Considering the abysmal lack of fact-checking on even the simplest of stories, the amount of content that is obviously just pandered from one web site to the next by so-called professional journalists, the number of images and stories that have been discovered to be (if not completely manufactured) at least heavily edited in favor of a political viewpoint...well, if people are having a hard time distinguishing "journalists" from "dipshit with a website and a viewpoint", I'd say journalists have only themselves to blame?
This is no more 'fly doing calculus' any more than people do calculus when they throw a snowball at a target.
Not to say that I'm not occasionally amazed at the staggering mathematical underpinnings of some of what we internalize as fairly simple things: - seeing - and interpreting - an image with light and color. - hitting a moving target with something - the signal complexity involved in muscle coordination to do just about anything.
I guess I'd call this the natural order of things.
We have, for example, a certain climate and conditions. It's been this way for 10's of 000's of years. In marine life, there are species that have evolved to be astonishingly successful in these conditions, outcompeting and marginalizing precursor species who were far more generalist but less efficient in these specific circumstances. Now that climate is changing, conditions are changing, and some of these hyperspecialist species are starting to falter and even go extinct. They simply can't cope with a wider range (or changed) of conditions. The previously-marginalized generalist species which had been pushed into inhospitable ecological niches (because that's the only place where they could compete better) are now becoming once again bountiful.
I see modern 2014 humanity has a hyper-adapted specialist condition of humanity. It's almost inevitable that such a brittle structure will at some point (for us) catastrophically collapse. I can only hope it's only a collapse "back to" a more generalist state of knowledge and durability...rather than extinction/
I'm not saying it's great, nor the best strategy; just drawing analogies.
I'm clearly not talking about "the world", I'm talking about the US.
Political prisoners here? Nope. Your point? None.
How do you claim the deterrent effect didn't work? It's unproveable. Of course it's not going to eliminate crime, there are always going to be people disregarding their own safety, particularly among the desperate. Them you're NEVER going to deter, you can only kill them....which the death penalty ALSO takes care of.
Only if you want to broaden the definition of "discrimination: in the legal sense so widely that everyone can claim to be a victim, sure. I'll concede that the trial lawyers of this country would agree wholeheartedly with you.
If I need someone to routinely reach something 8' high, I'm not hiring a little person. That'd be stupid. Is that heightist of me? If I need someone to routinely lift 80lb boxes, I'm going to tend to hire the strong dude that's 25 rather than the feeble 75 year old woman. Even if they both CAN do it, it's just logical that the 25 year old is going to be able to do it faster, longer, with fewer breaks and medical consequences.
If I want to hire someone for a job, and want to pay as little as possible to get as much work as possible, I'd tend to hire someone younger.* It's not 'discrimination', it's common sense.
*Now, I'd argue that millenials as a group are so repellent, lazy, unmotivated, and self-obsessed that they probably are the best argument against age discrimination. Even if a millenial is physically more capable of doing a job, I'd probably get more PRODUCTIVE work out of a middle-of-the-bell-curve 40 year old than that middle-of-the-bell-curve 20-something.
The US is perennially stupid when it comes to paying for any long-term investment, be it weather satellites or highways. The inability to fund that satellite has more to do with the general budget process than any sort of 'anti-global-warming' effort.
If you're contending that "global warming" isn't the mainstream scientific dogma today, you're either not paying attention, you're grossly naive, or you're being nakedly disingenuous.
TAANSTAFL. Everything's a compromise, and nothing comes for free.
You could have, for example, a justice system in which nobody is punished, ever. In that case, there would be a 0% chance the wrong person would be punished. Likewise, there'd be no sexism, no racism in law enforcement. I doubt anyone would agree that's a better result than the current system?
Americans accept that 30,000 largely-innocent people will die EVERY YEAR as a consequence of having an automobile-based transport system.
We accept compromises all the time. I drink water from plastic bottles despite concerns about pseudo-estrogens because ultimately, it's just too damn convenient not to. I expect that a tight calorie-restrictive, largely-vegan diet, managed carefully, would extend my lifespan - but I'd rather live 70 years happy than 90 years hungry all the time.
