Not voting is also a vote. When there is no real difference between the candidates offered, how do you protest?
Not voting is a vote, but it is usually interpreted in the opposite way to what you prefer.
There are usually third party candidates. And you can write in. Either proves genuine commitment.
Lack of personal commitment makes for an easily discouraged voter. Being an easily discouraged voter tends to encourage the worse kind of behavior in campaigning, in particular vicious negative campaigning. Negative campaigning is primarily about "suppressing" the other guys' likely voters through emotional arguments, not convincing anyone of anything meaningful about policy.
"Aw shucks...I do not really like anyone, I will not vote" is interpreted by political consultants as a definite positive for the person you disagree with more.
(1) Shades of Gray: What a does a Good Guy do when confronted between conflicts involved good people doing bad things and bad people doing good things?
(2) Traveling Angel: The character growth happens to those around him. Do they choose to become better people when face-to-face with such an example? Or something else?
Your basic criticism is why my fondness for the TV show Smallville waned. Since Clark is Clark with nowhere to go, and is unwilling to entrust his secret, he becomes the antagonist -- the guy who is trying to prevent character growth. Lex was (often) the protagonist -- the person who was willing to try and change himself and his relationships for the better (even if the risk of failure was not small).
I have never been pregnant myself, but it is a fair guess that the "problems" of being pregnant are a drop in the bucket compared to the "problems" of being a good parent. I do not doubt that the physical process of birth can dissuade, but I am doubtful that is really the major factor. Few women are brave enough to say out loud they do not want to be a mother because other things are more important -- it is not socially acceptable. Whining about giving birth is acceptable enough because even mothers who love being mothers may agree (to a point) and men will say "yuck" in accord.
The serious answer to the joking rhetorical question is that tile layers who like to play geometric patterns stumbled upon the properties of the 3-4-5 triangle. That 3*3 + 4*4 = 5*5 is completely obvious when the tile pattern is laying down right in front of you. It is trivial to demonstrate a triangle is right (or at least that is so extremely close to be a right triangle that no one cares about its variance) by physical inspection, applying a folding/flipping operation. The nature of such triangle became common enough knowledge, even if the proof did not come into existence for a long time later. The hard part is figuring out what to try and prove.
A good CTO should be able to explain where the money goes and why, and who are actually reasonably similar-kind and similar-sized organizations. If perceptions about the department are so bad, it could well be because it is woefully under-resourced relative to its charter. How could we know? Perhaps it is well past the time the CTO should take this question head-on, rather than have people snipe behind his or her back?
Surely there is no luck involved, you are right about that. The jaggedness is an artifact of some kind of systematic method of rescaling. Whether it is an actual useful kind of rescaling from our POV is doubtful, but someone probably did it for some reason that made sense to them.
Just to throw a hypothetical, maybe they only grade half the test, and then multiply by 2? They then more carefully grade the entire test for the very high and very low scores. That might be considered a cost savings tactic. (Of course that would be a terrible idea, but I am not saying there is a *good* reason for the peculiarities, only that it is not evidence of corruption.)
They may choose to disagree with a NSL, and go to court, of course. But being a "free country", corporations are not obliged to do so. They simply have no clear moral or legal responsibility to protect their corporate property, such that you will feel happy about your privacy.
Really, this is nothing. What about the corporate-owned property called your credit card records? That is up for sale, it is only not easily available because the banks know this stuff is valuable, and they plan on getting their piece of the big data-informed commerce pie by holding tight. But they are allowed to sell it to the gov't for nothing, if they so choose.
Having TA'd lower division courses at a large university, I think the "pretty much every school system in existence does this" is likely to be true.
For some reason, people carry a lot of per-conceptions about test scores being in a 0-100 range and the magic of numbers like 70, 80, 90.
If I write a mid-term, the most natural scoring rubric might be to give 1, 2, 3, or 4 points for each of 3 questions. Now that I have scores from 0-12, what do I do? I multiply by 5 and add 40 (perhaps). But maybe the correct cutoff points do not fall at conveniently near 70, 80, 90. (A score of 3 on 3 questions, translates to 85.) Do I rescale? If I do not rescale, I know I will get students whining "Hey, I scored 80. I DESERVE a B!" And what about the zeros that are rescaled to 60, should I do something about that?
