Parent is attempting to state carefully parsed statistical structures to counter widely available statistics that show that Blacks commit crimes at a rate greater than their proportion in the population. The goal is to refuse these statistics and to demonstrate that the criminal justice system is inherently biased and that this bias actually is the primary explanation for statistics which show Blacks committing crimes at a rate greater than their proportion of the population.
Personally, I'm willing to accept the idea that there is a greater level of criminality among Black populations but that it's a complex mix of sociological problems and economic distress that drives it, not race or racism. I think the criminal justice system is hard on anybody who isn't able to afford expensive legal representation.
I have three 1680x1050 displays now (I built my own desk 15 years ago to accommodate 2x21" glass tubes) so I have the room for it.
But I did two simple scale drawings -- one of pixel resolution and one of physical dimensions.
The good -- a single 3840x2160 panel at 1:1 scaling is 5x the display real estate of a single 1600x1050 display (more like 4x usable 1680x1050 displays). I could literally dump my entire multi-monitor setup for the 40" Mango display and gain the equivalent of a 4th display.
The bad is I would worry the additional height would be a bit of an egonomic nightmare. My existing displays are 4" above the desktop. The Mongo stand appears to be lower than mine, but not much more than 2", which would leave the top edge of the display area nearly 7" taller than my existing display.
The only other thing I can think of that might be an issue is how retarded "full" screen is and Windows clunky display for virtually splitting large screens. I use DisplayFusion now and it can do virtual window splits (so that maximizing a window in a region treats it as if it was a display the size of a region), but it only really works for window management -- watching a video "full" screen takes over the whole screen.
I don't know about you, but most of the day the only power used here is what's required to keep the fridge cold and the occasional running of the furnace blower.
At night when all the residents are home is when peak power is used -- fridge takes more power because it gets opened a bunch, lots of lights on (most are LED now, but I can't stop the others from leaving every. damn. light. on), probably 2 TVs turned on, computers running, etc.
Now the next question, do we perceive people as greedy and dishonest because they actually are, or because the level of greed and dishonesty is so high we simply assume everyone has this quality?
I'm curious whether people naturally game the system because people are inherently greedy and dishonest, or whether they're greedy and dishonest because the system itself appears rigged and gamed from the top down and they're only adapting to a broken system.
I can totally see a young person on a limited budget for whom "using the Internet" amounts to social media sites, clickbait news sites, and cat videos not bothering with any kind of wired broadband.
For them, there's nothing wired broadband gives them that they're not getting on their phone or tablet or tethered to their laptop.
Then there's living arrangements. I can remember more than one circus around getting and keeping a phone line in a shared house situation. What "tenant" has their name on the bill? At least one place I lived in for a summer there was nobody actually living there whose name was on the lease. Fortunately the group living there was responsible enough that we paid the rent and all the utilities, so we at least kept the lights on and kept the phone working.
My question is telemetry -- do we know the orbital location of ISS when the video was taken and can that be used to approximate the location of the phenomena? What part of earth might be centered under that location?
For one, they would talk up charging multiple people with felonies and then start plying them with immunity to flip. A few would flip, the ringleaders would get fingered and would be prosecuted on Federal charges in a very public trial to set an example.
Even if that didn't happen, there's nothing stopping the company from filing multiple civil lawsuits. And again a few would break ranks and the rest would get ruined financially.
The establishment would never tolerate an act of group sabotage like that. It would expose how dependent they are on IT support. There would be a lot of fear that it could happen again. Talk of systemic risk to the economy. New Federal laws proposed making not training your H1B a felony. It'd be awful.
Why not just monkeywrench the replacement training?
Train them wrong. Give them incomplete information. Be anti-social. Make a game and see how long you can go answering only yes or no. Basically make the training as empty and useless as possible. Waste time on useless details. Take long shits.
Obviously, no active sabotage, that would be a problem. But who says you have to be any good at the training?
My dog will occasionally raise his head and look around if there's dog sounds on TV, but only if he's been sleeping or otherwise not alert.
And maybe I just think it's the dog noises on TV, but in fact he's hearing something happening 4 houses away in the back yard that I can't here and the TV noise is just a coincidence.
My point was that I think the best dramas involve characters with moral ambiguity, where "right" and "wrong" and "good" and "bad" aren't completely clear and characters have good and bad sides and conflicting motivations.
