I believe the vast majority of the data they want to base their theories on doesn't pass muster for scientific research because they are now starting to admit that it doesn't and are asking for a do over. link BTW if they want us to believe they need to release the code as well. It is going to be pretty hard to sell the idea that programmers are infallible on/.
but the ordinary people who have jumped on the bandwagon and formed a sort of online lynch mob, seeking out any dissent.
Welcome to modern political discourse. We see this on both sides, and there seems to be very little middle these days.
There also seems to be a crowd of far-left wackos who see AGW as a golden opportunity to get *their* ideas implemented while nobody is thinking critically.
Yes, and they function much the same as far-right whackos in this respect, but are less organized.
The problem is that the science beyond a basic outline is too complicated to explain to people without a background in it. I don't understand most of it, and unless I want to go spend a few years in school learning this stuff, I'm not going to understand it either. So, we have to rely on those who do understand it. Right now there is no scientific body of national or international standing that is known to reject the basic findings of human influence on recent climate change.
I just can't see how taking the word of others (e.g. politicians, businessmen) that don't understand the science any better than I do
is better than accepting the consensus of the scientific organizations of the world.
Changes in the law affect law, not economics. Would you say we need to write all new physics every time someone moves a little mass?
As soon as you can test economic theories the way we test physics theories, then I might agree with you. As it stands, in order to make effective use of economic theory, you must have accurate information and be able to account for all of the major influences at any given time. That's rarely the case except when looking at the past. Using it to determine what we should do now does suffer from a lack of accurate and comprehensive information. They poll economists on current issues all the time and almost always end up with at least several different theories about what should be done and why. Usually because they're each including or excluding or weighing information differently.
So you bring up sub-prime mortgages that "haven't exactly helped out economy out." Even that's not exactly an accurate view of what's going on, though it is the popular view and the view that has benefited politicians to reinforce.
So what's the accurate view on that?
The subprime mortgages actually HAVE worked to help the economy out in various ways ranging from allowing people to have a chance at home ownership when they otherwise wouldn't have had the option to allowing financial institutions to hedge their bets, managing their risk.
So you're saying that sub-prime lending was a good thing? You're assuming that it's a good thing for people who couldn't qualify for a regular home loan to be able to buy a home. How do you figure? So they can get into some ridiculous gimmick loan that they don't understand and that will jack their rates through the roof? That's what happened. It wasn't a good thing.
As for what happened with the whole real estate financial mess, this is my basic take on it:
Real estate prices were rising. Banks wanted to make more loans, so they start targeting them at people with lower credit scores and getting them into mortgages that were initially affordable, but that would rise dramatically after a few years. This didn't concern the lender because they weren't going to hang onto that loan anyway. They were going to securitize the loans and insure them via credit default swaps get a AAA rating on it and sell them as great investment instruments. Considering that they were insured against losses, they probably seemed like a good investment, especially if you bought into the whole "real estate prices will always rise" theory.
But since the government had removed the requirement for the insurer (e.g. AIG) to maintain any sort of capital reserve to cover those CDS contracts, they were essentially printing money for themselves. Sell trillions worth of insurance with no need to actually have a prayer of covering any significant portion of it. Great work if you can get it. So when the real estate bubble bursts, the contracts come due and AIG and others go running to the government because they can't cover all those losses. The government (insanely, IMO) decides to pay out 100 cents on the dollar to cover those losses that the banks incurred, so the banks don't take a loss thanks to the taxpayers.
In fact, a huge part of what happened wasn't because of sub-prime mortgages and derivatives, but because of the political reaction to them. Politicians hijacked the system, throwing a wrench into it all and crashing it.
You could argue that the system should have been more durable so as to withstand politicians' meddling, but I wouldn't really blame the system itself for that.
Economists know this, but the word doesn't really get out because it's not politically convenient. As you say, the politicians want to increase their power at every turn, and the crash of the market that they caused through their hamhanded meddling is just another example of this.
Don't blame the economists or the financial system for the
You can’t call something a prediction when you already knew it.
You can’t call something falsifiable when it simply explains what you already knew.
Well, if you believe that evolution is wrong, then at least some of the claims it makes must be wrong, right? So where's the evidence to falsify those claims? Maybe you think there's something that it doesn't account for? Present evidence of that! Otherwise, why are you disputing it if you think all of the claims are consistent with the evidence?
I’ve already seen on plenty of occasions how evolutionists deal with people who try to offer evidence that doesn’t support the theory of evolution. First they insist that it just ain’t so. Then they make excuses why it just ain’t so. If all else fails, they attack the messenger... oh wait, no, that generally comes every step of the way.
You mean they offer scientific explanations for natural phenomena?! The horror!!
There is plenty of evidence that I could give you. I simply have absolutely no desire to change your mind about anything because I know that absolutely no amount of evidence can do that. So I’m not even trying.
