You are missing the point. The problem is that rather than making the female characters active in a meaningful way, they are essentially active in a way which emphasizes their role as sex objects. The impractical scantily clad armor is one example of this. In fact, as I pointed with the example of Abhorsen it is quite possible to have female leads in fantasy novels who aren't male sex objects.
And women characters in games need revealing armour, otherwise you would not be able to tell that they were women. They would look like any other tank, just with a funny feminine name (remember that the characters in games are not like ones on TV, where they are mostly close up; In videogames you have small character sprites and you need to exaggerate for players to be able to make what what they are at a glance.).
I can't quite tell if this is meant as a serious argument. Maybe you can tell that the character is female, because they have a female name, or because they have armor that is slightly feminine, without ridiculous cleavage. Moreover, any sort of argument of the sort you are making fails at another level: modern games have far better graphics yet games like World of Warcaft still have the same problem. Finally, you are operating under the default presumption that a small sprite with no secondary sexual characteristics must be male. What does that say?
I don't think that's all that's going on here. In a lot of classical fantasy including Lord of the Rings, many of the people who are involved aren't don't want to be. Both Sam and Frodo clearly are forced into their circumstances for example. And that's a pretty common thing in fantasy. The set of fantasy where people go out of their way to maim, kill and destroy like Conan is fairly limited.
This does in some ways raise serious points: A lot of classical fantasy had a dearth of women as characters. In Tolkien's case even when they are characters they are often far more passive than active. One sees how this conflicts with more modern sensibilities- look at how much screen time was given to Arwen and Eowyn compared to how much time they had in the books. (It is true that The Silmarillion also introduces some females but the overall numbers are low). Worse, when later fantasy did try to have empowered female characters, they were often more male fantasies, the classical "chicks in chainmail" and the like. One sees the extension of this to other variants as well in modern games, where in many videogames and MMOs otherwise equivalent armor is depicted as covering much less on the women and often emphasizing the female figure. And one sees a similar pattern in science fiction. Indeed, much of it doesn't even get close to passing the Bechdel test http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bechdel_test. Note that in the case of Lord of the Rings, it fails the Bechdel test so badly that no two major female characters even have a conversation. (Interestingly, another major foundation of the work- The Chronicles of Narnia has much more in the way of strong females.)
It shouldn't be that surprising in this sort of context that scifi and fantasy have for a long-time been seen as male-dominated genres. That's obviously not exclusively the case (I first started reading fantasy to some extent because woman who babysat me was a voracious consumer of fantasy novels), but it is a definite problem. There have been some clear changes in the genre in the last few years, especially in the Young Adult area. Thus, one has examples like Garth Nix's Abhorsen series where the main characters are to a large extent strong women, and actually strong not just skimpy-armor-strong. So the genre does seem to be changing, but there will likely always be some influence from what founded the genre.
Posner is one of the people who has gotten us into this situation. He wrote the opinion In re Aimster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_re_Aimster_Copyright_Litigation which provided a precedent for a fair bit of modern copyright issues on the internet. He's also advocated in the past that linking to copyright violating material should be considered a violation http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2009/06/the-future-of-newspapers--posner.html. Yes, he's right that the problems he identifies in TFA are there, but this is someone who has contributed to associated problems. It almost seems like Posner isn't quite able to say "I was wrong" but I guess we should take what we can get.
This is the logical culmination. We've already had decisions that making a sexual cartoon involving Bart Simpson is child porn http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7770781.stm. This isn't much farther than that.
The original claim dates from 2008 and 2009. (Original paper here- http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.3283). While TFA claims that this has been confirmed, the group confirming this shares many of the same authors http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.0205. This still has not yet been confirmed by a genuinely independent group. Also the claims still only focus on two specific isotopes Si-32 and Ra-226. One thing worth emphasizing is that this has no bearing on things like the age of the Earth or other uses of radiometric dating. The isotopes are not used generally for radiometric dating and the percentage change in decay rates being observed is tiny. Moreover, for many of the sorts of things we do radiometric dating we have multiple distinct methods that cross-check each other. For example, when doing zircon dating, one can date from both the decay of U-238 and that of U-235 which use distinct decay changes. This may turn out to be some very interesting thing going on, but as of right now the impact is limited even if it is correct.
