People mention the Kochs because they do a lot more than just donate money. They organize an extensive network of donations, as well as do real political activism. For instance, they payed for buses in order to bring more people to tea party rallies. They also do interviews with the news quite often and speak very candidly about their political views.
In short, they are basically the "poster child" of rich people attempting to influence politics. You'd think they have no other hobbies.
Background: At 10 years old I was getting up at 4:30 in the morning to deliver newspapers (1980's Los Angeles County). I would never allow my children to do this today.
I too was riding miles away from home when I was 8-10 years old. Why would you not allow your children to do this now (are you just referring to Los Angeles, or anywhere)? Crime rates are the lowest they have been in a long time.
I feel like the media is largely responsible for making the world seem scarier than it actually is. People are always comparing now to the 1950's... "back then, I didn't even lock my doors". Well guess what? You probably could leave your doors unlocked in 2015 and be just as safe (depending on the neighborhood, etc...).
If understanding how they know this means they need to explain an internet investigation unmasking Tor anonymization, they may very well need some technical explanations.
Well, that is why expert witness credibility is huge. All the prosecution needs is an FBI agent to take the stand and say something like "While party A and party B were attempting to hide their communications, we were able to monitor those communications with a high degree of confidence, and we 'overheard' them say x,y,z to each other." No knowledge of TOR required.
If the defense then calls in a witness who says something like "I do not believe it is possible for the FBI to have 'cracked' TOR", all the FBI agent has to say is their tech is a secret, and then the jury is just deciding who to believe based on who they find the most trustworthy.
In a lot of ways, it is probably way more important to have a kick-butt defense attorney that can gather tons of high ranking (charismatic) experts to speak on your behalf, then it would be useful to have tech jurors.
It is really strange that all the Jesus people in the US have no moral problem with spending trillions on an Army, but rage about money spent to educate the population and therefore make the country richer and more able to compete against other nations.
It really is not strange at all. The more educated people are, the more likely they are to be more liberal. The more you know, the more you question. That doesn't work well with religious extremism. For a concrete example: it would be very difficult to convince a STEM degree holder that the Earth is 6,000 years old.
Community colleges are great, but a lot of people fall into traps that sound like what you are describing. In >>99% of all cases, a 2-year degree from a community college does not knock off anywhere near 2 years from a 4-year bachelor's degree.
Well, you typically can't go a random 2 year then expect those two years to fulfill any 4 year school's first two years. You need attend a community college that partners with the 4 year school you want to attend later.
I agree that presidents have very little to do with gas prices, the course of wars, intelligence operations, etc... the world economy and the massive military industrial complex pretty much has its way with any president.
But look up the job numbers again. They are actually really good, no matter how you measure them. I don't think any particular set of policies helped or hurt helped much, I think it got better on its own, but the numbers are good.
I think it is more interesting to jump ahead X-hundred years and assume strong'ish AI, self-repairing robots can perform 100% of all hands-on service jobs. And I'm not talking just about waiter/janitor. Most of health care is basically following diagnostic formulas and trying X, then Y, then Z until the patient reports improved health.
Nano-bots can convert any atom to any other atom using self-generated (fusion) or solar energy. Dirt becomes gold for free for anyone.
The only thing of real value are raw materials of any form, to feed the nano-bots. So who produces anything of value to purchase land/dirt? Do we end up with a "nobility" that own all the land, and no one else has any way to become a land owner generation after generation?
I suppose some subjective things will always have value, like philosophy, art/music and artisanal food/wine. "Sing your way to home ownership!".
I don't think we've reached the 'singularity' or other pivotal event that would translate into a major shift in economics. Nothing will change the basic supply/demand equations until some part of the equations involved are truly free or infinite.
Any gains in efficiency and production just go to higher profits for owners. Why would anyone volunteer to pay someone the same for 20 hours of work, that they were previously making working 40 hours, just because some new tool came out that makes the worker twice as productive? The worker will only get payed based on the demand for his product. The boss would never just give him/her more just because they became more productive, unless there is a corresponding increase in demand for that product.
Think free energy / free work provided by self-replicating nano-bots (snap your fingers and a complete house is built in one week out of dirt by tiny robots who can transform any atom to another, etc..). Strong'ish AI machines handle most hands-on service industries, like cleaning, waiting, basic health care, etc..
At that point in time, the only thing of value will be raw material and truly subjective pleasures like artisanal food/wine, art/music.
Now that would be a shift that would fundamentally break supply/demand.
