You could try contacting your state attourney general. Paypal gave our money back ($1200) when the Ohio attourney general inquired on our behalf. The Washington attourney general seemed interested also, calling us a couple of times, and it appeared likely they would have done something if Ohio hadn't first.
My CEO boss told me to download and use whatever images we were unlikely to be successfully sued over. Power is the only language some people understand. I say sue them.
The benefits can be quite apparent to the person who is doing the treating.
Right, that's why I was so critical of his doctor, because the patient was clearly dying but the doctor kept writing him presciptions. There were indications the same doctor had other addict patients also. I might have expected this to have been investigated. But of course life isn't very much like crime TV.
It's very sad what happened to your roommate, but doesn't mean there isn't a place for drugs in psychology.
That is true. In my personal experience, which includes other anecdotes not entirely unlike the one I shared, I have not seen very much of the kind of professional conscientiousness that you refer to. So my judgment, based on what I know of the world and of people, is that on balance benzodiazepines are something to stay away from. And that view seems to be corroborated by the limited 'objective' information I could find on the subject. But if your experience has been different, and you're squarely facing facts as you know them, then I don't begrudge you arriving at a different conclusion.
Yes, I went slightly off topic and wasn't very clear about what I meant.
Often subcontracting looks good on a spreadsheet or in a power point presentation because the true costs are hidden. And corner cutting is often part of what enables the contractor to do things more cheaply.
So yes, BP may not have been trying to evade paying potential legal costs, and I agree that it will stick to them in any case. But I do think BP was trying to evade the true costs of their operation. And that kind of behavior, where orders are given from the top without accepting responsibility for how those demands are being met, is especially easy with contracting relationships.
According to legal experts on NPR a month or so ago, there will certainly be criminal prosecutions, it just takes a while for all the evidence to be gathered and charges to be prepared.
What's it got to do with BP? The rig was owned and operated by a company called Transocean.
This is a common legal and accounting ploy: subcontract everything to other companies, then you're not responsible for anything, even though you're in charge of everything.
I recently worked for a company, run incidentally by the spouse of a BP chief executive, that sells a medical product for applications that the product can not legally be sold for (in the US). Its way around this is to create three companies, one for engineering, one for distribution, and one for marketing. That way, the parent company claims that its selling nothing illegally because it distributes nothing, but only provides information. And the distributor claims that it does not target its product for the illegal applications, since it merely distributes. And the engineering company evades FDA engineering process requirements by saying that it merely distributes the product made by the engineering company, which ignores the regulations because it is ostensibly not subject to regulation since it is not the distributor, and it doesn't have a distribution operation that can be shut down. But all three companies are essentially the same company, run by the same people. The 'ethic' involved is that if you haven't yet been sued successfully, or shut down by regulators, then its all good.
At least Halliburton and Transocean have a separate existence from BP. But BP is still responsible.
OK, whatever. The when means 'at that time'. I could find examples where from context it means either 'not earlier' or 'not later' or both. In the present example, I think it means both, since we don't need the fork now even though Linus will disappear eventually.
The 'if and when' idiom does make literal sense. It means 'when it happens, if it does happen'. Your interpretation, in binary logic, would be 'if or when', not 'if and when'. (If 'A and B', and 'A' is false, then 'A and B' is false also. The 'B' doesn't render the 'A' part moot.)
I agree on all counts (except for being less confident that the net gain is 'large'). I didn't feel like arguing the 'more people abusing' point on/. though.
bizarrely, there is no serious research "debunking" AGW.
I don't think its bizzare, irrespective of the facts about global warming. Energy companies are also to some extent on the global warming bandwagon for political reasons, because their lobbyists are in a good position to determine who would control a gigantic carbon trading scheme and who would benefit.
It doesn't seem to me that the fact of influence of money can be used to make a decisive pro or con argument about global warming. All a person can do is continue to argue the merits of the science, even though a lot of people aren't going to be convinced by that.
Grants that in NO WAY influence the conclusions of such research?
