First, let me be clear that I'm NOT on Google's side here -- whatever it's doing, it doesn't sound like it's being fair to the labels. However...
Google uses content ID to figure out who owns copyright to music. So, if a video is uploaded that they know is owned by a copyright owner that has not negotiated with them, they can block the video saying that they have no license with the copyright holder and thus, nobody can upload that content.
Wait -- hold up. How does Google know that a video "is owned by a copyright owner"? Oh, that's right: The copyright owner had to tell Google that it owned the video and verify ownership.
And the link I just provided mentions that copyright owners have a variety of choices about what they want to do with videos that are under their ownership: they could block them, or monetize them, or simply track their views. According to Google's terms of use for Content ID, the copyright OWNER gets to decide what happens to content they OWN once they have verified ownership.
What you're telling me is the Google is now going to make a MASSIVE change to its terms of use and decide AGAINST THE WISHES OF CONTENT OWNERS to censor copyrighted material.
This effectively allows Google to block all content from the indie labels, uploaded by anyone and monetized or not.
Only if the labels have established ownership already by verifying it through the Content ID system -- Google isn't just going out there and figuring out who owns copyright by itself.
Google is not being clear about what they will do but the worst case is that they can block every indie music from youtube that has not licensed with them.
While what you're saying is theoretically possible, I imagine it would open up Google to all sorts of lawsuits. Basically, you're saying Google will now actively discriminate against the only people who have established their copyright ownership of material on YouTube. That sounds like an explicit violation of the copyright principle where owners are supposed to get MORE control over their content.
Moreover, it would be a significant alteration to Google's previous terms of use for Content ID. And, if independent artists really wanted to give the stuff away for free, why couldn't content owners simply retract their ownership claims -- which Google has an explicit procedure for?
From what I have read, most musicians consider YouTube as a promotional platform and not a revenue stream from videos. Google's threat is that they will eliminate Youtube as a promotional platform.
From what I've read it doesn't sound like this at all. What it sounds like is that YouTube is not a huge revenue stream, but artists get something from it. Google is offering to give labels money for their new subscription service, but the terms are not great. It sounds like they are also requiring labels to sign onto the subscription service terms to still retain ad money for the free service.
So, assuming I'm understanding this right, the choices for the labels are: (1) set a bad precedent by accepting unfair terms for the new service while retaining perhaps even further reduced revenues from the free service, or (2) refuse the terms and lose the small amount of revenue from free stuff.
Meanwhile, they can let Google do the enforcing by taking down their licensed videos, and play the media war. Worst case scenario is that they lose the small amount of ad revenue, but come back and re-post their videos for free (disclaiming blocking rights, as is their prerogative under content ID terms) and still get the promotional value with their videos on YouTube. Best case scenario is Google caves and gives them better terms.
Of course they do. This is just someone trying very hard to cover their arse.
Simple (unrealistic) proposal for a new law: for every employee under investigation the IRS has "lost emails" for, American taxpayers get a free year to use the excuse, "Oops, I just lost the financial documents for my audit" without any punishment, fines, or further questioning. By my reckoning, we all should have absolute defenses against tax audits until 2021 so far.
Perhaps a dire warning should appear in banner form at the top of any article about a company that pays shills to edit Wikipedia stating that it has been caught doing so, and that information about that company on Wikipedia portraying it in a positive light can't be trusted.
Wikipedia editors have all sorts of biases. When an article is popular enough to get the attention of lots of editors, there usually are enough to keep it from becoming too crazy.
But start dipping into the more esoteric subjects on Wikipedia, and you're bound to encounter little "fiefdoms" where an editor or a small group have established their domain of truth. It's not so much that they don't have adequately sourced information most of the time, as the sources they use are not indicative of current scholarly consensus or even accepted facts.
It often takes a huge edit war with a new editor or group fighting wiki-lawyering battles to dethrone these folks, and the fear is that the article will just get reverted back a month later when the conflict has died down and people have stopped looking.
Bottom line: if you want to start putting up "dire warning" banners about editors who have been caught putting misleading (or outright false) information on a page, you'd have to warn readers than a significant percentage of the information on Wikipedia can't be trusted.
That wikipedia is taken seriously as a source of information still astounds me.
What's astounding is how valuable and reliable a resource Wikipedia has become.
There's a difference between accurate and reliable. Wikipedia's accuracy, overall, is astoundingly good for a crowd-sourced entity. Wikipedia's reliability, on the other hand, is TERRIBLE.
Why? Because it's the encyclopedia that "anyone can edit." The whole conception of Wikipedia was great, and we've built up this amazing base of reasonably good information. But it's constantly fighting against the "barbarians at the gates." From the petty squabbles, wiki-lawyering, and edit wars to the constant barrage of vandalism and spam, it's a wonder the damn thing appears as "together" as it is on any given day.
But if you start to look hard, you see the cracks. Anyone who uses Wikipedia on a regular basis has seen random vandalism. I've seen vandals who have fun just changing random digits in dates or something. It's insane. Say all you want about Encyclopedia Britannica's errors, but it is relatively stable -- when you opened the book the next time, it wouldn't have randomly inserted typographical errors and deliberate mistakes thrown in.
Wikipedia is a hell of a lot more transparent than any encyclopedia ever published, and as long as you realize that Wikipedia is the beginning of your research, not the end, it will never steer you wrong.
Except when you happen upon a page in the middle of vandalism or some stupid edit war and see something that's completely misleading. Back when I used to edit Wikipedia occasionally, I'd go looking for the stuff. It's much more common than you'd think, and every new bot they create to try to keep things clean is fighting a useless war against stupidity.
It remains living proof that the "crowd" can make something awesome and that free can be great.. Even the people who scoff at the idea of Wikipedia and who love to tell you who that they can't believe anyone uses Wikipedia use it regularly.
I don't scoff at Wikipedia, but I don't believe a damn thing I read on it until I've verified it elsewhere. Too many random edits and too many encounters with all sorts of vandalism have taught me to be suspicious.
I'm trying to think of a readily available reference that's ever been as useful as Wikipedia, and I'm not coming up with anything.
How about a BETTER Wikipedia? If we truly have achieved this great resource, isn't it time to change the rules? What works best to grow your mom-and-pop restaurant into a small chain over a few years isn't necessarily the way to stay on top as a stable global business over a period of decades. It's time to lock down good pages on relatively stable topics, verify expert editors and get them to oversee future changes.
I'm all in favor of allowing anyone to still submit suggested edits, but maybe they could be on some other version of the page than the default that most people see from search engines -- the "unstable" or "experimental" bleeding-edge version. And consensus of knowledgable editors can move suggested changes to the "stable" version when they are justified.
That's the only way you're ever going to get something that's actually "reliable," to use your term. Right now, there's way too much time spent by volunteers fighting back the barbarians at the gates (and often new volunteers who are unfamiliar with Wikipedia's convention and stumble into random disputes or fights without knowing it... and thus are driven away). Instead, that energy could be focused on creating a stable, established baseline version, without worrying that any new IP address showing up could be trying to destroy what others have created.
Wikipedia is okay, but it could be great. But it reached a plateau in terms of administrative function maybe 5-7 years ago. It's time to move onto the next stage.
How would YouTube go about determining whether a particular video is a "music video" by a "music label"? If I compose and record original music to accompany a video that I have produced, and I upload the video to YouTube, does that make me a "label" and make the video a "music video", thus requiring me to formally release its soundtrack?
You're making this too complicated. This has nothing to do with definitions of "music videos" or "labels."
IF you want to upload a video of whatever to YouTube and show it for free, you are still free to do so. Nothing about that has changed.
IF, on the other hand, you want YouTube to pay you money from ad revenue it makes, you need to negotiate a license with Google/YouTube. Some labels and Google can't agree on terms, so Google has simply decided to walk away from the old licenses.
The old license terms gave the labels some ad revenue in exchange for YouTube having permission to show the (commercial) videos. If Google no longer agrees to the payment scheme, if can no longer show the videos, according to the old licenses. Therefore, it must take them down.
Nothing is preventing the independent labels (or artists themselves) from posting anything they want to for free. It's only if they are restricting the playing of videos so that they must receive shares in YouTube's profits in exchange that this matters.
Yep. And if you -- as an independent artist -- still want to post up a video and let them play it to whomever for free, you're welcome to do so.
Google is now saying that anybody who has a song up on YouTube that Google would like to include in their (for pay) streaming services (at a crappy rate of compensation) will have it removed from YouTube unless the artist signs up for these terms.
NO, it's NOT. Read TFA:
The BBC understands that even if blocks do go ahead, content from artists signed to independent labels will remain available on YouTube via channels such as Vevo.
Videos which are exclusively licensed by independent record labels, such as acoustic sets or live performances, may be taken down.
Read that again -- videos that are EXCLUSIVELY *LICENSED* by independent LABELS will be taken down.
In other words, the LABELS that these "independent" artists have signed with have refused to agree to Google's new terms. Therefore, the LICENSES that the LABELS agreed to are no longer valid.
Unless I'm reading this wrong, there's nothing here that implies that a TRULY "independent" artist couldn't post whatever he/she wants. But if that artist has signed with a label (even an "independent label" rather than one of the big ones), and that company manages the rights to the videos, then Youtube won't allow those videos to be shown in violation of licensing agreements made by those labels.
Google may be strong-arming labels to accept deals, but they aren't actually removing "independent" artists' videos -- only those videos which had been previously licensed by a label which refuses to agree to Google's terms.
