I have to second the recommendation for Citizen watches in terns of durability and longevity. I've eyed that model for years, but could never really justify the cost. I bought a much simpler analog Citizen watch close to 15 years ago too (just clockface with date), but for me the essential feature has been solar power. I used to buy a new cheap watch every couple years when the battery died (since it was often more of a hassle to change a battery than to just buy a new watch). But I finally decided to get one of the cheap Citizen models, and I've never desired another watch. Actually, I hate metal bands (which I find uncomfortable and skin irritating), so I've swapped leather bands a few times as they start to show wear... Now on my third band. The watch itself is still great.
I know a simple analog watch may not seem like the "nerdiest" choice, but mostly I want a watch that is reliable, durable, and I can quickly see the time on. I have to give presentations a lot, and having to turn on my phone screen periodically or walk to a computer just to see the time is annoying... And somewhat obvious to the audience. Take a watch off and lay it on a table or lectern, and you can surreptitiously glance at it from 5 feet away, and the analog hands are enough to tell you what the approximate time is. If I do need a stopwatch or timer or need to check email or schedule or whatever, I almost always have my phone on me... Which will likely have a superior interface to any watch. But to each his own...
First off, the parent post didn't say "nutritionists push starch" -- the post referred to SPECIAL INTERESTS. And the post you're responding to specifically cited the food pyramid, which was endorsed by the U.S. government and nutritionists. The base of that pyramid (i.e., the largest portion of daily food intake) was "Bread, Cereal, Rice and Pasta."
This is what one of the leading nutritionists at the USDA said later about what happened in the 1980s:
When our version of the Food Guide came back to us revised, we were shocked to find that it was vastly different from the one we had developed. As I later discovered, the wholesale changes made to the guide by the Office of the Secretary of Agriculture were calculated to win the acceptance of the food industry. For instance, the Ag Secretary's office altered wording to emphasize processed foods over fresh and whole foods, to downplay lean meats and low-fat dairy choices because the meat and milk lobbies believed it'd hurt sales of full-fat products; it also hugely increased the servings of wheat and other grains to make the wheat growers happy. [...]
Where we, the USDA nutritionists, called for a base of 5-9 servings of fresh fruits and vegetables a day, it was replaced with a paltry 2-3 servings (changed to 5-7 servings a couple of years later because an anti-cancer campaign by another government agency, the National Cancer Institute, forced the USDA to adopt the higher standard). Our recommendation of 3-4 daily servings of whole-grain breads and cereals was changed to a whopping 6-11 servings forming the base of the Food Pyramid as a concession to the processed wheat and corn industries. Moreover, my nutritionist group had placed baked goods made with white flour -- including crackers, sweets and other low-nutrient foods laden with sugars and fats -- at the peak of the pyramid, recommending that they be eaten sparingly. To our alarm, in the "revised" Food Guide, they were now made part of the Pyramid's base.
Normally I'm not a believer in "conspiracy theories," but here we have the story told by a former director of nutrition at the USDA. To my knowledge, no one has come out to contradict her account in the years since she made those claims.
You're right that we keep getting contradictory information, but the problem often isn't that the studies are bad in themselves, it's that the reporting on the study is bad.
I agree with this, but I don't quite agree with the restricting the blame as you do...
But reporters don't necessarily understand all of that, and in any case, that kind of nuanced and intelligent reporting won't sell ad time on CNN. [...] However, the far bigger problem is that most of our news outlets suck.
Etc.
That may all be true, but it's a far deeper problem than that. It's fundamentally tied up with science funding. Here's what actually happens:
(1) Researchers do research and write detailed findings. ("A correlates with B.")
(2) Researchers know that studies which get citations will help their careers, and studies that get more attention will help get them future funding. So, they include a lot of stuff in the "Discussion" section of their study that's incredibly speculative, but it makes it look like their findings will lead to a cure for cancer or something. (E.g., "We've shown correlation between A and B, but some preliminary studies show a connection among B, C, and D, and if C and D are true, then we might even have future research leading to E," where E is "curing cancer.")
(3) A university press office wants to draw attention to its faculty and its prominence as a university, so when it writes up the findings, it plays up the "MAY lead to cancer cure!" angle. The press office interviews the faculty member in charge, who gives an interview agreeing about what the study "MAY" ultimately lead to, but this gets bumped to the first paragraph of the press release, while the hedging "this is just a preliminary finding..." quote gets buried in paragraph 4 of the press release (whereas the hedging was integrated in the discussion section of the original paper). Now we effectively have the correlation between A and B buried deep in the press release, while C and D (which most people will have heard of) get the main story, and the speculation on E is foregrounded.
(4) Now science reporters finally get a crack at this. They see the university press release and its "may cure cancer!" in the first paragraph, which the mainstream news reporters now upgrade to the headline. They bury any hedging even further into the story, where few people will ever read it. They also find three other "experts" who are eager to get their names in the press, and who also present somewhat hedging statements, but the quotations are selected and broken up in ways that exaggerate the importance. In this case, A and B are now completely left out of the story (even though that's what the study measured) because average people don't know about them and wouldn't understand that. E becomes the headline, and C and D are used to support it.
So, while I agree with you that the news media is sensationalizing things, it's actually endemic to the whole process. Everyone from the actual researchers to the university press offices to the mainstream news media wants to get the study noticed.
Moreover, if you look at what actually happens AMONG SCIENTISTS is the same thing. Unless they are specialists in the particular area, they often just read the abstract of the old study, and if the original researchers includes some speculative sentence about the "broad ramifications" of the study in the abstract, the study frequently gets cited as if it PROVED this. I've seen instances of this in some fields where some "well-known" fact gets cited all the time, but when you track it back to the original study, what you actually find is a hedging very preliminary claim made in a discussion section that was never very well supported by the data (and the original researchers often explicitly hedge and SAY "more research is needed" or whatever).
I'll definitely agree with you that there are problematic elements here. And the news media is a part of it. But it's certainly not the only (and maybe not even the main) part of how bad science becomes accepted dogma.
The ignorance of looking at a 24 hour 17% drop vs a 300% 12 month raise is astounding. I would think most people who understand financial markets would not be this ignorant to call this a "crash"
For someone accusing others of being "ignorant" of financial markets, you sure have a funny way of reporting statistics. You do realize that IF you had a 300% gain, then a 75% loss would completely erase it, right? When talking about percentage gains this large, it usually helps to talk in terms of actual numerical gains or at least how much of a loss you have COMPARED TO the gain (in real numbers).
According to the first search hit I found, a year ago Bitcoin was at around $432. Yesterday, that site reported it as $1135. That's a 162% gain, not 300%. As I write this, Bitcoin is around $950. That's is indeed somewhere around a 16-17% loss in 24 hours.
But, from a clearer perspective on how we relate those two percentages, the gain for the past year was about $700. The overnight loss is so far around $185. In other words, Bitcoin lost OVER A QUARTER OF ITS YEARLY GAIN OVERNIGHT.
Is it back where it was a year ago? No. But trying to pretend that this is a minimal loss by juxtaposing numbers like 300 and 17 is disingenuous at best.
Should "people who understand financial markets" be worried at such a turn of events? Probably not. Because people who understand financial markets know that Bitcoin is right now a really bizarre investment subject to the whims of "pump and dump" investors, and there's still a lot of value locked up in some early investors who could completely crash the market if they decided to jump ship.
So, anyone "who understands financial markets" probably expects Bitcoin to be this volatile -- probably even more so. Whether a person "who understands financial markets" would consider Bitcoin a sound investment is a different question.
Our congressional leaders can't pass a law against it, it's prohibited by the constitution for the legislative branch to interfere with the executive branch in that way.
In what "way"? Please point to the passage of the Constitution that you're claiming makes this restriction. The only argument I've seen is it puts additional constraints on qualifications to be president (in addition to age 35 etc.) but that sounds pretty weak to me, since Congress can also pass laws saying the President can't commit all sorts of crimes. The issue isn't a matter of qualification (what the president does BEFORE taking office) but rather a decision to continue acting in problematic business dealings AFTER taking office.
Congress has basically plenary power to pass laws regulating the Executive as long as it doesn't hinder execution of the delegated Executive powers of Article II. There have been a number of SCOTUS rulings to this effect. Moreover, there was even a statute that basically included presidents in this sort of regulation from the Civil War through 1989 (and an attempt exempt the President when the law was recodified in 1962 under JFK was summarily rejected), but then they exempted president and VP.
It would be one thing if Congress were singling out the president for this sort of requirement (which might place an undue burden unfairly on the occupant of the office), but this is a law that applies to a multitude of government officials and serves a clear anti-corruption purpose. And there's no good argument that requiring divestment would interfere with the president's Article II powers, so I think there's little chance even a conservative SCOTUS would say such a statute is out of bounds. But who knows these days??
I think its much more reasonable to trust the opinions of major medical organizations than put stock in baseless fears pulled out the usual place.
You mean the same "major medical organizations" whose errors may be the 3rd leading cause of death in the U.S., amounting to roughly 250,000 deaths per year?
Don't get me wrong: I agree with you to the extent that I think it's probably MUCH more likely that doctors are making errors rather than deliberately killing people or letting people die. But given how few actual errors are admitted by doctors, it's hard to put the word "trust" and "major medical organizations" in the same sentence. (And yeah, I get that the reason doctors aren't more forthcoming about errors has to do with a whole bunch of legal crap and a litigation-happy culture, but the fact is that there's a lot of times when the "opinions" of "major medical organizations" screw up.)
