Mimeograph? Pfft. Lamestream. Real hipsters use Gestetner machines. Cutting a stencil is so much more tactile, plus you can get high from the correcting fluid.
aerobic exercise on an empty stomach for ~30 minutes has far better results. it starts burning calories from your stored fat instead of the calories in food in your stomach(because it doesn't exist).
While that's true, it's important to realize that your body is an adaptive system with complex behavior. So yes, your body burned fat (and probably some protein if you go for a long time) during fasting exercise because it has no choice, but remember your body also burns more calories after exercise in order to repair damage and to restock glycogen -- which is why high intensity interval training is more effective at fat burning than steady cardio, even though you burn fewer calories during exercise.
So the question most people are interested is does the net fat burned across both exercise and recovery increase if you do fasting cardio? Studies that looked at this (e.g. controlled diet to achieve overall calorie deficit plus randomized assignment to feed before/after exercise) suggest the answer is "no". Since the body did burn more fat in fasting exercise, it must then turn more preferentially to carbs after such a workout. So you burn more fat during the workout, but less after, for no net measurable benefit or harm.
Of course individuals vary. It may work for you. Some trainers feel that athletes who are already very lean my benefit from fasting cardio (e.g. body builders). And it's not like there's Moon shot levels of funding for this kind of research, although maybe there ought to be. So if your'e looking for evidence backed approaches you have to settle for generally slim evidence.
I've experimented with intermittent fasting. One of the benefits (besides weight loss) is that you feel sharper, more perceptive when you're a bit hungry. It's mind-altering, like taking a nootropic drug that actually works. Once you've tried it it makes extreme calorie restriction seem a bit more attractive.
The medical advice we've had I think overstates the evidence by equating any hunger with starvation, which are two different things. Starvation is your body cannibalizing itself to avoid death. Intermittent hunger is a normal and benign state; it's nature's signal to get off your ass and find something to eat.
The problem, as I like to say, is that evolution has gifted each one of us with an awesome mammoth killing machine, which we use sitting at a desk all day a few steps away from a refrigerator stockpiled with calorie-dense foods. And since we're not accustomed to normal hunger, we jump up and shove our face full of thousands of calories (surprisingly easy to do) because we think we're starving. So the grain of truth in the "never go hungry" philosophy is that if you aren't prepared for an occasional hunger pang, if you aren't going to be able to behave reasonably in the presence of unnatural quantities of unnatural foods, then you'd better avoid ever feeling hungry.
Hunger is stress -- like exercise. When you first start a strength training regime, you probably can't imagine you're doing this to your body. But you adapt, and you can take levels of stress that would have been impossible to tolerate at the beginning like they're nothing.
Ultimately it's the system costs that matter. Getting a hydrogen car infrastructure off the ground would be fabulously expensive. But it might happen as a side effect of other things. For example there have been proposals to develop a "Supergrid" in which energy is transferred in two forms: electricity along superconducting cables, and in the cryogenic cooling fluid, which would be liquid hydrogen.
Whether this makes sense isn't a purely technological question; it's an economic question, and involves scale, opportunity costs, and available resources. For example with a solar plant the inefficiency of hydrolysis may not matter very much if you can build the plant to be cheap enough; that energy you're wasting cracking water was going to waste anyhow.
It all comes down to marginal utility in the long term, which of course is uncertain because it hinges on predictions of the future. Things would be easier if you could just spend all your money on your most pressing problem, solve that, and move on to the next most pressing problem. You would take money,say, from education and put it into hunger, because hunger is lower on Maslow's hierarchy of needs than self-actualization. After you'd licked hunger you'd go on to the next thing and eventually get around to education.
Clearly a space program makes no sense for a country like Bengladesh with a GDP of 150 billion. India has a GDP approaching two trillion dollars. And while it has a lot of poor people, there are more middle class Indians than the middle class Americans. Those people work in industries like defense, technology and aerospace, that generate revenue.