The labels may in fact be in the right here, and maybe they should be holding out for a better deal. But let's not pretend that Google is arbitrarily taking down videos of random musicians -- it's removing commercial content that had been previously licensed, but now won't be because of a failure between the parties to agree.
If they're going to apply this uniformly, the video of your child dancing is now something they can use for their own profit.
I don't know about you, but if I were to post a video or other media on a website that serves up ads, I'm going to assume that that site is making money off of the ads. If you consider that using your materials for "commercial gain," then maybe you shouldn't post to a free hosting site that serves up ads.
On the other hand, if you want to get a share in that ad revenue, you're going to have to negotiate with the site owner. And if you don't think you're going to get a good enough deal, then you can pull your videos or media -- just as these labels are doing. Both sides here are making choices.
is my go-to source for internet shorthand. Any reason the FBI's too good to just use that?
Urban dictionary is edited by volunteers, and there are no real guidelines for entries. So, I suppose it could infiltrated by terrorists, who pose as submitters and editors to hide the true meaning of some internet abbreviations they are using to communicate about their next attack...??
(I'm being sarcastic here, but unfortunately knowing the U.S. government and current paranoia levels, this probably isn't far from their logic.)
However, rulings like these will create a (black?) market for disclosing information.
Maybe. It depends on the information. There's lots of information on the internet that no one cares about. There's lots of minor stuff about individual people that might be mildly damaging to someone's personal reputation, but except in a few incredibly rare transactions (like that specific person trying to get a new job or something), no one will care.
A lot of the uproar about the "right to be forgotten" involves actual public records and information which were previously "public" but hard to access (in the sense that you could access them only by traveling to a paper archive somewhere or perhaps sending a written request for a document). Now they can be instantly searched and show up on Google -- but the world functioned reasonably well when many of those records were not so accessible.
So, will people really go out of their way and make a "black market" for this information? Only if it's actually valuable enough that they'd bother to find out if the internet didn't exist.
I think of Google like a giant card catalog in an old library. (Anyone remember those? For you youngsters, there was a cabinet with a bunch of physical index cards that had lists for all the books and items in the library.)
Deleting links from Google is like removing the card from the card catalog. The book still remains on the shelf for anyone to go look at it. And if it's a particularly well-known book, people will find it anyway through other means (go ask the librarian, learn the subject organization for cataloging which will allow you to locate it, etc.).
But if it's a book that's been sitting on the shelf for 100 years and is covered with dust, checked out only once in 1967 by a curious academic with a specific interest, removing the card from the catalog just means the book fades into even more obscurity.
The court is only giving more value to the information, not stopping it spreading.
It's not "giving more value" to it -- it's just making it harder to find. It only has value if people know it exists and are willing to pay someone else to find it. If people don't even know the thing exists, why would anyone pay?
But you do have a point about "not stopping it spreading." There's a reason that people who want to ban library books don't just rip the card out of the card catalog -- they want to actually remove the book from the library shelves. The problem is the process itself of banning something will call attention to the item under question, leading every teenager in the county to track down that "evil banned book" even if the reference is removed from the card catalog. Unless we remove the information from actual websites hosting stuff, rather than just the most popular search engine, it's still out there -- and court filings will just draw attention to it.
So, I would expect that to be the next stage in all these "right to be forgotten" cases -- the argument will be that requiring a court filing to get stuff removed will itself draw attention to the information, so we'll need secret court orders telling Google to take things down, or else we risk emphasizing the very information that people are asking Google to delete. And secret court orders of course are a recipe for abuse....
Consider that you only have $10 to feed your family, and just came off-shift at your minimum-wage job.
Why do I have to shop every day? Can't I plan ahead a bit and shop once per week or something?
You can either buy:
- a McMeal on the way home from work (they have some sort of deal going now where you can get 4 burgers, some fries, and 4 soft drinks for $9.99)
McDonald's burgers are 1.6 ounces. Four burgers are 6.4 ounces of beef. I can buy a POUND (almost three times that amount) of ORGANIC GRASS-FED ground beef for $6 at the local "hippy" supermarket, $2 for 4 fresh-baked buns which are probably at least twice the size, and a pack of frozen french fries, for $10. You want cheeseburgers? Get the non-organic beef or buy a pack of pre-packaged buns to stay under $10.
What? You're missing the soft drinks? Don't bother. Or, if you really want to drink corn syrup or sweeteners, buy a 2-liter bottle when it's on sale for 50 cents.
- a couple of Pepperoni Little Caesars' pizzas, again on the way home from work
Do you have any clue how many pizzas I can make at home using better quality ingredients than Little Caesars for $10? The dough takes me about 5 minutes to mix up the day before, sits in the fridge. Take it out, turn on the oven, stretch, and bake. No fuss. With okay but better-than-average mozzarella (standard American style, not the fancy ovolini in water), premium flour, and better-than-average canned sauce, I probably could make nearly twice as much for $10. Use crappy ingredients like Little Caesars does, and I could probably make you 5 or 6 pizzas.
Better yet, spend $6 or so for the basic pizza ingredients for dinner, and spend the rest for some fresh veggies or toppings. Too expensive or no place to store the fresh veggies? Fine -- buy a can of black beans for less than a buck and substitute salsa for the sauce and make "Mexican pizza" -- more nutrition, more fiber, cheap and easy.
- burn $5 or so in gas to get proper food at the nearest decent grocery store 10 miles away, and spend an extra $8 doing that
What the heck are you buying for "extra $8" over the $10 budget = $18? That's a "nice Sunday dinner" budget for a family of four -- not with any fancy ingredients, but still. With that budget for a family meal, we can have a pound of nice steak and two sides, including some fresh vegetables or fruit. Beats the heck out of 6.4 ounces of McDonald's hamburgers and a few small packs of french fries. Or even roast an organic chicken with potatoes/rice and a vegetable, and pick the carcass clean and boil the bones for chicken soup in a few days. There might even be enough money left over to make biscuits and fresh fruit for "shortcake" dessert.
- spend $15 at inflated prices for nutritious food (though it's slightly old) at the nearest bodega/grocer/phone-card/payday-loan store,
I'm just going to stop here... are you incapable of planning ahead and shopping for a week wherever the grocery store is, or buying some bulk items to have food available when we can't get to the store... or...?
Thing is, most poor neighborhoods usually don't have decent grocery stores.
Yeah, a common myth. Actual studies on this issue have shown a higher density of grocery stores and supermarkets in poorer neighborhoods.
Or, you can save on cooking and grab some fast food, like most folks do,
You can't "save on cooking" -- cooking with basic ingredients is SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper than eating out, even compared to most fast food "deals."
Now, I know you're going to say: "well, some people are tired and don't have time and energy to cook every night!" Well, that may be true, but one can cook a
Or someone in that poor family could, once in a while, take a bike and go to a decent grocery store
True story -- some years back, I lived a few blocks from one of the cheapest grocery stores in a large city. The local chain had its priorities straight: they made money off of volume, rather than off of profit margin on individual items. Thus, the aisles were full of people from the time it opened until the time it closed, 14 hours every day of the week. It had quality food (much better than the average supermarkets in the richer parts of town, because the produce for example moved so quickly instead of sitting on shelves for weeks).
There were very few times I would go there where there wasn't a line of cabs sitting out front. That's what the poor people would do, since they couldn't afford cars -- they'd take a bus there or walk there, and then pay for the $10-15 cab ride home. A local newspaper once did a price survey and discovered this grocery store would save you 40% over average prices elsewhere in the city (not even counting sale prices).
So -- you don't even need to take a bike if you know the right place to shop. The people I saw there leaving with full carts and piling bags into a cab were undoubtedly saving HUNDREDS of dollars every month -- and they were getting their pick of all sorts of food. The price of a cab ride every other week or so was well worth it.
Poor people are fact because they CANT eat properly.
Hogwash. Sure, you can cherry pick healthy items that are expensive, but there are also plenty of healthy foods that are cheap: carrots, oatmeal, peanut butter, eggs, etc.
Actually, the basic criteria for cheap, healthy food are: (1) buy mostly individual ingredients, which you can combine in simple ways, rather than stuff that's made of dozens of processed items in combination, and (2) buy in bulk, buy on sale, buy in season.
The problem these days is: (1) most people don't have sufficient cooking skills to know how to deal with basic ingredients efficiently, as they have to on a busy schedule, and (2) our current food distribution system is tailored to people who don't plan ahead, so it's difficult to find true bulk retail outside of restaurant supply stores (which sometimes won't sell to individual consumers) or over the internet (where shipping can be prohibitively expensive).
There's this myth that you can't get cheaper food than the McDonald's dollar menu (or whatever), and you'll never get as many calories/dollar as you would buying that box of crappy supermarket donuts or bag or potato chips.
But that's simply not true. In most places, you can live on a reasonably varied healthy diet for a few dollars/day (less if you're willing to have fewer choices and be mostly vegetarian).
Where do you buy those things if there are no grocery stores within miles of your house and you don't have transportation?
Google food deserts.
Yeah, instead Google the myth of "food deserts." (See here, for example.)
Some useful quotes:
Poor neighborhoods, Dr. Lee found, had nearly twice as many fast food restaurants and convenience stores as wealthier ones, and they had more than three times as many corner stores per square mile. But they also had nearly twice as many supermarkets and large-scale grocers per square mile.
Dr. Sturm found no relationship between what type of food students said they ate, what they weighed, and the type of food within a mile and a half of their homes.
