The president is proposing a increase in defense spending of 54 billion dollars. The total annual spending on non-defense research is 69 billion, so you'd have to cut science funding by about 80% to pay for that. And then there are no doubt tax cuts for the wealthy coming too.
The debt ceiling is misnamed. There is no ceiling on incurring debt -- that happens whenever you spend more than you take in. It's a limit on turning that debt into financial instruments to sell to investors. That act doesn't increase debt per se; it merely means we owe money to bond holders rather than short term creditors.
This is a normal treasury function -- even large businesses operate this way. When Proctor and Gamble decides it could use a billion dollars for something, it doesn't always raid the piggy bank (cash reserves) or sell off assets -- although that's an option. It issues a corporate bond. It's absolutely routine.
The US Government has been doing this ever since 1917, all through the glory days of Eisenhower prosperity, and all that time there has been a debt ceiling that nobody except for Congressional and Treasury functionaries have ever heard of. The only reason we know this term now is that (a) the US Constitution (unusually) puts this treasury function in the hands of Congress and (b) Congress has been grotesquely dysfunctional for a decade.
As for what we "need" -- we need to decide on the mix of revenue, spending and borrowing makes sense, not monkey with an arcane implementation mechanisms.
The patent allows you to charge your device from another device... and I'd have sworn you'd need some kind of actual hardware to do something like that.
If I'm not mistaken the issue here is that the University of California is covered under the rules for government agencies, which are stricter than the rules for a private entity. The rules for private entities include a "balancing test" which weighs the costs and resources that entity has. There is no slack for government-run entities.
Arguably there should be a "public good" balancing test for corner cases like this, but the clear intent is that a public school like a high school must provide services like note taking and interpreters to profoundly deaf students -- if they have them. UofC can still offer these videos on campus because it can provide those services to students on campus, but it obviously can't provide them for every deaf or hard-of-hearing person on the Internet.
Excellent taste in watches, by the way. You can't beat the elegance of a simple analog watch, especially from the era before it became stylish to be large and vulgar.
I'm a collector vintage Indian watches, which while not quite of the same quality embody much the same aesthetic and can be had for about $15, including shipping from India.
Well, there's always Warren Buffett, who is pretty much what the rest of them pretend to be. He started his first business in middle school, filed his first income tax return at 14 years old, made his first sale of a business at age 16, for the equivalent of $16,240 in modern dollars. Today he runs a 140 billion dollar company whose headquarters has twenty employees and no conference rooms.
Buffett is by all reports amazing to work for. Being a manager in a company acquired by him has been compared to hitting the lottery. Once he decides you know what you're doing he just lets you do your thing. When the CEO of Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad called Buffett to report that flooding was going to cost the company a half billion dollars, Buffett reportedly responded, "You're not a publicly traded company, so why are you calling me?"
Buffett may be a genius, but part of his success surely is that his genius is unhindered by personal drama. There is immense power to that combination of intellectual spark, ambition, and... agreeableness.
Actually, that's not true. MMR was introduced in 1971, and by now has a much longer safety record than the individuals vaccines it replaces:
Cool. So where are the results of the drug trials comparing the effects and side effects of MMR to a control? You know, like they do with other drugs.
You can do a google scholar literature view for a "systematic review" of controlled experiments, like you would with any other drug. You should confine your attention to high impact factor journals though.
I don't know of any such applications that would be best described as a national security issue.
I certainly can, although I don't know whether they're what the author has in mind. The two applications that come immediately to mind are naval: high precision weather forecasting; and submarine identification from sensor data.
However, after educating myself on this specific topic, the only question I have is, "why pull the individual vaccines from the market if they work?"
Because nearly all parents are going to opt to vaccinate for measles, mumps AND rubella, and combining them means you give your kid two doses of vaccine instead of six.
Why not leave them as an option for parents who prefer that approach?
Because the market of parents who'd prefer to give their kids six vaccine doses rather than two is too small to profitably serve.
They took away the proven safe alternatives that had worked for decades.
Actually, that's not true. MMR was introduced in 1971, and by now has a much longer safety record than the individuals vaccines it replaces: Attenuvax (Measles, 1961), Mumpsvax (1967), and Meruvax (Rubella, 1969).
In my experience it's not necessarily uneducated parents. Uneducated parents, if they have access to a pediatrician, are apt to follow his or her advice. It's educated parents who question, and the miseducated ones question and come up with bad answers.
