What sort of consensual delusion is it that makes people continue to believe the "Whitehouse Petitions" mean SHIT?
Yes, Derek Khanna just mentioned it. Hooray. They hit 100k signatures.
But please: point to a SINGLE THING that the stupid "petition" website has started, stopped, or otherwise changed?*
*except to prompt some White House drone to hit the button 'generate response email': "Thank you for your interest in (issue). Please be assured that the (current president) administration takes your concern, and those of your other petitioners very seriously. President (current president) has reviewed the situation regarding (issue) closely with a team of experts and while you raise important concerns, feels that we should continue on the current policy course. Once again, thanks for your concern, (current president) appreciates your engagement on (issue)."
Phht, and people say that religion is dying. If this isn't a demonstration of naked, unsupported faith, I'm not sure what is.
Deep topic, camouflaged in a piece about automated kitchens.
I think this is just another symptom of problems we have with global homogenization. It's endemic, as the world grows smaller.
It's been raised many times about crop strains, but I think the more insidious threat to humanity in the long term is homogenization of intellect.
It struck me the other day in an NPR piece about the success of online courses like Khan Academy. They were batting around the idea that for the 1000-level college courses - in which it's little more than basics taught to auditoriums of 100+ students - you could record the greatest lecturers like Feynman, etc and have them teach everyone. They thought this was a generally good idea? I see limited appeal but terrible danger if everyone is taught to approach problems and conceive of things in the same way.
On a larger scale, if we all eventually spoke some sort of Chinese or English, most definitely we lose something, as different languages approach things with different conceptual frameworks.
Yes, I am (in this context) homo(genization)-phobic.
I've always wondered why the online poker services that were under siege for so many years didn't contact/partner with the Indian gaming casinos?
As I understand, they have a broad-brush immunity to gambling laws Federally, I'm no expert certainly but that seems like a nice, safe, legal foundation for hosting online real-money gambling.
I'm not sure I'm convinced that DPRK even HAS nukes. 0) the Ryongchon disaster - a truly enormous conventional explosion of mysterious origin, variously assigned 'colliding trains with LNG', 'train of ammonium nitrate', and other really explosive stuff suggests that DPRK could have been shipping colossal amounts of explosives for years.
1) the 2006 nuke test was rated at 1 kt, and 'some' radioactivity was detected. Pretty much sounds like a great pile of explosives interleaved with old Fiestaware dishes would give about the same result.
2) the 2009 test was likewise not much more than a fizzle, nuclearly-speaking, rated at 2-4 kt. Still well within the range of "giant frikkin' minecraft-style pile of explosives".
3) the 2013 test has now been estimated at 5kt. Huge, yes, but still doable. (One 50-car train of explosives = 5kt explosives. The DPRK could easily assemble 50 boxcars of explosives over 4 years.)
(tinfoil hat/) 4) it fits the narrative; with AlQaeda a pathetic rump of an organization reduced to bombing girls schools in remote Afghani provinces, we need an "enemy" to justify ongoing defense spending and 'alertness'.
And how, pray tell, are we ever going to 'fill in' this incomplete understanding if pussies like you wet their pants in terror whenever the idea of ethnicity shows up in any study whatsoever?
Seriously - we're on the brink of determining genetic predispositions for all sorts of subtle behaviors, yet the idea that ethnicity might be a marker is so horrifying that we can't touch that with a 10' pole.
Sure, 99.8% of the DNA from one person to the next is the same, But 98% between humans and Chimps is the same. So it's pretty clear that small genetic variations can be pretty damn significant.
Hell, we KNOW there are fundamental differences between men and women but to suggest that these lifelong gross chemical and physiological differences end up having any sort of broader impact on brain function - psychology, intellect, learning, skill sets, etc. - merely makes one the target for an academic lynching. (cf. Lawrence Summers)
I don't honestly know what the answers to these questions are. But I know that fearing to even ASK is reprehensible. THAT is 'traitorous' to the scientific spirit.
The fact that you haul out the 'fucking creep and traitor to the human spirit' suggests that your response is purely emotional. Thanks for proving my point. QED.
It really is like 'every other generation of MS OS sucks'.
Win 8 - disaster, major suckfest. Win 7 - pretty damn good. Win Vista - disaster, major suckfest Win XP - great, eventually Win 2k - ? I don't know, was this ok? WinME - ahahahahaa Win98 - really quite good Win95 - first generation, kind of a struggle, not nearly as good as OS/2 Win 3.0/3.1 - great for its time Win exec - offered pretty nearly nothing that other utilities/shells couldn't do better
Look, I know it's hard enough to get editors that perform basic functions like "make sure the link isn't just blog or product pimping" or "make sure that article hasn't been posted already", so asking them to actually PARSE the text and edit it is expecting a lot....but really, could you slant the language in the summary more?
"From the article: "Other scans have shown that brain regions associated with risk and uncertainty, such as the fear-processing amygdala, differ in structure in liberals and conservatives. And different architecture means different behavior. Liberals tend to seek out novelty and uncertainty, while conservatives exhibit strong changes in attitude to threatening situations. The former are more willing to accept risk, while the latter tends to have more intense physical reactions to threatening stimuli.""
