Most "democratic socialist" parties are socialist (like the DSP in the US), or have at some point in their history been socialist, or at least see socialism as a desirable long-term goal. But I'm sure there are exceptions. What you really have to do is ask what someone *believes*, not what they call themselves.
Sanders has never run away from the word "socialist", but what he seems to believe in is a strong welfare safety net, labor unions operating in a market economy which allows private profit but with regulatory restrictions on the ability of private entities to externalize costs like pollution. There are plenty of people who would call that "socialist", but most people who just plain call themselves "socialist" wouldn't. What he wants is for the US to be more like "Nordic model" country such as Sweden or Denmark. Maybe that's not your personal idea of political paradise, but it's a hell of a long way from North Korea.
As to why Sanders would call himself a socialist, it may be that's what he calls "socialism", but I think it's because he's a contrarian and gadfly who likes to rile people up but excels at retail politics in a tiny, tiny state. I'm all for his preferred policies, but personally I think he'd be terrible president because he's a self-righteous political prig who'd alienate and undermine any of his allies that didn't toe the line.
Well to be fair the man calls himself a socialist; he's just wrong about that. You're spot on about the bailout though. It's like my Bolshie Uncle Ivan used to say. "Kid," he'd say, "nobody really believes in socialism. Nobody believes in capitalism either. It's 'socialism for me, capitalism for you!'"
You are aware that budgets take effect the *following year*, right? The US fiscal year X starts in October of X-1.
The 103rd Congress was elected in November 1992, convened in Jan 1993, so they had input into the FY 1994 and FY 1995 budgets. In FY 1994 the federal deficit went down by 52 billion, and in FY 1995 the federal deficit went down by 39 billion. This means the deficit went down by about 20% in both the 103rd Congress/Clinton budgets.
But to be fair to George H.W. Bush the deficit was already coming down. After the deficit peaked at 290.3 billion in FY '92 , GHWB reneged on his famous "read my lips" promise and new taxes in FY '93 to reduced the deficit by about 12% to 255 billion.
Well, one thing about politics is that it occasionally serves up the wildly unexpected. But only occasionally. Sanders' views fall into acceptable range for the most highly partisan Democrats, but they're well aware they have to win votes outside the party base. They'd *prefer* Sanders to Clinton but most of them can live with Hillary -- the ones who can forgive her for voting for the Iraq AUMF bill that is.
As for having tried "Clinton", Hillary Clinton isn't Bill Clinton, any more than Jeb Bush is George W. Bush. If she were this election would be over. She's probably smarter and maybe even tougher than her husband, but she does't have the off-the-charts charisma.
This kind of reminds me of the interest Ron Paul generated a generation ago among some liberal-leaning voters.
Even if you're generally a straight-line party voter, if you have a brain you don't agree 100% with the party line. In a two-party system you have to make do with whatever centrist mush the least objectionable party is serving up. So when someone comes along who declines to squeeze himself into one or the other mold, he's bound to say a lot of things that people who really don't agree with him very much want to hear someone say.
He calls himself a socialist, but most self-avowed socialist wouldn't consider him one because he doesn't favor compulsory worker ownership, production for use, or any of the usual socialist agenda. He's basically what in Europe would be called a "social democrat" -- pro welfare and collective bargaining within a capitalist production system. He'd fit in with the old UK Labour Party or the contemporary Scottish National Party.
Well, to be fair he did want to let the Bush tax cuts expire in 2010, which would have cut the deficit considerably. These were sunsetted when they were put into effect so that the Bush administration could claim minimal impact on long-term debt.
It was a deal with Congressional Republicans. Obama got a reauthorization and extension of unemployment benefits (this was in the Great Recession), an inflation adjustment for the alternative minimum tax so it wouldn't bite middle income people, an extension of the child tax credit and earned income credit. Congressional Republicans got an extension of Bush tax cuts on people making more than $250,000 and a reduction of the estate tax.
Basically when push came to shove, both parties preferred to kick the debt can down the road for a few more years. It may have even been the right choice at the time given the weak private sector spending. Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, there are no deficit hawks during recessions.
He makes a lot of very rational statement, but then goes for batshit insane politics that would push us back to the worst part of the soviet experiment.
