"So today's class is on how to rob a bank, and it's clear the general public needs guidance because the average the average bank robbery nets only 7,500 dollars. Rank amateurs who know nothing about how to cook the books. The folks who know run our largest banks, and in our last go-round, they cost us over 11 trillion dollars. They cost us over 10 million jobs as well. So our task is to educate ourselves so we can understand why we have these recurrent intensifying financial crises and how we can prevent them in the future. And the answer to that is that we have to stop epidemics of control fraud. Control fraud is what happens when the people who control, typically a CEO, a seemingly legitimate entity, use it as a weapon to defraud."
A simple test is.. if a citizen did this to another citizen, would that be against the law?
I'm not sure that's a good test:
1) If one citizen deprives another of his liberty, that's kidnapping. If the government does it, it's incarceration.
2) If one citizen forcibly takes money from another, that's robbery. If the government does it, it's a fine.
3) If one citizen kills another, that's murder. If the government does it, it's capital punishment.
Why does this curious dichotomy exist? Because we elect people who will maintain law and order, to promote justice and all the other stuff in the preamble to the Constitution. Sometimes they have to apply force sometimes to achieve these ends because there are people willing to apply force to do evil, like robbery, kidnapping and murder.
And don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to disparage the backbone of the country. Does the average person work hard, feel pain, love deeply? Yes, that seems to me to be the reality. Are there brilliant sociopaths? Martin Shrkreli and other Wall Street titans come to mind. So yes, of course.
But, regarding making the best decisions on complex laws, electing representatives whose primary job it is to determine that seems the best system, as long as that system is not systemically undermined or corrupted.
Because the mass of people are easily manipulated and poorly informed.
Having representatives do our bidding does create more of a "single point of failure" system. But if the representatives are not actively working to undermine our interests (which in the current system is completely unclear), then it becomes their full time job to examine legislation for its costs and benefits, and to act in ways beneficial to those who elected them, and to the country.
Currently due to the influence of money, our representatives are more like university development officers than legislators. That has to be addressed. But direct democracy, with the average IQ of 100, is probably not the cure.
Our government system currently has a sickness. Leeches or cocaine are not the cure, nor is decapitation. Legislators will always be self-interested, as they are leaders in the human species. Figuring out how to re-focus their interests and the interests of their constituents in spite of sophisticated advertising and the promise of cushy sinecures is probably the best path forward.
"About 51 U.S. companies have reincorporated in low-tax countries since 1982, including 20 since 2012. A lot of drug companies are doing it, and low-tax Ireland is a popular corporate home. They’re doing it despite a 2004 law that legislators had promised would end the practice, despite rule-tightening by the Obama administration to limit it, and despite two decades of efforts by the Internal Revenue Service to rein it in.
A change of address doesn’t necessarily mean a real move. Companies are free to keep their top executives in the U.S., and most of them do.
Most importantly, perhaps, companies that invert overseas can take advantage of the generous U.S. system of interest deductions for payments to their own affiliates abroad — benefits that are only available with a foreign parent company."
This is pretty bold (not really the right word) of Pfizer to move overseas, considering that they, along with the rest of big Pharma are the ones who lobbied to make it illegal for Americans to import cheaper prescription drugs.
I think the word you're looking for is 'chutzpah'.
Politicians will feign helplessness (look at the issues they're able to reach consensus on, and those they're not). If a bill to change it ever came up, poison pills would be attached to it. A few academics will claim this sort of thing is an inexorable force of nature, and the farce will continue.
I started following these kinds of shenanigans prior to the financial crisis. The blame is on the politicians - not for being self interested, but for actually undermining the society for cash and favors from big donors. The vast majority of the voting public doesn't understand this kind of inside baseball. And the incumbency rate hasn't really changed much as a result of these issues. So the boiling of the frog (this society) will continue until we become Brazil or we snap out of the torpor.