So when liberals do it, its 'novelty, uncertainty' or 'risk'. When conservatives do it, it's 'threatening'. No, no editorial bias there.
Would it read differently if we reversed the words used, and said that liberals seek out 'threatening' situations and conservatives avoid risk and uncertainty? Meaning (roughly) the same, but it kinda makes liberals look rather stupid in turn.
Further, from the article: "The researchers found that liberals and conservatives donâ(TM)t differ in the risks they do or donâ(TM)t take" and âoeIf you went to Vegas, you wonâ(TM)t be able to tell whoâ(TM)s a Democrat or whoâ(TM)s a Republican". The summary says that they react very differently (when in fact, the article only says their brains 'light up' differently), but their actual behavior is indistinguishable.
Finally, the conclusion of the article says it quite clearly that the dynamic nature of the brain constantly reconfiguring itself means that we really cannot assert that anything is hard-coded...in DIRECT opposition to the summary header.
The actual studies are fascinating, shitty/. summary notwithstanding, for a couple of reasons: 1) to me it seems obvious, that the articles have the cause/effect reversed as well. It's not that our politics set our brain patterns; our brain patterns no doubt are expressed in our worldview/politics. 2) it's even more curious that the differences in response are NOT reflected in behavior - that's absolutely bizarre.
Don't get me wrong, the Pyramids are a stunning achievement - but you can't really contend that the last, say, 1000 years have been anything but pathetic.
Seriously, though: I'm not sure where the answer lies.
The fact is that it is a bloody interesting question: North-East Africa/South-West Asia and "humanity worth speaking of" were pretty much synonymous in the 1000+ BC era. Yet, by about 1000 BC they were clearly being outstripped and outcompeted by their near Northwestern neighbors. What did Greece have that Persia didn't? Why did Egypt essentially vanish into historical insignificance
China, on the other hand, pursued its own track of fantastic innovation, brilliant thought and widespread civilization...only to likewise fall prey to a sort of somnolence technologically and even culturally so that by 1900 it may have been the largest empire the world had ever seen in some respects, in others it was a laughingstock.
Is the "frontiers are the source of dynamism while the center becomes decrepit'" just too Toynbee (or Robert E Howard, for that matter) for the modern, enlightened era? I don't see a lot of more compelling hypotheses?
I find these questions absolutely fascinating, and I'm quite certain about one thing: histrionics about racism every time someone asks them is not conducive to developing ANY understanding of the forces at play.
III. EPA HEARINGS. DDT was banned by an EPA administrator who ignored the decision of his own administrative law judge.
17. Extensive hearings on DDT before an EPA administrative law judge occurred during 1971-1972. The EPA hearing examiner, Judge Edmund Sweeney, concluded that âoeDDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man⦠DDT is not a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to man⦠The use of DDT under the regulations involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds or other wildlife.â [Sweeney, EM. 1972. EPA Hearing Examiner's recommendations and findings concerning DDT hearings, April 25, 1972 (40 CFR 164.32, 113 pages). Summarized in Barrons (May 1, 1972) and Oregonian (April 26, 1972)]
18. Overruling the EPA hearing examiner, EPA administrator Ruckelshaus banned DDT in 1972. Ruckelshaus never attended a single hour of the seven months of EPA hearings on DDT. Ruckelshausâ(TM) aides reported he did not even read the transcript of the EPA hearings on DDT. [Santa Ana Register, April 25, 1972]
19. After reversing the EPA hearing examinerâ(TM)s decision, Ruckelshaus refused to release materials upon which his ban was based. Ruckelshaus rebuffed USDA efforts to obtain those materials through the Freedom of Information Act, claiming that they were just âoeinternal memos.â Scientists were therefore prevented from refuting the false allegations in the Ruckelshausâ(TM) âoeOpinion and Order on DDT.â
The problem with the premise (and I recognize it's not serious) is that it utterly ignores the entire basis of the foundation of the United States.
It's understandable when people from other countries don't "get it". It's sad/pathetic (and I'm really talking about the comments here) when people ostensibly FROM this country don't understand the basic premises of their own history.
"The electoral system overrepresents the least-populated states". Yes, that is PRECISELY the point.
The United States is not a country like most others, in which case the subdivisions are relatively-arbitrary political/administrative districts, counties, oblasts, whatever. The separate states are (or were) SOVEREIGN states, with a constitutionally-enforced protection of that sovereignty. The US Federal government is only allowed to act in very narrowly-defined areas that were mutually agreed by the original colonies to be of jurisdictional benefit - defense, foreign policy, etc.*
It's worth saying again: the States are NOT 'districts' of the US in the familiar sense that most countries have. For example, the US Federal government passes few laws that directly impact citizens. By far, the majority of laws applicable to people directly in the US are state laws and local (city) ordinances. The US Fed doesn't set national speed limits, for example; they set a limit and tell the states to comply or they won't get their Federal highway maintenance dollars.
The union of the Colonies was specifically predicated on a level of balance that allows them a voice disproportional to population.
