>while whispering conspiracy theories about scientists being in cohorts with the reds
That one's been happening for ages. Ayn Rand fervently believed, and publicly claimed, that all research indicating a link between smoking and lung cancer was a communist plot. She died of smoking-induced lung-cancer and maintained her refusal to accept the science even on her deathbed.
>Its not so much that they are paying journalists off, the rots further up the corporate chain with editors and bureau chiefs
Don't forget owners. Remember a few months ago when a bunch of editors at Breitbart resigned in protest because, they claimed, Trump was paying the owners to give him positive coverage ?
And that's breitbat, playground for the alt-right [read: neo-NAZI skinheads without charisma] - hardly a symbol of impartial, honest journalism to begin with and their editors hardly averse to a significant amount of spin. It must be serious bribery requiring coverage that goes from 'spin' to 'flat out bullshit' for that lot to resign in protest.
Erm there was no treason. And you realize that if you choose to charge her anyway - then you also have to charge Colin Powel, who did exactly the same thing with HIS private mail server ? Though I'd say charging him for his warcrimes should probably be a higher priority.
Yet another American who doesn't know the difference between the EU, EC and Eurozone.
He seems to think the EU came to be when the Eurozone was instituted with a common currency.
So to help him out: The EU as an idea was born in 1948 after World War 2 and the long, slow diplomatic process of establishing it began then. The precursor of the EU were the European Coal and Steel Community which was form in 1951. In 1957 the Treaty of Rome was signed which in 1958 became the European Economic Community, which consisted of the 6 original members including Germany and France. In 1965 the 3 market communities that made up the EEC was merged together to use a single set of institutions (courts and such) and this became known as the European Communities. By 1973 this had enlarged significantly and in 1979 the first direct elections to the European Parliament happened. The EU effectively reached it's current form in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union when East-Germany and other East-block nations started joining.
But in effect the EU dates back to 1948. And you may have noticed the absence of any major European landwars after world war 2 - the EU was created to avoid that, and in that regard at least, it has succeeded.
It's also weird that me, an African, seem to understand EU structures better than the parent poster - in fact the EU is one of the most democratic systems on earth. The European Parliament members are elected by voters in member nations. The EU holds referendums on any major issues allowing voters to override their representatives (in this regard it's more democratic than America where referendums are extremely rare events). Essentially the EU is much like the US Federal government with memberstate governments no unlike US state governments - but significantly more powerful and with a very direct say in EU governance, which state governments in the US don't get. The parent poster, like so many others, confuses the EC for the EU and calls the EU undemocratic, which it decidedly is not. The EC is not democratic, but the EC is also not a government - it's an economic management commission that reports to the parliament. It's powers are strictly limited to purely economic matters: the currency, trade regulations and common standards. In effect, the EC's closest US counterpart would be the Federal Reserve Bank and the Treasury, neither of which is democratic THERE either - because it makes no sense for such institutions to be democratic. They need appointed experts who know what they are doing, not people good at winning elections and importantly they must be run by people who don't worry about winning re-election because such institutions *have* to be able to make unpopular choices at times.
Currently the EC is pushing austerity measures very hard - all the economics say this is a terrible idea but the current set of commissioners are sold on it. There is huge public unhappiness about this. But they are able to do this, which they believe is required to keep the economy functioning, despite the opposition. Now of course, the problem with experts being able to do unpopular things is that sometimes they do things which are unpopular because they are wrong. But that's still better than doing what's popular because it's popular - a great way to destroy an economy rapidly. It's not ideal, but it's also the best system we have for these things and until somebody invents something better - every other idea is even worse.
So no, calling the EU undemocratic is fundamentally ignorant. Confusing the EC with it's extremely limited powers undemocratic would be true - but meaningless.
Mogadishu has not government to speak off. There's a group who claim to be the government but since they have no more power than any of the other corporations^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hwarlords around this claim is fairly meaningless. There's no official taxation or law enforcement to speak off anyway. What there is, is everything the world has always had before there was taxes and police and will always have where those are absent - warlords, slavers and absolute-rule-by-the-richest - the only thing making things slightly bearable to the average person being the amount of time the rich spend fighting each other - which would be even more useful if the bullet-fodder in their wars were not you.
That said there is actually an entire continent with no government at all - not even one that only exists on paper. It's called Antarctica. Not a lot of resources, terrible farming conditions... oh and there's that international treaty to ban anybody from claiming ownership of it or try to rule it but if you can get there, it's isolated enough nobody's going to bother to come take you away by force. At least if you stay far from the few research stations in the are. You'll pretty much have to hunt penguins and seals for food and how you're going to avoid scurvy I have no idea.
So year, places without government do exist. If you can't handle them - then what makes you think everybody^H^H^H^H^H^Hanybody else wants that ?
As I understand it there are two ways. It can be done by a majority of states voting for it, or by a special convention where both state governors and congress have to attend and it needs enough votes there.
I do know that the latter version, while theoretically possible, has never actually happened. This is because technically it's significantly harder. Governors won't generally vote against the state governments so you effectively still need a majority of the states, but you also need a majority from both houses of congress as well. Special conventions are therefore harder, but, if you could do it - would be significantly faster.
Of course, not everything that becomes a constitutional amendment starts out that way. The emancipation proclamation for example spent quite some time as basically an executive order before it was replaced by an essentially identical constitutional amendment. And the systems vary by country as well. In South Africa for example a constitutional amendment only requires a supermajority in both houses of parliament, and there have been 19 amendments in just 20 years since the final constitution was adopted. Granted, these are all fairly minor administrative stuff like changing the name of a province or moving a provincial border to put a town in a different province. The pace has definitely declined since the last election though. Before that the ANC government had a sufficiently large electoral majority that they could pass amendments entirely by themselves, nowadays they couldn't get the votes in parliament unless at least one large or several small parties agree with them. There's no way any of them would vote for term limit extensions that's for certain - hell half the ANC wouldn't want to (but probably will anyway since it's a party where your future depends entirely on voting the party line in every debate).
