(1) the point is people expect stairs to be consistent to some tolerance. We can argue about what that tolerance is, but the precise figure is irrelevant.
(2) if you're going to be nitpicky, well physician heal thyself. A floodplain is a land area prone to flooding; in some lexicons it refers specifically to riparian floodplains, but the term "coastal floodplain" is also used in coastal planning to refer to areas that are flooded by ocean storm surge by FEMA and other agencies.
I used the word "seawall" to give people something concrete to visualize; it has nothing to do with my point but if you prefer you can picture a beach berm, coastal bluff, marsh margin or causeway. The protective "structure" needn't be engineered or built; it merely has to protect what is behind it.
In Tracy Kidder's book House, he interviews a carpenter who talks about stairs. The carpenter claims that if you were to play a slow motion film of people walking up stairs you'd see that the soles of their feet clear the top of each stair tread by a couple of millimeters. They take the first step and then instinctively lift each foot by no more than they absolutely have to clear each step. That's why it's critically important to get the height of the first step right; if it's just a little bit off the stairway will forever after be tripping people up, but they won't know why because the difference is imperceptible.
There's something like that when it comes to buying land in a floodplain. The past performance of flood control structures is like that first step on the stairway; it sets peoples' expectations to future performance. But those structures introduce a discontinuity into a gradually increasing water level. The water may have come within an inch of the seawall top a half dozen times in the last year, but an inch is as good as a mile. But if the sea level rises an inch, well that doesn't sound like much but a lot of people will notice.
I know how encryption works on these devices. Once you've got the passcode you've got the keys to the kingdom.
Yes, they've got an AES chip, but it mainly facilitates a fast "wipe" of data on the phone. Storage is encrypted with a random key, which in turn is encrypted using the UID of the device. The encrypted key is stored in flash. When an emergency wipe is called for, the random key is erased and the data in storage, while still there, becomes inaccessible.
It's a clever compromise between security and convenience, but it's not really all that secure if you're worried about national security agencies. If they can bypass the OS entirely and go straight to memory they can brute force the PIN, and everything is laid bare, provided they reassemble the device or spoof the UID. Or they can simply read the encryption key from flash then decrypt the data they've extracted.
The scheme is plenty secure from ordinary thieves but not a three letter agency; probably not even organized crime. That doesn't make it bad; the lock on your back door isn't bad because it can't stop the CIA from doing a black bag job on you; you just have to be aware if that's a possibility.
Er... you don't make money by printing -- or minting -- it and just giving it away to someone. Coinage and paper money printing have almost nothing to do with the money supply. The ways coins and paper money get into circulation are exactly the same: they're purchased with money that everyone already agrees exists. So when a depository institution buys a newly printed dollar from the Fed, a new physical dollar enters circulation while and old dollar (possibly physical or possibly abstract) is removed from circulation.
I suppose if you minted a million dollar coin, there is in a sense a million dollars more than there was before. But it's not in circulation, it's sitting in a vault at the mint, so it might as well not exist.
The FBI isn't asking Apple to decrypt the phone. It's not encrypted, it's protected by a four digit PIN. Naturally it's trivial to defeat a four digit PIN if you have unlimited retries, which is why iOS limits you to, I think, ten successive attempts before the phone is wiped.
It all boils down to the old security/convenience tradeoff. Yes, you'd like the security of a phone where all the data was encrypted with a high entropy key, but you prefer a phone that you can unlock in a few seconds then use in an unrestricted manner. What the FBI is asking for is a version of iOS in which they can rapidly try an unlimited number of PIN guesses. You could get into any phone in a matter of hours that way. Heck you could built a robot with a capacitive stylus that tries ten PINs/minute and go through all the possible PINs in 16 hours; what's more if you permuted the sequence to prioritize the PINs mostly likely to be chosen by humans it'd probably finish in a fraction of that.
The notion that your iPhone data is somehow safe from the US Government is somewhat ludicrous. All the feds would have to do if the data on this phone were really critical to national security would be to take the phone apart, desolder the flash chips and dump the memory on them. Even if that data were encrypted, they could break the weak PIN trivially. A team of MIT course 6 juniors could probably do it.
