As Minsky points out, and common sense suggests, investing the artificial entity with a goal-seeking faculty which rewards success and discourages failure is giving it emotions.
Actually, I believe his point was that you should, but that in spite of that you can't expect them to be a perfect solution. His stories were about the corner cases in a world full of Three-Laws robots that did just fine.
I vaguely recall that in some later stories; ones he partnered with somebody maybe? Or written by others "in the Asimov universe" or some such? anyway, about the robots who didn't have the three laws; the point being that when any robot with the three laws intact really sat down and thought about it, it would go insane, because at any given instant there are millions of humans who are putting themselves in danger, and it is therefore incumbent on any robot to go stop it; and yet even if it tried to do so full time to the best of its ability, it would still fail to save all of them.
If you look at any of the well-known names in the great advances in the science of medicine, rarely will you see a for-profit corporation listed.
But if you look at the big advances from over the past 30 years. PCR? Corporate. Cure for hepatitis? Corporate. Advances in DNA sequencing? Corporate.
"Advances in DNA sequencing"? You want to point to that as an example of for profit company R&D? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... "Cure for hepatitis"? You mean Sovaldi? That's one of your three big advances in medicine over the past 30 years? "PCR"? That's not medicine, that's a technology. Like giving USSteel credit for medical progress because we have better steel for surgical knives now. Yes it is true, but s t r e t c h much?
People not only had affordable and cheap health care in USA, they had affordable and cheap health insurance. 50 years ago the most commonly sold health insurance plan would only cost $25 per year per family of 4 with a 500USD deductible, covering up to 50,000/year, which was more than enough for 2.5 years of stay in a hospital in a year. So it was catastrophic insurance, which and people paid for most of their expenses out of pocket and it was not a problem whatsoever.
Even before that, around 1920s, 1930s, a family with 2000-3000USD income would spend around 108USD in health care a year, closer to 261USD with hospital stay in a year.
Yes, insurance and health care used to be very cheap in the USA before the fucking piece of shit collectivist, and yes, socialist/fascist government destroyed the free market capitalism.
Please explain how American healthcare since the 1920s and 30s was socialist for the average family of 4, unless all of them happened to be over 65 and on medicare. Without that, I fail to see how socialism could have destroyed the previous wonderful and cheap system you mention.
And, Cuban exports include medical care, in that for-hire medical teams from Cuba show up in third world epidemics and send home the $, like mercenaries show up in a Republican War to Establish Democracy in the Middle East. Which is pretty impressive for a country with the size and poverty level of Cuba.
You did a lot more research into phages, though. I still don't understand why phages aren't being used as a part of standard surgical disinfection worldwide yet -- micro-organisms that literally eat life-threatening bacteria but that are too large to enter the human bloodstream... isn't that better than swabbing us all down with toxic chemicals?
For much the same reason as armies still prefer to shoot the enemy, or perhaps gas them, rather than spray them with flu virus. Biological warfare, even on the bacterial level, is tricky and unreliable with too many variables, and your "ammunition" has a tendency to die if you don't treat it carefully enough.
Ha ha ha ha! In the USSR we invented 4 or 5 antibiotics over the life of the country (a country that lasted for 69 or 74 years, depends on how you count) and it was complete and total socialism and of-course it was complete and total failure. How many antibiotics did they invent in Cuba exactly? North Korea?
American capitalism in 19th century American Free Market is actually what created cheap accessible and effective medical and pharma systems as for profit businesses and for the last 100 years American socialism/fascism have been destroying everything that was done.
What for profit business invented penicillin, which established the entire concept of antibiotic pharmacology as possible, which in turn gave rise to the entire modern field of pharmacological therapy for disease? or investigated and demonstrated its effects, on animals and on people? Which for profit business did the original R&D on cancer chemotherapy, the other big leg of pharmacology? Which for profit business discovered, researched, and developed insulin? Although, I do have to admit, in fields like therapy for restless leg syndrome, for profit companies have done the R&D, which largely consists of taking drugs already on the market and coming up with new diseases they can be marketed for; or conversely, taking drugs already on the market, and making them just different enough that they can be patented separately and marketed for the same diseases.
Basic biochemical research took the big hit during Reagan's Reign of Error, when Medicare payments to academic hospitals were cut. These institutions had been paid more for similar services than other hospitals, to offset the costs of both medical education and research. The big slowdown in basic research that started then has resulted in a lack of things in the applied research end of the pipeline now for industry to exploit.
