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USPS Discriminates Against 'Atheist' Merchandise
fish waffle writes "Suspecting that their strongly branded 'Atheist' products may be treated differently by more religiously-oriented postal regions, Kickstarter success Atheist Shoes conducted an experiment. They sent 178 packages to 89 people in different parts of the U.S., each person receiving one package prominently branded as 'Atheist' merchandise, and one not. The results: packages with the atheist label were nearly 10 times more likely to be 'lost,' and took on average 3 days longer to show up when they did. Control experiments were also done in Europe and Germany — it's definitely a USPS problem."
what to label the feces I mail. 3 extra shitty days in transit.
Maybe they are simply falling prey to Acts of God.
What the hell is an atheist product? Practically everything is an atheist product.
Yeah omnipotent beings can't do that on their own. Well, they could if hey existed.
Need to post some boxes that say 'contains god' and see if it gets there quicker than the control.
"XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, use more." - Anonymous Coward
Jesus didn't wear shoes -- why should you?
Their experiment is not correllation/causation.
They have identified something which is painfully obvious. The samples in this experiment are large enough to prove that the atheist branding has affect on the delivery and that it only happens like this in the US.
This detail difference is a strong indicator as to the motivations behind what is going on. In short, "unprofessional behavior." With all the troubles the USPS is having, these professionals should be more concerned about delivering value in the service they provide. Instead, the political affiliations (religion is politics, don't kid yourself) of participants entrusted with delivery are affecting how well they do their jobs.
When they are at home or in their groups, let them say and think whatever they want. Let them march and protest and hold up signs expressing themselves. But when they are out there delivering things? Now they are interfering with commerce. Sorry, hommies, but government doesn't play dat.
Sorry, hommies, but government doesn't play dat.
I'm thinking that results of the experiment disagree with you.
Sounds more like a USA problem than a USPS problem, this being an outlier of religious beliefs among wealthy nations. Atheist Shoes needed to send packages via FedEx and UPS in the same way to actually test this, and apparently didn't.
A true study would have equal numbers marked and unmarked. Also, did they change their origination point? If not, that could also skew the data.
If I had a dollar every time an atheist cried like a little bitch.....
I guess not reading the article makes you ask stupid questions.
Equal number of marked & unmarked packages. both sent out at the same time. both sent to the same address. They did this with 89 different people.
Be seeing you...
Does that mean ... they have no sole?
I'm sure there's a passage in the bible somewhere about delaying the goods in transit belonging to the non-believers. Probably in Levictus, alongside the bit about giving them bad haircuts if you're a barber.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
FTFA (which all the text is on a bloody image, I had to type that shit. You can thank me below.)
Now repeat the experiment with labels saying things like
'porn'
'lots of money inside'
'this package contains: newest iPhone'
I'm really interested in the outcome.
New theory: people love atheist products, so they get snatched more often by the postman.
It would be really interesting to do this experiment with tracking devices that logged their GPS locations periodically over 3G, and had multiple week-long battery life. The 'lost' packages could be tracked and it could be determined where they ended up. Mail fraud is a federal crime, but if it became a big national story with media shining light on the person(s) who were caught doing it, then it would likely result in some change, people going to prison, and the system improving to better serve the recipients of packages.
It's one that doesn't have a sole?
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
Yeah, for a god who is apparently such a petty asshole he wants people's mail to be lost if they don't believe in him, but is too fucking lazy to do it himself.
Well you took the fucking stupid crown.
All I can see is a plain white shoe.
What feature identifies it as 'atheist'?
"New theory: people love atheist products, so they get snatched more often by the postman."
Still shows a serious problem a UPS
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Ah, you would be one of those that don't really "get" the whole Enlightenment foundations of the US.
shoes cant believe in god silly, they have no soul
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
The samples in this experiment are large enough to prove that the atheist branding has affect on the delivery
Large samples? 1 non-branded and 9 branded articles went missing. That's not a huge number of cases to examine. The "3 days longer" statistic seems to be massively skewed by a single non-representative parcel that took 37 days later than its counterpart. And even if their statistics were correct, all they have demonstrated is that branded parcels took longer than unbranded - they should have also sent parcels with "God is great" on them, or some such if they wanted to demonstrate the nature of the bradning was decisive.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Hah, you fell for the troll.
Everybody knows that nobody reads the summary. We barely make it through the first couple of words of the title before posting.
How else can you get the frist post?
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
RTFA
each person receiving one package prominently branded as 'Atheist' merchandise, and one not
So equal numbers marked and unmarked. Can't get more equal than 1:1 ratio. (actually this was in the summary, so RTFS).
They all left Berlin
The "origination point" was outside the US. Packages that did not go through the US were not delayed or lost. Wherever in the US the problem is, the problem is at the USPS. Whether some locations in the US may or may not treat marked "atheist" mail better or worse does not make the general issue any better.
If I had a piece of earwax every time some religious person tried to make up excuses for his fellow religious men, I'd have more dollars worth or earwax than you would have.
FWIW, one of the 89 unmarked packages was lost too, so USPS is doing a bad job either way.
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This detail difference is a strong indicator as to the motivations behind what is going on. In short, "unprofessional behavior." With all the troubles the USPS is having, these professionals should be more concerned about delivering value in the service they provide. Instead, the political affiliations (religion is politics, don't kid yourself) of participants entrusted with delivery are affecting how well they do their jobs.
Unless the "lost" packages are the result of "concerned citizens" swiping them off of porches/out of mailboxes and tossing them in the trash (or into the book-burning-mobile). I grew up in a "religiously oriented" part of the US and had so many Darwin fish vandalized or removed from my pickup that I eventually switched to sticker on the inside of the rear window. After that I just got nasty notes and middle fingers from other drivers.
Actually, I wrote my thesis on life experience.
Is Germany suddenly no longer part of Europe?
A bunch of "rebels" who wanted to be "controversial." Who then started a company.
Another theory: a shoe company has a brilliant marketing idea to get free publicity based on the fact that a lot of people don't understand the difference between what they have done (or claim to have done) and a serious scientific study.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
This is only one sample and not repeated, therefore not proof.
What I would like to see is the distribution of the missing parcels. I would check the tracking on the missing packages and see if they were on the same truck. If they were on the same truck did that truck have an accident?
If your shoes have no sole you need to return them ASAP for a refund.
I would believe it if it were done by an impartial third party with a good reputation for professional survey taking, such as J.D. Power & Associates.
Oh this one was done by Atheist Shoes themselves? Nevermind.
I once did an internship for a company that shipped second hand business (=expensive) computer hardware on pallets.
Depending on which delivery service they used (I won't name the company), the products were either wrapped in clear foil or more expensive black foil.
Apparently, if they didn't wrap it in black foil, the chances of the pallet being lost increased significantly.
More on topic; as somebody pointed out on that shoe-company site; postal services are supposed to look for suspiciously marked packages. A package heavily marked "Atheist" might be considered a be a bit suspicious, especially in the US where the issue of religion seems to be a bit more polarized anyway. Screaming a (non-)religious opinion where non it expected does generally make one stand out from the crowd.
They should have included packages marked "Muslim", "Christian", "Neo-nazi" and "Non-religious", but I doubt the shoe-company would have ended up with the same amount of free advertising.
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So international/transatlantic handling of Deutsch Post is also a possible culprit? They should have shipped from USA to eliminate the international (as in not within EU economic zone) variable. That said, its still quite plausible the problem is on the US side, but if your going to claim to be scientific then actually be scientific.
Is it Atheist brand like they claim, or is it just the effect of displaying the content of the box? After all, a plain brown box is less likely to be stolen than one that says it has pricey new shoes in it.
A better test would be to have, as the control, boxes that say "Nike Air Jordans" (or whatever the closest competitor) and see if Atheist shoes get lost more than the Nikes.
If you read the article, they did lose 11 packages, which is why they conducted the study in the first place.
And what, throw anything more 'suspicious' looking away 10 times as often as they normal? Sounds like a pretty stupid idea even if that was what they were trying to do.
of the strength of America's fundamentalist undercurrent.
or "Anthrax Corporation"
A package heavily marked "Atheist" might be considered a be a bit suspicious, especially in the US where the issue of religion seems to be a bit more polarized anyway.
So explain to me: what exactly is the difference between the USA, and Afghanistan under the Taleban?
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
They didn't send out enough packages to be able to conclude anything other than the USPS giving a really shitty and unrelyable service. We'd need a couple of thousands more to conclude anything else. Also you'd have to factor in if the USPS had a really bad day.
20 minutes into the future
According to TFA, the only difference was the packing tape. It was either white with no info or with Atheist - Atheist - Atheist written all over.
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head
All I can see is a plain white shoe.
What feature identifies it as 'atheist'?
That'd be the soles...(!)
No, really. It's the soles. Go to their web site and look for yourself.
No sig today...
I noticed the same comment and it struck me as incredibly stupid.
USA post offices look for abnormal packages. Most drugs are sent in unusual packages so they are opened searched and resealed. If the tape said "GOD'S LAST STAND!" or "HAIL MARY!" you would have seen the same problem. One of those would have made for a better control.
I have my doubts about the drug thing. Why would people send their drugs in packages that look suspicious? Of course, if the post office only searches suspicious packages, all the drugs they'll find will be in suspicious packages, so mabye they feel like they are on the right track...
Now just because it is stupid, does not mean it can't be a real post office guideline.
Follow the shoe!
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head
Better pizza.
So it could come down to the parcels being marked as suspicious, going to the suspicious parcels department (leading to a 3 day delay), where one guy now has a nice line in selling second hand shoes in the bar after work (leading to higher incidence of "lost" packages).
Nice to see I'm not the only one to think that, I'll put this right next to "Ubuntu Satanic Edition" (no shit, look it up, complete with pentagrams and death metal) on the "We named this just to be "controversial" and "edgy" because that is what our focus group said it was" pile.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
So international/transatlantic handling of Deutsch Post is also a possible culprit? They should have shipped from USA to eliminate the international (as in not within EU economic zone) variable..
Which part of "the only difference was what was written on the box" is confusing you?
No sig today...
That is what the article says.
Maybe because your experience doesn't include shipping packages with prominent 'Atheist' branding?
Yeesssss... And less than 1% of non-Atheist branded packages were lost.
Yes, you certainly seem to be hard of understanding.
Just like Hitler, they went for the Poles first.
Worse? How could it be any worse...?
No sig today...
Large samples? 1 non-branded and 9 branded articles went missing. That's not a huge number of cases to examine. The "3 days longer" statistic seems to be massively skewed by a single non-representative parcel that took 37 days later than its counterpart
I would suggest that you take a relevant course in statistics. It is pretty obvious that you are rambling and reasoning without any understanding of the topic.
And even if their statistics were correct
The linked report clearly states the statistical methods they used and the results. If you want to criticize, just point out the incorrect statistical test and why it is not suitable in this situation, or why their conclusions are wrong. If you can't do that, you have no basis saying that their statistics are incorrect.
all they have demonstrated is that branded parcels took longer than unbranded
No. They have demonstrated that Atheist branded parcels took longer than unbranded parcels.
>and the USPS has never had anywhere near a 5% loss rate in my experience.
That's kinda the point of this whole thing. If true, the numbers are far too high to be statistical noise and indicate a trend.
Anyone who's ever actually sent a package through USPS should know that they explicitly recommend you destroy or cover any non-USPS related markings or labels, explaining that it may lead to delays or failure to deliver.
=Smidge=
I'll explain right after you explain to me why Afghanistan under Taliban regime should be considered average with regards religious polarization.
If your only defense is to compare with extremes, you've already lost the argument.
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It has the Darwin fish and the word "Atheist" stamped in the sole profile.
Actually, 178 packages.
How do you get that, from 11 missing out of 178? Even if had been 11 out of 89, it wouldn't be 'the majority'.
10 out of 89 'Atheist' branded packages were 'lost'. 1 out of 89 non-branded packages were lost.
Heh.
Their evidence suggesting the USPS discriminates against atheism is a hell of a lot stronger than any religion has for the existence of their Gods.
And they thought it said "A Theist".
They didn't want those pesky Theists getting any shoes and walking around the neighborhood knocking on doors.
What?! Zombies can read? Shit, I was going to hide behind the entrance of my favourite restaurant!
