But the two statements don't mean the same thing. A mandate to buy something is legally not the same as a tax increase, and the differences have consequences.
Trouble is that Obama is flip-flopping: to get the health care bill passed, he insisted that it is not a tax. Now to get it through SCOTUS, he is claiming that it is a tax.
But it isn't a tax. A tax would mean that everybody pays a health care tax and then gets a credit for getting private health care. You may think it amounts to the same thing, but it doesn't.
The health care law needs to be scrapped and replaced with one that defines the mandate in terms of a tax because that is all Congress has a right to do.
This "corruption" didn't start in the US, it started in Europe. The US fought it for the longest time and only finally fully implemented the Berne convention in the 1970's. Even today, European copyright regulations are far more restrictive than American ones. Europeans pay far more for blank media, membership in many copyright societies is mandatory, and laws and enforcement are draconian, often subjecting you to thousands of dollars in fees without benefit of a court proceedings. Most European nations don't even have a concept of a "public domain", and some rights remain with authors in perpetuity. And much of the copyright lobbying in the US is done by European publishers and producers.
You can't fix the copyright problem if you bark up the wrong tree. Europe is at least as much to blame for the world-wide copyright mess as the US, if not more.
You can A/B test with live visitors. Works well too.
It's still not a multi-armed bandit situation. The multi-armed bandit situation specifically means that you present either A or B, not an A/B choice. There are other machine learning techniques for optimizing A/B tests, just not the ones in the article.
Frankly it is no issue to me if Iranians can't see some stuff
If the UN gets control of the Internet, there is a real risk that you won't get to see what Muslim clerics and conservative Christians deem offensive, because together, they control a large number of powerful governments.
How about US censorship of porn and gambling? Or do you think the.xxx domain will not be used by republicans to make a push in the future to force all porn on to that new domain and then block it everywhere?
Porn and gambling are highly restricted in most places around the world, including parts of Europe. When you compare free speech rights around the world, the US is still better than almost all other places.
but the DMCA hits everyone in the whole world.
Bad as the DMCA is, it is still better than the legal situation that exists in many European countries. Look at France's HADOPI or the ability of Germany's GEMA to restrict music distribution in Germany.
MedicAlert comes with an ID number and phone number that medical staff can call for more information.
(I would expect that they will start offering NFC and implantable chips once it makes sense, but that's only a small improvement over what they already offer.)
Both Hanov and you are mixing up a couple of things. A/B testing is done with focus groups, not live visitors. When you test with focus groups, you don't run a live web server, and you're willing to pay for completion of some test design.
Algorithms for use with the multiarmed bandit are already widely used in live testing. Those algorithms properly belong to the field of machine learning (reinforcement learning), but it turns out that very simple algorithms or strategies are hard to beat. You're right that it's not "exclusively" machine learning because the simple algorithms were already known before machine learning even existed, but these algorithms are still primarily studied in machine learning.
As for whether these methods are effective, that's easy: they are, and they are widely used. The part that's hard isn't to decide which versions of a page to present how often, but instead to figure out which change was responsible for the better outcome you were interested in.
Predicting the outcome of a focus group is a completely different problem than multi arm slot machines.
He isn't trying to use ML to predict the outcome of a focus group.
ML is about classifying data based on quantifying the data into defined classes or toward optimal values.
ML is about many things. One thing it is about is how a learner should explore an environment in order to maximize what he learns. It is one of those techniques that Hanov refers to, and it's a good idea in principle. But he picked the wrong algorithm for focus groups.
The algorithm he points to would is the right one for online testing of different web page designs, where you stick with your current design 99% of the time but show visitors different designs 1% of the time and see whether those work better or worse.
The multiarmed bandit problem is a problem in which you simultaneously try to optimize your overall reward and still explore. As a consumer, I face that problem (switch brands or stick with the tried-and-true). However, for focus groups, maximizing rewards for participants doesn't matter; it's all about finding the best solution for the organizer of the focus group. The participants already get the products for free. That means that it is not a multiarmed bandit problem, and algorithms for solving such problems are the wrong algorithms to use for focus groups.
