RadioShack only has itself to blame. In the internet age, stores are no longer a place to buy products, but a place to get a product quickly or a place to talk to actual people
Agreed with some additions. I go to a store for one of a few reasons: 1) Entertainment. Shopping can be fun. Retail stores that do well understand this and work hard to make the shopping more than just an exchange of money for goods 2) Convenience. Sometimes you need something fast or more efficiently than is possible through online shopping. If I need something Right Now then I'm probably going to make the drive to the local store. 3) Selection. Some goods like produce and meats aren't identical from unit to unit and I want to pick the specific one I want. Also some goods are better purchased when you can actually touch and feel them. If all a retailer is selling is undifferentiated boxed goods then they are in danger of being eaten by Amazon. 4) Expertise. While you can get expertise though an online experience, sometimes there is no substitute for talking to a qualified expert in person. When I bought my first SLR camera it was invaluable to talk to the experts at my local camera shop even after I had done a ton of internet research. 5) Service. Good retail stores often have a service component to their business that is hard to replicate online. My local John Deere dealer services my lawn tractor every year in addition to having products for sale. Amazon would have a hard time replicating this business model.
Good retail businesses incorporate many of these features. Stores like Sears and yes, Radio Shack that sell the same boxed crap I can get elsewhere for less than amazing prices are doomed to failure.
The other big three were slow by comparison. On speed alone, Chrome won.
They all keep saying this. I use all the major browsers (Edge, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari) with some regularity and I cannot see any meaningful difference in speed between them. I'm sure there are some measurable differences but as an end user they are inconsequential. I use Firefox as my primary go to browser because it's cross platform (rules out Safari and Edge) and it's work flow and options suit me better than Chrome. I don't dislike Chrome but there is no reason for me to switch to it either for every day browsing because it doesn't offer me anything I need that I don't already have with Firefox.
Mozilla didn't help themselves by firing their employees for not being PC enough.
That has little to do with Chrome's dominance. Heck the only reason Chrome managed to displace Microsoft's offerings is that Microsoft got greedy and stopped improving their product. They had the market share and could have kept it if they hadn't been so short sighted.
Being worried on climate change is like being worried on gravity. It's there. You can't avoid it. Has there ever been a time when climate has not changed?
The climate hasn't changed dramatically for several thousand years and there is copious evidence to indicate that modern human industrial activity (particularly fossil fuel burning) is throwing the global climate out of whack. While there are things humans cannot control, our own activity is not among them.
Not too long ago Time magazine had cover where the biggest worry was looming ice age.
Is Time magazine a respected science journal? Maybe not the best source.
The percentage of believers doesn't prove facts. It proves belief.
Missing the point. The point is that when enough people get behind an idea it becomes possible to take meaningful action. This is a political survey regarding the effectiveness of scientific communication. The science is what it is and this survey does not deal with the science. The debate is largely a political and economic one and this seemingly is ammunition in that debate.
Whether or not you believe humans are responsible for climate change, the evidence is clear that climate change is occurring. A great many of the follow on consequences of climate change are highly predictable and many of them are bad. As such, logically it is almost irrelevant whether or not humans are the driver of the change even though the evidence seems bullet proof that we are responsible. Either way it clear that it is happening and it is equally clear is something we need to plan for and quite likely attempt to mitigate. You don't have to believe humans are responsible for it to be logical for us to take substantial action on the problem. It's really no different in principle than a volcano erupting - we still have to take action to address the consequences.
Of course the sticky bit of the problem is that dealing with the issue requires human action which will come at a cost. The only (sort of) sane reason to not act to deal with climate change is because someone has economic self interest interest in ignoring the problem. It's understandable if not justifiable. There are of course a few illogical reasons why people oppose taking action the most notable of which seems to be tribalism. Thing is that whether people believe in it or not they will end up dealing with the problem sooner or later. The cost of dealing with it sooner is lower but human nature being what it is it's not clear if that will happen before there are some severe consequences.
Yes, I know. I've been to Georgia and California, the only thing they have in common is the crappy weather.
Crappy weather? Did you visit during a hurricane or something? Both those states are known for many things but crappy weather isn't among them. Southern California in particular has a huge population in large part precisely because of its dependably nice weather. Unless you hate heat, Georgia is also quite nice.
You will, though, find the same kind of people anywhere provided you're looking for them, what differs is saturation. You will find left leaning liberals in, say, Texas. But they will be far fewer than in, say, Cali.
The current evidence supports alien superstructure to exactly the same degree as random gas clouds or the debris of a planet, which are the other hypotheses in the paper. There's no additional evidence to choose between them.
There is a HUGE difference between them. We've seen gas clouds and have proof of their existence. We have seen planetary debris in our own solar system. We have, to our knowledge, never seen any evidence of alien civilizations. While we may not be able to conclusively rule out aliens in this case at this time, there is ample reason to doubt that is the likely source of the observations given that we have no evidence of even so much as an alien microbe, much less an advanced civilization.
Have you actually ever formally studied logic and meta-logic? It's also a fun field.
Yes I have. Not sure what relevance that has here.