Does this mean any space project makes sense for India, given its poverty problems? Of course not. But the development of hypersonic aircraft/spacecraft is clearly applied research. That not only helps Indian companies, it helps with the brain drain project by giving the most capable engineers all the more reason to work at home rather than going overseas.
Well may be one of those areas where the needs of the producers don't immediately align with the needs of the consumer.
Early converged devices were pretty terrible -- I know because I developed for various pre-iPhone mobile platforms. The problem is that as manufacturers got better at making PDAs, the price kept dropping. This presented device-makers with a bind: either try to compete in a commodity market with razor thin margins, or add complications to their platform to differentiate it.
Now as someone who developed software for people working in the field, what I'd have *loved* to see would be something like the Palm m500, with a bluetooth connection to a phone or access point, and costing around $50. This would have met a lot of needs for an essentially disposable information terminal -- field workers are really rough on equipment. But it's a lot safer to make a converged device, even a bad one, and charge almost a thousand dollars for it; it resembles the business device makers got into in the first place. And eventually converged devices got good enough that I don't really miss not having a kind of customizable personal network of devices.
The tablet thing is similar to the demise of the PDA. Pretty good tablets (amazingly useful by the standards of a decade ago) are available for well under $100. Usable ones are appearing in the $50 range. So it makes much more sense for a manufacturer to steer customers to a more complicated device. But ultimately there will be a refinement of whatever people are being steered to accompanied by a culling of the weak players.
It doesn't have to scale. It just has to store and provide energy with enough efficiency to be commercially viable. This particular technology may not "solve all our problems", but I foresee a future in which we don't turn to just one thing to "solve all our problems". This is why we ought to upgrade our electrical grid; to allow more diverse energy sources to deliver over greater distances.
As for "mother nature's solution", it has a name: biomass. Environmentalists like biomass in principle because it forms a closed loop: carbon is emitted into the air in exact balance to carbon being taken out of the air. But there are still a lot of problematic details, such as conventional air pollution (i.e., other than CO2) and biomass crops displacing food crops. So they don't like corn ethanol, but ethanol from crops like switchgrass that can be grown in land not suitable for food crops could be a different story.
By the way I hate the "mother nature" language because it makes nature seem like Nature wants to make things nice for us. Mother nature is more like, say, a coot mom, which produces plenty of chicks in case there's a good resource year, then ruthlessly kills the excess. Mother nature doesn't care whether we suffer or die.
I used to develop mobile computing data collection systems for field workers, and one time I did an installation and training session in Palm Springs, where for four months out of the year the average daily high exceeds 100F, and fairly commonly goes north of 110F.
I asked people about this, and they said that it used to be bearable because it was bone-dry heat. Then developers started putting more and more golf courses in -- it's a great place to golf in the winter -- and the amount of water they need to keep the grass on golf courses alive over the summer changed the local climate so that often you had super-hot, humid days.
If you want to see the difference, next time you go into a sauna, splash a few tablespoons of water onto the rocks like the Finns do. 160F is actually pretty comfortable to sit in when there's 0% relative humidity, because dry air doesn't transfer heat very effectively. But a tiny amount of water in the air turns it into an oven. You're like a cold glass of water on a hot day: the water condenses on you because relative to the air you're quite chilly. That condensation packs a lot of heat.
Back in the early 80s I had a friend who went to work for a company that had systems that did more or less what you were saying, only the "box" was the ground. Their systems pumped heat out of the deep ground in the winter and back into the ground in the summer.
The thing is, building something that does that efficiently on a large enough scale to be useful takes a lot of money. It only makes sense if the net present value of the energy you saved was greater than the investment required. The company had been organized in the mid-70s energy crisis on the assumption that energy prices would remain high and probably increase, because the world was running out of oil. However that assumption was, at least in the short term, wrong. Oil reserves may have been dwindling, but there was more than enough present production capacity to meet any possible short term demand; it was cartel production limits that created the energy shortages of the 70s.
The production quote system collapsed in the 80s, pulling world energy prices down with them. That put a lot of alternative energy companies out of business, including the one my friend worked for.