So he's for establishing a gulag, is he? Citations please.
And of course it's even a *better* deal for the USA. We get to govern the place, put our military on it, claim the adjacent territorial waters, tax the people who live there etc., in return for the symbolic pretense that we're doing it according to ethical and legal principles. That's the deal.
Occasionally the pretense of principle presents some minor restrictions on what we do, but in that very same grand scheme of things it's still a pretty sweet deal.
In the neighborhood were I grew up there was a row of houses that were built on a paper street that had yet to be built. All those houses were accessed via temporary easements running over lots on the adjacent street. But after selling all the houses on the paper street the developer disappeared and nobody wanted to pay for the actual building of the paper street. The people who lived on the paper street just used the theoretically temporary easements on a practically permanent basis.
Once a year the owners of the adjacent lots would erect a temporary fence across the easement to prove that they hadn't legally abandoned their claim over the land. On that day the people who lived on the paper street had to ask permission to cross their neighbors' land. When I was a kid this had been going on longer than anyone in the neighborhood could remember -- judging from the age of the houses maybe thirty years -- but every year those neighbors would put those fences up in the hope that some day the paper street would be built and the easements would cease.
Of course the legal technicalities with the Hawaii telescopes are probably different, but the political principle is the same. If you don't assert your claims periodically, people will argue that you've abandoned them. And I suppose that Hawaiian natives are allowed to have politics like everyone else. Maybe sometimes there are more telescope friendly people in charge, and other times more native-rights assertive people.
was from the text used in a graduate-level data communication course I took many, many years ago. It said, more or less, that "Communication requires three things: a shared model, a shared set of symbols, and a common system for associating symbols with objects from that model."
Now here's the thing that I think is wise about that idea. People respond as if something like a famous photograph has an objective meaning and that everyone *should* somehow all have the same reaction to it. But intelligent, educated people should know better than that. Personally, I see a considerable element of self-deprecating humor in this particular choice of photo. However nobody should be particularly surprised that not everyone is laughing.
After many years of watching people drag out the pitchforks and torches when they're offended, or man the ramparts when they're offended by that offense, here's what I think the sensible way to handle this kind of thing is. When you feel offended by something someone says, say so, but without accusing the sayer of bad faith or collusion with the Forces of Oppression. When you have given offense you apologize and express yourself a different way.
You have a choice: you can either accept that people coming from different experiences will view things differently than you and work around that; or you can try to convince everyone in the world to think and feel the same way you do about everything.
I'm a member of several professional associations, including IEEE and the ACM. These societies have codes of ethics, which mandate things like respecting data privacy, accepting and cooperating with professional review, honoring contracts, respecting the rights of system stakeholders, providing honest estimates of project costs, disclosing conflicts of interest etc.
It's mostly stuff that almost goes without saying, so I have say I don't think much about these codes. But I sure would be pissed if one of these organizations was involved in helping the government violate its own code of ethics.
APA has a code of ethics for its members. Getting information out of an unwilling subject technically violates several principles the APA expects its own membership to abide by. For example the code of ethics requires APA members to safeguard the rights of anyone they're involved with professionally, and in particular those in situations where the subject's autonomy is limited. This would clearly forbid an APA member to be involved in the development of *any* coercive method, even if that method falls short of the legal definition of "torture".
Now arguably APAs code of ethics is too restrictive; arguably psychologists should be able to develop coercive methods so long as those methods are in the interest of society and do not rise to a reasonable standard of "torture". But until the APA rewrites its code of ethics it should refrain from any action which arguably might violate that code. To do otherwise, particularly secretly is morally repugnant for a dues-supported membership organization. It may even be malfeasance, since a non-profit is supposedly bound by the purpose for which it is chartered in its spending decisions.
Is there a valid reason we accept studies that have not been reproduced at least one more time to truly vet them before the community?
Well, you shouldn't. It's usually the press that blows a single study way out of proportion, because they have no understanding of how science works. Science *always* generates contradictory results early on as it gets the kinks worked out of a hypothesis. This is not some kind of failure of science, it's the way science is supposed to work. A critical follow-up attempt to check on some study's results is *of course* much less likely to reach significance, because of researcher bias either way.
