Trump may be a jackass, but this is his job. If he abuses the powers and access of his job, then people have a right to be pissed, but you can't preemptively take the tools of his job away.
You *do* know "Reefer Madness" is not scientifically accurate.
As for psilocybin, both it and LSD have very low toxicity AND very low addiction potential. If you compare them to caffeine on both those scales (toxicity and dependence), they stand in relation to caffeine roughly as caffeine stands to alcohol. And while individual cases of post-usage psychiatric problems have been reported in the literature, when the use is examined statistically the prevalence of self-harm and psychological distress is actually lower in psychedelic drug users.
This doesn't mean that users of such drugs can't come to harm; schizophrenics should especially avoid them. But I personally see very little medical or public health justification in preventing most interested individuals in experimenting with pharmacy grade psychedelics.
I could easily imagine licensed facilities for people interested in LSD. These facilities would be responsible for dosage and purity and could handle routine bad trips that would result in emergency room visits.
Everyone gets paid the same regardless of productivity?
No, people still have different salaries. They're just eliminating their individual performance bonuses.
In business there are times when things that are often a good idea might not be a good idea right now. For example, well-run performance bonus programs are generally effective, but if you've been running one which is widely perceived as arbitrary and unfair it might be better to call it off for a while rather fix it. Until people trust the umpires they aren't going to sacrifice to win the game.
Also, bonus programs do come with downsides; they increase employee stress and inter-employee conflicts. If those things are a big problem at your company, a performance bonus program might not be your best next move. After you've got those problems sorted out, sure.
That's what makes running a company challenging; you can't be a one-trick pony, you can't manage by platitudes and stereotypes. You have to manage according to the situation.
I think this is part to the reason. There's also the fact that most people refuse the read the manual anyway. For years that was my killer competitive advantage, I didn't mind reading anything, manuals, RFCs, academic papers, but it's still a lot to ask manufacturers to put money into something only maybe five percent of their customers use.
Finally, we live in a world of international trade. This is not about American manufacturers making stuff for English speaking Americans. Stuff gets made in China and shipped all over the world. So you're likely to get some kind of pictogram instructions with some hints in five or six languages.
These pictogram things aren't necessarily bad. I just bought some high end, Taiwan-manufactured bicycle components from a company called SRAM which came with one of those pictogram things that was *excellent*. The thing is, hiring somebody who is good at communicating visually is just as expensive as hiring someone who speaks a foreign language to translate. The real problem is that we're addicted to buying cheap, throwaway crap.
Stupid questions are often the best ones to ask. And when they're not, well, they're still more constructive than pissing all over someone because they're asking a question you don't need answered.
It isn't just a matter of finer grind == more flavor. The optimum grind for flavor depends on the brew method, because each brew method exposes the grounds to different temperature water for different amounts of time. For espresso you want a very fine grind that would be too bitter if you used it in a drip machine, because it has to extract extremely quickly. For cold brew you want super coarse because the coffee will be steeping in cold water for sixteen or eighteen hours.
I find my preference for grind varies by the bean type. The perfect drip grind for an Italian roast is too coarse for a light roast Moka Java.
No matter what method you use, you leave some flavor components in the grounds and extract some into the cup. That means you can get noticeably different results using two different methods, with neither method necessarily being better than the other. You can get noticeably different results from the exact same coffee grounds by doing pour over in a slightly different way.
I once worked for a very well-intentioned liberal white man who once gleefully toted up all the minorities he had hired; I was his Asian. The thing was, except for me every one there came out of the same graduate school program he founded, and I think every last one of them, even his black females, had wealthy lawyers as parents; his latino's father was some kind of government minister in Mexico. I was the only one there with a working class, inner city background, and believe me, I felt it. Certainly having him identify me as a his token Asian didn't make me feel valued, as an Asian or anything else.
Actually diversity *is* valuable to organizations as a counterpoint to another thing organizations need: cohesion. Cohesion without diversity equals group think; it leads to blind spots. That's how you get some outrageously tone-deaf PR campaigns, like Nivea's "White is Purity" campaign, or Pepsi's infamous Kendall Jenner campaign.