That's also by the way why the nuclear industry languished. The idea that Greenpeace somehow controls the regulatory process in the US is laughable; if oil prices continued at their 70s levels the anti-nuclear people would have been just pissing into a headwind. Did the anti-nuclear movement hurt the nuclear industry? Probably, but only because energy prices were low. Nothing trumps big short term profits in US politics.
Sure seems plausible, but decades in this business have taught me it's all about timing. And I would assert that having watched Apple over the decades its biggest advantage other than design is... timing. At least timing getting into any particular game. When to get out of a game? That's even tougher.
Tablet computing was always perfectly plausible. Microsoft got into the game early back in 2000 with it's Microsoft Tablet PC. Almost nobody remembers it now because it was way too early. By the time the iPad rolled around a combination of processor power, low battery life, and ubiquitous wireless Internet had created the opportunity for a killer tablet app: media streaming.
It's all those bits that go around an idea that transform it from an attractive pipe-dream into a practicality.
Now as for this "AI" business... Very early in my career I became aware of a schism in software design philosophies. Some people (like me) had a tool-making orientation. We saw software as a tool which supported people in some particular task, whether it was balancing their checkbook, finding some piece of information they used to have, or playing a game. But others were far, far more ambitious. They wanted to create intelligent agents that would relieve the user of the burden of thinking for himself. But we were so far from being able to create anything like that that by in large this philosophy produced badly designed tools.
It was a pipe dream when I got into this business back in the '80s, but we're much, much closer now, close enough that it's worth building AI into software tools. I consider Siri an example of this; "she" doesn't actually think for you, but she understands your requests pretty well.
The general notion of Big Data + AI on the handset is more plausible than ever now because it looks like we have a lot of the pieces in place. But it's a huge leap of faith to conclude a killer AI app will automatically emerge, and by "killer" I mean one that destroys an existing healthy market segment. Nobody can say it will or won't happen, but vague hand-waving allusions to big investments in intelligent agents don't impress me. That's nothing new.
You know how you know when things are going to change? When someone gives a demo and people stand up and cheer. Cynics attributed the rock concert like atmosphere of those old Apple product introductions to Steve Jobs' svengali-like powers, but that's a huge over-simplification. A lot of the enthusiasm was for Apple's timing. They were just about never the first to do anything, but they were often the first to do some things once it became possible to sell a lot of that thing.
That's indeed what I have, but (a) ultra low power mode doesn't allow you to use it as an access point, (b) you can't swap out batteries to ensure network connection and (c) it's actually inconvenient to carry a large converged device AND a tablet.
Yes. Beware any solution that is good enough for the short term. People will prefer it over a solution that's problematic in the long term, but better than the short term solution is in the long term.
The responsibility it to the shareholder, no the government.
Corporations are artificial entities defined and governed by laws and regulations which are in turn created by the government. A corporation's responsibility is whatever the government says it is. If government insists the corporation pay taxes it is the responsibility of the corporation is to pay taxes. The corporations can't just say "we'd rather pay the stockholders, so sod off."
In other words the problem isn't that the government can't compel the corporations to pay taxes. It's that it doesn't want to.
Oh sure, corporations have lots of clever people finding ways to avoid paying taxes, but for what it's costing the government could easily afford to hire its own armies of clever people to close the loopholes. So clearly government doesn't want to.
Which raises the question of who government is working for.
I actually agree to you that dictatorship is a significant contributor both to agricultural problems and long term instability. Dictatorships are inefficient and averse to empirically driven policies. Rewarding supporters and keeping enemies down puts massive strain on the economy.
That said, you still have to look at the specifics of what actually happened, not just appeal to your general knowledge of how these things usually go. And the Assad regime is very different from the state communist regimes you mention; it didn't do central planning for example.
Situations like this don't have a single, simple cause. It's when several causes come together. Islamist revolution ignited by the oppressive policies and cronyism of the Syrian regime is a perennial problem there, but the Assads have a long, bloody, but successful track record of putting them down. Think of opression as the spark. It's the displaced people that are the fuel, and if there's enough fuel you can't put the fire out.
