No, the thing that matters is to execute those actions which keep the machine of government moving along
Sometimes you work against your immediate interests in order to promote your long-term interests
No, that's what the career politicians tell themselves to validate their own hypocrisy.
And if the Tea Partiers were the only issue, and compromise and cooperation really are "currency", then rest of the Republicans would be closing deals hand over fist and legislation would be passing like shit through a goose. Tea Partiers not knowing how the "cooperation currency" works, just sitting on their "currency" and making no use of it, and thus raising it's value - it would be prime time to both cash in AND to make big deals for the future.
Cooperation earned earlier is now worth more cause there is none to get on the market. Same for the cooperation made now, which can be bargained for more future deals than usual.
Same goes for the other side. Democrats would be banning gayness and abortion, making guns mandatory for anyone older than 3 and bringing both death penalty and torture across the nation.
Nope... Just an old white guy trying to rationalize all those times he had no balls or integrity with bullshit from game theory. Which works only with perfectly rational actors. Which no human (other than a psycho here and there) ever is and no group of humans can ever be. E.g. Tea Partiers and "killing the ACA, which at this point is little more than an old campaign platform that has little bearing on the current issues that the country faces".
...that essentially, when you get down to it, all political decisions are the same. Voting in slavery or declaring a war or a rehaul of a transportation system... same shit. It's all just the stuff politicians do.
They act in concert with other legislators, even at the expense of their own beliefs, in order to bank capital or settle accounts.
Ergo, it is perfectly fine to give up one's own principles and voters in order to curry favor with one's peers and accumulate personal political prestige, which can then be further traded. So, giving up one's principles to accumulate prestige, and giving up one's voters to accumulate even more... Clearly, the only thing that matters is the prestige itself - i.e. staying in the game by keeping your seat. Thus, political system exists solely to supply politicians with jobs and entertainment.
As for voters... It's politics, stupid. Don't you people know that it is all the same? Raising taxes, lowering taxes, gay marriage, voting rights, prohibition, segregation, no guns, guns for everyone, free abortions, 1 child per family, mass sterilization of men and women, secular state and a theocracy, war on this or that, war here or there, death camps and summer camps... You just keep votin like your daddy did, ok? Good.
They literally have whole cities just lying around idle. I mean, Spain's got one, sure, but they have several. The economy never developed sufficiently to employ people in jobs that would permit them to live in developed cities in a capitalist society... so the places rot.
You are quoting gloating "China is fallin - see?" populist Daily Mail-grade articles which have little to no relevance to reality.
I.e. OMG LOOK AT THIS GHOST CITY! Silly Chinese peoples. Don't they know any thing? Their stupid, stupid brains.
Meanwhile, in reality... It's a case of combined schadenfreude over someone's perceived failure and a situation akin to when a small turnip farmer from Lower Bumfuck comes to a BigCityTM and starts despairing at the sight of a construction yard which will surely fail cause there is no chance that 50-storey building could ever be filled with people. He could have planted turnips there.
Ordos is actually an entire prefecture. Slightly bigger than South Carolina or Austria (86,752 km2). Population: ~1.9 million. Urban population: ~582,544, living in the Dongsheng District. That region has 16% of all coal reserves in China. And a 2nd highest income-per-capita in China. It has a textile, petrochemical, car, electricity generating and a building industry - all built on the back of all that coal. And they are using it to rapidly urbanize the prefecture - pooling all those 1.9 million people in one place. http://www.theatlantic.com/chi... http://www.vagabondjourney.com... http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes...
China is urbanizing RAPIDLY. At the rate of about 1% per year. How much is 1% out of 1.35 billion people, yearly? About an entire Los Angeles of people looking for home, food, work, running water, electricity... and generally better living conditions than back in their village. Year after year after year...
So, China is building entire cities from scratch and half coaxing half forcing people to move there. Not just dropping apartment buildings or giant towers and sand islands that "someone will surely buy into" either. Those are planned cities with built-in infrastructure (including all those "empty" parks and highways) to support hundreds of thousands of people with tens of thousands pouring yearly into Ordos alone, on a 20-year urbanization plan. Many of those people coming in quite literally from the fields.
I asked the men where they had lived before moving to their apartments in Kangbashi. One of them, a 56-year-old man named Li Yonh Xiang, spoke up. "I lived here," he said.
Li had been born and raised just steps from the bench where he was sitting. About half of the 90-acre park had belonged to his family; the government bought the land in 2000. "When we were peasants, we lived according to the weather," Li said. "Now I live in a heated building with six floors. The city is very nice. There are many cars and buildings, but the air is very clean."
China's urbanization program has been forced into motion by a fiscal policy that all but demands local cities expand to remain economically solvent. According to the World Bank, China's cities must fend for 80 percent of their expenses while only receiving 40 percent of the country's tax revenue, so land sales are often used to make up the difference.
A recent study by Dr. Michael Freeman, a clinical professor at UCSF and an entrepreneur as well, was one of the first of its kind to link higher rates of mental health issues to entrepreneurship.
Of the 242 entrepreneurs surveyed, 49% reported having a mental-health condition. Depression was the No. 1 reported condition among them and was present in 30% of all entrepreneurs, followed by ADHD (29%) and anxiety problems (27%). That's a much higher percentage than the US population at large, where only about 7% identify as depressed.
More surprising was the incidence of mental health in the families of entrepreneurs: 72% said they either had mental-health problems themselves or in their immediate family.
A founder who has no history of mental illness from a family with no history either "is the exception, not the rule," Freeman said.
Little is known about mental health conditions among the families of entrepreneurs. Of some relevance, though, is the fact that previous research has shown that first and second-degree family members of bipolar probands are high achievers across several domains that are important for entrepreneurship. Higier and her colleagues found that when compared to bipolar probands and normal controls, the unaffected identical twins of people with bipolar disorder demonstrate superior cognitive and interpersonal traits that would seem highly important for entrepreneurship, including enhanced social ease, confidence, assertiveness, intelligence, verbal learning, verbal fluency, extraversion, sociability, optimism, and resilience [89].
