failing to take advantage of the brief period of Democratic control of Congress by getting his health care plan passed (and instead trying to play fair with the GOP, a party which makes no bones about its policy of doing everything it can to harm the country when the other party holds the White House in order to make the President look bad)
Actually, "Obamacare" was more ambitious than the administration wanted -- they were cognizant of what happened to Clinton when he tried this. It was Nancy Pelosi who pushed for what Republicans call "Obamacare", which ironically was based on Romney's Massachusetts system, which in turn was based on Bob Dole's Republican counter-proposal to Clinton's plan.
It's not that Obama would be against a more radical single payer in principle, it's that he'd have been satisfied to fix enough specific problems (like pre-existing conditions and the "doughnut hole") without getting too politically exposed. I
Well, the rule of law as it has been settled over the last couple of centuries doesn't consider suspicion a burden to the target. That's because when the Bill of Rights was framed the cost and difficulty of surveillance was so high it was assumed not to be a serious threat to liberty. And that's where the current understanding of the US Constitution's limitations on police remains to this day. The law hasn't adjusted to the fact that it's now possible to *mechanize* suspicion and surveillance through cameras, software, networks and databases.
In fact this problem predates technological advances. The emergence of a government with powerful, permanently constituted security agencies is something the founders never dreamed of. That is the problem with "original intent"; in many situations what the founders might have intended is a matter of speculation. For example we now accept that 4th Amendment protections protect people in public places (Katz v. United States, 1967) but for a long time the limitation to a person's home, self, and papers was taken literally (Olmstead v. United States, 1928).
It is certainly not true that three letter agencies can do whatever they want, wherever they want; but the limitations the Constitution specifically puts on them do not cover their current capability to infringe on individual liberties, and the courts thus far have declined to check them under the Ninth Amendment or through extensions of other amendments..
Ever hear of NIMBY? It's easy to be against all regulations that protect other people's property.
Wanting protections for your own backyard makes you a concerned citizen. Wanting protections for everyone's back yard makes you an environmentalist -- and apparently a socialist.
Anyhow, the concerns raised by the group are reasonable, but raising a reasonable concern should not amount to veto power. The sensible way to respond to a reasonable concern is to commission an environmental impact assessment, give the public a little time to critique the study, then make a decision one way or the other. Either way there will be people who aren't satisfied, but there's no point in even talking to people who will only be satisfied unless they get their own way.
The long coexistence of wildlife and launch operations at the Kennedy Space Center is promising, but not conclusive. You can't generalize or reason from first principles one way or the other in cases like this. You have to work from location-specific data. While it is hard to put a precise cost on an environmental impact assessment, the cost of determining whether there's a reasonable concern here isn't likely to be a significant financial burden to a project like this.
It is just possible that geezers have learned a thing or two.
That's true, but it's also true that we older folks don't have the memory for arbitrary strings of data that we used to. So our choice is to use the same password for everything, use weak, easy to remember passwords, or use some kind of memory aid. I've opted for the last. I use KeepPassX religiously and generate unique, strong passwords for every site I use. I only have to remember one, moderately strong password which never gets transmitted over the wire.
In fact a few people like me probably skew the results if you're going by averages. According to TFA the average user chosen password has less than ten bits of entropy. My low-sensitivity site passwords have about 40-50 bits of entropy but my banking and ecommerce passwords have over 80. Remembering a half-dozen 80 bit passwords including mixed case, numbers and symbols would be a challenge for anyone, but it's a cinch if you don't even try.
Another trick I've recommended for people to use for sensitive data is to write down a several strong prefixes, carry them in your wallet, and concatenate them with weak but easy to remember password.
Well, I think that individuals who are honest and care about their work can contain their personal biases by conscientiously following lines of inquiry that lead in directions they'd rather not take. If that were not possible, it would be impossible to be honest with yourself about your own behavior. But like being honest with yourself, it's a lot easier to convince yourself you're being impartial than to actually do it.
I see a number of good reasons for bringing in outsiders, but the most compelling one is credibility. If an inside investigator clears a colleague or wrongdoing, people will suspect a cover-up. If he concludes that a colleague bears individual responsibility, *that* can be seen as a cover-up too: they might be throwing someone under the bus to protect the organization.
That last scenario actually happened in the US Navy investigation of the 1989 investigation of an explosion that killed 47 men in the gun turret of the USS Iowa. The bodies were removed without documenting their location or condition, the equipment in the turret removed and thrown overboard, and the interior repainted. All this was done with the knowledge of the admiral running the investigation. Witness testimony was coerced and in some cases altered, and the technical lead in the investigation was the officer who had overseen the packing of the powder bags that exploded. The only reason we know all this was the attempt at scapegoating was so transparent.
you need to shut-up and quit mocking them. The idea of a divine creator is no sillier than the idea of creation from nothing.
Well perhaps it is not the answer to the question "Did creation come from nothing" that is silly; perhaps it is the question itself.