So what does the FBI get by making this demand? Two things. A legal precedent they can use to force vendors to build back doors into their products, and an insecure version of iOS they could potentially load on anyone's iPhone that was out of their possession for a few hours. That has a number of advantages if you're the FBI and you want to do things that are outside or legal oversight.
What I'd propose is a compromise: we give the data to the FBI without giving them the sneaky side effects they want. After all, Apple has already handed over the backup, so we're talking about a marginal difference as far as customer privacy is concerned. Apple should create the compromised iOS version, and break into the iPhone, hand the data over to the FBI along with the totally wiped phone. That way the FBI is never in possession of a compromised version of iOS, and there is no legal precedent saying that vendors have to provide such a thing to them.
The game isn't to make it impossible for the contraband dealers to get their money -- if it were then we automatically lose. It's to make it sufficiently cumbersome that it's more likely they're caught.
Clearly an industry which can create narco-submarines is capable of getting heavy money out of the country, but note that the way narcosubmarines are most often stopped before they launch is human intelligence. The more people involved in a secret, the harder it is to keep. The conversion of bulky inventory to cash that's compact enough for a single person to carry is a big help in evading detection.
In some ways the take away lesson is that the best people are easiest to exploit.
Think about it. This guy's life was derailed by his feeling of personal responsibility for the consequences of his work. Granted, he shouldn't have agreed to designing and programming a game in five weeks when it normally took six months, but he was only twenty-four years old. People don't give inexperienced 24 year-olds 30 million dollars to spend because you don't expect someone like that to have the maturity to say "no". Many might have the judgement to do that, but it's normal for young, brilliant people to feel invincible, and the people with control of the purse strings should have known that.
Why not get rid of paper money denominated over $20, and introduce coins instead. After all, what difference does it make for most valid uses whether the material we make our physical money out of is paper or, say, stainless steel? And lets adopt a simple convention that $10,000 in coins denominated $50 or above weighs a kilogram. That makes the coins easy to count, and you can easily carry several thousands of dollars in cash on your person, but a million dollars in coins would weigh 100 kilos.
It'd still be possible to put your life savings under your mattress. Steel has a density of roughly 8000 kilos/m^3, so a million dollars of coins would still be quite compact. However paying for that $10 million dollar cocaine shipment would be extremely inconvenient to do in untraceable cash because it'd literally weigh a ton.
Personally, I find the idea of "settled science" ludicrous. And, FWIW, I'm a real scientist with genuine credentials to back that up (PhD physics from Tier 1 university).
Excellent. So you'll be investing in my perpetual motion machine then.
why in a country with negative interest rates the central bank would worry if people can't stuff their mattresses with large bills? It seems to me that if you're trying to avoid potential deflation you don't want people squirreling away their money in the banks or their mattresses.
ExxonMobil also has a huge vested interest in refuting any false role that burning oil has in accelerating climate change.
Yes, but you're premising your argument based on an assumption contrary to fact, which is that the truth about what oil is actually doing to the climate has anything to do with Exxon's motivations.
In the early 80s the scientific consensus was just finished shifting from projecting global cooling from the 1950s to anthropogenic CO2 driven warming. I remember this well because my wife the geophysicist was in graduate school at the time and it was an exciting but still contentious time. And Exxon was clearly aware of this shift at the time because as an oil company they employ people who follow geophysics. At the same time Exxon had just completed a thirty billion dollar deal to open the Natuna natural gas fields in Indonesia -- a reserve that's 71% CO2. When put into production it will become the single largest point source of CO2 in the world, accounting for 1% of all human CO2 emissions in the world. So when James Hansen testified about the emerging AGW consensus in 1988, Exxon suddenly realized it would lose tens of billions of dollars if Congress actually decided to do something about it. If you were Exxon management, what would you do?
The connection between the Natuna gas fields and Exxon's taking the lead in the PR campaign against the scientific consensus is well-documented at this point, but it makes no difference because the PR campaign has now achieved everything it could. We're past the point where a significant shift in climate is avoidable, we're in the middle of it. The main remaining question is how much of an impact we can have on the rate of change. So while denialists are still picking fights over whether the Earth is warming or cooling, the new area of contention is whether we can do enough to have an impact on the rate and magnitude of change. That's why Exxon has left of the baldly counter-factual anti-science PR campaign; there's enough real uncertainty on that question that they don't have to manufacture bogus uncertainty.