One might further point out that Congress ITSELF has worked to make it less representative. Note that in the first Congress, the House was approximately 62 members for a colonial population in 1790 of 3.8 million. Proportionally, this would mean the House today would be over 5000 members. Remember, that this likewise would impact the number of electoral votes in play, and pretty much eliminate the 'senator' anti-populist bias.
*Granted, the Constitution is pretty nearly in tatters, the remaining shreds filthy with the wipings of modern administrations and congresses who have actively colluded to evade and sap both the letter and spirit of the original framers.
Remember folks: Anyone can sue anyone, over just about anything.
That - coupled with a grossly Byzantine case-law system that seems to directly-reward $$ paid to platoons of attorneys - has really left us a broken system.
The problem is one of a level playing field, in both directions. On the one hand, we want our legal system to be accessible to anyone; this allows the impoverished parents of the kid that was crippled by defective playground equipment to sue Giant Mega Playground Corp despite their sub-poverty income. On the other hand, we don't want our legal system to entertain nuisance or frivolous lawsuits from parents of the kid that ate sand to be able to sue the sandbox maker and the gravel pit that made the sand.
How do we reconcile these two contrary positions?
The "loser pays for the trial" is good on the face of it, the problem is that the initial 'cost to enter the game' is so high
Here's my solution: use all the bloody lawyers. We have zillions.
1) REQUIRE any licensed attorney to do X hours of arbitration work per month as a condition of their license. This would be at whatever rate public defenders are paid. 2) any civil suit MUST pass through an arbitrator before being filed in court. This is non-binding arbitration; but the arbitrator will essentially counsel the parties as to their opinion of the case - find for the plaintiff, find for the defendant, or inconclusive*. (* there HAS to be this option, as some cases really ARE complicated and subtle). This arbitration is NO LAWYERS FOR THE PLAINTIFF OR DEFENSE. Just two people, stating their cases. This finding is given to the judge if the case goes to trial. (The point of this is to prompt settlement or abandonment of the suit.) 3) If the suit goes to trial: a) if it's found to be in agreement with the arbitrator, loser pays the full costs of trial PLUS a punitive amount set by the judge. b) if it's found to be opposite the arbitrator's ruling, the judge sets the burden of the court costs; more importantly (for the system), an 'overruled' arbitrator is given a 'point'. 3 points, they lose their license and must re-certify. (Whether there's an accumulation system, where 'correct' arbitrators can delete points with successful rulings, that's a nuance that may have some value too.) c) if the ruling was inconclusive, the judge of the case then can rule if the arbitrator was 'right' or not, and thus whether the arbitrator accumulates a 'point'.
The points are: - using our overabundance of lawyers constructively in their role as 'officers of the court' to productively to 'filter' the caseload presented to our courts - importantly, to hold the lawyers accountable for their findings, so they both take it seriously, and - provide people involved in a suit a chance to speak their piece AND feel they are getting a fair evaluation of their case - minimize the lawerly impact on the front-end of a case.
3d hasn't 'taken off' for television or computer games (or really even movies) despite million$ in promotion and efforts to sell new hardware.
3d is really a solution in search of a problem, particularly on the web.
The fact is that 3d today badly suffers from perspective and quality issues, and most consumers see it as pointless fluff.
In my own narrow perspective (see what I did there?) I have minor amblyopia so I TRULY don't care (obviously, I'm part of a small minority with this). I *can* force it so I can see things in 3d without too much effort. Nevertheless, I've occasionally gone to 3d movies and been totally unimpressed.*
*an experience shared by my binocularly-functional friends.
For movies, it's astonishing to me that they'll spend dozens of million$ on meticulous art design and set work to make sure the slightest detail is accurate in a film, and on imax theaters with fantastically comfortable seating and near-perfect sound...and then present it in a format that suffers badly from ghosting, bad lateral/peripheral perspective, and force the audience to watch in tremendously uncomfortable disposable, usually scratched-to-hell 3d glasses.
I'm a 'skeptic' and I've never assumed that the ecomarxists behind Global Warming are in it for the personal wealth (although Mr Gore has done fairly well with Carbon Trading, no?).
I've never - in this context - said 'follow the money!'.
No, I think the people who claim anthropogenic climate change are from a number of different, parallel but not always coordinated motivations: - I think there are well-meaning people, who, with the egoism humanity has always assumed, look at the bad things that seem to happen without reason - hurricanes, etc. - and cast about for an answer, blaming it on humanity. It's no more well-reasoned than blaming the Ocean Gods of course, but it seems to be in human nature to assume that everything happens because, around, and for us (remember how Earth used to be the center of everything?). - I think there are malignant eco-marxists who see political utility in the debate; they know that people are suckers for dolphins, pandas, and elephants. The 'we need to care for the environment' mantra is generally an appealing one (you're an idiot if you don't understand that you can't shit where you eat), but by careful presentation of facts and figures and charts, Joe and Joanne Public can be convinced to support a sort of eco-facism in which the eco-intelligentsia tells us how to live. - I think there's an eco-fanatical fringe who truly despise humanity, and who would love to see the cure to be 'a world without us'.
