Seriously, if we are talking about addiction, that is usually a combination of both physical dependence and psychological dependence. Adderall does not cause physical dependence, unlike drugs like nicotine or opioids or even alcohol. What does happen is psychological dependence and changes to the brain's dopamine system due to abuse. If amphetamine is abused, drug tolerance develops rapidly, and abusers have to take increasingly larger doses to get high. This can cause long-term changes in the brain's dopamine levels, often causing a withdrawal syndrome.
But this is not what happens when used long-term at therapeutic doses. There's little evidence to suggest that similar long-term changes occur in the brain when used at therapeutic levels. Some people will form psychological dependences on it anyway. But even a psychological dependence does not imply the problems of addiction.
Adderall is addictive, and those at biggest risk are new users and people abusing it recreationally. But if someone is taking it long-term, at therapeutic doses, they are unlikely to exhibit the classic hallmarks of addiction, such as impaired control over the substance, preoccupation with the substance, and continued use despite negative consequences.
Whether to take any medication is never a purely rational, level-headed choice. It is a combination of both the motivations and emotions that we have, and the rational calculus that forms part of our decision making.
Looking at the study itself, the students were given a 30mg dose of Adderall. Therapeutic doses start at 5 mg. So it doesn't surprise me that the side effects from a 30 mg dose overwhelmed any possible cognitive improvements.
The studies cited that found cognitive improvements also note that there is a dose response-curve, where up to a certain dosage, you see improvements in sustained attention and working memory, and past that working memory takes a dive while sustained attention continues to improve. Until it too begins to decrease.
These aren't wonder drugs. They're drugs. They're substances that have physiological effects on the body. Doses make a difference.
While Ritalin (methylphenidate) is a stimulant, it is not an amphetamine, but instead a phenethylamine. It works differently from amphetamine, since it works primarily as a dopamine reuptake inhibitor, whereas amphetamines increase the activity of neurotransmitters like dopamine. To simplify it, Ritalin works by keeping the brain from removing dopamine, while adderall works by increasing dopamine release. That's part of the reason why some people with ADHD respond better to Ritalin than Adderall, and vice versa.
Adderall, and its generic equivalents, are a combination of 25% levoamphetamine and 75% dextroamphetamine salts. They both have the chemical formula C9H13N.
Methamphetamine is a different drug entirely. In its medical form, it is generally sold as dextromethamphetamine hydrochloride, or under the trade name Desoxyn. Its chemical formula is C10H15N.
Both are approved for the treatment of ADHD in the US, but Adderall is much more likely to be prescribed. Under long-term medical use at therapeutic doses, addition is unlikely to occur with Adderall. While methamphetamine is approved for the treatment of ADHD, it is seldom prescribed due to the risks of recreational abuse and addiction associated with it. That said it is a safe and effective treatment for some people when other treatments fail.
It could just as easily be the other way around. Just because something might not be universal across all human cultures, doesn't mean it isn't biologically based anyway.
But that's the point I'm making. It could just as easily be the other way around. The fact that differences between sexes is cross-cultural proves that differences between sexes are cross-cultural. It does not prove any further fact about that those differences, or their basis. Damore assumes, as do the researchers he cited, that is proof these differences are biological in nature, without regard to their true etiology or even a mechanism of action.
I'm not aware of any research that demonstrates that cross cultural things aren't biological.
That's not how science works. We all start off with the null hypothesis, that there isn't any significant difference between populations, and that any difference observed is due to sampling or experimental error. And in this case, that means the first hurdle to pass is showing that something is truly cross-cultural. That's really hard to do. Most often, cross-cultural differences simply haven't been studied enough, and across enough cultures, for the effects of the differences in culture to shine through. 40 years ago, blood type effect on personality was thought to be biological in nature, and even recently color preference was thought to be biological. (See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4311615/ for one culture demonstrating it isn't.)
Let's say you pass that hurdle, and have sufficient statistical power to show a real difference. With regards to explaining cross-cultural psychological differences, there are still three possible explanations: biology, biology and culture, or culture. Proving that a cross-cultural difference is biological in nature requires, at the very least, showing a potential mechanism of action. For example, heightened levels of physical aggressiveness in men (compared to women) across cultures is often explained by the effects of testosterone, which does increase aggressive behavior. There is plenty of research to show how individual differences in the biological activity of testosterone show up as cross-cultural psychological differences in amounts of physical aggressive behavior. But even then, that doesn't account for the differing levels of physical aggression among men between cultures. There you can see that culture matters: just because something is biological doesn't mean it is determinative, and in meta-analyses of studies on physical aggressiveness and testosterone, there are wide variations in aggressiveness, meaning that culture is by far the larger effect.
There is a ton of research showing that cross-cultural differences either really aren't as cross-cultural as the original researchers thought, and that the effects of biology on cross-cultural psychological differences are small. If you aren't aware of it, you haven't been looking for it.
How does Norway punish assertive women?
Not just Norway: they all do. Take this study published in the Harvard Business Review: https://hbr.org/2015/12/leading-across-cultures-is-more-complicated-for-women
Men are allowed to to share conclusions; women are expected to guide listeners to conclusions. In not even one country were women allowed to be assertive in the same way as men. And this was a study about leadership positions. One might think there wouldn't be gendered expectations for corporate leadership, but there is.
And this is true for all kinds of examples about assertive behavior among women, not just in terms of leadership, but in negotiation and personal views, assertive women sustain social costs for that behavior.
Maybe he wasn't aware of that research?
Then maybe he shouldn't spout out publicly about stuff he doesn't know about. And I'm serious about that. We can't all be experts on everything. It's
I generally don't reply to anonymous cowards, but I'll make an exception.