What we are looking at in the anti-vaxxer movement is Emersonian self-reliance run amok. We've succeeded in teaching a generation not to put blind trust in authority figures, but without an interest in STEM for its own sake and with limited critical thinking skills, they have no choice but to turn to alternative authorities, individuals who embody everything that should be feared in an authority: deviousness, venality and ruthlessness.
I dunno. They do a Three Musketeers for every new generation, and that's always in the year 1625. Remaking Back to the Future every thirty years or so actually seems like a pretty good idea, because you can slide the window forward and have a whole fresh set of gags.
I've always been curious about this. It's a dumb thing to do, and makes the person look foolish, but beyond that why is this actually a crime in some places?
Well first of all, you can't take it for granted that it looks foolish. What determines whether something looks foolish isn't evidence, it is how many other people seem to think it's reasonable. And that perception is easily manufactured through the techniques of public relations.
As for laws against Holocaust denial, they are extremely rare and mostly confined to a few places with a history of complicity in the Holocaust. Personally, I don't think such laws do any good, but that doesn't mean that Holocaust denial is something to be taken lightly.
In the 1990s only about 2% of Americans were Holocaust deniers. So far as I know nobody has repeated that particular survey, but worldwide we know that (a) younger people and (b) people who get their news from social media are much more likely to believe holocaust denial. There also has been a dramatic and measurable increase in coverage of denialist conpsiracy theories in the mainstream media, which is normalizing denialism for many.
This suggests that Holocaust Denialism is poised to take off in a big way, as victims and liberators who witnessed the Holocaust story die off, and conspiracy theories about it begin to sound less crazy.
Just ignore the morons and let them play in their little pretend world.
The world would be an easier place if that were safe to do. But it's not. Stupidity isn't safe to ignore, it has consequences.
The relevant issue here isn't age, it's one of the "big five" personality traits: openness to new experiences.
Contrary to intuition, openness to new experience remains fairly consistent over a person's lifespan, only gradually declining starting in your 60s. The reason for this discrepancy is that when you are young, new experiences are mandatory. If you are a young person low on the seeking novelty scale you still have to go out and find your first job. But if you're the kind of young person who would eat a mealworm the docent at the insect museum offers you just to see what it's like, you'll still be doing stuff like that in your 60s.
Well... sure. I can call myself dictator of the world but if nobody else agrees with me it doesn't matter. The question is how do dictators get people to agree to give them power. And over years of watching them and reading about them, my conclusion is bullshit.
Bullshit is a lie that isn't for believing; it's for going along with. A lot of diplomacy is a kind of constructive bullshit.
Now it should be clear that all politicians bullshit. The ones who do it the least are contemptuously dismissed as "professorial" or "technocratic". Bullshit is an essential part of political discourse: we want a politician to inspire us, which is just another way of saying we want him to bullshit us. Classic example:
We choose to go to the Moon! We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard...
Taken on its own, this could be the finest piece of political bullshit ever uttered. But taken in context, Kennedy is making a coherent and rational point: liberal democracies must seize control of progress and direct it toward peaceful ends, that this will harness the ambition and competitive instincts of people and put them to constructive use.
And that's the difference between dictatorial bullshit and leadership bullshit: whether or not context matters. Dictators freely contradict themselves and their followers don't mind because all that matters is how the bullshit makes them feel in the moment. One of the most compelling historical figures for me is Joseph Goebbels, who was probably the most intelligent and certainly most educated member of the Nazi regime. He was also a man consumed by bullshit, even though it was the very bullshit he as propaganda minister was in charge of manufacturing. He had a sophisticated understanding of how bullshit works.
This suggests to me that what people need is training, not in critical thinking but critical feeling. It's not enough to be able not to be fooled; you have to want not to be fooled. You have to be able to reject something that makes you feel good because it is false.
Yes. His vision care should be covered by his insurance which in turn should be federally subsidized if he doesn't have enough income -- unless his income is very low, he's too young for Medicare and he lives in a state that has refused Medicaid expansion. The issue presumably isn't that he doesn't have coverage, it's that he has to pay for it.
Oh, they always did. You just know about it now, but you should have suspected it all along.
