Wow. I didn't pick up any of that at all, and I RTFA. It looked to me much more like acknowledgement of widespread difficulties with randomness, scale, and human fallibility. Exactly the kinds of things that would make someone who's a staunch defender of "science as a means to truth" to disregard valuable critical information about it.
There is no longer any redemptive value. Nixon completely freed the dollar from its linkage to gold and/or silver in 1973. The dollar now represents only an IOU to return it to the Federal Reserve. In other words, it is worthless.
I don't know what sort of conscientious effort you're referring to. Historically, few tyrannies have been eliminated peacefully.
Start with raising awareness. Work toward political activism. Will it work? I doubt it. However, I do not consider it moral to advocate for violent revolution.
The arbitrary application of existing, irrelevant laws to cover actions which the powers that be find convenient to criminalize offers proof that the rule of law is dead, that people are afraid to speak and act against it, and that we now have rule by force. It will take conscientious effort by a large part of the population to peacefully reverse this disturbing trend.
Amen. My dad (who served in the marines) said that the V-22 Osprey killed more marines than most foreign militaries, but Curt Weldon kept it going as a jobs-maker patronage project in Delaware County, PA.
I'm not Marxist. I'm using dialectic in the sense of the classical Greek method of reaching truth; through critical dialogue, in which each participant proposes a statement that's possibly true, and offers the opportunity for others to question it critically.
(This response isn't for the AC -- it's for others who might get sucked into his ignorance and presuppose things about my ideas which aren't remotely true.)
I see this often, and I suspect it is an actual class of logical fallacy...
I don't think it's a class of logical fallacy. I think it's a failure to sincerely engage in dialectic, or more likely, an example of bad rhetoric.
Dialectic requires asking questions, but the questioner must be interested in the answers, and agree to them or follow-up with relevant questions.
Rhetoric, as opposed to dialectic, is more a means of suasion than a logical approach to discovering the truth, and probably what was intended here.
Note that dialectic is not widely taught in the USA, even at the college level liberal arts curricula. I suspect that has a great deal to do with the sad state of discourse.
Ok, fine, then register before voting for yourself if required in your jurisdiction. FYI a friend of mine won two elections by writing himself in (seriously - local offices no one ever ran for).
Seriously. Instead of trying to rally support for a specific 3rd party candidacy, which never works, vote for yourself. If a huge number of people do this it will be a clear strike against the existing power establishment, and show the illegitimacy of the two parties.
I wish I had mod points. Your suspicion that the reason for the high price is kickbacks indicates you are (as a colleague of mine once said) "acutely aware of office politics but lacking in any patience for it". A rare and mixed blessing.
The scenario you suggested played itself out in gross fashion at my previous job. It wasn't desktop PCs, but something that basically killed a potential line of business before it could get off the ground. I'm not sure if it's the same root problem at my current employer but I know we pay a ridiculous amount for SAN storage ($2700 for 300GB of SCSI disk???).
Until such time as business people learn how to evaluate real IT talent and hand over IT decision making things will continue to frustrate.
But really, why do you need to list #1 if you have #2?
In my part of the country (suburbs of Philadelphia), teachers get as good or better entry level pay than many other "comparable" professions, and have better job security.
I'd like to point out that low teacher salaries in, say, Mississippi, are often used as an argument for across-the-board raises for teachers, and some of our schools here are over the top expensive, and often not just because of teacher salaries but also because of a lot more "discretionary" spending on things like classroom technology that may or may not have any impact on learning is done in the name of better education.
#3 only matters for kids from lower socioeconomic groups. It's completely unnecessary for middle class students. My wife is a specialist who's worked in the schools and she's read studies that show what it comes down to is that there is a STRONG correlation between being poor and doing better the more time you spend in a classroom vs. with "family". If mom is a crack whore and her boyfriend is beating you, you'll do better away from that situation (and yes, there are large numbers of schools where that is not a rare situation). Not so much for Beaver and Wally Cleaver, whose parents make sure they have a safe environment and enriching activities (soccer, youth orchestra, reading, TV off after 9:00 PM) on a regular basis. But it is politically unacceptable to say things like this so the studies go unpublicized.
#4 is really important. The problem there is that when you get a school full of kids who don't want to learn, you can't keep decent teachers, because there's NO salary that's enough to deal with total frustration, humiliation, and assault from students and parents on a daily basis. True story - I have a friend who was assaulted by a room of 4th graders and beaten with an electrical cord (she is a petite female). #1 won't help with that...nor will #2.
