My dad grew up dirt poor, as in the floor of his parents. By making decisions like the soda decision, he ended up flying us on private jets when he was 40.
Unlikely. Anyone who's made it big in finances will, if they're being honest with themselves, say that it came down to hard work, smart decisions, and luck. Your dad may have all of those qualities you admire, but that's not why he's rich. He's rich because he had those qualities and was in the right place at the right time when an opportunity presented. Some people win this lottery early. Some win it late in life. Very many though never get a winning ticket, and so for them, it doesn't matter.
The cognitive distortion you have just used is what is called the Just World Hypothesis.
I think it's rare that someone is driven to the streets due to a single fault as well. People often assume that homeless people are lazy and that's how they ended up on the street, and if they would just care enough to get off the street and get a job, they would be off in no time.
Numerous studies have been done and the overwelming majority are mentally ill or veterans. For some reason, watching people get blown apart by cluster bombs repeatedly has an effect on people's mental stability. It's the same thing with the prisons -- something like 86% of people in prison are suffering from severe mental illness.
But the Just World Hypothesis is what causes most people to reach a different conclusion than "We should help these people," -- and it's because if they admitted to themselves that they're very similar to these people and could experience the same misfortune, then it would also mean they are not, due to some intrinsic value in themselves, more deserving of success than the other guy is. It is, at its core, nothing more than a form of ego-protection. One that, unfortunately, has the side effect of condemning millions to destitute poverty, suicide, and illness.
When the resonance cascade occurs, we'll be able to just zerg-rush the bastards with PhD-and-crowbar equipped theoretical physicists. Aliens won't stand a chance.
True, but I'd rather they discover practical interstellar travel instead of being thrown in a meat grinder and set to puree. But hey, to each evil overlord, their own.
Unless by "this country" you mean Switzerland, I fail to see the relevance of your rant.
Well, my rants have a marmalade quality. If you like them at all, you're gonna love them and there will be nothing better. If you don't though, I have some good news: There's plenty of alternatives.
And in fact my daughter and I have been having this same conversation lately. I'm actually happy she's a philosophy major.
Your daughter, probably the same age as my sister. I wrote this to her, and by extension, her generation, not long ago. I'm reposting it here as free to share, provided you properly attribute it to me;
Dear Younger Generation,
I'm from the generation that created your ipads, and your internet, and your webpages. I was around before the internet (which to you, is probably the same as saying I was around before the last dinosaurs died out), before cell phones, and I know that the "save icon" used to be a real thing -- they were called floppies. They were like pen drives, only flatter, and easier to break.
So when I talk about technology, I hope you listen. I know you won't, like I didn't listen to my parents, and my parents didn't listen to/their/ parents, and so on. I know the majority of you haven't matured to the point to see the continuity between generations, that you are just one link in a very long chain. But that's okay. This message isn't for you today. This is a message for you to seal up in a bottle and forget about it for a few years... until it's time.
The message is this:
You cannot solve people problems with technology. If you have a problem with the world, you have to get out there, with other people, and do something about it. Not on the internet. Not on Facebook. Not on Twitter. In the street. In people's homes. At the grocery store. Wherever the problem is you want to fix, that's where you need to be, not in this abstract world my generation has created for you.
We made this to be a tool to help you understand the world you're living in. To give it context and meaning, because we spent our lives confused and awestruck by how fast humanity was moving. It really is the dawn of a new era, and we have provided the first tools for the generations to come to orientate themselves in it. We know you're going to do more than any generation has. That's a given. That is the benefit of youth -- and this was our contribution, our link in the chain. Someday, it'll be a footnote just the same as the invention of the printing press was. And that's okay. We don't know what your link will be, your contribution; That is your journey. Every generation is born anew with the same potentialities, unjaded, fresh.
But don't let this marvelous new invention, this new reality we have created, blind you to the deeper universal truths. Do not let them dampen and absorb your creative energies, and thereby weaken the case for further change. This was meant to be a tool to better understand the world we live in, not as an escape from it, or a substitution. You are still needed out there. This is a place to share your dreams, but it cannot fulfill them.
What this says is that every rich person in this country is lying through their teeth about needing immigrants. We have highly trained scientists and engineers. The percentages of people who have the right attitude and mental attributes to succeed in this line of work has remained constant for as far back as we've had standardized testing results. There has been no shift of the basic personality types from one to another; Each generation has had the same proportions as the previous.
What it means is that nobody wants to invest. And scientific progress is an investment. It doesn't give you the immediate payoff of, say, a sequel to the Fast and the Furious (what are they up to now, seven of those infernal movies?). Science isn't formulaic. There's no spreadsheet that says "And after you spend $100 million developing a drug for cancer, you'll get this as a reward. Spend $200 million, and you'll get a free t-shirt too." Science growth mirrors our own; We grow in spurts, with long periods where nothing seems to be happening, periods where change is slow, and occasional paradigm shifts.
This isn't very amiable to the current "get rich quick" culture the Boomers are espousing as they approach their retirement. They're sucking every corner of society dry looking for a quick way to monetize, any incremental way to earn a profit without much risk. And science... well, it's too risky for them. They don't care about future generations, or a cure for cancer, or putting men on the moon again. They want botox and comfortable retirements.
This is society reaching back and giving people who love science the middle finger. It's saying "We don't need you, because your contributions aren't immediate. You live in the future and we're trying to recapture our past." So unless science comes up with a cure for aging, or a time machine, it's not getting funding. And that's really all there is to this story. It's about greed, pure and simple. Nobody gives a damn about tomorrow, because for the people holding all the cash... their tomorrows are running out.
