A house, land, hobbies, an emergency fund in case needing time away from work, investments, nicer things, a stay-home wife, children, traveling, supporting loved ones, there are so many possible reasons.
Omnipotence just means being able to do whatever power can do. So it is incoherent to ask if God could make a square circle. The words don’t mean anything.
God could make a burrito too hot for himself to eat. Then he could make himself capable of eating it. Rinse and repeat.
Yeah I never really bought that language argument - the idea that the paradox arises solely from a schism between language and reality. I prefer to think eschatology solves the issue quite nicely. The omnipotent entity is the one for which such a situation never arises. Similarly if a universe evolves to give rise to God, who is to say that God was never present. Or all around us, really?
Either way I'd say Matthew 4:1 solves that paradox in a way that satisfies billions of people. Though I am getting a kick out of imagining Mexican/American Jesus munching on burritos.
There's two things there, and I don't get either of them.
First, if you want to sidestep if Jesus is omnipotent, then it's no longer saying anything about omnipotence.
Second, you also have to make the devil omnipotent.
Actually, the second point has a sub-point, because if it's two different entities then you get "an unstoppable force meets an immovable object" which is more easily resolved by "the force just passes right through the object without influencing it" — for the self-contradiction I gave to even be present, you would need to regard the devil as being another aspect of Yahweh in the same regard that Jesus is an incarnation of Yahweh within Christianity (not to be confused with how Jesus is seen in Islam, which totally rejects this as polytheistic idolatry).
> “We have succeeded in landing a compromise on a CO2 tax, which lays the groundwork for a restructured food industry -– also on the other side of 2030,” its head Maria Reumert Gjerding said after the talks in which they took part.
Yikes. All this is is a successful attempt by the ruling class to convince the subjugated to give up even more rights and freedoms. “It’s for your own good” on steroids. If you want to see clear proof of this, just note that on the strict numbers, this practice won’t meaningfully move the needle on the climate issue. In fact, will it even move the needle overall? Once you feed the animals better, namely with some seaweed incorporated into cow feed in particular, this total emission from these sources drops by some 80% or more. But of course that solution won’t do, because the entire point of these co2 laws is to have more control over people’s lives rather than to solve problems. If climate change ended tomorrow, these same people would try to push the same laws because the intention is to control the masses and to tax people more to feed the bureaucracy machine.
People should be wary of hall monitors and bureaucrats aiming for “restructuring” of food systems, especially for moral posturing reasons. In history that tends to lead to starvation.
> the entire point of these co2 laws is to have more control over people’s lives rather than to solve problems.
Interesting take, so the absolutely massive subsidies on meat that completely change the overall affordability of meat vs vegetables isn’t a problem. But trying to renormalize costs so the environmental impact of meat isn’t hidden away in subsidies is “control the people”.
If we removed all subsidies tomorrow the problem would go away as everyone just naturally cut 90% of their meat consumption because of the cost.
Subsidize produce too. The point of the subsidies is to normalize reliable access to food. Otherwise during low seasons, farmers would get wiped out and it would compromise food security.
This is probably a much more difficult question to answer than you might expect.
If you asked me, I think liberal democracies all around the world are going through a legitimacy crisis. People have not been feeling, for a while now, properly represented by their politicians so they are always seeking to vote for someone that seems like the outsider. Right now, that is represented by these sort of authoritarian, big demagogue politicians.
I think a lot of the problems of the modern world require much more innovative ways of doing politics and our liberal democracies which are based on this concept of the "vote for your representative" are at the limits of what they can do. The systems we have are slow and inefficient in a world that changes rapidly and requires politics to adapt much more quickly than they can.
For this reason, imo, people have grown dejected from politics and the response of the electorate is a sort of self-destruction where they will vote for anyone that can resonate with a message of "i can fix it". Whatever that character might be. It's easy for politicians to play certain cards; say, immigration is the problem and the fix is to stop it. That seems like a simple solution and it's a message that can be understood pretty easily.
