I agree that if I were to see nothing but that graph and then those two predictions, I'd say that the more conservative one seems more likely. However, the fact that most of the scientific community doesn't agree with me sounds like pretty convincing indication that there is something more complicated going on and that I - having no expertise in this subject - shouldn't give much weight to my own guesses over the predictions of those who study the subject for living.
So... do you happen to have any actual expertise in this field, so that it would make sense for me to care about your thoughts here?
I've read your post several times over and can't figure out whether you're trying to contradict something I said or not. In any case...
All economic systems are attempts to deal with scarcity of resources
Communism is precisely the post-scarcity utopia, which requires abundance of resources to exist first.
there isn't suddenly an abundance of resources because a certain system was adopted
Yes... And that's why no country tried to jump directly to communism, as none of them had the required abundance and all knew that they wouldn't reach that abundance simply by changing the system. Rather, they acknowledged that they would first need to reach the over abundance and believed that socialism would be more ethical and efficient system for the transitional period.
Furthermore, you're confusing resources with materials. Labor, capital and materials are the three equally needed resources for economic activity.
I can't figure out what in my post would make you think that. When talking about abundance of resources in relation to communism, the question is "Can everyone be delivered whatever they need?" and obviously that requires more than just the materials. (You can't deliver needed medical treatment without doctors and so on).
Many Americans don't seem to know (or perhaps care about) distinctions between communism (the form of utopia which countries like the Soviet Union supposedly wanted to achieve) and socialism (the system they intended to use in the transitional phase). Oversimplifying a bit... Communism is supposed to be a state where there is such an abundance of resources that everyone can get whatever they need and the motive to work would come not from material goods but from the social status that good workers receive, the idealistic desire to work for the good of mankind and stuff like that. Socialism is the idea that when a government takes control of the means of production and puts them to good use, the results are in some way (be it productivity, philosphical differences or whatever) better than than what capitalistic society can achieve... and if the difference in productivity is great enough, it could some day result in the overabundance of resources needed for communism.
So... When a CEO decides that he wants to give away huge sums of money (for social status and/or idealistic reasons... in a situation where he must have overabundance of resources for himself, because he is able to give away millions) and that the best receiver for the money are the workers that have produced the said wealth, I think that one could argue that it's - in small scale - very similar to how communist utopia was supposed to work.
Naturally this is all just a mixture of being pedantic and some form of thought experiments... but then again, what could you expect in a thread like this.
That sounds like a good idea. Give me a moment and I'll patent it.
Seriously though, that idea is mostly good but I think that the passing of time might be a problem. Deus Ex was awesome game when it came out, but if it were to come out today it wouldn't be all that good because the video games have taken huge leap forward in the last 12 years. So, should I vote it worse than nearly all new games and completely ignore the context, how much it influenced the genre, etc.? In general, it's very hard to compare older games to newer one because even if you make a decision on how to deal with the context, your memory might not be accurate (I remember having liked many games years ago but I can't remember how good they actually were compared to new ones).
You could of course only allow people to rate games they've played recently... or you could analyze that user A tends to think that older games aren't much worse than newer ones but B thinks that they are, see how much of B's ratings can be explained through the age of the game and correct that when showing his ratings to A... but it'd still be complex.
One reviewer might only rate highly hyped games which he expects to be good (nearly all fall to 60-100 range) and other reviewer tries out pretty much everything he encounters to find out those lone gems among less well-known indie games, etc. (let's say ranging from 20 to 95). We can't just take a bell curve of each and say "Game A is slightly above average on first reviewer's scale and Game B is slightly above average on the second reviewer's scale... so they're probably about equally good!". Sure, with large number of reviewers, you can still see which games do well and which won't but you have lost at least as much precision as you would have if you hadn't taken the bell curve in the first place.
That said, I don't know if reviews are that relevant anymore. I am active gamer but don't remember when was the last time I read a full review... There have been two times recently when I bought newer games from series I had played years ago (Cossacks and Anno 1602). I just wanted to take a quick peek on whether the games were considered about equally good, better or worse than the ones I had liked and whether they were very similar with just better graphics etc. or if some major concept had changed. That consisted mostly of looking the games up on Wikipedia and quickly glancing the first reviews I found using Google. I think I also checked the metascore, but it was more among the lines of "I'll buy it unless it turns out to have metascore under 60 or something". I didn't use that as exact metric.
Most games I buy are ones recommended to me by my friends, those recommended by blogs I follow (e.g., the Penny Arcade guys' news feed... you could consider those reviews, but they don't mention the games they hated, don't give scores, etc., just mention "Hey, that was pretty good. Try it out.") or those that just seem fun and don't cost much (When I noticed Orcs Must Die on Steam for under 5 euros, I didn't start doing extensive research on the critical acclaim of the game.)
Dragon agreed to pay Goldman a flat fee of $5 million
To my understanding a mutually agreed business deal is not stealing, even if one party does a shoddy job. If I pay you to write me a piece of software and when deadline flies past, the software isn't complete, you have not fulfilled your side of the contract and I might be able to sue you, but I don't think that the term stealing is usually used in that context.