I know you're being sarcastic here, and let me say -- I Approve. But, beneath sarcasm is usually a helping of truth and what you say is no different.
We laughed our collective asses off so hard we pissed ourselves when Gen Y tried Kony 2012 on Facebook and Youtube as a way to solve the problems of mass genocide in a third world country. Yup. They actually believed that copy-pasting a video clip and some crappy mspaint-edited bitmaps was going to lick that whole 'world peace' thing.
And now we're having "Code for America"... and suddenly everyone's acting all serious about it. The government doesn't need to be "reimagined". It needs to be rebuilt. It's got way too many defective components -- corrupt politicians, rich people who build massive computer networks for the sole purpose of targeted advertising (Obama and Romney both did. Obama succeeded; Romney imploded on the launch pad -- so I don't wanna hear anything about conservatives or liberals blah blah. They both did it. Deal.), we've got a bill under consideration in Congress where the only way anyone feels comfortable voting for it is if they're promised their vote will be anonymous until after they're dead, because it could affect the interests of the people who fund campaigns. I mean, guys, if this isn't a red flag, I don't know what is.
At all levels of government, there is stark and obvious signs of corruption -- your vote is largely meaningless. You're being asked to choose between Candidate A; "I am for those things which Candidate B is only slightly less enthusiastic about", and Candidate B; "I am in favor of things slightly different than that of Candidate A!"... It's like choosing between coffee dispensed from the left pot, or coffee dispensed from the right pot. It's the same. Fucking. Coffee.
And everyone knows this. No amount of "reimagining" or "clouding the intarwebs" is going to fix this. In fact, the only way to achieve the ambitious goals these people think a few ipads will accomplish is mass armed insurrection. I'm talking bullets, bodies, military tanks crushing people's houses, fire, looting... all that shit. But peacefully talking about it over (wait for it)... the internet? Please.
I don't know how much clearer I can be on this point:
ey are not making a choice. A thought pops into their head and
... and then what? If you asked them "Did you want to buy that soda?" will they say no? This is a choice. It may not be a good choice. It may not be a rational choice. But it is a choice. The article doesn't say they have no choice; I'm going to have to insist on a direct quote.
The 3 sodas a day example was not meant to be a tuition fund on its own - it is illustrating the lack of connection people make
I think you illustrated the lack of connection almost everyone has to statistics and probability. These are common cognitive distortions. Everybody has them. We value our own personal experience over direct observation. We are more afraid of what we don't know than what we do know. We are absolute and utter shit at estimating risk. This is the human condition, and I don't mean to single you out here; But being aware of these cognitive blindspots is the first step to managing them. I didn't say eliminate; I said manage. Everyone makes mistakes.
That said, you wrote what you wrote, and I'm holding you to it. You can apologize and say that wasn't what you meant, and that's fine -- but I'm not letting you change the goal posts here. You made an argument. It was a shit argument, and it died in place. Abandon it like a man and come up with a new one.
There is absolutely no basis for your conclusion. People can't think their way out...
Okay, I'm gonna stop you right here. You're moving the goal posts again. I said poor people deal with prejudice. That's it. That's all. And it may be an even bigger problem than the one under discussion. If you want to reply, reply to that statement directly. Provide factual and supporting evidence that poor people don't deal with prejudice, or at least that prejudice is less of a threat to them than this cognitive haze the researchers are asserting exists.
Consider that, and consider than soda is not the only extra people can do without if they really want to be financially better off. Consider the role of grants and scholarships, and do your math again. I'm sure you will realize it's not so flippant of a comment.
It remains a flippant comment. It may not be what you meant, but there it is, two lines up, staring you in the face and saying "I was a total dick back there, and someone called me on it." Man up to it. You can very probably come up with a better argument, possibly even one that is defensible, and supports your implicit belief that we shouldn't help poor people, with the followup being they need to help themselves first. I won't argue that belief. It's yours. Keep it. Honest. But I will argue with your faulty logic, cognitive mistakes, and apparent lack of empathy towards others whom you seem to implicitly feel are beneath you and morally inferior in some fashion.
I don't rag on them for being poor, but I know why they are and I know that they are also undeserving of handouts.
So you just don't tell them you hate them to their face. How noble of you.
They all seem to have a few things in common though: They have little incentive to pull in an income, and/or they really don't understand the concept of investment.
I don't know if you're aware of this, but public education was an idea that came from the working class. It was fought by the elite class for decades, despite popular support. Labor unions repeatedly shutting down factories and killing profits was what eventually created the federal mandate that public education be available in all states. After that, it was a fight to get blacks and minorities into schools, necessitating the national guard coming out to forcibly open the doors of schools in the South and allow them in. And now, higher education is being rapidly priced into extinction, and it is disproportionately affecting the working class.
So when you say "they don't really understand", consider the possibility that it's not because they can't understand, but lack access to resources that would allow them to.
One thing is clear though: Handing money to poor people isn't the answer. It never will be.
But handing money to CEOs "too big to fail" and banks so corrupt they put the entire economy in the drink for over a decade is? Why do you feel that it is more likely that hundreds of millions of Americans are lazy than that a few thousand of them are greedy?
They are unable to comprehend that by drinking water instead of three sodas a day, and putting the savings into a tax deferred education savings account, they can easily afford in-state tuition at a good university.
