Chris Dodd and Barney Frank were not behind the housing crisis. The housing crisis came from wide-spread fraudulent behavior by mortgage lenders and investment banks. It was up to the Fed to regulate these players, not the Congress. Now, thanks in part to Barney Frank, the Consumer Protection Bureau may also play a hand in reigning in criminal behavior by banks.
Also, there's nothing wrong with running a gay brothel. But that's beside the point. Chris Dodd, on the other hand, does seem to be openly admitting to running a racket. Perhaps RICO can be applied.
Unless you want your brain to still function well when you're older. Summary of findings: Those with 4-year degrees have brains which, in terms of capability, are 10 years younger by middle age, and beyond. So it's not just about getting a job right out of college. It's about still having a well-functioning mind when you're 50, 60, 70.
What would you pay to be ten years younger, in other words? Makes college education look cheap, at about any price.
A video lecture on the topic from the man who gave us the Josephson junction, who is certifiably smarter than any of us here and as good a physicist as we have on the planet. That doesn't mean he doesn't have some peculiar ideas. He most certainly does. Walks funny too. But some of his most peculiar ideas have paid off big time, and were contrary to "everyone's" intuitive sense of how things work in reality.
"I remain confident that the ISPs -- including the cable industry, which is the largest association of ISPs -- would not support the legislation if its enactment created the problems that opponents of this provision suggest," Leahy said.
So this is about Comcast/NBC Universal as the largest "ISP" in the "largest association of ISPs"? Fuck that. Not only is their main business content rather than service, but they're a last-mile provider, in which capacity they'd be far less affected by the onerous requirements of this bill than backbone providers or hosting providers.
What this really shows is that service providers should not be allowed to have a business interest in content. Period. It corrupts their perspective. And it allows them to get big enough to corrupt the perspective of paid-for representatives.
Engage in racist slander much? Read the article. Kenya is not so corrupt a place. I have close friends who worked for years there (in other business sectors) who confirm that.
Also, is it your view that branch offices of American corporations, if they should find themselves somewhere more corrupt than America, should join in the corruption? That's an odd view. There's specific American law against that, in fact, with strong penalties against a firm's American corporate operation if it can be proven that it enabled or condoned corrupt practices abroad. Whether American law covers the specific varieties of corruption alleged here I can't speak to. But do you really believe that there's nothing wrong with American corporations having foreign branches and subsidiaries engage in corruption?
And because of that, PBS has been leaning over backwards to appease the Republicans for years. That's exactly how the Republicans distort our media. They bully them all into line. Certainly the TV news operations have been cowed. The only exception is the NY Times, which is powerful enough not to care. But it has it's own problem: it always sucks up to whoever holds the presidency and to our military leaders.
Bernie Sanders was still short of a full commitment when he responded to me, but seems to be leaning against. Hope other Vermonters will push him on this. Play the anticorporate card - Bernie is strongly suspicious of the power of large corporations.
Leahy of course belongs to the Devil (aka his old buddy Michael Eisner) on this one.
Who gets this power to kill? Who over sees them? What ramifications will this have on other humans in society? Will it cause civil wars and uprisings that will undermine the existence of society in the first place?
The US & Chinese presidents. Those close enough to stage coups if they get out of hand. Full employment via military conscription. Depends on what you call "society."
Answering myself: Looks like Secure Easy Setup was the prior version, before the standard was set. No notion if it has the vulnerability. But I've turned it off anyway. Wouldn't have had it on if I'd notice it before in the menu, since I never use it anyway.
Is this the "Secure Easy Setup" option on the "Wireless" menu, which by default is enabled, and of which there's no info on the help screen of my WRT54G?
Plumes have been seen before. This has been reported in other articles on this. However the plumes seen before were neither so large nor grouped so closely together.
Your painting the scientists as "hyperbolic" speakers establishes, what, that you know a big word and can use it correctly in a sentence? This should cause us to see you as smarter than research scientists with advanced degrees and many years of expeditions to gather evidence? Trust me, they have a far larger vocabulary than you do. Yet you are the one speaking hyperbolically. Now, what drives you to that?
It's not as if the waters where these were found were terra incognito - or mare incognito - the arctic has been peopled for thousands of years, particularly by the Russians, which is how they came to possess not just Siberia but Alaska. So when a Russian, in particular, says the like has not been seen before, that's someone reporting from a culture which has a good historical knowledge of what's been there to be seen. Sort of like getting a report on the normalcy or not of current tornadoes from someone with deep roots in Oklahoma.
