The thing about systemic biases is that it's entirely possible that no one knows what, specifically, is the problem.
ok, well find out then. I'm not going to help you fight spectres. If you want a research grant I can probably support that.
The only thing I would ask is that you do the same thing I do, which is to agree that the imbalance indicates the potential presence of systemic bias, and be open-minded about causes and solutions. Don't just reject out of hand that there may be a legitimate problem, merely because no one can precisely articulate its cause.
In this example, we have a hiring process that was established around male behavioral norms, in an era when this made sense because only men were in the workplace. As women were introduced, no one thought to re-examine the process to decide if was applicable to them as well. In some jobs, skill at negotiation is a key job requirement and it actually makes sense to pay those who are more aggressive and better at it more money. But in many jobs it's not, yet the process is still applied.
This affects men too. Given a job where negotiation is not a required or relevant skill we see men who are better at negotiation being paid more then men who were not.
Is that fair? Is this also a problem that society needs to fix?
It's not fair, and seems worthwhile to fix.
Is this really a systemic bias against women after all? since it affects a lot of men too, while some women who are aggressive negotiators are doing fine.
If it affects 90% of women and 10% of men, yes, it's a systemic bias against women. Actually, if it affects 51% of women and 49% of men, it's a systemic bias against women, by definition. In the 51/49 situation it's probably not a bias that is significant enough to bother addressing, but it is a bias.
Should we be looking for 'equal pay for women' or should be we looking for 'equal pay regardless of how well you negotiate' ?
Why not both? Though the former seems like a larger issue.
As a result of this observation, some employers have abandoned the salary negotiation process, and instead just calculate a take-it-or-leave-it offer based on experience and qualifications.
Ignoring for a moment the male/female discussion, that's a stupid way to do business.
Meh. The employee can say "no" and go elsewhere. If the employee is desirable enough that they can negotiate, they are desirable enough that the employer is going to try to make a good offer. This is about as likely to work for the employee as against.
"But also, in general, any group that's been discriminated against becomes automatically the smart hire, because they have to be "twice as good to go half as far"
Simply astoundingly stupid.
Astoundingly obvious, you mean. If you have two people who have risen to a given level, and one of them did it by swimming upstream against discrimination while the other didn't have to deal with that, clearly the former is better.
I think you're missing the point. If there's something systemic that is preventing women from breaking into directing
Then point to that specific thing instead of making vague allusions. If there is a real problem, most of us are willing to help.
The thing about systemic biases is that it's entirely possible that no one knows what, specifically, is the problem. Systemic biases can be deeply buried in common processes that no one realizes are favoring one type of person over another, often due to the way processes interact with characteristics of the categories of people.
One of my favorite examples is observed variation in salary. Even when controlling for every factor that researchers could think of, and even when HR departments are doing their dead level best to ensure pay equity, we see women in professional positions getting paid less than their male counterparts. Finally, some researchers noticed that part of the typical professional hiring process was salary negotiation, and wondered if perhaps women didn't negotiate as hard, or if they negotiated less effectively. That led to a series of studies that found that (a) women generally don't negotiate as aggressively as their male counterparts, and (b) women who do negotiate aggressively are more effective at it than their male counterparts. Further studies delved into why women negotiated less aggressively and decided it's probably due to the cultural expectations of "niceness" and non-confrontationalism that women are raised with... and maybe even due to some inherent genetic bias in those directions.
In this example, we have a hiring process that was established around male behavioral norms, in an era when this made sense because only men were in the workplace. As women were introduced, no one thought to re-examine the process to decide if was applicable to them as well. In some jobs, skill at negotiation is a key job requirement and it actually makes sense to pay those who are more aggressive and better at it more money. But in many jobs it's not, yet the process is still applied.
As a result of this observation, some employers have abandoned the salary negotiation process, and instead just calculate a take-it-or-leave-it offer based on experience and qualifications. This actually turns out to eliminate another systemic bias that lowers female pay, the salary history. Traditionally, employers ask for salary history and use that to choose a starting point for negotiation. Since women were typically paid less than men at their previous jobs, this downward bias is carried forward.