That's where you're wrong. Actual evidence that disproves evolution, in whole or in part would be amazing! Not only would it teach us something important about how such evidence could have been missed and how we can improve our methods of research, but it would also allow us to learn something new and possibly ground-breaking about our world which could advance science in all kinds of ways. So yeah, if you had actual evidence that would be awesome! But so far you haven't presented anything that hasn't already been explained (and some of your evidence was explained and settled over 100 years ago by religious scientists).
Test it all you want. Or with other life forms; I hear they’re doing some pretty fascinating tests with E. coli. I suppose you’re right — you’ll never be done testing, but at some point I’d have to conclude you’re insane for continuing to repeat the same experiment and hoping to eventually get a different result.
If we saw something happen in the way you're describing, it would actually disprove evolution, because it just doesn't happen over the course of a few generations.
Don’t worry, you’ll find out.
We talking about eternal damnation, that kind of stuff? More mythology so twisted in its logic and meanings as to be incomprehensible to anyone with any conscience or intellect.
So you have some set of remembered studies from however long ago and have decided that it's all settled. Few things in economics are settled, and even small changes in the law can create an environment where old conclusions don't apply. We still see plenty of debate today about what parts of the New Deal were good or bad and for whom. Anyway, if I don't know which studies you're talking about, I can't really address them.
Bush's "tax cuts for the rich" was obviously not about letting rich people have more money for the hell of it, but about letting them keep more of their own money so that they could put it to use in economy-expanding ways. And it worked exactly as planned.
If they keep their money, they can use it in any way they please, and it certainly doesn't have to help the economy. Perhaps it was invested in sub-prime mortgage-backed securities and other fun financial instruments that haven't exactly helped our economy out. Of course it's not gambling when you know the house will give you your money back.
Given the amount of influence that the very rich have in Washington, I doubt they really need a reason. The system works for them, literally and figuratively. Who else gets the kind of access they get? All the government has done since its inception is devise new ways to reduce the effect of the individual voter. Through gerrymandering, constantly increasing district sizes, corporate personhood, etc, they have marginalized the individual voter to a large degree and rendered them ineffective in their ability to change their representation in Congress in any meaningful way.
No, you haven’t. You’ve given me tautological explanations of evidence. Since they were not falsifiable, I merely gave my own explanation of the same evidence.
Did you even bother to read the links I posted? Every section in this document gives examples of how the claims could be falsified! You know, under the "Potential Falsification" headers after the claims? The fact that they haven't been disproved yet shows that they are highly consistent with the observed evidence. It's still possible that they could be disproved if we find something that contradicts a claim, such as one of the many examples they give.
Evolution is conveniently devoid of actual, real, testable and falsifiable scientific claims. Everything evolution “predicts” either already happened, or will be so far in the future that we’ll all be dead before we can confirm it. Thus, not testable.
Wrong again. Plenty of the claims could be proven false today. They haven't been because nobody has found any evidence that contradicts the claims. The link above gives a bunch of claims and examples of falsifications. How come you can't offer any evidence to falsify even one of them?!
You want an actual, real, testable and falsifiable scientific claim from creationism? A lizard will never evolve into a bird. Ever. No, I don’t care if you claim it happened ten million or billion years ago. It won’t happen NOW, and it won’t ever happen, because it can’t, because it doesn’t work like that.
How is that testable? Didn't you just say that things that would take so long that we'd all be dead before we could confirm it are not testable? I'm not sure how you think evolution works, but I'm pretty sure you've got the wrong idea. Birds DID evolve from theropod dinosaurs. There's lots of evidence to support this, and you haven't shown anything that contradicts it except your own insistence that it just ain't so. Sorry, but that's not scientific evidence.
Want another? Read the book of Revelation. For added convenience, you’ll get to test this one even if you die before the main events take place.
And so on. There; I’ve addressed your points and shown that these “evidences for evolution” are not orthogonal or mutually exclusive to creationism’s claims.
Did I accomplish anything? Highly doubtful.
Of course you didn't. Wild speculation utterly unsupported by any scientific evidence is no argument at all. You could use the exact same logic to speculate that the universe was created by FSM or that the universe is just a pimple on some extra-universal being's ass. Saying that something could have happened through magic is not the same as having evidence for it. Burden of evidence is on the one making the claim.
Two things. One, your "theory" is not a scientific theory, so it's not even a possible explanation in a scientific sense. It depends on the supernatural, which is, by definition, untestable, in addition to the fact that there's no evidence of it anywhere.
Next, just because you don't understand the evidence behind evolution doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. The great thing about scientific theories is that their claims must be falsifiable. I've presented you with link after link after link of claims made by evolutionary theory. You have yet to present evidence to falsify a single one of them. So yeah, YOU FAIL.
In other words, if I post any evidence that I think supports creationism, you’ll explain it according to evolution. If you post any evidence that you think supports evolution, I’ll explain it according to creationism (feel free to try me on that, though). Why bother with that exercise in futility?
Translation:
"If I post any evidence that I think supports creationism, you'll provide a scientific explanation for it that I won't be able to falsify because I don't understand science and I don't know how to make a scientific argument. If you post evidence that you think supports evolution, I'll explain it according to creationist mythology and provide no scientific evidence whatsoever to support my claim."
