Slashdot Mirror

I like, in a sarcastic way, how you skirted the idea that charities would only help those they deemed worthy. I suspect that 'lazy' has a wealth of meanings for you. I am familiar with Charity Navigator. I would point you towards Rotten Tomatoes, which was, more or less, subverted the moment the big movie studios took a hit in profits they could trace back to the site. Do you think that the mega-churches would fail to do the same to Charity Navigator?

I don't like, in a literal way, how you made an allegation against Charity Navigator without doing any basic research. I looked at the top 4 megachurches (based on average attendance):

Life.Church. Charity Navigator has not rated it.
Church of the Highlands. Charity Navigator has not rated it.
Lakewood Church. Charity Navigator has not rated it.
North Point Community Church. Charity Navigator has not rated it.

So yes, I'm confident Charity Navigator won't be subverted by organizations it doesn't rate.

Republicans whine about unfunded liabilities, then spend big.

Yes, I'm very unhappy with Republicans about that. At least they -- unlike the proponents of socialized medicine -- aren't proposing new programs that would cause $218 trillion in additional deficit spending over the next 30 years (to say nothing of what the new programs would do to unfunded liabilities). You complain about hypocrisy on the issue of unfunded liabilities, which is certainly true of some Republicans, but you offer no solutions to that issue yourself.

The only way the system breaks down is if people stop paying taxes

You don't think Social Security will break down if the ratio of retirees to FICA-paying workers grows a lot larger (due to lower birth rate, increasing life expectancy, etc.)? That's what's happening in Japan, and to say fixing that problem is "a major political challenge" might be the understatement of the century. Sorry, rather than trusting your bare assertion, I will trust the official report of the U.S. Social Security Board of Trustees, which back in 2009 had already announced $17.5 trillion in unfunded liabilities. I've never seen a credible definition of "Ponzi scheme" that doesn't describe Social Security to a T.

Again, this comes back to you and those like you. This belief that anything that doesn't directly benefit you is a waste of money, no matter the net benefit to our society as a whole, that people who need assistance are just "lazy." It is short-sighted, narrow-minded, and it is dragging the US down more effectively than any outside agent ever could.

You must live in opposite world, because the facts consistently support the opposite of your assertions.
* I advocate for making the social safety net sustainable, and much more robust. That certainly doesn't benefit me; just the opposite, it requires me to become more charitable.
* I didn't say people who need assistance are lazy. I said they are the opposite of people who are merely lazy, and that they should receive the opposite treatment (more resources directed to them). Does your reading comprehension really suck that much, or do you just

Trump lifted the cap on H-2B worker visas. Then his businesses asked for 76 of them.

https://www.vox.com/2018/8/16/...

They already ask for papers at random >:(
https://www.vox.com/policy-and...

It's simply a stated fact by the DSA - their end-goal is for workers to own the means of production (through legally mandated takeover, since there is nothing stopping them from asking Unions to buy/manage/own businesses currently) - https://www.vox.com/policy-and...

It's just a rebranding of Communism to try and sneak it by people who are confused by words.

This is what we expect to happen with sources of heat: The farther away we are from the center of the flame, the cooler it becomes. But this doesn’t happen with the biggest, baddest fire in the solar system, our sun.

The surface of the sun is around 10,000F; its atmosphere, the corona, is around 2 million degrees, about 200 times hotter. It’s like if an airplane took off from ground level where it was 60F, and then reached a cruising altitude where it was 12,000F. It sounds preposterous. And the plane would melt.

Scientists call this weird phenomenon the “coronal heating” problem, and it has been stumping them for decades. In the early 1940s, scientists determined that one of the elements in the corona was a form of iron that had been stripped of 13 of its electrons, and it takes a massive amount of energy, in the form of heat, to pull electrons away from an atom of iron. But really, the mystery stretches back even further: When scientists first detected the iron in the 1860s, they mistook it for an entirely new element they dubbed “coronium.”

The coronal heating problem is just one of three interrelated mysteries the Parker Probe will collect data on in hopes of solving.

Another mystery is solar wind. This “wind” is composed of particles of matter being shot out from the sun’s corona in all directions. These particles get accelerated to speeds of millions of miles per hour, and no one knows exactly how. (Solar wind is why we have aurora borealis and aurora australis — the northern and southern lights — at our poles. Earth’s magnetic field deflects the wind particles to the poles, where they collide and ionize in a brilliant light show.)

Last is the mystery of coronal mass ejections. These are the sudden explosions of plasma and particles that spew from the sun and could potentially knock out power grids on Earth. We don’t completely understand the physics of these explosions; nor can we predict when and where they will happen (and if Earth will be in the crosshairs).

Four months after Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico struggles with lack of electricity, food and water

9 months after Hurricane Maria, thousands of Puerto Ricans still don’t have power

THis is what happens when you have poorly developed systems.