One of the weakest arguments in the memo was that
"These differences aren’t just socially constructed because: They’re universal across human cultures"
Something can be socially constructed AND be universal across human cultures. Just because you prove that something is cross-cultural doesn't mean that you've proved a biological origin. Cultures are remarkably similar, and one of the ways that occurs is that men are dicks across all human cultures, and I say that as a man. We are dicks.
The same is true for women: the same factors across cultures punish assertive women. Assuming that is because of biology because it is cross-cultural is assuming your own argument.
He says, "We need to stop assuming that gender gaps imply sexism."
Damore fails to also look at the mounds of research that shows most gender gaps have few other explanations other than sexism.
I was going to write a longer article on how and releasing that memo was so toxic, and a violation of Google's Code of Conduct, especially Section 2:
We are committed to a supportive work environment, where employees have the opportunity to reach their fullest potential. Googlers are expected to do their utmost to create a workplace culture that is free of harassment, intimidation, bias, and unlawful discrimination.
But then I figured that Google is going to paying lawyers to do that anyway.
I read the memo. It's sexist. It assumes its own argument. It's combative in tone and dismissive in argumentation. It's toxic for any company. And to boot, it's wrong.
Actually, that's incorrect. Income is defined in the Internal Revenue Code (aka the IRC, also Title 26 of the United States Code) in 61: "Except as otherwise provided in this subtitle, gross income means all income from whatever source derived..." It then goes on to list some included types of income, but expressly does not limit income to those kinds.
Commissioner v. Glenshaw Glass Co., 348 U.S. 426 (1955), holds that all gains except those specifically exempted qualify as income, that income is not limited by source such as by labor or by capital or both, and puts forth the test still used today to decide whether something is income or not. Income is an instance of "undeniable accessions to wealth, clearly realized, and over which the taxpayers have complete dominion."
So someone letting you live in their house for free is not necessarily income. The taxpayer (you) does not have an undeniable accession to wealth, merely an absence of payment. The taxpayer also does not have complete dominion over that, and if gratuitous, may be kicked out at any moment. Someone waiving a fee they normally charge is not income. That also fails the dominion prong, since the taxpayer has no control over it. There are circumstances where those can be income, but they aren't ordinarily income.
A friend giving you an interest-free or below-market interest rate loan isn't income either, but the IRS does have tables for the imputed interest you should charge because people have tried to disguise large gifts as loans. The gift tax is also there to avoid situations where someone tries to avoid the income tax by claiming it was a gift from someone. So the IRS isn't just going to take your word for it, unless it's small, like, less than $10,000, or you can show it doesn't have much of a tax effect.
Tuition waivers haven't been taxed because...*drumroll*... there's a statutory exemption from gross income under IRC 117(d). It has to be at an eligible educational institution. So qualified tuition reductions are one of those "except as otherwise provided in this subtitle."
Given the way arbitration works, if I do a crappy job on today's arbitration - that means less chance that I will be selected again.
True, but it also means that you have an incentive to please repeat players in the arbitration market.
The ONLY way I get the opportunity to serve as arbitrator in a future case, is to play it straight down the middle, decide the case strictly on the facts and the law, and explain myself in a properly written decision.
But is that really true? I'm sure for some categories of disputes, having a reputation for fairness and honesty will ensure repeat business, because both plaintiffs and defendants have an equal chance of needing services. But that isn't true of many contexts, including the mandatory employment arbitration context.
The repeat player effect exists within the employment arbitration context. Whether the repeat player effect is because of repeat player bias is a hard question to answer, but repeat players (employers) do better than one-shotters (employees) in almost every employment arbitration context. And it creates a structural advantage when one side repeatedly goes through a process, so it has built-in expertise versus its opponents who are essentially going through the process for the first time, every time.
I have no problem with arbitration as a dispute resolution method, so long as it is voluntarily agreed to and negotiated between two parties. I've negotiated arbitration clauses in contracts. Outside of a collective bargaining agreement, or the rare employee that can actually negotiate their employment contract, mandatory employment arbitration clauses are disproportionately and unconscionably tilted towards the employer. And the same is true for consumer contracts that have mandatory arbitration clauses. Companies wouldn't be putting these clauses in their contracts if they did not believe they benefited from them. And they do benefit from them.
Don't be daft, of course punishments have been ruled cruel and unusual in the US. Wilkerson v. Utah, 99 U.S. 130 (1878), affirmed that death by torturous means such as drawing and quartering, public dissection, burning alive, or disembowelment were cruel and unusual. Weems v. United States, 217 U.S. 349 (1910), overturned a punishment called cadena temporal. Trop v. Dulles, 356 U.S. 86 (1958), held that revoking natural born citizenship for a crime was cruel and unusual punishment.
Yes, people point to the outsize top figure, but, if convicted, for a first time CAFA offender breaking into a US government server, the US sentencing guidelines would probably max out around 5 years, with a 2 year sentence probably being average without any major downward or upward departures. I'm just spitballing that without any data to back it up, though, since computing any particular sentencing recommendation does take a lot to work out, and it varies based upon the individual case.
It is not all but impossible. In the last extradition review, conducted by a panel headed by Sir Scott Baker, they found the following: That the US made 130 extradition requests to the UK. That the UK refused 10 of those requests. That the UK submitted 54 extradition requests to the US. The US refused none of them. Of the 120 requests accepted by the UK, 77 were extradited. The rest were either pending in the UK legal system, the person voluntarily went to the US, or the case became moot for other reasons. Of the 54 requests accepted by the US, 38 were extradited. The rest either voluntarily went to the UK or the case became moot for other reasons.