Please explain the mechanism. How could a research grant affect the outcome of the research?
Suppose you've got 20 climate scientists, fairly honest but not immune to their prejudices influencing what kinds of questions they ask, or what contextual information they consider or leave out when presenting results. Suppose 10 find that global warming is a very serious problem that needs further study, and 10 find that there isn't much there that's worth looking at. In the next round, only the 10 with the more alarmist spin get funded, and the other 10 have been weeded out.
Or you can flip this around, and argue that global warming denialists are going to be able to get oil company grants. I'm not arguing for or against a particular position on global warming. I'm just trying to explain one way that funding affects scientific outcomes without overt fraud being committed.
Do you have any concrete examples.
I'm not a climate scientist, but I could give many, many concrete examples in other areas. This is a bit of a minefield, so I'll just give one. I know of a scientist who's work showed that the space station has severe limitations as a platform for microgravity research. His report was suppressed by NASA for political reasons, and he received no additional funding on that topic.
Or are you merely trying to smear the honesty of all reseach scientists for narrow, short-sighted political reasons?
I can't speak for that other guy. If he's like other global warming denialists I've argued with, his stance is likely to be all political. However, in my experience, the people who get all offended at the suggestion that money corrupts science are often the worst offenders, with the least amount of objectivity about their own biases.
A problem with working in an MS level research niche like you're targeting, is you'll be trying to earn a living competing against grad students who earn ~$15K/yr. I'm not saying this makes it impossible or not worth doing, just that its something to be aware of. If you're a US citizen you have a competitive advantage for DoD research, but then there's a different price you have to pay.
If you fly an airline that charges for checked bags, and you accidentally put a banned item in the carry-on, you either have to pay the fee to check the bag, lose the item, or mail at a high cost (if you have time). Probably this isn't a very big revenue generator, but I still find it annoying. The same goes with banning bottled water then selling it for $3 a bottle. Or setting up long security lines, then letting people through who pay a higher rate. This last one seems undemocratic. Its different than having better 'first class' seating for people who pay a premium, since the security lines are mandated by the government, not by the airline. (Though 'first class' seating is discriminatory also, if companies are getting breaks on their ticket prices that aren't available to everyone.)
Right. In theory, if federal bureaucracies get bad enough, people vote against the politicians that fund them. With powerful corporations, the best people can do is vote for politicians who promise to direct the bureaucracies to obstruct the corporations. There's one more level of indirection there, which gives the corporations more free reign.
Of course, unrestrained government power and corporate power are both bad, so we have to fight them both.
So what is it? Why do people build such huge deadweight loss systems, far beyond anything required to simply protect ourselves from invasion by others?
Here are a few reasons I see:
1. Offshoring of manufacturing. Weapons are physical things, and most other physical things are now made in China. If you live somewhere like Ohio, weapons development is pretty much what is left. In theory we could make other stuff like windmills, but there is a lot of inertia in economic development. Most people can't just get together with a half dozen friends and start an alternative energy company. But its pretty easy to get into DoD work, because it already exists locally.
2. Job competition from immigrant graduate students. If you've got US citizenship or a greencard, there's a lot less competition for grant money in research areas that are closed to non "US persons". This tends to drive native US engineering talent into DoD and 'homeland security' R&D, which fuels expansion in those areas.
3. Blood lust. A fairly significant portion of the people involved in DoD research are fascinated by lethal power, and presumably this accounts for much public support for it also. I think there are metaphysical causes for this, that it can't be understood purely in terms of a rational cost/benefit analysis. Or, if you're adverse to philosophical speculation, just chalk it up to our prehistoric past as hunter-scavangers, though I don't think that's a complete answer.
4. Fear. There is a lot of dishonesty our lives, and living a lie tends to be productive of paranoia. Some people are in a position to take advantage of that. There's a lot of fear in congress also, which results in ostensibly dovish representatives pouring a lot of money into secret defense and surveillance programs.