Coryell et al. found that the first-degree relatives of bipolar probands, including relatives with bipolar spectrum conditions, had significantly higher educational and occupational achievement than the close family members of people with other mental health conditions [72]. Other studies conducted over the last 100 years have reached similar conclusions [73, 74, 76, 90-92]. Creativity and innovativeness are foundational aptitudes of entrepreneurs. The close family members of bipolar probands have been shown to have high levels of creativity [23, 68]. First-degree relatives of people with bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, anorexia nervosa, and autism have been shown to be overrepresented in the scientific and artistic occupations [66]. Male relatives of people with schizophrenia were shown to be overrepresented in a listing of prominent people [93].
Also, ALSO, from the study:
Reviewed in conjunction with the results displayed Figure 1, 72% of the entrepreneurs in this sample either reported a personal mental health history (49%) or were asymptomatic yet reported a family mental health history (23%). By contrast, 48% of the comparison participants in this sample reported a personal mental health history (32%) or were asymptomatic yet reported a family mental health history (16%).
There IS also a PRETTY BIG issue with it being a self-reporting study and with the composition and the design of the control group.
Control was created by surveying "76 MBA student and faculty pool participants, and 149 psychology students", then mixing those participants with self-reported "entrepreneurs". Then, out of the total sum of 335 participants (meaning that 110 were actually pooled from "actual entrepreneurs") - 93 participants were declared as control because they answered "no" to the following question: "Have you ever been self-employed, a business founder, or a business co-founder (including non-profit businesses)?"
There are more psych and MBA students (132) among the "entrepreneurs" then "actual entrepreneurs" (110). So all those mental health numbers may be coming from self-diagnosing psych students. Which would kinda explain the fact that HALF OF THE CONTROL HAS A HISTORY OF MENTAL ISSUES AS WELL.
Whether Greece makes a "little" money on tourism or a "lot" of money on tourism is a function of how hospitable it is to visitors. If the country as a whole makes it a priority to be very nice and welcoming to foreigners, they stand to reap a lot more in tourist spending than if they take tourism for granted or, worse, go out of their way to make tourists feel unwelcome.
You can make the country hospitable up the wazoo, all it takes is ONE dickhead with an AK to fuck it all up. Or one missing child. Or a drowned one. Or a rainy season. Or a global economic crisis. Or simply a fashion trend.
Tourism is a nice bonus and a source of foreign currency, but you can't run a country on tertiary sector alone - unless you are willing to be permanently in debt or permanently poor OR to end up exactly where Greece is now. Both poor and in debt. Cause there is hardly a more literal way of signing off one's own economic security on "hope and prayer" than resting it on good graces of fickle foreigners bored with their everyday existence back home.
On top of it, to a small country, tourism is toxic. It artificially raises the property value to unrealistic levels, prices skyrocket and it overflows the local services with people who don't pay for those services. And you can't just tax them cause you don't want to scare them off or simply cause you can't properly charge for things like an increased burden on the environment or water supply. Or police - which will inevitably become corrupt first time that either local or governmental coffers go empty and they either get told to "skin" the foreigners or to let them slide. And corruption is again something that spreads across the entire society.
On top of that, it creates conditions where country's youth will spend their most productive years SERVING instead of studying. And since the prices are up, when they age out of serving drinks to fat tourists, they won't have a home of their own, they won't have an education - so they end up unemployed.
Which is where Greece was going with their long term unemployment rising (with youth unemployment always staying lower while following a more jagged, seasonal, curve) until the introduction of the Euro brought it down - through heavy borrowing which provided money for make-work jobs. People who were unemployed for decades got jobs. Yay! Just before the shit hit the fan they were running the lowest long term unemployment in last two decades, while the wages kept going up.
A comet is small, icy, Solar System body that, when passing close to the Sun, heats up and begins to outgas, displaying a visible atmosphere or coma, and sometimes also a tail.
And they are most certainly NOT made of sugar. No, not even that white tail.
HFCS 55 is 55% fructose, ~41% glucose and ~4% other sugars. Sucrose is 50-50 glucose and fructose.
Low blood sugar is low glucose. We eat/drink until we get to the "high glucose" level. At which point the craving stops.
HFCS 55 (the soda kind) contains 110% more fructose than sucrose, and ~80% less glucose than sucrose. So, to get the same "high glucose" level we will have to ingest more HFCS than sucrose. About 1.25 times more. Of a sweetener which contains 1.1 times more of that fat forming fructose.
1.25 * 1.1 = 1.375 1.375 times MORE fructose is ingested with HFCS, for the same amount of glucose, needed to reach satiety, than with sucrose. We might as well be pouring cooking oil into our table sugar and eating it with a spoon.
Sugar (sucrose) feeds you equal amounts of glucose and fructose. HFCS used in sodas is 55% fructose and 41% glucose.
Human body has built-in sensors for high glucose. Our blood sugar goes up, we feel energized, we stop being hungry.
Human body has NO sensors for fructose. You can eat or drink it all day and never feel you had enough. That's cause fructose in nature comes in the form of fruit. With all that fiber you have to gobble down and then carry around in your gut till the fructose gets extracted. And that would trip a bunch of other sensors telling us to stop eating.
So, when we take sucrose which is exactly half glucose half fructose, the moment we hit satiety for glucose that also trips our "I'm full" sensor and we stop eating. At which point we have ingested an equal amount of both ready to burn glucose and ready to be turned into fat and burned later fructose.
HFCS 55 on the other hand only has about 80% of glucose that sucrose has. And no fiber to trip the "fructose-comes-with-a-lot-of-fiber" sensor. So, to reach glucose satiety and trip the "I'm full" sensor drinking HFCS 55, we will have to intake about 1.25 times more sweetener then with sucrose. But HFCS 55 has 110% of the amount of the fructose contained in sugar (sucrose).
Meaning that to reach the same glucose satiety level which would trip that "I'm full" senor, we ingest 1.25 more sweetener which contains 1.1 times more of the chemical we use solely for production of fat. Unless we're hiking dozens of miles daily, in snow, up hill, both ways. Cause we evolved to store that fructose which grows in warm weather for the long winter months when there is no food growing on trees. And we don't start burning it until we burn all our glucose in our bloodstream.
1.25 times 1.1 equals 1.375 times more fructose (i.e. future fat) ingested when drinking HFCS 55 sweetened soda, compared to drinking the same soda sweetened with sucrose.
...shaped like a cube, 1 foot or 10 inches on each side and get a 1 gallon of volume.
