wtdata

For a - very - humourous social critic related to the theme, I highly recommend: Flatland, by Edwin Abbott. A book from the 18. cen. with very actual insights to it.

This is scarily Orwellian. Not only for the obvious aspect of having a supposedly free state now policing everything I said in my life.

But also, part of the data Facebook has on me is also made by aquaintances (tagged posts, locations photos).

I do have my settings so that I have to manually accept every tag (and I almost always don't). But I am under the suspicion here, that if asked, Facebook would also provide that data.

I know, that was my point, I probably explained it wrongly.

I meant that by stating that social sciences aren't actual sciences and have profound problems, one is in no way stating that disciplines that aren't sciences (like History, the example given) aren't not valid pursuits of human knowledge.

Exactly. That's also something that is used as an argument, which is a strawman: You are refuting the validity of a number of fields if you don't accept them as sciences.

There are plenty of very valid disciplines of human knowledge that aren't sciences (and they seem perfectly fine in not being sciences since they have a clear aim and methodology for their work that, by impossibility of what they do, just can't follow the scientific method). History is a clear example.

Sure, I can give you a good example about linguistics.

Noam Chomsky’s theory of a universal grammar [1] in linguistics which is the de facto accepted theory, although there is data from other researchers like Dan Everett that totally disprove the Chomsky’s theory with at least one concrete example. [2]

That is exactly the issue I am talking about. You have your in vogue theory in that field and everyone in the academia loves it, and when someone brings you concrete evidence of one of more cases where the theory clearly doesn't apply, what do linguistics do? They dismiss all evidence and carry on just using the theory that is popular.

Can you just wonder what would happen in a real field of science if someone brought forward evidence that the de facto theory clearly doesn't apply in one measurement that was made and you couldn't find anything wrong with that observation or measurement? Can you even imagine if someone came forward with a clear case where the velocity of light in vacuum was surpassed by something else? Or if someone was able to measure precisely the momentum and position of a particle? Or if someone found that the environment affects the genes of a living being in order for it to adapt? Or if someone found evidence of fossils much older than we though life in Earth to be?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Everett

I don't think the real problem here is even this example of pro gender bias. For me it is really the sham social sciences are, and always have been.

A big amount of their publication either follows political bias or, the academic bias of the moment and this happens all because they aren't really sciences. They don't follow the scientific method, they lack a criteria of refutability. You can say whatever it is fancy at the moment, and if some other study comes to contradict it, it doesn't matter.

In the end, I think, they are lengthy at fault for today's public opinion lack of trust in science. Anti-vaxers, flat-earthers, and less extreme examples, are enabled by the media presenting social science's findings as scientific when in fact they are clearly not scientific in nature. And with that, we end up taking credibility away from real sciences.

Every time we see the word "science" associated with this kind of practices, the word "science" looses meaning for the ones that can't understand the clear methodological difference between sociology and biology for instance.

Although I do think that education should be mostly free (which also means that the university degrees will be at according to the country needs... so there it goes most liberal arts degrees out the window), I think it's a very bad idea to change the rules of the game ad posteriori.

We can't trust a state that just keeps changing the rules like this.

I think you just don't understand how things work in India (neither did I until I lived there for a while).

The authorities don't police anything (the locals literally argue with the police, and carry on what they are doing even if the police tells them they can't do it), the only time you need the authorities to get something you have to bribe them (a small amount in westerns standards, but still...).

People don't care about their surroundings like they do in Europe. Your just throw garbage in the ground (also because the bins are mostly non existent). You have buildings from the 80's without plumbing (in some of them they are added after, outside the building).

There is chaos in any activity (traffic is just surreal).

A good part of people seem destitute, yet they have good mobile phones.

Your have 3 people doing the job of 1 in a lot of places. Example: In a restaurant there is someone getting your orders, someone putting the table and getting the orders to the table, and then someone that stays around serving you... literally putting the food on your dish, not just when they bring the food, but there, checking whenever your plate is empty and then filling it (you know, like your grandmother in a southern European country does). Outside bathrooms in a restaurant, there is someone just there to keep them clean, permanently. Yet the bathrooms are not clean at all.

All in all, India just defies your (at least mine) logic. I am worried about what will happen when it stops growing in the 10s% like it has been growing until now.

Well, no, because in Portugal - for instance - the environmentalists are also protesting against Lithium mining.

Exactly how were these policemen supposed to get these people to stop (or even attacking them since they were in the clear minority there), since they aren't using guns?

Same reason they are using DEB in Ubuntu at the moment: it's the one that best integrates with the particular OS.

I can't understand the drama. Why doesn't Valve just provide Steam as a Snap and saves us from installing all those dependencies anyway?

I tried the preemptive kernel and didn't make a difference.

I also tried Bitwig and it's great, but I use a Push I. That creates an issue (Bitwig support for Push fails in 2 major points: note repeat, and delete functionality... and they keep making changes without adding something as simple as that to the devices API).

I do use Wine (and Steam with it's various levels of Windows API calling), and I am happy about this.

Sure, it will create some issues during the first stages of this migration, but, more than once, I botched my system in the past with the needed i386 libraries (it didn't happen lately, can't tell if because I finally got my head around it of because they improved the tooling).

Still, in the end, we will all have a "cleaner" system. Either because they migrate parts of the Windows calling to 64bit or because they will keep everything neatly in containers, or, probably, due to a mix of both. But it's high time we improve the current state of these tools.

