Stuff that matters?

When is Xbox going to be forced to let the PlayStation store be available on their console?

How is this any different?

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...

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

Check out http://imo.im/. It has integration of practically every messaging service, as well as a great and android app.

Sorry, no. Moral relativism is complete bullshit. Some things are morally wrong ABSOLUTELY. One of them is supressing your populace's ability to communicate. I'm sick and tired of people justifying morally corrupt behavior just because it's state-sanctioned. Sorry, forcing women they have to wear a head-dress is absolutely not acceptable. Denying them basic human rights is absolutely not acceptable. Persecution of homosexuality is absolutely not acceptable. EVEN IF ALL THESE THINGS ARE STATE SANCTIONED. I'll take that one step further and say that it is even absolutely morally unacceptable for a radical state to possess nuclear weaponry, even more absolutely morally unacceptable for such a regime to have such unabashed hatred based on another people's religion.

The difference between a state and a mob is that one controls the military and one does not. Simply being a group does not magically grant anyone moral superiority or the ability to redefine basic human rights. Saying that its ok for ANYONE to do that is fucking retarded, and something that is continued by apologists. Your moral 'relativism' is the reason why atrocities like this are allowed to perpetrate.

I was under the impression that there was nothing to be gained by doing the schrodinger's cat experiment. The idea is that in collapsing the probability wave of any object, the "observer"-object (really anything that the collapsing object interacts with, conciousnes not required!) essentially becomes a superposition of states. This forms an outward expanding wave of super position with the individuals caught within the wave observing it as collapsed and those outside the event observing all those that interact with the superpositions becoming superpositions themselves.

For example scientist-A is in an isolated box and has a cat in an isolated box. The cat is a superposition either dead or alive, is definately one or the other when he opens the box. Let's say for him, the cat is dead when he opens it and that makes him sad. However the scientist-B, outside the larger box which contains scientist-A can now say that the box is filled a superposition of A-with dead cat (sad scientist), and A-with live cat (happy scientist). This is because scientist-B does not know the result of scientist-A opening the box,only that room now contains a superposition of a sad or happy man with a dead or live cat. Only when B opens this larger box does it the superposition of A collapse for scientist B. Now B is in the same position - he is now be a superposition of states of scientist-B seeing sad-man with dead cat, and scientist-B seeing happy-man with live cat. So the idea is that ALL quantum events function in this way. Performing this on any object, be it virus or molecule or cat. Of course because the real world has no such isolation boxes, these wavefronts of collapse and local superposition happen continuously and undetectably.

So what will happen is they'll go through all this difficulty to superpose two states. Then view the virus, seeing it in one state - all the while oblivious that they are now intertwined with that superposition to an outside observer.