Agreed. Netfilx is sometimes brilliant, sometimes bumbling, but delivering real value. Verizon is as close to the definition of evil in a corporation as you can get this side of a few of the big investment banks and mortgage lenders. Look at how Verizon screwed its union workers, despite all-time high profits, while paying its executives ever-more. Verizon's customers, also often screwed. They are on the front line of the upper class's war against the rest of us.
So of a total of something over 400 reactors we've only had about 4 melt down (Chernobyl and 3 of the six at Fukushima), so roughly 1%. The average age of the world's nuclear plants is 25 years. So per-nuclear-plant, per-century of operation, 4% melt down, and the odds are 1 in 25 of having a meltdown of major consequence at whatever nuclear plant you live closest to within your or your children's lifetimes.
Yup, when you do the math there's just nothing to be too worried about.
Peer review at the best journals is blind. Neither the reviewers nor the authors know who the others are. So where do personal politics come in? Unlike perhaps the AC who "works in science," I've been a peer reviewer. My response to a flawed submission is to forward back through the journal editor suggestions on how the author might strengthen their case, especially when the case is opposed to the stands I'm known for in my field. I like a good dispute. Good disputes create further publication opportunities for all involved, and invitations to speak at conferences, which are along with journals the lifeblood of academic science. If anything most areas accentuate disputes rather than cohere on consensus simply because there's more career opportunity involved in it.
So the consensus by 97% of climate scientists stands out as notably unusual. You won't find anything like that in neuroscience, or astrophysics, or economics... it is extraordinarily rare. Most of science is like big time wrestling or politics. We accentuate the conflict because it makes for a happier audience. When scientists come down so consistently on the same side of a set of questions as they do in climate science, this is a most unusual circumstance. One we should take seriously. They're going against the normal pattern of scientists; we usually love to accentuate our disputes.
Real science comes from the love of truth. Loving truth requires asking questions. Asking questions requires not just believing the first set of answers anyone presents. That includes especially the first set of answers you think of yourself. Real science requires that you take the proposed answers, when possible, and test them. Sometimes you can test them directly. Other times the test comes indirectly, when you use them to generate more questions, and find that some of them are testable. That's where we are currently, for example, with string theory. The immediate questions it raises can't be tested. But there are questions which follow from the answers its models suggest which can be.
Climate prediction is something like that. We don't have a lot of spare planets to test the answers on that we've come up with through our questions. The main question is: We know from physics that added carbon concentrations in an atmosphere of a planet circling a hot sun should heat the planet up. Does this answer apply in our circumstance, or do other factors negate the effect? We do need to question this. That's how science proceeds, asking more questions. And then we need to look at candidate answers and, when we cannot answer those directly, use them to generate further questions, in the hope that we can test those.
That's all very proper science. You man call it "skepticism" if you want. What's not proper science is to say, "Oh look, there are more questions we can raise. So let's just ignore the initial question. Because the most likely candidate answer - that the planet will warm - would cause prudent people to revise their business plans. And the set of business plans we have now, we're just not smart enough to come up with anything else."
I'm skeptical about that. Are we really so stupid, in the golden age of capitalism, just two decades after the main competing economic system fell, that our businesses can't flexibly adapt to changing circumstances and novel risks? That's a question that invites answers, which in turn invite further questions. It can itself be addressed scientifically, and "skeptically" if you will. If the people running our business believe that we can't adapt and prosper while facing fresh challenges, I'm skeptical that we have the right people running our businesses. How did we put such unimaginative people in charge? Why are they incapable of facing big questions with innovative answers, in the manner of our best scientists and engineers? What were they taught at those high-priced MBA mills? Obviously not science, nor the productive use of "skeptical" questioning to advance us farther towards both truth and the prosperity which a better grasp of truth can leverage.
You can't invest long-term when government economic policy is swerving from side to side
Nonsense. Would it be more fruitful to invest in the short term if government was presently doing more to boost employment so that people earn more money to spend? Sure. The failure of government policy is why businesses that depend on broad consumer spending (as compared to the luxury markets) are not making those short-term investments now. And part of what broad consumer spending supports is the CPU market, thus AMD's contraction.