Impeachment is a political act, not a criminal one. They can impeach someone for anything, such as corruption, incompetence, or because it's Tuesday.
Nope. Federal impeachment, while it obviously has political dimensions (duh) is for criminal offenses only. You need at least some pretext of criminal misconduct to use it. Here is what the US Constitution says about the impeachment of federal office holders:
The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other High crimes and Misdemeanors.
Impeachment is effectively an indictment, which is followed by a trial. Impeachment of a federal judge is a big deal, because the trial has to be conducted by the entire US senate. In the entire history of the US there have been fifteen federal judges impeached, resulting in a total of eight convictions. None of them were for incompetence or Tuesday-ism.
Actually the Syria situation was initiated by an unprecedented multi-year drought. This depopulated hundreds of rural villages, which destabilized the regime. The Assads have been ruthlessly crushing Islamist uprisings for generations, but this time the cities were flooded with hungry, angry, unemployed young men. The spark for ISIS was always there, but climate refugees gave it the fuel it needed to become unquenchable.
Now India is an entirely different case. It's a democracy, which is more stable than a hereditary dictatorship. It has a much larger, more robust, more diversified economy than Syria. All around it's a far more competently run society, despite the challenges it faces like endemic poverty. But it's also 50x larger in population. A much smaller relative disturbance in India can translate into a huge problem on an absolute scale. It's long-running dispute with Pakistan, and the fact that both are nuclear armed regional powers, adds quite a range of unpleasant outcomes to even a modest destabilization of India.
Well, religious (and other) provisos to "human rights" isn't an exclusively Muslim thing either. Many Christians believe that discriminating against gays or transgender people is OK, for example.
People understand the world in terms of ideological frames in which a term like "human rights" implies different things. A Swedish social democrat's notion of "human rights" is very different from a US Tea Party Republican. And it's not the case that either concepts of "human rights" is broader than the other; it's that each version contains things which are logically inconsistent with the other version. The social democrat sees the ability of an unpopular group to purchase without discrimination any good or service as part of the human rights package; the Tea Party Republican sees the right not to conduct business with people you find morally repugnant part of the human rights package. Neither sees their view of human rights as "human rights minus something"; they see their own version as complete and perfect and the other version as incomplete and/or inconsistent.
No matter where you stand in the hyperplane of ideology or religion, you will see others who stand in a different place as supporting limited versions of "human rights". And they'll see you the same way.
Basically most calamities are going to leave the wealthiest people relatively better off than everyone else. That's because their wealth is largely in forms that can be moved away from problems and toward opportunities with the click of a mouse. About the only thing that affects them equally is some kind of sudden and massive collapse in financial markets.
Well, they *are* vulnerable, because they operate outside the law and can be exploited by criminals You don't think that a prostitute you've paid $300 gets to keep that money? Almost all of that goes to the pimp.
Freelancing women are targets for beatings by pimps because they threaten the pimp's income. And what are they supposed to do, go to the cops and say "This guy is trying to steal my prostitution business?"
Once a prostitute is in the clutches of a pimp, she's not free to leave to business either. Even if she wants to move to a different city, if the pimp keeps her in place by threats to her friends and family.
And not every prostitute is a prostitute by choice. There are runaways who fall into a pimp's control; rural foreigners who are tricked into thinking they're immigrating to the US for a high-paying (by their standards) domestic service job.
Understand I have no issues with prostitution per se, but I have a big problem with slavery, and in any system where prostitutes operate outside the protection of the law it's a given that most of them are de facto slaves.
Which turns out to be not necessarily such a great idea, as evinced by the propensity of prosecutors and judges in such jurisdictions to use their positions for political gain.
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Mimeograph? Pfft. Lamestream. Real hipsters use Gestetner machines. Cutting a stencil is so much more tactile, plus you can get high from the correcting fluid.
aerobic exercise on an empty stomach for ~30 minutes has far better results. it starts burning calories from your stored fat instead of the calories in food in your stomach(because it doesn't exist).
