I have no problem with my belief system, which is evidence-based and falsifiable. I do have to live with people who are intellectual sheep but who've been deluded into believing they're free-thinkers.
Saying that is so doesn't make it so. There's overwhelming empirical evidence that the Earth has been warming since middle of the twentieth century, particularly from around 1970 onward. This is shown both in the surface instrumental record and in the satellite record.
Let me give a shout out to the London's James Smith & Sons cane shop. A hundred pounds will buy you an umbrella (made in the basement on site) that will be passed down to your distant descendants. When I went there 25 years ago they were still selling sword sticks. I purchased folding model for myself that unfurled to near golf-umbrella proportions. And for the tremendous sum of £140 (which would be £250 today) I bought my wife a magnificent umbrella which she forgot on the subway the first time she used it.
It's worth a visit just to browse. Plus that's the nearest thing to visiting Olivander's Wand Shop that you can do for real.
Sometimes I think that the worst thing that happened to America was the moon landing. Ever since then people have taken our technological leadership for granted, as if it were a natural and immutable state of affairs.
Well, I don't think anyone thinks many non-Chinese speaking Americans are going to move there. I think this is targeted at the top tier of immigrant talent, particularly people who may have come from China to the US for school and stayed. For them the equation is more complicated than the one you present, particularly if they feel unsafe, or even unwelcome in the US.
Just to put some perspective on this, as I write this there are 328,547 current graduate students in the US from China. Ten years ago nearly all of these people would have remained in the US -- and these are valuable people to have. Today far fewer do because it's become harder to get a green card, and opportunities.
Likewise there are 166K Indian graduate students in the US, many of whom China would like to lure away when they graduate. It would be better for us that they stay here, but China would very much like to obtain the services of these bright young people with shiny new graduate degrees from American universities.
I'm not talking about the cheap contract labor your IT consultant uses to run your Exchange server; I'm talking about the intellectual elites who create technologies, companies, and jobs. China may be a police state, but that doesn't make them stupid; they value these people. America... not so much. In fact there are places in this country where being an educated white American makes you the object of suspicion.
The great virtue of Democracy is not in ensuring good government, it's in getting rid of bad governments.
The fact that Congress is so reviled yet stable indicates we're no longer a functioning democracy. We're a plutocracy, where elections are determined by overwhelming advantages in fundraising.
Smart people have their own, unique brand of folly. It's rooted in arrogance, but it's just as dysfunctional as folly rooted in stupidity. Perhaps more so.
US kids don't need more computer science, US companies are already (still) offshoring tech jobs as fast as they can.
Well, it's not so simple as that. Let me illustrate.
The average salary of a software engineer in San Jose is $110,000. The average salary for a software engineer in Omaha NE is $77,629/year. So why aren't software companies setting up shop in Omaha? Possibly, they should. But the size of the talent pool around San Jose is immensely larger, making it more likely you can find exactly what you need if you're an employer. The market says that's worth paying a 42% salary premium.
Software is almost unique in its ability for workers to create the need for even more workers. If you are producing washing machines, the demand curve for washing machines doesn't shift because you make more of them. But the demand for software as a whole can. Software isn't like washing machines, because it isn't just one thing that addresses a single need. It's many things, some of which create new needs. The 130,000 people working for Oracle create many times that number of tech jobs -- for good and bad reasons. Who knows how many jobs the 700 people working for Canonical create, both users, app developers, and even developers of derivative distros.
I happen to agree that US kids don't need computer science, but for different reasons. You can't really learn much computer science until you've had at least high school math, so what they're really talking about is vocational training for programmers. That's an utter waste of time. Employers want at least *some* college, if not a degree, and if you're talking about middle school kids the training you give them is likely to be obsolete by the time they enter the workforce.