I did see the film, but missed that aspect of the backstory (the part that Earth needed the unobtainium).
IMHO, it wasn't emphasized very much and wasn't emphasized to the point where it wasn't really a major factor in the narrative.
And it doesn't change the natives, either -- they were too pure, IMHO. Give me a reason not to like them or to at least feel like Earth isn't just another expansionist colonial government seeking wealth.
Overall the film just felt like a propaganda piece with one side demonically bad and one side angelically good.
That's really different than the sales pitch by the store.
They always made it sound like the more expensive machines automated much of the process in an optimal way. Maybe it was just a pitch to sell really expensive machines ($500 to several thousand dollars) but my guess also is that *most* people willing to buy a super expensive automated machine want it for the quality and convenience and don't really have any interest in small-scale organic chemistry.
As for my own tastes, I would have been happy with something approximating what you get from a coffee place. FWIW, my tastes are too pedestrian to notice the difference between a place running a full-auto Franke espresso machine and a hipster-ish coffee house with a barista running a manual commercial machine.
I've ultimately given up on the whole idea and decided a $50 coffee maker from Target is good enough for my tastes and if I want an espresso I will just buy it from someplace.
What's funny is that it makes you realize how much actual *talent* was involved in making bubblegum tracks.
I'm sure the bubblegum acts used a lot of studio musicians and certainly as much production as was possible in the 1970s but it sure seems like it involved a lot more musical talent. Even if they bands themselves weren't writing the songs, they at least seemed able to play instruments and make music.
My son subjects me to awful contemporary pop music and it's surprising how much of it appears to lack much in the way of instrumentation. Quite often it's *just* a simple beat with repetitive rapping type lyrics, which often seems more like yelling than singing.
That seems really counter-intuitive. A cheap espresso machine is actually a better machine that produces a more consistent cup than an expensive machine, which also requires expensive accessories like micro fine adjustments?
Whenever I have engaged in the fantasy of an at-home espresso machine and actually wasted the time of the apparently knowledgeable specialty kitchen store employees, it always looked like the more you spent, the more likely you were to get consistently good espresso with less effort. That's always the way the clerks described it.
Although I have a good friend who uses the iconic stovetop espresso maker all the time and it seems pretty good.
You miss the point. It's not that there's any absolute moral justification for pillaging a planet, but as a drama, Avatar would have been more interesting if the people from Earth had been given some kind of "good" motivation and the indigenous planet residents had been given some kind of quality that made them bad.
Here's a kind of backstory:
Earth suffers a major internal military conflict, leaving its civilization in a shambles. Fortunately its moon colony wasn't involved, and it's charismatic leader Jesus Ngomo manages to unify Earth's factions and help rebuild the planet. The key to its restoration is the fusion system employing "unobtainium", an extremely rare material. Without this energy system, 80% of the population will die of disease or starvation.
The best known source of this is planet Avatar. Populated by a militant and warlike race whose civilization resembles pre-Columbian Mexico, the natives engage in slavery and human sacrifice. Unfortunately the easiest supplies of unobtainium are close to the native cities. The initial landing party who tried to negotiate with them were butchered. A fortified mining colony was established in an area believed inaccessible to the natives.
After establishing it, however, the Terrans discover that the natives are more mobile than they expected. The colony is attacked, resulting in significant reduction in output. The Terrans are forced to fight the natives against extreme odds. Earth weapons give them a slight advantage, but it results in the deaths of thousands of natives who continue to harass the colony.
Now you've got something more complicated -- a civilization struggling to rebuild itself which will collapse without the material from this planet, a material it can't obtain without brutal conflict with a violent and brutal society. Do we attempt to crush them mercilessly for our own benefit? If we don't, our civilization will collapse, resulting in the deaths of billions. If we do, we only succeed through brutalizing a people at the early stages of development whose defense of their world is no less justified than our attempt to save ours.
Avatar was enjoyable enough as optical stimuli but its simplistic moral landscape limited it to not much more than that.
I would have been more compelling if there had been more moral complexity than white Earth men come and abuse gentle and innocent indigenous people in order to extract their minerals.
It reduced both sides to a ridiculous caricature of good versus evil and drained it of any interest.
