Cigarette machine: not much of an inconvenience to buy cigs via alternate methods
Not my point. Businesses don't have them because (in many places anyway) local laws forbid them. Laws are written to affect business, not just people. Better example, do you see people smoking on domestic flights?
Motor cycle helmets: small percentage of the population, smallish inconvenience
Talk to a few anti-helmet types and see if they think it's a 'smallish inconvenience.' Regardless, the point is very clear, helmet laws work. Look at adjacent states with disparate laws, look at same states before and after helmet law passage and repeal. They are extremely effective at changing behavior, a direct repudiation of your simplistic thesis. Small population? We're talking about DMCA cracking, you think that isn't a small population?
The nasty truth is that people obey laws because they want to obey them, and not for any other reason. There is nothing magical about them.
I would submit people follow laws because or some combination of the following: 1.They agree with the law (ie don't murder), 2. They worry about getting caught (do you speed past a state trooper on the highway?). People break the law because of some combination of the related: 1. They don't agree with the law (civil disobedience), 2. They don't think they will get caught, 3. They are willing to pay the price if they do. What balance each plays is debatable, but arguing that laws cannot change behavior is just asinine. Go to singapore and tell me laws don't affect behavior.
Laws aren't effective ways to change behavior, which is why I just shake my head at all the folks who want more regulation to "fix" something.
Laws *can* be effective ways to change behavior. Seen any cigarette vending machines lately? Had a gander at motorcycle helmet usage rates versus helmet laws?
She obtained a high-visibility job that put her in a the position to affect the lives of thousands of applicants by intentionally and significantly lying to get her job - and now she and others want to call it an itty-bitty mistake - but only after she was caught of course.
Actually, she obtained a high-visibility job that put her in the position to affect thousands of lives by being damn good at it. Yes, she fucked up 28 years ago by padding her resume with degrees she didn't earn (to get a job that ironically, did not even require a degree). That deception was wrong, no question. However, she ended up being stellar at her job, and produced superb results for MIT and for the applicants and incoming students (and probably orders of magnitude more with her book on trying to de-stress college admissions). Pretty much everyone who has dealt with her thought she was the bee's knees. I'm not sure whether i think she should have been fired, lying is bad...but in this circumstance, it seems to me that the lie had approximately zero to do with her ability to do her job extremely well (and benefit loads of kids). Context matters, and in this case it's not totally clear-cut.
There are military officers who have committed suicide over less - but hey, this is the high-integrety acadmic world - blatant lies here are just - have a nice day - simple little mistakes.
Right, that's why MIT sacked her as soon as they found out about the deception...'cuz academics have no integrity. You are an idiot.
My point was to (apparently poorly) illustrate out the silliness of the AC parent's complaint that 'his vote didnt matter because someone else won the state.' You can make the same argument for any election if your candidate doesn't win, but that is not a valid reason not to vote.
Almost every county in the past presidential election broke right down the middle, except for a few counties in the heart of Kansas and Utah which were solidly red and some in California and New York that were solidly blue.
Lots of nice quotes. None of which are relevant. Article I says Cheney manipulated intelligence and pressured others to do the same. No one in your quote list had the position to do this.
Tarring congresspeople with 'but they said it too' tactic is not particularly germane to the issue of what Cheney did. Particularly when the argument is that Cheney deceived those congresspeople by intelligence manipulation. -Ted
Iowa has an independent, "nonpartisan" commission that does the re-districting, along with strict guidelines to make sure districts are "equal." The point is to keep elected officials out of drawing the lines that will elect those elected officials. Seems pretty smart.
However, the incumbency rate in Iowa is still 97%. I used to think fixing gerrymandering and mid-census re-districting and the like would fix our obviously broken system. I'm far less convinced of that now. I voted for the re-districting initiative, as I think it would be better to not even have the issue to worry about. However, I think the proposition overload in CA is what did this in, too many propositions every election that are often times difficult to parse correctly even for the most informed. I (and I think many others) default to a 'no' vote and have to be convinced otherwise.
At least, it can be. A quick search at Pubmed brings up eightstudies that examine the phenomenon of 'contagious yawning,' including in macaques and chimps. So even if the mythbusters experimental setup was pretty crappy, and their sample was too small to have enough power to find an effect, at least their conclusion agreed with the literature.
