no, it was designed to increase the power of hte Federal Government, because the Fed such as it was under the Articles was useless and ineffectual, and the country threatened to fracture into 13 seperate countries.
and quit referring to the founders as a single monolithic bloc and learn some history. there were many factions, each with a different view. its why the constitution is a mixed up hodge podge of bad compromises and vague statements.
only 5 of which were killed by a gun. nearly every spree killing before 1996 was a shooting. only one after involved a gun. the rest were arson, or knives. and each individual incident before 1996 had more fatalities than the incidents that followed 1996
actually "rebooting", ie, flipping the power switch or circuit breaker, isn't at all uncommon on avionics equipment on military aircraft. we aren't talking about typical computers that go through a boot process anyway. this is ruggedized equipment that largely lacks any thing resembling an operating system or RAM or much else a typical Slashdot reader would be familiar with.
anyone who's spent any time working on military aircraft as a maintainer, particularly the avionics systems, knows that inflight glitches are not at all infrequent. and when they pop up on the Master Caution* or elsewhere, often the first corrective action the pilot takes is to power cycle the specific piece of equipment. most every system is on its own breaker, and pilots are trained in what can and what cannot be power cycled in flight. the majority of the time, that's enough to fix the glitch.
and typically the first thing that happens when the pilot returns is a rep from each of the main work shops (avionics, flightline, airframes, ordinance, life support) meets him as he is exiting his aircraft, in order to ask if any gripes came up during the flight. this way they can get a jump on it before the pilot even gets back to the maintenance control to write the maintenance order describing the glitch.
there a thousands of wires, with hundreds of connectors, each connector a cannon plug consisting of several dozen pins, any one of which could have gotten slightly bent (or even broken) upon reconnection, making an imperfect electrical connection or faulty data bus signal (depending on system). Or a wire may fall out of the backend of the pin from a faulty installation of the retainer of the cannon plug. or the plug itself may be not quite fully seated; you'd think it would be easy, but there's a reason we have cannon plug pliers (aka "bi*ch grips"). There's also millions of solder joints and splices that can fatigue from vibration. sometimes a contact simply gets dirty cause oil or grease (we wipe everything constantly, but still happens).
(*speaking of PITA to maintain: due its nature, being tied into EVERYTHING (hundreds, sometimes thousands, of feet of wiring, depending on aircraft type), the Master Caution Panel (MCP) itself is often the actual point of failure, throwing false indications. one of the first things we frequently did in tracing a gripe was to first eliminate the MCP itself)
I am copy this to paste elsewhere, for this is perfect. I know far too many people who read reason religiously and are incapable of spotting even the most basic flaws in what they've read.
to be fair, those obtuse words are difficult for the typical reason author or reader to comprehend. they like things nice and simple, without nuance and requiring little thought. ie, its why they like libertarianism in the first place.:P
Pretty much the entire article that we are talking about can be summarized by the phrase "Ayn Rand didn't use the words 'gendered,' 'postcolonial,' or 'political ecology' in her books; therefore I don't know what they mean; therefore this paper's abstract is meaningless gibberish."
That pretty much sums up everything you'll find on reason.com on any topic.
the problem is that C8 is incredibly bad, but went uncontrolled for so long its no everywhere on the planet, and DuPont covered it up for the longest time (and continues to), knowing full well it was responsible for thousands of problems amongst thousands of people, both its workers and people living in the area of its plants and its secret dumping grounds. and its only one chemical out of the many tens of thousands about which very little if anything is actually known by the public, or even the manufacturers, because little to no testing is required.
its not Teflon that's toxic. its the manufacturing process.
yes, the company has a long and disgusting battle and coverup over the toxicity of C8 and the damage they've wrought on the environment, and as a result no place on the planet is currently uncontaminated by it (they've found it everywhere they've looked for it, even found it on ice in both the ARtcic and Antarctic, and the tissues of deep sea fish)
but C8 isn't present in Teflon itself. its part of the manufacturing process, but virtually none makes it into the final product.
