If you forbid educational loans, the economy would collapse as the flow of scientists, engineers, actuaries etc. into the entry level ranks dries up. Unless we open up to more immigration.
On the other hand, if you (a) your competition is financially weakened and (b) you think you can produce the product for a little less than they can, it's an opportunity to deal some competitors a death blow.
That could be valuable because with the build quality of modern TVs they have to be replaced every couple of years. That means that while there isn't growth in the number of TVs installed, there is potential for sales growth if there are fewer players.
A farmer had a wife who was so tight-fisted she never let him spend any money, even money he needed to run the farm. So he told the Zen master his problem and the master told the farmer to bring his wife to him.
As soon as the wife walked in the door, the master shoved his fist right in front of her face. "What would you say if my hand was always stuck like THIS?" he demanded.
"I'd say you'd had a deformed hand," the wife said.
"And what would you say," the master continued, shoving his open palm in her face, "if my hand was always stuck like THIS?"
"I'd say you had a different kind of deformity."
"Well, then," the master said. "You seem to know everything you need to."
Now my natural disposition is to be accommodating, but over the years I have learned sometimes you have to be a total intransigent bastard. Being a bastard shouldn't be opening move, and being nice shouldn't be the only move you have. You need to adapt the needs of the circumstance.
I'd never be 100% sure anytime someone makes generalizations. But I don't think that's it.
There *is* a trend to simply using devices as terminals to get at your cloud based data. It doesn't really matter for a lot of those people if they *own* the terminal or not.
But note carefully here the language: they have *access* to only one device at home. That means that it's almost certainly shared with other household members. And if it's a smartphone, chances are there a some pretty serious caps on the amount of data the family can use.
It'd be a lot different if the statistics said they only *owned* one device for their personal use.
This is Linus figuring out something that's been obvious to outsiders for a long time: sometimes he can be kind of a dick. That's not 100% bad, and it certainly doesn't make him a bad person. And on the scale of dickishness, it's not like he's that far out on the tail end.
But now he sees it, and it's made him ask a really smart question: is this really how I want to be?
There's lots of dickish people who are basically good people who just can't grasp why people react negatively to being treated abrasively or disrespectfully. And to be fair there are a lot of unreasonably sensitive people out there, about as many as there are unreasonably dickish people. But when most people have a problem with you, for example if they have to treat your behavior as a special case, then problem isn't most people. It's you.
Tiny? About 1/3 of adult Americans have college degrees, but here's the kicker: about 60% of adult Americans have attended college, but a large fraction of them never finish. If you include technical schools that don't grant degrees but which students take out loans to attend, the number goes up further.
Americans owe over 1.3 trillion dollars in student loan debt -- more than they owe in credit card debt by a good margin. That's why cracking down on unscrupulous or misleading educational institutions is important. Education -- both college and trade -- is a huge industry with a big impact on the economy.
If you visit a supermarket that caters to working class clientele, you'll find a vast ocean of convenience foods surrounded by a narrow fringe of regular food. For example if we call a foot wide section of one level of shelving a "shelf foot", my local supermarket has at least 75 shelf-feet dedicated to numerous variations on boxed macaroni and cheese. The same market only about ten or twelve shelf-feet dedicated to root vegetables.
The reason this market is dominated by prepackaged convenience foods is government subsidies. Take all that pasta and cheese; it's just subsidized wheat and milk industrially converted into a highly palatable food that is cheap because it's largely already been paid for with tax dollars. It'd be easy and cheap to stock up on enough of this kind of food to get you through the week, but doing that all the time would be courting obesity, hypertension, heart disease and stroke.
In other words, many home cooked meals are just crappy fast food, prepared at home. Vegetables, which are not subsidized, are surprisingly expensive when compared to this crap. On a per pound basis they're more expensive than meat, which is just subsidized grain converted into cows and chickens. Consequently it doesn't sell well, and it's not stocked well. I learned home cooking from my Cajun Mom back in the 1960s, but a lot of young people I know would have no idea how to prepare vegetables from raw.
I obviously have to rely on a more distant upscale supermarket to get the stuff I need to cook, but surprisingly this market's ratio of prepared convenience food to ingredients isn't much higher. It's just the the market is vast. You may find yourself buying a yanagi ba knife for cutting your sushi fish. You're not likely to be eating enough sashimi to justify this, but the whole place is a engine designed to provoke impulse purchases.
