This value of Ph represents optimism for the future and is directly correlated with the height of skirts above women's knees based on historical data related to how well the economy is performing.
Except the skirt theory has problems as an indicator -- it worked well up to the 1960s or so, but other economists have proposed a "lipstick index" (women buy more small luxuries like lipstick when the economy is bad) to the idea that the height of heels is a much better predictor (dubbed by some the "footsie" index... har, har).
Apparently heels go up in lean times, while skirts go down. But given the better correlation with heels, it seems that the skirt phenomenon may not be the driving trend. If heels go down, women's legs appear shorter, thus requiring skirts to go up to maintain constant L (i.e., the "legginess" factor). QED.
Nobody so far has been able to explain to me why we had to pass a constitutional amendment to outlaw alcohol, but the same thing is not necessary for any other drug.
Because the Constitution "changed" (at least in its interpretation) in 1937. Long story short: from 1789 to 1937, the Supreme Court believed that enumerated powers existed, thus putting rather restrictive and fundamental limits on the powers of the federal government.
For some reason in 1937, one of the justices on the Supreme Court switched sides. And ever since, the Supreme Court has basically interpreted certain sections of the Constitution (e.g., "interstate commerce," "general welfare," etc.) to mean "the federal government can do anything any state or local government can do."
Now, whether this shift was due to FDR threatening to pack SCOTUS with his cronies or whether Owen Roberts just changed his mind for some other reason, it happened. And once voters saw the effects -- like getting benefits from Social Security, Medicare, more sweeping Civil Rights legislation possible, etc. -- they kept endorsing the idea that the enumerated powers shouldn't matter.
So yeah, before 1937, federal power was limited (though it should be noted that some previous SCOTUS decisions had interpreted various enumerated powers more or less broadly). After 1937, there is no effective distinction between what the federal vs. more local governments can do.
Sorry, I can't take seriously a paper on the development of constitutional law which starts with an analogy to Star Wars.
Neither can I. Just skimmed the article.
TL;DR: This is a rant/metaphor about Originalism. The author argues that both narratives and process of creating narratives have surprises. Constitutional law has many "I am your father" moments (yes, that's what the author in TFA calls them) when previous information in a narrative/legal principle is reinterpreted. But Originalism (according to TFA) wants to claim that these narrative/legal surprises were ALL planned and intended by George Lucas/the Founders all along. But of course, they weren't -- both Lucas and the Supreme Court have made up new stuff as necessary. Thus, Originalism is stupid. QED.
It's a really drawn-out argument to make a really simple (and not very nuanced) point. Beyond simply pointing out that Lucas -- like any author -- changes his mind and evolves a narrative dynamically as part of the writing process, I don't really get why any of the further Star Wars details are necessary (and aren't even very interesting or entertaining).
I need to read the article, but it seems like 12 seconds is really, really short, let alone 8 seconds.
Is it just me, or did anyone actually look at the original Microsoft report and find it nearly impossible to read efficiently? It's over 50 pages of "infographic" nonsense, with too many random distractions -- changes in font size, colors, random meaningless clip art, etc. It seems to be structured to be "skimmable," but it's not. It's like a really bad Powerpoint presentation with way too many words and too many details, all dressed up in wacky graphics and colors.
I kept waiting to find out what the methodology was, e.g., how they determined the "8 seconds" thing or whatever. It's still not clear to me, though the closest they get to explaining methodology is buried in a 2-page appendix at the very end.
This kind of layout would be great for a document that effectively summarized information in a couple pages. It doesn't work AT ALL for a 50-page document.
If this were an actual published research study in a journal, I could have read a report that would probably take up 2 or 3 pages and give me a much more useful and organized summary. As it is, I couldn't even figure out enough information from the report to evaluate whether the methodology actually makes sense or could lead to any of the (supposed) conclusions. The kind of tests they did and how they interpreted these things were grouped into three different kinds of attention (given very broad terms whose relationship to the tasks is questionable), which all were then applied to various other ideas in seemingly arbitrary ways. It all reeks of marketing BS.
TL;DR: This report is TL;PO;HS;BM (i.e., "too long; poorly organized; highly suspect; [likely] bogus methodology," or, in a less charitable light: "too long piece of horse-sh*t bowel movement").
I think the person's point was that the person who wrote the original piece was treating it like theft, them viewing people's actions in terms of how much money they should be making and accusing people who negatively impact that prediction as thieves.
That's nice. But I don't see any evidence of such a perspective in the parent's original post. Here's what was said again:
Yes, by the end of your advert I might "want" your product that I'd never heard of, but as the OP says, "fuck you". You are taking money out of my pocket that I did not plan to allow its removal. In some circles, that's theft.
Let's first try reading this in the literal way where "you" consistently means "some company doing advertising" and "I" means the parent who wrote this post. In other words: (1) I read your advert, (2) afterward, I might want your product, (3) I didn't ask for your ad, (4) but you "took money out of my pocket that I didn't plan for" because I end up wanting and thus buying your product, and thus (5) that's theft.
I believe you're trying to re-read parent's post as though the last two sentences were magically written from the point of view of the author of TFA. But (a) there's no evidence of that (e.g., quotation marks, and (b) it doesn't relate in GP's argument to what came immediately before it.
I don't want to see ads, I'm sick to death of seeing ads, and I'll do everything in my power not to. If that means the end of the web, I don't care. There isn't a single solitary website I can't live without.
Ironic -- saying this on a website that serves up ads. (Granted, it allows you to block them if your karma is good, but clearly your morality still allows you spend time on sites that do the thing you detest, particularly to new users.)
The thing that gets me is that even though advertisers know full well we're all sick to death of advertising and don't want to see it they are doing everything they can to shove it down our throats whether we like it or not.
The problem is that they can run the stats. Companies know that successful ad campaigns can increase revenue. How effective web ads are, I don't know -- but there are good reasons that companies spend millions of dollars per minute to run ads during the Superbowl or why clothing companies pay to run ads in fashion and pop culture magazines, etc.
You may hate them and never look at them. I certainly don't -- when I'm trying to read an article in a magazine or newspaper, for example, it's like I "don't even see" ads. I know they are there, but I never look at them. And even if you offered me money to try to remember what any of them were about, I generally couldn't tell you.
But I also know I'm not "most people." And neither are you. For some reason, most people actually seem to pay at least some attention to ads... and that's why they exist.
Also, you have to consider things from a financial perspective. If you gave consumers a choice: (1) cable TV with commercials, or (2) cable TV with no ads, but you have to pay for all your programming, I'd bet very few people would be willing to pay the exorbitant cost to take choice (2). It's the same thing for magazines or newspapers, and perhaps for some online things too.
Personally, I'm willing to put up with random ads in a paper magazine or newspaper with otherwise good actual content, because I know that I end up paying less for content with little inconvenience. I can "filter" my own reading so they are not intrusive to me at all (though I've seen certain fashion magazines that seem to be 95% ads, and I simply would never buy such a magazine, even if I wanted to read some articles, because that's just annoying).
I'm less forgiving of ads that actually force me to waste time, whether they're TV commercials, or radio commercials, or web ads that delay my browsing or access to content. So I avoid things like that -- I don't watch live TV, I only tend to listen to public radio, and I don't revisit sites that have served up too many annoying ads to me.
And y'know what, If I'm forced to somehow sit thru an ad when I don't want to (I recently tried to watch a video at CBS.com, and if you block the ads you can't watch the program) I'm either going to a.) mute the sound and switch the tab till the ad is over, or b.) make note of the advertiser and NEVER patronize them simply because they forced me to sit thru an ad I had no interest in seeing. In most cases I will do both.
That's a valid choice, and I encourage it. The problem is that you are vastly outnumbered by people who won't take such a stance because they aren't quite as annoyed by the ads. So they put up with them, and as long as the advertisers see enough "views," they'll keep trying.
In any case, though I wish ads would just go away completely (like you), I realize that there are many people who find some (usually non-intrusive) advertising to be useful. (I know people who have told me that they buy some magazines to look at the ads. Seriously.) And if those people are willing to keep buying random crap to convince advertisers to keep paying to make better content, I'm personally willing to reap the benefits of cheaper content with little downside (since I'm never going to spend money on anything based on an ad, so the people who do are subsidizing me).
It's when advertising gets annoying and intrusive that I can't stand it. And I do the same thing you do -- I just don't go to that site anymore.
Yes, by the end of your advert I might "want" your product that I'd never heard of, but as the OP says, "fuck you". You are taking money out of my pocket that I did not plan to allow its removal. In some circles, that's theft.
Huh? I know that the meaning of the word "theft" gets argued about a lot around here -- particularly when the copyright enforcement police come around.
But whatever we think "theft" means, I don't think it has ANY relation to what you just said. You read something, then you decide to buy something. "In some circles, that's theft." Umm, no, it's not. You made a choice to spend money. That's not "theft" by any stretch of the imagination.
Active advertising is literally coercion, enticing, manipulating, and encouraging a viewer to make purchases that they otherwise do not wish to make.
See, all of those words mean different things. "Coercion" is generally immoral and often illegal. "Enticing" or "encouraging" are not. "Manipulating" is usually immoral, but whether it's illegal depends on context.
I hate advertising probably as much as you do. And I agree with you that it sometimes exploits people psychologically in unfair ways. I wish there were less of it. But as long as you don't have a significant mental deficit and the advertising is basically true (not false or misleading), I cannot possibly see how you say that someone choosing to spend money is "theft."
*All* Asians make up ~5.6% of the population of the United States, but they make up 20% of those admitted to Harvard. Discrimination?!