Nor can you subdivide up and down between the sizes without hauling out some really unintuitive fractions - while various measures use various fractions. Number of inches in a foot or a yard is NOT the number of ounces in a pint, quart or a gallon. Nor do any of those match with ounces, pounds and stones. And not only that, an ounce is not the same value OR fraction of a pint (1/20) and of a pound (1/16). How many ounces in a glass of water? Well it depends...
Meanwhile... 1 meter = 10 x 1 decimeter = 100 x 1 centimeter = 1000 x 1 millimeter 1 liter = 10 x 1 deciliter = 100 x 1 centiliter = 1000 x 1 milliliter 1 kilogram = 10 x 1 hectogram = 100 x 1 decagram = 1000 x 1 gram = 1000000 x 1 milligram 1 liter of H2O = 1 kilogram of H2O = 1 cubic decimeter of H2O
0 degrees Celsius = freezing point of H2O while 100 degrees Celsius = boiling point of H2O I.e. Points where it changes aggregate states from liquid to solid and from liquid to gas. Points at which you are no longer measuring temperature of a liquid. Ends of the scale.
Fahrenheit? 0 is the point of change of aggregate state of 1:1:1 mixture of salt, water and ice - while 100 is a couple of degrees above "blood temperature". Which is stupid in so many ways I don't even want to go into it. And no... "100 degrees means it's hot outside" is not a good rule of thumb due to a simple fact that no two people are alike or have exactly the same preferences.
And that's without going into more technical measures like Watt, Volt, Ampere, Calories etc. which are all based and interact with other SI units.
Cause... umm... you know... extinct is extinct. You can't say "no it isn't" if all you have to show for as evidence of existence it is... you know... nothing. This ain't a religious but a question of biology and of ability to count up to more than "one animal".
E.g. You can't go around claiming that T. Rex is actually hiding. And no, Bill Legend's T. Rex is not THE T. Rex.
The summary warns of "paid trolls", "FUD-ers" and finger pointers going around acting holier than thou, trying to "solve the problem" by placing the blame and spreading "it's the End Days" fear and panic.
You know... People generalizing the entire humanity as being "people who cannot imagine anything beyond 3 months" and "folks who actually want the world to end" and assuming that "we're going to drive the bus off that extinction cliff while singing happy days are here again."
Which is also a bit of ye old irrelevant conclusion fallacy. Cause... umm... people not able to think beyond 3 months about pandas or people wanting to burn all pandas and people singing "happy days" instead of working on preserving pandas... Well... they are not the ones actually working on preserving pandas, aren't they?
It's almost as if a relatively small group of people (compared to the world population or even the population of China) is taking steps to preserve the damn pandas - regardless of all those other people. Making them kinda irrelevant as long as they don't make it their business to get off their ass, fly off to a game preserve and start shooting pandas.
Police will be provided with FUNDS FOR guns (and ammo... and training... and maintenance... and special equipment needed... and better guns...) by the government. Average citizen will not be provided with a gun or any of the tools or procedures needed to operate one. NOR with the money to purchase any of it.
And that's not going into that average citizen from "when the 2nd amendment was drafted" was fucked if the local economy failed to provide gunpowder or lead. Nor could the average citizen waltz into a store, leave an IOU payable by the government, and waltz out with all the guns and ammo needed - on account of authority as an elected law enforcement officer.
And even without ANY other funds but the paycheck - police is paid to walk around with guns. Average citizens have to get and maintain a job - THEN should they be able to afford it, they can buy a gun and walk around with it. Without being paid for that.
Also, police will be provided with additional pairs of hands to handle more guns and even with an army should the need arise. Average citizen would have to pay for help from his/her own pocket. And would not be allowed to just call up the US army or any other army.
If I can prove the ballot is mine, then so can someone looking over my shoulder while I do it. Especially if he's pointing a gun at me.
...where people with guns force people to democratically vote-in the candidate supported by the people with guns?
People with guns don't need threatening or votes. They have the guns and are willing to use them as a tool of political influence. The simplest way is not threatening but shooting the dissenters. After all... you only have to do it once.
And that's if people are stupid enough to try to argue the legitimacy of results with a bullet.
You're full of it. Either that or you can't read. Also, by standing by hired thugs instead of the oppressed people you reveal yourself to be a fascist cunt.
The strikers opened fire first, murdered a few Pinkertons, tried to burn alive Pinkertons who were attempting to surrender, and then after accepting the Pinkertons' surrender, proceeded to torture them.
Not at all suprising that Wikipedia conspicuously fails to mention this.
The Pinkerton agents attempted to disembark, and shots were fired. Conflicting testimony exists as to which side fired the first shot. John T. McCurry, a boatman on the steamboat Little Bill (which had been hired by the Pinkerton Detective Agency to ferry its agents to the steel mill) and one of the men wounded by the strikers, said: "The armed Pinkerton men commenced to climb up the banks. Then the workmen opened fire on the detectives. The men shot first, and not until three of the Pinkerton men had fallen did they respond to the fire. I am willing to take an oath that the workmen fired first, and that the Pinkerton men did not shoot until some of their number had been wounded."[29] But according to The New York Times, the Pinkertons shot first.[30] The newspaper reported that the Pinkertons opened fire and wounded William Foy, a worker.[30] Regardless of which side opened fire first, the first two individuals wounded were Frederick Heinde, captain of the Pinkertons,[31] and Foy. The Pinkerton agents aboard the barges then fired into the crowd, killing two and wounding 11. The crowd responded in kind, killing two and wounding 12. The firefight continued for about 10 minutes.[32]
After a few more hours, the strikers attempted to burn the barges. They seized a raft, loaded it with oil-soaked timber and floated it toward the barges. The Pinkertons nearly panicked, and a Pinkerton captain had to threaten to shoot anyone who fled. But the fire burned itself out before it reached the barges. The strikers then loaded a railroad flatcar with drums of oil and set it afire. The flatcar hurtled down the rails toward the mill's wharf where the barges were docked. But the car stopped at the water's edge and burned itself out. Dynamite was thrown at the barges, but it only hit the mark once (causing a little damage to one barge). At 2:00 p.m., the workers poured oil onto the river, hoping the oil slick would burn the barges; attempts to light the slick failed.[36]
The Pinkertons, too, wished to surrender. At 5:00 p.m., they raised a white flag and two agents asked to speak with the strikers. O'Donnell guaranteed them safe passage out of town. Upon arrival, their arms were stripped from them. With heads uncovered, to distinguish them from the mill hands, they passed along between two rows of guards armed with Winchesters.[41] As the Pinkertons crossed the grounds of the mill, the crowd formed a gauntlet through which the agents passed. Men and women threw sand and stones at the Pinkerton agents, spat on them and beat them. Several Pinkertons were clubbed into unconsciousness. Members of the crowd ransacked the barges, then burned them to the waterline.[42]
As the Pinkertons were marched through town to the Opera House (which served as a temporary jail), the townspeople continued to assault the agents. Two agents were beaten as horrified town officials looked on. The press expressed shock at the treatment of the Pinkerton agents, and the torrent of abuse helped turn media sympathies away from the strikers.[43]
That's your "Wikipedia conspiracy" you little fascist cunt.
