After not being bothered to check on the insect count for 35 years, is it a coincidence this count occurred a little more than a year after Hurricane Maria?
People count insects all the time, and declines have been noted elsewhere (e.g., the UK). Just because you don't happen to hear about it, doesn't mean it isn't happening. (Daniel Kahneman calls this "WYSIATI": What You See Is All There Is.)
If insects could be wiped out by a 1-2 degree variance in temperature, they would have gone extinct hundreds of millions of years ago.
This is OBVIOUSLY a result of PESTICIDE use.
1. Could be both pesticide use and global warming. (Is there evidence that the insects were exposed to pesticides? Is the problem that insects are dying, or that they're not reproducing successfully?)
2. The present situation isn't just "1-2 degree variance in temperature", it's a change in temperature (and other related conditions) over an unusually short period of time. That may make a difference.
3. A lot of species HAVE gone extinct, according to the fossil record, and according to contemporary records, many more species of insects (and some mammals) continue to go extinct.
"The blame falls on the current US federal government shutdown...." And maybe on people who didn't plan ahead and renew their certificates before they expired?
Maybe they saw what a failure the fence was an decided that something different was needed.
The fencing that is there is a success. CBP (Customs and Border Patrol) confirms 90% of their apprehension are in areas that are not covered by fencing as it stands.
Sorry, but this is such a common statistical error that I feel compelled to point it out. The conclusion might be correct, but it doesn't follow from the evidence. What they know is that 90% of the people caught crossing the border illegally are in areas not covered by fencing. That doesn't say anything about how many people cross the border without being caught.
Again: the conclusion might be correct, and there might be evidence for it, but the 90% number is half a statistic.
The Democrats, and the majority of Americans, don't support the wall.
What are you talking about? A recent poll showed that 67% of Americans support the wall. A very small minority, around 15%, oppose it. The rest don't care. The Wall is incredibly popular.
Which poll was that?
Quinnipiac, December 18, 2018: "U.S. Voters Say No Wall And Don't Shut Down Government.... American voters oppose building a wall on the Mexican border 54 - 43 percent and say 54 - 44 percent the wall is not necessary to improve border security, according to a Quinnipiac University National Poll released today. This is the highest level of support for the wall since the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN- uh-pe-ack) University National Poll first asked the question in November 2016."
Fortune magazine, December 12, 2018: "69% of Americans Don’t Think Trump's Border Wall Is a Priority, Poll Says.... More than two-thirds of Americans don’t think the wall should be a priority, according to a new poll by NPR, PBS News Hour and Marist. Only 28% of those polled answered that the border wall should be an immediate priority, while 19% replied it shouldn’t be an immediate priority, and 50% said it shouldn’t be a priority at all."
"The Hill", December 28, 2018: "... a new Harvard CAPS/Harris poll released exclusively to The Hill. The survey found that 56 percent of respondents do not support the president’s proposal to construct a wall along the southern border, compared to 44 percent who do."
I'm sorry that people can't ride their bikes, hike and camp right now.
Actually people can still do all of those things. Thanks to the "partial government shutdown", there aren't any official government representatives available to prevent people from doing those things. There also isn't anyone available to empty the trash. If people would just take care of their own wastes instead of expecting their mommies and nannies to do it for them, this wouldn't be a problem.
But border security has been one of these everpresent "talking points" for DECADES now.... And this is both sides of the aisle.
Definitely agree with that. I'm not convinced a "wall" (by some definition) will make any significant difference in practice, though it might make a difference politically. A wall won't prevent people from coming into the country legally and then overstaying their visas, for example. Any kind of border protection also makes it harder for people to commute illegally, such as working part of the year in the US, leaving, and coming back. If they can't go back and forth, once they're in, they have to stay in.
Factoid: according to estimates from the Pew Research Center, the number of "unauthorized immigrants" in the US peaked in 2007 at 12.2 million and has declined since then to 10.7 million.
If you read the actual paper, you will see that this process delivers a whopping 1.84% efficiency.
The claim of 1.84% efficiency doesn't seem useful. I think the more relevant measure is 158 mW per square centimeter, or 15.8 watts per square meter, given a temperature difference of 105 (C or K).