Which doesn't mean I think teaching kids to program in Python or (depending on their age) Logo isn't a good idea. A little programming is a useful skill across many professions. But there are only so many class hours in a child's education, and you have to look very sharply for anything resembling diminishing returns. In my state Kindergartners are being assigned homework, believe it or not, because of the curriculum pressure in higher grades. Kindergarten is covering material that used to be covered in first grade, and day care providers (even small operations run out of the provider's home) are expected to take early childhood education classes and do what used to be done in kindergarten.
There's just no room to put more stuff in unless it's extremely useful.
If you're talking about things that happen with p < 10^-5 you can can't test to any kind of reasonable confidence level. Engineers have to use the collective experience of the profession as a whole as a guide, in addition to actual testing.
Since phone design is interdisciplinary -- involving marketing, industrial design and engineering -- engineers will just have to push back when the designers and marketers try to take that half millimeter away. This case will be a touchstone for future generations of EEs, the way the Tacoma Narrows Bridge is for civil engineers and Therac-25 is for software engineers.
I'm pretty sure I'd see features like independently powered exit row lighting, emergency exits, inflatable slides/rafts, life vests etc.
In design and engineering you can't make things failure-proof, but you can plan for certain failure-modes. Yeah, if you lose a wing at 10,000 feet or do a nose dive at Mach 2 into the ground nobody is going to survive. But there is plenty of design that goes into an airplane that is aimed at very rare situations like the loss of all engines.
The Abelson and Sussman textbook, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, uses LISP (actually Scheme). There are quite a few LISP fanatics who passionately feel it is still the best programming language made, citing such reasons as the simplicity of writing an interpreter for it. However, that textbook is pretty difficult. The authors didn't appreciate how hard recursion can be for many students to understand, and LISP and functional programming in general uses recursion so heavily it's the proverbial hammer for every nail of a programming problem.
Well, that's what you get when you beta test your textbook with MIT students. But that said, CLRS is no picnic for people who aren't very good at math, either.
True. And the cost/arrest concept is broken too. Would the arrests have been made anyway? Could they have been made another way?
When people have a tool they use it, whether it is the use-case that was supposed to justify the purchase -- and that can be a good thing (because the widget is earning its keep) or a bad thing (using a tool that's overkill, to expensive to operate, or counterproductive). The real question is what did they specifically buy this for? If the cost justification was that it was going to allow them to make x arrests per year, it's probably a failure. If the cost justification is some other kind of scenario that doesn't necessarily happen every year (e.g. the Beltway Sniper), then the question is whether they're using this thing reasonably.
If you're in favour of this then you're a fascist or you're an idiot.
Unfortunately having read history books myself I'm rather unconvinced that being in favor it is the critical question. I think the critical question is this: would you go along with it?
Which precisely describes the opposite of Paris, Mexico City, Madrid and Athens.
Nobody is saying you ought to be forced to take the streetcar from Mayberry to Petticoat Junction. From Monmarte to the Bastile -- transit makes more sense than driving, especially if you factor in time for parking.
It's just numbers on a spreadsheet. The Bank of Russia is Russia's central bank and there is literally no amount of money you can steal from a central bank that will harm it. That's because they're the people who issue the fiat in "fiat currency".
The harm is to the economy as a whole, in the form of inflation. In this case we're talking about the release of thirty one million spurious extra bucks into a two trillion dollar economy. Just a tiny bit of inflation, diluted to homeopathic concentrations and applied to everyone who uses rubles.
Of course the bank has to pursue this because it undermines confidence in the system, but this is as close to a victimless crime as any illegal way of obtaining thirty-one million dollars can be.
I'm all for things that go boom. I love weird, clever little gadgets. I admire a clever and subtle subversion of a system, even when I don't condone its use.
But geez; this thing is not exactly elegant. It uses a fairly basic circuit to exploit the completely unsurprising fact that the interface isn't designed to handle high voltages.
Oh, there's plenty of names left. How about "Coulumb"; and following the Tesla/Nikola pattern, I actually think "Charles-Augustin" would be a pretty good name for a luxury vehicle marque.