But what are the real problems of the 21st century, in Europe, in the USA, in the rest of the world? I think a lot of people might hyper-focus on certain problems and offer solutions just for those problems and act as if that could solve a much more systemic failure. Ultimately, it is my opinion that the problem is politicians/politics itself and so it is rather difficult for politicians to solve it. Politicians are quick to say "we've failed you" but they don't really mean it, it's true though.
A couple books that have really changed my perspective on how politics should be and why our systems are failing are: Systemic Corruption by Camila Vergara and Open Democracy by Helene Landemore. If you wanna know more.
National governments were formed to solve nation-sized issues (trains, taxation rates not changing every 50km, consistent languages and education systems, etc). Modern problems are bigger than that: globalized production chains, tax havens, climate change, migration flows, and superpower conflicts, simply cannot be fixed at the national level.
I can guarantee that all the boats in the Mediterranean and the North Sea will be shot on sight by my navy, but people will still get into Europe from somewhere else. I can ensure all the manufacturers in the country respect stringent pollution laws, but people will still buy cheaper and more polluting Chinese goods. And so on and so forth.
So we move to a super-national, continent-sized model, and we have a better chance to address these problems - but then we're adding more layers of indirection between citizenry and representatives, and we get an issue of legitimacy. It's a thorny subject.
Personally I think we can make good use of sortition to inject legitimacy into the system. Kind of like what has been done in ireland, france, belgium...
Sortition is very scalable and private citizens are actually much "cheaper" a resource than career politicians while imo being more legitimate and more interested in actually solving problems rather than furthering their careers.
It's an underrated social technology. It's why I recommended Landemore's book previously.
But a lot of people in government, even among the EC consists of what is effectively lifers. I don't think citing "outsiders" as the culprit is accurate.
The person who introduced CSAR most recently has been in high government positions for decades, I believe the previous iteration was as well.
Average tenure in the US senate is pretty close to the 2 term limit combined at 12 years, US house of representatives is also a bit over 4 terms combined at 8 years. Junior politicians are definitely not proposing their own legislation, especially with the existence of party whips and similar roles that exist across the world.
If its dejection, OK I can understand that. If it's seeking an outsider, yeah that's likely among the population. Authoritarian demagogues, well you're just labeling politicians what they are inherently, so no push back from me.
But combined together I can't accept. The people doing things like this are people who are familiar to us.
The thing is, the kind of people who become politicians at all are predisposed to this -- they are the kind of people who want to be in charge, to control, to decide.
(It's not just the EU, it's everywhere.)
Without pushback, politicians will just naturally move toward increasing their own authority. The new technology has opened up a new opportunity, so of course they are making their push.
Democracy, as messy, inefficient, and imperfect as it is, is the only form of government that gives all us non-politicians a reasonable chance to push back.
EU citizens don’t directly elect these politicians. They’re made up of heads of state, so people are voting for whoever they think is their best state government, and those resulting heads of state go to the council.
Also the EU isn’t some homogeneous entity, it’s made up of many different countries with many different views, that don’t all align. Asking why EU citizens vote for these types of politicians, is equivalent to asking why some Americans vote for abortion banning republicans. The answer as always is complicated, and there are many different issues that might feed into someone’s vote, and this specific issue might not have been the most important.
> people are voting for whoever they think is their best state government
It's even more complicated than that. For instance, "head of state" of Latvia in the Council which nominated current EU Commission president in 2019 was Karinsh, the prime minister of Latvia. Not being directly elected, the prime minister of Latvia gets nominated by president (not directly elected as well, BTW) and approved by coalition in the parliament. The punchline is that he was the leader of a party that got the least number of votes (and hence, number of seats in the parliament — 8/100) in the corresponding election. The party that got the most votes (and most seats) was not included into the coalition at all.
The fundamental problem with any representative democracy is that people want to vote on issues, but they are instead only given the opportunity to vote for whoever will "represent" them on those issues. Worse yet, it comes as a package deal where you have to basically select the policy package that comes the closest to what you want - which in practice often means "the least bad".
When the UK was in the EU we didn't care about the EU elections. Turnout peaked in 2004 at 38.9%, but could be as low as 24%.
If you asked the average UK citizen who their MEPs were, they wouldn't be able to tell you. And if we didn't care enough to know their names, we certainly weren't paying attention to the policies they voted for.