With the convenience of computers, it is really easy to rescale things. How or why they were rescaled that way is not likely to be understood by a casual outsider who did not see the sausage being made.
The malicious manipulation hypothesis lacks explanatory power -- there is no logical reason to believe that corrupt officials would find these kind of quirks more useful towards padding their wallets. The rescaling hypothesis does explain.
Furthermore, having TA'd at a large and respected state system university for very big lower division physics courses, I can say that hints of bi-modal or tri-modal distributions are not necessarily surprising. Arguably it is a good thing -- distributions that look like overwhelmingly influenced by randomness could imply weakness in the curriculum design and testing practices.
I do not disagree. But when processes are so amateurish, as in the anecdotes provided in the fine article, then it always will devolve to people over processes in a way that is not enlightening. One of the main purposes of every flavor of formalized process is to enforce some minimum level of communication.
"Outside effects" is an argument that cuts both ways. It does not mean anything until you dig down into a bit more details. In fact, superficial "outside effects" arguments are always used to rationalize flushing money down into a football stadium.
By its nature, a city must make investments and provide services that usually do not come close to "break even" by the normal rules of accounting. Building a stadium, hospital, subway line, freeway, bridge, high school, museum, park -- these are all exercises in balancing outside effects. In every case, with the notable exception of the baseball-only stadium, these investments "lose" money hand over fist. Singling out the one non-loser for special scrutiny does not make much sense.
It's called "civilization". Strategies for pooling resources allowed mankind to rise to the bronze age, and then beyond. People who are ideologically allergic to some rational strategies should be content to work without the benefits of even metal tools.
Baseball is a negligible burden on the taxpayers. Modern baseball stadiums come quite close to breaking even to the city -- some profit slightly, some at a modest loss. A baseball stadium is used 80something times per year, so financial solvency is not so difficult.
The real villains are the football stadiums. Professional football teams used their stadium all of ~9-10 times per year. The stadiums are much bigger and more expensive. They are less comfortable and practical for any use other than football. A football team is a loss to the city/county to the tune of a few hundred million dollars, and the football team will come back for another handout every 20 or so years, whenever they decide their stadium is shabby.
As baseball teams transition to attractive baseball-only stadiums -- a delight to both fans (and perhaps taxpayers), the absolute absurdity of "welfare queen" football teams is more and more obvious.
Nasdaq made explicit and implicit promises to many kinds of people. They failed to deliver. Even if damages are hard to evaluate, the SEC has to take some kind of action for that manifest failure. The courts are available for figuring out other details.
While this affair is not going to get the SEC covered in laurels, doing nothing was never a reasonable option.
Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that the other party is indeed "shady". So what? According to libertarian principles, the gov't and gov't bodies have no business interfering with non-fraudulent activities (or otherwise probable crimes).
What is the fraudulent activity involved here? Why would a touchy-feely assessment of the personal character of one party (the shady scumbags) actually matter unless and until there is clear evidence of fraud?
The question is whether a particular tax at a particular level causes inappropriate economic disruption or hardship. Ultimately we need to tax where the money is, while balancing the degree of inevitable disruption and hardship with wisdom.
Of course, people avoid saying that out loud -- in America, surely it will be only a few nanoseconds before some whiner equates the federal gov't with a famous bank robber. Really the wise should not fear for being emulated by bank robbers, even if fools will insist every single thing a bank robber ever did cannot contain wisdom.
Whether you really "own" a house or car is an emotional factor that is a distraction. Should someone less well off than you pay higher taxes, so that you can enjoy a more perfected perception of your personal relationship with a housing unit? Would it be okay if someone else got driven out of their own home with other taxes, when hardship could be shared equitably between you two without great harm?
I think my mathematics and quantum physics are not bad (although it were genuinely strong, perhaps I would have gone further than ABD), and I have trouble making "a lot more sense" of "using a 2-norm". Yes, I understand that the wave functions are complex, but that is not enlightening without a lot of math.
Most "spooky" results are simply the result of not accepting that everything is a wave form, and waves cannot understand that they are not supposed to be stretched across space. Which is another way of saying that JoshuaZ is correct about QM, unfortunately, being taught as "a series of counterintuitive results tacked on to classical physics". Pity.