You mean the countries of the former Soviet bloc? You may not have noticed, but they haven't been socialist for over a generation now, and sadly they still don't have a big biochemical segment. Or did you mean socialist like the rightwingers term such countries as Germany or Switzerland? Because you may not have noticed that Germany and Switzerland are the homelands of most of the pharmaceutical companies in the world.
The poster boy for the peculiar economics of antibiotics is Bayer Pharmaceutical, who had planned to carve out their particular niche in the Big Pharma ecology as the Antibiotics Company, based on the out of the park home run they scored with Cipro. That didn't pay off as planned, however, as practitioners and insurers voted overwhelmingly to go with the low cost me-too competitors, such as levofloxacin, despite reasonably persuasive evidence that Cipro was better. That being the case, it was predictable that Bayer's next in the pipe, Avelox, wasn't going to give them the big payoff based on their sales pitch that studies show that it will clear up an infection in 4 days instead of 5. Thus Bayer was forced to pack up their North American tents and go home. The unfortunate side effect of this is some unnecessary increase in resistance to this class of drugs, as use of the cheaper but less effective members allow more partially resistant bacteria to survive.
Chinese have also really kicked up their investment in wind power recently, to the point that their grid is struggling to catch up to it; they can actually generate more wind power than they can distribute.
I think solar is great - I have some panels on my camper, which is very conducive to solar type use because it's already designed to function off-grid. But let's be realistic. Let's say every home in America stuck a couple thousand watts of solar power on their roof, and wanted to sell the power into the grid (as opposed of having to store it on-site). How is that supposed to work? If no power generation is required by the power company when the sun is shining, but the full normal generation is required the instant clouds sweep over a community or at night, etc, then how is that supposed to work? None of the power generation plants can function in that "instant on / instant off" type of a mode. Particularly not nuclear. The point is, once the adoption reaches some (rather smallish) percentage, there will be some major problems and costs that will have to be addressed.
Regarding the incentives (tax credits and the like), again, once solar hits some critical mass, why would the government provide incentives? The incentives did their job, and got some number of people to adopt solar.
Nothing is stopping anyone from using solar. It's just that it may not be a profitable (as in selling electricity or getting a tax break) endeavor. So don't whine when it can't be used purely for an economical advantage.
The maximum load on the grid is always summer AC, when we end up with brownouts because the grid can't handle that load already. That, of course, is the exact time when solar will have maximum output. Point of use solar systems for as many AC units as possible just to reduce the degree to which the grid is insufficient will produce maximum ROI.
Then the next big hurdle will be recharging electric cars, which we can't assume will only happen when solar power is at it's maximum output. The utilities already assume it's something that happens at night when there's a lot of excess capacity that isn't earning its keep now. OK if you are a 9-5 commuter, not so great if you are on your vacation trip and were hoping you might be able to recharge en route without investing in a day's hotel stay.
No, the problem is that he and the corrupt party are constantly rewarded with reelection.
There's only one party that's corrupt? Or are you talking about the republi-crat party?
The voters have to work the system and be as active as the lobbyists, not just show up every two years.
And there's another problem. Lobbyists get paid, and it's a full time job. Plus they pay for what they want. The rest of us only have so much time to dedicate to politics and can not compete with the kind of funding that professional groups bring to bear.
It's an economic axiom, that in a zero sum game where a small number of players would each make a big gain at the expense of a large number of players who each suffer a smaller loss, it's going to happen; because the small number will be more motivated to make it happen than the large number are to oppose it. And that brings us to 2015.
Perhaps you failed to notice that my source was the Huffington Post. It is they who are saying that ISIS troops are using chemical weapons which they obtained from Saddam's stockpiles. While I will agree that Huffington Post is a bunch of wingnuts, they are are not noted for thinking that Bush was right about anything.
Yes, the source which stated, "chemical munitions remaining after the U.S. invasion, which the Times notes, originate not from the period when President George W. Bush claimed Iraq was producing weapons of mass destruction, but from earlier." Said Times article stating, "The United States had gone to war declaring it must destroy an active weapons of mass destruction program. Instead, American troops gradually found and ultimately suffered from the remnants of long-abandoned programs, built in close collaboration with the West." http://www.nytimes.com/interac...
Let's see, it was not Fox News spreading the idea that vaccines cause autism. That was MSNBC.