Actually, what studies there are, suggests left hand-driving is safer because it puts your right side facing oncoming traffic and gives the right-handed majority slightly faster reflexes when responding to problems from oncoming traffic.
That said, there is no really definitive answer either way, nothing has been proven concretely. It's true that the average accident rate is lower in left-hand-driving countries, it is also true that we can't definitively rule out other causes. It's not a question that can be easily answered and no hypotheses lends itself to really rigorous testing as you have overlaps from biology, neurology and about half the social sciences involved.
Correction: I did the math based on the working days in a year, but the actual period of overlap is only six months - so you have to cut the divisor in half, which means that, in fact all the coincidences become twice as common, so it's 36000 exact coincidences per year - and the others change the same way.
>What is your suggestion here, that there is a third agent responsible both for earthquakes and full/new moons?
Fallacy. There isn't only ONE alternative. A correlation ONLY proves that things happened to at the same times. Nothing more. Where you have a correlation between X and Y any of the following could be true. 1) The correlation could be because X causes Y - this is the one everybody assumes 2) The correlation could *actually* be because Y causes X 3) The correlation could be because an unknown, Z, causes both X and Y 4) Unknown A and B causes X and Y respectively and but unknown Z can cause both A and B 5) Nothing. X and Y are caused by A and B respectively but there is no causal link anywhere whatsoever and the correlation is simply coincidence.
Most human intuition is that 1 is the most likely, in fact 5 is far more likely. Humans underestimate just how incredibly common coincidence actually is. See my post above about how often people get diagnosed with austism and vaccinated on the same day. 18000 times a year just in the US (and that's just the lowest number of exact ones - what people perceive as the same thing goes into the hundreds of thousands). - and it's pure coincidence. I actually show the math that proves it is coincidence. That's what the statistics actually predicts the coincidence would be if there was NO causal link.
>on a boat 201 nautical miles off the US (in international waters) and nuke them You would kill every fish, octopus, whale, dolphin, narwhal and crab in a 30 mile radius?... You must really, really hate the beach.
Nah, I say strap 'em to an ICBM and launch it, set to explode in Low Earth Orbit.
With a little luck, the EMP will knock out some of their spysatelites while we're at it, and probably some Chinese ones too....may want to make sure you time the launch for when the ISS is on the other side of the planet though...
A third term would not be historic. It wouldnt' even match the current record. FDR served 4 terms. Term limits were only instituted after his 4th term. That also means, that should congress want to, they could remove them again.
Then again... they may just want to do that, Obama really hasn't enjoyed his time in office, I think he is very much looking forward to opening a library and retiring. I can totally see the republicans getting rid of term limits and pushing him onto the ballot now just to undermine his wish for a quiet retirement, after all they spent 8 years undermining him in every other possible way - up to and including undermining him in delicate foreign negotiations by writing to the other party to promise not to uphold the terms of any treaty once he is out of office, an act which - by the way, is illegal and amounts to treason. Why should they stop undermining him now ? He wants to retire, lets force him to serve another term.
Did you even read the quote you posted ? It literally says the OPPOSITE of what you think it says. It says depending on the legal system it could, indeed, be declared unconstitutional by any court.
The US legal system is one of those where any court can make such a declaration. However, such findings from a lower court are only valid in the jurisdiction of that lower court, and only if it's appealed will it, after passing through all the layers reach the supreme court which is the only court that can declare it unconstitutional with nation-wide effect.
A good example is the Communist Control Act of 1954. This law banned the US communist party. A clear violation of the 1st amendment. The case was taken to court and ultimately the supreme court of Arizona declared it unconstitutional. The Eisenhower government did not appeal that decision - and with good reason, they knew they would lose. As a result the case never got to the supreme court and the act was never struck down nationwide. It's still the law in 49 out of 50 states, but the Arizona court decision stands and the act is not law in Arizona. It's unlikely it will ever go before the court - since nobody has been prosecuted under the act in decades, there is nobody with standing to bring a case before the supreme court.
Interestingly though - it's possible for good politicians to do it themselves, though this is rare and I don't think the US has anybody like that. A good example comes from South Africa. In November 1996 parliament passed a healthcare reform bill which the president, Nelson Mandela, duly signed into law. The act contained a fatal clerical error that would, in effect, shut down many hospitals due to the words actually signed into law meaning something very different to what was intended. Now Mandela had a problem. He had signed the act before the mistake was discovered. The law was in effect and it was December. Parliament had closed for the Christmas holiday and would not reconvene until February - and the biggest road accident season of the year was about to happen - with half the hospitals hamstrung by a typo in a law. Without the option of having parliament pass an emergency amendment (since they were closed) Mandela brought a case before the Constitutional court, against himself, asking them to strike down the law an in reinstate the former law until the new year when the reform bill could be rewritten and corrected. The court agreed and struck down the case. It is on record as Mandela v Mandela. Mandela the citizen sued himself the President to get the court to strike down the law as an emergency measure to get rid of it until it could be fixed. Granted, suing yourself is somewhat simpler for a court than most cases, what with the defendent agreeing with everything you say and pleading 'no contest'.
It is also, entirely possible, to pass a law that is perfectly constitutional in wording - but ends up being applied in a way that, while consistent with that law, is no longer consistent with the constitution.
Such cases are generally rarer since they are more complicated, but they do exist, and are often the harder ones to solve. A good example would be Texas's onerous regulations on abortion clinics which have led to a great many closing. In theory a law to regulate a healthcare provider and ensure safe service is perfectly constitutional. But the application of this law has the effect of essentially denying many people access to abortions - and it is unconstitutional for government to deny them that. It's likely that, in due course, that case will be heard before the supreme court and more than likely it will be struck down for being unconstitutional in effect, if not in word, but that could take a while.
