Chathamization

> When Musk first said that an LA<->SF Hyperloop could be built for 1/8th the cost of the equivalent HSR, I chuckled and then waited for the punchline, which still hasn’t arrived.

Yeah, and that proposal was for something with much lower throughput, that didn't have stops along the way, and didn't even reach the same areas (they saved money by stopping outside both cities, which the rail line wouldn't do). It also assumed that the tubes could just be placed along the highway meridians (a lot of the money it was supposed to save was from this).

> There’s all sorts of safety nets, and many normal people use them.

Yeah, and they're often a mess. You often have to sign up in a bunch of different places and deal with a bunch of different broken bureaucracies, which isn't the ideal thing to have dropped on your plate when financial hardship strikes. It's not surprising that, for example, "Only about 1 in 6 people who are eligible for child care subsidies actually get it."[1] Simplifying the system and having it already active when people hit a hardship would be a huge improvement.

I was reading a story about one cities dilapidated homeless shelter. The people there were living in poor conditions - the building's infrastructure was falling apart, the food provided was terrible, etc. It was costing the city $4,680 a month to house the people there. The people would be much better off if the city simply handed them that money - heck, they'd be much better off if the city simply handed them half of that.

[1] http://www.npr.org/2016/08/21/490822086/the-financial-trials...

It's not just the current administration. One of the first things the Bush administration did was to allow more arsenic in drinking water[1]:

> EPA Administrator Christie Whitman on Tuesday rescinded a Clinton administration decision that would have significantly reduced the amount of arsenic allowed in the nation's drinking water.

[1] http://articles.latimes.com/2001/mar/21/news/mn-44369

Of course I can only speak from personal experience. But in my experience, long personal e-mail (several paragraphs) from friends to catch up used to be relatively common, and now they've all but disappeared (I don't think I've gotten any in the past couple of years). Likewise, long chats of the old AIM/MSN variety - spend an hour or two chatting with a friend sharing ideas and news with them - seems much rarer than before (where it wasn't uncommon to have them every few days).

Though I have my issues with it, I'd put Meetup[1] on there. Since it's relying on fees and not advertisements, it's more focused on using the internet to get people to meet in real life and not on getting people to avoid real life to spend more time on the site.

That's the type of stuff smartphones and the web should be used for - supplements that make us have a richer real life, not addictive junk food that competes with reality.

[1] https://www.meetup.com/

> If we're going to be totally honest, then first, let's call social media primarily talking to your friends and family. Which is one of the most deeply and fundamentally human things you can do.

I disagree. Pre-social media, people would talk with friends and family using e-mail and programs like AIM, and there would actually be deep and meaningful conversations. This has been supplanted by social media, which is often simple banal comments on an article/rant that someone threw up for everyone to see.

If someone told you 15 years ago that people would stop having conversations by e-mail and communicate by LiveJournal posts/comments instead, it would have seemed like a hilariously terrible idea, but that's more or less where we are.

On top of that, I feel like many people view the chat as subservient to the main feature of Facebook (sharing and commenting on articles, pictures, and personal rants). The last few times I attempted to have conversations with people on Facebook chat, people seemed happy but somewhat surprised, chatted for a little bit, and then the conversation quickly died (and no attempt was made to revive it).

Are they really much worse than other weapons? If they're firing at someone who is running at the border in the DMZ (where these are placed) during an invasion, the chance that you're going to hit a civilian is effectively zero. Compare that to, say, the large number of civilians killed by airstrikes or drone strikes.

I'd say it's not so much about how often people talk about wine, but how they approach wine in general.

For example, there's a group of wine selections that I've found to be pretty tasty (and often pretty affordable, with many in the $15-$25 range). I went into a busy wine store in an affluent neighborhood and asked the people in the wine department if they had any wines of that select, and they looked at me as if I was from the moon. They told me that's not the way wine is organized - they wanted me to give them a price point and tell them if it's red or white. That's how a lot of people approach wine: "I want to spend N dollars on a X color wine."

(I went to a smaller wine shop near a college, and they knew just who I was talking about)

People have said it's like talking about Vim vs Emacs, and it is somewhat, but it's like hearing people who have never used Vim or Emacs talk about Vim vs Emacs. Have you ever come across those conversations? Everyone is just repeating things they read and saying what they believe the common consensus is, and no one is thinking for themselves.

And if we're talking about self-sustaining Mars colonies, we're talking about something that's relatively far off in the future. If we talk about terraforming, we're talking about something much, much further off. It's worth considering the potential future that a Mars colony would exist in. For example, it doesn't seem impossible that we'll have something like brain uploads in the next 200 years. When that happens, what's the point of trying to keep human bodies alive on Mars? It would make about as much sense as trying to use horses to ship freight across the U.S.