The claim being made there seems to be substantially weaker than a 200 mile requirement. First, even the ACLU is making a claim about 100 miles, and that's talking about search and seizure. In the primary case in context, the government is agreeing that probable cause is still necessary. And no one is claiming in that article that not carrying an idea within that zone would be criminal. This is an example of something that's really bad and should be fought against. But it doesn't support the original claim much at all.
Yeah, I don't have any citation other than persona anecdote of it happening, and my impression is moreover similar to yours in that outside cities containing major military assets, such checks were in practice not that common.
Your first example is an example where a specific government agency tried to engage in overreach and the rest of the government said no. Not exactly a great exampe. As to your claim about 200 miles of the border requiring ID, I'm not aware of such and a quick Google search doesn't turn it up. Do you have a citation?
Except for communists, right?
If you lived in the US and it became known that you were communist, it was pretty much the same result. You lost your job, lost your friends, everything.
Yes, at times things sucked. But being a member of the Communist Party was never illegal (at least at a national level- some US states tried to make it illegal with varying degrees of success). And the set of things that were actually illegal has in the US always been a much smaller set. At most you have things like the Smith Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_Act which made penalties for advocating the overthrow of the US government. It isn't a similar situation.
Your point about technology is a very valid one. Technology is a two edged sword for freedom. It can help people coordinate resistance movements even as governments can use it to more effectively construct police states. So the level of danger does grow as technology improves.
So what was it that the USSR did exactly? I don't mean in Berlin near the wall, I mean in Moscow or Stalingrad or a Russian city with russian citizens, not conquered and occupied territory.
In the papers context, anyone authorized (police, KGB, GRU, etc.) could stop citizens at any time and ask for their papers, that included identification information, where they worked, etc. and could ask them why they were they were, what they were doing etc. Failure to cooperate was a crime. And this was frequently used and moreover was used to intimidate groups they didn't like. For a personal example, I know someone who grew up near Moscow in the 1970s who had become interested in Judaism. She joined a group of people who were reading and studying old texts. After a few months, it reached the attention of the government, and one time they went to their regular meeting, she was stopped by KGB people and asked where she was going, and told that it was an unwise thing to do. At the next meeting, they were raided and all arrested. She served a few months in jail and upon being released couldn't get any jobs. In the US, nor in most of the Western world do things like that happen. The USSR wasn't just bad compared to the US, it was bad compared to most civilized countries.
I'm perfectly fine with flying pretty much anywhere in the world, but I won't currently fly to the U.S..
Sure, the current restrictions on flying are stupid, petty and deeply inconvenient. If I were not a US citizen I'd probably not be that inclined to fly here either. But that goes to the "things aren't perfect and have gotten worse" matter, not to any sort of comparison with the USSR.
There are a lot of factual problems with your statements. I'm not going to list all the Soviet space accomplishments I learned about in school, because that's likely a function of specific school one went to and how much detail on the space program one had. But let's look at your other claims.
First of all, the US has not (until very recently in some states like Arizona) been a papers-please state, that is a state where the police can just stop you on the street and ask for your ID and other paperwork. The difference with cars is that you need a license to drive a car. Comparing that to what the USSR did is just not accurate.
Second, it is possible to travel to Cuba and has been for over a decade, and in fact it just got easier about a year ago. http://travel.nytimes.com/2011/07/10/travel/at-long-last-legal-trips-to-cuba.html. Even in years where it has been difficult, a minimum of around 50,000 Americans traveled there has been around 50,000. Moreover, there's a very large difference between it being difficult to travel to a specific country and making it nearly impossible to travel to most of the planet. Remember the Berlin Wall at all? People were shot trying to flee as a regular occurrence. The US may do nasty things sometimes to keep people out, but they aren't threatening their own citizens to keep them in.
None of this is to say that the US is perfect. There are serious problems with civil liberties. And in many ways they've gotten much worse in the last decade. But that doesn't mean it is at all like how things were in the Soviet Union.
Part of the problem with this sort of thing isn't just that it only works when it isn't widely known. Even if it is only marginally known, it will make criminals take security systems (even real ones) less seriously because they know there's a decent chance the system is fake. Since there's evidence that criminals already have poorer impulse control and less are less risk averse than the general population http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/294626-overview, http://jnnp.bmj.com/content/71/6/720.full, http://web.utk.edu/~wneilson/EcLett-Crime.pdf, this is likely to make them more likely to break in general. This will make alarm systems be less effective deterrents. Essentially this is very close to defecting in the n-player version of the prisoner's dilemma.