P.S.: Still trying to get WINASIO to work properly with Wine using one of the latest versions (I am trying to run Ableton in Wine, but the latency is just too high). If anyone has experience doing this, any tips would be apreciated.

Trump's commercial war on China (how clueless as it might be and having totally different motives) is at least finally contesting China's autocratic government power grabbing in all the Western world that has been unchecked since the 90's.

As a side effect, it's also curbing the world greatest polluter production and that will surely have a positive effect on global CO2 emissions.

I have no illusions that Trump's motives are all but ecological or progressive, but what matters is that the end result seems to be quite positive for the free world.

Meritocracy is the worst form of societal organization, except for all the others.

But, liberal parties have been loosing an awfull lot of elections lately, clearly this is no "hack" to win elections because it is not working as you state.

It's their ideology and it is up to the democratic process to judge it (favorably or unfavorably). And - although personally I favor controlled immigration only - it is perfectly healthy for a democracy to have parties that defend and present other perspectives.

Actually, almost all of the democratic acts in the West lately (don't mistake the echo chambers which one of us is submitted to in social networks for the will of the majority), show a clear support for parties that - amongst other things - want higher immigration limits.

EU parliament elections, EU local elections, USA presidentials, Brazil, and the list goes on.

One thing that constantly puzzles me about PKD is how far ahead his societal and philosophical imagination was, but how backwards his technological views remained.

He has androids being run by punctured cards (i.e this story), advanced civilizations relying on advanced typewriters using paper (i.e. The Little Black Box if I remember correctly the name), and mass communication based on telephone boots (i.e. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep).

> if abortion is outlawed then a father abandoning their child should also be outlawed

Men are forced to pay child support. Either if they want the child or not. Woman in almost every state, can choose to abort if they don't want to raise the child or at least monetarily support it. Men have no choice.

Woman are now 33% more likely to go to faculty than men. So care to explain how woman are being held back (unless your are proposing there are clear intelectual and cognitive differences between genders)?

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/aug/28/university...

The EU reduced their emissions by close to 30% in 30 years. These actions were obviously sufficient. Problem is that only the EU (what what are now the EU members) took the effort. The EU should be praised as an example and instead we have a bunch of environmentalist extremists shutting down airports here with drones.

UK is already diminishing their CO2 emissions for 30 years now and is set to continue decreasing them.

China increased them by 300% in 30 years and is set to continue increasing then.

All in all, UK seting their emissions at 0% wouldn't do anything for global warming. But China decreasing them by 50% would probably save us all. Yet, these so called environmentalists, keep finding excuses for letting China go on with their business as usual, which makes it really clear they are not interested in the well being off the planet but in social upveal and some kind of revolution in Europe to install their ideology (which has very little of environmentalism) in power.

I disagree. It's certainly not a fair comparison to look at these issues per capita. I should not be morally responsible for people that have way to many childrten with no regard for sustainability (be it environmental or economical).

Each country should be responsible to make their territory carbon neutral. If they have an high or low population density should be an irrelevant point.

Sorry but those actions where clearly sufficient. If all countries had reduced their CO2 emissions like the EU block did, we would be in an excellent state. The reduction needs to keep happening in a steady pace, not have a sudden shift like these extremist environmentalist are calling for.

My issue with those analysis is that they are political, not environmentalist. For instance, if you look at India in those same analysis, you see they are doing great (although having increased they CO2 emissions in 300% and set to soon become the 2nd biggest polluter by a long margin).

In fact that's my issue with this all movement: It seems to take roots in contesting Western Society by using the climate crisis to force major political change in the West by disrupting the all economic output (because this will be what happens if you suddenly break the energy consumption by several %), and then build a society according to the political views of a minority that thinks they know best.

At the same time, that won't stop global warming at all, since the emissions on the West are already the minor part of the global emissions (due to china) and soon will become an even smaller part (due to India).

> So what you're saying is, the fact we were wrong about how long it would take to recover proves that the whole thing was a farce?

It proves the all thing was an exaggeration.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boy_Who_Cried_Wolf

My stance on the current global warming is that it is real and that it is serious, but not nearly as catastrophic as the media and these more extremist environmentalists, present it.

i.e. If all other countries would go on a steady course of diminishing their emissions for about 1%/year like the EU has been doing for the past 3 decades, the problem will be addressed.

When counteracting what I said, you conveniently left aside:

1: The part where we, at the time, were told that the hole would take hundreds of years to close: It didn't. (Pear Reviewed article from 1996: https://www.nap.edu/read/9042/chapter/1#6)

2: China is still producing those CFCs: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44738952

No there is nothing contradictory, the points are simple:

1: These catastrophic scenarios have historically been great exaggerations of reality.

2: The major culprit at the moment, by a long margin, is China, while the EU has actually a very good track in reducing CO2 emissions.

The thing is, those Thatcher speeches (and of course all the movement in Europe) worked, we reduced our emissions by almost 30% in 30 years. Which makes it specially bad when a bunch of people from the comfort of their life in here, now decide they can go around with their extremist views of environmentalism causing havoc in no less than in an European country: i.e. the only set of industrialized countries that actually addressed the problem.

https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/eu/

And my post was not about not taking measures, but about the catastrophic scenarios we keep being presented.

> The ozone hole closed.

Well, the thing is my point is exactly the exaggeration of those catastrophic scenarios:

1: we kept being told the hole would take hundreds of years to close even if we completely shuted down all CFC emissions at the time.

2: China continues to emit CFCs: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44738952