Your two numbers don't necessarily have anything to do with each other. The distribution of intelligence (or whatever criteria college admissions are based on) is influenced significantly by various cultural and socioeconomic factors, regardless of race. And even if intelligence overall is basically assumed to be the same across racial groups (basically true, despite the various IQ studies that have tried to find very small differences), the tail end of the distribution on the high side may have different characteristics for different races (for various reasons, e.g., for socioeconomic reasons students who go to fancy private high schools tend to not include a lot of black students, so there are probably fewer black students who have had the educational opportunities to achieve at a very high level) -- which is all we're concerned about here.
Anyhow, a little while back this issue was covered in the media, particularly stuff like this NY Times piece. That includes this graph, which seems to show that Ivy League school admissions (who take race into account during admissions) have tended to arrive at Asians accounting for 15-20% of admissions in a very narrow band. While Caltech -- being one of the few elite schools that explicitly says it does NOT take race into account -- has seen Asian percentage rise significantly as the Asian population has in the U.S.
There are various problems with this oversimplified analysis, like the fact that Caltech has a different focus in overall student body from the Ivies in general, so it may attract different types of students with different skills. Nevertheless, there is a disturbing similarity to trends that were noted (for example) in the early 1900s with a "Jewish quota" that was enforced in many top schools to cap the number of admitted Jewish students, even if they had better applications than other students.
Is this effect real? Various statisticians have been debating it for the past few years. But it's at least something to think about, given the disparity between Asian percentage at top schools which take race into account and those which don't.
Democracy is just a sham anyway. It only really works to your advantage if you happen to be one of the dumbest people in the country.
...I think someone needs to read up on world history and the relative performance of various political systems.
Well, what stats are you looking at? Plato (in the Republic) discussed various forms of government, and democracy was the second-worst, eventually inevitably (according to him) degrading into tyranny.
And if you look at the track record of historical democracies, the giving of greater power to the public at large is often a prediction that a transition to a totalitarian, tyrannical, or autocratic form of government will follow. The people at the bottom of the socioeconomic system are desperate and will chase leaders who promise them anything, and all it takes is one or two such leaders with bad intentions, and things can turn bad really quickly.
Of course, those who promote "modern democracy" tend not to acknowledge such systems as true "democracies" -- they are instead oligarchies or totalitarian states or whatever that claimed to be "democratic" but were something else. But that sort of analysis generally neglects the fact that the totalitarian regimes are often at some point granted power in a democratic system... and then they become very difficult to unseat. One can find examples throughout history -- from the decline of the Roman Republic due to increasing populism and increasing power given to more people, ultimately leading to a string of dictators concluding with the Empire under Augustus Caesar, to the chaos and horrors in things like the French and Russian Revolutions where temporary periods of democracy rapidly gave way to terrors, purges, and then a return to autocratic or totalitarian rule, to the rise of power of Hitler in the Weimar Republic, a regime initially voted into office by majority rule (and then politically manipulated to turn into the Nazi state).
Democracies are dangerous things, and they put a lot of trust in both the people (and their leaders) to not vote away liberties, particularly in times of instability when the poorest and worst off are desperate enough to elect anyone, even someone ready to destroy democracy and negate rights in the name of helping them. I'm not saying there's a significantly better alternative, but democracy is certainly not the panacea that many people seem to think it is.
There are no such people. I mean, if there were, then WTF would they do when they go on a trip to a different state? Stand next to the gas pump and act helpless, like a drooling moron?
Are you serious? Have you never seen or heard of "full service" gas pumps? I have an elderly relative who is precisely a person like this -- I don't think she's ever pumped her own gas in her life. Granted, most of the time she lives in the city and doesn't drive, but when she does, she never pumps her own gas. One day when I was visiting her, she found it absolutely astonishing that I said we didn't have to take a big detour to some other gas station -- I'd pump her gas for her at the "self-service" pump.
These people are increasingly rare, given that more gas stations lack "full-service" pumps. But there are usually still plenty such gas stations around in a decent sized town, if you look for them. (Heck, even in the past few years I've had a guy not only pump my gas but actually clean my windshield and offer to check my oil level when I stopped at a random gas station during a trip.)
I went to visit in-laws in Oregon a while back, and was amazed at how much of a pain in the ass getting gas there was. In normal states, you can just get out, pump the gas, pay, and leave. But in Oregon? In Oregon you have to wait in line for fucking ever because they have one guy running around handling all the pumps and there's a line of cars waiting because he can't keep up.
Uh... go to another gas station, maybe?
I never lived in New Jersey, but I've spent a lot of time going through it, and I've only rarely seen the situation you describe at most gas stations -- and there it was usually a really busy time of day, and it wasn't significantly slowed down by the attendants: you'd probably have to wait in line anyway.
I'll tell you one thing -- I'd MUCH rather have some stupid state law requiring attendants to pump gas for me and be able to go from car to car, than the situation in many states where they outlaw the "catch" on self-service pumps, forcing you to stand there holding the damn trigger the whole time, even when it's below zero and you don't have your gloves on because you don't want them smelling like gasoline.
Yes, yes -- I've read all of the news stories about static discharge supposedly causing fires when people get back in their cars during refueling. First off, while it seems possible for such a situation to occur, there's little documented evidence that this is the cause of a significant number of fires at gas stations. And even so -- well, I never get back in my car -- I just want to be able to put my damn hand in my pocket rather than getting frostbite.
But the stupid government decides that I can't have the little "clicky thing" to pump the gas for me while I stand there... in that case, yeah, I'd rather require some other idiot to stand out in the cold and pump the gas for me. (Ironically, despite these requirements -- it should be noted that gas prices in New Jersey are generally some of the lowest in the U.S.)
Just for the record, what purpose does NOT killing him serve?
Any punishment inflicted by the government involves some sort of violation of rights and freedom. Whether the government confiscates your property/money by forcing you to pay a fine for parking your car on the wrong street, or whether it's denying you liberty by putting you in prison for something worse, or whether it's killing you -- the government is taking away freedom or rights.
And the question in a just and fair society should always be: is the taking away of rights justified in this circumstance? The default should ALWAYS be NOT to take away rights and freedom unless it is necessary. Otherwise, we no longer live in a free society.
For that reason, we should always ask five questions about punishments doled out by the state:
(1) Is this punishment sufficient to deter future offenses by this person?
(2) Is this punishment sufficient to deter others from committing this offense in the first place?
(3) Are there other punishments available which still satisfy conditions (1) and (2) but require fewer violations of the rights of the accused?
(4) When the state's action would not generally be allowed by private citizens (e.g., private citizens can't generally imprison or kill other citizens), does the state action "set a bad model" that encourages similar bad action among private citizens?
(5) Are there other unintended consequences of the administering the punishment in the justice system that could actually result in greater crime?
The death penalty certainly satisfies condition (1). Many people think it satisfies (2), but most people think it doesn't satisfy (3) since life in prison or whatever could equally satisfy (1).
The real questions arise with conditions (4) and (5). Historically (and still today in some places), if you beat someone, you'd be beaten. If you poked someone's eye out, you'd have your eye poked out. The problem with these systems is that when the state does something, it implicitly approves of that action as part of "civil behavior." While poking an eye out of a criminal may be a deterrent to those who might consider poking eyes out, it also sends a message to citizens that "poking eyes out is a reasonable thing to do in some circumstances, even after thorough deliberation by fair and just people." Does the death penalty say the same thing about killing and implicitly approve of such actions for some potential murderers? Probably not on a conscious level, but it's something to think about.
And lastly, we have to think about unintended consequences. Suppose the death penalty IS an effective deterrent. Suppose criminals are really afraid of it. That means if they do commit a crime where they'd be likely to get a death sentence, they may now be motivated to commit further (even more heinous) crimes to avoid punishment -- like killing witnesses. We've seen such effects sometimes with mandatory sentencing laws, like "three strikes laws" -- if a criminal knows that evidence of a "third strike" will send him to prison for life, he has a much stronger motivation to destroy evidence of that "third strike," even if it means threatening, harming, or even killing people.
In this case, there could be other unintended consequences, like turning the bomber into a martyr for a cause, which could encourage further terrorist actions and killing.
If we've asked all five questions and still think the death penalty produces the best overall policy and results in a civilized society, as well as resulting in both a sufficient punishment and NECESSARY denial of a right to life, only then is the death penalty "justice" in a free society.
I understand Europeans and others have difficulty understanding this. I'll explain:
To be clear: polls show that about 1/3 of Americans don't buy your logic. So while you may speak for many in the U.S., there is a substantial minority that disagrees.
We generally believe that certain crimes are so horrific that the only possible punishment is death. Unlike other places, our criminal justice system is not merely based around removing the threat from society, or rehabilitating them, but also around the idea of punishment.
Funny, that. The U.S. justice system has a long history of claiming that lex talionis is no longer our operating principle. That's why we have departments of "corrections" where we supposedly "rehabilitate" people. But you implicitly are claiming that's all rhetoric -- that when it comes down to it, we're just after revenge.
After all, what other justification is there for punishment when it is not intended to rehabilitate?
This misses the point. Justice based upon the idea of punishing someone, as a part of retributive justice or deterrence, has a long history, and while continentals may disagree, it's what we in the US choose to do. We believe, or at least our court system does, that some people DESERVE to die for their actions.