There are certainly other questions we could ask that clearly presuppose ordering events in impossible ways. What's colder than absolute zero? What's north of the North Pole? What has a higher elevation than directly overhead? What happens when you shrink a balloon to less than zero volume?
Asking whether creation came from nothing presupposes our notion of time and space can be extended before the Big Bang. It assumes that time is a fixed, universal measurement framework in which events can be unambiguously placed. But we already know that time is not like that. Special relativity has been pretty well corroborated by now. If time isn't a universal dimension but a set of paths along which events occur, it is no more repugnant to reason for those paths to lead back to a point than it is for them to go back endlessly.
This problem of trying to extend our understanding back before the beginning of the universe is not resolved by assuming a pre-existing God. Did anything happen before "the moment of creation"? If so, then the moment of creation is just an arbitrary point in time. So what was God up to in the eternity before that? If there is no beginning to time, there is no reason for God to perform the act of creation when he did. He had an eternity to work his way up to it. Possibly He has done this an infinite number of times, in which case time is as Eastern religions often conceive it: circular. Note that this conception of God doing things in an eternity before creation is no longer really transcendent. God may not be part of creation, but he is part of "existence" and does things because conditions in existence him cause him to, just like you or I put on a coat when it's cold. This version of God is not so different than you or I, just longer lived and more complex.
On the other hand, let's suppose God has the transcendent role religion assigns him, that he is indeed the First Cause. That means things didn't happen before the moment of creation. That brings us back to the same situation we have with the Big Bang. Does it make sense to talk about time in which events don't occur? Event he ticking of a clock is an event; a beat of the pulse; the vibration of an atom.
Perhaps it would be best to think of the beginning of the universe not as a limit to the Universe per se, but a limit to any kind of extrapolation from experience. The laws of physics as we know them came into being in first 10^-12 seconds. As we go back further to the Planck Epoch before 10^-43, intuition begins to break down. And as we push further back in that 10^-43 seconds, there will come a point earlier than which we can't even extend our deductive frameworks. Let's say the earliest event we can discern by deduction occurs at 10^-X. In the time between 0 and 10^-X our understanding completely breaks down. That tiny sliver of time is for all purposes an eternity, since we can't put any definite limit on events that occur in it.
I have often wondered whether intelligent life (obviously not as we know it) might have existed in the epoch of the Universe, only living on a vastly faster time scale. To that life our epoch of the Universe would look like the future heat death of the Universe does to us.
Well, there's nobody who could reasonably claim to answer that question with any authority, but if you'd like speculation then it *might* work like the Monolith did in 2001: Find an animal that's close to what you want and nudge it in a direction that favors the traits you're looking for.
If you're only interested in results rather than specific means, you don't necessarily have to mess with genetic engineering. Potentially you could do this on an entirely behavioral level then let natural selection take care of the details, which is what I take the Monolith to have done in 2001.
Cheap, crummy ebook conversions with no editorial checking. This has been going on for years, and it will continue to be a problem for the foreseeable future.
A physical book is costly to produce. It's costly to stock and ship them as well. Given those costs, the additional cost of doing a little editing is insignificant. Ebooks, on the other hand, open up new depths of low cost publishing. It's one of those perverse, ironic results. You'd think that cutting down the reproduction and stocking costs of a book would free up money for other tasks, but in fact what happens is that editing, design and promotion become an opportunity for cutting what is now a more significant proportion of expenses.
As ebooks become the dominant form of book reading, the opportunity arises for marginal publishers to publish books with expenses cut to the bone. Eventually the role of publishers as mediators between the author and public to disappear, and authors will hire editors, story development consultants and designers themselves. Or perhaps literary agents will take the place of traditional publishers, becoming full service business management services for authors. In any case, expect that a greater proportion of "published" books to be poorly designed and edited.
I would be very surprised if ObamaCare even made it into THOMAS.
Be surprised then. Both The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the earlier House version called The Affordable Health Care for America Act (subsequently amended into an entirely different bill) are in there. (And apropos of TFA, trying to find those bills then extract a stable URL is a pan because the UI appends session specific data to query result URLs).
But it turns out there's a good reason why you might have the impression that Obama was secretive about the health insurance reform bill.
Keep in mind that when it came to health insurance reform the political game had three sides. The Democrats in Congress wanted to pass the most ambitious reform bill they could manage. The White House wanted a bill big enough allow them to say they delivered on reform promises but not so big Obama face the kind of shit storm Clinton faced when he tried to do insurance reform. The Republicans wanted to force Obama and the House Democrats through the same political meat grinder they put Clinton through in the 1990s.
Obama was inexperienced in national politics at this point. His strategy was to make a high profile call for reform, then leave it up to the House to come up with a package of specific proposals that it could pass. The intent was to get a reform bill passed without staking too much White House credibility on the specifics, and not to give opponents a political punching bag before the details of the actual bill had been worked out. This was a miscalculation. The Republicans were able to attack straw men proposals like death panels, bolstered by the lack of political leadership from the White House. And by leaving the specifics up to the House, Obama got a bill that was a lot more ambitious and politically risky than he wanted (source:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/health/policy/21reconstruct.html). It was also some 70 billion dollars more expensive than he wanted (source: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0310/34753.html).
