Talk pages are your friend in these cases. If you post a rationale for your correction there, some experienced editor might be able to intervene and set things straight, or at least start a resolution procedure to gather opinions from more people.
Yeah, that works sometimes, particularly on articles that are popular enough that various editors might monitor them. If it's something too obscure and you happen to come up against a "king of the hill" situation against some editor, good luck. That was the final straw about when I stopped trying to improve Wikipedia -- I'd long since given up actually trying to write new content due to continuous warring over stuff that didn't matter (and, worse, once a situation was apparently "resolved," a few months or a year later, some jerk could come along and trash the whole thing and start up the controversies again). I basically gave up after an ADMIN had an edit war with a bunch of obviously much more knowledgeable users... who weren't even trying to delete his (preposterous) perspective; just trying to add other viewpoints to the article to make it less biased.
Anyhow, after that I did still occasionally make a minor correction where I saw a factual error -- ALWAYS accompanied by a Talk Page note, because I saw how many edits tend to be summarily reverted for no reason.
Than a few times that didn't work. Once I had an editor even try to report my IP as being highjacked for no apparent reason just because I had cited evidence that disagreed with the article. (That was in a case where I hadn't even EDITED the article -- I just brought up some proposed ideas to fix it on the Talk Page. Eventually, I contacted some admins and they stepped in to calm things down.)
After a few times of such nonsense, I got pretty frustrated. The last straw was about an article talking specifically about the text of a primary source. I altered the article slightly to delete misleading info and made a note on the Talk Page. Edits were summarily reverted. I fixed it again and put literally a DOZEN citations on the text of the primary source on the Talk Page. This time the "king of the hill" figured he'd try a different strategy and just waited two weeks, thinking I'd probably just forget about it. Then he/she posted "unsupported edits reverted" in response on the Talk Page and changed it back.
I don't have time for that sort of crap. I don't have time to run to admins to fix obscure -- but clear -- errors and enter into some sort of conflict resolution... which could ultimately be undone 2 years down the line by some other idiot who just happens upon the page and wants to "fix" it again.
Until Wikipedia adopts a "stable" version system of some sort for pages that have achieved consensus and figures out some way to take into account ACTUAL editorial expertise on a subject when it's offered, I will never contribute again. As far as I can tell, it's a shrinking community of hardcore wackos who are more interested in having policy debates whenever someone threatens their "policed content" than actually improving content.... meanwhile, all the time the "barbarians are at the gates" in terms of vandals, people making malicious or paid or distorting edits, etc., and it's only getting worse.
In such a culture, it's bound to breed paranoia and people struggling to revert any changes on their work. I completely get why they do it -- because it's a defense mechanism in an utterly broken system. That doesn't mean I want to take part in it.
I'd even go so far as to encourage subtle vandalism on Wikipedia (though I can't bring myself to do so), because the faster we draw attention to its foundational issues, the faster it might actually be abandoned for a better system or the public will wake up to how much crap is going on "beneath the surface." Reform is no longer possible within the system, if it ever was -- studies on the issue showed that Wikipedia coalesced as a bureaucracy very early, with ongoing debates o
You've given a great example of what's wrong with the modern world.
Because somebody might prefer to make use of idle time in a different way from you?
But get the fuck off your high horse lecturing to the rest of us.
Where do you see a lecture? I'd suggest you go back and re-read the post you replied to. I read it simply as someone who decided to make some changes in his own life, and was posing a few questions to others that he found helpful. At no point in the post do I see any commands or declarative sentences saying, "If you don't spend your free time learning 10 languages, you're an idiot!"
Did you read a different post from what I did? Because I just heard someone stating their opinion. You're stating yours. Why so defensive? And I didn't hear "vacuous hole of waste" applied to downtime in general -- it seemed to me to be a critique of stupid video games people play on their phones.... which can easily BE a "timesuck" for a LOT of people. (Again, I'm not judging people's choices, here... but in some respects arguing in favor of phone video games is AGAINST "brain downtime." I enjoy just sitting peacefully and thinking in my downtime sometimes... rather than the continuous phone stimulation some people seem to just give into all the time nowadays.)
And the thing is -- GP wasn't even saying "downtime is bad." He explicitly says he still "cut it down to 3 shows/week." Maybe that's adequate for him. Maybe his "relaxation" comes from exercise. Maybe it comes from doing the kinds of activities he suggests. I'm also the sort of person who finds intellectually stimulating "downtime" to be more fun than sitting on a couch watching some rerun of a stupid sitcom. I'm NOT judging -- if someone else needs that for their own sanity, that's great.
I am ALL for "moderation" in life and for finding time "for yourself" in whatever form feels good for you. GP seems to have discovered that he was feeling about his downtime for some reason. Maybe he was a couch potato and that made him depressed, overeating, whatever. Maybe what he's doing now makes him feel better.
For me, if I'm watching too TV rather than reading books or learning languages or learning some new math exercises or whatever, it generally means I'm depressed. I know this from experience.
But I also know that I have a job that I mostly find enjoyable and not particularly stressful. I completely understand other people may need to "unwind" a bit more, and most people don't seem to like intellectual engagement in their "downtime." That's great for them.
Anyhow, I'm not sure what prompted your crazed response. Maybe you were just in a bad mood, or maybe your defensiveness comes from something deeper. But I'm all in favor of "work/life balance" and I think people who insist on working huge numbers of hours to be "the most productive" is silly... and often likely to lead to the sort of regrets in a few decades you discuss. But GP's talking about what he finds makes him feel good about himself in HIS downtime. He obviously feels better about what he's doing now than what he used to, and he just wanted to share. Why not be happy for him?
To me, this exchange sounds like a fat guy who came along and said, "You know, I realized I didn't need all this food. It was a lot of empty crap calories to eat a slice of cake. And do you really NEED that cake? In 10 years, when you look back, will it have made you feel that better? I started eating mostly vegetarian with a few slices of bacon per week, and I"m feeling better for it. I stopped eating a lot of pies and cakes, and I'm feeling good." And then you come along and start yelling, "Stop lecturing us! It's okay to have pie when you need it -- you need to strike a dietary balance!"
I think the real issue isn't formal education but vocational towards jobs that are needed and offer a formal retraining when such jobs go out of date.
Agreed. One of the main problems with our educational system in the U.S. is that we've gone from a bifurcated rich/poor track system to something that's worse at serving both groups.
You go back a century or so, and most of the people went to high school were upper-class or upper-middle-class folks who were bound for college (or at least bound for things like office work which was more about abstract knowledge and learning skills than practical physical skills and specific career knowledge). A large percentage of the rest of the population left formal school sometime between 4th and 8th grade and got a job -- often apprenticing or something like that at first. By the time the rich folks had their diplomas and were ready for college, the poorer folks had a set of practical vocational skills under their belts. Obviously there were still problems (not to mention less social mobility), but the educational system at least was structured to target different aims.
Over the past century, we seem to have shifted general secondary education from a kind of "college prep" default to accommodate a broader population. My take on this is that we made a huge social "correlation != causation" mistake in thinking that high school, college, and formal education in general were what made people rich, which in fact in the past it was mostly the rich people tended to send their kids to college for historical reasons having to do with class divisions and the assumed educational models for different classes, etc. Poorer people aspired to send their kids to more school in the hope that it would make them rich, when in reality most people who used to go to these schools just happened to be rich already.
And of course there is often a benefit from more formal education, but the reality is that not everyone is cut out for it. And I'm not merely talking about intelligence here -- there's a lot of cultural assumptions that used to be wrapped up in what higher education was for, and we've now abandoned many of those assumptions.
The net result is that we've turned secondary schools from general prep for more abstract thinking and college into general knowledge programs, and we've turned college from training in abstract thought and broadening ideas into glorified trade school programs (with a few "general ed" and "distributed electives" courses that many students resent having to take). We've retained the institutional structure and many of the flawed pedagogical methods, but we've unmoored the system from its original purposes... so it no longer is good at serving most students.
This is my roundabout way of saying we need more vocational training and apprenticeships and whatever. And we need to realize that while college traditionally was supposed to prepare people for a life of intellectual contemplation (or whatever), it hasn't really done that in some time for many (most?) students. Instead, it's become a generally less effective version of career-training.
So what we really need to do is focus better on this vocational training and then re-training as necessary. We need to stop pretending that sending your kid to 2 or 4 years of college will magically get them a job, or that they'll somehow be prepared intellectually to just "figure out" how to do a different career if the first choice doesn't work.
Most people just can't do that very well. It doesn't necessarily have to do with lack of intelligence... it's just that, except for very abstract intellectual stuff, most people learn job skills best by doing that job and having practical training. Even the older idealized form of higher ed doesn't really prepare you to make those sorts of shifts, and the newer career-focused one isn't going to allow you to easily shift between them.
Or just as well, hire Stephen Fry, then you could have the voice of Jeeves.
If we're going to go English, my personal choice would have been Brian Sewell -- unfortunately he died last year (and he'd never be caught dead OR alive doing such a thing). If you don't know him, watch a YouTube video or two. The guy came across as the most pretentious ass -- excuse me, arse -- in all of the UK (though I often found him to be unintentionally hilarious to listen to), and he was widely known as the only person in Britain with a more posh accent than the Royal Family.
But his posh accent and condescending tone would be absolutely hilarious in something like this.
I do not EVER and will not EVER need a "responsible" party to get in between me and information, right or wrong. I'm sad so many people disagree with that, but if they want to only view whitewashed information, then that is there choice.
First, let me just note that Google IS already "getting in between you and information." You're accepting that its search ranking algorithms are a useful way of culling information for you, which means you're accepting the implicit "values" of that algorithm. E.g., sites that have more links often get ranked higher. By using a search engine, you're accepting that distortion of the raw data -- perhaps some folks want a search engine that will help them find stuff that is NOT so well-known or highly linked. (I doubt that would ever work, but still...) Google is NOT privileging that type of information for you.
In any case, I'm not sure the argument here is that people should be allowed to view "only whitewashed information." I think the argument is what happens if the top Google results are all links to factually inaccurate (but convincing, if you don't know anything) BS?
And what happens if a feedback loop starts as one such site gets more hits and links because it's the most popular, then two, then 5, then 10. And eventually the first page of Google hits is populated by false BS?
If you think this can't happen, it already does, though mostly in less insidious ways. For example, there are lots of supposed "facts" about well-known historical events that are known to be false, but they continue to be conveyed in pop history and other popular books and such. Academic history journals may have a consensus that these facts are false, but the popular "memory" of them continues on.
