Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Begun, the culture wars have. And brands are realising they can't stay neutral - (see the Komen debacle).

Credit to JC Penney's new CEO, (and Apple alumnus) Ron Johnson: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505263_162-57373794/j.c-penney-ceo-on-ellen-degeneres-controversy/



Ha. The best part is the last line where they ask him if he's wearing a JC Penney outfit - you can feel the cogs turning quickly in his mind.

0:55 = That's a really good point, the actual rate of unemployment is not being revealed.

We don't just need corporate influence out of politics, we need a new economic discipline that measures more than GDP, and actually makes some sense. WE are not merely rational actors, we individuals that are all part of communities and families, and yes we are prone to buying shit that supports corporations, but that doesn't mean we don't want something more fulfilling then becoming cogs in the machine of consumption.

Soon: "Welcome to the United Corporate $tates of America^tm, how can we take your money and turn you into a consuming cog of our system? God bless you!"

I've got two perspectives on some of these comments and the video, and thought I'd chime in with some (hopefully not overly longwinded) history / anecdotes:

First, I grew up and attended public school K-12 in Kansas in the 80's and 90's. Overall I am very pleased with the quality of education I received and the teachers I had. From High School, I remember having 3-4 standout excellent teachers, a whole lot of adequate / no-complaints teachers, and 3-4 teachers that I thought were sub-par.

The excellent teachers stand out in my memory because they got me more interested in subjects that I already had some interest in, OR because they made me appreciate subjects that I was otherwise pretty ambivalent about. For example, my math teacher who I studied Geometry, Advanced Algebra, Trigonometry, and AP Calculus with was fantastic. When I was in his classes, I loved learning about math. When I went to University and studied Calc 2 in a lecture hall with 400 other students and teacher-student interaction only with TAs, suddenly math wasn't anywhere near as interesting.

Some of the adequate teachers that I had were probably the favorite teachers of students with other interests. Expecting every teacher to mesh perfectly with absolutely every last one of their hundreds of students per year is probably setting the bar a little unrealistically high. That being said, even though I wasn't completely enthralled with their classes, I think that I got good value from them.

The teachers that I remember as being poor fall into two categories. First are those that taught subjects that I wasn't at all interested in and who did nothing to prompt me to change my mind. I remember hating one of my English teachers because she wasn't impressed with my lack of effort on things like poetry assignments. Looking back, I think that says much more about what I was putting into the class than the quality of that teacher. The other category had teachers that seemed lazy and ineffective, or those whose classes were complete wastes of time -- similar to those that @blankfist described. Most of those teachers were teacher/coaches who, in my point of view, were just phoning-in their teaching duties and only actively interested in the coaching. I still have a bias against sports being included in public school activities due to that type of teacher.


And I also have a perspective from the teaching side of things. I've been living in Thailand for about 4.5 years now, teaching English as a second language. I got a bachelor's degree in Computer Science but struggled finding a job when I graduated (I think I was naively setting my sights too high and too narrow, but thats another story). So, I ended up working as a farmhand on my family farm. That was OK but not really something that I was very passionate about.

Eventually through a family connection, someone approached me about traveling abroad for a year and working as an ESL teacher. I thought that would be an interesting thing to do and a good way to challenge myself, so I flew to Thailand in 2007 and started teaching. The school I connected with put me in as the teacher for kindergarten, which was crazy but fun and rewarding and a good sink or swim introduction to teaching (which I had no prior experience with or education in).

I ended up liking it so much that what was originally just going to be a 1-year experience got extended. I taught kindergarten for 2 years and 1st grade for 1 year. Then there was a big shakeup / administrative disaster at my former school and I switched into teaching High School aged students. Another challenge and something different to get used to, but I am enjoying that as much or more as the younger students.

Being a foreign, native-English-speaking ESL teacher in Thailand is a bit weird. There are lots of really *terrible* foreign teachers that are here to purely to have ready access to cheap beer and prostitutes, and who have absolutely zero interest in the actual teaching; it is just a paycheck. The average salary of a native-English speaking teacher here is about $12,000 a year, which sounds terribly low but is actually a pretty upper-middle class income by Thai standards. For the shitty teachers, it translates into a lot of beer and hookers.