The House Democrats, for their part, based their proposals on Romney's Massachusetts plan, which in turn was based on Bob Dole's Republican alternative to Clinton's reform plans. While this would seem to be a politically safe move, the lack of leadership from the White House meant they ended up taking the political damage for a much more radical government takeover of health insurance, while at the same time alienating their base for *not* doing that.
In the end Republicans were able to gain a significant political victory in Congress and and advantageous position against Obama at the price of enacting their own health care plan from the mid 1990s.
50-60 year-olds are more mature than teenagers. That should come as no surprise. Do you think those 50 year olds were as disciplined thirty-five years ago as they are today?
Well as simulation, AD&D was pretty bad. But as a role playing game it was fairly good.
Realism is an illusion in tabletop gaming. What produces that illusion is having to make choices that have consequences that play out. There's a certain *rhythm* to a game that's working well. It goes like this: decision (attack the creature), immediate result (creature is not surprised), string of action rounds, second decision (run away), result (party gets through the door) then problem (how to secure the door?).
Adding detail to a system in terms of a broader selection of alternatives at each point does add something to the game, but until you master all that detail it bogs the rhythm of the game down. Later editions of D&D seemed to me to be fine for people who'd played continually since the original AD&D, but bogged down the game for people who wanted to play casually or were coming to it new. I think from a *design* standpoint the subsequent changes narrowed the appeal of the game.
That's not to say I'm against making things more complex. For example played under house rules that added a decision after the initiative role; you could take the initiative or you could cede it for a bonus on a counter hit. It didn't slow the subjective pace of the game because it was a simple decision with immediate consequences.
You know something I noticed not too long ago? A lot of children these days simply have no concept of "need". If they don't "want" to do something they won't, and see no reason they should.
That isn't anything new. That's just immaturity, which (surprise) is characteristic of children. The problem in this world isn't childish children. It's childish adults.
For instance if they don't "want" to do their school work, many of them won't.
Well, speaking as a parent with actual direct experience with my kids and their friends, they have *way* more work than I did when I was their age in the 1970s.The day is so stuffed with curriculum schools have cut the lunch period to under fifteen minutes, and "study hall" is something kids have never heard of, replaced with special content boosting classes to help them through statewide testing. The time pressure has spilled over into homework. Even as elementary students they seldom had less than an hour of homework per night, and often had two.
And, if I recall what kids were like in the 70s (as opposed to how I'd like to believe we were), these kids have a work ethic far beyond anything I ever saw back then. If anything I think we've gone to far toward instilling work ethic in these kids, who don't have the self-directed time we did. Compared to my kids' highly scripted and controlled childhood, my own feels like something out of Tom Sawyer.
Where videogames fit into this picture isn't stimulation. My kids look at videogame time (strictly limited in our house) as precious decompression time. If kids reach young adulthood less socially mature (which I'm skeptical of) it's probably not gaming per se. It's more likely that so much is expected of them and so little spare time given to them they don't have enough experience directing their own activities with their friends.
my experience with children recently has shown me that simply understanding that things that "need" to happen simply must,
So far as I can see, this attitude is much more characteristic of *adult* Americans these days than it is of our kids -- at least the ones who are old enough that they should know this. We adult Americans don't want to plan for the future or to face anything unpleasant. When that neglect comes home to roost we want a quick fix and we want it yesterday. And if we can't get a quick fix we demand a scapegoat. If it is true kids are ignorant and lazy, does it make sense to believe the *kids* are responsible for their faulty education? It's not like the infants we got in this generation are somehow inferior.
But I don't think that kids today are no good. I look at the kids *I* know, and I see a generation that is brighter, more knowledgeable, and harder working than my generation was. If that's not what *you* see, then don't blame the kids. Blame the adults who raised them and the politicians you elected to set education policies..
Lack of insects is one of the reasons that a moon base is a low priority. True, some insects spoil crops or spread diseases, but others pollinate crops, recycle decaying matter, and are food for birds, fish and yes, people. They're a critical component of any sustainable ecosystem that works remotely like Earth's.
Somebody who can't see the positive aspects of insects is not qualified to make judgments about the role of space colonization in humanity's future, on the basis of irrational cultural biases and nature-phobia.
Now to answer your question of why we don't build a base on the moon, you can't judge whether something should be done on its own faults and merits, you've got to look at the merits of things you won't be able to do as result of pursuing it. In economics this is called "opportunity cost". Investing $1 at a 5% return when another, equally safe investment would yield 10% is like throwing away a nickel.
So when you look at whether the *government* should be investing in moon bases, you have to look at the other things it could be spending money on. Even if you think a government funded moon base is a net win in itself, you have to consider whether that money would be better spent exploring the Solar System so we know what's out there.
