It's either critical to national security or it isn't. In the former case why the hell are we pissing it away on trivial shit ranging from drug smuggling to murder?
I would guess if you talked to DEA/FBI/CIA, they would tell you that drug running and financial crimes are prime funding for terrorism and that the "real" reason they're so zealous about going after it is not because they give a shit about somebody getting high but that it allows them to gather intel and/or weaken terrorist organizations by disrupting their funding.
I know, I know, it begs the question why drugs remain illegal if legalization would lower prices, greatly reduce the money black market producers make, etc. But this is where the politicians step in and make speeches about thinking of the children, moral dangers, etc.
And this of course is where I put my tinfoil hat on and at least sort of believe that keeping drugs illegal is really about maintaining a justification for a surveillance regime that is orthogonal to drug enforcement. At the street cop level its about a reason to stop and frisk anyone, at the Federal level its about a reason to do data harvesting and mass surveillance.
As a parent of a 4th grade boy I would say the idea of a pro-boy bias is absolutely laughable.
In elementary school, girls are a teacher's dream -- polite, hard-working, focused. Boys are their nightmare -- boisterous, easily distracted, physically busy and fidgety.
When you walk through the halls and see the student work on the walls, the girls' writing is neat, their sentences well-structured and complete and if there's an artwork component, it's also very neat, colorful, etc. The boys work (with a small handful of exceptions) is almost always the opposite of this.
About the only thing that could justify a "pro-boy" bias would be that boys' end up monopolizing teacher time because they're like herding cats and the girls generally don't need as much attention to get the expected results. But calling this "bias" isn't at all accurate as it implies the teachers have an agenda in favor of boys rather then needing to give them some extra attention because otherwise they won't learn at all.
Look at Colorado. Legalized marijuana and the Mexican gangs are moving in to supply cheaper product.
I've heard the prices at Colorado pot stores are high (or maybe less cheap than some predicted), but they also (at least according to the media) are doing great business.
I don't doubt that Mexican gangs could smuggle in field-grown average quality pot, but who would bother with street dealers when you could walk into a retail store and buy much better product without any risk?
I don't see the retail operators risking their livelihoods supplying themselves this way, and at least the way it's portrayed in the media many of them have their own grow operations so they can offer their own varieties, ensure a stable supply, etc.
It's complex, sure, but how complex is it for the vast majority of taxpayers? Most people have pretty standardized and well-understood income sources and deductions.
Before my wife started working a lot of free-lance work, I used to do our taxes by hand (two incomes, two small stock dividends, mortgage, childcare expenses) and one year they said I overpaid and refunded something in the neighborhood of $25, every other year I was dead on and that was just from following the forms and IRS instructions.
I see no reason why the IRS couldn't handle that pretty easily and accurately. I can understand them not trying to automate truly complex investment vehicles or business taxes, but I'd also wager that people worried about those kinds of taxes would use a professional preparer anyway.
BMWs are expensive, BMW drivers tend to be affluent, affluent people can afford good insurance, replacing a stolen car is expensive, insurance companies will charge a higher premium on easily stolen models, affluent people might choose other cars because of high premiums and reduced sales and bad PR will force BMW to improve their security.
In theory, at least, the market response to easily stolen cars puts pressure on the carmaker to improve security.
It really baffles me why the IRS doesn't have a web form for filing taxes. They have all the filed data on what you made. The only explanation that makes any sense is lobbying pressure from the tax filing industry.
I think kids often don't really know what they like. My son has played a variety of sports -- soccer, baseball, basketball and football. Football he only played one season and halfway through that season he complained a lot -- was kind of afraid of the contact and it was "boring" (new kids without experience usually just play line positions, not ball-handling positions).
Last fall, soccer and football seasons overlapped and he didn't know what to do. He was leaning towards football but we had to remind him that soccer offered more playing opportunity and more involvement in the game, there wasn't serious contact, and even the equipment was less burdensome.
Yet after soccer season was over (which he never complained about), he said he was "only" interested in football, mostly because he had been playing a lot of it on the playground and caught up in NFL hype when that season got underway (oddly, neither my wife or I could give a shit about the NFL, although she will turn on the games as background noise during the season).
