Corporations don't have power over what you can say or hear. Give it a try: open your mouth and say something vile and you will find the words coming out of your mouth without Google or Amazon or anyone else preventing you.
Corporations aren't obliged to buy and re-sell your particular brand of idiocy, however.
Amazon is a private company. Every day, it chooses what it will and won't sell -- it's terms of service explicitly say it reserves the right to reject content for a very wide range of reasons including simply that it finds something "objectionable". Are you saying that's wrong? Should it be obliged to carry items it doesn't want to sell, just to make you happy? Why should it act against its own perception of its commercial interests just to satisfy your bizarre desire to treat it as some kind of national public library of record?
You're applying the wrong mindset to this. You're assuming people will test drive Teslas the way they test drive other cars. Tesla is obviously making a big bet that they can change this process without materially affecting sales. They may be wrong on this, but they'll have some data to support their approach, I'm sure. This is not about test driving a Tesla; this is about a no-quibble guarantee for people who have purchased a Tesla. The intention is to provide peace of mind on a sight unseen sale. The aim is to have most sales being like buying tech online -- simple, with a configurator, no price negotiations to add stress, and the product arriving on your doorstep a few days later.
Thank goodness you've suggested risk evaluating medical interventions. JAMA will be so relieved you've cracked the problem of what they should publish.
Companies that engage with political topics are playing with fire. Far better to draw the line at the illegal and not engage with anything else.
Well, that's your opinion. But Amazon, and just about every other company I can think of, disagrees. They all have terms of service that forbid users from engaging in a whole bunch of activity that's perfectly legal.
Amazon says this, for example: "Visitors may post reviews, comments and other content... as long as the content is not illegal, obscene, abusive, threatening, defamatory, invasive of privacy, infringing of intellectual property rights, or otherwise injurious to third parties or objectionable and does not consist of or contain software viruses, political campaigning, commercial solicitation, chain letters, mass mailings or any form of "spam"." In other words, Amazon does not permit perfectly legal content that is obscene, abusive, threatening, defamatory, invasive of privacy, infringing of IP rights etc etc. Note that they have a particularly broad statement in there: content that is "otherwise objectionable", a bar which they are clearly keeping for themselves to be able to take down anything they don't like. They do all that because they consider it in their interests to have these terms of service. So instead of complaining to me about slippery slopes, how about complaining to Amazon that they stop "playing with fire" and redraw the "line"?
So tell me, what's the difference between my applying pressure on Amazon to not publish these books, and your applying pressure to me not to speak up about Amazon? Why should I bow to your attempts to censor me?
Author of TFA assumes all vaccinations are 100% safe.
Exciting claim! Just do us all a little favour and quote any specific sentence you care to from TFA that backs up your contention, if you don't mind. Because it would be quite disingenuous, wouldn't it, to make a claim that the author believed something spurious and absurd like "100% safe" without having some actual specific evidence to show that was the case. It would, in fact, be a risible strawman, wouldn't it?
And we are free to show our disdain for Amazon, and the people making money, and the fuckers who shill for them with spurious arguments. And we are free to apply pressure to Amazon to try to dissuade it from allowing those books on its store. And it's free to choose to stock or not stock as it sees fit, taking into account the ethics of promoting lies, providing an open marketplace, the money it will make or lose by its choices, and the risk of regulation if it fails to take action.
So what's your point? Are you saying we shouldn't criticise Amazon's decision? Why would anyone shut up in the face of a big corporation facilitating harm in this way? We should speak up, and speak freely.
No, herd immunity is not just unvaccinated people getting protected, although it includes that category. And unvaccinated people are not just adults who have chosen not to vaccinate themselves despite being able to be vaccinated. People are unvaccinated because they are newborn babies, are immunocompromised eg are being treated for childhood cancers, are elderly, etc etc.
Did you really think your argument was even vaguely compelling? You sound like someone claiming a plane couldn't possibly fly because it weighs more than air -- just laughably naive and ignorant of the basic science.
But you keep on referring to the words as though they're mine. Why would you do that if you understand they're a quote? It's just... stupid. And why would you assert that text written by one of the world's pre-eminent paleontologists on the subject of the scope of experimentation in paleontology is irrelevant to a discussion about the scope of experimentation in paleontology? Again, it's just... stupid.