I completely agree. When people settled North America, Africa, or South America did they say, "oh you know what those are scared lands we will not disturb them."
They didn't have the notion of national sovereignty, and probably not even land-property, so I guess they probably said something like, "Hey, there goes a bunch of mastodon! Let's go catch some!"
Then later the Europeans arrived. They *did* have concepts of land-property and national sovereignty, and we *know* what they said: "All these uninhabited lands belong to us! Now let's go catch some slaves."
It's not the asymmetry in tactics that makes a "war" like this unwinnable. It's the lack of any definition of "victory".
In a traditional war, you win by seizing territory and national resources, forcing the leadership of the enemy to capitulate. In something like the Afghan War seizing territory and national resources is only the opening move. There is nothing left to seize. The enemy leadership is not going to capitulate because there's nothing they have, including their lives, that are seriously under threat. Even if they did their movement would splinter. The only thing you can do is turn the populace against them, but *you're* an occupying army and the main instrument you have for winning civilian hearts and minds are troops who have to defend themselves from an attack from the very civilian masses they're supposed to win over. Under the circumstances US forces have done an amazing job, but it's like a marriage going bad: one stupid word or action cancels out ten good deeds.
The closest thing to victory you can expect in something like this is to wait for a relatively calm stretch, declare victory and leave.
Am I the only one who doesn't see this as a positive thing?
Well, obviously not, but in the current political climate I'm pretty far to the left and I see this as a good thing. Except for people who have a vested interest in this question I should think you don't have much company.
Privatizing government *responsibilities* is a bad idea, because those tasks have to be carefully managed to ensure public interests are protected. It's that micromanagement where you can't control everything through a P&L statement that makes government inefficient, so farming out something like running prisons, providing police services or fighting wars to private contractors mans you've got the worst of both worlds: government inefficiency, and private sector indifference to the public good.
But we've always bought *stuff* from the private sector, whether it is weapons or tools or vehicles. And this is really not so radically different from the way we procured complex vehicles like the Space Shuttle or military planes, except that SpaceX is *operating* the vehicles as well. What matters is that the payload gets where it's going reliably; the public has no particular interest in *how* that is accomplished. So this looks like a good candidate for privatization to me, unlike fighting wars or running prisons.
Except no one looks back at the 20th century and remembers the great sea level disaster.
Ever hear of Venice? Of course Venice is also subsiding, but seven inches on top of that has made a big difference to them.
The problem with sea level rise in the short term isn't that suddenly you're city is drowned every day of the year. It's with the increase in frequency with which rare catastrophic events occur. Every coastal city has a high water level below which flooding effects are marginal and above which they are catastrophic (e.g. a levee is overtopped). How close waters commonly come to that mark determines the impact of a marginal increase in sea level.
Cities like Venice or New Orleans which are already prone to flooding are certainly affected by an 18 cm rise in mean sea level, although that effect isn't necessarily seen every year. Boston on the other hand was built to withstand 3-4m tides and has never had a major flood from the sea, so the 18 cm rise in the 20th C. had zero effect on it. If at some point in the future sea levels rise by a meter or so, flooding might become a common event in Boston. At that point a further 18 a cm rise would be very expensive to deal with.
The effect of sea level rise is not linear, and it's not uniform throughout the world. The effect depends on how a city is constructed and situated.
Now as to "geologically stable tide guages", if you knew anything about surveying you'd know that rather begs the question. In any case you can get any result you want by arbitrarily throwing out data; *mocking* data you'd prefer not to exist doesn't count as an argument.
It was also lousy but unfortunately common business practices.
Suppose you're a company that handles billing and payments for clients. One of your clients asks you for the credit card information for all of *his* clients. This scenario shows why you should be very reluctant to give that data to him. And for all you know, *he's* going to use it to commit identity fraud, or sell it on the black market.
Not disclosing this information inconveniences the customer slightly, but it also protects him.
When you receive sensitive private information from someone, you should not use it or transfer it to any third parties except as necessary to fulfill the purpose for which you received it, *even if* you are just a middleman between the buyer, the vendor, and the vendor's bank. Get the money transferred into the customer's account and the order to the customer's order fulfillment people and your job is done.
These problems come from not *thinking*. End user sends you data, you automatically store it without thinking, whether you need it or not. Customer asks you for that data, and you automatically give it to him without thinking. A service agreement should be concluded between you and your customer establishing what the customer is going to do with that data, and when and how the data will be provided. You shouldn't just give him data that is not necessarily *his* by right just because he asks for it.
The underlying problem is that companies operate as if the privacy and security of their end-users is none of their concern.
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Imagine yourself living in a small, isolated place with your wife, 24/7. Now imagine the wife a strong, stuborn feminist.
Poor Fred.
Yeah, all that on top of no booze.
Actually, "Obamacare" was more ambitious than the administration wanted -- they were cognizant of what happened to Clinton when he tried this. It was Nancy Pelosi who pushed for what Republicans call "Obamacare", which ironically was based on Romney's Massachusetts system, which in turn was based on Bob Dole's Republican counter-proposal to Clinton's plan.
