Look, I share your concern about for-profit prisons and I recently went to a conference that was largely about the issue. They should be abolished. However, they can also be a red herring here. According to Pew:
In 2015, just 8% of the nearly 1.53 million state and federal prisoners in the U.S. were in private facilities, up slightly from 5% in 1999. (http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/11/u-s-private-prison-population-has-declined-in-recent-years/)
For-profit prisons represent a very tiny portion of the overall prison system, and so while they may be a symptom of the deeper problems with the system overall, they are not in and of themselves the cause. We can abolish these for-profit prisons, but just like taking cough medicine, it will not do away with the deeper causes of the problem.
Besides that, the actual prison mentioned in the abstract is not a for-profit prison, but a maximum security state-run prison.
But you shouldn't start looking for God where the physics fails
Well said. However Catholics understand the relationship between God and science, it cannot be as a "God of the gaps." We are always tempted in that direction, but that is not merely a degrading of science, but a degrading of God, making God a mere haphazard explanation for the way things are.
But this is the difficulty. When it comes down to it, Catholicism wants to allow space for science to be science, but we must still essentially believe that the universe is a meaningful process. The Big Bang happened for a reason: because God wanted it to. And yet this is not an observable or demonstrable fact of science, but a tenet of faith. When we make it into a kind of would-be scientific datum, we end up again with a "God of the gaps" and make God into a mere pretense of scientific explanation.
People are always confused about this issue because of the political nature of such arguments and the ways terms like "intelligent design" are thrown around. Sometimes Catholics will use this term merely to signify that the universe is meaningful. In the same way, Catholics can be "Creationists" while still affirming evolution, because a Catholic sense of creation does not necessarily mean a literal reading of Genesis. However, sometimes "intelligent design" is used as a kind of would-be scientific claim, e.g. claiming that scientific observations prove the existence of God for such and such a reason. It is arguments like these, which blur the real autonomy and significance of science relative to faith, that can make some Catholics anxious about accepting the term "intelligent design" without qualification.
At the same time, TFA and the stuff it links to misrepresent the situation by exaggerating the perceived difference between Benedict XVI and Francis. (This is, sadly, typical of media about the pope.) They act as though the former supported "intelligent design" and the latter does not. But the truth is that both ultimately believe that the universe is meaningful and purposeful. Benedict had important theological conversations on the topic of evolution, for example, and it always came back down to the very same point that it will come to with Francis. Science must be allowed to freely speak on its own terms about evolution. As far as science goes, evolution is a random and dysteleological system. But Catholic faith for its own part, in order to remain true to itself, must always see within the static and noise of evolution a deeper purpose standing beyond it all and irreducible to it. Ironically, Francis does not stand out from Benedict by somehow giving more distance between science and religion. Quite the contrary, Francis's biggest accomplishment is to integrate the two more deeply by arguing that Catholic faith must act in accordance with the recommendations of environmental/climate science.
Let me start by saying that I hate Apple products. The only reason I have any is because I inherited them. But I do have to admit that FaceTime is way ahead of Microsoft's Skype or any of Google's many products. It just works. Seriously. My kids can use it easily to call me and it just works. I do not understand why, but the same just can't be said about other products, Skype in particular. No matter what whenever I try to video chat with someone via Skype, it takes a least half an hour for the other side to get it working, even my Mom who works on computers for a living. Half the time Skype will connect but the camera just won't work on one side or the other. Other times it just won't connect, or someone won't be visible, or the audio won't work, etc.
But FaceTime just works.
Just about everything else about iOS sucks, however,
... clearly, all of the 13 participants in this study had consumed lemonade of some variety before....
Yeah, I'm too lazy to RTFA, but from the bad summary your point sounds right on. Using LEDs to simulate the yellow color is half if not most of the "taste" that has been received.
I remember a while ago my wife made frosting and added pink food coloring. We could all swear that it tasted like strawberry frosting. But we did not add any strawberry flavoring whatsoever. The mere color of pink makes us expect to taste something strawberryish, to such an extent that it becomes impossible to separate out our subjective strawberry-tasting from the actual, objective flavor of the frosting.