In this case it helps that the unconstitutional effect is entirely intended and there is plenty of available evidence of that fact. Hell ending abortion is in the republican party platform - and many of the representatives who put it there are from Texas and on record as supporting it.
PS. repliers: I will not debate the morality of abortion rights with you. The example is of something that the constitution prevents the government from doing, which is being done via the trickery of passing a constitutional law with an unconstitutional effect.
Check the Fox News site. Didn't you know the government is taken everybody's guns ? No really. Bunch of jackbooted government thugs showed up at my cousin's place in Shitville Idaho and took her guns. No really. It happened. Told her the 2nd ammendment doesn't apply to an S-300 Surface to Air Missile launcher. She said she uses it to go duck hunting but would they listen ?
By this time next week you won't be able to carry an AK-47 gun into Arby's and scare the kids without some government thug showing up cause the 'owner called the police because he thought he was being robbed' and shooting you... I mean, seriously, that's only supposed to happen to black people ! And on Friday, they'll come collect them from your house. Honest! My niecedaughter told me !
Okay. Getting serious. Just a couple of months ago a man, guilty of no crime, was pulled over in a 'routine traffic stop'. He happened to be black. He had a gun, which he legally owned. He informed the cop that he had a, legal, gun and did absolutely nothing violent - obeying the officer completely. When the officer asked for 'license and registration' he reached for it... and was promptly shot dead. All this was captured on video - we have undeniable proof of what happened. Now you would THINK that the NRA would be up in arms about this. For once there we have an example of an ACTUAL assault on gun rights - when cops shoot you for having a gun you legally own and informed them you had with you. A gun you did not threaten them with, or commit any crime with. This actually WAS an assault on gun rights (that it was yet another black man killed by a cop is another matter). And what... crickets. Not a single response from the NRA. No press release. No protest. No rally. No mention on their website. Not so much as a fucking tweet.
The NRA may have gotten a tiny glimmer of sympathy from me - if they were acting against genuine oppression of legitimate gun owners - all of them, that includes black people in traffic stops. If they wouldn't stand up for him - then nothing they DO stand up for is worth protecting.
To be fair, our knowledge of these things is pretty much in it's infancy. When New Horizons sent us the first close-up pictures of Jupiter recently - the single biggest shock was how varied the land is. Mountains. Valleys. All the signs of a geologically active body - and no known mechanism for what could possibly let this relatively tiny little thing far from the sun's energy be geologically active. What could power it ? Is it still active or did it merely used to be, once, long ago ? Mars was considered geologically dead until recently - but now some evidence suggests there is still some geological activity going on. Everything we know about geology is based on Earth and almost all of it are inferred from indirect observations (mostly from seismographs and studying the layers in rocks). We have seen the magma at the plate boundaries in the oceans - but that's about the extent of direct observation of geological forces we have. Most of the planets have magnetic fields - we have no real idea how that's possible. We actually have a fairly complete theory about Earth's magnetic field (which is very much something geologists figured out) but hardly any of the components of that is present in most other planets and some have none -yet still have magnetic fields. Just today there is a headline about studies of moon rocks from the 1970's done with modern day spectrometers and finding things that suggests our model of the moon's formation is radically wrong and it was a much bigger impact than we previously thought. Astrgeophysics as a science is still just beginning to explore - and we can expect major and groundbreaking discoveries that rewrite every textbook to be coming frequently for quite some time yet, simply because what we are studying is still so incredibly unknown and we're just beginning to develop the technology to study it better -a process that is likely to accelerate rapidly.
>And something being "based entirely on statistical evidence" does not invalidate or weaken anything. It is the quality of the statistical evidence, not the mere use of statistical evidence, that would invalidate or weaken a claim.
Well, in this case, that evidence is purely of correlation. Correlation does not imply causation. Now as it happens - they aren't even claiming causation and there is no reason to suspect it. The suggestion is that tidal forces can make quakes worse - and there are conceivable mechanisms that might cause that effect, this does not however prove any of those mechanisms actually happen. They could all cancel out for all we know. What this does say is -there is reason to study more, there's something here worth further study.
Some of that study may be statistical - in which case it's important to remember the golden rule of these things: rule out all the data so far. Basically, the statistical clump you noticed, is not a valid sample in determining whether that clump matters or represents a real thing. This is where the scientific method kicks in. Based on the clump we can now predict that, in future, quakes that that coincide with new or full moons will also be more severe than quakes which do not. If that prediction holds- then we learn that there must, indeed, be some causal mechanism at play. If it does not -it means we picked an interesting but meaningless data set either deliberately or unintentionally because human brains are programmed to look for interesting patterns whether or not they exist.
Nah, that's PMS. There are more than enough people in the world, with cycles that are the same average length as the lunar cycle, that a significant number will end up correlating with it. Hence - crazy people at full moon.
Okay, so I just made that up but it's actually entirely possible. Much like the high incidence of autism diagnosis immediately after vaccination can be entirely explained by the high number of people getting vaccinated every day and the fact that autism first becomes diagnosible at around the same age - which means every day there is going to be a signficant number of people with as-yet-undiagnosed autism getting their vaccinations. Thousands actually.
Just to pick a minor nit. Photons really don't weigh nothing. They lack mass. But they do have weight. Weight is the force of gravity on something - gravity affects light (hence we get things like gravitational lensing) ergo - light has weight.
You need to learn to do estimations better. The American number is also an estimation - no exact number exists and due to how Uber operates it probably can't. You could get an exact number of how many have ever existed but right now the number of active ones would be hard to determine as it changes too often.
