The U.S. was founded on the notion of decentralized and localized government with a mostly powerless point of union called the Federal Government;
Yeah, that was done by the Articles of Confederation. The first federal government of the USA. It was an abysmal failure. The US constitution had a much stronger central federal government and worked a lot better.
Jesus, I guess the OP was partially right, we really have forgotten our history.
So... Could you give some actual examples of mob-rule, I mean direct democracy being disastrous?
Because off the top of my head I can name quite a few examples of our representative system going awry: The red scare, the patriot act, the mess we call our tax system, freedom fries.
More so when you let a single person be in charge of choosing who to invade: Vietnam, Iraq, The bay of pigs, Trail of tears...
I think you're full of shit, because you are literally arguing against democracy. We've fought wars over this. Really bloody wars. Wars whose only virtue was that we were on the side of democracy. You are the side that thinks people shouldn't be trusted to rule themselves.
I want to punish Pfizer for running a lethal medical experiments on 200 Nigerian children. 50 of which died, with other developing mental and physical disorders.
...Oh yes, it's apparent now that I'm a mutant commie traitor. This is obviously a fool's false utopia to have the audacity to demand that corporations doing horrible things deserve to have horrible things done to them. Forgive me blessed corporations for ever doubting your divine authority. Seriously dude, how can you possibly defend such actions? I'm not some crazy anarchist who wants to bring it all down, I want to punish wrongdoers. What sort of mental gymnastics are you doing to make that look like a bad thing? Did the harsh language of "bring them to their knees" just set off so many alarm bells in your head that you completely ignored WHO I want to bring down? And why?
(I also want to punish them further for attempting to undermine the credibility of the prosecuting lawyers in Nigeria. Thank you wikileaks.)
But no, you'll find a lot of these sort of tactics amongst other large and powerful organizations. We should bring them to their knees as well. The existence of one does not excuse the other.
Hey now, the industrialist robber barons DID do a lot of good things. They provided a lot of (admittedly shitty) jobs to people, they built up the infrastructure of our nation, and they donated a lot of libraries and concert halls. Yay, high-art. And that goes hand in hand with my point. You're acting like the pharmaceutical companies are somehow better than the robber barons. They aren't. They're doing horrible things while reaping in a ton of money. And they're also providing services that people value in the meantime.
The robber barons themselves did more than just soaking the poor while laughing themselves to the bank, just like Big Pharma. But one of the things they both did was soak the poor while laughing themselves to the bank.
And I'm sure the impoverished, worked-to-death immigrants thanked the robber-barons every night for the ability to hop on a rail car and get to california. You know, if they had the money.
You're implying that since big pharma does inded have a positive impact that they're above any reproach. Sorry, but that's not how it works. You can have an industry that does meaningful work, even good work, and they can still be absolute monsters in other aspects. It's good to remember that the pharmaceutical industry does indeed make beneficial drugs, but they are not above criticism. No one is.
Also, killing off a few mice is worth not having you sputter in convulsions constantly. I'm ok with that. Super-pacifists are extreamists, but they're harmless extremists.
Alternate reality: Sales doesn't know what customer wants, guesses that it's XYZ because competition advertises XYZ.
Sales: Mr. Engineer, we cannot continue to ingore the buzz-word gap!
Well it worked for my father. He's ~65, retired. Lifelong smoker.
He didn't like the tax. For a while there he was buying loose tobacco, empty cig casing, and loading them himself.
Saved himself a lot of money. And then they closed that loophole and taxed loose-leaf tobacco at a similar rate of a pre-made pack.
He was furious. That thanksgiving was... just... peachy keen. Yeah.
But he stopped smoking. He knew it was bad for him, and couldn't swallow the extra cost. It galled him.
users living in university communities tend to perform better than users of the same age in other locations.
Ok, that makes sense. You know, COLLEGE.
The result is not driven principally by college students,
Uh...... wut?
'Since our analysis controlled for age, the reason they score well is not simply that they have a lot of young people,'
uh huh. So they discovered that smart people go to college?
I'm sorry, could someone explain to me how they come to the conclusion that their results aren't driven by college students?