Windows machines suffer for a variety of reasons, but not really because they have more bugs.
Have anything to back that up with?
It's more the case that a combination of there being a lot of them out in the wild, most of which are "administered" by people who really aren't familiar with the system's internals, not helped by a poor UI which, after Mac OS X and GNOME 2.x, is easily a poor third in the user friendliness/transparent computing front.
So you are suggesting that Mac users as a group are more in tune with the system internals? Really? I'd buy that for Linux, you pretty much have to be in order to run most distributions out there. But OSX? That seems unlikely to me.
Contrary to myth, Mac OS X has vulnerabilities. If you want to know why it hasn't been the target of a concerted hacker attack, you have to look elsewhere than the "Windows is insecure by design, OS X and Unix isn't" stuff that's become the prevailing consensus.
Sure, those who say OSX is bulletproof are ignorant, but I don't think that is a terribly common belief. Those who say OSX is safer for the normal user are clearly correct. If you are asserting that OSX does a better job of making users be safe via more "transparent" practices, isn't that just a way of saying OSX is designed to be more secure?
And frankly, as a computer user, I don't really care if my Mac is less likely to be abused by the hoards than my XP system due to fewer holes, better designed security practices, magic pixie dust from cupertino, or just plain dumb luck. I just care that it is.
1) He announced a new product well in advance of actually shipping it.
Um, like every version of OSX?
2) Apple is entering a market place that is extremely competitive with a product which is a multiple of the cost of the competition. Which isn't even technologically competitive.
"no wireless, less space than a nomad. lame."
3) Nearly all of the technology is focused on being cute and pretty. The phone as announced lacks a good number of the features that the majority of phone users use. Contrast that to the iPod.
Out of curiosity, which features are you referring to?
4) With the price tag the way it is and Apple not already being a major player in the Cellphone market, the likelihood of them actually selling enough phones to make this more than an extravagant affront to their shareholders is practically nill.
Perhaps, perhaps not, but your thesis can not possibly be backed up with any more than the opposite can, ie speculation.
Contrast that to Leopard which is pretty much guaranteed to make Apple a significant amount of money.
And 4 months of delay on Leopard affects their eventual earnings how? Are people not going to not upgrade in the fall that would've in the spring?
Even MS has had the sense to just try and get their OS into the phones.
So *not* doing what microsoft did is a bad thing now?
Maybe if they get a significant number of phones with the OS on it they will try to do a phone, but not likely.
Well since apple is mostly a hardware company, and microsoft is mostly a software company, this seems to make sense to me.
Apple makes their money on hardware. They write software so that people will buy their hardware. OSX may be a great piece of software, like iTunes, but they are there to sell Macs & iPods. The parent suggested that 1. Apple is a software company, 2. is moving towards a new business model based on media distribution and 3. might sell or open-source their software. All of those are silly when you look at where Apple makes most of their money...on their hardware, just like always. -Ted
It looks like Apple is moving away from the operating system business and towards Hollywood's fat pipe into our homes. I hope they find a good buyer. Or better yet they open source it.
Yes, those powers were given by an overzealous Congress recently in an effort to get reelected without even reading the bills.
Let's see, from my (incomplete) list: energy policy secrecy, nope. The war, yes but only due to mis-information (al qaida in iraq? WMD? Yellowcake?), so thats really a no. Torture, nope. Rendition, nope. Signing statements, nope. FEMA (by which i meant the politicization of the department, putting horribly inadequately experienced political buddies in charge), nope. Whether FEMA is part of DHS or not is not really relevant if the head is a horse lawyer. FISA & domestic wiretapping, nope. Habeas corpus revocation, yes sort of, again at the behest of the administration. Scientific report "editing", nope. US Attorney purge, not really. The purge has nothing to do with congress, the patriot act provision (which was slipped in by a republican senatorial aid after final negotiations were finished) was passed by congress, but that is ancillary to the purge.
So, no, claiming those behaviors were somehow "given" by congress is not an accurate description. That they occurred and congress chose to look the other way is the only possible argument you could make, and even that is weakened by the administration's strong-arming.
