I am constantly amazed at how people cannot ten minutes without checking their phones (with the exception of those who are on call for various jobs). I love my iPhone, but if I am with other people, I am not on it, and it drives me up the wall when people I am with in public places get theirs out and start clicking away. Or while they are in the car. I was recently riding with my dad to my grandparents' house for a get-together, and he couldn't wait the 45 minutes until we got there to check the stocks (and he does not deal with stocks as a profession). I (politely) took the phone from him and asked him what he would like to look up.

And I also hate when friends/acquaintances call me from their cars because they are bored on their drive. You know what is stimulating to the senses? Paying attention to the damn road.
*rant over*

> Even things like the 911 truth conspiracy. That,
> to my mind, is an Internet phenomenon.

Has he never heard of the Grassy Knollers or the Single Bullet Theorists? There were bullshit, small-imprint books about the Kennedy assassination for decades.

This is just control freakery from lesser performers. Some people (authors, writers, columnists) like to think that text is too important to leave to the little people.... They want to take control of communication, or a least choke off the market directly below their own point on the popularity charts, and then everything will be OK.... Since they can't effectively refute the arguments from "lesser" humanoids, they think it would be better to just make those people shut up. It's not about love of truth, it's about pretending to be elevated from the Unwashed Masses.... But the UM's know a brother when they see one.

> Global jihad has been massively empowered
> by the Internet.

I don't think so. The internet may have given Jihad some new canvas sneakers, but it's also given them and vast, new mountain range to cross; The internet is putting practical, detailed information on every topic under the sun into the minds of everyone who knows how to read.

I almost, almost doubt the veracity of this paraphrase:

> "It's yet to be seen whether technology's overall
> effect on humanity has been good or bad, he said.

Without technology, there would be multiple billions fewer people on this planet, each of whom strongly believe their own presence to be a mark in humanity's favor.

Anyone who doubts the blessing of technology's "overall effect" should, for one weekday morning, be compelled to tell everyone they meet whether or not their presence is "good for humanity". The good sense from the resultant beatings would last a lifetime, and maybe through several generations of family lore.

PS, and to wit—

> *rant over*

Never, ever say that.

How about *rant over until someone inevitably pisses me off again*?

It's yet to be seen whether technology's overall
effect on humanity has been good or bad, he said
He said with a straight face, to boot. If only he could be transported back to the time when "technology" consisted of a sharpened stick. I wonder if he could say decisively if that was good or bad for humanity?

Anyone who doubts the blessing of technology's "overall effect" should, for one weekday morning, be compelled to tell everyone they meet whether or not their presence is "good for humanity".

Can we please, please implement this somehow? I have some people in mind...

Amy,

For your edification, I present to you and all your readers, the "Al Gore" urinals. That is my terminology for the always nasty smelling, waterless urinals that have been visited upon us like the plague.

Memo to Al Gore:

Al, you moron, (yes I have waxed redundantly) that fancy French named water you are drinking from the plastic bottle is the SAME recycled
brontosaurus piss I can get from my faucet. We have not leaked much of earth's excess water unto the moon, at least not recently. Al, don't tell anyone, but, the water on earth is pretty much a CLOSED SYSTEM, that's right Al, just like the oil in that Mercedes you shouldn't be driving (Germans, you will remember, are very, very, smart, and have to drive on that fast, fast, way, way, way over 65 road, the Autobahn).

So Al, let me guess, no Al Gore toilets, yet? Can't do "all that stuff dry"?

"Will people please turn off the goddamn clicking sounds on their phones? "

Yes! Please! A woman drove me nuts the other day texting because every time she chose a Japanese kana syllable her phone beeped. There are 52 of them so there are five (one row of the darn things) per number button and some on the pound key and other keys. They are in sets,
a i u e o
ka ki ku ke ko
sa shi su se so
ha hi hu he ho

so if wants to type 'asoko'(over there) for instance it's one click for 'a' five to get to 'so' and five more to get to 'ko' and that's just one word so the whole time she's texting (and she was lousy at it) beep-beep-beep......beepbeepbeep.....beep.....beep-beep-beep... I thought I'd go nuts, but then she most likely doesn't know how to shut it off...anyone who knows how to does it the first time they power up their new phone. It is an aggravating sound.

Right on Amy!

I think I mentioned here before, beloved and I actually call each other and talk to each other instead of texting. We do some email too, especially at work because he is rarely at a desk.

