Scott Adams' Blog

Death with Dignity - Claims Phase

Posted May 4th, 2015 @ 12:34pm in #deathwithdignity #AMA #disabledrights #catholic

In my prior post, Jimmy Akin provided the seed argument against physician-assisted death that I will pass through what I call the Rationality Engine. 

I have reduced Jimmy’s extensive arguments, along with other notable thoughts on the topic, into “claims” which I will soon evaluate for a verdict. 

Today I hope you can check my work and make sure the claims are clear, bias-free, and complete before I start with verdicts.

A lot of my readers here are big-media writers and editors, along with politicians and other thought leaders. So what we do here does influence the real world. And I think it is important because literally nowhere else is anyone even attempting objectivity on this topic.

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Assisted Dying Debate - Jimmy Akin’s Opinion

Posted May 1st, 2015 @ 7:35am

Background: A few weeks ago I made a public call for a qualified person to explain to my readers why assisted dying should NOT be legal. I asked because I had never met anyone who held that opinion and I wondered if such a person even existed. (Seriously.)

Jimmy Akin (see his website) volunteered, as did some readers of this blog. Jimmy has experience explaining this very topic, he’s a skilled communicator, and several readers suggested him. He also has a deep personal connection to the topic as you will read in his answers.

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That Time I Tried to Watch a Video on the Internet

Posted April 30th, 2015 @ 8:16am

About ten times a day I see a link on the Internet to a video clip that looks interesting or newsworthy. I usually click that link because apparently I am incapable of learning from experience.

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Robots Read News - New Miracle Drug

Posted April 29th, 2015 @ 8:59am

If your firewall is blocking the image, see it on Twitter here.

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Things That Cannot Be Communicated

Posted April 28th, 2015 @ 9:57am

As a writer, I keep bumping into topics that cannot be communicated for a variety of reasons. I thought I would list them so you see how many there are. That’s the surprising part.

 Feel free to skim it to get to the content after.

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New Sport - Castleball

Posted April 27th, 2015 @ 9:09am in #football #soccer #baseball #basketball

Sports are poorly engineered. Actually, most sports are not engineered at all. Things just evolved over time. That’s why our major sports are unnecessarily dangerous, expensive, and boring – at least by the standards of modern times.

Sports are still fine for watching. Actually, the spectating has never been better. But watching is not playing. It is the playing that is broken.

So I invented a new sport to solve the major problems common to most of the popular sports in America. I will be running tests on it in my backyard this summer to figure out the final rule set. I call it Castleball.  And it is a combination of the best parts of soccer, dodgeball and the video game Angry Birds.

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Libertarian Dilemna

Posted April 23rd, 2015 @ 8:30am in #taxes #libertarians #weed

Would a Libertarian favor laws designed to reduce the number of new tax laws?

Guest blogger Diana Wales explores some options for the small-government crowd.

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Robots Read News - Self-Driving Cars Unionize

Posted April 22nd, 2015 @ 8:09am in #robots #RobotsReadNews #self-driving cars #union

If your firewall is blocking the image, see it on Twitter here.

Humor Dimensions: Recognition (headlines about self-driving cars), clever (humans are meat cargo to unionizing cars, and they only dump every 100th passenger), cruel (third panel), and bizarre (cars unionize, robots talk).

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Brainwashing

Posted April 21st, 2015 @ 10:02am in #robots #applewatch #marketing

Suppose you could push a button and brainwash another person into changing his thinking to match your preferences. Would it be ethical to push that button? 

You probably had a bad reaction to the thought of brainwashing another human. It seems counter to every notion of freedom we have. And you certainly would not want anyone to brainwash you. 

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Robots Read News - About California’s Drought

Posted April 20th, 2015 @ 10:45am in #drought #robots #crude oil news

If your company firewall is blocking the image, see it on Twitter here.

Humor Dimensions Used: (4) Recognition (current news), cleverness (oddity of water being expensive and oil being cheap, solution of moving robots to California), cruel (robots stealing a state from idiot humans), bizarre (talking robot, surfing robot)

Predicted Sharing: Medium. Formulation is solid but California’s drought is somewhat local news.

———– Meanwhile, over on Top Tech Blog —————–

Here comes the fingernail mouse pointer. This is the technology, along with the Internet of Things, that will usher in what I call the Era of Magic. That’s when you just wave your hand at stuff and it does what you want, like magic.

If 3D printing keeps entering the mainstream, as in this Disney example, soon you will be able to print your own Dilbert character chess set. Alice is the queen, obviously. Asok is a pawn. Dogbert a knight. Dilbert a rook. Wally a bishop. Pointy-haired-boss is king?

And I get excited every time someone invents a new way to make electricity out of sunlight. I don’t know what you accomplished this year, but I know I didn’t invent any new energy sources.

————

Blah, blah, please read my book.