I'm shocked there has been no mention of The Economic Laws of Scientific Research. Terence Kealey makes a compelling argument that government funding more than crowds out private funding for Science.
I.e., we are worse off in terms of absolute contributions to Science because 'everyone' expects government to fund it - especially basic research surely has no profit motive so only public funding can possibly work. Completely wrong historically.
The risk of losing money in a savings account is not zero. By losing I mean, losing its purchasing power. Banks have repeatedly gone bust throughout all of history, in all countries. But there is such a thing as deposit insurance. In the U.S., your savings (up to 100K per account) are 'insured' by the FDIC, but the FDIC has a mere pittance of money compared to the total deposits in all the banks, or even in one of the big banks. It cannot, using the money it has, save all depositors if a big bank is allowed to go bust.
So, given your bank goes bust in say, one of those recessions the U.S. experiences in greater and greater frequencies, either you lose nearly everything in your 'savings' account as the FDIC doesn't have enough money to cover all of its deposits the bank loaned out for its own profit - fractional reserve banking serving YOU since 1913. OR the FDIC pleads to the Federal reserve to 'give' it money, print it that is, causing massive inflation. Though in that latter case, you get the money first, so get to spend at current prices before the influx of new currency causes prices to inflate.
Though in current times, the solution is that these banks are too big to fail. So whenever they gamble your money to make a profit, yet lose, they get some of those nice big bailouts from the Fed. In that case the banks get to the spend the money first, and everyone else holding USD gets an inflationary hit - again you lose your purchasing power of your savings.
I agree with your sentiment - it is, however, questionable to bring this up in threads like these where the community is still reeling from a loss. While I believe cryo preservation is a good idea in general, you must know that most people don't do this and are in fact strongly opposed to the idea. That means you are unlikely to convince people who are not already in favor of the concept. Also in this special case please keep in mind that the guy committed suicide, so talk about cryonics is just about the opposite of what is needed right now.
Saving people from destruction includes much more mundane things, such as getting timely and competent help when mental health problems arise - and, just as importantly, striving to keep a community friendly and supportive. Clinical depression is often a chronic and idiopathic illness, but crises can still be triggered by external influences and social support does play a critical role in the way an afflicted person deals with their problems. And that is something we should be working on.
With due respect, cryonics won't work. Why? Because "I am a strange loop" as Hofstadter would put it. We are NOT the code. We are the code execution. Think of the human subject as a really complicated, recursive sort of while(1) loop. When the program ends, we end. You can freeze the source code all you want - possibly even restart it but there is no reason I know of to think that such a restarted program would be "me", more like a fascmile of "me". I could be wrong, but not sure why I would be.
When I save the state of RAM to nonvolatile storage, then later put it back into RAM and continue executing, there are senses in which you could legitimately say it's not the same program. But they're not the senses I care about.
You should've censored yourself anyway. That is insensitive. What if it was your mother and some stranger said that? Come on, that's something you talk about when a person is alive, not when people are grieving. No one wants to learn about the science or pseudoscience of cronies when in mourning. Just, come on.... Really?!
I shouldn't have responded to this. Should've let it die and get buried but that kind of upset me.
If cryonics does work out, then bringing it up at inappropriate times could save lives. Please don't be angry at an honest attempt to prevent some people from dying.
Being able to discuss taboo subjects is what makes it great to be an intellectual after all - why are they taboo? is the reason a good or illogical?
In this case, death is bad, very bad. Something to resist with all our might, and cryonics is one just one tool in saving lives (yes, you are not dead until your actual neurons irrecoverably die). No need to go into the details of information theoretic death, just look into it yourself.
The point is, people deal with the concept of death in ways to prevent the unpleasant thought that you WILL die. One of these ways is to celebrate what a great life this person had, how sad it is that they have died but they had a good life. It's slightly more obvious that this person did not in fact have a good life (he only had 21 years), but the argument applies to all ages.
It's precisely why I decided to not self-censor here. I wanted to point out that we shouldn't celebrate death. Don't let death become something slightly more inevitable in your mind, fight it!
The essence of capitalism is that consumers buy what goods or services they think are worth for them, otherwise they don't. If a handmade knife is worth more to a chef then a china created one, then the chef benefits. Remember, knives are their tools of trade, just like for many of us computers are the tools of trade - who doesn't want the very best tools?
Even if the knife is not better than a mass produced one, as long as the consumer believes they are better off then the consumer gains from the transaction. Perhaps you, as a non-chef, are ignorant of the subtleties of knifes. I use a macbook, and there are sure to be people that wonder why I spend a big premium in price for computer with similar hardware. Why? well, I like quality tools.
It strikes me as attacking the very heart of capitalism by saying that its "an extravagantly wasteful alternative" to a mass produced knife - who are you to decide that? For one thing, this is competition, if mass produced knives are worse than hard crafted, let the market decide that and punish this (awesome) fella for his short production lines and 'inefficient' capital to knives ratio. The price for his knives will reflect how much better (or worse!) they are compared to the 'efficient' mass produced ones, and if he can't work fast enough to make a living, then he moves onto something else. It's sad, but life is about risks.
However, apologies if I have mistaken your point, though you claim that you're in Marxist mode so I'll counter it by being positively capitalistic.
I think the idea is that what you want to do differs from what you are doing, or what you must do. When you run faster than you're comfortable with, the will to do that comes from yourself. External forced, not using your willpower.
Two eyes are required for ordinary depth perception without workarounds, but depth perception is not required for 3D vision.
Speaking as someone who naturally has little to no depth perception (amblyopia affecting my right eye), I still see 3D just fine, catch flying objects (balls, frisbees, etc.) just fine, and am not disabled in any significant way except an inability to see into those magic eye puzzles.
Two eyes give you the ability to detect parallax without moving your head; those of us without binocular vision detect parallax by slight (imperceptible) movements of our head. There are many other useful visual artifacts of our 3D world: closer things are larger than farther things, closer things obscure farther things, and so on. Our brains just construct 3D worlds based on those data rather than the simpler, more reliable stationary parallax detection that you two-eyed folks use.
People also use depth of field / focal blur to aid depth perception. This is a major reason why the brain has issues with fake 3d using separate images, you want to focus on a part of the image, but things get blurry if you don't focus on the screen.
Motion parallax is the name for that effect. It is definitely a clue in perceiving 3 dimensions. Relative size is another clue: if you know roughly how big something is and it looks smaller, you can assume it's far away. Level of detail, interfering haze, etc all are other cues.
But the difference between what each eye sees is also an important factor in 3D vision. Movies just make it the only factor, which is probably why they can be disorienting. My guess would be that it's more important for things that are close than things that are far away; something 3 inches from your face appears to be in drastically different positions if you cover alternate eyes, but distant mountains look about the same.
Except that the more you exercise, the more your body hungers for more calories. The homeostasis theory of the body makes far more sense than the current thermodynamic view of eating; that change in weight is equal to what you eat minus what you burn.
If you exercise more, you burn more of course. Supposing that your body has no idea how much energy its consuming, and thus the 'what you eat' part of the equation is independent of the 'what you burn' is simply ridiculous.
Those diseases, the diseases of western civilization wont go away by simply exercising more. Exercise more, you eat more, you don't lose your fat weight, you won't reverse those diseases.
I.e., we are worse off in terms of absolute contributions to Science because 'everyone' expects government to fund it - especially basic research surely has no profit motive so only public funding can possibly work. Completely wrong historically.