The congressional district Cantor represents (which is drawn differently than the one used for presidential and gubernatorial elections) is heavily gerrymandered. Dave Brat is going to win it hands-down.
This is all totally off-topic, but there is one part of your argument that merits discussion. Pointing out that a few people have experienced very lucrative social mobility is not evidence of the system as a whole being conducive to it. In fact, such arguments serve the exact opposite goal by thwarting meaningful discussion of social and economic policy. A handy thought experiment from Cracked makes it more clear:
Let's say there are a hundred of you and your friends all locked in a room, and you're all starving. I walk in, and out of my fat wallet I pull a wad of bills that it more money than you'd make in a year. I set it on a table, and say, "the last one of you left alive gets this pile of money." Then, when all your friends are dead, you get rich, and I say, "see? The system is fair: any one of you can become a rich person, if only you try hard enough. It deliberately conflates "any of you can get rich" with "all of you will get rich." And you and your friends are so busy fighting each other that nobody is asking why there was only money for one of you in the first place.
Dr. Dre may have become a billionaire, but he grew up in a neighborhood systematically ghettoized, and the majority of the kids he grew up with ended up dead or in jail, and almost all of them stayed poor.
No, the short form of mathematics is "math" in American English, as American English regards "mathematics" as a group term, thus singular. Second, American English does not transfer pluralizations in this way.
In all honesty, probably the better approach would be how it is done in German -- which I might point out shares a much older parent language with both versions of English -- in which "Mathematik" has no plural form, and is shortened to "Mathe." That makes grammatical sense. Also, I should mention that the idea of what is "standard" based on historical precedent cuts both ways: the way American English pronounces the R (which I have to admit, even as a native speaker, sounds hideous, is one of the things Americans consistently fail do lose when speaking German, and is also one of the hardest things for non-native speakers to pronounce correctly) is actually closer to how it was historically pronounced. Should your American colleagues give you lectures on how your pronunciation of R glides is non-standard and dialectical? (And here I'm even talking about the R in standard British English, not that god-awful north-country dialect that turns even non-terminal Rs into a sort of W).
I hate to be That Guy, but the English to which you refer is only "standard" among Commonwealth countries, and is not a global one. Presupposing Commonwealth English to be a standard from which all other versions are derivative might reflect historical lineage, but not present usage. Since the idea of what constitutes a standard derives from the latter and not the former, referring to British English as a/the standard is, at best, inaccurate.
Neither of us would presume to instruct our colleagues on the Indian subcontinent, for example, that English is the standard of Indoeuropean languages, and thus superior to, say, Hindi or Sanskrit. The same is true here: both British and American English in their present form are versions of an older language, and neither one of them should be construed as normative.
"...you can't create a fast lane without worsening service for some Internet users. 'That's at the heart of what you're talking about here,' Wheeler said. 'That would be commercially unreasonable under our proposal.'"
This makes no sense at all. Is it just a bad summary? Waxman is citing testimony that internet fast lanes inevitably and necessarily degrade internet service for "non-premium" users, and Wheeler responds that the proposed regulation enables the FCC to prohibit that inevitable consequence of the system it creates?
"Yes, this regulation will degrade service, unavoidably. BUT! The regulation also says that we will make sure that this unavoidable consequence is prohibited, so it's all good!"
I don't think you understand how monopolies work. The majority of Comcast's customers have no alternatives. Where are they going to go? Back to dial-up? There are at best one or two other providers in any given market for internet service, and *none* for cable television. So, Google, Facebook, et al say they won't accept connections from Comcast servers, then... what? Comcast's customers stop using those companies' services, but don't switch providers. In retaliation, the peering providers that used to trade back all that traffic that those sites were generating stop doing that, so those companies lose even more traffic.
This is the point of a monopoly: they control access, and so they can control how the market functions.