It's not that Obama would be against a more radical single payer in principle, it's that he'd have been satisfied to fix enough specific problems (like pre-existing conditions and the "doughnut hole") without getting too politically exposed. I
Well, the rule of law as it has been settled over the last couple of centuries doesn't consider suspicion a burden to the target. That's because when the Bill of Rights was framed the cost and difficulty of surveillance was so high it was assumed not to be a serious threat to liberty. And that's where the current understanding of the US Constitution's limitations on police remains to this day. The law hasn't adjusted to the fact that it's now possible to *mechanize* suspicion and surveillance through cameras, software, networks and databases.
In fact this problem predates technological advances. The emergence of a government with powerful, permanently constituted security agencies is something the founders never dreamed of. That is the problem with "original intent"; in many situations what the founders might have intended is a matter of speculation. For example we now accept that 4th Amendment protections protect people in public places (Katz v. United States, 1967) but for a long time the limitation to a person's home, self, and papers was taken literally (Olmstead v. United States, 1928).
It is certainly not true that three letter agencies can do whatever they want, wherever they want; but the limitations the Constitution specifically puts on them do not cover their current capability to infringe on individual liberties, and the courts thus far have declined to check them under the Ninth Amendment or through extensions of other amendments..
Ever hear of NIMBY? It's easy to be against all regulations that protect other people's property.
Wanting protections for your own backyard makes you a concerned citizen. Wanting protections for everyone's back yard makes you an environmentalist -- and apparently a socialist.
Anyhow, the concerns raised by the group are reasonable, but raising a reasonable concern should not amount to veto power. The sensible way to respond to a reasonable concern is to commission an environmental impact assessment, give the public a little time to critique the study, then make a decision one way or the other. Either way there will be people who aren't satisfied, but there's no point in even talking to people who will only be satisfied unless they get their own way.
The long coexistence of wildlife and launch operations at the Kennedy Space Center is promising, but not conclusive. You can't generalize or reason from first principles one way or the other in cases like this. You have to work from location-specific data. While it is hard to put a precise cost on an environmental impact assessment, the cost of determining whether there's a reasonable concern here isn't likely to be a significant financial burden to a project like this.
It is just possible that geezers have learned a thing or two.
That's true, but it's also true that we older folks don't have the memory for arbitrary strings of data that we used to. So our choice is to use the same password for everything, use weak, easy to remember passwords, or use some kind of memory aid. I've opted for the last. I use KeepPassX religiously and generate unique, strong passwords for every site I use. I only have to remember one, moderately strong password which never gets transmitted over the wire.
In fact a few people like me probably skew the results if you're going by averages. According to TFA the average user chosen password has less than ten bits of entropy. My low-sensitivity site passwords have about 40-50 bits of entropy but my banking and ecommerce passwords have over 80. Remembering a half-dozen 80 bit passwords including mixed case, numbers and symbols would be a challenge for anyone, but it's a cinch if you don't even try.
Another trick I've recommended for people to use for sensitive data is to write down a several strong prefixes, carry them in your wallet, and concatenate them with weak but easy to remember password.
Well, I think that individuals who are honest and care about their work can contain their personal biases by conscientiously following lines of inquiry that lead in directions they'd rather not take. If that were not possible, it would be impossible to be honest with yourself about your own behavior. But like being honest with yourself, it's a lot easier to convince yourself you're being impartial than to actually do it.
I see a number of good reasons for bringing in outsiders, but the most compelling one is credibility. If an inside investigator clears a colleague or wrongdoing, people will suspect a cover-up. If he concludes that a colleague bears individual responsibility, *that* can be seen as a cover-up too: they might be throwing someone under the bus to protect the organization.
That last scenario actually happened in the US Navy investigation of the 1989 investigation of an explosion that killed 47 men in the gun turret of the USS Iowa. The bodies were removed without documenting their location or condition, the equipment in the turret removed and thrown overboard, and the interior repainted. All this was done with the knowledge of the admiral running the investigation. Witness testimony was coerced and in some cases altered, and the technical lead in the investigation was the officer who had overseen the packing of the powder bags that exploded. The only reason we know all this was the attempt at scapegoating was so transparent.
"Think about how stupid the average person is, then realize half the people are stupider than that!" -- George Carlin
Think how much more true that is now that Carlin has died.
you need to shut-up and quit mocking them. The idea of a divine creator is no sillier than the idea of creation from nothing.
Well perhaps it is not the answer to the question "Did creation come from nothing" that is silly; perhaps it is the question itself.
There are certainly other questions we could ask that clearly presuppose ordering events in impossible ways. What's colder than absolute zero? What's north of the North Pole? What has a higher elevation than directly overhead? What happens when you shrink a balloon to less than zero volume?