I'm in the U.S. I used to be at least a nominal supporter of the death penalty. I remember having long debates with friends when I was younger, and I made similar arguments to what you do. I also came up with other tangential justifications, which often appear here on Slashdot, like "it'd be worse if I were kept in prison for life, so I'd rather die in those circumstances -- therefore we should kill them" or whatever.
But as I've grown older, I've realized that arguments in favor of the death penalty inevitably boil down to FOUR main justifications:
(1) I'm mad at that guy. That's essentially what you're endorsing -- somebody did something bad, so I'm mad and I'm gonna kill him.
(2) I'm afraid of that guy. This is the argument that some people are so evil and cannot be rehabilitated, so they should be "put down" for the good of society. That might be valid reasoning if there weren't an alternative -- but we have maximum security prisons now. We don't need to kill this person to protect us.
(3) I want to scare other people. This has nothing to do with the actual justice served on an individual, but rather the idea that the death penalty actually deters other criminals from committing murder. There are some studies that suggest the death penalty may have a minor effect as a deterrent; there are others that refute that claim and say there is no statistical effect. One this is clear: Murderers are deterred by fear that they will be caught and go to prison, but a distant possibility of a death penalty is less of a deterrent. Perhaps if we reinstituted public executions where we tortured people in Times Square before killing them in some horrific way, maybe it might deter somebody... but the death penalty is applied so rarely and randomly that it can't function as a realistic deterrent.
(4) We've always done it this way. That's basically your other argument: there's a long history of revenge killing by the state, so why not continue to do it? it's the same wacky logic that propagates all sorts of ridiculous and stupid traditions and keeps our society from getting better. "I'm gonna haze these young dudes, because I was hazed." "When I was first starting out, I had to work 60 hours each week on little pay, so why shouldn't I do the same to these stupid kids." Etc. Sometimes to improve society, it makes sense to interrogate our traditions and ask whether they're actually doing good things, or whether it might be better for everyone if we found another way
Either you've never used a rice cooker or you don't understand that you just proved ShanghaiBill right.
And if cooking rice in a pot isn't the closest thing in traditional cooking to "fire-and-forget," I simply don't know what to say.
I do a LOT of cooking. I've been around lots of people with all sorts of cooking skills. I try not to judge people, but I've really come to the conclusion that (from a culinary skills standpoint) the world is divided into 3 types of people:
(1) People who don't own rice cookers, because they can't understand why anyone needs one and/or they don't make enough rice to justify it.
(2) People who own rice cookers because they cook rice every day or because they've found a rice cooker to be a good multipurpose appliance (as some people might use a slow cooker or a pressure cooker or whatever for many things), but still understand that you can cook rice easily without a rice cooker.
(3) People who own rice cookers and think it's impossible (or at least really difficult) to cook rice without one.
I fall in the first category. I definitely understand those in category (2), though. I'll never get the people in category (3). I had a roommate for a while who was scared to death of cooking rice in a pot -- she just couldn't comprehend how it would be possible to do it without a rice cooker and without a high probability of screwing it up significantly.
She was also the kind of person who would turn on my electric water kettle to heat up water for tea, go into another room, and forget about it. Then, 45 minutes later, she'd repeat. Then again. Then again. This process might go on through 5 cycles or more before she'd actually remember to come back and make tea while the water was still hot. One morning she tried to make oatmeal in a pan, and forgot about it on the stove -- for several hours. There was a layer of carbon about a half-inch thick on the bottom and whole kitchen had an odor that didn't go away for a week. She was in the next room. We had to throw the pan out. I could go on.
I've known a number of people who are completely oblivious, unable to find ways of organizing their lives or keeping track of time in even the most basic way. Those are the people who believe cooking rice without a rice cooker is difficult.
To the rest of us in the world, cooking rice is as close to "set it and forget it" as any cooking gets. It basically requires two moments of contact -- you don't need to "watch it" at all. You don't need to stir it (as ShanghaiBill implied).
(1) put water on stove, go do something else until you hear rattling in your kitchen (the pot lid as water boils), (2) throw in rice and other ingredients, turn stove down to low, set timer for the number printed on bag. Come back when timer goes off and eat dinner. Done. Yes, you might monitor the process the first 2-3 times you do it with a particular type of rice to tweak the time, but after that there's absolutely no reason to monitor it.
(And just to be clear, I realize that you were talking about specific types of music were basically impossible to typeset in the 18th century. I initially responded because I thought others might not get the fact that typesetting was possible in general for music, but it gradually faded away due to notational complexities and changing tastes in printing, greater varieties of types of music that were printed, etc.)
No, actually you're wrong. Keyboard (and solo violin) music couldn't be printed with movable type unless you separated out the parts and printed, more or less, one "voice" (or melody line) per staff (which was sometimes done, but it's hard to read, and for many kinds of music, totally impractical).
I think we're actually trying to agree with each other here, though perhaps I didn't go into enough detail to explain my points the first time around. I know risk going down the rabbit hole of music history minutiae, but why not...
Your initial post implied that it wasn't really possible to do movable type with music, but it was and it had been done. And there were plenty of examples of intavolaturas and original pieces of keyboard music in the late 16th and early 17th century that separated the various parts out. And yes, it was even possible to do multiple parts per staff, as in the tablature examples you mention. But the complexities of spacing and combining glyphs (as I specifically mentioned before) made this both impractical and difficult to read for keyboard or vocal music. So while polyphonic tablature was developed further for lute, vihuela, guitar, etc., the advantages of engraving were greater for polyphony in the kinds of scores you're talking about.
Or, to put it a different way, in your original post you were discussing the difficulties and complexities of engraving and why that made publishing expensive, etc. I was just adding that movable type (which seems like it should be easier -- to people who don't know much about music engraving but know the history of text printing where movable type was a huge technological leap) actually was attempted and used. But music typesetting faded out partly because trying to use it in 17th and 18th century instrumental styles would actually have been more difficult even than engraving (and would have produced a less readable result). It's not that it was impossible to produce blocks of type with more vertical notes -- tablature had been doing that for centuries -- but why would you bother? Engraving, despite its expense and complexity (which you rightly pointed out), was actually so much better-looking and practically easier to deal with.
I think older music (including classical) benefits from a survivor bias: the bad stuff has been forgotten, leaving only the good stuff.
That's really only partly true. Just as pop music has its particular fads and whims, so does history. Many composers and pieces we know today became part of the classical "canon" due to interest among particular historians or performers, or sometimes due to active lobbying efforts.
Take one of the most popular pieces of classical music today -- Antonio Vivaldi's "Four Seasons." Vivaldi was incredibly popular during his lifetime, but died a pauper. He was so popular originally that he wrote hundreds and hundreds of pieces, but these were completely forgotten within decades of his death. Then, in the early 20th century, a few random discoveries of his work and deliberate lobbying efforts by certain Italian businessmen and scholars led to a huge revival of interest in his music.
J.S. Bach came to be appreciated through a similar set of efforts, though in his case direct students of his and students of students championed his cause. By the mid-1800s, they had organized a campaign to publish a complete edition of his works, an unprecedented idea that basically created the idea of "classical music" as an appreciation of the works of certain "great composers" of the past.
Other pieces of music are remembered just because they happened to end up in popular anthologies, or because they were used in some popular textbook survey, or some music historian published some interesting book or article about them.
A lot of music was revived because it was considered unusual for the time -- Bach, for example, with his old-fashioned interest in complex counterpoint, was quite striking and likely "exotic" to the ears of the 19th century. More popular styles were often forgotten more quickly, but even there we have the odd exception: take Pachelbel's canon, a simple piece based on a repeating bass pattern. You could find literally thousands of such pieces written in the late 1600s and early 1700s, and probably hundreds that are just as interesting or "pretty" or whatever as Pachelbel's canon. But somehow that caught the interest of somebody a few decades ago (the legend I heard is that it was some radio DJ, but I don't know that for certain), and now it's one of the most popular pieces of "classical music," even though there's little distinctive about it from a historical sense. (In fact, as has been noted in parodies of Pachelbel's Canon, its chord progression is the ancestor of a lot of stereotypical standard pop music progressions that are still around today.)
I'm not saying that the music of the classical "canon" isn't "great music." But what we remember and what we perform and record today is as much dependent on the whims of history as our popular music is dependent on the whims of which genres are popular this year.
Technological note: keyboard and solo violin music couldn't be printed from movable type. It was engraved, a very tedious process which involved writing the score backwards onto a metal plate which was then etched. Engraving got much quicker, and cheaper, later in the 18th century, when the engraving punch was invented
Minor clarification (which you probably know) -- this music could be printed with movable type, but that had fallen out of fashion (and frankly generally looked terrible because of the complex issues of spacing, various glyph combinations, etc. that were required). Music had been printed using movable type ever since the first mass-printed music with Petrucci in the early 1500s. But engraving became increasingly popular during the 1600s, and by the 1700s (and Bach) basically everything was engraved. Typesetting was possible; it just wasn't what printers did at that point.
Or store both the original, and a standardized format. The place I work stores everything from engineering drawings, meeting minutes, purchase records, to manuals of old equipment in a central document library. It retains the original file, and makes a pdf of every file, and a link to both is listed in each entry.
THIS.
PDFs (or some similar standard) will ensure that the original documents can be read by everyone and viewed with the original formatting intended by the person creating them. Any differences in the version of Word or whatever is going to tweak the formatting in unpredictable ways.
But the originals should always be retained, since it may make future editing easier. And people also won't be stuck trying to undo whatever unpredictable reformatting or editing (e.g., loss of certain features moving between formats) might go on in your conversion process.