I might be flat out wrong there, as this isn't my first language, but my understanding of the term is that you take something from me without me agreeing to give it to you. If you simply fool me into paying you much more than what your service is worth, it sounds more like false advertising, contract breaking, fraud or something.
I lean left on local standards (those of European social democracy) so I'd probably be something like "extreme left" on American standards (if we consider Democrats a left-wing party). I have no love for either Goldman Sachs or the whole sector they operate in... that said, you can hardly call what they did "stealing".
Are they unethical? Sure. Have they broken some laws by deceiving regulators? Probably. Misleading advertising? Might be. Fraud? Depends on the contracts they've used... but stealing? No. They've simply not cared about the fate of their clients - or the society - except where they had the economic incentive to do so. That kind of stuff happens when you have free markets.
For any given amount of freedom in the markets, you get some good and some bad sides. You thus choose a level where the good sides outweigh the bad ones... and acknowledge that the decision also leads to some undesired results. What doesn't work is choosing one level, at first ignoring undesired results and then, when they become too apparent, call them stealing, etc. without making an argument for choosing another level of freedom in general.
According to quick Google, average depth of oceans is about 4km, surface area of earth is about 510'072'000 km2 and water covers about 70% of earths surface.
5.1E8 km2 * 4km * 0.7 = 1.428 billion km3. Sphere of that volume is about 1396 km across.
The GP's graph says "1390 kilometres across and has a volume of 1.4 billion cubic kilometres", which is very close to that quick approximation.
My approximation is very quick and dirty (I didn't take into account that surface of earth is less 4km below the surface than on the surface, which would reduce the sphere... but I also didn't take into account glaciers, etc. which would increase the sphere... Obviously the surface of sea isn't exactly 70% and the depth isn't exactly 4km...) but I feel very confident that the scale of the number is about right and it happens to perfectly match the graph.
I would say that everyone has - by default - a reasonable expectation of privacy whenever nobody else is around. Sure, if you are in a park, you can't do certain things that you could in the privacy of your home even if you don't see anyone, because you might not just have noticed someone and so on. However, in a half-public place, such as a store with no customers inside, you should be able to call your family/doctor/etc. or whatever without having to wonder whether someone is monitoring you in secret. (You may say "You shouldn't do that at work anyways" but that's to be settled between the employee and employer)
That all said, yeah... Involving the local cops? Sure. FBI? Maybe. Secret service? It does sound like an overkill.
The proof is in really hotly debated topics - you can see arguments from BOTH sides of a hot issue being moderated to +5, even if a lot of down-moderation is also applied. That's the key that tells you the system is working to keep people on all sides of an issue engaged, and makes the reading much more interesting as you have more of a real debate and much less a "pulpit" as you said.
It is true that you often see arguments from both sides modded up but I wouldn't draw too many conclusions from that. There are many topics that aren't debated essentially at all because the consensus / group think has already been reached. That isn't bad thing in itself (Not every topic should be debated. We should have consensus not to support genocides, for example...) but the point is that for any hot topic we debate there is a consensus about a dozen more that we don't debate and thus us having some debated issues doesn't prove much about variation.
Honestly though, I think that the biggest problem with/. moderation system is that mods use "-1 Redundant" and "-1 Offtopic" mods far too little. The most heated topics, like the one about constitutionality of Obamacare, have something like 2.5k messages. There is absolutely no way that most of those messages added to the discussion but most were just repeating the same arguments that others had already made... but weren't modded redundant. Part of the problem is that the same exact things were debated in many places, which is due to mods not being willing to use the offtopic mod when one thread of posts strays away from the topic of that thread. You can look at nearly any/. story and in the first thread there are many people who "reply" to the first poster or two just to get their comment higher even though they in no way relate to what the parent had said. This all forces people to spend a lot more time reading the same arguments over and over again and potentially missing some good ones due to the whole discussion about the subtopic not being in the same place.
While I mostly agree with you, I wouldn't dismiss relative terms completely in this short of cases. For example, if outbreaks have been in very steady decline for several decades and then we suddenly get worst outbreak in twenty years, it might tell us something very important (Is the trend turning? Has someone/-thing just made a very serious fuckup that caused it? How likely is it that it's just a statistical anomaly?) even if it doesn't tell us how worried we should feel about acute problems.
First of all, it's closer to 17%. With the current rate of decrease we'll hit 15% in something like four months if nothing happens before that. More importantly...
(The statistics above are extracted from W3Schools' log-files, but we are also monitoring other sources around the Internet to assure the quality of these figures)
Audience of W3Schools is people who are trying to learn the basics of certain web-related technologies and don't yet know that W3Schools is hardly the best place for that. Whether you like W3Schools or not, it's hardly representative of general population.
