thus perpetuating the double standard where if it's a male teacher and female student, it's horrible, but if it's a female teacher and male student, we're all giving him hi 5s.

As much as we would like those who pass judgement on us to be intelligent, the notion that this test-range is based on, is stable from a governing perspective.

Take the emotion out (concerns of ones personal safety/punishment) and review the situation again.

i.e. Businesses are financially driven and therefore do not hire people that are over educated for a role, as they do tend to feel unsatisfied and eventually will leave for a reason that falls within a bell curve (knowing they can do more). This sensibility is in direct relation to sustainability. If as a standard they kept hiring people unnecessarily skillful who will likely get bored and also know they could do something more intelligent/challenging/satisfying, they would blow all their money and go out of business.

Would you rather have,
1. No service (or and including, a perpetually collapsing service that exists only by way of endless cash injections that drains a countries budget), or
2. A relatively ok service that is trained to follow a fairly simple set of guidelines, with a dispute system (courts) to back up any non-time sensitive poor decisions?

There's no justifiable value to a required service if it's not sustainable.

They will still hire intelligent people, but for the right roles, which will be with different testing criteria. Not the more common base-level operator (widespread foot soldier) roles.

@Sniper007

Colonisation of other planets, if it happens, will not ease overpopulation on Earth. Assuming it's actually done with humans rather than, say bacteria which are so much easier to transport; it must involve small seed populations of colonists, not firing billions of people off into space. Where do you imagine the energy required would come from? As it stands in 2014 we can barely move a handful of people into low earth orbit, a few hundred kilometres away.

Think about the logistics of transporting and housing all these billions of colonists in a hostile environment. Making the environment itself habitable is an even greater challenge; we can't even seem to fix the one we have on Earth, the one we spent billions of years evolving to suit.

The expansion of the universe, meanwhile, is always giving us less material to work with and perpetually moving it further away.

@SDGundamX

Relying on technology to solve overpopulation is like refusing to stop smoking because by the time you get cancer science will have found a cure.

Scientific advancement is not a given. It doesn't progress at a guaranteed rate and it isn't a genie that will automatically offer a salve to every need. Or, to coin a cliche, "Where's my jetpack?"

Luckily however, in the instant case scientists have offered an easy solution to overpopulation: Stop having so many children.

@RedSky

Poverty reduction without population reduction - reduction, not stabilisation - is catastrophic. The current global population of ~7.2 billion is only survivable, never mind sustainable, because most of those billions are impoverished peasants who barely consume any resources at all. Elevating the poor to a rich, westernesque lifestyle multiplies the effects of overpopulation tremendously, even if it slightly slows population growth in absolute terms.

Rosling doesn't seem to understand the actual problem, and his predictions are at any rate, horrifyingly optimistic.

We need to be shooting for a global population in the range of 100 million - 1 billion. Any substantially higher number than that is an apocalypse waiting to happen.

@enoch

I'd agree Friedman wasn't directly responsible, but served more as an academic influence and a proponent of a particular approach because many of the Chilean economists who influenced policy had studies in Chicago.

As far as exploiting a crisis, arguably the crisis itself warranted dramatic action. High levels of inflation caused by Allende's money printing to support wholesale nationalisation of industries pretty much required this.

As inflation is self perpetuation by its continuous expectation and can continue even after the original stimulus is gone, there was little choice here. After all it took Volker nearly half a decade of high interest rates to tame it in the US in the early 80s, to do that after an economic and political crisis in a undeveloped country was an entirely different scale of difficult.

Successive governments likely reversed some of the economic policies enacted under his regime, but the foundation I meant was particularly the budgetary position, free trade, and a competitive cadre of private sector exporters. The welfare, health and educational spending were all made possible by this. Without a credible tax base, trying to enact spending on this level while also raising the tax rises would have just precipitated another crisis.

Coming back to inflation and economics, I believe policies against inflation especially, are generally misunderstood in the short term and their benefits unrecognised in the long term. I would probably say the reverse of what you said, economic policy rarely shows tangible results in the short term but almost always in the long term.