Cars aren't a contagious disease that grows exponentially. You might think there's a big difference between 20,000 deaths and 200,000 deaths, but with exponential phenomenon you have to take logarithms, it's the difference between 4.3 and 5.3; the models were only off by 20%.
And if you look at it from a really high altitude it is practically the same number. Or on a scale that only counts complete, round, millions - where 20 thousand and 200 thousand are exactly ZERO.
Just because point and percentage SEEM smaller when you decide to only count orders of magnitude, that does NOT mean that the resulting error isn't HUGE. Had the same model been used to predict whether a certain building code will produce earthquake-proof buildings, rating them a Richter 7-7.9 instead of 6-6.9 - it would be a pretty fucking CATASTROPHIC error when that 7.0000001 earthquake comes along.
AND on top of that it was NOT a difference between 20k and 200k but a difference between 20,712 and 1,400,000. Only about 70 times greater number. No biggie. What's an order or two of magnitude when spreading panic, right? Also, it is CASES - not deaths. Than number is even lower, about half of that - 11158
And that's why cars. Number of deaths by cars is a real, constant and present - ergo it is BORING. Not sensational enough. But some strange African disease... Oh my! Better lock up your doors, tape over the windows and don't leave your home unless you want to die horribly! Like in a burning metal can, bleeding from hundreds of small wounds but conscious enough to smell gasoline all over you while those flames keep lapping towards you... And your back is broken so you can't even kill yourself while you wait to first start cooking then burning to death...
even if you live in the West, if you weren't scared rigid by the Ebola outbreak, you didn't understand what just happened
No. It means you're not prone to panic resulting from conjunction fallacy, applied to a strange, foreign, wild, African, deadly disease, running rampant as locals reject treatment, release diseased people out of quarantine and spread the disease everywhere...
BTW... Did you know that there are 250,000 - 500,000 deaths from that harmless disease called the flu? That's just silly... who dies from flu... I had flu... nobody dies from flu. Avian flu on the other hand... Now that's dangerous.
Number of avian flu deaths? One 73 year old Chinese woman with an arm's length list of diseases to her name. http://edition.cnn.com/2013/12... BTW, average life expectancy in China - 75. 77 for women.
Ebola likes hot, humid climate and presence of monkeys and bats so the virus can keep on "simmering" all year long. And it really loves open casket funerals where everyone touches and kisses the dead person. It also loves rural areas with little or no medical resources or staff available.
It DOESN'T LIKE quarantine in colder, drier climates, stricter funeral rules and readily available cheap disinfectants... well... cheap in a developed Western country with adequate sanitation and medical facilities and staff.
As a bonus, people get sick quick and start dying really soon. And with no simmering bats and monkeys around... it dies out.
Hint: Despite every king and his uncle prancing around Africa during the colonial age, spreading diseases and generally doing stupid things like biting native women - no epidemic of Ebola ever made it to Europe. Unlike flu.
...and first among children and young adults (5 - 24) are cars, with 33804 deaths in 2013 alone. 6510 of those being in the 15 - 24 years of age range.
Now... Maybe you're out there, in the night, prowling garages and parking lots, killing all those cars in their sleep in order to prevent further deaths. Which would explain why you missed OP's point.
Which was that those "worst-case scenarios that mobilized international efforts" predicting "175,000 cases in Liberia by the end of 2014... [and] 1.4 million cases in Liberia and Sierra Leone" could result in a "crying wolf effect" when the next epidemic comes around.
...from accepting a "Yes", even in your own words.
Unless there is something like an auto-exercise machine that can provide a full range of human activity to a brainless corpse, the process would be pointless.
It is only that now it can all be replaced with exoskeletons.
As for...
It seems much safer and potentially more effective to simply raise a clone child and simply confiscate the body when the transplantee is ready.
Besides those rather retarded morality issues that have caused my post above to fluctuate from 1 to 5 and down back to 2... Which is hilarious, watching supposedly above average intelligent and educated people (i.e. Nerds.) getting so emotional about SciFi beliefs. Anyway, besides that... A "free range" clone would be susceptible to damage and destruction from diseases and injuries, thus increasing the number of clones needed (probably to hundreds) in order to have a single healthy clone readily available when necessary.
"Clone in a jar" can be kept safe from nearly anything, up to nuclear strikes. All "raising clone" does is make for a Michael Bay movie.
grew up physically disabled and had some function restored medically later in life.
Unless the person being cloned grew up physically disabled, that is of no relevance. The transplanted nervous system already knows how to use the body. We're not talking about someone growing up with physical issues preventing them from developing a healthy body - we're talking about someone with no issues getting a new body due to catastrophic wear and tear of the original body.
Again, reflexes are neurological and thus biological - and thus built-in in a healthy new body.
Slashdot Mirror
Clearly it was invented by cats.
The "joke":
Saw someone spill their high end juice cleanse all over the sidewalk and now I know god is on my side.
Don't knock-knock it.
Its screw cap is loose and its conjunction fallacy got spilled everywhere.
...in the closet about all that?
Do you often find yourself playing with finger puppets which resemble people around you?
No, the thing that matters is to execute those actions which keep the machine of government moving along
Sometimes you work against your immediate interests in order to promote your long-term interests
No, that's what the career politicians tell themselves to validate their own hypocrisy.
