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Bobbin Threadbare posted:From what I understand, the primary difference between hominids and all other species is the development of fire. It's entirely possible that the break between hominids and the earlier Australopithecus genus came when they learned how to control and cultivate fire. This one development has had a series of benefits: first, cooked food is much easier to digest than raw food, which meant that their digestive systems could become less efficient and therefore save on energy which could then be applied to other organs, in particular the brain. Second, the killing of germs and the technological applications of fire allowed hominids to live longer and travel into more inhospitable territory. Third, since they all had to sit around the fire pit and wait for their meals to cook, hominids were forced to become more social and cooperative which further increased the size and complexity of their brains. Bluhman posted:A big reason that the dinosaurs never got to really showing sapience I think, despite having way more time than we have had, is simply because the environment never made the push towards encouraging specifically a sapient lifestyle. For all that period the dinosaurs lived, the climate was pretty static among that time - Everywhere's humid, warm, and oxygen-rich, meaning the environment could support these huge lifeforms (More than just the Dinosaurs - Eurypterids are another great example; imagine 8 foot long lobsters.) There's no real need to adapt finely when the global climate is quite homogenous. The environment and climate favored a creature that had just enough wits to outsmart its predator/prey, and then spent the rest of its development on being fast and dodging. Or armored. Or whatever. And of course the only ones that'd be dead were either the old, the sick, the inexperienced and the just plain unlucky. But when human beings came, not only did we live in a more harsh unforgiving climate that forced us to band together, but the fact that we all HAD to communicate with each other when huddled around the fire against the deadly cold of night, filled with hungering beasts that had every opportunity to tear into our very existence...well... It's almost surprising that we ourselves DIDN'T become extinct through sheer determination and wild intelligence that grew exponentially out of desperation. I wonder if there are any aliens out there that are impressed by us, perhaps even admire us for such? We always like to imagine such in our media that they do, like in Stargate or Star Trek or Mass Effect, we always want to imagine that someone, somewhere out there...possibly admires us for being able to carve our way out of the ice and sculpt this world as our own.
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Apr 22, 2014 02:56
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tinkerttoy posted:The premise sounds amazing, how is it? Arthur C. Clarke did a similar one where a bunch of super-advanced aliens come in and set up, well, a UN led one world government. The meat of the book revolves around the debates between (kidnapped) lead UN rep to the aliens and the pro-human insurgents. Pretty interesting with a neat, if a bit meaningless twist at the end. tl;dr version is that humanity is just too drat uncivilized but the aliens feel that, once they take away our nukes* and force us to play nice for a generation or so, we can be integrated into the galactic community. Sort of an anti-Prime Directive. *Clarke spent most of the Cold War huffing off in Sri Lanka wishing NATO and the Warsaw Pact could sort out their differences and do more space stuff, drat it.
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Apr 22, 2014 03:45
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I havent even watched the new video (if its out yet) but drat if I get excited for it on a weekly basis now. Even moreso than the psn store update and suchother nerdshit. Excellent work bobbin, keep it up dude
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Apr 22, 2014 05:29
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:
Gene was in in the ground long before Earth:Final Conflict began production. It's claimed to be based on his notes, and there probably is a piece of paper that says "Aliens get to us first????" or something like it somewhere, but I doubt there was more than that. Look at Gene Roddenberry's other "lost" show, Andromeda for example, it's just a mashup of Genesis 2, a failed Roddenberry pilot about a man named Dylan Hunt who sleeps through the apocalypse and wakes up in a savage world, and Star Trek, because spaceships. I think his name was his biggest contribution to the shows. It actually was a pretty neat concept, and a lot more ambiguous than something like V, where the aliens are explicitly malevolent. Well, until they all turned into space vampires because ratings were low. But it wasn't what you'd call good. A product of Canada's bizarrely productive B-grade sci-fi industry. If you liked William Shatner's Tekwar, or Robocop: The Series That You Didn't Know Was Made, it may be for you.
