I'll pay you $5 for gold teeth and make a tidy profit. This article from 2019[1] said $40-92 per crown. Multiply by 1.6 based on the way gold has appreciated since 2019[2] and that's $65-147 or so per tooth.
But you also have the cost of man hours, marketing that you buy gold, finding a smelter that will take teeth, or do it yourself. That’s not all profit, plus you don’t know the gold weight until you remove it from the tooth. Which is risk. Plus it’s possibly a biohazard.
These people buy millions per day in gold, I’m sure if it was profitable they wouldn’t turn it away.
You can try it though, go to all the gold stores in your area and tell them you’ll buy all the teeth they bring in.
More and more graveyards are being fenced off and secured for this reason sadly. Plus generations ago some opted to be buried with their wedding rings and such. I know some smaller family ones in my area of central Washington have been robbed.
It was not true of this world 150 years ago that any person with sufficient learning could tap buttons to create an experience to be found in the hand of the majority of living humans.
I agree power and greed go hand in hand - absolute power corrupts, absolutely - but this bit? This is new.
I've never really seen Word as anything other than inferior, having cut my teeth on WordPerfect.
Others have posted their favorite shortcuts (and Reveal Codes truly was magical); my most used ones I haven't seen mentioned were Ctrl+Shift+F1 and Alt+Shift+F1. IIRC, those were spell check and thesaurus, respectively.
RIP Bruce, you made the world a better place for millions.
Many would say you can't have free will in a deterministic world because free will is about selecting one option from many. If there is no alternative option -- because the universe is completely determined -- how can you have any choice? You were always going to do exactly what it was previously determined you were always going to do.
They want "agency", which means something like looking at the universe and interfering with it without being part of it, like a scientist with the universe in a petri dish, somehow external to any universe and not subject to any rules or causality.
It's a bizarre but apparently intuitive wish. But this isn't necessary. A robot can select one option from among many. We can predict the robots choice. A human can do the same, and we can't predict the human's choice so well, because humans are deep and complex and actually think, but it's still a mechanism, and so what? The error here is in thinking that "mechanism = robot" and "mechanism = amoral", neither of which are true - except for all the non-human mechanisms, which is the great majority of the mechanisms (processes, etc.) that we see, and we don't like being lumped in with them in case it makes us robots and removes responsibility for choices. But it just doesn't.
And yet, knowing that free will does not exist can change someone's whole life trajectory. So free will is a useful delusion. But we can't control if we get to have the delusion. It's not surprising if this like of reasoning seems familiar.
Free will does exist, deterministic agency exists, and reasoning that determinism removes moral responsibility is an error. What doesn't exist is this metaphysical type of god-like beyond-universe agency that people obsess over for no obvious reason.
Free will is not a delusion it is an illusion. The difference is significant. Illusions are normal sensory perceptions common across nearly all humans that just happen not to correspond to anything in physical reality.
> Many would say you can't have free will in a deterministic world because free will is about selecting one option from many. If there is no alternative option -- because the universe is completely determined -- how can you have any choice?
Because "select 1 option among many" is not what's meant by free will and not how anyone serious understands the term. If someone is holding a gun to your head and telling you to choose option X, which is an option that you would NOT otherwise choose, you still have a choice by your definition, because you can choose to die or choose to accede to those demands. No one would agree that you have a freely willed choice though. Clearly you're missing some important ingredient, and this extra bit is why free will is compatible with determinism.
Some people in those situations have absolutely chosen to get shot, which means that true determinism functions differently than a metaphorical gun. You might not be morally culpable for what you do while under threat of death, but that's a separate question from whether you could physically have done something different.
In a deterministic universe there isn't a gun to your head, instead what you will do was decided by the configuration of atoms immediately after the Big Bang (and presumably by the configuration of whatever the heck came before). In a deterministic universe I do what I do because particles hit into each other in particular ways over countless eons and those particle interactions eventually coalesced into what I call myself and the particles in my brain bounce in particular ways that interact to create an illusion of choice.
> You might not be morally culpable for what you do while under threat of death, but that's a separate question from whether you could physically have done something different.
The principle of alternate possibilities was debunked by the Frankfurt cases, and that was not the point of the gun scenario.
The point was that nobody would consider a person acting under threat of death to be making freely willed choices, so defining choice in the naive and reductive sense that was suggested is just incorrect because it cannot exclude this case. Therefore this naive and reductive definition cannot be what people mean by "choice" in the context of free will.