You could just tax every transaction made with that currency at a fairly low percentage of the total transaction and do away with all the other taxes. Credit card companies figured this out decades ago.
Yeah, we could. However a sales tax alone is a very regressive form of taxation. Our society (USA) explicitly does not want regressive taxation.
Companies don't hire unless there is first a demand for a product or service (or the potential to create a new market). In that sense, companies never create jobs. Customers create jobs.
"What I don't like is when the government becomes an engine for wealth redistribution"
If a government providing fire service free to poor person B by taxing rich person A is wealth redistribution, then I would argue that wealth distribution is an unavoidable part of any functioning society. The question that left/right always debate, is the level of redistribution. How much is too much? I haven't heard any serious politician say that zero redistribution is a viable option, have you?
But if researchers correct for these factors, and compare whites and blacks in similar socioeconomic circumstances, and look at black children adopted and raised by white families
Was that Rushton and Jensen's work in 2005 or are you referring to another researcher? I can't seem to find anyone else claiming a significant IQ difference when all factors are controlled for.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Philippe_Rushton#Unfavorable - Sure seems like a lot of people people are highly critical of his science.
This clearly does not make sense as the same group of people tends to do just fine when being raised in a first world country.
Not true. There is a 15 to 18 point gap in IQ test scores in America between blacks and whites. That is about one standard deviation. Similar gaps exist in other mixed race countries.
I don't have time to read the entire thing. But my first thought was this: "I bet the studies didn't control for economic or social issues..."
Sure enough, I found this in the paper:
The question that still remains is whether the cause of group differences in average IQ is purely social, economic, and cultural or whether genetic factors are also involved.
The average black person has lower income, less opportunities, trapped in poverty cycles, etc... Of course if you don't control for those factors you'll see testing differences.
Is there a study that strictly controlled for factors like family wealth and educational opportunities?
Every renewable dream has us whizzing around in electric vehicles. But this could come true only if the future is nuclear.
People on slashdot make that statement, but I have yet to see any proof of it. Meanwhile, it is factually true that the Sahara desert contains 18 times the solar energy required by the entire world. Spread out over the worlds' deserts, that isn't terribly hard to imagine.
Or are you mainly referring to things like energy storage? Because theoretically renewables can provide many times over the energy that we need. Storage and grid management are mainly political will issues (how much do we want to spend, how much will we force energy companies to upgrade), not technical ones.
...because you don't "write" html. you get something else to write it for you.
Hand coding your own HTML pages is a lost art these days.
What sort of systems are you guys involved with that you don't have to manually modify HTML structure to line up with what your CSS/JS guys need or want?
Some HTML output is automated, but you still need a thorough understanding of what the HTML tag options are, what needs to be in the HEAD section, the overall flow of the page html for ADA checking, etc..
I use php, java/jsp, coldfusion, velocity templates/Liferay portal type systems, etc.. and still need to carefully think about html structure in my projects. What sort of workflow using what sort of framework/language allows you to produce a finished and styled web application without tinkering with HTML tags?
"American political norms" have shifted tremendously over the last 30 years. I am of the opinion that the Overton Window has shifted towards the right. We can probably argue all day why/how that happened, but the bottom line is that Reagan would be pretty center... even perhaps slightly liberal on some issues (like immigration) in today's politics.
A tea party person considers Hillary Clinton liberal. A liberal/moderate person considers Hillary Clinton center.
Mainstream news doesn't really make any fine grained distinctions other than blue/red. So yeah, Hillary is lumped into the 'blue' category, but that is just an arbitrary bucket. In terms of the history of political policies in this country, Hillary is pretty middle of the road. Just like her husband.
I'm sure that Hillary/Bill would have had more liberal policies if they thought they could, but they both seem to be pragmatists and not idealists when it comes to actual actions, not speeches.
You must have missed the last election. Democrats were shellacked.
You must have missed the last election. Low turnout, which always favors Republicans, but every minimum wage increase passed, pot legaization passed, person hood amendments failed etc. In other words the liberal agenda made lots of progress. Here's a nice analysis by a GOPer:
"Democrats were shellacked"...through the power of gerrymandering and record low voter turnout. I think we are going to continue to see these contradictory election results (over 50% of a State's population is liberal, but over 50% of a State's elected candidates are conservative) until the districts can be redrawn in 2020. Of course, the Democrats need to have control in 2020 to redraw the boundries.... chicken meet egg.
Hell, we look at the start of society by farming of a carbohydrate source.