As to Saddam having WMDs, you apparently have not read the reports about ISIS using the WMDs which Saddam had stockpiled (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/14/isis-chemical-weapons-_n_5987106.html)
Yeah, and if your grandfather has a crumbling German gas mask he picked up in WWI stashed away in a trunk in the attic that's proof that the Germans are preparing for chemical warfare.
> NASA, NOAA point out warming has stalled, no temperature has exceeded 1998's.
You deniers have got to stop using that one.
By now, we've all figured out that any mention of 1998 is just cherry-picking at its worst.
All you do is identify yourself as a zero-knowledge shill that should be ignored.
Why, I remember on July 26 1998 I accidentally left the oven on broil for an hour, and the oven thermometer read over 500 degrees; it's a known fact that the average temperature of the earth has not exceeded that since, and from this I deduce that that was the peak point of global warming in both time and space.
No, you are missing something vital here. The only way to really check whether a particular paper is valid is to a) be an expert in the field, and b) redo the research yourself. Otherwise, you are taking big shortcuts in your evaluation of a particular scientific paper. And these are big shortcuts you MUST take. There are thousands of scientific papers coming out every day, written by teams who have often collaborated for years. Most you can't read, because you can't read everything. Anything you do read, you are probably not going to redo the research yourself. That's kind of the point, isn't it? We all have specialties, and we do different things, so other people don't have to repeat what we have done? So how do you know whether a particular scientific paper is valid? Honestly, unless you can tell it isn't valid, you don't know whether it is valid science. You just have to guess. You guess based on the methods used, and whether the author seems to know his ass from a hole in the ground. And then you judge based on the credibility of the source. Is it from a Princeton professor? Someone from MIT? Or is it a quantum field theory paper written by a dentist? Is the author a whack job? Is the author a paid shill? Is the author a Stanford Astrophysics professor writing a paper about astrophysics, with no material conflicts of interest in the research, the research paper being published in a reputable peer-reviewed astrophysics journal? If you don't evalutate scientific papers this way, you don't properly evaluate scientific papers. Because realistically you can't evalutate them by duplicating the research yourself.
Yep, in a nutshell you got it.
Every nonscientist knows in their particular profession, even if it's counter guy at dunkin donuts, who is good and who is useless, even though it's not always clear from the outside. Science is no different.
'He has accepted more than $1.2 million in money from the fossil-fuel industry over the last decade while failing to disclose that conflict of interest in most of his scientific papers. Im a little curious if it is standard practice to not disclose this type of relationship. If it is, it is wrong. I see an ethics issue at hand
Id like to see a breakdown on which scientists are getting paid and by whom in all their works.
In other words, unless the total income of every scientist who believes in AGW is given to you along with a notarized copy of their tax returns you will continue to cling to the belief that each of them has an income which dwarfs Soon's 1.2 million, and which contractually obligates them to advocate for reduction of CO2 no matter what their research actually shows.
B$. My family of 5 coverage was $160 per month, $35 copay, no deductible. Here comes Osamabinladencare, one adult person is now $1200 per month for almost the same coverage, kids are forced to take medi-cal, which is free but will recoup any/all medical bills from my estate. No choice on this, it's this or pay the full outside price which is 10X what it was.
Those free market enthusiasts should be first in line to praise Obamacare for lowering costs; since now, the average family has a choice of several plans offered by several companies, in several grades (bronze, silver, gold, platinum, whatever) with equivalently reasonable mandated minimum benefits, rather than a take it or leave it deal from their employer, with a cost that depends mostly on what their employer wants to kick in. free market invisible hand theory suggests that consumers will flock to the most cost effective plans. I'm not a free market enthusiast, but even I can't see why they wouldn't.
That does leave the general overall tendency of costs to go up every year as they have for decades now. The reasons for this have been hashed over and over in the literature and the word Obama never comes up as a cause.
You can buy a congressman for a couple of grand but you can buy a state legislator for a couple of hundred. That's why until the Southern Strategy turned things upside down, the wealthy big money Republicans owned the federal government, while the small business Democrats owned the states and cities.
But that doesn't mean that we are supposed to turn into Somalia.
I love how the idea of reducing the size of the federal government is always compared to Somalia. Guess what? In addition to a federal government, most people are also under a state, county, and city/township government. Removing power from the federal government isn't going to result in bands of roving warlords and pirates. It would simply shift the balance of services provided from a bloated federal government back to the state & local level, where they belong and people have more opportunity to provide input.
sure. just like the red state governors have decided not to extend medicaid to their citizens too poor to afford to buy insurance on the exchanges even with a subsidy, even though that medicaid would be covered by the federal government. That's the kind of caring for their fellow citizens we can look forward to on the state level.