"Controlled for age" doesn't mean much to me, but sure, ok, it takes into account the age discrepancy. But... you know, it doesn't take into account that THEY'RE GOING INTO HIGHER EDUCATION. I really don't see how this isn't driven by college students.
This. It's not just television, but the general dumbing down of the populous. They provide simple escapism and take away that which makes people better. The stupid are easy to control, or are at least predictable.
The idea is pretty nicely described in this comic.
Now, read that comic and think about this a moment... Bradbury, Orwell, and Huxley have written thousands of words on the subject. Neil Postman has also ranted about the evil of television. Someone read all that and made a nice simple, easy-to-digest comic about it.
If this is the first and last you'll hear about this, clearly, Huxley is winning.
Calc 1,2,3 and differential equations were required for my software engineering degree. And while there are fields of software where %ANYTHING_EVERYTHING is important, I'm pretty sure they were weed-out classes. It's been 6 years in the industry and I haven't used calculus once. If I ever do run into a problem in that domain, I'll have to re-learn it, just like I have to learn or relearn %ANYTHING_EVERYTHING that I come across that I haven't dealt with in the last 5 years. (Although relearning IS a lot easier then learning something cold). Because the ability to learn is what makes me good at my job. That and knowing how the stack works. And how do we decide who gets a degree and who doesn't? Well.... with weed-out classes.
That awesome feeling you get when you read an insightful and funny post by someone and you log in just to friend them. And you discover they're already your friend.
show me fossils of some sort of MACRO evolution. i want at least 3 fossils for each stage in the conversion for Critter A to Critter B (say from fish to frog to lizard).
Well, that's going to be tough considering that frogs did not evolve into lizards. Their most common ancestor is a tetrapod. (ok, I'm being lazy, that's their shared superclass, it's below phylum and above class.) Frogs are OLD. Lizards are more closely related to humans than they are to frogs.
The wikipedia page of the evolution of fish, frogs, and lizards is a good place to start reading. It's kinda heady though, so maybe a primer on evolution would help.
But if you want some examples of macro evolution, let's say from fish to lizard, here you go:
Fish to Tetrapod is detailed nicely over here and tetrapod to lizard has a fair amount of evidence. Just, you know, scroll down and you'll see a progression. Sadly, the proto-frogs had soft bodies and didn't fossilize well, so it would take some actual work to show the evidence for that jump.
I advise you write a good enough story that the all-masterful 1% will choose to push your work onto their friends and cohorts. I mean, even if you had the name and address of this mystical 1%, what would you do reach them? Take them out to lunch? Give them a free copy? Pay them for a review? How is that not subverting the system which I go to for book suggestions? How anti-social of you. (Well, I can understand giving out free copies to critics, but that's moot with today's piracy and digital distribution.)
I'd prefer if you brute-force the popularity of your work via sheer quality.
The implied metric of the "we are the 99%" is either wealth or income, which is nearly synonymous. This has been painfully clear to anyone that's been paying attention. I'm going to feel dirty for this, but I also have to defend the TEA party. They're only controlled by the oil companies if you look at it through conspiracy glasses and assume that foxnews is controlled by oil men. They have tangential control at best.
I think you just tacked on "1%" to the end of some stereotypes and thought it was clever.
And of course there's always someone else that wants you on their side. Probably a lot of people. Welcome to a democracy, where they care what you think. It's your civil duty to parse through the marketing bullshit, choose the one you think is best, and either vote for the guy or support the cause.
Wow, condoms where expensive back in the day. Fifty cents in the 1950's was like $4.50 today. And USED!?
And really, while hand-eye coordination is important, I'd say flexibility and endurance got more of a workout.
You're religious, that's nice. Unfortunately, that doesn't tell us anything about whether or not you believe in either evolution or a young earth. Overzeetop is assuming that all or most of the technologically literate fall within the 54% that DO believe in evolution, but that's not nessesarily true. Sure, there's a correlation with technological literacy and being informed and intelligent, so hopefully you're part of it. But at this point, we don't know.