The gold standard for judging the state of science isn't a study, it's a review paper. This is a peer-reviewed paper, written by someone working in the field, summarizing the state of published evidence on some question in that field. These are supposed to be both comprehensive and extremely conservative in their findings.
Science is continually producing a streams of contradictory evidence. You should either pay very little attention to some new scientific idea, or be prepared to follow along in great detail over several years. But even forty years ago, when my local newspaper used to publish a whole section of science news one day a week (!!!) you could pretty much count on most of the media ridiculously overreacting to a juicy sounding bit of scientific controversy. What can you expect of today's emasculated and dumbed down reporting?
Imagine the media response if there were a study that came out that purported to show that smoking e-cigarettes was beneficial to health. It would be a media circus, but only the start of a long process in the scientific community. So rather than lighting up your e-cigarette, you should wait for the critiques and counter-studies to pile on, and then for a few review papers to come out after the dust settles. Most new ideas in science, like most new businesses, fail after a year or two.
Ebook edition of job-hunting bible "What Color is Your Parachute": $9.99. McGraw Hill High School Equivalency Study Guide ebook: $17.89. Typical study guide for trade test (plumbing, electrical, etc): $30-$60. Microsoft Office for Dummies: $13.99
Cheap Chinese 7" Android Tablet that can run ebook reading software: $35.
For comparison, how much a family of four spends on food in a year: $7800 - $15600/yr. Cost of a 2 br apartment in a crummy big city neighborhood:$13000/yr.
So, what's clear here is the cost of an ebook reader is tiny relative to other things a poor family needs, but that the cost of the books very quickly outstrips the cost of even a rather nice ebook reader like a Kindle.
Computers are cheap, especially if you don't need the latest and most powerful. You can get a functioning Android tablet that can work as an ebook reader for under $40. It won't be a *nice* tablet, but compared to the cost being shut out of the digital economy $40 is a reasonable investment for even a poor person. Otherwise how are you going to look for jobs, in the help wanted section of the newspaper? Are you going to buy used stuff from the print classifieds?
There are laptop formfactor Android computers for under $100. Those probably don't make sense for more affluent users, but now you can write a resume and cover letter for an online job application. And then of course there are always other peoples computers. But it's not unreasonable for a poor person to have a computing device these days on which he can read an ebook and maybe tap out emails when there's wi-fi he can borrow. It is not some kind of absurd luxury for poor people to own an ebook capable device.
One of the effects of the bill will be to make it impossible to use data from large scale public health studies. The raw data is secret for privacy reasons and for practical purposes impossible to replicate. For example the highly respected Framingham Heart Study has been running since 1948; under the terms of the bill its results couldn't be used in setting policy because the data are simply impossible to replicate.
Sometimes common sense is just wrong, particularly when it comes to predicting the behavior of other people who might not agree with what you consider "common sense". If you check his publications in Google Scholar, this guy's been publishing surgical neuroscience papers in real journals since around 1990. I think he really intends to try this.
Fraud she certainly is, but the fraud was so transparent that clearly she's not right in her head.
While the financial aspect of this makes her culpable, building an outrageous fraud around readily disprovable details of your personal biography is a very bad idea in the long run if you're simply a con artist. Doing that suggests that there are short term needs that trump simple financial considerations. Perhaps she felt she deserved more sympathy, nurturance and nurturance than she'd gotten in life. That's common enough that there's name for it: Factitious Disorder.
Over the years I've read many stories of people who assumed false biographies. Most often this took obvious forms -- passing for white before the Civil Rights Era. But in some cases people chose to assume minority identities, particularly as American Indians in the early 20th C. Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance was (by the terminology of the age) a negro with some Cherokee ancestry. He ran away to join a wild west show where he learned from Cherokee language from other performers, used that to get into Carlisle Indian School and later traded up his "Cherokee" identity for a Plains Indian one. Wenjiganooshiinh -- "Grey Owl" -- was an Englishman who was abandoned by his father in childhood then later adopted an Apache/Ojibwe identity.