Now my coworkers at this place were smart, cultured, and genuinely good people, but they were just *outrageously* condescending, and they couldn't see it because they were constantly reinforcing their own shared world views. Now I'm very liberal myself, but when some wealthy white woman talks about "privilege" it can set my teeth on edge. I understand the point she's trying to make, and it's not that she's wrong, but that's just a horribly tone deaf piece of jargon. Can you imagine how that sounds to a middle aged man who just lost his job at the mill? Lack of economic diversity means you can use that kind of jargon and never see the downside, like Nivea's "White is Purity" campaign.
I think my take away from that job is that a spot check of skin color, gender, and ethnicity can tell you if you *lack* diversity. But it can't tell you that you *have* diversity. The whole point of diversity in an organization is to provide situational awareness and flexibility in thinking.
Not really. For aeropress I use metal filters, which produce a slightly oilier results than paper, which I still occasionally use when the mood hits me. That cost is negligible. For pourover, I use a paper filter which adds about a nickle to the cost; but for french press no disposables are needed. I also occasionally do cold brew in the french press, although other people prefer a reusable coffee sock.
To be honest, I really don't need to grind my own beans. The reason to grind your own is that the coffee goes stale more slowly when it is un-ground, but a pound of coffee disappears practically overnight in my house.
Since about half of what I drink costs $5/lb, I don't know if I qualify as a coffee snob. I think of myself more as a coffee hacker.
Are you really able to taste a discernible difference between the two different beans you buy and grind?
Absolutely, but it is certainly easy to obliterate the differences between expensive beans and cheap beans by mishandling them.
It sounds like the coffee you drink is overextracted. Overextraction is common because it's what you get when you economize by using too little coffee and making up for that by brewing too long. The acid flavors extract first, then the sweet ones, then finally the bitter ones. By overextracting dark beans, which are naturally more bitter, you can produce a potent-tasting (although unpleasant) cup of coffee with less coffee. You also get excess bitterness from using water that is at boiling temperatures, beans that are ground too fine or inconsistently, and dirty equipment. It is also possible (although less common) for coffee to be underextracted, which produces a cup which is sour, thin and salty.
I enjoy coffee with cream and even sugar occasionally, but if the only way you can enjoy a pot of coffee is with cream then that coffee was almost certainly mishandled. Coffee is not like tea; certain varities of tea are mean to be consumed with milk and sugars, others not. Any coffee should be enjoyable black.
Making a good cup of coffee isn't rocket science, but it *is* cooking; there's some technique and care involved, and different coffee varieties and roasts require different approaches -- the way you can't really cook fish and steak the same way.
I grind my own coffee, and at $11.99 / pound for excellent beans the 15 grams I need for a mug of coffee cost me $0.39. I sometimes buy fairly good (but not super-premium) beans at $4.99 a pound, which means a cup of what you'd get at a typical coffee shop sets me back sixteen cents.
That's good, because I drink a *lot* of coffee.
Recently I discovered a programmable tea urn at the local Asian market that'll keep up to 5 liters of water at just the right temperature for for aeropress, which takes about 100 seconds to do a brew. So I can have a far better cup of coffee than I'd get from a Keurig in just about half a minute more time, at less cost. I reckon I drink about the equivalent of 20 k-cups worth of coffee per day, and if I use the pedestrian bulk beans I'd be saving over $2000/year. Most of the time I use higher quality beans, so I'm saving more like $800.
Well, the rates of functional illiteracy in the US is shockingly high: about one in seven adults have reading and writing skills that are so poor that they affect their ability to function, but they aren't technically totally illiterate.
That said, I don't think there's been so much a growth in illiteracy as a growth in accommodating peoples' laziness. Also as stuff is increasingly made in China and sold across the world, things like user manuals are almost a thing of the past. User produced YouTube videos are the de facto manual for many, many products.
It's called "gaming", and its bound to do it better than anything like this can.
Somehow I doubt any basically linear form like a movie or a TV show or a novel can offer enough interactivity to matter without undermining the uniquely valuable aspects of traditional storytelling. But it's not surprising that people -- corporate people -- keep trying.