Much of scientific progress has been made by taking a long jump away from established theory to explain some measurement that doesn't fit.
Yes all science is based on observations we cannot explain. That doesn't mean every observation requires invoking improbable causes derived from an absence of clear data. They have an observation that current models cannot adequately explain and the data available is sufficiently limited that we cannot yet conclusively rule out aliens as a potential cause. That is not the same thing as saying aliens ARE the cause and there certainly is insufficient evidence to have reasonable confidence in such a prediction. The null hypothesis is that it is NOT aliens until we have clear and compelling evidence to the contrary.
Quantum mechanics tells a very strange story indeed, one discordant with pretty much everything in ordinary experience and most scientific fields.
Quantum mechanics is a model that was built over the course of decades based on numerous observations and experiments. This "alien mega-structure" nonsense is not being handled remotely with the same care and precision.
They're both broke but Texas is staying afloat by leeching Hawaii dry while pretending to "save" them?
Ha! I actually did laugh out loud. Well done.
On a serious note, I said they were analogously different, not that the situations were at all the same. Think how different culturally Greeks are from Germans and you'll see a similarly large differential between Texans and Hawaiians or between urban California and rural Mississippi. Their outlook on life is quite different. Americans only seem like a cohesive group if you don't look very carefully, especially when race is involved. In actual fact both the people and the states are nearly as diverse as the various countries in the EU. We just have systems in place that bind these groups together a bit tighter than they might be otherwise.
From over here in Europe, what your political system looks like is one religious nutjob party that hates everything non-white and one non-religious nutjob party that hates everything white.
That's ok. Many ill informed people in America generally see Europe as either a bunch of lazy socialists or nazis. No, that isn't accurate or fair but it's about as ridiculous as your assertion.
I can't really see anything resembling a political platform in either of them. Mostly because they have pretty much identical stances on everything but religion and whether or not white males are the devil.
Only if you aren't paying any attention at all. The meme that the republicans and democrats are basically the same is preposterous nonsense and if anything they've been growing further apart over time. The difference is that the US is one country and state level politics aren't so visible to those in Europe. But I assure you that there are differences between US states every bit as large as those between European countries. Greece is as similar to Germany as Hawaii is to Texas.
Reagan at least was a Democrat for quite a while. Back in the early 1970's, he said that he didn't leave the Democrat party; the Democrat party left him.
Yes Reagan claimed that exact quote but it was bullshit then as it is now. Basically his brand of politics was more conservative than the bulk of the democrats. Reagan's politics drifted right long before he ever switched parties. His claim is exactly backwards for the most part.
And if you read the party platforms and public statements of most Dems in the 1950s through the mid-70's, they sound VERY Republican.
That's because many of them were what we think of republicans to be today. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 caused a huge number of democrats (particularly in the south) to switch party affiliations over the next decade. The south used to vote solidly democrat up until 1964. It was Nixon in 1968 that appealed to scared white voters in the south and started the transition to the solidly republican south we see today.
Today's Democrats used to be called "Communists", and today's Republicans used to be solidly Democrat.
SOME of today's republicans used to be democrats. Most democrats were politically to the left of those individuals long before they switched parties, largely over what is clearly racial bias after 1964.
Seriously just search the web for any random unknown caller's number and you'll find tons of them.
You are correct but I don't waste the time. Basically if it's a number I don't recognize or I'm not expecting a call I don't take the call. It goes straight to my voicemail service. Spam calls get flagged as such and blocked so I never get them again. I also subscribe to the "do not call" lists and I don't have a land line. My actual cell number never gets used. I use a voice mail number which forwards to my cell phone so few people have my actual direct line should I need to change it in the future. Makes screening calls much easier.
There certainly is evidence to support the "alien superstructure" theory.
If you want to call that evidence, fine, but it's extremely weak evidence. Weak to the point of being unworthy of serious consideration. Certainly not strong enough to reject the null hypothesis ("not aliens").
Quantum physics very much came from "blackbody curve, WTF?" Getting to the bottom of Plank's Law turned out to be a trip through the rabbit hole.
Yes there was a lot of physicists saying "that's odd" with a bunch of twists and turns which lead to quantum mechanics. Same for relativity. Same for many other branches of science. What they didn't do was make a handful of observations and then trumpet the most improbable of possible explanations that hadn't yet been ruled out into the mass media. They got to quantum mechanics gradually and with careful effort over many decades.
There's as much evidence for alien superstructure as random gas clouds. Since it doesn't matter in any practical way which explanation we favor, why not go with the fun one? Have you become that drab, gray, and soulless?
I consider properly conducted science to be incredibly beautiful and fun. If you want to make up fanciful stories unsupported by evidence to describe the world just wander down the hall to the theology department which is where you seem to be hanging out at the moment. They're really good at coming up with "fun" stories unconnected to reality as we know it.
You are, in your own words, saying "it isn't the most likely among the possible explanations". What are the other specific "possible explanations" that you consider to be more likely?
Pretty much any physical phenomena less complicated than a highly advanced alien civilization. Just invoking Occam's razor here. I'm not ruling the possibility out but it doesn't seem the most likely among the possible explanations. Pretty much every explanation other than "alien mega-structure" requires fewer assumptions.