What makes these two men relevant to this case is that they were both advocates of Indian rights. As outsiders, they understood what sympathetic outsiders wanted Indians to be better than an Indian would. And they would't have been able to pull it off if they weren't a little off their nut; if they didn't want to escape who they were for a more glamorous alternative.
If involves breaking the law -- not just some kind of namby-pamby administrative regulation but the basic stuff of civilization like like the prohibitions on assault or murder -- then I'll sure as hell tell what not to do.
If you're a veteran I'll gladly shake your hand and thank you for your service. I'd be honored to buy you a drink. But I won't hand you a get out of jail free card.
Have a little perspective. Yes it's wrong to impersonate a veteran, but it doesn't impugn the character of veterans. But claiming that all veterans will and should overreact to a breach of propriety with violence *does* impugn their character. Which is worse?
Well, the idea of copyright is to incent creators to create, not to reward them per se. So the sensible way of approaching is to ask how many years in advance a reasonable person would make economic plans for.
Corporations seldom worry about income streams ten years out; such future income is discounted to insignificance. On the other hand an artist planning on managing his own creations might very reasonable think about fifty years out. Seventy-five years is beyond the pale of reason if we're talking about incenting creation. So is any extension of pre-existing copyrights.
If we wanted to maximize the present value of future income to an artist contemplating creating or performing a song, I think a fifty year term would be reasonable, with the proviso that any assigned rights automatically return to him without encumbrance after ten or fifteen years. Such an arrangement would have no impact economic on his ability to sell the rights to his work immediately, and hold out the promise of getting a second bite of the apple in a decade or so.
There's a phase people go through in life where commitments pile up and play becomes something we intend to get around to. Look around. If you decorate your office space with posters of kayaking/rock climbing/whatever you're into, but you haven't actually done it in the last year because you don't have time, you have entered that phase.
The thing is, people in that phase still dress the part of their younger selves. And for a while at least they even still buy the stuff, until they don't have space for it.
People buy SUVs, even though they're ridiculously impractical for their situation, as a fashion statement. Turning a car from a utilitarian object into a fashion statement is what automobile marketing is all about. Look at SUV ads; what you're telling the world (or perhaps yourself) is that maybe on a whim you'll go off-roading or picnicking on the beach, instead of commuting to and from work, making runs to the supermarket, or chauffeuring your kids to soccer and music lessons. It could happen. Only it won't.
That's the reason SUVs back into parking spaces. Subconsciously their drivers are longing for a quick escape that will never come. SUVs would be the saddest of vehicles, or they would be if the people who bought them had a little more self-awareness.
You're quibbling irrelevant or implementation details. A lawmaker sponsoring legislation is part of his record; it has nothing to do with influence peddling.
The kind of dirty tricks advertising you warn about is possible today, so I don't see this as a point of objection. The solution is an orthogonal approach to combatting influence peddling --transparency.
As foe the matching fund criteria, the need to set them is not an objection to the scheme either. You can set them however you like. You could do it on number of signatures (X% of the registered voters); or number of distinct donors (Y% of registered voters). Whatever your goal is for the candidate pool, you can set the criteria accordingly. As long as the candidates of the two major parties always qualify it won't be worse than the status quo.
If you really want to reduce the influence of money in politics, the thing to do is reduce the power of political office. If a politician controls trillions of dollars every year, there's a vast incentive to get a piece of that by bribing him. And there's no way to remove that incentive other than to remove the power that makes the bribe the best way of getting something done.
I actually respect the principles behind this sentiment, but the only way to reduce the power of political office is by getting the politicians to vote to do that. As long as political power remains a valuable, readily purchased commodity then more power will accumulate in the government.
Of course I realize that my proposal *also* requires politicians to vote out the status quo. At least it's marginally more likely that they will vote out an aspect of the status quo that is miserable and degrading to them than they are to vote to marginalize themselves. After willingness to deliver favorable legislation to monied interest is no longer a qualifier for holding office, then there is a possibility of reducing the power of political office if that's what voters want.
That works great for really small donations, but those aren't the problem. If I had a ten million dollar donation chances are I know damn well where it came from.