No it's like Exxon is trying to score PR Brownie points; like a child molester who donates to a children's hospital and claims it all balances out in the end.
I agree that this makes the AGU look bad, but only because people are morons.
Well, while I agree with you in principle, coffee is an outlier. After decades of trying to find the cloud to go with the silver lining researchers have been unable to find much evidence for serious harm from sustained heavy coffee usage. You won't get high blood pressure or ulcers; and far from causing cancer there is now solid evidence that coffee protects you from liver and pancreatic cancers.
As for the caffeine, the only serious issue still on the table is possibly higher miscarriage rates. Aside from that the negative effects of caffeine are minor: sleeplessness if taken too late, jitteriness if taken in unaccustomed amounts, withdrawal if you decide to go cold turkey. So don't go cold turkey, drink away and enjoy the benefits.
Now I've made lifestyle changes which have for the most part eliminated my craving for caffeine. Since there's diabetes in my family I've lost weight, increased exercise, and improved my diet. Consequently I don't need caffeine to power through my afternoon fog any more; I can take it or leave it. But the evidence for the healthbenefits of coffee are so overwhelming -- particularly for liver and pancreatic function -- that I've deliberately reintroduced heavy coffee drinking to my daily routine. I brew about 60-90 grams of grounds every day by various methods -- the equivalent of about 4-6 cups of drip coffee. If I have to skip I miss it, but because of the other changes I've made a day without coffee is not the brain-numbing torture it once would have been.
If Dr. Oz claimed that something does all the good things coffee does with so few drawbacks, I'd chalk it up to him being a lying bastard. But coffee's the real deal.
My father told me that anyone with half a brain got tossed of the potential jury pool.
Well, I guess that says bad things about me because I've served on criminal trial juries twice.
What I experienced was a group of ordinary people in a situation where they asked to do something very extraordinary. And in that situation seemingly ordinary people do rise to the occasion. It's actually inspiring to witness that.
Now in defense of my own intellect I had enough of a brain to get accepted to Harvard and MIT -- I chose to got to MIT. Being there taught me a lot about smart people. Super-smart people in many ways aren't that different than just somewhat bright people, but one thing that's a pitfall for them is that they're so accustomed to being right when people around them are wrong. Super-smart people may in fact be less likely to act like fools than ordinary folks, but when they are foolish, boy oh boy there's no fool like a really smart fool -- not for stubbornness at any rate. Yes, you may be right more often than most people, but nobody is right all the time.
So if the prosecutor and defense attorney detected even a whiff of disregard for the opinion of others viewed as intellectual inferiors they'd be right not to want that person on the jury. It's not that that person will be wrong, it's that he won't contribute to the deliberative process. Maybe he'd be a good choice if you wanted a jury of one, but the risk of deadlocking when you have someone infected with overweening intellectual pride is just too high.
This is a matter of law, not "Rights" [sic]. Those two things are aligned only to the degree that politics demands they be aligned; and the politics in the US since 9/11 have been driven by the public's demand politicians do things to make them safe, even if those things have basically no chance of working. So it is quite possible that defending the rights of the American people is illegal, because the American people demand that it be so. It's beginning to look like all those airy-fairy French existentialist philosophers were right all along: the thing that people really dread is freedom.
What Snowden did was an act of civil disobedience. Civil disobedience isn't a get out of jail free card; that's actually the opposite of the way civil disobedience works. First you get into jail, and that is the start of a long, drawn out embarrassment for the authorities. And that can be very long. The South African government held Nelson Mandela for 27 years before it got sick enough of being a global pariah to eat its serving of crow.
So it's entirely likely that under a fair trial Snowden would be convicted and sent to jail for a long time, because the law itself violates peoples' rights.