I don't mean the ISPs, I mean the rest of us. Wheeler is a cable lobbyist; I suspect the court striking down the Open Internet Order was exactly the excuse to scuttle the net neutrality that all his buddies hate so much. Besides: the court has been very clear on this matter. The only way the FCC could force net neutrality would be by declaring ISPs common carriers. The Republican Party -- and Wheeler himself -- is adamantly opposed to such an action, and so it will not happen.
This smacks very much of the Obama administration responding to all the illegal wiretapping the NSA and FBI et al were doing not by arresting the perpetrators, but by writing the laws to give them authority to go right on doing it.
your math is a bit wonky. "weight/kg) / height(m) * height(m)" is just "weight(kg)." Perhaps you meant "height(m)^2" ? Extra parentheses help clarify terms.
Here's a thought. Maybe the sport as a whole -- and the PGA in particular -- could take a look at the many many country clubs that are still whites-only, and think about whether tolerating overt racism in your sport is the best way to market it.
Don't get me wrong, I have no issues with people celebrating human sexuality or whatever, but isn't it a bit... overindulgent to be treating a former Playboy Playmate as an authority on much of anything, or really caring at all what she says? I get that debunking anti-vaxxers is a good cause and all, but why are we bothering with this anti-vaxxer?
The problem lies, in part, with what I guess you could call the aesthetic of multitasking. We love to think that we're good at it, but -- as research has proven over and over [warning: first link is a pdf download] -- we are actually really shitty at it. The same is true of driving. I remember as a kid riding in my dad's car, how he would try to change the channel on the radio, or do something with the A/C, and immediately start veering the car off the road. At stoplights, the minute he stopped thinking about it, his foot came off the brake and the car would roll out into the intersection.
I don't think fixing cars or cell phones is going to get to the root of the problem. The root is that people think they can do more than one thing at a time and not trip over their own damn feet. Since changing the culture seems out of the question, no amount of technological fixes is going to save us from trying to do more than we're cognitively equipped to do.
Actually, you are slightly incorrect about motives, though the end result may be more scientifically accurate. "Climate change" and related terms were created by Frank Luntz specifically in order to make the phenomenon less scary-sounding, and thus to blunt action -- almost entirely by Democrats -- to respond to the problem. In so doing, he created decades of thumb-twiddling inaction by the US government, leading to the problem becoming much more severe and intractable than it might otherwise have been. But, yes, technically "climate change" more accurately describes what's happening, though "climate disruption" or something similar would probably be a better choice.
"Valuing knowledge, we preposterize the idea and say everybody shall produce written research in order to live, and it shall be decreed a knowledge explosion."
Someone explain to me again how GMO crops are the only possible way human beings are going to solve all our agriculture problems, and people opposed to them are Luddites? Did they not think that natural selection more or less negates any gains reached through GM within a few generations?
I'm surprised the free-marketeers haven't trolled this article yet, so I guess I'll do it for them. Here goes...
SEE?? This just proves that government bureaucrats can't do anything!!!1 If they'd just gotten those stupid regulators to get their boots of the throats of the job-creators, the guiding hand of free-market capitalism would have fixed this by now! This is why we need to cut capital-gains taxes and destroy the EPA!!!1
THANKS OBAMA WHERZ TEH BIRF CERTIFICATE BENGHRZGGG etc
Right. Because citizen activists publicizing how big powerful entities do horrible things when the government is too chickenshit to stop them really worked wonders in the case of the NSA's mass-surveillance program. Not to mention extraordinary renditions, offshore torture, firing DAs for not investigating bullshit "voter fraud," lying to Congress, lying to the UN, to the American public, etc etc.
I think companies who insist on putting copyright/trademark/registration symbols into their marketing should be required, in every verbal exchange with media, at every speaking engagement, and in ever recorded advertisement, to compel their representatives to speak the terms out loud.
So, for example, should one of their sockpuppets be reading their press material at a conference, it would sound like this: "In addition to the revolutionary remote replacement, HAL *COPYRIGHTED!!* is also introducing wearable technologies such as their HAL *COPYRIGHTED!!* Watch HAL *COPYRIGHTED!!* Ring, and HAL *COPYRIGHTED!! Glasses, etc etc" like a bad case of Tourette's Syndrome.