"A society cannot be both ignorant and free." -- Lady Gaga
Donors want favors, politicians want money, it's a symbiotic relationship (politicians shake down donors, donors view it as an investment/protection money) which has become more and more overt over the years. It undermines the rule of law of course, and leads to corruption, but as long as politicians keep getting re-elected and donors keep getting what they want, the system will continue.
As William F. Buckley famously said, "Though liberals do a great deal of talking about hearing other points of view, it sometimes shocks them to learn that there are other points of view."
What other as yet unguessed effects go into making life, a consciousness, a mind? I'm not talking magic, I'm talking about science and the description of the physical reality.
We're talking about modeling what we see as the physical structure of the brain. I suspect the actual cloning of a consciousness is quite some distance away, after we're able to fully explain just what is consciousness and the mind. Heck, just describing what makes something alive is beyond us right now. A potato is most surely alive, but without a mind as far as we can tell. We can quite closely describe the structure of the potato but not so much why it's "alive".
We are capable of seeing about 5% of the universe, the rest is dark matter and energy. I suspect there's plenty more going on with the brain and mind as well.
In one form of dictatorship, the dictators select the candidates who will stand for election. This is the system in Iran. The people dutifully vote for one or the other candidate.
Here, if one can control who can reach the general election, you stand a decent chance of profiting from whoever wins the election.
The Economist is a very pro-business magazine. Here's what they said about patents and the TPP:
"The cost of the innovation that never takes place because of the flawed patent system is incalculable. Patent protection is spreading, through deals such as the planned Trans-Pacific Partnership, which promises to cover one-third of world trade. The aim should be to fix the system, not make it more pervasive."
To the top executives, that's really the only question. They will happily load a company up with debt, execute massive stock buybacks to boost the share price, and to hell with the future and everyone else, I got mine.
So, did Carly get paid? If she did, it's perfectly understandable.
What's troubling is, if she didn't get paid, then she got owned, and getting owned so strategically like this is not a quality one would want in a national leader. Lack of strategic vision is very problematic. Merely being self-confident enough to be able to lead a large organization is insufficient for the presidency.
Just an FYI, as this is a Windows update thread which is trying to avoid Win10 nagware + telemetry. These are the updates I've identified so far. Feel free to add/update the list:
You need to hire a couple-three top people who can migrate the systems. Migration from EOL systems is a headache, requiring plenty of debugging. I've been in those situations, and you need people who can do that task.
From what I can see there is nothing special about him or what he did, he is just some cheeky kid who used a very naive way of getting attention and it got out of hand. All this talk of discrimination etc. seems like a beat-up and the poor kid will pay the price in the long run for all the manipulating adults have done to politically capitalise on his prank.
I didn't get the impression that the boy is cheeky or that this was a prank.
It just seems like he's a precocious kid interested in how things work and he wanted to show one of his teachers. Unfortunately, teachers' detectors are up for school violence (remember the child who was penalized for chewing his Pop Tart in the shape of a gun?) and the rise of radical Islam (Islamic gunmen attack the "Draw The Prophet" 40 minutes away in Garland Texas) resulted in this situation.
It's a tricky situation. However, calling the cops seems slightly absurd. They didn't think it was a bomb by the fact they didn't evacuate the premises and bring a bomb robot to blow it up. If the authorities find a credible threat, they bring in a bomb robot and blow up whatever the threat is. That didn't happen.
As far as taking things apart and putting them back together, Henry Ford did that sort of thing. This might have been simpler, but the boy correctly put it together in a different way.
The fuel of the future Environmental lunacy in Europe The Economist Apr 6th 2013
WHICH source of renewable energy is most important to the European Union? Solar power, perhaps? (Europe has three-quarters of the world’s total installed capacity of solar photovoltaic energy.) Or wind? (Germany trebled its wind-power capacity in the past decade.) The answer is neither. By far the largest so-called renewable fuel used in Europe is wood.
