The best way out that I've though of is to have five candidates selected by lottery from the qualified voters, no refusal allowed. After the election the selected one holds the office. When they retire they're not allowed any income from anyone except the government, which gives them a pension of twice the median population income. There are a few details to clear up, like what about property you own before you are drafted, but that basic plan should largely work. It eliminates the capability of buying the candidate before election or after retirement, and it gives all classes of society a reasonable chance of being selected proportional to their percentage in the population of voters.
Now how to implement something which doesn't yield any small group a strong advantage...
No. Bernie is going to lose because Hilary controls the party machinery. Unfortunately I cannot vote for her, because I believe she supports the TPP. She was a partial author, and when given a chance to disavow supporting it she waffled.
Both parties are playing "lesser of two evils", but to different audiences. The Dems are playing to the middle class and urban poor ("Vote for us or the Republicans will kill you economically...We aren't quite as bad."). The Repubs were playing to the paranoid-patriotic Know-Nothings. ("Vote for us or the Democrats will let in swarms of foreigners and sell the country to the communists. We aren't quite as bad.") Both plans are pretty evil, but hey, that was what they were intended to be.
Then Trump came along and started stealing from Hitler's playbook, This captivated a lot of the audience that the traditional Repubs has been playing to, and he wasn't controlled by the party. (Yeah, I've left out a lot of intermediate steps.) Now we've got a leading candidate who's either an incredibly subtle sociopath, a true paranoid lunatic, or ??? (Manchurian Candidate?). Best hope is that he's just an egomaniac, but that doesn't really seem plausible.
I have to wonder who you are considering to be "the nation as a whole". And calling them "free trade" is an abuse of the language. Free trade isn't supposed to mean you get to ignore the laws.
The wealth distribution problem is tied directly into these "free trade" agreements. They allow companies to move to where labor is cheap and pin labor in place. (Yeah, it's more complicated than that, but that's one of the main features.) Whether "everyone else" sees secondary benefits is debatable, and frankly quite dubious. Even when prices are as much lower as reduced costs would make sensible, wages tend to be so depressed that this is not sufficient compensation, and that optimistic "Even when..." just about never happens.
I've heard it said before and repeatedly and by many different people that TARP was necessary and successful. Perhaps it's true. Perhaps. But to me it looks like it was only successful because we can't directly tie the actions of the bailed out banks to the succeeding economic crisis. Banks that are too big to fail should be broken up as a part of the cost of being bailed out.
Actually is only "Linux and the BSDs are still way behind Windows when it comes to applications in some areas". But they are far behind when it comes to advertising in all areas. And, to be fair, even when the Linux or BSD version is better, it will be significantly different, and they those who have learned the MSWind version find them less desirable. (It also works in the other direction.)
So there is considerable entrenched opposition to switching away from MS even where there isn't a good reason. And this is sufficient to mean that the alternatives need to be considerable better. AND THIS IS A VALID REASON.
I, personally, don't have that reaction to switching software choices, but I'm a developer. I even like to switch programming languages. But it's unreasonable to expect other people to share my preferences.
As someone else said "you've got to write to the customer". For many purposes Python and Ruby are quite practical. I'm less sure about Perl for anything of any size. Even Perl programmers are likely to call it write-only code.
That said, there are lots of alternatives. Once upon a time I hooked some Eiffel code into an MSAccess program because MSAccess kept making arithmetic errors. A simple translation of the same code worked without flaw, and was faster. (These days that probably wouldn't work, but C++ would probably have done the job, I just liked Eiffel better. Besides, I didn't need to buy the Eiffel compiler.) Were I looking for alternatives and if I didn't like any of the major languages, I'd start looking at things like D, Go, Nemerle, Haxe or Rust. (Rust is still a bit raw.) Some of those are easier to use, some have better documentation, some have more libraries, etc. All are cross-platform, though whether the libraries are depends on what you are doing.
The cloud isn't a bad choice if you host your own cloud, and control access to the degree indicated by your security needs. A cloud running on a local device can be insulated from external access.