Even if it does deter people, it could easily lead to more and more intimidation required to get criminals to take the threat seriously, which could lead to an arms race of ridiculous looking security measures. Overall, this seems socially irresponsible.
That's simply the cult of Tesla. He was very bright and had a lot of good ideas but to say things like "Modern physics has nothing on Nikola Tesla" or "Tesla grokked physics like no one else before or (perhaps) since" simply isn't accurate. If we want to go with the celebrity route, Feynman would be the obvious counterexample to the second statement, especially since Tesla did absolutely no work in many fields of physics at all. But more to the point, Tesla couldn't have grokked things that well since the knowledge simply wasn't there, and because it is very hard for a single human to do everything. Thus for example Tesla never worked with superconductors (although they were known in his lifetime). Similarly, Tesla had as far as we can tell, no overarching ideas about theory that were at all helpful.
And of course, Tesla came out against special and general relativity. While it is conceivable that GR might have issues, SR is pretty damn well one of the best established theories there is. Tesla was just wrong.
Tesla was a man. A brilliant man, but a nevertheless, a man and not a god.
Basic physics says you can't extract that much energy from electromagnetic fields like that. Most fields diminish with an inverse square law (although magnetic fields actually diminish with an inverse cube for complicated reasons).
Remember that JP Morgan pulled his funding when Tesla didn't know how to incorporate an electric meter into his system for extracting energy from the aether ("higgs field" is the latest term, I think).
Ok. First, the notion of an aether was a ubiquitous substance necessary to explain among other things how electromagnetic waves traveled http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminiferous_aether. There was in the late 19th century and early 20th century, the reasonable but ultimately incorrect beliefs that waves required a medium to travel through. Since the main waves people were used to all obeyed that, it seemed reasonable. 20th century physics (especially Einstein's work) removed most of the reasons for thinking one would need an ether. Second, the Higgs field http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_field has nothing to do with this but is, very roughly speaking, an attempt to explain where the mass of elementary particles comes from. There's no way Tesla would have known anything about it. He had neither the math nor the particle physics knowledge to even guess at such a thing. You are essentially combining a variety of different ideas together that have little to do with each other.
When one has a Presidential candidate who waffles, flip-flops and simply doesn't state his policy goals like Romney does, there's a real concern that the VP is going to have a lot of influence on Presidential policies. This is all the more concern when the VP is specifically chosen because of his background as a policy wonk.
People use money laundering to disguise income from illegal sources such as drug cartels, arms dealing, prostitution, bribery, theft, extortion rackets, etc. That's the whole idea of money laundering. It takes dirty money and launders it. You might not think that all those activities should be illegal, but I strongly suspect that at least some of them are things you think should be illegal. And tracing the money is one of the most effective ways of catching criminals and breaking up criminal enterprises.
Sorry, that would be a marginally interesting premise and doesn't immediately call for really bad CGI of a giant monster. So it isn't allowed to be on SyFy.
I'm really fond of the Dunning-Kruger effect to the point where I mention it almost daily and people get annoyed with me. So I was really surprised to hear the claim in summary that Dunning had a Nobel. What would it be in? The last time a psychologist got a Nobel it was for work related to economics. Sure, enough 10 seconds of fact checking, verified that he's not on any list of Nobel Laureates, such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates or the official lists at Nobelprize.org. The claim about Dunning getting a Nobel isn't in TFA so I'm not sure where it came from.
The universe doesn't care about your ideology and operates the same way whether you like it or not. Not liking regulation for ideological reasons shouldn't impact whether or not regulation will accomplish a specific set of goals. If you are always convinced that your ideology and how the laws of physics work always align, then something is wrong with your evaluation of how reality functions.
Slashdot Mirror
The obesity rate for the United States is around 30% whereas it is 23% for the UK. http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_obe-health-obesity. Other metrics tell a similar story. See e.g http://www.oecd.org/els/healthpoliciesanddata/theeconomicsofprevention.htm. This puts Great Britain as one of the highest obesity rates of any country in the world but still not nearly as bad as the United States.