Right-wing party line, eh? Know what else is the right-wing party line? Here's a 2015 exchange between Ezra Klein and Bernie Sanders that is highly relevant:

Ezra Klein
You said being a democratic socialist means a more international view. I think if you take global poverty that seriously, it leads you to conclusions that in the US are considered out of political bounds. Things like sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders. About sharply increasing ...

Bernie Sanders
Open borders? No, that's a Koch brothers proposal.

Ezra Klein
Really?

Bernie Sanders
Of course. That's a right-wing proposal, which says essentially there is no United States. ...

Ezra Klein
But it would make ...

Bernie Sanders
Excuse me ...

Ezra Klein
It would make a lot of global poor richer, wouldn't it?

Bernie Sanders
It would make everybody in America poorer â"you're doing away with the concept of a nation state, and I don't think there's any country in the world that believes in that. If you believe in a nation state or in a country called the United States or UK or Denmark or any other country, you have an obligation in my view to do everything we can to help poor people. What right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don't believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country, I think we have to do everything we can to create millions of jobs.

You know what youth unemployment is in the United States of America today? If you're a white high school graduate, it's 33 percent, Hispanic 36 percent, African American 51 percent. You think we should open the borders and bring in a lot of low-wage workers, or do you think maybe we should try to get jobs for those kids?

I think from a moral responsibility we've got to work with the rest of the industrialized world to address the problems of international poverty, but you don't do that by making people in this country even poorer.

Ezra Klein
Then what are the responsibilities that we have? Someone who is poor by US standards is quite well off by, say, Malaysian standards, so if the calculation goes so easily to the benefit of the person in the US, how do we think about that responsibility?

We have a nation-state structure. I agree on that. But philosophically, the question is how do you weight it? How do you think about what the foreign aid budget should be? How do you think about poverty abroad?

Bernie Sanders
I do weigh it. As a United States senator in Vermont, my first obligation is to make certain kids in my state and kids all over this country have the ability to go to college, which is why I am supporting tuition-free public colleges and universities.

https://www.vox.com/2015/7/28/9014491/bernie-sanders-vox-conversation

I'll as you the same question:

If I care about immigration reform, which party is more likely to get me there? The one that wants no reform and blanket amnesty, or the one somewhat divided on the issue? Which party is calling for the abolition of ICE? Which party creates "sanctuary" cities/states? Which party runs cities that won't even convict a cold-blooded killer of manslaughter?

There wasn't a single Democratic vote for Trump's tax bill that put us even more massively in debt in either the House or the Senate either.

It was a budget bill. They didn't have to avoid a filibuster.

You're deluding yourself by not holding Republicans to their failures and the party's ideals become weaker for every person that does this.

If I care about immigration reform, which party is more likely to get me there? The one that wants no reform and blanket amnesty, or the one somewhat divided on the issue? Which party is calling for the abolition of ICE? Which party creates "sanctuary" cities/states? Which party runs cities that won't even convict a cold-blooded killer of manslaughter?

Biased news is not inherently "fake news". All news has some level of inherent bias just from the level of deciding what is "newsworthy" and what isn't. And that's before adding any editorial spin on the facts. You just have to recognize that bias and account for it. For example I get a lot of my foreign news from al-Jazeera, and I realize a lot of their content will have a pro-Qatar and pro-Palestine slant. There will always be inaccuracies as well, it's the nature of information-you always get more with time. "Fake news" is taking objective facts and claiming the opposite, not transparently correcting factual inaccuracies in reporting once they become known, or even just making shit up. "Fake news" has gone from the meaning "false news" to "news I don't like".

Deliberately cherry picking stats from legal immigrants, who are largely positive, and applying those to illegal immigrants, who are largely negative, is more than editorial bias. It's deliberately being misleading, which is certainly a flavor of lying, and is in fact what I'd call fake news. Here is an example: https://www.vox.com/2018/4/13/... The straw man they create is illegal immigrants pay no taxes. The actual issue many taxpayers have , myself included, is that illegal immigrants take out more than they put in. The article goes on to say that illegals pay $23.6 billion in taxes. They make it sound like a big plus, as if it helps. Left out is that they cost $134.9 billion, which means that the net cost is still >$100 billion in the red. This is far more than editorial bias, it's only pushing half the story with key facts unmentioned. The key fact of the costs are common sense, this isn't asking too much or a level of detail that is above average. The Vox article is what I'd call fake news. All it has is a straw man in the beginning followed by Enron style math where all liabilities are ignored.

China's worst plants still have more environmental safeguards than US plants. and have for years.
Yet you still post the same lies over and over.
American people still use far more coal for their electricity than Chinese or Indians, despite years of decreases and you telling us over and over how many plants are closing.
Depends on the country, in America, even though you use about 6x the electricity of similar countries, electricity is still behind transport for your CO2 because your cars and trucks are even more inefficient than your electricity and households..

They different is Watergate/Clinton investigations were started due to some pretty clear and damning evidence. Occam's Razor suggests the most likely instigating factor for the Mueller investigations was some political impropriety and fearmongering on the Democrat's part. In terms of real evidence pointing to a massive conspiracy by the Trump campaign to collude with Russia (on anything), it is objectively almost nothing. It still may or may not be true, but I don't think anyone can deny Democrats have twisted themselves in circles trying to convince the world of some massive conspiracy, a la 9/11 truthers.

