Do you read your own statements? You have have said Mann manipulated the data then he "tortured" the data. That is accusing him of fraud. Does English and words mean something in your world?
Fraud requires intent. Repeatedly applying incorrect statistical procedures until you get the result you want ("torturing the data") may be fraud, or it may be merely incompetence. In Mann's case, we don't know. I just point out that even if his results had been perfectly correct, it wouldn't exculpate him.
Global warming research is newer but it is backed up by more than a century of evidence which is the fatal flaw in your argument.
The effects from a century ago by themselves predict very little global warming in the future; based on that evidence alone, climate change simply isn't an issue. Global warming only becomes an issue if you assume the existence of feedback mechanisms, and those are based on recent results and theories, and they haven't stood the test of time yet.
As for agree with Mann results, you immediately jump to the conclusion that he was incompetent. His techniques were not as strong as it should have been or he should have done things differently (in a very new field) are not your first thoughts. The man must be incompetent because you disagree with him.
You aren't listening. I agree with Mann's primary conclusion about recent increases in temperature, as does the Royal Society. I disagree with his statistical methods, just like the Royal Society did. What he did wrong is what many scientists get wrong in any field. It's common statistical mistakes. Usually, those things get corrected through a few decades of additional work, but it takes that amount of time.
But as you just admitted yourself (contradicting your earlier statement), AGW "is a very new field", so there simply hasn't been time for people to go through this process. Many papers in AGW probably use incorrect methods, most of them are far more complex than Mann's paper, and many of them contain far more serious errors in their conclusion than Mann's paper.
$1k in Fairfax County VA, where my mother-in-law is, won't get much at all, and she can't afford to move without help.
Fairfax County is one of the most expensive places to live in the country; I wouldn't dream of living there myself. Moving to Lexington would cut her cost of living in half. She'd recoup the cost of moving within a few months from what she saves. You can loan her the money (about $1-2k). Or you can grab a U-Haul and just help her, which is what many kids do for their parents.
As for them preparing, both are divorcees who got squat from former husbands.
If she got nothing, that means she didn't bring anything into the marriage (which she would have gotten in full), and the couple didn't save for retirement during marriage either (which would have been split). So, in different words, she didn't bother saving for retirement and instead spent the money on living a nice life in some swanky area.
Mother-in-law worked into her 70s as a psychiatric nurse, but on her post divorce income couldn't really save anything.
Post-divorce is too late to start saving. But if you do, the first thing to do is live extremely frugally. She should have moved out of Fairfax right away after her divorce and really cut costs.
I agree there's a fine line, and it should be based upon where you live, and what resources you have.
My parents moved in their 70's to save money. I live in a cheap neighborhood in order to be able to save for retirement. I think it's wrong to ask me to take away money from my retirement savings in order to financially support your mother-in-law's lack of retirement planning and expensive choice of where to retire.
And if you want to give her a better retirement, why don't you give her a little extra money out of your own pocket or help her in other ways?
Not sure what you mean, as they haven't kept up with inflation, and thus put people into lower standards of living
That's debatable, since many of the items used in COLAs are of higher quality than they used to be.
My mother and mother-in-law are living on payments of about $1k/month...both divorcees with no additional income... but I do believe we need a safety net for those who really can't fend for themselves.
There's a fine line between a safety net and a subsidized retirement plan. $1k/month is actually a pretty good amount to live on in many places. And I think it's reasonable to ask the question of why they didn't prepare more for their own retirement and why their former husbands aren't paying.
"really good ones are 1%-ers" I don't believe that at all. Unless you are including entrepreneurs that have a background in technology, at which point, I'd stop calling them STEM workers.
Well, you may not believe it but it's true.
The 99'th percentile for household income starts at $394k; that's pretty easy to get for a couple, each making a base salary of $150k plus bonuses. I'd venture a guess that many senior engineers at places like Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft, etc. easily make that kind of money.
Among single filers, you're a 1%-er if you make $194k/year; that's again pretty easy to get for a Silicon Valley software engineer from base salary plus bonuses.
Entrepreneurs generally don't make anywhere near that kind of salary; it would be financially stupid for them to pull money out of their companies to pay themselves a big salary because they'd pay a lot of taxes on it; they just leave the money in their company and let it appreciate. "The rich" do similar things with their money. That's why this whole discussion of taxing the top 1% of income earners in order to "tax the rich" is so stupid.
