Yes, wouldn't out be nice if we had the right to max out our credit cards, give the proceeds to the kids, then die and have the debt evaporate. That's how any fair country does it.
If you can inherit your parents' wealth, why wouldn't you inherit your parents' debt? Same attitude as bank bailouts. I'm only responsible for things which occur to my advantage, anything that guess against me needs to be absorbed by somebody else, like The government, who shouldn't get a piece of any estates even if they're over 5 million because that's a death tax which sounds wrong.
The validity of the debt is a different question. Especially after all those years, questions arise as to where the evidence was hiding all this time.
Are the Bay Area's wealthy all part of some sort of illuminati group that identifies each other by license plate instead of secret handshakes? The answer is the state highway patrol
How can "the state highway patrol" be the answer to a question that starts with "Are..."?
Read my upcoming book, Poor Sentence Structure as an Index of Asperger's
It's tied to race. DC has a very large black population. When you have that in any city, murder rates are very high. Same for hispanics.
So we've enlarged upon " least homogenous" as a cause for murder to "large black population". Whenever you find two completely opposed ideas pulled together to prove something, you know you're in rightwingland.
I would also point out that the "US" - commonly condemned in such statistics - is probably the least homogenous country in the world. As such, it's probably useful to look at the state by state rankings, both positively and negatively:
(ranked by deaths per 100k)
1. District of Columbia 30.8 http://www.city-data.com/forum...
That comes from the same book of statistics that tells us the US has the best healthcare in the world. If you even take a day trip to Toronto you'll see more ethnic diversity than in the US.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
guess the author of the article hasn't watched CSI or Law and Order or True detective shows. It is usually a woman who is murdered in a domestic dispute or for life insurance money.
Good lord, on LMN (Lifetime Movie Network) there's a different woman being murdered by a man pretty much every 2 hours, 24/7. Mostly "based on a true case!"
Stats for North America are incorrect. Mexico is not a part of Central America, it is part of North America. Some may not know or like this, but it is correct.
Mexico is part of North America. (New Mexico, right?)
" In the world's most violent country, Honduras, a man has a 1 in 9 chance of being murdered during his lifetime."
On the other hand, his chance of being murdered not during his lifetime is much lower.
I can provide all sorts of apps and programs which were apparently coded by coal miners. Although, I must admit, they do appear to have been coded by coal miners who could not be taught to code.
Elite violinists may be the wrong test group. I remember a test of high tech tennis rackets, and the pros didn't find them much better than the regular designs, but the amateurs found them easier to use, less fatiguing, etc. Similarly, auto racing at the level where an amateur team has a professional driver on the team, is rife with stories of the pro bringing it in for a driver change and saying "it's perfect, don't change a thing" and the new guy takes it out and discovers it's missing a wheel or something. I suspect the elite violinists could do well with a plastic violin from the dollar store.
The devil lies in the difference between theoretical and actual performance, as demonstrated by the rush of "New, improved, no longer sounds awful" products right after the initial CD player boom, as well as the use of 24 bit DAC chips, etc. Now that that's been pretty well debugged, of course it's obsolete and we're onto MP3s.
"Why in the world would you need 24 bit DACs to decode 16 bit CDs, ha ha? "
"Because the smallest couple of bits in a cheap DAC are pretty unreliable, so if you actually need 16 bits you don't use a cheap 16 bit DAC, ha ha"
for one example.
Rather than A/B comparisons, a good test is to run the signal through an encoder/decoder or compressor/expander or whatever loop and then subtract it from the original with a good op amp and match levels for maximum cancellation and listen to the result, which is obviously the detectable distortion in its purest form. I, for one, was surprised at the horrible grunge generated by some DACs. It's really true, digitally- created distortion is really irritating. A little goes a long way.
As somebody pointed out to me once, if we truly had free will, then the concepts of things like punishment or advertising wouldn't work at all. The entire structure of civilization is based on the ability to alter other people's behavior to suit ourselves. "Give me food!" "My free will tells me to keep my food." "What does your free will say to cash?" "My free will has suddenly done an about face".