And if the Tea Partiers were the only issue, and compromise and cooperation really are "currency", then rest of the Republicans would be closing deals hand over fist and legislation would be passing like shit through a goose.
Tea Partiers not knowing how the "cooperation currency" works, just sitting on their "currency" and making no use of it, and thus raising it's value - it would be prime time to both cash in AND to make big deals for the future.
Cooperation earned earlier is now worth more cause there is none to get on the market.
Same for the cooperation made now, which can be bargained for more future deals than usual.
Same goes for the other side.
Democrats would be banning gayness and abortion, making guns mandatory for anyone older than 3 and bringing both death penalty and torture across the nation.
Nope...
Just an old white guy trying to rationalize all those times he had no balls or integrity with bullshit from game theory.
Which works only with perfectly rational actors.
Which no human (other than a psycho here and there) ever is and no group of humans can ever be.
E.g. Tea Partiers and "killing the ACA, which at this point is little more than an old campaign platform that has little bearing on the current issues that the country faces".
...that essentially, when you get down to it, all political decisions are the same.
Voting in slavery or declaring a war or a rehaul of a transportation system... same shit.
It's all just the stuff politicians do.
They act in concert with other legislators, even at the expense of their own beliefs, in order to bank capital or settle accounts.
Ergo, it is perfectly fine to give up one's own principles and voters in order to curry favor with one's peers and accumulate personal political prestige, which can then be further traded.
So, giving up one's principles to accumulate prestige, and giving up one's voters to accumulate even more...
Clearly, the only thing that matters is the prestige itself - i.e. staying in the game by keeping your seat.
Thus, political system exists solely to supply politicians with jobs and entertainment.
As for voters...
It's politics, stupid. Don't you people know that it is all the same?
Raising taxes, lowering taxes, gay marriage, voting rights, prohibition, segregation, no guns, guns for everyone, free abortions, 1 child per family, mass sterilization of men and women, secular state and a theocracy, war on this or that, war here or there, death camps and summer camps...
You just keep votin like your daddy did, ok? Good.
They literally have whole cities just lying around idle. I mean, Spain's got one, sure, but they have several. The economy never developed sufficiently to employ people in jobs that would permit them to live in developed cities in a capitalist society... so the places rot.
You are quoting gloating "China is fallin - see?" populist Daily Mail-grade articles which have little to no relevance to reality.
I.e. OMG LOOK AT THIS GHOST CITY! Silly Chinese peoples. Don't they know any thing? Their stupid, stupid brains.
Meanwhile, in reality...
It's a case of combined schadenfreude over someone's perceived failure and a situation akin to when a small turnip farmer from Lower Bumfuck comes to a BigCityTM and starts despairing at the sight of a construction yard which will surely fail cause there is no chance that 50-storey building could ever be filled with people.
He could have planted turnips there.
Ordos is actually an entire prefecture. Slightly bigger than South Carolina or Austria (86,752 km2).
Population: ~1.9 million.
Urban population: ~582,544, living in the Dongsheng District.
That region has 16% of all coal reserves in China. And a 2nd highest income-per-capita in China.
It has a textile, petrochemical, car, electricity generating and a building industry - all built on the back of all that coal.
And they are using it to rapidly urbanize the prefecture - pooling all those 1.9 million people in one place.
http://www.theatlantic.com/chi...
http://www.vagabondjourney.com...
http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes...
China is urbanizing RAPIDLY. At the rate of about 1% per year.
How much is 1% out of 1.35 billion people, yearly? About an entire Los Angeles of people looking for home, food, work, running water, electricity... and generally better living conditions than back in their village.
Year after year after year...
So, China is building entire cities from scratch and half coaxing half forcing people to move there.
Not just dropping apartment buildings or giant towers and sand islands that "someone will surely buy into" either.
Those are planned cities with built-in infrastructure (including all those "empty" parks and highways) to support hundreds of thousands of people with tens of thousands pouring yearly into Ordos alone, on a 20-year urbanization plan.
Many of those people coming in quite literally from the fields.
I asked the men where they had lived before moving to their apartments in Kangbashi. One of them, a 56-year-old man named Li Yonh Xiang, spoke up. "I lived here," he said.
Li had been born and raised just steps from the bench where he was sitting. About half of the 90-acre park had belonged to his family; the government bought the land in 2000. "When we were peasants, we lived according to the weather," Li said. "Now I live in a heated building with six floors. The city is very nice. There are many cars and buildings, but the air is very clean."
By stick and by carrot both.
http://europe.chinadaily.com.c...
China's urbanization program has been forced into motion by a fiscal policy that all but demands local cities expand to remain economically solvent. According to the World Bank, China's cities must fend for 80 percent of their expenses while only receiving 40 percent of the country's tax revenue, so land sales are often used to make up the difference.
Land is bought by cit
When god covers all your expenses and then some.
From TFA:
A recent study by Dr. Michael Freeman, a clinical professor at UCSF and an entrepreneur as well, was one of the first of its kind to link higher rates of mental health issues to entrepreneurship.
Of the 242 entrepreneurs surveyed, 49% reported having a mental-health condition. Depression was the No. 1 reported condition among them and was present in 30% of all entrepreneurs, followed by ADHD (29%) and anxiety problems (27%). That's a much higher percentage than the US population at large, where only about 7% identify as depressed.
More surprising was the incidence of mental health in the families of entrepreneurs: 72% said they either had mental-health problems themselves or in their immediate family.
A founder who has no history of mental illness from a family with no history either "is the exception, not the rule," Freeman said.
Also, from the study mentioned:
http://www.michaelafreemanmd.c...
Little is known about mental health conditions among the families of entrepreneurs. Of some relevance, though, is the fact that previous research has shown that first and second-degree family members of bipolar probands are high achievers across several domains that are important for entrepreneurship. Higier and her colleagues found that when compared to bipolar probands and normal controls, the unaffected identical twins of people with bipolar disorder demonstrate superior cognitive and interpersonal traits that would seem highly important for entrepreneurship, including enhanced social ease, confidence, assertiveness, intelligence, verbal learning, verbal fluency, extraversion, sociability, optimism, and resilience [89].
Coryell et al. found that the first-degree relatives of bipolar probands, including relatives with bipolar spectrum conditions, had significantly higher educational and occupational achievement than the close family members of people with other mental health conditions [72]. Other studies conducted over the last 100 years have reached similar conclusions [73, 74, 76, 90-92].