There are mathematically more efficient ways of doing this kind of testing. But there are other constraints when testing with human beings as well, such as dependencies on the order in which you test. A/B testing is probably a pretty good compromise.
Assange was in the press because of the Wikileaks scandal, so people scrutinized him more. If this hadn't been at the height of the scandal, the women might never have talked about him, or the press might never have picked it up. I don't see any indication of anything fishy going on.
In different words, no secret conspiracy on the part of the US, just US prosecutors doing their job and complying with the law (provided they even try to extradite him).
"I'm of the opinion that rape is when you use violence or drugs to force someone to have sex with you. That doesn't seem to be the case here."
So you are saying that because you don't approve of Swedish rape laws, the US is guilty of a conspiracy?
It's clear that there is more than enough evidence that Assange may have violated Swedish rape laws, so the Swedes want him. That's all there is to the story.
Maybe the US will take advantage of the situation to extradite him, maybe not, but that doesn't exculpate Assange in Sweden and it doesn't show a conspiracy.
I see. So you're saying that the US cleverly arranged for radical Swedish feminists to pass bad rape laws, caused numerous cases to be prosecuted under those ridiculous laws, then arranged for Assange to seduce two well-known women, who then faked their outrage and keep lying to the media and prosecutor (presumably getting paid a lot of money by the CIA for their perjury). Brilliant analysis!
"There is high agreement and medium evidence that in 2050 glo- bal average macro-economic costs for multi-gas mitigation towards stabilisation between 710 and 445ppm CO2-eq are between a 1% gain to a 5.5% decrease of global GDP (Table 5.2)"
"For increases in global average temperature of less than 1 to 3C above 1980-1999 levels, some impacts are projected to produce market benefits in some places and sectors while, at the same time, imposing costs in other places and sectors. Global mean losses could be 1 to 5% of GDP for 4C of warming,"
"Limited and early analytical results from integrated analy- ses of the global costs and benefits of mitigation indicate that these are broadly comparable in magnitude, but do not as yet permit an unambiguous determination of an emis- sions pathway or stabilisation level where benefits exceed costs. {WGIII SPM}"
(Note that I think the IPCC estimates of cost of mitigation is vastly underestimated, since it doesn't take into account opportunity costs, but let's just take them at face value.)
And their argument becomes even less compelling for American and European politicians when you look at the cost/benefit analysis for North America and Europe (Section 3.2.2).
Yeah, the AGW believers are like the mainstream Christian churches: they claim that they are open minded and tolerant but accuse anybody who doesn't believe of being immoral and evil and corrupting others with their message of unbelief; and while the great majority of people are members and they receive vast amounts of funding, yet they still keep complaining that they are being persecuted.
The common misconception, often repeated, always wrong. The profits margins are much, much higher than that in most verticals, though I am sure there is one or two verticals in the industry that are suffering, but 3-4%, that is way low.
Second, it makes no sense for profit margins to be higher, because then you'd see more people starting restaurants, driving down the margins.
They do not pay BECAUSE THEY DO NOT HAVE TOO!
Yes, and they don't have to because they can get lots of people willing to work for them for a low price and without health insurance. It's called a labor market and supply and demand.
Oh yes...criminalization that disproportionately impacts African-Americans.
African Americans get stopped, arrested, and convicted disproportionately because they commit crimes at a much higher rate than whites. Racism cannot and does not account for those outcomes, social problems in the African American community do.
However that does not exculpate employers either, but just means there's a lot to the story that requires corrective action.
Every tech company I have worked at has gone out of its way to recruit African Americans and Latinos because they thought it was good corporate citizenship. The fact is that there just aren't a lot of STEM graduates. For you to accuse companies that really are making an effort of being guilty of discrimination is really outrageous.
Nobody who is an AGW "believer" has a problem with people who say "OK, the science has shown that 90%+ of GW is anthropogenic, but I believe that reducing CO2 emissions is not cost effective compared to the cost of climate change."
Are you kidding? AGW believers will either tear you apart as an evil right-winger bent on world destruction, or they'll just ignore economic arguments altogether and tar you with the same brush as AGW deniers. And then they stand up in forums like these and claim that they would listen if anybody just started discussing economics with them. Get real and stop dissembling.