Slashdot Mirror
Most "democratic socialist" parties are socialist (like the DSP in the US), or have at some point in their history been socialist, or at least see socialism as a desirable long-term goal. But I'm sure there are exceptions. What you really have to do is ask what someone *believes*, not what they call themselves.
Sanders has never run away from the word "socialist", but what he seems to believe in is a strong welfare safety net, labor unions operating in a market economy which allows private profit but with regulatory restrictions on the ability of private entities to externalize costs like pollution. There are plenty of people who would call that "socialist", but most people who just plain call themselves "socialist" wouldn't. What he wants is for the US to be more like "Nordic model" country such as Sweden or Denmark. Maybe that's not your personal idea of political paradise, but it's a hell of a long way from North Korea.
As to why Sanders would call himself a socialist, it may be that's what he calls "socialism", but I think it's because he's a contrarian and gadfly who likes to rile people up but excels at retail politics in a tiny, tiny state. I'm all for his preferred policies, but personally I think he'd be terrible president because he's a self-righteous political prig who'd alienate and undermine any of his allies that didn't toe the line.
Well to be fair the man calls himself a socialist; he's just wrong about that. You're spot on about the bailout though. It's like my Bolshie Uncle Ivan used to say. "Kid," he'd say, "nobody really believes in socialism. Nobody believes in capitalism either. It's 'socialism for me, capitalism for you!'"
You are aware that budgets take effect the *following year*, right? The US fiscal year X starts in October of X-1.
The 103rd Congress was elected in November 1992, convened in Jan 1993, so they had input into the FY 1994 and FY 1995 budgets. In FY 1994 the federal deficit went down by 52 billion, and in FY 1995 the federal deficit went down by 39 billion. This means the deficit went down by about 20% in both the 103rd Congress/Clinton budgets.
But to be fair to George H.W. Bush the deficit was already coming down. After the deficit peaked at 290.3 billion in FY '92 , GHWB reneged on his famous "read my lips" promise and new taxes in FY '93 to reduced the deficit by about 12% to 255 billion.
Well, one thing about politics is that it occasionally serves up the wildly unexpected. But only occasionally. Sanders' views fall into acceptable range for the most highly partisan Democrats, but they're well aware they have to win votes outside the party base. They'd *prefer* Sanders to Clinton but most of them can live with Hillary -- the ones who can forgive her for voting for the Iraq AUMF bill that is.
As for having tried "Clinton", Hillary Clinton isn't Bill Clinton, any more than Jeb Bush is George W. Bush. If she were this election would be over. She's probably smarter and maybe even tougher than her husband, but she does't have the off-the-charts charisma.
This kind of reminds me of the interest Ron Paul generated a generation ago among some liberal-leaning voters.
Even if you're generally a straight-line party voter, if you have a brain you don't agree 100% with the party line. In a two-party system you have to make do with whatever centrist mush the least objectionable party is serving up. So when someone comes along who declines to squeeze himself into one or the other mold, he's bound to say a lot of things that people who really don't agree with him very much want to hear someone say.
He calls himself a socialist, but most self-avowed socialist wouldn't consider him one because he doesn't favor compulsory worker ownership, production for use, or any of the usual socialist agenda. He's basically what in Europe would be called a "social democrat" -- pro welfare and collective bargaining within a capitalist production system. He'd fit in with the old UK Labour Party or the contemporary Scottish National Party.
Well, to be fair he did want to let the Bush tax cuts expire in 2010, which would have cut the deficit considerably. These were sunsetted when they were put into effect so that the Bush administration could claim minimal impact on long-term debt.
It was a deal with Congressional Republicans. Obama got a reauthorization and extension of unemployment benefits (this was in the Great Recession), an inflation adjustment for the alternative minimum tax so it wouldn't bite middle income people, an extension of the child tax credit and earned income credit. Congressional Republicans got an extension of Bush tax cuts on people making more than $250,000 and a reduction of the estate tax.
Basically when push came to shove, both parties preferred to kick the debt can down the road for a few more years. It may have even been the right choice at the time given the weak private sector spending. Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, there are no deficit hawks during recessions.
He makes a lot of very rational statement, but then goes for batshit insane politics that would push us back to the worst part of the soviet experiment.