And even if it were true that many grocery stores in poor neighborhoods don't have a load of high-quality fresh produce choices (the main thing always brought up about "food deserts," if they exist), even the crappy urban grocery stores I've been in will often have "family packs" of cheap frozen veggies and such, or at least large cans of vegetables and fruit. It's not the best stuff on the planet, but the idea that the only thing available is McDonald's, boxes of donuts, and bags of chips is generally more of a myth than reality.
At Purdue for most math and science AP credits they still require you to take their own placement test during an orientation weekend.
Actually, if you read the MIT link, you'll note that MIT does precisely that for Chemistry and Biology credit, for example. If true, this souinds EXACTLY like one of the very schools I mentioned.
They flat out tell you during the physics one that maybe one kid a year will actually score high enough to opt out of the first physics class......so good luck.
Well, this link and this one both clearly state that getting a 5 on the physics C tests (as well as various scores on other science and math tests) will get you credit for various classes, including in the School of Engineering.
Now -- it's possible either (1) things have changed there since you were in school, or (2) you had to take some special version of physics or whatever in the engineering curriculum that was more advanced than they'd give you AP credit for -- but according to Purdue's own website, they DO give credit for AP classes in science and engineering with high enough scores.
I got no credit for my AP CS class because they just didnt consider it equivalent to anything in their first year engineering curriculum, maybe if I would have been going as a CS major and not CmpE it may have bought me something
Which is part of the point I made -- I agreed with the GP that sometimes you have to make a substitution in your major area. However, if you have AP credits in various things (say, AP European History or something), you should often be able to apply them toward requirements outside your major or elective credits, which could potentially save you time and/or money toward your overall degree.
Being able to get AP credit that counts towards requirements and graduation SOMETIMES != Being able to get AP credit ALWAYS. The GP was arguing for NEVER. I was saying SOMETIMES. You say "not ALWAYS." We don't disagree.
LOL, oh you're serious, let me laugh harder. If you think skipped courses due to AP credits reduce the number of hours needed to graduate at the vast, vast majority of schools you're mistaken. No, it will just let you skip an intro course and fill the hours requirement for your major for something a little less dull.
You can save money and get a head start on your degree when you enter college with credit youâ(TM)ve already earned through AP.
But if you're not convinced, let's look at some of the top schools in the U.S., and what they will do for a person with AP credit. Harvard says the following:
Students may be allowed to use an AP exam score (or appropriate international credential) to meet certain requirements (foreign language, introductory departmental course, etc.).
Students with a full yearâ(TM)s worth of advanced workâ"documented by AP exams, an IB diploma, or certain other international credentialsâ"may be eligible to petition for Advanced Standing. The College grants four Harvard full-course credits, the equivalent of a year of study, to those students who activate Advanced Standing.
In other words, you not only can pass out of a number of requirements, but you can also skip an entire year of college... at one of the top colleges in the U.S.
Even MIT, which is notorious for having one of the most restrictive AP policies in the U.S., will still give you credit for and let you pass out of the first semester of calculus or physics (both required of all MIT graduates) with sufficient AP scores. And you'll get unrestricted credit that can count toward miscellaneous electives you need for your degree or whatever for some other AP tests (e.g., humanities).
Bottom line: At the "vast, vast majority of schools," many AP courses WILL reduce the number of credits you need for graduation, as well as allowing you to skip intro classes.
You're right that many schools will still require you to take something else within your major to fulfill a minimum set of required credit hours. But you'll often still be able to use miscellaneous AP credits toward random electives.
Seriously -- do at least a minimum of research before you show your ignorance while wrongly making fun of somebody.
Having actually taught some high-school AP classes, I think that depends on where you're going to college. Colleges generally calibrate whether they accept AP credit and what score is required based on their curriculum.
For example, MIT's AP criteria states that they won't accept AP credit to pass out of a chemistry or biology class; to do so, you need to take MIT's own placement exam. They don't accept CS AP credit at all. And for calculus and physics, they basically require you to get a 5 on the hardest possible AP versions of those tests to get any credit. But much of MIT's basic undergrad curriculum goes as much as twice as fast as a typical college.
Most colleges, on the other hand, will give you a semester of college credit for almost all those subjects if you get a 4 or 5. (For comparison, here are the requirements for the University of Massachusetts. And this is still a fairly decent school, as state universities go.) Some might even give credit (or partial credit) for a 3.
I completely agree with you that some of the AP curriculum is crap. (For example, the AP E&M physics C test is ridiculously oversimplified compared to what a real college student with calculus should be able to do. On the other hand, the mechanics test for physics C isn't bad -- it's been dumbed down a bit over the past couple decades, but it can still have some reasonable questions.)
But the reality is that the AP credit *IS* roughly equivalent to the curriculum at many colleges. If it wasn't, colleges wouldn't give credit and advanced standing for AP scores.
That falls under "'born, not made". You're either born to good parents or you're not.
Not entirely true. Intelligence has a significant genetic component, but it isn't everything. And other skills or character traits, like hard work, curiosity, discipline, etc. often tend to fall more in the "nuture" category. Putting a kid in a home environment that encourages success will make a difference.
On the other hand, there have been other studies suggesting that the most important aspects of that nurturing environment for childhood development are based on who the parents/caregivers naturally ARE, rather than who they would LIKE TO BE. For example, how many books are in a home (even if they aren't children's books) is a better predictor of child success than how many books parents read to their kids. This doesn't imply that stocking large bookcases in your home will magically make your kids smarter -- it means that parents who own a lot of books are often the type of people who will convey a favorable learning environment for their kids... whether they "try" or not.
In any case, future success is definitely not determined at birth.
Nice analysis. The problem is that the fully vaccinated rate in San Diego County for whooping cough is a lot closer to 85% than it is to 99%. Combine that with some testing bias and the efficacy of this vaccine is in serious doubt.
This may be true, but my point is the news story as presented does not give us enough data to draw that conclusion. The news story says 85% of people with the disease have been unvaccinated -- to a layperson, that is incredibly misleading, since most people unfamiliar with statistics will assume that means that the vaccine is actively HARMFUL ("85% is much greater than 15%, so the disease must be targeting those with the vaccine!").
What it really should give is some sort of estimate of relative risk ("Based on current vaccination estimates, the risk of contracting the disease is about the same for those vaccinated as unvaccinated") or some estimates of actual incidence for the subgroups ("X cases per 100,000 people for vaccinated, Y cases per 100,000 for non-vaccinated").
I wasn't saying the vaccine IS effective. I was saying that quoting the statistic in TFA is at worst meaningless and likely to be incredibly misleading.
(Also, to be thorough, you'd need to consider other factors, such as the reporting rate for the various groups. For example, if some undocumented populations are both less likely to be vaccinated AND less likely to seek treatment because they are poor and/or fear discovery of their status or whatever, that could skew estimates. I'm not saying this IS the case, but we need to consider other differences between the vaccinated and unvaccinated groups to determine true efficacy.)
To truly see how well the whooping cough vaccination is working, you need to compare it to the percentage of total vaccinations.
THIS. The reporting in TFA is potentially making a false inference.
If this is unclear, think about it this way: If 85% of the 621 infected have been vaccinated, that means that 528 were vaccinated, and 93 were not.
Now, consider a hypothetical population of 10,000 people. And suppose (for the sake of argument) 99% of them are vaccinated. That means that 9900 people are vaccinated, and only 100 people are not.
Look at those statistics again for infections. If 93 of unvaccinated people were infected, that would constitute 93% of the entire unvaccinated population. In comparison, 528 out of the other 9900 would only be 5.33%.
In this hypothetical 99% vaccinated scenario, going without vaccinations means you are over 17 TIMES more likely to get infected if you are unvaccinated.
I doubt we can assume a 99% fully vaccinated rate, but as long as that rate is greater than 85%, the vaccine has some apparent effect. To wit:
Percentage of population vaccinated - relative risk
99% - 17.4 times higher risk for unvaccinated
97% - 5.7
95% - 3.3
90% - 1.6
85% - equal risk
less than 85% - vaccine is apparently not effective
You can't compare the incidence of things happening in two different subgroups without knowing the overall proportion of the subgroups within the population in general. Basic stats error.
I know of opera performances with piano. I've seen them, though usually they are in a smaller venue with limited staging. That's a different animal entirely -- turning large concert music into chamber music, and it's been done for centuries.
Such performances also retain the feeling of a truly live performance with acoustical instruments, with musicians interacting with each other rather than following some fake karaoke contraption with speakers laid out to simulate the layout of an orchestra.
I'd definitely pay to hear a chamber performance of an opera. But even in the opera world, Wagner's a bit of a specialty, and I find the idea of a chamber performance of the Ring to be a much weirder idea than Puccini, though maybe that's me.
Let me start by saying that I think anybody should be free to put on whatever kind of performance they want, and if people come and pay for tickets, so they make money -- terrific.
But this whole thing is a little weird to me. The entire style of singing in traditional opera (especially Wagner, which is what this particular story is about) is predicated on traditional acoustics, without electronic enhancement. Those crazy warbling sopranos do so to differentiate themselves timbrally from the orchestra and allow their voices to get to the audience. A singer otherwise would often get lost among the wash of sound from a 100 orchestral instruments.
So, if you want to get rid of the acoustic instruments, why the devil keep the operatic vocal performances the same? Give the singers microphones and let them perform in varying vocal styles, as done in most pop music and on Broadway these days.