To help you think of this, a cloud is what a mainframe used to be, with distributed access over a network, like a timeshare system used to have. Computers have gotten smaller and faster, and storage has gotten cheaper and bigger, so hosting your own cloud (i.e., tmeshare service) has gotten reasonable. You can allow or deny external access, or even allow external access to only particular TCP addresses, and only over custom protocols. It all depends on what you need. Most existing software can easily be modified to handle custom protocols if you have the source. You can even combine public-key with one-time pad encryption without too much difficulty. So it can be nearly as secure as local hard wired. (DON'T fiddle with the encryption code unless you're a real specialist, instead pipeline it. You don't need a high bandwidth one-time pad to make public-key essentially unbreakable.)
Bruno was about half a century earlier than Galileo. The idea of science was less well developed then, as was what was covered. And as you pointed out even much later at the time of Newton magic and science were still so intertwined that many of the foremost practitioners of one were also practitioners of the other.
But when you go back in time the concept of what science was becomes more confused with magic.
It's also true that the closer you get to the roots of a belief, even those held at the present time, they closer their "reasoning" becomes. Near the root there is little-to-no difference between religion, science, and magic. The basic belief in the permanence of objects is not subject to any valid reasoning. (OK, perhaps Zen should be excepted from the identity at that point, and a couple of others. But few, few. And they also coalesce at the next step in.)
Bruno was operating at the intersection of science, magic, and philosophy. And, yes, there were religious implications. But he was closer to science than to religion (though still closer to magic).
If you understood what he was saying, it WAS related to science. Also, of course, to magic. The two were usually quite tightly intertwined at that period. (Well, they still are, though less blatantly so. Much of the climate change denialism that isn't based on economics is based on theology...usually of a particularly unthoughtful kind. "Unthoughtful" as in the people holding it don't think about their beliefs. Usually they accepted them in childhood and also accepted that they weren't to question them.)
The example you're thinking of is Bruno of Nolan. They did coerce Galileo into silence, but Bruno is the one they burned. (Odd, really, when Galileo actually published a book about his theory which included a satirical dialog where there was a character who was obviously the Pope and who was named (after translation) Idiot.
You mean because they underestimated the warming? Or what?
I don't think any of the models the IPCC approved of forecast such a continuous chain of years with record breaking heat. If you want to say some areas were also colder than forecast, yes, that's also true. And much does depend on exactly how you measure temperature. But if I propose any specific method there are reasons why that's not a good choice. (Which is why many different methods are used.)
The temperature that I consider most significant over the short term is the average temperature of the ocean surface, but that's quite difficult to measure. Infrared measurments from space tend to get the top several meters (admittedly with rapidly decaying significance), samples taken from ships only pick up very local measurements, etc. But it's the temperature most directly related to the rate of evaporation.
FWIW, the IPCC was a political document and it trimmed out models at both extremes. This may have been unwise. But too many models were predicting things that politicians weren't willing to hear.
All that said, weather is complex and there have been areas where it didn't behave as expected. E.g., this was supposed to be a particularly wet winter where I live, but it has, instead, been drier and warmer than usual. For some reason that I haven't checked into, however, the snowpack is slightly ahead of normal. But things have been so warm that I still expect it to melt off in the early spring. Not good.
That's the question. Some people are reporting this, others are saying it didn't happen to them. And it's impossible to know what the difference between them is.
That said, I just consider it another reason to avoid MS, which I was already doing over EULA issues, so the details don't matter to me.
Considering how easy it appears to have been to avoid upgrading to MSWind10, it would not surprise me to find strong coercion to move to MSWind11...which just happened to implement a subscription model.
The effect would be the same as charging a subscription to MSWind10, but since the name had changed, no promises would have been broken.
That said, MS has just lied frequently enough that it wouldn't surprise me if they did it again. But they don't need to. Just do a "security update" that essentially bricks all systems using MSWind10 for any function except upgrading. They could even do it with a time delay and a nag screen with a variable frequency (by date). They'd need to ensure that the upgraded system couldn't work except when attached to the internet, though.
While your argument has a lot of merit, there's also a lot of research that shows that what particular foods you eat grossly changes your microbiome. (Not just the gut bacteria, but also the skin, what you shed as you walk around, etc.)
So, e.g., Vegans will have a radically different microbiome than will those who eat at McDonalds. And even assuming both groups get "full nutrition" as recognized by the USDA, they are quite likely to have tremendously different weights. And both of these will be quite different from someone who normally eats at a chinese restaurant. (I'm presuming that fried foods are minimized here. Otherwise it starts looking more like McDonalds.)