In its various forms, from sticks to pellets to sawdust, wood (or to use its fashionable name, biomass) accounts for about half of Europe’s renewable-energy consumption. In some countries, such as Poland and Finland, wood meets more than 80% of renewable-energy demand. Even in Germany, home of the Energiewende (energy transformation) which has poured huge subsidies into wind and solar power, 38% of non-fossil fuel consumption comes from the stuff. After years in which European governments have boasted about their high-tech, low-carbon energy revolution, the main beneficiary seems to be the favoured fuel of pre-industrial societies.
Should American Wood Fuel European Power? Growth of wood-fueled power generation in Europe spurs protests from Southern environmentalists in the U.S. Scientific American By Elizabeth Harball and ClimateWire | November 14, 2014
Europe's renewable energy targets drive demand for wood pellets. Other voices in the forestry sector, including Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, said that wood-based energy is renewable because the wood burned is replaced by other trees that take in carbon dioxide, making the process carbon-neutral.
Today, however, it is not U.S. policy that is driving the growth of the wood-fuel sector. Europe depends heavily on wood-based fuels to meet its goal of sourcing 20 percent of its power from renewable sources by 2020.
I work in a technical field in a somewhat creative environment. Sometimes I'm wrong. Sometimes I'm right. There are those who try to make it seem when someone's been wrong once they are wrong about everything. It's a debate tactic which I'm sure has a name, as it's not new. Don't fall prey to it.
Just because someone is wrong once, doesn't mean they are wrong about everything, forever.
Stanford researcher declares that the sixth mass extinction is here Stanford Report June 19, 2015
That is the bad news at the center of a new study by a group of scientists including Paul Ehrlich, the Bing Professor of Population Studies in biology and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. Ehrlich and his co-authors call for fast action to conserve threatened species, populations and habitat, but warn that the window of opportunity is rapidly closing.
"[The study] shows without any significant doubt that we are now entering the sixth great mass extinction event," Ehrlich said.
A Diet To Die For One bird feasts on food that would leave most other animals stone dead Nov 29th 2014 The Economist
Among an average of 528 types of bacterium found on the heads of 50 turkey and black vultures were those that can cause botulism, gangrene, tetanus, septicaemia, blood clots and metastatic abscesses in other animals. And although these birds did not have it, another study found Bacillus anthracis in vulture faeces. It causes anthrax, except in vultures.
Vultures clearly have strong stomachs, in every sense. With an acidity at least ten times that of a human’s, a vulture’s gut destroys a large amount of any potentially pathogenic bacteria that is ingested. Indeed, when the researchers analysed the contents of each bird’s large intestine, they could not detect some 85% of the micro-organisms they had found on its facial skin.
But what remains is hardly benign. The microbial flora in a vulture’s large intestine is dominated by two types of anaerobic faecal bacteria, Clostridia and Fusobacteria, both of which can be deadly to other animals. Some Clostridia species have been responsible for periodic mass die-offs in birds such as ducks, geese and waders (although other species can be beneficial), while Fusobacteria nucleatum is associated with human colon cancer.
Slashdot Mirror
Bullsh-t.
Linus Torvalds first started on BASIC. He talks about it in this brief interview with Bloomberg News.
William K. Black wrote a book with that title.
This is the introduction from his TEDx talk about bank fraud:
"So today's class is on how to rob a bank, and it's clear the general public needs guidance because the average the average bank robbery nets only 7,500 dollars. Rank amateurs who know nothing about how to cook the books. The folks who know run our largest banks, and in our last go-round, they cost us over 11 trillion dollars. They cost us over 10 million jobs as well. So our task is to educate ourselves so we can understand why we have these recurrent intensifying financial crises and how we can prevent them in the future. And the answer to that is that we have to stop epidemics of control fraud. Control fraud is what happens when the people who control, typically a CEO, a seemingly legitimate entity, use it as a weapon to defraud."
I'm not sure that's a good test:
1) If one citizen deprives another of his liberty, that's kidnapping. If the government does it, it's incarceration.
2) If one citizen forcibly takes money from another, that's robbery. If the government does it, it's a fine.