"Opposition to the ACA is an article of political faith among those who oppose President Obama and the Democratic leadership in Congress. Many conservatives have run their federal political races on a pledge to repeal “Obamacare.”[118] In addition, refusing Medicaid funds is part of a two-pronged strategy of some conservative leaders to undermine the ACA at the state level[119]—the other being to cede to the federal government the authority to establish insurance exchanges and regulate local insurance markets.[120] Opponents urge these sacrificial tactics because the ACA is President Obama’s signature domestic achievement, and so undermining “Obamacare” at any cost is seen as a prime strategy to weaken his political standing.[121] State-level Republicans see political advantage in aligning with these national opposition forces, or they fear the political costs of helping to implement any part of this new national law.[122]
Aside from crass political motivation (that some might think is racially tinged), obstinate ideology is the only other possible justification for the stubborn refusal of federal funds in the face of compelling evidence that Medicaid expansion will cost states little or nothing. Despite the potential to improve health for millions, conservative leaders simply object in principle to accepting more federal funds with any strings attached. As Patrick Henry reminded us, points of principle certainly can be worth dying for, or allowing others to die for, but is state autonomy over Medicaid one such do-or-die principle? If not, spiteful refusal of federal funds in order to undermine the ACA is at least callous, if not reprehensible." http://www.nclawreview.org/201...
We're not other countries. Our government is the most corrupt institution on the planet.
Why would you think a government, that couldn't roll out a website, after spending over $2 billion, could effectively manage something far more complex?
yeah, that makes perfect sense. our government is more corrupt than, say Putin's? the PLO? any oil company?
and you know what they say, if you can't make your unbelievably complex website run perfectly on the first day, then you're probably too subhuman to earn your salary,
so, let's be honest and stop the incompetent and corrupt government from wielding great military power abroad, and the power of life and death via the legal system domestically, right?
Slashdot Mirror
As Minsky points out, and common sense suggests, investing the artificial entity with a goal-seeking faculty which rewards success and discourages failure is giving it emotions.
"A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm."
So no.
Same as a Jewish mother.
The robot knows that the alcoholic in question is Hitler? I call Godwin!
Actually, I believe his point was that you should, but that in spite of that you can't expect them to be a perfect solution. His stories were about the corner cases in a world full of Three-Laws robots that did just fine.
I vaguely recall that in some later stories; ones he partnered with somebody maybe? Or written by others "in the Asimov universe" or some such? anyway, about the robots who didn't have the three laws; the point being that when any robot with the three laws intact really sat down and thought about it, it would go insane, because at any given instant there are millions of humans who are putting themselves in danger, and it is therefore incumbent on any robot to go stop it; and yet even if it tried to do so full time to the best of its ability, it would still fail to save all of them.
If you look at any of the well-known names in the great advances in the science of medicine, rarely will you see a for-profit corporation listed.
But if you look at the big advances from over the past 30 years. PCR? Corporate. Cure for hepatitis? Corporate. Advances in DNA sequencing? Corporate.
"Advances in DNA sequencing"? You want to point to that as an example of for profit company R&D? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Cure for hepatitis"? You mean Sovaldi? That's one of your three big advances in medicine over the past 30 years?
"PCR"? That's not medicine, that's a technology. Like giving USSteel credit for medical progress because we have better steel for surgical knives now. Yes it is true, but s t r e t c h much?
People not only had affordable and cheap health care in USA, they had affordable and cheap health insurance. 50 years ago the most commonly sold health insurance plan would only cost $25 per year per family of 4 with a 500USD deductible, covering up to 50,000/year, which was more than enough for 2.5 years of stay in a hospital in a year. So it was catastrophic insurance, which and people paid for most of their expenses out of pocket and it was not a problem whatsoever.
Even before that, around 1920s, 1930s, a family with 2000-3000USD income would spend around 108USD in health care a year, closer to 261USD with hospital stay in a year.
Yes, insurance and health care used to be very cheap in the USA before the fucking piece of shit collectivist, and yes, socialist/fascist government destroyed the free market capitalism.
Please explain how American healthcare since the 1920s and 30s was socialist for the average family of 4, unless all of them happened to be over 65 and on medicare. Without that, I fail to see how socialism could have destroyed the previous wonderful and cheap system you mention.