Only if the crackhead parents start acting like civilized humans and insist their children do the same will that problem get fixed. So it won't. Not as long as we insist on paying for people to breed indiscriminately and then acting like we don't know why they act like animals when we try force education on them.
(This assumes the VP doesn't cancel the SAP thing to make the old VP look bad.).
Sounds like the old VP already did that when he chose SAP.
Sorry, I know it's easy to beat up on SAP, but even though I know people who work there I think they offer terrible, terrible products.
The intellectual capacity required for a reasonable skepticism seems to be escaping a larger and larger swath of the populace
It seems this way, but if you look at history it's really just that more of the population has the ability to communicate to a large audience. Modern communications haven't resulted in better quality of information--it's just made communication cheaper and more accessible.
There's no rule of law any more. Look at the issue in the Gulf: Congress limited liability in 1990, but now the Federal government sees a political opportunity and so puts pressure on BP to pay up above the legal limit. It's rule by force today, with the rules on sale to the high bidder at the moment (given that political capital is worth more to Congress than money at the moment).
If the insult were expressed in a vacuum, I would have an easier time seeing it your way.
However, I struggle with the concept that we think others should shrug this off. How much damage have Western governments done to Pakistan, invading its neighbor, interfering in its elections, and bombing its citizens? Do you think you'd find it easy to laugh off a Pakistani web site's insult of your beliefs if your relatives had been killed by a Pakistani military incursion into your neighborhood?
I'm not saying I agree with the sentiment to prosecute people for heresy, but I do think those of us with the right to free speech might use it to voice criticism of our own actions before using it to hurl insults at those we've already injured.
Regarding exporting values, you make a good point. If Pakistan has broad-based support for such a measure, they should simply cut off access to FaceBook nationwide. Self-determination, right? Just because we believe in freedom of speech (even when used to inflame and insult) doesn't mean we have to mandate that same value for them.
Also, I wonder what the people who post insulting things about someone else's religion think they're achieving. Is there any beneficial outcome from that?
But either way nobody is *required* to buy a $900 laptop. It just might be less convenient, depending on what they meant by "financial assistance".
Either the parents or the taxpayers will be required to buy a laptop. It's an unnecessary expense, because the kids can learn whatever it is they need to learn without a laptop.
There are already many independent militias in the USA which practice maneuvers and have an organized body. The government, especially the ATF, tends scrutinize them closely, even though they are legal and constitutionally protected, because modern government (really everything since Lincoln) wants to maintain a monopoly on the use of force, despite this being the very thing the framers of the Constitution wanted to avoid.
Regulated in the language of the day meant "trained", not regulated in the sense of "controlled", so the point was that the citizenry had a right to assemble in force and be prepared to defend themselves. The opposite of today where that right is denied, and the government maintains a legal monopoly on the use of force.
None of the other phrases offer any substantial confusion to most people reading it today.
2 factors? You've listed three. Or, maybe you've presented an alternative argument to my viewpoint that the digit "2" indicates an ordinal number equivalent to zero plus one plus one.
That said, you also take two concrete examples of things you dislike that are really just examples of more abstract patterns.
1) That the GOP is the only corporate body which encourages its supporters to ignore new or contradictory data.
2) That religious groups are the only corporate bodies which encourage their supporters to ignore new or contradictory data.
I wonder how you would react if you met someone who was both religious and Republican but didn't fit your preconceived notions of what members or those groups would be.
The fact is there are lots of groups which have those behaviors, and there are lots of members of both the groups you chose to highlight who do not uncritically accept the work of their group's leaders. I.e. Jesuits who are Catholics and Ron Paul who's in the GOP or Dennis Kucinich who is a Democrat.
Amen to that! And one need look no further than to present an apparently contradictory fact to someone who adheres to mainstream scientific views to observe an irrational or even angry response. Science is a process of evaluation. Noncritical acceptance of scientific work products (honest and complete work products or otherwise) is religious.
...we should secretly add one of these emitters, working at equal wattage. I hypothesize it could cause a massive drop-off in general douchebaggery and fatherless kids over the next 20 years.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow. I didn't pick up any of that at all, and I RTFA. It looked to me much more like acknowledgement of widespread difficulties with randomness, scale, and human fallibility. Exactly the kinds of things that would make someone who's a staunch defender of "science as a means to truth" to disregard valuable critical information about it.
