Well, I don't disagree that there are false narratives all around, which is why I often find myself in the role of wet blanket among my fellow left-wingers. The truth is bad enough.
But if you only see the falsehoods perpetrated against *your* side, then it's a fair bet that the falsehoods perpetrated *by your side are doing their job.
The key element of hate speech is threat. Consider the difference between defacing someone's wall with your graffiti tag and defacing it with a swastika when the owner of that wall is Jew. They are not the same crime because the intent is different.
So in this case people may claim that it is "hate speech" that is inciting the ban, but more likely it is merely hateful speech, which is not illegal. It is not illegal to say you hate blacks. It is illegal to burn crosses on their lawn. It is certainly not illegal to express hateful opinions of Muslims, otherwise we'd have jails overflowing.
All of this is moot because we're talking about a private company that has it's own reasons. So really what you should be talking about is whether hateful speech should enjoy legal protection from private discrimination, like religious opinion does.
Historically, successful boycotts are economically unsuccessful. That is to say they don't force companies to comply because profits go down. Companies cave because the people who run them don't want to be associated with the target of the boycott.
One South African businessman remarked to me shortly after Apartheid was lifted that suddenly it was OK, maybe even cool to be South African. It was a tremendous relief not to have to have a defense ready whenever anyone asked him where he was from.
So by all means target Slate and HuffPo. But remember that what matters in a boycott is shame. If you can convince people it's more shameful to be associated with Slate than it is with Breitbart, you win. If not, you'll lose.
This seems a lot more feasible, though doing it using a purely robotic lander would still be very hard.
While clearly this makes human habitation a lot more feasible, I don't see that humans add that much to the initial phase. It's going to be machines doing most of the work, and humans and their food and life support add a lot of mass and cost that could be applied to more useful things. I'd imagine a robotic bootstrap phase in which machines built a small functioning environment. This would be designed around the limitations of machines. A small follow-on crew would follow which would use more versatile machines to establish a larger, more suitable habitat.
The real barrier is to find someone who actually wants to spend the money it would take to establish a manned Mars colony. Over time the costs would go down as robots get better and moving masses around the solar system gets cheaper. And the breakdown of robotic/manned depends on the relative rate at which robotics and space propulsion technology improve. The cheaper and more capable robots become relative to interplanetary travel per se, the more it makes sense for the pioneers of a colony to be robotic.
And therefore... (wait for it)... liberals are smarter than conservatives! QED, it's obvious!
As a liberal, I don't believe this is true. It's not intelligence; it's emotional engagement that makes you gullible.
So it's a matter of circumstance we're looking at here. Conservatives believed in the last election that they were at risk of losing their country. They truly hated and feared Hillary Clinton, and that made them gullible. Well what about liberals and Trump? I think the problem is that fake news couldn't get traction because Trump himself had already saturated his negatives. Before people could take the bit in their teeth they would be distracted by real bad news, or go back to seething over reality.
People in general are sheep because they allow themselves to be emotionally manipulated.
The irony is that you don't have to hack voting machines to swing the election. You just have to distribute them (or just the functioning ones) unevenly. I'm convinced that's why touch screen voting machines are preferred to optical scan ballots.
Well, I see a hitch in this plan: Apple doesn't actually make most of its popular products itself.
I certainly think it's possible to make a token number of devices here, something with symbolic value. But it's not going to be easy to build up enough domestic capacity to make a significant dent in our imports. For one thing Foxconn has got a lot experience doing this, and that's valuable -- worth actual money which will have to be added tot he cost. Probably the easiest way forward is to get Foxconn to build a plant here. But it's still not going to make a big difference.
To make a big difference fast, you have to take steps that are so drastic that they are sure to ignite a trade war, which will (a) raise domestic prices and (b) cost US export jobs. Even if this is a good thing in the long run, but there will be pain in the short run.
Yes, the US has the highest corporate tax RATE. It also has the most generous corporate tax deductions, making it tricky to do an apples-to-apples comparison. For the record the "effective tax rate" -- what corporations actually pay, is around 27.1%, compared to the OECD average of 27.7%.
On the other hand not all corporations are equal. Companies like Apple can hire the best financial and accounting brains on the planet. The complexity of tax code makes it easier for a company like Apple to evade paying, shifting the tax burden to smaller corporations.
It depends. Pretty much the goal of every business is to score a higher-than-normal profit, and there are a lot of ways to do that. Some of them are clearly unethical and unfair to consumers (Volkswagen). But a lot of them are beneficial to consumers -- like shrewd engineering, efficient manufacturing processes, and economy of scale.
