One thing you need to remember: Biological change is extremely slow compared to cultural change. One of the cultural changes has to do with attitudes towards genetic engineering of humans. Let the technology be perfected, and the cultures that *properly* embrace it will be the ones that survive. But defining what "properly" is... well, it's a hard problem. Probably worse than NP-Hard, as the proper answer depends on multiple conditions that are unpredictable, as well as upon a social consensus on goals.
If you're going that route, you need to consider the unavoidable expenses, and subtract that from the minimum wage. (Apartment rental around here has gone up a LOT more than car prices. So have some food prices, though I tend to buy unusual items, so I don't know about in general.) Additionally you need to consider the number of hours a typical worker at the modal salary is allowed to work/week by his employer. And the fraction of the population unemployed at all. Etc.
I think you'll find that the modal disposable income in the quartile of the population containing the modal wage has not gone up by even approximately 20%, and may well have decreased. This will vary by region calculated for, of course. But fewer people used to be stuck in minimum wage jobs, and the ones that were used to be able to work 40 hours/week.
Even the advice you offered is too aggressive about promoting loans. You also need to consider the probability that adverse circumstances will render your investment of reduced value while not reducing the cost of the loan. Insurance can help, but it, itself, is another cost burden, and MUST, inevitably, be on the average more costly than the amount of money it will save you.
As a statistician (well, once upon a time) let me say that the median is one of three averages. The averages are the median, the mean, and the mode. Each is an average with certain characteristics and areas of utility. If you've got a normal bell curve they are the same number.
For most purposes involving income the useful averages are the median or the mode. Not the mean, which is unduly influenced by extreme values. (I didn't read the article, so I'm only commenting on your response.)
Unfortunately, holding on to a new car for more than 6 years stops helping much (annual costs become dominated by other factors). ???
I generally hold onto a car over 10 years, and it's never cost me that much extra. You *do* need to maintain it as you go along, and it depends on how much you drive, but my current car is from the 1990's and isn't yet in condition where it needs to be replaces, though it's getting there.
You've got too narrow a focus. I'd give around a 20% chance that it was an unintended error, and no more than around a 40% chance that it was the NSA. But there are lots of other "official" actors, and even gangs of criminals and discontented employees as possibilities, also.
OTOH, I, at least, realize that my estimates in this case say more about me than about the external world. I'm too ignorant to place any certainty on those probabilities, loose as they are.
Assuming you're not a troll: The don't sell information on you, or information about you. The let people buy ads that will be shown to a defined demographic. Who is in that demographic is a company confidential secret.
If they sold information about who was in the demographic, others could place ads without paying them. So they keep it a secret. But they look for ways to place ads where they can act as a middleman, because that lets them maximize their profit.
P.S.: This information is around a decade old now, but I've seen no indication that anything about it has changed.
Google sells access to your privacy. It's against their business model to actually sell the information about you, instead what they sell is access to a demographic that includes you.
Thus: In *this* aspect Oracle is the evil party...though not because they sell software and hardware, but rather because they are trying to monetize APIs. (There are other reasons, but less related to this case.)
So now you're believing the word of both Oracle and a lawyer. I strongly suspect that Google *is* paying Apple to stay as their default search engine, after all, they paid Mozilla. But the amount is currently unsupported except by the word of a couple of professional liars. (For the purpose of the prior sentence I'm pretending that Oracle counts as a person.)
It's not so much that Gore had more votes, as that he apparently actually won the election, if you discount fraudulent results. One can't tell, of course. The Florida results have been legally sealed, e.g., and in most cases there wasn't even a challenge.
This is not to assert that the Democrats don't also rig elections. While the Republicans have been more blatant about it (can you say "Dibold"?), the Democrats also do it. Neither side has been willing to fix the electronic voting machines. (Well, you could plausibly claim that California did, as the current model maintains a paper trail, but I've never heard of a manual count being done. And it's possible that other states have done similar things, and I just haven't heard about it.)
Well, that may be an explanation for Trump, I haven't checked, but have you investigated how Hillary became the Democratic candidate? When Sanders started his campaign Hillary already had a large lead in committed delegates, and not a single primary had been held. It's my opinion he was selected by the party as the "designated loser" to provide the illusion of a popular contest, and he was willing because he wanted to promote his position, and for the outside chance that he might win anyway.
If you don't want to vote, you may be saying there's no decent candidate who has a chance. Or you may not care. Those are very different statements, with the same exterior symptoms.