Actually, that's very much how science works. Nothing is ever proven so, it's only ever proven not.
You need to (re-)familiarize yourself with the null hypothesis and what it means. The default position on any assertion is that there is no relationship between two measured phenomena unless there is positive evidence to justify rejecting the null hypothesis. This is the central task of experimental science.
Things are "proven so" all the time through observations. Using the term proof is probably not ideal when talking about science. Math has proofs. Science has observations and models. The distinction can be subtle sometimes but it's important. Regardless, we find positive evidence ("proof" if you will) of the existence of things constantly. If I want to prove the existence of a bird I go out and find an example of a bird. I don't prove the existence of a bird by process of elimination. We aren't going to prove the existence of aliens by any means other than a positive observation of aliens or their remains. We gain confidence in our models by making observations and seeing if the data fits the models. But remember, models are not proofs, they are descriptions. To your point we can disprove models by making a single positive observations of something incompatible with a proposed model. But we do not accept unsupported positive assertions without supporting evidence either. If someone believes that a Vogon construction fleet is the best model for this observation then the burden is on them to make an observation to support that model. The null hypothesis is that it is not a Vogon construction fleet until proven otherwise.
That doesn't mean anyone else has to believe every assertion anyone makes if it doesn't seem likely to them, and the burden is on the person making the assertion to change others' minds.
This is a good approximation of my point with the caveat that the burden is not to change someone's mind but to support or refute the model. If someone proposes a model ("this is an alien mega-structure!") then the burden is on them to find the evidence in the form of observations to support their hypothesis so that we may reject the null hypothesis ("it is NOT an alien mega-structure"). The burden is expressly NOT on me to go look for non-evidence to reject the null hypothesis.
But conversely, the burden of proof is on you if you want them (the person making the assertion) to change their mind.
Science is not about changing minds. It's about proving a model. Whether you believe the model or not is outside of my control no matter how overwhelming the pile of evidence I have might be. The default position (the null hypothesis) is properly that it is not aliens in the absence of compelling data to the contrary. Practically speaking I don't care if they want to believe something unlikely. My position on the alien mega-structure is "I don't know" as the evidence of alien activity is extremely weak. Until I see actual evidence it will remain "I don't know" and I will consider the null hypothesis to be the most likely correct one. I'm not rejecting the possibility of it being aliens, merely stating that I do not find the available evidence sufficiently strong to reject the null hypothesis. If someone wants to believe that aliens are involved and they aren't hurting anyone by their actions I certainly don't care.
You say it's not "the most likely"? Based on what?
Based on the fact that we've never seen evidence of alien life of any kind ever in any form. Not in the entirety of human history. Furthermore you should familiarize yourself with the concept of a null hypothesis. Proper scientific method is to presume there is no relationship between the observations and the existence of aliens until you can find evidence proving to a high degree of confidence that there is actually a relationship.
We have absolutely NO evidence one way or the other that it's NOT extraterrestrials.
I never claimed otherwise but that doesn't justify making the extraordinary claim that ET must have or even may have built it. The null hypothesis has to be that it is not aliens until we can find evidence to the contrary. To date there is precisely zero evidence for the existence of advanced extra-terrestrial civilizations. Find some and we can revisit this discussion.
You can say absolutely NOTHING concrete one way or the other with NO evidence.
Sure I can. I can say that the null hypothesis remains intact. That is a concrete statement about the evidence. I can also say with absolute certainty that we have never seen any evidence of aliens in human history. As such I can say that my confidence that this is not evidence of aliens is fairly strong. More evidence might move my opinion one direction or the other but there is not a strong case to be made for aliens as the most reasonable explanation at this time.
That's pretty much how quantum physics came to be. None of the sane explanations worked, so a very far-fetched approach was taken. "It's crazy, but the math works."
If the math works and it backs up experimental data and observations it isn't crazy. And no quantum mechanics was not discovered like this. Quantum physics came about through a steady progression of theory and discoveries and experiments over several decades all of which ultimately agreed with each other. Yes it is weird but it wasn't discovered via a process anything like what we are talking about here.
"Fanciful" is not a legitimate objection.
It is when there is no actual evidence to support the hypothesis. What we are seeing is a form of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. They couldn't figure out what the data was telling them so the painted a figurative bullseye (the alien mega-structure) on the data after the fact. To say that is bad science is to be very kind.
Here's the problem. All our good "mundane" explanations were all conclusively disproved.
So you shrug your shoulders and say "I don't know" until we can gather more evidence. Just because we have an observation you cannot yet explain does not justify jumping to the most fanciful conclusion one can imagine. To do otherwise is to be no different than people who see bright lights or weird object in the sky and immediately conclude that a UFO must be alien visitors, conveniently forgetting what the U stands for.
Go ahead and say "I don't know". It's good for you.
Now what?
Gather more data. That's how science works. There are a lot of things we haven't fully explained yet. One more isn't going to matter.
Do you realise that the Deadpool film was a reboot of the Deadpool in the X-Men Origins: Wolverine film?
