One might say that you do not know your history very well.
Go look up the fall of Argentina. We are doing what they did that made them fall. Greece is the same.
If you honestly think that the current policies of the US government are in any way comparable to those of either Greece or Argentina, you are too ignorant to have a meaningful opinion on the matter.
The only people I have ever heard say "I will not vote for candidate X because of his religion" are religious people who follow a religion other than that of candidate X. Seriously, I have never heard any of my fellow atheists say any such thing (and a good thing, too, because otherwise we'd have a hard time finding anyone to vote for). In the absence of evidence to the contrary, I'm going to guess that the "Atheists who say they won't vote for a guy because of religion, then vote for another guy, ignoring his admitted religion" exist only inside your own fevered imagination.
the Republican and Democratic parties have taken turns, term by term, doing eventually, exactly the same thing the other would do, perhaps sooner, perhaps later, for around a century
This is true. It is also true that they have generally not done the same things at the same time. Maybe in fifty years, the Republicans will be doing what the Democrats are doing now, or vice versa; it does not follow from this that Romney would do the same things from 2013 to 2017 that Obama would do, or vice versa. In fact, whichever of them wins (and it will be one of those two) will almost certainly do substantially different things than his opponent would have done.
That's a loaded question to ask anyway, its similar to asking, "Why use something other than Apple/Microsoft?"
No, it is nothing like that. The only way it would be comparable would be if someone asked you, "Would you prefer to use OS X, Windows, Linux, or BSD?" and then, regardless of what you said, made you use one of the first two choices.
Come late January, the President of the United States of America will be either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney. Deal with it.
At a guess, hurricanes and other weather systems don't so much remove heat from the Earth as make the distribution a little more uniform. All that wind and rain and storm surge creates a lot of friction with the ground, the water, and the surrounding air. Some of the heat released will radiate off into space, sure, but most of it won't--lots of cloud cover under the circumstances, obviously. So post-Sandy, it will maybe be a little warmer in the northeast US and a little cooler in the tropical Atlantic than it would have been otherwise. I have no idea if this effect is significant enough to measure for any one storm.
Yes, an OS that can only be used with overpriced hardware, made by the largest company in the world, is clearly socialist.
For any Republican who dislikes Macs, OS X is clearly socialist, because "socialism" is defined in Republicanese (a language which closely resembles English, and shares most of its syntax, but has a somewhat divergent vocabulary with lots of false cognates) as "anything a Republican doesn't like." For any Republican who likes Macs, OTOH, OS X is a triumph of the invisible hand of the free market, while Windows is pretty much the second coming of Joe Stalin. Linux is always Ron Paul.
It appears you're trying to make my point for me.... to paraphrase... At least I didn't...
Wow, you've really memorized the sophist's playbook, haven't you? Um, congratulations, I guess. You might want to consider a career in politics.
Anyway. I'm not the OP, and you shouldn't confuse us; my post was intended to endorse neither your view or his, just shed a little historical light on the matter. Which, BTW, your bit from Tom Horn (not exactly the most reliable of sources, I suspect) doesn't, particularly--assuming that what he says is true at all, it's a good bet that everyone in the various Apache bands knew perfectly well who their neighbors were and where they had come from. The situation he describes is more akin to the modern process of moving to a different city. You can certainly do that, and try to blend in with your new environment and not talk much about where you came from, but that's very different from true anonymity, which usually only exists during periods of mass migration. And even there, you're talking about a degree of freedom that hasn't been available to most of the people who have ever lived.
Personally, I recognize anonymity and privacy as historical anomalies and still think they're good things and worth preserving. There are lots of things that fall into this category: democracy, scientific medicine, and nearly instantaneous worldwide communication are three obvious examples out of a great number. I just have very little patience with arguments in favor of anything, even things I consider good, which resort to spurious history to bolster their points. Try arguing your positions on their merits, not on the basis of "as it was the old days..."
Wow, that's one of the most extreme cases of Poe's Law in action that I've ever seen. At least it sounds like she's taken the right actions to correct the problem as much as she can; hopefully future employers will take this into account.
As far as that particular period of American (in the broadest possible sense, relating not just to the terrority of the modern US but to "the Americas") history goes, you're right, but that hasn't been the norm in most of the world for a very long time. Ever since we settled down and started farming, most people were born, lived, and died within a day's walk of the same spot. Even before that, I suspect, most people lived their lives surrounded by more or less the same people, even if the location changed. There have been very few times in our history that complete personal reinvention was both possible and survivable. It's probably not surprising that we romanticize those periods, but that shouldn't keep us from remembering how rare they really are.