And most of the debt under Obama is STILL related to the ongoing War on Terror and recovering economy. And while the Average may be high, that ignores that the actual year-year values have been trending downward.
no, they are not running in the red (patently false misinformation)
speaking to SS, which you evidently need a lesson on, yes, it is a pay-as-you-go system, which is a sort of self-funding setup. as long as there are workers paying it, there are payments going out.
SS is not a savings account you pay into and then withdrawal from. SS is a direct cash transfer from current workers to current beneficiaries. It has a defined benefit amount.
The Trust Fund exists because for decades they took in more money than they paid out. There were many more workers than beneficiaries. and if they paid out everything they took in the benefits would be out of whack with the cost of living, and produce bad effects on the economy. and, while they generally assumed population would grow over time (more workers than beneficiaries), making the system sustainable, even they knew it would be useful to have a cushion; besides, they needed an account to deposit the money in and withdraw from anyway in the process. and by the time it was overhauled in the 1960s under LBJ it was obvious population might contract or slow down, and with periods of economic reduction or drops in labor, placing even more emphasis on maintain a healthy trust fund.
So they stocked the surplus away into the Trust Fund also. Im oversimplifying a lot here: technically all payments into and out of SS go through the Trust Fund. But the Trust Fund itself grew in size to be more than the sum of its intakes and payouts because of said mismatch. (And also technically there is two trust Funds, one for SS for old age, and one for SS for disability)
the part that is running out of money is the surplus in the Trust Fund which is separate from the mechanics of how SS itself operates.
having this account, aka Trust Fund, was useful because it allowed payouts to remain steady during periods of reduced revenue. it also allowed the monies within to be invested in various ways to allow it to keep its value, rather than lose value due to inflation. and some of that surplus has been used over the years to increase benefits amounts to keep the relative value of the benefits constant as inflation occurred and the cost of living increased, while wages didn't (aka, the last 40 years).
now with boomers retiring and the workforce (as a % of population) shrinking therefore there will be more people receiving benefits. enough such that the trust fund (the surplus from decades of taking in more than being paid out),if used to keep benefits at their current level will run out.
but that is just the surplus in trust fund. because the entire SS system is a operated as direct cash transfer from workers to beneficiaries is impossible for it to run out of money. Benefits may go down, and that what people are trying to avoid. But benefits will never cease as long we have an economy where people are still working.
but the Trust Fund is also solvent as its current levels for many years yet. (so no, it's not in the red)
and making it perpetually solvent is as simple as raising the income cap from 113k/yr (ie, if you make more htna that, you still only contribute to SS as if you make 113k/yr) to 250k/yr which would make the Trust Fund solvent til around the year 2150. and removing the cap entirely would make it solvent forever, and allow benefits to be increased dramatically as well.
the Trust Fund will never actually run out of money. it will just no longer have a surplus, and will only consist of the sum of its intakes and payouts as money transits the system.
-- as for the claim that congress has played hooky with the moneys, no they haven't. by law, the money cannot be used in the general fund. it cannot be touched or tapped directly by congress. there can no direct transfers or borrowings.
the confusion here comes from a very simple misunderstanding: remember that the Trust Fund gets invested to maintain its value? they did that by buying government
Uh, no. The ADDED debt per year is what I'm talking about. Ignore the reported "deficit" numbers, they're cooked big time. Look how much is added to the national debt every year - that will tell you how much excess spending went on.
I mean, if only there was some commonly agreed upon definition for the word 'deficit' and some publically available data or source to determine what it was. but you know those dictionaries...you cant trust them. and that congress...they never ever tell us what budget they've passed and trying to get revenues and expenditures out of the treasury dept, or the CBO? impossible!
your ignorance would be hysterical if it wasn't also so sad.
a) the MWP it wasn't a global phenomenon... b) most of the planet was cooler... c) and therefore the global average of that period was cooler than now
before it sticks in that pea brain of yours?
and lets be honest and just cut this charade short: you're next step will be to ask for data... which will be provided... which you will then reject out of hand because of some other crank easily disproven data that you will for some reason (ignorance? bias?) accept immediately while rejecting actual scientific proof out of hand.
that's how this game goes. and it's why you're a troll.
