...But that won't happen any time soon; we just need to replace them.
What do you intend to replace them with?
I agree it's a very bad problem, I just don't see a good answer. Term limits get rid of the few good legislators as well as the more numerous corrupt ones. But the corrupt ones make deals with each other to switch offices, so they are less affected. Either IRV or Condorcet voting would improve the representativeness of the legislature, but I don't see it in the cards. (I prefer Tarot over crystal balls.) Revolutions usually make things worse. Etc.
I agree that's how the legal system has interpreted the constitution. I don't believe that was the original intent, and it certain requires a lot of very creative arguing to assert that it's a reasonable interpretation.
OTOH, I'm also certain that SOME of the federalists would have been quite happy with that interpretation.
I actually voted against McCain/Palin. Obama hasn't so far been as bad as I had feared he might be. I don't think he has it in him to be as bad as McCain/Palin intended to be...but this will never be provable .
Remember, this is the guy who decided that evolution didn't happen at the level of the organism, but at the level of the gene.
With the forms of evidence that he accepts as valid, and the forms of argument that he accepts as valid (i.e., extreme reductionist), he's right. This isn't the form most people accept. So when he writes he tends to use words in a different way and with different meanings that most people are comfortable with. He isn't vague, he just doesn't accept any vagueness as valid. Evolution happens at the gene! The organism is only the carrier to that gene. (Note the reductionism.)
If you attend to him carefully, he makes quite a lot of sense. That doesn't mean that his conclusions will translate into the way that you use the words. I feel that to Dawkins "God" is either a meaningless noise or an entity that produces particular effects. The particular effects are not detectable, therefore the entity is a meaningless noise. This isn't what most people mean, but then what most people mean is half-way between totally rediculous and so vague as to be meaningless. I rather think that what most people really mean is what Bob Wilson once called the "big baboon". I.e., the huge alpha primate of the pack that will strike you down if you offend him. I.e., a set of inherited reflexes that once served our ancestors well. (Bob Wilson thought it was software rather than hardware. I tend to think of it as hardware that can have it's significance adjusted via manipulation of neural weights.) Note that I'm not sure that Dawkins would understand any explanation of what I believe. And if he understood it, I expect he'd say "Very interesting, but what's really going on is..." and talk about a reductionist reinterpretation which would be true, but not directly perceptible by consciousness.
I'm not sure. Was Pot Pol an atheist? Stalin probably was.
OTOH, Ghengis Khan et seq. were not atheists. Neither was Torquemada. It's a classic piece of irony that the Franciscans were in charge of much of the inquisition (because it's so much against their current public image).
In most cases, however, if you investigate, the religion was just a convenient cover for some people to become extremely wealthy at the expense of people who were already of moderate means or better. The power grab at the wealth of the Knights Templar is a bit of a classic along that line. (Note in most of my examples it was either clergy or officially Catholic kings doing the grabbing. This is probably because that's what ended up in the histories that I studied.)
OTOH, I have a friend who analyzed communism as a Catholic heresy. I didn't find it convincing, but the parallels were quite intriguing. Many of the most rabid atheists have had a strong religious upbringing. (As my friend did. Catholic in his case.)
I know. When I was studying arithmetic, I rarely got more than 80% correct.
That that's just talking about formal symbol manipulation. When you get to story problems...whew!! One can disagree even about what is being asked.
Don't expect ANY approach to yield certainly true results. Nothing in this world does.
It's true that induction, except mathematical induction, fails more often than many methods. It's also more powerful at deriving conclusions.
P.S.: Although I generally agree with Dawkins, especially when he's talking about evolution, I tend to think he takes a rather reductionist interpretation even of scientific facts. It's a very powerful approach, and it yields, when properly interpreted, facts that are guaranteed true. The problem is that it tends to cause you to understand words in a different way that the same words commonly used. E.g. I am a believer in gods... it's just that I don't think that Dawkins would recognize the entities that I believe in as having any reality. Just as he ascribes all evolution to molecular evolution. Yes, what he's talking about is a valid way to speak of reality. But it's not the normal way. (Neither is mine. When I speak of gods I'm talking about something similar to what C.G.Jung would have called archetypes, but they are partially physical...and have a distributed physical presence as genetic/protein/structural entites and a localized presence as electro-mechanical neural processes. They are unconscious processes that occasionally have partial conscious manifestations. Etc.)