Asking whether creation came from nothing presupposes our notion of time and space can be extended before the Big Bang. It assumes that time is a fixed, universal measurement framework in which events can be unambiguously placed. But we already know that time is not like that. Special relativity has been pretty well corroborated by now. If time isn't a universal dimension but a set of paths along which events occur, it is no more repugnant to reason for those paths to lead back to a point than it is for them to go back endlessly.
This problem of trying to extend our understanding back before the beginning of the universe is not resolved by assuming a pre-existing God. Did anything happen before "the moment of creation"? If so, then the moment of creation is just an arbitrary point in time. So what was God up to in the eternity before that? If there is no beginning to time, there is no reason for God to perform the act of creation when he did. He had an eternity to work his way up to it. Possibly He has done this an infinite number of times, in which case time is as Eastern religions often conceive it: circular. Note that this conception of God doing things in an eternity before creation is no longer really transcendent. God may not be part of creation, but he is part of "existence" and does things because conditions in existence him cause him to, just like you or I put on a coat when it's cold. This version of God is not so different than you or I, just longer lived and more complex.
On the other hand, let's suppose God has the transcendent role religion assigns him, that he is indeed the First Cause. That means things didn't happen before the moment of creation. That brings us back to the same situation we have with the Big Bang. Does it make sense to talk about time in which events don't occur? Event he ticking of a clock is an event; a beat of the pulse; the vibration of an atom.
Perhaps it would be best to think of the beginning of the universe not as a limit to the Universe per se, but a limit to any kind of extrapolation from experience. The laws of physics as we know them came into being in first 10^-12 seconds. As we go back further to the Planck Epoch before 10^-43, intuition begins to break down. And as we push further back in that 10^-43 seconds, there will come a point earlier than which we can't even extend our deductive frameworks. Let's say the earliest event we can discern by deduction occurs at 10^-X. In the time between 0 and 10^-X our understanding completely breaks down. That tiny sliver of time is for all purposes an eternity, since we can't put any definite limit on events that occur in it.
I have often wondered whether intelligent life (obviously not as we know it) might have existed in the epoch of the Universe, only living on a vastly faster time scale. To that life our epoch of the Universe would look like the future heat death of the Universe does to us.
in other words, 46% of americans are dumb
If by "dumb" you mean "below median intelligence", that's approximately correct.
How does "divinely guided" work?
Well, there's nobody who could reasonably claim to answer that question with any authority, but if you'd like speculation then it *might* work like the Monolith did in 2001: Find an animal that's close to what you want and nudge it in a direction that favors the traits you're looking for.
If you're only interested in results rather than specific means, you don't necessarily have to mess with genetic engineering. Potentially you could do this on an entirely behavioral level then let natural selection take care of the details, which is what I take the Monolith to have done in 2001.
Cheap, crummy ebook conversions with no editorial checking. This has been going on for years, and it will continue to be a problem for the foreseeable future.
A physical book is costly to produce. It's costly to stock and ship them as well. Given those costs, the additional cost of doing a little editing is insignificant. Ebooks, on the other hand, open up new depths of low cost publishing. It's one of those perverse, ironic results. You'd think that cutting down the reproduction and stocking costs of a book would free up money for other tasks, but in fact what happens is that editing, design and promotion become an opportunity for cutting what is now a more significant proportion of expenses.
As ebooks become the dominant form of book reading, the opportunity arises for marginal publishers to publish books with expenses cut to the bone. Eventually the role of publishers as mediators between the author and public to disappear, and authors will hire editors, story development consultants and designers themselves. Or perhaps literary agents will take the place of traditional publishers, becoming full service business management services for authors. In any case, expect that a greater proportion of "published" books to be poorly designed and edited.
I would be very surprised if ObamaCare even made it into THOMAS.
Be surprised then. Both The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the earlier House version called The Affordable Health Care for America Act (subsequently amended into an entirely different bill) are in there. (And apropos of TFA, trying to find those bills then extract a stable URL is a pan because the UI appends session specific data to query result URLs).
But it turns out there's a good reason why you might have the impression that Obama was secretive about the health insurance reform bill.
Keep in mind that when it came to health insurance reform the political game had three sides. The Democrats in Congress wanted to pass the most ambitious reform bill they could manage. The White House wanted a bill big enough allow them to say they delivered on reform promises but not so big Obama face the kind of shit storm Clinton faced when he tried to do insurance reform. The Republicans wanted to force Obama and the House Democrats through the same political meat grinder they put Clinton through in the 1990s.
Obama was inexperienced in national politics at this point. His strategy was to make a high profile call for reform, then leave it up to the House to come up with a package of specific proposals that it could pass. The intent was to get a reform bill passed without staking too much White House credibility on the specifics, and not to give opponents a political punching bag before the details of the actual bill had been worked out. This was a miscalculation. The Republicans were able to attack straw men proposals like death panels, bolstered by the lack of political leadership from the White House. And by leaving the specifics up to the House, Obama got a bill that was a lot more ambitious and politically risky than he wanted (source:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/health/policy/21reconstruct.html). It was also some 70 billion dollars more expensive than he wanted (source: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0310/34753.html).