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Apr 22, 2014 05:53
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While I for the most part agree with Bobbin at the end of the video, one shouldn't think of Aliens in human terms. Sure, we may like to show off but that's no reason to think an alien would. No reason to think an alien would do anything we would do. Considering how unlikely life itself on this planet existing was, and how unlikely it is our cultures developed as they have, it would therefore be pretty loving miraculous if alien life not only existed but developed the same sort of concepts and way of thinking we did. I've thought about it myself somewhat, that if aliens didn't want to conquest, trade, explore, expand or engage in diplomacy, or whatever, then what would they want? What are their concepts and desires? What I found is that it's actually quite hard to think outside of our own terms like that. Who knows, maybe intelligence and sapience will end up desiring the same things wherever it is, though I don't particularly see why. Also, it's fairly obvious at this point that Paul and JC are the Roswell aliens. Ain't nobody whose nobody talk that fast all the time.
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Apr 22, 2014 11:37
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The need for communication and social structures are pretty necessary for a species to actually advance to the point of actually getting to a space-exploration level, though. I mean, sure, there may be differences in ethics and morality, but the same basic premise of intelligence would be there. If they never banded together and formed a social/communal society then they wouldn't reach gunpowder. Or hell, even paved roads or cities, let alone spaceflight.
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Apr 22, 2014 12:58
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Vagon posted:The need for communication and social structures are pretty necessary for a species to actually advance to the point of actually getting to a space-exploration level, though. I mean, sure, there may be differences in ethics and morality, but the same basic premise of intelligence would be there. If they never banded together and formed a social/communal society then they wouldn't reach gunpowder. Or hell, even paved roads or cities, let alone spaceflight. Sure, but that doesn't mean that their social structures would necessarily in any way resemble our own (think of the classic 'ant aliens'), even outside of ethics or morality. Even their systems of mathematics and science might be anywhere from subtly to extremely different, since our own models are based on our perceptions and frames of reference, and become progressively more unreliable the further they are moved afield (particularly macro and micro scales, for instance). Even further, who's to say that any given advanced aliens are as expansionist as humans? Humans are specialized in manipulating their environment in order to facilitate expansion. Compare to elephants: extremely widespread and successful (at least, they once were), highly intelligent, social, and capable of fairly fine manipulation, yet highly specialized and in some ways inflexible in ways humans are flexible. Would it occur to uplifted elephants to build cities or personal vehicles, or attempt space flight? Who knows, but it's probably safe to say that elephant technology would be very different in both form and function than anything we use.
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Apr 22, 2014 15:47
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Brother_Walken posted:While I for the most part agree with Bobbin at the end of the video, one shouldn't think of Aliens in human terms. Sure, we may like to show off but that's no reason to think an alien would. No reason to think an alien would do anything we would do. Considering how unlikely life itself on this planet existing was, and how unlikely it is our cultures developed as they have, it would therefore be pretty loving miraculous if alien life not only existed but developed the same sort of concepts and way of thinking we did. I've thought about it myself somewhat, that if aliens didn't want to conquest, trade, explore, expand or engage in diplomacy, or whatever, then what would they want? What are their concepts and desires? What I found is that it's actually quite hard to think outside of our own terms like that. Who knows, maybe intelligence and sapience will end up desiring the same things wherever it is, though I don't particularly see why. While it's true that aliens may have completely different thought structures etc., considering our lack of example sapient aliens my thoughts are based on Occam's Razor: if an alien species has the same capabilities and desires as humans, specifically the capability and desire to travel into and explore space, then it is most likely that their motivations (ambition, pride, curiosity) are also similar. After all, if an alien species doesn't want to conquer, trade, explore, expand, or research (from their perspective) aliens, then for what in the galaxy are they spending all those resources to get into space?
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Apr 22, 2014 16:58
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Mordaedil posted:Maybe if we made maps of the large iron deposits we mine out they'd form rough shapes of giant constructions that were torn down and melted during an ancient disaster. It's a popular sci-fi theory that various large mineral deposits of Earth were actually seeded by aliens for later extraction and exploitation, prompted because they were usually caused by the appearance and subsequent replication of a single incredibly useful thing (i.e. cellulose, cyanobacteria). One of the largest continuous iron deposits in the world is the banded iron formation of the Labrador Trough. It was laid down during the Great Oxygenation Event (i.e. about 1,300,000,000 years to go before fish appear), so, uh, if you want to say aliens did it you can't really refute the claim as all evidence would have rusted away a long time ago and coastal civilizations would hardly be abnormal.
