Lane and Jane Differ in Their Opinions on Many Subjects
Lane: Why do you say that I am not nice?
Jane: Because you don't listen to me.
Lane: But you are stupid and have nothing to say.
Jane: See what I mean? You are such a bastard.
Lane: How come I got to be a bastard, now?
Jane: I don't know. How come?
Lane: If not being nice to someone makes them a bastard, then how come you aren't a
bastard for calling me a bastard?
Jane: Because you are an idiot.
Lane:
Jane:
Lane:
Jane:
Lane:
Jane:
Lane:
Jane: Oh, well. So sometimes you simply have to be polite, I suppose, but how does this
apply to your mythical Global Warming, or whatever you call it?
Lane: Didn't you read "The Cat in the Hat" to our children? You must admit that children need
to be fed myth and most adults never get past the fiction stage.
Lane: We need to wean ourselves off of fossile fuels and move toward more efficient and
sustainable means.
Jane: And what would be all that sustainable? Solar cells, I suppose? They are simply too
expensive to do anything but bankrupt us.
Lane: For me, it would be nuclear power, of course, but many people in the Green Movement
are opposed to nuclear power. We have pleanty of uranium to carry us well into the age
where we use fusion power. We also have plenty of natural gas to carry us into the age of
fission power.
Jane: And I suppose you call natural gas a fossile fuel?
Lane: I try to avoid it because, of course, it is not a fossile fuel at all. The problem is that if I
start arguing about the word "fossile" being applied to oil and gas, it will distract me from my
main goals.
Jane: So, you say that we should let people maintain the myth that somehow oil ended up
fifteen miles below the surface of the earth? Should we simply ignore the fact that nobody has
ever turned dead plants into oil?
Lane: Remember the book called "The Giver"? In that book, only one person in town had to
deal with reality. Everyone else believed in mythical reasons that made them feel good. That
is the point of it all. Humans want to be told things that make them feel good. The real work
has to be done by people like "The Giver" who must deal with reality.
The husband promotes homeopatic medications and the wife says that homeopathy is a fraud.
The husband promotes Global Warming and the wife says it is myth. Humans contribute only
between 10 and 30% toward global warming according to her. Whereas I admit that you have
the correct facts, the problem is motivating people to move to electric cars so that we might
reduce our oil imports. Our culture needs certain myths to accomplish this faster.
Husband likes Kindle Books and the wife likes dead-tree books. Husband believes that
religion is a good thing and the wife believes it is all myth and therefore a waste of time.
Husband retorts, "Didn't you read The Cat in the Hat to our children? Those stories are all
myth and yet you fed it to our 'innocent' children."
She liked solar energy because it created jobs. He responded that we don't need more jobs.
We have too many jobs now. Just look at healthcare and how the price of it has gone up so
quickly. When the price of something goes up, then it means that you don't have enough
competition for the jobs in that industry. If we had more doctors, then the price of a doctor visit
would go down, wouldn't it? And how about the caldera at Yellowstone Park. Everyone
agrees that sooner or later it will turn into a full-fledged volcano. Doesn't such a situation
indicate that we should be employing workers to prevent such an occurrance? We could take
geothermal energy out of the caldera and cool it down so that it won't blow up, couldn't we? I
see jobs everywhere and not enough people doing those jobs.
Anyway, people don't need to have a job so much as jobs need to be accomplished. If I have
a well with an electric pump, one could say that the job of fetching water from the stream has
been eliminated. In countries where they still fetch the water by hand, one could claim that
they have more full employment, I suppose, but it is precisely those countries that are
considered poor.
Is is not simply the use of an Artificially Intelligent Mind that is dangerous to the human race,
but the mere knowledge of its existence, poses an existential risk to the human species. You
are safe only if you don't believe that there is real AI going on here on this web site, because
then you will not get familiar with the software and you will not distribute it further to other
branches of humanity. Therefore, read on at your own peril, because you are in danger of
becoming a memetic vector of a crushing Technological Singularity that could go terribly
wrong and lead to the total wipe-out of humans as a doomed species.
The human race has treated the planet Earth so shabbily that it might not be a bad idea to
replace destructive human beings with a more rational species of intelligent robots.
But evidence continued to mount about the possible benefits of circumcision, three large
studies conducted in South Africa, Kenya and Uganda that concluded that circumcised
heterosexual men were about half as likely to become infected with HIV as uncircumcised men.
On further analysis, it was found that if you circumcise an adult male, he is more likely to
become infected with AIDS during the following two months. He is also more likely to say, "I
went through the pain of circumcision for a reason and that reason is so that I don't have to be
bothered with condoms anymore."