In the end this tells me wealthier people are eating a lot of junk prepared food too, but they're doing occasional stunt cooking where they reproduce stuff they've bought at restaurants or seen on TV.
It's no wonder we have an obesity epidemic. It's our tax dollars at work.
Latest thing I read about was Chinese counterfeit bike helmets flooding ebay. They look like the real thing on the outside, right down to the stickers on the outside, but the crack apart like an eggshell in the standard drop test.
This is a country where makers of infant formula adulterate their products with cheap and toxic ingredients like melamine. Even though it was a huge scandal back in 2008, counterfeit formula remains a huge problem because the country's crony capitalist system is unwilling to enforce serious regulation. The problem doesn't exist in Hong Kong, which has to limit the cross border purchases of formula from Shenzen otherwise there wouldn't be enough formula for Hong Kong families.
The reason China is so dysfunctional when it comes to protecting consumers or the rights of non-Chinese companies is that its government sees its job as promoting Chinese business interests, and its senior politicians have close family ties to those interests. China regularly makes public examples of low level officials, or officials who are on the political outs, but the whole concept of the government as working hand-in-glove with business interests is corrupt.
Again contrast this to Hong Kong. Hong Kong is one of the least corrupt societies in the world, with government corruption indices that put it on par with Belgium or Iceland and significantly less corrupt than the US. China as a whole ranks down near Albania.
And they didn't work very well by modern standards. It's simply not possible to get a comprehensive view of an ocean area that's tens of millions of square miles in extent with buoys. You can't really piece together an accurate picture of a storm's track unless you have an extensive network of densely located stations.
The reason we don't do it that way is that satellites are cheaper.
A lot of this is "design" as artistic expression rather than design as functional communication. And I suspect it's not people who are trained as designers but product managers with delusions of artistic ability. Or its marketers obscuring function with emotional messages that crowd out function.
Microsoft is particularly guilty of marketing communication trumping function. Microsoft Office's interface was pretty much as good as it needed to be by the mid 90s, with the exception of bug and security fixes, which are worth paying for, but not visible to users. But whenever Microsoft does a major update to a product that is used by end-users, they shuffle around functions so the user sees he's getting something different than he had before. UIs targeted at back end people tend to suffer less pointless change.
Then there are manuals that are full of cautions meant to absolve the vendor of legal liability if you do something incredibly stupid with their product, but don't actually help you use the product for its intended purpose.
Remote sensing does a lot for everyone, including poor people. At last count 10 people were dead from tropical storm Florence. But we've known for days exactly where it was going to hit and when. Imagine what it would be like if the first indication was hours instead of days in advance.
That's what it was like when I was a kid, Nobody had maps showing that a tropical depression over by the Azores was going to hit North Carolina five days from now as a major hurricane,
So it turns out knowledge is actually valuable in practical ways to ordinary people. It's not some kind of luxury just for namby-pamby smart people.
About 20-25 years ago there was movement to go "chlorine free" because of all the environmental impacts of chlorine compounds. Greenpeace, I think, was onboard.
At the time I worked for an environmental education organization, and we weren't onboard with the chlorine ban. The reason was that if you simply replaced chlorine compounds with other chemicals which performed the same functions, it is likely you'd get similar effects from discharging those chemicals, or perhaps other effects nobody knew about yet. It was at best buying a pig in a poke.
Anytime you ban something, you need to look at specifically what companies replace them with, because companies have no economic incentive to solve the problems supposedly addressed. It's like "fat free half and half", where companies replace the (healthy) dairy fat in coffee creamer with corn syrup. They know damn well they're not doing you any favors.
Technically, this doesn't meet the strictest standards for "recycling". It's re-use, which is better than throwing away, and is casually called by many people "recycling", but it doesn't actually form a cycle.
Recycling should form a closed loop, with the molecules being recycled moving through the cycle over and over again. The idea is to mimic natural biological systems in which matter is reused over and over again with an input of energy and an output of entropy.
So the big question is: what happens to the road sections when they wear out or have to be removed? If they're processed into new road sections, then that meets the strictest definitions of recycling. Also, the fate of plastic particles lost to the cycle has to be taken into account. Recycling milk bottles to more milk bottles can be very efficient in terms of matter losses, but exposing a former milk bottle to erosion for a decade or longer is a different story.