They might have called the character Deadpool but that wasn't Deadpool. That shared as much with the source material as the iRobot movie shared with the Issac Asimov book or Starship Troopers shared with the Heinlin novel.
Until proven wrong, I say it's Aliens. You can't prove me wrong until you have facts to dispute me
I don't have to prove you wrong. That's not how science works. You don't get to make an unsupported assertion of a positive result and then challenge others to prove you wrong. You made the assertion that it is aliens so you get to be the one to back it up with actual verifiable observations. You have a hypothesis and you get to be the one to run the experiment. For all I know it might be aliens and I'm not saying it is or is not. I'm merely saying that it isn't the most likely among the possible explanations and that we should not favor it until we have better evidence. This doesn't mean I'm ruling out out but merely that the evidence thus far does not even come close to the level needed to support that as a reasonable conclusion.
So are you saying that of the trillions of stars and trillions of habitable planets out there, not one of them has intelligent life on it?
No I'm saying that extraordinary claims require actual proof. Just because we cannot yet conclusively rule out that it is an "alien mega-structure" doesn't mean we should be favoring that as the likely explanation.
As far as I can tell, "aliens" is just one of many explanations brought forth by the authors of the original paper.
At most it should be a "we cannot rule this out conclusively" sort of footnote with copious caveats. Even mentioning it without additional evidence is borderline irresponsible given how crazy people get about such claims.
Unfortunately, many of the more mundane explanations such as dust clouds and massive comet clusters had since been ruled out, so that leaves "aliens" as one of the few remaining viable explanations
Unless ALL of the mundane explanations have been ruled out AND we have more evidence than some mere unexplained dimming, aliens is not a viable explanation. It's simply wishful thinking.
I personally would like to believe there's some cyclic process in the star itself, but I wouldn't rule out aliens just because it "sounds ridiculous".
It's not that it sounds ridiculous (though it does) but rather that there is no actual evidence for it other than an inability to conclusively rule it out.
That's a false premise. The gold standard didn't fail, it worked for millennia.
Yes the gold standard failed. It caused more problems than it solved and it was impossible to maintain for a host of reasons. All the gold standard is fundamentally is a peg of a currency to a commodity - in this case gold but other commodities could be used to more or less the same effect. This does have certain advantages but it also carries some very important disadvantages as well.
We moved off the gold standard as an international currency because it was too hard for the US government to balance its budget.
The actual reasons are multiple but there are a few key ones. For various practical reasons mostly related to international trade it was impossible to move the gold around to perfectly match the money supply in any given country at any given time. "Paper" Currency can change countries faster than it is practical to move the gold around to match where the currency is. And since most money is not actually in the form of coins nor is it practical to exchange it that way we tried a variety of (ultimately futile) means to compensate. There also were issues relating to imbalances in money supply versus labor and capital mobility.
If you want a modern example of the problems caused by a currency peg without the ability to adjust the money supply look at the problems Greece has had in recent years. When they joined the Euro they effectively pegged the drachma to the euro at a fixed rate (similar to a gold standard) and abrogated their right to tinker with the money supply. This has caused a host of difficult problems because the best tools to deal with the issues have been taken away from Greece.
On the other hand, we have seen fiat currencies fail many, many times
We've seen countries on the gold standard experience hyperinflation many times. The Weimar Republic is probably the most notable example and it led more or less directly to a world war. The gold standard is not a viable means to prevent this from happening. Countries on various incarnations of a gold standard defaulted routinely.
The US has only been on fiat currency since 1971
The US left the gold standard effectively in 1933 under FDR. What happened in 1971 is that the US stopped converting dollars to gold at a fixed rate but the US had already de-facto left the gold standard decades earlier.
It remains to be seen if we can manage it or not.
True enough I suppose but we've already proven that the gold standard cannot work in a modern economy so I'm not sure why you seem to favor returning to something that we've already established did not work well enough. Bitcoin does not show any characteristics that eliminate most of the problems with the gold standard aside from the physical transport issues.
"Savings" in the long-term is the removal of money from the economy. Money that goes unspent is the same as money that's been burned.
Not true at all as long as you hold your savings in a financial institution. Put your money in a savings account or similar and that money will get lent out to do other useful things in the economy. You can take it out of circulation by stuffing it in the figurative (or literal) mattress but that's not what happens to most money. Even if you purchase a financial instrument such as a stock or bond that money is merely transferred to someone else who can then put it to productive use. Now savings aren't perfectly efficient so there can be too much saving and not enough investing but that isn't the same thing as removing the money from the economy. It just means that the money isn't being utilized optimally.
If you put your money in the bank and then come back 10 years later and take it out to spend it, it's functionally the same as printing new money.
This is a direct contradiction to your assertion that savings = removal of money from the economy. If you put money into a bank and it gets lent out then it is not money that has "been burned" because it's in circulation. You are correct that fractional reserve banking has a money creation effect but that's the exact opposite of taking it out of circulation.