I'm 45; I've seen the eco left be wrong about DDT, about population, about food supplies, about fresh water. I've seen them lay down in front of trains to prevent the construction of nuclear plants - which then ended up creating more coal-fired plants and creating 100x MORE net radioactivity (http://www.sciencemag.org/content/202/4372/1045.short).
In short, they're well-intentioned, but stupid. All of this is layered neatly atop a largely science-ignorant public. No amount of strident shouting will change that the basic facts are against them:
"The climate is changing!" OF COURSE IT IS. It always HAS changed. "Look how much warmer it's gotten!" This was more useful in 2000, when it was in fact getting warmer. Global temps have pretty much flatlined the last 10 years. "Look at the warming curve for the last (cherry pick a span of time) years!" It's asinine to talk about climate in 10- or even 100-year spans.
Looking at the last million-year span, there are CLEARLY 'pulses' of temperature (and CO2) about every 120,000 yrs. It's been about 120,000 years since the last one.
I have yet to hear anyone explain how this can be, yet the current temperature pulse (as we seem to be in one) is somehow the fault of SUVs and industrialization?
Re DDT you might want to review the research; the fact is that DDT is a poster-child for the misinformed politically-driven 'eco-conclusion' that ISN'T informed by science.
The tests that were used for the basis of the book Silent Spring were deeply flawed, and the scientists that ran them, themselves acknowledged that they'd drawn the wrong conclusions as the birds' lab diets were woefully low in calcium - needed to make strong eggshells. When the same labs ran the same tests with adequate diets, there was NO consequence of significance identified in the birds fed DDT (they were slightly healthier, in fact, but it was within the variability of the test).
Meanwhile, millions died of malaria due to mosquitoes that WERE being controlled by DDT (although DDT-resistant mosquitoes were always a possibility, so it's unlikely to have continued to be the panacea it had been).
So one might want to be careful who one labels "sheep".
Undershoot, then overshoot. So close, and yet so far.
The OP was right, but undershot the problem in saying "companies are doing what they're supposed to" and blames "clueless lawmakers"; correct, but not going far enough.
The 2P is also right, in pointing out it's not simple naivete, but in fact GREEDY lawmakers who are taking kickbacks (in either power or money) for writing the laws in ways that enrich their contributors. Then he grossly overshoots the mark by going on to impute some sort of political bias, with an anti-Republican rant against a strawman set of GOP political beliefs.
If the problem was (as implied) solely with the Republicans and their (alleged) set of beliefs, why is the system as bad as it is? Since 1945, the Democrats controlled the Senate 70% of the sessions and the House a whopping 79% of the sessions.
My point isn't to paint the Republicans as "good guys" - the Republican politicians are greedy, self-interested scum.
It's simply evident that in this case, there IS no bias in Washington: our Federal politicians are ALL greedy self-interested scum and it's in no way attributable to a single party.
Rep. Steve Womack, R-Ark., (said) the legislation is a "bipartisan, bicameral, common-sense solution that promotes states' rights and levels the playing field for our Main Street businesses."
This, folks, is a politician. When he sees that local businesses are being heavily taxed, and some other business model comes into existence that evades that tax, his efforts are to ensure that other business is ALSO heavily taxed. Make sure the misery is spread equally, instead of (perhaps) asking if there's anything that can be done to reduce the misery generally.
Specialization increases efficiency in a system, generally. If products can be viewed electronically (remotely), and delivered by mail/courier, the 'public services' being used are minimal. The distribution center already pays property and relevant taxes. The carriers are paying taxes for gasoline and vehicles (which is already subsumed in their prices) which compensate for the public ways/facilities used. The homeowner is already paying property taxes for local law enforcement, etc. (Or the property owner, if it's a rental unit.) I and the retailer are both already further paying for the infrastructure allowing us to communicate.
The fact is that modern technology has made many goods more efficiently sold through remote-purchase and postal distribution. This is simply a (faster) recap of the paradigm-shift in commerce when traveling merchant caravans no longer bought everything on speculation to (hopefully) sell later down the trail. Likewise, big-box retailers kicked the crap out of local small retail/grocery stores generally (albeit that process isn't quite complete yet). Nobody today mourns the loss of the merchant caravan; and already the younger generations have no maudlin feelings about the local small general store.
I find it curious that you specify US states as your example, when in fact a far better example would be repressive muslim theocracies, where porn use and prostitution flourish at levels that would make a Vegas mobster blush.
"Progressive" now means that we'll tell you how to think and what to think.
It's great, I mean - look at all the burden that's taken off the individual!
(On a serious note relevant to the OP: (http://newsroom.unl.edu/blog/?p=1202) "The research, published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, found in a series of experiments that participants processed images of men and women in very different ways. When presented with images of men, perceivers tended to rely more on "global" cognitive processing, the mental method in which a person is perceived as a whole. Meanwhile, images of women were more often the subject of "local" cognitive processing, or the objectifying perception of something as an assemblage of its various parts." This was happening with both male and female survey subjects.
http://www.snpp.com/episodes/4F21 "The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots. Thank you."