Marriage is both social and legal construct. In most areas gay marriage can be legalized by simply changing the words man, husband, wife and woman to person and that's more or less it. However, changing the marriage to a construct between 2...n people, we need to totally rethink many concepts such as divorce (does it break the whole group or can just one person leave? Also, can a new person later on just "join" existing marriage?) and widowhood. If a man and two women are married and the man dies, are the two women now considered widows and are they now gay married to each other? What if one of the women died instead, are the man and other woman now considered widows? Issues like this matter because many laws are built on them.
It makes sense to fix gay marriage first, because that's so quick and easy, compared to legalizing polygamy in marriages.
I think that what the cop in your video did is just great - it didn't cost anything but reminded a couple of people on the scene (and 600k more on Youtube) that gods are just people like us and lowered the threshold to be in contact with them. However, if I were a cop, I wouldn't want to do that in front of a camera: I'd be scared shitless that it might cause a storm of "What?! A cop playing around? While in duty? On taxpayer money?!"
Three things are pretty well established (among both psychologists and economists):
a) Perceived happiness equals actual happiness (If we look at the brain activity near pleasure centers, we notice that how happy people say they are has very strong correlation with active those areas are. So if Antti from Finland rates his happiness at 60 and Ted from USA rates his happiness at 70, it's likely that Ted is actually happier and it's not just that they would have different scale due to culture, language, social class, etc...)
b) Absolute wealth increases perceived happiness only up to about 2000 dollars a month (If we look at countries below that threshold, average income correlates strongly with perceived happiness. Above that limit, very little)
c) Relative wealth to your peers increases happiness constantly (Look at essentially any country and you can bet that the wealthiest quarter is happier that the poorest quarter, even if the poorest quarter about reaches the threshold mentioned in b)
I don't have the time to write all evidence/arguments behind the above claims but if you're interested, I do recommend either the British economist Richard Layard's book Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (note: despite the name, it isn't any new age / self-help book) or getting up to date on the basics of modern psychology.
That being the case, it's a bit silly to make comparisons to medieval times and look at absolute wealth. Sure, we can say "Most of the poor no longer need to worry about starving to death in western countries" and that is a huge, happiness-increasing thing over the middle ages. But comparing their absolute wealth to aristocrats is more or less useless, because they are likely to be a lot less happy than the aristocrats (due to having low wealth and status relative to others instead of being considered the privileged elite of the society).
Also, you're pretty comfortably middle class so when people talk about the poor, they don't talk about people like you... but that's getting a bit offtopic.
Nokia is the name of the city where the company was incorporated in 1871.
As for the story... I've been waiting for this to happen. I'd love to see them succeed but I have very hard time imagining that it'll actually happen. I guess their best bet is staying afloat a while and hoping that Nokia decides to buy them back.
It's true that you need to download and install them yourself... But they are offered by Microsoft for free in their poweruser tools, are very lightweight and work well. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb545027
A couple of years ago I was quick to promote Linux over Windows due to higher reliability. Now I don't remember when was the last time that my Windows crashed but I've had numerous problems with Linux (On Ubuntu, last two times I allowed the package manager to make a major version update have broken the whole system. I then tried to install Mint, it crashed half a dozen times before I was finally able to get the whole installation through and then enabling two monitors broke X. I've had little interest to go back and find out what's the problem). I used to run Linux and just use Wine and VM when I had to use some windows app, now I run Linux inside a VM on Windows when I need to do programming.
Meanwhile, ever since Windows 7 came out, I've felt that Windows has better usability than the Linux desktops I've tried and massively better usability than the Mac I have to use at work.
I know that I've only given some anecdotes and opinions but while I understand that they aren't statistically significant, I use Linux, Mac and Windows nearly daily (iOS development, web-development and entertainment use) and I'm pretty sure that my recent lack-of-hate towards Windows is indicating that something has changed for the better.
Meanwhile MS is still in charge of the second most popular game console (Wii is the most popular but for somewhat different target audience), have gained some increase in market share on smartphones, are launching tablets and I don't think that the current year of Linux on Desktop is going to threaten MS any more than the previous ones.
So.. yeah. I'm not usually this "pro-MS", I hate Metro as much as the next geek, I have had to develop for WP7 and don't have much nice things to say about it, don't remember when was the last time I had any interest to try out Internet explorer and so on... but I still think that everything after the flop that was Vista, MS has been improving its act.
They might be sending message to the wider public: "Oh, you saw documents that state we are up to something really evil? Well... you can't know whether they're accurate or planted by us. If you were certain they were accurate, you might be willing to risk it all to do the right thing but now that you aren't certain... Do you feel lucky?"
The point of censorship is never to prevent access to information by a few dedicated people. It is to allow the masses - who want to feel like good people - a way to shield themselves from everything evil the government does so they have a way to rationalize to themselves why they don't do what they know to be the right thing. This is exactly that.
The discussion was about whether other nations have the right to criticize USA for not pulling its weight when it comes to development aid. I noted that the nations that criticize USA for it give out more both relative to their population and relative to the size of their economy so they do have the right to criticize.
Finland has 1/60th of the population and 1/46th of the yearly budget of USA but by your logic these shouldn't be taken into account when comparing the two? The amount of responsibility that a nation should bear has nothing to do with the size of that nation? We should only say "Okay, USA give more to charity than Finland, so Finland has no right to criticize"?