Note that this is an example of a hidden, systemic bias that was uncovered and is now understood. But systemic biases can stay hidden for a very long time. They can be subtle and very hard to spot. The existence of bias is often very easy to spot, even when the reasons are not: Just look at outcome equality. If outcomes are unequal, there must be some reason.
We're not really disagreeing. I said "...and I don't know how to...", you said "...you're not capable of..."
True. I was drawing that distinction. If all you're capable of is assembling pre-assembled blocks, then you're not much of a programmer. I draw that distinction because there are lots of so-called programmers out there that aren't capable of much more, and lament that they have a hard time finding a job.
If I'm a programmer, and I don't know how to make an LZW compression library, I can still be a good programmer.
If you're a programmer and you're not capable of understanding LZW compression if/when you need to, and writing a good library for it, given a few weeks, you're not a good programmer.
Of course, if you actually do such a thing on your employer's time, you're probably also not a programmer many people want to employ, unless there are really good reasons that LZW compression is needed and no available library will do the job.
a) A real coder would brag about "16k RAM" (or less). 48K was much later on.
Meh. I worked on smart card chips in the mid '90s with 256 bytes of RAM. That's right, one quarter of one kilobyte. That was working space, though -- variables; the code was in and executed from ROM or EEPROM (of which there was 8 kB and 1 kB, respectively). The call stack was in three dedicated registers, so you didn't have to waste any RAM on storing return addresses, but you were also limited to three calls deep. The guys who'd been around for a while told me about the joys of the previous chip, which had only 64 bytes of RAM, and only one stack register.
I'll bet my house averages three Amazon package deliveries per day, six days per week.
Do you buy bread - by the individual slice?
You do more per week than I can even remember. You must do more in a month than I've done in total.
There are five working adults living in my house, all using my Prime account. And, yes, we buy lots of groceries on Amazon, as well as clothing, electronics, sporting goods, auto parts... you name it. Other than perishables, we buy pretty much everything online, and most of it from Amazon, because of the combination of decent prices, good service and fast/cheap shipping.
Unfortunately competition is on the way out and monopolies are what we're heading for. And if I only have the choice between a corporate monopoly and a state monopoly, I choose the latter.
I demolished your argument so now you set up a strawman to knock down. Man up and get some intellectual honesty.
If Amazon offered Prime without it, at a savings of $20 or $30 or more, fuck yeah, I'd sign up for that "Prime Lite".
Which is exactly why they don't. They sign you up for something you want and then try to get you hooked on things you didn't think you wanted.
I suppose. $99 or $119, or even more, is worth it to me for the shipping. I'll bet my house averages three Amazon package deliveries per day, six days per week. We absolutely get our money's worth out of it. But I really have no interest in their video services. I've looked a handful of times and never found anything interesting. And even if it were interesting, it doesn't work very well on Chromecast, which means I would only use it on computer or mobile device screens. Meh.
Both A and B were spinning clockwise from the time they were entangled, there is no "change" involved, just the fact that measuring the spin of A lets you also know the spin of B.
Nit: They have opposite spin, not the same spin.
You're citing the "hidden variable" theory, which has been definitively disproven. An oversimplified-to-the-point-of-being-wrong explanation: There are multiple possible axes of measurement and it's impossible for the two particles to have opposite spin in all of them. Yet when we measure one particle in one axis, then measure the other in the same axis, we find that they always have opposite spin, regardless of which axis we picked.
Because that's a secondary concern. For the public sector, the product IS the main concern. Providing one that can fulfill the role it has to fill perfectly is the goal. Cost is secondary. For the private sector, the product only has to be good enough to fulfill the specs, what matters is doing it with as much profit as possible.
This is flatly untrue, and it's untrue for exactly the same reason that Marx's value theory of labor is wrong: It ignores the value of information or, equivalently, it presumes that all players have exactly the same information and knowledge. I'll grant that this was actually true for most of human existence, but it hasn't been true since well before Karl Marx was born.