Your question assumes mal-intent and stupidity on both mine and your part. I'm neither of those things and you are surely better than that. Can't you deal with a mild rhetorical flourish? You have to assume both mal-intent and stupidity to read my assertion that "Repeatability is not achievable for some branches of science where experiments can't be run" means that I don't understand you can carbon-date bones etc. I'm not intending to mislead you and I'm not being stupid. I'm getting at the subtle truth that you cannot experimentally test whether the dinosaurs died out due to a massive meteorite hitting the earth. You can run experiments that help you gather evidence that allow you to make more accurate inferences, but you can't re-run the event or anything approaching a model of it, because it's happened and it was wildly complex. If it makes you feel better to see this as some sort of grand concession, go right ahead doing that and missing the bigger picture.
Anyway, I'm now mightily bored of this. You seem much more interested in "winning" than in a constructive exchange. Is that really how you want to spend your life?
Um. Did you miss the point when I said i was quoting Wonderful Life, by Stephen Jay Gould? Or rather, how could you miss this? It was right there in my opening sentence!
You are aware of who Stephen Jay Gould is, right? If you think a Slashdot quote-by-quote rebuttal is an adequate response to one of the most significant paleontologists of the 20th century, and among the top popular science writers on evolution of all time, you probably need to (a) learn a little humility and (b) think again.
Seriously, stop getting (apparently indignant and (apparently) worked up and (apparently) thinking you know better, and go read about who Stephen Jay Gould was, and then go read Wonderful Life, and then let's have a conversation again. It's a better use of your time than dreaming up more reasons why Gould was wrong and you were right.
It's too long to get into on Slashdot, but pp277 onwards in Wonderful Life are the right starting point. A brief quote: "We talk about the 'scientific method,' and instruct schoolchildren in this supposedly monolithic and maximally effective path to natural knowledge, as if a single formula could unlock all the multifarious secrets of empirical reality. "...the 'scientific method' involves a set of concepts and procedures tailored to the image of a man in a white coat twirling dials in a laboratory--experiment, quantification, repetition...These procedures are powerful, but they do not encompass all of nature's variety. How should scientists operate when they must try to explain the results of history, those inordinately complex events that can occur but once in detailed glory? Many large domains of nature--cosmology, geology and evolution among them--must be studied with the tools of history. The appropriate methods focus on narrative, not experiment as usually conceived... "...The techniques of controlled experiment, and reduction of natural complexity to a minimal set of general causes, presupposes that all times can be treated alike and simulated in a laboratory. Cambrian quartz is like modern quartz--tetrahedra of silica and oxygen bound together at all corners. Determine the properties of modern quartz under controlled conditions in a laboratory, and you can interpret the beach sands of the Cambrian Potsdam Sandstone. "But supposing you want to know why dinosaurs died, or why mollusks flourished while Wiwaxia perished? The laboratory is not irrelevant, and may yield important insights by analogy...But the restricted techniques of the 'scientific method' cannot get to the heart of this singular event involving creatures long dead on an earth with climates and continental positions markedly different from today." There's a lot more to this idea and I could have carried the quote on for ages, but what you have above covers at least some of the important concepts.
I didn't say experiments weren't repeatable in paleontology, I said you can't run experiments. It's an historical science. It just works differently. For a popular science treatment of this topic, see Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life.
Wait, what? You actually think that's some kind of meaningful response? Let me break it down for you. You said scientists say four things: 1. "Our current model predicts a massive change" 2. "We don't know what that means" 3. "Or what will happen" 4. "But we probably have to do something" Scientists don't say any one of those 4 things. You would like it if they did, and if they introduced lots of equivocations about precision but misnamed it accuracy to help your cause, and if they elided the difference between "knowing every implication" and "knowing any implication" etc etc. Sometimes scientists use careful language that you can work really hard to interpret to be one of those 4 things, imagining you're some kind of super-smart lawyer in a made-for-TV court drama and you've just skewered the expert witness in the dock.
But it's all just rhetorical bullshit. You're committed to your cause. You know it, I know it, everyone knows it. You'd like to pretend scientists are on your side. It's bullshit. You know it, I know it, nearly everyone knows it, but it suits you to try to convince the few folks who don't know it. Well done, you. You can be very proud of your efforts.
- The scientists: Our current model predicts a massive change, we don't know what that means or what will happen, but we probably have to do something
The only way to think this is what scientists are saying about climate change is to be so committed to your preconceptions that you ignore what scientists are actually saying.
We're talking about a man who has deliberately chosen to wear a brown suit and orange shirt on his official photograph, along with an expression that suggests he has more than one problem with gas emissions.