3) If one citizen kills another, that's murder. If the government does it, it's capital punishment.
Why does this curious dichotomy exist? Because we elect people who will maintain law and order, to promote justice and all the other stuff in the preamble to the Constitution. Sometimes they have to apply force sometimes to achieve these ends because there are people willing to apply force to do evil, like robbery, kidnapping and murder.
And don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to disparage the backbone of the country. Does the average person work hard, feel pain, love deeply? Yes, that seems to me to be the reality. Are there brilliant sociopaths? Martin Shrkreli and other Wall Street titans come to mind. So yes, of course.
But, regarding making the best decisions on complex laws, electing representatives whose primary job it is to determine that seems the best system, as long as that system is not systemically undermined or corrupted.
Because the mass of people are easily manipulated and poorly informed.
Having representatives do our bidding does create more of a "single point of failure" system. But if the representatives are not actively working to undermine our interests (which in the current system is completely unclear), then it becomes their full time job to examine legislation for its costs and benefits, and to act in ways beneficial to those who elected them, and to the country.
Currently due to the influence of money, our representatives are more like university development officers than legislators. That has to be addressed. But direct democracy, with the average IQ of 100, is probably not the cure.
Our government system currently has a sickness. Leeches or cocaine are not the cure, nor is decapitation. Legislators will always be self-interested, as they are leaders in the human species. Figuring out how to re-focus their interests and the interests of their constituents in spite of sophisticated advertising and the promise of cushy sinecures is probably the best path forward.
Politicians write these rules - they are legislators. Here is a a history of the tax inversion.
"About 51 U.S. companies have reincorporated in low-tax countries since 1982, including 20 since 2012. A lot of drug companies are doing it, and low-tax Ireland is a popular corporate home. They’re doing it despite a 2004 law that legislators had promised would end the practice, despite rule-tightening by the Obama administration to limit it, and despite two decades of efforts by the Internal Revenue Service to rein it in.
A change of address doesn’t necessarily mean a real move. Companies are free to keep their top executives in the U.S., and most of them do.
Most importantly, perhaps, companies that invert overseas can take advantage of the generous U.S. system of interest deductions for payments to their own affiliates abroad — benefits that are only available with a foreign parent company."
This is pretty bold (not really the right word) of Pfizer to move overseas, considering that they, along with the rest of big Pharma are the ones who lobbied to make it illegal for Americans to import cheaper prescription drugs.
I think the word you're looking for is 'chutzpah'.
Politicians will feign helplessness (look at the issues they're able to reach consensus on, and those they're not). If a bill to change it ever came up, poison pills would be attached to it. A few academics will claim this sort of thing is an inexorable force of nature, and the farce will continue.
Gotta understand the decision-making process for politicians:
1) These companies are big donors.
2) 90% percent of the population has no idea about this, and fewer care.
3) Politicians get cash for looking the other way, and it has no impact on their electability.
I started following these kinds of shenanigans prior to the financial crisis. The blame is on the politicians - not for being self interested, but for actually undermining the society for cash and favors from big donors. The vast majority of the voting public doesn't understand this kind of inside baseball. And the incumbency rate hasn't really changed much as a result of these issues. So the boiling of the frog (this society) will continue until we become Brazil or we snap out of the torpor.
"A society cannot be both ignorant and free." -- Lady Gaga
I remember back in the 90s, when Loral sold US missile and space technology to the Chinese, after spending six to seven figures on key political figures and receiving waivers.
Donors want favors, politicians want money, it's a symbiotic relationship (politicians shake down donors, donors view it as an investment/protection money) which has become more and more overt over the years. It undermines the rule of law of course, and leads to corruption, but as long as politicians keep getting re-elected and donors keep getting what they want, the system will continue.
Upon considering an idea, the first question ought not to be, "Is it offensive?" but rather, "Is it true?"
As William F. Buckley famously said, "Though liberals do a great deal of talking about hearing other points of view, it sometimes shocks them to learn that there are other points of view."