I think that's pretty much how it would go. I've at least given you actual scientific claims that you can theoretically falsify. You won't provide even that for your argument because you can't.
And wonder of wonders, I just checked and you've already confirmed my hypothesis here. Good show.
I made other assumptions about the complaint based on a pattern. Like I said, there were 13 ethics complaints against Palin resolved (and two outstanding) when she resigned. Of those 13, Palin was found to not have committed any wrongdoing.
That's not necessarily true. One of those complaints was about her using state funds to pay for her kids' travel. She ended up paying back the money, but it wasn't an unfair or unfounded claim. I can't find much info on most of those complaints, so I can't address them. I do think that anyone that becomes (or even looks like they might become) a candidate for a major office is going to face increased scrutiny. This happens to all of them, so Palin is hardly alone in this. Hell, look at all the accusations leveled against Obama, I lost count of those a long time ago, but I'm pretty sure they outnumber Palin's by a wide margin, if only because he's been a target longer since he won the election.
Like I said before though, allegations against governors and congresspeople are very difficult to pursue as they can make it extremely hard to get the information needed to build the case, and they face little or no consequences for "losing" information like emails and such. Palin claimed that she wasn't even aware of Alaska's document retention policy. Since she didn't even know about it, I guess she was just lucky that it was determined that she wasn't technically violating it since it didn't specifically cover email.
I originally said that the e-mails being part of the deliberative process and therefore not subject to disclosure was a reasonable thing for Palin to say to the judge. Clearly, the judge would then rule on it. And he did; the MSNBC* article said the judge ruled it not illegal.
The judge decided for some reason that emails were different than, say, memos. I've seen no rationale for this, and it doesn't make a bit of sense to me. We often interpret older laws to cover newer technologies, but in this case, since the law didn't specifically mention email, the judge decided it wasn't a violation. Bizarre. At least the Alaska legislature rectified the situation going forward by specifically addressing emails and prohibiting use of private email accounts whenever possible, and requiring that copies be sent to government accounts whenever a private account is used.
Got a link to info about that study? Who did the study? Any others corroborate it?
In general, economists DO agree on an awful lot. What divergences exist tend to arise from differing subjective opinions about matters that aren't actually economic but rather matters of public policy and ethics.
In retrospect they may agree on some things, but then they can't agree about whether those findings apply to current situations because they can't agree on what the current situation is or how it came about.
I think I generally agree with you. I don't side with either party, because I agree with both of them on some issues as well, and I prefer to vote for specific candidates rather than a party. The more I've read and learned about all the health care issues in the country, the more difficult the problem seems to me. I understand the idea of wanting to take small steps, as the conservatives have been proposing, but I also feel that we need to fix the major problems very soon too. So far I haven't heard of any "small steps" proposals that would do anything about the preexisting condition problem, which is critical now that so many have lost their insurance. Even if we do set up some way for people to get affordable health insurance, it won't do them any good if they get rejected. I really don't see how that can be addressed without getting more healthy people into the system to offset the expense.
While I am in favor of taking actions to increase competition between insurers, I'm also concerned that allowing more interstate competition will require the federal government to start regulating the insurers rather than the states. If there was already compatibility there, why aren't the insurers already competing more than they are now? We seem to have a situation with many states where one major insurer dominates and a few smaller ones have a niche market. I'd love to know what's keeping the other major insurers from entering those markets.
Something definitely needs to be done to reduce the practice of "defensive medicine" too. We have to get the costs down and start eliminating the waste, and that seems like one of the big glaring areas to start with. That may involve some (careful) tort reform, but is likely going to take a lot more than that to fix it. I don't know what the ultimate solutions will be, but the system is very broken and the incentives in it are very twisted right now. It's not creating the better outcomes that we should expect for the much greater amounts of money being spent on it compared to other countries. With those kinds of rapidly diminishing returns, there's probably quite a bit of room to cut out very inefficient and downright wasteful practices.
Are you still trolling this story? Every time I've posted links to rebut your claims, you seem to stop responding. There's no evidence for the supernatural, so yes, you're the one making radical claims. More than that though, you're the one who has utterly failed to support a single one of your claims with even a link to a rationale, let alone anything that could actually be construed as evidence.
There certainly are differences between policies that increase the deficit. Sure they all increase the deficit, but that's not nearly the end of the story.
And no, the current state of affairs doesn't indicate that the boost from these tax cuts was temporary. It only demonstrates how later policies and events separately affected the economy.
Yeah, gonna call bullshit on that. You have no idea and no evidence to say what it demonstrates. You can't say anything even remotely definitive regarding how the tax cuts played a part in the economy and everything we've seen happen over the last couple years. Economics is more voodoo and guesswork than science, and I'm pretty sure you're no economist. As much as people like to bash on climate and weather models, economic models are far worse. Even economists can't agree on these things, largely because there are so many factors involved that can't be accurately measured that they really can't say much of anything for certain. They may see some correlations, but they can't definitively determine causation.