That said - let me correct your maths. For Uber to have the kind of response times, in as many cities as they do, considering the size of those cities and the level of demand - it's simply physically impossible for them to have less than 100-million or so drivers globally. 800-thousand is 0.8% of that - well within a reasonable margin of error for my Fermi estimation.
A hundred million employees it's big - but it wouldn't even make them the biggest employer in the world, and since they don't deem any of these people 'employees' and pay them a pittance and don't care about dealing with taxes or any of the overheads that come with employing people, it's not even a major challenge. It's only a third of the US population - and less than the employed population of the US by 17%. The US is a big country in economic terms - but in geographic terms you're not even in the top-5 (Brazil is almost 4 times larger in surface area than the US) and in population terms you are so far down the list you barely count. There are 1.5 Billion people in China, another Billion in India. The two most populous cities in the world is Mexico City and Sao Paulo in Brazil.
More than 70% of the people on this planet don't speak a word of English - that's just the ones who don't even know it as a second language, if you count first-language speakers only it drops to less than 20%.
The US is a geopolitical superpower - but in number of people you simply aren't an influence, and so you'll also never be an influence in anything that is derived from the number of people - such as, for example, the number of Uber drivers.
Another way to derive it. Take the known numbers. 7000 in Cape Town - population 3.4 million. 800-thousand in the US - population 350 Million. Notice the pattern there ? In both cases roughly 2000 out of every million people are an Uber driver. So that's 2 out of every 1000 people. A pattern that at least holds for the available data. That would give 200-million drivers for the world - give or take. Except we know that Uber isn't very big in China where their competition has most of the market so we can reasonably assume that they aren't as well represented there, so drop 1.5 billion of the total, and we should probably discount for cities with extremely good public transport as is found in Europe for example and assume the numbers will be lower there (it's only fair since I assumed them up for cities with worse public transport) - which if you factor it in brings us pretty close to my number of about 100-million world wide. This is Fermi-estimation, it's a scientific technique for deriving the best possible answer from limited data - it isn't exact and it doesn't claim to be, but it's good enough for some things, like just figuring out what order of magnitude something is likely to be or say getting a rough estimate of how many Uber drivers are likely to be American.
Like I said in my first post - you need to give about a percentage point of margin of error either way. So maybe it's a bit closer to 98%, that literally does not refute my point in the least. In fact, it only proves that the actual point I made was perfectly accurate. Because the point wasn't if it's 98% or 99.99% - it was that as a percentage of Uber drivers the Americans are literally an insignificantly small amount.
It's called estimation, and since I based that estimation on the best available data - you are full of shit. Americans can be so arrogant... you seriously think your relatively tiny country of 350 million people represent more than a tiny fraction of the drivers working for a company that operates in virtually every city on earth and employs thousands upon thousands of people in each of them ? The very idea that America may represent MORE than what I estimated is prima facie ludicrous on it's face.
Now I may be off by a fraction of a percent or so, but I am definitely much closer to the truth than you. Uber doesn't publish exact figures, all we have is the data compiled by journalists which is non-exhaustive, but they all support my estimation - while you offer nothing to support your refusal to accept it.
Extrapolation from available data is not "supposition" and it's a fucking long ass way from "making it up". It may be 99.999% or it could be 99.98% - but it sure as hell isn't very much further off what I estimated - the maths simply would not work for any significant deviation from it. All the figures I did cite are the ones for which reliable data is available. The US number is known, as is the number for Cape Town. I stated up front and clearly what my logic was, on what basis I adjusted estimates - and my calculations are as exact as anybody can possibly be.
Since you have offered absolutely nothing whatsoever to support refuting it, and I have at least some evidence supporting it - I win and until the day Uber publishes exact country-by-country stats on number of drivers so we can get the real figure, my number is by far the most likely one you will find. Either way - even when that happens it will refine my number - it would not depart radically from it, it cannot - not if uber actually exists - anything else is a divide by zero error.
I live in Cape Town South Africa. There are an estimated 7000 Uber drivers in this city, which is relatively small for Africa. There are an estimated 800-thousand Uber drivers in the US. If a tiny city in Africa has almost 1% as many drivers as the entire USA - then that 99.99% figure seems like a very conservative estimate. I imagine the figures are significantly higher in cities and countries where car ownership is lower. Uber also is surprisingly big in poorer countries where it is frequently a major source of jobs, and transport cost reductions really matter since the cost of getting to work and back is a significant (20% or more) share of their total income.
Cape Town likely has one of the lowest rates in Southern Africa actually since it already has one of the best public transport networks on the continent between trains a high-quality buss service with dedicated lanes which are significantly cheaper than using a car (roughly 10% of the cost of JUST fuel). The number is much, much higher in bigger cities like Johannesburg where there are more commuters and the public transport networks are much more limited. Now imagine a city like Lagos. Estimated population: 16 million people. Average income: $1.20 a day. Public transport system: non-existent. When I first visited Lagos in 2001 it was already the norm that private taxis were the primary way people commuted. Uber is perfectly placed to have essentially replaced them all there. I couldn't find a solid estimate on how many Uber drivers there are in Lagos but the one article I found stated that the number multiplied by 10 in the first 6 months since they started operations there in 2014. If that pattern held (a questionable assumption but without more data its the best we can do) that would mean the number will now be more than 40 times higher. I sincerely doubt it was less than 10-thousand to begin with.
That's just 3 cities outside the US in just one continent - there are 6 others. The odds that my number is not a massive underestimation are looking quite slim.
Slashdot Mirror
>while whispering conspiracy theories about scientists being in cohorts with the reds
That one's been happening for ages. Ayn Rand fervently believed, and publicly claimed, that all research indicating a link between smoking and lung cancer was a communist plot. She died of smoking-induced lung-cancer and maintained her refusal to accept the science even on her deathbed.