It's not checks and balances when Congress is trying to micromanage the Iraq war and international relationships.
Congress is explicitly given the authority to fund (or not) military actions. The country has expressed a clear opinion (in polls and the last election) that the are not supportive of the war. It would be dereliction for the congress to sit back and not exercise their duty to impact foreign policy in the way they are allowed to. Micromanaging is when you tell military commanders that they will have to make do with a smaller invasion force than they want, like the administration did.
If you honestly think it's fine think about if Tom Delay did the same thing with a Democrat president.
Better example, what if Newt Gingrich did that with Clinton? Oh, right, hedid.
That's all moot anyway, and you should read a social studies textbook before you speak about the powers again -- several of the items you list are perfectly legal and in the purview of the president. I also supported Bill Clinton's "grabs at power" if that's what you consider firing AGs... and he fired every single one for political reasons.
Go through that list and tell which you think are legal and ethical. Clinton, like Bush I, like Reagan administration, replaced all USA's when he came into office. They are political appointees, and that is normal way of administration change. Firing USAs mid-term is nearly unprecedented, and doing so because the USA's unwillingness to subvert the justice system for political hay is beyond unethical, if still technically legal. However, lying to congress for the reasons behind the firing, and lying about whether you were involved, is quite illegal.
Whether this administration broke the law in every one of my list is not really a defense. They clearly acted in a horribly unethical way in each, and *did* clearly break the law in many of them, with no repercussions until very recently. The point of oversight it to make sure the branch responsible for executing the laws is at least not breaking them, and ideally enforcing them appropriately. Claiming that exercising oversight responsibility is a bad thing really just does not make sense.
Sorry to double reply, but I forgot to address this: Even if you hate Bush you shouldn't stand for the power grab the Congress is going for lately. There is a reason we have a separation of powers. If you keep heading down this road the president becomes a figurehead, and soon the people that write the laws will be enforcing them as well.
Are you seriously worried about the legislative branch running wild over the executive?!? Don't you have that completely and totally backwards? The current administration has evidenced a wildly outrageous interpretation of a supreme and nearly unchecked executive branch (energy policy secrecy, war, torture, rendition, signing statements, FEMA, FISA, domestic wiretapping, habeas corpus, scientific report "editing" us attorney purge, etc etc). Whether you like Bush or not, you are deluded to think the executive is in danger of becoming too powerless. The "power grab" you bemoan is the first inkling of actual checks and balances that we've seen in 6 years, and it is not only legal, but is also the way our government is intended to run. Congress has the responsibility for oversight, and the recent reversion to it is nothing but welcome. -Ted
Not quite. You are not allowed to use gov't property for political purposes (Hatch Act), but you they converse is also true. Using non-gov't property for gov't purposes is illegal due to requirements of Presidential Records Act. It is known that emails from the RNC domains were used to conduct executive office of the president (EOP) business (the DOJ document dump has plenty of examples), so what has occurred is illegal.
If people are such unthinking sheep that take their moral cues from the television
If?! People take normalization cues from everywhere...TV, movies, friends, people on the street, etc. The psychologists have pretty much got that covered.
What I mean is, we are, as a society, more humane now, in general anyway, than we have been pretty much any time in history ever, so maybe we shouldn't worry about a slippery slope that we have been *climbing* for 5000 years.
Perhaps, though recently on this one issue of torture, I'm not so sure. When was the last time torture was official US military policy? Pretty sure we're at a local downtown on that one.
Also, the best argument I have seen regarding the slippery slope is that we should just make it illegal all the time, and then if it is actually needed the person who thinks it is needed will go ahead and break the law anyway.
Yeah, like it used to be for military. 'Course that brings up the problem of following orders, and who gets punished for following an illegal order?
What we need is a good, honest look at climate trends. Because words like "global warming" and "el niño" are so overused, diffused, and politicized, we have to look at this purely as a scientific study about climate trends, and the study has to be carried out by multiple parties.
Therefore, Until I read a series of papers about global climate change, papers that publish all of their source data, algorithms used in simulations, justifications for the use of those algorithms, and statistical analysis by qualified statisticians, I will refrain from forming a solid opinion one way or the other. Of course, the chances of that happening are exactly zero, because I don't have time to spend doing something like that. So I'll remain skeptical.
