Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
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Debt Deal Reached
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Average is best for Joe blow. He's not shorting anything.
"I'm not sure what you mean."
What's so hard to understand? Lots and lots of 401Ks were wiped out, more than 90% or more. Many never recovered. Yeah, only an idiot would gamble their money away... except if you're not paying attention, and everyone's telling you what a great deal it is, and that you're an idiot if you don't do it, and it's safe...
"Come on, you think I'm some hot shot Wall Street broker?"
No, I think you know more about investing than 90% of the rest of the country.
You can choose to educate yourself, or you can pick the safe position and forget about it. It was absolutely a scam to get people who are not interested in investing into mutual fund 401Ks. They were sold as the safe position not just by con artists, but by the whole society. The attitude that everyone should be in the stock market is bullshit spread around by folks that see any wealth built up by the middle class as something to be hoovered up.
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
on
Debt Deal Reached
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· Score: 2
"I'd rather lose 30% in one year and have it recover a few years later" That's best case scenario. Some how the mutual funds that Joe Blow Don't Know Wall Street thought were just a really good savings account lost a lot more and never recovered.
Imagine that, the guys that spend all day working the numbers screwed over the guys that work all day.
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
on
Debt Deal Reached
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· Score: 1
What is that, the Limbaugh version of history? Congress did cut spending... from the budgets that Reagan proposed.
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
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Debt Deal Reached
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· Score: 1
Except that the Democrats in 1981 went along with Reagan's policies but each year passed a smaller budget than he proposed, while the budget surpluses of the late '90s can be tracked back to the budget of '93 which raised taxes on the rich and was passed by the Democrats, and back to Bush I's budget, also passed by a Democratic congress. The republicans weren't able to undo it until Bush II was president. And the house was solidly republican when Bush II got his most momentous and costly bills passed.
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
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Debt Deal Reached
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· Score: 1
Yet another zombie lie.
Clinton did balance the budget even without social security in 1999, and ran a surplus even without social security in 2000.
How is this modded informative, the very introductory paragraph is a lie. Reagan proposed bigger budgets than what were passed.
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
on
Debt Deal Reached
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· Score: 1
You're right. Tea partiers believe that the current system should be brought down and then they'll rebuild it as a conservatopia.
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
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Debt Deal Reached
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· Score: 2
Unless you know something about investing...
401Ks are a pile of shit and a huge scam, see what happened to them in 2008. This is after years of help advisors telling us that you're an idiot if you don't contribute to your 401K.
"As with many CAGW believers, you're confusing *necessary* with *sufficient*."
As I said earlier, any one of the observations I mention above would go a long way to disproving global warming. Each of those assumptions is necessary, but not sufficient. Together, they come pretty close to being sufficient.
" the deity simply arranged all the molecules in the world billions of years ago so that when we got to the moment in time where I lost my keys,"
Thanks. Observations indicate that the future state of the universe can't be determined precisely enough from past states to allow this, so that mechanism has already been falsified. It's easy to come up with some theory of God that can't be disproved, but then it most likely wouldn't offer any real explanatory power. It's also easy to come up with disprovable theories of God that haven't been disproved yet, but that possible range of those theories is all the time shrinking.
"Having a more complex life form precede simpler life forms would contradict the premise of evolution, which is that complexity is not spontaneously derived, but naturally selected for over time."
Evolution doesn't preclude simpler organisms evolving from more complex organisms.
1) a) Why can't I assert this? If you got some reason to suspect that the spectrum effect is mitigated in atmospheric C02, put it forward. It might be a step towards falsifying that part of the theory.
b) This is what the news article suggests, but the abstract for the paper seems to me as if it's calling into question the validity if the satellite measurements.
2) Basically, would the signal get lost in the noise. We have some idea how much C02 we produce, and some idea about total sources and sinks so this should be pretty easy to figure out. Alternatively you could demonstrate that the rise in C02 had some other cause.
3) If it wasn't a human activity that sunk the extra carbon, then it would have to be increasing its sink rate to keep up with us.
