Let me tweak that idea for you a bit. Despite the childish selfishness of many of their ideas, a few of the memes the right wing is shopping are essentially correct.
Their "government shouldn't pick winners" mantra is well supported by the entirety of US history; what the government should be doing in the marketplace is identifying losers. Penalizing bad behavior that would otherwise be rewarded by a free market is one of government's primary functions - for example, murder-for-hire would be incredibly profitable if it weren't for laws that make it much less so. Theft and contract violation are legitimately penalized by government and not by armed vigilante action by businesses that have been harmed. I'll stop there but you can see the list is long!
Carbon taxes and sin taxes were once right-wing ideas - and good ones, too; taxation can be used to redress the externalization of costs by corporations and individuals. We currently punish people for working (income tax) and encourage successful companies to distort both the market and political governance (regulatory competition and so-called business inducements). A wiser course would be to eliminate income tax and outlaw state government "tax break and cash grant competitions" at the federal level, and finance federal government by taxing actors who physically harm the entire citizenry through air, water and ground pollution. If the only way to make something the people want entails high pollution, then the costs will be very high and profit margins slim - until human ingenuity, harnessed by greed if necessary, solves the problem. This is a market approach, but one where the government picks losers, based on quantifiable harm and not pie-in-the-sky techno-dreams of politicians whose sole scientific qualifications are an ability to read opinion polls.
If it's true that anti-vaxxers are harming society as a whole, make them pay for the harm. Tax them extra! Don't un-tax the winners, tax the losers; you can claim it's mathematically the same, but socially and psychologically it's entirely different. Let me pay a "nonvaccination tax" if I have some objection to preventing pandemics, and you'll cut the number of anti-vaxxers down to insignificance in a decade or less.
I guess we'll have to disagree since our arguments have conflicting premises.
1) You are still not giving up your definition of "functional" which I still contend is circular reasoning.
2) You've characterized my argument as an anthropomorphization of nature which is not my intent at all. I am merely refusing to accept a dubious categorization. The burden of proof is on those who would make this categorization, and I find their arguments very unconvincing.
3) You've discounted my point regarding the B&N Nobel Prize by saying they created a valid theory to explain their empirical results - this is not true. The prize was for "their important breakthrough in the discovery of superconductivity in ceramic materials" (direct quote) which was not adequately explained by any theory at that time. According to Wikipedia, there's still no scientific consensus on why it works.
My hypotheses is that "there is no such thing as nonfunctional DNA, every byte of it functions to some purpose" and mainstream science is already testing this idea (by continuing to find additional functions). The fact that we have not uncovered every purpose in the brief period we've even known about DNA is expected; humans do not normally exhaust the interesting characteristics of even simple elemental substances (like lead, for example, or carbon) when they've been known for centuries. You're aware of carbon nanotubules and buckyballs? Aerosolized lead influence on crime rates? These are new discoveries of properties of substances we've known of for a thousand years or more.
To believe we know enough about DNA to categorize any part as "nonfunctional" is hubris. As you mentioned, the concept of "junk DNA" has already been partially disproven over the last ten years, and I'm fairly confident that more remains to be discovered.
âoe...the scientific community will need to rethink some long-held views about what genes are and what they do, as well as how the genomeâ(TM)s functional elements have evolved." -- Francis S. Collins, 2007
Did I say I was condemning white people for Tuskegee? Maybe I'm talking about doctors. Or maybe about government employees. Or maybe about carbon based life forms. If having one thing in common with someone who commits atrocities makes you a party to those atrocities, then sharing skin color or profession or employer seems like fair grounds for equally nasty bigotry and hate-mongering. Shall we burn all doctors at the stake for Tuskegee?
And many people don't get to choose their belief systems, anyway - do you think an impoverished Saudi woman in Jazan or an abused Haredi child in Jerusalem will ever be allowed to leave the faith? They are kept in total ignorance of any other options; essentially they are sequestered and groomed psychologically by their own families, conditioned like Soviet children were during the glory days of the Stalinism and the New Soviet Man.