This all strikes me as an incredibly odd project -- they're going to replace musicians with oodles of speakers pointed in various directions to simulate musicians playing? All of this technology to propagate an art form whose style of performance and singing is predicated on acoustic real-life performance?
And why bother with all the sampling at all? Why not just hire real musicians to perform, record them, and then play that back with just the singers doing their thing? Surely the investment that's going into this to figure out how to place oodles of speakers, getting all that sound equipment, etc. could probably pay for a one-time investment in a decent karaoke-style recording of actual instruments?
From TFA:
Tino Gagliardi, the president of Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, in New York, likened it to operatic karaoke.
That sounds precisely like what it is. Not that there's anything wrong with that -- if they can get somebody to pay for it, why not? I don't get why the heck anyone would want to do with opera, whose aesthetic is all about low-tech, but whatever floats your boat.
For the purists, there is one further question, though:
Staging a "Ring" cycle in Connecticut with a digital orchestra is the dream of Charles M. Goldstein, a musician and would-be impresario who was once an extra chorister at the Met, and who founded the Hartford Wagner Festival with the idea that one day Connecticut could become the only place outside of Bayreuth, Germany, to perform entire "Ring" cycles every year. He argued that there was no loss of jobs for musicians because, from the outset, he had never planned to use live players in the pit.
Here's the problem -- what does "perform" mean? Literally, from its etymological roots, it means to put something into its final form. Actual live music depends on responsiveness between singers and conductors and orchestra. Nothing is ever quite the same twice -- and that is often one of the cool things about live music.
This guy is proposing to "perform" pieces by using canned sampled pre-recorded "orchestras" (if I understand it correctly). I'm not saying it isn't an interesting idea, but why do it with Wagner or traditional opera at all? Is there really an audience who really wants to see effectively a dressed-up opera karaoke?
People in Europe tend to be different than people in the US. We don't look for loopholes and try to rip off anyone just for the sake of ripping them off.
Umm, have you ever been to Italy? Or much of eastern Europe (particularly touristy parts or "bad" parts of big cities)?
To give you an example. Just around the corner from here, there's an "open bookcase". One of many in this town, I may add. It's basically a box full of books. You take books you no longer want there and put them in and take books you'd like to read out.
Yeah, my doctor's office has one of those. The local public library does too. I live in the US. What's your point again?
As far as I know, there is no way to track these books. You could take them and go and sell them in a yard sale. You could actually make a few bucks that way.
Yeah, here's the thing -- most Americans, like most people in most parts of Europe, are basically good-natured folk. Most people are not out to deliberately scam other people. And why ruin a nice public resource like this for a few bucks?
But there are always going to be those who will take advantage of others (where is worst?... I don't know, but my personal experience is northern Europe is better overall than the US, but Italy and some other parts are more questionable), and the internet makes it easier, because most people find it easier to treat others badly when they don't have direct contact with them.
You think those of us who are fit enjoy eating salads?
Salads are very tasty, one of my favorite foods. A salad made from fresh-picked vegetables from the garden is one of life's pleasures. If you don't like the salads you apparently are forcing yourself to eat, why not try variations: different types of greens, different vegetables, some other low-calorie nutrient-dense thing like legume dishes or something?
Why would you eat stuff on a regular basis that you don't like?
Do you really think I enjoy drinking water instead of soda?
You'd have to pay me to drink a can of actual Coke or just about any "normal" soda. It's terrible. It's sickeningly sweet. I didn't used to be this way, but then I stopped consuming so much random sugar for a few years. Now a Coke tastes disgusting.
You want to drink something other than water? Try unsweetened iced tea, or any number of other beverages. Heck, you could even make you own "soda" by mixing in a reasonable amount of some sweetener into soda water or something, rather than the ridiculous quantity in soda.
Or do you think we somehow magically like candy less than everyone else?
Again, I think most "candy" is disgusting, particularly in the U.S. It's way too sweet. Again, try living a reasonable diet with less processed foods without all the sugar constantly for a couple years, and you'll probably feel the same. I'll occasionally have a square of good dark chocolate or something, but the crap that Hershey's serves up or the stuff in candy bars is terrible.
We are still humans, and we crave the exact same things. A bag of Doritos and some beer look just as tempting to us as they look to you.
Doritos? Seriously? What are you, 12 years old? Again, a disgusting frankenfood. What the devil is the flavor of those things?
And most beers are rather bitter -- many humans don't naturally crave the taste of beer the first time they try it (same thing for black coffee). But social conventions and the alcoholic buzz cause people to get over their hesitance, and they get used to drinking stuff that tastes a little weird.
I like salads, and I don't like most of the things you claim that humans apparently naturally crave. I'll have a beer a couple times per month in social situations, but I'm not tempted to go out and buy beer just for the heck of it (and again, I think for most people, it's the mild alcoholic effects that they crave too, not just the taste).
And at the end of the day, diet is much easier than working out.
Absolutely agree. But the cravings are mildly concerning. Why would you bother to eat a lot of foods you don't like, and why don't you look for reasonable substitutes for "unhealthy" foods you don't want to eat?
With a lot of foods, liking them is a learned behavior and a gradual response that happens over time. If you remove the processed crappy foods with all the bad ingredients, you may realize you don't want those things as much anymore.
I knew a kid who was like this -- he never had candy or cookies or cakes or artificially sweet things. On the few occasions he was offered them, he would spit them out or at most take one bite and leave the rest. He hated ice cream. (Seriously.)
There's nothing necessarily universal about liking ridiculously sweet things: they were not part of our ancestors' diets. This kid lived for about 4 years, never asking for sweets, and generally rejecting them when offered. (He did enjoy many fruits, though more those which balance sweetness with some other tart flavors.)
This all changed when he went into a daycare situation where they'd have a birthday party for each kid, and they'd get cupcakes every time. Suddenly, cakes and sweets were connected with celebration... and suddenly this kid asked for them. And once sugar became "fun" and celebratory (see Hallowee
If obesity is a disability, and the legal definition of maiming is to disable or disfigure, will McDonald's advertising -- particularly when it materially misleads about health issues, like their Olympics sponsorship campaigns -- be ruled negligent maiming?
Forget about advertising. Just about everything about the McDonald's experience is designed to be mildly "addictive." Previous studies have shown that various aspects of fast food are often subtly tweaked to stimulate our brain or digestion in such a way that we crave more.
I'm not saying McDonald's should be held responsible for "maiming" either, but food scientists get better every year at finding ways to "trick" our bodies into enjoying their designer foods more. Obviously "making good food" has been the goal of cooks and chefs from the beginning of time, but there were some practical chemical limits on things that could be accomplished with traditional cooking techniques. You could always add a little more sugar or fat or whatever, but there was a limit before the food became unappetizing.
"Designer" foods have fewer limitations. Using various additives, stabilizers, flavor enhancers, etc., you can pack loads of terrible things into a complex processed formulation that are designed to cause a physiological response of targeted cravings and pleasure rewards that is different from anything we could do in the past.
If this trend continues, at some point it will be possible to manufacture foods that are actually as "addictive" as other substances that are highly regulated. And at some point we'll have to think about the implications of that.
You are technically right, the worst kind of being right. You are completely neglecting the multitude of e.g. psychological issues that cause people to eat so much they become morbidly obese.
THIS.
Seriously -- let's assume the AC (claiming to be MD) is right. Increasing rates of obesity have been called one of the biggest threats to health, one of the most dangerous trends, an "epidemic" that can ruin the lives of millions of billions of people.
And the AC notes -- well, they're doing it to themselves. There's no simple physical explanation (like thyroid dysfunction or whatever).
Okay -- then what? Let's think about this.
A patient comes into a doctor's office and shows evidence that she has been cutting herself. It has gotten to the point that it is causing complications (infections, etc.), not to mention a sign of mental problems. The doctor's response is: "Well, everything's pretty good, but you should lay off the cutting before your next physical. Have a great day!"
Another patient comes in showing evidence he has been bashing his head into the wall. It may have caused some concussions and there is a potential for long-term brain damage. The doctor's response is: "Well, keep doing what you're doing, but you really shouldn't bash your head so much. See you next year!"
Do these scenarios sound preposterous to you? Both patients come to a doctor exhibiting a behavior that the doctor has determined to be self-inflicted injurious behavior, which can have long-term negative consequences for their health -- and the best response the doctor has is: "Stop doing it so much"?
But that's precisely how doctors treat most obese patients. (Which isn't surprising, given that many have a serious bias against them, and other studies have shown that they tend not to trust obese patients or assume they can't follow directions or treatments.)
An obese patient comes in, exhibiting pre-diabetic symptoms, and perhaps other health problems. And the typical response is simply: "Try eating healthier. And exercise a little more. See you next year!"
If the AC is really a doctor, it's indicative of a truly sad perspective in the medical profession. If the AC truly believes that most patients' obesity is under their control (and not a physical deficit), but they are continuing to harm themselves actively on a long-term basis -- consistent with the characterization of obesity as a severe threat to good health -- the AC has a medical duty to at least try to probe a little deeper and discover whether there are other psychological problems or symptoms at work, or to refer the patient to someone who might be able to help.
Having known a number of people who have struggled with weight issues due (in part) to depression, anxiety, stress, etc., it's often not as simple as just saying, "eat better!"
If any other patients were displaying such self-destructive behavior with long-term health consequences, wouldn't doctors be more concerned?
Slashdot Mirror
First, let me be clear that I'm NOT on Google's side here -- whatever it's doing, it doesn't sound like it's being fair to the labels. However...