I'm not really arguing that a single payer system is needed. Just that there needs to be a lot more transparency in the system than we have now (i.e. virtually none), and I definitely agree that something needs to be done to fix the preexisting condition problem. It seems that that problem is the one that tends to drive us toward a universal system where everyone has to be covered and pay into the system. Otherwise we still have the problem we're seeing now with Blue Cross and Humana where they're jacking up rates because they've lost a lot of customers (because those customers lost their jobs and then their insurance). So they can't spread the costs enough now. We still end up paying for these people when they show up in the emergency room anyway though. It's basically the worst possible situation for both the taxpayers and the uninsured to leave them without any insurance.
Well. Ultimately there is a cold calculus that occurs: the cost of the treatments to the population of insured exceeds the premiums collected. The same problem can just as well occur in any single payer system, and the solution is about the same: deny coverage.
C//
Except then they call it "rationing", and it's a horrible socialist nightmare.
No, they cannot deny claims, either. Not insofar as they would deny them to everyone under the policy.
That's what I meant by denying coverage for treatments that they don't find to be cost-effective (or for whatever other reason, such as considering them to be "experimental", which is often interpreted pretty broadly by insurance companies).
You are incorrect about this. You do not file or disclose preexisting conditions for employer sponsored health care.
I don't think you followed the OP, who was correct. You CANNOT be dropped from an employer-sponsored group.
C//
But you also can't be sure what they'll actually cover you for either. They may not be able to drop you, but they can certainly deny claims and prevent you from getting treatments that they don't find to be cost-effective.
Re:Was it a cause of his legal trouble?
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Our Low-Tech Tax Code
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The only people who don't are those who want to avoid paying their proper share.
And people who understand the time value of money, which you obviously don't.
According to thesearticles and others I've read, she did claim executive privilege.
You're assuming a lot here. You assume that the "disgruntled" former aide is lying, although there's no evidence of that. You're assuming that the suit is just for purposes of harassment, again with no evidence of that. You're assuming that these emails are all personal (which just from the subject lines that were leaked (see the msnbc link for those too), it's quite obvious that they were about state business.
Whether they should be protected rather than released because they are part of the "deliberative process" is for a court to decide, not Palin. It may very well be that they should remain private for now, but that still doesn't mean it was appropriate or legal for those communications to go through a non-governmental email service.
The EU is not requiring that there is a brick-and-mortar store. The luxury brands themselves are doing. It's just that the EU used to prohibit them from discriminating against online retailers. Now they are letting luxury brands make that choice if they feel like it's worth it for their brand image. I don't see why there's such an uproar on slashdot.
Probably because TFA does a piss poor job of explaining that. Even after reading your explanation I'm still left wondering if this change only applies to luxury brands or everyone. I'm fine with the supplier getting to choose who they sell to, but the rules should be the same for everyone, and that's hardly clear here.
Brand owners - often in the high-end or luxury segment - say the provision is necessary to stop so-called free riders, competitors who benefit from promotions carried out by brand name companies, shifting stock online on the back of advertising of a brand's products and services.
Because "free riders" do not have to pay for the costs of a shop and related overheads, they can frequently offer brand-name products over the Internet at discounted prices.
"The purpose of a brick-and-mortar shop provision is to help retailers invest in luxury shops," said Antoine Winkler, a partner at law firm Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton who represents several brand name companies.
I'm slightly confused. Are they doing this to help the brick-and-mortar stores? Are they doing this to help the brands? I'm confused. It sounds like they are trying to take down low-overhead companies because they are too efficient. Does anyone know why this would be a good idea?
I don't know either. Is the next move to mandate that companies selling "luxury" brands must locate their store in a high-rent part of town too? I mean it just can't be fair if they set up a shop in the bad part of town and pay a fraction of the rent that the luxury stores pay, right? I'm not sure where this madness would end...
The hacking incident took place in September 2008. The only other stories I find say the same things. The boxes of emails that were turned over to Andree McLeod in June 2008 were heavily redacted, and the ones that were still being requested from the Yahoo accounts are the ones that Palin refuses to turn over, citing executive privilege. How you claim executive privilege over email that isn't related to state business, I have no idea, so I can only assume that they are state business related emails.
There were still FOIA requests pending, but Palin said it would cost $88,000 to hand over those emails, knowing that the woman couldn't pay it. That's more than a year's salary for most people, and a completely ridiculous amount for handing over 1,000 emails.
Lots of politicians get cleared after ethics probes. It's hard as hell to ever prove anything because of all the privileges they get and how easy it is for them to obstruct the investigation without consequence. Unless they get caught pretty much red-handed (like that William Jefferson asshole from Louisiana who got off really easy with only a 13 yr sentence), they'll generally get out of it. Even Jefferson put up a pretty good fight, and that one was about as open and shut as they come. If it had been anyone but a politician they'd have been screwed from the start.
Ok, I'm truly curious here. How the heck would the OS know what memory space corresponds to the active tab in FF versus the inactive tabs or other application data?
