FriendlyHacker

Am mentioning intellectual work here, not sports, sports is such a silly thing to me I don't even consider it. There are about 60 million people in Brazil who play soccer, but only the top league ones are making money playing (about 2000 people). As far as I can tell, if you have a normal brain, you have the potential to learn any intellectual job, given enough hours of practice. There are people working 3 jobs and not making enough money, how exactly is doing intellectual work harder than repetitive/dangerous work?

Hey Carter, nice work with the jQuery, but the best way to deal with this feature on an Invision Boards integrated chat, is to actually pull the preselected blocked list from the database. If anyone wants to use custom chat features, it should become an extra incentive for people to register and join the community, instead of doing extra work for front end only.

Agree with everything you said there. I notice a repeated pattern in this philosophical conversation though, of people not realizing how much extra effort it takes to be poor, and this strange idea of everyone having equal opportunities, everyone who is not mentally disabled has equal potential, but equal opportunity is a whole different deal. Bill Gates has a patent lawyer dad, this is something he was entitled to for simply being born, and also the reason Microsoft managed to surprise IBM and become insanely rich.

Money = Status Someone with 50 cats is insane, someone with 50 billion dollars is cool beyond measure. Status is a form of compensation, people try to cover up their shortcomings by seeming better than they actually are. You can have a small dick, but if you have long throbbing red Ferrari, all is fine. There is no status to gain in having 50 cats, even though cats are real and money isn't.

No, we don't need education as is right now. The alternative is already out there and getting cheaper by the minute: The internetPeople only need 2 things: 1 - Easy access to information 2 - Incentive to study The internet can provide both I don't have a college degree and it makes absolutely no difference in my life, because I've worked/studied enough to know more about certain subjects than people with degrees. The main focus in my career is to provide high quality educational material for free, and people do mention how having access to it has changed their life.

Nuclear power is not a bad thing by itself, it's just not something foolproof enough for us stupid monkeys to deal with. Cold fusion might be greatest discovery yet to come, but as long as humans are in charge of it, I don't trust on it being safe. There is plenty of wind, solar, wave and geothermal energy to go around, so I just don't see the point in dealing with something as potentially dangerous as uranium. A nuclear power plant works in a similar way a coal plant does, the radiation generates heat, the heat turns water into vapor and vapor turns a turbine, the turbine generates electricity. The thing about nuclear material though is that it will release heat continuously, you can shut down a coal power plant if you stop burning the coal, but uranium will remain hot for thousands of years. So in order to keep the reactor from exploding you need to keep it cool at all times, in case of power failure a backup system should come along to keep the cooling down process going, but because of the earthquake and human error, the backup system was not turned on, causing the reactor to explode when power failed. The reactor has exploded, but the uranium will remain releasing heat and radiation anyway, since the leak has not been contained it becomes a fucking disaster.

I only speak in behalf of myself and I do realize I have no solutions, the very nature of the problem dwarfs me. I have never mentioned communism, or having solutions or anything of the matter. The whole point of this topic is to show what it really means to be poor, and that the video entitled "The Truth About Poverty" is a lie. Statistically, you can win with a rigged dice, does not make it less rigged.

What kind of education people get in Canada or in Eastern Europe, compared to public school in Brazil? Do you know what functional illiteracy means? Do you know there are many people here coming out of primary school who are functionally illiterate? My parents have 5 degrees combined and I can read in 7 languages, while there are people picking rotten food from garbage, and taking pills they have no idea what are for, simply because that's only access to meds they have. I would not fucking dare to say that those eating from trash are there because they want to, or because they are lazy, or because they missed their opportunities, or because they are out of luck. When you start off with a rigged dice, there is no such thing as luck. Please let me know, how many hours someone in a Chinese iPhone assembly line needs to work in order to buy an iPhone. And let me know how that compares to your high paying cushy job, and I will tell you who is the lazy one. I'm highly educated and only need to work a few days a month to make ends meet, and let me tell you, I'm the one who is fucking lazy. You don't enjoy complaining? How about you stop complaining about people being lazy, and actually take a look outside your own belly button?

You can take your data about poverty in rich countries, and it might be representative there, but if you have ever seen poverty in third world countries, you would consider those "poor" people rich. You can talk about your lack of education during childhood, but you did mention ability with language and seems to not understand how different your future might have been if your parents were illiterate. You know what it means to be below poverty line in Brazil? It might mean living in a cardboard box inside a landfill and picking your food directly out of garbage. And if you don't believe this, please don't try to find the data for it, come here and see it for yourself. The most privileged people in society have a hard time to understand their own privileges, because they always had it and know nothing different from it.

If you don't know what are the evidences for it, you might call it a myth, if you know the evidences for it, you understand it's something more reliable than Newton's theory of gravitation, and also understand that, like Newton's theories, it has been revised many times over the last couple centuries. Just because you don't understand something, it does not make it wrong, that might be how philosophy works, but in science you actually need to test your ideas and see if they match reality, having ideas is not enough you need to repeat the same experiment hundreds of times and figure out how reliable it is(margin of error). And often the least expected outcomes coming from the lab are the greatest discoveries. Scientists don't give two shits about what people believe or not, it's either supported by evidence or it isn't. So the whole believing thing is irrelevant.

You can talk with nature, that's not really an issue, but when the rocks and pebbles start talking back, let me know how you've done it.

