I'd be quite surprised if the rest of the world thinks it's odd. The US is actively involved in numerous war crimes, and has been for a number of years. It's despicable.
Well, the UN is a bit more than a debating society. It is a place for nations around the world to sit down and talk. That capacity alone is quite important.
No, UN resolutions aren't binding. But they are a reflection of what governments around the world believe they should be seen supporting. This is a sign, in short, that the argument that governments should not engage in broad surveillance of citizens is being one ideologically. This doesn't stop any such surveillance, but it may be a step along the way towards limiting government surveillance.
Tesla needs much larger manufacturing capacity to even attempt to market less expensive cars. There's a reason they started with a high-end sports car, then moved to a somewhat cheaper luxury sedan: volume. Things like this which help Tesla to increase their manufacturing capacity help to pave the way towards them producing higher-volume, lower-cost cars.
But more than that, renewable base power generation is an easier nut to crack than biofuels. Especially with electric cars which, through smart grids, can be used to help smooth out the unreliability of renewable power sources. No, electric cars on their own don't do all that much to reduce our overall carbon footprint. But they are a piece of the puzzle in moving towards cleaner energy.
In the mean time, I'm also reasonably-certain that less carbon is emitted from the required electrical power generation than from burning fossil fuels in an internal combustion engine, even if the power source is coal plants (the large scale of coal plants lets them be a lot more efficient).
Really? So you're telling me that you don't qualify for the new subsidies? Given that the subsidies cover a family of four with income up to around $90k/year (varies a bit depeding upon the state), either you didn't get your healthcare through the exchange and are missing out, or you make enough that you can just suck it up and pay a little more.
So, you think being unable to get insurance because you have a pre-existing condition is better? Or getting thrown off of your existing insurance because you happened to get really sick?
The executive branch has discretion on the enforcement of laws. This is part of the division of powers as laid down in the constitution. The president can decide to de-emphasize or simply not enforce a particular law or section of a law. In making this statement, Obama is essentially stating, "The executive branch isn't going to enforce this particular provision until next year."
Also, it's not really possible that the new insurance policies are worse, because before the ACA, insurance policies as the ones we all have available starting next year did not exist. They may be more expensive, but it's because they cover more.
We are already at that "single payer" nirvana for everybody over 65. It's called Medicare, and Medicare has a significantly higher satisfaction rate than private insurance.
When Obama said: "If you like your plan you can keep it," — he meant to say: "If I like your plan, you can keep it." The millions, whose plans aren't, in Obama's omniscient and benevolent opinion, good enough — because they don't cover, say, obesity counseling, or contraception, or gender-changes — are out of luck...
As it turned out, a great many of the insurance plans offered to people were extremely sub-standard, covering little if anything, and would frequently drop coverage for people if they got too sick. These plans were (rightly) made illegal by the new regulations that require a base level of quality in insurance plans. Nobody is being hurt by being offered better insurance plans at a more reasonable cost.
Personally, I think this is a bad move. Sure, it means less hassle for a number of people. But those people will end up paying more and getting less for their money by staying on their current plans. It's too bad, really, that Obama made that rather stupid statement about the ACA. People are going to be hurt by Obama's attempt to keep his promise.
This kind of thing is exactly the sort of claim that I expect the NSA to bring up when attempting to justify its actions. And the thing is: there probably is a grain of truth to the whole thing. I bet that they could (if they were to declassify the documents) even put up some reasonable-sounding evidence to support the claim.
But I'd be willing to bet that if they did present their evidence, there would be legions of experts in computing and security that could poke holes in their logic. I'd be willing to bet they'd find their evidence to be flimsy at best (despite sounding superficially scary), and the actual plausibility of the attack to be minimal.
This, to my mind, is the real danger of keeping these kinds of investigations secret: even if you have well-intentioned people working on them, it's all too easy for them to mislead themselves into thinking they're fighting real threats, when nearly all of those threats never would have been dangerous in the first place. The only solution to this is to open up the investigation for a broad array of people to examine, so that the evidence can be criticized in the light of day.
There is precisely zero value in having an organization whose job it is to protect the US when that organization's activities are kept secret.