He may be an "expert" in what he wants, but I'm not sure he even really knows what he wants or understands the implications. If he plays football again it will be in an older age bracket (bigger players, more contact) and his lack of organized experience will mean relegation to non-ball handling positions like lineman. Soccer really is the more rational choice for him.
Anyway, I think parents often do have insights into what we "should" like in ways we're blinded to or trick ourselves into not believing.
About 20 years ago, the local newspaper made a big deal about changes to its journalism regarding crimes. They were no longer going to include the race of people suspected or accused of crimes. The purpose of this was social engineering -- they believed that reporting racial descriptions was just reinforcing existing stereotypes, mostly about African Americans.
Around the same time, there was a string of attacks on people in parks by young men riding around in cars with baseball bats. They would find a victim, jump out of the car and beat them with bats and then drive away. A victim of one of the early attacks had a very good description of the perpetrators but the newspaper rendered it basically useless because they eliminated most of the race-indicating descriptions. As it turns out, the perpetrators were black and there were 6-7 attacks before they got caught.
I know a couple of people who are journalists and I think they do believe they have to be responsible journalists and I think some of this starts to dovetail with political ideals.
But then again, there are douche bag customers, too, who refuse to update and insist on running grossly outdated software. Usually it has nothing to do with grizzled, old-school IT vets and their deep regard for mainframe era stability but super douchy business owners who just want to cash checks.
I *just* did a project for a customer like that. They built a brand-new infrastructure (which is quite good in terms of actual hardware) so they could install "new" 2003 r2 x86 servers and run an old x86 version of Metaframe and their ancient x86 ERP software the vendor barely supports.
There was some loose talk about new ERP software requiring some workflow changes, but it kind of seemed to boil down to just not wanting to spend any money.
I seem to a recall a documentary or article discussing the biological drive in reproduction that referred to a study that did a cross-cultural analysis of physical features that each culture valued. IIRC, they found that there were certain physical traits like waist-hip ratio that were independent of any culture preferences.
OT: When my wife were in Fiji 15 years ago, we took what amounted to a water version of a bus (stopped at many islands) in order to get to a small resort island we were staying at for the day.
On this boat, we were one of the few Caucasians on the boat and my wife was the only female Caucasian. We were standing on the deck of the boat when an Asian woman from a group of women (all Chinese, I think) approached my wife with a camera making the sort of universal "will you take a picture of us" hand gestures. My wife smiled, said yes, and went to take the camera.
The woman laughed and we figured out after a second that she wanted a picture WITH my wife. She handed ME the camera and I proceeded to take an individual photo of my wife with each of the Asian women in the group and several different group photos. (They didn't want my photo..)
My wife is about 5'10 (she had at least 3 inches on all of them, some even more) and had medium length blonde hair. Since none of the Asian women spoke any English we assumed that they may never have actually seen a tall, young blonde Caucasian woman before except in media and she was so novel to them it was kind of a status symbol for them to have a picture with a tall blonde white woman. I assume it was a status thing to have their picture taken, because all of them posed quite seriously, most of them putting their arm around my wife like she was an old friend.
And if you're lucky, the people you deal with are all seasoned veterans with the version you want support on, know all the fixes and troubleshooting info.
If you're not lucky, the people providing support for your version are clueless newbies who've never seen your version in active production and are relying on the internal KB and decision trees they stumbled across on an old file server.
And you could blame the vendor for being douche bags and that might be true, but then again, maybe the seasoned veterans want to work on the current release or need to be fed new and interesting stuff in order for the vendor to keep anyone competent in their support department. Which then makes the vendor non-douchy at least to some of their employees while still being frustrating to their customers.
My understanding is that non-Safari browsers as of iOS 8 now get to use JIT for Javascript. Chrome specifically doesn't use this feature still for some reason.
I don't notice a meaningful difference between Safari and Mercury on an iPhone 6+.
