figbucket

You're right however part of the freedom comes from choosing where your bubble ends. Consciously choosing where you filter what you allow into your bubble be it NYT front page or fox news etcetera.

>if your current interests and beliefs act as filters, then how will you ever develop new ones?

This partly comes down to being another personal choice and also consider that many things are linked in a way that enables you to develop new interests and beliefs.

One example of this is Wikipedia. Starting from pretty much any point of interest, you can find a great depth of chain linked resources to information you can choose to read and allow influence your interests and beliefs

>or, coming down to the core topic of this site, how will you know your audience... ?

Best to start by building what you know however I realise that's unrealistic. After that you just accept that you can't filter everything because somethings you want in your bubble have baggage. "Every rose has its thorne" as the saying goes.

Everyone already has a bubble around them. The difference is whether you consciously choose to let information/ideas/people/news in or not.

Making the conscious choice to filter to your preferrences is important and liberating because it enables you more control over the kind of life you want to live.

Good point.

>Having a kid is very robust against something like hyperinflation, lol.

While I don't know what the statistics are I don't like the idea of having children in part because of the assumption that they would want to help care for you later in life.

As much as I like and dislike my parents I'd sooner move to the otherside of the world than help them though old age.

If you work out savings of not having children and put the money in a decent savings plan you'll probably have enough to pay for better qualified care multiple times over what any children may provide (or not they're not obliged to help).

I'm wondering is anyone researching self driving larger vehicles and would future legislation require someone being present in the vehicle?

According to http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm as of 2010 over 4 million people work in transport and warehousing. A lot of which will be drivers. Self driving vehicles could mean then end for a lot of jobs especially if someone developed a retrofit kit for current vehicles.

I recall reading an article in which a psychologist written about a study that aimed to prove which method was more affective.

The conclusion of the study was that people are more likely to stick to a goal they keep to themselves. This is because often telling people a goal they will reward you with praise as if you already achieved it making it prematurely gratifying which causes you to lose motivation.

Also from my own experience public commitment is a bad motivational tool. This is because the motivator of public commitment is usually fear (failure etc) and fear is a terrible mindset to draw motivation from which (in my experience) can cause a lot of procrastination.

I'm not making any assumptions and certainly not assuming they'd be farm hands or that only government can create techology. It's all around us in the details.

The fact is that a businesses number one aim is to make a profit and that restricts most businesses to seeing no further than the end of their nose and limits their capacity for risky investments. When it comes to research, corporations should be looking for profitable applications of research before anything else because it's their number one aim. This means that a lot of research that doesn't have any clear practical application to a profitable model or doesn't meet a percieved profitable timescale is unlikely to be pursued.

I'm not denying that some companies do some groundbreaking research just that the inherint nature of corporations prevents them from taking risks that governments can take and which a lot of corporations capitalise on. Corporation and government funded research are two sides of the same coin. They both bring their respective benefits to society but one won't work without the other.

Most corporations would never have taken the big initial risks and government would likely never have practically applied the findings to a valuable product.

nonsense. Consider for a second all of the technology that corporations use in their products that were originally funded by government research projects like the internet(arpanet), world wide web (And others).

If government didn't have the scale to take on such projects a lot of these corporations wouldn't exist and a lack of research like those often government funded would just reinforce the status quo.

They maybe right but it isn't equal, it's giving them a competitive advantage.

I agree with paying the minimum amount of tax but what does that actually mean? Eric Schmidt said he believes taxes should be at the base of economic activity (ie Ireland) but this is bullshit because it puts all the power in the hands of the corporations and incentivies countries to lower taxes to encourage corporations to move there.

Taxes should be based on where products are consumed so that each country taxes the exact percentage of profits generated from sales in that country. If in the UK Google sales amounted to £1b profit then £230m should be corporation taxes.