Slashdot Mirror
RadioShack only has itself to blame. In the internet age, stores are no longer a place to buy products, but a place to get a product quickly or a place to talk to actual people
Agreed with some additions. I go to a store for one of a few reasons:
1) Entertainment. Shopping can be fun. Retail stores that do well understand this and work hard to make the shopping more than just an exchange of money for goods
2) Convenience. Sometimes you need something fast or more efficiently than is possible through online shopping. If I need something Right Now then I'm probably going to make the drive to the local store.
3) Selection. Some goods like produce and meats aren't identical from unit to unit and I want to pick the specific one I want. Also some goods are better purchased when you can actually touch and feel them. If all a retailer is selling is undifferentiated boxed goods then they are in danger of being eaten by Amazon.
4) Expertise. While you can get expertise though an online experience, sometimes there is no substitute for talking to a qualified expert in person. When I bought my first SLR camera it was invaluable to talk to the experts at my local camera shop even after I had done a ton of internet research.
5) Service. Good retail stores often have a service component to their business that is hard to replicate online. My local John Deere dealer services my lawn tractor every year in addition to having products for sale. Amazon would have a hard time replicating this business model.
Good retail businesses incorporate many of these features. Stores like Sears and yes, Radio Shack that sell the same boxed crap I can get elsewhere for less than amazing prices are doomed to failure.
The other big three were slow by comparison. On speed alone, Chrome won.
They all keep saying this. I use all the major browsers (Edge, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari) with some regularity and I cannot see any meaningful difference in speed between them. I'm sure there are some measurable differences but as an end user they are inconsequential. I use Firefox as my primary go to browser because it's cross platform (rules out Safari and Edge) and it's work flow and options suit me better than Chrome. I don't dislike Chrome but there is no reason for me to switch to it either for every day browsing because it doesn't offer me anything I need that I don't already have with Firefox.
Mozilla didn't help themselves by firing their employees for not being PC enough.
That has little to do with Chrome's dominance. Heck the only reason Chrome managed to displace Microsoft's offerings is that Microsoft got greedy and stopped improving their product. They had the market share and could have kept it if they hadn't been so short sighted.
Being worried on climate change is like being worried on gravity. It's there. You can't avoid it. Has there ever been a time when climate has not changed?
The climate hasn't changed dramatically for several thousand years and there is copious evidence to indicate that modern human industrial activity (particularly fossil fuel burning) is throwing the global climate out of whack. While there are things humans cannot control, our own activity is not among them.
Not too long ago Time magazine had cover where the biggest worry was looming ice age.
Is Time magazine a respected science journal? Maybe not the best source.
The percentage of believers doesn't prove facts. It proves belief.
Missing the point. The point is that when enough people get behind an idea it becomes possible to take meaningful action. This is a political survey regarding the effectiveness of scientific communication. The science is what it is and this survey does not deal with the science. The debate is largely a political and economic one and this seemingly is ammunition in that debate.
Whether or not you believe humans are responsible for climate change, the evidence is clear that climate change is occurring. A great many of the follow on consequences of climate change are highly predictable and many of them are bad. As such, logically it is almost irrelevant whether or not humans are the driver of the change even though the evidence seems bullet proof that we are responsible. Either way it clear that it is happening and it is equally clear is something we need to plan for and quite likely attempt to mitigate. You don't have to believe humans are responsible for it to be logical for us to take substantial action on the problem. It's really no different in principle than a volcano erupting - we still have to take action to address the consequences.
Of course the sticky bit of the problem is that dealing with the issue requires human action which will come at a cost. The only (sort of) sane reason to not act to deal with climate change is because someone has economic self interest interest in ignoring the problem. It's understandable if not justifiable. There are of course a few illogical reasons why people oppose taking action the most notable of which seems to be tribalism. Thing is that whether people believe in it or not they will end up dealing with the problem sooner or later. The cost of dealing with it sooner is lower but human nature being what it is it's not clear if that will happen before there are some severe consequences.
Yes, I know. I've been to Georgia and California, the only thing they have in common is the crappy weather.
Crappy weather? Did you visit during a hurricane or something? Both those states are known for many things but crappy weather isn't among them. Southern California in particular has a huge population in large part precisely because of its dependably nice weather. Unless you hate heat, Georgia is also quite nice.
You will, though, find the same kind of people anywhere provided you're looking for them, what differs is saturation. You will find left leaning liberals in, say, Texas. But they will be far fewer than in, say, Cali.
Certainly. I'm talking in generalities of course.
The current evidence supports alien superstructure to exactly the same degree as random gas clouds or the debris of a planet, which are the other hypotheses in the paper. There's no additional evidence to choose between them.
There is a HUGE difference between them. We've seen gas clouds and have proof of their existence. We have seen planetary debris in our own solar system. We have, to our knowledge, never seen any evidence of alien civilizations. While we may not be able to conclusively rule out aliens in this case at this time, there is ample reason to doubt that is the likely source of the observations given that we have no evidence of even so much as an alien microbe, much less an advanced civilization.
Have you actually ever formally studied logic and meta-logic? It's also a fun field.
Yes I have. Not sure what relevance that has here.
Much of scientific progress has been made by taking a long jump away from established theory to explain some measurement that doesn't fit.
