True. BMI is hardly perfect... but it's a good first step. Kinda like "Did you reboot it?"
Actually, no it's NOT a "good first step." It's a fair to poor "first step." It's more like a troubleshooting procedure that's guaranteed to give bogus results in a significant percentage of cases -- i.e., where it's wrong or off so often that asking the question is almost more likely to lead you down the wrong path for many cases, rather than giving you useful information.
The BMI formula assumes that adiposity relates to height squared. It does not. This is a simple fact. When people get taller, their bodies scale in three dimensions, not two. So, for really tall people, it's guaranteed to say they are more fat than they really are, and for really short people, it's guaranteed to say people are at a healthy weight when their fat or even obese.
The only reason the BMI formula appears to work at all is because women are both shorter and tend to have higher "healthy" bodyfat percentages. The BMI ranges are more-or-less supposed to be the same for men and women -- that should be a major red flag to anyone who knows anything about bodyfat, since healthy bodyfat ranges for men and women are clearly known to be different.
So, the mean female height is less than the mean male height, but the mean healthy female bodyfat amount is higher. Thus, to have a formula that works for both sexes, you need something that doesn't accurately reflect a "normal" body being scaled up or down. BMI fits the bill, and thus it has been used for population studies to compare mean statistics for overall populations. For individuals -- which it was never designed for -- it's TERRIBLE.
You can immediately see that from the men vs. women problem. BMI says a short man who is in the middle of the height range for women should have the same weight as an average woman. Given what we know about bodyfat, that doesn't make sense. Or, a tall woman who's over 6' or something -- to have a "healthy" BMI she'd often have to look like a waifish model.
"But," you say, "it's still a good first step. It's a simple formula."
Nope -- doesn't excuse it. There are a number of studies that have shown that a number of even simpler measures are actually more accurate at predicting health problems, propensity for disease, etc. For example, simply measuring the waist circumference for men -- regardless of height -- has been shown to be a better predictor of health problems than BMI. Think about that for a moment. Clearly a guy who is 5' tall should not have a waist size the same as a 7' tall guy. But studies have shown that even measuring the waist and saying, "Is it bigger than X inches?" without knowing anything about height, weight, or anything else is a better predictor than BMI.
Yeah, BMI sucks that bad.
But could a simple formula do that much harm? Well, why not just modify that "simple formula" to make it more accurate? In the days when you had to calculations by hand or with a slide rule, a formula involving only an exponent of 2 and a division might make sense. But most people don't calculate BMI by hand anymore -- they plug things into some sort of web calculator or look at a chart.
We can easily fix BMI to make it much more accurate. First, just change the exponent. Logically, as I mentioned at the outside, squaring the height makes NO SENSE. You might think that cubing the height would be better, since the body expands in three dimensions, but it turns out that the male/female factor and other things that don't quite scale precisely with the cube of the height makes an exponent of 3 bad too.
Various empirical studies have suggested an exponent of somewhere in the 2.3 to 2.7 range would be better. But really, to get any accuracy at all, you'd have to at least consider separating the sexes. At that point, you could narrow the range of the exponent for males an
How is this modded as "insightful"? The federal funding for this bridge had nothing to do with Palin (originally) -- it was Sen. Ted Stevens and other Alaska people actually in the federal government who got this approved... long before anyone outside of Alaska had ever heard of Sarah Palin. She later became involved with the issue as governor, and then it came up in 2008 as part of her VP candidacy issues, but the whole idea of the project came from Alaska senators and representatives in Congress... exactly like this tower. Palin had no such power in the federal government to argue for or against any such appropriation. Her VP candidacy was later.
Yeah, you know what -- I'm sorry. I really am. I've been having a weird couple days, and I've been posting more extreme posts than usual.
So, really, I am truly sorry. I was more annoyed at mods who rated your post highly for something that I thought had a lot of opinion and anecdote than I was annoyed at you. My rhetoric was unnecessary.
to question my own anecdotal evidence, with nothing more than opinion.
Actually, a lot of what I said is backed up by facts and studies. I pointed out a few of them in another reply above. I can provide more for some other points as well (like the rationale for decreased limits, which originally had to do with fuel economy stuff in the 1970s, but now generally has to with traffic concerns on many highways).
Citations that directly support my position are hard to find, and they seldom address the issue directly. But - that little paradoxical article should catch your attention.
Yes, I'm aware of that study and others. I'm aware that lower speed limits don't always save lives, nor do they always result in people actually driving slower.
What I was arguing against is that in your post you conflated the idea that (1) higher speed limits are desireable and (2) higher speeds are desireable. I think there are good reasons to question what we think we know about (1) and good psychological arguments to make different choices for posted limits. But I emphatically deny that there is any evidence out there that we'd be better off if everyone were driving 80 mph on highways overall instead of 55, even in places without obvious "danger" reasons to have a lowered limit.
For normal traffic, there's no need to travel at 80 mph. In fact, it reduces gas mileage usually to go significantly above 55 or so, because air resistance increases much more rapidly and you have to fight that at high speeds.
Cite your sources for this often repeated tripe. My own MPG continues to rise until it peaks when my speed exceeds 110 mph. Most any car that I've owned (and none of them were your big honking pointless SUVs or any other sort of passenger truck) continued to increase in performance up to at least 80 mph.
Good lord. Well, this is enough to call your whole post bogus already.
Try a freakin' search engine. The second link that came up for me is a 2009 study from Consumer Reports, with a variety of vehicles.
To the best of my knowledge, the increase in speed limit in TX over the years did not see a significant increase in accidents or fatalities.
That may be the case. There certainly are situations where raising the speed limit has not increased fatalities, but usually in places where (1) people generally already drove significantly over the limit, and (2) people did not actually increase their speeds on average to keep up with the corresponding increase in limit (in other words, if the limit went up 10 mph, the average speed went up only a little).
But this is irrelevant to the GP's point, which was accusing politicians of lowering speed limits for revenue purposes. If that does happen, my guess is it happens around cities, where highway speed limits are often significantly lowered (and also there are more likely to be a greated density of cops around to collect tickets). My point is that often there are other reasons for those lowered limits -- beyond safety, often the desire to prevent traffic problems.
In most modern cars, putting the cruise control on at high speeds will result in people relaxing... it doesn't matter whether you're going 55 or 65 or 80.
Citation please.
Well, there are a number of studies showing decreased attention for people using cruise control, such as this one. It's clear that reaction times are increased, etc. The higher the speed you're traveling, the more problematic these increased reaction times are.
I haven't really done a search for studies, but I've talked to a LOT of people who agree that the "feel" of higher speeds in many newer cars has become a lot smoother in recent years. Lots of car companies even advertise how quiet and smooth their rides now are.
I'm not saying the difference in traveling at 55 vs. 80 is nil, but I don't think it's anywhere near as noticeable in recent cars. Given the inherent additional danger of higher speeds, I think it's on the burden of you and GP to prove that people somehow are alert enough to actually drive "more safely" overall at 80 compared to 55.
You're pretty much street pizza at speeds greater than 60mph. The risk of bodily injury and the mortality rate increase from a speed of 60 mph to 80 mph is such a small number that you can consider it a foregone conclusion that you're not coming home in one piece or at all.
By that logic, why stop at 80 mph? Why not travel at 100 mph? 120 mph? 140 mph? It's already a foregone conclusion that you're going to die in a crash at any speed over 60, so why bother considering safety at all?
Of course that's nonsense. The faster you go, the more reaction time you need to avoid anything or make any changes to what you're doing. Combined with the increased kinetic energy that increases with the square of velocity, driving faster still is more likely to get you killed.
Sure, in certain types of severe collisions, you're going to
This makes perfect sense from a shareholder point of view. Raising the price to $119 will decrease the number of Prime members, thereby decreasing the cost of providing the Prime service, but the people who stay with Prime will likely more than pay for those who leave.
This logic is horribly flawed. Yes, it's possible that this will be the case, but it will really depend on a lot of factors.
The main problem is your assumption that the people who would drop were the ones who weren't profitable to Amazon. This is not necessarily true.
Let's take the shipping aspect. I bet a lot of people who pay for Amazon Prime don't order nearly as often as they assume they might. They just want stuff fast occasionally, so it's convenient. Maybe they only place an order every 4-6 weeks.
Now, let's say for the average order (just to make up some numbers), that Amazon breaks even at an $80 price point for shipping if a customer orders once per 4 weeks. If they order more frequently, the shipping ends up costing Amazon more than $80; if they order less, Amazon makes a profit.
Okay, so what happens when we raise the price to $120, i.e., an increase of 50%? Now the break-even point is 18 shipments per year, so you'd think Amazon can now afford to provide better service to frequent users, right?
Except, suppose a significant number of those people who only order once per 4, 6, 8, etc. weeks decide $120 is too much for them. They all drop. Suddenly you're left with all the "heavy users" of Prime -- the people who place orders weekly or biweekly or something. Amazon can now afford to make 18 shipments per year per customer, an increase of 50%, but their average customer demand went from 12 shipments per year to 26/year or 52/year or something.
It's perfectly possible for this to go the other way, in which case Amazon's decision works for shareholders and Amazon's profits. But it's also certainly possible that if they raise the price too much, it will drive away all but the "worst" Prime users in terms of the value to the company.
This is generally an issue whenever an "unlimited free X" service is offered. It's the issue with internet bandwidth, for example (to bring up something that's inevitably going to lead to huge digressions in this thread if anyone wants to argue about it). A small percentage of users for "unlimited" services often utilize a hugely disproportionate amount of resources... and most companies would generally prefer to get rid of the heaviest users when possible, if it were.
Instead, they usually accept the fact that they will take a hit in profits on the top 5-10% of "unlimited service" users (who cost more than they are worth) in order to grab that bottom 30 or 40% who barely use the service but pay anyway. The "unlimited" idea is great advertising.
But eventually, if you raise the price enough, you'll probably hit some sort of place where you only have those crazy people left... and the entire service ends up being unprofitable.
To take the extreme case, the logical outcome of your argument is that companies should increase prices to the point where they only have one customer for any given service, since the person who stays will "likely more than pay for those who leave." That's clearly not a "win-win" in most scenarios.
We hold the purse strings AND the votes. Either one alone is enough to eliminate the TSA. But we have said, en-mass, that the TSA is acceptable in our society. So it will continue.
wrong, WRONG, WRONG!. there are good reasons that there is a 91% incumbency rate. one reason is unfettered gerrymandering which completely subverts democracy.
There are many reasons why TSA will not be reformed. High incumbancy rate is one of them. But your citation of gerrymandering as a major problem for TSA reform is ridiculous here.