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Apr 22, 2014 18:12
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Aw, you didn't keep the plasma rifle! Sure, the GEP gun works against both people AND robots... but you don't go around blowing up ordinary bad guys with the GEP gun. (Indeed if you do then I imagine things would become trivially easy.) But the plasma rifle is really satisfying for fighting troops. It's a flamethrower turned into a long-range low-spread shotgun. It does massive damage, sets people/objects on fire, and it does splash damage so it can hurt multiple people at the same time. If you stick your skills points into Heavy so you walk around at a decent speed... it's the best thing. Even if you've gotta use cheats, at some go on one or two plasma rampages.
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Apr 22, 2014 19:58
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The regular GEP rockets shouldn't be used against troops, but WP rockets are exceptionally good at clearing large areas AND satisfy any lingering pyromaniac urges.
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Apr 22, 2014 21:01
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Even if aliens exist, our civilizations probably don't coexist in the same time frame. For all we know, the galaxy was once filled with radio chatter from tons of species who've since gone extinct. It's not like we'd know about their demise unless we happened on something they left behind in the ridiculous vastness of space.
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Apr 22, 2014 21:09
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Jaramin posted:Even if aliens exist, our civilizations probably don't coexist in the same time frame. For all we know, the galaxy was once filled with radio chatter from tons of species who've since gone extinct. It's not like we'd know about their demise unless we happened on something they left behind in the ridiculous vastness of space. Weird we haven't heard ANYTHING in the past 60 years out transmitting into space though. Have we?
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Apr 22, 2014 21:13
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Your inclusion of the geodynamo in your list of necessities for life make me really happy. I really like the run of the game, too. I was vaguely aware of MJ12 when I hit this point in the game, having found Ford Schick, but the different architecture and uniforms, and Daedelus make a great marked shift which I really enjoyed.
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Apr 22, 2014 21:56
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FinalGamer posted:...poo poo you're right, I totally forgot about the light years and all that, maaaaan. The Wow! Signal is a decent contender Alien civilizations would have different ways of transmitting information which we would have no way of decoding. Signals break down over time when they get scrambled by the ambient "noise" in space. Also keep in mind that we only have a few monitoring dishes monitoring a very small portion of the sky at any one time for signals that propagate at the speed of light(or near it). The odds of picking up anything intelligible from another race, long dead or not, is almost nil unless the signal were specifically directed to us and encoded so we would recognize it as a message and not meaningless background noise. Jaramin fucked around with this message at 22:10 on Apr 22, 2014 |
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Apr 22, 2014 22:07
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Plus, we don't know for how long we humans are going to keep using radio waves. In the grand scheme of things, 60 or a 100 or even 1000 years is a grain of sand on the beach of time. Before long we could have switched to an entirely new kind of communication, or gone extinct. Even if we do keep using radio waves, chances are observers in different star systems will be unlikely to pick out radio waves we send in future. Our radio transmissions became stronger and stronger for a while, but lately they have gotten weaker because we have better filtering technology, and because our transmitters have become smaller and more numerous. Our TV signals are now mostly broadcast by very directional antennae pointed directly at geostationary orbit (and down again), these sweep a fraction of the sky and are highly compressed - they wouldn't be recognizable as anything but a noise spike by any observer in a different star system. As audio radio moves more and more over to digital broadcast it also becomes harder to separate from noise by an outside observer.
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Apr 22, 2014 23:06
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It'll be a sad day when we do finally meet aliens because that'll lock off so many science fiction possibilities. Remember all those stories about Moon People and how they pretty much vanished after we went to the moon? Try to imagine us meeting an alien race for reals and that colors our perception so much we never write alien fiction ever again.
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Apr 22, 2014 23:24
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Speedball posted:It'll be a sad day when we do finally meet aliens because that'll lock off so many science fiction possibilities. Remember all those stories about Moon People and how they pretty much vanished after we went to the moon? Try to imagine us meeting an alien race for reals and that colors our perception so much we never write alien fiction ever again. I'd say that depends entirely on how they look like to be honest. If our first encounter is off actual intelligent life then maybe but if our first encounter is very basic lifeforms then there is really nothing stopping the sci-fi genre to continue writing about alien meetings. Speaking of aliens and such I recommend reading The Science of Aliens by Clifford Pickover which deals with alternative aliens in a really interesting way. Not to mention their perception of us as well.