Yes all science is based on observations we cannot explain. That doesn't mean every observation requires invoking improbable causes derived from an absence of clear data. They have an observation that current models cannot adequately explain and the data available is sufficiently limited that we cannot yet conclusively rule out aliens as a potential cause. That is not the same thing as saying aliens ARE the cause and there certainly is insufficient evidence to have reasonable confidence in such a prediction. The null hypothesis is that it is NOT aliens until we have clear and compelling evidence to the contrary.
Quantum mechanics tells a very strange story indeed, one discordant with pretty much everything in ordinary experience and most scientific fields.
Quantum mechanics is a model that was built over the course of decades based on numerous observations and experiments. This "alien mega-structure" nonsense is not being handled remotely with the same care and precision.
They're both broke but Texas is staying afloat by leeching Hawaii dry while pretending to "save" them?
Ha! I actually did laugh out loud. Well done.
On a serious note, I said they were analogously different, not that the situations were at all the same. Think how different culturally Greeks are from Germans and you'll see a similarly large differential between Texans and Hawaiians or between urban California and rural Mississippi. Their outlook on life is quite different. Americans only seem like a cohesive group if you don't look very carefully, especially when race is involved. In actual fact both the people and the states are nearly as diverse as the various countries in the EU. We just have systems in place that bind these groups together a bit tighter than they might be otherwise.
From over here in Europe, what your political system looks like is one religious nutjob party that hates everything non-white and one non-religious nutjob party that hates everything white.
That's ok. Many ill informed people in America generally see Europe as either a bunch of lazy socialists or nazis. No, that isn't accurate or fair but it's about as ridiculous as your assertion.
I can't really see anything resembling a political platform in either of them. Mostly because they have pretty much identical stances on everything but religion and whether or not white males are the devil.
Only if you aren't paying any attention at all. The meme that the republicans and democrats are basically the same is preposterous nonsense and if anything they've been growing further apart over time. The difference is that the US is one country and state level politics aren't so visible to those in Europe. But I assure you that there are differences between US states every bit as large as those between European countries. Greece is as similar to Germany as Hawaii is to Texas.
Reagan at least was a Democrat for quite a while. Back in the early 1970's, he said that he didn't leave the Democrat party; the Democrat party left him.
Yes Reagan claimed that exact quote but it was bullshit then as it is now. Basically his brand of politics was more conservative than the bulk of the democrats. Reagan's politics drifted right long before he ever switched parties. His claim is exactly backwards for the most part.
And if you read the party platforms and public statements of most Dems in the 1950s through the mid-70's, they sound VERY Republican.
That's because many of them were what we think of republicans to be today. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 caused a huge number of democrats (particularly in the south) to switch party affiliations over the next decade. The south used to vote solidly democrat up until 1964. It was Nixon in 1968 that appealed to scared white voters in the south and started the transition to the solidly republican south we see today.
Today's Democrats used to be called "Communists", and today's Republicans used to be solidly Democrat.
SOME of today's republicans used to be democrats. Most democrats were politically to the left of those individuals long before they switched parties, largely over what is clearly racial bias after 1964.
Seriously just search the web for any random unknown caller's number and you'll find tons of them.
You are correct but I don't waste the time. Basically if it's a number I don't recognize or I'm not expecting a call I don't take the call. It goes straight to my voicemail service. Spam calls get flagged as such and blocked so I never get them again. I also subscribe to the "do not call" lists and I don't have a land line. My actual cell number never gets used. I use a voice mail number which forwards to my cell phone so few people have my actual direct line should I need to change it in the future. Makes screening calls much easier.
There certainly is evidence to support the "alien superstructure" theory.
If you want to call that evidence, fine, but it's extremely weak evidence. Weak to the point of being unworthy of serious consideration. Certainly not strong enough to reject the null hypothesis ("not aliens").
Quantum physics very much came from "blackbody curve, WTF?" Getting to the bottom of Plank's Law turned out to be a trip through the rabbit hole.
Yes there was a lot of physicists saying "that's odd" with a bunch of twists and turns which lead to quantum mechanics. Same for relativity. Same for many other branches of science. What they didn't do was make a handful of observations and then trumpet the most improbable of possible explanations that hadn't yet been ruled out into the mass media. They got to quantum mechanics gradually and with careful effort over many decades.
There's as much evidence for alien superstructure as random gas clouds. Since it doesn't matter in any practical way which explanation we favor, why not go with the fun one? Have you become that drab, gray, and soulless?
I consider properly conducted science to be incredibly beautiful and fun. If you want to make up fanciful stories unsupported by evidence to describe the world just wander down the hall to the theology department which is where you seem to be hanging out at the moment. They're really good at coming up with "fun" stories unconnected to reality as we know it.
You are, in your own words, saying "it isn't the most likely among the possible explanations". What are the other specific "possible explanations" that you consider to be more likely?
Pretty much any physical phenomena less complicated than a highly advanced alien civilization. Just invoking Occam's razor here. I'm not ruling the possibility out but it doesn't seem the most likely among the possible explanations. Pretty much every explanation other than "alien mega-structure" requires fewer assumptions.