You'll note that none of the UK extradition requests were pending the US legal system. If the standards in the treaty are met, the U.S. Constitution offers little in the way to prevent extradition to the UK. Partly that is because as a treaty, it is part of the Supreme Law of the Land (Article 6, Clause 2), and partly because the US Constitution poses almost no barrier to extradition.
The US extradites its citizens quite often and quite readily. Some countries refuse to extradite their citizens, even if there is a valid extradition treaty (see France and Brazil). So long as there is a valid extradition treaty, and the crime charged satisfies the dual criminality component of those treaties, the US has and will extradite its citizens.
There's a very sane reason why deposits of under $10k in cash is a sign of criminal activity: it is often a sign that someone is trying to avoid the reporting requirements. This is usually done to hide unreported income or as part of a money laundering scheme. Any bank personnel advising people not to cross that limit are subjecting the bank to potential liability and giving their customers bad advice.
Why is it bad advice? By avoiding the reporting requirements, you've just created probably cause to believe that something illegal is going on with that money. In which case, you have just given the U.S. government the ability to freeze the account and seize the money.
If the deposit is from legal sources, it is better to take the time to fill out the reporting forms. It is a hassle, but it is better than the alternative. Even if the deposit is from illegal sources, it is often better to fill out the reporting forms, so long as you can do so without lying, which is another crime.
Well, I know it for Technicolor. Technicolor has already said that, "Similar to MPEG LA, we have also decided not to require licences from content providers for our HEVC technology."
Velos Media has been squishier about, but they have made no moves on content providers, and they have already said, "As it relates to content, we will take our time to fully understand the dynamics of the ecosystem and ensure that our model best supports the advancement and adoption of HEVC technology." So far, they have only been licensing HEVC-enabled devices.
From a licensing standpoint, it is a mess. But no HEVC licensing body is charging a royalty/content distribution free for content that is free to end users. That may change in the future, but this is true as of today.
For content that is free to end users, none of the HEVC licensing bodies charge a royalty/content distribution fee. In general, personal use of HEVC with either software or hardware encoders is free. Unless you're distributing HEVC-encoded videos under a paid scheme, you're not going to pay any patent fees just for encoding videos.
3 Reasons to bother with HEVC: 1. Of the three next gen video codecs, it is the most mature. The number of hardware decoders and encoders for HEVC dwarfs that of VP9. HEVC beats VP9 in both size and quality in many applications, though they are close. AV1's bitstream format hasn't even been frozen yet. 2. The patent situation is a mess, but it can be navigated. Not by most end users, but in general, most personal use of HEVC with x265 or your hardware encoder of choice is royalty free. 3. HEVC has already been adopted as the standard for Ultra HD Blu-ray, Apple is in big on HEVC, and if the patent situation clears, HEVC is already positioned to take over for H.264/AVC1.
But if you're a business... yeah, the patent mess makes you want to run away from it like a dumpster fire.
Trickster owes AC $100 mil in unprovable, but bona fide, debt. AC gives up, forgives $100 mil debt, writes off $100 mil loss on income taxes, issues Trickster 1099-C. Trickster receives 1099-C, has $100 mil in cancellation of debt income. Cancellation of debt income is ordinary income, not capital gains. Unless cancelled debt falls into certain exemptions, Trickster now has a $39,556,169.95 tax bill.
There's a difference between a bona fide debt that you can't enforce because of a defect, say, in the chain of title or in the note itself, or because you waited too long to try to enforce the debt and it became subject to a statute of limitations, and unprovable debt because it isn't bona fide in the first place. If there is no bona fide debt, there's no debt to cancel, so no cancellation of debt income.
And in many cases, because the person having their debt forgiven is insolvent already, they won't have any additional tax due to cancellation of debt. There are a number of exemptions for Cancellation of Debt income, it isn't something that most people have to deal with, and many who do have no additional tax burden.
I think forgiving debt is the right thing to do, and can sometimes return more than continuing to pursue bad debts. If a business is in the business of loaning money, a profitable business can forgive uncollectible debt and have deduct that from its gross ordinary income. If it is profitable, and is paying corporate income taxes, each dollar in debt forgiveness will save $0.35 in taxes it won't have to pay. That's higher than what bad debts go for on the bad paper market.
I've got no problem with these rulings: these loan trusts need to get their act together. They know the law much better than the people they are loaning money to, and have no excuse for not following it.
The real problem is whether the judicial case counts as a debt cancellation under the regulations.
The easy case is when a creditor says, "Ok, you're not going to be able to pay this, your debt is cancelled." The creditor writes off the debt, and the debtor receives debt cancellation income. There's even a form, the 1099-C, Cancellation of Debt, that the creditor is supposed (and under some circumstances, is required) to send to you and the IRS if they cancel a debt.
This is a harder case. The case was a failed proceeding to enforce the debt. This isn't like other judicial situations, where a court issues an order, like in bankruptcy, or a state receivership case, or even a probate case. So the creditor may still believe the debt is valid, but not judicially enforceable. In which case the debt isn't actually cancelled until they stop trying to collect. They can still send her letters asking her to pay the debt, after all - the only thing the court case does is prevent them from using the law to enforcing collection. And the student loan trust is probably required to send a 1099-C if the debt is cancelled, so until they decide to stop trying to collect on it, it isn't cancelled.
And if it is cancelled, there are many ways cancelled debt can be exempted from taxation, the biggest one being insolvency. If you owe more than you own (have more debts than assets), you are insolvent, and the tax code allows you to exempt cancellation of debt income to the extent of your insolvency. So if she has assets of $10,000, and federal student loans of $50,000, even a $31,000 cancellation would be non-taxable because of the extent of her insolvency.