You want observations? I've laid them out for you, all you have to do is go look. C02 is all around you, there's nothing stopping you from studying it to see how it works. You can observe carbon sinks, and relative carbon source rates. You don't even have to trust a scientist to do it!
"What could you possibly observe that could prove that the chain of events that led up to me finding my keys *wasn't* due to a deity?"
What a low bar for a miracle! Do you propose some mechanism by which the deity helped you to find your keys? I'll assume not, nobody ever bothers with that part, so we'll just have to rely upon the observations of the actual process that lead to you finding the keys which will be either you bumping into them by accident or suddenly remembering where you put them. God will be conspicuously absent as he has been in every observation ever.
"Look, for evolution, falsification is simple - show me a more complex life form that precedes simpler ones. A rabbit fossil in the pre-cambrian for example. This is science."
You can certainly disprove certain conceptions of God. If you only choose to believe in God in a disprovable manner, then yeah, you can't disprove that particular God, but most people believe in quite a different kind of God which has been disproved for a very long time.
1. You could run an experiment or derive from theory the result that the infrared trapping properties of C02 aren't real, or that some yet unknown effect balances it out.
2. You could simply demonstrate that human generated C02 is insignificant compared to the normal fluctuation of C02.
3. Demonstrate some human activity sucks C02 out of the atmosphere. If you could get enough of these together, the'd balance out emissions.
What's the big deal? You only have to show one of these. The only thing that's difficult about these proofs is that global warming is most likely happening so you won't be able to actually find the evidence.
If you have a theory of God that says he performed this or that specific miracle, then I can falsify it, and you'll have to rewrite your theory. This is precisely what's been going on over the last few hundred years which is why God has gone from dominating scientific explanation to being beyond science, which is just a polite way of saying he's irrelevant, a discarded theory.
That's scare tactics. There's no reason to restrict choice of doctors and every single health care system rations care. The US already has terrible wait times for non-emergency procedures and if you're like me and don't have insurance the wait time is as an additional "until I save enough money".
"The juries are still the sole arbiters of what constitutes reasonable doubt."
I don't disagree that the proposed system could be better than the existing. But the argument that two juries returning two different verdicts means that there is a reasonable doubt imposes a conception of reasonable doubt over that of the jurors, a conception that Dawkins seems to think is objective even obvious, but runs immediately contrary to established law that the decisions of the Jurors are inviolate assuming they did not break the law in making them.
"If there is any reasonable doubt, then there is reasonable doubt and the defendant should be found not guilty."
Who finds this reasonable? Not to the jury members, the only people empowered to determine reasonable doubt.
Even if there were 12 juries and 11 returned acquittals you'd have no basis for a verdict, and no power to impose your conception of reasonable doubt to reach one.
Have you ever been on a jury? They are quite frequently composed of folk who take their responsibility seriously, are committed to thinking through the evidence, and are willing to learn from their fellow jurors.
Dawkins is trying to apply mathematics to a situation where there isn't as yet any mathematical theory. What constitutes reasonable doubt? Dawkins would have it that if one jury decides to acquit, that would constitute reasonable doubt.
Reasonable doubt isn't a numerical value, it's jury instruction. It's the jurors themselves that decide what reasonable doubt is, and if two juries comeback with different verdicts all you know is that half thought there was reasonable doubt and half thought there wasn't. There isn't any more justification at this point for a verdict than if you had a hung jury.
This isn't to say that the proposal is a bad one. It might produce better verdicts, but the arguments and the article are atrocious.
That's a terrible article. Comparing jury decisions to a statistical process and Herring Gulls? Listening to the perspectives of 11 other people, contributing your own, and working through the consequences of all the evidence is not really the same sort of decision as a chick deciding where to peck.
Slashdot Mirror
Average is best for Joe blow. He's not shorting anything.
"I'm not sure what you mean."