I think the issue here is people mistaking Atheism for a religion (which it patently is not) and using it as a lifestyle-label. Talk about not getting it.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Surely the research has many flaws, but they sent out 89 unmarked packages and 89 marked packages. 1 unmarked package was lost, 9 unmarked packages. Already this is much more than just a statistical anomally. The probability of this being a random occurance is incredibly slim.
If you consider losing even 2 packages out of 89 to be normal,the chance of losing 9 packages out of 89 is less than 0.001%.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
"I'll explain right after you explain to me why Afghanistan under Taliban regime should be considered average with regards religious polarization."
It isn't. Neither is the USA.
Hence the request.
USPS != UPS
They are completely different organizations. USPS is the United States Postal Service, i.e. the government corporation that pretends to deliver crap. UPS = United Parcel Service, i.e. those brown-shirted dudes who intentionally smash your package with hammers to make it fit in the truck.
I am sure 9 vs 1 is a statistically significant difference.
Whether the nature of branding affects the results remains unproven, as you say.
If you want to prove that apples are magnetic, you don't just drop an apple over a metal plate and claim magnetism attracted the apple to the plate. You try to disprove other possibilities.
That's what they did. If you question it, do your own experiments. That's the real win in science. You can always test it yourself.
Learn to love Alaska
Now we have to consider the most likely reasons for this findings and perform further studies to find out which of those reasons are real.
Many of the current posters seem to be in the denial state: Can't happen or is just a statistical fluke.
"Just like Hitler, they went for the Poles first"
I thought the Nowegians were the first to the Poles (Nort and south anyway)
It's a sandal!
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
That assumes that each individual package was independent and random.
A single unlucky or freak event could affect multiple samples (for example if a sack holding 6 atheist packages gets lost or damaged).
To use a classic example. I could carry out a survey for people's favourite dog and have 99 out of 100 say poodle. If you assumed it to be truly random, the chances of that not indicating that American is a nation of poodle lovers is astronomical. However what if I then revealed that all these people had been asked in the same morning at the national poodle lovers convention? Would my survey still be nailed on? Even if I went to great lengths to randomly pick random attendees?
If it's suspicious they're supposed to seize it and turn it over to the USPIS for investigation.
Throwing shit in the garbage is only for waste.
So international/transatlantic handling of Deutsch Post is also a possible culprit? They should have shipped from USA to eliminate the international (as in not within EU economic zone) variable..
Which part of "the only difference was what was written on the box" is confusing you?
None of it. You are confused, you are failing to consider that people in *both* international Deutsch Post and USPS were reading what was written. Successful deliveries in domestic Deutsch Post do not rule out problems in the international handling.
Your presumption that just because God *won't* do something means he *can't* do it is flawed.
There's plenty of crap a sentient being can refrain from doing that it's perfectly capable of.
And the czech borders were already overrun in 1938 and confirmed in Munich Sep 29 1938.
So the packages were teleported from Germany warehouses to USPS facilities? If not, GP has a point, and the transatlantic shipping or customs could be to blame.
Did they cross check with similar sized, similar colored, random dictionary words-labeled packages?
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
And here ladies and gentlemen we have fine specimen of religious reasoning - "I don't believe it, so it cannot be true"
My expereince with USPS is that it can lose anything all the time.
My grandmother and mother once sent me birthday cards on the same day from the same post office.
One arrived 2 days later as it should have, the other took 3 weeks. They used the same labels for the address.
the USPS sucks period. try using their tracking system. it only provides updates after the package has been delivered.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
I suppose that you don't trust study on reliability of nuclear power plant ? There has been only 3 major accident, the sample is too small.
Have you heard of Atheist shoes before? Not me.
Tracking a package means it gets special treatment. Tracking packages means people can be held responsible for their actions. In those cases, the method would affect the outcome of the experiment.
But I like that you pointed out that it could be customs acting on the "suspicious" nature of the packaging. But it's only suspicious if you're into politics.
The experiment shows that most of the stuff got through just fine. Only 10 packages went missing but 9 of the 10 were the branded. That's a pretty high rate which can't easily be explained by randomness.
Still, I hope they do the experiment again. Undoubtedly, the outcome would be different. I suspect the USPS and customs services have been briefed on this already.
I would have thought that atheists pose no threat to national security or to any religious group. They simply go about their business or are there fundamentalist atheists who disrupt religious groups?
I propose that the same experiment be carried out with the word 'Muslim' replacing 'Atheist'. Discarding 'to be expected' security issues, I wonder how many parcels would go missing?
Now repeat the experiment with labels saying things like
Well, the same experiment with "fragile" boxes containing an accelerometer showed that they get beaten up far, far worse than an unmarked box.
Of course, for that one, we didn't really need more proof - I get somewhere around 100 assorted deliveries per year, all in great shape; even when they arrive in torrential rain and sit outside all day, I find them neatly bagged, perfectly safe and dry... Unless the sender stupidly marked them "fragile". Then I get a box at least badly frayed on all sides, often damp (even when delivered in dry weather, seriously, WTF), frequently with the corners blown out or other large inexplicable holes in the sides. I honestly don't think I've ever received a "fragile" package that didn't look like a second-hand box-fort from Afghanistan.
Sad, really... I mean, most of us don't exactly love our jobs. We may enjoy some parts of it, but on the whole, we'd still rather sleep in. But we get up every day to earn an honest day's pay. If you need to slack off a bit, hey, just don't get caught; but when you start taking out your lack of a fulfilling life on the very products they pay you to handle - GTFO.
'porn'
'lots of money inside'
'this package contains: newest iPhone'
These are things that a substantial portion of population might be immediately tempted to steal, but something simply labeled "atheist"? How many times have you been tempted to steal an atheist?
Ezekiel 23:20
That assumes that each individual package was independent and random.
A single unlucky or freak event could affect multiple samples (for example if a sack holding 6 atheist packages gets lost or damaged).
You make a good point - but given that two otherwise-identical packages were sent to each address at the same time, what are the chances that all the "atheist" packages would be put in one sack, and all the plain ones in another? Isn't the more plausible hypothesis that either packages would be assigned to sacks (/planes/trucks/etc) at random, or that ones going to the same address would have a much higher probability of ending up together? In either case, the probability of the sort of bias you mention is much reduced.
Need to type accents and special characters in Windows? Use FrKeys
I was thinking the same, sending the "unmarked" package with some other kind of tape on would have been a nice comparison. But taped packages arrived fine in Europe, maybe we are just more used to red tape over here.
"What the hell is an "atheist shoe"?"
It's a shoe that doesn't let you kneel for anybody, imaginary or not.
In a universe sadly not our own, someone resembling Morgan Freeman appears behind those people and asks them to guess which commandment they're breaking.
New theory: people love atheist products, so they get snatched more often by the postman.
That would explain disappearing packages, but how would it explain delays?
Hmm:
Way to go with your philosophical insights there AC! I'm enlightened.
And what is the chance that out of 89x2 packages, 6 labeled "atheist" end up in the same sack, but no unlabeled ones get there? Unless the label had an effect on correlation between packages...
USPS is the United States Postal Service, i.e. the government corporation that pretends to deliver crap.
So then, don't taunt them by putting tape with the word Atheist on it...
UPS = United Parcel Service, i.e. those brown-shirted dudes who intentionally smash your package with hammers to make it fit in the truck.
So then, don't taunt them by putting tape with the word Fragile on it...
It's not suspicious in itself. It's just an easy way to identify a bunch of packages coming from the safe supplier from a distance. My experience is that stuff with heavy branding gets inspected by customs more often.
9 out of 10 is a high proportion but until outside factors are eliminated (for example rather than "atheist" tape, use "Christian" or even something neutral like "Shoes", not just leaving it unmarked), and a more concerted effort to make the sampling more random (different origins, different times, different German postal agencies), it'd be too dangerous to draw any sort of conclusion.
Still wouldn't explain delays. Unless the "concerned citizens" are then later tortured by their conscience, and return the item...
Kickstarter atheist shoe company reports discrimination in USA. No red flags there. I believe them. I'm certain it's not a publicity stunt.
Actually, IAAS (I am a statistician) and the statistical tests that they used are the appropriate ones for this study. Assuming they're not faking the data, they have done the analysis correctly.
Ah, thank you -- I hadn't noticed that connection. I did think I would really like to see the data for myself, to find just such an anomaly.
If the "average of 3 days longer" statistic is really caused by that single outlier (i.e., if taking that out makes them about even), then it basically counts as a lie: while what they are saying is technically accurate, they know it will be interpreted as "the typical delivery took 3 days longer", which is not the same thing.
Hard to see how the 9:1 ratio of lost packages could be such an anomaly though...
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
Depends how they were handed over to the postal service. They may have been handed over sorted already by the store. They may have been sorted by a postal worker who thought they were all part of the same batch after they were handed over. There's no way of knowing if something like this occurred which is why using a random method is so important.
Excellent, so at 1% for usps insurance, and with a product that has enormous markup on it (probably >80% for hipster shoes), this business will be profiting with 5% higher sales. Not to mention increasing their profile with their target market due to the religious persecution of the USPS.
God works in mysterious ways.
No, it's a feature. Go read their website.
No sig today...
Your presumption of there being a god is flawed so that makes your response just as flawed.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
That would be why they did the control experiment where they shipped them to other countries apart from the USA.
No sig today...
They have a typo in their URL at the bottom of their infographic? Or are they saying that atheisberlin.com doesn't exist along with God?
The phrase is "righteous dude".
No sig today...
damn, the God of Fedex made me do that typo
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Anyone who's ever actually sent a package through USPS should know that they explicitly recommend you destroy or cover any non-USPS related markings or labels, explaining that it may lead to delays or failure to deliver.
Unfortunately for you, you have failed to understand their admonishment and are therefore repeating it when it is inapplicable. That applies to warning labels (e.g. ORM-D numbers) as well as bar codes and addresses, and has nothing to do with decorative tape.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The pastor of the local Presbyterian church in America isn't likely to raise up a mob to come beat you to death if you're accused of burning a Bible.
Someone who used to work at the Danish postal service (which may or may not be treating fragile packages the same way), explained this:
They have this large box on wheels they put the packages in, so they can easily roll them into a truck. Large heavy packages at the bottom, fragile packages on top, so they don't get damaged.
When the truck arrives at the destination, these boxes are rolled out and emptied, by TURNING THEM UPSIDE DOWN.
So, if the labeled and unlabeled packages traveled in pairs, why didn't the unlabeled package, coming from the same place and addressed to the same recipient, also get lost or delayed? If there was malice involved, wouldn't it affect both packages?
I grew up in a "religiously oriented" part of the US and had so many Darwin fish vandalized or removed from my pickup that I eventually switched to sticker on the inside of the rear window.
I had a darwin fish stolen from my car in Santa Cruz. Fucking religious wingnuts are everywhere. You're best off without any stickers on your car, though. They're the most reliable indicator of road rage.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Are you then going on to assert that it's acceptable to delay their packages because they're being clever? And if not, why is this observation worth making?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
They don't provide any actual data or proof on the site.
So they're lying?
I find it hard to believe that out of 189 packages, that enough were lost in total that branded because that would mean a minimum of 11/189 packages were lost, and the USPS has never had anywhere near a 5% loss rate in my experience.
Conclusion: This isn't accidental loss, it's deliberate. Somebody at the USPS saw packages with "Atheist" written on them and did something.
No sig today...
I would believe it if it were done by an impartial third party with a good reputation for professional survey taking, such as J.D. Power & Associates.
Oh this one was done by Atheist Shoes themselves? Nevermind.
Logical fallacy, appeal to authority. If you have a particular problem with the statistical methods involved, which are described in the article, you should raise that issue. But your comment as it stands is utterly without merit.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That commandment, apparently, was not taught to the US "christians".
The people who do this sort of thing are also in your government and education system. Making policies that affect you.
No sig today...
So when they repeat the experiment, and they lose 11 of the marked packages and 0 of the unmarked does is suddenly become "USPS loses infinitely more of our packages" or conversely 10 of one and 2 of the other "5 times more likely"
I don't even know the name of your logical fallacy, but creating a situation which didn't happen in your mind and then commenting on it is definitely one of them.