But long term, it is always riskier not to invest than to invest. The only question is the distribution of your investments. Large corporations have decided in large to invest in US dollar holdings. Contrary to those who expect inflation to be right around the corner, the corporations are betting that the dollar will appreciate - which is to say, we'll see a period of deflation. Deflation is already happening in much of Europe.
If the government were to create an active jobs program and institute a mildly inflationary monetary policy we'd be in business. But meanwhile, the truly smart businesses do all they can to be ready to ride the front of the wave in the next expansion. That means, among other things, not being stuck with last year's tech when it happens - another reason to hold onto money to buy the newest tech just ahead of the wave. That wave will come. It's being held back now by the stupidity and greed of an obstructionist party in Washington, but also by the lack of compelling new tech to leverage the advance. The latter is more important than the former, in the larger picture. And there's plenty of start-up ventures fully invested in filling that void. Some of them will succeed, if not this year, soon after. We just have to hope that the obstructionist, anti-science, tech-ignorant, economically-stone-age party doesn't gain control in the meanwhile.
The fruit Eve & Adam were not to eat was from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. In other words, it is not for humankind to judge good and evil. Which kind of leaves most of the theologians barking up the tree they were told not to. Judgment of others, of the good and evil in others, according to Jehovah, is itself the original sin. As His Son said, "Judge not lest ye be judged."
So Jehovahism is in part about not putting things on a good-evil scale. The God of Job is not to be judged for his acts. Science, by contrast, is in part about putting things on a true-false, or perhaps an evidence-no evidence scale - although there are also considerations of beauty and parsimony, especially where it shades into mathematics, where evidence is not the standard.
Those who do pass judgment against others claiming the authority of Jehovah are truly deep into the territory of falseness. If I were not a Jehovahist, abstaining from judging others as evil, I would judge them that. Seriously, they have embraced Satan and eaten the fruit.
He's the former Seattle police chief, where he led a department that was tolerant of smokers. He's also the guy in the administration with the job, so they reply being over his signature is appropriate.
However the reply was such a condescending collection of skewed propaganda as to make me seriously doubt my resolve to vote for Obama next time. It wasn't a balanced consideration of the facts. No mention of good evidence that pot smoking prevents lung cancer, for instance. Instead there was a stock claim it can lead to respiratory problems - a claim unsubstantiated by science. And a claim that it leads to emergency room admissions - without mentioning that these are incredibly few, and virtually none involve serious medical consequences. It was so far into half-truths as to be indistinguishable from lies.
When authority figures lie about pot, and kids smoke pot and realize they've been lied to, kids then conclude the authorities are also lying about opiates and cocaine. Lies about pot are a gateway to hard drug use, because they're like the boy crying wolf. It squanders authority to make such claims. And it ruins lives to arrest people for pot possession and cultivation. These laws, and those who defend them, do evil.
The Berkeley study got $150,000 from the Koch brothers precisely because those who started it came largely from outside climate science, having established their considerable credentials in other sciences, and announced at the outset their skepticism about the standards of climate scientists. They expected they well might find - and the Koch brothers clearly hoped they would find - that the interpretations of the temperature records accepted by over 97% of current climate scientists were exaggerated and sloppy.
The Berkeley study leaders are now openly surprised that their conclusions - using more advanced statistical methods than have been employed previously - are within 2% of the mainstream climate science analyses. I'll bet good money they get no further funding from the Koch brothers going forward. The Kochs have many billions, and have been generous in funding the economics department at Florida State University, with strings attached to assure that department will support economic theories the Kochs agree with ("Austrian school" economics). Universities keenly court large donors. Had the Berkeley climate study likewise come to conclusions agreeing with the brothers' prejudices, that cash-strapped university could have anticipated generous funding to support a climatology institute going forward.
So which side of the bread is buttered? Were the genius scientists too stupid to see they just dropped the bread butter-side down? Why have they followed the science even when it drives away their funding?
You really find a lack of skepticism about global warming out there? Rather, despite more skepticism than about any other topic in current science, 98% of scientists with expertise in the field conclude that anthropogenic global warming is a major threat to our species.