Shorter MarkPNeyer: I'm ignorant, aware of it, and too lazy to do anything about it, so I'll remain ignorant.
Why can't people just say, "Hell.. I'm not sure which side I believe yet." ?
The problem is that is exactly what is going on, despite a very clear consensus in the scientific community.
For every respected scientist that comes out in favor FOR global warming, there is another respected scientist that comes out against it..
That you say that means you aren't really paying attention. Can't totally blame you given the false equivalence the media has allowed, but that is still wrong.
Again.. I haven't decided which way I believe. Give me some real, unbiased facts, and I'll maybe make a decision. But if there's any hint of bias, I will see it and disregard said report.
As I point out almost every time this topic comes up, there is still no meaningful debate amongst the scientists. There are always a few crackpots (Flat-Earth Society anyone?), but amongst real scientists publishing in quality peer-reviewed journals, the debate is not whether anthropomorphic global warming is happening, but how much and how quickly.
What bothers me, as a scientist, is that even this article gets used in the he said/she said argument, when even the scientists it is discussing say, "I've no doubt that global warming is occurring..."
On an acute level, it seems to be as safe as eating spinach (note that this is anecdotal rather than rigerous scientific work).
However, cancer is generally not an acute condition. If that spinach had caused liver cancer over the course of x years and not intestinal distress over the course of a few days, you can bet your sweet bippy we'd still be eating it.
Statistical significance is a useless word in these sort of situations.
I disagree. Statistical significance offers just as hard a number (the p-value) as confidence intervals (in fact in the normal usage, they are intimately related).
"Natural" and "Nature" are nonsense words from a scientific perspective, used by people who would really like to use the word "God", but are too saphisticated or ashamed to actually use it.
Pedantically, I agree. If it can exist, it is natural. However, the common usage of natural to mean 'existing without human intervention' is clearly what is being intended here (even if that, to, is strictly incorrect).
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Cigarette machine: not much of an inconvenience to buy cigs via alternate methods
Not my point. Businesses don't have them because (in many places anyway) local laws forbid them. Laws are written to affect business, not just people. Better example, do you see people smoking on domestic flights?
Motor cycle helmets: small percentage of the population, smallish inconvenience
Talk to a few anti-helmet types and see if they think it's a 'smallish inconvenience.' Regardless, the point is very clear, helmet laws work. Look at adjacent states with disparate laws, look at same states before and after helmet law passage and repeal. They are extremely effective at changing behavior, a direct repudiation of your simplistic thesis. Small population? We're talking about DMCA cracking, you think that isn't a small population?
The nasty truth is that people obey laws because they want to obey them, and not for any other reason. There is nothing magical about them.
I would submit people follow laws because or some combination of the following: 1.They agree with the law (ie don't murder), 2. They worry about getting caught (do you speed past a state trooper on the highway?). People break the law because of some combination of the related: 1. They don't agree with the law (civil disobedience), 2. They don't think they will get caught, 3. They are willing to pay the price if they do. What balance each plays is debatable, but arguing that laws cannot change behavior is just asinine. Go to singapore and tell me laws don't affect behavior.
-Ted
Laws aren't effective ways to change behavior, which is why I just shake my head at all the folks who want more regulation to "fix" something.
Laws *can* be effective ways to change behavior. Seen any cigarette vending machines lately? Had a gander at motorcycle helmet usage rates versus helmet laws?
-Ted
Don't scrape the coating from the inside of the bulb, dissolve it in vodka, and inject it into your neck.
Dammit, there goes my Friday night.
-Ted
She obtained a high-visibility job that put her in a the position to affect the lives of thousands of applicants by intentionally and significantly lying to get her job - and now she and others want to call it an itty-bitty mistake - but only after she was caught of course.