Something that impressed me right away? He never interrupted a date with a gadget. Maybe not right away, but I noticed pretty quick. I didn't do it to him either.

There are countless other ways science and technology improve my life -- especially in how I am able to research my column. I used to drive to college libraries and spend and entire day tracking down a single book or a couple of studies.

I remember doing that with my dad when I was a kid. As soon as we got connected to the internet he taught me how to research there, be careful who I chat with, don't meet ANYBODY from the internet, all that. It's amazing what a difference having parents instead of feeders makes.

Crid's right, Harris's argument is ahistoric. But I suspect that he knows this. He's pushing a similar proposal to the one he'd introduced in THoF - everything is different now, we can't afford the same tolerant attitudes, authority must be seized by the enlightened!

The structure of his argument is the same in both - people use X to do bad, therefore X is bad.

What's funny is that his style of argumentation is very similar to that of the zealots he's attacking.

"It's yet to be seen whether technology's overall effect on humanity has been good or bad, he said."

OK then Sam. You go back to heating your house by a brick-lined fireplace and writing your books with a charred stick on birch bark because even a woodstove was made by machines and paper and pens - technology dude! Not to mention the printing presses your book was printed on.
And, for that matter, no flush toilet and you get to scrape your butt with seashells like the ancients did after disgorging their intestinal burdens.

I'm sorry but that comment is stupid enough to disqualify someone from speaking at TED much less writing a book I'd bother reading.

> How about *rant over until someone
> inevitably pisses me off again*?

Better. IJS, some of our adversaries are going require a lifetime of opposition. People too often daydream of solutions to problems that perpetual motion machines, where if it really WAS a solution you'd only have to do it once... Fill your gas tank once or whatever.

The ugly tendencies in these comments for Harris are a good example. But not only is there a continuing responsibility to point out that he's talking like a self-aggrandizing fool; it's also a lot of fun.

I think that TED has become a victim of it's own success. The average quality of their speakers has declined, so there are proportionally more popularizers and activists, and fewer people who are actually innovating things.

> The average quality of their speakers has declined

And those opening theme tunes are SO annoying...!

People too often daydream of solutions to problems that perpetual motion machines, where if it really WAS a solution you'd only have to do it once... Fill your gas tank once or whatever.

These are probably the same people who fail to realize that new technological feats and inventions tend to become more efficient and streamlined as they are perfected (Google "Highway Hi-Fi" and compare to hands-free iPod control for your car). When computers first came along, it was thought that they would only get bigger as technology advanced, but we now know that was not true. Then, they would get small enough to fit in a single room. In my mind, the wonderful thing about new technology is the ability to customize while trimming what you don't need.

Pranks and pseudoscience? The USA is one of the wealthiest and most literate countries in the world, yet 80% of its population believes in angels. Human beings are silly, irrational, foolish, and superstitious. The Internet didn't cause that, it's just a reflection of it.

Even things like the 911 truth conspiracy. That, to my mind, is an Internet phenomenon. No one would publish those books.

Right. Thierry Meyssan anyone?

Crid's spot on with this one. The Internet allows too many untermenschen to challenge the prevailing wisdom.

Why, if it weren't for those kids and their damned Internet, Global Warming would still be "settled science"!

Free speech is a pain in the ass, but it's better than any alternative. The problem is deciding who gets to play God and decide what speech is good and what speech is bad.

I'm sure Mr. Harris would think the Internet is the greatest invention in human history if we made him the gatekeeper of what ideas are allowed to be discussed and what ones aren't forbidden.

People like him are all about CONTROL -- they want to control what other people say, think and do. And they hate, hate, hate when their memes have to compete with other memes. After all, their ideas are superior to everyone else's; why should they have to actually persuade anyone else? We should just shut up and do as we're told.

PS: Fireplaces and charred sticks are just as much technology as the internet. We'd have to go back about 2 million years if we want to discuss whether technology's effect on humans is good or bad. And you'd have to be incredibly stupid to argue that it's been 'bad'.

"Human beings are silly, irrational, foolish, and superstitious" Well, yeah. Insane ideas like the notion that human sacrifice helped crops to grow or made the sun rise spread around the world thousands of years before writing was invented, never mind the internet.

It's interesting that the Inquisition had exactly the same attitude towards Gutenberg's printing press as Harris does towards the internet. When everybody could read the Bible & any other books for themselves, the authority of the Catholic Church was mortally challenged. Likewise, the world wide web is a huge obstacle to the designs of would-be fascists like Harris.

