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Comment Psyops (Score 0, Troll) 206

This, like other distractors which affect small numbers of individuals but are blown out of massive proportion through social media engineering, probably has its roots in Russian/Iranian/Chinese psyops.

Slow and insidious gradual change in culture. All these young fools believe a 4 day work week is now the way to go. What will that result in? Gradual decline in year to year output to the tune of around 20%. Sure, initially there may be little decline as those individuals who are for such a change set out to demonstrate they were right about maintaining productivity, but humans being humans, daily productivity will settle into the same amount as with a 5 day work week. Overall total output will be at a loss of that 5th day.

And like most things, the same people that push for stuff like this don't take the next step in critical thinking and analyze what that will mean. Economic contraction. Increase in prices. Decrease in buying power. Less goods, less income, less supply, stable demand.

But hey, 3 day weekend!

BTW such a ridiculous plan is not being discussed in any of the above mentioned countries for a reason...

Comment Scammers Paradise (Score 1, Redundant) 255

The whole appeal of iPhones is that they're incredibly secure, walled-garden, and have an app store that is well-vetted. Just wait until grandma gets the text telling her to side-load whatever nonsense crypto/spyware/notification blaster on her phone and then promptly drain her accounts while texting all her contacts further download links.

This ONLY benefits large corporations by letting them side-step Apple's surcharge. An unintended consequence of this will be scammers running wild on tech-illiterates, which at this point is nearly everyone. It absolutely does not help ANYONE ELSE.

Comment Re:an private parking lot can not control the bran (Score 2) 255

Absolutely they can. A private road or a private parking lot can make up whatever rules it wants."For paying customers only" "For Ferrari's Only" "No tresspassing".

You can do whatever you want. It isn't private property.

Comment Genius? (Score 2) 347

Looks like Mr. Genius Grant should have taken a basic (and I mean basic) philosophy course in undergrad. His conclusion illustrates his ignorance about the philosophical implications over lack of free-will.

Essentially the argument about punishment/reward for a universe without free-will is moot for two reasons. First, those punishing/rewarding other have no free-will themselves. Second, the purpose of punishment/reward is not to punish and reward the INDIVIDUAL. Rather their purpose is to function as a positive inducer or negative deterrent to SOCIETAL behavior.

The actions of an individual are not determined by free-will, they are determined by the environment and history that lead to the current state of the individual's brain. Society's only recourse is to try to shape this environment, to induce the brain towards actions we deem acceptable. So our reward/punishment systems serve to steer free-will-less individuals towards morality/ethics in their future free-will-less choices, not as retroactive reward/punishment.

So why does all this matter? Its all just philosophy because as you notice, the systems we set up to achieve our societal goals are the same whether there is free-will or not. Rewards and punishments continue, its just their justification and the philosophical implications are different. Social systems set up to be proactive and shape future free-will-less choices or they are they set up to retroactively reward/punish free-will choices. Those systems are indistinguishable aside from the philosophical debate.

Comment Hit piece (Score 5, Interesting) 125

I'm all about sustainability and communities like this are obviously not it. However, importing water is not a novel or unique thing - even Los Angeles does this and they're huge, next to the ocean, and have a mediterranean climate - not desert.

Hell, even the photos in the article were carefully chosen for the given narrative. Muted, washed out colors. You'd think they were taken in the 1970s. Showing only the most depressing sights for the town.

Articles like this undercut their message with their obvious slanting. Why not just state the facts: desert community has no sustainable water plan outside of importing and is overly ambitious / about to suffer massive hubris. By tainting it with this baked in bias it makes me not want to believe the article or agree with its conclusion.

Let the facts speak for themselves "journalist."

Comment Is this a bad thing? (Score 4, Insightful) 59

My experience was that the amount of students going to college far exceeded the amount of actual academics that should have been going to college. Many were "forced" by social pressure or family, while having no desire or motivation for academia.

Maybe people are finally waking up the fact that earning worthless degrees (you know which ones) that land you a job as a barista after 4 years and 50k of debt aren't worth it?

Hopefully we see a resurgence of trade schools and increase in trade workers. They make a great living and incur little debt. Win-win.

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