More compelling would have been some kind of desperate reason for Earth men to be there (some kind of end-of-civilization crisis on Earth) and if the indigenous people had been more complex than they are.
I'm not sure any population ever has been all good, shiny and happy like those blue people. How about internal factions with their own vicious conflict?
I read a book on the history of drug consumption and the argument the author made for religions objecting to drug use (or at least drug use outside the religious sphere) was that drugs allowed people to have mystical experiences outside the theological constraints and control of the religion.
Mystical experiences outside the control of the religious leaders were inherently dangerous to the religious structure because people may obtain enlightenment which contradicts the official dogma.
To this day, this is why you find religious figures in the west more tolerant of alcohol and objecting to psychedelic drugs.
I also think that part of the social function of very early religious leaders was something like pharmacologist. They were the ones who possessed the specialized knowledge on how and what substances could be used to provide mind-altering experiences. This gave them something of monopoly control over the drug supply and an ability to create and shape mystical experiences, reinforcing their own social role and create a group cohesion.
That's a distinction without a difference. There isn't any productivity that benefits mankind that hasn't been promulgated by commerce. You don't enjoy the benefits of lighting and indoor plumbing because they're good unto themselves, you enjoy them because of productivity improvements that made them cheap enough to obtain.
That's always been the shitty double-edged sword of capitalism. Without it we lack its oppressive forces, but with it we live in well-made structures of high-quality engineered materials with a surplus of food and cheap energy. Without it, we live in hovels and perform subsistence agriculture to survive.
The net result of productivity improvement is material prosperity. In fact I'd argue that part of the reason *income* inequality has survived politically is that in spite of it, material prosperity has continued largely unabated. It's the miracle of capitalism that has made a 60" flat panel display go from science fiction to a commodity in 20 years. I bought a 27" tube TV in 1988 for $750, inflation adjusted that money buys a 60" LCD TV.
I've heard the author TFA talks about speak, and I think his big-picture argument is reasonable -- we've managed to implement all the easy pickings in terms of larger productivity enhancements, whether its basic technologies like sewer and water and agriculture that let us concentrate populations for industrial use without pandemics or famine killing us, mechanical and energy use improvements (electricity, oil, machines) to more esoteric productivity, like integrating women into the workforce. It will take science fiction leaps in technology to gain more productivity improvements, like near-free energy or vast improvements in automation and artificial intelligence.
These countries have by and large been economic backwaters forever and its required basically a state of war and anarchy in Syria for several years to kick off a major wave of migration. End the fighting and you end most of the migration. The oil economies of most of these countries don't do a lot to help the man in the street anyway, they largely depend on general internal economic activity for subsistence.
Plus you have to figure that the Europeans won't tolerate much more migration as it stands. They already agreed to let Erdogan run a fascist dictatorship in exchange for letting them repatriate people who leave from there. A lot of central European countries have unilaterally closed their borders and fenced them off, any significant increase in migration will result in political changes that endorse not just closed borders, but the use of deadly force to keep people out, forced repatriation and so on.
You might argue that it would solve their problems.
If there was no demand for their product, the major world powers wouldn't quit injecting themselves into their affairs. With no income, they couldn't buy weapons. Without weapons, their ability to wage large-scale wars would drop off.
The whole place might not be nice, but it would probably settle back to a patchwork of tribal areas generally stable because there was no means of consolidating power or enforcing minority governance.
Look, I think drug prohibition laws (all of them) are baloney. Legalize 'em all and quit with the illusion that prohibition accomplishes anything but putting people behind bars.
But the reason we have them is that many religions (maybe even a plurality if counted by number of adherents) have prohibitions against consumption of mind-altering substances, quite often alcohol. But then there's the Mormons that prohibit caffeine and nicotine, too. Find me a country governed by Sharia law that allows cannabis consumption.
Plus there are various theological rules against consuming substances considered harmful and generic rules prohibiting general states of intoxication.
So just because there's not an 11th commandment that says thou shalt not blow a joint or geeze some smack doesn't mean that religious belief doesn't either outright bar it or consider it sinful in some way or other.
Slashdot Mirror
Parent is attempting to state carefully parsed statistical structures to counter widely available statistics that show that Blacks commit crimes at a rate greater than their proportion in the population. The goal is to refuse these statistics and to demonstrate that the criminal justice system is inherently biased and that this bias actually is the primary explanation for statistics which show Blacks committing crimes at a rate greater than their proportion of the population.