In Europe, many engineers are paid not all that differently from other professions that are much less demanding and specialized. If they make higher salaries, much of that difference is eaten up by progressive taxation. Socially, many European intellectuals look down their noses at applied disciplines and pride themselves in their inability to comprehend math, physics, and engineering. What motivation do you think people have to acquire highly specialized skills and take on high responsibility if society tells them that their skills and responsibilities aren't valued, either financially or intellectually?
And similar mechanisms are taking hold in the US. Progressives in Silicon Valley have been protesting well-paid software engineers and become downright hostile to technology, Democrats are constantly calling for increasingly higher tax burdens on high income earners, etc. All of those efforts target and discourage successful engineers, who are usually in the top income quintile (and really good ones are 1%-ers, not really a stretch given that their skills easily exceed those of 99% of all Americans).
You want more skilled engineers? Start valuing their contributions, and stop trying to forcibly reduce income inequality.
You can be pretty much certain that the NSA is trying to get its hands on the private data of anybody relevant to their interests and work: cryptographers, big data scientists, other related fields of computer science. This is simply so that they can make sure that they are ahead of what's out there in the public domain and academia.
And in addition, you can also be certain that any administration is going to be using the NSA and other spy agencies to keep track of potential dissidents, critics, and leakers: economists, social scientists, political opponents, political activists, members of the military, etc. And they are going to use that data to warn the administration of political attacks and silence opponents through leaks of unflattering personal information, as well as selective prosecution of actual wrongdoing.
That's not a question of whether this or any other administration is particularly bad or dishonest, it's simply what happens when you give any organization and any government the kind of power that the NSA has given to recent administrations.
To Apple, open source is just a means to an end. They badmouth open source when it serves their marketing purposes and use it when it saves them time and money. But their end, their business model, ultimately is hostile to open source. Furthermore, Apple wouldn't exist without open source; they couldn't have built what they are shipping themselves.
As for Apples open source releases, they have been mostly useful to Apple customers, not exactly a big contribution to the world of open source software.
"Printing money is, effectively, a tax on everybody who happens to hold money."
No wonder the conservatives fight as hard as possible to "starve the beast" even when doing so straves everybody else: after all, they are ahead in the race and don't like to be given a handicap.
I assume your convoluted reasoning is something like: "conservatives are wealthy and wealthy people hold a lot of money, so they don't like inflation because it erodes the value of their money". It's not that simple, though, because many assets that wealthy people hold (real estate, shares, etc.) aren't really affected by inflation, so they don't care much.
Inflation mostly affects people who have bought long term debt at fixed interest rates: banks, mortgage lenders, and pension funds. Wealthy people don't buy that stuff because it's not that profitable.
Total US non-govt public debt [wordpress.com] Quarterly changes in US public debt [wordpress.com]
Yes, I'm familiar with that data. I'm not sure what you're trying to prove though. US debt-to-income ratios are still way above the year 2000 levels, and that "deleveraging" is actually slower than the rate at which the debt was built up.
I'm just saying that you have to have economic policies that understand the effect and protect the economy from the negatives.
It is utter hubris to think anybody can "protect the economy from the negatives" of individual borrowing or spending decisions. In fact, all you accomplish with these policies is to hurt the economy, by tricking or forcing people into making decisions that they themselves would have concluded are bad for them, and usually by benefiting rent-seeking corporations. "Protecting the economy" is really just a fig leaf for crony capitalism.
The discussion was simply about inflation: did prices increase 10% per year as claimed by the original web site. Obviously not, because prices on almost everything have not quadrupled in the last 14 years.
How did you nitwits ever graduate college or high school? 10% inflation and you equate that to Quadrupling?
1.1 ^ 14 = 3.79, so approximately a quadrupling.
Quadrupling is a 400% increase that would take 40 years at 10% via simple math, and even then it would be right.
It's no wonder that with those kinds of stupid beliefs you come up with policies "We need a 30% flat tax on all assholes that makes $500K or more a year, and tax at 50% any stock or trading incomes." The reason other people are doing economically better than you is because you are stupid and uneducated.
The cost of living adjustments are flexible and political, to say the least. In reality, they are updated to higher and higher standards of living over time, which simply could get stopped.
If you want to see not only the actual stats for what inflation has been going on, note that inflation in America has been hovering around about 10% annual on most goods. See also this site: http://www.shadowstats.com/
That would mean that prices have quadrupled since 2000: are rent, houses, gasoline, food, cell phones, jeans four times as expensive as in 2000? Of course not. Many of those things have actually gotten cheaper.