Depending upon where you live and the time of year, if you have an efficient heater (that is, a heat pump rather than a furnace), you can easily get the same amount of heat for 1/2 to 1/5th the cost of turning on a light bulb. You can do even better if you invest in some of the more elaborate heating systems, such as geothermal systems (which, for home heating, make use of the fact that the ground just a few feet down remains at the average yearly temperature year-round to increase efficiency over systems which exchange heat with the surrounding air).
To the extent that she gets her perspective of patents from working for Google, she won't do this. Google is still a pretty young company, with relatively few patents (though the Motorola merger netted them a number of them). Coming from that atmosphere of a relatively small upstart struggling against the much larger patent portfolios of its older competition, she's much more likely to find sympathy with those who have concern about patent trolls and companies using patents to enforce market power than she is to side with powerful companies trying to suppress competition through patents.
Of course, she is an individual, and her personal beliefs may be quite far from those of Google. But I'd tend to expect her experience at Google, in this instance, would be a plus rather than a minus.
Bitcoins are absolutely terrible as a currency, however, as their value fluctuates wildly. This is by design, because the quantity of Bitcoins is independent of how they are used. If more people decide to hold onto Bitcoins instead of spend them, then their price will go up. As the price goes up, fewer people want to spend them and more want to hold onto them as stores of value.
As fewer people decide to hold onto Bitcoins, their price will go down. As the price goes down, more people will want to spend their Bitcoins and fewer will want to hold them as stores of value.
Thus, by design, Bitcoins are an extremely volatile currency. That makes them a horrible currency: what makes a currency good is that its value is predictable and understandable. It's a very good thing to be able to go to a grocery store and have a reasonably-good idea how much the food will cost. It's a very good thing to be able to take out a loan and be able to understand how much it's going to cost you to pay that loan back over a period of years. Bitcoin doesn't allow this: nobody knows how much the currency will be valued at a year or five years from now. Whatever its value, it will probably be very different from the present-day value.
Curious. But honestly I'm super-skeptical of this kind of result. I'd need to see some replications of the study, with complete blinding to the researchers as to which animals were in the control after the first (trained) generation.
The point is that we should be focusing on treatment, not punishment. There's also the extremely problematic aspect that people with mental illnesses may be less-able to defend themselves in court.
My primary concern with the way this was stated, however, is that many poorer people won't have access to mental health treatment, so they may be treated in the court system as if they have no mental illness. That is a serious problem. Honestly, I think we should just decide that medical treatment (whether mental or physical) is a human right that everybody deserves to have access to.
My understanding is that people with humanities Ph.D.'s also make pretty good money in the private sector. Certainly people with Ph.D.'s have much lower employment and much higher wages on average than those without.
I have a Ph.D. myself, and left academia because of the poor aspects for a permanent position. My total compensation is now six times what it was as a postdoc.
That said, I do feel that much of the job insecurity in the lower rungs of academia is due to a severe lack of investment in education and science, as well as some rather horrible business practices at many schools that lead to huge amounts of money for deans and coaches, but not much for teachers.
The problem with claiming that all Europeans came from a small number of people based upon a Y-chromosome study is that such a study, by design, misses many men who failed to leave male descendants. If, for example, I have four children, but they are all daughters, then my Y chromosome dies with me, even though many other of my genes will still live on in my daughters (in aggregate, if I had four children, around 94% of my genes would survive into the next generation).
This means that over time, we lose the Y chromosomes of many ancestral men just due to random chance. Those 1-3 men might well have been traveling in a group of 200 or so, and Europeans may still carry many genes from many of the other men in that group. But because the other members of the group didn't leave behind Y chromosomes, we don't see them in a Y-chromosome analysis.
The study seems to have found good evidence that Europeans are all descended from a small group, but 1-3 men seems to be stretching it.
No statistical analysis is not an antidote to bad statistical analysis. Good statistical analysis is. But then, with the sizes and numbers of their experimental groups, they'd have to have had a very strong, unambiguous effect for there to have been any statistically-significant result. Something along the lines of, "What happens when we give some rats a large dose of hydrogen cyanide?"
If there is any real health impact of certain GMO foods versus their non-GMO counterparts, it's going to be a very subtle effect that cannot possibly be detected in this sort of study.