If you answered "yes" to all of the above, are you willing to extend that logic to pollution. Look, USA pollutes the world MASSIVELY more than Finland (and remember, the higher population doesn't matter). How evil is that?!
I can understand why people dislike misleading marketing but why is it a positive thing if something is made in the USA? Humans are humans everywhere and companies are not more evil if they employ 100 people in Korea than if they employ 100 people in the USA (especially when they can probably employ 200 people in Korea instead of 100 people in the USA) I guess you could make a point about it being wrong because of the financial support (tax credits, etc.) that companies receive for staying in the states but most of the time the bureaucrats/politicians who award them do know how many people the companies employ so I doubt there is that much cheating going on...
If companies dodge tax (make their profit in one country, taking advantage of all the infrastructure, etc. provided by that country but then pay 0% taxes to some remote island), that's unethical and obviously just gaming the system. But if companies just employ people who don't ask so high material rewards that the planet can't support it in the long term, I have hard time seeing what's wrong.
Sure, most of the documents weren't important and some that were should probably have stayed secret... but that means they would've had to cherry pick which documents to publish. If they'd have cherry picked, people would have said "You obviously have some agenda, as you cherry pick documents that present [entity we like] in a bad light".
Also, by publishing everything they allow people to analyze not only what there was but also what wasn't there.
Also, there is no way that they would've been able to know what documents were important and what not. In some countries the press cross-checked the leaked stuff with their politicians' negotiations and foreign trips, saw if their politicians' public statements matched the data found in documents, etc... but there is no way that Assange or even some major newspaper would've been able to do that all alone.
So... yeah. I am not in the "everything government/officials do should be public" camp as I think officials should be able to do their work and have honest exchanges between each other without the press being able to take quotes out of context to produce artificial scandals... but I don't think that saying "Only x% of the published documents were important" is that good argument.
Other nations gets to wash their hands while we do the dirty work, even when it's stuff they'd otherwise do.
Citation needed.
Cut foreign aid in half, because I'm tired of hearing that we bought people 500,000 vaccines from the wrong companies.
Then, next time everyone starts crying about hostile nations, atrocities somewhere or epidemics of curable disease, we say, "We're done with the police role. Do it yourselves for a change."
I find what you say funny because USA already gives about half the aid compared to other heavily industrialized nations.
You are aware that USA development aid is 0.21% of GNI, right? Sweden, Norway and Luxembourg top 1.00%, Denmark and the Netherlands top 0.80%, Belgium, Finland, France, Ireland and UK top 0.50%, Switzerland 0.40%, Germany 0.39%, Canada 0.34%, Australia and Austria both at 0.32%... If you'd prefer to compare donations per capita, you'd not fare any better (Germany+UK+France exceed USA development aid by themselves though the population is a lot lower).
So, you think it should be cut to one fourth, then?
It's rare to see the EU parliament - composing of over half a dozen groups, each of which is umbrella organization for dozens of parties from many countries - to be as united as they were now. They voted not only against the internet restricting laws but also against the kind of shady activity that occurred during ACTA preparations. Whatever the commission says now, I doubt they've got the balls to bring ACTA - or nearly identical equivalents with different name - back anytime soon... it would be such an act of disrespect towards the parliament that things could escalate far more than anyone is willing to risk "just for copyright".
I think we're safe at least until June of 2014 (next parliamentary elections in EU)... that is, of course, unless same provisions are brought back in a bill that also mention child pornography. EU legislators are pretty weak against the "think of the children" argument.
The carbon credits you refer to, otherwise known as cap-and-trade, is pretty simple and great system that combines the best of free markets and government regulation. There is a consensus that we need to lower emissions and most people agree that some form of regulation from the government is needed. The problem is that it's very difficult to create a set of rules that work as intended.
For example UK recently built a massive power plant that runs on biofuel and what actually happens is that they transport the fuel all the way from Canada to be burned in UK. Why? Environmentally it would be better to burn it in Canada but UK provides greater incentives for such power plants. We could try to fix every small issue like that - both internationally and inside countries - but we'll always be left with incomplete (and increasingly complex) set of regulations that encourage to do stupid things. We need a free markets based solution that discourages polluting, not regulations that encourage finding workarounds.
Cap-and-trade is exactly that system. Rights to pollute are auctioned and the acceptable amount of pollution is slowly reduced over time, which encourages solutions that efficiently reduce pollution but discourages expensive solutions that provide relatively little benefits. The economic incentive for any environmental decision is directly relative to how much it actually helps the environment.