You need to define your terms more carefully, because as you have phrased it my can-opener is just such a system. There are cans it will not open, and others it partially opens, occasionally only sufficient to break the seal. But most of the time it works perfectly.
We don't know how many miles were dirven under solely AutoPilot(tm) control, ignoring the manufacturers instructions, so we can't guess how safe they are. It clearly neither is, nor was sold as, an automatic driver. It also seems to handle more cases properly than it was advertised to.
But it also seems clear than it needs more conspicuous labeling saying not to use it under sole control. A sticker in the middle of the steering wheel should suffice. After all, that's enough for cigarettes.
In which country? It was my understanding that it had been grown privately by small groups in India and China. True, this was as a test, but if the farmers had thought it worthwhile they would have kept seeds.
Not necessarily. A watermark can be used to validate the integrity of a copy of a document. In this use the watermark is, for example, a document checksum embedded in the document, and validates that either the document has been altered, or that it hasn't.
This use is like the encoded signing of an email, except that the presence of the signature is concealed from casual reading, but available for checking either by specialized applications or by a hex reader. It generally requires a graphics image be present, but the image can be transparent.
Golden rice has reportedly proven difficult to cultivate. Yams, squash, carrots, kale, spinach, etc. are good sources of vitamin A, and were traditionally cultivated before the push for cash crops...but if you're going to eat the rice, it's not a part of your cash crop anyway.
Also, I'm not certain how much vitamin A there is in how much golden rice. I've never happened to run across the figure. I find it quite plausible that yams are in incredibly better source of vitamin A that is an equal weight of rice (either both or neither being dried).
Since golden rice is (or was) free for non-commercial use, and trial plots were grown by private individuals, if it were a success, then it would have by now become widespread, though not commercial. It hasn't. So the people who grew it didn't find it worth replanting.
It is easy to do correctly, if you have enough space, proper equipment, etc. It's even easier to do it wrong...and for that you don't need much space or equipment.
Also, even if the composting is done incorrectly, I believe that it's still safe if only used on plants whose edible portions never touch the ground. (I'm not *really* sure of this, but I believe it to be true.)
If it's patented, and the patent is owned by a company attempting to monopolize a section of the food industry, then I don't trust it. I'm quite willing to phrase my doubts in any way that is publicly acceptable, including claims of lack of safety that I wouldn't normally accept, because I don't trust it for other reasons.
That said, the poster child of GMO, golden rice, doesn't seem to be working out. It doesn't seem to grow well. The only ones that grow well are the ones that do things like encourage excess use of poisons. (I know that's not how they claim it should be used, but that's how it gets used in practice.) I don't know that the various poisons are somehow denatured before it gets to me, so I'm dubious, and I have no ready way of testing. Perhaps, to pick one example, glyphosate is harmless ( https://www.google.com/search?... ) or the amount that actually ends up in the food is harmless. I'd rather just avoid the problem. Bt is probably harmless, but when plants are modified to generate it in every cell, then it's a danger that wasn't present when it was just dusted over the plants. Etc. In every particular case the chance of it really being harmful is trivial, but there are a HUGE number of cases. And the probabilities add rather than multiply.
As for "evidence be damned", who ran the tests, and how certain are you that you saw ALL the results. It's quite frequent for experimental results that produce an undesired result to be suppressed. A quick perusal of the list of specialties of the signatories did not convince me. I remember Linus Pauling and Vitamin-C. There were many signers who listed Medicine as their area of competence, but that's quite a broad area. I'd be more convinced if some of them listed bio-chemistry, but that was probably too complex for the compilers of the list. Any signer that listed Physics can be safely ignored. There were a lot of signers whose specialty was in Chemistry or Medicine, but those are such wide areas that I have no real reason to believe their opinion is worth more than mine. I could look up each one in turn and find out whether their area of expertise was such that I should pay attention to it, but that's a long list. And after I found those with significant areas of expertise, I'd need to research who they worked for and who funded any grants they might have either received or potentially receive. It's quite unfortunate, but believing in the honesty of people has taken a real beating over the last decade.
P.S.: The second paragraph is all about uncertainty, and valid reasons for having it. My real reasons, however, have more to do with monopoly power.
I don't know. I may have guessed wrong about how bad a move BREXIT is. I was expecting the DOW to take a big plunge, but now it's higher than it was before the event. And if I'm reading the chart correctly the London Stock Exchange has also recovered.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing you need to remember: ... well, it's a hard problem. Probably worse than NP-Hard, as the proper answer depends on multiple conditions that are unpredictable, as well as upon a social consensus on goals.