Google uses content ID to figure out who owns copyright to music. So, if a video is uploaded that they know is owned by a copyright owner that has not negotiated with them, they can block the video saying that they have no license with the copyright holder and thus, nobody can upload that content.
Wait -- hold up. How does Google know that a video "is owned by a copyright owner"? Oh, that's right: The copyright owner had to tell Google that it owned the video and verify ownership.
And the link I just provided mentions that copyright owners have a variety of choices about what they want to do with videos that are under their ownership: they could block them, or monetize them, or simply track their views. According to Google's terms of use for Content ID, the copyright OWNER gets to decide what happens to content they OWN once they have verified ownership.
What you're telling me is the Google is now going to make a MASSIVE change to its terms of use and decide AGAINST THE WISHES OF CONTENT OWNERS to censor copyrighted material.
This effectively allows Google to block all content from the indie labels, uploaded by anyone and monetized or not.
Only if the labels have established ownership already by verifying it through the Content ID system -- Google isn't just going out there and figuring out who owns copyright by itself.
Google is not being clear about what they will do but the worst case is that they can block every indie music from youtube that has not licensed with them.
While what you're saying is theoretically possible, I imagine it would open up Google to all sorts of lawsuits. Basically, you're saying Google will now actively discriminate against the only people who have established their copyright ownership of material on YouTube. That sounds like an explicit violation of the copyright principle where owners are supposed to get MORE control over their content.
Moreover, it would be a significant alteration to Google's previous terms of use for Content ID. And, if independent artists really wanted to give the stuff away for free, why couldn't content owners simply retract their ownership claims -- which Google has an explicit procedure for?
From what I have read, most musicians consider YouTube as a promotional platform and not a revenue stream from videos. Google's threat is that they will eliminate Youtube as a promotional platform.
From what I've read it doesn't sound like this at all. What it sounds like is that YouTube is not a huge revenue stream, but artists get something from it. Google is offering to give labels money for their new subscription service, but the terms are not great. It sounds like they are also requiring labels to sign onto the subscription service terms to still retain ad money for the free service.
So, assuming I'm understanding this right, the choices for the labels are: (1) set a bad precedent by accepting unfair terms for the new service while retaining perhaps even further reduced revenues from the free service, or (2) refuse the terms and lose the small amount of revenue from free stuff.
Meanwhile, they can let Google do the enforcing by taking down their licensed videos, and play the media war. Worst case scenario is that they lose the small amount of ad revenue, but come back and re-post their videos for free (disclaiming blocking rights, as is their prerogative under content ID terms) and still get the promotional value with their videos on YouTube. Best case scenario is Google caves and gives them better terms.
You can choose to believe
Of course they do. This is just someone trying very hard to cover their arse.
Simple (unrealistic) proposal for a new law: for every employee under investigation the IRS has "lost emails" for, American taxpayers get a free year to use the excuse, "Oops, I just lost the financial documents for my audit" without any punishment, fines, or further questioning. By my reckoning, we all should have absolute defenses against tax audits until 2021 so far.
That will stop this nonsense fast.
Perhaps a dire warning should appear in banner form at the top of any article about a company that pays shills to edit Wikipedia stating that it has been caught doing so, and that information about that company on Wikipedia portraying it in a positive light can't be trusted.
Wikipedia editors have all sorts of biases. When an article is popular enough to get the attention of lots of editors, there usually are enough to keep it from becoming too crazy.
But start dipping into the more esoteric subjects on Wikipedia, and you're bound to encounter little "fiefdoms" where an editor or a small group have established their domain of truth. It's not so much that they don't have adequately sourced information most of the time, as the sources they use are not indicative of current scholarly consensus or even accepted facts.
It often takes a huge edit war with a new editor or group fighting wiki-lawyering battles to dethrone these folks, and the fear is that the article will just get reverted back a month later when the conflict has died down and people have stopped looking.
Bottom line: if you want to start putting up "dire warning" banners about editors who have been caught putting misleading (or outright false) information on a page, you'd have to warn readers than a significant percentage of the information on Wikipedia can't be trusted.
That wikipedia is taken seriously as a source of information still astounds me.
What's astounding is how valuable and reliable a resource Wikipedia has become.
There's a difference between accurate and reliable. Wikipedia's accuracy, overall, is astoundingly good for a crowd-sourced entity. Wikipedia's reliability, on the other hand, is TERRIBLE.
Why? Because it's the encyclopedia that "anyone can edit." The whole conception of Wikipedia was great, and we've built up this amazing base of reasonably good information. But it's constantly fighting against the "barbarians at the gates." From the petty squabbles, wiki-lawyering, and edit wars to the constant barrage of vandalism and spam, it's a wonder the damn thing appears as "together" as it is on any given day.
But if you start to look hard, you see the cracks. Anyone who uses Wikipedia on a regular basis has seen random vandalism. I've seen vandals who have fun just changing random digits in dates or something. It's insane. Say all you want about Encyclopedia Britannica's errors, but it is relatively stable -- when you opened the book the next time, it wouldn't have randomly inserted typographical errors and deliberate mistakes thrown in.
Wikipedia is a hell of a lot more transparent than any encyclopedia ever published, and as long as you realize that Wikipedia is the beginning of your research, not the end, it will never steer you wrong.
Except when you happen upon a page in the middle of vandalism or some stupid edit war and see something that's completely misleading. Back when I used to edit Wikipedia occasionally, I'd go looking for the stuff. It's much more common than you'd think, and every new bot they create to try to keep things clean is fighting a useless war against stupidity.
It remains living proof that the "crowd" can make something awesome and that free can be great.. Even the people who scoff at the idea of Wikipedia and who love to tell you who that they can't believe anyone uses Wikipedia use it regularly.
I don't scoff at Wikipedia, but I don't believe a damn thing I read on it until I've verified it elsewhere. Too many random edits and too many encounters with all sorts of vandalism have taught me to be suspicious.
I'm trying to think of a readily available reference that's ever been as useful as Wikipedia, and I'm not coming up with anything.
How about a BETTER Wikipedia? If we truly have achieved this great resource, isn't it time to change the rules? What works best to grow your mom-and-pop restaurant into a small chain over a few years isn't necessarily the way to stay on top as a stable global business over a period of decades. It's time to lock down good pages on relatively stable topics, verify expert editors and get them to oversee future changes.
I'm all in favor of allowing anyone to still submit suggested edits, but maybe they could be on some other version of the page than the default that most people see from search engines -- the "unstable" or "experimental" bleeding-edge version. And consensus of knowledgable editors can move suggested changes to the "stable" version when they are justified.
That's the only way you're ever going to get something that's actually "reliable," to use your term. Right now, there's way too much time spent by volunteers fighting back the barbarians at the gates (and often new volunteers who are unfamiliar with Wikipedia's convention and stumble into random disputes or fights without knowing it... and thus are driven away). Instead, that energy could be focused on creating a stable, established baseline version, without worrying that any new IP address showing up could be trying to destroy what others have created.
Wikipedia is okay, but it could be great. But it reached a plateau in terms of administrative function maybe 5-7 years ago. It's time to move onto the next stage.
How would YouTube go about determining whether a particular video is a "music video" by a "music label"? If I compose and record original music to accompany a video that I have produced, and I upload the video to YouTube, does that make me a "label" and make the video a "music video", thus requiring me to formally release its soundtrack?
You're making this too complicated. This has nothing to do with definitions of "music videos" or "labels."
IF you want to upload a video of whatever to YouTube and show it for free, you are still free to do so. Nothing about that has changed.
IF, on the other hand, you want YouTube to pay you money from ad revenue it makes, you need to negotiate a license with Google/YouTube. Some labels and Google can't agree on terms, so Google has simply decided to walk away from the old licenses.
The old license terms gave the labels some ad revenue in exchange for YouTube having permission to show the (commercial) videos. If Google no longer agrees to the payment scheme, if can no longer show the videos, according to the old licenses. Therefore, it must take them down.
Nothing is preventing the independent labels (or artists themselves) from posting anything they want to for free. It's only if they are restricting the playing of videos so that they must receive shares in YouTube's profits in exchange that this matters.
YouTube is a free to anybody video site.
Yep. And if you -- as an independent artist -- still want to post up a video and let them play it to whomever for free, you're welcome to do so.
Google is now saying that anybody who has a song up on YouTube that Google would like to include in their (for pay) streaming services (at a crappy rate of compensation) will have it removed from YouTube unless the artist signs up for these terms.
NO, it's NOT. Read TFA:
The BBC understands that even if blocks do go ahead, content from artists signed to independent labels will remain available on YouTube via channels such as Vevo.
Videos which are exclusively licensed by independent record labels, such as acoustic sets or live performances, may be taken down.
Read that again -- videos that are EXCLUSIVELY *LICENSED* by independent LABELS will be taken down.
In other words, the LABELS that these "independent" artists have signed with have refused to agree to Google's new terms. Therefore, the LICENSES that the LABELS agreed to are no longer valid.
Unless I'm reading this wrong, there's nothing here that implies that a TRULY "independent" artist couldn't post whatever he/she wants. But if that artist has signed with a label (even an "independent label" rather than one of the big ones), and that company manages the rights to the videos, then Youtube won't allow those videos to be shown in violation of licensing agreements made by those labels.
Google may be strong-arming labels to accept deals, but they aren't actually removing "independent" artists' videos -- only those videos which had been previously licensed by a label which refuses to agree to Google's terms.
