Yes, I know about the political compass, but I believe it is intrinsically flawed as a guide to authoritarian behavior. Yes, you can be located in the upper left or right hand quadrants in terms of your theoretical opinions, but authoritarian leaders will always do what's most opportunistic and self-serving regardless of what they say they're for on the left/right axis.
Take the Nazi Party -- aka the "National Socialists". Their early platform fits very poorly into the political compass model; or rather it fits rather neatly into the model in a misleading way. They were authoritarian leftists according to the political compass model, in particular they were corporatists -- which doesn't refer to rule by business corporations, but rather rule by institutions representing groups in society. They also had racist and nationalistic planks to their program which differ dramatically from other upper left-hand quadrant parties.
All of the positions espoused by the Nazi party have a simple, straightforward explanation: mass insecurity, leading to fear and resentment of foreigners and of the elite. The resentment of foreigners accounts for the "national" part of national socialism, and the resentment of the elite accounts for the "socialism". However when Hitler gained the chancellorship he had no more use for the anti-elitist strain in the Nazi party, so he quickly moved to purge the party of its socialist elements in the Night of Long Knives. This illustrated the behavioral unreliability of authoritarian leaders I'm talking about. According to his rhetoric Hitler was as national socialist as ever, but given the lack of interest of authoritarians in consistency that's mere lip service. Authoritarian leaders always act to consolidate their power; their views on the other axis are window dressing. And the nature of authoritarian followers is to follow regardless of the leader's ideological inconsistencies.
That's not to say that the wise authoritarian doesn't take some care in shifting his positions. I think this explains the vital role of anti-semitism in the success of Naziism. The Nazis were initially anti-capitalist and anti-communist; but by identifying both with Jews they could keep some pretense of consistency while coopting big business and playing footsie with Stalin. You see what's really wrong with capitalism is the Jews; so doubling down on the anti-semitism allows you to shift right because it was really the Jewish element of capitalism that was the problem. Of course it's all opportunistic nonsense, and trying to locate that nonsense on some political axis is a waste of time. The one consistent thing about the Nazis was they could be relied upon to consolidate their power.
I also think that left/right axis of the political compass is a gross oversimplification, but that's a story for another day. Yes, the political compass is better than collapsing all differences to a single axis, but it's still simplistic.
Well, so what? What he's saying should hardly be controversial. As technologies make humans more powerful, it has made them more dangerous to themselves. Why would you expect otherwise?
Note that he's quite vague about what he means by "threat to humanity", which also puts him on fairly safe ground. I personally don't think that humans are quite capable of extinguishing life on the planet yet, given the adaptability of life. In fact given human behavioral adaptability I don't even think we're capable of driving ourselves to extinction. But we're certainly capable of destroying our civilization, which would not be unprecedented; in fact it's the historical norm. Modern humans have existed for about 2000 years and there is exactly one human institution that has lasted for more than 1% of that time: the monarchy of Japan.
If we are going to talk about extraordinary claims that therefore require extraordinary evidence, well that would have to be the claim that our civilization will endure indefinitely. It's true that many of the common causes of civilization collapse arguably don't apply to us. The defining characteristic of our civilization is the dominance of global institutions like empires and corporations; this makes collapse from outside invasion unlikely. On the other hand, technology has put novel means of cultural extinction into our hands, for example nuclear weapons and biological warfare agents.
Personally, I think the most underrated potential agent of collapse for our civilization is our banking system. Everything we do is controlled and motivated by money, which is increasingly abstract, credit, which is intrinsically abstract. If the banking system fell apart, or just the credit part of it fell apart, the whole show would instantly grind to a halt.
Of course; anyone with a half a brain can see he's a bigtime bullshitter. But that doesn't mean you should dismiss what he says; you can a learn a lot from the BS he spouts about the people who support him. What this shows is that they're not conservative or libertarian; and they're certainly not liberal either. So what are they?
They're authoritarian.
Authoritarians are a different breed from conservatives or liberals; conservatives and liberals differ on issues of ideology, but authoritarianism is about the cult of personality. The key attribute of an authoritarian leader is the utter lack of intellectual integrity. Authoritarian leaders don't serve ideologies, they use them, even mixing and matches to suit the need of the moment.
So the election of an authoritarian would be news for anyone who holds a principled political position, no matter what position that leader claims to support. In this case Trump is running as a conservative, but here he's signaled his complete lack of interest in consistency with principled conservatism. And his admirers admire him all the more for it. They aren't interested in consistency, they're interested in a "strong" leader, by which they mean someone who will unashamedly give voice to their resentments -- of foreigners and of the elite. That should sound alarmingly familiar.
So yes, Trump doesn't intend to force Apple to make its computers here. But if he gets elected and it serves his purposes he'll try. If he fails, he'll just point that as proof he has to have more power.