It's certainly not perfect. After all economics has the unfavourable position of being the combination of social science, lacking the ability to test results in clinical conditions isolating a single factor and yet requiring highly specific answers to solve its questions. At its best, it offers answers based on the cumulative knowledge accrued from iterative policies, at each point being based on the 'best available knowledge at the time'.

But it has worked, as I like to often mention, with independent central banks, essentially the most technocratic and pure application of economic theory, inflation has become a thing of the past in those countries that have adopted it.

Then again I'm biased as I majored in it at uni

First off, I want to say @artician, thanks for such an insightful comment, and enoch as well. I've not been participating in this community much for the past few years because of being busy with figuring myself out and trying to figure out how I feel about the mess we're in. Interesting conversations like this were what drew me to the sift initially.

Ultimately, I've come to a similar conclusion as you. While, as JustSaying noted, we do tend to be tribal creatures, the nature of the interaction between ingroups and outgroups is a learned one (for the most part) just like violence as an acceptable outlet is a learned habit (for the most part; children who are abused and grow up surrounded by violence are more likely to perpetuate abuse, etc). Because people naturally learn to be more tolerant and empathetic as they grow to understand each other and see how much their similarities outweigh their differences, this tribal nature shifts in more interconnected societies to things like political parties, sports fanships, cliques, etc. as the increased understanding/empathy between us decrease the potential for dehumanization of the "other" and violence.

We are living in more peaceful times than ever before in most ways. We are learning to be more accepting of religion, sexuality, and other differences more than ever before in terms of the global average. We have a system that promotes dehumanization and exploitation, selfishness and secrecy rather than compassion and empathy, sharing and oppenness, but such a system need not always be. There are no easy answers, and none of us can do anything alone to change things, but the majority of us are tired of the wars and killing, throwing away the lives of our youth instead of seeing what new art and science and wonder they could bring to our world. Those who lust after power enough to exercise it over their fellow men the way it has been are the few and very sick who need some help and removal from temptation, like a "recovering" alcoholic at a Christmas party.

I dont understand the interviewer or people being wildly upset by this, do they really think the zookeepers, who feed and care for this giraffe are simply sadistic morons who kills a giraffe for fun or just because they can? Obviously there was a reason for this.

I am , however, in principal against zoos. they may be educational on some level, but I have a distaste for the concept of keeping wild animals imprisoned like this. But I do think that most zoos and zookeepers do their best under the circumstances to keep the animals happy as they can be. Most wild animals in the wild of course, live in perpetual fear and/or hunger, and so forth, but I am much more in favour of us spending money on preserving wilderness, and stop the perpetual destruction of their natural habitat, instead of keeping specimens in special "cages"/zoos.

What is a $300,000 wristwatch? It's a $5 wristwatch mechanism with a bunch of diamonds or whatever hammered into it. And what are diamonds? Shiny pebbles. So what you have is something that cost all this labour to create but is actually worthless. What you have, actually, is $300,000 worth of value torn out of the world by criminals.

What I want to know is, what's the person who buys the wristwatch from Tom Perkins supposed to do with it? Shouldn't they also sell the watch to fund drug treatment centres?

I like the idea of this hallowed watch-totem perpetually moving hand-to-hand around the world shaming rich people into philanthropy. Then it could actually have been worth making.

"I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. "
-James Baldwin

“The difference between treason and patriotism is only a matter of dates.”
- Alexandre Dumas

"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
- George Orwell

Snowden, like Manning before him, spoke truth to power. In a difficult situation, he saw something that was wrong and took the incredibly brave decision to do something about it, even at the cost of his life as he knew it.

If you found out something you knew to be immoral (and on a massive scale), would you have the bravery to follow his example? When it meant probably never seeing your friends and family again?

I suspect history will ultimately come to see him as more a patriot than a traitor.

You can sign me up @bareboards2. If there were some broad agreement on terminology I would switch to gender neutral language instantly. Fucking sick of it.