Aaaand now you've demonstrated the complete Republican departure from reality. Did you actually look at the numbers you posted? It is absolutely clear from that list that far more Democrats are willing to vote against the majority of their fellow party members than Republicans are. Let's look at the numbers in terms of percentage of members breaking from the party line:
On average, again just going from your own numbers, Democrats are willing to vote against their party line 10% of the time, Republicans 2%, a fivefold difference, and more than enough to make the difference in a close vote. If even 8% of Republicans were as willing to compromise as their Democratic colleagues are, the country wouldn't be in the mess it's in right now.
Oh yeah, here's the R code in case you want to accuse me of playing games:
# capital letters indicate ratios of members voting against party majority to total part members voting, expressed as percentages R = 100 * r2 / (r1 + r2) D = 100 * d2 / (d1 + d2)
# package it up report = data.frame(rollcall, R, D) print(round(report))
# mean percentages print(round(colMeans(report[c("R", "D")])))
That should be enough to get you started for running some significance tests if you like.
Well, they might actually try working with them instead of trying to get them to "shut the fuck up".
Democrats seem to be all about compromise as long as it's the Republicans doing the compromising.
Your statement is so completely opposed to reality that I have to wonder what color the sky is on your planet.
The simple fact is that the Republicans in Congress have voted as a unified bloc, over and over, ever since Obama took office, while the Democrats have not. That's about as objective a measure of (un)willingness to compromise as you can find. The Democrats have compromised over and over again in a futile attempt to get the Republicans to agree to something--anything!--to help fix the mess the Republicans created, and which the Republicans are clearly determined to maintain. The Republican definition of compromise is "do everything I tell you, and I might hold off on calling you an America-hating socialist terrorist-lover for a day or so."
If it's a historical artifact, that means that science PhDs will not understand the limits of empiricism, and will disdainfully regard any knowledge outside the limited boundaries of empiricism as nonsense. Hmm, I guess you're right.
I can now state empirically that you're completely ignorant of science and scientists. Whether you're just as ignorant of philosophy, time will tell.
As you may have noticed, many scientists have initials signifying "Philosophy Doctor" after their names. Technically, scientific investigation is a philosophical investigation technique which derives from the ideas set forth by empiricist philosophers, and is a branch of epistemology.
Science and philosophy haven't been the same discipline for a long, long time. It's a historical artifact, nothing more.
I was mostly joking. No, I don't seriously want to throw them in gulags, if for no other reason than that countries which do such things tend to be pretty crappy places to live. I do, however, quite seriously think that acceptance of the doctrine of corporate personhood ought to be a deal-breaker for anyone seeking judgeship or elected office.
I hate to have to be the one to inform you of this, but corporations were invented by the Romans for the purpose of being considered a person under the law. "Corporations are people" has been the quick legal definition of what a corporation is for over two thousand years.
I hate to have to be the one to inform you of this, but asserting a thing doesn't make it so. Evidence?
This is why the founding fathers used language like "Natural Persons" to distinguish living people from fictional legal entities.
When and where did they do that, exactly? The phrase doesn't appear anywhere in the Declaration of Independence or in the Constitution. OTOH, the latter document refers to "person," "persons," and "people" repeatedly, with no indication whatsoever that these words are supposed to refer to anything other than actual living, breathing human beings.
Just removing person hood from corporations would be bad. You have to change the law so that corporations can own property.
That's what the law always said, at least until the idea of corporate personhood was invented. Corporations are legal entities to which we grant certain privileges, some of which happen to correspond to the rights of people: owning property, signing contracts, etc. Corporate personhood is a completely unnecessary addition.
Agreed, with the exception of the "Natural Person" language. "Person" should cover it quite nicely. And we can reinforce the point by sending anyone--particularly, but not exclusively, any judge or politician--who claims that corporations are people to labor camps in some American version of Siberia, say North Dakota, where they will be clothed in rags, housed in huts, fed on gruel, and worked to the edge of death. When their sentences are up, we can ask them if they understand the difference between corporations and people yet.
Slashdot Mirror
One might say that you do not know your history very well.
Go look up the fall of Argentina. We are doing what they did that made them fall. Greece is the same.
If you honestly think that the current policies of the US government are in any way comparable to those of either Greece or Argentina, you are too ignorant to have a meaningful opinion on the matter.
Atheists don't believe in evil.
Wow, you are really beating the shit out of that strawman. Good for you, I guess. Any time you want to talk to some real atheists, let us know.
The only people I have ever heard say "I will not vote for candidate X because of his religion" are religious people who follow a religion other than that of candidate X. Seriously, I have never heard any of my fellow atheists say any such thing (and a good thing, too, because otherwise we'd have a hard time finding anyone to vote for). In the absence of evidence to the contrary, I'm going to guess that the "Atheists who say they won't vote for a guy because of religion, then vote for another guy, ignoring his admitted religion" exist only inside your own fevered imagination.
With rare exception, countries with weak central governments are hellholes that no modern American would enjoy living in.
China, Cuba and North Korea are a paradise then.