That makes MEPs very susceptible to lobbying, and the EU system very susceptible to corruption in general.
I wrote to all the UK MEPs when the awful Copyright Directive was being proposed, with its completely impractical technical demands and chilling consequences. Most of the MEPs didn't have a clue what was going on, and they didn't seem to care, because they just parrotted the talking points that the Commission had put forward when it pushed the Directive through, and the MEPs planned to obediently vote for the Directive. The only ones that didn't plan to support the Copyright Directive were the Euro-skeptic MEPs, and thank goodness they were there in the mix.
Because if you don't want to vote for them you are immediately branded far-right and a racist, and Europe will fall into a slippery-slope of re-Nazifying itself.
Based on this Chat Control debacle, sounds like the people saying that have no idea what they’re talking about and should be encouraged to shut up or to be more precise and rigorous in their arguments lol
In fact, I think this kind of effort alienates people and turns them precisely into a direction where they vent their frustration with the system on wrong avenues.
In many ways, the people are voting for far-right politicians because there's been an intellectual elite that has told them again and again "your concerns don't matter, so just shut up for a moment". It turns out, they do matter. We ought to respect each other and listen to each other truthfully to be able to reach agreements.
Overall, I'd say, large groups of people are more than capable of reaching reasonable outcomes. The problem is our system of politics are not really encouraging dialogue and change of mind. In fact, a politician changing their mind is seen as a bad thing and is usually punished. But that's just how the system is set up to be, of course, a politician is supposed to represent an electorate so the politician needs to be rigid in their views and the electorate is the one that needs to change. But this comes with the problem that electorate cycles are slow and "the people" have a much harder time accessing and parsing information than a politician might have.
Ideally we'd ought to have a system where our representatives are capable and encouraged to come into an issue with an open mind, and upon deliberation decanting into a certain position. Regardless of political color.
And I think that's kind of completely the opposite to "these people should shut up", no, they should speak up and be heard. But it should be done in a context that allows for a fair and reasonable debate.
I'd prefer a society where when people say something stupid they are pointed out where they were wrong and why, instead of encouraging people to shut up
Right, but the hall monitors don’t grant that benefit of the doubt to others in the first place. Otherwise what parent pointed out wouldn’t be the case.
You may also be branded far-left too. The authoritarians in the 'center' are also afraid of a strong leftist movement taking their power and money away, not just a rightist one.
You can tell because different pro-surveillance arguments are concocted depending on the audience: for conservatives they say "think of the children, Islamic terrorism, drugs, etc." for leftists they say: "toxic content online, disinformation, right-wing-terror, hate crimes". And because everyone is terrified of the other side, and the Internet and mainstream media can be used to target these messages, we have what we have today.
No, it means that those who want it did not manage to trade enough compromises on other topics to those who don't want it or do not oppose it at least. If let's say a french economy sector benefits from policy A while a polish sector might lose from it, and Romania is neutral. In such a situation France might promise Poland their support for policy B which is beneficial for the pols, and they might promise a smaller favor to Romania to make them form the majority. If the pols are unhappy with the trade, they will bid for Romania's support against policy A. The show is funnier with 27 participants and fields that span through dozens of policies and over decades.
> If you ever read an article on a subject with which you have a lot of first-hand experience, you’ll notice that they always get major things wrong – basic facts, dates, names of people and organizations, the stated intentions of involved parties, the reasons a thing is happening – things even a novice in the space would know better about.
> Now think about all the articles you read about subjects that you don't know much about, why would the accuracy be any higher on those ones?
Why wouldn't the accuracy be higher? Extrapolating that way from limited experience is not something I would personally do. I would read everything, learn gradually, and continue learning and testing information with experiments and more information.
In the context of articles the answer is simple: because the journalist isnt the specialist, they likely just interviewed a few people and wrapped it up the article.
For comments it's a different story. You do occasionally get the real experts, but more often then not, you just get another mediocre human like myself that just voiced their opinion. Furthermore, there is a strong correlation with experts not commenting as they've got better things to do vs the average Joe that is commenting with little effort, essentially outputting significantly more comments.