Attempting to simplify the crises in Syria by pointing at climate change seriously under states all other factors. Hell, one of your own links (the usda one) clearly shows that Syria has been able to meet its needs IF allowed via imports
The USDA link shows no such thing; it shows Syria eating up its reserves as it fails to import enough wheat to make up the shortfall. Yes, Assad underwrote the price of bread, but there wasn't enough subsidized bread to meet demand, forcing people to buy non-subsidized bread which increased in price six-fold. The net bread expenditure went up by 20% in a country where many people spend half their income on food.
I'm not a reductionist; situations like this have multiple important factors. The Assad/Islamist thing had been simmering for decades -- generations really. Had that situation been different, the climate shock might not have destabilized the country. In point of fact bread prices were an issue throughout the Middle East and a major factor in the Arab Spring. Syria was arguably better positioned than most other Arab countries, but the stress of having 5% of your population displaced on top of the deep and old fault lines broke the country apart.
This is precisely how climate shock is going to work. It won't be like the proverbial frog in a pot of boiling water; it'll be formerly rare occurrences happening more frequently and stressing vulnerable populations. Take sea level rise; cities won't drown slpowly, but what was once a hundred year flood will become twenty year flood. That will stress coastal cities, and the results depend on how stable and wealthy a particular city is.
For example were sea level to rise almost a meter by 2100 (as is now within the scope of mainstream positions), the very wealthy coastal city I live in would go the Venice route and build a tidal barrier, which would conservatively cost at least ten billion dollars. Chittagong Bengladesh, however, will be screwed. My city has twice the GDP of Bengladesh as a whole even though it has 3% of the population.
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The difference is my belief is falsifiable. So in that respect I think you're belief system resembles faith more than than mine.
I have no problem with my belief system, which is evidence-based and falsifiable. I do have to live with people who are intellectual sheep but who've been deluded into believing they're free-thinkers.
Saying that is so doesn't make it so. There's overwhelming empirical evidence that the Earth has been warming since middle of the twentieth century, particularly from around 1970 onward. This is shown both in the surface instrumental record and in the satellite record.
Skepticism is doubt.
Unqualified disbelief is just another kind of orthodoxy.
Let me give a shout out to the London's James Smith & Sons cane shop. A hundred pounds will buy you an umbrella (made in the basement on site) that will be passed down to your distant descendants. When I went there 25 years ago they were still selling sword sticks. I purchased folding model for myself that unfurled to near golf-umbrella proportions. And for the tremendous sum of £140 (which would be £250 today) I bought my wife a magnificent umbrella which she forgot on the subway the first time she used it.
It's worth a visit just to browse. Plus that's the nearest thing to visiting Olivander's Wand Shop that you can do for real.
Sometimes I think that the worst thing that happened to America was the moon landing. Ever since then people have taken our technological leadership for granted, as if it were a natural and immutable state of affairs.
Well, I don't think anyone thinks many non-Chinese speaking Americans are going to move there. I think this is targeted at the top tier of immigrant talent, particularly people who may have come from China to the US for school and stayed. For them the equation is more complicated than the one you present, particularly if they feel unsafe, or even unwelcome in the US.
Just to put some perspective on this, as I write this there are 328,547 current graduate students in the US from China. Ten years ago nearly all of these people would have remained in the US -- and these are valuable people to have. Today far fewer do because it's become harder to get a green card, and opportunities.
Likewise there are 166K Indian graduate students in the US, many of whom China would like to lure away when they graduate. It would be better for us that they stay here, but China would very much like to obtain the services of these bright young people with shiny new graduate degrees from American universities.
I'm not talking about the cheap contract labor your IT consultant uses to run your Exchange server; I'm talking about the intellectual elites who create technologies, companies, and jobs. China may be a police state, but that doesn't make them stupid; they value these people. America... not so much. In fact there are places in this country where being an educated white American makes you the object of suspicion.
The great virtue of Democracy is not in ensuring good government, it's in getting rid of bad governments.