We have an imperfect justice system. Sometimes an innocent* man** is punished. This means that we still have work to do to improve it, but solely on utilitarian grounds I believe that killing every violent criminal with 30+ years left on their sentences would simultaneously ease overcrowding, improve budgets and conditions for prisoners who we are ultimately willing to release back into society, and provide a SUBSTANTIAL deterrent example for potential criminals.***
*"innocent": I can't find a single example where an incorrect conviction was handed down to someone truly innocent, as the picture is painted of some poor dude who just gets 'swept up' by jackbooted law enforcement. No, in every single example I've seen (and I've looked pretty hard) the 'innocent' victim is a bastard of the first order with multiple other convictions, history of illegality, and generally someone we as a society would be well rid of anyway. Sure, he might be 'innocent' of THAT SPECIFIC CRIME, but hardly 'innocent' in an absolute sense. ** as much as justice-system critics like to point to the disproportionate conviction of minorities as an example of a fundamental 'wrong' in the system, I notice that the staggering majority of convictions of are men, yet nobody claims sexism. Why? ***at the height of executions (in TX, the most aggressive death-penalty state by far), not even 1 in 1000 death row inmates end up being executed. Critics of capital punishment claim there's no deterrent value of the practice; I'd say that the people living on that ragged edge of society risk their lives for odds orders of magnitude worse than that on a regular basis. I'd say we haven't really ever given the death penalty a serious chance.
I'm pretty much about punishment, the death penalty, etc, but this even seems a little silly to me.
If someone isn't intimidated by a 20+ year prison sentence, they won't be intimidated by a 1000-year virtual one.
If someone has committed a crime that heinous, I personally believe that we should just kill them. No, I don't believe in rehabilitation for violent offenders...it's totally not about that. I think rehab is a silly, futile concept that statistics prove doesn't really work anyway.
So can we expect more funding for people doubting Global Warming, then?
Oh wait, no, that's DOGMA...we don't want 'mavericks' that question sacred cows. We want mavericks that challenge the Establishment in acceptable ways...
It's not age 'discrimination', it's simply a fact that companies would rather hire younger workers for a number of reasons: - they generally work for less - they will generally work longer hours with less complaints (often, they have nothing BUT work to do) - they're gullible, and aside from 'millenial ennui' are easily motivated, where older workers have "seen this crap a dozen times before"
What a middle-aged or older worker USED to bring to the job was a collective wisdom, a collective memory of what's worked and what hasn't, as well as a seasoned perspective. Now, however, when companies fire these workers, obviously their contextual skills at any other place are going to be worth far less.
Basically Fluke was a party behind the Trade investigation as to importations of comparable-appearing knockoffs.
I have no horse in this race; I don't use multimeters and couldn't care less who wins (although I tend to be a free-marketeer, generally). Imagegoogling for both, some of them look remarkably similar. I'd say the block was justified. If a bunch got through before the ban was enforced, that doesn't mean the ban was unjust or arbitrary.
Maybe a committe, and a staff...of course you have to have a competent staff. And they're going to be overworked, so a whole fleet of nubile, er, naive, er, talented interns.
And they'll need offices, maybe a new office building, somewhere downtown so they can exercise 'oversight' as closely as possible. A parking garage, certainly, plus probably a cafeteria. Probably a monorail from the airport is worth considering too...
Regarding the winter-misery point: the data may certainly show how unusual or extreme the winter was (as a 40-something in MN, it really wasn't that big a deal), but isn't it particularly sad how hard we're working to prove that we're miserable?
Of course, like everything in 2014, there's a political context (because at least in the West, we have pretty much eliminated every other serious danger that humans have faced, so we obsess over minutiae that would have been lost in the static to any other generation) in proving how severe the weather has been, right?
Yep, it was a long winter. For the bulk of human history, that's pretty much all anyone would have said, and moved on.
Not in 2014. In March 2014, as the days start to get longer, warmer, and sunnier...we're busy analyzing (proving, justifying) just HOW UNHAPPY we were?
...and the comment was certainly ill-advised, but the FACT is - if we're just counting the number of warheads, and the capability - he's pretty much right. They're the only country that could turn the US to ash. (shrug)
We're the only country that could do it to them, too.
That used to be what 'superpower' meant, before Russia turned into a great big Thugocracy. Well, they always sorta were, weren't they? Russia is Russian. I'm not sure what Pollyanna's thought that by changing flags, their essential nature was going to change? It didn't from despotic Monarchism to Socialism. Why should it change from Socialism to Oligarchy?
Slashdot Mirror
Considering the abysmal lack of fact-checking on even the simplest of stories, the amount of content that is obviously just pandered from one web site to the next by so-called professional journalists, the number of images and stories that have been discovered to be (if not completely manufactured) at least heavily edited in favor of a political viewpoint...well, if people are having a hard time distinguishing "journalists" from "dipshit with a website and a viewpoint", I'd say journalists have only themselves to blame?
"...pointing to a future stalked by floods, drought, conflict and economic damage if carbon emissions go untamed...."
At least their analysis is objective, measured, and not trying to panic anyone.
This is no more 'fly doing calculus' any more than people do calculus when they throw a snowball at a target.
Not to say that I'm not occasionally amazed at the staggering mathematical underpinnings of some of what we internalize as fairly simple things:
- seeing - and interpreting - an image with light and color.