Actually, that's very much how science works. Nothing is ever proven so, it's only ever proven not.
You need to (re-)familiarize yourself with the null hypothesis and what it means. The default position on any assertion is that there is no relationship between two measured phenomena unless there is positive evidence to justify rejecting the null hypothesis. This is the central task of experimental science.
Things are "proven so" all the time through observations. Using the term proof is probably not ideal when talking about science. Math has proofs. Science has observations and models. The distinction can be subtle sometimes but it's important. Regardless, we find positive evidence ("proof" if you will) of the existence of things constantly. If I want to prove the existence of a bird I go out and find an example of a bird. I don't prove the existence of a bird by process of elimination. We aren't going to prove the existence of aliens by any means other than a positive observation of aliens or their remains. We gain confidence in our models by making observations and seeing if the data fits the models. But remember, models are not proofs, they are descriptions. To your point we can disprove models by making a single positive observations of something incompatible with a proposed model. But we do not accept unsupported positive assertions without supporting evidence either. If someone believes that a Vogon construction fleet is the best model for this observation then the burden is on them to make an observation to support that model. The null hypothesis is that it is not a Vogon construction fleet until proven otherwise.
That doesn't mean anyone else has to believe every assertion anyone makes if it doesn't seem likely to them, and the burden is on the person making the assertion to change others' minds.
This is a good approximation of my point with the caveat that the burden is not to change someone's mind but to support or refute the model. If someone proposes a model ("this is an alien mega-structure!") then the burden is on them to find the evidence in the form of observations to support their hypothesis so that we may reject the null hypothesis ("it is NOT an alien mega-structure"). The burden is expressly NOT on me to go look for non-evidence to reject the null hypothesis.
But conversely, the burden of proof is on you if you want them (the person making the assertion) to change their mind.
Science is not about changing minds. It's about proving a model. Whether you believe the model or not is outside of my control no matter how overwhelming the pile of evidence I have might be. The default position (the null hypothesis) is properly that it is not aliens in the absence of compelling data to the contrary. Practically speaking I don't care if they want to believe something unlikely. My position on the alien mega-structure is "I don't know" as the evidence of alien activity is extremely weak. Until I see actual evidence it will remain "I don't know" and I will consider the null hypothesis to be the most likely correct one. I'm not rejecting the possibility of it being aliens, merely stating that I do not find the available evidence sufficiently strong to reject the null hypothesis. If someone wants to believe that aliens are involved and they aren't hurting anyone by their actions I certainly don't care.
You say it's not "the most likely"? Based on what?
Based on the fact that we've never seen evidence of alien life of any kind ever in any form. Not in the entirety of human history. Furthermore you should familiarize yourself with the concept of a null hypothesis. Proper scientific method is to presume there is no relationship between the observations and the existence of aliens until you can find evidence proving to a high degree of confidence that there is actually a relationship.
We have absolutely NO evidence one way or the other that it's NOT extraterrestrials.
I never claimed otherwise but that doesn't justify making the extraordinary claim that ET must have or even may have built it. The null hypothesis has to be that it is not aliens until we can find evidence to the contrary. To date there is precisely zero evidence for the existence of advanced extra-terrestrial civilizations. Find some and we can revisit this discussion.
You can say absolutely NOTHING concrete one way or the other with NO evidence.
Sure I can. I can say that the null hypothesis remains intact. That is a concrete statement about the evidence. I can also say with absolute certainty that we have never seen any evidence of aliens in human history. As such I can say that my confidence that this is not evidence of aliens is fairly strong. More evidence might move my opinion one direction or the other but there is not a strong case to be made for aliens as the most reasonable explanation at this time.
That's pretty much how quantum physics came to be. None of the sane explanations worked, so a very far-fetched approach was taken. "It's crazy, but the math works."
If the math works and it backs up experimental data and observations it isn't crazy. And no quantum mechanics was not discovered like this. Quantum physics came about through a steady progression of theory and discoveries and experiments over several decades all of which ultimately agreed with each other. Yes it is weird but it wasn't discovered via a process anything like what we are talking about here.
"Fanciful" is not a legitimate objection.
It is when there is no actual evidence to support the hypothesis. What we are seeing is a form of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. They couldn't figure out what the data was telling them so the painted a figurative bullseye (the alien mega-structure) on the data after the fact. To say that is bad science is to be very kind.
It would behoove you to follow Mark Twain's advice:
"Better to remain silent and thought a fool,
then to speak and remove all doubt."
That's good advice. You should take it.
Here's the problem. All our good "mundane" explanations were all conclusively disproved.
So you shrug your shoulders and say "I don't know" until we can gather more evidence. Just because we have an observation you cannot yet explain does not justify jumping to the most fanciful conclusion one can imagine. To do otherwise is to be no different than people who see bright lights or weird object in the sky and immediately conclude that a UFO must be alien visitors, conveniently forgetting what the U stands for.
Go ahead and say "I don't know". It's good for you.
Now what?
Gather more data. That's how science works. There are a lot of things we haven't fully explained yet. One more isn't going to matter.
Do you realise that the Deadpool film was a reboot of the Deadpool in the X-Men Origins: Wolverine film?