In most cases, this stuff isn't really a "big deal." But it does threaten to create a self-reinforcing loop over time. If sites are ranked by popularity, and the top 10 hits ignore academic journals and just reference the popular consensus, then eventually the top 20 or the top 100 hits could just be about popular consensus.
And it becomes an even greater problem with things like Wikipedia, which tend to cite commonly accessible sources, rather than things like academic journals. Other sites refer to Wikipedia. Scholars who aren't particularly informed within that specific discipline get lazy and just read Wikipedia, and several other top Google hits, and then they basically state the popular idea in a book. Wikipedia cites that book. And on the loop goes.
The inevitable result of ranking internet searches (and knowledge itself) only by some form of popularity is that it will become harder for minority views -- even those well-supported by evidence -- to "break through" and be available to a wider audience. Paradoxically, your position can likely lead to even more suppression of new ideas and "groupthink," unless an idea catches the wave of a new "meme" or other popular whim.
I'm not saying I have a solution to all this. But there's a reason why people over the ages often fear the "tyranny of the mob" -- what's most popular isn't always what's best. When it comes to knowledge, what's "popularly known" isn't always what's true. I'm not in favor of deleting or de-indexing any information or sites from Google's database, and any skewing of search algorithms is obviously open to abuse. But finding a way for "true" things to float to the top of searches and for demonstrably "false" things to be less prominently ranked -- no matter which is more "popular" -- seems a good aim.
It is very clear that described problem is malfunction of search ranking algorithm, you don't fix it by making it impossible to find offending searches, you fix it by making it rank result appropriately.
And just how do you propose to create a "ranking algorithm" that fixes this? Granted, we don't know all the details of Google's ranking system, but we do know something about it. We know Google depends on number and quality of links to pages to help determine the ranking and importance of pages.
Any such system is not going to converge to "truth" -- it will converge to popularity. If Holocaust deniers become popular enough and share their information enough, any ranking system that depends on popularity will inevitably rank the untrue links higher.
So how do you fix it? You'll either need to simply decide for the algorithm in individual cases that some things are actually "true" and others aren't, so that you tweak the search to give better results.
Or, you choose a third-party arbiter of "truth" (or multiple such sites). But how does that work? Any set of third-party sites is likely only going to have a tiny fraction of links to "reputable" sites, so Google can't exactly depend on those without potentially skewing results away from hits that may actually be popular and still reputable. If you had a sufficiently advanced AI algorithm, I suppose it could somehow "learn" what is true from these "reputable" sites and then see whether other popular sites conform... but I don't think we have any AI algorithms that are anywhere close to doing that consistently.
And even if you do these things, you're still skewing results based on sources you're going to choose to privilege, whether you're skewing the results directly or filtering them through chosen 3rd-party sources somehow.
Anyhow, I don't really see how you can create a "truth-o-meter" without at some point actually telling the search engine what is true and/or where to explicitly "find" truth.
Oh and by the way, I agree it shouldn't be "impossible to find offending searches," but exactly how do you create an algorithm that ensures untrue information ends up at a lower rank?
And yet....they/you (Christians) always quote Leviticus when it comes to homosexuality
To be fair, the standard Christian theology for the past couple thousand years was the Jesus nullified most of the "Old Law" by introducing a "New Covenant." That's why Christians ever since the first century didn't obey the manifold Levitical laws, including, for example, dietary restrictions that conservative Jews still follow.
The disconnect happened sometime around the early 19th century when a bunch of ignorant bible-thumpers basically created modern "Fundamentalism," which no longer was interested in consistent theology, and only chose the biblical passages it liked (e.g., condemning homosexuality from Leviticus) while ignoring the rest (e.g., the hundreds of other Levitical laws which are no longer observed).
The more consistent conservative Christians who actually subscribe to traditional Christian theology don't start with Leviticus. They point to New Testament passages mostly in the letters of Paul (which some have argued are vague in various ways), and only bring in Leviticus as a historical reference point to show supposed consistency in the condemnation of homosexuality.
But those New Testament passages are vague (according to some), leading a number of more liberal Christian denominations to ignore them completely -- hence the "mainline Protestant" acceptance of homosexuality and homosexual unions in recent years (many Methodists, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, UCC, etc.) as the broader culture also accepted it. See this list. Granted, that's a minority of Christians, but it's not an insignificant list.
I'm all for condemning the intellectually dishonest and ignorant bible thumpers who quote a few random Old Testament verses while ignoring most of the rest of the Old Testament. But that's only one segment of Christianity in general, and a relatively new strand in the history of the religion. Yes, of course Christianity traditionally condemned homosexuality, as did most Western society in general. Most of the largest Christian denominations continue to condemn it. But when the theologically consistent ones do it, they start with Paul and the New Testament.
I'm not saying that makes it any better... just noting the way the traditional argument goes. If you read early Christian writers (in the first few centuries of the church), they inevitably cite Paul on this issue, not Leviticus.
If so, it would mean anyone who buys a computer and installs Linux Mint (non-South Carolina version) on their PC has now broken the law.
Hey, don't knock Linux Mint South Carolina edition! Actually, it's known in the South as the Linux Mint JULEP edition. I've been using it ever since Version 1.0 ("Anti Abolition"), though it really only came into its own in the third version ("Commendable Calhoun"). The recent LTS versions ("Slightly Secessionist" and "Somewhat Segregationist") are really terrific!
You do have to get used to the quirks, though. I used to use the Gnome edition, but South Carolina deprecated that, since it sounded too much like "genome," and that sounded too close to evolutionist talk. I tried the new desktop environment OPPOSITE-SEXED-SPOUSE (the equivalent of MATE), but ultimately I decided to go with the KKKDE edition.
There are some cool South Carolinian features, such as:
-- "Tux" the Linux penguin is replaced by Cocky the USC Gamecock mascot.
-- The GIMP has a boot-up image of Preston Brooks caning Charles Sumner in the U.S. Congress, with Sumner limping away on his gimpy leg.
-- LibreOffice isn't... quite so "libre," if you know what I mean.
-- In honor of the Baptist teetotalers, WINE is renamed SWEET TEA.
-- My favorite feature -- the messenger Pidgin automatically converts your messages to appropriate creole dialects for the state. Main choices include "Gullah," "Redneck," and "Antebellum Plantation Owner," but if you insist on keeping your standard modern English, there's a selection "Godless Cityfolk" for you.
The "whole point" of the electoral college is not to block a winner that the college doesn't like.
True. That's a BS claim created out of a misreading of Federalist 68, promoted recently by people like Lawrence Lessig and the so-called "Hamilton Electors." I'm not going to bother rehashing all of this here, because I already explained Federalist 68 in detailed historical context in a post here.
The main effect has always been to elevate the voice of lower population centers.
Well, that's partially true. But if that were the main concern of the Founders, they could have just had Congress pick the President. Or they could have just assigned a set of weighted abstract "votes" to states based on Congressional representation numbers. Instead they chose to have actual Electors. Why? Again, I already explained it before in posts here and here.
For those who need a TL;DR explanation...
Basically, the Electoral College was conceived by the Founders at a time when political parties didn't exist and they couldn't imagine consensus over any candidates extending much beyond state borders. So, they first thought of having people on the national political scene (e.g., Congress) select the President, but they were afraid of corruption. So they came up with this wacky system of the Electoral College which was both designed in very specific (and arcane) ways to make regional candidates "float to the top" (you'll have to read my previous posts to understand how) AND put that power of in the hands of Electors who held no government office (and thus were less likely to collude or be corrupted). They built in all sorts of safeguards to prevent this collusion among Electors, which is why (among other things) they meet in separate states instead of all together.
Anyhow, the entire system was basically rendered useless with the emergence of political parties in 1796. It served some vague function for the next few decades, but became completely useless by the 1820s when most states adopted "general ticket" party-chosen slates of electors, rather than independent free thinking educated folks selected by the states to choose the President.
All of these other more modern justifications for the existence of the Electoral College are post hoc and don't take into account the situation the Founders were originally in.
Oh, in my final sentences I forgot the last possibility, i.e., that >90% of the previous "skeptics" had either died, stopped publishing for some other reason, or changed their minds between 2011 and 2013. I suppose that's possible, but that doesn't follow the trends Cook observed of a much more gradual growth of consensus despite fairly overwhelming evidence being collected in the early 2000s.
I first wanted to say thank you for holding your scientific position here in the face of ignorant objections. it always astounds me how people believe that the consensus among scientists is either a massive conspiracy or some sort of hugely biased poll where the objectors never get a voice.
With all that said, I took a few minutes to read your linked article. Something is a little "fishy" in that figure, based on the other articles cited. For example, he cites a 2010 study that claimed to find 2.5% of the top 200 climate researchers "as ranked by expertise (number of climate publications)" were "unconvinced by the evidence." That's 5 climate scientists just out of the top 200 -- and those 200 were apparently the most published folks.
How do we square that with the article's claim to only find 5 articles TOTAL (with 4 authors) -- out of the ~70,000 he claims to have looked at -- which show evidence of rejecting the hypothesis? The article further claims that these 5 articles were only ever cited once, implying that they don't have a strong reputation.
These claims seem a bit contradictory. If we are to believe the present study that there are only ~4 scientists who are skeptical (and apparently have minimal unpopular publications), how did the 2010 study find 5 skeptical scientists just among the 200 most published climate scientists??
Granted, the present article was done with publications a few years later, so some skeptics may have changed their minds (or died or whatever), but something doesn't quite add up here to get the 99.99% figure.
Also, this article apparently accepts "clear statements of rejection or that some process other than AGW better explains the observations" as the only evidence of "rejection," while lumping together all other articles in the "positive" group. I agree with the article's critiques of previous methods that just ignored all articles which didn't declare a "for or against" explicitly -- that also seems stupid. And I agree with the author that the vast majority of those which don't declare explicitly "for" AGW probably do still adhere to the theory. But that doesn't justify calling ALL articles without "clear statements of rejection" to be authored be scientists who adhere to the theory with no reservations.
And when we look back at Cook et al. (2013), we find 78 abstracts and 124 authors "reject AGW" explicitly and 40 abstracts/44 authors are "uncertain on AGW." While Cook found a gradual increase in the acceptance numbers over time (about +0.1%/year), he still was estimating it at ~98% in 2011, compared to ~97% over the 20-year period examined. Did these ~168 skeptical authors simply vanish in 2-3 years for your article's data? Have the criteria used to justify classifying a paper as a "rejection" been raised?