TestyTommy, agreed. But I was trying to go with things that at least *can* be made be hand. And I'll admit that paper *can* be made by hand but given the splinteraciousness of that kind of paper, I may opt for the seashell myself!

"The internet is putting practical, detailed information on every topic under the sun into the minds of everyone who knows how to read."

Very nice - and I enjoy it immensely (don't forget this, below). But distractions prohibit most (yes, I say most because of observing a wide range of professions at work) from actually understanding what they are seeing. Yes, I have dozens of examples. This is what led me to post The Formation of Belief. Although Crid (and no doubt, others) objects to my calling people "the leading lifeform", possibly objecting to us having littered the Moon, the process cited you use to gather information is correct. You can be overwhelmed with input. I can show you that where I work, or you can simply consider what's happening when you drive while talking on the phone.

Also - for those of you adamant about your world being better than before because of technology: you're talking from your own point of view. You can't help it, but there are two things to consider. It's not a done deal that our current path is sustainable, whatever your personal level of optimism (we're going to do nuclear power and it's going to kill us all, right, Crid?). Future generations may hate us for seeing what was necessary and not doing it - for leaving them a world with no wild animals at all, or no oil, or {fill in the blank}. Maybe you can see the future. Not me. Although technology may save us, it may also fail us. You can see the hint of this in 3rd-world energy demands and the impossibility of bringing the whole world, at current population levels, up through the 20th-century.

When you talk about today, you also ignore the opinions of your ancestors, who lived in the most modern times they could imagine and who had their own hopes and dreams of the future. Try to tell a Manhattan native 500 years ago that there was something better than pulling dinner out of a clean East River, and they'd say the equivalent of "Yeah, right."
You ignore what you've given up for convenience. How many times will you bend over for a guard because you want to ride on a plane?

Technology - the science of how things work, not a gadget - brings with it new problems. Talking on the phone, having an MRI, flying in a plane -- these things just are. Life is still work, even as it is converted from "nasty, brutish and short" to an episode of Logan's Run.

A measure of your admiration for technology:

How many would give up their remaining years of life to live as Logan did in the movie: 30 years of actual, continuous bliss, then you are killed painlessly.

No one wants, no one suffers, at any time, not for a second. The pinnacle of human achievement, right?

> No one wants, no one suffers, at any time,
> not for a second. The pinnacle of human
> achievement, right?

Raddy gets this.

Re: the title of the post— Yes, sunshine is the best disinfectant, and bad thinking is often best answered by more speech. But some infecting agents can grow anew overnight.... Friends, there will always be chores in the morning.

Psssssssssssssssssst,

Hey, all you Demorats out here, with the chads, and plastic water bottles, and ex VP, still a moron, save the planet Al Gore.

I don't even own a cell phone; (who cares?)

... and, anyway,

Amy's almost always right, so listen to her. :)

OK, I read more and want to quibble.

Who are we "leading"? Who, or what, follows?

> You can be overwhelmed with input

So you don't want people to have it? Haven't there always been people who couldn't make sense of the world around them, no matter how rich or lean their information streams?

There's nothing new about the internet as regards any genuine human right to exchange whatever information you want to share or receive. The principles composed over preceding millenia apply quite nicely.

One of the great things about having so much different technology is that you can feel free to ignore as much as you want. I check my email about once a week, and usually get one or two real messages with 1,000 pieces of junk. If anyone really wants to get in touch with me, they know my phone number. Amy seems to like to do it just the opposite, which is great.

I wonder if Mr. Harris is aware of the Holocaust. It was made possible withouth the use of email or the internet. That Adolf was way ahead of his time.

1) Typing vs. Longhand is a very personal choice for writers. I find typing almost automatic, and therefore the most transparent way to write. My wife keeps long journals in longhand, and only turns to the computer late in her writing process.

2) RE: kids and technology. You know I'm on your side when it comes to the passive-idiot parents. BUT all the good parenting in the world cannot protect kids from very real, corrosive cultural developments that are ubiquitous. Even my Orthodox Jewish kids are aware of - and exposed to - explicit, degrading messages and imagery from the larger culture.

Certainly technology facilitates that access/immersion. Even with parental safeguards (no TV, internet monitoring, cellphones and PIDs with limited memory and web access) my kids can acquire with a click of their phones imagery and experiences that in my youth could only be found behind counters or in seedy areas of town - if at all.