>Its not so much that they are paying journalists off, the rots further up the corporate chain with editors and bureau chiefs
Don't forget owners. Remember a few months ago when a bunch of editors at Breitbart resigned in protest because, they claimed, Trump was paying the owners to give him positive coverage ?
And that's breitbat, playground for the alt-right [read: neo-NAZI skinheads without charisma] - hardly a symbol of impartial, honest journalism to begin with and their editors hardly averse to a significant amount of spin. It must be serious bribery requiring coverage that goes from 'spin' to 'flat out bullshit' for that lot to resign in protest.
Erm there was no treason. And you realize that if you choose to charge her anyway - then you also have to charge Colin Powel, who did exactly the same thing with HIS private mail server ?
Though I'd say charging him for his warcrimes should probably be a higher priority.
Yet another American who doesn't know the difference between the EU, EC and Eurozone.
He seems to think the EU came to be when the Eurozone was instituted with a common currency.
So to help him out:
The EU as an idea was born in 1948 after World War 2 and the long, slow diplomatic process of establishing it began then.
The precursor of the EU were the European Coal and Steel Community which was form in 1951.
In 1957 the Treaty of Rome was signed which in 1958 became the European Economic Community, which consisted of the 6 original members including Germany and France.
In 1965 the 3 market communities that made up the EEC was merged together to use a single set of institutions (courts and such) and this became known as the European Communities.
By 1973 this had enlarged significantly and in 1979 the first direct elections to the European Parliament happened.
The EU effectively reached it's current form in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union when East-Germany and other East-block nations started joining.
But in effect the EU dates back to 1948. And you may have noticed the absence of any major European landwars after world war 2 - the EU was created to avoid that, and in that regard at least, it has succeeded.
It's also weird that me, an African, seem to understand EU structures better than the parent poster - in fact the EU is one of the most democratic systems on earth. The European Parliament members are elected by voters in member nations. The EU holds referendums on any major issues allowing voters to override their representatives (in this regard it's more democratic than America where referendums are extremely rare events). Essentially the EU is much like the US Federal government with memberstate governments no unlike US state governments - but significantly more powerful and with a very direct say in EU governance, which state governments in the US don't get.
The parent poster, like so many others, confuses the EC for the EU and calls the EU undemocratic, which it decidedly is not. The EC is not democratic, but the EC is also not a government - it's an economic management commission that reports to the parliament. It's powers are strictly limited to purely economic matters: the currency, trade regulations and common standards.
In effect, the EC's closest US counterpart would be the Federal Reserve Bank and the Treasury, neither of which is democratic THERE either - because it makes no sense for such institutions to be democratic. They need appointed experts who know what they are doing, not people good at winning elections and importantly they must be run by people who don't worry about winning re-election because such institutions *have* to be able to make unpopular choices at times.
Currently the EC is pushing austerity measures very hard - all the economics say this is a terrible idea but the current set of commissioners are sold on it. There is huge public unhappiness about this. But they are able to do this, which they believe is required to keep the economy functioning, despite the opposition. Now of course, the problem with experts being able to do unpopular things is that sometimes they do things which are unpopular because they are wrong. But that's still better than doing what's popular because it's popular - a great way to destroy an economy rapidly. It's not ideal, but it's also the best system we have for these things and until somebody invents something better - every other idea is even worse.
So no, calling the EU undemocratic is fundamentally ignorant. Confusing the EC with it's extremely limited powers undemocratic would be true - but meaningless.
Mogadishu has not government to speak off. There's a group who claim to be the government but since they have no more power than any of the other corporations^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hwarlords around this claim is fairly meaningless. There's no official taxation or law enforcement to speak off anyway.
What there is, is everything the world has always had before there was taxes and police and will always have where those are absent - warlords, slavers and absolute-rule-by-the-richest - the only thing making things slightly bearable to the average person being the amount of time the rich spend fighting each other - which would be even more useful if the bullet-fodder in their wars were not you.
That said there is actually an entire continent with no government at all - not even one that only exists on paper. It's called Antarctica. Not a lot of resources, terrible farming conditions... oh and there's that international treaty to ban anybody from claiming ownership of it or try to rule it but if you can get there, it's isolated enough nobody's going to bother to come take you away by force. At least if you stay far from the few research stations in the are. You'll pretty much have to hunt penguins and seals for food and how you're going to avoid scurvy I have no idea.
So year, places without government do exist. If you can't handle them - then what makes you think everybody^H^H^H^H^H^Hanybody else wants that ?
Though, you know I was kidding about giving Obama a third term just to spite him right ?
As I understand it there are two ways. It can be done by a majority of states voting for it, or by a special convention where both state governors and congress have to attend and it needs enough votes there.
I do know that the latter version, while theoretically possible, has never actually happened. This is because technically it's significantly harder. Governors won't generally vote against the state governments so you effectively still need a majority of the states, but you also need a majority from both houses of congress as well. Special conventions are therefore harder, but, if you could do it - would be significantly faster.
Of course, not everything that becomes a constitutional amendment starts out that way. The emancipation proclamation for example spent quite some time as basically an executive order before it was replaced by an essentially identical constitutional amendment.
And the systems vary by country as well. In South Africa for example a constitutional amendment only requires a supermajority in both houses of parliament, and there have been 19 amendments in just 20 years since the final constitution was adopted. Granted, these are all fairly minor administrative stuff like changing the name of a province or moving a provincial border to put a town in a different province. The pace has definitely declined since the last election though. Before that the ANC government had a sufficiently large electoral majority that they could pass amendments entirely by themselves, nowadays they couldn't get the votes in parliament unless at least one large or several small parties agree with them. There's no way any of them would vote for term limit extensions that's for certain - hell half the ANC wouldn't want to (but probably will anyway since it's a party where your future depends entirely on voting the party line in every debate).