The fact that other employers lost their cases has almost no bearing on this case. In a lawsuit, specifics matter. In this case, everything depends on exactly what business Uber is *really* in.
Uber's position amounts to this: it is NOT in the business of providing rides, it's just mediating a transaction between people who need rides and people who are willing to provide rides. Were that true, the drivers would be contractors. But their actions contradict that position in a number of ways.
First, Uber sets the prices riders will pay. If this were a transaction between the rider and the driver, the driver would offer his services at whatever price he wanted.
Second, Uber brands the drivers' cars; if you drive a luxury sedan it gets branded and sold to the rider as an "Uber Black". It sets minimum standards for cars. You can't pick up an Uber passenger in an old jalopy. If they were connecting riders to contractors, they could reasonably offer the riders a choice of how new or nice a car they were willing to settle for.
Finally, it supervises and disciplines its drivers. If your rating drops below a certain level, they will call you in for a meeting or deactivate you. It'd be one thing if they deactivate drivers with very low ratings -- drivers who are dangerous or threatening. But you can get in trouble if your rating drops to 4.6 on a scale of 1 to 5.
All this stuff suggests an effort by Uber to create, control, and market a consistent customer ride experience. In that case they're not just mediating transactions between riders and drivers, they're in the business of providing rides. That's what makes Uber drivers employees.
You also have to look at the shape of the land/sea interface. If you have a storm blowing directly along the long axis of a shallow, funnel-shaped estuary, you're going to get some spectacular effects at the narrow end, especially combined with rain-driven rising river levels.
This is one of the reasons the fact that the fact that you rode out a storm in your house in the past doesn't necessarily mean you're safe from a similar storm later. Minor changes in wind heading could result in very different effects. That's also why large storms can be more dangerous than smaller storms, even when the smaller storms are more intense. A geographically larger storm is more likely to intersect ideal conditions for causing damage.
Like most words, "information" has many meanings, including in certain contexts entropy. But that's not what "low information voter" refers to. It refers to uniformed voters. You could watch North Korean TV every waking moment and you'd be absorbing plenty of data, but very little information -- in the sense of that which makes you informed.
The thing that makes slavery wrong is that it treats people as if they were things without free will or feelings or purpose other than to serve us. Software modules actually are things without free will, feelings, or purpose other than to serve us.
It's offensive to call an adult black man "boy". It doesn't mean "boy" is an inherently offensive word or concept.
If you take a consequentialist view of ethics, the consequences of banning the word "slave" is that we no longer have a word to describe that concept. It does nothing for people actually are or were enslaved. How would you write a biography of Frederick Douglass? If you have a deontological view of ethics, there is no equivalence between describing an act and participating in the act; you can't end rape by not allowing people to use the word "rape".
People overall have a magical.view of words, which is why everyone is keen to police everyone else's language. That's how we ended up calling the place we poop the "rest room", which is kind of bizarre when you think of it.
Well, every orthodoxy, left or right, has its own version of it; it always looks ridiculous when viewed from the outside. To me it seems kind of silly to get upset about a ball player kneeling during the national anthem, but I don't doubt that people are sincerely offended.
This particular form of PC comes out two things: (1) Niceness -- a desire not to hurt anyone's feeligns and (2) Optimism, of a sort peculiar to young people and engineers: if there's a problem we can just *fix* it.
Well some problems just can't be fixed. You can't eliminate friction from mechanical systems, and you can't eliminate social friction from human societies. The only way to keep people from offending each other would be to separate them so thoroughly that nobody ever encounters anyone who was in any way different from them in opinions and outlook. If you've ever been married you'll realize that pretty much means we'd all be on our own.
So either we learn to live with each other, which may make us miserable, or we learn to live apart, which will certainly make us miserable.
Well, after Brexit it won't even be a symbolic win. When Britain leaves the EU, it also leaves behind the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU.
The EU is unique in the world in that an extensive array of explicitly enumerated human rights are protected constitutionally. In the US, human rights are protected by a patchwork of case law and SCOTUS ninth amendment based rulings. Example: Roe v Wade interpolates a woman's reproductive rights into the Bill of Rights. To some people this is common sense, to others it makes no sense. So the fundamental rights you enjoy as an American are subject to shifting court interpretations, which are the result of long term political campaigns to gain control of the court. The rights an American citizen enjoys, say to privacy, are a moving target, and more to the point a moveable target.