Does it make sense to ask "are electrical circuits safe?" Circuits are designed, and some designs are safe and others are dangerous.
Likewise there is no such category of things "genetically modified crops" that you can treat as one thing from the point of safety, because each genetically modified organism is an unique artificial construct. You could genetically engineer potatoes to contain ricin for example, and that thing would be unsafe by design. Heretofore nobody has found harmful GMO foods because they are the product of safe design process which protects the investment needed to bring a GMO product to market.
Some day in the future it may be possible to do something like desktop genetic engineering. If the cost of creating a genetically modified crop drops enough, and enough people try their hand at it, then eventually someone's going to make something dangerous. This might even be intentional. But at present when you look for GMOs you're looking for screwups.
We already know there are questions we can't answer. In fact, it isn't that hard to write down questions where barring extreme surprises, we can't answer them even given that they are essentially just simple computations. For example, does 2^(10^(10^500)) +1 have an even or odd number of distinct prime factors? That took two seconds to write down, but unless there's something very weird about numbers close to powers of 2 then we literally lack the computational power in the observable universe to answer that question.
Hmm. It may not be that we can't answer the question about the prime factors of very large numbers, but I think it might be more correct to say that we can't find out whether we are unable to answer that question, except by counterexample.
Take a look around you. Everything you can see has a relative position in three axes -- for example further north or south. It stands to reason (apparently) that everything is further north or south of everything else. So what's north of the North Pole?
When we say "logic", we usually don't mean mathematical logic, which has no position on truth per se, but is really more about consistency: if you believe this you must also believe that. So what do we usually mean? I think we usually mean intuition, which is based on our experience of our immediate environment. But if we extrapolate far enough outside of that immediate experience, those intuitions are to parochial to be much guidance, and our language in particular lets us down, leading us to ask meaningless questions like "what's north of the North Pole?"
How do we know this? How do we know our intuitions are wrong? Well, ironically it's logic, telling us that if what we immediately experience makes sense then conditions outside our experience have to contradict our intuitions.
Surely Iran won't secretly develop nukes anyway with all the billions they get from the sanctions being lifted
If Iran really has the ability to secretly develop nukes, then sanctions really have no point. Consider Iran in comparison to North Korea; Iran has 3x the population and 30x the GDP. Iran generates 750,000 university graduates/year and has substantial industrial, technological and scientific capabilities. If Iran wants a nuke it can develop a nuke, and it'll be a lot better than North Korea's nuke, provided they can get the fuel.
It should also be noted that Iran and North Korea share one advantage in the proliferation game that Iraq did not have: their own uranium mines. So they don't have to go to Niger for yellow cake, they can dig it out of their own ground.
So this leaves us with three options when it comes to sanctions and nuclear non-proliferation in Iran.
(1) We can maintain the status quo and hope that the sanctions render Iran incapable of developing its own nuke, despite Iran's obvious and massive advantages over North Korea even with sanctions in place.
(2) We can cut a deal which makes it much more difficult for Iran to produce weapons grade fuel. Naturally since this is a "deal" we have to have something to offer them.
(3) We can try to do to Iran what we did to Iraq in 2003-2011.
Before you decide you should consider the immensely greater geographical difficulty of fighting in Iran than in Iraq. Iran is a mountainous country 3x the size of Iraq and twice the population. Unlike Baghdad, Tehran is beyond the reach of US naval aviation, except from the extreme northern end of the Persian Gulf, and the entire length of that be extremely perilous for US ships to operate in. Basically we're looking at the most difficult land campaign the US has undertaken in since the WW2. The end result of that campaign isn't in question, but it's not reasonable to expect better or faster results than we got in Iraq.
This. Just to make the point even clearer, it takes a long, long time to go from ore to bomb grade uranium. The only way to speed up the process is to scale it up -- to have lots and lots of centrifuges working in parallel on lots and lots of uranium, like the US did in the Manhattan Project. Here is what our plant looked like. You can also peruse aerial images Pakistan's enrichment facility to see what a more modern plant would look like. These are not small, readily concealable facilities.
Is it possible that Iran is operating centrifuges completely underground where our intelligence services can't see them, as the GP poster claims? Sure, but only if their patient enough to wait decades to produce enough HEU for a bomb. The construction of an underground facility large enough to achieve "fast breakout" would be if anything harder to conceal than a surface plant. All the other parts of making a bomb and a delivery system are readily concealable, which is why anti-proliferation efforts focus on fuel. That means either Pu production, which would be very hard to conceal, or uranium enrichment, which is impossible.
So what paths does this leave Iran to "fast breakout"? Well, without a concealable enrichment program they'd have access to secret stashes of fuel that's already bomb grade or nearly so. But if that were the case the game's essentially over; there's nothing left that further sanctions could accomplish.
I don't feel any sympathy either, but your and my feelings aren't what's important here. We're still talking about a theft and on general principles I think the people who did it ought to be caught and punished.