There is a limit to a parent's ability to monitor and parent in this situation - this is especially true during the teen years, when kids become simultaneously more susceptible and less open with parents.

Excellent post. The choice to use technology (or not use it) far surpasses the intentions of all the do-gooders who want to regulate every human behavior.

As an aside, I require that my students hand-write all of their papers. On the first day of class, I give a sample typed-paper the "Paper Shredding Ceremony" (ironically, a form of "technology") in order to hammer home what I require for my class.

And, in my 10 years of teaching, I have never used a Power point presentation for any lecture that I have done, a trend I plan on continuing into my twilight years of college Professor/Dean-ship.

All said, I do not dissuade my faculty from utilizing what they need to in class, as long as it is not used as a crutch (which can be very tempting to some of the more lazy educators out yonder)

:-)

I personally hate racism. Yet, I believe someone should be able to say certain minorities are less intelligent than others, as an example of something that is currently suppressed as hate speech.

There are people who believe it. But, when challenged to prove they are wrong, I can't, because PC not only stops them saying it openly. It also stops any research to prove what I believe, which is all children whose mothers had good nutrition during pregnancy start out with equal intelligence, and any differences come later.

And, when I have to admit there is no such research, the racists (some of them in my own family) use that as proof the scientists well know those minorities are stupid so they don't want to touch it with a ten foot pole.

Free speech as intended by the founders of the US Constitution means open debate, then we vote, period. The minute we suppress free speech we are pre-determining the outcome

And it matters not if the non-racist people suppress racists, or the KKK burns people's barns who do not agree with slavery.

With free speech if someone engages in hate speech, they get answered promptly, and those who don't know who is right get to hear both sides.

The Jews got slaughtered because those who did not hate Jews were suppressed, not just because Jew haters said nasty things about Jews.

That seems to be normal in history. Few atrocities happen without people realizing bad things are happening, but as soon as you suppress dissent, bad things flow.

Ian, while I do miss written expressions such as letters, I also understand that my kids will be living in a technological world. You are as guilty as those who are trying to dictate what technology is used and when. I graduated high school in 1985 and even back then we had to hand in papers typed on a typewriter. Your resistance to allowing it in your class is not preserving a more genteel time. I'm not sure what you feel it does.

Pssssssssssssssssst:

Amy,

Take a break, stop and smell the coffee, and the nice roses your boyfriend got you, or will soon get you, or was planning to get you, and I reminded him.

The both of you enjoy Valentine's Day together, and send me a pic, please, if you feel like it, and I am not beating the excrement out of Gene Siskel on a poker table in Vegas (I did.).

I will take care of the clowns on the board, including this one. :)

P.S. I did say "Thank God for ATM machines.", didn't I?. But I am willing to say I didn't say that first, but don't quote me.

I also have a problem with Ian not letting his students type their papers. How is all of this handwriting practice going to help them get a job someday? One of my good friends got through college without ever learning to type, and it has been a huge struggle for her to find work. I have completely forgotten how to write in cursive properly, and it has never affected me one bit.

Mixed feelings about handwriting. My own pen ess yoo see kay SUCKS.... And every school teacher for the first twelve grades decided THEY were going to be the one to fix the problem. It was mostly a matter of sport to them, an opportunity to be cruel without fear of retaliation, and there was nothing I could do. The first IBM personal computer was released essentially the day got out of college... But it was only after learning type that I could express thoughts through text at all.

My hand is still more legible than Bill Clintons'.

So, like, I dunno.

I don't handwrite anything if I can avoid it. I'm a lefthander who was switched in elementary school. So I write with my right hand, but my left hand will always be the stronger hand. All through school, I struggled to handwrite essays, especially when I had to do it in class. I made poor grades in English because it was all I could do to just finish an essay in the allotted time; I never had any time to proofread or edit. And my hand hurt for hours afterwards. It's easy to be glib about handwriting being more cultured and mannered, but try that when your hand cramps up five minutes after you start. How can you think about sentence structure and word usage and literary devices when your hand hurts so bad that you have to concentrate just to hold the pen at the correct angle?

When I was finally able to start doing papers on a computer in college, it was like a miracle. All of a sudden the barrier between my thoughts and the paper was gone! It was like being cured of autism. I discovered that not only could I write, but that I actually enjoyed it. I set about making up for lost time, and I made straight A's in my college comp and literature classes. Writing is now one of my strengths in my profession.