Creativity and innovativeness are foundational aptitudes of entrepreneurs. The close family members of bipolar probands have been shown to have high levels of creativity [23, 68]. First-degree relatives of people with bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, anorexia nervosa, and autism have been shown to be overrepresented in the scientific and artistic occupations [66]. Male relatives of people with schizophrenia were shown to be overrepresented in a listing of prominent people [93].
Also, ALSO, from the study:
Reviewed in conjunction with the results displayed Figure 1, 72% of the entrepreneurs in this sample either reported a personal mental health history (49%) or were asymptomatic yet reported a family mental health history (23%). By contrast, 48% of the comparison participants in this sample reported a personal mental health history (32%) or were asymptomatic yet reported a family mental health history (16%).
There IS also a PRETTY BIG issue with it being a self-reporting study and with the composition and the design of the control group.
Control was created by surveying "76 MBA student and faculty pool participants, and 149 psychology students", then mixing those participants with self-reported "entrepreneurs".
Then, out of the total sum of 335 participants (meaning that 110 were actually pooled from "actual entrepreneurs") - 93 participants were declared as control because they answered "no" to the following question: "Have you ever been self-employed, a business founder, or a business co-founder (including non-profit businesses)?"
There are more psych and MBA students (132) among the "entrepreneurs" then "actual entrepreneurs" (110).
So all those mental health numbers may be coming from self-diagnosing psych students.
Which would kinda explain the fact that HALF OF THE CONTROL HAS A HISTORY OF MENTAL ISSUES AS WELL.
Whether Greece makes a "little" money on tourism or a "lot" of money on tourism is a function of how hospitable it is to visitors. If the country as a whole makes it a priority to be very nice and welcoming to foreigners, they stand to reap a lot more in tourist spending than if they take tourism for granted or, worse, go out of their way to make tourists feel unwelcome.
You can make the country hospitable up the wazoo, all it takes is ONE dickhead with an AK to fuck it all up.
Or one missing child.
Or a drowned one.
Or a rainy season.
Or a global economic crisis.
Or simply a fashion trend.
Tourism is a nice bonus and a source of foreign currency, but you can't run a country on tertiary sector alone - unless you are willing to be permanently in debt or permanently poor OR to end up exactly where Greece is now. Both poor and in debt.
Cause there is hardly a more literal way of signing off one's own economic security on "hope and prayer" than resting it on good graces of fickle foreigners bored with their everyday existence back home.
On top of it, to a small country, tourism is toxic.
It artificially raises the property value to unrealistic levels, prices skyrocket and it overflows the local services with people who don't pay for those services.
And you can't just tax them cause you don't want to scare them off or simply cause you can't properly charge for things like an increased burden on the environment or water supply.
Or police - which will inevitably become corrupt first time that either local or governmental coffers go empty and they either get told to "skin" the foreigners or to let them slide.
And corruption is again something that spreads across the entire society.
On top of that, it creates conditions where country's youth will spend their most productive years SERVING instead of studying.
And since the prices are up, when they age out of serving drinks to fat tourists, they won't have a home of their own, they won't have an education - so they end up unemployed.
Which is where Greece was going with their long term unemployment rising (with youth unemployment always staying lower while following a more jagged, seasonal, curve) until the introduction of the Euro brought it down - through heavy borrowing which provided money for make-work jobs.
People who were unemployed for decades got jobs. Yay!
Just before the shit hit the fan they were running the lowest long term unemployment in last two decades, while the wages kept going up.
As the debt kept climbing up as well.
You missed the point of the quote. Try translating it.
Un bon mot ne prouve rien.
It's by Voltaire. Not racist though.
But applicable to any quote used as if it is an argument or a self-evident fact. EVER.
There is no such thing as a cometing industry.
A comet is small, icy, Solar System body that, when passing close to the Sun, heats up and begins to outgas, displaying a visible atmosphere or coma, and sometimes also a tail.
And they are most certainly NOT made of sugar. No, not even that white tail.
HFCS 55 is 55% fructose, ~41% glucose and ~4% other sugars.
Sucrose is 50-50 glucose and fructose.
Low blood sugar is low glucose. We eat/drink until we get to the "high glucose" level. At which point the craving stops.
HFCS 55 (the soda kind) contains 110% more fructose than sucrose, and ~80% less glucose than sucrose.
So, to get the same "high glucose" level we will have to ingest more HFCS than sucrose.
About 1.25 times more. Of a sweetener which contains 1.1 times more of that fat forming fructose.
1.25 * 1.1 = 1.375
1.375 times MORE fructose is ingested with HFCS, for the same amount of glucose, needed to reach satiety, than with sucrose.
We might as well be pouring cooking oil into our table sugar and eating it with a spoon.
Sugar (sucrose) feeds you equal amounts of glucose and fructose.
HFCS used in sodas is 55% fructose and 41% glucose.
Human body has built-in sensors for high glucose. Our blood sugar goes up, we feel energized, we stop being hungry.
Human body has NO sensors for fructose. You can eat or drink it all day and never feel you had enough.
That's cause fructose in nature comes in the form of fruit. With all that fiber you have to gobble down and then carry around in your gut till the fructose gets extracted.
And that would trip a bunch of other sensors telling us to stop eating.
So, when we take sucrose which is exactly half glucose half fructose, the moment we hit satiety for glucose that also trips our "I'm full" sensor and we stop eating.
At which point we have ingested an equal amount of both ready to burn glucose and ready to be turned into fat and burned later fructose.
HFCS 55 on the other hand only has about 80% of glucose that sucrose has. And no fiber to trip the "fructose-comes-with-a-lot-of-fiber" sensor.
So, to reach glucose satiety and trip the "I'm full" sensor drinking HFCS 55, we will have to intake about 1.25 times more sweetener then with sucrose.
But HFCS 55 has 110% of the amount of the fructose contained in sugar (sucrose).
Meaning that to reach the same glucose satiety level which would trip that "I'm full" senor, we ingest 1.25 more sweetener which contains 1.1 times more of the chemical we use solely for production of fat.
Unless we're hiking dozens of miles daily, in snow, up hill, both ways.