Yes, I encourage everybody to read the IPCC report and look at the actual numbers. My conclusion after reading the IPCC report was that we should do nothing because the cost of inaction is likely lower than the cost of action on global warming, both on a global scale, and in particular for the US.
A pollution is not just "a waste product of an industrial process that is emitted into the environment"; pollution is "the introduction of harmful substances into the environment". Who is doing the polluting isn't relevant. What is relevant is that it must be "harmful". CO2 at the levels we are talking about with AGW is so far from being "harmful" to any animal or humans in any of the usual senses of the word that it clearly isn't a pollutant. Furthermore, if it were a pollutant, then you and I are emitting this pollutant.
It's proponents of action on global warming that are trying to redefine the meaning of the word "pollution", and not just to score rhetorical points, but in order to undermine congressional authority by extending EPA powers to regulating CO2 emissions.
I'd like to see more talk about costs and benefits and less talk to the effect, "I dislike the implications of what you're recommending therefore your analysis is wrong."
The quantifiable costs and benefits are given in the IPCC report: according to the report, inaction means a possibility of losing a few percent of world GDP decades-to-a-century from now, and action means a certainty of losing a few percent of world GDP sooner than that. I think even if you take the IPCC report at face value, the rational choice is clear.
A second issue is who should bear the cost. The US would be one of the least affected countries, so it has very little reason to act out of self interest. In addition, if you look objectively at history, the US bears a much smaller responsibility for current CO2 levels than Europe, yet Europeans are trying to come up with schemes that place more of the burden on the US. Attempts at manipulation on the part of Europe aren't going to encourage the US to act on an issue that isn't of that much importance to its interests anyway.
CO2 is one facet in a larger, we-are-changing-the-whole-of-the-earth problem.
What's the "problem"? We are a successful species and we have been changing the environment for many thousands of years. Of course, sometimes we screw up, but "changing-the-whole-of-the-earth" is not by itself a problem. And if you think that only started in the 1600's, you're naive. Even in 1600, there were almost no "natural" ecosystems left on any continent that had humans on it.
This is so not true. In Australia, the staff are paid more (a lot more), and the restaurant meals are cheaper. How can this be possible? The answer is worker productivity.
That is what "eliminate staff and automate more" means.
There is an interesting bit of history for why Australia has higher minimum wages and greater productivity for minimum-wage workers.
There's nothing particularly "interesting" about that, lots of countries with low unemployment work that way. Nor is it clear that Australia's choice to create a permanent class of unionized high-minimum-wage employees in dead end jobs is a good one.
I've long believed that laws should be written as a statement of intent combined with a reason for their passage, which could then be more easily interpreted by judges
They often have that; that's what all those "WHEREAS" clauses are.
Slashdot Mirror
But the two statements don't mean the same thing. A mandate to buy something is legally not the same as a tax increase, and the differences have consequences.
Trouble is that Obama is flip-flopping: to get the health care bill passed, he insisted that it is not a tax. Now to get it through SCOTUS, he is claiming that it is a tax.
But it isn't a tax. A tax would mean that everybody pays a health care tax and then gets a credit for getting private health care. You may think it amounts to the same thing, but it doesn't.
The health care law needs to be scrapped and replaced with one that defines the mandate in terms of a tax because that is all Congress has a right to do.
This "corruption" didn't start in the US, it started in Europe. The US fought it for the longest time and only finally fully implemented the Berne convention in the 1970's. Even today, European copyright regulations are far more restrictive than American ones. Europeans pay far more for blank media, membership in many copyright societies is mandatory, and laws and enforcement are draconian, often subjecting you to thousands of dollars in fees without benefit of a court proceedings. Most European nations don't even have a concept of a "public domain", and some rights remain with authors in perpetuity. And much of the copyright lobbying in the US is done by European publishers and producers.
You can't fix the copyright problem if you bark up the wrong tree. Europe is at least as much to blame for the world-wide copyright mess as the US, if not more.
It's still not a multi-armed bandit situation. The multi-armed bandit situation specifically means that you present either A or B, not an A/B choice. There are other machine learning techniques for optimizing A/B tests, just not the ones in the article.