Actually, she obtained a high-visibility job that put her in the position to affect thousands of lives by being damn good at it. Yes, she fucked up 28 years ago by padding her resume with degrees she didn't earn (to get a job that ironically, did not even require a degree). That deception was wrong, no question. However, she ended up being stellar at her job, and produced superb results for MIT and for the applicants and incoming students (and probably orders of magnitude more with her book on trying to de-stress college admissions). Pretty much everyone who has dealt with her thought she was the bee's knees. I'm not sure whether i think she should have been fired, lying is bad...but in this circumstance, it seems to me that the lie had approximately zero to do with her ability to do her job extremely well (and benefit loads of kids). Context matters, and in this case it's not totally clear-cut.
There are military officers who have committed suicide over less - but hey, this is the high-integrety acadmic world - blatant lies here are just - have a nice day - simple little mistakes.
Right, that's why MIT sacked her as soon as they found out about the deception...'cuz academics have no integrity. You are an idiot.
-Ted
My point was to (apparently poorly) illustrate out the silliness of the AC parent's complaint that 'his vote didnt matter because someone else won the state.' You can make the same argument for any election if your candidate doesn't win, but that is not a valid reason not to vote.
-Ted
Thanks to "winner takes all" my vote was essentially thrown out and changed to Kerry since that's what the majority of my state voted for.
Thanks to "winner takes all" my vote was essentially thrown out and changed to Bush since that's what the majority of my country voted for.
-Ted
Almost every county in the past presidential election broke right down the middle, except for a few counties in the heart of Kansas and Utah which were solidly red and some in California and New York that were solidly blue.
Nope.
Lots of nice quotes. None of which are relevant. Article I says Cheney manipulated intelligence and pressured others to do the same. No one in your quote list had the position to do this.
Tarring congresspeople with 'but they said it too' tactic is not particularly germane to the issue of what Cheney did. Particularly when the argument is that Cheney deceived those congresspeople by intelligence manipulation.
-Ted
Iowa has an independent, "nonpartisan" commission that does the re-districting, along with strict guidelines to make sure districts are "equal." The point is to keep elected officials out of drawing the lines that will elect those elected officials. Seems pretty smart.
However, the incumbency rate in Iowa is still 97%. I used to think fixing gerrymandering and mid-census re-districting and the like would fix our obviously broken system. I'm far less convinced of that now. I voted for the re-districting initiative, as I think it would be better to not even have the issue to worry about. However, I think the proposition overload in CA is what did this in, too many propositions every election that are often times difficult to parse correctly even for the most informed. I (and I think many others) default to a 'no' vote and have to be convinced otherwise.
-Ted
At least, it can be. A quick search at Pubmed brings up eight studies that examine the phenomenon of 'contagious yawning,' including in macaques and chimps. So even if the mythbusters experimental setup was pretty crappy, and their sample was too small to have enough power to find an effect, at least their conclusion agreed with the literature.
-Ted
Windows machines suffer for a variety of reasons, but not really because they have more bugs.
Have anything to back that up with?
It's more the case that a combination of there being a lot of them out in the wild, most of which are "administered" by people who really aren't familiar with the system's internals, not helped by a poor UI which, after Mac OS X and GNOME 2.x, is easily a poor third in the user friendliness/transparent computing front.
So you are suggesting that Mac users as a group are more in tune with the system internals? Really? I'd buy that for Linux, you pretty much have to be in order to run most distributions out there. But OSX? That seems unlikely to me.
Contrary to myth, Mac OS X has vulnerabilities. If you want to know why it hasn't been the target of a concerted hacker attack, you have to look elsewhere than the "Windows is insecure by design, OS X and Unix isn't" stuff that's become the prevailing consensus.
Sure, those who say OSX is bulletproof are ignorant, but I don't think that is a terribly common belief. Those who say OSX is safer for the normal user are clearly correct. If you are asserting that OSX does a better job of making users be safe via more "transparent" practices, isn't that just a way of saying OSX is designed to be more secure?
And frankly, as a computer user, I don't really care if my Mac is less likely to be abused by the hoards than my XP system due to fewer holes, better designed security practices, magic pixie dust from cupertino, or just plain dumb luck. I just care that it is.
-Ted
1) He announced a new product well in advance of actually shipping it.
Um, like every version of OSX?
2) Apple is entering a market place that is extremely competitive with a product which is a multiple of the cost of the competition. Which isn't even technologically competitive.