So he's for establishing a gulag, is he? Citations please.
And of course it's even a *better* deal for the USA. We get to govern the place, put our military on it, claim the adjacent territorial waters, tax the people who live there etc., in return for the symbolic pretense that we're doing it according to ethical and legal principles. That's the deal.
Occasionally the pretense of principle presents some minor restrictions on what we do, but in that very same grand scheme of things it's still a pretty sweet deal.
In the neighborhood were I grew up there was a row of houses that were built on a paper street that had yet to be built. All those houses were accessed via temporary easements running over lots on the adjacent street. But after selling all the houses on the paper street the developer disappeared and nobody wanted to pay for the actual building of the paper street. The people who lived on the paper street just used the theoretically temporary easements on a practically permanent basis.
Once a year the owners of the adjacent lots would erect a temporary fence across the easement to prove that they hadn't legally abandoned their claim over the land. On that day the people who lived on the paper street had to ask permission to cross their neighbors' land. When I was a kid this had been going on longer than anyone in the neighborhood could remember -- judging from the age of the houses maybe thirty years -- but every year those neighbors would put those fences up in the hope that some day the paper street would be built and the easements would cease.
Of course the legal technicalities with the Hawaii telescopes are probably different, but the political principle is the same. If you don't assert your claims periodically, people will argue that you've abandoned them. And I suppose that Hawaiian natives are allowed to have politics like everyone else. Maybe sometimes there are more telescope friendly people in charge, and other times more native-rights assertive people.
was from the text used in a graduate-level data communication course I took many, many years ago. It said, more or less, that "Communication requires three things: a shared model, a shared set of symbols, and a common system for associating symbols with objects from that model."
Now here's the thing that I think is wise about that idea. People respond as if something like a famous photograph has an objective meaning and that everyone *should* somehow all have the same reaction to it. But intelligent, educated people should know better than that. Personally, I see a considerable element of self-deprecating humor in this particular choice of photo. However nobody should be particularly surprised that not everyone is laughing.
After many years of watching people drag out the pitchforks and torches when they're offended, or man the ramparts when they're offended by that offense, here's what I think the sensible way to handle this kind of thing is. When you feel offended by something someone says, say so, but without accusing the sayer of bad faith or collusion with the Forces of Oppression. When you have given offense you apologize and express yourself a different way.
You have a choice: you can either accept that people coming from different experiences will view things differently than you and work around that; or you can try to convince everyone in the world to think and feel the same way you do about everything.
I'm a member of several professional associations, including IEEE and the ACM. These societies have codes of ethics, which mandate things like respecting data privacy, accepting and cooperating with professional review, honoring contracts, respecting the rights of system stakeholders, providing honest estimates of project costs, disclosing conflicts of interest etc.
It's mostly stuff that almost goes without saying, so I have say I don't think much about these codes. But I sure would be pissed if one of these organizations was involved in helping the government violate its own code of ethics.
APA has a code of ethics for its members. Getting information out of an unwilling subject technically violates several principles the APA expects its own membership to abide by. For example the code of ethics requires APA members to safeguard the rights of anyone they're involved with professionally, and in particular those in situations where the subject's autonomy is limited. This would clearly forbid an APA member to be involved in the development of *any* coercive method, even if that method falls short of the legal definition of "torture".
Now arguably APAs code of ethics is too restrictive; arguably psychologists should be able to develop coercive methods so long as those methods are in the interest of society and do not rise to a reasonable standard of "torture". But until the APA rewrites its code of ethics it should refrain from any action which arguably might violate that code. To do otherwise, particularly secretly is morally repugnant for a dues-supported membership organization. It may even be malfeasance, since a non-profit is supposedly bound by the purpose for which it is chartered in its spending decisions.
American Psychological Association (2012) style citations please.
References:
American Psychological Association. (2012). APA style guide to electronic references.
Is there a valid reason we accept studies that have not been reproduced at least one more time to truly vet them before the community?
Well, you shouldn't. It's usually the press that blows a single study way out of proportion, because they have no understanding of how science works. Science *always* generates contradictory results early on as it gets the kinks worked out of a hypothesis. This is not some kind of failure of science, it's the way science is supposed to work. A critical follow-up attempt to check on some study's results is *of course* much less likely to reach significance, because of researcher bias either way.
