A friend of mine attributes the refugee crisis in the Levantine countries to a severe drought caused by "climate change."

Does "climate change" mysteriously stop at Israel's borders? I haven't heard of any political breakdown or mass emigration from that country.

Metric uses weight in many cases where imperial uses volume. This makes the translation of old recipes into metric a chore. And it means you need a kitchen scale, something that a lot of of good cooks manage without in the US.

There are other barriers -- no one is going to replace their oven just because the numbers on the temperature knob don't match a new recipe (they might buy a new knob if it was easy enough, though!).

All in all, the arguments for not going to metric across the board is the same old "we'd rather have our kids deal with it". But fubarobfusco is correct, it is unlikely that it will happen in the next decade or so. The market clearly won't demand or accept it.

Your CS related ideas have me thinking. I would like to see git vs. svn. In my view, which system to use depends on the project. I prefer svn for most of my projects (those which are small and will not be released), and I think most git users don't understand the various advantages and disadvantages of the different available version control systems. When I mention that I like svn, many git users act with incredulity, and I usually find through discussion with them that they never tried svn.

17/7 - Update: Thank you to everyone for their assistance. Here is a re-worked version of Father. It is unlisted, for testing purposes. If one happens to comes across this post, please consider giving feedback regarding how long it captures your attention.

In the interests of privacy, please excuse the specialised account and lack of identifying personal information.

A bit of background: recently created a YouTube channel for the dual purposes of creating an online repository of works that can easily be hyperlinked, and establishing an alternative source of income. The channel is intended to be humorous, though neither speciously nor vituperatively so. One aim of posting this here is to see whether the humour is agreeable to elements of the LW community.

Another is to ask for advice. After a few days utilising Google's AdWords to generate views on one of the videos, of the 600 views received, not a single one engaged with the video beyond merely watching it. All the low-hanging fruit - enticing the viewer to engage by liking, subscribing, etc. has been plucked. One question is whether these requests for engagement are too subtle; perhaps erring on the side of not trying to annoy viewers has led to missed opportunities? The prospect for channel growth seems bleak in light of the above statistic.

Social media marketing, in the form of reddit, Twitter, and Pinterest have not yielded any subscribers. Word of mouth has yielded positive feedback, but no engagement outside of personal acquaintances. If the advice received here does not help, the next step is to create an account on a YouTube specific forum asking for assistance.

Are there obvious avenues for marketing being overlooked, here? Is there an obvious demographic or audience that would most enjoy these videos? Outside perspective is needed, and the dearth of feedback from strangers - both positive and negative - does not offer much indication of how to do things differently. Thank you for your time.

The general problem with it is that it can be used too easily as an excuse. Hm, I think we should try to find the meta of this, this looks useful. Basically imagine a graph where various human situations are on the X and the usefulness of a given thing in that situation is the Y. And another graph, where the usefulness of that thing as an excuse is on Y. And if the second tends to be higher, that is not a good thing.

Another meta: there is a difference between thinking I figure X is good and thinking I am entitled to decide whether X is good.

For example the good old trolley problem. Pushing the fat man is the almost obviously right choice looking at that situation only ("shut up and multiply", feelings like OMG I am a murderer now do not matter as much as lives), but it is highly dangerous if people feel like they are entitled to take such choices, they are entitled to sacrifice someone without their consent for the greater good. This is a very different thing. It generates an excuse for others in far different situations.

A truly saintly person would push the fat man then demand to be punished, because the choice was right but he was not entitled to make such a choice and others should not feel entitled to either.

You should give more credit to the emotional part of your brain :) It's not that stupid. There's a little extra something in-between the pain and the person causing it, that triggers the reaction of hatred against the person -- probably the expectation of hostile intentions. It's likely not a simple two-item person+pain=hatred association arc; even our emotional selves know this.

I think the scenario of an AI torturing humans in the future is very, very unlikely. For most possible goals an AI could have, it will have ways to accomplish them that are more effective than torturing humans.

So repeated stressful challenges (that are small enough to successfully navigate) can lead to long lasting satisfaction and happiness, while repeated low level dopamine spikes (say from browsing the net) can lead to long lasting malaise and apathy. Seems about right.

What about counter examples though?

I'm an economist not a programmer, but shouldn't the goal of programming be to write code that other people value? Also, you do need other people to program, the people who build the hardware, operate the power system, grow your food..., it's just that with extremely high probability you can count on them being there for you.

Could you elaborate on any specifics? Apparently the plant is legal in most of the world and only prohibited in very few countries.