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Apr 22, 2014 23:33
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Speedball posted:It'll be a sad day when we do finally meet aliens because that'll lock off so many science fiction possibilities. Remember all those stories about Moon People and how they pretty much vanished after we went to the moon? Try to imagine us meeting an alien race for reals and that colors our perception so much we never write alien fiction ever again. People will write lovely fiction about anything and anyone.
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Apr 22, 2014 23:35
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I always found the plasma gun just terribly unsatisfying. I wanted it to be cool, and even tried a playthrough where I wanted to use it, but ended up ditching it immediately because it's just super weak. Unless you shoot dudes in the head, MJ12 troopers can absolutely soak it, you have to unload into them 4-5 times, and it doesn't have nearly enough ammo to be useful. At best it's something I will use when I find it if I can use it up and pick up my real gun soon. However in the past I've been a real sucker for a long ranged scoped silenced sniper assault rifle. I've never bothered to math it to realize how bad it sucks, so I'm gonna end up playing again here using not the assault rifle. The scoped "loud pistol" is also something I used a lot in several playthroughs.
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Apr 23, 2014 00:06
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FinalGamer posted:So basically the reason the dinosaurs never kept evolving is simply because, they didn't have to. ...okay, I'm down with that, the world back then was a far more stable place ecologically what with amazing oxygenated rainforests and every single creature was more or less already evolved to be capable of either fleeing, guarding or just plain attacking anything else that would try to kill them. Evolution as rule seems to require very severe natural selection pressure to really get major trait selection. If a trait is not essential to survival/reproductive, there's no reason for it to get filtered by natural selection, and natural selection only selects for "good enough" as opposed to "best" (i.e. a trait that has you die young (but still able to reproduce before dying) is "less fit" than one that lets you live longer and reproduce longer, but that's not enough for it to get removed from the gene pool; hence why we have genetic diseases still). So the additional selection pressure on early humans vs. other critters was probably essential to getting development of such a relatively extreme change as sentience. Evolution also has to work with what it's got; I'm not familiar with the differences between mammalian and dinosaur/avian brains, but it may have been that primates had a "starting" brain design that was more amenable to mutations making it better. Primates also had existing traits like hands to take advantage of adaptions to intelligence, which would affect how helpful increased intelligence would be to our evolutionary survivability; the more you can actually do with your brains, the more having better brains becomes an evolutionary advantage. Bobbin Threadbare posted:While it's true that aliens may have completely different thought structures etc., considering our lack of example sapient aliens my thoughts are based on Occam's Razor: if an alien species has the same capabilities and desires as humans, specifically the capability and desire to travel into and explore space, then it is most likely that their motivations (ambition, pride, curiosity) are also similar. After all, if an alien species doesn't want to conquer, trade, explore, expand, or research (from their perspective) aliens, then for what in the galaxy are they spending all those resources to get into space? Not to put too much of a point on it, but us humans aren't exactly putting a lot of resources into space travel even with such desires too. If it's hard enough to get between the stars, maybe no race bothers with it because they always have easier options closer to hand. Also, regarding the actual video; you asked why a "nanotech lab" would be doing genetic research. Given one of the major headaches to genetic engineering is actually inserting DNA into the target, nanotech would actually be extremely helpful to the work, it's an easier way to meddle with genes than trying to stick stuff in with viruses and whatnot. Heck, you'd be in a better position to directly meddle with the existing DNA in a cell as opposed to inserting new DNA if you could send nanobots in to alter it directly. Would explain how they get some of the rather freaky critters in Deus Ex into existence so easily. MadDogMike fucked around with this message at 01:34 on Apr 23, 2014 |
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Apr 23, 2014 01:29
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MadDogMike posted:Not to put too much of a point on it, but us humans aren't exactly putting a lot of resources into space travel even with such desires too. If it's hard enough to get between the stars, maybe no race bothers with it because they always have easier options closer to hand. Patience, my friend.