You fail logic forever.
the Republican and Democratic parties have taken turns, term by term, doing eventually, exactly the same thing the other would do, perhaps sooner, perhaps later, for around a century
This is true. It is also true that they have generally not done the same things at the same time. Maybe in fifty years, the Republicans will be doing what the Democrats are doing now, or vice versa; it does not follow from this that Romney would do the same things from 2013 to 2017 that Obama would do, or vice versa. In fact, whichever of them wins (and it will be one of those two) will almost certainly do substantially different things than his opponent would have done.
Atlas Shrugged is just about as realistic as Harry Potter.
I think you owe J.K. Rowling an apology.
That's a loaded question to ask anyway, its similar to asking, "Why use something other than Apple/Microsoft?"
No, it is nothing like that. The only way it would be comparable would be if someone asked you, "Would you prefer to use OS X, Windows, Linux, or BSD?" and then, regardless of what you said, made you use one of the first two choices.
Come late January, the President of the United States of America will be either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney. Deal with it.
At a guess, hurricanes and other weather systems don't so much remove heat from the Earth as make the distribution a little more uniform. All that wind and rain and storm surge creates a lot of friction with the ground, the water, and the surrounding air. Some of the heat released will radiate off into space, sure, but most of it won't--lots of cloud cover under the circumstances, obviously. So post-Sandy, it will maybe be a little warmer in the northeast US and a little cooler in the tropical Atlantic than it would have been otherwise. I have no idea if this effect is significant enough to measure for any one storm.
From the raging lefties over at Fox News, here's a comparison of US to French annual health spending:
US: 17.4% of GDP / ~$8000 per capita
France: 11.8% of GDP / ~$4000 per capita
You were saying?
Yes, an OS that can only be used with overpriced hardware, made by the largest company in the world, is clearly socialist.
For any Republican who dislikes Macs, OS X is clearly socialist, because "socialism" is defined in Republicanese (a language which closely resembles English, and shares most of its syntax, but has a somewhat divergent vocabulary with lots of false cognates) as "anything a Republican doesn't like." For any Republican who likes Macs, OTOH, OS X is a triumph of the invisible hand of the free market, while Windows is pretty much the second coming of Joe Stalin. Linux is always Ron Paul.
Hope this clears things up.
It appears you're trying to make my point for me. ... to paraphrase ... At least I didn't ...
Wow, you've really memorized the sophist's playbook, haven't you? Um, congratulations, I guess. You might want to consider a career in politics.
Anyway. I'm not the OP, and you shouldn't confuse us; my post was intended to endorse neither your view or his, just shed a little historical light on the matter. Which, BTW, your bit from Tom Horn (not exactly the most reliable of sources, I suspect) doesn't, particularly--assuming that what he says is true at all, it's a good bet that everyone in the various Apache bands knew perfectly well who their neighbors were and where they had come from. The situation he describes is more akin to the modern process of moving to a different city. You can certainly do that, and try to blend in with your new environment and not talk much about where you came from, but that's very different from true anonymity, which usually only exists during periods of mass migration. And even there, you're talking about a degree of freedom that hasn't been available to most of the people who have ever lived.
Personally, I recognize anonymity and privacy as historical anomalies and still think they're good things and worth preserving. There are lots of things that fall into this category: democracy, scientific medicine, and nearly instantaneous worldwide communication are three obvious examples out of a great number. I just have very little patience with arguments in favor of anything, even things I consider good, which resort to spurious history to bolster their points. Try arguing your positions on their merits, not on the basis of "as it was the old days ..."
Wow, that's one of the most extreme cases of Poe's Law in action that I've ever seen. At least it sounds like she's taken the right actions to correct the problem as much as she can; hopefully future employers will take this into account.
As far as that particular period of American (in the broadest possible sense, relating not just to the terrority of the modern US but to "the Americas") history goes, you're right, but that hasn't been the norm in most of the world for a very long time. Ever since we settled down and started farming, most people were born, lived, and died within a day's walk of the same spot. Even before that, I suspect, most people lived their lives surrounded by more or less the same people, even if the location changed. There have been very few times in our history that complete personal reinvention was both possible and survivable. It's probably not surprising that we romanticize those periods, but that shouldn't keep us from remembering how rare they really are.
Just keep on digging that hole you're in, kid.
that's District 12 to you locals
[slow clap]
Aaaand now you've demonstrated the complete Republican departure from reality. Did you actually look at the numbers you posted? It is absolutely clear from that list that far more Democrats are willing to vote against the majority of their fellow party members than Republicans are. Let's look at the numbers in terms of percentage of members breaking from the party line:
603: Republicans 6% / Democrats 10%
602: Republicans 0% / Democrats 3%
601: Republicans 4% / Democrats 6%
600: Republicans 5% / Democrats 5%
599: Republicans 3% / Democrats 12%
598: Republicans 1% / Democrats 14%
597: Republicans 2% / Democrats 13%
596: Republicans 1% / Democrats 11%
595: Republicans 0% / Democrats 10%
594: Republicans 3% / Democrats 11%
On average, again just going from your own numbers, Democrats are willing to vote against their party line 10% of the time, Republicans 2%, a fivefold difference, and more than enough to make the difference in a close vote. If even 8% of Republicans were as willing to compromise as their Democratic colleagues are, the country wouldn't be in the mess it's in right now.