- hitting a moving target with something
- the signal complexity involved in muscle coordination to do just about anything.
I guess I'd call this the natural order of things.
We have, for example, a certain climate and conditions. It's been this way for 10's of 000's of years. In marine life, there are species that have evolved to be astonishingly successful in these conditions, outcompeting and marginalizing precursor species who were far more generalist but less efficient in these specific circumstances.
Now that climate is changing, conditions are changing, and some of these hyperspecialist species are starting to falter and even go extinct. They simply can't cope with a wider range (or changed) of conditions. The previously-marginalized generalist species which had been pushed into inhospitable ecological niches (because that's the only place where they could compete better) are now becoming once again bountiful.
I see modern 2014 humanity has a hyper-adapted specialist condition of humanity. It's almost inevitable that such a brittle structure will at some point (for us) catastrophically collapse. I can only hope it's only a collapse "back to" a more generalist state of knowledge and durability...rather than extinction/
I'm not saying it's great, nor the best strategy; just drawing analogies.
I'm clearly not talking about "the world", I'm talking about the US.
Political prisoners here? Nope. Your point? None.
How do you claim the deterrent effect didn't work? It's unproveable. Of course it's not going to eliminate crime, there are always going to be people disregarding their own safety, particularly among the desperate. Them you're NEVER going to deter, you can only kill them....which the death penalty ALSO takes care of.
... in the face of dogma.
"CEO of OLPC acknowledges that the smartphone has pretty much made their goal entirely obsolete."
Oh wait, that's not what he said?
Only if you want to broaden the definition of "discrimination: in the legal sense so widely that everyone can claim to be a victim, sure. I'll concede that the trial lawyers of this country would agree wholeheartedly with you.
If I need someone to routinely reach something 8' high, I'm not hiring a little person. That'd be stupid. Is that heightist of me?
If I need someone to routinely lift 80lb boxes, I'm going to tend to hire the strong dude that's 25 rather than the feeble 75 year old woman. Even if they both CAN do it, it's just logical that the 25 year old is going to be able to do it faster, longer, with fewer breaks and medical consequences.
If I want to hire someone for a job, and want to pay as little as possible to get as much work as possible, I'd tend to hire someone younger.* It's not 'discrimination', it's common sense.
*Now, I'd argue that millenials as a group are so repellent, lazy, unmotivated, and self-obsessed that they probably are the best argument against age discrimination. Even if a millenial is physically more capable of doing a job, I'd probably get more PRODUCTIVE work out of a middle-of-the-bell-curve 40 year old than that middle-of-the-bell-curve 20-something.
That's complete bullshit.
The US is perennially stupid when it comes to paying for any long-term investment, be it weather satellites or highways. The inability to fund that satellite has more to do with the general budget process than any sort of 'anti-global-warming' effort.
If you're contending that "global warming" isn't the mainstream scientific dogma today, you're either not paying attention, you're grossly naive, or you're being nakedly disingenuous.
TAANSTAFL.
Everything's a compromise, and nothing comes for free.
You could have, for example, a justice system in which nobody is punished, ever. In that case, there would be a 0% chance the wrong person would be punished. Likewise, there'd be no sexism, no racism in law enforcement.
I doubt anyone would agree that's a better result than the current system?
Americans accept that 30,000 largely-innocent people will die EVERY YEAR as a consequence of having an automobile-based transport system.
We accept compromises all the time. I drink water from plastic bottles despite concerns about pseudo-estrogens because ultimately, it's just too damn convenient not to. I expect that a tight calorie-restrictive, largely-vegan diet, managed carefully, would extend my lifespan - but I'd rather live 70 years happy than 90 years hungry all the time.
We have an imperfect justice system. Sometimes an innocent* man** is punished. This means that we still have work to do to improve it, but solely on utilitarian grounds I believe that killing every violent criminal with 30+ years left on their sentences would simultaneously ease overcrowding, improve budgets and conditions for prisoners who we are ultimately willing to release back into society, and provide a SUBSTANTIAL deterrent example for potential criminals.***
*"innocent": I can't find a single example where an incorrect conviction was handed down to someone truly innocent, as the picture is painted of some poor dude who just gets 'swept up' by jackbooted law enforcement. No, in every single example I've seen (and I've looked pretty hard) the 'innocent' victim is a bastard of the first order with multiple other convictions, history of illegality, and generally someone we as a society would be well rid of anyway. Sure, he might be 'innocent' of THAT SPECIFIC CRIME, but hardly 'innocent' in an absolute sense.
** as much as justice-system critics like to point to the disproportionate conviction of minorities as an example of a fundamental 'wrong' in the system, I notice that the staggering majority of convictions of are men, yet nobody claims sexism. Why?