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Apr 23, 2014 01:35
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Paramemetic posted:I always found the plasma gun just terribly unsatisfying. I wanted it to be cool, and even tried a playthrough where I wanted to use it, but ended up ditching it immediately because it's just super weak. Unless you shoot dudes in the head, MJ12 troopers can absolutely soak it, you have to unload into them 4-5 times, and it doesn't have nearly enough ammo to be useful. At best it's something I will use when I find it if I can use it up and pick up my real gun soon. Strange, I found the plasma rifle pretty effective, usually two shots to take someone down I think. Also you can aim the gruond near enemies and the splash damage will still hurt them a fair amount. And if you are shooting at the torso I guess there is random chance of getting a headshot since it fires a spread of three bolts. Maybe I'm remembering wrong. Maybe I just thought it was awesome because it had a great sound effect and I enjoy burning people with plasma.
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Apr 23, 2014 01:46
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For me, the plasma rifle was always an opportunistic weapon, like the LAW. If there was one laying around, I would use it until the ammo ran out and then chuck it. Ammo was too rare, and it was too situational for me to keep one in inventory.
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Apr 23, 2014 02:16
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By the time(if ever) we overcome the ungodly energy requirements required for interstellar travel and synthesis of exotic matter, Earth would be a nice enough place to live I doubt we'd see a whole lot of people calling for deep-space exploration. EDIT: Yeah, I could never justify using the plasma gun by this point in the game. I always just used the Dragon's Tooth. Jaramin fucked around with this message at 02:20 on Apr 23, 2014 |
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Apr 23, 2014 02:17
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Harold "Sunny" White posted:Imagine an American football, for simplicity, that has a toroidal ring around it attached with pylons. The football is where the crew and robotic systems would be, while the ring would contain exotic matter called negative vacuum energy, a consequence of quantum mechanics. The presence of this toroidal ring of negative vacuum energy is what's required from the math and physics to be able to use the warp trick. Imagine four balls on the edge of a cliff... It must be difficult to explain such technical things to those who are assumed to know nothing of them.
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Apr 23, 2014 03:59
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Why did you pick this one for the word friend? That isn't the word that comes to mind. 
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Apr 23, 2014 04:09
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Don't be ridiculous, an Alcubierre style drive never leaves ordinary space. What they don't tell you is that all current rockets actually do travel through hell.
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Apr 23, 2014 04:14
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I'm super glad Space X moved in here. It is really good to see rockets going up at a regular pace again, poo poo got bleak in this area after news of the shuttle program closing down. Always cool going, oh hey whats that noise, oh it's a rocket, oh hey Duck Dynasty is on alright.
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Apr 23, 2014 04:15
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RRRRRRRRRRRR. (The sound of a whole stack of thermoptic camo used at once.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vO5HQErrUM
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Apr 23, 2014 04:37
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YET, I'm chiming in on the Plasma vs GEP debate. The plasma gun is terrible compared to the flexibility of the rocket rifle. WP for anti-personnel and regular rockets against bots. Better accuracy, better range and it can take more upgrades.
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Apr 23, 2014 04:47
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Bluhman posted:
I had a similar  conclusion too when I thought about it. Maybe I play too many video games, but I think it helps to have a period where you're not competing against anything in order to avoid destruction, and focus only on gathering resources to survive. There were no dangerous critters that could cover large areas of land like large dinosaurs due to the mass extinction event and theorized decrease in oxygen in the world (less oxygen theoretically means the upper limits of life shrink). Thus, it becomes easier to find a safe spot to nest and control a territory, and fall into a safer routine. So now you have less critters trying to eat you as smaller creatures have less range they can travel in a day, so less of your time is focused on fighting/fleeing from other things for your life, and thus you'd get more free time to muck about with. Humans also became the world champions of distance running with our overpowered ability to sweat. To survive we could simply run down and kill animals when they became exhausted. It stands to reason that you could probably avoid predators, given enough warning time, with such an ability to fight off exhaustion.More free time is generally more time to experiment with your environment with, and that means that discoveries will happen at a faster rate. We also had the right tools for understanding and manipulating our environment: we likely had an innate curiosity of our environment inherited from the apes/monkeys/chimps (excuse my ignorance of the proper term). We also, as said before, had digits and even opposable thumbs to manipulate our environment with easily. It also helped, as also mentioned before in the thread, that we were very social animals. Ideas could spread rapidly among large populations of humans without having to wait generations for genetic mutations to occur. Memes could spread faster than genes. Using your mental faculties tends to strengthen them, human