Difficult but not impossible. Amazingly enough, not everything affordable made in misery. LEGO kits for example are mostly made in Europe. Every once in a while you can see inexpensive toys made in Sweden, shirts made in Egypt, platic containers made in Germany, furniture made in Canada, hammers made in Russia, just look at the stickers.
The problem is in my view is not that countries are dictatorships, the problems are:
1. Outsourcing everything to one country creates unhealthy dependence of recipient economy on manufacturer. Well you may say - China depends on USA as much as USA on China - and that will be false - you forgot about a big economy - European Union/Canada. Asymmetry is obvious.
2. Nothing bad in outsourcing some amount of production to poor countries - good way to help them in fact. But if you overstretch then will destroy wellbeing of the citizens of your country, forcing them out of job, and, because poor countries has poor environmental regulations, poison environment of the producer.
I don't have time to spend a lovely Saturday morning watching a 90-minute video just to criticize it, but how can one "debunk" the calories-in calories-out model? Surely this is just plain old thermodynamics?
While that's true, the prime mover in weight gain is still calories. The type of calories is a secondary effect.
Discussing diet is hard because everyone reasons from personal experience. E.g., in my experience, almost all my fluid intake is Dr. Pepper and I consume large quantities of the "worst" food, as a proportion of my diet, but I don't eat that much and I work out, so I'm strong and fit with low cholesterol.
The submitter's sensational headline has very little to do with the lecture. You shouldn't watch it to criticize it. You should watch it because it is a very good presentation.
And he brings up that point, and solidly refutes it.
Since you're short on time-- the human body processes a calorie of fructose differently than glucose-- it's actually more like ethanol (Maker's Mark in his case).
What cars do pilots drive?
What foods do vintners eat?
I'd say it's more like asking "What cars do park rangers drive?" or "What foods do wrestlers eat?" because we're talking about groups of people with quite specific requirements. The question, while overly broad, isn't silly, because there's a lot of people who have no idea and have never heard of things like Maple, Magma. Heck, now I coem to think of it I've never heard of Maxima, so your answer taught me something new. And if you learn something new from the answer, it's probably not a silly question!
Are the folks in prison really the same folks who would otherwise be attending the University of California? I think they're generally pretty different demographics.
Better K-6 education could probably decrease crime, if we can turn the illiterate, shiftless dullards who make up the lower rungs of society into literate and hardworking (if still dull) citizens. But this requires more a new educational strategy rather than just more money, and I don't know if anyone has thought of a good one yet.
One of my favourite theories on prison reform: a huge problem with prisons is the formation of gangs and other social structures within the prison walls; not only do these promote the emergence of a criminal culture within the prison, they also make the prisoners harder to guard.
This could be solved by keeping everybody in solitary confinement, but that's overly cruel. Instead, I'd propose splitting the prison into a whole bunch of separate units, each consisting of maybe a dozen prisoners, who would share facilities and never interact with prisoners outside their own unit. Every month, the units would be broken down and prisoners reassigned to different units, preferably arranged so that no prisoner would encounter the same fellow prisoner twice in one sentence. This way we could give prisoners enough social interaction to stop 'em going crazy while preventing them from ever constructing any more than the most rudimentary social structures.
Any downsides I'm not considering? I'm assuming that the whole thing could be accomplished without occupying any more space than the existing prison system, and hopefully with fewer guards.
I'm assuming that the whole thing could be accomplished without occupying any more space than the existing prison system, and hopefully with fewer guards.
This would not be the case. Enforcing such a policy would be prohibitively expensive. Following the theme of the article, we can't even afford < 12 student classes, and schools are much cheaper than prisons.
In my opinion the solution is simple: put less people in prison. This chart says it all for me:
Let's assume that the fraction of people in prison has grown over the last 70 years. This is either because sentencing has got harsher or because people are committing more crimes. Anecdotally, though, sentencing seems to have got less harsh -- for instance in the 1950s the Boggs act resulted in minimum mandatory sentences of 5-20 years for a first drug offense. Thus, we must conclude that people are committing more crimes than before.
Now, either they're committing more crimes because sentencing has got less harsh, or they're committing more crimes because of other social factors (eg the growth of gang culture, drug culture, et cetera). Either way it's not clear to me that making sentencing even less harsh than it already is will solve anything.
Just that many prisoners already know each other from their own neighborhoods. The groundwork of the social structure is already in place.
The problem is not guarding prisoners, the problem with prison reform is that it doesn't reform anything. The question is what do we want prisoners to do once they're out? There is always a political push for longer sentences but it's economically infeasible. So if we're then asking what we can do to make these people productive members of society again, then that takes money.
Yes, that's the problem. They need to get an incentive to prepare for life outside prison. Many of the prisoners don't have the education or the skills to get a real alternative. If they have a choice of a minimum wage or selling drugs, they will often choose the easy way.
I think the best solution would be to increase prison sentences, but give a similar (if not greater) reduction if they choose to re-educate/train themselves. They would also have to show a real intent, so that they don't just sit there without making an effort.
This will not work for everyone, but I am sure that it will reduce the number of prisoners with 3 strikes.
