Phi for All

Can we establish some definitions first? Since your poll question isn't the same as your title, do mental traits = intelligence? I consider perceptiveness to be a mental trait, but you don't necessarily have to be smart to be perceptive. Similarly, cunning seems to be a mental trait that some very intelligent people don't have, and some not very intelligent people have in abundance. Evidence seems to support the idea that there are no biological races within humans to begin with.

Oh. I thought you were going for believable. My bad. How about giant monster robots? A bipedal design with ostrich legs and a tail for balance, like a velociraptor, but with longer and more dexterous arms? You can still have your human operators in their places (but the guy in the head gets a much cooler cockpit). It could represent Earth as one of our most badass historical fighting forms, against the giant monsters from another planet.

What about it? It's bipedal, but not humanoid. It's got a better leg design for bipedal locomotion, better balance. It's a HumVee with ostrich legs, nothing like a human. And again, I was addressing the "believable" part, not the "possible" part. For me, the only legitimate reasons for a robot that looks like us is either to mimic us, scare us, or to use our tools. The AT-ST seems like a good fit if you want mobility in an area where terrain varies greatly, but scale it up six times bigger and you lose most of your ability to deal with terrain changes. Or to put it another way, if I need a 100 foot tall AT-ST to deal with my enemies, I'm probably going to build a big old bomb instead (or a planet killing death ray). Hey, how about designing your big humanoid robot but remove the flaws inherent in a quadrupedal design that now walks upright? Without losing too much in form, you should be able to give him the AT-ST legs. Smaller head for better balance? That sort of thing.

In the US, we need to stop electing leaders of the People from the group that has demonstrated they make decisions based mainly on personal gain. Since the Nixon era, we've allowed wealthy politicians and corporate efficiency to leech away our prosperity. Leadership is focused on what corporations want, and it's assumed that's what best for the People as well. What if we focused on the People, and assumed that's what's going to be best for the corporations? We'd certainly have more buying power to purchase goods and services. Surely a more prosperous middle class doesn't increase the risk for the wealthy, in fact it would seem to reduce both risk and reward equally.

! Moderator Note OK, not homework, and a public posting of answers. We're good.

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Sorry, who are you attributing this quote to?

You asked if this concept was believable, not "possible". It's a Hollywood concept, one that looks cool and will probably play well, but engineering-wise it's a bust. A 72 foot tall bipedal robot has a poor center of gravity for a walking machine. Four legs, like the Imperial Walkers from Star Wars is much more practical. There are great reasons to build a humanoid robot. If we want our machine to hand wash the dishes, walk up the stairs, mow the lawn with our lawnmower, run a race against humans, or drive a regular car, you build it to emulate the human form. Scaling the robot up twelve times normal removes this utility. Of course, all you need to do is come up with a believable reason why it needed to be built this way. Since it's not practical mechanically, perhaps there's a symbolic reason for it to look like a huge person. I guess if it scares the enemy witless (for a time, at least) because it looks that way, it might justify the limitations the design enforces.

! Moderator Note Please, don't EVER delete the opening post! You aren't the only person here to learn.

Can we do without you when the Christians/Corporations/Politicians decide to extend the definition of "psychopath" to cover more of the people they don't like?

What reason is there to emulate the human form if you can't use it to access human structure? If we make a humanoid robot, isn't it because we want it to interact with everything we've built?

You often move the goalposts when confronted with objections to your arguments. This makes it hard to have a discussion. Aren't you making the puddle's claim? “This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.” --Douglas Adams

Frozen pizza.

! Moderator Note Enforcing the rules ≠ censorship.

The disconnect with reality is in your tired, well-refuted arguments against welfare and social programs. Are you still buying into Reagan's image of the black Welfare Queen? Recent studies have shown that 93% of the fraud committed in the welfare programs is committed by the corporate vendors who are awarded federal contracts. It's pure escapism to believe it's the recipients who're responsible. Many Americans have bought into the talking-head drivel about there being so many people who don't feel like working. Same goes for the myth of the welfare moms with 8 or 10 kids so they can get more money (average in the system is 2.1 children, slightly higher than the societal norm). Ditto for welfare encouraging dependence, since studies have also shown that children of welfare recipients, while more likely to go on welfare, only do so about 20% of the time. That's four kids out of five that were enabled by the helping hand the People to escape that system. http://www.unm.edu/~coughlin/links/Publications/Welfare_Myths_and_Stereotypes.pdf I think it's just easier for some people to imagine long lines of lazy people draining the hard-earned money from their wealthy pockets. It's a fantasy that might let them keep more of their money. I'll try to dig up the poll I read where conservatives were asked some questions about taxes. Almost every single one agreed that more funding needed to go into fighting poverty, almost the same number that agreed welfare was a bad thing.

My daughter tries to use this on me when she has a missing assignment. "I did the homework, I just didn't turn it in!" Whether she actually did it is beside the point; the end result is still the same, nothing is learned.

So you think all those military minds just assumed we could mow those horsemen down, no problems? It was a just arrogance on their part that wasted so many resources on such a minimal threat? It's easy to see why a machine gun works well on a cavalry charge. It's less easy to understand why we keep shooting at flies with an RPG, especially when it seems to attract more flies. Terrorism thrives on all this attention, they can't afford the kind of marketing we give them for free every time they get violent. I just think it would be easier to ask the hosting country to remove the rotting carcass the flies are attracted to. There were plenty of people after 9/11 who called for diplomacy as the most effective way to deal with terrorism, but the Bush II administration steamrolled over them. They had plans already and 9/11 gave them the green light, literally and figuratively.