It takes just one person getting infected by some route (of which eating bush meat is one); how perfectly can do you think it's possible to insulate 340 people living West Africa from the wildlife there?
There's basically three places to attack a zoonotic infectious agent:
(1) In the enzootic reservoir (very likely impossible, otherwise we'd have eradicated flu); (2) at the point of contact between the enzootic reservoir and the human population (worthwhile but will never be 100% effective); (3) at the point of transmission between humans (potentially highly effective; if R0 1 the epidemic will "burn itself out").
If you want to get science reporting, then go to a source that provides science reporting. Like ScienceNews.org. It is funny that you bring up science reporting, since science reporting has definitely improved drastically. You just don't have to read it from a journalist who may not know anything about actual science.
You misunderstand my point. I've subscribed to Science News for over thirty years, so getting science news (small s, small n) is not a problem for me. However I live in a country where most people have never heard of science news; they don't have any access to reliable information on science, or indeed any other difficult subject area.
Like most generalizations, that's an exaggeration. I know because I'm almost 60 years old now, and I actually remember the way things used to be, and not with rose-colored glasses. Most things are way better than they used to be, but journalism isn't one of those things.
Journalism were never perfect; like any human institution it had its faults and biases. But it used to work far, far better than it does today. Take science reporting; if you lived in a major-ish city the leading newspaper in your town probably had a reporter dedicated to covering science topics -- sometimes more than one (thanks, Sputnik!). When there wasn't a major story like the moon landing those reporters churned out weekly science supplements.
We can actually measure the declinein dedicated science reporting by counting the number of newspapers with weekly science supplements. According to the Columbia Journalism Review in 1989 95 American newspapers had science supplements. By 2008 that had dropped to 35, and as of 2013 there were only 19 science supplements left. So when you have a science related story like climate change, or Ebola, the people the public turns to for information on those things have no more understanding of science or mathematics than they do.
There have been similar measurable declines in foreign affairs coverage as well, and while relatively more people are getting news from non-print media like TV those news sources have been increasingly moving to cheap, profitable, but less informative opinion "journalism".
Now there are some bright spots as well, it's not all doom and gloom. I think some of the better infotainment shows like The Daily Show or Last Week Tonight are tremendous assets, taking the place of news/opinion magazines for younger people today and in often doing that pretty well. I think their obvious snarkiness is actually less dangerous than the implicit biases of journalism back in the day. But there's no substitute for wearing out shoe leather tracking down facts, something that's in decline across the board.
Surely anybody responsible for security at a nuclear facility hasn't considered every possible way someone could cause a breach?
You don't seem to grasp the way most people prioritize concerns, which amounts to this: if (a) nothing has happened so far and (b) nobody around you seems to be concerned, then the risk in question isn't a priority. And if you think that things would have to be different in the management of nuclear plants, well look at how TEPCO, a company running coastal nuclear plants in the most seismically active region in the world, responded to a drastic upward revision by scientists of the probability of a 10+m tsunami -- which was not to respond at all.
Ordinary people pay attention to their personal experience and to the thinking of the people around them, which in itself is a good thing; but they don't pay much attention to analysis. In effect they treat theoretical concerns as being purely hypothetical, but those things aren't the same at all. So generally you have to wait for something really bad to happen before they'll do something about it, even if you can be almost certain that that thing is going to happen and you'll wish afterwards you'd prepared even a little bit for it.
Planetary Defense Office? Really? About the only thing worse I can think to call it is the Planetary Defense Registry of Motor Vehicles..
Here's how I'd sex up the presentation. I'd call it the Planetary Defense Force, issue snazzy uniforms and fund the program by selling T-shirts and caps. I feel certain that would raise far more money than Congress would ever appropriate for this purpose, except possibly in the event we noticed an asteroid that's actually going to hit us next Tuesday.
The rankings in individual benchmarks were all over the place; a composite of those benchmarks is only valid for some theoretical "average" workload that's the average of all the workloads each individual benchmark is supposed to represent; almost nobody is bound to have a workload that resembles that "average".
In fact the whole "shooutout" scenario is silly because Clear Linux is a container-centric distro. It makes no sense at all to compare it to general purpose distros like Ubuntu and plain vanilla Centos then leave out Red Hat/Centos's Atomic Host flavors.
In any case if performance is your paramount concern, then "out-of-the-box" performance is bound to be irrelevant to you because you'll be compiling from source with your own choice of compiler and flags, as well as fiddling with all those bells and whistles exposed in the/sys interface. What's interesting would be an exploration of why various distros did better or worse on individual benchmarks.
Actually once you get to the nitroglycerin step you are squarely in the ATF's purview, since they regulate explosives. "ATF" is an anachronistic acronym; since 1970 agency's full actual name is "The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives".