And, Cuban exports include medical care, in that for-hire medical teams from Cuba show up in third world epidemics and send home the $, like mercenaries show up in a Republican War to Establish Democracy in the Middle East. Which is pretty impressive for a country with the size and poverty level of Cuba.
You did a lot more research into phages, though. I still don't understand why phages aren't being used as a part of standard surgical disinfection worldwide yet -- micro-organisms that literally eat life-threatening bacteria but that are too large to enter the human bloodstream... isn't that better than swabbing us all down with toxic chemicals?
For much the same reason as armies still prefer to shoot the enemy, or perhaps gas them, rather than spray them with flu virus. Biological warfare, even on the bacterial level, is tricky and unreliable with too many variables, and your "ammunition" has a tendency to die if you don't treat it carefully enough.
Ha ha ha ha! In the USSR we invented 4 or 5 antibiotics over the life of the country (a country that lasted for 69 or 74 years, depends on how you count) and it was complete and total socialism and of-course it was complete and total failure. How many antibiotics did they invent in Cuba exactly? North Korea?
American capitalism in 19th century American Free Market is actually what created cheap accessible and effective medical and pharma systems as for profit businesses and for the last 100 years American socialism/fascism have been destroying everything that was done.
What for profit business invented penicillin, which established the entire concept of antibiotic pharmacology as possible, which in turn gave rise to the entire modern field of pharmacological therapy for disease? or investigated and demonstrated its effects, on animals and on people? Which for profit business did the original R&D on cancer chemotherapy, the other big leg of pharmacology? Which for profit business discovered, researched, and developed insulin?
Although, I do have to admit, in fields like therapy for restless leg syndrome, for profit companies have done the R&D, which largely consists of taking drugs already on the market and coming up with new diseases they can be marketed for; or conversely, taking drugs already on the market, and making them just different enough that they can be patented separately and marketed for the same diseases.
Basic biochemical research took the big hit during Reagan's Reign of Error, when Medicare payments to academic hospitals were cut. These institutions had been paid more for similar services than other hospitals, to offset the costs of both medical education and research. The big slowdown in basic research that started then has resulted in a lack of things in the applied research end of the pipeline now for industry to exploit.
You mean the countries of the former Soviet bloc? You may not have noticed, but they haven't been socialist for over a generation now, and sadly they still don't have a big biochemical segment.
Or did you mean socialist like the rightwingers term such countries as Germany or Switzerland? Because you may not have noticed that Germany and Switzerland are the homelands of most of the pharmaceutical companies in the world.
The poster boy for the peculiar economics of antibiotics is Bayer Pharmaceutical, who had planned to carve out their particular niche in the Big Pharma ecology as the Antibiotics Company, based on the out of the park home run they scored with Cipro. That didn't pay off as planned, however, as practitioners and insurers voted overwhelmingly to go with the low cost me-too competitors, such as levofloxacin, despite reasonably persuasive evidence that Cipro was better. That being the case, it was predictable that Bayer's next in the pipe, Avelox, wasn't going to give them the big payoff based on their sales pitch that studies show that it will clear up an infection in 4 days instead of 5. Thus Bayer was forced to pack up their North American tents and go home.
The unfortunate side effect of this is some unnecessary increase in resistance to this class of drugs, as use of the cheaper but less effective members allow more partially resistant bacteria to survive.
Chinese have also really kicked up their investment in wind power recently, to the point that their grid is struggling to catch up to it; they can actually generate more wind power than they can distribute.
I think solar is great - I have some panels on my camper, which is very conducive to solar type use because it's already designed to function off-grid. But let's be realistic. Let's say every home in America stuck a couple thousand watts of solar power on their roof, and wanted to sell the power into the grid (as opposed of having to store it on-site). How is that supposed to work? If no power generation is required by the power company when the sun is shining, but the full normal generation is required the instant clouds sweep over a community or at night, etc, then how is that supposed to work? None of the power generation plants can function in that "instant on / instant off" type of a mode. Particularly not nuclear. The point is, once the adoption reaches some (rather smallish) percentage, there will be some major problems and costs that will have to be addressed.
Regarding the incentives (tax credits and the like), again, once solar hits some critical mass, why would the government provide incentives? The incentives did their job, and got some number of people to adopt solar.