Sometime you might try skepticism about skepticism. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. A skepticism that's promoted by a PR firm working for the oil companies, that previously promoted skepticism about tobacco and cancer on behalf of the tobacco companies, is a good target for skepticism about skepticism. Or do you believe that loading up the lungs with tobacco is health, too, just as you apparently believe that loading up the atmosphere with CO2 is benign?
I agree that we should tax the externalities of fossil energy use directly, rather than use cap and trade to the same ends. Cap and trade was originally a Republican idea, since it involves a market mechanism (the "trade" part), rather than being a pure government program (as a tax is). But a carbon tax is favored by James Hansen (the NASA climate scientist much hated by Fox), and it's the most direct route to the result.
But the representative's claim that not raising the minimum wage is favored by science or the facts is nonsense. It's wishful thinking that keeping wages down results in more jobs. We're in an America now where wages have been broadly suppressed for 30 years - over which median income has been nearly flat while per-capita GDP has doubled, with almost the entire gains going to the super-rich. So where are the jobs? On the scientific side, comparisons of similar regions with different minimum wages, and before-and-after comparisons of places where minimum wages have been raised, find absolutely no support for the claim that there will be higher unemployment where minimum wages are higher. None. The evidence, while not conclusive, leans the other way. It certainly isn't "science" then to be against raising minimum wages. It's just what the people who would rather stiff their workers on wages indulge in as wishful thinking. They want it to be true. And if your logic is simple minded, it will seem as if it should be. It's not.
For one thing, when more people are paid more, the can spend more, which supports greater employment all around. That logic is perhaps too complex for the Republican mind, because it's a second-order effect - it depends on the whole local economic ecosystem's health, rather than the immediate profit to the firm that just hired a worker at a low minimum wage. But complex systems are like that - you get effects out of them that aren't predicted from studying their parts in isolation. The Republican argument against a higher minimum wage follows exclusively from studying a part in isolation.
So do the Republican arguments against moving to forms of energy production without such dire "externalities." So yes, price in the cost of the externalities with taxes (even though there's no exact math capable of application in setting those taxes), lower the income tax, and capitalism will find a way. Republicans generally doubt that capitalism is smart enough to find a way unless the current economic landscape is kept in stasis. They call this "lessening uncertainty." The modern "capitalist" Republican is as addicted to stasis as the leaders of the old Soviet Empire. Heaven forfend America should ever again have to embrace progress and change. How could we compete in such a landscape, where oil and coal companies don't rule us forever?
The category names are meaningless. At one point all corporate use of computers was "MIS" (Management Information Services/Systems). Then it all became "IT". Then universities wanted to set up new departments and invented the silly name "CS". Guess what? It's not science. If you're designing physical circuits (say, CPUs) it's engineering. If you're writing code, there's a mix of engineering and art in it, but it mostly requires proficiency in logic - or at the highest end advanced mathematics. (Although math is used heavily in science, it's not science. Mathematical systems can't be falsified by experiment, so are outside the scientific method. They're largely developed for aesthetic reasons by the mathematicians, independent of both scientific and engineering concerns.)
If you're developing quantum computers, you've probably got a true computer scientist or two on the team. Otherwise, if you say you're a computer "scientist," it's a joke. You've probably been trained as a technician, or if you're lucky as an engineer. If your school called that computer "science," it's bogus.
Anyway, what makes you valuable in the job market is knowing computers plus something else. And the something else can generally best be learned in the field, or in the trade. So if you can't find work that directly challenges your computer engineering skills, find something where you'll learn a lot on the job about some area where computers are applied. Then think about how someone who really understands that field or business can apply computers better, using the insights from your computer "science" education. At that point, you'll be of unique value, and have a future.
The article mentions that cake mix didn't sell in the 50s until they changed it to require the cook to add an egg. The claim is the labor of adding the egg made the result more pleasing. But this ignores the plain fact that you can still get pancake mix with or without the need to add an egg - and the kind that requires a fresh egg tastes better, because a fresh egg tastes better. It's the same difference as between scrambling a fresh egg and reconstituted eggs.
So this whole thing is premised on being insensible to quality. The assumption is that the all-in-one cake mix is just as good, which is an advertising claim, not the truth.
When it comes to aesthetic appreciation of built objects, the experience of construction is itself a dimension of aesthetic appreciation, which conveys real knowledge of form beyond mere appreciation of a finished, static object. Having experienced that dimension, you can no more set it aside than you can the smell of food that's now in your mouth. To do a test where you pretend people can set that aside and claim the results are science is dumb.