(Presuming you're in the USA.)
If I'm wrong, I loose nothing. If I'm right, you lose everything.
Pascal's Wager. Cute. Actually, what you lose is a life of working towards building a better world and what you get is a life dedicated to proping up a lie. You'll be remembered as a fool, one of many, who held his peers back. You'll be listed next to the Easter Islanders who cut down their trees, the french nobles who decided to let their children pay their debts, and the segregationists.
Unless you don't think that believing a lie really affects the world all that much. In which case, what's the point? If you're doing it because you think it makes you a good person, but it doesn't actually affect the world, then it doesn't really have an effect on you.
No, Pascal's wager is an overly narrow view of the effects of such a decision. It ignores the life a person lives and focuses only on what comes after. (which is nothing).
Furthermore, I'm not sure I'd want to chum about eternally with a bunch of people that wouldn't let me in just because I tried to be rational.
I'd really prefer if it was a two part system with the goggles talking to something in my pocket, or on my desk, or in my car, with painless way to transfer between them. I'd like a contextually aware display please.
Except there is no bush unless you were raised by abusive psychologists who were compulsive liars. "The bush" is a euphemism for "risk". There is no risk in this scenario. The child is assured to get two marshmellows if he can just stop listening to that little voice in his head that tells him to gorge now. Unless the child thinks that the adult is lying to him, in which case, sure, grab what you can get before they take it away from you.
An Xbox is the real baseball and real glove equivalent that normal kids play with today.
A home theater to play it in is the uniform equivalent that rich kids play in.
Nethack, dungeonCrawl, NewGrounds, Wesnoth, game demos, and pirated games are the stick equivalent that poor kids play with.
Slashdot Mirror
The U.S. was founded on the notion of decentralized and localized government with a mostly powerless point of union called the Federal Government;
Yeah, that was done by the Articles of Confederation. The first federal government of the USA. It was an abysmal failure. The US constitution had a much stronger central federal government and worked a lot better.
Jesus, I guess the OP was partially right, we really have forgotten our history.
and forgotten its history.
So... Could you give some actual examples of mob-rule, I mean direct democracy being disastrous?
Because off the top of my head I can name quite a few examples of our representative system going awry: The red scare, the patriot act, the mess we call our tax system, freedom fries.
More so when you let a single person be in charge of choosing who to invade: Vietnam, Iraq, The bay of pigs, Trail of tears...
And it gets worse if the people aren't even allowed to know it's being done.
I think you're full of shit, because you are literally arguing against democracy. We've fought wars over this. Really bloody wars. Wars whose only virtue was that we were on the side of democracy. You are the side that thinks people shouldn't be trusted to rule themselves.
I want to punish Pfizer for running a lethal medical experiments on 200 Nigerian children. 50 of which died, with other developing mental and physical disorders.
...Oh yes, it's apparent now that I'm a mutant commie traitor. This is obviously a fool's false utopia to have the audacity to demand that corporations doing horrible things deserve to have horrible things done to them. Forgive me blessed corporations for ever doubting your divine authority.
Seriously dude, how can you possibly defend such actions? I'm not some crazy anarchist who wants to bring it all down, I want to punish wrongdoers. What sort of mental gymnastics are you doing to make that look like a bad thing? Did the harsh language of "bring them to their knees" just set off so many alarm bells in your head that you completely ignored WHO I want to bring down? And why?
(I also want to punish them further for attempting to undermine the credibility of the prosecuting lawyers in Nigeria. Thank you wikileaks.)
So it's ok since everyone else is doing it?
But not every other large and powerful organization/industry coerces nations into agreeing to broken IP laws, performs lethal experiments on foreign children, lies about addictive products, and silences critics.
But no, you'll find a lot of these sort of tactics amongst other large and powerful organizations. We should bring them to their knees as well. The existence of one does not excuse the other.
Hey now, the industrialist robber barons DID do a lot of good things. They provided a lot of (admittedly shitty) jobs to people, they built up the infrastructure of our nation, and they donated a lot of libraries and concert halls. Yay, high-art. And that goes hand in hand with my point. You're acting like the pharmaceutical companies are somehow better than the robber barons. They aren't. They're doing horrible things while reaping in a ton of money. And they're also providing services that people value in the meantime.