But glycerin is a commonplace an innocuous chemical widely used in cosmetics and food; you can buy it by the barrel without raising any eyebrows. It makes no sense to reason that fats are under the purview of ATF because you can produce glycerin from it.
I tried to google the source of the grease story, and it appears that back in 2011 SCL asked for ATF's technical assistance in tracking down grease dumpers, but that the camera placements currently in question are for use in a current investigation by the Puget Sound Regional Crime Gun Task Force.
So no big mystery about why the ATF is tracking down grease dumpers, that's just a misreading of the evidence trail.
Laws like this aren't proposed to make people safer; they're proposed to make people feel like someone is doing something to make them safer. So the consequences of this proposal depend on the degree to which the French people feel vulnerable at this point in time. At a minimum it's bound reinforce the Conservatives' standing with their xenophobic base. It might gain them supporters. Depending on how future events play out, something like it may even pass, even though it demonstrably won't make anyone safer and arguably makes them more vulnerable.
Well, it's hardly news that Li-ion batteries have a variety of safety features built in. When I was an MIT student back in the 70s Li-ion was exotic tech that you took extreme precautions with. Today Li-ion cells have got so many layers of belts and suspenders it's perfectly safe to be carrying a 3500 mAh battery in your pocket -- as I am dong right now.
But as effective safety measures are, that's not quite the same as having an inherently safe cell. An inherently safe cell could well end up being cheaper, for one thing, or easier to scale to large sizes with the same safety margins. Of course most interesting inventions come to nothing, but fundamental improvements in the basic architecture of a common type of cell could potentially alter the economics of electric vehicles, for example.
Well, I'm not sure how commonplace people getting arrested for letting their kids to school actually is. When these things happen they become national causes célèbres -- and with good reason. But I wonder whether this isn't the mirror image of the "stranger danger" hysteria, that is to say something that does occasionally happen but much less often than we imagine it does. I see elementary school kids walking to school or the local park in my town all the time. If you visit New York City it's not remarkable to see kids on the subway.
The thing is that my town was incorporated in 1850 and retains its early 20th C pedestrian infrastructure: sidewalks, neighborhood schools and parks. Most of those parks have no dedicated parking, so walking is the norm. Recent subdivisions have marginalized walking. Now at my sister's relatively new subdivision in California there are large, beautiful parks with ample parking, but you can't walk to them safely because there many stretches with no sidewalks or crosswalks, and the cars travel on those roads at forty or fifty miles an hour. So while I had no problem sending my kids to the park on their own in my neighborhood, I'd probably drive them there. Same parent, different urban planning context.
I think of this situation as being in part like the hygiene hypothesis for the rise in allergies: without the level of exposure to infectious microorganisms that would have been normal throughout most of human evolution, our immune systems go haywire. It is now so safe for children our normal protective instincts go haywire. Back when kids routinely worked in textile mills or as powder monkeys in mines nobody's eyebrows would have been raised by some kid walking a few miles to school. Now that kids are very safe indeed bad things that happen to them walking down a well-traveled street in broad daylight are a relatively greater fraction of the overall risk, even though that risk is very, very small.
Then there's the way that our information filters affect our perceptions of risk. Take school shootings; in the three years since Sandy Hook, 555 children 12 or under have been killed by firearms in the US; but as shocking as that is, you have to put it context; there are roughly 29 million children 14 and under in the US. In comparison about 2600 babies die each year from low birth weight; while in a global context the US infant mortality rate is relatively low, compared to similar wealthy countries it is shockingly high, which suggests that man of these deaths are preventable. Likewise the comparable number of children who die from influenza and pneumonia in that period isn't on the radar screen because it isn't news when a child dies from a commonplace but largely preventable infection. In 2014 there were 32,000 cases of whooping cough in the US leading to 20 deaths, and pertussis is an entirely eradicable disease.
Don't get me wrong; insofar as school shootings are preventable by practical steps we should take those steps; but we ought to prioritize causes of mortality and injury based on hard data, not our information filters.
Interestingly enough, Slate leans a bit to the left... and most anti-vaxxers lean very much to the left, so why was the bile necessary?
You are obviously unfamiliar with how the left <air_quotes>functions </air_quotes>.
No matter where you are no the political spectrum, if you are completely honest with yourself you have to admit there are some people on your side who are an embarrassment. The kind of people who take an important and valuable idea and find a way to make a complete hash of it. The left wing anti-vaxxers have absorbed the lessons about distrusting the self-serving narratives of corporations and the powerful, but in their place they accept uncritically a different set of self-serving narratives peddled by anti-vaxx grifters. The anti-vaxxers cop the Emersonian self-reliance attitude, but they miss the really important part about thinking for themselves.
There is no such thing. Oh, there's remote sensing, but you have to ground truth that. And it leaves you in the dark about anything that happened before the 1990s when the first climate observation satellites were launched.
Slashdot Mirror
Typo, should read 200000 years. I should think that's obvious.