Slashdot Mirror
Coal plants are 35-45% efficient, where your stock car engine is about 20% efficient.
Chris Dodd and Barney Frank were not behind the housing crisis. The housing crisis came from wide-spread fraudulent behavior by mortgage lenders and investment banks. It was up to the Fed to regulate these players, not the Congress. Now, thanks in part to Barney Frank, the Consumer Protection Bureau may also play a hand in reigning in criminal behavior by banks.
Also, there's nothing wrong with running a gay brothel. But that's beside the point. Chris Dodd, on the other hand, does seem to be openly admitting to running a racket. Perhaps RICO can be applied.
Unless you want your brain to still function well when you're older. Summary of findings: Those with 4-year degrees have brains which, in terms of capability, are 10 years younger by middle age, and beyond. So it's not just about getting a job right out of college. It's about still having a well-functioning mind when you're 50, 60, 70.
What would you pay to be ten years younger, in other words? Makes college education look cheap, at about any price.
A video lecture on the topic from the man who gave us the Josephson junction, who is certifiably smarter than any of us here and as good a physicist as we have on the planet. That doesn't mean he doesn't have some peculiar ideas. He most certainly does. Walks funny too. But some of his most peculiar ideas have paid off big time, and were contrary to "everyone's" intuitive sense of how things work in reality.
So this is about Comcast/NBC Universal as the largest "ISP" in the "largest association of ISPs"? Fuck that. Not only is their main business content rather than service, but they're a last-mile provider, in which capacity they'd be far less affected by the onerous requirements of this bill than backbone providers or hosting providers.
What this really shows is that service providers should not be allowed to have a business interest in content. Period. It corrupts their perspective. And it allows them to get big enough to corrupt the perspective of paid-for representatives.
Engage in racist slander much? Read the article. Kenya is not so corrupt a place. I have close friends who worked for years there (in other business sectors) who confirm that.
Also, is it your view that branch offices of American corporations, if they should find themselves somewhere more corrupt than America, should join in the corruption? That's an odd view. There's specific American law against that, in fact, with strong penalties against a firm's American corporate operation if it can be proven that it enabled or condoned corrupt practices abroad. Whether American law covers the specific varieties of corruption alleged here I can't speak to. But do you really believe that there's nothing wrong with American corporations having foreign branches and subsidiaries engage in corruption?
And because of that, PBS has been leaning over backwards to appease the Republicans for years. That's exactly how the Republicans distort our media. They bully them all into line. Certainly the TV news operations have been cowed. The only exception is the NY Times, which is powerful enough not to care. But it has it's own problem: it always sucks up to whoever holds the presidency and to our military leaders.
Bernie Sanders was still short of a full commitment when he responded to me, but seems to be leaning against. Hope other Vermonters will push him on this. Play the anticorporate card - Bernie is strongly suspicious of the power of large corporations.
Leahy of course belongs to the Devil (aka his old buddy Michael Eisner) on this one.
The US & Chinese presidents. Those close enough to stage coups if they get out of hand. Full employment via military conscription. Depends on what you call "society."
Answering myself: Looks like Secure Easy Setup was the prior version, before the standard was set. No notion if it has the vulnerability. But I've turned it off anyway. Wouldn't have had it on if I'd notice it before in the menu, since I never use it anyway.
Is this the "Secure Easy Setup" option on the "Wireless" menu, which by default is enabled, and of which there's no info on the help screen of my WRT54G?
Plumes have been seen before. This has been reported in other articles on this. However the plumes seen before were neither so large nor grouped so closely together.
Your painting the scientists as "hyperbolic" speakers establishes, what, that you know a big word and can use it correctly in a sentence? This should cause us to see you as smarter than research scientists with advanced degrees and many years of expeditions to gather evidence? Trust me, they have a far larger vocabulary than you do. Yet you are the one speaking hyperbolically. Now, what drives you to that?
It's not as if the waters where these were found were terra incognito - or mare incognito - the arctic has been peopled for thousands of years, particularly by the Russians, which is how they came to possess not just Siberia but Alaska. So when a Russian, in particular, says the like has not been seen before, that's someone reporting from a culture which has a good historical knowledge of what's been there to be seen. Sort of like getting a report on the normalcy or not of current tornadoes from someone with deep roots in Oklahoma.