Deism was a quite useful religion. It allowed science to be created. If people who wanted to be scientists had been forced to be either atheists or agnostics, then there would have been so much public opprobrium heaped upon them that they could never have either published, spoken in public, or earned a living.
Whether it's useful in present day society may depend on where you live.
OTOH, if I remember correctly, the exact wording was "Congress shall make no law...". This isn't exactly congress.
So it's not an open & shut case. Personally I despise them for this action, but that doesn't make it unconstitutional. And I don't know anything about the Oklahoma state constitution.
Remember that the US constitution itself doesn't put very many limits on what the states can do. A lot of constraints have been read into it, but most of those I still see as power grabs by the federal government. And without valid constitutional basis. (I'm not saying anything about motives here. Sometimes the motive for a particular power grab seems valid, reasonable, and moral. That doesn't make the action itself any of those.)
Were I a lawyer I could be arguing that the University of Oklahoma gets federal money and therefore it has to obey federal rules. In this case I think the proximal result of arguing thus would be reasonable, but the argument is, itself, fallacious. I believe that it's also a traditionally supported argument. A more nuanced argument would be "If the University of Oklahoma doesn't accept federal restrictions, then it's ineligible for federal money, and one of those restrictions is that it cannot discriminate on the basis of a religious doctrine." That one is probably reasonable. Note that it's still a blatant power play, and has the same effect as the first version. (Consider the speed limits on freeways in Utah and Nevada when the feds mandated a 50 mph speed limit. In those states in most places the speed limit made no sense. But they adopted it anyway to continue to get federal highway money.)
P.S.; I think it was 50 mph. It was years ago, so it could have been some other number. Anyway, after the adoption there was so much public discontent that the speed limit requirement was lifted for those states.
You think that the choice of two candidates is an illusion, but I think you need to analyze the way votes are counted more accurately.
Now you said "If everyone...". Yes, you are right. This is a version of the Prisoner's Dilemma. But the uncomfortable fact is that there is not solution to the Prisoner's Dilemma...except changing the system. This is why I support Condorcet voting, and others support Instant Runoff. But both would require electronic vote tallying software, so in every case it's important that the software be open and that a permanent audit trail be available....but then you need that anyway.
It's not a trick. Do a systems analysis of the way votes are counted. There ARE only four choices: 1) Democrat or Republican 2) Republican or Democrat 3) Somebody else as a protest (won't affect the results) 4) It's not worth bothering to vote.
Note that in choice 3 it doesn't matter who you vote for. That person will never get in, and both of the major parties will ignore your response.
Consider, however, the Pat Paulson for President campaign. Because of that they changed the laws to not count votes that weren't for registered candidates. (And to forbid TV personalities from running for office, even as a joke.) That was one instance where an outsider MIGHT have ended up with the office, because everyone was disgusted with both of the major candidates, and because he spoke, via TV, to a very large segment of the populace. (It was a comedy show, of course.)
While you have some valid points, it's also true that prior to this many Banks had been discriminating on racial grounds. The response was an overreaction, and it did cause problems, but the original cause was severe.
I have frequently thought the government made incorrect decisions in attempting to remove racial discrimination. This doesn't mean that I don't recognize the real problems that were, and still are, evident. Solutions, however, are not apparent, and will, at minimum, require studied and nuanced action. Such things don't translate well into political diatribes, so they tend to not get done by legislatures. Bureaucrats can do that, but they've got their own problems. In particular they're rather unresponsive to people with little in the way of power. This is because Bureaucracy is essentially hierarchical.