And I'm going to seriously consider the opinion of someone who starts a Post with "They different"?

And just remember, after Trump stated Publicly that handing over Ambassador McFaul to Putin's gang of thugs for "Interviewing" was actually "worth Considering", the Senate voted 98-0 last week to block that idea.

http://time.com/5343322/michae...

Oh, and when Articles of Impeachment against Assistant AG Rob Rosenstein were filed in the House last night, only ELEVEN ***REPUBLICANS*** (out of 236 Representatives total) jumped on the bandwagon. Even Speaker of the House Paul Ryan spoke out Publicly against the measure. Even Trey Gowdy, who is NO supporter of the Mueller Investigation, said of the Rosenstein Impeachment attempt: "Impeach him? For What?"

https://www.newsweek.com/rod-r...

And in fact, those Eleven Traitorous Republicans have already turned tail and run home:

https://www.vox.com/2018/7/26/...

Yep. Sounds like the Democrats are the only ones that are beginning to think "something's up"...

Gimme a break, willya?

MAGAP

(Make America Get Another President (tm))

I don't think there's a conspiracy, but I *do* believe that, a few years ago, everyone sort of tacitly agreed that it would be good to have Russia as an enemy.

First (a couple of years ago) we heard about unspecified attacks on "critical infrastructure" by "Russian state-sponsored actors".

Then after the election it was "Russians meddled in the election", followed by "Russians hacked the election"

(It's on Wikipedia, so it must be true!) .

Then 17 intelligence agencies confirmed that the Russians hacked the election. Including, and I'm not making this up, Coast Guard Intelligence.

Thenn there is the infamous pee pee document

Of course the Mueller investigation is onto something, because... if there's nothing there why is Mueller still investigating?

Trump meeting with Putin is treason and...

Trump's treason was confirmed.

The thing is, the timing of the Steele dossier is inconsistent with the Russian narrative. If Hillary had known about the dossier during the campaign, she would have moved heaven and Earth to get it in the public eye before the election. The fact that she *didn't* implies that she was certain of winning the election, and the dossier was prepared for a different purpose.

There's no really good evidence that the Russian government is involved with any of the hacking, except to say "That's something they would do". It's the fallacy of the reversed conditional,

I think what we're seeing is a long-term narrative to (eventually) justify a conflict with Russia.

...and Trump stuck a pin in that by meeting with Putin and starting a normal political relationship.

(Probably every response to this post will call me out as a Russian puppet, use foul insults, or predict Trump going to federal prison. Ignore those posts - the ones to read are ones that have a reasoned argument, citing facts, hopefully with links backing up facts, and painting a believable picture of an alternate explanation.)

As a literate person who can spell 'omphaloskepsis', I worry about the future when shallow comic characters are the pinnacle of entertainment. People try to convince themselves that this it sci-fi, but it's only fantasy.

It's not sci-fi or fantasy, it's comic book. The comic book genre is essentially standard action blockbuster with a bit more drama and philosophy than usual.

The pornographic costumes are the main attraction to pubescent viewers and more than a few others.

They're a secondary appeal, but I'd say they're far from the main attraction. To the expect that pubescent viewers go on about them they're just tying to show off for their friends. As opposed to traditional films they're probably unusual to the extent that the leading actresses are able to keep their clothes on.

The simplistic moral lessons are mind numbingly stupid; good versus evil over and over with magical powers on all sides.

Did you see the latest Avengers? The plot was literally driven by a difference in philosophy.

But there's always a hope that they will gravitate toward real sci-fi and real human drama that makes interesting storytelling.

Like what? There have been and continue to be pure character dramas and slightly harder SF films, the victims of the comic book movies don't seem to be the more artsy intellectual films, it's the other action blockbusters that aren't getting made.

And as blockbusters go I think they're fine, if anything they do a bit more character and philosophy than most.

Personally, I would be more concerned about a properly bribed election official or two losing votes in a voting machine or even worse, a voting machine with remote access https://www.newsweek.com/elect....

This article from Vox highlights one of vote-by-mail strengths which is that it is very distributed and hard to tamper with at large scale. It's second strength is that is a fair process making voting accessible to anyone who is registered to vote. No need for polling places or special times and days, only a voting deadline of when your vote must be in an order to be counted. https://www.vox.com/policy-and...

of course, if you want to steal an election, here's your how to: https://foreignpolicy.com/2018...

See here. We're below population replacement rates. In fact it's one of the things that is freaking out a lot of (right wing) voters since it's immigrants that are replacing them. The actual (economically) right wing aren't so freaked out since the immigrants tend to be socially right wing because they hail from deeply religious countries.

Might want to leave Denmark off that list.
"I know that some people in the US associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism," he said. "Therefore, I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy."

https://www.vox.com/2015/10/31...