5. Greed. People want money so they can live in big houses, take expensive vacations, and retire early. Fear sells at higher margins than other services.
Any links on stats about benefits, please? I'd like to know how they measure that.
No, the benefits would obviously be quite subjective, which is why I spoke only of stats on addiction. And even those I doubt are very accurate. That's what makes it an opinion, or a judgment call. That some things are difficult to quantify does not put them beyond all understanding however.
Ironically, the issue of measuring benefit is at the heart of drug use and abuse. The body is designed to make you feel good when you do "good" things like eat or procreate, and feel bad when you do "bad" things like break a leg or fail to earn the approval of your pears. The drug circumvents this, for instance making you feel better when you're injured or unpopular. But since the body's positive/negative feedback mechanism is being thwarted, the user's feelings about whether the use is having a "good" or a "bad" effect tend to be unreliable.
In the case of my hapless roommate, the drugs were very clearly killing him, and he did feel that he was dying. But although he could intellectually see the cause, emotionally there was enough ambivalence that he could not slow down. (And even after he was dead, it was recorded as a drowning rather than an overdose, so he never showed up as an 'adverse effect' statistic either.)
You are right. But it still bothers me that nobody, myself included, could help my roommate/landlord, when he wanted to live and was not strong enough. Even though he bore a fair degree of responsibility for that.
Also, I find the extent of addiction in our society, and denial about it, to be disheartening. People live in cubicle prisons, and stab one another in the backs for money, then if someone feels down about all this they try to treat it as primarily a neurochemical imbalance. A lot of zoo animals are depressed also. I don't mean to disrespect people with mental illness, as if they can necessarily do better with the cards they've been dealt. But often part of doing better is seeing the cards as what they are. And that's how I see a lot of it.
How is this a troll? Thin skinned addicts with mod points? Corrupt doctors? This is the second time I've been modded a troll for posting this anecdote. Someone died. I'm just trying to help.
I have nothing against doctors in general, in fact I admire many of them. But I guess if the shoe fits....
If you believe that valium helps you or someone you love, maybe it does, and I'm not going to try to talk you out of it. My opinion, from what I've observed and the statistics I've read on addiction, is that the harm done outweighs any possible benefits. But if it bothers you that I am expressing this opinion, then maybe you ought to look at how your habit or your business is affecting your emotions.
My landlord killed himself with valium a few months ago, after a 12 year addiction. It was pretty obvious where things were headed, but his dealer^H^H^H^H^H^Hdoctor kept supplying him anyway. Eventually the temptation to keep upping the dose and feeling good overpowered his desire to live. A did a little research and found that this is a shockingly common problem.
Moral of the story: benzodiazephines suck. And your doctor may be more interested in paying off his student loans and buying a boat than being honest with himself about what's good for his patients.
Re:Strawman based on bastardized belief system
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Interesting. This would be a good example of why the pursuit of 'what did Jesus really think?" doesn't do much for me. To me, the teaching about sinning in the heart is a simple statement of fact. Its foolish to think that you can indulge all manner of nasty thoughts and be able to get away with it without it affecting you. If you fill your mind with crap, you become crap, and sooner or later crap is what will show externally as well. At the same time, it never occurred to me that someone would make a strict, rigid set of rules out of that, with 'punishment' for thought crimes. It doesn't work. It would be like trying to raise a perfect child by punishing them every time they make a mistake. So what did Jesus think about this? Its almost impossible for me to tell, so I don't worry about it. And it appears to me that those who make claims about Jesus are often just making up interpretations of the evidence, when other interpretations would make just as much sense.
Having worked there, I think the problem at NASA has more to do with the way job security is decoupled from performance. The organization just rots. Unfortunately, there's no easy fix for that, since if you try to establish stronger "merit based" criteria for pay and retention, the definition of merit just gets politicized and corrupted.
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You could try contacting your state attourney general. Paypal gave our money back ($1200) when the Ohio attourney general inquired on our behalf. The Washington attourney general seemed interested also, calling us a couple of times, and it appeared likely they would have done something if Ohio hadn't first.