Regardless, given the stats (which even more conservative estimates put at at least 100k deaths/year due to medical errors), I don't think it's a "baseless fear" to say that sometimes doctors may not necessarily make the best decisions for you.
By the way -- I am aware that some other countries have adopted this system already and haven't apparently seen such abuses or problems. I'm just posing some thoughts about where things COULD lead when we start changing basic assumptions like this.
I don't think presumed consent in this particular area bothers me per se, but I can imagine a lot of other issues where presumed consent would scare the living daylights out of me. Sounds like a very slippery slope.
I agree. While I too think it's somewhat silly to be concerned about ownership of body parts after death, this effectively causes ownership of the corpse (or at least parts of it) to pass to the state, unless you opt out. So while your property, finances, etc. pass to your family members by default, your own body comes under control of the state by default (who cedes it to medical professionals, it seems).
Death rituals are important to many people, especially loved ones who have to go through mourning. As the summary notes, many families DO object when it comes to this, even if they may be in favor of organ donations in the abstract. Does the state's interest in keeping other people alive outweigh the family's interest in their mourning ritual, particularly when it involves the actual physical parts of that loved one?
I'm all in favor of increasing organ donations -- making it trivial to sign up at any opportunity, etc. But what this law is effectively doing is removing ownership of the deceased person from the family and passing it to the state. I'm generally skeptical of any "opt-in" policies, and this one seems a bit worrying in terms of what it's saying legally about what the state can do.
Just to throw out some "slippery slope" possibilities -- could the government also decide that you are "opt-in" to a DNR order by default? If it would save on healthcare costs, perhaps speed up organ donation (and thus save lives), could that also be justified? If that seems extreme, how about if you're on life support in a coma? How about a persistent vegetative state? At what point can the state's interest in your organs outweigh the slim possibility you might ever wake up? Why let those organs deteriorate in that body for weeks, months, or years? What about those who don't have family members around to argue legally that organs should NOT be harvested yet?
Some of these scenarios may seem more extreme than others, but it seems like this seemingly minor "change in default" could have other legal consequences in the future in terms of how many decisions family members have control of in determining what happens to a loved one who is potentially near death. How far can the state's interest go here in superseding the wishes of the family?
Piracy is not necessarily a bad thing for the industry and the relationship between piracy and profits is complicated. The simplistic notion that every pirated copy equals a lost sale of equivalent value is demonstrably nonsense.
I absolutely agree with these statements. HOWEVER, it does not necessarily follow that since "every pirated copy != lost sale" THEREFORE "the industry isn't losing 'a lot' to piracy."
I frankly don't know how the balance works. It's complicated, as you note. But you focus solely on theatre revenues and the "experience" of going out to see a movie on a large screen. But that's definitely NOT the only place people pirate -- in fact, one might argue that substitution is the LEAST likely scenario where people will pirate a movie, not least because generally while movies as playing in theatres, pirated sources are often somewhat poor quality bootleg copies.
Comparing the movie theatre experience to downloading a bootleg poor-quality video taken in a theatre is not a fair comparison at all.
Instead, I think the somewhat more legitimate arguments for lost revenue probably come with later streaming and rentals, DVD purchases, etc. This is generally a smaller percentage of movie profits than first run in theatres, but it's still significant.
And that's why I'd argue that the headline here is definitely a bit slanted -- the bit about "despite piracy claims" isn't in TFA. And piracy -- where it does hurt anyone's profits -- is probably more of an issue when it comes to whether someone pays $3 or $5 or $10 or $20 to stream or purchase a DVD rather than simply downloading a copy online. I still agree with you that every pirated copy there STILL doesn't equal a lost sale, but there are probably a lot more lost sales there (streaming and rentals, once HQ torrents usually also make it to the web) than comparing the bootleg poor quality cam to the movie theatre experience.
All high school and elementary tenure does is mean you don't have to negotiate your contract every year, but you still can be fired for incompetence or poor performance.
What you say various significantly from state to state. There are definitely places where unions make it nearly impossible to fire teachers even for cause.
For perhaps the most infamous example, in New York City, teachers who are accused of misconduct generally spend an average of 3 years in a so-called rubber room, being paid to do nothing, before their cases are arbitrated. New York spends tens of millions of dollars each year paying hundreds of teachers to do nothing. And in many cases the teachers aren't ultimately fired.
That's an extreme example, but there are other states and municipalities which make teacher tenure quite strong. It's true that MOST teacher tenure is nowhere near as strong as college tenure, but it really varies from place to place.
I thought they claimed the original theatrical release version was destroyed
Did people claim that? I thought it was just that Lucas refused to release a HQ version of the original, because he wanted various "improvements" he had made over the years.
and would never be released in high quality
Yeah, I'm going to just say that I seriously doubt -- after all the crap Lucas has taken over the years for his tampering with various releases -- that he's going to actually release the TRUE original version in high quality. TFA makes it clear that nobody really knows what this will be:
As for the question of which version of the movie will hit the big screen in 4K if the release rumor is true, thatâ(TM)s something that has also stirred up debates among fans of the franchise....
That goes on to describe the various possibilities. I'd put the probability that Lucas is going to chance his mind now and release the original version as near 0%. Instead, he'll probably base this version on one of the more recent editions, probably with a few new tweaks and "improvements."
I always love these statements. Perhaps you live near one of the few public schools in the U.S. where ALL of the teachers are lazy bums. When I actually worked in public schools for a few years (a little over a decade ago), working at least 8-9 hour days was standard, because there was no possible way to get your grading, planning, and other random administrative work done during school hours... unless you were a terrible teacher who never assigned anything or did anything in class. (And yeah, there were some of those people I knew who were out the door with the bell every day. Most of the other teachers looked on them as slackers. The only other teachers who weren't hanging around in their classrooms for at least a couple hours after school were generally those that coached afternoon sports and activities.)
Anyhow, sure, you can doubt me or maybe your school district is different or whatever. I'd just note that there are MANY states that have major teacher shortages -- estimates are that we're now short by tens of thousands of teachers nationwide. And attrition rate is HUGE -- roughly half of new teachers leave the field within 5 years, and ~2/3 of vacancies are due to "pre-retirement attrition," i.e., people who leave the field early in their careers.
So -- here's my question: if it's such a "sweet deal" to be a teacher, why do we have so much trouble finding them, and why do so many teachers leave the field so quickly? (And, by the way, the median salary for teachers in many states is much less than 60K -- in some states median salary is barely above ~40K. Starting salary in many states is frequently in the low 30s or even high 20s.)
You may be right, but librarians have a nearly genetic imperative to prevent the loss of any book, even if nobody has read it in centuries.
I think the personal record I have for circulating books is a book that hadn't been checked out in 82 years. It was actually a really useful book which ended up providing a significant discussion in a research article I was writing -- and not just for historical interest.
Well, that's if you don't count archival sources, some of which probably hadn't been examined in significantly longer periods. But that's another story.
It's also a point of professional pride and the loss of books is at odds with their stated goals.
That's not quite true. All librarians who operate small local branches are familiar with periodic weeding. It's expected, and it's a skill that's taught to anyone with library degrees. That said, most librarians probably would prefer to keep books in stock -- even in closed storage stacks -- rather than discard them. But that's not generally feasible to do for long periods except at very large and well-funded university libraries.
No chance was given to students or faculty to buy the books. Millions of dollars of public property was destroyed. A long-standing and painstakingly collected archive was removed to solve a temporary space problem.
This sounds like something they wanted to keep quiet because they expected pushback. I've been at many university library booksales over the years where they sell off stuff they want to purge. The library makes a little money, and happy patrons take books home for cheap.
I still recall with fondness the annual booksale at my local public library when I was a kid. Some of it was purged books from the library, and a lot more were just random donations from the town. For most of the sale, prices were low (maybe $1 for a hardback, $.50 for a paperback), but then for the last hour or two on the last day they'd do $1/bag. You could get a large paper grocery bag full of books for a $1. I must have gone there for 6 or 7 years and walked away with multiple bags of books... stuff that was mostly obscure non-fiction that I'd never think of looking for (and which was mostly too obscure for the small local library to stock). Sure, I myself would purge a lot of those books within a year or two of purchase too, but I still own some of those books today... including some that contain info that's still hard to find on the internet.
It's unfathomable that a major university library would simply throw away so many books without even offering them to someone. To me, the only reasonable explanation is that the administrators who made the decision wanted to do it "quietly," because I'm sure the librarians wouldn't just want tens of thousands of books destroyed without at least offering them to faculty or students.
Geez, can you read? Look at the rest of the story. The WaPo story, in addition to a number of unnamed sources that express serious security concerns based on this incident, also has quotes from the governor of Vermont and a senator from Vermont implying that this could be have been a deliberate threat.
I agree with you that this SOUNDS much less dire than that quotes make it, but when you have various government security officials telling you it's serious and the most senior elected officials in Vermont implying that their information says it could have been a targeted hack, what exactly is the WaPo supposed to report? "We have quotes from numerous government officials that this may be a serious threat from Russian hackers, but we at the WaPo -- who don't have access to all the detailed security info here -- think all these government officials are talking BS"?
It seems like they're reporting on what they're being told by government officials, and the text of their correction seems in line with that. I agree it sounds overly inflammatory (based solely on the limited facts we know), and I'll happily join with you in condemning the WaPo for jumping the gun and reporting an active hack without enough evidence. But I also don't see much wrong with their correction based on the other information they report from what sources are telling them.