The main political force behind the Brexit movement was to escape from the restrictions of EU law, but this also includes EU human rights law which restricts the power of citizens to oppress each other, either directly or through the government. So while Brexit, does technically remove restrictions, whether your life will be more free depends on how well-placed you are.
We won't know and we can't know... yet. What really measure the impact of a paper's contribution is its citations. Check back in 5 years and rank countries by citations and you'll have a better idea.
Going by raw output volume, it shouldn't be surprising if China surpasses the US. Nearly one person in five alive lives in China. If you rank the top ten countries by science and tech research papers, it goes (or rather, went) US, China, Japan, Germany, UK, India, France, Italy, Korea, Canada. But if you rank those countries by per capita output, you get Canada, UK, US, Germany, France, Korea, Italy, China, India.
On a per capita basis, UK and Canada are very similar, as are the US, Germany, France, Korea, and Italy. China follows far behind that group, and India trails far behind China. That may be because many Indian scholars emigrate overseas, especially to the US. Similarly the US ranking is probably inflated by the large number of immigrant researchers here. As the US becomes less friendly to foreign students and researchers, we can expect our research output to fall both in quality and quantity.
Well (a) most people don't have a real need to cut the "central authority" out of the picture. People who trade in contraband and the illegal activities, sure. But the vast majority of the economy doesn't need it.
(b) There are real downsides to cutting out the central authority. One of them is volatility, which I've been saying all along but during the speculative bubble people saw that as an upside.
Actually there would be some real advantages to a government-backed cryptocurrency, although it would lack the romantic appeal. For one thing if a crypto-dollar were ever stolen from you, a court order could return control over it to you.
You know, I'm almost sixty, and in my entire life I've only known three people who actually did the kind of thing you're suggesting -- all coincidentally MIT electrical engineering grads. One worked for a defense contractor, living modestly until his mid 30s when he fulfilled the object of his plan: retired to live on his investments and start a new career as a photographer. Another worked in the early computer industry and then quick to get a liberal arts degree -- again the plan all along. The third went back to school become an elementary school teacher; that was more a late realization he wanted to do something else.
Slashdot Mirror
and do the other things, because they are easy, but because they are expensive.
If you forbid educational loans, the economy would collapse as the flow of scientists, engineers, actuaries etc. into the entry level ranks dries up. Unless we open up to more immigration.
On the other hand, if you (a) your competition is financially weakened and (b) you think you can produce the product for a little less than they can, it's an opportunity to deal some competitors a death blow.
That could be valuable because with the build quality of modern TVs they have to be replaced every couple of years. That means that while there isn't growth in the number of TVs installed, there is potential for sales growth if there are fewer players.
There's a Zen story which bears on this.
A farmer had a wife who was so tight-fisted she never let him spend any money, even money he needed to run the farm. So he told the Zen master his problem and the master told the farmer to bring his wife to him.
As soon as the wife walked in the door, the master shoved his fist right in front of her face. "What would you say if my hand was always stuck like THIS?" he demanded.
"I'd say you'd had a deformed hand," the wife said.
"And what would you say," the master continued, shoving his open palm in her face, "if my hand was always stuck like THIS?"
"I'd say you had a different kind of deformity."
"Well, then," the master said. "You seem to know everything you need to."
Now my natural disposition is to be accommodating, but over the years I have learned sometimes you have to be a total intransigent bastard. Being a bastard shouldn't be opening move, and being nice shouldn't be the only move you have. You need to adapt the needs of the circumstance.
It's Linus's life, and more to the point Linus's job, which I suspect he may understand better than we do.
I'd never be 100% sure anytime someone makes generalizations. But I don't think that's it.
There *is* a trend to simply using devices as terminals to get at your cloud based data. It doesn't really matter for a lot of those people if they *own* the terminal or not.
But note carefully here the language: they have *access* to only one device at home. That means that it's almost certainly shared with other household members. And if it's a smartphone, chances are there a some pretty serious caps on the amount of data the family can use.
It'd be a lot different if the statistics said they only *owned* one device for their personal use.
This is Linus figuring out something that's been obvious to outsiders for a long time: sometimes he can be kind of a dick. That's not 100% bad, and it certainly doesn't make him a bad person. And on the scale of dickishness, it's not like he's that far out on the tail end.
But now he sees it, and it's made him ask a really smart question: is this really how I want to be?