The reality is that knowledge is never equal, and the competitor that develops more and better knowledge during their production process will be able to produce the same good (or perhaps an adequate good -- sometimes an important application of knowledge is to avoid spending on unnecessary qualities) for a lower cost. This means that incentives for knowledge creation are incredibly important. Public organizations almost never have the same incentives to develop new knowledge that enables production at lower cost, and therefore they don't. This is true even when the public and private organizations produce exactly the same thing.
I find it baffling that people go back to these tired arguments, since we as a species have conducted an almost century-long, massive scale (though it has shrunk considerably of late) experiment in private vs public ownership of productive capacity, and the results of that experiment have been incredibly one-sided.
Competitive private ownership consistently generates goods and services that are both dramatically higher in quality and dramatically lower in price. There are exceptions in cases of monopoly (natural or otherwise) which eliminates the competitive element and removes the incentive for knowledge creation, but it is consistently true in every other situation.
Translated: SpaceX thought they needed to charge a premium to deal with bureaucracy but wildly underestimated just how much bureaucracy is required to interact with a multi multi billion dollar internationally operated property.
Not really. SpaceX were cheap only if you ignore the truckload of money that NASA paid them to develop their rockets and the fact that NASA bought 12 flights to carry supplies to the ISS, but the first two were basically test launches with very light payloads (CRS-1 and CRS-2).
SpaceX was only expensive if you can't do simple arithmetic.
For the first round of 20 flights, SpaceX is 20 * ($262.6M - $152.1M) = $2.2B cheaper than ULA. Subtracting out the $454M up-front investment, that still leaves a net savings of $1.75B. Even if you consider the time-value of the money by adding, say, 6% compound interest on the initial outlay all the way through 2020 (which is ridiculous), NASA will still have saved $1.18B vs ULA. And that's assuming ULA didn't get any development funding, which is false since both Boeing and Lockheed Martin built their spacegoing capability largely on NASA dollars, mostly under the old cost plus model (vastly more expensive).
NASA's own analysis looks even better for SpaceX, estimating the cost savings of launch system development alone (not considering operational savings) at over $3.5B. Of course, they were comparing to their traditional model.
And, frankly, continuing to undercut the competition by such a large margin would just be bad business. If your price is 42% lower than your nearest competitor's -- for the same quality of service, etc. -- you're leaving money on the table. Moreover, since NASA refuses to contract only a single supplier, it's not necessary to beat everyone, only to beat enough of them to stay in the group of contract recipients. This higher price will provide more capital to fund Musk's real goal: building a Mars transport system. Or to generate larger returns for its investors, which is totally fair since they put up as much as NASA did, and while we don't know how much they've taken out (if any), it can't be very much so far. Certainly far less than NASA's "profit" as compared to other launch options. But I think most of it will go into funding the Mars plans.
Usually, when you see a private enterprise offering something cheaper, you also lose an aspect the public provider takes into account that the private one doesn't give a fuck about.
It's the other way around. It's the public provider that doesn't care about an aspect, and that aspect is cost-efficiency.
Karen, even if it's not your intent, you're coming across like an insecure bully. WANNA BET???? HMMMM????? YOU MUST BE WRONG IF YOU WON'T BET!!!
It's foolish to trust the predictions of a pundit (or a fund manager) who won't commit their own money. Not because having skin in the game changes the probability that they are right, but because the lack of it demonstrates that they don't really believe their own words, and if they don't, why should anyone else?
Since you clearly don't believe your own predictions, why should anyone else believe you?
is Trump's administration denying more requests a good thing because they're denying bad requests or a bad thing because they're making so many outlandish requests. No real telling since it's a secret court.
Well, only one of the 11 FISA judges has been appointed since Trump took office, and Trump and his administration had no control over the choice -- appointments are made by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, with no executive or Congressional oversight, review or even input. Chief Justice Roberts has appointed all 11 of the current FISA judges. So, it's safe to say that the composition of the court hasn't changed with the administration.
What has changed is the leadership of the DoJ. So it seems clear that what has changed is the nature of the requests -- or possibly the number, but it would require a massive increase in number of requests to cause this change. My money is on the nature of the requests.
OTOH, the court rejected nine in 2016, the largest number in any year (until 2017). From 1979 to 2015, there were 12 rejections, in 2016 there were nine, in 2017 there were 26. So the change seems to predate Trump, a little.