Key questions: how much does it cost, what are its maximum and minimum operating temperatures, and how long does it last? "... TEGs are reliable, environmentally friendly, have a long lifetime...." but I don't know what "long" means.
One day in the not so distant future, it will either go bankrupt, or it will divert a large proportion of its tax revenue away from services that help poor citizens (like the police department and forest management) so that they can pay interest and principal on their bonds and pension debt.
If I recall correctly, both New York City and Detroit have declared bankruptcy in the past, but states aren't allowed to declare bankruptcy and aren't allowed deficit spending. And at some point, total debt exceeds any plausible amount of tax revenue. What happens then, I'm not sure.
Back in the 50s, when the interstate highway system was planned and construction began, did anyone budget for future maintenance?
In a word, no. The interstate highway system was built for interstate travel, because someone told President-former-General Eisenhower that it would take five days to get a tank across the US in case of invasion. The planners never expected interstates to be used for local commuting. What is now the Kennedy expressway in Chicago was originally designed with the expectation that it would carry 15,000 cars per day by 1980; in fact, it had 45,000 by 1970.
Obviously, the solution was to add more roads and more lanes. Later, it was discovered that if you make commuting faster, people move farther away, leading to a kind of positive feedback loop.
Another problem is that politicians are elected in an evolutionary process which leads them to make contradictory promises: promising more services (more roads, better roads, better schools, more police, better health and retirement plans for government employees, etc.) while also promising to lower taxes. Since politicians are elected by voters, and voters are people, and people are astoundingly stupid, this works great, until it doesn't. This was clearly elucidated in an episode of The Simpsons in which Homer was elected garbage commissioner.
Now that the word "literally" has become meaningless, "objectively" seems to have become the new target to be destroyed. I don't think that word means what you think it means.
Objective: "having reality independent of the mind.... expressing or dealing with facts or conditions as perceived without distortion by personal feelings, prejudices, or interpretations"
Make it JUST a watch and fitness tracker, no radio.... have the entire thing be powered by a replaceable watch battery.
I bought two Polar heart-rate monitors in 1998 that were very much like that. I'd buy more of them if I could. My biggest complaint about most current HRM devices is that the only way to get the data out is to upload it to a Web site owned and operated by the manufacturer. I prefer to keep my data to myself.
You're making some big unstated assumptions there. If I want to teleport from one location to another, I mainly care about two things: that the contents of my brain are preserved, and that when I arrive, everything still works. I don't need an atom-by-atom exact replica of my original body. In fact, if I come out the other side in a body that looks like (for example) a 20-year-old George Clooney or Ryan Gosling, that's not a bug, it's a feature. Of course, there's a very long way between transmitting one photon and transmitting (and reconstructing) the contents of a human brain, and there's the problem of proving that the person who arrived is the same as the person who left, but that's just engineering.
Sounds like, on practical terms, the people do indeed elect the president via a democratic republic. Calling it a democracy may be technically incorrect (and of course, everyone agree that's totally the best type of correct), but it aint so far off the mark that most would consider it wrong.
Depends. Even totalitarian dictatorships can have voting. What's the definition of a "representative democracy"? Does it mean the people elect representatives, or does it mean the politicians actually represent the people? If it's the latter, the US doesn't seem to be a representative democracy, as discussed in this 2014 paper by Martin Gilens (Princeton University) and Benjamin I. Page (Northwestern University).
Summary: "... economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence."
Actually, the constitution's 14th amendment says: "When the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress....
I think you missed a word. Note that it says "the right to vote... for the choice of electors", not the right to vote for the President or Vice President.
When their black children don't have black fathers nearly 90% of the time, tell them it's because of something white men do to them.
Actually, that is one factor. See this, for example.
Another factor is the differential incarceration rates for black men. For more background on that issue, see The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander.
On the other hand, I'm not at all sure what "black children don't have black fathers" is supposed to mean. I can think of at least three definitions. None of them hits 90%.
Do you think that after I offer stats and reasoning, that your hollow insults prove that you occupy some kind of high ground? No.