Odds are, she won't have any tax issues because of this, though dealing with any cancellation of debt situation can be worrysome.
No, that isn't that. The U.S. Tax Court is most definitely a court. The U.S. Tax Court is a federal trial court, established under Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, whose jurisdiction largely extends to cases having to do with federal tax matters. Most of the cases it sees deal with the federal income tax, and it is the only forum in which a taxpayer may litigate tax matters with the U.S. Government without having paid the disputed tax in full.
Coal will still be more expensive in the long run because of the higher costs of mitigating the environmental impact of coal. Even putting aside any climate change costs to consider from CO2, you still have sulfur, mercury, and lead to deal with, as well as the direct environmental impacts of coal mining, such as the increased mud and rock slides and flash flooding caused by mountaintop removal. Then you have the health effects of mining to consider, and those costs to workers and the public fisc continue to increase as they age and increased incidence of diseases like black lung, lung cancer, and other terminal illnesses cause them to die.
Even in terns of energy generation, coal is slower to heat up and to cool down, so you can't easily start or stop a coal fired energy plant, the same way you can with a natural gas fueled energy plant.
Coal is a dirty and expensive fuel, and the only thing cheap about it is the price you think you're paying. Because there are all kinds of costs hidden behind that.
Ridiculous. You're just making shit up. There are no health effects of methane leakage.
Re-read what I wrote. Methane leakage isn't just about methane itself: it's also about the VOCs that are also emitted with it. The VOCs have known health effects. Methane leakage is about more than just the methane itself.
But methane can have its own health effects. Ask the people of Porter Ranch, California if they would agree with you that there are no health effects of methane leakage. Most would disagree with you. That's because methane is an asphyxiant, which in high enough concentrations can cause headaches, dizziness, weakness, nausea, vomiting, loss of coordination, and loss of consciousness.
So how come America ever became a manufacturing powerhouse in the first place, if it's natural for manufacturing to always move to wherever the lowest-value labor can be found?
America became a manufacturing powerhouse because the cost of goods and labor was cheap, and the dollar was a weaker currency in comparison to other world currencies. America also had the legal and regulatory frameworks which encouraged innovation, as well as immigration policies that brought in productive workers from other countries to become citizens. But manufacturing's share of the economy has been in decline since 1953, hitting real declines in the late 1970s, going from over 28% of the economy to 11%. A large part of that is because of the increasing productivity of the American manufacturer, which has sextupled over the same period of time. Given the same inputs, a worker in the manufacturing sector today is six times more productive than their 1940's counterpart.
I didn't say that the lowest-value labor will win. I said, "certain kinds of manufacturing will be done where it is cheaper." And those kinds of manufacturing are where the additional costs of transportation and lengthening the supply line can be mitigated, such as low-added-value manufacturing, and manufacturing where there are returns to scale due to other factors (such as affiliated industries or natural resources being present). There are reasons why tech is still made in Silicon Valley and carpets are still made in Dalton, Georgia that have everything to do with geographic influences and nothing to do with the cost of labor.
Who was talking about jobs? I was talking about industry. It's a bad situation for America to depend on foreign industry. If the future of manufacturing is factories full of robots, do you think it's good for America for those factories to be built in China first?
I don't think it's good for America for those factories to be built in China first. But the fact is that many of those factories are being built in America first. Then they are being built in China. Because of spies and stealing of technology. I don't think it's a good idea for America to depend on foreign industry, no matter where they are located. But that does no
Methane from oil and natural gas leaks is the largest source of methane emission. It accounts for 32% of all anthropogenic methane emission. Hydroelectric dams emit only 1.3% of anthropogenic methane emission.
Regardless of whether they are larger per unit of energy consumed, it is in the collection process that they are released.
The EPA has been given plenty of leeway, but also plenty of oversight. Many Supreme Court precedents on the limits of administrative law have had to do with the limits of the authority of the EPA. Congress has had plenty of oversight, and there has been plenty of debate over what the EPA can regulate under the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts.
If Congress wants to curtail the EPA's abilities, all it has to do is pass legislation and get the President to sign it (or pass over his veto). The EPA's reach extends only as far as Congress and the Constitution permits. Anything the EPA criminalizes has to have been authorized in some way by Congress.
There's actually a Supreme Court doctrine called the nondelegation doctrine that says Congress can't give all of its powers away. Last argued in Mistretta v. United States (1989), the Court's last pronouncement was that "this Court has deemed it "constitutionally sufficient" if Congress clearly delineates the general policy, the public agency which is to apply it, and the boundaries of this delegated authority."
That doesn't work for the Clean Air Act. The Act authorizes citizen suits for when the EPA fails to enforce its own regulations. Citizens can sue polluters and even the EPA if they don't enforce it. Cutting off the funds doesn't work - the laws are on the books. The rules have been finalized. Even choosing not to enforce it won't work due to citizen suits being available to enforce the law. What were the words you used? Suck it.
From the court opinion: "The methane rule took effect on August 2, 2016, and required regulated entities to conduct an “initial monitoring survey” to identify leaks by June 3, 2017..."
They were given over 300 days to ensure compliance. Plenty of time to hire any necessary engineers, iron out any kinks, and make sure nothing was wrong before their first reporting deadline. And even if they still had something wrong, they would have had another 30 days to fix the problem before being subject to any penalties.
Trump has the same authority as Obama did to set enforcement priorities. He has already done so for DAPA (deferred action for parents of Americas), and ended it. Trump could also legally deport people currently protected by DACA (deferred action for childhood arrivals). It would just be evil and cruel. Legal, but evil and cruel. Which is why I suspect he hasn't done it.
