conservatives saying "it was good enough for grandpa, it's fine, don't change anything".
I think you'll find most conservatives actually saying "it wasn't so terrible for grandpa, so let's see how this new untested idea actually makes it better". There will always be people opposed to any sort of change, of course, but don't confuse evidence-based (as opposed to "it looks good on paper, let's do it") and outcome-based (as opposed to "what matters is the lawmaker's intentions were good") with anti-progress. Any seasoned engineer will tell you that the way you'll make the best progress is to test before you ship, because it's so much less effort to fix mistakes that way.
The Hobbit movies lost me with Beorn. WTF, PJ? WTF?
I really wanted this to be a light-hearted adventure, focused on Bilbo's character growth, and the point made that adventures can be fun and rewarding, but war just sucks. The book was pretty amazing that way.
Wait, you mean there's a life-threatening behavior gap? This is unacceptable, we must encourage women to do stupid things that may risk their lives. To not do so is sexist!
Actually, this is mostly done. The lifespan of women and men is quickly converging, as is pay (if you take into account lifetime hours worked - for professional women who haven't had a kid, I believe women are slightly ahead under 35 now).
Does Slashdot have to have a "gender gap story" every 2 Bennett stories or something? I guess it's out with "news for nerds" and in with "Reddit envy".
It seems people don't get this, so let's spell it out:
Inflation requires both demand and supply of money. You can't cause inflation simply by increasing the money supply, unless you go totally crazy with it - however, if that supply is there when the economy heats up and demand appears, look out.
Hpwever, 5-10% inflation during a good economy isn't per se a problem: high inflation is a symptom of a bubble economy but may be there without the bubble. And it's the malinvestment associated with a bubble that hurts everyone - "medium" inflation only really hurts people who made the wrong bet on the future value of the dollar.
As long as you don't actually crater the currency, inflation is merely a warning sign of the real problem, and the real problem is people working on things no one wants: from bubbles to government make-work, the stuff we have is just the stuff we make, and if we're not working to make stuff we want or need, we'll all suffer for it.
I wish I knew a good one! Most places are as crazy as ZeroHedge, in one direction or another. I read MarketWatch, but more to keep abreast of market fashion than reality (never read a stock market site for economic news).
The most useful stuff I've ever read on economics was the old-school stuff: on the business cycle, not just boom-bust but which sectors recover in which order - what leads recovery, and what's big when the end of the boom is near, and what survives best during the bust. The history of different kinds of currencies and the problems the had. The various big name economists from the first half of the 20th century, now that we can see the actual economic growth in various countries that seem to follow on or another of them. Everything old is new again.
The dollar is much like capitalism and democracy: it's the worst imaginable choice, except for everything else that's ever been tried. That's really it: the US government is just less effective at ruining the dollar than every other central bank for a major currency. Much of the current value of the euro is simply it's position as "second lest awful currency", a hedge against a reckless Fed.
When the dollar looked rough a few years back, interest in gold perked up, and interest in the Swiss franc bloomed, but the Swiss were apparently uncomfortable with the idea of becoming a reserve currency, and committed explicitly to falling with the euro. Odd choice, but there it was.
If the EU ever finishes collapsing, all the sovereign debt in the region blows up taking the Euro with it (it's only a question of when), and then finally recovers and regains financial credibility, then finally the dollar might be displaced, Or if China has it's inevitable revolution, and happens to emerge as a capitalist democracy, or when India or Brazil finally reach first-world status nation-wide. we might also have other credible currencies. But for now, the dollar is pretty much it.
That's not to say the dollar can't be destroyed if the Fed tries hard enough. But over the past downturn they were actually quite clever: while they were printing ~$2 T in no money via QE, they were removing ~$2T in money supply via bank reserves (while we continue with a 0 reserve banking system, the Fed paid attractive-enough interest that banks voluntarily increased their reserves to unprecedented levels). And the Fed did actually wind down QE. I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop, when that ~$2T in "Excess reserves" comes back into the money supply and turbo-charges inflation, but hopefully that will just be Carter-like, and not a currency collapse.
The purpose of toilets is to receive DRM. Not sure what TFS is complaining about: your cat comes along and deposits DRM in the litter-box; job well done!