Coincidentally I was thinking about this just this afternoon, because luckily I have nothing better to do at work than stand around contemplating gender politics; pleased and proud as I am of genderqueer crusaders trying to wrestle pronouns into shape, I've been generally unwilling to join them. For fuck's sake, I spend enough time every day arguing about the excess syllable in the number sev, I can't afford to multiply that by every sentence with a person in it.

Singularising plural pronouns is offensive to me on a practical and aesthetic level, Spivak's no damn good, you've got your zes and your hirs and your hens, it's a pain in the ass but as soon as we get some consensus and momentum it's going to be cool.

Can't see that feminism really has anything to do with all this, well, I have trouble seeing that feminism has anything to do with anything. Not to go all Trancecoach here with male world problems but they're similarly told that to be professional they have to knot a piece of cloth around their neck for no reason or slice the hair off their face every day for no fucking reason. The situation is that we have a bullshit tribal culture with endless absurd customs and arbitrary rituals which is perpetuated by morons.

So we should always be rationalising - language, culture, behaviour, expectations.

Gender neutrality is obviously the way to go. If you get shoved in a box you don't become the champion of the box and work to make your box the best box it can be; you break out and start beating your captors over the head with box fragments.

I don't give a fuck about women's problems; I don't give a fuck about women, but I'm glad to consider anyone who stops wearing makeup a part of my team because I don't wear makeup for the same reason I don't shave my stupid face.

Anyway that was my choggie impression for the day. Too much caffeine, not enough sleep, not enough time spent bathing in the blood of my enemies.

I have a degree in physics. I'm guessing that English is maybe a 2nd language for you? Your explanation of mass and weight is a little confusing. With regards to our astronaut on the moon, it's the difference in weight that matters. He should be able to (approximately) lift six times the weight he could on earth.
(Sidebar: It's often been said that Olympics on the moon would be fantastic because a man who could high-jump 7 feet high on earth would be able to high-jump 42 feet high (7x6) on the moon. In fact, he would only be able to jump about half that. Do you know why? I'll leave that with you as a challenge.)

Insofar as faked moon landings, I'm 90 % sure we went to the moon. However, bear in mind that Americans didn't know their own government was spying extensively on them til last year. It's the old joke... "Just because your paranoid, doesn't mean they aren't watching you..."

Alternative 3 is an interesting study of conspiracy dynamics. I first heard of it 30 years ago. It started as an April Fools joke in Britain on a science news TV show. It was brilliant in it's conception...

Short version:
1. Global warming will lead to total collapse of earth's eco-systems in two centuries or less.
2. Global governments are co-operating to move the cream of earth's leaders, scientists, etc to bases that have been established for decades on the far side of the moon and on Mars. (Alternative 3. Alternative 1 was huge underground bunkers, Alternative 2 was huge geo-synchronous cities... both were deemed too impractical to carry out.)
3. Mars is actually very liveable. We landed there in the 60s, established bases, using flying saucer technology developed here on earth by scientists.
4. The general population is being kept ignorant of the impending disaster, our advanced technology, the true state of Mars, etc. Governments worldwide are co-operating at the highest levels to perpetuate the myth that our progress in space is a slow, laborious process. (Which explains why the Soviet Union did not expose the Apollo programs as fake...) They don't want to cause a panic while they advance their agenda.
5. They have even developed psychic assassins capable of killing with their minds via spontaneous human combustion.

Due to TV schedule changes it was shown at a later date convincing the general public there that it was the real deal. (You can actually see the original show on YouTube... you'll even recognize some of the 'real scientists' etc as British character actors if you're old enough.)

It's a long convoluted story but thanks to a couple of follow up books and the Internet which gave it new life it has now 'morphed' into this vast conspiracy that involves alien / government co-operation at the highest levels à la X-Files. (The original conspiracy did not involve aliens...)

Adding to the fun and mystery is that some real world events -- too complicated to explain here -- later played right into details of the conspiracy.