No, it does not. Basic math tells you that the average life expectancy is the inverse of the average probability of death per year. Reproduction rate does not matter one bit. 40% death per year gives you an average life-expectancy of 2.5 years.
Huh? What sort of argument is this? "Basic math" can only tell you in this case that you're making a lot of unfounded assumptions to get your numbers.
First, we should be clear here that the stats are talking about colony deaths, not individual bees, which may have different dynamics in both death rate and reproduction from individual bees.
But to your specific argument, in particular, you're assuming not only a perfectly constant population (actual species in the world vary significantly in their populations over time, particularly things with relatively short lifespans), but also that survival (to adulthood and thus reproductive) rate will be directly related to death rate and birth rate. That latter assumption is almost always wrong, since it's generally dependent on various external factors -- most species in the world reproduce at a rate that is higher than necessary to achieve 100% replacement assuming a 100% survival-to-adulthood rate. The excess can flourish and grow the species population in "good times," and at other times predators, disease, and starvation will lower the survival rate significantly.
So, a 40% death rate per year may be abnormal, but exactly what it predicts in the long-term will be dependent not only on average lifespan, but on the ability of the species to reproduce at greater rates and/or survive at greater rates when under various external pressures.
For a concrete example, suppose food is the limiting environmental factor. Many species compete for food. If a species is capable of producing 4 times the current amount of offspring that survive to adulthood, either their reproductive systems work differently when food is limited (and they reproduce less) or 75% of the offspring die of starvation before maturing. If you suddenly start killing off adults at a much greater rate, then the extra available food for the remaining members of the species may lead to greater reproduction and/or more survival of offspring (due to less starvation). Thus, "basic math" cannot determine whether any particular death rate or increase "may mean extinction" without more detailed modeling of a biological system.
All of that said, the stats for the bees currently don't look very good...
Curiously this is almost always said by people who never played themselves. Tell me, what exactly is the problem with consenting adults playing a potentially violent game where there is some chance of getting hurt? How is it worse that an X-Games skateboarder who knows he's going to injure himself at some point? Or a sailor who knows they might drown?
You make very good points, though I read the GP as pointing out the apparent irrationality (to some) of playing football, rather than trying to outlaw it or something. It's one thing to make an argument that "no one should do X because X is bad, and thus X doesn't make sense"; it's slightly different to argue that "no one should ever be allowed to do X."
In any case, whatever the GP meant, I certainly don't have a problem with consenting adults doing whatever -- particularly if they are informed about the consequences of their actions.
Brain injuries are just one of the numerous medical problems caused by football
The only real problem I see with that is that children aren't adequately protected by the rules of the game when they play it.
Here's where your comment begins to seem a little disconnected from the current debate. You later go on to discuss "incidence of concussions and certain other injuries" for children and such. It's true that "concussions" and various other acute injuries are a significant problem, and perhaps modifications to rules to encourage more "sportsmanlike" play or whatever could help with some of those. But rule changes simply aren't going to change the fact that slamming your brain into your skull at high speed repeatedly for years on end now seems like it may have serious potential for chronicbrain damage.
Perhaps even more distressing are recent studies that suggest the possibility of significant effects on the brain even without concussions. If this latter research is confirmed and shown to have long-term consequences, it suggests that the problem can't be fixed just by tweaking the rules or discouraging serious injuries -- the potential for chronic brain damage may simply be part of a game where people slam heads together on a regular basis.
I don't think there's enough evidence to make this latter claim yet, but if it proves to be true, there is in fact at least a valid argument to support GP's contention that "no one should be playing football," assuming they care about brain function. The use of padding, helmets, and various other equipment may have had a positive effect of preventing serious acute injuries, but it may also have the unintentional effect of allowing players to play longer and harder in other ways and thereby sustain serious chronic injuries without realizing it.
I don't have polling data, but it does pass the sniff test to assume that one form of magical thinking, inculcated from birth, would tend to make the personality more at-risk of accepting other magical-thinking proposals.
Well, there are some studies which suggest what you say is true, but there are other scientists and psychologists who have claimed that supernatural beliefs and superstitions are "hard-wired" into humanity. Many anthropologists have argued that some sort of supernatural beliefs were necessary for the foundation of complex societies, but there's disagreement about the exact role or types of beliefs and their effects.
On the other hand, regardless of upbringing, there seem to be specific psychological traits that are highly correlated with religiosity, such as lower intelligence or various personality traits. There have been literally hundreds of studies on this stuff, and your proposal that various superstitious thinking may be related to and/or substituting for religious thinking has been studied for close to 40 years.
There seem to be no clear answers and a lot of contradictory studies about whether paranormal/supernatural beliefs are basically innate or mostly affected by psychological traits or intelligence, or whether nurturing children affects those tendencies in significant ways.
The only thing I can say is that people have believed weird nonsense throughout history, and even if you expunge various myths and bogey men, people will find other weird nonsense to believe -- whether it's aliens or conspiracy theories or whatever. You can even look at demographic stats and polls for other countries -- participation in institutional religion is very low in Europe, and many countries have relatively high numbers there of people who are nominally atheists, but various other types of occult and superstitious elements are exceptionally popular.
Bottom line: decreasing religious indoctrination of youth may have some impact on overall belief in "magical thinking," but many people will still find various weird things to buy into as adults. Aside from natural cognitive tendencies of humans to "ascribe meaning" to random or natural phenomena and such, religion is historically about defining social groups as well as beliefs, and there's a lot of evidence that people will buy into all kinds of weird crap if it seems like the stuff that most of the people around them are into.
Take religion out of it altogether. Would you trust a for-profit company to be charitable without any ulterior motivations? I wouldn't. Nor would I trust a religious organization for the same reasons. Doesn't mean their actions are bad but they aren't entirely trustworthy either.
Then why are we talking about religion at all? It seems you're just expressing a general cynicism that any organization which does charity must have "ulterior motivations."
I don't dismiss it, I just recognize that the motives are not always pure. A good work done for marketing is still a good work (usually). But it would be a better work if it were done simply because it was a good work without any ulterior motives. The same would apply if it were done by a secular organization. A company that does charity for marketing purposes still is doing charity but it's not wholesome in the same way it would be if they didn't try to benefit themselves in the process.
Is it even possible in your world for someone to do a charitable deed "with pure motives"? Actually, this is a good general philosophical question, or perhaps a sociological one -- do humans ever act "truly" altruistically?
People generally do good to others in the belief that it will provide some "greater benefit." That benefit may simply be an internal feeling that they are "a good person" for doing so, or it may be because they view charity as some greater societal contribution or obligation, or it may be in the hope that by being charitable to one person, that person (and people like them) will have a better chance of being charitable to others in return.
What you call "marketing" is often just an example of that latter motivation. "Marketing" implies that religions are selling something (and thus getting paid somehow), but poor homeless people at a shelter are never going to be the primary people funding most charitable organizations, even if they donate some money in return someday. Instead, the "marketing" is mostly an explanation of the rationale for why the good deeds are done in the first place.
I freely admit that there are some exploitative religious organizations out there, and there may be plenty who are overly pushy. I don't approve of them. On the other hand, I wouldn't consider their actions to have "ulterior motives" and certainly not "marketing" unless they are explicitly making conditions on their charity.
If somebody said, "Jesus tells us to give, so unless you come back to church on Sunday and give us more money back than we paid for the soup you ate, we won't give you any more 'free' soup," then I'd say you'd be justified in calling it "marketing." But I've never heard it put that way even by evangelical organizations, and I've seen the ledger sheets of some non-profits -- they don't expect to get a "return" on their charity work directly. The soup kitchen is never going to "turn a profit" because all the homeless suddenly got jobs and start giving huge sums to the non-profit or church or whatever. So how is it "marketing"? And even if by some strained logic you consider it so, they're still generally operating at a significant loss, so how is the work no longer charitable or altruistic... particularly if by doing their "marketing," they result in more people doing charitable actions in the world (which is often the goal)?
(Please note that I say all of the above as someone who has never attempted to proselytize for any organization, religious or not. But I have worked in a number of charitable organizations, both secular and affiliated with religious institutions.)
The real trend seems to be away from a "default" position of "Yeah, I guess I believe in God, and maybe I'm a Christian" to "Yeah, I don't really care that much."
Is that an actual shift in values, or is it just that it's more socially acceptable now to acknowledge that you don't care about religion that much? A few decades ago, these people may have just gone to church on Christmas and Easter, but otherwise showed no daily signs of being "religious," but it was just the default way of things.
Nowadays, these people may still go to church on Christmas and Easter or whatever because it's family tradition, but they behave precisely the same way as they did decades ago... it's just now they feel more free to admit that there are other things they do. (It's worthwhile to remember that socialization was very different a few decades ago; churches were an important hub for communities and still are, but now we have a lot more possible ways to participate in both real-world and virtual communities.)
Basically, the percentage of people who are "devout" and attend church regularly has remained roughly the same. The people who were essentially "meh" before probably still are, but they've found other ways of filling their time and social calendar than attending an occasional church BBQ.
That isn't to say there aren't significant shifts, but I'd be more likely to interpret this as a social shift rather than one in the number of "believers." After all, we seem to still have record numbers of nonsense shows on TV concerning ghosts, aliens, and whatever other crap. People are still willing to believe in all sorts of mystical weirdness (though I'd be interested in seeing some more recent polls than in that link) -- it's just becoming less institutionalized.
Slashdot Mirror
This value of Ph represents optimism for the future and is directly correlated with the height of skirts above women's knees based on historical data related to how well the economy is performing.