I didn't go digging through all the supplementary data to Cook, but from a graph of their data over time, it looks like they examined roughly 1500-1700 papers from 2011, which given their reported percentage of 98% acceptance in 2011 would imply somewhere around 30-35 papers Cook et al. found just in that year alone. But by 2013-14 of your cited study, that number fell to 2.5/year for a much larger sample (~12,000 articles/year).
The numbers don't quite mesh between these various studies, even if you take into account the rational criticisms of previous studies.
Basically, I'm mostly with you and the author of this article in that consensus is at least 97% and probably quite a bit more. But there's some flimsy argumentation being made here... either that, or the previous studies that claimed to have found a slightly higher percentages of objectors were fundamentally flawed in simply COUNTING the "rejections" in some way (even though the author doesn't argue that the previous data was outright false or something on that order).
I see a lot of in-recent-decades cultural shifts that can easily explain a rise in depression.
I wouldn't exactly dispute the gist of your claims, but I think the relevant psychological factor has little to do with your trends.
People in the past may not have divorced as much, but how much has infidelity actually risen? How much has "kids being raised in broken homes" risen compared to, say, rate of child abuse if you go back more than a couple generations? People used to whip their kids. You had pre-adolescents working in coal mines. Everybody (including kids) used to be basically slightly inebriated most of the time, back when water was frequently unsafe and the carrier of disease... so drunken beatings were pretty much normal.
Family situations were undeniably a lot worse back in the "good ole days." Even in the 1950s or whatever "golden age" of the American middle class family you might imagine from Leave it to Beaver, a significant number of people were taking some sort of crap for a "pick me up" that we'd conflate with drug use today.
Main difference: we didn't TALK about this stuff as much, outside of town gossip. We lamented the stories of the folks "on the other side of the tracks," and those people lamented the stories of the REALLY poor folks they knew. Today, we all lament our own situations.
Or, you talk about leaders as if corruption in politics were new. 'Twas always thus, but perhaps we didn't TALK about it as much.
Or, you talk about the decline of middle class numbers. Yeah, it's a bad trend. But, if we're going to talk about history, even most "poor" people in a place like the U.S. today are living with conditions leagues ahead of the "middle class" a couple centuries back.
I'd bet if you took a bunch of middle-class American folk and took them back to the 17th century and let them even lead a reasonably "upper-class" life then, a significant number would just commit suicide within a year... whereas the 17th-century folks were perfectly happy with what they had.
Why would anyone expect depression rates to go down in an environment like this?
I wouldn't exactly expect depression rates to go down, but I do think they're rather unpredictable based on objective living conditions of a population. There have been quite a few studies looking at "happiness" in more "primitive" cultures around the world and realizing that satisfaction and happiness have relatively little to do with anything objective, and a lot to do with your own perception of your life and the world around you.
Your post is a good example of the way narratives of cynicism and outright pessimism have taken over the way many people perceive themselves and their lives today. They turn on the news and they don't hear "Murder rate continues 1000+-year trend downward!" or even that murder rates or child abduction rates or whatever have fallen a lot in the past couple generations. Instead, they hear about bad stuff happening today or this week or this year. CONSTANTLY.
I am NOT arguing that we just bury our heads in the sand and ignore the news, but there is a lot of truth in the statement "Ignorance is Bliss."
If you thought about your examples a little more, you'd realize this is even encoded in your own "data." Why do people get divorced so often today, for example? Generally, it's because they claim to be "unhappy," and they think doing something else will make things better. Except the data shows they are MOSTLY WRONG. Divorce rates for second marriages are something like 66%; divorce rates for third marriages are close to 75%.
If people actually knew what "made them happy" and were capable of seeking it out rationally, the divorce rate should go down with more experience in marriages. Instead it goes up.
The issue is that people are not objective about their own experiences. They are mostly incapable of making objective assessments of how their sit
You do realize you're talking about the internet, right? Anybody can be hiding behind a pseudonym, and pseudonyms can always be hacked or hijacked. While I'm not at all defending the actions here of editing posts, having blind trust anywhere that a pseudonymous forum is conveying "truth" or co nsistency in sources or whatever is always dicey.
Granted you can't do a perfect job, and at some point you're taking away more liberty than, statistically speaking, you're saving.
It's easy to quantify at least some of these things. For example, let's take the TSA. Let's forget all the various abuses of the system, "lost" (or stolen) items, how Americans are forced into indignities that past generations would have found outrageous, etc.
Let's just focus on time. I remember going through airport security before 9/11. Yes, there were sometimes long lines, but it was frequently quick and easy. Now, let's just say the TSA adds on 5 minutes per traveler over the old security methods, which I think is overly generous to the TSA, but let's run with it. (It also doesn't take into account how most people now feel that have to arrive at the airport a LOT earlier than in the past, just in case security is slower that day. Really, we're probably losing more like 15-30 minutes, maybe more, due to that increased planning.)
On average, the U.S. has served approximately 800 million air travelers per year since 2001. Over 15 years, that's about 12 billion passenger trips. 5 minutes wasted in TSA security is 60 billion minutes of lost time.
Now, suppose we had a terrorist event and people were killed. How much time would be lost to those victims? Let's be generous and say 50 years/person is obliterated on average if they are killed. Taking just waking time of 16 hours/day or so, that comes out to about 17.5 million minutes of life lost if someone's killed in a terror attack.
Collectively, since 9/11, we've probably lost the collective "lifespans" of around 3500 people just waiting in line... and that's a conservative estimate.
Now -- obviously people will say, "That's an unfair comparison -- if someone dies, all sorts of really bad stuff can happen to the family, etc., so it's not reasonable to compare loss of life to just loss of time waiting in line." That's true. But those 5 minute inconveniences also add up. Sometimes people miss flights. Sometimes people forget items (or have items taken away) in security that were intended as gifts or to bring job to family members during a trip, or just to enhance someone's life or avoid inconvenience in more minor ways. I personally know someone who missed seeing his mother before she died because he showed up to airport security and (in his rush) had forgotten ID, so he missed his flight. It was emotionally devastating for him.
Could the negative effects created by that lost time for ~3.5 MILLION traveler trips waiting in a TSA line add up to the bad stuff suffered just by the family members of ONE person who dies prematurely, as I'm calculating here? It's tough to say, but looking at 3.5 million trips through the TSA line, I can bet there are number of pretty dire situations that occur too, due to security delays.
Okay, but say you still aren't willing to buy that analogy that the freedom in time we're losing is equivalent to more "victims" in lifespans lost than 9/11. How about ACTUAL deaths, indirectly caused by the TSA? For example, it is well-known from polling data and studies that there ARE a greater number of people who choose to travel by car rather than by plane since 9/11 to avoid security at airports -- whether they're actually annoyed at the security or just because it introduces significant delays that now makes car travel more reasonable for shorter trips.
But auto travel is much more dangerous than air travel. Various attempts have been made to quantify the number of extra deaths that could be attributed to this, and some studies have suggested as many as 500 extra deaths per year, though I think that sounds excessive.
But the point isn't what the actual numbers are -- statistically, we KNOW that more people make that choice to avoid airport security after 9/11, and we KNOW that auto travel is riskier, so there have been some deaths... very likely more deaths than the TSA has apparently prevented (a
when he thinks that "you all wanted to be spied on by us" is going to get much agreement from the public.
Yeah, the scary thing is that while the majority of Americans disagree, polls consistently show a rather huge number of people DO agree with the spying. Pew research found 42% of Americans approve of government collection of personal data, and when you ask a more generic question, like whether our anti-terrorism policies have "not gone far enough" vs. "gone too far restricting civil liberties," you'll see the majority of Americans saying we haven't gone far enough.
Of course, part of this has to do with how you frame the questions, and MOST of it has to do with how ignorant the American public still is about what this spying really entails. As John Oliver famously showed during his process of interviewing Edward Snowden last year, if you ask people, "Should the government be allowed to see nude pictures of you" sent by email or phone or whatever, we'd probably get near 100% agreement against the NSA policies. But it's not generally framed in those terms.
(By the way, whatever you think of Snowden or John Oliver for that matter, you should watch this interview. It's scary how quickly the American public has completely forgotten about Snowden, completely misunderstands what he did and what the surveillence program is actually about, etc.)
"They are doing exactly what our nation has asked them to do to protect us. They are the heroes."...
I also think this misunderstands the word "hero." Normally we don't equate the word "hero" with "doing exactly what we ask" of someone. A hero is generally somebody who goes beyond what the normal person would do -- who aspires to nobler intentions, greater achievements, unusual bravery, courage in the face of overwhelming odds, etc.
I don't mean to take anything away from those who do public service -- whether military, police, firefighters, paramedics, teachers, etc. Most of them are admirable people, but does just "showing up for work" qualify them to be "heroes"? I think there's some modern slippage in meaning that tends to say "yes," but that's not what the word "hero" has traditionally meant.
I'm sure there are some NSA people who are legitimate "heroes" in the traditional sense -- people who go far beyond what an average person might do, or what we'd ask a reasonable person to do, in service of the U.S. And I laud their efforts.
But just because "our nation asked" a number of NSA folks to spy on people in unconstitutional or illegal ways doesn't make their actions right, let alone "noble," and certainly not "heroic." Even in the service of "protecting us." And even IF you agree with the spying, it STILL doesn't make most people who just do their job "heroes," especially if they aren't doing anything particularly courageous, etc.
Shame on this NSA Director for co-opting the language of heroism to try to legitimize his own bad actions and decisions. It is a nefarious distortion and appropriation of the term that detracts from the legitimate heroes who serve us in all sorts of ways.
I think we're only beginning to see the karmic backfire from that win. Clearly they didn't just sacrifice a few goats to overcome the curse -- given the other events of 2016, I think the Cubs (or their fans) made a deal with the Prince of Darkness himself or something.
However, many independent artists would leap at the change to sign with a label, since 10% of something is better than 100% of nothing.
THIS. People always make the mistake of looking at high revenues that big-name artists get and dream of doing that themselves.
But that's kinda like dreaming of playing for the NBA or NFL or whatever -- sure, it happens, but the 99% of the kids out there playing high school sports will never have a chance at those sorts of salaries.
It is common for creative people to assume that they create the only value that matters, and that marketing, promotion, and distribution are all worthless.