Unless, of course, the leak is a plant, which you always have to consider the possibility of. If there's going to be leaks, why not engineer one that claims you can't, say read encrypted WhatsApp messages, when you actually can. While it's near impossible to break encryption algorithms, implementations are often if not usually significantly weaker than their algorithms are on paper.
If they're going to hold data-containing devices as evidence for up to a year, they'd better back them up. And once they have a disk image backup, there's no reason to hold onto the actual device, except as economic leverage on the suspect.
Well, speaking as a Democrat and former small business owner, it certainly isn't "bullshit". Expectations for the future definitely are one factor in determining whether you bring additional people on. It's an important factor; an employee who's not bringing in money is like a hole in the bottom of your fiscal ship.
But nobody really puts too much faith predictions of the future, particularly the distant future. You definitely are thinking about as much of the future as you can reasonably predict, e.g. at least a year or so out. Maybe two or three years depending on your business plans and the kinds of contracts you have in the pipeline. That determines whether you work your people overtime, hire contractors, or bring on new employees. A big reason why the stimulus package didn't help employment sooner was Republican insistence on "shovel ready" projects (which also in my experience leads to waste as agencies have piles of cash to dispense in a hurry, which means it gets shoveled into the maws of politically connected contractors).
What is wishful thinking is attributing confidence in the economy a year or two out to Trump. The fact is that we've had economic growth every quarter except I think maybe two for the last seven years. Now even if you thought Trump was going to destroy the economy, it's unlikely he'll do it in the next year, before his policies and budgets really take hold. And you can probably count on another year of momentum.
Now that said, while the recovery has been robust, it has been uneven. The post recession job rebound in particular has been confined to urban and metro areas; rural areas and small towns (particular mill-type towns centered around single businesses) have seen none of that, and the labor market participation rates have plummeted there. That's why these people don't believe there's been a recovery. For them there hasn't been.
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Well, I guess the Democrats are the party of science in your view. What does that make Republicans?
The president is proposing a increase in defense spending of 54 billion dollars. The total annual spending on non-defense research is 69 billion, so you'd have to cut science funding by about 80% to pay for that. And then there are no doubt tax cuts for the wealthy coming too.
The debt ceiling is misnamed. There is no ceiling on incurring debt -- that happens whenever you spend more than you take in. It's a limit on turning that debt into financial instruments to sell to investors. That act doesn't increase debt per se; it merely means we owe money to bond holders rather than short term creditors.
This is a normal treasury function -- even large businesses operate this way. When Proctor and Gamble decides it could use a billion dollars for something, it doesn't always raid the piggy bank (cash reserves) or sell off assets -- although that's an option. It issues a corporate bond. It's absolutely routine.
The US Government has been doing this ever since 1917, all through the glory days of Eisenhower prosperity, and all that time there has been a debt ceiling that nobody except for Congressional and Treasury functionaries have ever heard of. The only reason we know this term now is that (a) the US Constitution (unusually) puts this treasury function in the hands of Congress and (b) Congress has been grotesquely dysfunctional for a decade.
As for what we "need" -- we need to decide on the mix of revenue, spending and borrowing makes sense, not monkey with an arcane implementation mechanisms.
The patent allows you to charge your device from another device... and I'd have sworn you'd need some kind of actual hardware to do something like that.
If I'm not mistaken the issue here is that the University of California is covered under the rules for government agencies, which are stricter than the rules for a private entity. The rules for private entities include a "balancing test" which weighs the costs and resources that entity has. There is no slack for government-run entities.
Arguably there should be a "public good" balancing test for corner cases like this, but the clear intent is that a public school like a high school must provide services like note taking and interpreters to profoundly deaf students -- if they have them. UofC can still offer these videos on campus because it can provide those services to students on campus, but it obviously can't provide them for every deaf or hard-of-hearing person on the Internet.
you sound like a freak also.
When I was a teenager I got my ham radio operator license. So yeah.
Excellent taste in watches, by the way. You can't beat the elegance of a simple analog watch, especially from the era before it became stylish to be large and vulgar.
I'm a collector vintage Indian watches, which while not quite of the same quality embody much the same aesthetic and can be had for about $15, including shipping from India.
He's a boy who likes make-up. BFD. Sure it's not normal but normal is overrated.