You have not offered any stats or reasoning. As far as I can see, you presented a couple of numbers with no sources for those numbers and no definitions of what they mean.
In case anyone who happens to read this is actually interested in how such analysis can be done, I offer this. First, I find it helpful to make a list of knowns and unknowns: (1) Some number of deaths occur. (2) Of the deaths that occur, some will be detected within some period of time, while others will not be detected. (3) Of the deaths detected, some will be classified as homicide. Some of these classifications will be erroneous, in both directions: manner of death may be classified as homicide when it actually wasn't, and some actual homicides will be classified otherwise. (4) Of the cases in which the manner of death is homicide, in some cases some perpetrator will be identified; in other cases, no perpetrator will be identified. This is a key point. (5) Some of these identifications will be erroneous: the wrong person will be identified.
Now we can look at some actual numbers, from the FBI Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) for 2016, the latest year available:
Table 1: Note the column "Murder and nonnegligent manslaughter" for the year 2016: 17,250.
Table 5: "Offense Analysis", Murder, 2016: again, 17,250 (although this title doesn't mention "nonnegligent manslaughter").
Next: Expanded Homicide Data Table 3,
showing the races of victims and offenders. When I added up the numbers, I got a total of 6,676 victims and 6,676 offenders.
17,250 (total homicides) - 6,676 (total offenders) = 10,574, which is 61% of the total. So this table is missing 61% of the crimes listed in the previous table. Where did they
go? See the footnote: "This table is based on incidents where some information about the offender is known by law enforcement; therefore, this table excludes data when the offender age, sex, race, and ethnicity are all reported as unknown."
Again, a key concept: In 61% of the murders reported, the race of the offender was NOT KNOWN. So your assertion that "nígger males account for just over 50% of all US murders" is just not supported by evidence.
Further, consider the cases in which "race" of the "offender" is "known" (for some definition of "race", "offender", and "known"):
White offender: 2854 + 243 + 56 + 43 = 3196 (48%)
Black offender: 533 + 2570 + 37 + 16 = 3156 (47%)
Other: 40 + 17 + 123 + 4 = 184 (2.8%)
Race Unknown: 72 + 40 + 5 + 23 = 140 (2.1%)
(Total) 6676
So, in 2016, slightly fewer than half the murders (not "over 50%") were committed by black people and half by white people -- again, only considering those cases in which
the race of the offender was known, which comprised 39% of all cases identified as homicide. Assuming these numbers are correct, an offender was classified as black in 48% of 39%, or 19%, of all homicides. Again, in 61% of homicides, the race of the offender was not known.
I don't know the FBI definitions for "race" or "offender", but I do know the "clearance rate" in most of the US is less than 50%, and for most jurisdictions, "clearance" means that some suspect has been arrested for a crime (usually within the same reporting year in which the crime was detected). Not convicted, not even guilty by plea bargain -- just arrested. How many of those are actually guilty, of course no one really knows. The low clearance rate partially explains the number of cases in which race of the offender was not known, because no offender was identified.
Singular isn't even really needed, just a bit of thought: "Reasonable people might think that enabling it will stop porn sites from keeping track of what they watch...."
Whether "reasonable" is the correct word is still debatable.
There's only one solution to this... companies bear full legal liability for the security of their products.
The problem with that is that instead of having insecure pacemakers, we'd have no pacemakers at all, which would be worse. Or they'd cost a lot more, to support the cost of fighting lawsuits and paying fines. There has to be a middle ground somewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
I think people confuse "decimate" with "devastate".
After not being bothered to check on the insect count for 35 years, is it a coincidence this count occurred a little more than a year after Hurricane Maria?
People count insects all the time, and declines have been noted elsewhere (e.g., the UK). Just because you don't happen to hear about it, doesn't mean it isn't happening. (Daniel Kahneman calls this "WYSIATI": What You See Is All There Is.)
If insects could be wiped out by a 1-2 degree variance in temperature, they would have gone extinct hundreds of millions of years ago.
This is OBVIOUSLY a result of PESTICIDE use.
1. Could be both pesticide use and global warming. (Is there evidence that the insects were exposed to pesticides? Is the problem that insects are dying, or that they're not reproducing successfully?)