The robber barons themselves did more than just soaking the poor while laughing themselves to the bank, just like Big Pharma. But one of the things they both did was soak the poor while laughing themselves to the bank.
Wait, it's possible to fence with saber? I thought the whole thing was just some sort of performance art on the nature of head-concussions.
(Foil For Life!)
Live in the Quad Cities Area? We have a 10-week class starting at 6:30 tonight.
And I'm sure the impoverished, worked-to-death immigrants thanked the robber-barons every night for the ability to hop on a rail car and get to california. You know, if they had the money.
You're implying that since big pharma does inded have a positive impact that they're above any reproach. Sorry, but that's not how it works. You can have an industry that does meaningful work, even good work, and they can still be absolute monsters in other aspects. It's good to remember that the pharmaceutical industry does indeed make beneficial drugs, but they are not above criticism. No one is.
Also, killing off a few mice is worth not having you sputter in convulsions constantly. I'm ok with that. Super-pacifists are extreamists, but they're harmless extremists.
Alternate reality: Sales doesn't know what customer wants, guesses that it's XYZ because competition advertises XYZ.
Sales: Mr. Engineer, we cannot continue to ingore the buzz-word gap!
Well it worked for my father. He's ~65, retired. Lifelong smoker.
He didn't like the tax. For a while there he was buying loose tobacco, empty cig casing, and loading them himself.
Saved himself a lot of money. And then they closed that loophole and taxed loose-leaf tobacco at a similar rate of a pre-made pack.
He was furious. That thanksgiving was... just... peachy keen. Yeah.
But he stopped smoking. He knew it was bad for him, and couldn't swallow the extra cost. It galled him.
At that point childhood obesity shouldn't be as big of a problem. You know, because fewer people are loading up on soda.
Eeeeyup.
Like I said, dumbing down.
users living in university communities tend to perform better than users of the same age in other locations.
Ok, that makes sense. You know, COLLEGE.
The result is not driven principally by college students,
Uh...... wut?
'Since our analysis controlled for age, the reason they score well is not simply that they have a lot of young people,'
uh huh. So they discovered that smart people go to college?
I'm sorry, could someone explain to me how they come to the conclusion that their results aren't driven by college students?
"Controlled for age" doesn't mean much to me, but sure, ok, it takes into account the age discrepancy. But... you know, it doesn't take into account that THEY'RE GOING INTO HIGHER EDUCATION. I really don't see how this isn't driven by college students.
This. It's not just television, but the general dumbing down of the populous. They provide simple escapism and take away that which makes people better. The stupid are easy to control, or are at least predictable.
The idea is pretty nicely described in this comic.
Now, read that comic and think about this a moment... Bradbury, Orwell, and Huxley have written thousands of words on the subject. Neil Postman has also ranted about the evil of television. Someone read all that and made a nice simple, easy-to-digest comic about it.
If this is the first and last you'll hear about this, clearly, Huxley is winning.
Calc 1,2,3 and differential equations were required for my software engineering degree. And while there are fields of software where %ANYTHING_EVERYTHING is important, I'm pretty sure they were weed-out classes. It's been 6 years in the industry and I haven't used calculus once. If I ever do run into a problem in that domain, I'll have to re-learn it, just like I have to learn or relearn %ANYTHING_EVERYTHING that I come across that I haven't dealt with in the last 5 years. (Although relearning IS a lot easier then learning something cold). Because the ability to learn is what makes me good at my job. That and knowing how the stack works. And how do we decide who gets a degree and who doesn't? Well.... with weed-out classes.
That awesome feeling you get when you read an insightful and funny post by someone and you log in just to friend them. And you discover they're already your friend.
Brohoof.
show me fossils of some sort of MACRO evolution. i want at least 3 fossils for each stage in the conversion for Critter A to Critter B (say from fish to frog to lizard).