The mechanism for this is obvious. Humans are so rooted in memory that memory plays a major role in how we taste things. So, for example, I doubt that McDonalds objectively tastes half as good as I think it does, but it tastes good to me precisely because I grew up eating it, and every time I eat there I am in some sense reliving past memories. "Transmitting" lemonade would work in much the same way; the appearance of yellow brings up the memory of an extremely iconic yellow beverage.
The real challenge would be to try to simulate the flavor of lemonade without any color or any hint whatsoever that it is supposed to taste like lemonade. In fact, try to make chocolate taste exactly like lemonade. But this could also cause a negative reaction, because if I taste something that I expect to taste like one thing but then receive a different taste, this disjunction is likely to create a feeling of the grostesque. (But, then again, it could also create a weird new craze for chocolate lemonade.)
The ultimate stupidity of all of this is the misguided notion that language is simply rational, and that it can be defined beforehand in its rational character by a committee decision. The fact of the matter is that language is developed by use. It's stupid that we are told "a spider is not a bug because a bug is an insect and an insect has six legs." Who ever decided that a bug meant a thing with six legs? Certainly "insect" does, but "bug" has always in actual use meant just about anything small. We sometimes even call a germ a "bug." Likewise it's silly that we are told an American bison is not to be called a "buffalo." Again, it may not be what is more rightly called a buffalo, but Americans have been calling it a buffalo so long that it's more its name than "bison." It's just like how a jackrabbit is not really a rabbit but a hare. Normal human language was never designed to be a taxonomical system.
Instead of having a committee-accepted pure definition of "planet" beforehand, the scientific community needs to realize that people will call something a planet for reasons that have little or nothing to do with science. Live with it. Normal people need to be allowed to set the "pure" concept of planet aside as something to work with in its own proper context.
To that extent, I think this new recommendation could be good. The reason why is because it already conforms to an established language pattern; planetary geologists, they say, already consider (some?) moons to be planets. A broader definition should be taken to mean that some things can be considered planets in certain linguistic contexts and not in others.
I had increasingly been having discomfort due to the blindingly white color of web pages and apps these days. I was getting headaches and having so much trouble that I went to an eye doctor, only to find that my eyesight was still 20/20. But my eyes are also too dry. Taking antihistamine eye drops (Alaway) made a huge difference for me. In addition, I use Stylish and write styles for the web sites I use most frequently to make the background dark gray and the text off-white.
Sounds like a fascinating project, though I think you were wise to avoid getting yourself into trouble. Interestingly, from TFA:
Bryant Walker Smith, a law professor at the University of South Carolina, says that federal and state laws probably don’t pose much of a barrier to those with a desire to upgrade their vehicle to share driving duties. NHTSA has authority over companies selling vehicles and systems used to modify them, but consumers have significant flexibility in making changes to their own vehicle, says Smith, who advises the U.S. Department of Transportation on law and automation.
However, I think this law professor is still giving bad advice. Simply because the NHTSA won't stop you does not mean that you would have immunity or pity if something went wrong, especially if it hurt other people.
On top of that, he should not have told him to "change his password immediately." Since the email was fake, the user's password was not actually compromised. A not-so-savvy aide might have thought that changing the user's password would be a good safeguard, but saying this in context of the supposed typo simply reinforced the user's impression that the email was legitimate. Honestly, however, it's possible the aide really gave bad advice and is simply calling it a typo to cover it up.
It would've been smarter for them to have built in a seller code into the product key system so they could know more clearly where the key came from. Then, if some reviewer are suspected as illegitimate, they can trace the key's source, without necessarily having to block all Humble Bundle purchasers' reviews from counting.
I miss Firefly too, but I think it's dangerous to assume that we can simply get back to the past. Whenever I watch Next Generation now, I realize how much it is a product of a bygone era, e.g. its extremely optimistic technological future (who would really work without money?). We can artificially bring back names and faces, but it would never be the same show again; in fact, it would probably just annoy the original fans for being different.