Most recently accessed would be a good way to determine recent tabs, and most frequently accessed (or the one where the program counter is pointing) gives you the main executable. Just start by caching the least recently and frequently accessed pages first, your necessary application data to reload should be the last thing out of RAM. QED.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe the vast majority of the data they want to base their theories on doesn't pass muster for scientific research because they are now starting to admit that it doesn't and are asking for a do over. link BTW if they want us to believe they need to release the code as well. It is going to be pretty hard to sell the idea that programmers are infallible on /.
Your link seems to be broken.
but the ordinary people who have jumped on the bandwagon and formed a sort of online lynch mob, seeking out any dissent.
Welcome to modern political discourse. We see this on both sides, and there seems to be very little middle these days.
There also seems to be a crowd of far-left wackos who see AGW as a golden opportunity to get *their* ideas implemented while nobody is thinking critically.
Yes, and they function much the same as far-right whackos in this respect, but are less organized.
The problem is that the science beyond a basic outline is too complicated to explain to people without a background in it. I don't understand most of it, and unless I want to go spend a few years in school learning this stuff, I'm not going to understand it either. So, we have to rely on those who do understand it. Right now there is no scientific body of national or international standing that is known to reject the basic findings of human influence on recent climate change.
I just can't see how taking the word of others (e.g. politicians, businessmen) that don't understand the science any better than I do is better than accepting the consensus of the scientific organizations of the world.
Nice post, I completely agree (except I don't think GWB is a fascist lol).
So you don't really agree with him then? You just make exceptions for people whose policies you agree with?
"If you want to get serious about it, these guys claiming that the snow in Washington disproves climate change are almost unpatriotic."
My jaw dropped when I saw that Nye had said that. It was great seeing Bastardi take him apart. :-)
How was he wrong? The people claiming that current weather proves anything about climate are idiots and are just adding confusion to the discussion.
Changes in the law affect law, not economics. Would you say we need to write all new physics every time someone moves a little mass?
As soon as you can test economic theories the way we test physics theories, then I might agree with you. As it stands, in order to make effective use of economic theory, you must have accurate information and be able to account for all of the major influences at any given time. That's rarely the case except when looking at the past. Using it to determine what we should do now does suffer from a lack of accurate and comprehensive information. They poll economists on current issues all the time and almost always end up with at least several different theories about what should be done and why. Usually because they're each including or excluding or weighing information differently.
So you bring up sub-prime mortgages that "haven't exactly helped out economy out." Even that's not exactly an accurate view of what's going on, though it is the popular view and the view that has benefited politicians to reinforce.
So what's the accurate view on that?
The subprime mortgages actually HAVE worked to help the economy out in various ways ranging from allowing people to have a chance at home ownership when they otherwise wouldn't have had the option to allowing financial institutions to hedge their bets, managing their risk.
So you're saying that sub-prime lending was a good thing? You're assuming that it's a good thing for people who couldn't qualify for a regular home loan to be able to buy a home. How do you figure? So they can get into some ridiculous gimmick loan that they don't understand and that will jack their rates through the roof? That's what happened. It wasn't a good thing.
As for what happened with the whole real estate financial mess, this is my basic take on it:
Real estate prices were rising. Banks wanted to make more loans, so they start targeting them at people with lower credit scores and getting them into mortgages that were initially affordable, but that would rise dramatically after a few years. This didn't concern the lender because they weren't going to hang onto that loan anyway. They were going to securitize the loans and insure them via credit default swaps get a AAA rating on it and sell them as great investment instruments. Considering that they were insured against losses, they probably seemed like a good investment, especially if you bought into the whole "real estate prices will always rise" theory.
But since the government had removed the requirement for the insurer (e.g. AIG) to maintain any sort of capital reserve to cover those CDS contracts, they were essentially printing money for themselves. Sell trillions worth of insurance with no need to actually have a prayer of covering any significant portion of it. Great work if you can get it. So when the real estate bubble bursts, the contracts come due and AIG and others go running to the government because they can't cover all those losses. The government (insanely, IMO) decides to pay out 100 cents on the dollar to cover those losses that the banks incurred, so the banks don't take a loss thanks to the taxpayers.
In fact, a huge part of what happened wasn't because of sub-prime mortgages and derivatives, but because of the political reaction to them. Politicians hijacked the system, throwing a wrench into it all and crashing it.
You could argue that the system should have been more durable so as to withstand politicians' meddling, but I wouldn't really blame the system itself for that.
Economists know this, but the word doesn't really get out because it's not politically convenient. As you say, the politicians want to increase their power at every turn, and the crash of the market that they caused through their hamhanded meddling is just another example of this.
Don't blame the economists or the financial system for the
You can’t call something a prediction when you already knew it. You can’t call something falsifiable when it simply explains what you already knew.
Well, if you believe that evolution is wrong, then at least some of the claims it makes must be wrong, right? So where's the evidence to falsify those claims? Maybe you think there's something that it doesn't account for? Present evidence of that! Otherwise, why are you disputing it if you think all of the claims are consistent with the evidence?