Or perhaps they comprehend it just fine, but they make a choice you disagree with: Like after working a 10 hour shift for $7.25 an hour, they would like to have at least a small creature comfort, so they buy a six pack of beer (or soda), instead of going home and enjoying tasteless and bland tap-water. The thing about being poor that everyone forgets is that everything that might relieve the boredom and stress of long hours for little reward costs something. It's easy to say "I'll save a few dollars a day" when you've got a fat paycheck -- but when you have nothing and you're looking to those couple of dollars leftover in your wallet, it's hard to say "You don't exist, go away". But psychology aside, there's still the troubling issue of your really, really bad math skills.
Let's analyze your example of "three sodas a day". For the 2012-2013 year, tuition costs for state residents at a community college averaged $8,655 across the country. We're going to ignore cost of living adjustments, peripheral expenses like books, lost wages, and everything else. We're going to take just that tuition number and that will be the cost of "easily afford" at a "good university".
The cost of a 'soda', which to give you the best case scenario, will be for one of the plastic 16 oz variety, which averages about $1.50 right now. So we're going to go with $4.50 per day being blown on soda. In 1,923 days -- about 5.25 years worth of not drinking soda per year of tuition.
Now, given the rate of inflation combined with the rate that tuition has been rising, it's safe to say that number will be higher. And when you consider that tuition is only perhaps 2/3rds of the fees you'll be paying... that number goes up even more.
Bottom line here is that your assertion that saving the equivalent of three sodas a day ($4.50) can buy someone a college education is possible, but absurd. You would spend half your working life waiting. In reality, you're going to have to save more to make it happen. Working a minimum wage job, you're only going to be pulling in about $36 a day (at best). Odds are good you'll be clearing even less.
You're asking someone for whom three sodas a day accounts for about 1/8th of their total personal income to save even more to make this do-able. You'd have to at least double, and probably triple, the savings rate, to get into college within a reasonable timeframe.
Frankly, when you take rent, utilities, and everything else into consideration... a minimum wage job simply cannot sustain that level of investment. Not unless you want to starve, rack up debt elsewhere (like late fees, bank overdraft fees, etc.) -- which will happen anyway when you're living paycheck by paycheck.
The bottom line here is that what these scientists is saying has nothing to do with the conclusions you and many others are reaching: Which is that you can "think" your way out of poverty, or that the problem can be resolved by simple mathematical ability. It is much bigger than that. All this study does is show that when financial resources become severely constrained, people are poor judges of how to best utilize those limited resources.
It provides no guidance on a viable strategy for emerging from that environment, and your flippant advice about simply not drinking soda is symptomatic of another, perhaps larger problem, that poor people face: Prejudice.
ou really need to go into a horribly lit phone store, fight past its clawing denizens and look at what the low end of the Android sales REALLY represent...
As opposed to standing outside a trendy Apple store, looking at the people with their shiny little white box they just purchased for the sum of a mere month's wages, produced by a chinese factory with suicide nets along the perimeter because too many people were throwing themselves off the balconies due to low wages and 18 hour work days?
You know, I'd gladly take a "horribly lit phone store" and "clawing denizens" over staying awake at night wondering if I was buying the products of a plantation owner.
There is ample evidence, historically, and in every country that has ever existed for any length of time, that the government's expansion of police powers will continue until the people fight back. When the cost of consolidating power exceeds the cost of political activism, that is where the balance lays.
In today's "internet culture", with instant gratification and a certain detachment from one's peers, there is no real political activism occurring in industrialized countries that are economically stable. This has meant a rapid expansion of police powers in virtually every one of the top 20 countries by GDP.
Bluntly, the internet may give us access to the knowledge of what's going on anywhere on Earth, our collective knowledge, and does it all nearly instantaniously, but all of this information has blunted our resolve. It has given rise to the idea that technical solutions to social problems are not only viable, but preferred. It has substituted direct social interaction for abstract social interaction.
It could be argued that the internet itself is the proximate cause of the current state of affairs; It has made people complacent and politically impotent.
The problem is that you're using egrep in the first place. Here's the thing -- the overwhelming majority of your cycles are getting sucked loading, initializing, executing, then unloading, that thread. It's not that using regular expressions is processor-intensive... it's that repeatedly launching the same executable is.
Use something that can load once, read in the patterns, check all the e-mails that are queued, sort them, then exit. Your execution time will go from 15 seconds to 150 milliseconds.
Or is this just one more made up "fact" about another age of history and how superior we are today?
First, who said we're any better today than back then? We're still killing people for cross-dressing right now, just like we were back then. If you can be killed just for how you dress, what makes you think the (heretical) idea that we came from Mars instead of from God is any less worthy of a human BBQ in the public square?
You just keep claiming that, while the iPhone continues to top carrier sales charts even with old models...
Citation needed. I showed you mine, now you show me yours.
If it makes you happy to pretend, it's good that you have found peace of some kind in a world that makes no sense to you.
NOBODY expects the iPhone Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise...surprise and fear...fear and surprise.... Our two weapons are fear and surprise...and ruthless efficiency.... Our *three* weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency...and an almost fanatical devotion to the iPope.... Our *four*...no... *Amongst* our weapons.... Amongst our weaponry...are such elements as fear, surprise.... (muttering) I'll come in again.