There is also the issue of design which is a subjective judgment for a consumer -- but which doesn't make paying a premium for that thing irrational. Quite the contrary. It would be irrational to choose a lower-priced, worse-designed product if the marginal cost savings is less than the marginal loss of subjective enjoyment.
The disadvantage of course is that subjective value creates a huge incentive to manipulate consumer tastes. The only answer to this is cultivate your own tastes.
Actually, more about white vs. non-white. Trump swept whites in every economic, education, and sex category, except college-educated white women where Clinton scraped a razor-thin majority (51%).
Now let's talk working class whites. I grew up as non-white among working class whites, so I'm well aware that working class whites are a very diverse bunch. My best friends growing up were white. But I knew plenty of bigots too. The worst were twisted with pathological rage -- often alcoholism and abuse were part of their family background. They were people who felt so powerless they needed someone more vulnerable than them to take it out on. They weren't uncommon, but their existence in the group doesn't taint the entire group.
The Trump to Clinton ratio was 2::1 among voters who turned out. That stipulation is important, because Trump spent almost his entire campaign energizing his working class white supporters. So it's a pretty fair bet we're seeing a different sample of working class whites than we did in other recent presidential elections.
So the real mystery isn't why Trump won the working class whites; he courted them and energized the people within that group who might not have turned out. The real mystery is why educated white people, even nearly half of college-educated white women voted for him.
No, I think this is another case of the gulf between haves vs. have-nots widening.
I look at my kids' friends and they blow away the kids I went to school with. It's because they go to school in an affluent suburb with a high education budget which spends that money on curriculum and keeping class sizes small, not sports. Many of these kids will graduate with a dozen AP courses under their belt. They can tell you about the Federal Funds Rate and why it's important, explain how the Whig party collapsed, or who the sides fighting in Syria are and why.
But they are not typical. They may be above average in talent, but what really sets them apart from their peers is the opportunities they have been given, which outstrip anything anyone in my generation had unless they went to an elite private school.
Mark my words, the best educated segment of this next generation will be world-beaters. The question is can they carry the dead weight of their peers who went to schools with broken priorities that struggle to meet even basic standards of performance.
Well, getting really good public health data is hard, because it's expensive to do it in a way that gives you something you can go on, as opposed to something to purely speculate about. For all the limitations of something like the Framingham Heart Study or the Nurses Health Study, they're probably the gold standard when it comes to picking out statistical correlations that might be worth further investigation.
I think, though, if there were an increase in the death rate of dementia patients that was big enough to explain at 24% decline in twelve years we'd probably know it. Either the sampling was wildly biased at one or both ends of that period, or there's something going on. Management of diabetes and high blood pressure is definitely a plausible cause for such a decline because they're both correlated to vascular dementia and stroke.
On a personal note I know what you're going through. My Mom was really intelligent woman, but she had both hypertension and diabetes. The last ten years of her life she had progressive dementia, and it every time I saw her it was like a little bit more of her had slipped away. It encouraged me to get my act together -- without my mind I don't have much to live for, certainly not my looks. I dropped my blood pressure over several years 128/86 to 105/64 through diet and exercise.
I didn't say "insignificant". It's just not incredible when you consider the thermal mass of the ocean. If you think about it, that's why palm trees grow on the Isle of Scilly off the southern coast of Britain, even though it's at the same latitude as Newfoundland.
Well, people *do* work in the exclusion zone -- obviously the people involved in managing the ruins of the plant. So people *can* work there reasonably safely with precautions. And contamination is spotty. There are really hot spots, like the hospital which is too dangerous to enter without special gear, and there are other spots that are pretty much uncontaminated. In fact people have returned to subsistence farm, and they're OK as long as their soil and water is regularly tested.
The idea of setting up photovoltaic farms here is actually pretty clever. You don't want to bring lots of people into the exclusion area on an ongoing basis, because sooner or later they'll tramp around where they shouldn't go and spread the contamination. But the thing about PV panels is that they don't have any moving parts, and they aren't really that complicated to install. So you don't need that many people to get PV farms up and running, and with remote monitoring you don't really need anyone in the exclusion zone on a permanent basis to keep them running. With PV panels becoming cheap and land essentially free for the asking it makes a lot of sense.
What are you doing about this? Personally, I mean. What are you thinking about doing?
In part it's premature to be very specific. We have to see exactly what he does. I expect he may well stab some of his friends in the back, and that will be bad for him and good for people against him. Other the general outline is pretty clear: Protest. Educate. Volunteer. Donate. Call out bad behavior.