Yes, I know about the political compass, but I believe it is intrinsically flawed as a guide to authoritarian behavior. Yes, you can be located in the upper left or right hand quadrants in terms of your theoretical opinions, but authoritarian leaders will always do what's most opportunistic and self-serving regardless of what they say they're for on the left/right axis.
Take the Nazi Party -- aka the "National Socialists". Their early platform fits very poorly into the political compass model; or rather it fits rather neatly into the model in a misleading way. They were authoritarian leftists according to the political compass model, in particular they were corporatists -- which doesn't refer to rule by business corporations, but rather rule by institutions representing groups in society. They also had racist and nationalistic planks to their program which differ dramatically from other upper left-hand quadrant parties.
All of the positions espoused by the Nazi party have a simple, straightforward explanation: mass insecurity, leading to fear and resentment of foreigners and of the elite. The resentment of foreigners accounts for the "national" part of national socialism, and the resentment of the elite accounts for the "socialism". However when Hitler gained the chancellorship he had no more use for the anti-elitist strain in the Nazi party, so he quickly moved to purge the party of its socialist elements in the Night of Long Knives. This illustrated the behavioral unreliability of authoritarian leaders I'm talking about. According to his rhetoric Hitler was as national socialist as ever, but given the lack of interest of authoritarians in consistency that's mere lip service. Authoritarian leaders always act to consolidate their power; their views on the other axis are window dressing. And the nature of authoritarian followers is to follow regardless of the leader's ideological inconsistencies.
That's not to say that the wise authoritarian doesn't take some care in shifting his positions. I think this explains the vital role of anti-semitism in the success of Naziism. The Nazis were initially anti-capitalist and anti-communist; but by identifying both with Jews they could keep some pretense of consistency while coopting big business and playing footsie with Stalin. You see what's really wrong with capitalism is the Jews; so doubling down on the anti-semitism allows you to shift right because it was really the Jewish element of capitalism that was the problem. Of course it's all opportunistic nonsense, and trying to locate that nonsense on some political axis is a waste of time. The one consistent thing about the Nazis was they could be relied upon to consolidate their power.
I also think that left/right axis of the political compass is a gross oversimplification, but that's a story for another day. Yes, the political compass is better than collapsing all differences to a single axis, but it's still simplistic.
Well, so what? What he's saying should hardly be controversial. As technologies make humans more powerful, it has made them more dangerous to themselves. Why would you expect otherwise?
Note that he's quite vague about what he means by "threat to humanity", which also puts him on fairly safe ground. I personally don't think that humans are quite capable of extinguishing life on the planet yet, given the adaptability of life. In fact given human behavioral adaptability I don't even think we're capable of driving ourselves to extinction. But we're certainly capable of destroying our civilization, which would not be unprecedented; in fact it's the historical norm. Modern humans have existed for about 2000 years and there is exactly one human institution that has lasted for more than 1% of that time: the monarchy of Japan.
If we are going to talk about extraordinary claims that therefore require extraordinary evidence, well that would have to be the claim that our civilization will endure indefinitely. It's true that many of the common causes of civilization collapse arguably don't apply to us. The defining characteristic of our civilization is the dominance of global institutions like empires and corporations; this makes collapse from outside invasion unlikely. On the other hand, technology has put novel means of cultural extinction into our hands, for example nuclear weapons and biological warfare agents.
Personally, I think the most underrated potential agent of collapse for our civilization is our banking system. Everything we do is controlled and motivated by money, which is increasingly abstract, credit, which is intrinsically abstract. If the banking system fell apart, or just the credit part of it fell apart, the whole show would instantly grind to a halt.
Of course; anyone with a half a brain can see he's a bigtime bullshitter. But that doesn't mean you should dismiss what he says; you can a learn a lot from the BS he spouts about the people who support him. What this shows is that they're not conservative or libertarian; and they're certainly not liberal either. So what are they?
They're authoritarian.
Authoritarians are a different breed from conservatives or liberals; conservatives and liberals differ on issues of ideology, but authoritarianism is about the cult of personality. The key attribute of an authoritarian leader is the utter lack of intellectual integrity. Authoritarian leaders don't serve ideologies, they use them, even mixing and matches to suit the need of the moment.
So the election of an authoritarian would be news for anyone who holds a principled political position, no matter what position that leader claims to support. In this case Trump is running as a conservative, but here he's signaled his complete lack of interest in consistency with principled conservatism. And his admirers admire him all the more for it. They aren't interested in consistency, they're interested in a "strong" leader, by which they mean someone who will unashamedly give voice to their resentments -- of foreigners and of the elite. That should sound alarmingly familiar.
So yes, Trump doesn't intend to force Apple to make its computers here. But if he gets elected and it serves his purposes he'll try. If he fails, he'll just point that as proof he has to have more power.