Nothing is stopping anyone from using solar. It's just that it may not be a profitable (as in selling electricity or getting a tax break) endeavor. So don't whine when it can't be used purely for an economical advantage.
The maximum load on the grid is always summer AC, when we end up with brownouts because the grid can't handle that load already. That, of course, is the exact time when solar will have maximum output. Point of use solar systems for as many AC units as possible just to reduce the degree to which the grid is insufficient will produce maximum ROI.
Then the next big hurdle will be recharging electric cars, which we can't assume will only happen when solar power is at it's maximum output. The utilities already assume it's something that happens at night when there's a lot of excess capacity that isn't earning its keep now. OK if you are a 9-5 commuter, not so great if you are on your vacation trip and were hoping you might be able to recharge en route without investing in a day's hotel stay.
No, the problem is that he and the corrupt party are constantly rewarded with reelection.
There's only one party that's corrupt? Or are you talking about the republi-crat party?
The voters have to work the system and be as active as the lobbyists, not just show up every two years.
And there's another problem. Lobbyists get paid, and it's a full time job. Plus they pay for what they want. The rest of us only have so much time to dedicate to politics and can not compete with the kind of funding that professional groups bring to bear.
It's an economic axiom, that in a zero sum game where a small number of players would each make a big gain at the expense of a large number of players who each suffer a smaller loss, it's going to happen; because the small number will be more motivated to make it happen than the large number are to oppose it. And that brings us to 2015.
Perhaps you failed to notice that my source was the Huffington Post. It is they who are saying that ISIS troops are using chemical weapons which they obtained from Saddam's stockpiles. While I will agree that Huffington Post is a bunch of wingnuts, they are are not noted for thinking that Bush was right about anything.
Yes, the source which stated, "chemical munitions remaining after the U.S. invasion, which the Times notes, originate not from the period when President George W. Bush claimed Iraq was producing weapons of mass destruction, but from earlier."
Said Times article stating, "The United States had gone to war declaring it must destroy an active weapons of mass destruction program. Instead, American troops gradually found and ultimately suffered from the remnants of long-abandoned programs, built in close collaboration with the West." http://www.nytimes.com/interac...
Let's see, it was not Fox News spreading the idea that vaccines cause autism. That was MSNBC. As to Saddam having WMDs, you apparently have not read the reports about ISIS using the WMDs which Saddam had stockpiled (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/14/isis-chemical-weapons-_n_5987106.html)
Yeah, and if your grandfather has a crumbling German gas mask he picked up in WWI stashed away in a trunk in the attic that's proof that the Germans are preparing for chemical warfare.
> NASA, NOAA point out warming has stalled, no temperature has exceeded 1998's.
You deniers have got to stop using that one. By now, we've all figured out that any mention of 1998 is just cherry-picking at its worst. All you do is identify yourself as a zero-knowledge shill that should be ignored.
Why, I remember on July 26 1998 I accidentally left the oven on broil for an hour, and the oven thermometer read over 500 degrees; it's a known fact that the average temperature of the earth has not exceeded that since, and from this I deduce that that was the peak point of global warming in both time and space.
No, you are missing something vital here. The only way to really check whether a particular paper is valid is to a) be an expert in the field, and b) redo the research yourself. Otherwise, you are taking big shortcuts in your evaluation of a particular scientific paper. And these are big shortcuts you MUST take. There are thousands of scientific papers coming out every day, written by teams who have often collaborated for years. Most you can't read, because you can't read everything. Anything you do read, you are probably not going to redo the research yourself. That's kind of the point, isn't it? We all have specialties, and we do different things, so other people don't have to repeat what we have done? So how do you know whether a particular scientific paper is valid? Honestly, unless you can tell it isn't valid, you don't know whether it is valid science. You just have to guess. You guess based on the methods used, and whether the author seems to know his ass from a hole in the ground. And then you judge based on the credibility of the source. Is it from a Princeton professor? Someone from MIT? Or is it a quantum field theory paper written by a dentist? Is the author a whack job? Is the author a paid shill? Is the author a Stanford Astrophysics professor writing a paper about astrophysics, with no material conflicts of interest in the research, the research paper being published in a reputable peer-reviewed astrophysics journal? If you don't evalutate scientific papers this way, you don't properly evaluate scientific papers. Because realistically you can't evalutate them by duplicating the research yourself.
Yep, in a nutshell you got it.