Noise, really? I've never noticed any noise coming from wind power, so I looked it up. At 100m a wind turbine generates about 50db -- about the same noise level as the ambient sounds in a quiet suburb. As for eyesore, it depends. Maybe in a neighborhood of charming historic buildings, but in industrial neighborhoods turbines are often the least ugly built thing around.
As for building out nuclear to replace coal, it's a good idea, but the problem is having a solution in place in advance for decomissioning the plants and dealing with the spent fuel. Granted the politics of addressing that problem is horrible, but it's not a reasonable solution to kick that down the road because it's too hard to decide what to do about that now. While nuclear may be a good idea environmentally in principle, in practice we don't have our act together well enough to realize that vision. Not at present.
I don't know if this supposed discrepancy is true, but people wouldn't have to have a way to check the gender of a seller for it to be true. For example, imagine that women as a population tend to write their listings somewhat differently than men as a population. Which is not to say that every man could always write a more successful listing than any woman, it would just mean that on average women are socialized to present themselves in a way that sells less well.
That hypothesis seems to be at least partially supported by the study being discussed, in that subjects could get the sex of a lister 59% of the time with only a 9% false identification rate. So you wouldn't have to be consciously biased against women, you'd just have to favor a masculine style of presentation.
I've actually fallen into that trap myself hiring people; looking back on cases where candidates of different sexes were close in their qualifications, I now realize that in at least one case I made a bad decision because I felt more comfortable with the way man presented himself. It wasn't that I believed men were better developers than women, I've had outstanding developers of both sexes working for me. I just mistakenly believed that particular man would be better than that particular woman because of the way they interviewed; the man presented much more confidence, the woman more humility. I've learned to be much more wary of those kinds of vague impressions you can get in an interview.
I don't think you've got the issue here quite right. There's a couple reasons to believe that the 4th Amendment is not applicable in this case. The user of the phone is dead, so a lot of his privacy and autonomy interests are nullified now. He has no papers or effects that belong to him because he's a legal non-person. At best you could argue a chilling effect for other iPhone users -- and that's a pretty good argument. But thing this wasn't even his phone, it belonged to his employer. So while I think the 4th should be applied to phones owned or leased by living users, if the employer has no objection to the government searching the phone I don't see how the 4th applies in this case.
I've heard two serious issues actually raised, namely (1) that what the government is asking Apple to do is bad for the privacy of Apple's customers and (2) that the government has overstepped its authority in what it can compel Apple to do. This isn't a case of Apple sharing documents it has access to with the government, in fact Apple has already done that; the government is in effect asking Apple to develop a new tool that will give it easy access to any iPhone, any time, not just this one.
Aside from the fact that if Apple did it's job well (what are the chances?) developing this tool should be non-trivial, in absence of some kind of established oversight mechanism for using such toolsk the public shouldn't be too keen on letting the government have them.
Well, speaking as someone who's actually run a business, a lot of the secret of success is actually doing things that any fool would know is the right thing to do. The problem is that what you'd instantly see in a hypothetical case to be the right thing to do is often hard to see in a real one, particularly if it involves making changes. That's because people more often use their powers of reasoning to rationalize the status quo than they do to find a better way of doing things. And it's really, really hard in the moment to tell the difference between reasoning and rationalization.
I absolutely agree that a rationally run company would gain a powerful competitive advantage by not discriminating, but in certain cases biases and cognitive flaws can be so widespread that there isn't enough rational behavior to shift the behavior of the market as a whole. If enough people are acting in a certain stupid way, that stupid way of acting is stable and persistent.
Look around you with open eyes, and you'll see self-defeating behavior everywhere. The idea that economic forces are sufficient to purge most irrational behavior from the world is manifestly counter-factual. I know people who've run successful consultancies telling businesses to do painfully obvious things, like stop pouring money into promoting products that are hard to sell and focus on products customers actually seem to want. The gift these consultant have isn't seeing the obvious, it's getting other people to see the obvious.
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Seriously, you're just nitpicking.
(1) the point is people expect stairs to be consistent to some tolerance. We can argue about what that tolerance is, but the precise figure is irrelevant.
(2) if you're going to be nitpicky, well physician heal thyself. A floodplain is a land area prone to flooding; in some lexicons it refers specifically to riparian floodplains, but the term "coastal floodplain" is also used in coastal planning to refer to areas that are flooded by ocean storm surge by FEMA and other agencies.