It's amazing how many politicians appear to have read about the Indiana Pi bill and drawn the conclusion that those are the footsteps they'd like to follow in.
Dude. Have some respect for Hans Rosling. He only died a couple of years ago, and you're acting like you've never even seen his remarkable videos that explain that yes, education and specifically women's education is a driver for lower family unit size and increased longevity.
I'm always blown away by the story of Bangladesh he tells: from an average 7 babies per woman and lifespan of 50 years in 1972 to 2.2 babies per woman and lifespan of 70 years in 2017. That is one heckuva drop, powered by education. But Bangladesh is not alone -- this is a pattern across dozens of countries.
That's obviously wrong. An ICE vehicle is only fuelled at a gas station. An EV can be charged in many, many more places: at home; at work; in the parking lot while you're at the movies; etc etc. This reduces the overall demand for charging stations with usage patterns similar to gas stations.
For the avoidance of doubt, the point I'm making is not that home charging, work charging etc reduce the demand at on-the-road charging stations to zero. That's obviously not going to be the case. It's that they do reduce the demand very significantly. We won't know exactly what this looks like with large scale populations for many years, but it's clearly going to be 90+% home charging for everyone who has off-street parking, over the course of a year, based on convenience, price and typical range divided by typical distance driven per day. And a large fraction (30%? more?) of US citizens have off-street parking.
Thank goodness you pointed out the importance of solving range, charging station availability and time-to-charge as issues. It's definitely the first time those issues have been flagged in relation to EVs, which is why range, charging station availability and time-to-charge have all remained static for the past decade.
We should be considering: whether we need the product at all; the full weighted impact of a purchase -- yes, human rights, and also environmental impacts (CO2e, minerals extraction etc), and social costs and benefits, and so on; the practical alternatives and the differential impact of each choice (eg sourcing from S Korea vs China); etc etc.
And while the choices are in the end binary (buy or don't buy), the world is more finely graded.
Slashdot Mirror
Corporations don't have power over what you can say or hear. Give it a try: open your mouth and say something vile and you will find the words coming out of your mouth without Google or Amazon or anyone else preventing you.
Corporations aren't obliged to buy and re-sell your particular brand of idiocy, however.
Amazon is a private company. Every day, it chooses what it will and won't sell -- it's terms of service explicitly say it reserves the right to reject content for a very wide range of reasons including simply that it finds something "objectionable". Are you saying that's wrong? Should it be obliged to carry items it doesn't want to sell, just to make you happy? Why should it act against its own perception of its commercial interests just to satisfy your bizarre desire to treat it as some kind of national public library of record?
You're applying the wrong mindset to this. You're assuming people will test drive Teslas the way they test drive other cars. Tesla is obviously making a big bet that they can change this process without materially affecting sales. They may be wrong on this, but they'll have some data to support their approach, I'm sure. This is not about test driving a Tesla; this is about a no-quibble guarantee for people who have purchased a Tesla. The intention is to provide peace of mind on a sight unseen sale. The aim is to have most sales being like buying tech online -- simple, with a configurator, no price negotiations to add stress, and the product arriving on your doorstep a few days later.
Thank goodness you've suggested risk evaluating medical interventions. JAMA will be so relieved you've cracked the problem of what they should publish.
Companies that engage with political topics are playing with fire. Far better to draw the line at the illegal and not engage with anything else.
Well, that's your opinion. But Amazon, and just about every other company I can think of, disagrees. They all have terms of service that forbid users from engaging in a whole bunch of activity that's perfectly legal.
Amazon says this, for example: "Visitors may post reviews, comments and other content ... as long as the content is not illegal, obscene, abusive, threatening, defamatory, invasive of privacy, infringing of intellectual property rights, or otherwise injurious to third parties or objectionable and does not consist of or contain software viruses, political campaigning, commercial solicitation, chain letters, mass mailings or any form of "spam"." In other words, Amazon does not permit perfectly legal content that is obscene, abusive, threatening, defamatory, invasive of privacy, infringing of IP rights etc etc. Note that they have a particularly broad statement in there: content that is "otherwise objectionable", a bar which they are clearly keeping for themselves to be able to take down anything they don't like. They do all that because they consider it in their interests to have these terms of service. So instead of complaining to me about slippery slopes, how about complaining to Amazon that they stop "playing with fire" and redraw the "line"?
So tell me, what's the difference between my applying pressure on Amazon to not publish these books, and your applying pressure to me not to speak up about Amazon? Why should I bow to your attempts to censor me?