***at the height of executions (in TX, the most aggressive death-penalty state by far), not even 1 in 1000 death row inmates end up being executed. Critics of capital punishment claim there's no deterrent value of the practice; I'd say that the people living on that ragged edge of society risk their lives for odds orders of magnitude worse than that on a regular basis. I'd say we haven't really ever given the death penalty a serious chance.
I'm pretty much about punishment, the death penalty, etc, but this even seems a little silly to me.
If someone isn't intimidated by a 20+ year prison sentence, they won't be intimidated by a 1000-year virtual one.
If someone has committed a crime that heinous, I personally believe that we should just kill them. No, I don't believe in rehabilitation for violent offenders...it's totally not about that. I think rehab is a silly, futile concept that statistics prove doesn't really work anyway.
Life isn't precious, it is ubiquitous.
So can we expect more funding for people doubting Global Warming, then?
Oh wait, no, that's DOGMA...we don't want 'mavericks' that question sacred cows. We want mavericks that challenge the Establishment in acceptable ways...
Cost?
Then the inflated values of today will win.
Deaths?
Long term medical effects?
Gigatons of waste produced?
"Worst" is a worthlessly subjective word without context.
It's not age 'discrimination', it's simply a fact that companies would rather hire younger workers for a number of reasons:
- they generally work for less
- they will generally work longer hours with less complaints (often, they have nothing BUT work to do)
- they're gullible, and aside from 'millenial ennui' are easily motivated, where older workers have "seen this crap a dozen times before"
What a middle-aged or older worker USED to bring to the job was a collective wisdom, a collective memory of what's worked and what hasn't, as well as a seasoned perspective. Now, however, when companies fire these workers, obviously their contextual skills at any other place are going to be worth far less.
Yeah, because why would they get to defend the look and feel of their product? Crazy!
It's not like the other guys could import red, green, blue or any other color, right?
...when a scapegoat doesn't understand its role.
http://www.usitc.gov/publicati...
"* Certain Digital Multimeters, and Products with Multimeter Functionality
Investigation No. 337-TA-588
(Publication No. 4210; December 2010)"
from http://www.usitc.gov/intellect...
(Warning 162 page pdf)
Basically Fluke was a party behind the Trade investigation as to importations of comparable-appearing knockoffs.
I have no horse in this race; I don't use multimeters and couldn't care less who wins (although I tend to be a free-marketeer, generally). Imagegoogling for both, some of them look remarkably similar. I'd say the block was justified. If a bunch got through before the ban was enforced, that doesn't mean the ban was unjust or arbitrary.
"absent a condition of declared war, that might make any non-uniformed foreign forces in country spies"
Wouldn't they pretty much be called "tourists"?
Alternately, we could take the Obama route and offer them a "path to citizenship".
...is another committee, I'm sure of it.
Maybe a committe, and a staff...of course you have to have a competent staff. And they're going to be overworked, so a whole fleet of nubile, er, naive, er, talented interns.
And they'll need offices, maybe a new office building, somewhere downtown so they can exercise 'oversight' as closely as possible. A parking garage, certainly, plus probably a cafeteria. Probably a monorail from the airport is worth considering too...
Not sure they can be unlawful combatants unless there is actually combat taking place.
....LouisCK offers his videos for $5 with no DRM, and nets what, $400k on the first one?
I keep hearing this "it's a prepurchase" bullshit.
If I prepurchase something, and it's never later available, I am legally entitled to a refund.
Kickstarter has no such provision.
Regarding the winter-misery point: the data may certainly show how unusual or extreme the winter was (as a 40-something in MN, it really wasn't that big a deal), but isn't it particularly sad how hard we're working to prove that we're miserable?
Of course, like everything in 2014, there's a political context (because at least in the West, we have pretty much eliminated every other serious danger that humans have faced, so we obsess over minutiae that would have been lost in the static to any other generation) in proving how severe the weather has been, right?
Yep, it was a long winter. For the bulk of human history, that's pretty much all anyone would have said, and moved on.
Not in 2014. In March 2014, as the days start to get longer, warmer, and sunnier...we're busy analyzing (proving, justifying) just HOW UNHAPPY we were?
That's...pathological.
How could you possibly do this experiment without trying it through the frosted glass of a shower door with a naked person on the other side?
...and the comment was certainly ill-advised, but the FACT is - if we're just counting the number of warheads, and the capability - he's pretty much right. They're the only country that could turn the US to ash. (shrug)
We're the only country that could do it to them, too.
That used to be what 'superpower' meant, before Russia turned into a great big Thugocracy. Well, they always sorta were, weren't they? Russia is Russian. I'm not sure what Pollyanna's thought that by changing flags, their essential nature was going to change? It didn't from despotic Monarchism to Socialism. Why should it change from Socialism to Oligarchy?