I always thought it would make for a brilliant Hollywood movie -- the original version, not the 'updated' version.

I hate to get on Bill Nye, and I agree with the need for more foreign aid even. I must protest non the less about war being a minor factor in poverty and related deaths. Blaming the millions that die of starvation and malnutrition in Africa on that alone is little different than saying that the millions who starved under Stalin and Mao could have been saved by foreign aid.

Even when there isn't active warfare in the most poverty ridden places of the world, there are warlords and criminals ruling the region through starvation and actively redirecting what little foreign aid there is to themselves and away from those that do not support them. Simply sending more food and money to places like Somalia or North Korea does nothing to help the people there, and if the aid is naively sent blind to whomever holds power it actually makes things WORSE by strengthening the very monsters responsible for the suffering. I'd like to believe our apathy here is the biggest problem as much as the next guy, but the reality is that there are also people local to the problem involved first hand in perpetuating and profiting from human suffering. If we refuse to admit that there are instances were 'aid' necessarily takes the form of shooting the bad guys then we are doomed to watching as the next genocide plays out, as we did for the Rwandan Tutsis, Iraqi Kurds and Shias and countless others.

That's all wrong. Wikipedia is wrong, and you are wrong. The word atheism has been abused and warped to shy away from what the word of it actually means.

A-theism - not theism.

It's not plus(theism)/minus(atheism). It's plus/zero. Atheism is the neutral; theism is active belief.

Imagine a word like anti-theism would be the opposite of the spectrum; and yet a-antitheism would also be the neutral = a-antitheism == atheism.

Perpetuating a lie doesn't make it true.

Technicalities matter; semantics matter.

There is no taboo in discussing the "rape worthy" contents of media portrayals when it comes to the depiction of women, but there remains consistent and pervasive taboos when it comes to its comparability with men (despite the fact that, statistically speaking, men are far more likely to be the victims of rape than a woman is).

The silence on the issue is deafening, especially when you take into account that as many as 20% of male military veterans are the victims of sexual assault and trauma. Where's the depiction of this alongside its concomitant "warrior" culture depictions throughout the media which in fact breeds the very aggression which perpetuates it?

<crickets>

Moreover, where is the cognizance of how the media perpetuates the stereotypes of men which lead to greater proportions of men committing suicide? Or becoming homeless? Or suffering from crippling occupational injuries? Or dying in the line of duty? Or being alienated from their children/families while still being fully expected and legally obligated to support them financially?

I'd go so far as to say your very denial of these facts only serves to further underscore how commonplace it is to cater to the oppression of women, while continuing to perpetuate the ongoing subjugation and oppression of men.

Hmm.....habits I picked up while growing up. I can't say they were gotten from any one source, line, or context...but I had I still struggle to unlearn them.

Extreme independence, this mainly applies to learning in school. If I couldn't learn it in class or own my own, then I failed. I'd say this was a mix of bad teachers, parents who weren't familiar with the material, lack of easy and discrete tutoring options (although I can't say I would have used them), and the attitude that you should be able to do it on your own which was picked up along the way. This goes over into the next point.

Asking for help before you've tried for yourself. Now this is one of those things where it could go either way. Trying on your own might let you figure out a way that works for you, but it might also give you bad habits that don't carry over into other things. Mostly to do with mental tasks, but it also spreads into physical tasks. Like moving something too heavy or too large for one person, end up hurting yourself or breaking something and being chastised for the attempt that was almost implied you should make on your own for YEARS for everything. Or something as simple as trying to fix your bike, and ending up with it done wrong that could go spectacularly bad, like brakes that don't work well enough or a chain that breaks or skips and busting your face on your handle bars when you really stand on it. This is something where I still struggle today as an adult as to when asking for help or expecting help with something is "too soon" and getting varied results back. People who say "Why didn't you come to me sooner?" versus "That's easy! I can't believe you didn't try...." I think it's just so common with men that it's almost overlooked. And it leads into seeing people getting help as seeing them as stupid/weak/etc...then perpetuates the cycle. I don't know it's more of a US culture thing or what. Because I used to see a lot of foreign students in college that would work together on everything...I always viewed it as cheating and in some cases it was cheating by the rules of the college but overlooked in their cases.