Yes, gerrymandering might be relevant to TSA issues, if one of the major parties were actually against the TSA. That's simply not true. So, even if we swapped parties to put all Democrats or all Republicans in federal office, there's no proof that they would end the TSA at all. Gerrymandering may protect party interests, but your point is moot in the case of the TSA.
Also, I don't know what your gerrymandering point has to do with the Senate or Presidency. Both of those have to approve of changes in government too, and they approved of the TSA without gerrymandering....
Gallup found that 46 percent of respondents said they approved of "the way the representative from your congressional district is handling his or her job" while 41 percent disapproved. That's in spite of the fact that overall Congressional approval was at just 16 percent in the same survey and hasn't been higher than 24 percent since the start of 2011.
In other words, "Congress sucks, but my guy's an okay dude!"
That's why there's a high incumbency rate. Gerrymandering is much lower on the list of causes, and less relevant to TSA. You want reform? You need to get people to realize that their own representatives are PART of Congress, and they need to vote them out when Congress isn't working well.
For starters, our interstate highway system is demonstrably unsafe, compared the Autobahn. Have you ever noticed that nothing separates oncoming traffic? It has been pointed out to me that the Germans have double guard rails separating oncoming traffic. What do we have? A grass filled median.
Umm, on many of the highways I drive on in the U.S., when the oncoming traffic is placed closer (without a significant median), there are guardrails. If it's even closer, there's a concrete or double concrete barrier. You can argue that maybe we need more barriers, but engineers clearly use these solutions in many places in the U.S. when conditions warrant it.
I have hydroplaned fully loaded tractor trailers in these areas, while driving the posted speed limit or less.
In heavy enough rain, you can hydroplane. News at 11.
There's something called "adjust your driving to conditions." You simply can't always go the posted speed limit in heavy rain. Yes, there are places where the road is not ideal and water channels or pools happen in heavy rain. Those sorts of places exist in Germany and in Europe in general too. The U.S. is HUGE, and sometimes engineers don't predict things quite right over literally millions of miles of roadways. But your assumption that you should be able to just travel the speed limit without ever hydroplaning -- I don't think that's reasonable. (The size of your vehicle also won't make this impossible: heavy aircraft have been known to hydroplane, which is the reason many airports have adopted grooves on runways.)
Speed limits? Those are set by politicians, for the purpose of extracting revenues from the motoring public. When Eisenhower specced the interstate, it was intended that the interstate sustain 80 mph traffic.
Sure, if we want to move troops rapidly across the country, which was part of the rationale for the interstate system.
For normal traffic, there's no need to travel at 80 mph. In fact, it reduces gas mileage usually to go significantly above 55 or so, because air resistance increases much more rapidly and you have to fight that at high speeds.
As for why speed limits are what they are, I'm sure there are SOME places in the U.S. where they are politically motivated... corruption is everywhere.
But in general terms, speed limits are set for (1) safety reasons across a broad variety of road conditions, and (2) to increase traffic throughput to maximum levels. Yes, on a dry road on a perfectly clear day, you may be able to go 90 mph down a country road, but add in cross traffic, pedestrians, and any sort of weather, and maybe 40 or 45 mph is safer. A lot of times, people don't realize that proximity to residences or other issues requires a consideration of lower speeds for safety.
Most people also don't realize the necessity and rationale for (2), though, which often plays a role for highway limits.... particularly in cities and high-traffic areas. Believe it or not, you can actually often put more cars through a stretch of road at 45 mph than 80 mph, particularly if there are lots of merges, on/off ramps, other random traffic issues and curves, etc. Merges, lane endings, on/off ramps, etc. require a lot of fast reactions to keep traffic moving. At 80 mph, people overcorrect, and a chain of brake lights can rapidly create a traffic "wave" that snarls traffic for a half hour. If everyone is traveling at 45, it might be easier for those merges, etc. to happen... you can actually increase traffic throughput this way, which is why many cities have adopted flexible speed limits on highways during rush hour.
The human body has physiological reactions to traveling. On an open highway, with little to look at, the sound, vibrations, and general motions of the vehicle tends to lull people into relaxation and sleep at speeds around 55 mph. At speeds approaching 80 mph, everyt
Given the vast distance between stars, saying that most of the matter in the universe is dust between stars seems reasonable to me.
If there were that much dust, there would be a LOT more light scattering from stars and other effects.
Why do we need to introduce dark matter to get the math to work out?
It's not just like we have some random idea that there's a large amount of mass out there. The gravitational effects suggest it is concentrated in certain areas, certain parts of galaxies, etc. If the matter were simply dust or something concentrated enough according to those gravitational patterns observed, it would have major observable effects.
Beyond this, there are all sorts of more technical reasons why dark matter is unlikely to just be normal matter -- like all normal matter emits radiation, and we'd be able to detect it in background radiation patterns if there were that much out there. And also if all the dark matter were baryonic (e.g. MACHOs), it were seriously disagree with the observed distribution of elements in the universe. It would require the whole theory of the Big Bang (with its many self-consistent predictions) to be seriously flawed.
Then a bunch of nihilistic apostate Saudis flew airplanes into the Twin Towers, and over 3000 Americans died in the space of a single morning.
How many Americans have died from terrorist attacks since? How many died from terrorist attacks before then? (And no, you can't count attacks on troops in Iraq or whatever, where our presence instigated the attacks.)
What's that? Not that many? And you're many more times to be randomly killed by lightning that a terrorist? You'd have to fly in an airplane constantly, 24-hours/day for something like 3100 YEARS on average before succumbing to a terrorist attack?
NEWSFLASH: Thousands of Americans die every day. A couple thousand Americans die every day from heart attacks -- many of those could have been prevented. Many were due to poisoning by smoking, or eating too many snack cakes, or not bothering to take a daily walk, or whatever. Should we ban smoking, snack cakes, and require everyone to take a daily walk or else be put on forced governmental marches every day? Over a hundred people die in car crashes every day, a significant percentage from drunk drivers. Should we ban alcohol? Well, Prohibition didn't turn out so well. Should we summarily execute someone caught drunk driving, since people who do it are generally repeat offenders? How much action do we take? How much do we allow the government to do?
Lots of people die every day. Lots of deaths could have been prevented. That doesn't mean we should allow the government to take any action it wants.
Knowing what we know now, can any of us truly say that we'd face 300 million people (or 20 million if you're Canadian) and say "I know we could have easily prevented this tragedy, but we're not going to put in place the fixes that would prevent a future tragedy like this because we believe the outcome would be worse than the disease." And if you are willing to do so, are you willing to face a lifetime of condemnation and excommunication from everything you hold dear?
If we could have "easily" prevented a tragedy by fixing a few flaws in communication between intelligence agencies (as you claim), sure -- why not? But that's not how the government responded. It responded by gutting many of the guaranteed Constitutional rights -- and it gets worse every year, from massive spying programs to warrantless searches to illegal detentions to targeted drone strikes of Americans abroad without due process or trial.
I don't care what the guy supposedly did -- if he's American, you don't send a freakin' drone to summarily execute him because you think he may be plotting something. Due process means something. Citizens have rights. If you're in favor of allowing the President to do that, I really don't see much different in authorizing summary executions of repeat drunk drivers or tobacco company CEOs.
Okay, maybe you're not in favor of that. Maybe you just want better intelligence communication, as you said in your post. Well, why the heck are you posting on this thread then? This is about Canadian government overreaching in its spying, equivalent to many of the Patriot Act crap that has effectively gotten around things like the Fourth and Fifth Amendments.
How many "inalienable" rights are you willing to give up? I just want to know. Please list them, and where do you draw the line?
What's really, really funny is that on/., we are all pro-privacy, pro-dismantling of the security apparatus. But none of us ever stop to consider if we'd change our tune, if one of our family or loved ones was suddenly, inexplicably killed in a horrible way--and then discover that said death could have been easily prevented if only X and Y agencies had bothered to share their information.
Look -- if all it would take is for X and Y to talk to each other, the
Some of these questions can get tricky. Many have stumbled on this one:
3. The U.S. has decided to secure its warheads with a special 8-digit code password. Which is the best example of a good password to use?
a. The President's birth date.
b. The First Lady's birth date.
c. Some random set of 8 digits.
d. 00000000
e. 53180080
Now, you might think the correct answer here would be (c), but you'd be wrong. Turns out that it is (d).
Given the stupid reasoning and lack of maturity for this password -- "we wanna be able to gets our guys to blow stuff up if the Ruskies even blink!" -- my guess is that (e) is actually the second-best choice, i.e., "O BOOBIES!"
Unless there's an annual fee, there's no good reason to close them, so they sit in the safe.
In fact, depending on your financial situation, it may actually hurt your credit scores to close them.
Nobody knows the exact details of how the FICO algorithm works, but one significant component is your "debt-to-credit ratio." To take a simple example -- if, say, you have $4,000 in credit card debt, but a $10,000 limit, you have a credit utilization of 40%.
Technically, they do this with installment loans too (like car payments, mortgages, etc.), but as long as you don't have late payments on them, there's little chance that it will hurt you even if you still owe quite a bit.
So, the discussion is usually mostly around revolving credit, which for most people is credit cards. From people who have tried to figure out the FICO algorithm (as much as possible), it seems clear that it's generally a bad idea to hold more than 25 to 30% of the credit limit on any given credit card.
But this also applies to your collective available credit limit as well, which is where those extra cards can come in. Keep in mind that even if you pay off your balances every month, the statement balances still generally show up on your credit report -- so if you charge $5,000 every month but pay it off, it still looks like you're carrying roughly a $5,000 balance.
And if you only have $10,000 in revolving credit, that looks bad (50% credit utilization). But if you have a few other cards laying around that you never use, and your total limit is more like $50,000 or $100,000, that looks very good.
Important points: (1) This isn't going to make or break your credit score for most people, but if the debt-to-credit ratio is really off, it could hurt it by 50 points or more. So, (2) Think twice before cancelling any high-limit cards, if you don't have a lot of credit in general. There's no good reason to hold onto a store card with a $500 limit for most people, but getting rid of that $25,000 limit card you never use could actually make a dent in your credit score, depending on the rest of your finances.
And I haven't noticed merchants giving cash discounts for a long time.
They still exist, but are rare. Most commonly, I see this at gas stations for some reason -- and there, it's actually somewhat frequent (though by no means common anymore).
I suggest before reading this, you go back and look at your original reply to me, in which you were talking about 30-35 degree temps. Most of your reply is about your experience living in a place where you admit that you rarely encounter these things, so I don't see why you think that's particularly relevant to a discussion that you started about weather in temperatures around freezing.