My CEO boss told me to download and use whatever images we were unlikely to be successfully sued over. Power is the only language some people understand. I say sue them.
The benefits can be quite apparent to the person who is doing the treating.
Right, that's why I was so critical of his doctor, because the patient was clearly dying but the doctor kept writing him presciptions. There were indications the same doctor had other addict patients also. I might have expected this to have been investigated. But of course life isn't very much like crime TV.
It's very sad what happened to your roommate, but doesn't mean there isn't a place for drugs in psychology.
That is true. In my personal experience, which includes other anecdotes not entirely unlike the one I shared, I have not seen very much of the kind of professional conscientiousness that you refer to. So my judgment, based on what I know of the world and of people, is that on balance benzodiazepines are something to stay away from. And that view seems to be corroborated by the limited 'objective' information I could find on the subject. But if your experience has been different, and you're squarely facing facts as you know them, then I don't begrudge you arriving at a different conclusion.
Yes. Except that sometimes they spam you even if you've never played.
Yes, I went slightly off topic and wasn't very clear about what I meant.
Often subcontracting looks good on a spreadsheet or in a power point presentation because the true costs are hidden. And corner cutting is often part of what enables the contractor to do things more cheaply.
So yes, BP may not have been trying to evade paying potential legal costs, and I agree that it will stick to them in any case. But I do think BP was trying to evade the true costs of their operation. And that kind of behavior, where orders are given from the top without accepting responsibility for how those demands are being met, is especially easy with contracting relationships.
According to legal experts on NPR a month or so ago, there will certainly be criminal prosecutions, it just takes a while for all the evidence to be gathered and charges to be prepared.
What's it got to do with BP? The rig was owned and operated by a company called Transocean.
This is a common legal and accounting ploy: subcontract everything to other companies, then you're not responsible for anything, even though you're in charge of everything.
I recently worked for a company, run incidentally by the spouse of a BP chief executive, that sells a medical product for applications that the product can not legally be sold for (in the US). Its way around this is to create three companies, one for engineering, one for distribution, and one for marketing. That way, the parent company claims that its selling nothing illegally because it distributes nothing, but only provides information. And the distributor claims that it does not target its product for the illegal applications, since it merely distributes. And the engineering company evades FDA engineering process requirements by saying that it merely distributes the product made by the engineering company, which ignores the regulations because it is ostensibly not subject to regulation since it is not the distributor, and it doesn't have a distribution operation that can be shut down. But all three companies are essentially the same company, run by the same people. The 'ethic' involved is that if you haven't yet been sued successfully, or shut down by regulators, then its all good.
At least Halliburton and Transocean have a separate existence from BP. But BP is still responsible.
OK, whatever. The when means 'at that time'. I could find examples where from context it means either 'not earlier' or 'not later' or both. In the present example, I think it means both, since we don't need the fork now even though Linus will disappear eventually.
Then 'when' part tells you that you mean to wait for the event to happen, rather than act beforehand in anticipation of the event.
Not like any of this matters much.
The 'if and when' idiom does make literal sense. It means 'when it happens, if it does happen'. Your interpretation, in binary logic, would be 'if or when', not 'if and when'. (If 'A and B', and 'A' is false, then 'A and B' is false also. The 'B' doesn't render the 'A' part moot.)
I agree on all counts (except for being less confident that the net gain is 'large'). I didn't feel like arguing the 'more people abusing' point on /. though.
FYI, there ARE always other options, not IS.
(Just in case you do care about that, and English isn't your first language.)
bizarrely, there is no serious research "debunking" AGW.
I don't think its bizzare, irrespective of the facts about global warming. Energy companies are also to some extent on the global warming bandwagon for political reasons, because their lobbyists are in a good position to determine who would control a gigantic carbon trading scheme and who would benefit.