But do notice that saying that their microbiomes are different isn't saying which is better, or even that one is better than the other. What's better may depend on other environmental factors. (To be honest, I doubt that the microbiome encouraged by McDonalds has any advantages...but I don't *know*.)
It should not be surprising, however, if different micro-flora process foods differently. Even extremely differently. And this can easily affect thermodynamic efficiency.
You left out "except at the extreme ends of the distribution".
It's true that I once went on a week long water & vitamin pill fast and gained weight. But I doubt this would have happened if it had been a month long fast. Really.
And if you'll notice US citizens tend to be heavier and fatter than starving Ethiopians. (I'm not sure that the famine is still happening there, and I acknowledge that it was largely caused by local politics, but it did happen, and the Ethiopians involved were mainly not involved in the machinations.) So amount of food eaten *IS* crucial near the extremes.
In the middle, however, you are quite correct that there are lots of complex feedback loops, and simple explanations usually don't work.
Most viruses/exploits target a particular library running in the context of a particular application. This would fragment their ecosystem. And vaccinations against particular diseases (AKA binary patches) would be possible...but they've be very version dependent.
You're right, not every paradigm is going to be applicable, and I thing, after making due allowances for metaphor translation, this one would be too expensive. But the proposal isn't ALL bad.
There's a lot of evidence that your reply is the most correct.
FWIW, Louisiana used to have (perhaps it still does have) a "corporate death penalty" on the books. It was so rarely enforced that it might as well not have been there.
Sounds good. I do think that during that period corporations should be allowed to dissolve (but not go bankrupt). But how can you apply that to an international corporation? Especially not one incorporated within your legal bounds? Forbidding them to do business locally isn't quite the same thing. And what about rents due during that period on premises they occupy?
I think that this would require an entirely new set of laws to be written. Does making a river poisonous count as 1 week, 1 year, or one decade "in prison"? Does it depend on who uses the river for what? Whoo! The idea has merit, but implementation would be horrendous, with many questions that have no obvious answer, and you know who would be pushing for minimal punishment.
Well, it's different from that, and both worse and better.
If programs all used static libraries, then there would be an indefinitely large number of versions of each library on each working machine, but each library would only be accessible to the programs that were compiled with it.
This would have the advantage that "breaking changes" wouldn't affect working code. And the advantage that different versions of, say, a browser would be likely to use different versions of each library. THIS would make it more difficult to write a strongly infectious virus, but more difficult to eradicate an existing one. (SOMEONE is going to continue running version myBrowser.x.y.z, so the virus is likely to never go away unless it's wantonly destructive.)
FWIW, the human immune complex has lots of different "library routines" compiled in, but as the system runs the immune complex changes its genetic code (via a cut and paste approach). This is designed to prevent humans from presenting a mono-culture for infections. It's not perfect, but it works pretty well. And this is analogous to something that could be done with static libraries. I'm not really sure, however, that the systems are otherwise sufficiently similar that this would work on current computer systems. It does resemble having a set of virus checkers running in background threads all the time, but there are enough differences that...well, my best estimate is that running a closely analogous system would be so expensive that you couldn't do anything else.
I wish I didn't have to agree with you. In fact the "speed" with which this was addressed is sufficient to yield some credence to those who believe that it was supported by those who have in other circumstances acted to intentionally weaken secure cryptography, and other secure systems.
I will grant that the evidence in support of this theory is so scant that accepting it counts as paranoia, but similarly it is strong enough that rejecting it counts as living in a fools paradise. As with many situations it the uncomfortable middle position of "well, maybe" that seems most supported by the evidence.
OTOH, it's never fair to rule out bureaucratic inertia. Which isn't, now that I think about it, a much more comfortable option.
Unless you give me reason to consider that you have valid grounds for questioning my appraisal, then I'm not going to consider your response even remotely valuable.
AFAICT, you are "arguing from authority" with yourself as the authority. Which is alright, provided you have a valid basis for the claim to authority. You haven't even asserted any.
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Instant Runoff and Condorcet voting have significant advantages over the current system but they hardly fix the basic problem.
The basic problem is that the only people who even run for office are power mad. Nobody else would be willing to put up with it.
Also, doesn't Australia have Instant Runoff Voting? And look at the marvelous government they've gotten.