There's also the issue of controlling for sample bias, I'm guessing that the recipients were either existing punters or friends (hence participating in the experiment) and could thus conveniently "lose" their marked packages
And I'm sure you're a rapist and mass murderer.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What I find incredible is that even one parcel out of 200 got lost... WTF
My expereince with USPS is that it can lose anything all the time.
I don't think I've ever had the USPS lose anything sent to or from me. They have misdelivered an item or two, but they managed to get them back and deliver them a couple days later. My address is the same as an address up the road but with digits transposed. The road actually has a different name at that point, but UPS has gotten it wrong, too. They delivered about three reams of legal documents to me once, with a message on it about only being for the named recipient.
My grandmother and mother once sent me birthday cards on the same day from the same post office.
One arrived 2 days later as it should have, the other took 3 weeks. They used the same labels for the address.
I'm afraid you really don't have a statistically significant sample.
the USPS sucks period. try using their tracking system. it only provides updates after the package has been delivered.
That has not been my experience at all.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
They performed control experiments where the destination went to other parts of the world without that problem.
Their control packages reportedly went to "Germany and Europe". A better control would have been Canada, China and Japan, as the processing for non-European, overseas countries is certainly different.
Hard to see how the 9:1 ratio of lost packages could be such an anomaly though...
It's not the ratio - it's the fact that it's based on only 10 events. Just think - if one more non-branded package had gone through, the ratio would have halved. When would that next parcel have been lost? Would it have been on the 90th send, or the 180th? We don't know. If you were trying for statistical rigour, you'd want to repeat the experiment until you were satisfied that a few extra events on either side wouldn't have a significant event. Consider, if they'd had 90 branded lost, and 10 non-branded lost, the ratio would have made exactly the same as presented, but an extra event on either side would have had a far lower impact on the actual ratio.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
You're new theory fails the Occam's Razor.
What's more likely, a group of religious nuts are interfering with mail clearly against their religion in a country that is well known for it's amazingly high number of religious nuts?
Or that a bunch of people all have an incredibly keen interest in stealing the lovely and ever so popular [insert product no one has ever heard of here].
If they were actually sending iPhones then your theory would pass Occam's Razor, and above all would actually be very likely.
If you have a particular problem with the statistical methods involved
His reservation is with the trustworthiness of the experimenters. He thinks they're making this shit up.
Amazing, can't even rely on the post office to send your unbelieving-in-god parcel... :) how ungodly! :)
Of course, for that one, we didn't really need more proof - I get somewhere around 100 assorted deliveries per year, all in great shape; even when they arrive in torrential rain and sit outside all day, I find them neatly bagged, perfectly safe and dry... Unless the sender stupidly marked them "fragile". Then I get a box at least badly frayed on all sides, often damp (even when delivered in dry weather, seriously, WTF), frequently with the corners blown out or other large inexplicable holes in the sides. I honestly don't think I've ever received a "fragile" package that didn't look like a second-hand box-fort from Afghanistan.
You need to switch to a different delivery company, then. I've had that problem with DHL (seriously... they left a $600 computer monitor sitting on my front stoop because I wasn't home... thankfully my next-door neighbour saw it and rescued it so the hooligans on the other side didn't "liberate" it).
But with Purolator especially, I've never had a problem. I've also never had an issue with UPS, but I'm not in the states, so they may be different there.
Two things though: the first is that the USPS uses a lot of automatic sorting these days so there aren't as many people that see the packages and that is the second point, the odds are very good that these all went through the same hub when they arrived in the US. I'd say the odds are very good that this isn't some systemic "The USPS has a problem with atheists" but more of a "Hey, someone at USPS has a problem with atheists." Without seeing the raw tracking data though, it's really hard to know what is going on.
Their evidence suggesting the USPS discriminates against atheism is a hell of a lot stronger than any religion has for the existence of their Gods.
Depends on what tracking data looks like for the packages. If all of them are routed through the same hub then I'd say the evidence is that there is one person at USPS that discriminates against atheism as opposed to an organization of something like 574,000 employees. With that many people the odds are pretty good that a couple of them are atheists as well.
His reservation is with the trustworthiness of the experimenters. He thinks they're making this shit up.
If he has some evidence to those ends, or a specific reason why we should doubt their trustworthiness, then he should share it. Otherwise, he should stop FUDding.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Do they even get tracking info on international packages handled through post? If not, then they are relying on the reporting of people ordering atheist-logo'd shoes, who may have motivation to skew the reported outcome. Even if the shipper themselves have no such motivation. The reliability is even worse if these were test packages sent to consenting participants and not actual orders.
I grew up in a "religiously oriented" part of the US and had so many Darwin fish vandalized or removed from my pickup that I eventually switched to sticker on the inside of the rear window. After that I just got nasty notes and middle fingers from other drivers.
So this surprises you, somehow? You freely acknowledge that you grew up in an area with a lot of fundamentalists, and are surprised that people might be offended by you loudly advertising your belief in something that disagrees with their beliefs?
You're as bad as the Christians, if you don't understand why they may be offended by that.
No, you inferred surprise. At the time I was a teenager and felt the need to distinguish my truck from all the Jesus fish, bumper stickers telling me I was going to hell, crucifixes hanging from rearview mirrors, etc. Now I don't own a car and live in a town that is ~80% atheist/non-religious.
And no, I'm not as bad as the Christians because I never vandalized their cars, accosted them on the street, kicked them out of the Boy Scouts, got the middle school science teacher fired, or protected the pedophile gym teacher because of their religious views. Personally I think that it is childish to flip off a stranger because something on their car offends you.
Actually, I wrote my thesis on life experience.
Well said! I would give you about 100 mod points for that phrase alone, if I could. (You've explained sectarian conflicts like the Troubles in Northern Ireland, or the Sunni-Shiite mess in Iraq, in three words.)
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
No, I understand that. I certainly don't think that we can say with a high statistical certainty that the ratio of missing packages is 9:1 -- as you say, a single additional missed non-labelled package could make it 4:1. What I am saying is, whatever the actual ratio, it seems fairly unlikely to be 1:1 -- and that's a problem, even if it's only in fact 11:10.
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
Fire anyone who hold the shipment up, complains about the packaging or manages to lose the package. If your going to work for the postal service you need to show no basis towards any packaging.
Read up on what atheism actually is. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_atheism
Most atheists are of the negative atheism (or comparable) variety; not having any evidence for the existance of a god, they have no reason to believe a god exists, Basically applying Occam's razor to the problem. This is like all scientific theory; for all practical purposes, assumed true until proven otherwise but always understanding the theory might be incorrect.
Though the implications of, say, ignostics are different, the basic reasoning is similar; no scientific evidence = no belief.
Religion implies a belief in a god despite a lack of any evidence and counter-evidence.
Positive atheism implies a disbelief in god even if there would be factual evidence for the existence of a god.
Negative atheism (and most other forms of atheism/agnosticism) implies a disbelief in a god unless presented with factual evidence for the existence of a god.
Provide solid, scientific proof for a god and most atheists will gladly adopt the theory (not believe) of the existence a god.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Dividing 2 numbers does not result in "statistics"
No, but the Wilcoxon sign rank test with p<0.001 does.
There's also the issue of controlling for sample bias, I'm guessing that the recipients were either existing punters or friends (hence participating in the experiment) and could thus conveniently "lose" their marked packages if it help further the "OMG nasty fundies are persecuting our atheist brethren" agenda.
Each recipient received one of each, shipped on the same day. I find it an unlikely explanation that there was bias on that end.
I remember those yoyos. They were awesome.
Statistically, sure. But we need someone else to try this from entirely within the USA so that we can rule out Customs as the problem.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Maybe if they wouldn't litter in the stream of postal items, they wouldn't find other people picking up and throwing out their trash for them.
She slaps this wad of shit with pictures of this bearded white guy (Jesus was brown!)
That isn't as bad as it sound. Historically imagery of Jesus and other biblical folk has always been adjust to the target culture. Europeans and derived use to see the blonde Jesus because that's the picture typically used in medieval Europe among white people, but if you seek around you find lots of additional Jesuses, from the brown to the asian. Chinese Jesus in particular is awesome. You have no idea that's a Christian drawing unless someone tells you, otherwise your tendency is to assume it's a random Chinese historical/mythical event or another, what with everyone looking Chinese and wearing Chinese peasant clothes and having Chinese mountains as background etc.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
Contrariwise, I had a bumper sticker on my old car that read "Doing my part to PISS OFF the Religious Right". It got mildly vandalized once[1] in all the years I had it, and this was in heavily fundie Baptist southwest Missouri. Once when I went to get my hair cut the woman doing it said (with tones of mixed admiration and surprise) that I had a lot of guts doing that around here.
[1] I expect if it'd been easily removable (like a Darwin fish) it'd have been stolen by this individual, though.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
You sound like you're excusing the fundies' behavior and blaming the victim. If that's not your intent, reconsider how you communicate.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Heh! I once got a pair of shoes with the worst soles ever. They were destroyed in less than a week. I guess they went to heaven.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Ummm...well you are correct Sammy didn't wear a Saint medal. That is because he converted to Judaism in the mid 50s and he wore the Star of David. It is clearly visible in many photographs count the points there and maybe get out of your mom's basement a bit.
Also it DESPERATELY needs false samples. This test needs atheist labeled packages which in reality contain Al Bundy's Godly And Divine shoes.
If those weren't nicked then we could conclude that the postal workers use Divine Powers to find the heathen payloads.
Or they could also lose them all and let God sort them out.
Crack that whip! Deliver those mails you Cherubim and Seraphim! Mail for the Mail God!
20 minutes into the future
Your delusions of victimhood do not justify crimes against those who don't share your religion.
If the "average of 3 days longer" statistic is really caused by that single outlier
What the fuck.
..at least estimate the division in your head.. "37 D divided by 89 P ... thats not anywhere near 3.0 D / P and therefore couldn't possibly explain the on average 3.0 D / P extra travel time claimed, so anyone who suggested it is fucking stupid."
37 days over 89 packages is only 0.4157 days / package.
You seem to be pretending to use your brains by talking like maybe you might be, but for fuck sakes..
"His name was James Damore."
They don't provide any actual data or proof on the site.
You have to have faith.
A female one?
Atheism is a religious position. It's not an organised religion, sure, but it can be described as religion.
The one you're thinking of is agnosticism.
Rational thought is the only true freedom
Nor do your delusions of victimhood justify the hatred and attacks against those who don't share your lack of religion (that you wear on your sleeve like a religion).
The "3 days longer" statistic seems to be massively skewed by a single non-representative parcel that took 37 days later than its counterpart.
By "massively skewed" do you mean that dropping this single sample would only result in reducing the 3.0 days extra figure to a 2.6 days extra figure?
You clearly don't know what you are talking about.
37.0 D / 89.0 P = 0.4157 D / P
Another way to look at it that avoids your silly mistake: 89 packages each with 3 days average delay time is 89.0 P * 3.0 D = 267 DP. Now compare 37 to 267. Does it still look 'massive' as you so ignorantly claim?
"His name was James Damore."
People are either Christian, or headed for hell and of Satan.
Most American goods come from China, so American Christians prefer to buy the goods of Satan.
So with science and engineering -- of Satan.
Yet virtually everything around us came through science and engineering's magic touch
-- blended shirts (banned in the bible), invisible electromagnetic waves everywhere to be interpreted, risen people in airplanes, medical prosthetics getting even amputees to walk.
In the last hundred years, name one "good" thing religion has given us.
Now name something good science has given us.
speaking as a conservative baptist:
1 you have my permission to post a Goat Pentagram (or similar GTFA type symbol) on your door
2 if you would like to watch a good service from home hit http://www.salembaptistnow.org/#/salem-media at 10:45am on sunday
(i will be waving to you from the other side of the projection system)
3 http://www.xiphos.org/ would be a free bible study program with a great number of bibles and such (uses the crosswire format)
and with that i will close with yes Atheism is a Faith since Faith answers the question of Who is At Fault (for the big questions of Life)
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
The more likely factor at work here is that if 50 experiments are done by different organizations to test this same premise, the only one that gets published is the one with the newsworthy result. We don't know about the other 49 times that atheist packages were delivered equally well because who would ever report that?