(I would note that the QM as variance from Classical Physics can be sensible, but only if you deeply understand statistical physics at a level that is not usual even for physics PhDs.)
Our brains have evolved to feel comfortable with classical physics. When friends/family ask about exotic physics (QM or Relativity), I tell them: "The reason you are finding it implausible is your brain is working correctly; the sense comes from building up abstractions carefully with mathematics, motivated by precise experiments, that is completely outside everyday experience."
So is it a case of where they start out following the ethics guidelines the classes taught them, but end up pushing the edge and pushing the edge until they go too far, with the process generally taking years, as they slowly become disillusioned and greedy?
I suspect novice lawyers who so happen to lack scruples are uncertain about what they are likely to get away with, so they start out not behaving egregiously scummy. At times goes on, the scummy lawyers eventually figure out "cash cows". The "cash cows" are improved in their moneymaking aspect with volume. Volume in legal gray areas breeds minor mistakes. Minor mistakes breed complacence that leads to major mistakes. Every major mistake brings a small chance of pissing off an unusually astute judge.
You are assuming the hard stuff is the easy stuff, just because it is easy to describe with abstract human language. It is easy to say "simulate a healthy brain down at the cellular level", just like it is easy to say "track every grain of sand in a sandstorm". But actually doing either is very, very, very hard, and tweaking up the amount of computing power on hand does not really help. The hard part is not the computations. The hard part is getting the initial conditions correct.
It is not the computing power that is the problem, it is understanding what you are trying to simulate well enough that simulation is possible.
I suppose it might be possible to use a super advanced future electron microscope to, say, tear apart your brain a few molecules at a time and examine it one piece at a time. That might give enough data. Or it might not. And having vaporized your brain, does that data help? Can I combine that data with another data set from a second or a hundredth vaporized and formerly living brain to get the data I need. Hard to say. This is speculation. This is science fiction that might lead to real science decades in the future.
That we lack the data to even guess at what reasonable initial conditions would be is not speculation. That is a fact. That we are not even close is not speculation. That is a fact.
It is not a question of computing power, but whether the feedback loops down at the cellular level are correct. And even if those are correct, there are intermediate structures that must be tuned or the "brain" is a useless jumble. And even if those are very close, it would still take only tiny errors in initial conditions for the "brain" to be insane or otherwise crippled.
Correct. This is a necessary rule, or parties would fear any kind of concession during an unsuccessful negotiation would tie their hands if the matter eventually ends up in a courtroom. That would poison any effort to avoid trial.
The space shuttle was always a military-industrial complex socialism dressed up in a NASA publicity stunt. The very lucrative American aeronautics companies did not want to compete with a viable Russian space program, even after the Cold War was very obviously over.
The biggest problem is South Korea would complain about the US precipitating a war, for good reason. They dislike the North Korean gov't, of course, but NK is quite capable of flattening half of Seoul with conventional weapons.
This is a situation where the US just needs to be a calm adult and let South Korea take the lead.
In the long game, continued NK belligerence as we have seen over the last decade will eventually provoke Japan to build a nuclear deterrence. The threat of that expensive future nuclear arms is what is going to get China to talk some sense into NK...eventually. In the short term, China has incentive to do nothing. In the long term, China is probably more worried about being boxed in a nuclear Japan and a nuclear South Korea (and a nuclear India) than it cares about Korea.
I am a QA person with a couple non-engineering science degrees. I think what gives me the edge is the ability to imagine what might go wrong, and the curiosity to inform that kind of brainstorming.
I admit I do it for the paycheck. While it is not glamorous, it can be fun.
I would also note a certain disincentive towards moving into Dev, based on having been around the block. When a project goes completely to hell, the Devs get "asked" to work 70 hour weeks. Strangely enough, the QA workload drops off...because it is not possible to do much testing on something that does not work.
Your annual Dev salary is certainly higher, but how does your pay rate per hour of stress work out?
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Not voting is also a vote. When there is no real difference between the candidates offered, how do you protest?
Not voting is a vote, but it is usually interpreted in the opposite way to what you prefer.