The second problem is the actual workplaces. The state should pay a large amount of the ex-prisoner's salary for the first year, and a smaller amount in the second year. This will encourage companies to hire them. I'm not an economist, but I assume that this cost will be payed back by keeping them out of prisons.
Sounds like what we really need to do is outsource the prisons. To, say, Mexico, or China. I'll bet the Chinese don't pay $50,000 per prisoner per year to keep their prisoners locked up -- heck, they probably harness their labour to turn a profit.
Heck, they're probably not a democracy. And probably have no constitution or bill of rights. And probably haven't caught up with the 19th century. And probably disappear people left and right.
It's actually shocking how little reason there is to believe in a single set of underlying natural laws when you consider these issues with an open mind.
What's the alternative to a single set of natural laws?
Perhaps one set of natural laws that applies around here, and a slightly different set that applies in Andromeda, but only on Tuesdays? But surely the two sets, plus the Andromeda/Tuesdays restriction, put together form one slightly more complicated set of physical laws?
Perhaps an infinite set of subtly different natural laws which apply at different points in space and time? But that's still just one very large set of laws, right?
>What's the alternative to a single set of natural laws?
I take the point that however many natural laws there are, there is a set containing all of them. However, you did delete the important adjective "underlying" when asking your question. Isn't it pretty clear what it would mean for there to be no single set of underlying natural laws? It would mean, for example, that laws of chemistry would not necessarily be reducible to laws of physics, laws of psychology would not necessarily be reducible to laws of biology, etc. etc. You may think that this is wrong, but it's a perfectly intelligible idea.
Cartwright argues that there is no "ultimate", universal set of laws to which all other true laws inevitably reduce. From her point of view, laws are relatively local and specific. She goes through a lot of physical phenomena, particularly involving lasers, and shows that although physicists are able to make very precise predictions, they virtually never make these predictions merely by special-casing general principles. Her argument (which I don't have the space or expertise to summarize here) is that there is consequently no reason to think that the general principles are really true, even though they are fantastically interesting and useful.
Also, you seem to be tacitly assuming that all natural laws are necessarily going to be laws of physics, but that is one of the questions at issue. E.g., are we right to assume that all the laws of chemistry are "in principle" reducible to physics, even though we can never hope to make such a reduction in practice? Perhaps that is just a kind of unjustified faith in the unity of reality.
Anyway, I am sort of on the fence on these issues, but I found her arguments unexpectedly persuasive. It really is surprising how non-stupid the idea of a pluralistic reality is when you look at these questions in detail.
E.g., are we right to assume that all the laws of chemistry are "in principle" reducible to physics, even though we can never hope to make such a reduction in practice?
Actually, making that reduction in practice is pretty much what I do for a living.
Yes, I'm not suggesting that there's a complete disconnect between physics and chemistry, but we're a long way from having a complete understanding of how all chemical reactions work at the physical level. That is, an actual proof that all known laws of chemistry are mathematical consequences of the laws of physics (without making too many fudges, simplifying approximations, etc. etc.)
This is not in any way intended as a criticism of physicists or chemists, in case it comes across like that. They're both incredibly successful at what they do.
In this case we can be reasonably confident in the causal link between the switch and the light because we're controlling the switch ourselves -- this helps us eliminate the other causal possibilities (a) that the light going on and off causes the switch to flip and (b) both the light and the flipping of the switch are separately caused by some third factor of which we're ignorant.
In situations where we can't freely vary any of the parameters we're always going to have a lot more difficulty. Given a pile of correlations between, say, happiness and the countless other variables in the mere two hundred or so countries which exist (eg "average bovine thigh circumference"), it'd be impossible, in the absence of any good theories about what should make people happy, to determine what does make people happy.
Luckily we have pretty good ideas from our own observations and from those of others about what actually does make people happy: health, wealth, nice weather, absence of civil war, et cetera. But we'll never be able to get anything other than the vaguest confirmation of what we already believed out of statistical methods alone.
Or, we could just go back to the original topic of the article...people in Costa Rica seem to be happy.
Disbanding their military (which I was shocked to read, honestly) and spending the money (presumably) on education, amazingly, seemed to result in a better country? Hell, most countriesd if they disbanded their military and burned the money instead would be better off.
It seems to me, assuming this survey is remotely correct, is people enjoy a life where they are not sticking their noes into other countires business, and having nice weather and a strong social construct is pleasurable.
I can make the same inferences even if I'm just observing another person or some robot flipping the switch, so no, it doesn't depend on us "controlling" the switch.
But the robot _might_ be being controlled by some guy in another room who is also controlling the lightbulb (alternatively the person could be following instructions given by an earpiece). Or maybe they're both hooked up to a geiger counter. I admit it seems pretty unlikely that anybody would wire a robot or person up to flip a switch at exactly the same time a lightbulb comes on, but it only seems unlikely because of our pre-existing knowledge about robots and lightbulbs. If we take away that knowledge and simply make it a statement about how variable A changes when variable B does, it's much harder to infer which way, if either, the causal link goes.
(I suppose if you really wanted to be paranoid you could suppose that your _own_ actions in flipping the lightswitch might be subconsciously being controlled by someone else, but this is a whole different level of skepticism)