I used the word "seawall" to give people something concrete to visualize; it has nothing to do with my point but if you prefer you can picture a beach berm, coastal bluff, marsh margin or causeway. The protective "structure" needn't be engineered or built; it merely has to protect what is behind it.
This may well be true. But people *do* expect that the past is a guide to the future, or that if it's not change will be continuous not discrete.
In Tracy Kidder's book House, he interviews a carpenter who talks about stairs. The carpenter claims that if you were to play a slow motion film of people walking up stairs you'd see that the soles of their feet clear the top of each stair tread by a couple of millimeters. They take the first step and then instinctively lift each foot by no more than they absolutely have to clear each step. That's why it's critically important to get the height of the first step right; if it's just a little bit off the stairway will forever after be tripping people up, but they won't know why because the difference is imperceptible.
There's something like that when it comes to buying land in a floodplain. The past performance of flood control structures is like that first step on the stairway; it sets peoples' expectations to future performance. But those structures introduce a discontinuity into a gradually increasing water level. The water may have come within an inch of the seawall top a half dozen times in the last year, but an inch is as good as a mile. But if the sea level rises an inch, well that doesn't sound like much but a lot of people will notice.
I know how encryption works on these devices. Once you've got the passcode you've got the keys to the kingdom.
Yes, they've got an AES chip, but it mainly facilitates a fast "wipe" of data on the phone. Storage is encrypted with a random key, which in turn is encrypted using the UID of the device. The encrypted key is stored in flash. When an emergency wipe is called for, the random key is erased and the data in storage, while still there, becomes inaccessible.
It's a clever compromise between security and convenience, but it's not really all that secure if you're worried about national security agencies. If they can bypass the OS entirely and go straight to memory they can brute force the PIN, and everything is laid bare, provided they reassemble the device or spoof the UID. Or they can simply read the encryption key from flash then decrypt the data they've extracted.
The scheme is plenty secure from ordinary thieves but not a three letter agency; probably not even organized crime. That doesn't make it bad; the lock on your back door isn't bad because it can't stop the CIA from doing a black bag job on you; you just have to be aware if that's a possibility.
Er... you don't make money by printing -- or minting -- it and just giving it away to someone. Coinage and paper money printing have almost nothing to do with the money supply. The ways coins and paper money get into circulation are exactly the same: they're purchased with money that everyone already agrees exists. So when a depository institution buys a newly printed dollar from the Fed, a new physical dollar enters circulation while and old dollar (possibly physical or possibly abstract) is removed from circulation.
I suppose if you minted a million dollar coin, there is in a sense a million dollars more than there was before. But it's not in circulation, it's sitting in a vault at the mint, so it might as well not exist.
The FBI isn't asking Apple to decrypt the phone. It's not encrypted, it's protected by a four digit PIN. Naturally it's trivial to defeat a four digit PIN if you have unlimited retries, which is why iOS limits you to, I think, ten successive attempts before the phone is wiped.
It all boils down to the old security/convenience tradeoff. Yes, you'd like the security of a phone where all the data was encrypted with a high entropy key, but you prefer a phone that you can unlock in a few seconds then use in an unrestricted manner. What the FBI is asking for is a version of iOS in which they can rapidly try an unlimited number of PIN guesses. You could get into any phone in a matter of hours that way. Heck you could built a robot with a capacitive stylus that tries ten PINs/minute and go through all the possible PINs in 16 hours; what's more if you permuted the sequence to prioritize the PINs mostly likely to be chosen by humans it'd probably finish in a fraction of that.
The notion that your iPhone data is somehow safe from the US Government is somewhat ludicrous. All the feds would have to do if the data on this phone were really critical to national security would be to take the phone apart, desolder the flash chips and dump the memory on them. Even if that data were encrypted, they could break the weak PIN trivially. A team of MIT course 6 juniors could probably do it.
So what does the FBI get by making this demand? Two things. A legal precedent they can use to force vendors to build back doors into their products, and an insecure version of iOS they could potentially load on anyone's iPhone that was out of their possession for a few hours. That has a number of advantages if you're the FBI and you want to do things that are outside or legal oversight.