Muller is better than Starr: five convictions vs none.

None? Try FIFTEEN, kemosabe.

Investigations into Whitewater uncovered real wrongdoing. Fifteen people, in total, were convicted of various charges. The McDougals were convicted of fraud, as was Jim Guy Tucker, Clinton's successor as governor of Arkansas. Webster Hubbell, a law partner of Hillary's who served in the Clinton Justice Department, pleaded guilty to fraud charges. But ultimately, none of the many investigations into Whitewater â" including, most famously, one by independent counsel Kenneth Starr â" found that the Clintons did anything criminal. The conclusion was that it's likelier they were victims of Jim McDougal's malfeasance than that they were co-conspirators.

And none of Mueller's indictments have anything to do with Trump or Russiagate. So far you're 0 for 2, one more and you're out.

Sigh, You read russian propaganda like zerohedge? you must be so misinformed. Just google the it.

ad hominem :

a fallacious argumentative strategy whereby genuine discussion of the topic at hand is avoided by instead attacking the character, motive, or other attribute of the person making the argument, or persons associated with the argument, rather than attacking the substance of the argument itself.

Grow a brain. Your Russia! Russia! Russia!/Trump Derangement Syndrome is showing.

Read Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s remarks on the Russia indictments

there is no allegation in this indictment that any American was a knowing participant in this illegal activity. There is no allegation in the indictment that the charge conduct altered the outcome of the 2016 election.

Wow. Almost word-fucking-word for what the GP post says.

The sad thing is you probably believe your smarter than the GP poster.

A much bigger problem with Brett Kavanaugh is that he's a shitty judge who has a frighteningly amateurish understanding of the US' legal system. One nervous-laughable misunderstanding in particular is very appealing to wannabe-dictator President Trump: Kavanaugh believes that the US president has a power similar to the collective power of the US supreme court, and can declare any law unconstitutional on a whim:

https://www.vox.com/policy-and...

"Why worry about rubbing against people who's job it is to work with the diseased and can't even be bothered to change their clothes." is what you're telling me here.

...
Congratulations, that's you just making shit up. I never insisted on such.

Hypocrite. Congratulations, that's you just making shit up. I never wrote such.

"Yes, because "everything must be sterile""

Congratulations, that's you just making shit up. I never insisted on such.

hardly. And whether you insisted on it is not relevant to the argument. You're the one assuming that those scrubs are being worn after contact with "the diseased." You're the one assuming that somehow only hospitalized patients are "the diseased." News flash buddy, 25% of the people around you are "diseased" with staphylococcus (staph, not staff, for short).

When hospital staff work with patients known to have communicable infections, they change into other scrubs -- if only to avoid communicating those infections to other patients. When they do not, those scrubs are no more risky than any other streetwear, including that of people who visit patients in the hospital. If you're freaked out by the sight of people wearing scrubs in public then, yes, you are a germophobe.

https://www.vox.com/conversati... https://www.wired.com/story/pe...

He rented a room from a lobbyist who had dealings with the EPA for $50 a night. I'm sure any visitor to Washington could get a similar deal. The bed wasn't great though, others have described it as "a bit swampy".

I suppose he didn't like it either. So he had an aide get him a new one. From guess where?

His name is Seth Rich.

He died to expose the depth of the DNC and Obama Administration's corruption.

That is complete fucking bullshit.

Just because Fox made up some bullshit, doesn't make it true.

You should learn to use Google.

FALSE.

Of all the research on immigration's affects on jobs, there was only one study that found downward pressure, and that was only on low-skill workers without high-school educations. They looked at the impact of 125,000 cuban refugees from the Mariel Boatlift entering the miami job market over the period of just a couple of months. But on review, it turned out that the study's author, George Borjas, had basically cherry-picked his data. That the boatlift had no discernible impact on the labor trends that had started long before the boatlift and continued well after it.

All the other studies found either neutral, or more often positive effects on the labor market. That's because labor is not zero-sum - for example, more nannies means more stay-at-home-moms who can enter the workforce.

...American farmers are paid for by American tax dollars whether you consume dairy products or not.

This is why we have a 1.39 billion pound cheese surplus.

On a more serious note though; for this to be comparable to tobacco the oil companies would have had to know BEFORE the public how harmful oil was- and actively try suppressing the truth. As far as I am aware- oil companies didn't find out before the public- and the public continued to use oil after learning of the dangers.

That's because you are willfully ignorant. You don't want to know the truth. It's just a google search away, but you didn't ask because you didn't want to know. Well, I'm telling you anyway. Do people working for corporations really sell out our future for a cheeseburger? People do.

But the issue here isn't fairness or doing what is right. Ultimately professional sports are businesses. And they're not in the business of fair games, they're in the entertainment business.

This runs much deeper than that.

Why it's so much harder to predict winners in hockey than basketball — 5 June 2017

The NHL has a fairly high luck factor, and it's deliberate policy by the NHL to keep it this way. Lower scoring means that games remain undecided until the final minutes (preventing channel hoppers). It also means that the game outcomes are more random, meaning that every franchise—no matter how badly managed (hello, Edmonton)—has a shot of remaining in contention for most of the season.