Author of TFA assumes all vaccinations are 100% safe.
Exciting claim! Just do us all a little favour and quote any specific sentence you care to from TFA that backs up your contention, if you don't mind. Because it would be quite disingenuous, wouldn't it, to make a claim that the author believed something spurious and absurd like "100% safe" without having some actual specific evidence to show that was the case. It would, in fact, be a risible strawman, wouldn't it?
Additionally, does the evidence exist that vaccine is completely safe and carry no underlying problem?
You're not familiar with how science works, are you? Or medicine. Or, indeed, life, which offers us no risk-free choices.
And we are free to show our disdain for Amazon, and the people making money, and the fuckers who shill for them with spurious arguments. And we are free to apply pressure to Amazon to try to dissuade it from allowing those books on its store. And it's free to choose to stock or not stock as it sees fit, taking into account the ethics of promoting lies, providing an open marketplace, the money it will make or lose by its choices, and the risk of regulation if it fails to take action.
So what's your point? Are you saying we shouldn't criticise Amazon's decision? Why would anyone shut up in the face of a big corporation facilitating harm in this way? We should speak up, and speak freely.
No, herd immunity is not just unvaccinated people getting protected, although it includes that category. And unvaccinated people are not just adults who have chosen not to vaccinate themselves despite being able to be vaccinated. People are unvaccinated because they are newborn babies, are immunocompromised eg are being treated for childhood cancers, are elderly, etc etc.
Did you really think your argument was even vaguely compelling? You sound like someone claiming a plane couldn't possibly fly because it weighs more than air -- just laughably naive and ignorant of the basic science.
But you keep on referring to the words as though they're mine. Why would you do that if you understand they're a quote? It's just ... stupid. And why would you assert that text written by one of the world's pre-eminent paleontologists on the subject of the scope of experimentation in paleontology is irrelevant to a discussion about the scope of experimentation in paleontology? Again, it's just ... stupid.
Your question assumes mal-intent and stupidity on both mine and your part. I'm neither of those things and you are surely better than that. Can't you deal with a mild rhetorical flourish? You have to assume both mal-intent and stupidity to read my assertion that "Repeatability is not achievable for some branches of science where experiments can't be run" means that I don't understand you can carbon-date bones etc. I'm not intending to mislead you and I'm not being stupid. I'm getting at the subtle truth that you cannot experimentally test whether the dinosaurs died out due to a massive meteorite hitting the earth. You can run experiments that help you gather evidence that allow you to make more accurate inferences, but you can't re-run the event or anything approaching a model of it, because it's happened and it was wildly complex. If it makes you feel better to see this as some sort of grand concession, go right ahead doing that and missing the bigger picture.
Anyway, I'm now mightily bored of this. You seem much more interested in "winning" than in a constructive exchange. Is that really how you want to spend your life?
Um. Did you miss the point when I said i was quoting Wonderful Life, by Stephen Jay Gould? Or rather, how could you miss this? It was right there in my opening sentence!
You are aware of who Stephen Jay Gould is, right? If you think a Slashdot quote-by-quote rebuttal is an adequate response to one of the most significant paleontologists of the 20th century, and among the top popular science writers on evolution of all time, you probably need to (a) learn a little humility and (b) think again.
Seriously, stop getting (apparently indignant and (apparently) worked up and (apparently) thinking you know better, and go read about who Stephen Jay Gould was, and then go read Wonderful Life, and then let's have a conversation again. It's a better use of your time than dreaming up more reasons why Gould was wrong and you were right.
It's too long to get into on Slashdot, but pp277 onwards in Wonderful Life are the right starting point. A brief quote:
"We talk about the 'scientific method,' and instruct schoolchildren in this supposedly monolithic and maximally effective path to natural knowledge, as if a single formula could unlock all the multifarious secrets of empirical reality.
"...the 'scientific method' involves a set of concepts and procedures tailored to the image of a man in a white coat twirling dials in a laboratory--experiment, quantification, repetition...These procedures are powerful, but they do not encompass all of nature's variety. How should scientists operate when they must try to explain the results of history, those inordinately complex events that can occur but once in detailed glory? Many large domains of nature--cosmology, geology and evolution among them--must be studied with the tools of history. The appropriate methods focus on narrative, not experiment as usually conceived...