The value of Google passed the value of Russia (remember, these are just the publically traded companies - in the US that about half our economy, dunno for Russia). Russia has almost nothing going for it beyond oil, and the Saudis are using oil prices to fuck Iran sideways right now. The current governmental structure of both Russia and Iran are likely to collapse (Putin is pretty savvy - he may emerge as El Presidente for Life without the pretense of democracy he has now, but chaos one way or another). The ruble is almost certain to collapse, so no one's buying ruble-valued anything, (especially debt) and the risk of public companies in Russia getting either nationalized or simply destroyed by unrest is real.
I predict that tomorrow, there will be weather! Yeah, that's not what people mean by predicting the weather. Sure: the 24-hour weather forecast is better than random guessing, but it's still not much better than looking at the sky, and a barometer. And the 5-day forecast? Accuracy isn't in it.
Well, let me know when we actually get to the weather-predicting stage. I look forward to that. But I think we'll get fusion first, and maybe spelling and calendar reform.
or we can act on the best information we have right now with a degree of tentativity reasonable for any such endeavor
Oh ho! A moderate. Are you sure you're on the right site? Surely you meant to say "global warming is a hoax!" or "repent your sins of carbon emission, no economic sacrifice is too great!"
With respect, the phlogiston theory worked apart from the oxidation of iron. Noticing this shortcoming was one of the things that led to the discovery of oxygen.
Exactly. And aether made a lot of sense. And Freud had to start somewhere. None of that was bad science, that's just what early science looks like. We've just since the late 90s had the technology to seriously contemplate climate modeling, and only really in the past 5-8 years has the vast parallelism needed to do it well been available from more than a couple of research computers.
Again, just as it's a mistake to call it "pseudoscience", it's a mistake to believe than any of these early models in the first generation of a new science are particularly worthwhile. Certainly Climate Science is a field that needs more funding and research for decades to come. But just as certainly, it's not a fucking unfallible font of religious truth, and people who act as if it is are as annoying as the SJWs.
It should jump out at you that the past 10k years of relative climate stability is an anomaly, and that rapid (on geological scales) swings in temperature and CO2 are the norm. That whole system is not well understood, though I believe solar variation is the leading hypothesis right now. On a scale beyond a century, there's just no reason to expect climate stability in the first place.
On a decade by decade scale, there's no evidence of warming in the 17 years of reliable satellite temperature data. The null hypothesis - that average temperatures aren't changing - has actually been the best predictor of climate data since the late 90s, odd as that may sound.
The simple fact is: the atmosphere and oceans are chaotic systems, with a variety of positive and negative feedback loops, quite difficult to model, and you can't talk about climate change in a scientific way without doing so. There are no obvious conclusions to draw, as the system we live in is simply too complex for hand-wavy, back-of-the-envelope calculations to be interesting. We may simply lack the technology today to do this science properly. That's not a reason to stop - we built the LHC, proof we can do some fucking impressive technological advancement to achieve a scientific goal. But it is a reason to avoid arrogance.
Climate science is at the phlogiston / aether / Freud stage right now. That's fine, every science must start that way, and the scientific method works given time. But for goodness sake the lay believers are very much like a religion right now, complete with a list of sins and a Hell to roast in, and that's taking it too far!
It's easy to be self-righteous. I used to see it all the time from member of the Christian religion- most of whom weren't really that familiar with scripture. It's no more appealing seeing the same attitude from members of the new Global Warming religion, most of whom aren't really that familiar with the science.
Climate models may one day mature to something beyond the basket of hypotheses they are now, but none of them have yet been successful in predicting climate data, except where the null hypothesis also predicted that data. The science doesn't justify your arrogance. I wouldn't call it "pseudoscientific", but it's far from certain as well, and the actual predictive models (as opposed to hand-wavey claims) aren't yet well supported by actual data.
Your focused on a very narrow kind of gaming, and frankly nobody gives a fuck about that sort of political statement except SJWs. Ultimately I think that's the root of the gamergame fight:
SJW: Politics! Identity! Identity politics! GG: Fuck off, we don't care about that stuff SJW: See! Oppression! Misogyny! Identity politics! GG: No, seriously, fuck off! We just play games for the game mechanics, the presentation doesn't really matter.* SJW: Now we see the violence inherent in the system!
*There are actual academic studies to back this up. E.g., gamers pick an avatar/character based on in-game performance, not on any sense of identification with the character.
Heck, I remember the days of Quake 2, back when that was gaming, when everyone used the female character because her hit box was a bit smaller than the male. 0 fucks were given about gender identity in that choice.
As one of the few conservatives left on/., I can only agree fully with what the above smelly hippie has to say.