The schools here see foreigners are all fairly identical, easily replaceable cogs. Someone with a master's degree in Education and a real interest in being a good teacher can easily be replaced by a drunken loser that rarely shows up for classes if they don't fall in line with the Thai way of doing things or try to change up the status quo.

I hope that I do a decent job of teaching here. I am confident that I'm way better for my students than many of the drunken backpacker alternatives, but it is dangerous to set the bar that low and get complacent. I'm sure that to a lot of my roughly 800 students this year, I am merely adequate -- not all that memorable but at least not bad either. I know that some of them get a lot out of my classes and I can see them improving in English in leaps and bounds. And I know that there are some on the other side of the coin who are at best ambivalent about me and their English classes in general. My level of motivation prompts me to try my best, but I am too lazy and don't have enough time to throw a whole lot of extra effort at each and every one of my 800 students, most of whom I see for 1 hour a week total.

Anyway, my experiences here have made me appreciate all of my excellent former teachers that much more. Plus, I've learned that anyone that thinks that a teacher in the US is sub-par ought to be thankful that they probably aren't quite as bad as a sub-par "teacher" in Thailand...

Reminds me of a bit about Lyndon Johnson in Hunter Thompson's 'Better than Sex'

'Lyndon was running about 10 points behind, with only nine days to go... He was sunk in despair. He was desperate... he called his equally depressed campaign manager and instructed him to call a press conference at two or two-thirty ( just after lunch on a slow news day) and accuse his high-riding opponent (the pig farmer) of having routine carnal knowledge of his barnyard sows, despite the pleas of his wife and children... His campaign manager was shocked. 'We can't say that, Lyndon,' he said. 'It's not true.' 'Of course it's not,' Johnson barked at him, 'but let's make the bastard deny it.'

>> ^lucky760:

Undoubtedly, the right wing cogs will regard this as a glowing success: Trump pushed the president into submission. Trump > Obama! Yay!

Undoubtedly, the right wing cogs will regard this as a glowing success: Trump pushed the president into submission. Trump > Obama! Yay!

@GeeSussFreeK I'm going to pick and choose from your comment instead of quoting, since it's huge.


There are some major problems with this claim, IMO. I would like to clean up the wording of your second sentence. Something that doesn't interact in anyway with the cosmos, doesn't exist meaningfully. So something that does not, cannot, and will not interact with an object doesn't exist to that object. Indeed, when our own galaxy is racing away from the other galaxies at a speed faster than the speed of light (the space in-between being created at a rate which pushes us away faster than the speed of light) you can say the same thing, that our galaxy is the only object that exists in the universe. Other objects existed, but the no longer do. They might "exist" in some theoretical way, but they don't meaningfully exist. I completely agree with this position. If a being we want to call God doesn't exist here in any way physically, than he doesn't exist.

I'm not sure you can say that something doesn't exist, just because we cannot observe it directly anymore. Galaxies moving away from ours at greater than light speed still have had an effect on things around them and we can see the "traces" of them, which at least suggests that they exist - like black holes, which we cannot see directly either. Futhermore, we can observe on the galaxies moving parallel or at least along side our own, how they move and can thus estimate the position of the big bang and theorize from the given evidence that galaxies moving in the opposite direction should exist even if we cannot see them or in essence EVER interact with them again.

A similar argument can't be made for God.


Which brings us to your first point. How does the universe exist? I assure you we have more question in that than answers. And every answer brings forth new questions. We are no closer today to understand basic ideas than thousands of years ago.

You are being a bit facetious here, I suppose? We are quite a bit, actually a huge leap, closer to the basic ideas than we were thousands of years ago. The problem is that the target keeps moving further back. First cells, then molecules, then atoms, now quantum entanglement (or what its called).

For instance, how to objects move? Force is applied to an object making it move relative to the world. The world moves in the opposite direction, but only relative to the opposite force, which means very, very little.

If space is infinite, how do finite objects transverse infinite space in a finite time?
It isn't and they wouldn't.

What determines gravity attract at the rate it attracts?
I'm not a physicist, so I won't venture too far off ground here. It's understood as far as I know. @Ornthoron could you perhaps confirm for me?