Inflation and CPI aren't particularly well-defined numbers, so people can legitimately get different answers and use/misuse them for various political purposes. But anybody who claims that they are around ten percent obviously is an economic charlatan.
As a matter of rule, the U.S. can always pay back its debts by printing enough money to cover that debt.
True. And while US politicians might not give a damn whether the Chinese hate us, that would devalue huge amounts of debt held by US retirees, banks, and small investors, and they do vote.
I meant to say that taxes don't actually fund expenditures since the government can print money to pay for any expenditures it authorizes.
Printing money is, effectively, a tax on everybody who happens to hold money.
In deflation, it should be a stimulus policy (low tax, high spend).
You have a "stimulus" when you think people are not buying enough and saving too much; is that true of Americans? I don't think so.
Deflation and inflation are largely irrelevant; the value of money is just an arbitrary scale. If it adjusts, it adjusts according to economic conditions.
Europe is stupid (high tax, low spend). Yeah it sucks over there because they are not using their power as a fiat currency to put more Euros into the economy.
It sucks over there because governments limit economic activity through misguided policies. Both high taxes and other sorts of regulations do that. More government spending would generate a little more economic activity, but not enough to make up for the loss.
Look at Obama's stimulus programs: they failed to come even close to delivering what he promised. Government stimuli don't work and are a waste of money.
Wages have been stagnant because a lot money has been transferred to non-wage benefits. You can't heap more and more requirements on employers and expect wage increases to happen as before. Furthermore, since wages and non-wage benefits are taxed differently, it encourages employers even more to substitute non-wage benefits for wage increases.
Of course, employees get screwed this way: it's better to have the money and be able to determine yourself what to do with it. But it's progressives and "liberals" that are screwing workers this way; the wage stagnation that progressives like to complain about is of their own making.
(A second problem with your analysis is that inflation rate doesn't tell you what people pay. The inflation rate for different income brackets is different depending on what those groups consume.)
I think he's wrong and his policies are misguided. But it doesn't look to me like he said the fictional stories proved that these methods were useful, just that they illustrated how they were useful.
Does anyone know why the Republicans came right to the table on the sequester this time around? Because offense spending (thinly veiled as "defense" spending) was to be rolled back to 2003 levels. That is absolutely evil if you are a member of the Republicans.
Both parties love wasting tax dollars on useless things on a massive scale. Republicans pay lip service to small government but fail to deliver; Democrats swear and complain about big corporations and bankers but then use legislation for economic stimulation, job creation, and consumer protection to shove even more money in the hands of the groups the claim to hate. Both are "absolutely evil". Pick your poison.
I'm not entirely sure how my comment ended up being interpreted as a compliment to the DEA.
You suggested using selective enforcement as a policy. That is so much against the rule of law that it is offensive.
The DEA has most likely been treading lightly on applying this law because they risk having it rules unconstitutional if they go too far; they've already lost a case in court where the court condemned the law as unconstitutionally vague.
(Somehow there was a muddled and sarcastic anti-corporate statement in your posting as well, but that doesn't make up for it.)
Slashdot Mirror
Fraud requires intent. Repeatedly applying incorrect statistical procedures until you get the result you want ("torturing the data") may be fraud, or it may be merely incompetence. In Mann's case, we don't know. I just point out that even if his results had been perfectly correct, it wouldn't exculpate him.
The effects from a century ago by themselves predict very little global warming in the future; based on that evidence alone, climate change simply isn't an issue. Global warming only becomes an issue if you assume the existence of feedback mechanisms, and those are based on recent results and theories, and they haven't stood the test of time yet.
You aren't listening. I agree with Mann's primary conclusion about recent increases in temperature, as does the Royal Society. I disagree with his statistical methods, just like the Royal Society did. What he did wrong is what many scientists get wrong in any field. It's common statistical mistakes. Usually, those things get corrected through a few decades of additional work, but it takes that amount of time.
But as you just admitted yourself (contradicting your earlier statement), AGW "is a very new field", so there simply hasn't been time for people to go through this process. Many papers in AGW probably use incorrect methods, most of them are far more complex than Mann's paper, and many of them contain far more serious errors in their conclusion than Mann's paper.