What I'd propose is a compromise: we give the data to the FBI without giving them the sneaky side effects they want. After all, Apple has already handed over the backup, so we're talking about a marginal difference as far as customer privacy is concerned. Apple should create the compromised iOS version, and break into the iPhone, hand the data over to the FBI along with the totally wiped phone. That way the FBI is never in possession of a compromised version of iOS, and there is no legal precedent saying that vendors have to provide such a thing to them.
The game isn't to make it impossible for the contraband dealers to get their money -- if it were then we automatically lose. It's to make it sufficiently cumbersome that it's more likely they're caught.
Clearly an industry which can create narco-submarines is capable of getting heavy money out of the country, but note that the way narcosubmarines are most often stopped before they launch is human intelligence. The more people involved in a secret, the harder it is to keep. The conversion of bulky inventory to cash that's compact enough for a single person to carry is a big help in evading detection.
In some ways the take away lesson is that the best people are easiest to exploit.
Think about it. This guy's life was derailed by his feeling of personal responsibility for the consequences of his work. Granted, he shouldn't have agreed to designing and programming a game in five weeks when it normally took six months, but he was only twenty-four years old. People don't give inexperienced 24 year-olds 30 million dollars to spend because you don't expect someone like that to have the maturity to say "no". Many might have the judgement to do that, but it's normal for young, brilliant people to feel invincible, and the people with control of the purse strings should have known that.
Why not get rid of paper money denominated over $20, and introduce coins instead. After all, what difference does it make for most valid uses whether the material we make our physical money out of is paper or, say, stainless steel? And lets adopt a simple convention that $10,000 in coins denominated $50 or above weighs a kilogram. That makes the coins easy to count, and you can easily carry several thousands of dollars in cash on your person, but a million dollars in coins would weigh 100 kilos.
It'd still be possible to put your life savings under your mattress. Steel has a density of roughly 8000 kilos/m^3, so a million dollars of coins would still be quite compact. However paying for that $10 million dollar cocaine shipment would be extremely inconvenient to do in untraceable cash because it'd literally weigh a ton.
That's because they're working out issues. There's nothing like a persecution complex to take the sting off your personal mediocrity.
Personally, I find the idea of "settled science" ludicrous. And, FWIW, I'm a real scientist with genuine credentials to back that up (PhD physics from Tier 1 university).
Excellent. So you'll be investing in my perpetual motion machine then.
why in a country with negative interest rates the central bank would worry if people can't stuff their mattresses with large bills? It seems to me that if you're trying to avoid potential deflation you don't want people squirreling away their money in the banks or their mattresses.
ExxonMobil also has a huge vested interest in refuting any false role that burning oil has in accelerating climate change.
Yes, but you're premising your argument based on an assumption contrary to fact, which is that the truth about what oil is actually doing to the climate has anything to do with Exxon's motivations.
In the early 80s the scientific consensus was just finished shifting from projecting global cooling from the 1950s to anthropogenic CO2 driven warming. I remember this well because my wife the geophysicist was in graduate school at the time and it was an exciting but still contentious time. And Exxon was clearly aware of this shift at the time because as an oil company they employ people who follow geophysics. At the same time Exxon had just completed a thirty billion dollar deal to open the Natuna natural gas fields in Indonesia -- a reserve that's 71% CO2. When put into production it will become the single largest point source of CO2 in the world, accounting for 1% of all human CO2 emissions in the world. So when James Hansen testified about the emerging AGW consensus in 1988, Exxon suddenly realized it would lose tens of billions of dollars if Congress actually decided to do something about it. If you were Exxon management, what would you do?
The connection between the Natuna gas fields and Exxon's taking the lead in the PR campaign against the scientific consensus is well-documented at this point, but it makes no difference because the PR campaign has now achieved everything it could. We're past the point where a significant shift in climate is avoidable, we're in the middle of it. The main remaining question is how much of an impact we can have on the rate of change. So while denialists are still picking fights over whether the Earth is warming or cooling, the new area of contention is whether we can do enough to have an impact on the rate and magnitude of change. That's why Exxon has left of the baldly counter-factual anti-science PR campaign; there's enough real uncertainty on that question that they don't have to manufacture bogus uncertainty.