The best way out that I've though of is to have five candidates selected by lottery from the qualified voters, no refusal allowed. After the election the selected one holds the office. When they retire they're not allowed any income from anyone except the government, which gives them a pension of twice the median population income. There are a few details to clear up, like what about property you own before you are drafted, but that basic plan should largely work. It eliminates the capability of buying the candidate before election or after retirement, and it gives all classes of society a reasonable chance of being selected proportional to their percentage in the population of voters.
Now how to implement something which doesn't yield any small group a strong advantage...
No. Bernie is going to lose because Hilary controls the party machinery. Unfortunately I cannot vote for her, because I believe she supports the TPP. She was a partial author, and when given a chance to disavow supporting it she waffled.
Both parties are playing "lesser of two evils", but to different audiences. The Dems are playing to the middle class and urban poor ("Vote for us or the Republicans will kill you economically...We aren't quite as bad."). The Repubs were playing to the paranoid-patriotic Know-Nothings. ("Vote for us or the Democrats will let in swarms of foreigners and sell the country to the communists. We aren't quite as bad.") Both plans are pretty evil, but hey, that was what they were intended to be.
Then Trump came along and started stealing from Hitler's playbook, This captivated a lot of the audience that the traditional Repubs has been playing to, and he wasn't controlled by the party. (Yeah, I've left out a lot of intermediate steps.) Now we've got a leading candidate who's either an incredibly subtle sociopath, a true paranoid lunatic, or ??? (Manchurian Candidate?). Best hope is that he's just an egomaniac, but that doesn't really seem plausible.
I have to wonder who you are considering to be "the nation as a whole". And calling them "free trade" is an abuse of the language. Free trade isn't supposed to mean you get to ignore the laws.
The wealth distribution problem is tied directly into these "free trade" agreements. They allow companies to move to where labor is cheap and pin labor in place. (Yeah, it's more complicated than that, but that's one of the main features.) Whether "everyone else" sees secondary benefits is debatable, and frankly quite dubious. Even when prices are as much lower as reduced costs would make sensible, wages tend to be so depressed that this is not sufficient compensation, and that optimistic "Even when..." just about never happens.
I've heard it said before and repeatedly and by many different people that TARP was necessary and successful. Perhaps it's true. Perhaps. But to me it looks like it was only successful because we can't directly tie the actions of the bailed out banks to the succeeding economic crisis. Banks that are too big to fail should be broken up as a part of the cost of being bailed out.
Actually is only "Linux and the BSDs are still way behind Windows when it comes to applications in some areas". But they are far behind when it comes to advertising in all areas. And, to be fair, even when the Linux or BSD version is better, it will be significantly different, and they those who have learned the MSWind version find them less desirable. (It also works in the other direction.)
So there is considerable entrenched opposition to switching away from MS even where there isn't a good reason. And this is sufficient to mean that the alternatives need to be considerable better. AND THIS IS A VALID REASON.
I, personally, don't have that reaction to switching software choices, but I'm a developer. I even like to switch programming languages. But it's unreasonable to expect other people to share my preferences.
As someone else said "you've got to write to the customer". For many purposes Python and Ruby are quite practical. I'm less sure about Perl for anything of any size. Even Perl programmers are likely to call it write-only code.
That said, there are lots of alternatives. Once upon a time I hooked some Eiffel code into an MSAccess program because MSAccess kept making arithmetic errors. A simple translation of the same code worked without flaw, and was faster. (These days that probably wouldn't work, but C++ would probably have done the job, I just liked Eiffel better. Besides, I didn't need to buy the Eiffel compiler.) Were I looking for alternatives and if I didn't like any of the major languages, I'd start looking at things like D, Go, Nemerle, Haxe or Rust. (Rust is still a bit raw.) Some of those are easier to use, some have better documentation, some have more libraries, etc. All are cross-platform, though whether the libraries are depends on what you are doing.
The cloud isn't a bad choice if you host your own cloud, and control access to the degree indicated by your security needs. A cloud running on a local device can be insulated from external access.
To help you think of this, a cloud is what a mainframe used to be, with distributed access over a network, like a timeshare system used to have. Computers have gotten smaller and faster, and storage has gotten cheaper and bigger, so hosting your own cloud (i.e., tmeshare service) has gotten reasonable. You can allow or deny external access, or even allow external access to only particular TCP addresses, and only over custom protocols. It all depends on what you need. Most existing software can easily be modified to handle custom protocols if you have the source. You can even combine public-key with one-time pad encryption without too much difficulty. So it can be nearly as secure as local hard wired. (DON'T fiddle with the encryption code unless you're a real specialist, instead pipeline it. You don't need a high bandwidth one-time pad to make public-key essentially unbreakable.)