Given that modern humans were around for 100,000+ years with little population to show for it, until 10,000-8000 BC'ish when farming took off, says to me that we need to be careful with carbs more than anything. It is any extremely easy way to get a lot of calories fast. That was great for ballooning the population incredibly fast (in evolutionary time frames), but it makes sense to me that it is equally likely to balloon your waistline just as fast.
Once cars become cheap, automated, electric, and widespread in all parking lots, I think it is true that many people may give up owning a car.
But that is a much more likely scenario in moderate to hot climates, like California. I can't picture that happening for a long time in snowy parts of the country.
Also, some gaming would benefit from a screen like this. One that comes to find is Everquest. You use a lot of vertical space for chat windows, spell bars, both on the top and bottom of the screen typically. You want those chat boxes and spell bars to be as central to your vision as possible, not pushed way out into your peripheral vision.
That is the trouble with IT in general. There is no guaranteed level of professionalism that comes with any title. System Analyst, Business Analyst, Network Engineer, Software Engineer.... none of those guarantee any sort of particular set of knowledge or skills. Widely varied business to business.
It lasted six years dude. The effects were even more obnoxious than I listed; I remember dusting the house every bloody day because they were stirring up that much dust and dirt. They destroyed our local roads and paid nothing towards the repair of them. I moved out of that area a full year after they completed construction and the streams still weren't clear. That's what happens when you clear cut thousands of acres of forest. The out-of-towners they trucked in for the job showed no respect to the local community. The complaints ranged from the trivial (speeding, ignoring stop signs) to the obnoxious (unnecessary jake braking at 3am, sexual innuendo on their CB radios) to the criminal (assault and rapes tripled in Wyoming County during this project)....... I'll repeat: Wind power is a joke.
None of your complaints have anything to do with Wind Power as a technology. It sounds like a poorly run project, with uncaring and inconsiderate project leaders. That has nothing to do with Wind as a power source.
Slashdot Mirror
People mention the Kochs because they do a lot more than just donate money. They organize an extensive network of donations, as well as do real political activism. For instance, they payed for buses in order to bring more people to tea party rallies. They also do interviews with the news quite often and speak very candidly about their political views.
In short, they are basically the "poster child" of rich people attempting to influence politics. You'd think they have no other hobbies.
Not every solution has to be at a Federal level. Local politics (for example, campaign locally to bring in Google Fiber) can be much more rewarding.
Background: At 10 years old I was getting up at 4:30 in the morning to deliver newspapers (1980's Los Angeles County). I would never allow my children to do this today.
I too was riding miles away from home when I was 8-10 years old. Why would you not allow your children to do this now (are you just referring to Los Angeles, or anywhere)? Crime rates are the lowest they have been in a long time.
I feel like the media is largely responsible for making the world seem scarier than it actually is. People are always comparing now to the 1950's... "back then, I didn't even lock my doors". Well guess what? You probably could leave your doors unlocked in 2015 and be just as safe (depending on the neighborhood, etc...).
If understanding how they know this means they need to explain an internet investigation unmasking Tor anonymization, they may very well need some technical explanations.
Well, that is why expert witness credibility is huge. All the prosecution needs is an FBI agent to take the stand and say something like "While party A and party B were attempting to hide their communications, we were able to monitor those communications with a high degree of confidence, and we 'overheard' them say x,y,z to each other." No knowledge of TOR required.
If the defense then calls in a witness who says something like "I do not believe it is possible for the FBI to have 'cracked' TOR", all the FBI agent has to say is their tech is a secret, and then the jury is just deciding who to believe based on who they find the most trustworthy.
In a lot of ways, it is probably way more important to have a kick-butt defense attorney that can gather tons of high ranking (charismatic) experts to speak on your behalf, then it would be useful to have tech jurors.
It is really strange that all the Jesus people in the US have no moral problem with spending trillions on an Army, but rage about money spent to educate the population and therefore make the country richer and more able to compete against other nations.
It really is not strange at all. The more educated people are, the more likely they are to be more liberal. The more you know, the more you question. That doesn't work well with religious extremism. For a concrete example: it would be very difficult to convince a STEM degree holder that the Earth is 6,000 years old.
Community colleges are great, but a lot of people fall into traps that sound like what you are describing. In >>99% of all cases, a 2-year degree from a community college does not knock off anywhere near 2 years from a 4-year bachelor's degree.
Well, you typically can't go a random 2 year then expect those two years to fulfill any 4 year school's first two years. You need attend a community college that partners with the 4 year school you want to attend later.