Well, with their marketshare falling like a rock (Achievement unlocked: Apple Fanboy hate. -5 Karma, +5 reputation) they gotta do something -- Android is now passing 70% and continuing to climb while Apple dropped to about 15% and has been losing about 1% a month on average for the past two quarters (Achievement unlocked: Use of facts on the internet. +2 karma, -1 reputation). Of course, only on slashdot would the phrase "up to" cause people to cream their pants with excitement that the great and noble Apple (Achievement unlocked: Sarcasm! -1 karma, +7 reputation to shop owners in town GenX) was going to give them 'free' upgrades. It'll be just like going to a used car dealer and getting a "great deal" on your trade-in -- they give you x amount of dollars now, knowing that the buy-in (aka your loan APR) will offset it by x plus a percentage, so they can afford to be generous... just keep paying the monthly 'rental' fee (Achivement unlocked: Car analogy! +2 karma, +1 reputation).
So it's a slow news day wherever this was written. It seems they pull this recycled article out of the garbage somewhere every couple months. Yes, we "might" be from Mars. That isn't news. I think I saw a special on it on TV in 1998.
Actually, the "we came from Mars" thing has been around since the 1600s, ever since we observed there were other planets and imagined life on them. Of course, back then, we burned people at the stake for such ideas... whereas today it's just a piece of pleasant fiction written for a hot summer day.
All of these "conditions" are arbitrary and open to whatever interpretation the feds feel like today.
Well, Obama has about as much credibility here as his detractors, which is to say, not much. I lost the last of my respect when he issued a memo saying he'd only use drones in the event of an imminent danger to the country. He then went on to redefine imminent in geological terms, and danger as pretty much whatever the Administration thought it was. Your point here is very valid -- what the government says anymore has as much value as a Zimbabwe dollar. What it does, however, can be judged.
All the people who were convicted under laws the administration nows says are outmodded are still in jail. Local police continue to arrest people for simple possession. The DEA continues to raid and burn dispensaries in these states, and abduct their owners (and sometimes patients). Their behavior has changed not at all.
So, at least in the opinion of this author, the federal government will continue to act in this fashion, until such time as enough states pass laws about this that it becomes tenable to disband the DEA by means of an amendment to the Constitution. Congress will not back down; Even if tomorrow it was revealed that a new discovery means that we could synthesize the cure for cancer from marijuana, these assholes would continue breaking down people's doors and shooting them... though probably then for violating some company's patent. -_-
As it turns out, an average iOS user is worth roughly 4-5x more than an average Android user, at least in terms of what they're willing to spend on apps, which admittedly isn't the worth that we're talking about in this context, but is about the closest indication we can get to the relative worths of users on the different platforms, absent of having data on what the street value is for a compromised device of each variety.
Actually, this doesn't say anything except that IOS users are more willing to pay for apps -- this may be due to the smaller number of free alternatives and the fact that the IOS marketplace is controlled entirely by Apple, and you have to spend a not inconsiderable amount of money getting licensed and approved so you can submit apps to Apple. Android has no such restrictions. Since it costs less to develop for Android, it makes sense that the overall price would be lower -- afterall, you aren't by the mere act of creating an app indebting yourself and now need to make that money back just to break even.
It's also worth pointing out that you've made the false assumption that iOS has to offer a value that's equal to or greater than Android's before iOS would be a logical target, completely dismissing the fact that
Completely dismissing the fact that... and then you put up a string of assumptions with no citations? Please, by all means, show me the supporting documentation. At least you tried with the first link. It was totally off-topic and irrelevant, but I can admire the attempt. But it seemed like right after that, you gave up wanting to prove any of your other points, perhaps thinking that if you included a single link, you'd get up-modded and nobody would more closely analyze your faulty logic.
Android is designed to be configurable and modifiable by blah blah blah blah blah... more blah, some blah, extra blah to go with the blah
Again, blowing smoke in the hopes of covering up the original point: Which is that we're discussing what is manifest in reality, what is happening today, not the coulda, woulda, shoulda, that your post goes into great detail to construct. It's a wonderful hypothetical model, and maybe if this were a competition for best fictional work by an internet pundit, you'd win an award. But this is economics.
Of course, that doesn't excuse a company to fail at securing their products, just because no one has attacked them yet, but by all indications, the "security through obscurity" argument doesn't hold much water in this case, given that iPhone users are consistently shown to be disproportionately profitable to target and that they continue to sell extremely well overall (even the report you linked cites the fact that this is an expected low as part of the regular product cycle for the line and that they expect the iPhone to recapture its lost market share with the launch of the new iPhone this quarter).
Let's say that iphone owners are worth $30,000 each, and Android users are worth only $10,000. If Android users are 4.7x more numerous than iphone users... then Android users are the logical target, if you can only target one group or the other. Now, who really thinks iphone users have a net worth three times that of Android users? Android users, by the way, are 4.7x more numerous.
The rest of your argument is irrelevant. I don't have anything really to say to your security v. safety argument, because that's not what we were talking about and I have no desire to play the shifting goal posts game.
So I take it they've made the entire tablet out of the same material they make airplane black boxes out of? Because I've seen children destroy things that were made out of die-cast titanium without even realizing it, let alone feeling sorry about it.
Desktop publishing has used embedded, Turing-complete languages for decades -- TeX is Turing-complete, as is XSLT. It's the best and most compact way of specifying an abstract image for a generic rasterizing displays of arbitrary resolution.
No, it's not the best way; It has handed someone a root exploit. And it isn't the most compact way either -- because obviously it grew to such complexity that it became part of the kernel. These are design failures. If you cannot figure out a way to put pixels on the screen without getting yourself rooted, you're doing it wrong.
You're talking out of your ass making assumptions. Unix, wether it be Linux or BSD variation, is getting more and more popular.