"...The techniques of controlled experiment, and reduction of natural complexity to a minimal set of general causes, presupposes that all times can be treated alike and simulated in a laboratory. Cambrian quartz is like modern quartz--tetrahedra of silica and oxygen bound together at all corners. Determine the properties of modern quartz under controlled conditions in a laboratory, and you can interpret the beach sands of the Cambrian Potsdam Sandstone.
"But supposing you want to know why dinosaurs died, or why mollusks flourished while Wiwaxia perished? The laboratory is not irrelevant, and may yield important insights by analogy...But the restricted techniques of the 'scientific method' cannot get to the heart of this singular event involving creatures long dead on an earth with climates and continental positions markedly different from today."
There's a lot more to this idea and I could have carried the quote on for ages, but what you have above covers at least some of the important concepts.
I didn't say experiments weren't repeatable in paleontology, I said you can't run experiments. It's an historical science. It just works differently. For a popular science treatment of this topic, see Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life.
Wait, what? You actually think that's some kind of meaningful response?
Let me break it down for you. You said scientists say four things:
1. "Our current model predicts a massive change"
2. "We don't know what that means"
3. "Or what will happen"
4. "But we probably have to do something"
Scientists don't say any one of those 4 things. You would like it if they did, and if they introduced lots of equivocations about precision but misnamed it accuracy to help your cause, and if they elided the difference between "knowing every implication" and "knowing any implication" etc etc. Sometimes scientists use careful language that you can work really hard to interpret to be one of those 4 things, imagining you're some kind of super-smart lawyer in a made-for-TV court drama and you've just skewered the expert witness in the dock.
But it's all just rhetorical bullshit. You're committed to your cause. You know it, I know it, everyone knows it. You'd like to pretend scientists are on your side. It's bullshit. You know it, I know it, nearly everyone knows it, but it suits you to try to convince the few folks who don't know it. Well done, you. You can be very proud of your efforts.
- The scientists: Our current model predicts a massive change, we don't know what that means or what will happen, but we probably have to do something
The only way to think this is what scientists are saying about climate change is to be so committed to your preconceptions that you ignore what scientists are actually saying.
With the emphasis on "a". Repeatability is not achievable for some branches of science where experiments can't be run. Paleontology, for example.
We're talking about a man who has deliberately chosen to wear a brown suit and orange shirt on his official photograph, along with an expression that suggests he has more than one problem with gas emissions.
It's amazing how many politicians appear to have read about the Indiana Pi bill and drawn the conclusion that those are the footsteps they'd like to follow in.
Dude. Have some respect for Hans Rosling. He only died a couple of years ago, and you're acting like you've never even seen his remarkable videos that explain that yes, education and specifically women's education is a driver for lower family unit size and increased longevity.
Here's a great introduction to the topic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I'm always blown away by the story of Bangladesh he tells: from an average 7 babies per woman and lifespan of 50 years in 1972 to 2.2 babies per woman and lifespan of 70 years in 2017. That is one heckuva drop, powered by education. But Bangladesh is not alone -- this is a pattern across dozens of countries.
RAH always got the fundamentals right. The details were always interestingly wrong, too. Scudder cf Trump...
That's obviously wrong. An ICE vehicle is only fuelled at a gas station. An EV can be charged in many, many more places: at home; at work; in the parking lot while you're at the movies; etc etc. This reduces the overall demand for charging stations with usage patterns similar to gas stations.
For the avoidance of doubt, the point I'm making is not that home charging, work charging etc reduce the demand at on-the-road charging stations to zero. That's obviously not going to be the case. It's that they do reduce the demand very significantly. We won't know exactly what this looks like with large scale populations for many years, but it's clearly going to be 90+% home charging for everyone who has off-street parking, over the course of a year, based on convenience, price and typical range divided by typical distance driven per day. And a large fraction (30%? more?) of US citizens have off-street parking.
Electricity is much more ubiquitous than petroleum. Electricity is just about everywhere. Gas stations, not so much.
Thank goodness you pointed out the importance of solving range, charging station availability and time-to-charge as issues. It's definitely the first time those issues have been flagged in relation to EVs, which is why range, charging station availability and time-to-charge have all remained static for the past decade.
We should be considering: whether we need the product at all; the full weighted impact of a purchase -- yes, human rights, and also environmental impacts (CO2e, minerals extraction etc), and social costs and benefits, and so on; the practical alternatives and the differential impact of each choice (eg sourcing from S Korea vs China); etc etc.
And while the choices are in the end binary (buy or don't buy), the world is more finely graded.
Did those sentences really make sense in your head? What an exciting place it must be.