Movies and special TV shows are massive collective undertakings which take immense logistical ingenuity and financial risk just to bring to the screen. Just sit through the credits of a modern tentpole movie and you'll see more than five hundred people listed.
What's lost in all that tends to be authorial point of view. That's why you can go to a community theater and see a play put on by a handful of actors and stage hands that entertains you in a way that movies theoretically could can, but seldom do. It's not that blockbusters don't entertain you, but more often than not what you take away from them is the impressive production craft, not the story.
So I'm not surprised that producers would want to punt on the storytelling. Letting the audience choose is a way of getting them engaged without taking any risks.
This is not 1980. As weird as it may seem, I remember a time when newspapers had separate sections labelled "Jobs for Men" and "Jobs for Women", and any female applicant walking into HR was automatically given a typing test. Women in my generation were having none of that, and the ones entering management (and their successors) have long since climbed the greasy pole to the top.
Have we reached parity? No. Boards are still almost always majority male. And if the law required parity in male/female representation, that would be a huge change. But the law sets a standard that most of California's largest companies already meet. That is no accident. No politician is going to want to piss of Walt Disney.
There are few large companies that might need to add another director or replace the next retiring male director with a female one. But the world is heading for parity anyway; the law basically says you can't remain a statistical outlier.
The Obama era limitation amounted to no more than 6 grams (0.013 pounds) per gigawatt-hour. There, feel enlightened?
Why did they set that particular limit?
At the time the mercury limits were set (2011), there was considerable uncertainty about the exact impact in the population, although there was good reason to suspect mercury emissions were a problem. Mercury and mercury compounds found in combustion by-products are potent neurotoxins and can have a very long half-lives in the human body, in some cases nearly thirty years. This, along with its ability to bioaccumulate through the food chain, makes the economic effects of mercury emissions a serious concern.
Children exposed to the kind of mercury compounds found in coal plant emissions have reduced intellectual capacity. The net impact on the US economy in lost productivity due to lost intellectual capability alone has been estimated at 87 billion year 2000 dollars (soruce). Naturally if you put error bars around that figure they would be huge.
So given the uncertainty, why 0.013 pounds/GWh? Why not 0.02, or 0.005? Probably because it was as much as technologically feasible without forcing coal plants then operating to shut down. Since that point there have been measurable effects in population mercury levels, and the net long term benefits of the restrictions have been estimated at 43 billion annually (source).
Nonetheless, there are uncertainties. Nobody can tell you what the precise effect of a 6 gram limit has been, particularly in an era when coal-fired electricity plants have been closing due to competition with natural gas; still there isn't much doubt that coal-based mercury emissions are a bad thing.
Given the natural economic decline of coal, this regulatory change probably won't have much measurable economic impact. Will it harm people? Well, it's reasonable to assume that some children and infants downwind from the remaining coal plants might be harmed, but you won't be able to point to any one person with high mercury levels and quantify precisely how many IQ points he's lost or say with certainty his behavior control issues wouldn't have happened anyway. That was the status quo under the Obama era MATS regulations anyway.
Editor's picks are opinions reflect editorial priorities, which include making a buck. They don't validate anything.
Which products are best is a question that can be answered two possible ways. The first is to canvass impartial experts who follow these things but have no vested interest in the answer -- if you can find such a rare beast.
The second is crowd sourcing. You could do a statistically defensible sampling of what people are actually using, and then figure out what is gaining and losing ground and why.
OK, let's talk logic. I didn't contradict you in (2). I was pointing out that you were begging the question. I agree that that the misogyny of the source is irrelevant to the question of whether the source can be rescinded, but the identity and past behavior of the source is relevant to the conversation because it bears on his motives.
For the record I take no position on the authenticity of any misogynist troll's misogyny. A misogynist troll might well be a sincere misogynist in real life, but the only thing you can know for sure is that he's a troll.
Slashdot Mirror
3 x 0 = 0.
No, there are emergency room visits caused by caffeine too, some of which require hospitalization. Look it up.
And how do you know that doesn't work?
Trump may be a jackass, but this is his job. If he abuses the powers and access of his job, then people have a right to be pissed, but you can't preemptively take the tools of his job away.