Sir, my grandpa lived to the age of 94, and he smoked four packs a day. Does that mean if I smoke four packs a day, I have nothing to worry about health-wise? I suppose the cognitive error you've made is clearer now. You're giving personal experience too much weight. Please show me a survey saying that, today, Linux as a desktop platform is at least half as popular as Macintosh is. The short answer is, you won't find one. At least not one that's been done properly. Saying it's "getting more and more popular" is not the same as saying it's popular now. Monacles are getting more and more popular too (steampunk cosplay)... it doesn't mean I can wander out into the street and find top hats and monacles everywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
It shows how players need to be cautious of supporting a project based solely on the IP backing it.'"
Or as those of us in the old guard of the geek community call it... "The Lucas Effect".
My dad grew up dirt poor, as in the floor of his parents. By making decisions like the soda decision, he ended up flying us on private jets when he was 40.
Unlikely. Anyone who's made it big in finances will, if they're being honest with themselves, say that it came down to hard work, smart decisions, and luck. Your dad may have all of those qualities you admire, but that's not why he's rich. He's rich because he had those qualities and was in the right place at the right time when an opportunity presented. Some people win this lottery early. Some win it late in life. Very many though never get a winning ticket, and so for them, it doesn't matter.
The cognitive distortion you have just used is what is called the Just World Hypothesis.
I think it's rare that someone is driven to the streets due to a single fault as well. People often assume that homeless people are lazy and that's how they ended up on the street, and if they would just care enough to get off the street and get a job, they would be off in no time.
Numerous studies have been done and the overwelming majority are mentally ill or veterans. For some reason, watching people get blown apart by cluster bombs repeatedly has an effect on people's mental stability. It's the same thing with the prisons -- something like 86% of people in prison are suffering from severe mental illness.
But the Just World Hypothesis is what causes most people to reach a different conclusion than "We should help these people," -- and it's because if they admitted to themselves that they're very similar to these people and could experience the same misfortune, then it would also mean they are not, due to some intrinsic value in themselves, more deserving of success than the other guy is. It is, at its core, nothing more than a form of ego-protection. One that, unfortunately, has the side effect of condemning millions to destitute poverty, suicide, and illness.
Warning: Malcontent Anti-troll has detected an infection of type Forum/political.gen3. Would you like to clean or quarantine?
(click)
Excuse me, are you a liberal?
No. I'm Human.
It is bizarre to see you "defending" the little people.
Would you prefer I only defend the big people chasing them instead?
Aren't you the same ones who talk about flyover territory and hold a horror of people who aren't like yourselves?
Yes, I come in six-packs now.
How comfortable would you feel in a Section 8 housing project or a trailer park full of lower-class whites?
Depends on if it has air conditioning or not. It's pretty hot out right now.
Yeah, let's go ahead and shut the fuck up when we talk about the working class, because you hate them with a passion.
Dude, log off, you're drunk.
When the resonance cascade occurs, we'll be able to just zerg-rush the bastards with PhD-and-crowbar equipped theoretical physicists. Aliens won't stand a chance.
True, but I'd rather they discover practical interstellar travel instead of being thrown in a meat grinder and set to puree. But hey, to each evil overlord, their own.
Unless by "this country" you mean Switzerland, I fail to see the relevance of your rant.
Well, my rants have a marmalade quality. If you like them at all, you're gonna love them and there will be nothing better. If you don't though, I have some good news: There's plenty of alternatives.
And in fact my daughter and I have been having this same conversation lately. I'm actually happy she's a philosophy major.
Your daughter, probably the same age as my sister. I wrote this to her, and by extension, her generation, not long ago. I'm reposting it here as free to share, provided you properly attribute it to me;
What this says is that every rich person in this country is lying through their teeth about needing immigrants. We have highly trained scientists and engineers. The percentages of people who have the right attitude and mental attributes to succeed in this line of work has remained constant for as far back as we've had standardized testing results. There has been no shift of the basic personality types from one to another; Each generation has had the same proportions as the previous.
What it means is that nobody wants to invest. And scientific progress is an investment. It doesn't give you the immediate payoff of, say, a sequel to the Fast and the Furious (what are they up to now, seven of those infernal movies?). Science isn't formulaic. There's no spreadsheet that says "And after you spend $100 million developing a drug for cancer, you'll get this as a reward. Spend $200 million, and you'll get a free t-shirt too." Science growth mirrors our own; We grow in spurts, with long periods where nothing seems to be happening, periods where change is slow, and occasional paradigm shifts.
This isn't very amiable to the current "get rich quick" culture the Boomers are espousing as they approach their retirement. They're sucking every corner of society dry looking for a quick way to monetize, any incremental way to earn a profit without much risk. And science... well, it's too risky for them. They don't care about future generations, or a cure for cancer, or putting men on the moon again. They want botox and comfortable retirements.
This is society reaching back and giving people who love science the middle finger. It's saying "We don't need you, because your contributions aren't immediate. You live in the future and we're trying to recapture our past." So unless science comes up with a cure for aging, or a time machine, it's not getting funding. And that's really all there is to this story. It's about greed, pure and simple. Nobody gives a damn about tomorrow, because for the people holding all the cash... their tomorrows are running out.
I know you're being sarcastic here, and let me say -- I Approve. But, beneath sarcasm is usually a helping of truth and what you say is no different.
We laughed our collective asses off so hard we pissed ourselves when Gen Y tried Kony 2012 on Facebook and Youtube as a way to solve the problems of mass genocide in a third world country. Yup. They actually believed that copy-pasting a video clip and some crappy mspaint-edited bitmaps was going to lick that whole 'world peace' thing.