The study wasn't just unconvincing. It was riddled with serious flaws. The first and clearest complaint: they didn't do any statistical analysis. At all. Plus, some of the GMO and pesticide groups lived noticeably longer than the control group. The highest-dose pesticide or GMO group rarely did the worst, and sometimes did the best among the groups.
But perhaps the most damning problem of all is that the very design of the study was such that it was guaranteed that they would be able to find something wrong with the GMO/pesticide groups (at least superficially). This is due to the virtue of having in effect 20 different experimental groups of 10 mice each (10 male, 10 female for 10 different dosages of GMO's or pesticides). And they measured dozens of different things over the course of the study. In essence, if the rats in the GMO/pesticide groups hadn't had (superficially) more tumors, they would have had something else wrong with them more often, just due to random chance.
Whether this execrable excuse of a paper is so terrible due to abject incompetence or outright fraud, it deserves to be retracted. It should never have been published in the first place, but I'm glad the journal has decided to retract it in the end.
This is where they lost me. How often are scrapes and cuts (or even car accidents) treated with antibiotics? Sure, major lesions will warrant a general antibiotic, but in my first three decades of life i can count on one hand the number of times I took antibiotics, and almost all of them were preventative (meaning even without them, the risk to life was statistically indistinguishable from 0). Trying to rally the public with "if you get a scrape you will die" is pretty much fear mongering. And fear mongers can fuck right off.
Antibiotics are frequently and routinely used for minor scrapes and cuts. We just usually use a topical antibiotic, such as Bacitracin, rather than an oral antibiotic.
Yup. And if you want to use any kind of parallelism to compute the final result, you're going to have quite a hard time ensuring that the order of operations is always the same.
That said, there are libraries around that make use of IEEE's reproducibility guarantees to ensure reproducible results. That will likely correct any reproducibility issues that would otherwise be introduced by the compiler, but you still have the order of operations issue (which is a fundamental problem).
Personally, I think a better solution is to simply assume that you're never going to get reproducible floating-point results, and design the system to handle small, inconsistent rounding errors. I think that's a much easier problem to deal with than making floating-point reproducible in any modestly-complex system.
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I'd be quite surprised if the rest of the world thinks it's odd. The US is actively involved in numerous war crimes, and has been for a number of years. It's despicable.
Well, the UN is a bit more than a debating society. It is a place for nations around the world to sit down and talk. That capacity alone is quite important.
No, UN resolutions aren't binding. But they are a reflection of what governments around the world believe they should be seen supporting. This is a sign, in short, that the argument that governments should not engage in broad surveillance of citizens is being one ideologically. This doesn't stop any such surveillance, but it may be a step along the way towards limiting government surveillance.
Tesla needs much larger manufacturing capacity to even attempt to market less expensive cars. There's a reason they started with a high-end sports car, then moved to a somewhat cheaper luxury sedan: volume. Things like this which help Tesla to increase their manufacturing capacity help to pave the way towards them producing higher-volume, lower-cost cars.
But more than that, renewable base power generation is an easier nut to crack than biofuels. Especially with electric cars which, through smart grids, can be used to help smooth out the unreliability of renewable power sources. No, electric cars on their own don't do all that much to reduce our overall carbon footprint. But they are a piece of the puzzle in moving towards cleaner energy.
In the mean time, I'm also reasonably-certain that less carbon is emitted from the required electrical power generation than from burning fossil fuels in an internal combustion engine, even if the power source is coal plants (the large scale of coal plants lets them be a lot more efficient).
Really? So you're telling me that you don't qualify for the new subsidies? Given that the subsidies cover a family of four with income up to around $90k/year (varies a bit depeding upon the state), either you didn't get your healthcare through the exchange and are missing out, or you make enough that you can just suck it up and pay a little more.
So, you think being unable to get insurance because you have a pre-existing condition is better? Or getting thrown off of your existing insurance because you happened to get really sick?
The executive branch has discretion on the enforcement of laws. This is part of the division of powers as laid down in the constitution. The president can decide to de-emphasize or simply not enforce a particular law or section of a law. In making this statement, Obama is essentially stating, "The executive branch isn't going to enforce this particular provision until next year."