Exactly. There's this new myth of "YouTube-o-genesis" -- just put your stuff up on YouTube, and users can "discover you," and then you start raking in the big bucks, no labels or whatever needed.
And yes, that HAS happened. But for every sudden "YouTube sensation," there are 10,000 people out there who are uploading stuff that gets 5 views only from their friends. And among those 10,000 unlucky people are usually loads of talented folks... they just need some help getting attention.
Labels can still be a path to help that (though they're not the ONLY path). Getting a few percent of revenue from a label that actually promotes you, gets you gigs, etc., is likely a lot better than the beer money people chip in when you just sing at the local karaoke bar.
And I hate the RIAA's abusive copyright tactics as much as anyone else here, and I'll be the first to criticize labels that do bring in large revenues for their executives and staff, but pay a pittance to artists. Nevertheless, they CAN still serve a function, and thus many independent artists still DO sign on.
Really? So I just got a 'raise' at work from deflation, somehow that is demotivating?
Here's the fallacy -- how long do you think that "raise" will last in a persistent deflationary economy? Prices are going down, because monetary value is going up. That means corporate revenues go down. People with large amounts of money invest much less, because an investment would have to have a LARGE rate of return to actually be worthwhile... otherwise, you just hide your money under your mattress.
So, fewer investors, decreasing prices... corporate revenues go down. And somehow you think get to keep you "raise" at your current salary in deflated dollars?? Fat chance. Eventually, they need to start decreasing your salary -- probably even more than to keep "pace" with deflation, because of the decreased revenues. Or they just start laying people off.
But that's only the tip of the iceberg. Why would you buy property in a deflationary economy, when it is likely to be a depreciating asset? Loans become nearly impossible to justify -- banks would still have to charge interest on them to justify them, which means you're throwing money at a depreciating asset, while the principal of your loan and your payment sizes effectively grow due to deflation. And given the depreciating value of assets, banks are likely to require additional insurance fees in case of default (a lot more than they have on risky mortgages today).
People stop trying to get loans to open new businesses. Investors stop financing them, unless it's basically a "sure thing," since they can "make money" just stashing their cash away. People stop taking out loans for basic things like real estate and houses.
"But," you say, "Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe people should learn to save up more before buying a large purchase." Okay, except who do they rent from in the meantime if they don't take out a mortgage on a house? The people owning rental property face the same difficulties in maintaining a rationale for owning it. If it's decreasing in value, along with other goods, rents will eventually be driven down too (along with the decreasing salaries). Why invest in maintaining property? -- it's just throwing money at a continuously depreciating asset.
If you're a landlord in such an economy, the best strategy is probably to dump your property now and get more money out of it while you still can before its value decreases further.
And we can go on and on. People hoarding cash and dumping most other investments leads to economic stagnation, then worse. Eventually this results in a deflationary "spiral" and the economy tanks.
Oh sure, throughout all of this SOME people will still invest and spend money, but it becomes increasingly hard to justify.
People who support deflation generally never think through even the basic next steps in their logic. They just think they'll magically have "higher salaries" coming from somewhere to spend on cheaper goods. That doesn't happen in real economies. The only people steady deflation is good for are people who have giant money bins already. For everybody else, you'd be much better off with the 1-2% mild inflation and actually having a more active economy.
They would not even seek to stop it, considering the value of 1-2% per year "normal" (that's a tax on wealth, BTW).
Small amounts of inflation are NOT a "tax on wealth." I suppose you might consider it a "tax on money you hide under your mattress."
But in the real world, mild inflation encourages people with wealth to get that money out from under their mattress and invest it somewhere or do something with it.
Deflation, on the other hand, encourages hoarding of money, which means investments have to have much larger returns to seem worthwhile, so most people prefer to just keep their money "under their mattress." And why buy anything unless you need it right NOW? If you wait a year, it will be effectively "cheaper" since the value of your money has grown.
Basically, deflation means economic activity decreases significantly, which means EVERYBODY loses except for those who have huge amounts stuffed under their mattresses.
There are some folks under the mistaken impression that deflation will be good even for normal folks, since their money will buy more. Except do you really think your salary can stay the same in a consistently deflationary economy? Fewer people are investing or buying anything, which means economic activity goes down, which means less revenue at a lot of companies. That means the average Joe either is looking at a salary decrease to "keep pace" with deflation (actually likely more than that, due to the effects of decreased economic activity overall, which depress revenues) or else they just start firing people.
Staying at a steady "0" (no inflation or deflation at all) is nearly impossible. So, yes, government policy tends to try to stay stable at a low inflation rate, which both gives a mild buffer to the rate (avoiding the dangers of deflation) and gives a mild encouragement to investors to keep pumping money out, rather than hiding it under the mattress. Having a slight preference for economic activity over inactivity benefits us all significantly.
Unless you have a giant money bin full of enough to keep you going for the rest of your life already, you likely would do much WORSE in a deflationary economy than having mild 1-2% inflation with its supposed "tax."
Why are we calling this "fake" news instead of "incorrect news" or "wrong news" or "wacko conspiracy theory"?
Because "fake news" has a very clear meaning that should be apparent to anyone who knows what the word "fake" means. Where do you use the word "fake"? You use it in places where something that is known to be false by the originator has the appearance of truth.
That's different from "wrong" or "incorrect" because those can result from simple errors. "Fake" implies that the person who creates the "news" KNOWS it's fake.
Fake news can have lots of different motivations.
-- It can be satire or parody, like the Onion.
-- It can be produced by people who just want to make money -- as it apparently were in this past campaign by some Balkan teens (who are hawking this fake news just like people hawk fake watches or "designer" purses).
-- It can be deliberate propaganda, made up by someone with a particular perspective intended to energize (or outrage) other people with that perspective.
-- It can even be a hoax created by those who want to embarrass their opponents by getting them to "take the bait" and then reveal that it's BS all along (again, something that multiple people have admitted doing to try to sabotage the past election).
All of these things are encompassed by the clear and unambiguous word "fake," i.e., something KNOWN TO BE false that looks like the real thing.
There are lots of folks who have been reading headlines about "fake news" recently and assuming it's about something else -- e.g., partisan sites spreading biased propaganda. But that's NOT FAKE NEWS. That's opinion or biased reporting or whatever. It may have its own problems, but biasing or distorting news by selectively choosing what to report or how to report it is NOT FAKE NEWS.
Actually making something up and knowingly publishing something literally false ("Person X did Y in city Z" when you know that didn't happen) *IS* fake news.
If AI makes people obsolete, who will those companies peddle their wares to, and obtain income from?
Here's an even better question, given the headline:
If CEO's believe AI makes people irrelevant, does that imply AI will make CEOs obsolete too? (Setting aside the obvious quip that "CEO aren't really people.")
Given that there are various studies over the years showing that CEOs don't necessarily provide significant benefits to corporations (e.g., studies have shown that CEO pay does not correlate well with company performance, past CEO performance does not correlate well with future results, etc., to the point that some have wondered if it's mostly random chance whether a given CEO succeeds -- studies that attempt to quantify the chance component vs. the skill component in CEO performance seem to indicate the CEO's performance is only a few percent out of the total factors) -- then isn't that an argument for putting an AI in the CEO chair??
After all, even a lowly janitor can clearly point to clean floors at the end of the day to prove his worth to a company. CEOs seem to lead to mediocre performance or even declines about as often as they lead to successes, and those ups and downs are pretty unstable over the course of a career. (And if you get one "down" that's just too much, they give you the golden parachute, and it's off to the speaking circuit.)
By the way, I'm not at all questioning the fact that many CEOs are smart people or whatever. I'm saying that markets are volatile, and CEOs who are determining a future course are navigating uncertain "waters," just like stock pickers and fund managers -- another group who has been shown, overall, to rarely exceed chance in terms of success as a collective group (or over long enough periods of time). If anything, the critical function of a CEO is to provide "leadership" by making it look like there's a steady, clear course... but whether that course needs to be determined by somebody with a seven-figure salary vs. an AI vs. a magic 8 ball... I'm not so sure.
I agree with what the parent says here, but two other basic issues I'd point out in terms of "how Linux is better" are:
(1) Choice. I'm not talking about distros necessarily, which sometimes seem to fragment the Linux community unnecessarily. I mean just choice in general about what to install, how to manage it, how to use it, etc. I've definitely noticed a trend in software over the past 15 years or so to HIDE or outright DISABLE more and more choices.
Linux is sometimes criticized for TOO much choice -- too many configuration options, etc. But there are, well, choices in Linux (distros, desktop choices) that hide a lot of that stuff if you want. But if you WANT to be a "power user" and configure exactly what's on your system and how it works, you can.
(2) Support for lesser hardware. To me, this is a HUGE deal, because there are loads of cheap computers (both desktops and laptops) today that you can get for a few hundred bucks, sometimes less. And they're perfectly functional for the basic stuff that most people do 95% of time -- email, web browsing, basic documents, etc. Compared to hardware specs computers of 10 or 15 years ago that did the same stuff, they are hugely advanced, and a large number of people who don't do significant processor-heavy tasks simply don't need more.
But often these cheap computers come with the latest Windows release and other bloated software that just serves to slow them down. Or, even if they work well for the first year or so, various "updates" and "patches" and just the accumulated crap on a Windows system slow the system to a crawl.
With Linux, I'm able to pull a 10+ year old laptop out of my closet, install a modern, up-to-date OS with up-to-date security patches and support, and it runs well. Yeah, I'm obviously not talking about people who need advanced gaming support or complex video editing or whatever -- but if you just need a basic cheap system, Linux has plenty of options for you.
That's actually where it has shined for friends and family I've recommended it to. They have a computer that's 2 or 3 years old and just seems to be "slow." They ask me for advice for buying a new one -- and I have to tell them. "Well yeah, you COULD get that cheap laptop for only $300, but it's probably going to run slow out of the box. So you might want to spend a bit more." Or, I can just say, "Here -- install Linux, then see what happens." And now their old computer will work for several more years.
To me, that's one of the little-discussed aspects of what makes Linux better for some people. Over the years, it has literally saved me thousands of dollars, just by not having to buy more expensive hardware or upgrade just to run the latest bloat put out by Microsoft. That cost savings alone (even setting aside the cost savings of using free application software, etc. too) is not insignificant.
Slashdot Mirror
Talk pages are your friend in these cases. If you post a rationale for your correction there, some experienced editor might be able to intervene and set things straight, or at least start a resolution procedure to gather opinions from more people.