And now we're having "Code for America"... and suddenly everyone's acting all serious about it. The government doesn't need to be "reimagined". It needs to be rebuilt. It's got way too many defective components -- corrupt politicians, rich people who build massive computer networks for the sole purpose of targeted advertising (Obama and Romney both did. Obama succeeded; Romney imploded on the launch pad -- so I don't wanna hear anything about conservatives or liberals blah blah. They both did it. Deal.), we've got a bill under consideration in Congress where the only way anyone feels comfortable voting for it is if they're promised their vote will be anonymous until after they're dead, because it could affect the interests of the people who fund campaigns. I mean, guys, if this isn't a red flag, I don't know what is.
At all levels of government, there is stark and obvious signs of corruption -- your vote is largely meaningless. You're being asked to choose between Candidate A; "I am for those things which Candidate B is only slightly less enthusiastic about", and Candidate B; "I am in favor of things slightly different than that of Candidate A!" ... It's like choosing between coffee dispensed from the left pot, or coffee dispensed from the right pot. It's the same. Fucking. Coffee.
And everyone knows this. No amount of "reimagining" or "clouding the intarwebs" is going to fix this. In fact, the only way to achieve the ambitious goals these people think a few ipads will accomplish is mass armed insurrection. I'm talking bullets, bodies, military tanks crushing people's houses, fire, looting... all that shit. But peacefully talking about it over (wait for it)... the internet? Please.
I don't know how much clearer I can be on this point:
You can't solve people problems with technology.
You solve people problems with people.
The end.
ey are not making a choice. A thought pops into their head and
... and then what? If you asked them "Did you want to buy that soda?" will they say no? This is a choice. It may not be a good choice. It may not be a rational choice. But it is a choice. The article doesn't say they have no choice; I'm going to have to insist on a direct quote.
The 3 sodas a day example was not meant to be a tuition fund on its own - it is illustrating the lack of connection people make
I think you illustrated the lack of connection almost everyone has to statistics and probability. These are common cognitive distortions. Everybody has them. We value our own personal experience over direct observation. We are more afraid of what we don't know than what we do know. We are absolute and utter shit at estimating risk. This is the human condition, and I don't mean to single you out here; But being aware of these cognitive blindspots is the first step to managing them. I didn't say eliminate; I said manage. Everyone makes mistakes.
That said, you wrote what you wrote, and I'm holding you to it. You can apologize and say that wasn't what you meant, and that's fine -- but I'm not letting you change the goal posts here. You made an argument. It was a shit argument, and it died in place. Abandon it like a man and come up with a new one.
There is absolutely no basis for your conclusion. People can't think their way out...
Okay, I'm gonna stop you right here. You're moving the goal posts again. I said poor people deal with prejudice. That's it. That's all. And it may be an even bigger problem than the one under discussion. If you want to reply, reply to that statement directly. Provide factual and supporting evidence that poor people don't deal with prejudice, or at least that prejudice is less of a threat to them than this cognitive haze the researchers are asserting exists.
Consider that, and consider than soda is not the only extra people can do without if they really want to be financially better off. Consider the role of grants and scholarships, and do your math again. I'm sure you will realize it's not so flippant of a comment.
It remains a flippant comment. It may not be what you meant, but there it is, two lines up, staring you in the face and saying "I was a total dick back there, and someone called me on it." Man up to it. You can very probably come up with a better argument, possibly even one that is defensible, and supports your implicit belief that we shouldn't help poor people, with the followup being they need to help themselves first. I won't argue that belief. It's yours. Keep it. Honest. But I will argue with your faulty logic, cognitive mistakes, and apparent lack of empathy towards others whom you seem to implicitly feel are beneath you and morally inferior in some fashion.
I don't rag on them for being poor, but I know why they are and I know that they are also undeserving of handouts.
So you just don't tell them you hate them to their face. How noble of you.
They all seem to have a few things in common though: They have little incentive to pull in an income, and/or they really don't understand the concept of investment.
I don't know if you're aware of this, but public education was an idea that came from the working class. It was fought by the elite class for decades, despite popular support. Labor unions repeatedly shutting down factories and killing profits was what eventually created the federal mandate that public education be available in all states. After that, it was a fight to get blacks and minorities into schools, necessitating the national guard coming out to forcibly open the doors of schools in the South and allow them in. And now, higher education is being rapidly priced into extinction, and it is disproportionately affecting the working class.
So when you say "they don't really understand", consider the possibility that it's not because they can't understand, but lack access to resources that would allow them to.
One thing is clear though: Handing money to poor people isn't the answer. It never will be.
But handing money to CEOs "too big to fail" and banks so corrupt they put the entire economy in the drink for over a decade is? Why do you feel that it is more likely that hundreds of millions of Americans are lazy than that a few thousand of them are greedy?
They are unable to comprehend that by drinking water instead of three sodas a day, and putting the savings into a tax deferred education savings account, they can easily afford in-state tuition at a good university.
Or perhaps they comprehend it just fine, but they make a choice you disagree with: Like after working a 10 hour shift for $7.25 an hour, they would like to have at least a small creature comfort, so they buy a six pack of beer (or soda), instead of going home and enjoying tasteless and bland tap-water. The thing about being poor that everyone forgets is that everything that might relieve the boredom and stress of long hours for little reward costs something. It's easy to say "I'll save a few dollars a day" when you've got a fat paycheck -- but when you have nothing and you're looking to those couple of dollars leftover in your wallet, it's hard to say "You don't exist, go away". But psychology aside, there's still the troubling issue of your really, really bad math skills.