Also, it's not really possible that the new insurance policies are worse, because before the ACA, insurance policies as the ones we all have available starting next year did not exist. They may be more expensive, but it's because they cover more.
We are already at that "single payer" nirvana for everybody over 65. It's called Medicare, and Medicare has a significantly higher satisfaction rate than private insurance.
When Obama said: "If you like your plan you can keep it," — he meant to say: "If I like your plan, you can keep it." The millions, whose plans aren't, in Obama's omniscient and benevolent opinion, good enough — because they don't cover, say, obesity counseling, or contraception, or gender-changes — are out of luck...
As it turned out, a great many of the insurance plans offered to people were extremely sub-standard, covering little if anything, and would frequently drop coverage for people if they got too sick. These plans were (rightly) made illegal by the new regulations that require a base level of quality in insurance plans. Nobody is being hurt by being offered better insurance plans at a more reasonable cost.
Also, you're out of date: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/obama-letting-people-keep-canceled-health-plans-for-another-year/
Personally, I think this is a bad move. Sure, it means less hassle for a number of people. But those people will end up paying more and getting less for their money by staying on their current plans. It's too bad, really, that Obama made that rather stupid statement about the ACA. People are going to be hurt by Obama's attempt to keep his promise.
Would you Like to:
Correct version of the above:
Would you like to:
There is no corresponding correction to "death panels" because those are imaginary.
This kind of thing is exactly the sort of claim that I expect the NSA to bring up when attempting to justify its actions. And the thing is: there probably is a grain of truth to the whole thing. I bet that they could (if they were to declassify the documents) even put up some reasonable-sounding evidence to support the claim.
But I'd be willing to bet that if they did present their evidence, there would be legions of experts in computing and security that could poke holes in their logic. I'd be willing to bet they'd find their evidence to be flimsy at best (despite sounding superficially scary), and the actual plausibility of the attack to be minimal.
This, to my mind, is the real danger of keeping these kinds of investigations secret: even if you have well-intentioned people working on them, it's all too easy for them to mislead themselves into thinking they're fighting real threats, when nearly all of those threats never would have been dangerous in the first place. The only solution to this is to open up the investigation for a broad array of people to examine, so that the evidence can be criticized in the light of day.
There is precisely zero value in having an organization whose job it is to protect the US when that organization's activities are kept secret.
Depending upon where you live and the time of year, if you have an efficient heater (that is, a heat pump rather than a furnace), you can easily get the same amount of heat for 1/2 to 1/5th the cost of turning on a light bulb. You can do even better if you invest in some of the more elaborate heating systems, such as geothermal systems (which, for home heating, make use of the fact that the ground just a few feet down remains at the average yearly temperature year-round to increase efficiency over systems which exchange heat with the surrounding air).
What marketing advantage do you think this provides for Google?
To the extent that she gets her perspective of patents from working for Google, she won't do this. Google is still a pretty young company, with relatively few patents (though the Motorola merger netted them a number of them). Coming from that atmosphere of a relatively small upstart struggling against the much larger patent portfolios of its older competition, she's much more likely to find sympathy with those who have concern about patent trolls and companies using patents to enforce market power than she is to side with powerful companies trying to suppress competition through patents.
Of course, she is an individual, and her personal beliefs may be quite far from those of Google. But I'd tend to expect her experience at Google, in this instance, would be a plus rather than a minus.
Bitcoins are absolutely terrible as a currency, however, as their value fluctuates wildly. This is by design, because the quantity of Bitcoins is independent of how they are used. If more people decide to hold onto Bitcoins instead of spend them, then their price will go up. As the price goes up, fewer people want to spend them and more want to hold onto them as stores of value.
As fewer people decide to hold onto Bitcoins, their price will go down. As the price goes down, more people will want to spend their Bitcoins and fewer will want to hold them as stores of value.
Thus, by design, Bitcoins are an extremely volatile currency. That makes them a horrible currency: what makes a currency good is that its value is predictable and understandable. It's a very good thing to be able to go to a grocery store and have a reasonably-good idea how much the food will cost. It's a very good thing to be able to take out a loan and be able to understand how much it's going to cost you to pay that loan back over a period of years. Bitcoin doesn't allow this: nobody knows how much the currency will be valued at a year or five years from now. Whatever its value, it will probably be very different from the present-day value.