If the UN gets control of the Internet, there is a real risk that you won't get to see what Muslim clerics and conservative Christians deem offensive, because together, they control a large number of powerful governments.
Porn and gambling are highly restricted in most places around the world, including parts of Europe. When you compare free speech rights around the world, the US is still better than almost all other places.
Bad as the DMCA is, it is still better than the legal situation that exists in many European countries. Look at France's HADOPI or the ability of Germany's GEMA to restrict music distribution in Germany.
MedicAlert comes with an ID number and phone number that medical staff can call for more information.
(I would expect that they will start offering NFC and implantable chips once it makes sense, but that's only a small improvement over what they already offer.)
Both Hanov and you are mixing up a couple of things. A/B testing is done with focus groups, not live visitors. When you test with focus groups, you don't run a live web server, and you're willing to pay for completion of some test design.
Algorithms for use with the multiarmed bandit are already widely used in live testing. Those algorithms properly belong to the field of machine learning (reinforcement learning), but it turns out that very simple algorithms or strategies are hard to beat. You're right that it's not "exclusively" machine learning because the simple algorithms were already known before machine learning even existed, but these algorithms are still primarily studied in machine learning.
As for whether these methods are effective, that's easy: they are, and they are widely used. The part that's hard isn't to decide which versions of a page to present how often, but instead to figure out which change was responsible for the better outcome you were interested in.
He isn't trying to use ML to predict the outcome of a focus group.
ML is about many things. One thing it is about is how a learner should explore an environment in order to maximize what he learns. It is one of those techniques that Hanov refers to, and it's a good idea in principle. But he picked the wrong algorithm for focus groups.
The algorithm he points to would is the right one for online testing of different web page designs, where you stick with your current design 99% of the time but show visitors different designs 1% of the time and see whether those work better or worse.
The multiarmed bandit problem is a problem in which you simultaneously try to optimize your overall reward and still explore. As a consumer, I face that problem (switch brands or stick with the tried-and-true). However, for focus groups, maximizing rewards for participants doesn't matter; it's all about finding the best solution for the organizer of the focus group. The participants already get the products for free. That means that it is not a multiarmed bandit problem, and algorithms for solving such problems are the wrong algorithms to use for focus groups.
There are mathematically more efficient ways of doing this kind of testing. But there are other constraints when testing with human beings as well, such as dependencies on the order in which you test. A/B testing is probably a pretty good compromise.
Assange was in the press because of the Wikileaks scandal, so people scrutinized him more. If this hadn't been at the height of the scandal, the women might never have talked about him, or the press might never have picked it up. I don't see any indication of anything fishy going on.
In different words, no secret conspiracy on the part of the US, just US prosecutors doing their job and complying with the law (provided they even try to extradite him).
"I'm of the opinion that rape is when you use violence or drugs to force someone to have sex with you. That doesn't seem to be the case here."
So you are saying that because you don't approve of Swedish rape laws, the US is guilty of a conspiracy?
It's clear that there is more than enough evidence that Assange may have violated Swedish rape laws, so the Swedes want him. That's all there is to the story.
Maybe the US will take advantage of the situation to extradite him, maybe not, but that doesn't exculpate Assange in Sweden and it doesn't show a conspiracy.
I see. So you're saying that the US cleverly arranged for radical Swedish feminists to pass bad rape laws, caused numerous cases to be prosecuted under those ridiculous laws, then arranged for Assange to seduce two well-known women, who then faked their outrage and keep lying to the media and prosecutor (presumably getting paid a lot of money by the CIA for their perjury). Brilliant analysis!
It's in sections 5.6 and 5.7.