Cause we evolved to store that fructose which grows in warm weather for the long winter months when there is no food growing on trees.
And we don't start burning it until we burn all our glucose in our bloodstream.
1.25 times 1.1 equals 1.375 times more fructose (i.e. future fat) ingested when drinking HFCS 55 sweetened soda, compared to drinking the same soda sweetened with sucrose.
...shaped like a cube, 1 foot or 10 inches on each side and get a 1 gallon of volume.
Nor can you subdivide up and down between the sizes without hauling out some really unintuitive fractions - while various measures use various fractions.
Number of inches in a foot or a yard is NOT the number of ounces in a pint, quart or a gallon.
Nor do any of those match with ounces, pounds and stones.
And not only that, an ounce is not the same value OR fraction of a pint (1/20) and of a pound (1/16).
How many ounces in a glass of water? Well it depends...
Meanwhile...
1 meter = 10 x 1 decimeter = 100 x 1 centimeter = 1000 x 1 millimeter
1 liter = 10 x 1 deciliter = 100 x 1 centiliter = 1000 x 1 milliliter
1 kilogram = 10 x 1 hectogram = 100 x 1 decagram = 1000 x 1 gram = 1000000 x 1 milligram
1 liter of H2O = 1 kilogram of H2O = 1 cubic decimeter of H2O
0 degrees Celsius = freezing point of H2O while 100 degrees Celsius = boiling point of H2O
I.e. Points where it changes aggregate states from liquid to solid and from liquid to gas.
Points at which you are no longer measuring temperature of a liquid. Ends of the scale.
Fahrenheit?
0 is the point of change of aggregate state of 1:1:1 mixture of salt, water and ice - while 100 is a couple of degrees above "blood temperature".
Which is stupid in so many ways I don't even want to go into it.
And no... "100 degrees means it's hot outside" is not a good rule of thumb due to a simple fact that no two people are alike or have exactly the same preferences.
And that's without going into more technical measures like Watt, Volt, Ampere, Calories etc. which are all based and interact with other SI units.
Cause... umm... you know... extinct is extinct.
You can't say "no it isn't" if all you have to show for as evidence of existence it is... you know... nothing.
This ain't a religious but a question of biology and of ability to count up to more than "one animal".
E.g. You can't go around claiming that T. Rex is actually hiding. And no, Bill Legend's T. Rex is not THE T. Rex.
The summary warns of "paid trolls", "FUD-ers" and finger pointers going around acting holier than thou, trying to "solve the problem" by placing the blame and spreading "it's the End Days" fear and panic.
You know...
People generalizing the entire humanity as being "people who cannot imagine anything beyond 3 months" and "folks who actually want the world to end" and assuming that "we're going to drive the bus off that extinction cliff while singing happy days are here again."
Which is also a bit of ye old irrelevant conclusion fallacy.
Cause... umm... people not able to think beyond 3 months about pandas or people wanting to burn all pandas and people singing "happy days" instead of working on preserving pandas...
Well... they are not the ones actually working on preserving pandas, aren't they?
It's almost as if a relatively small group of people (compared to the world population or even the population of China) is taking steps to preserve the damn pandas - regardless of all those other people.
Making them kinda irrelevant as long as they don't make it their business to get off their ass, fly off to a game preserve and start shooting pandas.
Read PP's supposition.
A gun is an expensive toy.
Police will be provided with FUNDS FOR guns (and ammo... and training... and maintenance... and special equipment needed... and better guns...) by the government.
Average citizen will not be provided with a gun or any of the tools or procedures needed to operate one. NOR with the money to purchase any of it.
And that's not going into that average citizen from "when the 2nd amendment was drafted" was fucked if the local economy failed to provide gunpowder or lead.
Nor could the average citizen waltz into a store, leave an IOU payable by the government, and waltz out with all the guns and ammo needed - on account of authority as an elected law enforcement officer.
And even without ANY other funds but the paycheck - police is paid to walk around with guns.
Average citizens have to get and maintain a job - THEN should they be able to afford it, they can buy a gun and walk around with it. Without being paid for that.
Also, police will be provided with additional pairs of hands to handle more guns and even with an army should the need arise.
Average citizen would have to pay for help from his/her own pocket. And would not be allowed to just call up the US army or any other army.
Start there.
If I can prove the ballot is mine, then so can someone looking over my shoulder while I do it. Especially if he's pointing a gun at me.
...where people with guns force people to democratically vote-in the candidate supported by the people with guns?
People with guns don't need threatening or votes.
They have the guns and are willing to use them as a tool of political influence. The simplest way is not threatening but shooting the dissenters.
After all... you only have to do it once.
And that's if people are stupid enough to try to argue the legitimacy of results with a bullet.
You're full of it. Either that or you can't read.
Also, by standing by hired thugs instead of the oppressed people you reveal yourself to be a fascist cunt.
The strikers opened fire first, murdered a few Pinkertons, tried to burn alive Pinkertons who were attempting to surrender, and then after accepting the Pinkertons' surrender, proceeded to torture them.