Where the legal system is concerned, I'm more worried about people with mental health disorders not getting fair representation.
Curious. But honestly I'm super-skeptical of this kind of result. I'd need to see some replications of the study, with complete blinding to the researchers as to which animals were in the control after the first (trained) generation.
The point is that we should be focusing on treatment, not punishment. There's also the extremely problematic aspect that people with mental illnesses may be less-able to defend themselves in court.
My primary concern with the way this was stated, however, is that many poorer people won't have access to mental health treatment, so they may be treated in the court system as if they have no mental illness. That is a serious problem. Honestly, I think we should just decide that medical treatment (whether mental or physical) is a human right that everybody deserves to have access to.
Typo in the above: much lower unemployment, not employment, obviously.
My understanding is that people with humanities Ph.D.'s also make pretty good money in the private sector. Certainly people with Ph.D.'s have much lower employment and much higher wages on average than those without.
I have a Ph.D. myself, and left academia because of the poor aspects for a permanent position. My total compensation is now six times what it was as a postdoc.
That said, I do feel that much of the job insecurity in the lower rungs of academia is due to a severe lack of investment in education and science, as well as some rather horrible business practices at many schools that lead to huge amounts of money for deans and coaches, but not much for teachers.
The problem with claiming that all Europeans came from a small number of people based upon a Y-chromosome study is that such a study, by design, misses many men who failed to leave male descendants. If, for example, I have four children, but they are all daughters, then my Y chromosome dies with me, even though many other of my genes will still live on in my daughters (in aggregate, if I had four children, around 94% of my genes would survive into the next generation).
This means that over time, we lose the Y chromosomes of many ancestral men just due to random chance. Those 1-3 men might well have been traveling in a group of 200 or so, and Europeans may still carry many genes from many of the other men in that group. But because the other members of the group didn't leave behind Y chromosomes, we don't see them in a Y-chromosome analysis.
The study seems to have found good evidence that Europeans are all descended from a small group, but 1-3 men seems to be stretching it.
No statistical analysis is not an antidote to bad statistical analysis. Good statistical analysis is. But then, with the sizes and numbers of their experimental groups, they'd have to have had a very strong, unambiguous effect for there to have been any statistically-significant result. Something along the lines of, "What happens when we give some rats a large dose of hydrogen cyanide?"
If there is any real health impact of certain GMO foods versus their non-GMO counterparts, it's going to be a very subtle effect that cannot possibly be detected in this sort of study.
The study wasn't just unconvincing. It was riddled with serious flaws. The first and clearest complaint: they didn't do any statistical analysis. At all. Plus, some of the GMO and pesticide groups lived noticeably longer than the control group. The highest-dose pesticide or GMO group rarely did the worst, and sometimes did the best among the groups.
But perhaps the most damning problem of all is that the very design of the study was such that it was guaranteed that they would be able to find something wrong with the GMO/pesticide groups (at least superficially). This is due to the virtue of having in effect 20 different experimental groups of 10 mice each (10 male, 10 female for 10 different dosages of GMO's or pesticides). And they measured dozens of different things over the course of the study. In essence, if the rats in the GMO/pesticide groups hadn't had (superficially) more tumors, they would have had something else wrong with them more often, just due to random chance.
Whether this execrable excuse of a paper is so terrible due to abject incompetence or outright fraud, it deserves to be retracted. It should never have been published in the first place, but I'm glad the journal has decided to retract it in the end.
Antibiotics are frequently and routinely used for minor scrapes and cuts. We just usually use a topical antibiotic, such as Bacitracin, rather than an oral antibiotic.
Yup. And if you want to use any kind of parallelism to compute the final result, you're going to have quite a hard time ensuring that the order of operations is always the same.
That said, there are libraries around that make use of IEEE's reproducibility guarantees to ensure reproducible results. That will likely correct any reproducibility issues that would otherwise be introduced by the compiler, but you still have the order of operations issue (which is a fundamental problem).
Personally, I think a better solution is to simply assume that you're never going to get reproducible floating-point results, and design the system to handle small, inconsistent rounding errors. I think that's a much easier problem to deal with than making floating-point reproducible in any modestly-complex system.
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