life depends on being intelligent enough to do things like finding new ways to acquire or store food, water, and other resources. It seems natural to me that that capacity for intelligence propagated in our species. When the ice age rolled around, humans supposedly adapted to their environment by doing things like wearing the skins/fur of other animals, and buried food in permafrost for a long-term supply. As a side thought sparked by the mention of genes that are "good enough" and not "the best", I'd argue that some of our "negative" traits (such as DNA replication being imperfect, and eventually leading to the loss of critical information in DNA) actually keep us on a nice track of developing as a species/society, but that thought came after I had written this entire post, and it's enough words as-is. SirDifferential posted:You mentioned that if there was a conspiracy about alien crash landings, the people would be itching to tell everyone about it. This is a more recent development: Science used to be an extremely secret trade. In the times before enlightenment upon discovering some new method, for example to solve a particular polynomial problem, you didn't tell anyone how you did it. That was your bargaining chip and, at best, you told that you were able to do it without letting anyone in. Many reasons resulted in this, probably most importantly tendency to favor your own academic circles and keep your enemies in the dark. At a guess the problems Galileo had with the Church in the 16th century probably didn't encourage one either. Even if the times were changing Church was still an important part of your life. This is something I actually thought a while back I might explore this idea to incorporate into a game sometime. Let's say you know how to do something that no one else does, like sow and harvest crops. You are a highly valuable member of your community as a result. However, if you teach others or show them any gleams of information on your practice of sowing and harvesting crops, your knowledge gets found out and acquired by these other people. As a result, your own personal value goes down. You are no longer the only source of this knowledge of sowing and harvesting crops. There are a few big reasons I think caused science to open up progressively over it's history. The biggest and most obvious I believe is due to the advances in information technology. Writing down ideas, mass producing and distributing those writings with enhanced industrial and logistical capacity, being able to talk on a phone to a person across the world, and eventually having an internet (to have forums to post dumb things such as your own largely ignorant guesses about human evolution) made it easier to work with other people in order to develop your ideas. It stands to reason that the more people in on a "monopoly" of knowledge, the higher the likelihood that that knowledge will be leaked to your potential competitors. The second, as Bobbin stated in the latest video, is that we have a natural urge to teach, especially our children/the next generation of our species. It's my opinion that generally teachers are valued fairly high in almost all societies in terms of their worth to that society, although they're not always paid appropriately for this value for a variety of reasons. We in the US put teachers on a pedestal and consider them to be great contributors to our society. Thirdly, which is sort of a sub-point of the first, is that businesses grew, and therefore could distribute a product or service to increasingly larger populations. As I said before, the more people that can gleam any insight into your idea you're trying to keep secret, such as by consuming your product or service, or by competing firms looking to take some of your market share, the more likely it is they'll figure it out and "de-value" your knowledge by learning its secrets and inevitably reproducing your product or service, usually with some improvements of their own. I feel these elements greatly encouraged science to develop into the more open institution it is today. Because of this openness that has developed in science, I find it more and more unlikely for conspiracies to exist as time goes on. The more complex the conspiracy, the greater the chance for failure. The more people assisting in this conspiracy, the greater the chance that it will be leaked, uncovered, and likely thwarted. The only conspiracies I think are plausible to really exist are those aimed at making more money. I think it's entirely plausible for a business or group of businesses to get enough power in say, a government, to install politicians that install laws that favor that business that ends up getting the business more money. That's so plausible that it's happening all over the world in most likely every government to some extent, and has been for as long as we've had businesses and governments. I don't see a conspiracy covering up alien visitations as plausible, because I don't see it being a reasonable way to make anyone a good amount of money for this long of a time. Or maybe they carefully laid a conspiracy spanning several thousands of years because that's what they want me to think! 
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Apr 23, 2014 05:59
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Zudrag posted:We in the US put teachers on a pedestal and consider them to be great contributors to our society. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aw0aBkt8CPA 
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Apr 23, 2014 06:05
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By the way, here's the trailer for an upcoming documentary that's vaguely related to this week's topic by way of origins of life/the possibility of aliens, and it makes the MJ-12 believers look sane and reasonable by comparison. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8cBvMCucTg If you're not quite sure what this is all about, read the video's description. I don't want to say it here because I don't want to spoil the sudden realization you'll feel once you comprehend what it's trying to say. Also, to be fair to Kate Mulgrew, she has said publicly that she was just as misled as the scientists who are quoted waaaaaaaay out of context until it was too late to back out.