2. The present situation isn't just "1-2 degree variance in temperature", it's a change in temperature (and other related conditions) over an unusually short period of time. That may make a difference.
3. A lot of species HAVE gone extinct, according to the fossil record, and according to contemporary records, many more species of insects (and some mammals) continue to go extinct.
"The blame falls on the current US federal government shutdown ...." And maybe on people who didn't plan ahead and renew their certificates before they expired?
Maybe they saw what a failure the fence was an decided that something different was needed.
The fencing that is there is a success. CBP (Customs and Border Patrol) confirms 90% of their apprehension are in areas that are not covered by fencing as it stands.
Sorry, but this is such a common statistical error that I feel compelled to point it out. The conclusion might be correct, but it doesn't follow from the evidence. What they know is that 90% of the people caught crossing the border illegally are in areas not covered by fencing. That doesn't say anything about how many people cross the border without being caught.
Again: the conclusion might be correct, and there might be evidence for it, but the 90% number is half a statistic.
The Democrats, and the majority of Americans, don't support the wall.
What are you talking about? A recent poll showed that 67% of Americans support the wall. A very small minority, around 15%, oppose it. The rest don't care. The Wall is incredibly popular.
Which poll was that?
Quinnipiac, December 18, 2018: "U.S. Voters Say No Wall And Don't Shut Down Government. ... American voters oppose building a wall on the Mexican border 54 - 43 percent and say 54 - 44 percent the wall is not necessary to improve border security, according to a Quinnipiac University National Poll released today. This is the highest level of support for the wall since the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN- uh-pe-ack) University National Poll first asked the question in November 2016."
"ABC 30 News, St Louis" (undated): "CBS Poll: 51% Of Americans Support Border Wall"
Fortune magazine, December 12, 2018: "69% of Americans Don’t Think Trump's Border Wall Is a Priority, Poll Says. ... More than two-thirds of Americans don’t think the wall should be a priority, according to a new poll by NPR, PBS News Hour and Marist. Only 28% of those polled answered that the border wall should be an immediate priority, while 19% replied it shouldn’t be an immediate priority, and 50% said it shouldn’t be a priority at all."
Huffington Post, January 3, 2019 (politically liberal): "Trump Says Country Wants Border Wall, But That’s Not What Polls Say"
"The Hill", December 28, 2018: "... a new Harvard CAPS/Harris poll released exclusively to The Hill. The survey found that 56 percent of respondents do not support the president’s proposal to construct a wall along the southern border, compared to 44 percent who do."
It's not 15.8 Watts per square meter. There are 100x100 square centimeters in a square meter. It's 1580 W/m2.
You're right, of course. I lost a few decimal places among the millis and the centis. Thanks for the correction.
I'm sorry that people can't ride their bikes, hike and camp right now.
Actually people can still do all of those things. Thanks to the "partial government shutdown", there aren't any official government representatives available to prevent people from doing those things. There also isn't anyone available to empty the trash. If people would just take care of their own wastes instead of expecting their mommies and nannies to do it for them, this wouldn't be a problem.
But border security has been one of these everpresent "talking points" for DECADES now. ... And this is both sides of the aisle.
Definitely agree with that. I'm not convinced a "wall" (by some definition) will make any significant difference in practice, though it might make a difference politically. A wall won't prevent people from coming into the country legally and then overstaying their visas, for example. Any kind of border protection also makes it harder for people to commute illegally, such as working part of the year in the US, leaving, and coming back. If they can't go back and forth, once they're in, they have to stay in.
Factoid: according to estimates from the Pew Research Center, the number of "unauthorized immigrants" in the US peaked in 2007 at 12.2 million and has declined since then to 10.7 million.
It can be about more than one thing, and one of those things might or might not be intended.
My Super Monster Gold-Plated USB Type-C cable is working just great! It was only $500 ....
Ha! My $8,500 Ethernet cable sneers at your $500 USB cable! (They also have a 1.5-meter USB cable for $700.)
Some people just have Too Much Money, and the rest of us have a moral obligation to held relieve them of some of it.