Back when Jack Thompson was the Anti-gaming Asshole in Chief, the Penny Arcade guys had a brilliant idea about that, and the Childs Play charity was born. We need a similar idea here. I had hoped that fine young capitalists might be that, but they really don't seem to have their act together, much as I like their intentions. Anyone else have a clever idea for a grand gesture?
Hotmail is a legacy now, but Outlook.com is actually pretty good. It reminds me a lot of gmail before gmail went to shit. Nice clean web UI, like gmail used to have, too. It surprised me with how it doesn't suck - give it a try the next time you need a throw-away: I ended up moving there for my real email (because fuck Google).
Sometimes I wonder why companies, especially companies selling digital goods, don't just set the price in one particular currency then let it somewhat auto-fluctuate in the other currencies according to the market. Wouldn't that be simpler for them?
Sorry, that's illegal in many countries with fucked currencies.
Most seller of luxury goods in Russia aren't selling at all. The ruble is toilet paper now, and you can't legally sell in dollars (though there's a very long tradition of doing so anyhow). You'll get 2x as many rubles for a dollar on the street as the official exchange rate, as people with limited access to the international market are paying a premium to GTFO. The only other choice Steam has is to stop selling to Russia at all.
Google's market cap is higher that then Russian stock market right now.
Politically speaking, Russia's currency lost value because they invaded a nearby nation and they are under sanctions.
Not at all. Not eve a little. I doubt sanctions have ever accomplished anything. This is entirely OPEC: Saudi Arabia is destroying Iran. Iran can't survive at these oil prices, and the Saudi rulers want the current Iranian leadership gone. It's not quite so simple as an extension of the Shia-Sunni conflict, but that's the heart of it. Had this happened 5 years ago, it's likely ISIS wouldn't have happened, but sadly they can survive now without Iranian funding.
Slashdot Mirror
conservatives saying "it was good enough for grandpa, it's fine, don't change anything".
I think you'll find most conservatives actually saying "it wasn't so terrible for grandpa, so let's see how this new untested idea actually makes it better". There will always be people opposed to any sort of change, of course, but don't confuse evidence-based (as opposed to "it looks good on paper, let's do it") and outcome-based (as opposed to "what matters is the lawmaker's intentions were good") with anti-progress. Any seasoned engineer will tell you that the way you'll make the best progress is to test before you ship, because it's so much less effort to fix mistakes that way.
The Hobbit movies lost me with Beorn. WTF, PJ? WTF?
I really wanted this to be a light-hearted adventure, focused on Bilbo's character growth, and the point made that adventures can be fun and rewarding, but war just sucks. The book was pretty amazing that way.
Wait, you mean there's a life-threatening behavior gap? This is unacceptable, we must encourage women to do stupid things that may risk their lives. To not do so is sexist!
Actually, this is mostly done. The lifespan of women and men is quickly converging, as is pay (if you take into account lifetime hours worked - for professional women who haven't had a kid, I believe women are slightly ahead under 35 now).
Does Slashdot have to have a "gender gap story" every 2 Bennett stories or something? I guess it's out with "news for nerds" and in with "Reddit envy".
Not where I am - have things not picked up where you are? This is a slow recovery.
It seems people don't get this, so let's spell it out:
Inflation requires both demand and supply of money. You can't cause inflation simply by increasing the money supply, unless you go totally crazy with it - however, if that supply is there when the economy heats up and demand appears, look out.
Hpwever, 5-10% inflation during a good economy isn't per se a problem: high inflation is a symptom of a bubble economy but may be there without the bubble. And it's the malinvestment associated with a bubble that hurts everyone - "medium" inflation only really hurts people who made the wrong bet on the future value of the dollar.
As long as you don't actually crater the currency, inflation is merely a warning sign of the real problem, and the real problem is people working on things no one wants: from bubbles to government make-work, the stuff we have is just the stuff we make, and if we're not working to make stuff we want or need, we'll all suffer for it.
I wish I knew a good one! Most places are as crazy as ZeroHedge, in one direction or another. I read MarketWatch, but more to keep abreast of market fashion than reality (never read a stock market site for economic news).
The most useful stuff I've ever read on economics was the old-school stuff: on the business cycle, not just boom-bust but which sectors recover in which order - what leads recovery, and what's big when the end of the boom is near, and what survives best during the bust. The history of different kinds of currencies and the problems the had. The various big name economists from the first half of the 20th century, now that we can see the actual economic growth in various countries that seem to follow on or another of them. Everything old is new again.