Now... that all said, there are some flaws. First of all, for the system to work perfectly, (nearly) all countries should participate and all pollution (be it traffic, energy, industrial...) should be distributed like that. Certain aspects need tweaking (For example, a ton of greenhouse gases released to the upper atmosphere by airplanes are about as harmful as two tons of such gases released at ground level...) and others are difficult to handle just through cap-and-trade (relatively small amount of pollution to a very important wildlife sanctuary, for example) and one can argue that the way that the pollution rights are currently distributed is unfair towards developing countries... even so, the concept is great and with a little more effort put into cap-and-trade, it could allow us to abolish huge amounts of inefficient regulation and incentivize us to reduce pollution as efficiently as possible.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that if I were to see nothing but that graph and then those two predictions, I'd say that the more conservative one seems more likely. However, the fact that most of the scientific community doesn't agree with me sounds like pretty convincing indication that there is something more complicated going on and that I - having no expertise in this subject - shouldn't give much weight to my own guesses over the predictions of those who study the subject for living.
So... do you happen to have any actual expertise in this field, so that it would make sense for me to care about your thoughts here?
I've read your post several times over and can't figure out whether you're trying to contradict something I said or not. In any case...
All economic systems are attempts to deal with scarcity of resources
Communism is precisely the post-scarcity utopia, which requires abundance of resources to exist first.
there isn't suddenly an abundance of resources because a certain system was adopted
Yes... And that's why no country tried to jump directly to communism, as none of them had the required abundance and all knew that they wouldn't reach that abundance simply by changing the system. Rather, they acknowledged that they would first need to reach the over abundance and believed that socialism would be more ethical and efficient system for the transitional period.
Furthermore, you're confusing resources with materials. Labor, capital and materials are the three equally needed resources for economic activity.
I can't figure out what in my post would make you think that. When talking about abundance of resources in relation to communism, the question is "Can everyone be delivered whatever they need?" and obviously that requires more than just the materials. (You can't deliver needed medical treatment without doctors and so on).
Many Americans don't seem to know (or perhaps care about) distinctions between communism (the form of utopia which countries like the Soviet Union supposedly wanted to achieve) and socialism (the system they intended to use in the transitional phase). Oversimplifying a bit... Communism is supposed to be a state where there is such an abundance of resources that everyone can get whatever they need and the motive to work would come not from material goods but from the social status that good workers receive, the idealistic desire to work for the good of mankind and stuff like that. Socialism is the idea that when a government takes control of the means of production and puts them to good use, the results are in some way (be it productivity, philosphical differences or whatever) better than than what capitalistic society can achieve... and if the difference in productivity is great enough, it could some day result in the overabundance of resources needed for communism.
So... When a CEO decides that he wants to give away huge sums of money (for social status and/or idealistic reasons... in a situation where he must have overabundance of resources for himself, because he is able to give away millions) and that the best receiver for the money are the workers that have produced the said wealth, I think that one could argue that it's - in small scale - very similar to how communist utopia was supposed to work.
Naturally this is all just a mixture of being pedantic and some form of thought experiments... but then again, what could you expect in a thread like this.
That sounds like a good idea. Give me a moment and I'll patent it.
Seriously though, that idea is mostly good but I think that the passing of time might be a problem. Deus Ex was awesome game when it came out, but if it were to come out today it wouldn't be all that good because the video games have taken huge leap forward in the last 12 years. So, should I vote it worse than nearly all new games and completely ignore the context, how much it influenced the genre, etc.? In general, it's very hard to compare older games to newer one because even if you make a decision on how to deal with the context, your memory might not be accurate (I remember having liked many games years ago but I can't remember how good they actually were compared to new ones).
You could of course only allow people to rate games they've played recently... or you could analyze that user A tends to think that older games aren't much worse than newer ones but B thinks that they are, see how much of B's ratings can be explained through the age of the game and correct that when showing his ratings to A... but it'd still be complex.
One reviewer might only rate highly hyped games which he expects to be good (nearly all fall to 60-100 range) and other reviewer tries out pretty much everything he encounters to find out those lone gems among less well-known indie games, etc. (let's say ranging from 20 to 95). We can't just take a bell curve of each and say "Game A is slightly above average on first reviewer's scale and Game B is slightly above average on the second reviewer's scale... so they're probably about equally good!". Sure, with large number of reviewers, you can still see which games do well and which won't but you have lost at least as much precision as you would have if you hadn't taken the bell curve in the first place.
That said, I don't know if reviews are that relevant anymore. I am active gamer but don't remember when was the last time I read a full review... There have been two times recently when I bought newer games from series I had played years ago (Cossacks and Anno 1602). I just wanted to take a quick peek on whether the games were considered about equally good, better or worse than the ones I had liked and whether they were very similar with just better graphics etc. or if some major concept had changed. That consisted mostly of looking the games up on Wikipedia and quickly glancing the first reviews I found using Google. I think I also checked the metascore, but it was more among the lines of "I'll buy it unless it turns out to have metascore under 60 or something". I didn't use that as exact metric.
Most games I buy are ones recommended to me by my friends, those recommended by blogs I follow (e.g., the Penny Arcade guys' news feed... you could consider those reviews, but they don't mention the games they hated, don't give scores, etc., just mention "Hey, that was pretty good. Try it out.") or those that just seem fun and don't cost much (When I noticed Orcs Must Die on Steam for under 5 euros, I didn't start doing extensive research on the critical acclaim of the game.)