There is no longer any redemptive value. Nixon completely freed the dollar from its linkage to gold and/or silver in 1973. The dollar now represents only an IOU to return it to the Federal Reserve. In other words, it is worthless.
I don't know what sort of conscientious effort you're referring to. Historically, few tyrannies have been eliminated peacefully.
Start with raising awareness. Work toward political activism. Will it work? I doubt it. However, I do not consider it moral to advocate for violent revolution.
The arbitrary application of existing, irrelevant laws to cover actions which the powers that be find convenient to criminalize offers proof that the rule of law is dead, that people are afraid to speak and act against it, and that we now have rule by force. It will take conscientious effort by a large part of the population to peacefully reverse this disturbing trend.
Amen. My dad (who served in the marines) said that the V-22 Osprey killed more marines than most foreign militaries, but Curt Weldon kept it going as a jobs-maker patronage project in Delaware County, PA.
I'm not Marxist. I'm using dialectic in the sense of the classical Greek method of reaching truth; through critical dialogue, in which each participant proposes a statement that's possibly true, and offers the opportunity for others to question it critically.
(This response isn't for the AC -- it's for others who might get sucked into his ignorance and presuppose things about my ideas which aren't remotely true.)
I didn't want to imply this in my original post, as I am aware that such a perspective is often seen as paranoid, but I agree with you completely.
I see this often, and I suspect it is an actual class of logical fallacy...
I don't think it's a class of logical fallacy. I think it's a failure to sincerely engage in dialectic, or more likely, an example of bad rhetoric.
Dialectic requires asking questions, but the questioner must be interested in the answers, and agree to them or follow-up with relevant questions.
Rhetoric, as opposed to dialectic, is more a means of suasion than a logical approach to discovering the truth, and probably what was intended here.
Note that dialectic is not widely taught in the USA, even at the college level liberal arts curricula. I suspect that has a great deal to do with the sad state of discourse.
Ok, fine, then register before voting for yourself if required in your jurisdiction. FYI a friend of mine won two elections by writing himself in (seriously - local offices no one ever ran for).
Thank you for your thoroughly well thought-out and sane response. We need more like this.
Seriously. Instead of trying to rally support for a specific 3rd party candidacy, which never works, vote for yourself. If a huge number of people do this it will be a clear strike against the existing power establishment, and show the illegitimacy of the two parties.
I wish I had mod points. Your suspicion that the reason for the high price is kickbacks indicates you are (as a colleague of mine once said) "acutely aware of office politics but lacking in any patience for it". A rare and mixed blessing.
The scenario you suggested played itself out in gross fashion at my previous job. It wasn't desktop PCs, but something that basically killed a potential line of business before it could get off the ground. I'm not sure if it's the same root problem at my current employer but I know we pay a ridiculous amount for SAN storage ($2700 for 300GB of SCSI disk???).
Until such time as business people learn how to evaluate real IT talent and hand over IT decision making things will continue to frustrate.
I like that you provided #2 to balance #1.
But really, why do you need to list #1 if you have #2?
In my part of the country (suburbs of Philadelphia), teachers get as good or better entry level pay than many other "comparable" professions, and have better job security.
I'd like to point out that low teacher salaries in, say, Mississippi, are often used as an argument for across-the-board raises for teachers, and some of our schools here are over the top expensive, and often not just because of teacher salaries but also because of a lot more "discretionary" spending on things like classroom technology that may or may not have any impact on learning is done in the name of better education.
#3 only matters for kids from lower socioeconomic groups. It's completely unnecessary for middle class students. My wife is a specialist who's worked in the schools and she's read studies that show what it comes down to is that there is a STRONG correlation between being poor and doing better the more time you spend in a classroom vs. with "family". If mom is a crack whore and her boyfriend is beating you, you'll do better away from that situation (and yes, there are large numbers of schools where that is not a rare situation). Not so much for Beaver and Wally Cleaver, whose parents make sure they have a safe environment and enriching activities (soccer, youth orchestra, reading, TV off after 9:00 PM) on a regular basis. But it is politically unacceptable to say things like this so the studies go unpublicized.