Seriously? You do realize there are things call "spring" and "fall" in the north, too, right? You know -- when "temperatures hover between 30-35 degrees" and you might end up with a rainstorm or an icestorm or whatever?
Yes, I realize this. I grew up in the north and learned to drive in the north. It was snowing for my first behind-the-wheel driving lesson.
Please understand that "hovering between 30-35" is the norm for the entire winter down south, not just for a few weeks here, a few weeks there. Also, to tell you the truth, I don't remember the temperature being 30-35 much at all. I remember it being 60 degrees one day and 10 the next. Because the only terrain there to slow down those oncoming weather systems was about 1,000 miles of prairie grass. Sound familiar?
Yeah, it sounds familiar if you grew up in North Dakota or maybe Nebraska. If you grew up in eastern Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, etc., not so much.
In states that do have mountains and particularly those closer to things like the Atlantic Ocean where cold air masses frequently slam into more moist air that is moderated in temperature by the ocean, a large portion of the fall-winter-spring is spent with days in the 30-35 degree region. Much, much more time than in Atlanta, where it's basically just nights (and only a few days) in late December through February when that's likely.
Guess what? In the north, when they are calling for "freezing rain" or "sleet" and put out a winter storm warning, people drive with great caution. Now, most places in the north have salt to handle these scenarios, but -- even with the salt -- nobody wants to be driving on the roads during freezing rain, even in the north.
Whatever. I never looked at a weather report in the north unless I was waxing my skis. I certainly didn't check the NWS before hopping in the car.
You just admitted that you rarely experienced weather in the 30-35 degree region while growing up. If the day is clearly above or clearly below freezing, I can see why you wouldn't care so much unless a major weather event was happening. But if a major weather event -- as in something out of the ordinary like a blizzard -- was happening, I'd bet you might check the weather advisories, no? That's the equivalent of what was issued in Atlanta in terms of likely impact for where you grew up: MAJOR BLIZZARD ON THE WAY -- DANGEROUS ROAD CONDITIONS -- EMERGENCY TRAVEL ONLY RECOMMENDED. Those sorts of warnings only happen once in a while in the north, but you are meant to heed them. That's what happened in Atlanta this week.
Anyhow, for people who actually do live in places where the temperature is frequently around freezing, that IS when you're most concerned about being on the roads. There's no "Whatevah!" about it.
A warning about something like that happens, and people leave work early.
What? You're joking. If we left early for snow, we'd never be at work.
Who's talking about SNOW?? The previous sentence was talking about freezing rain and ice. And yes, people in PA or NY or NJ or CT or MA do consider leaving work early when there is ice in the forecast. Light snow, not so much. Ice -- heck, yeah.
Schools close.
Um, no. My kids' school district down here has more snow days in a single academic year than I had my entire life, growing up. Northern districts will close for
Up north, if it's winter and there's probable precip, it's going to be snow. In the south, our winter temperatures typically hover between 30-35 degrees, so even if precip is highly probable, it's really, really difficult to forecast if it's going to be snow, ice, or rain because very small changes in temperature can foul up the entire forecast.
Seriously? You do realize there are things call "spring" and "fall" in the north, too, right? You know -- when "temperatures hover between 30-35 degrees" and you might end up with a rainstorm or an icestorm or whatever? Just because there might be a period of anywhere from a few weeks to a few months -- depending on the region -- where temperatures are almost always low enough to guarantee snow doesn't mean there isn't lots of time every year where temperatures hover around freezing in the north. In fact, I'd say it's probably pretty likely that most locations in the north experience MORE time each year and MORE weather events in that freezing range than people in the south ever will... just because it's more likely given temperature ranges throughout the year.
Guess what? In the north, when they are calling for "freezing rain" or "sleet" and put out a winter storm warning, people drive with great caution. Now, most places in the north have salt to handle these scenarios, but -- even with the salt -- nobody wants to be driving on the roads during freezing rain, even in the north. A warning about something like that happens, and people leave work early. Schools close. I'd say those storms are the MOST likely in the north to result in public officials erring on the side of caution and cancelling school or putting out extra salt JUST IN CASE -- because an error in a storm around freezing could paralyze a city in the north. An error ignoring the possibility of only a couple inches of snow, on the other hand, is less likely to result in disaster with people used to dealing with that. You can drive slowly in a little snow, even without special equipment. There's nothing you can do to prevent sliding around with a car on ice.
I'd be interested to see what percentage of NWS snow warnings wind up being busts in Georgia. Something tells me that the percentage is higher than what you experience up north. Those warnings probably sound more like cries of wolf in Atlanta.
I'd be interested in this too. If that's actually true, that's an issue. But my guess is that a lot of this problem has to do with people -- and the news media -- not understanding the details of the weather warning information I mentioned in my post. I'd bet there are lots of winter storm "watches" and "advisories" every year, just as there are in the north. A decent percentage of those get cancelled or never materialize or whatever.
But "warnings" -- not so much. Unless the weather people in Georgia are significantly more incompetent, my bet is that every time a "watch" or an "advisory" comes on, people in the south go a little crazy, and then nothing or very little happens. Then when an actual "warning" comes up, they don't realize that means something different.
But that's only my guess -- and yes, I have lived a number of years in the southern states, and I don't recall a lot of excess "winter storm warnings," but I could be wrong.
A few months ago I ran across a study about the polarizing effect of internet forums. As I understood the theory, they thought that we all have these black/white ideas, but they're normally moderated by social interaction. Unfortunately the ease and anonymity of internet communcation allows us to express the exremeties of our beliefs without any social cost.
While this may be true, it hardly takes a fancy "study" to discover this.
Just observe how people behave in their cars during a daily commute. That will tell you everything you need to know about how decreased face-to-face interaction and anonymity changes social behaviors.
How many people lay on the horn for a few seconds when someone does something unexpected? How many people tailgate a person going too slow, or slow down in front of someone who is annoying, or cut people off when they're angry?
Now, ask yourself how often people would do similar things to a person's face. How many people would randomly start yelling at somebody if they are walking too slow on the sidewalk, or cut in front of somebody walking and deliberately slow down, etc.? Some -- but a lot fewer.
When we actually see people as individuals, we often see the reasons for their behavior, and we temper our reactions (maybe there's some reason we can see for a person walking slow that we could empathize with, whereas a slow driver is often just seen as an abstract impediment). We are vaguely sensitive to other human beings around us. If some people went around yelling and screaming and following people and blocking people like lots of folks do in an everyday commute, they'd likely be arrested or locked up for psychological evaluations.
But, when people start reacting to symbols or abstractions of people -- like cars or internet usernames or whatever -- that natural human empathy is partly lost. This is not surprising and can be observed in a number of situations other than internet forums.
Unfortunately, that's just too much for most people, it seems. So they invent a shadow projection of it all and live in the shadows.
Hmm... sounds quite like Plato's Cave. Most people live their lives not understanding the underlying truth, only seeing the dark shadows of its effects created by the firelight on the wall....
Don't know whether you were deliberately referencing Plato or not, but some might view the allegory as applicable here (though probably not in Plato's original sense).
You don't have to make 100% accurate predictions to be able to prepare for the future. That's why weather forecasts give a probability of precipitation, rather than a binary rain/no rain prediction. If you know rain is likely, you can carry your umbrella just in case. The attitude should not be "You need to prove something bad will happen before I prepare for it," but rather "Let me know if something bad might happen so I can prepare for it."
While you're right, I also think there is a more specific problem here. People are bad at making estimates based on probabilities -- "70% chance of rain? 30% chance of snow? Should I take action?"
The thing is -- the National Weather Service tries its best to keep the guesswork out of major weather events by issuing watches, advisories, and warnings. When a winter storm WARNING is issued, it means that there's a general consensus that this thing WILL occur and you should behave as if it will.
In this case, the NWS issued a winter storm warning at 3:38am on the day of the event, roughly 9 hours before snow started falling in Atlanta. Here's the official meaning of a winter storm watch and warning as put out by NWS in Atlanta:
Watch: Issued when the potential exists for 2 inches or more of snow in 12 hours, or 4 inches or more of snow in 24 hours. Also issued for potential of a quarter inch or more of freezing rain, or half an inch of sleet. In the North Georgia Mountains, the criteria are 3 inches in 12 hours or 4 inches in 24 hours.
Warning: Issued when a combination of snow, blowing snow, sleet, and/or freezing rain is likely to exceed warning criteria. Warning criteria are those detailed in the Winter Storm Watch.
In other words, a "warning" means it's pretty darn likely the thing is coming. Having lived in the northern U.S. for many years, I can think of a few times that a "warning" didn't really pan out, but not very many. A "watch" (or an "advisory," which is an intermediate level of sorts) is one thing, and can sometimes be wrong. A "warning" is meant to convey reasonable certainty that a major weather event will happen.
So, the average citizen doesn't need to necessarily concern himself/herself with probabilities -- these weather bulletins already contain significant information about how likely things are to happen.
Most people probably don't pay attention to these weather distinctions -- they just think "oh, there's some sort of weather alert." But they generally have very precise meanings.
For the general population to be ignorant of these meanings is perhaps expected. That's why governments and school officials need to understand these things and make reasonable calls -- but it appears they did not seem to know what "warning" meant in this case.
That's the disturbing thing. The NWS had stuff out saying there would be "dangerous" road conditions and that travel was not recommended well in advance of the snow.
One thing I would note though, there were probably 3 times in the last month where we were told we would have snow and it never happened. I think that might have made people feel like this was another false threat.
Here's the thing, though -- there are significant differences in the way the weather services categorize threats. Having a winter storm "watch" or "advisory" is one thing -- and many times these things will turn into nothing. The news media, particularly in the South, often gets over-excited at the prospect of snow, so when one of these things pops up, everyone gets concerned.
I've heard other people make the claim about previous predictions of snow in Atlanta this season. But did you actually receive a winter storm WARNING at those other times? I've tried to find this answer, but it's difficult to find information on that question. My sense is NO -- that previous predictions were NOT actually "winter storm WARNINGS," but merely forecasts or maybe "watches" or "advisories."
In this case, there was a warning issued something like 8-10 hours before the storm hit, which would have allowed plenty of time for people to act.
I think the problem is that people don't generally understand the difference between the various weather terminology. But "warning" means that it's really quite certain that something is going to happen. (Yes, it's occasionally off, but usually in terms of severity, not whether it's going to happen at all.)
Average people may be excused for not understanding what "warning" means, but that's no excuse for government and school officials.