At some point, the concept becomes meaningless if you can manipulate it.
One of these days, on the 11 PM news:
"Police today began hauling away large amounts of antimatter found hoarded in the home of a local resident. An unidentified spokesperson reported "The stuff was piled up all over the inside of the place so that you could barely move; he had little pathways and tunnels to get around. He's just lucky it never fell on him" Police have ruled the house too dangerous to enter until the piles are removed. His next door neighbor, a professor of physics at the local university, is quoted as saying "Well, that explains a lot"."
What's the difference between a simulation and reality, anyway? We know enough now that our idea of "reality" is quite wrong, and just works at our scales of size, time, energy, etc. At big scales, relativity makes everything we know wrong. At small scales, quantum phenomena makes everything we know wrong. We've evolved brains from the combination of primitive electrically excitable cells, and later on networks of those cells which are able to parse various inputs into components in such a way as to model reality in a fashion useful to us; at our scale. Period. Consider; the first neural nets were just random connections of those excitable cells; the ones that were wired across the body of the little sea slug or whatever, so that a bite on one end made the muscle at the opposite end contract, proved quite useful for survival. That's the start of the whole "intelligence" thing, and somehow our polarity regarding time ("bit my butt; past. move away; future.") More recently, the warm-blooded visual cortex (and apparently others; echolocation, sensory whiskers, etc.) evolved into such a fashion as to parse patterns of EM radiation that happened to be plentiful in the vicinity of that big source in the sky, so as to detect first points; then edges; then vertices and intersections; and from that, things we call by the concept "object" and are equipped to manipulate. The object orientation comes from our internal organization, not necessarily the basic structure of reality, which we know now is more probability wave functions involving spatial and temporal dimensions than "objects", at the bottom levels, at least as far down as we now get.
So, if reality is a giant system of coupled equations involving multiple dimensions, how exactly is that different from a simulation? And if we are in the middle of that and think we are in "reality", why would we think any different if we were in a simulation, whatever that might be?
"All I know is that I am conscious and I doubt I'm that special, "
But of course, you are (meaning I am) that special; in that you (I) can "see" inside yourself (myself) mentally, and not see inside anybody/thing else. Thus, logic suggests solipsism is correct; hypothesizing a whole bunch of similar critters that just happen to be different in that I can't see their internal reality is very illogical. Next thing, they'll be believing in a God or something.
By the same token; why do we think we have individual consciousnesses? There's just one universe, just one giant schroedinger's wave equation relating everything; how do we get the illusion that we are completely different and mentally unconnected entities, rather than just a continuous series of points of view of the same underlying phenomena?
Gotta be evolutionarily beneficial.
As we used to discuss in AI class, would an AI of suitable complexity experience "emotions"? Of course, at least behavior that would correspond to human behavior described as emotions and stemming from similar external stimuli. Any worthwhile AI would require goal-seeking behavior rather than rote programming, and that would inherently require evaluations of things like success and failure, and the behavior which causes either would have to be reinforced or extinguished respectively, and that's the kind of thing we feel as emotions, and the evolutionary reason why we have them, rather than just operating on logic like Mr. Spock. Similarly, I can handwave a vague understanding that it wouldn't exactly help your DNA multiply if you had a real objective view of the entire universe and your own actions thereto pertaining, but if you keep it down to "Me! How does it affect me!" you can serve your DNA quite well.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not a "re-examination". It's a butchering.
It's a high tech lynching. Whoops, wrong SCOTUSer.
Well, to reply in the spirit of this exchange, "No he didn't"
Yes, wouldn't out be nice if we had the right to max out our credit cards, give the proceeds to the kids, then die and have the debt evaporate. That's how any fair country does it.