No it's like Exxon is trying to score PR Brownie points; like a child molester who donates to a children's hospital and claims it all balances out in the end.
I agree that this makes the AGU look bad, but only because people are morons.
How is that different from calling ExxonMobil "heretics"?
Heretics actually believe the ideas they're spreading.
Well, I'm sorry to hear that; but you can go de-caff and still get the befits of the phenols and terpenes in coffee.
Well, while I agree with you in principle, coffee is an outlier. After decades of trying to find the cloud to go with the silver lining researchers have been unable to find much evidence for serious harm from sustained heavy coffee usage. You won't get high blood pressure or ulcers; and far from causing cancer there is now solid evidence that coffee protects you from liver and pancreatic cancers.
As for the caffeine, the only serious issue still on the table is possibly higher miscarriage rates. Aside from that the negative effects of caffeine are minor: sleeplessness if taken too late, jitteriness if taken in unaccustomed amounts, withdrawal if you decide to go cold turkey. So don't go cold turkey, drink away and enjoy the benefits.
Now I've made lifestyle changes which have for the most part eliminated my craving for caffeine. Since there's diabetes in my family I've lost weight, increased exercise, and improved my diet. Consequently I don't need caffeine to power through my afternoon fog any more; I can take it or leave it. But the evidence for the health benefits of coffee are so overwhelming -- particularly for liver and pancreatic function -- that I've deliberately reintroduced heavy coffee drinking to my daily routine. I brew about 60-90 grams of grounds every day by various methods -- the equivalent of about 4-6 cups of drip coffee. If I have to skip I miss it, but because of the other changes I've made a day without coffee is not the brain-numbing torture it once would have been.
If Dr. Oz claimed that something does all the good things coffee does with so few drawbacks, I'd chalk it up to him being a lying bastard. But coffee's the real deal.
My father told me that anyone with half a brain got tossed of the potential jury pool.
Well, I guess that says bad things about me because I've served on criminal trial juries twice.
What I experienced was a group of ordinary people in a situation where they asked to do something very extraordinary. And in that situation seemingly ordinary people do rise to the occasion. It's actually inspiring to witness that.
Now in defense of my own intellect I had enough of a brain to get accepted to Harvard and MIT -- I chose to got to MIT. Being there taught me a lot about smart people. Super-smart people in many ways aren't that different than just somewhat bright people, but one thing that's a pitfall for them is that they're so accustomed to being right when people around them are wrong. Super-smart people may in fact be less likely to act like fools than ordinary folks, but when they are foolish, boy oh boy there's no fool like a really smart fool -- not for stubbornness at any rate. Yes, you may be right more often than most people, but nobody is right all the time.
So if the prosecutor and defense attorney detected even a whiff of disregard for the opinion of others viewed as intellectual inferiors they'd be right not to want that person on the jury. It's not that that person will be wrong, it's that he won't contribute to the deliberative process. Maybe he'd be a good choice if you wanted a jury of one, but the risk of deadlocking when you have someone infected with overweening intellectual pride is just too high.
It's not as simple as that.
This is a matter of law, not "Rights" [sic]. Those two things are aligned only to the degree that politics demands they be aligned; and the politics in the US since 9/11 have been driven by the public's demand politicians do things to make them safe, even if those things have basically no chance of working. So it is quite possible that defending the rights of the American people is illegal, because the American people demand that it be so. It's beginning to look like all those airy-fairy French existentialist philosophers were right all along: the thing that people really dread is freedom.
What Snowden did was an act of civil disobedience. Civil disobedience isn't a get out of jail free card; that's actually the opposite of the way civil disobedience works. First you get into jail, and that is the start of a long, drawn out embarrassment for the authorities. And that can be very long. The South African government held Nelson Mandela for 27 years before it got sick enough of being a global pariah to eat its serving of crow.
So it's entirely likely that under a fair trial Snowden would be convicted and sent to jail for a long time, because the law itself violates peoples' rights.