Does it make sense to ask "are electrical circuits safe?" Circuits are designed, and some designs are safe and others are dangerous.
Likewise there is no such category of things "genetically modified crops" that you can treat as one thing from the point of safety, because each genetically modified organism is an unique artificial construct. You could genetically engineer potatoes to contain ricin for example, and that thing would be unsafe by design. Heretofore nobody has found harmful GMO foods because they are the product of safe design process which protects the investment needed to bring a GMO product to market.
Some day in the future it may be possible to do something like desktop genetic engineering. If the cost of creating a genetically modified crop drops enough, and enough people try their hand at it, then eventually someone's going to make something dangerous. This might even be intentional. But at present when you look for GMOs you're looking for screwups.
We already know there are questions we can't answer. In fact, it isn't that hard to write down questions where barring extreme surprises, we can't answer them even given that they are essentially just simple computations. For example, does 2^(10^(10^500)) +1 have an even or odd number of distinct prime factors? That took two seconds to write down, but unless there's something very weird about numbers close to powers of 2 then we literally lack the computational power in the observable universe to answer that question.
Hmm. It may not be that we can't answer the question about the prime factors of very large numbers, but I think it might be more correct to say that we can't find out whether we are unable to answer that question, except by counterexample.
Take a look around you. Everything you can see has a relative position in three axes -- for example further north or south. It stands to reason (apparently) that everything is further north or south of everything else. So what's north of the North Pole?
When we say "logic", we usually don't mean mathematical logic, which has no position on truth per se, but is really more about consistency: if you believe this you must also believe that. So what do we usually mean? I think we usually mean intuition, which is based on our experience of our immediate environment. But if we extrapolate far enough outside of that immediate experience, those intuitions are to parochial to be much guidance, and our language in particular lets us down, leading us to ask meaningless questions like "what's north of the North Pole?"
How do we know this? How do we know our intuitions are wrong? Well, ironically it's logic, telling us that if what we immediately experience makes sense then conditions outside our experience have to contradict our intuitions.
Surely Iran won't secretly develop nukes anyway with all the billions they get from the sanctions being lifted
If Iran really has the ability to secretly develop nukes, then sanctions really have no point. Consider Iran in comparison to North Korea; Iran has 3x the population and 30x the GDP. Iran generates 750,000 university graduates/year and has substantial industrial, technological and scientific capabilities. If Iran wants a nuke it can develop a nuke, and it'll be a lot better than North Korea's nuke, provided they can get the fuel.
It should also be noted that Iran and North Korea share one advantage in the proliferation game that Iraq did not have: their own uranium mines. So they don't have to go to Niger for yellow cake, they can dig it out of their own ground.
So this leaves us with three options when it comes to sanctions and nuclear non-proliferation in Iran.
(1) We can maintain the status quo and hope that the sanctions render Iran incapable of developing its own nuke, despite Iran's obvious and massive advantages over North Korea even with sanctions in place.
(2) We can cut a deal which makes it much more difficult for Iran to produce weapons grade fuel. Naturally since this is a "deal" we have to have something to offer them.
(3) We can try to do to Iran what we did to Iraq in 2003-2011.
Before you decide you should consider the immensely greater geographical difficulty of fighting in Iran than in Iraq. Iran is a mountainous country 3x the size of Iraq and twice the population. Unlike Baghdad, Tehran is beyond the reach of US naval aviation, except from the extreme northern end of the Persian Gulf, and the entire length of that be extremely perilous for US ships to operate in. Basically we're looking at the most difficult land campaign the US has undertaken in since the WW2. The end result of that campaign isn't in question, but it's not reasonable to expect better or faster results than we got in Iraq.
This. Just to make the point even clearer, it takes a long, long time to go from ore to bomb grade uranium. The only way to speed up the process is to scale it up -- to have lots and lots of centrifuges working in parallel on lots and lots of uranium, like the US did in the Manhattan Project. Here is what our plant looked like. You can also peruse aerial images Pakistan's enrichment facility to see what a more modern plant would look like. These are not small, readily concealable facilities.
Is it possible that Iran is operating centrifuges completely underground where our intelligence services can't see them, as the GP poster claims? Sure, but only if their patient enough to wait decades to produce enough HEU for a bomb. The construction of an underground facility large enough to achieve "fast breakout" would be if anything harder to conceal than a surface plant. All the other parts of making a bomb and a delivery system are readily concealable, which is why anti-proliferation efforts focus on fuel. That means either Pu production, which would be very hard to conceal, or uranium enrichment, which is impossible.
So what paths does this leave Iran to "fast breakout"? Well, without a concealable enrichment program they'd have access to secret stashes of fuel that's already bomb grade or nearly so. But if that were the case the game's essentially over; there's nothing left that further sanctions could accomplish.
I don't feel any sympathy either, but your and my feelings aren't what's important here. We're still talking about a theft and on general principles I think the people who did it ought to be caught and punished.