Well, there's always Warren Buffett, who is pretty much what the rest of them pretend to be. He started his first business in middle school, filed his first income tax return at 14 years old, made his first sale of a business at age 16, for the equivalent of $16,240 in modern dollars. Today he runs a 140 billion dollar company whose headquarters has twenty employees and no conference rooms.
Buffett is by all reports amazing to work for. Being a manager in a company acquired by him has been compared to hitting the lottery. Once he decides you know what you're doing he just lets you do your thing. When the CEO of Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad called Buffett to report that flooding was going to cost the company a half billion dollars, Buffett reportedly responded, "You're not a publicly traded company, so why are you calling me?"
Buffett may be a genius, but part of his success surely is that his genius is unhindered by personal drama. There is immense power to that combination of intellectual spark, ambition, and ... agreeableness.
Actually, that's not true. MMR was introduced in 1971, and by now has a much longer safety record than the individuals vaccines it replaces:
Cool. So where are the results of the drug trials comparing the effects and side effects of MMR to a control? You know, like they do with other drugs.
You can do a google scholar literature view for a "systematic review" of controlled experiments, like you would with any other drug. You should confine your attention to high impact factor journals though.
I don't know of any such applications that would be best described as a national security issue.
I certainly can, although I don't know whether they're what the author has in mind. The two applications that come immediately to mind are naval: high precision weather forecasting; and submarine identification from sensor data.
The big news is that everybody may miss out on the next industrial revolution.
That's often the case, but not always. In some applications you have a deadline -- or a deadline/precision trade off (e.g. weather prediction).
However, after educating myself on this specific topic, the only question I have is, "why pull the individual vaccines from the market if they work?"
Because nearly all parents are going to opt to vaccinate for measles, mumps AND rubella, and combining them means you give your kid two doses of vaccine instead of six.
Why not leave them as an option for parents who prefer that approach?
Because the market of parents who'd prefer to give their kids six vaccine doses rather than two is too small to profitably serve.
They took away the proven safe alternatives that had worked for decades.
Actually, that's not true. MMR was introduced in 1971, and by now has a much longer safety record than the individuals vaccines it replaces: Attenuvax (Measles, 1961), Mumpsvax (1967), and Meruvax (Rubella, 1969).
In my experience it's not necessarily uneducated parents. Uneducated parents, if they have access to a pediatrician, are apt to follow his or her advice. It's educated parents who question, and the miseducated ones question and come up with bad answers.
What we are looking at in the anti-vaxxer movement is Emersonian self-reliance run amok. We've succeeded in teaching a generation not to put blind trust in authority figures, but without an interest in STEM for its own sake and with limited critical thinking skills, they have no choice but to turn to alternative authorities, individuals who embody everything that should be feared in an authority: deviousness, venality and ruthlessness.
I dunno. They do a Three Musketeers for every new generation, and that's always in the year 1625. Remaking Back to the Future every thirty years or so actually seems like a pretty good idea, because you can slide the window forward and have a whole fresh set of gags.
I've always been curious about this. It's a dumb thing to do, and makes the person look foolish, but beyond that why is this actually a crime in some places?
Well first of all, you can't take it for granted that it looks foolish. What determines whether something looks foolish isn't evidence, it is how many other people seem to think it's reasonable. And that perception is easily manufactured through the techniques of public relations.
As for laws against Holocaust denial, they are extremely rare and mostly confined to a few places with a history of complicity in the Holocaust. Personally, I don't think such laws do any good, but that doesn't mean that Holocaust denial is something to be taken lightly.
In the 1990s only about 2% of Americans were Holocaust deniers. So far as I know nobody has repeated that particular survey, but worldwide we know that (a) younger people and (b) people who get their news from social media are much more likely to believe holocaust denial. There also has been a dramatic and measurable increase in coverage of denialist conpsiracy theories in the mainstream media, which is normalizing denialism for many.
This suggests that Holocaust Denialism is poised to take off in a big way, as victims and liberators who witnessed the Holocaust story die off, and conspiracy theories about it begin to sound less crazy.
Just ignore the morons and let them play in their little pretend world.
The world would be an easier place if that were safe to do. But it's not. Stupidity isn't safe to ignore, it has consequences.
The relevant issue here isn't age, it's one of the "big five" personality traits: openness to new experiences.