Of course not. If sex is not sacred anymore, then why would the data concerning it be? Sex itself is sold as a commodity. The sex toy reduces a sacred act to a mere technological-biological process of particular temperatures and intensity settings. There is nothing meaningful in it. So it makes sense that this essentially meaningless but useful data would be collected for further marketing purposes. The essential value of that data, just like human bodies in general today, will be determined by its marketability.
The underlying issue here, then, is not a mere privacy issue. It is the bigger issue of the meaning of the human body. Unless we can see the body as sacred, then nothing else in the world can remain sacred before the press of market pressures.
Who are we to pass judgment based on a short article? I admit that my first thought, too, was that they should simply wait her out, but it is not for me to judge without knowing all of the facts--that is why cases need to be handled by the judicial system. The police may have known something that we do not. They may have had reason to fear that she was a direct risk to her children or to other bystanders. They may have intended to wait longer but then fired first because, seeing that her shotgun was aimed at them, they perceived her finger moving to fire. She set up the negotiations to fail. She did not merely verbally threaten, but physically, visibly threatened them. The police made a hard decision. If it was wrong, at least I am not competent to say with such limited information. But at the very least, I am thankful that I myself did not have to make that decision, because I cannot be certain that in split-second timing I would have made the right one. It's easy for me to talk now about what should have been. It would not be so easy if someone were actively pointing a shotgun at me.
Now I'm usually all for a socioeconomic explanation for things, but I think that this argument involves certain assumptions that hint precisely at something much more significant. You argue that people are having less sex because they cannot afford homes and cannot afford to date. But this assumes first and foremost that dating and home ownership are necessary for sex. This shows that in our time, people have certain assumptions about how well-off one needs to be in order to be in a consistent relationship or begin a family. Hence I think that the main reason why young people are having less sex is precisely because so many marry much, much later--especially those who do not attend university, which is a major place to meet a spouse.
Hence the biggest shift is cultural. In the past, people generally married earlier and had assumptions about the necessity of marriage. I would bet that young single mothers, too, were less likely to remain single. It is hard to make very strong and specific cultural claims about thirty years ago, which was itself a discordant and complicated mess of a culture--but at least if we go farther back, it is clear that poor people married and had sex and did so much earlier than people today. So the difference is not that there are poor people--in fact, so many Americans today are not remotely as poor as they would have been 100 years ago or would be in the third world--but that we have very different assumptions about what role one's economic and social situation should play within sex and marriage.
Exactly. So it seems to me that, from a consumer's point of view, the chip card roll-out was a failure in both convenience and security.
In convenience, it is slower, and it's just awkward to insert the card in the front. It should have been to the side of the machine. Even salespeople are often confused and more than half the time the chip slot is there but disabled and they ask you to slide it anyway.
In security, the main problems are both because of backwards compatibility. We still use signatures, no PINs, and so it's still a farce of a security measure that does not stop people from simply stealing your physical card. Secondly, since the magnetic strips are still usable on the card, and many stores do not even scan the chip, someone who steals the card does not even need to use the chip at all. In fact, I would imagine that it's still possible to clone cards so long as you only use them the magnetic strip scanners. Lastly, how does this at all help to secure Internet purchases, which now make up a huge amount of credit card commerce?
It all depends on what kind of notes you take and what for. I am a professor and I tend to jot down lots of quick thoughts that some day I may work into a publication or else post online. I also write down detailed notes on books, i.e. what important thing I found on what page. I tend to hand write notes on color-coded post-its in the book and then I transcribe these on the computer either by typing or by voice.
I used to use OneNote a long time ago because it is very versatile and it's easy to make charts, etc. I switched to Evernote (free) because I wanted my data to be synced and because of the utter simplicity of it. At the time I didn't like how I couldn't do color and formatting on Android and I still hate Evernote's awful tables.
However, I developed a Perl script that allows me to type up my book notes in plain text and then easily format and color-code them. the script then automatically imports the output into Evernote. The API--at least back when I made the script--is not terribly great, but it at least works and I don't have to fuss with stupid VBA. I think I just used a command line script.