It takes just one person getting infected by some route (of which eating bush meat is one); how perfectly can do you think it's possible to insulate 340 people living West Africa from the wildlife there?
There's basically three places to attack a zoonotic infectious agent:
(1) In the enzootic reservoir (very likely impossible, otherwise we'd have eradicated flu);
(2) at the point of contact between the enzootic reservoir and the human population (worthwhile but will never be 100% effective);
(3) at the point of transmission between humans (potentially highly effective; if R0 1 the epidemic will "burn itself out").
If you want to get science reporting, then go to a source that provides science reporting. Like ScienceNews.org. It is funny that you bring up science reporting, since science reporting has definitely improved drastically. You just don't have to read it from a journalist who may not know anything about actual science.
You misunderstand my point. I've subscribed to Science News for over thirty years, so getting science news (small s, small n) is not a problem for me. However I live in a country where most people have never heard of science news; they don't have any access to reliable information on science, or indeed any other difficult subject area.
Like most generalizations, that's an exaggeration. I know because I'm almost 60 years old now, and I actually remember the way things used to be, and not with rose-colored glasses. Most things are way better than they used to be, but journalism isn't one of those things.
Journalism were never perfect; like any human institution it had its faults and biases. But it used to work far, far better than it does today. Take science reporting; if you lived in a major-ish city the leading newspaper in your town probably had a reporter dedicated to covering science topics -- sometimes more than one (thanks, Sputnik!). When there wasn't a major story like the moon landing those reporters churned out weekly science supplements.
We can actually measure the declinein dedicated science reporting by counting the number of newspapers with weekly science supplements. According to the Columbia Journalism Review in 1989 95 American newspapers had science supplements. By 2008 that had dropped to 35, and as of 2013 there were only 19 science supplements left. So when you have a science related story like climate change, or Ebola, the people the public turns to for information on those things have no more understanding of science or mathematics than they do.
There have been similar measurable declines in foreign affairs coverage as well, and while relatively more people are getting news from non-print media like TV those news sources have been increasingly moving to cheap, profitable, but less informative opinion "journalism".
Now there are some bright spots as well, it's not all doom and gloom. I think some of the better infotainment shows like The Daily Show or Last Week Tonight are tremendous assets, taking the place of news/opinion magazines for younger people today and in often doing that pretty well. I think their obvious snarkiness is actually less dangerous than the implicit biases of journalism back in the day. But there's no substitute for wearing out shoe leather tracking down facts, something that's in decline across the board.
Surely anybody responsible for security at a nuclear facility hasn't considered every possible way someone could cause a breach?
You don't seem to grasp the way most people prioritize concerns, which amounts to this: if (a) nothing has happened so far and (b) nobody around you seems to be concerned, then the risk in question isn't a priority. And if you think that things would have to be different in the management of nuclear plants, well look at how TEPCO, a company running coastal nuclear plants in the most seismically active region in the world, responded to a drastic upward revision by scientists of the probability of a 10+m tsunami -- which was not to respond at all.
Ordinary people pay attention to their personal experience and to the thinking of the people around them, which in itself is a good thing; but they don't pay much attention to analysis. In effect they treat theoretical concerns as being purely hypothetical, but those things aren't the same at all. So generally you have to wait for something really bad to happen before they'll do something about it, even if you can be almost certain that that thing is going to happen and you'll wish afterwards you'd prepared even a little bit for it.
Understand the problem it addresses better.
Planetary Defense Office? Really? About the only thing worse I can think to call it is the Planetary Defense Registry of Motor Vehicles..
Here's how I'd sex up the presentation. I'd call it the Planetary Defense Force, issue snazzy uniforms and fund the program by selling T-shirts and caps. I feel certain that would raise far more money than Congress would ever appropriate for this purpose, except possibly in the event we noticed an asteroid that's actually going to hit us next Tuesday.
The rankings in individual benchmarks were all over the place; a composite of those benchmarks is only valid for some theoretical "average" workload that's the average of all the workloads each individual benchmark is supposed to represent; almost nobody is bound to have a workload that resembles that "average".
In fact the whole "shooutout" scenario is silly because Clear Linux is a container-centric distro. It makes no sense at all to compare it to general purpose distros like Ubuntu and plain vanilla Centos then leave out Red Hat/Centos's Atomic Host flavors.
In any case if performance is your paramount concern, then "out-of-the-box" performance is bound to be irrelevant to you because you'll be compiling from source with your own choice of compiler and flags, as well as fiddling with all those bells and whistles exposed in the /sys interface. What's interesting would be an exploration of why various distros did better or worse on individual benchmarks.
Actually once you get to the nitroglycerin step you are squarely in the ATF's purview, since they regulate explosives. "ATF" is an anachronistic acronym; since 1970 agency's full actual name is "The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives".