They do cite that the National Weather Service had only issued a winter weather advisory for the area, not a watch or a warning, until 3:30am the day that all hell broke loose. Apparently local meteorologists disagreed with the NWS, but without their formal statements I'm not exactly surprised that public officials and employees didn't feel comfortable making statements.
Yes -- 3:30am. That is more than enough time to get major warnings and announcements out on the 5:00am or 6:00am news.
In case you don't realize this -- most weather scenarios are unpredictable. You often don't get official weather WARNINGS of major thunderstorms, tornados, winter storms, whatever until a few hours before they hit -- sometimes even less.
If the NWS had issued a warning at NOON on the day the storm hit, and it came in at 2pm, sure, I can see people saying "We didn't know."
But they put out an advisory over the weekend. And then they issued a WARNING (which, in weather-speak means, "it's time to believe this and get seriously prepared") something like 10 hours before the storm hit.
Unfortunate situation all of the way around.
Yes, but the point is that a significant part of this could have been prevented. Lots of cities and towns in the north don't make decisions about calling off schools or things until 4am or so of the day when a weather event is supposed to happen. And even later, in dire circumstances, when something unexpected goes on, they will make a decision to dismiss almost immediately and turn the buses around (or at least dismiss as early as possible, even at 11am or whatever).
None of that was even necessary here. The warning was issued well in advance, and even if it had only been a small amount of ice or snow in a city without plows and salt trucks, they should have issued warnings immediately -- even in the late morning, if they screwed up and didn't make a decision before the morning rush.
Waiting until the snow was actually falling for people to respond is just not reasonable, given the warnings and timing.
Just because it has the keywords "Bitcoin" and "Linus Torvalds" in the headline - it doesn't really mean its "news".
Personally, I've been finding lately that if it has the word "Bitcoin" in the headline, chances are that it's actually "anti-news" -- it actually sucks away collective "news-worthiness" from any site it appears on.
In all seriousness, the Slashdot editors and a lot of people around here must be invested in Bitcoin and banking on all the speculation going on. The strongest correlation to Bitcoin's value seems to be the amount of media attention it receives. The daily Bitcoin story here is getting ridiculous.
So you know what? I'm taking the Slashdot pledge -- from this day forward, I refuse to click on any story with "Bitcoin" in the headline. I refuse to comment.
I'm tired of debating with folks who have little clue about how currency works. I'm tired of debating with gold fanatics, or people who bizarrely think that deflation is a good thing. I'm tired of all the stupid arguments about exactly what sort of analogy is adequate to describe the kind of finance scheme is driving the value of cryptocurrencies -- Ponzi schemes, multi-level marketing, pump-and-dump, whatever. Followed, inevitably, by Wikipedia links describing all the details of various financial schemes, and why Bitcoin is none of them. What the heck cares?
Look, you guys want to invest in Bitcoin? Go ahead. Believe it will save the world or allow you to have your privacy or whatever. Maybe it will -- in like five or ten years or something. Maybe.
For now, it's just another speculative venture. You could just as well be debating the value of investing in any one of hundreds of companies or natural resources or commodities or whatever. What the heck makes Bitcoin so freakin' special? (And please, PLEASE -- don't answer that rhetorical question. I've heard a thousand variations on the answers.)
Come on, folks -- take the Bitcoin pledge with me! Save Slashdot from this nonsense.
What do you mean? What's going on with media players?
Umm, ever use a DVD player? I'd bet that it was region encoded, so it won't play DVDs from outside of your part of the world. Theoretically, this is supposed to be a piracy prevention scheme.
in fact, consumer pressure forced Apple to abandon DRM in the iTunes store.
Yes, for music. But try downloading any videos from most reputable sources without DRM. And, regardless, this discussion is about whether something will be significantly inhibited in its marketing by some sort of DRM... the iTunes store clearly became popular with DRM in place -- without competition from major non-DRM (especially Amazon), I'd bet Apple would still be using DRM for music... as it still does for videos, and as do most major video distributors.
In other words, there's little evidence that DRM gets in the way of sales for a new product or technology as long as it's cool or novel enough. Expectations have changed about music, but for many other things, DRM is still going strong.
No, I actually don't. I think exposing an all-seeing police state has great implications for the rights of that state's citizens, but has very little bearing on life vs. death.
Let me make the connections for you. Government surveillance and data collection does two things (among many others), depending on whether it's publicly known or not.
If the government is running public surveillance and effectively acting like a police state (think the TSA), it convinces many people of a supposed necessity for "security" against some "unseen enemy." It's very easy to turn that fear against some random foreign nation, even when the connection in tenuous -- e.g., the Iraq war. The continuous feeling of "unease" that many Americans have by being continuously bombarded with messages like "You need to take your shoes and belt off and d the 'special pose' for the nudey scanners, or you could DIE even on a plane from terrorists" is that there are enemies out there, and the government needs to protect you, probably including military actions. (And imagine if "weapons of mass destruction" might be involved! See Iraq above ramp up to try to create a conflict with Iran in recent U.S. politics.) Public surveillance and police state actions create a state of paranoia in the populace that can often lead them to support armed conflicts... because they're just that freaked out and scared.
Now, what about secret surveillance that is kept from the public? Well, it does similar things, except the paranoia now is left to fester inside the government and agencies that compile the data. There will always be apparent "threats" to every nation, always people shooting their mouths off about something or other, always people talking to shady people (but not actually intending to be terrorists).
But increased surveillance ensures that lots of people in the government are frankly OBSESSED with huge amounts of weird stuff going by their desks every day. A report here, a briefing there, and suddenly you're convinced that many people are plotting terrorist activities right now -- and they're out to get you.
I don't know this for certain, but I have to guess that this obsession with looking for ANY signs of potentially bad actions probably also contributed to the Bush White House arguing for an invasion of Iraq (again, see above). The more "data" that comes in, the more likely that people are to see random patterns in it, effectively finding what they want to see.
And when those people are in charge of major governments or lots of weapons, that kind of paranoid quest combing through random data is a serious threat to world peace.
I think there are better candidates.
So do I. But someone who exposed the paranoid actions of crazy governments intent on finding "unseen enemies" to attack HAS potentially contributed something significant toward future peace.
Of all the education debates, providing education does have a serious cultural impact: it empowers people.
In an ideal world, yes. HOWEVER...
Education is the enemy of government. Strong education makes government subordinate; weak education makes government powerful.
This argument often runs into problems, since -- in many countries -- education (or, rather, "schooling," which most people equate with "education") is primarily provided by the government. If the government runs schools, it doesn't have an interest in necessarily "empowering" anyone. It certainly doesn't have an interest in making itself "subordinate."
There is a fundamental conflict of interest when you put things this way. Yes -- education can be a powerful tool for social change, but government-run educational systems may have different primary interests. To the government, the most desirable outcome of education may be to produce obedient citizens.
I'm not at all saying that public education is a bad thing -- it certainly has been extremely helpful in a number of ways in developed countries. But education (i.e., schooling) by itself is no guarantee of "empowerment" or overcoming government... in fact it can actually make the citizenry more docile and obedient to the government.
Take a look into the history of compulsory public education in the U.S., and you'll find a lot of nasty business in various historical periods that is directly related to this -- government or business interests wanting to have more control over kids to train them to be good citizens and good workers, rather than "empowering" them to think on their own. Frankly -- the legacy of those ideas is still with us in the U.S. educational system, and arguably it is one of the things standing in the way of making things better. We have a schooling system partly designed NOT to educate and to empower, and recognizing the things that are built into the system that fight against true education is probably the only way to really "fix" things. Alas... that's an inconvenient story that the government doesn't want you to think about too hard, so most policy people don't talk about it.
Thanks for the informative post. I'm sure many will benefit from it.
Would it be so hard for submitters to expand their acronyms in the posts?
Yes -- what is this "U.S." thing that's mentioned in the summary and headline? I spend a bit of time searching, and I discovered it's actually an abbreviation for United States! How about that! It makes things so much clearer if submitters expanded every abbreviation -- I'm still not sure what this RADAR thing is that people talk about -- and while we're at it, maybe we should include definitions for every single technical term that ever occurs.[/sarcasm]
In all seriousness, I'm happy that you posted an explanation that clearly was helpful to some people. On the other hand, I think your idea that submitters need to explain well-established concepts goes a bit too far.
MOOCs have probably been the subject of dozens of stories on Slashdot in the past 2-3 years. They are perhaps the most important technical innovation in higher education in decades. What ultimate effects they will have are still to be determined, but they clearly have been receiving a HUGE amount of buzz for quite a while. The article you linked to even mentions that 2012 was dubbed by the New York Times as "The Year of the MOOC." This is hardly an obscure topic.
I don't at all mean for my reply to you to come across as mean-spirited. I only used sarcasm above because of your "Would it be so hard?!?" venting in your response. No, it's not so hard -- but it probably isn't necessary in this case. It's not like the days before the internet when an unfamiliar term might send you to multiple dictionaries or encyclopedias to figure out what's going on. Now, it merely takes 10 seconds to search for a topic this prominent and figure out what it is.
That's how you learn about stuff going on around you -- unfamiliar terms, abbreviations, acronyms, place names, public figures, etc. appear in Slashdot summaries all the time... at least they're unfamiliar to someone. Look them up. Learn something.
Also, use "context clues." The first sentence of the summary says "Coursera is an online website that offers free courses from many of the world's top universities." It's pretty clear from the rest of the summary that MOOCs are what Coursera offers -- hence MOOCs are probably "free courses from many of the world's top universities" or at least a concept very close to that idea.
If the summary had just randomly started talking about Coursera and MOOCs without mentioned anything that either did, that would be one thing. But I think this is pretty clear, at least as Slashdot summaries go.
The summaries are just that: they are summaries. They are not full news articles. If a full lengthy news article didn't explain what a MOOC was, that may be more of an issue. If the summary didn't link to any full news articles that explained what it was talking about, that would also be an issue. But this is a summary -- it needs to be abbreviated, and it can't explain everything. Especially when it's a topic that has been discussed many times here. We don't define what a "Tesla" or a "Bitcoin" is in every summary about them either.
Please -- continue to post helpful explanations of obscure terms or acronyms or whatever when you think they are useful. If they are, someone will mod them up. But I don't think anything about this summary was unclear, and even if it was to me, I could have figured it out by 10 seconds of searching. Frankly, I do that all the time on Slashdot -- I read about some concept I'm unfamiliar with in the summary, and then I look it up to figure out what's going on. That's what learning is about.
Slashdot Mirror
True. BMI is hardly perfect... but it's a good first step. Kinda like "Did you reboot it?"