This should be modded up. A lot of the OP's stuff seems pretty garden-variety college overload, but THIS. If he's in his mid-30s, and can't do simple multiplication, there is something dysfunctional in his cognitive processes. And yes: if he's suffering learning disabilities like this, maybe college isn't the right move. A trade school, sure. But I would steer him away from any four-year degree. I wonder what his major is...
"surveillance must be guided by standards and by high-level policymakers"
So, if I'm reading this summary correctly, the only real problem is that our chickenshit congress never tripped over its own feet in a rush to hand the executive branch these exact powers in some most-assuredly extra-patriotic piece of legislation? All the issues with this law will go away if it gets a stamp of approval? On a second note, why is it that nobody seems to mind (or make laws against) treating the inhabitants of other countries to police-state surveillance, including the heads of sovereign states?
holy crap, why are you the only one who seems to have understood what this lawsuit is actually about, and not (like every other upmodded comment) immediately freaked the fuck out at the word "person"? Every time this case has been discussed the last week, every thread is full of people waving these bullshit arguments about how now we have to let chimps vote or whatever, instead of actually reading about what is meant by the idea of non-human personhood. It's really disheartening to read that much stupid.
A not altogether unbiased source has a handy comparison of bird deaths between wind, nukes, and fossil fuels. This is the thing all this hoopla about bird deaths on wind farms conveniently overlooks: the number of wildlife deaths from other industries -- how many birds died in the Deepwater Horizon spill, by the way? -- vastly outpaces those from windmills.
Yes, it's sad, and I would like to see them mitigated. But it's the same idiocy that makes people compare three high-speed collisions in Tesla Model S fires to the tens of thousands of fires that happen every year in ICEs with nary a peep.
sigh... I wish folks hadn't read more into my initial comment than I intended, but I suppose its my own fault. I wasn't actually stating an opionion on whether people trading pictures online was in itself a bad thing-- in fact, I suspect the other commentor up above is probably right, that "won't anybody think of the children??!!" is a bullshit argument that probably does more harm than good. But any service that explicitly advertises itself as beyond the reach of surveillance will be, I suspect, very quickly populated with people circulating things that are, for better or worse, illegal. An unintended consequence of trying to avoid the NSA and Facebook's marketing bullshit quickly gets known as a haven for perverts, rather than the actual good it might do (and yes,, it may very well -- though I don't know nearly enough to have an opinion on the matter -- thus provide a safe outlet for people who might otherwise act out on their urges in more harmful ways). Just look at Tor: what started out as a means for dissidents to escape surveillance is now known to most laypeople as "that place where drug dealers meet with money launderers and identity thieves and hackers to trade with impunity."
Man, I wish I could mod you up. This entire argument is proto-fascist in its logic: criminals are bad people, therefore should have fewer protections than us good citizens. No, dumbass: it's precisely criminals -- even guilty ones -- who should have the most protection from prosecutorial abuse. Why? Because that's how you guard against a police state in which *everyone* is guilty, and only the whim of the state decides who among them is to be compelled into prison. It's how you ensure that the system is one that delivers *justice*, instead of inflicting revenge. Without the assurance that the one prosecuted is the guilty party -- and this can only be the case if self-incrimination is prohibited, since it can so easily be coerced -- the whole system collapses into illegitimacy and tyranny.
If you really don't understand just how easy it is to compel innocent people to incriminate themselves with the right kinds of pressure -- physical, emotional, psychological -- then you really don't know anything about how the justice system can be abused, and definitely have no business writing opinion pieces whining about how unfair it is that good people aren't coddled like all those undeserving criminals.
Slashdot Mirror
The congressional district Cantor represents (which is drawn differently than the one used for presidential and gubernatorial elections) is heavily gerrymandered. Dave Brat is going to win it hands-down.