If you can inherit your parents' wealth, why wouldn't you inherit your parents' debt? Same attitude as bank bailouts. I'm only responsible for things which occur to my advantage, anything that guess against me needs to be absorbed by somebody else, like The government, who shouldn't get a piece of any estates even if they're over 5 million because that's a death tax which sounds wrong. The validity of the debt is a different question. Especially after all those years, questions arise as to where the evidence was hiding all this time.
lay off the donuts. snack on crudites.
Are the Bay Area's wealthy all part of some sort of illuminati group that identifies each other by license plate instead of secret handshakes? The answer is the state highway patrol
How can "the state highway patrol" be the answer to a question that starts with "Are..."?
Read my upcoming book, Poor Sentence Structure as an Index of Asperger's
that's basically a license for speeding.
It's tied to race. DC has a very large black population. When you have that in any city, murder rates are very high. Same for hispanics.
So we've enlarged upon " least homogenous" as a cause for murder to "large black population". Whenever you find two completely opposed ideas pulled together to prove something, you know you're in rightwingland.
I would also point out that the "US" - commonly condemned in such statistics - is probably the least homogenous country in the world. As such, it's probably useful to look at the state by state rankings, both positively and negatively: (ranked by deaths per 100k) 1. District of Columbia 30.8 http://www.city-data.com/forum...
That comes from the same book of statistics that tells us the US has the best healthcare in the world. If you even take a day trip to Toronto you'll see more ethnic diversity than in the US. http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Try very hard not to be a minority in the United States. And stay away from Skittles.
And don't assault people that are carrying guns.
I.e., if they get out of a car and start hassling you, grovel in a convincingly nonthreatening fashion.
guess the author of the article hasn't watched CSI or Law and Order or True detective shows. It is usually a woman who is murdered in a domestic dispute or for life insurance money.
Good lord, on LMN (Lifetime Movie Network) there's a different woman being murdered by a man pretty much every 2 hours, 24/7. Mostly "based on a true case!"
Stats for North America are incorrect. Mexico is not a part of Central America, it is part of North America. Some may not know or like this, but it is correct.
Mexico is part of North America. (New Mexico, right?)
" In the world's most violent country, Honduras, a man has a 1 in 9 chance of being murdered during his lifetime." On the other hand, his chance of being murdered not during his lifetime is much lower.
Because all the potential murderers in Singapore are imprisoned for chewing gum.
I know you're joking, but that is exactly how twisted left wing ideology gets when it has festered too long.
Twisted Fester is the best metal band name ever.
I was under the impression that they don't mine coal any more, just remove the top of the mountain and scoop it out? (serious question, not trolling)
I can provide all sorts of apps and programs which were apparently coded by coal miners. Although, I must admit, they do appear to have been coded by coal miners who could not be taught to code.
Elite violinists may be the wrong test group. I remember a test of high tech tennis rackets, and the pros didn't find them much better than the regular designs, but the amateurs found them easier to use, less fatiguing, etc. Similarly, auto racing at the level where an amateur team has a professional driver on the team, is rife with stories of the pro bringing it in for a driver change and saying "it's perfect, don't change a thing" and the new guy takes it out and discovers it's missing a wheel or something. I suspect the elite violinists could do well with a plastic violin from the dollar store.
The devil lies in the difference between theoretical and actual performance, as demonstrated by the rush of "New, improved, no longer sounds awful" products right after the initial CD player boom, as well as the use of 24 bit DAC chips, etc. Now that that's been pretty well debugged, of course it's obsolete and we're onto MP3s. "Why in the world would you need 24 bit DACs to decode 16 bit CDs, ha ha? " "Because the smallest couple of bits in a cheap DAC are pretty unreliable, so if you actually need 16 bits you don't use a cheap 16 bit DAC, ha ha" for one example. Rather than A/B comparisons, a good test is to run the signal through an encoder/decoder or compressor/expander or whatever loop and then subtract it from the original with a good op amp and match levels for maximum cancellation and listen to the result, which is obviously the detectable distortion in its purest form. I, for one, was surprised at the horrible grunge generated by some DACs. It's really true, digitally- created distortion is really irritating. A little goes a long way.