I don't know the proper solution. I just know that nothing that's been tried so far is it.
You can criticize the actions of the Democrats, but at least they tried to help the larger number of people. (I'll agree that the attempts were ill-thoughtout and lead to problems.) The Republicans didn't even adhere to their own party's doctrines. They centralized and grew governmental power rather than reducing it. And they *OH BOY* grew the deficit.
Quite a bit before then. Check out the "Alien and Sedition Acts".
The problem is, the constitution doesn't have any enforcement branch that's effective over the federal government. I don't even know what such a thing could look like. The product of government is a bit abstract for normal Q/C measures to work, and even a good Q/C department requires the support of management to be effective.
It was the MSAccess2000 version, but I've personally caught MSAccess making a mistake when adding two numbers. It didn't happen often, but it did happen. And they weren't even large numbers.
Now you might say "But you only caught one out of hundreds of thousands of calculations!". My response is "Do you know how difficult it is to track down that kind of error!" I expect that there are thousands that I didn't catch, or ascribed to rounding errors. The next day I stopped using (i.e., creating new programs in) MSAccess. This was difficult, as I didn't really have any good alternative. For awhile I did all the calculations in external code. (Eiffel as it happens.) It was kludgy, but it got the job done, and I stopped finding any errors...well, outside of my own errors.
In Minnesota robots are a bad choice. If you choose to go with non-human laborers (back-hoe, anyone) then non-automated equipment is currently much cheaper. Even if you go fully mechanized, telefactor operated + minimal local robotic control would be much cheaper. There's no problem with light-speed delaying reaction times when you are so local.
N.B.: AFTER the robots have proven themselves on the moon, altered versions will start appearing on Earth. But paying for the development for use on Earth is silly. We've already got a very large unemployment problem.
P.S.: Some projections that I've seen estimate that there will be over 50% unemployment within 10 years due to increase in automation. NOT robots, in any normal meaning of the word. (Do you consider an automated fork-lift a robot? If so then the robots have already started eliminating jobs...and saving the companies that use them LOTS of money.)
I don't think you realize how drastically you are oversimplifying. The conditions are different, but not particularly easier. But competition from humans is nil, because humans need to carry life support. The equivalent for robots is much simpler. (Non-volatile greases, UV protection [i.e., no external plastic parts], etc.)
Repair is probably going to be a problem. I expect that at least initially any non-functioning robot is going to need to be scrapped. But with care it's probable that many can be kept going for years. Grit will be a major problem.
The lighter gravity means that the robots can have a lighter construction, but it also means that any berm will need to be higher. And the lack of water means that one can't use concrete.
I think this project may be just on the far side of currently possible. Which means that be the time it gets implemented it's likely to be bleeding edge.
I'm sure they *will* build it on Earth and make it work before they try it on Luna. But I have my doubts that they'll try it in Minnesota. That's not a very similar environment. White Sands, maybe.
Also, note that construction on the moon can afford to pay much more per robot because the cost of humans is so extraordinarily high.
Every *system* has issues, but not everyone who uses every system encounters those issues.
I've got a MSWind95 system that's been running without a hitch for 4-5 years now. I'm not claiming the system doesn't have issues, but it's not being asked to do anything that would activate those issues.
So don't presume that someone is lying if they tell you they don't have issues with some particular system. Just presume that they are limited in what they ask that system to do.
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to beg in the streets, steal bread, or sleep under a bridge." â"Anatole France
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...But that won't happen any time soon; we just need to replace them.
What do you intend to replace them with?
I agree it's a very bad problem, I just don't see a good answer. Term limits get rid of the few good legislators as well as the more numerous corrupt ones. But the corrupt ones make deals with each other to switch offices, so they are less affected. Either IRV or Condorcet voting would improve the representativeness of the legislature, but I don't see it in the cards. (I prefer Tarot over crystal balls.) Revolutions usually make things worse. Etc.