There's lots of dickish people who are basically good people who just can't grasp why people react negatively to being treated abrasively or disrespectfully. And to be fair there are a lot of unreasonably sensitive people out there, about as many as there are unreasonably dickish people. But when most people have a problem with you, for example if they have to treat your behavior as a special case, then problem isn't most people. It's you.
Tiny? About 1/3 of adult Americans have college degrees, but here's the kicker: about 60% of adult Americans have attended college, but a large fraction of them never finish. If you include technical schools that don't grant degrees but which students take out loans to attend, the number goes up further.
Americans owe over 1.3 trillion dollars in student loan debt -- more than they owe in credit card debt by a good margin. That's why cracking down on unscrupulous or misleading educational institutions is important. Education -- both college and trade -- is a huge industry with a big impact on the economy.
If you visit a supermarket that caters to working class clientele, you'll find a vast ocean of convenience foods surrounded by a narrow fringe of regular food. For example if we call a foot wide section of one level of shelving a "shelf foot", my local supermarket has at least 75 shelf-feet dedicated to numerous variations on boxed macaroni and cheese. The same market only about ten or twelve shelf-feet dedicated to root vegetables.
The reason this market is dominated by prepackaged convenience foods is government subsidies. Take all that pasta and cheese; it's just subsidized wheat and milk industrially converted into a highly palatable food that is cheap because it's largely already been paid for with tax dollars. It'd be easy and cheap to stock up on enough of this kind of food to get you through the week, but doing that all the time would be courting obesity, hypertension, heart disease and stroke.
In other words, many home cooked meals are just crappy fast food, prepared at home. Vegetables, which are not subsidized, are surprisingly expensive when compared to this crap. On a per pound basis they're more expensive than meat, which is just subsidized grain converted into cows and chickens. Consequently it doesn't sell well, and it's not stocked well. I learned home cooking from my Cajun Mom back in the 1960s, but a lot of young people I know would have no idea how to prepare vegetables from raw.
I obviously have to rely on a more distant upscale supermarket to get the stuff I need to cook, but surprisingly this market's ratio of prepared convenience food to ingredients isn't much higher. It's just the the market is vast. You may find yourself buying a yanagi ba knife for cutting your sushi fish. You're not likely to be eating enough sashimi to justify this, but the whole place is a engine designed to provoke impulse purchases.
In the end this tells me wealthier people are eating a lot of junk prepared food too, but they're doing occasional stunt cooking where they reproduce stuff they've bought at restaurants or seen on TV.
It's no wonder we have an obesity epidemic. It's our tax dollars at work.
Latest thing I read about was Chinese counterfeit bike helmets flooding ebay. They look like the real thing on the outside, right down to the stickers on the outside, but the crack apart like an eggshell in the standard drop test.
This is a country where makers of infant formula adulterate their products with cheap and toxic ingredients like melamine. Even though it was a huge scandal back in 2008, counterfeit formula remains a huge problem because the country's crony capitalist system is unwilling to enforce serious regulation. The problem doesn't exist in Hong Kong, which has to limit the cross border purchases of formula from Shenzen otherwise there wouldn't be enough formula for Hong Kong families.
The reason China is so dysfunctional when it comes to protecting consumers or the rights of non-Chinese companies is that its government sees its job as promoting Chinese business interests, and its senior politicians have close family ties to those interests. China regularly makes public examples of low level officials, or officials who are on the political outs, but the whole concept of the government as working hand-in-glove with business interests is corrupt.
Again contrast this to Hong Kong. Hong Kong is one of the least corrupt societies in the world, with government corruption indices that put it on par with Belgium or Iceland and significantly less corrupt than the US. China as a whole ranks down near Albania.
And they didn't work very well by modern standards. It's simply not possible to get a comprehensive view of an ocean area that's tens of millions of square miles in extent with buoys. You can't really piece together an accurate picture of a storm's track unless you have an extensive network of densely located stations.
The reason we don't do it that way is that satellites are cheaper.
A lot of this is "design" as artistic expression rather than design as functional communication. And I suspect it's not people who are trained as designers but product managers with delusions of artistic ability. Or its marketers obscuring function with emotional messages that crowd out function.
Microsoft is particularly guilty of marketing communication trumping function. Microsoft Office's interface was pretty much as good as it needed to be by the mid 90s, with the exception of bug and security fixes, which are worth paying for, but not visible to users. But whenever Microsoft does a major update to a product that is used by end-users, they shuffle around functions so the user sees he's getting something different than he had before. UIs targeted at back end people tend to suffer less pointless change.