This is all totally off-topic, but there is one part of your argument that merits discussion. Pointing out that a few people have experienced very lucrative social mobility is not evidence of the system as a whole being conducive to it. In fact, such arguments serve the exact opposite goal by thwarting meaningful discussion of social and economic policy. A handy thought experiment from Cracked makes it more clear:
Let's say there are a hundred of you and your friends all locked in a room, and you're all starving. I walk in, and out of my fat wallet I pull a wad of bills that it more money than you'd make in a year. I set it on a table, and say, "the last one of you left alive gets this pile of money." Then, when all your friends are dead, you get rich, and I say, "see? The system is fair: any one of you can become a rich person, if only you try hard enough. It deliberately conflates "any of you can get rich" with "all of you will get rich." And you and your friends are so busy fighting each other that nobody is asking why there was only money for one of you in the first place.
Dr. Dre may have become a billionaire, but he grew up in a neighborhood systematically ghettoized, and the majority of the kids he grew up with ended up dead or in jail, and almost all of them stayed poor.
No, the short form of mathematics is "math" in American English, as American English regards "mathematics" as a group term, thus singular. Second, American English does not transfer pluralizations in this way.
In all honesty, probably the better approach would be how it is done in German -- which I might point out shares a much older parent language with both versions of English -- in which "Mathematik" has no plural form, and is shortened to "Mathe." That makes grammatical sense. Also, I should mention that the idea of what is "standard" based on historical precedent cuts both ways: the way American English pronounces the R (which I have to admit, even as a native speaker, sounds hideous, is one of the things Americans consistently fail do lose when speaking German, and is also one of the hardest things for non-native speakers to pronounce correctly) is actually closer to how it was historically pronounced. Should your American colleagues give you lectures on how your pronunciation of R glides is non-standard and dialectical? (And here I'm even talking about the R in standard British English, not that god-awful north-country dialect that turns even non-terminal Rs into a sort of W).
I hate to be That Guy, but the English to which you refer is only "standard" among Commonwealth countries, and is not a global one. Presupposing Commonwealth English to be a standard from which all other versions are derivative might reflect historical lineage, but not present usage. Since the idea of what constitutes a standard derives from the latter and not the former, referring to British English as a/the standard is, at best, inaccurate.
Neither of us would presume to instruct our colleagues on the Indian subcontinent, for example, that English is the standard of Indoeuropean languages, and thus superior to, say, Hindi or Sanskrit. The same is true here: both British and American English in their present form are versions of an older language, and neither one of them should be construed as normative.
For the lazy/dumb, can you link a quick primer on why common-carrier designation is unfeasible?
"...you can't create a fast lane without worsening service for some Internet users. 'That's at the heart of what you're talking about here,' Wheeler said. 'That would be commercially unreasonable under our proposal.'"
This makes no sense at all. Is it just a bad summary? Waxman is citing testimony that internet fast lanes inevitably and necessarily degrade internet service for "non-premium" users, and Wheeler responds that the proposed regulation enables the FCC to prohibit that inevitable consequence of the system it creates?
"Yes, this regulation will degrade service, unavoidably. BUT! The regulation also says that we will make sure that this unavoidable consequence is prohibited, so it's all good!"
I don't think you understand how monopolies work. The majority of Comcast's customers have no alternatives. Where are they going to go? Back to dial-up? There are at best one or two other providers in any given market for internet service, and *none* for cable television. So, Google, Facebook, et al say they won't accept connections from Comcast servers, then ... what? Comcast's customers stop using those companies' services, but don't switch providers. In retaliation, the peering providers that used to trade back all that traffic that those sites were generating stop doing that, so those companies lose even more traffic.
This is the point of a monopoly: they control access, and so they can control how the market functions.