Bruno was about half a century earlier than Galileo. The idea of science was less well developed then, as was what was covered. And as you pointed out even much later at the time of Newton magic and science were still so intertwined that many of the foremost practitioners of one were also practitioners of the other.
But when you go back in time the concept of what science was becomes more confused with magic.
It's also true that the closer you get to the roots of a belief, even those held at the present time, they closer their "reasoning" becomes. Near the root there is little-to-no difference between religion, science, and magic. The basic belief in the permanence of objects is not subject to any valid reasoning. (OK, perhaps Zen should be excepted from the identity at that point, and a couple of others. But few, few. And they also coalesce at the next step in.)
Bruno was operating at the intersection of science, magic, and philosophy. And, yes, there were religious implications. But he was closer to science than to religion (though still closer to magic).
Well, I haven't seen any. Of course, I don't have flash installed, and I have Javascript disabled on most sites.
If you understood what he was saying, it WAS related to science. Also, of course, to magic. The two were usually quite tightly intertwined at that period. (Well, they still are, though less blatantly so. Much of the climate change denialism that isn't based on economics is based on theology...usually of a particularly unthoughtful kind. "Unthoughtful" as in the people holding it don't think about their beliefs. Usually they accepted them in childhood and also accepted that they weren't to question them.)
The example you're thinking of is Bruno of Nolan. They did coerce Galileo into silence, but Bruno is the one they burned. (Odd, really, when Galileo actually published a book about his theory which included a satirical dialog where there was a character who was obviously the Pope and who was named (after translation) Idiot.
You mean because they underestimated the warming? Or what?
I don't think any of the models the IPCC approved of forecast such a continuous chain of years with record breaking heat. If you want to say some areas were also colder than forecast, yes, that's also true. And much does depend on exactly how you measure temperature. But if I propose any specific method there are reasons why that's not a good choice. (Which is why many different methods are used.)
The temperature that I consider most significant over the short term is the average temperature of the ocean surface, but that's quite difficult to measure. Infrared measurments from space tend to get the top several meters (admittedly with rapidly decaying significance), samples taken from ships only pick up very local measurements, etc. But it's the temperature most directly related to the rate of evaporation.
FWIW, the IPCC was a political document and it trimmed out models at both extremes. This may have been unwise. But too many models were predicting things that politicians weren't willing to hear.
All that said, weather is complex and there have been areas where it didn't behave as expected. E.g., this was supposed to be a particularly wet winter where I live, but it has, instead, been drier and warmer than usual. For some reason that I haven't checked into, however, the snowpack is slightly ahead of normal. But things have been so warm that I still expect it to melt off in the early spring. Not good.
That's the question. Some people are reporting this, others are saying it didn't happen to them. And it's impossible to know what the difference between them is.
That said, I just consider it another reason to avoid MS, which I was already doing over EULA issues, so the details don't matter to me.
Considering how easy it appears to have been to avoid upgrading to MSWind10, it would not surprise me to find strong coercion to move to MSWind11...which just happened to implement a subscription model.
The effect would be the same as charging a subscription to MSWind10, but since the name had changed, no promises would have been broken.
That said, MS has just lied frequently enough that it wouldn't surprise me if they did it again. But they don't need to. Just do a "security update" that essentially bricks all systems using MSWind10 for any function except upgrading. They could even do it with a time delay and a nag screen with a variable frequency (by date). They'd need to ensure that the upgraded system couldn't work except when attached to the internet, though.
While your argument has a lot of merit, there's also a lot of research that shows that what particular foods you eat grossly changes your microbiome. (Not just the gut bacteria, but also the skin, what you shed as you walk around, etc.)
So, e.g., Vegans will have a radically different microbiome than will those who eat at McDonalds. And even assuming both groups get "full nutrition" as recognized by the USDA, they are quite likely to have tremendously different weights. And both of these will be quite different from someone who normally eats at a chinese restaurant. (I'm presuming that fried foods are minimized here. Otherwise it starts looking more like McDonalds.)
