Dark Unknown Matter would be a better name for lay people to understand what's going on. I'm no cosmologist but isn't it just a placeholder for something that gravity interacts with (and not much else) and we don't know what it currently is. When we discover what it is the name will change.
Agreed. My brother is a painter and has commented, "At least in the past cheap tools were one-time-use, now they are usually zero-time-use. Built so poorly they don't even work out of the box."
German General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord (a high-ranking army officer in the Reichswehr/Wehrmacht era):
“I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined.
Some are clever and diligent — their place is the General Staff.
The next lot are stupid and lazy — they make up 90% of every army and are suited to routine duties.
Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership posts, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions.
One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and diligent — he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always cause only mischief.”
I much prefer the Napolean attributed joke version where diligent is replaced with energetic. It ends with Napolean being asked "but general what about the fourth group, stupid and energetic?"
I think we put too much negative emphasis on people who aren’t as gifted intellectually.
In reality, the world works because of human automotons, honest people doing honest work; living their life in hopefully a comforting, complete and wholesome way, quietly contributing their piece to society.
There is no shame in this, yet we act as though there is.
This is what pains me with how many people respond negatively toward the idea of everyone being able to earn an honest living and raise a family. Too often the idea of "deserving it" comes into it as if doing your small part to contribute to society is not enough.
Doing a repetitive(ish) task day in day out requires a specific type of person, I'm not one of them.
But I do know multiple, just in my immediate familuy. People who graduated from school, went to the local factory and worked there for half a century before retiring. Pretty much the same job, moving widgets from A to B etc, nothing massively complex. I do respect the people who can do it and especially the ones who make it look effortless and efficient - even a bit performative.
Also because my home town is a "factory town", guess where I worked for my summer job(s). I wanted to shove a hot poker in my ear just to get away from the tedium after the first day. On the second day I was thinking how to automate the damn process to not involve me in it at all :D
I'm not blaming you here, but I think "automatons" may be inaccurate. A lot of the jobs that seem menial would be utterly bollixed if done by an automaton. The people continually handle the edge cases and tiny discrepancies between formal procedures and how things actually work. Consider the many stories of people experience AI bots when they try to get vendor support for products. "Please let me talk to a real person."
Many of those people, probably including most bureaucrats, are working on systems that have already been automated to the fullest extent possible. This is one of the reasons why bureaucracies seem chaotic and inefficient -- the stuff that works is happening automatically and is invisible. You only see the exceptions.
The automation can be improved, but it's a laborious process and fraught with the risks associated with the software crisis. You never know when a project is going to fall into the abyss and never emerge, and the best models of project failure are stochastic.
Anyone doubting this need only spend 15 minutes watching people using the self-checkout lines at the grocery store to see how good a good checkout person is...
I was like, I went from waiting for a cashier who's an absolute ninja with the scanning machine, to fumbling with my own groceries and fighting with GLaDOS about whether it was actually placed in the bag, or how much it weighs vs. how much it's supposed to weigh. Which usually ends with me waiting for an attendant anyway. And this is supposed to be a win?
I love a dog and a cat and tree. I can respect someone not as intelligent as other folks. I'd love it we started holding the crude, mean and willfully ignorant to a higher standard.
Human automatons? Why would you have mercy for automatons?
Just call them cattle, we might feel more compassion towards them if we don't think of them as machinelike.
I don’t know why you’re being downvoted. Using that sort of terminology already shows you don’t care about them more than the sort of energy someone has saying they would never consider keying _their_ car.
People don’t need to be exceptional to have intrinsic value.
I’m here man. Just want to make money and support my family. Couldn’t care less what some German general thinks about me. Even less care about online clowns trying to put people in buckets.
I think this heuristic used to be more useful before it became widely known. Laziness is a fine quality if diligence is publicly rewarded, but once people game the metrics to look more lazy than they really are, things break
When one communities deeply shared goals and aspirations conflict with another's (or subgroups) is when you get war and violence. The eras of relative peace is when you have one empire imposing its will.
I think these space projects are great, can create much good will, and give people dangerous things to do that are worth risking the danger for. But war, inequality, and climate mismanagement are political problems that are not going to be solved (if they need to be solved) by science and engineering (the first two at least).
Solving inequality starts with everyone gets the same upbringing. Imagine designing a boarding school where kids get placed at an early age, and get all the support that they need to basically learn how to have control of the environment around them, while also how to interact with other humans to act as a force multiplier in accomplishing bigger things).
You could do this right now with a lot less money then it seems, the problem is that you have to break ethical grounds - for example, you have to have police or support staff that forcibly take kids from their homes if the parents resist this sort of education for their kids. If you don't do this, then you essentially are back to square one.
It would be great if everyone felt and was in a major way in control of their life. Equal before the law and not much law. The people who want to create "equality" by preventing people from accumulating wealth also want to accumulate power in the state. A tiny fraction of people will also be running a socialist state.
I agree completely. My point is that documenting methodology is standard practice, as is strict quality control, in the microplastics literature. I don’t know what controls are missing according to GP, and we don’t yet have references here to back up that claim. By and large I think researchers are aware of the difficulties measuring this stuff, and doing everything they can to ensure valid science.
The top item in goods exports "mechanical power generators" probably benefits as much from high electricity prices as it costs.
Pharma is mostly R&D, not linked to actual incremental cost of production.
"Services" is the laptop job class.
It's not great that electricity has shot up this much, but it mostly falls on poorer (and older) consumers, as well as a few particularly intensive and old businesses (last bits of steel industry). We need to unjam the renewables transition sooner rather than later.
Before anyone says nuclear: Hinkley Point C site license was in 2012.
Lots of tech gets discovered, is heavily patented, and then 20 years late,r when that large first round of patents expire, people start working on and developing the tech.
Yes. If you send an email from a protonmail account to a gmail account that email is in google's system. Same if in the other direction. Would anyone using protonmail not know this. I would guess at least 99.9% of proton users understand this.
I would like to read this website but the font and colors are so poorly selected (read and grey for most of the text) that I'm not willing to struggle to do so. I guess my eyes are just old.
reply