Slashdot Mirror
Ha ha ha, I made a typo.
Seriously, if we are talking about addiction, that is usually a combination of both physical dependence and psychological dependence.
Adderall does not cause physical dependence, unlike drugs like nicotine or opioids or even alcohol. What does happen is psychological dependence and changes to the brain's dopamine system due to abuse. If amphetamine is abused, drug tolerance develops rapidly, and abusers have to take increasingly larger doses to get high. This can cause long-term changes in the brain's dopamine levels, often causing a withdrawal syndrome.
But this is not what happens when used long-term at therapeutic doses. There's little evidence to suggest that similar long-term changes occur in the brain when used at therapeutic levels. Some people will form psychological dependences on it anyway. But even a psychological dependence does not imply the problems of addiction.
Adderall is addictive, and those at biggest risk are new users and people abusing it recreationally. But if someone is taking it long-term, at therapeutic doses, they are unlikely to exhibit the classic hallmarks of addiction, such as impaired control over the substance, preoccupation with the substance, and continued use despite negative consequences.
Whether to take any medication is never a purely rational, level-headed choice. It is a combination of both the motivations and emotions that we have, and the rational calculus that forms part of our decision making.
Looking at the study itself, the students were given a 30mg dose of Adderall. Therapeutic doses start at 5 mg.
So it doesn't surprise me that the side effects from a 30 mg dose overwhelmed any possible cognitive improvements.
The studies cited that found cognitive improvements also note that there is a dose response-curve, where up to a certain dosage, you see improvements in sustained attention and working memory, and past that working memory takes a dive while sustained attention continues to improve. Until it too begins to decrease.
These aren't wonder drugs. They're drugs. They're substances that have physiological effects on the body. Doses make a difference.
Good comment, but I do have one clarification.
While Ritalin (methylphenidate) is a stimulant, it is not an amphetamine, but instead a phenethylamine. It works differently from amphetamine, since it works primarily as a dopamine reuptake inhibitor, whereas amphetamines increase the activity of neurotransmitters like dopamine. To simplify it, Ritalin works by keeping the brain from removing dopamine, while adderall works by increasing dopamine release. That's part of the reason why some people with ADHD respond better to Ritalin than Adderall, and vice versa.
That's completely incorrect. Don't spread misinformation.
Adderall, and its generic equivalents, are a combination of 25% levoamphetamine and 75% dextroamphetamine salts. They both have the chemical formula C9H13N.
Methamphetamine is a different drug entirely. In its medical form, it is generally sold as dextromethamphetamine hydrochloride, or under the trade name Desoxyn. Its chemical formula is C10H15N.
Both are approved for the treatment of ADHD in the US, but Adderall is much more likely to be prescribed. Under long-term medical use at therapeutic doses, addition is unlikely to occur with Adderall. While methamphetamine is approved for the treatment of ADHD, it is seldom prescribed due to the risks of recreational abuse and addiction associated with it. That said it is a safe and effective treatment for some people when other treatments fail.
Abuse of these drugs is another matter entirely.
But that's the point I'm making. It could just as easily be the other way around. The fact that differences between sexes is cross-cultural proves that differences between sexes are cross-cultural. It does not prove any further fact about that those differences, or their basis. Damore assumes, as do the researchers he cited, that is proof these differences are biological in nature, without regard to their true etiology or even a mechanism of action.
That's not how science works. We all start off with the null hypothesis, that there isn't any significant difference between populations, and that any difference observed is due to sampling or experimental error. And in this case, that means the first hurdle to pass is showing that something is truly cross-cultural. That's really hard to do. Most often, cross-cultural differences simply haven't been studied enough, and across enough cultures, for the effects of the differences in culture to shine through. 40 years ago, blood type effect on personality was thought to be biological in nature, and even recently color preference was thought to be biological. (See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4311615/ for one culture demonstrating it isn't.)
Let's say you pass that hurdle, and have sufficient statistical power to show a real difference. With regards to explaining cross-cultural psychological differences, there are still three possible explanations: biology, biology and culture, or culture. Proving that a cross-cultural difference is biological in nature requires, at the very least, showing a potential mechanism of action. For example, heightened levels of physical aggressiveness in men (compared to women) across cultures is often explained by the effects of testosterone, which does increase aggressive behavior. There is plenty of research to show how individual differences in the biological activity of testosterone show up as cross-cultural psychological differences in amounts of physical aggressive behavior. But even then, that doesn't account for the differing levels of physical aggression among men between cultures. There you can see that culture matters: just because something is biological doesn't mean it is determinative, and in meta-analyses of studies on physical aggressiveness and testosterone, there are wide variations in aggressiveness, meaning that culture is by far the larger effect.
There is a ton of research showing that cross-cultural differences either really aren't as cross-cultural as the original researchers thought, and that the effects of biology on cross-cultural psychological differences are small. If you aren't aware of it, you haven't been looking for it.
Not just Norway: they all do. Take this study published in the Harvard Business Review:
https://hbr.org/2015/12/leading-across-cultures-is-more-complicated-for-women
Men are allowed to to share conclusions; women are expected to guide listeners to conclusions. In not even one country were women allowed to be assertive in the same way as men. And this was a study about leadership positions. One might think there wouldn't be gendered expectations for corporate leadership, but there is.
And this is true for all kinds of examples about assertive behavior among women, not just in terms of leadership, but in negotiation and personal views, assertive women sustain social costs for that behavior.
Then maybe he shouldn't spout out publicly about stuff he doesn't know about. And I'm serious about that. We can't all be experts on everything. It's
I generally don't reply to anonymous cowards, but I'll make an exception.