Personally, I'm willing to accept the idea that there is a greater level of criminality among Black populations but that it's a complex mix of sociological problems and economic distress that drives it, not race or racism. I think the criminal justice system is hard on anybody who isn't able to afford expensive legal representation.
I have three 1680x1050 displays now (I built my own desk 15 years ago to accommodate 2x21" glass tubes) so I have the room for it.
But I did two simple scale drawings -- one of pixel resolution and one of physical dimensions.
The good -- a single 3840x2160 panel at 1:1 scaling is 5x the display real estate of a single 1600x1050 display (more like 4x usable 1680x1050 displays). I could literally dump my entire multi-monitor setup for the 40" Mango display and gain the equivalent of a 4th display.
The bad is I would worry the additional height would be a bit of an egonomic nightmare. My existing displays are 4" above the desktop. The Mongo stand appears to be lower than mine, but not much more than 2", which would leave the top edge of the display area nearly 7" taller than my existing display.
The only other thing I can think of that might be an issue is how retarded "full" screen is and Windows clunky display for virtually splitting large screens. I use DisplayFusion now and it can do virtual window splits (so that maximizing a window in a region treats it as if it was a display the size of a region), but it only really works for window management -- watching a video "full" screen takes over the whole screen.
I don't know what the country is doing, I do know what happens in my house.
I could almost see a 43" 4k computer monitor on my desk. It would be physically big enough to use without display scaling.
I don't know about you, but most of the day the only power used here is what's required to keep the fridge cold and the occasional running of the furnace blower.
At night when all the residents are home is when peak power is used -- fridge takes more power because it gets opened a bunch, lots of lights on (most are LED now, but I can't stop the others from leaving every. damn. light. on), probably 2 TVs turned on, computers running, etc.
Now the next question, do we perceive people as greedy and dishonest because they actually are, or because the level of greed and dishonesty is so high we simply assume everyone has this quality?
I'm curious whether people naturally game the system because people are inherently greedy and dishonest, or whether they're greedy and dishonest because the system itself appears rigged and gamed from the top down and they're only adapting to a broken system.
...and for what definition of "Americans"?
I can totally see a young person on a limited budget for whom "using the Internet" amounts to social media sites, clickbait news sites, and cat videos not bothering with any kind of wired broadband.
For them, there's nothing wired broadband gives them that they're not getting on their phone or tablet or tethered to their laptop.
Then there's living arrangements. I can remember more than one circus around getting and keeping a phone line in a shared house situation. What "tenant" has their name on the bill? At least one place I lived in for a summer there was nobody actually living there whose name was on the lease. Fortunately the group living there was responsible enough that we paid the rent and all the utilities, so we at least kept the lights on and kept the phone working.
It looks to me like some kind of plume.
My question is telemetry -- do we know the orbital location of ISS when the video was taken and can that be used to approximate the location of the phenomena? What part of earth might be centered under that location?
For one, they would talk up charging multiple people with felonies and then start plying them with immunity to flip. A few would flip, the ringleaders would get fingered and would be prosecuted on Federal charges in a very public trial to set an example.
Even if that didn't happen, there's nothing stopping the company from filing multiple civil lawsuits. And again a few would break ranks and the rest would get ruined financially.
The establishment would never tolerate an act of group sabotage like that. It would expose how dependent they are on IT support. There would be a lot of fear that it could happen again. Talk of systemic risk to the economy. New Federal laws proposed making not training your H1B a felony. It'd be awful.
Why not just monkeywrench the replacement training?
Train them wrong. Give them incomplete information. Be anti-social. Make a game and see how long you can go answering only yes or no. Basically make the training as empty and useless as possible. Waste time on useless details. Take long shits.
Obviously, no active sabotage, that would be a problem. But who says you have to be any good at the training?
My dog will occasionally raise his head and look around if there's dog sounds on TV, but only if he's been sleeping or otherwise not alert.
And maybe I just think it's the dog noises on TV, but in fact he's hearing something happening 4 houses away in the back yard that I can't here and the TV noise is just a coincidence.
My point was that I think the best dramas involve characters with moral ambiguity, where "right" and "wrong" and "good" and "bad" aren't completely clear and characters have good and bad sides and conflicting motivations.