Except the skirt theory has problems as an indicator -- it worked well up to the 1960s or so, but other economists have proposed a "lipstick index" (women buy more small luxuries like lipstick when the economy is bad) to the idea that the height of heels is a much better predictor (dubbed by some the "footsie" index... har, har).
Apparently heels go up in lean times, while skirts go down. But given the better correlation with heels, it seems that the skirt phenomenon may not be the driving trend. If heels go down, women's legs appear shorter, thus requiring skirts to go up to maintain constant L (i.e., the "legginess" factor). QED.
Can I have my Nobel Prize in economics now?
Nobody so far has been able to explain to me why we had to pass a constitutional amendment to outlaw alcohol, but the same thing is not necessary for any other drug.
Because the Constitution "changed" (at least in its interpretation) in 1937. Long story short: from 1789 to 1937, the Supreme Court believed that enumerated powers existed, thus putting rather restrictive and fundamental limits on the powers of the federal government.
For some reason in 1937, one of the justices on the Supreme Court switched sides. And ever since, the Supreme Court has basically interpreted certain sections of the Constitution (e.g., "interstate commerce," "general welfare," etc.) to mean "the federal government can do anything any state or local government can do."
Now, whether this shift was due to FDR threatening to pack SCOTUS with his cronies or whether Owen Roberts just changed his mind for some other reason, it happened. And once voters saw the effects -- like getting benefits from Social Security, Medicare, more sweeping Civil Rights legislation possible, etc. -- they kept endorsing the idea that the enumerated powers shouldn't matter.
So yeah, before 1937, federal power was limited (though it should be noted that some previous SCOTUS decisions had interpreted various enumerated powers more or less broadly). After 1937, there is no effective distinction between what the federal vs. more local governments can do.
Perhaps protection of commercial advertising is constitutional law's The Phantom Menace.
Sorry, I can't take seriously a paper on the development of constitutional law which starts with an analogy to Star Wars.
Neither can I. Just skimmed the article.
TL;DR: This is a rant/metaphor about Originalism. The author argues that both narratives and process of creating narratives have surprises. Constitutional law has many "I am your father" moments (yes, that's what the author in TFA calls them) when previous information in a narrative/legal principle is reinterpreted. But Originalism (according to TFA) wants to claim that these narrative/legal surprises were ALL planned and intended by George Lucas/the Founders all along. But of course, they weren't -- both Lucas and the Supreme Court have made up new stuff as necessary. Thus, Originalism is stupid. QED.
It's a really drawn-out argument to make a really simple (and not very nuanced) point. Beyond simply pointing out that Lucas -- like any author -- changes his mind and evolves a narrative dynamically as part of the writing process, I don't really get why any of the further Star Wars details are necessary (and aren't even very interesting or entertaining).
I need to read the article, but it seems like 12 seconds is really, really short, let alone 8 seconds.
Is it just me, or did anyone actually look at the original Microsoft report and find it nearly impossible to read efficiently? It's over 50 pages of "infographic" nonsense, with too many random distractions -- changes in font size, colors, random meaningless clip art, etc. It seems to be structured to be "skimmable," but it's not. It's like a really bad Powerpoint presentation with way too many words and too many details, all dressed up in wacky graphics and colors.
I kept waiting to find out what the methodology was, e.g., how they determined the "8 seconds" thing or whatever. It's still not clear to me, though the closest they get to explaining methodology is buried in a 2-page appendix at the very end.
This kind of layout would be great for a document that effectively summarized information in a couple pages. It doesn't work AT ALL for a 50-page document.
If this were an actual published research study in a journal, I could have read a report that would probably take up 2 or 3 pages and give me a much more useful and organized summary. As it is, I couldn't even figure out enough information from the report to evaluate whether the methodology actually makes sense or could lead to any of the (supposed) conclusions. The kind of tests they did and how they interpreted these things were grouped into three different kinds of attention (given very broad terms whose relationship to the tasks is questionable), which all were then applied to various other ideas in seemingly arbitrary ways. It all reeks of marketing BS.
TL;DR: This report is TL;PO;HS;BM (i.e., "too long; poorly organized; highly suspect; [likely] bogus methodology," or, in a less charitable light: "too long piece of horse-sh*t bowel movement").
I think the person's point was that the person who wrote the original piece was treating it like theft, them viewing people's actions in terms of how much money they should be making and accusing people who negatively impact that prediction as thieves.
That's nice. But I don't see any evidence of such a perspective in the parent's original post. Here's what was said again:
Yes, by the end of your advert I might "want" your product that I'd never heard of, but as the OP says, "fuck you". You are taking money out of my pocket that I did not plan to allow its removal. In some circles, that's theft.
Let's first try reading this in the literal way where "you" consistently means "some company doing advertising" and "I" means the parent who wrote this post. In other words: (1) I read your advert, (2) afterward, I might want your product, (3) I didn't ask for your ad, (4) but you "took money out of my pocket that I didn't plan for" because I end up wanting and thus buying your product, and thus (5) that's theft.
I believe you're trying to re-read parent's post as though the last two sentences were magically written from the point of view of the author of TFA. But (a) there's no evidence of that (e.g., quotation marks, and (b) it doesn't relate in GP's argument to what came immediately before it.
I don't want to see ads, I'm sick to death of seeing ads, and I'll do everything in my power not to. If that means the end of the web, I don't care. There isn't a single solitary website I can't live without.
Ironic -- saying this on a website that serves up ads. (Granted, it allows you to block them if your karma is good, but clearly your morality still allows you spend time on sites that do the thing you detest, particularly to new users.)
The thing that gets me is that even though advertisers know full well we're all sick to death of advertising and don't want to see it they are doing everything they can to shove it down our throats whether we like it or not.
The problem is that they can run the stats. Companies know that successful ad campaigns can increase revenue. How effective web ads are, I don't know -- but there are good reasons that companies spend millions of dollars per minute to run ads during the Superbowl or why clothing companies pay to run ads in fashion and pop culture magazines, etc.
You may hate them and never look at them. I certainly don't -- when I'm trying to read an article in a magazine or newspaper, for example, it's like I "don't even see" ads. I know they are there, but I never look at them. And even if you offered me money to try to remember what any of them were about, I generally couldn't tell you.
But I also know I'm not "most people." And neither are you. For some reason, most people actually seem to pay at least some attention to ads... and that's why they exist.
Also, you have to consider things from a financial perspective. If you gave consumers a choice: (1) cable TV with commercials, or (2) cable TV with no ads, but you have to pay for all your programming, I'd bet very few people would be willing to pay the exorbitant cost to take choice (2). It's the same thing for magazines or newspapers, and perhaps for some online things too.
Personally, I'm willing to put up with random ads in a paper magazine or newspaper with otherwise good actual content, because I know that I end up paying less for content with little inconvenience. I can "filter" my own reading so they are not intrusive to me at all (though I've seen certain fashion magazines that seem to be 95% ads, and I simply would never buy such a magazine, even if I wanted to read some articles, because that's just annoying). I'm less forgiving of ads that actually force me to waste time, whether they're TV commercials, or radio commercials, or web ads that delay my browsing or access to content. So I avoid things like that -- I don't watch live TV, I only tend to listen to public radio, and I don't revisit sites that have served up too many annoying ads to me.
And y'know what, If I'm forced to somehow sit thru an ad when I don't want to (I recently tried to watch a video at CBS.com, and if you block the ads you can't watch the program) I'm either going to a.) mute the sound and switch the tab till the ad is over, or b.) make note of the advertiser and NEVER patronize them simply because they forced me to sit thru an ad I had no interest in seeing. In most cases I will do both.
That's a valid choice, and I encourage it. The problem is that you are vastly outnumbered by people who won't take such a stance because they aren't quite as annoyed by the ads. So they put up with them, and as long as the advertisers see enough "views," they'll keep trying.
In any case, though I wish ads would just go away completely (like you), I realize that there are many people who find some (usually non-intrusive) advertising to be useful. (I know people who have told me that they buy some magazines to look at the ads. Seriously.) And if those people are willing to keep buying random crap to convince advertisers to keep paying to make better content, I'm personally willing to reap the benefits of cheaper content with little downside (since I'm never going to spend money on anything based on an ad, so the people who do are subsidizing me).
It's when advertising gets annoying and intrusive that I can't stand it. And I do the same thing you do -- I just don't go to that site anymore.
Yes, by the end of your advert I might "want" your product that I'd never heard of, but as the OP says, "fuck you". You are taking money out of my pocket that I did not plan to allow its removal. In some circles, that's theft.
Huh? I know that the meaning of the word "theft" gets argued about a lot around here -- particularly when the copyright enforcement police come around.
But whatever we think "theft" means, I don't think it has ANY relation to what you just said. You read something, then you decide to buy something. "In some circles, that's theft." Umm, no, it's not. You made a choice to spend money. That's not "theft" by any stretch of the imagination.
Active advertising is literally coercion, enticing, manipulating, and encouraging a viewer to make purchases that they otherwise do not wish to make.
See, all of those words mean different things. "Coercion" is generally immoral and often illegal. "Enticing" or "encouraging" are not. "Manipulating" is usually immoral, but whether it's illegal depends on context.
I hate advertising probably as much as you do. And I agree with you that it sometimes exploits people psychologically in unfair ways. I wish there were less of it. But as long as you don't have a significant mental deficit and the advertising is basically true (not false or misleading), I cannot possibly see how you say that someone choosing to spend money is "theft."
*All* Asians make up ~5.6% of the population of the United States, but they make up 20% of those admitted to Harvard. Discrimination?!