Why are macro objects analog and quantum objects digital?
Macron objects are perceived as analog, because we don't look closely enough and in short enough time spans. Any perceived analog object can be simulated digitally if you use enough data to do it. This is my understanding, anyway.

We can't even show that the sky is blue, only that it exists as a wavelength of light that human preservers sometimes interpret as a mind object of blue, we are no closer to understanding if blue is a real thing or a thing of mind.
This is a distinction between what is and what something is perceived as. Essentially you're touching upon qualia, which some cognitive scientists believe in and others don't. Blue is a real thing in so far as it's a wavelength of light. As for the rest, I don't know. It's a much harder question than you lead on, because a theory of mind is one of the hardest questions there are left.

I think you give to much credence to our understanding for this claim to be sufficient. To my knowledge, we have little understanding of the functional dynamics of the cosmos. We have pretty good predictive models, but that is a far cry for absolute certainty, a necessary for a claim such as this.


There are many metaphysical examples of all powerful beings and absence of their direct physical interactions being detectable as well. One of the more famous is of the "God mind" example. In a dream, you are in control of all the elements. Let's call all the elements of your dream your dream physics. The dreamer is in 100% control of the dream physics. The dream itself is a creation of his dream physics. The dream physics themselves are evidence of the dreamer. In addition, the dream, being wholly created from dream physics is also evidence of the dreamer. Parallel that back to us and you have one of the easiest and elegant explanations of the universe.

I think you are confusing a dream with the idea of a dream. You rarely have any control in dreams and even lucid dreamers don't have 100 % control. How a dream actually is made/dreamed is also a point of discussion in itself. A fundamental problem with this hypothesis is that WE think. Actors in our dreams don't think or do anything that has any effect in the world other than our memory of them. Like our thoughts, dreams don't have wills of their own.

Indeed, it is so comprehensible other views of the metaphysical nature of the cosmos will seem overly complex and lauded with burdensome hyper explanations, making this model satisfy an occam's razor over other possibilities. But complexity is hardly a model for evaluating truth, so I leave that just as an aside.

All other things being equal, the simplest explanation is usually the right one. But all other things aren't really equal here. Some thing are just inherently complex, like gravity or magnets. When you don't think about the details, it's easy to think your hypothesis is correct, but when you dig deeper it falls apart.

Actually, even if you accept the premise, it still means that the dreamer is completely removed from us; he has no control, because not even traces of it has been observed in our reality (the dream). So the complete lack of evidence also points to this hypothesis being false.

When you think it even further, we run into the ever present homunculus argument. Who's dreaming of the dreamer? And so on.

That our reality is actually a real, physical one is a much better explanation, because it neatly explains itself more completely - thereby actually fulfilling Occam's razor better.


Indeed, there are further explanations that would seemingly leave little evidence for God except for things happening just as they "should". One being the Occasionalism model, which interestingly enough, comes from the same mind as the previous example, George Berkeley. There is no proof that causation is the actuality of the universe. Just as if I setup a room full of clocks, and from left to right the clocks would sound off 5 seconds from the previous clock. To the observer, the clocks "caused" the next clock to sound, and on down the line they go. The problem is, there is actually no causal link to bind them, I created it after seeing A then B happen again and again. The fact is, no such link is there, I, the clock creator created it to appear that way, or maybe I didn't and you just jumped to conclusions. It is a classic example that Hume also highlights in his problems on induction.

Correlation does not imply causation. We have much supporting evidence of causation though. Forces are demonstrably interactive. Whether they were secretly set up to seem as if they interact aren't necessarily relevant, because demonstrably they do. There is no evidence to the contrary at all.

In your clock example, it is a physical room, so there are plenty of things to test the hypothesis that the clocks cause each other to ring. Are the clocks identical? Are there cogs inside the clocks? If we break one, will the chain still go on without it? Etc etc.

From observing X number of clocks you cannot strictly speaking extrapolate that to all clocks. That's the essence of the induction problem. Your hypothesis is based on limited data, and on further analysis it falls apart. Causality itself hasn't fallen apart yet. I'd like to see a proper argument against it, for certain.