I did see the film, but missed that aspect of the backstory (the part that Earth needed the unobtainium).
IMHO, it wasn't emphasized very much and wasn't emphasized to the point where it wasn't really a major factor in the narrative.
And it doesn't change the natives, either -- they were too pure, IMHO. Give me a reason not to like them or to at least feel like Earth isn't just another expansionist colonial government seeking wealth.
Overall the film just felt like a propaganda piece with one side demonically bad and one side angelically good.
That's really different than the sales pitch by the store.
They always made it sound like the more expensive machines automated much of the process in an optimal way. Maybe it was just a pitch to sell really expensive machines ($500 to several thousand dollars) but my guess also is that *most* people willing to buy a super expensive automated machine want it for the quality and convenience and don't really have any interest in small-scale organic chemistry.
As for my own tastes, I would have been happy with something approximating what you get from a coffee place. FWIW, my tastes are too pedestrian to notice the difference between a place running a full-auto Franke espresso machine and a hipster-ish coffee house with a barista running a manual commercial machine.
I've ultimately given up on the whole idea and decided a $50 coffee maker from Target is good enough for my tastes and if I want an espresso I will just buy it from someplace.
What's funny is that it makes you realize how much actual *talent* was involved in making bubblegum tracks.
I'm sure the bubblegum acts used a lot of studio musicians and certainly as much production as was possible in the 1970s but it sure seems like it involved a lot more musical talent. Even if they bands themselves weren't writing the songs, they at least seemed able to play instruments and make music.
My son subjects me to awful contemporary pop music and it's surprising how much of it appears to lack much in the way of instrumentation. Quite often it's *just* a simple beat with repetitive rapping type lyrics, which often seems more like yelling than singing.
That seems really counter-intuitive. A cheap espresso machine is actually a better machine that produces a more consistent cup than an expensive machine, which also requires expensive accessories like micro fine adjustments?
Whenever I have engaged in the fantasy of an at-home espresso machine and actually wasted the time of the apparently knowledgeable specialty kitchen store employees, it always looked like the more you spent, the more likely you were to get consistently good espresso with less effort. That's always the way the clerks described it.
Although I have a good friend who uses the iconic stovetop espresso maker all the time and it seems pretty good.
You miss the point. It's not that there's any absolute moral justification for pillaging a planet, but as a drama, Avatar would have been more interesting if the people from Earth had been given some kind of "good" motivation and the indigenous planet residents had been given some kind of quality that made them bad.
Here's a kind of backstory:
Earth suffers a major internal military conflict, leaving its civilization in a shambles. Fortunately its moon colony wasn't involved, and it's charismatic leader Jesus Ngomo manages to unify Earth's factions and help rebuild the planet. The key to its restoration is the fusion system employing "unobtainium", an extremely rare material. Without this energy system, 80% of the population will die of disease or starvation.
The best known source of this is planet Avatar. Populated by a militant and warlike race whose civilization resembles pre-Columbian Mexico, the natives engage in slavery and human sacrifice. Unfortunately the easiest supplies of unobtainium are close to the native cities. The initial landing party who tried to negotiate with them were butchered. A fortified mining colony was established in an area believed inaccessible to the natives.
After establishing it, however, the Terrans discover that the natives are more mobile than they expected. The colony is attacked, resulting in significant reduction in output. The Terrans are forced to fight the natives against extreme odds. Earth weapons give them a slight advantage, but it results in the deaths of thousands of natives who continue to harass the colony.
Now you've got something more complicated -- a civilization struggling to rebuild itself which will collapse without the material from this planet, a material it can't obtain without brutal conflict with a violent and brutal society. Do we attempt to crush them mercilessly for our own benefit? If we don't, our civilization will collapse, resulting in the deaths of billions. If we do, we only succeed through brutalizing a people at the early stages of development whose defense of their world is no less justified than our attempt to save ours.
Avatar was enjoyable enough as optical stimuli but its simplistic moral landscape limited it to not much more than that.
I would have been more compelling if there had been more moral complexity than white Earth men come and abuse gentle and innocent indigenous people in order to extract their minerals.
It reduced both sides to a ridiculous caricature of good versus evil and drained it of any interest.