"no wireless, less space than a nomad. lame."
3) Nearly all of the technology is focused on being cute and pretty. The phone as announced lacks a good number of the features that the majority of phone users use. Contrast that to the iPod.
Out of curiosity, which features are you referring to?
4) With the price tag the way it is and Apple not already being a major player in the Cellphone market, the likelihood of them actually selling enough phones to make this more than an extravagant affront to their shareholders is practically nill.
Perhaps, perhaps not, but your thesis can not possibly be backed up with any more than the opposite can, ie speculation.
Contrast that to Leopard which is pretty much guaranteed to make Apple a significant amount of money.
And 4 months of delay on Leopard affects their eventual earnings how? Are people not going to not upgrade in the fall that would've in the spring?
Even MS has had the sense to just try and get their OS into the phones.
So *not* doing what microsoft did is a bad thing now?
Maybe if they get a significant number of phones with the OS on it they will try to do a phone, but not likely.
Well since apple is mostly a hardware company, and microsoft is mostly a software company, this seems to make sense to me.
-Ted
Apple makes their money on hardware. They write software so that people will buy their hardware. OSX may be a great piece of software, like iTunes, but they are there to sell Macs & iPods. The parent suggested that 1. Apple is a software company, 2. is moving towards a new business model based on media distribution and 3. might sell or open-source their software. All of those are silly when you look at where Apple makes most of their money...on their hardware, just like always.
-Ted
It looks like Apple is moving away from the operating system business and towards Hollywood's fat pipe into our homes. I hope they find a good buyer. Or better yet they open source it.
Repeat after me, Apple is a hardware company. They have been since day one.
-Ted
Yes, those powers were given by an overzealous Congress recently in an effort to get reelected without even reading the bills.
Let's see, from my (incomplete) list: energy policy secrecy, nope. The war, yes but only due to mis-information (al qaida in iraq? WMD? Yellowcake?), so thats really a no. Torture, nope. Rendition, nope. Signing statements, nope. FEMA (by which i meant the politicization of the department, putting horribly inadequately experienced political buddies in charge), nope. Whether FEMA is part of DHS or not is not really relevant if the head is a horse lawyer. FISA & domestic wiretapping, nope. Habeas corpus revocation, yes sort of, again at the behest of the administration. Scientific report "editing", nope. US Attorney purge, not really. The purge has nothing to do with congress, the patriot act provision (which was slipped in by a republican senatorial aid after final negotiations were finished) was passed by congress, but that is ancillary to the purge.
So, no, claiming those behaviors were somehow "given" by congress is not an accurate description. That they occurred and congress chose to look the other way is the only possible argument you could make, and even that is weakened by the administration's strong-arming.
It's not checks and balances when Congress is trying to micromanage the Iraq war and international relationships.
Congress is explicitly given the authority to fund (or not) military actions. The country has expressed a clear opinion (in polls and the last election) that the are not supportive of the war. It would be dereliction for the congress to sit back and not exercise their duty to impact foreign policy in the way they are allowed to. Micromanaging is when you tell military commanders that they will have to make do with a smaller invasion force than they want, like the administration did.
If you honestly think it's fine think about if Tom Delay did the same thing with a Democrat president.
Better example, what if Newt Gingrich did that with Clinton? Oh, right, he did.
That's all moot anyway, and you should read a social studies textbook before you speak about the powers again -- several of the items you list are perfectly legal and in the purview of the president. I also supported Bill Clinton's "grabs at power" if that's what you consider firing AGs... and he fired every single one for political reasons.
Go through that list and tell which you think are legal and ethical. Clinton, like Bush I, like Reagan administration, replaced all USA's when he came into office. They are political appointees, and that is normal way of administration change. Firing USAs mid-term is nearly unprecedented, and doing so because the USA's unwillingness to subvert the justice system for political hay is beyond unethical, if still technically legal. However, lying to congress for the reasons behind the firing, and lying about whether you were involved, is quite illegal.
Whether this administration broke the law in every one of my list is not really a defense. They clearly acted in a horribly unethical way in each, and *did* clearly break the law in many of them, with no repercussions until very recently. The point of oversight it to make sure the branch responsible for executing the laws is at least not breaking them, and ideally enforcing them appropriately. Claiming that exercising oversight responsibility is a bad thing really just does not make sense.