My own personal conspiracy theory is the lack of ad blocking in Safari isn't about technology or Apple's walled garden security approach but about making nice with "content providers" and specifically trying to be advertiser friendly, either because there's somehow more money it for Apple or as some kind of gimme to encourage sites to be mobile Safari friendly knowing that an advertising stream will be there to justify the expense.
Corn's high carbon cost must be industrial agriculture. In theory, planting a row of corn in my backyard with a hoe and raising it organically should actually be "green" since I'm planting a plant.
The illegality argument only slightly holds water in that in a civil society there is a general need of a respect for the rule of law. Flagrant violations of the law are no more ethical for Uber than they are for Goldman Sachs.
But the primary reason it's contrived is that, as an argument, it doesn't reflect the qualitative reason it's illegal. Further, in a democratic republic, "legality" is entirely a political construct -- it's not an absolute measure of the ethics involved. Things can be illegal and ethical as well as legal but unethical.
Many laws around for-hire transportation aren't reflections of ethics at all, but are actually economic frameworks designed to protect and preserve a specific means of economic organization for the benefit of those in the for-hire transportation business (revenue and competition) and those empowered to regulate them (power and influence).
Most of the criticism of Uber's illegality isn't a reflection of the service itself but the extent that it violates the laws that protect the transportation cartels and their regulators.
And of course the irony of global warming and nutrition is that it will turn out that the foods that are healthiest are the ones that are that, at least as modern agriculture is practiced, have the highest carbon cost.
I wonder if part of the answer will become a lot more urban animal agriculture, and not just chickens, but people keeping a cow or some goats in the back yard to at least eliminate the delivery carbon costs. Feed would still be a problem as I doubt even generous suburban lots could produced enough feedstock.
But then maybe country clubs will turn into livestock clubs -- you won't join to play golf, you'll join to keep your livestock fed.
That's what this was. I think at the end of the day, Christie is too big-city, East Coast and Joisey to have any chance at GOP run for president, so he takes the opportunities where he can to somehow try to make himself more appealing to the so-called GOP base, probably the "matter of faith" lunatics who don't want gummint "chemicals" given to their kids against their wishes.
And he did it with the worst possible issue. Not vaccinating children is about as libertarian as tellng your children to go play in freeway traffic. Not only does he come down very wrong on the issue, he comes out making himself look like a patsy to the worst possible flavor of the Republican base and not like the "sensible" and "non-partisan" Republican he'd like to style himself as.
I'm pretty sure some of my vinyl has fewer than five plays on it. It was so fragile and useless anywhere that I almost always made a cassette to actually listen to it.
This worked sort of to my advantage during a bargain hunting phase when CDs became the norm. It became trivial to buy "older" music on vinyl for pennies that had been treated just as lovingly as my vinyl.
one the British learned when their colonies rose up and demanded independence.
While I generally agree with your thesis that an armed civilian population poses challenges to organized military force, especially a foreign occupying force, I don't know that it has much to do with the collapse of the British empire.
I think British largely ran out of resources to prop up their empire. Rhodesia held on as a colonial state for a decade without British support -- with British support, Rhodesia might still be a colony. South Africa was always marginal in terms of wholly British rule but nevertheless maintained a more or less colonial government for decades in spite of a largely pariah state status.
Which leaves the government in a challenging position. It can back down and work toward a peaceful resolution that doesn't risk bloodshed, it can tell its agents to use whatever force is necessary to do their job and have huge shootouts broadcast live on CNN, or it can send in Apache gunships to kill everyone who opposes them live on CNN.
I think an armed citizenry definitely helps, but the key seems be a lack of will and a lack of resources to fight total war. When the media isn't a factor, suppressing a local population through brute force and total warfare seems viable historically. The Russians had some real problems with the Chechens, but ultimately managed to maintain control. Their larger problems were poor training and equipment, but ultimately you could bomb them into the stone age, and they did.
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I think ditching Michelle Obama's carb-loaded healthy diet would help.
we still have recess.
It's either critical to national security or it isn't. In the former case why the hell are we pissing it away on trivial shit ranging from drug smuggling to murder?