I agree that's how the legal system has interpreted the constitution. I don't believe that was the original intent, and it certain requires a lot of very creative arguing to assert that it's a reasonable interpretation.
OTOH, I'm also certain that SOME of the federalists would have been quite happy with that interpretation.
Actually it's *lots* less idiotic.
What Pluto is called has no scientific relevance whatsoever. Especially what Pluto is called in popular media.
Besides, I not only want Pluto to continue being a planet, I want the next two beyond it to be called Mickey and Goofy.
I actually voted against McCain/Palin. Obama hasn't so far been as bad as I had feared he might be. I don't think he has it in him to be as bad as McCain/Palin intended to be...but this will never be provable
.
Remember, this is the guy who decided that evolution didn't happen at the level of the organism, but at the level of the gene.
With the forms of evidence that he accepts as valid, and the forms of argument that he accepts as valid (i.e., extreme reductionist), he's right. This isn't the form most people accept. So when he writes he tends to use words in a different way and with different meanings that most people are comfortable with. He isn't vague, he just doesn't accept any vagueness as valid. Evolution happens at the gene! The organism is only the carrier to that gene. (Note the reductionism.)
If you attend to him carefully, he makes quite a lot of sense. That doesn't mean that his conclusions will translate into the way that you use the words. I feel that to Dawkins "God" is either a meaningless noise or an entity that produces particular effects. The particular effects are not detectable, therefore the entity is a meaningless noise. This isn't what most people mean, but then what most people mean is half-way between totally rediculous and so vague as to be meaningless. I rather think that what most people really mean is what Bob Wilson once called the "big baboon". I.e., the huge alpha primate of the pack that will strike you down if you offend him. I.e., a set of inherited reflexes that once served our ancestors well. (Bob Wilson thought it was software rather than hardware. I tend to think of it as hardware that can have it's significance adjusted via manipulation of neural weights.) Note that I'm not sure that Dawkins would understand any explanation of what I believe. And if he understood it, I expect he'd say "Very interesting, but what's really going on is..." and talk about a reductionist reinterpretation which would be true, but not directly perceptible by consciousness.
I'm not sure. Was Pot Pol an atheist? Stalin probably was.
OTOH, Ghengis Khan et seq. were not atheists. Neither was Torquemada. It's a classic piece of irony that the Franciscans were in charge of much of the inquisition (because it's so much against their current public image).
In most cases, however, if you investigate, the religion was just a convenient cover for some people to become extremely wealthy at the expense of people who were already of moderate means or better. The power grab at the wealth of the Knights Templar is a bit of a classic along that line. (Note in most of my examples it was either clergy or officially Catholic kings doing the grabbing. This is probably because that's what ended up in the histories that I studied.)
OTOH, I have a friend who analyzed communism as a Catholic heresy. I didn't find it convincing, but the parallels were quite intriguing. Many of the most rabid atheists have had a strong religious upbringing. (As my friend did. Catholic in his case.)
OK. Now prove that solipsism isn't the true answer.
Nothing can be proved definitely true. Or false. The best you can do is "Most reasonable choice." And "reasonable" isn't a well-defined term.
Arithmetic isn't always true!
I know. When I was studying arithmetic, I rarely got more than 80% correct.
That that's just talking about formal symbol manipulation. When you get to story problems...whew!! One can disagree even about what is being asked.
Don't expect ANY approach to yield certainly true results. Nothing in this world does.
It's true that induction, except mathematical induction, fails more often than many methods. It's also more powerful at deriving conclusions.
P.S.: Although I generally agree with Dawkins, especially when he's talking about evolution, I tend to think he takes a rather reductionist interpretation even of scientific facts. It's a very powerful approach, and it yields, when properly interpreted, facts that are guaranteed true. The problem is that it tends to cause you to understand words in a different way that the same words commonly used. E.g. I am a believer in gods... it's just that I don't think that Dawkins would recognize the entities that I believe in as having any reality. Just as he ascribes all evolution to molecular evolution. Yes, what he's talking about is a valid way to speak of reality. But it's not the normal way. (Neither is mine. When I speak of gods I'm talking about something similar to what C.G.Jung would have called archetypes, but they are partially physical...and have a distributed physical presence as genetic/protein/structural entites and a localized presence as electro-mechanical neural processes. They are unconscious processes that occasionally have partial conscious manifestations. Etc.)