Yesterday, Washington Post ran a story that the Russians hacked our power grid.
Yep, and now that story contains a correction at the top of the page. That's what legitimate news sites do when they make factual errors. Fake news sites don't issue corrections, because their entire purpose is to make up facts.
NYT a couple days after the election reported Trump had poisoned Meghan Kelly before the first debate. Their source was Mrs. Kelly. Every other news outlet rushed to her to get details and she said that never happened.
Actually, your timeline is a bit messed up. What actually happened was that New York Magazine reported in September that "Kelly had even begun to speculate, according to one Fox source, that Trump might have been responsible for her getting violently ill before the debate last summer. Could he have paid someone to slip something into her coffee that morning in Cleveland? she wondered to colleagues." This was NOT ignored in the media, but rather spread in September as a big rumor, which Kelly did NOT address or debunk at that time.
Then a couple months later when the New York Times published a book review, it talks about a passage where Kelly recounts the SAME weird story herself where a driver repeatedly insisted on giving her coffee and then rapidly became violently ill. Why exactly she reported that story in her book is unclear, but it seems to confirm that she did find the incident suspicious, as had already been reported in major media outlets two months earlier.
The NYT book review is NOT meant to be a solid piece of "factual journalism," but rather a playful dialogue with the book. Note the repeated "We report. You decide." quip in the review, which is meant to make fun of the Fox News slogan -- and in this case meant to signal a somewhat sarcastic rendering of this story from Kelly's book:
Ms. Kelly never says outright that someone tried to poison her. (A stomach bug was going around, she notes.) But the episode spooked her enough that she shared it later with Roger Ailes and a lawyer friend of his. Foul play? Again: She reports. You decide.
After this story becomes even more viral (no pun intended) than the September one did, Kelly steps in and tweets that it really was just a stomach bug. But why did she even tell the story in the first place in the book with her suspicion (of what?)?
At best, the book critic at the NYT could be accused of "reading between the lines" about a suspicious passage in the book and reporting an old story which had appeared elsewhere that had NOT been previously debunked by Kelly... and then making a playful "She reports. You decide." joke about it.
Seriously?? Those are the best examples of "fake news" in the mainstream media you can come up with?
This is an actual fake news site. It's made up of completely bogus articles, though it looks legit and the stories may sound vaguely legit if you only read the headline and first paragraph. But it's completely bogus, and most of the stories make that clear by becoming increasingly ridiculous when you read them.
YET a number of "articles" on that satirical site have been shared hundreds of thousands or even millions of times on Facebook as if they were real news. Are you seriously going to say that a corrected article in the WaPo and a quip that echoed a pre-existing st
What's really funny is that about 90% of the things they like would fall under this umbrella, including a lot of content from the "real" media.
I really wish people would stop with this narrative, because it's a complete exaggeration and it's ignorant of the real problems for ACTUAL "fake news."
To be clear, I'm not claiming Germany's approach here is the right one, and there are people out there using "fake news" as an excuse to try to suppress legitimate content they don't agree with.
However, there is ALSO a TON of actual fake news. I don't mean mildly exaggerated news or somewhat misleading headlines that are cleared up when you read the full article. I don't mean articles that have a little bias in reporting or which choose to highlight some facts instead of others to slant in a particular way.
I'm talking about stories that assert demonstrably false facts to be true. Something like "X person did Y in city Z yesterday" when the person who wrote it knows that X doesn't exist and nobody did Y in Z.
Want an example of an ACTUAL "fake news" site? Here's one. The site tries to make itself look like CNN, but it has no affiliation with CNN. It's just a bunch of made-up nonsense. In this case, the author seems to be doing it as satire and to make money (something like a more subtle version of the Onion) -- and the author is actually rather disturbed by how often his stories get shared as if they were real news. (If you scroll down on that page, you'll actually see he has now included fake stories about how to spot fake crap on Facebook. Oh the irony.)
That site at least includes clues in most stories that make it clear that the stories are bogus if you bother reading beyond the first couple paragraphs. But many actual "fake news" outlets do no such thing -- they literally make step up with incendiary headlines because it will draw traffic.
Say what you will about the bias of mainstream media outlets -- which I completely agree are often biased in various ways -- but that's a very different thing from reporting detailed SPECIFIC FACTS that are KNOWN TO BE FALSE. Legitimate news sites that make factual errors make corrections and sometimes publish retractions. Fake news sites don't, because 99% of what they do is make up such facts.
Sorry, but this is utter bullshit, and in fact the exact opposite is true. As I said before, there are absolutely no contemporaneous accounts that speak of Jesus. Not a single one.
And again, there are literally hundreds of well-known historical figures that we could say the SAME THING about. Are you also going to go on a quest to remove them from history books on the same basis? (Homer, Pythagoras, Hippocrates, Democritus, Sun Tzu, Confucius, Socrates, etc., etc. The best you can say about most of these figures is that they MIGHT have existed as a physical person, but we don't have clear evidence. And that's a perfectly fair assessment. Yet you somehow want to claim that you can PROVE Jesus didn't exist.)
There are, however, plenty of accounts both written and physical of other well known figures who existed around the time during which Jesus supposedly lived.
Yep, and plenty of OTHER figures for which we have similar evidence to Jesus, i.e., no contemporary evidence, and only references by 3rd parties from decades or sometimes centuries later.
But not a single record ANY ANY KIND exists for a guy who (supposedly) walked on water, fed 5,000 people with "five barley loaves and two small fish", who healed the sick, cured the blind, raised a man from the dead, healed lepers, and who then died and then came back to life.
And at no point did I EVER argue that such a person existed. As I said, there was a dude named Jesus wandering around Judea in the first century or so, he was apparently killed by Pontius Pilate, and he apparently became the inspiration for folks who would later identify as "Christians." Beyond that, I think a lot of stuff is likely fabricated, as you do. BUT, we seem to have a number of sources for the dude existing.
The most reasonable explanation, the ONLY one that makes any sense at all is that he didn't exist, which is why he left not a single trace whatsoever.
I'm not going to go on with this argument, since there are plenty of better sources out there you could just be reading to realize how ridiculous this all is. But let me just point out what I consider the most serious flaw in all your "most reasonable explanation" -- we have absolutely NO ONE in the centuries after Jesus existed who made the claim that Jesus did NOT exist as an actual human.
If there were even the slightest doubt or rumor that that was true, it would be a boon not only to the enemies of Christianity (Romans, Jews, etc.), but to early Christian sects that are now described as heretics, many of which would have WELCOMED a Jesus that had no physical existence (the Gnostics, perhaps most prominently).
It takes a certain kind of hubris if you know anything about the early Christian heresy debates to look back at all of that and say that if ANYONE suspected Jesus wasn't a real "in the flesh" person that many groups would not have argued that to promote their causes.
So, at a minimum, what we do know is that within a few decades after Jesus's death, EVERYBODY -- from "mainstream" Christians to heretics to Jews who wanted to argue against this new emerging religion to Romans who persecuted them actively -- seemed to think... for whatever reason... that Jesus (called "Christ" by followers) was supposedly based on a real person. We know that to be true, based on historical evidence.
Beyond that, you can choose to believe the historical sources that would be more than sufficient for the existence of plenty of other folks, or you can doubt them and doubt the existence of many historical figures (as many scholars doubt the existence of other major historical figures like Socrates, etc.). I frankly don't give a crap. But don't go around saying you have PROOF that Jesus didn't exist.
That's completely false. In a court of law you'd throw out the case for the existence of Jesus simply because literally everyone who claims to have met him and subsequently wrote about it had a stake in whether the story was believed.
Uh, in addition to Tacitus (which you acknowledge) what about Josephus? He wasn't a Christian. He DID have long lists of all the false claimants to be a "Messiah" that went wandering around Judea in the first century (including Jesus, according to his standard for "false" messiah). At least one of his passages is corroborated in other quotations by early writers (within a few centuries), so that passage is very unlikely to be a medieval forgery/interpolation.
When someone does that in contemporary writing, we ignore them.
Again, I said repeatedly that such passages can not possibly PROVE Jesus existed (beyond a reasonable doubt, or whatever standard you want). What I said (again repeatedly) is that IF you throw out Jesus as a historical figure because of lack of evidence, you have to throw out literally HUNDREDS of other well-known figures from ancient history for lack of contemporary evidence too.
Standards for ancient sources are simply different than they would be for modern sources, because we have so few of them. I'm fine if you want to throw Jesus out of history books as a historical figure, but if you do so, please be sure to throw out a significant percentage of ancient history along with him.
Again, I don't really care whether Jesus was a "real" historical figure or not.
You spend a lot of time arguing about this for someone who doesn't care.
Actually, what really pisses me off about this debate isn't anything about Jesus. I hate conspiracy theorists. I will fight them wherever I see them. The Jesus mythicists or whatever they want to call themselves are mostly a breed of internet conspiracy theorists. As far as I know, there are only two credentialed historians with expertise in ancient history who actually have argued in favor of this theory in recent years -- the rest of legitimate historians think this is mostly a crackpot theory.... but it has gained traction on the internet just like climate skepticism and other BS.