It's blindingly obvious that cutting back on hooking, holding, and other forms of obstruction increases scoring and rewards actual talent.

But this isn't what the NHL as a professional business wants. What the NHL wants is the maximum number of viewers glued to soap opera–ish mediocrity.

Take the Bettman point: the worst idea I know of in all of professional sports. How it presently works:

2 win in regulation
2 win in overtime
2 win in shoot-out
1 loss in shoot-out
1 loss in overtime
0 loss in regulation

This simply encourages coaches to implement the trap and take no risks during regulation play; it encourages GMs to employ positionally responsible players with terrible hands, over another player of equal cost possessed of creativity and flair.

A correct formula would have negative convexity:

4 win in regulation
3 win in overtime
2 win in shoot-out
1 loss in shoot-out
0 loss in overtime
0 loss in regulation

This formula would substantially increase the skill factor within a few short years.

It's what the fans like to think they are paying for, but which they (mostly) are not getting. What we're getting instead is a Bettman kayfabe blow job.

Chances that robot referees would be employed to make this better, rather than worse, under current NHL governance: 0%.

Is it morals? More likely the employees are just foreign. And let's not kid ourselves, the employees from China are sending all the good info back home to their military.

If the President of the United States can work for the benefit of a foreign government, why shouldn't a Google worker?

https://www.vox.com/policy-and...

Current images provided by the Trump administration:

https://www.vox.com/policy-and...

These are not images from the Obama administration. These are from right now.

Qualcomm sold legally to ZTE. There was no problem with selling parts to ZTE before the sanctions.

ZTE broke the law by selling to Iran and North Korea. While the sanctions are in place, Qualcomm cannot sell to ZTE.

Why does Trump about jobs at a Chinese company that broke the law? There is some speculation of bribery, but there has been no investigation thus far.

Nah. You need to pay more attention to the news.

Ivanka Trump Wins China Trademarks, Then Her Father Vows to Save ZTE
Trump helps sanctioned Chinese phone maker after China delivers a big loan to a Trump project

Psychology Today is the best you can do? Whose side are you on, anyway?

The Lifespan of a Lie — 7 June 2018

About the author:

* Ben Blum was born and raised in Denver, Colorado.
* He holds a PhD in computer science from the University of California Berkeley.
* He was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow.
* He received an MFA in fiction from New York University, where he was awarded the New York Times Foundation Fellowship.

The author did mundo research, which including, near the end, an interview with Zimbardo himself, which included the following Frost–Nixon interaction:

"If [prisoners] said, 'I want to get out,' and you said, 'Okay,' then as soon as they left, the experiment would be over," Zimbardo explained. "All the prisoners would say, 'I want to get out.' There has to be a good reason now for them to get out. ... That's the whole point of the Pirandellian prison [Ed. note: Pirandello was an Italian playwright whose plays blended fiction and reality]. ... "

Zimbardo confirmed that David Jaffe had devised the rules with the guards, but tried to argue that he hadn't been lying when he told Congress [and others] that the guards had devised the rules themselves, on the grounds that Zimbardo himself had not been present at the time.

He at first denied that the experiment had had any political motive, but after I read him an excerpt from a press release disseminated on the experiment's second day explicitly stating that it aimed to bring awareness to the need for reform, he admitted that he had probably written it himself under pressure from Carlo Prescott, with whom he had co-taught a summer school class on the psychology of imprisonment.

The entire article is awesome. Read it now.

In summary, the entire experiment was conducted on the basis of publish or perish, and Zimbardo left few stones unturned—acting mainly through compliant Lieutenant Jaffe—to ensure that the end result was "publish".

Here's another link I dropped into a Slashdot thread a few days ago, of an academic whose pursuit of his local career incentive crossed more than a few lines:

Why the Joy of Cooking is going after a Cornell researcher — 28 February 2018

Plus, Orwellian popcorn swells enrollment and sells textbooks:

For psychology professors, the Stanford prison experiment is a reliable crowd-pleaser, typically presented with lots of vividly disturbing video footage. In introductory psychology lecture halls, often filled with students from other majors, the counterintuitive assertion that students' own belief in their inherent goodness is flatly wrong offers dramatic proof of psychology's ability to teach them new and surprising things about themselves.

On the other hand, there's a responsible, modern literature, such as Robert Sapolsky's Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (2017).

There are specific passages in there about the neurobiology of bad cops (under stress, unreliable neural pathways become faster and stronger than reliable neural pathways, operating entirely beneath the level of executive self-control).

Another recent book, Matthew P. Walker's Why We Sleep (2017) explains why—in modern society—operating at far less than our best has become de rigueur.

At the center of this book, with more laboratory studies than you can shake a stick at (many of these conducted until the cold, impartial eye of clinical fMRI scans),

[*] fMRI scans are cold and impartial when applied to slow, global brain phenomena such as sleep; for the fast and small, this, too, can be Wansinked.