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Apr 23, 2014 06:09
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Tarezax posted:HAHAHAHAHAHAHA Well to be fair, I think a problem highlighted in the exchange between the teacher and that big dumb blob is that paying teachers (and investing in education) is balancing act. Pay teachers too much, there is less budget to hire teachers to cover an appropriate amount of students. You might also draw in too many people that might "game the system" and be poor teachers that do it for the money and not for satisfying the natural urge of teaching. The more passion a person has in their work, such as teaching students, the more likely they are to work hard to do well in their work. I think everyone has encountered or been someone who works at a job just because it pays the bills that doesn't actually care about their work, and does the bare minimum to stay on the payroll. If running a public school or being a teacher at one suddenly became very profitable, I have a feeling the quality of teaching would suffer potentially as badly as if they had a lack of funding for appropriate resources. On the other hand, if you pay teachers too little, there's a labor shortage because no one wants to be a teacher if you can't pay the bills. If you can't pay the bills with the money you're making from your career/job, you're going to look for work elsewhere real fast. Passion only propels you so far. So I think that the reason teachers are paid fairly low is in this effort to keep the quality of teaching as high as possible by having the labor supply of teachers be people that are passionate about teaching, but keep people away that are simply out to make some easy dosh. Education is one of those things you don't want for your kid as "just barely acceptable", you generally want as good of an education as you can for yourself or your child. If an institution like a school system, or even a government is given enough restrictions to keep out those who would use it for just making money away by making it a poor investment choice given alternatives, I bet the quality of the product or service that institution provides is likely to be high despite providing a meager living to those who work in that institution. Those that have a passion to help people, through teaching or implementing laws, would enjoy the job enough to not care about making too little money. This is of course incredibly hard to balance, especially with a large organization like a government. This is all of course, my opinion, and I can't help but feel there's holes in this logic I'm not quite seeing. Unfortunately, no amount of money policies would help stop the "conspiracy" that teachers are teaching our children to "poo poo out satanic gay-liberal-abortions".  Bobbin Threadbare posted:By the way, here's the trailer for an upcoming documentary that's vaguely related to this week's topic by way of origins of life/the possibility of aliens, and it makes the MJ-12 believers look sane and reasonable by comparison.  Goodness gracious. I had seen a few of these people in "science" specials before and rolled my eyes at them, but this seems like they got tired of using logic and reasoning to try to fill in the gaps and just went "gently caress it, it was all a space-wizard. Also we are ~special~.". They are only doing a disservice to science as a whole. I blame the history channel and the "aliens" bullshit that got wedged into everything history-related on that network for works like this.
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Apr 23, 2014 06:58
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counterfeitsaint posted:Why did you pick this one for the word friend? That isn't the word that comes to mind. I was already going to link everyone to Fiasco, but now it's extra pertinent. Event Horizon did a lot of cool things, but the whole introduction cribs from that book like mad. It's a really weird tale, since it's Lem's furthest-future plot that still has humans in it and he shoehorns Pirx into it kinda awkwardly, but it's a great first contact story.
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Apr 23, 2014 07:07
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We're probably going to live to see the day when the last man to set foot on the moon dies.  Zudrag posted:Well to be fair, I think a problem highlighted in the exchange between the teacher and that big dumb blob is that paying teachers (and investing in education) is balancing act. Xander77 fucked around with this message at 07:26 on Apr 23, 2014 |
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Apr 23, 2014 07:24
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Zudrag posted:They are only doing a disservice to science as a whole. 
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Apr 23, 2014 07:27
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Zudrag posted:So I think that the reason teachers are paid fairly low is in this effort to keep the quality of teaching as high as possible by having the labor supply of teachers be people that are passionate about teaching. I don't think it works that way, dude.
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Apr 23, 2014 09:33
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Tarezax posted:HAHAHAHAHAHAHA Aaaah, youtube comments  quote:I loved this when it first came out and still do. These public school teachers think they are so special and intelligent. Do some analysis - most come from the bottom 20% of college performers... 'Don't know what to do in life? Just become a teacher' It's an easy job, and they don't deserve pensions. Don't like it, get a new job like the rest of the world!
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Apr 23, 2014 09:34
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