> Without reforms to medical school and medical residency programs, healthcare might never be affordable.

That's important, true. But that's not the only thing that would increase the amount of healthcare available to people. Dean Baker, for example, makes the important point that we could greatly increase the supply of doctors simply by allowing qualified foreign doctors to be certified in the U.S.[1] Lower class workers in industries like manufacturing have had to compete with foreign workers because of free trade, but upper class workers benefit from extreme protectionism that shuts out foreign competition. Protectionism is also why drug prices are so high; if people were allowed to import drugs from places like Canada, the cost would be substantially cheaper.

[1] http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/more-of-free-trade-in-d...

> That doesn't stop bicyclists at all.

It seems to stop at least a number of them, even in places like Denmark. Look at the answers to this question, "Do Danes ride a bike in heavy rain?"[1]:

> Yes, though fewer will than in nice weather.

> Bus fill up more then usual in rain, though

Or this blogpost about people from Copenhagen biking through the winter[2]:

> As mentioned before, 80% of Copenhageners cycle through the winter. That number is surely lower when we have hard winters with snowstorm after snowstorm, but the numbers are still impressive.

And keep in mind the number we'd be interested in would be lower - not just how many people generally cycle throughout the winter (which seems to be ~80%), but how many of that 80% still choose to cycle on particularly cold or snowy winter days.

So even if we could have infrastructure on par with Copenhagen, and even if we get a corresponding cultural shift (neither of these are easy or quick tasks), we would still need the other forms of transportation infrastructure to be able to handle the spillover that occurs when large amount of bikers don't feel like biking.

[1] https://www.quora.com/Do-Danes-ride-a-bike-in-heavy-rain [2] http://www.copenhagenize.com/2011/01/cycling-in-winter-in-co...

> i probably drive more than bike, depends on the weather and somewhat the mood i'm in

A lot of bikers won't bike when the weather reaches a certain point (too cold, too much rain). This means that even if you build infrastructure for bikes, you're still going to have to build just as much throughput for other modes of transportation as you did before (they have to handle situations where no one is biking).

> Some trials have been started, but people keep protesting and doing stuff like burning the fields.

That's not the reason why Golden Rice has been a failure[1]:

> While activists did destroy one Golden Rice test plot in a 2013 protest, it is unlikely that this action had any significant impact on the approval of Golden Rice.

> “Destroying test plots is a dubious way to express opposition, but this was only one small plot out of many plots in multiple locations over many years,” he said.

Rather:

> As Stone and Glover note in the article, researchers continue to have problems developing beta carotene-enriched strains that yield as well as non-GMO strains already being grown by farmers.

[1] https://source.wustl.edu/2016/06/genetically-modified-golden...

> People criticise soft drinks all the time.

For health reasons. They're very rarely criticized for their environmental impact, when they're impact is almost certainly greater than bottled water (since they're not just water and a plastic bottle, but water, a plastic bottle, plus sweeteners and additives).

Some schools have banned bottled waters but allowed bottled soft drinks.

I guess this is what I don't understand. Whenever this comes up, people usually act as if bottled water is no different than what comes out of people's taps. As the conversation goes on, though, people start talking about the filtration systems they've bought, or about having the water tested.

If we all know that tap water in many cases isn't the equivalent of filtered water, or that tap water can vary from location to location, why do these conversation invariably always start by pretending that there's no difference between bottled water and water straight from someone's tap?

You seem to have missed the two reasons I gave for why people may want to buy bottled water. Yes, people have faucets, but the water coming out of your tap often tastes different from the water you buy (yes, it might also be coming out of a tap, but there are many taps across the U.S. with varying taste). And there are various levels of purification - if people really believe that tap water is exactly the same as purified water, then home water filters are an enormous scam. But I've never heard anyone argue that.

Another reason people might buy a bottle of water is because of convenience - if someone's taking a long drive, for example, it's easier to buy a bottle of water at a gas station and drink it periodically than pull over every time they want to drink.

The reason I bring up soda is because there's sometimes less animosity towards soda than bottled water. Some schools will even ban bottled water, but allow bottled soda[1] - naturally leading to an increase in the less healthy option.

[1] http://grist.org/article/plastic-water-bottle-ban-leads-to-u...

> There's a worrying number of people in the world living in places with perfectly potable water, but who insist on drinking only environmentally-damaging bottled water through some superstitious belief that it's better for them.

It always seems odd that bottled water gets trashed a lot more than bottled soda, when soda is both worse for the consumer's health, and probably has a higher environmental footprint (since it's not just the water, but the water plus whatever sweeteners and chemicals get added).

True, soda doesn't taste the same as tap water, but bottled water doesn't taste the same as tap water a lot of the time, either. Some people also prefer the convenience of buying a bottle of water, and it would seem strange to say: "Hey, it's fine to buy something in the bottle if you're doing so for the flavor, but if you're doing so for the sake of convenience, that's terrible."