I’ve already seen on plenty of occasions how evolutionists deal with people who try to offer evidence that doesn’t support the theory of evolution. First they insist that it just ain’t so. Then they make excuses why it just ain’t so. If all else fails, they attack the messenger... oh wait, no, that generally comes every step of the way.
You mean they offer scientific explanations for natural phenomena?! The horror!!
There is plenty of evidence that I could give you. I simply have absolutely no desire to change your mind about anything because I know that absolutely no amount of evidence can do that. So I’m not even trying.
That's where you're wrong. Actual evidence that disproves evolution, in whole or in part would be amazing! Not only would it teach us something important about how such evidence could have been missed and how we can improve our methods of research, but it would also allow us to learn something new and possibly ground-breaking about our world which could advance science in all kinds of ways. So yeah, if you had actual evidence that would be awesome! But so far you haven't presented anything that hasn't already been explained (and some of your evidence was explained and settled over 100 years ago by religious scientists).
Test it all you want. Or with other life forms; I hear they’re doing some pretty fascinating tests with E. coli. I suppose you’re right — you’ll never be done testing, but at some point I’d have to conclude you’re insane for continuing to repeat the same experiment and hoping to eventually get a different result.
If we saw something happen in the way you're describing, it would actually disprove evolution, because it just doesn't happen over the course of a few generations.
Don’t worry, you’ll find out.
We talking about eternal damnation, that kind of stuff? More mythology so twisted in its logic and meanings as to be incomprehensible to anyone with any conscience or intellect.
Bush's "tax cuts for the rich" was obviously not about letting rich people have more money for the hell of it, but about letting them keep more of their own money so that they could put it to use in economy-expanding ways. And it worked exactly as planned.
If they keep their money, they can use it in any way they please, and it certainly doesn't have to help the economy. Perhaps it was invested in sub-prime mortgage-backed securities and other fun financial instruments that haven't exactly helped our economy out. Of course it's not gambling when you know the house will give you your money back.
Given the amount of influence that the very rich have in Washington, I doubt they really need a reason. The system works for them, literally and figuratively. Who else gets the kind of access they get? All the government has done since its inception is devise new ways to reduce the effect of the individual voter. Through gerrymandering, constantly increasing district sizes, corporate personhood, etc, they have marginalized the individual voter to a large degree and rendered them ineffective in their ability to change their representation in Congress in any meaningful way.
No, you haven’t. You’ve given me tautological explanations of evidence. Since they were not falsifiable, I merely gave my own explanation of the same evidence.
Did you even bother to read the links I posted? Every section in this document gives examples of how the claims could be falsified! You know, under the "Potential Falsification" headers after the claims? The fact that they haven't been disproved yet shows that they are highly consistent with the observed evidence. It's still possible that they could be disproved if we find something that contradicts a claim, such as one of the many examples they give.
Evolution is conveniently devoid of actual, real, testable and falsifiable scientific claims. Everything evolution “predicts” either already happened, or will be so far in the future that we’ll all be dead before we can confirm it. Thus, not testable.
Wrong again. Plenty of the claims could be proven false today. They haven't been because nobody has found any evidence that contradicts the claims. The link above gives a bunch of claims and examples of falsifications. How come you can't offer any evidence to falsify even one of them?!
You want an actual, real, testable and falsifiable scientific claim from creationism? A lizard will never evolve into a bird. Ever. No, I don’t care if you claim it happened ten million or billion years ago. It won’t happen NOW, and it won’t ever happen, because it can’t, because it doesn’t work like that.
How is that testable? Didn't you just say that things that would take so long that we'd all be dead before we could confirm it are not testable? I'm not sure how you think evolution works, but I'm pretty sure you've got the wrong idea. Birds DID evolve from theropod dinosaurs. There's lots of evidence to support this, and you haven't shown anything that contradicts it except your own insistence that it just ain't so. Sorry, but that's not scientific evidence.
Want another? Read the book of Revelation. For added convenience, you’ll get to test this one even if you die before the main events take place.
WTF does that even mean?
So no info on the study?
And so on. There; I’ve addressed your points and shown that these “evidences for evolution” are not orthogonal or mutually exclusive to creationism’s claims. Did I accomplish anything? Highly doubtful.
Of course you didn't. Wild speculation utterly unsupported by any scientific evidence is no argument at all. You could use the exact same logic to speculate that the universe was created by FSM or that the universe is just a pimple on some extra-universal being's ass. Saying that something could have happened through magic is not the same as having evidence for it. Burden of evidence is on the one making the claim.
In other words, if I post any evidence that I think supports creationism, you’ll explain it according to evolution. If you post any evidence that you think supports evolution, I’ll explain it according to creationism (feel free to try me on that, though). Why bother with that exercise in futility?
Translation:
"If I post any evidence that I think supports creationism, you'll provide a scientific explanation for it that I won't be able to falsify because I don't understand science and I don't know how to make a scientific argument. If you post evidence that you think supports evolution, I'll explain it according to creationist mythology and provide no scientific evidence whatsoever to support my claim."