So the "help" thing kind of leads into injuries, falling, etc. It's embarrassing to fall of course. But I can remember breaking my arm and having to walk home because my mom didn't believe I'd hurt myself. Or cases where I was having an asthma attack at school and told to just wait it out because I'd already used my rescue inhaler. Partly due to ignorance of the nurse or person involved, but also because there's just a mistrust of kids trying to "game" the system to get out of things. Admittedly some did this, I however did not, and I quickly learned to just tolerate all of the discomfort and distractions of various issues that may come up during the school day. Which led to a day where I was so sick I spent the entire day in the nurses office while they tried to contact a parent and had to ride the bus home flat on my back in a seat trying not to puke. Then with more apparent injuries, "walk it off" was and is the common thing you hear. It's holds some truth, but when your taught to put up with it.. I had a dislocated knee cap for a couple days. It was so bad the night before it popped back into place at school that I was using a crutch to get to the bathroom. Dislocated thumb that popped back into place when I fell trying to play football. I mean it sounds like I had horrible parents, but it was just so ingrained into me that if I could walk...I was fine.


Lots more stuff...but one that I'm not sure how to phrase properly. Anything to do with touching that might be seen as affectionate or showing concern. Pats on the back giving or receiving to or from another guy. Helping someone up could almost be seen as an insult at times. I want to say lots of eastern Euro cultures (which I could be entirely wrong here on the location) express themselves much more than US physically, and it's pretty alien for me to see given how it was and is for me aging. Of course there are times where I feel like I SHOULD do it, but the act of it is ingrained to be wrong.......? I guess that sounds as close to as I'm going to get with it.

But yeah, I see where they are going with the video. I also think that part of it is because opposite sex teacher/nurse/whatever showing above certain levels of care to a male/female student triggers something in the hormone addled brains that creates more problems. So in turn, adults are taught to put the kids in their box and treat them all like that to avoid the issues that might end up with you losing your job because Bobby or Susie thinks you like-like them. And in the past male teachers to male students might have been able to ignore the box, but I think with the public eye focused more on looking as being homosexual as more acceptable...the same sex teachers/etc are going to have adhere to the box thing too if they want to keep their jobs.

A word to Ant...and other "Christians"...
Please note that, if you take your rules for life from the old testament while ignoring the absolving statements of the new testament, you are a Jew, and not a Christian.
If that's the case...please note also that you should be stoned to death if you have ever done ANYTHING besides worship on the Sabbath (and also note that the Sabbath you are supposed to be doing that on is the JEWISH Sabbath, as the commandments were given to the Jews and obviously would be referencing THEIR culture in it's edicts, not the (non-existent at the time) 'Christian Sabbath'.) That includes mowing your lawn, making food, cleaning your home, driving, phone calls, any business at all, any banking at all, etc. It also includes hiring someone to do it for you (as in 'man servant'). If you've ever done anything on the Sabbath besides worship, you're bible said we should stone you to death...if you don't read the second part where Jebus absolves you of that and all other religious 'crime'...in perpetuity and for everyone.
I'm always bothered by 'Christians' spouting Jewish (old testament) religious law and not even understanding that's what they are doing. Real Christians should read the old testament as history to explain the mindset of those in the new testament, not as a set of rules they must follow, that's what Jebus allegedly said and did, he absolved you of the ALL the sins listed in the old testament and told you to respect and love each other and live the golden rule, not to degrade and denigrate those not following the rules they pick and choose from the wrong book.
Please do some self examination before telling others how to live, or what 'God' said, and remember that your rule book says clearly that anyone claiming to know the mind of God (or claiming to hear 'God's' voice/word) is either a liar or insane, either way not to be listened to.