So yeah, I do have a reason to fight about this, but it isn't the one you seem to think it might be. I don't give a crap about the historicity of Jesus -- I care about standards of history that are watered down by ignorant arguments. (By the way -- just to be clear -- at no point did I argue in favor of the miracle-working mythological Jesus... in fact, I explicitly said I was NOT trying to argue for that. I'm just pointing out that the case for some dude wandering around Judea in the first century named Jesus who served as an inspiration for the later Christian movement seems rather well-attested compared to other historical figures of the time).
Let me start with saying that I have no personal stake in whether or not Jesus was a historical figure. I don't really care about the historicity. However, I DO care about the validity of historical arguments, and you're making a statement here with certainty that is completely unjustified.
Basically, rather than objectively evaluating the evidence, you're stacking the deck unfairly against the other side. The reality is that there isn't really a way to CONFIRM the existence of Jesus after 2000 years, but using criteria applied to other historical figures from that era, Jesus has a stronger than average case for historicity. What that means is that if you're going to apply your same criteria for discounting Jesus to other historical figures, be prepared to throw out around 1/3 of the text of most textbooks with titles like "Ancient History," along with hundreds of other historical figures that we don't commonly doubt the historicity of.
There are absolutely no contemporaneous accounts that speak of Jesus. Not a single one. As far as the historical record is concerned he just did not exist. There's not a single carving, sculpture, poem, painting, drawing or mention of him from the time in which he supposedly lived.
Please reference the fraction of non-elite persons in a non-central Roman province that have such contemporaneous records at that time. Writers, aristocrats, and government officials have records of their existence. Not children of carpenters. And even for elite folks, the details are often quite sketchy and we often have to interpolate information from historians who wrote of these events a century or two later.
There is not a single mention in him in military records or dispatches back to Rome (and surely anyone who could command huge gatherings of people in a potentially disruptive province should be of interest). He is not mentioned in the records of Herodâ(TM)s court nor is he mentioned in the records of the Temple or by any Priests.
What the heck are you talking about? Do you have any sense of the small number of such records that exist today? There are no detailed accounts of "Herod's court" nor any detailed extant "records of the Temple" or writings of contemporary priests. These sorts of records simply don't exist today for the most part, and the few that do exist are incredibly fragmentary. It's not like we have some sort of "daily log" of events for Roman soldiers and "happenings at the Court and at Temple." (And we do have a number of possible references in the Talmud, though there's a lot that's unclear there.)
Surely if he was believed by some to be a prophet and others to be a false prophet some mention of the ruckus he was causing in Judean civic and religious society should have been recorded.
Unless his "ruckus" wasn't as notable as you think. We DO have evidence that there were a number of claimants of "false messiahs" who went around Judea during that era. We don't really know much about most of them, because why would we about some guy who was followed around by a small group of people who mostly did NOT "cause a ruckus" at first (recall that Jesus's message, at least as recorded, was mostly peaceful).
Anyhow, as for records aside from the Bible, there are several. First, you have Josephus, and your other reply to another post is either ill-informed or disingenuous, because while there ARE likely forgeries in Josephus (notably the Testamonim Flavianum), there are other passages that most historians accept as very likely to be genuine.
This! REading some of these posts, it would seem that some folks here want to go out and kill others to harvest their internal organs.
That's actually a classic philosophy hypothetical. Those who promote utiliarian ethics in general believe in the "greatest good for the greatest number." (There are various ways to define "good" here, but that's the gist.)
The extreme utilitarian perspective opposes the kind of ethics that has unbreakable "rules," like "Don't kill people." Instead, every situation has to be held up to the standard "What would make the greatest good for the greatest number?"
Classic objection to that stance is the hypothetical where a healthy person walks into a hospital and happens to be an organ match for 5 people who are dying. Should we kill the healthy person to save the dying folks?
I still remember sitting in an undergraduate philosophy class where two classmates tried to defend killing the healthy person -- there are actually quite a few people out there who want to actually go down that road, so it doesn't surprise me at all if people endorsed it here.
And sorry to self-reply, but I know the two answers to my final questions are likely (1) it's hard, and (2) it makes cutting-and-pasting annoying. To which I say -- (1) it's mostly hard because HTML was originally set up as a text-based medium, not a design engine, but that was a choice made in the era of modems that were creeping along just transmitting plaintext, and (2) are publishers only supposed to care about people who want to copy and paste something, or should they also care about people actually READING and whether that's an aesthetically pleasant experience?
Knuth created TeX out of frustration to help along digital-based print typography back when crappy print standards were arguably still a heck of a lot better than what most edited websites look like today. Just something to think about.
Yup. "Smart Quotes" or "Curly Quotes" were always a Typesetter's affectation, not universal, and not available in all historic Fonts. They add _nothing_ to legibility; they have no unique function. (Unlike say the m-dash and the n-dash... and nobody gives a damn about those distinctions either.)
While I don't necessarily disagree, there are loads of typographical conventions that could be similarly declared a "typesetter's affectation," just like various irregularities in spelling or grammar could just be declared a "pedantic grammarian's affectation."
There are conventions. Some of them are more useful than others. The convention regarding curly quotes is only really "useful" in a limited set of circumstances (mostly having to do with very tightly set text, where spaces are small enough that ambiguity about the direction of the quote can help parse the text).
But to the headline's question -- NO, the internet did NOT "kill" curly quotes. Standard typewriters never had them, for example. They've always been something "extra" for typographers to add into published material.
And in the grand scheme of things, I agree with you that there are much "bigger fish to fry" in terms of more meaningful typographical conventions that have fallen out of favor in the internet age, like your example of dash distinctions.
Personally, I'd point to the problem of treating all spaces alike in HTML. Yes, you can insert non-breaking spaces, thin spaces, etc. if you want, but most people don't know how -- and the few that do don't tend to bother much. This is an actual legibility issue: for example, where line breaks occur is important. If they occur in certain places, it can create confusion for the reader. Sure -- most of the time it's just a fraction of a second where your eyes skip back and you figure out what's really going on, but in most of the cases the reader can be spared those minor issues with just a few insertions of places for proper line breaks (and places to avoid them).
In general, the internet has basically killed a lot of typography, in the sense of detailed design and typesetting. Sure, it happens on some sites, but even those that seem to try hard often end up with stuff that looks like crap compared to print. (Example -- how many times have you seen drop caps that actually look right online? And yes, they can actually serve a purpose as they did in print -- they help readers quickly navigate around major sections. Without the page numbers of print, one could argue they can be MORE useful. And yes, there are other ways of doing it than drop caps -- my point is that even the sites that attempt to use them tend to look like abominations from a reasonable graphical design perspective that might include some nuance about pushing some drop caps out into the margin by a smidge or pulling in some lines subtly to flow around the letter or whatever.)
I know many people here will argue that these things don't matter. Yeah, a lot of the nuances are mostly aesthetic. But is there a reason that text can't (or shouldn't?) be pretty as well as legible? Or should we all just use black Times New Roman text on a white background with default spacing and formatting everywhere?
None of this should be read as an endorsement or criticism of Reagan on Trump, but...
I've seen this comparison several times with all the "Reagan, the actor?" jokes from the 1980s. Not so minor differences: Reagan was a multi-term governor of the largest state (California) before becoming President. Before that, he was already viewed as an important political commentator, making speeches for or against campaigns on the national scene. Before that, he was elected as president of the Screen Actors Guild multiple times, which at that time was heavily involved in politics (threats of McCarthyism, etc.).
Basically, Reagan had been on the national political scene for decades before becoming President and came in with a lot of related experience.
Again, not a criticism of Trump or whatever -- just noting the comparisons between Reagan and Trump in terms of the "surprise" that someone like them could attain the Presidency... Trump is on a different scale from Reagan.
I suppose my disappointment is not so much that I spent five minutes trying to help and my help was then rejected, it's that if that happened to me on something where I know WP was wrong before and my change was right, then clearly I can't trust other articles on subjects where I'm not an expert in case the same thing happened.
Yeah, spend a few years editing on and off (as I did, several years back), and you'll realize how common this problem actually is.
I imagine those operating WP would be the first to say you shouldn't trust WP as a primary source anyway, as I think they always have, but still, rejecting objectively correct changes damages the credibility of WP as a whole.
The problem isn't just the rejection -- since you CAN usually fight enough and escalate the situation enough to get the correct information into the article. Depending on who you're fighting, this might be rather simple or could take a detailed knowledge of Wikipedia procedure and many hours of time investment.
That's all problematic in and of itself... but the larger issue is that even if you fight to get something corrected, there is absolutely NO guarantee it will stay that way. This is a particular issue with stuff where there's a popular "consensus" on an issue, but the subject experts realized that was wrong decades ago. (This is particularly true in many humanities disciplines, like history, where stuff "everybody knows" is frequently wrong. And there are often plenty of non-specialist sources written by otherwise reasonably reputable people where you can still find the old "myths" propagated.)
So, you spend a few days and a lot of effort to get the "right stuff" in, but then a year from now some idiot comes along with some popular citations, rewrites the article, and throws out that stuff you fought so hard to get in. It's not just wasting your effort to get stuff in -- it's then committing to perpetual policing of the content. (And thus it's no wonder why many editors start getting attached to pages -- they themselves probably made some improvements over whatever idiots they kicked off years ago, so they get overprotective.)