The dollar is much like capitalism and democracy: it's the worst imaginable choice, except for everything else that's ever been tried. That's really it: the US government is just less effective at ruining the dollar than every other central bank for a major currency. Much of the current value of the euro is simply it's position as "second lest awful currency", a hedge against a reckless Fed.
When the dollar looked rough a few years back, interest in gold perked up, and interest in the Swiss franc bloomed, but the Swiss were apparently uncomfortable with the idea of becoming a reserve currency, and committed explicitly to falling with the euro. Odd choice, but there it was.
If the EU ever finishes collapsing, all the sovereign debt in the region blows up taking the Euro with it (it's only a question of when), and then finally recovers and regains financial credibility, then finally the dollar might be displaced, Or if China has it's inevitable revolution, and happens to emerge as a capitalist democracy, or when India or Brazil finally reach first-world status nation-wide. we might also have other credible currencies. But for now, the dollar is pretty much it.
That's not to say the dollar can't be destroyed if the Fed tries hard enough. But over the past downturn they were actually quite clever: while they were printing ~$2 T in no money via QE, they were removing ~$2T in money supply via bank reserves (while we continue with a 0 reserve banking system, the Fed paid attractive-enough interest that banks voluntarily increased their reserves to unprecedented levels). And the Fed did actually wind down QE. I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop, when that ~$2T in "Excess reserves" comes back into the money supply and turbo-charges inflation, but hopefully that will just be Carter-like, and not a currency collapse.
DRM-laden toilets?
The purpose of toilets is to receive DRM. Not sure what TFS is complaining about: your cat comes along and deposits DRM in the litter-box; job well done!
Cats are evil, pointless animals to have as pets. :-P
Oh Hell no: cats are evil pointy animals to have as pets.
There is a unicode character known as a soft hyphen.
Hey, this is Slashdot: we don't know about Unicode and we like it that way!
The value of Google passed the value of Russia (remember, these are just the publically traded companies - in the US that about half our economy, dunno for Russia). Russia has almost nothing going for it beyond oil, and the Saudis are using oil prices to fuck Iran sideways right now. The current governmental structure of both Russia and Iran are likely to collapse (Putin is pretty savvy - he may emerge as El Presidente for Life without the pretense of democracy he has now, but chaos one way or another). The ruble is almost certain to collapse, so no one's buying ruble-valued anything, (especially debt) and the risk of public companies in Russia getting either nationalized or simply destroyed by unrest is real.
I predict that tomorrow, there will be weather! Yeah, that's not what people mean by predicting the weather. Sure: the 24-hour weather forecast is better than random guessing, but it's still not much better than looking at the sky, and a barometer. And the 5-day forecast? Accuracy isn't in it.
You make and play the kind of game you like, and we'll make an play the kind of games we like, OK? There's room on Steam for lots of games.
get a liberal arts degree
I'd prefer a job instead, but hey: to each his own!
Well, let me know when we actually get to the weather-predicting stage. I look forward to that. But I think we'll get fusion first, and maybe spelling and calendar reform.
or we can act on the best information we have right now with a degree of tentativity reasonable for any such endeavor
Oh ho! A moderate. Are you sure you're on the right site? Surely you meant to say "global warming is a hoax!" or "repent your sins of carbon emission, no economic sacrifice is too great!"
Look, CO2 is like a blanket on the bed. Making it thicker makes you warmer. You wish to deny this?
I'm sorry, your answer must be in the form of a car analogy.
With respect, the phlogiston theory worked apart from the oxidation of iron. Noticing this shortcoming was one of the things that led to the discovery of oxygen.
Exactly. And aether made a lot of sense. And Freud had to start somewhere. None of that was bad science, that's just what early science looks like. We've just since the late 90s had the technology to seriously contemplate climate modeling, and only really in the past 5-8 years has the vast parallelism needed to do it well been available from more than a couple of research computers.
Again, just as it's a mistake to call it "pseudoscience", it's a mistake to believe than any of these early models in the first generation of a new science are particularly worthwhile. Certainly Climate Science is a field that needs more funding and research for decades to come. But just as certainly, it's not a fucking unfallible font of religious truth, and people who act as if it is are as annoying as the SJWs.
Look at the historical data.
It should jump out at you that the past 10k years of relative climate stability is an anomaly, and that rapid (on geological scales) swings in temperature and CO2 are the norm. That whole system is not well understood, though I believe solar variation is the leading hypothesis right now. On a scale beyond a century, there's just no reason to expect climate stability in the first place.