If you read the actual paper, you will see that this process delivers a whopping 1.84% efficiency.
The claim of 1.84% efficiency doesn't seem useful. I think the more relevant measure is 158 mW per square centimeter, or 15.8 watts per square meter, given a temperature difference of 105 (C or K).
Key questions: how much does it cost, what are its maximum and minimum operating temperatures, and how long does it last? "... TEGs are reliable, environmentally friendly, have a long lifetime ...." but I don't know what "long" means.
"Its daily subway and bus ridership of nearly 8 million dwarfs ...."
One day in the not so distant future, it will either go bankrupt, or it will divert a large proportion of its tax revenue away from services that help poor citizens (like the police department and forest management) so that they can pay interest and principal on their bonds and pension debt.
If I recall correctly, both New York City and Detroit have declared bankruptcy in the past, but states aren't allowed to declare bankruptcy and aren't allowed deficit spending. And at some point, total debt exceeds any plausible amount of tax revenue. What happens then, I'm not sure.
Back in the 50s, when the interstate highway system was planned and construction began, did anyone budget for future maintenance?
In a word, no. The interstate highway system was built for interstate travel, because someone told President-former-General Eisenhower that it would take five days to get a tank across the US in case of invasion. The planners never expected interstates to be used for local commuting. What is now the Kennedy expressway in Chicago was originally designed with the expectation that it would carry 15,000 cars per day by 1980; in fact, it had 45,000 by 1970.
Obviously, the solution was to add more roads and more lanes. Later, it was discovered that if you make commuting faster, people move farther away, leading to a kind of positive feedback loop.
Another problem is that politicians are elected in an evolutionary process which leads them to make contradictory promises: promising more services (more roads, better roads, better schools, more police, better health and retirement plans for government employees, etc.) while also promising to lower taxes. Since politicians are elected by voters, and voters are people, and people are astoundingly stupid, this works great, until it doesn't. This was clearly elucidated in an episode of The Simpsons in which Homer was elected garbage commissioner.
... having a yard is objectively a good thing ....
Now that the word "literally" has become meaningless, "objectively" seems to have become the new target to be destroyed. I don't think that word means what you think it means.
Objective: "having reality independent of the mind .... expressing or dealing with facts or conditions as perceived without distortion by personal feelings, prejudices, or interpretations"
Make it JUST a watch and fitness tracker, no radio. ... have the entire thing be powered by a replaceable watch battery.
I bought two Polar heart-rate monitors in 1998 that were very much like that. I'd buy more of them if I could. My biggest complaint about most current HRM devices is that the only way to get the data out is to upload it to a Web site owned and operated by the manufacturer. I prefer to keep my data to myself.
You're making some big unstated assumptions there. If I want to teleport from one location to another, I mainly care about two things: that the contents of my brain are preserved, and that when I arrive, everything still works. I don't need an atom-by-atom exact replica of my original body. In fact, if I come out the other side in a body that looks like (for example) a 20-year-old George Clooney or Ryan Gosling, that's not a bug, it's a feature. Of course, there's a very long way between transmitting one photon and transmitting (and reconstructing) the contents of a human brain, and there's the problem of proving that the person who arrived is the same as the person who left, but that's just engineering.
It's actually Edward Bernays
Sounds like, on practical terms, the people do indeed elect the president via a democratic republic. Calling it a democracy may be technically incorrect (and of course, everyone agree that's totally the best type of correct), but it aint so far off the mark that most would consider it wrong.
Depends. Even totalitarian dictatorships can have voting. What's the definition of a "representative democracy"? Does it mean the people elect representatives, or does it mean the politicians actually represent the people? If it's the latter, the US doesn't seem to be a representative democracy, as discussed in this 2014 paper by Martin Gilens (Princeton University) and Benjamin I. Page (Northwestern University).
Summary: "... economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence."
Actually, the constitution's 14th amendment says: "When the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress ....
I think you missed a word. Note that it says "the right to vote ... for the choice of electors", not the right to vote for the President or Vice President.
When their black children don't have black fathers nearly 90% of the time, tell them it's because of something white men do to them.
Actually, that is one factor. See this, for example.