From TFA:
Dragon agreed to pay Goldman a flat fee of $5 million
To my understanding a mutually agreed business deal is not stealing, even if one party does a shoddy job. If I pay you to write me a piece of software and when deadline flies past, the software isn't complete, you have not fulfilled your side of the contract and I might be able to sue you, but I don't think that the term stealing is usually used in that context.
I might be flat out wrong there, as this isn't my first language, but my understanding of the term is that you take something from me without me agreeing to give it to you. If you simply fool me into paying you much more than what your service is worth, it sounds more like false advertising, contract breaking, fraud or something.
I lean left on local standards (those of European social democracy) so I'd probably be something like "extreme left" on American standards (if we consider Democrats a left-wing party). I have no love for either Goldman Sachs or the whole sector they operate in... that said, you can hardly call what they did "stealing".
Are they unethical? Sure. Have they broken some laws by deceiving regulators? Probably. Misleading advertising? Might be. Fraud? Depends on the contracts they've used... but stealing? No. They've simply not cared about the fate of their clients - or the society - except where they had the economic incentive to do so. That kind of stuff happens when you have free markets.
For any given amount of freedom in the markets, you get some good and some bad sides. You thus choose a level where the good sides outweigh the bad ones... and acknowledge that the decision also leads to some undesired results. What doesn't work is choosing one level, at first ignoring undesired results and then, when they become too apparent, call them stealing, etc. without making an argument for choosing another level of freedom in general.
According to quick Google, average depth of oceans is about 4km, surface area of earth is about 510'072'000 km2 and water covers about 70% of earths surface.
5.1E8 km2 * 4km * 0.7 = 1.428 billion km3. Sphere of that volume is about 1396 km across.
The GP's graph says "1390 kilometres across and has a volume of 1.4 billion cubic kilometres", which is very close to that quick approximation.
My approximation is very quick and dirty (I didn't take into account that surface of earth is less 4km below the surface than on the surface, which would reduce the sphere... but I also didn't take into account glaciers, etc. which would increase the sphere... Obviously the surface of sea isn't exactly 70% and the depth isn't exactly 4km...) but I feel very confident that the scale of the number is about right and it happens to perfectly match the graph.
I would say that everyone has - by default - a reasonable expectation of privacy whenever nobody else is around. Sure, if you are in a park, you can't do certain things that you could in the privacy of your home even if you don't see anyone, because you might not just have noticed someone and so on. However, in a half-public place, such as a store with no customers inside, you should be able to call your family/doctor/etc. or whatever without having to wonder whether someone is monitoring you in secret. (You may say "You shouldn't do that at work anyways" but that's to be settled between the employee and employer)
That all said, yeah... Involving the local cops? Sure. FBI? Maybe. Secret service? It does sound like an overkill.
The proof is in really hotly debated topics - you can see arguments from BOTH sides of a hot issue being moderated to +5, even if a lot of down-moderation is also applied. That's the key that tells you the system is working to keep people on all sides of an issue engaged, and makes the reading much more interesting as you have more of a real debate and much less a "pulpit" as you said.
It is true that you often see arguments from both sides modded up but I wouldn't draw too many conclusions from that. There are many topics that aren't debated essentially at all because the consensus / group think has already been reached. That isn't bad thing in itself (Not every topic should be debated. We should have consensus not to support genocides, for example...) but the point is that for any hot topic we debate there is a consensus about a dozen more that we don't debate and thus us having some debated issues doesn't prove much about variation.
Honestly though, I think that the biggest problem with /. moderation system is that mods use "-1 Redundant" and "-1 Offtopic" mods far too little. The most heated topics, like the one about constitutionality of Obamacare, have something like 2.5k messages. There is absolutely no way that most of those messages added to the discussion but most were just repeating the same arguments that others had already made... but weren't modded redundant. Part of the problem is that the same exact things were debated in many places, which is due to mods not being willing to use the offtopic mod when one thread of posts strays away from the topic of that thread. You can look at nearly any /. story and in the first thread there are many people who "reply" to the first poster or two just to get their comment higher even though they in no way relate to what the parent had said. This all forces people to spend a lot more time reading the same arguments over and over again and potentially missing some good ones due to the whole discussion about the subtopic not being in the same place.
While I mostly agree with you, I wouldn't dismiss relative terms completely in this short of cases. For example, if outbreaks have been in very steady decline for several decades and then we suddenly get worst outbreak in twenty years, it might tell us something very important (Is the trend turning? Has someone/-thing just made a very serious fuckup that caused it? How likely is it that it's just a statistical anomaly?) even if it doesn't tell us how worried we should feel about acute problems.
First of all, it's closer to 17%. With the current rate of decrease we'll hit 15% in something like four months if nothing happens before that. More importantly...
(The statistics above are extracted from W3Schools' log-files, but we are also monitoring other sources around the Internet to assure the quality of these figures)
Audience of W3Schools is people who are trying to learn the basics of certain web-related technologies and don't yet know that W3Schools is hardly the best place for that. Whether you like W3Schools or not, it's hardly representative of general population.