However biggest real problem is the normalization of the lunatic fringe; the Klan, neonazis and white supremacists. These will have to be challenged. That means confront, fight if necessary, protect where needed.
Here's an interesting thing: boycotts almost never work in economic terms. Yet they often succeed in political terms. Because people don't like to be associated with embarrassing things. So we have the anti-Trump forces lining up to boycott companies and people who deal with Trump, and the pro-Trump forces lining to to boycott companies who won't, and likely neither will succeed in economic terms. The difference is the amount of personal shame that being called out by one side or the other will carry.
If they are common carriers then they can not inspect the content they carry and as such are not liable for that content.
However they can look at the envelope (the address and the return address) and charge differently/deliver with different quality of service, favoring their own content.
Basically Verizon would like it's Internet service to be like their cellular service years ago, where signing on meant you really had to use their services.
20C above average in the Arctic for the month of October; not 20C globally. As a result of the reduction of differences in albedo. It's not that extraordinary.
The problem with blockchain is designed to make a tradeoff between a very specific requirement and high computational costs/implementation complexity. The requirement is this: in a system where literally no individual actor can be trusted, make it possible for everyone to be able to determine who owns a particular bitcoin. The solution is this: employ an audit trail of past transactions that is intentionally designed to be computationally expensive to construct.
The strategy is that in order to repudiate a valid transaction or forge a phony transaction, you are forced to undertake a series of computations that are so difficult that the cost exceeds the likely reward.
The audit trail in blockchain is just a mechanism by which it accomplishes its purpose; blockchain's not suposed to be a particularly good way of making an audit trail. There are much easier and simpler ways of doing that, e.g., a message-passing architecture, so if you choose blockchain you need to show why it is better for your application.
So I can't tell you definitively whether the blockchain choice is wrong, because I don't know why it was chosen. However having watched fools play with golden hammers for decades now, I suspect it may be have been chosen for cachet. If so it's a monumentally stupid choice.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I don't disagree that there are false narratives all around, which is why I often find myself in the role of wet blanket among my fellow left-wingers. The truth is bad enough.
But if you only see the falsehoods perpetrated against *your* side, then it's a fair bet that the falsehoods perpetrated *by your side are doing their job.
The key element of hate speech is threat. Consider the difference between defacing someone's wall with your graffiti tag and defacing it with a swastika when the owner of that wall is Jew. They are not the same crime because the intent is different.
So in this case people may claim that it is "hate speech" that is inciting the ban, but more likely it is merely hateful speech, which is not illegal. It is not illegal to say you hate blacks. It is illegal to burn crosses on their lawn. It is certainly not illegal to express hateful opinions of Muslims, otherwise we'd have jails overflowing.
All of this is moot because we're talking about a private company that has it's own reasons. So really what you should be talking about is whether hateful speech should enjoy legal protection from private discrimination, like religious opinion does.
Historically, successful boycotts are economically unsuccessful. That is to say they don't force companies to comply because profits go down. Companies cave because the people who run them don't want to be associated with the target of the boycott.
One South African businessman remarked to me shortly after Apartheid was lifted that suddenly it was OK, maybe even cool to be South African. It was a tremendous relief not to have to have a defense ready whenever anyone asked him where he was from.
So by all means target Slate and HuffPo. But remember that what matters in a boycott is shame. If you can convince people it's more shameful to be associated with Slate than it is with Breitbart, you win. If not, you'll lose.
This seems a lot more feasible, though doing it using a purely robotic lander would still be very hard.
While clearly this makes human habitation a lot more feasible, I don't see that humans add that much to the initial phase. It's going to be machines doing most of the work, and humans and their food and life support add a lot of mass and cost that could be applied to more useful things. I'd imagine a robotic bootstrap phase in which machines built a small functioning environment. This would be designed around the limitations of machines. A small follow-on crew would follow which would use more versatile machines to establish a larger, more suitable habitat.
The real barrier is to find someone who actually wants to spend the money it would take to establish a manned Mars colony. Over time the costs would go down as robots get better and moving masses around the solar system gets cheaper. And the breakdown of robotic/manned depends on the relative rate at which robotics and space propulsion technology improve. The cheaper and more capable robots become relative to interplanetary travel per se, the more it makes sense for the pioneers of a colony to be robotic.
And therefore... (wait for it)... liberals are smarter than conservatives! QED, it's obvious!
As a liberal, I don't believe this is true. It's not intelligence; it's emotional engagement that makes you gullible.