One of the weakest arguments in the memo was that
"These differences aren’t just socially constructed because:
They’re universal across human cultures"
Something can be socially constructed AND be universal across human cultures. Just because you prove that something is cross-cultural doesn't mean that you've proved a biological origin. Cultures are remarkably similar, and one of the ways that occurs is that men are dicks across all human cultures, and I say that as a man. We are dicks.
The same is true for women: the same factors across cultures punish assertive women. Assuming that is because of biology because it is cross-cultural is assuming your own argument.
He says, "We need to stop assuming that gender gaps imply sexism."
Damore fails to also look at the mounds of research that shows most gender gaps have few other explanations other than sexism.
I was going to write a longer article on how and releasing that memo was so toxic, and a violation of Google's Code of Conduct, especially Section 2:
But then I figured that Google is going to paying lawyers to do that anyway.
I read the memo.
It's sexist.
It assumes its own argument.
It's combative in tone and dismissive in argumentation.
It's toxic for any company.
And to boot, it's wrong.
Actually, that's incorrect. Income is defined in the Internal Revenue Code (aka the IRC, also Title 26 of the United States Code) in 61:
"Except as otherwise provided in this subtitle, gross income means all income from whatever source derived..."
It then goes on to list some included types of income, but expressly does not limit income to those kinds.
Commissioner v. Glenshaw Glass Co., 348 U.S. 426 (1955), holds that all gains except those specifically exempted qualify as income, that income is not limited by source such as by labor or by capital or both, and puts forth the test still used today to decide whether something is income or not. Income is an instance of "undeniable accessions to wealth, clearly realized, and over which the taxpayers have complete dominion."
So someone letting you live in their house for free is not necessarily income. The taxpayer (you) does not have an undeniable accession to wealth, merely an absence of payment. The taxpayer also does not have complete dominion over that, and if gratuitous, may be kicked out at any moment. Someone waiving a fee they normally charge is not income. That also fails the dominion prong, since the taxpayer has no control over it. There are circumstances where those can be income, but they aren't ordinarily income.
A friend giving you an interest-free or below-market interest rate loan isn't income either, but the IRS does have tables for the imputed interest you should charge because people have tried to disguise large gifts as loans. The gift tax is also there to avoid situations where someone tries to avoid the income tax by claiming it was a gift from someone. So the IRS isn't just going to take your word for it, unless it's small, like, less than $10,000, or you can show it doesn't have much of a tax effect.
Tuition waivers haven't been taxed because...*drumroll*... there's a statutory exemption from gross income under IRC 117(d). It has to be at an eligible educational institution. So qualified tuition reductions are one of those "except as otherwise provided in this subtitle."
Given the way arbitration works, if I do a crappy job on today's arbitration - that means less chance that I will be selected again.
True, but it also means that you have an incentive to please repeat players in the arbitration market.
The ONLY way I get the opportunity to serve as arbitrator in a future case, is to play it straight down the middle, decide the case strictly on the facts and the law, and explain myself in a properly written decision.
But is that really true? I'm sure for some categories of disputes, having a reputation for fairness and honesty will ensure repeat business, because both plaintiffs and defendants have an equal chance of needing services. But that isn't true of many contexts, including the mandatory employment arbitration context.
The repeat player effect exists within the employment arbitration context. Whether the repeat player effect is because of repeat player bias is a hard question to answer, but repeat players (employers) do better than one-shotters (employees) in almost every employment arbitration context. And it creates a structural advantage when one side repeatedly goes through a process, so it has built-in expertise versus its opponents who are essentially going through the process for the first time, every time.
I have no problem with arbitration as a dispute resolution method, so long as it is voluntarily agreed to and negotiated between two parties. I've negotiated arbitration clauses in contracts. Outside of a collective bargaining agreement, or the rare employee that can actually negotiate their employment contract, mandatory employment arbitration clauses are disproportionately and unconscionably tilted towards the employer. And the same is true for consumer contracts that have mandatory arbitration clauses. Companies wouldn't be putting these clauses in their contracts if they did not believe they benefited from them. And they do benefit from them.
Don't be daft, of course punishments have been ruled cruel and unusual in the US.
Wilkerson v. Utah, 99 U.S. 130 (1878), affirmed that death by torturous means such as drawing and quartering, public dissection, burning alive, or disembowelment were cruel and unusual.
Weems v. United States, 217 U.S. 349 (1910), overturned a punishment called cadena temporal.
Trop v. Dulles, 356 U.S. 86 (1958), held that revoking natural born citizenship for a crime was cruel and unusual punishment.
Yes, people point to the outsize top figure, but, if convicted, for a first time CAFA offender breaking into a US government server, the US sentencing guidelines would probably max out around 5 years, with a 2 year sentence probably being average without any major downward or upward departures. I'm just spitballing that without any data to back it up, though, since computing any particular sentencing recommendation does take a lot to work out, and it varies based upon the individual case.
It is not all but impossible. In the last extradition review, conducted by a panel headed by Sir Scott Baker, they found the following:
That the US made 130 extradition requests to the UK.
That the UK refused 10 of those requests.
That the UK submitted 54 extradition requests to the US.
The US refused none of them.
Of the 120 requests accepted by the UK, 77 were extradited. The rest were either pending in the UK legal system, the person voluntarily went to the US, or the case became moot for other reasons.
Of the 54 requests accepted by the US, 38 were extradited. The rest either voluntarily went to the UK or the case became moot for other reasons.
You'll note that none of the UK extradition requests were pending the US legal system. If the standards in the treaty are met, the U.S. Constitution offers little in the way to prevent extradition to the UK. Partly that is because as a treaty, it is part of the Supreme Law of the Land (Article 6, Clause 2), and partly because the US Constitution poses almost no barrier to extradition.