The House Democrats, for their part, based their proposals on Romney's Massachusetts plan, which in turn was based on Bob Dole's Republican alternative to Clinton's reform plans. While this would seem to be a politically safe move, the lack of leadership from the White House meant they ended up taking the political damage for a much more radical government takeover of health insurance, while at the same time alienating their base for *not* doing that.
In the end Republicans were able to gain a significant political victory in Congress and and advantageous position against Obama at the price of enacting their own health care plan from the mid 1990s.
50-60 year-olds are more mature than teenagers. That should come as no surprise. Do you think those 50 year olds were as disciplined thirty-five years ago as they are today?
Well as simulation, AD&D was pretty bad. But as a role playing game it was fairly good.
Realism is an illusion in tabletop gaming. What produces that illusion is having to make choices that have consequences that play out. There's a certain *rhythm* to a game that's working well. It goes like this: decision (attack the creature), immediate result (creature is not surprised), string of action rounds, second decision (run away), result (party gets through the door) then problem (how to secure the door?).
Adding detail to a system in terms of a broader selection of alternatives at each point does add something to the game, but until you master all that detail it bogs the rhythm of the game down. Later editions of D&D seemed to me to be fine for people who'd played continually since the original AD&D, but bogged down the game for people who wanted to play casually or were coming to it new. I think from a *design* standpoint the subsequent changes narrowed the appeal of the game.
That's not to say I'm against making things more complex. For example played under house rules that added a decision after the initiative role; you could take the initiative or you could cede it for a bonus on a counter hit. It didn't slow the subjective pace of the game because it was a simple decision with immediate consequences.
You know something I noticed not too long ago? A lot of children these days simply have no concept of "need". If they don't "want" to do something they won't, and see no reason they should.
That isn't anything new. That's just immaturity, which (surprise) is characteristic of children. The problem in this world isn't childish children. It's childish adults.
For instance if they don't "want" to do their school work, many of them won't.
Well, speaking as a parent with actual direct experience with my kids and their friends, they have *way* more work than I did when I was their age in the 1970s.The day is so stuffed with curriculum schools have cut the lunch period to under fifteen minutes, and "study hall" is something kids have never heard of, replaced with special content boosting classes to help them through statewide testing. The time pressure has spilled over into homework. Even as elementary students they seldom had less than an hour of homework per night, and often had two.
And, if I recall what kids were like in the 70s (as opposed to how I'd like to believe we were), these kids have a work ethic far beyond anything I ever saw back then. If anything I think we've gone to far toward instilling work ethic in these kids, who don't have the self-directed time we did. Compared to my kids' highly scripted and controlled childhood, my own feels like something out of Tom Sawyer.
Where videogames fit into this picture isn't stimulation. My kids look at videogame time (strictly limited in our house) as precious decompression time. If kids reach young adulthood less socially mature (which I'm skeptical of) it's probably not gaming per se. It's more likely that so much is expected of them and so little spare time given to them they don't have enough experience directing their own activities with their friends.
my experience with children recently has shown me that simply understanding that things that "need" to happen simply must,
So far as I can see, this attitude is much more characteristic of *adult* Americans these days than it is of our kids -- at least the ones who are old enough that they should know this. We adult Americans don't want to plan for the future or to face anything unpleasant. When that neglect comes home to roost we want a quick fix and we want it yesterday. And if we can't get a quick fix we demand a scapegoat. If it is true kids are ignorant and lazy, does it make sense to believe the *kids* are responsible for their faulty education? It's not like the infants we got in this generation are somehow inferior.
But I don't think that kids today are no good. I look at the kids *I* know, and I see a generation that is brighter, more knowledgeable, and harder working than my generation was. If that's not what *you* see, then don't blame the kids. Blame the adults who raised them and the politicians you elected to set education policies..
Isn't that reason enough? What happened to ambition, curiosity, and doing things "because it's there?"
Those goals reasons exploration of the solar system a higher priority than settling the Moon.
Lack of insects is one of the reasons that a moon base is a low priority. True, some insects spoil crops or spread diseases, but others pollinate crops, recycle decaying matter, and are food for birds, fish and yes, people. They're a critical component of any sustainable ecosystem that works remotely like Earth's.
Somebody who can't see the positive aspects of insects is not qualified to make judgments about the role of space colonization in humanity's future, on the basis of irrational cultural biases and nature-phobia.
Now to answer your question of why we don't build a base on the moon, you can't judge whether something should be done on its own faults and merits, you've got to look at the merits of things you won't be able to do as result of pursuing it. In economics this is called "opportunity cost". Investing $1 at a 5% return when another, equally safe investment would yield 10% is like throwing away a nickel.
So when you look at whether the *government* should be investing in moon bases, you have to look at the other things it could be spending money on. Even if you think a government funded moon base is a net win in itself, you have to consider whether that money would be better spent exploring the Solar System so we know what's out there.