So it's a matter of circumstance we're looking at here. Conservatives believed in the last election that they were at risk of losing their country. They truly hated and feared Hillary Clinton, and that made them gullible. Well what about liberals and Trump? I think the problem is that fake news couldn't get traction because Trump himself had already saturated his negatives. Before people could take the bit in their teeth they would be distracted by real bad news, or go back to seething over reality.
People in general are sheep because they allow themselves to be emotionally manipulated.
The irony is that you don't have to hack voting machines to swing the election. You just have to distribute them (or just the functioning ones) unevenly. I'm convinced that's why touch screen voting machines are preferred to optical scan ballots.
Well, I see a hitch in this plan: Apple doesn't actually make most of its popular products itself.
I certainly think it's possible to make a token number of devices here, something with symbolic value. But it's not going to be easy to build up enough domestic capacity to make a significant dent in our imports. For one thing Foxconn has got a lot experience doing this, and that's valuable -- worth actual money which will have to be added tot he cost. Probably the easiest way forward is to get Foxconn to build a plant here. But it's still not going to make a big difference.
To make a big difference fast, you have to take steps that are so drastic that they are sure to ignite a trade war, which will (a) raise domestic prices and (b) cost US export jobs. Even if this is a good thing in the long run, but there will be pain in the short run.
Yes, the US has the highest corporate tax RATE. It also has the most generous corporate tax deductions, making it tricky to do an apples-to-apples comparison. For the record the "effective tax rate" -- what corporations actually pay, is around 27.1%, compared to the OECD average of 27.7%.
On the other hand not all corporations are equal. Companies like Apple can hire the best financial and accounting brains on the planet. The complexity of tax code makes it easier for a company like Apple to evade paying, shifting the tax burden to smaller corporations.
It depends. Pretty much the goal of every business is to score a higher-than-normal profit, and there are a lot of ways to do that. Some of them are clearly unethical and unfair to consumers (Volkswagen). But a lot of them are beneficial to consumers -- like shrewd engineering, efficient manufacturing processes, and economy of scale.
There is also the issue of design which is a subjective judgment for a consumer -- but which doesn't make paying a premium for that thing irrational. Quite the contrary. It would be irrational to choose a lower-priced, worse-designed product if the marginal cost savings is less than the marginal loss of subjective enjoyment.
The disadvantage of course is that subjective value creates a huge incentive to manipulate consumer tastes. The only answer to this is cultivate your own tastes.
Actually, more about white vs. non-white. Trump swept whites in every economic, education, and sex category, except college-educated white women where Clinton scraped a razor-thin majority (51%).
Now let's talk working class whites. I grew up as non-white among working class whites, so I'm well aware that working class whites are a very diverse bunch. My best friends growing up were white. But I knew plenty of bigots too. The worst were twisted with pathological rage -- often alcoholism and abuse were part of their family background. They were people who felt so powerless they needed someone more vulnerable than them to take it out on. They weren't uncommon, but their existence in the group doesn't taint the entire group.
The Trump to Clinton ratio was 2::1 among voters who turned out. That stipulation is important, because Trump spent almost his entire campaign energizing his working class white supporters. So it's a pretty fair bet we're seeing a different sample of working class whites than we did in other recent presidential elections.
So the real mystery isn't why Trump won the working class whites; he courted them and energized the people within that group who might not have turned out. The real mystery is why educated white people, even nearly half of college-educated white women voted for him.
The history of the rise of authoritarian regimes in the early 20th century.
Everything you say is probably true, but in this instance the cause the failure was a simple bearing that leaked.
If you think he's a typical establishment politician you don't know your history.
For politicians like Trump it doesn't matter to his followers if he contradicts himself. What matters is how he makes them feel in the moment.
But it was over the summer. You're neglecting the thermal mass of the ocean.
No, I think this is another case of the gulf between haves vs. have-nots widening.
I look at my kids' friends and they blow away the kids I went to school with. It's because they go to school in an affluent suburb with a high education budget which spends that money on curriculum and keeping class sizes small, not sports. Many of these kids will graduate with a dozen AP courses under their belt. They can tell you about the Federal Funds Rate and why it's important, explain how the Whig party collapsed, or who the sides fighting in Syria are and why.
But they are not typical. They may be above average in talent, but what really sets them apart from their peers is the opportunities they have been given, which outstrip anything anyone in my generation had unless they went to an elite private school.
Mark my words, the best educated segment of this next generation will be world-beaters. The question is can they carry the dead weight of their peers who went to schools with broken priorities that struggle to meet even basic standards of performance.
Never said it was bitcoin. I said it was designed to meet the needs of bitcoin, and does that very well.