Another factor is the differential incarceration rates for black men. For more background on that issue, see The New Jim Crow , by Michelle Alexander.
On the other hand, I'm not at all sure what "black children don't have black fathers" is supposed to mean. I can think of at least three definitions. None of them hits 90%.
Do you think that after I offer stats and reasoning, that your hollow insults prove that you occupy some kind of high ground? No.
You have not offered any stats or reasoning. As far as I can see, you presented a couple of numbers with no sources for those numbers and no definitions of what they mean.
In case anyone who happens to read this is actually interested in how such analysis can be done, I offer this. First, I find it helpful to make a list of knowns and unknowns: (1) Some number of deaths occur. (2) Of the deaths that occur, some will be detected within some period of time, while others will not be detected. (3) Of the deaths detected, some will be classified as homicide. Some of these classifications will be erroneous, in both directions: manner of death may be classified as homicide when it actually wasn't, and some actual homicides will be classified otherwise. (4) Of the cases in which the manner of death is homicide, in some cases some perpetrator will be identified; in other cases, no perpetrator will be identified. This is a key point. (5) Some of these identifications will be erroneous: the wrong person will be identified.
Now we can look at some actual numbers, from the FBI Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) for 2016, the latest year available:
Table 1: Note the column "Murder and nonnegligent manslaughter" for the year 2016: 17,250.
Table 5: "Offense Analysis", Murder, 2016: again, 17,250 (although this title doesn't mention "nonnegligent manslaughter").
Next: Expanded Homicide Data Table 3, showing the races of victims and offenders. When I added up the numbers, I got a total of 6,676 victims and 6,676 offenders.
17,250 (total homicides) - 6,676 (total offenders) = 10,574, which is 61% of the total. So this table is missing 61% of the crimes listed in the previous table. Where did they go? See the footnote: "This table is based on incidents where some information about the offender is known by law enforcement; therefore, this table excludes data when the offender age, sex, race, and ethnicity are all reported as unknown."
Again, a key concept: In 61% of the murders reported, the race of the offender was NOT KNOWN. So your assertion that "nígger males account for just over 50% of all US murders" is just not supported by evidence.
Further, consider the cases in which "race" of the "offender" is "known" (for some definition of "race", "offender", and "known"):
White offender: 2854 + 243 + 56 + 43 = 3196 (48%)
Black offender: 533 + 2570 + 37 + 16 = 3156 (47%)
Other: 40 + 17 + 123 + 4 = 184 (2.8%)
Race Unknown: 72 + 40 + 5 + 23 = 140 (2.1%)
(Total) 6676
So, in 2016, slightly fewer than half the murders (not "over 50%") were committed by black people and half by white people -- again, only considering those cases in which the race of the offender was known, which comprised 39% of all cases identified as homicide. Assuming these numbers are correct, an offender was classified as black in 48% of 39%, or 19%, of all homicides. Again, in 61% of homicides, the race of the offender was not known.
I don't know the FBI definitions for "race" or "offender", but I do know the "clearance rate" in most of the US is less than 50%, and for most jurisdictions, "clearance" means that some suspect has been arrested for a crime (usually within the same reporting year in which the crime was detected). Not convicted, not even guilty by plea bargain -- just arrested. How many of those are actually guilty, of course no one really knows. The low clearance rate partially explains the number of cases in which race of the offender was not known, because no offender was identified.
Isn't all this what the singular 'they' is for?
Singular isn't even really needed, just a bit of thought: "Reasonable people might think that enabling it will stop porn sites from keeping track of what they watch ...."
Whether "reasonable" is the correct word is still debatable.
So how does it handle legal ediscovery? Employers are responsible for coughing up employee communications during trial.
Maybe. I am not a lawyer, but the case of the governor and the disappearing text messages seems relevant. Maybe, if the company never had access to the messages, it doesn't have a responsibility to reveal them.
There's only one solution to this ... companies bear full legal liability for the security of their products.
The problem with that is that instead of having insecure pacemakers, we'd have no pacemakers at all, which would be worse. Or they'd cost a lot more, to support the cost of fighting lawsuits and paying fines. There has to be a middle ground somewhere.