Actually, no it's NOT a "good first step." It's a fair to poor "first step." It's more like a troubleshooting procedure that's guaranteed to give bogus results in a significant percentage of cases -- i.e., where it's wrong or off so often that asking the question is almost more likely to lead you down the wrong path for many cases, rather than giving you useful information.
The BMI formula assumes that adiposity relates to height squared. It does not. This is a simple fact. When people get taller, their bodies scale in three dimensions, not two. So, for really tall people, it's guaranteed to say they are more fat than they really are, and for really short people, it's guaranteed to say people are at a healthy weight when their fat or even obese.
The only reason the BMI formula appears to work at all is because women are both shorter and tend to have higher "healthy" bodyfat percentages. The BMI ranges are more-or-less supposed to be the same for men and women -- that should be a major red flag to anyone who knows anything about bodyfat, since healthy bodyfat ranges for men and women are clearly known to be different.
So, the mean female height is less than the mean male height, but the mean healthy female bodyfat amount is higher. Thus, to have a formula that works for both sexes, you need something that doesn't accurately reflect a "normal" body being scaled up or down. BMI fits the bill, and thus it has been used for population studies to compare mean statistics for overall populations. For individuals -- which it was never designed for -- it's TERRIBLE.
You can immediately see that from the men vs. women problem. BMI says a short man who is in the middle of the height range for women should have the same weight as an average woman. Given what we know about bodyfat, that doesn't make sense. Or, a tall woman who's over 6' or something -- to have a "healthy" BMI she'd often have to look like a waifish model.
"But," you say, "it's still a good first step. It's a simple formula."
Nope -- doesn't excuse it. There are a number of studies that have shown that a number of even simpler measures are actually more accurate at predicting health problems, propensity for disease, etc. For example, simply measuring the waist circumference for men -- regardless of height -- has been shown to be a better predictor of health problems than BMI. Think about that for a moment. Clearly a guy who is 5' tall should not have a waist size the same as a 7' tall guy. But studies have shown that even measuring the waist and saying, "Is it bigger than X inches?" without knowing anything about height, weight, or anything else is a better predictor than BMI.
Yeah, BMI sucks that bad.
But could a simple formula do that much harm? Well, why not just modify that "simple formula" to make it more accurate? In the days when you had to calculations by hand or with a slide rule, a formula involving only an exponent of 2 and a division might make sense. But most people don't calculate BMI by hand anymore -- they plug things into some sort of web calculator or look at a chart.
We can easily fix BMI to make it much more accurate. First, just change the exponent. Logically, as I mentioned at the outside, squaring the height makes NO SENSE. You might think that cubing the height would be better, since the body expands in three dimensions, but it turns out that the male/female factor and other things that don't quite scale precisely with the cube of the height makes an exponent of 3 bad too.
Various empirical studies have suggested an exponent of somewhere in the 2.3 to 2.7 range would be better. But really, to get any accuracy at all, you'd have to at least consider separating the sexes. At that point, you could narrow the range of the exponent for males an
How is this modded as "insightful"? The federal funding for this bridge had nothing to do with Palin (originally) -- it was Sen. Ted Stevens and other Alaska people actually in the federal government who got this approved... long before anyone outside of Alaska had ever heard of Sarah Palin. She later became involved with the issue as governor, and then it came up in 2008 as part of her VP candidacy issues, but the whole idea of the project came from Alaska senators and representatives in Congress... exactly like this tower. Palin had no such power in the federal government to argue for or against any such appropriation. Her VP candidacy was later.
We're about even. I call BS on your post as well.
Yeah, you know what -- I'm sorry. I really am. I've been having a weird couple days, and I've been posting more extreme posts than usual.
So, really, I am truly sorry. I was more annoyed at mods who rated your post highly for something that I thought had a lot of opinion and anecdote than I was annoyed at you. My rhetoric was unnecessary.
to question my own anecdotal evidence, with nothing more than opinion.
Actually, a lot of what I said is backed up by facts and studies. I pointed out a few of them in another reply above. I can provide more for some other points as well (like the rationale for decreased limits, which originally had to do with fuel economy stuff in the 1970s, but now generally has to with traffic concerns on many highways).
Citations that directly support my position are hard to find, and they seldom address the issue directly. But - that little paradoxical article should catch your attention.
Yes, I'm aware of that study and others. I'm aware that lower speed limits don't always save lives, nor do they always result in people actually driving slower.
What I was arguing against is that in your post you conflated the idea that (1) higher speed limits are desireable and (2) higher speeds are desireable. I think there are good reasons to question what we think we know about (1) and good psychological arguments to make different choices for posted limits. But I emphatically deny that there is any evidence out there that we'd be better off if everyone were driving 80 mph on highways overall instead of 55, even in places without obvious "danger" reasons to have a lowered limit.
For normal traffic, there's no need to travel at 80 mph. In fact, it reduces gas mileage usually to go significantly above 55 or so, because air resistance increases much more rapidly and you have to fight that at high speeds.
Cite your sources for this often repeated tripe. My own MPG continues to rise until it peaks when my speed exceeds 110 mph. Most any car that I've owned (and none of them were your big honking pointless SUVs or any other sort of passenger truck) continued to increase in performance up to at least 80 mph.
Good lord. Well, this is enough to call your whole post bogus already.
Try a freakin' search engine. The second link that came up for me is a 2009 study from Consumer Reports, with a variety of vehicles.
To the best of my knowledge, the increase in speed limit in TX over the years did not see a significant increase in accidents or fatalities.
That may be the case. There certainly are situations where raising the speed limit has not increased fatalities, but usually in places where (1) people generally already drove significantly over the limit, and (2) people did not actually increase their speeds on average to keep up with the corresponding increase in limit (in other words, if the limit went up 10 mph, the average speed went up only a little).
But this is irrelevant to the GP's point, which was accusing politicians of lowering speed limits for revenue purposes. If that does happen, my guess is it happens around cities, where highway speed limits are often significantly lowered (and also there are more likely to be a greated density of cops around to collect tickets). My point is that often there are other reasons for those lowered limits -- beyond safety, often the desire to prevent traffic problems.
In most modern cars, putting the cruise control on at high speeds will result in people relaxing... it doesn't matter whether you're going 55 or 65 or 80.
Citation please.
Well, there are a number of studies showing decreased attention for people using cruise control, such as this one. It's clear that reaction times are increased, etc. The higher the speed you're traveling, the more problematic these increased reaction times are.
I haven't really done a search for studies, but I've talked to a LOT of people who agree that the "feel" of higher speeds in many newer cars has become a lot smoother in recent years. Lots of car companies even advertise how quiet and smooth their rides now are.
I'm not saying the difference in traveling at 55 vs. 80 is nil, but I don't think it's anywhere near as noticeable in recent cars. Given the inherent additional danger of higher speeds, I think it's on the burden of you and GP to prove that people somehow are alert enough to actually drive "more safely" overall at 80 compared to 55.
You're pretty much street pizza at speeds greater than 60mph. The risk of bodily injury and the mortality rate increase from a speed of 60 mph to 80 mph is such a small number that you can consider it a foregone conclusion that you're not coming home in one piece or at all.
By that logic, why stop at 80 mph? Why not travel at 100 mph? 120 mph? 140 mph? It's already a foregone conclusion that you're going to die in a crash at any speed over 60, so why bother considering safety at all?
Of course that's nonsense. The faster you go, the more reaction time you need to avoid anything or make any changes to what you're doing. Combined with the increased kinetic energy that increases with the square of velocity, driving faster still is more likely to get you killed.
Sure, in certain types of severe collisions, you're going to
This makes perfect sense from a shareholder point of view. Raising the price to $119 will decrease the number of Prime members, thereby decreasing the cost of providing the Prime service, but the people who stay with Prime will likely more than pay for those who leave.
This logic is horribly flawed. Yes, it's possible that this will be the case, but it will really depend on a lot of factors.
The main problem is your assumption that the people who would drop were the ones who weren't profitable to Amazon. This is not necessarily true.
Let's take the shipping aspect. I bet a lot of people who pay for Amazon Prime don't order nearly as often as they assume they might. They just want stuff fast occasionally, so it's convenient. Maybe they only place an order every 4-6 weeks.
Now, let's say for the average order (just to make up some numbers), that Amazon breaks even at an $80 price point for shipping if a customer orders once per 4 weeks. If they order more frequently, the shipping ends up costing Amazon more than $80; if they order less, Amazon makes a profit.
Okay, so what happens when we raise the price to $120, i.e., an increase of 50%? Now the break-even point is 18 shipments per year, so you'd think Amazon can now afford to provide better service to frequent users, right? Except, suppose a significant number of those people who only order once per 4, 6, 8, etc. weeks decide $120 is too much for them. They all drop. Suddenly you're left with all the "heavy users" of Prime -- the people who place orders weekly or biweekly or something. Amazon can now afford to make 18 shipments per year per customer, an increase of 50%, but their average customer demand went from 12 shipments per year to 26/year or 52/year or something.
It's perfectly possible for this to go the other way, in which case Amazon's decision works for shareholders and Amazon's profits. But it's also certainly possible that if they raise the price too much, it will drive away all but the "worst" Prime users in terms of the value to the company.
This is generally an issue whenever an "unlimited free X" service is offered. It's the issue with internet bandwidth, for example (to bring up something that's inevitably going to lead to huge digressions in this thread if anyone wants to argue about it). A small percentage of users for "unlimited" services often utilize a hugely disproportionate amount of resources... and most companies would generally prefer to get rid of the heaviest users when possible, if it were.
Instead, they usually accept the fact that they will take a hit in profits on the top 5-10% of "unlimited service" users (who cost more than they are worth) in order to grab that bottom 30 or 40% who barely use the service but pay anyway. The "unlimited" idea is great advertising.
But eventually, if you raise the price enough, you'll probably hit some sort of place where you only have those crazy people left... and the entire service ends up being unprofitable.
To take the extreme case, the logical outcome of your argument is that companies should increase prices to the point where they only have one customer for any given service, since the person who stays will "likely more than pay for those who leave." That's clearly not a "win-win" in most scenarios.
We hold the purse strings AND the votes. Either one alone is enough to eliminate the TSA. But we have said, en-mass, that the TSA is acceptable in our society. So it will continue.
wrong, WRONG, WRONG!. there are good reasons that there is a 91% incumbency rate. one reason is unfettered gerrymandering which completely subverts democracy.
There are many reasons why TSA will not be reformed. High incumbancy rate is one of them. But your citation of gerrymandering as a major problem for TSA reform is ridiculous here.
