Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Current President (Score 1) 2

The current President could not possibly keep any secret and would fire anyone that attempts to hide anything from him.

The universe is huge. I have no doubt there is intelligent life somewhere off earth. There are 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe. 100 billion stars per galaxy, that is a lot of chances.

A galaxy is about 100,000 light years across, and we have a minimum of 5 million light years between galaxies.

A hundred thousand light years means there may still be alien life in the Milky Way that has not found us, but I think there is a good chance we are the only intelligent life in the Milky Way.

Given the 5 million light years and the speed of light limitation, I think there is not enough time for alien species to conquer their own galaxy, get to the Milky Way and find us. Given the trillions of galaxies and hundreds of billions of stars in each galaxy I think the odds are there is more life somewhere in the universe.

Comment Old style Republicans still exist (Score 1) 1

Yes, Trump and his Maga followers are not conservative. They are:

1) A combination of Plutocrats and Mercantilists (not capitalists)
2) Racists (anti-immigration is by definition racist in a country whose native born fertility rate is less than replacement).
3) Hate all of the American Constitution except the part that lets them buy guns and say what they want to say (i.e. Facist)
4) Want government that can do what they want to do but not what the Democrats want to do. (i.e. stop abortion but not regulate guns, safety or prevent prejudiced behavior)

That said, there are still millions of people registered as Republican that are:

Fiscally conservative.
Embrace limits on government
Believe in independence not dependence

Many of them are uneducated. Some of them hate Trump but like the power he has given them (i.e. the Supreme Court)

A very few are wising up to the fact that he is clearly pardoning actual criminals and ignoring crimes committed by police/his followers, prosecuting his political enemies without any evidence, ignoring gun rights, hiding his own sexual crimes, protecting others that engaged in sexual crimes, and most importantly transforming the government so that intentionally attempts to get around the laws of our nations and the court rulings rather than making honest attempts to follow the law.

This is why people in Republican states, such as Ohio and Texas are likely going to vote for Democratic Senators, rather than Republican ones.

There is yet hope to avoid the fall of the USA Constition and the resulting Fascist takeover.

Comment GOP hates capitalism (Score 3, Insightful) 118

The Republican President is a Mercantilist (Balance of Trade, High Tariffs)

Who called in Elon Musk, a Plutocrat, to destroy our regulatory systems.

While the red states love to engage in Communism (government control of businesses - like one warehouse for all the states liquor) for the benefit of the wealthy at the expense of the poor.

Capitalism is about the free market - where people get a free choice. If they do not have a free choice, it is not capitalism. When the choice is buy X or die (medicine for example) that is not free and not capitalism.

Comment Mix of culture and MONEY. (Score 1) 268

First, look at South Korea. They have the worst birthrate (not fertility) problem. Over the past 80 years, they created a culture focused on work with no work-life balance. Employees are expected to get drunk with their boss after work, rather than go out looking for a date or go home to their family. While they now offer things like paternity leave, if you take it, you lose the chance to get promoted. Which leaves you too poor to raise a child.

Next, our culture has allowed the costs of raising a kid to rise to about 1/2 million us dollars or about 8 times the average US income. This encourages women to make their number one consideration how much money a guy makes. If you see a beautiful woman with an unattractive guy you think he is rich.

There are a lot of factors involved in this issue, including the importance and expense of school (both lower grades and university), and the obsession with spending money on expensive things to get into the right college (after school activities). In the 1950s your average yearly college cost of a GOOD school was half the average salary, Now it approaches double it.

If we really want to encourage people to have children, no amount of tax discounts will do. You can't remove a mountain with a shovel, you need excavating machines.

We could put high taxes on any university that has more than half of their students paying more than half the US average salary. This would focus more of the money on education rather than research, which does have consequences.

We would also have to require them to separate out any activity that cost any money to do in their admissions applications and make it only apply to people paying full cost. That would specifically include people attending private high schools. If you can afford to go to them, you have to pay full price college admissions - and only compete against others.

This would punish certain states that are trying to save public money by encouraging parents to put their kids in private schools. NO. Do not make it more expensive to raise kids in order to save taxes for the wealthy in your state.