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What does this have to do with Occam's Razor?
Between 'someone got themselves a new pair of shoes' on one side and the whole mess that forms theist culture and worldviews on the other, which for some reasons still unknown to me leads to the spiriting away of packets in the name of god (?), I'd say the former is clearly the simpler theory.
No, it clearly affects products originating in Berlin and destined for the US.
That doesn't mean that it starts at the US border (and, even if it does start at the US border, it doesn't mean its USPS; US Customs, for instance, could be involved.)
And, even if it does start at the border, its not clear that the problem is with "Atheist". The neutral tape had no branding; it could be a -- and this is a widely recognized issue -- problem with branded vs. unbranded packages.
Too many uncontrolled-for variables to reach the conclusion (USPS discriminates against Atheist-branded products.)
False.
Yes, they were. Specifically, the setup they have does not distinguish between the explanation they present as their conclusion and:
* The actual difference shown being caused by branded vs. non-branded products rather than atheist-branded vs. other-branded products
* The actual problem occurring somewhere between the origin point and the arrival in the US but selectively targeting atheist-branded (or just branded, see previous point) products destined for the US
* The actual problem occurring in the US by some group or combination of groups other than the USPS (e.g., delay or loss by US Customs and/or package loss due to theft by private criminals at the delivery point.)
The experiment is a reasonable first step motivated by the hypothesis that the USPS discriminates against atheist-branded packages, but its not remotely sufficient evidence to support the conclusion that such discriminatio exists.
That their results seem to contradict the general statistics regarding package loss through the USPS and their obvious stand to gain from this sort of controversy definitely does not bode well for trusting their results.
Which general statistics? Published by the USPS I suppose.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Dumbass. It's not a fallacy to insist on an experiment to be conducted by an objective 3rd party in order to avoid the obvious appearance of a conflict of interest issue by company that's hostile to religion.
Coward. Yes, yes it is. Because the appearance of conflict of interest is irrelevant. Only an actual conflict is relevant. It is in their own best interest to be scrupulous if they are attempting to call someone else out for unscrupulous behavior.
Again, if you have a problem with the methodology, that's a valid concern. If you have some reason to believe that they're making this up beyond your own prejudice, that's a valid concern. But frankly, if I'm not going to trust someone based on their religious beliefs, it's not going to be atheists. They have internally logically consistent views. Religious people, on the other hand, already appear to be suffering from cognitive dissonance. They've repeatedly demonstrated their willingness to deceive themselves in order to justify their thought processes when they state things as fact in the absence of evidence.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yes, you are right. So the clustering and the maltreatment events could be separate.
Removing the outlier brings the average down to about 2.5 days but that is only correct if we suspect that the delay might be caused by something else than the "Atheist" label.
The fact that we still have an average delay of 2.5 days tells us that even the outlier could have been caused by the label and if that is the case it would be correct to keep it when calculating the average.
If you incite violence it will come. IMHO atheists want to believe. We all want to believe. Your last breath will be a tiny tiny tiny call for belief.
That aside, The 10 commandments are what separate us from Russia. I know when you are young, you want to be completely free. I get that. But the 10 commandments gives you a father, perhaps a better father than you had.
Help eliminate stupid speeding tickets
No one likes a hipster. Just the other day in my town someone - possibly God - put one component of a binary nerve agent in the Pabst Blue Ribbon and the other in various products that real white trash don't buy. Like The Mountain T shirts
http://www.complex.com/style/2013/02/15-brands-hipsters-love/the-mountain#galleryS
They had to close down the Punk/Hard Core venue within a week because no one turned up. Not a single person with a blue collar job died, so the police decided to mislay the evidence.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
You do not need a reason to distrust someone, particularly with a known bias (in this case Atheism and profit).
Unless you have a reason to believe that someone would tell you the truth, and would go against his own biases to do so, why would you have faith in something that would be easier and cheaper to make up and that benefits them to have believed?
Personally, I find it hard to believe that they would spend thousands of dollars running an experiment, when they already have a moderate amount of evidence (and more than enough to strongly recommend that their customers get unmarked packages).
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
You might want to read some history... the actual founders of America were quite liberal for their time. Also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_2012
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
That only makes the being worse IMO. Better to fail at omnipotence than benevolence.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Indeed! Labeling something Frag-ile, from Latin for the ability of something to be frag'ed, is just asking for it! captcha: damages
Coward. Yes, yes it is. Because the appearance of conflict of interest is irrelevant. Only an actual conflict is relevant. It is in their own best interest to be scrupulous if they are attempting to call someone else out for unscrupulous behavior.
Actually, when it comes to peer review, the appearance of conflict of interest is in fact extremely relevant and you need to be especially careful to make sure you guard against confirmation bias and are extremely clear in how you arrived at your conclusions. Lets put if this way, would you trust a company that puts out a study saying that their product is better than a competitors?
Probably in Levictus
I honestly wouldn't be surprised if that was in there.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
It would also be interesting to try the experiment with some other unpopular and/or demonized things like
KKK
Nazi
Moral Majority
Democrat
Republican
Lobbyist
Pro-Life
Focus on the Family
(wow, are "Pro-Life" and "Focus on the Family" the best I can do for modern conservative positions/organizations (Moral Majority is old)? I can't think of any that have the name recognition of liberal organizations like "NOW", "NAACP", "Planned Parenthood", etc.. Is that because conservative groups aren't called on as "experts" or as spokesmen for various groups when news organizations are covering stories the way the news organizations use liberal groups as supposed experts/representatives, or is it because of the rule that organizations tend to drift toward being liberal?)
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
You clearly don't know what you are talking about.
37.0 D / 89.0 P = 0.4157 D / P
Another way to look at it that avoids your silly mistake: 89 packages each with 3 days average delay time is 89.0 P * 3.0 D = 267 DP. Now compare 37 to 267. Does it still look 'massive' as you so ignorantly claim?
Wait, why are you using 89 packages when nine of them were lost in the mail? That means we don't have delivery time information for them and should be using 80 packages for the math. Also, without having the raw data that they used the best we can conclude is that the 37 days may have had a significant difference on the total, but the extent is currently unknowable.
They sent two packages to people in 49 of 50 states, all on the same day. That sounds like test packages, not product deliveries, or am I to believe they had orders from 49 states to ship out? Two pairs to each recipient, no less.
How did they choose recipients? Volunteers? Would volunteers not be motivated to skew the results?
Were the results gathered from tracking info? Do deliveries of German post packages by USPS get tracking info in the States, and did they pay for that option, or did they rely on reporting by the participants?
The only way to do this test without predetermining the outcome is to not rely on reporting of the recipients, and to ship identical packages except for labeling. And, of course, the test should be done by someone who does not stand to gain from the controversy.
I can believe packages labeled "atheist" go missing in the USA, but their numbers are both suspicious and convenient.
"1. can hardly believe the report about the sexual immorality going on among you—something that even pagans don’t do. I am told that a man in your church is living in sin with his stepmother.a 2. You are so proud of yourselves, but you should be mourning in sorrow and shame. And you should remove this man from your fellowship."
This is reiterated throughout the New Testament in Timothy and others but is never preached on that I've ever heard. I grew up in church, turned away from it for 6 years as an agnostic, and then came back after I finally sat down and started reading the Bible. When you actually read it, you'll be shocked at how heavily it's manipulated and abused on a daily basis for one purpose or another. If churches actually followed this rule of kicking out people who pretend to live one way and disgrace the entire congregation because of it you'd see dramatically less "duality" because the people who were there for show would no longer be there.
Churches should and do welcome people who are struggling with issues and seeking help. Everything from addictions to financial troubles. These people are not a problem. It's the people who try to visibly play the part with no intention of actually following through that continue to give the church a bad name.
"Don't teach a man to fish, feed yourself. He's a grown man. Fishing's not that hard." - Ron Swanson
It's a brilliant piece of marketing - convincing hipsters in Bumfucksville, USA that their footwear is so offensive to Joe Sixpack that the USPS deliberately loses them.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Large samples? 1 non-branded and 9 branded articles went missing. That's not a huge number of cases to examine.
Actually, it's plenty. The number of lost parcels should be, roughly speaking, a Poisson distributed statistic. If we assume a fixed rate of parcel loss, the number of parcels lost from any given batch of shipments should come in at that rate, plus or minus some noise. For this type of statistical distribution, the standard deviation from batch to batch is approximately the square root of the expectation value.
For 178 parcels (89 under each condition) the observed losses were 1 parcel (1.1%) for non-atheist packages, and 9 parcels (10%) for atheist packages. If we suppose that the actual loss rate is between those two extremes, we get a loss rate of about 5.5%, and an expected loss of 5 parcels per batch of 89 parcels.
The standard deviation for that batch size is the square root of 5, or about 2.2; the two observations that we have are both about two standard deviations away from the expectation value. The likelihood of pulling a random value this far from the expectation value by chance is about 5%; the likelihood of it happening twice is 5% squared: about 0.03%.
Feel free to twiddle with different expectation values and expected loss rates; you'll find the odds are strongly against these values coming up by chance.
The "3 days longer" statistic seems to be massively skewed by a single non-representative parcel that took 37 days later than its counterpart.
Roughly 80 parcels and roughly 40 days' delay means that the mean was increased by about half a day. Discarding that one outlying datum, the atheist packages still would have averaged 2.5 days longer for delivery. Among the ones that were delivered at all....
~Idarubicin
So?
Tu couque is not a valid logical rebuttal.
Kettles are still black even if it's the pot saying so.
Actually, when it comes to peer review, the appearance of conflict of interest is in fact extremely relevant
We're not talking about peer review, just the study. Peer reviewers must decide if the appearance of a conflict of interest is indicative of an actual one.
Lets put if this way, would you trust a company that puts out a study saying that their product is better than a competitors?
Only once it has been subjected to appropriate peer review.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Its called strawman... just fyi
My understand of the straw man is that it is an argument which has not been expressed, not an occasion. But I am more than willing to be educated...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Who in the US will decapitate you because your not a Muslim? The Taliban position is that not only is this acceptable, it is the appropriate action. A delayed package hardly seems morally equivalent.
"It's not as simple [wikipedia.org] as the forty minutes of instruction you had in high school would lead you to believe. But if you're in a hurry, here's a sign your sample size was small: you found only one of what you were looking for, e.g. one missing unlabeled package."
Yeah, you seriously don't know what you're talking about, and you need to stop. Here is the article on Fisher's Exact Test (used here to assess the significance of packages lost): "it is valid for all sample sizes". And, the sample sizes given in the Example hereunder are even smaller than those used for the shoe experiment (in the example, a grand total of 24 cases in the entire setup).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%27s_exact_test
Among the mistakes you've made in your citation is that you ignored this detail (2nd paragraph in your link): "using a target for the power of a statistical test to be applied once the sample is collected". They knew the test to be used (Fisher's Exact Test), and used an appropriate sample size; in fact, a fairly generous one. If the difference in package treatment were closer, then potentially a larger sample size would be required to detect the difference; but in this case the difference is so overwhelmingly, comically huge that a sample size of n~100 is more than enough to demonstrate the problem.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
No one likes a hipster.
Well, I'm trying very hard to understand what bearing this has on the current subject, and I think what you're trying to say is that if you don't like someone, it's acceptable to discriminate against them.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"The '3 days longer' statistic seems to be massively skewed by a single non-representative parcel that took 37 days later than its counterpart."
Why are you wasting time speculating on this when it's a 1-minute algebra problem? Looking only at the 85 cases that responded with dates, let x = average of the other 84 cases. So (84x+37)/85 = 3.03 --> 84x+37 = 257.55 --> 84x = 220.55 --> x = 2.62, which rounded to the nearest day, is still 3 days.
And this is actually generous, assuming that the non-branded packages were delivered in zero days; whatever the non-branded delivery time was, it reduces the effect of the Mississippi time even more.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
You can't prove that a Darwin fish is more likely to be stolen than a Palin-Huckabee 2016 sticker. Or, for that matter, a Mitt Romney one
http://twitchy.com/2012/09/29/got-a-romney-bumper-sticker-or-yard-sign-watch-out-for-these-unhinged-libs/
In fact it would be interesting to test if bumper stickers expressing a minority opinion were more likely to be defaced than ones expressing a majority one - perhaps holders of minority opinions are more prone to defacement because they are minorities.