Well, getting really good public health data is hard, because it's expensive to do it in a way that gives you something you can go on, as opposed to something to purely speculate about. For all the limitations of something like the Framingham Heart Study or the Nurses Health Study, they're probably the gold standard when it comes to picking out statistical correlations that might be worth further investigation.
I think, though, if there were an increase in the death rate of dementia patients that was big enough to explain at 24% decline in twelve years we'd probably know it. Either the sampling was wildly biased at one or both ends of that period, or there's something going on. Management of diabetes and high blood pressure is definitely a plausible cause for such a decline because they're both correlated to vascular dementia and stroke.
On a personal note I know what you're going through. My Mom was really intelligent woman, but she had both hypertension and diabetes. The last ten years of her life she had progressive dementia, and it every time I saw her it was like a little bit more of her had slipped away. It encouraged me to get my act together -- without my mind I don't have much to live for, certainly not my looks. I dropped my blood pressure over several years 128/86 to 105/64 through diet and exercise.
This seems to me to be a bit unlikely.
Oh, well then. That changes everything.
I didn't say "insignificant". It's just not incredible when you consider the thermal mass of the ocean. If you think about it, that's why palm trees grow on the Isle of Scilly off the southern coast of Britain, even though it's at the same latitude as Newfoundland.
Don't think of Trump's Mexico wall as 35 feet high and 1000 miles long. It's 240 RUs tall by 5.5 milllion rack widths long.
Well, people *do* work in the exclusion zone -- obviously the people involved in managing the ruins of the plant. So people *can* work there reasonably safely with precautions. And contamination is spotty. There are really hot spots, like the hospital which is too dangerous to enter without special gear, and there are other spots that are pretty much uncontaminated. In fact people have returned to subsistence farm, and they're OK as long as their soil and water is regularly tested.
The idea of setting up photovoltaic farms here is actually pretty clever. You don't want to bring lots of people into the exclusion area on an ongoing basis, because sooner or later they'll tramp around where they shouldn't go and spread the contamination. But the thing about PV panels is that they don't have any moving parts, and they aren't really that complicated to install. So you don't need that many people to get PV farms up and running, and with remote monitoring you don't really need anyone in the exclusion zone on a permanent basis to keep them running. With PV panels becoming cheap and land essentially free for the asking it makes a lot of sense.
What are you doing about this? Personally, I mean. What are you thinking about doing?
In part it's premature to be very specific. We have to see exactly what he does. I expect he may well stab some of his friends in the back, and that will be bad for him and good for people against him. Other the general outline is pretty clear: Protest. Educate. Volunteer. Donate. Call out bad behavior.
However biggest real problem is the normalization of the lunatic fringe; the Klan, neonazis and white supremacists. These will have to be challenged. That means confront, fight if necessary, protect where needed.
Here's an interesting thing: boycotts almost never work in economic terms. Yet they often succeed in political terms. Because people don't like to be associated with embarrassing things. So we have the anti-Trump forces lining up to boycott companies and people who deal with Trump, and the pro-Trump forces lining to to boycott companies who won't, and likely neither will succeed in economic terms. The difference is the amount of personal shame that being called out by one side or the other will carry.
If they are common carriers then they can not inspect the content they carry and as such are not liable for that content.
However they can look at the envelope (the address and the return address) and charge differently/deliver with different quality of service, favoring their own content.
Basically Verizon would like it's Internet service to be like their cellular service years ago, where signing on meant you really had to use their services.
20C above average in the Arctic for the month of October; not 20C globally. As a result of the reduction of differences in albedo. It's not that extraordinary.
The problem with blockchain is designed to make a tradeoff between a very specific requirement and high computational costs/implementation complexity. The requirement is this: in a system where literally no individual actor can be trusted, make it possible for everyone to be able to determine who owns a particular bitcoin. The solution is this: employ an audit trail of past transactions that is intentionally designed to be computationally expensive to construct.
The strategy is that in order to repudiate a valid transaction or forge a phony transaction, you are forced to undertake a series of computations that are so difficult that the cost exceeds the likely reward.
The audit trail in blockchain is just a mechanism by which it accomplishes its purpose; blockchain's not suposed to be a particularly good way of making an audit trail. There are much easier and simpler ways of doing that, e.g., a message-passing architecture, so if you choose blockchain you need to show why it is better for your application.
So I can't tell you definitively whether the blockchain choice is wrong, because I don't know why it was chosen. However having watched fools play with golden hammers for decades now, I suspect it may be have been chosen for cachet. If so it's a monumentally stupid choice.