Well, that's going to be tough considering that frogs did not evolve into lizards. Their most common ancestor is a tetrapod. (ok, I'm being lazy, that's their shared superclass, it's below phylum and above class.) Frogs are OLD. Lizards are more closely related to humans than they are to frogs.
The wikipedia page of the evolution of fish, frogs, and lizards is a good place to start reading. It's kinda heady though, so maybe a primer on evolution would help.
But if you want some examples of macro evolution, let's say from fish to lizard, here you go:
Fish to Tetrapod is detailed nicely over here and tetrapod to lizard has a fair amount of evidence. Just, you know, scroll down and you'll see a progression. Sadly, the proto-frogs had soft bodies and didn't fossilize well, so it would take some actual work to show the evidence for that jump.
Anyway, hope this helps.
I advise you write a good enough story that the all-masterful 1% will choose to push your work onto their friends and cohorts. I mean, even if you had the name and address of this mystical 1%, what would you do reach them? Take them out to lunch? Give them a free copy? Pay them for a review? How is that not subverting the system which I go to for book suggestions? How anti-social of you. (Well, I can understand giving out free copies to critics, but that's moot with today's piracy and digital distribution.)
I'd prefer if you brute-force the popularity of your work via sheer quality.
The implied metric of the "we are the 99%" is either wealth or income, which is nearly synonymous. This has been painfully clear to anyone that's been paying attention. I'm going to feel dirty for this, but I also have to defend the TEA party. They're only controlled by the oil companies if you look at it through conspiracy glasses and assume that foxnews is controlled by oil men. They have tangential control at best.
I think you just tacked on "1%" to the end of some stereotypes and thought it was clever.
And of course there's always someone else that wants you on their side. Probably a lot of people. Welcome to a democracy, where they care what you think. It's your civil duty to parse through the marketing bullshit, choose the one you think is best, and either vote for the guy or support the cause.
Wow, condoms where expensive back in the day. Fifty cents in the 1950's was like $4.50 today. And USED!?
And really, while hand-eye coordination is important, I'd say flexibility and endurance got more of a workout.
You're religious, that's nice. Unfortunately, that doesn't tell us anything about whether or not you believe in either evolution or a young earth. Overzeetop is assuming that all or most of the technologically literate fall within the 54% that DO believe in evolution, but that's not nessesarily true. Sure, there's a correlation with technological literacy and being informed and intelligent, so hopefully you're part of it. But at this point, we don't know.
(Presuming you're in the USA.)
If I'm wrong, I loose nothing. If I'm right, you lose everything.
Pascal's Wager. Cute. Actually, what you lose is a life of working towards building a better world and what you get is a life dedicated to proping up a lie. You'll be remembered as a fool, one of many, who held his peers back. You'll be listed next to the Easter Islanders who cut down their trees, the french nobles who decided to let their children pay their debts, and the segregationists.
Unless you don't think that believing a lie really affects the world all that much. In which case, what's the point? If you're doing it because you think it makes you a good person, but it doesn't actually affect the world, then it doesn't really have an effect on you.
No, Pascal's wager is an overly narrow view of the effects of such a decision. It ignores the life a person lives and focuses only on what comes after. (which is nothing).
Furthermore, I'm not sure I'd want to chum about eternally with a bunch of people that wouldn't let me in just because I tried to be rational.
I'd really prefer if it was a two part system with the goggles talking to something in my pocket, or on my desk, or in my car, with painless way to transfer between them. I'd like a contextually aware display please.
Except there is no bush unless you were raised by abusive psychologists who were compulsive liars. "The bush" is a euphemism for "risk". There is no risk in this scenario. The child is assured to get two marshmellows if he can just stop listening to that little voice in his head that tells him to gorge now. Unless the child thinks that the adult is lying to him, in which case, sure, grab what you can get before they take it away from you.
An Xbox is the real baseball and real glove equivalent that normal kids play with today.
A home theater to play it in is the uniform equivalent that rich kids play in.
Nethack, dungeonCrawl, NewGrounds, Wesnoth, game demos, and pirated games are the stick equivalent that poor kids play with.
Welcome to the digital era.