Knowing from past experience that open war with religious terrorists just helps recruit more terrorists, why was conventional warfare chosen to deal with the aftermath of 9/11? Even accepting that retaliation is a standard response when attacked, did it have to be done in such a way that it angered most Muslims, dragged their whole religion into the combat? Is that the way you deal with people you want to embrace democracy? These were supposed to be the best and brightest of their time, so I can conclude that it was just goofy old W who bumbled his way along without an exit strategy, or I can conclude that putting out the fire was never their intention. Why else throw gasoline?

Living within your means is simple, but it isn't easy. We're barraged constantly with the image of what a person with our income should dress like, what kind of car they should drive, neighborhood they should live in. It takes experience to know how little that sort of thing matters. Often, by the time you figure it out, you're already in debt you can't handle. Most people I know who get a $10K jump in salary feel the need to do something, starting with celebrating. And then it's really easy to justify buying a new car, because you've got an extra couple hundred dollars a week coming in. And this and that, better quality products after buying generic for so long, and suddenly you've spent that extra money several times over. If you'd just done nothing different, pretty soon you'd stop worrying about money as much. Every year at Christmas, my family tries to figure out how we can stop giving each other little bits of junk we wrap up just to unwrap. This year, we just accepted that unwrapping gifts is fun. We had a very few major gifts, mostly museum memberships and tickets to upcoming events, and all the stuff we wrapped were items we normally buy anyway. It's not the actual gift, it's not the value, it was just unwrapping it from under the tree and sharing the love that's fun. I can't help but feel that this attitude lies at the heart of why people (at least in the US) aren't more cooperative, which I feel increases this wealth inequality. We know intellectually that using our pooled resources does wonderful things like building roads and airports. We come up with fantastic social programs that help people in need and attempt to take care of the most needy among us. Then, inevitably, a group comes along that doesn't like the smell of someone, and declares they aren't worthy of public support. They get labeled lazy and irresponsible, and this group starts objecting to giving them anything from the resource pool. The group starts defining what it is to be a citizen of the US so they can exclude people they don't like. That's when we stop helping people just because they're people, and start justifying why we shouldn't have to pay so much in taxes. I can relate to that. Many years ago, I used to buy historical replica swords to collect. After a while, I realized I got more pleasure from pouring over the catalog, figuring out what I wanted to get next, anticipating the arrival, etc. When the blade actually got here, I admired it for a while... and then went back to the catalog, to look for my next treasure. I stopped collecting swords when I realized this. I wasn't a sword collector, I was a shopper.

And I'm suggesting that those who tried to do the controlling got the outcome they desired.

I think we've been controlling their behavior for a long time, but not in a way that's beneficial to anyone expect those who profit from war. When we name our war missions things like "Operation Infinite Justice", a direct slap in the face to Islam (apparently Allah alone can dispense "infinite justice"), we're manipulating their behavior, since we know from past experience that terrorists get whipped into a frenzy when their religion is mocked. Al Qaeda was just a little fringe group with a handful of followers until we started manipulating them. Everything we did to supposedly suppress them made them bigger and stronger. We're not completely stupid when it comes to war, so I have to think that the real objectives were met, that all that money did exactly what was planned.

To be fair, I think you were talking about people with learning difficulties in general, but you never qualified who you were talking about, so your use of the pronoun "them" still refers to the women you were talking about in the preceding paragraph. I can appreciate that this wasn't your intention, but that's the way it reads, sorry.

From what I've read, many of the rich are trying to make this about stealing the wealth they have currently that they worked so hard to earn, calling it class warfare. But most of the best solutions are more of a leveling of the playing field, shifting regulations and closing loopholes to help us back to a time when a lot more people had a shot at economic prosperity. The opportunity for good wages allows the rest of us to participate fully in the economy. I hope we can eventually see that our dependence on wealth has allowed the wealthy to narrow our options to the point where we can't do anything else but work for them. We're too afraid of not having what we think we should have. But as you say, can we ever uncouple our desire for material wealth from our happiness? I've always said I just want enough money so I don't have to worry about money. For me, it's not so much about the acquisition of stuff, it's about the freedom from stress that comes from knowing that I won't go hungry if the car breaks down. I think they go a long way in curbing the need for socially unacceptable behavior. Remove the need to steal, change the process that makes people want stuff they don't have, and you make it easier to be a moral person. Unless you're suggesting our morality comes from somewhere else, but that's probably a different topic.

Define "good weather". Southern CA with not much change (Salinas), or do you mind seasons as long as they aren't extreme (Pocatello, ID)?

! Moderator Note This is non-mainstream speculation, and can't live where students might mistake it for test answers. It's also a hijacking of another thread topic. I'm moving it to our Speculations section. pcalton, if you're posting here on SFN, we assume you've read our rules, and this section has some special ones. We want you to back up assertions with evidence, and try to answer questions as much as possible. All criticism is aimed at making your idea better, or showing it to be false, nothing is personal.