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What sort of consensual delusion is it that makes people continue to believe the "Whitehouse Petitions" mean SHIT?
Yes, Derek Khanna just mentioned it. Hooray. They hit 100k signatures.
But please: point to a SINGLE THING that the stupid "petition" website has started, stopped, or otherwise changed?*
*except to prompt some White House drone to hit the button 'generate response email': "Thank you for your interest in (issue). Please be assured that the (current president) administration takes your concern, and those of your other petitioners very seriously. President (current president) has reviewed the situation regarding (issue) closely with a team of experts and while you raise important concerns, feels that we should continue on the current policy course. Once again, thanks for your concern, (current president) appreciates your engagement on (issue)."
Phht, and people say that religion is dying. If this isn't a demonstration of naked, unsupported faith, I'm not sure what is.
Deep topic, camouflaged in a piece about automated kitchens.
I think this is just another symptom of problems we have with global homogenization. It's endemic, as the world grows smaller.
It's been raised many times about crop strains, but I think the more insidious threat to humanity in the long term is homogenization of intellect.
It struck me the other day in an NPR piece about the success of online courses like Khan Academy. They were batting around the idea that for the 1000-level college courses - in which it's little more than basics taught to auditoriums of 100+ students - you could record the greatest lecturers like Feynman, etc and have them teach everyone. They thought this was a generally good idea? I see limited appeal but terrible danger if everyone is taught to approach problems and conceive of things in the same way.
On a larger scale, if we all eventually spoke some sort of Chinese or English, most definitely we lose something, as different languages approach things with different conceptual frameworks.
Yes, I am (in this context) homo(genization)-phobic.
I've always wondered why the online poker services that were under siege for so many years didn't contact/partner with the Indian gaming casinos?
As I understand, they have a broad-brush immunity to gambling laws Federally, I'm no expert certainly but that seems like a nice, safe, legal foundation for hosting online real-money gambling.
I'm not sure I'm convinced that DPRK even HAS nukes.
0) the Ryongchon disaster - a truly enormous conventional explosion of mysterious origin, variously assigned 'colliding trains with LNG', 'train of ammonium nitrate', and other really explosive stuff suggests that DPRK could have been shipping colossal amounts of explosives for years.
1) the 2006 nuke test was rated at 1 kt, and 'some' radioactivity was detected. Pretty much sounds like a great pile of explosives interleaved with old Fiestaware dishes would give about the same result.
2) the 2009 test was likewise not much more than a fizzle, nuclearly-speaking, rated at 2-4 kt. Still well within the range of "giant frikkin' minecraft-style pile of explosives".
3) the 2013 test has now been estimated at 5kt. Huge, yes, but still doable. (One 50-car train of explosives = 5kt explosives. The DPRK could easily assemble 50 boxcars of explosives over 4 years.)
(tinfoil hat/)
4) it fits the narrative; with AlQaeda a pathetic rump of an organization reduced to bombing girls schools in remote Afghani provinces, we need an "enemy" to justify ongoing defense spending and 'alertness'.
(/tinfoil hat)
And how, pray tell, are we ever going to 'fill in' this incomplete understanding if pussies like you wet their pants in terror whenever the idea of ethnicity shows up in any study whatsoever?
Seriously - we're on the brink of determining genetic predispositions for all sorts of subtle behaviors, yet the idea that ethnicity might be a marker is so horrifying that we can't touch that with a 10' pole.
Sure, 99.8% of the DNA from one person to the next is the same, But 98% between humans and Chimps is the same. So it's pretty clear that small genetic variations can be pretty damn significant.
Hell, we KNOW there are fundamental differences between men and women but to suggest that these lifelong gross chemical and physiological differences end up having any sort of broader impact on brain function - psychology, intellect, learning, skill sets, etc. - merely makes one the target for an academic lynching. (cf. Lawrence Summers)
I don't honestly know what the answers to these questions are. But I know that fearing to even ASK is reprehensible. THAT is 'traitorous' to the scientific spirit.
The fact that you haul out the 'fucking creep and traitor to the human spirit' suggests that your response is purely emotional. Thanks for proving my point. QED.
It really is like 'every other generation of MS OS sucks'.
Win 8 - disaster, major suckfest.
Win 7 - pretty damn good.
Win Vista - disaster, major suckfest
Win XP - great, eventually
Win 2k - ? I don't know, was this ok?
WinME - ahahahahaa
Win98 - really quite good
Win95 - first generation, kind of a struggle, not nearly as good as OS/2
Win 3.0/3.1 - great for its time
Win exec - offered pretty nearly nothing that other utilities/shells couldn't do better
Look, I know it's hard enough to get editors that perform basic functions like "make sure the link isn't just blog or product pimping" or "make sure that article hasn't been posted already", so asking them to actually PARSE the text and edit it is expecting a lot....but really, could you slant the language in the summary more?
"From the article: "Other scans have shown that brain regions associated with risk and uncertainty, such as the fear-processing amygdala, differ in structure in liberals and conservatives. And different architecture means different behavior. Liberals tend to seek out novelty and uncertainty, while conservatives exhibit strong changes in attitude to threatening situations. The former are more willing to accept risk, while the latter tends to have more intense physical reactions to threatening stimuli.""