The fact that Congress is so reviled yet stable indicates we're no longer a functioning democracy. We're a plutocracy, where elections are determined by overwhelming advantages in fundraising.
Oh, he's bright enough. He's just a fool.
Smart people have their own, unique brand of folly. It's rooted in arrogance, but it's just as dysfunctional as folly rooted in stupidity. Perhaps more so.
US kids don't need more computer science, US companies are already (still) offshoring tech jobs as fast as they can.
Well, it's not so simple as that. Let me illustrate.
The average salary of a software engineer in San Jose is $110,000. The average salary for a software engineer in Omaha NE is $77,629/year. So why aren't software companies setting up shop in Omaha? Possibly, they should. But the size of the talent pool around San Jose is immensely larger, making it more likely you can find exactly what you need if you're an employer. The market says that's worth paying a 42% salary premium.
Software is almost unique in its ability for workers to create the need for even more workers. If you are producing washing machines, the demand curve for washing machines doesn't shift because you make more of them. But the demand for software as a whole can. Software isn't like washing machines, because it isn't just one thing that addresses a single need. It's many things, some of which create new needs. The 130,000 people working for Oracle create many times that number of tech jobs -- for good and bad reasons. Who knows how many jobs the 700 people working for Canonical create, both users, app developers, and even developers of derivative distros.
I happen to agree that US kids don't need computer science, but for different reasons. You can't really learn much computer science until you've had at least high school math, so what they're really talking about is vocational training for programmers. That's an utter waste of time. Employers want at least *some* college, if not a degree, and if you're talking about middle school kids the training you give them is likely to be obsolete by the time they enter the workforce.
Which doesn't mean I think teaching kids to program in Python or (depending on their age) Logo isn't a good idea. A little programming is a useful skill across many professions. But there are only so many class hours in a child's education, and you have to look very sharply for anything resembling diminishing returns. In my state Kindergartners are being assigned homework, believe it or not, because of the curriculum pressure in higher grades. Kindergarten is covering material that used to be covered in first grade, and day care providers (even small operations run out of the provider's home) are expected to take early childhood education classes and do what used to be done in kindergarten.
There's just no room to put more stuff in unless it's extremely useful.
If you're talking about things that happen with p < 10^-5 you can can't test to any kind of reasonable confidence level. Engineers have to use the collective experience of the profession as a whole as a guide, in addition to actual testing.
Since phone design is interdisciplinary -- involving marketing, industrial design and engineering -- engineers will just have to push back when the designers and marketers try to take that half millimeter away. This case will be a touchstone for future generations of EEs, the way the Tacoma Narrows Bridge is for civil engineers and Therac-25 is for software engineers.
I'm pretty sure I'd see features like independently powered exit row lighting, emergency exits, inflatable slides/rafts, life vests etc.
In design and engineering you can't make things failure-proof, but you can plan for certain failure-modes. Yeah, if you lose a wing at 10,000 feet or do a nose dive at Mach 2 into the ground nobody is going to survive. But there is plenty of design that goes into an airplane that is aimed at very rare situations like the loss of all engines.
The Abelson and Sussman textbook, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, uses LISP (actually Scheme). There are quite a few LISP fanatics who passionately feel it is still the best programming language made, citing such reasons as the simplicity of writing an interpreter for it. However, that textbook is pretty difficult. The authors didn't appreciate how hard recursion can be for many students to understand, and LISP and functional programming in general uses recursion so heavily it's the proverbial hammer for every nail of a programming problem.
Well, that's what you get when you beta test your textbook with MIT students. But that said, CLRS is no picnic for people who aren't very good at math, either.
Yes, but it would certainly be irresponsible to design airplanes as if they never crashed.
And of course voters in LA don't count.
True. And the cost/arrest concept is broken too. Would the arrests have been made anyway? Could they have been made another way?