I will leave it there. I am resolved to say I don't know. I also don't know that can or can't know. I am uber agnostic on all points, I just can't say. And I don't even know if time will tell.

It's a good start to all questions to say "I don't know". I do that too on many, many things. It's a much better starting point than when preachers usually say, "I know".

Your questions are interesting to me, because they deal with a lot of philosophical and physical stuff, I like those.

On a purely pragmatic level though, they are largely not that important. look at it this way, do you live your life as if causality exists? If you do and it works as you expected, then causality probably exist. If you live as if it doesn't exist, then the world is suddenly a very strange place. Do you live as if what you observe as blue is actually blue? Do others see it as blue as well? If they all do, then it's probably just blue. Does it make a difference if some people see it as green? Not really, I'd think.

Do you live your life as if there's a God? Do others? Does it make a difference? That's a very basic test of whether he actually exists. I argue that it doesn't make any difference at all, other than expected behavior of either party - some live as if a God exists and other live as if he doesn't exist. If the only difference in the people themselves, then the God falls out of the equation.

I think I've sufficiently trudged through this now. Sorry for the wall of text, hope it makes sense.

>> ^dag:

Some ADDers take offense at this popular view. They see ADD and ADHD as very specific set of symptoms that you either have or don't have - but would agree that many people have been misdiagnosed with the disorder.
I share your view however.
>> ^blankfist:
utilizing
ADD and ADHD are euphemisms for strong-willed and creative, possibly. Maybe these people are bored with the humdrum of institutionalized education or the repetitiveness of their job, and these little pills help them "fit in" and be the cog instead of the new voice or innovator.



I suppose I'll jump in here since I have been diagnosed with ADD (not the hyperactive type).

I don't think it is a well-defined condition, so it could just be a catch-all for several unrelated conditions. It's an issue that seems so simple when viewed through the lense of "common sense", but the further I've dug into the research behind it the murkier it has become.

Symptoms? Just to pick one... you know when you're thinking or reading about something and in the middle of it it reminds you of something else? How is that handled internally? How easy is it for you to quickly and consistently downgrade the importance of that sudden reference and maintain focus on the main idea of the original thought?

Imagine the mechanism(s) for controlling the importance of that new cognitive direction isn't working correctly for whatever reason, and the new direction becomes the primary direction almost instantly, unnoticeably, and in a way that completely destroys the original line of thought. Now imagine that happening two or three times per sentence while reading.

That's a state I was in for a while (to varying degrees). I wish it were something that could be overcome with effort, because I've never put more effort into anything in my life.


Causes? I have no idea. Maybe genetic, maybe environmental, maybe developmental, maybe something else? My guess is that it is largely developmental (a structural result of experience/habit), though with a smaller level of genetic and environmental influence. It's definitely affected by nutrition, sleep, exercise, meditation (etc), but those affect nearly any mental state.


All I can speak for is myself. Whatever I have/had (ADD or something else) had very real effects, and I certainly wouldn't say it stemmed from any form of "boredom". I love reading and science and math, but it's nice to be able to study something I love without suddenly realizing I'm thinking about how many screws are in a toaster and that I have no idea what I read over the past three paragraphs.



As far as whether or not ADD is a "disease" (perhaps disorder is more appropriate), I think that generally depends on how many people fit the symptoms. Is it a disorder if it affects 30% of people? What about 90%? ADD medication improves the mental performance of lots of people, but it also tends to decrease the performance of the top performers. It's a fascinating subject.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Some ADDers take offense at this popular view. They see ADD and ADHD as very specific set of symptoms that you either have or don't have - but would agree that many people have been misdiagnosed with the disorder.

I share your view however.

>> ^blankfist:

utilizing
ADD and ADHD are euphemisms for strong-willed and creative, possibly. Maybe these people are bored with the humdrum of institutionalized education or the repetitiveness of their job, and these little pills help them "fit in" and be the cog instead of the new voice or innovator.

*utilizing

ADD and ADHD are euphemisms for strong-willed and creative, possibly. Maybe these people are bored with the humdrum of institutionalized education or the repetitiveness of their job, and these little pills help them "fit in" and be the cog instead of the new voice or innovator.