I don't mean the ISPs, I mean the rest of us. Wheeler is a cable lobbyist; I suspect the court striking down the Open Internet Order was exactly the excuse to scuttle the net neutrality that all his buddies hate so much. Besides: the court has been very clear on this matter. The only way the FCC could force net neutrality would be by declaring ISPs common carriers. The Republican Party -- and Wheeler himself -- is adamantly opposed to such an action, and so it will not happen.
This smacks very much of the Obama administration responding to all the illegal wiretapping the NSA and FBI et al were doing not by arresting the perpetrators, but by writing the laws to give them authority to go right on doing it.
your math is a bit wonky. "weight/kg) / height(m) * height(m)" is just "weight(kg)." Perhaps you meant "height(m)^2" ? Extra parentheses help clarify terms.
Here's a thought. Maybe the sport as a whole -- and the PGA in particular -- could take a look at the many many country clubs that are still whites-only, and think about whether tolerating overt racism in your sport is the best way to market it.
Don't get me wrong, I have no issues with people celebrating human sexuality or whatever, but isn't it a bit ... overindulgent to be treating a former Playboy Playmate as an authority on much of anything, or really caring at all what she says? I get that debunking anti-vaxxers is a good cause and all, but why are we bothering with this anti-vaxxer?
The problem lies, in part, with what I guess you could call the aesthetic of multitasking. We love to think that we're good at it, but -- as research has proven over and over [warning: first link is a pdf download] -- we are actually really shitty at it. The same is true of driving. I remember as a kid riding in my dad's car, how he would try to change the channel on the radio, or do something with the A/C, and immediately start veering the car off the road. At stoplights, the minute he stopped thinking about it, his foot came off the brake and the car would roll out into the intersection.
I don't think fixing cars or cell phones is going to get to the root of the problem. The root is that people think they can do more than one thing at a time and not trip over their own damn feet. Since changing the culture seems out of the question, no amount of technological fixes is going to save us from trying to do more than we're cognitively equipped to do.
Actually, you are slightly incorrect about motives, though the end result may be more scientifically accurate. "Climate change" and related terms were created by Frank Luntz specifically in order to make the phenomenon less scary-sounding, and thus to blunt action -- almost entirely by Democrats -- to respond to the problem.
In so doing, he created decades of thumb-twiddling inaction by the US government, leading to the problem becoming much more severe and intractable than it might otherwise have been.
But, yes, technically "climate change" more accurately describes what's happening, though "climate disruption" or something similar would probably be a better choice.
"Valuing knowledge, we preposterize the idea and say everybody shall produce written research in order to live, and it shall be decreed a knowledge explosion."
Someone explain to me again how GMO crops are the only possible way human beings are going to solve all our agriculture problems, and people opposed to them are Luddites? Did they not think that natural selection more or less negates any gains reached through GM within a few generations?
I'm surprised the free-marketeers haven't trolled this article yet, so I guess I'll do it for them. Here goes...
SEE?? This just proves that government bureaucrats can't do anything!!!1 If they'd just gotten those stupid regulators to get their boots of the throats of the job-creators, the guiding hand of free-market capitalism would have fixed this by now! This is why we need to cut capital-gains taxes and destroy the EPA!!!1
THANKS OBAMA WHERZ TEH BIRF CERTIFICATE BENGHRZGGG etc
Right. Because citizen activists publicizing how big powerful entities do horrible things when the government is too chickenshit to stop them really worked wonders in the case of the NSA's mass-surveillance program. Not to mention extraordinary renditions, offshore torture, firing DAs for not investigating bullshit "voter fraud," lying to Congress, lying to the UN, to the American public, etc etc.
I think companies who insist on putting copyright/trademark/registration symbols into their marketing should be required, in every verbal exchange with media, at every speaking engagement, and in ever recorded advertisement, to compel their representatives to speak the terms out loud.
So, for example, should one of their sockpuppets be reading their press material at a conference, it would sound like this: "In addition to the revolutionary remote replacement, HAL *COPYRIGHTED!!* is also introducing wearable technologies such as their HAL *COPYRIGHTED!!* Watch HAL *COPYRIGHTED!!* Ring, and HAL *COPYRIGHTED!! Glasses, etc etc" like a bad case of Tourette's Syndrome.