So when liberals do it, its 'novelty, uncertainty' or 'risk'.
When conservatives do it, it's 'threatening'.
No, no editorial bias there.
Would it read differently if we reversed the words used, and said that liberals seek out 'threatening' situations and conservatives avoid risk and uncertainty? Meaning (roughly) the same, but it kinda makes liberals look rather stupid in turn.
Further, from the article: "The researchers found that liberals and conservatives donâ(TM)t differ in the risks they do or donâ(TM)t take" and âoeIf you went to Vegas, you wonâ(TM)t be able to tell whoâ(TM)s a Democrat or whoâ(TM)s a Republican". The summary says that they react very differently (when in fact, the article only says their brains 'light up' differently), but their actual behavior is indistinguishable.
Finally, the conclusion of the article says it quite clearly that the dynamic nature of the brain constantly reconfiguring itself means that we really cannot assert that anything is hard-coded...in DIRECT opposition to the summary header.
The actual studies are fascinating, shitty /. summary notwithstanding, for a couple of reasons:
1) to me it seems obvious, that the articles have the cause/effect reversed as well. It's not that our politics set our brain patterns; our brain patterns no doubt are expressed in our worldview/politics.
2) it's even more curious that the differences in response are NOT reflected in behavior - that's absolutely bizarre.
And what have they done the LAST 5000 years?
Don't get me wrong, the Pyramids are a stunning achievement - but you can't really contend that the last, say, 1000 years have been anything but pathetic.
Seriously, though: I'm not sure where the answer lies.
The fact is that it is a bloody interesting question: North-East Africa/South-West Asia and "humanity worth speaking of" were pretty much synonymous in the 1000+ BC era. Yet, by about 1000 BC they were clearly being outstripped and outcompeted by their near Northwestern neighbors. What did Greece have that Persia didn't? Why did Egypt essentially vanish into historical insignificance
China, on the other hand, pursued its own track of fantastic innovation, brilliant thought and widespread civilization...only to likewise fall prey to a sort of somnolence technologically and even culturally so that by 1900 it may have been the largest empire the world had ever seen in some respects, in others it was a laughingstock.
Is the "frontiers are the source of dynamism while the center becomes decrepit'" just too Toynbee (or Robert E Howard, for that matter) for the modern, enlightened era? I don't see a lot of more compelling hypotheses?
I find these questions absolutely fascinating, and I'm quite certain about one thing: histrionics about racism every time someone asks them is not conducive to developing ANY understanding of the forces at play.
Sure, if the people running the EPA were ethical.
Whups, no, they're as politically-invested as any other person inside the beltway:
http://junkscience.com/1999/07/26/100-things-you-should-know-about-ddt/
http://junkscience.com/1999/07/26/100-things-you-should-know-about-ddt/
Read it and weep. Or cheer, if you are one of those that believes Fox is the only propaganda station and all the ones you watch are "the truth".
All extensively noted.
The problem with the premise (and I recognize it's not serious) is that it utterly ignores the entire basis of the foundation of the United States.
It's understandable when people from other countries don't "get it". It's sad/pathetic (and I'm really talking about the comments here) when people ostensibly FROM this country don't understand the basic premises of their own history.
"The electoral system overrepresents the least-populated states". Yes, that is PRECISELY the point.
The United States is not a country like most others, in which case the subdivisions are relatively-arbitrary political/administrative districts, counties, oblasts, whatever.
The separate states are (or were) SOVEREIGN states, with a constitutionally-enforced protection of that sovereignty. The US Federal government is only allowed to act in very narrowly-defined areas that were mutually agreed by the original colonies to be of jurisdictional benefit - defense, foreign policy, etc.*
It's worth saying again: the States are NOT 'districts' of the US in the familiar sense that most countries have. For example, the US Federal government passes few laws that directly impact citizens. By far, the majority of laws applicable to people directly in the US are state laws and local (city) ordinances. The US Fed doesn't set national speed limits, for example; they set a limit and tell the states to comply or they won't get their Federal highway maintenance dollars.
The union of the Colonies was specifically predicated on a level of balance that allows them a voice disproportional to population.
One might further point out that Congress ITSELF has worked to make it less representative. Note that in the first Congress, the House was approximately 62 members for a colonial population in 1790 of 3.8 million. Proportionally, this would mean the House today would be over 5000 members. Remember, that this likewise would impact the number of electoral votes in play, and pretty much eliminate the 'senator' anti-populist bias.
*Granted, the Constitution is pretty nearly in tatters, the remaining shreds filthy with the wipings of modern administrations and congresses who have actively colluded to evade and sap both the letter and spirit of the original framers.
With a 6-digit ID, it's hard to believe you're so new here.
Remember folks: Anyone can sue anyone, over just about anything.
That - coupled with a grossly Byzantine case-law system that seems to directly-reward $$ paid to platoons of attorneys - has really left us a broken system.
The problem is one of a level playing field, in both directions.