The US extradites its citizens quite often and quite readily. Some countries refuse to extradite their citizens, even if there is a valid extradition treaty (see France and Brazil). So long as there is a valid extradition treaty, and the crime charged satisfies the dual criminality component of those treaties, the US has and will extradite its citizens.
There's a very sane reason why deposits of under $10k in cash is a sign of criminal activity: it is often a sign that someone is trying to avoid the reporting requirements. This is usually done to hide unreported income or as part of a money laundering scheme. Any bank personnel advising people not to cross that limit are subjecting the bank to potential liability and giving their customers bad advice.
Why is it bad advice? By avoiding the reporting requirements, you've just created probably cause to believe that something illegal is going on with that money. In which case, you have just given the U.S. government the ability to freeze the account and seize the money.
If the deposit is from legal sources, it is better to take the time to fill out the reporting forms. It is a hassle, but it is better than the alternative.
Even if the deposit is from illegal sources, it is often better to fill out the reporting forms, so long as you can do so without lying, which is another crime.
Well, I know it for Technicolor.
Technicolor has already said that, "Similar to MPEG LA, we have also decided not to require licences from content providers for our HEVC technology."
Velos Media has been squishier about, but they have made no moves on content providers, and they have already said, "As it relates to content, we will take our time to fully understand the dynamics of the ecosystem and ensure that our model best supports the advancement and adoption of HEVC technology." So far, they have only been licensing HEVC-enabled devices.
From a licensing standpoint, it is a mess. But no HEVC licensing body is charging a royalty/content distribution free for content that is free to end users. That may change in the future, but this is true as of today.
For content that is free to end users, none of the HEVC licensing bodies charge a royalty/content distribution fee.
In general, personal use of HEVC with either software or hardware encoders is free.
Unless you're distributing HEVC-encoded videos under a paid scheme, you're not going to pay any patent fees just for encoding videos.
3 Reasons to bother with HEVC:
1. Of the three next gen video codecs, it is the most mature. The number of hardware decoders and encoders for HEVC dwarfs that of VP9. HEVC beats VP9 in both size and quality in many applications, though they are close. AV1's bitstream format hasn't even been frozen yet.
2. The patent situation is a mess, but it can be navigated. Not by most end users, but in general, most personal use of HEVC with x265 or your hardware encoder of choice is royalty free.
3. HEVC has already been adopted as the standard for Ultra HD Blu-ray, Apple is in big on HEVC, and if the patent situation clears, HEVC is already positioned to take over for H.264/AVC1.
But if you're a business... yeah, the patent mess makes you want to run away from it like a dumpster fire.
Trickster owes AC $100 mil in unprovable, but bona fide, debt. AC gives up, forgives $100 mil debt, writes off $100 mil loss on income taxes, issues Trickster 1099-C. Trickster receives 1099-C, has $100 mil in cancellation of debt income. Cancellation of debt income is ordinary income, not capital gains. Unless cancelled debt falls into certain exemptions, Trickster now has a $39,556,169.95 tax bill.
There's a difference between a bona fide debt that you can't enforce because of a defect, say, in the chain of title or in the note itself, or because you waited too long to try to enforce the debt and it became subject to a statute of limitations, and unprovable debt because it isn't bona fide in the first place. If there is no bona fide debt, there's no debt to cancel, so no cancellation of debt income.
And in many cases, because the person having their debt forgiven is insolvent already, they won't have any additional tax due to cancellation of debt. There are a number of exemptions for Cancellation of Debt income, it isn't something that most people have to deal with, and many who do have no additional tax burden.
Read up on what the IRS itself says: Publication 4681, Canceled Debts, Foreclosures, Repossessions, and Abandonments (for Individuals).
I think forgiving debt is the right thing to do, and can sometimes return more than continuing to pursue bad debts. If a business is in the business of loaning money, a profitable business can forgive uncollectible debt and have deduct that from its gross ordinary income. If it is profitable, and is paying corporate income taxes, each dollar in debt forgiveness will save $0.35 in taxes it won't have to pay. That's higher than what bad debts go for on the bad paper market.
I've got no problem with these rulings: these loan trusts need to get their act together. They know the law much better than the people they are loaning money to, and have no excuse for not following it.
The real problem is whether the judicial case counts as a debt cancellation under the regulations.
The easy case is when a creditor says, "Ok, you're not going to be able to pay this, your debt is cancelled." The creditor writes off the debt, and the debtor receives debt cancellation income. There's even a form, the 1099-C, Cancellation of Debt, that the creditor is supposed (and under some circumstances, is required) to send to you and the IRS if they cancel a debt.
This is a harder case. The case was a failed proceeding to enforce the debt. This isn't like other judicial situations, where a court issues an order, like in bankruptcy, or a state receivership case, or even a probate case. So the creditor may still believe the debt is valid, but not judicially enforceable. In which case the debt isn't actually cancelled until they stop trying to collect. They can still send her letters asking her to pay the debt, after all - the only thing the court case does is prevent them from using the law to enforcing collection. And the student loan trust is probably required to send a 1099-C if the debt is cancelled, so until they decide to stop trying to collect on it, it isn't cancelled.
And if it is cancelled, there are many ways cancelled debt can be exempted from taxation, the biggest one being insolvency. If you owe more than you own (have more debts than assets), you are insolvent, and the tax code allows you to exempt cancellation of debt income to the extent of your insolvency. So if she has assets of $10,000, and federal student loans of $50,000, even a $31,000 cancellation would be non-taxable because of the extent of her insolvency.
Odds are, she won't have any tax issues because of this, though dealing with any cancellation of debt situation can be worrysome.