Agreed. Netfilx is sometimes brilliant, sometimes bumbling, but delivering real value. Verizon is as close to the definition of evil in a corporation as you can get this side of a few of the big investment banks and mortgage lenders. Look at how Verizon screwed its union workers, despite all-time high profits, while paying its executives ever-more. Verizon's customers, also often screwed. They are on the front line of the upper class's war against the rest of us.
The average age of the world's nuke plants is 25 years. Yeah, rare bad luck that this one was 5 years older than that.
So of a total of something over 400 reactors we've only had about 4 melt down (Chernobyl and 3 of the six at Fukushima), so roughly 1%. The average age of the world's nuclear plants is 25 years. So per-nuclear-plant, per-century of operation, 4% melt down, and the odds are 1 in 25 of having a meltdown of major consequence at whatever nuclear plant you live closest to within your or your children's lifetimes.
Yup, when you do the math there's just nothing to be too worried about.
Peer review at the best journals is blind. Neither the reviewers nor the authors know who the others are. So where do personal politics come in? Unlike perhaps the AC who "works in science," I've been a peer reviewer. My response to a flawed submission is to forward back through the journal editor suggestions on how the author might strengthen their case, especially when the case is opposed to the stands I'm known for in my field. I like a good dispute. Good disputes create further publication opportunities for all involved, and invitations to speak at conferences, which are along with journals the lifeblood of academic science. If anything most areas accentuate disputes rather than cohere on consensus simply because there's more career opportunity involved in it.
So the consensus by 97% of climate scientists stands out as notably unusual. You won't find anything like that in neuroscience, or astrophysics, or economics ... it is extraordinarily rare. Most of science is like big time wrestling or politics. We accentuate the conflict because it makes for a happier audience. When scientists come down so consistently on the same side of a set of questions as they do in climate science, this is a most unusual circumstance. One we should take seriously. They're going against the normal pattern of scientists; we usually love to accentuate our disputes.
Real science comes from the love of truth. Loving truth requires asking questions. Asking questions requires not just believing the first set of answers anyone presents. That includes especially the first set of answers you think of yourself. Real science requires that you take the proposed answers, when possible, and test them. Sometimes you can test them directly. Other times the test comes indirectly, when you use them to generate more questions, and find that some of them are testable. That's where we are currently, for example, with string theory. The immediate questions it raises can't be tested. But there are questions which follow from the answers its models suggest which can be.
Climate prediction is something like that. We don't have a lot of spare planets to test the answers on that we've come up with through our questions. The main question is: We know from physics that added carbon concentrations in an atmosphere of a planet circling a hot sun should heat the planet up. Does this answer apply in our circumstance, or do other factors negate the effect? We do need to question this. That's how science proceeds, asking more questions. And then we need to look at candidate answers and, when we cannot answer those directly, use them to generate further questions, in the hope that we can test those.
That's all very proper science. You man call it "skepticism" if you want. What's not proper science is to say, "Oh look, there are more questions we can raise. So let's just ignore the initial question. Because the most likely candidate answer - that the planet will warm - would cause prudent people to revise their business plans. And the set of business plans we have now, we're just not smart enough to come up with anything else."
I'm skeptical about that. Are we really so stupid, in the golden age of capitalism, just two decades after the main competing economic system fell, that our businesses can't flexibly adapt to changing circumstances and novel risks? That's a question that invites answers, which in turn invite further questions. It can itself be addressed scientifically, and "skeptically" if you will. If the people running our business believe that we can't adapt and prosper while facing fresh challenges, I'm skeptical that we have the right people running our businesses. How did we put such unimaginative people in charge? Why are they incapable of facing big questions with innovative answers, in the manner of our best scientists and engineers? What were they taught at those high-priced MBA mills? Obviously not science, nor the productive use of "skeptical" questioning to advance us farther towards both truth and the prosperity which a better grasp of truth can leverage.
Nonsense. Would it be more fruitful to invest in the short term if government was presently doing more to boost employment so that people earn more money to spend? Sure. The failure of government policy is why businesses that depend on broad consumer spending (as compared to the luxury markets) are not making those short-term investments now. And part of what broad consumer spending supports is the CPU market, thus AMD's contraction.