I colourful

I said "Most people her age don't understand computer technology, and don't want to understand." Most people, not all.

I've known many people who responded like the stories say Hillary did.

My opinion: Hillary Clinton showed many, many times in many ways that she was not deeply logical. She exhibited the behavior of people I've known who didn't want to try to understand technology.

Did Hillary Clinton give any deeply insightful ideas when she was Secretary of State? None of which I am aware. It seemed to me that she lacked depth everywhere, not just concerning technology.

This story, Understanding Hillary, says she is admired by her co-workers, and only weak in elections. It has seemed to me that she is weak everywhere in public.

It's basically arguing that the technology is undergoing path dependence, which is no big surprise as it happens all the time in lots of areas.

Want an interesting path dependence?

Science, as an industry, is so busy defending themselves from climate science denialism (in the extreme case: even that it could, in principle, be right) that science tends to hold up peer review as an exalted process of cognitive righteousness (which it is, over a time base of 50-year internal feedback cycles).

However, at the same time, peer review is also a political mechanism to enforce path dependence, which systematically biases trivial incrementalism (insignificant career fodder is fine, so long as it knows its tiny, tiny place), over profound and potentially game-changing speculation (the proper onus here should be that any definite, predictive theory which can not be presently disproved is by default considered publishable, but that's not how it works—not if it runs against the grain of the endowed, old-timer consensus worldview). To some degree this is a budgetary bun fight, because without publication, no grants; so the gate-keepers of publication are implicitly also the gate keepers of funding opportunity.

Society pays a steep price for the 50-year bullshit-rejection convergence window of peer review (though it sure beats languishing in 3000-year traditions of metaphysical naval gazing).

To some degree, science kind of likes being marginalized by the climate science deniers, because it distracts from asking legitimate questions about just how broken some of these internal political processes really are (who can patiently pose these questions when you're shouting down accusations 24/7 that you're ten or a hundred times less competent than you actually are?)

———

Did I mention p-hacking? What an ultimate crock. Easily predictable 50-years ago, and now we're just getting to it.

Why the Joy of Cooking is going after Cornell's Brian Wansink — 28 February 2018

Preregistration of study designs: This is a huge safeguard against p-hacking. Preregistration means that scientists publicly commit to experimental design before they start collecting data. This makes it much harder to cherry-pick results.

What an amazing innovation. Someone hand the guy or gal who proposed that idea the Fields Medal.

———

Yes, all those virtuous climate scientists vigorously defending the ultimate truth machine of peer review sat around for decades barely lifting a finger to institute pre-registation of study design.

And these are the people who are going to save the planet from the greenhouse gas godzilla? Good luck with that. (My most cynical internal voice assigns a p_success_STP_G3_1v0 somewhere in the vicinity of Reagan's nakedly preposterous space laser (Strategic Defense Initiative).

"But boss, the stakes! But boss, the stakes!" cries the white-tuxedoed midget from Fantasy Island.

This is naked appeal to the Theory of Narrative Causality. If it must happen, it will happen.

This is what Terry Pratchett calls narrativium: the iron law that a million-to-one long shot happens nine time out of ten (precondition: all the stakes having arrived just in the nick of time at a synchronous planetary-alignment cross-road of dire urgency).

Narrative Causality was also the stock in trade enabling Reagan to float the SDI concept to the receipt of Educated Snickers Only: the stakes were sufficiently sky high to trigger narrativium normalization of million-to-one odds. (Education, by some magic power, is a potent form of narrativium kryptonite.)

You're completely wrong, 17 of them do, but you knew that already.

13 Russian nationals and three Russian companies were indicted on conspiracy charges, with some also being accused of identity theft. The charges related to a Russian propaganda effort designed to interfere with the 2016 campaign. The companies involved are the Internet Research Agency, often described as a âoeRussian troll farm,â and two other companies that helped finance it. The Russian nationals indicted include 12 of the agencyâ(TM)s employees and its alleged financier, Yevgeny Prigozhin.

Richard Pinedo: This California man pleaded guilty to an identity theft charge in connection with the Russian indictments, and has agreed to cooperate with Mueller.

All of Robert Muellerâ(TM)s indictments and plea deals in the Russia investigation so far
That we know of

And yet that that's not really not how the NFL works. The players have very detailed contracts that outline exactly what they are paid to do; here is an article discussing how the NFL is probably in violation of their contractual agreements with the player's unions. The whole "kneeling" requirement was never negotiated with the players. When the Federal government (via Trump) gets involved in demanding a specific group of people do specific things against their will far outside of anything relating to the welfare of "the people" the First Amendment comes into play. Add in the blatant lies and disinformation spread by Fox News about the Eagles insinuating they knelt during the Anthem (when they were one of the only teams that did nothing like this the whole season), to the point of the Federal government is ranting about it...