Another detrimental factor is that mentally unwell people will often output orders of magnitude more comments then everyone else, complicating everything even more.
OP has a point. It depends on your frame. Some areas require far more specialized knowledge than others. If your specialization were something incredibly complex like quantum physics, you'd probably find ridiculous mistakes in 99% of mainstream sources. OTOH, articles about business or tax law may have far fewer lay errors, so you would be mistaken to project the popular information error rate in your own field onto popular reporting in every other field.
At least in theory, while the journalist isn't a subject matter expert, they have spent time reporting on the same domain. They know the people who are experts, and work under an editor who has worked in that field for decades. They should be able to validate any facts and be able to put them into context.
As newspapers have gotten hammered there are fewer and fewer people who actually do that, and more and more bloggers with loud opinions and few facts. Many good sources have gone defunct or given up trying. But there do remain a few sources of decent journalism, where the reporters and editor really are better informed than most laymen.
> You do occasionally get the real experts, but more often then not, you just get another mediocre human like myself that just voiced their opinion
Most of the comments experts make are just stating their own opinions as well. Take any credible expert in any field and you'll find equally credible experts who completely disagree with them. When experts are communicating with non-experts they're often really bad at explaining which points are just their opinions versus more widely accepted facts, and just as bad as explaining what other equally credible expert perspectives exist on a topic other than their own. They also tend to be pretty bad at explaining where the limits of knowledge in their field are as well.
I would suggest that the ego boost of being a highly regarded expert also tends to make these shortcomings worse with a lot of people, that increasing credibility and reputation can have the effect of increasing dogmatic-ness. Of the topics that I'm somewhat well informed about, I know very few "experts" who are good at explaining the perspectives of their field in a reasonably balanced way, I think Roger Penrose is quite good at doing this, but even he's not perfect and experts with his level of humility are not very common.
Sure. I mean, ask most coders what the best programming language or web framework is for a certain job, and they'll tell you it's whichever one they use. It's partly confirmation bias from their workplace, and partly "when all you have is a hammer..."
Should still maintain infrastructure for gas for the foreseeable future just in case of EMP. Coal too. That valuable knowledge should not be lost in case we ever need to go back to simpler ways as well.
How do you scale up to producing far more energy in that approach? What about the efficiency to produce large amounts of energy on large spacecraft and other planets and in the ocean?
are you asking how you scale up to producing far more energy with solar panels? world marketed energy consumption is about 18 terawatts, total terrestrial insolation is about 128000 terawatts, and current mainstream panels are about 23% efficient, so if you put solar panels on 50% of the earth's surface, you get 15000 terawatts, which is almost 1000 times more than the humans are using now. on the bottom of the ocean you probably need a different approach, maybe nuclear, or egs geothermal, or maybe running a cable up to the surface, or periodically receiving shipments of thermite in a submarine. some other planets will have no trouble with solar panels; others will need nuclear reactors
Getting only 1,000 times more than humans are using now but requiring 50% of the earth's surface seems like an awful deal. Not only do you need much more of the earth's surface, taking away from trees and habitats and other uses, but you need to significantly increase mining activities to produce the panels and their associated infrastructure. Whereas to get 15,000 additional terawawtts from more nuclear reactors, you could do that with 1,200 - 1,900 additional nuclear reactors occupying just the size of Rhode Island.
mostly you'd be floating them on the oceans (ideally the currently-nutrient-depleted parts of the oceans that aren't teeming with algae), but yeah, that's roughly the limit for solar, and as you're approaching that limit, you need to be thinking about space-based solar power, nuclear power, geothermal power, etc. maybe when you're at 64× of current energy consumption, say
probably we should think of this as a lower bound, though; adoption is likely to slow down as solar moves into application areas that are not already electrified or indeed yet done at all by humans, and the last 24 years have been, historically speaking, unusually peaceful
That depends on how much more efficient solar panels get and what future energy requirements are, but in any case it'll be worse to scale energy creation with solar than with nuclear.
i would instead say that as long as nuclear energy is horrendously expensive, it won't scale. but nuclear energy is not inherently horrendously expensive; it's just that human technology is very primitive still