It makes sense to fix gay marriage first, because that's so quick and easy, compared to legalizing polygamy in marriages.
I think that what the cop in your video did is just great - it didn't cost anything but reminded a couple of people on the scene (and 600k more on Youtube) that gods are just people like us and lowered the threshold to be in contact with them. However, if I were a cop, I wouldn't want to do that in front of a camera: I'd be scared shitless that it might cause a storm of "What?! A cop playing around? While in duty? On taxpayer money?!"
Three things are pretty well established (among both psychologists and economists):
a) Perceived happiness equals actual happiness (If we look at the brain activity near pleasure centers, we notice that how happy people say they are has very strong correlation with active those areas are. So if Antti from Finland rates his happiness at 60 and Ted from USA rates his happiness at 70, it's likely that Ted is actually happier and it's not just that they would have different scale due to culture, language, social class, etc...)
b) Absolute wealth increases perceived happiness only up to about 2000 dollars a month (If we look at countries below that threshold, average income correlates strongly with perceived happiness. Above that limit, very little)
c) Relative wealth to your peers increases happiness constantly (Look at essentially any country and you can bet that the wealthiest quarter is happier that the poorest quarter, even if the poorest quarter about reaches the threshold mentioned in b)
I don't have the time to write all evidence/arguments behind the above claims but if you're interested, I do recommend either the British economist Richard Layard's book Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (note: despite the name, it isn't any new age / self-help book) or getting up to date on the basics of modern psychology.
That being the case, it's a bit silly to make comparisons to medieval times and look at absolute wealth. Sure, we can say "Most of the poor no longer need to worry about starving to death in western countries" and that is a huge, happiness-increasing thing over the middle ages. But comparing their absolute wealth to aristocrats is more or less useless, because they are likely to be a lot less happy than the aristocrats (due to having low wealth and status relative to others instead of being considered the privileged elite of the society).
Also, you're pretty comfortably middle class so when people talk about the poor, they don't talk about people like you... but that's getting a bit offtopic.
Nokia is the name of the city where the company was incorporated in 1871.
As for the story... I've been waiting for this to happen. I'd love to see them succeed but I have very hard time imagining that it'll actually happen. I guess their best bet is staying afloat a while and hoping that Nokia decides to buy them back.
It's true that you need to download and install them yourself... But they are offered by Microsoft for free in their poweruser tools, are very lightweight and work well. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb545027
A couple of years ago I was quick to promote Linux over Windows due to higher reliability. Now I don't remember when was the last time that my Windows crashed but I've had numerous problems with Linux (On Ubuntu, last two times I allowed the package manager to make a major version update have broken the whole system. I then tried to install Mint, it crashed half a dozen times before I was finally able to get the whole installation through and then enabling two monitors broke X. I've had little interest to go back and find out what's the problem). I used to run Linux and just use Wine and VM when I had to use some windows app, now I run Linux inside a VM on Windows when I need to do programming.
Meanwhile, ever since Windows 7 came out, I've felt that Windows has better usability than the Linux desktops I've tried and massively better usability than the Mac I have to use at work.
I know that I've only given some anecdotes and opinions but while I understand that they aren't statistically significant, I use Linux, Mac and Windows nearly daily (iOS development, web-development and entertainment use) and I'm pretty sure that my recent lack-of-hate towards Windows is indicating that something has changed for the better.
Meanwhile MS is still in charge of the second most popular game console (Wii is the most popular but for somewhat different target audience), have gained some increase in market share on smartphones, are launching tablets and I don't think that the current year of Linux on Desktop is going to threaten MS any more than the previous ones.
So.. yeah. I'm not usually this "pro-MS", I hate Metro as much as the next geek, I have had to develop for WP7 and don't have much nice things to say about it, don't remember when was the last time I had any interest to try out Internet explorer and so on... but I still think that everything after the flop that was Vista, MS has been improving its act.
They might be sending message to the wider public: "Oh, you saw documents that state we are up to something really evil? Well... you can't know whether they're accurate or planted by us. If you were certain they were accurate, you might be willing to risk it all to do the right thing but now that you aren't certain... Do you feel lucky?"
The point of censorship is never to prevent access to information by a few dedicated people. It is to allow the masses - who want to feel like good people - a way to shield themselves from everything evil the government does so they have a way to rationalize to themselves why they don't do what they know to be the right thing. This is exactly that.
The discussion was about whether other nations have the right to criticize USA for not pulling its weight when it comes to development aid. I noted that the nations that criticize USA for it give out more both relative to their population and relative to the size of their economy so they do have the right to criticize.
Finland has 1/60th of the population and 1/46th of the yearly budget of USA but by your logic these shouldn't be taken into account when comparing the two? The amount of responsibility that a nation should bear has nothing to do with the size of that nation? We should only say "Okay, USA give more to charity than Finland, so Finland has no right to criticize"?
If you answered "yes" to all of the above, are you willing to extend that logic to pollution. Look, USA pollutes the world MASSIVELY more than Finland (and remember, the higher population doesn't matter). How evil is that?!