I would guess if you talked to DEA/FBI/CIA, they would tell you that drug running and financial crimes are prime funding for terrorism and that the "real" reason they're so zealous about going after it is not because they give a shit about somebody getting high but that it allows them to gather intel and/or weaken terrorist organizations by disrupting their funding.
I know, I know, it begs the question why drugs remain illegal if legalization would lower prices, greatly reduce the money black market producers make, etc. But this is where the politicians step in and make speeches about thinking of the children, moral dangers, etc.
And this of course is where I put my tinfoil hat on and at least sort of believe that keeping drugs illegal is really about maintaining a justification for a surveillance regime that is orthogonal to drug enforcement. At the street cop level its about a reason to stop and frisk anyone, at the Federal level its about a reason to do data harvesting and mass surveillance.
Pro-boy bias?
As a parent of a 4th grade boy I would say the idea of a pro-boy bias is absolutely laughable.
In elementary school, girls are a teacher's dream -- polite, hard-working, focused. Boys are their nightmare -- boisterous, easily distracted, physically busy and fidgety.
When you walk through the halls and see the student work on the walls, the girls' writing is neat, their sentences well-structured and complete and if there's an artwork component, it's also very neat, colorful, etc. The boys work (with a small handful of exceptions) is almost always the opposite of this.
About the only thing that could justify a "pro-boy" bias would be that boys' end up monopolizing teacher time because they're like herding cats and the girls generally don't need as much attention to get the expected results. But calling this "bias" isn't at all accurate as it implies the teachers have an agenda in favor of boys rather then needing to give them some extra attention because otherwise they won't learn at all.
Look at Colorado. Legalized marijuana and the Mexican gangs are moving in to supply cheaper product.
I've heard the prices at Colorado pot stores are high (or maybe less cheap than some predicted), but they also (at least according to the media) are doing great business.
I don't doubt that Mexican gangs could smuggle in field-grown average quality pot, but who would bother with street dealers when you could walk into a retail store and buy much better product without any risk?
I don't see the retail operators risking their livelihoods supplying themselves this way, and at least the way it's portrayed in the media many of them have their own grow operations so they can offer their own varieties, ensure a stable supply, etc.
It's complex, sure, but how complex is it for the vast majority of taxpayers? Most people have pretty standardized and well-understood income sources and deductions.
Before my wife started working a lot of free-lance work, I used to do our taxes by hand (two incomes, two small stock dividends, mortgage, childcare expenses) and one year they said I overpaid and refunded something in the neighborhood of $25, every other year I was dead on and that was just from following the forms and IRS instructions.
I see no reason why the IRS couldn't handle that pretty easily and accurately. I can understand them not trying to automate truly complex investment vehicles or business taxes, but I'd also wager that people worried about those kinds of taxes would use a professional preparer anyway.
BMWs are expensive, BMW drivers tend to be affluent, affluent people can afford good insurance, replacing a stolen car is expensive, insurance companies will charge a higher premium on easily stolen models, affluent people might choose other cars because of high premiums and reduced sales and bad PR will force BMW to improve their security.
In theory, at least, the market response to easily stolen cars puts pressure on the carmaker to improve security.
It really baffles me why the IRS doesn't have a web form for filing taxes. They have all the filed data on what you made. The only explanation that makes any sense is lobbying pressure from the tax filing industry.
Why should they expect certainty? Certainties in economics don't exist except when you're a monopolist getting rents.
I think kids often don't really know what they like. My son has played a variety of sports -- soccer, baseball, basketball and football. Football he only played one season and halfway through that season he complained a lot -- was kind of afraid of the contact and it was "boring" (new kids without experience usually just play line positions, not ball-handling positions).
Last fall, soccer and football seasons overlapped and he didn't know what to do. He was leaning towards football but we had to remind him that soccer offered more playing opportunity and more involvement in the game, there wasn't serious contact, and even the equipment was less burdensome.
Yet after soccer season was over (which he never complained about), he said he was "only" interested in football, mostly because he had been playing a lot of it on the playground and caught up in NFL hype when that season got underway (oddly, neither my wife or I could give a shit about the NFL, although she will turn on the games as background noise during the season).