Then there are manuals that are full of cautions meant to absolve the vendor of legal liability if you do something incredibly stupid with their product, but don't actually help you use the product for its intended purpose.
Remote sensing does a lot for everyone, including poor people. At last count 10 people were dead from tropical storm Florence. But we've known for days exactly where it was going to hit and when. Imagine what it would be like if the first indication was hours instead of days in advance.
That's what it was like when I was a kid, Nobody had maps showing that a tropical depression over by the Azores was going to hit North Carolina five days from now as a major hurricane,
So it turns out knowledge is actually valuable in practical ways to ordinary people. It's not some kind of luxury just for namby-pamby smart people.
About 20-25 years ago there was movement to go "chlorine free" because of all the environmental impacts of chlorine compounds. Greenpeace, I think, was onboard.
At the time I worked for an environmental education organization, and we weren't onboard with the chlorine ban. The reason was that if you simply replaced chlorine compounds with other chemicals which performed the same functions, it is likely you'd get similar effects from discharging those chemicals, or perhaps other effects nobody knew about yet. It was at best buying a pig in a poke.
Anytime you ban something, you need to look at specifically what companies replace them with, because companies have no economic incentive to solve the problems supposedly addressed. It's like "fat free half and half", where companies replace the (healthy) dairy fat in coffee creamer with corn syrup. They know damn well they're not doing you any favors.
Technically, this doesn't meet the strictest standards for "recycling". It's re-use, which is better than throwing away, and is casually called by many people "recycling", but it doesn't actually form a cycle.
Recycling should form a closed loop, with the molecules being recycled moving through the cycle over and over again. The idea is to mimic natural biological systems in which matter is reused over and over again with an input of energy and an output of entropy.
So the big question is: what happens to the road sections when they wear out or have to be removed? If they're processed into new road sections, then that meets the strictest definitions of recycling. Also, the fate of plastic particles lost to the cycle has to be taken into account. Recycling milk bottles to more milk bottles can be very efficient in terms of matter losses, but exposing a former milk bottle to erosion for a decade or longer is a different story.
The fact that other employers lost their cases has almost no bearing on this case. In a lawsuit, specifics matter. In this case, everything depends on exactly what business Uber is *really* in.
Uber's position amounts to this: it is NOT in the business of providing rides, it's just mediating a transaction between people who need rides and people who are willing to provide rides. Were that true, the drivers would be contractors. But their actions contradict that position in a number of ways.
First, Uber sets the prices riders will pay. If this were a transaction between the rider and the driver, the driver would offer his services at whatever price he wanted.
Second, Uber brands the drivers' cars; if you drive a luxury sedan it gets branded and sold to the rider as an "Uber Black". It sets minimum standards for cars. You can't pick up an Uber passenger in an old jalopy. If they were connecting riders to contractors, they could reasonably offer the riders a choice of how new or nice a car they were willing to settle for.
Finally, it supervises and disciplines its drivers. If your rating drops below a certain level, they will call you in for a meeting or deactivate you. It'd be one thing if they deactivate drivers with very low ratings -- drivers who are dangerous or threatening. But you can get in trouble if your rating drops to 4.6 on a scale of 1 to 5.
All this stuff suggests an effort by Uber to create, control, and market a consistent customer ride experience. In that case they're not just mediating transactions between riders and drivers, they're in the business of providing rides. That's what makes Uber drivers employees.
You also have to look at the shape of the land/sea interface. If you have a storm blowing directly along the long axis of a shallow, funnel-shaped estuary, you're going to get some spectacular effects at the narrow end, especially combined with rain-driven rising river levels.
This is one of the reasons the fact that the fact that you rode out a storm in your house in the past doesn't necessarily mean you're safe from a similar storm later. Minor changes in wind heading could result in very different effects. That's also why large storms can be more dangerous than smaller storms, even when the smaller storms are more intense. A geographically larger storm is more likely to intersect ideal conditions for causing damage.
Oh, more data doesn't mean more information.
Like most words, "information" has many meanings, including in certain contexts entropy. But that's not what "low information voter" refers to. It refers to uniformed voters. You could watch North Korean TV every waking moment and you'd be absorbing plenty of data, but very little information -- in the sense of that which makes you informed.