Fairfax County is one of the most expensive places to live in the country; I wouldn't dream of living there myself. Moving to Lexington would cut her cost of living in half. She'd recoup the cost of moving within a few months from what she saves. You can loan her the money (about $1-2k). Or you can grab a U-Haul and just help her, which is what many kids do for their parents.
If she got nothing, that means she didn't bring anything into the marriage (which she would have gotten in full), and the couple didn't save for retirement during marriage either (which would have been split). So, in different words, she didn't bother saving for retirement and instead spent the money on living a nice life in some swanky area.
Post-divorce is too late to start saving. But if you do, the first thing to do is live extremely frugally. She should have moved out of Fairfax right away after her divorce and really cut costs.
My parents moved in their 70's to save money. I live in a cheap neighborhood in order to be able to save for retirement. I think it's wrong to ask me to take away money from my retirement savings in order to financially support your mother-in-law's lack of retirement planning and expensive choice of where to retire.
And if you want to give her a better retirement, why don't you give her a little extra money out of your own pocket or help her in other ways?
That's debatable, since many of the items used in COLAs are of higher quality than they used to be.
There's a fine line between a safety net and a subsidized retirement plan. $1k/month is actually a pretty good amount to live on in many places. And I think it's reasonable to ask the question of why they didn't prepare more for their own retirement and why their former husbands aren't paying.
Well, you may not believe it but it's true.
The 99'th percentile for household income starts at $394k; that's pretty easy to get for a couple, each making a base salary of $150k plus bonuses. I'd venture a guess that many senior engineers at places like Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft, etc. easily make that kind of money.
Among single filers, you're a 1%-er if you make $194k/year; that's again pretty easy to get for a Silicon Valley software engineer from base salary plus bonuses.
Entrepreneurs generally don't make anywhere near that kind of salary; it would be financially stupid for them to pull money out of their companies to pay themselves a big salary because they'd pay a lot of taxes on it; they just leave the money in their company and let it appreciate. "The rich" do similar things with their money. That's why this whole discussion of taxing the top 1% of income earners in order to "tax the rich" is so stupid.
In Europe, many engineers are paid not all that differently from other professions that are much less demanding and specialized. If they make higher salaries, much of that difference is eaten up by progressive taxation. Socially, many European intellectuals look down their noses at applied disciplines and pride themselves in their inability to comprehend math, physics, and engineering. What motivation do you think people have to acquire highly specialized skills and take on high responsibility if society tells them that their skills and responsibilities aren't valued, either financially or intellectually?
And similar mechanisms are taking hold in the US. Progressives in Silicon Valley have been protesting well-paid software engineers and become downright hostile to technology, Democrats are constantly calling for increasingly higher tax burdens on high income earners, etc. All of those efforts target and discourage successful engineers, who are usually in the top income quintile (and really good ones are 1%-ers, not really a stretch given that their skills easily exceed those of 99% of all Americans).
You want more skilled engineers? Start valuing their contributions, and stop trying to forcibly reduce income inequality.
You can be pretty much certain that the NSA is trying to get its hands on the private data of anybody relevant to their interests and work: cryptographers, big data scientists, other related fields of computer science. This is simply so that they can make sure that they are ahead of what's out there in the public domain and academia.
And in addition, you can also be certain that any administration is going to be using the NSA and other spy agencies to keep track of potential dissidents, critics, and leakers: economists, social scientists, political opponents, political activists, members of the military, etc. And they are going to use that data to warn the administration of political attacks and silence opponents through leaks of unflattering personal information, as well as selective prosecution of actual wrongdoing.
That's not a question of whether this or any other administration is particularly bad or dishonest, it's simply what happens when you give any organization and any government the kind of power that the NSA has given to recent administrations.
Neither. LLVM simply has the benefit of several decades of additional experience in compiler construction.
To Apple, open source is just a means to an end. They badmouth open source when it serves their marketing purposes and use it when it saves them time and money. But their end, their business model, ultimately is hostile to open source. Furthermore, Apple wouldn't exist without open source; they couldn't have built what they are shipping themselves.
As for Apples open source releases, they have been mostly useful to Apple customers, not exactly a big contribution to the world of open source software.
No, open source never meant "source just available to paying customers". "Open" basically means "public".
I assume your convoluted reasoning is something like: "conservatives are wealthy and wealthy people hold a lot of money, so they don't like inflation because it erodes the value of their money". It's not that simple, though, because many assets that wealthy people hold (real estate, shares, etc.) aren't really affected by inflation, so they don't care much.