More Raddy-bitching:

> (we're going to do nuclear power and it's going
> to kill us all, right, Crid?)

Naw, it's more that smug, self-assured, profiteering weasels in delicate enterprises, pinching their pennies, will witlessly kill and maim on a scale previously unforeseen. It's happened before.

(Y'know, your arguments about this would carry a little more weight if someone ever got around to putting a proper, sturdy lid on reactor #4. It's been a quarter of a century, for fuck's sake.)

> the impossibility of bringing the whole world,
> at current population levels, up through the
> 20th-century.

Says WHO? By what cosmic insight are you so certain? Who's to say that if underdeveloped peoples were given modern education they wouldn't more than carry their weight in innovative solutions? Lomborg says micronutrients are the new frontier for improving human life: In some areas, iron alone can increase IQ by fifteen points. It's not that humanity isn't up to this challenge, it's that humanity hasn't been fully engaged. For you, sighing wearily in western wealth & comfort, to prattle that it can't happen for others is borderline obscene. Are you at heart a liberal, the teenage kind, the kind who thinks people are the problem (especially other people)?

See also Hitchens on the craven dwarves of Asia.

Besides, I think this:

> distractions prohibit most (yes, I say most
> because of observing a wide range of
> professions at work) from actually understanding

is exactly the Harris error. The little people are so DISTRACTED. If only they would turn to me as their righteous leader....

I was quite the stubborn child, and no amount of instruction, scolding, or pleading could teach me to hold a pencil properly. Thus, like Crid, I have terrible handwriting when I'm not being careful. But besides a way around my chicken scratch, typing allows me to immediately see the problems in my writing and then to better organize my thoughts. However, I take terrible notes on a computer. I remember things much better by writing them out longhand, and I can organize them in my own convoluted system. I work best with my handwritten notes that are organized into term paper form on the computer.

When I was in high school, a junior high opened near me that had paperless classrooms. The kids all took notes on PDAs and handed in papers electronically. I would have really struggled in that situation. On the other hand, I think I would cry if a teacher forced me to hand in a paper that was handwritten. Regular homework assignments are one thing, but papers? I am assuming from your post that you teach at a college/university. I am adding my query as to why you don't allow your students to hand in typed papers. Though it is very generous of you to allow your faculty to switch on their IBM Selectrics to do their jobs. Your smug assurance that you are doing the right thing may be worse than all those "do-gooders who want to regulate every human behavior." Which is what you seem to want to do, albeit in the tiny sphere under your absolute control.

Okay, sorry, I deleted a sentence before I submitted. The "you" I am addressing up there is, of course, Ian.

And just for the record, does Harris allege that the internet has brought about a surge of Christian fellowship amongst browsers? (Someone will have to tell me, because I didn't follow Amy's link. C'mon, it was to CNN! You didn't want to follow it, either.)

It didn't occur to me until just this moment to notice, but a wave a religious feeling is one thing that has NOT been sweepingly transmitted through the internet. It's not like Baptists have claimed Firefox while Lutherans go for Safari and Catholics use Internet Explorer. It's still more about pornography.

That's really kind of important. Of course, many of the blessings of religious fellowship are in-person kinds of things anyway... And certainly, a lot of other religious-type stupidities (terror of global warming, Obama-ism, the Ipad) have projected power into vast online territories.

But Pat Robertson and the Falwell family got nothing going on, at least to those not already inclined to visit their sites. That probably hurts their feelings very deeply, just as it gladdens my heart.

I don't see how eschewing Power Point accomplishes anything, either. I don't think you can go to a conference these days and use slides as easily as you could years ago.

It's not like Baptists have claimed Firefox while Lutherans go for Safari and Catholics use Internet Explorer.

Death cage match, winner reaps the spoils of the best and most fruitful web browsers in all the land. Who's with me?

Crella, I, too, was wondering where visual aids came into play. I have never actually put together a Power Point presentation, but I can see their advantages in speed and ease of use. What subject do you teach, Ian?

> Who's with me?

Favorite joke from 1980's television, Letterman.

Question: If Emmanual Lewis and Gary Coleman had a fight to the death with pool cues on television, who would win?