#4 is really important. The problem there is that when you get a school full of kids who don't want to learn, you can't keep decent teachers, because there's NO salary that's enough to deal with total frustration, humiliation, and assault from students and parents on a daily basis. True story - I have a friend who was assaulted by a room of 4th graders and beaten with an electrical cord (she is a petite female). #1 won't help with that...nor will #2.
Only if the crackhead parents start acting like civilized humans and insist their children do the same will that problem get fixed. So it won't. Not as long as we insist on paying for people to breed indiscriminately and then acting like we don't know why they act like animals when we try force education on them.
(This assumes the VP doesn't cancel the SAP thing to make the old VP look bad.).
Sounds like the old VP already did that when he chose SAP. Sorry, I know it's easy to beat up on SAP, but even though I know people who work there I think they offer terrible, terrible products.
The intellectual capacity required for a reasonable skepticism seems to be escaping a larger and larger swath of the populace
It seems this way, but if you look at history it's really just that more of the population has the ability to communicate to a large audience. Modern communications haven't resulted in better quality of information--it's just made communication cheaper and more accessible.
There's no rule of law any more. Look at the issue in the Gulf: Congress limited liability in 1990, but now the Federal government sees a political opportunity and so puts pressure on BP to pay up above the legal limit. It's rule by force today, with the rules on sale to the high bidder at the moment (given that political capital is worth more to Congress than money at the moment).
If the insult were expressed in a vacuum, I would have an easier time seeing it your way.
However, I struggle with the concept that we think others should shrug this off. How much damage have Western governments done to Pakistan, invading its neighbor, interfering in its elections, and bombing its citizens? Do you think you'd find it easy to laugh off a Pakistani web site's insult of your beliefs if your relatives had been killed by a Pakistani military incursion into your neighborhood?
I'm not saying I agree with the sentiment to prosecute people for heresy, but I do think those of us with the right to free speech might use it to voice criticism of our own actions before using it to hurl insults at those we've already injured.
Regarding exporting values, you make a good point. If Pakistan has broad-based support for such a measure, they should simply cut off access to FaceBook nationwide. Self-determination, right? Just because we believe in freedom of speech (even when used to inflame and insult) doesn't mean we have to mandate that same value for them.
Also, I wonder what the people who post insulting things about someone else's religion think they're achieving. Is there any beneficial outcome from that?
But either way nobody is *required* to buy a $900 laptop. It just might be less convenient, depending on what they meant by "financial assistance".
Either the parents or the taxpayers will be required to buy a laptop. It's an unnecessary expense, because the kids can learn whatever it is they need to learn without a laptop.
There are already many independent militias in the USA which practice maneuvers and have an organized body. The government, especially the ATF, tends scrutinize them closely, even though they are legal and constitutionally protected, because modern government (really everything since Lincoln) wants to maintain a monopoly on the use of force, despite this being the very thing the framers of the Constitution wanted to avoid.
Regulated in the language of the day meant "trained", not regulated in the sense of "controlled", so the point was that the citizenry had a right to assemble in force and be prepared to defend themselves. The opposite of today where that right is denied, and the government maintains a legal monopoly on the use of force.
None of the other phrases offer any substantial confusion to most people reading it today.
2 factors? You've listed three. Or, maybe you've presented an alternative argument to my viewpoint that the digit "2" indicates an ordinal number equivalent to zero plus one plus one.
That said, you also take two concrete examples of things you dislike that are really just examples of more abstract patterns.
1) That the GOP is the only corporate body which encourages its supporters to ignore new or contradictory data.
2) That religious groups are the only corporate bodies which encourage their supporters to ignore new or contradictory data.
I wonder how you would react if you met someone who was both religious and Republican but didn't fit your preconceived notions of what members or those groups would be.
The fact is there are lots of groups which have those behaviors, and there are lots of members of both the groups you chose to highlight who do not uncritically accept the work of their group's leaders. I.e. Jesuits who are Catholics and Ron Paul who's in the GOP or Dennis Kucinich who is a Democrat.
Amen to that! And one need look no further than to present an apparently contradictory fact to someone who adheres to mainstream scientific views to observe an irrational or even angry response. Science is a process of evaluation. Noncritical acceptance of scientific work products (honest and complete work products or otherwise) is religious.
It might be worth applying the LilyPond adjustment algorithms in his framework. Their stuff looks decent enough to be usable.
...we should secretly add one of these emitters, working at equal wattage. I hypothesize it could cause a massive drop-off in general douchebaggery and fatherless kids over the next 20 years.