And women characters in games need revealing armour, otherwise you would not be able to tell that they were women. They would look like any other tank, just with a funny feminine name (remember that the characters in games are not like ones on TV, where they are mostly close up; In videogames you have small character sprites and you need to exaggerate for players to be able to make what what they are at a glance.).
I can't quite tell if this is meant as a serious argument. Maybe you can tell that the character is female, because they have a female name, or because they have armor that is slightly feminine, without ridiculous cleavage. Moreover, any sort of argument of the sort you are making fails at another level: modern games have far better graphics yet games like World of Warcaft still have the same problem. Finally, you are operating under the default presumption that a small sprite with no secondary sexual characteristics must be male. What does that say?
I don't think that's all that's going on here. In a lot of classical fantasy including Lord of the Rings, many of the people who are involved aren't don't want to be. Both Sam and Frodo clearly are forced into their circumstances for example. And that's a pretty common thing in fantasy. The set of fantasy where people go out of their way to maim, kill and destroy like Conan is fairly limited.
This does in some ways raise serious points: A lot of classical fantasy had a dearth of women as characters. In Tolkien's case even when they are characters they are often far more passive than active. One sees how this conflicts with more modern sensibilities- look at how much screen time was given to Arwen and Eowyn compared to how much time they had in the books. (It is true that The Silmarillion also introduces some females but the overall numbers are low). Worse, when later fantasy did try to have empowered female characters, they were often more male fantasies, the classical "chicks in chainmail" and the like. One sees the extension of this to other variants as well in modern games, where in many videogames and MMOs otherwise equivalent armor is depicted as covering much less on the women and often emphasizing the female figure. And one sees a similar pattern in science fiction. Indeed, much of it doesn't even get close to passing the Bechdel test http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bechdel_test. Note that in the case of Lord of the Rings, it fails the Bechdel test so badly that no two major female characters even have a conversation. (Interestingly, another major foundation of the work- The Chronicles of Narnia has much more in the way of strong females.)
It shouldn't be that surprising in this sort of context that scifi and fantasy have for a long-time been seen as male-dominated genres. That's obviously not exclusively the case (I first started reading fantasy to some extent because woman who babysat me was a voracious consumer of fantasy novels), but it is a definite problem. There have been some clear changes in the genre in the last few years, especially in the Young Adult area. Thus, one has examples like Garth Nix's Abhorsen series where the main characters are to a large extent strong women, and actually strong not just skimpy-armor-strong. So the genre does seem to be changing, but there will likely always be some influence from what founded the genre.
Actually, having just reread the bit about linking, I now realized that it is even worse than that. Posner was arguing essentially that linking to a legitimate copy such as a newspaper's website should be considered a violation. See also this prior Slashdot discussion http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/06/28/1619211/Judge-Thinks-Linking-To-Copyrighted-Material-Should-Be-Illegal.
Posner is one of the people who has gotten us into this situation. He wrote the opinion In re Aimster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_re_Aimster_Copyright_Litigation which provided a precedent for a fair bit of modern copyright issues on the internet. He's also advocated in the past that linking to copyright violating material should be considered a violation http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2009/06/the-future-of-newspapers--posner.html. Yes, he's right that the problems he identifies in TFA are there, but this is someone who has contributed to associated problems. It almost seems like Posner isn't quite able to say "I was wrong" but I guess we should take what we can get.
This is the logical culmination. We've already had decisions that making a sexual cartoon involving Bart Simpson is child porn http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7770781.stm. This isn't much farther than that.
Ugh, typo. Yes, you are correct, thanks for catching that.
The manhole in question went 45 miles a second. That's around 70 kilometers a second whereas the speed of light is around 3*10^5 km/s. So it was going around .002 the speed of light, which is still very damn impressive but is a lot less than .1c. See http://professionalparanoid.wordpress.com/the-fastest-man-made-object-ever-a-nuclear-powered-manhole-cover-true/ for more about the manhole cover and the circumstances of its launch.