You *do* know "Reefer Madness" is not scientifically accurate.
As for psilocybin, both it and LSD have very low toxicity AND very low addiction potential. If you compare them to caffeine on both those scales (toxicity and dependence), they stand in relation to caffeine roughly as caffeine stands to alcohol. And while individual cases of post-usage psychiatric problems have been reported in the literature, when the use is examined statistically the prevalence of self-harm and psychological distress is actually lower in psychedelic drug users.
This doesn't mean that users of such drugs can't come to harm; schizophrenics should especially avoid them. But I personally see very little medical or public health justification in preventing most interested individuals in experimenting with pharmacy grade psychedelics.
I could easily imagine licensed facilities for people interested in LSD. These facilities would be responsible for dosage and purity and could handle routine bad trips that would result in emergency room visits.
Everyone gets paid the same regardless of productivity?
No, people still have different salaries. They're just eliminating their individual performance bonuses.
In business there are times when things that are often a good idea might not be a good idea right now. For example, well-run performance bonus programs are generally effective, but if you've been running one which is widely perceived as arbitrary and unfair it might be better to call it off for a while rather fix it. Until people trust the umpires they aren't going to sacrifice to win the game.
Also, bonus programs do come with downsides; they increase employee stress and inter-employee conflicts. If those things are a big problem at your company, a performance bonus program might not be your best next move. After you've got those problems sorted out, sure.
That's what makes running a company challenging; you can't be a one-trick pony, you can't manage by platitudes and stereotypes. You have to manage according to the situation.
I think this is part to the reason. There's also the fact that most people refuse the read the manual anyway. For years that was my killer competitive advantage, I didn't mind reading anything, manuals, RFCs, academic papers, but it's still a lot to ask manufacturers to put money into something only maybe five percent of their customers use.
Finally, we live in a world of international trade. This is not about American manufacturers making stuff for English speaking Americans. Stuff gets made in China and shipped all over the world. So you're likely to get some kind of pictogram instructions with some hints in five or six languages.
These pictogram things aren't necessarily bad. I just bought some high end, Taiwan-manufactured bicycle components from a company called SRAM which came with one of those pictogram things that was *excellent*. The thing is, hiring somebody who is good at communicating visually is just as expensive as hiring someone who speaks a foreign language to translate. The real problem is that we're addicted to buying cheap, throwaway crap.
Stupid questions are often the best ones to ask. And when they're not, well, they're still more constructive than pissing all over someone because they're asking a question you don't need answered.
This is how science ought to work, and by and large did work, up until two centuries ago or so.
Which is why science stopped advancing in 1818. It was the decline of the gentleman natural philosopher.
Did MST3K do that one?
Oh, I call BS. She knows she's worth it.
As long as skin color is important to society, then skin color is going to be one genuine axis of diversity, among many.
Race is scientifically speaking bullshit, but that doesn't mean that the race you're perceived to have makes no difference in your life.
It isn't just a matter of finer grind == more flavor. The optimum grind for flavor depends on the brew method, because each brew method exposes the grounds to different temperature water for different amounts of time. For espresso you want a very fine grind that would be too bitter if you used it in a drip machine, because it has to extract extremely quickly. For cold brew you want super coarse because the coffee will be steeping in cold water for sixteen or eighteen hours.
I find my preference for grind varies by the bean type. The perfect drip grind for an Italian roast is too coarse for a light roast Moka Java.
No matter what method you use, you leave some flavor components in the grounds and extract some into the cup. That means you can get noticeably different results using two different methods, with neither method necessarily being better than the other. You can get noticeably different results from the exact same coffee grounds by doing pour over in a slightly different way.
I once worked for a very well-intentioned liberal white man who once gleefully toted up all the minorities he had hired; I was his Asian. The thing was, except for me every one there came out of the same graduate school program he founded, and I think every last one of them, even his black females, had wealthy lawyers as parents; his latino's father was some kind of government minister in Mexico. I was the only one there with a working class, inner city background, and believe me, I felt it. Certainly having him identify me as a his token Asian didn't make me feel valued, as an Asian or anything else.