Actually, what studies there are, suggests left hand-driving is safer because it puts your right side facing oncoming traffic and gives the right-handed majority slightly faster reflexes when responding to problems from oncoming traffic.
That said, there is no really definitive answer either way, nothing has been proven concretely. It's true that the average accident rate is lower in left-hand-driving countries, it is also true that we can't definitively rule out other causes. It's not a question that can be easily answered and no hypotheses lends itself to really rigorous testing as you have overlaps from biology, neurology and about half the social sciences involved.
Correction: I did the math based on the working days in a year, but the actual period of overlap is only six months - so you have to cut the divisor in half, which means that, in fact all the coincidences become twice as common, so it's 36000 exact coincidences per year - and the others change the same way.
>What is your suggestion here, that there is a third agent responsible both for earthquakes and full/new moons?
Fallacy. There isn't only ONE alternative.
A correlation ONLY proves that things happened to at the same times. Nothing more. Where you have a correlation between X and Y any of the following could be true.
1) The correlation could be because X causes Y - this is the one everybody assumes
2) The correlation could *actually* be because Y causes X
3) The correlation could be because an unknown, Z, causes both X and Y
4) Unknown A and B causes X and Y respectively and but unknown Z can cause both A and B
5) Nothing. X and Y are caused by A and B respectively but there is no causal link anywhere whatsoever and the correlation is simply coincidence.
Most human intuition is that 1 is the most likely, in fact 5 is far more likely. Humans underestimate just how incredibly common coincidence actually is. See my post above about how often people get diagnosed with austism and vaccinated on the same day. 18000 times a year just in the US (and that's just the lowest number of exact ones - what people perceive as the same thing goes into the hundreds of thousands). - and it's pure coincidence. I actually show the math that proves it is coincidence. That's what the statistics actually predicts the coincidence would be if there was NO causal link.
>on a boat 201 nautical miles off the US (in international waters) and nuke them ...
You would kill every fish, octopus, whale, dolphin, narwhal and crab in a 30 mile radius?
You must really, really hate the beach.
Nah, I say strap 'em to an ICBM and launch it, set to explode in Low Earth Orbit.
With a little luck, the EMP will knock out some of their spysatelites while we're at it, and probably some Chinese ones too. ...may want to make sure you time the launch for when the ISS is on the other side of the planet though...
A third term would not be historic. It wouldnt' even match the current record. FDR served 4 terms. Term limits were only instituted after his 4th term. That also means, that should congress want to, they could remove them again.
Then again... they may just want to do that, Obama really hasn't enjoyed his time in office, I think he is very much looking forward to opening a library and retiring. I can totally see the republicans getting rid of term limits and pushing him onto the ballot now just to undermine his wish for a quiet retirement, after all they spent 8 years undermining him in every other possible way - up to and including undermining him in delicate foreign negotiations by writing to the other party to promise not to uphold the terms of any treaty once he is out of office, an act which - by the way, is illegal and amounts to treason. Why should they stop undermining him now ? He wants to retire, lets force him to serve another term.
>Then again, I'm not sure there is anything they haven't accused of having a liberal bias.
The NRA ? Actually... I'll bet there are some wingnuts who think the NRA is way too pro-gun-control.
But if I can run faster than him - I won't be charged, though it's arguably still murder.
Did you even read the quote you posted ? It literally says the OPPOSITE of what you think it says.
It says depending on the legal system it could, indeed, be declared unconstitutional by any court.
The US legal system is one of those where any court can make such a declaration. However, such findings from a lower court are only valid in the jurisdiction of that lower court, and only if it's appealed will it, after passing through all the layers reach the supreme court which is the only court that can declare it unconstitutional with nation-wide effect.
A good example is the Communist Control Act of 1954. This law banned the US communist party. A clear violation of the 1st amendment. The case was taken to court and ultimately the supreme court of Arizona declared it unconstitutional. The Eisenhower government did not appeal that decision - and with good reason, they knew they would lose. As a result the case never got to the supreme court and the act was never struck down nationwide. It's still the law in 49 out of 50 states, but the Arizona court decision stands and the act is not law in Arizona.
It's unlikely it will ever go before the court - since nobody has been prosecuted under the act in decades, there is nobody with standing to bring a case before the supreme court.
Interestingly though - it's possible for good politicians to do it themselves, though this is rare and I don't think the US has anybody like that. A good example comes from South Africa. In November 1996 parliament passed a healthcare reform bill which the president, Nelson Mandela, duly signed into law. The act contained a fatal clerical error that would, in effect, shut down many hospitals due to the words actually signed into law meaning something very different to what was intended. Now Mandela had a problem. He had signed the act before the mistake was discovered. The law was in effect and it was December. Parliament had closed for the Christmas holiday and would not reconvene until February - and the biggest road accident season of the year was about to happen - with half the hospitals hamstrung by a typo in a law. Without the option of having parliament pass an emergency amendment (since they were closed) Mandela brought a case before the Constitutional court, against himself, asking them to strike down the law an in reinstate the former law until the new year when the reform bill could be rewritten and corrected. The court agreed and struck down the case.
It is on record as Mandela v Mandela. Mandela the citizen sued himself the President to get the court to strike down the law as an emergency measure to get rid of it until it could be fixed. Granted, suing yourself is somewhat simpler for a court than most cases, what with the defendent agreeing with everything you say and pleading 'no contest'.
It is also, entirely possible, to pass a law that is perfectly constitutional in wording - but ends up being applied in a way that, while consistent with that law, is no longer consistent with the constitution.
