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What exactly is "decentralization"? The oligopolies and monopolies that tend to result under reduced regulation is more centralization; it's just corporate centralization instead of gov't centralization. Is one better than the other? Having banks that are "too big to fail" is a nasty side-effect of such. (They are still too big, by the way.)
Jefferson warned about excessively large government AND excessively large corporations.
Today, we call it "Blowback"
To be fair, Heinlein also wrote that all the moral and ethical problems inherent in transplanting a brain from an old man to the body of a just-deceased young woman - such as how the womans family and loved ones would cope -- could all be resolved by fucking them.
Of course, that novel also speculated that the deceased personality would still inhabit the body, despite the brain transplant too.
I mean, really, the premise was excellent, the opportunity to explore the social and technical ramifications of such a brain transplant would be classic SF material
Don't get me wrong, I like a lot of Heinlein's work, but nearly everything after Stranger in a Strange Land is a bit off the rails.
It slightly blows my mind that companies (airlines) would buy a piece of hardware that costs hundreds of millions of dollars, which is incredibly mobile and used to travel thousands of miles at a time, with a huge amount of liability (billions potentially), and not include any kind of built in, always-on, hard-wired tracking device. Especially in this day and age. We're just talking about pinging tiny little packets of positional data every few minutes.
And then a terrorist uses that simple, always on, pilot has zero control over, beacon system to start positioning drones in the flight path and we'll have bunch of people crawling out of the woodwork exclaiming...
"It slightly blows my mind that companies (airlines) would install a cheap beacon that the pilot and crew had no control over that literally told every terrorist on the planet where the target was every few minutes...
Just saying.
This is reactionist knee-jerk thinking; plane crashes are rare, hijackings rarer still, hijackings where the plane is actually missing even rarer still... It doesn't blow my mind at all that this isn't "standard equipment".
I also don't have gps transmitting devices on my kids in case they get lost, or kidnapped, or fall down a well either. Yet it would cost only pennies a day. Do you find that mind blowing too?
Your 3rd link gives a 403.
That's because you're one of those non-believing secular humanist atheists.
The summary didn't include the full sentence by Gates. Just for completeness, he said: "I think he broke the law, so I certainly wouldn't characterize him as a hero."
I wonder if he applies that line of thinking to other heroes.
Rosa Parks - broke the law
Mahatma Gandi - broke the law
Martin Luther King - broke the law
Paul Revere
John Hancock
Oscar Schindler
Underground Railroad...
French Resistance...
no, it means if you don't have anything smart to say, keep your mouth shut and people won't know if you are smart or dumb.
however, say one dumb thing and everyone now knows.
athiests being 'religious' is like saying "not collecting stamps is a hobby"
I don't think you understand what religion is. athiests simply don't believe in your fairy tales. and not believing in something is NOT anywhere close to being a religion, in itself. it might be a belief system (or better, a non-belief system) but its definitely NOT a religion anymore than not believing in unicorns makes you part of a group.
moreso: if you look at the world's worth of religions and if you are able to remove yourself from your own religion, you should be able to see that each little group of people is asserting things that are quite opposite or in conflict with the other group's views.
we can go around the world and measure where water boils and freezes, and if we keep the altitude constant, the values all agree.
otoh, if you go around the world and ask about creation myths, you get different answers, and the people answering all seem to think THEIR view is correct and others are wrong.
that one thought experiment, alone, was enough to convince me that all relgions are made-up and no one has any clue at all what the true reality is.
some things don't have easy answers. its better (for me, at least) to admit that than to make up synthetic answers.
finally, there is the group control aspect of religion. aside from the 'sleep well at night' concept, there is a lot of the 'do as I tell you or you will be punished, and by a guy with a much bigger stick than I have!'.
none of that is really productive to the modern thinking mind.
I would reply with "it is better to be thought a fool than to speak up and remove all doubt."
You can't reason your way into religion, it has to touch you personally. Someone in 1700 Europe would not be able to reason his way into belief that such things as elephants existed. He's have had to visit Asia or Africa to believe.
God is only invisible to those who choose to ignore him.
Wow. That's a load of bullshit.
Actually, that's quote from Moses, mumbling under his breath, as he was coming down from Mt Sinai.
I've never demanded anyone start a real war for Cersei's fictional c***.
That makes one of us.
"Listening to sermons and reading religious works like the Bible may also invoke a cognitive benefit. "You're exercising your higher cortical function, thinking about complex concepts that require some imagination,"
I've got a book by Isaac Newton called, "Optiks" that will give you all of that, without making you want to go out and kill non-believers.
Clearly, religion is the key to happiness:
http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-i...
"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." -- Howard Aiken