And speaking of Uncle Joe, the only two atheist regimes with any staying power (China and the USSR) did a pretty good job of showing that evil and atrocity occur with tedious frequency both within and outside of religions. There have clearly been plenty of anti-religious bigots who were just as brutal and antihuman as any religious bigot - who was the better man, Laurenti Beria or Teilhard de Chardin?Felix Dzerzinsky or Theodore Parker?
You can't condemn all Muslims for the actions of some Muslims without abandoning reason and decency for bigotry and hatred. It's a logical impossibility that was codified as far back as Aristotle. The characteristics of some parts of a whole are not always the characteristics of all parts of that whole, and to over-categorize is the fallacy of bigotry.
BES is a closed source app running on a windows server, so your use of the word "theoretically" is extremely appropriate here. It might provide secure encryption, but it'll be pretty hard to tell for certain.
Idiot. How many hideous acts does one group have to commit to get moved from the "racist slur" pile to the "enemy of civilization" pile?
I don't know, I'm not a piler. Help me out. Does the Tuskegee Syphilis Study count as just one hideous act, or should it be one for each infected black man who was given fake treatments? What about all the children born with congenital syphilis, do they count extra since their damage is incurable? Do all forty years of the study count, or just the 30 years when syphilis was routinely treated successfully for white men in the same geographic area?
Your logic seems circular to me. You've stated the conclusion as a premise ("evolution works just the other side around") and you've used your definition of what you expect to happen as the means of evaluating what has happened ("do something useful" = "the only function of DNA we have so far discovered"). It's not possible to repeatably test your argument; so even if it's correct it's not really science, it's philosophy (or possibly religion).
Supposing there are additional functions of DNA other than coding proteins is a much simpler explanation, and furthermore it's never wise to create dogmas that blockade avenues for research. Bednorz and Muller (the guys who invented theoretically impossible high temperature superconductors) won the Nobel Prize and made a lot of money by keeping both their minds and their options open.
I dunno. When I was having this argument 20 years ago all the geneticists I was working with at the time were insisting that "junk DNA" was literally leftovers with no purpose.
As an information scientist, though, I knew this had to be incorrect. Absent a really strongly supported, well understood mechanism it's illogical to suppose that natural selection would overwhelmingly favor massive storage abuse. It's more reasonable to suppose that there's something going on that's completely off the radar. Remember the presence of any number of understood mechanisms - such as DNA coding proteins, for one - does not in any way prove there's no further function of DNA that you don't know about yet.
To once again resort to car analogies, motor oil serves as a lubricant, a corrosion preventative, and a means of heat transfer. All these functions are critically important, and discovering any one of them would not mean the others do not exist. If 98% of human DNA does not code for protein, that's a very strong indication that DNA serves additional unknown function(s). It's best to keep an open mind.
It's like this: If you have a big enough ego, everything you don't understand must be unimportant junk.
Putting this in perspective with the traditional slashdot car analogy: all parts of your car that are not also part of a bicycle are just junk. This bladderwort's a bicycle, a honey badger is a car, see?
I'm always amused when somebody else's purely theoretical extrapolations are "valid data" but my personal observations are "mere anecdotes". The quintessential opposite of science... in science, what is actually observed is real, and what is theorized is fantasy - or at best, hypothetical, until repeatedly observed during controlled experimentation.
BTW, I hit a deer on I-95 with my 2002 Prius, which was absolutely loaded with computers, the other day. The insurance company totalled the vehicle since the deer's corpse cracked the inverter housing and broke a bunch of stuff in the steering column area, but the car had over 130,000 miles on it and not a single computer failure. I routinely started and drove the car in sub-freezing weather, and the inside temperature topped 130F on occasion. No problems. No problems with my 2012 plug-in Prius, either, which has both a hard drive and optical drive (Priuses have had OEM internal hard drives since 2005, you know).