Biological change is extremely slow compared to cultural change.
One of the cultural changes has to do with attitudes towards genetic engineering of humans. Let the technology be perfected, and the cultures that *properly* embrace it will be the ones that survive. But defining what "properly" is
If you're going that route, you need to consider the unavoidable expenses, and subtract that from the minimum wage. (Apartment rental around here has gone up a LOT more than car prices. So have some food prices, though I tend to buy unusual items, so I don't know about in general.) Additionally you need to consider the number of hours a typical worker at the modal salary is allowed to work/week by his employer. And the fraction of the population unemployed at all. Etc.
I think you'll find that the modal disposable income in the quartile of the population containing the modal wage has not gone up by even approximately 20%, and may well have decreased. This will vary by region calculated for, of course. But fewer people used to be stuck in minimum wage jobs, and the ones that were used to be able to work 40 hours/week.
Even the advice you offered is too aggressive about promoting loans. You also need to consider the probability that adverse circumstances will render your investment of reduced value while not reducing the cost of the loan. Insurance can help, but it, itself, is another cost burden, and MUST, inevitably, be on the average more costly than the amount of money it will save you.
One that gets into an accident. And traffic accidents are reported to be up this year.
Yeah, it's not like we have independent evidence supporting his statements...
As a statistician (well, once upon a time) let me say that the median is one of three averages. The averages are the median, the mean, and the mode. Each is an average with certain characteristics and areas of utility. If you've got a normal bell curve they are the same number.
For most purposes involving income the useful averages are the median or the mode. Not the mean, which is unduly influenced by extreme values. (I didn't read the article, so I'm only commenting on your response.)
Unfortunately, holding on to a new car for more than 6 years stops helping much (annual costs become dominated by other factors).
???
I generally hold onto a car over 10 years, and it's never cost me that much extra. You *do* need to maintain it as you go along, and it depends on how much you drive, but my current car is from the 1990's and isn't yet in condition where it needs to be replaces, though it's getting there.
Not so. The TTP is trans pacific. The one being negotiated with the EU is separate.
You've got too narrow a focus. I'd give around a 20% chance that it was an unintended error, and no more than around a 40% chance that it was the NSA. But there are lots of other "official" actors, and even gangs of criminals and discontented employees as possibilities, also.
OTOH, I, at least, realize that my estimates in this case say more about me than about the external world. I'm too ignorant to place any certainty on those probabilities, loose as they are.
I first saw that quote attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte.
Assuming you're not a troll:
The don't sell information on you, or information about you. The let people buy ads that will be shown to a defined demographic. Who is in that demographic is a company confidential secret.
If they sold information about who was in the demographic, others could place ads without paying them. So they keep it a secret. But they look for ways to place ads where they can act as a middleman, because that lets them maximize their profit.
P.S.: This information is around a decade old now, but I've seen no indication that anything about it has changed.
Google sells access to your privacy. It's against their business model to actually sell the information about you, instead what they sell is access to a demographic that includes you.
Thus: In *this* aspect Oracle is the evil party...though not because they sell software and hardware, but rather because they are trying to monetize APIs. (There are other reasons, but less related to this case.)
So now you're believing the word of both Oracle and a lawyer.
I strongly suspect that Google *is* paying Apple to stay as their default search engine, after all, they paid Mozilla. But the amount is currently unsupported except by the word of a couple of professional liars. (For the purpose of the prior sentence I'm pretending that Oracle counts as a person.)
It's not so much that Gore had more votes, as that he apparently actually won the election, if you discount fraudulent results. One can't tell, of course. The Florida results have been legally sealed, e.g., and in most cases there wasn't even a challenge.
This is not to assert that the Democrats don't also rig elections. While the Republicans have been more blatant about it (can you say "Dibold"?), the Democrats also do it. Neither side has been willing to fix the electronic voting machines. (Well, you could plausibly claim that California did, as the current model maintains a paper trail, but I've never heard of a manual count being done. And it's possible that other states have done similar things, and I just haven't heard about it.)
Well, that may be an explanation for Trump, I haven't checked, but have you investigated how Hillary became the Democratic candidate? When Sanders started his campaign Hillary already had a large lead in committed delegates, and not a single primary had been held. It's my opinion he was selected by the party as the "designated loser" to provide the illusion of a popular contest, and he was willing because he wanted to promote his position, and for the outside chance that he might win anyway.
If you don't want to vote, you may be saying there's no decent candidate who has a chance. Or you may not care. Those are very different statements, with the same exterior symptoms.