Yeah, that works sometimes, particularly on articles that are popular enough that various editors might monitor them. If it's something too obscure and you happen to come up against a "king of the hill" situation against some editor, good luck. That was the final straw about when I stopped trying to improve Wikipedia -- I'd long since given up actually trying to write new content due to continuous warring over stuff that didn't matter (and, worse, once a situation was apparently "resolved," a few months or a year later, some jerk could come along and trash the whole thing and start up the controversies again). I basically gave up after an ADMIN had an edit war with a bunch of obviously much more knowledgeable users... who weren't even trying to delete his (preposterous) perspective; just trying to add other viewpoints to the article to make it less biased.
Anyhow, after that I did still occasionally make a minor correction where I saw a factual error -- ALWAYS accompanied by a Talk Page note, because I saw how many edits tend to be summarily reverted for no reason.
Than a few times that didn't work. Once I had an editor even try to report my IP as being highjacked for no apparent reason just because I had cited evidence that disagreed with the article. (That was in a case where I hadn't even EDITED the article -- I just brought up some proposed ideas to fix it on the Talk Page. Eventually, I contacted some admins and they stepped in to calm things down.)
After a few times of such nonsense, I got pretty frustrated. The last straw was about an article talking specifically about the text of a primary source. I altered the article slightly to delete misleading info and made a note on the Talk Page. Edits were summarily reverted. I fixed it again and put literally a DOZEN citations on the text of the primary source on the Talk Page. This time the "king of the hill" figured he'd try a different strategy and just waited two weeks, thinking I'd probably just forget about it. Then he/she posted "unsupported edits reverted" in response on the Talk Page and changed it back.
I don't have time for that sort of crap. I don't have time to run to admins to fix obscure -- but clear -- errors and enter into some sort of conflict resolution... which could ultimately be undone 2 years down the line by some other idiot who just happens upon the page and wants to "fix" it again.
Until Wikipedia adopts a "stable" version system of some sort for pages that have achieved consensus and figures out some way to take into account ACTUAL editorial expertise on a subject when it's offered, I will never contribute again. As far as I can tell, it's a shrinking community of hardcore wackos who are more interested in having policy debates whenever someone threatens their "policed content" than actually improving content.... meanwhile, all the time the "barbarians are at the gates" in terms of vandals, people making malicious or paid or distorting edits, etc., and it's only getting worse.
In such a culture, it's bound to breed paranoia and people struggling to revert any changes on their work. I completely get why they do it -- because it's a defense mechanism in an utterly broken system. That doesn't mean I want to take part in it.
I'd even go so far as to encourage subtle vandalism on Wikipedia (though I can't bring myself to do so), because the faster we draw attention to its foundational issues, the faster it might actually be abandoned for a better system or the public will wake up to how much crap is going on "beneath the surface." Reform is no longer possible within the system, if it ever was -- studies on the issue showed that Wikipedia coalesced as a bureaucracy very early, with ongoing debates o
You've given a great example of what's wrong with the modern world.
Because somebody might prefer to make use of idle time in a different way from you?
But get the fuck off your high horse lecturing to the rest of us.
Where do you see a lecture? I'd suggest you go back and re-read the post you replied to. I read it simply as someone who decided to make some changes in his own life, and was posing a few questions to others that he found helpful. At no point in the post do I see any commands or declarative sentences saying, "If you don't spend your free time learning 10 languages, you're an idiot!"
Did you read a different post from what I did? Because I just heard someone stating their opinion. You're stating yours. Why so defensive? And I didn't hear "vacuous hole of waste" applied to downtime in general -- it seemed to me to be a critique of stupid video games people play on their phones.... which can easily BE a "timesuck" for a LOT of people. (Again, I'm not judging people's choices, here... but in some respects arguing in favor of phone video games is AGAINST "brain downtime." I enjoy just sitting peacefully and thinking in my downtime sometimes... rather than the continuous phone stimulation some people seem to just give into all the time nowadays.)
And the thing is -- GP wasn't even saying "downtime is bad." He explicitly says he still "cut it down to 3 shows/week." Maybe that's adequate for him. Maybe his "relaxation" comes from exercise. Maybe it comes from doing the kinds of activities he suggests. I'm also the sort of person who finds intellectually stimulating "downtime" to be more fun than sitting on a couch watching some rerun of a stupid sitcom. I'm NOT judging -- if someone else needs that for their own sanity, that's great.
I am ALL for "moderation" in life and for finding time "for yourself" in whatever form feels good for you. GP seems to have discovered that he was feeling about his downtime for some reason. Maybe he was a couch potato and that made him depressed, overeating, whatever. Maybe what he's doing now makes him feel better.
For me, if I'm watching too TV rather than reading books or learning languages or learning some new math exercises or whatever, it generally means I'm depressed. I know this from experience.
But I also know that I have a job that I mostly find enjoyable and not particularly stressful. I completely understand other people may need to "unwind" a bit more, and most people don't seem to like intellectual engagement in their "downtime." That's great for them.
Anyhow, I'm not sure what prompted your crazed response. Maybe you were just in a bad mood, or maybe your defensiveness comes from something deeper. But I'm all in favor of "work/life balance" and I think people who insist on working huge numbers of hours to be "the most productive" is silly... and often likely to lead to the sort of regrets in a few decades you discuss. But GP's talking about what he finds makes him feel good about himself in HIS downtime. He obviously feels better about what he's doing now than what he used to, and he just wanted to share. Why not be happy for him?
To me, this exchange sounds like a fat guy who came along and said, "You know, I realized I didn't need all this food. It was a lot of empty crap calories to eat a slice of cake. And do you really NEED that cake? In 10 years, when you look back, will it have made you feel that better? I started eating mostly vegetarian with a few slices of bacon per week, and I"m feeling better for it. I stopped eating a lot of pies and cakes, and I'm feeling good." And then you come along and start yelling, "Stop lecturing us! It's okay to have pie when you need it -- you need to strike a dietary balance!"
Education != intelligence
I think the real issue isn't formal education but vocational towards jobs that are needed and offer a formal retraining when such jobs go out of date.
Agreed. One of the main problems with our educational system in the U.S. is that we've gone from a bifurcated rich/poor track system to something that's worse at serving both groups.
You go back a century or so, and most of the people went to high school were upper-class or upper-middle-class folks who were bound for college (or at least bound for things like office work which was more about abstract knowledge and learning skills than practical physical skills and specific career knowledge). A large percentage of the rest of the population left formal school sometime between 4th and 8th grade and got a job -- often apprenticing or something like that at first. By the time the rich folks had their diplomas and were ready for college, the poorer folks had a set of practical vocational skills under their belts. Obviously there were still problems (not to mention less social mobility), but the educational system at least was structured to target different aims.
Over the past century, we seem to have shifted general secondary education from a kind of "college prep" default to accommodate a broader population. My take on this is that we made a huge social "correlation != causation" mistake in thinking that high school, college, and formal education in general were what made people rich, which in fact in the past it was mostly the rich people tended to send their kids to college for historical reasons having to do with class divisions and the assumed educational models for different classes, etc. Poorer people aspired to send their kids to more school in the hope that it would make them rich, when in reality most people who used to go to these schools just happened to be rich already.
And of course there is often a benefit from more formal education, but the reality is that not everyone is cut out for it. And I'm not merely talking about intelligence here -- there's a lot of cultural assumptions that used to be wrapped up in what higher education was for, and we've now abandoned many of those assumptions.
The net result is that we've turned secondary schools from general prep for more abstract thinking and college into general knowledge programs, and we've turned college from training in abstract thought and broadening ideas into glorified trade school programs (with a few "general ed" and "distributed electives" courses that many students resent having to take). We've retained the institutional structure and many of the flawed pedagogical methods, but we've unmoored the system from its original purposes... so it no longer is good at serving most students.
This is my roundabout way of saying we need more vocational training and apprenticeships and whatever. And we need to realize that while college traditionally was supposed to prepare people for a life of intellectual contemplation (or whatever), it hasn't really done that in some time for many (most?) students. Instead, it's become a generally less effective version of career-training.
So what we really need to do is focus better on this vocational training and then re-training as necessary. We need to stop pretending that sending your kid to 2 or 4 years of college will magically get them a job, or that they'll somehow be prepared intellectually to just "figure out" how to do a different career if the first choice doesn't work.
Most people just can't do that very well. It doesn't necessarily have to do with lack of intelligence... it's just that, except for very abstract intellectual stuff, most people learn job skills best by doing that job and having practical training. Even the older idealized form of higher ed doesn't really prepare you to make those sorts of shifts, and the newer career-focused one isn't going to allow you to easily shift between them.
Is that you, Bill? We all know you'd love to be in on something like this...
Or just as well, hire Stephen Fry, then you could have the voice of Jeeves.
If we're going to go English, my personal choice would have been Brian Sewell -- unfortunately he died last year (and he'd never be caught dead OR alive doing such a thing). If you don't know him, watch a YouTube video or two. The guy came across as the most pretentious ass -- excuse me, arse -- in all of the UK (though I often found him to be unintentionally hilarious to listen to), and he was widely known as the only person in Britain with a more posh accent than the Royal Family.
But his posh accent and condescending tone would be absolutely hilarious in something like this.
I do not EVER and will not EVER need a "responsible" party to get in between me and information, right or wrong. I'm sad so many people disagree with that, but if they want to only view whitewashed information, then that is there choice.
First, let me just note that Google IS already "getting in between you and information." You're accepting that its search ranking algorithms are a useful way of culling information for you, which means you're accepting the implicit "values" of that algorithm. E.g., sites that have more links often get ranked higher. By using a search engine, you're accepting that distortion of the raw data -- perhaps some folks want a search engine that will help them find stuff that is NOT so well-known or highly linked. (I doubt that would ever work, but still...) Google is NOT privileging that type of information for you.
In any case, I'm not sure the argument here is that people should be allowed to view "only whitewashed information." I think the argument is what happens if the top Google results are all links to factually inaccurate (but convincing, if you don't know anything) BS?
And what happens if a feedback loop starts as one such site gets more hits and links because it's the most popular, then two, then 5, then 10. And eventually the first page of Google hits is populated by false BS?
If you think this can't happen, it already does, though mostly in less insidious ways. For example, there are lots of supposed "facts" about well-known historical events that are known to be false, but they continue to be conveyed in pop history and other popular books and such. Academic history journals may have a consensus that these facts are false, but the popular "memory" of them continues on.