But long term, it is always riskier not to invest than to invest. The only question is the distribution of your investments. Large corporations have decided in large to invest in US dollar holdings. Contrary to those who expect inflation to be right around the corner, the corporations are betting that the dollar will appreciate - which is to say, we'll see a period of deflation. Deflation is already happening in much of Europe.
If the government were to create an active jobs program and institute a mildly inflationary monetary policy we'd be in business. But meanwhile, the truly smart businesses do all they can to be ready to ride the front of the wave in the next expansion. That means, among other things, not being stuck with last year's tech when it happens - another reason to hold onto money to buy the newest tech just ahead of the wave. That wave will come. It's being held back now by the stupidity and greed of an obstructionist party in Washington, but also by the lack of compelling new tech to leverage the advance. The latter is more important than the former, in the larger picture. And there's plenty of start-up ventures fully invested in filling that void. Some of them will succeed, if not this year, soon after. We just have to hope that the obstructionist, anti-science, tech-ignorant, economically-stone-age party doesn't gain control in the meanwhile.
The fruit Eve & Adam were not to eat was from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. In other words, it is not for humankind to judge good and evil. Which kind of leaves most of the theologians barking up the tree they were told not to. Judgment of others, of the good and evil in others, according to Jehovah, is itself the original sin. As His Son said, "Judge not lest ye be judged."
So Jehovahism is in part about not putting things on a good-evil scale. The God of Job is not to be judged for his acts. Science, by contrast, is in part about putting things on a true-false, or perhaps an evidence-no evidence scale - although there are also considerations of beauty and parsimony, especially where it shades into mathematics, where evidence is not the standard.
Those who do pass judgment against others claiming the authority of Jehovah are truly deep into the territory of falseness. If I were not a Jehovahist, abstaining from judging others as evil, I would judge them that. Seriously, they have embraced Satan and eaten the fruit.
He's the former Seattle police chief, where he led a department that was tolerant of smokers. He's also the guy in the administration with the job, so they reply being over his signature is appropriate.
However the reply was such a condescending collection of skewed propaganda as to make me seriously doubt my resolve to vote for Obama next time. It wasn't a balanced consideration of the facts. No mention of good evidence that pot smoking prevents lung cancer, for instance. Instead there was a stock claim it can lead to respiratory problems - a claim unsubstantiated by science. And a claim that it leads to emergency room admissions - without mentioning that these are incredibly few, and virtually none involve serious medical consequences. It was so far into half-truths as to be indistinguishable from lies.
When authority figures lie about pot, and kids smoke pot and realize they've been lied to, kids then conclude the authorities are also lying about opiates and cocaine. Lies about pot are a gateway to hard drug use, because they're like the boy crying wolf. It squanders authority to make such claims. And it ruins lives to arrest people for pot possession and cultivation. These laws, and those who defend them, do evil.
The Berkeley study got $150,000 from the Koch brothers precisely because those who started it came largely from outside climate science, having established their considerable credentials in other sciences, and announced at the outset their skepticism about the standards of climate scientists. They expected they well might find - and the Koch brothers clearly hoped they would find - that the interpretations of the temperature records accepted by over 97% of current climate scientists were exaggerated and sloppy.
The Berkeley study leaders are now openly surprised that their conclusions - using more advanced statistical methods than have been employed previously - are within 2% of the mainstream climate science analyses. I'll bet good money they get no further funding from the Koch brothers going forward. The Kochs have many billions, and have been generous in funding the economics department at Florida State University, with strings attached to assure that department will support economic theories the Kochs agree with ("Austrian school" economics). Universities keenly court large donors. Had the Berkeley climate study likewise come to conclusions agreeing with the brothers' prejudices, that cash-strapped university could have anticipated generous funding to support a climatology institute going forward.
So which side of the bread is buttered? Were the genius scientists too stupid to see they just dropped the bread butter-side down? Why have they followed the science even when it drives away their funding?
You really find a lack of skepticism about global warming out there? Rather, despite more skepticism than about any other topic in current science, 98% of scientists with expertise in the field conclude that anthropogenic global warming is a major threat to our species.
Sometime you might try skepticism about skepticism. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. A skepticism that's promoted by a PR firm working for the oil companies, that previously promoted skepticism about tobacco and cancer on behalf of the tobacco companies, is a good target for skepticism about skepticism. Or do you believe that loading up the lungs with tobacco is health, too, just as you apparently believe that loading up the atmosphere with CO2 is benign?