"where" would be a nice piece of information to provide so we could actually look at actual trends for your location and turn your anecdote into a verifiable piece of data.
he's wrong about the reasoning for trusting/distrusting an authority, but mostly (I think) because he oversimplified and missed the target he was aiming for.
I tried to lay out the actual process we go through in our minds when we evaluate expert testimony. in practice, we tend to do it quickly, being something that we do subconsciously thousands of times a day.
and as I said, it's not a perfect system, but we aren't logical creatures, hence why, in general, we trust experts in a field because they are experts in that field, particularly when we are not also experts in that same field don't have the resources to personally confirm everything.
2: Genetic: it's not merely that we don't like him, it's that he's been proven wrong repeatedly, and shown to be a sower of misinformation, repeatedly. he isn't a trust worthy source.
3: AFA: its not that the scientists agree with us, but that they represent the majority of scientific experts in the field, with reproducible and verifiable data, each arriving at the same general conclusion following the same train of investigation, thus forming a consensus of scientific thought. now unless you personally have the expertise, qualifications, resources, and time to challenge that consensus, along with legitimate data that pass scrutiny and is able to overturn the mountain of evidence against you, it is perfectly reasonable in this case to accept the "expert opinion".
the problem is in equating the presence of a fallacy in a statement with that statement being wrong. that is in fact, another fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Argument from fallacy is the formal fallacy of analyzing an argument and inferring that, since it contains a fallacy, its conclusion must be false.[1] It is also called argument to logic (argumentum ad logicam), fallacy fallacy,[2] fallacist's fallacy,[3] and bad reasons fallacy.[4]
Fallacious arguments can arrive at true conclusions, so this is an informal fallacy of relevance.[5]
fallacy is a caution light, not a stop light. it indicates that a better argument should possibly be sought, and/or that the statement should be careful scrutinized.
one of the most common fallacy is the argument from authority (typically referring to an authority other than one's self). this is because experts carry great weight in discourse, as they should, and, especially in regards to science, few of us have the time and resources to personally re-verify every known principle. thus the reliance on experts. just because an "expert" says it doesn't make it false....but nor does it make it true.
we make these sorts of evaluations about expert testimony all the time. amd there are three places where the statement can fall apart, and so three places where we make an evaluation:
A: The Person referring to an authority B: The Authority being cited C: The Statement being made
if the person making the statement is someone like a teacher or reporter referring to someone else as the authority, someone we tend to trust to bring us information, we tend to trust the information is accurate, and ignore the AFA. if the person making the statement is referring to themselves as the authority it's poor form; but if they provide data, the statement can be verified true/false on that basis and the AFA ignored, as the information is then judged on its own merits. if they provide nothing else though, we're likely to ignore the information, pending being provided the data. if the authority being referenced is an expert in the relevant field, we tend to trust the information, and again ignore the AFA. if they are not, we tend not to. if the statement is part of a consensus of thought (formed by repeated verification of results and peer review), we to trust it. if the statement has not been verified, we tend not to (note that we shouldn't reject it yet, pending more review) if the statement has been verified false, we tend to reject it outright.
thus if we can evaluate the information on its merits we can ignore the presence of an AFA as irrelevant. if we can't evaluate on the merits, then the authority and the person referencing them becomes the focal point of the evaluation as we determine their relevance. its not a perfect system, but then none of us are perfect logical creatures, and as stated, few of us can actually afford to recreate every scientific result.