You need to define your terms more carefully, because as you have phrased it my can-opener is just such a system. There are cans it will not open, and others it partially opens, occasionally only sufficient to break the seal. But most of the time it works perfectly.
We don't know how many miles were dirven under solely AutoPilot(tm) control, ignoring the manufacturers instructions, so we can't guess how safe they are. It clearly neither is, nor was sold as, an automatic driver. It also seems to handle more cases properly than it was advertised to.
But it also seems clear than it needs more conspicuous labeling saying not to use it under sole control. A sticker in the middle of the steering wheel should suffice. After all, that's enough for cigarettes.
Actually, IIUC, a trademark MUST not be a descriptive noun, or you will automatically lose it when challenged.
In which country? It was my understanding that it had been grown privately by small groups in India and China. True, this was as a test, but if the farmers had thought it worthwhile they would have kept seeds.
Not necessarily. A watermark can be used to validate the integrity of a copy of a document. In this use the watermark is, for example, a document checksum embedded in the document, and validates that either the document has been altered, or that it hasn't.
This use is like the encoded signing of an email, except that the presence of the signature is concealed from casual reading, but available for checking either by specialized applications or by a hex reader. It generally requires a graphics image be present, but the image can be transparent.
Golden rice has reportedly proven difficult to cultivate. Yams, squash, carrots, kale, spinach, etc. are good sources of vitamin A, and were traditionally cultivated before the push for cash crops...but if you're going to eat the rice, it's not a part of your cash crop anyway.
Also, I'm not certain how much vitamin A there is in how much golden rice. I've never happened to run across the figure. I find it quite plausible that yams are in incredibly better source of vitamin A that is an equal weight of rice (either both or neither being dried).
Since golden rice is (or was) free for non-commercial use, and trial plots were grown by private individuals, if it were a success, then it would have by now become widespread, though not commercial. It hasn't. So the people who grew it didn't find it worth replanting.
It is easy to do correctly, if you have enough space, proper equipment, etc. It's even easier to do it wrong...and for that you don't need much space or equipment.
Also, even if the composting is done incorrectly, I believe that it's still safe if only used on plants whose edible portions never touch the ground. (I'm not *really* sure of this, but I believe it to be true.)
If it's patented, and the patent is owned by a company attempting to monopolize a section of the food industry, then I don't trust it. I'm quite willing to phrase my doubts in any way that is publicly acceptable, including claims of lack of safety that I wouldn't normally accept, because I don't trust it for other reasons.
That said, the poster child of GMO, golden rice, doesn't seem to be working out. It doesn't seem to grow well. The only ones that grow well are the ones that do things like encourage excess use of poisons. (I know that's not how they claim it should be used, but that's how it gets used in practice.) I don't know that the various poisons are somehow denatured before it gets to me, so I'm dubious, and I have no ready way of testing. Perhaps, to pick one example, glyphosate is harmless ( https://www.google.com/search?... ) or the amount that actually ends up in the food is harmless. I'd rather just avoid the problem. Bt is probably harmless, but when plants are modified to generate it in every cell, then it's a danger that wasn't present when it was just dusted over the plants. Etc. In every particular case the chance of it really being harmful is trivial, but there are a HUGE number of cases. And the probabilities add rather than multiply.
As for "evidence be damned", who ran the tests, and how certain are you that you saw ALL the results. It's quite frequent for experimental results that produce an undesired result to be suppressed. A quick perusal of the list of specialties of the signatories did not convince me. I remember Linus Pauling and Vitamin-C. There were many signers who listed Medicine as their area of competence, but that's quite a broad area. I'd be more convinced if some of them listed bio-chemistry, but that was probably too complex for the compilers of the list. Any signer that listed Physics can be safely ignored. There were a lot of signers whose specialty was in Chemistry or Medicine, but those are such wide areas that I have no real reason to believe their opinion is worth more than mine. I could look up each one in turn and find out whether their area of expertise was such that I should pay attention to it, but that's a long list. And after I found those with significant areas of expertise, I'd need to research who they worked for and who funded any grants they might have either received or potentially receive. It's quite unfortunate, but believing in the honesty of people has taken a real beating over the last decade.
P.S.: The second paragraph is all about uncertainty, and valid reasons for having it. My real reasons, however, have more to do with monopoly power.
I don't know. I may have guessed wrong about how bad a move BREXIT is. I was expecting the DOW to take a big plunge, but now it's higher than it was before the event. And if I'm reading the chart correctly the London Stock Exchange has also recovered.