I think that's pretty much how it would go. I've at least given you actual scientific claims that you can theoretically falsify. You won't provide even that for your argument because you can't.
And wonder of wonders, I just checked and you've already confirmed my hypothesis here. Good show.
I made other assumptions about the complaint based on a pattern. Like I said, there were 13 ethics complaints against Palin resolved (and two outstanding) when she resigned. Of those 13, Palin was found to not have committed any wrongdoing.
That's not necessarily true. One of those complaints was about her using state funds to pay for her kids' travel. She ended up paying back the money, but it wasn't an unfair or unfounded claim. I can't find much info on most of those complaints, so I can't address them. I do think that anyone that becomes (or even looks like they might become) a candidate for a major office is going to face increased scrutiny. This happens to all of them, so Palin is hardly alone in this. Hell, look at all the accusations leveled against Obama, I lost count of those a long time ago, but I'm pretty sure they outnumber Palin's by a wide margin, if only because he's been a target longer since he won the election.
Like I said before though, allegations against governors and congresspeople are very difficult to pursue as they can make it extremely hard to get the information needed to build the case, and they face little or no consequences for "losing" information like emails and such. Palin claimed that she wasn't even aware of Alaska's document retention policy. Since she didn't even know about it, I guess she was just lucky that it was determined that she wasn't technically violating it since it didn't specifically cover email.
I originally said that the e-mails being part of the deliberative process and therefore not subject to disclosure was a reasonable thing for Palin to say to the judge. Clearly, the judge would then rule on it. And he did; the MSNBC* article said the judge ruled it not illegal.
The judge decided for some reason that emails were different than, say, memos. I've seen no rationale for this, and it doesn't make a bit of sense to me. We often interpret older laws to cover newer technologies, but in this case, since the law didn't specifically mention email, the judge decided it wasn't a violation. Bizarre. At least the Alaska legislature rectified the situation going forward by specifically addressing emails and prohibiting use of private email accounts whenever possible, and requiring that copies be sent to government accounts whenever a private account is used.
In general, economists DO agree on an awful lot. What divergences exist tend to arise from differing subjective opinions about matters that aren't actually economic but rather matters of public policy and ethics.
In retrospect they may agree on some things, but then they can't agree about whether those findings apply to current situations because they can't agree on what the current situation is or how it came about.
I think I generally agree with you. I don't side with either party, because I agree with both of them on some issues as well, and I prefer to vote for specific candidates rather than a party. The more I've read and learned about all the health care issues in the country, the more difficult the problem seems to me. I understand the idea of wanting to take small steps, as the conservatives have been proposing, but I also feel that we need to fix the major problems very soon too. So far I haven't heard of any "small steps" proposals that would do anything about the preexisting condition problem, which is critical now that so many have lost their insurance. Even if we do set up some way for people to get affordable health insurance, it won't do them any good if they get rejected. I really don't see how that can be addressed without getting more healthy people into the system to offset the expense.
While I am in favor of taking actions to increase competition between insurers, I'm also concerned that allowing more interstate competition will require the federal government to start regulating the insurers rather than the states. If there was already compatibility there, why aren't the insurers already competing more than they are now? We seem to have a situation with many states where one major insurer dominates and a few smaller ones have a niche market. I'd love to know what's keeping the other major insurers from entering those markets.
Something definitely needs to be done to reduce the practice of "defensive medicine" too. We have to get the costs down and start eliminating the waste, and that seems like one of the big glaring areas to start with. That may involve some (careful) tort reform, but is likely going to take a lot more than that to fix it. I don't know what the ultimate solutions will be, but the system is very broken and the incentives in it are very twisted right now. It's not creating the better outcomes that we should expect for the much greater amounts of money being spent on it compared to other countries. With those kinds of rapidly diminishing returns, there's probably quite a bit of room to cut out very inefficient and downright wasteful practices.
Are you still trolling this story? Every time I've posted links to rebut your claims, you seem to stop responding. There's no evidence for the supernatural, so yes, you're the one making radical claims. More than that though, you're the one who has utterly failed to support a single one of your claims with even a link to a rationale, let alone anything that could actually be construed as evidence.
You lose.
There certainly are differences between policies that increase the deficit. Sure they all increase the deficit, but that's not nearly the end of the story.
And no, the current state of affairs doesn't indicate that the boost from these tax cuts was temporary. It only demonstrates how later policies and events separately affected the economy.
Yeah, gonna call bullshit on that. You have no idea and no evidence to say what it demonstrates. You can't say anything even remotely definitive regarding how the tax cuts played a part in the economy and everything we've seen happen over the last couple years. Economics is more voodoo and guesswork than science, and I'm pretty sure you're no economist. As much as people like to bash on climate and weather models, economic models are far worse. Even economists can't agree on these things, largely because there are so many factors involved that can't be accurately measured that they really can't say much of anything for certain. They may see some correlations, but they can't definitively determine causation.