In most cases, this stuff isn't really a "big deal." But it does threaten to create a self-reinforcing loop over time. If sites are ranked by popularity, and the top 10 hits ignore academic journals and just reference the popular consensus, then eventually the top 20 or the top 100 hits could just be about popular consensus.
And it becomes an even greater problem with things like Wikipedia, which tend to cite commonly accessible sources, rather than things like academic journals. Other sites refer to Wikipedia. Scholars who aren't particularly informed within that specific discipline get lazy and just read Wikipedia, and several other top Google hits, and then they basically state the popular idea in a book. Wikipedia cites that book. And on the loop goes.
The inevitable result of ranking internet searches (and knowledge itself) only by some form of popularity is that it will become harder for minority views -- even those well-supported by evidence -- to "break through" and be available to a wider audience. Paradoxically, your position can likely lead to even more suppression of new ideas and "groupthink," unless an idea catches the wave of a new "meme" or other popular whim.
I'm not saying I have a solution to all this. But there's a reason why people over the ages often fear the "tyranny of the mob" -- what's most popular isn't always what's best. When it comes to knowledge, what's "popularly known" isn't always what's true. I'm not in favor of deleting or de-indexing any information or sites from Google's database, and any skewing of search algorithms is obviously open to abuse. But finding a way for "true" things to float to the top of searches and for demonstrably "false" things to be less prominently ranked -- no matter which is more "popular" -- seems a good aim.
It is very clear that described problem is malfunction of search ranking algorithm, you don't fix it by making it impossible to find offending searches, you fix it by making it rank result appropriately.
And just how do you propose to create a "ranking algorithm" that fixes this? Granted, we don't know all the details of Google's ranking system, but we do know something about it. We know Google depends on number and quality of links to pages to help determine the ranking and importance of pages.
Any such system is not going to converge to "truth" -- it will converge to popularity. If Holocaust deniers become popular enough and share their information enough, any ranking system that depends on popularity will inevitably rank the untrue links higher.
So how do you fix it? You'll either need to simply decide for the algorithm in individual cases that some things are actually "true" and others aren't, so that you tweak the search to give better results.
Or, you choose a third-party arbiter of "truth" (or multiple such sites). But how does that work? Any set of third-party sites is likely only going to have a tiny fraction of links to "reputable" sites, so Google can't exactly depend on those without potentially skewing results away from hits that may actually be popular and still reputable. If you had a sufficiently advanced AI algorithm, I suppose it could somehow "learn" what is true from these "reputable" sites and then see whether other popular sites conform... but I don't think we have any AI algorithms that are anywhere close to doing that consistently.
And even if you do these things, you're still skewing results based on sources you're going to choose to privilege, whether you're skewing the results directly or filtering them through chosen 3rd-party sources somehow.
Anyhow, I don't really see how you can create a "truth-o-meter" without at some point actually telling the search engine what is true and/or where to explicitly "find" truth.
Oh and by the way, I agree it shouldn't be "impossible to find offending searches," but exactly how do you create an algorithm that ensures untrue information ends up at a lower rank?
And yet....they/you (Christians) always quote Leviticus when it comes to homosexuality
To be fair, the standard Christian theology for the past couple thousand years was the Jesus nullified most of the "Old Law" by introducing a "New Covenant." That's why Christians ever since the first century didn't obey the manifold Levitical laws, including, for example, dietary restrictions that conservative Jews still follow.
The disconnect happened sometime around the early 19th century when a bunch of ignorant bible-thumpers basically created modern "Fundamentalism," which no longer was interested in consistent theology, and only chose the biblical passages it liked (e.g., condemning homosexuality from Leviticus) while ignoring the rest (e.g., the hundreds of other Levitical laws which are no longer observed).
The more consistent conservative Christians who actually subscribe to traditional Christian theology don't start with Leviticus. They point to New Testament passages mostly in the letters of Paul (which some have argued are vague in various ways), and only bring in Leviticus as a historical reference point to show supposed consistency in the condemnation of homosexuality.
But those New Testament passages are vague (according to some), leading a number of more liberal Christian denominations to ignore them completely -- hence the "mainline Protestant" acceptance of homosexuality and homosexual unions in recent years (many Methodists, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, UCC, etc.) as the broader culture also accepted it. See this list. Granted, that's a minority of Christians, but it's not an insignificant list.
I'm all for condemning the intellectually dishonest and ignorant bible thumpers who quote a few random Old Testament verses while ignoring most of the rest of the Old Testament. But that's only one segment of Christianity in general, and a relatively new strand in the history of the religion. Yes, of course Christianity traditionally condemned homosexuality, as did most Western society in general. Most of the largest Christian denominations continue to condemn it. But when the theologically consistent ones do it, they start with Paul and the New Testament.
I'm not saying that makes it any better... just noting the way the traditional argument goes. If you read early Christian writers (in the first few centuries of the church), they inevitably cite Paul on this issue, not Leviticus.
If so, it would mean anyone who buys a computer and installs Linux Mint (non-South Carolina version) on their PC has now broken the law.
Hey, don't knock Linux Mint South Carolina edition! Actually, it's known in the South as the Linux Mint JULEP edition. I've been using it ever since Version 1.0 ("Anti Abolition"), though it really only came into its own in the third version ("Commendable Calhoun"). The recent LTS versions ("Slightly Secessionist" and "Somewhat Segregationist") are really terrific!
You do have to get used to the quirks, though. I used to use the Gnome edition, but South Carolina deprecated that, since it sounded too much like "genome," and that sounded too close to evolutionist talk. I tried the new desktop environment OPPOSITE-SEXED-SPOUSE (the equivalent of MATE), but ultimately I decided to go with the KKKDE edition.
There are some cool South Carolinian features, such as:
-- "Tux" the Linux penguin is replaced by Cocky the USC Gamecock mascot.
-- The GIMP has a boot-up image of Preston Brooks caning Charles Sumner in the U.S. Congress, with Sumner limping away on his gimpy leg.
-- LibreOffice isn't... quite so "libre," if you know what I mean.
-- In honor of the Baptist teetotalers, WINE is renamed SWEET TEA.
-- My favorite feature -- the messenger Pidgin automatically converts your messages to appropriate creole dialects for the state. Main choices include "Gullah," "Redneck," and "Antebellum Plantation Owner," but if you insist on keeping your standard modern English, there's a selection "Godless Cityfolk" for you.
I'd highly recommend y'all give it a try!
The "whole point" of the electoral college is not to block a winner that the college doesn't like.
True. That's a BS claim created out of a misreading of Federalist 68, promoted recently by people like Lawrence Lessig and the so-called "Hamilton Electors." I'm not going to bother rehashing all of this here, because I already explained Federalist 68 in detailed historical context in a post here.
The main effect has always been to elevate the voice of lower population centers.
Well, that's partially true. But if that were the main concern of the Founders, they could have just had Congress pick the President. Or they could have just assigned a set of weighted abstract "votes" to states based on Congressional representation numbers. Instead they chose to have actual Electors. Why? Again, I already explained it before in posts here and here.
For those who need a TL;DR explanation...
Basically, the Electoral College was conceived by the Founders at a time when political parties didn't exist and they couldn't imagine consensus over any candidates extending much beyond state borders. So, they first thought of having people on the national political scene (e.g., Congress) select the President, but they were afraid of corruption. So they came up with this wacky system of the Electoral College which was both designed in very specific (and arcane) ways to make regional candidates "float to the top" (you'll have to read my previous posts to understand how) AND put that power of in the hands of Electors who held no government office (and thus were less likely to collude or be corrupted). They built in all sorts of safeguards to prevent this collusion among Electors, which is why (among other things) they meet in separate states instead of all together.
Anyhow, the entire system was basically rendered useless with the emergence of political parties in 1796. It served some vague function for the next few decades, but became completely useless by the 1820s when most states adopted "general ticket" party-chosen slates of electors, rather than independent free thinking educated folks selected by the states to choose the President.
All of these other more modern justifications for the existence of the Electoral College are post hoc and don't take into account the situation the Founders were originally in.
Oh, in my final sentences I forgot the last possibility, i.e., that >90% of the previous "skeptics" had either died, stopped publishing for some other reason, or changed their minds between 2011 and 2013. I suppose that's possible, but that doesn't follow the trends Cook observed of a much more gradual growth of consensus despite fairly overwhelming evidence being collected in the early 2000s.
I first wanted to say thank you for holding your scientific position here in the face of ignorant objections. it always astounds me how people believe that the consensus among scientists is either a massive conspiracy or some sort of hugely biased poll where the objectors never get a voice.
With all that said, I took a few minutes to read your linked article. Something is a little "fishy" in that figure, based on the other articles cited. For example, he cites a 2010 study that claimed to find 2.5% of the top 200 climate researchers "as ranked by expertise (number of climate publications)" were "unconvinced by the evidence." That's 5 climate scientists just out of the top 200 -- and those 200 were apparently the most published folks.
How do we square that with the article's claim to only find 5 articles TOTAL (with 4 authors) -- out of the ~70,000 he claims to have looked at -- which show evidence of rejecting the hypothesis? The article further claims that these 5 articles were only ever cited once, implying that they don't have a strong reputation.
These claims seem a bit contradictory. If we are to believe the present study that there are only ~4 scientists who are skeptical (and apparently have minimal unpopular publications), how did the 2010 study find 5 skeptical scientists just among the 200 most published climate scientists??
Granted, the present article was done with publications a few years later, so some skeptics may have changed their minds (or died or whatever), but something doesn't quite add up here to get the 99.99% figure.
Also, this article apparently accepts "clear statements of rejection or that some process other than AGW better explains the observations" as the only evidence of "rejection," while lumping together all other articles in the "positive" group. I agree with the article's critiques of previous methods that just ignored all articles which didn't declare a "for or against" explicitly -- that also seems stupid. And I agree with the author that the vast majority of those which don't declare explicitly "for" AGW probably do still adhere to the theory. But that doesn't justify calling ALL articles without "clear statements of rejection" to be authored be scientists who adhere to the theory with no reservations.
And when we look back at Cook et al. (2013), we find 78 abstracts and 124 authors "reject AGW" explicitly and 40 abstracts/44 authors are "uncertain on AGW." While Cook found a gradual increase in the acceptance numbers over time (about +0.1%/year), he still was estimating it at ~98% in 2011, compared to ~97% over the 20-year period examined. Did these ~168 skeptical authors simply vanish in 2-3 years for your article's data? Have the criteria used to justify classifying a paper as a "rejection" been raised?