Also minority opinions may well be the majority in some areas. Maybe they want payback for mistreatment they suffered when they were in the minority.
You're best off without any stickers on your car, though. They're the most reliable indicator of road rage.
Agreed. If you tell complete strangers your political views you shouldn't be too surprised if some of them object in a crazy way.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
He had faith that the study was done in a way that he could dismiss. So he didn't need to check the facts, as usual.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Probably in Levictus, alongside the bit about giving them bad haircuts if you're a barber.
You mean hipster kids didn't ask for those haircuts?
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
In related news:
Since when is BC a religioius institution? In a secular government: should taxpayers be forced to fund a religious institution?
You can thank me below
Mein name ist Von Below.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Good idea. I will send the suggestion to that company. They can send a bunch of shoes in my size to where I live and then I will send them out to other people to see if they get them. :)
Actually, IAAS (I am a statistician).
Thanks for the clarification. I was going to assume you were "Infrastructure as a Service" otherwise.
Sad, really... I mean, most of us don't exactly love our jobs. We may enjoy some parts of it, but on the whole, we'd still rather sleep in. But we get up every day to earn an honest day's pay. If you need to slack off a bit, hey, just don't get caught; but when you start taking out your lack of a fulfilling life on the very products they pay you to handle - GTFO.
There is a common misconception that the people at the various carriers are well paid, and should be happy to have good paying jobs, but you have to remember, that only the high seniority people are making anywhere close to top rate. Starting wages are pretty close to minimum wage, and are in fact less than Mcdonalds advertises. When you take out union dues, the amount is actually less than minimum wage. The new employee can look forward to reasonable raises, but its still part time only, and they're going to wait 10+ years before having enough seniority for a full time spot. All that time working part time for peanuts at a job that makes it difficult to hold down another part time job because it leaves you tired and sleep deprived, and you wonder why your packages get treated like crap. Its not the 20+ year veteran making a decent wage doing it, its the same kid that spits on your fries at Mcdonalds. He won't stay more than a few months anyway, so what does he care? Minimum wage in the US is a joke, and every one of these packages going by is a reminder to these guys of a lifestyle they will more than likely never be able to take part in.
Our country needs to re-evaluate its priorities when we lavishly reward banking executives for actively destroying the lives of millions just to increase their own profits, and then getting a bailout from those very same people whose lives they destroyed. Capitalism is as f***ed up as communism for very different reasons. The communists failed to account for greed in their world order, and the system got gamed by the greedy pretty quick. Capitalism survived for more than 200 years before the greedy figured out how to game the system. End result will be the same if we don't figure out how to get the greedy back to working for the system instead of gaming it...
-=Geoskd
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Oh and by the way : Germany \in Europe.
> I live in the South. This is Holy week. I have Christians constantly coming to my door to tell my about Jesus or, get this, switch to their church.
Offer them a piece of Matzoh and say that you're already covered.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
... one more thing not to believe in?
Observational data=delusions apparently. And calling you out when you lie is apparently "shameless attacks".
The article states that they were all sent out on the same date. It's probably safe to assume that they were all taken to the post office or mail handlers at the same time.
There's no way of knowing if the samples arrived at the post office in separate, pre-sorted atheist/unmarked piles/sacks or if the post office then decided to sort them by markings themselves. Having samples done at different times can eliminate data 'bunching up' or samples interfering with each other.
> Something could have happened in international handling in Germany. Unlikely but not ruled out. A better designed experiment is needed
RTFA (I know, Slashdot). "Having run a series of control tests in Germany and Europe, which demonstrate no such bias, the problem appears to lie in the USA..."
Which states ban atheists from holding public office, and which states ban theists from holding public office? Just to scratch the surface.
So... just so we can get a guage of what you mean by "extraordinary evidence", do you believe in evolution?
But you know... I really don't think that "Minority get discriminated against, news at 11" is all that extraordinary of a claim.
We're not talking about peer review, just the study. Peer reviewers must decide if the appearance of a conflict of interest is indicative of an actual one.
What we are engaging in right now is peer review! Just because we aren't looking at the study to decide whether or not it should be published doesn't mean it isn't peer review. It also doesn't matter if the original author is present or not, the study is being reviewed and judged based upon its merits or lack there of. As everyone has noted, there is a dearth of detailed data on how they arrived at their conclusions in addition to the fact that the authors need to ensure that their perceived bias doesn't show. For that matter, how do they know that USPS is to blame and not Deutsche Post or someone else involved in the delivery?
So, I just want to ensure I understand correctly. This Berlin, Germany based company sent two packages to 89 people across 49 states and because 5% of the packages went missing and , Christians are to blame? I realize that conspiracy theories are fun and all but this isn't even a well orchestrated one. Just because you mail multiple items at the same time does not mean the recipient of said items will receive them at the same time. It seems a more likely that government bureaucracy are most likely more to blame to than Christian bigotry. Given Customs inspections, freight hauling and delivery, distance between ports of entry for mail delivery and processing times the numbers aren't that surprising to me. Now, I show me that all of the packages shipped on the same day, went into the same freight container or multiple containers but boarded the same container vessel or aircraft on the same day, said container or containers with all of the packages were or not inspected by Customs at the same time on the same day, and then that container or set of containers arrived to a sorting facility operated by the USPS on the same day and from there the packages were mishandled, then I would believe that there was something specifically wrong with the Postal Services. The company would also need to show evidence that no other company shipping into the US has had similar issues. I am open to the thought, but not based on this companies obvious marketing ploy.
You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.- Nietzsche
well there are certainly passages about destroying property of the non-believers (i.e. smashing their idols)
and killing them all (too many passages to cite)
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
They have sufficient data to conclude there is a correlation. They do not have enough data to conclude "atheist-branded packages were 10 times more likely to disappear", let alone state it to three significant digits in the fine print.
But again, the experiment is far more flawed than taking liberties with converting mathematical results to language. Also in the fine print is a clue they relied on the reporting of biased reporters:
"4 participants did not get back to us with their dates"
That is, they asked of volunteer atheists "when did you receive it?". Way too much possibility for bias in this experiment.
> Something could have happened in international handling in Germany. Unlikely but not ruled out. A better designed experiment is needed
RTFA (I know, Slashdot). "Having run a series of control tests in Germany and Europe, which demonstrate no such bias, the problem appears to lie in the USA..."
I did RTFA. By "international" I did not mean within the EU economic zone, I was referring to the transatlantic variety. I made that clarification in a different post but not the one above. Although I believe it is more likely the problem lies in the US the fact remains that not all variables have been eliminated. US bound packages would go through different handling. They should have shipped US bound packages from the US.
There is partial answer in the fine print:
"4 participants did not get back to us with their dates"
In other words, they asked of volunteers "when did you receive it?", rather than tracking the packages. Way too much room for bias and manipulation in this experiment. Even if you trust that they even did the experiment.
I don't know how to do this experiment fairly, since tracking the packages might make delivery more reliable so it'd spoil the test, but as performed, it was certainly a very flawed experiment.
That would be why they did the control experiment where they shipped them to other countries apart from the USA.
Which part of "international (as in not within EU economic zone)" confused you? US bound packages go through different handling. Controls destined for only "Europe and Germany" are insufficient. They should have shipped US bound packages from the US.
Personally, I find it hard to believe that they would spend thousands of dollars running an experiment, when they already have a moderate amount of evidence
Personally, I find it to be bullshit that you would accept the moderate amount of evidence they had already when you refuse to accept the evidence they have compiled through statistical means.
(and more than enough to strongly recommend that their customers get unmarked packages).
So, your solution is to roll over and accept religious discrimination? Your solution does not lead where I want to go.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
As you would know if you were actually paying attention and not simply complaining for the sake of complaint, they performed similar studies against other postal systems.
First, I did read the article, well, infographic in this case, and I can't seem to find any links for where they did similar studies. Can you supply those links because I would like to read those studies as well. Furthermore, my point on how do we know that the delayes or lost packages being due to USPS is still valid. Someone in Deutsche Post could be to blame, or even someone else within in the UPU since we don't know things were routed. All we definitively know is that at somepoint between when the packages were mailed and when they were expected to arrive, something happended which may or may not have involved human intervention. If they were shippped surface they could have litteraly have fell off a boat which a bunch of other mail.
With regards to your comments on peer review, quit acting so pedantic.
Their is no solid evidence for what you want to be true, so we must all just take it on faith?
I am absolutely sure that more Atheist branded packages would be lost in the US. But at this point all we have is worse than hearsay.
What if I was the Catholic church and said that it sent ten men to spy on Atheist shoes and found that they spend all their profits on Vietnamese child sex slaves. Would your solution be to roll over and accept child sex slavery? Or would you demand we all march on heir headquarters and beat the CEO to death?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Why would anyone actually want their hair to look like that?
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
Well, they were paired, so if the sack held 6 atheist packages, you'd think that there'd be 6 unmarked packages in that same sack too.
Unless of course, the 6 atheist packages were put in a different sack than the 6 unmarked packages, and said sack just so happened to have been "lost" in transit.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Here's an interesting experiment to do, ask random preachers what their opinion is on cross religion marriages etc... You will find that a good portion of southern fundamentalist preachers will go out of their way to say "a relationship not based on god, is doomed to failure", of course ignoring the fact that the more fundamentalist christian churches, have the highest divorce rates of any religion currently.
So by changing the subject from sample size (as per your great-grandparent post), it seems like we agree that you were just bullshitting us on your knowledge of statistical methods. And with your new attempt, you don't even attempt any citations. You are just continuing with more and different bullshit.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Or maybe it means exactly what they said, and you're just hurt that people point out how religiously twisted the US is.
Spur of the moment malice against an obviously marked package?
I have always considered religion a disease...
Religion is a virus. A virus is a chunk of rogue program code that tempts a host into executing it, at which point the host is programmed to make copies of the code. Biological viruses have cells as hosts, and DNA or RNA as their program code. Computer viruses have computers as their hosts, and machine code as program code. Similarly, religions have minds as their hosts, with mind programs--ideas--as their program code.
The ultimate irony is that the Abrahamic religions don't believe in evolution, when it is precisely natural selection that led to their existence and dominance.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
is checking out old cathedrals while backpacking through Europe, & that's about it.
BTW how come hardly any Yanks take a year or 2 off after leaving school, or deferring a year or 2 of uni, & go backpacking around the world? Gez in the average youth hostel one is more likely to find more Kiwis even than Yanks, & it's seems when one does find backpackers from North America, virtually all of them turn out to be from either British Columbia or Quebec.
The thing is, 2 packages, one Atheist marked and one unmarked, were sent to each destination. So if there was a problem somewhere (truck shipment got sent to the wrong place, etc.) you would expect equal numbers of marked and unmarked packages to get lost/be delayed. Why would a sack or something be stuffed with only the atheist and not the unmarked packages? If that happened, then that just shows the USPS treated those packages worse, proving the company's point.
Just once, but she was really hot, and her boyfriend was an asshole . . .
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
I once had a package of trees delivered by UPs that I found smashed and lying on the side of the road. I'm glad they didn't die. I don't know if its the same everywhere, but I'd rather have packages delivered by a flock of carrier pigeons than UPS.
There shouldn't be any government protected monopolies
Then you wouldn't have electricity outside of major urban areas, no cable TV, no satellite communications, no telephone service, no potable water, no sewer service, no hospitals for anyone but the rich, no universities for anyone but the rich, TB and smallpox would still kill millions every year, etc. Don't know what kind of hell hole you want to live in, but I don't particularly care for the world your viewpoint would have delivered us.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
If all you care about is who is at fault, God already took full responsibility. Speaking through his prophet Douglas Adams: "We apologize for the inconvenience."
Man, all this talk about faith when the facts are right there in front of our noses...
+1 Disagree
Let's be reasonable -- this is a report by a group of people who have a bug up their rear about religion to the extent they want their shoes to be atheist. (Puns aside, what's religious about shoes, anyway, for Hitchens' sake?) I'm not particularly interested in reports like this from someone pushing an agenda that hard.
Likewise, I wouldn't be interested in hearing from the Phelps cult about packages festooned with their "God hates fags" crap getting lost in the mail, either.