I'm not really arguing that a single payer system is needed. Just that there needs to be a lot more transparency in the system than we have now (i.e. virtually none), and I definitely agree that something needs to be done to fix the preexisting condition problem. It seems that that problem is the one that tends to drive us toward a universal system where everyone has to be covered and pay into the system. Otherwise we still have the problem we're seeing now with Blue Cross and Humana where they're jacking up rates because they've lost a lot of customers (because those customers lost their jobs and then their insurance). So they can't spread the costs enough now. We still end up paying for these people when they show up in the emergency room anyway though. It's basically the worst possible situation for both the taxpayers and the uninsured to leave them without any insurance.
Well. Ultimately there is a cold calculus that occurs: the cost of the treatments to the population of insured exceeds the premiums collected. The same problem can just as well occur in any single payer system, and the solution is about the same: deny coverage.
C//
Except then they call it "rationing", and it's a horrible socialist nightmare.
No, they cannot deny claims, either. Not insofar as they would deny them to everyone under the policy.
That's what I meant by denying coverage for treatments that they don't find to be cost-effective (or for whatever other reason, such as considering them to be "experimental", which is often interpreted pretty broadly by insurance companies).
You are incorrect about this. You do not file or disclose preexisting conditions for employer sponsored health care.
I don't think you followed the OP, who was correct. You CANNOT be dropped from an employer-sponsored group.
C//
But you also can't be sure what they'll actually cover you for either. They may not be able to drop you, but they can certainly deny claims and prevent you from getting treatments that they don't find to be cost-effective.
The only people who don't are those who want to avoid paying their proper share.
And people who understand the time value of money, which you obviously don't.
According to these articles and others I've read, she did claim executive privilege. You're assuming a lot here. You assume that the "disgruntled" former aide is lying, although there's no evidence of that. You're assuming that the suit is just for purposes of harassment, again with no evidence of that. You're assuming that these emails are all personal (which just from the subject lines that were leaked (see the msnbc link for those too), it's quite obvious that they were about state business.
Whether they should be protected rather than released because they are part of the "deliberative process" is for a court to decide, not Palin. It may very well be that they should remain private for now, but that still doesn't mean it was appropriate or legal for those communications to go through a non-governmental email service.
The EU is not requiring that there is a brick-and-mortar store. The luxury brands themselves are doing. It's just that the EU used to prohibit them from discriminating against online retailers. Now they are letting luxury brands make that choice if they feel like it's worth it for their brand image. I don't see why there's such an uproar on slashdot.
Probably because TFA does a piss poor job of explaining that. Even after reading your explanation I'm still left wondering if this change only applies to luxury brands or everyone. I'm fine with the supplier getting to choose who they sell to, but the rules should be the same for everyone, and that's hardly clear here.
From the article
Brand owners - often in the high-end or luxury segment - say the provision is necessary to stop so-called free riders, competitors who benefit from promotions carried out by brand name companies, shifting stock online on the back of advertising of a brand's products and services.
Because "free riders" do not have to pay for the costs of a shop and related overheads, they can frequently offer brand-name products over the Internet at discounted prices.
"The purpose of a brick-and-mortar shop provision is to help retailers invest in luxury shops," said Antoine Winkler, a partner at law firm Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton who represents several brand name companies.
I'm slightly confused. Are they doing this to help the brick-and-mortar stores? Are they doing this to help the brands? I'm confused. It sounds like they are trying to take down low-overhead companies because they are too efficient. Does anyone know why this would be a good idea?
I don't know either. Is the next move to mandate that companies selling "luxury" brands must locate their store in a high-rent part of town too? I mean it just can't be fair if they set up a shop in the bad part of town and pay a fraction of the rent that the luxury stores pay, right? I'm not sure where this madness would end...
The hacking incident took place in September 2008. The only other stories I find say the same things. The boxes of emails that were turned over to Andree McLeod in June 2008 were heavily redacted, and the ones that were still being requested from the Yahoo accounts are the ones that Palin refuses to turn over, citing executive privilege. How you claim executive privilege over email that isn't related to state business, I have no idea, so I can only assume that they are state business related emails.
There were still FOIA requests pending, but Palin said it would cost $88,000 to hand over those emails, knowing that the woman couldn't pay it. That's more than a year's salary for most people, and a completely ridiculous amount for handing over 1,000 emails.
Lots of politicians get cleared after ethics probes. It's hard as hell to ever prove anything because of all the privileges they get and how easy it is for them to obstruct the investigation without consequence. Unless they get caught pretty much red-handed (like that William Jefferson asshole from Louisiana who got off really easy with only a 13 yr sentence), they'll generally get out of it. Even Jefferson put up a pretty good fight, and that one was about as open and shut as they come. If it had been anyone but a politician they'd have been screwed from the start.
Ok, I'm truly curious here. How the heck would the OS know what memory space corresponds to the active tab in FF versus the inactive tabs or other application data?
Most recently accessed would be a good way to determine recent tabs, and most frequently accessed (or the one where the program counter is pointing) gives you the main executable. Just start by caching the least recently and frequently accessed pages first, your necessary application data to reload should be the last thing out of RAM. QED.
Isn't that essentially what it's already doing?