What other as yet unguessed effects go into making life, a consciousness, a mind? I'm not talking magic, I'm talking about science and the description of the physical reality.
We're talking about modeling what we see as the physical structure of the brain. I suspect the actual cloning of a consciousness is quite some distance away, after we're able to fully explain just what is consciousness and the mind. Heck, just describing what makes something alive is beyond us right now. A potato is most surely alive, but without a mind as far as we can tell. We can quite closely describe the structure of the potato but not so much why it's "alive".
We are capable of seeing about 5% of the universe, the rest is dark matter and energy. I suspect there's plenty more going on with the brain and mind as well.
In one form of dictatorship, the dictators select the candidates who will stand for election. This is the system in Iran. The people dutifully vote for one or the other candidate.
Here, if one can control who can reach the general election, you stand a decent chance of profiting from whoever wins the election.
Lessig talked about this in his notable TED talk which discussed the very issue of a very few, very wealthy people controlling the primary system, leading to election of the candidates they favor.
The problem is, when you undermine the electoral system, you undermine the rule of law.
Millions spent by 487 organizations to influence TPP outcome
Kneel before the god of free trade.
I look forward to discovering the unexpected surprises in this thing.
The Economist is a very pro-business magazine. Here's what they said about patents and the TPP:
"The cost of the innovation that never takes place because of the flawed patent system is incalculable. Patent protection is spreading, through deals such as the planned Trans-Pacific Partnership, which promises to cover one-third of world trade. The aim should be to fix the system, not make it more pervasive."
-- The Economist, "Time to fix patents", 8 August 2015
To the top executives, that's really the only question. They will happily load a company up with debt, execute massive stock buybacks to boost the share price, and to hell with the future and everyone else, I got mine.
So, did Carly get paid? If she did, it's perfectly understandable.
What's troubling is, if she didn't get paid, then she got owned, and getting owned so strategically like this is not a quality one would want in a national leader. Lack of strategic vision is very problematic. Merely being self-confident enough to be able to lead a large organization is insufficient for the presidency.
Just an FYI, as this is a Windows update thread which is trying to avoid Win10 nagware + telemetry. These are the updates I've identified so far. Feel free to add/update the list:
KB 2952664
Compatibility update for upgrading Windows 7
https://support.microsoft.com/...
KB 2976978
Compatibility update for Windows 8.1 and Windows 8
https://support.microsoft.com/...
KB 3022345
Update for customer experience and diagnostic telemetry
https://support.microsoft.com/...
KB 3035583
Update installs Get Windows 10 app in Windows 8.1 and Windows 7 SP1
https://support.microsoft.com/...
KB 3068708
Update for customer experience and diagnostic telemetry
https://support.microsoft.com/...
KB 3075249
Update that adds telemetry points to consent.exe in Windows 8.1 and Windows 7
https://support.microsoft.com/...
KB 3080149
Update for customer experience and diagnostic telemetry
https://support.microsoft.com/...
You need to hire a couple-three top people who can migrate the systems. Migration from EOL systems is a headache, requiring plenty of debugging. I've been in those situations, and you need people who can do that task.
I didn't get the impression that the boy is cheeky or that this was a prank.
It just seems like he's a precocious kid interested in how things work and he wanted to show one of his teachers. Unfortunately, teachers' detectors are up for school violence (remember the child who was penalized for chewing his Pop Tart in the shape of a gun?) and the rise of radical Islam (Islamic gunmen attack the "Draw The Prophet" 40 minutes away in Garland Texas) resulted in this situation.
It's a tricky situation. However, calling the cops seems slightly absurd. They didn't think it was a bomb by the fact they didn't evacuate the premises and bring a bomb robot to blow it up. If the authorities find a credible threat, they bring in a bomb robot and blow up whatever the threat is. That didn't happen.
As far as taking things apart and putting them back together, Henry Ford did that sort of thing. This might have been simpler, but the boy correctly put it together in a different way.
Source from CDC (as of 2011).
Source from IIHS (as of 2013).