I agree that we should tax the externalities of fossil energy use directly, rather than use cap and trade to the same ends. Cap and trade was originally a Republican idea, since it involves a market mechanism (the "trade" part), rather than being a pure government program (as a tax is). But a carbon tax is favored by James Hansen (the NASA climate scientist much hated by Fox), and it's the most direct route to the result.
But the representative's claim that not raising the minimum wage is favored by science or the facts is nonsense. It's wishful thinking that keeping wages down results in more jobs. We're in an America now where wages have been broadly suppressed for 30 years - over which median income has been nearly flat while per-capita GDP has doubled, with almost the entire gains going to the super-rich. So where are the jobs? On the scientific side, comparisons of similar regions with different minimum wages, and before-and-after comparisons of places where minimum wages have been raised, find absolutely no support for the claim that there will be higher unemployment where minimum wages are higher. None. The evidence, while not conclusive, leans the other way. It certainly isn't "science" then to be against raising minimum wages. It's just what the people who would rather stiff their workers on wages indulge in as wishful thinking. They want it to be true. And if your logic is simple minded, it will seem as if it should be. It's not.
For one thing, when more people are paid more, the can spend more, which supports greater employment all around. That logic is perhaps too complex for the Republican mind, because it's a second-order effect - it depends on the whole local economic ecosystem's health, rather than the immediate profit to the firm that just hired a worker at a low minimum wage. But complex systems are like that - you get effects out of them that aren't predicted from studying their parts in isolation. The Republican argument against a higher minimum wage follows exclusively from studying a part in isolation.
So do the Republican arguments against moving to forms of energy production without such dire "externalities." So yes, price in the cost of the externalities with taxes (even though there's no exact math capable of application in setting those taxes), lower the income tax, and capitalism will find a way. Republicans generally doubt that capitalism is smart enough to find a way unless the current economic landscape is kept in stasis. They call this "lessening uncertainty." The modern "capitalist" Republican is as addicted to stasis as the leaders of the old Soviet Empire. Heaven forfend America should ever again have to embrace progress and change. How could we compete in such a landscape, where oil and coal companies don't rule us forever?
The category names are meaningless. At one point all corporate use of computers was "MIS" (Management Information Services/Systems). Then it all became "IT". Then universities wanted to set up new departments and invented the silly name "CS". Guess what? It's not science. If you're designing physical circuits (say, CPUs) it's engineering. If you're writing code, there's a mix of engineering and art in it, but it mostly requires proficiency in logic - or at the highest end advanced mathematics. (Although math is used heavily in science, it's not science. Mathematical systems can't be falsified by experiment, so are outside the scientific method. They're largely developed for aesthetic reasons by the mathematicians, independent of both scientific and engineering concerns.)
If you're developing quantum computers, you've probably got a true computer scientist or two on the team. Otherwise, if you say you're a computer "scientist," it's a joke. You've probably been trained as a technician, or if you're lucky as an engineer. If your school called that computer "science," it's bogus.
Anyway, what makes you valuable in the job market is knowing computers plus something else. And the something else can generally best be learned in the field, or in the trade. So if you can't find work that directly challenges your computer engineering skills, find something where you'll learn a lot on the job about some area where computers are applied. Then think about how someone who really understands that field or business can apply computers better, using the insights from your computer "science" education. At that point, you'll be of unique value, and have a future.
The article mentions that cake mix didn't sell in the 50s until they changed it to require the cook to add an egg. The claim is the labor of adding the egg made the result more pleasing. But this ignores the plain fact that you can still get pancake mix with or without the need to add an egg - and the kind that requires a fresh egg tastes better, because a fresh egg tastes better. It's the same difference as between scrambling a fresh egg and reconstituted eggs.
So this whole thing is premised on being insensible to quality. The assumption is that the all-in-one cake mix is just as good, which is an advertising claim, not the truth.
When it comes to aesthetic appreciation of built objects, the experience of construction is itself a dimension of aesthetic appreciation, which conveys real knowledge of form beyond mere appreciation of a finished, static object. Having experienced that dimension, you can no more set it aside than you can the smell of food that's now in your mouth. To do a test where you pretend people can set that aside and claim the results are science is dumb.