Oh yeah, here's the R code in case you want to accuse me of playing games:
# index
rollcall = 603:594
# 1 indicates members voting with party majority, 2 indicates members voting against
r1 = c(215, 227, 215, 218, 222, 225, 224, 227, 228, 222)
r2 = c(13, 0, 10, 11, 7, 3, 4, 2, 0, 6)
d1 = c(162, 173, 171, 172, 161, 157, 159, 162, 164, 162)
d2 = c(19, 6, 11, 10, 21, 25, 23, 20, 18, 20)
# capital letters indicate ratios of members voting against party majority to total part members voting, expressed as percentages
R = 100 * r2 / (r1 + r2)
D = 100 * d2 / (d1 + d2)
# package it up
report = data.frame(rollcall, R, D)
print(round(report))
# mean percentages
print(round(colMeans(report[c("R", "D")])))
That should be enough to get you started for running some significance tests if you like.
Well, they might actually try working with them instead of trying to get them to "shut the fuck up".
Democrats seem to be all about compromise as long as it's the Republicans doing the compromising.
Your statement is so completely opposed to reality that I have to wonder what color the sky is on your planet.
The simple fact is that the Republicans in Congress have voted as a unified bloc, over and over, ever since Obama took office, while the Democrats have not. That's about as objective a measure of (un)willingness to compromise as you can find. The Democrats have compromised over and over again in a futile attempt to get the Republicans to agree to something--anything!--to help fix the mess the Republicans created, and which the Republicans are clearly determined to maintain. The Republican definition of compromise is "do everything I tell you, and I might hold off on calling you an America-hating socialist terrorist-lover for a day or so."
If it's a historical artifact, that means that science PhDs will not understand the limits of empiricism, and will disdainfully regard any knowledge outside the limited boundaries of empiricism as nonsense. Hmm, I guess you're right.
I can now state empirically that you're completely ignorant of science and scientists. Whether you're just as ignorant of philosophy, time will tell.
As you may have noticed, many scientists have initials signifying "Philosophy Doctor" after their names. Technically, scientific investigation is a philosophical investigation technique which derives from the ideas set forth by empiricist philosophers, and is a branch of epistemology.
Science and philosophy haven't been the same discipline for a long, long time. It's a historical artifact, nothing more.
I was mostly joking. No, I don't seriously want to throw them in gulags, if for no other reason than that countries which do such things tend to be pretty crappy places to live. I do, however, quite seriously think that acceptance of the doctrine of corporate personhood ought to be a deal-breaker for anyone seeking judgeship or elected office.
I hate to have to be the one to inform you of this, but corporations were invented by the Romans for the purpose of being considered a person under the law. "Corporations are people" has been the quick legal definition of what a corporation is for over two thousand years.
I hate to have to be the one to inform you of this, but asserting a thing doesn't make it so. Evidence?
This is why the founding fathers used language like "Natural Persons" to distinguish living people from fictional legal entities.
When and where did they do that, exactly? The phrase doesn't appear anywhere in the Declaration of Independence or in the Constitution. OTOH, the latter document refers to "person," "persons," and "people" repeatedly, with no indication whatsoever that these words are supposed to refer to anything other than actual living, breathing human beings.
Protip: don't be this guy.
Say goodbye to the corporate research lab pioneered by Edison, Steinmetz, Westinghouse.
We already have.
How much of a debt does the geek owe to AT&T and Bell Labs, Xerox and PARC?
See above. Time to stop dreaming about the glory days, because they're gone and not coming back.
Just removing person hood from corporations would be bad. You have to change the law so that corporations can own property.
That's what the law always said, at least until the idea of corporate personhood was invented. Corporations are legal entities to which we grant certain privileges, some of which happen to correspond to the rights of people: owning property, signing contracts, etc. Corporate personhood is a completely unnecessary addition.
Agreed, with the exception of the "Natural Person" language. "Person" should cover it quite nicely. And we can reinforce the point by sending anyone--particularly, but not exclusively, any judge or politician--who claims that corporations are people to labor camps in some American version of Siberia, say North Dakota, where they will be clothed in rags, housed in huts, fed on gruel, and worked to the edge of death. When their sentences are up, we can ask them if they understand the difference between corporations and people yet.
Oh yeah, the problem's hardly unique to QM, or even physics.