As somebody pointed out to me once, if we truly had free will, then the concepts of things like punishment or advertising wouldn't work at all. The entire structure of civilization is based on the ability to alter other people's behavior to suit ourselves. "Give me food!" "My free will tells me to keep my food." "What does your free will say to cash?" "My free will has suddenly done an about face". At some point, the concept becomes meaningless if you can manipulate it.
One of these days, on the 11 PM news: "Police today began hauling away large amounts of antimatter found hoarded in the home of a local resident. An unidentified spokesperson reported "The stuff was piled up all over the inside of the place so that you could barely move; he had little pathways and tunnels to get around. He's just lucky it never fell on him" Police have ruled the house too dangerous to enter until the piles are removed. His next door neighbor, a professor of physics at the local university, is quoted as saying "Well, that explains a lot"."
What's the difference between a simulation and reality, anyway? We know enough now that our idea of "reality" is quite wrong, and just works at our scales of size, time, energy, etc. At big scales, relativity makes everything we know wrong. At small scales, quantum phenomena makes everything we know wrong. We've evolved brains from the combination of primitive electrically excitable cells, and later on networks of those cells which are able to parse various inputs into components in such a way as to model reality in a fashion useful to us; at our scale. Period. Consider; the first neural nets were just random connections of those excitable cells; the ones that were wired across the body of the little sea slug or whatever, so that a bite on one end made the muscle at the opposite end contract, proved quite useful for survival. That's the start of the whole "intelligence" thing, and somehow our polarity regarding time ("bit my butt; past. move away; future.") More recently, the warm-blooded visual cortex (and apparently others; echolocation, sensory whiskers, etc.) evolved into such a fashion as to parse patterns of EM radiation that happened to be plentiful in the vicinity of that big source in the sky, so as to detect first points; then edges; then vertices and intersections; and from that, things we call by the concept "object" and are equipped to manipulate. The object orientation comes from our internal organization, not necessarily the basic structure of reality, which we know now is more probability wave functions involving spatial and temporal dimensions than "objects", at the bottom levels, at least as far down as we now get. So, if reality is a giant system of coupled equations involving multiple dimensions, how exactly is that different from a simulation? And if we are in the middle of that and think we are in "reality", why would we think any different if we were in a simulation, whatever that might be?
"omnipotent and omniscient programmer" now THAT is clearly an impossible concept.
"All I know is that I am conscious and I doubt I'm that special, " But of course, you are (meaning I am) that special; in that you (I) can "see" inside yourself (myself) mentally, and not see inside anybody/thing else. Thus, logic suggests solipsism is correct; hypothesizing a whole bunch of similar critters that just happen to be different in that I can't see their internal reality is very illogical. Next thing, they'll be believing in a God or something.
By the same token; why do we think we have individual consciousnesses? There's just one universe, just one giant schroedinger's wave equation relating everything; how do we get the illusion that we are completely different and mentally unconnected entities, rather than just a continuous series of points of view of the same underlying phenomena? Gotta be evolutionarily beneficial. As we used to discuss in AI class, would an AI of suitable complexity experience "emotions"? Of course, at least behavior that would correspond to human behavior described as emotions and stemming from similar external stimuli. Any worthwhile AI would require goal-seeking behavior rather than rote programming, and that would inherently require evaluations of things like success and failure, and the behavior which causes either would have to be reinforced or extinguished respectively, and that's the kind of thing we feel as emotions, and the evolutionary reason why we have them, rather than just operating on logic like Mr. Spock. Similarly, I can handwave a vague understanding that it wouldn't exactly help your DNA multiply if you had a real objective view of the entire universe and your own actions thereto pertaining, but if you keep it down to "Me! How does it affect me!" you can serve your DNA quite well.