While that's true, it's important to realize that your body is an adaptive system with complex behavior. So yes, your body burned fat (and probably some protein if you go for a long time) during fasting exercise because it has no choice, but remember your body also burns more calories after exercise in order to repair damage and to restock glycogen -- which is why high intensity interval training is more effective at fat burning than steady cardio, even though you burn fewer calories during exercise.
So the question most people are interested is does the net fat burned across both exercise and recovery increase if you do fasting cardio? Studies that looked at this (e.g. controlled diet to achieve overall calorie deficit plus randomized assignment to feed before/after exercise) suggest the answer is "no". Since the body did burn more fat in fasting exercise, it must then turn more preferentially to carbs after such a workout. So you burn more fat during the workout, but less after, for no net measurable benefit or harm.
Of course individuals vary. It may work for you. Some trainers feel that athletes who are already very lean my benefit from fasting cardio (e.g. body builders). And it's not like there's Moon shot levels of funding for this kind of research, although maybe there ought to be. So if your'e looking for evidence backed approaches you have to settle for generally slim evidence.
I've experimented with intermittent fasting. One of the benefits (besides weight loss) is that you feel sharper, more perceptive when you're a bit hungry. It's mind-altering, like taking a nootropic drug that actually works. Once you've tried it it makes extreme calorie restriction seem a bit more attractive.
The medical advice we've had I think overstates the evidence by equating any hunger with starvation, which are two different things. Starvation is your body cannibalizing itself to avoid death. Intermittent hunger is a normal and benign state; it's nature's signal to get off your ass and find something to eat.
The problem, as I like to say, is that evolution has gifted each one of us with an awesome mammoth killing machine, which we use sitting at a desk all day a few steps away from a refrigerator stockpiled with calorie-dense foods. And since we're not accustomed to normal hunger, we jump up and shove our face full of thousands of calories (surprisingly easy to do) because we think we're starving. So the grain of truth in the "never go hungry" philosophy is that if you aren't prepared for an occasional hunger pang, if you aren't going to be able to behave reasonably in the presence of unnatural quantities of unnatural foods, then you'd better avoid ever feeling hungry.
Hunger is stress -- like exercise. When you first start a strength training regime, you probably can't imagine you're doing this to your body. But you adapt, and you can take levels of stress that would have been impossible to tolerate at the beginning like they're nothing.
OK, now I want one.
Ultimately it's the system costs that matter. Getting a hydrogen car infrastructure off the ground would be fabulously expensive. But it might happen as a side effect of other things. For example there have been proposals to develop a "Supergrid" in which energy is transferred in two forms: electricity along superconducting cables, and in the cryogenic cooling fluid, which would be liquid hydrogen.
Whether this makes sense isn't a purely technological question; it's an economic question, and involves scale, opportunity costs, and available resources. For example with a solar plant the inefficiency of hydrolysis may not matter very much if you can build the plant to be cheap enough; that energy you're wasting cracking water was going to waste anyhow.
More like ummm, maybe.
It all comes down to marginal utility in the long term, which of course is uncertain because it hinges on predictions of the future. Things would be easier if you could just spend all your money on your most pressing problem, solve that, and move on to the next most pressing problem. You would take money,say, from education and put it into hunger, because hunger is lower on Maslow's hierarchy of needs than self-actualization. After you'd licked hunger you'd go on to the next thing and eventually get around to education.
Clearly a space program makes no sense for a country like Bengladesh with a GDP of 150 billion. India has a GDP approaching two trillion dollars. And while it has a lot of poor people, there are more middle class Indians than the middle class Americans. Those people work in industries like defense, technology and aerospace, that generate revenue.
Does this mean any space project makes sense for India, given its poverty problems? Of course not. But the development of hypersonic aircraft/spacecraft is clearly applied research. That not only helps Indian companies, it helps with the brain drain project by giving the most capable engineers all the more reason to work at home rather than going overseas.