There are usually third party candidates. And you can write in. Either proves genuine commitment.
Lack of personal commitment makes for an easily discouraged voter. Being an easily discouraged voter tends to encourage the worse kind of behavior in campaigning, in particular vicious negative campaigning. Negative campaigning is primarily about "suppressing" the other guys' likely voters through emotional arguments, not convincing anyone of anything meaningful about policy.
"Aw shucks...I do not really like anyone, I will not vote" is interpreted by political consultants as a definite positive for the person you disagree with more.
There are two ways to go:
(1) Shades of Gray: What a does a Good Guy do when confronted between conflicts involved good people doing bad things and bad people doing good things?
(2) Traveling Angel: The character growth happens to those around him. Do they choose to become better people when face-to-face with such an example? Or something else?
Your basic criticism is why my fondness for the TV show Smallville waned. Since Clark is Clark with nowhere to go, and is unwilling to entrust his secret, he becomes the antagonist -- the guy who is trying to prevent character growth. Lex was (often) the protagonist -- the person who was willing to try and change himself and his relationships for the better (even if the risk of failure was not small).
I have never been pregnant myself, but it is a fair guess that the "problems" of being pregnant are a drop in the bucket compared to the "problems" of being a good parent. I do not doubt that the physical process of birth can dissuade, but I am doubtful that is really the major factor. Few women are brave enough to say out loud they do not want to be a mother because other things are more important -- it is not socially acceptable. Whining about giving birth is acceptable enough because even mothers who love being mothers may agree (to a point) and men will say "yuck" in accord.
The serious answer to the joking rhetorical question is that tile layers who like to play geometric patterns stumbled upon the properties of the 3-4-5 triangle. That 3*3 + 4*4 = 5*5 is completely obvious when the tile pattern is laying down right in front of you. It is trivial to demonstrate a triangle is right (or at least that is so extremely close to be a right triangle that no one cares about its variance) by physical inspection, applying a folding/flipping operation. The nature of such triangle became common enough knowledge, even if the proof did not come into existence for a long time later. The hard part is figuring out what to try and prove.
Mode parent up, please.
A good CTO should be able to explain where the money goes and why, and who are actually reasonably similar-kind and similar-sized organizations. If perceptions about the department are so bad, it could well be because it is woefully under-resourced relative to its charter. How could we know? Perhaps it is well past the time the CTO should take this question head-on, rather than have people snipe behind his or her back?
Surely there is no luck involved, you are right about that. The jaggedness is an artifact of some kind of systematic method of rescaling. Whether it is an actual useful kind of rescaling from our POV is doubtful, but someone probably did it for some reason that made sense to them.
Just to throw a hypothetical, maybe they only grade half the test, and then multiply by 2? They then more carefully grade the entire test for the very high and very low scores. That might be considered a cost savings tactic. (Of course that would be a terrible idea, but I am not saying there is a *good* reason for the peculiarities, only that it is not evidence of corruption.)
They may choose to disagree with a NSL, and go to court, of course. But being a "free country", corporations are not obliged to do so. They simply have no clear moral or legal responsibility to protect their corporate property, such that you will feel happy about your privacy.
Really, this is nothing. What about the corporate-owned property called your credit card records? That is up for sale, it is only not easily available because the banks know this stuff is valuable, and they plan on getting their piece of the big data-informed commerce pie by holding tight. But they are allowed to sell it to the gov't for nothing, if they so choose.
Having TA'd lower division courses at a large university, I think the "pretty much every school system in existence does this" is likely to be true.
For some reason, people carry a lot of per-conceptions about test scores being in a 0-100 range and the magic of numbers like 70, 80, 90.
If I write a mid-term, the most natural scoring rubric might be to give 1, 2, 3, or 4 points for each of 3 questions. Now that I have scores from 0-12, what do I do? I multiply by 5 and add 40 (perhaps). But maybe the correct cutoff points do not fall at conveniently near 70, 80, 90. (A score of 3 on 3 questions, translates to 85.) Do I rescale? If I do not rescale, I know I will get students whining "Hey, I scored 80. I DESERVE a B!" And what about the zeros that are rescaled to 60, should I do something about that?