That is, I'm not obligated to show you tolerance because I'm a moral person, rather, I'm obligated to show you tolerance if I'd like you to show me tolerance -- and to show it to others, too, because what goes around comes around.
The problem with tolerance is the moving of the goalpost. Tolerance used to mean "live and let live", now it's used to mean "celebrate & embrace".
Nonsense. Sure, people might ask you to celebrate and embrace, but you're not going to be considered intolerant for failing to do so, not by anyone remotely reasonable, and if someone does you should feel fully justified in telling them that they have broken the tolerance peace treaty by demanding that you express positive support for something you don't agree with. Of course, this assumes that you're quietly failing to celebrate and embrace -- if you're openly criticizing or especially if you're trying to stop them, then you are being intolerant and deserve to be labeled as such.
Note, however, that there are some subtleties here. For example, though we're not fans of gay marriage[*], when my wife and I attended the marriage of my brother-in-law to his husband, we celebrated and embraced it. I offered to be their wedding photographer, and my wife toasted them. We were celebrating and embracing their happiness, not gay marriage. Both of them understood and respected the nuances of this position, and were pleased we were there.
.
[*] I predicted 30 years ago that the US courts would force it and that attempts to define legal marriage as between a man and a woman were doomed. My suggested solution was civil unions for everyone, thereby removing government from marriage and effectively redefining it as a purely religious and/or cultural ceremony. That would have ensured legal equality for heterosexual and homosexual partnerships, but allowed church and cultural groups to retain the definition of marriage that they preferred (and allowed other churches and other cultural groups to redefine it as they saw fit).
Slashdot Mirror
The thing about systemic biases is that it's entirely possible that no one knows what, specifically, is the problem.
ok, well find out then. I'm not going to help you fight spectres. If you want a research grant I can probably support that.
The only thing I would ask is that you do the same thing I do, which is to agree that the imbalance indicates the potential presence of systemic bias, and be open-minded about causes and solutions. Don't just reject out of hand that there may be a legitimate problem, merely because no one can precisely articulate its cause.
In this example, we have a hiring process that was established around male behavioral norms, in an era when this made sense because only men were in the workplace. As women were introduced, no one thought to re-examine the process to decide if was applicable to them as well. In some jobs, skill at negotiation is a key job requirement and it actually makes sense to pay those who are more aggressive and better at it more money. But in many jobs it's not, yet the process is still applied.
This affects men too. Given a job where negotiation is not a required or relevant skill we see men who are better at negotiation being paid more then men who were not.
Is that fair? Is this also a problem that society needs to fix?
It's not fair, and seems worthwhile to fix.
Is this really a systemic bias against women after all? since it affects a lot of men too, while some women who are aggressive negotiators are doing fine.
If it affects 90% of women and 10% of men, yes, it's a systemic bias against women. Actually, if it affects 51% of women and 49% of men, it's a systemic bias against women, by definition. In the 51/49 situation it's probably not a bias that is significant enough to bother addressing, but it is a bias.
Should we be looking for 'equal pay for women' or should be we looking for 'equal pay regardless of how well you negotiate' ?
Why not both? Though the former seems like a larger issue.
As a result of this observation, some employers have abandoned the salary negotiation process, and instead just calculate a take-it-or-leave-it offer based on experience and qualifications.
Ignoring for a moment the male/female discussion, that's a stupid way to do business.
Why?
Meh. The employee can say "no" and go elsewhere. If the employee is desirable enough that they can negotiate, they are desirable enough that the employer is going to try to make a good offer. This is about as likely to work for the employee as against.
"But also, in general, any group that's been discriminated against becomes automatically the smart hire, because they have to be "twice as good to go half as far" Simply astoundingly stupid.
Astoundingly obvious, you mean. If you have two people who have risen to a given level, and one of them did it by swimming upstream against discrimination while the other didn't have to deal with that, clearly the former is better.
I think you're missing the point. If there's something systemic that is preventing women from breaking into directing
Then point to that specific thing instead of making vague allusions. If there is a real problem, most of us are willing to help.