But do notice that saying that their microbiomes are different isn't saying which is better, or even that one is better than the other. What's better may depend on other environmental factors. (To be honest, I doubt that the microbiome encouraged by McDonalds has any advantages...but I don't *know*.)
It should not be surprising, however, if different micro-flora process foods differently. Even extremely differently. And this can easily affect thermodynamic efficiency.
You left out "except at the extreme ends of the distribution".
It's true that I once went on a week long water & vitamin pill fast and gained weight. But I doubt this would have happened if it had been a month long fast. Really.
And if you'll notice US citizens tend to be heavier and fatter than starving Ethiopians. (I'm not sure that the famine is still happening there, and I acknowledge that it was largely caused by local politics, but it did happen, and the Ethiopians involved were mainly not involved in the machinations.) So amount of food eaten *IS* crucial near the extremes.
In the middle, however, you are quite correct that there are lots of complex feedback loops, and simple explanations usually don't work.
Most viruses/exploits target a particular library running in the context of a particular application. This would fragment their ecosystem. And vaccinations against particular diseases (AKA binary patches) would be possible...but they've be very version dependent.
You're right, not every paradigm is going to be applicable, and I thing, after making due allowances for metaphor translation, this one would be too expensive. But the proposal isn't ALL bad.
There's a lot of evidence that your reply is the most correct.
FWIW, Louisiana used to have (perhaps it still does have) a "corporate death penalty" on the books. It was so rarely enforced that it might as well not have been there.
That's fair. And I'm pretty sure it's illegal to poison people, so they are going to arrest those guys who poisoned people for profit, right?
Sounds good. I do think that during that period corporations should be allowed to dissolve (but not go bankrupt). But how can you apply that to an international corporation? Especially not one incorporated within your legal bounds? Forbidding them to do business locally isn't quite the same thing. And what about rents due during that period on premises they occupy?
I think that this would require an entirely new set of laws to be written. Does making a river poisonous count as 1 week, 1 year, or one decade "in prison"? Does it depend on who uses the river for what? Whoo! The idea has merit, but implementation would be horrendous, with many questions that have no obvious answer, and you know who would be pushing for minimal punishment.
Well, it's different from that, and both worse and better.
If programs all used static libraries, then there would be an indefinitely large number of versions of each library on each working machine, but each library would only be accessible to the programs that were compiled with it.
This would have the advantage that "breaking changes" wouldn't affect working code. And the advantage that different versions of, say, a browser would be likely to use different versions of each library. THIS would make it more difficult to write a strongly infectious virus, but more difficult to eradicate an existing one. (SOMEONE is going to continue running version myBrowser.x.y.z, so the virus is likely to never go away unless it's wantonly destructive.)
FWIW, the human immune complex has lots of different "library routines" compiled in, but as the system runs the immune complex changes its genetic code (via a cut and paste approach). This is designed to prevent humans from presenting a mono-culture for infections. It's not perfect, but it works pretty well. And this is analogous to something that could be done with static libraries. I'm not really sure, however, that the systems are otherwise sufficiently similar that this would work on current computer systems. It does resemble having a set of virus checkers running in background threads all the time, but there are enough differences that...well, my best estimate is that running a closely analogous system would be so expensive that you couldn't do anything else.
I wish I didn't have to agree with you. In fact the "speed" with which this was addressed is sufficient to yield some credence to those who believe that it was supported by those who have in other circumstances acted to intentionally weaken secure cryptography, and other secure systems.
I will grant that the evidence in support of this theory is so scant that accepting it counts as paranoia, but similarly it is strong enough that rejecting it counts as living in a fools paradise. As with many situations it the uncomfortable middle position of "well, maybe" that seems most supported by the evidence.
OTOH, it's never fair to rule out bureaucratic inertia. Which isn't, now that I think about it, a much more comfortable option.
Were you able to compile it, and verify that it matched the code being delivered? This is the step which was missing the last time I checked.
(I will admit that the code comparison itself has lots of gotcha's, but if you can't compile it you don't even get to that step.)
And your credentials are?
Unless you give me reason to consider that you have valid grounds for questioning my appraisal, then I'm not going to consider your response even remotely valuable.
AFAICT, you are "arguing from authority" with yourself as the authority. Which is alright, provided you have a valid basis for the claim to authority. You haven't even asserted any.