Wrong on all counts. People would pay for the services delivered and different individual entrepreneurs would deliver them and services would be priced correctly. People wouldn't be subsidised to live in suburbia, which is quite unsustainable once the subsidies are removed, there would be much less pollution, abuse and congestion as well, by the way, if the market were allowed to work rather than having government subsidise all of the bad behaviour.
You can't handle the truth.
For the reasons you state, the test of statistical significance does not allow us to conclude that the "true" ratio is close to 9:1. The statistical test shows that the ratio is significantly greater than 1. This is the interesting claim, and this conclusion should meet your criterion of "statistical rigour".
I take it you've never lived on a farm or in a small town. If government subsidies and monopolies did not require that utilities supply service to everyone then the only farms in the Untied States that would have electricity would be those owned by ADM and Monsanto, because normal farmers couldn't have afforded to have wires strung through miles of farmland. The poor would still be drinking river water and crapping in the street, because there is no incentive to dig up the streets and lay pipe for people whose bills won't pay for the infrastructure investment for two decades or more. If prices were raised to the point where the infrastructure payoff was in a time span considered reasonable by businesses water and sewer service would be unaffordable for most.
services would be priced correctly
So fuck the poor and middle class, civilization is only for the rich. I'd love to see how your phantasmagorical entrepreneurs would compete on price for delivering potable water to a neighborhood.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Is this really appeal to authority? I had to read the definition right now, but my understanding says that it would be if JDPA had done the study and Spy Handler said "they're usually right, so they're right here". But here, Spy Handler is claiming that experimenter bias may have influenced the execution of the experiment. This is always a valid concern in scientific experiments, though I personally don't buy it as the claim is made that all packages left Berlin at the same time and I don't believe they're lying. So I consider experimenter bias to be an unlikely source of violated assumptions, but you can't say it's completely without merit, right?
So fuck the poor and middle class, civilization is only for the rich
You're only starting to scratch the surface of roman_mir's fascist fantasy. He believes that civilization is only for those who can afford it, for sure. He also believes that democracy is abhorrent and representation is only entitled to the rich. Similarly he believes that the legal system - including criminal prosecution and defense - only needs to be available to those with money. This all comes from the church that roman_mir goes to - the church of ron paul.
Yes, in roman_mir's fantasy world, it is civilization, government, and laws for the rich - and fascism for the people.
A company that sells to the poor becomes extremely rich because that's the market where the most money is and figuring out how to satisfy their demands will make you very very wealthy, this includes water as well.
Agreed. When the bottom 60% hold a whopping 4.2% of the wealth a company would be just downright foolish to not focus on this market, because clearly that's where all the money it. This is why Apple has never been able to turn a profit.
You can't spell "oneiromancy" without "roman".
So fuck the poor and middle class, civilization is only for the rich.
Walmart is the largest, most profitable Western retail chain delivering cheapest goods to the largest customer base in the world probably.
Only a fascist would look at Walmart and think "there's a company that is good for the poor and the middle class". Walmart destroys jobs, communities, families, and employees. They drive other stores out of business. They drive down the value of real estate. They force employees to work terrible hours for terrible wages and as little for benefits as possible.
In other words, they are a fascist's dream come true. Of-course, your dream world is utter fascism so it fits well for you.
I'd love to see how your phantasmagorical entrepreneurs would compete on price for delivering potable water to a neighborhood.
A company that sells to the poor becomes extremely rich because that's the market where the most money is and figuring out how to satisfy their demands will make you very very wealthy, this includes water as well.
That is a whole lot of verbage with pretty well zero substance. Do you actually have an example of a for-profit company running pipes underground for water delivery? No, of course not.
As I said before, your dream state - a dream reinforced by your church - involves freedom, opportunity, civilization, democracy, and justice for the wealthy, and fascism for the people.
There shouldn't be any government protected monopolies, private sectors deals with people's needs, whether they are atheists or Muslims or whatever. Government will lose your package if you are an atheist, and I don't want to get into what they will do to you if you are a Muslim.
Your church distributes plenty of material through USPS, and it doesn't seem to get lost at a higher rate than anything else. You pretend to believe in freedom to do WTF someone wants, so why do you care if atheists are not getting their packages through, when your religious material goes through just fine? A true libertarian would say fuck 'em! and instruct them to find a different carrier or start their own. After all, a lost atheist package doesn't hurt you!
Yet DHL, UPS, Fedex are regulated under law, which makes them liable to lawsuits, to 'provide equal access' and all that nonsense, while in reality they want to provide the best customer service in order to win against competition.
Clearly this is the case. FedEx, UPS, and DHL all refuse to deliver to the dock of my lake front cabin, while USPS does, but I'm sure they would if not for discrimination preventing them from buying a boat or something.
You can't spell "oneiromancy" without "roman".
Figures that would get modded down, that actually helps prove my point.
I've only had a quick look at your first link. Those seem to be evidence of people's astonishing capacity to believe things and the lengths that they (possibly unconsciously) will go to to project meaning to events.
e.g. The weeping/bleeding statue probably started off with some discoloured rainwater coming off the statue. Some people noticed it and declared it to be blood and there was suddenly a lot more interest in it. It's far more likely that believers then added their own blood to the statue to increase the interest rather than the statue is some kind of miracle. The tested blood was a variety of blood types, so the idea probably occurred to several people.
It's very easy to find confirmation of pet theories/beliefs and those kind of things are self perpetuating. The interesting evidence is where you can perform an experiment and declare that one particular outcome would disprove the theory.
If you could state a theory such as "eating M&Ms cause invisible pink unicorns to materialise and become visible around you", then we could test that and see that it is false. Religion never provides us with anything that concrete.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
So, are you saying that atheist packages came from Canada and had the same fail rates? Sending them from Canada or other countries into the US would be scientific, wouldn't it?
testing out my trending skills
Surely attempts to replicate this experiment will follow. ["Witchcraft" in the label might provide a closely related experiment (not replication). ] One anecdote - last year I made a single order of eight books on witchcraft for a friend on my Amazon account and only two arrived. The order was split by the stock picker and I suspect that the paperwork for the remaining six books was "lost". [Do any atheists applying for rental accomodation in the USA wear small crosses ?]
Nooo, I'm saying if you act like an asshole don't be surprised if some people act like an asshole right back. Its sad that basic common courtesy has become practically an alien concept in our "me me me" culture but there ya go. Personally I'm an agnostic but I have no problem hanging with anybody of any religion because I make it clear if they don't try to shove their crap on me I won't try to shove mine on them and we all get along just fine.
They were NOT doing this because of some deeply held belief, this I will bet my last dollar was done JUST to start shit. And while I would never support members of the USPS stooping to this bozo's level I will say I can understand it, you act like a dick and some will act like a dick right back.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
While I have absolutely no doubt about the rampant hypocrisy many Christians display, I've never quite understood how that or anything else could lead one to worship Satan. I mean, think about it. You're going to buy in to the whole Judeo-Christian belief system, accept that the mythology of the Bible is real, that Yahweh and the Devil actually exist as genuine supernatural beings, which is to say gods, you accept all that, and then what do you do? Why, you sign up with the losing side! What else, it's the natural thing to do.
Am I the only one who sees something wrong with this picture?
They didn't ship from other countries to the USA. Also, just having "atheist" or "Christian" on the tape might confuse them, if they never heard of a religious brand of shoe. It would confuse me.
I ship to the USA on occasion, from Canada, and I need to fill out a form. Despite having done it several times, it still does seem odd. I believe that 1 slip up could easily confuse them.
This story is an example of why I never trust atheists to be impartial to the evidence, or to philosophy, or to morals.
I will admit that it is very suspicious that only certain packages get delayed, but I would never assume that it is hatred of "atheism".
testing out my trending skills
obviously an act of God! -now be careful that you do not anger him again or something bad may happen sometime to you in the future (up to and including death)
-I'm just sayin'
you are insisting that in the free market people would not find solutions
You're right, that's exactly what I'm saying because that is exactly what history shows us. The value of clean drinking water and sewers have been known for centuries, but as long as society has relied on the capitalist market to provide them only the wealthy have had such things. That is still true today in the Third World where IMF/WB proscriptions on social spending have been imposed. If you want I'll walk with you around the slums of Lima or Recife, and then around the slums of Caracas where the socialistic government has concentrated infrastructure spending. Where capitalism is the provider of services the neighborhoods of the poor host huge garbage piles and empty lots become the local latrine, and contaminated water is delivered in filthy trucks for the highest price the market will bear. I'm not exaggerating at all, we have relatives that live in Los Olivos in Lima, I defy you to stay with them for a weekend to see what their lives are really like and then go home and claim that the holy free market is providing adequately for their needs.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Or maybe it means exactly what they said, and you're just hurt that people point out how religiously twisted the US is.
Ironically, I am not a theist and I have a pair of their shoes. However, just because I share their view on religion doesn't mean I give them any more of a break on their statements than I would a theist. Since they did not have a statistically valid sample, you cannot extrapolate, with any validity, to the population, in this case the USPS. Doing so, makes their position no more tennable than the theist's position and to hold that it is is truly twisted.
You're right, that's exactly what I'm saying because that is exactly what history shows us.
- you are misreading history.
as long as society has relied on the capitalist market to provide them only the wealthy have had such things
- a society without free markets will not provide solutions for everybody, that is true, that is why society needs free markets to allow individuals to try and make their own fortunes by figuring out how to provide people with the products and services they need.
The wealthy never needed free market, they had their services as you correctly noted, it was the free markets, markets free from government intervention that created the capitalist system, which means system of private ownership and operation of property and thus of means of production. The free market allows people to be equal before law, which is what was often missing other types of societies. When you do not have equality before law, when some people are more equal than others because they are part of the ruling elite, that is when you get the wealthy few who get whatever they desire and a very large population who do not have their needs satisfied.
It is exactly the necessary combination of private ownership and operation of property and the equal protections of individuals, their right to operate property without being impeded by the law. The ability not to be discriminated against, protection against government discrimination and thus preferential treatment of some people as opposed to equal treatment under law of all people, this ability is what gave capitalism the boost, the tools needed to allow the majority of people to get the same type of products and services that the wealthy could always afford.
A wealthy member of elite does not care if there is such a product as a washing machine for example. He doesn't care if there is a system to provide clean water to the market. He can pay to have his clean water and have his laundry done by somebody on staff.
It is the capitalism within the paradigm of free market that allowed the rest of the people to enjoy the same services and products as the wealthy always could enjoy. Free market capitalism lifts all boats, without free market, without equal protection under law it doesn't really matter what the system of property ownership is, because most people won't have their right to own and operate property unhindered. They will suffer discrimination, their property will be taken away, they will not be able to keep the fruits of their own labour.
Unfortunately what you are actually advocating for without realising it is exactly that type of a system while believing that you are proposing a 'better' system. It's not better at all, because it doesn't rely on equal treatment by law, it requires discrimination and various types of oppression against most people to allow few to dominate.
The examples that you cite do not include places where people are actually equal before law and have their right to own and operate private property protected against government stealing and redistributing it. The real examples of free market capitalism are not found in Caracas but in Singapore or Hong Kong or Switzerland. Unfortunately USA can no longer boast to have free market capitalism either.
Capitalism for some and oppression is not what I am proposing.
You can't handle the truth.
Really? Is slashdot so threatened that you get modded down for pointing out much more plausible causes to a non-statistical report than some big consipiracy with the USPS? Ironically, I purchase their shoes and I am not a theist, but I guess, that just because one relies on reason instead of superstition does not mean you can question faulty science and statistics if the intent is to mock others.
Why do religious people consider "god fearing" to be a compliment? According to them, god is good and just; a person who fears god must be an evil person expecting divine retribution.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
You are wrong. Atheism is not a religion, it is just agnosticism with a militant stance. Both think that religion is basically nonsense and that cannot be a religion. Sure, some things miscaracterized as "atheism", like some forms of communism, fascism, or capitalism are basically religions, but that has nothing to do with actual atheism.