On a decade by decade scale, there's no evidence of warming in the 17 years of reliable satellite temperature data. The null hypothesis - that average temperatures aren't changing - has actually been the best predictor of climate data since the late 90s, odd as that may sound.
The simple fact is: the atmosphere and oceans are chaotic systems, with a variety of positive and negative feedback loops, quite difficult to model, and you can't talk about climate change in a scientific way without doing so. There are no obvious conclusions to draw, as the system we live in is simply too complex for hand-wavy, back-of-the-envelope calculations to be interesting. We may simply lack the technology today to do this science properly. That's not a reason to stop - we built the LHC, proof we can do some fucking impressive technological advancement to achieve a scientific goal. But it is a reason to avoid arrogance.
Climate science is at the phlogiston / aether / Freud stage right now. That's fine, every science must start that way, and the scientific method works given time. But for goodness sake the lay believers are very much like a religion right now, complete with a list of sins and a Hell to roast in, and that's taking it too far!
It's easy to be self-righteous. I used to see it all the time from member of the Christian religion- most of whom weren't really that familiar with scripture. It's no more appealing seeing the same attitude from members of the new Global Warming religion, most of whom aren't really that familiar with the science.
Climate models may one day mature to something beyond the basket of hypotheses they are now, but none of them have yet been successful in predicting climate data, except where the null hypothesis also predicted that data. The science doesn't justify your arrogance. I wouldn't call it "pseudoscientific", but it's far from certain as well, and the actual predictive models (as opposed to hand-wavey claims) aren't yet well supported by actual data.
Natalie Portman, naked and covered in old jokes!
Your focused on a very narrow kind of gaming, and frankly nobody gives a fuck about that sort of political statement except SJWs. Ultimately I think that's the root of the gamergame fight:
SJW: Politics! Identity! Identity politics!
GG: Fuck off, we don't care about that stuff
SJW: See! Oppression! Misogyny! Identity politics!
GG: No, seriously, fuck off! We just play games for the game mechanics, the presentation doesn't really matter.*
SJW: Now we see the violence inherent in the system!
*There are actual academic studies to back this up. E.g., gamers pick an avatar/character based on in-game performance, not on any sense of identification with the character.
Heck, I remember the days of Quake 2, back when that was gaming, when everyone used the female character because her hit box was a bit smaller than the male. 0 fucks were given about gender identity in that choice.
As one of the few conservatives left on /., I can only agree fully with what the above smelly hippie has to say.
Back when Jack Thompson was the Anti-gaming Asshole in Chief, the Penny Arcade guys had a brilliant idea about that, and the Childs Play charity was born. We need a similar idea here. I had hoped that fine young capitalists might be that, but they really don't seem to have their act together, much as I like their intentions. Anyone else have a clever idea for a grand gesture?
Hotmail is a legacy now, but Outlook.com is actually pretty good. It reminds me a lot of gmail before gmail went to shit. Nice clean web UI, like gmail used to have, too. It surprised me with how it doesn't suck - give it a try the next time you need a throw-away: I ended up moving there for my real email (because fuck Google).
Unless the man in question is Putin or Chuck Norris there's little he could do for Yahoo!.
Yahoo may pass the total value of the Russian stock market soon, if trends continue. Only Chuck can save Yahoo now.
Sometimes I wonder why companies, especially companies selling digital goods, don't just set the price in one particular currency then let it somewhat auto-fluctuate in the other currencies according to the market. Wouldn't that be simpler for them?
Sorry, that's illegal in many countries with fucked currencies.
Most seller of luxury goods in Russia aren't selling at all. The ruble is toilet paper now, and you can't legally sell in dollars (though there's a very long tradition of doing so anyhow). You'll get 2x as many rubles for a dollar on the street as the official exchange rate, as people with limited access to the international market are paying a premium to GTFO. The only other choice Steam has is to stop selling to Russia at all.
Google's market cap is higher that then Russian stock market right now.
Politically speaking, Russia's currency lost value because they invaded a nearby nation and they are under sanctions.
Not at all. Not eve a little. I doubt sanctions have ever accomplished anything. This is entirely OPEC: Saudi Arabia is destroying Iran. Iran can't survive at these oil prices, and the Saudi rulers want the current Iranian leadership gone. It's not quite so simple as an extension of the Shia-Sunni conflict, but that's the heart of it. Had this happened 5 years ago, it's likely ISIS wouldn't have happened, but sadly they can survive now without Iranian funding.
hahaha! A website with no NSA backdoor. You told a funny!