Well may be one of those areas where the needs of the producers don't immediately align with the needs of the consumer.
Early converged devices were pretty terrible -- I know because I developed for various pre-iPhone mobile platforms. The problem is that as manufacturers got better at making PDAs, the price kept dropping. This presented device-makers with a bind: either try to compete in a commodity market with razor thin margins, or add complications to their platform to differentiate it.
Now as someone who developed software for people working in the field, what I'd have *loved* to see would be something like the Palm m500, with a bluetooth connection to a phone or access point, and costing around $50. This would have met a lot of needs for an essentially disposable information terminal -- field workers are really rough on equipment. But it's a lot safer to make a converged device, even a bad one, and charge almost a thousand dollars for it; it resembles the business device makers got into in the first place. And eventually converged devices got good enough that I don't really miss not having a kind of customizable personal network of devices.
The tablet thing is similar to the demise of the PDA. Pretty good tablets (amazingly useful by the standards of a decade ago) are available for well under $100. Usable ones are appearing in the $50 range. So it makes much more sense for a manufacturer to steer customers to a more complicated device. But ultimately there will be a refinement of whatever people are being steered to accompanied by a culling of the weak players.
It doesn't have to scale. It just has to store and provide energy with enough efficiency to be commercially viable. This particular technology may not "solve all our problems", but I foresee a future in which we don't turn to just one thing to "solve all our problems". This is why we ought to upgrade our electrical grid; to allow more diverse energy sources to deliver over greater distances.
As for "mother nature's solution", it has a name: biomass. Environmentalists like biomass in principle because it forms a closed loop: carbon is emitted into the air in exact balance to carbon being taken out of the air. But there are still a lot of problematic details, such as conventional air pollution (i.e., other than CO2) and biomass crops displacing food crops. So they don't like corn ethanol, but ethanol from crops like switchgrass that can be grown in land not suitable for food crops could be a different story.
By the way I hate the "mother nature" language because it makes nature seem like Nature wants to make things nice for us. Mother nature is more like, say, a coot mom, which produces plenty of chicks in case there's a good resource year, then ruthlessly kills the excess. Mother nature doesn't care whether we suffer or die.
I used to develop mobile computing data collection systems for field workers, and one time I did an installation and training session in Palm Springs, where for four months out of the year the average daily high exceeds 100F, and fairly commonly goes north of 110F.
I asked people about this, and they said that it used to be bearable because it was bone-dry heat. Then developers started putting more and more golf courses in -- it's a great place to golf in the winter -- and the amount of water they need to keep the grass on golf courses alive over the summer changed the local climate so that often you had super-hot, humid days.
If you want to see the difference, next time you go into a sauna, splash a few tablespoons of water onto the rocks like the Finns do. 160F is actually pretty comfortable to sit in when there's 0% relative humidity, because dry air doesn't transfer heat very effectively. But a tiny amount of water in the air turns it into an oven. You're like a cold glass of water on a hot day: the water condenses on you because relative to the air you're quite chilly. That condensation packs a lot of heat.
Back in the early 80s I had a friend who went to work for a company that had systems that did more or less what you were saying, only the "box" was the ground. Their systems pumped heat out of the deep ground in the winter and back into the ground in the summer.
The thing is, building something that does that efficiently on a large enough scale to be useful takes a lot of money. It only makes sense if the net present value of the energy you saved was greater than the investment required. The company had been organized in the mid-70s energy crisis on the assumption that energy prices would remain high and probably increase, because the world was running out of oil. However that assumption was, at least in the short term, wrong. Oil reserves may have been dwindling, but there was more than enough present production capacity to meet any possible short term demand; it was cartel production limits that created the energy shortages of the 70s.
The production quote system collapsed in the 80s, pulling world energy prices down with them. That put a lot of alternative energy companies out of business, including the one my friend worked for.
That's also by the way why the nuclear industry languished. The idea that Greenpeace somehow controls the regulatory process in the US is laughable; if oil prices continued at their 70s levels the anti-nuclear people would have been just pissing into a headwind. Did the anti-nuclear movement hurt the nuclear industry? Probably, but only because energy prices were low. Nothing trumps big short term profits in US politics.