But glycerin is a commonplace an innocuous chemical widely used in cosmetics and food; you can buy it by the barrel without raising any eyebrows. It makes no sense to reason that fats are under the purview of ATF because you can produce glycerin from it.
I tried to google the source of the grease story, and it appears that back in 2011 SCL asked for ATF's technical assistance in tracking down grease dumpers, but that the camera placements currently in question are for use in a current investigation by the Puget Sound Regional Crime Gun Task Force.
So no big mystery about why the ATF is tracking down grease dumpers, that's just a misreading of the evidence trail.
Laws like this aren't proposed to make people safer; they're proposed to make people feel like someone is doing something to make them safer. So the consequences of this proposal depend on the degree to which the French people feel vulnerable at this point in time. At a minimum it's bound reinforce the Conservatives' standing with their xenophobic base. It might gain them supporters. Depending on how future events play out, something like it may even pass, even though it demonstrably won't make anyone safer and arguably makes them more vulnerable.
Well, it's hardly news that Li-ion batteries have a variety of safety features built in. When I was an MIT student back in the 70s Li-ion was exotic tech that you took extreme precautions with. Today Li-ion cells have got so many layers of belts and suspenders it's perfectly safe to be carrying a 3500 mAh battery in your pocket -- as I am dong right now.
But as effective safety measures are, that's not quite the same as having an inherently safe cell. An inherently safe cell could well end up being cheaper, for one thing, or easier to scale to large sizes with the same safety margins. Of course most interesting inventions come to nothing, but fundamental improvements in the basic architecture of a common type of cell could potentially alter the economics of electric vehicles, for example.
Well, I'm not sure how commonplace people getting arrested for letting their kids to school actually is. When these things happen they become national causes célèbres -- and with good reason. But I wonder whether this isn't the mirror image of the "stranger danger" hysteria, that is to say something that does occasionally happen but much less often than we imagine it does. I see elementary school kids walking to school or the local park in my town all the time. If you visit New York City it's not remarkable to see kids on the subway.
The thing is that my town was incorporated in 1850 and retains its early 20th C pedestrian infrastructure: sidewalks, neighborhood schools and parks. Most of those parks have no dedicated parking, so walking is the norm. Recent subdivisions have marginalized walking. Now at my sister's relatively new subdivision in California there are large, beautiful parks with ample parking, but you can't walk to them safely because there many stretches with no sidewalks or crosswalks, and the cars travel on those roads at forty or fifty miles an hour. So while I had no problem sending my kids to the park on their own in my neighborhood, I'd probably drive them there. Same parent, different urban planning context.
I think of this situation as being in part like the hygiene hypothesis for the rise in allergies: without the level of exposure to infectious microorganisms that would have been normal throughout most of human evolution, our immune systems go haywire. It is now so safe for children our normal protective instincts go haywire. Back when kids routinely worked in textile mills or as powder monkeys in mines nobody's eyebrows would have been raised by some kid walking a few miles to school. Now that kids are very safe indeed bad things that happen to them walking down a well-traveled street in broad daylight are a relatively greater fraction of the overall risk, even though that risk is very, very small.
Then there's the way that our information filters affect our perceptions of risk. Take school shootings; in the three years since Sandy Hook, 555 children 12 or under have been killed by firearms in the US; but as shocking as that is, you have to put it context; there are roughly 29 million children 14 and under in the US. In comparison about 2600 babies die each year from low birth weight; while in a global context the US infant mortality rate is relatively low, compared to similar wealthy countries it is shockingly high, which suggests that man of these deaths are preventable. Likewise the comparable number of children who die from influenza and pneumonia in that period isn't on the radar screen because it isn't news when a child dies from a commonplace but largely preventable infection. In 2014 there were 32,000 cases of whooping cough in the US leading to 20 deaths, and pertussis is an entirely eradicable disease.
Don't get me wrong; insofar as school shootings are preventable by practical steps we should take those steps; but we ought to prioritize causes of mortality and injury based on hard data, not our information filters.
Interestingly enough, Slate leans a bit to the left... and most anti-vaxxers lean very much to the left, so why was the bile necessary?
You are obviously unfamiliar with how the left <air_quotes>functions </air_quotes>.
No matter where you are no the political spectrum, if you are completely honest with yourself you have to admit there are some people on your side who are an embarrassment. The kind of people who take an important and valuable idea and find a way to make a complete hash of it. The left wing anti-vaxxers have absorbed the lessons about distrusting the self-serving narratives of corporations and the powerful, but in their place they accept uncritically a different set of self-serving narratives peddled by anti-vaxx grifters. The anti-vaxxers cop the Emersonian self-reliance attitude, but they miss the really important part about thinking for themselves.
But now this. He's dead to me.
There is no such thing. Oh, there's remote sensing, but you have to ground truth that. And it leaves you in the dark about anything that happened before the 1990s when the first climate observation satellites were launched.