Your two numbers don't necessarily have anything to do with each other. The distribution of intelligence (or whatever criteria college admissions are based on) is influenced significantly by various cultural and socioeconomic factors, regardless of race. And even if intelligence overall is basically assumed to be the same across racial groups (basically true, despite the various IQ studies that have tried to find very small differences), the tail end of the distribution on the high side may have different characteristics for different races (for various reasons, e.g., for socioeconomic reasons students who go to fancy private high schools tend to not include a lot of black students, so there are probably fewer black students who have had the educational opportunities to achieve at a very high level) -- which is all we're concerned about here.
Anyhow, a little while back this issue was covered in the media, particularly stuff like this NY Times piece. That includes this graph, which seems to show that Ivy League school admissions (who take race into account during admissions) have tended to arrive at Asians accounting for 15-20% of admissions in a very narrow band. While Caltech -- being one of the few elite schools that explicitly says it does NOT take race into account -- has seen Asian percentage rise significantly as the Asian population has in the U.S.
There are various problems with this oversimplified analysis, like the fact that Caltech has a different focus in overall student body from the Ivies in general, so it may attract different types of students with different skills. Nevertheless, there is a disturbing similarity to trends that were noted (for example) in the early 1900s with a "Jewish quota" that was enforced in many top schools to cap the number of admitted Jewish students, even if they had better applications than other students.
Is this effect real? Various statisticians have been debating it for the past few years. But it's at least something to think about, given the disparity between Asian percentage at top schools which take race into account and those which don't.
Democracy is just a sham anyway. It only really works to your advantage if you happen to be one of the dumbest people in the country.
...I think someone needs to read up on world history and the relative performance of various political systems.
Well, what stats are you looking at? Plato (in the Republic) discussed various forms of government, and democracy was the second-worst, eventually inevitably (according to him) degrading into tyranny.
And if you look at the track record of historical democracies, the giving of greater power to the public at large is often a prediction that a transition to a totalitarian, tyrannical, or autocratic form of government will follow. The people at the bottom of the socioeconomic system are desperate and will chase leaders who promise them anything, and all it takes is one or two such leaders with bad intentions, and things can turn bad really quickly.
Of course, those who promote "modern democracy" tend not to acknowledge such systems as true "democracies" -- they are instead oligarchies or totalitarian states or whatever that claimed to be "democratic" but were something else. But that sort of analysis generally neglects the fact that the totalitarian regimes are often at some point granted power in a democratic system... and then they become very difficult to unseat. One can find examples throughout history -- from the decline of the Roman Republic due to increasing populism and increasing power given to more people, ultimately leading to a string of dictators concluding with the Empire under Augustus Caesar, to the chaos and horrors in things like the French and Russian Revolutions where temporary periods of democracy rapidly gave way to terrors, purges, and then a return to autocratic or totalitarian rule, to the rise of power of Hitler in the Weimar Republic, a regime initially voted into office by majority rule (and then politically manipulated to turn into the Nazi state).
Democracies are dangerous things, and they put a lot of trust in both the people (and their leaders) to not vote away liberties, particularly in times of instability when the poorest and worst off are desperate enough to elect anyone, even someone ready to destroy democracy and negate rights in the name of helping them. I'm not saying there's a significantly better alternative, but democracy is certainly not the panacea that many people seem to think it is.
There are no such people. I mean, if there were, then WTF would they do when they go on a trip to a different state? Stand next to the gas pump and act helpless, like a drooling moron?
Are you serious? Have you never seen or heard of "full service" gas pumps? I have an elderly relative who is precisely a person like this -- I don't think she's ever pumped her own gas in her life. Granted, most of the time she lives in the city and doesn't drive, but when she does, she never pumps her own gas. One day when I was visiting her, she found it absolutely astonishing that I said we didn't have to take a big detour to some other gas station -- I'd pump her gas for her at the "self-service" pump.
These people are increasingly rare, given that more gas stations lack "full-service" pumps. But there are usually still plenty such gas stations around in a decent sized town, if you look for them. (Heck, even in the past few years I've had a guy not only pump my gas but actually clean my windshield and offer to check my oil level when I stopped at a random gas station during a trip.)
I went to visit in-laws in Oregon a while back, and was amazed at how much of a pain in the ass getting gas there was. In normal states, you can just get out, pump the gas, pay, and leave. But in Oregon? In Oregon you have to wait in line for fucking ever because they have one guy running around handling all the pumps and there's a line of cars waiting because he can't keep up.
Uh... go to another gas station, maybe?
I never lived in New Jersey, but I've spent a lot of time going through it, and I've only rarely seen the situation you describe at most gas stations -- and there it was usually a really busy time of day, and it wasn't significantly slowed down by the attendants: you'd probably have to wait in line anyway.
I'll tell you one thing -- I'd MUCH rather have some stupid state law requiring attendants to pump gas for me and be able to go from car to car, than the situation in many states where they outlaw the "catch" on self-service pumps, forcing you to stand there holding the damn trigger the whole time, even when it's below zero and you don't have your gloves on because you don't want them smelling like gasoline.
Yes, yes -- I've read all of the news stories about static discharge supposedly causing fires when people get back in their cars during refueling. First off, while it seems possible for such a situation to occur, there's little documented evidence that this is the cause of a significant number of fires at gas stations. And even so -- well, I never get back in my car -- I just want to be able to put my damn hand in my pocket rather than getting frostbite.
But the stupid government decides that I can't have the little "clicky thing" to pump the gas for me while I stand there... in that case, yeah, I'd rather require some other idiot to stand out in the cold and pump the gas for me. (Ironically, despite these requirements -- it should be noted that gas prices in New Jersey are generally some of the lowest in the U.S.)
Just for the record, what purpose does NOT killing him serve?
Any punishment inflicted by the government involves some sort of violation of rights and freedom. Whether the government confiscates your property/money by forcing you to pay a fine for parking your car on the wrong street, or whether it's denying you liberty by putting you in prison for something worse, or whether it's killing you -- the government is taking away freedom or rights.
And the question in a just and fair society should always be: is the taking away of rights justified in this circumstance? The default should ALWAYS be NOT to take away rights and freedom unless it is necessary. Otherwise, we no longer live in a free society.
For that reason, we should always ask five questions about punishments doled out by the state:
(1) Is this punishment sufficient to deter future offenses by this person?
(2) Is this punishment sufficient to deter others from committing this offense in the first place?
(3) Are there other punishments available which still satisfy conditions (1) and (2) but require fewer violations of the rights of the accused?
(4) When the state's action would not generally be allowed by private citizens (e.g., private citizens can't generally imprison or kill other citizens), does the state action "set a bad model" that encourages similar bad action among private citizens?
(5) Are there other unintended consequences of the administering the punishment in the justice system that could actually result in greater crime?
The death penalty certainly satisfies condition (1). Many people think it satisfies (2), but most people think it doesn't satisfy (3) since life in prison or whatever could equally satisfy (1).
The real questions arise with conditions (4) and (5). Historically (and still today in some places), if you beat someone, you'd be beaten. If you poked someone's eye out, you'd have your eye poked out. The problem with these systems is that when the state does something, it implicitly approves of that action as part of "civil behavior." While poking an eye out of a criminal may be a deterrent to those who might consider poking eyes out, it also sends a message to citizens that "poking eyes out is a reasonable thing to do in some circumstances, even after thorough deliberation by fair and just people." Does the death penalty say the same thing about killing and implicitly approve of such actions for some potential murderers? Probably not on a conscious level, but it's something to think about.
And lastly, we have to think about unintended consequences. Suppose the death penalty IS an effective deterrent. Suppose criminals are really afraid of it. That means if they do commit a crime where they'd be likely to get a death sentence, they may now be motivated to commit further (even more heinous) crimes to avoid punishment -- like killing witnesses. We've seen such effects sometimes with mandatory sentencing laws, like "three strikes laws" -- if a criminal knows that evidence of a "third strike" will send him to prison for life, he has a much stronger motivation to destroy evidence of that "third strike," even if it means threatening, harming, or even killing people.
In this case, there could be other unintended consequences, like turning the bomber into a martyr for a cause, which could encourage further terrorist actions and killing.
If we've asked all five questions and still think the death penalty produces the best overall policy and results in a civilized society, as well as resulting in both a sufficient punishment and NECESSARY denial of a right to life, only then is the death penalty "justice" in a free society.
I understand Europeans and others have difficulty understanding this. I'll explain:
To be clear: polls show that about 1/3 of Americans don't buy your logic. So while you may speak for many in the U.S., there is a substantial minority that disagrees.
We generally believe that certain crimes are so horrific that the only possible punishment is death. Unlike other places, our criminal justice system is not merely based around removing the threat from society, or rehabilitating them, but also around the idea of punishment.
Funny, that. The U.S. justice system has a long history of claiming that lex talionis is no longer our operating principle. That's why we have departments of "corrections" where we supposedly "rehabilitate" people. But you implicitly are claiming that's all rhetoric -- that when it comes down to it, we're just after revenge.
After all, what other justification is there for punishment when it is not intended to rehabilitate?
This misses the point. Justice based upon the idea of punishing someone, as a part of retributive justice or deterrence, has a long history, and while continentals may disagree, it's what we in the US choose to do. We believe, or at least our court system does, that some people DESERVE to die for their actions.
I'm in the U.S. I used to be at least a nominal supporter of the death penalty. I remember having long debates with friends when I was younger, and I made similar arguments to what you do. I also came up with other tangential justifications, which often appear here on Slashdot, like "it'd be worse if I were kept in prison for life, so I'd rather die in those circumstances -- therefore we should kill them" or whatever.