Yes, gerrymandering might be relevant to TSA issues, if one of the major parties were actually against the TSA. That's simply not true. So, even if we swapped parties to put all Democrats or all Republicans in federal office, there's no proof that they would end the TSA at all. Gerrymandering may protect party interests, but your point is moot in the case of the TSA.
Also, I don't know what your gerrymandering point has to do with the Senate or Presidency. Both of those have to approve of changes in government too, and they approved of the TSA without gerrymandering....
democracy is dead
Yes, spend some time reading your own link:
Gallup found that 46 percent of respondents said they approved of "the way the representative from your congressional district is handling his or her job" while 41 percent disapproved. That's in spite of the fact that overall Congressional approval was at just 16 percent in the same survey and hasn't been higher than 24 percent since the start of 2011.
In other words, "Congress sucks, but my guy's an okay dude!"
That's why there's a high incumbency rate. Gerrymandering is much lower on the list of causes, and less relevant to TSA. You want reform? You need to get people to realize that their own representatives are PART of Congress, and they need to vote them out when Congress isn't working well.
I call BS on much of your post.
For starters, our interstate highway system is demonstrably unsafe, compared the Autobahn. Have you ever noticed that nothing separates oncoming traffic? It has been pointed out to me that the Germans have double guard rails separating oncoming traffic. What do we have? A grass filled median.
Umm, on many of the highways I drive on in the U.S., when the oncoming traffic is placed closer (without a significant median), there are guardrails. If it's even closer, there's a concrete or double concrete barrier. You can argue that maybe we need more barriers, but engineers clearly use these solutions in many places in the U.S. when conditions warrant it.
I have hydroplaned fully loaded tractor trailers in these areas, while driving the posted speed limit or less.
In heavy enough rain, you can hydroplane. News at 11.
There's something called "adjust your driving to conditions." You simply can't always go the posted speed limit in heavy rain. Yes, there are places where the road is not ideal and water channels or pools happen in heavy rain. Those sorts of places exist in Germany and in Europe in general too. The U.S. is HUGE, and sometimes engineers don't predict things quite right over literally millions of miles of roadways. But your assumption that you should be able to just travel the speed limit without ever hydroplaning -- I don't think that's reasonable. (The size of your vehicle also won't make this impossible: heavy aircraft have been known to hydroplane, which is the reason many airports have adopted grooves on runways.)
Speed limits? Those are set by politicians, for the purpose of extracting revenues from the motoring public. When Eisenhower specced the interstate, it was intended that the interstate sustain 80 mph traffic.
Sure, if we want to move troops rapidly across the country, which was part of the rationale for the interstate system.
For normal traffic, there's no need to travel at 80 mph. In fact, it reduces gas mileage usually to go significantly above 55 or so, because air resistance increases much more rapidly and you have to fight that at high speeds.
As for why speed limits are what they are, I'm sure there are SOME places in the U.S. where they are politically motivated... corruption is everywhere.
But in general terms, speed limits are set for (1) safety reasons across a broad variety of road conditions, and (2) to increase traffic throughput to maximum levels. Yes, on a dry road on a perfectly clear day, you may be able to go 90 mph down a country road, but add in cross traffic, pedestrians, and any sort of weather, and maybe 40 or 45 mph is safer. A lot of times, people don't realize that proximity to residences or other issues requires a consideration of lower speeds for safety.
Most people also don't realize the necessity and rationale for (2), though, which often plays a role for highway limits.... particularly in cities and high-traffic areas. Believe it or not, you can actually often put more cars through a stretch of road at 45 mph than 80 mph, particularly if there are lots of merges, on/off ramps, other random traffic issues and curves, etc. Merges, lane endings, on/off ramps, etc. require a lot of fast reactions to keep traffic moving. At 80 mph, people overcorrect, and a chain of brake lights can rapidly create a traffic "wave" that snarls traffic for a half hour. If everyone is traveling at 45, it might be easier for those merges, etc. to happen... you can actually increase traffic throughput this way, which is why many cities have adopted flexible speed limits on highways during rush hour.
The human body has physiological reactions to traveling. On an open highway, with little to look at, the sound, vibrations, and general motions of the vehicle tends to lull people into relaxation and sleep at speeds around 55 mph. At speeds approaching 80 mph, everyt
Given the vast distance between stars, saying that most of the matter in the universe is dust between stars seems reasonable to me.
If there were that much dust, there would be a LOT more light scattering from stars and other effects.
Why do we need to introduce dark matter to get the math to work out?
It's not just like we have some random idea that there's a large amount of mass out there. The gravitational effects suggest it is concentrated in certain areas, certain parts of galaxies, etc. If the matter were simply dust or something concentrated enough according to those gravitational patterns observed, it would have major observable effects.
Beyond this, there are all sorts of more technical reasons why dark matter is unlikely to just be normal matter -- like all normal matter emits radiation, and we'd be able to detect it in background radiation patterns if there were that much out there. And also if all the dark matter were baryonic (e.g. MACHOs), it were seriously disagree with the observed distribution of elements in the universe. It would require the whole theory of the Big Bang (with its many self-consistent predictions) to be seriously flawed.
Then a bunch of nihilistic apostate Saudis flew airplanes into the Twin Towers, and over 3000 Americans died in the space of a single morning.
How many Americans have died from terrorist attacks since? How many died from terrorist attacks before then? (And no, you can't count attacks on troops in Iraq or whatever, where our presence instigated the attacks.)
What's that? Not that many? And you're many more times to be randomly killed by lightning that a terrorist? You'd have to fly in an airplane constantly, 24-hours/day for something like 3100 YEARS on average before succumbing to a terrorist attack?
NEWSFLASH: Thousands of Americans die every day. A couple thousand Americans die every day from heart attacks -- many of those could have been prevented. Many were due to poisoning by smoking, or eating too many snack cakes, or not bothering to take a daily walk, or whatever. Should we ban smoking, snack cakes, and require everyone to take a daily walk or else be put on forced governmental marches every day? Over a hundred people die in car crashes every day, a significant percentage from drunk drivers. Should we ban alcohol? Well, Prohibition didn't turn out so well. Should we summarily execute someone caught drunk driving, since people who do it are generally repeat offenders? How much action do we take? How much do we allow the government to do?
Lots of people die every day. Lots of deaths could have been prevented. That doesn't mean we should allow the government to take any action it wants.
Knowing what we know now, can any of us truly say that we'd face 300 million people (or 20 million if you're Canadian) and say "I know we could have easily prevented this tragedy, but we're not going to put in place the fixes that would prevent a future tragedy like this because we believe the outcome would be worse than the disease." And if you are willing to do so, are you willing to face a lifetime of condemnation and excommunication from everything you hold dear?
If we could have "easily" prevented a tragedy by fixing a few flaws in communication between intelligence agencies (as you claim), sure -- why not? But that's not how the government responded. It responded by gutting many of the guaranteed Constitutional rights -- and it gets worse every year, from massive spying programs to warrantless searches to illegal detentions to targeted drone strikes of Americans abroad without due process or trial.
I don't care what the guy supposedly did -- if he's American, you don't send a freakin' drone to summarily execute him because you think he may be plotting something. Due process means something. Citizens have rights. If you're in favor of allowing the President to do that, I really don't see much different in authorizing summary executions of repeat drunk drivers or tobacco company CEOs.
Okay, maybe you're not in favor of that. Maybe you just want better intelligence communication, as you said in your post. Well, why the heck are you posting on this thread then? This is about Canadian government overreaching in its spying, equivalent to many of the Patriot Act crap that has effectively gotten around things like the Fourth and Fifth Amendments.
How many "inalienable" rights are you willing to give up? I just want to know. Please list them, and where do you draw the line?
What's really, really funny is that on /., we are all pro-privacy, pro-dismantling of the security apparatus. But none of us ever stop to consider if we'd change our tune, if one of our family or loved ones was suddenly, inexplicably killed in a horrible way--and then discover that said death could have been easily prevented if only X and Y agencies had bothered to share their information.
Look -- if all it would take is for X and Y to talk to each other, the
Some of these questions can get tricky. Many have stumbled on this one:
3. The U.S. has decided to secure its warheads with a special 8-digit code password. Which is the best example of a good password to use?
a. The President's birth date.
b. The First Lady's birth date.
c. Some random set of 8 digits.
d. 00000000
e. 53180080
Now, you might think the correct answer here would be (c), but you'd be wrong. Turns out that it is (d).
Given the stupid reasoning and lack of maturity for this password -- "we wanna be able to gets our guys to blow stuff up if the Ruskies even blink!" -- my guess is that (e) is actually the second-best choice, i.e., "O BOOBIES!"
Unless there's an annual fee, there's no good reason to close them, so they sit in the safe.
In fact, depending on your financial situation, it may actually hurt your credit scores to close them.
Nobody knows the exact details of how the FICO algorithm works, but one significant component is your "debt-to-credit ratio." To take a simple example -- if, say, you have $4,000 in credit card debt, but a $10,000 limit, you have a credit utilization of 40%.
Technically, they do this with installment loans too (like car payments, mortgages, etc.), but as long as you don't have late payments on them, there's little chance that it will hurt you even if you still owe quite a bit.
So, the discussion is usually mostly around revolving credit, which for most people is credit cards. From people who have tried to figure out the FICO algorithm (as much as possible), it seems clear that it's generally a bad idea to hold more than 25 to 30% of the credit limit on any given credit card.
But this also applies to your collective available credit limit as well, which is where those extra cards can come in. Keep in mind that even if you pay off your balances every month, the statement balances still generally show up on your credit report -- so if you charge $5,000 every month but pay it off, it still looks like you're carrying roughly a $5,000 balance.
And if you only have $10,000 in revolving credit, that looks bad (50% credit utilization). But if you have a few other cards laying around that you never use, and your total limit is more like $50,000 or $100,000, that looks very good.
Important points: (1) This isn't going to make or break your credit score for most people, but if the debt-to-credit ratio is really off, it could hurt it by 50 points or more. So, (2) Think twice before cancelling any high-limit cards, if you don't have a lot of credit in general. There's no good reason to hold onto a store card with a $500 limit for most people, but getting rid of that $25,000 limit card you never use could actually make a dent in your credit score, depending on the rest of your finances.
And I haven't noticed merchants giving cash discounts for a long time.
They still exist, but are rare. Most commonly, I see this at gas stations for some reason -- and there, it's actually somewhat frequent (though by no means common anymore).
I suggest before reading this, you go back and look at your original reply to me, in which you were talking about 30-35 degree temps. Most of your reply is about your experience living in a place where you admit that you rarely encounter these things, so I don't see why you think that's particularly relevant to a discussion that you started about weather in temperatures around freezing.