It's really hard getting the attention of someone like Michio Kaku, guy is flooded with messages. You might be able to get in touch on his City College email address though, I might try getting in touch with him myself, nobody understands my ideas either.

I vote for Stefan to be replaced by a bald sock puppet called Mr Grumpyballs. Show will feature Mr Grumpyballs cursing Richard Nixon for 3 hours and sharing his views about how hopelessly stupid today's kids are. Let's make it happen.

"Talking to nature" You mean like Seaman? "Entangling itself with more subtle energies causing to be more powerful than consciousness." I can't understand what that means, too ambiguous. "Collective energy that can change a storm" You use the term energy so loosely I have no idea what it means, but hey, if you bump your pinky into the living room table, it might initiate a chain of events that might cause a storm.

This is pseudoscience. Mind is not the only thing observing matter and causing change to it, every particle can observe another particle, hence non locality is so shortlived and happens regardless of human or any other conscience. Humans have been around for about 200k years, the Universe for about 13.72 billion years. Anything that regards human conscience as having any importance on the grand scheme of things, will sound like geocentrism to me.

Please refer to where I said: "violence is not fundamentally wrong". Because I don't remember ever saying it. If you don't understand how something like communism can be non violent, that only means you don't understand it and not that I accept violence. And if you start talking about RBE being based in violence, that only means you don't understand RBE. You should stop assuming things, disagreeing with your political views does not automatically equate to violence and immorality.

Sure, I will change my mind, but first you need to properly explain your position and make sure you understand mine, but so far I find us talking at each other and not to each other, for instance: "Please explain how theft, assault, rape, or murder can be used in a good way." Why would you even ask a pacifist such a question?

You need to understand about why people want to own anything, in order to see ownership as a reflection of abuse. You only care about owning things, about protecting them, because people are willing to steal it and make your life miserable for it. As I said before, try removing the abusive people mindset and see if it still makes sense. You don't want to own anything, you don't want to care about protecting anything, all you want is access to things when you need them, and if you can't have that because it was stolen from you, that's abuse.

As someone who has been a volunteer for about 4 years without ever hearing about initiation of force, I find it intriguing this idea people have about RBE, they certainly haven't heard it from Jacque Fresco or Roxanne Meadows.Initiation of force is something people do in order to abuse power. You have to remove the abusive people mindset in order to see things like communism as a real option, it's only really bad if it ends under control of complete nut jobs like Stalin. Corrupted and abusive societies are reflections of corrupted and abusive people, no matter the socio-economic system you have, you can have the most perfect system in the world, if the people are insane the new system will reflect their insanity, the breaking point in technology is the user itself.

Holy shit brick in a cone Batman, I hope this guy has no Jules Verne powers.

If you don't get what I'm saying, you will in the future. If you don't understand the technology involved, you can only understand what I said when you see it happening. Going to the Moon was considered impossible, until it actually happened, then it becomes a common thing humans are known to do.

I like your reply, elliptical orbits are really just a twist, everything is pulling into everything so it makes no sense to claim about things being steady, not because it's a failure of the math in it, but because we don't live in a steady state Universe, or a steady enough solar system to begin with, when you consider there used to be more planets but they ended up falling into the Sun, being slingshot out of the solar system or crashing into other planets. Einstein didn't believe in such precision ever being possible, so he totally dismissed the idea, he's probably wrong about that though, nobody knows how engineering will be in 50 years from now, let alone 1000 years from now. "If matter is expanding, what is it expanding relative to?" Space is expanding, yourself is expanding. "This discussion gets to the heart of probably the biggest unsolved question in physics, what is mass?" Mass is the property of not traveling in the speed of light, anything that has mass is bouncing on and off the Higgs field so we have the luxury of not moving, or at least it seems that way. "At what speed does information travel?" Technically, it can travel at any speed, it can go faster than light, back in time, forward in time or it can go in the full fledged speed of a dial up modem. You would need to read about quantum cryptography to understand how that can be possible. "The idea that black holes are big bangs, is actually becoming very acceptable in theoretical physics circles." You might want to watch this amazing movie: http://www.videoneat.com/movies/2695/hawking-2004-watch-online I also recommend Hawking's book on baby Universes.

We keep talking about NSA abusing their power and about Internet safety, without ever considering that a sane society has no need for password protection. We live in a world of bold claims, claims of democracy, freedom, safety and privacy, but consider the following quote: "If you're truly free, you don't need anyone telling you how free you are." Jacque Fresco The NSA issue is not an issue of privacy or freedom, it's fundamentally about God like powers and monkey brains, it's the issue of alpha male monkeys hungering for more power than they can deal with. Political/economic systems are technologies for managing societies, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with democracy, anarchy, communism or a resource based economy, as long as there are people who will abuse power, nobody is truly free. As always the issue is not in technology itself, technology can't harm anyone, it's the people who abuse their power we have to worry about, the scary part is that today you don't need to be a computer genius to hack into anything and everyday it becomes easier, to the point of a 5 year old having as much power as Obama in the near future.I have no idea what will happen when both government and money stop making sense, simply because every individual is as powerful as governments and corporations, but I know that we are dealing with technologies far beyond our monkey brain capacity to safely deal with them. We will either learn how to properly educate our 5 year olds, or die in their hands.

Maybe we can meet up one day, would be fun chatting with someone who understands these things, I live nowhere near Toronto though, I'm in Brazil.