The original claim dates from 2008 and 2009. (Original paper here- http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.3283). While TFA claims that this has been confirmed, the group confirming this shares many of the same authors http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.0205. This still has not yet been confirmed by a genuinely independent group. Also the claims still only focus on two specific isotopes Si-32 and Ra-226. One thing worth emphasizing is that this has no bearing on things like the age of the Earth or other uses of radiometric dating. The isotopes are not used generally for radiometric dating and the percentage change in decay rates being observed is tiny. Moreover, for many of the sorts of things we do radiometric dating we have multiple distinct methods that cross-check each other. For example, when doing zircon dating, one can date from both the decay of U-238 and that of U-235 which use distinct decay changes. This may turn out to be some very interesting thing going on, but as of right now the impact is limited even if it is correct.
The claim being made there seems to be substantially weaker than a 200 mile requirement. First, even the ACLU is making a claim about 100 miles, and that's talking about search and seizure. In the primary case in context, the government is agreeing that probable cause is still necessary. And no one is claiming in that article that not carrying an idea within that zone would be criminal. This is an example of something that's really bad and should be fought against. But it doesn't support the original claim much at all.
Yeah, I don't have any citation other than persona anecdote of it happening, and my impression is moreover similar to yours in that outside cities containing major military assets, such checks were in practice not that common.
Your first example is an example where a specific government agency tried to engage in overreach and the rest of the government said no. Not exactly a great exampe. As to your claim about 200 miles of the border requiring ID, I'm not aware of such and a quick Google search doesn't turn it up. Do you have a citation?
Except for communists, right? If you lived in the US and it became known that you were communist, it was pretty much the same result. You lost your job, lost your friends, everything.
Yes, at times things sucked. But being a member of the Communist Party was never illegal (at least at a national level- some US states tried to make it illegal with varying degrees of success). And the set of things that were actually illegal has in the US always been a much smaller set. At most you have things like the Smith Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_Act which made penalties for advocating the overthrow of the US government. It isn't a similar situation.
Your point about technology is a very valid one. Technology is a two edged sword for freedom. It can help people coordinate resistance movements even as governments can use it to more effectively construct police states. So the level of danger does grow as technology improves.
So what was it that the USSR did exactly? I don't mean in Berlin near the wall, I mean in Moscow or Stalingrad or a Russian city with russian citizens, not conquered and occupied territory.
In the papers context, anyone authorized (police, KGB, GRU, etc.) could stop citizens at any time and ask for their papers, that included identification information, where they worked, etc. and could ask them why they were they were, what they were doing etc. Failure to cooperate was a crime. And this was frequently used and moreover was used to intimidate groups they didn't like. For a personal example, I know someone who grew up near Moscow in the 1970s who had become interested in Judaism. She joined a group of people who were reading and studying old texts. After a few months, it reached the attention of the government, and one time they went to their regular meeting, she was stopped by KGB people and asked where she was going, and told that it was an unwise thing to do. At the next meeting, they were raided and all arrested. She served a few months in jail and upon being released couldn't get any jobs. In the US, nor in most of the Western world do things like that happen. The USSR wasn't just bad compared to the US, it was bad compared to most civilized countries.
I'm perfectly fine with flying pretty much anywhere in the world, but I won't currently fly to the U.S..
Sure, the current restrictions on flying are stupid, petty and deeply inconvenient. If I were not a US citizen I'd probably not be that inclined to fly here either. But that goes to the "things aren't perfect and have gotten worse" matter, not to any sort of comparison with the USSR.
There are a lot of factual problems with your statements. I'm not going to list all the Soviet space accomplishments I learned about in school, because that's likely a function of specific school one went to and how much detail on the space program one had. But let's look at your other claims.
First of all, the US has not (until very recently in some states like Arizona) been a papers-please state, that is a state where the police can just stop you on the street and ask for your ID and other paperwork. The difference with cars is that you need a license to drive a car. Comparing that to what the USSR did is just not accurate.
Second, it is possible to travel to Cuba and has been for over a decade, and in fact it just got easier about a year ago. http://travel.nytimes.com/2011/07/10/travel/at-long-last-legal-trips-to-cuba.html. Even in years where it has been difficult, a minimum of around 50,000 Americans traveled there has been around 50,000. Moreover, there's a very large difference between it being difficult to travel to a specific country and making it nearly impossible to travel to most of the planet. Remember the Berlin Wall at all? People were shot trying to flee as a regular occurrence. The US may do nasty things sometimes to keep people out, but they aren't threatening their own citizens to keep them in.
None of this is to say that the US is perfect. There are serious problems with civil liberties. And in many ways they've gotten much worse in the last decade. But that doesn't mean it is at all like how things were in the Soviet Union.