It doesn't seem to me that the fact of influence of money can be used to make a decisive pro or con argument about global warming. All a person can do is continue to argue the merits of the science, even though a lot of people aren't going to be convinced by that.
Please explain the mechanism. How could a research grant affect the outcome of the research?
Suppose you've got 20 climate scientists, fairly honest but not immune to their prejudices influencing what kinds of questions they ask, or what contextual information they consider or leave out when presenting results. Suppose 10 find that global warming is a very serious problem that needs further study, and 10 find that there isn't much there that's worth looking at. In the next round, only the 10 with the more alarmist spin get funded, and the other 10 have been weeded out.
Or you can flip this around, and argue that global warming denialists are going to be able to get oil company grants. I'm not arguing for or against a particular position on global warming. I'm just trying to explain one way that funding affects scientific outcomes without overt fraud being committed.
Do you have any concrete examples.
I'm not a climate scientist, but I could give many, many concrete examples in other areas. This is a bit of a minefield, so I'll just give one. I know of a scientist who's work showed that the space station has severe limitations as a platform for microgravity research. His report was suppressed by NASA for political reasons, and he received no additional funding on that topic.
Or are you merely trying to smear the honesty of all reseach scientists for narrow, short-sighted political reasons?
I can't speak for that other guy. If he's like other global warming denialists I've argued with, his stance is likely to be all political. However, in my experience, the people who get all offended at the suggestion that money corrupts science are often the worst offenders, with the least amount of objectivity about their own biases.
A problem with working in an MS level research niche like you're targeting, is you'll be trying to earn a living competing against grad students who earn ~$15K/yr. I'm not saying this makes it impossible or not worth doing, just that its something to be aware of. If you're a US citizen you have a competitive advantage for DoD research, but then there's a different price you have to pay.
If you fly an airline that charges for checked bags, and you accidentally put a banned item in the carry-on, you either have to pay the fee to check the bag, lose the item, or mail at a high cost (if you have time). Probably this isn't a very big revenue generator, but I still find it annoying. The same goes with banning bottled water then selling it for $3 a bottle. Or setting up long security lines, then letting people through who pay a higher rate. This last one seems undemocratic. Its different than having better 'first class' seating for people who pay a premium, since the security lines are mandated by the government, not by the airline. (Though 'first class' seating is discriminatory also, if companies are getting breaks on their ticket prices that aren't available to everyone.)
Whatever happened to "live free or die"?
Right. In theory, if federal bureaucracies get bad enough, people vote against the politicians that fund them. With powerful corporations, the best people can do is vote for politicians who promise to direct the bureaucracies to obstruct the corporations. There's one more level of indirection there, which gives the corporations more free reign.
Of course, unrestrained government power and corporate power are both bad, so we have to fight them both.
So what is it? Why do people build such huge deadweight loss systems, far beyond anything required to simply protect ourselves from invasion by others?
Here are a few reasons I see:
1. Offshoring of manufacturing. Weapons are physical things, and most other physical things are now made in China. If you live somewhere like Ohio, weapons development is pretty much what is left. In theory we could make other stuff like windmills, but there is a lot of inertia in economic development. Most people can't just get together with a half dozen friends and start an alternative energy company. But its pretty easy to get into DoD work, because it already exists locally.
2. Job competition from immigrant graduate students. If you've got US citizenship or a greencard, there's a lot less competition for grant money in research areas that are closed to non "US persons". This tends to drive native US engineering talent into DoD and 'homeland security' R&D, which fuels expansion in those areas.
3. Blood lust. A fairly significant portion of the people involved in DoD research are fascinated by lethal power, and presumably this accounts for much public support for it also. I think there are metaphysical causes for this, that it can't be understood purely in terms of a rational cost/benefit analysis. Or, if you're adverse to philosophical speculation, just chalk it up to our prehistoric past as hunter-scavangers, though I don't think that's a complete answer.
4. Fear. There is a lot of dishonesty our lives, and living a lie tends to be productive of paranoia. Some people are in a position to take advantage of that. There's a lot of fear in congress also, which results in ostensibly dovish representatives pouring a lot of money into secret defense and surveillance programs.