Seriously? You do realize there are things call "spring" and "fall" in the north, too, right? You know -- when "temperatures hover between 30-35 degrees" and you might end up with a rainstorm or an icestorm or whatever?
Yes, I realize this. I grew up in the north and learned to drive in the north. It was snowing for my first behind-the-wheel driving lesson.
Please understand that "hovering between 30-35" is the norm for the entire winter down south, not just for a few weeks here, a few weeks there. Also, to tell you the truth, I don't remember the temperature being 30-35 much at all. I remember it being 60 degrees one day and 10 the next. Because the only terrain there to slow down those oncoming weather systems was about 1,000 miles of prairie grass. Sound familiar?
Yeah, it sounds familiar if you grew up in North Dakota or maybe Nebraska. If you grew up in eastern Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, etc., not so much.
In states that do have mountains and particularly those closer to things like the Atlantic Ocean where cold air masses frequently slam into more moist air that is moderated in temperature by the ocean, a large portion of the fall-winter-spring is spent with days in the 30-35 degree region. Much, much more time than in Atlanta, where it's basically just nights (and only a few days) in late December through February when that's likely.
Guess what? In the north, when they are calling for "freezing rain" or "sleet" and put out a winter storm warning, people drive with great caution. Now, most places in the north have salt to handle these scenarios, but -- even with the salt -- nobody wants to be driving on the roads during freezing rain, even in the north.
Whatever. I never looked at a weather report in the north unless I was waxing my skis. I certainly didn't check the NWS before hopping in the car.
You just admitted that you rarely experienced weather in the 30-35 degree region while growing up. If the day is clearly above or clearly below freezing, I can see why you wouldn't care so much unless a major weather event was happening. But if a major weather event -- as in something out of the ordinary like a blizzard -- was happening, I'd bet you might check the weather advisories, no? That's the equivalent of what was issued in Atlanta in terms of likely impact for where you grew up: MAJOR BLIZZARD ON THE WAY -- DANGEROUS ROAD CONDITIONS -- EMERGENCY TRAVEL ONLY RECOMMENDED. Those sorts of warnings only happen once in a while in the north, but you are meant to heed them. That's what happened in Atlanta this week.
Anyhow, for people who actually do live in places where the temperature is frequently around freezing, that IS when you're most concerned about being on the roads. There's no "Whatevah!" about it.
A warning about something like that happens, and people leave work early.
What? You're joking. If we left early for snow, we'd never be at work.
Who's talking about SNOW?? The previous sentence was talking about freezing rain and ice. And yes, people in PA or NY or NJ or CT or MA do consider leaving work early when there is ice in the forecast. Light snow, not so much. Ice -- heck, yeah.
Schools close.
Um, no. My kids' school district down here has more snow days in a single academic year than I had my entire life, growing up. Northern districts will close for
Up north, if it's winter and there's probable precip, it's going to be snow. In the south, our winter temperatures typically hover between 30-35 degrees, so even if precip is highly probable, it's really, really difficult to forecast if it's going to be snow, ice, or rain because very small changes in temperature can foul up the entire forecast.
Seriously? You do realize there are things call "spring" and "fall" in the north, too, right? You know -- when "temperatures hover between 30-35 degrees" and you might end up with a rainstorm or an icestorm or whatever? Just because there might be a period of anywhere from a few weeks to a few months -- depending on the region -- where temperatures are almost always low enough to guarantee snow doesn't mean there isn't lots of time every year where temperatures hover around freezing in the north. In fact, I'd say it's probably pretty likely that most locations in the north experience MORE time each year and MORE weather events in that freezing range than people in the south ever will... just because it's more likely given temperature ranges throughout the year.
Guess what? In the north, when they are calling for "freezing rain" or "sleet" and put out a winter storm warning, people drive with great caution. Now, most places in the north have salt to handle these scenarios, but -- even with the salt -- nobody wants to be driving on the roads during freezing rain, even in the north. A warning about something like that happens, and people leave work early. Schools close. I'd say those storms are the MOST likely in the north to result in public officials erring on the side of caution and cancelling school or putting out extra salt JUST IN CASE -- because an error in a storm around freezing could paralyze a city in the north. An error ignoring the possibility of only a couple inches of snow, on the other hand, is less likely to result in disaster with people used to dealing with that. You can drive slowly in a little snow, even without special equipment. There's nothing you can do to prevent sliding around with a car on ice.
I'd be interested to see what percentage of NWS snow warnings wind up being busts in Georgia. Something tells me that the percentage is higher than what you experience up north. Those warnings probably sound more like cries of wolf in Atlanta.
I'd be interested in this too. If that's actually true, that's an issue. But my guess is that a lot of this problem has to do with people -- and the news media -- not understanding the details of the weather warning information I mentioned in my post. I'd bet there are lots of winter storm "watches" and "advisories" every year, just as there are in the north. A decent percentage of those get cancelled or never materialize or whatever.
But "warnings" -- not so much. Unless the weather people in Georgia are significantly more incompetent, my bet is that every time a "watch" or an "advisory" comes on, people in the south go a little crazy, and then nothing or very little happens. Then when an actual "warning" comes up, they don't realize that means something different.
But that's only my guess -- and yes, I have lived a number of years in the southern states, and I don't recall a lot of excess "winter storm warnings," but I could be wrong.
A few months ago I ran across a study about the polarizing effect of internet forums. As I understood the theory, they thought that we all have these black/white ideas, but they're normally moderated by social interaction. Unfortunately the ease and anonymity of internet communcation allows us to express the exremeties of our beliefs without any social cost.
While this may be true, it hardly takes a fancy "study" to discover this.
Just observe how people behave in their cars during a daily commute. That will tell you everything you need to know about how decreased face-to-face interaction and anonymity changes social behaviors.
How many people lay on the horn for a few seconds when someone does something unexpected? How many people tailgate a person going too slow, or slow down in front of someone who is annoying, or cut people off when they're angry?
Now, ask yourself how often people would do similar things to a person's face. How many people would randomly start yelling at somebody if they are walking too slow on the sidewalk, or cut in front of somebody walking and deliberately slow down, etc.? Some -- but a lot fewer.
When we actually see people as individuals, we often see the reasons for their behavior, and we temper our reactions (maybe there's some reason we can see for a person walking slow that we could empathize with, whereas a slow driver is often just seen as an abstract impediment). We are vaguely sensitive to other human beings around us. If some people went around yelling and screaming and following people and blocking people like lots of folks do in an everyday commute, they'd likely be arrested or locked up for psychological evaluations.
But, when people start reacting to symbols or abstractions of people -- like cars or internet usernames or whatever -- that natural human empathy is partly lost. This is not surprising and can be observed in a number of situations other than internet forums.
You are thinking of LIBERTARIANS,... That is NOT a defining characteristic of Liberals, it never has been.
Umm, yeah it was. Where do you think the word "liberal came from? Then it radically changed about about a century ago.
Unfortunately, that's just too much for most people, it seems. So they invent a shadow projection of it all and live in the shadows.
Hmm... sounds quite like Plato's Cave. Most people live their lives not understanding the underlying truth, only seeing the dark shadows of its effects created by the firelight on the wall....
Don't know whether you were deliberately referencing Plato or not, but some might view the allegory as applicable here (though probably not in Plato's original sense).
You don't have to make 100% accurate predictions to be able to prepare for the future. That's why weather forecasts give a probability of precipitation, rather than a binary rain/no rain prediction. If you know rain is likely, you can carry your umbrella just in case. The attitude should not be "You need to prove something bad will happen before I prepare for it," but rather "Let me know if something bad might happen so I can prepare for it."
While you're right, I also think there is a more specific problem here. People are bad at making estimates based on probabilities -- "70% chance of rain? 30% chance of snow? Should I take action?"
The thing is -- the National Weather Service tries its best to keep the guesswork out of major weather events by issuing watches, advisories, and warnings. When a winter storm WARNING is issued, it means that there's a general consensus that this thing WILL occur and you should behave as if it will.
In this case, the NWS issued a winter storm warning at 3:38am on the day of the event, roughly 9 hours before snow started falling in Atlanta. Here's the official meaning of a winter storm watch and warning as put out by NWS in Atlanta:
Watch: Issued when the potential exists for 2 inches or more of snow in 12 hours, or 4 inches or more of snow in 24 hours. Also issued for potential of a quarter inch or more of freezing rain, or half an inch of sleet. In the North Georgia Mountains, the criteria are 3 inches in 12 hours or 4 inches in 24 hours.
Warning: Issued when a combination of snow, blowing snow, sleet, and/or freezing rain is likely to exceed warning criteria. Warning criteria are those detailed in the Winter Storm Watch.
In other words, a "warning" means it's pretty darn likely the thing is coming. Having lived in the northern U.S. for many years, I can think of a few times that a "warning" didn't really pan out, but not very many. A "watch" (or an "advisory," which is an intermediate level of sorts) is one thing, and can sometimes be wrong. A "warning" is meant to convey reasonable certainty that a major weather event will happen.
So, the average citizen doesn't need to necessarily concern himself/herself with probabilities -- these weather bulletins already contain significant information about how likely things are to happen.
Most people probably don't pay attention to these weather distinctions -- they just think "oh, there's some sort of weather alert." But they generally have very precise meanings.
For the general population to be ignorant of these meanings is perhaps expected. That's why governments and school officials need to understand these things and make reasonable calls -- but it appears they did not seem to know what "warning" meant in this case.
That's the disturbing thing. The NWS had stuff out saying there would be "dangerous" road conditions and that travel was not recommended well in advance of the snow.
One thing I would note though, there were probably 3 times in the last month where we were told we would have snow and it never happened. I think that might have made people feel like this was another false threat.
Here's the thing, though -- there are significant differences in the way the weather services categorize threats. Having a winter storm "watch" or "advisory" is one thing -- and many times these things will turn into nothing. The news media, particularly in the South, often gets over-excited at the prospect of snow, so when one of these things pops up, everyone gets concerned.
I've heard other people make the claim about previous predictions of snow in Atlanta this season. But did you actually receive a winter storm WARNING at those other times? I've tried to find this answer, but it's difficult to find information on that question. My sense is NO -- that previous predictions were NOT actually "winter storm WARNINGS," but merely forecasts or maybe "watches" or "advisories."
In this case, there was a warning issued something like 8-10 hours before the storm hit, which would have allowed plenty of time for people to act.
I think the problem is that people don't generally understand the difference between the various weather terminology. But "warning" means that it's really quite certain that something is going to happen. (Yes, it's occasionally off, but usually in terms of severity, not whether it's going to happen at all.)