Every nonscientist knows in their particular profession, even if it's counter guy at dunkin donuts, who is good and who is useless, even though it's not always clear from the outside. Science is no different.
'He has accepted more than $1.2 million in money from the fossil-fuel industry over the last decade while failing to disclose that conflict of interest in most of his scientific papers. Im a little curious if it is standard practice to not disclose this type of relationship. If it is, it is wrong. I see an ethics issue at hand Id like to see a breakdown on which scientists are getting paid and by whom in all their works.
In other words, unless the total income of every scientist who believes in AGW is given to you along with a notarized copy of their tax returns you will continue to cling to the belief that each of them has an income which dwarfs Soon's 1.2 million, and which contractually obligates them to advocate for reduction of CO2 no matter what their research actually shows.
B$. My family of 5 coverage was $160 per month, $35 copay, no deductible. Here comes Osamabinladencare, one adult person is now $1200 per month for almost the same coverage, kids are forced to take medi-cal, which is free but will recoup any/all medical bills from my estate. No choice on this, it's this or pay the full outside price which is 10X what it was.
One person, $1200 a month? not including subsidies?
http://money.cnn.com/infograph...
Those free market enthusiasts should be first in line to praise Obamacare for lowering costs; since now, the average family has a choice of several plans offered by several companies, in several grades (bronze, silver, gold, platinum, whatever) with equivalently reasonable mandated minimum benefits, rather than a take it or leave it deal from their employer, with a cost that depends mostly on what their employer wants to kick in. free market invisible hand theory suggests that consumers will flock to the most cost effective plans. I'm not a free market enthusiast, but even I can't see why they wouldn't.
That does leave the general overall tendency of costs to go up every year as they have for decades now. The reasons for this have been hashed over and over in the literature and the word Obama never comes up as a cause.
You can buy a congressman for a couple of grand but you can buy a state legislator for a couple of hundred. That's why until the Southern Strategy turned things upside down, the wealthy big money Republicans owned the federal government, while the small business Democrats owned the states and cities.
But that doesn't mean that we are supposed to turn into Somalia.
I love how the idea of reducing the size of the federal government is always compared to Somalia. Guess what? In addition to a federal government, most people are also under a state, county, and city/township government. Removing power from the federal government isn't going to result in bands of roving warlords and pirates. It would simply shift the balance of services provided from a bloated federal government back to the state & local level, where they belong and people have more opportunity to provide input.
sure. just like the red state governors have decided not to extend medicaid to their citizens too poor to afford to buy insurance on the exchanges even with a subsidy, even though that medicaid would be covered by the federal government. That's the kind of caring for their fellow citizens we can look forward to on the state level.
"Opposition to the ACA is an article of political faith among those who oppose President Obama and the Democratic leadership in Congress. Many conservatives have run their federal political races on a pledge to repeal “Obamacare.”[118] In addition, refusing Medicaid funds is part of a two-pronged strategy of some conservative leaders to undermine the ACA at the state level[119]—the other being to cede to the federal government the authority to establish insurance exchanges and regulate local insurance markets.[120] Opponents urge these sacrificial tactics because the ACA is President Obama’s signature domestic achievement, and so undermining “Obamacare” at any cost is seen as a prime strategy to weaken his political standing.[121] State-level Republicans see political advantage in aligning with these national opposition forces, or they fear the political costs of helping to implement any part of this new national law.[122] Aside from crass political motivation (that some might think is racially tinged), obstinate ideology is the only other possible justification for the stubborn refusal of federal funds in the face of compelling evidence that Medicaid expansion will cost states little or nothing. Despite the potential to improve health for millions, conservative leaders simply object in principle to accepting more federal funds with any strings attached. As Patrick Henry reminded us, points of principle certainly can be worth dying for, or allowing others to die for, but is state autonomy over Medicaid one such do-or-die principle? If not, spiteful refusal of federal funds in order to undermine the ACA is at least callous, if not reprehensible." http://www.nclawreview.org/201...
We're not other countries. Our government is the most corrupt institution on the planet.
Why would you think a government, that couldn't roll out a website, after spending over $2 billion, could effectively manage something far more complex?
yeah, that makes perfect sense. our government is more corrupt than, say Putin's? the PLO? any oil company?
and you know what they say, if you can't make your unbelievably complex website run perfectly on the first day, then you're probably too subhuman to earn your salary,
so, let's be honest and stop the incompetent and corrupt government from wielding great military power abroad, and the power of life and death via the legal system domestically, right?