I think these recent changes my seriously chase me away from Evernote, because I need more than two devices and the subscription fee is just outrageous. I have seriously thought of paying it before, but it just is not worth it when there's plenty of competition. Evernote is far from a great company; their UIs are often terrible and they hardly ever improve their apps in ways that actually help the users. For example, their UI just keeps getting more and more blinding white, and they will never add any option to be able to make it sensibly dark for those of us who have to stare at it all day. Thankfully I recently found an easy hack that at least improves it a little bit: https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/86645-solution-to-not-having-white-background-for-notes/
Nowadays I take most quick notes--like shopping lists--on my OneNote app on my Windows Phone. It sucks terribly, but it's much quicker than waiting for Evernote to load.
I think it's dishonest for Google to name something "Keep." We all know in a few years (or less) when Google inexplicably decides to focus its attention elsewhere, it will screw all of its users and take down the service. At that time I'm sure people will come up with plenty of complaints and puns for the name.
Sad--when I saw the headline I was hoping that Google would stop with the blindingly white background on everything and provide a dark interface. At least for now I can use Stylish to make Google dark, but there's way too many blindingly white web sites and apps out there and if Google were to change, it might encourage some others to do so as well. Twenty years from now I'm sure Slashdot will be covering studies showing that this generation's eyes have been destroyed by all the excessively bright white UIs.
The study shows our primitive mind makes a lot of decisions for us. But nothing about free will.
Exactly. In fact, better studies have even shown that some pre-processing of visual information occurs before the signal even reaches the brain. This reinforces the conclusion that much of our cognition is essentially prior to the activity of consciousness, even though consciousness would be a presupposition of free-will. (For example, my mind determines that a glyph on a screen is the letter L and then sends my consciousness not the raw pixel data, as it were, but rather the glyph pre-interpreted as an L; once within consciousness, I may or make not make a decision in regard to this glyph.) Thus the only relevant statement that the present study can make with regard to free-will is that fast-paced declarations about the imminent future may be at least partially determined in advance by preprocessing that occurs prior to the full experience of consciousness.
Note that I say "declarations about the imminent future" and not "choices" or "decisions." This study does not really deal with free-will directly because the participants are not necessarily even intending to make real decisions but only to pronounce upon the future. (Some may even interpret this as a kind of "psychic" prediction.) Hence their conscious minds are essentially tasked with acting like random number generators. But it is no surprise if we are bad at being random, just as computers are not fully random. If you ask me to come up with a random number, I will almost certainly pick a number that I am already predisposed toward picking because of the situation around me, or because it is one of my favorites, or because I am trying to be crafty, or because it happens to currently on my mind, etc. I can never be certain that any random number that I generate is truly random.
But free-will is not reducible to randomness, and therefore a lack of genuine randomness is not tantamount to a lack of free-will. Free-will is not the ability to do something random, nor the ability to be absolutely undetermined by outside influences. (Ironically, this study, implies that free-will in this case would be the ability to be wrong about predicting colors.) Ultimately free-will is the ability to decide about oneself to take up the mass of conscious data and concrete, pre-determined factors and to weave them into a connected narrative of selfhood. Thus free-will is not incompatible with any kind of predetermination whatsoever. Quite the opposite, when we experience ourselves as having made a free decision, we can also look back at that decision and see that it "makes sense." Hence I experience myself as freely deciding to eat lunch; but this makes perfect sense because I am hungry, I have a lunch on hand, I am used to eating lunch at this time, etc. We are too used to looking for ridiculous exceptions in order to try to prove free-will, like I need to make a decision that makes absolutely no sense at all. However, free-will is something that--at least according to our own conscious experience--occurs not simply in such extreme and exceptional cases, but even in the most mundane and predictable parts of conscious life.
Slashdot Mirror
Look, I share your concern about for-profit prisons and I recently went to a conference that was largely about the issue. They should be abolished. However, they can also be a red herring here. According to Pew:
In 2015, just 8% of the nearly 1.53 million state and federal prisoners in the U.S. were in private facilities, up slightly from 5% in 1999. (http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/11/u-s-private-prison-population-has-declined-in-recent-years/)
For-profit prisons represent a very tiny portion of the overall prison system, and so while they may be a symptom of the deeper problems with the system overall, they are not in and of themselves the cause. We can abolish these for-profit prisons, but just like taking cough medicine, it will not do away with the deeper causes of the problem.