What's so hard to understand? Lots and lots of 401Ks were wiped out, more than 90% or more. Many never recovered. Yeah, only an idiot would gamble their money away ... except if you're not paying attention, and everyone's telling you what a great deal it is, and that you're an idiot if you don't do it, and it's safe ...
"Come on, you think I'm some hot shot Wall Street broker?"
No, I think you know more about investing than 90% of the rest of the country.
You can choose to educate yourself, or you can pick the safe position and forget about it. It was absolutely a scam to get people who are not interested in investing into mutual fund 401Ks. They were sold as the safe position not just by con artists, but by the whole society. The attitude that everyone should be in the stock market is bullshit spread around by folks that see any wealth built up by the middle class as something to be hoovered up.
"I'd rather lose 30% in one year and have it recover a few years later" That's best case scenario. Some how the mutual funds that Joe Blow Don't Know Wall Street thought were just a really good savings account lost a lot more and never recovered.
Imagine that, the guys that spend all day working the numbers screwed over the guys that work all day.
What is that, the Limbaugh version of history? Congress did cut spending ... from the budgets that Reagan proposed.
Except that the Democrats in 1981 went along with Reagan's policies but each year passed a smaller budget than he proposed, while the budget surpluses of the late '90s can be tracked back to the budget of '93 which raised taxes on the rich and was passed by the Democrats, and back to Bush I's budget, also passed by a Democratic congress. The republicans weren't able to undo it until Bush II was president. And the house was solidly republican when Bush II got his most momentous and costly bills passed.
Yet another zombie lie.
Clinton did balance the budget even without social security in 1999, and ran a surplus even without social security in 2000.
http://www.cbo.gov/budget/data/historical.pdf
How is this modded informative, the very introductory paragraph is a lie. Reagan proposed bigger budgets than what were passed.
You're right. Tea partiers believe that the current system should be brought down and then they'll rebuild it as a conservatopia.
Unless you know something about investing...
401Ks are a pile of shit and a huge scam, see what happened to them in 2008. This is after years of help advisors telling us that you're an idiot if you don't contribute to your 401K.
When we found out he didn't make the world fully formed in historic times.
"As with many CAGW believers, you're confusing *necessary* with *sufficient*."
As I said earlier, any one of the observations I mention above would go a long way to disproving global warming. Each of those assumptions is necessary, but not sufficient. Together, they come pretty close to being sufficient.
" the deity simply arranged all the molecules in the world billions of years ago so that when we got to the moment in time where I lost my keys,"
Thanks. Observations indicate that the future state of the universe can't be determined precisely enough from past states to allow this, so that mechanism has already been falsified. It's easy to come up with some theory of God that can't be disproved, but then it most likely wouldn't offer any real explanatory power. It's also easy to come up with disprovable theories of God that haven't been disproved yet, but that possible range of those theories is all the time shrinking.
"Having a more complex life form precede simpler life forms would contradict the premise of evolution, which is that complexity is not spontaneously derived, but naturally selected for over time."
Evolution doesn't preclude simpler organisms evolving from more complex organisms.
1) a) Why can't I assert this? If you got some reason to suspect that the spectrum effect is mitigated in atmospheric C02, put it forward. It might be a step towards falsifying that part of the theory.
b) This is what the news article suggests, but the abstract for the paper seems to me as if it's calling into question the validity if the satellite measurements.
2) Basically, would the signal get lost in the noise. We have some idea how much C02 we produce, and some idea about total sources and sinks so this should be pretty easy to figure out. Alternatively you could demonstrate that the rise in C02 had some other cause.
3) If it wasn't a human activity that sunk the extra carbon, then it would have to be increasing its sink rate to keep up with us.
You want observations? I've laid them out for you, all you have to do is go look. C02 is all around you, there's nothing stopping you from studying it to see how it works. You can observe carbon sinks, and relative carbon source rates. You don't even have to trust a scientist to do it!
"What could you possibly observe that could prove that the chain of events that led up to me finding my keys *wasn't* due to a deity?"