Let's analyze your example of "three sodas a day". For the 2012-2013 year, tuition costs for state residents at a community college averaged $8,655 across the country. We're going to ignore cost of living adjustments, peripheral expenses like books, lost wages, and everything else. We're going to take just that tuition number and that will be the cost of "easily afford" at a "good university".
The cost of a 'soda', which to give you the best case scenario, will be for one of the plastic 16 oz variety, which averages about $1.50 right now. So we're going to go with $4.50 per day being blown on soda. In 1,923 days -- about 5.25 years worth of not drinking soda per year of tuition.
Now, given the rate of inflation combined with the rate that tuition has been rising, it's safe to say that number will be higher. And when you consider that tuition is only perhaps 2/3rds of the fees you'll be paying... that number goes up even more.
Bottom line here is that your assertion that saving the equivalent of three sodas a day ($4.50) can buy someone a college education is possible, but absurd. You would spend half your working life waiting. In reality, you're going to have to save more to make it happen. Working a minimum wage job, you're only going to be pulling in about $36 a day (at best). Odds are good you'll be clearing even less.
You're asking someone for whom three sodas a day accounts for about 1/8th of their total personal income to save even more to make this do-able. You'd have to at least double, and probably triple, the savings rate, to get into college within a reasonable timeframe.
Frankly, when you take rent, utilities, and everything else into consideration... a minimum wage job simply cannot sustain that level of investment. Not unless you want to starve, rack up debt elsewhere (like late fees, bank overdraft fees, etc.) -- which will happen anyway when you're living paycheck by paycheck.
The bottom line here is that what these scientists is saying has nothing to do with the conclusions you and many others are reaching: Which is that you can "think" your way out of poverty, or that the problem can be resolved by simple mathematical ability. It is much bigger than that. All this study does is show that when financial resources become severely constrained, people are poor judges of how to best utilize those limited resources.
It provides no guidance on a viable strategy for emerging from that environment, and your flippant advice about simply not drinking soda is symptomatic of another, perhaps larger problem, that poor people face: Prejudice.
ou really need to go into a horribly lit phone store, fight past its clawing denizens and look at what the low end of the Android sales REALLY represent...
As opposed to standing outside a trendy Apple store, looking at the people with their shiny little white box they just purchased for the sum of a mere month's wages, produced by a chinese factory with suicide nets along the perimeter because too many people were throwing themselves off the balconies due to low wages and 18 hour work days?
You know, I'd gladly take a "horribly lit phone store" and "clawing denizens" over staying awake at night wondering if I was buying the products of a plantation owner.
There is ample evidence, historically, and in every country that has ever existed for any length of time, that the government's expansion of police powers will continue until the people fight back. When the cost of consolidating power exceeds the cost of political activism, that is where the balance lays.
In today's "internet culture", with instant gratification and a certain detachment from one's peers, there is no real political activism occurring in industrialized countries that are economically stable. This has meant a rapid expansion of police powers in virtually every one of the top 20 countries by GDP.
Bluntly, the internet may give us access to the knowledge of what's going on anywhere on Earth, our collective knowledge, and does it all nearly instantaniously, but all of this information has blunted our resolve. It has given rise to the idea that technical solutions to social problems are not only viable, but preferred. It has substituted direct social interaction for abstract social interaction.
It could be argued that the internet itself is the proximate cause of the current state of affairs; It has made people complacent and politically impotent.
The problem is that you're using egrep in the first place. Here's the thing -- the overwhelming majority of your cycles are getting sucked loading, initializing, executing, then unloading, that thread. It's not that using regular expressions is processor-intensive... it's that repeatedly launching the same executable is.
Use something that can load once, read in the patterns, check all the e-mails that are queued, sort them, then exit. Your execution time will go from 15 seconds to 150 milliseconds.
Or is this just one more made up "fact" about another age of history and how superior we are today?
First, who said we're any better today than back then? We're still killing people for cross-dressing right now, just like we were back then. If you can be killed just for how you dress, what makes you think the (heretical) idea that we came from Mars instead of from God is any less worthy of a human BBQ in the public square?
You just keep claiming that, while the iPhone continues to top carrier sales charts even with old models...
Citation needed. I showed you mine, now you show me yours.
If it makes you happy to pretend, it's good that you have found peace of some kind in a world that makes no sense to you.
NOBODY expects the iPhone Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise...surprise and fear...fear and surprise.... Our two weapons are fear and surprise...and ruthless efficiency.... Our *three* weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency...and an almost fanatical devotion to the iPope.... Our *four*...no... *Amongst* our weapons.... Amongst our weaponry...are such elements as fear, surprise.... (muttering) I'll come in again.
Well, with their marketshare falling like a rock (Achievement unlocked: Apple Fanboy hate. -5 Karma, +5 reputation) they gotta do something -- Android is now passing 70% and continuing to climb while Apple dropped to about 15% and has been losing about 1% a month on average for the past two quarters (Achievement unlocked: Use of facts on the internet. +2 karma, -1 reputation). Of course, only on slashdot would the phrase "up to" cause people to cream their pants with excitement that the great and noble Apple (Achievement unlocked: Sarcasm! -1 karma, +7 reputation to shop owners in town GenX) was going to give them 'free' upgrades. It'll be just like going to a used car dealer and getting a "great deal" on your trade-in -- they give you x amount of dollars now, knowing that the buy-in (aka your loan APR) will offset it by x plus a percentage, so they can afford to be generous... just keep paying the monthly 'rental' fee (Achivement unlocked: Car analogy! +2 karma, +1 reputation).