This should be modded up. A lot of the OP's stuff seems pretty garden-variety college overload, but THIS. If he's in his mid-30s, and can't do simple multiplication, there is something dysfunctional in his cognitive processes. And yes: if he's suffering learning disabilities like this, maybe college isn't the right move. A trade school, sure. But I would steer him away from any four-year degree. I wonder what his major is...
"surveillance must be guided by standards and by high-level policymakers"
So, if I'm reading this summary correctly, the only real problem is that our chickenshit congress never tripped over its own feet in a rush to hand the executive branch these exact powers in some most-assuredly extra-patriotic piece of legislation? All the issues with this law will go away if it gets a stamp of approval?
On a second note, why is it that nobody seems to mind (or make laws against) treating the inhabitants of other countries to police-state surveillance, including the heads of sovereign states?
holy crap, why are you the only one who seems to have understood what this lawsuit is actually about, and not (like every other upmodded comment) immediately freaked the fuck out at the word "person"? Every time this case has been discussed the last week, every thread is full of people waving these bullshit arguments about how now we have to let chimps vote or whatever, instead of actually reading about what is meant by the idea of non-human personhood. It's really disheartening to read that much stupid.
A not altogether unbiased source has a handy comparison of bird deaths between wind, nukes, and fossil fuels. This is the thing all this hoopla about bird deaths on wind farms conveniently overlooks: the number of wildlife deaths from other industries -- how many birds died in the Deepwater Horizon spill, by the way? -- vastly outpaces those from windmills.
Yes, it's sad, and I would like to see them mitigated. But it's the same idiocy that makes people compare three high-speed collisions in Tesla Model S fires to the tens of thousands of fires that happen every year in ICEs with nary a peep.
sigh ... I wish folks hadn't read more into my initial comment than I intended, but I suppose its my own fault.
I wasn't actually stating an opionion on whether people trading pictures online was in itself a bad thing-- in fact, I suspect the other commentor up above is probably right, that "won't anybody think of the children??!!" is a bullshit argument that probably does more harm than good.
But any service that explicitly advertises itself as beyond the reach of surveillance will be, I suspect, very quickly populated with people circulating things that are, for better or worse, illegal.
An unintended consequence of trying to avoid the NSA and Facebook's marketing bullshit quickly gets known as a haven for perverts, rather than the actual good it might do (and yes,, it may very well -- though I don't know nearly enough to have an opinion on the matter -- thus provide a safe outlet for people who might otherwise act out on their urges in more harmful ways).
Just look at Tor: what started out as a means for dissidents to escape surveillance is now known to most laypeople as "that place where drug dealers meet with money launderers and identity thieves and hackers to trade with impunity."
So, who wants odds on how long it'll take before this becomes a haven for pæderasts to swap kiddie porn? Anyone?
I'm guessing about six months..
Man, I wish I could mod you up. This entire argument is proto-fascist in its logic: criminals are bad people, therefore should have fewer protections than us good citizens. No, dumbass: it's precisely criminals -- even guilty ones -- who should have the most protection from prosecutorial abuse. Why? Because that's how you guard against a police state in which *everyone* is guilty, and only the whim of the state decides who among them is to be compelled into prison. It's how you ensure that the system is one that delivers *justice*, instead of inflicting revenge. Without the assurance that the one prosecuted is the guilty party -- and this can only be the case if self-incrimination is prohibited, since it can so easily be coerced -- the whole system collapses into illegitimacy and tyranny.
If you really don't understand just how easy it is to compel innocent people to incriminate themselves with the right kinds of pressure -- physical, emotional, psychological -- then you really don't know anything about how the justice system can be abused, and definitely have no business writing opinion pieces whining about how unfair it is that good people aren't coddled like all those undeserving criminals.