Besides that, the actual prison mentioned in the abstract is not a for-profit prison, but a maximum security state-run prison.
Wow, reading through that bug was very informative... and sad. Thanks for the info.
But you shouldn't start looking for God where the physics fails
Well said. However Catholics understand the relationship between God and science, it cannot be as a "God of the gaps." We are always tempted in that direction, but that is not merely a degrading of science, but a degrading of God, making God a mere haphazard explanation for the way things are.
But this is the difficulty. When it comes down to it, Catholicism wants to allow space for science to be science, but we must still essentially believe that the universe is a meaningful process. The Big Bang happened for a reason: because God wanted it to. And yet this is not an observable or demonstrable fact of science, but a tenet of faith. When we make it into a kind of would-be scientific datum, we end up again with a "God of the gaps" and make God into a mere pretense of scientific explanation.
People are always confused about this issue because of the political nature of such arguments and the ways terms like "intelligent design" are thrown around. Sometimes Catholics will use this term merely to signify that the universe is meaningful. In the same way, Catholics can be "Creationists" while still affirming evolution, because a Catholic sense of creation does not necessarily mean a literal reading of Genesis. However, sometimes "intelligent design" is used as a kind of would-be scientific claim, e.g. claiming that scientific observations prove the existence of God for such and such a reason. It is arguments like these, which blur the real autonomy and significance of science relative to faith, that can make some Catholics anxious about accepting the term "intelligent design" without qualification.
At the same time, TFA and the stuff it links to misrepresent the situation by exaggerating the perceived difference between Benedict XVI and Francis. (This is, sadly, typical of media about the pope.) They act as though the former supported "intelligent design" and the latter does not. But the truth is that both ultimately believe that the universe is meaningful and purposeful. Benedict had important theological conversations on the topic of evolution, for example, and it always came back down to the very same point that it will come to with Francis. Science must be allowed to freely speak on its own terms about evolution. As far as science goes, evolution is a random and dysteleological system. But Catholic faith for its own part, in order to remain true to itself, must always see within the static and noise of evolution a deeper purpose standing beyond it all and irreducible to it. Ironically, Francis does not stand out from Benedict by somehow giving more distance between science and religion. Quite the contrary, Francis's biggest accomplishment is to integrate the two more deeply by arguing that Catholic faith must act in accordance with the recommendations of environmental/climate science.
Let me start by saying that I hate Apple products. The only reason I have any is because I inherited them. But I do have to admit that FaceTime is way ahead of Microsoft's Skype or any of Google's many products. It just works. Seriously. My kids can use it easily to call me and it just works. I do not understand why, but the same just can't be said about other products, Skype in particular. No matter what whenever I try to video chat with someone via Skype, it takes a least half an hour for the other side to get it working, even my Mom who works on computers for a living. Half the time Skype will connect but the camera just won't work on one side or the other. Other times it just won't connect, or someone won't be visible, or the audio won't work, etc.
But FaceTime just works.
Just about everything else about iOS sucks, however,
From TFA:
The inmates were able to get the parts from a program where inmates break down computers in order to learn computer skills and recycle the parts.
... clearly, all of the 13 participants in this study had consumed lemonade of some variety before. ...
Yeah, I'm too lazy to RTFA, but from the bad summary your point sounds right on. Using LEDs to simulate the yellow color is half if not most of the "taste" that has been received.
I remember a while ago my wife made frosting and added pink food coloring. We could all swear that it tasted like strawberry frosting. But we did not add any strawberry flavoring whatsoever. The mere color of pink makes us expect to taste something strawberryish, to such an extent that it becomes impossible to separate out our subjective strawberry-tasting from the actual, objective flavor of the frosting.