Of course if you don't believe me, that's OK, I'm just some guy on the Internet. Go check out the white papers describing Google, Intel and Yahoo running completely unconditioned data centers with no cooling other than outside air, which is pretty much the same thermal conditions as a car (although cars also have vibration issues). Or check out the hundreds of thousands of cars on the road with computers and hard drives running just fine since the late 1990s.
My 2002 Toyota Prius was loaded with computers and I drove it over 130,000 miles before I hit a deer on the highway with it. When the insurance company totalled the car, the computers all still worked. Despite being repeatedly frozen and cooked and vibrated!
Our cops don't have Toughbooks, they're definitely Dells. They look just like regular Latitudes from outside a parked cop car, but I admit I didn't actually stick my head in the window and check the model numbers. The cops play solitaire on them while driving down I-95.
Thanks for the info, I'll ask the next cop I see what the model is.
Interesting comparison. The reason spacecraft nearly always launch with old processors on board is that it takes a very long time for the NASA bureaucracy to officially qualify commercial chips for space. The Hubble's got 486 processors in it, for example - which they could have easily replaced during service mission 3 or 4B, but NASA couldn't permit it.
I'm betting that Detroit car companies have even more inefficient testing & validation bureaucracies than NASA does!
Laptops are not left out in the cold to experience -20 temperatures for weeks at a time.
Yes they are. The local warehouses are unheated and they stack laptops in them all winter, for weeks at a time.
Laptops are not left out in the sun to experience 130 temperatures for weeks at a time.
Yes they are - the four laptops baking in my car right now have been there for a month now. I fully expect them to work when I eventually pull them out - I know people who use generic, non-hardened laptops year-round in completely unconditioned environments. For at least 15 years now I have routinely subjected Dell, Micron and Thinkpad laptops to 120+ fahrenheit by leaving them in locked car over a weekend, never had a problem.
Laptops don't experience the degree of shaking a car component does.
Yes they do - all the cops around here have plain-jain Dell laptops mounted on arms in their cars, which actually increases the vibration they endure.
Laptops don't have a 6-10 year life expectancy.
OK, you got me on that one, but I don't really get your point - I keep both my cars and my laptops running longer than ten years, it's just a matter of good maintenance.
Fix them and then give them back pointing out what was wrong and where.
Great idea! That way, you can get on with the process of interviewing for your next job so much faster.
Because, you know, being a self-righteous irritant to senior staff in the most obnoxious way possible is always a great way to terminate your current employment. You won't have to bother keeping track of any references, either, since you won't want future employers to talk to anyone you've already annoyed. It's win-win!
I wholeheartedly agree with the EU decision. The honeybee is descended from a native European insect and is an important part of Old World ecosystems.
However, in the USA, European honeybees are imported domestic livestock, and Africanized honeybees are invasive pests.
See, despite all the hysteria, North America wasn't a vast unpopulated desert wasteland before the importation of honeybees. There are lots of native pollinators here, at least in places where humans haven't completely soaked the land and air with toxins yet.
Most major American crops (such as maize, the American corn) do not require imported pollinators to thrive. In fact all cereal crops (maize, rice, rye, wheat, etc.) and most trees are wind pollinated, needing no insect pollinators at all.
I'm truly curious about this. Don't the laws of supply and demand state that if the overall wage goes down, purchasing power goes down, and then prices must fall to match? I know this won't work in our current society of government mandated prices for commodities (through subsidies for farmers and such), but in a truly free market society would this not work?
Truly free markets cycle endlessly between boom and bust, with people starving and staging revolts at regular intervals.
Not in any American city I know of. You might get preschool for that price, or unlicensed day care. According to the Internets the average cost of non-religious private high schools in the USA was $27,302 in 2007. But dropping enrollment due to the post-Clinton economic situation has driven individual costs up even more since then.
In the USA, we have a driving test, which includes both driving with an observer and answering written questions. No parts of this test are considered to be in any way theoretical, which is why the previous poster was baffled by the reference to a "theory" test.