When people have a tool they use it, whether it is the use-case that was supposed to justify the purchase -- and that can be a good thing (because the widget is earning its keep) or a bad thing (using a tool that's overkill, to expensive to operate, or counterproductive). The real question is what did they specifically buy this for? If the cost justification was that it was going to allow them to make x arrests per year, it's probably a failure. If the cost justification is some other kind of scenario that doesn't necessarily happen every year (e.g. the Beltway Sniper), then the question is whether they're using this thing reasonably.
Yes, but the people inside them still have to make the choice to acquiesce to immorality.
Working for a corporation doesn't make you a robot.
If you're in favour of this then you're a fascist or you're an idiot.
Unfortunately having read history books myself I'm rather unconvinced that being in favor it is the critical question. I think the critical question is this: would you go along with it?
That is still hypothetical, you still have no idea what the official requirements would be.
Sure you do. It would require Muslims to be registered and tracked.
I assume that thirty one million dollars in a two-trillion dollar economy won't be noticed by anyone -- except, obviously, the people enjoying it.
Which precisely describes the opposite of Paris, Mexico City, Madrid and Athens.
Nobody is saying you ought to be forced to take the streetcar from Mayberry to Petticoat Junction. From Monmarte to the Bastile -- transit makes more sense than driving, especially if you factor in time for parking.
It's just numbers on a spreadsheet. The Bank of Russia is Russia's central bank and there is literally no amount of money you can steal from a central bank that will harm it. That's because they're the people who issue the fiat in "fiat currency".
The harm is to the economy as a whole, in the form of inflation. In this case we're talking about the release of thirty one million spurious extra bucks into a two trillion dollar economy. Just a tiny bit of inflation, diluted to homeopathic concentrations and applied to everyone who uses rubles.
Of course the bank has to pursue this because it undermines confidence in the system, but this is as close to a victimless crime as any illegal way of obtaining thirty-one million dollars can be.
I'm all for things that go boom. I love weird, clever little gadgets. I admire a clever and subtle subversion of a system, even when I don't condone its use.
But geez; this thing is not exactly elegant. It uses a fairly basic circuit to exploit the completely unsurprising fact that the interface isn't designed to handle high voltages.
Oh, there's plenty of names left. How about "Coulumb"; and following the Tesla/Nikola pattern, I actually think "Charles-Augustin" would be a pretty good name for a luxury vehicle marque.
Attempting to simplify the crises in Syria by pointing at climate change seriously under states all other factors. Hell, one of your own links (the usda one) clearly shows that Syria has been able to meet its needs IF allowed via imports
The USDA link shows no such thing; it shows Syria eating up its reserves as it fails to import enough wheat to make up the shortfall. Yes, Assad underwrote the price of bread, but there wasn't enough subsidized bread to meet demand, forcing people to buy non-subsidized bread which increased in price six-fold. The net bread expenditure went up by 20% in a country where many people spend half their income on food.
I'm not a reductionist; situations like this have multiple important factors. The Assad/Islamist thing had been simmering for decades -- generations really. Had that situation been different, the climate shock might not have destabilized the country. In point of fact bread prices were an issue throughout the Middle East and a major factor in the Arab Spring. Syria was arguably better positioned than most other Arab countries, but the stress of having 5% of your population displaced on top of the deep and old fault lines broke the country apart.
This is precisely how climate shock is going to work. It won't be like the proverbial frog in a pot of boiling water; it'll be formerly rare occurrences happening more frequently and stressing vulnerable populations. Take sea level rise; cities won't drown slpowly, but what was once a hundred year flood will become twenty year flood. That will stress coastal cities, and the results depend on how stable and wealthy a particular city is.
For example were sea level to rise almost a meter by 2100 (as is now within the scope of mainstream positions), the very wealthy coastal city I live in would go the Venice route and build a tidal barrier, which would conservatively cost at least ten billion dollars. Chittagong Bengladesh, however, will be screwed. My city has twice the GDP of Bengladesh as a whole even though it has 3% of the population.