@dystopianfuturetoday

I disagree. For one, I think most people who feel they have a career and not just a job to get by are passionate about what they do, perhaps not initially but certainly over time as they become experienced. They might not be educating future generations, but they're contributing to society in their own way.

I honestly can't figure out how paying good teachers more cheapens anything. I certainly can't see how it would discourage them from teaching in the first place. I can definitely imagine though that there are plenty of capable, educated and willing would-be teachers who are simply not happy with a teacher's salary. Look at the amount of people who come back from the private sector to teach at university.

And the fact of the matter is, there already is merit pay in teaching. Principals and managerial level positions get paid way more. Why hasn't this destroyed the fabric of educational society?

Education for the most part is very compartmentalized and I would argue very measurable. Say you teach a unit in maths for a whole year. You have massive control over direction for that period. Yes, you depend on cooperation from prior year levels, and you may depend on subjects that tie into yours (physics perhaps) or vice versa. But you have huge amounts of autonomy throughout that year, and a huge potential to individual shape outcomes.

You oversimplify the rest of the private sector. Take banks, arguably the most purely money driven. At the insitutional level have a front end staff that deals directly with clients and wants to maximise profitable deals. Typically, a separate team counter-balances them on credit risk, and another on market risk (interest/exchange risk). In combination, the goal attained is not simply blunt returns, it's risk weighed outcomes, which can only be achieved through cooperation because of mutually competing objectives.

I'm just not seeing how if well organised, schools can't be the same. Well structured, the Coke and Pepsi in your examples would be schools. Somehow both these corporations have managed to work together as a team despite most employees chasing wage rises essentially at the expense of the other, right?

If teachers are so driven and personally motivated as you say, why is it then so few are willing to go to under performing schools to raise their standards? After all, if they were so intrinsically altruistic, that would be the first place to start, no? Teaching in the 'burbs to upper middle class kids with parents who have already motivated them to succeed regardless of whether the teacher is any good isn't exactly hard right? I find it difficult to see how you can deny here that incentives would help.

I think we have different paradigms on education. Yes, great schools should be full of engaging extracurricular activities to choose from and develop students as a person not just as a capable cog in the working machine economy. But the great schools in the US, over here in Australia are already great. The issue is the ones who can't provide a basic education. The focus here doesn't need to be wishy washy but on structured targets achieved in the best way they can. There should be expected basic standards of knowledge to be reached and if progress is consistently not being made towards them, there should be consequences.

Again, my experience has been that good exams, even the internationally standardised exams I took at the end of high school required critical thinking. Bad exam design is the problem.

You make it sound like people in the private sector carry around a jail ball weight of mistrust and fear around with them everywhere they go. People spend upwards of 8 hours a day in a skilled position generally because they enjoy what they do. They want to do well, and the pay reward is ultimately ancillary and a reinforcing look for the will to do well that they had in the first place.

As for the last comment, again we philosophically disagree but I would say markets didn't. In the US at least, poor regulation and the domination of policy direction by collective interests (corporate and union) through poor campaign financing caused the recent mess and much of what continues. Take a look at Australia as an example, and you will see a very different story. None of our banks got in trouble much because of good regulation, interest groups do not dominate elections and our economy never went into recession.

The thumbnail image for this video has been updated - thumbnail added by vaporlock.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'Team Fortress 2, health, regeneration, bug, exploit, tf2' to 'Team Fortress 2, health, regeneration, bug, exploit, tf2, sam and max, cogs in motion' - edited by calvados

Would love to see an updated GG doing Cogs in Cogs

Lol. It's alright, it is a good video to promote.
I am going to guess SiftBot will say I do not have sufficient privilege to
*isdupeof=http://videosift.com/video/Sixty-Symbols-on-the-Nobel-Prize-for-Physics-2010

>> ^BoneRemake:

fuckin christ sakes.
siftbot is a piece of broken shit with cogs of frozen piss meshing together to create the ultimate of a fuckup in a bot.
dupeof=http://videosift.com/video/Sixty-Symbols-on-the-Nobel-Prize-for-Physics-2010
what a waste of a good mannered promote.
give me my money back ass-bot.