Say what you will about the reliability of old paper encyclopedias or their bias or errors too. Sure, that stuff existed. But they didn't spontaneously generate new errors on your shelf so that you never knew whether a given article got better or worse since the last time you opened the book.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to second the recommendation for Citizen watches in terns of durability and longevity. I've eyed that model for years, but could never really justify the cost. I bought a much simpler analog Citizen watch close to 15 years ago too (just clockface with date), but for me the essential feature has been solar power. I used to buy a new cheap watch every couple years when the battery died (since it was often more of a hassle to change a battery than to just buy a new watch). But I finally decided to get one of the cheap Citizen models, and I've never desired another watch. Actually, I hate metal bands (which I find uncomfortable and skin irritating), so I've swapped leather bands a few times as they start to show wear... Now on my third band. The watch itself is still great.
I know a simple analog watch may not seem like the "nerdiest" choice, but mostly I want a watch that is reliable, durable, and I can quickly see the time on. I have to give presentations a lot, and having to turn on my phone screen periodically or walk to a computer just to see the time is annoying... And somewhat obvious to the audience. Take a watch off and lay it on a table or lectern, and you can surreptitiously glance at it from 5 feet away, and the analog hands are enough to tell you what the approximate time is. If I do need a stopwatch or timer or need to check email or schedule or whatever, I almost always have my phone on me... Which will likely have a superior interface to any watch. But to each his own...
Since when have nutritionists pushed starch?
First off, the parent post didn't say "nutritionists push starch" -- the post referred to SPECIAL INTERESTS. And the post you're responding to specifically cited the food pyramid, which was endorsed by the U.S. government and nutritionists. The base of that pyramid (i.e., the largest portion of daily food intake) was "Bread, Cereal, Rice and Pasta."
This is what one of the leading nutritionists at the USDA said later about what happened in the 1980s:
When our version of the Food Guide came back to us revised, we were shocked to find that it was vastly different from the one we had developed. As I later discovered, the wholesale changes made to the guide by the Office of the Secretary of Agriculture were calculated to win the acceptance of the food industry. For instance, the Ag Secretary's office altered wording to emphasize processed foods over fresh and whole foods, to downplay lean meats and low-fat dairy choices because the meat and milk lobbies believed it'd hurt sales of full-fat products; it also hugely increased the servings of wheat and other grains to make the wheat growers happy. [...]
Where we, the USDA nutritionists, called for a base of 5-9 servings of fresh fruits and vegetables a day, it was replaced with a paltry 2-3 servings (changed to 5-7 servings a couple of years later because an anti-cancer campaign by another government agency, the National Cancer Institute, forced the USDA to adopt the higher standard). Our recommendation of 3-4 daily servings of whole-grain breads and cereals was changed to a whopping 6-11 servings forming the base of the Food Pyramid as a concession to the processed wheat and corn industries. Moreover, my nutritionist group had placed baked goods made with white flour -- including crackers, sweets and other low-nutrient foods laden with sugars and fats -- at the peak of the pyramid, recommending that they be eaten sparingly. To our alarm, in the "revised" Food Guide, they were now made part of the Pyramid's base.
Normally I'm not a believer in "conspiracy theories," but here we have the story told by a former director of nutrition at the USDA. To my knowledge, no one has come out to contradict her account in the years since she made those claims.
You're right that we keep getting contradictory information, but the problem often isn't that the studies are bad in themselves, it's that the reporting on the study is bad.
I agree with this, but I don't quite agree with the restricting the blame as you do...
But reporters don't necessarily understand all of that, and in any case, that kind of nuanced and intelligent reporting won't sell ad time on CNN. [...] However, the far bigger problem is that most of our news outlets suck.
Etc.
That may all be true, but it's a far deeper problem than that. It's fundamentally tied up with science funding. Here's what actually happens:
(1) Researchers do research and write detailed findings. ("A correlates with B.")
(2) Researchers know that studies which get citations will help their careers, and studies that get more attention will help get them future funding. So, they include a lot of stuff in the "Discussion" section of their study that's incredibly speculative, but it makes it look like their findings will lead to a cure for cancer or something. (E.g., "We've shown correlation between A and B, but some preliminary studies show a connection among B, C, and D, and if C and D are true, then we might even have future research leading to E," where E is "curing cancer.")
(3) A university press office wants to draw attention to its faculty and its prominence as a university, so when it writes up the findings, it plays up the "MAY lead to cancer cure!" angle. The press office interviews the faculty member in charge, who gives an interview agreeing about what the study "MAY" ultimately lead to, but this gets bumped to the first paragraph of the press release, while the hedging "this is just a preliminary finding..." quote gets buried in paragraph 4 of the press release (whereas the hedging was integrated in the discussion section of the original paper). Now we effectively have the correlation between A and B buried deep in the press release, while C and D (which most people will have heard of) get the main story, and the speculation on E is foregrounded.
(4) Now science reporters finally get a crack at this. They see the university press release and its "may cure cancer!" in the first paragraph, which the mainstream news reporters now upgrade to the headline. They bury any hedging even further into the story, where few people will ever read it. They also find three other "experts" who are eager to get their names in the press, and who also present somewhat hedging statements, but the quotations are selected and broken up in ways that exaggerate the importance. In this case, A and B are now completely left out of the story (even though that's what the study measured) because average people don't know about them and wouldn't understand that. E becomes the headline, and C and D are used to support it.
So, while I agree with you that the news media is sensationalizing things, it's actually endemic to the whole process. Everyone from the actual researchers to the university press offices to the mainstream news media wants to get the study noticed.
Moreover, if you look at what actually happens AMONG SCIENTISTS is the same thing. Unless they are specialists in the particular area, they often just read the abstract of the old study, and if the original researchers includes some speculative sentence about the "broad ramifications" of the study in the abstract, the study frequently gets cited as if it PROVED this. I've seen instances of this in some fields where some "well-known" fact gets cited all the time, but when you track it back to the original study, what you actually find is a hedging very preliminary claim made in a discussion section that was never very well supported by the data (and the original researchers often explicitly hedge and SAY "more research is needed" or whatever).
I'll definitely agree with you that there are problematic elements here. And the news media is a part of it. But it's certainly not the only (and maybe not even the main) part of how bad science becomes accepted dogma.
The ignorance of looking at a 24 hour 17% drop vs a 300% 12 month raise is astounding. I would think most people who understand financial markets would not be this ignorant to call this a "crash"
For someone accusing others of being "ignorant" of financial markets, you sure have a funny way of reporting statistics. You do realize that IF you had a 300% gain, then a 75% loss would completely erase it, right? When talking about percentage gains this large, it usually helps to talk in terms of actual numerical gains or at least how much of a loss you have COMPARED TO the gain (in real numbers).
According to the first search hit I found, a year ago Bitcoin was at around $432. Yesterday, that site reported it as $1135. That's a 162% gain, not 300%. As I write this, Bitcoin is around $950. That's is indeed somewhere around a 16-17% loss in 24 hours.
But, from a clearer perspective on how we relate those two percentages, the gain for the past year was about $700. The overnight loss is so far around $185. In other words, Bitcoin lost OVER A QUARTER OF ITS YEARLY GAIN OVERNIGHT.
Is it back where it was a year ago? No. But trying to pretend that this is a minimal loss by juxtaposing numbers like 300 and 17 is disingenuous at best.
Should "people who understand financial markets" be worried at such a turn of events? Probably not. Because people who understand financial markets know that Bitcoin is right now a really bizarre investment subject to the whims of "pump and dump" investors, and there's still a lot of value locked up in some early investors who could completely crash the market if they decided to jump ship.
So, anyone "who understands financial markets" probably expects Bitcoin to be this volatile -- probably even more so. Whether a person "who understands financial markets" would consider Bitcoin a sound investment is a different question.
Our congressional leaders can't pass a law against it, it's prohibited by the constitution for the legislative branch to interfere with the executive branch in that way.
In what "way"? Please point to the passage of the Constitution that you're claiming makes this restriction. The only argument I've seen is it puts additional constraints on qualifications to be president (in addition to age 35 etc.) but that sounds pretty weak to me, since Congress can also pass laws saying the President can't commit all sorts of crimes. The issue isn't a matter of qualification (what the president does BEFORE taking office) but rather a decision to continue acting in problematic business dealings AFTER taking office.
Congress has basically plenary power to pass laws regulating the Executive as long as it doesn't hinder execution of the delegated Executive powers of Article II. There have been a number of SCOTUS rulings to this effect. Moreover, there was even a statute that basically included presidents in this sort of regulation from the Civil War through 1989 (and an attempt exempt the President when the law was recodified in 1962 under JFK was summarily rejected), but then they exempted president and VP.
It would be one thing if Congress were singling out the president for this sort of requirement (which might place an undue burden unfairly on the occupant of the office), but this is a law that applies to a multitude of government officials and serves a clear anti-corruption purpose. And there's no good argument that requiring divestment would interfere with the president's Article II powers, so I think there's little chance even a conservative SCOTUS would say such a statute is out of bounds. But who knows these days??
I think its much more reasonable to trust the opinions of major medical organizations than put stock in baseless fears pulled out the usual place.
You mean the same "major medical organizations" whose errors may be the 3rd leading cause of death in the U.S., amounting to roughly 250,000 deaths per year?
Don't get me wrong: I agree with you to the extent that I think it's probably MUCH more likely that doctors are making errors rather than deliberately killing people or letting people die. But given how few actual errors are admitted by doctors, it's hard to put the word "trust" and "major medical organizations" in the same sentence. (And yeah, I get that the reason doctors aren't more forthcoming about errors has to do with a whole bunch of legal crap and a litigation-happy culture, but the fact is that there's a lot of times when the "opinions" of "major medical organizations" screw up.)
