent $32k on a brand new Camaro--that's less, 49% instead of 53%--yet the damn Camaro has a much-better-engineered engine, suspension, drive train, electronic stability control, satellite navigation system, five-DVD MP3 changer, built-in Spotify, etc. Not to mention people tend to measure cost of the car by amortization of aggregate car payment, maintenance, fuel, insurance, and so forth.

I've given the 15-paragraph explanation of wealth growth over time too many times. People respond mostly by freaking out or mis-interpreting it as supply-and-demand economics (it's not even vaguely supply-and-demand), because it's a god damn brand new theory, because historians have briefly commented on things like the Industrial Revolution without actually writing the damn pattern down. The above is the short of it, so you can work out the unifying theory of economics yourself and figure out why it's hard to measure economic growth and productivity. Bonus points if you suddenly understand why supply doesn't just increase, instead of price; why some markets overcharge huge mark-ups, and how competition does and doesn't control this; and what technical condition will occur if communism is suddenly the correct economic practice.

Aside from that, a one-time cash infusion does very little, kind of like if you drop off 500 pounds of rice to an Ethiopian and never feed him again.

Comment Re:Not to say it's unnecessary (Score 1) 843

Even the latest American jets had a hard time dog-fighting against the obsolete MIG-17.

This is why I said, up-thread, that we should consider perhaps that the F16 is superior, and that maybe we don't need to build new planes unless we're having trouble winning wars, since we used to have trouble fighting obviously-inferior MIG fighters 30 years out of date with our state-of-the-art hardware.

Comment Re:Drone It (Score 4, Interesting) 843

It sounds to me like our current crop of F16 fighters are superior. Why do we have a $1 trillion plane? I'm not saying it's a lot of money--it's only about $100bn every year, maybe less, for 10 years of development; and even $1 trillion right now one time wouldn't be a world-changing amount of money--but this is a lot of waste that could have gone elsewhere, for no obvious purpose. Somebody said, "We need better planes!", and I question why, when we have such fantastic planes, and when historical wars included clearly-inferior planes like MIG fighters wiping the floor with models three decades more up-to-date.

Comment Re:Drone It (Score 5, Informative) 843

Drone pilots are actually burning out due to extreme crisis of conscious issues. They work 9-5 killing people, then go home to their families; they're not living in a constructed fantasy of good versus evil fueled by the fact that other people are living in the same fantasy and mutually trying to kill you under the impression that you're the invader. They see themselves as terrible assassins, not righteous heroes fighting a murderous enemy.

Comment Re:Goodbye free speech (Score 1) 210

Pretty much, yes. Mind you, this starts getting into the same line of thinking that laws and police and prisons don't help, because arresting and imprisoning someone happens after a crime: some people surmise there is no deterrent effect, and so we would have exactly as much crime and as many murders and thefts and assaults and rapes if we just gave up on policing and shut down all the prisons.

Slashdot Top Deals

Waste not, get your budget cut next year.

Working...