Good point. Let's consider an electorate that looks at who is running, goes to their website in order to view their history and positions, and looks at how they have answered questionnaires from various organizations. They then use this information and vote accordingly, ignoring television ads and flyers.

For an electorate like this, a candidate needs vary little money. And extra million or two spent on ad buys isn't going to be useful, because people aren't voting based on television ads.

The desire to get more money to buy advertisements and flyers is a symptom of a larger issue - an electorate that votes based on ads and flyers, not positions (the situation is of course much more complicated than just this, but it at least highlights a major issue).

That's not really true. There are plenty of places where the voting system wouldn't hurt third parties (districts where one part or the other is practically non-existent, districts where the incumbent doesn't face a challenger, non-partisan races), but you largely don't see them making any progress there either.

The VPP is the most successful third party (most state reps), and it's only active in one state. The complete inability for other third parties to make almost any progress underscores the problems with the parties themselves (independents have been more successful than third party candidates).

In the past presidential election in the U.S., there were 22 candidates, including a socialist, a libertarian, borderline theocrats, establishment politicians, and whatever you classify Trump as.

There's usually a ton of competition, but most people simply don't care. Ask people who they voted for in the last primary for state legislator, and the reasons they voted for them over their opponents. In my experience, people often have a hard time remembering who they voted for the next day, and it's extremely rare for someone to have a good reason why they voted for them.

I've seen a lot of reformist candidates run against corrupt incumbents and lose. It's depressing, but even more so when you see that almost no one bothered paying attention to the race. And then you see the same people complain later - "Why's the government so bad? How come there's no choice and all candidates are the same?"

> When authors in the philosophy of mind stops rehashing ideas that could and most likely have occurred to 17th century philosophers for the sake of attaching their names to a publication, then it will see some progress.

I doubt people involved in philosophy of the mind will ever be useful here. If one keeps up to date on neuroscience, they'll see a lot of progress being made, but none of it is coming from the "philosophy of the mind" people. Not only that, but the "philosophy of the mind" people don't even seem to be aware of much of what's happening in neuroscience.

There seems to be a certain "God of the gaps" aspect to how philosophy approaches science, where people pretend that philosophy is fundamental approach to a field which is working on a particularly large and difficult problem. So you see that philosophers often approach things like the human mind and quantum theory quite different from how they approach chemistry or non-mind physiology.

> How is "consciousness" not just a modern word for "soul", minus the afterlife stuff?

There's actually an interesting analog with intelligent design. In both cases (evolution, the brain) it's clear that what's happening is that the emergent properties from incredibly complex systems is creating surprisingly complex results (surprisingly complex to the average observer). In both cases this bothers people because it means that humans aren't anything particularly special (just matter that happens to go through certain processes), and because it's hard for them to grasp the scale and complexity of the systems involved. So an invisible non-material explanation is theorized instead which sets humanity above the "mere" material world.

That's true, but there's still a ton of useful information freely available out there that gets ignored. For the vast majority of people the problem isn't lack of access to information that the government is concealing, but rather lack of interest in useful information they can access in seconds.

That's not to say that lack of access isn't a major problem - it is - but even when you solve that, you're going to be left with the much bigger lack of interest problem.

> “We demand convenience over security,” Velasquez said.

Banks send a constant stream of credit card offers through the mail and pay people to use credit cards (with rewards). Stores are always trying to get you to sign up for their credit cards and offering big discounts if you do, and car dealerships offer special deals - but only if you agree to finance your car. People might want more credit, but lets be honest - the financial industry is doing everything it can to shovel debt onto the American public.

Imagine if a loan shark went door to door in a neighborhood paying residents $500 to take one of his loans. That seems almost cartoonishly evil, but that's more or less what the financial industry does. And it's not hard to see why - the average credit card has an annual interest rate of 15%. Even after you factor in things rewards and people who don't pay, you're still looking at a very nice rate of return.

It's hard to see how identity theft isn't directly linked to financial institutions trying to make credit as easily available and as widespread as possible. Instead of viewing identity theft as a high price to pay for the convenience we want, it should be viewed as yet another terrible consequence of the financial industry's efforts to push as much debt onto Americans as they can.

Child marriage is legal in much of the the U.S.A.[1]:

> The search turned up cases of 12-year-old girls married in Alaska, Louisiana and South Carolina, while other states simply had categories of “14 and younger.”

Most states have no minimum age, though some have a minimum age between 14 and 17 (only two have a minimum age of 17 going by the map in the article).

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/26/opinion/sunday/it-was-for...

> “Trust us, we'd never use it against the people it's supposed to protect” isn't enough.