The mechanism for this is obvious. Humans are so rooted in memory that memory plays a major role in how we taste things. So, for example, I doubt that McDonalds objectively tastes half as good as I think it does, but it tastes good to me precisely because I grew up eating it, and every time I eat there I am in some sense reliving past memories. "Transmitting" lemonade would work in much the same way; the appearance of yellow brings up the memory of an extremely iconic yellow beverage.
The real challenge would be to try to simulate the flavor of lemonade without any color or any hint whatsoever that it is supposed to taste like lemonade. In fact, try to make chocolate taste exactly like lemonade. But this could also cause a negative reaction, because if I taste something that I expect to taste like one thing but then receive a different taste, this disjunction is likely to create a feeling of the grostesque. (But, then again, it could also create a weird new craze for chocolate lemonade.)
The ultimate stupidity of all of this is the misguided notion that language is simply rational, and that it can be defined beforehand in its rational character by a committee decision. The fact of the matter is that language is developed by use. It's stupid that we are told "a spider is not a bug because a bug is an insect and an insect has six legs." Who ever decided that a bug meant a thing with six legs? Certainly "insect" does, but "bug" has always in actual use meant just about anything small. We sometimes even call a germ a "bug." Likewise it's silly that we are told an American bison is not to be called a "buffalo." Again, it may not be what is more rightly called a buffalo, but Americans have been calling it a buffalo so long that it's more its name than "bison." It's just like how a jackrabbit is not really a rabbit but a hare. Normal human language was never designed to be a taxonomical system.
Instead of having a committee-accepted pure definition of "planet" beforehand, the scientific community needs to realize that people will call something a planet for reasons that have little or nothing to do with science. Live with it. Normal people need to be allowed to set the "pure" concept of planet aside as something to work with in its own proper context.
To that extent, I think this new recommendation could be good. The reason why is because it already conforms to an established language pattern; planetary geologists, they say, already consider (some?) moons to be planets. A broader definition should be taken to mean that some things can be considered planets in certain linguistic contexts and not in others.
I had increasingly been having discomfort due to the blindingly white color of web pages and apps these days. I was getting headaches and having so much trouble that I went to an eye doctor, only to find that my eyesight was still 20/20. But my eyes are also too dry. Taking antihistamine eye drops (Alaway) made a huge difference for me. In addition, I use Stylish and write styles for the web sites I use most frequently to make the background dark gray and the text off-white.
Sounds like a fascinating project, though I think you were wise to avoid getting yourself into trouble. Interestingly, from TFA:
Bryant Walker Smith, a law professor at the University of South Carolina, says that federal and state laws probably don’t pose much of a barrier to those with a desire to upgrade their vehicle to share driving duties. NHTSA has authority over companies selling vehicles and systems used to modify them, but consumers have significant flexibility in making changes to their own vehicle, says Smith, who advises the U.S. Department of Transportation on law and automation.
However, I think this law professor is still giving bad advice. Simply because the NHTSA won't stop you does not mean that you would have immunity or pity if something went wrong, especially if it hurt other people.
On top of that, he should not have told him to "change his password immediately." Since the email was fake, the user's password was not actually compromised. A not-so-savvy aide might have thought that changing the user's password would be a good safeguard, but saying this in context of the supposed typo simply reinforced the user's impression that the email was legitimate.
Honestly, however, it's possible the aide really gave bad advice and is simply calling it a typo to cover it up.
That was exactly my thought when I read the headline. I figured that the download was stuck at 99% and they were just waiting on that one last bit.
It would've been smarter for them to have built in a seller code into the product key system so they could know more clearly where the key came from. Then, if some reviewer are suspected as illegitimate, they can trace the key's source, without necessarily having to block all Humble Bundle purchasers' reviews from counting.
I miss Firefly too, but I think it's dangerous to assume that we can simply get back to the past. Whenever I watch Next Generation now, I realize how much it is a product of a bygone era, e.g. its extremely optimistic technological future (who would really work without money?). We can artificially bring back names and faces, but it would never be the same show again; in fact, it would probably just annoy the original fans for being different.
Is nothing sacred anymore? ...