"There is high agreement and medium evidence that in 2050 glo-
bal average macro-economic costs for multi-gas mitigation towards
stabilisation between 710 and 445ppm CO2-eq are between a 1%
gain to a 5.5% decrease of global GDP (Table 5.2)"
"For increases in global average temperature of less than 1 to 3C
above 1980-1999 levels, some impacts are projected to produce
market benefits in some places and sectors while, at the same time,
imposing costs in other places and sectors. Global mean losses could
be 1 to 5% of GDP for 4C of warming,"
"Limited and early analytical results from integrated analy-
ses of the global costs and benefits of mitigation indicate
that these are broadly comparable in magnitude, but do not
as yet permit an unambiguous determination of an emis-
sions pathway or stabilisation level where benefits exceed
costs. {WGIII SPM}"
(Note that I think the IPCC estimates of cost of mitigation is vastly underestimated, since it doesn't take into account opportunity costs, but let's just take them at face value.)
And their argument becomes even less compelling for American and European politicians when you look at the cost/benefit analysis for North America and Europe (Section 3.2.2).
Yeah, the AGW believers are like the mainstream Christian churches: they claim that they are open minded and tolerant but accuse anybody who doesn't believe of being immoral and evil and corrupting others with their message of unbelief; and while the great majority of people are members and they receive vast amounts of funding, yet they still keep complaining that they are being persecuted.
First, here are the facts:
http://smallbusiness.chron.com/average-profit-margin-restaurant-13477.html
Second, it makes no sense for profit margins to be higher, because then you'd see more people starting restaurants, driving down the margins.
Yes, and they don't have to because they can get lots of people willing to work for them for a low price and without health insurance. It's called a labor market and supply and demand.
African Americans get stopped, arrested, and convicted disproportionately because they commit crimes at a much higher rate than whites. Racism cannot and does not account for those outcomes, social problems in the African American community do.
Every tech company I have worked at has gone out of its way to recruit African Americans and Latinos because they thought it was good corporate citizenship. The fact is that there just aren't a lot of STEM graduates. For you to accuse companies that really are making an effort of being guilty of discrimination is really outrageous.
Are you kidding? AGW believers will either tear you apart as an evil right-winger bent on world destruction, or they'll just ignore economic arguments altogether and tar you with the same brush as AGW deniers. And then they stand up in forums like these and claim that they would listen if anybody just started discussing economics with them. Get real and stop dissembling.
Yes, I encourage everybody to read the IPCC report and look at the actual numbers. My conclusion after reading the IPCC report was that we should do nothing because the cost of inaction is likely lower than the cost of action on global warming, both on a global scale, and in particular for the US.
I, for one, am glad that people like you don't have more influence in our political system.
A pollution is not just "a waste product of an industrial process that is emitted into the environment"; pollution is "the introduction of harmful substances into the environment". Who is doing the polluting isn't relevant. What is relevant is that it must be "harmful". CO2 at the levels we are talking about with AGW is so far from being "harmful" to any animal or humans in any of the usual senses of the word that it clearly isn't a pollutant. Furthermore, if it were a pollutant, then you and I are emitting this pollutant.
It's proponents of action on global warming that are trying to redefine the meaning of the word "pollution", and not just to score rhetorical points, but in order to undermine congressional authority by extending EPA powers to regulating CO2 emissions.
The quantifiable costs and benefits are given in the IPCC report: according to the report, inaction means a possibility of losing a few percent of world GDP decades-to-a-century from now, and action means a certainty of losing a few percent of world GDP sooner than that. I think even if you take the IPCC report at face value, the rational choice is clear.
A second issue is who should bear the cost. The US would be one of the least affected countries, so it has very little reason to act out of self interest. In addition, if you look objectively at history, the US bears a much smaller responsibility for current CO2 levels than Europe, yet Europeans are trying to come up with schemes that place more of the burden on the US. Attempts at manipulation on the part of Europe aren't going to encourage the US to act on an issue that isn't of that much importance to its interests anyway.
What's the "problem"? We are a successful species and we have been changing the environment for many thousands of years. Of course, sometimes we screw up, but "changing-the-whole-of-the-earth" is not by itself a problem. And if you think that only started in the 1600's, you're naive. Even in 1600, there were almost no "natural" ecosystems left on any continent that had humans on it.
That is what "eliminate staff and automate more" means.
There's nothing particularly "interesting" about that, lots of countries with low unemployment work that way. Nor is it clear that Australia's choice to create a permanent class of unionized high-minimum-wage employees in dead end jobs is a good one.
They often have that; that's what all those "WHEREAS" clauses are.