This will save lives. Even with excellent drivers behind the wheel.
Maryland just abolished the parallel parking requirement, because of the growing moron population. Automated safety systems can come none too soon.
The fuel of the future
Environmental lunacy in Europe
The Economist
Apr 6th 2013
WHICH source of renewable energy is most important to the European Union? Solar power, perhaps? (Europe has three-quarters of the world’s total installed capacity of solar photovoltaic energy.) Or wind? (Germany trebled its wind-power capacity in the past decade.) The answer is neither. By far the largest so-called renewable fuel used in Europe is wood.
In its various forms, from sticks to pellets to sawdust, wood (or to use its fashionable name, biomass) accounts for about half of Europe’s renewable-energy consumption. In some countries, such as Poland and Finland, wood meets more than 80% of renewable-energy demand. Even in Germany, home of the Energiewende (energy transformation) which has poured huge subsidies into wind and solar power, 38% of non-fossil fuel consumption comes from the stuff. After years in which European governments have boasted about their high-tech, low-carbon energy revolution, the main beneficiary seems to be the favoured fuel of pre-industrial societies.
The Economist
See also:
Should American Wood Fuel European Power?
Growth of wood-fueled power generation in Europe spurs protests from Southern environmentalists in the U.S.
Scientific American
By Elizabeth Harball and ClimateWire | November 14, 2014
Europe's renewable energy targets drive demand for wood pellets. Other voices in the forestry sector, including Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, said that wood-based energy is renewable because the wood burned is replaced by other trees that take in carbon dioxide, making the process carbon-neutral.
Today, however, it is not U.S. policy that is driving the growth of the wood-fuel sector. Europe depends heavily on wood-based fuels to meet its goal of sourcing 20 percent of its power from renewable sources by 2020.
-- Scientific American
I work in a technical field in a somewhat creative environment. Sometimes I'm wrong. Sometimes I'm right. There are those who try to make it seem when someone's been wrong once they are wrong about everything. It's a debate tactic which I'm sure has a name, as it's not new. Don't fall prey to it.
Just because someone is wrong once, doesn't mean they are wrong about everything, forever.
Stanford researcher declares that the sixth mass extinction is here
Stanford Report
June 19, 2015
That is the bad news at the center of a new study by a group of scientists including Paul Ehrlich, the Bing Professor of Population Studies in biology and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. Ehrlich and his co-authors call for fast action to conserve threatened species, populations and habitat, but warn that the window of opportunity is rapidly closing.
"[The study] shows without any significant doubt that we are now entering the sixth great mass extinction event," Ehrlich said.
-- Stanford Report, June 19, 2015
A Diet To Die For
One bird feasts on food that would leave most other animals stone dead
Nov 29th 2014
The Economist
Among an average of 528 types of bacterium found on the heads of 50 turkey and black vultures were those that can cause botulism, gangrene, tetanus, septicaemia, blood clots and metastatic abscesses in other animals. And although these birds did not have it, another study found Bacillus anthracis in vulture faeces. It causes anthrax, except in vultures.
Vultures clearly have strong stomachs, in every sense. With an acidity at least ten times that of a human’s, a vulture’s gut destroys a large amount of any potentially pathogenic bacteria that is ingested. Indeed, when the researchers analysed the contents of each bird’s large intestine, they could not detect some 85% of the micro-organisms they had found on its facial skin.
But what remains is hardly benign. The microbial flora in a vulture’s large intestine is dominated by two types of anaerobic faecal bacteria, Clostridia and Fusobacteria, both of which can be deadly to other animals. Some Clostridia species have been responsible for periodic mass die-offs in birds such as ducks, geese and waders (although other species can be beneficial), while Fusobacteria nucleatum is associated with human colon cancer.
-- The Economist, November 29th, 2014
[Just because seagulls and vultures can do it, doesn't mean terns and albatrosses can]
The overseer whipping the slaves: "Damn, that one time, my arm got so tired, I didn't know if I could keep going. But I persevered." :)