Part of the problem with this sort of thing isn't just that it only works when it isn't widely known. Even if it is only marginally known, it will make criminals take security systems (even real ones) less seriously because they know there's a decent chance the system is fake. Since there's evidence that criminals already have poorer impulse control and less are less risk averse than the general population http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/294626-overview, http://jnnp.bmj.com/content/71/6/720.full, http://web.utk.edu/~wneilson/EcLett-Crime.pdf, this is likely to make them more likely to break in general. This will make alarm systems be less effective deterrents. Essentially this is very close to defecting in the n-player version of the prisoner's dilemma.
Even if it does deter people, it could easily lead to more and more intimidation required to get criminals to take the threat seriously, which could lead to an arms race of ridiculous looking security measures. Overall, this seems socially irresponsible.
That's simply the cult of Tesla. He was very bright and had a lot of good ideas but to say things like "Modern physics has nothing on Nikola Tesla" or "Tesla grokked physics like no one else before or (perhaps) since" simply isn't accurate. If we want to go with the celebrity route, Feynman would be the obvious counterexample to the second statement, especially since Tesla did absolutely no work in many fields of physics at all. But more to the point, Tesla couldn't have grokked things that well since the knowledge simply wasn't there, and because it is very hard for a single human to do everything. Thus for example Tesla never worked with superconductors (although they were known in his lifetime). Similarly, Tesla had as far as we can tell, no overarching ideas about theory that were at all helpful.
And of course, Tesla came out against special and general relativity. While it is conceivable that GR might have issues, SR is pretty damn well one of the best established theories there is. Tesla was just wrong.
Tesla was a man. A brilliant man, but a nevertheless, a man and not a god.
Remember that JP Morgan pulled his funding when Tesla didn't know how to incorporate an electric meter into his system for extracting energy from the aether ("higgs field" is the latest term, I think).
Ok. First, the notion of an aether was a ubiquitous substance necessary to explain among other things how electromagnetic waves traveled http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminiferous_aether. There was in the late 19th century and early 20th century, the reasonable but ultimately incorrect beliefs that waves required a medium to travel through. Since the main waves people were used to all obeyed that, it seemed reasonable. 20th century physics (especially Einstein's work) removed most of the reasons for thinking one would need an ether. Second, the Higgs field http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_field has nothing to do with this but is, very roughly speaking, an attempt to explain where the mass of elementary particles comes from. There's no way Tesla would have known anything about it. He had neither the math nor the particle physics knowledge to even guess at such a thing. You are essentially combining a variety of different ideas together that have little to do with each other.
When one has a Presidential candidate who waffles, flip-flops and simply doesn't state his policy goals like Romney does, there's a real concern that the VP is going to have a lot of influence on Presidential policies. This is all the more concern when the VP is specifically chosen because of his background as a policy wonk.
People use money laundering to disguise income from illegal sources such as drug cartels, arms dealing, prostitution, bribery, theft, extortion rackets, etc. That's the whole idea of money laundering. It takes dirty money and launders it. You might not think that all those activities should be illegal, but I strongly suspect that at least some of them are things you think should be illegal. And tracing the money is one of the most effective ways of catching criminals and breaking up criminal enterprises.
"Halting State" by Charlie Stross has a pretty similar premise. Real world cops are called in to investigate a bank robbery in an MMO.
Sorry, that would be a marginally interesting premise and doesn't immediately call for really bad CGI of a giant monster. So it isn't allowed to be on SyFy.
I'm really fond of the Dunning-Kruger effect to the point where I mention it almost daily and people get annoyed with me. So I was really surprised to hear the claim in summary that Dunning had a Nobel. What would it be in? The last time a psychologist got a Nobel it was for work related to economics. Sure, enough 10 seconds of fact checking, verified that he's not on any list of Nobel Laureates, such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates or the official lists at Nobelprize.org. The claim about Dunning getting a Nobel isn't in TFA so I'm not sure where it came from.
The universe doesn't care about your ideology and operates the same way whether you like it or not. Not liking regulation for ideological reasons shouldn't impact whether or not regulation will accomplish a specific set of goals. If you are always convinced that your ideology and how the laws of physics work always align, then something is wrong with your evaluation of how reality functions.