Slashdot Mirror
speaking of bullshit
no, it was designed to increase the power of hte Federal Government, because the Fed such as it was under the Articles was useless and ineffectual, and the country threatened to fracture into 13 seperate countries.
and quit referring to the founders as a single monolithic bloc and learn some history.
there were many factions, each with a different view. its why the constitution is a mixed up hodge podge of bad compromises and vague statements.
only 5 of which were killed by a gun.
nearly every spree killing before 1996 was a shooting.
only one after involved a gun. the rest were arson, or knives.
and each individual incident before 1996 had more fatalities than the incidents that followed 1996
seems like an improvement to me.
nice try.
actually "rebooting", ie, flipping the power switch or circuit breaker, isn't at all uncommon on avionics equipment on military aircraft.
we aren't talking about typical computers that go through a boot process anyway. this is ruggedized equipment that largely lacks any thing resembling an operating system or RAM or much else a typical Slashdot reader would be familiar with.
anyone who's spent any time working on military aircraft as a maintainer, particularly the avionics systems, knows that inflight glitches are not at all infrequent. and when they pop up on the Master Caution* or elsewhere, often the first corrective action the pilot takes is to power cycle the specific piece of equipment. most every system is on its own breaker, and pilots are trained in what can and what cannot be power cycled in flight. the majority of the time, that's enough to fix the glitch.
and typically the first thing that happens when the pilot returns is a rep from each of the main work shops (avionics, flightline, airframes, ordinance, life support) meets him as he is exiting his aircraft, in order to ask if any gripes came up during the flight. this way they can get a jump on it before the pilot even gets back to the maintenance control to write the maintenance order describing the glitch.
there a thousands of wires, with hundreds of connectors, each connector a cannon plug consisting of several dozen pins, any one of which could have gotten slightly bent (or even broken) upon reconnection, making an imperfect electrical connection or faulty data bus signal (depending on system). Or a wire may fall out of the backend of the pin from a faulty installation of the retainer of the cannon plug. or the plug itself may be not quite fully seated; you'd think it would be easy, but there's a reason we have cannon plug pliers (aka "bi*ch grips"). There's also millions of solder joints and splices that can fatigue from vibration. sometimes a contact simply gets dirty cause oil or grease (we wipe everything constantly, but still happens).
(*speaking of PITA to maintain: due its nature, being tied into EVERYTHING (hundreds, sometimes thousands, of feet of wiring, depending on aircraft type), the Master Caution Panel (MCP) itself is often the actual point of failure, throwing false indications. one of the first things we frequently did in tracing a gripe was to first eliminate the MCP itself)
my mod stalker is on a roll today.
not trolling.
not offtopic.
fuck off mods.
not trolling.
not offtopic.
I am copy this to paste elsewhere, for this is perfect.
I know far too many people who read reason religiously and are incapable of spotting even the most basic flaws in what they've read.
you're bonkers.
iceland is most definitely part of Europe under all 3 of the major categories of geography: cultural, political, and geologic.
"not randian"
I can only conclude you're rarely ever actually read anything they actually publish.
to be fair, those obtuse words are difficult for the typical reason author or reader to comprehend. :P
they like things nice and simple, without nuance and requiring little thought.
ie, its why they like libertarianism in the first place.
Pretty much the entire article that we are talking about can be summarized by the phrase "Ayn Rand didn't use the words 'gendered,' 'postcolonial,' or 'political ecology' in her books; therefore I don't know what they mean; therefore this paper's abstract is meaningless gibberish."
That pretty much sums up everything you'll find on reason.com on any topic.
Please make it so.
the problem is that C8 is incredibly bad, but went uncontrolled for so long its no everywhere on the planet, and DuPont covered it up for the longest time (and continues to), knowing full well it was responsible for thousands of problems amongst thousands of people, both its workers and people living in the area of its plants and its secret dumping grounds. and its only one chemical out of the many tens of thousands about which very little if anything is actually known by the public, or even the manufacturers, because little to no testing is required.
its not Teflon that's toxic.
its the manufacturing process.
yes, the company has a long and disgusting battle and coverup over the toxicity of C8 and the damage they've wrought on the environment, and as a result no place on the planet is currently uncontaminated by it (they've found it everywhere they've looked for it, even found it on ice in both the ARtcic and Antarctic, and the tissues of deep sea fish)
but C8 isn't present in Teflon itself.
its part of the manufacturing process, but virtually none makes it into the final product.