I agree that presidents have very little to do with gas prices, the course of wars, intelligence operations, etc... the world economy and the massive military industrial complex pretty much has its way with any president.
But look up the job numbers again. They are actually really good, no matter how you measure them. I don't think any particular set of policies helped or hurt helped much, I think it got better on its own, but the numbers are good.
Legacy of his Presidency, and what political chances he leaves behind for his party.
I think it is more interesting to jump ahead X-hundred years and assume strong'ish AI, self-repairing robots can perform 100% of all hands-on service jobs. And I'm not talking just about waiter/janitor. Most of health care is basically following diagnostic formulas and trying X, then Y, then Z until the patient reports improved health.
Nano-bots can convert any atom to any other atom using self-generated (fusion) or solar energy. Dirt becomes gold for free for anyone.
The only thing of real value are raw materials of any form, to feed the nano-bots. So who produces anything of value to purchase land/dirt? Do we end up with a "nobility" that own all the land, and no one else has any way to become a land owner generation after generation?
I suppose some subjective things will always have value, like philosophy, art/music and artisanal food/wine. "Sing your way to home ownership!".
I don't think we've reached the 'singularity' or other pivotal event that would translate into a major shift in economics. Nothing will change the basic supply/demand equations until some part of the equations involved are truly free or infinite.
Any gains in efficiency and production just go to higher profits for owners. Why would anyone volunteer to pay someone the same for 20 hours of work, that they were previously making working 40 hours, just because some new tool came out that makes the worker twice as productive? The worker will only get payed based on the demand for his product. The boss would never just give him/her more just because they became more productive, unless there is a corresponding increase in demand for that product.
Think free energy / free work provided by self-replicating nano-bots (snap your fingers and a complete house is built in one week out of dirt by tiny robots who can transform any atom to another, etc..). Strong'ish AI machines handle most hands-on service industries, like cleaning, waiting, basic health care, etc..
At that point in time, the only thing of value will be raw material and truly subjective pleasures like artisanal food/wine, art/music.
Now that would be a shift that would fundamentally break supply/demand.
You could just tax every transaction made with that currency at a fairly low percentage of the total transaction and do away with all the other taxes. Credit card companies figured this out decades ago.
Yeah, we could. However a sales tax alone is a very regressive form of taxation. Our society (USA) explicitly does not want regressive taxation.
Tax the company who creates the jobs
Companies don't hire unless there is first a demand for a product or service (or the potential to create a new market). In that sense, companies never create jobs. Customers create jobs.
"What I don't like is when the government becomes an engine for wealth redistribution"
If a government providing fire service free to poor person B by taxing rich person A is wealth redistribution, then I would argue that wealth distribution is an unavoidable part of any functioning society. The question that left/right always debate, is the level of redistribution. How much is too much? I haven't heard any serious politician say that zero redistribution is a viable option, have you?
But if researchers correct for these factors, and compare whites and blacks in similar socioeconomic circumstances, and look at black children adopted and raised by white families
Was that Rushton and Jensen's work in 2005 or are you referring to another researcher? I can't seem to find anyone else claiming a significant IQ difference when all factors are controlled for.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Philippe_Rushton#Unfavorable - Sure seems like a lot of people people are highly critical of his science.
This clearly does not make sense as the same group of people tends to do just fine when being raised in a first world country.
Not true. There is a 15 to 18 point gap in IQ test scores in America between blacks and whites. That is about one standard deviation. Similar gaps exist in other mixed race countries.
I don't have time to read the entire thing. But my first thought was this: "I bet the studies didn't control for economic or social issues..."
Sure enough, I found this in the paper:
The question that still remains is whether the cause of group differences in
average IQ is purely social, economic, and cultural or whether genetic factors are
also involved.
http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/30years/Rushton-Jensen30years.pdf
The average black person has lower income, less opportunities, trapped in poverty cycles, etc... Of course if you don't control for those factors you'll see testing differences.
Is there a study that strictly controlled for factors like family wealth and educational opportunities?
Every renewable dream has us whizzing around in electric vehicles. But this could come true only if the future is nuclear.
People on slashdot make that statement, but I have yet to see any proof of it. Meanwhile, it is factually true that the Sahara desert contains 18 times the solar energy required by the entire world. Spread out over the worlds' deserts, that isn't terribly hard to imagine.
Or are you mainly referring to things like energy storage? Because theoretically renewables can provide many times over the energy that we need. Storage and grid management are mainly political will issues (how much do we want to spend, how much will we force energy companies to upgrade), not technical ones.