But as I've grown older, I've realized that arguments in favor of the death penalty inevitably boil down to FOUR main justifications:
(1) I'm mad at that guy. That's essentially what you're endorsing -- somebody did something bad, so I'm mad and I'm gonna kill him.
(2) I'm afraid of that guy. This is the argument that some people are so evil and cannot be rehabilitated, so they should be "put down" for the good of society. That might be valid reasoning if there weren't an alternative -- but we have maximum security prisons now. We don't need to kill this person to protect us.
(3) I want to scare other people. This has nothing to do with the actual justice served on an individual, but rather the idea that the death penalty actually deters other criminals from committing murder. There are some studies that suggest the death penalty may have a minor effect as a deterrent; there are others that refute that claim and say there is no statistical effect. One this is clear: Murderers are deterred by fear that they will be caught and go to prison, but a distant possibility of a death penalty is less of a deterrent. Perhaps if we reinstituted public executions where we tortured people in Times Square before killing them in some horrific way, maybe it might deter somebody... but the death penalty is applied so rarely and randomly that it can't function as a realistic deterrent.
(4) We've always done it this way. That's basically your other argument: there's a long history of revenge killing by the state, so why not continue to do it? it's the same wacky logic that propagates all sorts of ridiculous and stupid traditions and keeps our society from getting better. "I'm gonna haze these young dudes, because I was hazed." "When I was first starting out, I had to work 60 hours each week on little pay, so why shouldn't I do the same to these stupid kids." Etc. Sometimes to improve society, it makes sense to interrogate our traditions and ask whether they're actually doing good things, or whether it might be better for everyone if we found another way
Either you've never used a rice cooker or you don't understand that you just proved ShanghaiBill right.
And if cooking rice in a pot isn't the closest thing in traditional cooking to "fire-and-forget," I simply don't know what to say.
I do a LOT of cooking. I've been around lots of people with all sorts of cooking skills. I try not to judge people, but I've really come to the conclusion that (from a culinary skills standpoint) the world is divided into 3 types of people:
(1) People who don't own rice cookers, because they can't understand why anyone needs one and/or they don't make enough rice to justify it.
(2) People who own rice cookers because they cook rice every day or because they've found a rice cooker to be a good multipurpose appliance (as some people might use a slow cooker or a pressure cooker or whatever for many things), but still understand that you can cook rice easily without a rice cooker.
(3) People who own rice cookers and think it's impossible (or at least really difficult) to cook rice without one.
I fall in the first category. I definitely understand those in category (2), though. I'll never get the people in category (3). I had a roommate for a while who was scared to death of cooking rice in a pot -- she just couldn't comprehend how it would be possible to do it without a rice cooker and without a high probability of screwing it up significantly.
She was also the kind of person who would turn on my electric water kettle to heat up water for tea, go into another room, and forget about it. Then, 45 minutes later, she'd repeat. Then again. Then again. This process might go on through 5 cycles or more before she'd actually remember to come back and make tea while the water was still hot. One morning she tried to make oatmeal in a pan, and forgot about it on the stove -- for several hours. There was a layer of carbon about a half-inch thick on the bottom and whole kitchen had an odor that didn't go away for a week. She was in the next room. We had to throw the pan out. I could go on.
I've known a number of people who are completely oblivious, unable to find ways of organizing their lives or keeping track of time in even the most basic way. Those are the people who believe cooking rice without a rice cooker is difficult.
To the rest of us in the world, cooking rice is as close to "set it and forget it" as any cooking gets. It basically requires two moments of contact -- you don't need to "watch it" at all. You don't need to stir it (as ShanghaiBill implied).
(1) put water on stove, go do something else until you hear rattling in your kitchen (the pot lid as water boils), (2) throw in rice and other ingredients, turn stove down to low, set timer for the number printed on bag. Come back when timer goes off and eat dinner. Done. Yes, you might monitor the process the first 2-3 times you do it with a particular type of rice to tweak the time, but after that there's absolutely no reason to monitor it.
But hey, to each his/her own....
I'm trying to figure out from your list what could possibly be multipurpose in your world.
(And just to be clear, I realize that you were talking about specific types of music were basically impossible to typeset in the 18th century. I initially responded because I thought others might not get the fact that typesetting was possible in general for music, but it gradually faded away due to notational complexities and changing tastes in printing, greater varieties of types of music that were printed, etc.)
No, actually you're wrong. Keyboard (and solo violin) music couldn't be printed with movable type unless you separated out the parts and printed, more or less, one "voice" (or melody line) per staff (which was sometimes done, but it's hard to read, and for many kinds of music, totally impractical).
I think we're actually trying to agree with each other here, though perhaps I didn't go into enough detail to explain my points the first time around. I know risk going down the rabbit hole of music history minutiae, but why not...
Your initial post implied that it wasn't really possible to do movable type with music, but it was and it had been done. And there were plenty of examples of intavolaturas and original pieces of keyboard music in the late 16th and early 17th century that separated the various parts out. And yes, it was even possible to do multiple parts per staff, as in the tablature examples you mention. But the complexities of spacing and combining glyphs (as I specifically mentioned before) made this both impractical and difficult to read for keyboard or vocal music. So while polyphonic tablature was developed further for lute, vihuela, guitar, etc., the advantages of engraving were greater for polyphony in the kinds of scores you're talking about.
Or, to put it a different way, in your original post you were discussing the difficulties and complexities of engraving and why that made publishing expensive, etc. I was just adding that movable type (which seems like it should be easier -- to people who don't know much about music engraving but know the history of text printing where movable type was a huge technological leap) actually was attempted and used. But music typesetting faded out partly because trying to use it in 17th and 18th century instrumental styles would actually have been more difficult even than engraving (and would have produced a less readable result). It's not that it was impossible to produce blocks of type with more vertical notes -- tablature had been doing that for centuries -- but why would you bother? Engraving, despite its expense and complexity (which you rightly pointed out), was actually so much better-looking and practically easier to deal with.
I think older music (including classical) benefits from a survivor bias: the bad stuff has been forgotten, leaving only the good stuff.
That's really only partly true. Just as pop music has its particular fads and whims, so does history. Many composers and pieces we know today became part of the classical "canon" due to interest among particular historians or performers, or sometimes due to active lobbying efforts.
Take one of the most popular pieces of classical music today -- Antonio Vivaldi's "Four Seasons." Vivaldi was incredibly popular during his lifetime, but died a pauper. He was so popular originally that he wrote hundreds and hundreds of pieces, but these were completely forgotten within decades of his death. Then, in the early 20th century, a few random discoveries of his work and deliberate lobbying efforts by certain Italian businessmen and scholars led to a huge revival of interest in his music.
J.S. Bach came to be appreciated through a similar set of efforts, though in his case direct students of his and students of students championed his cause. By the mid-1800s, they had organized a campaign to publish a complete edition of his works, an unprecedented idea that basically created the idea of "classical music" as an appreciation of the works of certain "great composers" of the past.
Other pieces of music are remembered just because they happened to end up in popular anthologies, or because they were used in some popular textbook survey, or some music historian published some interesting book or article about them.
A lot of music was revived because it was considered unusual for the time -- Bach, for example, with his old-fashioned interest in complex counterpoint, was quite striking and likely "exotic" to the ears of the 19th century. More popular styles were often forgotten more quickly, but even there we have the odd exception: take Pachelbel's canon, a simple piece based on a repeating bass pattern. You could find literally thousands of such pieces written in the late 1600s and early 1700s, and probably hundreds that are just as interesting or "pretty" or whatever as Pachelbel's canon. But somehow that caught the interest of somebody a few decades ago (the legend I heard is that it was some radio DJ, but I don't know that for certain), and now it's one of the most popular pieces of "classical music," even though there's little distinctive about it from a historical sense. (In fact, as has been noted in parodies of Pachelbel's Canon, its chord progression is the ancestor of a lot of stereotypical standard pop music progressions that are still around today.)
I'm not saying that the music of the classical "canon" isn't "great music." But what we remember and what we perform and record today is as much dependent on the whims of history as our popular music is dependent on the whims of which genres are popular this year.
Technological note: keyboard and solo violin music couldn't be printed from movable type. It was engraved, a very tedious process which involved writing the score backwards onto a metal plate which was then etched. Engraving got much quicker, and cheaper, later in the 18th century, when the engraving punch was invented
Minor clarification (which you probably know) -- this music could be printed with movable type, but that had fallen out of fashion (and frankly generally looked terrible because of the complex issues of spacing, various glyph combinations, etc. that were required). Music had been printed using movable type ever since the first mass-printed music with Petrucci in the early 1500s. But engraving became increasingly popular during the 1600s, and by the 1700s (and Bach) basically everything was engraved. Typesetting was possible; it just wasn't what printers did at that point.
Otherwise, agree with your points.
Or store both the original, and a standardized format. The place I work stores everything from engineering drawings, meeting minutes, purchase records, to manuals of old equipment in a central document library. It retains the original file, and makes a pdf of every file, and a link to both is listed in each entry.
THIS.
PDFs (or some similar standard) will ensure that the original documents can be read by everyone and viewed with the original formatting intended by the person creating them. Any differences in the version of Word or whatever is going to tweak the formatting in unpredictable ways.
But the originals should always be retained, since it may make future editing easier. And people also won't be stuck trying to undo whatever unpredictable reformatting or editing (e.g., loss of certain features moving between formats) might go on in your conversion process.