Clinton did have surpluses
http://www.factcheck.org/2008/...
And most of the debt under Obama is STILL related to the ongoing War on Terror and recovering economy.
And while the Average may be high, that ignores that the actual year-year values have been trending downward.
So again.
You posted BS.
no, they are not running in the red (patently false misinformation)
speaking to SS, which you evidently need a lesson on, yes, it is a pay-as-you-go system, which is a sort of self-funding setup.
as long as there are workers paying it, there are payments going out.
SS is not a savings account you pay into and then withdrawal from.
SS is a direct cash transfer from current workers to current beneficiaries.
It has a defined benefit amount.
The Trust Fund exists because for decades they took in more money than they paid out.
There were many more workers than beneficiaries.
and if they paid out everything they took in the benefits would be out of whack with the cost of living, and produce bad effects on the economy.
and, while they generally assumed population would grow over time (more workers than beneficiaries), making the system sustainable, even they knew it would be useful to have a cushion; besides, they needed an account to deposit the money in and withdraw from anyway in the process.
and by the time it was overhauled in the 1960s under LBJ it was obvious population might contract or slow down, and with periods of economic reduction or drops in labor, placing even more emphasis on maintain a healthy trust fund.
So they stocked the surplus away into the Trust Fund also.
Im oversimplifying a lot here: technically all payments into and out of SS go through the Trust Fund.
But the Trust Fund itself grew in size to be more than the sum of its intakes and payouts because of said mismatch.
(And also technically there is two trust Funds, one for SS for old age, and one for SS for disability)
the part that is running out of money is the surplus in the Trust Fund which is separate from the mechanics of how SS itself operates.
having this account, aka Trust Fund, was useful because it allowed payouts to remain steady during periods of reduced revenue.
it also allowed the monies within to be invested in various ways to allow it to keep its value, rather than lose value due to inflation.
and some of that surplus has been used over the years to increase benefits amounts to keep the relative value of the benefits constant as inflation occurred and the cost of living increased, while wages didn't (aka, the last 40 years).
now with boomers retiring and the workforce (as a % of population) shrinking therefore there will be more people receiving benefits.
enough such that the trust fund (the surplus from decades of taking in more than being paid out),if used to keep benefits at their current level will run out.
but that is just the surplus in trust fund. .
because the entire SS system is a operated as direct cash transfer from workers to beneficiaries is impossible for it to run out of money
Benefits may go down, and that what people are trying to avoid. But benefits will never cease as long we have an economy where people are still working.
but the Trust Fund is also solvent as its current levels for many years yet.
(so no, it's not in the red)
and making it perpetually solvent is as simple as raising the income cap from 113k/yr (ie, if you make more htna that, you still only contribute to SS as if you make 113k/yr) to 250k/yr which would make the Trust Fund solvent til around the year 2150. and removing the cap entirely would make it solvent forever, and allow benefits to be increased dramatically as well.
the Trust Fund will never actually run out of money.
it will just no longer have a surplus, and will only consist of the sum of its intakes and payouts as money transits the system.
--
as for the claim that congress has played hooky with the moneys, no they haven't.
by law, the money cannot be used in the general fund. it cannot be touched or tapped directly by congress.
there can no direct transfers or borrowings.
the confusion here comes from a very simple misunderstanding:
remember that the Trust Fund gets invested to maintain its value? they did that by buying government
the deficit IS THE CHANGE.
its added to it EVERY YEAR.
f'ing moron.
Uh, no. The ADDED debt per year is what I'm talking about. Ignore the reported "deficit" numbers, they're cooked big time. Look how much is added to the national debt every year - that will tell you how much excess spending went on.