If you really want to get them confused, tell them you left your lorry on the hard standing with the bonnet up to fool the peelers whilst you spent a penny in the loo.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me tweak that idea for you a bit. Despite the childish selfishness of many of their ideas, a few of the memes the right wing is shopping are essentially correct.
Their "government shouldn't pick winners" mantra is well supported by the entirety of US history; what the government should be doing in the marketplace is identifying losers. Penalizing bad behavior that would otherwise be rewarded by a free market is one of government's primary functions - for example, murder-for-hire would be incredibly profitable if it weren't for laws that make it much less so. Theft and contract violation are legitimately penalized by government and not by armed vigilante action by businesses that have been harmed. I'll stop there but you can see the list is long!
Carbon taxes and sin taxes were once right-wing ideas - and good ones, too; taxation can be used to redress the externalization of costs by corporations and individuals. We currently punish people for working (income tax) and encourage successful companies to distort both the market and political governance (regulatory competition and so-called business inducements). A wiser course would be to eliminate income tax and outlaw state government "tax break and cash grant competitions" at the federal level, and finance federal government by taxing actors who physically harm the entire citizenry through air, water and ground pollution. If the only way to make something the people want entails high pollution, then the costs will be very high and profit margins slim - until human ingenuity, harnessed by greed if necessary, solves the problem. This is a market approach, but one where the government picks losers, based on quantifiable harm and not pie-in-the-sky techno-dreams of politicians whose sole scientific qualifications are an ability to read opinion polls.
If it's true that anti-vaxxers are harming society as a whole, make them pay for the harm. Tax them extra! Don't un-tax the winners, tax the losers; you can claim it's mathematically the same, but socially and psychologically it's entirely different. Let me pay a "nonvaccination tax" if I have some objection to preventing pandemics, and you'll cut the number of anti-vaxxers down to insignificance in a decade or less.
I guess we'll have to disagree since our arguments have conflicting premises.
1) You are still not giving up your definition of "functional" which I still contend is circular reasoning.
2) You've characterized my argument as an anthropomorphization of nature which is not my intent at all. I am merely refusing to accept a dubious categorization. The burden of proof is on those who would make this categorization, and I find their arguments very unconvincing.
3) You've discounted my point regarding the B&N Nobel Prize by saying they created a valid theory to explain their empirical results - this is not true. The prize was for "their important breakthrough in the discovery of superconductivity in ceramic materials" (direct quote) which was not adequately explained by any theory at that time. According to Wikipedia, there's still no scientific consensus on why it works.
My hypotheses is that "there is no such thing as nonfunctional DNA, every byte of it functions to some purpose" and mainstream science is already testing this idea (by continuing to find additional functions). The fact that we have not uncovered every purpose in the brief period we've even known about DNA is expected; humans do not normally exhaust the interesting characteristics of even simple elemental substances (like lead, for example, or carbon) when they've been known for centuries. You're aware of carbon nanotubules and buckyballs? Aerosolized lead influence on crime rates? These are new discoveries of properties of substances we've known of for a thousand years or more.
To believe we know enough about DNA to categorize any part as "nonfunctional" is hubris. As you mentioned, the concept of "junk DNA" has already been partially disproven over the last ten years, and I'm fairly confident that more remains to be discovered.
âoe...the scientific community will need to rethink some long-held views about what genes are and what they do, as well as how the genomeâ(TM)s functional elements have evolved." -- Francis S. Collins, 2007
Just thought I'd let you know the three I just tested all still worked fine.
Did I say I was condemning white people for Tuskegee? Maybe I'm talking about doctors. Or maybe about government employees. Or maybe about carbon based life forms. If having one thing in common with someone who commits atrocities makes you a party to those atrocities, then sharing skin color or profession or employer seems like fair grounds for equally nasty bigotry and hate-mongering. Shall we burn all doctors at the stake for Tuskegee?
And many people don't get to choose their belief systems, anyway - do you think an impoverished Saudi woman in Jazan or an abused Haredi child in Jerusalem will ever be allowed to leave the faith? They are kept in total ignorance of any other options; essentially they are sequestered and groomed psychologically by their own families, conditioned like Soviet children were during the glory days of the Stalinism and the New Soviet Man.