No, it does not. Basic math tells you that the average life expectancy is the inverse of the average probability of death per year. Reproduction rate does not matter one bit. 40% death per year gives you an average life-expectancy of 2.5 years.
Huh? What sort of argument is this? "Basic math" can only tell you in this case that you're making a lot of unfounded assumptions to get your numbers.
First, we should be clear here that the stats are talking about colony deaths, not individual bees, which may have different dynamics in both death rate and reproduction from individual bees.
But to your specific argument, in particular, you're assuming not only a perfectly constant population (actual species in the world vary significantly in their populations over time, particularly things with relatively short lifespans), but also that survival (to adulthood and thus reproductive) rate will be directly related to death rate and birth rate. That latter assumption is almost always wrong, since it's generally dependent on various external factors -- most species in the world reproduce at a rate that is higher than necessary to achieve 100% replacement assuming a 100% survival-to-adulthood rate. The excess can flourish and grow the species population in "good times," and at other times predators, disease, and starvation will lower the survival rate significantly.
So, a 40% death rate per year may be abnormal, but exactly what it predicts in the long-term will be dependent not only on average lifespan, but on the ability of the species to reproduce at greater rates and/or survive at greater rates when under various external pressures.
For a concrete example, suppose food is the limiting environmental factor. Many species compete for food. If a species is capable of producing 4 times the current amount of offspring that survive to adulthood, either their reproductive systems work differently when food is limited (and they reproduce less) or 75% of the offspring die of starvation before maturing. If you suddenly start killing off adults at a much greater rate, then the extra available food for the remaining members of the species may lead to greater reproduction and/or more survival of offspring (due to less starvation). Thus, "basic math" cannot determine whether any particular death rate or increase "may mean extinction" without more detailed modeling of a biological system.
All of that said, the stats for the bees currently don't look very good...
Really nobody should be playing football.
Curiously this is almost always said by people who never played themselves. Tell me, what exactly is the problem with consenting adults playing a potentially violent game where there is some chance of getting hurt? How is it worse that an X-Games skateboarder who knows he's going to injure himself at some point? Or a sailor who knows they might drown?
You make very good points, though I read the GP as pointing out the apparent irrationality (to some) of playing football, rather than trying to outlaw it or something. It's one thing to make an argument that "no one should do X because X is bad, and thus X doesn't make sense"; it's slightly different to argue that "no one should ever be allowed to do X."
In any case, whatever the GP meant, I certainly don't have a problem with consenting adults doing whatever -- particularly if they are informed about the consequences of their actions.
Brain injuries are just one of the numerous medical problems caused by football
The only real problem I see with that is that children aren't adequately protected by the rules of the game when they play it.
Here's where your comment begins to seem a little disconnected from the current debate. You later go on to discuss "incidence of concussions and certain other injuries" for children and such. It's true that "concussions" and various other acute injuries are a significant problem, and perhaps modifications to rules to encourage more "sportsmanlike" play or whatever could help with some of those. But rule changes simply aren't going to change the fact that slamming your brain into your skull at high speed repeatedly for years on end now seems like it may have serious potential for chronic brain damage.
Perhaps even more distressing are recent studies that suggest the possibility of significant effects on the brain even without concussions. If this latter research is confirmed and shown to have long-term consequences, it suggests that the problem can't be fixed just by tweaking the rules or discouraging serious injuries -- the potential for chronic brain damage may simply be part of a game where people slam heads together on a regular basis.
I don't think there's enough evidence to make this latter claim yet, but if it proves to be true, there is in fact at least a valid argument to support GP's contention that "no one should be playing football," assuming they care about brain function. The use of padding, helmets, and various other equipment may have had a positive effect of preventing serious acute injuries, but it may also have the unintentional effect of allowing players to play longer and harder in other ways and thereby sustain serious chronic injuries without realizing it.
I don't have polling data, but it does pass the sniff test to assume that one form of magical thinking, inculcated from birth, would tend to make the personality more at-risk of accepting other magical-thinking proposals.
Well, there are some studies which suggest what you say is true, but there are other scientists and psychologists who have claimed that supernatural beliefs and superstitions are "hard-wired" into humanity. Many anthropologists have argued that some sort of supernatural beliefs were necessary for the foundation of complex societies, but there's disagreement about the exact role or types of beliefs and their effects.
On the other hand, regardless of upbringing, there seem to be specific psychological traits that are highly correlated with religiosity, such as lower intelligence or various personality traits. There have been literally hundreds of studies on this stuff, and your proposal that various superstitious thinking may be related to and/or substituting for religious thinking has been studied for close to 40 years.
There seem to be no clear answers and a lot of contradictory studies about whether paranormal/supernatural beliefs are basically innate or mostly affected by psychological traits or intelligence, or whether nurturing children affects those tendencies in significant ways.
The only thing I can say is that people have believed weird nonsense throughout history, and even if you expunge various myths and bogey men, people will find other weird nonsense to believe -- whether it's aliens or conspiracy theories or whatever. You can even look at demographic stats and polls for other countries -- participation in institutional religion is very low in Europe, and many countries have relatively high numbers there of people who are nominally atheists, but various other types of occult and superstitious elements are exceptionally popular.
Bottom line: decreasing religious indoctrination of youth may have some impact on overall belief in "magical thinking," but many people will still find various weird things to buy into as adults. Aside from natural cognitive tendencies of humans to "ascribe meaning" to random or natural phenomena and such, religion is historically about defining social groups as well as beliefs, and there's a lot of evidence that people will buy into all kinds of weird crap if it seems like the stuff that most of the people around them are into.
Take religion out of it altogether. Would you trust a for-profit company to be charitable without any ulterior motivations? I wouldn't. Nor would I trust a religious organization for the same reasons. Doesn't mean their actions are bad but they aren't entirely trustworthy either.
Then why are we talking about religion at all? It seems you're just expressing a general cynicism that any organization which does charity must have "ulterior motivations."
I don't dismiss it, I just recognize that the motives are not always pure. A good work done for marketing is still a good work (usually). But it would be a better work if it were done simply because it was a good work without any ulterior motives. The same would apply if it were done by a secular organization. A company that does charity for marketing purposes still is doing charity but it's not wholesome in the same way it would be if they didn't try to benefit themselves in the process.
Is it even possible in your world for someone to do a charitable deed "with pure motives"? Actually, this is a good general philosophical question, or perhaps a sociological one -- do humans ever act "truly" altruistically?
People generally do good to others in the belief that it will provide some "greater benefit." That benefit may simply be an internal feeling that they are "a good person" for doing so, or it may be because they view charity as some greater societal contribution or obligation, or it may be in the hope that by being charitable to one person, that person (and people like them) will have a better chance of being charitable to others in return.
What you call "marketing" is often just an example of that latter motivation. "Marketing" implies that religions are selling something (and thus getting paid somehow), but poor homeless people at a shelter are never going to be the primary people funding most charitable organizations, even if they donate some money in return someday. Instead, the "marketing" is mostly an explanation of the rationale for why the good deeds are done in the first place.
I freely admit that there are some exploitative religious organizations out there, and there may be plenty who are overly pushy. I don't approve of them. On the other hand, I wouldn't consider their actions to have "ulterior motives" and certainly not "marketing" unless they are explicitly making conditions on their charity.
If somebody said, "Jesus tells us to give, so unless you come back to church on Sunday and give us more money back than we paid for the soup you ate, we won't give you any more 'free' soup," then I'd say you'd be justified in calling it "marketing." But I've never heard it put that way even by evangelical organizations, and I've seen the ledger sheets of some non-profits -- they don't expect to get a "return" on their charity work directly. The soup kitchen is never going to "turn a profit" because all the homeless suddenly got jobs and start giving huge sums to the non-profit or church or whatever. So how is it "marketing"? And even if by some strained logic you consider it so, they're still generally operating at a significant loss, so how is the work no longer charitable or altruistic... particularly if by doing their "marketing," they result in more people doing charitable actions in the world (which is often the goal)?
(Please note that I say all of the above as someone who has never attempted to proselytize for any organization, religious or not. But I have worked in a number of charitable organizations, both secular and affiliated with religious institutions.)
Here are Gallup's historical trends up to 2013.
This is the most insightful post here so far.
The real trend seems to be away from a "default" position of "Yeah, I guess I believe in God, and maybe I'm a Christian" to "Yeah, I don't really care that much."
Is that an actual shift in values, or is it just that it's more socially acceptable now to acknowledge that you don't care about religion that much? A few decades ago, these people may have just gone to church on Christmas and Easter, but otherwise showed no daily signs of being "religious," but it was just the default way of things.
Nowadays, these people may still go to church on Christmas and Easter or whatever because it's family tradition, but they behave precisely the same way as they did decades ago... it's just now they feel more free to admit that there are other things they do. (It's worthwhile to remember that socialization was very different a few decades ago; churches were an important hub for communities and still are, but now we have a lot more possible ways to participate in both real-world and virtual communities.)
Basically, the percentage of people who are "devout" and attend church regularly has remained roughly the same. The people who were essentially "meh" before probably still are, but they've found other ways of filling their time and social calendar than attending an occasional church BBQ.
That isn't to say there aren't significant shifts, but I'd be more likely to interpret this as a social shift rather than one in the number of "believers." After all, we seem to still have record numbers of nonsense shows on TV concerning ghosts, aliens, and whatever other crap. People are still willing to believe in all sorts of mystical weirdness (though I'd be interested in seeing some more recent polls than in that link) -- it's just becoming less institutionalized.