Regardless, given the stats (which even more conservative estimates put at at least 100k deaths/year due to medical errors), I don't think it's a "baseless fear" to say that sometimes doctors may not necessarily make the best decisions for you.
By the way -- I am aware that some other countries have adopted this system already and haven't apparently seen such abuses or problems. I'm just posing some thoughts about where things COULD lead when we start changing basic assumptions like this.
I don't think presumed consent in this particular area bothers me per se, but I can imagine a lot of other issues where presumed consent would scare the living daylights out of me. Sounds like a very slippery slope.
I agree. While I too think it's somewhat silly to be concerned about ownership of body parts after death, this effectively causes ownership of the corpse (or at least parts of it) to pass to the state, unless you opt out. So while your property, finances, etc. pass to your family members by default, your own body comes under control of the state by default (who cedes it to medical professionals, it seems).
Death rituals are important to many people, especially loved ones who have to go through mourning. As the summary notes, many families DO object when it comes to this, even if they may be in favor of organ donations in the abstract. Does the state's interest in keeping other people alive outweigh the family's interest in their mourning ritual, particularly when it involves the actual physical parts of that loved one?
I'm all in favor of increasing organ donations -- making it trivial to sign up at any opportunity, etc. But what this law is effectively doing is removing ownership of the deceased person from the family and passing it to the state. I'm generally skeptical of any "opt-in" policies, and this one seems a bit worrying in terms of what it's saying legally about what the state can do.
Just to throw out some "slippery slope" possibilities -- could the government also decide that you are "opt-in" to a DNR order by default? If it would save on healthcare costs, perhaps speed up organ donation (and thus save lives), could that also be justified? If that seems extreme, how about if you're on life support in a coma? How about a persistent vegetative state? At what point can the state's interest in your organs outweigh the slim possibility you might ever wake up? Why let those organs deteriorate in that body for weeks, months, or years? What about those who don't have family members around to argue legally that organs should NOT be harvested yet?
Some of these scenarios may seem more extreme than others, but it seems like this seemingly minor "change in default" could have other legal consequences in the future in terms of how many decisions family members have control of in determining what happens to a loved one who is potentially near death. How far can the state's interest go here in superseding the wishes of the family?
Piracy is not necessarily a bad thing for the industry and the relationship between piracy and profits is complicated. The simplistic notion that every pirated copy equals a lost sale of equivalent value is demonstrably nonsense.
I absolutely agree with these statements. HOWEVER, it does not necessarily follow that since "every pirated copy != lost sale" THEREFORE "the industry isn't losing 'a lot' to piracy."
I frankly don't know how the balance works. It's complicated, as you note. But you focus solely on theatre revenues and the "experience" of going out to see a movie on a large screen. But that's definitely NOT the only place people pirate -- in fact, one might argue that substitution is the LEAST likely scenario where people will pirate a movie, not least because generally while movies as playing in theatres, pirated sources are often somewhat poor quality bootleg copies.
Comparing the movie theatre experience to downloading a bootleg poor-quality video taken in a theatre is not a fair comparison at all.
Instead, I think the somewhat more legitimate arguments for lost revenue probably come with later streaming and rentals, DVD purchases, etc. This is generally a smaller percentage of movie profits than first run in theatres, but it's still significant.
And that's why I'd argue that the headline here is definitely a bit slanted -- the bit about "despite piracy claims" isn't in TFA. And piracy -- where it does hurt anyone's profits -- is probably more of an issue when it comes to whether someone pays $3 or $5 or $10 or $20 to stream or purchase a DVD rather than simply downloading a copy online. I still agree with you that every pirated copy there STILL doesn't equal a lost sale, but there are probably a lot more lost sales there (streaming and rentals, once HQ torrents usually also make it to the web) than comparing the bootleg poor quality cam to the movie theatre experience.
All high school and elementary tenure does is mean you don't have to negotiate your contract every year, but you still can be fired for incompetence or poor performance.
What you say various significantly from state to state. There are definitely places where unions make it nearly impossible to fire teachers even for cause.
For perhaps the most infamous example, in New York City, teachers who are accused of misconduct generally spend an average of 3 years in a so-called rubber room, being paid to do nothing, before their cases are arbitrated. New York spends tens of millions of dollars each year paying hundreds of teachers to do nothing. And in many cases the teachers aren't ultimately fired.
That's an extreme example, but there are other states and municipalities which make teacher tenure quite strong. It's true that MOST teacher tenure is nowhere near as strong as college tenure, but it really varies from place to place.
I thought they claimed the original theatrical release version was destroyed
Did people claim that? I thought it was just that Lucas refused to release a HQ version of the original, because he wanted various "improvements" he had made over the years.
and would never be released in high quality
Yeah, I'm going to just say that I seriously doubt -- after all the crap Lucas has taken over the years for his tampering with various releases -- that he's going to actually release the TRUE original version in high quality. TFA makes it clear that nobody really knows what this will be:
As for the question of which version of the movie will hit the big screen in 4K if the release rumor is true, thatâ(TM)s something that has also stirred up debates among fans of the franchise. ...
That goes on to describe the various possibilities. I'd put the probability that Lucas is going to chance his mind now and release the original version as near 0%. Instead, he'll probably base this version on one of the more recent editions, probably with a few new tweaks and "improvements."
The teachers do barely work.
I always love these statements. Perhaps you live near one of the few public schools in the U.S. where ALL of the teachers are lazy bums. When I actually worked in public schools for a few years (a little over a decade ago), working at least 8-9 hour days was standard, because there was no possible way to get your grading, planning, and other random administrative work done during school hours... unless you were a terrible teacher who never assigned anything or did anything in class. (And yeah, there were some of those people I knew who were out the door with the bell every day. Most of the other teachers looked on them as slackers. The only other teachers who weren't hanging around in their classrooms for at least a couple hours after school were generally those that coached afternoon sports and activities.)
Anyhow, sure, you can doubt me or maybe your school district is different or whatever. I'd just note that there are MANY states that have major teacher shortages -- estimates are that we're now short by tens of thousands of teachers nationwide. And attrition rate is HUGE -- roughly half of new teachers leave the field within 5 years, and ~2/3 of vacancies are due to "pre-retirement attrition," i.e., people who leave the field early in their careers.
So -- here's my question: if it's such a "sweet deal" to be a teacher, why do we have so much trouble finding them, and why do so many teachers leave the field so quickly? (And, by the way, the median salary for teachers in many states is much less than 60K -- in some states median salary is barely above ~40K. Starting salary in many states is frequently in the low 30s or even high 20s.)
You may be right, but librarians have a nearly genetic imperative to prevent the loss of any book, even if nobody has read it in centuries.
I think the personal record I have for circulating books is a book that hadn't been checked out in 82 years. It was actually a really useful book which ended up providing a significant discussion in a research article I was writing -- and not just for historical interest.
Well, that's if you don't count archival sources, some of which probably hadn't been examined in significantly longer periods. But that's another story.
It's also a point of professional pride and the loss of books is at odds with their stated goals.
That's not quite true. All librarians who operate small local branches are familiar with periodic weeding. It's expected, and it's a skill that's taught to anyone with library degrees. That said, most librarians probably would prefer to keep books in stock -- even in closed storage stacks -- rather than discard them. But that's not generally feasible to do for long periods except at very large and well-funded university libraries.
No chance was given to students or faculty to buy the books. Millions of dollars of public property was destroyed. A long-standing and painstakingly collected archive was removed to solve a temporary space problem.
This sounds like something they wanted to keep quiet because they expected pushback. I've been at many university library booksales over the years where they sell off stuff they want to purge. The library makes a little money, and happy patrons take books home for cheap.
I still recall with fondness the annual booksale at my local public library when I was a kid. Some of it was purged books from the library, and a lot more were just random donations from the town. For most of the sale, prices were low (maybe $1 for a hardback, $.50 for a paperback), but then for the last hour or two on the last day they'd do $1/bag. You could get a large paper grocery bag full of books for a $1. I must have gone there for 6 or 7 years and walked away with multiple bags of books... stuff that was mostly obscure non-fiction that I'd never think of looking for (and which was mostly too obscure for the small local library to stock). Sure, I myself would purge a lot of those books within a year or two of purchase too, but I still own some of those books today... including some that contain info that's still hard to find on the internet.
It's unfathomable that a major university library would simply throw away so many books without even offering them to someone. To me, the only reasonable explanation is that the administrators who made the decision wanted to do it "quietly," because I'm sure the librarians wouldn't just want tens of thousands of books destroyed without at least offering them to faculty or students.
Geez, can you read? Look at the rest of the story. The WaPo story, in addition to a number of unnamed sources that express serious security concerns based on this incident, also has quotes from the governor of Vermont and a senator from Vermont implying that this could be have been a deliberate threat.
I agree with you that this SOUNDS much less dire than that quotes make it, but when you have various government security officials telling you it's serious and the most senior elected officials in Vermont implying that their information says it could have been a targeted hack, what exactly is the WaPo supposed to report? "We have quotes from numerous government officials that this may be a serious threat from Russian hackers, but we at the WaPo -- who don't have access to all the detailed security info here -- think all these government officials are talking BS"?
It seems like they're reporting on what they're being told by government officials, and the text of their correction seems in line with that. I agree it sounds overly inflammatory (based solely on the limited facts we know), and I'll happily join with you in condemning the WaPo for jumping the gun and reporting an active hack without enough evidence. But I also don't see much wrong with their correction based on the other information they report from what sources are telling them.