Especially because it's been so horribly abused in the past. Take this case in Manassas, Virginia. 17 year old texts a picture of his penis to his 15 year old girlfriend. The police find out, charge the 17 year old with distributing child pornography, and take pictures of his penis saying they need it for evidence[1]. They then get a warrant from the courts demanding that the 17 year old send them a picture of his erect penis[2]. And if he didn't comply:

> If he doesn't cooperate, the Manassas City Police Department has threatened to take him to a hospital and medically induce an erection with an injection, attorney Jessica Harbeson Foster toldThe Washington Post.

Eventually they backed off when it received widespread attention in the press. Later it turned out that the detective in charge of the case was a pedophile[3]:

> A Manassas City police detective, who was the lead investigator in a controversial teen “sexting” case last year, shot and killed himself outside his home Tuesday morning as police tried to arrest him for allegedly molesting two boys he met while coaching youth hockey in Prince William County.

When I read stories like this, I'm at a loss for words. No one in the justice system realized how terrible this is? Not only does this show the problem with giving law enforcement this kind of power, but I think it shows that we really need some sort of public advocacy department to monitor and go after this sort of abuse (someone to watch the watchmen).

The kid in the case got probation, by the way.

[1] http://time.com/2971033/virginia-police-search-warrant-photo... [2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/07/09/virgin... [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/manassas-...

> If it's the behavior of neurons that's special, then consciousness is no longer identical with neurons, it's identical with any physical system that functions the same way.

Sure, I don't think brain uploads are impossible. If we were having this conversation in 100 years, I might be saying that "red experience" is the result of neuronal/circuit activity. But functions the same way is the relevant part - a rock does not function the same way. I don't think either of us expect a human to act the same way if their brain is replaced by a rock. On some level, we both know that the brain is fundamentally different from a rock.

> And then you have the possibility of very counterintuitive arrangements, like a billion Chinese instantiating a blue experience, or a meteor shower simulating experiences.

I think we can both agree that a computer is merely a physical object. That doesn't mean that surfing the web or playing a video game on "a billion Chinese"/"a meteor shower" is any less counterintuitive. Imagining any incredibly complex system being completely simulated by random physical phenomena is bizarre.

And the human brain is much, much more complex than a laptop. Really, go read up on it - 86 billion neurons, 100 trillion synapses, neurons firing 200 times a second. Consider the work it takes to simulate one second of brain activity (with far fewer neurons and synapses than a human brain)[1]:

> The simulation involved 1.73 billion virtual nerve cells connected by 10.4 trillion synapses and was run on Japan's K computer, which was ranked the fastest in the world in 2011.

> It took the Fujitsu-built K about 40 minutes to complete a simulation of one second of neuronal network activity in real time, according to Japanese research institute RIKEN, which runs the machine.

> The simulation harnessed the power of 82,944 processors on the K computer, which is now ranked fourth on the biannual international Top500 supercomputer standings (China's Tianhe-2 is the fastest now).

You're far more likely to see the dust in the air randomly play Casablanca for you from start to finish than you are for meteor showers to randomly start simulating the human brain. The human brain is complex. Really, really, really complex. So complex that weird emergent stuff like "red experience" happens. People have a hard time conceptualizing things when they become so vast; that's understandable. But there's no need to invent invisible qualia simply because we have a hard time understanding things on this scale.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/fujitsu-supercomputer-simulates-1-...

> Subjective awareness exists. "Qualia" is a name for the content of awareness.

Well, as I said in an earlier post, I'm talking about the existence of qualia "beyond being a vague description for emergent properties arising from our cells." People have a sense of self, sure, and people experience things. But usually the people who bring up "qualia" seem to think that our sense of self can't be explained as simply being neuronal activity.

For instance, "redness" doesn't seem to be mysterious at all to me. Our brains fire in a certain way when presented with certain stimuli. As for why they fire in that particular way, it's complicated because the brain is complicated (and each persons brain is unique). But it's a complicated physical system (and one that we're gaining a better understanding of each day).

> One is that it's hard to see (pun unintended) how the explanation for neuronal activity is the same thing as having a red experience.

I guess I don't understand why that's hard to see. It seems pretty straightforward to me. We know that neuronal activity is necessary for the experience, we know that it coincides with the experience, and we know that changing how neurons operate can effect the experience. It doesn't seem like a stretch to say that they are the experience.

> Second problem is that it makes the physical system of brain activity special...It's also hard to see what makes neuronal activity any more special than the cells in your toes or molecules in a rock. Why can't a rock have a red experience when interacting with light at that wavelength?

If we're defining "red experience" as the neuronal activity that humans have when they see red, your wondering why a rock can't have that? I mean, because it's a rock that doesn't have a single neuron, let alone a human brain?

But beyond that - are there people that actually argue that brain activity isn't special? You're not going to have a "red experience" if you have no brain activity.