Of course not. If sex is not sacred anymore, then why would the data concerning it be? Sex itself is sold as a commodity. The sex toy reduces a sacred act to a mere technological-biological process of particular temperatures and intensity settings. There is nothing meaningful in it. So it makes sense that this essentially meaningless but useful data would be collected for further marketing purposes. The essential value of that data, just like human bodies in general today, will be determined by its marketability.
The underlying issue here, then, is not a mere privacy issue. It is the bigger issue of the meaning of the human body. Unless we can see the body as sacred, then nothing else in the world can remain sacred before the press of market pressures.
Who are we to pass judgment based on a short article? I admit that my first thought, too, was that they should simply wait her out, but it is not for me to judge without knowing all of the facts--that is why cases need to be handled by the judicial system. The police may have known something that we do not. They may have had reason to fear that she was a direct risk to her children or to other bystanders. They may have intended to wait longer but then fired first because, seeing that her shotgun was aimed at them, they perceived her finger moving to fire. She set up the negotiations to fail. She did not merely verbally threaten, but physically, visibly threatened them. The police made a hard decision. If it was wrong, at least I am not competent to say with such limited information. But at the very least, I am thankful that I myself did not have to make that decision, because I cannot be certain that in split-second timing I would have made the right one. It's easy for me to talk now about what should have been. It would not be so easy if someone were actively pointing a shotgun at me.
Now I'm usually all for a socioeconomic explanation for things, but I think that this argument involves certain assumptions that hint precisely at something much more significant. You argue that people are having less sex because they cannot afford homes and cannot afford to date. But this assumes first and foremost that dating and home ownership are necessary for sex. This shows that in our time, people have certain assumptions about how well-off one needs to be in order to be in a consistent relationship or begin a family. Hence I think that the main reason why young people are having less sex is precisely because so many marry much, much later--especially those who do not attend university, which is a major place to meet a spouse.
Hence the biggest shift is cultural. In the past, people generally married earlier and had assumptions about the necessity of marriage. I would bet that young single mothers, too, were less likely to remain single. It is hard to make very strong and specific cultural claims about thirty years ago, which was itself a discordant and complicated mess of a culture--but at least if we go farther back, it is clear that poor people married and had sex and did so much earlier than people today. So the difference is not that there are poor people--in fact, so many Americans today are not remotely as poor as they would have been 100 years ago or would be in the third world--but that we have very different assumptions about what role one's economic and social situation should play within sex and marriage.
Exactly. So it seems to me that, from a consumer's point of view, the chip card roll-out was a failure in both convenience and security.
In convenience, it is slower, and it's just awkward to insert the card in the front. It should have been to the side of the machine. Even salespeople are often confused and more than half the time the chip slot is there but disabled and they ask you to slide it anyway.
In security, the main problems are both because of backwards compatibility. We still use signatures, no PINs, and so it's still a farce of a security measure that does not stop people from simply stealing your physical card. Secondly, since the magnetic strips are still usable on the card, and many stores do not even scan the chip, someone who steals the card does not even need to use the chip at all. In fact, I would imagine that it's still possible to clone cards so long as you only use them the magnetic strip scanners. Lastly, how does this at all help to secure Internet purchases, which now make up a huge amount of credit card commerce?
How do you know he was unattended? He could have been standing right next to the parents.
So the new pod design eliminates mid-air casualties. But it crushes bystanders on the ground when it lands after being ejected.
It all depends on what kind of notes you take and what for. I am a professor and I tend to jot down lots of quick thoughts that some day I may work into a publication or else post online. I also write down detailed notes on books, i.e. what important thing I found on what page. I tend to hand write notes on color-coded post-its in the book and then I transcribe these on the computer either by typing or by voice.
I used to use OneNote a long time ago because it is very versatile and it's easy to make charts, etc. I switched to Evernote (free) because I wanted my data to be synced and because of the utter simplicity of it. At the time I didn't like how I couldn't do color and formatting on Android and I still hate Evernote's awful tables.