Such cases are generally rarer since they are more complicated, but they do exist, and are often the harder ones to solve. A good example would be Texas's onerous regulations on abortion clinics which have led to a great many closing. In theory a law to regulate a healthcare provider and ensure safe service is perfectly constitutional. But the application of this law has the effect of essentially denying many people access to abortions - and it is unconstitutional for government to deny them that. It's likely that, in due course, that case will be heard before the supreme court and more than likely it will be struck down for being unconstitutional in effect, if not in word, but that could take a while.
In this case it helps that the unconstitutional effect is entirely intended and there is plenty of available evidence of that fact. Hell ending abortion is in the republican party platform - and many of the representatives who put it there are from Texas and on record as supporting it.
PS. repliers: I will not debate the morality of abortion rights with you. The example is of something that the constitution prevents the government from doing, which is being done via the trickery of passing a constitutional law with an unconstitutional effect.
Check the Fox News site. Didn't you know the government is taken everybody's guns ? No really. Bunch of jackbooted government thugs showed up at my cousin's place in Shitville Idaho and took her guns. No really. It happened. Told her the 2nd ammendment doesn't apply to an S-300 Surface to Air Missile launcher. She said she uses it to go duck hunting but would they listen ?
By this time next week you won't be able to carry an AK-47 gun into Arby's and scare the kids without some government thug showing up cause the 'owner called the police because he thought he was being robbed' and shooting you ... I mean, seriously, that's only supposed to happen to black people ! And on Friday, they'll come collect them from your house. Honest! My niecedaughter told me !
Okay. Getting serious. Just a couple of months ago a man, guilty of no crime, was pulled over in a 'routine traffic stop'. He happened to be black. He had a gun, which he legally owned. He informed the cop that he had a, legal, gun and did absolutely nothing violent - obeying the officer completely. When the officer asked for 'license and registration' he reached for it... and was promptly shot dead. All this was captured on video - we have undeniable proof of what happened. Now you would THINK that the NRA would be up in arms about this. For once there we have an example of an ACTUAL assault on gun rights - when cops shoot you for having a gun you legally own and informed them you had with you. A gun you did not threaten them with, or commit any crime with. This actually WAS an assault on gun rights (that it was yet another black man killed by a cop is another matter). ... crickets. Not a single response from the NRA. No press release. No protest. No rally. No mention on their website. Not so much as a fucking tweet.
And what
The NRA may have gotten a tiny glimmer of sympathy from me - if they were acting against genuine oppression of legitimate gun owners - all of them, that includes black people in traffic stops.
If they wouldn't stand up for him - then nothing they DO stand up for is worth protecting.
And he studies nutrition and writes about sugar containing sweets and chocolates ?
This, dear friends, is the theory of nominative inevitability at work.
To be fair, our knowledge of these things is pretty much in it's infancy. When New Horizons sent us the first close-up pictures of Jupiter recently - the single biggest shock was how varied the land is. Mountains. Valleys. All the signs of a geologically active body - and no known mechanism for what could possibly let this relatively tiny little thing far from the sun's energy be geologically active. What could power it ? Is it still active or did it merely used to be, once, long ago ?
Mars was considered geologically dead until recently - but now some evidence suggests there is still some geological activity going on. Everything we know about geology is based on Earth and almost all of it are inferred from indirect observations (mostly from seismographs and studying the layers in rocks). We have seen the magma at the plate boundaries in the oceans - but that's about the extent of direct observation of geological forces we have.
Most of the planets have magnetic fields - we have no real idea how that's possible. We actually have a fairly complete theory about Earth's magnetic field (which is very much something geologists figured out) but hardly any of the components of that is present in most other planets and some have none -yet still have magnetic fields.
Just today there is a headline about studies of moon rocks from the 1970's done with modern day spectrometers and finding things that suggests our model of the moon's formation is radically wrong and it was a much bigger impact than we previously thought.
Astrgeophysics as a science is still just beginning to explore - and we can expect major and groundbreaking discoveries that rewrite every textbook to be coming frequently for quite some time yet, simply because what we are studying is still so incredibly unknown and we're just beginning to develop the technology to study it better -a process that is likely to accelerate rapidly.
>And something being "based entirely on statistical evidence" does not invalidate or weaken anything. It is the quality of the statistical evidence, not the mere use of statistical evidence, that would invalidate or weaken a claim.
Well, in this case, that evidence is purely of correlation. Correlation does not imply causation. Now as it happens - they aren't even claiming causation and there is no reason to suspect it. The suggestion is that tidal forces can make quakes worse - and there are conceivable mechanisms that might cause that effect, this does not however prove any of those mechanisms actually happen. They could all cancel out for all we know.
What this does say is -there is reason to study more, there's something here worth further study.
Some of that study may be statistical - in which case it's important to remember the golden rule of these things: rule out all the data so far. Basically, the statistical clump you noticed, is not a valid sample in determining whether that clump matters or represents a real thing. This is where the scientific method kicks in. Based on the clump we can now predict that, in future, quakes that that coincide with new or full moons will also be more severe than quakes which do not. If that prediction holds- then we learn that there must, indeed, be some causal mechanism at play. If it does not -it means we picked an interesting but meaningless data set either deliberately or unintentionally because human brains are programmed to look for interesting patterns whether or not they exist.
Nah, that's PMS. There are more than enough people in the world, with cycles that are the same average length as the lunar cycle, that a significant number will end up correlating with it. Hence - crazy people at full moon.
Okay, so I just made that up but it's actually entirely possible. Much like the high incidence of autism diagnosis immediately after vaccination can be entirely explained by the high number of people getting vaccinated every day and the fact that autism first becomes diagnosible at around the same age - which means every day there is going to be a signficant number of people with as-yet-undiagnosed autism getting their vaccinations. Thousands actually.
Just to pick a minor nit. Photons really don't weigh nothing. They lack mass. But they do have weight. Weight is the force of gravity on something - gravity affects light (hence we get things like gravitational lensing) ergo - light has weight.