With the convenience of computers, it is really easy to rescale things. How or why they were rescaled that way is not likely to be understood by a casual outsider who did not see the sausage being made.
Please, mod parent up.
The malicious manipulation hypothesis lacks explanatory power -- there is no logical reason to believe that corrupt officials would find these kind of quirks more useful towards padding their wallets. The rescaling hypothesis does explain.
Furthermore, having TA'd at a large and respected state system university for very big lower division physics courses, I can say that hints of bi-modal or tri-modal distributions are not necessarily surprising. Arguably it is a good thing -- distributions that look like overwhelmingly influenced by randomness could imply weakness in the curriculum design and testing practices.
I do not disagree. But when processes are so amateurish, as in the anecdotes provided in the fine article, then it always will devolve to people over processes in a way that is not enlightening. One of the main purposes of every flavor of formalized process is to enforce some minimum level of communication.
"Outside effects" is an argument that cuts both ways. It does not mean anything until you dig down into a bit more details. In fact, superficial "outside effects" arguments are always used to rationalize flushing money down into a football stadium.
By its nature, a city must make investments and provide services that usually do not come close to "break even" by the normal rules of accounting. Building a stadium, hospital, subway line, freeway, bridge, high school, museum, park -- these are all exercises in balancing outside effects. In every case, with the notable exception of the baseball-only stadium, these investments "lose" money hand over fist. Singling out the one non-loser for special scrutiny does not make much sense.
It's called "civilization". Strategies for pooling resources allowed mankind to rise to the bronze age, and then beyond. People who are ideologically allergic to some rational strategies should be content to work without the benefits of even metal tools.
Baseball is a negligible burden on the taxpayers. Modern baseball stadiums come quite close to breaking even to the city -- some profit slightly, some at a modest loss. A baseball stadium is used 80something times per year, so financial solvency is not so difficult.
The real villains are the football stadiums. Professional football teams used their stadium all of ~9-10 times per year. The stadiums are much bigger and more expensive. They are less comfortable and practical for any use other than football. A football team is a loss to the city/county to the tune of a few hundred million dollars, and the football team will come back for another handout every 20 or so years, whenever they decide their stadium is shabby.
As baseball teams transition to attractive baseball-only stadiums -- a delight to both fans (and perhaps taxpayers), the absolute absurdity of "welfare queen" football teams is more and more obvious.
Nasdaq made explicit and implicit promises to many kinds of people. They failed to deliver. Even if damages are hard to evaluate, the SEC has to take some kind of action for that manifest failure. The courts are available for figuring out other details.
While this affair is not going to get the SEC covered in laurels, doing nothing was never a reasonable option.
Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that the other party is indeed "shady". So what? According to libertarian principles, the gov't and gov't bodies have no business interfering with non-fraudulent activities (or otherwise probable crimes).
What is the fraudulent activity involved here? Why would a touchy-feely assessment of the personal character of one party (the shady scumbags) actually matter unless and until there is clear evidence of fraud?
The question is whether a particular tax at a particular level causes inappropriate economic disruption or hardship. Ultimately we need to tax where the money is, while balancing the degree of inevitable disruption and hardship with wisdom.
Of course, people avoid saying that out loud -- in America, surely it will be only a few nanoseconds before some whiner equates the federal gov't with a famous bank robber. Really the wise should not fear for being emulated by bank robbers, even if fools will insist every single thing a bank robber ever did cannot contain wisdom.
Whether you really "own" a house or car is an emotional factor that is a distraction. Should someone less well off than you pay higher taxes, so that you can enjoy a more perfected perception of your personal relationship with a housing unit? Would it be okay if someone else got driven out of their own home with other taxes, when hardship could be shared equitably between you two without great harm?
I think my mathematics and quantum physics are not bad (although it were genuinely strong, perhaps I would have gone further than ABD), and I have trouble making "a lot more sense" of "using a 2-norm". Yes, I understand that the wave functions are complex, but that is not enlightening without a lot of math.
Most "spooky" results are simply the result of not accepting that everything is a wave form, and waves cannot understand that they are not supposed to be stretched across space. Which is another way of saying that JoshuaZ is correct about QM, unfortunately, being taught as "a series of counterintuitive results tacked on to classical physics". Pity.