The labels may in fact be in the right here, and maybe they should be holding out for a better deal. But let's not pretend that Google is arbitrarily taking down videos of random musicians -- it's removing commercial content that had been previously licensed, but now won't be because of a failure between the parties to agree.
If they're going to apply this uniformly, the video of your child dancing is now something they can use for their own profit.
I don't know about you, but if I were to post a video or other media on a website that serves up ads, I'm going to assume that that site is making money off of the ads. If you consider that using your materials for "commercial gain," then maybe you shouldn't post to a free hosting site that serves up ads.
On the other hand, if you want to get a share in that ad revenue, you're going to have to negotiate with the site owner. And if you don't think you're going to get a good enough deal, then you can pull your videos or media -- just as these labels are doing. Both sides here are making choices.
is my go-to source for internet shorthand. Any reason the FBI's too good to just use that?
Urban dictionary is edited by volunteers, and there are no real guidelines for entries. So, I suppose it could infiltrated by terrorists, who pose as submitters and editors to hide the true meaning of some internet abbreviations they are using to communicate about their next attack...??
(I'm being sarcastic here, but unfortunately knowing the U.S. government and current paranoia levels, this probably isn't far from their logic.)
However, rulings like these will create a (black?) market for disclosing information.
Maybe. It depends on the information. There's lots of information on the internet that no one cares about. There's lots of minor stuff about individual people that might be mildly damaging to someone's personal reputation, but except in a few incredibly rare transactions (like that specific person trying to get a new job or something), no one will care.
A lot of the uproar about the "right to be forgotten" involves actual public records and information which were previously "public" but hard to access (in the sense that you could access them only by traveling to a paper archive somewhere or perhaps sending a written request for a document). Now they can be instantly searched and show up on Google -- but the world functioned reasonably well when many of those records were not so accessible.
So, will people really go out of their way and make a "black market" for this information? Only if it's actually valuable enough that they'd bother to find out if the internet didn't exist.
I think of Google like a giant card catalog in an old library. (Anyone remember those? For you youngsters, there was a cabinet with a bunch of physical index cards that had lists for all the books and items in the library.)
Deleting links from Google is like removing the card from the card catalog. The book still remains on the shelf for anyone to go look at it. And if it's a particularly well-known book, people will find it anyway through other means (go ask the librarian, learn the subject organization for cataloging which will allow you to locate it, etc.).
But if it's a book that's been sitting on the shelf for 100 years and is covered with dust, checked out only once in 1967 by a curious academic with a specific interest, removing the card from the catalog just means the book fades into even more obscurity.
The court is only giving more value to the information, not stopping it spreading.
It's not "giving more value" to it -- it's just making it harder to find. It only has value if people know it exists and are willing to pay someone else to find it. If people don't even know the thing exists, why would anyone pay?
But you do have a point about "not stopping it spreading." There's a reason that people who want to ban library books don't just rip the card out of the card catalog -- they want to actually remove the book from the library shelves. The problem is the process itself of banning something will call attention to the item under question, leading every teenager in the county to track down that "evil banned book" even if the reference is removed from the card catalog. Unless we remove the information from actual websites hosting stuff, rather than just the most popular search engine, it's still out there -- and court filings will just draw attention to it.
So, I would expect that to be the next stage in all these "right to be forgotten" cases -- the argument will be that requiring a court filing to get stuff removed will itself draw attention to the information, so we'll need secret court orders telling Google to take things down, or else we risk emphasizing the very information that people are asking Google to delete. And secret court orders of course are a recipe for abuse....
Consider that you only have $10 to feed your family, and just came off-shift at your minimum-wage job.
Why do I have to shop every day? Can't I plan ahead a bit and shop once per week or something?
You can either buy:
- a McMeal on the way home from work (they have some sort of deal going now where you can get 4 burgers, some fries, and 4 soft drinks for $9.99)
McDonald's burgers are 1.6 ounces. Four burgers are 6.4 ounces of beef. I can buy a POUND (almost three times that amount) of ORGANIC GRASS-FED ground beef for $6 at the local "hippy" supermarket, $2 for 4 fresh-baked buns which are probably at least twice the size, and a pack of frozen french fries, for $10. You want cheeseburgers? Get the non-organic beef or buy a pack of pre-packaged buns to stay under $10.
What? You're missing the soft drinks? Don't bother. Or, if you really want to drink corn syrup or sweeteners, buy a 2-liter bottle when it's on sale for 50 cents.
- a couple of Pepperoni Little Caesars' pizzas, again on the way home from work
Do you have any clue how many pizzas I can make at home using better quality ingredients than Little Caesars for $10? The dough takes me about 5 minutes to mix up the day before, sits in the fridge. Take it out, turn on the oven, stretch, and bake. No fuss. With okay but better-than-average mozzarella (standard American style, not the fancy ovolini in water), premium flour, and better-than-average canned sauce, I probably could make nearly twice as much for $10. Use crappy ingredients like Little Caesars does, and I could probably make you 5 or 6 pizzas.
Better yet, spend $6 or so for the basic pizza ingredients for dinner, and spend the rest for some fresh veggies or toppings. Too expensive or no place to store the fresh veggies? Fine -- buy a can of black beans for less than a buck and substitute salsa for the sauce and make "Mexican pizza" -- more nutrition, more fiber, cheap and easy.
- burn $5 or so in gas to get proper food at the nearest decent grocery store 10 miles away, and spend an extra $8 doing that
What the heck are you buying for "extra $8" over the $10 budget = $18? That's a "nice Sunday dinner" budget for a family of four -- not with any fancy ingredients, but still. With that budget for a family meal, we can have a pound of nice steak and two sides, including some fresh vegetables or fruit. Beats the heck out of 6.4 ounces of McDonald's hamburgers and a few small packs of french fries. Or even roast an organic chicken with potatoes/rice and a vegetable, and pick the carcass clean and boil the bones for chicken soup in a few days. There might even be enough money left over to make biscuits and fresh fruit for "shortcake" dessert.
- spend $15 at inflated prices for nutritious food (though it's slightly old) at the nearest bodega/grocer/phone-card/payday-loan store,
I'm just going to stop here... are you incapable of planning ahead and shopping for a week wherever the grocery store is, or buying some bulk items to have food available when we can't get to the store... or...?
Thing is, most poor neighborhoods usually don't have decent grocery stores.
Yeah, a common myth. Actual studies on this issue have shown a higher density of grocery stores and supermarkets in poorer neighborhoods.
Or, you can save on cooking and grab some fast food, like most folks do,
You can't "save on cooking" -- cooking with basic ingredients is SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper than eating out, even compared to most fast food "deals."
Now, I know you're going to say: "well, some people are tired and don't have time and energy to cook every night!" Well, that may be true, but one can cook a
Or someone in that poor family could, once in a while, take a bike and go to a decent grocery store
True story -- some years back, I lived a few blocks from one of the cheapest grocery stores in a large city. The local chain had its priorities straight: they made money off of volume, rather than off of profit margin on individual items. Thus, the aisles were full of people from the time it opened until the time it closed, 14 hours every day of the week. It had quality food (much better than the average supermarkets in the richer parts of town, because the produce for example moved so quickly instead of sitting on shelves for weeks).
There were very few times I would go there where there wasn't a line of cabs sitting out front. That's what the poor people would do, since they couldn't afford cars -- they'd take a bus there or walk there, and then pay for the $10-15 cab ride home. A local newspaper once did a price survey and discovered this grocery store would save you 40% over average prices elsewhere in the city (not even counting sale prices).
So -- you don't even need to take a bike if you know the right place to shop. The people I saw there leaving with full carts and piling bags into a cab were undoubtedly saving HUNDREDS of dollars every month -- and they were getting their pick of all sorts of food. The price of a cab ride every other week or so was well worth it.
Poor people are fact because they CANT eat properly.
Hogwash. Sure, you can cherry pick healthy items that are expensive, but there are also plenty of healthy foods that are cheap: carrots, oatmeal, peanut butter, eggs, etc.
Actually, the basic criteria for cheap, healthy food are: (1) buy mostly individual ingredients, which you can combine in simple ways, rather than stuff that's made of dozens of processed items in combination, and (2) buy in bulk, buy on sale, buy in season.
The problem these days is: (1) most people don't have sufficient cooking skills to know how to deal with basic ingredients efficiently, as they have to on a busy schedule, and (2) our current food distribution system is tailored to people who don't plan ahead, so it's difficult to find true bulk retail outside of restaurant supply stores (which sometimes won't sell to individual consumers) or over the internet (where shipping can be prohibitively expensive).
There's this myth that you can't get cheaper food than the McDonald's dollar menu (or whatever), and you'll never get as many calories/dollar as you would buying that box of crappy supermarket donuts or bag or potato chips.
But that's simply not true. In most places, you can live on a reasonably varied healthy diet for a few dollars/day (less if you're willing to have fewer choices and be mostly vegetarian).
Where do you buy those things if there are no grocery stores within miles of your house and you don't have transportation?
Google food deserts.
Yeah, instead Google the myth of "food deserts." (See here, for example.)
Some useful quotes:
Poor neighborhoods, Dr. Lee found, had nearly twice as many fast food restaurants and convenience stores as wealthier ones, and they had more than three times as many corner stores per square mile. But they also had nearly twice as many supermarkets and large-scale grocers per square mile.
Dr. Sturm found no relationship between what type of food students said they ate, what they weighed, and the type of food within a mile and a half of their homes.