The gold standard for judging the state of science isn't a study, it's a review paper. This is a peer-reviewed paper, written by someone working in the field, summarizing the state of published evidence on some question in that field. These are supposed to be both comprehensive and extremely conservative in their findings.
Science is continually producing a streams of contradictory evidence. You should either pay very little attention to some new scientific idea, or be prepared to follow along in great detail over several years. But even forty years ago, when my local newspaper used to publish a whole section of science news one day a week (!!!) you could pretty much count on most of the media ridiculously overreacting to a juicy sounding bit of scientific controversy. What can you expect of today's emasculated and dumbed down reporting?
Imagine the media response if there were a study that came out that purported to show that smoking e-cigarettes was beneficial to health. It would be a media circus, but only the start of a long process in the scientific community. So rather than lighting up your e-cigarette, you should wait for the critiques and counter-studies to pile on, and then for a few review papers to come out after the dust settles. Most new ideas in science, like most new businesses, fail after a year or two.
Ebook edition of job-hunting bible "What Color is Your Parachute": $9.99.
McGraw Hill High School Equivalency Study Guide ebook: $17.89.
Typical study guide for trade test (plumbing, electrical, etc): $30-$60.
Microsoft Office for Dummies: $13.99
Cheap Chinese 7" Android Tablet that can run ebook reading software: $35.
For comparison, how much a family of four spends on food in a year: $7800 - $15600/yr.
Cost of a 2 br apartment in a crummy big city neighborhood:$13000/yr.
So, what's clear here is the cost of an ebook reader is tiny relative to other things a poor family needs, but that the cost of the books very quickly outstrips the cost of even a rather nice ebook reader like a Kindle.
Computers are cheap, especially if you don't need the latest and most powerful. You can get a functioning Android tablet that can work as an ebook reader for under $40. It won't be a *nice* tablet, but compared to the cost being shut out of the digital economy $40 is a reasonable investment for even a poor person. Otherwise how are you going to look for jobs, in the help wanted section of the newspaper? Are you going to buy used stuff from the print classifieds?
There are laptop formfactor Android computers for under $100. Those probably don't make sense for more affluent users, but now you can write a resume and cover letter for an online job application. And then of course there are always other peoples computers. But it's not unreasonable for a poor person to have a computing device these days on which he can read an ebook and maybe tap out emails when there's wi-fi he can borrow. It is not some kind of absurd luxury for poor people to own an ebook capable device.
One of the effects of the bill will be to make it impossible to use data from large scale public health studies. The raw data is secret for privacy reasons and for practical purposes impossible to replicate. For example the highly respected Framingham Heart Study has been running since 1948; under the terms of the bill its results couldn't be used in setting policy because the data are simply impossible to replicate.
... now all it needs is a light side and a dark side.
Sometimes common sense is just wrong, particularly when it comes to predicting the behavior of other people who might not agree with what you consider "common sense". If you check his publications in Google Scholar, this guy's been publishing surgical neuroscience papers in real journals since around 1990. I think he really intends to try this.
Fraud she certainly is, but the fraud was so transparent that clearly she's not right in her head.
While the financial aspect of this makes her culpable, building an outrageous fraud around readily disprovable details of your personal biography is a very bad idea in the long run if you're simply a con artist. Doing that suggests that there are short term needs that trump simple financial considerations. Perhaps she felt she deserved more sympathy, nurturance and nurturance than she'd gotten in life. That's common enough that there's name for it: Factitious Disorder.
Over the years I've read many stories of people who assumed false biographies. Most often this took obvious forms -- passing for white before the Civil Rights Era. But in some cases people chose to assume minority identities, particularly as American Indians in the early 20th C. Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance was (by the terminology of the age) a negro with some Cherokee ancestry. He ran away to join a wild west show where he learned from Cherokee language from other performers, used that to get into Carlisle Indian School and later traded up his "Cherokee" identity for a Plains Indian one. Wenjiganooshiinh -- "Grey Owl" -- was an Englishman who was abandoned by his father in childhood then later adopted an Apache/Ojibwe identity.