What a low bar for a miracle! Do you propose some mechanism by which the deity helped you to find your keys? I'll assume not, nobody ever bothers with that part, so we'll just have to rely upon the observations of the actual process that lead to you finding the keys which will be either you bumping into them by accident or suddenly remembering where you put them. God will be conspicuously absent as he has been in every observation ever.
"Look, for evolution, falsification is simple - show me a more complex life form that precedes simpler ones. A rabbit fossil in the pre-cambrian for example. This is science."
And how would this disprove evolution?
You can certainly disprove certain conceptions of God. If you only choose to believe in God in a disprovable manner, then yeah, you can't disprove that particular God, but most people believe in quite a different kind of God which has been disproved for a very long time.
1. You could run an experiment or derive from theory the result that the infrared trapping properties of C02 aren't real, or that some yet unknown effect balances it out.
2. You could simply demonstrate that human generated C02 is insignificant compared to the normal fluctuation of C02.
3. Demonstrate some human activity sucks C02 out of the atmosphere. If you could get enough of these together, the'd balance out emissions.
What's the big deal? You only have to show one of these. The only thing that's difficult about these proofs is that global warming is most likely happening so you won't be able to actually find the evidence.
If you have a theory of God that says he performed this or that specific miracle, then I can falsify it, and you'll have to rewrite your theory. This is precisely what's been going on over the last few hundred years which is why God has gone from dominating scientific explanation to being beyond science, which is just a polite way of saying he's irrelevant, a discarded theory.
It means he's probably stupid and getting it wrong.
The scientific method has nothing to do with satisfying skeptics.
Shouting down skeptics doesn't sound great on its face, but shouting down idiots is a long standing and important tradition in science.
A huge wealth of data for free, or did you forget that data costs money?
Have you ever heard of a non-disclosure agreement? You certainly can do this and there's plenty of good reasons to.
"Maybe they were hoping for more money."
How craven. It's enough to give an oil company shill the vapors.
And these overreactions suggest to you that we'd have been better off to not restrict Arsenic and Asbestos? If not, what's your point?
That's scare tactics. There's no reason to restrict choice of doctors and every single health care system rations care. The US already has terrible wait times for non-emergency procedures and if you're like me and don't have insurance the wait time is as an additional "until I save enough money".
"The juries are still the sole arbiters of what constitutes reasonable doubt."
I don't disagree that the proposed system could be better than the existing. But the argument that two juries returning two different verdicts means that there is a reasonable doubt imposes a conception of reasonable doubt over that of the jurors, a conception that Dawkins seems to think is objective even obvious, but runs immediately contrary to established law that the decisions of the Jurors are inviolate assuming they did not break the law in making them.
"If there is any reasonable doubt, then there is reasonable doubt and the defendant should be found not guilty."
Who finds this reasonable? Not to the jury members, the only people empowered to determine reasonable doubt.
Even if there were 12 juries and 11 returned acquittals you'd have no basis for a verdict, and no power to impose your conception of reasonable doubt to reach one.
Have you ever been on a jury? They are quite frequently composed of folk who take their responsibility seriously, are committed to thinking through the evidence, and are willing to learn from their fellow jurors.
Dawkins is trying to apply mathematics to a situation where there isn't as yet any mathematical theory. What constitutes reasonable doubt? Dawkins would have it that if one jury decides to acquit, that would constitute reasonable doubt.
Reasonable doubt isn't a numerical value, it's jury instruction. It's the jurors themselves that decide what reasonable doubt is, and if two juries comeback with different verdicts all you know is that half thought there was reasonable doubt and half thought there wasn't. There isn't any more justification at this point for a verdict than if you had a hung jury.
This isn't to say that the proposal is a bad one. It might produce better verdicts, but the arguments and the article are atrocious.
That's a terrible article. Comparing jury decisions to a statistical process and Herring Gulls? Listening to the perspectives of 11 other people, contributing your own, and working through the consequences of all the evidence is not really the same sort of decision as a chick deciding where to peck.