Actually diversity *is* valuable to organizations as a counterpoint to another thing organizations need: cohesion. Cohesion without diversity equals group think; it leads to blind spots. That's how you get some outrageously tone-deaf PR campaigns, like Nivea's "White is Purity" campaign, or Pepsi's infamous Kendall Jenner campaign.
Now my coworkers at this place were smart, cultured, and genuinely good people, but they were just *outrageously* condescending, and they couldn't see it because they were constantly reinforcing their own shared world views. Now I'm very liberal myself, but when some wealthy white woman talks about "privilege" it can set my teeth on edge. I understand the point she's trying to make, and it's not that she's wrong, but that's just a horribly tone deaf piece of jargon. Can you imagine how that sounds to a middle aged man who just lost his job at the mill? Lack of economic diversity means you can use that kind of jargon and never see the downside, like Nivea's "White is Purity" campaign.
I think my take away from that job is that a spot check of skin color, gender, and ethnicity can tell you if you *lack* diversity. But it can't tell you that you *have* diversity. The whole point of diversity in an organization is to provide situational awareness and flexibility in thinking.
Not really. For aeropress I use metal filters, which produce a slightly oilier results than paper, which I still occasionally use when the mood hits me. That cost is negligible. For pourover, I use a paper filter which adds about a nickle to the cost; but for french press no disposables are needed. I also occasionally do cold brew in the french press, although other people prefer a reusable coffee sock.
To be honest, I really don't need to grind my own beans. The reason to grind your own is that the coffee goes stale more slowly when it is un-ground, but a pound of coffee disappears practically overnight in my house.
Since about half of what I drink costs $5/lb, I don't know if I qualify as a coffee snob. I think of myself more as a coffee hacker.
Are you really able to taste a discernible difference between the two different beans you buy and grind?
Absolutely, but it is certainly easy to obliterate the differences between expensive beans and cheap beans by mishandling them.
It sounds like the coffee you drink is overextracted. Overextraction is common because it's what you get when you economize by using too little coffee and making up for that by brewing too long. The acid flavors extract first, then the sweet ones, then finally the bitter ones. By overextracting dark beans, which are naturally more bitter, you can produce a potent-tasting (although unpleasant) cup of coffee with less coffee. You also get excess bitterness from using water that is at boiling temperatures, beans that are ground too fine or inconsistently, and dirty equipment. It is also possible (although less common) for coffee to be underextracted, which produces a cup which is sour, thin and salty.
I enjoy coffee with cream and even sugar occasionally, but if the only way you can enjoy a pot of coffee is with cream then that coffee was almost certainly mishandled. Coffee is not like tea; certain varities of tea are mean to be consumed with milk and sugars, others not. Any coffee should be enjoyable black.
Making a good cup of coffee isn't rocket science, but it *is* cooking; there's some technique and care involved, and different coffee varieties and roasts require different approaches -- the way you can't really cook fish and steak the same way.
I grind my own coffee, and at $11.99 / pound for excellent beans the 15 grams I need for a mug of coffee cost me $0.39. I sometimes buy fairly good (but not super-premium) beans at $4.99 a pound, which means a cup of what you'd get at a typical coffee shop sets me back sixteen cents.
That's good, because I drink a *lot* of coffee.
Recently I discovered a programmable tea urn at the local Asian market that'll keep up to 5 liters of water at just the right temperature for for aeropress, which takes about 100 seconds to do a brew. So I can have a far better cup of coffee than I'd get from a Keurig in just about half a minute more time, at less cost. I reckon I drink about the equivalent of 20 k-cups worth of coffee per day, and if I use the pedestrian bulk beans I'd be saving over $2000/year. Most of the time I use higher quality beans, so I'm saving more like $800.
Well, the rates of functional illiteracy in the US is shockingly high: about one in seven adults have reading and writing skills that are so poor that they affect their ability to function, but they aren't technically totally illiterate.
That said, I don't think there's been so much a growth in illiteracy as a growth in accommodating peoples' laziness. Also as stuff is increasingly made in China and sold across the world, things like user manuals are almost a thing of the past. User produced YouTube videos are the de facto manual for many, many products.
You can't be on your smartphone more than all the time.