Answer (choose one):

A. Emmanual Lewis

B. Gary Coleman

C. The American viewing public.

Powerpoint is just a medium. Barb Oakley and I hung out together today and did our respective work on our computers, and she showed me a Powerpoint for a talk she did that was fascinating and very entertaining. Showed much more than you could ever show with chalk on a chalkboard. In other words, it communicated better, and isn't that the point?

You can't edit pen and paper writing without retyping the whole thing, which is a huge waste of time. The Macintosh, which I got in 1985, changed my life. When I heard, not long ago, that Steve Jobs was sick, I sent him a thank you note.

I am firmly in the "C" camp, Crid.

Oh, and apparently we're all wrong about the internet. It's EVIL and causes plagiarism: http://www.slate.com/id/2244430/

What an idiot. Amy, you do tons of research, right? Have you ever mistaken any of that research for something you wrote yourself (she asks rhetorically, knowing the answer)? My favorite part? The one where Posner says he's too stupid to have plagiarized: Clearly, if I were a serial plagiarizer, I would have scanned my own drafts with such [plagiarism detection] software before submitting to the [Daily] Beast. I'm adding this guy to our cage match, Crid.

That's funny, I used to have to do the same thing in college to avoid forgetting to cite (which is why I always had a friend read my stuff first). What is really sad is that this guy thinks it's okay because he isn't stealing "great prose from another writer," but merely "facts, figures, the most mundane information." [quotes from Jack Shafer's great article at Slate] Apparently even these "banal" sentences were better than anything he could have come up with himself.

Crid,

Thanks for the link on North Korea. Asians are weirdly racist and suspicious against each other. Everytime I'm there Im a little taken aback by it.

Crid, damn, get a clue.

You can't bring two billion Chinese, a billion Indians and a couple of billion others up yearning for automobiles and single-family homes as they are built today.

This isn't about me. Just do the math.

And notice where your oil prices are going now that Toyota, Ford and GM all have car plants in China.

Even in the USA, there's a lesson to be had in the Cash for Clunkers program to which most are immune: you can buy a car you can't afford to own. This goes for individuals, and nations are made up of those.

This is The Age of Oil. There will be a lot of scrap iron around when it's over.

-----

We have (SRS has) some people over from Sellafield, by the way. They report the tax rate in Britain on engineering professionals (~$75K/yr) is about 42%, that gas is about $10 a gallon, and there is a six week wait to treat a broken leg, suffered by the teenage son of one of the reps.

Wow, that's technology!

Raddy, address my points –rather than kick back more of your voodoo superstition– and we'll talk.

Voodoo superstition, my ass. go learn something.

It didn't occur to me until just this moment to notice, but a wave a religious feeling is one thing that has NOT been sweepingly transmitted through the internet.

I agree. Some small groups that otherwise would not have been able to gather critical mass have used the internet to organize, such as Christian goths, but these are by definition fringe groups. Churches put information and sermons online. Our church uses e-mail instead of sending out a paper newsletter. When we moved to a new state, we used the internet to find and weed out potential churches to attend. There are theological resources online, and of course there's lots more arguing on various forums about theological issues.

> go learn something.

I've learned that when the power of your prayers (e.g., ("You can't bring two billion Chinese, a billion Indians and a couple of billion others up") is questioned, you'll merely repeat the prayers.

One important point...

> You can't bring two billion Chinese, a billion Indians
> and a couple of billion others up yearning for
> automobiles and single-family homes as they
> are built today.

This is like saying that modern New Zealanders will never be able to conveniently travel to Polynesia as the settlers did a millenia ago, in scatter-shot, high-risk explorations on outrigger canoes. The modern New Zealanders don't HAVE to visit that way... They can book a flight.

Emergent cultures don't need to build modern industrial economies out of scratch, re-inventing the wheel or contemporary banking or even germ theory on their own. They don't have to go through an Edsel stage— They can start today, with the Prius.

Crid, you won't listen to me about my own profession. Why should I spend hours, literally, showing off what I've learned about global markets over decades when you're satisfied with your blindness?
You haven't even noticed your straw man.

Do the math. Show the real energy requirement to bring these people into the present. If you had so much as a subscription to The Economist, you'd have a clue -- but you're substituting some combination of fairy tale and hand-waving to say it'll be not only possible, but simple.

No, it won't.

It was this book that described how repugnant the phrase "do the math" is.

> you won't listen to me about my own profession.