I mean, if only there was some commonly agreed upon definition for the word 'deficit' and some publically available data or source to determine what it was. but you know those dictionaries...you cant trust them.
and that congress...they never ever tell us what budget they've passed
and trying to get revenues and expenditures out of the treasury dept, or the CBO? impossible!
your ignorance would be hysterical if it wasn't also so sad.
see? you proved me right already.
how many times do you have to be told that:
a) the MWP it wasn't a global phenomenon...
b) most of the planet was cooler...
c) and therefore the global average of that period was cooler than now
before it sticks in that pea brain of yours?
and lets be honest and just cut this charade short:
you're next step will be to ask for data...
which will be provided...
which you will then reject out of hand because of some other crank easily disproven data that you will for some reason (ignorance? bias?) accept immediately while rejecting actual scientific proof out of hand.
that's how this game goes.
and it's why you're a troll.
"where" would be a nice piece of information to provide so we could actually look at actual trends for your location and turn your anecdote into a verifiable piece of data.
he's wrong about the reasoning for trusting/distrusting an authority, but mostly (I think) because he oversimplified and missed the target he was aiming for.
I tried to lay out the actual process we go through in our minds when we evaluate expert testimony.
in practice, we tend to do it quickly, being something that we do subconsciously thousands of times a day.
and as I said, it's not a perfect system, but we aren't logical creatures, hence why, in general, we trust experts in a field because they are experts in that field, particularly when we are not also experts in that same field don't have the resources to personally confirm everything.
2: Genetic: it's not merely that we don't like him, it's that he's been proven wrong repeatedly, and shown to be a sower of misinformation, repeatedly. he isn't a trust worthy source.
3: AFA: its not that the scientists agree with us, but that they represent the majority of scientific experts in the field, with reproducible and verifiable data, each arriving at the same general conclusion following the same train of investigation, thus forming a consensus of scientific thought. now unless you personally have the expertise, qualifications, resources, and time to challenge that consensus, along with legitimate data that pass scrutiny and is able to overturn the mountain of evidence against you, it is perfectly reasonable in this case to accept the "expert opinion".
the problem is in equating the presence of a fallacy in a statement with that statement being wrong.
that is in fact, another fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Argument from fallacy is the formal fallacy of analyzing an argument and inferring that, since it contains a fallacy, its conclusion must be false.[1] It is also called argument to logic (argumentum ad logicam), fallacy fallacy,[2] fallacist's fallacy,[3] and bad reasons fallacy.[4]
Fallacious arguments can arrive at true conclusions, so this is an informal fallacy of relevance.[5]
fallacy is a caution light, not a stop light.
it indicates that a better argument should possibly be sought, and/or that the statement should be careful scrutinized.
one of the most common fallacy is the argument from authority (typically referring to an authority other than one's self). this is because experts carry great weight in discourse, as they should, and, especially in regards to science, few of us have the time and resources to personally re-verify every known principle. thus the reliance on experts. just because an "expert" says it doesn't make it false....but nor does it make it true.
we make these sorts of evaluations about expert testimony all the time.
amd there are three places where the statement can fall apart, and so three places where we make an evaluation:
A: The Person referring to an authority
B: The Authority being cited
C: The Statement being made
if the person making the statement is someone like a teacher or reporter referring to someone else as the authority, someone we tend to trust to bring us information, we tend to trust the information is accurate, and ignore the AFA.
if the person making the statement is referring to themselves as the authority it's poor form; but if they provide data, the statement can be verified true/false on that basis and the AFA ignored, as the information is then judged on its own merits. if they provide nothing else though, we're likely to ignore the information, pending being provided the data.
if the authority being referenced is an expert in the relevant field, we tend to trust the information, and again ignore the AFA.
if they are not, we tend not to.
if the statement is part of a consensus of thought (formed by repeated verification of results and peer review), we to trust it.
if the statement has not been verified, we tend not to (note that we shouldn't reject it yet, pending more review)
if the statement has been verified false, we tend to reject it outright.
thus if we can evaluate the information on its merits we can ignore the presence of an AFA as irrelevant.
if we can't evaluate on the merits, then the authority and the person referencing them becomes the focal point of the evaluation as we determine their relevance.
its not a perfect system, but then none of us are perfect logical creatures, and as stated, few of us can actually afford to recreate every scientific result.