He may be an "expert" in what he wants, but I'm not sure he even really knows what he wants or understands the implications. If he plays football again it will be in an older age bracket (bigger players, more contact) and his lack of organized experience will mean relegation to non-ball handling positions like lineman. Soccer really is the more rational choice for him.
Anyway, I think parents often do have insights into what we "should" like in ways we're blinded to or trick ourselves into not believing.
About 20 years ago, the local newspaper made a big deal about changes to its journalism regarding crimes. They were no longer going to include the race of people suspected or accused of crimes. The purpose of this was social engineering -- they believed that reporting racial descriptions was just reinforcing existing stereotypes, mostly about African Americans.
Around the same time, there was a string of attacks on people in parks by young men riding around in cars with baseball bats. They would find a victim, jump out of the car and beat them with bats and then drive away. A victim of one of the early attacks had a very good description of the perpetrators but the newspaper rendered it basically useless because they eliminated most of the race-indicating descriptions. As it turns out, the perpetrators were black and there were 6-7 attacks before they got caught.
I know a couple of people who are journalists and I think they do believe they have to be responsible journalists and I think some of this starts to dovetail with political ideals.
And it must be where wire hangers come from.
I wonder how many young starlets were convinced they would be up-and-coming if they would get with a senator and be up-and-cumming?
They're not saying this in terms of wide-open streaming of back catalogs and less obsession with DRM.
But then again, there are douche bag customers, too, who refuse to update and insist on running grossly outdated software. Usually it has nothing to do with grizzled, old-school IT vets and their deep regard for mainframe era stability but super douchy business owners who just want to cash checks.
I *just* did a project for a customer like that. They built a brand-new infrastructure (which is quite good in terms of actual hardware) so they could install "new" 2003 r2 x86 servers and run an old x86 version of Metaframe and their ancient x86 ERP software the vendor barely supports.
There was some loose talk about new ERP software requiring some workflow changes, but it kind of seemed to boil down to just not wanting to spend any money.
I seem to a recall a documentary or article discussing the biological drive in reproduction that referred to a study that did a cross-cultural analysis of physical features that each culture valued. IIRC, they found that there were certain physical traits like waist-hip ratio that were independent of any culture preferences.
OT: When my wife were in Fiji 15 years ago, we took what amounted to a water version of a bus (stopped at many islands) in order to get to a small resort island we were staying at for the day.
On this boat, we were one of the few Caucasians on the boat and my wife was the only female Caucasian. We were standing on the deck of the boat when an Asian woman from a group of women (all Chinese, I think) approached my wife with a camera making the sort of universal "will you take a picture of us" hand gestures. My wife smiled, said yes, and went to take the camera.
The woman laughed and we figured out after a second that she wanted a picture WITH my wife. She handed ME the camera and I proceeded to take an individual photo of my wife with each of the Asian women in the group and several different group photos. (They didn't want my photo..)
My wife is about 5'10 (she had at least 3 inches on all of them, some even more) and had medium length blonde hair. Since none of the Asian women spoke any English we assumed that they may never have actually seen a tall, young blonde Caucasian woman before except in media and she was so novel to them it was kind of a status symbol for them to have a picture with a tall blonde white woman. I assume it was a status thing to have their picture taken, because all of them posed quite seriously, most of them putting their arm around my wife like she was an old friend.
And if you're lucky, the people you deal with are all seasoned veterans with the version you want support on, know all the fixes and troubleshooting info.
If you're not lucky, the people providing support for your version are clueless newbies who've never seen your version in active production and are relying on the internal KB and decision trees they stumbled across on an old file server.
And you could blame the vendor for being douche bags and that might be true, but then again, maybe the seasoned veterans want to work on the current release or need to be fed new and interesting stuff in order for the vendor to keep anyone competent in their support department. Which then makes the vendor non-douchy at least to some of their employees while still being frustrating to their customers.
My understanding is that non-Safari browsers as of iOS 8 now get to use JIT for Javascript. Chrome specifically doesn't use this feature still for some reason.