On the one hand, we want our legal system to be accessible to anyone; this allows the impoverished parents of the kid that was crippled by defective playground equipment to sue Giant Mega Playground Corp despite their sub-poverty income.
On the other hand, we don't want our legal system to entertain nuisance or frivolous lawsuits from parents of the kid that ate sand to be able to sue the sandbox maker and the gravel pit that made the sand.
How do we reconcile these two contrary positions?
The "loser pays for the trial" is good on the face of it, the problem is that the initial 'cost to enter the game' is so high
Here's my solution: use all the bloody lawyers. We have zillions.
1) REQUIRE any licensed attorney to do X hours of arbitration work per month as a condition of their license. This would be at whatever rate public defenders are paid.
2) any civil suit MUST pass through an arbitrator before being filed in court. This is non-binding arbitration; but the arbitrator will essentially counsel the parties as to their opinion of the case - find for the plaintiff, find for the defendant, or inconclusive*. (* there HAS to be this option, as some cases really ARE complicated and subtle). This arbitration is NO LAWYERS FOR THE PLAINTIFF OR DEFENSE. Just two people, stating their cases. This finding is given to the judge if the case goes to trial. (The point of this is to prompt settlement or abandonment of the suit.)
3) If the suit goes to trial:
a) if it's found to be in agreement with the arbitrator, loser pays the full costs of trial PLUS a punitive amount set by the judge.
b) if it's found to be opposite the arbitrator's ruling, the judge sets the burden of the court costs; more importantly (for the system), an 'overruled' arbitrator is given a 'point'. 3 points, they lose their license and must re-certify. (Whether there's an accumulation system, where 'correct' arbitrators can delete points with successful rulings, that's a nuance that may have some value too.)
c) if the ruling was inconclusive, the judge of the case then can rule if the arbitrator was 'right' or not, and thus whether the arbitrator accumulates a 'point'.
The points are:
- using our overabundance of lawyers constructively in their role as 'officers of the court' to productively to 'filter' the caseload presented to our courts
- importantly, to hold the lawyers accountable for their findings, so they both take it seriously, and
- provide people involved in a suit a chance to speak their piece AND feel they are getting a fair evaluation of their case
- minimize the lawerly impact on the front-end of a case.
3d hasn't 'taken off' for television or computer games (or really even movies) despite million$ in promotion and efforts to sell new hardware.
3d is really a solution in search of a problem, particularly on the web.
The fact is that 3d today badly suffers from perspective and quality issues, and most consumers see it as pointless fluff.
In my own narrow perspective (see what I did there?) I have minor amblyopia so I TRULY don't care (obviously, I'm part of a small minority with this). I *can* force it so I can see things in 3d without too much effort. Nevertheless, I've occasionally gone to 3d movies and been totally unimpressed.*
*an experience shared by my binocularly-functional friends.
For movies, it's astonishing to me that they'll spend dozens of million$ on meticulous art design and set work to make sure the slightest detail is accurate in a film, and on imax theaters with fantastically comfortable seating and near-perfect sound...and then present it in a format that suffers badly from ghosting, bad lateral/peripheral perspective, and force the audience to watch in tremendously uncomfortable disposable, usually scratched-to-hell 3d glasses.
Your post is a collection of strawman arguments.
I'm a 'skeptic' and I've never assumed that the ecomarxists behind Global Warming are in it for the personal wealth (although Mr Gore has done fairly well with Carbon Trading, no?).
I've never - in this context - said 'follow the money!'.
No, I think the people who claim anthropogenic climate change are from a number of different, parallel but not always coordinated motivations:
- I think there are well-meaning people, who, with the egoism humanity has always assumed, look at the bad things that seem to happen without reason - hurricanes, etc. - and cast about for an answer, blaming it on humanity. It's no more well-reasoned than blaming the Ocean Gods of course, but it seems to be in human nature to assume that everything happens because, around, and for us (remember how Earth used to be the center of everything?).
- I think there are malignant eco-marxists who see political utility in the debate; they know that people are suckers for dolphins, pandas, and elephants. The 'we need to care for the environment' mantra is generally an appealing one (you're an idiot if you don't understand that you can't shit where you eat), but by careful presentation of facts and figures and charts, Joe and Joanne Public can be convinced to support a sort of eco-facism in which the eco-intelligentsia tells us how to live.
- I think there's an eco-fanatical fringe who truly despise humanity, and who would love to see the cure to be 'a world without us'.
I'm 45; I've seen the eco left be wrong about DDT, about population, about food supplies, about fresh water. I've seen them lay down in front of trains to prevent the construction of nuclear plants - which then ended up creating more coal-fired plants and creating 100x MORE net radioactivity (http://www.sciencemag.org/content/202/4372/1045.short).
In short, they're well-intentioned, but stupid. All of this is layered neatly atop a largely science-ignorant public. No amount of strident shouting will change that the basic facts are against them:
"The climate is changing!" OF COURSE IT IS. It always HAS changed.
"Look how much warmer it's gotten!" This was more useful in 2000, when it was in fact getting warmer. Global temps have pretty much flatlined the last 10 years.