And no, atheism is not a religious position. It is an opinion about religion, and as such fundamentally different. It IT terms, it is one meta-layer above. It also happens not to be a "belief" or "faith", it happens to stem from observation and by now has a solid scientific foundation. One of them is that religion in all structured or organized forms is a more or less malicious meme infection that reduces rational functionality so as to defend itself against the infected host. One result is that those afflicted by religion are out of sync with reality. This can be range from pretty benign to violently dangerous. Agnostics just managed to retain or regain their mental health. And yes, that is actually the current state of the scientific analysis. Those afflicted of course try to fight this insight, e.g. by constructs like "intelligent design". But basically, this is on the level of drug addicts claiming that they do not have a problem (which for some of them is even true, but for many it is not so).
Also note that dualism is compatible with the current state of scientific insight, even though many physicalists deny this. I think hard-core physicalism is just a not very rational counter-reaction to religion and the denial of dualism stems from a misidentification of dualism as religion. Which it is not.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
You do realize that the world you describe in your second and third paragraphs never actually existed, don't you? You remind me a lot of the old Stalinists that I knew back in the 80s, for whom the purges and the Ukrainian famine never happened.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
If you can't bother to use a dictionary, why not use wikipedia? You're already at your computer.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Honestly I don't see it that way at all. I wonder how many people even know atheist products are shoes. Recognition of a common word vs a company that no one has heard of (lets face it they aren't Nike), I think religion is by far the simpler theory.
Also, without having the raw data that they used the best we can conclude is that the 37 days may have had a significant difference on the total
No. Thats not how math works. Even using only 80 packages, the most impact on the average delay that the 37 day delay for a single package could cause is 0.46 days per package.
This is the problem with the current generation right here. You don't even have a basic math foundation in which to filter yourselves from making extremely stupid comments.
"His name was James Damore."
BTW, you really didn't get it. Caracas, where the poor are getting potable water and sewage systems, is the anti-free-market example. Lima and Recife, where people have to buy dirty water by the bucketful, are the free market examples.
Hong Kong? Where businesses need the approval of the Chinese Communist Party to operate? Switzerland? Seriously?
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
We will only be equal before the law when the weight of person's vote is directly proportional to the amount of land they own. Until then we as a nation are just a bunch of takers, a handful of makers, and a whole lot of takers who believe that they're makers.
You can't spell "oneiromancy" without "roman".
Free markets mean treating your employees like shit, and by this measure China has some of the freest markets in the world.
You can't spell "oneiromancy" without "roman".
I don't know if you live in USA, but that was one of the examples where free market capitalism happened, you are the guy 'denying purges and famine in Ukraine', only you don't know USA history of free market capitalism building the productive capacity in America.
Today China has a system much closer to the free market then most of the rest of the world, that's how it was able to bring about 350 million people out of poverty in 30 years, not by the Communist Party building stuff, but by Communist Party letting go of people's desire to satisfy their own demand and allowing them to own private property. Even with all the corruption in China, it is still one of the most preferred places for business in the world today, that's where all the capital has gone.
You can't handle the truth.
Again, none of those places actually have free markets. To have free markets there has to be as little government regulations as possible while having private property rights protected equally. Chinese Communist Party is not the economy in China, obviously they hold the political power, yet the people are allowed to operate in a mostly free market. They would be much better off if they stopped controlling the currency in a central way. And yes, Singapore and Switzerland, seriously. Of-course now Switzerland is also centrally controlling the currency by fixing it against the Euro at a stupid 1.2 level, hopefully we'll have this overturned soon enough.
You can't handle the truth.
The least government regulation, and thus the freest market, is found on Mars, thus all the smart businesses will be moving there soon enough.
You can't spell "oneiromancy" without "roman".
To have free markets there has to be as little government regulations as possible while having private property rights protected equally.
Government must not, and is not authorized to protect private property rights, as doing so necessarily requires stealing people's private property. Property rights will be protected just fine once the government stops interfering with free market protection services.
You can't spell "oneiromancy" without "roman".
No. Thats not how math works. Even using only 80 packages, the most impact on the average delay that the 37 day delay for a single package could cause is 0.46 days per package.
Actually, the reporting said that the raw numbers were for 3.03 so if it were not for that outlier the actual average would be 2.57 days which is right on that cusp were another outlier could have thrown things off.
Which brings things back around to my original point: without the original data or at least a reported standard deviation we are grasping at straws. If they came back a report of 3.03 days with a standard deviation of 0.2 then we can safely conclude that the outlier didn't have much of an impact. However, if the standard deviation was 1 or more then it would have had a significant impact and would indicate skewed results.
This is the problem with the current generation right here. You don't even have a basic math foundation in which to filter yourselves from making extremely stupid comments.
Stupid question, but how would you even know what generation I belong to let alone what my mathmatical background is?
So the government's only role is as an enforcer for the corporations? No. Not just 'no', but 'no fucking way no!' What the hell is wrong with you?
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
How do you read my comments and come to that conclusion? First of all there shouldn't even be a government provided corporate charter, which abdicates personal responsibility, creates a moral hazard.
The only role for the government is to enforce individual rights and contract law and protect borders against invasion.
You can't handle the truth.
Damn, so much stupid in such a short post.
Yes, I live in the Untied States, and apparently know a fuck of a lot more about its history than you do. You have heard of the word 'tariff', haven't you? Until Ronnie Raygun's Badministration the supposed "free market capitalism" in the US was protected from foreign competition by tariffs, some of them rather egregiously blatant blocks of specific competitors. The railroads, mining industry, timber industry, the settlement of the entire Midwest by farmers, the ranching industry, and the petrochemical industry all exist exclusively because of government land grants. The airline industry only exists because of the network of airports built by state, local and federal government, and the passenger airlines would never have been a large scale success without the government-imposed safety and inspection regulations that made that form of travel safe.
Even with all the corruption in China
You actually mean "because of all the corruption", don't you? Without it they would never be allowed to dump MEK directly into the rivers, contaminating potable water supplied downstream for hundreds of miles. Without the corruption they wouldn't be allowed to run unsafe mines that kill hundreds of people a year. Without it they wouldn't be able to force hourly employees to work hundreds of hours of unpaid overtime. Without corruption they wouldn't be able to seize farm plots that have belonged to families for centuries to site their new factories. The corruption is one of the things that make operating in China so attractive to the mega-corporations.
Apparently you're too young to remember why the EPA and the various consumer protection agencies exist. I suggest you go talk to your grandparents and ask them about the Cuyahoga River burning, about the bubble-head children, about the families who died of starvation in the Depression, and the mercury babies. Business needs to be more tightly regulated, not less. Every single time that public/government control of business is relaxed it causes havoc and destruction. Every single time. You can't point to a time where unregulated businesses didn't attempt to seize the property of others (generally the commons) for their own gains. That is the nature of businesses and businessmen, greed and rapaciousness are not virtues to normal people, and they certainly are not assets to society.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
A study conducted in this way could show that a box with custom "Atheist" label on the tape is treated differently than a normal box. Tons of people think this means bias towards atheists. If the study didn't start off with a confirmation bias, a different box would have had another, maybe "christian".
Otherwise this is just a study on adding extra designations to see if they affect the shipping in the US. Still an interesting experiment, but you have to realize what it is testing.
Besides, you're asking them to read an extra word. That is a built-in delay right there.
Assuming they're not faking the data...
An infographic posted to a commercial website trying to sell us stuff? How could we doubt that?
If you believe that we were created by natural (just not terrestrial) being or their machines, and that everything in the bible can be interpreted as natural phenomena (possibly intentional, possibly extraterrestrial, but still natural), then you are probably an atheist, or at least agnostic. And I like you. I don't necessarily consider it a *likely* hypothesis, but I have always been fond of it as a hypothesis, anyway. (I've always wished I could write, cause I've always wanted there to be a good retelling of the old testament as hard sci-fi.)
Anyway, being theistic, necessarily requires belief in something *supernatural*.
As to your first sentence, if you think the evidence "doesn't support" evolution, you're probably getting definition of evolution from wrong and/or outdated sources.
Damn, so much stupid in such a short post.
- your comments are not just stupid, they are reeking of hate.
No, you don't know anything about the country you live in. Reagan talked a good game, but he never cut any spending, he increased spending and he did also raise taxes. He didn't anything that he promised at all, so there was no 'free market capitalism' during his administration, not even a little bit. Tariffs are one way to fund government, but as a currency or more correctly trade war measure they eventually fail because they are there to protect the falling value of the fake currency.
The real free market in USA existed prior to the Fed's new mandate to monetise Treasury debt, which was given to it by the Congress in 1917. That's when free market capitalism took a serious blow in USA, when the growth of the government became unstoppable. Of-course that was a second blow, the first was IRS with the income taxes, which ensured that both: the government would grow as a percentage of production rather than consumption (which government is, it's all consumption, in fact it's luxury consumption) and destruction of individual freedom not to be property of the State. The income tax immediately changes the status of a person from a free human being to something else entirely, property of the State, and the State decides just how much productivity (labour, work) the person will be forced to give up to the government, the collective.
Energy companies, petrochemical, etc., they were doing just fine in USA prior to 1911, when the government destroyed the largest economy of scale. Standard Oil was the company that drove prices down for over 40 years, from 50 cents a gallon to 5.9 cents a gallon and in the process the owners of the company became some of the richest people in history. Once S.O. was destroyed, the oil prices never went down again. A government with its tariffs breaks your legs and gives you crutches, and now you have to thank it for the ability to crawl again?
As to China, the Chinese government prior to the industrialisation of the country was dumping all the pollutants it ever wanted anywhere it wanted.
It takes a wealthy nation to become aware and to be able to pay for clean environment. China was not a wealthy nation 30 years ago, today it is. Now it can start looking at environment on a case by case basis, clearly they have work to do, but they are some of the freest people in terms of ability to do business and thus in terms of ability to build savings, capital.
They have capital, the CAN take care of their environment and as the government of China will have to drop the fixed exchange rate to the US dollar and the Chinese consumer will become more affluent, the people in China will demand that their industries take care of the pollution, and it will have nothing to do with government.
Government cannot fix anything, it can't build anything, it can't generate wealth, it can destroy it. It will be companies solving the pollution problems.
EPA exists because of complete corruption by the government, which completely abdicated its responsibility to protect private property rights of individuals. Public "property" is the reason for pollution.
In fact earlier in this thread I mentioned this: you are going to talk about 'socialising costs and privatising gains', like you are doing right now, but you are on the side of government socialising costs and privatising gains when it comes to other types of monopolies, like USPS, which you like apparently for some reason.
So you like USPS and yet you don't like other forms of government protection, which lead to the pollution in the environment, because those forms of protection act to protect various large interests, monopoly interests created by the government, but they completely spit on the rights of individual private property owner.
Business does not need to be regulated at all, in fact US Congress does not even have that authority to regulate business, it has
You can't handle the truth.
Oh, and the depression was caused by the government, the Federal reserve monetising bad UK debt, same as the Fed is doing now monetising US debt, and this monetisation created the bubble in the stock market, which blew up (like the stock market bubble of the nineties and the housing bubble, also caused by the Fed and FDIC and FHA, HUD, F&F, but primarily Fed and FDIC).
But before the Great Depression there was no FDIC, HUD, F&F, there was only the Fed, and that was enough to cause that recession. Then Hoover's and FDR's policies turned that recession into the depression, which lasted until 1947, when USA finally cut its spending by 60% and taxes by overall 30%. Similar to the spending and tax cuts in 1921, when that depression was also ended because gov't spending was cut by 70% by Harding. That depression was also caused by the money printing.
Of-course the fifties and sixties were the time of huge government expansion and terrible suppression of the free market, with taxes that caused people to create entire industries that would help them to avoid being taxed instead of being free to build new industries and businesses. That growth of gov't caused the collapse of the dollar and that's when Nixon defaulted on the gold dollar in 1971. That's when USA started seeing massive outflows of capital, as savers were running for the hills. That's when real GDP growth stopped, that's when inflation truly kicked off, that's when people's real earnings started going down, as they became less and less productive due to the capital outflow.
For the last 40 years US government has been pumping and inflating one bubble in the economy after another, and that's what is happening to the economy today - it's on its last legs, can't take anymore pumping. The bond bubble with implode and will take the dollar with it and that's when the era of huge government will come to an end.
Of-course the government won't go that easy, it may even try to implement martial law, declaring a state of emergency. Such things happen as people turn to just about anybody who promises to solve the problems. Last time a major event like that happen it was in Germany in 1933.