Contrary to intuition, openness to new experience remains fairly consistent over a person's lifespan, only gradually declining starting in your 60s. The reason for this discrepancy is that when you are young, new experiences are mandatory. If you are a young person low on the seeking novelty scale you still have to go out and find your first job. But if you're the kind of young person who would eat a mealworm the docent at the insect museum offers you just to see what it's like, you'll still be doing stuff like that in your 60s.
Well... sure. I can call myself dictator of the world but if nobody else agrees with me it doesn't matter. The question is how do dictators get people to agree to give them power. And over years of watching them and reading about them, my conclusion is bullshit.
Bullshit is a lie that isn't for believing; it's for going along with. A lot of diplomacy is a kind of constructive bullshit.
Now it should be clear that all politicians bullshit. The ones who do it the least are contemptuously dismissed as "professorial" or "technocratic". Bullshit is an essential part of political discourse: we want a politician to inspire us, which is just another way of saying we want him to bullshit us. Classic example:
We choose to go to the Moon! We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard...
Taken on its own, this could be the finest piece of political bullshit ever uttered. But taken in context, Kennedy is making a coherent and rational point: liberal democracies must seize control of progress and direct it toward peaceful ends, that this will harness the ambition and competitive instincts of people and put them to constructive use.
And that's the difference between dictatorial bullshit and leadership bullshit: whether or not context matters. Dictators freely contradict themselves and their followers don't mind because all that matters is how the bullshit makes them feel in the moment. One of the most compelling historical figures for me is Joseph Goebbels, who was probably the most intelligent and certainly most educated member of the Nazi regime. He was also a man consumed by bullshit, even though it was the very bullshit he as propaganda minister was in charge of manufacturing. He had a sophisticated understanding of how bullshit works.
This suggests to me that what people need is training, not in critical thinking but critical feeling. It's not enough to be able not to be fooled; you have to want not to be fooled. You have to be able to reject something that makes you feel good because it is false.
If outstanding accomplishment in exploration makes someone worth remembering, then more people should be familiar with the name Ahman Ibn Majid.
Wasn't the ACA supposed to fix this?
Yes. His vision care should be covered by his insurance which in turn should be federally subsidized if he doesn't have enough income -- unless his income is very low, he's too young for Medicare and he lives in a state that has refused Medicaid expansion. The issue presumably isn't that he doesn't have coverage, it's that he has to pay for it.
Oh, they always did. You just know about it now, but you should have suspected it all along.
Unless, of course, the leak is a plant, which you always have to consider the possibility of. If there's going to be leaks, why not engineer one that claims you can't, say read encrypted WhatsApp messages, when you actually can. While it's near impossible to break encryption algorithms, implementations are often if not usually significantly weaker than their algorithms are on paper.
Actually, you know who needs this?
The cops.
If they're going to hold data-containing devices as evidence for up to a year, they'd better back them up. And once they have a disk image backup, there's no reason to hold onto the actual device, except as economic leverage on the suspect.
Well, speaking as a Democrat and former small business owner, it certainly isn't "bullshit". Expectations for the future definitely are one factor in determining whether you bring additional people on. It's an important factor; an employee who's not bringing in money is like a hole in the bottom of your fiscal ship.
But nobody really puts too much faith predictions of the future, particularly the distant future. You definitely are thinking about as much of the future as you can reasonably predict, e.g. at least a year or so out. Maybe two or three years depending on your business plans and the kinds of contracts you have in the pipeline. That determines whether you work your people overtime, hire contractors, or bring on new employees. A big reason why the stimulus package didn't help employment sooner was Republican insistence on "shovel ready" projects (which also in my experience leads to waste as agencies have piles of cash to dispense in a hurry, which means it gets shoveled into the maws of politically connected contractors).
What is wishful thinking is attributing confidence in the economy a year or two out to Trump. The fact is that we've had economic growth every quarter except I think maybe two for the last seven years. Now even if you thought Trump was going to destroy the economy, it's unlikely he'll do it in the next year, before his policies and budgets really take hold. And you can probably count on another year of momentum.
Now that said, while the recovery has been robust, it has been uneven. The post recession job rebound in particular has been confined to urban and metro areas; rural areas and small towns (particular mill-type towns centered around single businesses) have seen none of that, and the labor market participation rates have plummeted there. That's why these people don't believe there's been a recovery. For them there hasn't been.
Just an old guy who's spent years watching people make themselves miserable by trying to make themselves happy.