So it's a slow news day wherever this was written. It seems they pull this recycled article out of the garbage somewhere every couple months. Yes, we "might" be from Mars. That isn't news. I think I saw a special on it on TV in 1998.
Actually, the "we came from Mars" thing has been around since the 1600s, ever since we observed there were other planets and imagined life on them. Of course, back then, we burned people at the stake for such ideas... whereas today it's just a piece of pleasant fiction written for a hot summer day.
I guess that's progress.
All of these "conditions" are arbitrary and open to whatever interpretation the feds feel like today.
Well, Obama has about as much credibility here as his detractors, which is to say, not much. I lost the last of my respect when he issued a memo saying he'd only use drones in the event of an imminent danger to the country. He then went on to redefine imminent in geological terms, and danger as pretty much whatever the Administration thought it was. Your point here is very valid -- what the government says anymore has as much value as a Zimbabwe dollar. What it does, however, can be judged.
All the people who were convicted under laws the administration nows says are outmodded are still in jail. Local police continue to arrest people for simple possession. The DEA continues to raid and burn dispensaries in these states, and abduct their owners (and sometimes patients). Their behavior has changed not at all.
So, at least in the opinion of this author, the federal government will continue to act in this fashion, until such time as enough states pass laws about this that it becomes tenable to disband the DEA by means of an amendment to the Constitution. Congress will not back down; Even if tomorrow it was revealed that a new discovery means that we could synthesize the cure for cancer from marijuana, these assholes would continue breaking down people's doors and shooting them... though probably then for violating some company's patent. -_-
As it turns out, an average iOS user is worth roughly 4-5x more than an average Android user, at least in terms of what they're willing to spend on apps, which admittedly isn't the worth that we're talking about in this context, but is about the closest indication we can get to the relative worths of users on the different platforms, absent of having data on what the street value is for a compromised device of each variety.
Actually, this doesn't say anything except that IOS users are more willing to pay for apps -- this may be due to the smaller number of free alternatives and the fact that the IOS marketplace is controlled entirely by Apple, and you have to spend a not inconsiderable amount of money getting licensed and approved so you can submit apps to Apple. Android has no such restrictions. Since it costs less to develop for Android, it makes sense that the overall price would be lower -- afterall, you aren't by the mere act of creating an app indebting yourself and now need to make that money back just to break even.
It's also worth pointing out that you've made the false assumption that iOS has to offer a value that's equal to or greater than Android's before iOS would be a logical target, completely dismissing the fact that
Completely dismissing the fact that... and then you put up a string of assumptions with no citations? Please, by all means, show me the supporting documentation. At least you tried with the first link. It was totally off-topic and irrelevant, but I can admire the attempt. But it seemed like right after that, you gave up wanting to prove any of your other points, perhaps thinking that if you included a single link, you'd get up-modded and nobody would more closely analyze your faulty logic.
Android is designed to be configurable and modifiable by blah blah blah blah blah... more blah, some blah, extra blah to go with the blah
Again, blowing smoke in the hopes of covering up the original point: Which is that we're discussing what is manifest in reality, what is happening today, not the coulda, woulda, shoulda, that your post goes into great detail to construct. It's a wonderful hypothetical model, and maybe if this were a competition for best fictional work by an internet pundit, you'd win an award. But this is economics.
Show me the money. The end.
Of course, that doesn't excuse a company to fail at securing their products, just because no one has attacked them yet, but by all indications, the "security through obscurity" argument doesn't hold much water in this case, given that iPhone users are consistently shown to be disproportionately profitable to target and that they continue to sell extremely well overall (even the report you linked cites the fact that this is an expected low as part of the regular product cycle for the line and that they expect the iPhone to recapture its lost market share with the launch of the new iPhone this quarter).
Let's say that iphone owners are worth $30,000 each, and Android users are worth only $10,000. If Android users are 4.7x more numerous than iphone users... then Android users are the logical target, if you can only target one group or the other. Now, who really thinks iphone users have a net worth three times that of Android users? Android users, by the way, are 4.7x more numerous.
The rest of your argument is irrelevant. I don't have anything really to say to your security v. safety argument, because that's not what we were talking about and I have no desire to play the shifting goal posts game.
So I take it they've made the entire tablet out of the same material they make airplane black boxes out of? Because I've seen children destroy things that were made out of die-cast titanium without even realizing it, let alone feeling sorry about it.
Desktop publishing has used embedded, Turing-complete languages for decades -- TeX is Turing-complete, as is XSLT. It's the best and most compact way of specifying an abstract image for a generic rasterizing displays of arbitrary resolution.
No, it's not the best way; It has handed someone a root exploit. And it isn't the most compact way either -- because obviously it grew to such complexity that it became part of the kernel. These are design failures. If you cannot figure out a way to put pixels on the screen without getting yourself rooted, you're doing it wrong.
You're talking out of your ass making assumptions. Unix, wether it be Linux or BSD variation, is getting more and more popular.
Sir, my grandpa lived to the age of 94, and he smoked four packs a day. Does that mean if I smoke four packs a day, I have nothing to worry about health-wise? I suppose the cognitive error you've made is clearer now. You're giving personal experience too much weight. Please show me a survey saying that, today, Linux as a desktop platform is at least half as popular as Macintosh is. The short answer is, you won't find one. At least not one that's been done properly. Saying it's "getting more and more popular" is not the same as saying it's popular now. Monacles are getting more and more popular too (steampunk cosplay)... it doesn't mean I can wander out into the street and find top hats and monacles everywhere.