Average people may be excused for not understanding what "warning" means, but that's no excuse for government and school officials.
They do cite that the National Weather Service had only issued a winter weather advisory for the area, not a watch or a warning, until 3:30am the day that all hell broke loose. Apparently local meteorologists disagreed with the NWS, but without their formal statements I'm not exactly surprised that public officials and employees didn't feel comfortable making statements.
Yes -- 3:30am. That is more than enough time to get major warnings and announcements out on the 5:00am or 6:00am news.
In case you don't realize this -- most weather scenarios are unpredictable. You often don't get official weather WARNINGS of major thunderstorms, tornados, winter storms, whatever until a few hours before they hit -- sometimes even less.
If the NWS had issued a warning at NOON on the day the storm hit, and it came in at 2pm, sure, I can see people saying "We didn't know."
But they put out an advisory over the weekend. And then they issued a WARNING (which, in weather-speak means, "it's time to believe this and get seriously prepared") something like 10 hours before the storm hit.
Unfortunate situation all of the way around.
Yes, but the point is that a significant part of this could have been prevented. Lots of cities and towns in the north don't make decisions about calling off schools or things until 4am or so of the day when a weather event is supposed to happen. And even later, in dire circumstances, when something unexpected goes on, they will make a decision to dismiss almost immediately and turn the buses around (or at least dismiss as early as possible, even at 11am or whatever).
None of that was even necessary here. The warning was issued well in advance, and even if it had only been a small amount of ice or snow in a city without plows and salt trucks, they should have issued warnings immediately -- even in the late morning, if they screwed up and didn't make a decision before the morning rush.
Waiting until the snow was actually falling for people to respond is just not reasonable, given the warnings and timing.
Just because it has the keywords "Bitcoin" and "Linus Torvalds" in the headline - it doesn't really mean its "news".
Personally, I've been finding lately that if it has the word "Bitcoin" in the headline, chances are that it's actually "anti-news" -- it actually sucks away collective "news-worthiness" from any site it appears on.
In all seriousness, the Slashdot editors and a lot of people around here must be invested in Bitcoin and banking on all the speculation going on. The strongest correlation to Bitcoin's value seems to be the amount of media attention it receives. The daily Bitcoin story here is getting ridiculous.
So you know what? I'm taking the Slashdot pledge -- from this day forward, I refuse to click on any story with "Bitcoin" in the headline. I refuse to comment.
I'm tired of debating with folks who have little clue about how currency works. I'm tired of debating with gold fanatics, or people who bizarrely think that deflation is a good thing. I'm tired of all the stupid arguments about exactly what sort of analogy is adequate to describe the kind of finance scheme is driving the value of cryptocurrencies -- Ponzi schemes, multi-level marketing, pump-and-dump, whatever. Followed, inevitably, by Wikipedia links describing all the details of various financial schemes, and why Bitcoin is none of them. What the heck cares?
Look, you guys want to invest in Bitcoin? Go ahead. Believe it will save the world or allow you to have your privacy or whatever. Maybe it will -- in like five or ten years or something. Maybe.
For now, it's just another speculative venture. You could just as well be debating the value of investing in any one of hundreds of companies or natural resources or commodities or whatever. What the heck makes Bitcoin so freakin' special? (And please, PLEASE -- don't answer that rhetorical question. I've heard a thousand variations on the answers.)
Come on, folks -- take the Bitcoin pledge with me! Save Slashdot from this nonsense.
What do you mean? What's going on with media players?
Umm, ever use a DVD player? I'd bet that it was region encoded, so it won't play DVDs from outside of your part of the world. Theoretically, this is supposed to be a piracy prevention scheme.
in fact, consumer pressure forced Apple to abandon DRM in the iTunes store.
Yes, for music. But try downloading any videos from most reputable sources without DRM. And, regardless, this discussion is about whether something will be significantly inhibited in its marketing by some sort of DRM... the iTunes store clearly became popular with DRM in place -- without competition from major non-DRM (especially Amazon), I'd bet Apple would still be using DRM for music... as it still does for videos, and as do most major video distributors.
In other words, there's little evidence that DRM gets in the way of sales for a new product or technology as long as it's cool or novel enough. Expectations have changed about music, but for many other things, DRM is still going strong.
No, I actually don't. I think exposing an all-seeing police state has great implications for the rights of that state's citizens, but has very little bearing on life vs. death.
Let me make the connections for you. Government surveillance and data collection does two things (among many others), depending on whether it's publicly known or not.
If the government is running public surveillance and effectively acting like a police state (think the TSA), it convinces many people of a supposed necessity for "security" against some "unseen enemy." It's very easy to turn that fear against some random foreign nation, even when the connection in tenuous -- e.g., the Iraq war. The continuous feeling of "unease" that many Americans have by being continuously bombarded with messages like "You need to take your shoes and belt off and d the 'special pose' for the nudey scanners, or you could DIE even on a plane from terrorists" is that there are enemies out there, and the government needs to protect you, probably including military actions. (And imagine if "weapons of mass destruction" might be involved! See Iraq above ramp up to try to create a conflict with Iran in recent U.S. politics.) Public surveillance and police state actions create a state of paranoia in the populace that can often lead them to support armed conflicts... because they're just that freaked out and scared.
Now, what about secret surveillance that is kept from the public? Well, it does similar things, except the paranoia now is left to fester inside the government and agencies that compile the data. There will always be apparent "threats" to every nation, always people shooting their mouths off about something or other, always people talking to shady people (but not actually intending to be terrorists).
But increased surveillance ensures that lots of people in the government are frankly OBSESSED with huge amounts of weird stuff going by their desks every day. A report here, a briefing there, and suddenly you're convinced that many people are plotting terrorist activities right now -- and they're out to get you.
I don't know this for certain, but I have to guess that this obsession with looking for ANY signs of potentially bad actions probably also contributed to the Bush White House arguing for an invasion of Iraq (again, see above). The more "data" that comes in, the more likely that people are to see random patterns in it, effectively finding what they want to see.
And when those people are in charge of major governments or lots of weapons, that kind of paranoid quest combing through random data is a serious threat to world peace.
I think there are better candidates.
So do I. But someone who exposed the paranoid actions of crazy governments intent on finding "unseen enemies" to attack HAS potentially contributed something significant toward future peace.
Of all the education debates, providing education does have a serious cultural impact: it empowers people.
In an ideal world, yes. HOWEVER...
Education is the enemy of government. Strong education makes government subordinate; weak education makes government powerful.
This argument often runs into problems, since -- in many countries -- education (or, rather, "schooling," which most people equate with "education") is primarily provided by the government. If the government runs schools, it doesn't have an interest in necessarily "empowering" anyone. It certainly doesn't have an interest in making itself "subordinate."
There is a fundamental conflict of interest when you put things this way. Yes -- education can be a powerful tool for social change, but government-run educational systems may have different primary interests. To the government, the most desirable outcome of education may be to produce obedient citizens.
I'm not at all saying that public education is a bad thing -- it certainly has been extremely helpful in a number of ways in developed countries. But education (i.e., schooling) by itself is no guarantee of "empowerment" or overcoming government... in fact it can actually make the citizenry more docile and obedient to the government.
Take a look into the history of compulsory public education in the U.S., and you'll find a lot of nasty business in various historical periods that is directly related to this -- government or business interests wanting to have more control over kids to train them to be good citizens and good workers, rather than "empowering" them to think on their own. Frankly -- the legacy of those ideas is still with us in the U.S. educational system, and arguably it is one of the things standing in the way of making things better. We have a schooling system partly designed NOT to educate and to empower, and recognizing the things that are built into the system that fight against true education is probably the only way to really "fix" things. Alas... that's an inconvenient story that the government doesn't want you to think about too hard, so most policy people don't talk about it.
Thanks for the informative post. I'm sure many will benefit from it.
Would it be so hard for submitters to expand their acronyms in the posts?
Yes -- what is this "U.S." thing that's mentioned in the summary and headline? I spend a bit of time searching, and I discovered it's actually an abbreviation for United States! How about that! It makes things so much clearer if submitters expanded every abbreviation -- I'm still not sure what this RADAR thing is that people talk about -- and while we're at it, maybe we should include definitions for every single technical term that ever occurs.[/sarcasm]
In all seriousness, I'm happy that you posted an explanation that clearly was helpful to some people. On the other hand, I think your idea that submitters need to explain well-established concepts goes a bit too far.
MOOCs have probably been the subject of dozens of stories on Slashdot in the past 2-3 years. They are perhaps the most important technical innovation in higher education in decades. What ultimate effects they will have are still to be determined, but they clearly have been receiving a HUGE amount of buzz for quite a while. The article you linked to even mentions that 2012 was dubbed by the New York Times as "The Year of the MOOC." This is hardly an obscure topic.
I don't at all mean for my reply to you to come across as mean-spirited. I only used sarcasm above because of your "Would it be so hard?!?" venting in your response. No, it's not so hard -- but it probably isn't necessary in this case. It's not like the days before the internet when an unfamiliar term might send you to multiple dictionaries or encyclopedias to figure out what's going on. Now, it merely takes 10 seconds to search for a topic this prominent and figure out what it is.
That's how you learn about stuff going on around you -- unfamiliar terms, abbreviations, acronyms, place names, public figures, etc. appear in Slashdot summaries all the time... at least they're unfamiliar to someone. Look them up. Learn something.
Also, use "context clues." The first sentence of the summary says "Coursera is an online website that offers free courses from many of the world's top universities." It's pretty clear from the rest of the summary that MOOCs are what Coursera offers -- hence MOOCs are probably "free courses from many of the world's top universities" or at least a concept very close to that idea.
If the summary had just randomly started talking about Coursera and MOOCs without mentioned anything that either did, that would be one thing. But I think this is pretty clear, at least as Slashdot summaries go.
The summaries are just that: they are summaries. They are not full news articles. If a full lengthy news article didn't explain what a MOOC was, that may be more of an issue. If the summary didn't link to any full news articles that explained what it was talking about, that would also be an issue. But this is a summary -- it needs to be abbreviated, and it can't explain everything. Especially when it's a topic that has been discussed many times here. We don't define what a "Tesla" or a "Bitcoin" is in every summary about them either.
Please -- continue to post helpful explanations of obscure terms or acronyms or whatever when you think they are useful. If they are, someone will mod them up. But I don't think anything about this summary was unclear, and even if it was to me, I could have figured it out by 10 seconds of searching. Frankly, I do that all the time on Slashdot -- I read about some concept I'm unfamiliar with in the summary, and then I look it up to figure out what's going on. That's what learning is about.