And even if it were true that many grocery stores in poor neighborhoods don't have a load of high-quality fresh produce choices (the main thing always brought up about "food deserts," if they exist), even the crappy urban grocery stores I've been in will often have "family packs" of cheap frozen veggies and such, or at least large cans of vegetables and fruit. It's not the best stuff on the planet, but the idea that the only thing available is McDonald's, boxes of donuts, and bags of chips is generally more of a myth than reality.
At Purdue for most math and science AP credits they still require you to take their own placement test during an orientation weekend.
Actually, if you read the MIT link, you'll note that MIT does precisely that for Chemistry and Biology credit, for example. If true, this souinds EXACTLY like one of the very schools I mentioned.
They flat out tell you during the physics one that maybe one kid a year will actually score high enough to opt out of the first physics class......so good luck.
Well, this link and this one both clearly state that getting a 5 on the physics C tests (as well as various scores on other science and math tests) will get you credit for various classes, including in the School of Engineering.
Now -- it's possible either (1) things have changed there since you were in school, or (2) you had to take some special version of physics or whatever in the engineering curriculum that was more advanced than they'd give you AP credit for -- but according to Purdue's own website, they DO give credit for AP classes in science and engineering with high enough scores.
I got no credit for my AP CS class because they just didnt consider it equivalent to anything in their first year engineering curriculum, maybe if I would have been going as a CS major and not CmpE it may have bought me something
Which is part of the point I made -- I agreed with the GP that sometimes you have to make a substitution in your major area. However, if you have AP credits in various things (say, AP European History or something), you should often be able to apply them toward requirements outside your major or elective credits, which could potentially save you time and/or money toward your overall degree.
Being able to get AP credit that counts towards requirements and graduation SOMETIMES != Being able to get AP credit ALWAYS. The GP was arguing for NEVER. I was saying SOMETIMES. You say "not ALWAYS." We don't disagree.
LOL, oh you're serious, let me laugh harder. If you think skipped courses due to AP credits reduce the number of hours needed to graduate at the vast, vast majority of schools you're mistaken. No, it will just let you skip an intro course and fill the hours requirement for your major for something a little less dull.
False.
Heck, it's even on the official AP exam website:
You can save money and get a head start on your degree when you enter college with credit youâ(TM)ve already earned through AP.
But if you're not convinced, let's look at some of the top schools in the U.S., and what they will do for a person with AP credit. Harvard says the following:
Students may be allowed to use an AP exam score (or appropriate international credential) to meet certain requirements (foreign language, introductory departmental course, etc.).
Students with a full yearâ(TM)s worth of advanced workâ"documented by AP exams, an IB diploma, or certain other international credentialsâ"may be eligible to petition for Advanced Standing. The College grants four Harvard full-course credits, the equivalent of a year of study, to those students who activate Advanced Standing.
In other words, you not only can pass out of a number of requirements, but you can also skip an entire year of college... at one of the top colleges in the U.S.
Even MIT, which is notorious for having one of the most restrictive AP policies in the U.S., will still give you credit for and let you pass out of the first semester of calculus or physics (both required of all MIT graduates) with sufficient AP scores. And you'll get unrestricted credit that can count toward miscellaneous electives you need for your degree or whatever for some other AP tests (e.g., humanities).
Bottom line: At the "vast, vast majority of schools," many AP courses WILL reduce the number of credits you need for graduation, as well as allowing you to skip intro classes.
You're right that many schools will still require you to take something else within your major to fulfill a minimum set of required credit hours. But you'll often still be able to use miscellaneous AP credits toward random electives.
Seriously -- do at least a minimum of research before you show your ignorance while wrongly making fun of somebody.
They're not anywhere near college level.
Having actually taught some high-school AP classes, I think that depends on where you're going to college. Colleges generally calibrate whether they accept AP credit and what score is required based on their curriculum.
For example, MIT's AP criteria states that they won't accept AP credit to pass out of a chemistry or biology class; to do so, you need to take MIT's own placement exam. They don't accept CS AP credit at all. And for calculus and physics, they basically require you to get a 5 on the hardest possible AP versions of those tests to get any credit. But much of MIT's basic undergrad curriculum goes as much as twice as fast as a typical college.
Most colleges, on the other hand, will give you a semester of college credit for almost all those subjects if you get a 4 or 5. (For comparison, here are the requirements for the University of Massachusetts. And this is still a fairly decent school, as state universities go.) Some might even give credit (or partial credit) for a 3.
I completely agree with you that some of the AP curriculum is crap. (For example, the AP E&M physics C test is ridiculously oversimplified compared to what a real college student with calculus should be able to do. On the other hand, the mechanics test for physics C isn't bad -- it's been dumbed down a bit over the past couple decades, but it can still have some reasonable questions.)
But the reality is that the AP credit *IS* roughly equivalent to the curriculum at many colleges. If it wasn't, colleges wouldn't give credit and advanced standing for AP scores.
That falls under "'born, not made". You're either born to good parents or you're not.
Not entirely true. Intelligence has a significant genetic component, but it isn't everything. And other skills or character traits, like hard work, curiosity, discipline, etc. often tend to fall more in the "nuture" category. Putting a kid in a home environment that encourages success will make a difference.
On the other hand, there have been other studies suggesting that the most important aspects of that nurturing environment for childhood development are based on who the parents/caregivers naturally ARE, rather than who they would LIKE TO BE. For example, how many books are in a home (even if they aren't children's books) is a better predictor of child success than how many books parents read to their kids. This doesn't imply that stocking large bookcases in your home will magically make your kids smarter -- it means that parents who own a lot of books are often the type of people who will convey a favorable learning environment for their kids... whether they "try" or not.
In any case, future success is definitely not determined at birth.
Yep -- absolutely right. I was writing this quickly and didn't say that correctly.
Nice analysis. The problem is that the fully vaccinated rate in San Diego County for whooping cough is a lot closer to 85% than it is to 99%. Combine that with some testing bias and the efficacy of this vaccine is in serious doubt.
This may be true, but my point is the news story as presented does not give us enough data to draw that conclusion. The news story says 85% of people with the disease have been unvaccinated -- to a layperson, that is incredibly misleading, since most people unfamiliar with statistics will assume that means that the vaccine is actively HARMFUL ("85% is much greater than 15%, so the disease must be targeting those with the vaccine!").
What it really should give is some sort of estimate of relative risk ("Based on current vaccination estimates, the risk of contracting the disease is about the same for those vaccinated as unvaccinated") or some estimates of actual incidence for the subgroups ("X cases per 100,000 people for vaccinated, Y cases per 100,000 for non-vaccinated").
I wasn't saying the vaccine IS effective. I was saying that quoting the statistic in TFA is at worst meaningless and likely to be incredibly misleading.
(Also, to be thorough, you'd need to consider other factors, such as the reporting rate for the various groups. For example, if some undocumented populations are both less likely to be vaccinated AND less likely to seek treatment because they are poor and/or fear discovery of their status or whatever, that could skew estimates. I'm not saying this IS the case, but we need to consider other differences between the vaccinated and unvaccinated groups to determine true efficacy.)
To truly see how well the whooping cough vaccination is working, you need to compare it to the percentage of total vaccinations.
THIS. The reporting in TFA is potentially making a false inference.
If this is unclear, think about it this way: If 85% of the 621 infected have been vaccinated, that means that 528 were vaccinated, and 93 were not.
Now, consider a hypothetical population of 10,000 people. And suppose (for the sake of argument) 99% of them are vaccinated. That means that 9900 people are vaccinated, and only 100 people are not.
Look at those statistics again for infections. If 93 of unvaccinated people were infected, that would constitute 93% of the entire unvaccinated population. In comparison, 528 out of the other 9900 would only be 5.33%.
In this hypothetical 99% vaccinated scenario, going without vaccinations means you are over 17 TIMES more likely to get infected if you are unvaccinated.
I doubt we can assume a 99% fully vaccinated rate, but as long as that rate is greater than 85%, the vaccine has some apparent effect. To wit:
Percentage of population vaccinated - relative risk
99% - 17.4 times higher risk for unvaccinated
97% - 5.7
95% - 3.3
90% - 1.6
85% - equal risk
less than 85% - vaccine is apparently not effective
You can't compare the incidence of things happening in two different subgroups without knowing the overall proportion of the subgroups within the population in general. Basic stats error.
I know of opera performances with piano. I've seen them, though usually they are in a smaller venue with limited staging. That's a different animal entirely -- turning large concert music into chamber music, and it's been done for centuries.
Such performances also retain the feeling of a truly live performance with acoustical instruments, with musicians interacting with each other rather than following some fake karaoke contraption with speakers laid out to simulate the layout of an orchestra.
I'd definitely pay to hear a chamber performance of an opera. But even in the opera world, Wagner's a bit of a specialty, and I find the idea of a chamber performance of the Ring to be a much weirder idea than Puccini, though maybe that's me.
Let me start by saying that I think anybody should be free to put on whatever kind of performance they want, and if people come and pay for tickets, so they make money -- terrific.
But this whole thing is a little weird to me. The entire style of singing in traditional opera (especially Wagner, which is what this particular story is about) is predicated on traditional acoustics, without electronic enhancement. Those crazy warbling sopranos do so to differentiate themselves timbrally from the orchestra and allow their voices to get to the audience. A singer otherwise would often get lost among the wash of sound from a 100 orchestral instruments.
So, if you want to get rid of the acoustic instruments, why the devil keep the operatic vocal performances the same? Give the singers microphones and let them perform in varying vocal styles, as done in most pop music and on Broadway these days.