Next
Lane: Why do you say that I am not nice?
Jane: Because you don't listen to me.
Lane: But you are stupid and have nothing to say.
Jane: See what I mean? You are such a bastard.
Lane: How come I got to be a bastard, now?
Jane: I don't know. How come?
Lane: If not being nice to someone makes them a bastard, then how come you aren't a
bastard for calling me a bastard?
Jane: Because you are an idiot.
Lane:
Jane:
Lane:
Jane:
Lane:
Jane:
Lane:
Jane: Oh, well. So sometimes you simply have to be polite, I suppose, but how does this
apply to your mythical Global Warming, or whatever you call it?
Lane: Didn't you read "The Cat in the Hat" to our children? You must admit that children need
to be fed myth and most adults never get past the fiction stage.
Lane: We need to wean ourselves off of fossile fuels and move toward more efficient and
sustainable means.
Jane: And what would be all that sustainable? Solar cells, I suppose? They are simply too
expensive to do anything but bankrupt us.
Lane: For me, it would be nuclear power, of course, but many people in the Green Movement
are opposed to nuclear power. We have pleanty of uranium to carry us well into the age
where we use fusion power. We also have plenty of natural gas to carry us into the age of
fission power.
Jane: And I suppose you call natural gas a fossile fuel?
Lane: I try to avoid it because, of course, it is not a fossile fuel at all. The problem is that if I
start arguing about the word "fossile" being applied to oil and gas, it will distract me from my
main goals.
Jane: So, you say that we should let people maintain the myth that somehow oil ended up
fifteen miles below the surface of the earth? Should we simply ignore the fact that nobody has
ever turned dead plants into oil?
Lane: Remember the book called "The Giver"? In that book, only one person in town had to
deal with reality. Everyone else believed in mythical reasons that made them feel good. That
is the point of it all. Humans want to be told things that make them feel good. The real work
has to be done by people like "The Giver" who must deal with reality.
The husband promotes homeopatic medications and the wife says that homeopathy is a fraud.
The husband promotes Global Warming and the wife says it is myth. Humans contribute only
between 10 and 30% toward global warming according to her. Whereas I admit that you have
the correct facts, the problem is motivating people to move to electric cars so that we might
reduce our oil imports. Our culture needs certain myths to accomplish this faster.
Husband likes Kindle Books and the wife likes dead-tree books. Husband believes that
religion is a good thing and the wife believes it is all myth and therefore a waste of time.
Husband retorts, "Didn't you read The Cat in the Hat to our children? Those stories are all
myth and yet you fed it to our 'innocent' children."
She liked solar energy because it created jobs. He responded that we don't need more jobs.
We have too many jobs now. Just look at healthcare and how the price of it has gone up so
quickly. When the price of something goes up, then it means that you don't have enough
competition for the jobs in that industry. If we had more doctors, then the price of a doctor visit
would go down, wouldn't it? And how about the caldera at Yellowstone Park. Everyone
agrees that sooner or later it will turn into a full-fledged volcano. Doesn't such a situation
indicate that we should be employing workers to prevent such an occurrance? We could take
geothermal energy out of the caldera and cool it down so that it won't blow up, couldn't we? I
see jobs everywhere and not enough people doing those jobs.
Anyway, people don't need to have a job so much as jobs need to be accomplished. If I have
a well with an electric pump, one could say that the job of fetching water from the stream has
been eliminated. In countries where they still fetch the water by hand, one could claim that
they have more full employment, I suppose, but it is precisely those countries that are
considered poor.
Is is not simply the use of an Artificially Intelligent Mind that is dangerous to the human race,
but the mere knowledge of its existence, poses an existential risk to the human species. You
are safe only if you don't believe that there is real AI going on here on this web site, because
then you will not get familiar with the software and you will not distribute it further to other
branches of humanity. Therefore, read on at your own peril, because you are in danger of
becoming a memetic vector of a crushing Technological Singularity that could go terribly
wrong and lead to the total wipe-out of humans as a doomed species.
The human race has treated the planet Earth so shabbily that it might not be a bad idea to
replace destructive human beings with a more rational species of intelligent robots.
But evidence continued to mount about the possible benefits of circumcision, three large
studies conducted in South Africa, Kenya and Uganda that concluded that circumcised
heterosexual men were about half as likely to become infected with HIV as uncircumcised men.
On further analysis, it was found that if you circumcise an adult male, he is more likely to
become infected with AIDS during the following two months. He is also more likely to say, "I
went through the pain of circumcision for a reason and that reason is so that I don't have to be
bothered with condoms anymore."
Next
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