The thing that makes slavery wrong is that it treats people as if they were things without free will or feelings or purpose other than to serve us. Software modules actually are things without free will, feelings, or purpose other than to serve us.
It's offensive to call an adult black man "boy". It doesn't mean "boy" is an inherently offensive word or concept.
If you take a consequentialist view of ethics, the consequences of banning the word "slave" is that we no longer have a word to describe that concept. It does nothing for people actually are or were enslaved. How would you write a biography of Frederick Douglass? If you have a deontological view of ethics, there is no equivalence between describing an act and participating in the act; you can't end rape by not allowing people to use the word "rape".
People overall have a magical.view of words, which is why everyone is keen to police everyone else's language. That's how we ended up calling the place we poop the "rest room", which is kind of bizarre when you think of it.
Well, every orthodoxy, left or right, has its own version of it; it always looks ridiculous when viewed from the outside. To me it seems kind of silly to get upset about a ball player kneeling during the national anthem, but I don't doubt that people are sincerely offended.
This particular form of PC comes out two things: (1) Niceness -- a desire not to hurt anyone's feeligns and (2) Optimism, of a sort peculiar to young people and engineers: if there's a problem we can just *fix* it.
Well some problems just can't be fixed. You can't eliminate friction from mechanical systems, and you can't eliminate social friction from human societies. The only way to keep people from offending each other would be to separate them so thoroughly that nobody ever encounters anyone who was in any way different from them in opinions and outlook. If you've ever been married you'll realize that pretty much means we'd all be on our own.
So either we learn to live with each other, which may make us miserable, or we learn to live apart, which will certainly make us miserable.
Well, after Brexit it won't even be a symbolic win. When Britain leaves the EU, it also leaves behind the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU.
The EU is unique in the world in that an extensive array of explicitly enumerated human rights are protected constitutionally. In the US, human rights are protected by a patchwork of case law and SCOTUS ninth amendment based rulings. Example: Roe v Wade interpolates a woman's reproductive rights into the Bill of Rights. To some people this is common sense, to others it makes no sense. So the fundamental rights you enjoy as an American are subject to shifting court interpretations, which are the result of long term political campaigns to gain control of the court. The rights an American citizen enjoys, say to privacy, are a moving target, and more to the point a moveable target.
The main political force behind the Brexit movement was to escape from the restrictions of EU law, but this also includes EU human rights law which restricts the power of citizens to oppress each other, either directly or through the government. So while Brexit, does technically remove restrictions, whether your life will be more free depends on how well-placed you are.
We won't know and we can't know... yet. What really measure the impact of a paper's contribution is its citations. Check back in 5 years and rank countries by citations and you'll have a better idea.
Going by raw output volume, it shouldn't be surprising if China surpasses the US. Nearly one person in five alive lives in China. If you rank the top ten countries by science and tech research papers, it goes (or rather, went) US, China, Japan, Germany, UK, India, France, Italy, Korea, Canada. But if you rank those countries by per capita output, you get Canada, UK, US, Germany, France, Korea, Italy, China, India.
On a per capita basis, UK and Canada are very similar, as are the US, Germany, France, Korea, and Italy. China follows far behind that group, and India trails far behind China. That may be because many Indian scholars emigrate overseas, especially to the US. Similarly the US ranking is probably inflated by the large number of immigrant researchers here. As the US becomes less friendly to foreign students and researchers, we can expect our research output to fall both in quality and quantity.
Well (a) most people don't have a real need to cut the "central authority" out of the picture. People who trade in contraband and the illegal activities, sure. But the vast majority of the economy doesn't need it.
(b) There are real downsides to cutting out the central authority. One of them is volatility, which I've been saying all along but during the speculative bubble people saw that as an upside.
Actually there would be some real advantages to a government-backed cryptocurrency, although it would lack the romantic appeal. For one thing if a crypto-dollar were ever stolen from you, a court order could return control over it to you.
You know, I'm almost sixty, and in my entire life I've only known three people who actually did the kind of thing you're suggesting -- all coincidentally MIT electrical engineering grads. One worked for a defense contractor, living modestly until his mid 30s when he fulfilled the object of his plan: retired to live on his investments and start a new career as a photographer. Another worked in the early computer industry and then quick to get a liberal arts degree -- again the plan all along. The third went back to school become an elementary school teacher; that was more a late realization he wanted to do something else.