You can't handle the truth.
Public "property" is the reason for pollution.
That is one of the strangest statements that I've seen you make. How does the existence of the Cuyahoga River cause pollution? (Well, except for being full of dihydrogen monoxide.) Let's avoid large sweeping statements and focus on this one example for clarity. The river was bordered by chemical, paint and plastic factories. Since there was no regulation on those businesses waste was dumped into the river for decades, and finally it spontaneously combusted several times one summer. It was a historical flash point (no pun intended) which directly caused the creation of the EPA.
Is your position that the problem was caused by the river not having an owner? That can't be the case, since nothing would have stopped the owner from just accepting payments from the business owners to dump their waste. If not, what are you trying to say?
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Precisely, not having an owner is the problem. I have made comments on this very issue previously (a number of times), here is a thread on the same topic so I don't have to repeat it again.
You can't handle the truth.
Atheists == communists, don'cha know?
Well not really, but that was the big fear in the 50s, and old prejudices die hard.
I think, mostly likely, it's a reaction from True Believers to an Other. When there's no markings on the package, the true believer is likely to think there's a good chance that it comes from another true believer.
But "Atheist" on the packaging, declaring itself intentionally, explicitly, to be an Other? The True Believer might think "these are not my people. These are people I don't like. They fight against my faith. Oops, their package was 'lost.' What a tragedy."
pie recipes in spiderman?
Yes, Hostess pies. Their delicious cherry filling is perfect for catching Dr. Octopus.
OMG. I loved those Hostess ads. I couldn't find one with Doctor Octopus (I remember one though), but this one is my favorite for sheet WTF-ness:
http://www.seanbaby.com/hostess/v2spiderman17.htm
Is your position that the problem was caused by the river not having an owner? That can't be the case, since nothing would have stopped the owner from just accepting payments from the business owners to dump their waste. If not, what are you trying to say?
Eventually the privately owned river would run into a privately owned ocean, at which point the owner of the ocean could sue for damages, assuming he had the foresight to own or lease a court of law. He could then send his privately owned sheriff to seize the assets of the original polluter.
You can't spell "oneiromancy" without "roman".
Ah, I had forgotten that the Libertardian solution to all social problems is horizon-to-horizon herds of lawyers. Thanks for the reminder.
.
And I thought that Scientology was a bizarre religion . .
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
No, the absence of the moral hazard provided by the government takes care of that particular problem, which by the way has exploded during the half socialist half fascist state of affairs now found in USA given all the regulations and rules that exist, which is exactly why there are so many lawyers - to argue about the rules and regulations.
It is the abundance of government created rules and regulations (and taxes obviously) that provides the endless opportunity for lawsuits, not absence of regulations and only protections of individual freedoms. Protections of individual freedoms don't require much in terms of court time as long as there is no case by government to steal the freedoms (something you are advocating).
You can't handle the truth.
I have a conjecture that this is related to DHS, and NOT USPS. One test for this would be to do the same experiment from inside the US.
I'm just thinking that packages that are taped with ATHEIST tape probably attract more homeland security attention when coming into the country than other packages. If you want to try another experiment, try packages that are stamped with CHRISTIAN, and see if they get the same treatment. Then try MUSLIM or ALLAHU AKBAR and see what happens.
Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company -- Mark Twain
It would take 7 packages each with 37 days extra (the largest extra delay observed) to explain the 3 days average extra shipping time..
You do know that outliers are samples that are far from the population, right? If there are 7 or more out of 80 or 89, then they are not far from the population. At that point they are representative of the population.
At what point do you admit that you arent actually educated enough to have been equipped with the skills necessary to make reasonable arguments?
"His name was James Damore."
If we did away with the idea that government was responsible for protecting individual liberties we could stop stealing capital from private ownership to pay for a court system. Any government powerful enough to protect individual liberties will necessarily be powerful enough to infringe individual liberties. It's far more just to let individuals and the free market protect their own liberties.
You can't spell "oneiromancy" without "roman".
This is why air pollution is such a huge problem. Property owners need to start claiming ownership of all the airspace above their land. Airlines can negotiate with individual property owners for the right to fly in their airspace. Unauthorized aircraft can be dealt with the same way you would deal with any other trespasser.
You can't spell "oneiromancy" without "roman".
The only role for the government is to enforce individual rights and contract law and protect borders against invasion.
Individual taxpayer's rights, you mean. If you don't pay taxes you don't deserve the right to vote, and once you give up the right to vote, or any other right for that matter, you give up ALL rights.
You can't spell "oneiromancy" without "roman".
If the packages had been shipped from 10 locations within the US the test would be 10 times more valid. One clerk where the packages were received from Germany could have been responsible for most of the missing packages.
While it does seem that the experiment was conducted properly (with the right controls and a decent sample), what we don't know is what the take-away actually is. The experiment group was one sort of "provocative" branding and the control was neutral branding. The one big take-away is that there appears to be some bias in USPS. It may be that atheism is indeed the principal subject of the bias, but there may be other explanations. Is there a general bias against politically or sociologically charged messages within branding? Are there different rates of biases against different kinds of messages? Does that bias appear local, uniform, or tied to certain major hubs? As always, more research is needed.
Alexey
Yes, it's a faith in exactly the same way that not watching TV is a channel. Glad we can all agree on that. ;)
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
It would take 7 packages each with 37 days extra (the largest extra delay observed) to explain the 3 days average extra shipping time..
First, I'm not saying that the vast majority of the packages where delivered on time as it is really hard to get a three day difference like that without a significant quantity of packages being delivered after the plain taped packages. Also, considering that the authors didn't mention that there were a number of packages arriving outside of that three day delivery window, I'm assuming that most of them arrived within that three day delivery window. Thus, the following would work to give you an average of 3.025 days:
1 Day - 5
2 Days - 42
3 Days - 12
4 Days - 20
37 Days - 1
However, that also gives a standard deviation of 3.933 days which implies that the outlier is having a significant impact upon the results. Removing that outlier (dropping it completely) gives us an average of 2.59 days and a standard deviation of 0.93 which is in line with what we would expect. Granted this would still clearly indicate that there is a discrepancy from the plain tape package.
You do know that outliers are samples that are far from the population, right? If there are 7 or more out of 80 or 89, then they are not far from the population. At that point they are representative of the population.
Yes, I know that and I believe that I just demonstrated why it is important to know the standard deviation when discussing this data as well.
At what point do you admit that you arent actually educated enough to have been equipped with the skills necessary to make reasonable arguments?
Likely around the same time that you admit that I might actually know what I'm talking about, although I if I mention the fact that I work with hidden Markov models will you at least give me the benefit of the doubt that I've had a couple math courses in my day?
Grandparent (and anyone else) is also free to repeat the experiment himself!
Why exactly do they assume that it's USPS discarding packages? My money is on Customs or whatever they call themselves now. They should re-run the experiment, this time shipping the packages from an origin somewhere in the US.
So run a test. The UK is a very secular society these days - although I couldn't promise it's majority atheist. So set up a test, using packages branded in three ways:
- Jesus Wuvs Your Scarf
- Atheist Scarves
- Winter Scarf Co
Send a hundred of each via Royal Mail and see which ones get delivered.
My bet is: No difference.
Now, repeat that experiment with USPS. Let us know your results.
The package wont get lost, you will become "lost" when the police come knocking, and unlike charges of rape, murder, child molesting, etc you wont have any legal defense possible once accused.
Removing that outlier (dropping it completely) gives us an average of 2.59 days
Exactly as I said but you seemed to want to argue against it. You argued that there was a population makeup where the outliers had a significant impact, but you cannot actually produce one.
"His name was James Damore."
Exactly as I said but you seemed to want to argue against it. You argued that there was a population makeup where the outliers had a significant impact, but you cannot actually produce one.
You keep ignoring when I'm talking about standard deviation which leads me to believe that you don't know what it is or why it is important to this conversation. This also proves that there is no point in arguing with you. So fine, you win, I bow to your superior intellect and clearly doing the simple mean is the best way to approach this problem and the lack of raw data or standard deviation information clearly has no use.
1. fill box with a newspaper, wrapped in security tape or whatever.
2. inure to max. value offered.
3. send (with "Atheist" label)
=======================
4. PROFIT for each one that gets "lost"
atheism is not a religious position. It is an opinion about religion
I think you've just defined "religious position" in the second part of the quoted section. It is an opinion, perhaps even a position, on religion? But not a religious position? Not sure you've got your thinking cap on there.
If I were being more accurate above, then I should have written "The one you're thinking of is agnostic atheism". Or apathetic/pragmatic agnosticism, which is also wonderfully called Apatheism.
OK, I definitely overstepped in saying atheism can be described as a religion itself, but there are groups of atheists who are behaving very much like organised religions and as it is de-facto a religious position then the stretch doesn't look too far.
. It also happens not to be a "belief" or "faith", it happens to stem from observation and by now has a solid scientific foundation.
Oh, my. From the point of view of the ~7billion theists it looks like faith. Not that that's going to hold much water if you're atheist, I admit!
Atheism has a very weak scientific foundation - in that it's the null hypothesis. And those who claim it is stronger than that are as self serving as that retard who "did calculations", presumably with a crayon up his nose, and gave an age for the earth from the Bible.
I direct you to Thomas H Huxleys discussion on this:
"Agnosticism, in fact, is not a creed, but a method, the essence of which lies in the rigorous application of a single principle...Positively the principle may be expressed: In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration. And negatively: In matters of the intellect do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable."
Some of the wisest words I've ever read.
Rational thought is the only true freedom
As I said in response to another comment
If I were being more accurate above, then I should have written "The one you're thinking of is agnostic atheism". Or apathetic/pragmatic agnosticism, which is also wonderfully called Apatheism. I definitely overstepped in saying atheism can be described as a religion itself, but there are groups of atheists who are behaving very much like organised religions and as it is de-facto a religious position then the stretch doesn't look too far.
Rational thought is the only true freedom
Reply reformatted for readability. Sorry about that
atheism is not a religious position. It is an opinion about religion
I think you've just defined "religious position" in the second part of the quoted section. It is an opinion, perhaps even a position, on religion? But not a religious position? Not sure you've got your thinking cap on there.
If I were being more accurate above, then I should have written "The one you're thinking of is agnostic atheism". Or apathetic/pragmatic agnosticism, which is also wonderfully called Apatheism. I definitely overstepped in saying atheism can be described as a religion itself, but there are groups of atheists who are behaving very much like organised religions and as it is de-facto a religious position then the stretch doesn't look too far.
It also happens not to be a "belief" or "faith", it happens to stem from observation and by now has a solid scientific foundation.
Oh, my. From the point of view of the ~7billion theists it looks like faith. Not that that's going to hold much water if you're atheist, I admit!
Atheism has a very weak scientific foundation - in that it's the null hypothesis. And those who claim it is stronger than that are as self serving as that retard who "did calculations", presumably with a crayon up his nose, and gave an age for the earth from the Bible.
I direct you to Thomas H Huxley's words on agnosticism:
"Agnosticism, in fact, is not a creed, but a method, the essence of which lies in the rigorous application of a single principle...Positively the principle may be expressed: In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration. And negatively: In matters of the intellect do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable."
Some of the wisest words I've ever read.
Rational thought is the only true freedom
They could have included a neutral (non-framed) condition, so 1) no text on package, 2) "atheist" on package, 3) (random text) on package. Or; since they're trying to confirm the hypothesis that this has something to do with religion, 3) (random text) on package and 4) "In God we trust" on package (or something similar).
Statistics seem fine to me (like person below me said).
Either way, I really like the blue shoes and the price looks good to, I might order me a pair and ask for them to put "KILL ALL CHRISTIANS" on the box.
My gut tells me that a one-tailed test would be more appropriate as they're trying to confirm a hypothesis; but I might be wrong. My gut sucks in stats.
It might just be that if you label things atheist, USPS employees are less likely to care about it, as is their management. I wonder what would happen if they shipped "Jewish" shoes in Palestine, or "Palestinian" shoes in Isreal?
I suspect the moral of the story is if you run against the social grain, insure your shipments.
Beware: I believe all are created equal, and have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.