Yesterday, Washington Post ran a story that the Russians hacked our power grid.
Yep, and now that story contains a correction at the top of the page. That's what legitimate news sites do when they make factual errors. Fake news sites don't issue corrections, because their entire purpose is to make up facts.
NYT a couple days after the election reported Trump had poisoned Meghan Kelly before the first debate. Their source was Mrs. Kelly. Every other news outlet rushed to her to get details and she said that never happened.
Actually, your timeline is a bit messed up. What actually happened was that New York Magazine reported in September that "Kelly had even begun to speculate, according to one Fox source, that Trump might have been responsible for her getting violently ill before the debate last summer. Could he have paid someone to slip something into her coffee that morning in Cleveland? she wondered to colleagues." This was NOT ignored in the media, but rather spread in September as a big rumor, which Kelly did NOT address or debunk at that time.
Then a couple months later when the New York Times published a book review, it talks about a passage where Kelly recounts the SAME weird story herself where a driver repeatedly insisted on giving her coffee and then rapidly became violently ill. Why exactly she reported that story in her book is unclear, but it seems to confirm that she did find the incident suspicious, as had already been reported in major media outlets two months earlier.
The NYT book review is NOT meant to be a solid piece of "factual journalism," but rather a playful dialogue with the book. Note the repeated "We report. You decide." quip in the review, which is meant to make fun of the Fox News slogan -- and in this case meant to signal a somewhat sarcastic rendering of this story from Kelly's book:
Ms. Kelly never says outright that someone tried to poison her. (A stomach bug was going around, she notes.) But the episode spooked her enough that she shared it later with Roger Ailes and a lawyer friend of his. Foul play? Again: She reports. You decide.
After this story becomes even more viral (no pun intended) than the September one did, Kelly steps in and tweets that it really was just a stomach bug. But why did she even tell the story in the first place in the book with her suspicion (of what?)?
At best, the book critic at the NYT could be accused of "reading between the lines" about a suspicious passage in the book and reporting an old story which had appeared elsewhere that had NOT been previously debunked by Kelly... and then making a playful "She reports. You decide." joke about it.
Seriously?? Those are the best examples of "fake news" in the mainstream media you can come up with?
This is an actual fake news site. It's made up of completely bogus articles, though it looks legit and the stories may sound vaguely legit if you only read the headline and first paragraph. But it's completely bogus, and most of the stories make that clear by becoming increasingly ridiculous when you read them.
YET a number of "articles" on that satirical site have been shared hundreds of thousands or even millions of times on Facebook as if they were real news. Are you seriously going to say that a corrected article in the WaPo and a quip that echoed a pre-existing st
What's really funny is that about 90% of the things they like would fall under this umbrella, including a lot of content from the "real" media.
I really wish people would stop with this narrative, because it's a complete exaggeration and it's ignorant of the real problems for ACTUAL "fake news."
To be clear, I'm not claiming Germany's approach here is the right one, and there are people out there using "fake news" as an excuse to try to suppress legitimate content they don't agree with.
However, there is ALSO a TON of actual fake news. I don't mean mildly exaggerated news or somewhat misleading headlines that are cleared up when you read the full article. I don't mean articles that have a little bias in reporting or which choose to highlight some facts instead of others to slant in a particular way.
I'm talking about stories that assert demonstrably false facts to be true. Something like "X person did Y in city Z yesterday" when the person who wrote it knows that X doesn't exist and nobody did Y in Z.
Want an example of an ACTUAL "fake news" site? Here's one. The site tries to make itself look like CNN, but it has no affiliation with CNN. It's just a bunch of made-up nonsense. In this case, the author seems to be doing it as satire and to make money (something like a more subtle version of the Onion) -- and the author is actually rather disturbed by how often his stories get shared as if they were real news. (If you scroll down on that page, you'll actually see he has now included fake stories about how to spot fake crap on Facebook. Oh the irony.)
That site at least includes clues in most stories that make it clear that the stories are bogus if you bother reading beyond the first couple paragraphs. But many actual "fake news" outlets do no such thing -- they literally make step up with incendiary headlines because it will draw traffic.
Say what you will about the bias of mainstream media outlets -- which I completely agree are often biased in various ways -- but that's a very different thing from reporting detailed SPECIFIC FACTS that are KNOWN TO BE FALSE. Legitimate news sites that make factual errors make corrections and sometimes publish retractions. Fake news sites don't, because 99% of what they do is make up such facts.
Sorry, but this is utter bullshit, and in fact the exact opposite is true. As I said before, there are absolutely no contemporaneous accounts that speak of Jesus. Not a single one.
And again, there are literally hundreds of well-known historical figures that we could say the SAME THING about. Are you also going to go on a quest to remove them from history books on the same basis? (Homer, Pythagoras, Hippocrates, Democritus, Sun Tzu, Confucius, Socrates, etc., etc. The best you can say about most of these figures is that they MIGHT have existed as a physical person, but we don't have clear evidence. And that's a perfectly fair assessment. Yet you somehow want to claim that you can PROVE Jesus didn't exist.)
There are, however, plenty of accounts both written and physical of other well known figures who existed around the time during which Jesus supposedly lived.
Yep, and plenty of OTHER figures for which we have similar evidence to Jesus, i.e., no contemporary evidence, and only references by 3rd parties from decades or sometimes centuries later.
But not a single record ANY ANY KIND exists for a guy who (supposedly) walked on water, fed 5,000 people with "five barley loaves and two small fish", who healed the sick, cured the blind, raised a man from the dead, healed lepers, and who then died and then came back to life.
And at no point did I EVER argue that such a person existed. As I said, there was a dude named Jesus wandering around Judea in the first century or so, he was apparently killed by Pontius Pilate, and he apparently became the inspiration for folks who would later identify as "Christians." Beyond that, I think a lot of stuff is likely fabricated, as you do. BUT, we seem to have a number of sources for the dude existing.
The most reasonable explanation, the ONLY one that makes any sense at all is that he didn't exist, which is why he left not a single trace whatsoever.
I'm not going to go on with this argument, since there are plenty of better sources out there you could just be reading to realize how ridiculous this all is. But let me just point out what I consider the most serious flaw in all your "most reasonable explanation" -- we have absolutely NO ONE in the centuries after Jesus existed who made the claim that Jesus did NOT exist as an actual human.
If there were even the slightest doubt or rumor that that was true, it would be a boon not only to the enemies of Christianity (Romans, Jews, etc.), but to early Christian sects that are now described as heretics, many of which would have WELCOMED a Jesus that had no physical existence (the Gnostics, perhaps most prominently).
It takes a certain kind of hubris if you know anything about the early Christian heresy debates to look back at all of that and say that if ANYONE suspected Jesus wasn't a real "in the flesh" person that many groups would not have argued that to promote their causes.
So, at a minimum, what we do know is that within a few decades after Jesus's death, EVERYBODY -- from "mainstream" Christians to heretics to Jews who wanted to argue against this new emerging religion to Romans who persecuted them actively -- seemed to think... for whatever reason... that Jesus (called "Christ" by followers) was supposedly based on a real person. We know that to be true, based on historical evidence.
Beyond that, you can choose to believe the historical sources that would be more than sufficient for the existence of plenty of other folks, or you can doubt them and doubt the existence of many historical figures (as many scholars doubt the existence of other major historical figures like Socrates, etc.). I frankly don't give a crap. But don't go around saying you have PROOF that Jesus didn't exist.
That's completely false. In a court of law you'd throw out the case for the existence of Jesus simply because literally everyone who claims to have met him and subsequently wrote about it had a stake in whether the story was believed.
Uh, in addition to Tacitus (which you acknowledge) what about Josephus? He wasn't a Christian. He DID have long lists of all the false claimants to be a "Messiah" that went wandering around Judea in the first century (including Jesus, according to his standard for "false" messiah). At least one of his passages is corroborated in other quotations by early writers (within a few centuries), so that passage is very unlikely to be a medieval forgery/interpolation.
When someone does that in contemporary writing, we ignore them.
Again, I said repeatedly that such passages can not possibly PROVE Jesus existed (beyond a reasonable doubt, or whatever standard you want). What I said (again repeatedly) is that IF you throw out Jesus as a historical figure because of lack of evidence, you have to throw out literally HUNDREDS of other well-known figures from ancient history for lack of contemporary evidence too.
Standards for ancient sources are simply different than they would be for modern sources, because we have so few of them. I'm fine if you want to throw Jesus out of history books as a historical figure, but if you do so, please be sure to throw out a significant percentage of ancient history along with him.
Again, I don't really care whether Jesus was a "real" historical figure or not.
You spend a lot of time arguing about this for someone who doesn't care.
Actually, what really pisses me off about this debate isn't anything about Jesus. I hate conspiracy theorists. I will fight them wherever I see them. The Jesus mythicists or whatever they want to call themselves are mostly a breed of internet conspiracy theorists. As far as I know, there are only two credentialed historians with expertise in ancient history who actually have argued in favor of this theory in recent years -- the rest of legitimate historians think this is mostly a crackpot theory.... but it has gained traction on the internet just like climate skepticism and other BS.