Waste disposal, right? Got it. But we wouldn't necessarily let the guy who installs tail lights in a Ford Focus design a fuel injector; we certainly wouldn't let him speak too pompously about the future importance of motor transport to civilization, or even where a particular highway should go.

> Do the math.

You haven't offered any, Raddy. YOU'RE the one who's offering the broadest possible presumptions in unsubstantiated, CYNICAL, SELF-AGGRANDIZING arguments. Self-aggrandizing doesn't cut it; you think you deserve modernity, but the little people out there don't because they didn't get in under the wire, and that's just tough titties. This is lunacy.

> you're substituting some combination of fairy
> tale and hand-waving to say it'll be not only
> possible, but simple.

Who said anything about simplicity? See above: I'm the guy who says there will always be chores in the morning. You seem to want life to be an inexpensive, perfectly reliable, discussion-free perpetual-motion machine... One that happens to reward your particular industry.

YOUR "fairy tale" is that people are stupid (though as an essential corollary, you personally are not). They're so stupid that even if one-third of humanity has its intelligence raised by 15 IQ points, they'll still be destined for wretchedness, and we might as well write them off.

Good luck selling that.

Rad -

40 years ago, we were told that there was no way for food production to keep up with population growth, and entire continents were going to die.

Food production technology proceeded to prove the Chicken Littles wrong.

Crid believes as I do - you cannot make predictions about the future that leave out the possibility of innovation to improve efficiency or yield or productivity.

If you had told a zipperhead 20 years ago that we'd have chips with over a billion transistors on them, he might have granted that possibility. If you told him it would be a six-core CPU built on a 45 nm feature size, he'd tell you that it wasn't possible.

Engineers are in the business of making what normals think is impossible happen.

It's definitely true that Powerpoint is widely abused. I think that's because, in part, it makes it so easy for people who don't know how to organize their thoughts to slap-dash something together. Some people are just hopeless at presentations, and Powerpoint emphasizes how hopeless they are. When I worked at Bell Labs, the accepted style for presentations was to stand in front of the room and read off the charts verbatim. Yawn. No wonder AT&T got broken up.

It doesn't help that Microsoft ditched the pretty-good clip art that they supplied with early versions of Powerpoint, in favor of the ridiculous cartoony stuff they give you now.

New article today at Slate that seems apropos to this thread. http://www.slate.com/id/2244198/pagenum/all/#p2

The debate about "technology" as we know it today (the internet, Facebook, gaming, etc.) pretty much started with the birth of literacy, or at least when it was available to more than the clergy and ruling class (damn those pesky peasants, wanting to read!). The article mentions priests in the 18th century having a problem with newspapers because the people would get their information outside of the Church. Well, they probably shouldn't have asked Jerome to translate the thing into (what was then) modern Latin. The more people can read about what they are learning in church, the less hold the Church has on them. Ditto for any sort of leader. I just read a book called The 19th Wife (by David Ebershoff, go pick it up) that details some of the gross lies the early Mormons were told about other religions. They believed that all other denominations were devil-worshipers, and accepted it as true partly because they had no access to outside confirmation.
This article is not railing for or against anything, but I like the second-to-last paragraph that says some of our misconceptions about the effects of current technology are, in fact, wrong.
And bonus points to the writer for quoting Douglas Adams.

You a lapsed mormon as well Six?

Relating to that, NumberSix, is something else we all know: rule #1 in the dictator's handbook is to restrict access to education. Because, as we saw throughout the 20th century, an ignorant population is an easier-to-control population.

You know, only somebody who has no idea what is shipped through his town daily would cry like Chicken Little about Bhopal being everywhere. Then, only the schizophrenia I am so fond of pointing out would let the same guy claim technology is the answer!

Again, Crid: I'm not doing anything for you, because unless you do it yourself, you just won't read it.

Just claiming that "we fixed things before, we'll do it again" is not even wrong. It's not thinking. Neither is making things up about me because I have thought for awhile.

Not a lapsed Mormon, lujlp, just someone who is deeply interested in that sort of cult-like behavior. Though I did grow up with half the family Southern Baptist and the other half Church of Christ, so it's a wonder I came out halfway sane and rational (my great aunt, while AT HER GRANDSON'S WEDDING RECEPTION, told him how disappointed she was in him because he had a beer--he's 22). Thank God my parents didn't push anything on me.

a little off topic... did any one see the sixty minute interview 2 nights ago about the Bloom Energy?