Sure seems plausible, but decades in this business have taught me it's all about timing. And I would assert that having watched Apple over the decades its biggest advantage other than design is ... timing. At least timing getting into any particular game. When to get out of a game? That's even tougher.
Tablet computing was always perfectly plausible. Microsoft got into the game early back in 2000 with it's Microsoft Tablet PC. Almost nobody remembers it now because it was way too early. By the time the iPad rolled around a combination of processor power, low battery life, and ubiquitous wireless Internet had created the opportunity for a killer tablet app: media streaming.
It's all those bits that go around an idea that transform it from an attractive pipe-dream into a practicality.
Now as for this "AI" business... Very early in my career I became aware of a schism in software design philosophies. Some people (like me) had a tool-making orientation. We saw software as a tool which supported people in some particular task, whether it was balancing their checkbook, finding some piece of information they used to have, or playing a game. But others were far, far more ambitious. They wanted to create intelligent agents that would relieve the user of the burden of thinking for himself. But we were so far from being able to create anything like that that by in large this philosophy produced badly designed tools.
It was a pipe dream when I got into this business back in the '80s, but we're much, much closer now, close enough that it's worth building AI into software tools. I consider Siri an example of this; "she" doesn't actually think for you, but she understands your requests pretty well.
The general notion of Big Data + AI on the handset is more plausible than ever now because it looks like we have a lot of the pieces in place. But it's a huge leap of faith to conclude a killer AI app will automatically emerge, and by "killer" I mean one that destroys an existing healthy market segment. Nobody can say it will or won't happen, but vague hand-waving allusions to big investments in intelligent agents don't impress me. That's nothing new.
You know how you know when things are going to change? When someone gives a demo and people stand up and cheer. Cynics attributed the rock concert like atmosphere of those old Apple product introductions to Steve Jobs' svengali-like powers, but that's a huge over-simplification. A lot of the enthusiasm was for Apple's timing. They were just about never the first to do anything, but they were often the first to do some things once it became possible to sell a lot of that thing.
Well, it's object oriented features suck, but it's really quite nice for functional programming. I'm glad to see that paradigm make such a comeback.
That's indeed what I have, but (a) ultra low power mode doesn't allow you to use it as an access point, (b) you can't swap out batteries to ensure network connection and (c) it's actually inconvenient to carry a large converged device AND a tablet.
Yes. Beware any solution that is good enough for the short term. People will prefer it over a solution that's problematic in the long term, but better than the short term solution is in the long term.
Well, yes, because battery life trumps everything for us.
What I'd really like is a flip phone with a replaceable battery that can also serve as a mobile access point.
The responsibility it to the shareholder, no the government.
Corporations are artificial entities defined and governed by laws and regulations which are in turn created by the government. A corporation's responsibility is whatever the government says it is. If government insists the corporation pay taxes it is the responsibility of the corporation is to pay taxes. The corporations can't just say "we'd rather pay the stockholders, so sod off."
In other words the problem isn't that the government can't compel the corporations to pay taxes. It's that it doesn't want to.
Oh sure, corporations have lots of clever people finding ways to avoid paying taxes, but for what it's costing the government could easily afford to hire its own armies of clever people to close the loopholes. So clearly government doesn't want to.
Which raises the question of who government is working for.
I actually agree to you that dictatorship is a significant contributor both to agricultural problems and long term instability. Dictatorships are inefficient and averse to empirically driven policies. Rewarding supporters and keeping enemies down puts massive strain on the economy.
That said, you still have to look at the specifics of what actually happened, not just appeal to your general knowledge of how these things usually go. And the Assad regime is very different from the state communist regimes you mention; it didn't do central planning for example.
Situations like this don't have a single, simple cause. It's when several causes come together. Islamist revolution ignited by the oppressive policies and cronyism of the Syrian regime is a perennial problem there, but the Assads have a long, bloody, but successful track record of putting them down. Think of opression as the spark. It's the displaced people that are the fuel, and if there's enough fuel you can't put the fire out.