'For Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), however, Sloan's efforts weren't sufficient. "You should be fired," Warren told Sloan. "Wells Fargo needs to start over, and that won't happen until the bank rids itself of people like you who led it into this crisis." '

Attorney General to make a demand to Wells Fargo for damages on fake bank and credit card accounts (Nov. 29, 2017)

Wells Fargo cheated millions of customers. The Republican tax bill is about to hand it a big win. (Dec. 19, 2017)

It doesn't matter when the system is broken.

The rich end up with all the gains in productivity.

So does it matter if we raise minimum wage from $10 an hour to $15 an hour, if in the end that $5 ends up in the hands of the rich anyway?

(In case you're wondering how it gets there: one of the most common methods today is consumer debt)

Depending on who runs the numbers under Obama the national deficit rose by 7 to 10 trillion dollars. Almost doubling or doubling, again on who runs the numbers, off all presidents before him combine. That alone is a disaster.

You're talking debt not deficit. The debt jumped because he put all that off-the-books military spending in Iraq and Afghanistan under Bush back in the budget, where it belong. It wasn't being counted before, because [neocon magic]. Deficits actually decreased throughout the Obama years after jumping at the beginning.

More corrupt than Nixon? An you can prove this how?

Easy, by measuring the number of investigations and scandal-related resignations among cabinet members in the first year of his Presidency. Trump is off the charts. Go ahead, complain about "nothing proven in a court of law". Neither was Watergate. It's only a year in, give it time. Pruitt's leading the charge rather well.

Why can't you people just accept, despite his personal faults, he is actually doing a pretty decent job?

Because by any reasonable measure, he's not. His govt is plagued by dysfunction, can't get out of their own way. All he does is tweet about how awesome he is and how he's making America great again. Actual accomplishments: zero. Economic policy impacts: zero. We're still riding out the crest of the Obama economy. After that it's all downhill.

The one thing businesses need most is certainty. The Mad Tweeter changes his mind every few hours on matters of national security. There's zero consistency, zero planning, zero rational decision making. In short we're fucked.

Are you sure you aren't overestimating the effects of a very small but very noisy minority? I've never heard of people boycotting Solo, and I'd even heard of the Ep7 boycott which turned out to be literally 2 dudes on Twitter.

• There have been about 250 fatalities from school shootings over 18 years (excluding suicides and gang violence). That works out to (250)/(18) = 13.9 deaths per year. Since there are approximately 51 million K-12 students in the U.S., a student's odds of being killed in a school shooting in any given year are (51 million) / (13.9 per year) = 1 in 3.67 million.
• About 120 Americans are killed every year by deer. (325.7 million Americans) / (120 per year) = 1 in 2.71 million.

So a student is more likely to be killed by a deer than from a school shooting. Where are all the walk-outs and protests advocating deer population control?

For some perspective on the scope of the school shooting problem, look at the stats the CDC puts out. For 2015, the leading causes of death among the 15-19 year old demographic were:

3,919 deaths - Accidents (mostly automobile accidents and drug overdoses). 282x more than school shootings.
2.061 deaths - Suicide. 148x more.
1,587 deaths - Homicide (mostly outside school, and gang related). 114x more.
583 deaths - Malignant neoplasms (cancer). 42x more.
306 deaths - Heart disease. 22x more.
195 deaths - Birth defects. 14x more.
72 deaths - Influenza (the flu). 5.2x more.
63 deaths - Chronic lower respiratory diseases. 4.5x more.
61 deaths - Cerebrovascular diseases. 4.4x more.
52 deaths - Diabetes. 3.7x more.
41 deaths - Complications from pregnancy and childbirth. 3x more.

A protest over excessive rates of teen pregnancy could potentially save 3x more lives than a protest over school shootings. Likewise, teaching kids not to each too many sweets, to exercise, not to smoke, get the flu shot, use sunscreen, not to join gangs, to buckle their seat belt, not to use drugs, and offering them counseling for depression, would all be much more productive uses of our time and effort than worrying about or debating school shootings. For that matter, controlling deer populations to reduce the number of fatalities from striking deer could potentially save 1.35x as many students' lives as lost to school shootings.

If you want to tackle a life-threatening issue that students face, probably the best choice is suicide. It results in more than a hundred times as many student deaths as school shootings. But when's the last time you saw the media run a story about teen suicide? The only reason school shootings are even on the radar is because of the media using them to play the "think of the children!" card against guns.

You do make an important observation, though: it is leftists that have been going around after WWII to make groundless accusations against others of being fascists and neo-Nazis. Every Republican president over the last couple of decades has been denounced as a "fascist", "Nazi", and/or "white supremacist" by the left. Every conservative commentator or intellectual has been denounced as such.

Actually, it's conservative commentators that have a problem with it. Perhaps not every single one, but enough, that you're just being a hypocrite and fraud, protesting your own crimes that you ascribe to others.

And then you one-up'd it: By going further.

Perhaps you can blame Democrats for it, you do tend to falsely accuse them of being responsible for everything you do.