I don't notice a meaningful difference between Safari and Mercury on an iPhone 6+.
My own personal conspiracy theory is the lack of ad blocking in Safari isn't about technology or Apple's walled garden security approach but about making nice with "content providers" and specifically trying to be advertiser friendly, either because there's somehow more money it for Apple or as some kind of gimme to encourage sites to be mobile Safari friendly knowing that an advertising stream will be there to justify the expense.
...our new three-headed overlords.
This is what I was going to say. I'm told there's never enough people, although maybe this is a "never enough people for what we want to pay" problem.
Corn's high carbon cost must be industrial agriculture. In theory, planting a row of corn in my backyard with a hoe and raising it organically should actually be "green" since I'm planting a plant.
The illegality argument only slightly holds water in that in a civil society there is a general need of a respect for the rule of law. Flagrant violations of the law are no more ethical for Uber than they are for Goldman Sachs.
But the primary reason it's contrived is that, as an argument, it doesn't reflect the qualitative reason it's illegal. Further, in a democratic republic, "legality" is entirely a political construct -- it's not an absolute measure of the ethics involved. Things can be illegal and ethical as well as legal but unethical.
Many laws around for-hire transportation aren't reflections of ethics at all, but are actually economic frameworks designed to protect and preserve a specific means of economic organization for the benefit of those in the for-hire transportation business (revenue and competition) and those empowered to regulate them (power and influence).
Most of the criticism of Uber's illegality isn't a reflection of the service itself but the extent that it violates the laws that protect the transportation cartels and their regulators.
And of course the irony of global warming and nutrition is that it will turn out that the foods that are healthiest are the ones that are that, at least as modern agriculture is practiced, have the highest carbon cost.
I wonder if part of the answer will become a lot more urban animal agriculture, and not just chickens, but people keeping a cow or some goats in the back yard to at least eliminate the delivery carbon costs. Feed would still be a problem as I doubt even generous suburban lots could produced enough feedstock.
But then maybe country clubs will turn into livestock clubs -- you won't join to play golf, you'll join to keep your livestock fed.
That's what this was. I think at the end of the day, Christie is too big-city, East Coast and Joisey to have any chance at GOP run for president, so he takes the opportunities where he can to somehow try to make himself more appealing to the so-called GOP base, probably the "matter of faith" lunatics who don't want gummint "chemicals" given to their kids against their wishes.
And he did it with the worst possible issue. Not vaccinating children is about as libertarian as tellng your children to go play in freeway traffic. Not only does he come down very wrong on the issue, he comes out making himself look like a patsy to the worst possible flavor of the Republican base and not like the "sensible" and "non-partisan" Republican he'd like to style himself as.
I'm pretty sure some of my vinyl has fewer than five plays on it. It was so fragile and useless anywhere that I almost always made a cassette to actually listen to it.
This worked sort of to my advantage during a bargain hunting phase when CDs became the norm. It became trivial to buy "older" music on vinyl for pennies that had been treated just as lovingly as my vinyl.
one the British learned when their colonies rose up and demanded independence.
While I generally agree with your thesis that an armed civilian population poses challenges to organized military force, especially a foreign occupying force, I don't know that it has much to do with the collapse of the British empire.
I think British largely ran out of resources to prop up their empire. Rhodesia held on as a colonial state for a decade without British support -- with British support, Rhodesia might still be a colony. South Africa was always marginal in terms of wholly British rule but nevertheless maintained a more or less colonial government for decades in spite of a largely pariah state status.
Which leaves the government in a challenging position. It can back down and work toward a peaceful resolution that doesn't risk bloodshed, it can tell its agents to use whatever force is necessary to do their job and have huge shootouts broadcast live on CNN, or it can send in Apache gunships to kill everyone who opposes them live on CNN.
I think an armed citizenry definitely helps, but the key seems be a lack of will and a lack of resources to fight total war. When the media isn't a factor, suppressing a local population through brute force and total warfare seems viable historically. The Russians had some real problems with the Chechens, but ultimately managed to maintain control. Their larger problems were poor training and equipment, but ultimately you could bomb them into the stone age, and they did.