Impeachment is a political act, not a criminal one. They can impeach someone for anything, such as corruption, incompetence, or because it's Tuesday.
Nope. Federal impeachment, while it obviously has political dimensions (duh) is for criminal offenses only. You need at least some pretext of criminal misconduct to use it. Here is what the US Constitution says about the impeachment of federal office holders:
The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other High crimes and Misdemeanors.
Impeachment is effectively an indictment, which is followed by a trial. Impeachment of a federal judge is a big deal, because the trial has to be conducted by the entire US senate. In the entire history of the US there have been fifteen federal judges impeached, resulting in a total of eight convictions. None of them were for incompetence or Tuesday-ism.
I wonder where people get their civics knowledge.
You can't impeach someone for being a paranoid and incompetent.
Actually the Syria situation was initiated by an unprecedented multi-year drought. This depopulated hundreds of rural villages, which destabilized the regime. The Assads have been ruthlessly crushing Islamist uprisings for generations, but this time the cities were flooded with hungry, angry, unemployed young men. The spark for ISIS was always there, but climate refugees gave it the fuel it needed to become unquenchable.
Now India is an entirely different case. It's a democracy, which is more stable than a hereditary dictatorship. It has a much larger, more robust, more diversified economy than Syria. All around it's a far more competently run society, despite the challenges it faces like endemic poverty. But it's also 50x larger in population. A much smaller relative disturbance in India can translate into a huge problem on an absolute scale. It's long-running dispute with Pakistan, and the fact that both are nuclear armed regional powers, adds quite a range of unpleasant outcomes to even a modest destabilization of India.
I dunno. It sounds to me like an episode summary from a Gerry Anderson supermarionette show.
Well, religious (and other) provisos to "human rights" isn't an exclusively Muslim thing either. Many Christians believe that discriminating against gays or transgender people is OK, for example.
People understand the world in terms of ideological frames in which a term like "human rights" implies different things. A Swedish social democrat's notion of "human rights" is very different from a US Tea Party Republican. And it's not the case that either concepts of "human rights" is broader than the other; it's that each version contains things which are logically inconsistent with the other version. The social democrat sees the ability of an unpopular group to purchase without discrimination any good or service as part of the human rights package; the Tea Party Republican sees the right not to conduct business with people you find morally repugnant part of the human rights package. Neither sees their view of human rights as "human rights minus something"; they see their own version as complete and perfect and the other version as incomplete and/or inconsistent.
No matter where you stand in the hyperplane of ideology or religion, you will see others who stand in a different place as supporting limited versions of "human rights". And they'll see you the same way.
Basically most calamities are going to leave the wealthiest people relatively better off than everyone else. That's because their wealth is largely in forms that can be moved away from problems and toward opportunities with the click of a mouse. About the only thing that affects them equally is some kind of sudden and massive collapse in financial markets.
Well, they *are* vulnerable, because they operate outside the law and can be exploited by criminals You don't think that a prostitute you've paid $300 gets to keep that money? Almost all of that goes to the pimp.
Freelancing women are targets for beatings by pimps because they threaten the pimp's income. And what are they supposed to do, go to the cops and say "This guy is trying to steal my prostitution business?"
Once a prostitute is in the clutches of a pimp, she's not free to leave to business either. Even if she wants to move to a different city, if the pimp keeps her in place by threats to her friends and family.
And not every prostitute is a prostitute by choice. There are runaways who fall into a pimp's control; rural foreigners who are tricked into thinking they're immigrating to the US for a high-paying (by their standards) domestic service job.
Understand I have no issues with prostitution per se, but I have a big problem with slavery, and in any system where prostitutes operate outside the protection of the law it's a given that most of them are de facto slaves.
Which turns out to be not necessarily such a great idea, as evinced by the propensity of prosecutors and judges in such jurisdictions to use their positions for political gain.