"Look at the warming curve for the last (cherry pick a span of time) years!" It's asinine to talk about climate in 10- or even 100-year spans.
Looking at the last million-year span, there are CLEARLY 'pulses' of temperature (and CO2) about every 120,000 yrs. It's been about 120,000 years since the last one.
I have yet to hear anyone explain how this can be, yet the current temperature pulse (as we seem to be in one) is somehow the fault of SUVs and industrialization?
Re DDT you might want to review the research; the fact is that DDT is a poster-child for the misinformed politically-driven 'eco-conclusion' that ISN'T informed by science.
The tests that were used for the basis of the book Silent Spring were deeply flawed, and the scientists that ran them, themselves acknowledged that they'd drawn the wrong conclusions as the birds' lab diets were woefully low in calcium - needed to make strong eggshells. When the same labs ran the same tests with adequate diets, there was NO consequence of significance identified in the birds fed DDT (they were slightly healthier, in fact, but it was within the variability of the test).
Meanwhile, millions died of malaria due to mosquitoes that WERE being controlled by DDT (although DDT-resistant mosquitoes were always a possibility, so it's unlikely to have continued to be the panacea it had been).
So one might want to be careful who one labels "sheep".
Undershoot, then overshoot. So close, and yet so far.
The OP was right, but undershot the problem in saying "companies are doing what they're supposed to" and blames "clueless lawmakers"; correct, but not going far enough.
The 2P is also right, in pointing out it's not simple naivete, but in fact GREEDY lawmakers who are taking kickbacks (in either power or money) for writing the laws in ways that enrich their contributors. Then he grossly overshoots the mark by going on to impute some sort of political bias, with an anti-Republican rant against a strawman set of GOP political beliefs.
If the problem was (as implied) solely with the Republicans and their (alleged) set of beliefs, why is the system as bad as it is? Since 1945, the Democrats controlled the Senate 70% of the sessions and the House a whopping 79% of the sessions.
My point isn't to paint the Republicans as "good guys" - the Republican politicians are greedy, self-interested scum.
It's simply evident that in this case, there IS no bias in Washington: our Federal politicians are ALL greedy self-interested scum and it's in no way attributable to a single party.
Most accurately, at least in American politics:
Democrats stay democrats; independents tend to become conservatives as they age.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/118285/democrats-best-among-generation-baby-boomers.aspx
Rep. Steve Womack, R-Ark., (said) the legislation is a "bipartisan, bicameral, common-sense solution that promotes states' rights and levels the playing field for our Main Street businesses."
This, folks, is a politician.
When he sees that local businesses are being heavily taxed, and some other business model comes into existence that evades that tax, his efforts are to ensure that other business is ALSO heavily taxed. Make sure the misery is spread equally, instead of (perhaps) asking if there's anything that can be done to reduce the misery generally.
Specialization increases efficiency in a system, generally.
If products can be viewed electronically (remotely), and delivered by mail/courier, the 'public services' being used are minimal. The distribution center already pays property and relevant taxes. The carriers are paying taxes for gasoline and vehicles (which is already subsumed in their prices) which compensate for the public ways/facilities used. The homeowner is already paying property taxes for local law enforcement, etc. (Or the property owner, if it's a rental unit.) I and the retailer are both already further paying for the infrastructure allowing us to communicate.
The fact is that modern technology has made many goods more efficiently sold through remote-purchase and postal distribution. This is simply a (faster) recap of the paradigm-shift in commerce when traveling merchant caravans no longer bought everything on speculation to (hopefully) sell later down the trail. Likewise, big-box retailers kicked the crap out of local small retail/grocery stores generally (albeit that process isn't quite complete yet). Nobody today mourns the loss of the merchant caravan; and already the younger generations have no maudlin feelings about the local small general store.
I find it curious that you specify US states as your example, when in fact a far better example would be repressive muslim theocracies, where porn use and prostitution flourish at levels that would make a Vegas mobster blush.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that most 'violent porn' is, like most porn, staged with consenting adult actors.
And why would 'violent porn' be so suspect, but simple gross violence (without a penis or vagina in sight) be ok?
Agreed.
Last time I checked, most of the women in porn were volunteers/paid.
How does taking their picture violate their civil rights, for chrissake?
It's 2013 people.
"Progressive" now means that we'll tell you how to think and what to think.
It's great, I mean - look at all the burden that's taken off the individual!
(On a serious note relevant to the OP: (http://newsroom.unl.edu/blog/?p=1202) "The research, published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, found in a series of experiments that participants processed images of men and women in very different ways. When presented with images of men, perceivers tended to rely more on "global" cognitive processing, the mental method in which a person is perceived as a whole. Meanwhile, images of women were more often the subject of "local" cognitive processing, or the objectifying perception of something as an assemblage of its various parts." This was happening with both male and female survey subjects.
http://www.snpp.com/episodes/4F21
"The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea.
They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall
mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by
small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is
clear: To build and maintain those robots. Thank you."
WWCTD
What
Would
Commander
Taco
Do?
Wonder how he feels about this. I mean, he got his pile of $$ and "is out" but still, I bet he cares.