More compelling would have been some kind of desperate reason for Earth men to be there (some kind of end-of-civilization crisis on Earth) and if the indigenous people had been more complex than they are.
I'm not sure any population ever has been all good, shiny and happy like those blue people. How about internal factions with their own vicious conflict?
I read a book on the history of drug consumption and the argument the author made for religions objecting to drug use (or at least drug use outside the religious sphere) was that drugs allowed people to have mystical experiences outside the theological constraints and control of the religion.
Mystical experiences outside the control of the religious leaders were inherently dangerous to the religious structure because people may obtain enlightenment which contradicts the official dogma.
To this day, this is why you find religious figures in the west more tolerant of alcohol and objecting to psychedelic drugs.
I also think that part of the social function of very early religious leaders was something like pharmacologist. They were the ones who possessed the specialized knowledge on how and what substances could be used to provide mind-altering experiences. This gave them something of monopoly control over the drug supply and an ability to create and shape mystical experiences, reinforcing their own social role and create a group cohesion.
That's a distinction without a difference. There isn't any productivity that benefits mankind that hasn't been promulgated by commerce. You don't enjoy the benefits of lighting and indoor plumbing because they're good unto themselves, you enjoy them because of productivity improvements that made them cheap enough to obtain.
That's always been the shitty double-edged sword of capitalism. Without it we lack its oppressive forces, but with it we live in well-made structures of high-quality engineered materials with a surplus of food and cheap energy. Without it, we live in hovels and perform subsistence agriculture to survive.
The net result of productivity improvement is material prosperity. In fact I'd argue that part of the reason *income* inequality has survived politically is that in spite of it, material prosperity has continued largely unabated. It's the miracle of capitalism that has made a 60" flat panel display go from science fiction to a commodity in 20 years. I bought a 27" tube TV in 1988 for $750, inflation adjusted that money buys a 60" LCD TV.
I've heard the author TFA talks about speak, and I think his big-picture argument is reasonable -- we've managed to implement all the easy pickings in terms of larger productivity enhancements, whether its basic technologies like sewer and water and agriculture that let us concentrate populations for industrial use without pandemics or famine killing us, mechanical and energy use improvements (electricity, oil, machines) to more esoteric productivity, like integrating women into the workforce. It will take science fiction leaps in technology to gain more productivity improvements, like near-free energy or vast improvements in automation and artificial intelligence.
I question that thesis.
These countries have by and large been economic backwaters forever and its required basically a state of war and anarchy in Syria for several years to kick off a major wave of migration. End the fighting and you end most of the migration. The oil economies of most of these countries don't do a lot to help the man in the street anyway, they largely depend on general internal economic activity for subsistence.
Plus you have to figure that the Europeans won't tolerate much more migration as it stands. They already agreed to let Erdogan run a fascist dictatorship in exchange for letting them repatriate people who leave from there. A lot of central European countries have unilaterally closed their borders and fenced them off, any significant increase in migration will result in political changes that endorse not just closed borders, but the use of deadly force to keep people out, forced repatriation and so on.
You might argue that it would solve their problems.
If there was no demand for their product, the major world powers wouldn't quit injecting themselves into their affairs. With no income, they couldn't buy weapons. Without weapons, their ability to wage large-scale wars would drop off.
The whole place might not be nice, but it would probably settle back to a patchwork of tribal areas generally stable because there was no means of consolidating power or enforcing minority governance.
Look, I think drug prohibition laws (all of them) are baloney. Legalize 'em all and quit with the illusion that prohibition accomplishes anything but putting people behind bars.
But the reason we have them is that many religions (maybe even a plurality if counted by number of adherents) have prohibitions against consumption of mind-altering substances, quite often alcohol. But then there's the Mormons that prohibit caffeine and nicotine, too. Find me a country governed by Sharia law that allows cannabis consumption.
Plus there are various theological rules against consuming substances considered harmful and generic rules prohibiting general states of intoxication.
So just because there's not an 11th commandment that says thou shalt not blow a joint or geeze some smack doesn't mean that religious belief doesn't either outright bar it or consider it sinful in some way or other.
What do you think productivity means? Output -- revenue and ultimately profitably, per employee.
It can't be limited to the simple physical labor output of a factory worker, otherwise how would you measure the productivity of an office worker?