(I would note that the QM as variance from Classical Physics can be sensible, but only if you deeply understand statistical physics at a level that is not usual even for physics PhDs.)
Our brains have evolved to feel comfortable with classical physics. When friends/family ask about exotic physics (QM or Relativity), I tell them: "The reason you are finding it implausible is your brain is working correctly; the sense comes from building up abstractions carefully with mathematics, motivated by precise experiments, that is completely outside everyday experience."
So is it a case of where they start out following the ethics guidelines the classes taught them, but end up pushing the edge and pushing the edge until they go too far, with the process generally taking years, as they slowly become disillusioned and greedy?
I suspect novice lawyers who so happen to lack scruples are uncertain about what they are likely to get away with, so they start out not behaving egregiously scummy. At times goes on, the scummy lawyers eventually figure out "cash cows". The "cash cows" are improved in their moneymaking aspect with volume. Volume in legal gray areas breeds minor mistakes. Minor mistakes breed complacence that leads to major mistakes. Every major mistake brings a small chance of pissing off an unusually astute judge.
You are assuming the hard stuff is the easy stuff, just because it is easy to describe with abstract human language. It is easy to say "simulate a healthy brain down at the cellular level", just like it is easy to say "track every grain of sand in a sandstorm". But actually doing either is very, very, very hard, and tweaking up the amount of computing power on hand does not really help. The hard part is not the computations. The hard part is getting the initial conditions correct.
It is not the computing power that is the problem, it is understanding what you are trying to simulate well enough that simulation is possible.
I suppose it might be possible to use a super advanced future electron microscope to, say, tear apart your brain a few molecules at a time and examine it one piece at a time. That might give enough data. Or it might not. And having vaporized your brain, does that data help? Can I combine that data with another data set from a second or a hundredth vaporized and formerly living brain to get the data I need. Hard to say. This is speculation. This is science fiction that might lead to real science decades in the future.
That we lack the data to even guess at what reasonable initial conditions would be is not speculation. That is a fact. That we are not even close is not speculation. That is a fact.
Please mod parent up.
It is not a question of computing power, but whether the feedback loops down at the cellular level are correct. And even if those are correct, there are intermediate structures that must be tuned or the "brain" is a useless jumble. And even if those are very close, it would still take only tiny errors in initial conditions for the "brain" to be insane or otherwise crippled.
Correct. This is a necessary rule, or parties would fear any kind of concession during an unsuccessful negotiation would tie their hands if the matter eventually ends up in a courtroom. That would poison any effort to avoid trial.
The space shuttle was always a military-industrial complex socialism dressed up in a NASA publicity stunt. The very lucrative American aeronautics companies did not want to compete with a viable Russian space program, even after the Cold War was very obviously over.
The biggest problem is South Korea would complain about the US precipitating a war, for good reason. They dislike the North Korean gov't, of course, but NK is quite capable of flattening half of Seoul with conventional weapons.
This is a situation where the US just needs to be a calm adult and let South Korea take the lead.
In the long game, continued NK belligerence as we have seen over the last decade will eventually provoke Japan to build a nuclear deterrence. The threat of that expensive future nuclear arms is what is going to get China to talk some sense into NK...eventually. In the short term, China has incentive to do nothing. In the long term, China is probably more worried about being boxed in a nuclear Japan and a nuclear South Korea (and a nuclear India) than it cares about Korea.
In the uglier scenarios, QA started with an explicitly optimistic schedule and then were asked to do less testing four or five times.
If someone tries to finger QA for a bug getting through, they will simply get laughed at.
I am a QA person with a couple non-engineering science degrees. I think what gives me the edge is the ability to imagine what might go wrong, and the curiosity to inform that kind of brainstorming.
I admit I do it for the paycheck. While it is not glamorous, it can be fun.
I would also note a certain disincentive towards moving into Dev, based on having been around the block. When a project goes completely to hell, the Devs get "asked" to work 70 hour weeks. Strangely enough, the QA workload drops off...because it is not possible to do much testing on something that does not work.
Your annual Dev salary is certainly higher, but how does your pay rate per hour of stress work out?