And speaking of Uncle Joe, the only two atheist regimes with any staying power (China and the USSR) did a pretty good job of showing that evil and atrocity occur with tedious frequency both within and outside of religions. There have clearly been plenty of anti-religious bigots who were just as brutal and antihuman as any religious bigot - who was the better man, Laurenti Beria or Teilhard de Chardin? Felix Dzerzinsky or Theodore Parker?
You can't condemn all Muslims for the actions of some Muslims without abandoning reason and decency for bigotry and hatred. It's a logical impossibility that was codified as far back as Aristotle. The characteristics of some parts of a whole are not always the characteristics of all parts of that whole, and to over-categorize is the fallacy of bigotry.
BES is a closed source app running on a windows server, so your use of the word "theoretically" is extremely appropriate here. It might provide secure encryption, but it'll be pretty hard to tell for certain.
Yeah, you're right, but don't forget Pennsylvania, where a crooked state senator supposedly tried to run over a drug-addled supreme court justice right in the middle of Philadephia.
I don't know, I'm not a piler. Help me out. Does the Tuskegee Syphilis Study count as just one hideous act, or should it be one for each infected black man who was given fake treatments? What about all the children born with congenital syphilis, do they count extra since their damage is incurable? Do all forty years of the study count, or just the 30 years when syphilis was routinely treated successfully for white men in the same geographic area?
Your logic seems circular to me. You've stated the conclusion as a premise ("evolution works just the other side around") and you've used your definition of what you expect to happen as the means of evaluating what has happened ("do something useful" = "the only function of DNA we have so far discovered"). It's not possible to repeatably test your argument; so even if it's correct it's not really science, it's philosophy (or possibly religion).
Supposing there are additional functions of DNA other than coding proteins is a much simpler explanation, and furthermore it's never wise to create dogmas that blockade avenues for research. Bednorz and Muller (the guys who invented theoretically impossible high temperature superconductors) won the Nobel Prize and made a lot of money by keeping both their minds and their options open.
I dunno. When I was having this argument 20 years ago all the geneticists I was working with at the time were insisting that "junk DNA" was literally leftovers with no purpose.
As an information scientist, though, I knew this had to be incorrect. Absent a really strongly supported, well understood mechanism it's illogical to suppose that natural selection would overwhelmingly favor massive storage abuse. It's more reasonable to suppose that there's something going on that's completely off the radar. Remember the presence of any number of understood mechanisms - such as DNA coding proteins, for one - does not in any way prove there's no further function of DNA that you don't know about yet.
To once again resort to car analogies, motor oil serves as a lubricant, a corrosion preventative, and a means of heat transfer. All these functions are critically important, and discovering any one of them would not mean the others do not exist. If 98% of human DNA does not code for protein, that's a very strong indication that DNA serves additional unknown function(s). It's best to keep an open mind.
It's like this: If you have a big enough ego, everything you don't understand must be unimportant junk.
Putting this in perspective with the traditional slashdot car analogy: all parts of your car that are not also part of a bicycle are just junk. This bladderwort's a bicycle, a honey badger is a car, see?
I'm here to help.
I'm always amused when somebody else's purely theoretical extrapolations are "valid data" but my personal observations are "mere anecdotes". The quintessential opposite of science... in science, what is actually observed is real, and what is theorized is fantasy - or at best, hypothetical, until repeatedly observed during controlled experimentation.
BTW, I hit a deer on I-95 with my 2002 Prius, which was absolutely loaded with computers, the other day. The insurance company totalled the vehicle since the deer's corpse cracked the inverter housing and broke a bunch of stuff in the steering column area, but the car had over 130,000 miles on it and not a single computer failure. I routinely started and drove the car in sub-freezing weather, and the inside temperature topped 130F on occasion. No problems. No problems with my 2012 plug-in Prius, either, which has both a hard drive and optical drive (Priuses have had OEM internal hard drives since 2005, you know).