What makes these two men relevant to this case is that they were both advocates of Indian rights. As outsiders, they understood what sympathetic outsiders wanted Indians to be better than an Indian would. And they would't have been able to pull it off if they weren't a little off their nut; if they didn't want to escape who they were for a more glamorous alternative.
If involves breaking the law -- not just some kind of namby-pamby administrative regulation but the basic stuff of civilization like like the prohibitions on assault or murder -- then I'll sure as hell tell what not to do.
If you're a veteran I'll gladly shake your hand and thank you for your service. I'd be honored to buy you a drink. But I won't hand you a get out of jail free card.
Have a little perspective. Yes it's wrong to impersonate a veteran, but it doesn't impugn the character of veterans. But claiming that all veterans will and should overreact to a breach of propriety with violence *does* impugn their character. Which is worse?
Well, the idea of copyright is to incent creators to create, not to reward them per se. So the sensible way of approaching is to ask how many years in advance a reasonable person would make economic plans for.
Corporations seldom worry about income streams ten years out; such future income is discounted to insignificance. On the other hand an artist planning on managing his own creations might very reasonable think about fifty years out. Seventy-five years is beyond the pale of reason if we're talking about incenting creation. So is any extension of pre-existing copyrights.
If we wanted to maximize the present value of future income to an artist contemplating creating or performing a song, I think a fifty year term would be reasonable, with the proviso that any assigned rights automatically return to him without encumbrance after ten or fifteen years. Such an arrangement would have no impact economic on his ability to sell the rights to his work immediately, and hold out the promise of getting a second bite of the apple in a decade or so.
There's a phase people go through in life where commitments pile up and play becomes something we intend to get around to. Look around. If you decorate your office space with posters of kayaking/rock climbing/whatever you're into, but you haven't actually done it in the last year because you don't have time, you have entered that phase.
The thing is, people in that phase still dress the part of their younger selves. And for a while at least they even still buy the stuff, until they don't have space for it.
People buy SUVs, even though they're ridiculously impractical for their situation, as a fashion statement. Turning a car from a utilitarian object into a fashion statement is what automobile marketing is all about. Look at SUV ads; what you're telling the world (or perhaps yourself) is that maybe on a whim you'll go off-roading or picnicking on the beach, instead of commuting to and from work, making runs to the supermarket, or chauffeuring your kids to soccer and music lessons. It could happen. Only it won't.
That's the reason SUVs back into parking spaces. Subconsciously their drivers are longing for a quick escape that will never come. SUVs would be the saddest of vehicles, or they would be if the people who bought them had a little more self-awareness.
You're quibbling irrelevant or implementation details. A lawmaker sponsoring legislation is part of his record; it has nothing to do with influence peddling.
The kind of dirty tricks advertising you warn about is possible today, so I don't see this as a point of objection. The solution is an orthogonal approach to combatting influence peddling --transparency.
As foe the matching fund criteria, the need to set them is not an objection to the scheme either. You can set them however you like. You could do it on number of signatures (X% of the registered voters); or number of distinct donors (Y% of registered voters). Whatever your goal is for the candidate pool, you can set the criteria accordingly. As long as the candidates of the two major parties always qualify it won't be worse than the status quo.
If you really want to reduce the influence of money in politics, the thing to do is reduce the power of political office. If a politician controls trillions of dollars every year, there's a vast incentive to get a piece of that by bribing him. And there's no way to remove that incentive other than to remove the power that makes the bribe the best way of getting something done.
I actually respect the principles behind this sentiment, but the only way to reduce the power of political office is by getting the politicians to vote to do that. As long as political power remains a valuable, readily purchased commodity then more power will accumulate in the government.
Of course I realize that my proposal *also* requires politicians to vote out the status quo. At least it's marginally more likely that they will vote out an aspect of the status quo that is miserable and degrading to them than they are to vote to marginalize themselves. After willingness to deliver favorable legislation to monied interest is no longer a qualifier for holding office, then there is a possibility of reducing the power of political office if that's what voters want.
That works great for really small donations, but those aren't the problem. If I had a ten million dollar donation chances are I know damn well where it came from.