...because you don't "write" html. you get something else to write it for you.
Hand coding your own HTML pages is a lost art these days.
What sort of systems are you guys involved with that you don't have to manually modify HTML structure to line up with what your CSS/JS guys need or want?
Some HTML output is automated, but you still need a thorough understanding of what the HTML tag options are, what needs to be in the HEAD section, the overall flow of the page html for ADA checking, etc..
I use php, java/jsp, coldfusion, velocity templates/Liferay portal type systems, etc.. and still need to carefully think about html structure in my projects. What sort of workflow using what sort of framework/language allows you to produce a finished and styled web application without tinkering with HTML tags?
"American political norms" have shifted tremendously over the last 30 years. I am of the opinion that the Overton Window has shifted towards the right. We can probably argue all day why/how that happened, but the bottom line is that Reagan would be pretty center... even perhaps slightly liberal on some issues (like immigration) in today's politics.
A tea party person considers Hillary Clinton liberal.
A liberal/moderate person considers Hillary Clinton center.
Mainstream news doesn't really make any fine grained distinctions other than blue/red. So yeah, Hillary is lumped into the 'blue' category, but that is just an arbitrary bucket. In terms of the history of political policies in this country, Hillary is pretty middle of the road. Just like her husband.
I'm sure that Hillary/Bill would have had more liberal policies if they thought they could, but they both seem to be pragmatists and not idealists when it comes to actual actions, not speeches.
Also https://mayday.us/
You must have missed the last election. Democrats were shellacked.
You must have missed the last election. Low turnout, which always favors Republicans, but every minimum wage increase passed, pot legaization passed, person hood amendments failed etc. In other words the liberal agenda made lots of progress. Here's a nice analysis by a GOPer:
http://blog.chron.com/goplifer...
"Democrats were shellacked"...through the power of gerrymandering and record low voter turnout. I think we are going to continue to see these contradictory election results (over 50% of a State's population is liberal, but over 50% of a State's elected candidates are conservative) until the districts can be redrawn in 2020. Of course, the Democrats need to have control in 2020 to redraw the boundries.... chicken meet egg.
Hell, we look at the start of society by farming of a carbohydrate source.
Given that modern humans were around for 100,000+ years with little population to show for it, until 10,000-8000 BC'ish when farming took off, says to me that we need to be careful with carbs more than anything. It is any extremely easy way to get a lot of calories fast. That was great for ballooning the population incredibly fast (in evolutionary time frames), but it makes sense to me that it is equally likely to balloon your waistline just as fast.
Once cars become cheap, automated, electric, and widespread in all parking lots, I think it is true that many people may give up owning a car.
But that is a much more likely scenario in moderate to hot climates, like California. I can't picture that happening for a long time in snowy parts of the country.
Also, some gaming would benefit from a screen like this. One that comes to find is Everquest. You use a lot of vertical space for chat windows, spell bars, both on the top and bottom of the screen typically. You want those chat boxes and spell bars to be as central to your vision as possible, not pushed way out into your peripheral vision.
That is the trouble with IT in general. There is no guaranteed level of professionalism that comes with any title. System Analyst, Business Analyst, Network Engineer, Software Engineer.... none of those guarantee any sort of particular set of knowledge or skills. Widely varied business to business.
It lasted six years dude. The effects were even more obnoxious than I listed; I remember dusting the house every bloody day because they were stirring up that much dust and dirt. They destroyed our local roads and paid nothing towards the repair of them. I moved out of that area a full year after they completed construction and the streams still weren't clear. That's what happens when you clear cut thousands of acres of forest. The out-of-towners they trucked in for the job showed no respect to the local community. The complaints ranged from the trivial (speeding, ignoring stop signs) to the obnoxious (unnecessary jake braking at 3am, sexual innuendo on their CB radios) to the criminal (assault and rapes tripled in Wyoming County during this project). ......
I'll repeat: Wind power is a joke.
None of your complaints have anything to do with Wind Power as a technology. It sounds like a poorly run project, with uncaring and inconsiderate project leaders. That has nothing to do with Wind as a power source.
I travel back and forth along the Columbia River all the time. There is a huge amount of wind power and ongoing construction. I've never been inconvenienced. Never had a road closed. Never seen any large amounts of dust. http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-_z61PskCFZU/Tf5MQLBMofI/AAAAAAAABMA/_iJDGCRxHSw/s1600/DSCF2258.JPG