However, I developed a Perl script that allows me to type up my book notes in plain text and then easily format and color-code them. the script then automatically imports the output into Evernote. The API--at least back when I made the script--is not terribly great, but it at least works and I don't have to fuss with stupid VBA. I think I just used a command line script.
I think these recent changes my seriously chase me away from Evernote, because I need more than two devices and the subscription fee is just outrageous. I have seriously thought of paying it before, but it just is not worth it when there's plenty of competition. Evernote is far from a great company; their UIs are often terrible and they hardly ever improve their apps in ways that actually help the users. For example, their UI just keeps getting more and more blinding white, and they will never add any option to be able to make it sensibly dark for those of us who have to stare at it all day. Thankfully I recently found an easy hack that at least improves it a little bit: https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/86645-solution-to-not-having-white-background-for-notes/
Nowadays I take most quick notes--like shopping lists--on my OneNote app on my Windows Phone. It sucks terribly, but it's much quicker than waiting for Evernote to load.
I think it's dishonest for Google to name something "Keep." We all know in a few years (or less) when Google inexplicably decides to focus its attention elsewhere, it will screw all of its users and take down the service. At that time I'm sure people will come up with plenty of complaints and puns for the name.
Sad--when I saw the headline I was hoping that Google would stop with the blindingly white background on everything and provide a dark interface. At least for now I can use Stylish to make Google dark, but there's way too many blindingly white web sites and apps out there and if Google were to change, it might encourage some others to do so as well. Twenty years from now I'm sure Slashdot will be covering studies showing that this generation's eyes have been destroyed by all the excessively bright white UIs.
The study shows our primitive mind makes a lot of decisions for us. But nothing about free will.
Exactly. In fact, better studies have even shown that some pre-processing of visual information occurs before the signal even reaches the brain. This reinforces the conclusion that much of our cognition is essentially prior to the activity of consciousness, even though consciousness would be a presupposition of free-will. (For example, my mind determines that a glyph on a screen is the letter L and then sends my consciousness not the raw pixel data, as it were, but rather the glyph pre-interpreted as an L; once within consciousness, I may or make not make a decision in regard to this glyph.) Thus the only relevant statement that the present study can make with regard to free-will is that fast-paced declarations about the imminent future may be at least partially determined in advance by preprocessing that occurs prior to the full experience of consciousness.
Note that I say "declarations about the imminent future" and not "choices" or "decisions." This study does not really deal with free-will directly because the participants are not necessarily even intending to make real decisions but only to pronounce upon the future. (Some may even interpret this as a kind of "psychic" prediction.) Hence their conscious minds are essentially tasked with acting like random number generators. But it is no surprise if we are bad at being random, just as computers are not fully random. If you ask me to come up with a random number, I will almost certainly pick a number that I am already predisposed toward picking because of the situation around me, or because it is one of my favorites, or because I am trying to be crafty, or because it happens to currently on my mind, etc. I can never be certain that any random number that I generate is truly random.
But free-will is not reducible to randomness, and therefore a lack of genuine randomness is not tantamount to a lack of free-will. Free-will is not the ability to do something random, nor the ability to be absolutely undetermined by outside influences. (Ironically, this study, implies that free-will in this case would be the ability to be wrong about predicting colors.) Ultimately free-will is the ability to decide about oneself to take up the mass of conscious data and concrete, pre-determined factors and to weave them into a connected narrative of selfhood. Thus free-will is not incompatible with any kind of predetermination whatsoever. Quite the opposite, when we experience ourselves as having made a free decision, we can also look back at that decision and see that it "makes sense." Hence I experience myself as freely deciding to eat lunch; but this makes perfect sense because I am hungry, I have a lunch on hand, I am used to eating lunch at this time, etc. We are too used to looking for ridiculous exceptions in order to try to prove free-will, like I need to make a decision that makes absolutely no sense at all. However, free-will is something that--at least according to our own conscious experience--occurs not simply in such extreme and exceptional cases, but even in the most mundane and predictable parts of conscious life.
A morbidly obese, stinking animal. Yeah, I think that represents our American heritage quite well.
Easy. It's the same reason why people are obsessed with "liking" things on Facebook.