The thing about systemic biases is that it's entirely possible that no one knows what, specifically, is the problem. Systemic biases can be deeply buried in common processes that no one realizes are favoring one type of person over another, often due to the way processes interact with characteristics of the categories of people.
One of my favorite examples is observed variation in salary. Even when controlling for every factor that researchers could think of, and even when HR departments are doing their dead level best to ensure pay equity, we see women in professional positions getting paid less than their male counterparts. Finally, some researchers noticed that part of the typical professional hiring process was salary negotiation, and wondered if perhaps women didn't negotiate as hard, or if they negotiated less effectively. That led to a series of studies that found that (a) women generally don't negotiate as aggressively as their male counterparts, and (b) women who do negotiate aggressively are more effective at it than their male counterparts. Further studies delved into why women negotiated less aggressively and decided it's probably due to the cultural expectations of "niceness" and non-confrontationalism that women are raised with... and maybe even due to some inherent genetic bias in those directions.
In this example, we have a hiring process that was established around male behavioral norms, in an era when this made sense because only men were in the workplace. As women were introduced, no one thought to re-examine the process to decide if was applicable to them as well. In some jobs, skill at negotiation is a key job requirement and it actually makes sense to pay those who are more aggressive and better at it more money. But in many jobs it's not, yet the process is still applied.
As a result of this observation, some employers have abandoned the salary negotiation process, and instead just calculate a take-it-or-leave-it offer based on experience and qualifications. This actually turns out to eliminate another systemic bias that lowers female pay, the salary history. Traditionally, employers ask for salary history and use that to choose a starting point for negotiation. Since women were typically paid less than men at their previous jobs, this downward bias is carried forward.
Note that this is an example of a hidden, systemic bias that was uncovered and is now understood. But systemic biases can stay hidden for a very long time. They can be subtle and very hard to spot. The existence of bias is often very easy to spot, even when the reasons are not: Just look at outcome equality. If outcomes are unequal, there must be some reason.
Which male directors specially were selected in part because of their sex? Please elaborate.
I think you don't understand what "systemic" means.
We're not really disagreeing. I said "...and I don't know how to...", you said "...you're not capable of..."
True. I was drawing that distinction. If all you're capable of is assembling pre-assembled blocks, then you're not much of a programmer. I draw that distinction because there are lots of so-called programmers out there that aren't capable of much more, and lament that they have a hard time finding a job.
If I'm a programmer, and I don't know how to make an LZW compression library, I can still be a good programmer.
If you're a programmer and you're not capable of understanding LZW compression if/when you need to, and writing a good library for it, given a few weeks, you're not a good programmer.
Of course, if you actually do such a thing on your employer's time, you're probably also not a programmer many people want to employ, unless there are really good reasons that LZW compression is needed and no available library will do the job.
a) A real coder would brag about "16k RAM" (or less). 48K was much later on.
Meh. I worked on smart card chips in the mid '90s with 256 bytes of RAM. That's right, one quarter of one kilobyte. That was working space, though -- variables; the code was in and executed from ROM or EEPROM (of which there was 8 kB and 1 kB, respectively). The call stack was in three dedicated registers, so you didn't have to waste any RAM on storing return addresses, but you were also limited to three calls deep. The guys who'd been around for a while told me about the joys of the previous chip, which had only 64 bytes of RAM, and only one stack register.
"Ending" a war which has effectively been over for 70 years is a symbolic gesture, but little more than that.
Have you been to the DMZ? The war has been on hold, but hasn't been over. Both sides are armed to the teeth and serious as shit there.
If he had done this in England, would it still have counted as being in the passenger seat?
He did it on the M1, near Hempel Hempstead, England.
Do you buy bread - by the individual slice?
You do more per week than I can even remember. You must do more in a month than I've done in total.
There are five working adults living in my house, all using my Prime account. And, yes, we buy lots of groceries on Amazon, as well as clothing, electronics, sporting goods, auto parts... you name it. Other than perishables, we buy pretty much everything online, and most of it from Amazon, because of the combination of decent prices, good service and fast/cheap shipping.