I didn't go digging through all the supplementary data to Cook, but from a graph of their data over time, it looks like they examined roughly 1500-1700 papers from 2011, which given their reported percentage of 98% acceptance in 2011 would imply somewhere around 30-35 papers Cook et al. found just in that year alone. But by 2013-14 of your cited study, that number fell to 2.5/year for a much larger sample (~12,000 articles/year).
The numbers don't quite mesh between these various studies, even if you take into account the rational criticisms of previous studies.
Basically, I'm mostly with you and the author of this article in that consensus is at least 97% and probably quite a bit more. But there's some flimsy argumentation being made here... either that, or the previous studies that claimed to have found a slightly higher percentages of objectors were fundamentally flawed in simply COUNTING the "rejections" in some way (even though the author doesn't argue that the previous data was outright false or something on that order).
I see a lot of in-recent-decades cultural shifts that can easily explain a rise in depression.
I wouldn't exactly dispute the gist of your claims, but I think the relevant psychological factor has little to do with your trends.
People in the past may not have divorced as much, but how much has infidelity actually risen? How much has "kids being raised in broken homes" risen compared to, say, rate of child abuse if you go back more than a couple generations? People used to whip their kids. You had pre-adolescents working in coal mines. Everybody (including kids) used to be basically slightly inebriated most of the time, back when water was frequently unsafe and the carrier of disease... so drunken beatings were pretty much normal.
Family situations were undeniably a lot worse back in the "good ole days." Even in the 1950s or whatever "golden age" of the American middle class family you might imagine from Leave it to Beaver, a significant number of people were taking some sort of crap for a "pick me up" that we'd conflate with drug use today.
Main difference: we didn't TALK about this stuff as much, outside of town gossip. We lamented the stories of the folks "on the other side of the tracks," and those people lamented the stories of the REALLY poor folks they knew. Today, we all lament our own situations.
Or, you talk about leaders as if corruption in politics were new. 'Twas always thus, but perhaps we didn't TALK about it as much.
Or, you talk about the decline of middle class numbers. Yeah, it's a bad trend. But, if we're going to talk about history, even most "poor" people in a place like the U.S. today are living with conditions leagues ahead of the "middle class" a couple centuries back.
I'd bet if you took a bunch of middle-class American folk and took them back to the 17th century and let them even lead a reasonably "upper-class" life then, a significant number would just commit suicide within a year... whereas the 17th-century folks were perfectly happy with what they had.
Why would anyone expect depression rates to go down in an environment like this?
I wouldn't exactly expect depression rates to go down, but I do think they're rather unpredictable based on objective living conditions of a population. There have been quite a few studies looking at "happiness" in more "primitive" cultures around the world and realizing that satisfaction and happiness have relatively little to do with anything objective, and a lot to do with your own perception of your life and the world around you.
Your post is a good example of the way narratives of cynicism and outright pessimism have taken over the way many people perceive themselves and their lives today. They turn on the news and they don't hear "Murder rate continues 1000+-year trend downward!" or even that murder rates or child abduction rates or whatever have fallen a lot in the past couple generations. Instead, they hear about bad stuff happening today or this week or this year. CONSTANTLY.
I am NOT arguing that we just bury our heads in the sand and ignore the news, but there is a lot of truth in the statement "Ignorance is Bliss."
If you thought about your examples a little more, you'd realize this is even encoded in your own "data." Why do people get divorced so often today, for example? Generally, it's because they claim to be "unhappy," and they think doing something else will make things better. Except the data shows they are MOSTLY WRONG. Divorce rates for second marriages are something like 66%; divorce rates for third marriages are close to 75%.
If people actually knew what "made them happy" and were capable of seeking it out rationally, the divorce rate should go down with more experience in marriages. Instead it goes up.
The issue is that people are not objective about their own experiences. They are mostly incapable of making objective assessments of how their sit
You do realize you're talking about the internet, right? Anybody can be hiding behind a pseudonym, and pseudonyms can always be hacked or hijacked. While I'm not at all defending the actions here of editing posts, having blind trust anywhere that a pseudonymous forum is conveying "truth" or co nsistency in sources or whatever is always dicey.
Granted you can't do a perfect job, and at some point you're taking away more liberty than, statistically speaking, you're saving.
It's easy to quantify at least some of these things. For example, let's take the TSA. Let's forget all the various abuses of the system, "lost" (or stolen) items, how Americans are forced into indignities that past generations would have found outrageous, etc.
Let's just focus on time. I remember going through airport security before 9/11. Yes, there were sometimes long lines, but it was frequently quick and easy. Now, let's just say the TSA adds on 5 minutes per traveler over the old security methods, which I think is overly generous to the TSA, but let's run with it. (It also doesn't take into account how most people now feel that have to arrive at the airport a LOT earlier than in the past, just in case security is slower that day. Really, we're probably losing more like 15-30 minutes, maybe more, due to that increased planning.)
On average, the U.S. has served approximately 800 million air travelers per year since 2001. Over 15 years, that's about 12 billion passenger trips. 5 minutes wasted in TSA security is 60 billion minutes of lost time.
Now, suppose we had a terrorist event and people were killed. How much time would be lost to those victims? Let's be generous and say 50 years/person is obliterated on average if they are killed. Taking just waking time of 16 hours/day or so, that comes out to about 17.5 million minutes of life lost if someone's killed in a terror attack.
Collectively, since 9/11, we've probably lost the collective "lifespans" of around 3500 people just waiting in line... and that's a conservative estimate.
Now -- obviously people will say, "That's an unfair comparison -- if someone dies, all sorts of really bad stuff can happen to the family, etc., so it's not reasonable to compare loss of life to just loss of time waiting in line." That's true. But those 5 minute inconveniences also add up. Sometimes people miss flights. Sometimes people forget items (or have items taken away) in security that were intended as gifts or to bring job to family members during a trip, or just to enhance someone's life or avoid inconvenience in more minor ways. I personally know someone who missed seeing his mother before she died because he showed up to airport security and (in his rush) had forgotten ID, so he missed his flight. It was emotionally devastating for him.
Could the negative effects created by that lost time for ~3.5 MILLION traveler trips waiting in a TSA line add up to the bad stuff suffered just by the family members of ONE person who dies prematurely, as I'm calculating here? It's tough to say, but looking at 3.5 million trips through the TSA line, I can bet there are number of pretty dire situations that occur too, due to security delays.
Okay, but say you still aren't willing to buy that analogy that the freedom in time we're losing is equivalent to more "victims" in lifespans lost than 9/11. How about ACTUAL deaths, indirectly caused by the TSA? For example, it is well-known from polling data and studies that there ARE a greater number of people who choose to travel by car rather than by plane since 9/11 to avoid security at airports -- whether they're actually annoyed at the security or just because it introduces significant delays that now makes car travel more reasonable for shorter trips.
But auto travel is much more dangerous than air travel. Various attempts have been made to quantify the number of extra deaths that could be attributed to this, and some studies have suggested as many as 500 extra deaths per year, though I think that sounds excessive.
But the point isn't what the actual numbers are -- statistically, we KNOW that more people make that choice to avoid airport security after 9/11, and we KNOW that auto travel is riskier, so there have been some deaths... very likely more deaths than the TSA has apparently prevented (a
when he thinks that "you all wanted to be spied on by us" is going to get much agreement from the public.
Yeah, the scary thing is that while the majority of Americans disagree, polls consistently show a rather huge number of people DO agree with the spying. Pew research found 42% of Americans approve of government collection of personal data, and when you ask a more generic question, like whether our anti-terrorism policies have "not gone far enough" vs. "gone too far restricting civil liberties," you'll see the majority of Americans saying we haven't gone far enough.
Of course, part of this has to do with how you frame the questions, and MOST of it has to do with how ignorant the American public still is about what this spying really entails. As John Oliver famously showed during his process of interviewing Edward Snowden last year, if you ask people, "Should the government be allowed to see nude pictures of you" sent by email or phone or whatever, we'd probably get near 100% agreement against the NSA policies. But it's not generally framed in those terms.
(By the way, whatever you think of Snowden or John Oliver for that matter, you should watch this interview. It's scary how quickly the American public has completely forgotten about Snowden, completely misunderstands what he did and what the surveillence program is actually about, etc.)
"They are doing exactly what our nation has asked them to do to protect us. They are the heroes."...
I also think this misunderstands the word "hero." Normally we don't equate the word "hero" with "doing exactly what we ask" of someone. A hero is generally somebody who goes beyond what the normal person would do -- who aspires to nobler intentions, greater achievements, unusual bravery, courage in the face of overwhelming odds, etc.
I don't mean to take anything away from those who do public service -- whether military, police, firefighters, paramedics, teachers, etc. Most of them are admirable people, but does just "showing up for work" qualify them to be "heroes"? I think there's some modern slippage in meaning that tends to say "yes," but that's not what the word "hero" has traditionally meant.
I'm sure there are some NSA people who are legitimate "heroes" in the traditional sense -- people who go far beyond what an average person might do, or what we'd ask a reasonable person to do, in service of the U.S. And I laud their efforts.
But just because "our nation asked" a number of NSA folks to spy on people in unconstitutional or illegal ways doesn't make their actions right, let alone "noble," and certainly not "heroic." Even in the service of "protecting us." And even IF you agree with the spying, it STILL doesn't make most people who just do their job "heroes," especially if they aren't doing anything particularly courageous, etc.
Shame on this NSA Director for co-opting the language of heroism to try to legitimize his own bad actions and decisions. It is a nefarious distortion and appropriation of the term that detracts from the legitimate heroes who serve us in all sorts of ways.
I think we're only beginning to see the karmic backfire from that win. Clearly they didn't just sacrifice a few goats to overcome the curse -- given the other events of 2016, I think the Cubs (or their fans) made a deal with the Prince of Darkness himself or something.
However, many independent artists would leap at the change to sign with a label, since 10% of something is better than 100% of nothing.
THIS. People always make the mistake of looking at high revenues that big-name artists get and dream of doing that themselves.
But that's kinda like dreaming of playing for the NBA or NFL or whatever -- sure, it happens, but the 99% of the kids out there playing high school sports will never have a chance at those sorts of salaries.
It is common for creative people to assume that they create the only value that matters, and that marketing, promotion, and distribution are all worthless.