> In a deterministic universe I do what I do because particles hit into each other in particular ways over countless eons and those particle interactions eventually coalesced into what I call myself and the particles in my brain bounce in particular ways that interact
So an intelligent being was created with certain preferences and values, and as long as this being was able to deliberate and make choices in accordance with those preferences and values, that being was making freely willed choices. How this being was able to do this at the subatomic level is completely irrelevant, and bringing it up is, at best, a category error.
> The point was that nobody would consider a person acting under threat of death to be making freely willed choices, so defining choice in the naive and reductive sense that was suggested is just incorrect because it cannot exclude this case. Therefore this naive and reductive definition cannot be what people mean by "choice" in the context of free will.
I disagree with this characterization as it omits entirely the moral culpability central to Frankfurt's argumentation. Frankfurt cases are about moral culpability[1]. I did not refer to morality or culpability but only the base naive case given that the question was "why can't you have both?" and I think the epistemic force of the base case is nontrivial.
I think your error here is that you are presuming:
(a) If you are acting under threat of death, you cannot do otherwise but save your life.
(b) When you define freedom as the ability to have done otherwise, you cannot be free in the case of (a).
(c) All cases of human choice must be free.
(d) Given (b) and (c), the definition must be incorrect.
As the other person in the thread pointed out, some people can choose death in the face of death or some other choice. It has happened many times throughout history. So saying "you must save your life" is outright false. Some people choose one option, some people choose another. This has no force on the definition of freedom.
Even if you say in that specific case a person is not free because they could not do otherwise, it does not follow that the definition of freedom can't handle the case. It may follow that the person is not blameworthy - which is what Frankfurt was getting at - but that's nowhere near saying that the theory can't handle the case at all. Some might say the person under threat of death could do otherwise, some might say the person under threat of death could not do otherwise. That's not fatal to anything, it just shows the definition is incomplete.
If you read the article, it uses that construction. To quote: "The Japanese parliament has passed [...] a law that compels Apple to allow access to third-party app stores and payment providers on devices that run iOS." There's quite a bit more required of Apple, too, if you read further.
I read the article just to understand how they "allowed" something. And I found what you found. The word "compel" is more polite than "force". But force nonetheless.
4 years college taking some of the toughest courses there are to be ready for 4 years of medical school. After that 8 years of schooling then you have to go through the hazing ritual they call "residency". Residency varies depending on your specialty, from 3 to 7 more years[1] - during which time you're working 60-80 hour weeks [2].
So baseline if you're smart and hard working, you need to take the hardest college track from ages 18-22, medical school (22-26). Then work two jobs worth of hours as a trainee making well under 100k starting at age 27 and into your early 30s [3] so you can't save or pay down any of your debt from getting here.
So if you choose to be a doctor, you have to:
(a) dedicate to working your ass off at 18,
(b) keep at it until you're in your early 30s,
(c) start with massive debt
I think it's actually pretty amazing that we have as many doctors as we do.
But what's the actual rate limiting factor? I remember liking at University entrance requirements in my country and the minimum requirements were low compared to what you actually needed because of the insane competition.
Why not just expand the amount of spots and train more doctors? Surely they don't take everyone that applies and then filter them out (even CS doesn't do that).
The limiting factor, as I understand it, is residency slots. Residency slots are, for some reason, principally funded by Medicare, so they are funded by Congress, which has for the past several decades not increased that allocation. Apparently that's starting to change?
In my opinion though, I can't see why the number of doctors should be something that is principally controlled by congress at all, and ideally some other method should come about.
Until that happens though, it's up to Congress to fix this.
I've read about it and came upon the same answer as you just gave, but I'm not satisfied with it.
Looking around the world, it seems to me that most developed countries (if not all) suffer from the same problem of lack of doctors. Some mask it by pulling doctors from poorer countries (including poorer developed countries), but it seems like there's a lack of doctors everywhere. If that's the case then Congress can't really be the only limiting factor.
Why are there no developed countries that have far too many doctors? The only countries that I can think of that export doctors are Cuba and third world countries.
You need to be smart, hard working, dedicated, and interested in medicine. That’s going to be a limiting factor. Add in high tuition and a public that hates you, and it’s hard to motivate.
But that's the history that makes the flipping of the script so stark. Anybody embedded deeply enough in the company should be aware of that exact loss of reputation.
And if the company fails to know its own history well enough that even they are missing the point that speaks volumes about how they value institutional knowledge.
[1] https://thegoldcenter.com/how-much-gold-is-in-a-dental-crown... [2] https://www.macrotrends.net/1333/historical-gold-prices-100-...