You need to learn to do estimations better. The American number is also an estimation - no exact number exists and due to how Uber operates it probably can't. You could get an exact number of how many have ever existed but right now the number of active ones would be hard to determine as it changes too often.
That said - let me correct your maths. For Uber to have the kind of response times, in as many cities as they do, considering the size of those cities and the level of demand - it's simply physically impossible for them to have less than 100-million or so drivers globally. 800-thousand is 0.8% of that - well within a reasonable margin of error for my Fermi estimation.
A hundred million employees it's big - but it wouldn't even make them the biggest employer in the world, and since they don't deem any of these people 'employees' and pay them a pittance and don't care about dealing with taxes or any of the overheads that come with employing people, it's not even a major challenge. It's only a third of the US population - and less than the employed population of the US by 17%.
The US is a big country in economic terms - but in geographic terms you're not even in the top-5 (Brazil is almost 4 times larger in surface area than the US) and in population terms you are so far down the list you barely count.
There are 1.5 Billion people in China, another Billion in India. The two most populous cities in the world is Mexico City and Sao Paulo in Brazil.
More than 70% of the people on this planet don't speak a word of English - that's just the ones who don't even know it as a second language, if you count first-language speakers only it drops to less than 20%.
The US is a geopolitical superpower - but in number of people you simply aren't an influence, and so you'll also never be an influence in anything that is derived from the number of people - such as, for example, the number of Uber drivers.
Another way to derive it. Take the known numbers. 7000 in Cape Town - population 3.4 million. 800-thousand in the US - population 350 Million. Notice the pattern there ? In both cases roughly 2000 out of every million people are an Uber driver. So that's 2 out of every 1000 people. A pattern that at least holds for the available data. That would give 200-million drivers for the world - give or take. Except we know that Uber isn't very big in China where their competition has most of the market so we can reasonably assume that they aren't as well represented there, so drop 1.5 billion of the total, and we should probably discount for cities with extremely good public transport as is found in Europe for example and assume the numbers will be lower there (it's only fair since I assumed them up for cities with worse public transport) - which if you factor it in brings us pretty close to my number of about 100-million world wide.
This is Fermi-estimation, it's a scientific technique for deriving the best possible answer from limited data - it isn't exact and it doesn't claim to be, but it's good enough for some things, like just figuring out what order of magnitude something is likely to be or say getting a rough estimate of how many Uber drivers are likely to be American.
Like I said in my first post - you need to give about a percentage point of margin of error either way. So maybe it's a bit closer to 98%, that literally does not refute my point in the least. In fact, it only proves that the actual point I made was perfectly accurate. Because the point wasn't if it's 98% or 99.99% - it was that as a percentage of Uber drivers the Americans are literally an insignificantly small amount.
It's called estimation, and since I based that estimation on the best available data - you are full of shit. Americans can be so arrogant... you seriously think your relatively tiny country of 350 million people represent more than a tiny fraction of the drivers working for a company that operates in virtually every city on earth and employs thousands upon thousands of people in each of them ?
The very idea that America may represent MORE than what I estimated is prima facie ludicrous on it's face.
Now I may be off by a fraction of a percent or so, but I am definitely much closer to the truth than you. Uber doesn't publish exact figures, all we have is the data compiled by journalists which is non-exhaustive, but they all support my estimation - while you offer nothing to support your refusal to accept it.
Extrapolation from available data is not "supposition" and it's a fucking long ass way from "making it up". It may be 99.999% or it could be 99.98% - but it sure as hell isn't very much further off what I estimated - the maths simply would not work for any significant deviation from it. All the figures I did cite are the ones for which reliable data is available. The US number is known, as is the number for Cape Town. I stated up front and clearly what my logic was, on what basis I adjusted estimates - and my calculations are as exact as anybody can possibly be.
Since you have offered absolutely nothing whatsoever to support refuting it, and I have at least some evidence supporting it - I win and until the day Uber publishes exact country-by-country stats on number of drivers so we can get the real figure, my number is by far the most likely one you will find. Either way - even when that happens it will refine my number - it would not depart radically from it, it cannot - not if uber actually exists - anything else is a divide by zero error.
I live in Cape Town South Africa. There are an estimated 7000 Uber drivers in this city, which is relatively small for Africa. There are an estimated 800-thousand Uber drivers in the US.
If a tiny city in Africa has almost 1% as many drivers as the entire USA - then that 99.99% figure seems like a very conservative estimate. I imagine the figures are significantly higher in cities and countries where car ownership is lower. Uber also is surprisingly big in poorer countries where it is frequently a major source of jobs, and transport cost reductions really matter since the cost of getting to work and back is a significant (20% or more) share of their total income.
Cape Town likely has one of the lowest rates in Southern Africa actually since it already has one of the best public transport networks on the continent between trains a high-quality buss service with dedicated lanes which are significantly cheaper than using a car (roughly 10% of the cost of JUST fuel). The number is much, much higher in bigger cities like Johannesburg where there are more commuters and the public transport networks are much more limited.
Now imagine a city like Lagos. Estimated population: 16 million people. Average income: $1.20 a day. Public transport system: non-existent. When I first visited Lagos in 2001 it was already the norm that private taxis were the primary way people commuted. Uber is perfectly placed to have essentially replaced them all there. I couldn't find a solid estimate on how many Uber drivers there are in Lagos but the one article I found stated that the number multiplied by 10 in the first 6 months since they started operations there in 2014. If that pattern held (a questionable assumption but without more data its the best we can do) that would mean the number will now be more than 40 times higher. I sincerely doubt it was less than 10-thousand to begin with.
That's just 3 cities outside the US in just one continent - there are 6 others. The odds that my number is not a massive underestimation are looking quite slim.