Exactly. There's this new myth of "YouTube-o-genesis" -- just put your stuff up on YouTube, and users can "discover you," and then you start raking in the big bucks, no labels or whatever needed.
And yes, that HAS happened. But for every sudden "YouTube sensation," there are 10,000 people out there who are uploading stuff that gets 5 views only from their friends. And among those 10,000 unlucky people are usually loads of talented folks... they just need some help getting attention.
Labels can still be a path to help that (though they're not the ONLY path). Getting a few percent of revenue from a label that actually promotes you, gets you gigs, etc., is likely a lot better than the beer money people chip in when you just sing at the local karaoke bar.
And I hate the RIAA's abusive copyright tactics as much as anyone else here, and I'll be the first to criticize labels that do bring in large revenues for their executives and staff, but pay a pittance to artists. Nevertheless, they CAN still serve a function, and thus many independent artists still DO sign on.
Really? So I just got a 'raise' at work from deflation, somehow that is demotivating?
Here's the fallacy -- how long do you think that "raise" will last in a persistent deflationary economy? Prices are going down, because monetary value is going up. That means corporate revenues go down. People with large amounts of money invest much less, because an investment would have to have a LARGE rate of return to actually be worthwhile... otherwise, you just hide your money under your mattress.
So, fewer investors, decreasing prices... corporate revenues go down. And somehow you think get to keep you "raise" at your current salary in deflated dollars?? Fat chance. Eventually, they need to start decreasing your salary -- probably even more than to keep "pace" with deflation, because of the decreased revenues. Or they just start laying people off.
But that's only the tip of the iceberg. Why would you buy property in a deflationary economy, when it is likely to be a depreciating asset? Loans become nearly impossible to justify -- banks would still have to charge interest on them to justify them, which means you're throwing money at a depreciating asset, while the principal of your loan and your payment sizes effectively grow due to deflation. And given the depreciating value of assets, banks are likely to require additional insurance fees in case of default (a lot more than they have on risky mortgages today).
People stop trying to get loans to open new businesses. Investors stop financing them, unless it's basically a "sure thing," since they can "make money" just stashing their cash away. People stop taking out loans for basic things like real estate and houses.
"But," you say, "Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe people should learn to save up more before buying a large purchase." Okay, except who do they rent from in the meantime if they don't take out a mortgage on a house? The people owning rental property face the same difficulties in maintaining a rationale for owning it. If it's decreasing in value, along with other goods, rents will eventually be driven down too (along with the decreasing salaries). Why invest in maintaining property? -- it's just throwing money at a continuously depreciating asset.
If you're a landlord in such an economy, the best strategy is probably to dump your property now and get more money out of it while you still can before its value decreases further.
And we can go on and on. People hoarding cash and dumping most other investments leads to economic stagnation, then worse. Eventually this results in a deflationary "spiral" and the economy tanks.
Oh sure, throughout all of this SOME people will still invest and spend money, but it becomes increasingly hard to justify.
People who support deflation generally never think through even the basic next steps in their logic. They just think they'll magically have "higher salaries" coming from somewhere to spend on cheaper goods. That doesn't happen in real economies. The only people steady deflation is good for are people who have giant money bins already. For everybody else, you'd be much better off with the 1-2% mild inflation and actually having a more active economy.
They would not even seek to stop it, considering the value of 1-2% per year "normal" (that's a tax on wealth, BTW).
Small amounts of inflation are NOT a "tax on wealth." I suppose you might consider it a "tax on money you hide under your mattress."
But in the real world, mild inflation encourages people with wealth to get that money out from under their mattress and invest it somewhere or do something with it.
Deflation, on the other hand, encourages hoarding of money, which means investments have to have much larger returns to seem worthwhile, so most people prefer to just keep their money "under their mattress." And why buy anything unless you need it right NOW? If you wait a year, it will be effectively "cheaper" since the value of your money has grown.
Basically, deflation means economic activity decreases significantly, which means EVERYBODY loses except for those who have huge amounts stuffed under their mattresses.
There are some folks under the mistaken impression that deflation will be good even for normal folks, since their money will buy more. Except do you really think your salary can stay the same in a consistently deflationary economy? Fewer people are investing or buying anything, which means economic activity goes down, which means less revenue at a lot of companies. That means the average Joe either is looking at a salary decrease to "keep pace" with deflation (actually likely more than that, due to the effects of decreased economic activity overall, which depress revenues) or else they just start firing people.
Staying at a steady "0" (no inflation or deflation at all) is nearly impossible. So, yes, government policy tends to try to stay stable at a low inflation rate, which both gives a mild buffer to the rate (avoiding the dangers of deflation) and gives a mild encouragement to investors to keep pumping money out, rather than hiding it under the mattress. Having a slight preference for economic activity over inactivity benefits us all significantly.
Unless you have a giant money bin full of enough to keep you going for the rest of your life already, you likely would do much WORSE in a deflationary economy than having mild 1-2% inflation with its supposed "tax."
See, if you actually want to debunk this, these are the questions you have to answer.
I wasn't trying to "debunk" anything. I was just offering a definition of "fake news" vs. erroneous or incorrect reporting vs. biased news.
Why are we calling this "fake" news instead of "incorrect news" or "wrong news" or "wacko conspiracy theory"?
Because "fake news" has a very clear meaning that should be apparent to anyone who knows what the word "fake" means. Where do you use the word "fake"? You use it in places where something that is known to be false by the originator has the appearance of truth.
That's different from "wrong" or "incorrect" because those can result from simple errors. "Fake" implies that the person who creates the "news" KNOWS it's fake.
Fake news can have lots of different motivations.
-- It can be satire or parody, like the Onion.
-- It can be produced by people who just want to make money -- as it apparently were in this past campaign by some Balkan teens (who are hawking this fake news just like people hawk fake watches or "designer" purses).
-- It can be deliberate propaganda, made up by someone with a particular perspective intended to energize (or outrage) other people with that perspective.
-- It can even be a hoax created by those who want to embarrass their opponents by getting them to "take the bait" and then reveal that it's BS all along (again, something that multiple people have admitted doing to try to sabotage the past election).
All of these things are encompassed by the clear and unambiguous word "fake," i.e., something KNOWN TO BE false that looks like the real thing.
There are lots of folks who have been reading headlines about "fake news" recently and assuming it's about something else -- e.g., partisan sites spreading biased propaganda. But that's NOT FAKE NEWS. That's opinion or biased reporting or whatever. It may have its own problems, but biasing or distorting news by selectively choosing what to report or how to report it is NOT FAKE NEWS.
Actually making something up and knowingly publishing something literally false ("Person X did Y in city Z" when you know that didn't happen) *IS* fake news.
If AI makes people obsolete, who will those companies peddle their wares to, and obtain income from?
Here's an even better question, given the headline: If CEO's believe AI makes people irrelevant, does that imply AI will make CEOs obsolete too? (Setting aside the obvious quip that "CEO aren't really people.")
Given that there are various studies over the years showing that CEOs don't necessarily provide significant benefits to corporations (e.g., studies have shown that CEO pay does not correlate well with company performance, past CEO performance does not correlate well with future results, etc., to the point that some have wondered if it's mostly random chance whether a given CEO succeeds -- studies that attempt to quantify the chance component vs. the skill component in CEO performance seem to indicate the CEO's performance is only a few percent out of the total factors) -- then isn't that an argument for putting an AI in the CEO chair??
After all, even a lowly janitor can clearly point to clean floors at the end of the day to prove his worth to a company. CEOs seem to lead to mediocre performance or even declines about as often as they lead to successes, and those ups and downs are pretty unstable over the course of a career. (And if you get one "down" that's just too much, they give you the golden parachute, and it's off to the speaking circuit.)
By the way, I'm not at all questioning the fact that many CEOs are smart people or whatever. I'm saying that markets are volatile, and CEOs who are determining a future course are navigating uncertain "waters," just like stock pickers and fund managers -- another group who has been shown, overall, to rarely exceed chance in terms of success as a collective group (or over long enough periods of time). If anything, the critical function of a CEO is to provide "leadership" by making it look like there's a steady, clear course... but whether that course needs to be determined by somebody with a seven-figure salary vs. an AI vs. a magic 8 ball... I'm not so sure.
I agree with what the parent says here, but two other basic issues I'd point out in terms of "how Linux is better" are:
(1) Choice. I'm not talking about distros necessarily, which sometimes seem to fragment the Linux community unnecessarily. I mean just choice in general about what to install, how to manage it, how to use it, etc. I've definitely noticed a trend in software over the past 15 years or so to HIDE or outright DISABLE more and more choices.
Linux is sometimes criticized for TOO much choice -- too many configuration options, etc. But there are, well, choices in Linux (distros, desktop choices) that hide a lot of that stuff if you want. But if you WANT to be a "power user" and configure exactly what's on your system and how it works, you can.
(2) Support for lesser hardware. To me, this is a HUGE deal, because there are loads of cheap computers (both desktops and laptops) today that you can get for a few hundred bucks, sometimes less. And they're perfectly functional for the basic stuff that most people do 95% of time -- email, web browsing, basic documents, etc. Compared to hardware specs computers of 10 or 15 years ago that did the same stuff, they are hugely advanced, and a large number of people who don't do significant processor-heavy tasks simply don't need more.
But often these cheap computers come with the latest Windows release and other bloated software that just serves to slow them down. Or, even if they work well for the first year or so, various "updates" and "patches" and just the accumulated crap on a Windows system slow the system to a crawl.
With Linux, I'm able to pull a 10+ year old laptop out of my closet, install a modern, up-to-date OS with up-to-date security patches and support, and it runs well. Yeah, I'm obviously not talking about people who need advanced gaming support or complex video editing or whatever -- but if you just need a basic cheap system, Linux has plenty of options for you.
That's actually where it has shined for friends and family I've recommended it to. They have a computer that's 2 or 3 years old and just seems to be "slow." They ask me for advice for buying a new one -- and I have to tell them. "Well yeah, you COULD get that cheap laptop for only $300, but it's probably going to run slow out of the box. So you might want to spend a bit more." Or, I can just say, "Here -- install Linux, then see what happens." And now their old computer will work for several more years.
To me, that's one of the little-discussed aspects of what makes Linux better for some people. Over the years, it has literally saved me thousands of dollars, just by not having to buy more expensive hardware or upgrade just to run the latest bloat put out by Microsoft. That cost savings alone (even setting aside the cost savings of using free application software, etc. too) is not insignificant.