Unfortunately competition is on the way out and monopolies are what we're heading for. And if I only have the choice between a corporate monopoly and a state monopoly, I choose the latter.
I demolished your argument so now you set up a strawman to knock down. Man up and get some intellectual honesty.
If Amazon offered Prime without it, at a savings of $20 or $30 or more, fuck yeah, I'd sign up for that "Prime Lite".
Which is exactly why they don't. They sign you up for something you want and then try to get you hooked on things you didn't think you wanted.
I suppose. $99 or $119, or even more, is worth it to me for the shipping. I'll bet my house averages three Amazon package deliveries per day, six days per week. We absolutely get our money's worth out of it. But I really have no interest in their video services. I've looked a handful of times and never found anything interesting. And even if it were interesting, it doesn't work very well on Chromecast, which means I would only use it on computer or mobile device screens. Meh.
Both A and B were spinning clockwise from the time they were entangled, there is no "change" involved, just the fact that measuring the spin of A lets you also know the spin of B.
Nit: They have opposite spin, not the same spin.
You're citing the "hidden variable" theory, which has been definitively disproven. An oversimplified-to-the-point-of-being-wrong explanation: There are multiple possible axes of measurement and it's impossible for the two particles to have opposite spin in all of them. Yet when we measure one particle in one axis, then measure the other in the same axis, we find that they always have opposite spin, regardless of which axis we picked.
Because that's a secondary concern. For the public sector, the product IS the main concern. Providing one that can fulfill the role it has to fill perfectly is the goal. Cost is secondary. For the private sector, the product only has to be good enough to fulfill the specs, what matters is doing it with as much profit as possible.
This is flatly untrue, and it's untrue for exactly the same reason that Marx's value theory of labor is wrong: It ignores the value of information or, equivalently, it presumes that all players have exactly the same information and knowledge. I'll grant that this was actually true for most of human existence, but it hasn't been true since well before Karl Marx was born.
The reality is that knowledge is never equal, and the competitor that develops more and better knowledge during their production process will be able to produce the same good (or perhaps an adequate good -- sometimes an important application of knowledge is to avoid spending on unnecessary qualities) for a lower cost. This means that incentives for knowledge creation are incredibly important. Public organizations almost never have the same incentives to develop new knowledge that enables production at lower cost, and therefore they don't. This is true even when the public and private organizations produce exactly the same thing.
I find it baffling that people go back to these tired arguments, since we as a species have conducted an almost century-long, massive scale (though it has shrunk considerably of late) experiment in private vs public ownership of productive capacity, and the results of that experiment have been incredibly one-sided.
Competitive private ownership consistently generates goods and services that are both dramatically higher in quality and dramatically lower in price. There are exceptions in cases of monopoly (natural or otherwise) which eliminates the competitive element and removes the incentive for knowledge creation, but it is consistently true in every other situation.
Translated: SpaceX thought they needed to charge a premium to deal with bureaucracy but wildly underestimated just how much bureaucracy is required to interact with a multi multi billion dollar internationally operated property.
Not really. SpaceX were cheap only if you ignore the truckload of money that NASA paid them to develop their rockets and the fact that NASA bought 12 flights to carry supplies to the ISS, but the first two were basically test launches with very light payloads (CRS-1 and CRS-2).
SpaceX was only expensive if you can't do simple arithmetic.
For the first round of 20 flights, SpaceX is 20 * ($262.6M - $152.1M) = $2.2B cheaper than ULA. Subtracting out the $454M up-front investment, that still leaves a net savings of $1.75B. Even if you consider the time-value of the money by adding, say, 6% compound interest on the initial outlay all the way through 2020 (which is ridiculous), NASA will still have saved $1.18B vs ULA. And that's assuming ULA didn't get any development funding, which is false since both Boeing and Lockheed Martin built their spacegoing capability largely on NASA dollars, mostly under the old cost plus model (vastly more expensive).
NASA's own analysis looks even better for SpaceX, estimating the cost savings of launch system development alone (not considering operational savings) at over $3.5B. Of course, they were comparing to their traditional model.