That is a last resort and to take that from responsible gun owners is crazy. If I wasn't home, I would want my wife to have access to a gun because while she waits for the cops, she would be otherwise defenseless.

Get a dog. It will make you safer than owning a gun will, and won't make you more likely to commit suicide or kill a family member.

If you have a dog, that home intruder won't even try to come into your house. Bad guys avoid dogs, but they look to steal guns

A gun in the house increases the risk to your family.

https://academic.oup.com/aje/a...

https://www.scientificamerican...

https://www.vox.com/cards/gun-...

You shouldn't care about school shootings either. There have been about 250 deaths in school shootings over 18 years (non-gang, non-suicide), or about 14 per year. Since there are approximately 51 million K-12 students in the U.S., a student's chances of being killed in a non-gang, non-suicide school shooting in any given year are about (51 million students) / (14 deaths/year) = 1 in 3.6 million.

You're more likely to be killed by a deer. About 120 Americans are killed by deer every year. (325.7 million Americans) / (120 deaths/year) = 1 in 2.7 million chance of being killed by a deer each year. Do you wring your hands over the possibility of being killed by a deer, and hold marches to demanding the deer population be controlled?

The U.S. causes of death statistics are readily available from the CDC website. For 2015, the leading causes of death for the 15-19 year old demographic were:

3,919 deaths - Accidents (mostly automobile accidents and drug overdoses)
2.061 deaths - Suicide
1,587 deaths - Homicide (mostly outside school, and gang related)
583 deaths - Malignant neoplasms (cancer)
306 deaths - Heart disease
195 deaths - Birth defects
72 deaths - Influenza (the flu)
63 deaths - Chronic lower respiratory diseases
61 deaths - Cerebrovascular diseases
52 deaths - Diabetes
41 deaths - Complications from pregnancy and childbirth

All of these represent a greater risk to students than the 14 deaths per year from school shootings.

Even as a "business" man Trump had exactly one trick - screw over people that trusted him. The Trump University scam was all about conning regular schmoes who believed he would help them (and don't forget he agreed to pay $25M in restitution to them). Meanwhile the guy was notorious for stiffing the blue-collar workers that he contracted with on his buildings.

But when it comes down to negotiating with people who don't trust him, he either folds like a wet blanket or flips the table and walks away. That might work in the business world where there is always a new sucker around the corner. But in politics, there isn't an endless supply of suckers, you have to keep going back to the same table with the same people.

Also, this is only partly related but every time he screams "witch-hunt" people should know that Mueller has already charged 19 people, 3 companies and secured 5 guilty pleas. One year in, even the watergate investigation didn't have as many results as that.

Yep, thank you for serving me to demonstrate how the public is deceived by Fox News, Rightwingers and other such KKK-s. You server well as a demonstration exhibit, once again we thank you.

Now slink off to your favorite safe place (Fox & Friends? Stormfront? WSJ?).

PS: https://www.vox.com/cards/poli... - here's your hard data.

The problem is that car accidents are in general vastly under-reported by the media. Until the last couple years, the single most dangerous thing you did was to get into a car (surpassed only recently by drug overdoses). On average, about 1 in 102 people you know are fated to die in a car accident. Compare to the odds of some of the other things the media devotes a disproportionately high (or low) amount of coverage time:

Suicide: 1 in 91
Police killed on duty: 1 in 104 (1.1 million officers / (135 per year * 78 year lifespan normalization)
Homicide by gun: 1 in 285
Drowning: 1 in 1,086
Fire: 1 in 1,506
Choking: 1 in 3,138
Killed by police: 1 in 4,336 (325.7 million / (963 * 78 year lifespan)
Complications from pregnancy: 1 in 5,965 (325.7 million / (700 * 78 year normalization)
Terrorism in U.S.: 1 in 28,033 (325.7 million / (3277 * 78 year lifespan / 22 years sample))
Killed by deer: 1 in 34,797 (325.7 million / (120 * 78 year lifespan)
Gun accident: 1 in 8305
Lightning: 1 in 114,195
School shootings: 1 in 121,033 (325.7 million / (138 * 78 year lifespan normalization / 4 years sample))
Dog attack: 1 in 132,614
Plane crash: 1 in 205,552
Terrorism in U.S. excluding 9/11: 1 in 248,954
Shark attack: 1 in 3,690,101 (325.7 million / (43 * 78 year lifespan / 38 year sample)

If news reports were truly unbiased, you'd expect to see:

Roughly 3x as many reports about fatal car accidents than gun homicides.
5x as many reports of women dying from pregnancy than reports of terrorism fatalities (including 9/11, 77x without).
39x as many stories about people dying of choking on food, versus school shootings.
43x as many stories about fatal car accidents than police shootings.
91x as many reports about suicides than gun accidents.
Over 100x as many stories about people being killed by deer, than killed by sharks.

The truth is the media picks and chooses which stories they want to publicize, whether it be because of their unusual and provocative nature (e.g. Tesla crashes, plane crashes, school shootings, shark attacks), or to serve a political agenda.