I completely agree. When people settled North America, Africa, or South America did they say, "oh you know what those are scared lands we will not disturb them."
They didn't have the notion of national sovereignty, and probably not even land-property, so I guess they probably said something like, "Hey, there goes a bunch of mastodon! Let's go catch some!"
Then later the Europeans arrived. They *did* have concepts of land-property and national sovereignty, and we *know* what they said: "All these uninhabited lands belong to us! Now let's go catch some slaves."
I once interviewed a retiring Navy officer to become my boss. His name (I am not making this up):Captain Jack Hammer.
It's not the asymmetry in tactics that makes a "war" like this unwinnable. It's the lack of any definition of "victory".
In a traditional war, you win by seizing territory and national resources, forcing the leadership of the enemy to capitulate. In something like the Afghan War seizing territory and national resources is only the opening move. There is nothing left to seize. The enemy leadership is not going to capitulate because there's nothing they have, including their lives, that are seriously under threat. Even if they did their movement would splinter. The only thing you can do is turn the populace against them, but *you're* an occupying army and the main instrument you have for winning civilian hearts and minds are troops who have to defend themselves from an attack from the very civilian masses they're supposed to win over. Under the circumstances US forces have done an amazing job, but it's like a marriage going bad: one stupid word or action cancels out ten good deeds.
The closest thing to victory you can expect in something like this is to wait for a relatively calm stretch, declare victory and leave.
Boy, it's not like we didn't watch Russia do the exact same thing... *bangs head on table*
Your *shoe* comrade, you're supposed to bang your *shoe*.
Bozhe moi.
Well, obviously not, but in the current political climate I'm pretty far to the left and I see this as a good thing. Except for people who have a vested interest in this question I should think you don't have much company.
Privatizing government *responsibilities* is a bad idea, because those tasks have to be carefully managed to ensure public interests are protected. It's that micromanagement where you can't control everything through a P&L statement that makes government inefficient, so farming out something like running prisons, providing police services or fighting wars to private contractors mans you've got the worst of both worlds: government inefficiency, and private sector indifference to the public good.
But we've always bought *stuff* from the private sector, whether it is weapons or tools or vehicles. And this is really not so radically different from the way we procured complex vehicles like the Space Shuttle or military planes, except that SpaceX is *operating* the vehicles as well. What matters is that the payload gets where it's going reliably; the public has no particular interest in *how* that is accomplished. So this looks like a good candidate for privatization to me, unlike fighting wars or running prisons.
It's not as roomy as a coffin. It's more like a straightjacket, which is ironic.
Except no one looks back at the 20th century and remembers the great sea level disaster.
Ever hear of Venice? Of course Venice is also subsiding, but seven inches on top of that has made a big difference to them.
The problem with sea level rise in the short term isn't that suddenly you're city is drowned every day of the year. It's with the increase in frequency with which rare catastrophic events occur. Every coastal city has a high water level below which flooding effects are marginal and above which they are catastrophic (e.g. a levee is overtopped). How close waters commonly come to that mark determines the impact of a marginal increase in sea level.
Cities like Venice or New Orleans which are already prone to flooding are certainly affected by an 18 cm rise in mean sea level, although that effect isn't necessarily seen every year. Boston on the other hand was built to withstand 3-4m tides and has never had a major flood from the sea, so the 18 cm rise in the 20th C. had zero effect on it. If at some point in the future sea levels rise by a meter or so, flooding might become a common event in Boston. At that point a further 18 a cm rise would be very expensive to deal with.
The effect of sea level rise is not linear, and it's not uniform throughout the world. The effect depends on how a city is constructed and situated.
Now as to "geologically stable tide guages", if you knew anything about surveying you'd know that rather begs the question. In any case you can get any result you want by arbitrarily throwing out data; *mocking* data you'd prefer not to exist doesn't count as an argument.
It was also lousy but unfortunately common business practices.
Suppose you're a company that handles billing and payments for clients. One of your clients asks you for the credit card information for all of *his* clients. This scenario shows why you should be very reluctant to give that data to him. And for all you know, *he's* going to use it to commit identity fraud, or sell it on the black market.
Not disclosing this information inconveniences the customer slightly, but it also protects him.
When you receive sensitive private information from someone, you should not use it or transfer it to any third parties except as necessary to fulfill the purpose for which you received it, *even if* you are just a middleman between the buyer, the vendor, and the vendor's bank. Get the money transferred into the customer's account and the order to the customer's order fulfillment people and your job is done.
These problems come from not *thinking*. End user sends you data, you automatically store it without thinking, whether you need it or not. Customer asks you for that data, and you automatically give it to him without thinking. A service agreement should be concluded between you and your customer establishing what the customer is going to do with that data, and when and how the data will be provided. You shouldn't just give him data that is not necessarily *his* by right just because he asks for it.
The underlying problem is that companies operate as if the privacy and security of their end-users is none of their concern.