It's called "gaming", and its bound to do it better than anything like this can.
Somehow I doubt any basically linear form like a movie or a TV show or a novel can offer enough interactivity to matter without undermining the uniquely valuable aspects of traditional storytelling. But it's not surprising that people -- corporate people -- keep trying.
Movies and special TV shows are massive collective undertakings which take immense logistical ingenuity and financial risk just to bring to the screen. Just sit through the credits of a modern tentpole movie and you'll see more than five hundred people listed.
What's lost in all that tends to be authorial point of view. That's why you can go to a community theater and see a play put on by a handful of actors and stage hands that entertains you in a way that movies theoretically could can, but seldom do. It's not that blockbusters don't entertain you, but more often than not what you take away from them is the impressive production craft, not the story.
So I'm not surprised that producers would want to punt on the storytelling. Letting the audience choose is a way of getting them engaged without taking any risks.
This is not 1980. As weird as it may seem, I remember a time when newspapers had separate sections labelled "Jobs for Men" and "Jobs for Women", and any female applicant walking into HR was automatically given a typing test. Women in my generation were having none of that, and the ones entering management (and their successors) have long since climbed the greasy pole to the top.
Have we reached parity? No. Boards are still almost always majority male. And if the law required parity in male/female representation, that would be a huge change. But the law sets a standard that most of California's largest companies already meet. That is no accident. No politician is going to want to piss of Walt Disney.
There are few large companies that might need to add another director or replace the next retiring male director with a female one. But the world is heading for parity anyway; the law basically says you can't remain a statistical outlier.
The Obama era limitation amounted to no more than 6 grams (0.013 pounds) per gigawatt-hour. There, feel enlightened?
Why did they set that particular limit?
At the time the mercury limits were set (2011), there was considerable uncertainty about the exact impact in the population, although there was good reason to suspect mercury emissions were a problem. Mercury and mercury compounds found in combustion by-products are potent neurotoxins and can have a very long half-lives in the human body, in some cases nearly thirty years. This, along with its ability to bioaccumulate through the food chain, makes the economic effects of mercury emissions a serious concern.
Children exposed to the kind of mercury compounds found in coal plant emissions have reduced intellectual capacity. The net impact on the US economy in lost productivity due to lost intellectual capability alone has been estimated at 87 billion year 2000 dollars (soruce). Naturally if you put error bars around that figure they would be huge.
So given the uncertainty, why 0.013 pounds/GWh? Why not 0.02, or 0.005? Probably because it was as much as technologically feasible without forcing coal plants then operating to shut down. Since that point there have been measurable effects in population mercury levels, and the net long term benefits of the restrictions have been estimated at 43 billion annually (source).
Nonetheless, there are uncertainties. Nobody can tell you what the precise effect of a 6 gram limit has been, particularly in an era when coal-fired electricity plants have been closing due to competition with natural gas; still there isn't much doubt that coal-based mercury emissions are a bad thing.
Given the natural economic decline of coal, this regulatory change probably won't have much measurable economic impact. Will it harm people? Well, it's reasonable to assume that some children and infants downwind from the remaining coal plants might be harmed, but you won't be able to point to any one person with high mercury levels and quantify precisely how many IQ points he's lost or say with certainty his behavior control issues wouldn't have happened anyway. That was the status quo under the Obama era MATS regulations anyway.
Editor's picks are opinions reflect editorial priorities, which include making a buck. They don't validate anything.
Which products are best is a question that can be answered two possible ways. The first is to canvass impartial experts who follow these things but have no vested interest in the answer -- if you can find such a rare beast.
The second is crowd sourcing. You could do a statistically defensible sampling of what people are actually using, and then figure out what is gaining and losing ground and why.
OK, let's talk logic. I didn't contradict you in (2). I was pointing out that you were begging the question. I agree that that the misogyny of the source is irrelevant to the question of whether the source can be rescinded, but the identity and past behavior of the source is relevant to the conversation because it bears on his motives.
For the record I take no position on the authenticity of any misogynist troll's misogyny. A misogynist troll might well be a sincere misogynist in real life, but the only thing you can know for sure is that he's a troll.