Of course if you don't believe me, that's OK, I'm just some guy on the Internet. Go check out the white papers describing Google, Intel and Yahoo running completely unconditioned data centers with no cooling other than outside air, which is pretty much the same thermal conditions as a car (although cars also have vibration issues). Or check out the hundreds of thousands of cars on the road with computers and hard drives running just fine since the late 1990s.
My 2002 Toyota Prius was loaded with computers and I drove it over 130,000 miles before I hit a deer on the highway with it. When the insurance company totalled the car, the computers all still worked. Despite being repeatedly frozen and cooked and vibrated!
Our cops don't have Toughbooks, they're definitely Dells. They look just like regular Latitudes from outside a parked cop car, but I admit I didn't actually stick my head in the window and check the model numbers. The cops play solitaire on them while driving down I-95.
Thanks for the info, I'll ask the next cop I see what the model is.
The point would be NASA wouldn't have to buy processors on eBay for five times the value they original sold for.
No, I'm not kidding.
Interesting comparison. The reason spacecraft nearly always launch with old processors on board is that it takes a very long time for the NASA bureaucracy to officially qualify commercial chips for space. The Hubble's got 486 processors in it, for example - which they could have easily replaced during service mission 3 or 4B, but NASA couldn't permit it.
I'm betting that Detroit car companies have even more inefficient testing & validation bureaucracies than NASA does!
Yes.
Yes they are. The local warehouses are unheated and they stack laptops in them all winter, for weeks at a time.
Yes they are - the four laptops baking in my car right now have been there for a month now. I fully expect them to work when I eventually pull them out - I know people who use generic, non-hardened laptops year-round in completely unconditioned environments. For at least 15 years now I have routinely subjected Dell, Micron and Thinkpad laptops to 120+ fahrenheit by leaving them in locked car over a weekend, never had a problem.
Yes they do - all the cops around here have plain-jain Dell laptops mounted on arms in their cars, which actually increases the vibration they endure.
OK, you got me on that one, but I don't really get your point - I keep both my cars and my laptops running longer than ten years, it's just a matter of good maintenance.
Great idea! That way, you can get on with the process of interviewing for your next job so much faster.
Because, you know, being a self-righteous irritant to senior staff in the most obnoxious way possible is always a great way to terminate your current employment. You won't have to bother keeping track of any references, either, since you won't want future employers to talk to anyone you've already annoyed. It's win-win!
I wholeheartedly agree with the EU decision. The honeybee is descended from a native European insect and is an important part of Old World ecosystems.
However, in the USA, European honeybees are imported domestic livestock, and Africanized honeybees are invasive pests.
See, despite all the hysteria, North America wasn't a vast unpopulated desert wasteland before the importation of honeybees. There are lots of native pollinators here, at least in places where humans haven't completely soaked the land and air with toxins yet.
Most major American crops (such as maize, the American corn) do not require imported pollinators to thrive. In fact all cereal crops (maize, rice, rye, wheat, etc.) and most trees are wind pollinated, needing no insect pollinators at all.
It's one of the benefits of experience that you know what to skip... although it's not always the same things for everybody.
Truly free markets cycle endlessly between boom and bust, with people starving and staging revolts at regular intervals.
Road construction is not in any way like computer consulting.
Not in any American city I know of. You might get preschool for that price, or unlicensed day care. According to the Internets the average cost of non-religious private high schools in the USA was $27,302 in 2007. But dropping enrollment due to the post-Clinton economic situation has driven individual costs up even more since then.
In the USA, we have a driving test, which includes both driving with an observer and answering written questions. No parts of this test are considered to be in any way theoretical, which is why the previous poster was baffled by the reference to a "theory" test.
If you really want to get them confused, tell them you left your lorry on the hard standing with the bonnet up to fool the peelers whilst you spent a penny in the loo.
http://xkcd.com/385/
Trust me on this, wiring skill isn't normally supposed to depend on possession of a pale pink penis. You're totally doing it wrong.