Deism was a quite useful religion. It allowed science to be created. If people who wanted to be scientists had been forced to be either atheists or agnostics, then there would have been so much public opprobrium heaped upon them that they could never have either published, spoken in public, or earned a living.
Whether it's useful in present day society may depend on where you live.
OTOH, if I remember correctly, the exact wording was "Congress shall make no law...". This isn't exactly congress.
So it's not an open & shut case. Personally I despise them for this action, but that doesn't make it unconstitutional. And I don't know anything about the Oklahoma state constitution.
Remember that the US constitution itself doesn't put very many limits on what the states can do. A lot of constraints have been read into it, but most of those I still see as power grabs by the federal government. And without valid constitutional basis. (I'm not saying anything about motives here. Sometimes the motive for a particular power grab seems valid, reasonable, and moral. That doesn't make the action itself any of those.)
Were I a lawyer I could be arguing that the University of Oklahoma gets federal money and therefore it has to obey federal rules. In this case I think the proximal result of arguing thus would be reasonable, but the argument is, itself, fallacious. I believe that it's also a traditionally supported argument. A more nuanced argument would be "If the University of Oklahoma doesn't accept federal restrictions, then it's ineligible for federal money, and one of those restrictions is that it cannot discriminate on the basis of a religious doctrine." That one is probably reasonable. Note that it's still a blatant power play, and has the same effect as the first version. (Consider the speed limits on freeways in Utah and Nevada when the feds mandated a 50 mph speed limit. In those states in most places the speed limit made no sense. But they adopted it anyway to continue to get federal highway money.)
P.S.; I think it was 50 mph. It was years ago, so it could have been some other number. Anyway, after the adoption there was so much public discontent that the speed limit requirement was lifted for those states.
7. Because when you show up in pain so bad you want to scream with every step, you aren't in any position to bargain.
You think that the choice of two candidates is an illusion, but I think you need to analyze the way votes are counted more accurately.
Now you said "If everyone...". Yes, you are right. This is a version of the Prisoner's Dilemma. But the uncomfortable fact is that there is not solution to the Prisoner's Dilemma...except changing the system. This is why I support Condorcet voting, and others support Instant Runoff. But both would require electronic vote tallying software, so in every case it's important that the software be open and that a permanent audit trail be available. ...but then you need that anyway.
It's not a trick. Do a systems analysis of the way votes are counted. There ARE only four choices:
1) Democrat or Republican
2) Republican or Democrat
3) Somebody else as a protest (won't affect the results)
4) It's not worth bothering to vote.
Note that in choice 3 it doesn't matter who you vote for. That person will never get in, and both of the major parties will ignore your response.
Consider, however, the Pat Paulson for President campaign. Because of that they changed the laws to not count votes that weren't for registered candidates. (And to forbid TV personalities from running for office, even as a joke.) That was one instance where an outsider MIGHT have ended up with the office, because everyone was disgusted with both of the major candidates, and because he spoke, via TV, to a very large segment of the populace. (It was a comedy show, of course.)
While you have some valid points, it's also true that prior to this many Banks had been discriminating on racial grounds. The response was an overreaction, and it did cause problems, but the original cause was severe.
I have frequently thought the government made incorrect decisions in attempting to remove racial discrimination. This doesn't mean that I don't recognize the real problems that were, and still are, evident. Solutions, however, are not apparent, and will, at minimum, require studied and nuanced action. Such things don't translate well into political diatribes, so they tend to not get done by legislatures. Bureaucrats can do that, but they've got their own problems. In particular they're rather unresponsive to people with little in the way of power. This is because Bureaucracy is essentially hierarchical.