They might have called the character Deadpool but that wasn't Deadpool. That shared as much with the source material as the iRobot movie shared with the Issac Asimov book or Starship Troopers shared with the Heinlin novel.
Imagine a situation of Trump's equivalent there President of the Solar System or the like.
I don't have to imagine it because Douglas Adams already wrote about him
Until proven wrong, I say it's Aliens. You can't prove me wrong until you have facts to dispute me
I don't have to prove you wrong. That's not how science works. You don't get to make an unsupported assertion of a positive result and then challenge others to prove you wrong. You made the assertion that it is aliens so you get to be the one to back it up with actual verifiable observations. You have a hypothesis and you get to be the one to run the experiment. For all I know it might be aliens and I'm not saying it is or is not. I'm merely saying that it isn't the most likely among the possible explanations and that we should not favor it until we have better evidence. This doesn't mean I'm ruling out out but merely that the evidence thus far does not even come close to the level needed to support that as a reasonable conclusion.
So are you saying that of the trillions of stars and trillions of habitable planets out there, not one of them has intelligent life on it?
No I'm saying that extraordinary claims require actual proof. Just because we cannot yet conclusively rule out that it is an "alien mega-structure" doesn't mean we should be favoring that as the likely explanation.
As far as I can tell, "aliens" is just one of many explanations brought forth by the authors of the original paper.
At most it should be a "we cannot rule this out conclusively" sort of footnote with copious caveats. Even mentioning it without additional evidence is borderline irresponsible given how crazy people get about such claims.
Unfortunately, many of the more mundane explanations such as dust clouds and massive comet clusters had since been ruled out, so that leaves "aliens" as one of the few remaining viable explanations
Unless ALL of the mundane explanations have been ruled out AND we have more evidence than some mere unexplained dimming, aliens is not a viable explanation. It's simply wishful thinking.
I personally would like to believe there's some cyclic process in the star itself, but I wouldn't rule out aliens just because it "sounds ridiculous".
It's not that it sounds ridiculous (though it does) but rather that there is no actual evidence for it other than an inability to conclusively rule it out.
That's a false premise. The gold standard didn't fail, it worked for millennia.
Yes the gold standard failed. It caused more problems than it solved and it was impossible to maintain for a host of reasons. All the gold standard is fundamentally is a peg of a currency to a commodity - in this case gold but other commodities could be used to more or less the same effect. This does have certain advantages but it also carries some very important disadvantages as well.
We moved off the gold standard as an international currency because it was too hard for the US government to balance its budget.
The actual reasons are multiple but there are a few key ones. For various practical reasons mostly related to international trade it was impossible to move the gold around to perfectly match the money supply in any given country at any given time. "Paper" Currency can change countries faster than it is practical to move the gold around to match where the currency is. And since most money is not actually in the form of coins nor is it practical to exchange it that way we tried a variety of (ultimately futile) means to compensate. There also were issues relating to imbalances in money supply versus labor and capital mobility.
If you want a modern example of the problems caused by a currency peg without the ability to adjust the money supply look at the problems Greece has had in recent years. When they joined the Euro they effectively pegged the drachma to the euro at a fixed rate (similar to a gold standard) and abrogated their right to tinker with the money supply. This has caused a host of difficult problems because the best tools to deal with the issues have been taken away from Greece.
On the other hand, we have seen fiat currencies fail many, many times
We've seen countries on the gold standard experience hyperinflation many times. The Weimar Republic is probably the most notable example and it led more or less directly to a world war. The gold standard is not a viable means to prevent this from happening. Countries on various incarnations of a gold standard defaulted routinely.
The US has only been on fiat currency since 1971
The US left the gold standard effectively in 1933 under FDR. What happened in 1971 is that the US stopped converting dollars to gold at a fixed rate but the US had already de-facto left the gold standard decades earlier.
It remains to be seen if we can manage it or not.
True enough I suppose but we've already proven that the gold standard cannot work in a modern economy so I'm not sure why you seem to favor returning to something that we've already established did not work well enough. Bitcoin does not show any characteristics that eliminate most of the problems with the gold standard aside from the physical transport issues.
"Savings" in the long-term is the removal of money from the economy. Money that goes unspent is the same as money that's been burned.
Not true at all as long as you hold your savings in a financial institution. Put your money in a savings account or similar and that money will get lent out to do other useful things in the economy. You can take it out of circulation by stuffing it in the figurative (or literal) mattress but that's not what happens to most money. Even if you purchase a financial instrument such as a stock or bond that money is merely transferred to someone else who can then put it to productive use. Now savings aren't perfectly efficient so there can be too much saving and not enough investing but that isn't the same thing as removing the money from the economy. It just means that the money isn't being utilized optimally.
If you put your money in the bank and then come back 10 years later and take it out to spend it, it's functionally the same as printing new money.
This is a direct contradiction to your assertion that savings = removal of money from the economy. If you put money into a bank and it gets lent out then it is not money that has "been burned" because it's in circulation. You are correct that fractional reserve banking has a money creation effect but that's the exact opposite of taking it out of circulation.