Then there is food and healthcare. They should be near free to all children under the age of 18. Every school should offer free lunches to all students - and require them to be both healthy and delicious. This is NOT hard to do, other countries do it all the time. Sweden, Brazil, India are fine examples. The trick is to have a separate budget, so nobody cuts the food budget because they cut the education budget.

Health care again should not depend upon how much money your parents made, we cover the healthcare of the elderly, just put all kids in Medicare until age 18.

Will this cost money? Yes. but it solves the problem we created by trying to save money in the wrong areas.

Comment Another word for stupidity. (Score 4, Insightful) 137

I think what is really going on is that is not 'fluid IQ', but regular, normal "IQ".

That is, stupid people either do not realize the AI is wrong, or more likely, they are so used to being corrected by more intelligent people that they just assume the AI must be smarter than they are and do not challenge it.

I can also see a small number of submissive/shy/apathetic people just accepting the wrong information and thinking it is not worth fixing.

This kind of thing gets me so mad that I would never just accept that.

Comment Re:Maybe stick to the speed limit? (Score 1) 199

While it is true that most speed limits are placed due to risk, that is not always true.

There are places in the US and other countries where speed tickets are used to raise money from out of towners. They do things like down shift the speed by 10 mph for a 1 mile stretch and then station a cop near there. The cops know the local cars and if they do happen to break the law they get warnings.

In addition, often speed limits are set differently for wealthy parts of town vs the poor parts of town - to give out more tickets in the poor areas.

Similar things happen with parking enforcement. My personal 'favorite' is looking at police cars illegally parked all around the police station. Or the slightly more sophisticated version of this where the parking laws around the police station are different than those around the rest of the city.

Comment Re:Did they fire their paralegals? (Score 2) 51

1) If your lawyer does not have a paralegal, you should fire them. Law is a very paperwork intensive industry. Now a days you can get away with 1 paralegal serving multiple lawyers, but nobody and I mean nobody goes without a paralegal. Smaller shops may have only one person doing the work of a receptionist and paralegal and other things, but they will always have at least one person.

It is inappropriate for a lawyer to have the paralegal check his work, but if you are not going to check it at all, that is incredibly stupid. Stupid as in how the hell did you get into law school and how did they not kick you out.

2) I never said the lawyer is not responsible. He signed it, he is responsible. If you are not personally going to check it, at least have your paralegal do it. That is simple logic.

Comment Re:Not as good as it looks (Score 1) 129

You are wrong, the shots do NOT affect happiness from eating at all. They actively negate hunger and also affect how sugar is manipulated by the body. Nothing they do affects dopamine.

Moreover, you have overly simplified an extremely complex issue, in large part to blame the fat people.

Dietary fiber does not totally suppress appetite. Feeling full discourages eating, it does not negate hunger. You can very easily feel hungry even if you also feel full. That is one of the issues that many obese people face.

Moreover, obesity is not merely an addiction. There are multiple other factors, including exercise. People with physical impairments that preclude exercise are much more likely to be obese, and this has nothing to do with addiction. Depression is related to addiction, but is not identical and also plays a part.

Most important appears to be metabolism. There are people that can eat twice as much food as others and still maintain their weight. And there are people that do not lose weight even if they cut their food intake significantly.

One of the ways you can tell addiction is the correlation with other addictions.

Alcoholism, drug addiction, and gambling are all highly correlated. People that have problems with one are extremely likely to have problems with the other two.

Obesity is slightly correlated, but nowhere near the correlation between the three main addictions.

Does addiction play a part? Yes. but the studies all show it is much less than you suggest.

Comment Clone propriety software too? (Score 2) 125

If the AI can clone free software, then it should be able to clone non-free software. The real question is whether we should bother copyrighting any software if it can be so easily duplicated.

Nobody is going to copyright my voice singing - there are so many other better singers.

If software becomes so easy to create than it loses it's value.

Hm - perhaps someone should clone all the software we install on items we buy that comes with licenses that prevent repair. We own the hardware and we usually hate the software that comes on smart appliances. A cheap replacement for it may screw with their illegal and unethical attempts to control what you do with stuff you own and they do not.

Slashdot Top Deals

Suggest you just sit there and wait till life gets easier.

Working...