I don't know the proper solution. I just know that nothing that's been tried so far is it.
You can criticize the actions of the Democrats, but at least they tried to help the larger number of people. (I'll agree that the attempts were ill-thoughtout and lead to problems.) The Republicans didn't even adhere to their own party's doctrines. They centralized and grew governmental power rather than reducing it. And they *OH BOY* grew the deficit.
Quite a bit before then. Check out the "Alien and Sedition Acts".
The problem is, the constitution doesn't have any enforcement branch that's effective over the federal government. I don't even know what such a thing could look like. The product of government is a bit abstract for normal Q/C measures to work, and even a good Q/C department requires the support of management to be effective.
It was the MSAccess2000 version, but I've personally caught MSAccess making a mistake when adding two numbers. It didn't happen often, but it did happen. And they weren't even large numbers.
Now you might say "But you only caught one out of hundreds of thousands of calculations!". My response is "Do you know how difficult it is to track down that kind of error!" I expect that there are thousands that I didn't catch, or ascribed to rounding errors. The next day I stopped using (i.e., creating new programs in) MSAccess. This was difficult, as I didn't really have any good alternative. For awhile I did all the calculations in external code. (Eiffel as it happens.) It was kludgy, but it got the job done, and I stopped finding any errors...well, outside of my own errors.
In Minnesota robots are a bad choice. If you choose to go with non-human laborers (back-hoe, anyone) then non-automated equipment is currently much cheaper. Even if you go fully mechanized, telefactor operated + minimal local robotic control would be much cheaper. There's no problem with light-speed delaying reaction times when you are so local.
N.B.: AFTER the robots have proven themselves on the moon, altered versions will start appearing on Earth. But paying for the development for use on Earth is silly. We've already got a very large unemployment problem.
P.S.: Some projections that I've seen estimate that there will be over 50% unemployment within 10 years due to increase in automation. NOT robots, in any normal meaning of the word. (Do you consider an automated fork-lift a robot? If so then the robots have already started eliminating jobs...and saving the companies that use them LOTS of money.)
I don't think you realize how drastically you are oversimplifying. The conditions are different, but not particularly easier. But competition from humans is nil, because humans need to carry life support. The equivalent for robots is much simpler. (Non-volatile greases, UV protection [i.e., no external plastic parts], etc.)
Repair is probably going to be a problem. I expect that at least initially any non-functioning robot is going to need to be scrapped. But with care it's probable that many can be kept going for years. Grit will be a major problem.
The lighter gravity means that the robots can have a lighter construction, but it also means that any berm will need to be higher. And the lack of water means that one can't use concrete.
I think this project may be just on the far side of currently possible. Which means that be the time it gets implemented it's likely to be bleeding edge.
I'm sure they *will* build it on Earth and make it work before they try it on Luna. But I have my doubts that they'll try it in Minnesota. That's not a very similar environment. White Sands, maybe.
Also, note that construction on the moon can afford to pay much more per robot because the cost of humans is so extraordinarily high.
Unhh.... a petard was a kind of hand thrown bomb. One with a fuze that was lit...like very slow primacord.
"Hoist by one's own petard" means lifted into the air by one's own bomb...or possibly the other meaning of the word, fart.
"They have fangs! they have teeth!"
OTOH, the Furies were supposed to be much worse than merely being eaten by beasts.
Well....or possibly Eiffel, if you want garbage collection.
Every *system* has issues, but not everyone who uses every system encounters those issues.
I've got a MSWind95 system that's been running without a hitch for 4-5 years now. I'm not claiming the system doesn't have issues, but it's not being asked to do anything that would activate those issues.
So don't presume that someone is lying if they tell you they don't have issues with some particular system. Just presume that they are limited in what they ask that system to do.
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to beg in the streets, steal bread, or sleep under a bridge." â"Anatole France
I'm told that's now a domain squatter. (Just imagine who would squat on THAT domain.)