Not at all suprising that Wikipedia conspicuously fails to mention this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The Pinkerton agents attempted to disembark, and shots were fired. Conflicting testimony exists as to which side fired the first shot. John T. McCurry, a boatman on the steamboat Little Bill (which had been hired by the Pinkerton Detective Agency to ferry its agents to the steel mill) and one of the men wounded by the strikers, said: "The armed Pinkerton men commenced to climb up the banks. Then the workmen opened fire on the detectives. The men shot first, and not until three of the Pinkerton men had fallen did they respond to the fire. I am willing to take an oath that the workmen fired first, and that the Pinkerton men did not shoot until some of their number had been wounded."[29] But according to The New York Times, the Pinkertons shot first.[30] The newspaper reported that the Pinkertons opened fire and wounded William Foy, a worker.[30] Regardless of which side opened fire first, the first two individuals wounded were Frederick Heinde, captain of the Pinkertons,[31] and Foy. The Pinkerton agents aboard the barges then fired into the crowd, killing two and wounding 11. The crowd responded in kind, killing two and wounding 12. The firefight continued for about 10 minutes.[32]
After a few more hours, the strikers attempted to burn the barges. They seized a raft, loaded it with oil-soaked timber and floated it toward the barges. The Pinkertons nearly panicked, and a Pinkerton captain had to threaten to shoot anyone who fled. But the fire burned itself out before it reached the barges. The strikers then loaded a railroad flatcar with drums of oil and set it afire. The flatcar hurtled down the rails toward the mill's wharf where the barges were docked. But the car stopped at the water's edge and burned itself out. Dynamite was thrown at the barges, but it only hit the mark once (causing a little damage to one barge). At 2:00 p.m., the workers poured oil onto the river, hoping the oil slick would burn the barges; attempts to light the slick failed.[36]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The Pinkertons, too, wished to surrender. At 5:00 p.m., they raised a white flag and two agents asked to speak with the strikers. O'Donnell guaranteed them safe passage out of town. Upon arrival, their arms were stripped from them. With heads uncovered, to distinguish them from the mill hands, they passed along between two rows of guards armed with Winchesters.[41] As the Pinkertons crossed the grounds of the mill, the crowd formed a gauntlet through which the agents passed. Men and women threw sand and stones at the Pinkerton agents, spat on them and beat them. Several Pinkertons were clubbed into unconsciousness. Members of the crowd ransacked the barges, then burned them to the waterline.[42]
As the Pinkertons were marched through town to the Opera House (which served as a temporary jail), the townspeople continued to assault the agents. Two agents were beaten as horrified town officials looked on. The press expressed shock at the treatment of the Pinkerton agents, and the torrent of abuse helped turn media sympathies away from the strikers.[43]
That's your "Wikipedia conspiracy" you little fascist cunt.
Feel free to read up on events leading up to the
Cars aren't a contagious disease that grows exponentially.
You might think there's a big difference between 20,000 deaths and 200,000 deaths, but with exponential phenomenon you have to take logarithms, it's the difference between 4.3 and 5.3; the models were only off by 20%.
And if you look at it from a really high altitude it is practically the same number.
Or on a scale that only counts complete, round, millions - where 20 thousand and 200 thousand are exactly ZERO.
Just because point and percentage SEEM smaller when you decide to only count orders of magnitude, that does NOT mean that the resulting error isn't HUGE.
Had the same model been used to predict whether a certain building code will produce earthquake-proof buildings, rating them a Richter 7-7.9 instead of 6-6.9 - it would be a pretty fucking CATASTROPHIC error when that 7.0000001 earthquake comes along.
AND on top of that it was NOT a difference between 20k and 200k but a difference between 20,712 and 1,400,000.
Only about 70 times greater number. No biggie. What's an order or two of magnitude when spreading panic, right?
Also, it is CASES - not deaths. Than number is even lower, about half of that - 11158
And that's why cars.
Number of deaths by cars is a real, constant and present - ergo it is BORING. Not sensational enough.
But some strange African disease... Oh my!
Better lock up your doors, tape over the windows and don't leave your home unless you want to die horribly!
Like in a burning metal can, bleeding from hundreds of small wounds but conscious enough to smell gasoline all over you while those flames keep lapping towards you...
And your back is broken so you can't even kill yourself while you wait to first start cooking then burning to death...
even if you live in the West, if you weren't scared rigid by the Ebola outbreak, you didn't understand what just happened
No.
It means you're not prone to panic resulting from conjunction fallacy, applied to a strange, foreign, wild, African, deadly disease, running rampant as locals reject treatment, release diseased people out of quarantine and spread the disease everywhere...
BTW... Did you know that there are 250,000 - 500,000 deaths from that harmless disease called the flu?
That's just silly... who dies from flu... I had flu... nobody dies from flu.
Avian flu on the other hand... Now that's dangerous.
Number of avian flu deaths?
One 73 year old Chinese woman with an arm's length list of diseases to her name.
http://edition.cnn.com/2013/12...
BTW, average life expectancy in China - 75.
77 for women.
Ebola likes hot, humid climate and presence of monkeys and bats so the virus can keep on "simmering" all year long.
And it really loves open casket funerals where everyone touches and kisses the dead person.
It also loves rural areas with little or no medical resources or staff available.
It DOESN'T LIKE quarantine in colder, drier climates, stricter funeral rules and readily available cheap disinfectants... well... cheap in a developed Western country with adequate sanitation and medical facilities and staff.
As a bonus, people get sick quick and start dying really soon. And with no simmering bats and monkeys around... it dies out.
Hint: Despite every king and his uncle prancing around Africa during the colonial age, spreading diseases and generally doing stupid things like biting native women - no epidemic of Ebola ever made it to Europe.
Unlike flu.
...and first among children and young adults (5 - 24) are cars, with 33804 deaths in 2013 alone.
6510 of those being in the 15 - 24 years of age range.
Now... Maybe you're out there, in the night, prowling garages and parking lots, killing all those cars in their sleep in order to prevent further deaths.
Which would explain why you missed OP's point.
Which was that those "worst-case scenarios that mobilized international efforts" predicting "175,000 cases in Liberia by the end of 2014... [and] 1.4 million cases in Liberia and Sierra Leone" could result in a "crying wolf effect" when the next epidemic comes around.
...from accepting a "Yes", even in your own words.
Unless there is something like an auto-exercise machine that can provide a full range of human activity to a brainless corpse, the process would be pointless.
It is only that now it can all be replaced with exoskeletons.
As for...
It seems much safer and potentially more effective to simply raise a clone child and simply confiscate the body when the transplantee is ready.
Besides those rather retarded morality issues that have caused my post above to fluctuate from 1 to 5 and down back to 2... Which is hilarious, watching supposedly above average intelligent and educated people (i.e. Nerds.) getting so emotional about SciFi beliefs.
Anyway, besides that... A "free range" clone would be susceptible to damage and destruction from diseases and injuries, thus increasing the number of clones needed (probably to hundreds) in order to have a single healthy clone readily available when necessary.
"Clone in a jar" can be kept safe from nearly anything, up to nuclear strikes.
All "raising clone" does is make for a Michael Bay movie.
grew up physically disabled and had some function restored medically later in life.
Unless the person being cloned grew up physically disabled, that is of no relevance.
The transplanted nervous system already knows how to use the body.
We're not talking about someone growing up with physical issues preventing them from developing a healthy body - we're talking about someone with no issues getting a new body due to catastrophic wear and tear of the original body.
Again, reflexes are neurological and thus biological - and thus built-in in a healthy new body.