This all strikes me as an incredibly odd project -- they're going to replace musicians with oodles of speakers pointed in various directions to simulate musicians playing? All of this technology to propagate an art form whose style of performance and singing is predicated on acoustic real-life performance?
And why bother with all the sampling at all? Why not just hire real musicians to perform, record them, and then play that back with just the singers doing their thing? Surely the investment that's going into this to figure out how to place oodles of speakers, getting all that sound equipment, etc. could probably pay for a one-time investment in a decent karaoke-style recording of actual instruments?
From TFA:
Tino Gagliardi, the president of Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, in New York, likened it to operatic karaoke.
That sounds precisely like what it is. Not that there's anything wrong with that -- if they can get somebody to pay for it, why not? I don't get why the heck anyone would want to do with opera, whose aesthetic is all about low-tech, but whatever floats your boat.
For the purists, there is one further question, though:
Staging a "Ring" cycle in Connecticut with a digital orchestra is the dream of Charles M. Goldstein, a musician and would-be impresario who was once an extra chorister at the Met, and who founded the Hartford Wagner Festival with the idea that one day Connecticut could become the only place outside of Bayreuth, Germany, to perform entire "Ring" cycles every year. He argued that there was no loss of jobs for musicians because, from the outset, he had never planned to use live players in the pit.
Here's the problem -- what does "perform" mean? Literally, from its etymological roots, it means to put something into its final form. Actual live music depends on responsiveness between singers and conductors and orchestra. Nothing is ever quite the same twice -- and that is often one of the cool things about live music.
This guy is proposing to "perform" pieces by using canned sampled pre-recorded "orchestras" (if I understand it correctly). I'm not saying it isn't an interesting idea, but why do it with Wagner or traditional opera at all? Is there really an audience who really wants to see effectively a dressed-up opera karaoke?
People in Europe tend to be different than people in the US. We don't look for loopholes and try to rip off anyone just for the sake of ripping them off.
Umm, have you ever been to Italy? Or much of eastern Europe (particularly touristy parts or "bad" parts of big cities)?
To give you an example. Just around the corner from here, there's an "open bookcase". One of many in this town, I may add. It's basically a box full of books. You take books you no longer want there and put them in and take books you'd like to read out.
Yeah, my doctor's office has one of those. The local public library does too. I live in the US. What's your point again?
As far as I know, there is no way to track these books. You could take them and go and sell them in a yard sale. You could actually make a few bucks that way.
Yeah, here's the thing -- most Americans, like most people in most parts of Europe, are basically good-natured folk. Most people are not out to deliberately scam other people. And why ruin a nice public resource like this for a few bucks?
But there are always going to be those who will take advantage of others (where is worst?... I don't know, but my personal experience is northern Europe is better overall than the US, but Italy and some other parts are more questionable), and the internet makes it easier, because most people find it easier to treat others badly when they don't have direct contact with them.
You think those of us who are fit enjoy eating salads?
Salads are very tasty, one of my favorite foods. A salad made from fresh-picked vegetables from the garden is one of life's pleasures. If you don't like the salads you apparently are forcing yourself to eat, why not try variations: different types of greens, different vegetables, some other low-calorie nutrient-dense thing like legume dishes or something?
Why would you eat stuff on a regular basis that you don't like?
Do you really think I enjoy drinking water instead of soda?
You'd have to pay me to drink a can of actual Coke or just about any "normal" soda. It's terrible. It's sickeningly sweet. I didn't used to be this way, but then I stopped consuming so much random sugar for a few years. Now a Coke tastes disgusting.
You want to drink something other than water? Try unsweetened iced tea, or any number of other beverages. Heck, you could even make you own "soda" by mixing in a reasonable amount of some sweetener into soda water or something, rather than the ridiculous quantity in soda.
Or do you think we somehow magically like candy less than everyone else?
Again, I think most "candy" is disgusting, particularly in the U.S. It's way too sweet. Again, try living a reasonable diet with less processed foods without all the sugar constantly for a couple years, and you'll probably feel the same. I'll occasionally have a square of good dark chocolate or something, but the crap that Hershey's serves up or the stuff in candy bars is terrible.
We are still humans, and we crave the exact same things. A bag of Doritos and some beer look just as tempting to us as they look to you.
Doritos? Seriously? What are you, 12 years old? Again, a disgusting frankenfood. What the devil is the flavor of those things?
And most beers are rather bitter -- many humans don't naturally crave the taste of beer the first time they try it (same thing for black coffee). But social conventions and the alcoholic buzz cause people to get over their hesitance, and they get used to drinking stuff that tastes a little weird.
I like salads, and I don't like most of the things you claim that humans apparently naturally crave. I'll have a beer a couple times per month in social situations, but I'm not tempted to go out and buy beer just for the heck of it (and again, I think for most people, it's the mild alcoholic effects that they crave too, not just the taste).
And at the end of the day, diet is much easier than working out.
Absolutely agree. But the cravings are mildly concerning. Why would you bother to eat a lot of foods you don't like, and why don't you look for reasonable substitutes for "unhealthy" foods you don't want to eat?
With a lot of foods, liking them is a learned behavior and a gradual response that happens over time. If you remove the processed crappy foods with all the bad ingredients, you may realize you don't want those things as much anymore.
I knew a kid who was like this -- he never had candy or cookies or cakes or artificially sweet things. On the few occasions he was offered them, he would spit them out or at most take one bite and leave the rest. He hated ice cream. (Seriously.)
There's nothing necessarily universal about liking ridiculously sweet things: they were not part of our ancestors' diets. This kid lived for about 4 years, never asking for sweets, and generally rejecting them when offered. (He did enjoy many fruits, though more those which balance sweetness with some other tart flavors.)
This all changed when he went into a daycare situation where they'd have a birthday party for each kid, and they'd get cupcakes every time. Suddenly, cakes and sweets were connected with celebration... and suddenly this kid asked for them. And once sugar became "fun" and celebratory (see Hallowee
If obesity is a disability, and the legal definition of maiming is to disable or disfigure, will McDonald's advertising -- particularly when it materially misleads about health issues, like their Olympics sponsorship campaigns -- be ruled negligent maiming?
Forget about advertising. Just about everything about the McDonald's experience is designed to be mildly "addictive." Previous studies have shown that various aspects of fast food are often subtly tweaked to stimulate our brain or digestion in such a way that we crave more.
I'm not saying McDonald's should be held responsible for "maiming" either, but food scientists get better every year at finding ways to "trick" our bodies into enjoying their designer foods more. Obviously "making good food" has been the goal of cooks and chefs from the beginning of time, but there were some practical chemical limits on things that could be accomplished with traditional cooking techniques. You could always add a little more sugar or fat or whatever, but there was a limit before the food became unappetizing.
"Designer" foods have fewer limitations. Using various additives, stabilizers, flavor enhancers, etc., you can pack loads of terrible things into a complex processed formulation that are designed to cause a physiological response of targeted cravings and pleasure rewards that is different from anything we could do in the past.
If this trend continues, at some point it will be possible to manufacture foods that are actually as "addictive" as other substances that are highly regulated. And at some point we'll have to think about the implications of that.
You are technically right, the worst kind of being right. You are completely neglecting the multitude of e.g. psychological issues that cause people to eat so much they become morbidly obese.
THIS.
Seriously -- let's assume the AC (claiming to be MD) is right. Increasing rates of obesity have been called one of the biggest threats to health, one of the most dangerous trends, an "epidemic" that can ruin the lives of millions of billions of people.
And the AC notes -- well, they're doing it to themselves. There's no simple physical explanation (like thyroid dysfunction or whatever).
Okay -- then what? Let's think about this.
A patient comes into a doctor's office and shows evidence that she has been cutting herself. It has gotten to the point that it is causing complications (infections, etc.), not to mention a sign of mental problems. The doctor's response is: "Well, everything's pretty good, but you should lay off the cutting before your next physical. Have a great day!"
Another patient comes in showing evidence he has been bashing his head into the wall. It may have caused some concussions and there is a potential for long-term brain damage. The doctor's response is: "Well, keep doing what you're doing, but you really shouldn't bash your head so much. See you next year!"
Do these scenarios sound preposterous to you? Both patients come to a doctor exhibiting a behavior that the doctor has determined to be self-inflicted injurious behavior, which can have long-term negative consequences for their health -- and the best response the doctor has is: "Stop doing it so much"?
But that's precisely how doctors treat most obese patients. (Which isn't surprising, given that many have a serious bias against them, and other studies have shown that they tend not to trust obese patients or assume they can't follow directions or treatments.)
An obese patient comes in, exhibiting pre-diabetic symptoms, and perhaps other health problems. And the typical response is simply: "Try eating healthier. And exercise a little more. See you next year!"
If the AC is really a doctor, it's indicative of a truly sad perspective in the medical profession. If the AC truly believes that most patients' obesity is under their control (and not a physical deficit), but they are continuing to harm themselves actively on a long-term basis -- consistent with the characterization of obesity as a severe threat to good health -- the AC has a medical duty to at least try to probe a little deeper and discover whether there are other psychological problems or symptoms at work, or to refer the patient to someone who might be able to help.
Having known a number of people who have struggled with weight issues due (in part) to depression, anxiety, stress, etc., it's often not as simple as just saying, "eat better!"
If any other patients were displaying such self-destructive behavior with long-term health consequences, wouldn't doctors be more concerned?