And, frankly, continuing to undercut the competition by such a large margin would just be bad business. If your price is 42% lower than your nearest competitor's -- for the same quality of service, etc. -- you're leaving money on the table. Moreover, since NASA refuses to contract only a single supplier, it's not necessary to beat everyone, only to beat enough of them to stay in the group of contract recipients. This higher price will provide more capital to fund Musk's real goal: building a Mars transport system. Or to generate larger returns for its investors, which is totally fair since they put up as much as NASA did, and while we don't know how much they've taken out (if any), it can't be very much so far. Certainly far less than NASA's "profit" as compared to other launch options. But I think most of it will go into funding the Mars plans.
Usually, when you see a private enterprise offering something cheaper, you also lose an aspect the public provider takes into account that the private one doesn't give a fuck about.
It's the other way around. It's the public provider that doesn't care about an aspect, and that aspect is cost-efficiency.
I actually don't care if you believe me or not.
So you're just trolling. Okay. Thanks for clarifying.
Karen, even if it's not your intent, you're coming across like an insecure bully. WANNA BET???? HMMMM????? YOU MUST BE WRONG IF YOU WON'T BET!!!
It's foolish to trust the predictions of a pundit (or a fund manager) who won't commit their own money. Not because having skin in the game changes the probability that they are right, but because the lack of it demonstrates that they don't really believe their own words, and if they don't, why should anyone else?
Since you clearly don't believe your own predictions, why should anyone else believe you?
is Trump's administration denying more requests a good thing because they're denying bad requests or a bad thing because they're making so many outlandish requests. No real telling since it's a secret court.
Well, only one of the 11 FISA judges has been appointed since Trump took office, and Trump and his administration had no control over the choice -- appointments are made by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, with no executive or Congressional oversight, review or even input. Chief Justice Roberts has appointed all 11 of the current FISA judges. So, it's safe to say that the composition of the court hasn't changed with the administration.
What has changed is the leadership of the DoJ. So it seems clear that what has changed is the nature of the requests -- or possibly the number, but it would require a massive increase in number of requests to cause this change. My money is on the nature of the requests.
OTOH, the court rejected nine in 2016, the largest number in any year (until 2017). From 1979 to 2015, there were 12 rejections, in 2016 there were nine, in 2017 there were 26. So the change seems to predate Trump, a little.
Did the total KwHr/yr of coal-produced electricity go up or down?
Down. http://lmgtfy.com/?q=china+ele...
That is, I'm not obligated to show you tolerance because I'm a moral person, rather, I'm obligated to show you tolerance if I'd like you to show me tolerance -- and to show it to others, too, because what goes around comes around.
The problem with tolerance is the moving of the goalpost. Tolerance used to mean "live and let live", now it's used to mean "celebrate & embrace".
Nonsense. Sure, people might ask you to celebrate and embrace, but you're not going to be considered intolerant for failing to do so, not by anyone remotely reasonable, and if someone does you should feel fully justified in telling them that they have broken the tolerance peace treaty by demanding that you express positive support for something you don't agree with. Of course, this assumes that you're quietly failing to celebrate and embrace -- if you're openly criticizing or especially if you're trying to stop them, then you are being intolerant and deserve to be labeled as such.
Note, however, that there are some subtleties here. For example, though we're not fans of gay marriage[*], when my wife and I attended the marriage of my brother-in-law to his husband, we celebrated and embraced it. I offered to be their wedding photographer, and my wife toasted them. We were celebrating and embracing their happiness, not gay marriage. Both of them understood and respected the nuances of this position, and were pleased we were there.
.
[*] I predicted 30 years ago that the US courts would force it and that attempts to define legal marriage as between a man and a woman were doomed. My suggested solution was civil unions for everyone, thereby removing government from marriage and effectively redefining it as a purely religious and/or cultural ceremony. That would have ensured legal equality for heterosexual and homosexual partnerships, but allowed church and cultural groups to retain the definition of marriage that they preferred (and allowed other churches and other cultural groups to redefine it as they saw fit).
What about the freedom of the employer to hire whom he wants for the job?
https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=12023151&cid=56495869
You can choose to abide by the treaty, or not.