No, that isn't that. The U.S. Tax Court is most definitely a court. The U.S. Tax Court is a federal trial court, established under Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, whose jurisdiction largely extends to cases having to do with federal tax matters. Most of the cases it sees deal with the federal income tax, and it is the only forum in which a taxpayer may litigate tax matters with the U.S. Government without having paid the disputed tax in full.
Coal will still be more expensive in the long run because of the higher costs of mitigating the environmental impact of coal. Even putting aside any climate change costs to consider from CO2, you still have sulfur, mercury, and lead to deal with, as well as the direct environmental impacts of coal mining, such as the increased mud and rock slides and flash flooding caused by mountaintop removal. Then you have the health effects of mining to consider, and those costs to workers and the public fisc continue to increase as they age and increased incidence of diseases like black lung, lung cancer, and other terminal illnesses cause them to die.
Even in terns of energy generation, coal is slower to heat up and to cool down, so you can't easily start or stop a coal fired energy plant, the same way you can with a natural gas fueled energy plant.
Coal is a dirty and expensive fuel, and the only thing cheap about it is the price you think you're paying. Because there are all kinds of costs hidden behind that.
Ridiculous. You're just making shit up. There are no health effects of methane leakage.
Re-read what I wrote. Methane leakage isn't just about methane itself: it's also about the VOCs that are also emitted with it. The VOCs have known health effects. Methane leakage is about more than just the methane itself.
But methane can have its own health effects. Ask the people of Porter Ranch, California if they would agree with you that there are no health effects of methane leakage. Most would disagree with you. That's because methane is an asphyxiant, which in high enough concentrations can cause headaches, dizziness, weakness, nausea, vomiting, loss of coordination, and loss of consciousness.
So how come America ever became a manufacturing powerhouse in the first place, if it's natural for manufacturing to always move to wherever the lowest-value labor can be found?
America became a manufacturing powerhouse because the cost of goods and labor was cheap, and the dollar was a weaker currency in comparison to other world currencies. America also had the legal and regulatory frameworks which encouraged innovation, as well as immigration policies that brought in productive workers from other countries to become citizens. But manufacturing's share of the economy has been in decline since 1953, hitting real declines in the late 1970s, going from over 28% of the economy to 11%. A large part of that is because of the increasing productivity of the American manufacturer, which has sextupled over the same period of time. Given the same inputs, a worker in the manufacturing sector today is six times more productive than their 1940's counterpart.
I didn't say that the lowest-value labor will win. I said, "certain kinds of manufacturing will be done where it is cheaper." And those kinds of manufacturing are where the additional costs of transportation and lengthening the supply line can be mitigated, such as low-added-value manufacturing, and manufacturing where there are returns to scale due to other factors (such as affiliated industries or natural resources being present). There are reasons why tech is still made in Silicon Valley and carpets are still made in Dalton, Georgia that have everything to do with geographic influences and nothing to do with the cost of labor.
Who was talking about jobs? I was talking about industry. It's a bad situation for America to depend on foreign industry. If the future of manufacturing is factories full of robots, do you think it's good for America for those factories to be built in China first?
I don't think it's good for America for those factories to be built in China first. But the fact is that many of those factories are being built in America first. Then they are being built in China. Because of spies and stealing of technology. I don't think it's a good idea for America to depend on foreign industry, no matter where they are located. But that does no
Read the regulation: 81 Fed. Reg. 35,824. Page 35,838.
Methane from oil and natural gas leaks is the largest source of methane emission. It accounts for 32% of all anthropogenic methane emission.
Hydroelectric dams emit only 1.3% of anthropogenic methane emission.
Regardless of whether they are larger per unit of energy consumed, it is in the collection process that they are released.
The EPA has been given plenty of leeway, but also plenty of oversight. Many Supreme Court precedents on the limits of administrative law have had to do with the limits of the authority of the EPA. Congress has had plenty of oversight, and there has been plenty of debate over what the EPA can regulate under the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts.
If Congress wants to curtail the EPA's abilities, all it has to do is pass legislation and get the President to sign it (or pass over his veto). The EPA's reach extends only as far as Congress and the Constitution permits. Anything the EPA criminalizes has to have been authorized in some way by Congress.
There's actually a Supreme Court doctrine called the nondelegation doctrine that says Congress can't give all of its powers away. Last argued in Mistretta v. United States (1989), the Court's last pronouncement was that "this Court has deemed it "constitutionally sufficient" if Congress clearly delineates the general policy, the public agency which is to apply it, and the boundaries of this delegated authority."
That doesn't work for the Clean Air Act.
The Act authorizes citizen suits for when the EPA fails to enforce its own regulations.
Citizens can sue polluters and even the EPA if they don't enforce it.
Cutting off the funds doesn't work - the laws are on the books. The rules have been finalized.
Even choosing not to enforce it won't work due to citizen suits being available to enforce the law.
What were the words you used? Suck it.
From the court opinion:
"The methane rule took effect on August 2, 2016, and required regulated entities to conduct an “initial monitoring survey” to identify leaks by June 3, 2017..."
They were given over 300 days to ensure compliance. Plenty of time to hire any necessary engineers, iron out any kinks, and make sure nothing was wrong before their first reporting deadline. And even if they still had something wrong, they would have had another 30 days to fix the problem before being subject to any penalties.
Trump has the same authority as Obama did to set enforcement priorities.
He has already done so for DAPA (deferred action for parents of Americas), and ended it.
Trump could also legally deport people currently protected by DACA (deferred action for childhood arrivals).
It would just be evil and cruel. Legal, but evil and cruel.
Which is why I suspect he hasn't done it.