-Ted
Sorry to double reply, but I forgot to address this:
Even if you hate Bush you shouldn't stand for the power grab the Congress is going for lately. There is a reason we have a separation of powers. If you keep heading down this road the president becomes a figurehead, and soon the people that write the laws will be enforcing them as well.
Are you seriously worried about the legislative branch running wild over the executive?!? Don't you have that completely and totally backwards? The current administration has evidenced a wildly outrageous interpretation of a supreme and nearly unchecked executive branch (energy policy secrecy, war, torture, rendition, signing statements, FEMA, FISA, domestic wiretapping, habeas corpus, scientific report "editing" us attorney purge, etc etc). Whether you like Bush or not, you are deluded to think the executive is in danger of becoming too powerless. The "power grab" you bemoan is the first inkling of actual checks and balances that we've seen in 6 years, and it is not only legal, but is also the way our government is intended to run. Congress has the responsibility for oversight, and the recent reversion to it is nothing but welcome.
-Ted
Not quite. You are not allowed to use gov't property for political purposes (Hatch Act), but you they converse is also true. Using non-gov't property for gov't purposes is illegal due to requirements of Presidential Records Act. It is known that emails from the RNC domains were used to conduct executive office of the president (EOP) business (the DOJ document dump has plenty of examples), so what has occurred is illegal.
-Ted
Ad homonym attacks are counterproductive
eye think ewe have heired.
-Ted
If?! People take normalization cues from everywhere...TV, movies, friends, people on the street, etc. The psychologists have pretty much got that covered.
What I mean is, we are, as a society, more humane now, in general anyway, than we have been pretty much any time in history ever, so maybe we shouldn't worry about a slippery slope that we have been *climbing* for 5000 years.
Perhaps, though recently on this one issue of torture, I'm not so sure. When was the last time torture was official US military policy? Pretty sure we're at a local downtown on that one.
Also, the best argument I have seen regarding the slippery slope is that we should just make it illegal all the time, and then if it is actually needed the person who thinks it is needed will go ahead and break the law anyway.
Yeah, like it used to be for military. 'Course that brings up the problem of following orders, and who gets punished for following an illegal order?
-Ted
And that would be "Screw the Environment" ?
-Ted
Ask, and ye shall receive.
-Ted
Shorter MarkPNeyer:
I'm ignorant, aware of it, and too lazy to do anything about it, so I'll remain ignorant.
-Ted
The problem is that is exactly what is going on, despite a very clear consensus in the scientific community.
For every respected scientist that comes out in favor FOR global warming, there is another respected scientist that comes out against it..
That you say that means you aren't really paying attention. Can't totally blame you given the false equivalence the media has allowed, but that is still wrong.
Again.. I haven't decided which way I believe. Give me some real, unbiased facts, and I'll maybe make a decision. But if there's any hint of bias, I will see it and disregard said report.
As I point out almost every time this topic comes up, there is still no meaningful debate amongst the scientists. There are always a few crackpots (Flat-Earth Society anyone?), but amongst real scientists publishing in quality peer-reviewed journals, the debate is not whether anthropomorphic global warming is happening, but how much and how quickly.
What bothers me, as a scientist, is that even this article gets used in the he said/she said argument, when even the scientists it is discussing say, "I've no doubt that global warming is occurring..."
-Ted
Ahem
-Ted
However, cancer is generally not an acute condition. If that spinach had caused liver cancer over the course of x years and not intestinal distress over the course of a few days, you can bet your sweet bippy we'd still be eating it.
Statistical significance is a useless word in these sort of situations.
I disagree. Statistical significance offers just as hard a number (the p-value) as confidence intervals (in fact in the normal usage, they are intimately related).
"Natural" and "Nature" are nonsense words from a scientific perspective, used by people who would really like to use the word "God", but are too saphisticated or ashamed to actually use it.
Pedantically, I agree. If it can exist, it is natural. However, the common usage of natural to mean 'existing without human intervention' is clearly what is being intended here (even if that, to, is strictly incorrect).
-Ted