5. Greed. People want money so they can live in big houses, take expensive vacations, and retire early. Fear sells at higher margins than other services.
Oh come on, that was brilliant.
Any links on stats about benefits, please? I'd like to know how they measure that.
No, the benefits would obviously be quite subjective, which is why I spoke only of stats on addiction. And even those I doubt are very accurate. That's what makes it an opinion, or a judgment call. That some things are difficult to quantify does not put them beyond all understanding however.
Ironically, the issue of measuring benefit is at the heart of drug use and abuse. The body is designed to make you feel good when you do "good" things like eat or procreate, and feel bad when you do "bad" things like break a leg or fail to earn the approval of your pears. The drug circumvents this, for instance making you feel better when you're injured or unpopular. But since the body's positive/negative feedback mechanism is being thwarted, the user's feelings about whether the use is having a "good" or a "bad" effect tend to be unreliable.
In the case of my hapless roommate, the drugs were very clearly killing him, and he did feel that he was dying. But although he could intellectually see the cause, emotionally there was enough ambivalence that he could not slow down. (And even after he was dead, it was recorded as a drowning rather than an overdose, so he never showed up as an 'adverse effect' statistic either.)
Let it go, dude.
You are right. But it still bothers me that nobody, myself included, could help my roommate/landlord, when he wanted to live and was not strong enough. Even though he bore a fair degree of responsibility for that.
Also, I find the extent of addiction in our society, and denial about it, to be disheartening. People live in cubicle prisons, and stab one another in the backs for money, then if someone feels down about all this they try to treat it as primarily a neurochemical imbalance. A lot of zoo animals are depressed also. I don't mean to disrespect people with mental illness, as if they can necessarily do better with the cards they've been dealt. But often part of doing better is seeing the cards as what they are. And that's how I see a lot of it.
How is this a troll? Thin skinned addicts with mod points? Corrupt doctors? This is the second time I've been modded a troll for posting this anecdote. Someone died. I'm just trying to help.
I have nothing against doctors in general, in fact I admire many of them. But I guess if the shoe fits....
If you believe that valium helps you or someone you love, maybe it does, and I'm not going to try to talk you out of it. My opinion, from what I've observed and the statistics I've read on addiction, is that the harm done outweighs any possible benefits. But if it bothers you that I am expressing this opinion, then maybe you ought to look at how your habit or your business is affecting your emotions.
My landlord killed himself with valium a few months ago, after a 12 year addiction. It was pretty obvious where things were headed, but his dealer^H^H^H^H^H^Hdoctor kept supplying him anyway. Eventually the temptation to keep upping the dose and feeling good overpowered his desire to live. A did a little research and found that this is a shockingly common problem.
Moral of the story: benzodiazephines suck. And your doctor may be more interested in paying off his student loans and buying a boat than being honest with himself about what's good for his patients.
Interesting. This would be a good example of why the pursuit of 'what did Jesus really think?" doesn't do much for me. To me, the teaching about sinning in the heart is a simple statement of fact. Its foolish to think that you can indulge all manner of nasty thoughts and be able to get away with it without it affecting you. If you fill your mind with crap, you become crap, and sooner or later crap is what will show externally as well. At the same time, it never occurred to me that someone would make a strict, rigid set of rules out of that, with 'punishment' for thought crimes. It doesn't work. It would be like trying to raise a perfect child by punishing them every time they make a mistake. So what did Jesus think about this? Its almost impossible for me to tell, so I don't worry about it. And it appears to me that those who make claims about Jesus are often just making up interpretations of the evidence, when other interpretations would make just as much sense.
Having worked there, I think the problem at NASA has more to do with the way job security is decoupled from performance. The organization just rots. Unfortunately, there's no easy fix for that, since if you try to establish stronger "merit based" criteria for pay and retention, the definition of merit just gets politicized and corrupted.