So yeah, I do have a reason to fight about this, but it isn't the one you seem to think it might be. I don't give a crap about the historicity of Jesus -- I care about standards of history that are watered down by ignorant arguments. (By the way -- just to be clear -- at no point did I argue in favor of the miracle-working mythological Jesus... in fact, I explicitly said I was NOT trying to argue for that. I'm just pointing out that the case for some dude wandering around Judea in the first century named Jesus who served as an inspiration for the later Christian movement seems rather well-attested compared to other historical figures of the time).
Jesus never existed.
Let me start with saying that I have no personal stake in whether or not Jesus was a historical figure. I don't really care about the historicity. However, I DO care about the validity of historical arguments, and you're making a statement here with certainty that is completely unjustified.
Basically, rather than objectively evaluating the evidence, you're stacking the deck unfairly against the other side. The reality is that there isn't really a way to CONFIRM the existence of Jesus after 2000 years, but using criteria applied to other historical figures from that era, Jesus has a stronger than average case for historicity. What that means is that if you're going to apply your same criteria for discounting Jesus to other historical figures, be prepared to throw out around 1/3 of the text of most textbooks with titles like "Ancient History," along with hundreds of other historical figures that we don't commonly doubt the historicity of.
There are absolutely no contemporaneous accounts that speak of Jesus. Not a single one. As far as the historical record is concerned he just did not exist. There's not a single carving, sculpture, poem, painting, drawing or mention of him from the time in which he supposedly lived.
Please reference the fraction of non-elite persons in a non-central Roman province that have such contemporaneous records at that time. Writers, aristocrats, and government officials have records of their existence. Not children of carpenters. And even for elite folks, the details are often quite sketchy and we often have to interpolate information from historians who wrote of these events a century or two later.
There is not a single mention in him in military records or dispatches back to Rome (and surely anyone who could command huge gatherings of people in a potentially disruptive province should be of interest). He is not mentioned in the records of Herodâ(TM)s court nor is he mentioned in the records of the Temple or by any Priests.
What the heck are you talking about? Do you have any sense of the small number of such records that exist today? There are no detailed accounts of "Herod's court" nor any detailed extant "records of the Temple" or writings of contemporary priests. These sorts of records simply don't exist today for the most part, and the few that do exist are incredibly fragmentary. It's not like we have some sort of "daily log" of events for Roman soldiers and "happenings at the Court and at Temple." (And we do have a number of possible references in the Talmud, though there's a lot that's unclear there.)
Surely if he was believed by some to be a prophet and others to be a false prophet some mention of the ruckus he was causing in Judean civic and religious society should have been recorded.
Unless his "ruckus" wasn't as notable as you think. We DO have evidence that there were a number of claimants of "false messiahs" who went around Judea during that era. We don't really know much about most of them, because why would we about some guy who was followed around by a small group of people who mostly did NOT "cause a ruckus" at first (recall that Jesus's message, at least as recorded, was mostly peaceful).
Anyhow, as for records aside from the Bible, there are several. First, you have Josephus, and your other reply to another post is either ill-informed or disingenuous, because while there ARE likely forgeries in Josephus (notably the Testamonim Flavianum), there are other passages that most historians accept as very likely to be genuine.
Then you have Tacitus, one of the MOST respect
This! REading some of these posts, it would seem that some folks here want to go out and kill others to harvest their internal organs.
That's actually a classic philosophy hypothetical. Those who promote utiliarian ethics in general believe in the "greatest good for the greatest number." (There are various ways to define "good" here, but that's the gist.)
The extreme utilitarian perspective opposes the kind of ethics that has unbreakable "rules," like "Don't kill people." Instead, every situation has to be held up to the standard "What would make the greatest good for the greatest number?"
Classic objection to that stance is the hypothetical where a healthy person walks into a hospital and happens to be an organ match for 5 people who are dying. Should we kill the healthy person to save the dying folks?
I still remember sitting in an undergraduate philosophy class where two classmates tried to defend killing the healthy person -- there are actually quite a few people out there who want to actually go down that road, so it doesn't surprise me at all if people endorsed it here.
And sorry to self-reply, but I know the two answers to my final questions are likely (1) it's hard, and (2) it makes cutting-and-pasting annoying. To which I say -- (1) it's mostly hard because HTML was originally set up as a text-based medium, not a design engine, but that was a choice made in the era of modems that were creeping along just transmitting plaintext, and (2) are publishers only supposed to care about people who want to copy and paste something, or should they also care about people actually READING and whether that's an aesthetically pleasant experience?
Knuth created TeX out of frustration to help along digital-based print typography back when crappy print standards were arguably still a heck of a lot better than what most edited websites look like today. Just something to think about.
Yup. "Smart Quotes" or "Curly Quotes" were always a Typesetter's affectation, not universal, and not available in all historic Fonts. They add _nothing_ to legibility; they have no unique function. (Unlike say the m-dash and the n-dash... and nobody gives a damn about those distinctions either.)
While I don't necessarily disagree, there are loads of typographical conventions that could be similarly declared a "typesetter's affectation," just like various irregularities in spelling or grammar could just be declared a "pedantic grammarian's affectation."
There are conventions. Some of them are more useful than others. The convention regarding curly quotes is only really "useful" in a limited set of circumstances (mostly having to do with very tightly set text, where spaces are small enough that ambiguity about the direction of the quote can help parse the text).
But to the headline's question -- NO, the internet did NOT "kill" curly quotes. Standard typewriters never had them, for example. They've always been something "extra" for typographers to add into published material.
And in the grand scheme of things, I agree with you that there are much "bigger fish to fry" in terms of more meaningful typographical conventions that have fallen out of favor in the internet age, like your example of dash distinctions.
Personally, I'd point to the problem of treating all spaces alike in HTML. Yes, you can insert non-breaking spaces, thin spaces, etc. if you want, but most people don't know how -- and the few that do don't tend to bother much. This is an actual legibility issue: for example, where line breaks occur is important. If they occur in certain places, it can create confusion for the reader. Sure -- most of the time it's just a fraction of a second where your eyes skip back and you figure out what's really going on, but in most of the cases the reader can be spared those minor issues with just a few insertions of places for proper line breaks (and places to avoid them).
In general, the internet has basically killed a lot of typography, in the sense of detailed design and typesetting. Sure, it happens on some sites, but even those that seem to try hard often end up with stuff that looks like crap compared to print. (Example -- how many times have you seen drop caps that actually look right online? And yes, they can actually serve a purpose as they did in print -- they help readers quickly navigate around major sections. Without the page numbers of print, one could argue they can be MORE useful. And yes, there are other ways of doing it than drop caps -- my point is that even the sites that attempt to use them tend to look like abominations from a reasonable graphical design perspective that might include some nuance about pushing some drop caps out into the margin by a smidge or pulling in some lines subtly to flow around the letter or whatever.)
I know many people here will argue that these things don't matter. Yeah, a lot of the nuances are mostly aesthetic. But is there a reason that text can't (or shouldn't?) be pretty as well as legible? Or should we all just use black Times New Roman text on a white background with default spacing and formatting everywhere?
None of this should be read as an endorsement or criticism of Reagan on Trump, but...
I've seen this comparison several times with all the "Reagan, the actor?" jokes from the 1980s. Not so minor differences: Reagan was a multi-term governor of the largest state (California) before becoming President. Before that, he was already viewed as an important political commentator, making speeches for or against campaigns on the national scene. Before that, he was elected as president of the Screen Actors Guild multiple times, which at that time was heavily involved in politics (threats of McCarthyism, etc.).
Basically, Reagan had been on the national political scene for decades before becoming President and came in with a lot of related experience.
Again, not a criticism of Trump or whatever -- just noting the comparisons between Reagan and Trump in terms of the "surprise" that someone like them could attain the Presidency... Trump is on a different scale from Reagan.
I suppose my disappointment is not so much that I spent five minutes trying to help and my help was then rejected, it's that if that happened to me on something where I know WP was wrong before and my change was right, then clearly I can't trust other articles on subjects where I'm not an expert in case the same thing happened.
Yeah, spend a few years editing on and off (as I did, several years back), and you'll realize how common this problem actually is.
I imagine those operating WP would be the first to say you shouldn't trust WP as a primary source anyway, as I think they always have, but still, rejecting objectively correct changes damages the credibility of WP as a whole.
The problem isn't just the rejection -- since you CAN usually fight enough and escalate the situation enough to get the correct information into the article. Depending on who you're fighting, this might be rather simple or could take a detailed knowledge of Wikipedia procedure and many hours of time investment.
That's all problematic in and of itself... but the larger issue is that even if you fight to get something corrected, there is absolutely NO guarantee it will stay that way. This is a particular issue with stuff where there's a popular "consensus" on an issue, but the subject experts realized that was wrong decades ago. (This is particularly true in many humanities disciplines, like history, where stuff "everybody knows" is frequently wrong. And there are often plenty of non-specialist sources written by otherwise reasonably reputable people where you can still find the old "myths" propagated.)
So, you spend a few days and a lot of effort to get the "right stuff" in, but then a year from now some idiot comes along with some popular citations, rewrites the article, and throws out that stuff you fought so hard to get in. It's not just wasting your effort to get stuff in -- it's then committing to perpetual policing of the content. (And thus it's no wonder why many editors start getting attached to pages -- they themselves probably made some improvements over whatever idiots they kicked off years ago, so they get overprotective.)
Say what you will about the reliability of old paper encyclopedias or their bias or errors too. Sure, that stuff existed. But they didn't spontaneously generate new errors on your shelf so that you never knew whether a given article got better or worse since the last time you opened the book.