Noise, really? I've never noticed any noise coming from wind power, so I looked it up. At 100m a wind turbine generates about 50db -- about the same noise level as the ambient sounds in a quiet suburb. As for eyesore, it depends. Maybe in a neighborhood of charming historic buildings, but in industrial neighborhoods turbines are often the least ugly built thing around.
As for building out nuclear to replace coal, it's a good idea, but the problem is having a solution in place in advance for decomissioning the plants and dealing with the spent fuel. Granted the politics of addressing that problem is horrible, but it's not a reasonable solution to kick that down the road because it's too hard to decide what to do about that now. While nuclear may be a good idea environmentally in principle, in practice we don't have our act together well enough to realize that vision. Not at present.
I don't know if this supposed discrepancy is true, but people wouldn't have to have a way to check the gender of a seller for it to be true. For example, imagine that women as a population tend to write their listings somewhat differently than men as a population. Which is not to say that every man could always write a more successful listing than any woman, it would just mean that on average women are socialized to present themselves in a way that sells less well.
That hypothesis seems to be at least partially supported by the study being discussed, in that subjects could get the sex of a lister 59% of the time with only a 9% false identification rate. So you wouldn't have to be consciously biased against women, you'd just have to favor a masculine style of presentation.
I've actually fallen into that trap myself hiring people; looking back on cases where candidates of different sexes were close in their qualifications, I now realize that in at least one case I made a bad decision because I felt more comfortable with the way man presented himself. It wasn't that I believed men were better developers than women, I've had outstanding developers of both sexes working for me. I just mistakenly believed that particular man would be better than that particular woman because of the way they interviewed; the man presented much more confidence, the woman more humility. I've learned to be much more wary of those kinds of vague impressions you can get in an interview.
I don't think you've got the issue here quite right. There's a couple reasons to believe that the 4th Amendment is not applicable in this case. The user of the phone is dead, so a lot of his privacy and autonomy interests are nullified now. He has no papers or effects that belong to him because he's a legal non-person. At best you could argue a chilling effect for other iPhone users -- and that's a pretty good argument. But thing this wasn't even his phone, it belonged to his employer. So while I think the 4th should be applied to phones owned or leased by living users, if the employer has no objection to the government searching the phone I don't see how the 4th applies in this case.
I've heard two serious issues actually raised, namely (1) that what the government is asking Apple to do is bad for the privacy of Apple's customers and (2) that the government has overstepped its authority in what it can compel Apple to do. This isn't a case of Apple sharing documents it has access to with the government, in fact Apple has already done that; the government is in effect asking Apple to develop a new tool that will give it easy access to any iPhone, any time, not just this one.
Aside from the fact that if Apple did it's job well (what are the chances?) developing this tool should be non-trivial, in absence of some kind of established oversight mechanism for using such toolsk the public shouldn't be too keen on letting the government have them.
Well, speaking as someone who's actually run a business, a lot of the secret of success is actually doing things that any fool would know is the right thing to do. The problem is that what you'd instantly see in a hypothetical case to be the right thing to do is often hard to see in a real one, particularly if it involves making changes. That's because people more often use their powers of reasoning to rationalize the status quo than they do to find a better way of doing things. And it's really, really hard in the moment to tell the difference between reasoning and rationalization.
I absolutely agree that a rationally run company would gain a powerful competitive advantage by not discriminating, but in certain cases biases and cognitive flaws can be so widespread that there isn't enough rational behavior to shift the behavior of the market as a whole. If enough people are acting in a certain stupid way, that stupid way of acting is stable and persistent.
Look around you with open eyes, and you'll see self-defeating behavior everywhere. The idea that economic forces are sufficient to purge most irrational behavior from the world is manifestly counter-factual. I know people who've run successful consultancies telling businesses to do painfully obvious things, like stop pouring money into promoting products that are hard to sell and focus on products customers actually seem to want. The gift these consultant have isn't seeing the obvious, it's getting other people to see the obvious.
Yes, but my point is that capitalism doesn't make hiring decisions. People do, and people care about things that only an idiot would..
The fact is, if women were a better value at 72 Cents on the dollar, any business would be foolish to hire men.
... And your point would be?