I can understand why people dislike misleading marketing but why is it a positive thing if something is made in the USA? Humans are humans everywhere and companies are not more evil if they employ 100 people in Korea than if they employ 100 people in the USA (especially when they can probably employ 200 people in Korea instead of 100 people in the USA) I guess you could make a point about it being wrong because of the financial support (tax credits, etc.) that companies receive for staying in the states but most of the time the bureaucrats/politicians who award them do know how many people the companies employ so I doubt there is that much cheating going on...
If companies dodge tax (make their profit in one country, taking advantage of all the infrastructure, etc. provided by that country but then pay 0% taxes to some remote island), that's unethical and obviously just gaming the system. But if companies just employ people who don't ask so high material rewards that the planet can't support it in the long term, I have hard time seeing what's wrong.
Sure, most of the documents weren't important and some that were should probably have stayed secret... but that means they would've had to cherry pick which documents to publish. If they'd have cherry picked, people would have said "You obviously have some agenda, as you cherry pick documents that present [entity we like] in a bad light".
Also, by publishing everything they allow people to analyze not only what there was but also what wasn't there.
Also, there is no way that they would've been able to know what documents were important and what not. In some countries the press cross-checked the leaked stuff with their politicians' negotiations and foreign trips, saw if their politicians' public statements matched the data found in documents, etc... but there is no way that Assange or even some major newspaper would've been able to do that all alone.
So... yeah. I am not in the "everything government/officials do should be public" camp as I think officials should be able to do their work and have honest exchanges between each other without the press being able to take quotes out of context to produce artificial scandals... but I don't think that saying "Only x% of the published documents were important" is that good argument.
Other nations gets to wash their hands while we do the dirty work, even when it's stuff they'd otherwise do.
Citation needed.
Cut foreign aid in half, because I'm tired of hearing that we bought people 500,000 vaccines from the wrong companies.
Then, next time everyone starts crying about hostile nations, atrocities somewhere or epidemics of curable disease, we say, "We're done with the police role. Do it yourselves for a change."
I find what you say funny because USA already gives about half the aid compared to other heavily industrialized nations.
You are aware that USA development aid is 0.21% of GNI, right? Sweden, Norway and Luxembourg top 1.00%, Denmark and the Netherlands top 0.80%, Belgium, Finland, France, Ireland and UK top 0.50%, Switzerland 0.40%, Germany 0.39%, Canada 0.34%, Australia and Austria both at 0.32%... If you'd prefer to compare donations per capita, you'd not fare any better (Germany+UK+France exceed USA development aid by themselves though the population is a lot lower).
So, you think it should be cut to one fourth, then?
It's rare to see the EU parliament - composing of over half a dozen groups, each of which is umbrella organization for dozens of parties from many countries - to be as united as they were now. They voted not only against the internet restricting laws but also against the kind of shady activity that occurred during ACTA preparations. Whatever the commission says now, I doubt they've got the balls to bring ACTA - or nearly identical equivalents with different name - back anytime soon... it would be such an act of disrespect towards the parliament that things could escalate far more than anyone is willing to risk "just for copyright".
I think we're safe at least until June of 2014 (next parliamentary elections in EU)... that is, of course, unless same provisions are brought back in a bill that also mention child pornography. EU legislators are pretty weak against the "think of the children" argument.
The carbon credits you refer to, otherwise known as cap-and-trade, is pretty simple and great system that combines the best of free markets and government regulation. There is a consensus that we need to lower emissions and most people agree that some form of regulation from the government is needed. The problem is that it's very difficult to create a set of rules that work as intended.
For example UK recently built a massive power plant that runs on biofuel and what actually happens is that they transport the fuel all the way from Canada to be burned in UK. Why? Environmentally it would be better to burn it in Canada but UK provides greater incentives for such power plants. We could try to fix every small issue like that - both internationally and inside countries - but we'll always be left with incomplete (and increasingly complex) set of regulations that encourage to do stupid things. We need a free markets based solution that discourages polluting, not regulations that encourage finding workarounds.
Cap-and-trade is exactly that system. Rights to pollute are auctioned and the acceptable amount of pollution is slowly reduced over time, which encourages solutions that efficiently reduce pollution but discourages expensive solutions that provide relatively little benefits. The economic incentive for any environmental decision is directly relative to how much it actually helps the environment.
Now... that all said, there are some flaws. First of all, for the system to work perfectly, (nearly) all countries should participate and all pollution (be it traffic, energy, industrial...) should be distributed like that. Certain aspects need tweaking (For example, a ton of greenhouse gases released to the upper atmosphere by airplanes are about as harmful as two tons of such gases released at ground level...) and others are difficult to handle just through cap-and-trade (relatively small amount of pollution to a very important wildlife sanctuary, for example) and one can argue that the way that the pollution rights are currently distributed is unfair towards developing countries... even so, the concept is great and with a little more effort put into cap-and-trade, it could allow us to abolish huge amounts of inefficient regulation and incentivize us to reduce pollution as efficiently as possible.