I understand where you're coming from. It's hard to have friends with opinions that you think are wrong. One of the reasons that I'm taking the time to provide a counterview is because if the feedback is primarily negative people often feel ashamed of their attributes. I'm vegetarian and I receive primarily negative feedback for it. Same with being a geek, and a programmer. Due to how this affected with me when I was younger I tend to think that negative feedback for attributes without a clear negative should be kept to a minimum.
A healthy attitude to judge others by is if they are causing direct harm to others. I think murder is wrong, violence towards others is wrong, or controlling others who seek a different lifestyle through social or legal pressures is wrong.
Saying "If you don't enjoy what I enjoy there is something wrong with you" is a value judgement. Not seeing eating, or sex, or other commonly enjoyed activities as enjoyable (or simply not as priorities) does not mean you need to be fixed. Personally I love eating, but I would gladly have a substitute to take care of the nutrition aspect so I didn't have to bother about it and could eat a few times a week purely for pleasure.
That's not the situation. He exposed the fact that the US Military was breaking the law. Thus whistle-blowing. There are laws protecting him and he is still being punished.
The great thing about life is that we can make our own choices. I don't think judging other people based on the decisions they make is a healthy attitude. The more we provide new options for people the more diversity in human experience we create and that is often beneficial. Guess who didn't choose to partake in sex despite plenty of opportunity: Nikola Tesla. Of course he never did anything important...
Since vegetarianism tends to attract a certain sort of person anecdotal evidence regarding them is shaky at best. It would be interesting to see various studies but I'm not sure there are many I trust since they tend to get hijacked to serve a political or moral point. If soylent (or some future product) does prove successful I would think a lot of vegetarians (as well as meat eaters) would benefit from having some occasionally just to make sure they're getting all their required nutrients.
Delete everything. If you find yourself needing to reimplement something later you can always check out the old code in the repo but probably it would be better to reimplement it anyway. (You are using source control aren't you?)
Sorry, I didn't mean to necessarily endorse either of them. I just mean if you check the fact sheets there's normally a field for "leader" which has their name listed after.
Wiktionary gave me the following:
"in charge (not comparable)
Having the responsibility of leading or overseeing.
He left his daughter in charge of watching her younger sisters.
Having the power of command or control.
This internet browser puts you in charge of your personal settings. "
Both of these men have a great deal of the power of command and control in their respective countries. The recent leaks have made it also very clear that they are "overseeing" heh. As for leadership that's a sticky subject that is way too philosophical for me to touch right now.
Sure I guess, after all it's basically just who runs the largest social network in the country. I guess Putin is the Obama of Russia in that he's the man in charge there.
Bad doesn't cancel out good, they exist side by side. I admire the US for it's amazing alternative culture (steampunk, goth, robots, anime, comic books, oh my). I admire it for it's incredible technological innovation. I have often weighed those things against the lack of support for it's citizens (No free healthcare, little to no vacation, often mandatory overtime, rich wins legal system, etc). I don't know as much about Russia and the US but I'm sure that it has a tremendous amount of good and bad living side by side. There's plenty to be proud of as well as ashamed of.
Depends what else you cut out, for instance I would add commuting in there. If you prioritize living close to work (or working remotely) then exercise can be your commute. IE Run or bike to work. Or if that's not an option do a karate class or get a climbing gym membership with your kids and exercise while spending time with them. Combining things you want to do is a great way to check off more things on the list.
This is an excellent point. I find it interesting that so many things that I use in my own life for orientation are not even noticed by a broad section of humanity. Philosophy, technology, religion, politics, these are often monumental issues to certain people while rarely even noticed by others. It's interesting that the human experience is so diverse especially intellectually. It's hard to escape the belief that what I follow is IMPORTANT though. As well as the follow up thoughts of "If only more people paid more attention to X the world would be a better place...".
Heh, don't you see? By identifying as a Buddhist and classifying a particular bit of wisdom as "belonging" to that religion you are falling into exactly the trap that he described. I grew up in the Buddhist community and ironically the greatest trap that Buddhists fall into is pride. Similar to the technology community ;)
That sounds to me similar to the sentence: "Either wear a bulletproof vest or don't, and if you don't then you have waived your right to get upset if you get shot in the chest in the future." You always have the right to be upset if a third party accesses your data. Getting upset about unjust things is exactly how changes happen that make the world a better place. I understand that it's important to take safeguards but not everyone has the technical expertise or interest to protect their data. Many people don't even realize that the problem exists.
I feel like we have an equal problem of thinking of intelligence and skill as immutable constants. I think of both as a muscle, the more I exercise them the better they become. While I realize that everyone starts with certain advantages if you find something you enjoy or want to do and you work hard at it, you will be successful.
Gimp yes, Inkscape no, everyone I sit in front of Inkscape loves it and it made me overcome my feeling of "I'm a programmer, I can't do art" thanks to it's great interface and smooth learning curve.
Modern medicine, physics, modern housing, sanitation, plumbing, etc, etc. They have a massive amount to gain. You can romanticize their situation, or we can decide to leave them there for other reasons but claiming they have nothing to gain is just plain wrong.
I would assume he's referring to the fact that evolution works by allowing the weak to die, or at the least not reproduce and without those mechanisms evolution is a different beast.
I find that trying not to think about something increases rather than decreases stress about that area. Only by thinking and thinking about it head on can I eventually come to peace with it. Otherwise I try to go into escapism and end up just feeling more crappy and tire to boot.
That's a strawman unless you can produce data that relates the reproduction rate to the standard of living. If you can do that then apparently what you're saying is that a country needs to enforce low standards (or at least wildly differing) standards of living in order to ensure survival.
I.e. absent major changes your argument has been refuted; Many say the example your argument and other's like it provide are object lessons in what not to do.
Also as a side note you can't compare the US to third world countries and get meaningful results, normally all first world countries are better than third world countries. By comparing the US to other first world countries you will see it's strengths and weaknesses more easily.
Well it's a huge difference with Europe. Specifically in Austria where I'm living everyone gets an education for free, there's free health care, even menial jobs are well paid. Everyone lives a pretty solid middle class life but there are much fewer people struggling to change the world. Fewer success stories but everyone is taken care of. It's an interesting situation, hell there's not even credit card debt since if your credit isn't paid by the end of the month it's locked until you pay your balance down to zero.
That's the wonderful and horrible thing about the US. There are a myriad of high risk high reward options like credit cards and student debt. For some people they pay off, for others they end up drowning in debt. There are some wonderful success stories and some terrifying stories of lives reduced to abject poverty.
I love this system. Halifax, NS had an amazing culture of that when I was in my late teens early twenties I furnished all my apartments with street finds/repairs. Sadly the city is going through gentrification and they're starting to crack down on this.
I agree. Sometimes there are real consequences to showing up at a protest and a mask is necessary. At any time the protest could turn violent and you've gone from being a legal protester to a 10 year prison sentence in a second through no fault of your own.