Inflation mostly affects people who have bought long term debt at fixed interest rates: banks, mortgage lenders, and pension funds. Wealthy people don't buy that stuff because it's not that profitable.
Your point being what exactly?
Yes, I'm familiar with that data. I'm not sure what you're trying to prove though. US debt-to-income ratios are still way above the year 2000 levels, and that "deleveraging" is actually slower than the rate at which the debt was built up.
It is utter hubris to think anybody can "protect the economy from the negatives" of individual borrowing or spending decisions. In fact, all you accomplish with these policies is to hurt the economy, by tricking or forcing people into making decisions that they themselves would have concluded are bad for them, and usually by benefiting rent-seeking corporations. "Protecting the economy" is really just a fig leaf for crony capitalism.
I've got to ask, though: did you actually ever graduate high school? Compound interest is 7th grade high school, even part of Common Core.
http://www.ixl.com/standards/c...
I'm flabbergasted that anybody capable of even turning on a computer fails such basic math.
The discussion was simply about inflation: did prices increase 10% per year as claimed by the original web site. Obviously not, because prices on almost everything have not quadrupled in the last 14 years.
1.1 ^ 14 = 3.79, so approximately a quadrupling.
It's no wonder that with those kinds of stupid beliefs you come up with policies "We need a 30% flat tax on all assholes that makes $500K or more a year, and tax at 50% any stock or trading incomes." The reason other people are doing economically better than you is because you are stupid and uneducated.
The cost of living adjustments are flexible and political, to say the least. In reality, they are updated to higher and higher standards of living over time, which simply could get stopped.
Of course, the best way of getting rid of the unfunded Social Security liabilities is also to inflate them away.
(Ironic how really none of the words "social", "security", "trust", or "fund" actually applies to that fiction.)
That would mean that prices have quadrupled since 2000: are rent, houses, gasoline, food, cell phones, jeans four times as expensive as in 2000? Of course not. Many of those things have actually gotten cheaper.
Inflation and CPI aren't particularly well-defined numbers, so people can legitimately get different answers and use/misuse them for various political purposes. But anybody who claims that they are around ten percent obviously is an economic charlatan.
True. And while US politicians might not give a damn whether the Chinese hate us, that would devalue huge amounts of debt held by US retirees, banks, and small investors, and they do vote.
Printing money is, effectively, a tax on everybody who happens to hold money.
You have a "stimulus" when you think people are not buying enough and saving too much; is that true of Americans? I don't think so.
Deflation and inflation are largely irrelevant; the value of money is just an arbitrary scale. If it adjusts, it adjusts according to economic conditions.
It sucks over there because governments limit economic activity through misguided policies. Both high taxes and other sorts of regulations do that. More government spending would generate a little more economic activity, but not enough to make up for the loss.
Look at Obama's stimulus programs: they failed to come even close to delivering what he promised. Government stimuli don't work and are a waste of money.
Wages have been stagnant because a lot money has been transferred to non-wage benefits. You can't heap more and more requirements on employers and expect wage increases to happen as before. Furthermore, since wages and non-wage benefits are taxed differently, it encourages employers even more to substitute non-wage benefits for wage increases.
Of course, employees get screwed this way: it's better to have the money and be able to determine yourself what to do with it. But it's progressives and "liberals" that are screwing workers this way; the wage stagnation that progressives like to complain about is of their own making.
(A second problem with your analysis is that inflation rate doesn't tell you what people pay. The inflation rate for different income brackets is different depending on what those groups consume.)
I think he's wrong and his policies are misguided. But it doesn't look to me like he said the fictional stories proved that these methods were useful, just that they illustrated how they were useful.
This has nothing on the amount of pork and waste in the farm bill that's making its way through Congress.
Call your representatives and ask them to stop it.
Both parties love wasting tax dollars on useless things on a massive scale. Republicans pay lip service to small government but fail to deliver; Democrats swear and complain about big corporations and bankers but then use legislation for economic stimulation, job creation, and consumer protection to shove even more money in the hands of the groups the claim to hate. Both are "absolutely evil". Pick your poison.
You suggested using selective enforcement as a policy. That is so much against the rule of law that it is offensive.
The DEA has most likely been treading lightly on applying this law because they risk having it rules unconstitutional if they go too far; they've already lost a case in court where the court condemned the law as unconstitutionally vague.
(Somehow there was a muddled and sarcastic anti-corporate statement in your posting as well, but that doesn't make up for it.)